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Inspired by Angels in America, the French artist’s latest album is a raw, dreamlike, 20-song epic that still feels like a first draft. | Inspired by Angels in America, the French artist’s latest album is a raw, dreamlike, 20-song epic that still feels like a first draft. | Christine and the Queens: Paranoïa, Angels, True Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christine-and-the-queens-paranoia-angels-true-love/ | Paranoïa, Angels, True Love | Christine and the Queens’ last record, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue), was a lengthy and labyrinthine concept album wrapped around a fuckboy alter ego. It should have been fun, but the music was plodding and unwieldy, with none of the ebullience that has become Chris’ trademark, and the lore of the mysterious, begloved Redcar overpowered the music itself. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love thankfully sheds some Redcar impulses—Chris is no longer hiding behind a persona nor flanking supermodels—but retains its complex framework. Across 20 songs, he weaves intimate revelations about transition, sex, and grief into a three-part bilingual epic, incorporating Madonna on three tracks as the voice of an omniscient, artificially intelligent Eye.
Chris’ syllabus for Paranoïa, Angels, True Love centers on Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning magnum opus, which follows a young man, Prior Walter, who is dying of AIDS in New York City in the late ’80s. Chris watched the 2003 miniseries adaptation of the play during the pandemic; he felt profoundly moved by its joyful ending, in which Prior refuses to bring about an apocalypse, begging instead for “more life.” “Subconsciously I picked that play because I wanted to manifest that for myself,” Chris confessed to Vulture.
He clearly sees the relevance of Kushner’s writing in this political moment. The expansive possibilities of gay life in the ’70s collapsed in the total ruin of the AIDS crisis; the Trans Tipping Point of the ’10s is a distant memory in our current discourse over puberty blockers, book bans, and Bud Light. Christine and the Queens’ early transmasculine anthems, like “iT” and “Girlfriend,” are irrepressible, carefree—diametric opposites of the tense depiction of trans life in Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Chris wonders, in “He’s been shining for ever, your son,” if his mother is looking down from heaven, “for a daughter.” The break from romance and sex, for Chris as for Prior Walter, is fraught; lovers walk out or fail to satisfy. The human body is capable of betrayal, too. Prior hemorrhages blood and hides his Kaposi’s sarcoma beneath long sleeves. Chris, touching himself, is horrified to realize that “it’s all still there.” A heavenly body, by contrast, sounds terribly appealing.
But Chris does not organize these themes particularly well. He boasted about writing some of these songs in 20 minutes and recording all his vocals in single takes, immediately upon waking. Occasionally, there is a raw vulnerability to the delivery, the sleep audible in his voice. Sometimes, though, it means he simply doesn’t hit his notes. Frequently free-associating at the microphone, he lets several songs dissolve into wordless vocalization: either the echoing vowels of choirs in cathedrals or the sighs and half-formed words of lovers in bed. The sacred and profane, side by side, atop one another, always in excess.
With Mike Dean onboard as co-producer, the atmosphere is extravagant, too: enormous, full of echo, and fiercely neutral. Snare drums skitter. Synths hum low, darkly, in contrast to the high, angelic humming of choirs. The keys and guitars have a saw-toothed, industrial quality. When these elements collide on the 11-minute “Track 10,” you can almost see Chris back-lit on a bare stage, smoke rolling low around his feet—a rockstar moment, but bare and unadorned. When A.G. Cook briefly takes over, 17 tracks in, for part of “Lick the Light Out,” his production is so effusive, so glittering and joyous, that it makes Dean’s work seem incomplete by comparison.
For every stunner—the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears Can Be So Soft,” the curious and searching “I Met an Angel,” the dusky doo-wop of “True Love,” featuring 070 Shake—there is a head-scratcher. What are we to do with “Full of Life,” little more than Pachelbel’s Canon played to completion over an incongruous vocal track? Why does the sexual anarchy of “Let Me Touch You” and “Aimer, Puis Vivre” fizzle into something so dull and disorganized? Think of those cold, pale Roman marbles, stripped, over millennia, of their paint. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is a hall of those statues—not all fully formed, and often crying out for color.
In The World Only Spins Forward, Isaac Butler and Dan Kois’ oral history of Angels in America, Kushner tells of the 10 sleepless days and nights in which he wrote 700 longhand pages of Perestroika, the play’s second half, in a spider-infested cabin on the Russian River. At its very best, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love captures this feverish lightning-in-a-bottle energy. But where Kushner’s many moving parts lock into place, spurring each other on toward a harrowing, rapturous climax, the songs of Chris’s album never quite cohere. Moments of clarity and craftsmanship are undercut by extended periods of improvisation. The reason Angels in America captivates audiences, despite its length and density, is that Kushner returned home from the Russian River, pulled out his red pen, and edited. Paranoïa, Angels, True Love still feels like a first draft.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified Mike Dean as a producer. He is a co-producer. | 2023-06-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-14T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | June 14, 2023 | 6.8 | 95bbcbde-033a-4f2a-a73a-6c63491322af | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
With cover songs and a couple of originals, this solo live performance captures the prolific Roxy Music leader in top form: the weirdo conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams. | With cover songs and a couple of originals, this solo live performance captures the prolific Roxy Music leader in top form: the weirdo conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams. | Bryan Ferry: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bryan-ferry-live-at-the-royal-albert-hall-1974/ | Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 | To be Bryan Ferry in 1974 was like being Bob Dylan in 1965, Clark Gable in 1939, and Oscar Wilde in 1895. He commanded his space, he bulldozed the rickety fence between sincerity and irony for a generation of acolytes, and his hair was fabulous. Running a parallel solo career while singer-songwriter-keyboardist for Roxy Music, Ferry released six albums in just two years. This solo live performance, recorded weeks after the release of Roxy’s fourth album Country Life and six months after his second covers collection Another Time, Another Place, captures Ferry and backing band in top form. No audible laryngitis here—Ferry’s vocal attack shakes the rafters. Expect improvisation and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 will disappoint. Novelty, though, it’s got—Ferry sounded like no singer in rock.
Leading the album with his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” works as manifesto and adrenaline pumper. On 1973’s These Foolish Things, the song was fit for a Las Vegas floor show, stuffed with frantic brass and fruity backup vocals; the performance is a dissertation on finding the Mel Tormé in Mick Jagger. The Royal Albert Hall version applies a gutbucket rock approach, thanks to bassist John Wetton and drummer Paul Thompson. Always the art student, Ferry reveled in the contrast: the white tuxedo-clad dandy arching languorous quotation marks around the devil’s music. Yet he cared too. Over Eddie Jobson’s watery Fender Rhodes—one of the few concessions to the times—Ferry unleashes his most empathetic high notes on the first third of Another Time, Another Place’s self-written title track: a valentine to the records he grew up loving and whose rebellious spirit he’d honor by rewiring them.
But Ferry also possessed an actor’s instinct for understatement. Girl group and Motown hits moved him as much as the rock numbers. Although the live takes on the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” don’t differ much from his studio ones, their professions of vulnerability aren’t what audiences expected from white male rock singers. Most impressive is his insistence on keeping the feminine pronouns intact on Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”; David Bowie may have proclaimed the Church of Man-Love a holy place to be, but Ferry’s identification with the desires of young women went beyond queerness into symbiosis; for the length of a 45 rpm single, Ferry and those female characters share a commonality.
Concluding with the title track of his first solo album, an English standard from the 1930s, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 captures an artist reclaiming an earlier era’s detritus as his own. Ferry opened his mouth and dozens of heirs spilled out, few with his knowledge of R&B and fewer with the wisdom to posit themselves as the essential secondhand man: a conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams. He revolutionized the pop song by remaking/remodeling it as Pop Art: a readymade comprised of avant-garde electronic stylings, effects-laden guitars, mournful oboes, and lyrics that embraced romantic obsession by mocking it. So much labor because he believed obsession deserves cool appraisal, too. Singing about foolish things meant he believed in them. | 2020-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | BMG | February 8, 2020 | 7.5 | 95bdb150-6041-42e3-a046-b11ec999900c | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Ladytron follow the expansive, immediate Witching Hour with a record of more restrained goth-pop. | Ladytron follow the expansive, immediate Witching Hour with a record of more restrained goth-pop. | Ladytron: Velocifero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11551-velocifero/ | Velocifero | Not only was Witching Hour one of the better albums of 2005, it more or less saved Ladytron's career. For a group that sprang up right on time for the whole early-aughts electroclash morass to subsume them, the group's transformation to a subtly more melodic, pop-friendly, and emotionally expressive style made a lot of sense, both in terms of stylistic evolution and just plain old self-preservation. It's the same instinct that kept New Order and Depeche Mode going long after people stopped using the term "new wave" in earnest-- and even if there was still plenty of runway-walk detachment in their sound, the music made it feel perfectly human.
But there's another human impulse that keeps the follow-up Velocifero from hitting quite as hard, and that's the desire to stick with what works, especially if that formula took you to another level. There's not much wrong with that method where this album's concerned; substituting refinement and subtle expansion for constant evolution isn't that heinous a crime, and being big on Witching Hour will probably lead you to appreciate Velocifero in a more reserved way. There's no pinned-to-your-seat blowaways like "Destroy Everything You Touch" or "High Rise", a shortage of legitimately affecting ballads in the vein of "All the Way..." or "Beauty*2", and a severe dearth of the subtle levity that made Witching Hour an expansive record-- in other words, there's really not a lot of immediacy to Velocifero at all.
What this record does have is a solid number of goth-pop hookfests. Compared to the highlights of their previous records, the songs on Velocifero have more movement than actual force; the shuffle-glam "Ghosts" gets surprisingly little bass-range impact from such a heavy stomp, and the rapid synth-pop pulses on "I'm Not Scared" and "Season of Illusions" threaten to slip from a groove to a rut if you think of them strictly in terms of rhythm. (For a record with some input from Ed Banger electro-pop remix specialists Vicarious Bliss, that's kind of hard to imagine.)
But the vocals make up for that, and aside from the occasional lyrical clunker (from "Versus": "like a kitten versus rain"-- d'aww, sniffle), it's impressive how Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo take empty-on-paper lyrics and give them meaning through sheer repetition. We've already heard more than enough about little runaways from Del Shannon (and, uh, Bon Jovi), but Marnie's singing in "Runaway" sweetly offsets the harsh snarl of Velocifero's hardest-hitting instrumental backing and turns a pop cliché ("Where you waking up today/ My little runaway") into a haunting refrain. The aforementioned "Ghosts" works because its enigmatic hook-- "There's a ghost in me/ Who wants to say I'm sorry/ Doesn't mean I'm sorry"-- is delivered with Marnie's note-perfect sing-song delivery, a simultaneously taunting and regretful voice which not only gives the words gravity but lends a good amount of weight to an otherwise flat-sounding song. And Mira Aroyo, relatively scarce on Witching Hour, has more opportunities to showcase her icy, sharp, often-foreboding voice, singing in her native Bulgarian with a sinister deadpan on "Black Cat" and a sleek, mellifluous energy on traditional folk song "Kletva"; in English her raspy purr turns the circa-1990 techno-pop of "Deep Blue" into a seething come-on.
Writers and fans like to talk about how wintry and cold Ladytron's music is, which might be the album's real shortcoming; maybe it'll sound a bit more appropriate five or six months after its June release when its isolated iciness has a suitable environmental backdrop. But even with a somewhat diminished speaker-filling capability and a couple of songs that seem to have less actual energy than they should, Velocifero's subtlety will eventually reward further listens. Not everything has to be an exclamation point or a CGI explosion, and even if Ladytron excel in big, instant-grab attention-getting pop maneuvers, the dearth of them here only means that they've got a good venue to prove they can get by OK on restraint. | 2008-06-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-06-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nettwerk | June 2, 2008 | 7.2 | 95d088fd-8a8d-4d38-8c78-668cf585b293 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The duo’s collaborative mixtape isn’t a complete disaster, and it’s nice to hear Lil Wayne rap adequately again. | The duo’s collaborative mixtape isn’t a complete disaster, and it’s nice to hear Lil Wayne rap adequately again. | Lil Wayne / Rich the Kid: Trust Fund Babies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-wayne-rich-the-kid-trust-fund-babies/ | Trust Fund Babies | Rich the Kid is always in the right place at the right time. Back in 2012, he was introduced to Migos in a club, and they hit it off. By the following year, the Atlanta trio would be the first signees of Quality Control, have a hit single (“Versace”)—which grew so big that Drake hopped on the remix—and they’d drop one of the most definitive Southern rap mixtapes of the 2010s (Y.R.N.). Through all this, Rich tagged along, becoming their unofficial fourth member through two collaborative mixtapes, which weren’t that good—but the timing was perfect. Again and again, Rich would be in proximity to rappers who were much more interesting than he was at the ideal moment: Kodak Black and Playboi Carti right before they became household names; Famous Dex and Jay Critch around the time of the overlooked group mixtape Rich Forever 3; YoungBoy Never Broke Again when Rich somehow convinced YB to do a joint mixtape. I suppose Rich deserves credit for his ability to spot talent, but he’s been able to survive in rap through sheer persistence and networking.
His latest venture is Trust Fund Babies, a collaborative mixtape with Lil Wayne; and of course, given Rich’s combination of dumb luck and business savvy, it arrives amid a so-called Wayne renaissance. Oh, you haven’t heard? Lil Wayne is apparently back and rejuvenated. The evidence for this is a run of features over the past year or so, though despite streaks of brilliance—his nerding out for The Firm on AZ’s Doe or Die II, or the hunger in his raps on Tyler the Creator’s “Hot Wind Blows”—it’s too inconsistent for me to call it a resurgence.
That pretty much holds true on Trust Fund Babies, which seems to exist for the sole reason that Rich grew up on Wayne, and Wayne thought Rich had good vibes. (A more cynical guess would be that Rich rang Wayne’s doorbell and presented him with a hefty duffel bag.) But whatever the motives behind the tape, it’s bizarre that it’s not a ton of fun, given such low stakes. Take the unbearably dry “Yeah Yeah.” It’s cool that Wayne is horny, but if he’s going to be horny, it should be more descriptive than “She just wanna give me some sloppy, yeah/She just wanna lick on my lolly, yeah.” (Gross me out!) On “Shh,” he clocks in a verse so dull, you can’t even single out a line that’s so bad it’s good. He shows signs of life on “Headlock,” but his puns aren’t clever enough to justify the a capella intro.
So much of the space here is filled with Rich hooks and verses that could have easily been recycled and no one would know it. He continues to have no identity of his own, switching between that tired triplet flow and a lazy Young Thug impersonation throughout (most egregiously on the chorus of “Feelin’ Like Tunechi”). If Thug sued me for associating him with this mess, I would understand!
The only reason to care about this mixtape is Wayne, even if it often sounds like he’s being held captive in a studio by Rich and has to rap his way out. “Buzzin’” is a highlight, with some dizzying classic Wayne wordplay and a graphic sex punchline that gets funnier the more you think about it: “She give me brain, that’s skully/She drunk a Wayne McFlurry.” And “Big Boss” has one of the mixtape’s few tolerable Rich the Kid verses. Wayne shines on the spacey production with familiar yet witty punchlines. But the truth is the bar is low. After years of health scares, label issues, and the depressingly awful raps between I Am Not a Human Being II and Free Weezy Album, it’s just nice to hear Wayne rap adequately again. It may not be a comeback, or a return to his glory days, or whatever other overstatement you’ll come across, but it’s fine enough that this half-assed business deal with Rich the Kid isn’t a complete disaster.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Money Entertainment / Republic | October 6, 2021 | 4.9 | 95d2413b-484e-470a-9311-203ffa37cef3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The first example of the late musician's instrumental work to be unearthed on Audika features some of the most gorgeous, populist sounds from New York's late-70s avant-garde. | The first example of the late musician's instrumental work to be unearthed on Audika features some of the most gorgeous, populist sounds from New York's late-70s avant-garde. | Arthur Russell: First Thought, Best Thought | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6910-first-thought-best-thought/ | First Thought, Best Thought | The late Arthur Russell's reputation still largely rests on his work as a producer of disco singles in the late 1970s and early 80s. There's nothing wrong with that. Russell rewrote disco in handwriting so fluid and personal that his stature would be assured even if that were all ever he did. But of course it wasn't. I think with time Russell's lyrical work-- one hesitates to use the phrase "singer-songwriter"-- will only grow in stature, until it stands alongside his disco records in listeners' minds. But before his famed visit to Nicky Siano's Gallery club, and just before he formed his country (not country) band the Flying Hearts, Russell was on a modern composer's track, performing his (for the sake of ease, let's call it) minimalist music at downtown New York venues like the Kitchen.
First Thought, Best Thought is the first example of Russell's instrumental work to be reissued by Audika Records, whose Steve Knutson has taken up the challenge of sorting through hundreds of hours of unreleased tapes. Like Audika's other Russell reissues, it features gorgeous sleeve design-- including a heartbreaking portrait of a forlorn-looking Russell, eyes sunken in shadow and cheeks mottled with acne scars-- and liner notes from Russell and the musicians he worked with at the time, in this case Ernie Brooks of the Modern Lovers. Unlike the other reissues, it features music that is both more and less compelling than the Russell listeners have come to know.
The first disc contains the two-part "Instrumentals", which was planned to be a 48-hour continuous performance but was only ever played live in bits and pieces. The previously unreleased "Instrumentals Volume One" is a masterpiece, up there with "In the Light of the Miracle" and World of Echo as Russell's greatest achievements. It melts the bustle of urbanity into the ebb and flow of a Midwestern lake. (Russell was obsessed with bodies of water growing up in Iowa, the way only a landlocked boy can be.) Minimalist only in its repetition, which weaves more than it cycles, "Instrumentals Volume One" is not what immediately springs to mind when you think of experimental music from the 1970s. It's beautiful, for one thing. And it sounds like it was made by someone who switched the radio on every now and again. In it, you can hear the gentle lope, twanging guitar ostinatos, and sweeping strings of 70s soul, the crosstown yearning of someone like Bobby Womack. You can also hear the ghosts of Ives, Copeland, and all the American composers who located the soul of the country in the fields, the canyons, and the frontier spaces. Russell wanted to gently dissolve the distinctions between high and low, catching hell for bringing the specter of popular music into New York's avant-garde. But he also dissolved geography. The space across 110th Street became as wide as a wheat field.
"Instrumentals Volume 1" is worth the price of First Thought, Best Thought all on its own. Nothing else on these two discs is quite so beguiling, but the other pieces continue to reveal other sides of Arthur Russell. "Instrumentals Volume 2" flows out from "Volume 1", slowly stripping away the drums until the instruments melt into each other like the wax of multi-colored candles collecting in a pool. "Reach One" is a very early composition from 1973 which plays two Fender Rhodes electric pianos off each other with meandering results. (It's not necessarily an insult to call this juvenilia.) "Tower of Meaning", on the other hand, is an orchestral work of great refinement that cycles through slow, deliberate, not unpretty chords. It's the most traditionally classical piece on First Thought, though as always with Russell words like "traditional" and "classical" are relative terms. The set is rounded out by "Sketch for the Face of Helen", a rumbling bit of oily musique concrète that features a bleating tugboat.
Audika's reissue program is an act of devoted, some might say obsessive, scholarship and curatorship that deserves every bit of acclaim it's received. Five years ago, the availability of Russell's work was limited to a handful of songs on the first Disco (Not Disco) compilation. With the unearthing of material that never left Russell's apartment and the careful repackaging of records out-of-print for years, it now encompasses a broader view of Russell's genius than even those there at the time could have known. The most amazing thing of all is that a huge iceberg of still-unreleased music lurks under the receding, placid waters of Russell's anonymity. Give Steve Knutson a knighthood or something already. | 2006-04-18T02:00:31.000-04:00 | 2006-04-18T02:00:31.000-04:00 | Experimental | Audika | April 18, 2006 | 7.5 | 95d44c93-5d94-47b6-b99c-9ed692da87c9 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
The songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who’s collaborated with Big Thief, the Deslondes, and the Low Anthem returns with a sparse, earnest collection that occasionally overstates its message. | The songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who’s collaborated with Big Thief, the Deslondes, and the Low Anthem returns with a sparse, earnest collection that occasionally overstates its message. | Twain: Noon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/twain-noon/ | Noon | At the end of “Noon,” the first song on Twain’s new album of the same name, Matthew Davidson makes a promise to someone long departed: “I will not forget,” he sings over a simple piano theme and a volley of solemn cymbal crashes. It’s not the words that hit so hard, but the way he delivers them, in particular the way he delivers that last one. He holds that final note for way too long, sustaining that vowel until his voice quivers and feathers into the air. It sounds unplanned, a spontaneous decision, an act of intuition that gestures toward a bittersweet realization: Simply not forgetting will not be enough to keep that person in his life. That long note also reminds you that there’s a physical body singing the airy songs on Noon. For better or for worse, the music might just float away if he didn’t tether it.
A music industry equivalent of a character actor, Davidson is one of those veteran musicians whose work you’ve heard even if you missed out on Twain’s 2017 breakthrough, Rare Feeling, or any of his solo releases since. In the late 2000s he joined the Low Anthem and helped them expand their scope and palette; more recently, he has been playing fiddle with the Deslondes and working with Big Thief, even contributing to their recent double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. Twain is his leading role, an opportunity to step toward the front of the stage. Especially for a multi-instrumentalist credited with guitar, keys, and pedal steel on such a wide variety of projects, there’s something startling about the restraint he shows on Noon. He keeps the arrangements light, sparse yet spry, and he jettisons the electric guitar and drums of Rare Feeling for a sound that mixes acoustic guitar with soft percussion and flourishes of piano and reeds.
Far and away the most prominent instrument, however, is his voice: a high, slightly nasal sound just shy of a croak, recalling the mannerisms of Andrew Bird or any of the freak-folkies of the 2000s. Davidson has a tendency to rush into a melody and to worry over a phrase until it becomes a mantra. This approach conveys a quiet excitement: utter commitment to whatever he’s singing about. He’s unceasingly, unrelentingly earnest on Noon, without the wryness or humor you might expect from someone who describes their album as a “self-caricature of the musician and writer Matthew Davidson.” That tone can be limiting, but it does highlight his knack for investing mundane situations with deep meaning, whether he’s sharing a joint with a cook (“2 Lovers”) or driving his tour van into the sunrise (“The Priestess”).
Just as Davidson can make you think catching up with an old friend is a sublime experience, he can indulge lofty philosophical ideas that overstate his message. Lines like “Beauty is wanting to be what you really are” suffocate every other sentiment and crowd out all nuance, all without sounding particularly profound. Noon becomes especially cumbersome when he tries to address current political concerns. “Please don’t let them outlaw silence,” he begs on “Vitality,” which sounds like a social media post rendered in florid language: “That is where peace likes to grow.” You can agree with him on every issue and still think “King of Fools” is far too obvious a polemic. “I see a couple children fighting over toys/How long must they die and die and die to satisfy the king of fools?” Won’t somebody please think of the children?
The album title refers to the lowest point in the pendulum swing, a midpoint in a cycle of reaction and action, questioning and understanding. It’s an intriguing idea, but too often Davidson sounds like he is singing from a place of enlightenment, where he can see everything—his past and our present—with perfect clarity. There’s no sense of him figuring things out, which deflates so much of this ambitious album. Enlightenment is never as compelling as the rocky road to get there. | 2022-10-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Keeled Scales | October 31, 2022 | 5.8 | 95d689dd-6701-41fa-97ce-46442157d447 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
A new compilation of this hybrid Nigerian dance music—popularized in the U.S. by the likes of Drake and Diplo—shows that with Afrobeats, there’s much more than one dance. | A new compilation of this hybrid Nigerian dance music—popularized in the U.S. by the likes of Drake and Diplo—shows that with Afrobeats, there’s much more than one dance. | Various Artists: Afrobeat Hot Hits: New Urban Dance Grooves From Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-afrobeat-hot-hits-new-urban-dance-grooves-from-africa/ | Afrobeat Hot Hits: New Urban Dance Grooves From Africa | Afrobeats is an expanding genre from West Africa, primarily Nigeria, focused on blending the world’s best dance music together. It has become an infectious hybrid: immediately engaging, but a genre that is still growing with time. Afrobeats began with a foundation of Nigerian and Ghanaian pop music, and—over the past decade and a half—has added hip-hop, more pop, grime, dancehall, soca, house, R&B, and even EDM along the way. If you can dance to it, Afrobeats producers have found a way to work with the sound. Charting the roots of the genre does not reach back too far (it doesn’t share much more than a name with the singular Afrobeat made famous in the 1970s by Fela Kuti). Gaining traction in the UK in the early 2000s, major global attention came by 2013, arguably due to the massive hit “Personally” by P-Square—a song that was eventually covered by Jamaican dancehall artist Busy Signal in 2014 as “Professionally”. The huge, warm bass rhythm of the song, combined with a smooth flow and Auto-Tuned earworms, makes it a case study in what Afrobeats is able to achieve.
The U.S. has been hearing the influence of Afrobeats for the past few years now. Folks famous for taste-testing (and cribbing) like Drake and Diplo are well into the sound and its undeniable dancefloor-filling ingredients. The rhythms are layered and relentless, fast enough for a fast wine, but not so quick as to deny a solid head nod; the sparkling clean production values and strong melodies make nearly every song stick. Shanachie Records’ compilation of the genre’s best tunes from the past half decade or so aims to change this, and it’s a good introductory course: Every song on Afrobeats Hot Hits, the first collection of its sort in the U.S., is a strong example of the sound. With Afrobeats, there’s clearly much more than one dance.
The vast majority of the tracks on Hot Hits feature Nigerian artists, with the exception of Ghanaian hip-life duo R2Bees, a remix of American soul artist Anthony David, and a feature from Jamaican Sean Paul. This means that many tracks make use of the West African language of Pidgin, like “Wetin Dey,” a track by upcoming singer/songwriter Rayce (now signed to Shanachie himself). “Wetin Dey” features reliable Nigerian hit-maker Davido and takes its title from the Pidgin phrase for “what’s going on?” In The Guardian, writer Kobby Ankomah-Graham argued that “Pidgin is where our inventiveness will be on full display.” One might say the same thing about Afrobeats.
The high quality of each track here makes it easy to play Hot Hits from start to end, and since Afrobeats has really entered into the U.S. mainstream, the feel and rhythms are familiar. Adding to the set’s power is how individual Hot Hits tracks bring heavy hitters together. In addition to “Wetin Dey,” Davido appears alongside singer Kiss Daniel and former UK “X-Factor” contestant Tiwa Savage on a remix of “Woju.” The prodigal Wizkid, who everyone should know from his contribution to a certain Drake megahit, appears on “Crazy,” with the diva vocals of Seyi Shay. It’s tracks like this that helped these artists sign mega deals with Sony Music and RCA, respectively, over the last year. Another Hot Hits track that has received international attention is the instructional “Shake Ur Bum Bum,” by Timaya. Here, it features dancehall don Sean Paul, but there’s also a version featuring Trinidad’s seven-time soca monarch Machel Montano.
Another highlight of the compilation is “Ileko” from Tiwa Savage. She might not have the name recognition of Wizkid, but Savage has performed and recorded with huge names, from George Michael to Mary J. Blige. The confectionary chorus of “Ileko” shows off her deft melodic sense, so much so that you might call her the Queen of Afrobeats—though she’s got solid competition from Yemi Alade (whose collab tune with R2Bees, “Pose,” appears here) and the upcoming Kayefi.
A remix of Kayefi’s track “Oreski” is the last track on the compilation, but it rises to the top of the heap. Layers of rhythm reminiscent of UK funky house and UK garage are paired with moody vocals—Kayefi calls her style “Afro-soul”—and a chorus that soars over dense beats. Every track on Afrobeats Hot Hits will make people move, but it’s perhaps Wande Coal’s “Rotate,” with its soca bounce and sweet hook, that most elicits images of sweaty clubs. And even a culturally and consciously-focused tune like Tekno’s “Rara”—the video for which showcases panoramic imagery of Nigeria, both rural and urban—is built for the dancefloor.
Perhaps the biggest triumph of this beginner’s guide to Afrobeats is the fact that it’s all in one place. Though it’s possible to troll the internet and find these tracks, streaming and on YouTube, the compilation makes for an especially pleasant experience. It’s also a way to access these tunes in an officially licensed manner: given the challenge to Afrobeats from piracy, this is a good thing. More than anything, however, this a one-stop spot for music that sounds best loud, and thanks to the file quality here, it can actually be turned up. | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Shanachie | August 29, 2017 | 7.5 | 95d7ea87-f21f-4a2b-882c-f4f795971151 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
Bruce brings heaps of feeling to a new set of some of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs, giving them a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic sound. | Bruce brings heaps of feeling to a new set of some of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs, giving them a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic sound. | Bruce Springsteen: Only the Strong Survive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-only-the-strong-survive/ | Only the Strong Survive | There are Bruce Springsteen albums born of obsession and perfectionism, endless studio hours and piles of discarded could-have-been classics left in the vaults. There are others that arrive in sudden flashes of creativity, bolts of inspiration with the smoke still rising while you listen. And now there is Only the Strong Survive, a covers album he made in early lockdown during “off hours” at his home studio, where he recreated a selection of his favorite, largely obscure soul songs alongside producer Ron Aniello and engineer Rob Lebret.
Before you rush to judgment about another classic rocker taking the Rod Stewart route, it’s important to remember that covers have always meant something different for Springsteen. Whether he was turning a Jimmy Cliff reggae single into an arena-ready burst of tension and release, or digging through centuries of American folk music to craft his most playful and vibrant record of the 21st century, he has a way of not only telling us his favorite songs but also showing us how those songs make him feel. It’s a quality that’s allowed chestnuts like “Shout” to stand alongside, say, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Jersey Girl” as staples of his concert setlists for decades.
From the opening snare thwack of the title track, however, it’s clear that Only the Strong Survive is a less transformative endeavor. “Now I remember my first love—of course, the whole thing went wrong,” the 73-year-old announces in his warm crackle of a speaking voice, updating Jerry Butler’s original with only some slight variations in word choice and an actorly chuckle. From there, it’s almost note-for-note: the strings and backing vocalists, the walking bassline and mid-chorus fadeout. (A “Volume 1” on the cover indicates there’s more where these recordings came from, and it quickly becomes evident how he was able to be so prolific.)
The most surprising thing about Only the Strong Survive is the song selection itself, which ranges from classics like Jimmy and David Ruffin’s “Turn Back the Hands of Time” to relatively modern fare like Dobie Gray’s 2000 song “Soul Days” and later gems from groups like the Commodores (1985’s “Nightshift”) and the Four Tops (1981’s “When She Was My Girl”). For those with even a casual familiarity with Springsteen’s music, it will be obvious what draws him to this material. The arrangements share his penchant for grand catharsis and minor-to-major uplift, blues in the verse and gospel in the chorus. In the lyrics, there are Chevrolets, backroads, summer nights, and lost love. Even just glancing at titles like “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” and “Someday We’ll Be Together,” the connections are so evident and obvious that he barely has to adjust them to put his own stamp on the music—and so he doesn’t.
In the place of his more characteristic touch is a confident, faithful, and occasionally synthetic-sounding accompaniment provided largely by Aniello as his one-man band. (Sam Moore of Sam & Dave makes two welcome appearances as a guest vocalist.) Since 2012’s Wrecking Ball and its grab-bag follow-up, High Hopes, Aniello has proven to be Springsteen’s most focused studio collaborator, seemingly pushing him to explore a specific element on each release. On 2019’s Western Stars, it was a wistful, melodic side of his solo songwriting, embellished with lush orchestral arrangements that felt like completely new territory. On 2020’s warm plate of comfort food Letter to You, it was the live-in-the-studio sound of the E Street Band: a familiar atmosphere that encouraged Springsteen to dig back into his catalog for abandoned songs he had yet to record with his bandmates.
On Only the Strong Survive, as Springsteen tells it, the focus is his voice. In an introductory video, he is practically shouting with excitement about the fruits of this exercise. (“I’m a good old man,” he says, cracking himself up.) You can hear what’s got him so hyped. From a gravelly whisper to a full-throated croon, a giddy roar to an anguished howl, the material allows him to explore the range of his late-career delivery, the same way his Broadway show could swerve between vulnerability and self-effacing humor without losing its narrative thread. There’s a jolt of comic desperation as he bellows “I live with emptiness” to kick off “7 Rooms of Gloom” and a sense of profound tenderness as he tells us it’s “gonna be all right” in “Nightshift.” He makes the nostalgia of “Soul Days” feel like a recollection of his formative years in Asbury Park, while it’s easy to imagine the regret of “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” situated between his own tortured chronicles of couples drifting in and out of each other’s lives.
On a record whose unrelenting brightness veers as close to Vegas as Springsteen has ever allowed himself—even 1992’s Human Touch, another largely upbeat collection with a similar set of influences, feels downright gritty by comparison—these moments of purpose help earn its place in his ongoing winning streak of studio work. It’s got character, and more than that, it’s got energy: Springsteen has never sounded quite so lighthearted, so unburdened, on record. It’s easy to think of a few ways he could have made this music feel more essential to his body of work—say, enlisting his E Street bandmates to help flesh some songs out—but at this stage in his career, he seems more driven by the act of creating itself: lighting a spark and watching as it grows, knowing someone, somewhere, could find a little hope in its light. After all, he reminds us, that’s what these songs provided for him. | 2022-11-11T00:04:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-11T00:04:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 11, 2022 | 7 | 95d8ff97-35db-45f0-870f-e92b3aa3ad9e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
With more than 20 volumes and counting, the Éthiopiques series on France's Buda Musique has been an invaluable source for Ethiopian music; this 28-track, 2xCD record takes on the uneviable task of attempting to serve as a primer. | With more than 20 volumes and counting, the Éthiopiques series on France's Buda Musique has been an invaluable source for Ethiopian music; this 28-track, 2xCD record takes on the uneviable task of attempting to serve as a primer. | Various Artists: The Very Best of Ethiopiques: Hypnotic Grooves From the Legendary Series | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10747-the-very-best-of-ethiopiques-hypnotic-grooves-from-the-legendary-series/ | The Very Best of Ethiopiques: Hypnotic Grooves From the Legendary Series | I don't entirely agree with the title of this compilation. Most likely, the majority of fans familiar with the Éthiopiques series on France's Buda Musique-- over 20 volumes and counting-- wouldn't agree with it either. It's an entirely subjective thing. If I were to make my own 28-track, 2xCD compilation of the very best of Éthiopiques, it would have three or four songs in common with this one. This is a good thing, serving to illustrate the wealth of outstanding music that series editor Francis Falceto has uncovered over the past 10 years. And at any rate, it's hard to argue with the subtitle, as these discs are indeed filled with hypnotic grooves that offer a nice beginner's guide to a series that's earned every scrap of its legendary status. If you like what you hear on this compilation, the next step is obvious: Dive in and start snapping up Éthiopiques volumes.
Americans and some Europeans could be forgiven for harboring skepticism about a series focused on reissuing Ethiopian popular music-- two decades later, images of the East African nation's 1980s famine is the first, if not the only, reference point many of us have of the country. It's hard to overstate how tiny a piece of the Ethiopian puzzle those images are. This is a country with a continuous history stretching back two millennia, a nation that converted to Christianity in the 4th century, and the only African nation never to be colonized by Europeans, though it did endure a brief occupation by Fascist Italy in the late 1930s and early 40s. It's also home to the oldest human remains ever found. Because of its highland geography and buffer zones of desert, Ethiopian culture developed more or less separately from surrounding cultures, with distinctive music to match.
Though only a few volumes of the Éthiopiques series have focused on traditional music, you can hear its strands running through the dozens of electric rock, soul, and jazz tracks on the records that cover the 1969-1978 "Golden Age" of Ethiopian pop music. It's most obvious in the pentatonic scales and melismatic vocal delivery, but it's also there in the six-against-four rhythms, lyrics filled with double entendres, and the saxophone styles of dozens of players who drew improvisational inspiration from the traditional shelléla war chant, used as a rallying cry prior to battle by Ethiopian troops right into the early 20th century.
All these elements mixed so seamlessly with American rock and soul in the hands of the country's best musicians created a new style of music. Most of the musicians who played on the scene that came to be known as "Swinging Addis" got their starts playing in official bands of Haile Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia-- the Body Guard Band, Police Band, Army Band and official theater bands churned out musicians who were deftly skilled on Western instruments and highly disciplined. Most recordings and performances by singers were backed by official, government-controlled bands until the late 60s, when the first independent groups cautiously made their way onto the scene. These musicians had mostly resigned from official bands, particularly the Body Guard Band, many of whose members had been implicated in a 1960 coup attempt.
As the Golden Age took shape, there was almost no formal outside input-- Mulatu Astatqé, the innovator of the Ethio-jazz style and one of the country's most prominent arrangers, as well as a great vibraphonist, was the only musician in Addis Ababa who had received musical education in Europe and the U.S., though others would travel abroad later. Mulatu's greatest counterpart in developing a distinct Ethio-sound, Girma Beyene, was a self-taught keyboardist and vocalist who learned most of what he knew from listening to American Armed Services broadcasts from Asmara in the north of the country (it's now the capital of independent Eritrea).
Nearly all of Ethiopia's vinyl and (more commonly) shellac record output was accomplished by two shoestring record labels. The first, Amha, founded by Amha Eshete, was technically illegal when it opened in 1969 in defiance of the government's official monopoly on recordings. Amha was done for after the 1974 coup that deposed Selassie and installed a ruling military council known as the Derg, led by the narcissistic dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. Maryam's government imposed curfews that effectively destroyed Ethiopian nightlife and censored all media with a heavy hand-- its economic mismanagement was also partially responsible for those images of famine in the 1980s that we're all so familiar with in the West. One record label, Kaifa, managed to stay alive, issuing vinyl records until 1978, recording with just two microphones.
The music those two labels captured dominates Éthiopiques, and this compilation provides a good cross-section of the series, including a few cuts from artists who fall slightly outside the Golden Age/Swinging Addis purview for good measure. You get the four biggest singers of the era: Mahmoud Ahmed, Alemayehu Eshete, Tlahoun Gessesse and Ayalew Mesfin, several tracks featuring Girma Beyene, including half of the four vocal tracks he recorded, and a nice, if disproportionately large, helping of instrumental tracks from Mulatu, shelléla sax king Getatchew Mekurya and others.
Strangely, no woman singers have been included, although the female voice is so central to Ethiopian musical culture. Other odd decisions include choosing to open disc one with three instrumentals, even though their quality is unimpeachable, as well as only picking Mahmoud Ahmed tracks from Ere Mela Mela (available on Volume 7 of the series). While it's a great album-- and was the first Ethiopian LP to be widely heard in other countries (10 years after its initial release)-- Ahmed has two other volumes in the series, and they're both just as good, if not even better. Ahmed was a master vocalist, though, and all of the tracks that were included are fantastic regardless. Perhaps the only vocalist more powerful than Ahmed was Tlahoun Gessesse, who absolutely wails on all of his inclusions, with melismatic virtuosity and a preacher's fervor.
The only tracks that fall well outside the Golden Age-- a solo piano piece by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou and an otherwordly modern recording of a traditional song accompanied by the ancient Harp of King David by Alemu Aga-- serve as a nice accent, illustrating where a few of the (to Western ears) exotic elements of the Western-influenced popular music tracks came from.
What's most striking about the music-- and the thing that makes this series worth checking out to nearly any mildly adventurous listener-- is that these tracks consistently transcend the curiosity factor. Yes, Girma Beyene's "Enken Yelelebesh" has a dark, tropical feel and a offbeat melody, Getatchew Mekurya's sax sounds like the work of an alternate-universe Archie Shepp, and Alemayehu Eshete's "Telantena Zare" tops its jazzy soul backing with a wildly melismatic and crazed vocal, but fundamentally they're all just great tracks, and they stack up to their closest American and European analogs quite well. Mulatu Astatqe, more than just good Ethio-jazz, is just good jazz.
Add in the fact that the Ethiopian recording industry, due to lack of resources, had a built-in quality control-- if you weren't good enough, and your song wasn't excellent, you didn't get recorded. Is this the place to start? Well, it's a good place to start, though you could do nearly as well going straight to Volumes 8 or 13-- it's a matter of how tentatively you want to explore the series-- and you should explore it. This is some of the world's most captivating music. | 2008-01-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-01-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Manteca Music / Buda Musique | January 3, 2008 | 9.2 | 95da850b-339c-4ed9-9ed7-d5647c43d2be | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On their first album as a collective, Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boom-bap revivalism that made them famous. | On their first album as a collective, Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boom-bap revivalism that made them famous. | Beast Coast: Escape From New York | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beast-coast-escape-from-new-york/ | Escape From New York | Ever since 1999, the rappers and producers of the Beast Coast collective have been pegged as Golden Age evangelists and neoclassicists. They were a New York City squad with throwback New York City values, out to restore the soul to what de facto leader Joey Bada$$ called rap’s “very trash state.” A supergroup made of three smaller Brooklyn rap groups—Pro Era (Bada$$, Kirk Knight, CJ Fly, Nyck Caution, Powers Pleasant), Flatbush Zombies (Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, Erick the Architect), and the Underachievers (Issa Gold and AK the Savior)—they spent their early years trying to conjure Biggie’s era by showing utmost reverence to the sacred land he stood on.
As they’ve grown up, the crew has softened a bit on revivalism. The Pro Era kids started singing more. The Zombies ventured into trap. Joey Bada$$ ghostwrote some of “Rockstar.” On Escape From New York, the first album by Beast Coast as a unit, they seem eager to escape their own provincial past. “This is actual, like, music,” Meechy told Hot97. “Nothing wrong with the boom-bap shit, but we didn’t really try to follow a format that everybody tried to lay for us.” Produced primarily by Erick Arc Elliott and Powers Pleasant, with Elliott serving as the project’s executive producer, Escape From New York turns its title into a metaphor. Beast Coast attempt to move beyond the boundaries established by the hallowed ground of their home, finding a deeper inspiration in brotherhood.
Despite their intentions, the album still often feels like wandering into a pointless cypher. Elliott pushed against nine-minute songs or “this Wu-Tang reincarnation kind of thing,” but most of the songs are still huge posse cuts, just with more condensed verses. Some songs have as many as nine. Some members squeeze in for a measly four bars. Sometimes it can be like watching too many people cram into an elevator; everyone would probably be better off if a few stepped off and caught the next one. They go to such lengths trying to ensure that everyone gets enough mic time that the process can feel restrictive. They don’t even get particularly cute with the matchups: Flatbush Zombies largely stick with their own, and Nyck Caution and Kirk Knight, who already teamed up for 2017’s Nyck @ Knight, almost always appear together.
There is a level of comfort that also feels like complacency. “I play these songs for people sometimes and they’re like, ‘Is that you or Joey?’” Meechy Darko told Complex. “I love that, because it’s me and Joey going after each other and that means we are in sync together.” But that smudging can also speak to a lack of originality. While they all do tend to follow one another, there isn’t much synchronicity in what they choose to rap about outside of “Problemz.” There is very little continuity. It can be difficult to get three performers on the same page, much less ten.
Cream rises to the top in situations like this, and Joey Bada$$ and Meechy Darko separate themselves from the pack. Bada$$ remains the best rapper this crew has to offer; the most technically proficient in a collective that prides itself on that sort of thing, and the artist with the highest ceiling. Meechy raps with such personality that he’s the only person who benefits from shorter verses. He could chew up scenery during a cameo. “You never get what you deserve, just what you negotiate/You want the bag, I want the safe/Click-clack, nobody safe,” he raps on “Rubberband,” howling like a berserk preacher. On at least two occasions, he gets two verses on the same song, and he earns them. On the flip side, no pairing underachieves quite like the Underachievers, who seem to shrink away at nearly every occasion. They suffer the most in this rigid format. There isn’t nearly enough time for their verses to pick up any momentum. The other members of Pro Era may as well be cardboard stand-ins most of the time.
Escape From New York is most engaging when it doesn’t try to force droning lesser rappers on listeners and instead focuses on making the “actual music” Meechy talked about. Songs like “Snow in the Stadium” and “Desperado” show that this group is, in fact, capable of producing not just functional but enjoyable rap songs under these tight conditions. But there isn’t enough of this balance, and a lot of that work is undercut by songs reinforcing the pecking order like “Puke,” a hookless bar-fest that crescendos into an all too meta Bada$$ breakdown: “I don’t even keep score, bitch I got the win/They need me like oxygen/On me, the whole block depend,” he raps, and it’s hard not to read that as rap Atlas bearing the entire Beast Coast on his shoulders. Bada$$ is the most talented and most famous member of the collective, and the Zombies have carved out their own little niche, but the Beast Coast album’s most insurmountable challenge is convincing the listener that the rest could ever hope to escape New York without them. | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 30, 2019 | 6.5 | 95dbf0fa-5358-49f1-9cd5-62e07ea98584 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The California producer’s second release is a chill, whimsical listen whose Balearic compositions are filled with jazzy guitar, vintage synths, and reveal themselves to be surprisingly complex. | The California producer’s second release is a chill, whimsical listen whose Balearic compositions are filled with jazzy guitar, vintage synths, and reveal themselves to be surprisingly complex. | Scott Gilmore: Subtle Vertigo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/scott-gilmore-subtle-vertigo/ | Subtle Vertigo | Blessed are those who have regular access to yard sales, for they shall inherit the best gear and records. Take Scott Gilmore, whose idiosyncratic studio setup is the product of years’ worth of scrounging through strangers’ garages in his native Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley. He records his music directly to a quarter-inch reel-to-reel machine that he picked up at a yard sale, and his instruments represent a mix of the enviably rare (Arp Odyssey), the economically minded (Roland TR-606 drum machine, a cheaper alternative to the more famous 808 or 909), and the truly unusual (a bamboo saxophone).
His music, which sounds as vintage as his Hammond 102200 Preset Synth, also has the distinct air of something you might find in a dusty corner of someone’s garage. The tracklisting of a recent mix that Gilmore put together for Red Bull Radio gives a good indication of his influences, like Arthur Russell, Gary Wilson, Captain Beefheart, R. Stevie Moore—a motley crew of eccentrics and iconoclasts who bent the process of getting music down on tape to their own crooked wills. Full of clean-toned guitars, percolating rhythm boxes, and layer upon layer of wispy analog synthesizers, it takes its principal stylistic cues from Krautrock and library music; the album often sounds like Air’s Moon Safari or Stereolab’s Dots and Loops run through a beat-up transistor radio that’s been wrapped in cheesecloth.
It makes a natural fit for Mark Barrott’s International Feel, an Ibiza-based record label that has taken upon itself to revive the sounds of Balearic music at its balmiest: The album is a chill, whimsical listen marked by sunny melodies, lilting rhythms, and timbres as watery as the ice melting in the bottom of your glass. Though Subtle Vertigois billed as his debut album, it’s actually the follow-up to a 2016 cassette on SFV Acid’s SFV Records label. Whereas that tape, bearing the low-key title Volume 01, was recorded in mono, the new one makes the leap to stereo; it also boasts an ever so slightly richer, fuller sound, achieved by recording eight separate tracks to his reel-to-reel, bouncing into the computer, then recording another pass on the multi-track and bouncing down again. Nevertheless, it maintains the same muted, understated air as its predecessor.
In “Pieced Together,” jazzy guitar chords strum around a kind of lite-reggae groove while Hammond stabs evoke wooden-floored roller rinks. “Walking Underground” fleshes out a sun-bleached bossa nova groove with sighing vocals that sound like they’ve been rescued from an answering machine. “Flight Through Grey” superimposes the German Autobahn onto the Southern California highway system, crisscrossing the arid landscape to the pulse of a chugging motorik groove, while long, skinny synth leads trace contrails against the pale sky. The opening duo of “E70 No. 01” and “Europe” will appeal to Shy Layers fans; the songs’ faintly tropical guitar tone, sublimated funk, and bittersweet reverie are cut from cloth similar to that used in the Atlanta musician’s yacht-pop debut.
Gilmore studied guitar for 18 years, and the level of musicianship here is accordingly high. His evolving compositions are surprisingly complex, given their laid-back air: Not only do they nail their desired hazy mood, but Gilmore’s multi-tracking methods keep their moving parts constantly shifting, so that no two passages are quite alike. New counterpoints are always cropping up, new voices constantly slipping into the mix; synthesizer leads multiply like Mickey Mouse’s splintered broom in Fantasia (just way more chill—imagine “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” adapted for the era of legal weed, maybe). If the album’s easy-going rhythms and chord changes suggest a certain low-stakes air, the music’s understated virtuosity keeps you coming back, and the penultimate track, “Tides”—a short, ambient sketch for arpeggiated synthesizer—hints at a more experimental undercurrent that Gilmore could well follow into his next recording, should he choose to. A wonderful Sunday-morning record, Subtle Vertigo revalidates the very idea of easy listening. | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | International Feel | June 21, 2017 | 7.2 | 95e141bb-3ca0-4640-8436-349b07aa0432 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his latest album, the Buffalo rapper and member of the tough-talking trio Griselda makes his first bid for a bigger audience. | On his latest album, the Buffalo rapper and member of the tough-talking trio Griselda makes his first bid for a bigger audience. | Conway the Machine: From King to a GOD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-the-machine-from-king-to-a-god/ | From King to a GOD | Buffalo’s Griselda Records has built a fiefdom in western New York through prolific output with a very specific aesthetic, characterized by deep-seated grime draped in muted elegance. It’s the sound of long nights and cold winters, art made by hustlers toiling in relative obscurity, unable to garner support even from local institutions. As one of its founding MCs, Conway the Machine has come to embody Buffalo’s identity as a forgotten city, carrying a chip on his shoulder big enough to block out the sun. But on his latest LP From King to a God, Conway looks to shed his earthly confines for something more heavenly.
A rapper’s voice is their instrument, and few have one as distinct as Conway. His Bell’s Palsy (the result of several gunshot wounds) splits his diction right down the middle of his face, somewhere in between sharp and slurring. He’s a poignant lyricist with a penchant for storytelling, and his words are always intelligible, even if they sometimes sound strained through gritted teeth. His flow can turn an average track into something memorable, and serves as the perfect foil to his brother Westside Gunn’s nasal delivery.
The lyrics that unique instrument delivers on From King to a God are often vivid—albeit somewhat rehashed—street tales told with clever wordplay and a knack for scene-setting. He carries himself with the confidence of someone who knows they’re hard, and therefore isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, threatening violence and shedding tears in the same breath on “Juvenile Hell” (“I cried when Country Mike died, my heart broke/On the yard, get your jaw broke, as far as the bars go/Not only did I raise the bar, the bar broke”).
From King to a God’s production credits are star-studded, spanning several decades of hip-hop royalty, including EPMD’s Erick Sermon, Gang Starr’s DJ Premier, Mobb Deep’s Havoc, and the reigning maestro of mafioso rap, the Alchemist. The bulk of the production is handled by UK producer Beat Butcha and Griselda’s in-house producer Daringer, who are reverent enough towards the aforementioned OGs that the aesthetic across From King to a God is relatively seamless. The lone exceptions come from two modern-era production gurus, Hit-Boy and Murda Beatz.
Murda Beatz’s “Anza” floats a Double Dragon-esque chiptune melody atop a buoyant beat, and sounds like nothing else on the album. But the Hit-Boy helmed “Fear of GOD” is the album’s most compelling track, with a twinkling beat that teasingly withholds a sinister bassline in service of calculated drops. The inclusion of a perfectly serviceable Dej Loaf verse is curious, to say the least—her candy-coated AutoTune delivery sticks out like a sore thumb against the muted mahogany flows that typically populate Griselda records. And the vibe vanishes as abruptly as it arrived, shifting back into the tortured strings of the Method Man collab “Lemon.” It’s the strongest verse from Mr. Meth in years (“We creamin' em with pockets of dirty money, I'm clean again/Ain't gotta tell you I'm dope, just stick the needle in”), but the sequencing does it no favors.
From King to a God would be considered a solid effort from most MCs, but it's clear Conway has his aim set higher. Having conquered his hometown, Conway now seeks adulation from the world at large. And largely, it’s a world that has moved on from the New York sound of the ’90s. There are forays into potential new directions, but much of From King to a God finds Conway treading water. And the late additions to the tracklist—including the three interludes that essentially eulogize his homie DJ Shay (the recently deceased Griselda production mainstay) and tracks produced by DJ Premier and Khrysis—seem to look more backward than forward.
Conway admits that this LP is meant to be somewhat of an appetizer for his forthcoming Shady records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, the record that would mark a sea change for both himself and Griselda as a whole. And if he wants to shed the genre-rapper tag and graduate to the next level of stardom, he’ll need a record that elevates the Griselda sound beyond the limits of Buffalo’s icy streets.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Drumwork Music Group / Griselda / EMPIRE | September 14, 2020 | 6.9 | 95e21a4c-4946-48b6-86ab-1ac12c3359f9 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Black Mountain mainman Steve McBean here finds more room for the rest of the band's burgeoning personalities, and the resulting record raises the stakes of the debut considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catchup with their new material's epic-sized dimensions. | Black Mountain mainman Steve McBean here finds more room for the rest of the band's burgeoning personalities, and the resulting record raises the stakes of the debut considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catchup with their new material's epic-sized dimensions. | Black Mountain: In the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11056-in-the-future/ | In the Future | Black Mountain's accomplished self-titled debut found frontman Steve McBean synergizing numerous local Vancouver talents along with his own grab bag of music sensibilities. To further up the ante, the band made little effort to shroud their classic rock fanaticism. Whatever you wanna call them-- revivalists, re-interpreters, or even rock fundamentalists-- that first record provided an engaging snapshot of late 1960s/early 70s AOR. With that in mind, sophomore effort In the Future faces the challenge of holding our attention amidst all these Guitar Hero games and Led Zeppelin reunions without puffing itself up to the ridiculous levels of more mainstream retro-stoners like Wolfmother and the Mars Volta.
Thanks to the emergence of side projects Blood Meridian and Lightning Dust, the curtain's been lifted, and suddenly Black Mountain sounds more complicated and conflicted than the bleary-eyed grin their debut flashed. The Debbie Downer pathos of Amber Webber, who until now had sounded like an afterthought on the band's recordings, spills over from her sobering Lightning Dust material, recorded with fellow Mountaineer Joshua Wells. Coupled with Blood Meridian exposing the bluesy id of bassist Matt Camirand, Black Mountain had no choice but to make room for these burgeoning personalities. While the debut grooved on a countercultural us v. them moral trip, Future raises the stakes considerably, leaving the band's musical talents to play catchup with their new material's epic-sized dimensions.
Simply juxtaposing Future opener "Stormy High" with the debut's first track "Modern Music" suggests that the band's more profound than playing Nintendo while high, but not entirely immune to "J.R. Tokin'" jokes. Starting with a lugubrious, "Hell's Bells"-style arpeggio before launching into stoner-metal chanty, McBean repeatedly belts the song's title as Wells's banshee howls in the background, foretelling McBean's lyric about "witches on your trail." A fitting way to kick off the album, "Stormy High" gently eases the listener into Black Mountain's increasingly fantastical world. The eight-minute "Tyrants," on the other hand, sounds like a Middle Earth baptism by fire. With its sprawling sections and gauntlet of brain-numbing riffs, "Tyrants"'s best analog would probably be "Don't Run Our Hearts Around." However, where the latter dims for hushed verses of traditional blues bellyaching, the former's eerie, calmer moments wrench the soul just as violently as the louder ax assaults.
Future provides a wide spotlight, and McBean's much more willing here to pass the shine to Wells when she's better suited for the part. "Queens Will Play" essentially beefs up Lightning Dust's threadbare palette of organ and guitar, changing a simple church house hymn into a menacing cathedral dirge. She even gets to carry the torch to the finish line with closer "Night Walks", a dreamy ballad that offers spiritual replenishment after a mystically taxing hour of dense music.
That's right, Future's hardly a smooth ride. Whether verified or not, drug use has always gone hand-in-hand with these guys, but here they either smoked too much and lost focus on some of these winding mini-sagas or remained painfully sober and sacrificed much of their debut's mind-freeing vibe. Black Mountain's strategic sequencing of long-track/short-track managed to keep listeners locked on, particularly for its dazzling first half. Future's valleys sag slightly lower, giving the listener less incentive to motor through this psych jungle. The sappy Spider-Man 3 soundtrack ballad "Stay Free" comes off the heels of the ho-hum "Wucan", a six-minute piece of all-too-canonized psychedelic sounds, and the nearly 17-minute (!) "Bright Lights" finds the band's creativity running on fumes by its midway point. Fortunately, buried in this massive time capsule you find some succinct nuggets, particularly the Tom Petty-esque swagger of "Angels" and crying-into-beer lurch of "Wild Wind". Ultimately, Future can't compete with the classic rock divinity that's been worshipped in countless high school parking lots and shag carpeted basements for the last 40 years, but you gotta love them for trying. After all, in a time when four rock gods reuniting for a one-off concert becomes the music story of the year, what can any of us mortals do? | 2008-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 23, 2008 | 7.4 | 95e48797-0a7a-4b50-a232-32b20ea57588 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
A concept album that serves as a nostalgic trip down clubland lane, Moby's latest attempts to distill a quarter-century of NYC dance music into one hour. | A concept album that serves as a nostalgic trip down clubland lane, Moby's latest attempts to distill a quarter-century of NYC dance music into one hour. | Moby: Last Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11362-last-night/ | Last Night | Moby's controversial strategy of licensing the hell out of 1999's Play proved, not surprisingly, something of a devil's bargain. After years of hard work on the club scene and as a cult crossover star, Play was the big payoff and big payday all wrapped up in one. But the downside was that Moby's sudden ubiquity, and the seeming effortlessness with which Play proliferated, downgraded the Moby brand. The guy actually accomplished quite a bit creatively before he became a commercial force, but making it look easy made a lot of detractors think it actually was.
