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The inaugural release in a new Captured Tracks compilation series surveys a generation of college-rock bands that drew sustenance from the chiming guitars of R.E.M. and the Byrds. | The inaugural release in a new Captured Tracks compilation series surveys a generation of college-rock bands that drew sustenance from the chiming guitars of R.E.M. and the Byrds. | Various Artists: Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983 - 1987 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-strum-and-thrum-the-american-jangle-underground-1983-1987/ | Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983 - 1987 | If you spent your formative years reading zines such as The Big Takeover and Puncture, you may experience a Proustian tingle while perusing the tracklist for Strum & Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987. It’s the inaugural release in Captured Tracks’ Excavations series, a set of compilations highlighting music from the 1970s through the 1990s that influenced the label’s roster. To give you an idea of the underdog status represented, cerebral Homestead Records stalwarts Salem 66 are probably the comp’s best-known act.
At a time when Sonic Youth were imploring people to “Kill Yr Idols,” Strum & Thrum’s musicians were emulating them: They drew sustenance from the Byrds’ radiant Rickerbacker tones; the spare, poignant intro to the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”; and early R.E.M.’s rambling approximations of Roger McGuinn’s guitar sound. Post-punk and no wave are nowhere to be heard in their orderly compositions. These groups almost uniformly privilege the guitar, and rarely do they disrupt a steady beat—although Start deviate from the prevalent 4/4 and Sex Clark Five dabble with quasi-prog-rock chord progressions and tempo switches. The stylistic niche plowed by most of the 28 acts here is narrow and, culturally and aesthetically, white. Not a scintilla of blues, funk, soul, jazz, or dub exists in these prototypical indie-rock songs. (The main points of Sasha Frere-Jones’s 2007 essay “A Paler Shade of White”—namely, that ’00s indie rock was defined in no small part by its aversion to the rhythmic expressions of mid-20th century, African-American popular music—could apply to Strum & Thrum.)
Music historian (and former Matador general manager) Johan Kugelberg regards the era documented here as American indie rock’s “Dark Ages.” Nevertheless, vibrant scenes were sprouting in college towns and small cities. Captured Tracks has dug deep to find gems from those microcosms. Luckily for these artists scorned by major labels and commercial radio, the college-radio infrastructure was burgeoning, connecting their smart, concisely constructed rock with students and zine-readers nationwide. The uninitiated, and those not alive during Reagan’s bleak reign, can learn much from Strum & Thrum about this stratum of sensitive-person rock.
The deities to which the majority of the comp’s artists genuflect are the Byrds and R.E.M., with occasional nods to the Smiths and Scottish label Postcard’s roster (Aztec Camera, the Go-Betweens). A substantial chunk of the album sounds like outtakes from Chronic Town and Murmur: For instance, the staccato rock of Holiday’s “Change” is essentially R.E.M.’s “1,000,000,” but with vocals influenced by the vivacious delivery of Kate Pierson, of the B-52’s. Strum & Thrum wholeheartedly champions verse-chorus-verse song structures, with no extravagant solos and few deviations from standard rock instrumentation.
With sonic innovation and political commentary off the table, these bands focused on writing catchy melodies, wittily rendering romantic entanglements and youthful musings, and generating those all-important guitar tones—the “jangle” and its close kin, the “chime.” The radiant timbres here generally signify innocent wonder and indomitable joy, despite the chronic threat of nuclear war fostered by American and Soviet leaders. Columbus, Ohio’s Great Plains slaughter doom with “When Do You Say Hello?,” a song so jittery it makes the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” seem like it’s in first gear. The Ferrets mine party-starting gold with “She Was Unkind,” which audaciously fuses riffs from the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Kinks’ “She’s Got Everything.” The Springfields’ Sunflower” attains a peak of Rickenbacker bliss via a fey paean to nature that could make Brian Wilson sigh.
Some of the more interesting songs here skew darker, including “Seven Steps Down,” by Salem 66, a Boston group, founded by three women, that crafted some of the most alluring hooks of the ’80s underground yet never transcended cult status. You can hear seeds of Helium and Liz Phair in their surprising dynamics and bewitching earworms. The modestly triumphant 28th Day rocker “Pages Turn (Alternate Version)” offers an early example of Barbara Manning’s ingenious songwriting and poignant vocals. On Riff Doctors’ “Say Goodbye,” singer Donna Esposito expresses the bittersweet feeling of liberation after a soured relationship, but the music radiates a restrained elation, a trick also perfected by the Smiths. The most rhythmically robust song here, Absolutely Grey’s “Remorse” is an emotional roller coaster in which Beth Brown sings, “I feel a bit remorseful now that you’re dead/But no more darkness in your head” like a female Gordon Lightfoot, her mossy tone catching with overwhelming emotion.
Taking cues from reissue specialist labels such as Numero Group and Soul Jazz, Captured Tracks has unearthed deep cuts from a stratum of rock that’s been swathed in apathy for over three decades and puts them into context. While it might be a stretch to say that Strum & Thrum’s artists influenced many of today’s indie rockers, it nevertheless represents a vault full of potential holy grails for fans of, say, Car Seat Headrest or Cloud Nothings. Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper wants Strum & Thrum to prove that America’s ’80s underground rock bands merit the same respect as those from their more heralded British and New Zealand counterparts on labels such as Creation and Flying Nun. That’s a tall order, but even if he hasn’t quite succeeded, Strum & Thrum does an admirable job casting some much-needed light on those “Dark Ages” of American indie.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Captured Tracks | December 3, 2020 | 7 | 9df5e3c8-67a0-48f3-ab80-3b9e790e42eb | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
In the context of her catalogue, this feels like a coming out party for Ramona Gonzalez's Nite Jewel. Compared to the electro-pop project's more lo-fi beginnings, the music here is forthright and clear. | In the context of her catalogue, this feels like a coming out party for Ramona Gonzalez's Nite Jewel. Compared to the electro-pop project's more lo-fi beginnings, the music here is forthright and clear. | Nite Jewel: One Second of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16347-nite-jewel-one-second-of-love/ | One Second of Love | It makes a certain kind of sense that Nite Jewel's music sprung from the underbelly of L.A. Despite its unpolished aesthetic and Ramona Gonzalez's professed aversion to more conventional ideas about glamour (there she is, spewing neon vomit at a swanky photo shoot in the clip for "Artificial Intelligence"), her music exists in the realm of gauzy fantasy: it is a dream world made reality. Up until now, all of the slinky, lo-fi electro-pop that Gonzalez has made as Nite Jewel has been molten and surreal, conjuring Dali paintings with drum machines and keyboards melting in place of clocks. Some of the moments on her 2009 debut Good Evening and her 2010 Am I Real? EP shone brighter than others, but they all crafted an atmosphere of mystery: it was nearly impossible to glean any specifics about the lyrics, not to mention the persona of the singer uttering them. Her latest LP, One Second of Love prompts a question that most artists who've carefully cultivated a sense of enigma have got to confront sooner or later (just ask the Weeknd or Lana Del Rey): what happens when mystery evaporates?
In the context of her catalogue, then, the cover of One Second of Love feel like the Nite Jewel equivalent of Meet the Beatles. The image-- like the music it represents-- is forthright and clear; you immediately get the idea that this record is her coming out party. And from the opening moments of "This Story", there's an obvious change in her sound: with its lucid, minimalist production, One Second of Love is the first Nite Jewel record that sounds like it takes place in the waking world. It's also an attempt to bring the poppier impulses to the forefront of her songs. The press release cites plenty of avant-garde influences, but also-- perhaps most importantly-- the 1990s R&B-pop of TLC and SWV.
The expertly minimalist lead-off single "One Second of Love" makes an early argument that this new sound is definitely a step in the right direction. The track has a buoyant, danceable beat (it's been said that Nite Jewel makes the kind of dance music that you can't actually dance to, but this is Gonzalez's strongest ever rebuttal to that claim), and an uncluttered atmosphere that blooms-- thanks to some Gary Numan-like synths and backing vocals from Julia Holter-- at just a couple of choice moments. The ballad "In the Dark" slows things down but still boasts one of the record's catchiest choruses, while the funk-inflected, sputtering-yet-smooth "She's Always Watching You" sounds like the Dirty Projectors covering Sade. "These girls are always smilin'/ At these late night events," she sings, perhaps professing some of the stresses of living out married life on a stage (her husband, Cole M. Greif-Neill of the Samps and formerly Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, plays on the record and in her touring band). "Baby, can't you see that I am through?/ Cause she's always watching you."
One Second of Love runs into some problems in its second half, particularly during the slower, starker tracks like "Unearthly Delights" and "No I Don't." Even on her lo-fi records, Nite Jewel's best when anchored by some kind of beat; Good Evening tracks like "Bottom Rung" and "Universal Mind" show how vague and occasionally downright tedious her music can become when it's not tethered to some kind of driving pulse. And because One Second of Love eschews Good Morning's layered, kitchen-sink atmospherics, its dull moments feel exceptionally dull because the atmosphere is so thin. Though the gentle groove of the penultimate track "Autograph" provides a late jolt to the album, its back half feels particularly disappointing given that the A-side boasts some of Nite Jewel's strongest material to date.
In the end, One Second of Love is enjoyable but slight: its stronger moments render the weaker ones particularly forgettable. "One Second of Love" and "She's Always Watching You" show that minimalism do occasionally suit Nite Jewel well, but in cleaning up her sound she's also scrubbed away too many of the textures that made her music so distinct. Still, One Second of Love marks an unmistakably huge progression for Gonzalez as a songwriter: she's developing a keener ear for melody and a more confident delivery. This record isn't quite the breakout statement that it seems to be shooting for, but its highlights are ample proof that there's more to Nite Jewel than just smoke and mirrors. | 2012-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | March 5, 2012 | 7.1 | 9dfaf5d9-3123-42a9-9811-cf45edfa67fa | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
On his new album, the New Orleans-based Benjamin Booker makes retro music feel modern, reflecting on racism in America while drawing on blues, soul, and gospel. | On his new album, the New Orleans-based Benjamin Booker makes retro music feel modern, reflecting on racism in America while drawing on blues, soul, and gospel. | Benjamin Booker: Witness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benjamin-booker-witness/ | Witness | You’re in the Deep South and it’s so hot that a thick film of sweat has become the top layer of your skin. You’re in a small, weathered-and-worn black church, the type that’s walls seem to shimmy and shake when the folks inside get a little too excited. A bright piano riff dances through the congregation. The choir sways and sings in unison as the strongest member of the choir reveals herself to be Mavis Staples. At the end of his second verse, the choir’s leader, Benjamin Booker, croons, “everybody brown can get the fuck on the ground,” before he takes us to the bridge: “see we thought that we saw that he had a gun.”
This is the atmosphere that New Orleans by way of Tampa Bay artist Benjamin Booker paints on the title track of his sophomore album, Witness. The gospel-inspired, Staples-assisted song examines what exactly it means to bear witness to something heinous, like the incessant murder or, to be frank, lynchings of black and brown people at the hands of the state. Will you just stand there, take action, or go on with life because this is all routine? Booker doesn’t come armed with solutions in hand and he doesn’t need to. He’s curious and angry as all hell about the wave of racism being reported, televised, think-pieced, and podcasted on a constant dystopian loop.
Booker’s eponymous debut from 2014 was a youthful collection of spirited punk and blues rock that captured the aura of aimless youth and Southern blues. Its riffs were as raw as exposed flesh wounds, successfully evoking luminaries like the Detroit Cobras, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Stooges as well as contemporaries like Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, and Ty Segall. Witness bears only a few jolts of the adrenaline and delicious chaos that oozed all over that album. One such instance is the brisk, high-energy opener, “Right on You,” which is about the inevitability of death creeping up behind. On the highlight “Motivation,” Booker expresses pain and frustration through polished arrangements and clear lyrics.
But the raw, carnal fervor of Booker’s punk numbers is still present—and sometimes it’s more pronounced—on Witness’ acoustic and naked electric blues and soul, when the opposing forces of a lush or refined landscape and Booker’s gravely voice work in concert. “Believe,” the album’s strongest track, uses this new direction keenly. Booker finds himself lamenting an overwhelming feeling of confusion and hopelessness while an amalgam of electric blues, gospel, and soul swell behind him.
While Booker has grown into his comfort zone as a songwriter on Witness, he had to leave home to find it. As he explains in an essay about the creation of Witness, a bout of writer’s block and a thirst to escape that aforementioned dystopian loop of racism in America led him to do just as his hero James Baldwin did in the late 1940s. Baldwin flew to Paris without speaking a lick of French; Booker, meanwhile, arrived in Mexico without speaking a lick of Spanish. Both felt it necessary to escape America, her porcelain hands tightly wrung around their throats. But Booker spent only a month away. After getting into a physical altercation outside of a club, he came to the realize that hostility can’t be escaped; it’s right on you, and it’s best to confront it.
There isn’t a clear answer for how one should react to bearing witness. Some people bear witness and get politically active; some take up respectability politics, refusing to acknowledge what’s true. Some people get broken down, mentally and physically. In his essay on Witness, Booker also cites a passage from “Reflections of a Maverick,” a conversation between Julius Lester and James Baldwin published by The New York Times in 1984. Baldwin, armed with the artist’s duty when acting as a witness, says: “I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve seen makes me know I have to say, I know.” In that sense, Baldwin and Booker are in kind. Booker reacts by looking inward, examining current political, personal, and cultural strife, and conversely making retro music feel modern. But he speaks for no one other than himself, to let it be known no evil goes unseen. | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 19, 2017 | 8.1 | 9dfba71f-0e90-4d8e-9444-8b877208c1fa | H. Drew Blackburn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/h.-drew blackburn/ | null |
After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013’s NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, experimental producer/composer James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with Skid Row. It should come as no surprise that it's short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. | After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013’s NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, experimental producer/composer James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with Skid Row. It should come as no surprise that it's short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. | James Ferraro: Skid Row | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21225-skid-row/ | Skid Row | Even before the ongoing coast-to-coast exodus, Los Angeles has always held a mythic allure to New Yorkers. To a nearly surreal extent, every meaningful aspect of living in New York is inverted there, like some kind of Gulliver's Travels opposite-land paradise–a place of endless cars and infinite residential square footage, where generalized anxiety is something to be worked on rather than bragged about and people seem to enjoy going to bed at a reasonable hour.
Despite all the breathless endorsements from transplants that swear that they've never felt so good before, L.A. does have a substantial dark side–a populace dealing with PTSD after years of gang violence compounded by police violence, the reactionary paranoia wafting in from Orange County, its ongoing ecological disaster. It's a place where you can stand in the window of a multimillion dollar loft downtown and gaze out over an ephemeral shanty town that blooms and evaporates daily, cocktail in hand, feeling like nothing so much as a sci-fi villain.
After producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013's NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with its follow-up, Skid Row. It comes as no surprise that his L.A. album is short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. There's not much of New L.A. in his portrait, no bohemian Brooklyn expats chillaxing in a pleasant new climate. Ferraro's L.A. is a dystopian vision stitched together from its drought-stricken everyone's-a-reality-show present and the bad old '90s, where the riots, the OJ trial, and the LAPD's corrupt culture blurred together to cast an ominous shadow on the city's carefully cultivated image.
His urban pessimism remains undulled–as does his passion for oppressively ugly recording techniques–but Ferraro's switched up some of his musical approach. While Hell 3:00 AM sounded like a nightmare version of contemporary R&B, Skid Row does something similar with L.A.'s native funk styles, which have recently been revived in less bleak ways by the likes of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar.
Ferraro's take on funk strips away all of its organic sensuality and joy, leaving a creepy husk that's still fascinating to inspect. "White Bronco", which kicks off the record after one of the computer-generated spoken word introductions that have become something of a Ferraro trademark–this one featuring a pair babbling about gated communities and "burning Priuses on the highway" and conducting a transaction for an iced latte–slows a slow-jam groove down even slower until it sounds eerily narcotized and its minimalist synth bass riff takes on a menacing aspect. Ferraro's monotone listing of facts from the Nicole Brown Simpson murder trial mixed in with samples of TV news surrounding the Rodney King beating conflate the two sensational acts of violence like someone who's either heavily intoxicated or just suffered a head injury. At the two-thirds point of the song, Ferraro hits a vocal lick that sounds like Snoop's "'G' Thang" flow, and it feels like some kind of sick punchline.
Ferraro's freer with hooks on Skid Row than he was on Hell 3:00 AM, and there are songs like "Thrash Escalate" and "Rhinestones" that sound like they could slap if they were sped up a few percent. He might be starting to come to terms with his innate pop talents, or it could just be a new tactic of dispensing hints of traditional pop pleasures into the gloom to keep his audience off balance.
Skid Row isn't really about those singular moments though, or about walking away from it with a hook stuck in your head. They're just elements in a solidly built cohesive whole that feels like a J.G. Ballard novel filtered through late-night Ableton sessions, and a worthy addition to the long line of punk albums about Los Angeles that render it as a city built on fantasy with a nihilistic streak that runs to its core. | 2015-11-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Break World | November 16, 2015 | 6.6 | 9e041b1c-4345-4e21-9e6f-9319b8c13b70 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
With help from some outside producers, Chvrches’ try to launch themselves into the mainstream. The result is an uncomplicated, unsurprising collection of steely synth pop. | With help from some outside producers, Chvrches’ try to launch themselves into the mainstream. The result is an uncomplicated, unsurprising collection of steely synth pop. | Chvrches: Love Is Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chvrches-love-is-dead/ | Love Is Dead | The onus on any band naming their album Love Is Dead is to either prove it or prove it wrong. Uncompromising statements have been Chvrches’ currency since the beginning: short, punchy phrases that alternately empower and eviscerate. The title of the Scottish trio’s third album refers to what singer Lauren Mayberry has called society’s “death of empathy” and it accompanies 13 songs designed to get more people than ever to notice that message. It’s fair enough that, seven years in, one of the bands responsible for poptimising indie-rock might want to launch themselves ruthlessly at the mainstream. But on Love Is Dead, Chvrches misjudge the moment a few different ways.
A Chvrches song used to make you gasp—take the fantastical melodies of 2013’s “The Mother We Share”—and even in the trio’s more straightforward moments, they conjured audacious drama. The drop of 2015’s “Clearest Blue” wasn’t just striking because it ripped off Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” but because it refashioned it as an EDM confetti bomb and got away with it. The trio always prided themselves on their resourcefulness—the fact that a damp Glasgow basement and a phalanx of obscure synthesizers wielded by members Iain Cook and Martin Doherty made their 2013 debut The Bones of What You Believe one of the few DIY (in spirit, if not label) albums to break the UK Top 10. So it’s strange that they should let outside producers in for the first time.
Assisted by ringer Greg Kurstin (Sia, Beck, Foo Fighters) and British pop mastermind Steve Mac (One Direction, Ed Sheeran, Shakira), much of Love Is Dead is stout and uncomplicated, keeping Chvrches’ ever-skyward outlook earthbound. “Get Out” opens with static claps on the beat; Mac’s “Miracle” features a lumbering “whoa-oh-oh” chorus better suited to Imagine Dragons. Kurstin’s presence recalls his work on Tegan and Sara’s excellent 2013 album Heartthrob, a pop transformation as giddy as it was sensitive to their style—heights that Love Is Dead reaches for but doesn’t often clinch. Besides, Chvrches have always been a smart pop band that is now, for some reason, second-guessing its instincts.
Love Is Dead’s straightforward gait often keeps Mayberry hemmed in, curtailing one of pop’s most dramatic ranges to one-note verses and structures that value repetition over surprise. The dazzling parts of a Chvrches song transcend a clichéd lyric but the lack of spectacle here makes the clichés glare (”Can’t live forever with my head in the clouds/Can’t predict the weather with my feet on the ground,” Mayberry frets on “Wonderland”) as Mayberry often leans on simple rhymes beaten into bruising choruses (”never, ever,” “get out, get out,” “deliver-iver-ance”). There are few moments as inventive and heart-seizing as “Graffiti,” in which Mayberry invokes names youthfully scrawled on a bathroom wall as a vivid metaphor for the precariousness of her generation’s future: “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to grow old,” she sings tenderly: “And now we never will.” It’s bleak yet hopeful, resignation tinged with beauty.
Maybe it’s a case of attempting to simplify the medium to amplify the message. Despite some pat songwriting, Love Is Dead features some of Mayberry’s most pointed lyrics, aimed at hypocrites and ivory tower-dwellers, and underscoring her commitment to the fight against them. A line about bodies “washing up on the shore” (which she’s explained is about dead refugee children) fits awkwardly in “Graves,” though otherwise, the song matches “Graffiti” for starry-eyed pleasure when Mayberry’s vengeful presence finds its truest calling. And again, despite its labored chorus, the simmering verses of “Deliverance” render tension elegantly. The first warns religious bigots that they’re on shaky ground, each line starting with “careful when;” the second finds Mayberry asserting hers is solid, each line starting, “Trust me…” Somber and seething, it ranks among her best work.
Mayberry searches relentlessly for light in the dark. Her insistence on standing for what is right and never turning a blind eye also reads as a fight to resist desensitization, a powerful theme for a pop record. But Love Is Dead often sounds desensitized, unyielding, and defensive. “I always regret the night I told you I would hate you till forever,” Mayberry repeats on “Forever” with a blunt force that doesn’t really sound remorseful; there’s neither anguish nor pride when she yells, “Maybe I am just too much for you” at the song’s climax. “My Enemy,” a moody duet with the National’s Matt Berninger, has a numbed quality, though the tone fits their exchange about how inflammatory emotions across a political (or perhaps romantic) divide can kill any possibility of discussion.
It’s only towards the end of the album that a welcome softness arrives. The blocky structures loosen up on “God’s Plan” (aka the inevitable one where Doherty sings), and “Wonderland” and “Heaven/Hell” bound in on basslines worthy of New Order, adding some much-needed euphoria and human physicality. The latter in particular is fittingly cosmic for the moment that Mayberry challenges other people’s ideas of how she should wield her power as a woman in pop. I feel guilty praising her defeated turn on “Really Gone” in case it perpetuates stereotypes of what pop femininity “should” look like—i.e. vulnerable—but nevertheless, it’s a lovely coda to a demanding album. Her Scottish accent breaks through as she sings, “I’m holding on, I’m holding on,” in a voice so high and forlorn that she seems to be doing so by her last nerve.
Whereas Chvrches sounded futuristic when they first emerged, it’s this lack of softness on Love Is Dead that makes it sound dated upon arrival, out of kilter with the current pop moment. Steely synths are out of fashion; kin like Years & Years, the 1975, Christine and the Queens, Troye Sivan, and even Paramore offer a playful tenderness that Chvrches avoid, or maybe even fear. Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic. If Chvrches prove anything on their third album, it’s that pop that truly galvanizes in moments of hardship is never without love. | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Glassnote | May 30, 2018 | 6.3 | 9e13aa0f-aa85-4b1d-a3fd-ed607af49b11 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Australian duo’s debut full length features warm, pleasing vocal lines and electro-pop beats, but it never coheres to tell the kind of story they want to tell. | The Australian duo’s debut full length features warm, pleasing vocal lines and electro-pop beats, but it never coheres to tell the kind of story they want to tell. | Kllo: Backwater | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kllo-backwater/ | Backwater | Kllo’s Simon Lam and Chloe Kaul are masters of juxtaposition, infusing their bubbling electro-pop beats with mellow R&B vocals and a churning, ever-present sense of yearning. Fittingly, they named their album after the bodies of water that “rest beyond a current’s reach,” those seen as “stagnant and turbid.” Backwater, the duo’s debut full length, is a collection of songs written while the cousins “waded in figurative backwater,” experiencing the excitement of a world tour but also while homesick for their hometown of Melbourne. At their best, the songs on Backwater capture the mixed feelings Lam and Kaul experienced while writing them, artfully weaving heartache through intrepid pop hooks. However, despite their claims that this is their most adult music yet, the songs don’t feel like they have matured much from the disjointed lyrics and pleasant-but-homogeneous electronic beats of their last EP, Well Worn.
As with their previous releases, Kaul’s voice is consistently a treat, pouring smooth like cream into coffee as it twists through a backbone of Lam’s UK garage-inspired beats. On “Last Yearn,” Kaul’s tenderness adds layers of emotional complexity to otherwise straightforward lyrics about the end of a relationship. When she sings, “Where are we going?/I need some closure from you/Where do we go from here?” her crooning injects the loneliness of ending a relationship with the softness of remembering why you loved the other person in the first place. On album highlight “Downfall,” her voice draws out short, abstract phrases about loss and attempted resilience and suspends them in an ether of skittering drums and synth. Kaul is a sonic anchor as the instrumentals somersault forward at a thrilling pace, making the song at once exhilarating and comforting.
Still, the beauty of Kaul’s vocals can only take the album so far. The lyrics, more often than not, function like hashtags that declare the theme of an Instagram post rather than like poetry that captures life experiences with nuance. The album deals extensively with heartache, but rarely provides details that make the narratives feel personal or unique. On “Dissolve,” Kaul sings, “Called it forever/We’re caught in the game/Well maybe we’re both to blame/Putting this under pressure.” In just four lines, the song addresses unfulfilled expectations, confusion, regret, and anxiety, but never elaborates on why or how the narrator experiences these myriad emotions. “Nylon” starts with potential, a slower, more contemplative track on which Kaul laments that she doesn’t want to die young and needs “someone to rely on.” It feels like she is about to make herself vulnerable by delving into her fears and insecurities, but again, she only skims the surface. Why is she afraid she’s going to die young? How does she express this fear? What does it look like when she relies on someone else? Her lyrics evoke these questions but never answer them.
Of course, dancefloor music evokes emotion viscerally and physically, not necessarily linguistically. But, when words take a back seat, the music has to tell a story; it has to build or wallow or surprise the listener to remain captivating. Much of the instrumental narrative on Backwater lacks conviction. The lyrics generally circle around the same themes throughout, and the dance beats follow suit. Many of the songs are longer than necessary and the looped and distorted backing vocals can be distracting rather than cohesive, as on lead single “Virtue.” The ocean of synths throughout the album create an ethereal ambiance consistent with their earlier work but are rarely distinct from one song to another. These sonic elements give Kllo’s music a rich sheen that makes them pleasant to listen to, but that doesn’t always stick after the music stops playing. The duo clearly have good stories, but need to expand the range of emotions they use to tell them. | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Ghostly International | November 9, 2017 | 6.3 | 9e17dc41-c2d4-42e1-80cd-0a7ab099f5ce | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Guitarist William Tyler crafts a spare and meditative soundtrack for filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's quiet frontier story. | Guitarist William Tyler crafts a spare and meditative soundtrack for filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's quiet frontier story. | William Tyler: Music From First Cow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-tyler-music-from-first-cow/ | Music From First Cow | American history has historically been painted on a large canvas. By purposeful contrast, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is very small, a frontier story you can hold in your hand—Reichardt renders her version of America’s emergence as the gentle intimacy between two men, a purposeful pushback against the grand narratives of our past. A quiet cook called Cookie (John Magaro) has made his way to Oregon with an outfit of fur trappers, where he encounters King Lu (Orion Lee), a widely traveled immigrant from China. Both men have no clear future, but no real home to return to; the only possible direction is forward, carving out a transient existence on the outposts of expansion.
The town they find themselves in is home to the titular first cow in the territory, owned by the wealthy emissary of a British trading company (Toby Jones). With some simple ingredients and a little pilfered milk, Cookie and King Lu are able to make quick money selling cakes and pastries to settlers desperate for anything close to a creature comfort, but it’s only a matter of time before the jig is up, the cow is fenced off, and the newfound friends are run out of town.
Reichardt occupies a unique position within American independent cinema; she’s a known name who regularly works with familiar faces, but the compass that orients her vision remains experimental. Films like Old Joy (scored by Yo La Tengo, and starring Will Oldham) and Certain Women are purposeful in their pacing, deliberate and meandering like a walk in the woods, but uniquely concerned with the organic beauty of Western American landscapes. In Japan, there’s a concept called shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” which means immersing yourself in the ambience of a wooded environment as you would soak in a tub—Kelly Reichardt’s movies always make me feel like I’ve taken a forest bath for a thousand years, renewed and revitalized like photosynthesis working its natural magic on a shriveled leaf.
William Tyler similarly sits at the crossroads of accessible and avant-garde — he’s the son of the couple who wrote country standards for legends like The Oak Ridge Boys, but his instrumental Americana work approaches post-country. There’s an expansiveness to Tyler’s music that owes as much to ambient music as it does to John Fahey. Merge Records has released Tyler’s score for the film, along with snatches of dialogue, as Music From First Cow. Reichardt applies a tiny lens to an overwhelming subject, so it’s only fitting that Tyler reduces the scope of his work in turn. His score is only one small part of the movie’s audio track, a subtle human presence within Reichardt’s typically rich palette of natural sounds.
Each cue builds on repeated themes, which Tyler introduces by way of lone electric guitar on “An Opening.” The film begins in the present day, but as a single cut takes us back over a century, Tyler’s signature instrument is swaddled with era-appropriate accompaniment, as a familiar tune is translated across varied timbres: toy piano on “Cookie’s Theme,” mandolins and banjos on “Arrival” and “A Clearing in the Field.” Emptiness and absence are key players; on “The Separation,” he lets the notes hang, the harsh slide of a guitar and faint piano keys suggesting the distance between human beings in this unknown landscape. The only time he is surrounded by a full ensemble is on “A Closing,” as our two drifters have been subsumed by a rigid world of capitalist civilization.
Tyler and Reichardt are both artists who flirt with pop structure while remaining committed to a more experimental ethos. But they are more than stylistic kindred; each uses their work to push back against the coming reality First Cow gently warns of. The problem with being an artist on the avant-garde frontier is that frontiers exist to be closed—through their union, William Tyler and Kelly Reichardt express a continued commitment to a harmonious existence between humanity and the landscape it inhabits. | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | March 16, 2020 | 7.1 | 9e180a1c-a861-4e42-be62-546043dfa9d7 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, is a cheap, placebo imitation of a party. | Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, is a cheap, placebo imitation of a party. | Steve Aoki: 4OKI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22143-4oki/ | 4OKI | One of YouTube’s stranger side coves is the Binaural Beats channel, a collection of droning, synthesized audio tones that promise to deliver the sensations of “digital drug doses.” In this virtual den of depravity, electronic “opium” sprawls out in an oaky, low thrum, and virtual “LSD” keens along in a piercing wobble that fuzzes out like Timothy Leary’s hairline. Auditory alcohol, helpfully, features an illustration of frothy pints to pair with a skittering, Merzbow-worthy hum. Sadly for all iTweakers, though, these clips only deliver a buzz in the acoustic sense.
Steve Aoki’s latest EP, 4OKI, would slot perfectly into this playlist; it’s also a cheap, placebo imitation of a party. Like Neon Future I and II, the Dim Mak founder’s full-length album set, the four-track effort spackles vaguely futurist clicks and clamors onto staid beats while braying singularly for hedonistic excess; it’s passive EDM calculated to score his cake-flinging, crowd-rafting concert theatrics, where the static nature of the music is muted by frosting wedged into ear canals. In this melee, Aoki’s unrelenting pitched-down vocals and anemic house beats get a dramatic boost; the refrain “Whatever those dope girls sippin’/Is what I’m drinkin’/Pour me one more cup when I'm pimpin’/Pass the keys I’m fuckin’ whipping’’ has a chance at sounding bracing instead of brainless, its attendant bass drop ferocious instead of toothless (“Dope Girlz,” with Shaun Frank). “ILYSM,” with Autoérotique (a Dim Mak signee, as are all the vocalists), might perform a greater alchemy than turning a few callback lines of Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down” into a hollow frat roar.
Like many party vices, this flip approach could be embraced if it were fun, which it isn’t. Even at a scant 16-minute runtime, 4OKI is tedious; the bottomed-out dubstep yowling of “The drum kick hits and the kids will die” (“Kids,” with Morten) and shrill siren bleats atop various demands to “Bring the Funk Back” (with Reid Stefan) are interchangeable, down to how they evoke two fax machines in a tumble dryer. Even for a showman who’s admitted that touching his DJ equipment during songs is “not absolutely necessary,” the approach suggests an incurious nature. It’s the sort of enforced, one-note debauchery that disrespects EDM fans, caricaturing them unfairly as libertine halfwits.
Aoki seems in no hurry to experiment with his money-minting formula; the trailer of an upcoming Netflix documentary teases a hero’s arc of him defying the expectations of his father, Benihana tycoon Rocky Aoki, and he dismissed the cake-averse as “haters” and “trolls” in a voluble 2014 essay for The Daily Beast. Most likely, he will savvily outlive the current EDM bubble when it deflates in a flurry of glow sticks and flash tattoos; that documentary is, after all, called I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. But if every generation rebels against their parents, it breeds hope for our future–because it means that someday when Aoki pivots back on his artificial hip, desserts at the ready, the new guard will stand in implacable silence, demanding dance music that is more than empty calories. | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dim Mak | August 2, 2016 | 2.5 | 9e190dc7-708d-4ef1-bb68-41320f824ee5 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Accompanied by Joan Shelley, Will Oldham, and others, the Louisville guitarist sets Hebrew psalms and poetry to music with a comforting, candlelit atmosphere. | Accompanied by Joan Shelley, Will Oldham, and others, the Louisville guitarist sets Hebrew psalms and poetry to music with a comforting, candlelit atmosphere. | Nathan Salsburg: Psalms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-salsburg-psalms/ | Psalms | The warm, fingerpicked songs of Nathan Salsburg have always hinted at an obsession with history and tradition. For his first few albums, the Louisville musician expressed himself through solo acoustic guitar, an instrument that he plays with such a second-nature dexterity that it can feel like another appendage. Releases like 2013’s Hard For To Win and Can’t Be Won and 2018’s Third were elaborate, carefully picked bouquets of twirling steel-string harmony that often glowed with the hope of new beginnings and emanated the scent of dusty vinyl. It checks out: Salsburg is a historic preservationist who has now served as curator for the Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity for over 20 years, presiding over the late ethnomusicologist’s early field recordings of folk music from around the world.
Last year, Salsburg pivoted, digging into his vast record collections for source material that would eventually become Landwerk and Landwerk No. 2. (“Otherwise they’d just sit around on the shelves,” he said). The two companion albums were built from looped snippets of old 78-rpm records, largely of Yiddish and klezmer music, which Salsburg then gently augmented with his own guitar, playing circular phrases and immersing himself in the auras of the antique fragments. Psalms, his latest release, also adheres to a specific concept, but a bolder one: These 10 songs are almost entirely based on Hebrew psalms from the Old Testament, with music composed by Salsburg over the past five years and recorded last year with a band that includes Spencer Tweedy on drums, as well as Will Oldham and Salsburg’s partner and frequent collaborator Joan Shelley on backing vocals.
Similar to the Landwerk project, Salsburg dives into a specific time and place on Psalms, one that traces to some part of who he is today, turning to his guitar as a sort of notepad. But here, he swaps out the mystery evoked by decontextualized samples for the mystery of his own faith. Salsburg, who says he occasionally felt alienated by the culture of his religious upbringing and has recently grown closer to Judaism on his own terms, envisioned this project as another way to comfortably engage with his religion. It succeeds in familiar ways: Salsburg lets us in on his refreshingly genuine reactions to his journey, sounding every bit as meditative as you might expect, often centered. It’s a fairly niche project, and its parameters are rigid, but it can also be deeply comforting in both its reverent, focused intent and candlelit atmosphere.
Salsburg sings on nearly every track—a rare occurrence in his catalog—and mostly in Hebrew. He chose most of these passages by flipping through a bilingual Book of Psalms and trying out the phrases that struck him, many of which are praises to Hashem’s compassion, natural-world wonders, or in several cases, the act of singing itself. He shows off a grizzled but delicate baritone, calming with just a hint of pitchiness—the perfect amount to affirm that a great natural singing voice is no prerequisite for singing, much less singing hymns.
Structurally, Psalms sticks to familiar territory. Some tracks, like opener “Psalm 147,” fall into the looped-cell rhythms of Landwerk, while others, like the subsequent “Psalm 19,” feature several independent verses and sections. Both styles can work, and Salsburg sequences Psalms so that it traverses moods and cadences. There are stretches of solemn tension followed by ones of plain beauty and relief. On “Psalm 104,” Salsburg’s acoustic guitar scurries through a soothing waltz that simmers like an aromatic stock, modestly seasoned to proportion by a piano accompaniment from longtime friend James Elkington. It’s the album’s peaceful calm before the (very gentle) storm of its crest, “O You Who Sleep,” the only English-sung track and non-psalm on the album, dedicated to the late David Berman of Silver Jews, who himself once documented his own mid-adulthood reconnection with Judaism. It’s a moving tribute, an appropriate moment for Psalms to cross into folk-rock for the first and last time.
Hearing Salsburg sing and play through the lens of religion—one specific part of his identity—doesn’t carry the same weight as the more holistic self-portraits of his early solo work or the novel archival dives of Landwerk. But it also touches a part of his soul that those prior albums couldn’t: the part that developed when Salsburg was a child, singing Jewish music in the stained-glass-filtered sunlight of his Louisville synagogue, overcome with intangible joy. For some who have known that feeling, it can become more elusive with time. Like a cantor’s voice resonating through the front doors to a house of prayer, Psalms invites you to come inside, take a seat, and rest in the friendly pews of its sanctuary.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | August 30, 2021 | 7.3 | 9e220b86-1644-43cb-a064-f1831b509a48 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On another of his many genre dalliances, the acerbic singer-songwriter teams with the New Orleans r&b legend. | On another of his many genre dalliances, the acerbic singer-songwriter teams with the New Orleans r&b legend. | Elvis Costello: The River in Reverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9143-the-river-in-reverse/ | The River in Reverse | So now that he just did an art-jazz project, it's time for another rock record from Elvis Costello, right? Alas, The River in Reverse, a collaboration with New Orleans r&b legend Allen Toussaint, is another genre dalliance intended to showcase Costello's supposed versatility. Well, here he throws himself headlong into Toussaint's back catalog, naturally selecting more obscure cuts (the guy did write "Working in a Coalmine"), backed by the Imposters and augmented by Toussaint himself and NOLA horn players.
Yes, that's New Orleans, but this isn't a cash-in on recent tragedy: Costello has worked with the legendary Toussaint more than once before (notably on the piano part for Spike's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror"). And while there is some back and forth concerning songwriting, it's meant to be a "Costello Sings the Songs of Toussaint" songbook record-- a voice-meets-pen LP like those in vogue before the rock era.
Costello sings every song but one, Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further". And that's actually sort of a shame: Costello's proven himself effective in plenty of contexts outside of rock, but all his vibratos and melismas and belted notes seem like so much flailing compared to Toussaint's effortless croon. He has a sharp ear for choosing songs that remain relevant, but this is one genre that eludes him as a performer. Granted, he's never seemed entirely at home on jazz and classical records, but the pairing has never been as jarring as it is here, with new Costello songs standing directly next to the traditionals.
While he belabors notes on the deep cuts from Toussaint's catalog, the Costello-sung covers that frontload the album fall short. Listen to the Costello-Toussaint collaboration "Ascension Day" to hear just how nimble Costello's voice can be, alternately skipping across and gluing together the fluid notes of the piano line. And looking past its crushing self-awareness as an anthem for Hurricane Katrina victims, "The River In Reverse" really works. Penned entirely by Costello, when it hits the line, "There must be something better than this/ I don't see how it can get much worse," the song shifts from a percussive acoustic guitar pattern to a resigned sigh from the horns. Meanwhile, Toussaint's slightly dissonant piano dances low in the mix, Costello cramming in syllables with his usual verve-- all hinting at a range of frustration and discontent bubbling underneath.
These, however, are exceptions. Most of these tracks merely feel professional or workmanlike, sincere recordings that sadly lack inspiration. The River in Reverse could have been vastly improved with more collaboration and fewer ostentatious performances, giving the two big names on the marquee more moments to shine than to strain. | 2006-07-07T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2006-07-07T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Verve Forecast | July 7, 2006 | 6.1 | 9e305e75-5a85-43ae-9045-8bbbbcd67c4f | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
On their first new album in four years, the Irish punk quartet channel pure, visceral panic through screeching sensory assaults and scrap-metal clang. | On their first new album in four years, the Irish punk quartet channel pure, visceral panic through screeching sensory assaults and scrap-metal clang. | Girl Band: The Talkies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girl-band-the-talkies/ | The Talkies | After laying dormant for nearly a half decade, Irish quartet Girl Band open their new album with a self-administered stethoscope test. “Prolix” isn’t so much a song as a diagnosis—for nearly two minutes, we hear nothing but frontman Dara Kiely’s breathing over an ominous, reverberating drone. But as the track goes on, Kiely‘s breaths turn harder, faster, and louder, until he’s desperately gulping air like a desert roamer sucking on their canteen. It’s the sound of pure, visceral panic—which is to say, on their first album in four years, Girl Band are in perfect health.
“Prolix” isn’t staged—it’s a document of Kiely's actual panic attack in the studio. And coming from an artist who’s made no secret of his mental-health struggles—which precipitated the band’s extended hiatus—the track is a grim reminder that, even though Kiely feels well enough to resume his musical career, anxiety is an insidious affliction that can creep up at any time without warning. But the process of airing out his issues in the press and in past songs has made Kiely less interested in exploring them through his music now—when writing The Talkies, he deliberately avoided the use of the words “I” or “you” to avoid the painful introspection they may trigger. But while Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.
More so than 2015’s Holding Hands With Jamie, The Talkies finds each member functioning less like a typical musician and more like a loose lever on a console, crashing in and dropping out of the mix at random moments. Guitarist Alan Duggan has completely unlearned the art of riffs and solos, using his instrument solely for textural dissonance—the more nauseating, the better. Bassist Daniel Fox deals exclusively in gut-rumbling frequencies, while drummer Adam Faulkner avoids the snare like it might be rigged with electric shocks. The result is drained of any rock-band formalism, all scrap-metal clang and kick-drum thump teetering on collapse.
Kiely‘s lyrics mimic this deconstructionist approach, atomizing everyday scenes and conversations into fragments. On The Talkies, you’ll hear references to pop-cultural icons like Ricki Lake, Zinedine Zidane, Bert and Ernie, and the Byrds, though when fed through Kiely’s cut-and-paste filter, they become disembodied figures thrown into a parade of freaks that includes “mental zoo boy,” “Crunchy Percy,” and the “bloke with The Man and The Legend shirt.” Kiely clearly delights in the beautiful absurdities of the English language: The post-apocalyptic chain-gang chant “Aibohphobia” references the (not officially recognized) fear of palindromes while piling them onto prospective victims (“Cain a Maniac! Salt an Atlas! Strap on No parts! Bird Rib!”) with all the merciless fervor of a waterboard interrogation.
Kiely doesn’t so much front the group as submit himself to them: As “Couch Combover” builds into a seasick, distortion-soaked stomp, it sounds like Kiely is puking and crying at the same time. But later in that same song, the squall subsides to reveal Kiely gently singing the track’s chorus, offering a glimpse of the pop singer trapped in a noise band’s body.
By the time we reach The Talkies’ tumultuous seven-minute climax “Prefab Castle,” Girl Band’s balance of composure and cataclysm has tipped toward the latter. The emergency sirens are ringing out, the walls are closing in, and Kiely reverts to his panic-attack gasp. And yet as the song begins its final descent, Kiely recites a mantra with unnerving calm: “When it’s depressed/Still in love/When it’s happy/Still in love/When it’s all sad/Still in love/When it’s anxious/Still in love.” It may not be everyone’s definition of a peaceful conclusion, but after all the punishment Kiely’s endured over the course of this record, it’s a minor miracle he’s still breathing at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | September 27, 2019 | 8 | 9e311ce5-f784-4e78-935a-cfdb2cf91be6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Performed on a 132-year-old pipe organ, the latest project from the Australian sound artist dials up the volume and revels in the rumble. | Performed on a 132-year-old pipe organ, the latest project from the Australian sound artist dials up the volume and revels in the rumble. | Lawrence English: Observation of Breath | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lawrence-english-observation-of-breath/ | Observation of Breath | The world famously quieted during lockdown. Lawrence English, on the other hand, used the opportunity to get loud. When he wasn’t busy running his label Room40, a gathering place for experimental musicians like David Toop, Merzbow, and Beatriz Ferreyra, or editing archival field recordings from the Amazon rainforest, English logged many hours seated at a 132-year-old pipe organ in his hometown of Brisbane, Australia, feeding air into it until the walls shook.
It wasn’t his first time on the organ. English had already incorporated recordings of the same instrument into his 2014 album Wilderness of Mirrors and 2017’s Cruel Optimism, digitally sandblasting his source material into a blackened fuzz similar to the work of Ben Frost and Tim Hecker. But for 2020’s Lassitude, he took a different route. Rather than covering his sounds in layers of distortion, he simply let the tones be, filling the empty concert hall with chords held so long that they came to seem more like weather systems than compositions. In place of musical motifs or events—melodic figures, rhythmic patterns, even something as simple as an audible step between notes—Lassitude’s two 20-minute pieces simply hang in mid-air, sullen as the silence between two people no longer on speaking terms.
Recorded during the same sessions, Observation of Breath shifts the emphasis from minimalism to maximalism, dialing up the volume and reveling in the rumble. There’s still not much happening in these pieces. “And a Twist,” by far the shortest track at less than three minutes long, is the only one that contains something resembling a melody: Its searching, right-hand figure stumbles uncertainly over quivering mid-range tone clusters, mulling over minor seconds with furrowed brow. On the three remaining tracks, English applies varying amounts of pressure, leaning into his massing tones as though slowly tightening the crank on an iron vise. All three are similar in shape to Lassitude’s spectral drones, but they differ in force.
“A Torso” might be Sunn O))) unplugged: Anchored by a glowering pedal tone for the duration of its 10-minute expanse, it is a charcoal fog of bass. But as you acclimate to the darkness, you begin to perceive a world of detail. The bass sound slowly pulses, like the breathing of a beast at rest. In the high end, a faint whistling pricks the air and is gradually joined by softly shrieking kin, a confederacy of tea kettles. The buzz bristles, porcupine-like; as tones layer, they create secondary pulses, a moiré overlay of trembling air. It’s an overwhelmingly physical sound, one that orients you within the particulars of the space in which you are listening. Shift your head, and the room spins.
“A Binding,” six minutes long, is simpler: a single consonant chord that seems to glow from within, like light through a forest; ghostly tones softly flare up from out of nowhere before disappearing into the murk. It’s gentle, calming. The closing “Observation of Breath,” on the other hand, revisits the gloomy mood of Lassitude. Twenty-one minutes long, it is the album’s most patient piece; outwardly, it seems like a single held note. It starts out muted, like a dial tone wrapped in cotton batting. But, as with “A Torso,” it comes alive over time, thickening almost inaudibly. Pinpoints of light pierce the darkness; overtones fan out in shimmering rays. The edge of the mix crackles like a thing on fire. It changes so gradually as to be almost imperceptible, but if you skip through the track, you’ll hear immediately how it evolves, sections piling up like a fistful of Pantone swatches of different shades of gray.
“Observation of Breath” drives home English’s interest in the combined powers of density and duration: tones packed so thick you can barely pick them apart, extended until they eclipse all other inputs. These may not be particularly original ideas; drone and doom musicians have been attacking similar techniques for years. And other recent recordings—from FUJI||||||||||TA and Kali Malone, for instance—have done more to explore the organ’s expressive dimension. But these comparisons don’t lessen Observation of Breath’s sheer brute power—particularly when it’s heard good and loud, so that the floor trembles and the walls shake, exactly as English intended.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hallow Ground | September 23, 2021 | 7 | 9e3478c4-f5ab-4e3d-8c51-c00d4bc6d2d2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The singer/songwriter's new album is stunningly ambitious, veering from R&B to rap, pastoral British folk, psych rock, disco, and more. | The singer/songwriter's new album is stunningly ambitious, veering from R&B to rap, pastoral British folk, psych rock, disco, and more. | Janelle Monáe: The ArchAndroid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14271-the-archandroid/ | The ArchAndroid | Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid immediately dazzles you with its ambition. It's a 70-minute, 18-track epic comprising two suites, each beginning with an overture, telling a futuristic story starring a messianic android. It's not even the beginning of the saga-- the first sequence was her debut EP, Metropolis: The Chase Suite. The songs zip gleefully from genre to genre, mostly grounded in R&B and funk, but spinning out into rap, pastoral British folk, psychedelic rock, disco, cabaret, cinematic scores, and whatever else strikes her fancy. It's about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-mutating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime. Monáe describes The ArchAndroid as an "emotion picture," an album with a story arc intended to be experienced in one sitting, like a movie. It most certainly works in this way, but at first blush, it's almost too much to take in all at once. The first listen is mostly about being wowed by the very existence of this fabulously talented young singer and her over-the-top record; every subsequent spin reveals the depths of her achievement.
The most impressive thing about The ArchAndroid isn't that it bounces between genres, but that it does so without compromising quality or cohesion. Its most recent antecedent is André 3000's The Love Below, but Monáe and her songwriting partners skillfully avoid that album's overreach and missteps, showing a similar level of fearless creativity but with greater focus and discipline. Despite the style-hopping, the album is sequenced so that many of the songs flow together seamlessly, and the shifts in tone seem intuitive rather than jarring. Monáe's dramatic structure goes a long way toward keeping this from being an incoherent pile-up of affectations, providing a narrative through line that makes sense of the transitions, and implies momentum and resolution even if you're tuning out the lyrics.
The success of the album is also due to Monáe's raw talent as a vocalist. She inhabits each style with natural grace, nailing the subtleties of rapped verses and tight harmonies as well as she can belt out a climax or deliver a punky growl. Much like fellow sci-fi magpie David Bowie, Monáe sings with the confidence of a star, but is essentially a vocal chameleon who places the needs of her songs ahead of her ego. Her performances can be jaw-dropping-- check out the transition from gentle folk phrasing to showstopping vocal runs on "Oh, Maker" for one example-- but she never gets in the way of her songs, which rely as much on her star power as the remarkable versatility of her band.
The ArchAndroid is deliberately conceived as a world unto itself, but Monáe very carefully places herself in a broader cultural context, as much out of ambition as wide-eyed fandom. Her liner notes list off inspirations for each track, ranging from references to Star Wars and Stevie Wonder album art to Salvador Dali and "the atomic bombs in Muhammad Ali's fists." She comes off like an enthusiastic student of the arts, eager to create on the level of her top-shelf reference points. Her naked desire to become iconic is endearing-- mainly because she is actually effective in presenting a look and a sound that is unmistakably her own, even when her influences are front and center. Everything that goes into her music comes out skewed, and even the most familiar elements of classic R&B-- percussive horn stabs, scratchy rhythm guitar-- suddenly seem fresh and modern rather than nostalgic and reverent. Her choice of outside collaborators has a similar effect in creating a context for herself, establishing kinship and aesthetic continuity with the unapologetically bohemian poet Saul Williams, the forward-thinking hip-hop of Big Boi from OutKast, and Of Montreal's flamboyant psychedelic funk.
