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Kansas City indie pop trio Shy Boys' self-titled debut is a triumph of ramshackle aesthetics and homespun hooks. Instrumentally, Shy Boys is far from dazzling, but that doesn't seem to hold the group back. | Kansas City indie pop trio Shy Boys' self-titled debut is a triumph of ramshackle aesthetics and homespun hooks. Instrumentally, Shy Boys is far from dazzling, but that doesn't seem to hold the group back. | Shy Boys: Shy Boys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18917-shy-boys-shy-boys/ | Shy Boys | Forget that Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours" rap for a second—sometimes, you're better off going in cold. Take, for instance, Kansas City trio Shy Boys. Brothers Collin and Kyle Rausch and roommate Konnor Ervin formed the band before they'd ever picked up their instruments, and from the ramshackle sound of their self-titled debut, they haven't lost much sleep staying up late to work on their scales. Unabashed amateurishness can cut both ways; certain groups cut through the rough patches with enough youthful exuberance or ingrained pop sensibility, but for others, the incompetency's more than the songs can bear. Instrumentally, Shy Boys is far from dazzling: tentative one minute, roughshod the next. But these limitations don't seem to be holding Shy Boys' songcraft back. From these rickety arrangements, they've carved out the kind of sly, spiny, instinctive hooks any seasoned band would be lucky to stumble upon.
The Shy Boys have dubbed their jangly indie-pop "landlocked surf music," which, as self-styled descriptors go, isn't half-bad. Rumbling staccato riffs and candied Beach Boys harmonies form the foundation of many of these songs, and there's a late-afternoon haze hanging over even the least sunstroked numbers. There's no shortage of turn-of-the-60s pop in the DNA of these songs, from doo-wop to teen-heartthrob crooner-types; the syrupy, slightly unsettling "Heart is Mine" is Frankie Avalon by way of the first Smith Westerns LP, while the late-LP twofer "Fireworks" and "Trim" are one spiked punchbowl away from closing out a Sadie Hawkins dance. But, while certain touchstones echo throughout these songs, their unschooled approach to songcraft mostly keeps mere imitation at bay. Shy Boys is a short album—ten songs in barely 24 minutes—and songs don't waste a lot of time getting to the point. Hooks are shoved front-and-center, pesky things like bridges fall by the wayside, and instrumental flourishes are few and far between. It's a risk, but it pays off; by eliminating the distance between you and these homespun hooks, they burrow their way into your head that much quicker.
Though singer/guitarist Collin Rausch's lyrics all-too-often get swept up in a sea of reverb, he's in sweet, tender voice throughout Shy Boys, singing with a delicacy that carries his message through the thick coating of Vaseline. The swirling, Shins-gone-surf "Bully Fight"—inspired by YouTube-infamous meanie Richard Gale—finds Rausch throwing his charmingly thin voice around like a guy with some experience with getting picked on, while the jittery "And I Am Nervous" pretty much reviews itself. That nervous energy's a big reason for Shy Boys' success; getting through these songs in one piece lends these songs an urgency that leaves slowpoke ballad "Submarine" feeling woozy, waterlogged. From a structural standpoint, these songs never seem more than a couple bum notes from falling apart. But, between that verge-of-collapse sound and unforced, plucked-from-the-air hooks, Shy Boys operates with a kind of spluttering grace. These unforced, unfussy, unshakably catchy songs are awfully easy to like, and their precarious presentation's just gauzy and peculiar enough to hold together after the dozenth listen.
In a few short years, Ervin and the Rausches haven't just learned how to put a couple chords together; they've figured out how to build songs around their encumbrances, giving their tottering hooks proper space and all but dispensing with the rest. Proficiency's nice, but it isn't everything, and plenty of veteran bands go to great lengths to unlearn enough to write a song as sharp and spontaneous as the swift, stuttering "Postcard". Shy Boys still have a few things to figure out, but for now, what they don't know isn't hurting them any. | 2014-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | High Dive | January 22, 2014 | 7.1 | 9be21322-6ba0-43a3-9c83-390590731f06 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | 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 examine the lone and remarkable album from the Olympia, Washington band, a noisy, youthful, and chaotic expression of indie rock in the early ’90s. | 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 examine the lone and remarkable album from the Olympia, Washington band, a noisy, youthful, and chaotic expression of indie rock in the early ’90s. | Lync: These Are Not Fall Colors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lync-these-are-not-fall-colors/ | These Are Not Fall Colors | Lync were only around for two years, just a blip on the timeline. In the brief window between late 1992 and fall 1994, the Olympia, Washington, trio released four 7"s, three compilation tracks, and their lone LP, the beloved These Are Not Fall Colors. That’s the sum total of their official output, save for a six-track demo cassette that never reached beyond their friends around town and scenesters they met on Econoline jaunts up and down the West Coast. If Lync had called it quits before completing their only full-length, they might be remembered no more vividly than scores of other groups that spent a year or two in the DIY trenches before disbanding, leaving behind a few pieces of wax as the only evidence of their existence.
But with this whirlwind of an album, Lync articulated something exceptional: a blurry expression of youth, fleeting and ineffable. There was something else in the record’s inchoate swirl, too, if you listened for it: a proposal for where rock music might go next. Still—and this is a big part of the record’s approachable charm—their designs were hardly as grandiose as all that. These Are Not Fall Colors is not a manifesto but a personal statement, the sound of a fistful of wrinkled notebook pages covered in blurry blue ballpoint. Marked by an evident lack of calculation or self-consciousness, the record wasn’t an attempt to set any kind of bar; it was a simple bloodletting, wild and joyous and pure.
Olympia, a smaller town located an hour southwest of Seattle, had been an incubator of independent music since the early 1980s. That was partly thanks to Evergreen State College, a public institution, founded in 1967, whose freeform methods attracted restless thinkers from all over. But it had even more to do with the efforts of Calvin Johnson. A Baltimore native, Johnson had moved with his family to the region in 1970, when he was 8 years old. Despite Olympia’s relative isolation, he discovered punk in its very earliest days. By 1978, still a high-school student, he had his own show on KAOS, the fledgling Evergreen College radio station, and in 1982 he launched K Records, a cassette label with a quirky, homespun aesthetic.
K began as an outlet for music by Johnson and his friends—bands like Mecca Normal, Girl Trouble, and his own Beat Happening. The sound of the label was lo-fi by default. Early releases were recorded straight into a boombox; Beat Happening tracked part of their second album, 1987’s Jamboree, on the porch. The label’s scrappy feel was partly a function of Johnson’s tastes, partly a function of necessity. They Xeroxed sleeves and colored them by hand because it was cheap; they used stick-figure drawings because they were unpretentious. When other punks were festooning their boots with spikes and chains, Johnson had a pink bandana tied around his ankle. (“This guy’s a kook,” his friend Ian MacKaye recalled thinking.) At 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention, a six-day festival that definitively put the Olympia scene on the map, Johnson threw fistfuls of vegan-friendly candy into the crowd.
At the center of K’s aesthetic was an inextinguishable innocence, a sincerity summed up in a letter that Johnson wrote to the New York Rocker in 1979, when he was just 17 years old. “I know the secret: Rock’n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35. It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.”
By the early 1990s, K had become a hub in an international network of musicians, artists, and zine-makers. They had forged links with like-minded folks in Japan and the UK, and had found kindred spirits in Washington, D.C.’s Dischord, swapping artists and sharing tours. Shielded from the glare of Seattle’s grunge boom, Olympia’s scene was flourishing, developing its own idiosyncratic character. (“One of the reasons I kinda was pretty heavy-handed about having us be from Issaquah is I didn’t want to get pigeonholed with either Seattle or the Olympia thing,” Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock would later say. “You know, the Seattle music scene, i.e. grunge or whatever, was a little more straightforward rock or metal, and Olympia seemed to get a little stranger.”) The riot grrrl movement had its roots in Olympia, where Bikini Kill and Bratmobile got their starts. Another young man with strong ideas about teen spirit also briefly lived in Olympia before he moved to Seattle and became world-famous: Kurt Cobain even wore a stick-and-poke tattoo of the K Records logo on his forearm.
All the while, new labels like Kill Rock Stars, Yoyo Recordings, and Punk in My Vitamins were springing up to accommodate the growing number of bands in town. “You’d just walk down the street and talk to people and meet all these people,” Lync’s Sam Jayne would later recall. “People would come from out of town… to play a show, and they end up staying there for a week because there’s nothing else to do. It was really transient, and there were lots of kids that were scenesters… It was a total network of kids that were crashing on each others’ couches and moving from one town to the next.”
It’s easy to look back today and think of this era as a monolithic movement. But terms like “grunge” and “Pacific Northwest” (or, more frequently, “Seattle”) were just metonyms for other forces impossible to pin down. In 1992, punk and what today is called indie rock were in flux; the scene was a tangle of ideas, musical styles, and social networks. Hardcore, pop punk, emo, screamo, white-belt, pigfuck, metal, thrash, sludge, powerviolence, riot grrrl, indie pop, lo-fi, alt folk, alternative, college rock, and yes, even grunge—they all overlapped, feeding off one another even when they were at odds, and Lync, who refused to pick a lane, reflected the beautiful chaos of it all.
Sam Jayne, James Bertram, and Dave Schneider were teenagers when they formed Lync. There is very little documentation of their early years as a band; their debut appearance seems to have been on the October 1992 cassette compilation This Is My World, on Seattle’s Excursion Records, alongside local bands like the straight-edge Undertow and the similarly NYHC-inspired Brotherhood (featuring Greg Anderson, later of Sunn O)))). Lync’s placement on 1993’s Julep: Another Yoyo Studio Compilation, with groups like Heavens to Betsy, Slant 6, and Kicking Giant, earned them a mention as “up-and-comers” in that October’s SPIN. A Seattle scene report published in the inaugural issue of Punk Planet, in May 1994, noted, “Three good things about Olympia—Unwound, Mary Lou Lord, and Lync. I sure can’t think of anything else.” (Clearly, the inter-city rivalry was real.)
Its rarity notwithstanding, Lync’s 1993 demo cassette, Codename is not a particularly auspicious debut. The audio is tinny, the timekeeping ramshackle. Jayne’s voice sounds like he’s singing through the wrong end of a telescope, Schneider’s drums are just a cracked glaze of crash cymbals, and it’s difficult to make out Bertram’s bass at all. Stylistically, the six songs are a mix of by-the-numbers emo and pop punk, with some jangly garage rock thrown in for good measure. “Lightbulb Switch,” sung from the perspective of a boy who can’t reach the lightswitch, has a yelpy viridity that suggests the Dead Milkmen covering Shel Silverstein.
Lync’s February 1993 session with Pat Maley at his YoYo studios yielded sharper sound and clearer vision: The three-song Pigeons EP situates them halfway between the impassioned pop punk of Jawbreaker and the tortured post-hardcore of their scene-mates Unwound (technically from Tumwater, just down the road from Olympia). Slow and brooding, “Pigeons” riffs metaphorically on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, Jayne’s voice shifting between muttered spoken passages and the raspy sing-shouting that would become his trademark; the peppy “Electricity,” obliquely about the ecological cost of hydroelectric power, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Bay Area’s Lookout! Records, where Green Day got their start.
If those lyrical themes sound awfully emo, the music also occasionally waded a few too many steps in that direction; in “Friend,” Jayne’s voice breaks as he shrieks, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” the raw wounds of teenage angst rendered just a smidgen too performatively for comfort. It’s clear that Lync were still finding their sound. “We had our influences and I don’t think we could even step out of them for a second to see what those were,” Jayne later observed. “Like, I had no idea what kind of music that Lync was making. And somebody would try to explain it to me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that is.’”
Lync recorded again in late 1993, this time with Nation of Ulysses’ Tim Green at the Red House, an unassuming Olympia studio that would turn out records from Bratmobile, Karp, Unwound, and Sleater-Kinney in its brief run. They were getting closer to the sound of their album—thickening the guitars, alternating between ringing open chords and thorny patches of dissonance. On “Two Feet in Front,” a 1994 single for K’s International Pop Underground series, they approached their arrangements first like glassblowers, drawing out elegantly elongated tones, then blacksmiths, hammering bent chords till sparks flew. “Lightbulb Switch” reappeared on the B-side, this time as a frenetic two-minute blast of double-time hardcore.
In May and June 1994, Lync set up at John & Stu’s Place, in Seattle, with Phil Ek in the producer’s chair. A former grocery store, the studio was the place of grunge lore. Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and TAD had all recorded pivotal albums in previous incarnations of the space. It was also the site of Nirvana’s first recordings, two of which would end up on Bleach. It’s striking to think that Ek, just two years into his career behind the boards, was recording Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love at the same time he was making These Are Not Fall Colors. The two bands may have had overlapping histories (in 1993 and 1994, Doug Martsch recorded a number of songs with Calvin Johnson, one with Bertram and Schneider as his rhythm section, that were later released on K as The Normal Years), but the albums bear zero resemblance to one another. Where There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is all layers and light—close-harmonized vocals and clean-toned jangle filigreed against Martsch’s incandescent soloing—These Are Not Fall Colors is dense and humid, sticky as the browning leaves in a compost pile.
“B,” the album’s opening song, might as well have been the work of a different band than the one that had recorded those earlier 7"s. It begins with a gust of feedback and a spidery, dissonant guitar figure; Bertram’s bass enters, briefly teasing a reassuringly consonant resolution, but then the axis slips, throwing the harmonies into disarray. Schneider’s drumming is just a sea of flayed cymbals punctuated by the occasional snare. Things only get messier in the chorus, where Bertram mashes at his strings as though his hands had not quite worn off a local anesthetic. Can something so formless even be called a chorus? There’s no actual melody to speak of; bass, guitar, and drums merely tumble in rough concord, like a rockslide moving grudgingly uphill. Jayne is sing-shouting front and center, something about seriousness and serial killers, while in the background, another voice screams bloody murder.
Anyone paying close attention to the rapidly evolving sound of emo might have recognized some of these sounds. Heroin had explored parallel ideas on their self-titled 12" the year before, and closer to home, Unwound had spent the previous three years developing a remarkably similar grammar of feedback flare-ups and detuned strings. But with These Are Not Fall Colors’ next song, “Perfect Shot,” Lync showed that they weren’t simply angling to be the next signing on Gravity, the San Diego label that brought screamo into the world.
The song begins with a trim, almost jaunty guitar riff; for a moment we’re back in Jawbreaker territory. Then Bertram mashes a bass chord, Jayne shouts something unintelligible, and Schneider smacks the snare, just once. This is the drummer’s favorite trick: to signal an impending shift with a snare crack as unmistakable as a rifle report. Then all hell breaks loose. Like the album itself, “Perfect Shot” is a collision of errant vectors, a tug-of-war between competing impulses. Schneider’s toms swirl like leaves in an updraft; Jayne’s guitar and Bertram’s bass are perpetually jabbing and sparring. The album’s arrangements boast a newfound complexity, the changes mapped out in hasty, back-of-the-napkin calculations that lurch between consonance and dissonance.
The real signature is the music’s immediately identifiable texture and weight: Its bottom-heavy sonics and ringing harmonics give it the heft and dull gleam of a lump of tarnished bronze. Everything is supersaturated. It’s frequently difficult to tease out the bass parts from the guitars; Jayne and Bertram don’t voice their chords so much as wring them from the coils. It’s a murky, logy sound, which only makes Jayne’s sandpapered howls and slightly nasal sing-speaking come off all the more unhinged. The muddiness feels intentional: not the obfuscation of a poor recording job but a sense of surfeit, as though there were so much sound in the room, so much turbulent, intractable feeling, that it overwhelmed the circuits and the tape.
For all the ferment, the record is not without its anthems. “Silverspoon Glasses” strikes the perfect balance of pop-punk hooks and screamo turmoil, and between its shout-along chorus (“Bombs go! Krakakowkrakow!”) and conspiratorial muttering, contains one of Jayne’s most compelling vocal performances on the album. “Cue Card” is a wistful triumph of soaring chords with lyrics vague enough that you could find just about any meaning that you wanted in it. “Heroes & Heroines” harnesses the chaos of Universal Order of Armageddon before sinking back into the album’s sweetest chorus: “It’s you, it’s you, it’s you/You know the sky’s the limit for you.” As much as Lync mirrored some of their contemporaries, These Are Not Fall Colors cast a wider net: “Cue Cards” channels the full-spectrum shimmer of Sonic Youth and Hüsker Dü, and “Turtle” evokes Slint forebears Squirrel Bait’s “Sun God,” from their 1985 debut EP on Homestead Records, with almost uncanny precision. However accidental the resemblance, the comparison is instructive. Consciously or not, Lync were reaching back to the punk and indie rock of a decade before and picking up strains that had largely fallen by the wayside.
The yearning “Pennies to Save” might constitute the album’s emotive peak. Even if you couldn’t make out the bulk of the lyrics, that pleading chorus was plain as day: “Where has it gone?” It’s as though even here, in the brightness of their youth, Lync could feel the carefree days slipping away, calcifying into adulthood. Written from the perspective of a grownup who has woken up one day and realized that their youth is behind them, the song represents a remarkable feat of empathy. Punk taught to live fast, die young, but here, Lync understood the necessity of grappling with life’s inevitable denouement.
The album title made clear how central ideas like youth and disappointment were. Its genesis is revealed on an insert with the album. On the right-hand side of the page, there’s a photocopied diary entry of Jayne’s, dated January 5, 1983, which would have made him 9 or so. On the left-hand side, a drawing of a tree with some blue scribbles over the top. Then, in a grownup’s hand, a note with an arrow pointing at the drawing: “Use a fall color, not blue.” With that knowledge, the album’s din becomes even sweeter, every “wrong” note and dissonant smear an act of vengeance against small-minded teachers and childhood traumas.
The album was released on July 25. There weren’t many reviews—one in CMJ, another brief mention in the Orlando Sentinel—but they were generally positive. “While their music sometimes tumbles down from serenity into an avalanche of noise, it always does so with a touch of grace,” noted the Seattle Rocket. “These Are Not Fall Colors is their best release to date, and it is indicative of the new world order at K Records: a shift away from the cutesy minimalism that people often (wrongly) attribute to the label.”
Lync played at least a handful shows that summer, including Olympia’s YoYo A GoGo Festival and Berkeley’s hallowed 924 Gilman Street. Then, on October 11, 1994, at an all-ages Seattle club called the Velvet Elvis, the band played its final show. Footage from the gig captures a wall-to-wall crush of kids. Jayne, in wraparound shades and a black track jacket, stands impassive at the mic, while Schneider wails away behind him in an argyle sweater and Bertram, turned to face his bandmates, repeatedly leaps into the air and falls to the ground. The video quality does few favors to their already muddy sound, but even in this no-fi presentation, vitality courses through their playing.
“It was another one of these rash decisions that I made,” Jayne would later say of the breakup. “I didn’t think we were making as many songs in Lync as I wanted… I was just running rampant around Olympia. I drove myself and everyone crazy because I just had this unchecked energy level.” Jayne had begun recording tapes in his bedroom on a 4-track recorder before graduating to an 8-track given to him by his cousin, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. “I would just sit and record tons of music,” recalled Jayne. “Then I kind of just quit Lync for some reason. I got frustrated with those guys or something like that, probably something really stupid.”
With his Love as Laughter project, Jayne’s tapes would occupy him, miraculously, for the next 26 years of his life. What began as experiments in extreme lo-fi—akin to Smog or Sebadoh’s hermetic early work, captured on a pair of self-released cassettes in 1994—gradually evolved into winsome bedroom garage pop on two albums for K in 1996 and 1998. In 1999, he’d sign to Sub Pop, going on to record three albums of sharp-eyed power pop and classic rock for the Seattle label. (Schneider even joined him on 1999’s Destination 2000.) Bertram and Schneider, meanwhile, would join Built to Spill for a spell; Bertram also picked up with 764-HERO, a Seattle guitar-and-drums duo whose skewed melodies were clearly influenced by Lync’s own songwriting, before moving on to Red Stars Theory.
No matter how brief their tenure, Lync left a lasting mark. When Jayne died in late 2020, age 46, his teenage band was mentioned in headlines right alongside his long-running solo project. Jayne had gone missing in mid-December. He was found a few days later, curled up in his pickup truck. His family says he died of an undiagnosed heart condition on the eve of a road trip back to the Pacific Northwest. In the following days, a flood of tributes sketched out a tapestry of his influence. There were remembrances from his peers in the Pacific Northwest—Phil Ek, Modest Mouse’s Kirby James Fairfield, his former bandmate Schneider—as well as Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, even the comedian Fred Armisen, who recalled Jayne joining Modest Mouse on stage for a 2004 performance on Saturday Night Live. Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold wrote simply: “You didn’t know it but you were an elusive and formatively inspiring hero to me and you touched so many of the lives of the people we love. You were Sam fucking Jayne. Fuck.”
What virtually all those tributes share in common is an emphasis on his generosity of spirit. Many of them feature some brand of late-night hijinks that are notable for their childlike innocence. Mike Simonetti, whose Troubleman Unlimited label would co-release Lync’s 1997 anthology Remembering the Fireballs (Part 8), recalled playing basketball with Jayne until dawn after a Lync show in suburban New Jersey. The Moldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson remembered Jayne as the mastermind of an imaginary “gang” called the Soda Jerks, filling up Dixie cups with self-serve soft drinks and then dashing out the door, screaming “Soda Jerks!” Sugar also featured in Lois Maffeo’s tribute, in which the two tourmates bought cotton candy from a convenience store in the Midwest and then proceeded to soak each other with car-wash hoses, leaving them bent over with laughter and holding wet, sticky paper cones.
The innocence of these memories feels true to the essence of These Are Not Fall Colors. For all its turbulence, it is a hopeful sound. In early 2020, Jayne made one of his occasional posts to the group’s page on Facebook. “The band we made as children is still loved and listened to and is for ‘kids’ of all ages,” he marveled. Back in the day, he could hardly have imagined that his album would someday become a classic; he was just intent upon making music for himself and his friends. But even then, he added, he had an inkling that there might be something lasting in these songs: “My feeling was I hoped to remind my future self what it meant to be young and stand for something. I think it worked, standing in 2020 I’d like to hug that kid and thank him.”
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | K | April 11, 2021 | 8.7 | 9be37b36-938b-44fb-a798-c9caf05ec98e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
As its title suggests, the Atlanta rapper’s album is pop-focused and geared for emo. She sounds reborn, retrofitting her scrappy rap with Technicolor pop-punk for songs about overcoming heartbreak. | As its title suggests, the Atlanta rapper’s album is pop-focused and geared for emo. She sounds reborn, retrofitting her scrappy rap with Technicolor pop-punk for songs about overcoming heartbreak. | Bali Baby: Baylor Swift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bali-baby-baylor-swift/ | Baylor Swift | The Bali Baby introduced on Baylor Swift is a brand new model. Anyone familiar with the three tapes the 20-year-old Atlanta rapper (by way of North Carolina) released in 2017, or perhaps just one of her more popular songs—like “Iggady,” “Banana Clip,” or “Pretty”—won’t recognize this version of her. Bali has pivoted away from her natural no-hook trap before, but not even the more melody-focused 2018 EP, Bali Blanco, foreshadowed a transformation of this magnitude.
As the title suggests, the album is pop-focused and geared for emo; the artwork implies this shift, depicting the outline of a Stratocaster, a photo collage, and a journal with “DO NOT READ” on its cover. These hint at some long-established signifiers of teenage angst, a lovestruck girl scribbling her inner-most thoughts inside the sanctum that is her bedroom noodling at a guitar and screaming them into songs. The implication is that pop rock allows for a rawness that rap does not. “I love rock-pop music,” Bali told XXL last month. “I listen to every song on Guitar Hero.” Baylor Swift leans into that interest to fashion a brand new identity. Bali sounds reborn, retrofitting her scrappy rap with Technicolor pop-punk for songs about overcoming heartbreak.
Produced entirely by New York beatmaker and frequent collaborator Chicken, Baylor Swift is a high stakes emotional investment more daring than anything coming from her peers in Atlanta. Bali said the album “tells the tale of a broken-hearted girl who put her all into the mic,” and this plays out in an arc over the course of eight tracks. A few times, headphones become symbols of escape, of drifting away and disappearing into song, where the memory of an ex can’t find you. Her music mines that same withdrawal, finding a simple comfort in just getting this out of her system, like she’s wailing into a pillow and purging the impurities from her body. From the outset, she laments lost love, how quickly feelings that were once so intense can fade (“Now every time you touch me, it doesn’t feel as strong as it used to!”), but by the end, she’s acceptant, albeit still bruised. “Yes, I know I’m gon’ forgive her/’Cause that’s how I wash the pain away,” she sings on “Killer.” It’s a slow-building catharsis full of rewarding turns, in sound and temperament.
As a rapper, Bali is usually peppy and playfully confrontational. She brandishes weapons and impishly makes light of her enemies (“Bounce on your tits if they’re looking like racks/I set a trap ‘cause these bitches is rats”). But as a singer on Baylor Swift, she is an aggrieved lover swaying from dependent to indignant. The opener, “Introduction,” is designed to throw the album’s first-time listeners off the scent. Atop squelching synths, she raps as she always has, literally reintroducing herself with clever parallels like “Bitches copy me, just need to cop a fucking feature/I’m a perfect picture, niggas say I’m Mona Lisa.” The album really starts with the nasally “Backseat,” which has drawn comparisons to everyone from Avril Lavigne to Rebecca Black. From there, Baylor Swift spirals outward into a moody post-rap mash-up of guitars and synths.
There is a punchy rap intermission, “WWW,” slotted in, meant as a reminder that she does, in fact, still rap—“So I see y’all forgot I had motherfucking bars so I had to bring it back out real quick, you dig?” she says in the song’s intro—before she ventures even further out for a four-song suite spanning glitchy bedroom pop. She navigates this sonic mélange just as she navigates the challenging romance explored in her lyrics: thoughtfully and with great finesse. She understands the limits of her voice and never pushes too hard, at times letting the pitchiness or the distortion of her vocals speak for her. “There’s a few things I know for sure/And one of them is: loving you is way too hard,” she bawls on “Few Things,” dragging out some syllables as she’s nearly swallowed up by incoming waves of sound. She refuses to resign herself to an endless cycle of pain: “There’s a few things I know: That I will not die without your love/I’ll miss you a lot, but I’ll be fine.”
Since Lil Wayne’s Rebirth exploded preconceptions about rocking while hip-hop, moving the goalposts for rappers making music they decidedly classify “rock,” the seams in rap-rock have become harder to find (See: Trippie Redd or Lil Tracy or Princess Nokia). Where does rap end and rock begin for these young artists? These rappers don’t draw lines between their rap personas and their rock aspirations, they just adjust as it suits their mood and their music. Someone like Lil Uzi Vert is a near-perfect synthesis of pop punk and rap, the love child of Wayne and Paramore, and the late Lil Peep was finding the middle-ground between Future and Brand New. But Bali’s influences are somewhat harder to trace. Her characterization of pop rock as “stuff that was on Guitar Hero” implies a distillation of sounds. Somewhere along the line, she decided that “rock,” for her, simply meant emotional honesty, being true to herself and her feelings. Across the candid songs of Baylor Swift, the Atlanta shapeshifter embraces the healing power of self-actualization. | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | TWIN | May 12, 2018 | 7.4 | 9be5bedc-6bfe-4f4e-8fde-4c2875c76b59 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Hold Steady frontman's solo work continues its twilit exploration of frail hopes, wasted lives, and quiet battles against despair. | The Hold Steady frontman's solo work continues its twilit exploration of frail hopes, wasted lives, and quiet battles against despair. | Craig Finn: I Need a New War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/craig-finn-i-need-a-new-war/ | I Need a New War | Craig Finn calls I Need A New War the conclusion to a trilogy he began with 2015's Faith In The Future and continued with 2017’s We All The Same Things. but like so many rock ‘n’ roll triads, it only came into focus in hindsight. At its outset, neither Finn nor his fans assumed he was on a grand journey; he was merely experimenting with softer, quieter territory. By reuniting once more with producer Josh Kaufman—along with drummer Joe Russo and engineer Dan Goodwin—Finn puts a capstone on a period of exploration that has yielded richer results than anyone imagined, possibly including Finn.
All three records share a subdued palette that stands in stark contrast to the barroom roar of the Hold Steady. The moody smear of saxophones, keyboards, and guitars suggest a noir netherworld pierced by lone shafts of color in the form of rousing horns and choirs. Finn spends as much time speaking as singing, and the gently cresting result can feel a bit like a collection of lullabies for adults. This is music designed for twilight.
All these sly, subtle arrangements shift attention directly upon Finn's songs, which withstand such close scrutiny. More than ever, Finn feels more like a short-story writer than a singer-songwriter. New York City as a presence and an idea looms over the record, but you don’t need to know the first thing about the place to have these songs resonate. Every one of Finn’s characters exists in a recognizable world, one where disappointment is commonplace but despair is rare.
Finn's sardonic humor and empathy appears to have deepened with age. The narrator of “Something To Hope For” celebrates the silver lining of an insurance payment delivered after an accident work—a perfect Craig Finn character. It's this humanism that distinguishes I Need A New War from its partners in Finn's loose trilogy, and helps the record stand alone. In its quiet way, it radiates with all of the intensity of the Hold Steady’s scrappiest cuts. Finn has already built a sturdy legacy, but his solo records yield their own durable pleasures: I Need A New War shines like a beacon of light in a dark time. | 2019-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | April 29, 2019 | 8 | 9beafe87-4eaa-496f-8d37-bb94e61db13d | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On her new album, Tamaryn aims for sky-high '80s-goth melodrama. | On her new album, Tamaryn aims for sky-high '80s-goth melodrama. | Tamaryn: Dreaming the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tamaryn-dreaming-the-dark/ | Dreaming the Dark | On the first three albums she released under her first name, Tamaryn Brown adopted a shoegazer's approach to her own voice, casting it as just another instrument in the bleed. She sings differently now. Tamaryn's new record Dreaming the Dark retains her penchant for nostalgic brooding, but it spikes her voice up to the top of the mix, where she wields it with commanding ferocity.
If previous Tamaryn albums drew abundant comparisons to Thatcher-era goths like Cocteau Twins and The Cure, Dreaming the Dark is more aligned with Tears for Fears, the English duo whose 1985 album Songs from the Big Chair broke over to the U.S. market. She has cited Tears For Fears in interviews, while positioning Kanye West as an interloper between herself and the '80s. "You know when you listen to 808s & Heartbreaks [sic]? If you listen to that record you see that he has this unabashedly, blatant worship of Tears for Fears," she said recently. "I feel like my album is kind of like trying to capture that relationship."
Trying, maybe, but in the end Tamaryn sounds more worshipful of Tears for Fears than Kanye ever did. If 808s and Heartbreak cleaned up weepy '80s synth-pop for the digital age, ditching the reverb but keeping the melodrama, Dreaming the Dark plunges it right back into its original murk. Reverb coats just about every sound on every track. Most of the synthesizer patches and drum machine beats sound like they could have issued from equipment that was lying in storage since the Reagan era.
As a result, the album feels a little staid and trapped in amber. Tempos hit at a regular pulse and melodies round their bases without fanfare. "In a fit of rage/I will select the pain," Tamaryn bellows on "Fits of Rage," like pain were an item in a drop-down menu. A church bell, or a facsimile of one, tolls at the beginning of "You're Adored" and I can't even envision the graveyard.
Only in the opening track, the terrifically fun "Angels of Sweat," does Tamaryn cut loose and swing for the rafters. The song offers a plummy take on a Thatcher-era goth classic—the vampire love song. "Embrace your desire," she impels, launching her voice up to the top of her range and elongating the last syllable to an extended gasp. "Lived so many lives/It's already night/Feel as hard as I bite." No matter how many incarnations it takes, no matter how many decades it stalks through, vampire sex, it seems, never gets old. It offers a strange kind of power, this evil you want to fuck and then become. The construct of the vampire positions death and terror as objects of desire, not revulsion, and it's a great time to close your jaws around what you fear.
The camp of goth doesn't present itself as lucidly on other songs as it does on "Angels of Sweat," which is a shame: Tamaryn has the voice for it. Without that delight at the darkness, the sense of triumph over what ails you, the album tends to get bleached from velvety black to matte beige, all its chrome spikes sanded down to meet public school safety regulations. | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dero Arcade | March 23, 2019 | 6.5 | 9beba86e-14e2-49fd-91db-aed6068a6799 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The English band’s second album this year isn’t a complement to its predecessor so much as just another iteration on a now-standard formula. | The English band’s second album this year isn’t a complement to its predecessor so much as just another iteration on a now-standard formula. | Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foals-everything-not-saved-will-be-lost-part-2/ | Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 2 | At this point, Foals have settled into their role as alternative-radio festival stalwarts. Ever since the grimy riffs and macho vocals of Holy Fire lead single “Inhaler,” they’ve shown increasing comfort with their U2-sized sound. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—the build of oft-synched signature song “Spanish Sahara” remains so stirring that its replicants, like “Late Night” and “Sunday,” soar by association. Even if March’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1 was too cluttered to recapture the intimacy of “Sahara,” unexpected detours like the sparse “Cafe D’Athens” and chaotic rave-up “In Degrees” broke through the murky production. Part 2, the band promised, would be heavier still—but mostly it continues the now-standard Foals album formula, dividing its tracklist into Aggressive, Funky, and Somber. It’s not a complement to its predecessor so much as just another collection of Foals songs.
Besides, it hardly makes sense to differentiate between a rock and a pop album when every instrument is reduced to overcompressed mush. The band’s brash self-production blows up their sound until all definition is lost. The most disappointing casualty is Jack Bevan’s drumming—once the backbone of Foals’ music, he now sounds buried beneath atmospheric synths and guitars. Not that he has a lot to do: First single “Black Bull” is rhythmically identical to “What Went Down,” second single “The Runner” mimics “Inhaler,” and so on. “Like Lightning” plays like the kind of utilitarian blues-rock that music directors reach for when the Black Keys aren’t in the licensing budget.
Foals are most interesting when exploring new territory. While Part 1 shined in its homages to In Rainbows-era Radiohead, Part 2 harks back further to the progressive rock of the ’70s and ’80s. “10,000 Feet” is a half-time Rush homage, down to a repeating “Tom Sawyer” synth. The album’s back half recalls the post-Peter Gabriel, pre-Abacab Genesis, a band that balanced technical prowess with surprisingly poppy melodies. Genesis also evolved from eccentric outsiders to pop stars, and while Foals are too self-serious to embrace the style’s campier elements (leave that to their smarter, more irreverent tourmates Everything Everything), they seem to have tapped an unexpected wellspring. For all their posturing about making a record that “really resonated with the current time,” they’re more at home in old-fashioned prog.
The lyrical content, meanwhile, remains virtually unchanged between the two records. This band is famous for its energy, not its insight, and you’d be hard-pressed to hear the political subtext Foals say they’d like to impart. The band describes “Black Bull” as “a conflicted diary of masculine confusion and negative tendencies”; the actual chorus goes, “We not playing around/The black bull’s in town.” Even an intriguing turn of phrase like “turn me into a wedding ring” turns out to be a thuddingly literal reference to a more interesting story: Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose ashes were turned into a diamond more than 25 years after his death. “Dreaming Of” is made up of references to other, better songs (“you’re dancing on your own,” “you’re always crashing that same car,” “there’s always something in the way”), but at least the magnet-poetry approach feels like a deliberate character study of someone obsessed with looking back instead of facing reality.
Rather than forming the second half of a complete statement, Part 2 struggles to differentiate itself. Even with the occasional continuity—like when the earlier “Surf Pt. 1” pays off on Part 2’s penultimate “Into the Surf”—this album could have arrived first with few alterations. “Neptune” and “Dreaming Of” will slot nicely into live performances, but they’re surrounded by songs too effortful to be filler and too unmemorable to be worthwhile. “The defining record of our career, I think we’ve still got it in us,” frontman Yannis Philippakis recently admitted to Dork, but Foals’ career-defining statement is less likely to be a new record than a playlist of all their singles. It’s hard not to lose patience as they trudge towards that album, promising they’re getting closer while moving in place.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | October 23, 2019 | 5.7 | 9bf19521-9ce8-4da1-94da-e48a738c6265 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The Los Angeles singer’s mellow, folk-inflected R&B explores give-and-take in relationships with others and with ourselves. A companion release revisits her recent EP, adding texture and emotion with live instrumentation. | The Los Angeles singer’s mellow, folk-inflected R&B explores give-and-take in relationships with others and with ourselves. A companion release revisits her recent EP, adding texture and emotion with live instrumentation. | UMI: Introspection / Introspection Reimagined | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/umi-introspection-reimagined/ | Introspection / Introspection Reimagined | Singer and songwriter UMI, an L.A. transplant by way of Seattle, writes with the earnest, diaristic vulnerability familiar to those raised in an era where self-interrogation is a public, shareable form of artistic expression. She debuted in 2018 with a four-track EP, Interlude, which was soon followed by a single, “Remember Me,” a wistful rendering of love deferred in the vein of Aaliyah’s “Four Page Letter.” Two years later, her Introspection EP signaled a more confident vision of the type of artist she wanted to be: Songs like “Bet” and “Pretty Girl hi!” cast UMI as a child of ’90s R&B with a folky pop twist. Her music is mellow, an unobtrusive soundtrack for daydreaming and long drives; it didn’t quite scratch the surface of the mainstream, but online, it found an audience.
Last week, when Twitter informed me that the high-profile relationship between rappers Saweetie and Quavo was over, UMI’s “Bet Reimagined” was playing in the background. Saweetie had alleged infidelity, observing that no material gift could bandage the betrayal; UMI’s lyrics seemed to encapsulate the separation of a couple who had appeared outwardly perfect, even as one party nursed righteous fury. “I be moving around it/And you on some clown shit/And I ain’t about it/Don’t ever doubt it,” she sings, simultaneously offering a warning and a farewell. “Bet Reimagined” comes from UMI’s latest Introspection Reimagined EP, where she has now dynamically reimagined Introspection’s stories of give-and-take in relationships, both with others and ourselves, with live accompaniment.
For the live version, UMI called more than a dozen collaborators to Malibu’s Shangri-La Studios, where they remixed and rearranged her existing material with their own artistic interpretations. On opener “Introspection,” Hailey Niswanger’s flute and Aisha Gaillard’s drums create a pop-inflected rhythmic background that carries hints of classical music, adding greater tension to the song’s story of stifled rage and emotional insecurity. UMI writes all of her own songs, projecting a purposeful and personal voice, though her lyrics are sometimes weighed down by simplistic musings that land without a great deal of substance. Lines like, “And maybe who I be is enough/And maybe all I need is a hug,” from “Open Up”—now “Open Up Reimagined”—come across as feeble attempts to emote indecision, suggesting an artist who’s still learning to shape compelling narratives from intangible strands.
There are singers whose voices transform a room with their sheer force and range, and others who seep into the atmosphere, adding contrasting colors to empty space. UMI is among the latter, and she’s even better with a live band beside her. On the bleak “Where I Wander,” her feathery tone is knotted by pain and her notes are jagged at the edges. “I just let go of the pressure to hit notes or sound perfect….and when I let go of that it’s like the notes just hit themselves,” she explains in an accompanying documentary. The Reimagined string quartet (bassist Micah Moffett, guitarist Jake Nuffer, cellist Jean Paul, and violinist Victor Ekpo) are steadying companions: They do not take over UMI’s storytelling, nor do they wallow in the background. Instead, they step forward when she recedes, adding texture where it’s needed. The remade EP offers two new tracks, “Beautiful Day” and “Solitude,” interludes that connect the dissolution of a relationship to the stretchy bliss of regeneration. The instrumental arrangement on the latter echoes the darkness of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Bitter; UMI’s vocals are restrained but hopeful.
By reworking an existing body of work, UMI makes her progress something to which we all can bear witness. She dares to show the cracks in her voice, removing the studio polish and letting emotion take over: same person, same songs, different delivery. Some changes are subtle, others more significant. It’s not a small step to take as an up-and-coming artist, and it shows that she’s willing to go out of bounds for the sake of the candor that’s so central to her music. The process of revision can carry a connotation of failure and incompleteness. But when you revise—or in this case reimagine—new possibilities become evident and a type of metamorphosis occurs. It’s not always obvious, but when done well it compels us to accept change and embrace the difference. So then: What about a Saweetie remix?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | March 29, 2021 | 6.1 | 9bf590e2-ab1f-45c9-993e-3f758fcd6a82 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
The Chicago artist marries political commentary with deep introspection, resulting in a richly composed R&B album about the echoes of the past and the promise of the future. | The Chicago artist marries political commentary with deep introspection, resulting in a richly composed R&B album about the echoes of the past and the promise of the future. | Jamila Woods: LEGACY! LEGACY! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jamila-woods-legacy-legacy/ | LEGACY! LEGACY! | When Nina Simone first learned of the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls, her immediate reaction was to try to build a gun in her garage for retaliation. After a cooler head prevailed, thanks to her then-husband/manager, she retreated to the den of her home in Mount Vernon, New York and wrote “Mississippi Goddam.” For the next seven years, the civil rights movement guided her artistic compass, and she became an unwavering voice for oppressed people of color everywhere.
With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods eagerly takes the reins from pioneers like Simone. On Woods’ 2016 debut HEAVN, her acerbic wit was literally child’s play—transposing the clapping game “Miss Mary Mack” for stark lyrics about police brutality on “VRY BLK,” for example. Those kernels have now ripened on her second album, one that is richer and fuller in every respect. Evocative of Mos Def’s landmark album Black on Both Sides, LEGACY! LEGACY! marries incisive political commentary with deep introspection. The result is an album full of wordplay, anger, and wry humor. Woods returns to us a brazen young artist and woman, keenly aware of the backlash she could face for her transparency.
Each track on LEGACY! LEGACY! highlights a legendary artist of color, spanning disciplines, genres, and decades—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, Miles Davis. For Woods, collectively, they become examples of how to unapologetically navigate life as a person of color. Each song’s subject is treated with the same reverence and warmth as Woods’ own ancestors, who are also referenced throughout. While she assumes responsibility for mining sociopolitical issues in her music, she also stands on the shoulders of these figures in search of her own humanity.
Inspired by the life of trailblazing singer Betty Davis, the album’s opener “Betty” begins with just three simple chords on the piano—in walks “Betty Mabry,” quiet and unassuming, a then-23-year-old girl raised in Pittsburgh. When we meet “Mrs. Miles Davis,” Woods injects bold, rhythmic layers into the track, marking her arrival. She served as Davis’ muse, but taking a backseat role was just not for her. Their turbulent union dissolved after just one year, and not long after, the funk goddess emerged onto the scene. Armed with her newfound independence, Davis would go on to break barriers in rock, R&B, and funk, but she never achieved mainstream success and was often criticized for her hypersexuality. As Woods sings on “Betty,” she finds both catharsis and validation for the audacity to be different without compromise: “I am not your typical girl/Throw away that picture in your head,” she declares.
The ways in which black excellence has been continuously jettisoned in America is unending: take Muddy Waters’ first meeting with the Rolling Stones. At the time, Waters was allegedly painting the ceiling of his own record label, Chess, when the British rock stars arrived to record “Satisfaction” during a stop for their first U.S. tour. On “Muddy,” Woods cries out, “They can study my fingers/They can mirror my pose,” over an electric guitar that blares out in protest and anger. She is caught between adoration for her hero, rage over the rampant appropriation of black music, and the understanding that this damage goes beyond repair.
On “Basquiat,” Woods explores how the behavior of an artist of color unfairly becomes fodder for public opinion. She draws inspiration not just from her own run-ins with the media, but chiefly from an interviewer who once asked the renowned artist “what makes him angry,” suggesting that the “rage” seen in his work could be summoned upon command: “These teeth are not employed/You can’t police my joy.” The song simmers along on a jazzy hip-hop groove for nearly seven minutes, peppered by a staccato call-and-response (“Are you mad?/Yes I’m mad”). Tellingly, the song never erupts, and when Woods sings “They wanna see me angry,” she’s sighing, not shouting. Her exhaustion is palpable, resigned to wear the mask that “grins and lies,” as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar once said—the mask that she must wear to quell the seething rage she feels when asked, once again, to explain herself.
In his landmark 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,” W.E.B. DuBois argued that the liberation of all black people would come from cultivating a handful of exceptional blacks through higher education. Over a century later, black artists and activists, poets and politicians continue to thrive across a spectrum of different mediums. Almost every predecessor conjured in and in-between Woods’ lyrics balanced their craft alongside an unending fight for total equality, whether they wanted to or not: “All the women in me are tired” becomes a running motif throughout the album. With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods positions herself to join the battle, bridging the gap, once and for all, between our unresolved past and the promise that awaits us all on the horizon. | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Jagjaguwar / Closed Sessions | May 15, 2019 | 8.5 | 9c018824-c7ce-4420-88ba-f34f890fb6e3 | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
A solo artist gathers some pals for a trippy trip through the droney side of the avant-garde. Good for island meditations and pretending to be weightless. | A solo artist gathers some pals for a trippy trip through the droney side of the avant-garde. Good for island meditations and pretending to be weightless. | Mind Over Mirrors: Undying Color | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22900-undying-color/ | Undying Color | A project begun on an island in Washington State, Mind Over Mirrors springs from the imagination of Jaime Fennelly, who now resides in Chicago. Across five limited edition releases, Fennelly has performed alone. And while Undying Color, his sixth album (and first for Paradise of Bachelors) also began as a solo excursion (this time with Fennelly decamping to southwestern Wisconsin), he then went back into the studio with a full-fledged ensemble, including members from Eleventh Dream Day, Califone, Circuit des Yeux and Jon Mueller of Death Blues, to add more color to his drones and drifts.
But while Mind Over Mirrors now sounds like a live group, their influences don’t reference bands per se as much as they do iconoclastic American composers of the 20th century. Mirrors’ bio references G.I. Gurdjieff’s esoteric harmonium music, but almost every piece on Undying Color hearkens back to the likes of Terry Riley, Harry Partch, Laurie Spiegel and Henry Flynt, to name a few. And at the center of it all remains Fennelly’s hard-pumping harmonium. His drone hovers over opener “Restore & Slip,” the album’s most energetic number. It then swiftly scales up thanks to a tumbling drum kit beat and some furious fiddling that evokes the sawing fury of Henry Flynt and his penchant for hillbilly minimalism. Together it all builds to an ecstatic and buzzing peak that the album is hard-pressed to replicate for the remainder of the album.
While Fennelly’s Indian pedal harmonium has always been the centerpiece of Mind Over Mirrors, with Undying Color he adds in an Oberheim synth and shows a wider range and malleability. On “Gray Clearer,” he has a tone that wheezes and expands like Pauline Oliveros’s bandoneon against a shuffling, shamanic thump. For “Splintering,” Fennelly mimics the antigravity properties of Laurie Spiegel’s analog components, floating free alongside rubbed singing bowls and a wordless vocal from Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater member Janet Beveridge Bean. His harmonium swirls and slowly accrues a thick shoegaze fuzz on the flickering “600 Miles Around.” And on “Glossolaliac,” Fennelly’s keys churn and cycle like one of Terry Riley’s vintage all-night flights, soon synching with violin and Haley Fohr’s voice. It’s the clear album highlight, a cosmic trip that condenses such expansive minimalist explorations into a delectably concise three-minute length.
Inversely, where the album stumbles is on the lengthy 12-minute song, “Gravity Wake.” The Oberheim yawns and crests, a steady snare pattern giving the piece its processional rhythm. Bean and Fohr’s voices entwine in murmurs about space and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Fohr’s more dramatic voice giving gravitas to the command: “Be the gravity wake.” Tasteful and restrained as Fennelly’s playing is, here it doesn’t have quite enough energy or movement to sustain such a runtime. That said, the expanded palette and membership bodes well for future explorations. | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Paradise of Bachelors | February 15, 2017 | 6.8 | 9c0ac1e0-81de-4e3d-8935-b8ed8e26858c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Farao is the Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen. Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. The lyrical themes circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them. | Farao is the Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen. Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. The lyrical themes circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them. | Farao: Till It’s All Forgotten | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20957-till-its-all-forgotten/ | Till It’s All Forgotten | Farao, aka Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen, could have taken a more predictable road on her debut album. She has the breathy, clear, slightly husky soprano voice that's come to characterize "indie" (the genre, not the ethos). She has the right image. She has the instrumental chops. She could have created songs that are more easily consumable than those on Till It's All Forgotten, songs that fit into TV and film montage or title sequences. She could have taken the easy road. We should all be thankful she didn't.
Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. It's not in the least bit easy to create music that sounds truly like you and nobody else, but Jahnsen manages to do so. The instrumentation on Till It's All Forgotten is rich—electronics, horns, synth strings, piano, a standard guitar-based rock band, vocal manipulation—and though all that layering and texture could feel heavy and cluttered, it rarely does. Jahnsen has an ear for structure, always pulling when the song could have pushed, turning right when it could have turned left, never relying on ABABC to get her through. Opener and title track "TIAF" is a perfect example—it's a lush, beautiful song with stacked vocals and a cascading synth that would drift into quirky Starbucks background fare if not for the stuttering, off-time percussion that jars the song out of complacency.
The lyrical themes on Till It's All Forgotten always circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them. It's an album about slippage, discomfort, unease. "Bodies", which was released as a single with an unsettling and intimate video depicting the solitary and intense relationship between two teenage girls as they explore a landscape abandoned by adults, is a dense song even without the visuals, with its military-percussive lope and clot of horn punctuation. Jahnsen has said the song is about "surrendering to bad decisions and consciously going down the wrong path", something all of us can relate to but few of us would brag about.
It's this commitment to quotidian territory that makes Till It's All Forgotten so engaging. The delicate "Hunter" could read as a love song but is instead about the process of dehumanizing another. The haunting "Feel" could be simply about sexuality but is instead about the desire for deep connection with someone else. The sprawling "Warriors" refuses to lapse into epic inspirational platitude; it is about the exhaustion of being perpetually ready to fight. Jahnsen takes well-covered general themes and distills something small and strange out of each; her instrumentation is huge and complicated while her lyrics remain resolutely human-scale.
Jahnsen played and arranged many of the instruments on the album herself, and the album is like an expansive and bizarre terrarium in which Jahnsen has carefully called for the placement of each element. She places tinny synth microtones next to big wooden piano notes on "Fragments", a song about human complications, and she loops her vocals around these basic tones, she demonstrates how naturally complications arise from a simple setup. Arrangements this teeming could be claustrophobic, but Jahnsen exerts firm control over her rich and highly detailed world. It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile. | 2015-09-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-09T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | September 9, 2015 | 7.1 | 9c0fbfd2-19e7-4830-bff6-85be923b0622 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
Available for the first time digitally, these two albums from the free-jazz supergroup featuring pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Anthony Braxton offer a singular display of musicianship and chaos. | Available for the first time digitally, these two albums from the free-jazz supergroup featuring pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Anthony Braxton offer a singular display of musicianship and chaos. | Circle: Circle 1: Live in Germany Concert / Circle 2: Gathering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22342-circle-1-live-in-germany-concert-circle-2-gathering/ | Circle 1: Live in Germany Concert / Circle 2: Gathering | Pianist Chick Corea and saxophonist Anthony Braxton were not destined to be creative partners for long. But the year these virtuosos spent in the free-jazz supergroup Circle proved to be a notable one. By 1970, Corea was a master of high-energy, abstract playing, thanks to his tenure in a particularly wild edition of Miles Davis’ group. And Braxton’s work alongside fellow Chicagoans like Wadada Leo Smith had already put a charge into progressive improvisers on multiple continents—though Braxton was also down in the mouth over the long odds he faced in getting his ambitious classical pieces heard in New York and Paris. On the night he met Corea, Braxton considered himself more of a chess-game hustler than a working musician.
The origin story goes that Braxton was prodded into a one-off gig by some longtime associates. After the concert, drummer Jack DeJohnette led the crew over to the Village Vanguard, where Corea was playing in a trio with drummer Barry Altschul and bassist Dave Holland (another Davis veteran, as was DeJohnette). Braxton sat in with Corea’s group, and when the night came to an end, the pianist gave Braxton his address and asked him over to jam. Six months later, CBS Records was taping a show by Corea, Braxton, Holland, and Altschul—a quartet going by the name Circle.
Circle 1: Live in Germany Concert was originally issued in 1971, along with the final studio session the group produced before busting up (Circle 2: Gathering). CD reissues of both albums came out through Corea’s Stretch imprint in the ’90s, before falling out of print. Now both records have been introduced to the digital catalogue. As none of Circle’s other studio sessions and live recordings are available on streaming services, these reissues would be welcome even if they were of middling quality. Luckily, each one comes across as a worthy addition to this short-lived band’s discography.
*Germany *shares a setlist with the latter half of Circle’s other famous live album—though at this gig, the band pushes prettiness and aggression to greater extremes. A long suite of two compositions by Holland opens the record. Corea gives “Toy Room” a haunted solo introduction that keeps the childhood nostalgia of the main theme from seeming too innocent when it arrives. With the rhythm section offering free-time support, Corea’s long feature only gives brief glimpses of the prickly side of his playing. Braxton’s entrance on flute has a similarly lyrical quality, even when his lines create strange harmonies. Corea occasionally follows Braxton into freer vistas before pulling the saxophonist back to the underlying tune. Despite the fact that the song never gets that far “out,” there’s a compelling drama to the way the players negotiate this loveliness.
After an improvised, transitional section in the suite, another Holland tune follows. (In keeping with a typo from the original pressing, the song “Q & A” is once again spelled “O & A” on this reissue.) Given its jabbing, repetitive hook, this composition was well suited to demonstrations of Circle’s collective power. But this take from Germany sounds particularly energetic. From the outset of his first soprano solo, Braxton is heard mixing all the paints from his “language music” palette—with harsh overblowing quickly giving way to longer-held tones, then wide-interval attacks.
In addition to the timbral intensity of the performance, the quick juggling of such different sound styles has its own hardcore feel. And when the band relents, they keep the experimental vibe afloat by rustling around with miscellaneous percussion instruments and whistles. Later on, Corea flashes some powerful cluster-chords (which owe a debt to Cecil Taylor), and then Braxton helps thrash through Holland’s theme again, this time on alto. He stays on that instrument for the band’s frequent concert closer, the standard “There Is No Greater Love.” It has a buoyant strut—at least until the band bashes its form to pieces.
Though each show could prove distinct, Circle’s setlists never seemed to alter greatly. By contrast, their output in studio sessions could result in unstructured group improv, as well as tight duos, trios, and full-quartet workouts. The only studio album released near-contemporaneously with the group’s existence was Circle 2: Gathering. After Corea found a large public with his rock-influenced Return to Forever ensemble, Blue Note records hurried out archival collections of Circle’s first studio rehearsals with Circulus and Circling In. But while those vault-clearing sets are interesting, they don’t cast the same spell that Gathering does.
The album is one long track, credited to Corea’s compositional pen. But the openness of the performance—and its simultaneous balance—is an achievement that only a well-drilled group can deliver. The poetic understanding between Braxton and Holland is announced early on when the string player (on cello) offers gorgeous bowed lines behind the soprano saxophonist’s soulful phrases. Corea’s opening melodic material is similarly attractive, and he provides well-timed transitions and smart support to other band members throughout.
Circle’s two biggest personalities may have both been impatient to explore their new ideas. For Corea, that meant a hard turn away from the free-jazz fringe, and an embrace of both Scientology as well as what he called the more “communicative” sound of his subsequent rock-fusion style. Braxton had electronic music, big-band albums, and multi-orchestra concepts knocking around in his head. But on Gathering, they still had the patience necessary to make a collaborative group work at a high level. | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Jazz | null | September 7, 2016 | 8.1 | 9c13665d-6c54-4116-b406-5070576bb06a | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
After last year's successful collaboration "Bo Peep (Do U Right)", R&B singer Jeremih links up again with moody producer Shlohmo for a full EP's worth of songs, including the latter's previously released remix of the former's "Fuck U All the Time". Chance the Rapper guests. | After last year's successful collaboration "Bo Peep (Do U Right)", R&B singer Jeremih links up again with moody producer Shlohmo for a full EP's worth of songs, including the latter's previously released remix of the former's "Fuck U All the Time". Chance the Rapper guests. | Jeremih / Shlohmo: No More EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19675-jeremih-shlohmo-no-more-ep/ | No More EP | Few releases have so effectively shrugged at the supposed dichotomy of “alternative” and “traditional” R&B over the past few years than Late Nights with Jeremih, the free mixtape from Jeremih that quietly grew to be a cult favorite after dropping from left field in 2012. And anyway, that binary—which took real shape around 2011, thanks in large part to the clamor around the Weeknd’s landmark debut, House of Balloons—has always been more about the audience than about the artist. There are vague aesthetic similarities among R&B artists pegged as “alternative” (or otherwise)—a focus on vibe over narrative, a tendency to distort vocals to the point of disembodiment—but what it more often designates is a certain seal of approval, a go-ahead for guilt-free consumption by whatever your term of choice may be for those who’ve warmed to R&B in the 2010s but approach the bulk of the genre under the protective cloak of irony.
Late Nights, at once radio-driven and experimental, shared some of those aesthetics but managed to duck that conversation so thoroughly that it made you question if the conversation was worth having to begin with. Its oddness was approachable from all angles, as Jeremih and a league of ambitious producers (Mike WiLL Made It in his absolute prime, pop soothsayer Tricky Stewart, occasionally Jeremih himself) took cues from the sounds of the underground but never quite presented them as “cool.” All this was especially surprising coming from the guy best known for “Birthday Sex”, a doofy novelty hit that’s endured solely because people continue to have birthdays. But even then, there were glimmers of promise: in a 2009 acoustic performance of the same song, he transformed it into something intimate and feather-light, accompanying himself on piano.
When Jeremih initially linked last year with moody L.A. producer Shlohmo for Yours Truly and Adidas Originals’ Songs From Scratch series, it wasn’t such an improbable pairing: here was a singer willing to go all in with producers’ stranger impulses working with a beatmaker that possesses omnivorous tendencies, whose gooey sad-boy soundscapes draw from ghostly R&B balladry, abstracted hip-hop percussion, and hissy ambience alike. (The first half of last year’s Laid Out EP could, with very slight stretches of the imagination, be considered some warped form of R&B itself.) That collaboration, “Bo Peep (Do U Right)", was proof enough: gorgeously smoggy, humid, and sort of tragic despite the surface romance, with Jeremih’s weightless falsetto piercing through the groaning bassline, “Wish somebody would’ve seen us, baby.” It was heavier than Jeremih’s usual stuff, but it worked, at least as a one-off. A year later, the duo aim to replicate its magic on No More, their six-track collaboration; but where Jeremih floated on “Bo Peep,” the majority of the EP falls flat.