Still, at the same time, there may be something to that in light of Moby's post-Play output. Given that Moby has total autonomy, both creatively and financially, it's disappointing that the past several years have seen him do little in the studio to take advantage of freedoms many artists would kill for-- all while dozens of boundary-pushing DJs and producers circulate in and out of fashion. Maybe Moby sensed it himself, and, rejecting complacency, set himself some ambitious goals with Last Night, a concept album that serves as a nostalgic trip down clubland lane. This being Moby, it even comes with an explicit statement of purpose. "It's me trying to take 25 years of going out in NYC and condensing it into a 65-minute record. It's also trying to condense an eight-hour night into just over an hour of music."
Distilling 25 years of material and an eight-hour experience into a 60-minute record is no small feat, and to Moby's credit Last Night isn't a totally pedantic drag. Moby's never been shy about tipping his hand when it comes to his influences, and returning to dance music for inspiration makes perfect sense at this point in his career-- especially after the relatively uninspired Hotel and Baby Monkey (recorded as Voodoo Child, his last stab at a "straight" dance record). But there's "inspired" and then there's inspired. Compared to (for example) Hercules & Love Affair's own recent stroll through New York's varied club history, the relatively indifferent grooves on Last Night don't quite cut it. These may be songs designed to make you move but the results are only intermittently rousing.
"Ooh Yeah" and "I Love to Move in Here" (featuring the Cold Crush Brothers' Grandmaster Caz) start the album out with cool (as in cold) disco diva vocals and hip-house, respectively. Retro cred established, the disc then moves into peppier territory with "257.zero". The track doesn't really go anywhere, but it still feels like it could go on longer than three and a half minutes. "Everyday It's 1989", on the other hand, so perfectly encapsulates the spirit of rave that it might as well be drawn from a comp circa that titular year. If Moby wanted to distill that hour further down to just a single track, it would be this one.
The track's also a reminder of Moby's prowess as a producer, but unfortunately too much of Last Night stresses his recent bona fides as master of the middle of the road. The hip-hop spiced single "Alice" (featuring members of Nigeria's 419 Squad) rides a moody subterranean bass but ends pretty much where it begins. "Hyenas" is all swoon and no drama. "Disco Lies" and "Stars" (anthems, both) are more perfect late-80s/early-90s club recreations that nonetheless miss an opportunity to mix (or at least bridge) the past with the present. Somewhere in the middle are tracks like "Live for Tomorrow" and "I'm in Love", sexy, moody things that are equal parts bedroom lures and hints at the beckoning chill-out room.
That chill-out atmosphere kicks in for the album's final stretch, gloomy tracks such as the woozy trip-hop of "Degenerates" or the circular, minor key dirge "Mothers of the Night" that act as the big comedown after the implied narrative's night on the town. By dedicating such a big hunk of the album to the early morning, however, the lasting vibe conveyed by the record is not euphoric or even nostalgic, but oddly elegiac. In the end, lost amidst the faithfully reproduced house piano progressions and familiar melodies is anything signaling that those epiphany-filled late nights were actually, you know, fun. If Moby's glory days were anything like this, Last Night never quite makes an entirely convincing argument why anyone would ever want to go back. | 2008-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | April 3, 2008 | 5.2 | 95e51bce-7d8f-4ef0-97d7-0bec9b037eb1 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
On his solo instrumental debut, the New York acoustic guitarist balances the romantic dynamics of flamenco and the meticulousness of Windham Hill with the unguarded qualities of improvised music. | On his solo instrumental debut, the New York acoustic guitarist balances the romantic dynamics of flamenco and the meticulousness of Windham Hill with the unguarded qualities of improvised music. | Mason Lindahl: Kissing Rosy in the Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mason-lindahl-kissing-rosy-in-the-rain/ | Kissing Rosy in the Rain | Mason Lindahl skipped the great solo-guitar surge of the last decade. In 2009, the North California native debuted with Serrated Man Sound, a quixotic collection of post-New Weird American pastiche. He sighed like M. Ward and cooed like Devendra Banhart, howled like the Dodos and crooned like Vetiver. Inchoate as it was, Serrated Man Sound didn’t cause a ripple in a scene that was already evaporating. The record’s real thrills, though, were its glimmers of guitar heroism—the dizzying dynamics of “No Man,” the phosphorescent flickers of “Nine.” “What if he just shut up and played?” one might have wondered, a conundrum that has vexed decades of fingerstyle giants. We never found out: While William Tyler, Gwenifer Raymond, and Steve Gunn navigated new routes from beneath the shadow cast by late colossus Jack Rose, Lindahl disappeared.
Or so it seemed. Lindahl’s first album in a dozen years and first since migrating to New York, Kissing Rosy in the Rain is as enchanting and emotive as any of the solo guitar records released during his extended absence. Tender, melancholy, and candid, these nine songs for nylon-stringed guitar suggest a gnarled apple tree bare in winter—muted wonders, suspended somewhere between sweetness and sadness. As its name and rapturous title track suggest, Kissing Rosy in the Rain is a remarkable distillation of nature’s bittersweet cycles, especially the way love eventually entails loss, and loss sometimes offers a new start.
The first thing you may notice about Kissing Rosy in the Rain is the sweep of its beauty. With little more than his guitar and occasional electronics, Lindahl weaves melodies and layers harmonies as though buttressed by a miniature orchestra, much like his predecessor James Blackshaw. You can imagine opener “Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling” replicated in some lavish concert hall, or the patient “Outside Laughing” rearranged for a string quartet. “Distress” and “Deep Wish,” meanwhile, summon the romantic dynamics of flamenco, where tufts of notes pause to exhale as if the music were a living organism. This majesty betrays more than a whiff of Windham Hill and ECM, stables whose instrumentalists have often been lampooned for meticulousness that borders on pedantry.
But these songs are pretty without being precious, more concerned with emotional integrity than sonic purity. Listen closely, and you’ll hear Lindahl lift from a string too soon or the noise inside the studio interrupt an otherwise silent rest. In fact, were the layers beneath these tracks not so deliberate and subtle—the baleful organ drone under the dirge “In Lieu,” the kaleidoscopic smears around “Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling”—these songs might be mistaken for improvisations, made in a such a way that the occasionally aberrant note or creaking chair couldn’t be corrected in a subsequent take. “Soft Light” feels like a brief meditation on chronic self-doubt, as patient but intense as an improvisation by impressionistic mage Loren Connors.
This idea will be familiar to fans of Grouper and Marisa Anderson, artists who have recently allowed their compositions to bend to the demands of space and time. This indeterminate approach fosters imperfection and vulnerability, coexisting conditions that remind us that music is first cathartic for the person who makes it. For Lindahl, these details let you in the room as he sorts through his passions. More important, though, these tiny errors reinforce Lindahl’s larger point: Nothing is ever entirely wonderful or tragic, broken or righteous. Hearing a string buzz against a fret or Lindahl pause to search for the next note turns listening into an act of trust.
Kissing Rosy in the Rain was originally slated for release early in the fall of 2020. As with innumerable other plans, the pandemic and its atmosphere of unease prompted months of delays. These songs now arrive right on time, at the start of a year when almost any smidgen of hope or delight already seems meted out with a matching dose of anxiety. Lindahl writes little hymns for the uncertainty of our existence and gentle laments for vanished happiness. His nylon notes flicker like a flame in a stiff wind, embattled but still clinging to the original spark.
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. | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Tompkins Square | January 25, 2021 | 7.7 | 95e8d47f-297d-43b2-9522-3e0b6ccba960 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The viral phenom’s full-length debut cuts her modern pop sensibility with doses of historicism, embracing opposing energies with effortless swagger. | The viral phenom’s full-length debut cuts her modern pop sensibility with doses of historicism, embracing opposing energies with effortless swagger. | King Princess: Cheap Queen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-princess-cheap-queen/ | Cheap Queen | By now, Mikaela Straus’ artistic predicament has become uncannily familiar: A young unknown with a fresh, infectious sound releases a song that catches fire. Streams rack up, fame arrives overnight; the pressure’s on to articulate an artistic identity, cook up a debut album, and make good on the promise of that first hit, fast—all while contending with the gaze of several million curious onlookers. If Straus, who’s better known as King Princess, wanted to compare notes on the ups and downs of a viral breakout, she could do so with a fairly spectacular peer group that includes Maggie Rogers, Billie Eilish, and Clairo.
Straus’ story has an added layer of complexity. Last year, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter rose up on the shoulders of her song “1950,” a sticky, Harry Styles-cosigned debut that took inspiration from classic queer literature and opened with a nod to her sexual orientation: “I hate it when dudes try to chase me.” On its heels came “Talia,” a bit of liquor-wet, post-breakup revelry directed to a conspicuously female subject, and the self-explanatory single “Pussy Is God.” Within months, King Princess was not just a burgeoning pop phenom, but a burgeoning queer idol.
In the historically sanitized landscape of pop music, queer expression is undeniably radical, particularly how Straus does it—by naming and gendering her desire in a way that, not long ago, few dared to. And if Straus is fazed by the burden of representation, she doesn’t show it. Her debut album—that first true test of her artistry—is titled Cheap Queen, borrowing a term from drag culture, and on its cover, she appears with her face done up in drag queen glam, down to the painted-on beauty mark. The title track, she says, is a tribute to her squad, all cheap queens in their own right. (Straus, whose father runs Brooklyn’s Mission Sound studio, inherited a leg up in the industry, so it’s a bit cheeky of her to make a personal brand of scrappiness—but then, cheekiness is part of her brand, too.) Like any good pop song, “Cheap Queen” strikes a balance between specificity and relatability. It shouts out its community without wading into identity politics, instead cultivating, through its inclusive warmth and effortless swagger, a stoner-pop appeal likely to resonate with anyone who’s ever stayed up drinking and smoking with pals.
Thematically, though, “Cheap Queen”—originally one of the album’s sharp, economical interludes, until Straus’ team persuaded her to expand it—stands apart. On the whole, the album is more concerned with lovers than with friends. Sequenced as a chronological narrative, Cheap Queen loosely follows a fraught renegotiation of space between exes; the particulars aren’t quite so interesting as the emotions they draw out. Straus has noted her eagerness to “write about getting my heart smashed,” and she repeatedly delivers on the drama of that declaration. “Homegirl,” a schmaltzy, vibraphone-embellished ballad, tracks the triangulation of glances between Straus and the boys who are eyeing the same woman at a party—the kind of gathering where close quarters reveal vast emotional distance. The gulf between Straus and her love interest widens as she considers forgotten possessions unlikely to be reclaimed (“Isabel’s Moment”) and nervously awaits a text unlikely to arrive (“Watching My Phone”).
The latter song’s clincher is an admission of inadequacy: “I can’t be the million girls you’re going to meet.” The meekness is gutting; its narrator is barely recognizable as the same person who earlier claimed to be “getting too cocky, since everyone wants me,” who wrote off her ex with a sweetly condescending, “You’re probably just a fan now, babe.” But embracing opposing energies is the King Princess way. She is confident and vulnerable, cool and earnest. As her chosen moniker suggests, she’s masculine and feminine, swaggering and soft, posing for Playboy as both cheerleader and jock. She’s posing for Playboy, a bastion of the male gaze that her widely broadcasted sexuality belies.
In particular, Cheap Queen plays on a tension between old and new. Straus and her Gen-Z peers grew up listening to Drake, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift, but Straus’ industry-adjacent upbringing also exposed her to ’70s rock bands including Led Zeppelin and T. Rex. Like Styles, who helped precipitate her fame, she seems eager to cut her modern pop sensibility with doses of historicism. On Cheap Queen, the drum pads and Auto-Tune harmonics that defined her first singles are still part of the mix, but the computer isn’t her primary tool. There’s a hint of Janis Joplin when Straus layers in blues guitar and organ or teases the occasional snarl out of her otherwise silky voice. Latter-day rock prophet Father John Misty drops by to handle drums on “Ain’t Together,” a crisp, handsome tune with Beatles-esque eccentricity in its (digitally approximated) Mellotron fills and densely layered backing vocals.
Still, Straus is a distinctly contemporary creator, versed in samples and pitch-shifts and interludes—songs as short as post-digital attention spans—that house some of her most intriguing musical ideas. To the extent that viral success is explicable, it seems sensible that hers continues to hold. As Cheap Queen makes plain, she’s not an ingénue with one great idea—she has a few dozen of them, informed by sources spanning decades and genres. There are moments when she slips up—“Watching My Phone,” with its lugubrious strings and wistful choral embellishments, feels particularly overworked—and she isn’t breaking ground in pop by disregarding its supposed borders. But where post-genre stream-baiters pull their numbers by anesthetizing distinctive sounds, King Princess pulls hers by playing up their contrasts.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Zelig / Columbia | October 28, 2019 | 7.4 | 95ed93d6-f531-40ef-8478-60ac249e60dc | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
The Toronto band’s pummeling sound still evokes white-knuckled, visceral disgust, but they struggle to take these songs somewhere more interesting than they started. | The Toronto band’s pummeling sound still evokes white-knuckled, visceral disgust, but they struggle to take these songs somewhere more interesting than they started. | Metz: Atlas Vending | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metz-atlas-vending/ | Atlas Vending | METZ isn’t hooky in the traditional sense of the word, but their appeal is immediate as that of any pop band. Years before Shellac and Hot Snakes broke their hiatuses, the Toronto trio’s Sub Pop debut proudly kept the bad vibes going for antisocialites who didn’t care to pledge full allegiance to hardcore, punk, noise, or indie rock. If Steve Albini producing their 2017 album Strange Peace didn’t move the needle much, it’s only because you might’ve assumed he did the other ones too. And yet, Strange Peace started to renege on the promises Alex Edkins made two years earlier on II: that METZ would never hire a big producer, clean up their sound, or make anything accessible enough for radio. Three years later, Atlas Vending verges even closer to “accessible” and “expansive.” For better or worse, the snare tone is still their best hook.
But what a snare tone. It’s about the first thing heard on the opening “Pulse,” a form of “grimy, airless 200-cap venue” vérité so antithetical to a typical studio-produced sound that it comes off like CGI—as if Hayden Menzies is banging oil drums inside a meat locker, which itself in inside a well, which itself is inside a cave. Getting on METZ’s wavelength has always required a miserabilist bent, and the insistent beat is self-explanatory: It’s the pulse of a man whose heart pumps coffee sludge, steel shavings, and malevolence, soldiering on in the hopes that tolerance for pain might amount to something useful.
It’s an apt state of existence for Atlas Vending, as METZ’s music skews more political by default in 2020. We’re told that Edkins addresses “crushing social anxiety, addiction, isolation, media-induced paranoia and the restless urge to leave everything behind,” and really, what else is an aggrieved noise-rock band supposed to write about? “A Boat to Drown In” and “Hail Taxi” avoid restating the obvious, but would benefit from a less oblique approach. Edkins attacks every lyric with the same unyielding, agitated bark, making it hard to grasp any heightened sense of stakes or outrage. Is he newly infuriated by three years of doomscrolling since Strange Peace or is this the inevitable outcome of matching his band’s unyielding, agitated music?
The cerebral aspect of METZ’s music is always secondary to its concussive power, and on Atlas Vending they take great care to get the sound and associations in place. Co-producer Ben Greenberg’s stint with The Men coincided with their creative zenith before he pivoted back to the industrial, urban assault vehicle of Uniform. The mixing comes courtesy of Seth Manchester, who guided the mainstream breakthrough of Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want, recreating their prior sonic snuff with a prestigious, filmic scope that roped in Nick Cave fans. METZ doesn’t lack those acts’ extremist convictions; Atlas Vending is among the most pummeling music released by a big-league indie label in 2020. Nearly every track has something to offer the pedalboard gawkers—the guitars of “Parasite” replicate a dentist’s drill on chattering teeth, the harmonies of “Blind Youth Industrial Park” imagines Alice in Chains’ Facelift as part of Sub Pop’s back catalog, and Chris Slorach’s bass tone ought to require oversight from OSHA.
Each of these things happens within the first 30 seconds or so, and METZ struggle to find ways to take their songs somewhere more interesting than they started. The choruses of “Blind Youth Industrial Park” or “Hail Taxi” are clean enough to pass for anthemic, but their impact diminishes with repetition, Edkins’ melodic austerity and rigid intonation ensuring they’re anthemic only relative to other METZ songs. “The Mirror” kicks off with an intriguing post-hardcore rendering of the Bo Diddley beat and cycles in place for about five minutes. Lead single “A Boat to Drown In” does this intentionally, a seven-minute motorik meant to signify a bold new direction rather a low-risk pivot, the result of incrementally widening their influences over the past decade. There’s no denying METZ’s ability to summon a white-knuckled, visceral disgust where tension and release are indistinguishable. It slaps, but it doesn’t leave much of a mark.
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. | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 13, 2020 | 6.4 | 95ef5da7-a47a-485b-a0e9-2b50a5962704 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Naeem Juwan steps away from the Spank Rock persona on an album that drifts between manic experimentation and somber fury. It’s the work of a freer musician, one unburdened by internet hype. | Naeem Juwan steps away from the Spank Rock persona on an album that drifts between manic experimentation and somber fury. It’s the work of a freer musician, one unburdened by internet hype. | Naeem: Startisha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naeem-startisha/ | Startisha | If you spent time online in 2006, there’s a chance you thought Spank Rock was cool. His music was a defining cog in the genre-mashing thunderdome that emerged alongside bloghouse; it was superficially exciting and quickly overwhelming party music, an abrasive and sometimes thrilling concoction of break-beat Baltimore club mixed with bass-heavy hip-hop, house, rock, and electronica. But unlike his collaborators from the same era, who found commercial success by evolving out of the internet pockets they started in—artists like Diplo, Santigold, and Benny Blanco—Spank, real name Naeem Juwan, stayed put, treading water in some mid-aughts fantasy. He quickly became a relic of his time; when I think of Spank Rock, whose debut album YoYoYoYoYo came out in 2006, I think of purple American Apparel hoodies and cups of froyo at Pinkberry.
Startisha, Juwan’s debut album under his first name, arrives six years after the last Spank Rock EP. It’s the work of a freer musician, one unburdened by internet attention, hype, or the need to stand out. Most importantly, though, it’s an attempt by a musical harbinger to prove, all these years later, that he does, actually, have something to say. For the past five years, Naeem worked on new music with producers Sam Green and Grave Goods, in Philadelphia, and with Ryan Olsen in Minneapolis. He popped up last year on Bon Iver’s i,i, earning a writing credit on the transcendent hymnal “U (Man Like)” and a personal tribute on album highlight “Naeem.” Startisha’s nine songs, two of which carry writing credits from Justin Vernon, are undeniably more personal than Naeem’s previous work. There’s something cathartic about an artist with such a purposeful persona finally shedding his layers, even when it doesn’t reveal as much as he might think it does. But this album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.
That sweet spot is the Francis and the Lights co-write “Stone Harbor,” a warm tribute to Naeem’s longtime boyfriend. Green and Grave Goods’ production swells from a trip-hop bounce, layered with electronic horn flares to a full-bodied, piano-flushed sing-a-long; it’s a near perfect encapsulation of the internal chaos of missing a partner, a sensation both vulnerable and assured. “Every song I hear I think of you/Every love I’ve had I think of you,” Naeem repeats, like a prayer. Just as transportive is “Simulation,” which features Vernon and Swamp Dogg and takes a page from Kanye West and Vernon’s maximalist playbook, blending folksy keys with heavy 808s as Naeem raps, scattershot, about the Sandy Hook shooting, banned books, and the DC Comics character King Mob. He still knows how to party, though, dipping back into Spank Rock territory on “Let Us Rave” and the ridiculously fun “Woo Woo Woo,” a raunchy and cocky posse cut over a hiccuping Baltimore house beat that features Juwan’s long standing (and sorely underrated) collaborators Micah James and Amanda Blank.
It’s unclear, really, what Startisha is trying to say, beyond manifesting a fresh start for its protagonist. When Naeem tries too hard to tell us who he is, he stumbles—songs like “Us” and “Right Here” feel insular and half-conceived, and his verses, while not Spank Rock-level crude, have the pent-up, free-associative energy of long-restrained rambles. The album’s closer, “Tiger Song,” is a well-intentioned but exhausting attempt at something like a worldview, where Naeem’s pontifications about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are downright confounding. It’s unedited and raw, as inaccessible as a stranger’s scribbled journal entry.
It’s on Startisha’s title track, though, that we finally meet Naeem Juwan. The song tells the story of his childhood neighbor, Startisha, who appeared one day at a family get-together, drawn by the thump of the Baltimore club music playing, and danced with Naeem. He never forgot it. And over a dripping, fractured electronic symphony that’s part A.G. Cook and part Bon Iver, he unites both the awe he felt at the time, witnessing Startisha’s presence, and the nostalgia he feels for her now.
“Sometimes when I have time/I think of you and I wonder/Do you still move this way?” he sings. Nearly six minutes long, the song luxuriates in its remembrance; soaked in heavy drums, luscious horns, and dramatic vocal runs, it has the feel of a rediscovered home video, a simple but vivid origin story of an impressionable queer black kid watching a glamorous black woman dance. Naeem is singing about his radiant neighbor, but he’s also singing to himself: the one still in the closet as a boy in Baltimore, the one slamming sounds together on some blog in 2006, the one searching for an artistic identity, the one we meet, now, finally at peace with himself. “I’m still moving, I’m still moving, I’m still moving,” he sings, pained, as the song peters out. He’s assuring us, but really it feels like he’s reminding himself. When you’ve been stuck for this long, even the smallest hint of clarity can feel heaven-sent.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 37d03d | June 15, 2020 | 7 | 95ef7a16-5ddf-44a4-a532-92aa19ebaaa6 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
A benefit compilation from the venerable UK label 4AD sets its roster loose on its back catalog for a varied set of covers that uphold the imprint’s exploratory spirit. | A benefit compilation from the venerable UK label 4AD sets its roster loose on its back catalog for a varied set of covers that uphold the imprint’s exploratory spirit. | Various Artists: Bills & Aches & Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-bills-and-aches-and-blues/ | Bills & Aches & Blues | The venerable UK indie label 4AD has long embodied a sensibility more than a particular sound. As the label’s U.S. general manager, Nabil Ayers, recently observed to The New Yorker, even during its halcyon 1980s and ’90s, signature acts like dream-pop fantasists Cocteau Twins and college-rock absurdists Pixies had little in common musically. So Bills & Aches & Blues, a new 18-song set of 4AD artists covering other 4AD artists’ songs, comes with both a distinguished pedigree and a wide stylistic purview.
With proceeds benefiting an after-school program for children, the album exists for a good cause. At its best, Bills & Aches & Blues presents beloved and lesser-known artists from the label’s roster unearthing hidden gems with the same adventurous, borderless spirit that has cemented 4AD’s status as a pioneering indie institution. Yet, especially in the form available on streaming services—four separate, side-long EPs—the compilation often feels like less than the sum of its parts. While it’s clear that the songs and musicians here are interconnected, exactly how is sometimes less so.
The tracklist for Bills & Aches & Blues—the title is from the Cocteaus’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk,” a song that doesn’t necessarily ask you to notice the words—is unpredictable, for better and worse. It’s not exhaustive: You’ll search in vain for TV on the Radio, SpaceGhostPurrp, St. Vincent, Throwing Muses, A.R. Kane, Zomby, Camera Obscura, Gang Gang Dance, or perhaps your 4AD act of choice. It’s not a greatest-hits victory lap, either, though it opens with relative newcomer Tkay Maidza’s jubilant electro-pop take on Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” and includes a sadly irritating, H.O.R.D.E. Festival-hootenanny version of the Breeders’ “Cannonball” by Tune-Yards. (Two of 4AD’s unlikeliest global smashes—Modern English’s “Melt With You” and M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump Up the Volume”—are, probably wisely, absent.) It’s also not a rarities project, but the label’s mindset seems to show through most vividly when its artists take the road less traveled.
On Bills & Aches & Blues, 4AD’s bigness and ineluctable weirdness often meet through the Breeders, specifically Kim Deal. Two of the label’s most revered artists of the 2000s and ’10s—Bradford Cox (of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound) and Big Thief—each choose Breeders covers, and they’re not obvious picks. Big Thief’s autumnal folk-rock rendition of Deal’s stark “Off You,” from 2002 comeback Title TK, is simply gorgeous, finding common ground in off-kilter catharsis. Cox, a longtime champion of 2008’s underrated Mountain Battles, is firmly in avant-garde mode for that album’s title track, all drones and chimes, but his version is a welcome curveball that suits the strange, ceremonial original. Better yet, and similarly art-damaged, is the Breeders’ astonishingly faithful cover of “The Dirt Eaters,” an astral-folk ’90s deep cut from cult group His Name Is Alive. Ambient project Bing & Ruth’s piano-based reworking of the Pixies’ Deal-led “Gigantic” turns one of 4AD’s best-known songs into something unrecognizable. Serene and instrumental, it’s a Bing & Ruth song now, a fake-out as fun as it is irreverent.
Glimmers of 4AD’s bizarre alchemy pop up across the compilation. Helado Negro’s leisurely synth-folk take on recent Deerhunter album cut “Futurism” is a delight, as is Aldous Harding’s lithe, loungey reinvention of a song close to Deerhunter fans’ hearts, “Revival,” originally off of 2010’s Halcyon Digest. Jenny Hval luxuriates radiantly in the ethereal introversion of shoegaze trailblazers Lush’s 1989 EP track “Sunbathing”; U.S. Girls transform the Nick Cave-led Birthday Party’s 1982 Junkyard title track from glowering goth rock to their own expansive art-rock style. Future Islands’ regal baritone recasting of Colourbox’s 1985 single “The Moon Is Blue” arrives as a wonderfully convincing love letter. It sounds a bit like Arctic Monkeys in their songs-about-lunar-taquerías phase, while also highlighting the work of one of alternative music’s many unheralded Black artists, Colourbox singer Lorita Grahame.
The chemistry doesn’t always click. Dry Cleaning’s cover of Grimes’ “Oblivion,” a haunting electro-pop single from 2012’s Visions that has since taken on a life of its own, is a regrettable disaster, a somnolent trudge: The UK band rightly spotted a connection to their own fragmentary lyrical approach, but alas, this group known for spoken vocals doesn't seem ready yet for actual singing. British producer SOHN’s cover of Tim Buckley’s modern standard “Song to the Siren”—which became a 4AD landmark as sensuously reimagined by the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser fronting the label’s This Mortal Coil collective—is silkily sung and elegant adorned, but it’s a bit po-faced for its surroundings, like it’s wearing a suit on the off chance it’ll be called on for Grammys tribute. Much the same goes for Swedish project Becky and the Birds’ strummy, glitchy, ultimately reverential update of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago ballad “The Wolves (Act I and II),” a song that came out on 4AD in Europe but seems inextricably linked with its North American indie label home, Jagjaguwar.
Bills & Aches & Blues is a frequently impressive assemblage of extraordinary artists running amok through a trove of extraordinary songs, with occasionally uneven results. If what unites them all at times feels undefinable, that’s probably the point: 4AD’s roster is most interesting when they’re exploring, escaping, closing their eyes and dipping into an ocean of swirling, immersive sound. The most thrilling and maybe representative discovery here is Irish folk experimenter Maria Somerville’s cover of the profoundly obscure “Seabird,” a 1995 song by short-lived Unrest offshoot Air Miami. Surreal and escapist, with hypnotic drones and the sounds of waves splashing, it’s a fitting 2021 successor to the reverb-drenched dreamscapes that have been inextricably associated with 4AD for almost all of the label’s astounding 41-year run.
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. | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | 4AD | April 7, 2021 | 6.9 | 95f12ea5-0a3b-4f19-a43f-deac5070f017 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The Irish American singer-songwriter taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings. | The Irish American singer-songwriter taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings. | Aoife O’Donovan: Age of Apathy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aoife-odonovan-age-of-apathy/ | Age of Apathy | To title an album In the Magic Hour—as Aoife O’Donovan did in 2016—is to invite certain chromatic expectations. She delivered, in part, by exploring memories of childhood summers on the southern coast of Ireland, daubing the text with crepuscular blues and low moons. Ancestors sang like evening stars, skin tasted like fine light. O’Donovan’s probing compositions—the culmination of a career straddling the worlds of progressive bluegrass and folk—unfolded like porch-lit conversations, which meant that even at its uneasiest, the record was unhurried. And there was unease. Magic Hour ended with a triptych of songs about escape: planning, packing, panicking. But all that activity hung in the air, a sort of motion memory.
Six years later, O’Donovan is still on the move. The images are as impressionistic as ever, but now the impressions arrive at velocity: On the Taconic State Parkway, on bus routes to Brooklyn and Boston; in a horse-drawn cart on the plains and a car on the cusp of Earth’s orbit. On Age of Apathy, she taps into the propulsion of prime Joni Mitchell: a restless mind bouncing against the blur of one’s surroundings. She has that same actor’s sense—when to go big, when to bring it backwards. A celebration of the muse returning, “Phoenix” puts a muted groove to an in-the-pocket strum right out of “This Flight Tonight.” “Fever’s got me shaking/Rises up like a road to meet me,” O’Donovan sings. She sounds honored. The title track, like “Flight,” finds the narrator on an impulsive trip, blasting tunes to chase her thoughts. O’Donovan breaks into one of those tunes at the end: Mitchell’s “My Old Man.”
No song here, though, is as plainly lovestruck as that snippet. “Galahad” feints at devotion, but O’Donovan ultimately treats the legend as a foil, someone whose pursuit of Avalon only adds space between him and everyone else. “Somebody told me you were pure of blood and oxygen/That your good knife can cut through anything,” O’Donovan smirks. “But I’m alive.” She leaves him staring at seagulls, having flirted him to a draw. The chamber-rock crawler “Lucky Star” alternates details of a seasonal affair with travel complaints. O’Donovan and guest Madison Cunningham—both alumni of the radio variety show Live From Here—prod the fog with mewling guitars. “I’ll die if you tell the world about my third eye,” O’Donovan murmurs. It reads as a joke but sounds like a threat. So does the chorus: “If I had a little money/I would go somewhere.”
For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving. On the title track, a lonely trek upstate bears a memory of sheltering in a Christian Science center on 9/11, a sort of existential way station she doesn’t wish on anyone else. “Oh, to be born in the age of apathy,” she sighs over cymbal roll and hovering strings, ”When nothing’s got a hold on you.” “Elevators” follows, with brittle guitar that flaps like a wren finding a place to land. “In America,” the refrain keeps intoning: usually a marker of pretension, but here it’s mostly the springboard for some clever internal rhyme. Having seen too many big-box stores and gas station bathrooms, O’Donovan hops into a covered wagon and heads for the past. She arrives at a prairie lake. “What’s good here?” she yells, “and what are we going to make?”
Age of Apathy ends with the blithely sunny “Passengers,” an expansion on In the Magic Hour’s closer “Jupiter.” Each track puts O’Donovan in a car heading for outer space. In “Jupiter” she’s driving, asking her companion to speak to her “of star stuff.” In “Passengers,” she’s ceded the wheel but not the navigation. “Stay in your lane, you’ll be fine,” she notes over a warm rumble. “Mercury is stuck in Scorpio and the Little Dipper’s dripping dry.” The effect is that of an astrological driving instructor, sure, but an expert one. I’m not sure anyone else keeps as many vehicles running, or maps as many escape routes. | 2022-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Yep Roc | January 24, 2022 | 7.3 | 95f28221-29f4-43a4-821e-0e0c222360ea | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
On her first EP under her own name, the artist formerly known as Wynter Gordon returns to R&B; it’s a record marked by her striking voice and emotional candor. | On her first EP under her own name, the artist formerly known as Wynter Gordon returns to R&B; it’s a record marked by her striking voice and emotional candor. | Diana Gordon : Pure EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diana-gordon-pure-ep/ | Pure EP | 2016 was a year of professional rebirth for the artist previously known as Wynter Gordon. Gordon, who was born in Queens and lives in Los Angeles, had been writing for pop stars for more than a decade, and she had experienced several false starts in the spotlight, including a stint making impersonal, big-tent EDM. She was rankled by the anonymity of her own music but didn’t know how to make a change. Then she was called upon to write for Beyoncé on what would become the Lemonade tracks “Sorry,” “Daddy Lessons,” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” She ended up penning what was arguably the album’s most culturally resonant line: “He better call Becky with the good hair.”
Shortly thereafter, Gordon chose to start performing under her given name, Diana. (An anonymous source told Page Six that, according to Gordon, Beyoncé had suggested the shift, but Gordon has been more circumspect in interviews.) Whatever the truth, the name change made a difference. It connoted a new, more personal approach to music, an approach that animates Gordon’s first EP under her own name, Pure. The five-song record hits with the impact of something twice as long, and it is a worthwhile addition to the group of strong female-led R&B projects of the past two years.
Gordon’s father abandoned her family soon after her birth, and her mother, who became intensely religious, was harsh and domineering. Gordon was forced to become a parent to her five siblings, a task that took up much of her emotional energy, even after she left home at 17. Pure is a distillation of those experiences, an understated but strongly felt record about the muddle of love and pain that family brings. The strongest of its songs is “Kool Aid,” a ballad dedicated to Gordon’s brothers, including one who she was out of touch with for 16 years before finding him homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. The song is suffused with warmth and encouragement as Gordon performs the role that she has said comes most naturally to her, that of the nurturer. Another standout finds her playing the opposite part, pleading, in a moment of vulnerability, for a “Moment to Myself.” And “Thank You” is bitterly addressed to her father, as she acknowledges the way his absence shaped her: “Always knew you didn’t like me/Always seem to forget to invite me/The little tomboy, shoes too tight/If I was wrong then, now I’m so right.”
The Los Angeles producers Noise Club produced “Kool Aid,” and another single, “Wolverine,” and co-produced the rest of the tracks here. They keep things simple (minimalist synths, huge echoing bass, and skittering drum lines) and stay out of her way, often to underwhelming effect: The hooky melody on “Thank You”’s pre-chorus, for instance, makes less of an impact because the beat does not shift to accompany it. As a result, Gordon lives and dies on the strength of her consistently striking voice and her occasionally messy songwriting. “Wolverine” is a head-turner, with its mercilessly catchy chorus and a pre-chorus that captures the volatility of living with her mother. But it’s also a cluttered song, filled with fragments that bear a puzzling relationship to one another. It might be difficult to make sense of it all without the supplementary material of the singer’s interviews.
The rest of the songs are clearer but less ambitious. If Gordon has not yet quite caught up with peers like SZA and Teyana Taylor, it is not because she is lacking in emotional urgency. Rather, she hasn’t quite found the words that would allow her to channel her emotions with precision. But her extraordinary empathy makes for a notable contrast with the occasional solipsism of other up-and-coming singers. The final song on the EP, “Too Young,” finds her speaking in her mother’s voice, confessing to her children that she and their father made a youthful mistake. It is a testament to the depth of Gordon's understanding that she is able to perceive so much of the pain she and her siblings have undergone as stemming from something so human as a simple bad choice. Despite her anger at her parents, the song is forgiving, soothing and, like the rest of Gordon’s music, strangely sanguine. | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 18, 2018 | 7.3 | 95f78e9f-817c-4186-8c5c-c5d509839d9e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
The L.A. band Puro Instinct evaporates some of the shoegaze fog around their debut for some tentative bigger pop maneuvers. | The L.A. band Puro Instinct evaporates some of the shoegaze fog around their debut for some tentative bigger pop maneuvers. | Puro Instinct: Autodrama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22066-autodrama/ | Autodrama | Shortly after the release of their hotly anticipated debut *Headbangers in Ecstasy**, *Puro Instinct unlocked the highest level of achievement for a Los Angeles buzz band in 2011: Haunted Graffiti played the 16th birthday party of guitarist/vocalist Skylar Kaplan at Wombleton Records in Highland Park. The duo have barely released any music since, and even in the past few months, there are stark reminders of the distance between “Los Angeles indie rock in 2011” and the current day: the imminent demolition of the Smell, lackluster records from now-veteran peers Nite Jewel and fellow sister act Bleached, an eerie lack of news on Ariel Pink’s latest antics. Moreover, *Headbangers in Ecstasy'*s then-fashionable ambition to find the hazy overlap between 4AD and MTV in the ’80s is pretty much de rigueur at this point. But the lack of hype surrounding Puro Instinct this time around actually works towards their advantage: having improved in every aspect over the past five years, they can sound new again on the surprisingly crafty Autodrama.
Puro Instinct have modernized in an important way, which is that they’ve internalized the relatively recent inversion of the long-assumed maturation process of music nerds: Slowdive, Pale Saints and the like were their teenage discoveries, now Piper and Skylar Kaplan are pop music advocates. That said, no one will confuse the Kaplan sisters with Haim; only the shawl-twisting mysticism of “Six of Swords” and “Scorpio Rising” (“Time is just a slap on the wrist/to the bastard child of Genesis”) bear the hint of Fleetwood Mac ca. *Tango in the Night. *
*Autodrama *is largely self-produced with assistance from Sam Mehran, who appears to appreciate the misty, immersive qualities of reverb as much as his former Test Icicles bandmate Dev Hynes. As much as they vouch for Katy Perry, Piper and Skylar aren’t *big *vocalists, and these songs aren’t meant to be belted out anyways. The melodies and production are both tiny and a little tinny, pop music more reminiscent of the hi-NRG or freestyle hits you were more likely to hear at any given roller rink in the ’90s than a hockey arena.
While Puro Instinct’s newfound confidence allows the hooks to protrude from the mix rather than recede behind a smeared lens, this also means their lesser ideas are also given more prominence. “Twelve dead Americans/Young and dumb, full of cum, holding smoking guns/Stuffed into body bags/Stack ’em up, send ’em off, let God sort ’em out” is a lyric that would be jarring in any context, more so within an album with an otherwise entirely insular focus and a genre that’s almost invariably apolitical. But even if “End of an Era” is Puro Instinct at their most #woke, the song itself is an Ambien-laced plod, the vocals just *enough *off the beat to sound like an irritating tic rather than an intentional choice. Inexplicably, this quality carries over to the equally momentum-killing title track.
At the very least, “End of an Era” is a disturbance to *Autodrama’s *surface-level shimmer and proof of Puro Instinct making an effort to provide depth. The Kaplans are just as referential as they were on *Headbangers in Ecstasy, *though there’s more discernible substance. Yes, “Panarchy” is a pun on the wild stereo mixing techniques on the opening track, and it’s also a nod to the concept of choosing whatever form of governance you want without limitations of geography. It’s easy to hear what they're getting at, given the Kaplans’ disillusionment with the music industry after the underwhelming performance of Headbangers in Ecstasy. The remaining emotional state of *Autodrama *is murkier: “What You See” recasts “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a DJ Khaled-esque exercise in visualizing success, while the outlook of “Peccavi” is more attributable to Homer Simpson: trying is the first step towards failure.
Somehow, these don’t feel like contradictory viewpoints on a record mostly concerned with the blowback from vulnerability. And according to the actual Six of Swords tarot card inspiring the song of the same name here, they're not. It’s otherwise known as the “Slough of Despond,” more of an emotional and physical divot than a depression. If it appears reversed when pulled, the Six of Swords signifies a choice to wallow in misery. When upright, it provides the promise Puro Instinct so deeply desire on Autodrama: being able to move forward, even in a less than ideal situation. | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Manifesto | July 1, 2016 | 6.4 | 95fa2e60-1a3e-4826-873b-eda102d7ca5d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Seattle-based emo band longs for the unattainable with a sense of modesty and restraint that can be as frustrating as it is endearing. | The Seattle-based emo band longs for the unattainable with a sense of modesty and restraint that can be as frustrating as it is endearing. | Worst Party Ever: Dartland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/worst-party-ever-dartland/ | Dartland | If there was any question whether a band called Worst Party Ever qualifies as emo, consider that their debut, Dartland, has a house on the cover. But as the genre has become ever more atomized and antic since their formation in 2014, the Seattle-via-Sarasota quartet have distinguished themselves in reverse, functioning at an even, slightly elevated emotional keel. Songwriter Andy Schueneman experiences the same communication breakdowns and spiritual crises as his peers, but instead of screaming into the void, he offers a shrug and a shoulder to lean on.
The band’s 2016 compilation Anthology crammed 21 songs into 53 minutes; representative titles include “Did the Cubs Just Win the World Series?” and “Sleeping With My Cellphone (Demo).” Conversely, only one of 12 song titles on Dartland is “funny” and most are just one word. Worst Party Ever recorded the album with producer Tyler Floyd, who’s helped other scrappy, emo-adjacent acts (Greet Death, Dogleg, Michigander) level up their sound. But while Dartland appears to be the first Worst Party Ever release forged by actual expectation, it holds true to their credo of never making anything seem like too big a deal. Nearly half the songs check out after about a minute and a half, evoking rain-slicked Pacific Northwest indie rock c. 2002, the early emo revival’s folkier variants, and the plainspoken, compact specs of pop music right this moment. For people in Worst Party Ever’s age demo, Dartland might recall latter-day Tigers Jaw songs stuffed into TikTok or early Joyce Manor if they had access to Rob Schnapf’s production.
Schueneman’s sonorous, conversational vocals are just about the only thing left from Worst Party Ever’s origins as a topical acoustic emo band jokingly compared to the Front Bottoms. If not the most dynamic instrument, it’s a voice well-suited to express a palpable yet manageable unease. The minor-key surge of “Circle” gets the blood moving, but it won’t open up the pit. The wistful leads of “Prism on a Window” suggest a pervasive wistfulness but will not induce any tears not already in motion. Dartland is littered with strong choruses and the verses are just as melodically immediate—in case Schueneman decides to end a song without a chorus, which he often does.
Dartland’s sense of modesty and restraint can be as frustrating as it is endearing. On a cursory listen, the album’s 23 minutes breeze by like a sitcom in the background. With undivided attention, its shortcomings intensify: There’s no dramatic arc, no moment of true catharsis, or a sonic curve aside from the acoustic intro and tempo shifts of “Provenance.” But if we’re to take Schueneman at his word, the longing for something greater in Worst Party Ever’s music is by design; Dartland seeks an exact frequency to express distinct wants that are not likely to be satisfied any time soon.
In his songs, Schueneman yearns for a new body to test out his resolution for cleaner living, a new god that can give him advance warning about all the ways he’s going to fuck up—but until then, he spends “Provenance” continuing to fill his current body with drugs. He does not want to leave his house, or sometimes even his bathroom, but what to do about weather so beautiful it feels like a supernatural challenge to depression? Friends talk endlessly into the night about future plans, but no one wants to change. On the closing “Into the PÜR,” Scheuneman asks, “Do you still talk to all your friends?/The people you lived near when you were a kid,” and it doesn’t sound rhetorical. Throughout Dartland, he regards people engaged in healthy and fulfilling social relationships as if he’s staring at a UFO. When you’re on Worst Party Ever’s wavelength, the things that aren’t really, like, that big of a deal are low-key all-consuming.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-11T15:13:00.000-05:00 | Rock | No Sleep | January 12, 2022 | 6.8 | 95faf0f8-4f48-4c32-a77d-e037455983f2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Loaded with snarled rhymes and hyperlocal references, the Brooklyn rapper’s latest tape is a thrilling, larger-than-life depiction of New York hip-hop cornerstones. | Loaded with snarled rhymes and hyperlocal references, the Brooklyn rapper’s latest tape is a thrilling, larger-than-life depiction of New York hip-hop cornerstones. | Bub Styles: Outerwear SZN 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bub-styles-outerwear-szn-3/ | Outerwear SZN 3 | As residential districts fall prey to Bloomberg-era economic policy, New Yorkers have watched their city become a parking lot for foreign capital, a disposable plaything for the millionaire class. Chinatown Sound, a video series from Brooklyn rapper Bub Styles, is a testament to the holdouts and leftovers. Each installment features a lone rapper rhyming a cappella on a sidewalk in the Lower Manhattan neighborhood. The format obviates the rap-battle element of most freestyle showcases, and the environs of downtown’s last ethnic enclave lend solemnity to the late-night setting. Styles spotlights a diverse range of performers—Black, Dominican, Nuyorican, and Jewish artists from across and beyond the five boroughs—yet their similarities are striking. In spite of varying backgrounds, they share many of the same mannerisms, intricate codes of regional speech and dress. As wordy and flamboyant as they are, the subtext speaks volumes: These are the last men standing.
“Imitation of the Rappers You Idolize,” the finale of Styles’ latest tape Outerwear SZN 3, reflects the Chinatown Sound ethic. Fellow Brooklynite ARXV raps the opening verse, his couplets like schoolyard taunts: “Y’all just imitations of the men you idolize/Rockin’ all that Gucci and Dior, but your attire lies.” He rhymes in full sentences, pausing haphazardly in the absence of sturdy percussion, the understated production accentuating his slang and inflection. Styles’ verse, on the other hand, is delivered in a primal roar: “I just popped two triple-stacks like they was Advils/Each meal that I ate this week equaled the weight of an anvil.” His vocals arrive with a subterranean rumble, like echoes from an abandoned IRT tunnel.
Outerwear SZN 3 is a leering triumph of tri-state genre work, its obligatory trafficking narratives embellished with a garish palette. On “Buckfast,” Styles contrasts designer labels and luxury cars with dollar-store squalor. “Smoke Box,” his portrait of a vindictive kingpin, concludes with the exhausted hustler ensconced in a 2006 Nissan Maxima, rolling up his own product. Wealth and seediness are collapsed in a collage of New Era fitteds, greasy deli meats, and paneled North Face jackets. If you can’t transcend your circumstances, you might as well cop new Foamposites.
It’s emblematic of Styles’ world-building that so many references—the brands, the jargon, the sneakers—are 20 or 30 years old. Yet Outerwear SZN 3 isn’t nostalgic so much as suggestive of an empire in decline. Styles meets his neighbors with hostile disdain (“Shit, I’ll poke a hole up in your diaphragm/Dog, it’s lookin’ like it’s only glizzy in your diet, man”); he boasts of a corpulent physique, proof positive of a self-made man. If his persona is larger than life—a street-corner dealer with Scarface ambitions, a loud mouth, and a brash wardrobe—it’s satire of the post-Nems, post-Action Bronson variety. However warped or attenuated, the Giuliani-era hallmarks endure as recognizable shorthand, and Styles translates them into a dour, grandiose lexicon.
The downtempo arrangements from Finn, Ace Fayce, and Revenxnt balance Styles’ menace with a more evocative elegance. His supervillain voice drapes heavy drums and sinister basslines on “Lights Out” and “Glockcoma,” whereas “Smoke Box” and “Cumbia in Cooley High” spell the aggression with resplendent jazz loops. Clocking in at just under 90 seconds, “Holiday” breaks the pace with a blistering double-time showcase. As Styles barrels through his verses, producer Brassxbeard switches out the instrumental layers, isolating the snarling vocals and centering Styles amidst the nervy production.
Outerwear SZN 3’s success lies in its interpretation of genre cornerstones, an insularity that borders on inscrutability. Yet even its hyperbolic elements—the pitbull brutishness, the grown-man pageantry—speak to a systemic winnowing of local lore. When a cultural capital is subsumed by speculators, when ornate masonry gives way to chintzy steel and fiberglass, survival becomes a matter of marking territory. Where operatic mid-’90s classics like Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and Onyx’s All We Got Iz Us dramatized the lawlessness of precincts left to fend for themselves, Styles’ flashier oeuvre poses a follow-up question: What happens when a city decides to take back its streets? | 2023-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cold Cut | March 16, 2023 | 7.7 | 96060277-f474-49c9-823d-b18d9ceb0fe2 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
On their debut, the Columbus, Ohio, four-piece All Dogs offer 40 minutes of grungy intimacy. Maryn Jones (who also plays solo as Yowler) delivers her words with joyous belligerence over hectic drums and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks. | On their debut, the Columbus, Ohio, four-piece All Dogs offer 40 minutes of grungy intimacy. Maryn Jones (who also plays solo as Yowler) delivers her words with joyous belligerence over hectic drums and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks. | All Dogs: Kicking Every Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20961-kicking-every-day/ | Kicking Every Day | When All Dogs' debut tape started getting noticed in summer 2013, it felt as if the Ohio four-piece, fronted by indie-rock lifer Maryn Jones, were on the crest of something. Katie Crutchfield had just released Cerulean Salt, her breakthrough second album as Waxahatchee. Northampton's Speedy Ortiz would soon release their debut, as would Wales' Joanna Gruesome, while Courtney Barnett first broke beyond Australia that August. All received some degree of international mainstream acclaim; the plainspoken, fuzzed-up frontwoman was being widely celebrated for the honesty that would likely have been dismissed as typical confessional singer-songwriter chick fare a decade, or even half a decade, earlier. While the links to forebears like Liz Phair were clear, their simply stated, often brutal honesty felt somehow new.
Two years later, as All Dogs finally release their debut album, its 40 minutes of grungy intimacy feel, in a sense, relatively commonplace, though that's good. Praising young female lyricists for the simple candor with which they confess complex emotional devastation as if they didn't expect to be heard is a trope by now, but the growing audience and respect for a woman's internal life should be relished. And even if Kicking Every Day firmly inhabits a sound and type, that doesn't mean that it has nothing new to offer. The female trainwreck is having a pop cultural moment on the big and small screen, but all too often these figures are reduced to their perceived or self-professed limitations. Jones (who is also a member of Saintseneca and plays solo as Yowler) deals with the constant mutability of experience, refusing to let a single interpretation of an event define her. It's appropriate to an age where everyone is the editor of their own life, when self-love and self-loathing go hand-in-hand online.
Back on "Love Song", from that debut 2013 tape (a split with fellow Columbus band Slouch), Jones warned a potential partner not to give her a chance because, she admitted, she'd only fuck it up, "just wait and see." Across Kicking, she confesses to being driven by anxiety and self-loathing, maintaining on "Skin" that "every darkness I push through/ There is a quiet familiar feeling/ And in it I am always waiting for everything to fall/ Just like I always make it so." "That Kind of Girl" starts with her mid-sentence, aware that she's as destructive a force in someone else's life as she always imagines herself to be. But the minute some unknown third party warns her lover off "messing with that kind of girl," she starts burning with rage, demanding transparency and explanation over a fiery squall and bass that drones and sparks like an anchor towed down a gravel road. On paper, Jones' lyrics can scan a little sad-sack; on record, she delivers them with the joyous belligerence that befits a band who often sound like early 2000s Guided by Voices, all mid-fi production, hectic drums, and fuzzy power chords hewing euphoric hooks. They play arena-sized in basement studios, their reach infectious.
Jones spends much of Kicking bristling against her own limitations as well, aware of the way her self-defeating impulses play into depression's toxic loop. "I will find a way to justify my pain," she sings on "Skin", and asks any friend that finds her on the floor to check if she's alright, but not to tell her otherwise on "Sunday Morning", a Lemonheads/Sundays-y bundle where she's caught adrift in the routine-less routine of touring. "How Long" is a triumphant-sounding portrait of self-loathing where she gives the Joan Didion edict about staying on good terms with your past selves a nightmarish inversion: "All these people that I've been hold knives." Her lacerating lyrics offer the potential for deadening recognition, but also empathy. "Your Mistakes" has a softer touch, as if Sharon Van Etten had started releasing records as a drunk 19 year old in a garage, and offers a friend comfort for the way that enduring regrets tend to obliterate the mind. Jones makes shame corporeal and emptiness vast, giving these songs gut-punching impact beyond the lingering melodies.
split tape w/slouch and November 2013's 7” both saw All Dogs moving at breakneck speed, stretching out power-pop with fiery yearning. Towards the end of Kicking especially, things take a calmer, darker, turn, the drums often fading away. The stillness suits them. Standout "Leading Me Back to You" has the tainted romance of American Football or Mineral; before the defiant chorus kicks in, "Skin" could be a relic from 1990s Louisville, and the warm hiss of "The Garden" suggests that it's Jones' original demo. It's a softly strummed plea for someone to hold tight, because parts of her are going to disappear by the time she returns from some sojourn—not through collapsing in on herself as in opener "Black Hole", but by heeding the warning she set out in the careening "Flowers": that you'll never find satisfaction "if all that you grow are gardens of longing for things you don't know." Kicking Every Day spends a lot of time trawling the murk, but recognizes that, ultimately, it's down to the individual to dig herself out; it's a warm thump of encouragement from an equally grubby hand. | 2015-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Salinas | September 3, 2015 | 7.6 | 961db159-0ad0-4220-9dd6-b22e631b7711 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
The unparalleled Scottish band has its first two LPs reissued and expanded, with Peel Sessions and live performances added. | The unparalleled Scottish band has its first two LPs reissued and expanded, with Peel Sessions and live performances added. | Arab Strap: The Week Never Starts Round Here [Deluxe Edition] / Philophobia [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14566-the-week-never-starts-round-here-deluxe-edition-philophobia-deluxe-edition/ | The Week Never Starts Round Here [Deluxe Edition] / Philophobia [Deluxe Edition] | In a 2009 interview with Stereokill, Malcolm Middleton claimed that of all the albums he's recorded, his favorite is the first, Arab Strap's The Week Never Starts Round Here. "It's completely undiluted and free from any self-expectations which we later developed," was the reason he gave, and this makes sense when you're thinking about albums from the standpoint of a creator. Listening back is like finding yourself in a snapshot from when you were younger and the complications hadn't added up in your life yet. For a listener, of course, it's a bit different-- those same self-expectations that make Middleton uneasy when listening to his later work can nonetheless help a band create something greater, and I think age actually helped Arab Strap. Their final two albums, Monday At the Hug & Pint and Last Romance, are really fine records. The complications had piled up for sure, but the band's outlook changed as well, and their more nuanced way of looking at the world made for their best music.
It's still interesting, though, to go back and revisit the band's debut and follow-up, especially with the bigger picture of their subsequent career in mind. Chemikal Underground's deluxe reissues bulk up the sound a little bit (but not too much) and each add a bonus disc with a Peel Session and a live performance that offer a more complete look at the band's early career than the albums alone would have. The Week Never Starts Round Here is in fact a pretty unpretentious, honest sounding record. Middleton, who did the instrumentals, and Aidan Moffat, who handled the vocals and lyrics, were a unique, fearless band right out of the gate, and Moffat's approach to sex and the exquisite misery of sleeping around and staying drunk immediately set them apart.
You can hear what Middleton was talking about in that interview, too. The record rambles quite a bit, to the point where it feels a fair amount longer than its 45-minute running time. There are a couple tracks that end with demo-sounding recordings of Moffat singing by himself, "General Plea to a Girlfriend" is abrasively lo-fi, and a few of the songs are a bit shapeless, but the duo's basic sound is well-established, with Middleton's guitar and drum machines laying out rough, urban landscapes for Moffat to wander through. Moffat's vocals were often aggressively amelodic, a speak-sing whose shape was heavily governed by his thick Scottish accent and Scots dialect, so he gets by more on detailed storytelling than a big chorus. There are some amazing moments, though-- Middleton's guitar on "I Work in A Saloon" is delicate and light, providing an almost absurd counterpoint to Moffat's character sketch of a bartender who's stuck in a bar full of women he's slept with and split with.
And of course, there's the band's debut single, "The First Big Weekend", which epitomizes everything great about Arab Strap and points the way toward their later work with its taut dance rhythm, snapping guitar and brilliant weekend-in-the-life lyrics. Moffat and his friends drink all night and crash all day, but there's so much more to it: they sleep through the indignity of Scotland's loss to England at Euro 1996, fail to win the canteen quiz night, get misty-eyed watching "The Simpsons", invade a playground, give each other questionable advice (i.e., giving up cheese to avoid nightmares) and take the train. It builds up to the big sing-along refrain: "Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever, high with our friends it's officially summer." The real key to why it all works, though, is that Moffat stuffs the whole range of emotions into lyrics-- it's a good time, but there's frustration and sadness in it all too. He sees women he still loves but also hates for the indignities they've visited upon him (and he on them), and he gets bruised jumping a fence. It feels real.