Monáe's sci-fi mythology is an inspired addition to the rich canon of Afrofuturist art, but it's not necessary to buy into her elaborate high concepts to get the basic appeal of her music. Her imagination and iconography deepen the record as an experience and give her license to go far out, but it ultimately serves as a fun, flashy framework for pop songs with universal lyrical sentiments. The first of the two suites mainly deals with identity and self-realization; the second is essentially a set of love songs. As with all the musical genres blended into The ArchAndroid, Monáe uses the conventions of science fiction as a means of communication, tapping into mythic archetypes for their immediate resonance and power. And where many concept albums run a high risk of being pompous, cryptic, and self-important, Monáe keeps things playful, lively, and accessible. It's a delicate balancing act, but Monáe and her band pull it off, resulting in an eccentric breakthrough that transcends its novelty. | 2010-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bad Boy / Wondaland Arts Society | May 20, 2010 | 8.5 | 9e391ab3-d5d8-4edf-ab7b-66c064ff02e3 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Drawing principally from minimalism, ambient, and krautrock, Swiss producer Benjamin Kilchhofer’s latest is a deeply immersive timbral and tactile experience. | Drawing principally from minimalism, ambient, and krautrock, Swiss producer Benjamin Kilchhofer’s latest is a deeply immersive timbral and tactile experience. | Kilchhofer: The Book Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kilchhofer-the-book-room/ | The Book Room | To listen to Benjamin Kilchhofer’s music is to enter into an unfamiliar universe. Working with modular synthesizers, percussion, and the occasional field recording, the Swiss musician creates rippling, finely detailed soundscapes with one foot in the natural world. Repetitive but always morphing, never playing a given loop the same way twice, and interwoven with real and synthetic birdsong, his burbling sequences suggest rushing water, arrays of leaves, fog banks, and dewdrops. Perusing The Book Room’s track titles, meanwhile—“Anzu,” “Chogal,” “Nihic,” “Thorron”—feels like flipping through the pages of a yellowed atlas in a foreign tongue. There’s no indication of what these words might mean, but to say them aloud and savor their strangeness makes a fitting complement to the music’s pervasive air of mystery.
He is in good company. Some of the most exciting music on electronic music’s periphery in the past couple of years has devoted itself to a similar kind of world-building. There’s Masayoshi Fujita and Jan Jelinek’s Schaum, murky as a jungle backwater; Andrew Pekler’s humid Tristes Tropiques, which takes its title from Claude Levi-Strauss’ impressionistic classic of critical anthropology; the percussive thrum of Don’t DJ records like Authentic Exoticism; and Jan Schulte’s Tropical Drums of Deutschland compilation, a survey of wanderlust-filled German new age from the 1980s. Kilchhofer’s shared affinities with this ethnographical line of inquiry are found not only in his samples of birds, rainfall, and drum circles, but also in his visual art, like drawings of tschäggättä masks that resemble etchings from 19th-century textbooks. But Kilchhofer looks for inspiration much closer to home: The tschäggättä is a traditional Swiss celebration—an echo of ancient cultures in contemporary Europe.
Kilchhofer draws principally from minimalism, ambient, and krautrock. The tumbling marimbas of “Plyn,” where a syncopated flute figure bounces over bright wooden tones, call back to Steve Reich’s experiments in overlapping pulses. In beatless sketches like “Anzu,” “Durhi,” and “Thorron,” synthesizer melodies twist like vines captured on time-lapse video. The bulk of the album is resolutely percussive, and his hi-def rhythmic programming nods to both Harmonia’s percolating electronic pulses and Jaki Liebezeit’s knotty timekeeping for Can—though much of the time there are no traditional drum sounds at all. The leathery thwack of real hand drums traces a few tracks, like “Vran” and “Topot,” but for the most part his synths are inseparable from his percussion, with bass tones and whittled-down white noise offering an electrifying illusion of real-world congas and shakers and claves.
It all makes for an unusually tactile listening experience. The shape-shifting textures and careful use of the stereo field paint a three-dimensional picture of artificial space that, when heard on a good pair of headphones, might make VR headsets feel redundant. And while the consistency of his palette—metallic plucks, wooden thwacks, and silvery drones throwing off overtones—means that it can be difficult to differentiate one track from another, his varied tempos keep the 74-minute album engaging all the way through. Some tracks are sleek and fleet-footed like “Hedha” and “Uhta”; others, like the 150-beats-per-minute “Skimo,” dance on the lip between slow and fast, with half-time pulses triggering intricate chain-reactions of delay. Some of his most exciting songs are the slowest, where the woozy tempos create ample open space for his polyrhythms to stretch out. “Topot” is a mind-boggling tangle of micro-pulses, almost claustrophobic in its labyrinthine twists and turns; “Wiwanni,” on the other hand, pairs its loping dembow cadence with a synth melody as refreshing as mountain air.
Ultimately, the only real precedents for this stuff are two prior EPs under Kilchhofer’s name. (There are hints of this sound in earlier material he recorded under the Timoka alias, though those records hew closer to conventional house and techno.) Adding to the album’s alien character, The Book Room is one of those albums that sounds slightly different every time you listen to it. At home, it might settle into a kind of bubbling ambient repose conducive to reading or dining. But when I listened to it on an airplane not long ago, it lent a powerful sense of otherworldliness to the humdrum surroundings—particularly once I landed and weaved my way through the crowded terminal, its liquid, slow-fast pulses bathing the sea of moving bodies in a surreal glow. It was the ultimate music-as-drug experience, tipping the most quotidian experience on its ear. In The Book Room, unfamiliar worlds are right beneath our nose. | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Marionette | February 6, 2018 | 7.7 | 9e3a09b8-ed6d-4b29-92cd-df57b219f0fd | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Demon City, Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's follow-up to her sumptuous debut American Drift, is a wonder of concision and represents another massive leap forward in her growth. | Demon City, Virginia producer Elysia Crampton's follow-up to her sumptuous debut American Drift, is a wonder of concision and represents another massive leap forward in her growth. | Elysia Crampton: Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22103-elysia-crampton-elysia-crampton-presents-demon-city/ | Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City | Five years after the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4th of 1776, over three thousand miles to the south of Philadelphia, an Aymaran (the indigenous peoples of the Andes and Altiplano) abolitionist and revolutionary named Bartolina Sisa was at the head of an army of some 40,000 in revolt against the Spanish colonial powers in Bolivia. She led a six-month siege of Bolivia’s colonial capital, La Paz. The siege was broken by colonial troops in September, and on the fifth of that month, Sisa was captured, and brutally and publicly humiliated and executed in the Colonial Square. In what seems like an almost mythological punishment, her body was cut into pieces, and was cruelly showcased throughout villages around the Bolivian countryside as a grim reminder of imperial power. Sisa has become a legendary figure in the Bolivian and South American imaginary, a martyr for a kind of indigenous sovereignty which is still precarious and unsure in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America. Her date of death, September 5th has been the International Day of the Indigenous Women since 1983. Sisa’s legend is at the heart of Elysia Crampton’s second album, Elysia Crampton Presents: Demon City.
Crampton, in her own right, has been one of the leaders of a revolution happening in electronic music. The defiantly heterogeneous genderqueer aesthetic of artists like Arca, Rabit, Lotic, and Crampton comprise an increasingly borderless, intelligent, and expansive sound that is hard to describe but radically visceral in effect. Her debut, American Drift,* *is an astounding document that conjoined explorations of Virginia’s history with urgent and spiritual excavations of brownness, otherness, and being a Latina as a sort of geology, deeply ingrained into the very soil beneath the floorboards of our homes, built on top of a generations of racist and colonial history.
She has described this second album as an epic poem, and it is a companion piece to a theatrical production called* Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future*, which premiered at Oberlin earlier this year. The play, which Crampton has said is a “DJ production incorporating dialogue and playacting,” is a coda to Sisa’s story, told from the perspective of her severed limbs. The play moves between the past that Sisa’s body observes and a utopian future where the sun has died, the prison industrial complex has been destroyed, and trans-humanoid arachnids rule the world. It’s a techno-futurist story in the style of writers like Octavia E. Butler or Samuel R. Delany, where the possibilities of radical queerness are explored through the lens of science fiction. But it also is a good way to see what she calls the essential “clowniness,” of her art, a certain sense of wild free-play that treats strains of culture and narrative equally. She is after all, one of the musicians who can comfortably blend together Justin Bieber and Steve Reich.
After finishing up *American Drift, Crampton moved from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to Pacajes, Bolivia to help care for her grandmother Flora. The music was written between Bolivia and Northern California, and even more so than her last album, it invites an entire community of artists to contribute. Rabit, the Danish producer Why Be, the London DJ Lexxi, and Chino Amobi are all present and as Crampton would have it, the Demon City *is as much their work as it is hers. She has said that “the album is a testament to [her] friend’s involvement in [her] life.”
Artistically speaking, *Demon City *represents a leap forward in terms of Crampton’s musical growth. *American Drift *was like a sumptuous glass overflowing, but Demon City is a wonder of concision, with songs that mostly fall under four minutes. *Demon City *also does away with words or vocals, a key element of *American Drift. *The booming baritone “transvangelist” prayers of her regular collaborator Money Allah are not to be found here, and if anything replacing the trancelike effect of those sermons is unifying thread of hypnotic percussion. When she still went under the moniker of E+E, the writer Adam Harper described her production technique as “epic collage,” and in *Demon City *she gives credence to that by creating songs with her collaborators that are more densely textured, and more danceable than anything she’s made before.
The opener, “Irreducible Horizon” (made with Why Be) skillfully blends together ominous minor key pianos with hiccuping hip-hop drums and ominous ambient drone, smashing together genres into a track that incites exciting confusion and possibility. “After Woman (for Bartolina Sisa),” her collaboration with Rabit, is one of the most painterly songs she’s made—a vertiginous whirlpool of colorfully splattered noises. In the album’s title track, also made with Rabit, they make MIDI horns feel almost religious. The two songs that follow-up “The Demon City,” “Children of Hell” (made with Chino Amobi) and “Esposa2 2013 (No Drums)” (made with Lexxi) count as the album’s most joyful and cinematic moments. In “Children of Hell” she and Chino smash clouds of static with guttural laughs and goofy horns, creating a collage that pulls together the ambient pleasures of her work as E+E into the massive scope of her recent work. “Esposas” is a palatial, with swooping strings and horns that sounds sourced from fantasy epics. It is victorious in so many ways.
Overall, the sound of *Demon City *is one of the best showcases of Crampton’s ability to invite the historical sounds of huayño, cumbia, and many more sonic vernaculars into a vast electronic landscape. In this album she finds the perfect middle ground between the archivist's sensibility and the futurist’s optimism. Her music has always made one feel a little lost in time and space, and in *Demon City *she’s created a special extraterrestrial zone that barely lasts half an hour, where if you just listen you can get a glimpse into a realm of possibility you desperately want. A place in the world where difference is celebrated, and healing and growth are givens. | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Break World | July 18, 2016 | 8.2 | 9e4c3430-910c-41c5-9d3c-bf4a798039de | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The London slowcore band’s second album is a gentle refinement with an atmosphere of loss. | The London slowcore band’s second album is a gentle refinement with an atmosphere of loss. | deathcrash: Less | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deathcrash-less/ | Less | Tiernan Banks has declared that deathcrash’s new album is “more emo” than their last one and…hold on a minute. The album with “Wrestle With Jimmy”? The album with a nine-minute twinkle odyssey culminating in the lyric, “And if you die by suicide my blue heaven/Then thank you just for telling me/And doing all you could”? But while the despairing emotional tenor has held firm since 2022’s Return, deathcrash have largely done away with everything else that likened their previous work to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slint, Codeine, Mogwai, and many, many other titans of maximized minimalism—the supersized song lengths, spoken-word passages, eerie patches of silence punctured by blistering distortion, multi-part suites, anything that stands between the audience and Banks’ wounded words. As a title, Less is both promise and provocation, certainly to the listener, but more to deathcrash themselves.
“Pirouette” opens in a state of convincing vulnerability, slowly exploring whether deathcrash are in an introductory jam or putting together a proper song. As they do throughout Less, Banks’ vocals tentatively enter, tracing out a melody as if trying to find a lightswitch in the dark. Over the next five minutes, “Pirouette” becomes a compelling staring contest within the band, operating at a far greater intensity while only barely raising the volume. In the past, someone would inevitably blink and hit the distortion pedal, a post-rock reflex to deliver the emotional payload. It comes eventually, though, halfway through the next song, and even then, “Empty Heavy” holds true to its promise—it’s more of a hollow, throbbing pain than cathartic release.
While “less” is the M.O., “loss” is Banks’ muse; whether it’s the spare, practically see-through arrangements or the fact that it’s nearly a half hour shorter than Return, everything underscores that something once present is now gone. “I play dead/You wake up/Don’t pretend at all,” Banks sighs at the end of “Pirouette,” establishing the recurrent theme of passing through, of processing. Less is haunted by an uncanny vision of ghostly beings, the drowsy optimism of very early morning, or the muted reflection of a night that hasn’t ended yet. The flashpoints that create loss—death, separation, tragedy—all happen off-screen.
Less isn’t the type of music that usually gets described as “warm,” the implication being that joy or sympathy are primary emotions capable of radiation. Rather, Banks’ worn and welcoming voice projects both loneliness and a desire for intimacy with subtle cues, like a barfly strategically keeping a seat open as they nurse a beer in deep thought. Banks’ lyrics spare on particulars (“I broke my promise,” “You went away”), refusing anything that would prevent a listener from occupying their own space within Less. Of Banks’ many descriptions of heartache, the chorus of “Distance Song” is the most evocative: “It doesn’t hurt/It just won’t stop bleeding out,” he seethes, though a backing vocal lower in the mix suggests a deeper desire to just scream, to fight back against the constant drain of grief.
Though the essentialist approach of Less results in a more coherent and individual expression of a band once overwhelmed by RIYLs, it’s also a bit of a trade-off. The audacious sprawl of Return always impressed on the whole, even when the individual songs lacked definition. The latter still can hold true on Less, as its stirring choruses and poignant guitar harmonics are patched together by verse melodies that can feel like afterthoughts when delivered in Banks’ expressive, but limited, longing exhales. If the songs themselves occasionally feel stretched beyond their means, it’s reflective of the creative process as a whole; deathcrash admitted that Less was originally planned as a transitional EP before it metastasized into a bigger project. This aspect of Less doesn’t just calibrate expectations but also serves as a reminder that deathcrash emerged from the South London art-rock scene that birthed Black Country, New Road, black midi, and caroline—all prolific, shapeshifting acts that have used their studio albums as snapshots of their creative process rather than definitive works to be rehashed again and again for the next two years. If deathcrash intend to capitalize on Return’s word-of-mouth success with a more traditional leveling up, maybe that will come with time. For now, the call and response in the chorus of “Duffy’s” serves as an operating principle, a reminder for both deathcrash and Banks not to take on the full weight of hype or human suffering: “Don’t do too much.” | 2023-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Untitled (Recs) / Fire Talk | March 18, 2023 | 7.1 | 9e51119c-76bf-429e-90b3-0f4d4f2f92f2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Shins' James Mercer teams with producer and Gnarls Barkley member Danger Mouse for a melancholy pop record. | The Shins' James Mercer teams with producer and Gnarls Barkley member Danger Mouse for a melancholy pop record. | Broken Bells: Broken Bells | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13979-broken-bells/ | Broken Bells | It's been a while since Danger Mouse or the Shins did anything to change your listening habits, let alone your life. In the past decade, Danger Mouse's landmark Grey Album mash-up and membership in Gnarls Barkley helped anticipate indie rock's increasing openness to hip-hop and R&B crossovers. A couple of years earlier, James Mercer paved the way for future indie crossover success stories with the Shins' Garden State contribution and controversial Olympics-aired McDonald's commercial. That the pair's paths might eventually cross was more inevitable than unexpected.
Mercer and Danger Mouse's debut as Broken Bells is not quite up to the level of either's best projects, but in its own quiet way, it hits its marks. The pair first worked together on the David Lynch/Sparklehorse project Dark Night of the Soul, and Broken Bells picks up the sadsack spirit of that record-- it's a deceptively catchy album centered on personal loss. It's unclear whether we're supposed to trace Mercer's lyrical malaise to a shattered relationship with his band (Mercer split with Shins mates Marty Crandall and Jesse Sandoval in 2008), a lover, or both. But this much is certain: Something has ended.
In the album's brightest moments, there are enough swooning harmonies, replayable choruses, and psych-baked production elements that you might not even notice Mercer's dark thoughts. Besides, the singer is clearly attempting to move on here, taking advantage of this fresh setting to try on new looks: film-score orchestration and acid flange meet a Pet Sounds-like vocal odyssey on "Your Head Is on Fire"; "The Mall & the Misery" opens with Springsteen-ian Americana and then veers off into post-punk guitar stabs; "Sailing to Nowhere" is a horror-show waltz; and Mercer's nearly unrecognizable falsetto on album standout "The Ghost Inside" recalls the high, cracked croon of another Danger Mouse collaborator, Blur/Gorillaz singer Damon Albarn.
An early version of the record included a nicely gloomy song with Knife-like vocal effects that's been replaced by the sumptuous psych-pop balladry of "Citizen". "Trap Doors", already one of the album's catchiest songs, benefits from some extra synths and backing vocals, and "October" has a few new lyrics.
Still, unlike its creators' best prior accomplishments, Broken Bells doesn't seem prepared, or even attempting, to cross over. Nor does it feel like a new direction or outlet for either artist-- it's more of a nice detour. In one of the record's more cheerful moments, amid the shambling acoustic guitar and slithering keyboard of "October", he shares some helpful advice: "Don't run, don't rush, just float." It's what he and Danger Mouse do here, and while that's hardly a recipe for breaking new ground, the results are rarely less than pleasant.
Note: This piece as originally published was based on an earlier version of the album. The retail version includes differences that do not materially change the reviewer's opinion of the record. They are now accounted for above. We apologize for the oversight. | 2010-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Columbia | March 11, 2010 | 7.2 | 9e543996-ef67-475b-9b98-2d5652bc721f | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The chilling and provocative new album from the electroacoustic producer is a work of speculative sonic fiction, reimagining the sounds of ancient Mayan musical history. | The chilling and provocative new album from the electroacoustic producer is a work of speculative sonic fiction, reimagining the sounds of ancient Mayan musical history. | Debit: The Long Count | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/debit-the-long-count/ | The Long Count | Stand in front of the Kukulkán pyramid at Chichén Itzá, clap your hands, and a strange chirping sound rings out—a sound that sonograms have confirmed is nearly identical to the call of the quetzal, a bird considered sacred in ancient Mayan culture. Tour guides have for years entertained tourists with the curious phenomenon, and in 1998, acoustic researcher David Lubman finally discovered the source of the mystery: the design of the pyramid’s staircase. Academics debate whether the sound is intentional, an ingenious feat of acoustical engineering—“The Mayans may have made the world’s first audio recording a thousand years ago,” gushed The New Scientist—or merely an architectural happy accident. But there is no doubt that music was central to the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica; we know from frescoes, codexes, and archeological artifacts that it played a key role in ritual and ceremonial life.
The Mayans developed a vast array of musical instruments: clay whistles, conch trumpets, gourds filled with seeds or pebbles, turtle-shell drums played with antlers. Some of these instruments were strikingly complex: One ocarina unearthed in Belize boasted three hidden chambers and could generate 17 notes. Sets of differently pitched bone flutes may have been played together in harmony. But we don’t know what this music sounded like. No musical notation system has been discovered; the collapse of the great Mayan cities in the 8th and 9th centuries, followed by two centuries of genocidal Spanish conquest, wiped out the ancient culture’s musical traditions. But The Long Count, a provocative work of sometimes harrowing electroacoustic music by the Mexican-American musician Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, attempts to revive the sound of instruments that fell silent more than a thousand years ago.
Much of Debit’s music until now has focused on rethinking club orthodoxy. Animus, her 2018 debut LP, balanced brittle grime with unsettling ambient, while 2019’s System EP delved into the triplet-heavy tribal guarachero of her native Monterrey. But The Long Count, which takes its title from the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, abandons all traces of conventional dance music. Though ambient in form, it’s far from mood music as commonly conceived—it might better be called a work of speculative sonic fiction. To create the music, the New York-based artist utilized the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s archive of Mayan wind instruments, using machine learning to develop a set of digital instruments modeled on her cryptic source materials.
Though it’s not immediately clear what role machine learning played from simply listening to the music—my guess is it has something to do with wrangling playable digital patches from whatever limited acoustic samples were available from these rare, fragile instruments—there’s no mistaking the otherworldly quality of The Long Count’s sounds. Long, breathy tones waver in pitch, rising and falling like distant signals carried on a humid breeze. Sometimes they take the form of mournful solo cries; at others, they tangle in eerie dissonance. Musicologists believe that ancient Mayan musical scales were much different from our own, and Beatriz’ frequencies are appropriately alien.
In places, the music takes on a mournful quality evoking ritualistic laments: The seasick pitches of “1st Night” are soft yet unsettling, like an overture to the dead. Other tracks are more atmospheric: “3rd Night” immerses wheezing, whistle-like sounds in soupy drones, while “2nd Day” sets birdlike chirps against groaning sub-bass and cenote-sized reverb. There’s little in the way of recognizable melody or rhythm; The Long Count often feels less like a musical composition than a field recording of an unfamiliar landscape in which the tape has picked up unexplained transmissions.
Despite its hushed volume and muted sounds, The Long Count stands apart from most ambient music. Like the work of Eliane Radigue, its unfamiliar frequencies can trigger odd psychoacoustic effects: Turn “7th Day” up loud enough, and your head feels encased in a cage of invisible buzzing wires. Like the isolationism of Thomas Köner, its emotional register is tuned not so much to garden-variety melancholy as nameless dread, suggesting something vast and shapeless looming just beyond the limits of your perception.
The fundamental strangeness of Debit’s approach feels like more than merely a stylistic choice (even if it is right at home on Modern Love, a UK label known for doomy electronic music). Instead, it reads as an acknowledgement of how much we don’t know about ancient Mayan musical history. Its severe austerity might also scan as an act of post-colonial resistance, especially at a time when ambient music often dissolves into soothing, palliative kitsch, and New Age spiritualism sends European DJs on ayahuasca pilgrimages.
Debit’s album, in contrast, refuses to pander to mystical fantasies. Yet it would not be a stretch to say that there’s a spiritual dimension here—just one that’s a world away from tourist-friendly cliches. Some archeologists have argued that for the ancient Maya, musical instruments were not just objects to be played; they were the physical embodiment of divine entities, conduits for celestial presence. On The Long Count, Beatriz undertakes a radical act of exhumation—a transubstantiation of electricity into breath, and vice versa—using artificial intelligence to unlock the life force from a long-dormant being. That’s not something to be taken lightly, and you can detect Beatriz’ own sense of humility and responsibility in her chilling, awe-struck tones. | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Modern Love | February 23, 2022 | 7.5 | 9e58f749-fd3b-4f1c-99af-f0749a4f44f3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Australian instrumentalists have always used their breathtaking technical dexterity to craft songs that feel like little worlds. Their fourth album fills those spaces with emotion. | The Australian instrumentalists have always used their breathtaking technical dexterity to craft songs that feel like little worlds. Their fourth album fills those spaces with emotion. | Tangents: New Bodies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tangents-new-bodies/ | New Bodies | At some point during the first three albums by Australian instrumental quintet Tangents, you’re bound to get a bit breathless. Tangents don’t write songs so much as they create little worlds, each one a microcosm teeming with separate but symbiotic ideas, like samples of fertile soil viewed under a microscope. An unorthodox ensemble of keyboards, drums, bells, cello, effects, and electronics, they front-load their pieces with varied sounds: bits of warm folk melody and cold string drone, buoyant trip-hop rhythm and tessellated gamelan percussion. It’s easy to feel buried beneath all these elements or swept away in their inevitable landslide.
On Tangents’ 2013 debut, I, my breathless moment came early, when drummer Evan Dorrian climbed atop a cello-and-circuits din to dance with his kit; on 2016’s Stateless, it was the rising action of “N-Mission,” when drums and electronics coiled repeatedly around a loping pizzicato cello line, teasing a deliverance that never came. Their fourth and best album, New Bodies, overflows with these sensations—of being overpowered and delighted, of being buoyed up and washed away by Tangents’ seemingly endless ideas.
Tangents began as a strictly improvisational ensemble, recording their first two records in single sittings. I documents the first time they ever played together. But for Stateless, they elected to edit that spontaneous energy, clipping and rearranging their improvisations into sophisticated, interconnected pieces. On “Oberon,” they summoned the slow, accretive approach of Australian instrumental elders the Necks, while “N-Mission” recalls the way Four Tet uses florid little themes as the anchors for rising rhythms. But the album sometimes came off as too scripted and fastidious, sucking the early improvisational air from the editing room.
The band takes a similar compositional approach to the seven pieces on New Bodies, but that lost beginners’ energy has returned and even grown. “Immersion” again evokes the Necks, but this time you feel as if you’re in the room with Tangents, lifted in real time as their controlled commotion rises. Serene closer “Oort Cloud” moves like a daydream, with whispering electronics and persistent piano suggesting a minor breeze that rustles the hair on your arms. It is lovely and carefully constructed music that also feels casual and conversational. If you didn’t know these were edits of improvisations, you might assume they were simply remarkable, complicated compositions.
This emerging seamlessness seems to have made Tangents less self-conscious, too. They’ve started to shed their preference for compositional austerity or coolness. “Swells Under Tito” is the most outwardly joyous and funky tune in their catalog. Ebullient drums and a cello that flits between rubbery bass and restless smears lift a West African guitar line, which flashes like a roadside sign inviting you to an all-night party. The guileless tune suggests a discarded Akron/Family or Dirty Projectors demo, meticulously sculpted by a third party into its final prismatic form. During the back half of “Terracotta,” a tune that initially invokes Four Tet’s repetitive ecstasy, pianist Adrian Lim-Klumpes dips into a trio vamp with Dorrian and cellist Peter Hollo, whose plucking somehow elicits the robustness of an upright bass. The passage sounds like Keith Jarrett righteously commandeering the keys of Medeski Martin & Wood. Tangents never seemed the sort to make Saturday cookout tunes, but they sound spectacular testing the edges of their accessibility.
Still, the most significant shift on New Bodies—and the mature move that could push Tangents beyond the realm of instrumental esoterica, like their Temporary Residence labelmates Explosions in the Sky—is a nascent emotional resonance. “Gone to Ground” hinges on the group’s technical excellence. A prepared piano rattles around a bleak landscape of distended drones and disjointed beats, alternating with sections where stately progressions sit inside the rhythms’ rests, finding a bona fide groove. But those threads tangle late in the 11-minute odyssey, forming a knot of rumbling bass, anxious percussion, and aching countermelodies. With its push and pull between rest and restlessness, “Gone to Ground” is a sophisticated musical map of ordinary frustration, complete with a requisite this-too-shall-pass comedown.
Absorbing opener “Lake George” captures the exhaustion that follows a long-cohesive group’s split, without warning, into distinct factions. For the song’s first half, Tangents seem to drift through a reverie, with echoing guitar notes lacing around low cello and steady drums; then, the kinetic Dorrian sprints headlong while the band stands still, dismayed by the sudden departure. As the song fades into what feels like an exhalation, you might be struck by the familiarity of this kind of relationship—a situation that’s contentious to the point of collapse. For years, an emotional narrative like this one would have seemed superfluous for Tangents, a quintet devoted to technical dexterity and clarity. On New Bodies, they allow those sharpened skills to inhabit emerging human forms, a move that speaks as powerfully to the heart as it does to the brain. | 2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | June 18, 2018 | 7.9 | 9e5d6db0-dc81-4b69-bfc3-79694d021a4f | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On her the acoustic Unknown Rooms, Los Angeles musician Chelsea Wolfe attempts to reconnect with her folk roots, allowing a few sunrays to poke into the gothic sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. But this isn't exactly her campfire record. | On her the acoustic Unknown Rooms, Los Angeles musician Chelsea Wolfe attempts to reconnect with her folk roots, allowing a few sunrays to poke into the gothic sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. But this isn't exactly her campfire record. | Chelsea Wolfe: Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17180-unknown-rooms-a-collection-of-acoustic-songs/ | Unknown Rooms: A Collection of Acoustic Songs | On her acoustic record Unknown Rooms, Chelsea Wolfe allows a few sunrays to poke into the lightless sepulchre she built on 2011's Apokalypsis. That record, with its gothic, bloodstained imagery and bleak post-punk guitars, carried all the warmth of a medieval hex: It opened with a gurgling, feral scream that sounded like something peeling off your skin with its incisors. Wolfe's vocals channeled PJ Harvey in full Rid of Me "lick my injuries" mode, and earlier she'd released a cover of the cheery Burzum number "Black Spell of Destruction". It spooked a lot of people to attention.
Unknown Rooms, as she told Brandon Stosuy recently, was her attempt to connect to her "folk roots," citing a love of Townes Van Zandt and Hank Williams. But this isn't exactly her campfire record, unless that campfire is surrounded by plague and marauders: Wolfe has kept the kernel of eerie blankness and premonition even as she tones down the vampy theatrics. Ironically, she digs even deeper into your skin than before. Sometimes a lullabye can freak you out even more than a midnight horror flick.
Her voice, in these wide-open arrangements, emerges as stunning: Her whispered, wispy high notes on "The Way We Used To" and "Spinning Centers" are lovely and convey unsettling frailty, like a hurt creature lurking in a corner that you aren't sure you should touch. The imagery isn't accidentally chosen: Wolfe seems powerfully drawn to vulnerability-- hers, yours, ours-- and she finds multiple ways to make you taste this unease. One of those is to make herself sound weak, trembling: She floats tiny, wordless harmonies in the background on "Spinning Centers", multi-tracking her close-mic'd voice into a pale, enervated choir. Around her, bowed string harmonics sigh dryly, drawing her further out of her body into the surrounding ether.
The songs themselves are stark, still, often nothing more two open chords strummed in common time. Surrounding them are a violin or two, muted horns, and acres of the white space. In their fidgety stasis, the songs capture some of the poetic nervousness of early Cat Power: When Wolfe whispers "Boyfriend, be careful if you can," on "Boyfriend", drawing the word "boyfriend" haltingly, like an extraterrestrial voicing its first English word, I was reminded of Marshall's "Nude as the News", where news of a pregnancy is delivered as end-times prophecy: "I've got a son in me/ And he's related to you/ He is waiting to meet you/ He is dying to meet you." Wolfe's Unknown Rooms contain some of the same mundane menace, and it's a refreshing reminder of the horror to be mined from the good old boring everyday world.
Unknown Rooms is a short album, but its nine songs capture and sustain free-floating fear and menace. And even a few pockets of tenderness: On the quietly expansive "Flatlands", over two-finger-picked chords, Wolfe sings, "I never cared about anything you ever owned/ I want flatlands, I want simplicity/ I need your arms wrapped hard around me." On closing track "Sunstorm", Wolfe pounds two major chords on piano with brittle force, crooning, "I remember/ everything you said," until she dissolves. Unknown Rooms might be a stylistic sidestep for Wolfe, a dalliance with a simpler set-up, before she plunges back into the icy black again. But even if she goes full-on Carrie-at-the-prom next, it seems likely she'll only continue to gather force. | 2012-10-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | October 17, 2012 | 7.7 | 9e616c85-98e5-447d-b7db-74087591eb5a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On their harrowing and strangely cleansing second album, the Brooklyn-based vocalist and poet grapples with depression, anxiety, and identity. | On their harrowing and strangely cleansing second album, the Brooklyn-based vocalist and poet grapples with depression, anxiety, and identity. | YATTA: WAHALA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yatta-wahala/ | WAHALA | At one point on “Francis," a song on the Brooklyn-based vocalist and poet YATTA’s second album WAHALA, a loop of the ubiquitous ice cream truck jingle pops up. Depending on your mood, it will either stir idyllic childhood memories or set your teeth on edge. YATTA excels at inspiring these kinds of polarizing emotions on WAHALA, whose title translates from Krio into “a state of worry, trouble, a terrible mess." Short lines of improvised poetry and fragmented phrases are manipulated with a loop pedal and sent swimming across the ambient backing tracks. Over all of this, YATTA grapples with depression, anxiety, and identity, and ultimately tries to convince themselves of the near-impossible—to just buck up and be happy. When the album ends after 30 minutes, it’s like you’ve been listening to the therapy session going on inside someone else’s head. The experience is both harrowing and strangely cleansing.
WAHALA is dominated by YATTA’s voice—or, rather, YATTA’s voices. Armed with a toy box of digital tricks, their vocals are pitched up or down to represent various parts of their personality competing for space in the same psyche. Deeper, distorted tones represent the dark side; a child-like lilt hints at optimism. Loops and glitches applied to these words become part of the project’s metronome: On opener “A Lie”—which begins with the advice “Hey, don't let yourself ruin/Run the show!”—the latter part of the word “survive” is repeatedly triggered to conjure a sense of rhythm.
This experimental production gives WAHALA an undulating texture that’s complemented by YATTA’s own fluid voice. On “Cowboys,” which adds wavering guitar to the hazy mix, YATTA sings “Cowboys are black/And techno is too,” and layers the sentiment with a demonic, guttural voice proclaiming “Artsy black girls are like Pokemon/Gotta catch ‘em all.” These juxtaposed fragments land like slogans from an unearthed Basquiat painting—they’re a cue for your mind to wander off into the imagery.
A quote from YATTA accompanying WAHALA explains that the album is inspired by “being black, being trans, and being African on foreign land,” along with psychosis and depression, rage and pain, tension and confusion, and the cyclical nature of these intermingling factors. But the music and the message don’t play out in a tidy linear unpacking; these facets cannot be dealt with one at a time under the auspice of the increasingly commercialized concept of self-care. The soul of WAHALA is about accepting that all these different feelings can be felt at once. YATTA inches towards this realization on the album’s concluding song, “Underwater, Now.” Set to a soothing, submerged choral backdrop, YATTA throws off the processing effects and speaks in their natural voice, expressing something we can all relate to: “All I know is that it all fucking hurts.” | 2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | PTP | August 26, 2019 | 7.6 | 9e6228f0-1646-4ac0-9ce0-a9294de80468 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Italian producer Donato Dozzy's contemplative new album is built entirely around the sound of the mouth harp. It's an arcane concept, but Dozzy—whose most common mode is techno—is no stranger to constraints. | Italian producer Donato Dozzy's contemplative new album is built entirely around the sound of the mouth harp. It's an arcane concept, but Dozzy—whose most common mode is techno—is no stranger to constraints. | Donato Dozzy: The Loud Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21020-the-loud-silence/ | The Loud Silence | The history of the mouth harp is vast: It is believed to have originated in Asia, possibly as early as the 4th century BCE, and its spread extends from Vietnam to Finland, from Siberia to Cameroon. The Dutch musicologist Phons Bakx has compiled a list of more than 1,000 names for the instrument, including the English-language terms trump, gew-gaw, mouthfiddle, Omaha flapjack, and marranzano pancake. It's most commonly known in English as the Jew's harp—a name whose etymology has flummoxed scholars for decades. Spaniards have called it the pio pollo ("squeaking chicken") and the Dutch, the Gedachtenverdrijver ("thought dispeller"). But among its most evocative names might be the Italians' scacciapensieri, or "worry killer"—a name whose meditative connotations go to the heart of the Italian producer Donato Dozzy's contemplative new album, which is built entirely around the instrument.
It's an arcane concept, but Dozzy—whose most common mode is techno—is no stranger to constraints; his last LP, the Spectrum Spools-released Sintetizzatrice, was made using only the singer Anna Caragnano's voice, run through kaleidoscopic, dubwise processing. His approach is similar here, wreathing the instrument's gravelly flange in an airy filigree of reverb and delay. Sometimes he sets the mouth harp front and center, as with the opening "Personal Rock"; Dozzy has described how he recorded the album on the slopes of mountains and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and "Personal Rock", bookended by buzzing bees and distant thunder, swims in that sense of place. On "For Arnaud", the instrument's steady plucks are stretched and warped by subtle delay and chorus effects; the brightness of the tones and the brisk, skipping pulse are light and invigorating, like an early fall morning.
Elsewhere, Dozzy opts for abstraction. "Cross Panorama" sounds like it comes from the same tapes that yielded "Personal Rock", but this time electronic echo all but swallows the source material, and the reverb's resonance throws off great, yearning harmonics. In "Concert for Sails", the instrument is nearly eclipsed by the gentle creaking and slapping of ropes in the harbor. And in "The Net", short, clipped tones are tossed down a ricocheting delay chain, evoking the influential dub techno project Vainqueur, while the grinding title track might almost be a cover of Aphex Twin's iconic "Digeridoo".
It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno. In his notes on the album, Dozzy speaks of trance states and all-night rituals, and here, he successfully unites centuries, if not millennia, of tradition into a hypnotic whirlwind. Not bad for a sound made entirely from a strip of bent metal. | 2015-10-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Further | October 7, 2015 | 6.9 | 9e66e083-b3b4-4832-854c-b83f32f65e1f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Australian DJ made her name with crowd-pleasing house anthems full of cheeky basslines and pop immediacy, but her debut LP aims for sophistication over quirkiness. | The Australian DJ made her name with crowd-pleasing house anthems full of cheeky basslines and pop immediacy, but her debut LP aims for sophistication over quirkiness. | Logic1000: Mother | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic1000-mother/ | Mother | Logic1000’s breakthrough track “DJ Logic Please Forgive Me” is a clever idea well executed. An archly titled edit of an already famous song, it kicks in with the chorus of Deborah Cox’s much-sampled “It’s Over Now” before dropping the kind of cheeky bassline that can send a small club in an English university town into pint-chucking meltdown. Yet these qualities—pop immediacy, winking humour, brash confidence—are in low supply on Logic1000’s first full-length, which aims for sophistication over quirkiness and ends up adrift from both.
Samantha Poulter’s musical journey since her debut has been one of increasing focus—or, perhaps, a steady narrowing of parameters. On her debut EP, along with that ’90s R&B flip (dubbed “one of the big tracks of 2019” by Four Tet), Poulter tooled around with the easy touch of the Zen-minded beginner, exploring the hinterland between reggaeton and 2-step, shaken-up Middle Eastern drums, even stripping out rhythms to expose negative dubspace. But by 2021’s In the Sweetness of You EP, a furrow was emerging: well-behaved rave, taking bits of house, garage, and reggaeton and rendering them in soft pastel shades on remixes for artists like Glass Animals, Fever Ray, and—an obvious influence—Caribou.
Among Mother’s 12 tracks, a solid vocal house EP lurks: three trim, catchy songs with slick pop vocals, not hard or hip enough for underground dancefloors but miles classier than anything blaring out over the stairmasters at your gym. “Every Lil” is the best of them, tapping into the heat of Miami’s Latin club scene through MJ Nebreda’s soft-stroke vocals, a reggaeton-house rhythm, splashy drums from DJ Plead, and—why not?—the chord progression from “Music Sounds Better With You.” It’s smart; it works. The other two are sturdy singles, but could have been made any time in the last decade: “Self to Blame,” with California singer Kayla Blackmon, provides punchy dance-pop on the Disclosure-to-Dua Lipa continuum, and “Promises” is polished to a shine by Kaytranada collaborator Rochelle Jordan.
What’s left over is puzzlingly anonymous. Pushed further and deeper, this material might’ve been its own record—a set of supple, deep house for well-groomed dancefloors, all moisturised and minty of breath. “Heartbeat” turns simplicity to its advantage, ping-ponging around a chiming bassline redolent of Jaydee’s ’90s house classic “Plastic Dreams.” “All You Like,” with its dreamy minor chords sighing around an insistent vocal, is in thrall to Caribou and Four Tet—but without the quirks and tics that gird her elders’ oddball genius. “Grown on Me” serves up the same sort of soft-boiled UK bass, lacking in structure beyond the usual build, rise, drop, repeat. Even cranked up loud, this just isn’t functional dance music—there’s an empty space where the oomph should be.
With a title like Mother, you might expect a more biographical slant, or maybe a return to the archness of that first hit. It’s one of those deceptively simple words with infinite associations, from ball culture slang to Darren Aronofsky’s most divisive movie. And Poulter’s own life story offers plenty of dramatic material, from recent motherhood (as discussed on her podcast, simply titled Therapy) to depression, psychosis, and even a near-death experience after a car accident. Yet Poulter’s presence barely registers, perhaps overshadowed by the steering hand of her producer-partner Tom McAlister (who releases dance music as Cop Envy and Big Ever) and the lyrical thrust of her hired singer-songwriters.
As can often happen with house and techno albums, Mother feels like it’s been willed into existence as a milestone on a CV rather than an urgent statement of artistic intent. If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end. The cult of house music can be precious, and yes, a touch snobby, but we know how we want it: raw, hard, messy, uplifting, joyous, transcendent, bizarre. And isn’t that the very stuff of motherhood? | 2024-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Because Music | April 2, 2024 | 5.9 | 9e700b64-3f49-4700-83af-c38972a731f9 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
More than a decade after his last album, the UK singer-songwriter grapples with an intense period of personal upheaval in songs that return to the melancholy, idiosyncratic sound of his early work. | More than a decade after his last album, the UK singer-songwriter grapples with an intense period of personal upheaval in songs that return to the melancholy, idiosyncratic sound of his early work. | Patrick Wolf: The Night Safari EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patrick-wolf-the-night-safari-ep/ | The Night Safari EP | Patrick Wolf’s resounding baritone easily conjures up gravitas, lending his best songs a combined air of theatricality and raw emotion. The English musician’s first two records were tightly wound, explosive with pent-up angst, and beguiling in their ornate instrumentation, poetic lyrics, and damaged electronics; when Wolf trended toward a more mainstream sound—as on his last album of new material, 2011’s disco-spangled, lovesick Lupercalia—he traded the strange charms of his early work for the ill-fitting patina of generic radio pop. Management and A&R troubles made things even more complicated for the London singer-songwriter. (“If I think about Lupercalia now,” he said recently, “it’s like hands around my neck.”) Wolf’s 2012 acoustic album of reworked songs became a way of cleaning the slate that also, as the years went on, looked more and more like a career sendoff.
Wolf’s first new music in over a decade, then, has baggage to unpack. The Night Safari EP was crafted out of an intense period of personal upheaval, including bankruptcy, a struggle with addiction, and the passing of his mother. Wolf understandably turns inward, purging bouts of anxiety and depression through diffuse, melancholy electro-folk. It’s a welcome return to his earlier sound, embellished throughout with electronic wrinkles and the deep, rich tones of his viola. Early standout “Nowhere Game” clips by with clattering percussion and pitch-shifted vocal rhythms, capturing the cyclical nature of addiction in references to “the danger that keeps you alive”: “Dying to be living proof/Of something survived in your youth,” he sings mournfully over the chugging beat, adding to its acute sense of hopelessness.
The title track further recalls the sullen music of his early breakthroughs. Here, Wolf creates a gentle build of plucked Celtic harp over an eddying piano melody for a disquieting look at those late-night moments in bed when your mind chews over every anxious thought imaginable. “Don’t you lose sleep/Pay no mind to me unraveling,” he pleads as the song loosens into a digitized, cut-up rhythm. It’s a more successful approach to playing with familiar sounds than “Archeron,” which uses a 7/8 time signature to evoke a fractured headspace; Wolf delivers a cryptic, chanted monologue inspired by novelist Robert Graves amid ominous organs and strings, jerking back and forth between quiet and bombast. It’s effective in its jarring delivery, but feels stiff and out of step with the rest of the EP’s carefully arranged tableaux.
Still, Wolf’s ear for melody and imagistic lyrics remain strong, knifelike features of his music. Although The Night Safari’s sweeping dramas can be dour, Wolf’s voice, sonorous and commanding, is only growing finer with age. On “Dodona,” with its gorgeously cinematic viola solo and sorrowful piano, Wolf is at his most moving, stretching his voice from a low growl to a scratchy, throaty high. “His tongue is rattling,” Wolf sings of his protagonist, a “whipping boy” overwhelmed by trauma: “But broken bells don’t make a sound/No matter how hard you hit ’em.” Like the rest of The Night Safari’s most enthralling songs, it gives way to a well-earned, bruising form of catharsis. | 2023-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Apport | April 19, 2023 | 6.8 | 9e7066f4-f759-481a-89d6-5f812f2208bf | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The debut release on Dutch label Queeste is everything you could wish for in an ambient soundtrack to humid midsummer nights, its melodies as graceful as a swallow’s arc. | The debut release on Dutch label Queeste is everything you could wish for in an ambient soundtrack to humid midsummer nights, its melodies as graceful as a swallow’s arc. | Haron : Wandelaar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haron-wandelaar/ | Wandelaar | Small record labels don’t enjoy quite the tastemaking status they once did, but the debut release on the Dutch label Queeste suggests that it will be an imprint worth watching. Queeste is a new venture from one of the people behind the Hague’s Wichelroede, a short-lived mail-order outlet and cassette label that, for a couple years in the middle of this decade, carved out a nice little niche for experimental club sounds. It was an obscure operation, for sure, but their C90s brought together acts like Beatrice Dillon and Ben UFO, or Cloudface and Powder—the kind of names likely to perk up the ears of a certain type of curious househead with a taste for obscurity—on split mixtapes that traced the outer limits of DJ culture.
Haron, too, is Dutch. Not long ago, he was banging out lush yet lo-fi techno, soaked in emotion and tape saturation, in the company of peers like Legowelt and Aurora Halal. But his debut album forsakes beats altogether. For long stretches, Wandelaar is even bereft of electronics. Much of it could be mistaken for a private-press recording from the 1980s; it is both minimalist and sentimental, a pensive descendant of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Harold Budd, the Catalan composer Frederic Mompou. Right now, in midsummer, it sounds like everything you could wish for in a spacious soundtrack to humid nights, its melodies as graceful as a swallow’s arc against a sky the color of a nectarine. It’s safe to say that, come winter, the album’s environmental properties—its ability to both blend in with its surroundings and heighten the senses—will be just as evocative.
It’s not news that ambient, new age, and Balearic styles have recently been solidifying their footholds in leftfield electronic music, despite the fact that each is decades old; it’s no secret, either, that they are all easily caricatured and frequently faked. But Wandelaar (the title translates as “Walker” or “Hiker”) is a reminder that vision and musicianship will always carry the day. It is a quiet, understated album in which compositional rigor and improvisational expressiveness neatly dovetail.
Wandelaar isn’t entirely without electronics. After “Lotuseter,” the searching 10-minute piece that opens the album, in which short, agile runs are bathed in echo and faint synthesizer—a meditative sojourn, a series of questions without answers—the A-side takes a succession of gentle left turns. First there are fluttering string pads, then a tentative electronic glissando that sounds a bit like a pitched-down THX “deep note”—both markers of a distinctly cinematic style, one quite different from the airy naturalism of the opener. As “Maangerij” seamlessly gives way to “Caverne” (though titled separately, they are essentially two parts of the same composition), the sounds freeze and fracture, echoing some of Oneohtrix Point Never’s disorienting strategies. Finally, the short “Selenieten” closes out the record’s first side with dull thuds and digital trickery: an atonal palate cleanser before Haron returns to the unabashedly sentimental style with which he begins the album.
The B-side’s three long tracks all build on the sound and techniques established with “Lotuseter.” An air of mystery prevails. The ghosts of Debussy and Satie hang like a pastel mist over languid, lyrical melodies, as unexpected modal runs keep the music from tipping too far toward the maudlin. Judicious electronic processing lends a subtly surreal touch. Shifting slapback delay suggests a piano recital staged in an auditorium whose architecture keeps morphing; reverb comes and goes in bursts, tugging against the music’s meandering flow and keeping the listener slightly off balance, like the uneven surge of a chemical flashback.
“Music for Elbows” ends the record with a coda of sorts. This time the halting runs of “Lotuseter” play out more like a forearm mashing keys, in quick, unfussy strokes. If you’ve ever seen the experimental director Chris Marker’s moving 1990 short “Cat Listening to Music”—a three-minute video of his cat sleeping on a keyboard, set to Mompou’s “Pajaro Triste”—you will recognize the mood here: calm, unpretentious, peaceful. Restrained, soothing, but never bland, Wandelaar never tries to be anything it’s not. It’s a canny stylistic shift for Haron, and a wonderful first record from Queeste: a minor miracle disguised as a soundtrack to a catnap. | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Queeste | July 11, 2018 | 8 | 9e75ce27-072c-4edf-9bc3-22dbcd4079a5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The composer Peter Broderick assembles a 35-strong choir of professional and amateur singers, and the results are like a secular church service: rough around the edges, punctuated with laughter, and joyous. | The composer Peter Broderick assembles a 35-strong choir of professional and amateur singers, and the results are like a secular church service: rough around the edges, punctuated with laughter, and joyous. | The Beacon Sound Choir: Sunday Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beacon-sound-choir-sunday-songs/ | Sunday Songs | If you had gone wandering along North Mississippi Avenue in Portland, Oregon, on a Sunday morning a couple of years ago, as you strolled past Taquería Por Que No on your way up to Mississippi Records, you might have heard the muffled sounds of singing filtering through the walls of a white clapboard building. The sound came not from one of the neighborhood’s storefront houses of worship, however, but from inside Beacon Sound, a community-minded record store where, for a year or so, the composer Peter Broderick assembled a few dozen people to break bread and sing together—a kind of secular service, like church without the praying.
Broderick has a serious pedigree: He’s a member of the Danish chamber-indie group Efterklang as well as Kill Rock Stars’ indie-folk band Horse Feathers, and his own releases have appeared on labels like Erased Tapes (home to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds) and Simon Raymonde’s Bella Union; he recently published his first volume of sheet music for solo piano. Beacon Sound, despite its down-to-earth profile—its Facebook page is pretty evenly split between store news, activism, and local politics—puts out heavy hitters like Terry Riley and Jóhann Jóhannsson on its in-house label.
But the Beacon Sound Choir is an amateur affair that welcomes singers “regardless of musical experience.” Portland singer-songwriter Alela Diane is a member, and so is Broderick’s sister Heather Woods Broderick, also a member of Horse Feathers and Efterklang, but it’s immediately apparent from the ensemble’s swollen tones that this is no professional choir. On the group’s first recording, a 10” on the Berlin/Glasgow label Infinite Greyscale, they didn’t even sing words. Hence the title, Sunday Morning Drones: After coffee and chitchat, with the group standing in a circle, one singer would strike a note and the rest would gradually join in, first in unison and eventually moving up and down the scale before finally coming back to the root note together.