Shlohmo’s productions are typically dense and blurry, his bittersweet melodies rendered in smudgy sepia tones and built from intricately arranged layers of what sound like organized anxieties. When there are vocals, they’re often samples; even when they’re not, as with “Don’t Say No”, his lovely 2013 collaboration with How to Dress Well, vocals tend to serve as yet another instrument in the mix, rather than the focal point. Though “Bo Peep” proved an exception, Jeremih’s voice isn’t intended for this sort of environment; there’s a translucency to his falsetto that radiates when given the proper space, but gets bogged down by too much outside noise.
Late Night’s best moments— “773 Love,” “Fuck U All The Time,” “Go To The Mo”—shared a certain sense of delicacy, their productions defined primarily by negative space. No More could benefit from some of this airiness; instead, it often feels stifling, Jeremih’s voice mired in the layers of hi-hat twitches and bass grumblings. Title track “No More” burbles and quivers yet doesn’t quite move in any particular direction. “Let It Go” is pretty—it’s certainly the best new song on the project—but ultimately reads as a slightly subpar cousin to “Bo Peep”. And when the duo aim for sparseness, on skeletal closing track “The End,” they’re left with a handful of parts and not much whole; Jeremih’s a touch off-key and slightly out of time, and a tacked-on appearance from Chance the Rapper is a bizarre choice for a finale, entirely at odds with the warm, woozy sensuality of the preceding tracks.
Most questionable here is the inclusion of Shlohmo’s “Fuck U All the Time” remix, the original version of which he released well before the two ever crossed paths. It’s essentially just an extended version of the original, which boasts an additional Jeremih verse packed with mildly cute, mostly embarrassing lines like, “Don’t let the time ticky-icky-icky while I’m snapping off your bra/ And biting on your Vickies.” Moments like that are forgivable, if a bit dorky (and it’s far from the first remix of the song crammed with superfluous verses), but it’s harder to understand the impulse to improve upon a song that draws seductiveness from subtlety by piling more stuff on top—that familiar moaning bassline, those little beeps and clatters. It’s that same impulse that characterizes much of the past few years of so-called alt-R&B: pile on the effects, pitch down the voice, and let 'er rip. That impulse holds No More back from approaching the transcendence of Jeremih and Shlohmo’s first collaboration (or most of Late Nights): too much of the EP feels like a drawn-out remix of a song that didn’t really need it in the first place. | 2014-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Wedidit | July 25, 2014 | 6.1 | 9c1b261d-8528-41ff-86e9-451ec214e666 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The soundtrack to the runaway-hit Netflix sci-fi series evokes some of the ‘80s touchstones of the show, but in a more restrained way. | The soundtrack to the runaway-hit Netflix sci-fi series evokes some of the ‘80s touchstones of the show, but in a more restrained way. | Kyle Dixon / Michael Stein: Stranger Things OST, Vol. One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22265-stranger-things-ost-vol-one/ | Stranger Things OST, Vol. One | You could occupy a whole afternoon arguing about whether the Netflix series “Stranger Things” marks the jump-the-shark moment for the ’80s fetishization that’s been building for the past half-decade, or whether it represents the trend’s creative peak. Does the show cleverly re-invent the ’80s film touchstones that directors Matt and Ross Duffer wear on their sleeve? Or is their riffing on Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, and John Carpenter just artistic cannibalism? Is it time to adjust the tracking-control in our minds and stop looking at the world through VCR-tinted glasses?
Surprisingly, these question are pretty much moot when it comes to the first installment of the “Stranger Things” soundtrack. (The forthcoming Volume Two contains entirely different material and more or less accompanies a different set of episodes.) Much to their credit, composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein opted for a far less overt nostalgia than the Duffers. This is all the more surprising—not to mention admirable—when you consider that in Dixon and Stein’s main gig as members of the Austin-based experimental synth quartet S U R V I V E, they’re not necessarily shy about their taste for referencing ’80s keyboard sounds, even if they do so with good taste.
If S U R V I V E don't quite blur the distinction between the cheese and the cream of that decade, it doesn’t so much matter. By and large, audiences no longer seek to distinguish between, say, the Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F” and Duran Duran bassist John Taylor’s serpentine fretwork. Under the heat lamp of kitschy nostalgia, what once sounded artificially sweetened or even objectionable has acquired a hazy glow we regard with fondness. But for the first 10 of *Volume One’*s thirty-plus tracks, you might get the impression that Dixon and Stein were aiming for the vibe of minimal early-’90s ambient techno instead. Even when they construct a keyboard riff ringing enough to serve as a top-line chorus hook (“Kids”), they still don’t oversaturate the music with retro tones.
Whatever you think of how Dixon and Stein’s scoring cues succeed within the framework of the show, the pair deserves credit for its efforts to avoid being intrusive. There are moments when S U R V I V E nods to John Carpenter’s scores, but the duo don’t make the same move here: The first 10 tracks don’t remotely suggest the suspense, horror, supernatural thrills, or even the basic human drama that the show’s storyline aims for. With a plot that involves a search for a missing child, another child who possesses telekinetic abilities, an ancient, monstrous being called a demogorgon, etc, “Stranger Things” hardly lacks for elements one would expect composers would drool at the chance to sink their teeth into.
Taken as a suite of music on its own merits, Volume One flows rather seamlessly—no small achievement. The canvas they paint on is remarkably spare and restrained: At any given point, it feels as if there are only a handful of sounds in the stereo field, and what at first comes off as a limited range slowly reveals itself as the opposite. It takes a while to notice because the first third of the album streams by with the unhurried gentleness of a tiny brook; it’s no insult whatsoever to say that this section of the music, with its pillowy synth pads, is perfectly suited for a scenic drive or even a rainy-day meditation on the porch. *Volume One *even borders on New Age at times, which initially leaves you scratching your head as to how Dixon, Stein, and the Duffers envisioned that this music would complement and support its target material.
But then Volume One takes a dramatic and agile heel turn. The first minute and a half of the album*'s* 11th track, “The Upside Down,” begins with much of the same unthreatening serenity that precedes it, as a feathery keyboard glimmers like rays of sunlight beaming down through the treetops. You almost expect Enya to appear (again, no insult) until the composers hit a 30-second stretch where, using little more than a handful of keyboard swells, they very gently begin to suggest a shift toward a darker mood.
When the piece hits the two-minute mark, listeners find themselves plunged into a nightmare before they’ve even had time to blink. Dixon and Stein pull off the change with uncanny grace. Perhaps the most deft and unsettling touch is their use of synths to mimic a vaguely inhuman howling. At its best, horror cinema taps into humankind’s primal terror and reminds us that, at the end of the day, we are still at the mercy of predatory forces that we don’t fully understand. Dixon and Stein’s arrangement on “The Upside Down” hits the bullseye on that sensation, and the fact that they wait so patiently to spring this shift on the audience shows that they put a great deal of thought into their decisions. Down the homestretch, Dixon and Stein allow themselves to indulge the shades of melodrama that listeners will immediately recognize as typical of TV music. Understandably, several of their choices in this section recall the music from the “X-Files,” but at this point, they have have earned the right to ham it up a bit.
Aesthetics aside, “Stranger Things” also reminds us of the pros and cons of modern television. Audiences get to enjoy more daring work in long-form format that the traditional network structure just couldn't allow for. On the other hand, we can never be sure these days whether a series is going to make it to another season. As it stands now, it’s up in the air whether “Stranger Things” will be back for a season two. But with not one but two scores to show for their involvement, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein have at least proven themselves to the world, whatever happens to their vehicle next. | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Lakeshore | August 17, 2016 | 8 | 9c2006c6-e380-4166-a688-29b425a87217 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Migos found the perfect moment to drop their short but potent EP 3-Way. | Migos found the perfect moment to drop their short but potent EP 3-Way. | Migos: 3 Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22141-3-way/ | 3 Way | Trap and drill music—derived from communities within communities riddled with gang ties and drug money—are often dismissed for lack of substance. But once you dig past the “drugs, money, and women” signifiers, there are rich veins of meaning—take Future’s undying paranoia and bouts of depression he gingerly sprinkles into his albums.
Migos did nothing, though, to remedy those stereotypes with their debut single “Versace.” The Atlanta rap outfit came through like a hurricane with a formulaic hook that garnered them immediate club praise and local radio airplay. Then it trickled into the mainstream (everyone loves yelling out the names of deceased fashion designers with an aspirational brand), and they chased “Versace” with “Hannah Montana.” Migos were ultimately disregarded as lacking depth to their music. For this reason, their latest EP 3-Way is a success: The project, while short, introduces us all to new dimensions into the Migos collective psyche.
All lyrics aside, the 5-track EP is full of hard production. Zaytoven checks in twice (“3-Way” and “Coppers and Robbers”) to offer some name recognition, yet travels along a similar vein as the other three producers (Cassius Jay, Ricky Racks, and Dun Deal) in crafting dark, sinister beats that rise and fall with their hammering cadences. The title track is very on-brand, a combo of jazzy and churchish keys supporting fantasies about money. But even as Quavo is yapping about phone taps and “bitches,” he inserts some “coulda shoulda wouldas”: “Shoulda played for the Dolphins/Shoulda played for the Saints.” Once a high-school football star with a potential NFL career, he’s repetitively rapping about guns, and while this probably isn’t some self-actualization moment for Quavo, the recognition of a missed opportunity lingers.
“Coppers And Robbers” is another low-key dark cut as Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff all reveal that in the childhood game of “cops and robbers,” they fulfilled their destiny as the latter. “Can’t Go Out Sad” is a laundry list of material boasts, though the more they emphasize they’re not hurting for money, the more they underscore the other ways they might be hurting (the title alone reveals that need for reassurance). “Savages Only” is the real star of the show: a mildly controversial track addressing police violence but placed within the context of fighting fire with fire, as redemption can only come from “savages only.” Sure, it’s not the most hyper-conscious cut, but for a group that’s been previously written off as thoughtless, this track still feels noteworthy.
Sonically, 3-Way is very much an extension of Migos’ Y.R.N. 2 mixtape from earlier this year, but their content is seemingly drifting into new directions. With the upcoming election, racial injustice, and police brutality, many artists have changed the subject of their tune. Perhaps the country’s current climate inspired Migos to delve deeper this time, or perhaps they were this deep all along and we just weren't listening. | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 16, 2016 | 6.5 | 9c20f5b9-5026-4e92-a893-7cf08ce3f87f | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
Built on loud, low-bit-rate samples, the New York rapper uses a relaxed, almost deadpan flow to nestle deep in his own consciousness, drawing you in close to his words. | Built on loud, low-bit-rate samples, the New York rapper uses a relaxed, almost deadpan flow to nestle deep in his own consciousness, drawing you in close to his words. | Navy Blue: Gangway for Navy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-gangway-for-navy/ | Gangway for Navy | The man behind the Navy Blue moniker, Sage Elsesser, is a pro skater who models for Supreme, has his own Converse sneaker and can be heard at the end of Frank Ocean’s Blonde boasting of his ability to play the theremin. But on Gangway for Navy, a compelling and hazy collection of songs posted to Soundcloud this month, Elsesser is far away from the starry social circles he sometimes inhabits. Instead, he’s nestled deep in his own consciousness, rapping in a loose delivery over tightly wound samples about the friends and family that molded his heart. It sounds a lot like his longtime friend and one-time roommate Earl Sweatshirt’s 2018 album Some Rap Songs and achieves a similar effect.
Like Earl did on Some Rap Songs, which he worked on while crashing at Elsesser’s Brooklyn apartment a few years ago, Elsesser builds the production on Gangway mostly by himself using loud, low-bit-rate samples erected on sharp, crushing percussion. Whereas loop-diggers like Madlib tended to fold his drums smoothly into the sample, Elsesser aerates each snare and bass kick with shrapnel, giving his tracks a big heaving quality, like a barge swaying in the middle of a storm. On “can’t take me,” hi-hats and bass kicks pulse under a rubbery organ line; machine-gun claps propel a bed of pitched-down strings on “slow down.”
This sound is the buoyant force of Gangway, a sound on which Elsesser floats during his verses. His flow is relaxed and deadpan, the opposite of showmen MCs who alter their timbre to emphasize certain lines. You won’t necessarily catch his small pockets of detail on first listen, but that’s part of the fun, searching for them on each return visit. On “carlos,” for example, he encapsulates the long-term toll of abandonment by a loved one with the line, “I can count the years when it hurt the most.” He finishes that verse by stating three words but only attaching meaning to two: “Growth, these words, know they hurt to hold/Grace, give thanks, know I’m not alone/Grief…” He lets the third word linger, as if he himself is its definition.
Heartache is an underlying theme of Gangway, but Elsesser never conveys it dramatically. Rather, it’s more like he’s stating the facts of his existence, balancing questions of profundity (“My soul is scared...will I fall victim to the same three things?”) with the nuances that formed his childhood, down to what exactly was on the dinner table. He speaks about his role as a man, both in his family (he mentions his sisters, mother, dad, and grandma frequently) and the greater universe. He’s a son and brother to his direct kin, but also to the millions of descendants of Africans who were brought over as slaves to this country. “Got the face of my father, hands of my fathers,” he boasts poetically on the opener, “apprehension.”
There’s zero talk here about his life in the limelight, gracing lookbooks, and popular skate videos, but there are hints of its difficulties, such as on “shine on me!,” when he raps, “More problems on my plate cause I’m grown/Not cause I’m growin’.” Featured on the track is Bronx rapper MIKE, whose music Earl introduced Elsesser to while they were living together. His voice is much huskier than Elsesser’s whirring hum and gives the project—he’s featured on two of its eight tracks—some needed dynamism. “Always hogs on the block cause the area harsh,” he grunts, a colorful line that demonstrates why he’s gradually becoming the face of NYC’s alternative hip-hop scene. But the true beauty of Gangway lies in its personalism. It’s bone-deep, poems spun through a stream of consciousness. It takes a long time for some artists to sound like themselves; for Elsesser, it’s the name of the game. | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 12, 2019 | 7.7 | 9c2cec0e-2456-4fdc-b594-c278b5835a36 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
On their fourth full-length, the Salt Lake City doom band SubRosa take inspiration from a 100-year-old dystopian novel about a modern surveillance state. The resulting album is their best yet. | On their fourth full-length, the Salt Lake City doom band SubRosa take inspiration from a 100-year-old dystopian novel about a modern surveillance state. The resulting album is their best yet. | SubRosa: For this We Fought the Battle of Ages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22251-for-this-we-fought-the-battle-of-ages/ | For this We Fought the Battle of Ages | For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages—the fourth album by Salt Lake City doom-and-drama masters SubRosa—takes its inspiration from We, an almost 100-year-old dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is a paralyzing, prescient portrait of a modern surveillance state, where a world made of glass prevents secrets and state policies curtail pleasurable sex. We predates George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 by two decades and helped shape a literary tradition where the chief concern is exactly how much state authority can overpower individual autonomy. It is a most relevant anxiety in 2016. But an hour-length album that lifts lines, themes, and arcs from an especially didactic framework? That may sound like a bit much.
During the last decade, though, SubRosa has steadily learned to make the obscure accessible, to open up the high-volume lurch and heavy-menace scowl of doom to an ever-widening audience. Founder and leader Rebecca Vernon has woven threads of bewitching folk and magnetic grunge into her metal, an approach epitomized by 2013’s More Constant Than the Gods. Backed by a fleet of violins and a rhythm section that could quickly sink from featherweight to heavyweight, Vernon’s anthems pulled you into their oversized gothic churn. And on Battle of Ages—yet again, the best work of SubRosa’s career—she doubles down on the ability to make the esoteric compelling. This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries. You may want to press “pause” just to ponder, but the brooding, booming music demands you move onward.
Four of Battle of Ages’ six songs break the 10-minute mark, with two lasting for a quarter-hour. These unabashed track lengths give SubRosa room to roam and the ability to fold a panoply of sounds and ideas into one space. “Black Majesty,” for instance, opens with Vernon singing a black widow’s lullaby (“Isn’t it good to be acquainted with darkness?” she begins) over crackling electronics. The song soon lunges forward, though: room-rattling drums cut beneath a low-slung riff before the whole band shifts into a double-time sprint, where screeching violins intensify the raw nerves of the rhythm section. There are strong hooks and soft harmonies, a section that feels like Cocteau Twins gauze and another that feels like Silver Mt. Zion-sized fury. And these are just accessories to lyrics where Vernon poignantly wonders about the redemption inherent in mortality and the error inevitable in myth. “We love the taste of false perfection/The more the lies, the more we laud,” she seethes amid a complicated bridge. The line pulls all her abstraction into a political moment where a reality television star sits near the brink of the presidency.
Elsewhere, Vernon softly sings folk music in Italian over a plucked lyre. The band pits death metal barks against seraphic harmonies during “Wound of the Warden,” a 13-minute sprawl where the midsection could be a rock radio classic unto itself. “Troubled Cells” conjures a loneliness and despair so exquisite it might as well be a murder ballad, while the shout-along coda reimagines the Arcade Fire’s mix of gang vocals and strings with more interest in dark than light. It’s no small wonder that SubRosa’s most ambitious work, where songs last as long as television shows, doubles as its most compulsory listen. Both qualities stem from SubRosa’s command of so many styles and ability to hide the seams that stitch them together.
Novelistic inspiration, turns out, suits SubRosa perfectly, as it matches the band’s scale, where big ideas about life, death, freedom, and love are emboldened by songs that pull in influences like a vortex. Sure, For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages shares themes and scenes with We, from which it, like Orwell did, lifts a worried vision for the future. More important, though, is that it shares the audacity to reimagine how the world looks or sounds. Zamyatin was an architect of what has become an idiom. And few doom bands operate with the urgency and inclusion of SubRosa, a group that’s made an album you can’t escape about a world you wish you could. | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Profound Lore | August 29, 2016 | 8.2 | 9c33c122-180c-4b85-a5ed-1e1e44e70d65 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The New Jersey band’s debut LP sticks to time-tested hardcore formulas, but even within those bounds—and in under 17 minutes—the group discovers whole universes. | The New Jersey band’s debut LP sticks to time-tested hardcore formulas, but even within those bounds—and in under 17 minutes—the group discovers whole universes. | Gel: *Only Constant * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gel-only-constant/ | Only Constant | Gel make hardcore for the freaks. That’s a statement of intent, established in the title of the New Jersey band’s 2019 demo and reaffirmed at every sweaty, ecstatic show they’ve played since. Increasingly, over an impressive string of singles and a split with Cold Brats, it’s also become a subgenre of their own making. Gel play a joyously elastic version of hardcore punk that rejects the genre’s tough-guy orthodoxy while retaining its powerful punch. On Only Constant, the band’s 17-minute debut full-length, they lay out their most expansive, iconoclastic vision yet.
Only Constant works so well because it faithfully captures Gel’s energetic live set. They know how to get a room (or a Sonic parking lot) moving and keep it moving, and their recordings rely on that same sense of momentum. On paper, they’re not doing anything revolutionary. A Gel song typically consists of two or three riffs, usually played at a couple of different tempos, with a fat rhythm-section groove underpinning the guitars and vocalist Sami Kaiser unleashing their scorched-earth howl on top of everything. But within that relatively simple formula, Gel have discovered whole universes.
“Honed Blade,” Only Constant’s searing opening track, is one such universe. Its first riff, a chunky little three-chord progression initially played just by guitarist Anthony Webster, emerges out of a brief swell of feedback. Kaiser ad-libs a sardonic “Ha, ha,” which prompts the rest of the band to jump in, with second guitarist Maddi Nave doubling the riff and locking it to a stomping groove. At this point, we’re 12 seconds into the song. For the rest of its 100-second duration, Gel work through a couple of their signature tempo shifts, introducing a second riff that functions more like a variation on the first one and letting Webster rip on a squealing effect that may or may not qualify as a lead. Then it’s over, you wipe the blood from your lip, and “Fortified” kicks in.
Gel maintain the same brisk clip for most of Only Constant’s runtime. They’re on record as being anti-horseshoe: the crowd formation that forces non-moshers to the back and sides while a big empty pit opens in the middle of the room. They want bodies in constant motion, with kids flinging themselves at, onto, and off of the stage. The songs on Only Constant reflect that desire. They’re comfortable dropping into the occasional slower groove, but they elide the kind of ultra-obvious mosh parts that tend to form horseshoes. Even when they do offer a little bit of red meat to the pit, there’s always something texturally interesting going on at the same time—a warped take on a Slayer divebomb, a little power-pop bounce to the chords, or a shuffle drum pattern.
It helps, too, that Kaiser’s vocal style is less drill sergeant and more enthusiastic therapist. They sing about confidence, self-acceptance, and their desire to transcend self-destructive tendencies with a kind of suppliant empathy, urging the listener to make the connections that will draw them in even closer to the music. It’s a far cry from the genre’s stereotypical barking exhortations to “open up this fucking pit.” The most forceful lines come at the end of “Fortified,” when Kaiser roars, “Don’t fucking cower/Stand your ground/Stare right back and be proud.” It’s clear that they’re singing it not only to themself, but to all the other freaks in the room.
The emphasis on community that’s baked into Gel’s premise also yielded Only Constant’s one misstep. “Calling Card” sets a series of fan-submitted voice memos to a simple, echoey guitar line and a skittering drumbeat. The clips tend to be catty and vulgar: “If being assertive makes me a bitch, then I guess I’m a fucking bitch”; “You’re a fucking snake and looking at your face makes me want to throw the fuck up”; etc. “Calling Card” appears midway through the track listing, and it stops the album’s momentum dead in its tracks. Worse, its attempt at inclusiveness comes off as cliquey, suggesting that if you can’t relate to the gossipy gripes of the inner-circle hardcore scene, then the song isn’t for you. Maybe that’s what “hardcore for the freaks” means to some people, but it’s far more persuasive when it sounds like a sweat-choked DIY space being whipped into a euphoric frenzy. Fortunately, the rest of Only Constant understands that. | 2023-03-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Convulse | March 31, 2023 | 7.3 | 9c3ffa7e-f386-4f31-b70d-c03feee7408e | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
As the touring guitarist for Mikal Cronin and the bassist in Fuzz, Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich is in the orbit of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. He brings serious guitar chops to his own band but also knows how to switch things up, incorporating psychedelic tinges and a heavy bottom end. Segall contributes on drums. | As the touring guitarist for Mikal Cronin and the bassist in Fuzz, Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich is in the orbit of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. He brings serious guitar chops to his own band but also knows how to switch things up, incorporating psychedelic tinges and a heavy bottom end. Segall contributes on drums. | Meatbodies: Meatbodies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19701-meatbodies-meatbodies/ | Meatbodies | Mikal Cronin put on some killer live shows last year surrounding MCII, but while he was singing beautifully and strumming his 12-string, another longhair consistently threatened to steal the spotlight. Chad Ubovich, the touring guitarist responsible for the huge solo on "See It My Way", has undeniable chops. He's also the bassist for Fuzz, and it's the same deal—he does a lot more than just slouch in the background and play the minimum. When this dude takes a solo, you watch. Based on those sideman gigs alone, it makes sense that his band Meatbodies got picked up by In the Red for a pair of singles and a long-player.
Last year, they released a very good self-titled cassette on Ty Segall's God? Records (as Chad and the Meatbodies). It sold out fairly quickly and, in circles that care about those sorts of things, became one of those instantaneous small batch collector's items. But with their debut LP, it's more difficult to view the band as small-press ass-kicking upstarts. Meatbodies was recorded and mixed by Eric "King Riff" Bauer, Bob Marshall, and Chris Woodhouse (who, between the three of them, have worked on every Live in San Francisco release and most Segall, Cronin, Fuzz, and Oh Sees records). The cover art was done by Fuzz and Slaughterhouse artist Tatiana Kartomten. Segall even plays drums and bass on a few tracks here. Meatbodies are embedded in that world, and they're working within a formula that's proved successful for their more-visible peers. Comparisons are inevitable; the bar is high.
Pro wrestling heels use the term "B+ player" about guys in Ubovich's position—rookies who put on a good show but aren't quite headliners. But he rips, you see. He's always been a destroyer, and on Meatbodies, he also proves to be an ace rock'n'roll strategist. The tone here is set perfectly: 59 seconds of psychedelic sci-fi noise, and then, very suddenly, Ubovich and Segall come in at full power, electric guitars unrelenting, with "Disorder". It's a loud, exciting, kinetic, and brazen introduction. Like Daniel Bryan before him, Ubovich rises to the occasion.
But Meatbodies don't just blindly hit peak after peak, shredding toward the high heavens uninterrupted for a full album. They pull back and indulge their more psychedelic inclinations, letting Ubovich's voice shine, lilt, and echo over steady acoustic strumming. When that starts sounding too sterile after a couple minutes, he dirties it up by dropping an electric guitar solo in the middle. While they craft plenty of catchy hooks and choruses over the album's dozen tracks, they don't lean on any one thing for long. There's always a changeup in place. They'll dismantle a loud and fast song for a sluggish, slow finish. Any band can churn out an exciting two-minute garage punk song and then repeat the formula a few times. Very few artists of this ilk exhibit this much patience, which makes for a continually rewarding listen.
If there's a clear-cut example of Meatbodies making the upgrade from "band with a tape and some 7" tracks" to "rock band to watch," it's the re-recorded album version of "Wahoo". The ramshackle stomper is now stadium-ready. (It's worth checking out the original tape version of that song, too—a fun document of the band's lo-fi, warbly beginnings.) The track comes late in the album, and when it arrives, Ubovich has already found several opportunities earlier in the LP to show off what he's capable of as a guitarist. And sure, there's excellent guitar work on the track, but there's a clearer focus on the confidence he exhibits as a frontman. He yelps, screams, and croons like a seasoned rock star. "I don't know and I don't care," he sings at the bridge. He does care, though—if he didn't, Meatbodies wouldn't sound half this good. | 2014-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-10-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | October 14, 2014 | 7.5 | 9c46eda3-ec61-473c-800a-715eafaaf26c | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Four short EPs from Greta Kline feature the singer-songwriter at a piano singing her detailed and deeply felt songs with newfound conviction. | Four short EPs from Greta Kline feature the singer-songwriter at a piano singing her detailed and deeply felt songs with newfound conviction. | Frankie Cosmos: Haunted Items | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-cosmos-haunted-items/ | Haunted Items | The objects in Greta Kline’s songs are like signposts along a winding road, underscoring the quotidian intimacy that has become the hallmark of her prolific output as Frankie Cosmos. Her beloved dog JoJo, taxidermied in a museum; a Sappho book read by an anonymous lover, observed through a bedroom window. For her latest project, a series of EPs entitled Haunted Items, Kline takes inspiration from the way objects can contain tiny emotional universes, permeated by the contexts surrounding their existence.
Frankie Cosmos songs often feel haunted—they appear on early albums quiet and dusted with tape hiss, and reappear later, more fully formed. Haunted Items, by contrast, has not played out in the public eye because Kline originally wrote them for piano, an instrument she did not know how to record, even in demo form. Instead, these tracks reverberated in her head, an affectation that plays out in the small rhymes and repetitions that punctuate the EPs. One can picture Kline sitting at the piano or on a tour bus repeating the intro to “Eternal,” a strangely hypnotic track towards the middle of the collection: “Nothing is ever nothing/Everything is everything/Inside of part of everything is nothing.” What could otherwise be a stoner platitude is delivered so earnestly it nearly makes the sentiment feel new again. It is, like the best Frankie Cosmos songs, imbued with an optimistic sense of wonder, a manifestation of what she has called her “mantra”: “Isn’t it crazy that I have feelings and exist?”
The piano was Kline’s first instrument, though she found recitals too anxiety-inducing and eventually took up the guitar. But on Haunted Items, the piano feels like a natural companion that brings you closer to the writing process. On the simple and sweet “Rings on a Tree,” she plunks out a bright chord progression with one hand, as her vocals play the role of the second hand. On “Allowed,” a dissonant minor key helps establish the playfully dark tone of the song, letting Kline’s distinctive lyricism set the rest of the scene: “You are just a scary bug/You can’t hurt me.” It feels a bit like a puppet show put on in a basement, a series of short ditties sung with the conviction of a Broadway musical.
Her voice, always a step or two away from breaking in higher octaves, is quiet but firm, filled with the charming eccentricities that often make Kline seem more like a friend playing songs in her bedroom. She occasionally clips her “g’s,” like on “String,” a song about struggling to maintain a facade while on the verge of an emotional breakdown: “No one’s ever noticin’/The way that I am balancin’.” It lends a closeness, even a kind of everydayness, to ideas that are scary or larger than life.
But despite the intimacy in these EPs—a clear step back from the fast-and-loud approach she adopted on last year’s Vessel—there is a distinctive boldness in Kline’s verses. The nihilism and despondency once commonplace in her lyrics are replaced here with a newfound resilience. If she was once framed as a despondent wallflower, this album begins to recast her as someone wise from heartbreak and loneliness. On “In the World,” Kline finally takes the space she wanted on 2014’s Zentropy, exploring the kind of rebirth that can happen after leaving an all-consuming relationship: “A day goes by that I don’t think of you,” she sings, a line to be scribbled into notebooks by lovelorn teens the world over.
Kline’s lyrics have always had an uncanny ability to sneak up on the listener; the “wow” moment often comes long after the song ends. On Haunted Items, this happened for me on “Tunnel”: “And baby I got hair now that’s never even heard of you,” she sings plainly. It only took 53 albums or so, but Greta Kline has finally turned her acerbic wit on someone other than herself. In the hushed tones of bedroom pop, it is a veritable mic drop. | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 9, 2019 | 7.6 | 9c4b50b3-204a-4b8a-b1a4-a05a14db3e80 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
In proving herself as a rapper, Doja Cat offers up an uneven album that is accomplished but gets bogged down in reactive and repetitive songs. | In proving herself as a rapper, Doja Cat offers up an uneven album that is accomplished but gets bogged down in reactive and repetitive songs. | Doja Cat: Scarlet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doja-cat-scarlet/ | Scarlet | Doja Cat’s arachnidemonic no-features rap album would like a word with anyone who ever said that she’s not really a rapper. Scarlet asserts Doja’s ability to rap, and her right to be multi-talented and difficult—“difficult art” is high praise. If only anything about Scarlet were difficult. It’s reactive and repetitive, pairing unsurprising takes on traditionalist hip-hop with sharp retorts to last season’s insults. Conceptually, the album is pitched somewhere between Rico Nasty’s Anger Management and Taylor Swift’s Reputation, a razor-edged heel turn that has always something to prove. It’s probably the biggest album to be so concerned with posting, which doesn’t give it the blockbuster quality it deserves.
Doja Cat has answered doubters before, once saying that “it’s fine if people think that I can’t rap,” but Scarlet—working title First of All—implies maybe it isn’t anymore. In one of many spring-summer 2023 tweets later deleted, but not before they made headlines, Doja wrote, “i also agree with everyone who said the majority of my rap verses are mid and corny…. I just enjoy making music but I’m getting tired of hearing yall say that i can’t so I will.” Scarlet’s relatively straight-ahead approach to hip-hop sounds like ’90s boom-bap retrofitted with an eye to contemporary sample drill, rage, and cloud rap. Frequent Lil Yachty collaborator Earl on the Beat has a hand in four tracks including singles “Paint the Town Red” and the dreamy love song “Agora Hills”; Jay Versace is behind the most California-sounding beats, channeling West Coast old school on “97” and L.A. beat scene on “Often.” A generous sample budget pays for classic material like the Ric Flair soundbite on “Balut” and Earl’s Dionne Warwick sample, the first sound on the album: a dove of peace over Evil Doja’s shoulder in “Paint the Town Red,” the No. 1 hit that’s an exact fit for her fake-bloodied, take-no-prisoners horrorcore persona.
After the opening “Red” and “Demons,” Scarlet is a purgatorial run of similarly paced songs that play like progressively shallower echoes of the singles’ pride and bluster. Moment to moment Doja’s performance is dynamic—sweet falsetto, thick nasal drawl—but her writing can make her sound like a sore winner bringing playground taunts to a flame war (“You look like a butter face”) and flatlining on “Love Life” as she congratulates her business team. Remy Ma, who last year reported that the Doja Cat fanbase “came for my life” after she’d said she didn’t think of Doja as a rapper, merits a subtle dig hidden in a stream of punning wordplay on “Ouchies,” and Doja spends not a little time beefing with those same “extremist” superfans on her own behalf, commentating on minor controversies and reminding them that every hate click counts.
Who but those very people are supposed to enjoy this? The rest of us get low-effort bars like “She like it from the back/’Cause she don’t ever front” in songs individually and cumulatively longer than they should be. The quest to settle the score starves Scarlet of opportunities for whatever Doja might have come up with independently—remember “Mooo!”? The woman is so gifted you almost forgot she started out in cow spots. It’s easy to be unsympathetic to the internet troll who gets more attention than you, more attention than any human brain is meant to process. Online pop fans can be relentless, especially to women—ask me how I know—but the only way to survive creatively on the internet is to trust the opinions you value and no one else’s.
Let’s bring it back: “Paint the Town Red” is a well-deserved Halloween hit and the smirking way Doja says “I’d rather be famous instead” sounds like Slim Shady-era Eminem. I love the irreverent way she flexes about not needing a drink to have fun—horrorcore should be scary and fun and Scarlet desperately needs more of the second. That creepy demon-bat-visits-Bella-Goth single artwork for “Demons”? Should have been the album cover. I wish she’d called up some other chronically online rappers, like Rico or JPEGMAFIA for instance, and set everybody loose. Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room. | 2023-09-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Kemosabe / RCA | September 25, 2023 | 5.9 | 9c4cdb6f-110a-4709-8695-bc9d117f0b5b | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Writing for string octet plus soloists Nate Wooley and Brian Chase, the New York composer’s work is rooted in the ways that sound absorbed by the body can both reflect and influence emotional states. | Writing for string octet plus soloists Nate Wooley and Brian Chase, the New York composer’s work is rooted in the ways that sound absorbed by the body can both reflect and influence emotional states. | Jessica Pavone: Lull | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessica-pavone-lull/ | Lull | Scattered throughout the score for Jessica Pavone’s Lull are instructions to “choose independent tempo,” and “alternate freely” between set pitches. Time stamps guide each player between sections of spontaneously interpreted notes or drones; at other times, players are instructed to listen to a specific performer for a given tempo or tonal center. The violist’s work is difficult to categorize; recently she has composed primarily for orchestral instruments, especially chamber ensembles, but these types of directions in her scores allude to her background in jazz and free improvisation. Pavone has made numerous albums with guitarist Mary Halvorson and recorded extensively with avant-garde jazz icon Anthony Braxton, which just begins to scratch the surface of her involvement in New York’s creative music scene over the past decade and a half. Yet Pavone’s music, often consisting of slowly undulating tones sustained and modulated over long durations, hits the ear much differently than the chaotic ecstasy of free jazz. Instead, her compositions are wholly absorbing, sinking the listener into a nebulous pool of sound.
Lull expands upon many of the ideas Pavone has been developing on recent quartet releases Brick and Mortar and Lost and Found. The ensemble has grown to an octet—two players each on violin, viola, cello, and bass—and swells further to include soloists Nate Wooley on trumpet and percussionist Brian Chase (of Yeah Yeah Yeahs fame). In an interview with Halvorson published as she was writing the pieces that would become Lull, Pavone mentions an interest in cymatics—the study of physical shapes manifested by sound and vibration—and how sound absorbed by the body can influence and reflect emotional states. These methodological tangents encouraged her to give her collaborators more latitude to play notes and sounds that felt good to them, that literally hit their body in pleasing ways and were comfortable to play, going so far as asking both Chase and Wooley what their favorite notes were so she could compose pieces for the octet around those tones. This music is generous in the way it prioritizes the physical and emotional capacities of its performers; it is by turns gorgeous, knotty, and expressive.
Of the four pieces on Lull, “Ingot,” which features Wooley, most elegantly embodies these ideas. The trumpeter sustains a G for the nearly the entire duration of the piece, subtly adjusting its timbre using an assemblage of mutes, a sheet of aluminum, and his own voice, while the octet drones ominously beneath. Exploring the possibilities inherent in a single note has been a cornerstone of classical minimalism for over half a century, but Wooley’s masterful command of texture, coupled with the heaving waves produced by each string player’s independent tempi, produces a unique effect and intensity that grows as the piece unfolds. What begins as a tentative tremble gradually dilates and bursts into a panoply of overtones as horsehair scrapes the steel strings right where they meet the bridge.
Dissonance and chaos lurk at the edges of each piece. This might be expected of music that offers numerous freedoms to a group of eight musicians, but Pavone directly builds many of these moments into the score. “Indolent” begins with violin and viola gently overtaking one another like placid waves lapping at a shoreline, but four minutes in, each pulse becomes more biting and claustrophobic as the tonal center dissolves and pitches start to veer wildly. “Holt,” which centers on Chase’s pitched snare drum and amplified cymbal, is turbulent from the outset, the spastic snare hits augmented by violins and violas tapping the wooden side of their bows fitfully against the strings. The piece climaxes with rushes of noise as Chase bears down on the electrified cymbal.
The beauty of musical expression is the way it can harness emotions of all types and intensities, and what feels “good” to the performer can be experienced in an infinite number of ways by the listener. Pavone studied with a sound healer prior to writing the music on Lull, and although the bowls and gongs used by those practitioners are not always consonant to ears acclimated to Western scales and harmonies, they are nonetheless deeply affecting, just as this music is. The power of these pieces comes from the inherent subjectivity of sound: the vast number of ways that any given tone can be interpreted and experienced by the composer, performer, and listener. By centering the pleasure of the performer, we learn more about their personalities, preferences, and pleasures. And that knowledge, in turn, allows us to drift closer to a space of shared understanding and bliss.
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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. | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Chaikin | October 26, 2021 | 7.4 | 9c502ad4-96a7-46c8-907f-904c8136c26b | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
If you were a Dinosaur Jr. fan the first time around, it still seems amazing, three albums into their post-2005 reunion run, they're together at all. But at this point, the early drama isn't as interesting as the fact that the new albums-- 2007's Beyond, 2009's Farm, and now I Bet on Sky-- are all good to very good. | If you were a Dinosaur Jr. fan the first time around, it still seems amazing, three albums into their post-2005 reunion run, they're together at all. But at this point, the early drama isn't as interesting as the fact that the new albums-- 2007's Beyond, 2009's Farm, and now I Bet on Sky-- are all good to very good. | Dinosaur Jr.: I Bet on Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17050-i-bet-on-sky/ | I Bet on Sky | If you were a Dinosaur Jr. fan the first time around, it still seems amazing, three albums into their fantastic post-2005 reunion run, that they're together at all. People mention that Lou Barlow was dismissed and that he and J Mascis had clashes, but it felt darker than that. I went to one of Sebadoh's early shows during the tour for 1991's III; Barlow was sour about being fired, and he punctuated songs with jokes about J Mascis. Pointed tunes like "The Freed Pig" were followed by pre-recorded taunts played on a portable tape deck, which usually targeted his former bandmate, or the situation in general. You imagined punches being thrown the next time they were in a room together. It's unclear where everyone is in the reconciliation process at this point-- Mascis isn't all that effusive outside his guitar solos-- but part of what's made Dinosaur Jr. a great band is the ongoing tension between the group's leaders. (For his part, the eternally mellow drummer Murph doesn't seem to be bugged by the bickering.) At this point, though, the drama isn't as interesting as the fact that the new albums-- 2007's Beyond, 2009's Farm, and now I Bet on Sky-- are all good to very good.
These days, bands getting back together to relive the glory days is nothing special. But it takes a certain kind of group to reunite and create vital music. In most cases, you have older bands solidly recreating their past (see: Mission of Burma); it's rarer to see artists with the ability to top what they did the first time around (see: Swans). Judging the dialog around the post-break Dinosaur Jr. records, J, Lou, and Murph are straddling the line between the two: On Beyond and Farm, outside small modernist details, they sounded very much like they did in the pre-Green Mind SST years. I Bet on Sky's title offers a hint that they've gone in a slightly different direction for album three (it's worth noting they've now matched their output of the first 80s run). The shift's easy to explain: I Bet on Sky feels like the material that emerged after Barlow was fired: 1991's underrated Green Mind, 1993's alt-rock crossover Where You Been, and the most commercially successful album, 1994's Without a Sound.
There's a softer, more spacious feel to those albums; if you go back to the 1985 self-titled debut, 1987's masterwork You're Living All Over Me, or 1988's also classic Bug, it's amazing just now noisy and claustrophobic those albums were. (It's there that they reminded you of their earlier days in the hardcore/punk band Deep Wound and Mascis' later work with the metal group Upsidedown Cross.) The albums after Barlow left had plenty of dirt and distortion-- especially Green Mind-- but they offered more space in the compositions, probably because Mascis suddenly had more space in general to work with. I'm always reminded of those 90s videos of him skiing or playing golf; you get that kind of cleaner vibe, nobody living all over him anymore.
That feeling continues onto the lilting, sunny I Bet on Sky. The uptempo mid-album track "Pierce the Morning Rain" even sounds a lot like Green Mind's opener "The Wagon", and I Bet is Dinosaur Jr's cleanest sounding album to date. The feel is laidback, and as Mascis promised during the pre-release press run, fairly "funky." He's has always had a knack for lodging hooks in his feedback, but these are some of his tightest pop songs: Tracks like "Watch the Corners" or opener "Don't Pretend You Didn't Know" bring to mind Built to Spill's warm, welcoming psychedelia. This time, outside the more plaintive "What Was That", the downcast vibe comes this time from a pair of Barlow tracks, the prototypical Sebadoh dust-kicker "Rude" and the jaunty, autumnal rocker "Recognition".
Throughout, Mascis' voice is calmer, less ragged; Sky sometimes feels like his acoustic album Several Shades of Why married to a fuller backing band. There's also a push beyond the basic guitar/bass/drums setup with a twinkling piano on"Don't Pretend" and "Stick a Toe In". These tracks and the "Baby Britain" bounce in general bring to mind what Elliott Smith did when he decided to indulge his Beatles obsession on XO. This is not a complaint: It goes well with the graying hair. All in all this is a kinder, gentler Dinosaur-- you won't have another "Severed Lips", sorry-- making a very solid album, one that finds the band gelling with half the fuzz. It's a subtle shift, but this is neither a move away from their sound nor toward the raging rock of old (even with all those warm-and-fuzzy Mascis guitar solos). In the sprawling, happy anthem "I Know It Oh So Well", Mascis asks, "Is there light ahead?" Judging from the music here, the answer is a resounding yes. | 2012-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 21, 2012 | 7.9 | 9c502f9b-1b72-48ea-b0e7-05f351b0f71d | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 features artists from all over Canada combining Native American culture and popular music. The tracklist has been carefully curated to not only to emphasize the diversity of the artists and their ideas, but to reveal the vibrancy and energy of this large and largely undocumented scene. | Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 features artists from all over Canada combining Native American culture and popular music. The tracklist has been carefully curated to not only to emphasize the diversity of the artists and their ideas, but to reveal the vibrancy and energy of this large and largely undocumented scene. | Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19986-various-artists-native-north-america-vol-1-aboriginal-folk-rock-and-country-19661985/ | Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 | The members of the Canadian rock group Sugluk saw their small, remote village electrified in more ways than one. Located in the northernmost tip of Quebec, just outside the Arctic Circle, their town—previously called Sugluk as well—consisted primarily of tents and igloos, with the first few permanent structures and power lines added in the 1960s. Even after that initial modernization, most teenagers traveled down to Kuujjuarapik or even as far south as Quebec City for school. The four musicians returned home with loads of pop records by the Beatles, Hendrix, and others, which they used as textbooks to teach themselves how to play their instruments and write their own songs. Soon they were playing community dance halls around the region, and their reputation grew to the point that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recruited them to record two 7" singles in 1975. That remains the extent of their catalog, although Sugluk continued touring into the 1980s and reunited in 2013.
Of their handful of extant tracks, three are included on Light in the Attic’s new comp Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985. Those songs show a band developing an identity even as it stamps popular folk-rock with its own personal flourish. "Fall Away" opens with a thundering drum fill and a shaky one-note bass groove, setting the stage for singer George Kakayuk’s bittersweet tale of thwarted romance. The song has the folksy grit of Neil Young, but the rambunctious energy of the Flamin’ Groovies. Guitarist Tayara Papigatuk takes over on "I Didn't Know", which sounds so loose and rambling the rhythm section might be the only thing holding it together. Showing their range, "Ajuinnarasuarsunga" (which translates from Inuktitut as "I Tried Hard") is a folksier number defined by the band’s careful harmonies and a lovely piano rambling in the background. "Though the band was not 100 percent satisfied with these raw one-take recordings," writes Kevin "Sipreano" Howes in the Native North America liner notes, "they remain one of the earliest examples of original Inuit rock music recorded in Canada and carry an exceptional spiritual weight."
If Sugluk emerge as one of the stars of Native North America, it’s largely because you can hear a very particular struggle in their songs—not necessarily to be heard by a mainstream audience, but to define themselves through some combination of Native American culture and popular music. That endeavor to some degree informs every song here, as artists from all over Canada calibrate their own equations for personal expression. Some, like the group Sikumiut, sound like they could play shows alongside Young or Joni Mitchell. Others, like Morley Loon and Shingoose, barely nod to pop music at all. But almost everyone on Native North America writes and sings about the impulse to both imitate others and distinguish oneself. Gordon Dick, a member of the Lil’wat Nation and a self-taught guitarist, even gives a name to this music: "I dreamed I was in a rock group, playing on a Saturday night. Our name wasn’t like the Beatles, but I found an old Indian name: Siwash Rock."
Native North America might have easily buckled under the weight of good intentions. Howes, a Toronto-based vinyl collector, DJ, and blogger, spent years scouring record stores and flea markets all over Canada to locate these rare records, then tracked down and researched the unsung artists behind them. That process by itself is important, as it provides valuable information on lesser-known chapters in the history of Canadian rock, but that alone doesn’t ensure a 2xCD/3xLP set, much less the first in what appears to be a multi-volume series, will be listenable or engaging as anything other than an artifact. Fortunately, Howes does not conflate the idea of the music—its origins, its politics, or its import—with the music itself. He has curated the tracklist not only to emphasize the diversity of the artists and their ideas, but to reveal the vibrancy and energy of this large and largely undocumented scene.
Native North America likewise shows the extent to which popular music welcomes and nourishes marginalized perspectives; the form is endlessly adaptable and fundamentally democratic—even when democracy itself is not. Most of these artists faced prejudice or hardship of varying severity, which naturally informed their music. "Police they arrest me, materialists detest me," Willie Dunn sings on "I Pity the Country". "Pollution it chokes me, movies they joke me." The impression is one of forced isolation, as though society has stripped away every refuge that might comfort the singer—except music, that is. It’s a startling opener to the comp, especially since Dunn’s steadfast voice conveys resignation more than anger. He’s not fighting the system, but pitying the sad men who perpetuate their own unhappiness.
"I Pity the Country" is not too different from the politically-motivated folk, rock, and country coming out of the North American mainstream at that time. Many of the artists on Native North America were weaned on early country & western, in particular the lonesome ballads of Hank Williams, but their music has more in common, both sonically and politically, with that of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash (whose 1964 album Bitter Tears looms large over this set, even if it is never mentioned). Tribal drums become a rock'n'roll rhythm section on Lloyd Cheechoo’s "James Bay" and "Tshekuan Mak Tshetutamak" by Groupe Folklorique Montagnais, a powerful means of announcing the artists’ aboriginal roots. The Chieftones (who billed themselves as "Canada’s All Indian Band") kick off "I Shouldn’t Have Did What I Done" with a drum pattern practically quoted from some cheesy old Hollywood Western, but it turns out to be more than just a marketing ploy as the band’s energetic garage-rock attack subverts any expectation of stoicism associated with Aboriginal stereotypes.
The idea of pop music as a means of presenting oneself to the world gives Native North America some cohesion despite the range of ethnicities, geographies, and genres represented in its tracklist. The comp celebrates those distinctions even if it can’t quite underscore them, which means the extensive liner notes become a crucial guide for listening. A problem that affects so many compilations becomes especially acute*:* You not only want to hear more songs by these artists, but also want to hear more songs in their original context. How did Willy Mitchell expand on the folksy urgency of "Call of the Moose" for his 1981 album Sweet Grass Music? Does the rest of the Saddle Lake Drifting Cowboys’ material sound as good as the Ventures-meets-Buckaroos "Modern Rock"? And what about the 1981 comp Goose Wings: The Music of James Bay, which includes tunes by Lawrence Martin, Lloyd Cheechoo, and Brian Davey? Of course, stoking your curiosity about underrepresented artists only means Native North America is doing its job. | 2014-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-11-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Light in the Attic | November 25, 2014 | 7.9 | 9c533c0e-f601-4d8a-89cb-e5f50b63f4c8 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On her bright and self-assured solo debut, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner offers the most all-encompassing document of her tastes yet, incorporating dreamy indie rock and digital pop. | On her bright and self-assured solo debut, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner offers the most all-encompassing document of her tastes yet, incorporating dreamy indie rock and digital pop. | Flock of Dimes: If You See Me, Say Yes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22432-if-you-see-me-say-yes/ | If You See Me, Say Yes | At some point, for Jenn Wasner, all the praise she attracted as a guitarist began to grow complicated. “It felt so strange to have the focus shift from my songs and ideas to my guitar playing,” the Wye Oak leader shared in an essay this summer. “‘This chick shreds!’ ‘Hey, you can really play!’” Wasner saw how her own guitar work was often cast as a spectacle, in contrast to her equally talented male bandmates. “No one draws any additional attention to them — it is taken in stride,” Wasner wrote. “Meanwhile, time and time again, you are fawned over like a child who’s just taken her first steps.”
It’s no wonder, then, why Wasner took a trial separation from the guitar with Wye Oak’s 2014 *Shriek—*though it only served to reinforce how integral the instrument was to the band’s identity. That record fit a pattern of extremes: Wye Oak’s 2011 breakthrough Civilian was guitar-rock; Shriek was their synthesized reinvention; and the one-off LP from Wasner’s side-project Dungeonesse was an exercise in Mariah Carey-worshipping pop. In contrast to those albums, each built around clear or implicit parameters, her debut LP as Flock of Dimes, If You See Me, Say Yes, is simply a Jenn Wasner record. It’s the most all-encompassing showing of her tastes yet, representing in equal measure guitars and synths, dreamy indie rock and digital pop. Along with Wye Oak’s Tween, a collection of outtakes released earlier this year, it’s proof that Wasner does her best work when she doesn’t impose restraints on herself.
Wasner has adjusted her vision for Flock of Dimes since its early singles. She began the project as a channel for beat-heavy experiments that didn’t fit under the Wye Oak umbrella, but as that band grew increasingly synth-minded itself, Flock of Dimes became more straightforward, an outlet for her most revealing songs. It’s a meaningful evolution for a songwriter who once thrived on obfuscation. An air of secrecy hung over Wye Oak’s best records, a haze that rendered key sentiments cryptic. Even the consonant-swallowing slur in Wasner’s voice seemed like a form of omission.
But her songs on If You See Me are bright and open, documenting with clear prose new beginnings, the passage of time, and—poetically for an album she mostly recorded alone—the hermetic tendencies that keep her at a distance from even the closest people in her life. On the rippling “Given/Electric Life,” Wasner admits that she’s “Afraid to be seen as I see myself/Even more to be seen as I really am” and resorts to counting down the days. And as if summoning the more approachable, carefree person she longs to be, the music is deliberately outgoing. The radiant “Everything Is Happening Today” looks to the extroverted thump of her neighbors and labelmates Sylvan Esso, while “Ida Glow” corrals its Gary Numan-esque synths around a pumping disco-house beat. Even “You, the Vatican,” a Wye Oak-sounding number about the most Wye Oak of subjects—death—is delivered with reassuring warmth.
On an album like Civilian or Shriek, that song might have chilled to the bone, with guitars either severely squalling or eerily absent. But here Wasner’s guitars amble amicably alongside her, refracting light over her songs without upstaging or overwhelming them. There’s never the slightest threat they’ll erupt into a blistering solo, the way they so often used to. As awesome as those solos always were, they’re barely missed here. If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself. | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 28, 2016 | 7 | 9c54ddad-e53e-45d2-82cf-1a8f93624b8a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
After 30 years together, the hardcore dynamos hit a nadir. Their collaborative album with Chelsea Wolfe and Stephen Brodsky is exhausting and predictable, a ceaseless barrage of the banal. | After 30 years together, the hardcore dynamos hit a nadir. Their collaborative album with Chelsea Wolfe and Stephen Brodsky is exhausting and predictable, a ceaseless barrage of the banal. | Converge: Bloodmoon: I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/converge-bloodmoon-i/ | Bloodmoon: I | Converge have never been big on acting their age. Consider 2017’s The Dusk in Us, released as the band neared the end of its third decade. On the opening track, vocalist Jacob Bannon hurled himself into guitarist Kurt Ballou’s boobytrapped thicket of riffs like a teenager dive-bombing from the stage apron of their first hardcore gig. They occasionally came up for air during those 44 minutes, but The Dusk in Us mostly felt as splenetic and urgent as their breakthrough, Jane Doe, an album by then old enough to drive. In 30 years, the quartet has taken multiple forays into doom, noise, and musclebound rock, but they’ve always returned to warped hardcore. Outliers in a field where vim and nuance tend to trade places with age, Converge always seemed renewed by the collision, an inspiring trait as three-quarters of the band approach 50.
Their new album Bloodmoon: I is the first time Converge have truly shown their wear. For these 11 tracks, they resort to a trick so predictable even Itchy and Scratchy tried it: Add new members to an old mix that always worked. Gothic singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and Cave In livewire (and former Converge member) Stephen Brodsky wrote and recorded Bloodmoon with the band, following years of sporadic collaborations. About half the time, as on the arcing opener, the results are a kind of Converge With Friends affair, the flagship’s primal fits given extra melodic or theatrical flair. For the rest, as on the smoke-haloed doom of “Scorpion’s Sting,” Converge sound as if they’re trying to be anything other than themselves, to shake loose hardcore strictures once and for all. These new forms mostly flatter no one; bloated, maudlin, and tiresome, Bloodmoon is the surprising nadir of a career that long seemed dauntless.
Every bit of Bloodmoon, of course, isn’t a waste. After an initial 2019 session, lockdown stymied further real-time collaborations, meaning the bulk of the record was built via pen-pal exchange. Especially considering that Ballou, one of metal’s most vital producers, patched the album together from these long-distance pieces, it sounds phenomenal, its complex layers tucked together with the intricacy and care of a prize-winning baklava. Thrilling little moments lurk in the recesses—the barbed glissandi beneath the outbursts of “Blood Moon,” the bells twinkling around Nate Newton’s jarring bass on “Flower Moon,” the way Wolfe and Bannon tangle with the heat of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen during “Crimson Stone.” Taking lead vocals on “Failure Forever,” Brodsky coaxes Converge into relaxing just enough to net a pop-metal winner, a stern anthem of perseverance with a soft hook at the center. “Viscera of Men” slides gracefully between hardcore pummel and operatic majesty; when those styles meet about 40 seconds into the song, it is scintillating, a concise demonstration of how to play well with others.
But such thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin. Despite those predictable modes, the sounds are so overdone and unfocused that listening in one sitting is exhausting. The ghoulish chants of “Tongues Playing Dead,” the overwrought crisscrossing harmonies of “Daimon,” reams of purple poetry about liars and cowards and flowers and (obviously) moons that say so very little—Bloodmoon feels like a prog-rock collage built from the scraps of the overblown metal bands that tend to get nominated for Grammys. It is a ceaseless barrage of the banal.
For a decade now, Wolfe’s own albums have colored in shades of dark gray, and those spells have sometimes worked. Pushed too hard, however, her limited palette can start to feel like costume-shop occultism. That happens on Bloodmoon, as Wolfe’s increasingly predictable parts hamstring the momentum. “Lord of Liars” thrills with tech-metal flashes, but Wolfe’s refrain drapes them like blackout curtains, blocking out the frisson. Both the heaviness of her heartsick waltz, “Scorpion’s Sting,” and the darkness of her spectral conjuring, “Coil,” feel superficial. In these moments, you wonder what Windhand leader Dorthia Cottrell or singer-songwriter and Thou collaborator Emma Ruth Rundle—powerful and believable singers whose blues feel more lived-in—could have done in her stead.
Ahead of Bloodmoon, Brodsky said, “It’s been a real treat to see one of my favorite bands continue to do cool stuff and break the molds.… It’s a very rare thing in this kind of music to go an experimental route and challenge the ‘rules.’” Right on, man. But is there anything more cliché in rock’n’roll than the band that hangs on too long, fading away slowly with live versions of classic albums and guest-laden clusterfucks? Bloodmoon is indeed the latter, the sound of a band adding some different fuel to its 30-year-old fire. Here’s hoping the embers still burn after this noxious smoke has cleared.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Deathwish / Epitaph | November 19, 2021 | 5.3 | 9c55655d-705e-45cb-9e62-f8e211be84a9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Originally released in 1984 as a companion to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards, this collection of Satie’s solo piano pieces is a cornerstone of Japanese ambient. | Originally released in 1984 as a companion to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards, this collection of Satie’s solo piano pieces is a cornerstone of Japanese ambient. | Satsuki Shibano: Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/satsuki-shibano-wave-notation-3-erik-satie-1984/ | Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984 | Erik Satie casts a long shadow. The eccentric French composer’s distinctive approach to melody and harmony has traveled decades downstream from his starting point in the 19th century, imparting lessons not only to musicians in the contemporary classical world, but also jazz artists and New York minimalists like John Cage (who, in a 1958 essay, praised Satie’s innovations as “indispensable” to his own work). Few, however, have been as thoroughly transformed by Satie as Tokyo-based pianist Satsuki Shibano. Her lifelong fascination with the composer began in 1977 when, as a university student, she attended a recital of Satie’s music at an art museum in Ikebukuro. “It turned out to be my starting point for awareness toward the concept of music and the way it should be listened to,” Shibano said of the experience.
Following the concert, Shibano reached out to Satoshi Ashikawa, the musician and record-store owner who organized the event, and asked to be introduced to the pianist: Jean-Joël Barbier, a Satie historian from France who recorded the composer’s full oeuvre of piano works across a series of LPs. Barbier agreed to take Shibano on as a protégé and whisked her away to Paris for two and a half years of intensive study. Upon her return to Japan in 1982, Shibano played her own recital of Satie compositions—and this time, Ashikawa approached her with a request. In the time that Shibano had been away, Ashikawa had founded his Sound Process label and released two albums in what he called the Wave Notation series: Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ambient masterclass Music for Nine Postcards and his own Still Way, which took inspiration from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. He wanted Shibano for the third installment.
Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984 was conceived as a compilation of Satie’s “furniture music,” which proposed the idea of music made to soundtrack daily life long before Eno or anybody else did. Ashikawa and Yoshimura were developing a radical idea of “environmental music” together, in which the pieces they composed were inextricably linked with places. Satie’s furniture music was fundamental to this theory; Japan was at the apex of a renewed interest in his work. (One national newspaper called it a “quiet boom.”) But there was an abrupt change of plans; Ashikawa passed away in a car accident only a year after commissioning the album, and Shibano was left to complete it on her own. She opted for solo piano, played without accompaniment. It’s just Shibano and her muse.
The record is unusual as a Satie anthology. Rather than arranged chronologically or by theme, the tracks are simply sorted (mostly) alphabetically. It’s not comprehensive, either; Shibano plays a selection of Satie’s Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, and Nocturnes (alongside more obscure works like Caresse), but not his most famous of these. Gymnopédie No. 1, which has been widely used in television and film, is a stark omission. There’s a sense that Shibano is actively resisting the commercialization of Satie, imploring the listener to assemble their own picture. Even the subtitle that adorns the original obi, 1866-1925, seems to suggest this. Those aren’t the dates of composition, but the years of his birth and death. Erik Satie 1984 is honest about what it is: a wide-ranging but incomplete portrait of the man seen through the eyes of the person in front of the sheet music.
In a short span of time, Shibano learned a lot from Barbier—but she also learned how to set herself apart. Her playing speaks volumes in the subtle ways it differs from her mentor’s, her touch lighter and her sound brighter as her fingers dance along the keys. Hearing these interpretations, it becomes clear why Ashikawa saw her as a critical piece of his new vision for ambient music; Shibano lets each note linger in the air, fulfilling Satie’s promise of music as interior design. She would stick with Satie for the rest of her life, evolving her approach over 10 albums as she continued to learn the nuances of listening more meaningfully. She would probably say she’s only improved with time, but Erik Satie 1984 remains a pivotal work that deserves to stand beside its Wave Notation sisters. It captures the moment when Japan’s premier interpreter of a legendary composer found her voice. | 2023-05-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | WRWTFWW | May 26, 2023 | 8 | 9c5871d5-78bc-4239-99e1-cfbb302ec41a | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
It's a bit late to be talking about New Year's Resolutions, but mine was to dig through the ... | It's a bit late to be talking about New Year's Resolutions, but mine was to dig through the ... | Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/952-you-forgot-it-in-people/ | You Forgot It in People | It's a bit late to be talking about New Year's Resolutions, but mine was to dig through the boxes upon boxes of promos that arrive at the Pitchfork mailbox each month, and listen intently to hundreds of them in one sitting, in an attempt to discover those rare, impossibly great bands that would otherwise slip through the cracks. It's been an absolute bitch so far, and awfully disheartening, but I've hit paydirt a couple of times, and in those moments of glory, it's been worth wading through every cut-up Cuban big beat record, every generic Midwestern rock record, every bar band, every swing band. See, the problem is, it's impossible to know what's what; you have to just dive in and hope for the best, because sometimes the bands with the worst names and most hideous packaging are just great musicians who would make terrible image consultants.
Case in point: Broken Social Scene. No one wants to admit that they like a band that goes around calling themselves this-- a band who, judging from their artwork, stands around all day looking pensive, crouching, and feeling the music in dramatic grayscale, a band that finds its home on Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag Records, who puts the message "break all codes" above their own barcode, and who dedicates their album to their "families, friends and loves." I already had them pegged! How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?
I don't know. But this disc is nothing like you'd imagine. Not even almost. I've been over it again and again looking for some cause, some reason, anything, that would compel a band with this much unfiltered creativity and kinetic energy-- a band without even the slightest suggestion of tear-stained poetry or bedroom catharsis-- to fall victim to the worst possible Vagrant Records clichés. I can't find it. All I know is that when I press play, and this disc whirrs to life, it inexplicably sheds its crybaby façade and becomes... sort of infinite.
I've been listening to this disc for months on repeat-- sometimes just this disc for days-- but it wasn't until I began doing research for this review that it began to make sense how a band like this could materialize from out of nowhere with such a powerful and affecting album. I knew from the liners that the group has ten members (fifteen if you include guests); what I didn't know was that all of them have been wandering from band to band within the wildly experimental Toronto music scene for years, or that they all came together from groups like Stars, Do Make Say Think, Treble Charger, A Silver Mt. Zion, and Mascott with the unified goal of making, of all things, pop music. One of its members told a Toronto weekly that "we'd already made our art-house albums... the whole ideology of trying to write an actual four-minute pop song was completely new to so many of us."
Who could have imagined it would come so easily? You Forgot It in People explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop. For proof, pick virtually any track: the sound barrier-bursting anthem "Almost Crimes", the subdued, gossamer "Looks Just like the Sun", the Dinosaur Jr.-tinted "Cause = Time", or the shimmering, Jeff Buckley-esque "Lover's Spit". And there's plenty more where that came from. How about the chugging guitar-pop of "Stars and Sons", which spins a distant, churning keyboard drone beneath the best moments of Spoon's Girls Can Tell and punctuates it with a barrage of percussive handclaps. Or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" which showcases Emily Haines' melting alto caught in a beautiful, cyclical refrain and intensely modified by vocal effects while violins float atop subtle banjo plucking and cascading toms. Or "KC Accidental", which blasts searing, super-melodic guitar, a drumkit alternately galloping and relentlessly beaten, and an impenetrable wall of accelerating orchestration, before crash-landing into a deliquescent pop lullaby.
The band's aforementioned art-house pedigree goes a long way toward making You Forgot It In People more than just another fantastic pop record: One of its foremost traits is its airy spaciousness. On many of its tracks, the sounds seem to resonate indefinitely, as if played at top volume on a Greenland hillside and recorded miles away. Simultaneously, the album is dense with the baroque instrumentation of all fifteen players, each part beautifully arranged, and all of them bleeding together in perfect harmonic unison. Chalk one up for heretofore unknown producer David Newfeld, who isolates the song's key instruments upfront in the mix, and captures all others as delicate nuances-- an expansive, pillowy bed of ethereal violins, muted trumpets and flutes to softly support the traditional guitars, bass and drums.
Rock critic Michael Goldberg recently speculated that what makes music fanatics thirst for the obscure is the desire to discover music that is "uncontaminated by the commerce machine." This, he says, is the reason we cling to the abstract and unmarketable, the outlandish and abrasive. And yet, this is also the guy whose favorite album of last year was the painfully vacuous adult-contempo masterflop by Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man. Granted, not all of us share Goldberg's taste for sub-folk cheddar, but there's something like that record in each of our collections. So, how can there be room for both challenging, forward-thinking music and straight-up accessibility?
Well, we're not total fucking assholes, right? We can kick back with Ekkehard Ehlers or Electric Light Orchestra-- there's inherent greatness in both. But the holy grail for people like us is the record that combines outright experimentation and strong hooks, something that engages us mentally while appealing to the instincts that draw us toward pop immediacy. Some of the best records ever have been ones that put these two seemingly disparate elements together-- and you can go as recent as The Notwist's Neon Golden or as far back as Sgt. Pepper's (and probably farther, if you want). This kind of music shouldn't be hard to come by; it's just that not many artists are able to perfect that balance.
Broken Social Scene have, and even made it seem effortless. I wish I could convey to you just how perfectly this record pulls off that balancing act, how incredibly catchy and hummable these songs are, despite their refusal to resort to pandering or oversimplicity. I wish I could convey how they've made just exactly the kind of pop record that stands the test of time, and how its ill-advised packaging and shudder-inducing bandname seem so infinitesimal after immersing yourself in the music. And I hate to end this saying, "You just have to hear it for yourself." But oh my god, you do. You just really, really do. | 2003-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts / Paper Bag | February 2, 2003 | 9.2 | 9c5bfc21-753a-4179-96b3-2ebe9c7fe195 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Jon Spencer and his New York blues-punks return with their first new album in nearly two decades—a powerful showcase for singer Cristina Martinez and the fiery, apocalyptic buzz in her wake. | Jon Spencer and his New York blues-punks return with their first new album in nearly two decades—a powerful showcase for singer Cristina Martinez and the fiery, apocalyptic buzz in her wake. | Boss Hog: Brood X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23051-brood-x/ | Brood X | The cover of the November 13, 2016 edition of The New York Daily News featured a photo of an enraged anti-Trump protester, mouth agape in mid-scream, hoisting a placard reading “Reject President Elect.” Whose scowl should it be but that of Cristina Martinez, lead singer in Boss Hog, the sleazy, funked-up blues punk band she formed with her husband (and ex-Pussy Galore bandmate) Jon Spencer back in 1989.
For many Boss Hog fans, it was the first glimpse of Martinez they’d seen in a long while. The band hadn’t released a new album since 2000’s Whiteout, and had only played sporadically in the interim. The front-page appearance was all the more surprising given that Boss Hog weren’t exactly model activists in their day—their entire oeuvre was an assault on good taste that included nude album covers, profane provocations, and covering Ike Turner at a time when he’d been branded public enemy number one. But in hindsight, Martinez’s Daily News snap was a perfect promotional poster for Boss Hog’s first new album in nearly two decades, a record that—like that portrait—captures its subject feeling alternately defiant, enraged, and, frankly, a little scared.
Back in the ’90s, Boss Hog’s evolution ran parallel that of the Blues Explosion, and by mid-decade, the two bands were at their creative zeniths, funneling their grimy blues-punk, Blaxploitation funk, and break-beat influences through an interconnected sewer system. And that symbiotic relationship extended to the lead couple’s playfully combative duet dynamic, with Martinez rebuffing Spencer’s come-ons like she was splashing a drink in his face. But even though the two bands are enjoying second winds this decade, their aesthetics have diverged considerably. Like Spencer’s most recent Blues Explosion blast, Brood X is about coming to terms with the changing nature of the city that he and Martinez call home. But where Spencer’s record was filled with nostalgic nods to the golden days of New York punk and rap, Brood X is consumed by feelings of dread and dislocation.
Certainly, it’s several degrees darker than the pop-oriented Whiteout, where Boss Hog had essentially streamlined into a trashier Garbage. Brood X also downplays the dusty-grooved blues/funk vibes of their mid-’90s releases to wade back into the primordial stew of goth, No Wave, and post-punk that coursed through the ’80s New York underground at the band’s infancy. At the same time, the addition of keyboardist Mickey Finn—initially recruited for a string of 2008/2009 reunion dates—gives Boss Hog the means to project their grit with a vivid, cinematic grandeur. The frantic opener “Billy” serves as the showroom model for their retooled capabilities: Over Spencer’s needling guitar riff, Martinez purrs out apocalyptic intimations (“I want all the darkness!”) like PJ Harvey fronting PiL, while the lock-step battery of bassist Jens Jurgensen and drummer Hollis Queens effortlessly alternate between a galloping death-disco and a gut-punching thrust. And then Finn’s ray-gunned keys thread it all together like a B-52’s channeling Richard Kern instead of Ed Wood.
Even though the songs on Brood X were written well before last fall’s election nudged the Doomsday Clock a few seconds closer to midnight, their unsettled energy is well in sync with these troubling, trembling times. The album may have been envisioned as a critique on the cost of living, but it now sounds like an anguished, existential address on the fear of dying: The organ-hummed “Ground Control” recasts eerily serene scenes of a gentrified New York (“Where did my city go?”) as a haunted-house horror flick, while “Shh Shh Shh” finds Martinez writhing atop a queasy, repetitive bass throb, her echoing distorted-telephone voice slowly degenerating into madness. And when Martinez asks, “How does it feel to feel good?” on “Black Eyes,” the song’s stalking, sludge-covered lurch suggests she won’t know the answer anytime soon.
Boss Hog’s sporadic track record—and Martinez’s decision back in 2000 to choose child-rearing over touring—can mean she’s often overlooked by listicle celebrations of great ’90s frontwomen (even as her soulful sneer has endured through progeny like Peaches, Karen O, and Alison Mosshart). Brood X feels like necessary recourse in that regard. With Spencer playing a mostly silent partner here, we get an unfettered, full-screen view of Martinez’s particular POV—not just as a paragon of pre-Giuliani New York, but as a working mom stepping back into the punk-rock trenches.
Brood X’s quiet closers are no less visceral than their high-voltage predecessors, providing a more intimate manifestation of the agitated feelings coursing throughout the record. On “Sunday Routine,” Martinez renders domestic doldrums as a Nick Cave psycho-drama, her spite becoming all the more audible as the details of her day turn more mundane. (“Hiding under wolfskins! Reading airport novels!”) When she seethes, “we lack for motivation / we need the agitation,” she gives voice to the simmering restlessness that’s thrust her back into the spotlight after so many years away.
Most striking is “17,” a ghostly acoustic blues that initially sounds like it was scraped off an old 78, but gradually morphs into a piece of musique concrète built from synth shocks, chopped-up vocals, and feedback scraps. “I was swallowed by the noise/I was just 17,” Martinez sings, offering a fever-dream reminiscence of her teenage-delinquent days in Pussy Galore. But in the song’s dying moments, she’s swallowed by a different sort of noise: an encroaching torrent of cicadas. Brood X is named for the variety of cicadas that spend 17 years underground before swarming to the earth’s surface to lay their eggs—only to die shortly thereafter. With the band hinting in interviews that their comeback could very well be a one-and-done affair, it seems all too obvious: They’re crawling out of the darkness covered in dirt, using their rare moment in the sun to unleash an infernal buzz. | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | April 1, 2017 | 7.8 | 9c60cc5a-dce7-43c9-86a0-6985c16ade95 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
19-year-old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner emerged from nowhere to collaborate with Kanye on The Life of Pablo. On New English, he sounds like the last five years of hip-hop watered down. | 19-year-old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner emerged from nowhere to collaborate with Kanye on The Life of Pablo. On New English, he sounds like the last five years of hip-hop watered down. | Desiigner: New English | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22079-new-english/ | New English | On the face of it, Desiigner seems like he might be intriguing: A nobody just a few months ago, the 19-year-old rapper is fresh off collaborating with one of the most famous musicians on the planet. And on top of that, his entire persona is built off another one of the most famous rappers alive? That’s some alternate universe, sci-fi shit, forget about Gucci Mane being a clone. His mixtape New English, unfortunately, is a lot less intriguing to listen to: It sounds like the last five years of hip-hop watered down.
New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on. There’s Waka Flocka Flame’s and Lex Luger’s maximalism; the overwhelming, in-the-red sing-song mayhem of Chief Keef, and, of course, the distinct promethazine-enhanced drawl of Future. Aside from his Brooklyn-borne lilt, there’s nothing separating what Desiigner’s doing from any of these artists. Travis Scott has gotten away with a lot of Desiigner’s sins because some of his textures are nice, and Mike Dean and a gang of wizard producers turned Rodeo into something occasionally enjoyable. But there’s nothing you can do here to redeem this material—which is maybe why it’s stuffed with a needlessly lush intro and several interludes, a consummate filler move so Tidal users could enjoy strings in high-def.
There are a few times the sheer audacity of this thing works. There’s “Caliber,” whose hook is just “caliber” a bunch of times, and is such a baldfaced Future rip it’s galling (yet addicting). “Monstas & Villains” sounds like a 2012 drill track (specifically, it sounds almost exactly like this deep King Beece/Lil Reese cut). “Overnight” lurches like a good Future song, and is actually pretty decent, a spacey bit of pathos like *EVOL**’*s “Lie to Me,” but unfortunately that's the catch: it’s more of a “decent 2016 Future song” than a “good 2013 Future song.” There’s an almost experimental quality to these flagrant stylistic excursions, like when you zoom in closer and closer on a photo until you see the Ben-Day dots. You're looking at the elements, and they create a nice pattern, but you miss the artwork's essence.
Desiigner just turned 19, which means when Waka and all those guys first broke in 2009/2010, followed up with drill’s 2012 moment (to say nothing of Gucci’s ascent years before that), he was anywhere from 12-15. I imagine that plays a huge role into how he creates, but if age were an excuse, how do you explain Kodak Black, who cops a Boosie flow but transcends his easy comparison checkpoint with engaging music? I want to applaud the Desiigner that writes a song called “Pluto,” performs like this on national TV, and crashes the BET Awards, off sheer gumption, but where are those tendencies on this tape?
I never thought “Panda” sounded like Future. If I cocked my head a certain way, yes, I heard it, but his stuttering, double-time flow is something not really in Future’s toolbox, and the more I listened, I thought the song's twists and turns, light on its feet like a boxer, was enough to make it more than a novelty. “What is he saying? Why does he sound like that?” Those two questions can get you pretty far in rap. This was even more true with his now infamous XXL Freestyle, dubbed “Timmy Turner.” Over finger snaps, Desiigner sang in a playground cadence with a thick patois: there was something there, a melodic sense of unease, a tease of a dark story delivered with the menace of a troubled adolescent. It had personality. It stuck in your mind. It did more in 45 seconds than New English does in 36 minutes. | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | G.O.O.D. Music | July 2, 2016 | 4.7 | 9c7a2db4-b54f-405c-90c1-30114db2b69f | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Scottish post-rockers provide the soundtrack for an experimental feature that follows Zinedine Zidane throughout the course of one full Real Madrid match. | Scottish post-rockers provide the soundtrack for an experimental feature that follows Zinedine Zidane throughout the course of one full Real Madrid match. | Mogwai: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9617-zidane-a-21st-century-portrait-ost/ | Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait OST | The most exhausted adage of the post-rock boom was that bands placed within that genre's elastic borders were "making soundtracks for imaginary movies." It's a popular knee-jerk response to instrumental music, the assumption that if the artist doesn't provide a verbal story themselves, they must be creating accompaniment to a visual narrative, a sentiment reinforced by the ubiquitous film-and-slide visuals of the scene's live shows. But cliché or no, it was only a matter of time before this questionable logic was repeated often enough to become fact, and the big bad industry actively began to pursue post-rock acts to score their films. The only surprise of this inevitable partnership is the recurrent subject matter of post-rock-scored movies: The criminally un-indie wide world of sports.
Consider the trend started by Explosions in the Sky with their ponderous music for the high-school football drama Friday Night Lights, which fit the trappings of a film that attempted to make the sport look every bit as grandiose as the participants and spectators felt it to be. Post-rock's crescendo swells and somber atmospherics were surprisingly apt supplements to the slow-motion and deadly serious vocabulary of sports propagated by NFL Films' stylized highlights, helping transform athletic struggles into the substitute for war and violence sociologists keep telling us about. But still, football seemed to be an incongruous fit for an indie rock score, given the (admittedly stereotyped) assumption that not many Texan high school football players probably have Explosions in the Sky on their iPods.
Soccer, on the other hand, has become the indie rock of sports in America, with a small, fiercely loyal crowd that aggregates in designated locations, a thriving internet community dealing in esoteric terminology, and a raging streak of Anglophilia. So, from an outsider's perspective, a post-rock album about soccer doesn't seem so weird. Of course, Mogwai are Scottish, which means their perspective on soccer is more traditional, while tracks like "Helps Both Ways" from Come on Die Young and "Hugh Dallas" from Matador's Everything Is Nice compilation tipped the group's affinity for sport. Thus, on paper, they seem like the perfect outfit to score a documentary on the career of one of the most acclaimed and controversial of recent soccer superstars, Zinedine Zidane.
Without having seen the movie-- unsurprisingly, it hasn't yet made it Stateside-- I can't fully judge how well the 11 songs included here fit the film's subject matter, but certain predictions can be made. Certainly the film-- which follows a full match from Zidane's perspective, a film experiment that was also conducted in the 1970s with George Best as its subject-- is not in the Nike/MTV quick-cut style, with the compositions of Mogwai so tortoise-paced that watching soccer at regular speed seems to outrun the album when played simultaneously. Besides the crawling tempo, the music is also uniformly grave and bleak, thick with low-end and storm-cloud piano, feedback-drone guitars, and sparse, brushed drumming. YouTube links seem to indicate that the film is entirely made up of Zidane close-ups, suggesting that the music is meant to underscore the loneliness of the midfielder, playing a team sport but isolated on the pitch in front of millions of eyes.
That's all well and good in a theatre, but independent of its visuals, Mogwai's Zidane is a bit of a slog, exhibiting fewer dynamics than the band's usual work. Like a nil-nil game, the record contains rewards for those willing and able to focus on the subtleties, but feels ultimately unsatisfying, producing endless buildup without any payoff-- even songs with enthusiastic titles like "Wake Up and Go Berserk" or "I Do Have Weapons" fail to ignite. Part of this circular effect is the repetition of melodies; three of the songs appear in two versions, and many of the songs ride a similar lead-bass arrangement.
But soundtracks are generally less about variety and more about establishing mood, something that Zidane does very well. It can also be argued that, in the limited arena of musical translations of a singular person or character, that Mogwai's music captures the somber, conflicted essence of Zizou, a player whose long career of accomplishments was overshadowed by an unfortunate flare of temper in his final game, an Algerian who became a national hero for his home country's former occupier, a playmaker who maintained a stern gravity amidst occasionally weak-kneed and histrionic opponents and teammates. The album's success along these lines may lie not in post-rock's supposed adeptness in reinforcing the external drama of modern sports, but because its instrumental tumult perfectly reflects the internal conflict of the athlete himself. | 2006-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Wall of Sound | November 17, 2006 | 6.4 | 9c7bbe20-6e34-4468-97de-bfdece01ae7c | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The UK producer’s debut album, 12 years into his career, bridges his popstar songwriting with his work in the UK funky scene. | The UK producer’s debut album, 12 years into his career, bridges his popstar songwriting with his work in the UK funky scene. | Lil Silva: Yesterday Is Heavy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-silva-yesterday-is-heavy/ | Yesterday Is Heavy | Lil Silva has amassed a scroll of writing credits for the likes of Adele, Mark Ronson, BANKS, and serpentwithfeet, to name a few, all while holding his own style in the UK funky scene as a DJ and producer. As his career bifurcated, he slowly connected those two worlds through ideas first auditioned on his 2016 EP Jimi, a stark blend of UK bass, house and hip-hop beats. The production on his debut album, Yesterday Is Heavy, still employs the synths and rhythms that have been a staple of his work from the beginning and bridges it with his popstar songwriting. Released 12 years into his career, it sounds like a piece of music someone has spent their entire life up until that point trying to make.
On Yesterday Is Heavy, Silva wanted to concentrate on the present while considering the past. The album title is a shortening of the old adage, “Yesterday is heavy, so put it down”—in this case, he’s laying it to tape. This is an electronic album that placates the listener as much as it fires them up. This is most evident on the emotionally stirring opener “Another Sketch.” Beginning with his fizzing synth, it builds a rushing airspace with a ream of textures before he enters with an illuminating croon. His words question the systemic racism ingrained in his country as his voice is swarmed by gilded strings. It sounds very busy, but Silva never loses the balance of these productions.
Family is an important pillar of Yesterday Is Heavy, not just in terms of kinship. The collaborations with friends old and new act like tour guides that stretch Silva to the outer reaches of his sound, like the melancholic lead single “Backwards” with old-time creative partner Sampha. The song’s descending hook is an excellent piece of musical signposting that personifies the vivid imagery of being physically pulled under by one’s intrusive thoughts. As Sampha’s voice skims down the scale singing, “It’s backwards how you cyclone me/Sinkhole, black hole, control me,” he marches in lockstep with the rest of the track to create a shuffling momentum.
The collaborations don’t always lead to interesting places: “Leave It” with Charlotte Day Wilson is easy to glaze over with its dry guitar licks and muted hook, and is the sole instance where Silva’s presence isn’t felt other than as a background vocal. A much stronger pairing is “To The Floor” with BADBADNOTGOOD, who lead the way with a bassline that Silva subtly chops up to ensure his fingerprints are on it, or the grimey, string-backed beat he sews for Canadian rapper Skiifall on “What If?”
Though Silva is keen to workshop his poised production around other voices, the few beat-focused cuts on the album manage to invite in the emotionally progressive club experience. “September” does the Jamie xx trick of recycling an old soul sample by pulling it into his world through a cloudy dream bubble; to further the notion of family, he brings on scene affiliate MC Judah on the soaring track “Vera.” Judah professes to Silva, “I said it once and I’ll say it again/You are important to the lineage of the UK club sound.” Consider this album an extension of UK club’s instinctual soul. | 2022-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | Nowhere Music | July 22, 2022 | 7.3 | 9c81cf69-07b3-4034-bab0-a085be38ac10 | Nathan Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-evans/ | |
On his latest album, Jack Tatum incorporates newly vulnerable songwriting into his ’80s dreamworld. | On his latest album, Jack Tatum incorporates newly vulnerable songwriting into his ’80s dreamworld. | Wild Nothing: Hold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-nothing-hold/ | Hold | On May 25, 2010, Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks released a pair of homespun debuts by bands whose re-interpretations of first-wave indie pop would help spearhead a wave of millennial DIY nostalgists. Since then, Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing have charted parallel paths: Both followed their debuts with a studio-grade sharpening of their sound, then pivoted to baroque songcraft with vintage electric keys and saxophone solos. Following a joint tour celebrating the bands’ 10th anniversaries, their respective frontmen each settled down to start families before returning this year with unusually personal albums that re-examine their past work through the lens of fatherhood. Beach Fossils’ Dustin Payseur returned to his surf-pop style on June’s Bunny; Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum finds new meaning in his dreamscape on Hold, emerging with some of his most touching tracks to date.
Hold was written shortly after both the birth of Tatum’s son and the onset of the pandemic. The inability to tour or book studio time, coupled with the parental learning curve, forced him to reconsider his priorities—a shift that’s reflected in the exploratory nature of his new work. In contrast to the distinct aesthetics of 2016’s Life of Pause and 2012’s Nocturne, Hold adopts a refreshing sense of whimsy. Self-producing for the first time since 2010, Tatum dabbles in one-off genre experiments, toys with eccentric lyrical devices, and embraces a maximalist ethos that sets this album apart.
Loosening up Wild Nothing’s sound also allows Tatum to peel back the obscurity of his lyrics. On “Pulling Down the Moon (Before You),” the Peter Gabriel-inspired closer, he indulges in a newfound sentimentality, describing the renewed purpose he’s found in fatherhood and the anxiety that comes with it. “A whole existence I can hold/But won’t ever weigh me down,” he sings, reverb-gated snares and delayed lead guitar echoing all around. His vocals nudge to the front of the mix, a deluge of psychedelic effects highlighting the vulnerability in each word.
The most gripping moments dissect Tatum’s insecurities with surreal, self-deprecating humor. “Suburban Solutions,” inspired by his move from Los Angeles back to his home state of Virginia, second-guesses the desire for domesticity. He pictures his new setting as an ironic advertisement for the bourgeois lifestyle, soundtracked by a chintzy array of synths. “Take a big bite,” he commands in the cartoonishly pitched-down voice of a commercial announcer. Where dreams once represented escapism in his music, the subconscious now feels occasionally antagonistic. It’s strange to hear a Wild Nothing track to adhere so tightly to a concept, but Tatum grounds the material in his trademark stuttering rhythm guitar and booming motorik beats.
When Tatum returns to dreams, he seems eager to wake up. In “Histrion,” he recounts a familiar nightmare: standing in front of an audience and forgetting every word. (In the final verse, a crane hoists him offstage.) Bolstered by warbling Auto-Tune, he belts with unprecedented abandon, slamming piano chords and wailing in a Todd Rundgren falsetto to amplify the ecstasy. This ability to surprise is Hold’s greatest asset. After dabbling in Eno-esque ambient sounds, straight-ahead shoegaze, and baggy beatcraft, Tatum lets the layers of nostalgia overlap when “Dial Tone” calls back to that old, breezy jangle circa Golden Haze, a time when Wild Nothing’s ’80s revivalism set a new benchmark for bedroom pop. He can still rekindle its magic on cue. | 2023-10-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | October 27, 2023 | 7.5 | 9c841f77-9a32-4031-b02b-4087774f0ee0 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
On a double EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, the Russian producer delivers punishing techno shot through with happy pandemonium. | On a double EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, the Russian producer delivers punishing techno shot through with happy pandemonium. | Buttechno: badtrip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buttechno-badtrip/ | badtrip | Like Yello, Pépé Bradock, and Aphex Twin before him, Buttechno is an electronic artist who takes his music both very seriously and with a welcome dollop of humor. His careful attention to the craft of production is accompanied by a tongue permanently in search of cheek.
The prolific Moscow producer’s two contributions to Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!, a scene-setting 2018 compilation on Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, marked Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov) as the jester in the Trip camp, his songs bursting with mutant gabber, silly noises, and arcade-level Autechre experimentation. badtrip, a double EP that marks his first full release for the label, confirms his trickster reputation. While there’s nothing laugh-out-loud funny here, all nine tracks are marked by the kind of puckish mischief you might find in Aphex Twin’s “Milkman” or Captain Beefheart’s legendarily opaque Trout Mask Replica, with an admirable degree of chaos underlying their punishing techno sound.
“U.D.U.” is key to understanding the EP’s happy pandemonium. At first, the song sounds like a mess, an anarchic frenzy of industrial-grade bass drums, hi-hats, snares, and toms suggesting two entirely unrelated tracks leaking into your headphones. Listen closely, though, and “U.D.U.” starts to make a wonderful kind of sense as the various beats—forward, backward, pitched up and down—pull at the limits of a 4/4 cadence to create a bizarrely funky breed of chaos that is all the more sublime for being slightly unfathomable. The fabulous “wb movement” is similarly bewildering, with shakers, hi-hats, and snares positioned around the bass-drum pulse in off-kilter patterns that seem designed to unsettle the listener’s rhythmic instincts.
“j become,” on the other hand, is sneakily mischievous. On first evidence, the track is a fairly standard replica of the early Trax records that were designed to put the wind up your nightgown via pummeling beats, relentless synth hooks, and menacing vocal lines, only for Milyakov to yank the bass drum backwards half a beat, so that the mix briefly resembles the kind of botched drop that gives amateur DJs waking nightmares. That he punctuates this effect with the sound of a record spinning back—precisely the move a nervous DJ would make to rescue the situation—suggests a producer who cares very little for the DJ-centric nature of techno.
The manipulation of vocal hooks, a hallmark of recent Trip releases, is also in evidence here. On “BBBASE” vocal samples tumble about the octaves like socks in a washing machine, spinning a psychedelic web of noise around the nonchalant central riff, while the gruff robotic vocal that runs through “pkds” and “tr-919” becomes so maddeningly repetitive you suspect annoying the listener might actually be the point.
These two songs illustrate badtrip’s principal weakness, namely an occasional tendency to ramble that seems at odds with the lunatic energy of “U.D.U” or “wb movement.” “Ferenz-18” worries at its central synth melody like a cat with a dying vole, the track prickling along like a distressed take on Isolée’s classic “Beau Mot Plage”; it could stand to lose a good two minutes, while “pkds” and “tr-919” are seriously overstretched.
badtrip doesn’t give any simple answers. DJs will be put off by the EP’s rhythmic roguery, while home listeners may be frustrated by sporadic needless repetition. At its best, though, badtrip’s musical imagination rides gloriously roughshod over the conventions of techno. | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Trip | November 6, 2019 | 6.9 | 9c8a2e0a-a784-4e19-8be7-dd2c6f5d5e6f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length for Hyperdub, she returns with a four-track EP for the label. If Quarantine resembled an amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame by including none of her trademark vocal swoops. | Less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length for Hyperdub, she returns with a four-track EP for the label. If Quarantine resembled an amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame by including none of her trademark vocal swoops. | Laurel Halo: Behind the Green Door EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18051-laurel-halo-behind-the-green-door-ep/ | Behind the Green Door EP | It's less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length album for Hyperdub, the brittle, beautiful Quarantine. This four-track EP for the same label makes that record feel light-years away. The vocals are gone, the sense of space has all but vanished. If Quarantine resembled a Cronenbergian amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame. Those swooping vocal takes feel absent at first. It's hard not to mourn their removal, and worry about the premature halting of an idea that had long life in it yet. On further plays, though, Behind the Green Door casts a different shadow over Quarantine, just as that album did with her prior work. It makes Quarantine a stronger, bolder piece, gaining a little extra weight due to the sense of isolation, even among Halo's own work, that surrounds it.
The sense of forward momentum merges into the music on Behind the Green Door in a quite literal sense; these aren't exactly club bangers, but the feeling of propulsion is aided by the beats that underpin all four tracks. Those rhythms guide Halo down a purposefully tangled path, picking up elements of house music and minimal techno along the way, but cloaking them in a sense of agitation that's barely kept below surface level. This isn't exactly angry music, but there is a feeling of itchy unease that runs as a theme throughout. "NOYFB" is the best embodiment of this, with each new layer feeling slightly out of step with everything that came immediately prior. It's disorienting, which is, it seems, Halo's favorite place to be, allowing her to construct worlds that immediately get pulled down and discarded on the cutting room floor. She never appears fully satisfied in the present moment, always eager to move on somewhere else.
Halo has commented on the "sexual energy" of these tracks, setting up a fascinating disparity between the title of the EP (taken from a well-known porn film from the 1970s, which was among the first hardcore pictures to gain wide distribution) and the tender pound that thumps through a track like "Sex Mission". If there is a sexual energy, it's wide-ranging, bridging from moments of quiet joy and reflection to feelings of loneliness and alienation. But the sense of distance being gained while human aspects recede, at least compared to what came before on Quarantine, adds a further twist. The bass drum beats and bursts of stiff electronics that rise in "UHFFO" suggest a darker sensuality, something more akin to the dystopian sci-fi dreams of Demon Seed, the 70s horror feature in which Julie Christie is impregnated by a supercomputer. The underlying themes of that film-- of technology being abused, breaking down, fudging the lines between what's real and artificial-- serve as a useful parallel to the feel of Behind the Green Door.
It's interesting to listen back to Hour Logic, Halo's 2011 EP for Hippos in Tanks, in light of the moves she's made here. In many ways the two releases feel like the flipside of a utopian dream, with the earlier work all brash outward moves, caught up in a moment of cautious optimism. "Throw" from this EP is noticeably harder, more pessimistic in outlook, with the warped, house-y piano stabs the perfect dysfunctional hook to signal a sense of restlessness. There's a feeling of moving away from something, not to a space necessarily much darker than some of Quarantine, but certainly one where chaos and decline are taking a stronger hold. The title of the EP makes more sense in that context, if you take the enormous popularity of Behind the Green Door as a sort of ground zero for the subsequent wave of seedy profiteering that the adult film industry would be built upon. This work feels more in tune with decay and exploitation in sexual portrayal, the numbness accrued from a constant barrage of imagery, than anything that’s notionally "sexy." | 2013-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | May 21, 2013 | 7.2 | 9c8ab68d-a6f4-475d-a872-09fe5ece1d8e | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Plot twist: Diplo’s star-studded new EP will not make you twerk, but it might make you cry. | Plot twist: Diplo’s star-studded new EP will not make you twerk, but it might make you cry. | Diplo: California EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diplo-california-ep/ | California EP | Before worldwide stardom and innumerable A-list collaborations, before mobilizing an endless parade of twerkage with Major Lazer, even before his revolutionary work with M.I.A. on “Paper Planes” and Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1, a 25-year-old named Thomas Wesley Pentz released an album called Florida. It was a strange, compelling trip-hop record, notable, in 2004, for its multi-genre fluency. But the other striking element—then and particularly now, for those who have followed Pentz’s career as perhaps the best-known DJ of his generation—was the sadness at the album’s core. Damn, it’s true: Even Diplo gets the blues.
Fourteen years later, Diplo has released another solo record named for a state. The modest-seeming California EP harkens back to the mood of that first album, channeling the DJ’s sadz through understated downtempo production and a star-studded guest list. Here though, Partyboi Diplo has asked his energetic vocalists to change things up, like Judd Apatow trying to coax depth from Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People. In a smart opening gambit, he enlists Lil Yachty, Mr. Happy himself, for the hook on standout “Worry No More,” which also features early Diplo collaborator Santigold. It’s a straightforward song about chasing your dreams, embellished with familiar dancehall touches. But Yachty’s plaintive singing steals the show and gives the track an emotional weight rarely present on a Diplo record. His delivery is heartfelt, as if he’d never made it big in the first place.
For years, Diplo’s brand has been reliable enough that, if you were DJing a party and running out of ideas, you might be willing to throw on his latest release without vetting it first. But try it with California, and half your guests could be sniffling by the end of the third song, “Look Back,” a vocal showcase for DRAM, who rips into it with the force of Cee-Lo on a juice cleanse. A similar turn comes from Desiigner, who sounds completely morose on “Suicidal”—and not that xanned-out type of morose either. He’s genuinely torn up.
It’s hard to imagine that Diplo, whose success has been built almost entirely on his savvy ability to give the people what they want when they want it, just decided one day to make a sad record. He’s been paying attention. He knows that emo is now openly beloved, that the SoundCloud wave has made even Swedish moper Yung Lean seem as if he was critically underappreciated. (He wasn’t.) With their naked SoundCloud aping, California tracks “Wish” and “Color Blind” make Diplo’s calculations a bit more obvious, reminding critical listeners of the producer’s parasitic tendencies. “Color Blind” in particular, feels like an overproduced mainstream ripoff, its rainbow synth and handclap chorus a poor match for rapper Lil Xan’s bummed delivery.
And yet. It’s not unimaginable that Diplo, who turns 40 this year, has grown reflective. In a recent interview with the BBC DJ Annie Mac, the producer expressed envy of his younger collaborators. “They have all this freedom,” he said. “They’re not afraid to try anything.” By contrast, he saw himself as “working on borrowed time.” So as this brief EP draws to a close with the cathartic “Get It Right,” a potent mix of piano keys, stadium-status drums, a power chorus from MØ, and one of those pitched-up bridges that Diplo so adores, don’t be surprised to find yourself actually, emotionally, moved. Damn, it’s true: We all get sad sometimes. | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mad Decent | March 26, 2018 | 7.4 | 9c8b08bb-1ced-4fd4-8a8e-d7e1bc328ef4 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
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 Jyoti Mishra’s 1997 major-label debut, a collection of tender homemade synth-pop that spawned an unlikely global hit. | 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 Jyoti Mishra’s 1997 major-label debut, a collection of tender homemade synth-pop that spawned an unlikely global hit. | White Town: Women in Technology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/white-town-women-in-technology/ | Women in Technology | Sometime around 1978, Jyoti Mishra saw Pennies From Heaven, a BBC miniseries that interspersed period drama with actors lip-syncing old songs. In the second-to-last episode, a schoolteacher has resolved to return to sex work when her adulterous lover, a sheet music salesman played by Bob Hoskins, breaks out in a bleak lament. Titled “My Woman,” the song was originally by Bing Crosby, but the show’s version, recorded in 1932 by London crooner Al Bowlly, stands out for a funereal, three-note opening trumpet phrase. You might even know it: BUM, bum ba-bum, bum ba-bum, bum ba-bum.
Born in 1966 in Rourkela, India, Mishra emigrated with his middle-class family to the UK when he was 3, eventually settling in Derby, in central England. He endured bullying, racist and otherwise. “I was the annoying know-it-all kid at school, a title I held alongside fattest lad,” Mishra has said. He started playing keyboards when he was 12, and, as he tells it, quit school at 16 “specifically to go on the dole and play in a band.” During the 1980s, he began to identify as a revolutionary Marxist.
After attending a “life-changing” Pixies concert, Mishra formed White Town as a conventional guitar band in 1989, citing standard indie-rock influences of the time: the Wedding Present, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and My Bloody Valentine. At their third gig, White Town opened for Primal Scream. “The name White Town was a reference to growing up as an Asian person in Britain,” Mishra told Sound on Sound. “That’s not been depressing, but there certainly was a sense of alienation.” A government program for the unemployed, the now-defunct Enterprise Allowance Scheme, helped Mishra start his own label, Satya Records.
The funding enabled him to release White Town’s first single, 1990’s “White Town,” in a run of 1,000 7" vinyl copies. “There are some things in life that have to be done regardless of success or failure,” reads a typewritten note tucked within the sleeve. The A-side casts a handy lens on Mishra’s nascent sensibility. He sings in a hushed voice that evokes quintessential Sarah Records indie-pop groups like the Field Mice, joined by cello throbs like Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” and propulsive streaks of MBV-style noise-rock. But the lyrics address a lover who, it’s implied, has left him under racist pressure from her parents. “If it’s not worth fighting for,” Mishra sighs, “it’s worth nothing at all.”
White Town were still deeply underground, but they caught the ear of Geoff Merritt, owner of Urbana, Illinois-based indie label Parasol, which put out several of the group’s subsequent records. The other band members drifted away, and Mishra recorded White Town’s full-length debut, 1994’s Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality, by himself on an eight-track. Fascinating if flawed, the album tends toward run-of-the-mill jangle, and though some of the songs are among Mishra’s catchiest, as a whole the 67-minute outing is uneven and overlong. But he also experiments with gender ambiguity on the buoyant “My Baby Will Love Me,” and rails against racists and fascists. In verbose sleeve notes, Mishra name-checks radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, while backing away from Marxism or any other orthodoxy. He sums himself up as “amateur philosopher, semi-pro songwriter, and career pervert.”
By 1994, Mishra was studying at the University of Derby. He has claimed that he’d long since given up “completely” on any youthful dreams of a major-label deal. But around this time, he acquired a sampler and began working with loops. “I was influenced by hip‑hop, Cabaret Voltaire, and musique concrete, and thought that the creative use of sound in avant‑garde was brilliant,” he has said. “It was a little bit like the Marcel Duchamp school of ‘readymade’ art: You find an object in real life, and you make it your own by putting it in a different place and context.”
Mishra’s most significant spin on the readymade concept was his treatment of “My Woman,” the 1932 jazz record he’d heard as a child on Pennies From Heaven. He spotted the CD soundtrack in the 1990s. “If I could remember the riff from all those years ago, I figured it must be catchy,” Mishra has said. He built an answer song around a sample of that nagging horn fanfare, drawing inspiration lyrically as well as musically: “The original song was so anti-woman that I wanted to twist it another way.”
The result, “Your Woman,” overflows with lofty ideas. The lyrics are coy about the narrator’s gender and sexuality; they also incorporate Mishra’s disillusionment with certain leftists he viewed as hypocrites. Off-kilter beats crunch like early hip-hop, and guitars stab toward Chic’s disco-funk, while bouncy keyboards bring to mind both vintage synth-pop like Bronski Beat or Yaz and the acid-house hangover of White Town’s fellow postmodernists Saint Etienne. (Mishra has mused that the song’s juxtapositions appealed to his “intertextualist” mindset.) But “Your Woman” also has a scruffy, underdog charm. Mishra made the record at home, taking up only five tracks on his trusty eight-track mixer, with gear he estimated as worth “about a grand.” His whispery vocals, often more like Paddington in a library after marmalade, are fey and even sultry, but they’re cloaked in distortion that could be from Jay Gatsby’s Victrola or a telephone booth down the block.
“With ‘Your Woman,’ I tried to mix ideology and autobiography and put elements of pop songs from the ’30s alongside those of the ’80s to come up with something meaningful for the ’90s,” Mishra has said. “But people listening to the radio don’t have to get all that, of course. They can just dance around to it. And if you couldn’t get people to do that, they wouldn’t listen to anything you had to say anyway.”
In 1996, Parasol released “Your Woman” on the four-song CD single >Abort, Retry, Fail?_, named after the error message Mishra’s computer kept giving him the weekend he tried to mix the tracks; the dreaded MS-DOS prompt “sort of characterizes what’s been going on for me the last few years,” he wrote in the sleeve notes. He was 30. Then one night, in Mishra’s telling, he was DJing in Derby when he noticed that people on the dancefloor “really, really liked” the new single, so he sent copies to five big labels and five radio DJs. On October 28, 1996, BBC Radio 1’s Mark Radcliffe started playing “Your Woman.” And kept on playing it. Suddenly Mishra was at the center of a label bidding war, and a few days before Christmas 1996 he signed with Chrysalis/EMI affiliate Brilliant!. More than a hard drive had been reset.
When “Your Woman” hit No. 1 in January 1997, becoming only the fourth “debut” single to do so since the UK singles chart began in 1952, delirium ensued. Major labels traditionally held a vise grip on the means of music’s production, distribution, and marketing. Now here was this chart-topper out of nowhere who refused to go on Top of the Pops or appear in his own music video. To the fevered British press, “Your Woman” proved that advances in technology had democratized recording to the point that aspiring artists no longer had to play in dingy clubs or suck up to label A&Rs. Mishra was “merely the first of the No. 1 bedroom superstars.”
The frenzy cooled a bit as “Your Woman” spread internationally, but the song’s popularity continued. U.S. modern rock radio was in its “faux-ternative” phase, a post-grunge interregnum where pop acts could pass for alternative before the forthcoming chokehold of nu-metal. Another unknown outfit, Primitive Radio Gods, had notched a sample-based hit the previous year. Beck’s genre-mashing Odelay was the incumbent critics’ darling. Prince’s decade-old “If I Was Your Girlfriend” still faintly rippled in the zeitgeist. With the original Star Wars films enjoying a theatrical re-release in 1997, some fans surely gravitated to the unmistakable similarities between the “My Woman” horn riff and John Williams’ Darth Vader theme. In a puritanical country where the Supreme Court was still six years away from striking down anti-sodomy laws, tabloids questioned the obscure White Town singer’s sexuality.
But maybe, as Entertainment Weekly put it in a track review lauding “Your Woman” as worthy of comparison to the Spice Girls (high praise, then and now!), the song was simply “powerful pop.” As a teenage Arizona transplant, I distinctly remember a letter from a friend back in my Northern California hometown hipping me to “that ‘I could never be a woman’ song.”
Women in Technology, which came out in February—only about two months after Mishra signed with Chrysalis—was no match for the “Your Woman” phenomenon. But it’s an eccentric, endearing album in its own right. An overjoyed and perhaps over-confident Mishra writes in the liner notes, “I hope you like this album. But hey—if you don’t, just go and record your own. It’s really not that difficult.” Such demystification was in the post-punk tradition of the earliest UK indie bands such as the Desperate Bicycles. But White Town’s wispily lovelorn synth-pop more closely resembled post-punk’s ’80s pivot toward New Pop glamour—in particular, fellow lapsed Marxist Green Gartside and his group Scritti Politti’s transition from skittery mess to electro-soul sweetness. Women in Technology was a gateway to the wider world of what Mishra has called “unpopular pop.” It’s still an odd, enjoyable listen, a horny, housebound cousin to the sublime Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85, and a featherlight harbinger of cultural trends to come.
Nothing else on Women in Technology is like “Your Woman.” Still, some of Mishra’s best work comes when he experiments with similar abandon. “Thursday at the Blue Note” remains sui generis, with its melange of dreamy Indian instrumentation, distorted-to-hell drum programming, and night-out-in-the-life storytelling that prefigured the Streets (“Look, I know I’m no oil painting/But my face doesn’t need re-arranging,” Mishra sings). Another highlight, él Records-worthy bossa nova ballad “A Week Next June,” is when Mishra keeps it most basic, capturing his pleading vocal and nylon-string guitar strums in a single mic (with a lovely solo overdubbed by guitarist Robert Fleay, who guests on a handful of the tracks). Today you could compare it to early Belle and Sebastian, but back then not many people had heard Belle and Sebastian yet.
Most of the album, though, is in that peculiar synth-R&B, post-New Pop no man’s land (and no “Your Woman”’s land). “Undressed” opens the record with slow-jam drum machine en route to sweet nothings like “I’ve had too many one-night stands,” murmured between Theremin-like synth wobbles. Second single “Wanted,” buzzing electro-pop featuring guest vocalist Ann Pearson, was admittedly chosen to “defy hit parade expectations” and did its job only too well. “The Function of the Orgasm” delivers decent one-liners (“Is it me or him that you’re screwing?”), and “The Death of My Desire” is a chaste return to the punkish guitar of earlier White Town, but neither song is as memorable as their titles.
Still, a few glimmers invite the prospect of what might have been—if “Your Woman” had been a smaller hit, if the second single had been better selected, or if the entire album were simply more coherent. With shoegaze textures and another boom-bap beat, “The Shape of Love” is an alluring look at long-distance romance in the computer age (“I know the world is turning/I know it’s yesterday for you,” Mishra sings). The track that resonates most in a more socially conscious era is a reworking of that first 1990 single, “White Town.” This time, rudimentary guitar arpeggios and frosty drum machine provide the sole backing for Mishra’s stark lyrics, leading into a coda of gorgeous synth. The love interest’s name has been anonymized to “baby,” but the hurt lingers.
The world was as confused about Women in Technology as I remain, all these years later. By the numbers, it was a shocking triumph. Outside Britain, “Your Woman” also went to No. 1 in Iceland and Spain, peaking at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. A month after release, the album had sold more than 120,000 copies in the United States alone. But reviewers, many presumably unaware of UK indie arcana, mainly seemed divided on whether the album showed White Town was or wasn’t a “one-hit wonder.” A sign of the times was a cringey Village Voice double review of Women in Technology with tender Australian pop duo Savage Garden’s self-titled debut album: “High school girls will buy Savage Garden,” Chuck Eddy opined, “but college chicks’ll opt for White Town.”
As time passed, “Your Woman” secured a minor place in the pop pantheon. The Magnetic Fields, cited in the sleeve to Women in Technology, returned the favor a couple of years later, with Stephin Merritt noting in the booklet to his 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs that “Your Woman” was one of his “favorite Top 40 songs of the last few years.” In 2010, Pitchfork ranked “Your Woman” as one of the Top 200 Songs of the 1990s, situating it alongside sample-based indie chestnuts of the era such as the Land of the Loops’ “Multi-Family Garage Sale.” But the album’s legacy feels unresolved; like “Your Woman,” White Town was at once overexposed and under-examined.
Predictions that White Town’s unlikely ascent heralded an overturning of the music industry order were right and wrong. No doubt quite a number of bedroom solo tinkerers took inspiration in Mishra’s wake. The internet clearly made it easier for musicians and listeners to connect—I recall Mishra responding personally to my request on a fan email list about how to play “A Week Next June” on guitar. In the mid-2000s, wide-eyed indie bands like Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the Boy Least Likely To could spring up from relative obscurity, along with one-person twee pop factories like Jens Lekman or the Honeydrips, abetted by blogs and webzines.
“Pop is accessible,” Mishra said. “I’m a nerd, not Jim Morrison.” He was adamant that what mattered wasn’t the equipment used, whether good or bad, but the song itself: “You should judge things only with your own ears.” Another do-it-yourself auteur, Sufjan Stevens, would later espouse a similar view. But the Village Voice’s critique was right about one thing: White Town did present a false dichotomy in the liner notes, where Mishra writes, “I still believe that music is about emotion rather than fashion.” Of course, it’s about both. A new wave of bedroom pop led by Billie Eilish, Clairo, and Beabadoobee has generated its own seemingly overnight breakouts, fueled by an au-courant stylishness well-suited for TikTok virality. And why not? There was always a disconnect in presenting White Town’s major-label debut as authentic and unmediated. If anything, it’s the enduring commercial appeal of “Your Woman” that’s granted Mishra artistic freedom—most recently on this year’s Fairchild Semiconductor, billed as the soundtrack to an imaginary TV series. White Town’s own Bandcamp page self-deprecatingly quotes a biography calling Mishra “one of the more intriguing, although frustratingly inconsistent, musicians in ’90s indie pop.”
Maybe Women in Technology holds up best as a testimony to Duchamp’s notion that the ordinary can be elevated into art. Because of Mishra, the “White Christmas” guy collaborated across centuries with grime trailblazer Wiley, and Prohibition-era trumpet rings out on last year’s pandemic album by UK pop star Dua Lipa, herself a daughter of immigrants. Who knows what’s next? “I feel like I’m the luckiest person alive,” Mishra said in March 2020. He must’ve suspected as much when writing Women in Technology’s future-nostalgic finale, “Once I Flew,” which samples astronauts. “Though it’s easy to forget,” Mishra sings of a past brush with the infinite, “I don’t seem to have managed yet/And I don’t think I ever will.” Imperfect sound can last forever too.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-11-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Chrysalis | November 7, 2021 | 7.2 | 9c97fa51-afc3-4e84-897c-77fc395ae6c5 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
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 Warren Zevon’s 1976 breakthrough, an unforgettable collection of rock songs as short stories set in a seedy, mythological American West. | 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 Warren Zevon’s 1976 breakthrough, an unforgettable collection of rock songs as short stories set in a seedy, mythological American West. | Warren Zevon: Warren Zevon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/warren-zevon-warren-zevon/ | Warren Zevon | “Desperados Under the Eaves,” the tale of personal and ecological apocalypse that remains Warren Zevon’s single greatest song, takes place at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel. It was a real establishment where Zevon stayed sometimes—the sort of seedy old Los Angeles joint where the songwriter felt most at home. After an orchestral introduction and a few lines about margaritas and an empty coffee cup, there’s a premonitory flash of Beach Boy harmonies, and the stakes rise dramatically along with Zevon’s singing voice:
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this hotel will be standing
Until I pay my bill
The lyric, like many of Zevon’s, invests a scene of real-life debauchery and turmoil with mythological significance. During the six-year stretch between his failed first album and his miraculous second, he availed himself mightily of the various temptations early-1970s L.A. offered. He had an appetite for booze, pot, acid, sex, and fighting that led to frequent separations from the mother of his first child, born when Zevon was 22. During one such bender, he was holed up at the Hollywood Hawaiian when he realized he didn’t have enough cash to cover the bill. A friend came and helped him escape through the window.
According to legend, he came back years later and attempted to make good. That second album, self-titled, had been only a modest commercial success upon its release in 1976, but Zevon’s name was still in the papers. Critics hailed him as a major new talent. His compositional ambition, writerly wit, and general air of rakish malignancy all helped set him apart from his peers in the soft-rocking L.A. songwriter scene he’d been kicking around for years. The hotel didn’t want to take this newly minted rock star’s money. They accepted instead a few copies of Warren Zevon, which closes with “Desperados Under the Eaves.”
Zevon had already accrued substantial debts, financial and emotional, at this relatively early juncture in his life, and he would continue racking them up for a long time after. Only those who knew him well—the friends he alienated, the wife he subjected to drunken beatings and threats of suicide, the children he all but abandoned, and whoever happened to be around when he indulged in his habit of firing guns indoors as a joke—can say with any authority whether the music he left behind is enough to repay them. His self-titled album, at least, settled his bill with the Hollywood Hawaiian.
Zevon sometimes seemed to view his own story as a sort of fable scripted either by fate or the doomed protagonist himself, if those two entities could even be separated. “I’ve been writing this part for myself for 30 years, and I guess I need to play it out,” he quipped upon learning, in his mid-50s, of the mesothelioma that would soon kill him. Take the Zevonian view, and you might wonder whether some larger cosmic debt at the Hollywood Hawaiian remains unpaid. The author and tragic hero of this fable is no longer with us. The hotel has changed names in the decades since he stayed there. But the building still stands.
~
Christmas, 1956: A mobbed-up professional gambler arrives unannounced at the home of his wife and 9-year-old son. He’s bearing a gift of a Chickering upright piano, taken as winnings from an all-night poker game and presented to the boy as his very first musical instrument. Mom isn’t having it, perhaps because dad refuses to maintain more than a sporadic presence in their lives. She calls the piano a “headache machine,” and orders her husband to remove it from the house. Her husband’s name is William, but his intimates call him Stumpy. Stumpy Zevon—a name straight from the paperback crime novels his son would grow to love—takes the carving knife that Beverly has set out for the Christmas turkey and hurls it toward her head. He misses by mere inches. She flees the house, and Stumpy soon leaves again, too, telling his son he won’t be back this time. Surely, young Warren is traumatized. But at least he has a piano.
Music and violence, creation and destruction, remained entwined for much of Zevon’s life. He took to the piano quickly after that Christmas, and later the guitar, building a reputation as a prodigy that eventually, improbably, reached the awareness of Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, a Russian-French expat then living in L.A. Thirteen-year-old Warren took a few lessons in music composition and appreciation at Stravinsky’s home. In yet another heavy-handed symbolic twist in the myth of Zevon’s self-immolating genius, it was at one of these initial encounters with the highest echelon of musical achievement that he first drank alcohol, the substance he would come to believe fueled his creativity, even as it ravaged him.
Zevon’s mother eventually found a new partner, who openly resented and sometimes beat her son. He also kept the house stocked with booze, which became teenage Warren’s clandestine supply. A decade or so later, while preparing to record Warren Zevon, he was drinking a quart of vodka a day.
That album’s second song is an explicit account of Zevon’s parents’ chaotic marriage. “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” isn’t morose, or even particularly serious; it’s positively jaunty. The chorus—“Mama couldn’t be persuaded when they pleaded with her, ‘Daughter, don’t marry that gambling man’”—delights in its own assonance and alliteration. One backing singer practically yodels the word “mama.” A fiddle reels across the instrumental breaks. If you weren’t familiar with Zevon’s biography, you might take it for another song set in the old West, like the album-opening “Frank and Jesse James.” His childhood tormentors are abstracted through the distances of time and irony into harmless and even laughable archetypes.
One particular line hints at the bitterness Zevon must have still carried toward his family, and the separation he’d carved out for himself in the intervening years. “Her parents warned her, tried to reason with her/She was determined that she wanted Bill,” he sings in the first verse. “They’d all be offended at the mention still/If they heard this song, which I doubt they will.”
~
Depending on your perspective on Warren Zevon, he might have looked either like a has-been or a promising new contender in those early-‘70s years spent flopping between Hollywood apartments and hotels. He had dropped out of high school, scored a modest hit at 19 as one half of the paisley-patterned folk duo lyme and cybelle (Zevon, an e.e. cummings fanatic, had insisted on no capitalization), and another as a songwriter for the Turtles; a third song earned him his first Gold record when it landed on the soundtrack for Midnight Cowboy.
But early success turned to early failure. His first solo album, 1970’s Wanted Dead or Alive, was a collection of bluesy and psychedelic hard rock that bears strikingly little resemblance to the masterworks that would follow, and that almost no one bought or heard. Without a recording contract, he found reliable but unglamorous work as the live bandleader for the Everly Brothers, hitmakers of the ’50s and early ’60s who now drank heavily and fought relentlessly: heroes of an earlier era gone to seed, like characters in a Warren Zevon song.
Attempting to escape the bad behavior that L.A. brought out in both of them, Zevon and his wife Crystal bought a pair of one-way tickets to Spain, where they hoped to start a quieter new life. It was beginning to look as though his career as a recording artist was over when he received a transatlantic postcard from Jackson Browne, beckoning him back to California with the promise of a record deal. Zevon had never stopped writing songs, and he played them for anyone who would listen. In his years as a part-time musician and career partier, he’d built up an impressive roster of friends and admirers, Browne chief among them. The star singer-songwriter convinced David Geffen, self-styled benevolent patron of the L.A. scene, to give Zevon a shot at his label, Asylum, with Browne producing.