Philophobia opens with a hell of a couplet: "It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen/ But you've no idea where that cock has been." In some sense, this is the band responding to that self-expectation Middleton referred to later. They put the sex and disturbance right up front, almost caricaturing themselves before getting down to the business of placing all that imagery in the context of stories. They may have had self-expectations on Philophobia, but the pair had also acquired discipline and made a better album, one that works almost as a song cycle-- the consistency of Moffat's storytelling and subject matter turns the album into a full-fleshed character study with each song acting as a sort of chapter in the story of some boozing bloke's wrecked and often wretched life. Middleton grew as an arranger as well, incorporating occasional strings, more sophisticated drum programming and more keyboards, and he joins Moffat in injecting a bit of humor as well, especially on "Not Quite a Yes", where his beat is hilariously stadium-ready. The songs have more shape to them and consequently so does the album.
The albums stand well on their own, but the bonus discs are very welcome, not least because the live recordings actually offer superior versions of quite a few of these songs. The two Peel Sessions are especially lively and illuminating. On the first, the band is backed by members of Belle & Sebastian, sounding distinctly unlike their other band as they mash the distortion pedals and hammer the drums, and Moffat delivers the non-album track "I Saw You" in a straight deadpan as he talks about going to see a Belle & Sebastian show, remarking that the girl he had a crush on at the time was friends with "the girl who plays the cello." The Week Never Starts Round Here also includes a full recording of the band's first live performance, a ragged but energetic set at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, while Philophobia gives you the band's full set at the T In The Park festival from 1998.
The live material hints at the fuller sound the band would later explore on its best albums-- certainly, there'd be no cause to complain if the rest of the band's output got a similar treatment. What's most fascinating about these two LPs, though, is hearing Moffat and Middleton sort out how to make these mumbly barstool rants and gutter stories into compelling songs. They didn't always succeed, but their best early songs were outstanding and set them apart from virtually everyone else on the Scottish and larger UK music scene. | 2010-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 19, 2010 | 6.8 | 961e3f81-b3bf-4efe-b658-5b53737a5b4a | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The percussionist and composer explores the minutiae of a break-up via a robotic text-to-speech program on her quietly devastating new album. | The percussionist and composer explores the minutiae of a break-up via a robotic text-to-speech program on her quietly devastating new album. | claire rousay: it was always worth it | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-it-was-always-worth-it/ | it was always worth it | A hush overtook the room just before claire rousay performed at the small nonprofit arts space Rhizome in Washington, DC last summer. The percussionist sat quietly behind a snare and tom with two microphones placed directly above the drumheads. The beginning of her set crept out of that silence as she picked up small pieces of metal and plastic—a bowl, screws, steel wool, an unidentifiable white cylinder, an empty can of La Croix—and placed them on the taut mylar, shuffling them around, rubbing and striking them against each other and the drums. The microphones picked up the minute sounds, the soft crinkles and sudden plinks, but also rousay’s rapid, precise movements. It was a delicate chaos that emphasized the strange resonances of everyday objects and our interactions with them, foregrounding sounds usually taken for granted and making them feel vivid, intimate, and new.
That practice of locating the revelatory in the mundane is at the core of rousay’s work, which encompasses both compositions and free improvisation. In the past year, her recordings and live-streamed performances have shifted almost exclusively to utilizing the robotic voice of a text-to-speech program, her own spoken words, and manipulated field recordings. These pieces are direct and vulnerable, taking pieces of our built environment and using them to interrogate her experiences and relationships, her guilt and anxieties. “i’m not a bad person but…” recounts moments of shame and regret, while “Tuufuhhoowaah” centers around the digital audio cues of texting on an iPhone interspersed with recorded conversations with her friends—the everyday clatter of sounds and thoughts that fill a restless mind.
it was always worth it is a devastating culmination of so many of the processes rousay has been exploring over the past year. She assembled and recorded the piece after the break-up of a six-year romantic relationship, saturating the music with grief. Each passage unfolds like one of the persistent, bleak thuds of realization that come with looking back at severed connections, putting moments of both joy and pain into the context of the relationship’s inevitable collapse. She feeds letters they wrote each other into the text-to-speech program, rendering words of affirmation flat and emotionless, and intersperses recordings captured at home during the final week with her partner. Slow swells of synthesizer augment the piece’s sense of drama and weight, as well as offering a tonal center to return to; it’s rare that rousay provides such a clear sense of harmonic development instead of reveling in the indeterminate nature of found sounds.
If that harmonic development suggests a narrative, it is a non-linear one, fractured by the fallibility of memory and the unpredictability of heartache. The lines of text rousay pulls oscillate between heartfelt declarations (“You are so loved”) to tentative reassurances of security (“I know things have been rough lately, but I want to remind you that I love you, and I’m working hard to be with you”), the blunted tone of the computer echoing the numbness of shock and a feeling of alienation from one’s own memories. Nearly halfway through the 20-minute piece, the synthesizer dampens to a low growl, growing in intensity as high- pitched pulses go in and out of phase until it abruptly collapses into a recording of rousay listening to “Innocent” by Our Lady Peace. It is a surprising turn, but in grief there are moments where normal things feel out of place and absurd. The hushed conversation that follows, barely audible, could feel banal if the intensity of the situation wasn’t already made clear.
If rousay’s work typically excavates meaning from small, everyday objects, it was always worth it locates it in the smallest moments that add up to life’s most shattering experiences. Drawing attention to the mundane elements of personal trauma grounds the experience in something tangible and relatable. We’ve all stared, numb with shock, at a message on our phone, unable to believe something so life-changing could arrive via such a blank medium. rousay’s work intensifies this feeling with her mastery of texture and detail. The computer blurts out “I will always love you” as the final piece fades, the ambiguity of the phrase hanging in the air as life resumes.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Longform Editions | January 5, 2021 | 7.7 | 96241dfb-3c0c-4a1c-a136-088eba863a2c | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On the second part of a planned trilogy of archival anthologies, a long-forgotten Belgian group from the early 1990s emerges as standard-bearers of globe-trotting ambient and psychedelic techno. | On the second part of a planned trilogy of archival anthologies, a long-forgotten Belgian group from the early 1990s emerges as standard-bearers of globe-trotting ambient and psychedelic techno. | Pablo’s Eye: Bardo for Pablo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pablos-eye-bardo-for-pablo/ | Bardo for Pablo | Reissue culture is a curious business. For every unnecessary major-label re-release that clogs up pressing plants around Record Store Day, there are artists who went largely unheard in their day who are worthy of reconsideration in the here and now, be it a contemplative Japanese ambient composer or a pioneering transgender soul singer. But sometimes artists just hide in plain sight, as is the case with Pablo’s Eye. A loose Belgian collective that formed in 1989 around Axel Libeert, the lone constant over the decades, the group had releases on Swim ~ (an experimental label run by Wire’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel) and the prolific Australian electronic imprint Extreme. You can still scoop up most of their discography for a few bucks on CD.
But it’s in the way that Ostend-based record label STROOM has presented their fellow countrymen’s body of work that makes it resonate with newfound mystery nearly three decades later. STROOM has already gained notice for curious excavations, like that of the Latvian performance group Nebijušu Sajūtu Restaurēšanas Darbnīca and the Japanese chanteuse Sonoko, but a trilogy of Pablo’s Eye reissues is their biggest statement to date. The first installment, Spring Break, presented the collective as an unheralded Balearic group full of Spanish whispers, pliant bass, unobtrusive hand drums, and echoing nylon-string guitars, perfect for sundown sets on the White Island.
STROOM’s second compilation, Bardo for Pablo, now explores a side of the group that’s darker, druggier, and more transcendent—less linen-clad loungers and more like tribal-techno and breakbeat primitives. Rather than the seven credited members on Spring Break, this particular set pares down to three: Libeert, Dirk Wachtelaer, and Thierry Royo. The shift is most noticeable on the massive, 12-minute opener “Amb 8.” It comprises essentially the same elements as the beguiling, relaxing “Amb 7,” from the first set, just remixed into something psychotropic. By tweaking the settings ever so slightly, Pablo’s Eye present a parallel dimension of these once-placid sounds, allowing dread, unease, and a chemically-enhanced sense of disorientation to seep in at the edges. Propelled by a deep, throbbing tom-and-timbales pattern and a sustained, almost levitating church organ, the wide vistas of “Amb 8” imply an intoxicating void, making the set’s invocation of the concept of bardo all the more germane. Voices echo from a seemingly vast distance, so that one can’t quite pin down whether they are shouts of ecstasy, grief, or seduction. Midway through, a slowed-down “Funky Drummer” beat surfaces and the track turns into a lost ambient-techno epic, putting it in the same hypnotic and diaphanous class as other early-1990s tracks like the Orb’s “Blue Room” and fellow Belgians Mappa Mundi’s “Trance Fusion.”
The rest of the set is full of other early-’90s electronic-music tropes, particularly the chunky breakbeats that were prevalent during that era. Paranoia curls around “Cypher NY Mix” while the claustrophobic breaks and encroaching dread of “Today” could easily get mistaken for a lost Maxinquaye demo. In a better world, the incessant toms, ritualistic percussion, and queasy processing of “My Only Guide Is” would replace Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea” as the tribal-techno standard. Every track here is so mesmerizing that it makes one wonder just how the collective went largely overlooked over the decades. It’s not hard to imagine these tracks being mistaken for the work of new, mischievous producers like Sex Tags Mania’s DJ Sotofett or Acting Press’ PLO Man. Compiling these drum-heavy experiments from the collective, STROOM posits Pablo’s Eye as not simply a reissue curio but something that’s completely contemporaneous. | 2018-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Stroom | July 6, 2018 | 8.2 | 96291243-e3b3-4b56-bcdb-30d089e02dc9 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Somewhere deep in the heart of Athens, Georgia, there lies a 10-acre cornfield. Five feet from its northwest corner stands ... | Somewhere deep in the heart of Athens, Georgia, there lies a 10-acre cornfield. Five feet from its northwest corner stands ... | Of Montreal: Horse and Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed): The Singles and Songles Collection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5950-horse-and-elephant-eatery-no-elephants-allowed-the-singles-and-songles-collection/ | Horse and Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed): The Singles and Songles Collection | Somewhere deep in the heart of Athens, Georgia, there lies a 10-acre cornfield. Five feet from its northwest corner stands a single willow tree. One hazy Sunday afternoon, I set about reclining under this tree, when all of a sudden I heard a great rumbling. The earth beneath me began to crumble, and before I could move it bottomed out and I found myself plunging toward the bowels of the earth. Descending towards what I was sure would be my demise, I blacked out.
I awoke in a brightly lit environment, surrounded on three sides by endless white space. Directly in front of me stood a gargantuan green metal gate, reflecting the mysterious light so intensely that I could barely look at it. "My God!" I said to myself. "I'm... dead!"
"Not so!"
I spun around to see where the mysterious voice had come from, and found myself face-to-face with six large elephants. To my amazement, the largest began to speak:
"Greetings, visitor. We are the six keepers of the Elephant 6 Kingdom. I am Fluffy, the elephant of precious cute."
"I am Pinky, elephant of psychedelia."
"I am Zanzithoph, elephant of bizarre and archaic instruments."
"I am Fatty, elephant of dense, layered production."
"I am Friendly, elephant of perpetually rotating band members."
"I am Ringo, elephant of Beatle worship. And you have arrived just in time for the party."
Before I had an opportunity to interrogate the elephants, I was whisked through the green gates into a vast open field. The elephants led me to a massive circus tent that lay in the middle of the field. "We cannot go beyond this point," spoke Pinky. "We wish you the best of luck." And with that, the six immense pachyderms dissolved into a sweet-smelling mist.
"Hello? Hello?" No response, except the echo of my own voice through the distant hills. Timidly, I peeled back the curtain leading to the giant big top. The incoming flood of shapes and colors almost knocked me on my back. Inside, various creatures, all dressed in tie-dyed business suits were mingling, drinking bright green ambrosia from silver goblets. But before I could fully take in my surroundings, the ringmaster approached me. "Welcome," he said. "We've been expecting you. My name is Robert Schneider."
"How did I get here?"
"You got here through the door."
"Yes, yes, but how did I get here?"
"Ah, but the question is not how you got here. The question is, how did you get there?"
I looked around and, to my astonishment, I found myself standing on the opposite end of the circus at the base of a giant stage. Robert was nowhere to be found. A voice came from behind me:
"No time to dawdle! The band is about to play!"
"Robert! What?! What band?"
"Shhhh!"
I turned around to find that the stage, which only moments ago had been empty, was completely set up. Three skinny gents in silver t-shirts were standing onstage, guitars in hand, grinning at me.
"My name is Kevin Barnes," said a man with a guitar, "and this is my band, Of Montreal. We are going to play some songles for you."
"Songles?!"
The band started their set. From the moment they began playing, I could tell I was going to dig it. Of Montreal had all the tenets of a great Elephant 6 band-- the catchy melodies, the whimsical lyrics, the marching-band-on-acid aesthetic, it was all there in full form. I turned to Robert, who stood next to me, eating porridge out of a tremendous pink flower.
"Bob, these guys sound great! Let me guess... you're their producer?"
A pearl-shaped tear welled in Robert's eye. He replied, "Alas, no!"
"But Bob! They sound so..."
"So Beatles? Yes, I know! Listen to 'Scenes from My Funeral!' Tell me that guitar part isn't taken straight out of 'Getting Better!'"
"Well, they definitely sound like they like the Beatles, but I wouldn't quite compare..."
"Oh, they do. They really like the Beatles."
"I love how dense and layered the sound is-- the sound is just huge! It reminds me of..."
"The Beatles?!"
"Uh... Hey, what's he doing now?"
"Oh... you see, Kevin likes to tell stories. This song is called 'Ira's Brief Life as a Spider'. It's about a spider who gets bitten by a snake hiding in a lake in a crater on his own tongue."
"What in the fuck?! This is starting to freak me out. I love this music, but the lyrics are starting to get on my nerves a little."
"Granted, the lyrics are a bit twee. But the music is so good! Kevin can write a good melody so effortlessly and arrange it impeccably."
"Wait a second. Is this a Kinks song?"
"Yes! 'World Keeps Going Round'."
"Good tune. But couldn't Kevin have done a bit more with the arrangement? Wouldn't it have been that much better if he'd given Ray Davies a complete psychedelic makeover?"
"Perhaps. Hold on, they're finishing the set!"
And as the last few notes rung out from Kevin Barnes' guitar, the array of strange creatures that, along with me, had made up the audience, returned to their underground dwellings. This left only Robert and I.
"Say, Bob, that was a really fantastic show! I'm going to pick up one of their records as soon as I get back. Wait a second... get back?! How am I supposed to get out of here?!"
"Do not fear. One sip of this drink will return you to the place that you call home."
I grasped the silver-lined goblet from Robert's hand and took a quick sip of the iridescent liquid contained within. The second the drink touched my lips, I found myself standing back underneath the willow tree. The Elephant 6 Kingdom seemed nothing but a distant memory. Shaken, I gathered my bearings and started to head home. "Boy," I said to myself, "that was one hell of a trip. Kind of like..."
A familiar voice echoed in the distance: "Magical Mystery Tour?" | 2000-05-31T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2000-05-31T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Bar/None | May 31, 2000 | 8.3 | 9629d267-7d59-4f36-95c0-ab7fbc615d50 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Guy Blakeslee's second album under his own name is issued by Leaving Records, an L.A. imprint that specializes in the astral and the abstruse. These six pieces are complementary, connected tributes to several strains of musical mysticism—American primitive guitar playing, New Age trance-induction, Krautrock ascendance, and ambient drift. | Guy Blakeslee's second album under his own name is issued by Leaving Records, an L.A. imprint that specializes in the astral and the abstruse. These six pieces are complementary, connected tributes to several strains of musical mysticism—American primitive guitar playing, New Age trance-induction, Krautrock ascendance, and ambient drift. | Guy Blakeslee: The Middle Sister | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21393-the-middle-sister/ | The Middle Sister | Guy Blakeslee, it seems, did not launch a solo career with a clear category in mind. In 2014, after a decade spent leading the occasionally entrancing psych-and-blues syndicate the Entrance Band, Blakeslee stepped from beneath a long-hanging haze to issue Ophelia Slowly, his proper solo entrée. The nine-song set suggested the musical equivalent of a clean haircut acquired for a job interview, as though Blakeslee wanted to prove he had moved beyond the chemically addled numbers of his youth and matured into proper rock songcraft. As such, moments on Ophelia Slowly aligned with the War on Drugs, Beach House, the Walkmen and, lo and behold, Kings of Leon. Sure, some wild-eyed, static-heavy clips remained, but now past the age of 30, Blakeslee seemed to have cleaned up his act and cleared up his songs.
But The Middle Sister, his second LP under his own name, is a reentrance to a psychedelic state of mind, at least on the surface. Issued by Leaving Records, a Los Angeles imprint that specializes in the astral and the abstruse, The Middle Sister is an all-instrumental, guitar-and-accessories reverie of two very different, very high minds. If Ophelia Slowly was Blakeslee’s attempt to sharpen the edges of his rock and aim for a bigger audience, The Middle Sister turns left and aims for the solitude of the stars. These six pieces are complementary, connected tributes to several strains of musical mysticism—American primitive guitar playing, New Age trance-induction, krautrock ascendance, and ambient drift. It fails, however, to get very far beyond pleasant.
The record’s first half, a two-song collection called "Halcyon Movement," offers precisely what the title implies—peaceful, feather-light acoustic guitar meditations that spiral upward toward some New Age ideals, for eight-to-10 minutes each. Not content with the sound of six strings alone, the second selection adds the sustained washes of singing bowls and the twinkling ripples of distant piano. Blakeslee plays a bit harder above them, feverishly strumming the chords toward the diptych’s end as though pushing back against the very veil of prettiness he’s created. These extended compositions reach for the majesty of James Blackshaw’s finest recorded hours, which turned six or 12 strings into graceful little symphonies. But Blakeslee’s approximations are rudimentary and shambolic, too uneven and pedestrian to provide the lift of his predecessors.
The four-movement back half, collectively dubbed "Maja (Queen of the Storm)," comes as an uninterrupted four-song suite. Blakeslee starts alone, routing rudimentary triads through a series of guitar effects, tape delays, and static shrouds. It’s a wan recreation of the Stars of the Lid’s galaxy-sized swells. A drum machine subsequently anchors this wafting chromaticism, with rays of noise dissolving into and out of a beat that is itself more identifiable than Klaus Dinger’s name. Blakeslee lets that steady thrum disappear gradually, first into a drums-and-guitar space jam and, finally, a glacial six-minute exit that splits the difference between Eno’s ambient systems and Tim Hecker’s high-volume thrall. This is a listener’s digest version of those enormous touchstones; Blakeslee has slimmed the giants he summons of necessary weight and context, repurposing their accomplishments into his own facile end.
The best of Blakeslee’s work with Entrance found him digging deep into archaic source material, challenging and churning it into tunes that, no matter how clear the inspirations, felt like personal journals. He’d wrestled with the references. But The Middle Sister feels passive and passing, like a fleeting homage from a musician just starting to explore new sources. It’s hard not to picture Blakeslee in the back of a van or at the desk of a bedroom, going down YouTube, Spotify, or MP3-blog wormholes with transfixing masters like John Fahey or Lubomyr Melnyk, Cluster or Ash Ra Tempel, only to re-emerge with the hope of making a record like that of his own. What will tickle his fancy next, you wonder?
Our instant access to almost everything produces interesting, vital recombinations of sounds and styles at an astonishing clip. But the same capability can lead, of course, to records that, like The Middle Sister, scan like the composite result of a string of Google searches. It’s a modern joy to be forever a digital dilettante, continually discovering something new with each successive point-and-click. It’s a lot less interesting to hear a restless musician turn in an album that’s little else. | 2016-01-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2016-01-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Leaving | January 12, 2016 | 6.4 | 962fef8c-6cba-41d5-9853-0cd80a18103f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The 24-year-old Providence musician’s 15th album bursts with imagination, complexity, and feeling. The abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged. | The 24-year-old Providence musician’s 15th album bursts with imagination, complexity, and feeling. The abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged. | Asher White: Home Constellation Study | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asher-white-home-constellation-study/ | Home Constellation Study | A few details to get out of the way up front. Home Constellation Study is Asher White’s 15th album, though the actual number of releases on her Bandcamp, which includes various side projects and non-album collections, is 26. The earliest of these, a ghostly collage of feedback and field recordings of Icelandic landscapes, came out when the Providence musician was 14 years old. She is now 24.
White’s prodigious early years may help to explain the accomplishment and imagination of Home Constellation Study, an album whose abundance of ideas might seem excessive if it weren’t so carefully arranged. One song sounds like Radiohead with periodic interruptions from Lightning Bolt, another like Burt Bacharach by way of Jim O’Rourke, a third like a Gamble & Huff symphonic soul epic downsized to the scale of a basement rehearsal room. A partial list of instruments that White played includes guitar, bass, drums, banjo, glockenspiel, granular synthesis, piano, and “fake mellotron”—nearly everything on the album, save for some horns and additional electronics.
White clearly loves pop and outré music from many eras. The period that Home Constellation Study most directly recalls is the one just before she started uploading her work: the mid-to-late 2000s, a time when indie rock held accessibility and experimentation in delicate balance, when a bruising noise-rock band might share a bill with a psych-folk collective that seemed sort of like a cult, when DIY scenes had just enough attention to feed bands’ ambition—but not yet so much that they crumbled under the pressure or cleaned up their acts and signed to majors. And though White wrote and recorded Home Constellation Study primarily by herself, it feels distinctly social, in an embodied, in-person, perhaps old-fashioned sort of way. So much music from young songwriters and producers now evokes the solitary overstimulation and context collapse of hours spent online. White’s feels more like hitting the road with a friend, making impromptu stops, laughing together, getting into arguments whose stakes are not hidden behind screens, then talking it out and hitting the road again.
Home Constellation Study begins in transit, with “Theme From Leaving Philadelphia,” a travelogue that a less adventurous arranger might have set to simple acoustic guitar or piano, for maximum directness and authenticity. Instead, White opts for sounds that reflect the wonder and frenzy of her departure. First, there is a fanfare of horns, voices, and maybe fake mellotron that recalls Aaron Copland’s hymns to the American spirit more than it does indie rock. Then the drums come in with a groove like a runaway train. There’s an acoustic guitar somewhere deep in the mix, strumming so hard and fast I can’t help but worry about carpal tunnel. Asa Turok’s trombone and Addy Schuetz’s sax bob and weave, sometimes offering lyrical countermelodies and sometimes terse punctuation. Cowbells clang like only cowbells can. White sings as if at a comfortable remove from the frenzy, tracing exuberant spirals of melody, unbothered by the rushing noise on the other side of the train window. The rhythms of the words neatly fit the hairpin turns of the tune; impressions of inner feeling and outer landscape begin to blur in her imagistic lyrics. One line returns persistently, nagging as it might have nagged the hungover passenger as she wrote: “I am still drunk!”
One gets the sense that White is not satisfied with a song until each of its constituent parts has been turned over and considered from all possible angles for potential adjustments that might make it somehow stranger and more familiar at once. Each time the wonky guitar hook to “Runes” repeats, it is one beat longer or shorter than the previous version, a change that doesn’t at first register on the conscious level beyond a vague sense of unsettlement. “Slow Wheel of the Year,” whose guitar-and-voice arrangement is the album’s sparest and most straightforward, has percussion breaks that sound like the lazy clicking and whirring of a bicycle’s gears as its rider coasts downhill.
These idiosyncrasies are almost always in service to the effect of a song as a whole. In the case of “Slow Wheel of the Year,” the unusual instrumentation illustrates the title and the words; in “Dream Design House,” the verse’s underlying rhythm subtly shifts to accommodate White’s vocal phrasing, using time-signature changes to make the music smoother and more natural rather than ostentatiously jagged in the manner of math rock. The printed lyrics to the gorgeous and cautiously optimistic love song “Capital Cowboy” contain a reference to Steely Dan that doesn’t actually appear in the final recording, an easter egg or version-history error that is revealing in some small but significant way: Though White’s music sounds almost nothing like the Dan on its surface, you can see how she might relate to their famous fastidiousness.
White’s preference for poetic formalism and non-narrative imagery also sets her apart from her generational peers. A line might move you not for what it reveals about Asher White as a person, or the way it makes her more relatable to you as a listener, but for the exquisite way its syllables and phonemes drape across the melody. Her interest in the musical possibilities of language can make the songs tough to parse for literal meaning, but it also makes them emotionally supple, adaptable to whatever the listener might bring. “Downstate Prairie” is apparently about city-dwellers who fetishize the idea of simple rural existence. The lines that stick with me come after most of the instruments fall away—banjo, churning drums, skronky free-jazz sax, enormous slabs of guitar distortion—leaving only White’s voice and a few bare chords: “No more borrowing the trouser and the collar and the boot/No more visiting the orchard and absconding with the fruit/Hand in hand.” You can see how they relate to the idea of urban hipsters stealing valor from country folks, but in context, for me, they sound more like a last look at love gone by, at days spent breaking rules and wearing each other’s clothes.
White writes challenging melodies for herself to sing, and pulls them off with low-key sprezzatura, never at pains to show off their difficulty. Her inflections color the words with feeling beyond whatever might be grasped on the page alone. There is a world of rich contradiction in the way she breathes the word “photograph,” in “Capital Cowboy”: on the one hand, longing for reassurance; on the other, radiating self-possession that requires no such outside validation for sustenance. Her human presence as a singer helps to hold Home Constellation Study’s divergent strains together, and to keep the album from ever coming across like an exercise in music-school intellectualism, no matter how elaborate its underpinnings. White may have had a sizeable head start on many of her peers in learning how to put a record together, but as a character in her own songs, she’s just like any other young American: high on romance and danger, restless in love and ideas, unsure of herself and the world, determined to figure it all out. | 2024-07-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | July 8, 2024 | 8 | 963c4494-b2ea-4782-b8bc-5b7d1a4ac964 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Returning to the duo format, the MacArthur grant-winning experimental percussionist teams up with an elite classical violinist for an album of wide-ranging improvisations. | Returning to the duo format, the MacArthur grant-winning experimental percussionist teams up with an elite classical violinist for an album of wide-ranging improvisations. | Jennifer Curtis / Tyshawn Sorey: Invisible Ritual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jennifer-curtis-tyshawn-sorey-invisible-ritual/ | Invisible Ritual | Devotees of the experimental scene know that Tyshawn Sorey thinks big. He won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017 and premiered a new song cycle with Opera Philadelphia the following year, and he has continued to revise and refine a dramatic tribute to Josephine Baker. While fans wait for some of those ambitious projects to be recorded, the composer and multi-instrumentalist has recently turned to the intimacy of duo sets.
It would be a mistake to think of these as minor offerings. Last fall brought an inspired concert recording with veteran pianist Marilyn Crispell. Now there’s another gem under that same heading. Invisible Ritual pairs Sorey off with the violinist and composer Jennifer Curtis, a player from the International Contemporary Ensemble, an elite new-classical crew. Once again, this set documents fully improvised performances. But there’s nothing tossed off about it.
Curtis’s range as a soloist is a revelation. She proves a nimble listener and co-leader as she works with Sorey to create a 76-minute program rich with narrative drama. There are no track titles (other than Roman numerals). But instrumental music as expressive as this doesn’t need any additional poetry.
The short opening movement introduces an amalgam of attributes that the pair will explore in greater depth over the duration of the album. Free-improv twangs of violin and skittering cymbals set the stage for airy textures, but before long, kick-drum blasts and strummed strings tease the influence of propulsive folk forms. Country blues and vintage rock have their place in this mix, as do the calm and the not-quite-silence of select Art Ensemble of Chicago deep cuts.
The following movements make good on these promises. Sorey tends to produce sounds all over his kit, playing even the edges (or sides) of every piece of equipment in his arsenal. And Curtis can match him texture for texture, tossing off clean-tone, song-like sounds, as well as quivering glissandi, and moving between jaunty pizzicato plucking and bowing close to the bridge—the latter effect producing thin, piping harmonics. After she plays a fragment of melody, the delicate extended techniques from her violin that follow sometimes suggest wisps of some phantom turntablist’s remix.
At two points during the set, Sorey switches to piano (a side of his multi-instrumentalism that hasn’t been all that prominent on recordings). During the third track, he shows the same feel for nuance and delicacy that can be heard in his subtler percussion work. On the fifth track, he becomes a speed demon with a light touch. Adopting an edgier tone while matching Sorey’s quickness of thought, Curtis provides a winning element of contrast.
Beautiful balladry takes center stage during the sixth movement. Feel free to skip directly to this part if you’re eager to hear how a free-improv session might channel conventional loveliness. But those who have been keeping up with Sorey’s recent work won’t be surprised. After that pinnacle of songful gorgeousness, the duo ventures back toward passages of tumult; the recording ends with an extended exploration of sparser, quieter energies.
This album may not announce itself as capital-I Important; it lacks some of the superficial, external signs of ambition that can help audiences understand how serious a work intends to be. There is no operatic libretto here; nor is there much of a promotional engine in place. (The album is released by the International Contemporary Ensemble’s own Tundra label.) But the quality of interplay to found here is always news, whenever and however it makes itself heard. | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Tundra | January 29, 2020 | 7.4 | 96404c38-a9c2-4f03-9e6c-7b3befd9f52b | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
Before the Asheville guitarist found his signature blend of deadpan humor and tight hooks, he cut his teeth on the more introspective songwriting highlighted on his newly reissued 2019 solo debut. | Before the Asheville guitarist found his signature blend of deadpan humor and tight hooks, he cut his teeth on the more introspective songwriting highlighted on his newly reissued 2019 solo debut. | MJ Lenderman: MJ Lenderman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mj-lenderman-mj-lenderman/ | MJ Lenderman | It’s been a banner year and a half for the unassuming MJ Lenderman. Thanks to both his solo work and his role in modern Southern rock group Wednesday, the Asheville guitarist has become a genuine indie-rock star. His recent output has included his 2022 breakthrough Boat Songs, last month’s stellar live collection And the Wind (Live and Loose!), and Wednesday’s anthemic Rat Saw God, which showcased the communal side to Lenderman’s guitar playing. Another solo album is on the way, but in the meantime, a new reissue of Lenderman’s self-titled 2019 debut—including its first-ever vinyl edition—offers a fresh look at his fuzz-rock origins.
For anyone who discovered Lenderman through bite-sized vignettes like “Someone Get the Grill Out of the Rain,” the droniness of MJ Lenderman may come as a surprise. These songs sprawl to six or eight minutes in length, filled out with molasses-slow drums from Owen Stone and circuitous guitar melodies from Lenderman and Lewis Dahm. (The band also includes frequent Lenderman collaborators Colin Miller and Xandy Chelmis on bass and lap steel, respectively, along with guest appearances from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Indigo De Souza, and saxophonist Alex Brown.) Yet the album doesn’t feel plodding or dense; as the song “Space” would suggest, Lenderman gives these tracks room to breathe, letting a single strum or burst of reverb play out for a moment before the band comes back together like a long exhale.
On his earlier work, Lenderman took inspiration from Jason Molina, and anyone familiar with the Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co. oeuvre will recognize some of its hallmarks here. You can hear Molina’s bleating inflection in Lenderman’s singing on “Heartbreak Blues,” his voice scraping the rafters of his tenor register, or in the multiple references to “the darkness” that punctuate the album’s musings on loneliness. But underneath the gravitas, Lenderman’s plainspoken style offsets the heaviness with candid observations. “Southern Birds” sounds like it was inspired by nothing more than what Lenderman saw outside his window one morning, and that simplicity brings levity and warmth to the whole record.
Lenderman shines an ample spotlight on his collaborators, which also helps cut through any self-seriousness. The album’s centerpiece is “Left Your Smile,” a gorgeous song built around a guitar hook reminiscent of Drive-By Truckers in which Lenderman’s voice is completely absent from the chorus, replaced by De Souza’s low, ghostly howl. On “Grief,” Lenderman distills the feeling into its most elemental form—“There’s a part of you/I wanna hold in my hands/A part of you I want again”—while letting Alex Brown’s mournful saxophone take center stage.
On subsequent records, Lenderman has found his signature in a distinctive blend of deadpan humor, tight grooves, and heavy distortion. But the charm of MJ Lenderman lies in watching him trying things and seeing what sticks. With “Basketball #1”—which would get a sequel on his Lucky EP—Lenderman hints at the empathetic, character-driven stories that will later become his stock in trade. In the middle of reuniting with an old flame, Lenderman goes off on a drawn-out tangent, describing a kid he used to play basketball with who’s now fallen on hard times. “Anyways,” he intones, cutting himself off, “I’m glad you got out of all the bad things you’ve been in.” Through the sorrow and darkness, Lenderman shows that relief can be its own kind of euphoria. | 2023-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dear Life | December 22, 2023 | 7.8 | 964505b5-e430-4e12-84ee-62d04cec516e | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
Recovery is a 7" box set (10 singles, 20 tracks) put out by the Fractured label; the imprint asked 20 artists working in the realm of experimental music to cover a song, and the results include Matmos doing Bow Wow Wow, Jóhann Jóhannsson on OMD, Barbara Mortgenstern tackling New Order, and Fennesz covering A-Ha. | Recovery is a 7" box set (10 singles, 20 tracks) put out by the Fractured label; the imprint asked 20 artists working in the realm of experimental music to cover a song, and the results include Matmos doing Bow Wow Wow, Jóhann Jóhannsson on OMD, Barbara Mortgenstern tackling New Order, and Fennesz covering A-Ha. | Matmos / Fennesz / Jason Forrest / Ryoji Ikeda / Barbara Morgenstern / SND / Mika Vainio: Recovery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12704-recovery/ | Recovery | I'm sitting on the floor, next to the stereo, computer in my lap. I'm listening to songs like "Running Up That Hill" and "Billie Jean" and "Back in Black". I'm parked here next to the turntable because I'm playing 7" singles, which means I need to be ready to put something new on every three or four minutes. But something strange is going on: "Back in Black" consists only of a couple of sine wave tones for bass and a few blasts of white noise static for the guitar riff; "Billie Jean" is little more than a few clicks, and you can just barely make out the bassline; and I can't tell you what is going on with this crazy "Running Up That Hill".
Recovery is a 7" box set (10 singles, 20 tracks) put out by the Fractured label. It comes housed in thick box and the design of the set (by Graham Dolphin) is sharp and well put together but not too fancy. It feels a bit more like an art object more than a functional set of music, which I guess is appropriate. The people behind Recovery asked 20 artists working in the realm of experimental music-- they are drone purveyors, laptop abstractionists, extreme techno minimalists, and improvisers, but they don't have much truck with popular music-- to cover a song from the past that's been especially significant to them. So we get extreme minimalist Ryoji Ikeda doing AC/DC, UK click'n'cutters SND doing Michael Jackson, and Mika Vanio, best known for his post-industrial work in Pan Sonic, doing Kate Bush.
In the best tracks here you can hear a sense of discovery and the fresh crackle of energy that comes from two aesthetics colliding. Richard Chartier makes highly detailed microsound pieces, and Russian producer/composer CoH is too prolific to pin down, though he has a fondness the harsh and noisy. But they come together on for a version of Soft Cell's "Bleak Is My Favorite Cliché", slowing the original to half-speed, adding some mechanized hum, and whispering the lyrics. It feels like isolationism/dark ambient soundscaping mixed with proper goth, and the effect is thrilling. BJ Nilsen, best known now for his albums of field recordings, covers Joy Division's "Heart and Soul", keeping the tense, grinding groove of the original almost exactly but fleshes it out with judiciously placed distortion, and the affection he brings to the material is palpable. Thoughtful re-works these might be, but the pleasures are immediate and obvious.
Matmos' terrific choice of cover, Bow Wow Wow's "C30, C60, C90, Go!", is a sly reminder that Recovery is a defiantly physical object (vinyl-only, no mp3s), comprised of songs from a time when all music could be held in the hand. Google the lyrics of the 1980 hit and marvel at how accurately they predict present modes of music consumption (Matmos thought enough of the words to print them on the 7" label here). Matmos also deliver musically, mirroring the clattering Burundi beat of Bow Wow Wow quite closely while adding some wicky high-pitched squelches and whispered vocals for a net effect that is cartoonish and playful. (Here I note that Matmos' Drew Daniel has written for Pitchfork.) The flip of the Matmos single is Barbara Morgenstern doing New Order's "Temptation", which serves as a reminder of how hard it is to mess up a brilliant song, though her slightly awkward phrasing and modest bedroom pop production nicely play up the song's vulnerability.
Interesting but perhaps not surprising is that most of the songs chosen come from the 1980s and, depending on how broad your definition, can be loosely classified as new wave. It's a clear reminder of how much sway that era held for artists later working in the electronic field, even the bands that haven't since been canonized. Both Fennesz' version of A-Ha's "Hunting High and Low" and Jóhann Jóhannsson's take on OMD's "Souvenir" zero in on the lush romanticism of the new pop era's sonics, blowing things up to 70mm widescreen proportions. Though in the press notes for the set Jóhannsson claims that his track is "revenge" for being seduced by OMD as a kid before later discovering their superior influences, these two tracks feel like loving homages that demonstrate how almost any song's unexplored corners can be transformed into something new by a good listener. Serving as counterweights to these highs are the handful of tracks that seem like conceptual goofs, some of which are pretty fun (Ikeda on "Back in Black") some of which are boring (Vanio's track is nice enough, but its relationship to Kate Bush is vague at best) and some of which seem pointless (never really dug SND's original stuff, and this "Billie Jean" does nothing for me.)
It goes out without saying that cover comps these days are a dime a dozen. Indie artists pay tribute to heroes, smirk along to guilty pleasures, and logroll with like-minded contemporaries to keep their names in the blogs. It seems a harmless trend, if uninspiring. But the artists here aren't involved in such games. These are intellectual types, people with concepts, who think things through when taking on new projects. Recovery reflects this more cerebral and considered stance, and some of these covers seem like commentaries or venues to work through ideas more than musical tributes (or, for that matter, send-ups). Which means that Recovery is "interesting" more often than it's "fun." But there's still enough variety in the mix to make the whole project worthwhile. | 2009-02-25T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2009-02-25T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Rock | Fractured | February 25, 2009 | 6.5 | 96554b9d-c1d9-45a8-b84b-c1eb0b4fac41 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Buffalo rapper continues to build his grimy, boom-bap brand, one endearingly straightforward release at a time. | The Buffalo rapper continues to build his grimy, boom-bap brand, one endearingly straightforward release at a time. | Westside Gunn: Hitler Wears Hermes 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-hitler-wears-hermes-7/ | Hitler Wears Hermes 7 | New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently boasted that the Buffalo Bills are the only true-blue NY football team, as they’re the only one that actually plays in-state. (Both the Giants and Jets play in a stadium in New Jersey.) Buffalo rapper Westside Gunn has been trumpeting a similar claim in the realm of rap, dubbing himself the “New King of New York” despite being from a city upstate that’s more known for its snowfall than hip-hop. But while MCs from the NYC boroughs have tried to shake the dust off their sound with trap hi-hats, Gunn and his Griselda Records cohorts have proudly embraced the loops and drum breaks of the city’s “Golden Age” and revamped them. So much so that the richest rapper to ever make it out of Brooklyn recently gave them a management deal.
On Hitler Wears Hermes 7, the formula doesn’t change, with Gunn rapping ruthlessly about life on the streets of Buffalo over glistening barely touched samples. With each edition of the series, the bars seem to get a little harder, the beats a little prettier, and Gunn’s persona comes further into focus. The project opens with DJ Drama, whose Gangsta Grillz mixtapes once served as proclamations of stardom for artists like Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, decreeing that the “Buffalo kids done did it.” It’s a sentiment Gunn circles back to often on Hermes 7 with crass lines like, “First nigga in my city with a Rolls/Fuck two bad bitches at the Lowe’s,” injecting a conventional rap boast with some of his hometown’s blue-collar attitude.
Gunn’s voice is a nasally high-pitched yap, somewhere between Brooklyn rappers AZ and Troy Ave, and is perfectly tuned for talking shit. “At the Roc Nation brunch with my tool on, don’t disrespect us,” he cooly warns on “Gondek.” Elsewhere, on “Connie’s Son,” he crows that he’s “made half at least half a mil’ ridin’ Megabuses,” a clever reference to the cheap bus service that’s been exposed more than once as a tool used by traffickers to run drugs across state lines. Griselda crew members Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher show up to deliver equally gritty verses, as well as a surprisingly in-form Fat Joe, who harkens back to his D.I.T.C. days on “Kelly’s Korner” by lamenting how he once got his hand put in a meat grinder for stealing a Mafia don’s car.
The production, handled by a who’s who of boom-bap aficionados like Alchemist, Statik Selektah and Griselda in-house producer Daringer, is as lovely as the lyrics are ugly. The swirling keys on “Broadway Joes” sound more like something jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi laid down for A Charlie Brown Christmas than a backdrop to an ode to cooking crack. The soaring vocal sample on the frontend of “Undertaker vs. Goldberg,” meanwhile, throws Gunn’s violent “doot, doot, doot, doot” ad-libs into a warm swirl. The only moments the beats come up short are when their simplicity veers into redundancy, like a few minutes into “Undertaker,” which could have been bolstered by some drums.
This could be said for other aspects of Hermes 7 as well, a project that’s endearingly straightforward but has a firm ceiling as a result. By its midpoint, you pretty much know how each song will unfold, a one-note dish that’s tasty on first bite but starts to lose its flavor by the end. Make no mistake, this is who Westside Gunn is: He makes one kind of song and does it well. Putting out a niche product has ironically led him, along with the rest of Griselda Records, to a larger audience. But even recipes for success can be improved upon. | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Griselda | November 11, 2019 | 7.3 | 965a799a-c094-451f-a5cd-3a24597e4ef2 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
In 2017, the National revisited their 2007 classic Boxer at a show in Brussels, and the set has been packaged for a Record Store Day release. You had to be there... | In 2017, the National revisited their 2007 classic Boxer at a show in Brussels, and the set has been packaged for a Record Store Day release. You had to be there... | The National: Boxer (Live in Brussels) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-national-boxer-live-in-brussels/ | Boxer (Live in Brussels) | Boxer: classic stuff, definitive album for one of the definitive indie rock bands of 21st century. One of the best live bands too. The National curate festivals and massively influential artist compilations, Matt Berninger’s relationship with his brother was deemed a worthy subject for a critically-acclaimed documentary, they’ve been this close to debuting at #1 on Billboard and won a Grammy in a category that actually gets televised. It’s been a very, very long time since the National actually had anything to prove, and yet they take the stage as the same Cincinnati transplants who spent years getting ignored in New York long before their infamous tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show. It’s easy to imagine them spending each pre-show reading and internalizing every backhanded compliment about their erudite image and fanbase and getting back into that 2005 headspace. Oh, and the city of Brussels seems pretty awesome too. So it’s hard to rate Boxer (Live in Brussels) both as an actual experience and as a recorded document of music. I would have paid a significant amount of money to watch Boxer live in Brussels, and not a single dollar for Boxer (Live in Brussels).
At the very least, Boxer (Live in Brussels) keeps most of its promises—Boxer played in full, in order, with no encores or stage banter indicating it was indeed recorded in Brussels and not the CalCoast Credit Union Open Air Theatre or Verizon Hall or any other late-2017 tour stop. “This is a sad record,” Berninger jokes at the end of “Guest Room,” before mentioning the tendency of grammar-minded fans to hear the title of the next song as “Racing Like a Pronoun.” That’s about it. And so the utility of Live in Brussels is less about whether the National improve on any of the originals so much as offer something different than an album that has been a fixture for the entirety of its existence.
Live in Brussels inevitably capitalizes on the personal nostalgia driving any 10-year anniversary year celebration—the night you got way too drunk and sung “Fake Empire” in a cab home, the night you got way too drunk and listened to “Slow Show” while scrolling through ex’s Facebook profiles, and so forth. It also skews the global context of Boxer and shows just how much it was a product of its time. “Fake Empire” is technically the National’s biggest hit, so it at least feels weird as the opener of a live set in 2017. It sounds a little jauntier, less solemn than it did originally—it was released towards the very end of Dubya’s second term, after all, where more hopeful times were clearly in sight. Were it written for 2018, “Fake Empire” would be both way too on-the-nose and too obtuse. “Mistaken for Strangers” likewise took on a very time-specific kind of sociopolitical heft shortly after its release and feels weirdly quaint in retrospect: a portrait of “economic anxiety” when that term felt like less of a coded euphemism. The central metaphor of “Start a War” was daring, but not insensitive. Those songs still feel like people falling apart, not an entire society.
But that’s all taken care of in the first seven minutes and in all likelihood, the Brussels crowd is not here to reassess Boxer as a document of slow, steady American decline. It then falls to the individual to scavenge Live in Brussels for any new wrinkle: horn sections are a luxury for bands playing a hometown gig or a festival, and the National is big enough to mandate one at just about any show. These horns were on Boxer too, and when the coda on “Fake Empire” catches the beat differently than it does on the album, it's a papercut-subtle change that drives me nuts. “Mistaken for Strangers” runs a little breathless and ragged, Berninger occupying the space of the beleaguered desk jockey rather than an omnipotent narrator whose judgment feels comforting—this adult life is unmagnificent, it’s not just you. The studio version of “Squalor Victoria” is the shortest song on Boxer and it’s the longest one on Live in Brussels, whipping up a turbulent outro, the only time Berninger screams on something written after 2005. And if you’ve seen the National at any point in the past 10 years, this is the exact version of “Squalor Victoria” you’ve heard every single time.
As avowed Grateful Dead fans, it’s not surprising that the National would eventually leverage their live reputation into a burgeoning cottage industry—you wonder why it took them this long. But there’s nothing cynical about Boxer (Live in Brussels), and it’s being released on Record Store Day, where 98% of the available goods are clearly “collector’s only” artifacts. Sure, it’s Boxer’s time to celebrate its birthday, and yet it’s the National album that’s the least revelatory in a live setting. Alligator will forever be the National’s enduring document as underdogs and the way some people will always want to see them—there’s no way we’re ever getting back the guys who made “Mr. November” and “Abel.” The claustrophobic, dense production that made High Violet such a convincingly difficult comedown record was off-putting to some and seeing “Terrible Love” once will make you understand why it managed to replace “Mr. November” as their perennial set closer. Trouble Will Find Me is still kind of a grab bag, but loose—the most “live” National record, and even if Sleep Well Beast isn’t as energetic as their past work, it’s worthwhile to see how they get to play with their new toys.
And then there’s Boxer—the one with the tightest songs, the most exacting arrangements, a muted Side B. Yeah, “Gospel” and “Guest Room” are the kind of fan-favorite deep cuts that likely got retired from setlists once High Violet dropped and that deflated horn outro of “Mistaken for Strangers” will always take me right back to those days of eating another lonely dinner in my cubicle at 7:30 PM during a 14-hour day that hasn’t ended yet. But more than any National album, Boxer needs the things that make these guys such compelling live theatre—listening to a record, you can’t see Berninger take mighty pulls from a bottle of wine and lose himself in the din during the instrumentals, nervously pacing, head-down like so many of his narrators. There are no covers, no possibilities of “Cherry Tree” or “Cardinal Song,” no way to fully appreciate the intense physicality of the Devendorf and Dessner brothers’ instrumental compositions. None of which is to detract from the National’s live reputation, mind you. Live in Brussels does the opposite, reminding you of all the fun you’re not having. | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 21, 2018 | 6 | 966c14f1-5b3f-41a8-90cc-97e594aa71eb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
2 Chainz made a name for himself by following his mentor Lil Wayne’s lead, but the pair’s new collaborative album finds the teacher struggling to keep up with his student. | 2 Chainz made a name for himself by following his mentor Lil Wayne’s lead, but the pair’s new collaborative album finds the teacher struggling to keep up with his student. | Lil Wayne / 2 Chainz: Collegrove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21706-collegrove/ | Collegrove | 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne have been running mates for almost a decade now; following their collaborative 2007 hit "Duffle Bag Boy," Wayne has appeared as a featured guest on every 2 Chainz album, and 2 Chainz has often returned the favor on mixtapes and the 2013 single "Rich as Fuck." It’s a naturally absurd pairing: At their best, both rappers’ similarly skewed perspective allows them boil down the universe into an endless supply of WTF punchlines. On Juicy J's strip club ode "Bandz a Make Her Dance," for instance, 2 Chainz and Wayne deliver sometimes-head-scratching non sequiturs about their favorite pastime, and it’s representative of their combined cheekiness. It’s also the first song that comes to mind when 2 Chainz raps, "You said, ‘You can make a million rappin’ ‘bout some pussy,’" on "Dedication," the opener to their new project, ColleGrove, recounting some wizened Wayne advice. 2 Chainz made a name for himself not only by listening to Wayne but also following his lead, so it’s a bit odd that ColleGrove has him spending so much time dragging Wayne behind him.
That isn’t by design, of course. The intention of ColleGrove is, as the hometown-referencing name suggests, to merge the rappers’ two worlds, and to also display 2 Chainz’s enviable respect for Wayne. "Dedication" is a "Big Brother"-style narration of the duo’s longstanding friendship, with 2 Chainz paying homage to Wayne’s impact on his career. (The record is billed as a 2 Chainz album likely because of Wayne’s unresolved disputes with Cash Money, making this the ultimate outpouring of gratitude.) And in a way, ColleGrove is itself a dedication, to both Lil Wayne and the era of freaky one-liners he ushered in. But Wayne is now a shell of the rapper 2 Chainz revered, and here, standing beside Atlanta’s zinger king, he struggles to get an interesting word in edgewise.
At his peak, Lil Wayne was an efficient and effective puncher, taking compact swings and landing in flurries. There are glimpses of that here, but more often than not Wayne is merely trying to keep pace. At this point, he simply has trouble matching 2 Chainz’s outlandishness bar-for-bar. For every "I’m so high the blunt feel like a dumbbell/ These niggas tiny like a spider on a Spud Webb," Wayne provides, 2 Chainz delivers five delirious winners like "I had a sitdown with Farrakhan/ Turned the White House to the Terrordome." This unbalance becomes an issue on songs like "Rolls Royce Weather Every Day" and "Bentley Truck," where Wayne sputters so much that you wish this was just a 2 Chainz album.
To be fair, some of it is. Six tracks are 2 Chainz-only, including two highlights—"MFN Right" and "Not Invited"—which originally appeared on his recent EP, Felt Like Cappin, where they benefitted from the shorter running time; without Wayne verses, they feel out of place here. It’s also odd that one of that EP’s standouts, "Back on My Bullshyt," which features of the better Lil Wayne verses in recent memory, didn’t make it to ColleGrove.
"MFN Right" and "Not Invited" also standout as the sonic outliers here, one minimalist, the other soulful. Everything else lies along a gradient of glazed synths that mushroom, percolate, or oscillate, allowing just enough room to accommodate both Wayne’s whine and 2 Chainz’s groggy drawl. The production credits are a road map of the pair’s collective journey, from one-time in-house Cash Money producer Mannie Fresh, to modern trap architects Mike WiLL Made It, Southside, and Zaytoven, to rap’s current all stars Metro Boomin, TM88, and FKi. Their collective effort doesn’t quite live up to their pedigree, but it’s still formidable.
That is, excepting the Mannie Fresh-produced "Gotta Lotta," with its unnecessarily dense layering and nursery rhyme hook. It’s symbolic of why ColleGrove stalls. There are moments where everything goes right, like on the well-paced "Bounce" or the London on da Track-produced VIP checklist "Section," and you can see how the album may have worked in theory. These rappers have an undeniable chemistry, and when they both find their best, the album is pure fun. But more often than not, ColleGrove plays out like 2 Chainz pulling his friend and mentor up by his bootstraps while ceding a bit of the spotlight in the process. It’s a generous gesture, but a costly one. | 2016-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | March 9, 2016 | 6.8 | 966cdbae-c776-450a-b1cd-0386de5441f6 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Luke Abbott’s synth/sax/drums trio illustrates the links between London’s fertile jazz scene and longstanding psychedelic traditions in six vibrant, unedited improvisations. | Luke Abbott’s synth/sax/drums trio illustrates the links between London’s fertile jazz scene and longstanding psychedelic traditions in six vibrant, unedited improvisations. | Szun Waves: New Hymn to Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/szun-waves-new-hymn-to-freedom/ | New Hymn to Freedom | When mountains move, entire landscapes change—not just how we perceive them, but the physical properties of their dirt, what oenologists call terroir. One such tectonic shift appears to be taking place throughout the UK’s experimental-music scene. The rising profile of London’s jazz movement is pushing the immediacy and vibrancy of group improvisation far from the jazz community itself, creating an environment at once related and separate.
To wit: It's entirely possible to hear New Hymn to Freedom, the excellent sophomore album by Szun Waves, as part of this new world. To place it in this context, one need only engage “Constellation,” the album’s grand, searching opener, wherein saxophonist Jack Wyllie, synth experimentalist Luke Abbott, and drummer Laurence Pike slowly bloom together into a noisy flower, full of yearning spirituality, knotty runs, and wonderful internal exchanges, all of it at once synthetic and organic. Texturally, Szun Waves even mirror the sax/synths/beats mix of the Comet Is Coming, one of the numerous groups featuring Shabaka Hutchings, a central figure in London jazz. (The two projects also share a label.)
The six wholly unedited improvisations of New Hymn to Freedom don’t so much open the window on another corner of London’s “scene”—only the most broad-minded interpreters of the word “jazz” would place much of this droney, psychedelic music in that tradition—as they illuminate the field on which many of UK’s experimental musicians have been playing of late. Social, sharing, dynamic interplay is hardly the exclusive provenance of London’s DIY scene, but the recovery of this model for musicians working at the intersection of electronics, rhythm, and improvisation has been instrumental in pushing individuals towards group settings.
Szun Waves is a trio of such curious veterans. Abbott’s is probably the most recognizable name, from the texturally thorny, synth-heavy electronic music he’s been creating for nearly a decade as part of James Holden’s Border Community stable; both Wyllie, whose saxophone and electronics are an integral part of the Mercury Prize-nominated jazz ensemble Portico Quartet, and the Australian Pike, a veteran of electronics-meets-jazz groups PVT and Triosk (whose 2003 album with producer Jan Jelinek, 1+3+1, is one distinguished precursor of New Hymn to Freedom), are more formally attuned to collaborative improvisation. The project began as a duo between Abbott and Wyllie, exploring a space somewhere between drone-oriented ambiance and Vangelis’ globe-trotting new age (you can hear why Wyllie’s Portico were long-time mainstays of Peter Gabriel’s ethnographically inclined Real World label), and the trio’s potential fruition came into focus on 2016’s At Sacred Walls.
By comparison, New Hymn to Freedom feels like a wonderfully rollicking coming-out party, consistently stormy and stirring in ways that the trio’s debut only hinted they could be. One of the traits it does share with the more electronic-minded London jazz participants is its desire to push people toward engaged motion. On “High Szun,” Pike moves all over his kit to rev up the rhythm alongside Abbott’s arpeggiated synth runs; Wyllie’s soprano phrases are often processed, short and repetitive, before voicing the tune’s melody with a stateliness that briefly recalls Coltrane and Pharoah cutting through the musical gale. One can envision hearing this at strategic moments in DJ sets by Four Tet or Ben UFO.
At their best, Szun Waves jams come as swells, with a power that is hard to dismiss, regardless if you can see their intentions from a click away. Even when the build-up is as long—and the name as potentially portentous—as the 12-minute closing title track, the pay-offs win. The feedback-like squall of a duet between Abbott and Wyllie at the end of “New Hymn to Freedom,” with Pike’s hi-hats pushing the space, can easily be imagined as the contemporary progeny of numerous jazz-attuned psychonautical Brits, from Robert Wyatt to Jason Pierce. It’s also a bountiful example of the local dirt’s modern harvest. Drink it in. | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | The Leaf Label | September 5, 2018 | 7.2 | 966d887a-41d9-4e54-9a86-31485111c2b8 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
The New York duo’s gloomy trip rock songs are danceable, depressing, and designed for you to mosh with your shadows. | The New York duo’s gloomy trip rock songs are danceable, depressing, and designed for you to mosh with your shadows. | Amiture: Mother Engine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amiture-mother-engine/ | Mother Engine | New York winters are best soundtracked by brutal reverb or ice-cold synths. Model/Actriz and Nation of Language, two beloved newcomers out of the Brooklyn indie scene, have mastered this particular chill on either side of the spectrum. Somewhere in the middle lies Amiture, a duo made up of Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil. This latest group out of New York’s new school of rock convey an earnest isolation by way of screeching guitars and quick-paced drum machines, a desire to dance in the dark alone.
While their debut The Beach was comparatively synth-heavy, their follow-up Mother Engine feels dark as an oil slick—and just as coarse. The grooves here feel slightly askew, oscillating between the danceable and utterly depressing. Whitescarver sings with ferocity throughout, his tremulous voice soaring with rock’n’roll smolder, though at times it borders on inaudible growling. Still, cuts like fuzzed-out single “Billy’s Dream” unfortunately reduce him to a low grumble lost in a sea of drums and reverb.