The results of that record were transportive—at once monolithic and vaporous, with nebulous clusters of frequencies and overtones swirling in mid-air like murmurations of starlings. They continue those drone experiments in one song on this short but captivating album, and on the side-long “Sea of Voices,” a remix by the Dutch electronic musician Machinefabriek, their wordless singing is stretched and smeared into a 16-minute opus reminiscent of Stars of the Lid. On the rest of the record’s songs, the group has graduated to actual lyrics, but the project remains an informal, proudly untutored affair.
The sound is thick with the atmosphere of its untreated room. Heavy with natural reverb, footsteps, and the occasional cough or cleared throat, it sounds a lot like a rainy day spent indoors. The opening “Spring Song,” a playful, close-harmonized ode to the end of winter, begins with someone counting off the beat and snapping fingers in time, and it ends with a flurry of giggles. Wind chimes tinkle quietly in the background of “Drone 3,” and if you listen closely to “Can’t Wrap My Head Around It”—a collision of Philip Glass or Meredith Monk and ragged Appalachian folk—you might briefly make out the gurgling of an infant’s coo.
Despite the music’s traditional feel—some pieces sound almost medieval, while others resemble camp meeting songs’ melodies—all were written specifically for the group by members of the choir. “The Perpetual Glow” is a simple lullaby, kind of a psychedelic take on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” (”Weeping stars go flying/On their way to play/You’ll catch a ride and fly out/To the heavens of your mind,” runs the first verse) for which Broderick devised a basic notation system to enable non-musicians to read the music. “Spring Song” is the result of a songwriting exercise in which the choir broke into three groups, each of which wrote one verse before coming back together to sing the whole song. The final verse perfectly encapsulates its off-the-cuff origins: “Winter’s over/Moods are lifting/Let it glow/I don’t know.”
A few songs are mere fragments, like rehearsal sketches, and these, too, are likely to break off into murmurs. “I completely forgot where—I had a melody in my head!” exclaims a voice in “Watermelon Sugar,” interrupting a soft, wordless chord, and bringing the song to a premature close. No one seems to mind; we hear chuckles, a smattering of applause, and another voice saying, “I loved that so much!”
All these imperfections are part of the record’s charm—particularly the frequent laughter, perhaps because it’s such a palpable reminder of the actual physical joy of making music, particularly singing music, with other people. But the singers can command more serious moods, too. Slipping between major and minor keys, “Fortunate Ones” (written by Holland Andrews, aka Like a Villain) sounds faintly like Georgian polyphony; its somber tones are as rich as the smell of incense. “We are the fortunate ones/Who get to be whole again,” they sing; it is a kind of psalm whose open-ended meaning could just as easily apply to the act of singing itself. | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | First Terrace | July 24, 2017 | 7.7 | 9e7da00d-ac7e-4498-9ae9-8953afe4a82d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Australian-born, UK-based musician hones her songwriting and polishes her production without losing the atmospheric qualities that made the first two albums in this trilogy so captivating. | The Australian-born, UK-based musician hones her songwriting and polishes her production without losing the atmospheric qualities that made the first two albums in this trilogy so captivating. | Penelope Trappes : Penelope Three | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/penelope-trappes-penelope-three/ | Penelope Three | Trilogies often don’t end well. The Godfather Part III, The Rise of Skywalker, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Dark Knight Rises were all major disappointments, and that’s just a partial list—even The Hangover Part III failed to stick the landing. For Australian-born musician Penelope Trappes, the stakes may not be quite as high, but her new album Penelope Three, the closing chapter of a series that includes 2017’s Penelope One and 2019’s Penelope Two, does arrive with a certain amount of pressure, as it’s clear that she’s made a significant effort to level up her craft.
Before releasing Penelope One, Trappes logged the better part of a decade as one half of electro-techno outfit the Golden Filter, a group that emerged from NYC during the late-2000s bloghouse boom and impressively survived the trend’s precipitous crash. The duo found a smattering of success, but it wasn’t exactly a vehicle in which Trappes—who was then a thirtysomething mother—felt free to fully express herself. Her solo material, however, which she began developing in earnest following a move to the UK in 2014, is intensely personal and emotionally naked; it’s no coincidence that the artwork for several of her releases have revolved around nude portraits of Trappes herself.
Musically, Trappes’ work is heavily stepped in the dreamy sounds of classic 4AD, particularly bands like This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins. In many ways, Penelope One and Penelope Two were more like mood boards than collections of actual songs, with hazy soundscapes and richly emotive (albeit somewhat unintelligible) vocals, her reverb-soaked melodies drifting like tendrils of smoke in a dimly lit room. There was a distinct sense of intimacy to those records, and Trappes luxuriated in the quiet as she reckoned with love, loss, and the frustrations of growing older in a youth-obsessed industry.
Those issues are still present on Penelope Three, but they’re no longer swirling in the ether. Although the new LP won’t ever be mistaken for a glossy pop record, its production is notably bigger and brighter than Trappes’ previous efforts. Dazzling first single “Nervous” sounds closer to FKA twigs than Mazzy Star, and aside from being one of the most electronic tunes in her catalog, it also displays a newfound sense of theatricality that pops up repeatedly throughout the album. “Red Yellow” sounds like an updated version of Portishead’s sultry trip-hop pageantry, and album closer “Awkward Matriarch” is another big swing, with Trappes’ vocals triumphantly soaring atop a crescendo of strings and guitar fuzz before the song suddenly peters out in the final minute, leaving behind only the sound of the howling wind and an empty room.
Between the reverb and raw emotion, there are similarities between Grouper’s work and Penelope Three, but even during its starkest moments, there’s a lushness to the LP that makes albums like PJ Harvey’s White Chalk feel like a more appropriate reference. That record dealt in a sort of gothic, piano-centric chamber pop, and Trappes explores similar territory on melancholy songs like “Blood Moon” and “Fur & Feather.” The latter, a clear highlight, was inspired by both Celtic mythology—more specifically, the tale of the Selkie—and the impending departure of Trappes’ only daughter, who left home earlier this year. As such, there’s a tangible sadness to the music, but Penelope Three is ultimately more about processing than wallowing.
Trappes is now in her forties, an age when the music industry—and popular culture in general—tends to start nudging women aside, or ignoring them altogether. Penelope Three pushes back, but not by delivering facile empowerment anthems. Trappes simply takes ownership of who and where she is in life, ruminating on family, femininity, motherhood, and her own body, regardless of whether or not society is interested in those things. It’s a bold choice, and her confidence lends the album a notably weighty feeling.
The record’s fortified production also helps on that front. Album opener “Veil” showcases Trappes’ vocal range—in her younger days, she actually studied opera—while “Forest” and “Northern Light” both employ ominous strings to ratchet up the drama. Her compositions have become less ephemeral, and while there’s still a haunting, dreamlike quality to the work, Penelope Three never attempts to skate by on aesthetic alone. Perhaps some lo-fi charm has been lost along the way, but these are proper songs, and Trappes has centered herself in the narrative while solidifying a sound that was already spellbinding to begin with. It’s difficult to know how audiences will respond—added polish isn’t always appreciated in independent-music circles—but if Trappes was all that concerned with what people thought, she likely wouldn’t have finished this trilogy in the first place.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Houndstooth | May 27, 2021 | 7.5 | 9e8149a3-1232-4dfd-9420-2267d7d6acde | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Recorded at the same time as 1986’s masterpiece World of Echo, this posthumous collection offers an essential glimpse into Arthur Russell’s haunted, luminous sound. | Recorded at the same time as 1986’s masterpiece World of Echo, this posthumous collection offers an essential glimpse into Arthur Russell’s haunted, luminous sound. | Arthur Russell: Picture of Bunny Rabbit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arthur-russell-picture-of-bunny-rabbit/ | Picture of Bunny Rabbit | Like his friend and colleague Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell was an artist with no spiritual homeland. He was a composer who made pop music, an introvert who haunted discos, an Iowa native who was neighbors with Allen Ginsberg. Also like Eastman, Russell has proven slipperier the harder we’ve grasped for him. No matter how many unheard works emerge from the vaults, there is the sense that we will never truly know him. Whether it’s country, dance-pop, or cello improvisation, a serene inscrutability beams out at you from his music, his only true signature.
The person who knew Russell most intimately was his partner, Tom Lee, and our vision of Arthur Russell, however spectral, is largely a product of his work. Russell was widely admired in his lifetime but only managed one studio album—1986’s World of Echo—and never took full advantage of his connections to figures like Ginsberg or Philip Glass. After Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, Lee tasked himself with sorting through the thousands of poorly labeled tapes Russell left behind. Working with Steve Knutson of Audika Records, Lee has fleshed out Russell’s catalog with extraordinary care.
The albums that Audika has released—including masterpieces like Calling Out Of Context, Love Is Overtaking Me, and Iowa Dream—have redefined what it means to tend to a musical legacy. Each release feels like a coherent piece of a larger picture—a remarkable feat, considering that it doesn’t seem to be at all the way Russell worked. He never stopped working on music that always sounded unfinished, switching endlessly between projects. But Lee and Knutson have taken his unruly, wide-ranging muse and transformed it into a catalog. The result feels less like a discography than a neural map of Russell’s creative process.
For evidence of their grace, consider the fact that the pair waited until 2023 to release this. The nine pieces on Picture of Bunny Rabbit closely resemble the by-now-hallowed World of Echo, both in sound and in spirit. Russell wrote and recorded many of the pieces in the same sessions, and they feel like an extension of that album’s haunted, lunar sound world, with Russell’s voice and cello sending lonely ripples out to die on an ocean of reverb. Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it.
There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again. This was the first atmosphere in which many of us first encountered him—dust motes spinning slowly in light, air stilled, his voice and cello the tenor of murmured prayers. You can almost never make out precisely what Russell is saying, save for alluring phrases that come through crystal-clear: “The very idea,” from “Telling No One,” or “It’s the only day” from “Not Checking Up,” a song in which Russell seems to mumble dreamily about watching an old loved one from afar. Russell was enraptured by ambient sound—blenders, buses, subways, whirring fans—and it seemed important to him that his music fold into the hum of everyday life. “Do you want to know who this person is?” Russell sighs on “Very Reason,” before drifting away again. His music is like a fish tank, his voice swimming mutely by, fixing you with its wide unreadable eye.
When we listen to Picture of Bunny Rabbit, we hear Russell as Knutson and Lee hear him, and many works on the album bear the unmistakable mark of their co-creation. The numbered “Fuzzbuster” pieces that break up the tracklist come from a test pressing unearthed by Russell’s mother and sister. They fit intuitively, like Terrence Malick shots of clouds and sky in between dialogue. “In the Light of a Miracle” is a stunning creation, and it wouldn’t exist without Knutson, who edited and shaped its sublime seven minutes out of a much longer improvisation. Who knows how many unproductive hours and minutes Knutsen logged listening to these tapes before his ears perked up: the bouncing bow pattern, the high vocal melody, seemingly calling from across a distant hill. But the piece, as it exists here, is an exalted clearing, a revelation among a discography of revelations: “Holding in the light/Reaching in the light,” Russell repeats, his voice dancing like a wisp out of your peripheral vision.
For Russell, World of Echo was just one tributary in a vast river of music. It was one mode, one style. He didn’t make academic distinctions, and he didn’t make emotional ones, either—his dance music is suffused with the same unearthly longing as his composed works. All of his work pointed to the same luminous spot in the distance—a hazy glowing light that it seemed like only Russell could see. | 2023-06-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Audika | June 28, 2023 | 9 | 9e83783b-12ab-40e3-9e64-196148a8c649 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
On his latest project, the jazz drummer and innovative producer brings the heart of the famous Blue Note catalog into the present. | On his latest project, the jazz drummer and innovative producer brings the heart of the famous Blue Note catalog into the present. | Makaya McCraven: Deciphering the Message | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makaya-mccraven-deciphering-the-message/ | Deciphering the Message | By the time Blue Note gave Makaya McCraven access to their archives to use as the foundation for his new album, the self-proclaimed “beat scientist” had already been swimming in it for years. The catalog is so essential to the jazz canon—and McCraven’s style in general—that he had already worked with some of the tracks, like trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s 1961 hard bop tune “Sunsets.” The theme persists throughout Deciphering the Message; McCraven is not just exploring Blue Note’s catalog, but his own relationship with it.
With such a sprawling collection of work to pull from, McCraven narrowed his focus to records from the ’60s and earlier, which helps Deciphering the Message maintain the consistency of a single session despite pulling from more than a dozen different records. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers form the connective tissue; McCraven uses vocal samples from Blakey’s records as a de facto MC, like the “Pee Wee Marquette Announcement” from A Night at Birdland, Vol. 1 or “Introduction by Art Blakey” from At the Jazz Corner of the World, Vol. 1. And sitting at the center of his own orbit of talented contemporary musicians, McCraven spends as much of the album in conversation with Blakey—the drummer, the bandleader, the mentor—as he does with his music.
Through the second half of the 20th century, Art Blakey’s band served as a finishing school of sorts for some of jazz’s brightest young stars, offering early platforms to the likes of Lonnie Liston Smith, Terence Blanchard, both Wynton and Branford Marsalis, and many, many more. Here, McCraven manages to assemble a virtual all-star band from Jazz Messenger alumni (Horace Silver, Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter) and his own crew of contemporary virtuosos (Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Marquis Hill, Greg Ward). He intentionally obfuscates the line between samples and new recordings, between drum machines and drum kits. The result is something familiar yet otherworldly, an album full of collaborations between young talent and old legends, some of whom passed long ago.
Collaborative as it is, Deciphering the Message began as a solitary process, with McCraven digging through Blue Note’s crates alone to build a foundation. He’d pull loops and rearrange parts, then overdub bass, keyboards, and drums. It mirrors the workflow of a hip-hop producer, not unlike J Dilla and Madlib, who serve as his closest contemporary analogues. He’d send those sketches to friends like Parker, Paul, and Hill, who would record their parts and send them back, giving him another pass at the arrangement with fresh material informed by the originals.
There’s a scholarly approach to the record, a study in non-linear composition, and while there are infinitely more vibes here than an academic text, a closer look reveals a thesis on McCraven’s philosophy of using the recording studio as an instrument. He eases into this on the first track, inserting his own drum, bass, and percussion tracks into saxophonist Hank Mobley’s 1966 song, “A Slice of the Top.” McCraven’s rhythms inject new energy, propelling old songs into the new millennium with a beat-driven, hip-hop feel. And Joel Ross’ vibraphone, Jeff Parker and Matt Gold’s guitars, Marquis Hill’s trumpet, Junius Paul’s bass, Greg Ward’s alto and De’Sean Jones’ tenor saxophones...they all feed off of it, sometimes blending into the original composition, sometimes piercing through the mix to demand attention, like the familiar intonation of Parker’s electric guitar on Kenny Dorham’s “Sunset,” which rises and falls like a horn with a squeal filtered through a distortion pedal.
McCraven carved out his own space in contemporary jazz on In The Moment (2015) and Universal Beings (2018), sampling his own band’s improvised sessions, then pulling, stretching, and rearranging the pieces until it shaped something new. And his stunning recreation of Gil-Scott Heron’s I’m New Here gave new context to the incendiary words of the famous poet and musician. With each subsequent project, he continues a lifelong conversation with the music that’s shaped him, leaving his own mark on it in turn.
Deciphering the Message takes it further: it blurs the line of what a “real” band is. Is it a group of people in a room, or can it stretch across time, including both the living and the dead? McCraven said he wants to introduce a new generation to these records that were foundational not only to him, but to music itself. These artists helped draft a blueprint for the way contemporary musicians improvise; soaring and swerving in and out of the pocket, yet always pulled back in by the gravitational pull of the rhythm section. With these improvised riffs, they forged building blocks for an entire wave of hip-hop—these are the records that MPC maestros like Pete Rock and DJ Premier, or Madlib and J Dilla would pick through with tweezers when making the beats that would come to define a generation. Deciphering the Message helps connect these dots. But it also plays like a fantasy come to life, a dream set at the Blue Note, with long-lost titans beaming in from the afterlife to sit in with the young blood, like proud parents watching their children surpass them.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | November 24, 2021 | 7.4 | 9e8d7436-323d-4645-8bfc-48e646134816 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Latinx artist reimagines traditional Mexican ranchera folk songs with a goth edge and a lavish, telenovela-style production. | The Latinx artist reimagines traditional Mexican ranchera folk songs with a goth edge and a lavish, telenovela-style production. | San Cha: La Luz de la Esperanza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/san-cha-la-luz-de-la-esperanza/ | La Luz de la Esperanza | In August of 2015, Lizette Anabelle Gutierrez fled the San Francisco Bay for her aunt’s farm in Jalostitlán, Jalisco, Mexico. In San Francisco, she had hosted a monthly goth/industrial/punk/drag party called Dark Room, and as San Cha, she made the kind of music you might hear at that party. But she arrived in Jalisco defeated and downtrodden, emotionally drained by a toxic relationship with a mentor who turned on her. It was at this nadir that the idea for La Luz de la Esperanza was born.
Encouraged by her tía, she embraced the region’s rancheras, traditional folk songs that originated in the Mexican countryside. Her aunt liked to remind her of Pepe Aguilar, a legendary ranchera artist who at one time aspired to rock’n’roll stardom; it was only once he embraced rancheras that he became a star. As they did for Aguilar, these Mexican folk songs helped Gutierrez find her voice, pushing her outside of her comfort zone to realize that she indeed had the range.
Enamored with the beauty and drama of the telenovelas she grew up with, Gutierrez conceptualized her own, using the rancheras as the vehicle for her own novela. But the scale of her ambition exceeded her means, and it would be a dream deferred. She shelved the novela and focused on writing what would become Capricho del Diablo (“The Devil’s Whim”), a stunning cumbia goth EP that told the story of the mentor that tortured her and drove her from the Bay in the first place.
Capricho del Diablo christened a new sound for San Cha, and its success opened up new opportunities. Supported with studio time and funding, she was able to manifest her dream at the Red Bull Music Festival Los Angeles, staging the multi-act novela in a converted church complete with the full band, background singers, elaborate sets, costumes, and makeup she originally envisioned. La Luz de la Esperanza is the realization of that dream.
The story follows Dolores, a domestic worker at an opulent estate who falls for a suave aristocrat named Salvador. It queers the telenovela trope of a poor girl falling for a rich man: Dolores is poor but elegant, bathed in sunlight. She’s inhabited, but not haunted, by the spirit Esperanza, the embodiment of hope; when she finds true love it’s not with a handsome prince, but with a femme ghost. In many ways, the record serves as a metaphorical backdrop for San Cha’s life and career. Dolores is romanced by the prospect of a better life, only to find herself caged, abused, and ultimately rescued by a ghost.
Musically, the songs on La Luz de la Esperanza feel like modernized rancheras with a rock edge and a goth sensibility. You can hear these disparate influences on tracks like “Por el Horizonte,” with its choral harmonies, thumping bassline, and layered guitar tracks that wail as dramatically as a telenovela character finding out their lover is in a coma. “Prettiest Thing” injects an electric charge into a ranchera guitar, with dreamy atmospherics that capture the weightlessness of falling in love.
Throughout the record, San Cha effortlessly mixes Spanish and English, acoustic and electronic sounds, rock riffs and towering, operatic vocals. Her voice is a revelation, immensely powerful; it evokes wondrous beauty as she plumbs the depths of tragedy. She could always sing, but those classic rancheras her tía pressed her to sing helped her realize her voice’s true strength. It’s the perfect vehicle for her talent.
This may not technically be San Cha’s first record—she released the industrial goth-rock LP Off Her Throne! in 2013—but it is still very much a debut. It’s a work of art that took her entire life to make, the synthesis of years of struggle and growth, a style forged on the ranches of Jalisco and in the queer clubs of San Francisco. La Luz de la Esperanza is San Cha’s journey of self-actualization, empowered by the spirits of her ancestors to crush her demons into a fine powder and then use it to beat her face with a perfect smoky eye. | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | self-released | January 7, 2020 | 8 | 9e92b398-cbfa-4680-b384-ed4040767963 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The fast-rising Santa Cruz hardcore band attack their new LP with a murderous intensity, transforming genre tropes into killer hooks. | The fast-rising Santa Cruz hardcore band attack their new LP with a murderous intensity, transforming genre tropes into killer hooks. | Gulch: Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gulch-impenetrable-cerebral-fortress/ | Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress | Gulch have reached a rarefied status in hardcore where outsiders who haven’t heard their music still might have heard things about them—frontman Elliott Morrow’s demonic intensity, or maybe the group’s now-legendary This is Hardcore 2019 set, in which they imported the gleeful, cartoonish physicality of the Santa Cruz scene to a roomful of burly East Coast punks. The band’s merch is notorious, too: their logo adorns Sanrio-themed hoodies and rugby sweaters that usually sell out within hours and fetch over $500 a pop on resale sites. None of this necessarily makes Gulch unique within hardcore, where even the best albums risk redundancy next to to the live experience. But there is no live experience of any kind right now; Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is all Gulch have to sustain their hype in 2020, and they invest themselves in their debut like the quarantine could last the rest of their lives.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress isn’t meant to replicate the grim, grubby spaces where Gulch might have been playing in a simpler time. Jack Shirley’s always-sharp production removes the murk that suffused 2019 Promo (two tracks of which show up here) and allows the band’s ugly, ugly vision for hardcore to come into relief. Even if there are no pits to open the fuck up for the foreseeable future, Gulch still acknowledge the value of showmanship and scarcity—they dropped Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress with mere days of advance notice on July 24 and unintentionally provided entertaining contrast for people who find space for hardcore and folklore. For all of their fans’ superlatives like “unhinged” or “chaotic,” Gulch are very much intentional about how they present themselves: as with 2018’s Burning Desire to Draw Last Breath, Boone Naka’s strikingly beautiful and bloody art graces the cover.
On first exposure, Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress is 15 minutes of flailing limbs and demonic howls held together by centrifugal force, intended to be confirmed by two or three-word assessments of its intensity. The group is equally adept with the pure speed-freak flash of the ultra-technical Botch and Dillinger Escape Plan, the sheer ugliness of Emperor or Rotten Sound, and the antisocial populism of any given Sound and Fury headliner. Not much is intelligible, save for self-explanatory title shouts of “Lie, Deny, Sanctify” and “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” whose theme is more literally explored in “Fucking Towards Salvation.”
Subsequent listens reveal actual nuance and craft, words that might imply an egghead’s vision of hardcore. But even though the word “cerebral” is in the title, all such activity here is in service of intimidation and dominance. The brevity of Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress may honor hardcore’s structural rules, as Gulch understand 15 minutes is about as long as anyone should last making a scrunched face. It’s also a decision that gives specific meaning to every single blow to the skull. Gulch elevate traditional hardcore signifiers into killer hooks—on the title track, they pitch and stereo-pan feedback into a conversational melody, underscoring Morrow’s best impersonation of an overdriven amp. They throw an evil tritone over the brief militaristic pomp of “Cries of Pleasure, Heavenly Pain,” making Morrow’s howls of corporeal annihilation feel earned. They slow down and bring back their nasty riffs, thereby making them nastier. Each 90-second burst of malevolence here is a writhing, breathing being that Gulch have fully under their control.
Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress ends with a cover suggesting Gulch might have their sights set on bigger things. The closing “Sin In My Heart,” relatively epic at three and a half minutes, isn’t a particularly obscure or counterintuitive cover choice for a hardcore band. Gulch have wisely identified the Siouxsie and the Banshees song that already came equipped with a hardcore bassline and a hardcore lyric sheet (nearly half is just the title being repeated). They aren’t breaking the mold or expanding the horizons of hardcore, just providing an infusion of vitality when the genre should feel paralyzed; if the pit ever opens again, they’ll be ready when we are.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Closed Casket Activities | August 6, 2020 | 7.9 | 9e939469-b7cb-4f7b-a801-b5ff1e798446 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
For his first album under his own name, the ever-wild guitar renegade lampoons the posers and newbies while again rewiring rock’n’roll until the circuits almost short. | For his first album under his own name, the ever-wild guitar renegade lampoons the posers and newbies while again rewiring rock’n’roll until the circuits almost short. | Jon Spencer: Spencer Sings the Hits! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-spencer-spencer-sings-the-hits/ | Spencer Sings the Hits! | If there’s been a constant in Jon Spencer’s 30-year journey from garage-punk attitude monster to Baby Driver car-chase choreographer, it’s been his fascination with trash. For Spencer, disposability is the ultimate marker of authenticity. He’s built his musical empire from pop-culture detritus too strange, lascivious, and threatening to be absorbed into the mainstream. It’s there in the scrap-metal beats of Pussy Galore, in the B-movie sound design of the Blues Explosion, in the porno-mag packaging of Boss Hog, and in the band he calls Heavy Trash. At this point in his career, that zeal has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite the Blues Explosion’s brief flirtation with Beastie-abetted arena tours and movie-star-laden videos in the 1990s, Spencer has effectively been expunged from the modern indie rock narrative, just as his hell-raising heroes Hasil Adkins, Andre Williams, and R.L. Burnside have been excluded from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
If contemporary culture has consigned Spencer to the rubbish bin, the least he can do is make a dance move out of it. His first-ever album under his own name, Spencer Sings the Hits!, opens with a directive to “Do the Trash Can,” a floor-quaking stomp that’s part Fred Schneider, part Frankenstein. The track hinges on the maniacal spiel and sweaty stench of the typical Blues Explosion grind. But, in lieu of Judah Bauer’s slinky swagger, Quasi keyboardist Sam Coomes delivers a synth-buzzed fuzz that doubles as phantom bass. And in sharp contrast to Russell Simins’ funky struts, drummer M. Sord’s clamorous, caveman beats burrow a subterranean path back to the garbage-can clang of Pussy Galore.
Spencer spent last winter rummaging through a junkyard near his recording locale in Benton Harbor, Mich., searching for pieces of scrap to accompany traditional drums. He found his holy grail in the form of a gas tank from an old Chevy. For Spencer, the metallic sound is no simple throwback device or gimmick; it’s his way of asserting an elbow-greased work ethic in a culture that’s become reliant on push-button convenience. On Spencer Sings the Hits!, Spencer isn’t so much playing rock’n’roll as scientifically reanimating it, welding and wiring the debris together into a mechanistic monstrosity that’s perpetually on the verge of short-circuiting.
Spencer Sings the Hits! is, of course, an ironic sales pitch. While riding the dollar-store Stones riff of “I Got the Hits,” he spends more time cheekily boasting of his chart-topping potential (“So many emotions! So much passion! Crazy melodies! So many hits!”) than actually demonstrating it. In Spencer’s case, the “hits” are more of the clenched-fist variety, as he devotes a good deal of the record to taking shots at posers who would dare take the easy route to rock infamy. On “Fake,” he hammers at “counterfeit punk” with an industrial-blues mallet, while the zombie a-go-go of “Beetle Boots” digs its pointy heels into upstart groups that put fashion before passion: “You think it’s easy being in a band/Wrong priorities, misguided intentions/Ironic distance just reinforces convention!” The song would have felt more relevant 15 years ago in the post-Strokes/Stripes era of garage-rock opportunists; it’s not like the market is currently overrun with armchair Back from the Grave fetishists. Still, Spencer oozes enough authoritative contempt to make “imitation leather and plastic zippers” seem like crimes worthy of a bench trial.
Even as pop culture continues to diverge sharply from Spencer’s definition of cool, he remains too spirited and unhinged as a performer to harden into cranky-old-man bitterness. He’s more like the neighborhood freak at the end of the street who’s less interested in scaring the kids off his lawn by wielding a shotgun than in weirding them out with all bizarre junk he’s hoarding on the porch. On “Wilderness,” he hops aboard a chugging “No Fun” groove but flips Iggy’s ennui into a celebration of holding onto whatever makes you feel good in an ever-changing world: “Stick your head in a cave/Stick your head in a hole/Rockabilly, disco, punk, soul/Trousers with flares/The noise, the noise, the noise!” Fashion is fleeting, but trash is forever. | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | December 3, 2018 | 7.3 | 9e983dac-f197-4028-8dea-c845527aa8a6 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The bounce queen’s latest EP marks her return to the unctuous, mechanized mother tongue of New Orleans. | The bounce queen’s latest EP marks her return to the unctuous, mechanized mother tongue of New Orleans. | Big Freedia: 3rd Ward Bounce EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-freedia-3rd-ward-bounce-ep/ | 3rd Ward Bounce EP | Big Freedia is the gender non-conformist darling of New Orleans bounce music who has made waves in the crossover markets of cable television (as the star of the Fuse series “Big Freedia Bounces Back”), mainstream pop, and rap. Freedia’s star has risen since her bellowing timbre laced Beyoncé’s “Formation” and the 2018 Drake single “Nice for What.” Her success is a testament to her ability to beat the odds. She has grown from the Third Ward’s Melpomene Projects to become the most popular ambassador of bounce music—a hybrid of electronic and rap named for the action it elicits from anyone with a little junk in the trunk—on the international stage. The wins Freedia has enjoyed, however, have been countered by legal trouble and family tragedy and it would not be a stretch to wonder whether Big Freedia had enough gas in the tank to bounce back. True to the hometown tradition of resilience, 3rd Ward Bounce marks her return to the unctuous, mechanized mother tongue of New Orleans.
Freedia’s five-track 3rd Ward Bounce EP follows her 2016 holiday album A Very Big Freedia Christmazz as the polychromatic fruit of her first major label deal with Asylum Records. Though lead single “Rent” draws parallels between the lyrical content and Freedia’s housing-related legal issues, the song is more a close cousin to Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor,” demanding reciprocity from people that pay her little more than lip service. That sentiment is the wide foundation of the project. Though “Rent” delivers its message through the lens of a relationship with a freeloading paramour (she dresses down with the adlib, “Bitch, I’m your landlord”), the point could apply to anyone that has ever taken Freedia or the artform of bounce for granted. Big Freedia’s response, appropriately, is “Talkin’ talkin’ talkin’ talkin, yada yada yada yada.” It seems fairly simple as far as she is concerned. You either you show up for the party or you don’t.
Big Freedia dials back the crisp exploratory pop on 2014’s Just Be Free to embrace the wobbling down-home slappers that have long been her bread and butter. Leveraging the momentum of the 2017 Mannie Fresh collaborative track “Dive,” Freedia pairs with singer Lizzo on the bubblegum and bass-tinged “Karaoke.” She’s back at fighting weight when she says, “I showed up on time/Leave hoes shook inside,” at which point Freedia drops the title track—a hometown roll call that should assuage any fears she’s gone Hollywood. Then there’s “Bomb,” plied with a cacophony of electronic claps that drown the mix, and heavy-handed in its borrowing from the traditions of trap, Miami bass, and EDM.
Big Freedia rebounds and caps her homecoming with the Goldiie-assisted “Play,” which picks up where her “Formation” monologue left off. In an attempt to ride the wave of that gigantic look just a bit longer, Freedia pens a song that reinforces the “I did not come to play” mantra of the latter. Conflating a cheap attempt to extend the shelf life of the moment with a signature drop wastes an opportunity to double down on the ace writing that opens the EP. The soulful run on the refrain is a familiar crutch by the end of the release. While it would be refreshing to hear Freedia carry a project without a singer, the addition of a crooner has historically proven effective in making rap (and bounce) palatable to pop consumers. Given Big Freedia’s stated intention to slay, the decision is an understandable concession on an otherwise solid release that makes the proliferation of New Orleans bounce music her top priority. | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Asylum | June 9, 2018 | 6.1 | 9e9b6776-ac3b-490d-a68f-c5f98026a0e2 | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | |
Countering the isolation of the past year, the UK house producer draws upon classic club sounds in an EP guided by the life-giving virtues of community. | Countering the isolation of the past year, the UK house producer draws upon classic club sounds in an EP guided by the life-giving virtues of community. | I. JORDAN: Watch Out! EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/india-jordan-watch-out-ep/ | Watch Out! EP | India Jordan’s warmly inventive retro house debut, For You, garnered the kind of breathless acclaim that, for many a musician, might prompt the dumping of a day job. Jordan, an equality, diversity, and inclusion consultant at King’s College, London, not only kept theirs; their follow-up sounds almost like an ode to office gigs, finding in nightlife the inspiration required to get through the day shift. If For You was a love letter to queer club kids, Watch Out! is one for working people, compressing the space from commute to clock-out into five pulse-quickening takes on classic club sounds.
It’s a bold move, coming at a time when both dancing and commuting present grave threats to human health. But Jordan is wary of submitting permanently to the sedentary lifestyle necessitated, for the moment, by COVID. They warn that the virus has imposed “the ideal lifestyle the Tories want us to have”: a world with plenty of solitary labor and no collective pleasure. Jordan instead believes in the emancipatory potential in partying, seeing it as a space for building solidarity between people pushed to the margins.
The EP opens with the alarm-clock jolt of “Only Said Enough,” an homage to vintage breakbeat rave. Over dawn-colored synths and junkyard drums, and against a looping melisma reminiscent of an old-school house diva, a voice urges, “Come on! Let’s start it!” It’s a rousing beginning, one that makes it impossible to do anything but rub the sleep from your eyes and slide into your shoes. Fittingly, the hardcore “Watch Out!,” which follows, suggests rush-hour traffic on a crowded city street. Its looped air horn evokes the wail of an emergency vehicle; its vocal sample probably isn’t a barking dog dodging into traffic, but sure sounds like it. The song moves through airy, dulcet passages of lush, layered synths and into rapid drum-and-siren melees, the sound of all hell breaking loose.
“You Can’t Expect the Cars to Stop If You Haven’t Pressed the Button” is the EP’s most stripped-down track, but also its most inventive. A relentlessly percussive, found-sound techno odyssey, it rides on a gleeful, ingenious sample of a Dublin traffic signal that has been looped into a rattling, bit-crushed drum pattern. Jordan preserves the hollow, percussive pop, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever checked their watch at a crosswalk. But they string the sounds together, too, accordioning them out ’til they’re nearly unrecognizable. The result is thrillingly tense, like a timer on a TV game show punctuated with pew-pews from a Star Wars gun.
The audible crosswalk signals Jordan samples were developed to make life easier for visually impaired pedestrians. But they benefit everyone, adding clarity, joy, and a little music to busy urban journeys. (Recently, while I was waiting at an intersection, a mechanical voice pronounced “Wait”; I turned to my boyfriend and sang, “They don’t love you like I love you.”) There is something lovely about Jordan’s insistence that accessible pedestrian signals are “the best sound in the world!” It’s a testament to their improvisational instincts that they saw the potential for bracing music in sidewalk mundanity.
From the crush of the lunch-break sidewalk, Jordan ferries listeners on to “Feierabend”—a German word for the end of the workday. Clocking nearly 150 beats per minute, it’s the EP’s fastest track by a considerable margin, yet it floats instead of banging. The synths sound hollow, like world-weary moans, before giving way to fast, clattering cymbals and footwork toms—a disco nap, and then a party. The record finally settles into “And Groove,” a closing track that, despite the insistent drum machine, feels for all the world like the sleepy end of the night in a coffee bar, the piano plinking jazzily, a distant voice crooning dreamily. This finale is as slow and quiet as “Only Said Enough” was fast and loud. There is a fully realized concept in these five brief songs, a story told simply and well: wake, work, dance into unconsciousness; repeat.
On the cover of Jordan’s first EP, they posed for a portrait in a bathroom at East London’s Dalston Superstore, a favorite queer club. It had been a space where they felt permitted to be themself, to hook up away from prying, judgmental eyes. Now, with the Superstore and similar clubs shuttered by this virus, it’s harder than ever for queer people to find community. How comforting to think that a closeted young person—forced, at the end of their bedroom workday, to sit and sup with homophobic family—might cue up this irresistible EP and indulge in an after-hours party for one.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | May 11, 2021 | 7.8 | 9eabd5f2-38fc-40d6-933f-c1e62458dfc6 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
After a romantic and musical breakup, Corrina Repp stashed her guitar in a closet and spent a year away from music to collect herself. The songs on The Pattern of Electricity ring out, despite her cooling off period. She sings song after song with the wounded determination of somebody who understands on a rational level they’ll be all right, even if her gut doesn’t fully believe it yet. | After a romantic and musical breakup, Corrina Repp stashed her guitar in a closet and spent a year away from music to collect herself. The songs on The Pattern of Electricity ring out, despite her cooling off period. She sings song after song with the wounded determination of somebody who understands on a rational level they’ll be all right, even if her gut doesn’t fully believe it yet. | Corrina Repp: The Pattern of Electricity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21008-the-pattern-of-electricity/ | The Pattern of Electricity | Of all the words that could have been used to describe Corrina Repp at the start of her career—singer, songwriter, folkie—"performer" wasn’t the first that came to mind. Especially on her first albums for Hush Records, which seemed to take the label’s name literally, with Repp singing as if in a library, cushioned by stray guitar strums and murmured electronic tones. The Pattern of Electricity is Repp’s first solo release since 2006’s deeply lonesome The Absent and the Distant, and despite the nine-year gap, her slow, subdued music hasn’t changed all that much. What has changed, however, is her voice. Far from a whisper, it now rings out. She’s performing.
Credit her time in Tu Fawning for that enhanced presence. During her solo hiatus Repp dedicated herself to that Portland band, which began as a freewheeling outlet for whatever whim captured the fancy of her and co-lead Joe Haege, be it droning psychedelia or freakish jazz. By 2012’s A Monument the group had discovered some discipline, playing in line with the percussive thrust and theatrical bombast of bands like the Black Keys and Florence and the Machine. It was a solid record, and so conveniently in sync with popular tastes that the group must have had high hopes it. In live footage of the group from around that time, Repp almost seems to be practicing for bigger stages. The band never made it that far, though. They dissolved soon after, along with Repp’s romantic relationship with Haege.
The Pattern of Electricity is a breakup album, albeit one a bit removed from the initial sting of the split. After Tu Fawning unraveled, Repp stashed her guitar in a closet and spent a year away from music to collect herself. These songs reflect that cooling off period, capturing the early healing stages of heartbreak, when resentment and grief begin to give way to thoughts about picking up the pieces. "Woman, shed yourself again," she commands herself on opener "The Beast Lives in the Same Place", as if recovery is something to be willed. She sings song after song with the wounded determination of somebody who understands on a rational level they’ll be all right, even if her gut doesn’t fully believe it yet.
That same hard-fought resolve carries through even the album’s most sorrowful moments, like the hymnal-esque "Woods" and the organ-washed "Long Shadow (with Pb)", but Electricity resists wallowing in the darkness just for the sake of it. Repp smuggles some genuine dazzle into the album’s showiest number, "Pattern the Cuts / Calm Ass Mofo". From its minimalist opening pulses, that seven-minute song blossoms into a dapper orchestral pop suite with shades of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. "I haven't been this calm before," she sings, "and now I know I want more." Like much of the album, it’s a song about trying to channel heartache into something productive, a search for a silver lining. These songs may grieve, sometimes toughly, but they never mope. | 2015-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde / Discolexique | September 16, 2015 | 6.6 | 9eadfe35-e719-4b33-9226-50c4178ff257 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On her sparse and riveting second album, the singer-songwriter examines the personal cost of embracing difficult emotional truths. | On her sparse and riveting second album, the singer-songwriter examines the personal cost of embracing difficult emotional truths. | Gordi: Our Two Skins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gordi-our-two-skins/ | Our Two Skins | Sophie Payten needed a break. In 2017, while still deep in medical exams, she released her debut album Reservoir under the stage name Gordi and fell for another woman virtually at once, right as Australia was landing on a verdict for same-sex marriage. A tumultuous year like that can induce burnout and numbness as easily as it can energize. Payten camped out in her home of Canowindra with two engineers from the first album’s sessions (Bon Iver co-producers Zach Hanson and Chris Messina) for a month of recording. The focus on intimacy makes Our Two Skins a stronger record than her first, with a clearer voice.
Payten and her co-producers recorded with only a handful of instruments, and compared to Reservoir, the results are much cleaner. Opener “Aeroplane Bathroom” is a piano ballad stark enough to hold its own against modern classics “Liability” and “Cellophane,” with raw emotion in place of Lorde’s wordplay or FKA twigs’ ethereality. Written in 20 minutes, Payten literally situated in the 24-inch confines of a plane lavatory, “Bathroom” is a different kind of panic attack than the usual heaving-through-a-paper-bag depiction—more a shutdown from sensory overload. The rest of the album is similarly intimate, and while “Unready” and “Sandwiches” have brighter alternate mixes (John Congleton helms a version of “Unready” with the crunch of modern alt-pop), even those feel more organic than the several sample packs’ worth of layering that characterized Reservoir’s production.
The lyrics prove the most thrilling development, using earthy imagery to convey human emotions (“a flooding rain and endless wave/and the warmth of our two skins,” an early single titled “Volcanic,” “harvesting the sorrow of this land”). These songs depict feelings too vast for lyrics to convey, to the point where not even nature can contain them. The careful arrangements set Payten further apart: Influence Justin Vernon would put dozens of saxophones over the piano accelerando that closes “Volcanic,” but this song tops out at a brushed drum kit and a handful of sound effects. “Free Association” even closes with a slide guitar solo that hints at a move into alt-country.
Payten’s writing is strong enough that she pulls off worthwhile takes on familiar themes. A straightforward love song like “Extraordinary Life” could be cloying on its own, but the whimsical verses are just the right amount of verbose, sounding smart instead of smug (“A wave refracted a divergence underneath/Toward directions that took gravity away from me”). “Life,” which works as a contrast to the more insular songs on the album, feels especially resonant now, nearly tragic—at some point in the future, her partner will get the life she deserves, but an extraordinary life is just not accessible right now. Any song that alludes to loneliness could feel accidentally prescient during a pandemic, but being queer can already feel so isolating that the theme resonates no matter what is going on in the outside world.
Her lyrics only falter when Payten sounds aware of her audience, becoming self-consciously clever: “My irrationality is like a nationality” threatens to kill “Hate the World” as soon as it starts. The neat rhymes and simplistic couplets often create a fascinating tension with the more complex subjects (that’s how “Aeroplane Bathroom” gets away with a “stranger/danger” rhyme), but a line like “There is something/There’s not nothing” on “Look Like You” undersells rather than understates an examination of queer representation.
Our Two Skins is not quite an outright celebration of authenticity and discovering yourself—if that was intended, the anxiety of “Aeroplane Bathroom” wouldn’t loom so heavily over the record. Is living “authentically,” as the phrase goes, worth the daily indignities that come with being different? There is no calm in that storm, and nothing worth romanticizing. Skins doesn’t try: Payten finds beauty anyway, never ignoring her fears, but remembering why the fear is worth braving at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Jagjaguwar | July 2, 2020 | 7.6 | 9eb2c9af-a4da-4f44-8590-6302f7da8787 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The lo-fi bedroom pop that defined Indiana singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner’s early career grows much larger on her latest album. She uses new instrumentation to express old feelings of anger, longing, and fear. | The lo-fi bedroom pop that defined Indiana singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner’s early career grows much larger on her latest album. She uses new instrumentation to express old feelings of anger, longing, and fear. | Amy O: Elastic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amy-o-elastic/ | Elastic | Bloomington, Ind. singer-songwriter Amy Oelsner describes her new album Elastic as “either her second or her ninth, depending on how you count.” She has been making and independently and releasing albums as Amy O since 2004, but put out her label debut with last year’s Arrow. Elastic finds her in flux; she is developing a fuller sound and recording at a professional studio for the first time, while still drawing from the lo-fi bedroom pop that defined Arrow and the releases before it. Oelsner says Elastic is the result of learning to take up space as a female musician, noting, “I always had an aversion to being a girl onstage with a guitar singing quiet songs. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but I always knew I wanted to do something with a bit more volume, a bit more anger.”
Opener “Lavender Night” is undoubtedly loud and angry. The song was written after a trip to the doctor to have a lump examined, the anxiety of reckoning with one’s own mortality propels the song forward. Though there was doubt and sorrow throughout Arrow—many of the songs were “inspired by the death of a close friend”—the best moments on Elastic intensify those emotions, weaving them through feverish instrumentals and clearer, foregrounded vocals. When she sang, “You’re gonna be okay” on Arrow’s ”Deep Throat,” the song felt restorative, assurance that she is healing. But on “Lavender Night,” when she concedes, “Another bullet dodged for now,” there is foreboding in her voice as she grapples with the reality that comfort is fleeting, often sandwiched between moments of crushing doubt.
Still, Amy O hasn’t abandoned her starry-eyed wonder. Arrow is marked by rendezvous at the arcade, city lights that look like fireflies, drinking coffee dark, and music videos filmed in grassy fields. “David,” a song that comes towards the end of Elastic, abandons distortion for plucky, clean guitar that allows Oelsner’s falsetto space to croon a lullaby of advice: “Under the water nothing is real/When you are older, you’ll know the deal.” Open flowers sigh and summer is a wonder on “Cherry Blossom,” and “Sunday Meal” leaves Oelsner feeling, “like a bug in a field/Silver shimmering.” Imagery is often repeated on the album. Of the twelve songs on Elastic, for example, five reference dreaming, a motif that can certainly be evocative if properly substantiated, but that loses meaning when used so casually and so often. When Oelsner pastes tired motifs into her lyrics without building upon or contextualizing them, she asks the listener to do the work of identifying with hollow shells of grandiose concepts.
The harmonization found in Arrow takes center stage on Elastic, adding complexity and vigor to the sound while preserving the yearning in her voice. On “Spill,” an album highlight, she layers her vocals, singing, “I’ve gotta find myself a way out of here,” creating moments of dissonance followed by a delicious resolution. “Sunday Meal”, a song written in the wake of her grandmother’s death, decoupages backing vocals with a chorus that gets faster upon repetition, a dizzying rumination how quickly the feeling of home can slip away. Sometimes Oelsner’s enthusiastic layering paired with such abstract lyrics becomes disorienting. The harmonization on “Untouchable Heart” feels overcrowded, and the distortion and synths on “Spacey Feeling” are noisy, easily overpowering a chorus comprised largely of the word “moon.”
The moments that work best are when the instrumentation and vocals distill singular, cohesive emotions. Her most literal lyrics are often the strongest—a request to look in the fridge for food, the pressing need to escape, a freak out in the car ameliorated by stopping to get lime La Croix. Oelsner uses new instrumentation to express old anger, longing, and fear. Though she occasionally missteps, the transliteration process is a captivating one to witness. | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Winspear | August 14, 2017 | 6.7 | 9eb467e7-9b9c-4241-8090-c9e52985a90c | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | null |
Released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film, Kid Cudi’s latest is a pleasant surprise—a minor project that features some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade. | Released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film, Kid Cudi’s latest is a pleasant surprise—a minor project that features some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade. | Kid Cudi: Entergalactic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kid-cudi-entergalactic/ | Entergalactic | Kid Cudi doesn’t plan to rap forever. In recent interviews, the 38-year-old has doubted the likelihood of performing beyond his forties (“Like, my name is Kid Cudi,” he told Esquire). Although he wouldn’t be the first rapper to tease retirement without following through, Cudi has spent the last few years like an artist plotting an exit strategy, diversifying his portfolio with a spate of acting, writing, and directing projects. He’s finding some success. Earlier this year he gave a charismatic supporting turn in Ti West’s horror hit X, which along with its prequel Pearl was produced by Cudi’s production company Mad Solar.
Cudi’s latest record, Entergalactic, is a product of those same ambitions to conquer film and television, a visual album released in conjunction with an animated Netflix film of the same name. A low-key romantic comedy, the movie casts Cudi as an aspiring cartoonist opposite best friend Timothée Chalamet and love interest Jessica Williams, and the album shares the feature’s low stakes and blissful, lovelorn vibe. It’s ironic that a project born of Cudi’s desire to leave recording behind contains some of his most purely enjoyable music in a decade.
Entergalactic comes on the heels of his most backward-looking album yet, 2020’s Man on the Moon III: The Chosen, the latest sequel to the 2009 debut he’s cast his entire career as a celebration of. Like so many Cudi records before it, Man on the Moon III was listless to the point of misery, beholden to muses he’d already exhausted the first time around. With its depthless depressive musings and cosmic ponderings, it was another empty statement from a rapper who wears the mantle of a great artist without making great art.
One of the most pleasant surprises about Entergalactic, then, beyond its unshowy but absolutely sumptuous production, is that Cudi is finally writing outside himself. By singing from the perspective of his rom-com alter ego, he frees himself to let a little light into his dreary world. On “New Mode,” he telegraphs the new direction: “Finally got my head right, it's a new me.” On “Angel” and “Ignite the Love” he sounds convincingly smitten. One of two R&B-slickened Ty Dolla $ign collaborations, “Can’t Shake Her” has the soft touch of 6LACK’s most unforced work.
Cudi remains a clumsy lyricist, and only his most devoted rap forum evangelists could mistake his raw prose for profundity. “This life goes on and on, yeah/Living my truth is all I know,” he raps on “Livin’ My Truth,” a song that affirms his gift for saying nothing. But if nothing else, he’s becoming a more economical writer, and when he gets out of the way of his own music, the results can be gorgeous. Beautifully scored with the understated strings of a Luther Vandross ballad, “Maybe So” might be the most elegant composition he’s ever recorded.
If you take all the indulgence and excess out of a Kid Cudi record, is it even a Kid Cudi record? Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself. | 2022-10-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Republic | October 5, 2022 | 6.5 | 9eb4e8f6-6b04-4c2b-ad10-13a06d2224e1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Working in isolation, the Paramore leader extends the healing narrative of last year’s Petals for Armor with a sparse, unadorned album that casts a mournful glance to the past. | Working in isolation, the Paramore leader extends the healing narrative of last year’s Petals for Armor with a sparse, unadorned album that casts a mournful glance to the past. | Hayley Williams: FLOWERS for VASES / descansos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayley-williams-flowers-for-vases-descansos/ | FLOWERS for VASES / descansos | For a career built on fiery catharsis, Hayley Williams’ 2020 album Petals for Armor was an anticlimactic solo turn. For Williams, who lives alone in Nashville, the pandemic-enforced seclusion that followed its release led to an agonizing period of stasis and self-reflection. Petals for Armor was meant to be her big breakup record, her ecstatic rebirth as a vibrant and vivacious force for self-liberation; instead, she had to put off tour plans and sit with her final product, realizing discomfitingly that her pain didn’t evaporate with the album’s release. “You just don’t write a song and then you’re through it,” she said later in an interview. Her 10-year relationship with New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert—which ended in divorce—apparently could not be processed through 15 bright hooks.
In fits and starts, she started combing through songs she had written over the years—some dating back as far as Paramore’s 2017 release After Laughter—piecing together recordings that continued the healing narrative. The resulting collection, FLOWERS for VASES / descansos, paints a more modest picture of heartbreak. If Petals for Armor danced on the graves of her failed romances, FLOWERS for VASES revisits their tombstones with a mournful glance at what had been.