How impressive was that roster of admirers? Look at Warren Zevon’s credits. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, with whom Zevon shared an apartment for a while. Don Henley, Glenn Frey. Phil Everly. Bonnie Raitt. Carl Wilson himself singing and arranging those Beach Boy harmonies on “Desperados Under the Eaves.” Zevon was not remotely famous at the time; short of Browne’s involvement behind the boards, there was no guarantee that the album would be a success. These people were there because they believed in Zevon’s work, a singular blend of hardboiled storytelling, old-school melodic know-how, and raucous rock’n’roll. That, and the fact that the recording sessions were all-night ragers, fueled by cocaine and liquor, which probably didn’t hurt, as far as convincing them to drop by the studio.
The decision to return to L.A. had not been an easy one. After the tumult of the previous years, Spain represented an idyll for Warren and Crystal, one they were reluctant to abandon. According to Crystal, it was Warren who pushed hardest against the idea of coming back. As they were preparing to leave for Europe, he’d written “Backs Turned Looking Down the Path,” an underappreciated gem that he would later insist was his catalog’s crown jewel. It is the lone oasis of pure sweetness on an album otherwise characterized by dark clouds, desperation, and gunfire.
“Backs Turned Looking Down the Path” centers on a couple, like the Zevons leaving L.A., who have decided to put their checkered pasts behind them, striking out anew with only love as their guide. Atop gentle acoustic guitars from Buckingham and Browne, Warren delivers a rare line not shaded by irony or varnished by any other overtly literary impulse. He speaks plainly: “Nothing matters when I’m with my baby,” stretching the last word to three syllables and wielding it like an amulet against the outside world’s incursions.
Given the betrayal, abuse, and eventual divorce that accompanied Zevon’s rise to fame back home, “Backs Turned” becomes especially poignant: the last glimpse of a path not taken.
~
The junkie’s lament “Carmelita” is about as perfectly written as a song can be. Its protagonist sits by the radio in Echo Park, listening to a staticky broadcast of mariachi music and dreaming of a lover in Mexico. He has pawned his typewriter for heroin, an acknowledgement of the deleterious effects of substance abuse on creativity that the songwriter himself would avoid facing for another decade. He is one of several narrators on the album who are on the brink of suicide, a grim reality that Zevon makes palatable through elegant and grimly funny obfuscation: “I’m sitting here playing solitaire with my pearl-handled deck.” Decks of cards don’t often come with handles, pearl or otherwise.
But these finely wrought details are not the first things about “Carmelita” you notice. You might listen for years before the true meaning of the solitaire lyric strikes you. What you notice first about “Carmelita” is the chorus, which hits like a bear hug from an old friend. It’s the sort of song that feels like it’s always been there, waiting for you to sing along at midnight, like it might have somehow written itself if Zevon never came along to do it. You needn’t have special education from Stravinsky; nor, for that matter, any experience with heroin addiction. (Zevon himself, with typical bravado, once said that his own encounters with the drug amounted to a “brief flirtation and not a tragic love affair.”) All you need to know is the feeling of wanting to be someplace other than where you are, with someone who might hold you close.
Zevon spent much of his free time in the years around his self-titled record and its follow-ups working on a symphony, which never saw the light of day outside of a few interludes on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, his fourth album. Between Wanted Dead or Alive and Warren Zevon, he began work on a record whose entire second side would consist of outré sound experiments. It never came out. Years later, he conceptualized a release that would incorporate formal influence from the groundbreaking novels of Thomas Pynchon into music that operated on several divergent narrative and melodic threads at once. He admitted bashfully in one interview that what he’d made instead was a rock album.
For all Zevon’s literary ability and aspirations toward some putatively higher form of art, rock’n’roll—music that works instinctually, moving you in ways that all the world’s theorizing can’t quite articulate—was his calling and his fate. With the help of Browne and his other collaborators, Zevon crafted an album that is sumptuous and inviting despite its intricate writing and often painful subject matter. The music is never a mere vehicle for the words. The ascending guitar riff of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” and the sweeping melody of “Hasten Down the Wind” could rouse even a listener who isn’t paying attention to what Zevon is saying. As a vocalist, he has an appealing mixture of everyman humility and committed showmanship: the bespectacled loner who hops onstage and discovers a powerhouse frontman lurking somewhere in his id.
Of course, rock was a hot commercial prospect in the mid-’70s, and Zevon made no bones about his desire for stardom. But there’s also something generous about the way his songs reach toward the audience and embrace them, rather than retreating inward. Zevon was often selfish and indulgent in his personal life, but in his music he was intent on giving something to listeners, something they could feel.
Even a song like “The French Inhaler,” whose narrator condescends toward a woman who uses sex to survive in a town that values her for little else, is kind in its way. Its chorus of backing singers and close attention to the details of her nighttime existence affords her a dignity that the song’s narrow-minded observer refuses to see. Zevon wrote it for Tule Livingston, the mother of his first child. “Despite the subject matter,” their son Jordan told the Guardian, “my mom would play that song to me after a couple of glasses of wine and laugh and say: ‘Isn’t that brilliant?’”
~
Warren Zevon’s first and last songs begin with the same overture, played on solo piano on “Frank and Jesse James” and later arranged for strings on “Desperados Under the Eaves.” That conspicuous reprise, along with a few recurring images in the lyrics, suggest that this is a concept album of sorts. Zevon himself envisioned it as such, according to C.M. Kushins’ biography Nothing’s Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon, and at least one critic picked up on the thread at the time. “Who could have imagined a concept album about Los Angeles that is funny, enlightening, musical, at moments terrifying, and above all funny?” wrote Stephen Holden in his 1976 Rolling Stone review. Kushins expands further on that claim: “Experienced in chronological order, the songs told an entire epic of the American West.”
This notion, along with many in Zevon lore, is both a little true and a little preposterous. Warren Zevon renders L.A. with remarkable vividness, creating an entire noirish world from Topanga Canyon dancefloors and Echo Park fried chicken stands. Allow your imagination to roam, and perhaps you’ll see the separated lovers from “Hasten Down the Wind” peering at each other across the bar in “Join Me in L.A.” But the thematic unity arises from the strength of Zevon’s writing, not because of any grand narrative about the making of the American frontier. In “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” an antic rocker about one man’s prodigious sexual exploits and self-loathing, he compares one especially crafty paramour to Jesse James. The callback feels more like a delightful cameo than an operatic leitmotif.
Rather than a thesis statement, “Frank and Jesse James” is an album-opening outlier, the story on Warren Zevon most distant from the songwriter’s own personal experience. (He apparently took inspiration from his time roaming the country with the Everlys.) A heroic piano-led number, it follows the arc of popular legend about the Jameses, positioning them as Robin Hoods of the Old West rather than the anti-abolitionist terrorists the historical record shows them to be. If there is a thematic thread in “Frank and Jesse James” that the rest of the record unspools, perhaps it lies in that very evasion: the hope that a good story might be enough to make the ugly truth invisible.
“Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?” Zevon asks 10 songs later in “Desperados Under the Eaves,” a final flash of daylight on an otherwise nocturnal album, the warm rays conveying retribution rather than relief. “Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?” he continues. “Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves?” Maybe “Frank and Jesse James” is a dream of the sort of noble, swashbuckling existence the album’s wayward men convince themselves they are leading. In a moment of astonishing audacity, “Desperados” closes with Zevon mimicking the hum of an air conditioner. Its gentle drone, massaging the raw edges of a hangover, becomes a triumphant melodic theme, with piano and strings soon arriving to accompany the humming, like the music that might play at the end of a cowboy movie as the heroes ride off across the plain.
Just before the air-conditioner orchestra, Zevon revises an earlier lyric: “Don’t the sun look angry at me?” There is a certain addict’s grandiosity and egocentrism that runs through Warren Zevon, especially in the idea that a collection of songs about one man’s hopes and foibles could tell the story of an entire city or state. The album’s failure to live up to its ostensible concept is only appropriate for a collection of songs that grapple with hopes dashed, ideals unmet, and dreams of a life more romantic than the sum of its sad particulars. It’s a good thing he called it Warren Zevon, because that’s what it’s really about.
~
Most of Warren Zevon’s songs are narrative, more like short stories than poems. “Mohammed’s Radio” is a notable exception. It foregrounds the single mysterious image of the prophet and his transistor, leaving any questions about literal or symbolic meaning unanswered. A few colorful archetypes drop by for a line or two—the sheriff, the village idiot, the general and his aide-de-camp—but the song also makes attempts to address a universal condition: Everybody’s restless, everybody’s desperate. Its central mode of address is direct second-person. Don’t it make you want to rock and roll all night long?
My best guess—and one others have ventured before me—is that “Mohammed’s Radio” is about the redemptive power of music. Everyone huddles around the speaker: “You’ve been up all night listening for his drum/Hoping that the righteous might just, might just, might just come.” Appropriately, Zevon and his collaborators convey this message most persuasively in the sound itself, using their singing and playing to fill the gaps in the lyric sheet. This is gospel music for churches with booths and stools instead of pews. Zevon and Browne, on piano and guitar, delicately interweave. Nicks and Buckingham, at their most soulful, provide cascading backing vocals. Bobby Keys, saxophonist and honorary Rolling Stone, works his Exile on Main Street magic. You can practically see the bartender filling his mop bucket in the back room, preparing for the hour when the few remaining patrons have left and it’s his job to make the place clean again.
This minor exaltation lasts for just shy of four minutes, and then it’s on to “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” whose pounding groove signals the triumph of our most destructive impulses. “I’ve got a .38 special up on the shelf,” Zevon snarls. “If I start acting stupid, I’ll shoot myself.” Whatever flickering grace a song like “Mohammed’s Radio” may offer its performers and listeners, it can’t save us on its own. You can rock and roll all night long, but you still have to face the morning after. | 2023-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Asylum | April 2, 2023 | 10 | 9ca21815-603d-4371-abfc-b069d882a487 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
This 4xCD retrospective of a group synonymous with Britpop’s worst excesses captures their pop peacocking and genuine charm, accompanied by a lingering feeling of trying too hard. | This 4xCD retrospective of a group synonymous with Britpop’s worst excesses captures their pop peacocking and genuine charm, accompanied by a lingering feeling of trying too hard. | Menswe@r: The Menswe@r Collection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/menswear-the-menswear-collection/ | The Menswe@r Collection | Pop music’s history is best written not by the winners or the losers, but by the bands who fall in between: the latecomers, coattail riders, and almost-made-its whose relatable success gives the closest insight into what a musical scene was really like after the outliers and innovators had blazed their trail. In this sense it is Menswe@r—well-connected London scenesters whose moment in the sun was as brief as their rise was meteoric—who, more than Pulp, Blur, or Oasis, epitomised Britpop in all its plasticky glory.
Formed in 1994, the year of Our Lord Parklife, Menswe@r signed a v@st record de@l after a handful of gigs, appeared on Top of the Pops before their first single was released, and scored a Top 20 hit with their debut album, Nuisance, before heading into sharp decline. A flagship single flopped, the band parted company with their label, and a second album, the Camden country-flavored ¡Hay Tiempo!, was only released in Japan. In 1998 Menswe@r called it a day, their name a lingering reminder of the worst excesses of Britpop, as British music fans en masse tried to pretend they had actually always been more into Radiohead.
Menswe@r’s persistent infamy, while perhaps inevitable in the UK’s fast-moving music scene, was not entirely deserved. The Menswe@r Collection, a 4xCD box set that rounds up almost everything the band recorded, does unwittingly highlight a number of Britpop’s glaring faults, packed as it is with retro obsessions, dry production, and a lingering feeling of trying far too hard. “Daydreamer,” the band’s best-known song, sounds so loaded with naked commercial ambition that it is hard to imagine it was born out of actual human emotion. At the same time, the song is a telling example of Menswe@r’s Wire-meets-Roxy Music pop peacocking, with enough sultry hooks, glam strut, and suggestion of sexual misadventure beneath the radio-friendly sheen to make it an acceptable bedfellow to Suede’s poppier moments. If you were a major-label A&R in London during the Britpop era, you would have bid big money for them too.
Nuisance, remastered for disc one of this set, is essentially more of the same Britpop bombast: acute pop hits, angular attitude, and one-paced gloss; music for trying out cheap copies of expensive shoes. That the band eked three Top 20 hits out of the album is a sign of both how dominant Britpop came to be and Menswe@r’s infectious commercial confidence; the hooks on “Sleeping In” and “Stardust” are as sharp as the band’s mod suits and twice as well worn.
Disc two, A Sides and B Sides, while considerably more varied, largely proves that the British music industry’s taste for endless new chart-eligible formats in the 1990s was tinged with delirium—would any sane record company executive have greenlit Menswe@r’s drum’n’bass-driven cover of PIL’s “Public Image”? Menswe@r evidently picked their best songs for their first album, although the spaghetti Western boogie of “26 Years,” a B-side on Sleeping In, shows that the band could be considerably more interesting when they rolled up their shirt sleeves and let down their hair. The disc is also home to the deeply unloveable “We Love You,” the song that sunk Menswe@r’s career by stalling at a then-unacceptable 22 in the UK charts. It’s the kind paper-thin faux epic British bands were so keen on at the time, a song that strains every artless sinew in an attempt to be anthemic.
The feeling of fruitful relaxation that runs through “26 Years” continues toward the back end of disc four (Rarities and Demos) as we see the band reach beyond the Sta-Prest glam punk of their debut album on their way to ¡Hay Tiempo! A promising set of songs from the second album’s sessions shows the band dabbling in Small Faces-style blues psychedelia (“She Makes Him”), the baroque pop of the Zombies (“Is This the Way”) and Valium-era Beach Boys (“Pick Me up on Your Way Down”). It’s sweet, unoriginal, and rather intimate—a drunken bearhug to Nuisance’s cocaine stare—although the band’s light-fingered approach to melody once again lets them down on “Something for Nothing,” which is like Radiohead’s “Planet Telex,” telexed.
¡Hay Tiempo!, in solitary majesty on disc three, isn’t quite the abrupt left turn the band would like it to be. Menswe@r singer Johnny Dean recently described ¡Hay Tiempo! as “a punk/indie band, suddenly making five-minute acid-tinged country-rock pieces.” But, as ever when a British band shoots for country, the results end up closer to the Rolling Stones’ rootsy dalliances than to country music itself, while the acidic touch of ¡Hay Tiempo! is more the citric suckle of home-pressed lemonade than a full-on psychedelic freak out.
You can understand why a conservative record company got spooked. ¡Hay Tiempo! often feels like Menswe@r trying on other bands’ clothing, rather than finding themselves: “Lower Loveday” is Menswe@r does Spiritualized; “Holding Tight” is a second-hand Sweetheart of the Rodeo; “Shine” is Menswe@r on potent early Verve—and so on. It’s a rather faceless release for a band who once traded on image. But ¡Hay Tiempo!’s gilded grooves are far more listenable in 2020 than the band’s overly brittle debut album, thanks to some emotive songwriting (“Silver Tongue” especially) and reassuringly expensive production, including contributions from Pee Wee Ellis (once of James Brown’s band) and the High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan.
¡Hay Tiempo! isn’t a lost classic, then, and The Menswe@r Collection won’t propel Menswe@r to the top—or even the top two—shelves of British indie rock. But it should help musical history look more kindly on a band whose vaguely androgynous charm and sharp edges have aged a lot better than the Oasis-lite and bedwetting indie that came along in Britpop’s wake to hold the UK charts in a relentlessly beige headlock.
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. | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Demon | October 26, 2020 | 5.7 | 9ca2ef32-36e5-4153-9763-873e1717c2e6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
null | The grammatical inequality in the band name She & Him is significant, even if it's a joke or a mistake: The female with the nominative pronoun is Zooey Deschanel, the actress whose credits include *Elf*, *All the Real Girls*, and *The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford*. The male with the objective pronoun is Matt Ward, the John Fahey and Hank Williams acolyte who in eight years has risen from indie label obscurity to, arguably, the three or four spot in the active Merge Records rotation. Both Deschanel and Ward have their own successful careers, but on | She & Him: Volume One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11260-volume-one/ | Volume One | The grammatical inequality in the band name She & Him is significant, even if it's a joke or a mistake: The female with the nominative pronoun is Zooey Deschanel, the actress whose credits include Elf, All the Real Girls, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The male with the objective pronoun is Matt Ward, the John Fahey and Hank Williams acolyte who in eight years has risen from indie label obscurity to, arguably, the three or four spot in the active Merge Records rotation. Both Deschanel and Ward have their own successful careers, but on Volume One-- the first offering from their new collaborative band She & Him-- him is less than she. Although Ward produced the record and closet songwriter Deschanel only started sharing her songs at his request, the album succeeds mostly because those songs feel like familiar AM radio classics and because her voice offers instant emotional empathy. Ward's tasteful playing and sparse arrangements just serve to make something good that much better.
She also narrates the 11 songs here, all about her changing relations to an anonymous him: On the charming "Sentimental Heart", she's wrecked, crying on the floor, lonely without him. One song later during "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?", she's sitting on the shelf, playfully waiting for him to come over. On the petulant "Take It Back", she doesn't want to be loved, fooled, or wooed by him. One song later during "I Was Made for You", she's giddy over the smiling him in the street. The him in question changes throughout Volume One, but she relates to the masculine through a consistently naïve romanticism, whether it's riding a tandem bicycle alone on the somehow upbeat "Black Hole" or cheerfully telling girlfriends that love is a glorious but interminable conquest on "This Is Not a Test". Aside from two duets and obscurant backing vocals on one track, Ward serves as him only sonically, servicing the songs from the wings; thematically, Deschanel sings about a him that's not Ward at all.
But Ward and the team he gathered for two Portland, Ore., sessions in Fall 2006 and Winter 2007-- Norfolk & Western/Decemberists/M. Ward drummer Rachel Blumberg, Saddle Creek production mainstay Mike Mogis, Devotchka violinist Tom Hagerman-- are invaluable to Volume One. Deschanel writes old pop songs built around black-and-white, simplistic emotions and dotted with vintage sexual innuendo (see "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" and "Black Hole"). Her precious delivery suggests Loretta Lynn or any number of jazz vocalists minus a bit of brio, and the band-- which either builds gradually into its walls of sound or keeps things spartan and pristine-- helps the songs make sense. Ward provides an anxious staccato string arrangement and a Mellotron hum on "Sentimental Heart", teasing an optimism that, like Deschanel's romanticism, is always denied. Above Mogis' plaintive steel sighs and Ward's indifferent acoustic waltz on "Change Is Hard", her fragility becomes personal and endearing. Blumberg's big drums and Ward's stuttering electric line offer a platform for her elation on "I Was Made For You", and when Ward trails her voice on "You Really Got a Hold on Me", he's the perfect complement, his voice the shadow behind her sunlight.
Deschanel is more convincing when she's on an extreme end of romance-- either losing it or being swept into it-- than when she's trying to rationalize it. She makes that mistake three times on Volume One. The other sense of disappointment here comes from the promise Volume One suggests but doesn't deliver: Deschanel's writing is too canny ("Why do you edit? Give me credit") and her voice too natural (listen for that Feist-like crack on "Change is Hard") to sit on the tribute shelf very long. Granted, the retro exuberance here will be what sells She & Him to those beyond the indie realm. Don't be surprised when Garrison Keillor jumps on board. But with this successful introduction and the admitted homage to influences it entails finished, Deschanel has a solid foundation for building her own classic sound. After all, she's a readymade star who's already found a pretty fantastic facilitator in him. | 2008-03-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-03-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 10, 2008 | 7.4 | 9ca67ba3-79d2-4530-a312-29b9915cca1d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Mary Timony led Helium into the outer sci-fi reaches of ’90s alt-rock. Their new career-spanning box set captures their singular, influential style of punk mysticism and righteous shredding. | Mary Timony led Helium into the outer sci-fi reaches of ’90s alt-rock. Their new career-spanning box set captures their singular, influential style of punk mysticism and righteous shredding. | Helium: Ends With And / The Dirt of Luck / The Magic City / No Guitars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23133-ends-with-and-the-dirt-of-luck-the-magic-city-no-guitars/ | Ends With And / The Dirt of Luck / The Magic City / No Guitars | In the early 1990s, riot grrrl rose in the Pacific Northwest, making charged feminist statements with bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile leading a semi-underground punk revolution. Their movement was partially a response to the male-dominated grunge era, which had already achieved commercial success. An emerging crop of female voices like Alanis Morissette and Tracy Bonham rose to mainstream status in the mid-’90s alongside iconoclasts like Björk and Polly Jean Harvey, but flying somewhat under the radar was Mary Timony, a singular talent in her college town of Boston.
Declaring and expressing your feminism wasn’t easy in an industry controlled and executed mostly by men, and those who did were the brave souls who paved the way for a new era of female-fronted bands to come, among them Gossip and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, about a decade later. Mary Timony also took on sexism and sex workers, but in more subtle fashion. The cellular makeup of her music seemed inscrutable. She was one-part shoegazer, one part rocker; another part punk, another part mystic.
At that time, Timony was just getting started in what has become her winding walk around the block of American indie rock, leaving a lasting impression that she’s continuing to craft after nearly three decades of making her brand of math-prog-punk. Called a prodigy by music teachers during her formative years, Timony ignited her start in 1990 as lead guitarist with the short-lived D.C. Dischord lady band Autoclave, fronted by Christina Billotte. Fast-forwarding to 2014, Timony announced Ex Hex, the garage-rock trio that made waves with Rips. In the middle of a long and storied journey, Timony spent several years doing solo projects, a one-year stint in 1999 with Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in the Spells, and from 2010–2013, pounded out post-punk jams with supergroup Wild Flag, again with Brownstein, plus S-K/Quasi drummer Janet Weiss.
But from 1992–1997, there was Helium, a five-year riot of rock’n’roll. They were central to East Coast indie, and the band’s history comes full-circle with Matador’s vinyl re-release of their 1995 full-length debut, The Dirt of Luck, and a double LP of Helium’s second and final LP, The Magic City, combined with the No Guitars EP. Matador also gives us Ends With And, a double LP collection of Helium rarities, singles, EPs, and demos that were pulled out of the dust of basements and attics.
As singer and guitarist, Timony played the role of songwriter-in-chief for Helium, but the band’s hardiness is owed in large part to bassist Ash Bowie, he of critical guitar acclaim for Polvo, and Shawn King Devlin on drums. Interestingly, Bowie had never played bass before Helium, and Helium didn’t exactly start as Helium. In the early formation days in Boston, Helium was a quartet called Chupa with only one constant: Devlin. The rest of band included Brian Dunton, Jason Hatfield (Juliana Hatfield’s brother), and Mary Lou Lord on vocals and guitar. As a recent Boston University grad, Timony replaced Lord shortly after formation, because Lord wasn’t a fan of electric instruments.
Sound-wise, Helium was influenced by prog and paired well with Touch & Go bands like Blonde Redhead and Polvo, and Sub Pop’s the Spinanes. Restless but not reckless, Helium mixed themes of beauty and femininity with underlying dirty, dark, and masculine tones. Their lyrics are sometimes angry, other times mysterious and melancholy, and almost always a little mythical. As the band progressed, some Helium songs became complicated and heady. Angels, skeletons, and prostitutes are some of the characters you’ll meet on The Dirt of Luck. Timony tells tales of troubled young souls, though you can’t always make out the lyrics when her vocals are drowned out by heavy guitar. On the first track, “Pat’s Trick,” Timony introduces her monotone voice and a chugging guitar/bass melody, a song that mentions flowers and power, but with absolutely no hippie references. On “Baby’s Going Underground,” Devlin’s drums build like thunder as Timony sings, “Baby, I saw they kicked you down/Now you’re the only dirty trick in town/The stars are bright under your nightgown/A star is bright, a star is round.”
Helium took a leap forward with 1997’s The Magic City, with Timony’s vocals ringing louder, the band emitting more collective confidence, and the sound becoming richer with the addition of keyboard, sitar, and harpsichords. Magic City songs are often like fairy tales, covering topics ranging from devil’s tears to magic crimes in ancient times, and even aging astronauts. You could find early Genesis influences on the eight-minute epic, “The Revolution of Hearts Pts I and II.” On “Lady of the Fire,” Timony sings, “I was born underground, I have two horns/And I’m gonna make love to a unicorn.” It was a strange confluence of alt-rock and fantasy, both kinetic and transportive.
Which leaves us with the finale: Ends With And, a collection of songs pressed onto blue and yellow vinyl. Timony said that she “pored over hours of unlabeled cassette demos, odd test pressings, and DAT tapes” to assemble songs like “Green Chair,” which as you learn from the liner notes, was created in 1997 with their friend Kendall Meade (Mascott) while touring Europe with Sleater-Kinney. These liner notes are one of the best parts about the double LP, akin to a fanzine filled with the inside scoop about the band, by the band. Also included in the set are clips of reviews from Sassy and Chick Factor, official arbiters of cool back in the Clinton era.
At a time when riot grrrl aimed to change the game for female musicians, Mary Timony played for both teams. She was simultaneously respected by the politically charged Pacific Northwest scene—and continues to collaborate with them today—while making a statement as a badass woman guitarist in Helium. Helium’s sound is cemented in the ’90s, but the curiosity of Timony and the far-out ways of her music let this music live outside of the standard imagery of college rock and grunge. Her impact on music is both indelible and ever-changing, and most importantly, far from over. | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 24, 2017 | 8.5 | 9ca69b53-220d-45a3-9d75-bf383616f8ac | Amy Schroeder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-schroeder/ | null |
The debut album by Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting his attempt to reunite house's splintered factions. Analysis aside, it's also a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music. | The debut album by Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting his attempt to reunite house's splintered factions. Analysis aside, it's also a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music. | Slava: Raw Solutions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17915-slava-raw-solutions/ | Raw Solutions | For years, dance music was gripped by a compulsion to sort its constituent material into ever more finely grained categories, so that a style like drum n' bass could spawn dozens upon dozens of sub-subgenres, each with its own precise aesthetic definition. Thankfully the easy digital exchange of music and the influx of new participants in the culture who aren’t bound by received orthodoxies has helped to break this taxonomical fever, and the dance music artists most worth paying attention to right now are the ones paying the least attention to the lines drawn between styles.; ones like Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava Balasanov, for instance.
Balasanov (who records using just his first name) has in the past been associated with the seapunk and witch house movements, but that’s more a side-effect of putting out music on labels like Coral Records and Tri Angle than because of any particular stylistic affinity. He identifies simply as a house musician, which is much closer to the truth, although still inexact. On his debut full-length, Raw Solutions, Balasanov gives the impression of someone taking all of house's splintered, baffling stylistic descendants, and attempting to fuse them back into one unified whole.
While Raw Solutions takes a holistic view towards house, with an apparent goal of touching on every possible variation of the form, Balasanov obviously has some favorites. He gets the most mileage out of a Chicago-specific stylistic continuum that starts in first-wave house and moves on through ghetto house, juke, and footwork, folding an entire evolutionary branch back in on itself in an atemporal collage of stuttering high-speed beats, raunchy vocal loops, and retro-ravey synths.
As interesting as Balasanov’s attempt to create an ur-house may be-- as well as his excursions further afield into R&B, moombahton, and beyond-- his emulations of those sounds wouldn’t be proper tributes unless they bumped. Which they do, it turns out. Raw Solutions can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting it, but stepping away from the analytical perspective reveals it to be a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music.
Balasanov has a deeply intuitive understanding of house’s build-and-release dynamic, as well as its give and take with its audience, which he applies in interesting ways. The return from the breakdown on the opening track, “Werk”, which nods at salsa and 90s club music, is a piece of subtle, nuanced craftsmanship that’s the polar opposite of the walloping EDM drop. The triptych of “Girls on Dick”, “Wait”, and “On It” comprise a two-part exploration of ghetto house’s hypnotic salaciousness, split up by a brief, juxtapositional trip into chillwave-inflected ambience.
Raw Solutions is more ambitious than the average dance album, both in terms of the span of sonic territory that it covers and its attempts to synthesize all of it into one cohesive work. And it’s more successful than most. Track-by-track, the music’s potent, but like Balasanov’s approach to making it, it’s much more than simply the sum of its parts. | 2013-05-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Software | May 16, 2013 | 7.8 | 9cb65364-a1a2-43bc-b71d-aecd7ee6bc58 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Though far from their debut, the band’s 1975 self-titled album felt like a debut: a pop-rock statement and the unexpected intersection of two parallel spheres that offered something genuinely new. | Though far from their debut, the band’s 1975 self-titled album felt like a debut: a pop-rock statement and the unexpected intersection of two parallel spheres that offered something genuinely new. | Fleetwood Mac: Fleetwood Mac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fleetwood-mac-fleetwood-mac/ | Fleetwood Mac | Fleetwood Mac existed for nearly a decade prior to the release of Fleetwood Mac in 1975 but not in a manner that modern audiences would recognize. The story of how Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks transformed the British blues band anchored by drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie is well and often told in countless documentaries, retrospectives, and such reissues as this new triple-CD/single-DVD Super Deluxe Edition. Repetition has curdled this fascinating tale, rendering happy accidents as the work of divine providence, but by adding a disc of rough alternate takes along with a disc of live material, this Super Deluxe Edition helps make the familiar seem fresh once again.
Tired though it may be, the prehistory of Fleetwood Mac is essential to understanding the album because the record exists at the intersection of two very different rock’n’roll aesthetics. By the time 1975 rolled around, the Mac were survivors. Mick and John—the two constants in the band since its inception through today—had the luck to work with two troubled guitar geniuses. Peter Green dominated the group’s earliest and bluesiest records, eventually succumbing to LSD right around the time his cohort Jeremy Spencer abandoned music for a religious cult. Neither departure was clean, but guitarist Danny Kirwan acted as a bonding agent for the band until they found Bob Welch, a rocker with a sentimental streak who seemed content to linger in the amorphous space separating AOR rock and adult contemporary pop. If all this turnover wasn’t confusing enough, the band had to combat an imposter Fleetwood Mac assembled by their former manager.
All these names have wound up as footnotes to Fleetwood Mac history because Mick Fleetwood happened to fall for a demo from the unknown SoCal singer/songwriters Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. If producer Keith Olsen, who helmed Buckingham Nicks’ self-titled 1973 album, never played Mick that tape, odds are good Fleetwood Mac would’ve wound up hiring some other hotshot blues guitarist. Instead, Fleetwood wound up finding something he’d later call “IT” within Buckingham Nicks, a folk-rock duo whose music shared almost no similarities to the albums Fleetwood Mac made prior to 1975. The one possible musical connection between the two groups was the melodicism of Christine McVie, a singer-songwriter who played piano with the blues combo Chicken Shack prior to her marriage to John. Once they were bride and groom, Christine officially joined the band in 1971, contributing appealingly soft and hooky counterpoints to the spacey rock of Kirwan and Welch.
Nevertheless, there was no clear analog in the Fleetwood Mac discography to the dreamy folk of Nicks and the barbed pop perfectionism of Buckingham, sounds that were as distinctly American as Fleetwood Mac’s blues jams were British. Buckingham Nicks were also survivors of languishing in musical limbo the West Coast, but were not quite naive upstarts when they accepted Fleetwood’s offer to join Fleetwood Mac: they had been playing the same game for just as long as the Mac, only in a different league. That’s why the 1975 album called Fleetwood Mac—the group’s second album to be named after the band; according to David Wild’s liner notes in the 2018 Super Deluxe Edition, fans apparently distinguish it from its predecessor by calling it “the White Album” but it’s hard to imagine there are many listeners who bother with such a distinction—feels like a debut: the unexpected intersection of two parallel spheres offers something genuinely new.
Listening to Fleetwood Mac now, decades after it turned the group into superstars, it still seems fresh, unlike any other of its 1975 peers, and that’s all due to how the band merged two aesthetics. Fleetwood Mac, especially in the years following Peter Green’s departure, were something of a mood band, achieving a hazy, spacious vibe that lacked definition. Buckingham Nicks were their counterparts, focused not just on the precision of songs but also productions: their 1973 album captures nascent versions of the two singer/songwriters, where Nicks’ delicateness is balanced by Buckingham’s manic perfectionism.
Buckingham did attempt to get Fleetwood Mac to march to his beat—legend has it he was attempting to tell John how to play a part until the bassist put the hammer down, telling Buckingham that the band was named after him—but wound up settling for compromise, assisting Nicks and Christine in deepening their compositions, while his band gave soul and elasticity to his tightly wound songs. Such synthesis is the appeal of Fleetwood Mac, in part because it’s assembled from so many lingering ideals from the ’60s: hippie mysticism, pop practicalism, R&B grooves, and rock rebellion all molded into music that is simultaneously professional, personal, commercial, and eccentric.
By piling on alternate takes, single edits, and live material, the Super Deluxe Edition underscores how Fleetwood Mac worked at achieving this fusion. Maybe the early versions are rough, but they feel kinetic because the band is figuring out just who they were. Even better is the live material, where the band navigates the distance between their early blues roots and newly discovered immaculate pop. Because he plays lead guitar and sings, Buckingham winds up dominating, but the wonderful thing about these versions of “Oh Well” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown)” is that they’re blues tunes fronted by a musician whose instincts pushes him in the opposite direction of the blues, which gives these performances a thrilling energy.
Even if the bonus material is worthwhile, the music that remains marvelous is the proper album. Perhaps its origins are in leftovers—many of the songs were originally intended for a planned second Buckingham Nicks album, “Crystal” is revived from the first, the brilliant power pop of “Blue Letter” is taken from the unheralded Curtis Brothers—but the Fleetwood Mac feels unified because this album is an album of convergence. Every element of the album teems with boundless possibilities, so much of which could be found in the absolutely bewitching Nicks-helmed “Rhiannon,” which is why Fleetwood Mac seems thrillingly alive and resonant longer after it has been absorbed into our collective consciousness. | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | January 27, 2018 | 9 | 9ccc4695-d558-4bc9-881e-66d37d099c6e | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
A million years ago, Vanessa Carlton released "A Thousand Miles", the pop song that launched a generation of piano lessons. Now, she's releasing the raw, muted, refreshingly weird Liberman, a record that could share headspaces with Perfume Genius or Angel Olsen. | A million years ago, Vanessa Carlton released "A Thousand Miles", the pop song that launched a generation of piano lessons. Now, she's releasing the raw, muted, refreshingly weird Liberman, a record that could share headspaces with Perfume Genius or Angel Olsen. | Vanessa Carlton: Liberman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21173-liberman/ | Liberman | Let's get "A Thousand Miles" out of the way. Fourteen years ago, Vanessa Carlton made a very popular song that will follow her around forever. Fair enough; it's very catchy. But times have changed. Can't Vanessa? She recently told CBS News that she "learned a lot" since her debut album, "which is mostly that you don't know anything." That's as good a place as any to reset, which she does with the refreshingly raw Liberman.
Like the bulk of her recordings, it's still comprised of her honeysuckle voice and piano licks, but Liberman (so named after Carlton's grandfather, one of whose paintings of nudes hangs in her home and served, she says, as a sort of inspiration) either lets those components stand alone or accentuates them with mild indulgences, like blunted brass or hand claps. The bare songwriting is not something you would identify as avant-garde, but Carlton's inclinations are a lot weirder than they used to be. Take the album cover, which with its thick white border and bold black type resembles a Gentlewoman magazine cover. This isn't quite an album of Swiss design-inspired art jams, but maybe it's her version. The single "Operator" has Carlton using the huskiness of her voice to sound threatening in a way that makes you wonder what a truly severe Vanessa Carlton album might sound like.
Still, Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk. Early single "Blue Pool", for example, touches on each in a way that feels refreshingly old school, as though pop radio these days was comprised of Fleetwood Mac and the Mamas and the Papas. The song's latter third is given over entirely to arpeggiating keyboard runs in a way you don't notice at first, because it's so atmospheric and catchy. But it's also odd—is this a sketch of a song? An extended outro? What is it doing here?
The album is pockmarked with quirky decisions like this and it's better for it. Were Liberman the creation of a heretofore-unknown artist, it's difficult to imagine an album of such earnestness generating the kind of pre-release interest that would deem it worthy of CBS News. But that's the pickle of early success. The flipside is that it's also harder to imagine fans of punkier singer-songwriters like Angel Olsen or Tobias Jesso Jr. embracing her. She should share a stage with Perfume Genius. They both have beautiful voices and something to say.
For Carlton, that message is a simple, almost sisterly, "You got this." "That's the way it is, love," she sings on "House of Seven Swords", breaking the fourth wall with some mild real talk. This is the person I want to hear tell me "shit happens"; the confidence in her voice is very reassuring. Perhaps that is the source of some of Carlton's magic, that she herself is delivering the shaman's prayer she sings about on album opener "Take It Easy". "When heaven wraps around you/ And she will/ Take it easy". Don't mind if I do. | 2015-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dine Alone | October 21, 2015 | 7.8 | 9cd0f1a5-ffd8-4dcf-9bd7-4318b49b77b8 | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | null |
On the synth-pop group’s latest album, they incorporate eerie and inventive production that sometimes overpowers their strengths. | On the synth-pop group’s latest album, they incorporate eerie and inventive production that sometimes overpowers their strengths. | Poliça: Madness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polica-madness/ | Madness | Since Poliça first gained traction in the early 2010s, vocalist and synth player Channy Leaneagh has been their franchise player, doing the lion’s share of press and standing in the spotlight during live shows and videos. On the Minneapolis synth-pop group’s latest album, Madness, there’s a shift: Leaneagh’s swooping voice is less central than it was on 2020’s When We Stay Alive, an album that combined ruminative lyrics about injury and recovery with arrangements that felt a little too slick and mechanical. Madness flips that approach. The instrumentation is more laid back, but the vocals—always a key part of Poliça songs—receive a surreal, futuristic sheen.
Madness makes prominent use of Allovers, an “anthropomorphic production tool” designed by producer Ryan Olson (also Leanagh’s husband) and Seth Rosetter. In 2019, the pair incorporated it into a MASS MoCA sound installation that transformed a museum building into a kind of living instrument, generating music based on the idle chatter and movements of patrons. On Madness, it blends the percussion with the swelling synths to create an uncanny valley quality—too organic to be digital, but too robotic to be analog. What might have been a stack of synths and drums on an earlier Poliça record now has an unpredictable rhythmic and sonic variance, like the familiar yet bizarre refractions of artist Alexander Mordvintsev’s DeepDream technology.
The use of Allovers leads to some interesting textural moments, like the oscillating, tinny ding behind the neo-soul groove of “Blood” or the guttural gurgling underneath “Away.” In general, however, Madness plods more than the band’s best work and doesn’t make as novel use of Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson’s dual drummer setup. The most musically interesting Poliça records, like 2016’s United Crushers, balanced moments of ambience with jagged, uptempo anthems that invited dancing. At just seven songs, Madness devotes nearly half its runtime to burbling ballads that lack structure, denying the catharsis of those career peaks.
Madness is billed as a “companion piece” to When We Stay Alive, an album partially inspired by Leaneagh’s recovery from a debilitating fall that reshaped her perspective. None of the lyrics here hit with the same level of urgency or intensity, although “Fountain,” with its description of a tumultuous relationship, comes closest. (“Don’t you calm me when I speak/I will never be that weak,” Leaneagh warns.) In early interviews, Leaneagh explained her resistance to being perceived as a singer-songwriter, claiming to focus less on enunciation than conveying emotions, and this record makes her writing feel secondary to the music.
Leaneagh has been obscuring her voice and coating it in digital effects since the band’s debut. But coming off a gripping lyrical record like When We Stay Alive, it’s hard to feel as connected to Madness, particularly when the most compelling lines are swallowed by the production. “Alive” features an impassioned vocal performance, but the actual lyrics are obscured behind the oscillating synths. The juxtaposition of Leaneagh’s falsetto and Chris Bierden’s bassline on “Sweet Memz” is enchanting—she holds long, elegiac notes while his fingers move nimbly around the fretboard—but its introspective message is bogged down by clunky lines like “I ain’t special, just one of a kind.” The intense delay used on Leaneagh’s voice on “Fountain” overpowers the melody, and that’s emblematic of an issue with several of these songs: The band succeeds at setting a solemn mood, but mood itself is often all they communicate.
Poliça emerged at a time when the sound of fellow synth-pop bands like Chvrches and Purity Ring was both commercially viable and cutting edge. Those groups have tried various deviations and tweaks on their original formula over the years, and Poliça now appear in search of a middle ground that combines their visceral songwriting with Madness’ inventive textures. At their best, these songs offer hints of that forward trajectory: Blending naturalistic elements with an eerie, post-modern edge, Leaneagh’s voice guides us through the maze, reminding us that human emotion still has a role in the cybernetic future. | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | June 6, 2022 | 6.5 | 9cd74790-6e8e-45f6-a2ba-fad6b501bdfb | Grant Rindner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grant-rindner/ | |
The Australian metal band’s sixth album is dense and disorienting, collapsing the boundary between the human voice and machine-made clamor. | The Australian metal band’s sixth album is dense and disorienting, collapsing the boundary between the human voice and machine-made clamor. | Portal: Avow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portal-avow/ | Avow | There is no escaping a Portal record. The Australian avant-garde metal band deliberately packs every bar of their music to attain maximum carnage. They do not yield to melody, space, or enunciation. Instead, they “selfishly explore the abhorrent side of life,” as guitarist Horror Illogium once put it. Portal’s sixth album, Avow, is especially punishing. Each of its six tracks is dense with mayhem—fast-flying shrapnel that tears through the temporal lobe and leaves you in a state of frenzied delirium. In Portal’s world, the path to transcendence is not meditation but the merciless bombardment of life’s ugliest shit. Somewhere in that thorny tangle lies divine madness—ecstasy bred from agony.
Portal shroud themselves in self-made mythology, swapping their real-life identities for esoteric pseudonyms like Aphotic Mote and Omenous Fugue. In concert, they opt for dark theatrics, shielding their physical forms with ornate and ritualistic costumes. Mysterious frontman the Curator has appeared as an evil pope, a grandfather clock, and a tentacled demon in Renaissance garb, to name a few. The same meticulous attention to detail exists within their music. As Avow unfurls, Portal find new depths to their technical, transgressive death metal. Ignis Fatuus pummels his drum kit at speeds comparable to the discharge of an automatic weapon. Guitarists Illogium and Mote sound like they are attacking their strings with hacksaws instead of picks. The Curator lurks in the shadows, waiting until you’ve settled in before unleashing his furor.
Technically, there is a break between each song on Avow, but you won’t find refuge there. (As if this music wasn’t extreme enough, Portal dropped a companion album—the unruly noise LP Hagbulbia—the very same day.) Like their best records, Avow blares and pulsates as a unified whole. With tracks ranging from five minutes to 10, it is an act of stamina that ends in elation. Opener “Catafalque,” the longest track, rides the ceaseless onslaught of guitar, disfigured by distortion and performed with calculated violence. It takes two whole minutes before the Curator storms in with his malignant growl—a guttural, subhuman sound that further defiles his bandmates’ noise.
Though it is half the length of “Catafalque,” “Offune” is Avow’s most distressing cut. Battered toms and the Curator’s breath-of-death are its major planes of sound, but it’s the prickling guitar riffs that burrow under the skin. High-pitched and clipped, they prod and poke at the psyche like subliminal messaging in a horror film. On “Manor of Speaking,” Portal play with psychoacoustics, the collective snarl of their instruments taking the shape of a disembodied scream in the song’s final moments. The inability to differentiate between machine-made clamor and the human voice is a natural evolution of Portal’s disorienting tactics. Sounds bleed into one another and bloom into a mammoth squall. The long-term side effects include a dizzying, unnameable dread, something that sticks in your gut long after you’ve turned off your stereo.
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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. | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | June 4, 2021 | 7.6 | 9cd74edd-b2e6-4ee7-ae47-6602a48942e3 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On their bona fide all-stars album, everyone from DRAM to Amber Mark to The-Dream cannot save the electronic duo from their tastelessness. | On their bona fide all-stars album, everyone from DRAM to Amber Mark to The-Dream cannot save the electronic duo from their tastelessness. | Chromeo: Head Over Heels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chromeo-head-over-heels/ | Head Over Heels | Karl Marx said that history repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Like a slap bass or Zapp drum, it’s an irresistible cliché, but useful. Chromeo first got me thinking about Marx because they got me thinking about Daft Punk. Like the louche robots, Dave 1 and P-Thugg began in Francophonic bedrooms with a strong personal style and a predilection for funk licks, which they took to increasingly vast crowds as white, heterosexual guys rediscovered the joys of dancing their girlfriends and gay friends and POC acquaintances never forgot. Cue a crisis of credibility perhaps inevitable after sticking around for fifteen years and voila: Chromeo’s Head Over Heels, a bona fide all-stars album, Random Access Memories-style, that attempts to show off their own bona fides.
Head Over Heels aims lower than its counterpart from a few years ago, and in all fairness, does achieve a funky kind of farce. Chromeo rounded up some studio legends—Jesse Johnson, who co-wrote classics like “The Bird” and “Jungle Love” as an original member of the Time; Raphael Saadiq, who seemingly produced every hit of the ’90s; and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who did the same in the ’00s, or at least those not produced by The-Dream, who also sings on this album—and enlisted their solid musicianship in the service of some really dumb ideas.
Which is all to say, Head Over Heels sounds expert, expensive, accomplished, while being distasteful in almost everything else. First single “Juice” pours out a sugary, intoxicating groove reminiscent of ’80s boogie masters Mtume, whose Tawatha Agee provides backing vocals, then sours it with some gross ideas about power dynamics: “Relationships ain’t a democracy,” oh, Jesus, gross. “Must’ve Been” is a sort of “Fuck You” after the weed kicks in; it’s hard to get excited about a talk box these days, but Johnson’s guitar is so ticklish, and DRAM’s harmonies so pretty, you might as well giggle, if you can, at the lyric’s macho theatrics. To be fair, it’s the cost of doing business if you’re a fan of the band that brought you “Needy Girl” and “Sexy Socialite.”
If the album is typically weird about women, it’s worse about money. “Slumming It” starts out with, “She got lipstick on my blue collar,” and it’s downhill from there. Imagine “Common People” without the class consciousness, or “Uptown Girl” with a protagonist even less believably marginalized than Billy Joel and a (pretty good) saxophone solo instead of the faux-Frankie Valli lilt. And “Bad Decision” is a very Ivanka Trump kind of love song, in which a guy gives his future over to the credit industrial complex to show his devotion. “Let’s book a shopping trip, maybe I could charter a jet/And I don’t give a shit if I never get out of debt,” he croons. “Take out all my money from the bank/Take you around the corner, buy a ring…You make me want to make a bad decision.” Falling for this acquisition-as-affection is a bad decision too.
On the upside, “Just Friends” could tear the roof off a particular kind of penthouse party in DTLA or Williamsburg, mostly due to the super-charismatic Amber Mark and a groove that stays out of her way. But you might as well listen to Maroon 5 if you enjoy the slickness, and there are dozens of better bounces to be had from Atlantic Starr to Daft Punk themselves, nevermind Nite Jewel and Thundercat and Ariana Grande and the list goes on. Head Over Heels might replace the duo’s trademark mannequin legs on the cover for their own, but these days such co-opting of realness is real meh. It’s genderfluid like a tech bro in a stunt romper drinking a Monster. The farce is strong with these ones. | 2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Big Beat / Atlantic | June 18, 2018 | 5.7 | 9ce0a40b-f4ab-4a70-8f01-5a0ac2eab5a0 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Technomancer is certainly Travis Egedy’s most nicely produced output yet, with his voice coming through stronger than ever. Yet its reach is not as big as its grand potential. Slowing down and going for a clean sound is a fine aesthetic choice, but the songs' final feeling is one of aiming at something and not quite making it. | Technomancer is certainly Travis Egedy’s most nicely produced output yet, with his voice coming through stronger than ever. Yet its reach is not as big as its grand potential. Slowing down and going for a clean sound is a fine aesthetic choice, but the songs' final feeling is one of aiming at something and not quite making it. | Pictureplane: Technomancer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21162-technomancer/ | Technomancer | The world that these songs on exist in, as Pictureplane’s Travis Egedy sings to us, is a dead one (where, of course, people get it on in the ruins of a shopping mall). The arrangements on Technomancer frequently play like droning or piercing alarms, particularly on tracks like “Sick Machine” and “Death Condition,” the latter of which is laden with clunky, mechanical percussion that makes it sound like a vintage video game. Whereas Pictureplane’s 2011 record Thee Physical spun queer and cyborg theory into fuzzy house-inspired electronica, Technomancer plays like a soundtrack to a sci-fi dystopian film. It works well as a concept record about trying to break out of one’s oppressive urban regime, with Egedy weaving his whispery conspiracy theories into every track.
But while Pictureplane’s signature ’90s-evoking female vocal samples might sing soulfully in the distance, the record feels drained of the energy his previous albums showcased. The common setting on Techomancer is slowmo, with most tracks favoring ethereal, romantic ’80s synths over the pumped up, choppy compositions on Thee Physical. Even the breakbeat intro on “Harsh Realm” cuts out a minute in, favoring a more chilled out, awkward see-saw synth progression before returning to the sound of the song’s start. The blaring airhorns and record scratching sounds on “Street Pressure” feel like they’re working against the soft, sultry melody Egedy builds on that song, like a jokey nod to traditional club music. All of this seems at odds with the sound Pictureplane has cultivated thus far. There’s a tame, almost downtempo vibe to a lot of this record that keeps it from beginning to end in a sluggish, not very dance-friendly territory.
Technomancer is certainly Egedy’s most nicely produced output yet, with his voice coming through stronger than ever on a lot of these songs. “Crack all the windows downtown, it’s that new American noise,” he sings to a “renegade street trash” on the more traditional, radio-friendly pop track “Riot Porn.” But the noise of Technomancer just plays too comfortably. Technomancer is very high concept in its man vs. machine dystopian themes, but the darkwave-edged beats Egedy constructs, while bleak, don’t possess the same level of imagination. In seemingly trying to make more cinematic and visionary electronica he ends up making pretty lackluster, slow-burning pop. On Technomancer Egedy’s typically wire-frayed, wall-of-sound ’90s mixtape sound feels stripped into something more pedestrian rather than futuristic. | 2015-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Anticon | November 2, 2015 | 5.9 | 9ced42b7-f239-4880-8b70-96604458323b | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
Early last year, Markus Siegenhort, leader of the German black metal explorers Lantlôs, elected to split with Neige, the leader of France’s Alcest and one of the key figures in carrying black metal past its atavistic beginnings. Despite the breakup, on Melting Sun, Lantlôs’ fourth and most cohesive album, Siegenhort likewise sings sans ire, his mid-range croon ferried upward by a set of gentle effects. | Early last year, Markus Siegenhort, leader of the German black metal explorers Lantlôs, elected to split with Neige, the leader of France’s Alcest and one of the key figures in carrying black metal past its atavistic beginnings. Despite the breakup, on Melting Sun, Lantlôs’ fourth and most cohesive album, Siegenhort likewise sings sans ire, his mid-range croon ferried upward by a set of gentle effects. | Lantlôs: Melting Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19267-lantlos-melting-sun/ | Melting Sun | Death, murder, betrayal and suicide: Thanks to the salacious deeds that helped to shape the face of black metal and the hyperbolic reports that galvanized those bygone deeds as modern music mythology, those options might seem to be the only such ways bands split with their members. But nearly a quarter-century after Dead made good on his name, the characters and the contents of black metal have evolved. Knotty, nasty fury has given rise to bands who couch assaults in pretty, dramatic shapes—shoegaze atmospherics, electronic environments, symphonic structures.
Early last year, Markus Siegenhort, leader of the German black metal explorers Lantlôs, elected to split with one member not through torture or even a tantrum, but instead through a fawning email. “I am very thankful, not only for your singing, but also for pushing the band and last but definitely(!) not least for your friendship. … Though, we can’t go on like this,” he wrote. “I hope you understand our/my situation and don’t see this as total cut on all edges. I still like you as a person and still want to be friends. Needless to say this!!!”
The singer receiving the email was Neige, the leader of France’s Alcest and one of the key figures in carrying black metal past its atavistic beginnings. In Lantlôs, he shared vocals with Siegenhort for 2010’s .neon and 2011’s Agape, albums that countered roars with post-rock drama and jazz redirection to varying degrees. With his own project, Neige had moved steadily from the belligerent black metal of his youth to gentle, sophisticated, metal-barbed rock. But with Lantlôs, he could still scream. Now they didn’t need him anymore. “I want to do vocals on this thing,” Siegenhort wrote to Neige of the next album. “I am so proud and I feel like my voice suits the music that I feel like it was nonsense giving it away for the sheer sake of friendship.”
Given the genteel manner of Neige’s excommunication, it seems needlessly provocative to suggest an emerging rivalry between Alcest and Lantlôs. But their respective new records do just that. Released in January, Alcest’s Shelter found Neige stepping cleanly out of his shadowed past to coo over washes of reverb-tempered distortion and arpeggio splendor. He committed so fully to the saturated sound of shoegaze and the ascent of post-rock that he recorded Shelter in Sigur Rós’ own Icelandic bubble with guest vocals from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead. In spite of the ostentatious production, though, Shelter sounded thin and hesitant, a concession to obsessions rather than a victory over them.
On Melting Sun, Lantlôs’ fourth and most cohesive album, Siegenhort likewise sings sans ire, his mid-range croon ferried upward by a set of gentle effects. As with Alcest, Lantlôs has largely let go of the black metal to be found on those earlier albums. Now a trio, the band has retained a love of shrieking-and-stacked guitars, though they now flood less-claustrophobic post-rock forms in order to arrive at a sort of over-amplified and intoxicating dream pop. Where Alcest’s own step into the light revealed a withering paleness, Melting Sun is sanguine and bracing, an album that doesn’t lose power simply because the band has discarded a once-central element of its sound. Siegenhort was right: Lantlôs didn’t need Neige, after all.
Lantlôs runs on efficiency during Melting Sun. In the past, they’ve slipped into tangents that, to some extent, only showed just how beyond metal they’d gone—into the era of electric Miles, the atmospheres of krautrock, the brow-beatings of doom. But for these six tracks, they smartly splice those influences into one another, a move that maintains momentum. The most aggressive bits bear texture, and the most billowing moments don’t float too far afield. Lantlôs finds unexpected ways to link hooks and heaviness while mostly splitting the space between them. “Jade Fields,” for instance, cycles through celestial harmonies and refracted, kaleidoscopic guitar notes that suggest Dustin Wong, but the rhythm section beneath them is a coil of muscle. A minute into “Cherry Quartz”, Lantlôs races through one of the album’s few black metal spans. Beneath the harsh haze, though, there’s a romantic slide guitar part, the bait left waving in the wind. The moment suggests the Twilight Sad sporting full sleeves. Even closer “Golden Mind", which drifts into a Beach House-esque reverie, carries a vaguely sinister air.
At the midsection of “Aquamarine Towers”, the three-piece shifts instantly out of a march, turning the meter into a trap of tripwires and the riff into electronic noise that creeps like volunteer vines. The moment suggests that Lantlôs should be the next ostensible “metal” act on Thrill Jockey, a label that’s managed to move between Tortoise, Oval, and the Body during the last few years. After all, such willful hybridization is what ultimately makes Melting Sun so much more compelling than Shelter, the latter which follows a definitive stylistic choice to its mannerist and rather boring end. Instead, Melting Sun pulls every trick in Lantlôs’ past into the present, making for charged pop that’s short neither on volume nor surprises nor impact. Melting Sun, like Shelter, is gorgeous. In this case, though, that’s only the start of the compliments, not the end. | 2014-05-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-05-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Prophecy | May 26, 2014 | 8 | 9cf3de6b-34ff-4ae4-96c1-fa6078a935a7 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | 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 1978 album from an icon of soul and disco, a formative record in the queer canon. | 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 1978 album from an icon of soul and disco, a formative record in the queer canon. | Sylvester: Step II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sylvester-step-ii/ | Step II | On New Year’s Eve, 1986, Sylvester appeared on The Late Show With Joan Rivers in a towering, orange sherbet-colored wig and a sequined pantsuit. It had been nearly a decade since his breakthrough single, the mirrorball disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” from 1978’s Step II, and the famously androgynous San Francisco singer had built up an easy rapport with Rivers; they’d previously worked together at an AIDS benefit, before the pandemic gained national attention. The conversation eventually eased into some expected ribbing: “What did you say when your family found out you wanted to be a drag queen?” Rivers asks.
“I am not a drag queen!” the singer guffaws, tossing back that fiery mane. “I am Sylvester.”
Simple and matter-of-fact, the retort is a snapshot of the disco maven as he forever intended himself to be: a one-of-a-kind talent in no uncertain terms—Sylvester—destined for stardom long before the world was prepared for it. He melded gospel, funk, and disco to create a spangled, unforgettable impression on the ’70s and ’80s, and through it all, Sylvester remained resolutely himself. The qualities about him that were so often marginalized—Black, gay, and feminine—were the same ones that made him an undeniable star.
Born Sylvester James in South Central Los Angeles, he was fed an early musical education from his doting grandmother and Pentecostal church choirs, where he studied Aretha Franklin interpretations and honed a featherlight, inimitable falsetto. Sylvester joined a troupe of drag queens named the Disquotays in his teens, fixing the crew’s wigs and outfits and floating from party to party under the cover of night to dodge laws forbidding drag in California. He left home in 1970 for San Francisco. It was there, in the queer, roving melting pot of the Castro, where Sylvester began to perform.
Sylvester flourished in San Francisco, which quickly became his adopted home city for its sense of sexual liberation; no other city could quite contain him. He joined the renegade drag act the Cockettes and taught them gospel, but otherwise clashed with their outrageous brand of sketch comedy. Yet his appearances with the group—and especially his soaring solos—quickly turned Sylvester into an underground sensation. In 1972, when David Bowie failed to sell out his first San Francisco show, he told reporters, “They don’t need me; they have Sylvester.”
A seed had been planted, and Sylvester began to perform solo as the doyenne Ruby Blue, a jazz and soul persona influenced by his grandmother that he’d first assumed with the Cockettes. He played at the Rickshaw Lounge in Chinatown, singing standards by early icons like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Lena Horne. Ruby came about, in Sylvester’s words, to inhabit “the mystery of it. The freedom of it. The glamour of it.” Here, the genesis of Sylvester’s music was born, rich in soul and spiritual traditions, with a high tenor capable of trying on different feminine vocal styles at a whim.