But these vocal modulations have the potential to touch the heart. Over looping guitar and cold, sparse percussion, “Dirty” tells a tale of queer yearning for an old flame now masquerading as straight. “You’re just like me/You wanna be a lady/You wanna make it dirty,” Whitescarver whispers to his former beau, evoking a pain all too familiar to any horny loverqueer spurned. On “Baby,” Whitescarver’s breathy snarl glides over upbeat drums. A particularly chilling cut comes in the form of “Cocaine”: Opening the doleful final third of the record, the namesake drug serves as a metaphor for Whitescarver’s toxic lover, a relationship he compares to being “just like [his] father” in a hushed rasp. This is a trip-hop scorcher for love addicts with daddy issues.
Halfway through, Mother Engine begins to sputter. “HWL” feels like a Garbage B-side better left off the album, carried only by Whitescarver’s floaty voice. The song positions him as the latest in a long line of alt-rock frontmen whose lyrics can hardly be made out past the vocal dramatics. Near the end, the instrumental “Porte Sosie” proves that the band need not rely on the ghostly beauty of the lead singer’s pipes. Layered electric guitar riffs clash in a chaotic miasma, reviving a record that at this point feels like post-punk slosh. Moments like these are proof of this album’s crackling, compelling soul.
Leonard Cohen famously said cracks allow light to enter, but the fissures in Whitescarver and Goupil’s music allow plenty of space to mosh with your shadows. Mother Engine is a sexy gallowdance, a trip rock journey that contains echoes of early 2000s New York, when Karen O and Julian Casablancas were rubbing shoulders with Paul Banks and James Murphy. It’s a chilling dream in a leather jacket, a one-night stand taken home from Welcome to the Johnsons that disappears in a thrush of guitar, in a wisp of smoke. | 2024-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Electronic | Dots Per Inch | February 23, 2024 | 7.2 | 9670ce24-7b21-47f4-9d78-52a1b4f30e3e | E.R. Pulgar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/e.r.-pulgar/ | |
Sam Beam’s earliest recordings reveal a songwriter and singer already secure in his eccentricities. Far from sounding tentative, these songs are more like a lost Iron & Wine album. | Sam Beam’s earliest recordings reveal a songwriter and singer already secure in his eccentricities. Far from sounding tentative, these songs are more like a lost Iron & Wine album. | Iron & Wine: Archive Series No. 5: Tallahassee Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iron-and-wine-archive-series-no-5-tallahassee-recordings/ | Archive Series No. 5: Tallahassee Recordings | Sam Beam just sorta stumbled into Iron & Wine. When he moved to Tallahassee to attend graduate school at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts in the late 1990s, writing songs was merely a hobby. It was more like an extension of his filmmaking, and he didn’t think much of the music he did make, at least not until a friend lent him a four-track recorder. Setting his songs to tape and playing them back, Beam could actually hear them for the first time. He started making decisions about structure, lyrics, melodies, arrangements, and vocals. Through another friend, he landed a song on a compilation by the Portland-based Yeti magazine, then signed a record deal with Sub Pop and an immediate tour opening for Isaac Brock’s side project Ugly Casanova.
In 2015, the first volume in Iron & Wine’s Archive Series collected songs from early in his career, most dating just before the release of his 2002 debut The Creek Drank the Cradle, but the fifth volume goes even deeper into his vault, unearthing some of his very first recordings. (Volumes 2, 3, and 4 were tour-only releases.) Often an archival compilation like this one reveals a steep learning curve, using those first tentative recordings as a point against which to measure an artist’s progress toward more familiar material. It is gently disappointing that Tallahassee reveals a songwriter and singer already secure in his mannerisms and eccentricities, already in possession of the traits that would eventually endear him to fans. Aside from some rather abrupt fades and a lo-fi hum similar to the one that pervades his debut, the music sounds professional, accomplished, refined. You miss the creative epiphanies, those moments when a young musician realizes what he can do within a song. You miss the idea that an artist started off like any of us.
That’s only the mildest of complaints, especially since Tallahassee plays less like a compilation and more like a lost Iron & Wine album. As produced by E.J. Holowicki, the friend who lent Beam that four-track and plays bass, these songs cohere into something like a story or a statement, with opener “Why Hate Winter” immediately establishing all the traits that would soon define Iron & Wine: the easy intimacy, the patient melody, the arrangement that’s both austere and generous, the hints of something darker behind a romantic idyll. Similarly, he’s already developed a vocal tic, a way of hitting a note slightly flat. Rather than conveying powerful emotion, it reinforces a compelling stoicism, a form of understatement that serves Beam well especially on “This Solemn Day” and “Calm on the Valley.”
To a certain degree, much of Tallahassee sounds like it could be an extension of Beam’s filmmaking, which he’s described as “pretentious” and others have likened to Andrei Tarkovsky. Some of these songs are like short movies in themselves, or at least modest soundtracks to short scenes. The windswept melody of “Ex-Lover Lucy Jones” follows a lovelorn man building shrines to a woman, before revealing that the romance is one-sided and the man an unreliable narrator. Beam punctuates the tale with the most basic harmonica solo you could imagine—a series of long inhalations and exhalations marking the passage of time that might separate lovers from each other or from the people they once were. On this song and throughout Tallahassee, Beam demonstrates a knack for devastating succinctness, giving only enough details to insinuate a pain that never becomes overwhelming—the kind you just live with from one day to the next. Nothing about these songs sounds tentative or grasping. Already he understands how to settle into a song and simply let it breathe on its own.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | May 12, 2021 | 7.5 | 9677969f-c099-4b5e-a50a-0f3869b9955f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The British trio moves beyond the tropical-house Top 40 of their debut on a theatrical, diverse sophomore album that finds frontman Olly Alexander blurring the boundaries between sacred and profane. | The British trio moves beyond the tropical-house Top 40 of their debut on a theatrical, diverse sophomore album that finds frontman Olly Alexander blurring the boundaries between sacred and profane. | Years & Years: Palo Santo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/years-and-years-palo-santo/ | Palo Santo | Images of spirituality and religion permeate the work of Years & Years. The title of the British trio's 2015 debut album was Communion. Those themes become even more prominent in tracks with names like “Sanctify,” “Hallelujah,” “Karma,” and “Preacher” on the sometimes bombastic, sometimes sensual follow-up, Palo Santo. (“Palo santo,” or “holy wood,” is an incense used in indigenous Inca culture to cast away evil spirits.) In most Western theologies, dancing is the devil’s work, and the thrill of shaking your blasphemous hips while invoking the Lord predates Madonna by centuries. But you can see why Years & Years, in particular, connect music with religious transcendence. For an artist like the trio’s principal songwriter, the energetic Olly Alexander, who’s gone from mild-mannered frontman to fledging queer icon in just a few years, pop isn’t a frivolous pastime—it’s a sacred experience.
Alexander’s lyrics have always dealt with the murky, complicated side of desire, a fascination that gives physical heft to Palo Santo’s spiritual imagery. “Sanctify,” the record’s lead single and opener, finds him mid-hookup with a man who professes to be heterosexual. “You don’t have to be straight with me/I see what’s underneath your mask,” Alexander chides, in an apt double entendre, as he asks the guy to “sanctify my body with pain.” The contrast between the quiet verses and wide-open pop chorus mimics the lovers’ conflicting emotions of shame and ecstasy. Alexander ladles on the drama with Timberlakian trills, his voice smooth and precise against icy synths. A welcome reinvention for Years & Years, the track departs from the tropical-house Top 40 they’re known for, moving toward a more theatrical and intense sound.
Palo Santo puts its best foot forward with “Sanctify,” and a handful of subsequent songs make for some of the most enjoyable music Years & Years have released thus far. Although it uses a somewhat predictable dancefloor-as-site-of-divine-communion metaphor, “Hallelujah” is so relentlessly upbeat that its sounds blast through the mundanity of its lyrics, reigning in the atmosphere of Ibiza beach-rave revelry just before it slides into gaudiness. With an intro lifted almost note-for-note from Lauryn Hill’s “Everything is Everything,” “Karma” differentiates itself from typical Discover Weekly pap by taking inspiration from ’90s R&B girl groups instead of the sub-EDM vocoder pop many of Years & Years’ contemporaries peddle. At his best, Alexander exudes the youthful confidence of a kid perfecting his moonwalk in the bedroom mirror.
Unfortunately, while the front half of Palo Santo is packed with catchy tunes and genuine surprises, the album struggles to sustain its sense of wonder—or even structure. Communion was a scientifically balanced record, each of its songs similar enough to the others in tone and atmosphere to sustain a consistent mood. But “Hypnotised,” a ballad with lyrics like, “Just one look at you/My heart has been hypnotised,” meanders so aimlessly that the record never recovers. Even attempts to reintroduce dancefloor fodder feel strangely out of place in its wake. “If You’re Over Me,” a peculiar choice for a second single, uses a sing-song synth line to trace a picture of redemption in the midst of a failed relationship. The songs that follow blur together like the by-the-numbers pop Years & Years so eloquently challenge on tracks like “Karma.”
Palo Santo is a promising sophomore album because it evolves past the sound of the band’s debut. But at its low points, the record lacks the bite to drive home the razor’s-edge duality of sacred and profane that Alexander seems to thrive on. Eventually, themes of salvation, damnation, and enraptured revelation become mired in electropop clichés that are beneath the band’s talent. At their best, Years & Years are capable of godlike sublimity. To take up permanent residence in the heavens, all they need to do is exorcise a few colorless spirits. | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | July 7, 2018 | 6.5 | 967bfed9-ce1b-41a8-b71e-5bbcfc1cefeb | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
null | It could be said that Elvis Costello had the distinct pleasure of living out the ultimate dream of every sharp-witted, incurably bitter young bastard with hopes of achieving stardom. In only two and a half years, he was propelled from an awkward, computer-programming teenager with a Jazzmaster and ugly glasses to the prototype for chic geekdom. Virtually overnight, he established himself as among the most articulate songwriters rock music has ever seen, infusing punk with the literacy it had always strived for but rarely achieved. With superstar status and a reputation for pushing the envelope, Costello was able to crystallize | Elvis Costello & The Attractions: Armed Forces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1621-armed-forces/ | Armed Forces | It could be said that Elvis Costello had the distinct pleasure of living out the ultimate dream of every sharp-witted, incurably bitter young bastard with hopes of achieving stardom. In only two and a half years, he was propelled from an awkward, computer-programming teenager with a Jazzmaster and ugly glasses to the prototype for chic geekdom. Virtually overnight, he established himself as among the most articulate songwriters rock music has ever seen, infusing punk with the literacy it had always strived for but rarely achieved. With superstar status and a reputation for pushing the envelope, Costello was able to crystallize the thematic threads of political and personal devastation that ran through his first two records into the concept of "emotional fascism," the original title for Armed Forces.
Though Armed Forces is in many ways the most conceptually aggressive and confrontational of Costello's first three records, it doesn't carry with it the same immediacy of his first two releases, 1977's My Aim Is True and 1978's This Year's Model, on which he came as a man with something to prove. There's something intensely subversive about My Aim Is True with its undercurrents of anger and frustration providing a foundation for his synthesis of pop melody, country twang, and punk energy. This Year's Model, meanwhile, saw Costello expanding his sound significantly, with each instrument coming through as clear and urgent as a warning siren. It was equal parts whispered confession and frantic street corner sermon, and though he never quite reached its apex again, Armed Forces comes very close.
As Costello writes in the liner notes to this expanded reissue, Armed Forces marks the first time that he was actually aware of his audience. Perhaps in an attempt to elucidate the web of veiled and convoluted social and personal references running through his first two records, the album is lyrically much more general, and remarkably self-conscious, right from the opening lyric, "Oh, I just don't know where to begin." This, of course, doesn't slow Costello down-- "Accidents Will Happen", one of the finest songs in his, or any, repertoire, matches a signature smirking double-entendre with an almost Baroque pop sensibility. Melodically and lyrically, the song is above reproach, as Costello sings of infidelity with what could either be construed as regret or smug satisfaction. It's also one of several songs on Armed Forces to benefit from the album's dense production.
Whereas both My Aim Is True and This Year's Model are sharply produced, relatively sparse affairs, Armed Forces is extravagantly layered with dense instrumentation and rich, effusive textures. Pete Thomas' maniacal drumming is much more consistent than on previous outings, and keyboardist Steve Nieve, for the first time, is as likely to be found at a piano as behind a synthesizer. On "Accidents Will Happen" and the similarly stunning "Oliver's Army", in which Costello winds catchy and elegant melodies around slightly off-kilter chord progressions, the production works to the record's advantage, filling the songs out with bombastic power-pop arrangements and giving weight to their urgency. "Big Boys" and "Green Shirt"-- two subdued products of the same mold that produced "The Beat" and "Pump It Up", and make full use of steady, insistent rhythms and the unstoppable kinetic energy of The Attractions-- are near-classics as well, but are somewhat hindered by the album's smoother production. An earlier acoustic version of "Big Boys" included as a bonus track on Rhino's reissue of This Year's Model reveals layers of anger and heartbreak that the album version buries beneath impenetrable four-part harmonies and a heavy fog of reverb.
Of course, even if the production on Armed Forces often serves to conceal, rather than reveal the nuances of Costello's songwriting and The Attractions' always impeccable playing, the songwriting can hardly be argued with. "Goon Squad" carries on the menacing tone and complex rhythms of "Watching the Detectives" and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" with a prodigious sense of melody; "Party Girl" is yet another example of Costello successfully executing what would, in the hands of a lesser musician, quickly strike as overwrought; "Moods for Moderns" turns disco cliché into new wave brilliance; and a fiery, acidic cover of Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" mockingly closes an album packed with dauntless, condemnatory social commentary.
In the end, the greatest strength of Armed Forces may be the same thing that makes it less viscerally powerful than Costello's two prior records-- its songs absolutely demand to be appreciated for their craftsmanship. In many ways, Armed Forces can be seen as the point at which Costello dropped the role of angry young upstart, and became more comfortable with his personification as a songwriter. And considering that he has since remained largely true to this sound, it can be seen not only as the consummation of all he had worked toward, but a window to what he would later accomplish. | 2003-03-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-03-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Columbia | March 2, 2003 | 9.5 | 967caca3-6f1a-4275-bc1a-f43d4b8e92f9 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
The collected solo recordings from a veteran of three of krautrock’s fundamental groups—Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia—walk the line between mesmerizing riffs and wistful, cinematic gestures. | The collected solo recordings from a veteran of three of krautrock’s fundamental groups—Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia—walk the line between mesmerizing riffs and wistful, cinematic gestures. | Michael Rother: Solo / Solo II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-rother-solo-solo-ii/ | Solo / Solo II | Before he’d turned 25, Michael Rother had played in three innovative groups—Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Harmonia. The guitarist became an avatar of what’s become known as krautrock, inspiring bands as disparate as Stereolab, Chrome, and Negativland with sounds ranging from beatific pastoralism to industrial clangor. Rother’s solo recordings from 1977 onward, which are enshrined in the Solo and Solo II boxed sets, haven’t been as world-shaking as those earlier forays into avant rock, but they reveal his ability to wring maximal emotion from minimal gestures in ways that seem quintessentially Northern European.
It’s fair to say that Rother discharged most of his best ideas with Neu! and Harmonia. In “Hallogallo,” the lead-off track from Neu!’s 1972 debut album, Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger drafted perhaps the most emulated krautrock blueprint: Dinger’s “Apache beat” chugging swiftly beneath Rother’s plaintive guitar wails and Dinger’s curt rhythm-guitar quacks, all contoured by producer Conny Plank for optimal aerodynamic glide. This was ultimate driving musik for the Autobahn of your imagination. You can hear the seeds of much of what’s collected on Solo in Neu! 75’s “Isi.” Its melody suggests grand vistas and tempered hope, its beats advancing with purposeful propulsion. But when an artist has dreamed up ideas as significant as those, falling short of them is no disgrace. On Solo’s collected recordings—Flammende Herzen, Sterntaler, Katzenmusik, Fernwärme, two previously unreleased soundtracks (Die Räuber and Houston), and a smattering of live recordings and remixes from the 21st century—Rother hones his trademark riff mesmerism, emphasizing beauty and placidity.
Flammende Herzen (1977)—featuring Can’s Jaki Liebezeit on drums and Plank on the console and Yamaha synth—reiterates Rother’s predilection for expansive song structures, cruise-control rhythms, and guitar tones that signify anguish and ecstasy. “Zyklodrom” and “Karussell” are exemplary; the latter’s melody is perhaps Rother’s most grandiose. No wonder it’s been covered by William Tyler, another master of big-sky guitarscapes. Another key track, “Feuerland,” was redone by Kompakt Records’ Justus Köhncke; you can hear the roots of ’90s German techno’s streamlined efficiency in the original’s purring sonorities and clipped 4/4 gait.
Sterntaler (1978), with Liebezeit and Plank again in tow, follows in the vein of Flammende Herzen. “Stromlinien” exemplifies Rother’s m.o. during this phase: majestic melodiousness propelled by fleet, locomotive beats. It becomes clearer on Sterntaler that Rother—as he’d shown in Harmonia, where his parts smoothly blended with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius’ synths—may be one of the least extravagant guitar heroes in rock, favoring artfully modulated squalls and muted spangles that exude modesty, even as they’re blanketing the firmament.
A 12-song love letter to felines, 1979’s Katzenmusik purveys a more interior sound, with faintly precious melodies and less emphasis on rhythm, although Liebezeit remains. Rother introduces eBow to his repertoire, which enables him to generate infinite sustain and evoke cat-like cries. Rother’s own cats recently had given birth to more kittens than he could handle, forcing him to give them away; any downhearted moments on the album might be traced to that feeling of loss.
With Plank gone, Rother takes a slightly darker tone on 1982’s Fernwärme (the title means “warmth from a distance”). “Elfenbein,” written after the death of his uncle, detours into a mournful, gothic meditation that verges upon Bohren & der Club of Gore territory. Liebezeit’s ever steady beats undergird the guitarist’s pleasantly undulating peregrinations, the legends working with nonchalant precision. Fernwärme also contains Jim O’Rourke’s favorite Rother song, “Klangkörper,” which bears hints of the minimal, gaseous techno for which many Germans would become revered nearly two decades later.
Rother’s evocative instrumentals enabled him to make a natural transition to film scoring, as 2013’s The Robbers and 2012’s Houston prove. From the former, “Part 1” is an ideal specimen of panicky, vehicle-chase soundtracking. When not in quicksilver-propulsion mode, Robbers settles into an ice-blue orb of beautiful tentativeness, as exemplified by “Part 4.” The zenith of Houston occurs on “Part 5”; over a foundation of emotive static, Rother unleashes Doppler-effected guitar sighs, conjuring a sense of hope receding toward the vanishing point. One of the principal through lines of Solo is Rother’s ability to express overwhelming emotions with as few gestures as possible, and “Part 5” captures it beautifully, with a mesmerizing repetition of rigorously honed motifs.
Solo II collects Rother’s output from 1983’s Lust to 2020’s Dreaming, with additional bonus tracks from the ’90s. He mostly goes the one-man-band route, and the presence of his guitar gradually diminishes. This material bears only the faintest traces of Rother’s peak-’70s sound, which leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, we admire artists who avoid repeating themselves. On the other, we wish musicians wouldn’t abandon the qualities that endeared us to their work in the first place. But the main problem with Solo II? His ideas aren’t as galvanizing within this 37-year stretch.
On Lust the dominance of the Fairlight CMI synth lends the songs a candied timbre. Couple that with melodies redolent of movie-of-the-week schmaltz, and the result hews closer to OMD at their cutest than to the paradigm-shifting rock and electronic music that marked Neu! and Harmonia. “Palmengarten” epitomizes this approach with its meringue-light synth and pastel, pointillistic guitar pirouetting over pitter-pat drums. Lust’s anomalous standout is “Pulsar,” a polar meditation reminiscent of Michael Hoenig’s 1977 album Departure From the Northern Wasteland.
The pensive guitar intro to “Süssherz,” Süssherz und Tiefenschärfe’s opener, may make it hard to believe that this is the same musician who scorched earth with “Negativland.” Here, Rother is more interested in tugging your heartstrings than in blowing your mind. Thankfully, things improve with “Tiefenschärfe,” whose glittering keyboard fantasia foreshadows Spiritualized’s organ-drone symphonies, before shifting into a motorik rhythm that implies purposeful glide to an important rendezvous. Think of “Tiefenschärfe” as an update of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” At 13 minutes, it’s one of the grandest works in Rother’s ’80s canon. “Blaues Licht” ends the album with a frosty tone poem of exquisite poignancy—like Brian Eno’s Apollo at the North Pole.
The title of Traumreisen translates as “dream trips”; if only these weren’t such tepid journeys. While “Reiselust” barges in with the aggressive, thunky beats of a new-wave club hit, the tune bears a tinny urgency. Rother’s guitar tone has lost its edge, dissolving into anodyne sheen and modest prettiness, with outsized demonstrations of melodrama marring several tracks. Redemption comes on “Schwarze Augen,” a percolating, Tangerine Dream-esque efflorescence of majestic synth swells, and the heroic, Neu!-like rock of “Lucky Stars.”
On 1996’s Esperanza, Rother abandons rock and lights out for various strains of middlebrow electronic music, and enlists a vocalist for the first time. He also calls on Joachim Rudolph to program ProTools and DD-1000 computer software, making this the most digital-sounding record in Rother’s discography. On “Silver Sands,” a forlorn panpipe melody and prim boom-bap lifted from the trip-hop playbook alert you to his new paradigm. At 17 tracks, Esperanza could have benefited from editing, but Rother does generate some engrossing ideas. “Weil Schnee Und Eis” (which features vocals and lyrics by Jens Harke) proffers sluggish trip-hop that could almost be mistaken for a release by WordSound artist Spectre, its low end far dirtier than typical for Rother, who’s notoriously averse to bass frequencies. The gently psychedelic “Wolkenwelt” is odd enough to segue into an ambient-dub excursion by the Orb and proves that Rother may have had an ear cocked toward the outdoor-rave circuit. Esperanza’s peak cosmic effort, “Gleitflug,” is as hypnotic as Harald Grosskopf’s best material.
If Esperanza proved that Rother could adeptly adapt to the zeitgeist, for 2004’s Remember (The Great Adventure) he relied more heavily on singers, outside producers (including Asmus Tietchens and Jake Mandell), danceable rhythms, and conventional song structures. The chant-intensive “Energy It Up (Part 1)”—featuring Herbert Grönemeyer’s vocals and easy-going beats by Mouse on Mars’ Andi Toma—resembles the Beta Band. Perhaps even more surprising are the songs that recall the Wire offshoot A.C. Marias: “Sweet Sweat,” with singer Sophie Joiner adding a frosty swirl of sensuality, and the slow-burning churner “Energy It Up (Part 2),” which is cross-hatched with strange FX. But the maudlin, widescreen ballad “Morning After (Loneliness),” the humdrum electronic brooder “Nostalgia,” and the stodgily depressing “Remember” are so ill considered, they almost negate the album’s highlights.
This year’s Dreaming continues Rother’s drift away from rock and toward song-based electronic music. Rather than boldly deviating from previous works, he instead nudges the music’s minimalist elements into slightly altered forms. So although “Bitter Tang” echoes the slow-motion disco of Lindstrøm, a first for Rother, it retains his plangent guitar tone and those trademark wistful chord progressions that suggest awe of natural beauty. Dreaming is at its worst when it slips into the saccharine sentimentality of“Fierce Wind Blowing,” “Gravitas,” and “Quiet Dancing.” More often, though, Rother seems suited for his role as an elder hero transitioning into a late-career metamorphosis. The soaring minimalist techno of “Wopp Wopp” isn’t a million kilometers from Kraftwerk’s late-period work, with its synthesized vocals blurring into a serene drone over the sproingy metallic percolations. At once majestic and dulcet, the dub funk of “Hey Hey” splits the difference between the Orb and Enya.
Recorded from 1988 to 1994, Bonustracks yields a few extraordinary cuts from Rother’s hiatus between 1987’s Traumreisen and 1996’s Esperanza, but the majority of the collection traffics in Weather Channel tapestries. Typical is “The Doppelgänger,” a pellucid, mellow guitar study with faint echoes of his pastoral Neu! magic augmented by wispy choral drones and the occasional cymbal crescendo. “Silencio,” a majestic meander of ambivalent beauty, represents Rother’s default mode of this era: a wan resignation that nonetheless contains depth and breadth. But it’s “Unterwasserwolken” that reminds us of Rother’s forte: forging aquatic ambience pregnant with pathos through long delays on his guitar, and then shifting into a smooth motorik jam with the élan of a bicyclist leaning into a downhill swerve.
These two boxed sets prove that Rother’s music has changed subtly and at his own pace, sporadically capturing the thrill of his peak feats in Neu! and Harmonia. They also reveal that Rother’s talents flourish best in group settings. Listening to Solo and Solo II, you can sense the returns diminishing, but the original source was so potent, even the decline bestows rewards.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | September 8, 2020 | 7.5 | 967dde99-8faa-4524-912b-4cb37d00726a | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
An unannounced album from the Japanese producer sounds as mysterious as ever, but his once chilly techno has warmed and deepened, and a communal, even celebratory spirit has come to the fore. | An unannounced album from the Japanese producer sounds as mysterious as ever, but his once chilly techno has warmed and deepened, and a communal, even celebratory spirit has come to the fore. | Shinichi Atobe: Heat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shinichi-atobe-heat/ | Heat | The price to send a package via airmail from Saitama, Japan to Manchester, England is a little over $20. Not too long ago, a CD made this 5,853-mile journey, arriving at the offices of DDS records, the label run by the electronic duo Demdike Stare. The disc contained Japanese producer Shinichi Atobe’s fourth LP, Heat. There was no other info attached: no artist statement or supplemental details, just an hour of new music from one of dance music’s most reclusive producers. Or that’s how the story goes. But whatever route the seven tracks took to arrive at DDS’ doorstep, one thing rings true: The cost of postage pays for itself. Atobe’s latest is a priceless addition to a formidable catalog, and it stands apart from anything he’s done before.
Up until four years ago, Atobe had exactly one release to his name—2001’s Ship-Scope, an EP of ambient techno so evocative it could elicit tears from a sympathetic listener. Then in 2014, Demdike Stare followed a tip from Atobe’s previous label, the Berlin dub-techno pioneers Chain Reaction, and tracked him down. Since then, Atobe has entrusted DDS to release both new and archival music from his collection, which now includes three albums of material, each building upon the dreamy logic of Ship-Scope. Cold and swirling and sad, Atobe’s recent releases have been every bit as enigmatic and alluring as their creator.
But Heat does not sound like any of this previous work—it’s a house record first and foremost. Heady and soulful and smooth in a way that harks back to Mr. Fingers, Heat is an open book compared to the black boxes of Atobe’s past albums. Its thesis is clear from the moment a humid synthesizer melody introduces the opener, “So Good So Right”: This is a record, as its title suggests, primarily interested in the warmer end of dance music. These are tracks to make you sweat. It’s a new climate for Atobe’s music, downright tropical. The plush hand drums and purring bassline on “Heat 1” swing and sway like palm fronds moving with the ocean breeze; the slippery and bubbly synths on “Heat 2” move like bodies writhing on a waterbed.
Even as Atobe paints with brighter, more vivid hues on Heat, a blueness works at the lower registers of the album. There is a rich, emotional world here, one where melancholy freely intermixes with joy: On “Heat 4,” hi-hats chirp and crawl around hissing ghostly ambient noise like crickets on a foggy night, but right beneath the creepiness is the softest, supplest low end.
Working in this hot and heavy mode, Atobe transports all the exacting rigor and creativity of his techno to the creation of house melodies whittled to dancefloor perfection. Patience is what connects the soulfuness of Heat to Atobe’s back catalog. But in the beatific piano chords and the crispy kick drums, it’s easy to hear the communal spirit of Heat: These are songs oriented towards public consumption, not private listening. That change in setting and intent might shock anyone who has been following Atobe’s records over the years. But when Heat locks into its groove, it taps into the contemplative spirit that powers all of his music. Atobe’s work has always been about the rewards that come with careful, repeated listens. The beauty of Heat is the way it allows its listeners to experience those gifts together. | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DDS | September 19, 2018 | 8 | 9685c01a-3fa8-408a-ade0-ea363e2bc006 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
Jessy Lanza’s new EP, You Never Show Your Love, features remixes from founding Teklife member DJ Rashad, whose beats were used posthumously. The contrast of up-tempo, glitchy styles and languid, floating electro-R&B is a testament to Lanza's chameleonic style. | Jessy Lanza’s new EP, You Never Show Your Love, features remixes from founding Teklife member DJ Rashad, whose beats were used posthumously. The contrast of up-tempo, glitchy styles and languid, floating electro-R&B is a testament to Lanza's chameleonic style. | Jessy Lanza: You Never Show Your Love EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20848-you-never-show-your-love-ep/ | You Never Show Your Love EP | Since Jessy Lanza released her debut Pull My Hair Back in September of 2013, the electro-R&B landscape has become significantly more crowded. Her debut effort with Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan was a well-produced, confident effort that nonetheless was at times a bit too restrained, if only because Lanza's vocal power was otherwise so apparent in the few instances in which it was allowed to shine through. Those hints seemed to suggest there would be more of her in future efforts.
On Lanza’s new EP, You Never Show Your Love, on UK-based label Hyperdub, you can hear those same glimmers of promise. Lanza’s voice on the EP’s title track is light and smooth, floating over the languid beat in a way that almost brings to mind a sunnier Sade. The EP was produced by Teklife’s DJ Spinn and Taso, and the beats are pure footwork. While the title track is more of a slow jam, the beat slowly orbiting Lanza’s vocal, the rework, featuring founding Teklife member DJ Rashad’s beats used posthumously, is up-tempo and glitchy, contrasting with Lanza’s floating vocal to great effect. This chameleon-like quality is one of Lanza’s signatures—her vocals are versatile, and tend to melt into a mix rather than overpowering it. This is a commendable skill, especially in a house singer, but there are many moments when you wish the music would be more about her, and less about the beat.
While the EP is atmospheric, it does nothing to separate Lanza from the scene that has grown up around her. Her vocals skew more purely house than FKA twigs or Banks, but she lacks their same showmanship or melodrama, and it's difficult to imagine the niche she would fill. You Never Show Your Love is a small sampling of the Canadian vocalist's work, however, and her choice in producers speaks volumes to her curatorial vision. If That Voice were to assume a place in the forefront of the engaging, boundary-pushing beats she picks for herself, she could sound larger than life. | 2015-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | July 30, 2015 | 6.2 | 968814ee-13cf-42f5-8bc7-5b16eefb9587 | Maud Deitch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maud-deitch/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the highlight of Jonathan Richman’s rich and varied solo career. | 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 explore the highlight of Jonathan Richman’s rich and varied solo career. | Jonathan Richman: I, Jonathan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonathan-richman-i-jonathan/ | I, Jonathan | When Jonathan Richman was 19, he arrived at an epiphany in the Israeli desert. The scruffy salesman’s son from Natick, Massachusetts, was traveling after a short-lived stab as a solo musician in New York, home of his heroes the Velvet Underground. There, in the miles of sand, gazing at a full moon, Richman had a vision: he would form a band. When he returned home he assembled the group that would become the Modern Lovers, and their story is one of the greatest in rock. They helped invent punk and new wave, and they broke up before they ever released a record. Their brilliant self-titled debut, cobbled together from demos and issued in 1976, is acclaimed as one of the best albums ever.
What happened immediately afterward is another great rock story: Just as the Modern Lovers’ belated popularity was cresting on the punk wave, Richman formed a new version of the group and pushed it in a different direction, with prominent acoustic guitar and what seemed like songs for children. By 1978, Richman and these Modern Lovers had parted ways, too, and here’s where some accounts of Richman’s decades-long career lose the thread. But he actually had some of his very best work in front of him.
More than 40 years on, what happened after the Modern Lovers’ rise and fall might turn out to be the best Richman story of them all. He used his kid-friendly ditties from the late ’70s to home in on a not-so-humble goal: to really connect with an audience by just singing what he felt. “People think that what I do can’t be done because it’s too simple,” Richman told art critic Kristine McKenna in 1980. “A lot of people think I’m being sarcastic. But if people can see that I’m not afraid to entertain them just by being myself—just walk up there and sing what I feel and they can dance to it, and enjoy it, with me doing nothing more than being myself—then that’s my mission.” Richman’s solo career can best be understood as a continual expansion of this quest, using intimate live shows to communicate joy and sadness with a stripped-down sincerity and generous charm. His fourth solo album, 1992’s I, Jonathan, is his defining recorded statement as a solo artist, and it offers a natural entry point into his scattered but rewarding catalog.
The albums Richman had released in the ’80s and early ’90s had already gone a long way to challenge the widespread impression that his post-Modern Lovers music was innocent or naive. His lyrics could be plainspoken or filled with wry wonder, but his best songs might be about standing up to nosy neighbors, say, or retaining individuality during marriage. In keeping with the improvisational, no-setlist nature of his live shows, Richman began to rework songs across multiple albums. He would also sing in different languages, dust off unexpected covers, and throw in the occasional moody instrumental. The approach to recording might vary, but the basic sensibility was strummy garage-pop with hints of surf, rockabilly, and doo-wop. I, Jonathan brought these strands together for a beach party so sparsely accoutered it could be dropped into your living room. And despite its title, the album took a village to create—there are about a dozen musicians credited overall. Richman told one interviewer at the time that the album was his best because he’d had so many friends helping make it.
But I, Jonathan also succeeds because it places Richman’s solo-era whimsies firmly in the context of the one-hit wonders and uncompromising noise-rock that inspired him to make music in the first place. Throughout the album, Richman uses ’60s rock’n’roll tropes and images to illuminate his vision of a better life in the present. He gets right to point on the opening track, “Parties in the U.S.A.,” greeting listeners and declaring at that he’s “from the ’60s, the time of ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu.’” Though this song borrows shamelessly from the McCoys’ 1965 hit “Hang On Sloopy,” it tells a story about our increasing isolation from each other amid technological advancements. Richman isn’t longing for the old days, only the parties and the sense of connection they brought. It’s a feeling that hasn’t aged much in the 26 years since it was recorded.
I, Jonathan is full of these transformations, where something old starts to look new through Richman’s wise, wide eyes. In “Rooming House on Venice Beach,” he revisits a famous L.A. hippie haven but what he remembers are early-’70s holdovers—drunks, beardos, weirdos—and a dirt-cheap crash pad right next to the ocean. “It was wild and free,” he concludes the hiccupy boardwalk romp, “and that appealed to me.”
An even bigger revelation is found in the rickety Chuck Berry crunch of “Velvet Underground.” The song explains, in terms a child could understand immediately and an adult can spend a lifetime pondering, how a work of art can be so personally moving. VU’s “Sister Ray” is, famously, a 15-minute feedback dirge with lyrics about injecting heroin and sucking on someone’s ding-dong, and it’s also the song that influenced a teenage Richman to write the chugging guitar part to the most enduring Modern Lovers song, the nervy highway anthem “Roadrunner.” In “Velvet Underground,” he celebrates the band for being not only wild and free, but also for creating their own unmistakable atmosphere, and for describing the world they saw vividly without flinching. When he works bits of “Sister Ray” into his own song, it’s a strange and beautiful tribute from the closest person they ever had to a protégé.
Sometimes Richman refreshes the familiar just by bringing the song’s concept into the modern age. Disheveled stomper “You Can’t Talk to the Dude” sympathizes with a woman who’s stuck in a doomed relationship with a guy who won’t share his feelings—not a common Nuggets compilation theme, as I recall. With low-tech sound effects, “Tandem Jump” updates novelty surf-rock for a world where there’s skydiving, and the effect is positively exhilarating. “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” perhaps Richman’s best-known solo song, borrows liberally from the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman,” but this ode to un-self-conscious dancing happens to take place in a venue where older songs couldn’t dare tread. It’s pure joie de vivre, political merely by its existence, and its sweetness spreads through a crowd as surely as if they were standing downwind from a chocolate factory.
As the songs unspool, I, Jonathan continues to find inventive links between Richman’s past and present. “A Higher Power” channels the Lovin’ Spoonful’s belief in magic and finds proof of its existence in what seems to be Richman’s real-life romance (“I knew it from afar in that lonely rock and roll bar,” he sings, a description that matches how he reportedly first saw his then-wife Gail). “That Summer Feeling,” one of Richman’s most gently devastating songs, is about knowing that the good old days really weren’t, but finding yourself longing for those sensations anyway. On the dream-like closing track, “Twilight in Boston,” where Richman vividly narrates a walk through his long-ago stomping grounds, he signs off, “Time for adventure.”
After I, Jonathan, Richman’s solo act slowly gained a cultural foothold. In 1993, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Julia Sweeney did an endearing interview with him for SPIN. That same year, Richman was the second-ever musical guest on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” after Radiohead, and he’d appear on the show several more times, including the YouTube-famous performance of “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar.” By the end of the decade, those ’70s kiddie songs like “I’m a Little Airplane” had become staples on “Sesame Street,” and Richman had appeared in two Farrelly Brothers films, most prominently as a Greek chorus in There’s Something About Mary. He divorced and remarried, kept touring and, every now and then, he quietly released an album, many of which are very good.
Richman’s work is about being fully present in the moment with other people, and that’s difficult to capture in a studio for all time. But I, Jonathan is as close as he’s come, and it’s a perfect gateway to all that his music promises. In recent years, he has revised the Modern Lovers’ “Old World,” which originally took aim at hippie drug culture by declaring his love for his parents and full engagement with reality; now he clarifies, “I don’t want to go back to the old world,” what with its “mustard gas and women not being allowed to vote.” Just this year, when an interviewer asked Richman about a much-circulated 1973 letter he’d sent to Creem titled “Masculine Arrogance Blows,” he admitted to still having to work on that arrogance in himself.
Richman challenges us to experience pain and pleasure at their fullest. To embrace progress, but not when it dehumanizes us. To be ourselves completely, in the knowledge that we’re all in this together. To be free, like “Roadrunner”: I feel alone I feel alive I feel a love. He has been dissected by gifted critics from Lillian Roxon and Lester Bangs to Ellen Willis and Greil Marcus, but the most illuminating writing I’ve found about Richman’s I, Jonathan era comes from the closing line of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch concert review: “He simply played and sang with love and joy, and he made his audience feel good.”
Richman recently translated a book of Italian poetry, by the Bologna-based writer Alberto Masala. A blog post announcing the project includes these verses: “An old man went every night to sing the sunset in a cave on the mountain top/And every night a child followed him to observe him from a distance. One day the child asked: ‘You sing alone. Your people are scattered, broken up, exterminated by alcohol, fatigue, hunger, drugs, prison… Now only they speak the language of the empire, and are not even able to understand you… they laugh at you… why do you continue to sing? You’re left alone…’/The old man replied: ‘If I do not sing would mean that they also took me.’” They haven’t taken Richman yet. | 2018-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rounder | April 22, 2018 | 8.7 | 968988e5-fa1f-4668-bfcc-adda28f22d7f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Who even cares about the ocean anymore? Or the beach, for that matter? If I want to deal with dead ... | Who even cares about the ocean anymore? Or the beach, for that matter? If I want to deal with dead ... | Yo La Tengo: The Sounds of the Sounds of Science | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8865-the-sounds-of-the-sounds-of-science/ | The Sounds of the Sounds of Science | Who even cares about the ocean anymore? Or the beach, for that matter? If I want to deal with dead fish and syringes I'll take my dad to the supermarket (he has a problem). And that doesn't even address all those alien-style face-huggery things that call the water their home. At least on land animals can be relied upon to have things like eyes; half the crap in the briny deep hasn't even discovered the joys of internal organs. Apparently, though, there are at least a few people who enjoy the ocean-- the French have been particularly enamored of it for several years now, sparking a long tradition of strange and disturbing films documenting the behavior of its contents.
Jacques Cousteau may have gotten all the glory on that front, but Jean Painleve had more art in a single reel of his work than Cousteau had in his whole pruny body. Declaring that "science is fiction," Painleve wasn't content to tamely document the exploits of octopi "doing it" as were so many of his contemporaries, preferring instead to arrange his films to not only be enlightening, but entertaining as well (he was hung up on invertebrate intimacy, too-- they all were-- but he was funnier about it). Painleve ventured nearer to his subjects than scientific interest would dictate, artificially imbuing them with distinctly human characteristics like rage and sexuality through the careful editing and scoring of his films. It didn't win him any points with the scientists, but the French surrealists invited him to all their picnics.
Flash forward to April 2001, the San Francisco Film Festival: eight of Painleve's most famous shorts (films, that is) are scheduled to be displayed, and Yo La Tengo is asked to write and perform a live score. Long story short, history is born. In case you missed it, don't fret-- your friends in Yo La Tengo have gone to great lengths in the studio to bring you The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, and you ought to thank them. It's not a throwback to their earlier scattershot aesthetics, but that's obvious (it's a score for underwater documentaries, after all), and anyone who's well-versed with the dream-inspiring tunes from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out should have no trouble submerging themselves within these soothing aural vignettes.
Each track was written to accompany a specific piece of Painleve's work, and Yo la Tengo's level of success ranges from impressive to downright incredible. For the few of these films that I've been fortunate enough to see, the Hoboken three captured the feel of each short damn near perfectly, and crafted songs so moving and evocative for the remainder that by the end of the album I felt as though I'd seen them all. Even when the album 'picks up,' it still never strays far from a relaxed exploration of the lush organics they're able to draw from their standard rock setup, aided here by assorted percussive oddities (vibraphones, chimes, etc).
As calm as their most recent work has been, a more natural touchstone for The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is the Future Sound of London's Lifeforms. Some ambient music seems to want nothing more than to be the next employee pick at Natural Wonders or some other ridiculous hippy emporium, but the best of this genre isn't willing to fade into the wasteland of new-age background music. Brilliance along the lines of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II isn't so passive-- listening creates a sense of revelation, completely enfolding the listener in its wet, glowy womb. The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, over the course of 77 minutes, manages to do that.
In fact, within the realm of organic ambient, Yo La Tengo may even have an advantage over a few of the reigning techno acts. If the techno-organic creatures of Lifeforms come from Mars, Yo La Tengo's are distinctly Earthbound in keeping with the subject matter of these documentaries, owing mainly to the human qualities of the sprawling, emotive performance. Each song is an epic, sometimes changing course two or more times before concluding. "The Sea Horse" chronicles the male sea horse giving birth in dramatic fashion; "How Jellyfishes are Born" illustrates the diversity among jellyfishes, um, giving birth; and for a change of pace, "The Love Life of the Octopus" is about birth preliminaries (I promised you octopus sex). Naturally, Yo La Tengo doesn't let the thematic similarity stifle them-- each cut is vibrant and unique, capturing its scene with colorful tonality.
"Shrimp Stories" may be the album's single fault. Some of Yo La Tengo's famous diversity shows up in this free-jazz inspired standout, but for this record's purposes it just seems out of place. Mainly, The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is a document of new environments being unveiled, and "Shrimp Stories" seems painfully mundane in contrast. It's solid, and does well at breaking the pace, but isn't exactly compelling. But this lone misstep aside, the album is remarkably powerful, showing not only that Yo La Tengo are fully capable of penning elaborate film scores, but that their years have earned them a unique adeptness at communicating real emotion, human and otherwise, with conventional instrumentation. Animal porn never sounded so good. | 2002-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Egon | July 31, 2002 | 8 | 969268ba-b967-454a-a639-ebb9f3cc0db4 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Japanese band’s technically masterful, tremendously expensive 1981 album, a record that looms over 40 years’ worth of electronic production. | 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 Japanese band’s technically masterful, tremendously expensive 1981 album, a record that looms over 40 years’ worth of electronic production. | Yellow Magic Orchestra: BGM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yellow-magic-orchestra-bgm/ | BGM | As a Japanese initialism, “BGM” stands for “background music.” It’s meant to evoke the blissful ’80s ambient work of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, the kind of idyllic music that wafts from hip mass-market clothing stores or loops quietly under television dialogue. So it was with more than a hint of irony that YMO repurposed this term for their flashy, futuristic fourth album. BGM hones in on the “techno” aspect of the groundbreaking trio’s “techno-pop,” channeling each member’s unique personality into a monument of electronic music history, all captured with state-of-the-art recording gear. Four decades on, the album is a foundation for all manner of “synthetic” music that would follow, from synth-pop and IDM to hip-hop and well beyond.
This is the story of YMO’s formation in the late 1970s, in brief: Hosono, already a musical force in Japan after leading the influential rock group Happy End, assembles a crew of session players for his next solo album. This group includes a friend from college named Yukihiro Takahashi, as well as an up-and-coming arranger named Ryuichi Sakamoto. The jazzy exotica masterwork Paraiso, credited to Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band, is released in 1978. That same year, Hosono asks Takahashi and Sakamoto if they want to start a new project together. He proposes the new band as a “stepping stone” to greater heights in each of their solo careers. Takahashi agrees; after some initial hesitation, Sakamoto does, too.
By the end of 1980, with three albums under their belts, YMO were indisputably the most successful pop band in Japan—big enough to tour the world and then come home to pack out the Budokan. But when Hosono spoke to the Los Angeles Times that year, he portended a shift to come: “We don’t see ourselves as a dance band. YMO was planned as an electronics band from the beginning because that was the sound we were all looking for…. Something out of the ordinary.”
Though Hosono had stuck to Japanese-language lyrics in Happy End, YMO recorded in English with assistance from a translator. Seeking more control over their next endeavor, Hosono and Takahashi found a new lyrical collaborator on their bandmate’s solo album: The sole vocal track from Sakamoto’s 1980 record B-2 Unit, “Thatness and Thereness,” featured translation help from one Peter Barakan, an Englishman with a job in Japanese broadcasting. Barakan had never worked as a lyricist before, but that didn’t matter much; he was quickly hired by Sakamoto’s management in an admin role, one that covered all matters involving English, including songwriting. His first project: BGM.
The enormous success of the 1979 Japan-only release of Solid State Survivor meant that YMO’s label, Alfa, was willing to shell out big bucks for the follow-up. According to the itemized receipt printed on its back cover, BGM cost ¥51,250,000 to make. Once you convert to U.S. dollars and adjust for inflation, that’s a staggering $730,106.93—and that’s just for the gear. Before a listener slipped the vinyl out of its sleeve, they could look through the music’s discrete components in molecular detail: YMO accounted for every Moog, electronic drum, and effects processor, as if to suggest their own technical virtuosity as the standard against which future generations would compete. (Over three decades later, Aphex Twin would pull the same move on Syro.)
These songs and their sounds are intrinsically tied to the machines used to craft them. Alongside Sakamoto’s debut, BGM was one of the first albums to feature the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The high price tag of the 808 upon its release in 1980 (almost $4,000 in 2021 dollars) made it prohibitively expensive for most, but not for YMO. The glories of its use in the hip-hop and dance music of decades to come—relentless mechanical hi-hats, claps crisp enough to cut through any mix—are on full display on Takahashi’s “Camouflage” and Sakamoto’s searing, mechanical cover of his own “1000 Knives.”
But no amount of expensive gear could alleviate YMO’s interpersonal strain. The working relationship between Hosono and Sakamoto had deteriorated to the point where the two men could barely stand to be in the studio at the same time. Sakamoto was thus absent for much of the BGM sessions, leaving the bulk of the songwriting to Hosono and Takahashi. His contributions to the final tracklist are nonetheless striking. Along with “1000 Knives,” two other songs are credited to Sakamoto: The meta-referential vocoder jam “Music Plans” and a remix of another solo track, “Happy End,” which feels like a progenitor of the ambient techno that would emerge in the following decade from artists like Carl Craig or the Orb. The composer smears out his hyper-melodic, Tchaikovsky-esque chord rotations with resonant signal modulation until the piece is practically unrecognizable, allowing an icy drum loop to pierce the midsection for just a brief moment before it vanishes again.
Sakamoto is rightfully credited for much of YMO’s forward-thinking sound design, but Hosono and Takahashi give the band its earnest heart. The first voice you hear on BGM is Takahashi, singing in English, trembling ever so slightly as he paints the portrait of a melancholic dancer pirouetting through the night on “Ballet.” Where previous YMO hits like “Firecracker” were cheeky subversions of Western exotica artists who traded in Orientalism, BGM immediately presents itself as something new: a more sterile, hyper-modern musical document, an innovation empowered by their burgeoning technopolis. “Dancing with sadness, just for yourself,” Takahashi sings on “Ballet,” masking his vocal with layers of digital filtering. “Lost in the motion, a mime with no end.”
“Out of the three, Takahashi was probably the best-versed in Western pop music,” Peter Barakan recounted in an interview years later. As he tells it, Sakamoto desired more clear-cut translations and Hosono knew “pretty much what he wanted” when it came to songwriting, whereas Takahashi was open to a more collaborative dialogue, even asking Barakan for pronunciation notes during recording. “He knew that whatever he wrote, I was going to translate into English anyway—so he would write Japanese lyric ideas in a fairly ‘English’ sort of way, because he was listening to pop music in English as well.”
This all comes together on “Cue,” the album’s most (and possibly only) radio-friendly single. Takahashi’s lead vocals and drums are front and center, propelled forward by robotic, sequenced bass and wiggling synthesizers. YMO often left lyrics until late in the process, opting to spend countless hours tweaking drum rhythms and synth sounds before rushing to finalize the words—so it only makes sense that “Cue,” like “Music Plans,” is another song about playing songs, an idea that coalesced near the end of months of sometimes-tense studio grind. After staying in the background, Hosono finally joins Takahashi in full voice near the end for a final refrain: “I’m sick and tired of the same old chaos/Must be a way to get out of this cul-de-sac.”
“Cue” was the first single from BGM and it eventually became a fan favorite, earning a place on setlists from YMO’s scattered reunion gigs in the 2000s. But neither audiences nor critics regarded this album as highly as their prior work, and it failed to match the success of Solid State Survivor in Japan. Western music critics in particular seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the band, even before the new album arrived in the spring of 1981. When discussing YMO, writers frequently evoked the names of other synth-wielding acts who had preceded them—Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Roxy Music—but few were able to regard the band as anything other than a foreign oddity. Instead of innovators, they saw only a Japanese facsimile of something that had come before, stripping the band of their humanity in the process.
“It wasn’t clear whether the men were playing the machines or vice versa,” declared a writer for the Washington Post after a YMO performance in 1979. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times compared them favorably to Kraftwerk and then proceeded to deride the band’s “severe presentation.” Some reviews were explicitly racist (“If this band didn’t already exist, some fiendish Japanese technicians would go and invent them,” read the Guardian), while others were simply misguided. As one Chicago Tribune journalist wrote of YMO in late 1980: “Even the most imaginative use of synthesized instrumentation has its limitations…. there [are] strong feelings in many quarters that synthesized music is on the verge of running its course.”
With the benefit of hindsight, even BGM’s “dodgy” tracks have aged well. Hosono’s “Rap Phenomena,” with its chanted lyrics and atonal synths, is construed by some as a rare misstep from the otherwise meticulous producer. Cynics write it off as a cringey attempt at trend-chasing from across the Pacific, a bizarre misinterpretation of the developing rap scene in New York City. What they overlook is that from the moment YMO chose their name, they operated with a sense of humor. For their 1980 mini-album X∞Multiplies, they interspersed the tracklist with comedy skits and recorded a new wave cover of Archie Bell & the Drells’ R&B classic “Tighten Up,” which gave us one of the funniest Don Cornelius interviews in Soul Train history. (Differences between the Japanese and U.S. release of the album didn’t help the disconnect; the sketches on X∞Multiplies were replaced by songs from the Japan-only Solid State Survivor.)
While YMO’s first three albums were space-age, synthesized takes on the past, BGM presented a startlingly prescient glimpse into electronic music’s future. Listen to “Rap Phenomena” now and hear subtle echoes of its resonant groove and polyrhythmic vocal sample manipulation everywhere in today’s electronic music. The back half of BGM gestures at entire nascent styles; the skittering drum programming of Aphex Twin (“U.T.,” “Camouflage”), the ominous drama of synthwave (“Mass”). Ambient closer “Loom” might have been the only track to fit the traditional criteria for “BGM,” had it not opened with a patiently ascending, two-minute-long Shepard’s tone. Today, the intro evokes the trademark THX “Deep Note,” though the song predates it. With the help of Hideki Matsutake, the computer whiz who served as YMO’s unofficial “fourth member,” the band deployed some of the most cutting-edge recording technologies available, unearthing their emotive possibilities years before others would do the same.
BGM also hinted at the future of YMO itself. Tensions between Sakamoto and Hosono never fully resolved, leading the band to go their separate ways in 1984 before reuniting decades later. (“We lost our energy and we stopped fighting,” Takahashi explained with a laugh in 2008. Sakamoto remarked: “Well, if I met my past self, I’d punch him.”) In terms of legacy, it’s perhaps the most important album they ever made as a unit. Each member’s subsequent solo work, at one point or another, subsumed the influence of BGM’s palette. It’s there in Takahashi’s heartfelt synth-pop records, Hosono’s ambient work, Sakamoto’s later collaborations with David Sylvian—a splash of drum machine, an unnatural texture. It’s the thrill of a tranquil synthesizer made loud, then aggressive, and then serene again.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Alfa | March 7, 2021 | 9.2 | 9696f699-e4d2-4114-88d1-f15c4d688ef8 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
After 2022’s stripped-back Sewaside II, the Montreal rapper-producer opts for stranger beats, a packed guest list, and what sound like real instruments to balance his beguiling sample flips. | After 2022’s stripped-back Sewaside II, the Montreal rapper-producer opts for stranger beats, a packed guest list, and what sound like real instruments to balance his beguiling sample flips. | Mike Shabb: Sewaside III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-shabb-sewaside-iii/ | Sewaside III | Mike Shabb has been a secret weapon in Montreal’s rap scene for years. Rather than turning out other staple sounds of the city—the danceable electro funk of Kaytranada or Planet Giza, the industrial and metal-tinged catharsis of Zambian transplant Backxwash—Shabb leans toward the new-age formalism of producer Nicholas Craven and rappers like Chung. He started out making trap around 2017, but he was also a fan of the classic boom-bap and airy, drumless loops that still define certain corners of underground hip-hop. After connecting with Griselda affiliate Craven, Shabb worked to refine his diverse sounds, dropping vibey turn-up joints like 2021’s Quarantine Flow and 2023’s Hood Olympics while doing ad hoc engineering for Boldy James and earning multiple beat placements on Westside Gunn’s 10.
Shabb has an ear for beguiling samples and knows how to work them into beats spacious enough for scenery-chewers like Estee Nack to stomp through. After the handsome and stripped-back production of Sewaside II, which emphasized boasts, koans, and confessions told through his slick Montreal slur, he reaches higher and digs deeper on this year’s Sewaside III. The beats are stranger, the guest list is more packed, and there even seem to be live instruments in the mix. Shabb goes grander without trying to fix what isn’t broken, letting gnarled tendrils grow out of an already solid foundation.
As a rapper, Shabb takes the lifestyle route, detailing his day-to-day in the 514. He isn’t concisely poetic like Boldy or a cartoonish bruiser like Gunn or Nack; depending on whether he’s slinging metaphors or simply storytelling, his croak of a voice oscillates between chill and despondent. Most of the time, he’s posted on the block and plotting out next moves while fear and regret linger in the margins. On “Grinchy,” where he’s masked up like MF DOOM and carrying a dog on him like Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a stray line sticks out from the warbling piano and betrays Shabb’s true feelings: “I keep my head high in situations I can’t cope.” That sentiment ripples under every moment on the album—from spliff tugs in the middle of shootouts where marks are running like Forrest Gump (“Free Cars”) to memorializing fallen friends and looking after their sons like Shep in Above the Rim (“Julie”). Fleeting moments of sadness prove that he’s only lowered the mask so much, and that intrigue keeps every vignette compelling.
But outside of any deeper readings, Shabb is here to rap while expanding the boundaries of his production. Sewaside III’s beats shift from woozy, Conductor Williams-style dirges to lusher arrangements that will have you second-guessing whether these are samples or live-band interpolations. Some songs, like the spellbinding “Free YSL,” split the difference between competing strategies while Shabb and New Jersey rapper Da$h trade war stories and scars. There are meat-and-potatoes rap tracks like the Lord Sko-featuring “Milk Crate,” loose interludes like “We Live in Montreal” that add regional kick-back flair, and peppy hype tracks like “Ben Wallace”; Shabb approaches each with style and finesse. Thirteen of the album’s 17 songs are entirely self-produced. He’s ambitious, but not so self-absorbed that he takes himself too seriously, giving even the more ponderous tracks a breezy pace.