FLOWERS for VASES is essentially Williams’ first true solo endeavor. In spirit and execution, Petals for Armor felt like an extension of her work with her band: Paramore guitarist Taylor York helped compose almost all of the songs on the album, while its uptempo melodies picked up where After Laughter left off. By contrast, Williams wrote and performed FLOWERS for VASES entirely alone. Her choices here reveal a songwriter more indebted to the arpeggiated guitar of a ’70s folk singer like Sibylle Baier than the power chords of mall punk. The acoustic finger picking on “Wait On” and “HYD” feels immediately familiar, as if pulled from a book of folk standards. Her melodies, both on the guitar and on her maudlin, muted piano, are unpretentious and unadorned, their minimal flourishes reflective of her isolated environment. Williams doesn’t innovate on the basics, but for a singer who has long hidden anger behind blown-out reverb and larger-than-life synths, her pared-back instrumentation feels like a modest yet purposeful reset.
Williams’ voice is undoubtedly the standout feature of her band, both husky and gentle, dangerous yet warm. On Petals for Armor it was chopped to bits, used as syncopated rhythm rather than as a central force within the album’s bubbly melodies. But with only an acoustic guitar and piano to hide behind, here her voice sounds refreshed. The extended vowels on “First Thing to Go” glide as if she just sighed them into being. She rarely reaches for the sharp, emotive peaks of her multi-octave range, but instead approaches songs softly. On “Over Those Hills,” her low register sounds gravely and almost weary, but it fits the relaxed nostalgia of the song, like an old friend recalling an ex-lover over a morning cigarette. The album’s minimal production suits her reflective demeanor—her humming shakes beneath her wary guitar strumming; her falsetto hints at her full-throated capabilities, but keeps the album grounded in the spirit of solitude. There are no obvious singles or earworms, but more so than Petals for Armor, FLOWERS for VASES takes a step closer to healing.
The album’s shortcomings also reflect the work of a lead singer who’s just starting to find her own voice. Without a band to grow ideas from seedlings into full-fledged songs, lyrical motifs fall flat. Williams makes admirable attempts to paint the difficult dissolution of love with nuance—“Inordinary” draws a striking connection between her marriage and her troubled childhood with equal parts sadness and strength. But she more often turns to platitudes, which the album’s sparse instrumentation places on full display. She has a knack for winking metaphors—a rabbit gnawing on a shotgun, an amputation without a tourniquet—but sometimes gets lost in her own cleverness, repeating phrases until they lose their potency. Her words get in the way of the texture of her voice, mixed so prominently that clumsy writing becomes impossible to ignore. The album’s penultimate song proves that rule by exception: With only a field recording and a piano, “Descansos” strikes a plaintive, contemplative note that suggests Williams might have even more to say as a composer and producer than solely as a lyricist.
FLOWERS for VASES’ second title, descansos, refers to markings placed at the side of the road in memoriam. It’s a fitting framework for Williams’ second solo record, which reflects on the death of her marriage without the ceremonial embellishment of a proper burial. It’s also the first album that feels entirely hers, one that only works outside of the framework of Paramore. “I can barely remember what it feels like to belong to myself,” she recalled thinking while writing the album. On the final track, she approaches the closest thing to a personal mantra: “No more music for the masses.” These aren’t songs for a crowd, but Williams seems finally ready to play for an audience of one.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Atlantic | February 11, 2021 | 6.8 | 9eb6f6bd-505c-437e-af4a-2e9363bafdd9 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On their second album Not to Disappear, the indie folk trio Daughter have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. The music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water. | On their second album Not to Disappear, the indie folk trio Daughter have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. The music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water. | Daughter: Not to Disappear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21455-not-to-disappear/ | Not to Disappear | The English indie folk trio Daughter nestled into the void on 2013’s If You Leave, but on Not to Disappear, their second and better record, they fashion their own lifeline back out again. The debut was spacious and crystalline yet suffocating, somehow; the music, epic in its melancholy, made claims of a vast emotional experience that exceeded the scope of the lyrics. It didn’t help that Elena Tonra, a hushed singer in thrall to Jeff Buckley and Ian Curtis, was writing in an idiom of frozen hearts, heavy winters, and home-wrecking floods, metaphors as dead as her idols.
In the last three years, Tonra and the band have wisely ditched the notion that seriousness plus reverb equals profound art. You can hear the transformation on "Numbers," Not to Disappear’s lead track. Tonra opens with a deadpan jibe at a mystery antagonist–"Take the worst situations/ Make a worse situation"–then, after a pregnant pause, gets down to an unsympathetic commentary on hookup culture and its grubby allure. "I’ll wash my mouth but still taste you," she sighs, letting her implications linger, before serenely chanting, "I feel numb in this kingdom."
Recorded with Nicolas Vernhes, the esteemed Brooklyn producer, the music is expansive and spangly, like staring down a deep well to glimpse a ripple of light on the water. There’s a mix of nocturnal indie-pop, gothic post-punk, doomy shoegaze, chest-beating post-rock, and resplendent dream-pop, which all comes off as a great, stellar mush. Igor Haefeli’s guitars are devoutly atmospheric, while Remi Aguilella tends to drum like the National’s Bryan Devendorf, surging forth at the first opportunity, as if to race beyond the desolate soundscape’s frame.
The only sonic outlier is "No Care," a surprising nod to Arab Strap, speak-sung by an antsy narrator whose agency shrinks as she mollifies a manipulative partner. On a record dense with allusions to imminent motherhood, it bodes ill that every relationship is ruptured by insecurity ("To Belong"), undermined by emotional distance ("Alone / With You"), or both of the above, as on "No Care": "Oh, there has only been one time where we fucked, and I felt like a bad memory," Tonra sings. "How I wanted you to promise we would only ever make love/ But my mouth felt like I was choking, broken glass, so I just slept it off."
For all Not to Disappear’s forward strides, something remains of the debut’s pallor, and with it a niggling suspicion that, despite their commercial inferiority to the xx, Florence and the Machine, and even Foals, Daughter have no spicy condiments for those groups’ bread and butter. But if their five-year-plan isn’t to play catch-up with festival-bait big-leaguers, a song like "Doing the Right Thing," about the plight of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, suggests they have the legs to go somewhere else entirely. The song is earthy yet spectral, like an emboldened Hundred Waters, sung from the unique viewpoint of a dementia victim fully aware of her lapsing state. She drowns in lost memories–"I'll call out in the night for my mother/ But she isn't coming back for me"–yet remains privy to the big picture: "But you will not tell me that/ Cause you know it hurts me every time you say it." Concluding the song from in front of a television set, she sings that while "everyone’s in love, I just sit in silence."
If she’d been attuned to Not to Disappear, the narrator would know the appearance of love is often a veneer. It’s an instructive double-standard: Daughter’s music spans that gap between the very real drudgery of everyday life, and the more potent stories we tell ourselves when times are bleak. | 2016-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | 4AD / Glassnote | January 19, 2016 | 6.7 | 9eb76278-a1fa-4063-aebf-052fcb100a3e | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
On its charmingly homespun debut, the Montreal band plays slap-happy rock music that’s more about feeling the spirit than stressing over perfection. | On its charmingly homespun debut, the Montreal band plays slap-happy rock music that’s more about feeling the spirit than stressing over perfection. | Feeling Figures: Migration Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feeling-figures-migration-magic/ | Migration Magic | Since the early 1990s, the small town of Sackville, New Brunswick has been a hub of lo-fi, home-recorded indie rock. It was here that Julie Doiron launched the DIY label Sappy Records, spotlighting members of her band Eric’s Trip and their surrounding community before expanding into the annual SappyFest music festival. Sackville is also where Feeling Figures’ co-vocalists Zakary Slax and Kay Moon first crossed paths. For several years, they self-released songs on cassette under the name Dead Beat Poet Society, and the debut album from their new moniker has a charming homespun sensibility that sounds out of time.
The Olympia, Washington-based indie-rock institution K Records is a fitting home for Feeling Figures. Upon moving to Montreal, Slax met drummer Thomas Molander in a French language class and recruited bassist Joe Chamandy (Theee Retail Simps, Celluloid Lunch Records) to firm up the rhythm section. After scrapping the album’s initial sessions, Feeling Figures decamped to their rehearsal space and recorded Migration Magic live in one go. Revisiting older tunes from their Dead Beat Poet Society days and tossing in two covers, the group pulled together a slap-happy album that’s more about feeling the spirit than stressing over perfection.
The heavier songs written and sung by Slax sound strikingly different from the tender twee-pop tunes where Moon takes the lead. “Seek and Hide” slows down Feeling Figures’ feverish pace with clicking rim shots, before Moon’s solo acoustic number “You Were Young” strips things back even further. “I Should Tell You” foregoes guitars altogether, as Moon echoes the song’s winsome melodies on piano. When she admits “I’ve wasted a life/Trying not to pick up all the pieces/And spill them like Reese’s,” her sheepish delivery stands out like Moe Tucker’s songs for the Velvet Underground.
The songs written by Slax blur the line between indie-pop and garage-rock as they tumble toward his wigged-out guitar solos. When he shout-sings in unison with Moon on album closer “Remains,” the doubled power of their voices ups the hair-raising intensity. Slax switches up his delivery on “Sink,” with spoken-word vocals that pick up in the choruses like Ben Hozie from Bodega. On Migration Magic’s catchiest song, “Movement,” the verses sound like a lower-fi take on the Strokes, before gang vocals hit in the choruses. “I mystify myself,” they enunciate, asking an existential question: “Does my struggle speak to anyone else?”
The album’s two covers dip into disparate genres while preserving the band’s bedroom-pop intimacy. Harmonium’s “Pour Un Instant” is a rollicking homage that communicates a sense of mutual affection not often present in pastoral French prog. “Don’t Ever Let Me Know” is propelled by drum rolls around the kit, bringing the Bobby Fuller Four’s original into ’90s indie-rock territory. This broad appreciation of musical history proves they know the rules and how to break them. In the final moments of Migration Magic, Slax and Moon pose a simple plea: “If I can just be a stain on your memory/I will be complete.” With every listen, their slacker punk smudge continues to grow. | 2023-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | K / Perennial | December 1, 2023 | 7.1 | 9ebe9848-cbf6-434d-9306-75f09d91e37a | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
Created in a period of grieving, Danish electronic composer Villads Klint’s second album mimics the messiness of feelings in flux, pairing everyday sounds with hints of trance and Baroque. | Created in a period of grieving, Danish electronic composer Villads Klint’s second album mimics the messiness of feelings in flux, pairing everyday sounds with hints of trance and Baroque. | Minais B: Quiet Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/minais-b-quiet-bloom/ | Quiet Bloom | The structure of Quiet Bloom has more in common with a ballet or an opera than with pop music. On his second album as Minais B, Copenhagen composer Villads Klint values the unpredictability of emotion over neat stylistic resolution. Within a single track there might be several transitions, each one bouncing off the other in a frenetic call-and-response. There are clear leads—organ music, a pixelated take on trance, a devotional choir—but the storytelling is a law unto itself.
The music of Minais B’s 2017 debut album, Deep Care, skewed closer to “distroid,” a name that musicologist Adam Harper gave to a strain of post-internet music he described as “brutal and cybernetic.” Quiet Bloom is a very different kettle of fish. Following the death of a loved one, Klint created the album away from the city, on the coast of a Danish island. “It was my first time being totally alone for two weeks, and in the cold winter of Scandinavia,” he writes in the album notes. “It was a period of extreme moods for me, but the music came out.”
What that sounds like is sometimes a digital growl, a sharp inhalation, and a cloying harpsichord that’s gradually phased to the point of haziness (“Ceremony”). Two interludes, “Intermezzo 1” and “Intermezzo 2,” ground the album in a semblance of everyday life. The first features room hiss and mechanical rumbling and clicking, while the latter includes what could be the slam of a car door and the sweep of a brush on concrete. Against this pedestrian backdrop—the sound of life seemingly carrying on as normal—the album’s more mercurial moments take on greater meaning. On “Little Sun,” for example, a plucked synthetic string and resonant organ eke out some breathing space in a skeletal Baroque form before being momentarily drowned out by a demented trance arpeggio.
Trance music has become a popular source material for electronic artists concerned with reexamining and recontextualizing the dance-music languages of the late 20th century. For many of today’s young European producers, it’s the music of their childhood or the scene they just missed out on. While Lorenzo Senni’s approach to trance forfeits release, in thrall to endless ascent, Minais B zooms in so close that he cracks the lens. What’s refracted on “Where We Meet” is a crosshatch interpretation of a build complete with choral underpinnings, its surface ecstasy revealed to be a mishmash of desire and alienation. The reflex of Quiet Bloom is to simultaneously reach toward and away from itself; the kind of dance that dealing with loss demands.
Where the album really shines is when its ambiguous motion is given the space to run wild. The two longest tracks, ”Weaver” and “Magnolia,” unfold in a balletic display of potent gestures and dramatic twists and turns. Organs provide familiar sentimentality on both tracks, yet are spliced in such a way that they emancipate rather than overpower. Quiet Bloom does not deliver a tidy narrative about the processing of grief. What makes it such a riveting listen is that it allows each fluctuating feeling some time in the sun. | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anyines | May 5, 2020 | 7.5 | 9ec71a5a-ea3e-4e55-b464-ae6e1e383bd0 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
In the second volume in a series of free-flowing, ambient-tinged mini-albums, the composer—daughter of the late sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar—seeks out a new vocabulary for her instrument. | In the second volume in a series of free-flowing, ambient-tinged mini-albums, the composer—daughter of the late sitar virtuoso Pandit Ravi Shankar—seeks out a new vocabulary for her instrument. | Anoushka Shankar: Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anoushka-shankar-chapter-ii-how-dark-it-is-before-dawn-ep/ | Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn EP | For almost two decades, Anoushka Shankar has been on a mission to liberate the sitar from both the rigid strictures of the Indian classical tradition and the Orientalist cliches of hippie spirituality that the instrument often invokes in the West. She’s no iconoclast; Shankar continues to perform Hindustani classical music, including compositions by her father, the late Pandit Ravi Shankar. But for the London-born musician, who grew up between the UK, Delhi, and Los Angeles, that tradition represents just one of the many possibilities presented by the medieval stringed instrument.
Since her third studio album, 2005’s Rise, Shankar has explored ways to slip the sitar into new contexts. She has used the instrument to address contemporary social issues—the Syrian refugee crisis, or violence against women in India—and make grand arguments about the interconnectedness of different musical traditions. Last year, she embarked on a new project, one less focused on the outer world than the inner life of the mind: a trilogy of mini-albums, each recorded in a different space with different collaborators, interlinked yet capable of standing on their own. She set one condition for herself: to enter the studio with a blank slate, open to wherever the moment might take her. The series’ first installment, Chapter I: Forever, for Now, emerged from a single memory, an afternoon with her kids in the garden of her London home.
Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn picks up where its predecessor left off, moving from the warm, cozy intimacy of the late afternoon to the more ambiguous emotional landscape of the deepest night. In Shankar’s conception, the night is a sanctuary, a retreat from the indignities and psychic wounds of the day—a time for healing and contemplation. But with its shadows and all-encompassing darkness, the night also belongs to nightmares, bogeymen, and all sorts of things that go bump in the dark.
Largely written and recorded over a few days at composer and producer Peter Raeburn’s studio in California, the six tracks on Chapter II chart a journey through the night’s many iterations, leading up to the first gleam of daybreak. Best known for his award-winning film scores, Raeburn brings a strong cinematic sensibility to the production and arrangement. While Chapter I—produced by Arooj Aftab—was airy and minimalist, with each note blown up to cosmic proportions, the new record is more ambient and atmospheric, the sitar pulsing bright through layers of drones and electronics.
The dreamy synths and gently propulsive piano of “Pacifica” conjure a limitless horizon, over which Shankar’s sitar traces delicate, twilight-hued patterns. On “Offering,” reverb-drenched sitar notes unfurl and mutate. Three minutes in, a melody finally emerges, at first muted but slowly swelling in intensity and brightness, like consciousness emerging from meditation, carrying with it the memory of a connection to something greater.
“In the End”—a rework of a song Shankar and pianist Danny Keane first wrote for her 2017 score to the 1928 silent film Shiraz: A Romance in India—is suffused with the bone-deep melancholy that often strikes in the wee hours, the faint dysphoria of existence. On “Below the Surface,” melancholy transmutes into something more disquieting. Shankar’s effects-laden sitar buzzes ominously, like a swarm of locusts, or the swell of anxiety that precedes a panic attack.
Throughout, Shankar appears determined to write a new musical grammar for her instrument. She repurposes the sitar’s deep drone—an instantly recognisable signifier of Indian mysticism across the world—to create tense, atmospheric textures that recall the post-industrial unease of dark ambient. She subtly bends its notes into darkly sinuous shapes, shading its microtones in unfamiliar emotional color. On the found-sound-sampling “What Dreams Are Made Of,” her sitar is accented with the twang of desi-tinged Americana. On “Offering,” the instrument gleams and swirls like a perpetually modulating synth.
Her re-interpretation of the sitar is most evident in the climactic “New Dawn.” The song starts off slow and hypnotic, Shankar improvising on a single phrase over tender piano. Halfway through, another piano chimes in with accelerating ostinatos, raising the tempo. Raeburn and Shankar keep adding layers of sitar to the mix, riffs and motifs piling up with each bar. The track builds to a rousing crescendo of mythic proportions, a Glenn Branca-esque symphony of shimmer. Notes billow outwards, chasing the darkness like the sun’s first rays over the horizon. For Shankar, the passage from night to morning is more than just a metaphorical emotional journey; Chapter II also represents the dawning of a new day for the sitar. | 2024-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Leiter / BMG | April 16, 2024 | 7.4 | 9ececae4-d7d7-43f4-bac1-713c3b5b43c8 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Swedish electronic musician and singer Hannes Norrvide's dark post-punk minimal wave has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. His debut, Growing Seeds, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music. | Swedish electronic musician and singer Hannes Norrvide's dark post-punk minimal wave has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. His debut, Growing Seeds, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music. | Lust for Youth: Growing Seeds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17366-growing-seeds/ | Growing Seeds | Lust for Youth feels neither lustful nor particularly youthful: The work of one Swedish guy holding down two or three notes on a Casio and declaiming tonelessly, like he's straining to make himself heard over a supermarket PA system, it feels about as sensual as a tomb. If it evokes any lust at all, it's the vampiric sort, as if Gary Oldman, in all his blade-licking, scenery-chewing, Frau Helga-wig sporting Bram Stoker's Dracula glory, had composed a minimal wave album for his beloved instead of crossing oceans of time. Its stylistic antecedents are pretty clear-- New Order, the Normal, and the earliest and most inchoate 1970s synth-pop experiments. But it feels very much like a keyhole peek at one man's private torment.
His name is Hannes Norrvide, and Growing Seeds has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. The sound is corroded and thin, and some of the songs are so defaced by fuzz that they're barely legible. If you were scanning a car radio and landed on a station that sounded like "We Planted A Seed", you would grit your teeth and wait it out, seeing if the signal improved being plowing forward. It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.
The limited palette works to the album's advantage. Listening to it, you feel pushed beneath the surface of something: It helps that Norrvide's fingers somehow always land on an instantly memorable four-note synth riff. The carpal-tunnel drive of "Champagne", in which two rudimentary earworms bounce off each other for four minutes, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music. The same goes for "Cover Their Faces", which manages to summon "Plainsong" grandeur with a tiny octave riff and tinny drum fill. The more time you spend in this flattened landscape, the more individual peaks rise up from it. Songs like "Neon Lights Appear" and "It's You" are synth bangers on a cellular level.
Over this digital blizzard, Norrvide drifts like the rumor of a lead singer. He's subdued, but it's the subdued of an emotional meltdown faintly overheard through three or four apartment walls. Behind the otherwise wordless blank space of "We Got Lust", you can faintly make out a woman's screams and sobs, an upsetting and affecting addition. Picking through the album to discern moments like this, like when Norrvide repeatedly gasps "Now...dream of you..." ("Modern Life"), makes them feel more precious for being hard-won. Whether or not this chilly despair is intentional or just a byproduct of the methods used to make it isn't clear; Norrvide told FACT Magazine that Growing Seeds is "about getting out of a depressive period and meeting new love." Which is a little mind-bending given the album's tone. But it's the atmosphere that keeps pulling me back to it, hoping to extract another clue this time around. | 2012-11-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Sacred Bones / Avant! | November 16, 2012 | 7 | 9ed0d8a6-1c80-4ee9-8a02-38e07169ea13 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Led by singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch, the short-lived, NYC-based Teenage Jesus and the Jerks cultivated a visceral severity that redeemed its dearth of material. Compiling recordings from six shows — five in NYC and one in Toronto — Live 1977-1979 presents a convincing argument that stage Jerks might have been superior to studio Jerks. | Led by singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch, the short-lived, NYC-based Teenage Jesus and the Jerks cultivated a visceral severity that redeemed its dearth of material. Compiling recordings from six shows — five in NYC and one in Toronto — Live 1977-1979 presents a convincing argument that stage Jerks might have been superior to studio Jerks. | Teenage Jesus & The Jerks: Live 1977-1979 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21331-live-1977-1979/ | Live 1977-1979 | In the 94 minutes it takes to watch Blank City, director Celine Danhier’s 2009 No Wave documentary, one could convulse through the entirety of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ studio discography multiple times. Led by singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch, the short-lived, NYC-based Jerks cultivated a visceral severity that redeemed its dearth of material. Lunch's caterwaul sounded dangerous and vulnerable, and she sang as though choking words free — wounded, defiant, and quaking with a restrained sense of vengeance made all the more impressive by Lunch’s youth during this period. The band, meanwhile, was the rock’n’roll equivalent of an active blender full of gravel.
Compiling recordings from six shows — five in NYC and one in Toronto — Live 1977-1979 presents a convincing argument that stage Jerks might have been superior to studio Jerks. For these sets, Lunch and drummer Bradly Field were the linchpins in a lineup that at times included James Chance of the Contortions on saxophone and future Sonic Youth drummer Jim Sclavunos on bass. On Live, they traded in the intimate miserablism of their singles for something even uglier: a volley of abrupt, interrogative blurts. In the face of audience indifference—crowd chatterers at the January 17, 1979 Max’s Kansas City and November 4, 1978 CBGB’s gigs deserve footnote credit alongside Live mastering engineer Weasel Walter —the Jerks went for broke, urgent, persistent, and stridently staccato. “Orphans” surfaces here twice in virulent form, with Lunch’s serrated guitars kiting and spiralling around Field’s brute thwomp. The band doubled down on the already confrontational fury of “The Closet” by lurching forth in a glowering lockstep, every spat syllable hitting like a fist on a locked door.
Within and beyond the context of “The Closet,” “the size of this room feels like jail” stands as a revelatory lyric. With songs often clocking in at around 75 seconds and its non-chronological tracklist, Live can feel like a veritable blizzard of Jerks, as insular as the scene surrounding the band. Concurrently, Lunch was playing with Beirut Slump as the Jerks approached a late 1979 implosion; solo, collaborative, theater, and literary projects exploded in myriad directions shortly thereafter. The beast that incubated Lunch’s burgeoning voice could never hope to contain it. | 2016-01-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Other People | January 4, 2016 | 7.8 | 9edbd54d-dc7b-4d86-9a73-5b0b95252850 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The British-Nigerian rapper’s second album is as ambitious, technical, and deeply felt as his first. It is sure to keep his star on the rise. | The British-Nigerian rapper’s second album is as ambitious, technical, and deeply felt as his first. It is sure to keep his star on the rise. | Dave: We’re All Alone in This Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-were-all-alone-in-this-together/ | We’re All Alone in This Together | Throughout the 1990s, genocidal conflict tore through the former Yugoslavia. People in the region fled for safety; many arrived on UK shores. At least one study found that those resettled in Britain suffered more trauma than those who had remained in the Balkans. In 1948, a passenger liner called the Empire Windrush arrived in London from the Caribbean. The ship’s name became synonymous with a generation of immigrants ushered over to Britain by its former colonial governors to plug labor shortages resulting from the Second World War. Seventy years later, in one of the biggest British political scandals in recent memory, it was revealed that the UK government had wrongly deported scores of Windrush migrants, stripping them of their homes and identities. They await their reparations.
These are not subjects that warrant light treatment. The British-Nigerian rapper Dave studies all three simultaneously, threading narratives with gravitas and filmic flair in a shade over five-and-a-half minutes on “Three Rivers”—a highlight on his towering second album, We’re All Alone in This Together—managing to comb in discussion of domestic violence, depression, and an oblique confrontation of the current UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who last year admitted that her own immigration policies might have prevented her parents from moving to the UK in the 1960s. It is a feat of technical prowess, historical acuity, musical derring-do, and one that Dave makes look easy. No wonder millions hang on his words.
Since releasing his debut album Psychodrama in 2019, Dave’s star has barely faltered. He’s bagged pretty much every major musical accolade the UK has to offer, almost overshadowed Stormzy’s headline slot at Glastonbury 2019 after inviting a young fan on stage to trade bars with him, and called the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a racist on live TV during a spine-tingling performance of “Black” at the Brit Awards (one Labour Party politician called it the “best political speech” they’d seen in a decade). His activity outside of music has only propelled him further and higher. He took a role in Netflix’s Drake-assisted reboot of Top Boy, the gritty UK series depicting austerity, power struggles, and drug wars in a fictional East London. He was with Daniel Kaluuya when the actor picked up his Oscar this April (Kaluuya crops up offering words of advice across the album). He was there, lurking quietly, when Kaluuya, along with Giggs, Damson Idris, and others generated a semi-viral moment by debuting as the “DSS” or “Dark Skinned Society”—doing nothing more than hanging out in the West Coast sunshine. In short, his feet have barely touched the ground. So the challenge he faces with We’re All Alone in This Together—maintaining his position as a freshly-installed spokesperson for his generation—has only swollen. Dave confronts it head on.
We’re All Alone in This Together begins with the pips of a film reel cue mark and follows a cinematic three-act structure. The opening action sequences—rap flexing churned with rage-fuelled tirades on social inequalities—slide into scene-setting Afrobeats and alté boogie assisted by fellow Nigerians WizKid and Boj, before winding up with elongated stretches of searching inner monologues that reach for some closure. Opener “We’re All Alone” offers a microcosm of this arc. A gut-wrenching switch midway through—punchy drums evaporate to solo piano as Dave says, “I got a message from a kid on Sunday morning/Said he don’t know what to do and that he’s thinking of killing himself”—comes after the rapper is done swaggering through his favorite worldly foods, holiday destinations, and car brands. The shift might seem crass if it wasn’t for Dave’s willingness to open up in return: “Me and him got more in common than he thinks.” This moment introduces the path he will tread across the album’s 12-track, hour-long narrative, diluting braggadocio with heavy doses of reality. On “Survivor’s Guilt,” the album’s final song, he flips a UK rap cliché of the drug-dealing motorway trip into a moment of extreme vulnerability, as his crippling anxiety leaves him “crying in the driver’s seat.”
There are a few constants throughout the album’s broad arc. Dave’s wordplay is, by this point, unrivaled. Whether running through his watch collection or picking apart immigration policy, nearly every line packs multiple meanings. He doubles and triples up on entendres. The other recurring element is Dave’s piano which, again, twinkles under boasts just as reliably as emotional breakdowns. With such grand ambitions for an album, these spinal elements—just as Psychodrama was structured around a fictional therapy session—are more than necessary.
At moments, the record sags under its own weight, especially in the final third, from the James Blake-conducted and ShaSimone-featuring “Both Sides of a Smile” to the forensic, 10-minute self-examination of “Heart Attack.” Both tracks could support essays of their own. Their weighty presence might be aided, as in all great cinema, by moments of levity. The snippets of conversation lifted from studio sessions—reflecting the type of reasoning that takes place in Black barbershops throughout London and beyond—offer a binding agent. But there’s a lot to hold in here. Dave’s mother’s tearful exhortations at the end of “Heart Attack” are as close to a pressure release as the album’s closing sequences get.
This heaviness isn’t strictly reserved for international politicking. Dave frequently trains his pen on issues closer to home. He has a unique ability to explain and contextualize the concerns of the young and marginalized, without preaching or patronizing. Two years since his last album, many of the struggles he addresses are the same. London is on course for its worst year of teenage killings since 2008, and on “Heart Attack” Dave tussles with his powerlessness to affect change, along with the guilt and pressures he feels as a second-generation immigrant (“I think back to my youth and I was so ungrateful/How many of our parents had dreams they abandoned/So they could put food on the table?”). The best communicators show, rather than tell. Dave is on his way to mastering this subtle distinction.
For being just 23, Dave raps as if he’s lived several lifetimes—perhaps because, like so many of the immigrant kids he writes for and about, he’s had to grow up faster than most. That’s not to suggest that younger artists aren’t capable of insight or potency, but rather that Dave still has so much to show the world. The choral posse cut “In The Fire” brings together multiple generations of the UK’s still-blossoming and belatedly-appreciated rap scene, and crowns him as its new ringleader. We’re All Alone in This Together isn’t Dave’s magnum opus. But the best thing is, he’s just getting started. We’re barely past the opening credits.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Neighbourhood | July 28, 2021 | 7.6 | 9ee4d221-e9f4-4508-bec2-2467dd09784a | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Owen Ashworth spent over a decade giving voice to the anxieties of young misfits with battery-powered keyboards serving as his primary accompaniment. He rebranded himself as Advance Base in 2011, and the best moments on his newest album find melancholy taking a backseat to lucid, unguarded sincerity. | Under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Owen Ashworth spent over a decade giving voice to the anxieties of young misfits with battery-powered keyboards serving as his primary accompaniment. He rebranded himself as Advance Base in 2011, and the best moments on his newest album find melancholy taking a backseat to lucid, unguarded sincerity. | Advance Base: Nephew in the Wild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20889-nephew-in-the-wild/ | Nephew in the Wild | Growing up isn't easy. Just ask Owen Ashworth. Under the name Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Ashworth spent over a decade giving voice to the anxieties of young misfits with battery-powered keyboards serving as his primary accompaniment. His best songs during these years were miniature bildungsromans, richly detailed portraits of characters fighting to achieve adulthood despite personal failings, everyday struggles, and diminished horizons. By the end of his run as CFTPA, this tension between immaturity and responsibility had reached its logical apex: parenthood. The songs on CFTPA's 2009 swan song*,* Vs. Children, read like cautionary tales*—*it's an album populated by absent fathers, abandoned mothers, and the children hanging in the balance.
Having all but exhausted the artistic possibilities built into the Casiotone name, Ashworth rebranded himself as Advance Base in 2011 and set to work de-modernizing his sound. He's now more likely to reach for a Fender Rhodes over a Casio SK-1 and has been studying time-tested pop songcraft, as his recent covers of classic rock and gospel artists attest. His debut as Advance Base, 2012's A Shut-In's Prayer, felt like a natural extension of his previous work, 10 short vignettes soundtracked by charmingly homespun downer-pop.
Nephew in the Wild continues along this same path, employing the warm sonics of vintage gear in service of Ashworth's storytelling. Many of the longstanding hallmarks of his sound can be found here*—twinkling melodies, sustained minor chords—*though everything feels a bit looser this time around. Ashworth leans on electric piano for most of the lead parts, with guitar, autoharp, synthesized mellotron, and the occasional analog drum machine filling things out. The most striking change, however, is Ashworth's vocals. After years of singing with a flat intonation that gave his voice the tenor of a resigned sigh, on many of Nephew in Wild's songs, Ashworth pushes himself to be more expressive, with results that are more tuneful, if still every bit as charmingly gruff.
Musically, Nephew in the Wild feels like a logical progression from Ashworth's past work; lyrically, however, it isn't always as clear of a step forward. Most of the album's narratives focus on flinty Midwesterners coping with decidedly adult problems: addiction, jealousy, dead-end jobs. These characters feel slightly out of reach for Ashworth and their stories often lack the depth and novelistic detail for which he's known. The post-collegiate malaise of CFTPA characters felt real*—*you could imagine them pulling up a barstool next to you and unburdening themselves of their troubles. By way of comparison, the characters on Nephew in the Wild never quite come into focus.
But then there's "Kitty Winn", the album's final and best song. Over a simple, lullaby-like melody, Ashworth details the joys of married life and parenthood as he looks back on the recklessness of his youth. The song is a clear outlier in Ashworth's catalog; here melancholy takes a backseat to lucid, unguarded sincerity. Summing up the difference between then and now, Ashworth gingerly sings, "I'm not out looking for something/ I haven't found/ You won't see me around/ I've got a family now." He sounds like a man who's managed to navigate life's pitfalls, arriving at the contentment that so often eludes his characters. On "Kitty Winn" it feels like Ashworth finds his footing as Advance Base, delivering a song that's as affecting as his best work even if there's little that's "painfully alone" about it. Growing up might not be easy but it seems like Owen Ashworth is getting the hang of it. | 2015-08-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Orindal | August 18, 2015 | 6.7 | 9ee533b3-46d2-4b22-9876-864df37a44f7 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
On his collaboration with Kenny Beats, the Miami rapper pays tribute to unbridled rap personas like DMX and ODB. | On his collaboration with Kenny Beats, the Miami rapper pays tribute to unbridled rap personas like DMX and ODB. | Denzel Curry / Kenny Beats: Unlocked | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denzel-curry-kenny-beats-unlocked/ | Unlocked | Rappers love Kenny Beats. They can pull up to his L.A. studio, find a comfy spot in the room to roll up a little weed, and wait for the producer to make a beat perfectly tailored to their taste. In minutes, the Connecticut-born beatmaker will have their fantasies cooked up—maybe they’ll even get a comical social media post or their own episode of his YouTube series The Cave. After leaving the touring EDM duo LOUDPVCK, he immersed himself in hip-hop, and now his range is nearly limitless. Kenny can make hyphy Bay Area anthems for ALLBLACK; he can capture the headbanging punk-inspired rage of Rico Nasty; Sada Baby can hit his best gyrating two-step to one of his funky Detroit instrumentals; his West Coast beats are breezy enough for 03 Greedo’s hair to sway in the Cali wind. Kenny Beats can do it all.
For Denzel Curry, blurring regional lines is the norm. As a teenager he was a member of Raider Klan, a South Florida-based rap clique obsessed with Memphis crunk and Houston screw. But even as he ventured outside of his area code, the throughline of his music has always been his Miami home. In 2019, Curry released ZUU, which used his city’s rich musical history as a foundation: beat breakdowns ready for an Uncle Luke night at a strip club, grimy Trick Daddy-influenced verses, and a guest spot from Rick Ross, rapping about cocaine. Unlocked is a curveball; for the first time he completely upends his roots, with the help of Kenny Beats.
Unlocked sounds like a descendant of outer-borough New York City rap sometime between Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and EL-P’s Fantastic Damage. Over the course of the brief eight-track album, Curry’s appreciation for the era comes across as genuine. He retrofits his manic and messy Miami Gardens-bred rapping style into cadences that pay homage to unhinged hip-hop personalities like DMX and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. On “So.Incredible.pkg,” maybe the album’s best, he says, “It’s the man of the hour/Super confident and my clothes yell it louder,” not quite reaching the drunken chaos of the beloved ODB, but coming close.
Curry’s energy is unpredictable enough to prevent the homage from feeling stale. Similar to early DMX, Curry’s gifted at causing mayhem while remaining fully in control. “Lay_Up.m4a” gradually builds to the disarray, delivered over a Kenny standout that’s grim enough for an after hours bus ride to the deepest corner of Queens. “Take_It_Back_v2” blends his slowed vocals with chipmunk-high ones, a refreshingly cartoonish track that fits alongside the short animated film released with the album.
But for the most part, Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats are on different wavelengths. Where Curry is chaotic, Kenny is too neat. The producer approaches the intro to the project like he’s following a step-by-step guide titled “How to make a RZA beat”—the video clip sample is placed too cleanly and the beat drop is glossier than anything that would ever leave RZA’s mid-’90s basement studio.“‘Cosmic’.m4a” wants to capture the grime of New York’s former underground, but it’s smooth around the edges instead of sounding like it was made in the sewer. “So.Incredible.pkg” features sharp rapping by Curry, but the production is like an early Pro Era record without the feeling of teenage sincerity and discovery.
Any excuse to hear Denzel rapping right now is a good one. But Unlocked feels like it was made out of convenience—like going to Chipotle instead of the corner Mexican spot because it’ll save you 20 minutes. It’s good, sure. Curry is rapping his ass off. But Kenny Beats’ production isn’t anything new. There are no imperfections, no colors outside of the lines, and with that, it misses some of the heart that makes regional rap special. | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | February 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 9ee5e878-5f91-4087-96d2-e327da0160db | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The loops and layers of the Berlin-based cellist’s solo album evoke resonant emotions that could afford to linger. | The loops and layers of the Berlin-based cellist’s solo album evoke resonant emotions that could afford to linger. | Anne Müller: Heliopause | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anne-muller-heliopause/ | Heliopause | Since she started recording in 2007, Anne Müller has accrued a solemn, emotionally resonant discography. Trained at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts and busy as a symphonic cellist for the early part of her career, Müller has pivoted in recent years towards the modern classical/ambient axis. You can hear her adept string work across a series of collaborations with Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, and singer-songwriter Agnes Obel. Heavy-hearted, soundtrack-ready, and dramatic as those albums can be, Müller’s debut solo effort Heliopause reveals a subtle sense of humor: How else to introduce a solo album than with a piece titled “Being Anne”?
Müller is deeply invested in this music: She wrote, arranged, recorded, and produced Heliopause. So what does “Being Anne” sound like? If it’s a snapshot of her interior state, it’s a tricky place to be. Her main instrument remains at center, augmented by drums and a broken piano turned into a percussion instrument. A threshing churn of strings, tingling pizzicatos, thunderous low end, a tock like a doomsday clock: The many layers and loops evoke dread, hope, anticipation, and hurry. Müller’s skill is to keep them as the jumble they are, each sensation visceral but fleeting and increasingly hard to differentiate.
“Solo? Repeat!” returns her to the more familiar territory of solo cello, with solemn opening notes that recall the iconic cello suites of Bach. But much as one may enjoy “Suite No. 1 in G Major”—as well as Müller’s ability to impart such history in 21st-century collaborations—the looped bass throb winds up feeling like a remix. As it plays out, it nudges the piece into luxury car commercial territory.
With “Nummer 2,” Müller again looks to the history of her instrument and offers up her own variation, this time on the cello’s role in a minimal composition like Steve Reich’s “Violin Phase.” It’s not a rigorous tribute, but the slowly accruing layers convey that effect, adding a steady thwack to give it an underlying pulse. As it resolves, one only wishes she had given it a little more room to breathe.
Heliopause takes its name from the region where the sun’s wind ceases to reach, the absolute fringe of our solar system that leads into interstellar space. For an artist who has spent most of her musical life in collaboration with either large groups or one other musician, it’s a fitting metaphor for solo explorations. The title track is the most resonant of the set, conveying the disembodying feel of zero gravity with slow cello and shimmering electronics. At just over five minutes, one longs for more space to drift and luxuriate in its beauty. Once you’ve reached the edge of the solar system, why rush back to Earth?
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | December 4, 2019 | 6.9 | 9eeb6d2f-0b24-444f-b35d-644453834e49 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Ryley Walker is one of the leading young stylists in a crowded instrumental guitar scene, and on his debut, he aims to create a record that joins his folk-rock heroes: Van Morrison, Pentangle, Mike Cooper, and more. | Ryley Walker is one of the leading young stylists in a crowded instrumental guitar scene, and on his debut, he aims to create a record that joins his folk-rock heroes: Van Morrison, Pentangle, Mike Cooper, and more. | Ryley Walker: Primrose Green | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20215-primrose-green/ | Primrose Green | In his quarter-century, Ryley Walker seems to have made definitive decisions about what qualifies as a worthy influence: Van Morrison records made between 1968 and 1974, Jackson C. Frank, Pentangle, and the recently reissued early works of Mike Cooper are all among the examples. On Primrose Green, he embraces those inspirations without wrestling with them. He lugs their aged weight around as signs of good taste and his self-proclaimed place in a historical lineage. Though Walker comes from a mid-sized city in Illinois, he sings as if he bounced between the British Isles as a kid. Alongside his shoplifted accent, he apes Morrison’s trademark grunts and melismas.
Make no mistake: Walker is a prodigious talent. He’s one of the leading young stylists in a crowded instrumental guitar scene. He possesses the light touch of Bert Jansch, the unbottled energy of Peter Walker, and the musical erudition of John Fahey. And he has a Miles Davis-like capability to surround himself with astounding musicians, from early collaborator Daniel Bachman to the band of Chicago jazz firecrackers who not only support him on Primrose Green but also supply many of its best moments. Walker is versatile, too, with a chameleonic quality that allows him to slip into ragged electric blues and bucolic acoustic reveries with equal ease. Of all the songwriters trying their hand at this revivalist approach during the last decade, including Steve Gunn, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Sharon Van Etten, Walker is the most natural and enviable.
The band he built for Primrose Green is a stirring, captivating ensemble, too, the kind of group that could jam for an uninterrupted hour and never lose an audience’s attention or its own freewheeling focus. During the extended introduction of "Love Can Be Cruel", for instance, they delight in the space between folk-rock form and jazz-band freedom. Heavy acoustic strumming, sharp electric guitar and twinkling keyboards dart around a deep rhythm, working into a frenzy until the song approaches the ecstasy of a raga. "On the Banks of the Old Kishwaukee" depends upon another stunning groove built by drummer Frank Rosaly and bassist Anton Hatwitch. Walker wires a moaning blues theme into the beat, suggesting the wonderful roots-rock patience of American Beauty-era Grateful Dead. The band sizzles during "Sweet Satisfaction", dips and dives during "Same Minds", and charges into vibraphone-and-bass bedlam during "Summer Dress".
But the trouble comes with Walker—the songwriter and singer, not the instrumentalist. For someone so obsessed with classic troubadours, he has a damning disregard for his own songs. He over-sings almost every part of this record, trying to match his heroes with an inadequate instrument. The screamed lover-boy exhortations of "Summer Dress" are counterproductive at best, copycatting at worst. He treats every written syllable of "Sweet Satisfaction" like a chance to slur a half-dozen of them, stretching words until it’s easier to ignore them. Walker’s lyrics read like a set of unfinished end-rhyme exercises by a college student who has just discovered the Beats. Smoking grass at night makes him feel "alright"; leaving his love, however cruel, would make him into a "fool."
For a point of contrast, see "Griffiths Buck Blues", the one instrumental number on Primrose Green. Over a harmonium drone, Walker musters pure energy and expression with only his guitar. As he starts and stops, slows and sprints, he communicates dread and unease with the conviction his voice lacks.
The extensive biography that accompanies Primrose Green positions it as "an album of a sort we haven’t seen since the 1970s"—a bit of description perhaps too on the nose, as these 10 songs are acts of pure creative anachronism and affectation. The shape of Walker’s voice and the twists and turns of his band reanimate a specific aesthetic without adding much more than the tools of modern production. While Primrose Green is a great statement for a '70s freak-folk cosplayer, I just hope it’s not a career-defining one for Walker. | 2015-03-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | March 30, 2015 | 6.2 | 9f0e66c0-0782-439f-bae6-4bbff1674519 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The mid-'90s Memphis band Grifters wrote songs that sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to, inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This was their most bracing statement. | The mid-'90s Memphis band Grifters wrote songs that sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to, inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This was their most bracing statement. | The Grifters: Crappin’ You Negative | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22228-crappin-you-negative/ | Crappin’ You Negative | Ever since Jeff Buckley was claimed by the Mississippi River in 1997, an entire cottage industry has cropped up to give us greater insight into his enigmatic talent, which left behind one perfect, timeless full-length album and much speculation about what could’ve been. But now that the vaults have been thoroughly scraped for every last improvised Smiths cover, a recent online initiative invites us to get to know Buckley at the most intimate level. Over at jeffbuckleycollection.com, you can virtually thumb through his personal vinyl archive as if you were hanging out on his living-room rug with a glass of lilac wine. However, in the jump from Philip Glass to Guided by Voices, a favorite band is missing, one that Buckley praised in the pages of Rolling Stone and eagerly pitched to the radio-station programmers he encountered on the Grace* *promo circuit. Perhaps the absence has to do with the fact the group in question rose up in the early ’90s, and Buckley only owned their music on CD. In any event, the oversight is all too appropriate—after all, the Grifters are used to being left out of canons.
The Grifters were the sort of group your record-store clerk would recommend if they saw you walking up to the register with a copy of Slanted and Enchanted or Bee Thousand—a band for braver souls willing to dig deeper into the dirt. They were, in many respects, a typical ’90s indie-rock act. Their sound was a Memphis-brewed melange of overlapping aesthetics: the fuzz-blasted melodicism of Guided by Voices, the crooked hooks of Pavement, the hoot ‘n’ holler hysterics of Jon Spencer, the dirty-needle boogie of Royal Trux. But at the center of that Venn diagram, the Grifters staked their own uncharted turf: a post-modernist, pulp-fictional universe populated by cool jerks, mambo kings, dragon ladies, and other mysteries. Even at their most ferocious, the Grifters carried themselves with an air of Rat Pack sophistication—their cryptic songs sounded like smart conversations you wished you could contribute to and inside jokes you wanted to be let it on. This is a band whose idea of an opening line is “Well, I swear, I never meant to leave you tied up to a train”—and their peculiar personality is perfectly encapsulated by that discomfiting mix of callousness and concern.
The Grifters weren’t exactly obscure in their day—beyond Buckley’s vocal endorsements, their records were reviewed in all the major music mags (leading to a two-album run on Sub Pop), and their association with Memphis’ Easley McCain Recording studio helped make it an Abbey Road-esque destination for A-list indie-rockers in the ’90s. But they never crossed over to the realm of Leno appearances, 120 Minutes rotation, and Calvin Klein ads like those aforementioned peers. As such, the Grifters don’t really have a legacy today, probably because their music is too scrambled and combustible to easily imitate. Their impact is felt most acutely close to home: In Memphis outsider-rock lore, the Grifters are the spiritual link between Big Star and Goner Records. Tellingly, their recent, sporadic spate of reunion dates was prompted by their participation in the 2013 documentary Meanwhile in Memphis: Sound of a Revolution. And, in keeping with that regional focus, some of the band’s pre-Sub Pop catalogue is now being brought back to market via Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records.
While 1993’s One Sock Missing thrust the Grifters to the topsoil of America’s lo-fi underground (complete with self-explanatory anthems like “She Blows Blasts of Static”), the band would carve out their own unique groove on 1994’s Crappin’ You Negative, where the battery of bassist Tripp Lamkins and drummer Stan Gallimore busted through the scuzzy surface with Zeppelin-esque might. Like Buckley, the Grifters had an unabashed affinity for the blues—a sound that had been all but vanquished from indie rock during the post-hardcore ’80s. Where Buckley channeled the blues’ eternal sadness, The Grifters adopted its slide-riff sleaziness and feral heat. But the Grifters were no blues-rock band—they were too compulsive to let their feet get stuck in that quicksand foundation.
Thanks to David Shouse and Scott Taylor’s good-cop/bad-cop dynamic, their songs had a consistently unsettled quality, marked by duelling melodies, out-of-sync harmonies and jarring aesthetic juxtapositions. Crappin’ standouts like “Maps of the Sun,” “Get Outta That Spaceship & Fight Like a Man,” and “Holmes” may come slathered in juke-joint grease, but Shouse’s arch, Bryan Ferry-esque vocals redirect them toward the cosmos. And while Taylor sings with a more typical Midwestern twang, his manic energy steers revved-up rockers like “Black Fuel Incinerator” into fiery, at times frightening chaos.
But Crappin’ You Negative’s explosive outbursts are tempered by serene lo-fi interstitials, and a pair of balladic set-pieces—the distortion-caked despair of “Felt-Tipped Over” and desolate desert twang of “Junkie Blood”—that preview the more refined songcraft Shouse would showcase in his post-Grifters band Those Bastard Souls. And as if to reward us for indulging their every whim, the Grifters’ send us off with the adrenalized, straight-ahead power-pop of “Cinnamon”, though, naturally, even this shot of sweetness is laced with poison: “fee-fee-fi-fi-fo-fum/I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
The Grifters would go on to write more structurally sound pop songs on 1996’s Sub Pop debut Ain’t My Lookout, but Crappin’ You Negative remains the best, most bracing showcase of what made the band so strange and special: the sudden pendulum swings between class and crass, between somber, tape-hissed meditations and outrageous lounge-act theatrics, between skronky Beefheartian disintegration and arena-ready rock-outs. As the early-’90s lo-fi revolution proved, any band of Tascam amateurs can make a racket. But in its violent vacillations between rock ‘n’ roll tradition and treason, Crappin’ You Negative is a reminder that one must first know the rules of rock ‘n’ roll before you can properly break them. | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | August 19, 2016 | 7.9 | 9f1bad97-026c-4708-8b61-afc63265c1a7 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Books member returns to familiar terrain, but his drifting electronic mood pieces are too often riddled with diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides that keep the listener at arm’s length. | The Books member returns to familiar terrain, but his drifting electronic mood pieces are too often riddled with diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides that keep the listener at arm’s length. | Paul de Jong: You Fucken Sucker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-de-jong-you-fucken-sucker/ | You Fucken Sucker | As one half of the the Books, Paul de Jong was responsible for some of the early aughts’ coziest, stoniest reveries. On albums like Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink, the folktronica duo attracted a cult following with warm audio collages that stitched together left-field hip-hop, melancholic minimalism, spoken word, and emo’s self-seriousness into an expansive mishmash. Their sound was tailor-made for college students: a wide-eyed, world un-weary affirmation of every late-night dorm debate and weedy epiphany. It expressed a nostalgia for the present moment, a sense of trembling fragility and poignancy that can seem indelibly real yet rarely lasts once one joins the workforce.
On his new solo record, You Fucken Sucker, de Jong returns to this familiar terrain of proggy flourishes, fingerpicked guitar, and unhurried jam sessions woven into intricate electronic mosaics and drifting mood pieces. This should be manna from heaven for Books devotees. But the album suffers from a solipsistic haziness, struggling to maintain that youthful magic. If his duo soundtracked a time of heady self-discovery, Sucker is trapped, years later, in the dull roar of a hangover.
Starting with its title, Sucker fixates on futility, immobility and the grinding frustrations of making it through the day. The album is framed as navigating “personal tragedy and emotional fatigue,” but it does little to transmute that pain into something meaningful for the audience. Instead, it freely dumps diaristic scribblings and nihilistic asides and asks the listener to sift for meaning.
Take opener “Embowelment,” which rolls out with energized percussion and impressively swerving melodic interplay. Less than 90 seconds in, it unleashes an unearned primal-scream session. Unceremoniously plopped into the mix and delivered with a minimum of skill or precision, it neatly illustrates one of the album’s central rubs. For every nuanced compositional zig, there’s a sloppy, half-baked zag waiting around the bend.