Sylvester’s gender identity was purposefully inscrutable. His costumes oscillated between feminine extremes, sporting tinsel tutus with bouffanted wigs, but offstage he could be just as muted. Sylvester was equally comfortable trying on “butch” signifiers like leather pants or a close-cropped haircut; both sides lived within him at all times. He insisted that he never thought about his sexual identity onstage, citing a piece of advice given to him by another one of his idols, Josephine Baker: “The illusion you create onstage is all.” Sylvester defied categorization at every opportunity, and shrugged off questions intended to pin him down with the same cool he maintained on record: “Look dear, being gay means absolutely nothing except to straight people,” he sniped to a nosy reporter in 1978.
By the time Sylvester began to cut his own records, having signed to the San Francisco label Blue Thumb, he was still finding a niche. His rock-funk music, performing as Sylvester and the Hot Band, was far from the synthy, formulaic disco beginning to dominate both the charts and the gay clubs he frequented. Sylvester was a casual disco fan at best, and it wasn’t until he signed with jazz label Fantasy, by way of veteran producer Harvey Fuqua, that he fully leaned into the vision. Sylvester released a soulful self-titled album in the summer of 1977 and followed it up the next year with the glittering Step II, which remains his most precise and dazzling album.
The album’s opening one-two punch, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat),” both flaunt Sylvester’s musical genius, but the former is his his crown jewel. Working with a band led by guitarist James “Tip” Wirrick, the singer intended it as a traditional ballad and wrote lyrics off the cuff in the studio. The arrangement morphed into something else entirely once Patrick Cowley, a friend and producer obsessed with Giorgio Moroder and Euro-dance eccentrics, got a hold of the song and infused it with a synthesized disco pulse. (“I’ll always love and be grateful to you,” reads Sylvester’s dedication to Cowley in Step II’s liner notes, “for being right on time.”) “You Make Me Feel” pumps with the same space-age DNA as Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” released just the year before, only with Summer’s wispy voice replaced by Sylvester’s high-wire depiction of the era in San Francisco: “To dance and sweat and cruise and go home and carry on and how a person feels,” as he described it. His falsetto dances along with tense breath control until he screams that orgasmic chorus, a full-throated Pentecostal spiritual transformed into an instant disco crowdpleaser.
Sylvester believed there were “enough love songs in the world like there were enough children,” yet Step II throbs with passion. Sylvester covers Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s swaying “I Took My Strength From You,” elongating his vocals into gossamer threads and bending the song into a pure devotional. “Was It Something That I Said,” a rolling R&B song co-written with Fuqua, opens with a back-and-forth between Sylvester’s beloved backup singers, Martha Wash and Izora Armstead (aka Two Tons o’ Fun, who would later form the Weather Girls). “Child, have you heard the latest?” they titter. “Uh-oh, what’s goin’ on now? About Sylvester breakin’ up?” He recalls receiving a letter with a phone number, only to call and find it disconnected. The fallout leaves him overcome, a miniature tragedy writ large with funky keys, horn licks, and a spoken-word bridge.
Step II and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” led Sylvester to international success. The album went gold (celebrated by the label with wine bottles pressed with Step II labels, no less), and Sylvester made a slew of TV appearances where he put on brassy performances for national audiences. He opened for acts such as the Commodores, the O’Jays, and Chaka Khan, and extensively toured Europe, whipping fans abroad into a Beatles-style mania. Practically overnight, all of Sylvester’s dreams of stardom had become a reality, and he hadn’t forsaken any part of himself to get there.
Sylvester received the keys to San Francisco on March 11, 1979, and “You Make Me Feel” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2018, formally confirming Sylvester’s impact on American culture at large. Go to any gay club or Pride event worth its salt and you’ll hear “You Make Me Feel” blaring over the speakers at some point, spinning open and sending every person to the dancefloor to commune. Remnants of the ballad version appear on a reprise halfway through Step II, but look no further than the ascendant, gospel rendition on 1979’s live album Living Proof, recorded at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, for hard proof of the song’s divine power, no matter the conduit: Sylvester breaks from the propulsive beat for a slowed-down interlude bolstered by a choir, his voice climbing into an angelic upper register that blows the wind out of you.
Sylvester died at 41 of AIDS in 1988, just a year after his longtime husband, architect Rick Cranmar, died of the same. Cowley, too, died of AIDS in 1982, the same year the two recorded the sleek Hi-NRG blast “Do You Wanna Funk?”; Cowley became one of the first publicized deaths from the virus. Sylvester also put a face to the crisis when he led the People With AIDS group in a wheelchair at the 1988 San Francisco Pride Parade. “He’s allowing us to celebrate his life before his death, and I don’t know a single star who has the integrity to do that,” the novelist Armistead Maupin wrote afterward.
The toll that AIDS took on our queer forebears can never be overstated, but Sylvester’s loss is especially heavy on the mind. He often said he would earn enough money to retire at an early age, move somewhere bucolic, and do absolutely nothing for the rest of his days. Even with over 20 years of glamour and success, it hurts that Sylvester never got that future. “I don’t want much—just a fabulous time,” he said the year Step II came out. “I have quite normal feelings but I like to take on a little bit more excitement than most. I am what I am, I do what I do, I know what I am, I live for what I feel.” Through his extraordinary style and boundless imagination, Sylvester generously paved the way for all of us to do the same.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fantasy | February 7, 2021 | 9.2 | 9cf46210-7d79-4167-9365-ae2f11343b50 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On his third full-length album for Rune Grammofon, Supersilent's virtuoso trumpeter explores the genesis of his own life, drawing from a wealth of home-taped sounds from his youth. | On his third full-length album for Rune Grammofon, Supersilent's virtuoso trumpeter explores the genesis of his own life, drawing from a wealth of home-taped sounds from his youth. | Arve Henriksen: Strjon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10212-strjon/ | Strjon | To call the Norwegian group Supersilent "post-rock" is a misnomer: Their music is pre-rock, or, in a sense, pre-genre. It's the kind of amorphous sound mass you imagine at the beginning of the universe, an obliterative black-hole suction that takes modern cues only from the intuitive progressions of jazz and the chaotic sound atmospheres of electronic devices. Not to mention that post-rock is in the habit of forcing its cues, determined to hit that cathartic peak before the tape runs out. Supersilent, meanwhile, arrives at catharsis torturously if at all, preferring to let their variations unspool organically, reveling in unresolved tension and inertia.
On his third full-length album for Rune Grammofon, Supersilent's virtuoso trumpeter Arve Henriksen explores the genesis of his own universe: Strjon is the medieval name of Henriksen's home town-- it roughly means "streaming water," which even the most unsympathetic listener would have to admit is germane to the album's fluid, natural sound. Drawing from a wealth of home-taped sounds from his youth in Stryn, Henriksen recruited his Supersilent band mates Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten to produce the album and to add keyboards and guitars to Henriksen's trumpet and electronics. But Strjon isn't an early demos thing; Henriksen simply used these early sketches as templates, allowing his modern polish to dovetail with his youthful zeal.
The result is a quietly stunning album of fugues, stasis, and moods. Given the starkness of its sound palette and the restraint of its compositions, its allure is uncanny-- that melancholy trumpets threading through evocative drones doesn't wear thin over the album's forty-seven minutes is a testament to Henriksen's compositional ingenuity and ace musicianship. The album opens with "Evocation": The sinuous, quavering trumpet figure is at once ominous and inviting; it has a palpable whooshing quality that makes it sound almost like a reed instrument, and you get a distinct sense of the musician's subtle embrasure behind the sounds. As a bowed drone pushes in for contrast, Henriksen's theme breaks out of its unsteady rut and waxes lyrical. Amid the gently reverbed guitars of "Leaf and Rock", Henriksen plays a slightly throttled and darkly romantic theme that cracks emotively at its root notes. His trumpet springs tiny, squealing leaks over the angelic glimmer of "In the Light", and lurches through damaged iterations of the caesurae-divided theme of "Evocation".
Elsewhere on the album, Henriksen breaks away from this satisfying but circumscribed approach to tinker with rhythm and mood. On "Twin Lake" cavernous guitar twinkles play off of hovering keyboards and Henriksen's bracingly high trumpet runs. Its nighttime-at-the-wharf aura is so strong you can practically smell the brine; all that's missing is the caw of gulls and the lonesome clank of a rusty pylon bell. The title track consists of nothing more than a primordial, modulating rumble; it's a study in soupy inertia. "Green Water" is light and airy with an atonal atmospheric buffer; percussive pings make it feel less nebulous than most of the album. "Black Mountain", a gyroscopic whirl of clipped, aggressive synth peals, is also atypically kinetic. And on "Glacier Descent", which is remindful of Growing with its shivering melodic cycles and low textural rumbles, Henriksen intones clear vowels over droning throat singing, gradually gathering it all up into a celestial crescendo. It's worth noting that the presence of a voice doesn't humanize "Glacier Descent" to any greater degree than the instrumental songs on Strjon, an album that is remarkable for its intimacy and wordless expressivity. | 2007-05-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-05-18T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Global / Jazz | Rune Grammofon | May 18, 2007 | 7.8 | 9cf516bb-baca-4095-bc7c-09940235ec2d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Singer-songwriter Julie Byrne’s* *new album has the lucidity and tactility of a healing crystal. Not unlike Phil Elverum, she paints sublime, awestruck moments when simple things become overwhelming. | Singer-songwriter Julie Byrne’s* *new album has the lucidity and tactility of a healing crystal. Not unlike Phil Elverum, she paints sublime, awestruck moments when simple things become overwhelming. | Julie Byrne: Not Even Happiness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22743-not-even-happiness/ | Not Even Happiness | There are two things you can’t escape: the sky and yourself. It serves us, then, to understand both. Not Even Happiness, the pristine new album from singer-songwriter Julie Byrne, probes cosmic notions such as these with wonder and aplomb. Wanderer, dreamer, naturalist, loner, romantic—with her bold fingerpicking and deep voice, Byrne makes these well-worn identities feel newly alive. Not Even Happiness has all the lucidity and tactility of a healing crystal—or more to the point, a rose quartz, the one that might help you to love.
Blending folk, new age, and silence, Not Even Happiness is a balm. In both sound and sensibility, it strives for clarity, that ultimate marker of enlightenment. Orchestral arrangements sit subtly in the mix; an occasional flute slides in, or a sample of crashing waves. Byrne solemnly charts the places she’s seen—Kansas, Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming—and fills her lyrics with elemental things. She lies in a “verdant field,” catches “stars from a back porch,” watches a “dove over the prairie.” Her language is diffuse, braiding together themes of autonomy, desire, and struggle, but despite the heft of her poetry, the music exudes disarming ease. It feels much shorter than its 33 minutes. Not Even Happiness imagines a cross-section of Leonard Cohen’s mysticism and Judee Sill’s vulnerability—like the latter artist, Byrne’s keen pop sense and stacked harmonies play out like wind carrying her along. “Because they take themselves lightly, angels can fly,” the philosopher Alan Watts notes in his book Become What You Are, and Byrne seems to mind this idea sonically.
Byrne named her album Not Even Happiness because happiness, perhaps, is not always the point. There are virtues beyond happiness—strength, wisdom, integrity, self-possession—and Byrne honors these. Though she is a nomad, she doesn’t romanticize the position; her rootlessness sounds more like a calling, one that chose her, with sacrifices and doubts. “I have dragged my lives across the country/And wondered if travel led me anywhere,” Byrne sings on “I Live Now As a Singer,” conjuring the sweep of This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren.” She sounds devoted to an inner compass only. On opener “Follow My Voice,” Byrne sings, “I was made for the green, made to be alone,” and she prioritizes her solitude with a sly turn: “I’ve been called heartbreaker/For doing justice to my own.” Not unlike Phil Elverum, Byrne paints sublime, awestruck moments when simple things become overwhelming. “Will I know a truer time/Than when I stood alone in the snow,” she sings. “And the moon was in the sky and shone.” Nearly a capella, she intones, “I’ve been seeking God within.”
Despite this self-reliance, these are patently love songs, processing the unravelling of a heart sewn shut. The human heart is never easy in a Byrne song, though, by nature of its connection to an active human mind. Byrne knows the difference between solitude and loneliness, and she bears the lessons of the former while endeavoring the enormous task of navigating the latter with dignity. On “Morning Dove,” her tone evokes Gillian Welch, as she vividly paints her surroundings—the woods, the endless river—but sweetly admits to trailing off: “I thought of you so presently,” she sings. “I could not wait to tell you the truth.”
Gleaming and steadied and wide, “Sleepwalker” is Not Even Happiness’ most gripping moment. It captures both the infatuated feeling of nascent love and how a dream of life can tempt you to lose control of your own. “I traveled only in service of my dreams,” Byrne sings, “I stood before them all/I was a sleepwalker.” Few contemporary songwriters earn a comparison to Angel Olsen, but in its acuity and grace—what Leonard Cohen called “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you”—Not Even Happiness makes a case for Byrne as one of them.
Throughout Not Even Happiness, Byrne sounds like a person who might worship the sky, but the majestic “Natural Blue” is a proper ode. There’s nothing particularly unusual about her tale of driving through familiar southwestern towns on tour, but her images evoke the life-affirming feeling of catching the exquisite light just so through a moving car window, while meditating on the changing scenery as it flickers by. “When I first saw you/That feeling, it came over me, too/Natural blue,” Byrne sings. Were “Natural Blue” released a decade ago, perhaps the poet Maggie Nelson would have found something in it to include in her 2009 prose-poem Bluets, a radiant reflection on the color. “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light” goes Bluets’ final sentence, and a similar logic guides Not Even Happiness, in which the most worthy wandering happens on roads within. | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Ba Da Bing / Basin Rock | February 6, 2017 | 8.3 | 9cf70b53-3278-41bf-929b-556cea315217 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Eef Barzelay produces his group's latest SpinART LP-- the band's fifth overall. | Eef Barzelay produces his group's latest SpinART LP-- the band's fifth overall. | Clem Snide: End of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1503-end-of-love/ | End of Love | Eef Barzalay isn't as weird as he'd like you to think; he's just another quirky singer-songwriter trying to figure out how the universe works. But his insights are filtered through a very personal perspective and come out his mouth as lyrics that are skewed, surreal, and often humorous. On Clem Snide's fifth album, End of Love, he sings about the nature of love and the mysterious doings of God. On the title track, love becomes just another hipster trend, a comparison that gives Barzalay the opportunity to scold a fickle trend-follower ("You're the first to know when a movement's come and gone") and observe that "no one will survive the End of Love." On "Jews for Jesus Blues", he peruses the promises of Christianity and realizes "now that I'm saved I miss being lost." And he tries to answer the age-old question, Why do bad things happen to good people?, on "God Answers Back", and comes up with something much better than, say, "God Shuffled His Feet": "Your blood will color every sunset/ Your tears will help Me grow some trees."
These are big big issues (are there any bigger?), inspired by the deaths of his mother and his mother-in-law. But Barzalay works better with small moments, things that everyone experiences but few actually take time to consider. Through these instances (as on "Joan Jett of Arc" from The Ghost of Fashion and "Made for TV Movie" from End of Love) he catches brief glimpses of life and death but only hints at their dwarfing magnitude. When he faces them head-on, they ironically become smaller in scale-- less daunting and therefore less affecting.
So End of Love isn't Barzalay's best collection of songs, and the production tends to gloss over the instruments so songs like "Collapse" and "When We Become" sound subdued and blandly unobtrusive. Still, the album has some unaffected gems, including closer "Weird", which sounds like it was recorded during a party and effortlessly pops the bubbles of the self-proclaimed oddballs who "aren't as weird as you'd like me to think." Best of all is the quiet "Made for TV Movie", in which a Lucille Ball biopic inspired a Tolstoyian revelation: "They would never make a movie if everything was great/ Because happiness is boring."
What makes "Made for TV Movie" so sublime (in the sense of both overwhelming and mortally terrifying) isn't the playful songwriting, but the sound. An unidentified young girl, no more than four or five, sings on the bridge, a couple of measures of wordless la la las. But she's utterly charming, not only in her innocently arhythmic delivery but in the reaction she solicits from Barzalay. He turns his attention from the microphone to the child, and the world closes in around them. It's maybe the most intimate moment captured on a Clem Snide album-- completely unrehearsed, unaffected, and endearing. | 2005-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2005-02-24T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | spinART | February 24, 2005 | 6.7 | 9cf90a00-fd66-450f-b64f-ac64328d8dcd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Where the South African singer-songwriter’s work was tinged with melancholy, their new album, executive produced by Nile Rodgers, renders carnal ecstasy in bright tones and major keys. | Where the South African singer-songwriter’s work was tinged with melancholy, their new album, executive produced by Nile Rodgers, renders carnal ecstasy in bright tones and major keys. | Nakhane: Bastard Jargon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nakhane-bastard-jargon/ | Nakhane: Bastard Jargon | When Nakhane began writing Bastard Jargon, they were hell-bent on making “a sex album,” as they explained to Vogue earlier this year. The South African singer-songwriter, now based in South London, devised their third full-length as an outburst of joy—a jubilee meant to contrast with their earlier, more melancholy work. But even as they built each song drums first, crafting experimental dance pop pulsing to four-on-the-floor beats, darkness found a way of creeping in. “It ended up being what I call an existentialist sex album,” Nakhane said in the same interview. “It’s fun, but there’s always this kind of memento mori in the background, a fear that you’re fucking up, or a reckoning with your mistakes.”
There isn’t much in the way of explicit sex on Bastard Jargon, but you’ll catch quick glimpses of erotica, like sneaking a peek through a cracked bedroom door. Nakhane presents themselves as vulnerable and emboldened in these personal vignettes: They moan, recline “splayed and physical,” and replay nights of carnal ecstasy while sipping their morning coffee. Nakhane’s scenery is hushed and intimate, so they designed their narration to feel familiar, as if they were serenading someone over the phone, or chatting with a lover in bed, each word muffled slightly by pillows. But rather than calibrate the instrumental tracks to mirror that intimacy, Nakhane and a cast of contributors—including executive producer Nile Rodgers, John Congleton, and Max Hershenow (aka Alexmaax)—occasionally clog the album with dated production and unimaginative arrangements. Nakhane’s songs have strong bones, but they could benefit from fewer—or different—collaborators.
Nakhane was intent on recording a big, blissful third album, and most of the songs on Bastard Jargon are written in major keys. But instead of resembling modern dance hits, certain songs sound taped from pop-rock airwaves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the layers of instruments fail to add nuance or depth. “The Conjecture” plods along to tin-can drums and a bristly synth pattern that loops for most of the song. The thin backing track can’t stand up to Nakhane’s velvet-lined voice, and the effect feels a bit like a pop diva doing karaoke. Their multi-tracked chorus doesn’t help: the melody is fluffy and a little too sweet, like a bale of cotton candy.
Early single “Do You Well” is a slight improvement, but it still has the gloss of generic feel-good disco. The addition of Perfume Genius does little, as his voice gets smothered in snapping drums and reverb. On the chorus, bright keys follow Nakhane’s vocal hook like a dot bouncing across words in a lyric video, an on-the-nose choice that feels especially cloying. The “memento mori” Nakhane spoke of is nowhere to be found in these melodies. Both “The Conjecture” and “Do You Well” might have flourished with a few dark or subversive production details.
Getting a little ragged and dirty serves Nakhane well, as evidenced by “Tell Me Your Politik,” Bastard Jargon’s best song. The track bumps to big nasty synth blasts, live percussion, muted hand claps, and sampled shouts that erupt just beneath the surface of the mix. Nakhane coats their voice in subtle distortion, eliminating any potential schmaltz, while a warm, crackling sax solo from Shabaka Hutchings lends a handcrafted feel. At the center of “Tell Me Your Politik” is a verse from South African artist Moonchild Sanelly, who snaps and flexes in English and her native Xhosa. It is an energetic contrast to Nakhane’s elegant timbre.
Opener “The Caring” is also propelled by less obvious parts: a drum machine that sounds like a crumbling rock, a programmed squeak that recalls a Brazilian cuíca. The chorus hearkens back a few decades, but it nods to post-new wave bands like General Public and Londonbeat—a forgotten but spry vintage of pop music. “The Caring” is also where Nakhane unwittingly articulates what might be Bastard Jargon’s chief flaw: “I was so full of light/I was blinding,” they sing over palm-muted guitar. Nowhere is this truer than on stadium-pop ballad “Hold Me Down,” which has the DNA of a huge hit but the production value of a compressed demo. The angel-choir backing vocals feel cheap and cheesy, as do the glowing beams of synthesizer. The chorus is so catchy, Nakhane’s voice so lush, that “Hold Me Down” could have been recorded with a fraction of the bells and whistles—the light that bounces off of them is blinding indeed. | 2023-04-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | BMG | April 7, 2023 | 6.5 | 9cfddaba-342d-4a9b-b545-24c40dea2b5a | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Former members of L.A. dub-punkers Future Pigeon pay tribute to the music of the Middle East with a brief EP filled with danceable rhythms and region-appropriate ululations. | Former members of L.A. dub-punkers Future Pigeon pay tribute to the music of the Middle East with a brief EP filled with danceable rhythms and region-appropriate ululations. | Rainbow Arabia: Basta EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12062-basta-ep/ | Basta EP | The opening seconds of Rainbow Arabia's debut EP are more knuckleball than curve: "Omar K" begins with chanted call-and-response vocals, and what at first seems like it might be a well-timed study of traditional West African music quickly veers a good distance eastward, and makes clear which global destination the duo have actually mined for so much inspiration. With a name like theirs, of course, you should have little trouble figuring out where to look to get some sense of what informs not just their keffiyeh-fied aesthetic but their Cairo-via-Echo Park primitivist dance hybrid as well. Big hint.
Rainbow Arabia are married couple Danny and Tiffany Preston, formerly of L.A. dub-punkers Future Pigeon. As with their earlier band, Rainbow Arabia are out for your hips, and this first effort is strangely propulsive. While press materials state that the two combine Middle Eastern flavors with American experimental dance music, I'm not sure there's anything especially "American" about their project aside from its mailing address. On the other hand, because their music is so attached to the region and its rumble, I can't help but wonder what kind of reaction the Basta EP might elicit from ears that grew up with those sounds. Fairly or not, questions of authenticity are destined to haunt this band.
Musically, Rainbow Arabia work a pretty minimal setup. While the overall vibe stays in place, their means of execution requires many parts. The synth and drum machine workouts are certainly house-meets-tribal, but the menacing beats realized in "Let Them Dance" and "Hear No See No" aren't what lend those particular cuts their bones. What really sticks out are the serpentine guitar lines that slither their way through the EP, sometimes taking on the shape of post-punk spikes, garage crunch, and Edge-like delay effects. That sort of guitar eclecticism is mirrored in turn by Tiffany Preston, whose yips, yaps, and prairie crows work well in the Rainbow Arabia's efforts to transport as much as immerse. An easy reference point would be Ponytail's whirling frontwoman Molly Siegel. While her vocal turns aren't nearly so easy to place stylistically, the two both hit high registers some might call distracting more than complimentary.
The fifth and final track on this 20-minute EP, "The Basta", opens by sampling video game effects that, according to the eternal geek in me, can be traced to 80s SEGA quarter-vacuum Altered Beast. That's one way to kick off an off-kilter dance track punctuated most memorably by Tiffany Preston's last few yelps, I guess; but it also points to a possible way forward. You could easily argue that, given their commitment to their influences, Rainbow Arabia don't have many options when it comes to their next move. Could be, but this closer shows that that they've still managed to find a few interesting keepsakes in this bazaar they've gotten lost in. | 2008-08-11T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-08-11T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Tiny Man | August 11, 2008 | 6.5 | 9d041bb1-53e3-4d58-b61d-7bb7fa17474c | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Noah Lennox’s vinyl-only EP is a curious world apart, smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor. | Noah Lennox’s vinyl-only EP is a curious world apart, smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor. | Panda Bear: A Day With the Homies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panda-bear-a-day-with-the-homies/ | A Day With the Homies | Even in 2018, when streaming’s juggernaut is thought to have steamrolled every alternative path to our ears, to release a record on vinyl and vinyl alone is no big thing. There’s no accurate count of how many such discs appear every year, but in electronic music alone, it’s likely to be thousands of titles. Still, to be an artist of a certain stature and to put out a record only on wax is a kind of statement. It might be to invoke simpler times; it might be to separate the true fans from the passive ones and reward the former for their faithfulness. (It might also simply be a way of saying, “I’m not crazy about the streaming companies’ payouts.”)
In Panda Bear’s case, A Day With the Homies—a muggy, delirious five-track EP available only on vinyl—feels almost like a note scribbled on a scrap of paper and meant to be burned, buried, or swallowed. It sounds like he’s singing things that he needs to get off his chest yet doesn’t necessarily want finding their way into the digital slipstream. (In this sense, the 12” is strangely reminiscent, ironically enough, of Snapchat’s original utility as a repository of self-destructing messages.) There’s always been a dark side even to Noah Lennox’s sunniest work, but A Day With the Homies hides an especially toxic twinge beneath its sugar-coated crust.
You might not notice at first because the music is typically ebullient: smeared with color and couched in his characteristic wordplay and deadpan humor. “Took a sock to the socket/We got a black eye/Sucks and everything,” he chirps early in the opening “Flight,” mimicking a petulant teenager’s slouch and sly grin. Bursting with swollen bass frequencies and overdriven drum machines, it’s the Beach Boys for a world in which the rising seas have turned coastal real estate into an oil-slicked hellscape.
The background is forever threatening to swallow up the foreground: “Nod to the Folks” is framed with siren wails; “Shepard Tone,” named after a mind-bending auditory illusion, opens with what might be slowed-down helicopter rotors, sounding as disorienting and grandiose as Apocalypse Now’s Wagner-from-above as Lennox sings of deep throats, stinking bogs, and sucker punches. You wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the racing pulse, but it’s a song about endings: “Folks quit/when there’s nothing to quit on,” he intones, voicing one of the record’s major themes. “Fingers everyone,” runs the song’s endless chorus, as feedback wriggles and squirms.
The opener, too, turns out to be a conflicted sort of farewell, if not a kiss-off, with cryptic messages to his “good crew” (“Can’t be goodbye/Goodbye good crew/So I won’t say goodbye/Goodbye to you”) encoded in sticky-sweet barbershop harmony. Track two, “Part of the Math,” starts off even darker, with a serrated guitar chord slicing ominously away for what seems like forever. When Lennox finally opens his mouth, it’s to sing, “It comes out of nowhere/Like a rope/Wrapping tighter and tighter/Round the throat.” The shuffling beat is a throwback to 1990s rock/electronic fusions, like Screamadelica-era Primal Scream; Lennox’s lyrical lapses into ironic hemming and hawing suggest a character that’s part George-Michael Bluth, part Donnie Darko.
It can be hard to square the bleakness of the lyrics with the verdant excess of the sound, though its lo-fi sonics certainly match the rawness of the emotions contained within. And you might even occasionally wish Lennox would give free rein to his somber side. Is “Stop making it about your shit” a reproachful command, or a self-help mantra? Lennox has a way of making even the gloomiest pronouncements—“We’re all gonna be/Six feet in the coldest ground”—sound as giddy as a kid’s birthday party. He’s never shied from singing frankly of familial tragedy and personal travails, which will no doubt tempt some fans to parse Homies for biographical clues.
The crickets on “Flight” sound like a callback to both Animal Collective’s campfire era and the group’s Meeting of the Waters EP, from last year, which Avey Tare and Geologist wrote on their own, holed up in some Amazonian backwater. That group has always been an elastic enterprise; is Homies about stretching wings, or breaking points? No one but Lennox knows, of course. The EP opens with the sound of keys being scooped up off the table, and to join him here is to follow him on a singular flight of fancy, to enter into his own hermetic world, where dejection meets exhilaration and jumbled thoughts run free. It exists only on wax because it’s a refuge; its purposeful clutter the antithesis of everything that’s streamlined, optimized, and accessible at the click of a button. “We don’t share at all/Why are we telling them to share it all,” he sings at the close of “Flight,” and it might as well be the raison d’etre for the whole record. | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | January 12, 2018 | 6.6 | 9d04e00e-918d-45f9-a742-c6c26112a7a0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
This new quartet, which features the sax playing of Colin Stetson and drumming of Greg Fox, turns the crossroads of metal and jazz into a righteous, ecstatic fusion. | This new quartet, which features the sax playing of Colin Stetson and drumming of Greg Fox, turns the crossroads of metal and jazz into a righteous, ecstatic fusion. | Ex Eye: Ex Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ex-eye-ex-eye/ | Ex Eye | Wherever heavy metal meets with jazz, some caveat emptor is almost sure to follow. “It’s not swing for the faint of heart,” a typical critical warning may read, like a semi-serious disclaimer on a bottle of high-grade hot sauce. “Only for fans of the EXTREME!” The custom isn’t without warrant, of course. This particular musical crossroads has long been one of outsized intensity, from Bill Laswell’s decades of outlandish experiments to the jazz-laced intricacy of prog metal and breakneck thrash. Then there’s a recent cadre, like France’s Aluk Todolo and the Netherlands’ Dead Neanderthals, that likes to dress its jazz in black, so the knotty complexity comes shrouded in steely menace. Independently, jazz and metal can be hyper-codified forms, each very selective about what gets through the gates of credibility; together, they are almost wickedly so, with a sense of self-selection as intimidating as the sounds themselves.
But Ex Eye, a new quartet featuring some very familiar names, seems determined to upend that off-putting expectation. On its radiant and righteous self-titled debut, Ex Eye—drummer Greg Fox, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, guitarist Toby Summerfield—gathers like a thunderstorm around the baritone saxophone of Colin Stetson, whose high volume and versatility are both anchor and catapult. His tightly spiraling melody during “Opposition/Perihelion; The Coil,” a long-playing fever dream of relentless drums and ascendant guitar, is the snake charmer’s ruse, the trick that tantalizes this beast of a band. On the other hand, his ability to hold and stretch a note like a bionic foghorn during “Anaitis Hymnal; The Arkose Disc” provides a canvas, gradually covered with a wash of accreting, overwhelming sound. Ex Eye slices exciting elements from a dozen extreme forms—black metal and doom metal, free jazz, hard bop, harsh noise, EDM, even 20th-century symphonies—and shapes them into seamless chimeras. These five pieces are as urgent as they are magnetic. Against incredible odds, Ex Eye is practically uplifting.
Make no mistake: The sounds here are certainly foreboding. Stetson’s bulbous saxophone tone often suggests the dying rites of some safari animal, while Ismaily’s electronics conjure insectoid swarms of Pentecostal intensity. Summerfield prefers high-treble riffs that flicker like lightning, and the hyperkinetic drumming familiar from Fox’s time in Liturgy or leading his own band Guardian Alien is omnipresent and exaggerated here.
But all four members of Ex Eye also boast pedigrees at the accessible fringes of the avant-garde. Stetson is the unlikely solo saxophone star who makes punishing records with Mats Gustafsson and pleasing ones with Bon Iver. Fox records esoteric pieces using biorhythm sensors, but he also plays with rock bands, tinkers with dance tracks, and drums for experimental music’s favorite recent gateway, Ben Frost. Summerfield hopscotches among genres and scenes, while Ismaily has backed the likes of Tom Waits and Laura Veirs.
With that in mind, these five songs never feel laborious, overindulgent, or repetitive. “Xenolith; The Anvil” even sounds like an outlier instrumental hit or, better yet, the obliterative answer to TNGHT’s “Higher Ground” and Anna Meredith’s “Nautilus”—a piece of mutated fanfare meant to soundtrack some grand conquest. Even when these songs stretch beyond the 10-minute mark, they’re busy enough to earn and maintain attention, dense enough to reward it repeatedly. “Tten Crowns; The Corruptor,” for instance, seems as drunk on Dixieland as it is high on the neoclassical metal of Yngwie Malmsteen. As the band zigs and zags, these 12 minutes fly past.
Sure, jazz and metal can have tedious rules, with minutiae-minded debates about what does or does not fit beneath each umbrella filling message boards and books alike. But at their best, both forms conjure a feeling of liberation, with sounds and ideas too immense for rock or pop strictures. The overwhelming volume of metal and the imaginative improvisation of jazz are parallel musical avenues for getting free. That’s often been lost in combinations of the two. As Ex Eye make high-volume symphonies of whatever they want, those are the values that they splice together so well. This is incredibly heavy music made light (joyful, even) by the zeal and power of its players. By plowing into, through, and ultimately out of the dark, Ex Eye is an ecstatic fusion—an exhilarating exclamation of defiance, no warning required. | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Relapse | July 12, 2017 | 8.1 | 9d08f01d-dab6-4723-9956-1937c40250e2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Briana Marela's new album, All Around Us, gets its name from a children’s book, an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way she talks about emotions. She recorded it in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, and strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits. | Briana Marela's new album, All Around Us, gets its name from a children’s book, an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way she talks about emotions. She recorded it in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers, and strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits. | Briana Marela: All Around Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20923-all-around-us/ | All Around Us | All Around Us gets its name from a children’s book. It's an appropriate inspiration given the plainspoken way Briana Marela talks about emotions. "It’s cool to care! Chill is boring," she recently tweeted, and she means it; she titled her 2012 album Speak from Your Heart.
Marela recorded All Around Us, her first for Jagjaguwar, in Reykjavík with Sigur Rós producer Alex Somers. Strings are played by Amiina, another name that shows up frequently in Sigur Rós album credits. Not surprisingly, some of this record’s instrumental sections—particularly the intros of "Dani", "Surrender", and "Further"—feel like place settings for a soaring Jónsi vocal. Instead, Marela enters with crystalline sweetness, not unlike Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry, but breathier, more deliberate, and precise. Just as she does in her intimate live performances, Marela loops and layers pitched exhalations (usually "oh" or "ah-oh") to create choral collages that could just as easily evoke Iceland or her Pacific Northwest homeland. It’s her best, most affecting asset.
Her emotional forthrightness can be refreshing, too. On "Friend Tonight", she forces herself out of the house and pleads for an old flame to help her face the darkness, but only in a platonic way. "Don’t come back to my bed tonight/ I just need a friend tonight," she repeats. Just as often, though, her only mildly poetic candor disrupts the songs. Marela’s lyrics sometimes lack craft and thoughtfulness, like words plucked from a diary and dropped into a song without regard to word choice or rhythm. It’s a fine line between childlike and childish, and too many songs tend toward the latter. On "Take Care of Me", a bouncy tale of a relationship going right, a line like "Now you know me so well, it’s special that I can be myself" stands out not for its honesty but its jarring "Sesame Street" tone.
"I Don’t Belong to You" suffers from the same clunkiness: "Dream of all the possibilities/ We can do anything/ It’s not a competition/ Everyone has music within them." And "Follow It" is meant to be similarly inspirational, but even amid the gorgeous waves of Marela’s vocals and the well-placed, unpredictable percussion, the words sound like the platitudes of an out-of-work motivational speaker.
She's at her best when she’s lyrically and instrumentally ethereal. "Everything Is New" reworks a song from an earlier live album, and Marela wisely lets it breathe and slowly build, accompanying only with subtle drones at first. "What matters when everything is new?" she asks. It’s a worthwhile question, and she uses it to get at the concept of carpe diem. "All we have is now," she says. "All we have is here, and I don’t have the time/ Want to keep you always near, but I don’t have the time." That is honest simplicity. Sometimes—perhaps most often—relationships end not with fits of rage and screaming and crying. They end for multiple mundane reasons. Two people are right in front of each other, yet they don’t have time to figure it out. Life gets in the way. As Marela sings on the title track, "Time is love, and love is the time it takes to know someone so well." Love takes time, and that takes work—that’s the stuff that belongs in both children’s books and Marela’s music. | 2015-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 13, 2015 | 5.8 | 9d0eb3bd-4b82-48d7-b1ba-fd918d792d42 | Joel Oliphint | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joel-oliphint/ | null |
Following 2016’s iiiDrops, the Chicago rapper returns with another album that defies expectations. There is a greater range of flows explored, a greater range of tones discovered, and a sharper focus throughout. | Following 2016’s iiiDrops, the Chicago rapper returns with another album that defies expectations. There is a greater range of flows explored, a greater range of tones discovered, and a sharper focus throughout. | Joey Purp: QUARTERTHING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joey-purp-quarterthing/ | QUARTERTHING | Toward the end of QUARTERTHING, a distinction is made: “There are two types of people in this world: the type of people that look and the type of people that see.” Joey Purp has long been in the latter camp, possessing both a steely awareness and the ability to detail the nuances of the world before him. He is proudly a dope dealer’s son but wants a different future for his own. He’s so attuned to his own contradictions and the ways they reflect the communities that made him, that he often sees all the angles—a byproduct of a life spent straddling binaries. QUARTERTHING is where everything he’s seen starts to bleed together. It’s an expansive album that casually balances his puffed-up swaggering and his conscience-stricken morality.
He’s been vocal about his commitment to defying the expectations of what it means to be a Chicago rapper, something he’s been building toward since 2012’s The Purple Tape. QUARTERTHING is his most daring progression, rewrites the laws that previously governed his songs and takes a sledgehammer to any sonic barriers left. It’s a transformation similar to the one Vince Staples underwent from Summertime ’06 to Big Fish Theory, shifting from clear-eyed documentarian to composition-concentrated aestheticist without compromising the integrity of the powerful, personal stories captured inside. Some raps stumble upon episodes from his dealer past, others are all about securing the bag, but his actions speak louder than his words.
Many rappers contain multitudes, but Purp is among the most effortlessly pliable. He can be two different things in the same breath. On QUARTERTHING, he is a survivalist who is only a few steps removed from his days as a co-conspirator in a family drug enterprise and from making it out of a crime-adjacent life for good. He spends a lot of time dreaming, and reconciling those dreams with crushing realities: “Dreaming about the problems money bring/When you used to not having shit young niggas brag about everything,” on “Look at My Wrist.” You get the sense that he’s speaking directly to QUARTERTHING’s thesis: that Purp has entered the stage of his rap career where he’s seeing more money than he’s ever seen before, and this is him making a big show of that big payoff.
It’d be easy to hear this record as broader than its predecessor, a turn away from the finely spun tales that felt pragmatically lyrical. The writing is undoubtedly less mindful and scene-driven here, less determined to one-up talented local friends like Chance, Saba, Vic Mensa, and Mick Jenkins. But the rapping on QUARTERTHING is even more loose-jointed and pleasing to the ear, slashing in and out of beats so precisely it’s almost surgical. There is a greater range of flows explored, a greater range of tones discovered, and a sharper focus throughout.
His raps are less wordy and less committed to description, but they aren’t without plotting. They maintain the same vigilance, the same cautious optimism, and the same shrewdness. He’s still liable to rip off a perfectly measured meter, like this one on “24k Gold/Sanctified”: “Thinking ’bout the game and all the ways it should be redesigned/Thinking ’bout the pain and all the days my brother spent confined/Thinking about the stages and the ways they infiltrate the mind.” If the observations are framed more simply, the constructions are just as complex, if not more.
And there’s nothing simple about the ambitious and wide-ranging songcraft, which veers from reverential soul to Chicago house to barking trap without ever feeling unfocused or cursory. Each style feels lived in; Purp masters everything from fleet-footed club rap to expressive, cinematic Just Blaze-like chipmunk chops. The sounds are more dynamic, too; bigger, as on “Godbody Pt. 2,” or more far-out, as on “Paint Thinner,” or more remote, as on “2012.” iiiDrops was all maximalist brass and skipping Neptunes-ish funk. The songs honked and wheezed and skittered, a controlled cacophony Purp commanded with force. These songs are more finely tuned without any jarring transitions. His raps vary to fit the textures of each production, which sample a great breadth of sounds.
If there’s any pathos lacking in QUARTERTHING, Purp fills it in with thrilling performances and exquisite arrangements from Knox Fortune, Thelonious Martin, Nez & Rio, RZA, and more. Even for a rapper who has made a point of showing us his versatility before, this feels radical and exploratory. These are songs that refuse to be beholden to what came before, songs that understand and even cherish their connections to music of the past but have entirely different destinations in mind. That unwillingness to retrace any steps is a true mark of vision. | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 10, 2018 | 8.3 | 9d11589b-fb1b-4a2e-b197-8954486fb08b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On her debut album, the Chattanooga rapper balances raunchy sex talk with reflections on trauma. It’s a deliriously entertaining, ambitious project from an artist operating at her peak. | On her debut album, the Chattanooga rapper balances raunchy sex talk with reflections on trauma. It’s a deliriously entertaining, ambitious project from an artist operating at her peak. | Bbymutha: Muthaland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bbymutha-muthaland/ | Muthaland | Bbymutha believes in the power of reclamation. Originally performing under the name Cindyy Kushh, the Chattanooga rapper has flipped her current name, usually a pejorative, into a term of endearment. “It’s not an insult to me,” she told The Fader in 2018. Women in rap—particularly Black women—face constant pressure to repress their sexuality, but Bbymutha is having none of that. Her previous projects balance her outward sexual bravado with the public and private turmoil bubbling beneath the surface. On Muthaland, her debut (and apparently final) album, she expands her ideas to feature-length.
The double album’s framing device involves skits depicting a game show, live “from the fiery depths of hell,” where a contestant named Bootyholeisha spends 24 hours with Bbymutha. It’s a loose concept that telegraphs the levity sprinkled throughout the album. Opening song “Roaches Don’t Die” showcases her knack for balancing laughs with confessions. She’s dressing men down for trying too hard one minute (“Niggas tuck they tees/Tryna sell a fantasy/That buckle bigger than your dick, huh?”) and reliving memories of being jumped in her high school gym the next. By its end, the song’s title becomes a battle cry; she’s clawed her way out of the pits.
The hallmarks of Bbymutha’s lyrics are fairly straightforward: kiss-offs to ain’t-shit dudes, flexing on other women, reflecting on trauma, and a plethora of sex talk. Her style borrows from the blueprint laid by fellow raunchy Tennessee rap titan Gangsta Boo, but Bbymutha is no carbon copy. Her rhyme schemes are elastic, her thick Chattanooga drawl stretching rhymes like taffy across entire songs. The run of songs from “Holographic” to “Cocaine Catwalk,” in particular, is deliriously entertaining, with Bbymutha constantly topping her own braggadocio (“Rock a nigga’s semen like a ski mask” from “Either Way” is a personal favorite). Her unrestrained freedom is a tonic in a world where conservative pundit Ben Shapiro can go viral for asking his “doctor wife” about the scientific accuracy of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP.”
The narrative focus allows her room to experiment with flows and music. Rock Floyd, who co–executive produced Muthaland alongside Bbymutha, is responsible for more than half of the album’s beats. Some songs crunch menacingly (“Spooky Mutha Mansion,” “Cocaine Catwalk”) while others sail by on jagged house rhythms (“Nice Guy,” “Heavy Metal”), but all are united by a booming low end, affording Bbymutha’s words considerable heft. The handful of songs produced by others, including Detroit sound masher Black Noi$e—who recently featured Bbymutha on his electric new record Oblivion—mesh nicely with Floyd and Bbymutha’s vision. She sounds just as comfortable keeping pace with Yung Baby Tate over the metallic clangs of “Nice Guy” as she does singing over the plucky synths on “Dream Sequence.” Her versatility is even more impressive considering the album’s length. At 25 tracks—20 songs and five skits—there’s remarkably little fat on Muthaland. It’s the second album of the year, following Blu & Exile’s excellent comeback project, Miles: From an Interlude Called Life, to justify such a loaded tracklist.
Across Muthaland, Bbymutha reclaims several words used to jab at her pride: “baby mama,” “slut,” “hoodrat.” She says them with her chest and siphons the negative energy in order to lift herself above the competition. It’s exhilarating, which makes the prospect of her early retirement all the sadder. Rap could use several more voices like hers. If Muthaland really is the last album Bbymutha plans on releasing to the public, she’s brought us into her twisted world at its creative peak.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The Muthaboard | September 9, 2020 | 8 | 9d193e8d-79ec-4833-8dcf-cca062a7302f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives-- covering 1963-72-- finally arrives as a 10-disc multimedia set available on DVD or Blu-ray. | Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives-- covering 1963-72-- finally arrives as a 10-disc multimedia set available on DVD or Blu-ray. | Neil Young: The Archives Vol. 1: 1963-1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13164-the-archives-vol-1-1963-1972/ | The Archives Vol. 1: 1963-1972 | In the wake of Bob Dylan's successful 1985 expanded anthology Biograph, it seemed like every rock artist of note was lining up for CD box-set canonization. And true to his reputation as a futurist, David Bowie tried to outdo them all with 1989's Sound + Vision, which supplemented the usual greatest-hits-plus-rarities format with a bonus disc of visual content that would showcase the glorious new CD-Video format. There was only one problem with his attempt to revolutionize the box set: no one knew what the hell a CD-Video disc was, let alone owned any kind of device that would allow one to view it.
It was around this same time that Neil Young started talking up an ambitious career-retrospective project called Archives, and given the amount of unreleased songs Young routinely dusted off in his concerts, fans had come to expect nothing less than a parallel-universe repertoire every bit as rich and deep as his official one-- a Decade to last for decades. But as gleaned by anyone who's gone to a Neil Young show expecting to hear the hits but treated to an hour of Greendale instead, being a Neil fan requires a certain amount of patience. Twenty years since its first public mention, Archives has gone on to usurp even Chinese Democracy as the ultimate lost-album punchline. But the long-delayed arrival of this first volume seems less a matter of archeology as technology. And like the Bowie box, there's some confusion about how exactly you're supposed to use the thing.
Neil Young is an odd sort of perfectionist, favoring a raw immediacy in his recordings that often means leaving the mistakes in for purity's sake, but he's obsessed with making sure those mistakes are mixed and mastered to sometimes unattainable standards of fidelity. (He refused to release arguably his finest album, 1974's On the Beach, on CD until 2003 for this reason.) So it appears that the advent of Blu-ray HD audio technology was the missing piece that has allowed Neil to realize his multimedia masterplan for Archives. What little public comment he's made about Archives' release has taken the form of evangelical praise for the medium, urging fans to adopt the new technology like a Best Buy salesman working on commission.
The first volume of Archives arrives as a 10-disc set, spanning the first 10 years of Young's career and, somewhat confusingly, three different formats. For the most ardent audiophiles, there's the $300 multimedia-enhanced Blu-ray edition that includes six compilation discs; the previously released Live at the Fillmore East and Live at Massey Hall; an additional solo concert recorded in 1969 at the Riverboat coffeehouse in Toronto (though it boasts a tracklist similar to last year's Live at Canterbury House set, also included here as an unlisted bonus throw-in); the first DVD release of Young's infamous tour-documentary-cum-existential-road-flick, Journey Through the Past; plus online-update capabilities through which users will have access to more material.
For equally fervent fans (and Pitchfork reviewers) with inferior home-entertainment set-ups, there's a $200 version boasting all of the above musical and multimedia content in a DVD format. And for those who just want some Neil on-hand in the car to soundtrack future road trips forevermore, there's a basic eight-disc $100 CD box with all the tunes but none of the extras. (All versions come with mp3 download codes, though we all know how Neil feels about iPods.)
Regardless of the format, each version of Archives makes the same convincing case: For Neil Young, the years of 1963 to 1972 were marked by a rapid maturation and a series of successful stylistic reinventions that rivaled the Beatles. Starting out as the surf-rockin' frontman for Winnipeg garage combo the Squires, he quickly transitioned into the folkie busker cutting early demos of "Sugar Mountain" for Elektra Records in 1965; the wide-screened psychedelic visionary in Buffalo Springfield; the savage electric warrior of 1969's Crazy Horse debut, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; the heroic hippie wingman for Crosby, Stills and Nash; and then the country-rock traditionalist of 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest. On top of summarizing a tidy 10-year span, Archives Vol. 1 ends symbolically with Neil at his commercial peak, before a growing disillusionment with rock stardom and the death of close friends would usher in a more darkly compelling phase of his career.
But while they're paying the least amount of money, the CD-box purchasers may feel the most short-changed, as Archives is not quite the vault-clearing revelation that fans may have been hoping for. Of the advertised 43 unreleased tracks, most take the form of alternate mixes or live versions of familiar material, ranging from the subtle (a cavernous mix of "Helpless" that enhances the song's hymnal qualities) to the substantial (early stripped-down versions of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and future On the Beach track "See the Sky About to Rain"). But as Archives attests, the lack of true, unheard rarities can be explained by the fact that Neil's been pulling from his mythical stash of lost songs since the mid-60s, padding his 70s and 80s releases with songs ("Winterlong", "Come on Baby Let's Go Downtown", "Wonderin'") written during this early era.
So in a purely musical sense, Archives' real selling point isn't so much the tracklist as the remastering. And make no doubt about it: Next to the budget-line CD issues that Reprise rushed to the market in the late 80s, the new versions sound spectacular, breathing new life into these old warhorses. (The swirling symphonics of Harvest's "A Man Needs a Maid", in particular, beg for a big pair of headphones and an easy chair.) However, one can't help but question why these remasters can only be accessed via an expensive box set rather than through individual album reissues. With so many songs here already familiar to even the most casual classic-rock radio listener, the most illuminating moments on Archives come from the less celebrated tracts of his career. For one, the Squires tracks provide not just a time-capsule snapshot of Neil's first recording forays; rather, songs like the wonderful "I'll Love You Forever" provide glimpses of an unrealized future as a Beatlesque balladeer. (Alternately, the twangy instrumental "Mustangs" could pass for vintage Meat Puppets.) And if the turn-of-the-70s triumvirate of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, and Harvest became the go-to soundtracks for America's post-hippie hangover, Neil's comparatively overlooked 1969 self-titled debut feels all the more contemporary for being excluded from that classic-rock holy trinity, boasting a soft-rock lushness that-- in light of psychedelic successors like the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Sparklehorse-- has proven as influential as any album in his canon.
But as Archives' multitude of newspaper clippings and radio interview excerpts explain, it was Neil's dissatisfaction with that first album's textured production and mastering that made him go folk/rock (not to be confused with folk-rock), and though they're already been released, the Massey Hall and Fillmore sets still represent this era's purest manifestations of those acoustic/electric extremes. The 1969 Riverboat disc, however, is less about what Neil does during the songs (acoustic readings of his first-album and Springfield catalogues) as between them: he talks. A lot. So much so that the these between-song "raps" constitute their own bonus feature on the Riverboat disc-- perhaps inspired by one-time tour-mate Thurston Moore's similar verbal deconstruction of a Venom live album-- with a stream of amusing anecdotes about groupies, drugs and the Guess Who. In the same sense, Archives is ultimately less interesting when seen as a compilation of music than as a digital storehouse of a man's complete life and work.
Taken individually, the reams of extras that accompany every track on the DVD/Blu-ray editions-- candid photos, original handwritten lyric sheets, radio-promo spots, newspaper clippings, tape-box doodles, and so on-- may not seem like a compelling reason to pony up for Archives' enhanced options. But cumulatively, they chart an evolution as intriguing as that heard in the songs. Given that Neil's become rather media-shy in his old age, Archives provides an opportunity to track his transformation as a public figure through the many newspaper articles and radio-interview clips gathered here, from the wide-eyed teenager promoting his club night in the Winnipeg daily to the disgruntled Buffalo Springfield exile trashing Jimmy Messina's mixing job on that band's last record (early evidence of Neil's notorious audiophilia) to the self-described "rich hippie" contemplating the peculiarities of fame just as Harvest is about to make him a superstar.
And the (mostly hidden) video teases sprinkled throughout the set-- like CSNY performing "Down By the River" on a David Steinberg-hosted teen dance show, or rare glimpses of the long-gone Riverboat-- culminate with a treasure trove of footage on Archives' final disc. Here we get a series of intimate interviews conducted during Harvest's farmhouse recording sessions, as well as Archives' most amusing easter egg find: a 15-minute sequence where Neil discovers CSNY bootlegs during a record-shopping trip circa 1971, sparking a heated argument with the store employee that culminates in Neil walking out of the shop, bootlegs in hand, without paying for them. (The sequence is especially resonant in light of Neil's recent endorsement of Warner Music Group pulling all their artists' videos off YouTube.)
Taken together, Archives' musical and visual material form as complete a picture of Neil Young's early years as the most die-hard fan could hope for. But therein lies the fundamental flaw of Archives on DVD-- you can't take them together. Each track is housed in a virtual file folder that allows you to play the audio track or scour the bonus content; there is no way to do them simultaneously. So your options are either to let the music play uninterrupted (while your screen displays serene film loops of spinning record players and reel-to-reel machines), or exit "play" mode and silently sift through the extras-- without being able to actually listen to the song those extras are meant to contextualize. It's like being told that your computer can run iTunes, or your web browser, but you have to shut down one to use the other. It means you end up spending as much time fiddling with your DVD menu controls as enjoying the material you're trying to access. You have to spring for the Blu-ray to access different pieces of media simultaneously.
Brian Eno was recently quoted as saying that if the practice of selling music in physical form is to continue, the emphasis will have to shift from the content to the form, to enable a unique user experience that can't be replicated with the click of a mouse. Archives constitutes a bold step towards this new paradigm, where the delivery system is as much in service to the supplemental materials as the music that ephemera serves to canonize. And for all its multimedia chicanery, Archives ultimately seeks to reassert an old-fashioned mode of attentive listening and engagement that's been mostly lost as music becomes a WiFi-streamed soundtrack to some other activity. But if Neil expects his fans to retain their enthusiasm for future volumes (particularly when the focus shifts to his erratic 80s output), he'll need to make that immersion process more fluid, less disruptive. Certainly Archives' first volume contains enough audio and visual stimuli to keep a Neil Young fan busy till the next edition arrives (presumably) in 2029. But that's as much a comment on the impractical, time-consuming interface as the content itself. | 2009-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-06-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | June 17, 2009 | 7 | 9d1c7ee7-66ed-4712-991e-a460c0d7c52c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The UK musician offers a revealing look at the making of her acclaimed 2011 album Let England Shake—just the latest in a growing series of behind-the-scenes demo collections. | The UK musician offers a revealing look at the making of her acclaimed 2011 album Let England Shake—just the latest in a growing series of behind-the-scenes demo collections. | PJ Harvey: Let England Shake - Demos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pj-harvey-let-england-shake-demos/ | Let England Shake - Demos | In 2015, Londoners were invited to watch PJ Harvey at work on her ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project. Artist and band took up residence in a studio in the city’s historic Somerset House that was open to the public in 45-minute slots. The reaction to this experiment was a mixture of fascination and frustration: Some audiences caught the band in full inspirational flight; others witnessed 45 minutes of drum tinkering. Seven years on, PJ Harvey continues to pull back the curtain on the recording process: Let England Shake - Demos is the seventh in a series of demo albums accompanying the vinyl reissues of her work, mixing artistic revelation with superfluity in a way that would resonate with Harvey’s Somerset House audience.
Harvey has a long history of fleshing out her official releases with supplementary materials. In 1993, she followed Rid of Me with the incendiary 4-Track Demos just five months later. Many of the recent collections feel less than essential, except perhaps to superfans; Harvey tends not to tinker too much with the structure of her songs during the recording process, which means the listener is left with what are often, essentially, crudely recorded versions of already familiar songs. But Let England Shake - Demos is by far the most enlightening of the bunch. Like an uneven block of stone, it allows us to witness how she chipped away at the album’s singular shape, abandoning ideas that might have lessened the songs’ impact.
Let England Shake, PJ Harvey’s eighth studio LP, is one of her strongest and most experimental works, thanks in part to her clever use of sampling to support her songwriting—like a two-line extract from Niney the Observer’s incandescent reggae classic “Blood and Fire” that winds around “Written on the Forehead” like a scaffold, its stiff reinforcement vital to the song’s emotional load. At the time, Harvey said that lines from songs she was listening to would somehow work their way into her music. But Let England Shake - Demos shows that these lines could also work their way out. The album’s title track initially featured a sample from Canadian vocal quartet the Four Lads’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which Harvey scrapped after realizing it was “drawing the song back rather than letting it become its own living entity.” Listening to the demo version, this was undoubtedly the right decision: The Four Lads’ overly cheery melody clouds out the pitiless blue-sky clarity of the song’s studio take.
Similarly, the demo version of “Bitter Branches” is shot through with a crackling, wobbling siren sound, like an alien invasion witnessed through a 1930s radio, that gums up the song’s gears. If you listen to the two “Bitter Branches” side by side, expunging this effect seems like an obvious decision. At the time, it was probably anything but, just one among thousands of agonizing individual choices an artist confronts when making a record. These nuances suggest that Let England Shake - Demos is a record destined primarily for PJ Harvey obsessives and audio freaks keen to pore over subtle tweaks in songwriting and production. “Hanging In The Wire - Demo,” for example, reveals that the protagonist of the song was originally called “Davy,” while on “The Glorious Land - Demo,” Harvey experiments with an oddly warbling accent that gets toned down considerably in the album version.
Yet there are a handful of early takes that rival (and perhaps even eclipse) the polished Let England Shake studio creations. “The Words That Maketh Murder - Demo” features a generous sample of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” that is reduced to a brief interpolation in the song’s studio version; the clip’s carefree rock swing adds a moment of shocking levity to this most intensely overwrought of albums. Elsewhere, the scratchy guitar of “The Last Living Rose - Demo” bares its teeth in a way that sits well with the song’s exhausted contemplation of England, while the distorted, stripped-back air of “In the Dark Places - Demo” allows Harvey’s savage vocal to hit even harder, a gaping laceration to the studio version’s sutured wound.
Let England Shake - Demos may be a supporting act, feeding off the original LP’s emotional spark like suckerfishes on a shark. But as an insight into the creative process of one of England’s greatest musicians, the record has shades of The Beatles: Get Back: It depicts artistry as not merely a lightning bolt of inspiration, but the sum total of the innumerable choices, bold and mundane alike, that surround it.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UMe / Island | January 29, 2022 | 7.6 | 9d1f39d6-dbd5-4781-abb6-e14a2d2318db | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
With warbly melodies and cozy instrumentation, the songwriter and producer’s first solo album in 16 years finds an intimate sanctuary. The messiness is a feature, not a flaw. | With warbly melodies and cozy instrumentation, the songwriter and producer’s first solo album in 16 years finds an intimate sanctuary. The messiness is a feature, not a flaw. | Rusty Santos: High Reality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rusty-santos-high-reality/ | High Reality | If the name Rusty Santos rings a bell, there’s a good chance that at some point in your life you were the kind of devout Animal Collective fan who traded live bootlegs in forum threads and defended Danse Manatee’s honor to the death. Though never an official member of the group, he played a pivotal role as producer during the mid-aughts, piecing together Sung Tongs’ collage of acoustic guitars, spooky samples, and barbershop harmonies. He’s continued to work with Panda Bear on solo projects like the plunderphonic Person Pitch and 2019’s Buoys, as well as a few alumni from AnCo’s boutique Paw Tracks label, but simply lumping Santos in with the storied psych-rock outfit does him a disservice.