Boasting the adventurousness and variety of a mixtape, Sewaside III is the most sprawling project in Shabb’s discography. On the penultimate track, “Free Jazz,” he yelps from inside a jazz-quartet whirlwind about the uncertainty of fame before a more sedate beat gives way to crooning about love and self-harm. It doesn’t quite have the focus and polish of his mentor Craven’s work, but he’s aiming for something bigger, more representative of his divergent tastes and thus slightly harder to categorize; he’s taking the hallmarks of traditional hip-hop and pushing them through filters attuned to Montreal’s cultural mix of jazz, dance, rap, and diasporic African influences. If this is what it sounds like for Mike Shabb to come into his own, he’s moving in the right direction. | 2024-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 29, 2024 | 7.4 | 969bfc22-033f-4828-b1ab-eb783378398a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Twelve years is a long time to hold a job. Any elderly engineer or factory worker\n\ can attest to ... | Twelve years is a long time to hold a job. Any elderly engineer or factory worker\n\ can attest to ... | Superchunk: Here's to Shutting Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7617-heres-to-shutting-up/ | Here's to Shutting Up | Twelve years is a long time to hold a job. Any elderly engineer or factory worker can attest to the banality of the same tired day-to-day routines. Eventually, wasted months trail behind like a dense fog in your hazy memory, leaving you wondering if there was even any point to it all. Fortunately for Superchunk, their job entails being a highly influential rock band with a devoted fanbase, their own record label, and a legacy that most of the nation's wealthiest 1% would trade in their multi-millions for. For Superchunk, twelve years is a dream come true.
Their humble beginnings as a small-time Chapel Hill pop band in 1989 have, over the years, given way to next-big-thing status, major label bidding wars, and eight studio albums, several of which have become heralded as indie classics. Now in their 30s, the long-standing lineup of Mac McCaughan, guitarist Jim Wilbur, bassist Laura Ballance and drummer Jon Wurster is still making music with the same heart of their early records, even while time has begun to change them into a subtler incarnation of their former selves.
Signs of the new, more refined Superchunk first appeared on 1999's Jim O'Rourke-produced Come Pick Me Up with tracks like "Tiny Bombs" and "Hello Hawk." But they were just signs, as raucous, infectiously upbeat songs like "Good Dreams" and "June Showers" dominated the album with anthemic bliss. On Here's to Shutting Up, though, the once-tightly wound hyper heroes have foregone the distortion in lieu of smoothed-out balladry and reflective repose.
While often sung from the point of view of fictional characters, McCaughan's lyrics on Here's to Shutting Up often reveal his wist for days gone by. This is perhaps most notable in one of the album's rare rockers, "Out on the Wing," in which a person confides, "All the music that I love is out of date/ So take me to the place/ Where there's no such thing as taste," a sentiment most thirty-something ex-music fans can bitterly relate to. Several of these songs also dwell on young love and history, such as the subdued, pedal-steel-infused "Phone Sex," which addresses a teenager stood up for a date, and the despondent 7\xBD-minute-long "What Do You Look Forward To," where McCaughan recalls seeing "anticipation and a smile on the face of this girl/ And her mother through the glare on the glass of the windshield as they drove away."
But even though this album exhibits a softer, more melancholy side of Superchunk, a handful of old-school rockers fill the album out nicely. It's with one of these, the not-necessarily full-force, but nonetheless aggressive "Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)," that the album's clear standout comes. Amidst a pounding rhythm section, McCaughan seems to deride art schools more than that classic time-wasting high school elective with lines like, "Why so serious/ When it's only your life that's at stake/ Why so serious/ When your life is the art that you make," and, "So shit in a can but your art is not free." Elsewhere, the almost Guided by Voices-length slab of raging guitars and crashing drum fills, "Rainy Streets," provides some early relief from the album's pensive meditations.
Producer Brian Paulson, who worked with the band on 1993's Foolish, is back behind the decks for Here's to Shutting Up, and despite the band's maturing songcraft, his recording techniques give the record more of a classic Superchunk feel. Jim O'Rourke may have added some meaty soundwork to Come Pick Me Up, but Paulson seems more comfortable with the guys, mixing Mac McCaughan's still-boyish tenor amongst the instrumentation rather than up in your face. It's a seemingly small touch, but an unexpected one, and it makes all the difference in the album's long-term listenability.
Of course, at the end of the day, Here's to Shutting Up isn't anything spectacular. The new direction of these songs seems logical enough, and will likely sit well with longtime fans who are, by now, also growing somewhat less excitable. Still, you can't help but miss the youthful ambition of Superchunk's glory days, when they seemed so relevant shouting out simple songs of love and boredom, and blared constantly from college stations across the country. On the other hand, twelve years is a long time to hold a job. It's just nice to see that they're still inspired by what they do. | 2001-10-09T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2001-10-09T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 9, 2001 | 7.9 | 969c7449-beb4-4fcd-a048-5e50aa7e991c | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Recorded over three long, inspired days in a studio north of Rio and newly remastered for its 15th anniversary, this is as solid a dub outing as has issued from anywhere beyond Jamaica. | Recorded over three long, inspired days in a studio north of Rio and newly remastered for its 15th anniversary, this is as solid a dub outing as has issued from anywhere beyond Jamaica. | Lucas Santtana: 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucas-santtana-3-sessions-in-a-greenhouse/ | 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse | Born in Bahia but long based in Rio de Janeiro, Lucas Santtana should have had both ears plenty full from those two centers of Brazilian culture. With his colloquial, imagistic Portuguese and references to all manner of regional and historical Brazilian styles—plus early career affiliations with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico Science, and Arto Lindsay—Santtana’s music invites comparisons to tropicália’s heady fusions of local and foreign styles, manguebeat’s collisions of rock, rap, and maracatu in the 1990s, or yet another wave of bossa nova. But the textures and timbres of Santtana’s songs point to an even stronger site of influence: Jamaican reggae, especially the pulsing basslines, hazy echoes, and layered mixing techniques of dub. With the 15th anniversary reissue of 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse, remastered red-hot by German dub-techno wizard Stefan Betke (aka Pole), a pillar of Brazil’s 21st-century new wave digs into the roots of his sound, revealing a foundational reverence for dub reggae.
Recorded over three long, inspired days in a studio north of Rio, 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse is as solid a dub outing as has issued from Brazil, or just about anywhere beyond Jamaica’s shores, evincing a studied mastery of the musical and technical approaches developed by Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, and their peers and acolytes. This is not dub as cliché overload of fragment and reverb, but as attentive and creative engineering, on-the-spot arrangement, and improvised interplay. With the help of Recife’s Buguinha Dub on the boards, the album was recorded and mixed entirely live by Santtana and his touring group, Seleção Natural. The sessions produced a handful of stellar Santtana originals and several “dubs,” or covers performed as live dub versions—a soundcheck practice the band developed together and decided to lean into. We hear no overdubs, though occasional banter between tracks evokes the warm studio ambience. The liveness and lightness of the sessions shines through: not too serious, not too rigid, yet still rigorous. It’s dub as practice, process, and style.
Santtana’s embrace of dub as a mixing method accommodates his incorporation of rock, Afrobeat, samba, and so on. But he and the band also embrace dub as a musical style: bass enjoys pride of place with drums a close second, while spiky guitars, harmonized brass, and voice take turns in the foreground, echoing into muted silence at the stroke of a fader. Album opener “Awô Dub” is a prime example of this tendency, an unhurried instrumental led by a bubbling bassline, Nyabinghi-adjacent percussion, horns that duck in and out of the mix, and judicious use of effects to support the shifting arrangement. “Lycra-Limão,” on the other hand, applies dub aesthetics—especially deep bass, echo, and use of space—to an upbeat ska number that could get suspendered kids dancing in any number of cities and eras.
For all the Jamaican touches, Brazilian accents emerge as both subtle and explicit nods to local traditions and icons. On “Tijolo a Tijolo, Dinheiro a Dinheiro,” a high-pitched guitar evokes the cavaquinho, Brazil’s signature four-string lute, and the drummer’s rimshots call back to bossa nova even as the beat leans more toward the rolling grooves of Tony Allen. Tropicália pioneer and alt-MBP stalwart Tom Zé stops by to sing on a dub cover of his own “Ogodô Ano 2000.” As on the original, a misleadingly Zeppelin-esque riff is reconfigured by Zé’s snaky, surprising rhythms—led here by the bass, of course—but then a soupier texture swirls in: Dueling guitars and dense percussion span the stereo field as a cowbell pans from left to right, and a chording instrument with no attack echoes on offbeats while Zé’s own voice bounces around the room.
Perhaps more than any other track, “Pela Orla Dos Velhos Tempos” blurs lines between copy and original, import and indigenous. The opening TR-808 beat may suggest early funk carioca—or the stateside electrofunk and Miami bass that inspired it—but the primary reference for this “dub” is a manguebeat classic, a Nação Zumbi song reanimated here by the group’s own Gilmar Bola 8, who sings and raps “old school” style (“antigamente,” as the chorus goes) for a track about the good ol’ days. The strikingly bare electronic percussion is soon submerged in a larger ensemble sound that never stops accruing and shedding layers. The song winds down with whispers over 808 cowbells and a single pummeling bass note; the final word falls to the hand drums, calling out to Rio, Salvador, Kingston, Miami, Havana, and more.
While clearly in the spirit of the sessions, one intertextual experiment falls flat. “A Natureza Espera” begins as a promising, meditative piece of reggae em português but goes off the rails with a lengthy English recitation of the opening of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Maybe it sounded better in a second language, or in that inspired studio atmosphere, but what might’ve seemed like a trippy complement turns into a dreary detour.
The tropicália movement of the ’60s and ’70s and Recife’s manguebeat scene of the ’90s are clear touchstones here. But while Santtana’s music has much in common with kindred attempts to fuse Brazilian folk and pop styles with rock, rap, and everything else, 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse illustrates how his songwriting is less motivated by the idea of fusion per se than by the expressive capacities of a familiar but putatively foreign musical language like dub. In that sense, the choice of Stefan Betke to remaster the album—i.e., to remix it at the level of foregrounded frequencies—is a fitting one: In dub tradition, Betke goes bold, showing his hand while reshaping the sound, and highlighting how Berlin’s regard for and distinctive take on dub parallel those of Brazil. In both we hear mutual intelligibility, but also many wonderful things to be found in translation.
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 | Electronic | Mais Um Discos | June 1, 2021 | 7.4 | 96a3f371-716c-41fa-bab6-cae57351bdc0 | Wayne Marshall | https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/ | |
The rap radio pleasure-seekers grow up, exploring new sounds and real-world themes. It’s sometimes formulaic, but maturity looks good on them. | The rap radio pleasure-seekers grow up, exploring new sounds and real-world themes. It’s sometimes formulaic, but maturity looks good on them. | Rae Sremmurd: Sremm 4 Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rae-sremmurd-sremm-4-life/ | Sremm 4 Life | The repeat reveler learns that partygoing is as much a skill as an activity. At some mundane but critical point—having a kid, dropping a phone into a bar toilet, turning 30, falling asleep in a work meeting, having a second kid—life demands a game plan. To party without incident, substances have to be diluted or avoided; comfortable shoes must supplant cute ones; rides home need to be pre-arranged. On their fourth album, veteran socialites Rae Sremmurd reach this humbling stage of partying without sacrificing their irreverence or glee, finding new delights, sounds, and topics in the crucible of adulthood.
Brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi are both dads now, a detail not explicitly mentioned on Sremm 4 Life, but one that contextualizes the album’s frequent acknowledgement that consequences exist. Almost a decade ago, Rae Sremmurd were youthful insurgents storming rap radio. Though they rhymed over the same druggy trap beats as Future and iLoveMakonnen, they ducked the numbed recoil that pulsed through that era’s music, turning up without ever coming down. Their giddy squeals and impish barks ricocheted across their mentor Mike WiLL Made-It’s eccentric beats like billiard balls. After an extended childhood, age has caught up with them. “It’s time to show people we’re more than just some party boys,” Jxmmi told i-D last year.
“Shots, shots, shots, yeah we’ll feel them in the morning,” Jxmmi shouts on weary opener “Origami (Hotties),” a world away from a similar and much more enthused chant on “Safe Sex Pay Checks” from their 2015 debut. “Everything unfolding like the chapter in the children’s book/From the window of the plane, I can tell that the city crooked,” exhales Swae Lee on the pensive “Something I’m Not.” On different songs, each of them mentions the killing of their stepdad in 2021, for which their younger brother was charged and sentenced to prison. The tragedy comes up only twice, but the gravity of the experience seems to snake through the songwriting, which can be as anguished as it is exuberant.
If Rae Sremmurd growing up and partying responsibly sounds depressing, don’t worry; Jxmmi still takes the shot. They continue to be a bacchanalian group prone to cartoonish flexes and rakish debauchery, as seen on “Sexy” and “Royal Flush.” Here, they match their boasts with confessions and doubts, a development that complicates their jubilant party tunes. “ADHD Anthem (2 Many Emotions)” is full-blown emo rap, Rae Sremmurd wailing over squiggly video game synths and seismic bass kicks.
“Not So Bad (Leans Gone Cold),” a sample drill track that trades the tea of Dido’s “Thank You” for a cup of lean, is melancholy but swaggering, the pair’s strained voices springing off of gliding bass and weepy keys. Historically, most of the darkness in Rae Sremmurd songs has stemmed from the spacey melodies and eerie drum programming of Ear Drummers’ nocturnal production style; here, the rappers are the ones who cast the shadows.
Compared to the careful sprawl of triple-LP Sr3mm, which artfully unwound the brothers’ divergent styles and production tastes while avoiding lulls, this outing can feel formulaic and less adventurous at times. The duo (or sometimes a featured guest) typically plays off a Swae Lee chorus, a structure that anchors most of the songs here. When the hook bricks, as on the uninspired “Activate,” the song collapses. The brothers’ middling showings just barely best yet another phoned-in Future verse. “Got empty bottles and models, my heart empty,” he sings flatly. Single “Torpedo” is just as inert, with Swae Lee not even committing to the tepid chorus: “Takin’ off for that cash, like torpedo/And ya pockets too tight, just like a speedo.”
When Swae Lee’s hooks connect, things fall into place. He floats through the misty bounce of the Zaytoven- and Mike WiLL-produced “Mississippi Slide,” while Jxmmi tumbles across it like a bowling ball. For the squeaky twerk joint “Bend Ya Knees,” Swae Lee dispenses cool playboy flexes while Jxmmi gushes Auto-Tuned punchlines. “I’m a bald-head nigga, just like Mr. Clean/And they know it’s me, hit the dro and shoulder lean,” Jxmmi raps, one of his many standout lines. He needs his brother’s cool melodies as much as Swae Lee needs his spry rapping, but interesting things tend to happen when he takes the lead, a potential first teased on his solo debut Jxmtro.
“Flaunt It/Cheap,” the album’s highlight, consciously discards the batting order of most Rae Sremmurd songs—Swae Lee on the hook and first verse, with Jxmmi on cleanup. The result is delightful. It begins with a drum’n’bass beat that slows into a minimal drum track, then flows into woozy Miami bass. Jxmmi struts across the shifting ground like a drum major, his swagger carrying the song even after Swae Lee takes the wheel. If Rae Sremmurd is truly a lifelong commitment, as this album’s title suggests, this kind of shuffling will be key to the group’s longevity. As their widened outlook and refreshed palette show, they’ve got plenty more parties planned. | 2023-04-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ear Drummer / Interscope | April 12, 2023 | 7.1 | 96a78ed0-b11f-4656-95e1-d9add6270c5e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The young German-Haitian singer-songwriter, who has famously written songs for Rihanna, basks in the gangly freedom of developing her own voice. | The young German-Haitian singer-songwriter, who has famously written songs for Rihanna, basks in the gangly freedom of developing her own voice. | Bibi Bourelly: Free the Real (Pt. 2) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22623-free-the-real-pt-2/ | Free the Real (Pt. 2) | The music industry is rarely generous with fairytale successes, but the closest thing to one was bequeathed last year upon 22-year-old German-Haitian songwriter Bibi Bourelly. Discovered on Instagram, Bourelly was introduced to Kanye West and, more broadly, to the songwriting industry in perpetual need of young creatives to lend the stars some trickle-up swag. After some abortive writing for Usher, Bourelly found a taker in Rihanna, whose albums are a pretty reliable microcosm of songwriting trends; of her prolific output, Rih cut the brash pre-Anti single “Bitch Better Have My Money” and the sloshed torch song “Higher.” The songs could scarcely be different in production—the former set to grinding trap by Travis Scott, the latter to relatively tranquil soul—but Bourelly’s influence is stark and clear.
Where former Rih surrogates like Ester Dean assembled songs explicitly around hooks, retrofitting words and meaning later, Bourelly’s approach is more that of an open-mic songwriter: sprawling, unfiltered, every lyric sung to the breaking point. The Rihanna stint turned into a deal with Def Jam and several solo singles, compiled on an EP this May: the on-the-nose Free the Real (Pt. 1). Unfiltered was certainly the aim, or at least a version of authenticity filtered through folk and acoustic rock. Single “Sally” is a bluesy ruckus of handclaps and scuzzed-up guitar, “Ego” twangy and stalking, “What If” almost grunge. Though the EP perhaps demonstrated more promise than mastery, it was certainly her own.
Pt. 2 is much of the same: more notebook sketches of titles (“Poet,” “Untitled”) and more acoustic cuts that bear little resemblance to pop, R&B, or—refreshingly—the vast swath of alt-pop artists tipped as her peers. Bourelly’s age and pop gigs have saddled her with comparisons to precocious pop quirkers like Alessia Cara and Lorde, but they’re a poor fit. Her actual predecessors are closer to PJ Harvey or Janis Joplin, and—for better and worse—she comes off less as a pre-branded star and more as a writer finding her voice in real time. Her literal voice is unsurprisingly strong and versatile: sometimes zero-fucks blasé, sometimes scratchy and vulnerable, and sometimes—as on her Rihanna ballads—a confrontational belt.
But her writing voice is the main draw: the voice of a girl who grew up on hip-hop and saw no reason why it couldn’t coexist with folk-rock or country. There’s perennial talk, of course, about young artists growing up in the streaming era being unbound by genres; in particular, 2016 has found almost every pop star dabbling in acoustic genres (cynically, perhaps driven by Top 40’s playlists shrinking and the increasing dominance of country and AC formats). Bourelly sounds like it was her idea all along.
The downside to being unformed is there’s still a lot you’ve got to get out of your system. On this EP, that’s “Poet.” It’s got the slickest production on the album: rock-radio sheen, with precisely timed strings and backing-singer interjections. But it’s also got the hook “you’re my Kurt Cobain,” and its other metaphors—cocaine, rock’n’roll—aren’t much better. Bourelly’s other material, thankfully, is far more compelling: the prickly guitar intro and plainspoken disses of “Flowers” (“I may smoke a lot of marijuana/But I’m not your little whore”); the assured stomp of “Fool,” and especially the single “Ballin.”
It’s the best song written to date about the precarious quasi-fame one can fall into as a rising artist, where you can write multiple Rihanna hits, make the magazine rounds and 25 Under 25 roundups, sing on Colbert, be highly Googleable, and yet still be broke as fuck. Bourelly begins the track by announcing, as casually as you’d mention a papercut, getting fired from Old Navy; then, with this-too-will-pass assurance, she continues through the details: dodging landlords, jumping subway turnstiles, living off ramen and hot sauce, feeling ambivalent about the paparazzi who are one degree of separation away. As a montage of the music-industry fairytale as it looks to those living it, it’s striking. But as a snapshot of Bibi Bourelly’s career, judging by her material it may soon prove itself quite modest. | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | November 14, 2016 | 6.8 | 96b35bd4-2253-4f0b-bfcd-ae7c682fa6de | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
On their third album, the Philadelphia shoegaze band’s tried-and-true arrangements are not terribly original, but they are deeply felt. | On their third album, the Philadelphia shoegaze band’s tried-and-true arrangements are not terribly original, but they are deeply felt. | Nothing: Dance on the Blacktop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nothing-dance-on-the-blacktop/ | Dance on the Blacktop | Dream pop and shoegaze, with their diffuse atmospheres and negative space, invite us to fill in the blanks with our own baggage. The Philadelphia band Nothing do a lot of that filling-in for us—these shoegazers do not look down; they stare you in the eye. It can feel suspect, imposing too much of Nothing’s bleak history onto the blank canvas. But when the saga involves incarceration, pharmaceutical sadist Martin Shkreli, and permanent brain damage—as it does for Nothing frontman Domenic Palermo, who was jumped outside a show in Oakland in 2015 and barely survived—the narrative becomes knotted inextricably into the gentle music. Nothing’s dismal backstory both colors in their sound and accounts for its sadness, its heaviness, its palliative effect. A reputable magazine recently called Nothing “the world’s unluckiest band,” and a journalist once began an interview with the apt question: “Do you feel cursed?” If there’s a hex on Nothing, they embrace it. “I’m living in a dream world,” Palermo sang on 2016’s “Nineteen Ninety Heaven.” “Life’s a nightmare.” That could be Nothing’s manifesto.
The title of Nothing’s third record, Dance on the Blacktop, is a phrase Palermo learned while serving two years in prison in the early 2000s (he stabbed someone in a brawl, claiming self-defense). It is slang for fighting, but Palermo adopts it to mean something like riding the inevitable chaos of existence with grace. Dance on the Blacktop tempers its self-defeatist lyrics with pummeling light, and while the songs here hew closer to billowing 1990s alt-rock than on previous records, there’s still an appealing minimalism to the sound. That might come from the band’s backgrounds in hardcore: Palermo was in Horror Show, on Deathwish; new bassist Aaron Heard also fronts the brutalist Jesus Piece; drummer Kyle Kimball was in the gothier Salvation.
Dance’s tried-and-true arrangements—simmering and erupting, despondent and ecstatic—are not terribly original, but they are deeply felt. “Zero Day” is a decently melancholy Smashing Pumpkins impression, as Palermo sings of “infinity, oblivion” and his “empty sky of everlasting misfortune.” “You Wind Me Up” recalls Dinosaur Jr.’s dry, drawling “Feel the Pain” to an extreme (John Agnello produced both) though its raw character distinguishes it: “We were sitting in the sun/Smoldering a love/The drugs were never strong enough.” There’s an uncomplicated, slackerish romanticism to most Nothing lyrics, as Palermo sings of faded souls and inscrutable stars. Amid the thundering swirl of “I Hate the Flowers,” Palermo is “shook outta heaven, fell into hell.”
The album contains some gorgeous, subtle shifts, almost micro-sized, as if feeling the world after a handful of edibles. With a disarmingly sweet vocal turn, the strummy dynamism of “Us/We/Are” oddly recalls Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins. “I know it sounds crazy/There’s static in my head/Everything red,” Palermo sings, likely reflecting on his brain trauma. “Blueline Baby” is the album’s highlight, exploding like green fireworks. Palermo wrote it, he says, “about a girl [he] knew who OD’d when she was 13,” and it is a work of pure pathos. On a deluxe edition of Dance, Nothing faithfully cover Grouper’s drone-folk mini-masterpiece “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” and if they learned something about the restorative qualities of music from it, “Blueline Baby” is proof.
The cover art for Dance on the Blacktop features a photograph of the New York author Chelsea Hodson in a blank mask, looking hyperreal and obscured at once. Listening to Nothing, I think of a line from her excellent recent essay collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, which presents a similar mix of elegance and destruction: “How much can a body endure?” she writes. “Almost everything.” Dance on the Blacktop is music at the edge of Hodson’s “everything.” Its theme might be resolve, tenacity, or redemption itself—the sound of hitting rock bottom, looking up, and still catching a glimpse of beauty above. | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Relapse | August 29, 2018 | 7.1 | 96b69790-fc9d-4cfa-b812-02f95bcccfdf | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Mike Kinsella expresses ugly sentiments with inverse beauty in Owen's acoustic-heavy return. | Mike Kinsella expresses ugly sentiments with inverse beauty in Owen's acoustic-heavy return. | Owen: The King of Whys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22178-the-king-of-whys/ | The King of Whys | To nearly the same degree that Mike Kinsella once influenced the aesthetic of modern emo, his solo project Owen deconstructs it. His projects American Football and Owls channeled effusive lyricism and intricate instrumental interplay in short, brilliant bursts of creativity; by contrast, Owen albums usually find Kinsella alone with his acoustic guitar, making plainspoken assessments of the accruing obligations and disappointments of adulthood.
The King of Whys is Kinsella’s first collection of new material since the wildly successful American Football reunion in 2014, which put him in front of audiences that dwarfed any he saw during that band’s initial late-‘90s run. It might be tough for those newcomers to make the transition from that band’s gentle single “Never Meant” to King’s lead one, “Lost,” on which he sings roughly, “Stay poor and die trying/Take the drugs I didn’t take/Lay the whores I didn’t lay/’Cause I was too afraid that I might like it.” This is Kinsella’s most extreme Owen album yet, the most bitter, the funniest, the saddest, and the most ambitious.
It’s also the first time one might assume that Owen is a full band. The King of Whys was mostly written and recorded in two nine-day sessions with S. Carey, a member of Bon Iver who opened for several of American Football’s reunion dates. It’s Kinsella’s first time working with an outside producer and a backing set of musicians (as well as the first time he’s recorded an album outside Chicagoland), and Carey’s imprint is strong in the brassy orchestration, textural found sound, and a layer of aloed reverb that soothes rough edges in the mix. It could easily be confused for Kinsella walking in on a Volcano Choir or Bon Iver session, and amplifies the newfound emotional urgency in Kinsella’s lyrics.
The King of Whys is never not magnificent, maybe too much for its own good–despite Kinsella’s unsparing account of his father's alcoholism and depression, the handclaps and chipper strumming of “A Burning Soul” could’ve made it a mid-‘90s college hit à la Guster. Many of the initially novel aspects of The King of Whys teased out by Carey–wisely utilized trumpet, percolating polyrhythms, mid-song digressions into gorgeous guitar lattices–nod back to American Football. The King of Whys can often seem like an answer to that band’s self-titled debut album, inverting that record’s youthful insouciance to express a tenderized, emotionally exhausted adult mindset. “Don’t worry about the money, we’ll get by or we won’t,” Kinsella sighs on “Sleep Is a Myth,” before seemingly muttering into his sleeve, “You look better hungry.”
Much of The King of Whys takes that tone of one-sided mental arguments, ones that could probably decimate any relationship if they were verbalized. But for better or worse, Kinsella’s had too many drinks or worked too many hours to take it there. “If you give me this battle, I’ll give you the war/I’m tired of being someone’s, tired of keeping score,” Kinsella sings on “Tourniquet,” a transaction in emotional economics that could’ve been voiced on any previous Owen record. But then he summarizes the album’s overall shift in tone: “Give me that goddamn bottle and then leave me alone,” he snipes. It actually sounds reasonable to let him destroy himself for awhile; it’s a small price to pay if he’ll feel those involuntary bouts of bitterness and hatred without acting on them.
There are some incredibly ugly things expressed on The King of Whys, but the tone never suggest Kinsella endorses them–it’s hard to imagine “Tourniquet” getting the emo sing-a-long treatment of, say, Bright Eyes’ “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” or Death Cab for Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels.” He’s just as likely to use the insularity of The King of Whys to make jokes about the futility of expression: “I’m so settled down, it feels like the earth moves if I do,” he cracks. Meanwhile, “Empty Bottle” is damn near acoustic stoner rock, invoking two separate but related escape valves for Kinsella in Chicago. In his head, hell is a crowded goth night; heaven is dreaming of being asleep, speaking French, and a jukebox that plays nothing but Isn’t Anything. Whether or not Kinsella can actually remember his teenage feelings, The King of Whys proves that he can still experience them. | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 2, 2016 | 7.2 | 96b6c1dd-cf21-43f4-85c2-35cf78ca6e44 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Darkside’s Dave Harrington and Benoit & Sergio’s Benjamin Jay join forces on an introspective album that fuses treated guitar and ambient electronics with obliquely confessional lyrics. | Darkside’s Dave Harrington and Benoit & Sergio’s Benjamin Jay join forces on an introspective album that fuses treated guitar and ambient electronics with obliquely confessional lyrics. | Lights Fluorescent: The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lights-fluorescent-the-oldest-sons-of-the-oldest-sons/ | The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons | The musical partnership of Dave Harrington and Benjamin Jay, a duo that calls itself Lights Fluorescent, may seem completely disjunctive. Harrington, best known as one half of Darkside, with Nicolas Jaar, has built a pedigree as an improvisatory guitarist with an avowed love for jam bands and a deft way of reframing jazz history for his own ends. Benjamin Jay makes house music, most famously with Benoit & Sergio, although his work with occasional outfit NDF expanded into more explicitly experimental terrain. Jay’s contribution to dance music has always been idiosyncratic and deeply human: He sings about loving girls who never apologize, hating DJs who focus too much on “color frequencies or resonance,” and following your principles.
Along with his impeccable phrasing, this slanted yet highly credible lyrical perspective is the principal sliver of Jay’s previous projects that survives in Lights Fluorescent. A drum-free record, their debut, The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons, locates itself far from the dancefloor; the lyrics inhabit a nostalgic, obliquely confessional mode that, along with the heavy electronic soundscape, points toward something like chillwave. “I’ve been listening to Neil Young,” sings Jay on the standout track “Neil Young/Cues,” voice splitting the difference between nasal and husky as he completes the thought: “Those Baltimore afternoons.”
Once a PhD candidate studying Renaissance literature in the aforementioned city, Jay sings like a grown son only just understanding that his Another Green World references (on the powerful “Palace Walls”) might age him out of being a kid. Harrington uses his guitar more sparingly than fans of his sprawling—both in size and ambition—ensemble the Dave Harrington Group might expect. Yet even if the skittery, allegro, electric-Miles sensibility Harrington fostered in his band is apparently absent from Lights Fluorescent, strong traces of his previous work remain, particularly his liberal and creative use of feedback. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons demonstrates the growth of Harrington the producer, not Harrington the jazz musician.
His embrace of the studio, paired with Jay’s always evident, albeit still nascent, ability as a pop singer-songwriter, make for a surprising, successful alchemy. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a clinic in how to pace an album’s rhythms without using drums. Synthesizers are employed consistently yet simply, hugging tightly to chord changes. The feeling of tension and release is bound up in whether the keys—and the occasional structural bass, as on the short and sad “Epitaph”—provide a pulse, or if they serve to deepen the duo’s sense of texture, like most of the instrumentation. The record’s forays into traditional musicianship are illusory: The spiky, bright guitar line on the title track is a loop, and unlike Harrington’s jazz-fusion predecessors, whose studio embellishments were often hidden beneath a heap of instruments, the sparsity of Lights Fluorescent’s compositions does little to conceal their means of production.
Some may point out that the duo looks backward musically, and certainly aspects of its sound will be familiar to anyone who surveyed the synth-happy surfaces of early 2010s indie. Yet the trajectory of the two minds behind Lights Fluorescent suggests that this project is one lucky meeting in a couple of long, omnivorous careers. Jay has decided to scale the introspective scaffolding that buttressed the dancefloor mantras of his past. Harrington, like a number of artists who cut their teeth in the jazz world—John Zorn and David Torn among them—has furthered his understanding that working in the amorphous genre of jazz fusion entails fusing with the innovations of the present, even when that means leaving jazz behind entirely. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a fusion few would expect, which finds its makers comfortable together: on the near side of experimentation, and on the far side of pop. | 2019-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kingdoms | November 25, 2019 | 7.6 | 96c03b74-d738-4c30-84f5-4b17af094fea | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
An anthology of the emo pioneers’ complete works testifies to their thrift, their seriousness, and their towering legacy; it captures the essence of a crucial era in the genre’s history. | An anthology of the emo pioneers’ complete works testifies to their thrift, their seriousness, and their towering legacy; it captures the essence of a crucial era in the genre’s history. | Indian Summer: Giving Birth to Thunder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/indian-summer-giving-birth-to-thunder/ | Giving Birth to Thunder | Indian Summer are a quintessential Numero Group salvage project: Toiling in obscurity, the Oakland band founded a subgenre and produced a small, influential body of work that quickly went out of print. Today their records serve as both stylistic textbooks and collector’s items. But this is the first time the esteemed archival label felt weird about the optics. “Give emo a chance,” they recently tweeted, offering a playlist of formative genre tracks that ends in 1995, the year Cap’n Jazz broke up and months after Indian Summer did the same. Giving Birth to Thunder is Indian Summer in its entirety, but it’s also the essence of an entire era where emo was still strictly post-hardcore, before it started to cross-breed with pop and assume the form that today inspires such reverent nostalgia.
Giving Birth to Thunder doesn’t unearth any new gems, as 90% of it already exists as Science 1994—an undisputed classic of second-wave emo, though nearly everything else about that 2002 anthology is up for debate. The versions available on CD and YouTube have completely different track titles than the one frontman Adam Nanaa posted on Bandcamp; those comprise a nine-word poem that inspired this collection’s name. The band was famous for declining to name any of its songs, leaving the business of titles to its fans. Setlists would read like hieroglyphs, with songs designated by guns, planes, and angels; the band members went either uncredited or by their first initials.
The idea of an actual full-length was likely anathema to the band, or maybe just an economic impossibility. Indian Summer scraped by moment to moment during their one-year existence; they played approximately 100 shows on wretched tours guided by a tattered copy of Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, fueled by the minimal amount of fast food and stolen gas to make it to the next gig and whatever else it took to get home and cut the next track before money ran out. And then they’d do it all over again. In the liner notes, Nanaa is upfront about dollars and cents, in terms that seem stark even for 1994—a $50 bass, 30-minute sessions at a $75-per-day studio, $175 monthly rent in Emeryville split among the four members, driving 12 hours to play a gig for $20, making it from Vancouver back to the Bay with only $10 between them. Their stage setup was reliant on duct tape, cinder blocks, and a microcassette playing back a dubbed copy of a Bessie Smith record.
Smith’s voice was the binding agent on Science 1994, appearing intermittently throughout the post-hoc collection of the band’s scattered works. It’s tempting to think that Nanaa imagined future crate diggers rescuing his own band’s 7"s—enticed by the cryptic cover and overwhelmed by the pure torment in the voice—the same way he’d plucked the blues LP from an Oakland junkyard. With Indian Summer, the most pretentious explanation is usually the correct one. But not here: Like any number of rap producers around the same time, they simply liked the crackle and spectral presence—they felt it would add color, and that a 70-year old blues recording could do that is a testament to their unrelenting austerity. They wanted, Nanaa writes, to “emulate the nights in Oakland we spent fucked up and passed out with the needle dragging at the end of the LP.”
On a prior release of Science 1994, Nanaa made a similar claim, specifying, “the needle dragging on the Slint LP,” which describes a good portion of Giving Birth to Thunder in its meditative moments. It’s metal music in a literal sense—guitars strung with pipe cleaners playing barbed note clusters, splash cymbals covered in tinfoil, the dulled meat-locker reverb of “Orchard.” Traversing the quiet moments of Giving Birth to Thunder is like walking on a polluted beach. It does sound a hell of a lot like Slint, which was probably the point—Indian Summer were deadly serious young men, but also punk rock fanboys, their enterprise guided by entirely by their favorite bands, not authors, not poets, not abstract painters, not philosophical tracts. They nicked as much from Slint and Fugazi as they did from Texaco and Denny’s, seeing how much they could get away with before being caught and discarding anything that didn’t suit an immediate need.
The name Indian Summer itself was on loan from a deep cut from the Doors’ Morrison Hotel, though they took nothing else from that band. Nearly their entire identity was derived from Dischord and SST: Nanaa’s pre-Indian Summer band was named Sinker, in tribute to an Ignition 7", and he coined their last tour “Celebrated Summer” (after the Hüsker Dü song). They had principles, but no politics. “Emotional revolution. Fucking pain,” an old Sinker ad proclaimed. For his Repercussion Records imprint, “Emotional, angry, or pissed music preferred.” The Nanaa brothers and Marc Bianchi aspired to Fugazi’s democratic vocal delegation, but they foreswore call-and-response or even alternating leads; they just all crammed together behind one mic and shouted whenever they saw fit. Even their use of octaves attests to their thrift: It’s the easiest, most economic way to make a riff sound bigger than it really is, leaving no space for thirds or fourths or anything else that would complete an actual triad.
But this all worked in favor of a band that prioritized immediacy above all else. There are no builds on Giving Birth to Thunder, no clever transitions. There is nothing medium about Indian Summer. Though Nanaa described Indian Summer as “quiet thunderstorm” on his Bandcamp, their defining moments are like a flash flood—torrential, merciless, and not even remotely beautiful, mowing down everything in its path. Nanaa often reads his lyrics rather than pruning them for melodic contours, and his words are elegant in their violence: People are walking weapons in “mm.,” and “Woolworm,” alternately known as “Angry Son” or “Sleeping,” is not a biblical parable. Nanaa was abandoned by his father and he’s extremely pissed off about it. “When you start screaming ‘I am the angry son,’ it’s hard to read that any other way,” he admits in the liner notes.
There’s only one song that isn’t already available on Science 1994, a closing squall titled with three lightning bolts. The liner notes and “propaganda” included in the physical edition are the real draw here, creating context for a band who had a blast making exquisitely bleak music about not having a friend in the world. They were more expansive than their peers Antioch Arrow and Heroin, who were making primordial screamo in “white belt country” (i.e., San Diego ca. 1992), more artful than the punk that their occasional roommate David Hayes was releasing on Lookout!, more experimental than the ascetic Ebullition bands from Goleta.
Most notably, Indian Summer struck up a friendship with Cap’n Jazz through Mark Pearsall, a sonic and spiritual guide for the band and Midwest emo ambassador who ran Man With Gun, the imprint that released Shmap’n Shmazz and almost nothing else. The parallels between Cap’n Jazz and Indian Summer are unmistakable: two brothers forming a band to process the trauma of their broken homes (the Kinsellas grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father, the Nanaas’ was an absentee), self-styled weirdo punks that unwittingly defined emo for the rest of the decade and quickly called it quits after touring broke their spirits and friendships.
But otherwise, they’re distinct products of their environment: Cap’n Jazz were led by a future college professor and University of Illinois students who would soon discover post-rock, jazz, and Steve Reich. Their music was anxious but approachable and exuberant, well-suited for house parties and basements throughout the Midwest. Conversely, Nanaa was a high-school dropout who ended up in the Bay Area after three days on a Greyhound bus, and Giving Birth to Thunder is shaped by crushing poverty and omnidirectional anger. The offshoots of Cap’n Jazz shaped nearly every form of popular emo for the next 25 years, while the members of Indian Summer mostly played in even more obscure punk bands, with the exception of Bianchi, whose Her Space Holiday was something of an inverse Postal Service at their artistic peak. An instrumental version of 2003’s The Young Machines would’ve been a minor classic in the burgeoning lap-pop subgenre, but Bianchi’s off-key, beyond-TMI lyrics about his sex life and distaste for music critics (occasionally both) were more in line with The Ugly Organ and ...Is a Real Boy at the time.
Like most formative bands from emo’s first and second waves—Cap’n Jazz, Moss Icon, Rites of Spring, the Hated, Embrace—their scant output is celebrated for its purity as much as its innovation. Still, Indian Summer’s imprint is unmistakable on the thornier outgrowths of emo; as Nanaa mutters over his band’s tensile anti-grooves, he establishes a template for the literary, conceptual post-hardcore of La Dispute and Defeater. Isolate “mm.” in a petri dish and a Bay Area version of Thursday might sprout—perhaps their late-career highlight “Millimeter” isn’t a direct tribute, but “I Am the Killer” may well be. Brand New shrewdly pointed out Steve Albini’s work on In Utero and Goat as guides for their post-emo pivot on 2009’s Daisy, but that indelible trick on “Vices” that knocked everyone on their collective ass, where a gospel vinyl crumbled under a violent blitz of guitar distortion? Pretty much a verbatim rip of “Aren’t You Angel?” If the intention of Giving Birth to Thunder was to present Indian Summer as something separate from current-day emo, it only proved that the genre is right where they left it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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CORRECTION: A previous version of this review attributed the inspiration of the name “Celebrated Summer” to Revolution Summer instead of Hüsker Dü. | 2019-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | September 19, 2019 | 8.4 | 96c3bacc-1920-4bb4-99b6-1c84288e7bb5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, the Los Angeles-based artist synthesizes it all into a gaudy yet distinctive sound. | At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, the Los Angeles-based artist synthesizes it all into a gaudy yet distinctive sound. | 2hollis: boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2hollis-boy/ | boy | 2hollis is a beloved fixture in a music scene with no name. What do you call a mash of Bladee, Chief Keef, Max Martin, Skrillex, and the Geometry Dash computer game soundtrack, anyway? The 20-year-old, Los Angeles-based singer, rapper, and producer, whose real name is Hollis Frazier Herndon, makes wildly processed industrial dance pop and rap: His pyrotechnic production is the stuff of a cooped-up prodigy whose mind can’t help but move a million miles an hour.
Early releases garnered a fervent internet following, his sub-Reddit and Discord channel filled with kids obsessing over his personal history, production techniques, and eerie aesthetic, which I can only describe as Roscoe Dash does medieval. His early content, though, has been scrubbed from the internet. Past projects and music videos now live via aliases and alt accounts; scrapped Instagram stories and deleted tweets are archived on fan forums. His official pages include only a sliver of his catalog, the few pictures he shares of himself a selection of highly filtered headshots. He’s hardly done any interviews, rarely posts on social media, and barely promotes his music. So why, on a niche corner of the internet, are kids calling him a messiah?
Hollis didn’t come out of nowhere. His mom, Kathryn Frazier, is the founder of the PR firm Biz 3, whose roster includes the Weeknd, J. Cole, and Daft Punk. She also co-owns a record label with Skrillex, while his dad, John Herndon, was the drummer for Tortoise and releases solo music as A Grape Dope. While Hollis has likely benefited from a life spent around musicians, his work feels most influenced by internet addiction and multimedia fluency. It might be tempting to peg him as just another kid with bleach-blond hair uploading iterative computer music to SoundCloud—an offshoot of whatever it was we decided hyperpop meant. But Hollis’ latest full-length album, boy, establishes him as a remarkably distinctive, eagerly experimental savant whose sound never stalls or stagnates.
Before his recent pivot to industrial dance and electropop, Hollis’ music mostly resembled that of Drain Gang stalwarts Yung Lean and Bladee, Swedish accent and all (although Hollis is from Chicago). Cloud rap suited him; his 2022 EP, As Within, So Without, made with producer kimj, features some of his best songs. Last year, when he dropped 2, an electroclash house record, the switch at first felt stark. The album is all shook-up soda and manic bravado: warp-speed synth leads and arpeggios, wet columns of bass and angsty singing, skittery four-on-the-floor drums and explosive FX. On closer inspection, Hollis’ idiosyncratic take on dance music isn’t all that different from his quirky interpolations of trap and drill. At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, Hollis’ ability to swerve and synthesize his scatter-brained source material into a unique amalgam of genre-blurring music stands out. It’s an exciting development for an artist who may just be scratching the surface of his best work.
boy surpasses 2 as an even clubbier, gummier electropop record. “two bad” is brighter and more radio-ready than anything in Hollis’ discography—a huge gated synth lead supports his urgent, insistent singing, which sounds like Justin Bieber after seven cigarettes. And while the track could certainly be played at big-tent EDM festivals, what differentiates “two bad” from your standard glowstick banger is how relentlessly it reinvents itself. Drums shift tempos and textures mid-song, an endless supply of synth patches roving madly around the mix. On “say it again,” another rave-destined track, Hollis resists simple patterns and structures—a lo-fi piano breakdown interrupts the song’s midpoint; a whole verse is dedicated to Hollis muttering “I want you to say it again” above a pulsing bass and stuttering synth pluck. The mutating compositions make for an exhilarating listen, whether you tune in on headphones, while driving, or as you thrash around a neon-streaked club.
One of Hollis’ more obvious strengths as a vocalist is how powerfully he can distill visceral emotions through seemingly simple means. Opener “you once said my name for the first time” may be the most elegantly constructed song in his catalog, a whiny digital organ giving way to soaring choral harmonies before the song bursts into a droning, deranged drop that lasts nearly two minutes. “One day I’ll say your name for the last time,” he sings with conviction, extending the final note until his voice falters. Even when he returns to his trusted bag of blustery, bit-crushed rap, like on late album highlight “lie,” he communicates anguish and longing despite cycling through clichés (“cross my eyes, I hope to die/I’ll never lie”). Hollis can communicate lust, regret, rage, or despair with a snicker or sigh, a screech or vocal chop, a melody so disorientingly strange it elicits an emotional reaction, even if the writing’s puerile and unspecific.
This transference isn’t always rendered so smoothly. “promise” is a forgettable attempt at a bombastic piano ballad, and “sister,” though one of boy’s finer beats, is fraught with a peculiar analogy about loving your girlfriend like a sibling. Languishing too long in Hollis’ world can drain as much as it enlivens, simulating the sensation of replenishing your serotonin stores after doing too much molly. But Hollis isn’t in the business of pacing himself. He’s racing full speed ahead, threatening to blast open any preconceptions you may have had about what a kid making music on a laptop can accomplish. | 2024-06-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | self-released | June 14, 2024 | 7.2 | 96ce402a-df14-4bd5-a5a5-20faa78e4051 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The nocturnal, comforting Illumination Ritual offers up a definitive portrait of the Appleseed Cast, a record that can serve as an entryway to the post-rock/emo band's sprawling discography as well as a culmination of it. | The nocturnal, comforting Illumination Ritual offers up a definitive portrait of the Appleseed Cast, a record that can serve as an entryway to the post-rock/emo band's sprawling discography as well as a culmination of it. | The Appleseed Cast: Illumination Ritual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17919-the-appleseed-cast-illumination-ritual/ | Illumination Ritual | The Appleseed Cast were tagged as an emo band in their earliest days and that's likely to stick in 2013. It says as much about the elasticity of the genre as it does about how Chris Crisci's mercurial band hasn't allowed anything else to define them since. Over the past decade and a half, they haven't made two consecutive recordings without shuffling their lineup, their sonic focus, and often both: In the late 90s, the Lawrence, Kansas, band were peers of Mineral and Planes Mistaken For Stars, earnest Midwesterners expanding on the template set by Sunny Day Real Estate. By the time they dropped their critically acclaimed, two-volume series Low Level Owl in 2001, they were receiving Radiohead comparisons, but then again, so was anyone who laid plaintive vocals over electronics and guitars treated with more than two effects pedals. As the 2000s progressed, they moved towards a centrist indie-rock sound before going off the grid into full-on, post-rock moodiness on 2009’s Sagarmatha. By 2011’s Middle States EP, you could sense them circling back towards their original sound, and Illumination Ritual sticks the landing. Whether or not it’s Appleseed Cast’s best record feels irrelevant, though it’s certainly in contention. At this point, it offers a definitive Appleseed Cast, something that can serve as an entryway to their sprawling discography as well as a culmination of it.
Illumination Ritual can certainly be a potent nostalgia trip: the clean, interlocking guitars, Crisci’s rounded vocals and nervous percussion rhythms are pure Deep Elm and Jade Tree throwbacks that thankfully avoid a similar tendency towards unwieldy verbiage or grating affectation. Even if there aren’t too many singalong moments, Crisci’s vocals remain warm and melodic throughout and the production is crisp without being brittle. The concision carries over to the instrumentals; “Branches on the Arrow Peak Revelation” and “Simple Forms” recall Peregrine or Sagarmatha with their fluttery guitar delay, subtle electronic manipulation, and floating ambience.
Crisci kept unusual hours writing much of Illumination Ritual-- as indicated by centerpiece “30 Degrees 3 AM”, the liminal feeling expressed in many of his lyrics are a result of walking the razor-thin line between “up too late” and “up too early.” There’s an unmistakably nocturnal mood to it all and it’s not the kind of wakefulness that’s a result of panic or some other insatiable mania: Crisci’s halting, elliptical lines evoke a moment where you can’t quite decide whether to take your waking state as a sign that you should start that novel or just try one more time to drift back to sleep.
This might not sound all that exciting and for the most part, Appleseed Cast don’t excite so much as they comfort; Illumination Ritual is more a soundtrack for thinking about feelings rather than being in the thrall of emotion. "Adriatic To Black Sea", “Great Lake Derelict”, and “Cathedral Ring” provide Illumination Ritual’s most forceful moments out of insistent builds rather than sudden movement-- it’s unclear what Crisci’s getting at besides a certain sense of yearning (lines like "I feel so akin to rain," “the only girl is shooting for gold,” “a new cathedral, burn it down” are typical) that’s abetted by the satisfying effect the trio achieves by pushing the tempo and lunging forward musically.
It all makes for a consistent listen, as the longer instrumental passages and more melodic material draw from the same tones and structures. But it can lead to Illumination Ritual washing over you rather than creating immersion. While they’re capable of calming ambience, the Appleseed Cast lack the sort of striking dynamics that can serve as a substitute for its lack of immediacy. Nor are they particularly innovative in creating texture; Nathan Wilder is an active and pugilistic drummer who often serves as the “lead” when Crisci steps away from the mic, but too often they resort to the kind of clean, ringing peals of delayed guitar that’s going to sound like something the Edge has already done more memorably.
None of this should be surprising or even disappointing for listeners holding the torch for the Appleseed Cast eight albums and several EPs in. But for the curious listener, the definitive nature of Illumination Ritual can cut both ways, as Appleseed Cast demonstrate their capabilities without having too many definitive strengths come to the fore, consolidating a decade and a half of intriguing, and occasionally compelling experimentation into a manageable 45 minutes. | 2013-04-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Graveface | April 23, 2013 | 6.9 | 96d5d2fa-ebe0-4555-9a80-156226f2d41e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Will Wiesenfeld's latest EP as Baths, Ocean Death, hits you in the head with enormous, blunt impact. Following his most recent record, last year's Obsidian, the EP showcases the singer’s continued focus on mortality and heartbreak. | Will Wiesenfeld's latest EP as Baths, Ocean Death, hits you in the head with enormous, blunt impact. Following his most recent record, last year's Obsidian, the EP showcases the singer’s continued focus on mortality and heartbreak. | Baths: Ocean Death EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19317-baths-ocean-death-ep/ | Ocean Death EP | On Cerulean, Baths’ 2010 debut LP, songs sounded splintered, shot through with percussive interruptions that were unwieldy yet ear-catching. These arrangements made Will Wiesenfeld, then loosely associated with Los Angeles’ Low End Theory scene, stand out in a company of seemingly likeminded beat-heads. Since then, his output has become deceptively simple, retaining the signature characteristics of his earlier work, and Baths' latest EP, Ocean Death, hits you in the head with enormous, blunt impact.
Following Will Wiesenfeld’s most recent record, last year's Obsidian, the EP showcases the singer’s continued focus on mortality and heartbreak. He approaches each subject with the misdirection of an experienced comedian: death is discussed with morbid joy, and heartbreak is met with anger instead of sadness or self-pity. Wiesenfeld’s songwriting remains evocative as ever, and while Ocean Death lacks the thematic cohesion of its predecessor, it’s another beguiling offering from a singer and beatmaker who continues to evolve into a singular artist.
At points, Ocean Death takes cues from dance music, evoking '90s dub techno while slowing things down and revealing a darkly humorous streak. The title track at once resembles Vincent Floyd and early Four Tet; it's a whirring, humming paean to death that sounds eerily ceremonial. A baroque atmosphere lingers throughout the EP, even as Wiesenfeld's subject and sound shifts track-by-track. Wiesenfeld's an admirer of Björk and Kate Bush, artists whose surface approachability offers passageway into complicated songs; on Ocean Death, he’s working in a similar way, adding static prickles to represent a growing contempt for a lover on “Yawn” and burnishing the otherwise dour “Voyeur” with what sounds like harp strings.
Obsidian was informed by Wiesenfeld’s battle with a deadly strain of E. coli, and its lyrics were both gruesome and vulnerable in a way that bred a unique intimacy. For the majority of Ocean Death, he's moved away from the pain and venom that he expressed so vehemently last time. Compare Obsidian's “Earth Death” to the EP’s title track: where “Earth Death” described the fear of a person trapped in his own dying body, “Ocean Death” is gleeful, as Wiesenfeld takes on the role of the ocean, asking for someone to be sacrificed to him. It's a fitting image on a release where Wiesenfeld widens his scope.
There are still hints of Wiesenfeld's scorched-earth songwriting. The cruelest couplet here, on “Yawn”, masterfully combines the mundane and the vicious: “Your steady breath when you’re reading/ I think about our love and its lack of meaning.” Wiesenfeld’s sharp sense of humor pokes through elsewhere, especially in the coy attitude on “Fade White,” which finds him coaxing a companion to join him in the embrace of nonexistence.
Ocean Death scan as less personal than Wiesenfeld’s earlier work, but the more generalized approach suits the music's expanse. He no longer seems obsessed with his own death: the perspective here suggests a broader apocalypse, and in that sense, the EP represents something larger than anything Wiesenfeld's done previously. Dark and painful at points, Ocean Death is still filled with wonder at the largeness of the world and the awesome power of endings. | 2014-05-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anticon | May 7, 2014 | 7.8 | 96e523ec-4c57-484b-9502-18d4c31f7f05 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Released by the Russian label Gost Zvuk, producer Aleksei Nikitin offers a 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by six-month-long St. Petersburg winters. | Released by the Russian label Gost Zvuk, producer Aleksei Nikitin offers a 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by six-month-long St. Petersburg winters. | Nocow: Ledyanoy Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23179-ledyanoy-album/ | Ledyanoy Album | No matter the sanctions, headlines, or politics, there’s a steady trickle of music making its way out of Russia. Platforms like Soundcloud and mega-giant Facebook clone VK allow a mostly unencumbered flow of mp3s from the world’s largest country to western markets, and the Gost Zvuk label is one of the foremost purveyors of underground electronic music seeping into the US.
Familiar names like Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov), OL (Oleg Buyanov) and Piper Spray have already graced Gost Zvuk’s 12 releases to date across their three sister imprints. Gost Zvuk’s releases often feel austere and impenetrable to non-Russophones, each record hand-stamped with Cyrillic text. However hard it is to translate, Gost Zvuk has been a reliable source of heady, otherworldly beats and sketches since their first release in 2014, a four-track EP from one Aleksei Nikitin—better known as Nocow. Now on their seventh release, Gost Zvuk brought Nocow back into the fold with Ledyanoy Album, a shimmering 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by the six-month long St. Petersburg winters.
With a title that roughly translates to the “Ice Album,” Ledyanoy uses a thumping techno pulse—cold, but not quite hypothermic. “Alunogen” rides a breakneck 160bpm beat, like a train running off its tracks, while opener “Stalaktit” (“Stalactite”) lingers in two minutes of feverish polyphonic static. In spite of such a division in tempo and having written some tracks as many as seven years ago, Ledyanoy Album coheres around the rich atmospheres Nocow creates. The delicate, minimal-techno pulse of “Satew” (“Network”) pumps warm blood through veins as frosty bells spin around your head. Cold air is no threat when you’re properly bundled up. In a recent interview, Nocow said the album feels cold, but “not in terms of an absence of emotion. Space is also cold but it is not frightening, more so mysterious.”
This relationship between cold sounds, cosmic textures, and warm feelings pervade Ledyanoy, and the album’s most rewarding moments are also its most emotional. The uplifting flute and punchy tech-house beat of centerpiece “Tayut Ogni” (“Melting Flames”) reflect a sunny Ibiza imagined from midwinter St. Petersburg. The atmospheric electro jam “Uskoreine” (“Acceleration”) similarly benefits from its warm emotional core as the gliding strings and hand drums bring a lively, tropical feel to an empty crater on the moon.
When the clubby beats disappear on Ledyanoy Album, Nocow conjures dense interludes that recall the rich, lo-fi textures of Huerco S. and Aphex Twin’s SAW II. From the slow-motion plunge of “Ledorub” (“Ice Axe”) to the return-to-earth fireball “Plachushchaya Kometa” (“Crying Comet”) and meditative echoes of closing cut “MIR,” the atmospheres are feather-light and all-encompassing. Aside from “MIR,” Nocow seems to have abstained from the inclusion of field recordings in the tracks, leaving the album without any terrestrial reference. Nocow’s kick drums bang his tracks back down to earth, but across Ledyanoy, you’re either being whipped around by the frozen wind, or floating in the abyss.