Action and inaction are recurring themes. “Doings” critiques self-help slogans—“Keep in mind that whatever you’re doing, it’s part of your doing”—then gradually sinks into hopelessness: “When you’re dead, you’re done.” It segues right into “Dimples,” which continues the same theme: “I don’t enjoy what I’m doing/It has all been done before.” Even the winding melody is intoned in monosyllabic tones of do-do-do. On “Doomed,” we get “I can’t do anything” before an overeager chorus of “Fuck you up your ass” and clipped dog barks. This kind of despondency can be fertile artistic ground, but de Jong doesn’t, well, do that much with it, preferring to wallow in the mire. From time to time he’ll jump into action and bring in some movement with high-speed scalar runs or a deft turnaround, but these accents and asides feel like the spasms of energy that punctuate an otherwise crushing depression.
The two tracks that most overtly succumb to those blank, closed-circuit comforts of despondence are respectively the strongest and weakest on the album. “Pipe Dream” offers four and a half minutes of low-key synthesizer bells that drift without melody, momentum, or apparent development; it’s the only time where de Jong lays back and lets the music do the talking. As unambitious as a day spent hiding in bed, it nonetheless engages in a way nothing else on Sucker does. But at the close of the LP, “Breaking Up” attempts a cringeworthy confrontation. A woman screams snippets of dialogue atop some inconsequential noodling. “There’s a girl in a bed,” and “You’re disgusting” give way to “Mad, mad, mad, mad… sad or glad” and “Good better best.” Hardly harrowing, these feel less like catharsis than a drunken tantrum from next door, or a sub-par student theater group. Suddenly we’re back in college, but de Jong is no longer the super-smart, shroomy Derrida fan across the hall. Looking at the title again, one wonders who he thinks the “sucker” is? Is it de Jong, the victim of some unnamed and devastating deception, or is it others who are able to see hope where he sees only despair? Either way, having brought us into the heart of his darkness, we’re left with precious little to guide us back into the light. | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | April 7, 2018 | 5.5 | 9f1d1aec-fd37-4de6-9b5b-19f5de9ccc68 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
This new release from Italian producer Lory D compiles and digitizes five recent EPs, previously only available on vinyl. It’s a behemoth document of organic, shapeshifting techno. | This new release from Italian producer Lory D compiles and digitizes five recent EPs, previously only available on vinyl. It’s a behemoth document of organic, shapeshifting techno. | Lory D: Strange Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lory-d-strange-days/ | Strange Days | “Where’s your bassline? Do you know?” asks a robotic, feminine voice on Lory D’s “Bass Bam.” For a techno artist obsessed with the squiggly, brain-melting potential of the Roland TB-303 Bassline synthesizer, the question is rhetorical; acidic basslines are at the core of the veteran Italian producer’s repertoire, along with booming 4/4 kick drums and a deceptively minimal approach to composition. For over two decades, Lory D (aka Lorenzo D’Angelo) has carved his own space as an unsung hero of club music, releasing destructive dancefloor tracks that have quietly slipped under the radar of the techno mainstream. But since 2011, D’Angelo has found a home on the Glasgow label Numbers, releasing a series of five EPs titled Strange Days Vol. 1-5. They’ve now been compiled and digitized for a wider release: a snapshot of organic, shapeshifting techno that still sounds furiously futuristic.
D’Angelo’s productions reflect an immediacy and grittiness that belie the precisely tuned instruments in his arsenal. While many of his tracks loop repeatedly, or eschew a traditional sense of melody, D’Angelo’s capacity to wring out unexpected rhythms and slippery mutations from his drum machines and synthesizers is consistently surprising. He’s as much a peak-time performer as he is a machine-manipulator, with subtle flourishes of DJ-style pullbacks and stuttering, lurching effects—but it never obscures the human touch behind his tracks. With every break in sequence and groove, the steely, overdriven machines offer a glimpse past the circuitry, into the mind of a techno wizard.
While Strange Days offers expertly executed club music, not every turn is smooth. The filter sweeps on the mangled “Acidattak,” for example, retain some clicky high frequencies, twitching in the background while the kick drum keeps the track moving with pummeling force. It’s imperfect yet honest, and only bolsters the off-the-cuff raw style that D’Angelo owns so well. The following track, “Ostia Girl,” shows a more particular approach to the use of effects, even if it means settling on a completely disorienting and nearly undanceable take. Atop a simple 808 beat, D’Angelo stutters his drums and slices a vocal sample, mutating and scorching it.
While other tracks like “Acix9999” or the trance-leaning “Sq11” feel bombastic and densely packed, D’Angelo’s acid maintains a laser-sharp focus, offering little more than minute changes to the mix and scrupulously adjusted parameters. The stepping, subterranean bass on “Deep Acoustic” leaves barely anything there above the weighty throb save a tight hi-hat, fleshy clap, and whispery atmosphere. D’Angelo lets the beat coast for almost eight minutes without change, and it’s one of the strongest, most haptic tracks in his catalog. The same goes for “grn-HF,” a slice of techy dub that is both punchy and wistful, as its simple string motif softens the hard-edges of his booming drums.
Operating with the mindset of a live performer, and boasting decades of experience in production, Lory D makes music that is highly functional in the hands of a DJ; his tracks are tailor made for club play. Just under two hours long, Strange Days is a behemoth document and doesn’t go down easily in one single take. But for DJs and fans of warped and wacky acid techno, Lory D unequivocally operates at the apex of the style. Heavy, precise, and exhilarating, the beauty of Strange Days is defined by its own dark and twisted terms. | 2017-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Numbers | July 27, 2017 | 7.5 | 9f1e2e39-2bbe-46ea-8e82-e497b6a17d64 | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | null |
"The Best Show on WFMU" is a cult phenomenon, but nothing about The Best of the Best Show feels closed off or for-fans-only, even given an overstuffed deluxe-package treatment that feels aimed directly at the diehards. | "The Best Show on WFMU" is a cult phenomenon, but nothing about The Best of the Best Show feels closed off or for-fans-only, even given an overstuffed deluxe-package treatment that feels aimed directly at the diehards. | Scharpling & Wurster: The Best of the Best Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20203-scharpling-and-wurster-the-best-of-the-best-show/ | The Best of the Best Show | Newbridge, the fictional New Jersey suburb invented by Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster, is a town run on hubris and populated by people who either don't know or refuse to believe that they're deluded failures. That blend of reliable comedy tropes can drive inspiration for a long time, and when Tom Scharpling announced in 2013 that "The Best Show on WFMU" was coming to an end, the general consensus was that it was going out on top. Scharpling's alternately cranky and enthusiastic rapport with his callers and the inspired regular-Joe insight of the monologues woven in with them demonstrated his mastery of the radio comedy format, while the extended bits Scharpling did with Superchunk drummer and top-flight weirdo Jon Wurster made it the stuff of legend. This was the kind of phenomenon that sustained a more-or-less-weekly show over 12-plus years, which means their "greatest hits" collection is a sixteen-disc, 20-plus hour box set—with a bonus USB stick that includes another 4 ¾-hours' worth of material—that still could be described as "scraping the surface."
That's a lot of mileage to get out of just two people, though the trick is that these people actually represent multitudes. Wurster's weirdly sympathetic call-in characters, co-created and co-written with Scharpling, are exercises in gradual-reveal lunacy that ramp up a conversation until both Scharpling and the listener are left repeating Wurster's ludicrous claims ("you are two inches tall") and malaprops ("laser beans") with a bewildered disbelief. Over the course of a call that can stretch past the 20- or 30-minute mark, a friendly conversation mutates into a series of escalating threats, an arrogant display of untouchability that eventually crumbles to reveal the hapless loser beneath, or, as the origin-point "Rock, Rot & Rule" perfectly revealed, a self-proclaimed expert revealing just how arbitrary and flimsy his knowledge really is. It's comedy that breaks down just how funny it can be to hear somebody with way too much self-confidence obliviously dig his own grave.
It's a cult phenomenon, but nothing about The Best of the Best Show feels closed off or for-fans-only, even given an overstuffed deluxe-package treatment that feels aimed directly at the diehards. The diehards might even find an excuse or two to gripe about omissions (where's "The Chippert Report" and its daring exposé of Davenport, Iowa's "toilet rock" scene?), but what's included is definitive and varied enough to draw in both entry-level listeners and longtime fans who snapped up all their previous collections on Stereolaffs.
Of course there are usual suspects and recurring characters. New Jersey-defaming hoagie enthusiast Philly Boy Roy details his family's felonious Memorial Day exploits, battles post-Eagles playoff loss depression, and gets his wife to call in to reveal just how obsessed he is with Scharpling. The aimless, low-energy Pudge gets a few laughs as the call-in regular who has literally nothing to say short of "I'unno." And even with his central conceit basically being "hippie Deadhead who takes bong rips mid-call," Wurster's giggly, wheezy-falsetto performances as Bryce and his rapport with the aggravated-yet patient Scharpling elevate a concept that other comedy acts would make into a one-dimensional caricature.
Couple these regulars with a few of the show's most notorious calls, including the first appearance by Fonzie inspiration/violent elderly sociopath Roland "The Gorch" Gorchnik and the introduction of splatter-flick auteur Trent L. Strauss (famed for The Tool Belt Killer, The Hacksawist, and Art School Arson), and you've got a strong cross-section of what makes the "Best Show" canon so beloved. When Wurster gathers more than a dozen of his most popular characters together in an hour-and-a-half panel discussion for Newbridge's highest office during 2008's "Mayubinatorial Debate", hearing him inhabit all these different characters in close quarters—Roy, Pudge, monstrously obese barbershop singer Zachary Brimstead, legendary drummer/erotic fiction author Marky Ramone—is pretty astounding. It's worldbuilding of a kind you don't often get from two people in any medium—and they did it pretty much pro bono.
A lot of Scharpling and Wurster's appeal rides on a certain sort of deep-knowledge obsession with the absurd minutiae of popular music and the people that take it extra-seriously. "Rock, Rot & Rule" came in the middle of one of Scharpling's pre-"Best Show" airings and provoked angry fans to call in to object to the rankings of Wurster's know-it-some musicologist Ronald Thomas Clontle. Wannabe rock stars who have unrealistic dreams of making it ("Count Rockula", whose own box-set vision is trashed by notable music website shovel.com) share space with rock stars who have unrealistic ideas of what "making it" entitles them to (Wurster's version of Gene Simmons has a grand old time arrogantly auditioning the actual, in-studio Ted Leo and Carl Newman to be replacement members of KISS). The "Best Show" fandom in indie rock is well-documented, and has roped in everyone from Michael Azerrad (briefly interrogated by Wurster on the air as to why Wire Train weren't included in Our Band Could Be Your Life) to Damian Abraham (who became an evangelical enthusiast of the show and broke the ice on tour with Kurt Vile by swapping Philly Boy Roy anecdotes).
You get a ridiculous amount of stuff with this box set, sure: all that audio content, plus a book featuring some great essays by the aforementioned Abraham, comedian Julie Klausner, and call screener A.P. Mike, an extensive interview on the show's origins and developments with Jake Fogelnest, photos of archival material (including crib sheets Wurster used for some of the calls); and illustrations by longtime show-associated cartoonists Neil Numberman and Casey Burns. But what you're really buying, whether you're new to the world of Scharpling and Wurster or a Friend of Tom from back in the day, is an acknowledgement of a hard-won, rightly-earned cult. It's an in-group that always has more room for anyone willing to forge a deep connection with the town that's comin' to get ya. And it can't be stopped—even Scharpling's 2013 farewell turned out to be a hiatus instead, and "The Best Show" continues to this day as an Internet show delving deep into the one of the biggest, strangest, best worlds in comedy. There's more—way more—where this box set came from, and this collection is a prime reminder of why we're lucky that it's not slowing down anytime soon. | 2015-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Numero Group | April 10, 2015 | 8.8 | 9f1f8411-0e3e-439b-9869-54b98d0e7fd6 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Kansas City producer Iggy Romeu’s strange, evocative second album for West Mineral feels so divorced from musical convention, there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen. | Kansas City producer Iggy Romeu’s strange, evocative second album for West Mineral feels so divorced from musical convention, there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen. | Mister Water Wet: Significant Soil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mister-water-wet-significant-soil/ | Significant Soil | Mister Water Wet took his triumphant place among the community he helped create when he debuted on West Mineral Ltd. in 2019. As a DJ and promoter in Kansas City, Andrés Ignacio “Iggy” Romeu brought together many artists that would define the label’s signature foggy, clubwise strain of ambient music. Romeu’s work was removed from this sound for most of the decade—he seemed more interested in making music that popped off in the club rather than delving into layers of ghostly static and white noise—but his West Mineral debut, Bought the Farm, revealed an imagination for grayscale, ’90s-style ambient no less vivid than that of associates like Huerco S., Ulla, or Pontiac Streator. His follow-up, Significant Soil, is even stranger and more evocative.
This is not music intended to soothe. If Romeu’s mentee Huerco S. leans toward the romantic gestures of Wolfgang Voigt or Basic Channel, Significant Soil is more akin to ramshackle Y2K-era records like Nobukazu Takemura’s Scope or Mika Vainio’s Olento, which feel so divorced from musical convention there’s the thrilling sense that anything could happen. On Significant Soil, one damned thing after another happens. “I Saw the Green Flash” alone throws us sawing synth strings, B-movie UFO whistles, tactile field recordings, and what sounds like a robot attempting to sing doo-wop with a mouthful of bees. “When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground” opens with a masticating sample not unlike something you’d find on Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica before a doleful, martial horn starts duetting with a chintzy reggae organ and a wet rustle of static.
Romeu’s music feels so thrown together that sounds that might not necessarily “work” contribute to the overall effect of witnessing something assembled by the proverbial tornado blowing through a scrapyard. It’s the same failsafe effect that let Phil Elverum get away with shredding on the pencil sharpener in the middle of his most ambitious rock opera. The Shinichi Atobe-like “Good Apple” sets a piano loop against a crude-sounding drum machine, and neither seems to acknowledge the other is in the room, as if they ended up together purely by chance. “Bory” opens the album by repeating a serrated synth lead for six minutes. It makes as little sense as anything else, which means it’s a great scene-setter.
Significant Soil can feel disruptive and even disturbing at first, but once you come to anticipate its twists and turns, it takes on a holistic quality independent of the spare parts it seems to be made of. Everything is in service of the atmosphere, which is mysterious, wintry, and often beautiful, especially when an “Isthmus” of hand drums and cut-up vocals connects the rest of the album to the long, bittersweet, sighing ambient closer “Losing Blood.” Most good music makes the listener ask: Who is this? Better yet is music that makes the listener ask: What is this? Significant Soil is thrilling because on top of those queries, it makes the listener ask: Why? Romeu’s answer: Why not? | 2022-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | West Mineral Ltd. | August 30, 2022 | 7.6 | 9f21c7f6-2029-4c8b-a2d5-a724c73f9d33 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Inspired by poet Alda Merini, the Italian violinist and vocalist composes a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, illuminating complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life. | Inspired by poet Alda Merini, the Italian violinist and vocalist composes a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, illuminating complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life. | Silvia Tarozzi: Mi specchio e rifletto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silvia-tarozzi-mi-specchio-e-rifletto/ | Mi specchio e rifletto | For those less inclined toward astrology, celebrity birthdays can be a shortcut to understanding one’s arrival on the cosmic scene. It’s an amusing, low-stakes thought exercise: What traits do you share with a more minor kind of star? The free-improvising violinist Silvia Tarozzi found such a kinship with a fellow Italian, celebrated Milanese poet Alda Merini, who shares a March 21 birthday with the Bologna musician. Over the course of a decade, Tarozzi used the natural rhythms of Merini’s poetry as scaffolding for her works-in-progress, and those pieces became her new album, Mi specchio e rifletto (I mirror and reflect). Her careful assemblage is a nuanced investigation of the divine feminine, refracting the quotidian weight of womanhood through an improvisor’s prism.
The album’s coruscating title track builds a clever infinite-mirror illusion, scalloping Tarozzi’s voice as she names the facial features in her reflection. Her overlapping vocal rounds deliver the upside-down feeling of trying to square one’s own self-perception with that of the outside world. And in vocalizing what she sees in the mirror, Tarozzi makes herself more visible. The theme carries throughout the record as she shifts between diaphanous contemporary-classical flutters and murky synth gnarls, illuminating the complex emotional specifics of motherhood and life as a working musician.
Tarozzi deploys familiar gestures of femininity and gradually peels them apart to reveal internal tumult. Though she counts Deep Listening oracle Pauline Oliveros as one of her most influential mentors, her own approach prioritizes a busier array of textures applied across shorter, self-contained compositions. She begins the album with “Al cancello,” a brisk instrumental that she leads with cheerful violin as flute and piccolo sparkle around slow, curving cello parts. On “La forza del canto,” a plucked violin over downcast strings introduces a sense of anxiety, and “La sostanza dell’affetto” dives in deeper, sliding away on a tail of elastic guitars that melt over one another like popsicles in summer heat. “Domina” introduces more tension, building friction between multiple layers of synths and processed vocals as Tarozzi repeatedly warns, “Smettila di ascoltarli/Ti sfrutteranno”: “Stop listening to them/They will exploit you.”
Nodding to their shared birthday, “La forza del canto” is Tarozzi’s most direct tribute to Merini, and she presses her voice upward on the song’s wide-open refrain. It’s wind in sails; it sounds like trying, a daring tribute to women who choose a public life. Merini, who died in 2009, was lauded in her home country for her insight on love, religion, heartbreak, eroticism, and suffering. She spent much of her adult life institutionalized and separated from her children, an experience she detailed in her 1989 memoir A Rage of Love. The sweeping romantic ache of her work—little of which has received English translation—echoes out of the chasm between her full, deep sense of self and others’ refusal to acknowledge it.
Tarozzi built her compositions around the rhythmic structure of Merini’s verse, but copyright issues meant that she eventually had to complete the pieces with her own lyrics. Her words explore specific minutiae that bring her fulfillment: a gentle light splashing over violets, a spider’s taut silk, the generous sense of wonder in the eyes of a loved one. On 2015’s Apocalypse, girl, Jenny Hval asked, “What is it to take care of yourself? What are we taking care of?” With Mi specchio e rifletto, Tarozzi addresses the subtleties of those questions. She writes in her liner notes that her compositions were influenced by “the psychedelic experience of pregnancy,” which manifests in the offset saxophone flares of “Sembra neve” and the synthetic mechanical fizz of “...e non volevi le ali.” Joni Mitchell once said she used suspended chords to express unresolved questions about the outcome of her own life, and Tarozzi’s wavering loose ends on “Domina” and “Hai nella bocca un silenzio” relay a similar overwhelmed uncertainty.
With the album’s closing number, “xxx Anna,” Tarozzi offers a touching, if unorthodox, love note to her grandmother. By resurrecting and collaging fragments from earlier in the album, she seeks to approximate the internal state of her grandmother’s mind as she grappled with dementia. After familiar excerpts meet a chaotic crescendo, the piece concludes with a warm sense of calm. Like “Al balcone,” which nods to a tradition of elderly Italians holding court on their balconies, “xxx Anna” is an empathetic appreciation of her foremothers. By connecting her own ancestry with Merini’s influence, Tarozzi speaks to a larger, often invisible web of women and the shared experiences of their private lives.
The date that first bound Tarozzi to Merini traditionally falls around the vernal equinox, the annual starting pistol for renewed growth and abundance. Though the women were separated by time, Mi specchio e rifletto is the bountiful garden of their meeting. Like Merini and so many others, Silvia Tarozzi wants to be seen as her full self. She paints private worlds, illustrating labyrinthine feelings in new colors. And by rendering her own reflection more brilliant, Tarozzi makes it easier for others to see themselves, too.
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. | 2020-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Unseen Worlds | August 29, 2020 | 7.8 | 9f2396d4-1549-4643-8a76-bee963b4b0fb | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
These live sets between the saxophonist and pianist capture a dialogue between two highly skilled and empathetic collaborators whose reverence for space matches their regard for the music itself. | These live sets between the saxophonist and pianist capture a dialogue between two highly skilled and empathetic collaborators whose reverence for space matches their regard for the music itself. | Archie Shepp / Jason Moran: Let My People Go | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/archie-shepp-jason-moran-let-my-people-go/ | Let My People Go | Archie Shepp doesn’t play the saxophone so much as he sings through it. His phrasing is expressive and free, on par with the great jazz and blues vocalists, and six decades of making music has not dulled his abilities. Each note on Let My People Go, his new record with pianist Jason Moran, is fresh, like the start of some fascinating conversation you’re lucky enough to overhear. At 83, Shepp has found a worthy partner in this particular exchange. Moran is 37 years Shepp’s junior, but has worked with greats like Wayne Shorter, Cassandra Wilson, and Charles Lloyd. His presence on Let My People Go is elegant and highly sensitive to Shepp’s spirited wanderings. Recorded live in 2017 and 2018, Let My People Go captures a dialogue between two highly skilled and empathetic collaborators, whose reverence for space matches their regard for the music itself.
Let My People Go collects Shepp and Moran’s performances from two sets: a gig at Paris’ annual Jazz à la Villette festival in 2017 and live recordings from 2018’s Enjoy Jazz Festival in Mannheim, Germany. For their first time recording together, having met just a few years prior, it’s remarkable how at ease both men sound in each other’s presence. Shepp has said that he tries not to use written music during his performances in an attempt to “make it as much like old New Orleans as possible: that is, completely improvised and nonacademic.” Let My People Go epitomizes that spirit; it deals in pure feeling.
Shepp is lyrical and emotive with his instrument. He is capable of communicating great pain, but does not clog every measure with shrieks. Moran is equally tasteful and expressive, but if Shepp is a painter, Moran is more like an expert boxer, shuffling in only when there is space to do so, dancing away gracefully when there is not. Standards like “Round Midnight,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and “Isfahan” are all prime examples of this gorgeous exchange, and each one takes on new life in Shepp and Moran’s hands. Shepp and Moran explore the darker corners of “Isfahan,” a Duke Ellington tune from his band’s 1967 album Far East Suite. Shepp’s measures are full of longing, and they occasionally seep out in queasy blurts; Moran tiptoes in between them, striking clusters of notes that sparkle and growl. The effect is intimate and forlorn, as if Ellington’s orchestra turned in for the night and Shepp and Moran stayed onstage to concoct their own after-hours sonata.
The chemistry between Shepp and Moran is so heady, it could easily be disturbed by singing. But when Shepp’s voice comes in the final third of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” it’s more of a comfort than a surprise. His range has settled into a velvety timbre that creates the deepest tone on the album. His repetition of the title phrase is pained, as if crushed under the weight of the song’s history as a traditional spiritual. On “Go Down Moses” Shepp sings the album’s titular line with a similar gravity: “Let my people go.” It is a sobering demand, following some of Moran’s most stunning, dynamic piano work.
Shepp has always felt that the music made by Black artists functions as a political act in and of itself. But throughout the decades, he has always gone further than just making music. Shepp was actively involved with the Civil Rights movement, wrote politically charged theater pieces, and recorded an album in response to the tragic outcome of the Attica prison uprising. Today, Shepp is still pushing forward, inviting the new guard to recontextualize jazz standards, and actively collaborating with them. Let My People Go is at its core a conversation between a jazz elder and a modern virtuoso, one that draws on a rich history of ideas, but offers space to further the discussion.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Archieball | February 15, 2021 | 7.5 | 9f26561e-67b5-4f6c-83c8-1022e9b3f2c5 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
2xCD reissue of the crucial 1982 LP adds live tracks, Peel sessions, and a B-side. | 2xCD reissue of the crucial 1982 LP adds live tracks, Peel sessions, and a B-side. | The Fall: Hex Enduction Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2979-hex-enduction-hour/ | Hex Enduction Hour | How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Fall starts and ends with Hex Enduction Hour. It sure as hell doesn't start with the 458489 B-sides collection, like I once thought. "Hey, it's cheap, and it has lots of songs, and it's two discs!" = bad move. If you're new to the scene, and you want to know what the big deal is about this Fall group, proceed to Hex Enduction Hour post haste. But don't just take the word of some bitter no-talent sweater-wearing Pitchfork Media jerk. Renowned musicologist Courtney Love swears by the album's ramshackle opulence and vituperative charm. Even street thugs like Hex Enduction Hour! Why, one went so far as to play catch with my driver's side backseat window using a piece of concrete, just to get a hold of a copy.
Castle has kindly reissued the album, and added a bonus disc. The recent Peel Sessions collection makes the inclusion of two session tracks somewhat superfluous, but that valuation assumes you're fanatical enough that the decision to drop upwards of $50 for a 6xCD set of radio sessions is no biggie. If you're not so disposed, enjoy this interpretation of "Deer Park" (the third on this collection) and a rinky-dinked "Who Makes The Nazis?" that replaces the introductory ping-ponging bass line with some banjo-sounding plunking. In addition, there's a B-side-- "I'm Into C.B.", which sounds like a Fall B-side-- and some live tracks. Most notable from the live stuff is the inappropriately titled "Jazzed Up Punk Shit", unless their idea of jazz came from traveling into the future to watch This Is Spinal Tap. It's more like down-tempo Fall shit, the band puttering along on E (the fuel gague reading, not the recreational aid) as Mark E. mulches "shit" into "shirt." All of this is good, by the way.
No write-up concerning the Fall is complete without mentioning and/or quoting their gone-but-not-forgotten patron saint John Peel, so here you go: "Always different, always the same." And that's Hex in a nutshell. You've got two-drummer, four-on-the-floor rave-ups like "The Classical", you've got pensive seethers like "Hip Priest", and you have a kazoo on "Nazis?"-- all different, but all the same. It's Mark E. Smith's scatological charisma that makes, breaks, and remakes the Fall. As has been said before and will be said many times, the Fall are pre-, post-, and beyond punk, taking the same old tools and building timeless machines. Atavistic in approach, futuristic in scope. And catchy as all hell, too-- phrases like "hey there, fuckface" and "he is not appreciated" are hard to escape, either while listening to this record or doing anything else. The most quotable tidbits, however, are the ones that can't be neatly discerned through Smith's interpretive elocution. In regards to a pseudo-intellectual magazine editor: "Has a beard which was weird/ Some time ago heard Ramones in '81/ Has a Spanish guitar." In regards to who makes the Nazis: "Motels like three split-level mirages...Buffalo lips on toast, smiling."
But what does it sound like, you may ask? Well, it sounds like the Fall. It sounds like a group of five talented musicians trying to play as brilliantly stupid as possible, while a sixth fellow from the docks hops on stage, grabs the mike, and fights his way through the morass scorched-earth style. It sounds like the primordial ooze that birthed touchstones like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground come to life, nursing a bitch of a hangover and a vendetta. It's something you're born with, not something you learn. And, as on most Fall records, but especially this one, it's something to behold. | 2005-07-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-07-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Kamera | July 5, 2005 | 9.6 | 9f2935a0-9f57-4124-ac24-e2bc2c2f2ef4 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
The Los Angeles band nods to various corners of psychedelic music while transcending its influences on this blissful and spacious debut album. | The Los Angeles band nods to various corners of psychedelic music while transcending its influences on this blissful and spacious debut album. | Dummy: Mandatory Enjoyment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dummy-mandatory-enjoyment/ | Mandatory Enjoyment | Dummy has all the makings of a modern cult band. Formed in late 2018, the Los Angeles group have evolved noticeably in a short span of time, leaving behind the shivering avant-folk of their first EP and lo-fi video game music of EP2, recorded on an iPhone. Their debut full-length, Mandatory Enjoyment, is just as voracious, merging the band’s key influences from 1990s noise-pop and early electronic psychedelia with ambient interludes that add welcome dynamics between bursts of frenzied instrumentation. You could call it “record collection rock,” but it’s also one of this year’s most consistent debuts.
Emma Maatman’s droning organ is a hallmark of Dummy’s music, filtering through almost every song on Mandatory Enjoyment. When combined with her sundazed, deadpan vocals and drummer Alex Ewell’s endlessly cycling rhythms, they sound like they’ve intently studied the Stereolab catalog. However, the band of self-professed music nerds are just as likely to name-drop bossa nova post-punks Antena, new age godfather Laraaji, or the original LA jangle-pop group, The Byrds. Dummy’s brand of drone-pop is intended to be blissful and spacious rather than dour and claustrophobic: “We love the idea that you can make layered, complex, chaotic music but not in the pursuit of it being difficult or abstract,” they have said.
Dummy’s dual guitarists Joe Trainor and Nathan O’Dell (both former members of Baltimore band Wildhoney) inject the album’s noisiest songs with jolts of distortion. “Punk Product #4” is the first time we hear them let it rip, before the brief, scrambled solo at the conclusion of “Daffodils” that sounds like Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan kept on a short leash. The latter song leaps out of the tracklisting, bookended by the field sample interlude “Unremarkable Wilderness” and thumping, Silver Apples-styled motorik of “X-Static Blanket.” This clever sequencing makes Mandatory Enjoyment’s louder passages pop and the quiet ones feel deeply hypnotic.
Outside of Dummy, the band’s members have spent time in unexpected corners of music, including Maatman’s role in the doom metal group Taarkus and her work as an art director for Southern Lord Records. With these years of experience, it makes sense that their lyrics would include elements of meta-commentary. Midway through “Punk Product #4,” Maatman defines the dilemma of any DIY artist wearing influences on their sleeve: “Years spent mining the obscure/What are they worth?/A couple hundred bucks a week/Scattered infinitesimally.” One song later, on the buoyant “Cloud Pleaser,” O’Dell lays out his complaints about the current state of rock music: “Everything homogenized/Easy to digest/Guitars crystalline/Sounds so pointless.” The two singers’ voices come together to trade calls and responses on the standout “Daffodils,” as the choruses provide a sarcastic suggestion to bury your head in the sand: “Never mind the changing times/Just ignore the signs.”
In his latest book, Muse-Sick, author and producer Ian Brennan writes that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon remained on the charts for 957 weeks in part due to its vast dynamic range: “Those classics take a journey and allow the ear to rest—to listen to the noises within the ‘quiet,’” he writes. Dummy have understood this lesson since the extended ambient closer of their first EP, and both sides of Mandatory Enjoyment end with a similarly sprawling multi-part suite. Showcasing their attention to detail, a clopping woodblock rhythm appears halfway through “H.V.A.C.” before fading into clattering percussion and kosmische synth tones. “Atonal Poem” drifts through metallophone-like electronic bleeps reminiscent of Hiroshi Yoshimura, then returns with a reprise of the band’s chiming art-rock. In less capable hands, music so meticulously researched and constructed could sound like pure mimicry. Instead, Dummy have transcended their influences and crafted their own record collector gem.
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. | 2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | November 2, 2021 | 7.6 | 9f2b7994-fc7d-4fbf-8346-57ec3506d736 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
With her second album, Willow Smith opts for a more organic and raw sound. It’s a huge leap in the right direction, as she uses her guitar to channel alternative singer-songwriters of the 1990s. | With her second album, Willow Smith opts for a more organic and raw sound. It’s a huge leap in the right direction, as she uses her guitar to channel alternative singer-songwriters of the 1990s. | Willow: The 1st | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/willow-the-1st/ | The 1st | Willow Smith has spent the entirety of her career in the limelight. It’s been eclectic and interesting, if not always stellar. Willow is clearly not interested in being a Top 40 popstar, though her stabs at higher consciousness through futuristic R&B have lacked the nuance of her more acclaimed peers. With her second album, the 17-year-old Willow faces the daunting task of avoiding a sophomore slump while having already reinvented herself twice before even graduating high school.
At this point, anything remotely musically challenging would be a relative win. But in a welcome turn of events, The 1st sees her leave the humdrum Soundcloud electrobeats well behind, opting instead for something more organic, substantial, and raw. These are all qualities that actually enhance her millennial-new-age persona instead of tempering it.
Upon first glance, the album still suffers from the same thematic editing issues that have always hampered the songs she writes. Opener “Boy” begins with the bluntly adolescent lyricism that gave her last album, Ardipithecus, its amateurish air: “Hey mom, I met a boy/He plays guitar/He likes Quentin Tarantino/And really sad songs.” It aims for “Leader of the Pack,” but sounds more like a saccharine diary entry.
But Willow displays a clear desire to grow as an artist and see her creative potential realized. As the album unfurls, each track digs deeper into this new down-to-earth, acoustic sound that seems tailor-made for her personal and reflective songwriting. “Boy” announces this tonal shift with plucked violins and lush strings, its pacing languid and relaxed. Willow’s voice settles into a throaty contralto, recalling Fiona Apple’s jazz-flecked vocals on Tidal.
In fact, for an album made by someone who wasn’t even born during the decade, The 1st is a surprisingly adept compendium of alternative female singer-songwriters of the 1990s. “And Contentment,” which features Willow on guitar, respectfully culls from Tracy Chapman’s introspective folk. The light grunge, crunchy guitar riffs, and strident vocals of “Human Leech” recall Alanis Morissette’s razor-sharp pop angst. An easy highlight, “Warm Honey” takes the indie rock breakbeats of Luscious Jackson and infuses them with Erykah Badu’s early mix of lilting R&B and esoteric imagery (“The universe is too bright/Light beams in the sky speaking to my third eye”).
Willow knows she’s talented and she knows that, due to her status, she has to prove that talent twice as much as anyone else. That The 1st is able to somewhat shed its lyrical blemishes within the first few tracks—evolving into a measured, intelligent, laid back soul-rock record—speaks to the tenacity with which Willow pursues her artistic goals. On much of The 1st, it sounds like Willow is still figuring out her own creative persona—the guitar playing on “Romance” feels simplistic, and tracks like the repetitive “Oh No!!!” bog down what would otherwise be a fresh sound. That said, Willow is clearly biding her time, searching for the optimal self. The 1st represents a huge leap in the right direction. | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | MSFTS MUSIC / Roc Nation | November 9, 2017 | 6.7 | 9f2e5694-14e6-4937-b507-228b54223def | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The fifth full-length from the experimental Berlin-based musician offers a meditation on negativity that’s dreary and enervating in equal turns. | The fifth full-length from the experimental Berlin-based musician offers a meditation on negativity that’s dreary and enervating in equal turns. | Silvia Kastel: Air Lows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silvia-kastel-air-lows/ | Air Lows | The first words spoken on Air Lows are a firm suggestion: “Lay back.” Silvia Kastel’s tone is that of a knowledgeable overseer at a DIY hallucinogen ceremony. Her advice pans back and forth across the track while the cosmic instrumental suggests a funny person jumping around on the moon, alone with their thoughts. It’s an oddly whimsical introduction to a genuinely grave experimental electronic album full of anhedonic synths and moody sound effects. Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.
Much of Kastel’s previous output, both solo and as a founding member of the Italian duo Control Unit, has been influenced by ’70s and ’80s sounds of no wave and industrial music. Along these lines, her work often deals with themes of existential angst and depressive catharsis. She returns to this approach on Air Lows, but opens up her sound by incorporating motifs from club music for the first time—a move possibly influenced by her current home in Berlin. Kastel nurtures a more electrifying kind of machine energy by lacing her tracks with spectral techno beats stretched out in slow-mo. It becomes full-on body music when she discharges slabs of murky sub-bass that drag like an anvil across concrete. The effect is intensely visceral and immediately evocative of strains of sonic dread developed within jungle and UK dubstep.
Spindly, high-pitched synth gestures connect Kastel’s jumpy drum patterns and her gut-shifting low-end. They have an almost alchemical influence on the inner ear, their timbres alight with pleasantly grating resonance. It’s these passages, in combination with Kastel’s eerie vocal murmurations, that give the record its occult, para-spiritual feel. On the first half of Air Lows, these elements are implemented in a “song”-like format that feels a little too overdetermined by formal constraints. It’s on the album’s second half, which is more like a loosely defined four-part movement, that they really sync up with one another. The sonic palette forms its own ecology of sound, mutating and germinating in combusting feedback loops. “Heart 2 Tape” etches out a creepy form of dreamy decadence, while on “Spiderwebs” and “Concrete Void” Kastel pairs unwavering emotional intensity with dispassionate remove.
Much contemporary music that draws upon the canon of industrial and dark ambient ends up sounding like unimaginative Tumblr mood-boarding, or a flimsy attempt at LARPing bygone scenes. Kastel mostly avoids these pitfalls, though, and it’s clear that Air Lows is something a little more singular. Deciphering the lyrical content of her alternately sung and spoken passages can be hard, but one audible turn of phrase in “Spiderwebs” is a good index for the record’s ethos: “It’s the poetry of nothing/Concrete void.” Kastel’s previous solo release was called The Gap, and her fascination with hardcore negativity pervades the general spirit of Air Lows. Exactly what this negativity is supposed to do is left ambiguous—it’s positioned more like an abstract emotional compass than anything remotely resembling a coherent ideological stance.
The record’s central feeling tends to diffuse—in the moments when you’re not paying attention—through small adjustments in ambiance and mood. Gloom is stylized in many ways on Air Lows, and Kastel renders it luxuriously on the unsettling final track, “The Closer The Stranger.” Mainlining bursts of what the artist might figure as “concrete void,” it immerses the listener in smudged bliss. Kastel’s work here suggests that negativity can be bountiful, overflowing: something we ought to “lay back” into, as she urged in the beginning. | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Blackest Ever Black | November 17, 2017 | 7 | 9f2ffc22-de85-4816-be74-7b54e6a71602 | Alexander Iadarola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/ | |
Devendra Banhart's fourth album corrals the combined talents of the loose-knit freak-folk community; the result is one of the scene's most accessible and engaging records. | Devendra Banhart's fourth album corrals the combined talents of the loose-knit freak-folk community; the result is one of the scene's most accessible and engaging records. | Devendra Banhart: Cripple Crow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/553-cripple-crow/ | Cripple Crow | As "freak-folk" began to hit a stride last summer, Devendra Banhart's Golden Apples of the Sun compilation suggested a cogent introduction to the genre. A year later, Cripple Crow provides, in a sense, the loose-knit scene's strongest group effort to date. Banhart's fourth album isn't a compilation, nor is it billed as a group project, but he's assembled such a rich cast of cohorts here, it feels more like the fruit of community interaction than the product of a lone singer/songwriter.
The communal vibe is hinted at by the album's artwork: Rather than adorning the cover with his usual calligraphic scribbles, Banhart offers a composite photo of "The Family" (a term he often ascribes to his musical friends), gathered beneath a large knotty tree and accompanied by the disembodied heads of smiling spirits. Sgt. Pepper is the obvious point of departure, though unlike the Beatles' classic, there are no numbered silhouettes in the liner notes to decode the relative anonymity of the photo subjects. Fittingly, the only immediately recognizable figure is Banhart himself, crouching front and center, wings spread wide.
The artwork conjures Native America, an attribute Banhart seemingly alluded to in a recent email exchange, admitting that he's "a little terrified at how white most of the people are," but reassuring me that "68% of the people on the cover have Native American blood." Indeed, Banhart strives for ethnic diversity on Cripple Crow, boasting the highest concentration of Spanish-sung tracks of any of his albums (he was raised in Venezuela where Spanish was his mother tongue), and finding him moving further beyond "freak" territory and into a worldly blend of various exotic approaches. Banhart has always experimented with method and sound, but he's never before approached Cripple Crow's expertise and variety. In all its obvious details, the album not only finds Banhart coming into his own as a songwriter and performer, but suggests future directions for the 24-year-old as well.
Having started out on primitive recorders and four-track machines, Banhart only recently graduated to proper studios, and Cripple Crow further increases fidelity, possessing a warmer, more pristine quality. His vocals, too, often draped in slight reverb, are especially assured and less flaky than on previous outings. And as mentioned above, an ensemble cast showed up to back him: There's best chum Andy Cabic (aka Vetiver), Noah Georgeson (of Joanna Newsom's old rock band the Pleased, and producer of The Milk-Eyed Mender), and Thom Monohan (Pernice Brother and production whiz). The cast also includes members of Currituck Co., Espers, Yume Bitsu, The Blow, Feathers, CocoRosie, and others. Basically, it's a traveling band of hippies excited about Donovan who aren't afraid to rock.
On Oh Me Oh My's "Roots", Banhart sang, "I don't play rock 'n' roll." All that's changed. Cripple Crow features an explosion of psychedelic R&R stuffs. "Long Haired Child" maneuvers a three-pronged guitar attack-- Adam Forkner's distorted noodling, Banhart's wah-wah, and acoustic coupling-- backed with Otto Hauser's drums and Jona Bechtolt's percussion. "Lazy Butterfly" is memorable for Cabic's closely mic'd backing vocals and a tambora sheen along with hand drums and guitars. And "Little Boys", which Banhart alleges is sung from the perspective of a schizophrenic Hermaphrodite, is divided in half by a mid-song bass change-up which shifts the song up from a sorta boring Oldham prom-dance lament to its sinister, surfy refrain: "I see so many little boys I wanna marry/ I see plenty little kids I've yet to had."
Juxtaposed against a number of upbeat rock tracks, Banhart's quieter, more introspective material often makes a stronger impact. "Dragonflies", a whispered duet between Banhart and Matteah Baim of Metallic Falcons, flutters by in less than a minute with a cryptically tender lyricism. Likewise, album opener "Now That I Know" is one of his most beautiful and controlled tracks yet. It finds him backed only by cello and his own guitar, in confessional: "12 years old/ In [my] mama's clothes/ Shut the blinds and lock up every door/ And if you hear someone's coming near/ Just close your eyes it'll make 'em disappear."
Elsewhere, on "Heard Somebody Say", there's a sense of protest, with Feathers' lovely vocals adding witch-hunt background layers. Banhart gently lays down the thesis-- "Heard somebody say the war ended today/ But everybody knows it's going still"-- before winding around to the chill-inducing punchline, the easiest anti-war slogan ever: "It's simple, we don't want to kill." Later, he tries out Dylan rhyme schemes on "I Feel Just Like a Child", while "Some People Ride the Wave" is Louis Armstrong with New Orleans toy jazz ("some people write the songs that stay inside our souls"); "The Beatles" lets it be known that "Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the only Beatles in the world" before shifting gears into Spanish; Pangea and various fertility myths are given new legs in "Chinese Children"; and endless love song "Korean Dogwood" tells as thorough an elliptical story as Banhart's tackled.
Banhart's ambition is apparent throughout, but at 22 tracks and almost 75 minutes, the album does stretch its legs too long. Though it feels like an attempt to document as thoroughly as possible his late winter retreat to Woodstock, any more experienced mystics will tell you that blanks, dissolves, gaps, and other ingredients for mystery could've made it even richer. Still, Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern music. | 2005-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | XL | September 12, 2005 | 8.4 | 9f34cbd2-8c01-428d-a0b1-548652b1d89a | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The Puerto Rican trio’s debut album is a sleek collage of reggaetón, indie rock, and R&B, heralding a vivid new era of Caribbean syncretism. | The Puerto Rican trio’s debut album is a sleek collage of reggaetón, indie rock, and R&B, heralding a vivid new era of Caribbean syncretism. | Los Rarxs: La Rareza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-rarxs-la-rareza/ | La Rareza | Much like the motley dialects, foodways, and spiritual practices that define the region, Caribbean musicians have never been shy about colliding genres in the spirit of innovation. It’s a deeply rooted cultural approach that has carved the path for the region’s most commercially successful artists of the last few decades—just consider the history of salsa, reggaetón, and dembow, to name a few. Now a whole new generation is poised to do the same with contemporary sounds, and Los Rarxs are at the forefront. Their debut album sharpens their revelrous R&B, but it also offers a snapshot of Latinx popular music’s current zeitgeist, especially in the Caribbean.
Los Rarxs have been searching for their voice over the course of their last four EPs, turning their disparate styles and musical inspirations into the funk and spark that now defines them. Singer Vento Alejandro forged his sleek vocal style fronting rock bands on Puerto Rico’s beachy west coast, where competing with raucous instruments prepared him to share the booth with two exuberant wordsmiths. Meanwhile, rappers Erre and FOKINFROID’s delivery is lively and quick-witted, allowing them to complement each other instead of swerving into redundancy. Orteez, their longtime beatmaker and unofficial fourth member, is the lead producer of the album (his recent credits include fast-rising names such as popetón purveyor Rauw Alejandro and emotón darling Álvaro Díaz). The introduction of new collaborators MELLOWAVES and UNOUNO (aka Muela Inmunda) might account for the doors the band opens here, though they don’t stray too far from the sound that garnered them a following in the first place: a chimerical blend of indie rock, quiet storm R&B, East Coast hip-hop, and sticky reggaetón that is both cohesive and spirited. Think of them as a more debaucherous the Internet, or Free Nationals with slightly more verve, and some essential Boricua swag as the secret ingredient.
La Rareza’s first single, “No Tire Foto,” fuses house music with other genres, taking a page from a trend that has permeated música urbana for the past two years. The band follows the same direction in “Búscame,” a track that stitches an energetic drum’n’bass break with lyrics about seeking the ultimate party. It’s tailor-made to be played at rude volumes during a pregame, and infusing the song’s fun and flirty aura with a dose of EDM is a seamless combination.
With its electric guitar licks, slow-jam drums, and Vento’s frisky chorus, opener “Tú Nunca Has Sentido” signals to old fans that the boys are trying something new and vying for more commercial appeal. The album takes off on the next song; “Guitarra” maximizes the trio’s talents into a danceable track chock full of sexy double entendres and a perreo beat designed for grinding with your partner of choice. FROID in particular shines here, with a clever verse that name drops Fender and B.B. King, staying true to the theme without losing its provocative edge. “Enetepé” is also a standout; it’s a mishmash of snares, hi-hats, and warbles that embraces whimsy, but doesn’t succumb to mere cacophony.
Vento cedes “Nomes13” to his shooters Erre and FROID, and the two team up for a riotous diss track. Here, Erre’s flow resembles street storytelling with an edge, his cadence sometimes recalling Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Wish Bone, while FROID’s bars reflect a cheekier, more mischievous, and prurient demeanor. “Arrogantel,” meanwhile, is another opportunity for Vento to flaunt his smooth tenor and pop-rock and R&B sensibilities. Whether they’re being romantic or rambunctious, Los Rarxs always wear their emotions on their sleeves.
Reggaetón and its offshoots have dominated Puerto Rico for more than a decade, and more recently, Latinx trap and drill have encroached upon (and sometimes transcended) their predecessors. But now, pockets of a new sound—or sounds—have emerged on the island. Los Rarxs is one of numerous examples of up-and-coming artists creating a new aural oasis in Borikén, one that gleefully refuses easy definition. Alongside other performers like RaiNao (who Bad Bunny recently highlighted as one of his favorite discoveries of the summer and who is herself a fan of La Rareza) they instead exist in a musical smorgasbord that owes as much to rock en español icon Draco Rosa as reggaetón legend Don Omar.
Early in their career, Los Rarxs had unbridled zeal; today they’re more disciplined, but still thrilling. When even the most subdued tracks tempt a repeat listen, and the strongest ones promise to be in rotation for the rest of the year, it’s clear Los Rarxs are heralding a vivid new era of Caribbean syncretism. | 2022-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Sonido Porno | August 3, 2022 | 7.3 | 9f3f352d-f95f-47d7-a411-70ec31ecb966 | Juan J. Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/juan-j. arroyo / | |
This Australian garage-rock band's vocalist is several shades more complex and adaptable than your typical throat-shredding truth-teller: His warm, soulful voice pilots his group's promising 26-minute self-titled debut. | This Australian garage-rock band's vocalist is several shades more complex and adaptable than your typical throat-shredding truth-teller: His warm, soulful voice pilots his group's promising 26-minute self-titled debut. | Royal Headache: Royal Headache | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16599-royal-headache/ | Royal Headache | "When he sings, it just comes out." That was Chris "Shortty" Short, drummer of soulful Sydney garage-punkers Royal Headache, expressing his own awe at the vocal stylings of his bandmate Shogun to Pitchfork's Evan Minsker. A half century past its born-on date, in the midst of yet another uptick in interest in the scuzzy stuff, and even the best of garage rock's new breed's not exactly long on surprises; the cream of this particular crop, as our Jayson Greene rightly noted a week back, "plays upon beloved memories while confusing them," but the worst of it simply seems to content itself with rehashing of somebody else's past glories. Get 20 seconds into "Never Again", opening chugger of Royal Headache's 2011 self-titled debut (just reissued in the States), and you may find yourself wondering whether you're in for another rotely rollicking, backward-facing fuzz assault. Seconds later, Shogun opens his mouth and, well, you won't be wondering that much longer.
Soul's a tough one to quantify, one of music's true know-it-when-you-hear-it propositions. But this Shogun character's got soul, no doubt about it. His voice-- warm, urgent, overloaded with feeling-- comes on like a house on fire, harkening back to the grit and grain of Faces-era Rod Stewart and Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club, several shades more complex and adaptable than your typical throat-shredding three-chorded truth-teller. It's a wonderfully lived-in, schtick-free, era-defying thing; along with Rod and Sam, young Roger Daltrey, Argybargy-era Glenn Tilbrook, and even Bob Pollard edge their way into the frame, but what Shogun's doing is hardly some studious reading of all these greats. As Shortty rightly claims, it just seems to come out that way, the kind of thing you just can't fake. Sure, Shogun sings the hell out of these songs, but every line's imbued with real emotion, and even when he's jamming stanzas with a couple-three too many words, his meaning's never less than crystal-clear. That, too, is soul.
Shogun's assuredly the centerpiece here, but sub him out for somebody else, and Royal Headache's songs would still stand fairly tall. For every economy-ridden post-Ramones thrasher like "Back and Forth", there's a shambolically stately, wordless breath-catcher like "Wilson Street" or a misty-eyed yearner like "Distant and Vague", which sounds for all the world like the kind of song the Beatles would've covered in their Hamburg days. These performances-- lo-fi without sloppiness, reined-in without losing their rollicking edge-- provide a rock-solid counterpoint for Shogun's hollers and croons. The whole record's got a bristling, live-in-a-room feel, and vocally, there's almost nothing in the way of harmonizing. Shogun, front-and-center on every track but the instrumental, has it covered all by himself.
Royal Headache's 26 minutes go by quickly, and while it's not all run-and-gun pacing, another ballad (or another "Wilson Street") might have helped a bit with the balance. And, as with any innovation-averse music like this, there's a rousing game of spot the influence to be played if you think you can keep up. But the inclusive, ebullient Royal Headache's simply having too much fun in the present to ever let the past get in their way. "Honey Joy"-- the highest of Royal Headache's many highs-- finds an exuberant Shogun shouting, "honey joy, honey joy, honey joy, boys," a line that, typed out, doesn't look like much of anything. But Shogun, like Brenton Wood in "The Oogum Boogum Song" or Otis Redding in "Happy Song (Dum-Dum)", manages to turn that little sliver of nonsense into a pint-hoisting, mates-toasting embrace. "It just comes out," you say? By all means, keep it coming. | 2012-05-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? | May 11, 2012 | 8 | 9f3f76a1-6a42-4a2b-b683-e09a22244fc9 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The result of a 10-day recording session in Salvador De Bahia in Brazil, Calidostopia! features material from Oval's post-2010 output transformed into pop-structured songs featuring vocals from seven South American artists. | The result of a 10-day recording session in Salvador De Bahia in Brazil, Calidostopia! features material from Oval's post-2010 output transformed into pop-structured songs featuring vocals from seven South American artists. | Oval: Calidostópia! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17860-oval-calidostopia/ | Calidostópia! | Back in the mid-90s, Berlin's Markus Popp became known for trailblazing the iconic Clicks & Cuts style, working with the glitchy audio from skipping CDs. Back then, his band Oval was a trio, but Popp subsequently went solo and pursued an increasingly abstruse aesthetic with a series of albums for Thrill Jockey. Popp has often said that his work from this era was concerned with deconstructing and commenting on "music" in the traditional sense of the term, rather than participating directly in that culture. Oval's "Aero Deck", from 1994's Systemisch, was sampled on "Unison" from Björk's Vespertine, which takes a similarly deconstructionist approach.