During footwork’s breakthrough period from 2011 to 2014, he worked behind the boards on some of the genre’s most pivotal releases, including DJ Rashad’s Welcome to the Chi and Traxman’s The Architek. This brief stint in Chicago’s underground club scene had a marked effect on Santos, inspiring his own band the Present to migrate from psychedelic noise rock to vaguely Lynchian club music. While his recent production credits with Jackie Mendoza and Panda Bear have been more grounded in indie-pop tradition, Santos’ fascination with the Auto-Tuned glossolalia and 808 thump of contemporary trap has steered his clients into intriguing territory.
High Reality, Santos’ first solo album in 16 years, revisits the skeletal brand of folktronica he and Panda Bear explored on Buoys. Strummy campfire chords lay a foundation for much of the record, a familiar groundwork that gives Santos ample room to expressively contort his digitally altered vocals. But he ditches the echoing samples and aquatic sound effects that tethered Buoys to the AnCo oeuvre, opting for a drier, more economical mix that allows for greater intimacy between artist and audience.
Each instrument that appears on “Kick Out the Spirit,” for example, feels so clean that it’s slightly unsettling. Plasticky synth strings undergird acoustic fingerpicking, punctuated by the occasional dash of drum machine that sounds like it came packaged with Santos’ recording software. Though far from lo-fi, his chosen sound palette is back-to-basics in a contemporary sense, sharing a sense of post-digital authenticity with the clever use of Logic’s stock percussion on recent Porches releases, or Kanye West’s ability to make generic organ presets sound regal in the right context. These smooth textures place emphasis on Santos’ voice, which is, in contrast, closely mic’d and subtly distorted, following warbly off-the-cuff melodies that are more concerned with immediate expression than catchiness. “I will disown this dystopian nightmare,” he sings with defiant optimism: His major-key battle cries wield hope in a present that seeks to stamp it out at each turn.
Santos’ will to manufacture hope isn’t merely meant to be a salve for These Uncertain Times. High Reality was written after he was placed under an involuntary psychiatric hold due to a psychotic break, and he has said that the record and its title describe his mindstate while “detached from day-to-day reality during [his] crisis.” Opener “Dream in Stereo” sets the tone immediately, tucking internal frustration beneath a surface layer of jangly psychedelic pop. “I know how it feels to never quite belong,” he coos, extending both empathy to the listener and assurance to himself before illustrating this struggle to connect in surreal detail. Santos conjures elements of the album’s new-age mythos—angels, stardust, auras—with the intense concentration of a spellcaster, injecting mysticism into the song’s standard indie-rock trappings.
“Symbolic” and “Apocalypses” take the juxtaposition between cozy instrumentation and cataclysmic imagery a step further. Occupying High Reality’s middle section, both tracks are rather spare, consisting of little more than light strumming, handclaps, and a few keyboard flourishes, supplying a tranquil backdrop for scenes that would feel at home in the Book of Revelation. On the latter track, Santos describes feeling the laws of physics distort as his soul is assumed into heaven: a morbid, ambiguously triumphant vision wrapped in a chorus that goes down like warm Sleepytime tea.
High Reality’s medium and message may be mismatched, but this messiness is a feature, not a flaw. Through gentle restraint, Santos has fashioned his own source of comfort in a vast, sometimes confounding narrative that feels beyond his control. Oddly enough, it’s when the record’s sound mirrors its subject matter, like on the serpentine “Master Zodiac,” that it misses the mark, embarking on lengthy math-rock tangents that draw attention away from Santos’ vocals and leave you without space to properly take in the tumult. For the most part, though, the record does provide this sanctuary, like watching a raging storm through the window from the safety of your own bed. There’s something soothing about a little chaos when it’s seen from a distance. | 2022-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Lo | July 25, 2022 | 6.8 | 9d207b42-3cd5-4505-91a5-a5b334f5c1eb | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The Inglewood artist’s first album as Kendrick and SZA’s labelmate is a neo-soul-tinged space odyssey about love. | The Inglewood artist’s first album as Kendrick and SZA’s labelmate is a neo-soul-tinged space odyssey about love. | SiR: November | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sir-november/ | November | On the first proper song of SiR’s latest LP, he sings, “All her lil friends can’t stand me/Because they know I would trade her love for a Grammy.” The arrogant posture is surprising, coming from someone whose breakthrough EPs were overflowing with sweet nothings, and it stands in contrast with the romantic security he sings about on the album’s closing track (“You don’t care about my name/If I didn’t have a dime, you would care for me the same”). That conflict—between pride and heart, loving and leaving—provides the dramatic tension at the album’s core.
November arrives exactly one year after TDE announced SiR as its newest signee. The label’s roster doesn’t seem to believe in creating run-of-the-mill anything, and it follows that the 31-year-old Inglewood singer-songwriter and producer R&B isn’t just R&B. There’s a neo-soul silkiness to many of his songs, with an atmospheric, jazzy vibe in the production—November is an album for lighting incense, not candles. In this sense, he’s TDE’s answer to a moment that has seen acts like Daniel Caesar subtly returning to the genre’s more tender roots with great success. Even so, throughout the album, SiR deftly bridges his old-school sounds with new-school references (“hit the DM”).
This is especially notable in the case of “K,” a female robotic travel companion who interacts with SiR throughout the album. She runs a systems check, alerts him of his progress on an unspecified interstellar journey (“33 trillion kilometers to go,” she says at the album’s midway mark), and provides him with emotional comfort. To listeners, she’s a plot device that offers narrative cohesion and a context to invest in beyond the music. And much like “Jane,” the computerized sidekick who accompanied Kanye West into outer space on his Glow in the Dark tour a decade ago, “K” is a way to signal SiR’s growing artistic ambitions.
Throughout, SiR (who’s married in real life) sings like a selfish man reliving past transgressions. On the slow-burning and Schoolboy Q-assisted “Something Foreign,” he’s nonchalant and focused on his status. “Tryna keep it humble in a world full of egos, gangsters, and evils,” he sings over a fluttering piano melody. Yet ego seems to get the best of him over and over again. “Something New,” a horn-laden duet with British singer-songwriter Etta Bond, captures a summer’s forbidden love. “Tell me what would you do if she was me/Tell me how would you move if we were free,” Bond delicately sings. Elsewhere, on “I Know,” an Auto-Tuned SiR taunts somebody’s babyfather over a lowrider bassline; “Never Home” finds him doing a spoken-word interlude about how the lifestyle of an up-and-coming musician has pulled him away. He remains unapologetic as a woman demands answers over voicemail for their relationship (or lack thereof).
By the time the fuzzy kick of “War” and the reverb- and regret-tinged “Better” come around, SiR is finally ready to admit fault. “I know I’m right where I needed to be all along, so/Until I have your love, there’s no surrender, no retreat,” he sings on the former, his satin voice making the words effortlessly believable. Songs of romance—present and lost—are what he does best, and he peels back the layers of passion with exceptional potency. “She just wanted to love me, I wouldn’t let her/Now she don’t know me,” he bemoans on “Better,” before dejectedly asking “K” to delete the transmission and initiate sleep, as they’re still 12 trillion kilometers away from their destination.
It’s never made clear where, exactly, he and “K” are headed. Perhaps they’re on a journey towards acceptance of one’s flaws, or nodding to the feeling that one has forever left to go, no matter how much progress is made. Or maybe the trip represents SiR’s potential as his career starts to take off. Whatever the case, November makes it easy to lose yourself in the ride. | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment | January 18, 2018 | 7.2 | 9d21a45e-02d9-48ac-83d4-ea7d9a085e84 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Focusing more on songcraft than synth textures, inc. no world's sophomore album is a more grounded, elemental look at 21st-century R&B. | Focusing more on songcraft than synth textures, inc. no world's sophomore album is a more grounded, elemental look at 21st-century R&B. | inc. no world: As Light as Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22351-as-light-as-light/ | As Light as Light | On their 2013 debut no world, the L.A. duo inc. no world (formerly inc., also formerly Teen Inc.) were more comfortable in the shadows than in the light. Directors of mood first and foremost, brothers Andrew and Daniel Aged crafted a consistent set of earnest if at times anonymous blue-eyed R&B. no world was the product of two studio rats who had spent years honing their craft, reverent to plush ’80s R&B but with a foot in the ’00s. Their vibes-above-all approach played to their strengths: They were not deconstructionists but faithful recreators and Andrew’s gentle vocals were treated more like a texture blended into the mood.
As Light As Light, their first album in three years, plays it straighter. Andrew’s voice is pushed closer to the front of the mix and the production carves out a deeper pocket for his vocals. Whereas no world featured repeated mantras that unfurled at their own pace, As Light As Light places an emphasis on more traditional verse-chorus-verse songwriting. On “The Wheel,” everything revolves around and builds up to its chorus, where all the heft comes from Andrew’s vocals, injected here with a heat previously only hinted at. When he latches onto a chorus that’s got legs (“Waters of You”), the brothers instinctively milk it for all its worth. But moving away from the chant-like repetition that worked so well on no world exposes some pedestrian songwriting: Andrew fails to breathe life into the love-as-water metaphor on “Without Water,” and when the Ageds don’t peel back the layers, Andrew’s verses tend to get lost in the shuffle (“In Your Beauty”), a song that should have taken off at least one if not two accessories before leaving the house.
Andrew’s devotionals, given extra weight now that he demonstrates his range as a vocalist, are forever in a state of adoration. “I have fears, I have fallen, and I’ve lost my way back home/But I’ve never had to wonder about the love you’ve shown,” he sings about a long-time lover on “Without Water.” These are songs of connection, not conquest; they celebrate emotional support, not emotional drain. “We’ll stay up laughing [about] what we thought was true,” he imagines on “In This Dream,” a late-album slow-burner with a hollowed-out warmth. Andrew sings with a generous optimism that feels hard-earned, the kind that emerges after a realization that all other approaches hold intimacy at arm’s length.
Near the end, its songs become sparse and less adorned—even rootsier. There’s an honest-to-god slide guitar on “In Love,” which shimmers with a lightness characteristic of inc. no world’s former sound but with a stronger focus on songcraft. Much like the rest of As Light As Light, even though the song contains fewer elements, the production feels thicker and less prone to being carried off by the slightest breeze. What remains, however, is an overriding sense of anonymity that blunts the impact of Andrew’s sentiments. While Andrew has a knack for sticky hooks, his vocals rely on nuance more than natural charm—in a crowd of whispery R&B vocalists, he just doesn’t have the range to stick out. But his ability to spin on the same line and draw out different meanings works for inc. no world, who are smart to cast off some of their ambient textures in favor of something more elemental. They remain immaculate R&B players who understand the pleasure of patience and the power of delicacy. | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | No World | September 8, 2016 | 6.8 | 9d2b5916-53e9-4f28-b7d7-eceb3a77b50e | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
A fundamental EP from the Detroit techno titan gets reissued 18 years after its release; aimed squarely at the dancefloor, its three cuts are by turns gooey, steely, and strange. | A fundamental EP from the Detroit techno titan gets reissued 18 years after its release; aimed squarely at the dancefloor, its three cuts are by turns gooey, steely, and strange. | DJ Bone: Riding the Thin Line EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-bone-riding-the-thin-line-ep/ | Riding the Thin Line EP | The recent flurry of attention around Detroit’s DJ Bone has a better-late-than-never quality. Active since at least the mid 1990s, he has been a tireless presence in the techno underground, pushing his purist vision regardless of critical accolades (or lack thereof). A Motor City loyalist, Bone has always affirmed and expanded upon the core values and aesthetics pioneered by his hometown’s more visible trailblazers, particularly Underground Resistance. Tough percussion and lean, linear structures are the critical support beams for jarring facades. Over two decades after his debut, and with Bone riding a career high, Anotherday Records revisits 1999’s brutal, definitive Riding the Thin Line EP.
Originally released on Juan Atkins’ Metroplex, Riding is a perfect introduction to his world: It’s a hit-and-run haiku, deftly articulating the scope of his work across three cuts. Urgent and concise, the EP establishes the sweaty claustrophobia that Bone would make his trademark and applies it to tracks that are by turns gooey, steely, and strange.
“Shut the Lites Off” wastes no time getting started. Over a barreling groove, a stern, unvarnished vocal sample repeats the title phrase. Halfway between a boot-camp command and a mantra, it builds intensity by doing nothing at all. It’s the kind of tension-escalating power move that creates indelible dancefloor moments. The strings that rise up two minutes in provide a hint of relief, softening the mood with romantic brushstrokes, but overall the track feels like a game of chicken played with the listeners.
“The Funk” builds on the year-zero electro of Atkins’ Cybotron project with a snappy snare and hi-hat pattern fizzing across sludgy 808 bass bombs. The vocals maintain the incantatory style of “Shut the Lites Off,” repeating, “This is what we call the funk,” but the track is littered with quick asides, acidic squiggles, and dissonant sound effects. Closing track “The Haunting” is the best of the bunch: a pounding maelstrom that’s somehow more aggressive yet more restrained than its counterparts. A breathy vocal, glassy strings, and unrelenting percussion submerge listeners in a delirious atmosphere of anxious sensuality. It oozes sex yet seems unconcerned with reaching any kind of climax. Instead it just flickers, shimmers, and roils for a much-too-short four-and-a-half minutes.
In the fabric of Riding you can hear echoes of the past and hints of the future: the Berlin school’s concurrent early experiments in dub, Chicago’s legacy of slimy seduction, and industrial’s clanging techno-primitivism. Meanwhile, the syrupy flanging on “The Funk” and the magenta drip of “The Haunting” directly prefigure the psychedelic house explorations of New Jersey’s DJ Qu and Nicuri. What ties it together is functionality—not to make DJ’s lives easier but to make dancers’ nights crazier. Bone’s concerns lie squarely with the body, using weird twists and heady textures to drive the audience. In this sense, Riding the Thin Line is aptly titled: The EP skates delicately between body and soul, hallucinatory visions and subsuming rhythms, and heaving physicality and heavenly moments of ethereal reprieve. | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anotherday | July 29, 2017 | 7.6 | 9d2d8397-0dfb-411c-adb8-3fe7fecef122 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Filtering the sound of ’80s freestyle through a buoyant, time-warped haze, the debut album from singer/producer Marcus Brown is both captivating and elusive. | Filtering the sound of ’80s freestyle through a buoyant, time-warped haze, the debut album from singer/producer Marcus Brown is both captivating and elusive. | Nourished by Time: Erotic Probiotic 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nourished-by-time-erotic-probiotic-2/ | Erotic Probiotic 2 | With their inquisitive pop music under the name Nourished by Time, singer and producer Marcus Brown rummages through the past like an archaeologist. Since 2019, the Baltimore-raised, London-based crooner has released a series of singles exploring a wide range of 1980s touchstones including new wave, electro-funk, and R&B. On his brief 2022 release Erotic Probiotic, he condensed these influences to two tracks of brooding and fluid synth-pop that recalled Depeche Mode and the Blue Nile. A year later, they’ve taken to another ’80s staple: freestyle. The genre of roller rinks, impassioned belting, and uptempo 808 beats invigorates Brown’s once-muted approach. It’s his debut album, but he sounds reborn.
Erotic Probiotic 2 plays like a sampler of a time-warped ’80s that took place entirely in Brown’s head—and maybe extends into the present day. In these apparitional songs, Jodeci harmonies float over Paul Hardcastle synth drizzles; Larry Blackmon screams spring off of RZA drums; warped samples of podcast-era Joe Budden and ESPN’s Jay Williams melt into a shoegaze thicket. Brown likely has some personal connections to these disparate sources, but he completely sublimates those attachments into the songwriting. The result is music that is studied but uncouth, familiar but unbidden.
The freestyle credo is that anything goes—rapping, piping, scatting—as long as the rhythm doesn’t let up, and this ethos emboldens Brown to freefall through time. Single “Daddy” begins with pulsing drum programming, ascendant harmonies, and a cheery rap verse that initially evokes hip-house. But then nocturnal synths and a sour guitar melody descend, and Brown’s vocals turn forlorn for the second verse. “The dot connector/The spot corrector/I say I love you/You say whatever,” they chant on the jubilant but fretting chorus. “Dot connector” is a fitting phrase for their approach, reflecting both the vaporous subject matter and Brown’s expert weaving of styles.
This vision stands out on “The Fields.” The skittering hi-hats, snappy snares, and buoyant bassline suggest Miami bass, while the questioning vocals root the performance in freestyle. “Once or twice I prayed to Jesus/Never heard a word back in plain English/More like signs or advertisements/Telling me to keep consumerizing,” Brown sings on the bouncy hook, lost in the mixed messages of the modern world. They don’t sink into despair though; voicing his confusion pushes him to keep seeking answers.
The singing on Erotic Probiotic 2 is as homespun as the production. Brown has a liquid baritone that can percolate with ache or froth with joy, and here it does both and more. Opener “Quantum Suicide” features expressive whispers, shouts, coos, and moans that inject intimacy into the bleak subject matter. “Have you ever prayed/For your invention?” they ask. On “Soap Party,” his voice recedes into misty key melodies and propulsive drums as he confesses to being scared to make a move in a relationship. “The truth is in the sun/But there’s comfort in rain,” they sing. It’s one of many moments on the album where the exuberance of the songwriting belies feelings of inertia and indecision.
Despite the retro sounds, Brown studiously avoids nostalgia in his work, an approach that’s refreshing but comes at the expense of vulnerability. Other pop syncretists, like Sudan Archives, Moodymann, and Yves Tumor bring out the appetite and longing in their songs, each acquired curio divulging something about the collector’s urges or facilitating a grand aesthetic. Not so much with Erotic Probiotic 2. Freestyle could be Nourished by Time’s artistic roadmap, or just a passing interest. It’s a testament to these engrossing performances that, wherever they go next, they will probably sound right at home. | 2023-05-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Scenic Route | May 4, 2023 | 8.2 | 9d31413d-8624-46d9-9b14-4d65cb8b4ad5 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
A sort of biography in mixtape form, Tribal Rites offers the chance to hear dance-music history through the ears of one of the culture’s most discerning listeners. | A sort of biography in mixtape form, Tribal Rites offers the chance to hear dance-music history through the ears of one of the culture’s most discerning listeners. | Bill Brewster: Bill Brewster Presents Tribal Rites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-brewster-bill-brewster-presents-tribal-rites/ | Bill Brewster Presents Tribal Rites | In 1999, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton published Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, a seismic book that elevated the club DJ from mere nightlife accessory to unsung hero. Two of the music’s most influential DJs, Larry Levan in New York and Ron Hardy in Chicago, had died in 1992, having received little media exposure in their lifetimes. Brewster and Broughton’s work sought to correct that oversight by exalting the DJ and lovingly excavating the underground culture’s rich history. Brewster’s argument on behalf of dance music’s cultural validity has resonated widely. It’s difficult to imagine the current dance-music landscape—with even energy-drink manufacturers and liquor companies dedicated to documenting the culture—without Brewster’s example.
As a DJ, Brewster has proven himself a tireless compiler of dance music’s hidden corners, and he spells out his life’s narrative arc as a DJ, writer, and music fiend on Tribal Rites, a fascinating 3xCD (or 4xLP) compilation. Across 41 tracks, Tribal Rites traces Brewster’s biography as a listener, from psychedelic rock to snotty punk to ecstatic house music, finding through lines across a bewildering number of sounds and—like the greatest DJs he’s interviewed—crafting a story with these seemingly disparate songs. In an era lousy with compilations, DJ mixes, and streaming playlists, the compilation not only unearths some elusive, bewildering gems; it offers the chance to hear through the ears of one of dance music’s most discerning listeners.
A number of themes arise over the nearly four-hour runtime of Tribal Rites, but the first thing that jumps out is not so much its party-time atmosphere as its apocalyptic undertones, as evidenced by two tracks dating from 1971. There’s the sulfuric crunch of Agape’s “Rejoice,” a Christian rock curio that sets ominous Biblical lines (from Matthew 24:7 and Acts 2:20) into psychedelic rock; General Crook flips a line from the Sermon on the Mount for the stomping sting of “What Time It Is.” Which seems heavy, until you consider that dance music culture as we know it today originated in the pressure cooker of 1970s New York, serving as an antidote to the brutality its participants—primarily African-Americans, Latinos, and gays, lesbians, and trans people—faced in their daily lives. Early parties like David Mancuso’s Loft and Nicky Siano’s the Gallery were safe havens for their audience.
In that light, when Brewster gets to Floyd Beck’s slinky groover “Party Is the Solution,” from 1980, it hits less like an escapist trifle and more like the revelatory and all-inclusive conceit that a proper dance party actually is. But Brewster is also enough of a British punk at heart to find a similar revelation in the snarky piss-take of Gaffa’s “Attitude Dancing (Land Of a 1000 Dunces).”
The frisson of different genres coupling with one another on the dancefloor gives Tribal Rites its spark. There’s the dubbed-out disco frolic of the Raincoats’ “Animal Rhapsody (Version)” and Ruts DC doing spindly dance grooves; reggae’s massive influence creeps into a cavernous take on Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” as well as the early Afrobeat classic (and Loft staple) “Soul Makossa” (recast as the syrupy “Reggae Makossa”). But Brewster also finds illumination in quieter moments, like the synth-laced country chimes of the Bobbie Gentry rarity “Thunder in the Afternoon.” It says something about Brewster’s counterintuitive tastes that the comp’s most gobsmacking moment is an acoustic take—made with banjo, mandolin, and pedal steel—on Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That.”
The last portion of the set focuses on streamlined house and techno, ranging from the dub-techno masterclass of Maurizio’s “M4” to Swayzak’s microhouse splicing of Larry Heard’s “Night Images” to the flute-laced tech-house remix of Chicken Lips’ “Is That You or Me.” But when the anthemic piano and gospel vocals of Clifton King’s “Family Prayer” come on, the energy is singular. A staple on stations like KISS-FM and WBMX back in the early ‘90s and the epitome of that era’s garage house sound, the song finds ecstatic uplift in lines like “And while we party/We all get closer/Dance to the family prayer.” Clifton King cites Ecclesiastes 1:9: “It is written there’s nothing new under the sun.” He then finds ample reason to keep dancing. | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Eskimo | November 21, 2017 | 7.8 | 9d3eae66-efd3-44f5-a47b-53562b2b1935 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Where the Sacramento band's previous work often showed off their chops for chops' sake, their fourth album seems to have more serendipitous origins, and sees them bring their carnival rock vibe to skate punk, dream pop, and proto-emo. | Where the Sacramento band's previous work often showed off their chops for chops' sake, their fourth album seems to have more serendipitous origins, and sees them bring their carnival rock vibe to skate punk, dream pop, and proto-emo. | Tera Melos: X'ed Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18107-tera-melos-xed-out/ | X'ed Out | Sacramento trio Tera Melos traffic in genres that are often viewed as the opposite of punk, i.e., prog, math-rock, *post-*hardcore. But when done properly, these styles generate all of the enthusiasm of punk while turning its traditional logic about formal training on its head: What if your love of music inspires you to train to the point where you can accomplish anything you want? That’s what Tera Melos get at on their fourth album, X’ed Out, a super-collider of genres, riffs and mad rhythms that is often thrilling, occasionally exhausting, and, unlike most chops-based music, never dull.
It wasn’t always this way. Their previous work was often chops for chops'-sake, impressive on a theoretical level, manifesting in songs as spazzed-out and inscrutable as their titles-- “Guy vs D.C. Sniper,” “A Spoonful Of Slurry (is Good for What Ails You),” to name a few. While their instrumental capacities are still plenty baffling, Tera Melos appear to be relishing the opportunity to encounter new difficulties; whereas jamming a 7/4 riff against a 12/8 backbeat is a puzzle that can be solved with enough effort, the stuff X'ed Out goes for is sparked by the metaphysical-- ingenuity and serendipity.
Fortunately, Tera Melos sound exhilarated by the potential of not having an idea of where these songs might end up. X’ed Out begins on a monotone, palm-muted riff that could’ve found itself on a Phoenix or Strokes record; in fact, when Nick Reinhart’s vaporous falsetto first enters, it sounds a great deal like “Tap Out” from Comedown Machine. A couple of clean guitar runs nestle their way into the mix, and all of a sudden, it’s more in the style of looping enthusiasts like Dustin Wong. And then... a circle-pit ready chorus in Sufjan Stevens’ favorite time signature?
The name of that song is “Weird Circles”, which becomes a prophetic statement. X’ed Out is full of loops that don’t quite close, song structures that aren’t verses and choruses so much as geometric patterns jutting against each other at strange angles, genres ricocheting in a game of pinball. Siphon out the hooks of “Weird Circles”, “Sunburn”, and “Tropic Lame”, and you have the basis for 2013’s most excellent skate punk EP. Isolate the beatless and beatific drift of “Snake Lake” and “No Phase”, and Tera Melos make a case for themselves as a covert dream pop act. Come across “New Chlorine” or “Until Lufthansa” in the wild and Tera Melos is a fine reminder of a time when Jawbox and Jawbreaker were getting major-label deals.
Which is to say that while X’ed Out is Tera Melos’ most accessible work by a large margin, it’s still all relative. There are hooks all over the place and just as many ways to deliver them-- guitars that sound more like steel drums, phonetic cooing, ridiculous drum fills. But Tera Melos aren’t pop craftsmen working in ornate arrangements; they’re playing with such frantic speed and precision, it’s more like they’re trying to defuse live bombs. This makes Tera Melos a cozy fit on Sargent House, a label which has cornered the market on carnival rock with the likes of Fang Island, And So I Watch You From Afar and Bosnian Rainbows. It’s not divisive so much as deep niche-- this stuff isn’t for everyone, largely because the accompanying up-with-people delivery that can be somewhat grating. But X’ed Out offers the same thrill rides without the sugary stodge. Granted, Reinhart’s vocals are so airy that they often sound indecipherable in isolation, to say nothing of when they’re placed amidst Tera Melos’ whirligig arrangements. That said, there’s substance and protein here-- the music is always given muscle to counteract the finger-tapping treble and you can suss out lyrics about punk rock bills, street names, and other clues to the emotional and physical geography of X’ed Out.
They're still subject to incomprehensibility; besides being the longest track on X’ed Out, “Slimed” relies too much on overeager skronk to fill the time, as if to give listeners an idea of what they previously missed out on. On the opposite end, while “X’ed Out and Tired” is sensible as a closing sigh of relief, as a straight-up acoustic strummer, it doesn’t make much of a case for Tera Melos to unplug just yet. Those both come later on, when the listener is likely to be more exhausted than the people actually playing the music. While it’s exciting to hear a veteran band sharply change course on the fly, Tera Melos doesn’t always have a grasp on the mundane things like pacing or sequencing that make for a smoother LP experience. Still, even if it’s a fourth album delivered with the enthusiasm and conviction of a debut, Tera Melos sound too damn geeked about where they are now to let X’ed Out be a definitive document. | 2013-05-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-05-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | May 13, 2013 | 7.1 | 9d402277-0490-4da1-9fbe-c1c74d2c3ce4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Norwegian house producer Bjørn Torske builds enveloping shapes from the merest scraps of musical information and in recent years has been making loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. His new Kok EP feels like a concise alternate version of 2010's excellent Kokning mixed with headphones in mind. | Norwegian house producer Bjørn Torske builds enveloping shapes from the merest scraps of musical information and in recent years has been making loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. His new Kok EP feels like a concise alternate version of 2010's excellent Kokning mixed with headphones in mind. | Bjørn Torske: Kok EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18790-bjorn-torske-kok-ep/ | Kok EP | Hardly anyone starts out as a minimalist—at least, not a good one. Whether working in music, painting, or poetry, perhaps you can only effectively leave out as much as you've previously put in. Norwegian house music producer Bjørn Torske has been at it since the late 1990s, and it shows in his advanced level of idiosyncratic understatement. He builds enveloping, vividly fluttering shapes from the merest scraps of musical information—a plucked string, a smear of organ, a dollop of bass—which are deeply syncopated around contoured absences, where the more overt gestures of house music should be. Torske's constructions sound at once impossible and effortless, as if lightly carried along by their own oddball physics, and he treats 4/4 time like a curio cabinet that hides infinite compartments of different shapes and sizes.
In recent years, Torske has been making what are essentially loose disco edits of his own instrumental recordings. Organically shambling but mechanically repetitive, the style sounds more like deceptively simple psychedelic pop (Moondog is frequently invoked by way of comparison) than dance music. 2010's Kokning was soft and shaggy, with a warm acoustic glow, and seemed much more concerned with gently nudging around time and space than moving bodies. Some quirky programmed rhythms cast thin tethers to the dance floor, but even those fall away on the Kok EP, which was recorded during the same studio sessions as Kokning. You can certainly hear the tonal and instrumental continuity, with lots of ultra-minimal funk guitar slowed down to a canter and lush, sharply glinting organ tones*. Kok* winds up like a concise alternate version of Kokning mixed purely with headphones in mind.
Kok seems at first like it might shape up as little more than Kokning outtakes, a pleasant if not exactly thrilling proposition. The opening prelude is a just brief cinema theme for walking bass, organ, chimes, and scatted claps. The following "Assistenten" has a nice taut build around an off-center pulse, expanding the established sound palette with slapping percussion and what sounds like a tiny elephant trumpeting. But Torske is still just warming up, and the final three pieces feel like more than practiced vamps. "Setter" braids together stuck string figures, shivery drones, and jittery percussion into one striated mass. On "Totem Expose", wowing frequencies bore urgent rhythms through a metallic noise cloud that gradually turns inside out, ending as an organist's hymn. And mesmerizing finale "Nestor" sends a filtered curlicue slowly arcing through a cold cosmos of rangy, oblique counterpoint. Though less fleshed-out and essential than Kokning or its predecessor, the delightful Feil Knapp, this final entry in Torske's "to boil" trilogy (counting last year's Oppkok remix 12") has more than enough simmer to warrant the concept. | 2013-12-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2013-12-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | December 10, 2013 | 6.5 | 9d412be4-56db-4aea-8fa2-2e1cf2305296 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The New York City-based conceptual and visual artist’s experimental club tracks channel the legacies of black women icons into visions of utopias. | The New York City-based conceptual and visual artist’s experimental club tracks channel the legacies of black women icons into visions of utopias. | Mhysa: NEVAEH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mhysa-nevaeh/ | NEVAEH | When it comes to reinterpreting songs, how you sing matters just as much as what you’re singing. Louis Armstrong turned an apocalyptic dirge into a celebration of new life and a New Orleans jazz funeral standard with his recording of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Whitney Houston transformed a limping nationalist anthem into a tear-jerking ballad of resilience with her 1991 performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at that year’s Super Bowl. Excavating new meanings from old work and stirring new emotions: This is the talent electronic artist Mhysa brings to her latest album, Nevaeh, as she plants seeds of R&B, pop, and spiritual hits and allows them to bloom over crashing beats, twinkling chimes, and playful synths.
Mhysa is the musical alter ego of New York City-based conceptual and visual artist E. Jane. In her experimental club tracks, she channels the legacies of black women icons into visions of utopias. As she did on her 2017 debut fantasii, on Nevaeh Mhysa borrows sentiments from cultural greats like Lucille Clifton and Janet Jackson, translating and interpolating them with an ear for industrial sounds and unorthodox compositions. On the minimalist “breaker of chains,” Mhysa repurposes Lauryn Hill’s smoldering hooks from Nas’ 1996 track “If I Ruled the World,” her crisp, airy soprano infusing the declarations of world change with delicate hope. Accompanied by a quiet tambourine and a cavern of reverb, she replaces any suggestion of Nas—who allegedly abused singer Kelis, one of Mhysa’s inspirations, during their four-year marriage—with an expansive silence. She accomplishes a similar transformation in her own repeated renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” breathing passion into every line. Throughout Nevaeh, Mhysa offers up the lone black woman’s voice as a conduit for an age-old dream of heaven, or the album’s title spelled backwards.
For many, there’s no greater utopia than the crush and ecstasy of a dancefloor. And since Mhysa’s beginning in 2015, she’s proven she knows the way around a club banger. Despite that track record, Nevaeh includes just one all-out dance track, “Sanaa Lathan.” The song’s braided textures link it to the rest of the album, which is more ethereal. Instrumental track “Float” alternates sped-up and slowed-down samples that evoke the solemnity and resonance of a cathedral organ. Meanwhile, “sad slutty baby wants more for the world” features an R&B vocal sample that delays and dissolves on loop into a ghostly chorus approaching white noise.
When Mhysa appears as a vocalist and lyricist, it’s with all rough edges exposed. Rather than masking vocal aberrations, Nevaeh’s lo-fi production and embrace of background sounds—like a door slam or a sharp inhale before speaking—highlight occasions when Mhysa’s gospel-rooted melismas go flat or stray from buttoned-up convention. Her unguarded presentation, along with the embrace of sexual desire in her lyrics, presents an unvarnished vulnerability often left out of the current bedroom pop umbrella. Softness and vulnerability, Mhysa reminds us, is not without its jolts, snags, and base desires. Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”
Similar to the gospel pioneers who channeled heavenly praise through devil’s music, Mhysa offers promises of peace and salvation via seemingly opposed aesthetics like manipulated found sounds and striking production. Though Nevaeh centers on the idea of an ideal destination, its focus on journey and transportation is what makes it captivating. By its closing songs, dreamy contentment gives way to urgency, as if heaven is drifting away. “I want to fucking believe, I want you to make it better,” Mhysa sings repeatedly on “BELIEVE Interlude,” gradually curling the plea into a challenge. On Nevaeh, Mhysa draws strength from creeping change, where most others would only find dread.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | February 18, 2020 | 6.9 | 9d441f61-ded9-495f-bc04-d5ee5f4f0993 | Ann-Derrick Gaillot | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ann-derrick-gaillot/ | |
In what is essentially a radical remix project, the artist formerly known as Dirty Beaches refines his own imperfect saxophone recordings into something radiant and pure. | In what is essentially a radical remix project, the artist formerly known as Dirty Beaches refines his own imperfect saxophone recordings into something radiant and pure. | Alex Zhang Hungtai: Divine Weight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alex-zhang-hungtai-divine-weight/ | Divine Weight | When Alex Zhang Hungtai made his live debut at the “Twin Peaks” Roadhouse last year, it felt like an appropriate grand prize for years of dedicated service in the realm of avant-garde noir. After all, when we first encountered Zhang, a decade ago, in his greased-up Dirty Beaches guise, he looked and sounded like the sort of enigmatic outlaw who would step off a David Lynch set—familiarly ’50s-retro yet eerily freakish. Now, he was getting to inhabit the role for real, even if it was with a fake band. But because it marked the first time in many years that we’d heard Zhang play anything resembling rock‘n’roll, the “Twin Peaks” cameo also underscored just how far he’d drifted since Dirty Beaches’ 2011 breakthrough, Badlands—and how the music he’s made since then has been too eclectic and audacious to conform to a pat descriptor like “Lynchian.”
Since retiring the Dirty Beaches moniker in 2014, having completed the transition from songs to soundscaping, Zhang has fully indulged his newfound aesthetic freedom. Whether he’s releasing meditative piano instrumentals, forming violent free-jazz trios, or constructing dark, dissonant sound collages with Love Theme, Zhang is never afraid to expose his work’s jagged edges. He’s long favored a raw field-recording ambience that amplifies the overarching sense of improvised experiments being caught on tape in real time. But on his first proper release under his own name, Zhang refines past imperfections into something radiant and pure.
Divine Weight is, in essence, a radical remix project. Dissatisfied with a recent cache of saxophone recordings, Zhang fed them through his laptop, manipulating the sounds into entirely new forms, like rusted copper piping stripped out of an abandoned building and melted down into shiny, interwoven wiring. Structurally, the album evokes the immersive, carefully orchestrated ambient set pieces of Dirty Beaches’ 2014 swan song, Stateless, but on a more cosmic scale. Philosophically speaking, he’s moved beyond Lynch toward Jodorowsky: Zhang has cited the Chilean auteur’s psychomagic teachings as a guiding influence on these recordings, and the music here mirrors their therapeutic mission to transform deep-seated, subconscious trauma into rapturous spiritual release.
Even at its most abstract, Zhang’s music has historically drawn attention to its tactility: The instrumentation was readily identifiable, the mise-en-scène vivid, and you could practically feel his tape loops disintegrate before your ears. But Divine Weight revels in disorientation, blurring the line between sound and source, perception and reality, weaving an atmosphere that’s as oppressive as it is weightless. Sounding like Tim Hecker remixing Colin Stetson, “Pierrot” and “Matrimony” mutate their constituent parts into unrecognizable shapes; the former remolds its sax scraps to emulate the haunting hum of flutes, while the latter layers on frosty synth drones until they approximate the sound of a church choir frozen in a moment of ecstatic harmony. On “This Is Not My Country,” the debased brass serves as the raw material for a trembling, dissonant symphony that conjures our unsettled world today. Famously nomadic, Zhang lived in Los Angeles until the 2016 election influenced his permanent departure from the United States, and this track feels like a visit to the scorched-earth site of a home he no longer recognizes.
Some emotional respite arrives in the form of “Yaumatei.” Though it bears no obvious resemblance to the Love Theme piece of the same name, it’s the track that feels most spiritually connected to Zhang’s past work. Honoring his penchants for geographic title references and raw field-recording ambience, “Yaumatei” feels both more grounded and less refined than anything else on the album. But following that impressionistic interstitial, Divine Weight climaxes with its colossal 20-minute title track, which answers all the hazy-headed music that preceded it with the clearest, most epically scaled statement of Zhang’s career.
“Divine Weight” is indeed a perfect title for this ecclesiastic orgy of church-organ drones that rain down like sunbeams piercing 100-foot-high stained-glass windows. It’s a magnum opus that conveys both the solemnity of a funeral service and the everlasting joy of a soul crossing over to the other side in a blaze of white light. It’s a mountain of crescendoing chords piled one atop the other in perpetuity, grasping for a sky that’s always just out of reach. It’s that THX warm-up fanfare looped for all eternity at jet-engine volume. It is both gorgeous and grotesque. Throughout his career, Zhang has invited us to see the beauty in grit. But here, he presents us with a new challenge: to bear the crushing burden of relentless splendor. | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | NON Worldwide | July 9, 2018 | 7.7 | 9d45a7ff-a5fe-4885-aa3a-3d7f53c107b1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
This Heat perfected a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude. You can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica. | This Heat perfected a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude. You can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica. | This Heat: This Heat/Health and Efficiency/Deceit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21407-this-heathealth-and-efficiencydeceit/ | This Heat/Health and Efficiency/Deceit | Before it was a recording studio, Cold Storage was a meat locker, its floors slicked with blood. But under This Heat's occupancy, between 1977 and 1981, the South London space became a laboratory for a strange and volatile new strain of avant-garde rock—by turns thundering and ephemeral, hopeful and wry, surgically precise and caveman-crude—that didn't quite square with anything else that was happening at the time. Their motto was simple: "All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert."
Two members of the band, drummer Charles Hayward and multi-instrumentalist Charles Bullen, had been playing in various progressive rock bands for more than a dozen years; Gareth Williams, the group's third member, had no musical training at all. That tension guided them as they established an exploratory practice based on extended collective improvisation that incorporated not just guitar and drums, but also viola, melodica, organ, household objects, and broken toys. They used tape machines to stretch the fabric of time and creative mic placement to warp space. They were fueled not just by formal restlessness but also by rage at consumer society—"Sleep," the opening song on 1981's Deceit, juxtaposes advertising copy with references to Pavlovian experiments in conditioning—and their certainty that humanity was on a nuclear collision course with itself. "That's why our music wasn't psychedelic and drifty, why it was so hard-edged and angular," Hayward told Simon Reynolds in Rip It Up and Start Again. "We had no interest in making people stoned with our sounds."
This Heat released only two albums and one EP during their brief run, and those barely registered amid the competing din of the period. But you can hear in their slim catalog, which returns to wax thanks to these reissues from Light in the Attic, the seeds of vast fields of music that would follow: post-rock, math rock, homemade musique concrète, and experimental electronica. This Heat did not yield a single signature sound so much as a zone of possibilities.
And that very range is part of what makes their music so bracing. Listening to their self-titled 1979 debut album, one moment you are lulled into a meditative state by the incidental bells and airy sax skronk of "Not Waving"; the next you're given whiplash by churning dissonance and muscular rhythms that anticipate early Swans, along with Shellac, Black Dice, and Lightning Bolt. "Music Like Escaping Gas," with its trembling organ, dissonant acoustic guitar, and chanted sing-speaking, could be mistaken for a rough Gastr del Sol demo, while "The Fall of Saigon" reroutes Brian Eno's wispy art rock through the Velvet Underground's funereal drones. The narcotic texture of that song, gloopy and atonal, stands in stark contrast to the lyrics' sly sense of humor: It begins by making a meal of a cat, and, by the end, the narrator has eaten everything that's not bolted to the floor, right down to the TV and the armchair. The fall of an empire has never been rendered in bleaker, more bitterly humorous terms.
The whole sweep of This Heat's project can be heard on the uncharacteristically optimistic "Health and Efficiency," the A-side of a 1980 12". "Here's a song about the sunshine," they sing over a major-key melody that prefigures Stereolab songs like "Nihilist Assault Group"; soon, they spiral into a locked groove of violently yanked guitar strings and hypnotically looped drums. The clatter of woodblocks and milk bottles adds to the din; they even mix in the sounds of a nearby playground before the eight-minute side dissolves into a detuned and deconstructed reprise of the main theme. On the flip, the tape composition "Graphic / Varispeed" is 11 and a half minutes of held organ tones that rise and fall like the sound of a single-engine propeller plane circling the neighborhood. Stylistically, its musical minimalism is at odds with This Heat's twitchy muscularity, but the intensity of its focus is absolutely in keeping with the group's unflinching approach.
Their second and final album, 1981's Deceit, doesn't entirely do away with the extreme sonic abstraction. "Radio Prague" is an experiment in mechanical pulses and cut-up radio broadcasts, and "Hi Baku Shyo (Suffer Bomb Disease)" is a kind of expressionist sound painting of a post-nuclear landscape: wails, church bells, buzzing flies. For the most part, though, the album marks a significant leap forward in songwriting. (Mixed by the reggae engineer Martin Frederick, it also marks a significant improvement in fidelity.) Deceit's lyrics encompass both acid critique and post-structuralist philosophy while finding poetry in the everyday, and its grooves are both catchy and strangely inscrutable. This band could also flat-out jam: "S.P.Q.R.," with its chiming guitars and close-harmonized chants, goes head to head with Mission of Burma's "Academy Fight Song" as one of the most triumphant-sounding protest songs of the era. The album's anthemic scale helps explain how This Heat ended up opening for U2 at London's Hammersmith Palais that year.
Thirty-five years later, the depth and breadth of their creativity remain both astonishing and incredibly prescient. On the tribal cut-and-paste piece "Shrinkwrap," their vocal multi-tracking sounds like the Beastie Boys via Monty Python. And on "A New Kind of Water," Deceit's climactic penultimate song, their sturm and clang presents a model for the haunted cabling of Sonic Youth's Bad Moon Rising. The song's title is a sendup of marketing, but it ultimately concerns nothing less than the survival of the species: "Fly away Peter, hide away Paul/ Who can watch as the Earth burns, shatters, and dies?"
For many years, This Heat records were hard to come by, though sporadic reissues and compilation features helped keep their legacy alive. Thanks to the new vinyl reissues and streaming, their catalog is now more widely available than ever. And yet, This Heat also feel further from the zeitgeist than ever. The sort of noisy, difficult rock that they helped pioneer has gone out of favor, and their electronic experiments have become second nature. But that resistance to faddishess helps make their music an exhilarating experience to this day, whether it's a first encounter or the continuation of a years-long relationship. What you hear in a song like "A New Kind of Water" isn't just intelligence; it's urgency. We've become far too accustomed to the 24-hour alert; today, This Heat's work is a reminder that we could use more possible processes, more open channels. | 2016-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | January 26, 2016 | 9 | 9d4ccf3b-d5b6-40a0-8579-6ddf91ceaa6d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
I've been waiting anxiously in the foothills for Corin Tucker's voice to come down off the mountain. At ... | I've been waiting anxiously in the foothills for Corin Tucker's voice to come down off the mountain. At ... | Sleater-Kinney: All Hands on the Bad One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7239-all-hands-on-the-bad-one/ | All Hands on the Bad One | I've been waiting anxiously in the foothills for Corin Tucker's voice to come down off the mountain. At night the villagers used to hear her baying at the moon. Alas, the impassioned Sleater-Kinney frontwoman has left her banshee goat of a wail up to pasture on the craggy cliffs. All Hands on the Bad One finds the Northwest power-trio at their most melodic, playful, sarcastic, and punchy. Occasionally the spirit of the goat god still springs from Tucker's belly, but these screams follow baiting pop harmonies. Besides, when Rolling Stone uses the words "brilliant" and "fury" in the latest glowing Britney Spears review, Corin's outbursts feel positively baptismal.
Sleater-Kinney and Fugazi reside alone in the top echelon of American punk rock. They make darling twins. Both bands continue to grow in talent, despite the jaded whines of old schoolers. Both feature dueling guitars that bobble complex, inventive lines like ping-pong paddles. (And Sleater-Kinney don't even need a bassist to lock the groove.) Both can raise the hair on the back of your neck, the ass out your seat, and the volume on your stereo. Most importantly, both hold a mirror up to the face of themselves, their scene, and society in general. You better believe that "And for all the ladies out there I wish/ We could write more than the next/ Marketing bid/ Culture is what we make it/ Now is the time to invent!" is the "We owe you nothing/ You have no control!" of 2000. Now that the smoke has blown away after the media exploitation of the riot grrl scene, the true believers remain behind-- not working PR for emo bands.
But preaching has its limits. After all, a band can't write a song called "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun," and load it with lyrics such as, "Like a piece of art/ That no one can touch/ Your head is always up/ In the clouds/ Writing your songs/ Won't you ever come down," without actually having some fun. The album opens with the proposition of "Eye cream and thigh cream/ How 'bout a get-high cream" before shouting "but I gotta rock!" and bursting into oo-waah's and handclaps. "Milkshake n' Honey" spits wit at expatriates in Paris as Corin rolls her eyes at the type of denizens in The Sun Also Rises. Acting the roll of the insolent daughter, Tucker exclaims, "Daddy says I got my mama's mouth/ I'm all about a forked tongue and a dirty house."
But this isn't poetry! More than ever, S-K put four to the floor and hammer away on infectious riffs. A brash return to vigor after the mellower The Hot Rock, All Hands will win over new ears who previously found the sound too sky high, loose, and angular. Like a David Mamet character rewrite over a Joel Schumacher script, Corin reveals greater character depth than ever before. All Hands on the Bad One finds Sleater-Kinney at their most fist-pumping (on the title track), lovely ("Leave You Behind"), longing ("The Swimmer"), and bratty ("The Professional"). Janet Weiss hammers harder, Carrie Brownstein smothers with perfect harmonies while digging deeper on the E string, and Corin grabs your aorta and strokes. When Sleater-Kinney, the band with the busiest guitar lines and boldest voice, turn in their best effort yet, it demands your attention. | 2000-04-30T01:00:13.000-04:00 | 2000-04-30T01:00:13.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | April 30, 2000 | 8.3 | 9d54b5ed-01db-450d-8e37-654d6404df28 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
Daniel Lanois' third solo album Shine-- the first since his decade-old For The Beauty Of Wynona-- is difficult to swallow ... | Daniel Lanois' third solo album Shine-- the first since his decade-old For The Beauty Of Wynona-- is difficult to swallow ... | Daniel Lanois: Shine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4950-shine/ | Shine | Daniel Lanois' third solo album Shine-- the first since his decade-old For The Beauty Of Wynona-- is difficult to swallow, and not because of any challenging experimentation, politics, or off-kilter production. None of that, nah.
What got me nervous about this album is that, for his reputation, it's the most drab, adult-oriented product to make it to my stereo since some Starbucks-sipping visitor got sentimental about the Magnolia soundtrack. "Those frogs were symbolic!" he cried, and asked me to bow with him before his shrine to Aimee Mann.
It's here we enter the world of the tame, a land where Sting is king and Phil Collins is raucous. It's the bottled atmosphere of Borders, the safety a slightly left-wing baby boomer craves as they sip tea and read bestsellers about other baby boomers. It's Jeff Healey. Lanois writes somewhat catchy, almost moody stuff, but when I say "moody" I mean like a CEO gets moody when there isn't enough whole milk in his latte.
My dad's a nice man. I imagine him not only liking Shine, but also finding it soothing; he could downright chill to this. If pops and I were resting on his overstuffed couch, the few things on Shine I enjoyed-- faint bells during the first minute of "I Love You", off-key guitar, chimes, a pedal steel-- wouldn't make an impression on him, while the many things he'd love-- "This reminds me of a less crazy Astral Weeks!"-- would have me flashing back to the summer I interned at Musician Magazine, brewing weak coffee for Rush fans with fake tans and male-pattern-baldness ponytails.
The production on Shine is beyond clean: slide guitar winds in like a coma, tumbleweeds bounce into the sky, a creepy voice exhales and makes me jump. Layers and distances are detailed, but nothing overlaps or crowds, always shiny. Anesthetic, like a commercial.
Lanois produced the record himself, and if you don't know his name, he also produced Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, Peter Gabriel's So and Us, and U2's The Joshua Tree and All That You Can't Leave Behind, to list but a few of his credits. So no, I'm not talking DIY: his microphones probably cost more than my apartment. Maybe you're a better person than I am, maybe you can hurdle the squeaky-clean production. Answer me this: do you find the Counting Crows moving? If so, you're halfway there.
Aside from the overproduction, the songwriting is pat: none of the tracks deviate from what's laid out in the first stanza: "No need to worry about surprises, sir/ Just sit back and relax, sir." Three of the four instrumentals are decent, clean versions of Will Oldham's Odes, while "Space Key" takes the ghostly atmospherics of "Transmitter" and "JJ Leaves L.A.", including a drum machine so crisp, it's as if you're forever riding into the sunset, leaving town on 70mm stock.
What Lanois always has, no matter what he brings to the table personally, is star power. Emmylou Harris offers backup on the album opener, "I Love You", and Bono chimes in with a mellow vocal turn on the second track, "Pretty Falling At Your Feet". The sunglassed one wrote the track with Lanois during the All That You Can't Leave Behind sessions; for all his shallow pomposity, Bono can be tolerable-- even pretty-- when he isn't trying to pretend he's smarter than he is.
What does Lanois himself sound like? He sounds like everyman-- he's French Canadian. No accent; he could be a newscaster in the Heartland. There's no doubt he's an accomplished producer, but he drops the ball trying to communicate anything other than light-weight, overextended metaphors: "My tremolo, you're my fire...what keeps me walking is your shine." His odd musings are especially grating because he mixes the vocals so high.
Final litmus test: in the liner notes Lanois writes, "What a privilege to be able to make music.Here is a small portion of what's cooking in the kitchen. I hope that some piece of it will elevate your spirit. May we all touch a heart somewhere, sometime." Your gut reaction to his best wishes is a solid indication of how palatable you'll find Shine. | 2003-05-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-05-18T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | May 18, 2003 | 5.6 | 9d574ddc-5754-48bf-ab39-970dbef20030 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling\n\ quartet by changing ... | In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling\n\ quartet by changing ... | Uncle Tupelo: 'No Depression', 'Still Feel Gone' and 'March 16-20, 1992' | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8344-no-depression-still-feel-gone-and-march-16-20-1992/ | 'No Depression', 'Still Feel Gone' and 'March 16-20, 1992' | In the current issue of Bookforum, Jeff Tweedy, who has been documented referencing a certain darling quartet by changing the refrain of "Heavy Metal Drummer" to "Playing Joy Division covers, beautiful and alone," says: "The circuit between Justin Timberlake and a fourteen year-old girl is what's really important about music, and... that connection is more profound than the one between an Interpol record and a fifty-year-old rock critic." Whuh-oh! Holy Christgau! The Tweedist notes that if a scientist from the future came to visit us (why not a Terminator, Jeff?) that "N*SYNC would tell him more about our culture than any Will Oldham record." (Ahem, females have made remarkable advances in science-careering, there, Cap'n Foxtrot.) Then he half-disses Wilco! Have fourteen years of high-profile music-making got my boy all discombobulated? If he's truly under the spell of über-pop's nauseous gravity, something tells me he'd find the hullabaloo over his remastered, bonus-track-befattened early work with Joltin' Jay Farrar a tad unremarkable. And I'll admit: the worth of these discs to anyone not already a Tupelo tutee will depend on whether your response to monoliths is an infantilizing, golly-bum wonderment, or an urge to pull a Jello Biafra and tinkle on the shriney behemoths.
Let me set the scene for the cultural landscape when Uncle Tupelo busted out: The cassingle shelves were still reeling from the layered grooves of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance". People were fascinated with the psychological underpinnings of evil-twin absorption due to Stephen King's scouring of the subject in The Dark Half. Filmgoers finally learned what happened after Chris Lloyd's unforgettable Doc flew away in the garbage-fueled hovercar; and to tell the truth, we were underwhelmed by Cyborg Biff, Western Biff, and the absence of Crispin Glover as the fitful McFly patriarch. The scene was clearly set for a pair of Illinois malcontents to usurp and enhance a country sound that had already been fangled by folks from places as far away as California, some quite well (Rank & File, Green on Red, etc).
The "heartland" was suffering as usual from Bookended Syndrome, penned (if one can be penned in vastness) between all manner of paisley undergrounds and post-punk revivals. And even the South had that whole "Southern" brand to promulgate. So these two prophets of the twang-blast complaint-jam, Tweedy and Farrar, successfully tractorjacked a style of delivery, reappropriating it for the midwest, further secularizing its good-versus-evil conceits (which already hinted at man-versus-machine struggles) by installing a new industrial devilry. No Depression is, of course, the album that spawned a webboard, a magazine, and a movement (if "movement" is an accurate word to describe a music largely about sitting around, watching trains go by, inhaling silo rust, drinking, and feeling grandiosely bummed). What's beautiful is that the expression isn't Unkie's but A.P. Carter's, from Toop's cover of his economic theodicy "No Depression in Heaven"-- one of two Carter covers that beg for hill-cred on this hyperactive debut. (While we're being infinitely tangential, consult Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg's excellent page-turner Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone for a history of the spastic and rambling A.P., the father of country who stole as many songs as he wrote.)
Reissues, though, demand to be examined in terms of how they "hold up," and No Depression's reputation seems vestigial, especially next to its follow-up, Still Feel Gone. Sure, "Screen Door" is a damn good skittle of misfitude, but elsewhere the boys sound like they haven't grown into their coveralls, and they were certainly yet to discover subtlety. Tweedy's faked southern accent can induce smirks, and Farrar's spoofable earnestness might have you bellowing about assembly lines into your Body Shop hempbrush. No Depression is innovative for about thirteen minutes, after which it's sorely redundant. The sophomore album is so much stronger-- it sounds like a fourth or fifth album-- that one wonders why the bash-n-crop genre these guys spawned isn't called "feelgone." In addition to how Still Feel Gone's spectacular drums and (cliché alert-- but they earn it) "blistering solos" benefit the most from the digital refurbish, the band had settled into its song structures: the lyrics, though still awful slogany, are less strained (especially the part about "walking cancerous miles"), the banjo backdrops are better timed, and the shifts from harmonica and acousti-pliddle into Hüsker Dü-dom are more organic. This album is a slightly wiser No Depression with plenty of power steering fluid.
Though definitely saddle-punk, Still Feel Gone is interestingly the least country Tupelo record, due to its trad-coverlessness, its Minutemen tribute "D. Boon", its heavy-handed production by the Fort Apache crew (who knobbed everyone into Boston-fodder a la Dino Jr and Buffalo Tom), its genius opener "Gun" (on which Tweedy synthesizes the entirety of The Replacements' Tim), and its genius closer "If That's Alright" (on which Tweedy lays the groundwork for what would become known as the grunge ballad). How did it become conventional wisdom that Farrar was the better songwriter? Much of his stuff is prosaic and melody-less; he may have better pipes than Jethco, but his homemade Stipe-Mellencamp-Linnell-Rollins smoothie can get hoary and grate.
Oh snap: The boys then hooked up with newly mandolin-competent producer Peter Buck, fresh from losing his religion and wearing vests over blouses, to record, in the actual South, their least characteristic but by far best album. (Sorry, Anodyne fans-- call me revisionist, but that out-n-back disc hardly sounds like a unified band. You can practically hear Tweedy sizing up new member Stirratt's mutiny-mettle. Even Still Feel Gone predicts a future schism, as any careful listener can detect seedlings of the irreconcilable differences between Farrar's insistence on gestures of meaningfulness and Tweedy's burgeoning nihilism.) Forty percent rearranged traditionals and covers, March 16-20, 1992 strove for a porchiness that risked hokum, but thankfully, Buck rendered the project pristine; you'd think it were laid down in some soundproof gazebo outside an all-retiree church. The acoustic guitar has rarely sounded better than it does here.
This record's Geffen-be-damned songs against capitalism and Danzig-be-damned songs against Satan helped to make Tupelo the favorite uncle of many a bandwagon purist. The not-quite bluegrass of Tweedy's tearjerker "Wait Up" stands as one of the band's most inventive moments, and slowcore owes a debt to the almost-undrummable version of murderer's lament "Lilli Schull". (This review will now acknowledge the stickwork of Mike Heidorn. The man kept the fuggin beat.) Farrar tormentedly taps into some woodland ghost on his rendition of Dylan's rendition of the anonymous "Moonshiner" (since revisited by Cat Power, who rightfully added a verse about wanting to tour hell). The songs about hard labor and unionbusting on March transcend the almost-quaint pre-NAFTA factory sentiments that underscore the first two albums. Tupelo's decidedly unescapist catalog reaches its apex in these oppression anthems, which, eleven years later, still haunt as mottoes of a perennially defeated army (and Wilco would, of course, go on to double-honor workingman's minstrel Woody Guthrie). Surely gazillionaire Buck was so enraptured by the blacklung alchemy underfoot that he could have never guessed that something called Wilco would tour with R.E.M., or that he'd play with the lauded troupe on a record called Down With them.
I'm the rare bitch who resents bonus tracks. They violate the sequencing of classic albums; imagine how a film's coherence would be disrupted if the "deleted scenes" played right after the denouement (consult the recent ripoff Forever Changes, though I won't complain about the mid-90s Ryko reissues of Bowie and Costello). This triad boasts the usual, serviceable smattering of faster versions, slower versions, live versions, and rare covers. Standouts include the unbelievably naptime-then-thunderous "Sauget Wind", among the band's top five songs, and proof that a fallen tree in the forest makes a bustass sound even if Albini didn't mic it. Two covers that should have been included on albums are "I Wanna Destroy You" (especially now that The Soft Boys are, um, soft) and Iggy's "I Wanna Be Your Dog". These awesome homages would have broken up the austerity of Tupelo's humorless albums; one of my record-store coworkers once tossed March across the sales floor, proclaiming, "I can't take their seriousness anymore, man: I'm trying to digest a hot dog, and I gotta live." An aborted, hidden cover of the theme from The Waltons constitutes the ultimate pop-south surrender, though the show's atheist dad remains an inspiration.