The artwork for Ledyanoy features a winter landscape by the 19th-century post-impressionist Russian painter Igor Grabar, whose evocative scenes are both static and bursting with life. Grabar himself, like Nocow and countless other Russian artists, was fascinated by the complex and often surreal experience of the Russian winter. “There is nothing to compare with a colorful polyphonic moment,” Grabar once wrote, “such as a winter day full of frost, where color scale is changing every minute, evolving into fantastic shades.” Where one might see a winter’s day frozen, still and white, Nocow weaves a restless and vibrant collage of a frozen land ready to inherit the thaw of spring. | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Gost Zvuk | April 24, 2017 | 7.4 | 96eb98ef-8544-4a10-9504-c5f61b15806d | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | null |
For the final installment in his years-long genre study of house music, the L.A. funk prophet takes a different structural approach while maintaining a minimalist spirit. | For the final installment in his years-long genre study of house music, the L.A. funk prophet takes a different structural approach while maintaining a minimalist spirit. | Dām Funk: Architecture III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dam-funk-architecture-iii/ | Architecture III | In many ways, DāM-FunK’s career has been hyper-focused on a single object. Modern funk is so tied to his name that it’s easy to reduce him to that alone. But the legendary California musician hasn’t been off on an island so much as he’s been developing a neural network of Black music in its many forms. It’s not just that DāM-FunK’s music is influenced by bass funk and boogie and disco. It’s not even that he’s collapsed those genres into one tidy box. It’s that he’s been carving out new ways of intoning and connecting with them through funk.
His latest EP, Architect III, is the third and final installment in a years-long genre study of house music. It may not be a significant milestone or an entirely unexpected turn in his discography, but the Architect series’ experiment brings to the surface what’s often bubbling beneath DāM-FunK’s music: the rabbit holes of sub-genres he famously explores, which often lead to a well of Black electronic music. That gravitation towards rhythmic intersections may be one reason that DāM-Funk’s records are equally timeless and futuristic. (It should come as no surprise that he has frequently cited the future-funk of Prince’s 1999 as the initial spark for his career.) The six pieces on Architect III take a different structural approach to track mechanics and soundscapes than DāM’s usual output, but the minimalist four-on-the-floor songs here aren’t such a departure for him in the grand scheme.
The spacy woosh and ambient soundscape that floats atop “Think” wouldn’t give him away, but the dense, bulbous sound of the bass synth is pure DāM-FunK. That bass is a straight line through the track that leaves nothing in its wake. A few times across the song’s nine-minute stretch, it bubbles out of its groove and, without missing a beat, adds or removes a note that makes it swing momentarily with the same forward momentum. “Night Kruise” is straight-ahead electro-funk, immediately familiar terrain to any DāM-Funk fan, though a more rugged and minimalist version of his standard pocket. It also takes the same balanced approach as “Think,” where the bassline is the center of gravity, and everything else hovers loosely around its orbit.
Other tracks are more aggressive and wear their structures on the outside. Neither “Feel” nor “Shine” scaffold towards or obscure their 4/4 foundations, but they’re not empty beats as much as they are vessels, dancefloor canvases for the shimmering, euphoric synth work that DāM-Funk paints over the top. Those synth sounds—both the watercolor-like ambient effects that blend in the background and the weightier foundational elements—are DāM-FunK’s calling card. It’s tempting to point to the artist’s brushstrokes (the synth sounds) as the end goal. But that would undersell the genius, simple chord progressions and melody writing that DāM-Funk bends those synths towards. DāM-Funk, after all, has never struggled to find substance with his music. One of his extraordinary talents as a DJ is how he invites listeners to share his perspective and look at familiar sounds in a new way or position them in unexpected contexts. Architect III isn’t some foreign object in his catalog; it’s just a different object for his gaze.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Glydezone | April 29, 2021 | 7.3 | 96efc015-30fb-4cf1-afef-4e79fcdc4f4c | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The prolific Kenyan-born, Berlin-based electronic musician departs from his typical use of field recordings, but environmental sound still makes its mark on his immersive, long-form explorations. | The prolific Kenyan-born, Berlin-based electronic musician departs from his typical use of field recordings, but environmental sound still makes its mark on his immersive, long-form explorations. | KMRU: Dissolution Grip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kmru-dissolution-grip/ | Dissolution Grip | KMRU is not the call sign of a radio station, though it could very well be. The calendar of this imaginary broadcaster would vary in format and genre. Shows would change frequently: evolve, morph, disappear. To tune into KMRU would mean being surprised. Some shows would feature lengthy abstract drones, others would venture into the territory of techno, or focus on cerebral minimalism, and some would feature guest instrumentalists and vocalists. Yet for all that unpredictability, to pull up KMRU on your radio dial would invariably entail hearing field recordings—sometimes in their raw, undigested form, but far more frequently augmented by all manner of digital techniques and aesthetic practices.
But of course KMRU isn’t a radio station; KMRU is a lone individual (if an impressively prolific one). That taut quartet of letters is a compression of his family name: Kamaru. First name Joseph, born in Nairobi, Kenya, and relocated to Berlin, Germany, he has over the past few years become a widely referenced figure in contemporary electronic music, excelling in all the sounds mentioned above. Throughout it all, field recordings have been central to his work—quarried for their textural qualities, or sliced and diced into corrosive soundscapes, or laid bare to serve as vicarious sonic travel aids.
But on his new album Dissolution Grip, the first release from his own label, OFNOT, he manages to remove field recordings entirely while nonetheless amplifying their presence. (If KMRU actually were a radio station, this radical shift would suggest a change in management had occurred.) During his studies with artist and composer Jasmine Guffond at Berlin’s Universität der Künste, KMRU developed a technique of rendering field recordings into visual representation, then interpreting those images as graphic scores. Yet despite the absence of bird song, traffic din, and quotidian clatter, KMRU’s emphasis on long-form immersive explorations persists.
The album fades in quickly. Within a split second, the opening track, “Till Hurricane Bisect,” rises to an unsteady hum, like a drum kit’s cymbal resonating to nearby traffic. Halfway through its 15 minutes, you might mistake the piece for the audio of a wartime documentary, due to a hovering, whirring noise, like a helicopter overhead, sweeping the territory. The most chilling sounds, though, are close-ups: little knocks that will have you pausing the music to check if someone is trying to get your attention. His under-recognized gift for melody is evident when a slow monosynth line emerges—a green shoot, a hopeful moment—before it is suffocated by clanging.
On the title track, tonal moments toward the end sound very much like KMRU is singing along, intoning with the synthesized drones. It may simply be a trick of the overtones, or perhaps a deep man-machine empathy. Elsewhere amid its 13 and a half minutes are toothed zithers and euphonious timbres, palpitating murmurs and demanding noises—in other words, many of the emotional cues one might expect from KMRU, just rendered through different means. To listen is to wonder what is being represented, or reconstituted: from sound to image and back to sound again. Here and on the closing track, the 12-minute “Along a Wall,” the music begins to resemble a Sarah Davachi organ piece or a Harry Bertoia sound sculpture—or, more than anything, old-school space music. Having moved to Germany from Kenya, KMRU has tapped into the country’s storied vein of kosmische: rather than field recordings of our planet, an offworld sound born of technology.
The album title does leave a lingering question. What exactly is in a state of “dissolution”? Is he implying that field recordings have loosened their hold on him—and if so, will we listen back to it as a pivotal point in his career, or simply one among many exploratory works? But don’t take Dissolution Grip to be the conclusion of KMRU’s engagement with everyday sound, at least not for now. As early as the end of October, he’ll have yet another album out, Stupor, this time on the Helsinki-based Other Power label. It is packed with ordinary noises transformed into music rich with drama and compositional heft. Its opening track interweaves oscillating purrs with the voices of children at play and the beep of a truck backing up. In other words, classic KMRU. | 2023-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | OFNOT | October 4, 2023 | 7.2 | 96f6a15c-55f7-485d-920e-308fee855f77 | Marc Weidenbaum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-weidenbaum / | |
Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be. | Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be. | Doves: Kingdom of Rust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12904-kingdom-of-rust/ | Kingdom of Rust | The story of Doves puts lie to the old adage that "it's all about the music, man." Because if it really were all about the music, Jez and Andy Williams would be the most famous brothers to come out of Manchester, Jimi Goodwin would be the go-to Britpop duet partner for Jay-Z and Kanye, and all those "Viva La Vida" ringtones you hear going off at Urban Outfitters would be replaced by a digitized symphony of Doves' "Black and White Town".
But as their back-story includes no tabloid-baiting tales of fraternal fisticuffs or marriages to Hollywood starlets, Doves could be the most unassuming, unsung band to have scored back-to-back UK No. 1 album debuts; on North American shores, their ascent has been somewhat hampered by the fact that their opening bands (the Strokes in 2001, the Rapture in 2002) have blown up bigger than the headliner. And unless one of the Doves starts dating Jennifer Aniston anytime soon, it's unlikely that Kingdom of Rust will radically change their stature. Rather, Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why the Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be: their unwavering flair for producing mountainous, Wembley-worthy pop anthems that are nonetheless invested with a palpable degree of grace and humility.
While the past decade has seen the indie kids go dance and the dance kids go indie, Doves' 1998 formation was ironically predicated on an abrupt, 180-degree break from their former house-production guise as Sub Sub, absconding rhythmic propulsion for a space-rock sway. But more than any previous Doves album, Kingdom of Rust is built for motion and acceleration, leading its songs to unexpected and often exhilarating highs: Slow-percolating opener "Jetstream" counts down to lift-off with a hi-hat-triggered techno bed track that gradually intensifies into a tremorous, tribal clatter; "The Outsiders" blasts potholes into the Autobahn with a brawny Krautrock beat. Even when the band seemingly reverts to its familiar astral balladry on "10:03", the reprieve is short-lived-- Goodwin's sweet, moonlit serenade is eventually upended by a creepy chorus of ghostly voices, launching a psych-rock eruption that suddenly transforms the song from Kingdom of Rust's most elegiac moment into its most unsettling one.
Perhaps this restlessness is indicative of certain frustration on Doves' part in seeing their efforts eclipsed by less imaginative, more mawkish Britpop bands, and in turn, a desire to distance themselves from the sad-sack pack; it's hard to imagine the likes of Elbow turning in something quite as fierce and paranoid as "House of Mirrors", a fuzz-soaked stomper punctuated by jarring, bump-in-the-night sound effects. For a band whose Allmusic.com descriptor list includes the terms "earnest," "reflective," and "lush," Doves are just as effective at being aggressive, to the point where Kingdom of Rust's serene turns feel more listless than usual: the dark, orchestral manoeuvre "Birds Flew Backwards" exposes the limitations of Goodwin's haggard voice, while "Spellbound" feels like an echo of previous capsized lullabies like "Sea Song"..
But then some tricks are worth repeating: Doves' most enduring and admirable quality-- from 2000's "The Cedar Room" to 2002's "There Goes the Fear" to 2005's "Black and White Town"-- has been their ability to render everyday urbanity in joyful, fantastical form, and to this canon we can add Kingdom of Rust's "Winter Hill", a paean to innocent, hand-held romance sent skyward on a pillow of Spiritualized swirls. It's just the sort of song that should earn Doves a return appearance to the UK top 10, but such an accomplishment is ultimately a moot point for these guys: They don't need high chart placements to make them feel like they're on top of the world. | 2009-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Heavenly | April 15, 2009 | 7.2 | 96feea2e-910e-4645-85db-1471bf707f7f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The collaborative LP from Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett feels like an overheard discussion between two existential misfits. They sing songs about writing songs, covering each other in the process. | The collaborative LP from Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett feels like an overheard discussion between two existential misfits. They sing songs about writing songs, covering each other in the process. | Courtney Barnett / Kurt Vile: Lotta Sea Lice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courtney-barnett-kurt-vile-lotta-sea-lice/ | Lotta Sea Lice | Philly country-psych zen master Kurt Vile and Australian indie-rock orator Courtney Barnett are at once an odd couple and a perfect union—not so much a mirror image of one another as a negative exposure. Vile rarely rocks out as rambunctiously as Barnett, and Barnett doesn’t ever zone out to the same degree as Vile. And where Barnett can pack an impossible amount of observational narrative detail into a single couplet, Vile often spends his songs lingering on the feeling of lingering. But on a musical level, the two encroach on common twangy turf whenever their respective songs settle into a country-rock groove. And ultimately their differing songwriting styles serve the same function—they’re coping mechanisms against the absurdities and indignities of the modern world, navigating them toward an inner peace that always seems just a little out of reach. (That they just so happen to share first names with the preeminent power couple of ’90s alt-rock only makes their partnership seem all the more pre-destined.)
Their debut collaboration, Lotta Sea Lice, thus feels less like a collection of traditional duets than an overheard discussion between two misfits who just met at an Existentialists Anonymous meeting. Unlike most he-said/she-said pairings, there’s no romantic role-play here, no cheeky entendres, no faux-frisson milked for dramatic tension, no song that’s ever going to replace “Islands in the Stream” or “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” on hipster karaoke-bar playlists. Instead, we’re treated to an intimate, fly-on-the-wall perspective on two peers talking shop about their songwriting methods. They’re the sort of chats that tend to happen behind dressing-room doors or around backstage festival buffets and swag lounges; here, they’re set to a roots-rock soundtrack that’s as casual as the conversation.
But these seemingly mundane interactions are elevated by the audible bonhomie that Vile and Barnett exude when communing with one another. On the opening “Over Everything,” the two compare notes on their peculiar creative processes (he finds inspiration in solitude; she “speed-read[s] the morning news”), practically singing over one another with the excitement of two new acquaintances slowly coming to the realization that they’re actually long lost soul mates. After trading lines, Vile and Barnett sing the final verse in harmony as if sealing their friendship by blood pact, before mischievously steering the song’s breezy acoustic lope into a stormy, twang-tangled extended outro.
But there’s a lot more to Lotta Sea Lice than the mere novelty of hearing two celebrated musicians singing songs about writing songs. “Let It Go” taps into more deep-seated anxieties about staying motivated, with the war between creativity and lethargy reflected in the tension between the song’s slow-dissolve, dew-drop guitar lines and restless, hiccupping drum beat (respectively provided by the Dirty Three dream team of Mick Turner and Jim White). And where the windswept country shuffle “Continental Breakfast” is a charming paean to Vile and Barnett’s long-distance friendship, it’s also a glimpse into the dislocating, Groundhog Day-like effect of touring for a living: “I cherish my intercontinental friendships, we talk it over continental breakfast,” Barnett sings, before adding, “In a hotel/In East Bumble, Wherever/Somewhere on the sphere, around here.”
True to the album’s songwriter-workshop vibe, Vile and Barnett reveal more of themselves through a couple of covers and song swaps that allow them to get out of their own heads and dig deeper into the dirt. Originally recorded by Barnett’s wife Jen Cloher, “Fear Is Like a Forest” is a perfect fit for the album’s psychoanalytical themes, but gives the duo the opportunity to lean into a Crazy Horse grind (given an extra churn by Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa). And with Vile taking the lead, Barnett’s 2013 saloon-blues set piece “Out of the Woodwork” (translated here in proper Vile-speak to “Outta the Woodwork”) acquires a more ominous, black-cloud intensity. But the album’s most arresting moment comes when Barnett seizes Vile’s “Peeping Tomboy” and makes it her own, clearing up the original’s meditative haze for a stark, aching solo-acoustic interpretation, making lines like “I don’t want to work but I don’t want to sit around/All day frowning” feel less like an indecisive slacker’s mantra and more like the desperate pleas of an emotionally paralyzed agoraphobe.
As those self-covers attest, Lotta Sea Lice is very much a middle-ground meeting—there’s none of the wild abandon that marks Barnett’s signature songs, while the duo never approach the hypnotic allure of Vile’s most entrancing work. This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch. (It’s also unconcerned with being a little silly—though, fortunately, “Blue Cheese” boasts enough of a fetching honky-glam swagger to forgive throwaway lines like “I met a girl named Tina/That girl, that girl supplies the reeferina.”) Fitting for two songwriters raised on ’90s alt-rock, Vile and Barnett bid us adieu with a winsome cover of Belly’s 1993 acoustic reverie “Untogether,” which Turner infuses with lysergic, Mazzy Star-like guitar slides. “You can’t save the unsavably untogether,” the duo sing in harmony, obliquely referencing the inherently fleeting nature of their alliance, as their solo careers and family lives inevitably beckon once again. But Lotta Sea Lice is a testament to how two artists can finish each other’s sentences even as they live worlds apart. | 2017-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 12, 2017 | 7.6 | 9709ed2e-00e1-4638-9989-b1eb9b711867 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The unhurried new album from English indie pop trio Saint Etienne centers on a theme of geography. Across 19 tracks, the band offers a day-in-the-life snapshot of their native London commuter towns. | The unhurried new album from English indie pop trio Saint Etienne centers on a theme of geography. Across 19 tracks, the band offers a day-in-the-life snapshot of their native London commuter towns. | Saint Etienne: Home Counties | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23357-home-counties/ | Home Counties | The ninth studio album from English indie pop trio Saint Etienne explicitly references place in every aspect of its presentation, from lyrics to artwork to the title itself—which is English slang for a loosely-defined ring of commuter communities that surround the city of London. For American listeners, the closest comparison would be the outskirts beyond the edges of New York’s outer boroughs or the suburbs in general. But neither of those exactly matches the ambience of a setting that Blur guitarist Graham Coxon once described with an image of blue tit birds pecking for the cream at the top of home-delivered milk bottles.
Like Coxon, Saint Etienne’s chief lyricists—frontwoman Sarah Cracknell and keyboardist Bob Stanley—paint pictures of a seemingly idyllic place that becomes a stultifying enclosure for its inhabitants. With Home Counties, they take listeners on a tour through their native world via 19 tracks that, according to the band, thread together a day-in-the-life snapshot of the entire region. Geography naturally plays a prominent role. “The trains took us away from the smoke,” Cracknell narrates in a spoken passage from the moody, bossa nova- and flute-tinged organ epic “Sweet Arcadia.” Her narration runs “from Fenchurch Street through Limehouse, West Ham, Barking, and over the fields to Laindon, Dunton, Pitsea, Benfleet to Southend on Sea.” Other songs evoke snapshots of trips home across the moor, commutes to and from the town of Whyteleafe “on the rail-replacement bus,” and an apple tree up a winding hill, and so on.
Though the entire album plays on its characters’ relationships to the mundane, Cracknell and Stanley refrain from spelling out much of anything about the lives of those characters. Few things are as universal as mixed feelings towards the place you grew up, but *Home Country’*s message takes a backseat to the music. According to the band, for example, “Whyteleafe” imagines David Bowie if he’d ended up as a working stiff who daydreams out the bus window of “the Paris of the sixties/The Berlin of the seventies.” You’d never know it, though, unless you were told. Likewise, good luck finding the hints of post-Brexit England that Cracknell has recently said the band laced into the new album’s storylines.
After recruiting Cracknell in 1991, Saint Etienne settled into a pattern of framing each album around a theme while also varying their musical approach. This time, the band’s trademark dance element no longer serves as the music’s primary backbone thanks to more fleshed-out arrangements by producer/multi-instrumentalist Shawn Lee. In spots where Lee plays live drums, he provides a solid counterpoint to Stanley and fellow keyboardist/co-founder Pete Wiggs’ electro-thump. Across the board, though, the musicianship shows a level of seasoning and poise that precious few bands manage after becoming comfortable with their identity. It’s that sense of comfort that keeps Saint Etienne grounded when they step out on the album’s many musical limbs.
Saint Etienne have never been the type of band that hits you over the head with attitude or attack. They sound especially loose and unhurried here. You’d expect an album with so many hookless detours to lose steam. Much of “Sweet Arcadia,” for example, consists of keyboard haze that’s devoid of rhythm. And you won’t be tapping your toe to “Angel of Woodhatch,” which closes the album out with dour cello, flute, and soft steel drum percussion. Nevertheless, the sweeping, open choruses of songs like “Magpie Eyes,” “Whyteleafe,” and “Take It All In” steal the show, and those songs are actually supported, not diminished, by the more abstract moments. Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view. | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Heavenly | June 10, 2017 | 7.6 | 9720401f-9c7c-4b7c-a7b9-62b2b9e63e05 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Guided by the inquisitive lyrics of singer Audrey Kang as she narrates the process of searching for self through song, the band’s lush third album feels like a ride-along to the creative process. | Guided by the inquisitive lyrics of singer Audrey Kang as she narrates the process of searching for self through song, the band’s lush third album feels like a ride-along to the creative process. | Lightning Bug: A Color of the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lightning-bug-a-color-of-the-sky/ | A Color of the Sky | Lightning Bug have previously wrestled with the fragile alchemy of the artistic process. On their third album, the billowing A Color of the Sky, singer Audrey Kang zeroes in on a fascination with self-discovery through song, contemplating music’s ability to illuminate deeper truths in both its author and receiver, and artistic labor’s unlikely transfiguration into bliss. Underneath the record’s enveloping shoegaze swoon, these quiet musings bring us close enough to feel the vulnerable intimacy of its creation.
A Color of the Sky is the New York group’s most direct and fully rendered work to date: a beautiful collection of songs paying direct homage to the dreamy atmospheres, curling synthesizers, and blown-out guitars of slow-burning art rock and blistering shoegaze greats: Mazzy Star, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, the Stone Roses. Yet Lightning Bug re-imagine this canon in the context of an entirely new plot. Like Creation Records fan fiction, a ’90s 4AD reboot, or a shoegaze memoir, A Color of the Sky builds upon a familiar palette, reconfiguring foundational sounds in order to reexamine them.
Lyrically, the album amounts to an extended meditation on the struggle inherent in the creative process. “If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell?/Mining for the substance in the dark and precious well/Pour out my convictions till I'm hollow as a bell,” Kang sings on “Song of the Bell.” Her voice’s delicate confidence tells its own story. The record’s driving momentum and spiritual haze simultaneously pit enchantment and disillusionment against each other. The evolution from simple song to sonic universe is almost always made clear by each track’s gradually intensifying production, effectively mimicking this dialogue. Most songs build upward from a quiet voice and an acoustic guitar, drum, or synth into a sea of lulling feedback and fluttering ambience, direct conversations bleeding out into layered fantasies. Each song has a brief moment when the whimsical textures dissipate, and Kang is left alone, looking directly into the mirror.
“When you’re playing or writing a song, you have to enter your own little world to access it. I think that’s another way of ‘coming back to yourself,’” Kang told Stereogum last month. Kang articulates this dance on opener “The Return”: “But as I starе into the heart of my own twisting fire/The songs yet to be written flock around me like a choir.” She reckons with the need for the work of others to communicate her own feelings: “I turn to poetry/I turn to the books I read/To say what I mean,” she whispers on the album’s title track. She interrogates the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, how signifiers can feel more real than what they remind us of: “How colors feel stronger and feelings so true/That even the flowers smell more like you.” Narrating the process of searching for the self through song, A Color of the Sky feels like a surreal ride-along to the creative process. Even so, it can be difficult to make out these lyrics through their quiet exhaled delivery behind a haze of effects, like pulling back a curtain only to reveal a cloud.
Listening to A Color of the Sky can feel, at times, like playing all of your favorite shoegaze, alt-rock, and dream-pop records at once, Zaireeka-style. Moments feel plucked directly from their source, recontextualized as subtle elegies to the loyal comforts of a treasured record collection. From the Bends-era heavy chords of “I Lie Awake” to the Loveless-like harsh whisper-squeals of “Song of the Bell” to the patient Talk Talk tribute “The Chase,” a collage of lush synth tones and fuzzy warmth orbits each track like an atmosphere, evaporating into thin air, and drifting away like a memory.
A Color of the Sky’s immersive textures beckon, while its meta-aware poetry keeps the listener at a distance. Yet Kang’s attempts to demystify the nature of songwriting somehow pull us in closer, providing a glimpse into the process of creation. Lightning Bug’s ability to transform the vulnerability and struggles of producing meaningful art into a gorgeous and deeply affecting record is its own sort of magic trick. A Color of the Sky wears its derivative textures as a superhero might don a form-fitting costume, transforming tales of creative defeat into high-definition triumphs.
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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. | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | July 13, 2021 | 7.6 | 972acdce-f49d-4fd6-b5fa-883e9efc04c7 | Drew Litowitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-litowitz/ | |
The New York nightlife veteran’s new album chronicles pandemic survival in the city and the difficult joy that’s followed. | The New York nightlife veteran’s new album chronicles pandemic survival in the city and the difficult joy that’s followed. | Eli Escobar: The Beach Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eli-escobar-the-beach-album/ | The Beach Album | When was the last time New York dance music was “hot”? Some would probably argue the answer lies in the culture’s initial Brooklynification in the early 2000s, as chronicled on the margins of Lizzie Goodman’s Meet in the Bathroom. Older heads might cite the decade leading up to 9/11 when local rhythm undergrounds, hip-hop and house, became world conquerors. Historically minded utopians often argue the city is always popping, a kernel of truth held onto most tightly by romantic transplants.
When you come of age in New York club culture, as Eli Escobar has, you recognize how connected its ups and downs are to the state of the city. By that measure, everything great happening in those clubs right now (hint: a lot) takes place in the shadow of 2020: the pandemic, the protests, the failed civic response, the officially shuttered nightlife and its roar back to life. All this turmoil is at the heart of Escobar’s The Beach Album, which got its title because the forty-something New Yorker recorded it in a house on the city’s Ramones-immortalized Rockaway Beach, where he and his family spent lockdown. Here is not only the period’s trauma, but the deeply complicated joy taking place afterwards.
An Upper West Side kid who began playing records, throwing parties, and making beats as a late-’80s/early-’90s teen, Escobar has been a presence across the city’s clubbing spectrum ever since. His career began in the dusk of hip-hop’s golden age and hit professional cruise while he paid his dues as an all-night-selecting worker bee during Manhattan’s bottle service days and blog-house phase. Now Escobar is one of the city’s most popular and hardworking DJs, sidestepping the festival and global circuit to gig locally several times a week: playing specialty big-room house or techno at queer party nights, street-soul and classic hip-hop on hotel rooftops, or a signature ’80s-heavy “sad boy electro” at Bushwick dives. At Tiki Disco, the decade-long outdoor summer institution he throws with DJ Lloyd and Andy Pry, the sound is an endless string of iconic dance tracks for packed Sunday afternoon crowds. The selections are egalitarian, the crowd-reading is precise, and the layered mixing superlative.
Escobar brings this sociological awareness and cultural fluency to The Beach, the latest and best in a series of sample-heavy mixtapes he produced during a creative burst early in the pandemic. 2020’s There Are Ghosts Everywhere in New York City grafted soul music onto community monologues and throwback interviews with neighborhood residents, while 2021’s Lullabies for a Sleeping City was a downtempo beat-tape on the theme of quiet urbanity and resilience. Though dancefloors were shuttered at those times, Escobar never stopped making songs for movement and release: grimy funk-house loops, pop-techno compositions, modular synth experiments. What ties The Beach together is how its tracks—which in Escobar’s eclectic style runs the gamut from hip-hop interludes to epic Balearic fantasias—accept the weight of the pandemic without getting swallowed by it, the context deepening the grooves. Another generation’s death disco—or, more precisely, Midtown 120 Blues—comes into view.
The album sounds like both a diary of shut-down seclusion and a strangely hopeful vision of living through it. The endurance is centered in the myriad of sampled voices populating The Beach, many of them joyful chops from gospel records and older raps, bringing a classic Prince Paul vibe to the chronicle. Some are overt in how they address the circumstances. The female singer on a short, electronic-dub-heavy ‘80s R&B groove entitled “If It Takes a Miracle” makes her point by finishing the title’s sample line (“...to survive this time”). The vocal loop over the deep, minimalist drum-machine freestyle, “Findaway2day,” insists that “you’ve got find a way baby,” as keyboards raise the harmonies skyward, an intermittent trumpet couplet strikes an anthemic pose, and the pops of vinyl underneath collapse the timeline continuum, crashing all the survival crises bore by the various dance communities Escobar serves into a wonderfully uplifting evocation.
Other voices taunt and bubble and babble, providing the irreverence that good-time dance tracks require. When the male rapper on opening bass-sequencer groover “Daywun” carries on about the need to “repeat the funk-funk-funk—you got to,” it seems less a sonic reflection of when all the indoor-days bled into one another than an age-old call to move. No interpretation is necessary of Escobar’s exquisite vocal chopping on “Down All Day,” a disco-techno monster whose sound harkens back to Carl Craig and Lil Louis classics; its wordless skat functioning as the driver and the ride. “Down All Day” hints at the chaos of letting yourself go, while clearly presenting the loose-joint constraints which great DJs can wind tightly into mixes of rhythm that keep a crowd up. Eli Escobar knows that this is how you honor the city’s tradition without becoming a prisoner of it. To bring that beat back, to make it hot again, the first thing you have to do is survive. | 2023-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Off Track | September 20, 2023 | 7.8 | 973151e8-978f-4e03-9bdc-2b5e40c34cbf | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
The synth-pop group offers a remarkably assured debut, with 10 pristine pieces that eschew dramatics for concision. | The synth-pop group offers a remarkably assured debut, with 10 pristine pieces that eschew dramatics for concision. | Nation of Language: Introduction, Presence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nation-of-language-introduction-presence/ | Introduction, Presence | After Ian Devaney’s first band—the polished, punk-tinged rockers Static Jacks—fell apart in the early 2010s, the singer sought comfort in recreating the synth pop of his youth. What started as a nostalgia trip would eventually morph into a proper band, expanding to include ex-Static Jack member Michael Sue-Poi and synth player Aidan Noell. The band took its time, trickling out singles piecemeal before finally releasing their debut album Introduction, Presence, four years after forming.
The time put in shines through; Introduction, Presence is a remarkably self-assured debut, 10 pristine pieces of synth pop that eschew dramatics for concision. Songs like “Rush & Fever” and “On Division St” reach the glory of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and The Human League through an attention to craft that many bands with the same influences fail to notice. The album is full of miniaturized synth flourishes and clear, crisp drum beats that were probably fussed over for months until they came out just right. Sue-Poi’s bass lines are the secret weapon, having learned Peter Hook’s lesson that the bass can be a powerful melody instrument.
Despite the shimmer, Introduction, Presence is a decidedly forlorn work, haunted by the ever-present specter of past mistakes and accumulated hardship. “I’m wasting away/I took the long road home and it never paid off for me,” Devaney sings in the album opener “Tournament” in a downcast voice that echoes through the entire record. Yet while nostalgia and longing inform the album, they never consume it, and the band knows when to push forward. “Turn the pages/Try to find another way,” he sings achingly at the end of“The Motorist,” desperate to escape this moment in his life.
Introduction, Presence doesn’t offer any great reinventions. Notes of Altered Images, early Depeche Mode, or even modern contemporaries like Black Marble are impossible to ignore while listening. But their understanding of the genre they’re working in—its workings, tropes, and trappings—is so refined that they are able to boil it down to its barest essence, saving catharsis for just the right moment.
That moment arrives with the album’s final song, “The Wall and I.” It shines as their most anthemic cut through just a few well-placed, dramatic keyboard notes and some unexpected guitar chords. Devaney sounds just as trapped in his circumstances as he always does, but for once it feels like he might transcend them as well. “I stared up the wall and he said/‘I don’t know’ is not an answer to the question,” he wails in the chorus, realizing he can no longer hide in indecision. Not necessarily a comforting epiphany, but fitting for an album built on making peace with the past, and taking small steps to something grander. | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | May 28, 2020 | 7.4 | 97374f7b-cd77-4758-b480-f7afd633f487 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | |
The Chicago percussionist, bandleader, and composer offers a moving, frequently ebullient album that doesn’t shy away from the terrors of America’s past and present while managing, somewhat incredibly, to find hope in the country’s future. | The Chicago percussionist, bandleader, and composer offers a moving, frequently ebullient album that doesn’t shy away from the terrors of America’s past and present while managing, somewhat incredibly, to find hope in the country’s future. | Kahil El’Zabar: America the Beautiful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kahil-elzabar-america-the-beautiful/ | America the Beautiful | Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was an American when he rearranged the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He had left Paris in 1939 and was in the process of establishing residency in the U.S. when he decided to put his spin on the national anthem of his new country, where he would end up living for the rest of his life. His 1941 arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner”—which landed him in mild trouble with the Boston police—premiered in the early days of World War II. It keeps the melody intact, but he shades it with subtle blue harmonies that tweak the song’s strident sense of empowerment, rounding into a finale that, while still triumphant, is somewhat cracked. America, in Stravinsky’s telling, is weaker than it insists, but it still has the capacity for good. It takes less than 15 seconds with Kahil El’Zabar’s America the Beautiful to understand that he feels the exact same way.
The Chicago percussionist, bandleader, and composer came up through the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, serving as its chairman from 1975 to 1983, and he would go on to play with everyone from Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp to Dizzy Gillespie and Cannonball Adderley. America the Beautiful, his second album of 2020—following June’s excellent Spirit Groove—is built around his rearrangement of the hallowed title track. It’s a moving, frequently ebullient album that doesn’t shy away from the terrors of America’s past and present while managing, somewhat incredibly, to find hope in the country’s future.
For El’Zabar, “America” begins with the drum. Specifically, the hand-pounded pulse of an African drum that sets the pace for his ensemble, which includes trumpeter Corey Wilkes, cellist Tomeka Reid, and the late baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, who makes his final recorded appearance here. They set the familiar melody into place, but they immediately saw holes in its bright optimism with uneven, uncomfortable harmonies. The symbolism is obvious, but no less moving for it: the notion of America’s beauty has been wounded, but crucially, it’s still afloat. Like John Coltrane’s quartet expanding the boundaries of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” the ensemble takes us far away from the song’s founding idea, only to return to it with a refreshed vision. That the melody is muddier and more difficult to make out when the group states it again near the end of the song is only part of the point; one gets the sense that, for El’Zabar, what matters most is that it persists.
“America the Beautiful” isn’t the only standard El’Zabar reconstructs. Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” here titled “Sketches of an Afro Blue,” is heralded by the string section, who recite the melody as if they’re making a dire announcement. The percussion nearly goes out of sync, wobbling on the edge of phasing out and keeping things from getting too comfortable, while Reid flies all over her cello’s fingerboard, spraying notes and nearly gasping into harmonics. There’s a relentless emotional heaviness to El’Zabar’s composition that’s virtually invisible in the original. Their take on Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s canonical “Express Yourself,” however, explodes like a box of compressed sunshine. While Bluiett’s baritone puckers and shouts, Reid and violinist Samuel Williams saw at the rhythm like they’re playing with a string band, connecting a timeless anthem of Black joy to music being made by Black people in this country over a hundred years ago.
But El’Zabar’s intermixing of brightness and lamentation is at its best in the original “Freedom March.” An eight-minute showcase for Bluiett, it unwinds slowly, sounding like both halves of a jazz funeral happening at the same time, the dirge and the celebration coexisting in a way that’s coherent, but not easy. Bluiett struts alongside the ensemble as they make their way through the tune, punching out deep runs with a chortle and pinching into a high scream. He’s all over the place: He beckons from an adjacent alleyway, then falls into place and plays alongside his bandmates for a few moments before growing restless and popping back out again. Taken together, it all suggests that the titular freedom means not only the freedom of expression, but the freedom to keep marching, to keep pushing, to find within confusion and anger—and joy and beauty—the raw materials needed to build something new.
Which makes the drum that kicks off the album feel even more auspicious. Throughout America the Beautiful’s frenetic explorations, it’s the percussion that keeps the ensemble grounded. El’Zabar, who performs most of it, plays in a way that’s intricate and complex, lacing together a number of interwoven sounds sourced from African music, Latin jazz, and funk. At times it feels like an argument for Black culture as both a consistent force in this country and a rebuke to the chaotic excesses of white supremacy’s most demonstrative displays of power. If we understand the word “politics” to mean the way we organize our mutual action, this is explicitly political music: “Now’s the time for us to collectively invoke a confluence of trust and imagination that will enlighten a future path towards ethical humanity,” El’Zabar writes in the album’s statement of purpose. It seems strange, in the waning months of 2020, to hear someone express hope for our country’s future—to suggest that anything like “ethical humanity” is still possible on a societal level. But then again, Americans have been guiding their country toward the light since the days of its broken birth. Most just weren’t called “American” at the time.
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. | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Spiritmuse | November 2, 2020 | 7.8 | 973bf449-0fb3-498e-b70b-876f075602eb | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a six-song EP from 1992, a record that alchemized the sound and provocative aggression of Nine Inch Nails. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a six-song EP from 1992, a record that alchemized the sound and provocative aggression of Nine Inch Nails. | Nine Inch Nails: Broken EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nine-inch-nails-broken-ep/ | Broken EP | Let’s begin, as we must, with death by cock and ball torture. A man walks into a dark and grimy basement decorated like a makeshift temple. He offers a rose to a ramshackle altar, then lights a candle. As he undresses, the camera lingers on each piece of his suit, then notices the barbed wire tattooed above his clean-shaven genitals. He climbs into the chair in the center of the room, purified, an offering. The motorized chair clenches around his body like a fist. Needles pierce his hand, and he groans in pleasure; a robotic claw pinches at his stomach, his scrotum, his dick. He moans again, in ecstasy. Then the machine and its appendages disembowel him completely and feed the slurry of his guts through a metal sphincter, which, if I may, draws to mind the harmony between a camera lens and an anus. So much for Bob. Trent stands up from the spot where he’s been watching in the waiting room and enters the same chamber of worship. He’s next.
This is “Happiness in Slavery,” the revolting, hypnotizing, beautiful video that accompanied Nine Inch Nails’ Broken EP in 1992. The man fed to the machine is played by Bob Flanagan, a performance and video artist who lived with cystic fibrosis and made gruesomely provocative art from his station inside the late 20th century’s techno-medical apparatus. He was likely best known for nailing the head of his penis to a board in front of a live audience to Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”; that’s how Trent Reznor heard of him, anyway. They made a natural pair: the scrappy, squalling poster boy for the newly mainstreamed industrial movement and the professional masochist who carried on in the tradition of COUM Transmissions, the violent and depraved performance-art collective that gave rise to Throbbing Gristle, the first band to claim “industrial” as a descriptor for themselves. The sound of metal chewing meat and actual metal chewing actual meat fused together again.
By the time he recorded Broken, Reznor had gotten everything he’d ever wanted and hated it. He wrought a lucrative career from a childhood fascination with music; he also seethed about the indignities of Reagan-era capitalist machinery only to find himself its shiniest new cog. Like his contemporary Kurt Cobain, Reznor came of age gagging at the pap that slicked MTV, the tired rock bands with aerated hair surfing the last dregs of glam. He grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where nothing happened. As a kid, he latched onto the juvenile antics of shock rock outfits like Alice Cooper and KISS that he saw on TV and suggested that something, somewhere, might be happening. Eventually, he found his way to the Chicago-based industrial label Wax Trax! and their mainstay act Ministry, who taught him that songs could be hideous and irresistible at the same time.
After a fleeting college stint, Reznor dropped out in 1984 and moved to Cleveland, where he briefly suffered the humiliation of playing in a new wave band. He quit that, too, and scooped up a job cleaning toilets at a local recording studio in exchange for a little money and a lot of free studio time. He taught himself MIDI and began scratching out the jagged synthpop demos that would ultimately mutate into Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine.
Released on the independent label TVT, Pretty Hate Machine moved exponentially more copies than any other record in the proto-industrial scene. It helped that some minor controversy attended NIN’s first single: While recording the video for “Down In It,” a weather balloon filming an aerial shot got away from the crew and ended up in the hands of the cops, who took it for a snuff film. The authorities tracked down the very much alive Reznor, who either got the footage back or refilmed it. Though you can now see the uncut version, MTV ultimately axed the shot of Reznor lying completely dead on the pavement, glooped up in corn starch that suggested early-stage decomposition.
The fresh FBI file may have boosted Nine Inch Nails’ reputation, but the songs powered themselves: all hard edges and taut screams, galvanized by production assistance from British producer Flood (known for his work with Depeche Mode and Soft Cell) and Adrien Sherwood and Keith Leblanc of the New York industrial hip-hop ensemble Tackhead. With these new collaborators, Nine Inch Nails coiled the clang and scrape of Skinny Puppy and Front 242 tightly around hooks as delicious as anything in Duran Duran’s chart-swallowers—a winning contrast. Reznor’s rural American alienation glittered in cellophane. It turned out there was a massive untapped market of teenagers who felt the same frustration and despair, who found themselves stranded in the hinterlands of life, who hated everything but loved to dance about it. Pretty Hate Machine sold 350,000 copies; then Nine Inch Nails thrashed their way through a daytime slot at the inaugural Lollapalooza in 1991, and the number swelled to over a million.
It all came so close to never happening. When Reznor first delivered Pretty Hate Machine to TVT, label head Steve Gottlieb scoffed. He took the sour, abrasive collection for a failure, the complete deflation of the promise he’d heard in Reznor’s demos. Gottlieb almost canned the release, then decided to put it out anyway, and then found himself with a megalith under his roof. Still, the windfall didn’t sway him. Rather than allow Reznor the creative leeway he craved, Gottlieb boxed him in further. He tried to push NIN toward his own vision of a commercially successful band: chipper remixes designed to play in the worst possible clubs, lazy music videos decorated in hot, anonymous women. The conflict reached a fever pitch when TVT buried a collaboration with Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker, a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut” recorded under the moniker 1000 Homo DJs, after Gottlieb held Reznor’s performance rights for ransom.
“I hate them,” Reznor said of his label in a 1991 interview with the Boston Globe. “I thought maybe we’d prove ourselves and they’d leave us alone, but it’s turned into, ‘OK, you’ve sold this many records, but you could sell—well, add a 0 to it—if you use this producer or do this house mix.’ What are you talking about!? That’s the mentality I’m dealing with.” Deep in the music industry, moving units, and amassing fans, Reznor found out that a shitty boss was a shitty boss no matter what kind of job you had.
Nothing seemed to motivate him so much as an adversary. Instead of combing down the bristles on his music, Reznor took it darker. After Lollapalooza wrapped, he set out on a second, secret tour, recording songs under aliases at studios across the country with the full-band, guitar-heavy sound he’d honed onstage. He sluiced the bile he’d been fermenting into tighter, hotter, toothier songs than he’d ever written before. The thin layer of arch coolness that protected Pretty Hate Machine flaked away, leaving a raw, festering core. He collected this burst of work under the name Broken, and put it out as a six-song EP (with two hidden bonus tracks—a cheeky cover of an early Adam and the Ants song, “Physical,” and a fleshing-out of a track Reznor had recorded with the industrial supergroup Pigface, “Suck”). It served as a kiss-off to TVT as he ditched them for Jimmy Iovine’s new label, Interscope, and launched his own incubator imprint, Nothing.
Broken amplified the elements that sucked listeners into NIN’s chaotic live shows, hoisting the guitars in the mix and deepening the beats with a smattering of acoustic drums. Reznor went nastier, figuring he might shake the specter of pop success. Instead of derailing, he only gained momentum. In October of 1992, Broken debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart while Pretty Hate Machine hung around at No. 173, three years after its release. In 1993, the Recording Academy awarded NIN’s first Grammy, in the Best Metal Performance category, to the single “Wish.” (Three years later, their mud-covered Woodstock ’94 performance of “Happiness in Slavery” would score a trophy in the same category; NIN hasn’t bagged a Grammy since.) The deeper Reznor dug, the deeper the world burrowed. At the daybreak of the ’90s, his misery was a lightning-hot commodity.
But Broken didn’t just moan. Alongside the inflammatory anger and paralyzing dejection, Reznor kept his keen ear for pleasure. He found the erotic charge in surrendering to the fullness of your pain, the frisson in the place where suffering obliterates the ego. Sex—real sex, the improvisational, scriptless, scary kind, not just the mechanical performance of studied acts—works the same way. It storms you until all the “you” washes away. With Broken, in the grind of “Last” and the shrieks of “Gave Up,” Reznor split new layers of skin into a thundering eroticism. These songs would pave the way for “Closer,” the brutally romantic single off of NIN’s 1994 watershed The Downward Spiral, an album that would, in fact, flow abundantly through radio and MTV alike.
To accompany the Broken EP, Reznor worked with directors Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle’s in-house synth pervert and half of Coil), Eric Goode, Serge Becker, and Jon Reiss to make a series of videos, each more prurient than the last, all of which make the “Down In It” video look like a Pixar short. The full sequence would come to be known as the Broken movie; though NIN never officially released it, Reznor passed around VHS copies to his inner circle, each marked with a unique glitch so he would know the source of any bootlegs. It circulated like a snuff film, copy to grainy copy; years later, Reznor would leak it himself as a hidden digital download on NIN’s website.
In the video for “Wish,” the only airable segment from the series, Reznor flails in a sea of starving men, beautiful under Sleazy’s lens. Latex opera gloves cling to his biceps; fishnets crisscross his pasty legs. He scrapes out a distorted guitar riff and screams about fist-fucking. Sleazy fixes a lascivious gaze on the scene. Men grope each other, glistening; they reach for Reznor through the bars of the cage that enclose him and his band, grabbing at his long, greasy hair as he staggers around the stage.
For over 20 years, starting with that first Lollapalooza, “Wish” has been a staple of the band’s sets. Live videos from the ’91 tour show Reznor in a similar stance as he makes his way onstage: slouched and hobbling, dusted in corn starch and streaked with grime, bent over the mic with his forehead to the floor, rolling around in torn glitter tights and creased combat boots, almost weeping. Rather than lead the crowds that have gathered for him, rather than stand upright and fling his arms wide and bask in their love like a rock star, he makes himself an offering. He submits.
He does the same in an alternate, safe-for-work video for “Gave Up,” filmed in the house where Charles Manson’s followers murdered Sharon Tate (and where Reznor would complete much of The Downward Spiral), featuring a baby-faced Marilyn Manson in the accompanying band. Reznor cradles himself as he whispers into the microphone in the middle of a dimly lit studio setup. It’s got to be the first rock video to show someone playing an Apple computer; the track name “Fuck you steve” flashes on the screen just before the band erupts into the first pre-chorus.
Reactionary glosses of Nine Inch Nails position them as little more than an expression of male power jutting out into a submissive culture, a plume of hot violence that makes impressionable teens do terrible things. More than anything else in Reznor’s catalog, Broken troubles that story. NIN found power in the venting of rage, sure; plenty of fans attached their own frustrated anger to what Reznor spewed. But those vents let in as much air as they let out steam. Throughout Broken, apertures appear: words whispered close to the ear into near silence, fractured and terrified screams. Reznor discovered his falsetto on Broken and found it to be a bidirectional valve, a vulnerable emission. As “Happiness in Slavery” thunders to a close, he repeats the song’s title over and over. “Happiness” comes out as a defeated whisper; “slavery” as a cascade of corroded, enfeebled shrieks—the last gasp of the mutilated, not the victory call of the mutilator. He twisted his voice into a stark departure from his idols and mentors in Ministry. In place of Al Jourgensen’s blockaded sneer, Reznor pressed a bleeding fissure into the wire.
“Smashed up my sanity/Smashed up integrity/Smashed up what I believed in/Smashed up what’s left of me,” Reznor squeals in that same pathetic register on “Gave Up,” his voice digitally lacerated and mixed with the vocalizations of his beloved golden labrador, Maise. “After everything I’ve done, I hate myself for what I’ve become.” Over a brisk one-two step—a rhythm you could almost skip to—Reznor collapses at the bottom of his fully realized aspirations, finding them as hollow as anything else. Broken occurs at that pivotal point where self-loathing softens into self-exploration, where the nadir of your suffering both obliterates the known world and expands its borders. It made way for the ugliness of The Downward Spiral, but it also cleared space for its tremendous and spare beauty: the painful sweetness of “Hurt,” the impossible delicacy of “A Warm Place.” Broken jettisoned venom and turned over newly fertile soil.
Like the monolithic albums on either side of it, Broken sold more than a million copies. Its slim volume towered over the decade that followed, as the seat of the beleaguered outsider became one of the readiest places to park a megaphone, as industrial metal thinned into Korn and curdled into Limp Bizkit in parallel streams. Turgid masculinity ruled MTV again, drained of its eroticism, all openings walled off. But there was a moment, captured in Broken, when the world’s leading industrial pop star was a sub for the masses, laying bare his worst impulses and then chasing them all the way down the pipes to searing, mangled bliss. The corollary to “fuck everything” is “there has to be more than this.” And maybe the “more” of the world is sealed by a door you have to bite open. | 2023-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nothing / TVT / Interscope | May 21, 2023 | 7.6 | 97440b8e-ae30-4274-9feb-657d5dbf19f5 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
On his masterful new album, Dan Bejar moves like a ghost through his familiar and inscrutable universe. | On his masterful new album, Dan Bejar moves like a ghost through his familiar and inscrutable universe. | Destroyer: Have We Met | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/destroyer-have-we-met/ | Have We Met | Spend enough time listening to Destroyer and the world will start to resemble a Dan Bejar song—when a bon vivant slips in an unexpected curse word; when a friend tries to place a melody by humming the guitar part; when a common phrase twists into a surrealist riddle via an AutoCorrect mishap. Since he first emerged in the mid-’90s, Bejar has reflected the world in these abstract and broken-sounding ways: “Sing the least poetic thing you can think of,” he recently said of his preferred method of songwriting, “and try to make it sound beautiful.” As cerebral as Bejar’s work can be, the state of mind with which his music is most commonly associated is drunkenness: the predilection to spew nonsense, the bravado in convincing the room you’re fine, even as you spill wine all over yourself.
While he once accompanied these gestures with rambly, glammy folk-rock, Bejar has spent the past decade mining the milder tones of sophisti-pop, soft rock, and adult contemporary: genres so removed from youthful abandon that even speaking their names has a somewhat sobering effect. It’s music that feels connected to middle age, and Bejar has navigated his 40s using its muted horns and lush synths to accompany visions as fragmented and nightmarish as ever. On 2011’s Kaputt, a career peak that served as an unlikely commercial breakthrough, these textures might have seemed like a left turn; by now, it’s just where we expect to find Bejar—in luxurious settings, skeptical, eyeing the exits.
Compared to 2017’s ken, a gothic-sounding record distinguished by chillier tones and pared-down lyrics, his masterful new album Have We Met sets a larger canvas. Produced by bandmate John Collins, the music is sweeping and bold and surprising. “Cue Synthesizer” is the first Destroyer song to feature a prominent slap-bass part; the title track is so wispy and vaporous that Bejar’s voice never actually appears in it. Same goes for the closing moments of the record: a hellish coda of buzzing samples, like a demonic YouTube tab left open by mistake. “Just look at the world around you,” goes a pivotal lyric. “Actually, no, don’t look!” The music is filled with similar retractions: It’s his most inviting, embracing record, until suddenly it’s not.
The more elaborate and professional his arrangements have grown, the more Bejar has withdrawn. His presence has grown so dry and distant that there are moments when Have We Met has the ghostly quality of a posthumous release. Coming from a songwriter who litters his lyric sheets with exclamation marks, the words to “The Man in Black’s Blues” are downright haiku-esque. (“When you’re looking for Nothing/And you find Nothing/Is more beautiful/Than anything you ever knew.”) In the extraordinary “Kinda Dark,” he delivers his apocalyptic verses in a distracted whisper over subdued electronic scenery. When the drums hit and the electric guitar attacks out of nowhere, it feels genuinely startling: the appearance of the looming threat he’s been slowly backing away from the whole time.
This sense of unease spans the record, making uptempo songs like the glittery “It Just Doesn’t Happen” and the soaring “Crimson Tide” sound like dispatches from a doomed adventure. Other songs exist in the cloud of smoke that’s left behind. “The Television Music Supervisor” is one of them—an eerie, ambient ballad narrated from the deathbed of a music-industry gatekeeper, haunted by regret. It’s not the first time that Bejar has addressed someone in his field—“Don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves,” he once told his critics—but its spectral atmosphere makes it feel like a different, darker type of in-joke. “I can’t believe...” go its closing lyrics, fading out on an unresolved final scene.
As of late, Bejar seems to think a lot about getting older. “I feel like the time-release poison could still be inside of me,” he once joked. “I’m ready to completely lose sight of all that is good.” The favored concerns of aging writers—wisdom, directness, sentimentality—remain anathema to his work. Other than the proudly synthetic music that accompanies it, what separates Bejar’s writing from peers like John Darnielle or Bill Callahan is a refusal to follow any kind of emotional arc. You don’t relate to a Destroyer song so much as you find yourself mysteriously pulled inside of it, drawing connections and finding meaning on your own. The effect is elusive but visceral. “It’s called love,” he sings in “University Hill,” moments after listing, one-by-one, the scattered remains of a hacked-up body.
And yet, he can still aim for the heart. In “The Raven,” one of the best songs he’s ever written, the tone feels personal, even nostalgic. That is, it’s precisely the kind of thing we expect from our master songwriters nearing 50—his own twisted way of saying: seize the day while you still can. “Come out, come out, wherever you are/But you don’t/The dead don’t come out,” he cautions. A chilling enough message on its own, but then he continues: “The dead twist and shout/In an invisible world/The Grand Ole Opry of Death is breathless.... Breathless.” Now, we’re back in his domain—an unlikely chorus, a couple puns—as he sweeps us from the world we know toward some strange afterlife, where the audience is as bewildered as us and the artist on stage has never sounded more at home.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge / Dead Oceans | January 31, 2020 | 8.5 | 9749c248-9eaa-4a5e-a7df-acdaa3a17553 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The follow-up to 2002's Title TK-- a tentative first step back into the public eye after nearly a decade of inactivity-- Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley Deal proudly flaunting their bull-headed perseverance and their familiar arsenal of quirks, hiccups, sputters, and enthusiasm. | The follow-up to 2002's Title TK-- a tentative first step back into the public eye after nearly a decade of inactivity-- Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley Deal proudly flaunting their bull-headed perseverance and their familiar arsenal of quirks, hiccups, sputters, and enthusiasm. | The Breeders: Mountain Battles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11367-mountain-battles/ | Mountain Battles | It's generally bad critical form to reference the record company-supplied bio in a review, but the one-pager accompanying the Breeders' Mountain Battles is worth mentioning: It's written by Josephine Wiggs, who played bass on the band's first two albums but left in the late 1990s while the Breeders withered in a seemingly interminable state of inertia. That Wiggs has resurfaced after a decade to play the role of Breeders cheerleader speaks volumes about the kind of faith and goodwill Kim and Kelley Deal have accrued over the years, despite a career that's nearly derailed on more than a few occasions due to the sisters' well-documented substance abuse and the group's peculiar recording habits and revolving-door rhythm sections. After hearing Mountain Battles, Wiggs admits her reaction was: "Why aren't I playing on this album?" Her excitement is genuine-- Mountain Battles is indeed the best Breeders album since 1993's Last Splash.
Which, of course, isn't saying a helluva lot, given that the 15 years in between have produced but one official record: 2002's Title TK, whose nine-years-in-the-waiting build-up was far too great a weight for its brittle, often sluggish low-fi pop oddities to withstand. In lieu of a return-to-form, we simply had to be content with the fact that the Breeders had returned at all. However, in contrast to all the uncertainty that hung over the band pre-Title TK, the Breeders approached Mountain Battles from a position of relative stability, with bassist Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Medeles, and producer Steve Albini all returning for another go; the six-year gap between that album and Mountain Battles is easily accounted for by Kim's entry into rehab in 2002 and the subsequent Pixies reunion tours that kept her on the road for the better part of 2004-05. But true to the Breeders tradition of tellingly apropos album titles (the hermetically sealed claustrophobia of 1990's Pod, the breakthrough/burn-out of Last Splash, the work-in-progress feel of Title TK), Mountain Battles suggests that all those Pixies paychecks don't make the Breeders' business any easier. If Title TK was a tentative first step back into the public eye, Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley proudly venerating the Breeders' battle-scarred history and bull-headed perseverance.
Like Last Splash's "New Year", Mountain Battles' "Overglazed" is more intro than proper opener: Over an ascendant surge of swirling backward-looped guitars and crashing drums, Kim repeats the song's lone lyric-- "I can...I can feel it!"-- like someone who's just woken from a coma. Or, in her case, it's someone who's reconnected with a muse that only seems to appear every half-decade or so, which would explain her tendency to linger on a feeling: "Night of Joy" plays up the contrast between its sweet, girl-group melody and the song's hauntingly absent ambience (much like Kim's star cameo on Sonic Youth's 1995 creeper "Little Trouble Girl"); the optimistic rebirth narrative of "We're Going to Rise" playfully jibes with the song's lethargic waltz rhythm, as if slowing down the action lets her better savor the moment of peace.
With such deliberately spare presentation, Mountain Battles takes some time to warm up to (and new-wave toss-offs like "Bang On" still carry traces of Title TK's song-sketch incompletion), but then Kim and Kelley Deal's pretty sing-song harmonies and affable Ohio charm can distract us from how difficult the Breeders' music can be-- both for them as players and us as listeners. By this point, that very sense of struggle is intrinsic to the Breeders sound: It's pretty amazing that after all those years of line-up changes and aborted recording sessions, the Breeders pretty much sound exactly the same as they ever did, the quirks, hiccups, and sputters once attributed to a certain amateurish enthusiasm sounding ever more like purposeful components of their bubblegum bricolage. (See: the basement-Zeppelin chug of "No Way".)