In 2010, after almost a decade of silence from the Oval project, Popp started afresh with the name. He described O, released as Oval, as feeling like a "debut album". Sampled sonic minutiae were replaced with real instruments, "loops" replaced with "riffs," and careful studio arrangements supplemented with live improvisation. The results, by Oval's standards, were unprecedentedly warm and inviting. This pioneer of the abstract was, he claimed, finally making "music."
Take a closer look at Oval's discography, though, and this narrative starts to feel simplistic. For all his emphasis on procedure over music and his use of self-imposed compositional restraints, Popp has always had something of a populist sensibility. Half of Oval's oft-overlooked 1993 debut LP, Wohnton, featured charmingly unschooled vocals and breakbeat-led percussion, inviting comparisons with contemporaries Seefeel. A decade later, Popp collaborated with singer Eriko Toyoda as So, for an eponymous LP where twilit vocal-guitar ballads lurked under the clouds of digital filigree.
Calidostopia!, recently released as a free download, isn't so much a bolt from the blue as a return to a long-held preoccupation. This record was the result of a 10-day recording session in Salvador De Bahia in Brazil, funded by the Goethe Institute and the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia. Popp brought along tracks taken from O, its preceding EP Oh, and offcuts compilation OvalDNA, as well as some unreleased sketches. Seven vocalists from across South America transformed them, in Popp's words, from "material" into "songs." As such, this record treats vocals in a manner more direct than Popp has attempted since Wohnton, and foregrounds the song-like forms latent in Popp's recent compositions.
Given that many of these tracks have been previously released, the palette of this album will be familiar: gorgeous resonant tones, somewhere between guitar and plucked piano strings, that sputter sharply or lap like waves; splashy drums dancing nimbly around a groove; miniaturised squalls of electronic noise. In fact, as with O, Popp's choice of sounds is almost too uniform, leaving it up to the vocalists to ward off potential monotony. Here they have mixed success. At points the marriage of vocal and backing is entirely adequate but doesn't really amount to more than the sum of its parts. Maité Gadea fails to take command in "Glossy", and her contribution feels slightly extraneous as a result; Aiace's melodies on "Alpen" and "Credit Roll" unfold in a measured, staid manner that seems to stifle the organic nature of their backings.
But a handful of exquisite moments make the whole thing worthwhile. Agustín Albrieu is the most reliable in this regard, his wonderfully clear, open tone lending a starry-eyed quality to opener "Featurette" and closer "Savvy Aeropuerto". Elsewhere, Hana Kobayashi transforms "Koral" into a beautiful hushed lullaby, undeniably the record's highlight. Calidostopia! certainly feels like a hothoused project rather than a painstakingly constructed album-- the vocals are a little lacking in finesse at points, and the wholesale use of pre-existing tracks can lend the thing a feeling of inflexibility. But at its best it's a captivating listen, and an admirable move from a producer who continues to challenge himself after two decades in the game. "This might be only the beginning," says Popp of this project. Fingers crossed. | 2013-03-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-03-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | self-released | March 22, 2013 | 6.8 | 9f43268c-0183-4b87-8cff-5ddcedce9e13 | Angus Finlayson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/angus-finlayson/ | null |
Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. The former powerviolence group Ceremony's new album, their second for Matador, finds them wanting to sound like Joy Division, and it’s interesting in the way that any true debacle is interesting. | Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. The former powerviolence group Ceremony's new album, their second for Matador, finds them wanting to sound like Joy Division, and it’s interesting in the way that any true debacle is interesting. | Ceremony: The L-Shaped Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20569-the-l-shaped-man/ | The L-Shaped Man | Hardcore is a genre that revels in certain clichés—the ultimate of which is making a record that renounces your ties to hardcore. Despite its commonality, it’s still a risky maneuver: perhaps playing in such a stylistic straitjacket has made a band incapable of doing anything else. Even if it’s an artistically successful record, it can alienate old fans without attracting new ones. Most relevant to Ceremony, it’s a card you only get to play once. Six years after they could be accurately described as "powerviolence," the Bay Area group released their John Goodmanson-produced Matador debut *Zoo—*a slog through boggy, primordial punk, interesting for the sole fact that it was made by a former powerviolence band. Ceremony undergoes another drastic change on The L-Shaped Man, but it cannot be leniently judged relative to Violence Violence. They’re now just one of the thousands of indie rock bands that really want to sound like Joy Division, and sounding no more engaged with their source material than the average dude plucking an Unknown Pleasures graphic T off the rack at Hot Topic.
Mind you, Ceremony are on their fifth record and are named after a Joy Division song. But at the very least, the veritable return to their roots makes sense within the context of The L-Shaped Man. Ceremony are also one of the thousands of indie rock bands making a conceptual breakup record; and in these situations, such a breakup is assumed to be so catastrophic that it totally dismantles one’s self-construct and leaves nothing but foundation. Joy Division lyrics, advice from your father, bumper stickers that read "all things pass"—everything you’ve been led to think is trite once you’re out of your teens might actually reveal themselves to be the truth.
There’s no way to judge the authenticity of Ross Farrar’s emotions on The L-Shaped Man. But how can he can be exempt on an album where everything feels like facade? In particular, the facade inherent in Ceremony’s own name, as they grab at the most obvious signifiers of their idols and pass them off as their own. For one thing, Farrar’s vocals are now unrecognizable, or only recognizable as Ian Curtis karaoke. To be fair, Curtis is a natural touchstone for a punk rock carny barker, as his enduring qualities—the militaristic cadences, the claustrophobic melodies—can be approximated without much technical ability.
But you can’t fake his command or intensity or sonorousness, though Farrar tries. Or maybe he doesn’t try hard enough. The lyrics are delivered with honesty and presumed urgency. They are also proof that those qualities can be less important than thinking before you talk. The dishwater-gray ambience of "Exit Fears" implies sleepless nights filled with lingering regret, while Farrar moans, "The pain will leave in the night/ Memories return in the light"—which seems to express the exact opposite of what he means. "The root of the world is in the red heart," "you saw yourself walking with no one else and it scared you"—they all aspire to be aphorisms and fade upon impact like a tweet never to be favorited. The album title itself is indicative of Farrar making observations without any insight—men are generally L-shaped, but...so?
The lack of resonance is even more obvious in Farrar’s newfound tone, a monster mash of alternating cartoonish bellow and honk which doesn’t sound like Curtis or Paul Banks so much as the dude from Editors drunkenly imitating Paul Banks trying to sing like Ian Curtis. Of all Farrar’s means of cheating towards cogency—repetition of lyrics that just can’t bear the attempts at establishing portent, lending numerous song titles a definitive article to import significance—the most absurd is his Jay McInerney-like tendency to speak almost entirely in the second person. Call it Turn on the Bright Lights, Big City.
As a working unit, Ceremony still play with customary, clumsy enthusiasm. The terse drumrolls, plangent guitar fills, and basslines that are all thumbs—it’s all here and played with the expected looseness of a former hardcore band that moved onto garage rock and is now learning post-punk on the fly. It occasionally coalesces into a surf-goth hybrid that at least justifies John Reis being roped into this. Who knows what Ceremony expected of the former Hot Snakes/Rocket From the Crypt frontman, but his production might be more overmatched than mismatched: the confused melodies Farrar strews over the piano plunking of "Hibernation" and the wayward guitar leads in "Root of the World" can generously be heard as an experiment in avant-garde atonality. Ceremony would’ve been better off phoning a different guy from Drive Like Jehu—put Mark Trombino behind the drums or the boards and he could provide a high-velocity, low-viscosity sleekness that would make relatively hooky outliers like "The Separation" and "Bleeder" go incognito on satellite radio as enjoyably derivative post-pop-punk.
The L-Shaped Man does have an advantage over Zoo, in that it’s interesting in the way any true debacle is, where a band’s conviction is either impervious to any kind of outside intervention or just not subject to it. Just look at the album cover: almost immediately after Ceremony revealed The L-Shaped Man, fans noticed its too-hilarious-to-be-intentional similarity to a gag from the "A Millhouse Divided" episode of "The Simpsons." This is better known as the "Can I Borrow a Feeling" episode, an unfortunate coincidence seeing as how we’re talking about a record whose entire aesthetic is on loan. It’s even more serendipitous in light of the exact scene with the offending Pictionary attempt—there we have Kirk Van Houten, on the verge of a calamitous divorce, yelling at a dinner party crowd who reacts to his inept visual rendering of "dignity" with embarrassed silence. Maybe it's good for a laugh, but only as a defense mechanism against the cringe-inducing experience of watching artistic expression abandon a heartbroken man at his lowest moment. | 2015-05-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-05-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 20, 2015 | 3.3 | 9f43aa3f-431e-4178-a94c-5663c9d982f1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Hot Chip founding member’s first official solo full-length is a collection of charming odes to the history of dance music. | The Hot Chip founding member’s first official solo full-length is a collection of charming odes to the history of dance music. | Joe Goddard: Electric Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23106-electric-lines/ | Electric Lines | As a founding member of Hot Chip, Joe Goddard has been producing on an international stage since his band’s dance pop became popular in the mid-2000s. Over the past decade, he’s also released high-energy disco and house as one half of the 2 Bears, co-founded Greco-Roman Records, and produced countless remixes (he was even nominated for a Grammy last year for his edit of the Chemical Brothers’ “Wide Open”). But many of those efforts seemed secondary to Hot Chip. More than any of his previous solo endeavors, Goddard’s latest solo album, Electric Lines, holds steadily on its own.
For Electric Lines, Goddard has adapted the tried and true DJ/producer album format—multiple vocal features, obscure samples, pop structures—to his particular sensibilities. But instead of stringing cookie-cutter dancefloor hits, Electric Lines is an electronic pop LP funneled through the intellectual lens Goddard honed during his many years in Hot Chip’s ranks. One of the best examples of this is the album’s opening track, “Ordinary Madness,” which sounds like a meditation on the Zara Larsson-style tropical house that has been tediously inescapable for the past five years or so. Amid warm, tinkling synths and breezy electric guitars, British singer Slo sweetly croons a catchy melody—if she sounded any more laid-back, she’d have had to record her takes on a chaise lounge. Instead of merely copying radio-friendly summertime songs, Goddard tries to deconstruct them, injecting an arsenal of tricks into tired production tropes, making something both familiar and instantly listenable.
Lead single “Home” is the album’s crown jewel, both an homage to the deep Detroit house of the ’80s and the UK big beat chart-toppers of the ’90s. Built around a jubilant sample of “We’re on Our Way Home” by 1970s Detroit funk group Brainstorm, “Home” couples that band’s star-reaching, soulful vocals with those of 26-year-old Daniel Wilson, an American singer and producer who has been one of this genre’s best kept secrets for the past few years. With its low R&B tones and splashy snares, “Home” is a perfect middle ground between an understated comedown and an all-out peaking-on-the-dancefloor banger. It illustrates the feeling of reluctantly leaving a party only because the sun has decided to come up.
Goddard’s odes to the history of dance music are charming, and Electric Lines convincingly showcases the sheer breadth of his encyclopedic knowledge of production. It’s also a little too reliant on it. Though solidly enjoyable, Electric Lines could have benefitted from some more concretely original ideas to propel it forward.
But when Goddard taps into his love for house, disco, and techno, his enthusiasm radiates through the speakers. Where the sample on “Home” is used in contrast to the song’s more low-key moments, “Lose Your Love” repurposes the Emotions’ “I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love” in a more traditional way, carving through a climbing piano loop punctuated with blasts of horns. Goddard gives us a taste of the familiar with the title track, featuring vocals by Hot Chip’s lead singer Alexis Taylor. It’s the quietest and most reflective song on the record, a slow-building web of handclaps, electropop keys, and Taylor’s unmistakably pensive voice. It’s difficult not to pit it against other Hot Chip songs, and realistically, it could fit on any one of their albums. Here, it’s a touching look at what Goddard has accomplished and a new place to stand. | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino / Greco-Roman | April 17, 2017 | 7.2 | 9f45c983-7ad4-4161-89b9-cc1d2ebdaecc | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
2 Chainz's Trap-A-Velli Tre arrives as the rapper is fighting to remain relevant in a crowded field. Perhaps because of this, he raps with real purpose for the first time in a long time, and the tape contains several serious reminders that 2 Chainz still has real hit-making potential. | 2 Chainz's Trap-A-Velli Tre arrives as the rapper is fighting to remain relevant in a crowded field. Perhaps because of this, he raps with real purpose for the first time in a long time, and the tape contains several serious reminders that 2 Chainz still has real hit-making potential. | 2 Chainz: Trap-A-Velli Tre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20926-trap-a-velli-tre/ | Trap-A-Velli Tre | When rapper 2 Chainz released Trap-A-Velli in 2009 he was still Tity Boi, the more prominent member of middling Atlanta duo Playaz Circle. That seems like a lifetime ago. Back then, as a signee of Ludacris' label, Disturbing Tha Peace, with one hit single to his credit (which was heavily indebted to its Lil Wayne feature), his boasts were discernibly smaller. Still, it was easy to hear his talent working. Even then he was an expert at making basic rap colorful and comical (on "Stunt": "The feet on the whip, big like Jurassic Park/ The car tall, to get in you need a running start"). By the time 2010's Trap-A-Velli 2 arrived, the rapper was a free agent, and it felt like he was campaigning to be a star, swaggering a bit bigger on record while carefully floating around an alternate moniker. The following year brought the name change and with it came the breakthrough, completing one of the more successful rebrands in rap history. Shortly thereafter, he landed the rap trifecta: a big feature run, a signature mixtape, and a #1 debut.
The third installment in the series, Trap-A-Velli Tre, comes at a very different time for 2 Chainz. After becoming a chart mainstay for much of the '10s, he's fighting to remain relevant in a crowded field. His 2013 sophomore album, B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time, was shut out by urban radio: Not only did it sell significantly less than its predecessor, it also failed to chart a single in either the Billboard Top 40 or the Rap Top 10. (Four of his previous five singles hit both of those marks.) For a rapper that relies on visibility as much as 2 Chainz does, that's a pretty sizable blow. Last year, his solid FreeBase EP came and went without so much as a whimper, despite the stellar, single-ready "Crib in My Closet" with big name guests Rick Ross and A$AP Rocky. He's at the point in his career where stagnation could render him a footnote.
Perhaps 2 Chainz is aware of this, because on Trap-A-Velli Tre, for the first time in a very long time, he raps with real purpose. These aren't the phoned-in raps from failed crossovers like Jessie J's "Burnin' Up" and TeeFLii's "24 Hours". 2 Chainz has always been naturally charismatic, and it's an integral part of his shtick, but his true talent is measuring the weight of a goofy punchline. When he raps "Get so much pussy I go to sleep with a condom on" on "A Milli Billi Trilli", it comes after a string of considerably less ridiculous jokes and it lands right before the hook, boosting its effectiveness.
Good comedy sometimes requires a sharp eye for commentary, and on the tape's centerpiece, "GOAT", which features The-Dream, he mixes in keen observations ("Mama's only child, the crackhouse was my daycare") with goofy humor ("Aiming for the stars, so I fucked her on the balcony"). Trap-A-Velli Tre often struggles to find that balance elsewhere. On a pair of Zaytoven-produced tracks, "BFF" and "Starter Kit", cringeworthy bars stick out like sore thumbs. His daughters pop up on "Halo (Letter to My Unborn Son)", a weird record written from the perspective of the fetus. There's a random bar about having enough land to find Sasquatch. Sixteen tracks means there is far too much room for filler. 2 Chainz isn't built to embellish.
Despite the overabundance of one-liners, it isn't all laughs on Trap-A-Velli Tre. There are several serious reminders that 2 Chainz still has real hit-making potential. The TM88-produced "Big Meech Era" staggers back in time through otherworldly synths and feedbacking 808s. "Watch Out" reinterprets the minimalism of OG Maco's "U Guessed It" and turns it into a full-on jam that can sustain itself for longer that six seconds. On "Lapdance in the Trap House", produced by Honorable C Note, he shouts some of his most graphic boasts ("Put a half a milli in an MCM bag/ Had that muthafucka looking pregnant!") over deflating synth chords. If he can again harness his charm, he may just stick around awhile longer. | 2015-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 19, 2015 | 6.6 | 9f52b327-98d5-451d-87eb-46813a41287b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
While only four tracks and under 20 minutes of music, the Swedish duo Thunder Tillman’s debut EP spans continents. | While only four tracks and under 20 minutes of music, the Swedish duo Thunder Tillman’s debut EP spans continents. | Thunder Tillman: Jaguar Mirror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22192-jaguar-mirror/ | Jaguar Mirror | There’s not much info to be gleaned on the Swedish duo Thunder Tillman, and you have to dig deep just to find out that number of members and country of origin. Perhaps most elucidating is a recent mix for The Lot radio, wherein the group (or was it just one member plus their life coach?) labeled the set “a magic carpet ride with no dead weight” and then proceeded to drift through tripped-out edits of Lizzy Mercier Descloux and PiL as well as world-music warpers like Hector Zazou and Aksak Maboul. All these smartly chosen regional jams, mixing into a psychedelic Pangaeam points to their own sound, as their own productions seamlessly slid right into the mix without marking an obvious crossing of borders.
While only four tracks and under 20 minutes of music, Thunder Tillman’s debut EP for ESP Institute spans continents. In that manner, it both mirrors the aesthetic of the LA-based imprint while also marking a new direction for it. Since 2009, ESP Institute has specialized in left-field dance tracks from producers around the world; it’s where Norwegian Prins Thomas remixes Japanese weirdos Cos/Mes, dark circuitry gets bent by Serbian 33-10-3402 and Aussie Tornado Wallace gets washed out by Cali beachheads Pharaohs. But like most dance imprints, the label usually focuses on producers working by their lonesome, while Tillman sounds like a duo just jamming things out, not quite sure where their ultimate destination might be.
Take opener “Exact Location of the Soul” which begins at a low murmur of strummed guitar and droning organ. Just as it passes the minute mark and you suspect it has reached a chill cruising altitude, it suddenly picks up velocity. Drums crash in and give the song a classic motorik beat and the song blooms into Technicolor with flute twirls and swirling keys. The melody climbs higher, and while it brings to mind the likes of La Düsseldorf as well as bands like Stereolab and Spiritualized who emulated that sublime rock drone, “Soul” drifts along at its own pace.
The other tracks eschew the dancefloor entirely, but are sublime in their own right. “Snake Charmers Union” moves slowly, propelled by little more than a shaker and floor toms as the melody glints behind the percussion, wheezing and whirring at a relaxed pace, slowly dovetailing into the dizzying keyboard arpeggios of early Terry Riley on closer “Alignments.” The title track suggests the most promise: A bass and church organ figure lurch together, beehive drones and wordless vocals swell all around while a rattle invokes cumbia at its most psychedelic. It all suggests a methodical climb up Teotihuacan, and nearly four minutes in, it all strips back to just organ and voice, suggestive of a Morricone soundtrack, building tension with only a few elements. And like most magic carpet rides or pyramid climbs, you wonder just how you got up to this rarefied space and how you'll get back down. | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ESP Institute | August 3, 2016 | 7.7 | 9f55c305-6ce5-4f3d-98c7-886991fe1b0f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Puerto Rican quartet blends streamlined psych pop, atmospheric chillout, and yacht-rock disco on a concept album about lovelorn dream states. | The Puerto Rican quartet blends streamlined psych pop, atmospheric chillout, and yacht-rock disco on a concept album about lovelorn dream states. | Epilogio: Cromo Rx | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/epilogio-cromo-rx/ | Cromo Rx | With their 2018 debut album, Modo, Puerto Rico’s Epilogio staked out a thoroughly contemporary position within a lineage of Latin psych rock and disco. Founded a few years before, the quartet worked its way from smaller venues to touring Mexico at a time when rock was being eclipsed by Latin trap, standing out in their Geordi La Forge-esque visors and all-white tracksuits. Tracks like “Sonido Infinito,” “Submarina Club,” and “Otro Nivel” channeled inspirations from ’70s Argentine rockers Almendra and Pescado Rabioso alongside dream pop and acid jazz into sleek, subdued funk.
Five years later, the group applies its retro fixations to more ambitious ends with Cromo Rx, a concept album about a special pill that lulls those who take it into a deep slumber filled with fantastical dreams. They lean into the setup with aplomb, using it to alchemize sounds and genres: bolero interludes sandwiched between surf-rock riffs; glam-metal guitar hooks and echoes of ’80s new wave that segue into somber emo.
Following the expository “La Pastilla de Tus Sueños, Pt. 1” (“The Pill of Your Dreams, Pt. 1”), the horn fanfare of “Pirámide” kicks off the sojourn with a fusion of indie rock and electric sitar, courtesy of Peré Oudav. Peppered with references to heat, mirages, and pyramids, the song evokes a trippy desert landscape, an idea underlined by the René Laloux-inspired visuals of its music video. From that setting they shift to the pastoral ’60s harmonies of “Hangar,” whose folksy twangs make it easy to picture Epilogio performing from a quaint fairgrounds gazebo. “12AM,” in contrast, harnesses arena-rock energy with crisp drums and bluesy guitar licks before morphing into a sleek, Tame Impala-esque shuffle that underlines guitarist Marco Torres’ breezy croon.
Epilogio have been releasing the bulk of Cromo Rx’s tracks as singles for a year now, and fittingly, the album feels like a collection of A-sides. “Circuito por Milán” and “Platicar” are tailor-made to kill live, so much so that they re-recorded the latter to include an extended jam they’d been tacking on at the end in concert. The ethereal "Molecular" marries funky wah-wah with chillout, while the solemn “Los Cuervos”—with guest vocals from Chango Menas, of the now-disbanded group Índigo—pulls back the sheet and confirms what’s really gnawing at Epilogio’s melancholy: heartbreak, of course, as ever. It’s all fun and games until you remember what you’re trying to run away from. Beneath fanciful lyrics sketching out the album’s dream world—filled with explorers, race car drivers, secret agents, and spacemen—lurks an underlying angst: These are adventures meant for two.
Concept albums can be a risky proposition, but Epilogio make good use of Cromo Rx’s expanded imaginative bandwidth. As they travel from dream to dream, the band revels in exhilarating moods while grappling with the lovelorn feelings that loom over the fits of joy. Whereas Modo was an “instruction manual” to overcoming heartbreak, here they bring a more outlandish approach to similar subject matter. The sound of the record is so lively and varied that the album’s conceptual Macguffin might not even have been necessary. But Epilogio’s creative swing helps show off the breadth of their musicality and their increasingly sharp lyrics. As rock en español oscillates between indulging in saccharine pop and retreating to harder-edged corners of alternative and metal, Epilogio show that there’s another path to be found in tapping the nostalgic sounds of decades past and reshaping them into a narrative that hits all its emotional beats. | 2023-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | December 11, 2023 | 7.6 | 9f5b665f-106f-4f0c-aa3f-b6e6f3e5baa7 | Juan J. Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/juan-j. arroyo / | |
The L.A. duo's debut album is very much in sync with the R&B slow jams made popular in recent months. But inc. doesn't aim to duplicate the vocal abilities or striking personalities of contemporaries Frank Ocean or Jessie Ware, opting instead for distinct, velveteen scene-setting. | The L.A. duo's debut album is very much in sync with the R&B slow jams made popular in recent months. But inc. doesn't aim to duplicate the vocal abilities or striking personalities of contemporaries Frank Ocean or Jessie Ware, opting instead for distinct, velveteen scene-setting. | Inc.: no world | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17625-teen-inc-no-world/ | no world | no world is Andrew and Daniel Aged's second release as inc. (formerly Teen Inc.), and it refines and improves on 2011's 3 EP. On that brief release, the two L.A. producers were still trying to extract their strengths as songwriters and producers from their fixation on 1980s R&B. Two years later, they've found a much more appealing comfort zone. The Ageds are producers and session players first-- they've produced and played with a handful of big names in R&B, soul, and pop music as well as lo-fi artist Nite Jewel-- and this approach manifests itself clearly on no world, which feels like the work of studio hermits successfully dialing in on a sound. The atmospheres, textures, and melodies here feel drawn from a parallel universe where smooth Quiet Storm standards like "All This Love" or "Secret Lovers" were made in the ProTools era of infinite layering.
Whether by plan, luck, or a combination of both, no world finds itself in good company. Over the past 12 months, sultry, slow jam R&B has made an incredible comeback: Miguel's "Adorn" borrowed from "Sexual Healing" and Gregory Abbott's "Shake You Down", and the sound found its cachet heightened with Frank Ocean's "Thinkin' Bout You", Usher's "Climax," Jessie Ware's Devotion, and the Voodoo reissue. inc. doesn't aim to duplicate the vocal abilities or striking personalities of their most skilled contemporaries, instead opting for distinct scene-setting. Opening cuts "The Place" and "Black Wings" are enveloping soundscapes cloaked in velvet, cut with a self-conscious air of mystery. When Andrew sings, "I feel like you've been here before," it's the perfect piece of bedroom soul scene-setting: It's all about you, not him, wait... doesn't he know you from somewhere?
Though the album is obsessed with the sound of the early 1980s, the Ageds incorporate nods toward R&B's internet-fueled 21st century mutations; "The Place" and "5 Days" pull the flat, skittering drum patter from Atlanta's trap-rap production playbook. The last few years' indie/R&B crossover resonates throughout the album, as well, with good reason. Legendary British independent 4AD is releasing no world, and the grey, slowly billowing guitars on "black wings" and the cavernous atmospherics of "Angel" feel like the Aged brothers' nod toward label godheads the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. Andrew's muted vocals throughout the record, mixed to blend in with the production, have more in common with Toro y Moi's willowy retro soul than anything currently climbing the R&B charts.
Being perfectly of its time obviously doesn't mean that no world competes on the same level as their most successful contemporaries: the xx, Rhye's viral-era, gender-twisting Sade fixation, even How to Dress Well's full-on smooth-soul deconstruction. There's the sense that the duo with the purposefully generic corporate moniker, the timid fixation on lower case letters, and the penchant for composing songs out of genres are comfortable with their whispery anonymity, which is fortunate: inc. is both faithful to its source material and clever enough to twist it into new shapes, but at least for the time being, no world is unlikely to bring the Ageds out of the shadows. | 2013-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | February 19, 2013 | 7 | 9f609c86-8997-4250-8c24-81e3988fd778 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
This punk band from Vancouver has learned a thing or two about sludge and volume from the year punk broke, but Nü Sensae also have the finesse to break the mold. At its best, the record is a thrilling example of the power of righteous anger. | This punk band from Vancouver has learned a thing or two about sludge and volume from the year punk broke, but Nü Sensae also have the finesse to break the mold. At its best, the record is a thrilling example of the power of righteous anger. | Nü Sensae: Sundowning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17193-sundowning/ | Sundowning | Rage at its most pointed can offer a footing, a way to define yourself through protest and negation. But it's more potent when left open to interpretation. Delivered in abstract terms, rage can elevate a punk band. Furious questions, not answers, leave a lasting impression. What does this band detest? Nü Sensae, the Vancouver trio of bassist and vocalist Andrea Lukic, drummer Daniel Pitout, and newly added guitarist Brody McKnight, explore the latter territory on their heaviest and finest noise punk record yet, Sundowning.
Nü Sensae's approach feels like a cut-and-paste message-in-a-bottle from the early 1990s: the hysteric vocal ferocity of Babes in Toyland's Kat Bjelland; the unpredictable artistry of early Sonic Youth; the violent corners of post-hardcore noise à la Unsane. This band has learned a thing or two about sludge and volume from the year punk broke; in 2010, inspired by Bikini Kill zines, they began monthly fan-mailings to hundreds of followers around the globe. But Nü Sensae also have the finesse to break the mold: guitars that hint at mystic psychedelia, dirging death marches, wildly tense drum builds. Some verses border on floating, spoken word, as in the record's dread-laced final moment: "I'm in my own world. Life is a nice girl," Lukic deadpans on the massive "Eat Your Mind". "Sweet and secret subtle mess. My 45 is loaded. My head is exploding."
Everything on Sundowning is heavier and more pronounced than the band's 2010 full-length TV, Death, and the Devil. The menacing lead single, "Swim", is a dynamic punk song about doing something new-- "I hit it for the first time/ You wouldn't even try"-- that packs more variation into three minutes than some punk groups manage on an entire record. It opens with sharp, ringing chords and pummeling drums that foreshadow Lukic's clenched, harrowing attack: shrill, full-throated roars that are improbably visceral. Here, and throughout, Lukic flips between coarse, grating shrieks and a hovering, emotionless style that channels Kim Gordon. It sounds both schizophrenic and seamless, anchoring the band's studied loud-quiet shifts. Sundowning's contrasted vocals create a friction that increases the album's velocity, even when thematically deluded, like on the maniacal "Dust": "Speak backwards/ Talk faster/ The walls become a monster/ You've realized/ Your nightmares/ Are thoughts and nothing matters."
Melody is not a priority. The band seems more concerned with dismantling drum kits. Pitout's percussive assaults function like an additional voice of their own-- opening songs unexpectedly with crescendoing rolls, or working with negative space to create something tense and uneasy. The distant "Tea Swamp Park" and "Say What You Are" use skittish, barely-there instrumentation with peculiar, far-off harmonies. The album's introductory instrumental "First Born" conjures a slow, haunted sense of isolation, like peaking through the door to a musty old house, suspecting it's empty but imagining the potential horrors inside. "Tyjna", meanwhile, is a grim, anxious, and ultimately thrilling track sung in Lukic's native Serbian, centered on a jailed person hit with a supernatural fear of our internalized secrets. "What do I do now without my thoughts?" Lukic shouts. Its sentiment feels timely, with a delivery easily comparable to Pussy Riot.
In a 2011 radio interview, a broadcaster asked Pitout about a t-shirt he wore in a picture online: "GIRLS INVENTED PUNK ROCK, NOT ENGLAND," the popular Kim Gordon shirt. The reporter inquired as to what Pitout thought women and non-straight men bring to punk. "Personally, I'm a gay male, and I really relate to female punk musicians," he said. "There's something inherently angry and punk about growing up a girl, or gay, or feeling like you don't fit into the top seat in society." Nü Sensae, despite their loud and endearingly torturous qualities, don't communicate so transparently on record. But Sundowning is an empowering listen, and Lukic's roars force you to reckon with what's raw inside yourself.
Last weekend, I went running with this album. I happened upon a young man clad in a very different sort of shirt: "Cool story babe. Now make me a sandwich." Dumbfounded, I paused, and started towards him; took a photo, told him squarely to fuck himself, and moved away. Which is to say, bands like Nü Sensae can offer valid lessons for living; stay mad, make something of it. And they also offer reminders that so long as pricks like that guy exist, and better dressed versions of him are entrusted as lawmakers, our world will always have room for vital, liberative punk. | 2012-09-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-09-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Suicide Squeeze | September 27, 2012 | 8 | 9f7273ba-ecce-45a5-b27f-75a9d6d924b9 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Michael Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record. | Michael Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record. | Michael Jackson: Xscape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19333-michael-jackson-xscape/ | Xscape | Michael Jackson has released more new music in the five years since his death than in the 12 years before it. Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record, inexplicably named after the group that had a hit with "Just Kickin' It". It's a set of outtakes and misfires that Jackson recorded in the 20th century, freshly "re-produced" by L.A. Reid, Timbaland, and others to sound as if he'd just shown up to make a new record in a contemporary style.
That, it should be noted, is a trick that's been tried before with Jackson's music. When Motown overdubbed and remixed some of his decade-old factory seconds in 1984, it yielded the Farewell My Summer Love album, whose packaging briefly fooled a few people into thinking it was the follow-up to Thriller. It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.
It doesn't help that the outtakes they're dealing with are several tiers below the stuff that ended up on Jackson's later albums—maybe the estate is trying to parcel out the best material over time, maybe it doesn't get any better than this. "A Place with No Name" is Jackson's rewrite of America's two-chord wonder "A Horse with No Name", which is a bad enough idea on its own; Stargate, who produced the new version, replace the signature guitar riff with a sugary electroswing arrangement, but it doesn't help. Most of these tracks are Jackson hiccuping and eee-hee-ing on autopilot through underdeveloped semi-tunes; both Grace Jones and MC Lyte beat him to the title "Slave to the Rhythm" with much better songs. (The version here is not the one with Justin Bieber that leaked a while back.)
Jackson liked to present himself as pop's eternally youthful Peter Pan. In truth, he was more its Rabbit Angstrom, forever re-enacting his moment of moonwalking glory from a position of ever-increasing bitterness. Defensive, brittle songs like Xscape's title track ("don't you try to tell me what is right for me!") don't look good on anyone. The most embarrassing song here, though, is "Do You Know Where Your Children Are", a Dangerous outtake that apparently never got finished. (If Jackson knew what the bridge's lyrics were going to be, he wasn't letting on in the recording studio.) It's a finger-jabbing harangue about a 12-year-old runaway who's "tired of stepdaddy using her/ Saying that he'll buy her things while sexually abusing her" and ends up hooking on Sunset Boulevard. As courageously stand-taking as it was for Jackson to indicate that he opposed child abuse, it might not have been wise for his estate to release a song in which he's getting all sanctimonious about that particular topic. (The shred-by-numbers guitar solo that ends the new version doesn't do the song any favors either.)
The one keeper on Xscape is its opener, "Love Never Felt So Good", which is also its oldest song—it dates from 1983 or so—and the one that's been in circulation the longest: written by Jackson and Paul Anka, it initially surfaced on a 1984 Johnny Mathis album. It's got the best Jackson vocal here, too. The original take, which is mostly just his voice, fingersnaps and a piano, showcases the kind of gravity-defying singing-for-pleasure that we barely heard from him in the post-Thriller era. The deluxe version of Xscape appends a Timbaland-produced remix of "Love Never Felt So Good" on which Justin Timberlake sings along with the old tape, featuring disco flourishes borrowed from Jackson's "Working Day and Night". It sounds pleasantly like an echo of good Michael Jackson, but the fact that sampling an even earlier Jackson song makes it sound more contemporary says something about how wrongheaded this entire project is. | 2014-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | May 15, 2014 | 4.1 | 9f73bb2b-033b-48f5-bd0c-47c6facf2202 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Philadelphia band return with a glorious sheen on their pro-worker, pro-barroom rock’n’roll. | The Philadelphia band return with a glorious sheen on their pro-worker, pro-barroom rock’n’roll. | Sheer Mag: A Distant Call | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheer-mag-a-distant-call/ | A Distant Call | At this point in Sheer Mag’s five-year career, the Philadelphia four-piece has delivered more power-pop and heavy metal riffs than a Thin Lizzy cover band expo. Their face-slapping, fist-pumping anthems have sounded countless working-class and socialist rallying cries. By now, are we hoping for more of the same? Or are we ready for growth, their “weird” album, the kind that would shuttle the group from one vintage era to another, maybe a record with some ’80s-influenced keytar and 808s, alongside a ’90s grungy self-seriousness?
When a band is so deeply rooted in and influenced by an era long since past, progress can be hard to track. If you were to get no further than the first couple songs on their second full-length album, A Distant Call, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing that Sheer Mag was ready to give us more of that old school rock‘n’roll, rather than something riskier. “Steel Sharpens Steel” opens with lead vocalist Tina Halladay’s signature manic howl, kicking off a stomp-and-chant anthem about fighting the system that comes down like a sledgehammer. “Blood From A Stone” covers the injustice of living check to check in the land of milk and honey. They are perfectly serviceable and easily accessible follow-ups to 2017’s Need to Feel Your Love and Compilation LP (a collection of Sheer Mag’s first three EPs). Eleven or 12 songs like this would be good enough—after all, we could always use more thrashing workers’ rights anthems.
But A Distant Call is a slow, slow burn. It’s not until halfway through “Unfound Manifest”—an open-hearted reflection on the guilt and shame of feeling depressed while so many others have it worse off than you—that the band unleashes new depths. “I’m in my head and I’m feeling false,” Halladay sings over a bridge of warbly, undistorted guitar. That vulnerability, combined with the unfamiliar, looser, almost jazzier sound—more Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles rather than, say, Kiss—signals that something new has broken through. These songs are equally as ripe with earworm melodies as their others, but with components that are less obvious or easy to reach for. Sheer Mag has infused their typically punchy hooks with texture.
On “Silver Line,” a 12-string acoustic is complemented by a lap steel guitar and keyboard (a sentence I never thought I’d use to describe a Sheer Mag song) but it’s capped off with a monster electric guitar solo from Kyle Seely that shoots off into space. This is what progress sounds like. It doesn’t have to mean abandoning what defines you as a band. It’s the buffing of a rough diamond until it shines. Less lo-fi fuzz and more layered, compelling instrumentation underlay lyrics co-written by Halladay and Matt Palmer that touch on more personal themes like domestic abuse and depression. “The Right Stuff” is Halladay’s righteous message to anyone who might have critiques about her body size: “I don’t care what they see/I think of beauty differently/If you’re worried about my health/Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” A Distant Call is an album with depth of production, more deliberate songwriting, and a commitment to style.
The most notable change comes in Halladay’s raspy growl. This record was written after she was laid off from her job, out of a relationship, and mourning the death of a father with whom she had a complicated relationship. On previous albums, Halladay screeched as if her life depended on it, nearly cracking when hitting the high notes. Here, she is no less restrained, but the true tone in her singing voice comes through (helping matters, she recorded her vocals in a studio with producer Arthur Rizk rather than on her usual 8-track recorder). This change doesn’t weaken the band’s DIY spirit—they still self-release all their records and rail about communist uprisings and our corrupt government—but this upgrade to Halladay’s vocals allows those lyrics to shine brighter. On “The Killer,” she sings repeatedly, straight into an epic key change, “The Cold War never ends/It starts all over again/He’s got you right between the eyes/Waving the flag for human rights.” The better we can hear her, the more potent the message becomes.
If the scrappy early single “Fan the Flames” was the song to metaphorically grab the major label’s attention, A Distant Call sounds like the result of one of those lucrative multi-album record deals with unlimited studio time by comparison. Even the design of the Sheer Mag logo on this go-round has slightly morphed. On previous albums, the text was flat and black, in the style of any classic power-pop band of the hair-metal era. On this record, that logo has been given 3D depth and is finished in shiny chrome, with a twinkle glinting off the surface. Same band, same logo, same spirit—polished.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wilsuns RC | August 24, 2019 | 7.8 | 9f78451f-7299-4879-8cc5-5bfd84f6218b | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
Katie Crutchfield revisits six tracks originally recorded in 2012, waving away the lo-fi haze that blanketed much of her early work to reveal her celebrated skills as a storyteller and singer. | Katie Crutchfield revisits six tracks originally recorded in 2012, waving away the lo-fi haze that blanketed much of her early work to reveal her celebrated skills as a storyteller and singer. | Waxahatchee: Great Thunder EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waxahatchee-great-thunder-ep/ | Great Thunder EP | Katie Crutchfield’s back catalog is ripe for rediscovery. Since embarking on her first musical venture—The Ackleys, co-fronted with her twin sister Allison, who now leads Swearin’—at age 15, Crutchfield has bounced between collaborative recording projects, released four studio albums under her solo alias Waxahatchee, and experienced no apparent dips in productivity. Now 29, Crutchfield is heralded for the dexterity and directness of her songwriting, but the sheer size of her oeuvre means that some of her songs remain unknown even to steadfast fans.
She took her first step toward remedying this with 2016’s Early Recordings, a reissue of her little-heard first EP as Waxahatchee. Now, Crutchfield has excavated another EP’s worth of songs, this one from a short-lived group she formed with Swearin’ bassist Keith Spencer in 2012. Great Thunder, which shares that band’s name, reintroduces six of its tracks. While the new recordings vary in their faithfulness to the originals, all are minimally arranged, foregoing showy production to highlight Crutchfield’s skills as a storyteller and singer. Time has brought these treasures into sharper focus, waving away the lo-fi haze that blanketed much of her early work and retelling old tales with new clarity and conviction.
Recorded at April Base, Justin Vernon’s secluded Wisconsin studio, Great Thunder has the expected cabin-in-the-woods vibes, both in the sparse acoustic instrumentation that shapes each song and in the pangs of isolation that course through its emotional core. On “You’re Welcome,” Crutchfield turns to make-believe to bridge the space between herself and another: “You can pretend you don’t hold back anymore.” The haunting lead single “Chapel of Pines” is built around the question, “Will you go?,” posed as a relationship falls into crisis (the lyric has changed from the original, hypothetical “Would you go?”). “You Left Me With an Ocean” gives the query its tragic answer: “You can’t say goodbye/You rip out its lungs and you let it die,” Crutchfield laments.
These stories of separation and distance are intensified by the way Crutchfield tells them. Her voice has always been striking; both airy and gritty, it floats delicately through her melodies but sometimes gets caught on a note or two. Here, it gains additional texture from the sickness that befell Crutchfield just before she began recording. She strains more than usual: In the sustained notes of closer “Take So Much,” this audible pain makes the narrative—in this case, centered on her earnest desire to take the blame for a partner’s shortcomings—all the more potent. Here, and often throughout the EP, Crutchfield’s only accompaniment comes from unfussy block chords plunked out on a piano. Tasked with holding the listener’s attention, her voice delivers.
If you feel the slightest bit of whiplash listening to these tracks on the heels of Crutchfield’s latest album, last year’s remarkable Out in the Storm, you aren’t alone. That release made a case for her skill as a rock bandleader; it found her crashing through the end of a relationship with live-wire energy and a herd of brash electric guitars. She has acknowledged the disconnect between her two most recent releases, calling Great Thunder “a complete 180” from Out in the Storm. Presumably, this paring down is not a permanent stylistic shift so much as a creative exercise —a chance for Crutchfield to revisit the simple roots of her songwriting practice. In its completion, she has demonstrated just how few colors she needs to paint vividly. | 2018-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Merge | September 7, 2018 | 7.3 | 9f7d103d-ea08-454c-ae3b-f12c59062c42 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Regina Spektor is, without a doubt, the most talented representative of New York's antifolk scene, although\n\ calling her ... | Regina Spektor is, without a doubt, the most talented representative of New York's antifolk scene, although\n\ calling her ... | Regina Spektor: Soviet Kitsch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7739-soviet-kitsch/ | Soviet Kitsch | Regina Spektor is, without a doubt, the most talented representative of New York's antifolk scene, although calling her that is like calling the current outbreak of bird flu Asia's least deadly epidemic. I'm an unapologetic relativist when it comes to music, so Spektor's alliance with the repulsive likes of The Moldy Peaches does color my perception of her. Antifolk's modus operandi is to masquerade drooling insolence as outsider art, but the unholy progeny of Tiny Tim and Beat Happening have a pretty good thing going, because it's absolutely impossible to approach them with any objective criterion of quality.
Regina Spektor doesn't need that coat of post-modern protection. Her songs are clever and touching in any context, and her technical prowess is considerable: A girl from a good Russian-Jewish family (her father comes to her shows), she's put her inevitable piano lessons to good use. Spektor does, however, constantly employ a trick I consider dirty: She reaches her audience's ears and heartstrings through feigned naivete. The I'm-just-a-wee-lass stance is apparent throughout *Soviet Kitsch, as well as her live performances, where she's been known to pout and giggle and murmur and feed the crowd chocolates; what the Russians call * manernost' is her only liability, but it's badly holding her back.
Take the best song on the record, "Ghost of Corporate Future"; this exquisitely structured number steadily spirals up from a plinky opening to a majestic finish, from a street sketch to a Big Statement on life and how to live it. "Everything is plastic/ And everyone's sarcastic/ And all your food is frozen/ And it needs to be defrosted," sings Spektor in an inimitable mix of horror and wonderment. But watch the whimsy go to work: "Maybe you should cut your own hair/ 'Cause that would be so funny/ It doesn't cost any money/ And it always grows back." Spektor delivers "funny" in a kindergarten squeak that would only be accessible to the rest of us through regression therapy; this kind of stuff only works live, and then in measures. In the studio, it's murder: Even if Regina's mannerisms are totally spontaneous, guess what? They won't be by your third listen.
Other songs suffer a similar fate. There's a wealth of great material here-- "Carbon Monoxide", the expansive "Chemo Limo", "Your Honor" with its sudden outbursts of punk thrash-- all diminished, to various degrees, by genre affectations. When Regina's not belting Billie, she's cooing Tori, or vamping up elastic Bronx vowels; although there's no Russian accent to speak of, Spektor's occasional Björk-isms compound the cuteness.
Soviet Kitsch, which was deliberately intended as a minor release, is currently enjoying a wider audience than it appears to have been made for. Some of it has to do with Julian Casablancas' dabbling in arts patronage: Spektor opened for The Strokes on their European tour dates and duets on the inconsequential "Reptilia" B-side "Modern Girls and Old-Fashioned Men". I'm reminded of the way David Bowie parades around his admiration for Daniel Johnston: Spektor is becoming a unit of freak-cred currency. Except in this case, the ball is still in her court; she can still walk out of the corner into which the circumstance and alliances are painting her, with wits and talent intact. | 2004-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Shoplifter | March 9, 2004 | 6.8 | 9f9600e7-401e-4353-a5ac-28bcd47dc24a | Pitchfork | null |
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On their first album in 38 years, George Clinton and his impressive band channel the Parliament of old for something decidedly modern. It’s delightfully raunchy but also surprisingly tenderhearted. | On their first album in 38 years, George Clinton and his impressive band channel the Parliament of old for something decidedly modern. It’s delightfully raunchy but also surprisingly tenderhearted. | Parliament: Medicaid Fraud Dogg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parliament-medicaid-fraud-dogg/ | Medicaid Fraud Dogg | P-Funk bandleader George Clinton was raised at the center of the world’s pharmaceutical industry. His family moved to Plainfield, New Jersey only a few years after the Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical company settled in nearby Morris Plains, and in the decades since, 14 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies on Earth have called the state home. Naturally, Clinton has some choice words for the industry he’s watched drug the American public, characterizing Big Pharma as an untamable, parasitic beast, and everyone with a prescription regimen as members of a dazed zombie horde: “It’s one nation under sedation, everybody is getting high on something.”
Parliament’s first album in 38 years, the deliciously zany Medicaid Fraud Dogg, is an indictment of what Clinton has called “bullshit medicine” and the system that produces it, suggesting, almost off-handedly, that you choose funk as your sedation alternative. “It’s about the real Medicaid fraud, which is the big pharmaceutical companies,” he told Offbeat magazine. It’s unclear if the album is meant as “Dr. Funkenstein” meets Doggystyle, but it frequently finds the seam where P-Funk and G-Funk meet. A revamped Parliament horn section—featuring band lifers Greg Thomas, Bennie Cowan, Fred Wesley, and another notable James Brown band member Pee Wee Ellis—along with an entirely new cast of players channel the Parliament of old for something decidedly modern. Clinton leads them marching into a new war on drugs with horndog funk jams less concerned about health care than general wellness. As always, Clinton and company’s antidote is clear: lewdness, absurdist humor, and opalescent funk refracting several decades of black music. It’s delightfully raunchy but also surprisingly tenderhearted.
Medicaid Fraud Dogg is over 100 minutes long, seemingly exploring every idea Clinton and his crew have had for the Parliament project since 1980’s Trombipulation. Written primarily by Clinton and longtime P-Funk member Tracey Lewis, the album honors Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar, and “all that shit coming out of Atlanta” while staying truest to the soul at the Parliament core. New characters are introduced into the P-Funk mythology, like Loodie Poo Da Pimp, Oil Jones, and the eponymous Fraud Dogg. It is more grounded than his space funk of the ‘70s, but no less alien. The album doesn’t always hit the sweet spot, at times veering too far into the absurd or doing too much, but it’s never shy about trying. Sometimes, just as a song is kicking into gear, the bizarro lyrics will snap you out of the groove, as on “Kool Aid” (”Hump until you hiccup/Pump until the pussy poop”), evoking his role as a doctor in FlyLos’ gross mutant horror flick Kuso. (Clinton fittingly compared being in Kuso to being on drugs again.) If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.
Clinton’s genuine concern for the medical system translates in both the messaging and the often soothing soul sound, which branches out in all directions. “The bigger the pill, the harder to swallow/She turns into something else with half a water bottle,” Tra’Zae sings on “Medicated Creep,” flipping a coined Parliament phrase into a commentary on pill addiction. The intoxicating title track gradually grows from golden horn riffs—played by Ellis, Wesley, and Whitney Russell—into a medley of electric piano, synths, and hip-hop drum programming. In keeping with the Parliament mandate, there is a concerted effort to provide music as a substitute through which to survive what ails you, especially on songs like “Psychotropic” and “Pain Management.” “Learn to deal with it!” Clinton implores on the latter, handing out a prescription for weed and funk.
The wildest and most wonderful songs on Medicaid Fraud Dogg understand P-Funk’s relationship to rap and embrace it. The Scarface-featuring lead single, “I’m Gon’ Make U Sick O’Me,” slaps P-Funk horns on a synth bass blaster fit for a low-rider, the song’s suspension springing forth as if on hydraulics. “I’m Gon’ Make U Sick O’Me,” which pledges to both make you sick and provide the remedy, is a satire of malicious pharma practices designed to keep people medicated and dependent. On “Set Trip,” Lewis and Clinton pose as gangsta rappers atop a Chuck Brown-conjuring go-go blend. The raps on “Insurance Man” echo Tupac’s flow on “Keep Ya Head Up” to directly address the country’s current healthcare crisis, standing with Obamacare and rebuking Trump’s opposition to programs like Planned Parenthood. “Mama Told Me” is like a vintage Jeezy trap epic if performed by the marching band at an HBCU homecoming.