Funny how Tweedy went on to be the John The Baptist of futro folk-rock, while Farrar's last project was a (vocal-less, natch) score for a film about the homoerotic subtext of football. Though this band spent two albums raving about beer and entropy, and could be skimpy on imagery, they rocked at a better ratio than they didn't. But is being the forebearers of a genre whose proponents average two good songs per album really something to be proud of? All we need now is for some statistician to ascertain why No Depression is loved by a disproportionate amount of people with mustaches. | 2003-04-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-04-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rockville | April 24, 2003 | 6.7 | 9d5c134c-065f-428a-9f8e-02eed7b5d237 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | 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 British singer-songwriter’s 1972 album, an intimate and delicate collection of queer folk-rock from one of the best voices in his generation. | 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 British singer-songwriter’s 1972 album, an intimate and delicate collection of queer folk-rock from one of the best voices in his generation. | Labi Siffre: Crying Laughing Loving Lying | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/labi-siffre-crying-laughing-loving-lying/ | Crying Laughing Loving Lying | “There are things you can say in a song that you would be too embarrassed to say in conversation,” Labi Siffre told a BBC interviewer in 1972. “In a song you can say it and it sounds correct. It’s a cowardly way of saying things one would never say.” Delightfully unpretentious, Siffre sits in a gray collared shirt against a window overlooking a thicket of trees, still fresh-faced at 27 years old and already sharply perceptive of the vulnerability of his own folk music. He’s being a little playful, quoting a song of his own at the end. His confidence is earned: He had just released his exquisite third album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, the record which introduced him as a generational talent, one who over the next 50 years would create timeless music that’s become a touchstone for his folk descendants, pop superstars, and rappers alike.
Born in 1945 in Hammersmith, London, to a Nigerian father and multi-racial mother from Leeds, Siffre was the fourth of five brothers. He followed in their footsteps and attended a religious school that proved an ill fit for the artist. “I was brought up to have low self-esteem,” he once said of growing up as a gay kid surrounded by rigid Catholic ideology. “I grew up being told by society that as a homosexual I was a bad, wicked, evil person.” The experience led him to become a lifelong atheist; he recalled being bemused at how people believed in an omnipotent man who “does magic tricks of life or death.” For Siffre, his emotions and beliefs mattered most—mindfulness of those around you, political engagement, love and compassion. He identified as gay as early as 4 years old, a sheer, unalterable fact that inevitably colored his life and music. “The most important thing in your life is what happens at home,” Siffre once said. “It is head and shoulders above everything else.”
To escape Catholicism’s orthodoxy, Siffre found solace in music he discovered in his older brother Kole’s expansive, well-curated vinyl collection: Fats Domino, Charles Mingus, and Little Richard, plus electric bluesman Jimmy Reed, jazz-pop lounge singer Mel Tormé, and the soul-stirring Billie Holiday. Those early influences often bubble up in Siffre’s music, delivered through his complex fretwork, bittersweet lyricism, and a sense of wilted yearning bound in sweet melodies. An obsessive childhood love of Frank Sinatra’s dramatic, heartbroken “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” speaks volumes to the wistfulness that arcs through his discography.
By the mid ’60s, Siffre had his mind fixed on becoming a musician. While slogging through an array of day jobs—driving an unlicensed taxi, working as a filing clerk at Reuters, carrying and stacking boxes at a warehouse—he played guitar by night in a trio at Annie’s Club in the Soho district, run by famed jazz artist Annie Ross. Modeling his bluesy style after legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery, the moonlighting allowed Siffre to hone his skills while encountering a series of stars: Mose Allison, Betty Carter, and Joe Williams all passed through the club, setting Siffre’s mind ablaze as he learned from watching his childhood heroes up close. Eventually, he began performing solo at saxophonist Ronnie Scott’s club, where he switched to singing and ditched the electric guitar, preferring the closeness of sound that an acoustic offered him. “For me it always feels as though the amplifier is between me and the guitar,” he explained. “If it’s all fingers then it’s just you.”
That intimacy, drawn from Siffre’s faithful acoustic guitar and his inimitable, high-pitched voice, imbues his music with a comforting glow, as if bathed in the warmth of a snug fireplace. Following his improvised jazz club education, Siffre briefly attended the Eric Gilder School of Music in his early twenties for lessons in harmony, guitar, and singing, where he discovered he’d “merely been hearing” as opposed to listening. At 24, feeling more confident and strapped with several demos and a backing band of his own, he spent three months performing at clubs in Amsterdam to find his footing onstage. When he returned to London in 1969, the demos had made their way around the industry and he was signed for his first album, spurring a prolific run through the beginning of the 1970s that contains some of the decade’s most beguiling music.
Siffre’s first two albums, 1970’s self-titled debut and its follow-up, The Singer and the Song, are rife with pristine, homespun folk-pop like “Bless the Telephone,” a song about waiting for a lover’s call that remains one of Siffre’s most masterful expressions of everyday romance. The records were modest successes, led by the lilting, strings-laden radio hit “Make My Day.” By the time he recorded his third album, Crying Laughing Loving Lying, he had found a sweet spot, chiseling every element of his craft down to a polished, delicate new form.
Crying Laughing Loving Lying is produced and written in its entirety by Siffre. The music runs counter to the flowery, psychedelic English folk of the era, confronting the listener immediately with the stark a cappella song “Saved.” “I am a free man, and my father he was a slave,” he sings, voice soaring into an echo, “I have been broken but my children will be saved.” The song sets the table for the album’s focus on nurturing and being nurtured above any other higher power. “I don’t need religion to tell me what to do,” he affirms. “I know that I should love you.”
An album full of sumptuous acoustic folk, Crying Laughing Loving Lying remains his best work, a fine-wrought synthesis of his lovestruck sound. The jaunty “It Must Be Love” rides a taut ukulele melody during its verses before blooming into a full-hearted valentine: “I need to be near you every night, every day,” he sings, gentle as a down comforter. It’s no wonder the crowdpleaser became the album’s biggest hit, lending itself well to a swaying Top of the Pops performance and reaching No. 14 on the UK charts. But the best song is the knotty, early highlight “Cannock Chase.” Siffre’s guitar gently canters forward while his voice reaches up into a dreamy falsetto to overcome a wave of self-doubt. “I thought my day would never come,” he sings, “Maybe it won’t/But I’ll have fun and I’ll hold tight/’Cause that way it might.” The hopefulness is spurred on by a flurry of horns and strings, rising around him like birdsong.
Siffre’s openness is his greatest strength as a songwriter. He had come out of the closet by the time Crying was released, and was no longer writing oblique lyrics in his ballads. “It occurred to me that I couldn’t do that any more,” he said, instead determined to speak directly about the men he loved, even if listeners didn’t catch on so easily. “I don’t care if there’s another man/I don’t care if there’s three or four,” he sings with a tremble in his throat on the lullaby “Fool Me a Good Night.” “I don’t care because it’s better than the way I was living before.” His queer love songs were written in plain sight, unavoidable to those who listened close enough. (“Give me the simple signs,” he sings on the same song, “Just the ones I want to see.”) The same is true of the sweet, minute-long “Till Forever,” which opens with the image of Siffre peering up from a book to see his lover asleep and wearing his sweater on the sofa, a scene of lived-in romantic bliss that’s restorative in its sincerity. “Put your arms around me, now, after all this time,” Siffre sings in a rousing example of his eye-widening breath control, allowing the phrase to deepen like an exhale.
Siffre’s steady command extends to his uniquely diaristic songs, adding further heft to the ethereal instrumentation and songwriting. “Hotel Room Song” is one of the few tracks about a specific autobiographical moment, based on a TV interview that put Siffre in a sour mood before a concert. The song catches him mid-thought over career doubts, captured against rippling guitar and celesta: “Last night I thought ‘I’ll never ever write another song,’” he sings ponderously, “Last night I decided that all the songs I write are wrong.” It’s a brief self-portrait of a young artist struggling with the demands of an industry he already found himself in spiritual conflict with.
On the title track, another hit single, he finds astonishing beauty in simplicity. Locking into a mesmerizing roundelay, Siffre circles a tranquil guitar melody with warm, multi-tracked vocals, moving through four similar verses that capture a swirl of contradictions with sly ease. “Loving never did me no good no how,” he sings, “That’s why I can’t love you now.” Then he reveals the undercurrent of irony: “Lying never did nobody no good, no how,” he allows, voice fading into the air, “So why am I lying now?” It’s a distillation of his best songwriting impulses, roaming and tightened at once, with sheer joy holding its center.
Crying Laughing Loving Lying reached No. 11 on the UK charts, making it his most successful album and leading to critical acclaim and a wider fanbase. The music on his three follow-up albums, especially 1973’s social justice-minded For the Children and 1975’s funky Remember My Song, continued his trend of crafting precise, absorbing music, now occasionally informed by more explicit political and sociological ideas. Unsurprisingly, audiences weren’t as receptive.
Following the release of 1975’s Happy, Siffre moved to the English countryside to spend time with his lifelong partner and husband, Peter Lloyd, and focus on different pursuits. He was disillusioned by a fickle music industry and the constant demand to write singles resembling past successes. “I went in believing that the music business would be run by—who else?—musicians,” he conceded. Siffre also faced the claustrophobic labeling of his music by his various identities. “Being Black, you were supposed to be ethnic. Being gay, you were supposed to be camp,” he explained. “Then you could be put in a little box.” His work always resisted such markers and Siffre insisted that his music be respected on its own, never abiding by the cult of celebrity around any artist.
During his absence from the spotlight, however, Siffre never stopped writing. He returned to the charts in 1987 when, horrified by a documentary on apartheid in South Africa, he penned the anthemic “(Something Inside) So Strong” as a direct response. While its lyrics vividly condemn racist discrimination, “So Strong” is multifaceted and speaks just as easily to Siffre’s sexuality. “The higher you build your barriers/The taller I become,” go the opening lines, offering a path of self-expression for those who may not have one readily available. Through his music, Siffre has always subverted the ways institutions exert power over people, threading themes of self-empowerment into his easy-listening production with subtle repose. During Pride month in 2020, he released the ballad “(Love Is Love Is Love) Why Isn’t Love Enough?,” a reworking of an older track that speaks to years of living and loving as a queer person.
Though Siffre never became a household name, his influence is wide-reaching. When the ska-punk band Madness covered “It Must Be Love” in 1981, it peaked at No. 4 in the UK and has since become a wedding staple in the country (Siffre is there at the end of the video, grinning and playing a violin as a surprise member of the band). Olivia Newton-John released a version of “Crying Laughing Loving Lying” in 1975, while Kenny Rogers covered “So Strong” and built an entire album around the song only a year after its release, giving it a healthy second wind. As recently as 2014, Kelis recorded a cover of “Bless the Telephone,” adding to the song’s lovelorn pathos with her own faithful spin.
It’s easy to see why so many artists remain besotted by Siffre’s unassuming complexity. His work most prominently pumps through hip-hop’s DNA; it’s Siffre’s funky guitar, reinterpreted from the delirious 1975 two-hander “I Got the…,” that Jay-Z used for “Streets Is Watching” and which Dr. Dre looped in order to launch Eminem’s career on “My Name Is.” (Siffre, unfamiliar with sampling and bothered by Eminem’s lazily homophobic and misogynist lyrics, only approved a clean version of the track at the time.) On “I Wonder,” a beatific track from Kanye West’s 2007 album Graduation, West lifts a passage from Crying’s “My Song” and leaves it largely intact, fully understanding the power of his voice left unadorned. Siffre’s work is so stitched into the pop cultural fabric that, once you start to look, you find his fingerprints everywhere.
Now in his 70s, Siffre is a prolific author and has begun to open up more in interviews on his undersung career with characteristically British modesty—“I’m getting used to being rediscovered,” he joked with a hearty laugh during a 2020 podcast. His entire catalog is rooted in that unswaying sense of self. “I don’t believe in giving the audience what they want,” he said in that early 1972 BBC interview. “I believe in giving them my best and making them like it. You don’t make hit records that way, but you can sleep at night.” A profound sense of dignity courses through Siffre’s entire career, but it effloresced on Crying Laughing Loving Lying, a statement of compassion that hasn’t lost any of its well-worn charms.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan. | 2023-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | Pye | June 11, 2023 | 9 | 9d6166cc-c0b7-4bf1-96ee-70f4172ed2f2 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Assisted by Brooklyn beatmaker DJ Rude One, the rambunctious rapper makes his most focused, pared-down project yet. | Assisted by Brooklyn beatmaker DJ Rude One, the rambunctious rapper makes his most focused, pared-down project yet. | DJ Rude One / RXK Nephew: The Onederful Nephew | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-rude-one-rxk-nephew-the-onederful-nephew/ | The Onederful Nephew | RXK Nephew is a bug-eyed paranoiac with a work ethic like no other. When he’s really in the zone, you’ll blink and discover 10 new songs on his YouTube channel. Included in his immense catalog are insights into all the ways you can block someone online (on Yahoo!, PayPal, the Canadian dating site Plenty of Fish), why certain male artists are problematic (“Lil Yachty never had a yacht before rap”), and why he wants to sue Applebees (“Bitch I’ve been having 2 for $20”). He’ll seemingly riff on anything, over anything—slinking West Coast funk, spacey Atlanta trap—even if he hates the beat.
Earlier this year, Neph declared intentions to be more strategic, slowing down his output ahead of his studio debut, Till I’m Dead, which he recorded sober with only one producer. That more considered pacing didn’t last long—he released five projects in three months, but they all had a sense of polish that his loosies tend to lack. Now, Neph teams up with Brooklyn producer DJ Rude One for The Onederful Nephew, his most focused, pared-down project yet. In lieu of his typically colorful, haphazard palette is tense neo-boom bap; Rude One’s beats are restrained to a white-knuckling degree, pairing barely-there loops with spare percussion.
This restraint rubs off on Neph, who tones down his usual ranting and cultivates a menacing presence. His writing takes on a sickly hue. Over the horror-movie organs of “Murder for Hire,” Neph wrestles with his love for selling dope and the guilt of seeing his auntie nod out and break her teeth. He gives himself a disquieting ultimatum: “If rap don’t work then it’s murder for hire.” On “Raw Dope,” he paints himself as a cold-hearted kingpin over tinny drums and harpsichord. The threat of violence underpins every relationship: When he snarls “beating up that bowl, I got domestic prices,” it’s an unnerving double-entendre.
Neph frequently raps in the second person, lobbing absurd insults at a target just out of view. Here, his disses feel like score-settling. Against different production, a line like “How you 50 with a 12-year-old boy chest?” from the brooding “F**k Yo’ Set” could be funny. But set against Rude One’s chiaroscuro backdrops, Neph is Tommy DeVito pressing, “I amuse you?”
The pair cut the tension with “B.B. Belt,” a hysterical ode to the bedazzled belts designed by B.B. Simon. Over Rude One’s most animated beat, Neph goes into a stream-of-consciousness trance: “I’ll run your ass over in an Audi/ I’ll run your ass over in a Beamer/I’ll run your ass over with some black forces,” he threatens, roasting his faceless, presumably broke haters. It’s a welcome respite from the near-suffocating pressure of the rest of the record, comic relief after a jumpscare, but doesn’t subtract from the rest of The Onederful Nephew’s harrowing vibe. The thrill of The Onederful Nephew comes from watching a loose cannon become more calculated. | 2023-06-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | June 20, 2023 | 7.1 | 9d6f1244-f9bc-4356-bb67-6bc81111008a | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
On the followup to his explosive major-label debut Edgewood, the Atlanta rapper tries to show us his heart but trips over his own painfully limited writing. | On the followup to his explosive major-label debut Edgewood, the Atlanta rapper tries to show us his heart but trips over his own painfully limited writing. | Trouble: Thug Luv | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trouble-thug-luv/ | Thug Luv | Tupac Shakur said that even thugs cry, and Atlanta rapper Trouble takes that to heart on Thug Luv. Usually a hardened street presence, on his new album, he wants to display a softer side of himself. In his follow-up to his 2018 major-label debut, Edgewood, he tests his limits—writing more about his search for intimacy, upping his use of Auto-Tune, and switching up his flows. But the album is tonally confusing, aesthetically grating, and lacking the deft touch of Edgewood architect Mike WiLL Made-It.
Unlike his idol, Boosie, Trouble struggles to reveal the layers beneath his hard exterior. On opener “Dreamin Bout My Dawgs,” he reminisces powerfully about friends he lost to long prison bids—“Young, it was just somethin’ ‘bout your spirit/Your smile just gave a nigga extra hope, I need you near me/Be free,” he raps. But that emotional force dissipates as the album goes on. There are songs about self-medicating with drugs and pursuing a soulmate, but he never has anything more to express than the basic idea that thugs are people too. In a mini-doc called “Origins,” he claims that “Special” is about his son, but except for a cursory “Had a son, I had to cut back on the drink” line, Trouble has nothing to say about fatherhood or what makes his son special to him. He does, however, manage to rap about buying a Tesla and offer to “take that big booty to a movie.” Like most of the album, the song simply exposes his limitations as a writer, and it’s hard to see Thug Luv as anything other than a massive stylistic regression.
Edgewood was executive produced by a locked-in Mike WiLL Made-It. Returning to hardcore rap after a few years in pop, Mike offered some of his most inspired beats in years, turning Zone 6 into A Nightmare on Elm Street and the bando into a haunted house. By comparison, Thug Luv isn’t just poorly produced, it sounds cheaper, lighter on resources. The bootleg Timbaland bounce of “Which 1 Of Em” and the lazily recycled “Choppa Style” beat on “She A Winner” are both shoddy. Verses from 2 Chainz and Jeezy are phoned-in, and Trouble can’t even seem to settle on any coherent theory on what thug love means to him. It is impossible to get invested in this rapper as the thug with the heart of gold when he won’t even commit to the bit.
The few occasions where Trouble shines, he’s back to his cutthroat ways. The sinister, Mike WiLL-produced “All My Niggaz” finds him standing his ground: “Fuck all that playin’ and wolfin’ I’m with the shits,” he raps. On “Ain’t My Fault,” he flips Silkk the Shocker’s 1998 hit into an indifferent anthem of his own. “Pride” is the closest he comes to diagramming the ways in which performing emotionlessness gets thugs killed. But in these songs, he’s all but scrapping the album’s theme of showing love and taking care.
One of Edgewood’s final tracks, “Ms. Cathy & Ms. Connie,” laid a clear path for the album that Thug Luv could’ve been. On the song, Trouble remains the same get-it-at-all-costs hustler he’s always been, only the subtext is that everything he does to make a buck—be it thugging or rapping—is for the sake of those around him. He doesn’t have to spell out his love for these people or slather on Auto-Tune for you to feel the weight of his commitment to them. Trouble has built a reputation as “the rapper who stayed,” the guy for whom making it out didn’t mean leaving those in his community behind. The mini-doc shows him chopping it up at the local barbershop, mingling with the kids at a barbeque, and buying his mom her beautiful new house—more or less being the mayor on his block. He would’ve had far greater success leaning into that characterization on Thug Luv. Love doesn’t always have to be demonstrated so bluntly. Often it speaks for itself. | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | April 30, 2020 | 6.1 | 9d6f4ac8-54e8-43ec-b6f1-01ac16598495 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
This new 50-song box set traces parallel paths through the futurist rockers’ rise, fall, and eventual reunion. | This new 50-song box set traces parallel paths through the futurist rockers’ rise, fall, and eventual reunion. | Devo: 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973–2023 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devo-50-years-of-de-evolution-1973-2023/ | 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973–2023 | Devo’s philosophy of de-evolution feels prophetic: Society does seem to be slipping backward. So the time is ripe for 50 Years of De-Evolution 1973-2023, an anthology of the Akron art rockers who made their name pairing wiry proto-punk grooves with sly social critique. Fitting their embrace of irony—they opened 1979’s Duty Now for the Future with a regal instrumental called “Devo Corporate Anthem,” after all—the career-spanning compilation is available in a variety of incarnations, the splashiest of which is a 4xLP box set containing a variety of collectible tchotchkes.
The air fresheners, lithographs, and Brain Dead capsule collections add to the distinctly festive air surrounding 50 Years of De-Evolution. Unlike the previous double-disc set Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology, this compilation isn’t a chronological document, but a celebration of a complex, sometimes baffling body of work. Too long to count as a greatest-hits compilation, too reliant on the band’s standards to be of considerable interest to hardcore fans—all the rarities have been in circulation for a while—50 Years of De-Evolution nevertheless portrays an act that simultaneously inhabited its times and pointed the way to the future.
Few bands had as electrifying or confounding a first act as Devo. They were art school students who were radicalized by the May 4, 1970 shooting of student protesters at Kent State University, where core members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were witnesses to the massacre. Devo used the idea of de-evolution to convey their outrage at the country’s swing to the political right. Casale and Mothersbaugh and their respective brothers, both named Bob, distilled their grimy mix of fantastical futurism and eroding industrial dreams in The Truth About De-Evolution, a 1976 short film where they appeared in a variety of guises. One of the roles they played was a robotic rock band who sang “Jocko Homo”—the source of the group’s famous call-and-response chant, “Are we not men?” “We are Devo!”—and “Secret Agent Man,” a perverted cover of the 1966 hit by Johnny Rivers. They were kinetic transmissions from an alternate universe.
The Truth About De-Evolution won first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival, but the band soon gained enough momentum to eclipse its filmmaking ambitions. Locking in their lineup with drummer Alan Myers, Devo knocked out a handful of terse, nervy singles that refined rock’n’roll to its brutalist essence, which left plenty of space for smart-ass sci-fi musing. Early on, Devo used cover songs to illustrate the distance between themselves and other rock bands: Where their peers reveled in abandon and catharsis, they specialized in rhythms so tightly wound, they seemed mechanical. This difference was especially evident in their version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which stripped the Rolling Stones anthem of Keith Richards’ signature Fuzz-Tone riff and ramped up tension with guitars that scratched to a clockwork beat.
At their best, Devo seemed like aliens translating cultural clichés back to an unexpecting audience. Witnessing Devo on Saturday Night Live in 1978 or happening upon the video for “Whip It” during the early days of MTV only reinforced how unlike the group seemed from everything that surrounded them. Their regimented concerts put the lie to punk’s allegedly anarchic spontaneity; the cookie-cutter conformity of their uniforms—especially after they introduced their matching “energy dome” hats in 1980—seemed unnerving. And the Booji Boy mask could be genuinely unsettling.
Although it’s replete with period photos and memorabilia, 50 Years of De-Evolution doesn’t quite capture the thrilling sense of otherness Devo conveyed at their peak. Heard within the vacuum of their own catalog, Devo seem more eccentric than revolutionary. This is especially true of the increasingly computerized music they made after 1980’s Freedom of Choice, the album Mark Mothersbaugh retrospectively called “the end of Devo.” The band carried on for many years after that, yet their creative processes shifted. Instead of workshopping material in group rehearsals, Mothersbaugh built songs on his synthesizers. The stiff, clipped drum machines and plasticky keyboards—crystallized on the clanging din of “Shout,” the title track to a 1984 album beaten into submission by a Fairlight synthesizer—were in a sense a logical progression from Devo’s mechanical rock’n’roll, yet the airless arrangements made it seem as if the band were succumbing to the very things they once satirized. Devo sounded most alien, ironically, when they were clearly just humans attempting to play like robots.
Yet 50 Years of De-Evolution goes a long way toward disguising Devo’s self-acknowledged drop-off in the mid-1980s by effectively offering two paired compilations that retell the band’s story in quick succession. Each CD (or 2xLP pair) starts at the beginning, then follows the group’s rise and fall. The first disc runs through the big hits, then concludes with their 2010 comeback. The second disc starts over with ostensible rarities from the early years—not exactly hits, but still canon—and then retells the story, ending once again with their 21st-century return. (The gambit can be confusing: The original indie versions of “Mongoloid” and “Jocko Homo” are tucked away on the second disc, while the major-label remakes open the first disc.) It feels like the compilers got halfway through the comp before deciding it needed a dose of the demented energy of “I’m a Potato,” “Be Stiff,” and “Uncontrollable Urge.”
By re-tracing its steps, 50 Years of De-Evolution winds up shifting focus to Devo’s true strength: Underneath the futurism, they were a tough, lean rock’n’roll band. The first three records are underpinned by the heavy backbeat of Alan Myers, a “human metronome,” as Casale called him, who nevertheless retained a sense of funk. Devo didn’t quite disguise this debt to R&B: They hired Robert Margouleff, an engineer and synthesizer pioneer who made his reputation through his 1970s work with Stevie Wonder, to help record Freedom of Choice. R&B’s influence is readily apparent throughout the anthology, in both their early songs and material from the 2010 reunion record Something for Everybody, which featured Josh Freese on drums.
Freese may not possess Myers’ subversive swing, but he gives Devo a necessary pulse that contrasts markedly with the mannered music Devo made in the waning days of the ’80s. That’s the real revelation of 50 Years of De-Evolution: These Midwestern art rockers may have portended the future, but in their hearts, they pledged allegiance to the same working-class rhythms that fueled 20th-century rock’n’roll. | 2023-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | December 2, 2023 | 7.4 | 9d6fbcbd-2b21-47f4-8690-20b94779f10d | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Featuring multiple songs that became staples of the Grateful Dead’s live set, the 1972 solo debut by the guitarist and singer gets a deluxe edition with a new mix and some recent live recordings. | Featuring multiple songs that became staples of the Grateful Dead’s live set, the 1972 solo debut by the guitarist and singer gets a deluxe edition with a new mix and some recent live recordings. | Bob Weir: Ace (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-weir-ace-50th-anniversary-deluxe-edition/ | Ace (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) | In the early 1970s, the Grateful Dead were playing the most exciting music of their long career, writing many of the songs that would sustain them for the next two decades, but they weren’t spending much time in the studio. A newcomer might take a look at their discography between ’70’s American Beauty and ’73’s Wake of the Flood and conclude that the famously stage-centric band had abandoned studio albums entirely: a pair of live records and a solo outing each from singer-guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. Though Garcia’s solo debut often sounded like the work of the Dead, and contained several songs that the band would make their own in concert, in practice it was a hermetic affair, with Jerry playing nearly all of the instruments himself. Weir’s, on the other hand, features the full lineup, save for keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, still an official member but in ill health at the time.
Just 19 years old at the time of the Dead’s founding in 1965, Weir was the band’s youngest member, and spent its earliest years as a support player, adding shards of harmonic accompaniment to Garcia’s liquid lead guitar lines. Over time, he grew into a sort of second frontman: affable and workmanlike, the guy onto which the audience could project themselves, his easy relatability a natural foil to Garcia’s gnomic mystique. Ace marks Weir’s transition from mere rhythm guitarist to a full-fledged composer and driving force of the band. Despite its origins as a receptacle for surplus Weir material, all of its songs but one became beloved staples of the Dead’s live sets.
Weir was writing songs steadily in the early ’70s: “I got a lot of material, and I just can’t use all of it for the Grateful Dead,” he told a Crawdaddy interviewer months after Ace’s release. But soon after he began working, the other members started showing up, asking if they could contribute: “Everybody gets wind of the fact I got the time booked, and I may be going into the studio. So, one by one, they start coming around, Lesh and Garcia, ‘Hey, man, I hear you got some time booked at Wally Heider’s. Need a bass player? A guitarist?’”
It is a Dead truism that the live tapes are more essential than the albums, an inversion of the hierarchy that governs other bands’ canons. Ace is no different. Surely, most listeners of its 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition will be more familiar with various bootlegged versions of “Playing in the Band” or “Greatest Story Ever Told” than the recordings presented here. From the perspective of deep fandom, it is almost impossible to imagine how the album might come across on its own terms to a listener approaching its songs for the first time. On the surface, it fits in with other West Coast folk- and country-rock of its time. But Weir, the Dead’s jorts-wearing regular joe, is a much stranger composer than he initially seems. Melodic lines, and sometimes entire song sections, jut out crookedly from their surroundings. Complex rhythms disguise themselves as simple, and vice versa. It might take you several listens to discern which part of a given tune is supposed to be the chorus, if it has one at all.
For fans, the Ace reissue is primarily an opportunity to get reacquainted with the studio versions of its songs. The most obvious difference is the horn section—instrumentation that the Dead never took on the road with them, but that Weir has continued to employ in his various projects outside the band over the decades. “Black-Throated Wind,” one of the very best collaborations between Weir and John Perry Barlow, his childhood friend and frequent lyricist, uses the tale of a solitary hitchhiker to reflect on a larger American loneliness. Onstage, it was rawboned, sometimes desolate, anchored by a descending Garcia guitar line. The Ace version is comparatively peppy, with funky punctuation from New Orleans-style brass. Disappointingly, a new mix for the reissue isolates the horns in the left stereo channel and brings them down to the point of being barely audible, perhaps in an effort to bring the accompaniment more in line with the song’s overall emotional tenor. Like many Dead studio efforts, Ace has an occasionally uncanny character, with a gloss that can seem gaudy and unsuited to the material. But why make it sound more like the live versions when there are so many live versions already out there?
The reissue also includes a live recording from last year of Weir and his Wolf Bros band playing through Ace in its entirety, augmented by a horn section and guest vocals from Americana stars Tyler Childers and Brittney Spencer. Fans will get a kick out of hearing Weir and Spencer duet on “Walk in the Sunshine,” the one song from Ace that didn’t make it into the Dead’s repertoire. (They were wise to leave it out: Its sprightly melodies are deflated by a preachy lyric from Barlow, espousing an indulgent and individualistic view of hippieism in keeping with his future career in libertarian politics.) Weir’s voice, an acquired taste even when he was young, has grown gnarled with age, and the decision to pair him with consummately professional singers like Childers and Spencer doesn’t serve either side of the equation: The performance can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a warts-and-all affair in classic Dead fashion or a slick theatrical revue.
But Ace itself holds up as a rare chance to hear the Dead throwing down in the studio during its most creatively vital era. Sitting between the band’s stripped-down acoustic work of 1970 and the increasingly jazzy and progressive albums of ’73 through ’75, it comes as close to capturing their classic early-’70s sound as any other non-live recording. The arrangements are tightly wound, but no one stays too close to the center for long, finding outside spaces for improvisatory flair—Phil Lesh’s wandering bass melodies on “Looks Like Rain,” Bill Kreutzmann’s cascading tom fills on “Cassidy”—and then weaving back in.
If nothing else, fans and neophytes alike can bask in the studio version of “Playing in the Band,” Ace’s eight-minute centerpiece. That’s nothing compared to live versions, the longest of which clocks in at 46 minutes. But the Ace version contains some of the best jamming they ever did in the studio, at a relatively compact and approachable runtime. Onstage and on record, “Playing in the Band” is a marvel, slipping from liquified jazz fusion to hard-charging rock’n’roll and back, making them sound like two opposing sides of the same essential force. Only the Dead could sound like this, and only with Bob Weir at the wheel. | 2023-01-25T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-17T16:43:16.706-05:00 | Rock | Rhino | January 25, 2023 | 7.6 | 9d817ee8-5d04-4a38-b11c-ca2557530e4a | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Denmark-born, Sweden-based experimentalist works with humble, home-recorded materials, but the richly expressive dimensions of her 4-track creations transcend their threadbare origins. | The Denmark-born, Sweden-based experimentalist works with humble, home-recorded materials, but the richly expressive dimensions of her 4-track creations transcend their threadbare origins. | Astrid Øster Mortensen: Skærgårdslyd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/astrid-oster-mortensen-skaergardslyd/ | Skærgårdslyd | The title of a recent compilation neatly sums up the sound brewing in Gothenburg: Contemporary Handmade Music From Sweden. “Handmade” is the crucial term here: Artists gathered around Discreet Music—a record store, label, and distributor in the southwestern coastal city—are cobbling together an experimental style that’s distinctly homespun. DIY to the extreme, this ragtag mix of folk, field recordings, and noise suggests gummed-up tape heads, weatherbeaten guitars, and waterlogged Casio keyboards in basement studios lined with moth-eaten carpets—maybe the occasional pagan bonfire, too, given the music’s often eerie cast.
At once amateurish and avant-garde, much of this stuff could conceivably have been made at any point in the past 50 or 60 years. Blod’s contribution to the compilation, “Tillsammans,” sounds like a pair of overdubbed takes from a grade-school piano recital; Hugo Randulv’s “Cello improvisation 1” channels Arthur Russell, John Cale, and Suicide in dubbed-out buzzsaw drones; Arv & Miljö’s “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap” hums like an outboard motor. A relative newcomer to the scene, Astrid Øster Mortensen works with similarly humble materials, but the richly expressive dimensions of her 4-track creations transcend their threadbare origins. On one of her two contributions to the compilation, tape-warped harp plucks and tentative vocalizations blossom into radiant, sweeping glissandi, as though mapping out the imaginative leap implied in the song’s title: “Har ondt i halsen og går til biblioteket for at låne en bog” (“Have a sore throat and go to the library to borrow a book”). She may be “a shy kind of being,” as her other song on the collection puts it, but beneath the hush, big ideas are at play in her music.
Skærgårdslyd, Mortensen’s second long player, captures a powerful sense of presence. Like her debut, 2021’s Gro Mig En Blomst, she recorded it among the islands of the Gothenburg archipelago (Skærgårdslyd translates as “archipelago sound”). Birdsong and church bells leak through open windows; murmurs in the background, or dishes clattering on a countertop, hint at daily life going about its business. When she plays guitar, her fingers squeak against the strings, drawing your attention to the physicality of flesh and metal; when she sings, her voice distorts slightly, as though her lips were brushing against the wire mesh of the mic head.
On Mortensen’s debut, her music sometimes felt less like songs than blurry snapshots of windswept vistas, and on the new album, her sounds remain raw and rough-hewn. The opening “Igenom Livet Utan Att Såra Någon” (“Through Life Without Hurting Anyone”) begins with footsteps, wind noise, and ghostly whistling; as she stabs sternly at bright, brittle guitar chords, tinny, rapidly bowed violin descends like a fine gray mist. On “Styrsö Kyrkorgel,” a solo organ piece, reminiscent of Kali Malone’s work, that Mortensen recorded in a church on the tiny, car-free island of Styrsö, she patiently builds meditative harmonies as smooth as the floorboards beneath her. In tracks like these, the abiding sense of stasis has more in keeping with minimalism than song form.
In places, Mortensen seems intent upon developing more fully fleshed-out compositions. On the gorgeous “Hvem Er Det Som Stjæler Min Ungdom” (“Who’s Stealing My Youth”), she sings wistfully, her voice high and thin over gently plucked guitar, wrapped in a warm blanket of slap-back delay; not since Grouper’s Ruins has a mood this lonely felt so welcoming. And “Det Endnu Usagte” (“The Still Unspoken”), where she mulls a plaintive monotone melody over slowly rising piano chords, could almost pass for a cover of “Everything in Its Right Place,” as if Radiohead’s song had been fished from a tide pool after years underwater, sun-bleached and worn smooth by the waves.
These songs hint at places Mortensen’s music might go next, but for now, even her most unvarnished soundscapes remain captivating. DIY music has always prized, and sometimes fetishized, spontaneity and error, but on Skærgårdslyd, the lo-fi qualities never feel forced; they are integral to the album’s mode of expression. Often it feels like a documentary of work in progress: Tracks frequently stop mid-song, pause, and then pivot to a new melody or instrument. All these strategies come to a head on the penultimate song, “Du Finns Kvar Någonstans” (“You Are Left Somewhere”). It begins with clanging church bells, passes through a squall of tape distortion, then settles on a dulcet lullaby for piano and voice. Thirty seconds before the end, Mortensen pauses: We hear background voices, footsteps, the clanking of dishes in the sink, the beeping of a microwave. She returns to the piano but the key is different, the melody vague. It sounds as though she’s trying to recall a tune she once knew, and as the volume fades out, she’s still absent-mindedly probing at the keys. Whatever we are hearing, it’s clearly not a rehearsed performance, but something rough and unplanned—a glimpse of musical thought in the wild. It’s a reminder that music is not a polished object but a living practice. Skærgårdslyd derives its power from this unaffected intimacy: a home, a hearth, two hands, and whoever happened to be in earshot. You feel lucky to count yourself among them. | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Discreet Music | March 17, 2022 | 7.8 | 9d84754e-ef99-468e-a5ea-bed81b5b8eeb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Following Klaxons and Justice, the third of this year's big indie-dance crossovers issues its debut album. SMD's debut maintains an unerring devotion to always-hooky pastiche in the name of a good time and to pop's unbreakable and road-tested formalism when it comes to things like song length and the need for a kick-ass chorus. | Following Klaxons and Justice, the third of this year's big indie-dance crossovers issues its debut album. SMD's debut maintains an unerring devotion to always-hooky pastiche in the name of a good time and to pop's unbreakable and road-tested formalism when it comes to things like song length and the need for a kick-ass chorus. | Simian Mobile Disco: Attack Decay Sustain Release | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10345-attack-decay-sustain-release/ | Attack Decay Sustain Release | Can we call a moratorium on using the phrase "rock artists getting into electronic music" as a pejorative, unless you're going to chuck out, I dunno, Sweet Exorcist or that guy who used to be in the Housemartins or dozens of other beloved post-rave producers? Simian Mobile Disco were as deep in rock as a pair of quarrymen, even if you'd never know it to listen to this record. James Ford and James Shaw got their start in workman-like indie four-piece Simian, lost to the discount bins had SMD not branched sideways into success in the populist end of dance. That success first came with Justice's remix of Simian's "Never Be Alone" (titled "We Are Your Friends"), released on Ed Banger-- a label which, for many people, might as well be a rock imprint. And as a production team, SMD did the rock remix thing and helmed the debut album from neon enthusiasts and indie rock serial daters the Klaxons.
But Myths of the Near Future was, even accounting for taste, a tinny din. It was the sound of its producers trying to futilely collate the rapid-fire ideas of a young band without the taste or craft to execute them without it sounding like a drunken bar fight. And Justice wields dance music as if fending off zombie attackers at the DJ booth. Meanwhile, SMD's excellent debut album as a stand-alone group, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is for dancing, not moshing-- especially if that's dancing in front of your bedroom mirror to the radio, like Tony Manero, primping before hitting the town.
What makes SMD a better pop band than Justice or the Klaxons is their commitment to clean danceable beats (the electro arpeggios of "Sleep Deprivation" clang as loudly and brightly as a Max Martin production) and lighthearted and immediate hooks ("Hot Dog" turns robotized double-dutch taunts, motor-revving bass, and stampeding drums into the rollerskate chant the last Rapture album couldn't quite reach). But what really sells Attack Decay Sustain Release is Simian Mobile Disco's unerring devotion to always-hooky pastiche in the name of a good time, and to pop's unbreakable formalism when it comes to things like track length and the need for a kick-ass chorus.
Justice and the Klaxons are pastiche artists, too, but SMD's vision is friendlier, scornful of "weren't the '80s wacky" irony, with their ears wide open to such less-than-punk sounds as Bobby O's hi-NRG, Information Society's pure energy, Sweet Sensation's freefalling freestyle, and every lite-brite shade of pop-house and techno in the spectrum. "It's the Beat" falls over itself combining all of the above plus a New Order morse code bleep, a numerical-minded Kraftwerk squelch-melody, a Technotronic fanfare riff, and a rap from a Go! Teamer who wants to be Roxanne Shante. And forget rock, except for maybe the martial tempos, because there's nothing aggressive (read: "overly masculine") about SMD's mix, and nothing purposefully ugly, either. "I Believe" and "Love" both shamelessly borrow the classic big-fey-voice-over-booming-synth dynamics of Depeche Mode at their most pop and Erasure at their most soulful.
For SMD, electronic music begins and ends with the radio, from Soft Cell to Crystal Waters, and so its over-the-top friendliness, immediacy, and excitement has a cramped, amped-up hysteria, like all great bubblegum. (It's also short like a bubblegum album-- 10 tracks in under 40 minutes, most songs being perfect A-side lengths for seven-inch singles.) And even as prototypical indie kid pop-cultural curators-- who else is so into old bubblegum sounds?-- SMD's knock-out craft just might win them a wide American audience. After all, another indie pop duo (who used to record for Stereolab's label!) went on to become one of the top-shelf post-rave pastiche pop acts and to sell out arena crowds. And if SMD aren't quite Daft Punk, Attack Decay Sustain Release is a good sign that their Discovery might be right around the corner. | 2007-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope / Wichita | June 21, 2007 | 8.4 | 9d87fca2-5ca6-41a5-a8ed-25e64ffe90c6 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The English duo's latest studio album backs away from the darkness of 2010's Delicacies and moves toward the pleasure principle once again. | The English duo's latest studio album backs away from the darkness of 2010's Delicacies and moves toward the pleasure principle once again. | Simian Mobile Disco: Unpatterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16654-unpatterns/ | Unpatterns | The middle ground is dangerous territory when it comes to dance music. Simian Mobile Disco have existed there, uneasily, for over five years now. Making things difficult for themselves, SMD try to borrow from both ends of the spectrum without ever fully embracing lowbrow or highbrow, all-grins fun or fearsomely precise grooves. 2007's debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, is their only album to really tackle the combination head-on, and probably not so coincidentally, it's also still their best. On Attack, SMD brought the underground's attention to detail and bubblegum dance's playfulness to what might have otherwise been churned-out bangers. They remembered the starkest acid tracks and the most cavernous bleep experiments were once played alongside stupid-fresh (or plain dumb-assed) hip-house foolishness.
If you haven't heard a thing SMD's done since Attack, you might think Unpatterns is the work of a completely different act. It's probably the most low-key and dazzle-averse SMD album yet. Gone are the sassy rollerskate-jam vocals and fat-bottomed rhythm tracks, along with any hint of rock-band bombast or hip-hop swagger. If all those sound like things that make life worth living, you may wish to proceed with caution. These 10 tracks build slowly, each crisp element added to the mix with a watchmaker's patience, and at their most energetic they're still pretty laid-back. SMD want part of the pleasure to be hearing that ingenuity in action, how you can build from just a rustle of synthetic snare drum to complex climax, all without going for obvious crowd-pleasing moves. It's not minimalism, at least in sense of your more acetic art-techno types, all scrawny sonics and inhibited groove. It's more like populist forms-- banging jack tracks on "Put Your Hands Together", lush deep house on "Seraphim"-- stripped back to the most essential parts.
When it works, it's thrilling because SMD can provoke an emotional response, make you swoon or tense up or bust in-seat dance moves, with almost nothing, as if trying to one-up all those other producers who need luscious chord changes, rude basslines, over-the-top diva interjections, etc. But while these tracks want your total attention, they're just as often best appreciated as ambient with a lingering taste of club music, something that passes the time pleasantly enough without really sticking. SMD want these subtle shifts in beat and synth to sound momentous, but their desire for nuance sometimes get the better of them, the results crisply rendered but without any visceral hook or ear-engaging compositional oddness, the extras that makes even the most intellectual-minded dance music compulsively replayable. When disconnected bleeps on "Cerulean" finally resolve themselves into an astringent hook, just in time for the gentle beat to drop, it's clearly meant to be a nerve-tingling dancefloor epiphany, even if you're parked on your keester nowhere near a club. But the whole thing's so dainty and fussy that it provokes a shrug rather than a shudder, and it's too beholden to DJ formula to go anywhere surprising, to play with the really out-there kids in art-techno's first-rank.
The lackluster stuff on Unpatterns isn't a chore, the way smarty-pants dance can be when producers mistake restraint or difficult as intrinsically interesting qualities. But it does make you realize that one of SMD's gifts, as a rock band that defected into the dance world, was a fearlessness at incorporating elements (singing, bridges, dynamics) shrugged off by techno aesthetes who too often confuse monotonous with hypnotic. (It's not surprising that your ears will perk up every time a vocal drops in on Unpatterns.) The last few SMD discs have gone either all-pop or all-weird, with wildly different results, quality-wise and otherwise. 2009's Temporary Pleasure erred by making the duo's crass hunger to crossover a little too overt for comfort, stuffing itself with limp performances by ringer guest singers and trying to pass off over-fussed loop music as radio-ready. (You know, just minus the songs.) 2010's Delicacies could almost be heard as a band recoiling from an obvious mistake. The darker, stranger tracks offered few concessions to SMD's original dance-curious rock fanbase, even if the album occasionally tipped into the kind of rote "stripped-down" groove-making that's been everywhere in the last decade.
And that's where they've decided to stay, apparently, even if Unpatterns backs away from the darkness and moves tentatively toward the pleasure principle once again. This album may lack the wonky heights of Delicacies. It also stays far, far away from the cheeseball lows that stunk up Temporary Pleasure, something for which I guess we should be thankful. SMD are still stuck in the middle, and if they've finally happened on a formula that goes down smoothly for the length of a whole album, you may still find yourself missing the slick tricks and rough edges, all that dance-as-rock oomph and crap rapping, that once made them so endearing. | 2012-05-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-05-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wichita | May 22, 2012 | 6.2 | 9d8cec47-96c6-4cd8-b2d2-3e26b1ffd1aa | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg come together for a new project. | Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg come together for a new project. | Blue Water White Death: Blue Water White Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14701-blue-water-white-death/ | Blue Water White Death | It's no surprise that Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg were drawn to each other. They both like pretty songs with abrasive embellishments, and their voices sound startlingly alike. As a bigger fan of Xiu Xiu than Shearwater, I had to listen to this collaborative album by Stewart and Meiburg several times before realizing that the songs where Stewart sounded more like Carey Mercer than usual were actually sung by Meiburg. I might still be getting them mixed up in some places, and that's fine-- the haziness of identity suits both musicians' personae. Unfortunately, ambiguity also pervades at the musical level to less interesting effect.
Stewart is always best as his most extreme-- not just the violence and volume of "I Luv the Valley OH!", but the restraint and grotesque intimacy of "Fabulous Muscles". When he goes all-out, his music can be riveting even when it's disastrous by conventional standards of taste. Meiburg, too, thrives when simmering or combusting more than anywhere in between. This album downplays both of their strengths. The band name comes from a 1971 documentary about reckless shark hunters, but the air of danger and excitement is thin. Stewart turns in a few inspired passages of ominous lyricism, but the music itself is a rickety stage for them.
The opening track is short and boiling, like a warm-up for a big, scary album to come. But then it just keeps warming up. "Grunt Tube" is good, with Stewart's layered voice hovering over the piano for a big Antony-style climax, but many other songs are forgettable and embryonic. "Song for the Greater Jihad" and "Death for Christmas" are interminable, their meandering acoustic arpeggios and organ blears haphazardly splattered with power-tool sounds and noisy percussion. They tread a safe middle road between traditional beauty and experimental ambition. I'd be all for Stewart trying out an album of traditional songs-- he's got a great voice and an under-appreciated knack for catchy tunes-- but this is too equivocal; its conventional gambits are slackened by peripheral noise and draining repetition.
The record was conceived and recorded in a single week, and it leaves you wondering what would have happened if they had done more sketching beforehand. A couple of the best and most polished tracks are tucked away at the end, creating the impression that Stewart and Meiburg were just starting to seriously gel when they called it a wrap. "Gall" has a deep and dreamy feel, with hints of classic soul, and points toward the mannered singer/songwriter-style work this could have been. "Rendering the Juggalos", a glorious noise-pop topiary, raises another compelling "What if?" It's intriguing enough to warrant hope for a second record, but this complacent first try-- neither too pretty nor too ugly, too conventional nor too experimental-- feels inessential for all but the most sympathetic Xiu Xiu and Shearwater fans. | 2010-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Graveface | October 11, 2010 | 5.8 | 9d97b825-c2bc-43be-9b0c-f4a2fc747a10 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Cabaret spook, glam-rock stomp, and Germanic electro-house from should-be star Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory. | Cabaret spook, glam-rock stomp, and Germanic electro-house from should-be star Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory. | Goldfrapp: Supernature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3506-supernature/ | Supernature | I should probably like this more than I actually do. Who doesn't want to get behind Alison Goldfrapp and company? She's nothing if not on the ball, having transformed herself from elegant mid-90s Orbital cooer to elegant late-90s spook to an equally timely role-- something like a cross between Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey, between Annie and Siouxsie Sioux, between Rachel Stevens and Beth Gibbons, the evil-twin model of the shimmery dancefloor princess-bot. And Supernature kicks off with that flag flying high, on "Ooh La La": some hard schaffel, some hand-clapping glam-rock stomp, some dangerously icy taunting, and enough Germanic electro-house action to make you want to drop it like it's cold, ruthlessly efficient, and strangely angular. Why do I have a sick suspicion that this is how awesome Peaches thinks she sounds?
So I do half-go for it, from that first rush of ice to the veins to the dots of old-model cabaret spook that crop up later, and from there through the buzz and pulse of the inbetween. Witchy English vibes, analog synth surgery, superhuman icy-vulnerable vocals, and production that sounds alternately like high-polish chrome and a sucking black hole: What more do I usually ask for?
Well, something, obviously, because somewhere along the line I lose it. Maybe it's the part where Alison wants to "ride on a white horse," though I suppose there's both a half-decent hero/heroin joke and a T. Rex reference in there. Maybe it's the part where I remember that I have Gary Numan and Siouxsie albums I still haven't listened to it enough. Or maybe it's just the peculiar plaint of the electro dance-pop full-length: the sound of those mid-tempo album-completing tracks. They're effortlessly organized, full of so much dense trebly shimmer and helium swooning and sighing that you actually zone out and stop hearing them, right up until you realize your ears hurt a little from taking it all in. They're loads of effort poured into a product that winds up sounding like nothing in particular, immaculate synth arrangements not quite making up for the fact that the song will neither bang and swell nor relax into a dreamy lull. If Alison were Kylie, she could at least spice things up by switching modes-- sunny here, earnest here, then back to machine-tooled intimidation. Alison, being Alison, has to stay all witchy all the time.
And there's the non-shocker: This is sure to sound better in the variegated sweep of a good DJ mix-- something that's not, given the present currency of "electro-house," so difficult to come across. The bangers here will sound fab on the pop ends of said mixes, "Ooh La La" owning all. The tracks that lapse back into Goldfrapp's old Felt Mountain electronic-chanteuse mold will sound fine in your apartment. ("U Never Know" and "Let it Take You" make a gorgeous break from the ultra-dense buzz, getting progressively softer, silkier, and more minimal.) But plenty of these tracks keep feeling like exercises: too thick and melodic to work like dance music, but with melodies that refuse to stick as satisfyingly as pop.
Which makes this pretty much what you'd expect: the prime-time flagship of glammy electroid dancefloor pop, curiously expensive-sounding and accessible to all, but strangely stripped of the functionalism of the dance record and the full thrills of pop. Sometimes that lands it in the sweet spot. Just as often, though, it seems to have forgotten what in the world it was meant to offer in the first place. | 2005-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | August 31, 2005 | 7 | 9d97dd1e-e997-47cc-8531-0cfac4de10a0 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Two veteran selectors propose an ideal soundtrack for sunsets on Ibiza, drawing from Japanese electro-pop, soundtrack classics, and recent productions with a Balearic mindset. | Two veteran selectors propose an ideal soundtrack for sunsets on Ibiza, drawing from Japanese electro-pop, soundtrack classics, and recent productions with a Balearic mindset. | Various Artists: La Torre Ibiza — Volumen Dos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-la-torre-ibiza-volumen-dos/ | La Torre Ibiza — Volumen Dos | “Balearic by its very nature is about three things: melody, counterculture, and proper personal freedom and individuality.” So Mark Barrott told me a few summers ago on the island of Ibiza, ground zero for an omnivorous and nebulous dance music style that exists in defiant opposition to the trends that clog the small Spanish island every summer. Though his philosophy may not be shared by many of Ibiza’s visitors, Barrott has nevertheless carved out a little niche for this club counterculture, right down to a residency at Hostal La Torre, an inn nestled on a cliff on the west side of the island where Barrott soundtracks the most mystical time on the island: sunset.
The classic chill-out Ibiza mixes of yore often came from cafés and luxury resorts; La Torre also releases its own compilations, which are helmed by Barrott and La Torre musical director Pete Gooding, a White Island veteran whose name can be found on comps with titles like Viva Ibiza Chill and Café Mambo Ibiza 2005. On the latest installment, across 17 tracks, the two alight on modern dance music, Hawaiian funk, Italian dream house, and classic Hollywood film scores, embracing and making coherent all of Balearic music’s quirks. It’s cosmic and cosmopolitan, dancey and drifty, cheesy and dramatic.
The collection opens with the elegant pop of Japanese act dip in the pool and their 1989 single “On Retinae (East),” a track that’s stuffed with sounds—piano, electric keys, pizzicato strings, chiming guitar, and clarinet—yet graceful on its feet. Balearic music is rooted in the 1980s, but the two selectors are sagacious in their choice of recent material: Following dip in the pool comes Studio Barnhus associate Ishi Vu’s 2015 track “Tema Perr Malva,” striking a balance between effervescent and exotic, and full of ethereal strings, wordless vocals, and giddily bubbling hand drums. There are also sparkling cuts from the UK’s Lord of the Isles and Australia’s Tornado Wallace, both of whom released impressive debut albums in the past two years that somehow went overlooked. Another standout comes from the duo Fuga Ronto’s recent debut EP: Their spry and refreshing “L’Uomo Invisibile” revives the famous Compass Point sound (Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” Talking Heads’ “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)”) with spindly guitars, dubbed-out percussion, and sensuous vocal chants—the aural equivalent of a sun-dappled day.
DJing in a Balearic style appears easier than it actually is. It’s one thing to beat-match hours’ worth of contemporary genres like house or trance, another to dart like a bumblebee between different styles, as one might expect to hear at David Mancuso’s Loft, a Moodymann party in Detroit, or at the fabled Ibiza clubs of yore. Though it’s a compilation and not a DJ mix, La Torre Vol. 2 succeeds remarkably well at the Balearic DJ’s sleight-of-hand. It might at first scan as forced eclecticism to move from Malian vocalist Oumou Sangaré’s beguiling “Diya Gneba” to the Durutti Column’s Tracy Chapman and Otis Redding-sampling “Otis,” and then on to a wind-chime-laced song about surfing, but it all hangs together beautifully.
So deft is Barrott and Gooding’s touch that they can take even well-known pieces like Vangelis’ 1981 Oscar-winning score for Chariots of Fire and reimagine them as scores for that serene ocean view. It takes a DJ’s strength of vision to make the well-worn harmonica of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme sound fresh. But here, far from the bitterly cold streets of New York City, it triumphantly wafts out over the Balearic Sea at sunset. | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Hostel La Torre | August 1, 2017 | 7.8 | 9d9b092c-7f04-4de9-bbc3-ceafe7812806 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Nelly Furtado’s exuberant energy elevates her new album. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles—synth-rock, R&B, and piano balladry among them. | Nelly Furtado’s exuberant energy elevates her new album. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles—synth-rock, R&B, and piano balladry among them. | Nelly Furtado: The Ride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22948-the-ride/ | The Ride | Nelly Furtado’s past decade splits nicely into two halves: a winsome folk-pop starlet amid a cluster of similar folkies, turned Timbaland collaborator amid a cluster of those. It’s hard to talk about Furtado’s career without mentioning her impressive reinvention. Furtado’s a stylistic chameleon, able to adopt almost any style and do it as well or better. “I’m Like a Bird” and “Turn Off the Light” had an exuberance lacking from the anodyne soft-rock and dreary nu-grunge alongside her on the radio. And 2006’s Loose—foreshadowed by a preternaturally assured verse on a Missy Elliott remix—distinguished itself on nearly every single, even with its clichéd good-girl-gone-bad narrative tread by countless pop stars before and after.
Furtado’s 2010s, however, have so far been one attempt after another to recapture 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible and its standouts, such as the M.I.A.-alike “Parking Lot.” But the overall pop audience hasn’t bitten. Enter plan B: going independent, getting metaphorical with Dev Hynes about the Large Hadron Collider, joining Merrill Garbus for a color-guard show, releasing a series of spacey singles. There’s a certain inevitability to this. As pop radio grows more and more hostile to female singer-songwriters and is as hostile as ever to older artists—and as Timbaland has torpedoed the relevance of his sound via a succession of bad tracks—virtually all of Furtado’s peers are going this route. Vanessa Carlton released an art-pop record with aspirations closer to Regina Spektor than Rachel Platten; Michelle Branch cut an album with Patrick Carney. Furtado’s now working with St. Vincent’s producer John Congleton. As always, this causes a little confusion. The line between mainstream and alternative pop blurs more and more by the month—but this reality tends to let albums slip off both radars.
Thankfully, Furtado’s vibrancy elevates The Ride from the rote affair it could have been. Her flexibility is an asset as she attempts many styles. “Cold Hard Truth” and “Right Road” have the bassy strut swagger of St. Vincent’s “Digital Witness”—the former with call-and-response interludes, the latter with a distorted guitar line. “Sticks and Stones” has M83’s arena synth-rock in its blueprint; “Pipe Dreams” channels Dev Hynes’ gossamer R&B; “Carnival Games” and “Phoenix” are piano ballads. “Paris Sun”—to shockingly good effect—recalls Goldfrapp at their steeliest. (Given that Alison Goldfrapp’s career has followed a near-identical trajectory to Furtado’s, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.)
The Ride’s primary flaw is apparent in its mere titles. Too much of the record, particularly the ballads, falls into the songwriter’s trap of taking a conceit and writing every last bit of subtext out of it. (Most egregiously, as The Ride is a comeback record of sorts, is the right-on-cue closing ballad about a phoenix, executed with all the quiet assuredness of a track that’s already been done dozens of times.) Sometimes this isn’t entirely Furtado’s fault. “Tap Dancing,” written with Nashville songwriters Natalie Hemby and Liz Rose—best known for working with Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift, respectively—strives like so many other Nashville portfolio pieces to stretch a figure of speech out to four minutes. And without the twang a country artist would give it, those four minutes are pretty bland.