No, there isn't a "Cannonball" here, but the buoyant, bass-driven strutter "Walk It Off" makes for a dandy companion piece to Pod's "Only in 3's"; Kelley's power-pop pick-me-up "It's the Love" gleams with a "Divine Hammer" shimmer; and the sisters' voices have never sounded finer than on the country-harmony duet "Here No More". But Mountain Battles' air of revitalization-- the thing that has Wiggs wishing she had her old job back-- is characterized not just by these straight pop shooters, but the apparent glee with which the Deals toss out the curveballs: the Teutonic-tongued oompa-loompa punk of "German Studies", the Spanish-sung slow dance "Regalame Esta Noche" and the bizarro rumble-in-the-jungle group chant of "Istanbul". Once upon a time, bands used to model their careers on copping the Breeders' moves (see: Salt, Veruca). Mountain Battles' greatest success is it makes that very idea seem once again like both an admirable ideal, and an unachievable one. | 2008-04-09T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-09T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 9, 2008 | 7.5 | 974ac9cf-2a41-45dd-b1e1-54c762fb891d | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The solo debut of the Los Angeles composer and Weeknd associate is a sobering, often surreal film reel of fleeting joy, made by a talent whose only agenda is to capture the sounds in his head. | The solo debut of the Los Angeles composer and Weeknd associate is a sobering, often surreal film reel of fleeting joy, made by a talent whose only agenda is to capture the sounds in his head. | Benny Bock: Vanishing Act | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-bock-vanishing-act/ | Vanishing Act | “The Weeknd Producer Goes Solo” would be a nice headline for Benny Bock’s latest album. The Los Angeles keyboardist and composer wrote and produced the Dawn FM standout “Here We Go … Again” with The Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston and a handful of songwriting professionals. Bock’s melodic top line could have been lifted off any classic Motown record and is wide enough to sustain both Beach Boy cooing and a Tyler, the Creator verse. To describe his synths as “silky” is a testament to their comfort and quality, not some cheap shorthand for ’70s R&B. Dawn FM is a sad listen, but Bock helps heighten it to something timeless. However, Bock’s solo debut, the ambient jazz-leaning instrumental cycle Vanishing Act, sounds little like The Weeknd. Vanishing Act is not a playful record. It is a sobering, often surreal film reel of fleeting joy, made by a talent whose only agenda is to capture the sounds in his head, be they jazz or not. For people who don’t follow ambient jazz, Vanishing Act will feel like a revelation.
To make the album, Bock teamed up with Pete Min, the super engineer who’s recently worked with Orville Peck, Diana Ross, and The Strokes. Vanishing Act began as a series of improvised sessions under Min’s direction; there’s a slickness here comparable to the last Strokes record. That slickness–and most of Bock’s tricks–can be heard on Vanishing Act’s opening pair of tracks. Named after jazz pianist Erwin Helfer, one of Bock’s first music teachers, opener “Erwins Garden” is jazz at its most classical and familiar. A deceivingly quaint piano line–played on one of those grand pianos that you’ve seen in every hotel bar lounge–soon gives way to weeping strings that act like a dancing shadow pushing the piano into unknown territory. The following track, “Dynamo,” flips the switch. A sudden and artificial perpetual beat now steers the keys. Bock then takes us on a steady jog throughout that shadow’s glowing darkness, with light just peeking outside our reach. On first listen, one could laugh at these songs that feel like they were commissioned to soundtrack a Blade Runner spinoff for Disney+. (“But don’t make it so sad,” you can hear an executive say.) Upon further listening though, the warmth of these compositions feels like an achievement.
The rest of Vanishing Act repeats this pattern: major-key feels swimming throughout a minor-key atmosphere. There is a case of diminishing returns as the LP loses its element of surprise; nothing here sounds as memorable as those opening moments, but the rest of Vanishing Act rarely bores. In fact, it’s fun to think about these ten compositions not so much by their impressive sound palettes but by the images they evoke. The bass in the title track feels like it’s trying to punch water until it encounters an alien laser beam. “Eight Below Zero” has gleaming pedal steel courtesy of Rich Hinman that evokes an alternative universe in which Stevie Wonder went through a space cowboy phase. The funeral-appropriate “Solid Air” feels like the song The Weeknd wanted to play during the end credits of Uncut Gems. And so on.
Los Angeles is Vanishing Act’s central motif. Bock’s LA is sparse, gray, and weirder than the fantasia of most major Hollywood movies. It’s similar to the rainy LA that Brad Mehldau imagined when writing his own 2000s off-jazz compositions like “When It Rains,” which feels like a looming influence on this record. Listening to Vanishing Act is like seeing a Los Angeles freeway with no traffic. Yes, it’s technically possible, even though it’s something most of us will never see firsthand. Less heartache, more blissache. Unlike Bock’s avant-jazz peer Sam Gendel, who channels yearning through glitches and artificial vibes, Bock uses technology to sound as naked and naturalistic as possible, as if plucking a synthesizer out of a garden. And like Nils Frahm, Bock is skilled with an unflashy use of silence in-between all the notes. This is a record that respects your time and gets that you could use some time to meditate.
The music itself isn’t always memorable, and it can feel repetitive, but these are forgivable qualities in a solo debut. Like last year’s excellent Theo Alexander release Sunbathing Through a Glass Screen, this cycle can make one feel excited again for more accessible key-leaning compositions that aren’t afraid to neighbor modern classical music. Vanishing Act feels like a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie where the audience is drawn to what’s omitted as much as what’s in front of them. It’s strong and beautiful, even when it feels like something is missing. Maybe that’s the point. | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | June 10, 2022 | 7 | 974dd962-874c-46f8-a691-7e61a8147a7a | Brady Gerber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-gerber/ | |
On its Slumberland debut, the London boy/girl indie-pop quartet churns out expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny, creating shoegaze that looks you square in the eye. | On its Slumberland debut, the London boy/girl indie-pop quartet churns out expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny, creating shoegaze that looks you square in the eye. | Veronica Falls: Veronica Falls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15818-veronica-falls-veronica-falls/ | Veronica Falls | At the end of the video for Veronica Falls' "Bad Feeling", Roxanne Clifford, the group's bob-haired singer/guitarist, clad in a dashingly fey polka-dot blouse, picks up an antique book-- the ultimate twee signifier-- and lights it on fire. Given indie rock's recent jangle-pop overload, and the comments that Veronica Falls have made in the press ("people like to romanticize about C86 [but] there were lots of rubbish bands associated with it..."), it's tempting to wonder aloud: is "Bad Feeling" the C86 version of that video where George Michael goes iconoclastic on us and sets his own leather jacket ablaze?
Well, maybe not, but at the very least it's a decent visual metaphor for the band's sound: expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny. You could have said the same thing of Slumberland labelmates and fellow fresh-faced indie poppers the Pains of Being Pure at Heart when they first burst out the gates with Pastels badges on their sleeves-- the quartet's self-titled debut hits with the same sort of immediacy that that first Pains LP did. Both records do familiar things so well that, occasionally, momentarily, they actually trick you into thinking you've never heard anything like them before.
But, of course, you have. In fact, if you've been paying any attention to Glasgow/London hybrid Veronica Falls, you've actually heard some of these very songs before: The single "Found Love in a Graveyard" made the rounds almost two years ago, and then came "Beachy Head", "Bad Feeling", and "Come on Over" earlier this year. But after a run of strong 7"'s, their self-titled debut finally confirms that Veronica Falls are more than a singles band. Though they operate with a pretty limited sonic palette (boy/girl harmonies; dueling, reverb-drenched guitars; lots of tambourine), there's a sustained momentum over these 12 tracks that even manages to bring in some unexpected influences-- "Beachy Head" sounds like a zombified Mamas and the Papas thrashing at surf-punk guitars with shards of glass.
Given the group's penchant for ghosts and reverb, it's tempting to grab for a familiar collection of low-hanging adjectives: dreamy, ethereal, haunting-- except that, actually, Veronica Falls is none of these things. There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window. The guitar sound is immaculate: Clifford and James Hoare's strings don't jangle so much as bristle-- taut chords that dart restlessly in and out of each other's way. There's a clarity of texture-- a specificity even-- to every element of the band's sound. Which makes it something of an anomaly: shoegaze that looks you square in the eye.
Thematically speaking, shit's dark. There's a song called "Misery", there are not one but two songs in which the narrator's lover might be a ghost ("Graveyard", "Bad Feeling"), and though "Beachy Head" might sound like a carefree postcard from indie rock's current backdrop of choice, it's actually about jumping off a cliff and drowning yourself. Thankfully, the record ends on a high in every sense: "Come on Over" is perhaps the most hopeful-- and best-- track the band's got to their name. "Crimson and clover, I'll touch your shoulder," Clifford sings over the mounting tension of a furiously strummed guitar. It's the Veronica Falls aesthetic in miniature: the ghosts of pop past conjured convincingly and intimately enough to feel like flesh and blood. | 2011-09-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-09-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Slumberland / Bella Union | September 19, 2011 | 7.7 | 974eb26c-b34e-4a46-8788-2d5f01ff50bd | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The latest from the re-reconstituted Dinosaur Jr. proves the equilibrium they discovered on their 2007 comeback Beyond remains intact. | The latest from the re-reconstituted Dinosaur Jr. proves the equilibrium they discovered on their 2007 comeback Beyond remains intact. | Dinosaur Jr.: Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22149-give-a-glimpse-of-what-yer-not/ | Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not | It’s hard to believe that it’s now been more than 10 years since Dinosaur Jr. kicked off the unexpectedly fertile third chapter of their long and storied career. This period has now lasted longer than both the trio’s first original “classic” period from ‘84-89 as well as the second era post-Lou Barlow from ‘89-97. On their latest, the steady and excellent Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not, it’s clear that their well for inspiration has not yet run dry.
Beginning with Beyond in 2007, each of the Dinosaur Jr. “new” records have been relatively consistent in form, structure and quality. Although regularly cited as a return to the original band’s sound, the recent songwriting truthfully draws less from the trio’s first go-around and more from the melodic guitar pop of J Mascis’ underrated solo records More Light (2000) and Free So Free (2002). Of these records, Beyond was perhaps the most songful, with cuts like “Almost Ready,” “Been There All The Time,” and “We’re Not Alone” sweeter than just about anything found on the band’s original three ‘80s records. Farm was noteworthy for signaling that the band’s comeback was no one-off, but also—single “Over It” aside—for delving back into some of the heavier, murkier sounds and textures the band was originally known for. 2012’s I Bet on Sky split the difference and featured for the first time a strong(er) presence of keyboards, including Mellotron on soaring opener “Don’t Pretend You Didn’t Know.”
Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not hews close to Beyond, albeit with an effort to slim things down*. *On the charging opener “Goin Down,” a second of amp hum hangs in the air before the song kicks off, and what follows is archetypal “new” Dinosaur Jr.: chugging, crunching-but-hummable and with a nice bow-tying solo. The even catchier “Tiny” drills it down further, at only 3:12 lasting not a second longer than it needs to.
Better still is the beautiful, floating “Lost All Day,” which connotes a feeling of exactly that; when Mascis’ solo comes in midway, it almost feels like it might swallow the song whole. Though the song never really goes anywhere, it has a sense of circular renewal that lends itself to a moment of mania where you might put the song on repeat and just let it run over and over.
Give a Glimpse does, however, stick largely to well-trod paths, with not a ton in the way of experimentation. As always, it’s Mascis’ guitar that is the main attraction here, the reason for caring. “I Walk for Miles,” the album’s longest cut, begins as a bit of a “been here before” grunge before giving way into a dark, feedback-drenched solo that lasts for a minute before breaking down and restarting all over again, almost never seeming to end. “I Told Everyone” starts off as nothing too special, a toned down version of “Lost All Days’” forlorn, but features yet another excellent Mascis solo worth holding onto.
Interestingly, the one wildcard is that Barlow’s two penciled-in tracks on Give a Glimpse appear to be better and more serious than any of his six preceding tracks on the first three comeback records. While one can appreciate the democratic concession of including Barlow-penned songs on Dinosaur Jr. records, it’s always been his unique bass-playing style, and not his songwriting, that made the band better.
Most of the previous six Barlow cuts had felt like dashed-off throwaways, like the interludes that typically fill in space on Sebadoh albums (the same goes his ‘80s contributions). But on Give a Glimpse, with “Love Is…” and album closer “Left/Right,” it seems like Barlow is finally comfortable sounding like himself on a Dinosaur Jr. record. The duh-duh-duh-dum opening bass line of “Left/Right” especially could drop on *Bakesale or Harmacy. *Fans can cross their fingers hoping it portends Barlow’s deeper integration into the songwriting, but it could just as easily mean the man’s itching to get out again. | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 3, 2016 | 7.5 | 97579158-4619-44e8-a9f3-f054398a6518 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in Battles' history. It's a satisfyingly clean take on what the band does best after the somewhat chaotic, "various artists" feel of 2011's Gloss Drop. | La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in Battles' history. It's a satisfyingly clean take on what the band does best after the somewhat chaotic, "various artists" feel of 2011's Gloss Drop. | Battles: La Di Da Di | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21140-la-di-da-di/ | La Di Da Di | Battles’ third album, La Di Da Di, feels like a return to something elemental and specific in the band’s history. It is satisfyingly clean, echoing the bright, shiny flatness of the current digital landscape. It’s as basic as these guys can get, which all said, isn't especially basic: The music feels like a highly-saturated, highly-composed Takashi Murakami print, or a website that needed a lot of programming to make it look as minimal and usable as possible (not for nothing are there songs here called "Dot Com" and "Dot Net").
They could’ve easily gone in a different direction. After a series of early EPs, Battles had their breakout with their 2007 debut LP, Mirrored, a collection bolstered by the single, "Atlas", a propulsive track featuring the sped-up, processed vocals of Tyondai Braxton: part man, part machine, part Saturday morning cartoon. It was bouncy, energetic, instantly memorable, and had an appropriately shiny, cathartic video that found the group performing the song in a glossy, glassy cube. It also meant they had a de facto "frontman."
But Braxton left while Battles were recording the followup, 2011’s Gloss Drop. As a result, the remaining members invited a few guest vocalists to contribute: Gary Numan, Kazu Makino, the Boredoms' Yamantaka Eye. The biggest song was the sunny, poppy "Ice Cream", which featured vocals from Chilean producer Matias Aguayo. It didn’t necessarily sound like Battles, but like "Atlas", it had a great, sexy video and got a lot of traction. Expanding the number of knob turners, Gloss Drop was followed by a remix collection, Dross Glop, that included reworkings by Kode9, Shabazz Palaces, Gang Gang Dance, the Field, Hudson Mohawke, and others.
That’s a lot of cooks, for sure, and when your core group features players like heavy-hitting drummer John Stanier (Helmet, Tomahawk), virtuosic guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams (Don Caballero, Storm & Stress), and bassist/guitarist Dave Konopka, vocals and additional hands aren’t necessary. These are expressive, inventive players who know how to compose and execute in interesting, affecting ways. They can basically "talk" through their instruments, and it was a good move to strip things back on La Di Da Di, a vocal-free collection heavy on repetition. You might think of Trans Am, Factory Floor, or Zombi, but it’s squarely Battles. The various vocalists on Gloss Drop gave that collection a kind of chaotic or "various artists" feel—here there’s a solidity and feeling of forward motion.
It’s at its best early, especially on the almost-7-minute opener, "Yabba", which starts with a wash of colorful feedback before moving into a tight pulse of keyboards that sound like guitars, guitars that sound like keyboards, and rumbling drums and bells. (This is echoed in the final song of the collection, "Luu Le", which feels like a deconstruction of what came before it.) La Di Da Di succeeds when you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s less successful, mostly in the middle and toward the end, when things start to come off a bit like playful incidental ambient bits or post-rock circus music.
The best songs bring to mind super specific images (here were a few of mine: a landscape of yellow parakeets, an HTML version of the Who, a Magic Rock sculpture, "attack of the Sea Monkeys", the recent Earth catalogue sped-up and painted neon, a mime dressed in a rainbow-colored unitard), and that’s part of what makes Battles interesting. Things drag here and there, mostly when they move away from hyper speed to mid-tempo, and when Stanier’s drums take a bit of a backseat to the instruments piling up in front and around them. During those moments, Battles sound like too many instrumental acts with chops, and lose what makes them special. At 50 minutes, it's maybe a bit too long: when you're working with coiled energy, you can't afford to lose momentum. That said, when they're in the zone, there's not much like it. | 2015-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | October 2, 2015 | 7.5 | 975a9d56-da1d-4adc-ae07-8088f34a966c | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Black Album, Metallica enlist Phoebe Bridgers, Kamasi Washington, Moses Sumney, Weezer, J Balvin, and many more for this enormous and uneven tribute album. | Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Black Album, Metallica enlist Phoebe Bridgers, Kamasi Washington, Moses Sumney, Weezer, J Balvin, and many more for this enormous and uneven tribute album. | Metallica: The Metallica Blacklist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-the-metallica-blacklist/ | The Metallica Blacklist | The heavy metal tribute album was once a mainstay of used CD bargain bins. These releases often operated more like promotional tools than true albums, as labels asked their developing bands to bang out a Slayer or Iron Maiden cover in the hopes of perking up the ears of prospective fans. With precious few exceptions—the 1994 Black Sabbath tribute Nativity in Black went gold—these releases were essentially disposable, and they rarely featured artists with their own massive audiences. The Metallica Blacklist, a four-hour, 53-track behemoth of Black Album covers, is easily the most ambitious release of its kind. With contributions from pop stars, indie luminaries, and country icons, the Metallica-approved charity compilation is the band’s latest attempt to position their self-titled 1991 album as a work that transcends the boundaries of metal.
Metallica were already on their way to becoming the biggest metal band in the world before they made the Black Album. Their previous record, 1988’s …And Justice for All, yielded the MTV hit “One” and earned them their first Grammy. Justice pushed Metallica to their physical limits, with barrages of ultra-technical riffs and off-kilter rhythms stuffed into prog-pollinated song structures. Rather than doubling down on complexity, Metallica used Justice’s follow-up to transform into a new kind of heavy band, one that could reach the radio rock fans their thrashier records didn’t. The Metallica Blacklist can only exist because of that transformation: The simplified songwriting lends itself to musical pliability in a way that ’80s Metallica doesn’t, and the most successful Blacklist cuts are the ones that take full advantage of that fact.
Only a handful of songs on The Metallica Blacklist scan as metal. Their devotion to the source material is admirable, but next to some of their more daring company they seem to be missing the point. Slipknot’s Corey Taylor clearly loves “Holier Than Thou,” but his note-perfect interpretation feels out of place. The spirit of the release is better captured by the thumping, maximalist pop of Rina Sawayama’s “Enter Sandman” and the disquieting beauty of Moses Sumney’s “The Unforgiven.” These covers find a nugget of truth in the original and deliver it in a fresh context.
Other tracks use Metallica’s songs like jumping-off points: Flatbush Zombies build a woozy hip-hop epic around a pitch-shifted sample of “The Unforgiven,” splashing wrenchingly autobiographical verses on James Hetfield’s vaguely anti-authoritarian canvas. IDLES turn “The God That Failed” into a bug-eyed post-punk exorcism, while Kamasi Washington pulls off the most impressive feat of the record, discovering a swirling spiritual jazz workout in the little-loved “My Friend of Misery” and enlisting vocalist Patrice Quinn to breathe new life into Hetfield’s cynical lyric.
Of course, on a 53-track album, they can’t all be winners. Reggaeton hitmaker J Balvin drops off a version of “Wherever I May Roam” so half-assed that it seems like he accidentally delivered the demo. Weezer, who scored an improbable hit in 2018 by covering Toto, sleepwalk through a carbon copy of “Enter Sandman” that follows the original note-for-note except when they interpolate a lick from “Buddy Holly.” A group called Goodnight, Texas brings a stomp-clap-hey to “Of Wolf and Man.” By welcoming such an enormous list of contributors, Metallica all but ensured that Blacklist would be an uneven listening experience—and it is.
It’s unclear if the compilation is even intended to be heard in sequence. The tracklist follows the Black Album’s precisely, which means it opens with six consecutive covers of “Enter Sandman” and later forces front-to-back listeners to endure a whopping 12 renditions of “Nothing Else Matters.” As good as some of them are—Phoebe Bridgers’ delicate version feels like a Punisher outtake, and Miley Cyrus enlists Elton John and Yo-Yo Ma for no reason other than she can—listening to the same song a dozen times in a row feels masochistic. There’s some great music on The Metallica Blacklist, but how great can an album truly be if you can’t stomach listening to it in one sitting? The Black Album launched Metallica to superstardom because of its approachability, but in its attempts to offer something for everyone, Blacklist spreads itself too thin.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Blackened | September 10, 2021 | 6 | 975af449-ed6a-4411-aaa1-3fd209da72e9 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
On his latest album, Keith Rankin programs a virtuosic MIDI cello, tempering awe-inspiring moments with potent reminders of its synthetic nature. | On his latest album, Keith Rankin programs a virtuosic MIDI cello, tempering awe-inspiring moments with potent reminders of its synthetic nature. | Giant Claw: Mirror Guide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/giant-claw-mirror-guide/ | Mirror Guide | Dayton, Ohio’s Keith Rankin released his first tape as Giant Claw in 2010, a pivotal time in the sound of the Midwest experimental underground. Noise stalwarts like Wolf Eyes, Hive Mind, Skin Graft, and Kevin Drumm had dominated the previous decade with their countless experiments in disquiet. Yet, by the end of the aughts, fellow Ohioans Emeralds began releasing gorgeous, kosmische-informed improvisations on labels like Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson, breaking open the scene’s stylistic barriers and laying the groundwork for Giant Claw’s first releases. Around the time Rankin released those unassuming synthesizer-based cassettes, he also co-founded the label Orange Milk, which subverted the identity of the region and built a global network of boundary-shattering musicians. Emerging from a critical moment in a scene’s evolution, Rankin and his cohorts challenge genre conformity by juxtaposing dislocated sounds in ways that reflect the internet’s most dissociative aspects.
Noise is central to Rankin’s music, but those pockets of pixelated chaos are surrounded by splashes of vibrant color and vaguely familiar fragments of melody. Due to his insatiable appetite for novel sounds, he’s repeatedly upended his production techniques only to emerge with a new aesthetic framework time after time. Synthesizers were supplanted by the plunderphonic bliss of anonymized R&B samples, fractured trap beats, and stuttering loops on 2014’s Dark Web, sounding at times like several SoundCloud windows playing simultaneously. With Deep Thoughts a year later, he recontextualized nominally cheesy MIDI approximations of choruses, pan pipes, and strings by twisting them into complex contrapuntal wanderings—similar to what Wendy Carlos might have conjured after taking a hit of DMT. While 2017’s Soft Channel unified these approaches, it was also more turbulent and unpredictable, full of moments where Rankin tried his best to induce sensory overload, a tactic he once again inverts on his new album Mirror Guide.
Four years in the making, Mirror Guide feels like the opening of a new chapter for Giant Claw. Previous albums approximated the immersive, endless scroll, where images, ideas, and sounds fly by, leaving pockmarks of dopamine spike and withdrawal. What Rankin has created here feels more like an open-environment video game; it is still digitally rendered and hyperreal, but there is space to explore, with variations on recurring motifs and even a central character: a MIDI cello set to pizzicato mode. That soft, synthetic pluck is the first sound that appears on album opener “Earther,” revving up to superhuman speed only to tumble back to a crawl, like a baby bird testing its wings. As the track progresses, percussive hits, synth pads, and an unquantifiable number of other sounds appear, but rather than quash the cello’s momentum, they accent its graceful melodic turns. On Mirror Guide, each element, no matter how aesthetically disparate, works to build a unified narrative.
From the creak of twisted metal to a sharp inward breath, Rankin’s concrete world is full of sounds that resemble reality, but it resides fully in the uncanny valley. Rankin’s programmable cello is capable of feats far beyond the capacities of its corporeal counterpart, often breaking out into spontaneous rapid-fire runs and striking chords impossible to reach with two hands and ten fingers, but the sound is deadened without any actual space to reverberate inside. Constant, rapid fluctuations of tempo give the impression of a machine struggling to imitate the way human performers stretch rhythmic phrasings to express emotion. The climactic moments on Mirror Guide often collapse into glitched static, as if the toil of emoting in such a dramatic way overloads a CPU otherwise capable of seamlessly rendering the labyrinthine environment. The cello is often heard brooding, imbued with human sensitivity, but in the world of Giant Claw, those qualities are clear approximations, hinting at the limits of technology to express the nuances of one’s inner world despite its power to transcend the limitations of the body.
In certain ways, Rankin is a spiritual successor to composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose pieces for player piano from the mid-20th century highlighted the machine’s capabilities to perform works that incorporated multiple tempos and numerous melodies simultaneously. But while Nancarrow took a utopian view of technology, Rankin conveys a persistent skepticism by envisioning a digital virtuoso cellist incapable of fully grasping the nuances of emotional expression. There is plenty of joy to be found in Mirror Guide, and abundant moments of genuine beauty that border on awe, but its brilliance comes from the composer’s insistence on tempering those moments with potent reminders of its synthetic nature. Like a sunset made brilliant by air pollution, the beauty is a reminder of just how deep down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.
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. | 2021-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Orange Milk | May 17, 2021 | 7.9 | 975b49af-9600-4c70-b37e-bfdf798c28c3 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Equally inspired by late Romantic symphonies and experimental electronic techniques, the Swiss composer pushes both classical tropes and ambient conventions to their breaking points. | Equally inspired by late Romantic symphonies and experimental electronic techniques, the Swiss composer pushes both classical tropes and ambient conventions to their breaking points. | Noémi Büchi: Matter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/noemi-buchi-matter/ | Matter | Noémi Büchi’s music seems to exist in the abstract realm of ideas, yet the Swiss sound artist sees her work as eminently tangible. “A musician also works with matter, the air,” she says. “It seems to be immaterial because it has a much smaller density than other objects, but after all, everything is material.” Büchi considers sound a physical medium “like stone, wood, paint or textile.” The theme runs through her discography: the titles of her EPs Matière and Hyle are taken from the French for “material” and the ancient Greek for “substance.” Completing the trilogy is Matter, her first full-length album: a maximalist re-imagining of Romantic and modernist classical music using a shapeshifting, futuristic electronic orchestra.
With her 2020 debut, Matière, Büchi seamlessly combined bouncy modular synthesis with quotidian field recordings, like a folk artisan gathering supplies from their everyday surroundings. Matter moves from the craft fair to the museum, drawing from her classical training to twist symphonic music into fantastic sonic sculptures. Büchi’s signing to the Zürich label -OUS places her in a milieu of like-minded artists like Feldermelder and Furtherset, who combine experimental electronics with the grand scope of symphonic music. Büchi is more explicit with her classical influences, however, citing Stravinsky, Mahler, Scriabin, and Ligeti as touchstones. Matter invokes those composers’ ambition and drama as well as their musical tropes. After studying the late Romantic and early modernist canon, Büchi uses whatever she can—modular and digital synthesizers, acoustic instruments and voice, Max/MSP and SuperCollider—to transform their ideas into entirely new, and new-sounding, music of her own.
Büchi composed Matter as if she had an orchestra in her head, with the added benefit that imaginary players don’t have to abide by the laws of physics. Though her ensemble’s individual sections are identifiable, they swirl and collide in noisy aerial acrobatics, sometimes becoming hopelessly tangled. The strings that open the album on “Elemental Fear” build to a crescendo and morph into stuttering percussion, cycling across the field while their centripetal force tilts the track’s trajectory sideways. On “Taking the Train With Mr. Shark,” meanwhile, a propulsive electronic piano rhythm is lifted up by sweeping, romantic strings, lending nostalgic grandeur to what could otherwise be the basis of a techno track. In the album’s densest moments, Büchi pushes symphonic harmony to a breaking point, drawing on both experimental electronic and classical traditions but fitting wholly in neither category.
Matter suffers when this tension between the old and the new is lost. “Uncertainty of an Undefined Interdependence” is more reminiscent of Tim Hecker than Gustav Mahler, placing us too comfortably in the present, rather than in the uncanny space between past and future that Büchi so deftly conjures elsewhere. The late Romantic harmonic progression on the similarly ambient album closer “Prelude for Rational Freshness,” for example, is rendered at once familiar and strange by the song’s buzzing synths, which fall out of tune only to soar upward and harmonize again.
Büchi insists that “each of my sonic fantasies must be possible.” Matter is her proof of concept. With her arsenal of tools, whether digital or analogue, hardware or software, she transforms her Romantic and modernist themes into such unexpectedly beguiling shapes that it appears her imagination is truly her only constraint. As a sculptor of sound, Büchi makes it infinitely pliable: dense as marble but light as air. | 2023-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | -OUS | January 6, 2023 | 7.2 | 975df192-b524-49c9-9ff9-73a9a1b80cec | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Sabrina Fuentes’ debut album offers a flashback of adolescence in New York, filtering teenage themes through a studied imitation of ’90s grunge. | Sabrina Fuentes’ debut album offers a flashback of adolescence in New York, filtering teenage themes through a studied imitation of ’90s grunge. | Pretty Sick: Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pretty-sick-makes-me-sick-makes-me-smile/ | Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile | Sabrina Fuentes—the singer and model who formed Pretty Sick when she was 13 and in Catholic school, playing a pastiche of ’90s grunge at DIY venues around New York—is a walker. Her lyrics have always been inscribed with a rambler’s perspective. From the band’s 2017 self-titled EP, in which she addressed the city’s noise (“so loud and dull”) like a lover, to 2020’s “Deep Divine,” which saw her “Out on Allen Street at 7 in the morning/Out on Bowery at midnight in the summer,” Fuentes has made plain that her view of the city hasn’t come from the windows of a bus or taxi cab. Rather, this is someone who has spent their young life right in the nib and the nip of the city, as only a pedestrian could have.
Fuentes is now entering her twenties, and her debut album with Pretty Sick is a walk through her late adolescence—a psychogeographic mapping of teenage memory in New York City. “Yellow roses in Tompkins Square Park,” it opens, with a low rumble of grizzled bass, before launching into a grab-bag of teenage themes: desperate intensity, anhedonia, relationship abuse, substance abuse—all of which take place in Upper Manhattan parks, dive bars, bedrooms, and dancefloors.
The album’s musical influences are obvious and immediate, suggesting a stoner who grew up listening to Nirvana, Hole, and the Breeders. “I have a bad habit of anything I listen to starting to sound mirrored in my own music,” Fuentes said in an interview. It’s unfortunate that she appears to have doubled down on this habit on her debut album. Often, songs sound more like tributes to her influences than reinventions. On “Drunk,” Fuentes lifts Courtney Love’s vocal phrasing from “Violet”—right down to the very last “everything!,” which Fuentes delivers like she’s desperate to hold onto the word. The impact would be more intense were it not such a naked imitation.
Fuentes’ bass playing is wholly indebted to Kim Deal’s just-pedal-through-it technique: self-restraint as a governing aesthetic. The template contrasts well with Fuentes’ leaky, screaming, bleeding singing—Courtney Love vocals over a Kim Deal bassline is, after all, a pretty sick proposition—but it limits the songs rather than expanding them. Many tracks begin with an isolated, minimally emphatic bassline tethered to a tried-and-tested arrangement; the way the band’s songs then tend to explode —from skeletal sludge to a mudstorm of distortion and rolled-off treble tones—makes them feel like a kind of deja vu.
On “Human Condition,” the Pretty Sick world finally comes into focus, marrying dogged romance with adorably adolescent philosophical critique: “The freedom you’re being sold is just submission,” Fuentes sings over a driving, poppy hook, giving her blunt cut of a line some heft, and saving it from coming off as teenage sanctimony.
Fuentes is a singular and compelling lyricist: “The emotion I am most familiar with is longing/The feeling I know best is wanting more/I’d like to trade my glutton heart for songing/But instead, I will remain a singing whore,” she reels off on “Sober,” as though sharing an accidentally poetic journal entry. Even her slipshod meter scans as charming. On “Yeah You,” each line is packed with a few too many syllables, like an overfilled gas tank threatening to explode; the surfeit speaks to the urgency of Fuentes’ expression. Makes Me Sick Makes Me Smile largely reads as a moratorium on teenage feeling—a final weep before the weeplessness of adulthood. A final walk in the park. A final goodbye, it is hoped, to the influences that led her here. | 2022-10-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | October 6, 2022 | 6.3 | 9766e20c-3eff-470d-bdcb-10ed43eca0e6 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Steeped in the warm, psychedelic pop-rock of the 1970s, the new record from erstwhile garage rocker Kyle Thomas is a gold-toned nostalgia voyage that’s never entirely familiar. | Steeped in the warm, psychedelic pop-rock of the 1970s, the new record from erstwhile garage rocker Kyle Thomas is a gold-toned nostalgia voyage that’s never entirely familiar. | King Tuff: Smalltown Stardust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-tuff-smalltown-stardust/ | Smalltown Stardust | Smalltown Stardust reveals the sensitive side to King Tuff, the garage-rock persona Vermont eccentric Kyle Thomas adopted in the late 2000s. Those early King Tuff records—delivered just after Thomas spent some time playing in Witch, the stoner metal group from Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis—prized fuzztone and grime, offering cheap, high-octane thrills. Thomas consciously avoids that kind of excitement on Smalltown Stardust, instead wandering down the path he began to carve with 2018’s The Other. Designed as a deliberate reset, a chance to flush the dirtiest elements of garage rock out of his system, The Other nevertheless featured significant contributions from fellow rockers like Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, inevitably tying it to previous King Tuff albums even if it never sounded as sludgy. Smalltown Stardust represents the true opening of a new chapter, showcasing a gentle troubadour singing songs of nature.
Previous King Tuff albums occasionally suggested the pastoral—see “Evergreen,” from 2012’s King Tuff—but these tender accents effectively highlighted the raucousness of the rest of the record. Here, Thomas strips away the filth from his hooks, relaxing his rhythms while placing melody at the forefront. He doesn’t do this on his lonesome: Smalltown Stardust was written and produced with singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist SASAMI, aka Sasami Ashworth. At the start of the pandemic, Ashworth and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy holed up at Thomas’ home in Los Angeles, a living arrangement that encouraged collaboration. Smalltown Stardust is the third in an informal series that includes SASAMI’s 2022 album Squeeze, co-produced by Thomas, and Fun House, the 2021 Hand Habits record produced by Ashworth and mixed by Thomas. In every meaningful way, Ashworth is on equal ground with Thomas throughout the album, not only providing harmonies but shaping melodies and molding an aesthetic distinct from any other King Tuff record.
The album title hints at Thomas’ grand concept: He’s writing about childhood in his hometown, a time when he felt more deeply connected to nature. Getting back to the garden is hardly a new idea in rock’n’roll and, unabashed revivalist that he is, Thomas reaches for a handful of old records as he plots his own journey through the secret life of plants. There’s a vague Wings wind blowing through this small town: Not only do Thomas and Ashworth’s platonic duets suggest an alternative Wings where Marc Bolan married Linda McCartney, “How I Love” and “Portrait of God” are punctuated by simple, tasteful guitar fills straight out of Paul McCartney’s six-string work on Wild Life, while “The Bandits of Blue Sky” marches to a stately rhythm reminiscent of Ram. Wings aren’t the only 1970s touchstone in play: The cheerful pulse of Thomas and Ashworth’s harmonies on “Tell Me” evoke Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.
Recognizing these allusions is part of the fun of Smalltown Stardust—the record is littered with them, including a knowing nod to the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society on the title track—but pastiche isn’t the point. The references buttress Thomas’ voyage into a nostalgic, naturalistic past: an ode to childhood animated by favorite sounds of old. Ashworth helps keep Thomas from drifting down memory lane, adding textures and harmonies that sound comforting but not entirely familiar, giving the psychedelic lilt of his melodies space to breathe. Gaze into Smalltown Stardust’s airy arrangements and you might see a reverse image of previous King Tuff records. That was music made for the cold dark of night, or at least a dimly curtained bedroom; this is music made to be heard in the reassuring glow of sunshine. | 2023-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 7, 2023 | 7 | 9777fa86-49d9-4325-b040-f1b239a10d78 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Will Toledo’s re-recorded version of an album originally released in 2011 speaks to his greatest gifts as a songwriter: wit, cynicism, and an eye for detail that captures teenaged desire and heartache. | Will Toledo’s re-recorded version of an album originally released in 2011 speaks to his greatest gifts as a songwriter: wit, cynicism, and an eye for detail that captures teenaged desire and heartache. | Car Seat Headrest: Twin Fantasy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/car-seat-headrest-twin-fantasy/ | Twin Fantasy | With his band Car Seat Headrest, Will Toledo has constructed the perfect vehicle for his obsessions. Since its inception in 2010, it’s become a highly referential project with a series of related album titles (2015’s Teens of Style preceded 2016’s Teens of Denial) and nods to other songs and bands from the Cars to Modest Mouse to They Might Be Giants. But the connection he makes to the music of others is nothing compared to the density of the internal references. A chorus from one song might show up as the bridge in another; a lyric might connect to an observation made earlier in the record, or even the record before. And Toledo’s constant tinkering goes beyond hiding Easter eggs; he also revisits older recordings until he gets them right. Teens of Style consisted of re-recorded versions of songs culled from his vast catalog (he put out nine releases on Bandcamp before signing to Matador). And now he has taken that re-make/re-model impulse even further.
The new Car Seat Headrest album, Twin Fantasy, is a completely re-recorded version of an album that Toledo originally released in 2011. There’s not much precedent for this sort of do-over—if this were film, say, it’d be like Steven Soderbergh re-making Sex, Lies and Videotape, which I could actually see him doing at some point. But Toledo, two years after his last batch of new songs, apparently believes enough in this album to think that he can make a better version of it to share with the wider world.
Twin Fantasy isn’t just another one of Toledo’s Bandcamp albums. It’s an ambitious song cycle that’s been held up by his small but fervent online cult as his masterpiece. The songs explore in painful detail the narrator’s infatuation with a nameless man, a relationship that Toledo has said was based in part on his own experience. It was originally written when Toledo was 19, and the album is appropriately dense with confusion and anxiety and self-doubt, though the self-laceration is characteristically cut with laughs. And whether or not it fits the criteria of a concept album proper (there isn’t a clear narrative from song-to-song), Twin Fantasy feels very much like an album about a single experience. Aside from an offhand comment about an ex or two, there are only two people in every song—the person singing, and the guy to whom it’s addressed (“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” Toledo sings on “Nervous Young Inhumans”). If the person delivering the lines wasn’t so funny, the level of obsession might be a little scary. But Toledo pulls off an album with a jarring degree of specificity that touches on feelings familiar to almost anyone who has experienced young desire and heartbreak.
Toledo’s narrator in Twin Fantasy wants to get so close to the object of his affection that they essentially fuse together, but all he can think about is everything that’s pulling them apart. He sees images of his beloved everywhere (“When the train came it was so big and powerful...I wanted to put my arms around it”) while suspecting they’re too fucked and damaged to make it work (”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”). He writes about watching movies and taking drugs, relays a story about coming out to his friends while pretending to be drunk, notes that having a body can be a drag. The story he tells is not about what happens, but what almost happens, what he wants to happen, what he wishes didn’t happen. The present moment is always undercut by a memory or a wish; strictly from reading the lyric sheet, it’s never entirely clear if the relationship is something real or something that is happening in Toledo’s head. The promise of pleasure is washed out by feelings of dread.
This makes Twin Fantasy sound grim and somber, but it’s actually the opposite. The explosive arrangements and Toledo’s delivery make it much more of a dark comedy. Brilliant individual lines pile up (”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature” is a line that Silver Jews’ David Berman wishes he wrote), but the record’s real genius is in how the songs simmer and then burst, in perfect sync with the arc of the feelings. Early highlight “Beach Life-In-Death” stretches over 13 minutes, an epic meditation on raw want and jet-black self-loathing (”I am almost completely soulless, I am incapable of being human…it should be called anti-depression, as a friend of mine suggested, because it’s not the sadness that hurts you, it’s the brain’s reaction against it”) with instantly memorable screamed choruses worthy of the finest power pop.
“Bodys” has the gleaming pulse of the Strokes, and finds Toledo commenting on the song in real-time as it unfolds—“Is it the chorus yet? No. It’s just a building of the verse, so when the chorus does come it’ll be more rewarding”—and then it delivers on that observation, with layered vocals that bring to mind the stacked harmonies of ELO. The songs never stay still, for better or worse, they’re always in the process of building up or breaking down, which makes this jagged tail feel even more restless.
Some will find it shocking that an even lower-fi version of this album exists. The production values are somewhere on the lower end of inexpensive mid-tier indie rock, but the meat-and-potatoes sonics ultimately serve to make the record sound timeless. Give or take a Skype reference, it could have come out in 1994. It’s hard to know how the faithful who have been living with this album for half a decade will take its reinvention. Given the force of the music, the improved sonics give it greater weight, and the existence of two versions somehow makes the whole thing even more interesting—fading memory reflected and then re-assembled—and it’s hard to hear this re-visit as anything but a triumph. Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing—but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing. | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 16, 2018 | 8.6 | 977aeb98-9058-4c01-b149-56cc6b1fbf34 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Tom Jenkinson returns to his "classic" sound, albeit with a twist-- this is a live, solo performance recorded in Paris. | Tom Jenkinson returns to his "classic" sound, albeit with a twist-- this is a live, solo performance recorded in Paris. | Squarepusher: Solo Electric Bass 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13363-solo-electric-bass-1/ | Solo Electric Bass 1 | Getting called a virtuoso or mad scientist comes with some heavy baggage for a musician, so it says a lot about Tom Jenkinson, who records as Squarepusher, that he's been repeatedly labeled as both. Getting tagged with these contradictory stereotypes-- a classically trained workhorse mastering the canon versus an improvisational, intemperate tinkerer dismantling the rules-- goes a long way toward describing the Warp mainstay's musical output. He can sound technically brilliant and wickedly provocative at times, whether it's with restless, distended breakbeat patterns, buoyant bass-heavy fusion excursions, or airy combinations of these and other styles. And on his new album, in a gesture that could be a challenge in both senses of the word, he merely plugs in his bass and lets his playing speak for itself.
And bass, unaltered and without digital delay or effects, it definitely all you'll hear, whether it's delicate melodic progressions, arpeggiated chords or spitfire runs up the fretboard. While Jenkinson's skillful playing, the vital pulse of tracks like "Cooper's World" from Hard Normal Daddy or "Circlewave 2" from Hello Everything, has earned serious plaudits and a shout-out from Flea, it may be slightly surprisingly to hear how classically oriented some of the songs on Solo Electric Bass 1 are. Granted, he claims to have taught himself classical guitar at age 10, but the elegant, breakneck playing on tracks like "S.E.B. 6" resembles that of a Spanish guitarist, and "S.E.B. 5" is a rubbery, staccato splatter of notes that belies the thickness of bass strings. Hyperactive "S.E.B. 8" showcases Jenkinson's antsy side, bouncing between slap-happy antics and more slow and soulful passages. As the naming convention and out-of-order tracks suggest, the songs blend into each other. It creates an album weighed toward showcasing masterful execution that leaves a pretty muted general impression. Unless you're predisposed toward technical prowess and solo bass recordings, it's probably going to come off as more of a clinic than a collection of great songs.
In a 2006 XLR8R interview with Pitchfork contributor Mark Pytlik, Jenkinson spoke of avoiding the "music for musicians" tag. A limited-edition solo bass album recorded live at a Paris theater-- just one musician, one amp, and a six-string-- might appear pretty musician-friendly, leaning heavily toward virtuosic self-satisfaction. A large part of Jenkinson's fanbase isn't going to rush out to purchase uncut and unfiltered bass noodling, unless they were hoping for some intriguing digital manipulation or that the Loveless-esque cover was meant as a strong visual clue. But don't start with the simplistic slap bass/"Seinfeld" theme jokes without considering what these tracks say about Jenkinson's process and procedure. There's a reason the audience gets enthusiastic during this 12-song set. Jenkinson is technically one hell of a bass player. Perhaps by playing it straight, he's playing with people's definitions of what does and doesn't constitute musical skill in a digital world or merely showing off his own ridiculous abilities. For an artist known for restlessness and provocations, this may be a "mature" way to fuck with expectations. | 2009-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 11, 2009 | 5.6 | 977dfb5d-3d34-4ccd-afd6-f80959e997b8 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
The second album from guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano confirms Rangda to be an active, cohesive band of the highest caliber. | The second album from guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano confirms Rangda to be an active, cohesive band of the highest caliber. | Rangda: Formerly Extinct | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17166-formerly-extinct/ | Formerly Extinct | While a completely accurate count is near impossible, the three musicians who make up Rangda-- guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and drummer Chris Corsano-- have between them appeared on somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 albums, recorded with dozens of different collaborators. With artists this prolific it is never certain how long any particular collaboration or project will last; and in 2010 when the three released False Flag, their debut as Rangda, it was not immediately clear if this was to be a one-off album or the work of an ongoing group. But musicians with this much experience are also able to recognize when they've struck upon a special combination, and their second album Formerly Extinct confirms Rangda to be an active, cohesive band of the highest caliber.
In retrospect, False Flag sounds like a bit of a feeling-out process, as the three musicians, each with his own well-established voice, blast noisy improvisations and rifle through ideas as they learn how best to mesh their eccentric styles. On Formerly Extinct that process is completed, and Rangda sounds like a band that knows exactly who they are and what they want to do together. Forgoing noisier digressions, every track on the album is taut and sinewy, with the musicians listening to one another and anticipating each other's moves as if they were sharing limbs. For now at least, Rangda have settled into a sound that seems very much an idealized hybrid between Six Organs of Admittance and the more song-oriented moments of Sun City Girls, with the album performing the weird magic trick of sounding about as you might expect it to while still being filled with surprises.
For Sir Richard Bishop, whose work as a solo artist and with the Sun City Girls, as summarized by Marc Masters, has continually defied all possible boundaries, Formerly Extinct might be one of his most straightforward and song-centered albums to date. Even "Silver Nile", the album's lone long-form piece, is crafted with an entrancing, slowly unwinding melody as Chasny's and Bishop's guitars patiently circling one another like a pair of desert vultures. As is always the case with Bishop's work, vague Eastern and North African echoes abound on such tracks as "Idol's Eye" and "Majnun", with Chasny able to match whatever accent Bishop chooses to adopt.
There have always been two main risks whenever such veteran improvisational musicians as these play together: Either someone will tend to hog the ball while the other players are reduced to the role of mere accompanists, or else everyone will be so disinclined to step on each other's toes that nobody actually makes any memorable moves at all. The most remarkable thing about Rangda, then, is their music's balance. No one player ever dominates any given song, and whenever either Chasny or Bishop steps forward to take a solo, the other works with Corsano to keep things continually engaging in the background.
Whenever a trio is able to achieve a balance like that, it usually means there is some world-class drumming going on, and that is the case with Corsano on Formerly Extinct. Rangda's songs are oddly built creatures, filled with enough abrupt time changes and strange meters for me to wonder if any of this might qualify as math-rock. Throughout the album Corsano is able to keep everything moving so deftly his playing seems almost nonchalant, his rhythms continually churning and roiling but never sounding particularly flashy or show-offish.
As satisfying as Formerly Extinct sounds, it also drops a few tantalizing hints of what might still be to come from Rangda. On "Tres Hambres", with its sly nod to ZZ Top, Chasny and Bishop volley a circular riff back and forth between the speakers with a dazzling ease, and on the brief "Goodbye Mr. Gentry", I can't help but get visions of classic Minutemen songs in my head, and it leads me to wish for a track or two where these guys fuel the amps and rip into a straight 4/4 psych-rock monster closer to what Chasny does with his Comets on Fire crew. But that's just me getting greedy; for now it's enough to know that, with Formerly Extinct, Rangda not only prove themselves to be a going concern as a band, but that they might just be starting to really hit their stride. | 2012-10-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-05T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | October 5, 2012 | 7.9 | 9786ed0e-7835-45d8-95d6-4b7f1171c7da | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
At one point, Luke Slater’s atmospheric-techno guise sounded like the future of electronic music; a welcome new archive proves its soundscapes and grooves were prescient. | At one point, Luke Slater’s atmospheric-techno guise sounded like the future of electronic music; a welcome new archive proves its soundscapes and grooves were prescient. | The 7th Plain: Chronicles II / Chronicles III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-7th-plain-chronicles-ii-chronicles-iii/ | Chronicles II / Chronicles III | For years, the 7th Plain was the least understood alias of British electronic producer Luke Slater. In the early 1990s, he beat ravers into submission with the unrelenting techno of his project Planetary Assault Systems. Under his own name, he signed to NovaMute for albums that presented him as an electronic auteur, capable of melodic floor-fillers, Underworld-inspired alt-techno, and the occasional dalliance with electroclash. In the 2010s, he narrowed his focus on Planetary Assault Systems’ spartan purism and launched L.B. Dub Corp as an outlet for his bassier instincts. But the work of the 7th Plain—Slater’s atmospheric-techno guise, responsible for two sublime albums in 1994 and almost nothing since—languished in obscurity, even as its lush soundscapes and carefully sculpted machine grooves have proved prescient.
In 2016, A-TON—an imprint of Ostgut Ton, the label of iconic Berlin nightclub Berghain—began rectifying that disappearance with Chronicles I, a collection of the 7th Plain’s unreleased and archival material. With Chronicles II and III, curious listeners are finally afforded a more complete picture of what made the 7th Plain so special. (All three volumes are also available as a six-LP box set, Chronicles I-III.) The character of the sound leaps out: Slater drizzles his synths, as syrupy and golden as honey, on in loopy arpeggios and gloopy layers. His flickering drum programming bristles with hi-hats, rimshots, and flintlike handclaps, raining down in showers of sparks.
Stylistically, the music of all three volumes hovers between Detroit techno and early IDM, in both genres’ most lyrical modes. The lush pads and legato leads of tracks like “Time Melts” are precursors of the liquid-metal atmospheres Carl Craig would pursue on Landcruising the following year. The dubby undercurrent and wafting, wordless vocals of “Shades Amaze” could almost be mistaken for electronic shoegaze act Seefeel, while “Excalibur’s Radar” has a silvery drama reminiscent of Autechre’s Amber, IDM’s emotive peak. Foggy cultural memory around rave’s chillout-room traditions has led to a kind of oppositional thinking: music for dancing here, music for lounging there. But, aside from a purely ambient track or two, including a burbling number that could be an early Air demo, the 7th Plain’s work resists that binary. Instead, in its emphasis on groove over bounce, it finds a middle path between dance music and armchair raving. At its most electrifying, it moves like a daydream strapped into a hydraulic exoskeleton.
For longtime fans, Chronicles II has the surprises. Four of its eight tracks are previously unreleased, rescued from the old DATs and reel-to-reel tapes of Slater’s studio; three more are non-album tracks, alongside the 1994 single “Astra Naut-E,” from The 4 Cornered Room. At their best, the previously unreleased cuts expand upon his known work in subtle ways. A planetarium fantasy par excellence, “Silver Shinhook” weds gently thundering percussion to limpid piano reminiscent of Harold Budd; its surging arpeggios connect the dots between Tangerine Dream and Global Communication. “JDC” dials back the atmospherics to zero in on a wriggly, shape-shifting synth lead that’s among the funkiest things here; “To Be Surreal” sets out its shiny drum and synth baubles like miniatures in a glass menagerie.
But Chronicles III has the stronger material: With four songs from The 4 Cornered Room and three from My Wise Yellow Rug, this is the nucleus of Slater’s best and most affecting work, and the obvious place for newcomers to start. “Time Melts,” “Reality of Space,” “Excalibur’s Radar,” and “Think City” are all as good as atmospheric techno gets; in the past quarter-century, they haven’t aged a day. It’s hard not to wonder why A-TON chose this particular shape for Chronicles, cherry-picking from carefully paced albums that benefit from being heard in full rather than just re-issuing them. The tracks that aren’t on Chronicles make perfect sense in the context of their records. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to dividing the unreleased songs between Chronicles I and Chronicles II, either.
There’s more unreleased 7th Plain material still out there; his 1996 album Playing With Fools never made it past the test-pressing stage. One track was repurposed as “Railer (Further Exploration),” which opens Planetary Assault Systems’ 2011 album, The Messenger; as for the rest, says Slater, “That’s buried.” It’s a shame, as “Railer” is among the most emotional music in his catalog. The rare occasion when he has left beats behind entirely, it offers a glimpse of the ambient essence lurking inside this opulent architecture. While the shape of these anthologies might frustrate hardcore collectors, having this music available is beyond welcome. The 7th Plain never became techno’s future—at least, not in the way it sounded at the time. But today, rescued like a fistful of heirloom seeds from its neglected patch of turf, it’s ready for rediscovery. | 2018-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | December 19, 2018 | 7.4 | 97870fc4-4fbb-44c1-b699-f31dc8365c88 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Evoking the golden age of LA hip-hop with rapid-fire rhymes, vivid set pieces, and sample-centric beats, the rapper finally offers a proper follow-up to an ill-fated opus. | Evoking the golden age of LA hip-hop with rapid-fire rhymes, vivid set pieces, and sample-centric beats, the rapper finally offers a proper follow-up to an ill-fated opus. | Blu / Oh No: A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blu-oh-no-a-long-red-hot-los-angeles-summer-night/ | A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night | Under slightly different circumstances, Blu might’ve been a star. In 2009, following years of increasing buzz and work alongside the likes of J Dilla, the Los Angeles rapper inked a deal with Warner Brothers that included not just music but films for each of his forthcoming records. But a familiar tale of major-label woe followed, culminating in a sort of pyrrhic victory: Frustrated or jaded, Blu allegedly leaked his major-label opus, NoYork!, at Rock the Bells in 2011 and has since burrowed into the underground, releasing a steady string of small-budget, lo-fi albums. At last, though, he appears ready to offer a proper follow-up to NoYork!, even if A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night doesn’t sound like the record you’d expect from an underground rapper with a bent toward experimentation. An ambitious, slickly produced throwback, Red Hot taps Blu’s reserves of nostalgia and civic pride.
This isn’t the first time Blu has tried to make a record like this: 2014’s Good to Be Home attempted back-to-basics West Coast rap. But it lacked cohesion, exacerbated by a perpetually murky mix. Still, it now feels like a trial run for Red Hot, which addresses the previous problems while retaining the core conceit. This album works in conversation with iconic LA rap records of the previous three decades, from Regulate...G Funk Era to Madvillainy. It is Blu’s most ardent attempt to embed himself within that lineage. And if you’re hoping to make a West Coast classic but your relationship with Madlib is strained, you could do worse than enlist his younger brother, producer Oh No. Working from a shared love of dusty samples and technical rapping, the two traditionalists are entirely in sync.
The sheer conviction with which Blu delivers his vision here sets Red Hot apart from its revivalist peers and Blu’s own past. Not a single second feels wasted, as Blu crams a cascade of syllables into every available space. He raps furiously, wielding more energy and focus than at any point since his hungry debut, 2007’s Below the Heavens. Inspired by the narrative settings of The Chronic and Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, Blu weaves a story that reads like a paean to a disappearing metropolis, creating a real sense of place over these 17 tracks. Blu’s Los Angeles is filled with tense moments, suspicious looks, and flashes of violence, a city where encroaching gentrification exists somewhere over the horizon and danger lurks around every corner.
As you might expect from a rapper who managed to finesse a film deal, these pieces are cinematic in sound and scope. With descending keys and autoharp stabs, “Stalkers” conjures a film noir score, as Blu and Donel Smokes breathlessly trade bars like they’re in a rap battle. Unfortunately, Blu mars the throwback stance with a homophobic slur—inexcusable in 2019, regardless of what decade you’re emulating. “Murder Case” interpolates Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was the Case” to tell the story of the protagonist’s downfall, while guest emcees play the roles of Blu’s new cellmates in “Jail Cypher,” sharing stories and advice.
The album’s most theatrical moment arrives with a two-track centerpiece, as tightly scripted as a scare in a horror movie. The interlude “Champagne” mimics the sort of major-label-mandated “song for the ladies” that was so omnipresent on 1990s rap records, but it cuts off abruptly as “The Robbery” begins. Blu and Oh No milk the jarring transition for everything it’s worth. Over little more than a palm-muted guitar and snares that sound like drumsticks hitting metal trash cans, Montage One and TriState narrate a robbery as it unfolds, vying to deliver the best rap-nerd pun while they’re at it. “So take it off slow, nigga, run the jewels/Another rap group? Nah, I mean chains and shoes,” TriState growls.