These diversions only work because Parliament, despite all its new players and moving parts, is still in touch with what made the band so great in the first place. It allows the members to make something curious like the warped “Antisocial Media,” in which Clinton sings, “Bloggers are bitching, so I tweet/And my Twitter thing is twitching/Still scratching at the itch out of reach.” The seven-minute funk-rock odyssey “No Mos” and the infectiously horny “69” are two sides of the same coin, varying shades of the classic P-Funk experience updated. On the album, Clinton not only traces his band’s impact through the generations of music it influenced but suggests it still has the power to influence people today. At its best, most enthusiastic, and most optimistic, Medicaid Fraud Dogg proposes that funk is the panacea. | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | C Kunspyruhzy | May 30, 2018 | 7.3 | 9f9ac6e4-4479-469b-b56b-c78aa5d44828 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Janelle Monáe’s fourth album exchanges science fiction for lusty romance, creating a rapturous Afrofuturistic sound collage for sunny days and sticky nights. | Janelle Monáe’s fourth album exchanges science fiction for lusty romance, creating a rapturous Afrofuturistic sound collage for sunny days and sticky nights. | Janelle Monáe: The Age of Pleasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janelle-monae-the-age-of-pleasure/ | The Age of Pleasure | During a routine memory-erasing operation, the New Order—the oppressive regime at the center of Dirty Computer’s “emotion picture”—comes across information about an underground resistance army. Sporting a kufi crown, Janelle Monáe’s alter ego Jane 57821 leads the rebels. They collude in the shadows, preparing for a coup d’état. Tragedy strikes when state officials seize Jane for neutralization. When all seems lost, her lover Zen breaks her out of the lab. The Age of Pleasure occurs in a world where these femme dissidents won the battle against totalitarianism. For many marginalized individuals, it’s difficult to dream of better worlds while mired in chaos and destitution. Janelle Monáe takes us to the promised land.
Opener “Float” is the victory speech to “Django Jane”’s battle cry. Monáe is no longer in survival mode. “No, I’m not the same, nigga,” they announce over celestial horns. They’ve come out as a “free-ass motherfucker” and they refuse to dignify bigotry with any engagement. The Age of Pleasure revels in an ecclesiastic enjoyment of indulgence. Some might argue that good Christians must deprive themselves of earthly pleasure, but the Good Book said, “Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.” Shaking their Baptist tits on a yacht in an all-white ensemble, Monáe keeps the liquor and celebratory mood flowing with those who value them in all their complexity.
Monáe flourishes in a Pan-African utopia. Wondaland co-producer Nate Wonder melds diasporic influences into an Afrofuturistic soundscape. “Champagne Shit” pairs an electric piano sound found in Ethiopian electronic dance music with a sinuous synth that mimics the ancient Egyptian ney flute. Evoking the historical memory of these fruitful civilizations, Monáe aligns themself with their regality. Amapiano grooves meet android ball culture on the humid “Phenomenal.” Throughout the album, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 supply reverberating brass; Wonder adds breezy woodwinds characteristic of Afrobeats. No diasporic record is complete without reggae tunes and Caribbean riddims, and the presence of Jamaican dancehall legend Sister Nancy on “The French 75” interlude encapsulates the sense of laid-back communion. Each influence ebbs and flows through the record like neighbors stopping by for some rum and gossip.
The blues have always served as an outlet for Black queer people to explore their sexuality and gender expression. Subverting the ogling gazes of those who wish to covet and control their body, Monáe worships their own flesh and desire, which after all are molded in God’s image: “If I could fuck me right here right now, I would do that.” They take the guilty out of guilty pleasure. “Lipstick Lover” envisions the kind of sapphic orgy where you show up looking for an anonymous thrill but leave with three new best friends. If the record is a steamy tropical romance novel, then Monáe plays both the broad-shouldered hunk and the yearning damsel. “Leave a sticky hickey in a place I won’t forget,” they plead.
A roster of eclectic collaborators balances The Age of Pleasure’s masculine and feminine energies. Grace Jones lends her husky French to the seductive interlude “Ooh La La.” Doechii channels Good Girl Gone Bad-era Rihanna in a raspy, haughty verse on “Phenomenal.” The hypnotic spoken-word opening to “The Rush” is voiced by Black cinema bombshell Nia Long. Of all the features, Ghanaian-American singer Amaarae best matches Monáe’s apocalyptically horny energy: “Fucking you like it’s my destiny.” Even blinded by lust, no one denigrates women as conquests. Tender aftercare arrives in the polyamory ode “Only Have Eyes 42” and the acoustic remembrance “A Dry Red.”
Like their original alter ego Cindi Mayweather, Monáe is a time traveler, archiving information and bearing witness for future generations. As an actor, they’ve worked on several films that centered on Black freedom struggles: Hidden Figures, Antebellum, Harriet, and Moonlight. For over a decade, in concept albums and short stories, they’ve crafted allegorical worlds to warn against the dangers of ahistorical thought. The protagonists in The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, a collection of Monáe’s dystopian fiction, liberate themselves through an intergenerational collective consciousness. Jane convinces Zen to escape by triggering shared memories of their relationship. The Age of Pleasure isn’t as intricate as their sci-fi novellas or as electrifyingly innovative as The ArchAndroid. It’s a bacchanal in the haven Monáe constructed for themself, cobblestone by cobblestone, tree by tree. Even the Lord rested. | 2023-06-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-09T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wondaland Arts Society / Atlantic | June 9, 2023 | 7.6 | 9f9d6f0f-7fe7-4083-9179-98ab3f230c61 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The soul singer Kadjha Bonet offers a twisting, rich mix of psychedelia and soul on her plush debut album. | The soul singer Kadjha Bonet offers a twisting, rich mix of psychedelia and soul on her plush debut album. | Kadhja Bonet: The Visitor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22550-the-visitor/ | The Visitor | For an artist whose bio reads that she was “born in 1784 in the backseat of a sea-foam green space pinto,” L.A.-based soul singer Kadjha Bonet’s debut LP The Visitor sounds a bit closer to home than that. Her sound is retro-fitted, but you only have to travel to, say, the experimental jazz-meets-soul-meets-singer-songwriter traditions of 1974 to find her home planet. Her voice twists Roberta Flack’s velvet tone around the archness of Shirley Bassey over creamery-rich strings, producing a sound as familiar as it is haunting.
“Honeycomb” is the album’s lead single, and alongside mid-album tracks “Nobody Other” and “Portrait of Tracy” it sets forth the best case for Bonet. Both are couched in a majestic sort of of blaxploitation soul, a mix of half-remembered Bond themes and the string section from Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 epic Superfly. Bonet's voice is the twist in the fabric, the element that sends the song down a Lewis Carroll rabbit hole; her falsetto on “Nobody Other” creates a vortex where the Isley Brothers’ and Aaliyah’s version of “At Your Best” meet. It also features a rolling Hammond organ, another classic crate-dust sound.
Bonet employs the intentional oxymoron “fickle majesty” in “Honeycomb’”s lyrics, and the phrase is also an apt description for the album. The Visitor is an amazing virtuoso performance, both for Bonet’s voice and for the many instruments she plays on it. However, the songwriting loops and twirls around styles and concepts that traditionally have straight-line meanings, and it creates a bit of ear fatigue, especially when so much of the album sits in a luxurious mid-tempo. On “Fairweather Friend,” Bonet discovers the limits of a friend’s loyalty and mourns it with a cool, laconic vocal that drains all the sorrow of the song. The trilling harplike ripples behind her are lovely, but the song is a little inert.
Bonet can’t be faulted for ambition; the plush arrangements bring to mind Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid in their scope and scale. “Francisco” swirls together late-’60s Beatles psychedelia and “Walk On By” woodwinds into something that might be called “Sgt. Pepper soul.” On the title track she delivers the impressionistic lines “Skin the color copper/She comes without a call” in an overwhelmed rush. Immediately thereafter, “The Visitor” spills into a well-composed orchestral mini-suite and closes with a vocal run that displays the stunning full breadth of her voice.
But The Visitor doesn't quite equal the sum total of its impressive pieces. Like a lot of talented artists working underneath their potential, Bonet offers a collection of familiar references, immaculately recreated, without telling us something about herself that we might hold onto. She is a master at her craft, but she hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to say just yet. | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fat Possum / Fresh Selects | November 8, 2016 | 7.2 | 9fa9a498-b9bd-47b7-b994-62ea862bec6f | Marcus K. Dowling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-k. dowling/ | 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 devastating and sublime debut from one of the most outstanding voices and songwriters in country music. | 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 devastating and sublime debut from one of the most outstanding voices and songwriters in country music. | Iris DeMent: Infamous Angel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iris-dement-infamous-angel/ | Infamous Angel | When Iris DeMent was a baby, her father staged a wildcat strike—meaning a strike without the backing or safety of a union—at the Emerson Electric plant in Arkansas. He stood for a year on the picket line before the whole thing collapsed in 1964, sending his family of 16 scrambling for a new home. They packed up everything they had and hastily relocated to Buena Park, California, and then Sacramento. Iris’ father found work as a gardener and a janitor, and her mother raised the family in extreme hardship. When things grew unbearably difficult, as they often did, Iris’ mother Flora Mae sat down at the piano to sing.
Iris’ childhood was Pentecostal, which meant church, stark moral lines, and lots of gospel. Music was ever-present: It was a connection to the Arkansas Delta they’d left behind and a vent for repressed feelings. Her older sisters formed a gospel group known as the DeMent Sisters and recorded one album. Her father played fiddle at dances and in church and her family passed the hymnal book around every week and harmonized. The first secular voices Iris heard were Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn, but not until she was 5 years old. Before then, it was just her own voice, her mother’s, and the hymnal book. “She told me, before she died, singing is praying,” DeMent said of her mother, who died in 2011. “I find that songwriting is praying, too.”
DeMent didn’t begin writing her own songs or recording them until she was in her twenties. By then, she was living in Topeka, Kansas, cleaning houses and waitressing. Once in a while, to make extra money, she sang at nightclubs and bars. It stirred something in her, a nameless desire that she finally put a name to when she signed up for a creative writing course at Washburn College. She had always been intensely shy, even bashful, but, as she told Terry Gross in 2015, “when the songs started coming to me, I felt I didn’t have the option to hide.” She wanted to be a singer and a songwriter, and she wanted her music in the world. She would write her own songs and record them, no matter if no one liked them, no matter if everyone laughed. So she borrowed her brother’s guitar and sat down to write “Our Town.”
Nearly 30 years later, the song’s been passed around like a church plate—you could hear it on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” on the series finale of Northern Exposure. DeMent writes from the perspective of a woman watching her small town dwindle and slip into the past. It’s not a novel lens—Americana and country music are full of the regrets of the small-towners who feel left behind, who understand that the bustle and business of living is something happening elsewhere, that they are the supporting characters of their own lives.
But DeMent’s version of this old trope stands out in part because of its unsentimental bleakness. The first line of the song—“And you know the sun’s setting fast”—plunges us mid-sentence into a world where death is swiftly approaching. DeMent’s verses are simple and spare, like all of her writing. She stops to note when she had her babies and where her parents are buried, takes a glance at the bar where she met her lover “on one hot summer night,” and moves on. It could be any small town in America in the past 60 years, which is precisely the point. By the song’s end, the narrator has set off for parts unknown (“but I don’t wanna go”) and the sense of desolation is overwhelming.
The other reason, of course, that people were spooked to attention by “Our Town” was DeMent’s voice. It is a tremulous wail, a disruptive vibration that shakes and rattles the spaces that attempt to contain it. When she sings, she often contorts her face into a comical grimace, like a small girl scolding her doll. People have described her voice as “childlike,” but the wisdom in her delivery is far too grave, too matter-of-fact to ascribe to a child. It is the clarion voice of someone who has been singing to survive unimaginable hardship since they were little and who has never stopped to consider, even once, how they might sound to others.
When DeMent’s career began, listeners often assumed she had been raised in some Appalachian holler or on a dirt farm instead of an Orange County suburb. In this confusion, she was like many artists associated with American roots music: John Fogerty, for example, from Berkeley, or Buck Owens from Bakersfield; Dwight Yoakam from Los Angeles, or Gillian Welch from Manhattan. Like those artists, DeMent’s connection was more spiritual than geographical. She might have moved hundreds of miles away, but she only had to open her mouth for everyone to hear the Pentecostal Arkansas Delta living inside her.
Things moved fairly quickly for DeMent once she decided on singing. In 1988, she moved to Nashville; the folk label Rounder handed her a record contract shortly after. Her debut Infamous Angel was released in 1992 to universal acclaim, and less than a year later, someone played a demo for Lenny Waronker at Warner Brothers, who just as promptly bought her out of her Rounder contract. DeMent has been touring and releasing records at a steady clip ever since, save for a dry spell in the 2000s when she got married, battled depression, and emerged with 2012’s stunning Sing the Delta.
DeMent’s story—in its simple turns and clean lines—shares a little with John Prine’s, an artist with whom she will forever be linked. Like Prine, DeMent wrote some of her most indelible and beloved songs on her very first try. DeMent’s first two songs on Infamous Angel were “Our Town” and then “Let the Mystery Be.” If it is a cliché to note when an artist arrives “fully formed,” it is nonetheless still a shock when a brand-new artist steps to a stage, clears their throat, and then seems to say with their first words precisely what they’ve been waiting a lifetime to say.
“Let the Mystery Be” is an astonishing, sui generis accomplishment—a breezy song about not knowing where you go after you die. At first, DeMent sets out the terms of the great beyond in the simplest and folksiest imaginable language—“Everybody’s wondering what and where they all came from”—before considering the various options before her. In her patience, she sounds like she’s refereeing a particularly intractable family argument. She touches lightly on atheism (“Some say once you’re gone, you’re gone forever”) and on animism (“Some say that they’re coming back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas”) before returning, again and again, to the serenity of not knowing. “I think I’ll just let the mystery be,” she sings, the sweet shrug audible in her voice.
Among countless other things, the song also offers a plainspoken accounting for her own Pentecostal childhood, a way of sifting through what she will keep and what she’s leaving behind. Over the years, she’s repeatedly expressed gratitude for that culture, for the exposure to gospel and the deep spiritual well that nourished her, but she has spoken just as often of learning to leave behind its dogma. On “Let the Mystery Be,” she dispenses with damnation and purgatory and parses out the kernel she knows she will treasure (“I believe in love and I live my life accordingly”). It’s like watching someone discover their guiding philosophy in real time every time you play it.
She revisited this territory on 2012’s “The Night I Learned How Not to Pray,” which retold with harrowing simplicity the death of her friend’s baby brother. “I was sure if I prayed hard enough that God would make it right,” she sings. When her efforts are unsuccessful (“I knew that it was over when my sister slammed that phone against the wall”) she learns a hard lesson, one she keeps from her family: “God does what he wants to anyway.”
Irreconcilable loss is DeMent’s great theme, and it resounds across Infamous Angel. On “These Hills,” a nostalgic visit to the countryside of the narrator’s youth quickly becomes a deathbed vision of paradise lying just beyond. Unlike Johnny Cash, she doesn’t raise the fear of hellfire. On her cover of the Depression-era standard “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” heaven is just some place where you’ll finally get space to yourself. In her writing, death is nothing special, just another place humans go.
But there is also nothing storybook about her writing. DeMent’s best songs lean into the crippling heartache of loss with the same sobriety with which they examine the mysteries of the afterlife. “After You’re Gone” feels like the flip side to the serenity of “Let the Mystery Be”—the dead may not have much left to worry about, or to feel, wherever they’re headed. But those of us left on earth must walk in the wilderness, and DeMent’s writing leads us through it, cutting a new path with each line.
“There’ll be laughter even after you’re gone/I’ll find reasons to face that empty dawn”—in just one couplet, DeMent encompasses grief in all its platitudinous truths and ugly realities. Scan the YouTube comments for one of these songs and visit a wailing wall of lost relatives, brothers, sisters, spouses. It is clear these songs have soundtracked countless funerals, induced communal waves of compulsive sobbing. There is a moment, in the brittle numbness of fresh grief, when you yearn for something, anything to reach through to the raw mess of nerves and viscera underneath. You are awaiting—dreading, craving—the gut punch. And Iris DeMent songs gently provide it.
The penultimate song on Infamous Angel revisits the wellspring of all of DeMent’s music, the reason for the purity of her singing and the clarity of her vision. It is called “Mama’s Opry,” and it tells in loving detail of watching her mother sing country songs to herself under her breath. The indelible image, which lingers over the album, is of young Iris noticing the private sparkle in her mother’s eyes as she hums Jimmie Rodgers, pinning clothes on the line: “I’d be playing in the grass/To her what might’ve seemed obliviously/But there ain’t no doubt about it, she sure made her mark on me.”
The snapshot is both intimate and clear, and in just two lines, it delivers us back to a vanished world. This deliverance has always been the promise of Americana—premised on the idea that the world it depicted was gone, and had perhaps never existed outside of fleeting moments of the imagination. But the message living within it only grows more powerful as we make our way through successive seasons of loss. Your childhood home, your family, and your entire way of life may disappear. Whatever you can offer in this contingent world is whatever is left inside of you when all else is gone, and what comes out of you when you open your mouth.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Philo | January 24, 2021 | 9 | 9fae26e2-076e-424b-9fcd-6606a02a3791 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist ... | Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist ... | Steve Earle: Jerusalem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2647-jerusalem/ | Jerusalem | Maybe when I'm pushing 40, and I've survived heroin addiction and plowed through six wives (as this artist, pushing 50, has), I'll "get" Steve Earle, or be able to get excited by him, because from where I'm sitting, his albums consistently sound like the kind of stuff that folks over 35 find "edgy" or "raw." Lucinda Williams, 50 this year, would be his female counterpart. Having heard the best moments of, say, Will Oldham and Cat Power (for all their melodrama and actorly distance), I am loathe to describe the Earle/Williams catalog as "haunting" or "intimate." Though some of their work is stunning (2-3 songs per album), one has to adjust to the borderline overproduction and to the straightjacket of trad-songcraft. I'm willing to bet you an illiterate folk artist's lucky paintstick that some of the Earle/Williams praise comes by default, because they use elements of country in ways that are exponentially more interesting than their competition (the committee-written popaganda leaking from the bowels of whatever lunkhead cowboy or smiley slutloaf got corralled into sing-slinging it), the same way the dithering, blah Democrats can seem noble next to Ashcroft's Army.
That political analogy is apt, too, if one compares, say, Ford truck pitchman Alan Jackson's (complete with requisite parenthetical) "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" to Earle's "John Walker's Blues". Jackson's 9/11 song is a predictable piece of vaguely Christian know-nothingism, with the very telling line, "I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you/ The difference in Iraq and Iran." (I immediately thought of an acquaintance who has lectured me on the Bible, but who asked, when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan, "Is Israel Islam?") Earle's song is an agenda-less character study of a confused everyteen with a martyr complex on a search for meaning beyond "MTV" and "the soda pop ads." Where Jackson's gesture required only Nashville greed-sap gumption, Earle's song took cojones, especially if you remember the climate into which the song was released, a phase of kneejerk "No Muslims Allowed" nationalism that some of us in 2003 look back on laughingly, like unfortunate bangs captured in a yearbook photo or a Stevie B. cassingle under the bed, as if our flaggery was an odd fad in which we goofily got caught up. For all the bluster over "John Walker's Blues", the song merely aims to humanize an enemy/unpopular perspective, down to its chant fade-out.
But we Americans often just want to perceive our enemies as they're presented in Independence Day, as alien and cultureless insect-like villains, just black circles to shoot out of the sky (see WWII portrayals of the Japanese, etc). So Earle risked bristling the reactionary segment of his audience, an audience he has fostered over the course of a slew of albums on which he has been a "progressive," but Nascar-twangy version of the Midwest's Mellencamp, the Northeast's Springsteen, or the South's-but-he-doesn't-flaunt-it Tom Petty. His audience expanded particularly after The Mountain, his all-bluegrass album (only hinted at by the sinister banjo of this record's song "for" the wrongly-convicted West Memphis 3, "The Truth"). Webboard damnations of Jerusalem aren't hard to find, and even Amazon customer reviews contain someone spooked by "Satanic" and "demonic" vocal effects ("Ashes to Ashes" is tuff-Earle, sounding campier than Vincent Price) and someone abandoning Earle due to the "liberal agenda fest" of his "social commentary."
Yes, seven of this album's eleven tracks qualify as commentary, but except for bassline-driven "America v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)", which is a kind of "Like a Rolling Stone" account of complacent former activists, most of the critiquin' is done so allegorically or abstractly that it could qualify as storytelling. That means four of the songs are standard singer/songwriter fare, catchy love-ditties (such as the duet with Emmylou Harris, "I Remember You") or fuzzy mythmaking (such as "Shadowland"). The closer, and title track is an ambitiously optimistic but ultimately frustrating song that tries to apply the ain't-we-all-god's-chilluns syncretism of "John Walker's Blues" to the Middle East. The song also borrows "I may be a dreamer" logic from John Lennon's blues, "Imagine". But "Imagine" was an atheist utopian fantasy, whereas Earle's "Jerusalem" pines for a peace that will come from "the children of Abraham" on "the ground where Jesus stood." Though Earle admits he sounds like a "fool" and sings of "looking into his heart" instead of subscribing to the defeatist attitude of the "man on TV," the song is dang hard to take seriously because, even when you strip away the situation's socioeconomic muck and the occupation debate, you get, fundamentally: groups of racists chosen specially by their respective gods, murdering each other over the gods' specially chosen dirt. Earle's "peace together" is just too long a shot.
You may have noticed how this review has been yammering almost exclusively about Earle's lyrics. That's not just because his narratives are abubble with big ideas, or because I assume you know his gruff-to-nasal voice, but because, aside from the occasional Eastern touch, or smoking blues-harp solo, or Gary Numan-esque keyboard trill, the album's music is what you'd expect: Three minutes of radio-ready guitar-and-drum arrangements. Of the tone experiments, one really works (the Doug Sahm-ish zydecali-texmex immigrant's plea "What's a Simple Man to Do?") and one fails horribly (the female call-and-responders of "Conspiracy Theory"). While Earle could be commended for his tireless examination of the death-penalty or for distributing, on his label, the great what-if-Costello-led-a-cowpunk-bar-band Six String Drag, I can only say that his new album is "good, for what it is," and that is still a great concession for ears honed to more expansive sonic approaches.
So if you ever had a fusion snob successfully argue to you that The Replacements were just overrated bash-n-pop (I mean, look at Westerberg now, and Tommy Stinson's next band was even called Bash & Pop), you won't find anything of value in Jerusalem's music. These tried-and-true structures can seem fried-and-false. Though Earle comes off as more a son of Dylan than Jakob, Bob at 60 writes much fresher songs, songs that one doesn't have to be weathered to enjoy. | 2003-02-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-02-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Artemis / E-Squared | February 16, 2003 | 5.6 | 9fb23b0e-7d66-4a99-8015-385da1b038c6 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
The 18-year-old singer-songwriter moves away from hyperpop and digicore on his debut album, sharpening his pop instincts as he unpacks the chaotic intensity of teenage emotions. | The 18-year-old singer-songwriter moves away from hyperpop and digicore on his debut album, sharpening his pop instincts as he unpacks the chaotic intensity of teenage emotions. | glaive: i care so much that i dont care at all | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glaive-i-care-so-much-that-i-dont-care-at-all/ | i care so much that i dont care at all | In glaive’s overwhelming pop songs, every setback feels like the end of the world. The narrators of the 18-year-old singer-songwriter’s music are desperate and distressed, living life at the end of their rope while detailing commonplace problems like romantic dissolution, small-town loneliness, and adolescent rage. It’s how the world appears when you’re young, still finding your place, falling in and out of love; each second is saturated with intense meaning. glaive captures this surfeit of feeling with conviction and unselfconsciousness on his debut full-length, the title of which, i care so much that i dont care at all, sums up his whole approach. He feels every moment with the wide-eyed wonder of someone who’s learning what it means to be a person: rapturously, sincerely, despairingly.
Like many kids stuck at home in 2020, the artist born Ash Gutierrez, then 15, started making songs in his bedroom with help from friends he met on the internet. His bruised ballads resonated, and songs like the fragile “Astrid” quickly became important texts for a new generation of always-online pop musicians and fans. From his earliest, overstuffed productions, which recalled several generations of internet music at once—distorted emo rap, Drain Gang’s heavy-lidded pop euphoria, the Adderall-addled club music brewing on SoundCloud in the wake of PC Music—he demonstrated a knack for making songs whose unstable sonics echoed the unsteady feelings in his lyrics. Swooning, glitch-scoured singles like “Pissed” sounded like they might collapse in on themselves in a pile of digital detritus.
These experiments led glaive—along with fellow pop mutants brakence and ericdoa—to be lumped into the then-nascent scenes of hyperpop and digicore. But there was “nothing hyper” about much of his music, he told The New York Times in 2020. In the years since, he has signaled his increasing interest in making pop songs without glitches or distortion. He tried recording simpler songs on transitional works like the 2021 EP all dogs go to heaven and then i’ll be happy, a collaboration with ericdoa. But i care so much that i don’t care at all is the first time that he sounds truly comfortable making more straightforward and decidedly less “hyper” pop songs. The ease with which he spins up sugar-rushing harmonies on songs like “the prom” is evidence of a songwriter with a deft knowledge of the pop toolkit. And the clarity and confidence of his arrangements in turn allow him to express deeper, more complex emotions. Every lightning bolt of teenaged revelation strikes even more precisely.
“the car,” for example, is built around an uncomplicated arrangement that recalls several decades’ worth of guitar-led pop, from Ric Ocasek’s emotional anthems to Third Eye Blind’s blurry dramas to the brittle edge of mid-’00s radio emo. But it also shows a songwriter willing to navigate confusing headspaces, bitterly spitting out a story about infidelity, substance abuse, and broken promises. glaive even spares a moment of tenderness for a man who, until that moment, seemed to be the song’s villain. “I’d be lying to your face if I said I didn’t feel for him,” he sings. “He’s doing way more than I did for ya.” He demonstrates a new comfort in unpacking complicated emotions—which he does especially impressively on lead single “as if,” a gnarled song about trying to leave behind old friends while not quite being able to let them go, a cutting sentiment for anyone who’s ever forged a relationship out of convenience.
Aided by a host of producers and songwriters—including returning collaborators Jeff Hazin and Ralph Castelli, as well as fellow moody songwriters like Alexander 23 and underscores—i care so much that i dont care at all gleams with an unprecedented polish. Together glaive and his collaborators favor grand gestures (vocal harmonies stacked heavenward, dramatic stop-start dynamics, samples of Timothée Chalamet monologues) that suit the bleeding-heart songwriting and mile-a-minute delivery. Straining at the limits of his upper range, he crams every yelped line full of stray thoughts and syllables.
But some moments feel naive or overly simplistic. One notable misstep is “all i do is try my best,” in which he contemplates killing himself upon learning how much he owes on his taxes. That tossed-off admission is an uneasy—and glib—echo of the record’s opener, “oh are you bipolar one or two?,” in which he unpacks suicidal ideation in more vivid, and chilling, detail. He sings of the touch of “metal to skin,” and takes a deep look at his emotional volatility—an empathetic and surprisingly mature sentiment in a song that opens with him grabbing a gun and writing a note to all his friends and family. It’s dramatic, no doubt, but affecting. At its best, i care so much that i dont care at all captures the ecstatic, uncomfortable intensity of the joy and turmoil of being young. And if it ever feels awkward or fumbling, well, that’s an essential part of being a teenager too. | 2023-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Interscope | July 18, 2023 | 6.7 | 9fc7047d-1618-4d27-a160-8b3de12277ed | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On their Epitaph debut, the Grand Rapids post-hardcore band ruminates on the small stuff—death, grief, life, love. | On their Epitaph debut, the Grand Rapids post-hardcore band ruminates on the small stuff—death, grief, life, love. | La Dispute: Panorama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/la-dispute-panorama/ | Panorama | There is no middle ground between diehard fans of La Dispute and people who decide after five seconds it sounds like Fugazi doing books on tape. Over the past decade, La Dispute’s peers in the New Wave of Post-Hardcore (or just “The Wave”) have increasingly leaned into their underlying populist aspects—Touche Amore emerged as populist firebrands, the early screamo of Pianos Become the Teeth has burnished into silvery mope-rock, mewithoutYou’s folky mysticism has veered uncannily close to R.E.M.—but from the beginning, the Grand Rapids quintet have been the most demanding and divisive band in a fanatical subgenre. Their faithful read the Grand Rapids post-hardcore band’s music as prophetic, dazzling, beyond mere songcraft—to be treated like literature rather than music.
Panorama comes five years after La Dispute’s most recent record. Having already fulfilled one New Wave rite of passage (being produced by Will Yip), they complete another by signing to Epitaph. But while Panorama is their most user-friendly release, it’s the one that asks most of all to be engaged with like a book—with undivided attention and without any expectation of immediate gratification, to linger on and to be footnoted for later discussion and rumination.
Like their peers, La Dispute have determinedly whittled away at their extremities. Their 2008 debut Somewhere At the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair remains one of the most unique hardcore albums of the century—Jordan Dreyer mumbled, hectored and caterwauled anachronistic lyrics informed by Annabel Lee, Joanna Newsom, Kurt Vonnegut, and Japanese folklore, while the band dabbled in jazz, screamo, prog-rock and spoken word. Both wildly pretentious and guileless, it’s a rare document of a band with no expectations, no precedents, and unchecked ambition. Dreyer has expressed guilt over how the bombast of early fan favorites could obscure and distort their intentions; listeners could gloss over the thoughtful survey of race and retribution in his fictionalized eyewitness account of a failed drive-by shooting 2011’s “King Park” and just zone out during the big crescendo. Their approach on 2014’s Rooms of the House was more muted, but even a fabricated breakup album still has fairly traditional moments of emotional release.
Panorama skillfully and subtly creeps towards resonance rather than catharsis, an approach that can make even their own colleagues sound like they’re trying to cheat towards the big release. Even when La Dispute rock, they do so like they’re trying to tiptoe on a frozen pond. “Anxiety Panorama” and “View From Our Bedroom Window” are too plaintive to whip up a circle pit. The guitars are nearly silent throughout the frostbitten “In Northern Michigan,” until they seep through the silence like car exhaust in a closed garage. The chorus of “Footsteps at the Pond” finds Dreyer’s vocals drowning in guitar midrange, one of the many times where his lyrics become obscured or buried in the mix—a curious decision for a band who relies so heavily on Dreyer’s words, but a rewarding one, evoking half-remembered car conversations, murmured dream states, panicked awakenings.
Panorama finds Dreyer ruminating on the relatively tragedy-free 31 years of his life and asking how he can provide support to someone who’s experienced far worse. “Could I even be half of what you need?” he begs on “Fulton Street I.” Without guidance, Dreyer moves forward with good intentions and a crippling fear of making matters worse. “We keep her picture on the fridge/I keep a rabbit toy for kids/You gave me strength to fix myself/I gave you tokens, toys and gifts,” Dreyer offers on “Rhodonite and Grief.” With its slinky, diminished jazz chords and mournful horns, it’s a possible sequel to Rooms of the House’s “Woman (in mirror)”—it’s an album about death and grief, but also about the inability to communicate.
“You said ‘kill me by surprise’ again/‘I don’t want to stay alive’/To watch the words go first like hers,” Dreyer moans, writing from the perspective of his real-life partner. “If we could choose the way we leave/Fill out circles on a ballot sheet/Vote the way we’ll go...What would we do?,” Dreyer asks on the lengthy, awe-inspiring closer “You Ascendant,” cycling through heavenly and humdrum ways to die before realizing the crushing truth that someone’s going to have to go first. Perhaps the only solution to avoiding this grief is passing together, or at least, living in the possibility that it might not have to end at all. “Or can we live forever here? Be buried in our best memories,” he asks, thinking over drunken good times, an intimate road trip, everything that makes “life too beautiful, too sweet, despite everything.” In the end, Panorama is a love story—you just need to read between the lines. | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | March 15, 2019 | 7.6 | 9fcab82d-e755-4d6b-b9ee-02939a6faee4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Twin Cities artist Lizzo is a triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality. On her new album, she comes off like an already-minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she’s already stepped over, laughing. | The Twin Cities artist Lizzo is a triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality. On her new album, she comes off like an already-minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she’s already stepped over, laughing. | Lizzo: Big GRRRL Small World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21312-big-grrrl-small-world/ | Big GRRRL Small World | Twin Cities artist Lizzo seems to have fans and collaborators in just about every pocket of the music world: Sleater-Kinney invited her to open for their reunion tour; fellow Minneapolitan Prince featured Lizzo and bandmate Sophia Eris on last year's PLECTRUMELECTRUM; Ryan Olson produced much of her debut LIZZOBANGERS. She's a true triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality and an unstoppable force on record, as amply proven with single "Batches and Cookies" (and its buttered-up hunkfest of a video) and with previous groups GRRRL PARTY and the Chalice. Big GRRRL Small World comes off as the work of an already minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she's already stepped over, laughing.
Big GRRRL Small World—named for a line on LIZZOBANGERS, and Lizzo's label BGSW, on which she released the album—finds her reckoning with her sudden fame, and also the things that plague it: white culture vultures, terrible dudes (consigned on "Ride" to the "Support Group for Men Without Lizzo," a demolishingly hilarious couple of bars), people who need her references RapGenius'd clear for them, needy people, misogynists. It's all delivered with sheer glee, and some of it is among the most wicked fun committed to record in 2015.
It also sounds gorgeous; largely produced by BJ Burton (Low, Sylvan Esso, Poliça), the album is full of unexpected turns and immaculate codas. Lizzo bends each track to her will, twisting them until they're anything but obvious. "Ain't I", the closest thing here to a LIZZOBANGER, begins with references to reparations and Russian czars but ends with a distant, slightly untuned piano interlude and distorted guitar squeals. The ballads speak the language of vulnerability but twist R&B tropes to different ends. Standout single "Humanize" begins as a shimmering post-coital reverie sung in feather-soft voice and ends smothering and alone, with a voice like the feather's sharp end.
Lizzo's lyrics on "Humanize" complicate everything, full of reversals ("your skin is warm—it keeps me up though I am tired") and pinprick-perfect lines: "No, you can't lay on my shoulder, there are spikes and scales and your cheek would just press them in." It's an exhausted, near-existential sigh: one of yearning for connection but unable to find it, particularly when the ones you're supposed to connect with are the aforementioned terrible dudes. "En Love" begins as another sumptuous soul piece, Lizzo's besotten cooing resting upon beds of '90s synth pads, until Lizzo drops the punchline—"with myself!"—and turns the track into a trap jam. Lizzo's force of personality prevents the switch up from being mere gimmick, as does her generosity; she dedicates a verse to her best friend, and to her listeners.
Indeed, the most straightforward tracks on Big GRRRL Small World, such as empowerment ballad "My Skin", are explicitly about and for everyone who looks like and looks up to her. This—not only her indie friends, or her crystalline production, and especially not her place in any made-up taxonomy of female rappers she's been placed into—is largely responsible for her whirlwind success, and Lizzo knows it. "I love that because I am a woman and because I rap and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me," Lizzo told Billboard. "I get to speak to these people who did not get spoken for in this genre." Big GRRRL Small World succeeds because it's just that: a showcase for the small world, a keepsake for the big grrrls.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Bon Iver's Justin Vernon produced LIZZOBANGERS. | 2015-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | BGSW | December 10, 2015 | 7.5 | 9fd0647c-994a-4194-9bdb-fd5f5ad5c14e | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The landmark debut by Trent Reznor's band is reissued, with new mastering overseen by Reznor and longtime engineer Tom Baker and an additional B-side. | The landmark debut by Trent Reznor's band is reissued, with new mastering overseen by Reznor and longtime engineer Tom Baker and an additional B-side. | Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14890-pretty-hate-machine/ | Pretty Hate Machine | For reasons I won't get into here, my little brother spent the first couple weeks of ninth grade in a Baltimore psych ward. While he was in there, he desperately wanted one of his tapes, and that tape was Pretty Hate Machine, an album already a few years old at that point. Rather than bringing it to him, my dad decided to listen to it, making it about 90 seconds in-- to the first "Bow down before the one you serve/ You're going to get what you deserve" bit on "Head Like a Hole"-- before deciding the album was Satanic and throwing it in the trash. I tried arguing the point with him ("No, dad, he's talking about money! Listen to it!"), but he didn't budge. For much of the 1990s, Pretty Hate Machine was that type of album: One that could inspire fervent, devotional need and absolute revulsion, largely depending on the age of the person hearing it. And that's even more impressive when you consider that it's basically a synth-pop album.
The greatest trick Trent Reznor ever pulled was convincing the world he was the devil. With his biblical-phallic band name, his reportedly furious early live shows, his fishnets worn as sleeves, Reznor staked out a position for himself on the Alice Cooper shock-rock continuum. Reznor certainly talked a big game about his industrial influences, even taking part in the Wax Trax! collective Pigface, but it wasn't the punishing megaphone-addled arm of industrial that most informed Reznor's debut album; it was the genre's nascent new-wave period. Scene kings Ministry, after all, started out as floppy-haired New Romantics. And so, for that matter, did Reznor himself; Google Exotic Birds sometime.
Reznor would progress further into scraping roar not long later; 1992's "Wish" was certainly no Depeche Mode song. But Pretty Hate Machine is haunted, synthetic dance-pop through and through. The beats have muscle, but it's not metal muscle or pigfuck muscle or even post-punk muscle. "Head Like a Hole", the big hit, is probably the most rock thing on the whole album, but even that song opens with "Heart of Glass"-esque percussion ripples before the drum machine thunder and weird hooting noises come in. "Terrible Lie" is built on synth-scrapes that, in less distorted form, could've shown up on a New Order single, and "Sin" likewise has a whole lot of "Blue Monday" in its DNA. Whenever a verse ends during "Kinda I Want To", we get a quick little reptilian disco synth-fight. Glacial new-age keyboard tones abound, and big nasty guitars really don't. And Reznor knew how to mine this form for all the emotional catharsis it was worth, which was a lot.
But Reznor still stood out as a rock star, maybe the rock star of the time. Largely, that's a credit to his absolutely magnificent rock-star voice, one of the finest of his generation. On Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor sounds tough but also strained and vulnerable. There's a huge, frustrated mall-kid aspect to his voice, to the way it goes from defeated mutter to impotent yowl in no time flat. It's like he knows how petty he can sound, but he can't help himself. There's plenty of rancor on Pretty Hate Machine, too, much of it directed at some unspecific "you" that made his frustration all the more relatable: "I gave you my purity, and my purity you stole." On "Terrible Lie", he never bothers to specify what the lie in question is; does it matter? "Why am I seething with this animosity?" he asks, like even he doesn't know and can't justify it.
Much of Pretty Hate Machine concerns a simple scenario: Being young but feeling that your life is already over, that your best days are already behind you. On "Down in It": "I used to be somebody." On "That's What I Get": "How can you turn me into this/ After you just taught me how to kiss... you?" (On that extended pause, Reznor sounds like he's 12, like that "you" will never arrive and he's just admitted that he never made out with anyone before.) And on the time-stopping album centerpiece "Something I Can Never Have": "Everywhere I look, you're all I see/ Just a fading fucking reminder of who I used to be." "Something I Can Never Have" is where Reznor's vulnerability really becomes his greatest asset. His scream gone, his voice turns to pure bottomless dejection. He's carefully considered every aspect of his life, and nothing looks good. In the words of decade-later imitators Linkin Park, he sounds like he's about to break. Or like he's already broken.
"Something I Can Never Have" also shows an absolute mastery which would blossom soon after into something like genius, and which was already pretty far along in 1989. Starting with nothing but a haunted, minimal piano figure and a few hushed synth tones, the track slowly lets in sputtering static, faraway door-slam drums, and quiet little counter-melodies. Guitar never shows up; it'd break the spell. When NIN would do this track live, you could practically hear the collective intake of breath at those first piano notes. As far as I'm concerned, it's probably the single finest song Reznor ever wrote.
In later years, Reznor would push all the ideas on Pretty Hate Machine even further-- into a sputtering maelstrom, depressive stillness, zoned-out trance-states, and terrible beauty. But the ideas are all there already, contained in a 10-song capsule that ends quickly enough that everything lingers. Most of the songs on Pretty Hate Machine are fairly long, but no time is wasted. This new reissue doesn't much alter that original experience. The remaster job doesn't sound much different from the original article, and the sole bonus track, a sexed-up B-side cover of Queen's "Get Down Make Love", sort of misses the point; this was, in a lot of ways, an album about not getting laid. So the real reason to revisit the album is the album itself, nothing else. Now that Reznor has retired the NIN touring institution and become a sort of Internet-friendly cool-uncle figure, it's pretty striking to go back to that seismic first strike and re-feel all the stuff we first felt hearing this thing. | 2010-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 24, 2010 | 9.5 | 9fdd25b5-8f99-4230-9280-bb3bed3c2838 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
On their best album, this fascinating “philosophy jam band” begins with indie rock touchstones and then explores the fringes of those ideas. | On their best album, this fascinating “philosophy jam band” begins with indie rock touchstones and then explores the fringes of those ideas. | Young Jesus: The Whole Thing Is Just There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-jesus-the-whole-thing-is-just-there/ | The Whole Thing Is Just There | Young Jesus leader John Rossiter writes essays for The Los Angeles Review of Books about viewing the NBA as a socioeconomic metaphor. In interviews, he talks about Crass and the non-narcotic uses of mushrooms. He works at a celebrated California bookstore, and only camp counselors seem more excited about their jobs. Maybe that all seems as imposing as Young Jesus’ new album, The Whole Thing Is Just There—six songs, 49 minutes, sprees of knotty improvisations within rock tunes. But there’s an endearing transparency to Young Jesus’ competing personality quirks. They’re the grad student at a Big Ten university who reads books about jazz improvisation while manning a DSA table on campus before getting drunk at the five-act indie rock house show. A sort of philosophy jam band that riffs on ideology and politics instead of actual solos, Young Jesus are audacious but accessible, instantly likable even at their most esoteric.
Except the last Young Jesus album, 2017’s S/T, there’s nothing else really like The Whole Thing Is Just There around. Even that one was far removed from the albums made by the Chicago-based version of Young Jesus, a Midwestern crossbreed suited for anyone who wanted the Hold Steady to lead an emo revival. S/T was the first work Rossiter finished in Los Angeles, and it sounded absolutely nothing like its surroundings. Pivoting into post-rock landscapes both beautiful and barren, it was as cold as the desert at night or warm as the sun glaring off the frozen tundra.
But Young Jesus hadn’t quite unraveled the paradox of how to be intentional about its improvisation, so S/T came in uneven segments. On The Whole Thing Is Just There, the separation between the songs and the jams is mostly gone. Putting aside the 21-minute closer “Gulf,” the preceding half-hour is evenly split among five tracks, which doesn’t radically alter Young Jesus’ songwriting process. They’re just doing everything with more volume and confidence.
Signing to Saddle Creek for the re-release of S/T and the release of The Whole Thing Is Just There is a realization of Rossiter’s drunken 20-something dreams. While Young Jesus are more likely to reference Bill Orcutt and Albert Ayler than Conor Oberst these days, they haven’t forfeited the perpetually yearning quality of landlocked emo. Regardless of wave or variant, the Midwestern stuff is music for searchers, channeling the impossibility of true fulfillment through imperfect voices striving for a note always out of reach. That is here, as is a dose of self-deprecation. Young Jesus recognize the potential for unintentional humor when name-dropping Very Serious Art. “Saganism vs. Buddhism” surveys the assumed dissonance between science and spirituality and begins with a third-eye lyric. It risks turning into Live or Ab-Soul before Rossiter sighs in a deader-than-deadpan lilt, “I have begun contacting various mystics/I have begun buying rocks in stores.”
While it’s easy to focus on Young Jesus’ long songs or high concepts, “For Nana” should combat any assumptions that these pieces are inaccessible or overly challenging. Rossiter brought it into the studio as a wisp of an idea written after watching his grandmother die. “When you leave the room/I wonder how a heart exists beyond the beat,” Rossiter moans over tentative, gauzy guitars, coos outlining his question. Young Jesus spend the improv section trying to imagine a soul leaving its body.
Rossiter leads a current events workshop at Skylight Books and I imagine most of the discussions take on a similar trajectory to the songs on The Whole Thing Is Just There. They start with a welcoming remark and an introduction to a monolithic subject, establishing a conversational flow that honors everyone’s ideas and risks pure entropy before bringing it to a harmonious closure. During the first and final minute of any song here, Young Jesus suggest conventional indie rock. The mordant piano intro of “Saganism vs. Buddhism” could pass for the National. Over a doom-metal churn, “Deterritory” matches their half-twee, half-anarcho-punk philosophy of resisting cynicism by holding hands and raising fists. After a spry midsection of double-time drums and escalating yells, Rossiter returns to the opening theme of “Deterritory,” yelling, “It’s not enough to hate the world we live in!” A cymbal crash brings the song to a startling halt. It is as mesmerizing as watching a stadium implode in slow motion, as affirming as replacing it with a community center.
The feeling of S/T and The Whole Thing Are Just There inspire references to similarly uncompromising slabs of post-rock: Spiderland, Perfect From Now On, early Modest Mouse, and late Talk Talk, reflecting a nostalgia for a time when indie felt less beholden to fashion and narrative and more to mere ideas. The Whole Thing Is Just There is not an album from which Young Jesus can “level up” or whatever, because that would require forgoing the stream-of-consciousness improv of “Fourth Zone of Gaits” or the making of “Gulf,” a song Rossiter joked will be listened to in full by maybe five people. (He didn’t say if the four members of Young Jesus were included.)
A six-minute song that expanded into more than 20 while Young Jesus were in the studio, “Gulf” is Rossiter’s lament for “a century moving much too quickly.” It followed a writing-and-recording process that grappled with the same issues as basically every other indie rock band in 2018: Is playing my music a worthwhile pursuit in this political moment? Does my art and presence take up an unnecessary amount of space? Should I be making any kind of art when there’s so much more to be done? Not every single second of “Gulf” feels completely essential, but the entirety is. Young Jesus ask themselves thousands of questions, and they have the only proven solution—the release of pervasive self-doubt and anxiety is in the doing, the creating. | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | October 20, 2018 | 8.1 | 9fde11e7-d531-41b9-bb0b-3b46f0f8043d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
RL Grimes is the grittier, more ominous alter-ego of 22-year-old producer Henry Steinway, who makes big-room EDM as Clockwork. His new EP also showcases one of the producer’s greatest talents: his ability to restructure songs entirely without losing the drama of soaring dance melodies. | RL Grimes is the grittier, more ominous alter-ego of 22-year-old producer Henry Steinway, who makes big-room EDM as Clockwork. His new EP also showcases one of the producer’s greatest talents: his ability to restructure songs entirely without losing the drama of soaring dance melodies. | RL Grime: High Beams EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18327-rl-grime-high-beams-ep/ | High Beams EP | Henry Steinway is a modern day Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to his electronic dance potions. His day-glo personality is called Clockwork; a 22-year-old with big-room, mega-club house bangers like his jacked remix of Avicii’s “Levels” that hat-tips the fusion dance genre of moombahton while shoveling in heaps of electro to sidestep along the way. As Clockwork, Steinway has pulled production aesthetics from and played alongside house staples (like Avicii or Afrojack) while mining through indie-hip EDM scenes fostered by A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold and Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak imprint. He embraces trancy synth build-ups and uses chainsaw revs and electro-burping tech-house that’s fistpump ready even if it’s made with mosh-pits in mind. RL Grime, however, is a totally different animal.
It’s easiest to present RL Grime as Steinway’s grittier, more ominous alter-ego. One with trap prowess, catering more to stomps than pumps. And RL Grime really is all about that life; he fiddles with the bass and messes with tightly-wound beats, pulling away from the explosive, emotionally manipulative pandering of his EDM counterpart. But the mega-club mentality hasn’t completely escaped him. With his remix of Benny Benassi’s chart-topping hit “Satisfaction” last year, the producer wound down the shrill, whining melody to use as fodder for frantic bass blips and sexily sauntering snares. The idea of mimicking overbearing pop melodies with syncopated horns and strategically placed beats flips the song on its head. It also represents one of the producer’s greatest talents: his ability to restructure songs entirely without losing the drama of soaring dance melodies.
And so High Beams*’* strongest points showcase the ease in which Steinway can use this technique crossover to straight rap production. Last year’s “Mercy” remix with Salva immediately comes to mind upon hearing “CliqCliq”, the duo’s collaboration for this EP. Like “Mercy”, the hit-sampled track is catchy, clappy, and sinister. Pitchy synths wail over staticy beats and a loopy, buzzing drone that could easily drive a person insane was it not complemented with the menacing, echoing thuds of static that push the song forward. “Secondary” features Compton based rapper Problem for what turns out to be the most complete, radio-ready track on the EP; a testament of where RL Grime could head if he was so inclined.
Elements from Clockwork remain as well. “Pockets,” the album’s intro, tempers his hip-hop instrumentation with lush laser-like synths that pan over ping-pong drum-rim rhythms and bouncing MPC beats. “Shells” gives in a little more to the tropes, becoming a moonbounce of elastic synths that wind up, scream out, and boomerang around the song. As with Baauer-- a recent tour-mate and fellow Fool’s Gold/Mad Decent affiliate-- this balance of rap’s bump-n-grind groove and EDM’s flashiness helps prevent an artist from getting swallowed by the glut of the recent trap craze. But where Baauer is putting in work to show that he can also do house (by stripping down Disclosure’s “You & Me”) and ravey festival show-stoppers (his collab with Just Blaze for the Jay Z sampled “Higher”), Steinway has no need. In turn the producer’s High Beams EP serves not only as RL Grime’s debut EP on Fool's Gold but as a window into where RL Grime and Clockwork meet. | 2013-07-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-07-26T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fool’s Gold | July 26, 2013 | 6.8 | 9fe88ec2-f483-42eb-b6e3-ab25fbb19561 | Puja Patel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/puja-patel/ | null |
The band’s new live double LP is an exceptionally accomplished and generous look back at their evolution from shy indie darlings to touring powerhouse. | The band’s new live double LP is an exceptionally accomplished and generous look back at their evolution from shy indie darlings to touring powerhouse. | Belle and Sebastian: What to Look for in Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-what-to-look-for-in-summer/ | What to Look for in Summer | It's been 24 years since Belle and Sebastian emerged from the Glasgow underground, clutching a surfeit of near-perfect songs. Their classic first and second LPs, Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, established frontman and principal songwriter Stuart Murdoch as a generational talent, a writer who intuitively wedded the forensic character studies of Joni Mitchell to the chamber music of early John Cale, lending a Dylan-esque sophistication to the Sarah Records bands that were his sonic progenitors.
Ever since then, they’ve endured personnel changes, sonic reinventions and on occasion, hurt feelings beyond repair. And yet they endure, having lasted a decade-and-a-half longer than the Beatles, Velvets, or Smiths. On the new double live LP What to Look for in Summer, some of it recorded over three days on a cruise ship in August of 2019, the group thrillingly undertakes the business of excavating their long, complicated history.
In their infancy, Belle and Sebastian shows were charming but anguished affairs: a studio creation fighting to meet the challenge of sound people, monitors, and audiences. What a difference half a lifetime makes. Any trace of that old anti-professionalism is the outlier here—lead guitarist Stevie Jackson’s playing is Mike Bloomfield-worthy, and longtime members Richard Colburn, Sarah Martin, Chris Geddes, and Bobby Kildea form a rock-solid unit operating at David Bowie levels of showmanship.