Even these tracks, though, are redeemed by Furtado’s spirit indestructible. She tears into every song with indomitable energy, and usually has production to match. Though it doesn’t quite mesh with the ballad, the twitchy percussion of “Carnival Games” at least livens things up. Where similar tracks might coast on their heroic synth riff, “Sticks and Stones” pushes the arrangement to a crescendo that sounds actually thrilling. And “Flatline” is a subversion in the Swedish pop style: one loud chorus, complete with snare-drum fireworks and “Two Weeks” piano pep, set to the line “I don’t feel nothing at all”—the song equivalent of a Hyperbole and a Half cartoon. For the album’s graphic emblem, Furtado settled on sunflowers with swords, a symbol of how, she told Billboard, “life when it is at its most beautiful is at its most painful.” Like Furtado’s best work, the peaks of The Ride capture the same. | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nelstar | March 29, 2017 | 6.8 | 9da544d6-ad47-44c6-9894-cba99c33866f | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Super Furry Animals singer teams with a Brazilian VCR repairman/peace activist to craft a record on a homemade synthesizer/drum-machine. | Super Furry Animals singer teams with a Brazilian VCR repairman/peace activist to craft a record on a homemade synthesizer/drum-machine. | Tony Da Gatorra vs. Gruff Rhys: The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14489-the-terror-of-cosmic-loneliness/ | The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness | The wonderful thing about the Super Furry Animals is the way they make the most illogical ideas seem perfectly sensible. Experimentation in rock music often implies a certain degree of pretentiousness and studiousness, but since their formation 15 years ago, the Super Furries and their offshoots have embraced the anarchic joy in pushing the structural and conceptual parameters of their psychedelic pop songs. So when band leader Gruff Rhys announced that his next extracurricular release would be an album recorded with Brazilian VCR repairman/peace activist Tony Da Gatorra, using his namesake homemade synthesizer/drum-machine contraption, the immediate response wasn't so much "WTF?" as "but of course."
The byproduct of the South American sojourn captured in Rhys' recent documentary, Separado!-- an exploration of his familial roots in Argentina's small Welsh expat community-- The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness diverges sharply from the winsome folk-rock that's defined Rhys' two solo albums to date and the sleek synth-pop of his John Delorean-inspired Neon Neon project, not to mention the Super Furries' grand, progged-out epics. This is lo-fi electro-punk done favela-style, on the cheap and on the fly. (Recording reportedly took all of five hours.) The operative word here is the "vs." separating the two principals' names on the album cover: The songs on The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness share the same rudiments-- Rhys' nastily distorted guitar riffs and the skeletal click tracks produced by Tony's Gatorra-- but given that the songwriting is split evenly between two guys from very different backgrounds who don't speak the same language, their respective contributions contrast considerably.
Sonically, the album is of a piece with the earliest home-recording excursions of Ween and Royal Trux, wherein the tinny resonance of the synthetic rhythms and the phased-out fuzz of the guitars bleed into the same cacophonous frequency. But even in these harsh environs, Rhys' melodic graces still shine through: It's not hard to imagine the robot rock of "In a House With No Mirrors (You'll Never Get Old)" and the T. Rexy "Oh Warra Hoo!" being used as raw demos for future SFA elaboration. Da Gatorra's Portuguese-sung compositions, however, are far more demanding, and not just on account of the language barrier. According to the accompanying press materials, Da Gatorra's message is one of peaceful protest and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, but his delivery is far more caustic than such hippie-centric platitudes would suggest.
Not being a naturally gifted singer or songwriter, Da Gatorra opts for circular sing-speak rants-- positing him as something of a Brazillian Mark E. Smith-- whose repeated refrains provide some semblance of structure but are prone to rambling on arbitrarily past the five-minute mark. There are certainly moments on "O Que Tu Tem" and "Voz Dos Semterra" where you can hear Rhys' guitar playfully joust with Da Gatorra's stream of verbiage, and you get a genuine sense of two new friends with different tongues devising their own unique mode of communication. But with most of Da Gatorra's tracks locked into minimal, metronomic beats, and precious little in the way of discernible melody or groove to latch onto, there's no compelling reason for non-Portuguese-speaking listeners to revisit them. When Rhys reemerges late in the album for the cool, Suicide-styled Parisian-protest salute "6868", you're not so much appreciative of the change in pace as left wondering how exactly these songs are supposed to relate to one another. The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness may attempt to forge a common ground between two trans-Atlantic artists, but even when working from the same instrumental base, the sensibilities at play here are still oddly segregated. | 2010-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Turnstile | July 28, 2010 | 5.6 | 9dab6499-2bd1-4f1f-8841-9ed55ead8368 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Every second of Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Brian Friedberg’s debut album is a cacophony, with sounds that range from Bible-verse vocal samples to foghorns to the tinkling of shattered glass. | Every second of Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Brian Friedberg’s debut album is a cacophony, with sounds that range from Bible-verse vocal samples to foghorns to the tinkling of shattered glass. | Rizzla: Adepta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rizzla-adepta/ | Adepta | What do you do when your life’s work is putting you in harm’s way? Brian Friedberg, a Brooklyn-based artist who DJs and produces dance music as Rizzla, faced this quandary while working on their first full-length, Adepta. In a recent interview, they recounted how a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment prevented them from engaging in the club culture that is dance music’s lifeblood, explaining that this sudden disconnect from the social and experiential elements of the art form freed them up to work in the studio. “Reorienting my relationship to the making of music from a direct product of DJ sets in the club to a more speculative experiment in world building has been simultaneously painful and liberating,” Friedberg reflected.
That combination of agony and ecstasy comes through in the sonic chaos of Adepta. Despite Friedberg’s stated intention of taking their sound beyond the confines of the dancefloor, the record’s iridescent intensity bears a closer resemblance to their mixes and DJ sets than to their previous studio works. Their last proper release as Rizzla, 2015’s Iron Cages EP, balanced trippy, relentless beatcraft with pockets of negative space. But there’s little breathing room to be found on Adepta, which comes via producer Kingdom’s Night Slugs-adjacent Fade to Mind and bears the brash, polyphonous touchstones of that label’s brand of dance music. Every second is a cacophony, incorporating sounds that range from Bible-verse vocal samples to foghorns to the tinkling of shattered glass.
It’s not exactly noise music, but Adepta can be a harsh listen. Yet Friedberg’s kitchen-sink approach to assembling these 12 tracks (which are accompanied by two fine vocals-driven remixes) is energizing even as it threatens to exhaust. British bass maven Untold’s Black Light Spiral, from 2014, is a recent analog—but while that record emphasized its endless-tunnel atmosphere above all else, Adepta’s most surprising moments highlight Friedberg’s melodic sensibility. The title track centers around a sling-blade vocal sample that slices through the splashy drums and bed of low-tone bass that surrounds it. “Test Man” fuses a bruising industrial techno motif with tangy trance synths. And the punishing drums of “Dewdrop” fall away to reveal a lovely thumb-piano-sounding melody submerged under layers of processing.
While compositions like these craft an environment that feels separate from the dancefloor functionality of proper club music, Adepta’s two bonus tracks marry that world-building studio nerdery with more crowd-pleasing immediacy. The effervescent “Fall of Cadia” will sound familiar to listeners who’ve followed the Night Slugs or Fade to Mind catalogs over the past decade. “Chainsaw,” meanwhile, is pure maximalism—a pair of intertwined, cascading melodic lines smothered by an alluringly grotesque vocal sample and a gradually intensifying footwork beat. Dizzying, disruptive, and danceable all at once, it’s a concise and spellbinding encapsulation of the frenzied perspective that guides Friedberg’s debut album. | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fade to Mind | July 12, 2018 | 7.2 | 9daf2ca6-3f5c-46b5-ab20-c5e000fb3cda | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
With inventive storytelling and eclectic beats, the Toronto-based rapper constructs a breakup album that sucks everyone into the drama. | With inventive storytelling and eclectic beats, the Toronto-based rapper constructs a breakup album that sucks everyone into the drama. | Haviah Mighty: Crying Crystals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haviah-mighty-crying-crystals/ | Crying Crystals | Even when she’s slipping between vantage points and historical perspectives, Haviah Mighty maintains a strict sense of focus. On “Snowfall,” the opener to her latest album, Crying Crystals, she vaults between first- and second-person narration as she tries to make sense of a failed relationship. The nameless lover she once dreamed of picking out “French oak doors” with is ready to bail at the first sign of choppy waters, and Mighty raps to her with a suppressed croak: “You the type that don’t believe in love deep down/Once the lust died down, I ain’t seen you ever since.”
You can hear the level-headed swag of Young M.A battling it out in her head with Drake at his most treacly, an interplay channeled in her voice: measured yet crushed at the prospect of failure. “Snowfall” doesn’t have the macrohistorical ambition of a song like “Thirteen,” a standout from her Polaris-winning 13th Floor, an album that charted the history of North American slavery through the signing of the 13th Amendment and beyond. But it takes a similar narrative approach. Both songs leap between the perspectives of “I” and “you” in an effort to live within the story. Mighty’s charismatic writing guides us through the switch-ups.
Crying Crystals’ subject matter is less wide-reaching than that of 13th Floor and the 2021 mixtape Stock Exchange. Instead, Mighty brings her fearsome skill as an MC and narrator to an account of personal growth and acceptance through every stage of a deteriorating relationship, finding autofictional spectacle in inner turmoil and outer conflicts. Sometimes, like on the second verse of “Lil Baby,” she’s depressed and, instead of taking the pills her doctor prescribed, she throws herself into fleeting rebounds. She refers to a “betrayal” but also admits she’s plenty toxic herself. On “Boundaries,” the emotional abuse she inflicted on her partner summons feelings of guilt that quickly explode into arguments. The drama is as messy as anything on Love Island, but Mighty gives dimension to petty spats by honing in on the hurt and neglect lingering in the background. On “Main Character,” pleas for affection (“You ain’t a work of art, you the gallery”) give way to molly-fueled ragers when fences can’t be mended. She brings equal confidence to moments when she’s losing herself in new love (“Zoom Zoom”) or tearing down a sneaky link who oversteps: “I ain’t make you bathe in my piss enough,” she growls on “All the Time.”
As a Canadian with Jamaican and Bajan ancestry who grew up enthralled by battle rap, Mighty brings a love for hip-hop and diasporic sounds that shines through Crying Crystals’ eclectic beats. The Jersey club patterns and pastel synths on “All the Time” sit comfortably alongside the new-age riddim Mighty conjures on the self-produced “Zoom Zoom” and the lush amapiano pulses of the sultry “Room Service.” Some of the more traditional rap beats—the moody guitar strums and 808s of the Tony Parker-produced “Manifest It,” the faded violins and thumping drums of the Bizness Boi-produced “Honey Bun”—sound unseasoned compared to the deep grooves that dominate the album’s back half. But in Mighty’s hands, these styles blend like different shades of the same color. She’s no longer seeking to bridge broad political subjects and autobiography: This time, she’s telling a simple story of love, acceptance, and broken hearts in vignettes. She makes it sound as cathartic and natural as deleting photos of your ex. | 2023-07-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mighty Gang Inc. | July 17, 2023 | 7.3 | 9db05e11-ecae-4451-be48-5ed1de73cd4e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Like 2012’s Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Mount Eerie’s new album Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Phil Elverum’s calm, soothing voice. | Like 2012’s Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Mount Eerie’s new album Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Phil Elverum’s calm, soothing voice. | Mount Eerie: Sauna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20221-mount-eerie-sauna/ | Sauna | Here Phil Elverum is again, two and a half years after we left him on Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, and he's still, essentially, in the same spot. As he put it on Clear Moon's "Through the Trees Pt. 2": "I go on describing this place, and the way it feels to live and die." The line was a clear mission statement, and the "go on" in this formulation seems as important as the "describing". On Sauna’s title track, he says he writes "to prove I don't exist/ To show that I am beyond this animal form and this lost mind." Existence, for Elverum, is conditional, not to be trusted, something that might disappear the second you take it for granted. Mount Eerie releases feel like an act of philosophical tax-paying, Elverum’s way of reasserting that he still exists, at least for a moment or two longer.
Like Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that two-part series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Elverum’s calm, soothing voice. The album opens with a monumental whoosh of an organ, accompanied by crackling fire and the hiss of water hitting hot coals. The setting is pretty obvious, given the record’s title, but Elverum makes it explicit immediately: "I don’t think the world still exists/ Only this room in the snow, and the light from the coals." The song rolls on for 10 minutes, a luxurious stretch of drone rock as thick and murky as the lyrics are clear: "My life is a small fire I carry around," he sings, echoing, maybe, the "carrying the fire" line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Elverum has never been artful or coy about his music: If you listen to a few minutes of one of his records, he will probably spell out for you exactly what he is exploring on them, and he will probably even tell you how he intends to do it. There is an admirable transparency to him, a sense that he has nothing to hide and would like for you to venture into the mysteriousness of his records armed with exactly as much information as he has. His lyrics are riddled with everyday actions: "I walked to the bookstore in the rain that silently filled the air/ All the lights were off or dim/ And there was nothing to do but walk to town and back," he sings on "Pumpkin". There is something almost aggressively quotidian about the scenarios he paints, like an indie film that aims to test your patience for how little action constitutes a "motion picture." Coffee is poured, windows are gazed at pensively, tractors idle.
As always, that mystery resides in the sounds he manipulates. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum. The amount of mood, texture, and feeling he can communicate with a single guitar drone is uncanny. His sounds feel soft and pliable, like they've had a portion of their middle frequencies carefully ladled out, yielding only boom at the bottom and wisp at the top. The only frequency in between is Elverum, his conversational voice sailing out of the murk like a paper airplane hitting your bedroom window. The arrangement serves as a neat metaphor for Elverum’s relationship to the world: His voice, small as it may be, is the only thing he can be sure of.
Musically, Sauna represents a thawing, the point when the icy chill of black metal, which has gripped Elverum for years, passes. Instead of snow imagery, we get rivers, and the blotted, heavy guitars and humid organ act out the thaw the lyrics describe. Piano and violins share a plucked major-key figure on "Books", which speckle the surface of the song like little orange and red paint daubs blobbed onto grey. Folky 12-string guitars ring out on "Pumpkin", a song on which Elverum clambers over damp rocks to observe a split-open pumpkin sitting on a river bed. The pumpkin, bright and fat, feels like a fertility symbol, and his fascination with it in the song stands in for the album’s preoccupations. On "Spring", the 13-minute climax of the record, the mood darkens, as the organ blasts out hair-raising dissonances and the thaw turns into a deluge: "Nothing is impermeable/ The basement’s flooded," he intones. Even in a season of rebirth and fertility, Elverum sees the possibility for oblivion.
Weather—specifically, crappy weather—has always been an inspiration for Elverum, something he discussed last July on the podcast Song Exploder. Deconstructing his beloved "I Want Wind to Blow", from the Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2, he called the weather "a metaphor for my emotions. That was kind of what all of my songs were about then and, arguably, still are." On Sauna, the weather has shifted, but Elverum’s mind state has not. "As long as I am drawing breath, the world still exists/ But when I die, everything will vanish," he sings on "Planets". | 2015-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | February 4, 2015 | 8.1 | 9db9073d-f4d6-48db-8bfe-ac1fe9d278c6 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Billing itself as a “guitarless guitar band,” the New Zealand noise-rock trio endeavors to make bass, keyboard, and two-piece drum kit sound as loud as possible. | Billing itself as a “guitarless guitar band,” the New Zealand noise-rock trio endeavors to make bass, keyboard, and two-piece drum kit sound as loud as possible. | Wax Chattels: Wax Chattels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wax-chattels-wax-chattels/ | Wax Chattels | Wax Chattels bill themselves as a “guitarless guitar band,” which is a shorter way of saying that they make loud, taut noise rock without one of its customary ingredients: electric guitar. Instead, the Auckland, New Zealand, trio spends most of its debut album trying to find exactly how many different ways it can make a bass, keyboard, and two-piece drum kit sound as loud as possible. For most bands, that would just mean cranking all their instruments into the red as a way to mask any potential sonic holes. Wax Chattels certainly know how to do this with ease. Album opener “Concrete” is blunt and to the point: Each instrument cuts in and out with increasing frequency, starting and stopping until it all blurs together into a cavalcade of noise. “NRG” could break apart at any moment, the drums nothing but snare rolls and cymbal crashes by the end, paired with raw, organ-like squeals from a keyboard that sounds like it’s on the verge of short-circuiting.
The album’s frantic and frenetic nature may stem from the circumstances of its creation. Wax Chattels recorded their debut album—the first material they ever put to tape—in just two days, with sessions stretching until four in the morning, and nearly all of it was recorded live. Yet there is more at play than just nervousness and sleep deprivation. The musicians, who met while attending jazz school at Auckland University, know not to just repeatedly hit the listener over the head with a barrage of oversaturated distortion. Dips into airy psychedelia on “X-Files” tribute “Gillian” and Damaged Bug-esque pop on “Parallel Lines” help keep the album from becoming one-note.
Even more than loudness, the album’s defining characteristic is its undercurrent of acidity. Lots of bands are loud without letting bleakness or bitterness in, but Wax Chattels fully embrace both. As cheeky as it might be for a band to sing about “shrinkage,” dig deeper and something darker is at play, from the buzz-saw bass lines to the casual way Peter Ruddell manages to infuse a “Seinfeld” catchphrase with such spite. Singing the titular chorus of “Stay Disappointed,” the band’s resignation is palpable in a way only those leaving their twenties could fully understand. It all comes to a head with the closing track, “Facebook,” a lurching, static, borderline sludgy attack on social media and its dehumanizing nature. It’s the album’s weakest moment, feeling a little too much like another snarky op-ed written about those dang millennials. But it does serve to crystalize Wax Chattels’ larger viewpoint: The world is an ugly place, so why not make noise that reflects that?
Noise rock doesn’t always lend itself to variation; that Wax Chattels so gracefully maneuver within the self-imposed limitations of the genre is commendable. Their debut doesn’t dwell in darkness, but it does understand it. They clearly had fun, in the most twisted sense of the word, crafting something harsh and driving. It’s a concentrated sour gumdrop of a record, melting a small hole in your mouth before giving any relief. But that pain is part of the point. | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks / Flying Nun | May 21, 2018 | 6.5 | 9dba021e-760f-493d-b50a-5bced4506532 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | |
Attempting to cement their title as a legacy rock act, Green Day absorb the kind of lazy regression they once rallied against. | Attempting to cement their title as a legacy rock act, Green Day absorb the kind of lazy regression they once rallied against. | Green Day: Saviors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-day-saviors/ | Saviors | Billie Joe Armstrong says that he listens to punk rock every day. He wants you to know that Green Day recorded their 14th album, Saviors, while all three members were physically present in the same room because—and this part is important—that’s what real rock bands do. According to its creators, Saviors is the final installment in a trilogy that began with 1994’s breakout Dookie and 2004’s mainstream-conquering American Idiot. It’s been touted as a revival of the real Green Day: the dyed-in-the-wool East Bay punks who don’t shy away from politics, as they did on 2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers, or lean into bloated theatrics, as on 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown. It’s not the first time the band has trotted out its bona fides: 2016’s Revolution Radio was similarly promoted as a “back to basics” rock record. Saviors isn’t a return to form so much as another overcorrection, professional rebels trying to live up to their status as Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees.
“You wanna make rock’n’roll history again together?” That’s how megaproducer Rob Cavallo, who did some of his most famous studio work with the band on American Idiot, pitched frontman Billie Joe Armstrong on the creation of this album. Here’s what that sounds like: The guitars are overdriven to the point of parody, like a rock preset on GarageBand. There’s the dense opening solo on “One Eyed Bastard” that sounds strikingly similar to P!nk’s “So What,” the palm-muted downstrokes on “Coma City,” and the Blur-indebted riff that opens “Living in the ’20s.” The band is eager to honor its influences—Saviors, recorded in London, has a cover that might recall a famous UK punk group. But it often feels like Green Day are pantomiming some other band rather than embracing the three-piece rapport that made their early records so maddeningly catchy. Bassist Mike Dirnt is barely audible in the mix and Tré Cool’s drumming remains perfectly proficient, keeping time and nothing more.
Green Day used to be kind of transgressive: proud stoners when weed was still anti-establishment, self-aware pranksters in a scene that took itself deadly seriously. On Saviors, their politics are milquetoast at best and dubiously reactionary at worst. Armstrong wrote opener “The American Dream Is Killing Me” around the time the band was recording Father of All Motherfuckers, but thought the song might be too much of a lightning rod in an already polarized country. Who can say if things would have gone differently had the world heard “Don’t want no huddled masses/TikTok and taxes” back in the Trump era? Within the contemporary political moment, his observations are quaint and overly broad: “People on the street/Unemployed and obsolete,” he laments on Saviors’ first song. Elsewhere, it’s hard to tell if he’s for or against enhanced policing (“Coma City”) or anti-racism (“Strange Days Are Here to Stay”). It’s a blessing that in 46 minutes Armstrong never sings the word “woke.”
When they’re not diagnosing America’s ills (something to do with condos?), Green Day are trying to live up to that wildly ambitious album title. Decades removed from the sweaty Gilman walls that birthed them, their lyrics land somewhere between punk Mad Libs—“Slam-danced on my face again… Rude boy going comatose” from “Look Ma, No Brains!”—and profane Simlish: “Fuck it up on my rock’n’roll,” Armstrong sings, more mouth sounds than words, on “Corvette Summer.” He is extremely comfortable cribbing lyrics from the ghosts of pop’s past: “Don’t know much about history” on “Look Ma, No Brains!” and “Get around/I can get around” on “Corvette Summer.” Squint at the title track and its anthemic chorus—“Calling all saviors”—sounds strangely familiar too. Charitably, you could call it paying homage; cynically, you might wonder if this qualifies as copyright infringement. There’s also a love story somewhere in here: “She is a cold war in my head, and I am East Berlin,” he sings on “1981.” I’ve tried my hardest, but the best I can determine is that he means that he is thinking about her all the time, or that she is somehow rationing his food.
These days, Green Day interviews exude a sense of pride and acceptance: No, they’re not going to retread the Imagine Dragons DayGlo synths of Father of All Motherfuckers; they’re here to make rock’n’roll history! But with that comes complacency. Stripped of the urge to reinvent themselves, Green Day hope to ride into the sunset as America’s most affable punks. Even the album’s one sincere stab at acting the band’s age, a reflection on parenthood called “Father to a Son,” seems to give up halfway through, content to repeat its title rather than dig deeper. It’s a shame to see them trade in the legacy of their best work while repeating themselves as farce.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that, prior to Saviors, Rob Cavallo last worked with Green Day on 2004’s American Idiot. The producer worked with the band on a trio of 2012 studio albums. | 2024-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise / Warner | January 23, 2024 | 5.1 | 9dcebac4-b8d1-476f-be9c-320046f18250 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
These first seven albums constitute the first act of Waits’ remarkable career, even as these reissues complicate that journey from assembly-line singer-songwriter to eclectic iconoclast. | These first seven albums constitute the first act of Waits’ remarkable career, even as these reissues complicate that journey from assembly-line singer-songwriter to eclectic iconoclast. | Tom Waits: The Asylum Era | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-waits-closing-timethe-heart-of-saturday-nightnighthawks-at-the-dinersmall-changeforeign-affairsblue-valentineheartattack-and-vine/ | The Asylum Era | Tom Waits had one of the wildest trajectories of any rock artist in the 1970s—or possibly ever. A regular presence in San Diego’s coffeehouse folk scene in the late 1960s, he was living out of his car when Herb Cohen, the manager for the Mothers of Invention and Linda Ronstadt, discovered him and helped to secure a record deal with the fledgling Asylum Records. David Geffen and Elliot Roberts had just opened the label in 1971, but already it was a home to some of Southern California’s finest singer-songwriters, including Jackson Browne, Judee Sill, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. Waits was plugged as a like-minded artist, based on songs like “Martha” (covered by Tim Buckley) and “Ol’ 55” (covered by labelmates the Eagles).
As the decade progressed, Waits grew weirder and woolier, indulging his penchant for weapons-grade schmaltz as well as his fascination with Beat jazz and the seedier byways of Los Angeles. With each album his voice curdled more deeply into a whiskey growl, often sounding like Louis Armstrong after a bender. His songs sprawled into strange recitations about gutter characters: strippers and barflies, hucksters and grifters, vagrants holding up lampposts and waitresses slinging hash. During it all, Waits maintained strict control over his craft—his music rarely seems haphazard—but bent his songs into new shapes to portray characters and convey emotions that didn’t have much of an outlet in pop music at the time. If his peers and labelmates were Laurel Canyon, Waits was the more sordid Tropicana Motel.
Waits’ current label, Anti-, is reissuing his first seven records, first on CD and on LP over the next few months, chronicling his time at Asylum. Newly remastered but without any bonus material, they form something like a road trip through an America that maybe never existed except in Waits’ own head, or perhaps a novel about an artist defining himself against pretty much every major trend. However, just because they show Waits getting comfortable in his own skin and learning how he could present himself to his fans, these albums comprise more than simply a prelude to his remarkable run of records in the 1980s and 1990s. These seven albums constitute the first act of a remarkable career, even as these reissues complicate that trajectory from assembly-line singer-songwriter to eclectic iconoclast.
Let’s back this Cadillac up a bit. While his teenage friends were playing psychedelic rock and protest pop, a young Tom Waits was discovering his parents’ record collection of big bands and crooners. He got more out of Bing Crosby than he did from the heavy guitar rock coming out of California at the time, but when he started performing, he was a folkie by necessity: He couldn’t afford a band, and coffeehouses were the only venues that would offer him a stage. Many of the songs on his 1973 debut Closing Time were written when Waits was making the rounds in San Diego, like “Ol’ 55,” an ode to the car that carries him away from his girlfriend’s bed on an early morning. It’s the only song with any daylight on this otherwise night-owl collection that’s set in bars and walk-ups and incorporating language he heard eavesdropping while working the door at the Heritage, a folk club on San Diego’s Mission Beach.
These are some of Waits’ most composed songs, the ones that hew closest to popular forms and structures. That’s not a criticism; this is just one melodic, highly structured mode that made these songs coverable by folk singers and shitty country-rock bands. They’re also some of his most focused songs: “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You” is an ode to missed opportunities, Waits never leaving his stool to tell the story of two strangers who never become anything more. Tender in its depiction of the low and the lonesome, the song is his first glimpse of this barroom milieu, which he would explore much more fully on subsequent albums. It might have sold poorly, but Closing Time reveals an artist who was obviously more than just another SoCal singer-songwriter.
Released in late 1974, The Heart of Saturday Night represents a significant step forward, with Waits inching closer to his signature setting and sound. It’s a concept album about the American Saturday Night and the sense of freedom or obligation or possibility contained in those hours. He’s not interested in the sinner-saint/Saturday night-Sunday morning dichotomies; the morals associated with organized religion have very rarely informed his lyrics. Rather, his characters are motivated by something ineffable, unnameable: “Tell me, is it the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin’?” he asks of no one in particular on the title track. “Is it the barmaid that’s smilin’ from the corner of her eye? Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye?” Everybody wants a little romance, a little drama, a little signal that all these late nights and early mornings, dive bars and cheap beers, desperate glances and furtive hookups might actually add up to something like a worthwhile life.
Waits captures the melancholy but not exactly the excitement that Bruce Springsteen (his elder by two months) was conjuring in his similarly jazzy, relentlessly loquacious compositions around the same time. But the Boss exuded youth and all the promise contained therein; he was an optimist, a believer in the redemptive powers of rock’n’roll. Waits sounded old before his time, his voice deepening into a growl and his characters sloshing in their resignation. He was 25 going on 70 as he sang “San Diego Serenade,” his most bittersweet break-up ballad.
Elsewhere, he just sounds out of time. The Jazz Age saw a brief resurgence in the 1970s, thanks to movies like The Great Gatsby and novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, but those works depict America as a font of wealth, luxury, and frivolity. For Waits, jazz conveyed deprivation and poverty, down-and-outers making the most of a few bucks and getting by on gumption and ingenuity. He convened a small band behind him, some sessions musicians who’d played for Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie, among others. They lend “Diamonds on My Windshield” and “Fumblin’ With the Blues” a rhythmic elasticity, a Spartan quality that reflects the details of Waits’ world as ably and as convincingly as his lyrics do.
Waits took to the road, extending his persona to the stage and refining it in front of often hostile audiences who didn’t know the Tropicana Motel from the Chateau Marmont. His third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, benefits from those experiences even if it doesn’t really reflect them. It’s a live album, but only sort of. Waits and producer Bones Howe assembled a small audience of friends at the Record Plant in L.A., rolled out a piano and a microphone, and let Waits bend their ears for a few hours. It’s not a real nightclub, more like a Hollywood film set. He introduces it as “Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge,” then dives into a superlatively loose set that blurs the lines between song and stage banter. Where does his intro end and “Emotional Weather Report” begin? Is the eleven-minute “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)” a real song or just a long aside to the audience?
Nighthawks offers the best glimpse of Waits’ world so far, and what’s remarkable is the keen detail, the rich observations, and the sly turns of phrase. A street is full of “used car salesmen dressed up in Purina checkerboard slacks and Foster Grant wraparounds.” Eyeballing a smoky barroom he sees, “Stratocasters slung over the Burgermeister beer guts, and the swizzle-stick legs jackknifed over Naugahyde stools.” Few songwriters make such a meal of proper nouns. Waits has a hundred different ways to describe the moon in the night sky and a thousand different ways to describe a taxicab. One is “piss yellow,” another “bastard amber Velveeta yellow.” To see those words on a page is one thing; to hear Waits deliver them in his Satchmo growl—adjusting his cadence with the timing of a stand-up comedian, deploying the word “Velveeta” like a raunchy punchline—is something else entirely. This live/not live album is a pivotal release for Waits, one that demonstrates the depth of his world and the extent of his dedication to evoking it in fine, eccentric clarity.
To distance himself even further from what he perceived to be the popular image of the rock star, Waits traveled from one show to the next in a jalopy, stayed in fleabags instead of luxury hotels. Rather than coke and heroin, he indulged a vice more in fitting with the world he depicted: booze. Even by his own admission, Waits drank a lot—much more than this persona he was adopting demanded. That friction between him and the industry he had reluctantly joined is the theme, sometimes subtle and occasionally not subtle at all, running through his fourth album, Small Change.
The milieu is familiar, but he makes it all sound fantastical. “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)” is another song that sounds like it was recorded at 3 a.m. in a bar, but what sets it apart is how Waits presents the setting as nearly surreal: “The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep,” he observes from his bench. “The telephone’s out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make.” It sounds like the world he has carefully crafted on his first three albums is unraveling at its seams. “Pasties and a G-String” de-eroticizes its low-rent burlesque as a phantasmagoria of despair and boredom. Even “Step Right Up,” with Waits playing the carnival barker on some seedy midway, turns advertising slogans into dark magic.
As wiseacre and rambunctious as that particular song may be, Small Change is electrically charged with a pathos that comes across as both false and real, with Waits playing the raconteur masking his very real sadness behind expressions of sadness. “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” launches a counteroffensive against his congenital sentimentality, as he slyly undercuts his own pieties: “The moon ain’t romantic, it’s intimidating as hell,” he crows. Deeply embedded in the underbelly, Small Change is nevertheless Waits’ most personal, even is most confessional album, somehow refracting the real person through the persona.
It didn’t take much for Small Change to outsell Waits’ previous albums, and it finally established him as an artist who could headline instead of support. Over the next few years, he would tour elaborate productions that occasionally incorporated fake snow and stage props. He used a cash register as percussion for “Step Right Up” (foreshadowing the pots-and-pans percussion on 1983’s Swordfishtrombones). Now that he had established his particular sound, Waits set about exploring it thoroughly over the next three albums, making slight adjustments and tinkering with various sounds and styles. Strings became more and more prominent, especially on 1977’s Foreign Affairs. Waits’ fifth begins with an instrumental called “Cinny’s Waltz,” which acts as a Technicolor overture for the songs that follow.
The tracks are austere, usually just Waits and a piano. Still, these are some of Waits’ most cinematic compositions, both musically and lyrically. “I Never Talk to Strangers,” a duet with Bette Midler, sounds like a rehash of “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and “A Sight for Sore Eyes” plumbs the same nostalgia as “Martha,” among other songs. But Waits stretches out on the album’s second side, spinning wild yarns about hitmen and hitchhikers.
Waits always borrowed heavily from Hollywood, not only its grandiose soundtracks but also its neglected glamour and noir tableaux. In 1978, he took his first role in Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley, as a piano player named Mumbles. It wasn’t a stretch; the character was based loosely on him to begin with. Later, “I Never Talk to Strangers” would inspire Francis Ford Coppola to write and direct 1981’s One from the Heart. So it’s fitting that Waits opens Blue Valentine with “Somewhere,” from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story. The song, like the musical, began onstage but was soon translated to the big screen, which parallels the trajectory Waits himself was taking. It must have seemed like an odd cover choice at the time, and Waits gives an odd performance by rounding his vowels and flattening the ends of his words into hisses and moans.
On the other hand, “Somewhere” makes perfect sense thematically: His characters may be hard up, but they’re still dreaming about that promised “place for us.” “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” a minor hit at the time and a fan favorite for decades after, is one of Waits’ most devastating tunes. He sings in the voice of the title character as she describes a happy life to an old friend: She’s married and off the dope, pregnant and hopeful. Someone might have stolen her record player, but “I think I’m happy for the first time since my accident.” The last verse arrives like a punch in the gut, as she admits she’s making it all up before asking to borrow some dough.
That Minnesota sex worker may be Waits’ richest character, a dreamer who spins an elaborate yarn that even she doesn’t have the heart to maintain. If women have stayed at the margins of his world, usually playing strippers and molls and closing-time hook-ups and more generally serving as fuel for his very masculine sentimentality, here Waits gives a woman a starring role and manages to create a deeply complex and contradictory character. His voice might sound low and gruff, but his performance isn’t mannered or distracting. Rather, he’s deeply sympathetic, especially as he reveals her very modest dream: “I wish I had all the money we used to spend on dope,” he muses. “I’d buy me a used car lot and I wouldn’t sell any of ‘em. I’d just drive a different car everyday dependin’ on how I feel.”
In the context of Waits’ nearly fifty-year career, 1980’s Heartattack and Vine is often discussed as a transitional album, a pivot away from the jazzier settings of his Asylum records and toward a much wilder and weirder mode. And certainly there are clear signposts pointing the directions he would head in the new decade. But in the context of this reissue series, Heartattack and Vine sounds less like a transition and more like a goodbye to those back alleys and underbellies, those barrooms and speakeasies that he once inhabited so easily. On subsequent records that setting would be much less prominent, so it’s fitting that “In Shades” is an instrumental, a smooth, organ-led interlude saturated with nightclub chatter and silverware clatter. Waits himself is missing from the milieu, as though he has fled the scene already. And he ends the album with “Ruby’s Arms,” one of his tenderest compositions. It’s his goodbye to a lover he leaves before the sun comes up, something like a prequel to “Ol’ 55” that brings everything full circle. But it’s also a goodbye to every barfly and every hoodlum and every itinerant on some “inebriational travelogue” he’s met along the way. “I will leave behind all of my clothes I wore when I was with you,” he sings. And then he ends the album with a fond farewell as he rides off into the sunrise: “As I say goodbye… I’ll say goodbye.”
Bon voyage, as well, to the grizzled persona he inhabited throughout the 1970s. No longer a cult figure, he had become what you could reasonably call successful, the music industry bending to him rather than him accommodating its demands. But perhaps the most significant change—the one that really took him out of himself—came in 1978, on the set of Paradise Alley, when Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. In addition to becoming his songwriting partner, she inspired him to sober up and to expand the sound and scope of his music. “I didn’t just marry a beautiful woman,” he told The Guardian in 2006. ”I married a record collection.” He would never again be quite as prolific as he was in the 1970s—seven albums in seven years—but he would never again be truly alone again in a song. | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | March 24, 2018 | 8.7 | 9dcee5e2-95e6-44d7-b62d-54360a48dd53 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Texan singer/songwriter Jess Williamson ditches the bucolic sound of her stark debut for a haunted urban malaise that feels far more natural for her. | Texan singer/songwriter Jess Williamson ditches the bucolic sound of her stark debut for a haunted urban malaise that feels far more natural for her. | Jess Williamson: Heart Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22690-heart-song/ | Heart Song | Native State, the 2014 debut record by Jess Williamson, depicted the Texan singer/songwriter’s journey back to her home state from a stint living in NYC, ditching the city and its discomforts for the wide-open country of her heart. Driven largely by banjo and other folksy instruments like dobro and dulcimer, Native State’s sound lumped Williamson into a loose constellation of mournful, folksy musicians, despite the fact that her spindly, spine-tingling voice took her songs in places most of her supposed peers would never dare to go. But Heart Song, Williamson’s sophomore effort, raises the question of how native Native State really was, as it finds her ditching bucolic Americana and returning to a place of urban malaise that feels far more natural for her.
What remains unchanged is Williamson’s stunning voice, which remains as compelling and remarkable as it was on Native State. Her rich, lip-curled contralto has an uncanny familiarity to it, hitting a spot somewhere between Cat Power and Angel Olsen, with moments of early Joanna Newsom’s yawp. But the way she wields this voice is unique. On Native State, that voice often seemed set off in opposition to the rustic instrumentation, but on Heart Song everything seems fused together as one.
Her writing, while evocative in any setting, feels more suited to these ominous all-night-diner/on-the-road soundtracks than to porch-mystic musings. Opener “Say It” captures this transition well, conjuring a quasi-Lynchian vision of a weary, wary woman conversing with a lover: “We could do better than this cheap motel/But somehow here I feel the most like myself.” On the slowly unfolding and percussion-less “Snake Song”—which references Will Oldham’s apocalyptic folkie forbearer Palace Brothers with the lyric “There is no one what will take care of you”—Williamson offers the sharp line “I have made friends with those too jealous to let the love come in/And I’ll never talk to them again even if I again talk to them.” Each track relies heavily on reverb-soaked electric guitar lines, a stark simplicity that works in tandem with Williamson’s soaring, interrogative voice.
The atmosphere on Heart Song is so strong and captivating that it pulls the more experimental moments into the center as well, like the mariachi deathsong closer “Devil’s Girl.” The best first-person storytelling manages to exist both inside and outside of the narrator’s head, a state which Williamson achieves deftly with cleverly written—and most importantly, delivered—lines such as “It’s evil how the best men I know are in and out of hospitals/Fighting some devils/…. Well maybe I am just the devil’s girl.” “Devil’s Girl” is actually an older song of Williamson’s, but the music been recast for Heart Song, scrapping the previous bluegrass/folk trappings in place of something rawer and more emotive.
At only seven tracks, Heart Song feels almost too brief. Its ghostly instrumentation and measured pace distort your sense of time in a manner similar to stark classics like Songs: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain. Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time. Heart Song never tires nor loses its tension, as if Williamson’s voice has finally found its proper milieu. | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Brutal Honest | December 17, 2016 | 7.7 | 9dd3f9b1-e1a7-4acc-aa1c-1bda3c445f6c | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Peter Sagar is a former guitarist for Mac DeMarco, and his charms are not dissimilar from DeMarco’s own. Here, he incorporates yacht rock and R&B tropes for a thrift store synth-pop sound. | Peter Sagar is a former guitarist for Mac DeMarco, and his charms are not dissimilar from DeMarco’s own. Here, he incorporates yacht rock and R&B tropes for a thrift store synth-pop sound. | Homeshake: Fresh Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22838-fresh-air/ | Fresh Air | Since leaving Mac DeMarco’s touring band in 2013, Peter Sagar has been releasing music as Homeshake. His first two albums albums, In the Shower and Midnight Snack, were not terribly far from DeMarco’s own charm. They were endearing and melancholic, but also introspective and kind of gross. His sound was pleasantly ramshackle, born from groovy guitars, echo, and a lilting, almost bored singing voice. Sagar’s music oozed a languorous, supine, stoned feeling, and he played the guitar as if it were a balloon animal: his riffs were elastic, contorted, and silly.
Overall, on those two records, Sagar’s spin on slacker rock was easy listening, malleable and affecting in the way DeMarco’s rock was anthemic. Both Sagar and DeMarco sell versions of the world that you want to inhabit: devil may care, but anxiously millennial. And of all the musicians spawned from DeMarco’s smokey den (Alex Calder and Walter TV among them), Sagar always seemed poised to be the one to breakout.
On his third album, Fresh Air, Sagar incorporates new tropes, including AM-radio yacht rock and quiet storm R&B, into his practice. He’s incorporated the off-kilter guitar playing of his earlier work into his new sound, cleaved from cheap synthesizers and drum machines, and the result could be described as thrift store synthpop, or as it might have been called eight years ago: chillwave. Generally, this vibe suits Sagar. The architecture of his sound has always held some of the funniest parts of the ’80s at its core. And here, the pure sleaziness he is able to extract from his instruments can be gloriously campy, or unexpectedly elegant and morose. But he’s also capable of laying down the cheese too thick.
In the album’s title track, he pairs together white noise and funky guitars into an inexplicable but personable ballad of loneliness and stress. In the background, a faltering metronome chimes in, giving the song an even more broken down feel. On “Call Me Up” and “Every Single Thing,” Sagar adds unforgettably sugary synth riffs that are equally danceable and mopey. Yet, he also has a tendency to stretch his voice way past his range, sometimes with effects, or through plodding vocal gymnastics. If anything, his voice might be a big reason some of this music falls flat. On “Timing,” his voice is far too brittle to carry the mercurial beat.
But his aesthetic, for better or worse, has not veered too far from his earliest efforts. On early cassettes, and previous albums, the low-quality trappings of his recordings were appealing. Three albums in, it seems like Sagar still has some learning to do. All over Fresh Air lay old tropes: bursts of static, helium-inflected voices, scratchy sound, guitar noodling. The album also lacks cohesive pacing; its level of energy is low enough that it easily becomes background listening. While there isn’t quite anyone who possesses Sagar’s style in the wide world of indie rock, he’ll have to add a few more tricks, lest he fall into rote routine. | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sinderlyn | February 3, 2017 | 7.3 | 9dd62d2f-3832-4f62-8c58-905da343f126 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Capping off one of the decade's great bodies of mood music, the Clientele continue to conjure and charm through their evocative music. | Capping off one of the decade's great bodies of mood music, the Clientele continue to conjure and charm through their evocative music. | The Clientele: Bonfires on the Heath | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13544-bonfires-on-the-heath/ | Bonfires on the Heath | Who could have guessed, as the first decade of the new millennium came on like a clean slate, that the Clientele would have a multi-album career in them? A follow-up to the band's 2000 singles collection, Suburban Light-- so ingratiating and familiar it felt like the distillation of some heartsick indie-pop ideal-- seemed less impossible than superfluous. When something feels perfect, you don't necessarily want want xeroxes, however much you may think you want more in your life. Yet here we are, as the first decade of the new millennium slumps to an ignoble close, with the fourth Clientele album. (Fifth, if you count Suburban Light.) And thankfully the band never really did attempt to reconjure the magic of those early singles, perhaps realizing that leaning on the same reverb-blurry signature would have dimmed the original's charm. What made the Clientele special proved surprisingly durable across multiple releases, fidelity upgrades, and songwriting shifts.
That special something at first felt impossible to convey. Atmosphere. "Vibe." Put on a Clientele record and you're entering a space, one crafted as much through sound as lyrical associations, which tend toward the kind of quasi-cinematic string-pulling that makes for the band's own brand of enjoyable cliché. It's lonely without tipping into alienation. It's in tune with the power of memory without being deadened by generic nostalgia. It's someplace where changes in the weather can leave people dumbstruck. And if the music itself were a hair more melodramatic, its wistfulness would probably be unbearable. But the band's restraint, skirting emotional didacticism while still providing room for listeners' own specific states, appeals to humanity's more evanescent (and maybe pop-resistant) feelings. If you're never going to hear unfettered joy on a Clientele record, they're never woe-is-me slogs, either.
That said, despite the band's admirable disinterest in repeating themselves, Bonfires stumbles when the Clientele ditch the musical framework they've perfected to carry these less-than-obvious emotional states. For new listeners, think heartsick, echo-wobbly strum carried along (just barely) by the shuffle of 1960s AM gold. The Clientele are not, despite the guitars and their era-specific sound, a rock'n'roll band. You can't imagine them whipping a club full of Hamburg drunks into a chair-flinging frenzy. That sort of energy sounds feigned and forced coming from a band known for music fragile enough to be shattered by a forceful cough from the audience. Bonfires tracks like "I Wonder Who We Are" and "Sketch" are stiff approximations of cutting loose. If not quite as cheesy as interstitial music in a Mike Myers vehicle, they're still pretty ersatz.
Still, we're talking a handful of uptempo misfires out of 12 tracks. The Clientele aren't vain or foolish enough to try rocking out for a whole album. And even the ersatz shit sounds lush as hell. If the early Clientele singles made a virtue of trad indie pop's innovation-through-cheapness recording values, those values actually added to the music's character-- reverb can cover a lot of empty space on both the songwriting and production end of things-- then maturity as a band (and slightly bigger budgets, presumably) made that Clientele-specific sense of place all the more 3-D. The sound of Suburban Light was as smudgy as a head under the effects of cheap wine. Bonfires retains just enough of a fuzzy edge-- a Clientele album without fuzz would be the work of another band entirely-- while its clearer bursts of guitars, bells, organs, piano, strings, and horns lend a gentle eeriness, like bright radio melodies heard through the bleary ears of pre-coffee early morning.
Crucially, in terms of this tension between clarity and fuzziness, fire and varying intensities of late-summer light seem to have replaced rain and early spring's lingering dimness as the band's go-to tropes this time out. Bonfires is an indian summer record if ever there was one, music for the dizzying strangeness of unseasonable warmth as the trees begin to brown and sweaters come out of storage. The title track conjures images of watching kids through sleep-deprived eyes as they crowd around piles of burning refuse, the guitars peeling and quavering like weak flames. Frontman Alasdair MacLean even drops the line, "late October sunlight in the woods," if you needed a no-nonsense scene-setter. The next track's called "Harvest Time", a similar late-decade thickening of the band's patented murmuring drift, paring the lyrics down even further to leave just wordless long notes that hover between grown-ass swoon and little boy longing. But that title, though: Throughout Bonfires, it's as if the band's trying to beat the synesthetes at their own game, making an album impossible to describe without using colors like ochre and umber and sunset red. You may not be able to recall its melody without prompting, but damned if you wouldn't be able to describe the image it paints with lyrics you could inscribe on a matchbook.
The best of the Bonfires extends the Clientele's great project: building, through hyper-evocative descriptive fragments and music to match, one of the great imaginary places in pop. The Clientele's suburb is obviously the product of an English coming of age, but it's also just dreamily vague enough to mirror the lives of listeners almost anywhere. (Unless you happen to live in one of those William Gibsonish fourth-world megalopolises with no green spaces.) The vibe of Bonfires is strong enough to almost feel the leaves crunching underfoot and smell the smoke cutting through the growing chill in the air, an indie-pop equivalent to Brian Eno's windswept and stone-solid world-building circa On Land. It's not an album you can dance to, but it's one you can live in and with, alone, which is rare enough to be applauded. The band's steadily curated one of the decade's great bodies of mood music. In an odd way, it strikes me as almost cousin to Sufjan Stevens' quixotic attempt to bring each state in the union to life: The Clientele seem to be trying to capture the light and air and meteorological conditions and attendant emotional baggage of each season, with a disarmingly straight-faced grace and wonder that makes it one of pop's more laudable long-term career moves. | 2009-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 7, 2009 | 7.4 | 9dd9bc3d-940d-4ad9-a750-cba3e7cc1e4e | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s third album is serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge and the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age. | The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s third album is serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge and the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age. | Faye Webster: Atlanta Millionaires Club | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faye-webster-atlanta-millionaires-club/ | Atlanta Millionaires Club | Few R&B albums have a pedal steel; few alt-country albums have a rap feature. Faye Webster’s Atlanta Millionaires Club somehow has all of the above. Even stranger, she manages to smooth these apparent contradictions into serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge. A musician and photographer known for monochromatic, winkingly humorous portraits of Atlanta hip-hop figures, Webster is releasing her third album at just 21 years old. It has the melancholy clarity of someone twice her age, and a dreamy transience perfect for an overcast Sunday.
Webster’s very first album, 2013’s Run & Tell, was polished traditional folk, inspired by country and bluegrass passed down by her musician mother and grandfather. While not adventurous, it’s remarkably pleasant; it’s hard to believe it’s the work of a 16-year-old, much less one who’d only been writing songs for two years. After a brief stint at college in Nashville, she returned home to Atlanta and recorded a self-titled 2017 album for Awful Records, the musical collective better known for its roster of left-field rap acts. Alongside artists like Father and Ethereal, Webster was an anomaly, but her arty individualism represented an important common value. Faye Webster kept the pedal steel but traded twangy guitars for soulful orchestral accents and groovier rhythms, gliding on the spun-gold thread of Webster’s voice, now sounding less like Emmylou Harris and more like herself.
She’s not a particularly powerful singer; she aims for the wistful plaintiveness to match her self-deprecating acceptance that things sometimes work out for everyone else but you. The album cruises with a casual slackness that can camouflage the precision of its production, like the horn flourishes that enliven light-stepping tearjerkers “Hurts Me Too” and “Jonny.” Kacey Musgraves and Natalie Prass are apt comparisons, but Webster sounds equally at home on a country song as she does singing hooks for Awful recording artists. Father murmurs a nonchalant verse on “Flowers,” the most unusual song here, with a molasses-slow boom-clap and tinkling music-box melody. “What do you prefer?/I don’t have that much to offer,” Webster sings, shifting into whispery sing-song.
Webster’s hyper-modern brand of cool moves with a swiftness that can make her interest in internet rap seem vintage, and her throwback non-musical passions—baseball and trick yo-yoing—seem trendy. Yet her sharply observed and simply stated lyrics land with immediacy. “The day that I met you I started dreaming,” she sings on album centerpiece “Kingston,” a lush, slow-building fantasy of romantic escape. She writes with refreshing obviousness about life as a homebody (“My dog is my best friend, and he doesn’t even know what my name is”), or how it feels to end a relationship with someone who’s also in the entertainment biz (“Right now your picture is all over Atlanta, no matter which way that I drive”). Even at her lowest, she doesn’t sound sorry for herself, preferring to let the pedal steel do the crying.
Plenty of currently trendsetting popular music resists precise categorization. In the case of a Khalid or a Diplo, this impulse can lead to stream-friendly mush. Webster is a bit too weird to fall into that trap; even when her path appears incongruous, one never has the sense that she’s acting other than as she intended. Idiosyncratic yet understated, Atlanta Millionaires Club wraps in a little of everything without doing too much of anything. | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | May 29, 2019 | 7.8 | 9dec6f83-3699-4ef3-bd5a-0a91b7c47304 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The posthumous Phife Dawg album, a showcase for his dexterous vocal style, reveals what had become most important to the rapper’s life in his post-Tribe years. | The posthumous Phife Dawg album, a showcase for his dexterous vocal style, reveals what had become most important to the rapper’s life in his post-Tribe years. | Phife Dawg: Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phife-dawg-forever/ | Forever | Four days after the 2016 presidential election, the surviving members of A Tribe Called Quest appeared on Saturday Night Live to perform songs from their just-released reunion album, the improbably great We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service. The group recorded the album before Donald Trump’s victory—as Dave Chappelle, who hosted SNL that night, repeatedly argued, Trump was merely sticking his finger in existing fault lines—but the results gave it new gravity. It was a moment of philosophical as well as aesthetic triumph for Tribe, their prescience made obvious.
Not all its members made it there to gloat. During the second verse of the galvanizing “We the People…,” when Phife Dawg’s vocals kicked in, Q-Tip and Jarobi shuffled to the stage wings, making room for a giant banner with Phife’s face to be unfurled. NBC’s cameras zoomed in on the late rapper’s picture until the living ones reappeared in the frame to play hypeman for their friend, their backs turned to the studio audience, egging on a static image.
The performance was less than eight months after Phife, born Malik Taylor, had died from diabetes-related complications at the age of 45. In the nearly 20 years between The Love Movement and We got it from Here, Phife, dogged by ill health and still frustrated over the dynamics that led to Tribe’s breakup, released little music. Forever, his first posthumous album—assembled by his longtime DJ, Dion Liverpool, from largely unfinished demos—reveals what had become most important to Phife in his post-Tribe years: family and a particular kind of integrity, where teaching a child to read and not fucking up a cypher are interconnected parts of one worldview. It also shows a dexterous vocal style that is more easily transposed across eras than longtime listeners might have imagined.
Phife and Q-Tip met when they were children attending the same Seventh Day Adventist church in Queens. But where Q-Tip was free to pursue his secular interests—his father was a jazz collector, and the opening verse to The Low End Theory recounts an informed back-and-forth about musical styles between father and son—Phife’s family adhered more strictly to the faith. He wasn’t permitted to hear hip-hop, much less participate in it, except in surreptitious doses outside the home. This is perhaps why, if Q-Tip could turn moodily inward or grapple with abstract social issues, Phife’s raps always felt more purely social. He was trying to intimidate or entertain, always playing to the block parties in his memory.
Though much of the derision he faced was unfair—Phife’s sly irreverence was a valuable counterweight—there are certainly points on Low End and Midnight Marauders when he sounds quaint next to Q-Tip, as if he were shadowboxing Run while his contemporaries built a spaceship. Forever unlocks in Phife’s vocals a keen adaptability. See the alternatingly rambling and staccato flows on “Dear Dilla,” or the way he moves, on the title track, from Fred Astaire tap dances over the top of the beat to grooves deep in its pocket. Despite song structures that inevitably recall rap from the early and mid-’90s (the trio of cautionary moral tales on “Only a Coward,” the voicemail-dotted “Sorry”), Phife’s voice is allowed here to feel muscular and modern.
Forever’s production descends from Tribe’s work with the late J Dilla, especially on The Love Movement. (It includes the aforementioned Dilla tribute and another song that features his younger brother, Illa J.) The beats skew warm and attempt at points to replicate the signature Ummah swing. This is a familiar musical mode for Phife, but not the only one he works well in. The lone solo album he released during his life, 2000’s Ventilation: Da LP, is a minor but deeply enjoyable take on the more caustic, post-Premier New York rap from the turn of the century, the kind of record for which “dated” is not pejorative. Forever misses some of Ventilation’s bite, even if the gentler tones are fitting given the new album’s themes.
Throughout Forever, Phife raps proudly about taking care of his family members; the album’s first verse, one of the parables from “Only a Coward,” is about a rich rapper who won’t do the same. The peace Phife seems to find in domestic life is especially moving when complicated by stories about his decaying body, delivered optimistically: On “Fallback,” he dreamily imagines a life with “no more dialysis,” and on “God Send,” the answered prayer of a kidney donation is presented as a blessing, with no apparent bitterness about Phife’s own organs failing. But even a listener who stumbled onto this album with no knowledge of real-life events would feel that buoyancy punctured by some of the guests, who address Phife as a deceased person. These eulogies were surely heartfelt on the parts of those rappers and singers, but they make that listener long for cameos like Busta Rhymes and Redman, who meet Phife on his playful level.
The most moving moment on Forever is when Phife laments playing phone tag over the final two years of Dilla’s life. Here and elsewhere on the album, Phife’s penchant for peppering his raps with specific details (often proper nouns—fashion labels, street names) merges with his increased willingness to talk about periods in his career when he felt slighted, disrespected, or simply sad about the way things broke with his lifelong friends. It remains heartbreaking that he lost his life so soon. But in the same way that facts from outside the text color Forever’s relative optimism about Phife’s health, the existence of that final Tribe album resolves some of the lingering anxiety about the group’s dissolution that seemed to haunt him for so long. | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Smokin’ Needles / AWAL | March 23, 2022 | 7 | 9df1420c-5666-4a96-9721-d86f8d1d358e | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Produced by Beau Sorenson and recorded at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone, Melissa Ann Sweat’s fourth album under the alias is a searching work of elemental folk minimalism. | Produced by Beau Sorenson and recorded at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone, Melissa Ann Sweat’s fourth album under the alias is a searching work of elemental folk minimalism. | Lady Lazarus: Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-lazarus-impossible-journey-of-my-soul-tonight/ | Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight | You don’t need much to make a Lady Lazarus song. Verses, choruses, a bridge? These are surplus to requirements. Accompaniment? Maybe just a splash, but it’s entirely optional. Flashy singing and lyrics? They’d just get in the way. A beginning, a middle, and an end—even these you can skip. The song should sound like it’s already been cycling forever when you press play, and like it might keep on like that forever.
To make a Lady Lazarus song, all you really need is a scrap of piano melody, played loosely but with a lot of feeling, sustained and reverbed to gather the harmonics into a self-generating ambience, and a handful of refrains, as direct as you can make them, in a plainspoken first-person register. That, and a voice capable of casual beauty and laidback ardency. Oh, and you need to be Melissa Ann Sweat, whose particular experiences, daring sincerity, and healing drive add depth to simplicity, so the whole exceeds the sum. That’s the tricky part.
Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight is Sweat’s fourth album as Lady Lazarus, and her second recorded in a professional studio, John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone. For Sweat, it’s an ornate affair; she plays not just piano but also keyboards, electric strings, and electric vibraphone, while producer Beau Sorenson adds atmospheric synth pads and textures. But for anyone this side of Grouper’s standards, it’s still a work of elemental folk minimalism. Without big peaks or tonal shifts, the music laps over you, the accompaniment no more than shining mist blowing off the songs’ soft, regular waves.
The album opens with “I Know What It Feels Like,” bathing a a few enigmatic but heartfelt phrases in glimmering Rhodes chords and strings—a song that tunes you into its subtle atmospheric fluctuations and then dissipates as dreamily as it appeared. On “I Recall July,” the endless restarting of the piano phrase and the low-tide tug of a saxophone cultivate an air of hushed anticipation. “Give a Little Bit of Yourself, Babe” is Sweat’s version of going big, which means the wavelets mass into gentle swells, but on “Golden Heart,” we’re right back to music that proceeds not by momentum, but touch by touch, thought by thought, feeling by feeling.
Lady Lazarus’ songs have often been about searching for love, home, and healing, things with complex and contradictory interrelations. Impossible Journey of My Soul Tonight seems to rearrange them, and resolves a long-building chord of self-actualization. On “Driving the Streets of Your Town,” Sweat, who lived in Austin and elsewhere before she returned to her native Santa Cruz County, describes cruising alone at 4 a.m. through streets she left at 18, taking stock of what’s still there and what’s gone. This quiet moment, which has the introspective solitude that has distinguished her best songs since “The Eye in the Eye of the Storm,” 10 years ago, comes near the beginning of the album, where the lyrics are all about waiting and remembering. But by “Golden Heart,” illusions are dissolving. The tenses of Sweat’s verbs of longing are changing from present to past, clearing the way for something new. By the end, an open-ended vision of solitude and freedom has emerged, one that will resonate with anyone who has sought home elsewhere but found it within, or anyone who’s still trying to. | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | self-released | January 8, 2020 | 7 | 9df53134-78dc-41f9-bfa9-668c0a5f8173 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ |
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