NoYork! hinged on buzzing chiptune production, forward-looking for its time. But A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night is willfully out of step with contemporary hip-hop, rendering a world where New York and L.A. remain rap’s only gravitational centers. That kind of wishful thinking might not win over many new listeners, but Red Hot makes a strong case for Blu and Oh No as two of the most dedicated West Coast zealots working. Blu clearly stopped paying any mind to others’ idea of success a long time ago; he now sounds all the better for it. | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Nature Sounds | March 1, 2019 | 7.3 | 97875e31-345b-49d7-98c6-d8f661f453bf | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Wordy, thoughtful rapping is thriving, but the Virginia-born MC makes the style feel particularly urgent. Neither his full-on delivery nor his absurdist sense of humor dilute his razor-sharp focus. | Wordy, thoughtful rapping is thriving, but the Virginia-born MC makes the style feel particularly urgent. Neither his full-on delivery nor his absurdist sense of humor dilute his razor-sharp focus. | $ilkMoney: I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silkmoney-i-dont-give-a-fuck-about-this-rap-shit-imma-just-drop-until-i-dont-feel-like-it-anymore/ | I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore | The average $ilkMoney song is stuffed with information, a veritable almanac of psychoactive drugs, John Singleton movies, and Black liberation theology. There aren’t many rappers in 2022 who could spit about phonemic orthography, like some long-lost member of X Clan, before dissing jeweler Johnny Dang and dreaming of someone stealing his stash of DMT so they can expand their minds; there are even fewer who would title the song in question “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms and Bwoy Oh Bwoy.” But that’s exactly what the Virginia-born rapper and member of the now-defunct group Divine Council has done on his absurdly titled surprise album I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. He may be ambivalent about the rap game—he accuses labels of low-balling him, and seems cagey about working with all but a select few rappers and producers—but his actual bars land with a white-hot intensity that could melt lead.
$ilkMoney crams syllables together in his verses, but he never succumbs to the robotic verbal fireworks of battle rap or the hokey faux-traditionalism of a Logic. The best analogues might be Extinction Level Event-era Busta Rhymes or Brooklyn rapper Elucid on pep pills; $ilk’s speed and careening rhythmic patterns never dilute his diction or razor-sharp focus. “Fuck Black Lives Matter, let’s go/Back to the days of Black power when our struggle was ours/And wasn’t monetized for the outsiders outside us,” he barks on “Cuummoney Amiliani,” in one massive gulp of breath. Just listening to him rattle off thoughts can leave you feeling winded, and that’s clearly by design—on “One Glazed and One With the Jelly Filled Nucleus,” he admits he’s not here to offer hooks or melodies. Anyone can rap fast or chortle into the mic, but $ilk’s words impact with precision, dozens of calculated blows drumming away at the chest.
In keeping with his staccato technique, $ilk favors nonsequiturs over storytelling: He jumps from rap grievances to boasts that he’s never had sex with a white woman to drug-fueled conversations with serpent gods that could’ve easily come from an episode of The Midnight Gospel. Punchlines aren’t always his focus, but much of what he says is funny or shocking in some way. In “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(,” he invokes Jimmy Kimmel’s infamous blackface impersonation of basketball player Karl Malone, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” descends into frenzied slam poetry, casting rhythm to the wind as he laments how racism and capitalism are figuratively boiling him alive, howling, “How can I be so delicious to a nation that claims to hate my skin and existence?” Even the song titles—“A White Bitch Killed Gary Coleman,” “Colonized Ectoplasmic Jar-O-Niggafish,” “Eddie Murphy Golden Child Hat”—give $ilk space to flesh out these demented little worlds. That brazenness is sometimes a double-edged sword—the opening of “S.F.C.S.S.S.$ (P.a.a.M.F.)” dwells a little too long on his rationale for “call[ing] bitches bitches” before deflecting altogether—but his ability to make you laugh, think, and stew in cathartic rage through the chaos is consistently entertaining.
If $ilk is a bowling ball crashing his way through these hallucinogen-laced thoughts, then Harlem-born producer and longtime collaborator Kahlil Blu is the bumper keeping him from sliding into the gutter. Blu produced all of Imma Just Drop, and his beats match the hectic variety of $ilk’s raps with outsized flair. “I Ate 14gs of Mushrooms” and “Cuummoney Amiliani” blend hazy sample work with crystal-clear drums and synths to compound two different but equally epic sounds into psychedelic rocket fuel. “One Glazed” lets a guitar lick simmer in the background of what sounds like 808 Mafia trying their hand at drum’n’bass. “A Visit From the Giant Portal Wizard Snake” and “Jodi Don’t Love Me No Mo :-(” settle into intoxicating sampled chops and loops, while “Emmm, Nigga You Is Tasty >:)” turns a whir of sampled hand drums and flutes into an audible seance. Both Blu and $ilk are at their most uninhibited on “Tasty,” $ilk’s growing anger over connections between slavery, the music industry, and Black death dovetailing perfectly with the syncopated madness of Blu’s sample. No matter what he’s served, $ilk never trips up, barreling through every beat with purpose.
$ilk is living through the same disheveled, surreally racist society as the rest of us, and the emphasis he places on rapping his way through the madness is jaw-dropping. Wordy, thoughtful raps have thrived over the last decade, but they rarely feel this urgent or wired, as though he were snapping out of a drug-induced dream and trying to commit it all to paper before it fades from memory. $ilk has nothing but contempt for the rap industry at large, but he still cares deeply about craft and intent. He says as much on the second half of “One Glazed,” where he raps that putting all his competitors on notice is his duty: “This a hard task but it came with a tool, like a hard hat/It’s all facts; you ain’t slept on, lil nigga, your fuckin’ song’s wack!”
Structurally, Imma Just Drop isn’t much different from $ilk’s earlier projects, like 2019’s equally wildly titled G.T.F.O.M.D: There’s Not Enough Room for All You Motha Fuckas to Be On It Like This or 2020’s Attack of the Future Shocked, Flesh Covered, Meatbags of the 85. But Imma Just Drop is looser and burns more intensely, pressing $ilk’s love for pop-culture references, Black self-actualization, and blunted conversations with floating planet chunks into a tab of potent rap music—and rap is just his side gig. As long as the music hits like this—and is willing to rip listeners out of their chairs and punt their brains across the room—there’s really no reason to fix what isn’t broken. | 2022-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | DB$B | November 23, 2022 | 8.4 | 978e1575-9396-4169-b93e-56e35aa667f4 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
On his 1977 solo debut, the American flutist probes the possibilities of his instrument: multi-tracking it, pairing it with harpsichord, and playing alien, unadorned Ellington standards. | On his 1977 solo debut, the American flutist probes the possibilities of his instrument: multi-tracking it, pairing it with harpsichord, and playing alien, unadorned Ellington standards. | James Newton: Flute Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-newton-flute-music/ | Flute Music | In late 1984, James Newton climbed through New Mexico’s Carson National Forest, near where Georgia O’Keeffe lived, to play the flute amid the din of crickets and twittering birds. He recorded himself using power generated from a motorcycle battery. Newton was “thinking about the flute as an instrument found in all world cultures,” he said. The resulting album, Echo Canyon, captured long threads of improvisation bouncing off the rock around him, forming walls of sound that seemed just as ancient. In the years since, Newton has continued to use the flute as a probe to poke at the sublime. He began laying that groundwork years earlier, in his solo debut Flute Music, reissued this year for the first time since its 1977 release.
Newton tries out different structural frames for his instrument throughout Flute Music. On opener “Arkansas Suite (Bennie),” he multi-tracks it into two minutes of fluttering chorus. A fleeting architecture forms: When one layer rises above the rest, those beneath it support its exploration of melody, or its slow glide into a single sustained note. It sounds like a convocation, highlighting the flute’s proximity to the human voice. There’s no layering on the song’s second part, “Arkansas Suite (Solomon’s Son).” Instead, Newton hems his flute in with the help of a harpsichord, whose metallic sound holds the flute’s wandering like an enormous wire cage for a rare bird. He uses percussion on “Darlene’s Bossa” to the same effect, letting his flute embroider the song’s steady samba rhythm. These structures provide a sort of anchor for Newton, ground that he can use to contrast his flute’s airborne freedom.
The most exciting moments on Flute Music happen when Newton is fully unbound. “Skye” begins with martial drums and rattling chimes that sound at first like swords unsheathing. They quiet when Newton’s flute emerges as a calming force, compelling the percussion into order. With the addition of guitar, bass, and percussive embellishments, Newton lets the song unfurl like a changing landscape watched from a train window. He adjusts his playing so that the tone wavers between mournful and agitated, his blowing ragged and torn one moment but clear and full the next. On the album’s B-side is “Poor Theron,” an 18-minute free-jazz experiment. Rattling bells, trombone bursts, and long piano riffs often replace Newton’s flute altogether; when it returns, it sounds like a scream.
The record’s penultimate track is a version of Duke Ellington’s jazz standard “Sophisticated Lady.” Where singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday imbued the song with complicated feelings of longing and ennui, Newton’s take is barren and strange, the only track on the record that features nothing beside his flute. Newton’s career is studded with other references to pioneering artists, including a full-length ensemble tribute to Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, and, later, one to Frida Kahlo. Looking back at his debut, it’s clear how those influences would come to figure into his goals as an artist and jazz innovator himself—to find out out how to push the expressive limits of his instrument as close to transcendence as possible. | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Morning Trip | March 3, 2022 | 7.8 | 978e73b5-eb15-4f19-8dd2-347e81195617 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
On their debut collaborative album, R&B’s most self-aware lotharios synthesize their respective approaches in quixotic pursuit of sexual healing. | On their debut collaborative album, R&B’s most self-aware lotharios synthesize their respective approaches in quixotic pursuit of sexual healing. | Ty Dolla $ign / Jeremih: MihTy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-dolla-dollarign-jeremih-mihty/ | MihTy | Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign are unquestionably the natural successors to the figure of the of “R&B thug” that defined the R&B charts for most of the aughts. This seems self-evident and unproblematic—until you remember that the progenitor of the term is R. Kelly, whose legacy is now permanently marred by his misdeeds. But that now-instinctive aesthetic wince is exactly why the two artists’ careers have been so refreshing—they’ve proven to be experts at parsing the difference between charmingly rakish and disturbingly loutish that Kelly’s songcraft (and personal life) nearly always elided. Both artists often feel as if they’re singing about their loverman personas as much as they are inhabiting them. With Jeremih, the deconstruction is mostly musical, through the dubby, reflective negative space that the Late Nights mixtape and album both exuded. With Ty, it’s more often manifested in lyrical detail that provokes empathy even toward his most louche stories, especially on last year’s career peak, Beach House 3. On MihTy, their debut collaborative album, they’ve linked up with frequent collaborator Hitmaka and created a project so buttery smooth that you might not realize how much it’s at war with itself.
The sound of MihTy is blockier and brighter than the usual palettes of either artist, often hearkening back to the chunky hip-hop soul of peak Puff Daddy and Jermaine Dupri—sometimes overtly, as in the R. Kelly-aping chorus of “FYT,” or the bassline borrowed from Mary J. Blige’s “Love No Limit” remix for “The Light.” To distinguish themselves, Hitmaka and co. bring neon synth pads and a dash of vaguely Balearic electronic sparkle to the proceedings, eschewing deference in favor of, oddly enough, a chillwave-y evocation of 1990s R&B. The general effect of the production’s geometric wobbliness is a woozy, classicist gilded cage in which Jeremih and Ty are set loose to ping-pong off each other.
Accordingly, there’s something slightly anxious about the album, flitting lyrically as it does (often within the same song) between straightforward fuckbook braggadocio and nervous reflections on success—“You know this shit ain’t me/So you can’t blame me/If I act a little different these days,” croons Jeremih on the hypnagogic slow jam “These Days.” On standouts like that one, the MihTy project lays out a central driving conflict that’s classically hip-hop, with a twist: Rather than negotiating street authenticity, Ty and Jeremih instead unpack the post-fame viability of intimacy. The aforementioned “FYT” has some of Jeremih’s best lines here, as his honeyed vocal gently skewers his diva reputation right along with his lover’s apparent lack of taste: “I’m in Neiman Marcus throwing tantrums/You think you know high fashion/Just to take it off, babe.” Ty, meanwhile, demonstrates a more explicit neurosis, singing on “Perfect Timing,” “Wish that I could take it back/Said some things I shouldn’t have said/Meant it at the time/I know I take it way too far.” His gravelly “Meant it at the time” subtly percolates, until you suddenly realize that it’s a clever inversion of the classic line, “I didn’t mean it, baby!”
Reading MihTy (and, by extension Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign’s careers in general) as a critical take on R&B’s full-throated embrace of lust before all—“My mind is telling me no, but my body is telling me yes!”—is tempting, but it inevitably brushes against some annoying realities. Chris “ugh” Brown’s presence on this record is aggravating in a way his appearances usually aren’t—mostly because it’s harder to explain him away as a mere hook for hire. When Brown delivers his salacious lines on “Surrounded,” it inevitably draws attention to the incongruity of the song with the savvy, winning self-awareness of the rest of the album. As a result of that track, and a few emotionally one-note cuts in the middle stretch (“New Level” and “Take Your Time,” both of which feel like the result of perfectionism overwork), MihTy fails to shake its creators’ shared albatross of always almost making a classic record.
But in general, MihTy gently gleams with a humanism that is equal parts existential and licentious. The delicate closing triptych of “Lie 2 Me,” “Ride It,” and “Imitate,” perhaps the album’s three best tracks, feels instructive. The first is a swaying ode to paranoia and loyalty. The second inhabits the anxiety of exhibitionism and then lullabies it to sleep. The third fears romantic loss with a choral intensity and seeks to bargain. Each song feels, at first, like it might be a goodbye, or a hello, or a c’mere. Each one is really all three. | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Def Jam | November 3, 2018 | 7.7 | 9791110d-d7de-417d-a25b-dbd284e95b04 | Austin Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/austin-brown/ | |
Double Cup, the new album from Chicago producer Rashad Harden, is a gorgeous, invigorating collection that places equal importance on melody and rhythmic texture. It’s unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience. | Double Cup, the new album from Chicago producer Rashad Harden, is a gorgeous, invigorating collection that places equal importance on melody and rhythmic texture. It’s unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience. | DJ Rashad: Double Cup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18627-dj-rashad-double-cup/ | Double Cup | The rise of footwork as a formidable sub-genre of electronic music over the last few years has raised an interesting question: How do you listen to the stuff? On one level, the Chicago-borne sound is purely functional; its high-BPM tempos, disorienting bass lines, and hypnotically repetitive approach to sampling form the perfect soundtrack for the juke-derived footwork style of dancing, which favors fast feet and athletic skill. Near the top of this decade, footwork caught the collective ear of the always-hungry-for-something-new UK dance scene: Forward-thinking label Planet Mu delivered a smattering of footwork-associated releases near the end of 2010, including the first volume of the scene-surveying Bangs & Works compilation. Much of the footwork music created around that time was fascinating, inspiring—and, as home-listening material, maddening.
Footwork’s relative inaccessibility suggested that it would become a niche concern in the constantly changing realm of dance music, but it stayed in the conversation, as solid releases from veterans of the sound, boundary-pushing newcomers, and canny genre-fusion outsiders pushed things in more musical and distinctly individual directions. All these roads lead to Double Cup, the new album from Rashad Harden, who produces as DJ Rashad. A gorgeous, invigorating collection of tracks that places equal importance on melody alongside rhythmic texture, Double Cup is unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience. This stuff would kill on a dancefloor, but you don't have to watch anyone’s feet to appreciate what’s on display here.
Double Cup closes out a particularly fruitful year for Rashad, a two-decade-plus veteran of the scene who started dancing juke at 12 and began honing his DJ and production skills just a few years later in the early ’90s. In March, he made his debut on Hyperdub with the Rollin’ EP, an expressive collection that featured the astounding “Let It Go,” a game-changer of a tune with rolling, hyperspeed drums and an evocative vocal sample; in July, he dropped another solid EP, I Don’t Give a Fuck, the title track of which appears on Double Cup, too. (“Let It Go,” a superior cut and arguably Rashad’s strongest track to date, is conspicuously absent here, but the record’s overall high level of consistency makes its exclusion a negligible gripe.)
Ironically, Double Cup achieves a new level of musicality previously untouched by footwork by jettisoning much of the genre's rigid formality. This stuff is practically in Rashad’s blood, so his ability to dismantle the sound he’s lived with for much of his life and reassemble it in a fresh and exciting way is expected as much as it is impressive. For instance, he splices in other elements of beat-fixated music—jungle’s frantic mania, bass music's oblong structures, the glowing synths of vintage house and techno, West Coast hip-hop’s honey-slathered haze—to fit a more footwork-indebted framework. I've heard a few people compare Double Cup’s dizzying sampledelia to J Dilla’s masterwork Donuts; while the former lacks the latter's cohesion and singularity of purpose, both records possess the similar thrill of hearing a master of an existent genre taking their sound to new, exciting heights.
Footwork often sounds as handmade as it does futuristic, and being able to see the seams of tracks both imperfect and flawless is one of the genre's more endearing qualities. On Double Cup, those seams are more or less nonexistent—for music that is so frequently intense and hard-hitting, many tracks here possess an impossibly smooth finish. From opening cut “Feelin”’s twinkling sighs to the smothering sensuality of “Let U No,” it at times sounds like Rashad has literally opened a window in footwork's oxygen-sealed atmosphere. The bass lines smack as hard as ever, but they’re placed lower in the mix rather than serving as these tracks’ central axis, creating a more varied sonic topography that’s also easier on the ears.
Footwork’s practitioners tend to congregate in scenes, and Rashad is no different: He’s a founding member of the Teklife crew, whose logo is emblazoned on Double Cup’s packaging, and he’s also a part of the largely elder-statesmen Ghettoteknicianz outfit. Accordingly, Double Cup is collaborative—“I Don't Give a Fuck” and the harrowing weed anthem “Reggie” are the sole Rashad solo cuts here—with DJs and frequent collaborators Spinn (whose very good LP from earlier this year, Teklife, Vol. 2: What You Need, makes for a nice companion to this record), Manny, Earl, and Phil pitching in on additional beats and the occasional rap cadence.
It’s also a largely Midwestern record, and its sole misstep occurs in the form of a collaboration with a non-regional artist: UK producer Addison Groove, whose 2010 single “Footcrab” was instrumental in introducing footwork’s genetic material to bass music. His and Rashad’s “Acid Bit” is an intriguing curiousity, with plenty of the acidic synth work that the name implies, but ultimately the tune is a disruption to the album's already-nebulous flow. Which raises the other caveat regarding Double Cup: Listening to footwork in long stretches can be exhilarating, and exhilaration can often lead to exhaustion. The record runs 51 minutes long, and since it resembles less a properly structured album and more an expertly curated collection of tracks, it’s best taken in smaller bursts for maximal effect.
The greater Chicago area has frequently been at the forefront of left-of-center sounds that have bubbled up, from the coruscating rock deconstructivism of Shellac and Big Black, to Gastr del Sol’s amorphous genre fusion, to Frankie Knuckles’ still-standing reign as “The Godfather” of house music. The past few years, especially, have provided a few fresh and unfamiliar sounds in regional hip-hop and dance music, and Double Cup is the latest testament to the wellspring of ingenuity that Chicago’s recent musical culture has to offer. For Rashad, it’s a defining statement 20-plus-years in the making, a brilliant document that puts him in the position any veteran would kill to occupy: Instead of looking back at the past, now it’s all about where he takes his sound next. | 2013-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 22, 2013 | 8.6 | 97937757-cfff-4afc-a083-a8ff9a3227ac | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Laurie Anderson’s collaboration with the San Francisco-based string quartet presents a powerful, elegiac cycle of songs that show how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe. | Laurie Anderson’s collaboration with the San Francisco-based string quartet presents a powerful, elegiac cycle of songs that show how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe. | Laurie Anderson / Kronos Quartet: Landfall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurie-anderson-kronos-quartet-landfall/ | Landfall | “How many people can do everything?” asked Lou Reed in 2003. He was explaining to the television host Charlie Rose why Laurie Anderson was the “absolute perfect person” to be NASA’s first artist-in-residence. (She would also be its last.) By then, Anderson had been a visual artist, filmmaker, and unlikely pop musician. She once read David Bowie’s mind; she hung suspended upside-down over Coney Island; she taught her dog to play piano. With the folks at NASA, Anderson toured the Hubble Space Telescope and met astronauts and nanotechnologists, ultimately producing a poem called The End of the Moon, which she recited between violin interludes. Formally and conceptually grappling with colossal forces of the unknown, The End of the Moon is a fitting precedent to Anderson’s gripping collaboration with the revolutionary Kronos Quartet—a string quartet who also once worked with NASA and have in their four-decade career, you could say, done everything.
Both Anderson, a consummate New Yorker, and Kronos Quartet, from San Francisco, have been prolific interrogators of American power since the 1970s. In classical music, Kronos challenged the dominance of European-American composers, investigating world music, rock, and jazz; at times, they have played with projections of Occupy and the Arab Spring behind them, or collaborated with leftist historian Howard Zinn. In a 2014 interview, Kronos founder David Harrington said, “Of all the string quartets in the world, I’m intending to have the largest F.B.I. file.” But the greatest link between Anderson and Harrington might be their abilities to see the future.
Harrington dreamed of collaborating with Anderson for decades. But it was not until after the release of Anderson’s 2010 LP Homeland that Landfall began to take shape, first as a traveling live performance and now as a 30-track album of epic sweep. Composed by Anderson and featuring her spoken word, Landfall is a cycle of songs that observe the devastating wake of Hurricane Sandy through her eyes. Though much of Landfall was written before the third costliest storm in U.S. history ravaged the East Coast in October of 2012, Sandy dominates this intense work. It is the sound of a quintessential New Yorker processing a New York tragedy, salvaging something from the sad wreckage, internalizing the debris of a creative life, showing how human memory can be stronger than catastrophe.
The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew. There is a celestial scope to these pieces, as if Anderson has composed a new cosmos where lies are not hidden, but rather laid bare; where we can decipher what is real. Anderson’s lucid spoken word combines with the quartet’s weeping elegance to portray the gravity of disaster, of seismic motion, of ominous anticipation, all with a gentle immediacy. By “Our Street Is a Black River,” Anderson begins her story: “From above, Sandy was a huge swirl that looked like the galaxies,” she states, and in her iconic way, she continues, “whose names”—pause—“I didn’t know.”
Anderson’s spatial phrasings convey a sense of steadiness in an increasingly precarious world. She speaks on only a handful of tracks, but her extended pauses are like deep breaths amid the exhausting act of processing. Here, the Kronos Quartet heighten her breaks to audacious effect, sometimes emulating the shape of drones, or ragas, or curled question marks, sometimes augmented by electronics. Anderson—who once turned the William S. Burroughs maxim “language is a virus” into song—has found fantastic collaborators in Kronos, who can say so much without language when language fails. On “The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel,” there are no words but churning, paddling, involuntary movement; it is a resigned procession; you have to keep moving.
On “Everything Is Floating,” Anderson plainly describes how it felt to descend upon her waterlogged downtown basement after Sandy and see the muck of keyboards and projectors, papers and books, “all the things I had carefully saved all my life… becoming nothing but junk.” With this somber, dramatic, and yet peaceful music, she evokes another maxim she has repeated often, from her Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche: “Feel sad without actually being sad.” This is a survival guide, and maybe Landfall is, too.
Landfall seems to synthesize many of the concerns of Anderson’s life: language, technology, America’s gargantuan cons. And it all coalesces on “Nothing Left but Their Names,” an astounding nine-and-a-half-minute monologue in Anderson’s classic down-pitched vocal style. She catalogues extinct species such as spotted lizards, mastodons, and many kinds of sloths. Her meditation wanders through the imaginative power of words, how they can be superior to experience itself. But Anderson ends, profoundly, on the moon and the stars. “You know the reason that I really love the stars?” Anderson asks. “It’s that we cannot hurt them. We can’t burn them. We can’t melt them or make them overflow. We can’t flood them or blow them up… But we are reaching for them.” If natural disasters are wrapped up with the worst of humanity—the greed and consumption and violent men that keep greenhouse emissions rewiring the atmosphere; the forces of destruction that cause nature to combust upon itself—at least we still have the stars.
Simultaneously with Landfall, Anderson has released a career-spanning book of art and essays called All the Things I Lost in the Flood. In it, she recalls the wild discussions she had at NASA, like a 5,000-year plan to move all manufacturing, and its pollution, off the Earth. She also illuminates her 1981 hit “O Superman,” the electronic odyssey of a tune that transformed her into what she’s called an “anthropological” pop musician. “Here come the planes,” it goes, “They’re American planes.”
When Anderson sang it a few days after 9/11, she writes, “I had the eerie sensation of singing about the absolute present. Each time I revived the song people would say, ‘Did you just write this? It’s so much like what’s going on right now.’ They had forgotten that the current war has been going on for well over 30 years, every once in a while getting a new name: ‘The Gulf War,’ ‘The Iraq War,’ ‘The War on Terror.’” If climate change, a war against Earth, is to continue, Landfall is destined to retell the story of the next hurricane, the next perilous Sandy. Anderson still sees the future, but she starts by paying attention. | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | February 27, 2018 | 7.7 | 9794b0ca-8ed8-4f30-9f02-88de860566c6 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
With Bush, those who yearn for a Snoop album produced entirely by the Neptunes almost get their wish: Pharrell Williams handles the boards here, with occasional assistance from his former production partner Chad Hugo. It's less a rap album than a tribute to '70s funk and R&B. | With Bush, those who yearn for a Snoop album produced entirely by the Neptunes almost get their wish: Pharrell Williams handles the boards here, with occasional assistance from his former production partner Chad Hugo. It's less a rap album than a tribute to '70s funk and R&B. | Snoop Dogg: Bush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20435-bush/ | Bush | Over the course of two decades, Snoop Dogg’s adaptability has allowed him to move from the G-funk of "Gin and Juice" to the sweaty club anthems of "Down 4 My N’s" to the reggae of Snoop Lion. His voice sounds good over all kinds of production, but some of his best late-period work has come when collaborating with the Neptunes. The success of "Beautiful" established Snoop, the Neptunes, and Charlie Wilson as a powerful team, and led to the Virginia producers contributing several tracks (including the chart-topping "Drop It Like It’s Hot") to his 2004 album, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece. With Bush, fans who might have yearned for a Snoop album produced entirely by the Neptunes at the time (almost) get their wish: Pharrell Williams handles the boards here, with occasional assistance from his former production partner Chad Hugo.
Bush was conceived as a tribute to the funk and R&B of the 1970s, and the familiar wail of Stevie Wonder’s harmonica on the stand-out opener, "California Roll", establishes the mood. Over an instrumental as smooth as a ride down Rodeo Drive on an 85-degree day, Snoop's croon is convincing enough to sell lines like “So if you wanna go to Melrose/ Let’s hit Adidas, girl, we got our own shell toes." Pharrell positions L.A. as the nucleus of luxury and vice ("Baby you can be a movie star/ Get yourself a medical card, yeah/ ‘Cause that’s how California rolls") on the sticky hook, and Wonder accents P’s trademark falsetto with background vocals.
Both Snoop and Pharrell are products of the '70s, so it makes sense that they'd embrace the ambiance of the music they grew up listening to, and that they'd be pretty good at it. The mood holds from the bubbly disco of "R U A Freak" to the Nile Rodgers-inspired guitar work on "Awake", a song that brings to mind the second wind you get during a party’s final 20 minutes. On "Peaches N Cream", Snoop, Pharrell, and Wilson combine once again for an infectious retro-funk fusion. From start to finish, Bush is a feel-good record.
Snoop has said that he tapped Pharrell for creative guidance because he wanted a cohesive sound for the album. At just 41 minutes long, Bush is indeed an easy listen, but the songs also bleed together. "I Knew That", for example, opens with the same motif as the one used on the superior "Peaches N Cream". And although the album features just 10 songs, it feels like there are only about six. Bush is designed to function as an old funk record that you can let run for an entire party’s duration, but its uniformity might make it less appealing over the long haul.
Still, it makes sense for Snoop to be making this type of music at this stage of his career, as he approaches his mid-forties and rap recedes into his past. The music puts past images of him grooving to Bootsy Collins while stoned in Baby Boy or dancing to Funkadelic in The Wash in perspective—funk has long been his lifeblood. So while Bush is strong enough musically, you can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if this crew had followed R&G with a full-length a decade ago, when everyone involved was still in his prime. | 2015-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 13, 2015 | 6.5 | 9798a918-ee66-4da3-a038-593c6d839a85 | Julian Kimble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julian-kimble/ | null |
With a crisper sound and direct homages to underground music of generations past, the enigmatic London trio’s Matador debut is moody, moth-eaten record-collector rock that gets by on moody insouciance. | With a crisper sound and direct homages to underground music of generations past, the enigmatic London trio’s Matador debut is moody, moth-eaten record-collector rock that gets by on moody insouciance. | Bar Italia: Tracey Denim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bar-italia-tracey-denim/ | Tracey Denim | Bar Italia spent their first few years in quasi-anonymity, tinged with the default intrigue that attaches to certain bands who decline to overshare. They bathed in the transitive mystique of association with Dean Blunt, who released their first few recordings on his World Music label, and they trafficked in a diffuse mixture of sounds cribbed from 1980s and ’90s UK indie: tendrils of flanged electric guitar, mopey boy/girl vocals, the occasional squall of stompbox fuzz. Pairing sullen dissonance with stone-faced reticence, their music was heavy on vibe and difficult to pin down, its consistency as vague as their intentions.
Early songs rarely broke the two-minute mark, but they were the opposite of pithy. Sour as curdled milk, they resembled demos rescued from a thrifted four-track recorder, practically archaeological in their layers of magnetic hiss and half-obscured hints of slowcore and shoegaze. One track in particular—“Killer Instinct,” the penultimate cut on their second album, 2021’s Bedhead—served as a kind of Rosetta Stone: Roughly halfway through its 99-second run, a warbly voice breaks into a ramshackle cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” the timekeeping as haphazard as the tune-carrying. For all the galaxy-brain speculation, the unguarded qualities of “Killer Instinct,” as well as the obviousness of the reference, suggested that the band’s motives weren’t all that complicated. As it did for generations of indie rockers before them, the apparent amateurism testified to the depth of their feeling.
With Tracey Denim, Bar Italia’s first album for Matador, even more of the mystery dissipates, and not just because the group is now known to be the trio of Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton, of the duo Double Virgo, and Nina Cristante, a longtime Dean Blunt associate who moonlights as an “intuitive trainer” and nutritionist. The sound of the self-produced record suggests a fog burning off. The chords are crisper, the rhythms sprightlier, and the hooks stickier, though the mood remains hushed and the textures moth-eaten. More than ever, they wear their influences—the Cure, Slowdive, Pavement—on their tattered sleeves. “Clark” is a showcase for the guitar-bass interplay of New Order’s Low-Life; the lush acoustic guitars and sighing vocals of “changer” are prime Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or Wish-era Cure.
On previous Bar Italia records, the contours of their music were obscured by lo-fi murk, but on Tracey Denim the guitars assume the foreground, chiming post-punk riffs offset by sturdy basslines. Their use of dissonance feels more strategic here, with clanging chords throwing off a faint metallic glow that helps silhouette the skeletal melodic lines. The grooves are groovier, too, imbued with the shuffling syncopations of the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine, groups that smuggled dance rhythms into late-’80s indie under cover of a guitar-heavy wall of sound.
This is, without a doubt, record-collector rock, a finely calibrated tribute to the evergreen sounds that have fueled underground rock for decades. Where Bar Italia attempt to impress their own identity is in their multi-part vocal interplay, an unusual approach that’s all the more noticeable for their distinctive (if unpolished) voices. On most songs, all three musicians take turns at the mic, lending a sense of fractured perspective to their narrow set of themes: anxiety, loneliness, breakups, unrequited love, the desire to be left alone. This broken-mirror style of storytelling feels novel, but there’s no getting around the fact that the vocals are not, by and large, Bar Italia’s strong suit. All three singers favor plodding, eighth-note cadences. Cristante opts for the sorts of sing-song melodies a daydreaming child might make up. And Tarik Fehmi has a distressing tendency to caterwaul like Robert Smith at his most despondent. They’ve got a built-in defense: For decades, this kind of shambolic aesthetic has signified immediacy over virtuosity, heart over chops. But it’s hard not to be distracted by the moments when the lyrics fall flat or the singing goes awry. Their chord progressions are smart and the production is appealing, but neither is enough to carry the record on its own.
Even though the album is only 44 minutes long, 15 songs feels like about seven too many. Apart from the standout “Clark” and the Breeders-esque “Friends,” the record’s back half congeals into a blur of muddy chords and aimless melodies. And even some of the catchiest songs, like “changer,” are bogged down by clunker rhymes (“Didn’t get the chance to say I want more/Doesn’t have to be this way, it’s too pure/Now that you have gone away, I’m bored”). Still, at their best, Bar Italia get by on moody insouciance. On “Nurse!,” Cristante encounters an awful man at a party and tries to steady herself with a kind of mantra: “You will make it to the other side/You know it’s just another night.” Then the song shifts. The groove lightens, the chords brighten, and Fenton paints a picture of unburdened freedom: “A mask covered your eyes/And you move like crazy to your favorite song/You said ‘I’m coming alive’/Haven’t felt this way since you were 21.” It’s a neat encapsulation of a powerful idea: music as the fountain of eternal youth, a timeless sentiment that hits especially hard on a record steeped in déjà vu. | 2023-05-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-24T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 24, 2023 | 6.9 | 97a0c710-6bfe-40cf-b82b-8f1c16e9f8b3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Yeasayer's latest is an ambitious psychedelic quasi-concept record that is refreshingly (sometimes bizarrely) out-of-step with current trends, occasionally baffling, but mostly unsuccessful. | Yeasayer's latest is an ambitious psychedelic quasi-concept record that is refreshingly (sometimes bizarrely) out-of-step with current trends, occasionally baffling, but mostly unsuccessful. | Yeasayer: Amen & Goodbye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21768-amen-goodbye/ | Amen & Goodbye | In 2009, Yeasayer's Chris Keating surprised fans by abandoning the comfortably pastoral landscape of* All Hour Cymbals* to guest on Simian Mobile Disco’s farcical electro-house banger “Audacity of Huge.” At the time, this decision seemed unusual for a number of reasons: Here was a guy who sang “we can all grab at the chance to be handsome farmers” when indiedom was cresting peak plaid, now ironically bragging about his “Damien Hirst telephone” and “Kool-Aid swimming pool.” The lyrics were clever in an era when hipster-bashing was particularly hip (the “bag of Bill Murray” line still scans as prescient in a post-Miley/molly world), but the move added to the already-nagging suspicion that Keating and Co. were calculated trend hoppers rather than truly idiosyncratic personalities.
That narrative further congealed when* Odd Blood* positioned Yeasayer as a glossier version of MGMT (or stonier version of Empire of the Sun), but the transformation largely pleased fans: “O.N.E.” and “Ambling Alp” remain two of the band’s most successful and beloved songs. So, when* Fragrant World* dropped in 2012, it was almost a surprise that Yeasayer took another creative left turn, abandoning synth-hippie bacchanalia for a more en-vogue, minimalistic sound. (Their lyrics, however, remained a similar mixture of oblique references, social commentary, and love songs.) Four years later, the band now has a chance to take stock of its motley career and reset expectations once again. And to their credit, Amen & Goodbye may be the first time the band has doubled down on its weirdest impulses. The result is an ambitious psychedelic quasi-concept record that is refreshingly (sometimes bizarrely) out of step with current trends, occasionally baffling, but mostly unsuccessful.
Nowhere is Yeasayer’s latest iteration better crystallized than “I Am Chemistry,” a psych-pop opus that, given the title and sartorial stylings of the band, you might assume is about drugs, but is actually—possibly literally—about toxic chemicals. (Keating sings, “A C4H10FO2P puts you on your knees,” listing out the molecular structure of Sarin gas.) This could be another instance of Yeasayer attempting to get political (see: "Reagan's Skeleton”) or an extended analogy about a troubled relationship. But "chemicals weapons = bad" is hardly a nuanced worldview and neither is identifying emotional instability with DDT. Worse, is the song's clunky sexual imagery. The words, “She only needs my help pleasuring herself beneath the rue leaves,” are sung with a vague John Lennon impersonation that the band returns to throughout the album.
Sonically, things aren’t any more coherent. The chorus to "I Am Chemistry"—big and syrupy—plays like an outdated bid for alt-rock radio play, but it clashes with the other discordant elements in the arrangement. Surprisingly pleasant, however, is the bridge, sung by The Roches member Suzzy Roche, which sounds like something Pink Floyd would have stitched into the fabric of a mid-’70s arena anthem, but it doesn’t jive with the otherwise slick production.
Other tracks are rarely more lucid, but just as ardent. “Gerson’s Whistle” is a keyboard-driven rocker that mixes elements of Yeasayer’s early-career folk harmonies (“Can you hear / There is something in the darkness”) with a vocal melody that heads into Californication-era Red Hot Chili Peppers territory. It makes you wonder what type of listeners the band is trying to court—possibly all of them? "Uma," a ballad that reaches for emotional resonance, comes off only as a treacly Beatles knockoff. However, "Cold Night," the most straightforward song on the album, is a simple pleasure. Rather than pile on historical or philosophical allusions, the lyrics are straightforward and immediate. "I regret all the times I didn't respond to you," goes one mournful statement, a sentiment we can all identify with.
According to the band, Amen & Goodbye was recorded in the Catskills, where the band attempted to return to a less digitally-saturated existence and there’s certainly an argument to be made that Amen & Goodbye is about the strife between contemporary technology and spirituality. But with songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper. Amen & Goodbye plays as a sincere attempt at recreate the type of album that the band loved from decades past—meandering, experimental, uncompromising. This may seem interesting to the members of Yeasayer, but listeners will be left wondering where the band's interest in pop economy went. But the audacity, it should be noted, is huge.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Suzzy Roche is a sibling of Rufus Wainwright. | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | April 5, 2016 | 5.4 | 97a99821-10a8-429c-94b7-0c42451bae16 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
On her official debut, the electric rapper-singer is by turns deliriously chaotic, full of ambition, and unfocused as she tries a little of everything that’s made her a star. | On her official debut, the electric rapper-singer is by turns deliriously chaotic, full of ambition, and unfocused as she tries a little of everything that’s made her a star. | Rico Nasty: Nightmare Vacation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rico-nasty-nightmare-vacation/ | Nightmare Vacation | It was Rico Nasty and Kenny Beats’ first time in the studio together. She asked him for heavy metal. Then she stepped out, took some molly, and came back in. He apparently hadn’t finished the beat yet, but Rico saw something in its half-baked state and insisted on recording. She might’ve been motivated by some rap beef, maybe not. Rico’s hook was simple yet deadly. Kind of like that time Ice Cube rhymed “AK” with “good day,” there was a sense of foreboding in its relief: “Thank God, I ain’t have to smack a bitch today.”
The 2018 loosie “Smack a Bitch” laid the foundation for the Maryland rapper’s electrifying screamo rap—jagged guitar riffs, booming trap drums, and an unbridled rage that pushes Rico's vocal cords to the brink, hoarseness be damned. The song reappears with a deliriously chaotic remix on Rico’s official debut album, Nightmare Vacation, recalling the genesis of her punk-rap hybrid sound. The menacing rasp was simmering under the surface on standouts like “Key Lime OG” and “Poppin” from her 2017 mixtape Sugar Trap 2, but it wasn’t until 2018’s Nasty and 2019’s Anger Management that it took shape.
Rico has talked of pop ambitions—one of her biggest inspirations is Rihanna—and like the Bajan icon, she finds multiple pit stops between the sweetness and fury of her various personas. In addition to Kenny Beats on “Smack a Bitch,” Rico enlists 16 other producers across 16 tracks, including Dylan Brady from 100 gecs and Take a Daytrip, hitmakers for Sheck Wes and Lil Nas X. There are more than a few moments of brilliance, but as a whole, the album lacks cohesion, feeling less exploratory and unbound than simply unfocused.
Where Nasty brought Rico’s hard edges into sharper focus, Nightmare Vacation reshapes them, experimenting with cadence and tone in playful and exciting ways. Rico has mastered aggression but shirks formulas and predictability, stretching out the spectrum of anger and blending it with humor, bravado, and brattiness. The sparse keys and impish vocal contortions of “Check Me Out” recall the dexterity of OG Maco’s flow on the Vine staple “U Guessed It.” On the track, her equally strained and cheerful delivery of “you snooze you lose” is both hilarious and frightening, a polarizing combo that Rico somehow makes work. On the more extreme end, the grinding guitar loop and feverish overdubs of “Let It Out” are expertly engineered to remedy the pent-up frustration and anxiety that have come to characterize not just this calendar year, but every single one before it.
Moving beyond rage, “iPhone” yearns for romance and conjures some of Rico’s most tender vocals, a considerable feat considering the maximalist production and extreme vocal effects of Dylan Brady’s production. Elsewhere, the flirty interplay between Aminé and Rico on “Back & Forth” is a welcome water break amidst the harder cuts, while the bubblegum singsong rap of the Don Toliver and Gucci Mane-assisted “Don’t Like Me” is a pleasant-but-forgettable pop number.
The second half of the album drags and struggles to match the vigor that preceded it: The pop-leaning “No Debate” is uncharacteristically devoid of emotion, while “Own It” has the kind of groove and vapid soundbites you might hear at a club more interested in bottle service than the mosh pits of Rico’s live shows. Even “Pussy Poppin,” which is structured around a loop that sounds strikingly similar to the Triggaman beat, awkwardly fails to capture the ass-shaking magic of New Orleans bounce despite being built off the genre’s secret sauce.
The deficiencies laid bare in the latter portion are almost wiped away by the “Smack a Bitch” remix. Featuring rap newcomers, ppcocaine, Sukihana, and Rubi Rose, the show-stopping posse cut takes the energy of the original, wraps it in explosives, and sets it on fire. Recalling the thrill of Nicki Minaj’s “Monster” verse, each rapper raises the bar set by the previous one, destroying and remaking the track as they go along. By the last verse, ppcocaine can barely be bothered to stay on beat as she threatens to run bitches over in her Tesla truck—it feels like you are riding shotgun with her.
Nightmare Vacation bursts with potential, and while not all of it is realized, the moments that click signal that Rico is an artist with a strong gut, confidently expanding the boundaries of her craft. In a recent interview with Coveteur, Rico discussed wanting to make music that explicitly referenced recent social unrest but stopped because it felt “cheesy” and” forced.” Her catalog has always reflected the time: In an age of immeasurable loss, the power of her raw expression—whether it be screams or angsty croons for affection—lies in its ability to excavate and release those feelings, giving way to something new and hopeful.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic | December 9, 2020 | 7.4 | 97ac3599-fc9e-47e6-ad03-32b54eb7b137 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
Featuring Bob Dylan, St. Vincent, and Ben Gibbard, the performances here breathe refreshing gay life into old songs, even if it smacks of branded content a little bit. | Featuring Bob Dylan, St. Vincent, and Ben Gibbard, the performances here breathe refreshing gay life into old songs, even if it smacks of branded content a little bit. | Various Artists: Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-universal-love-wedding-songs-reimagined-ep/ | Universal Love: Wedding Songs Reimagined EP | It’s #20gayteen and rising LGBTQ pop stars like Troye Sivan and Hayley Kiyoko are doing away with the vague usage of “you” and getting specific about the objects of their affection. It’s not you; it’s him, or her, or them. Welcome to the call-me-by-your-pronoun era of pop music. Perched in their midtown Manhattan offices, watching the movement swell to a tipping point, are the executives of McCann New York—an advertising agency that recently commissioned this Universal Love EP for its client, MGM Resorts. The six-song EP is comprised of traditional wedding songs redesigned for same-sex couples.
Heavy-hitters like Bob Dylan lent their names to the project alongside pop-activists like Kesha and indie megastars like St. Vincent. The EP’s executive producer, Rob Kaplan, and co-producer, Tom Murphy, hail from the advertising world and the former runs Wool & Tusk, a company that, “pairs advertising agencies, brands and cultural institutions with music.” As an ad campaign, Universal Love is a huge success. It scored free publicity for itself in The New York Times, Billboard and Rolling Stone, and, as a result, probably drove a few extra thousand clicks to its client’s website. It’s a case study in how to get brand activism right. But can sponsored content like this really offer its audience anything genuine? Can swapping the pronouns in a love song actually make it more relatable to LGBTQ listeners? Call me a sucker, but as a newly betrothed gay woman, I have to say, it feels nice to have a song.
The EP’s success stems largely from the involved artists’ interpretations. Since 1928, “She’s Funny That Way” has been sung by men and women about partners of the opposite sex and Bob Dylan was likely aware of the song’s genderfluid history. His version pays homage to both Sinatra’s orchestral take and Billie Holiday’s bluesier approach. In the first verse, a pianist’s light stroke of descending keys trails Dylan’s warm voice as he sings, “Now he seems quite out of place/Like a fallen star.” It’s one of many playful elements in the arrangement that helps surface the song’s inherent silliness which had been buried by more heavy-handed approaches in the past.
When it was first released in 1963, “Then He Kissed Me” was lauded for effectively capturing the rush of a first crush in song. Produced by Phil Spector, it told the story of a young girl gushing over her steady. Now rewritten as “And Then She Kissed Me,” St. Vincent’s version features vigorous drumming that keeps up with the furious heartbeat of a young woman who just experienced that “Oh fuck, I think I like her, like her” feeling for the first time. When Clark confesses, as if through clenched teeth, “I wanted to let her know that she was more than a friend,” she’s relaying an experience that’ll ring true for same-sex couples who’ve had to navigate their feelings in a world where opposites supposedly attract.
The lead singer of Bloc Party, Kele Okereke, took on love’s sturdiest soundtrack by choosing to redo the Temptations’ classic, “My Girl.” He freed himself from the song’s most famous hallmarks to make space for his own version which replaces the original’s strings, horns and endless crescendos with a more mellow and contained approach to instrumentation. A light but steady touch on the drums carries the track along at a pleasant pace. In Okereke’s hands, “My Girl” turns into “My Guy” and matures from being an exuberant, declaration of love to a relaxed admiration of someone dear to him. It’s a sweet transformation to a song that’s been nearly loved to death.
The biggest missed opportunity on Universal Love is Valerie June’s reworking of “Mad About the Boy.” Originally written by the famed, gay playwright Noël Coward, supposedly for Cary Grant, the lyrics tell the story of a man (Coward) who’s revived by a pesky crush for a young Hollywood star (Grant). It’s a dramatic song, and though June commands the sprawling arrangement well enough with her brassy vocals, she fails to imbue it with the kind of melodrama Coward intended. Given the song’s origins, it’s worth wondering what kind of emotional effect would’ve been produced by a version that featured a man’s vocals. Still, June’s version is a convincing one, as are all of the tracks on Universal Love. Kesha turned in a damn good version of Janis Joplin’s “I Need a Man to Love,” but it’s Ben Gibbard’s stripped-down version of the simple “And I Love Her” that reminds listeners just how ordinary but wonderful it is to love someone without limit. | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sony | April 13, 2018 | 6.4 | 97ad007d-ba37-4e3d-8e8a-0b1d19aab1e3 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | |
The TDE soul singer takes a darker turn on his second record, a sad and gauzy R&B collection full of bitterness and missed connections. | The TDE soul singer takes a darker turn on his second record, a sad and gauzy R&B collection full of bitterness and missed connections. | SiR: Chasing Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sir-chasing-summer/ | Chasing Summer | SiR’s debut album began with a computerized female voice who answered to “K” telling the singer his plane was ready. “K” guided the album, chirping at SiR between creamy ballads and serving as a sort of tour guide and road map. You can hear faint traces of this narrative device on SiR’s latest album, Chasing Summer, which is book-ended by a pilot’s voiceover and the faint sputter of plane engines. It’s an odd framing for an album that never leaves home: The Inglewood singer drifts around the city with his hair down, flirting with girls who grew up on Queen Street. Even metaphorically, there’s not a lot of movement: SiR’s songs tend to find one mood and simmer in it.
SiR makes hazy, gliding neo-soul songs about love. He has been married for a decade, most interviews with him are quick to point out, and therefore much of his music is assumed to be autobiographical. His last album swerved towards ego and pettiness in a way that felt out of place and unconvincing. “All her little friends can’t stand me/Because they know I would trade her love for a Grammy,” he spat, before slipping back into his familiar jazzy, tender singsong. On Chasing Summer, SiR stops making excuses and plunges into cruelty. “Did I stutter when I told her ass/ None of this was ever meant to last?” he spits over surging synthesizers. On the ironically titled “That’s Why I Love You,” he gets even more direct: “I never wondered what this could be/I just fuck you and leave.” SiR has stressed that much of this album is fictional; the second track is titled “John Redcorn,” supposedly from the perspective of the cartoon King of the Hill character. “Sometimes, I’m not telling my exact truth because I like to keep some of my privacy,” he told DJ Booth earlier this month. Safely shrouded in make-believe, he’s free to lash out.
The effect is an album that bristles with paranoia. SiR creates conditions in which actual relationships are impossible: He’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time; he replays conversations that never happened; he waits for calls he won’t take. “We both know this house could never be a home,” he sings. “But ain’t you sick of spending all your nights alone?” The kindest words in the record are about weed—“Isn’t she the best?” he crows about a sativa hybrid.
But at 14 songs, the album feels bloated. Its swirl of features are hit or miss. Smino and Kendrick Lamar inject life into the spaces SiR hollows out. Zacari, who should be a natural complement, arrives on the soulless “Mood” for the generic hook: “I ain’t in the mood/If I ain’t in my bag/Do anything for the cash.” Lil Wayne’s presence seems more like a signifier of SiR’s stardom than an addition to the music; “What’s a girl without a booty?” he yawns through Auto-Tune. SiR’s at his best when he’s swimming through his loneliness.
The obvious comparison point for Chasing Summer is SZA’s CTRL: another Kendrick Lamar-featuring RCA and TDE collaboration, another gauzy and sad love record with an unfortunate line about pussy (“Pussy tastes like diamonds”, SiR croons, which is only marginally less awful than CTRL’s “Pussy can be so facetious.”) The records are stylistically similar, but for SZA, deconstructing romance felt like a revolution. With SiR, it’s a way to tread in place. | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA | August 29, 2019 | 6.8 | 97b0b57a-f41e-4349-b3c2-5f4d9cf58277 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
New York band follows its debut album Fever to Tell-- this decade's gold standard for transcending indie hype-- with a record that offers only one side of the group's multifaceted sound. | New York band follows its debut album Fever to Tell-- this decade's gold standard for transcending indie hype-- with a record that offers only one side of the group's multifaceted sound. | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Show Your Bones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8889-show-your-bones/ | Show Your Bones | It's impossible not to hear the ghost of Fever to Tell on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' follow-up, Show Your Bones. With its 2003 full-length debut, the Brooklyn-based trio confidently staked out diverse territory-- from the meltdown-rock of "Pin" to the march of "Black Tongue" to the tenderly skewed balladry of "Maps"-- and played those extremes against each other, so that each became even more extreme in contrast. The result was a complex sound that was simultaneously inviting and confrontational, and it made Fever to Tell this decade's gold standard for transcending indie hype. But while it makes sense for the YYYs to play off that earlier sound here, their new album sounds like only one side of a multifaceted band.
For Bones, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recruited producer Squeak E. Clean, who fits these songs with an array of bells and whistles-- not to mention sirens, organs, programmed beats, acoustic guitars, rattling percussion, keyboards, and various studio effects. Most of it, unfortunately, simply seems unnecessary or excessive. In fact, more often than not, these sonic geegaws detract from the band's intensity, compartmentalizing the record's explosive moments from the songs themselves.
Nick Zinner's guitar sounds smaller and less commanding here, and Karen O has toned down her presence considerably, rarely relying on the vocal tics that once seemed the equivalent of her famously ragtag glam fashion. Even when she unleashes that hellfire growl in "Fancy", it's buried so far in the mix that it's indistinguishable from the band's racket. Brian Chase's drum work remains confoundingly intricate, but seems strangely restrained nonetheless. The percussion should punish your eardrums when he pounds out the opening of "Fancy"; instead it sounds polite, like he's clearing his throat to get your attention. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs finally do cut loose at the frenzied end of the Strokes-fest "Mysteries", the moment has a get-it-all-out-now feel.
These are growing pains for a band that has done a lot of maturing since Fever to Tell made them semistars. This newfound wisdom has its benefits, chief among them a confessional tone to the songwriting that effectively blurs the distinctions between Karen O and Karen Orzalek. Show Your Bones is a post-fame album, with many songs written from the specific perspective of a touring musician. "Warrior" begins as an acoustic ballad much like the previous album's "Modern Romance", but builds linearly to an intense finish as Karen O laments, "Travel away, travel it all away/ The road's gonna end on me." She never lapses into self-pity, though, mainly because the attraction of an excited audience proves as strong as the pull of a stable, homebound life. First single "Gold Lion" sounds like a mission statement: "We'll build a fire in your eyes."
For its faults, howeveer, Show Your Bones contains some genuinely disarming moments that reveal the band's considerable emotional and sonic force. Despite its similarity to Love and Rockets' "No New Tale to Tell", "Gold Lion" unleashes a booming wordless chorus and a high-flying guitar riff from Zinner. On "Way Out"-- perhaps the album's most effectively dramatic track-- O infuses her vocals with a palpable emotional fatigue, sounding desperate to reconnect with the world even as she slowly sinks into numbness: "It's around me so tight!"
Still, on Show Your Bones the Yeah Yeah Yeahs occupy only one corner of the territory they claimed on Fever, walking confidently in their own footsteps but without claiming any new ground. If Fever had a skuzzy film of sweat and alcohol that sounded persuasively real, with songs that could have been cobbled together from scraps found in garbage bins and dumpsters, unmade beds and mess-strewn rooms, Bones possesses a too-clean sound and a songwriterly approach that seems more redolent of the studio than the stage. These refinements, which prove merely cosmetic, sap their sound of its brutal spontaneity and mute the band members' idiosyncrasies, and as a result, the album sounds guarded, with very little danger and too few moments of real urgency. | 2006-03-26T01:01:54.000-05:00 | 2006-03-26T01:01:54.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | March 26, 2006 | 6.8 | 97c80e12-c88c-439b-b6f3-4e30d269fc69 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Wiki is best known as the linchpin in the NYC rap trio Ratking. On his solo debut, he pares down his writing and focuses on the pointedly unglamorous side of touring, all stale gas station food and cramped van seats. | Wiki is best known as the linchpin in the NYC rap trio Ratking. On his solo debut, he pares down his writing and focuses on the pointedly unglamorous side of touring, all stale gas station food and cramped van seats. | Wiki: Lil Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21329-wiki-lil-me/ | Lil Me | Wiki, a 22-year-old from the Upper West Side, is best known as the linchpin in Ratking, the trio whose 2014 LP So It Goes is one of the clearest articulations of New York City in the 21st century. Lots of the writing, critical and otherwise, about the group's music has really been about revivalism. Is Ratking bringing the '90s back? Should they bring the '90s back? (How much Avirex do they own?) In reality, both So It Goes and the follow-up EP, 700 Fill, are forward-thinking. The group's ties to Clinton-era New York are ethereal—Wiki's affinity for Cam'ron-esque marriages of crass humor and life advice, Sporting Life's winter-resistant drum programming, Hak's careening narratives. And every piece of Ratking's New York has been picked for a purpose, even if it's dragged through mud and sleet and trampled on by commuters afterward.
The young rapper's solo debut, Lil Me, is an act of decluttering. Where he was once verbose and technical at the expense of his message, here he pares down his writing: "Light Ls, make it glow/ It takes a toll on my health," from the closer "Sun Showers". In some ways, this is Wiki's touring record, but it's not about groupies or friction in a relationship back home. It's pointedly unglamorous, all stale gas station food and cramped van seats. On "Living With My Moms" he raps, "I don't even know/ It's wherever the label tell me to go"; on "Seedy Motherfucker", he tells us about getting booed during his set. Even the victories (clean sound checks, crowds who half-understand the lyrics) seem smaller-than-life. Wiki alludes to graver problems—coke habits, robberies, loaded guns—but lets them linger in the margins.
The out-of-town dates serve primarily as an excuse for Wiki to re-examine his hometown. On the Madlib-produced half of the opener "WikiFlag", Wiki's pining: "It's been a minute since I've been given a New York dap." "3 Stories", one of two songs produced by the Montreal-based DJ Kaytranada, is a detail-obsessed narrative in the classicist vein. "Hit the L", which reassembles the Ratking lineup, could unfurl in a dozen different directions, but it stays fixed in a smoky room, walls closing in. Sporting Life hooks up a turn-of-the-century chipmunk soul loop, yet chops it into two one-second samples, and uses those sparingly.
The song that follows,"Old Blocks New Kids", is Lil Me's thematic center. Reigns at the top are short like leprechauns, and the song (another furnished by Sporting Life) celebrates the turnover. *"*Oh pops, I know you thought that you could do this/ You ain't stupid, but you old, pops—new kids." That's Wiki's New York: cold, cutthroat, decaying, being reborn. Over and over, stripping away anything that's unnecessary. | 2015-12-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Letter Racer | December 11, 2015 | 7.6 | 97c9d1ae-46b5-4072-a8ec-d58a772fb510 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
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