Following a traditional Scottish fanfare, What to Look for in Summer breaks out of the gate with a romp through the 1998 highlight “Dirty Dream Number Two” and a delightfully glammed-up take on the 2003 single “Step Into My Office, Baby.” Both convey a spirit that is nostalgic without being maudlin. Although the band has been making reliably good-to-great records up until this day, the bulk of the material centers on their early classics, as befits any band with a quarter-century legacy.
What to Look for in Summer consciously fashions itself after immersive, almost comically overstuffed concert albums like Neil Diamond’s 1972 Hot August Night or Thin Lizzy’s 1978 double set Live and Dangerous. At a time when attention spans are increasingly trained towards 20-second videos, imposing slabs of vinyl like these are increasingly artifacts of an earlier era. It may be a rearguard war, but throughout its one hour and forty-minute run-time, it’s an exceptionally accomplished and generous one.
A marvelous reading of the 2006 track “Funny Little Frog” sounds like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson fighting for a melody and lyric and ending in a double disqualification. “My Wandering Days Are Over”—dedicated to ex-bandmate Isobel Campbell—is a delicate wonder, actualizing the outlaw country impulses only hinted at in the studio version. There's also a great, cathartic rip-through the title track to The Boy With the Arab Strap, a symphony of Al Green grooves, recorder solos, and social realism that brings together all of Murdoch’s preoccupations into a tuneful eight-minute monologue on dancing, philosophy, public transportation, and sex toys: It’s the ‘90s indie “Tangled Up in Blue.”
It’s something of a cheerful paradox that for all of the surpassing intimacy of Belle and Sebastian’s deeply personal music, it has fostered a devoted fan base and a profound sense of community between group and followers. Most of all this is what to expect from What to Look for in Summer. The songs sound great, but the easy on-stage banter and joyful communion with the audience sounds even better. Shut-ins of the world, unite and take over.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | December 17, 2020 | 8 | 9ff11687-610e-4170-97fb-1e59457caeed | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
With sharp DIY production and earnestly self-aware lyrics, Eric Reyes’ debut radiates familiar, understated emo-pop charm. | With sharp DIY production and earnestly self-aware lyrics, Eric Reyes’ debut radiates familiar, understated emo-pop charm. | Snow Ellet: Suburban Indie Rock Star EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snow-ellet-suburban-indie-rock-star-ep/ | Suburban Indie Rock Star EP | Chicago singer-songwriter and filmmaker Eric Reyes knows he isn’t famous yet. “I thought I’d come so far/The world can make you feel small,” he sings on “to some i’m genius,” the opening track of suburban indie rock star, his debut EP as Snow Ellet. “Yeah, I guess I’m kinda cool/To some, I’m genius like I always knew,” he concludes, reminding himself that even the most self-assured among us sometimes require outside validation. After years of performing with fine-print Warped Tour bands and uploading one-off tracks to his SoundCloud, Reyes quietly released suburban indie rock star in March of this year. By late April, a handful of independent blogs, podcasts, and Twitter tastemakers had caught on to Snow Ellet’s understated emo-pop charm. Suddenly, “to some i’m genius” became more than just an aspiration.
suburban indie rock star’s radiant melodies and double-tracked vocals have garnered understandable comparisons to Oso Oso’s Jade Lilitri, who similarly weaves elements of contemporary emo and pop-punk with the familiar warmth of early indie rock. Reyes was a kid when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Enema of the State first hit shelves, and he’s referenced both as catalysts in his musical awakening. The crossroads of ’90s indie rock and emo is a well-worn path by now, but with Reyes’ myriad influences and sharp DIY production, the EP feels more like a future reference point for like-minded successors than an attempt to chase a trend.
Lyrically, suburban indie rock star is earnestly self-aware, pinpointing anxieties and personal foibles with wit: “It’s useless to panic blindly/I’m just as useless, to put it kindly,” goes a standout lyric on “in reverie.” “I wrote the book on honesty,” he sings on closer “casualty.” “I wrote the book on being second best and nothing less.” More than once, Reyes refers to himself as the “casualty,” casting a shadow across his subject matter. But a sense of personal victory comes through on “brick”: “Get out the window, I’ll throw a brick/And I’ll make the neighbors stare while I’m running out of there,” Reyes sings, perhaps a metaphor for the social burdens of calling attention to yourself; being perceived has never been more unnerving.
At five songs and less than 12 minutes, suburban indie rock star is a brief listen. But even with the pseudo-brash title, Reyes’ prudent humility stands out. Rock stardom, by his definition, doesn’t necessarily involve selling out arena tours or dating Hollywood elites; as far as suburban indie rock star is concerned, immortalization can come by way of low-key hangouts or packed car rides with trusted companions. Snow Ellet makes an appropriate soundtrack for those moments.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4 Three! | May 7, 2021 | 7.1 | 9ff36126-8ca0-4df4-84d9-802c98a2a17b | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The singer-songwriter aims for a bigger sound with her new EP, a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips. | The singer-songwriter aims for a bigger sound with her new EP, a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips. | Samia : Scout EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/samia-scout-ep/ | Scout EP | There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in To Kill a Mockingbird in which Scout, after meeting Boo Radley for the first and last time, walks home alone. “As I made my way home, I felt very old,” she narrates, “but when I looked at the top of my nose, I could see fine misty beads, but looking cross-eyed made me dizzy, so I quit.” It’s an uncharacteristically whimsical passage for its logical setup: the experience of seeing misty beads is not exclusive to youth, but Scout’s flitting attention—as well as the defiantly indirect admission that she is, in fact, crying—imply her persistent girlhood.
On her excellent 2020 debut, The Baby, Samia sought refuge in the same willful distraction. The cozy “Big Wheel” begins with a child’s litany (“I got bug bites on my legs/I got two friends who look alike/I got coffee in the morning/And my mama in the night”), slowly approaching the subject of a deceitful boyfriend; the narrator of “Waverly” painstakingly describes an East Village diner before alluding to her own heartbreak. Even if The Baby is ultimately about being a daughter, lover, and friend, its scatteredness lent an oblique lens to Samia’s adolescent blues, her shrugging honesty eschewing that oh-so-millennial earnestness.
The follow-up EP Scout is a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips. As a songwriter, Samia remains wary of melodrama; she still talks about her friends and parents in the interchangeable manner of an only child. If the result is a more ponderous record than its predecessor, that’s mainly due to Boone Wallace and Andy Seltzer’s production. Like a lost track from Now Now’s Saved, Scout’s centerpiece “Show Up” opens with melancholy piano chords and blooms into a warehouse-sized arrangement with an enrapturing chorus and a legit beat drop. Although The Baby flirted with electronic elements, it mostly stuck to an intimate indie-rock sound; in comparison, Scout sounds big.
At times, the synths and vocal effects leave Samia sounding a bit washed out. She’s got a pretty remarkable voice, yet her inflection is delicate, her default mode a narcotized listlessness punctuated with plaintive refrains. But for the most part, the engineering is deployed with purpose: where The Baby didn’t have much room for singalong anthems, Scout has several, including a faithful rendition of When in Rome’s “The Promise.” The cover makes for a curiously apropos finale—if you didn’t know better, you’d assume that the rushing chorus and beatific lyrics were Samia’s own.
Even the title of her debut, The Baby, functioned as both an apology and alibi, an admission of frivolity, and a promise to clean up her act. Scout suggests a more interesting trajectory and a more difficult one—there’s never any shortage of angst or longing when the irony runs out. With luck, Samia could be one of those perpetually coming-of-age figures like Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, and Carly Rae Jepsen, dwelling in the rapturous precipices, chasing sunsets and self-discovery no matter the cost.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | July 27, 2021 | 7.2 | 9fff6362-53c1-4e8d-b4a2-7adeb69671cd | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Two of rap’s biggest hitmakers team up for a sleek, vengeful project that somewhat successfully tries to recapture the feeling of an event album. | Two of rap’s biggest hitmakers team up for a sleek, vengeful project that somewhat successfully tries to recapture the feeling of an event album. | Future / Metro Boomin: WE DON’T TRUST YOU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-metro-boomin-we-dont-trust-you/ | WE DON’T TRUST YOU | Future and Metro Boomin are wistful for the days when rap regularly had moments, the kind of moments that had you FOMO-racing to your computer. Nothing was worse than being out of the loop. Remember when Nicki Minaj blacked out on “Monster”? When Funk Flex lost his mind during his premiere of Kanye and Jay-Z’s “Otis”? When Kendrick started a civil war with “Control”? When Drake and Meek Mill were at each other’s necks? When Future dropped his mixtape-run victory lap Dirty Sprite 2 and shot to the moon? Those days were fun. With their vengeful, event album We Don’t Trust You, Future and Metro seek to recapture that essence by creating a moment of their own.
And who better to orchestrate an event than two of rap’s essential hitmakers of the last decade teaming up for what is billed as their first official joint album—even if the heads know that it is really DS2. Just the sight of their names alongside each other is enough to bring back memories of “Radical,” “Thought It Was a Drought,” “Mask Off,” or any of their other smashes. Though, as far as Future’s collaborators go, I would have rather heard his album with Nard & B or DJ Spinz or Mike WiLL Made-It, producers who helped to shape his druggy trap blues but have never gotten the chance to flesh that out. A Future and Metro album has no choice other than to be a supernova, so We Don’t Trust You is much safer and more conservative than I imagine any of those would be. The only room to tread new ground is by going bigger and glitzier.
Metro has been headed down that path for a while, tinkering with the cinematic evolution of his Southern trap roots. There was the glossy 2022 solo album Heroes & Villains, which felt like his audition to curate the music of a superhero movie. Six months later he did exactly that with the heavily polished soundtrack for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That shine bleeds into the production of We Don’t Trust You; smooth and spotless and heavy on showy beat switch-ups and orchestral touches. For example, “Young Metro” builds up to a synth explosion that booms as pristinely as a Hans Zimmer score.
That’s fine for Hollywood music intended to blast from the loudspeakers at amusement parks, but with production that has a trap foundation, the blemishes, the kinks, the idiosyncrasies, even if purposeful, are everything. Metro was a hitmaker who always got weird with it: the fuzzy 808s on “I Serve the Base” hit like a firestorm, the synths on “Wesley Presley” are like alien transmissions. In fact, some of the coolest Atlanta rap of the last year, such as Ken Carson’s A Great Chaos, is rough, messy, and influenced by the controlled havoc of old Metro. Here, the beats aren’t drastically different from what he would have done eight or nine years ago—you could picture Slime Season Thug on “Slimed In” or Savage Mode-era 21 Savage on “GTA”—except for the fact that it feels like they’ve been hosed down with sanitizer.
At least Metro weaves in the extravagance way more naturally than the wannabe Kanye albums out there (hi, Utopia and 2093). The switch from slow and moody to uptempo and flashy in a snap on “Ice Attack” is fun enough, elevated by a showstopping Future verse where he’s bragging about his diamonds and throwing words like “banoodles” out there for the hell of it. The church-bell-driven roar of “Type Shit” is a standout, and the few seconds of Future and Playboi Carti trading slurred bars as the beat fades is transcendent. Strongest are unfussy deep cuts, like “Fried (She a Vibe),” one of those eerie strip club on a weekday afternoon joints Future and Metro are masters at. Or “Ain’t No Love,” where Zaytoven’s ominous church organs and flutes show up and you start wondering why this just isn’t Beast Mode 3.
For what it’s worth, Future sounds jazzed-up, which isn’t always the case nowadays. He’s not all Seven Dwarfs wrapped into one like he once was; throw on Hndrxx and he’s pissed off, sad, feeling himself, hating himself, flexing, melting down, at the same time, all the time. Now he’s less interested in the whys, though his life remains a self-indulgent blur of drugs and sex. Refreshingly We Don’t Trust You sheds the played-out supervillain act of I Never Liked You in exchange for decently vivid kingpin bars, even if I’d rather just go fire up Astronaut Status or Streetz Calling for that.
Pivotally, despite less singing and character work, Future still nails that sleazy, sinister atmosphere that only he can pull off. For instance, on the first half of “Magic Don Juan (Princess Diana)” he sounds like he’s on day three of a bender as he spits, “Got that sniff on me, that white shit like Tom Brady.” That seediness is injected in the album intro where he’s vaguely muttering in the shadows about fake friends like he’s about to go on a Charles Bronson-style revenge mission, as it slowly becomes more clear that he’s chatting shit about Drake.
The thing that is supposed to cement We Don’t Trust You as the kind of unforgettable, zeitgeist-defining rap moment that doesn’t happen anymore are the subliminals about Future and Metro’s breakup with Drake. (College campuses in 2016 would be heartbroken.) That seems to be the motivating force behind why Future’s tongue is more venomous than usual and the album is packed with bite-sized clips of a wrathful, heelish Prodigy monologue. Other than the intro, Future leaves the real grimy work to a sourpuss appearance from Kendrick. Over Metro’s solid flip of West Coast digital funk jam “Everlasting Bass,” Kendrick throws a few warm-up jabs at Drake (and J. Cole, much less important). “Motherfuck the big three, nigga, it’s just big me,” he yells, addressing Cole’s idea that the trio are the three pillars of modern rap. A declaration of a war of words and sass. But it’s hard to let go of the fact that I would have cared so much more about this hip-hop soap opera a decade ago, the last time it would have felt deeper than bored rich guys bickering for attention and streams. The timing is off.
The same goes for We Don’t Trust You. None of it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but why now? Maybe because nostalgia for the last two decades of Atlanta trap is on the uptick, as those who grew up with the groundbreaking subgenre look for comforting retreats from the uncertain and unpredictable and very online future of rap. In the last few years we’ve already seen Tyler, the Creator in his quest to prove his rap bona fides gesture toward the spirit of old Jeezy and T.I. mixtapes with DJ Drama tags; Westside Gunn, the ultimate hip-hop revivalist, toss DJ Trap-A-Holics drops on his last album. Even a pop star like Camila Cabello is on the hunt for some vintage cool points by interpolating Gucci Mane. Future and Metro don’t even seem so sure themselves of what the world wants from them—that could be why they’ve hedged with a second joint album that is weeks away. So instead with We Don’t Trust You they take the easy way out by evoking past memories rather than building new ones. Understandable because remembering the old days is pretty sweet, well, until it hits you that they’re gone. | 2024-03-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / Freebandz / Republic / Boominati Worldwide | March 27, 2024 | 7 | a009e00c-51b4-4594-b3fc-b85f58cd3f5e | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Graveface band veers toward a mutant electronic version of sunny folk-pop that somehow also sounds claustrophobic, sickly, and a little bit damaged. | Graveface band veers toward a mutant electronic version of sunny folk-pop that somehow also sounds claustrophobic, sickly, and a little bit damaged. | Black Moth Super Rainbow: Dandelion Gum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10246-dandelion-gum/ | Dandelion Gum | Black Moth Super Rainbow apparently consists of a few pals with funny nicknames like Tobacco and Father Hummingbird, who dress strangely, occasionally wear masks, and make music together off in some isolated rural area near Pittsburgh. It all sounds suspiciously engineered to cultivate an image for the band as eccentric pop outsiders. Fortunately, the backstory doesn't matter much, because the first thing to do with a record like BMSR's latest, Dandelion Gum, is to forget about who made it: The music discourages any engagement with personality. For one thing, the album's vocals are warped beyond repair by vocoder, even when its tracks occasionally veer toward a mutant electronic version of sun-drenched folk-pop. Most of the time, you can't understand a thing being said, but here, that's not a problem: The meaning of the music comes through regardless.
As a band, Black Moth Super Rainbow, have been toiling away for a few years now, amassing several full-lengths, CD-Rs, and collaborations, most notably a 2006 split EP with the Octopus Project. But where the group's earlier records, when not traveling a purely instrumental path, incorporated more or less "regular" singing, Dandelion Gum takes a big risk: It relies on a single vocal filter throughout the course of the entire album. Typically, a processed voice so readily becomes the focus of a song that, without at least some change to the effect, a full record can seem samey or redundant. Luckily, Black Moth have an unusual enough mood going here that the uniformity becomes a strength. The vocals are playful but not played for laughs; to me they sound claustrophobic, almost sickly. It's not a voice that brings shiny singing robots to mind, but rather people who've spent so much time indoors that their bodies have begun to change in unhealthy ways. To that end, the vocoder gives the record a shade of darkness it wouldn't otherwise have.
The keyboards throughout sound vintage, with textures that bring to mind Mellotron and Moog, while the guitars are thin, trebly, and speckled with analog dust. The central pulsating riff of "Sun Lips" sounds an awful lot like the dream-channeled refrain of "Strawberry Fields Forever", even as it's used in service of what is ultimately a tremendously simple little pop tune. "We miss you in summertime," the singer (that would be Tobacco on the mic) intones through his machine, and since it seems kind of like a love song, the presence of "we" is a little odd. Does he have a mouse in his pocket? Maybe it's one of those songs that seems directed to a woman but is really about weed. Somehow, though, it works. Chalk it up to the world of this album.
If much of Dandelion Gum sounds like something recorded at home on the cheap, "Rollerdisco", which forms an impressive 1-2 punch after "Sun Lips", demonstrates that Black Moth gets the most out of their modest set-up. Like much of their past work, it comes over like a spry, airy, and tremendously evocative instrumental Boards of Canada interlude, from back when the Scottish duo still did that sort of thing. And the acoustic guitar loop in "Jump Into My Mouth and Breathe the Stardust" has the old-tape-found-under-a-tree-stump vibe that gave BoC's The Campfire Headphase an appealing sense of water-damaged psychedelia. Early Beck is even invoked on "Melt Me", which sounds an awful lot like what "Devil's Haircut" would have been had Carl Stephenson helped lay it down for Mellow Gold. Still, despite the occasionally folky melodic sensibility, Black Moth's aesthetic is always spacey-- they're more likely to be scoring a laser show at a planetarium than busking on a street corner.
Wherever these guys are holed up and whether or not they really call the drummer Iffernaut, Dandelion Gum is a nice surprise and a good example of why doing one thing very well is sometimes more than enough. | 2007-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-05-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Graveface | May 23, 2007 | 7.8 | a0100689-cf65-4d78-9805-d48f7f1af3cb | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Talking Heads’ second album expanded their sound and took them to the dancefloor, marking the beginning of their career-defining collaborations with Brian Eno. | Talking Heads’ second album expanded their sound and took them to the dancefloor, marking the beginning of their career-defining collaborations with Brian Eno. | Talking Heads: More Songs About Buildings and Food | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talking-heads-more-songs-about-buildings-and-food/ | More Songs About Buildings and Food | When the Ramones and Talking Heads toured Europe in the spring of 1977, Johnny Ramone was annoyed by seemingly everything. The varieties of lettuce served abroad. Stonehenge (“a buncha rocks,” he called it, according to the excellent book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire). And of course, the James Brown tapes that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth played on the bus. Though the two bands frequently gigged together within the early New York punk scene, the Ramones were all about girl groups and surf rock, while their preppy-looking tourmates—particularly Weymouth and her soon-to-be husband, drummer Chris Frantz—were wild about funky R&B.
Toward the end of the tour, Talking Heads played a small solo show in London. Brian Eno, fresh off making Low with David Bowie, caught the gig and invited the band to lunch the next day, which turned into listening to records at his flat. The producer put on Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac and blew their minds. Afrobeat music (particularly West African polyrhythms) would become the next big influence on the members of Talking Heads, culminating in their magnum opus, 1980’s Remain in Light. But while that was still percolating, the group made an immediate connection with Eno. By the following spring, Talking Heads had kicked their original production team of disco pros to the curb and took up recording More Songs About Buildings and Food alongside Eno in the Bahamas.
Though many tracks on their second album were live staples dating back to 1975, the songs took on a more groove-oriented sound as Talking Heads progressed and played to their strengths. Incorporating disco rhythms separated them further from Television, their closest corollary in the CBGB scene. The tempos were slowed down and simmering, while the layers of instrumentation and effects were built up. You can hear Eno’s “studio as instrument” approach in all sorts of sonic details, like the loudspeaker-style vocals and reverb bouncing off the drums in “Warning Sign,” the curious clicks and dubby echoes punctuating “Stay Hungry,” or the faint twinkling between lines in the chorus of their heady cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” But these increasingly intricate aesthetics never threaten to overthrow the music’s pleasure center: an involuntary compulsion to move your body. On More Songs About Buildings and Food, Talking Heads were sorting out how to engage simultaneously with the mind and the soul (or at least the hips)—how to be both art-rock and dance music.
“Take Me to the River,” their first Top 40 hit, is ground zero for this duality. At the time, various white fools were reinterpreting Reverend Green’s 1974 album-cut-turned-Syl-Johnson-hit, ranging from the horrid (Foghat) to the decent (Levon Helm); none of them come near Talking Heads’ singular take. A soul song that walks the line between the sacred and the profane is not something you’d expect a singer who typically yelped quotidian paranoia to excel at, yet David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal phrasings—his pauses, his stretched-out crooning and strained falsetto, his “yayayayayaya” that sounds like it’s coming toward you—forever changed the way people hear “Take Me to the River.” And Byrne isn’t even the cover’s main power source, Weymouth is. Their version is one big, throbbing bass loop—the fastest, possibly only route to a sexy Talking Heads song.
Byrne spends much of his band’s most immediately danceable record not getting laid, though. He claims he’s just too busy for romance these days. When he demands, atop a frantic guitar jangle in “The Good Thing,” that you stop and watch him work, it could almost be the album’s thesis statement. But Byrne is not just a workaholic, he’s also humorously jaded: The girls, after all, are “getting into abstract analysis” instead of paying attention to him. The one clear relationship portrait he paints is completely absurd, centering around a couple that funnels their stupid fights into a hit TV show; cheekily, it’s called “Found a Job.” By and large, these songs are about being a young, ambitious artist in the city, an album where the age is forever 26 and the mood is raring to go.
Two songs that epitomize this outlook, “Artists Only” and “The Big Country,” are among the album’s most beautiful—the former for its interlocking parts, the latter for its swooning simplicity. An ode to the creative process, “Artists Only” is built from the kind of instrumental interplay that makes you want to dismantle it just so you can understand the source of its magic and mystery; is it the swirling organ melody, the chiming guitar riff, or the chugging bassline that produces this effect? (Like most things Talking Heads, the magic’s in the combinations.) Meanwhile, “The Big Country” is as lucid (and twangy) as Byrne gets: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” he pronounces outright in the surprisingly laidback chorus. He borrowed the phrase “the big country” from Roxy Music’s Country Life closer “Prairie Rose,” where it refers to Texas, but as far as Byrne’s concerned, it’s any place you’d fly over without feeling much curiosity. It’s a barbed judgement he sings with relative peace, like someone relieved they live amid the move and hustle of New York City instead of, y’know, America.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | April 23, 2020 | 8.8 | a012e98c-d7e4-4bf4-ab71-d74c9cd53849 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
Bowles has the power to transform the sound of a banjo—and traditional folk music—into something transcendental, often bringing the spirit of Americana to new heights. | Bowles has the power to transform the sound of a banjo—and traditional folk music—into something transcendental, often bringing the spirit of Americana to new heights. | Nathan Bowles: Whole & Cloven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22279-whole-cloven/ | Whole & Cloven | Nathan Bowles may be best known as a banjo player, but he’s not just a banjo player. Aside from playing drums, piano, and organ in Steve Gunn’s touring band as well as supporting roles in Pelt and Black Twig Pickers, Bowles’ solo albums cover a wide terrain. On 2014’s Nansemond, guitarist Tom Carter nearly stole the show. His solos helped bring Bowles’ compositions—which recall both early American folk and more contemporary revivalists like Jack Rose—to thornier and heavier places. Nansemond positioned Bowles as a crucial force in folk music, showcasing his ability to interweave the genre’s communal spirit with chilling moments of ambient introspection.
The latter informs the most beautiful composition on Whole & Cloven, Bowles’ colorful, uplifting follow-up to Nansemond. Despite its on-the-nose title and extended runtime, the 11-minute “I Miss My Dog” is an exercise in subtlety, a gorgeous and impeccably paced elegy. Its slow-building structure touches on the darkness within Nansemond, but the song ascends with a feathery rhythm that serves as the album’s heartbeat. Remarkably, it uses traditional folk elements and instrumentation to reach something closer to New Age music.
In a recent interview, Bowles explained his attraction to the banjo "because it’s a drum with strings on it. I tend to play everything percussively.” He puts that sentiment into practice throughout his performances on Whole & Cloven. An earthy buzz created by an acoustic guitar echoes through the beatific “Words Spoken Aloud,” sounding at once like a jaw harp and a kazoo. The sunshower of keys in “Chiaroscuro,” meanwhile, suggests that he looks at the piano just like the banjo: an even bigger drum with strings on it. Playing all the instruments himself, Bowles transcends their primary sounds, reinventing them to better suit his compositions. Even his banjo playing, which is as rhythmic and virtuosic as always, more closely resembles a sitar in most songs. In “Gadarene Fugue,” the actual percussion flitters from his picking like sparks from a campfire.
After using something like an entire music store’s worth of instruments, in “Moonshine Is the Sunshine,” as on several Nansemond tracks, we get to hear Bowles' actual voice. He sings exactly like you’d imagine a guy with a banjo to sing: a lazy, gravely holler that sells the obscure folk song’s “Wouldn’t it be funny if all the fish dropped out of school?” cutesiness. It’s one of the only tracks on the album that scans immediately as standard folk music: the kind of song a traditionalist like Sam Amidon might color with sadness, or Gillian Welch might stretch out into a cavernous ballad. But Bowles just plays it straight, stomping his foot, and bellowing along. It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful. On an album that reshapes folk music into something boundless and new, “Moonshine” is a testament to how far he’s come. | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | August 30, 2016 | 7.5 | a01578bb-649c-4142-a04f-1eb2503562bc | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The inscrutable shoegaze legends return with a towering reunion album, their first in 22 years. Unexpectedly, it is their most emotionally accessible music yet. | The inscrutable shoegaze legends return with a towering reunion album, their first in 22 years. Unexpectedly, it is their most emotionally accessible music yet. | Hum: Inlet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hum-inlet/ | Inlet | Rumors of a fifth Hum album have been circulating since 2016, and there’s some poetry in its surprise drop coinciding with the 20th-anniversary celebration of Deftones’ White Pony, this century’s most influential vision for heavy melodic rock and something that wouldn’t exist without Hum. In the past decade, an entire galaxy of bands equally indebted to shoegaze, emo and alt-rock has emerged from the niche Hum occupied in their heyday—seen as intimidating older brothers by fellow bands on the upstart Polyvinyl label in their home base of Champaign-Urbana, overshadowed and unfairly likened to upstate neighbors/tour mates Smashing Pumpkins. Yet, Inlet doesn’t indicate a band awaiting a hero’s welcome or trying to connect with the world at large. Rather, the massive album presents an invitation to block out everything in existence and ponder the enormity of the universe.
Hum’s wanderlust for inner odysseys was evident in the titles of their two major-label albums: You’d Prefer an Astronaut, Downward is Heavenward. Inlet doesn’t evoke the same playful adventurousness; its heavily fortified exteriors are more reflective of their standoffish relationship with media attention; a decade before it soundtracked a Cadillac commercial, the modest success of “Stars” allowed Hum to terrorize the Howard Stern Show with glass-shattering volume and confound Matt Pinfield by wearing chicken suits on 120 Minutes. “Step Into You” is the only thing here that could possibly give Hum a second chance at the mainstream success they tried their hardest to avoid—mostly because it’s the only thing here less than five minutes, though the cyclical, deadpan melody, head-nodding midtempo groove and hair gel-slick guitar solo could’ve shared space on the alt-rock dial next to Collective Soul.
Hum’s legacy has largely been stewarded by acolytes like Greet Death, Narrow Head, and the Talbott-produced Cloakroom, all of whom have embraced their more funereal aspects and ignored their commercial flirtations. In that light, Inlet is essentially fan service. Talbott’s rhythm guitar, moves with the velocity of a mudslide or molten lava, while Tim Lash’s textured leads evoke water and air, replicating an algae bloom in “Waves” or a slow-motion geyser on the chorus of “Shapeshifter.” And the riffs—the riffs!—are Black Sabbath-slow and simple, like Hum really spent 22 years stockpiling and eliminating anything that couldn’t withstand at least six minutes of repetition or maintain its melodic thrust at the slowest possible tempos.
There are no strings, no Hum 2.0 electronic upgrades, not even post-rock crescendos — in fact, “Folding” does the opposite, stopping midway to bathe in beatless, infinite sustain. Half of the songs here are longer than eight minutes, so the “prog” tag they acquired from Downward is Heavenward will probably stick. It would’ve been enough if Hum had simply picked up where they left off, but Inlet pulls off something far more difficult—it could pass for the work of a band influenced by Hum, taking them in a more minimalist, esoteric direction: post-hardcore guitars played at stoner metal tempos.
Throughout the ’90s, Talbott grew increasingly inscrutable—if his lyrics had remained as legible as they were on “Stars,” Hum might have dealt with greater visibility. But for whatever reason—perhaps the threat of fluke success has faded, or age has eroded their contrarian defense mechanisms—Inlet is Hum’s most emotionally accessible album. Placed unexpectedly high and clear in the mix, Talbott’s vocals function as a lighthouse beacon for anyone trying to navigate the dark, misty and forbidding path surrounding it. While the song titles here are much less florid than, say, “Isle of the Cheetah” or “An Afternoon with the Axolotls,” they’re every bit as evocative, saying exactly what Hum are going to do before they do it. “Cloud City” creates an unforeseen nexus between Helmet and Ride, a monument suspended in air, and of course, Hum nails the sonics of “Waves.” More importantly, the guitars align with Talbott’s evocation of memory’s painful onset—“the dying landscape meets the water/and the waves of you roll over me again.” Hum are just as committed to the theme of “Shapeshifter,” with Talbott going on a Phil Elverum-esque naturalist tangent, imagining himself as a fawn and a bird soaring, “to heights unimagined, 'til loneliness turned back its hold.”
As with the comeback albums from Sleep, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and American Football, Inlet is inherently decadent—four people taking two decades to create about 50 minutes of outrageously luxurious guitars. But Hum has little interest in making an event out of their return, declining to do any press or even provide lyrics. The newfound clarity of their sound allows Inlet to answer any questions that it might raise, a world unto itself: after spanning the depths of the ocean, the expanse of the desert and the breadth of the sky, “Shapeshifter” returns to where Inlet began—“Suddenly me just here back on the land/Reaching for you and finding your hand.” This isn’t escapism, but a meditative retreat—give it an hour of your time and return to the material world more grounded than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Earth Analog | July 1, 2020 | 7.8 | a026bb7e-b3b9-4f12-9039-b27f11d19a01 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
A collection of radio sessions by 10 of Warp’s defining artists is an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s breadth of vision. | A collection of radio sessions by 10 of Warp’s defining artists is an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s breadth of vision. | Various Artists: WXAXRXP Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-wxaxrxp-sessions/ | WXAXRXP Sessions | If you want to survive and thrive creatively in the music industry long-term, you could do worse than study Warp. The UK indie label got its start in the late 1980s with a bass-heavy regional dance sound known as bleep. By 2000, Warp had relocated from Sheffield to London, and led the rise of what it dubbed “electronic listening music” and others called, for better or worse, intelligent dance music. Over the past two decades, the label has expanded its horizons, dabbling everywhere from Los Angeles beat music to Brooklyn art-rock to chameleonic Detroit rapper Danny Brown. Last year’s Warp debut by Yves Tumor, Safe in the Hands of Love, felt like another future milestone.
So Warp has certainly earned a 30th-anniversary celebration. Less clear is what released form that should take in 2019, when the label’s groundbreaking studio work is only a couple of taps away, and previous anniversary compilations already exist. Large anthologies are crucial in Warp’s history, going back to 1992’s genre-defining IDM compilation Artificial Intelligence, which helped expose Aphex Twin and Autechre. WXAXRXP Sessions, available piecemeal or as a 10-disc vinyl box set, distinguishes itself by bringing together only radio sessions, including previously obscure or unreleased tracks.
There are 41 tracks here, from 10 of Warp’s defining artists, with recording dates spanning from 1990 to this summer. That’s more than three hours of music, and plenty of it is great: an alternate-history crash course in a boundary-pushing label’s impressive breadth of vision. But a collection of 10 radio sessions is still a collection of radio sessions. This buffet of material feels like it would once have been relegated to B-sides on import-only CD singles, to be cherished by the most diehard fans.
In a press release, guitarist Mark Clifford of Seefeel tells a story that seems emblematic of WXAXRXP Sessions. The electronic-leaning UK shoegaze innovators are represented here with a dubby 1994 radio session for beloved BBC radio host John Peel that includes two previously unreleased tracks. One of them, an aqueous, lurching beast that would make an incredible sample for a present-day rap song, the band apparently came up with on the spot. Clifford recalls that Peel announced the song by saying, “Rough for Radio, that’s exactly how we like it,” and the title stuck.
WXAXRXP Sessions offers the chance to hear some of the label’s more heavily mythologized artists in just this state, rough for radio. Aphex Twin is documented here in another Peel session, one of only two that Cornish synth wizard Richard D. James (among many other aliases) has ever done. This warm, playful set—highlighted by rarity “Slo Bird Whistle,” which sounds true to its name—is an inviting glimpse of James on the eve of his 1995 album ...I Care Because You Do. The 1998 Peel session by Boards of Canada, the Scottish electronic duo’s sole radio performance, loosens up a few tracks from their sublime album of the same year, Music Has the Right to Children, alongside a Peel-only curio: the glitchy, percussive “XYZ.” A previously unreleased 1990 Peel session by Leeds’ LFO accounts for Warp’s rave-era origins, though the haunting “Rob’s Nightmare” shows the duo was already thinking beyond the dancefloor.
More recent Warp radio sessions illuminate how the label has evolved while maintaining its forward-looking spirit. A four-song set by Flying Lotus, most of which originally aired on BBC Radio 1 in 2010, finds a top-notch band breathing new life into heady jazz-funk from that year’s Cosmogramma and 2007’s Reset EP, plus a sultry one-off called “Golden Axe.” Four songs recorded by Mount Kimbie during Warp’s takeover of London online radio station NTS this past June underline what a forceful live act the once primarily electronic duo has become, bolstered by scene-stealer Mica Levi’s beautifully slurred “Marilyn” guest vocal. New York composer Kelly Moran, whose session is the only one here that has never been broadcast, extends the Warp tradition of contemplative, deep-listening experiences into the less familiar realm of prepared piano.
As an excuse to expose new audiences to Warp’s formidable roster, WXAXRXP Sessions is fine, and piling all these sessions into a playlist and hitting shuffle is fascinating; they flow, despite their differences. But, unusually for the label, this seems less like the sound of tomorrow than a (lavishly assembled) completist novelty. There, too, Warp may be a harbinger of how to get by in the record business. Considering the richness of the scraps stitched together here, it’s hard to get too upset about whatever keeps the music playing.
Buy: Rough Trade (Mount Kimbie) (Bibio) (Kelly Moran)
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Warp | November 22, 2019 | 7.2 | a030ad3f-0a62-4eff-90d8-3c358afe2b21 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records. | Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records. | Neil Young: A Letter Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19295-neil-young-a-letter-home/ | A Letter Home | Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. From the looks of things, Pono seems to be the most practical application of Young's audio purism to date. He's been a loud critic of the mp3 and digital audio degradation for years, and he's embraced expensive and clunky listening formats to ensure that listeners are getting the best possible sound quality. His public persona in recent months has been that of "expert audio purist"—decrying "underwater listening" behind a desk, driving record executive Mo Ostin around to show off the capabilities of his new format, and so forth.
So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records. In fact, the sonic quality of Young's latest, A Letter Home, might be a little worse than its spiritual forebears: Young joined Jack White at his Third Man HQ in Nashville, where he posted up in a 1940s phone-booth-size studio with limited resources—his acoustic guitar, a harmonica, a piano, and White—to record a handful of covers direct to vinyl. It's pretty much the sonic opposite of, say, his early collaborations with Jack Nitzsche. You can hear the continuous scrape of the grooves, pops, and momentary warps—tiny flaw after tiny flaw. Vintage-sounding and created using White's toys, it has all the appearance of a record featuring the guy who encased Paramount's archives in an oak cabinet and gussied up old Charley Patton records.
Young introduces the album with a letter to his dead mother, telling her that she should talk to his dad (his parents divorced in 1961), asking her to relay a message to his late bandmate Ben Keith, and telling her about how the public turns on Al, the weatherman. It's a sweet, absurd bit of business that vaguely recalls his sense of humor from Human Highway, and it frames the album as a care package to the afterworld, with songs and messages sounding like they're being transmitted via string-connected aluminum cans. This context renders his subsequent performance of Phil Ochs' "Changes" heart-wrenching. His voice is quiet, his guitar is strummed tenderly, the song he sings is about aging and loss. "Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else, one last cup of wine we'll pour/ And I'll kiss you one more time, and leave you on the rolling river shores of changes." At one point in the song, he misses a chord change, which makes the performance feel incredibly human. After all, this is Neil Young, who's got an entire discography of impeccably recorded material. Those small flubs are like scratched out words on a page, and they make the record feel much more intimate.
For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home. The strongest moments on the album are the most delicate ones, which shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone who's spent any time with "Ambulance Blues" or Live at Canterbury House. The restrained material is also better suited for this recording format. His stripped down readings of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" and "Early Morning Rain" pares both songs back to their essentials—beautifully delivered acoustic rambles about being a long way from home and a pained look back at a relationship. On one of his two duets with White, a version of the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder if I Care as Much" that closes the album, their voices sound completely gorgeous together and neither White nor Young showboats. It's a loving, simple, well-done tribute.
Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content. Young's cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" is partially blown by warped sound to the point where the original version sounds more assertive and fully realized than Neil's cover. Occasionally, Young will blow the harmonica too hard and temporarily mar every other sound; elsewhere, he covers songs that flat-out sound bad in the audio format they're presented in. "Since I Met You Baby" is an unessential, bleary version of Ivory Joe Hunter's velvet R&B original, while "My Hometown", removed from the production of Born in the U.S.A., is repetitive and a bad fit for Young's voice. The cover of "On the Road Again" is just a slapdash mess; White's vocals somehow sound abrasive, and similar to the Springsteen cover, Neil's voice just isn't well-suited to tackle Willie Nelson's register.
Young said the songs he picked to cover were "songs that I love, songs that changed my life," and said behind the archaic recording quality was some "beautiful music". There's nothing more beautiful or potentially life-changing on A Letter Home than his take on Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death". It's a gorgeous, heartbreaking song about a heroin overdose—it's devastating and beautiful coming from Young, a longtime Jansch disciple who also lost friends to the needle (and wrote some of his best songs about it).
There's a video of Young performing the song, and at the end, White comes up and says, "That sounded good." Young replies, "That's a heavy song." He wasn't focused on how it sounded—he was thinking about what he was singing. In that way, A Letter Home doesn't contradict his work on Pono. Both projects, different as they are, stem from his deep love for the material. If anything, the crackling whistle that introduces "Needle of Death" speaks much more strongly to the life-changing power of music than any extra-musical project ever could. | 2014-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | May 2, 2014 | 6.3 | a0326562-71e5-4b3f-bdb9-b0e44ec2c67c | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album dilutes jangly reverb and pop-punk energy into a sound that’s chemically weather-treated for commercial appeal. | The 21-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album dilutes jangly reverb and pop-punk energy into a sound that’s chemically weather-treated for commercial appeal. | EKKSTACY: EKKSTACY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ekkstacy-ekkstacy/ | EKKSTACY | Browse some of the recent profiles of 21-year-old singer-songwriter Ekkstacy, and two details appear over and over: First, his biggest song, the airy “i walk this earth all by myself,” has a lot of streams. Second, although he began his career in high school making SoundCloud emo rap, he’s now proudly an indie rocker. Neither genre translates well on his new self-titled album, one of the most assertively generic releases in recent memory. These thickly shellacked songs lack the disaffected-but-exciting undercurrent that Ekkstacy’s influences share; they also ignore the elegance of his higher vocal register, which resonated on his early self-releases. The result is a clinically impersonal record that reveals nearly nothing about the artist for which it’s named.
Initially, Ekkstacy modeled his sound after the misty, arpeggiated ennui of late-2010s grunge rappers like XXXTentacion. His early releases—“the sadness in my smile” and “uncomparable”—achieve a tidy, if derivative, style reminiscent of the late Florida rapper’s 2017 album 17, while “broken/feelings 2” played with the drawn-out syllables and big hooks of predecessors like Juice WRLD and Chief Keef. A comment on one of Ekkstacy’s first SoundCloud tracks sums up the lovelorn resentment of that era of his sound: “showed him this now he play it for other bitches.”
When Ekkstacy took a familiar turn from emo rap towards rock, he did some homework, dutifully embracing a Misfits-lite sound and naming a bright, uncharacteristically energetic track on his 2022 album misery after ’80s goth rock pioneers Christian Death. His latest album is a set of underpowered, faintly grungy power-pop that washes up alongside mid-aughties beach bands like Wavves or Beach Fossils. Those tentpole inspirations stand on either side of a project that seems to exist at the expense of Ekkstacy himself, a young musician whose interests have been chemically weather-treated for commercial success.
At barely over 30 minutes long, EKKSTACY feels like a slog. The mood is one of vague sadness that drowns out his delicate voice both literally and figuratively. Cliché lyrics (“I don’t wanna smile/I just want to cry”) run together unconvincingly over foamy production from Deb Never collaborator Apob and the Contra Gang producer Manget$u. Their smooth touches only soften an environment that’s already desperate for some thrown elbows, out-of-nowhere synth breaks, or full-throated guitar solos.
Instead, every riff is dulled down until the details bleed together like a blurred Zoom meeting background. A Trippie Redd feature on the pretty earworm “problems” barely registers. The Kid Laroi, whose polished vocals provide a minor jolt to the otherwise forgettable “alright,” fares better. But it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint specific moments of interest before they’re quelled by the anonymous room tone of the album. A song about a nondescript but beautiful girl titled “bella” is not the antidote.
Ekkstacy does eke out some breathing room amid the suffocating same-old. The crashing two-part climax on “the headless horseman lost his way” achieves some gratifying catharsis on either side of its muted, bedroom-pop vocal loop. “fuck” is fun in a dopey way, probably because it involves a lot of yelling “fuck” with the occasional “yeah!” But these flashes of raw energy are swallowed by the surrounding chaff, and a jerky riff that thrilled for 20 seconds on TikTok fades into tedious wallpaper punk. EKKSTACY winds up feeling as diaristic as a cue card. | 2024-01-25T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | UnitedMasters | January 25, 2024 | 4.6 | a03fc207-2cfd-4dd4-b1d2-243802a8e922 | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Collaborating with artists like Mr Eazi, Burna Boy, and Sampa the Great, the Beninese icon builds upon a proudly pan-Africanist musical vision that celebrates the power of community. | Collaborating with artists like Mr Eazi, Burna Boy, and Sampa the Great, the Beninese icon builds upon a proudly pan-Africanist musical vision that celebrates the power of community. | Angélique Kidjo: Mother Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angelique-kidjo-mother-nature/ | Mother Nature | Angélique Kidjo’s musical vision places Africa at the center of her work. Born and raised in Benin, the polyglot singer/songwriter/storyteller was sourcing from the roots of African rhythms long before they came into vogue as international signifiers of taste and worldliness. On Mother Nature, Kidjo serves up a feast of the most sublime sounds found in the Black diaspora. Recording in France, she calls upon a virtual collective of artists from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mali, Zambia, and the U.S. to craft a dynamic, varied album that nods to the foundational sounds of Afrobeat, the spirituality of Zilin, and the role of the griot, while embracing the sounds of Banku and hip-hop. The end result is a project with shared memories, global reach, and a singular genesis that spans the continent’s artistic realms.
Kidjo is credited as either composer or producer on 11 of the album’s 13 tracks, but in both the studio and her songs, collaboration and community are of utmost importance. Singing in Fon, Yoruba, French, and English, she calls for women’s autonomy, uplifts an African generation raised on political disappointment, and aspires toward a world that understands the true weight of ubuntu. On “Dignity,” Kidjo and Nigerian singer-songwriter Yemi Alade sing about the women they’ve become and for the women who raised them, their voices weaving between pop and Afrobeat. Structured in a call and response between the two, the track hangs on the impassioned refrain, “Respect is reciprocal.” As an anthem of female empowerment, the message is understated but resolute. It doesn’t have the direct confrontation of South African star Yvonne Chaka Chaka’s “Who’s Got the Power,” but it is equally as determined to highlight those who are most marginalized as full and capable beings deserving of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
On “Africa, One of a Kind,” Nigerian Banku singer Mr Eazi joins Malian legend Salif Keita to reimagine Keita’s 1995 song “Africa.” Where some write songs to rep area codes or neighborhoods, Kidjo, Keita, and Mr Eazi address those who claim allegiance to the entirety of the continent, celebrating a pan-Africanist pride that recognizes no borders. These cross-generational collaborations give the album much of its power. On “Do Yourself,” Kidjo cedes room to Nigerian superstar Burna Boy but remains very much present via her distinctive vocal riffs, which, depending on the song, can be cries of celebration or shouts of defiance. Here they are the latter, serving to remind what makes her such a captivating performer and storyteller; her idiosyncrasies add fullness to her work. “Omon Oba,” with appearances by Beninese artists Lionel Loueke and Zeynab, takes its old-school feel from Zimbabwean township music pioneered in the early 1930s, and “Take It or Leave It” is unmistakably influenced by the urbane tones of highlife, with an amusingly frank verse courtesy of EarthGang’s Olu.
Kidjo, 60, comes from the same generation as Burundian singer Khadja Nin and South Africa’s late Brenda Fassie, and her narratives are part of a tapestry of stories collected, given color, and stitched together by African women. All three saw Africa as it heaved and gasped for air, and each offered melodies for the moment. Fassie’s “Boipatong” swept through Southern Africa in 1992, carrying its message of resistance to white colonial rule far beyond her native home. In 1996, on “Sambolera,” Nin sang of the bleeding soil and betrayed citizens who had emerged from the dust to be fed lies and deceit. Years later, Kidjo responds with “Fired Up,” an ode to those who have stormed through streets to get things done. “Ready, set, we are fired up!” she yells.
Kidjo’s music flows most easily, and the messages land with the greatest impact, when she’s not proselytizing, as she does on the Sampa the Great-assisted “Free and Equal” and the album’s title track. Analogies to color blindness and cultural mosaics on “Meant for Me” feel out of sync with an album that proudly centers voices of the Black diaspora. Her collaborators focus their collective lens on Blackness and daily African realities, both mundane and exceptional. To sing of a racial rainbow sounds forced and toothless, and lacks the persuasive power that marks the album’s strongest songs.
Kidjo’s calls for harmony might sound willfully naive were it not for the fact that the entire trajectory of her career has been shaped by a genuine belief that music can change the world. No one is left behind in her body of work. On Mother Nature, she looks backward, to the figures who have come before her, and outward, uniting regional traditions into a celebratory pan-Africanist movement, while nurturing musicians like Yemi Alade, Mr Eazi, and Sampa the Great, young Black creators who follow Kidjo’s example of community-rooted artistry. Her success is not a pyramid but a constantly growing circle.
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. | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Decca | June 21, 2021 | 7.6 | a04136aa-ca91-4727-a403-de2d1bf287ab | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
Former emo stars ditch much of their raw, co-ed harmonies and refocus their vocal spotlight to train solely on Caithlin De Marrais. | Former emo stars ditch much of their raw, co-ed harmonies and refocus their vocal spotlight to train solely on Caithlin De Marrais. | Rainer Maria: Catastrophe Keeps Us Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6672-catastrophe-keeps-us-together/ | Catastrophe Keeps Us Together | On the casino floor at Caesar's Palace, carefully positioned to catch spillover from the adjacent Colosseum Theatre, is a gift shop devoted to a unique and singular brand: the Celine Dion Boutique. Now, I'm not so oblivious as to have missed the luminance of Ms. Dion's starpower, but as a marketable icon, Dion seems a bit hollow, and buying a $250 tracksuit with her name emblazoned on it seems a little like buying merchandise celebrating water or air. This is, after all, a performer whose big-budget Vegas revue features a Cirque du Soleil knockoff troupe to compensate for her shortage of stage presence.
Rainer Maria are far from having a replica historical amphitheater built for their performances, never mind the attached gift shop, but over the course of their five-album career their sound has traveled a path toward the kind of big-voice/big-message concept that would pack 'em in at an indie casino (Cosloy's Palace?). Once upon a time, the trio rode the second or third wave of emo, with Kyle Fischer and Caithlin De Marrais hurling raw harmonies at each other like Fleetwood Mac cum Fugazi. But after mastering that dynamic on the first song of their first full-length ("Tinfoil") the band has refocused their vocal spotlight to train solely on De Marrais.
In a technical sense, De Marrais' pipes are powerful enough to carry the band's load, especially now that they don't have to deal with intrusion of Fischer's indie-boy yelp. However, the band has also streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns. Rainer Maria may still be writing love songs, but the relationships of Catastrophe Keeps Us Together appear thematically and musically less complicated and knotty.
Even with an occasionally dark-tinged lens, Catastrophe's hearts will go on in widescreen style. The title track turns a grim apocalyptic vision into a repopulation fantasy, De Marrais belting out, "At the end of the world, I'm gonna find you," in true end-credits fashion. Elsewhere, "Love is..."-like statements are dropped, instructions for relationship success are dispensed, and acoustic guitars are played crisply. Not every story has a happy ending, but songs like "Life of Leisure" and "Already Lost" don't have anywhere near the meltdown of a good old De Marrais/Fischer screaming match-- and the vocab-heavy narrations fall short of disguising their cloying, cliched sentiments.
Fischer's input throughout is restricted to his guitar, which continues Rainer Maria's trend of focusing mostly on echobox atmosphere rather than serrations. Problem is, the punchier parts still sound the best, the four-chord mantra of "Bottle" or the overdrive-drenched darting between the drums of "I'll Make You Mine" standing out relative to the spacier, flimsier tones of their reinterpretation of Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine".
It's useless to keep wishing hard for the heady days of the mid-90s; like the rest of us, the members of Rainer Maria are different people than they were 10 years ago. But it's still discouraging to see a band that once painted such accurate sound pictures of the complexities of love go the primary-color route of the power-ballad, snipping off the loose ends and hangnails that formerly propelled their relationship updates. Like the anthemic stylings of Ms. Dion, Catastrophe's valentines are direct and glossy, but ultimately as hollow as a gift-shop bauble-- a brand unworthy of a tracksuit. | 2006-04-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-04-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Grunion | April 26, 2006 | 4.8 | a0428cac-bfd6-43dd-b626-d75f7fe64167 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
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