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The first Fog record in almost a decade finds Andrew Broder distilling years of genre-hopping down to a core aesthetic. This is Fog in its purest form: minimal, haunting and darkly impressionistic. | The first Fog record in almost a decade finds Andrew Broder distilling years of genre-hopping down to a core aesthetic. This is Fog in its purest form: minimal, haunting and darkly impressionistic. | Fog: For Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21852-for-good/ | For Good | Andrew Broder has held a lot of jobs over the course of his career: turntablist, indie-rock frontman, beatmaker, ambient musician. More recently, he’s been working as a handyman and commercial painter in his native Minneapolis. Following the release of 2007’s Ditherer, Broder stepped away from the Fog moniker for nearly a decade, though he continued to dabble in various side-projects and solo endeavors. With the benefit of distance, Broder is now looking back at his itinerant career, drawing inspiration from his own work and as ever, pushing forward into new terrain. For Good isn’t just a new Fog record—it’s an album where Broder finds his way back to the project’s off-kilter core.
Still, a lot has changed since 2007, not the least of which is Broder himself. On For Good, his vocals are more confident, his darkly impressionistic lyrics sharper, his piano playing playing delicate yet assured. Stepping back from the full-band arrangements of Ditherer, Broder returns to the lone tinkerer ethos that underpinned his early work but with all of his new tricks in tow. For Good essentially feels like the summation of Broder’s wide-ranging career: the loose rhythms of Ditherer, the pop sensibility of 10th Avenue Freakout, the wispy avant-turntablism of Ether Teeth.
In some ways, this is also Broder’s most approachable record yet. Title track "For Good" masquerades as a '70s British rock ballad until wobbly percussion and mechanical wheezing subsume the mix completely. "Kid Kuma" could easily pass for a Hail to the Thief-era Radiohead B-side, with its clattering percussion, rubber-band bassline and a chorus set airborne by Broder's falsetto.
On other songs, though, Broder is as uncompromising as he’s ever been. The record’s midsection is both bleak and sonically confrontational—here Broder lets his experimental side run wild within the constraints of a pop song. "Cory" is a claustrophobic nightmare: all oppressive low-end, machine-gun drums and submerged, chopped-up vocals as percussion. "Crime was always there for you/Crime was always there for me," Broder sings during one of the song’s few bright spots. "Jim" is driven by a breakbeat that whirrs to life like some terrifying machine: it sounds like the sort of thing Amon Tobin and Scott Walker might cook up together in an abandoned factory full of old industrial equipment. "Trying" is a sample-based hip-hop instrumental trapped under a heavy cloak of foreboding, like Madlib if he had co-produced a track for Thom Yorke’s The Eraser.
Some of the most stunning songs here bridge the gap between Broder’s past and present. Take the penultimate track, "Made to Follow," a gorgeous little hymn that’s punctuated by errant samples of dialog that Broder scratches in and out of the frame. The end result feels like a crisper, higher-fidelity version of Fog circa Ether Teeth, minus the ramshackle scrappiness. Scratching also features prominently on songs like "Trying" and "Sisters Still," reminding us of Broder’s turntablist bona-fides while blurring the line between DJ and songwriter.
Most of For Good is already fairly minimal, but album closer "Father Popcorn" strips away nearly all ornamentation to zero in on the very essence of Broder’s craft. Like many of these songs, it traces a wandering narrative, nodding toward our new gilded age in its opening ("On a rickshaw ride/racing to the rich part of London at night"), sketching out a scene of Lynchian Americana in its midsection ("Diner counter/Piece of peach pie/Cup of coffee/Wet my fingers") and settles on a tender vignette of fatherhood, closing with the lines "Father popcorn/Father popcorn/Make the popcorn." Musically, it’s one of the most skeletal songs of Broder’s career, consisting of little more than a repeating piano figure, hushed vocals and swells of strings that flutter, hummingbird-like, around the final notes of each bar. Despite its nearly seven minute runtime, the song is consistently engaging throughout, proving how far Broder has come as a songwriter and vocalist.
If there’s a surprise to be found on For Good, its that Broder finally sounds comfortable with his own vision; in his time away from the project, it seems that he was able to reconcile all of the different sounds that Fog has attempted over the years. Despite how sonically adventurous some of these songs are, there’s something almost serene about For Good, especially when considered next to the anxious energy of previous Fog albums. That said, unlike a truly original record like Ether Teeth, For Good is hardly groundbreaking: it’s an album of warped, melancholic indie-pop that slots in nicely next to acts like Sparklehorse, the Eels, and Radiohead. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if Fog’s current incarnation is a far cry from its more experimental beginnings. After all, the point of an experiment is to arrive at an answer. Andrew Broder seems to have finally found some. | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Totally Gross National Product | May 10, 2016 | 7 | a2468a61-2950-4e53-bc04-a825cd7b6335 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Three-chord punk boiled down to two-chord devotionals, these two amazing Feelies records are back, and both are worth a lot of your time. | Three-chord punk boiled down to two-chord devotionals, these two amazing Feelies records are back, and both are worth a lot of your time. | The Feelies: Crazy Rhythms / The Good Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13403-crazy-rhythms-the-good-earth/ | Crazy Rhythms / The Good Earth | The Feelies formed as a four-man rock band in a New Jersey suburb whose biggest 20th century shakeup was a textile strike. They wrote some original material and learned a couple of Beatles songs. They took their show 20 miles southeast to Hoboken, drove to Manhattan under the Hudson River, tucked in their shirts, pushed their glasses up on their nosebridges, and unleashed a kind of hypnotic punk-lite so buttoned up that it sounds choked-- like they counted to four and grabbed an electric fence. Did I say the Feelies are a rock band? I misspoke. They're a particle collider.
Crazy Rhythms, their 1980 debut, has none of the attitudinal markings of rock-- no looseness, no swing, no danger, no laughs. Its cover-- a band portrait on a sky-blue void, echoed 14 years later on Weezer's "blue album" -- is bland and eerie. It looks like a misplaced rendering of four boys whose closest contact with rock music came from fixing radios. The title of the album appears as some innovative form of non-joke.
And yet, and yet. Three-chord punk-- apparently too excessive for them-- is boiled down to two-chord devotionals: one for the first three minutes, one for the second. Two- and three-note guitar solos drone over the mix like a Muezzin's call. Bill Million and Glenn Mercer sing in grey, unimpressive voices-- probably influenced by the Velvet Underground, but just as likely a product of the belief that lead vocals were for generally immodest people.
The focus and direction of the sound hangs on Mercer and Million's guitars, but the essence of the album-- the DNA sequence not found anywhere else-- is its percussion tracks. Cymbals and hi-hats are ignored almost entirely-- too cathartic, too showy. Almost every track is overdubbed with a dry chorus of cowbells, claves, woodblocks, bells and maracas. Glenn Mercer's credit on a cover of the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" reads: "other guitar, vocals, bell, coat rack." Drummer Anton Fier thumps out the words NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET NOT TIRED YET in Morse code on his tom-toms. Presumably, shows ended with the rest of the band unplugging him.
It's fastidious, committed and unendingly tense music. A couple of tracks-- first single "Fa Ce'-La" and "Original Love"-- take the shape of pop songs: A few minutes, a few parts, a verse, a chorus. Most of the songs, though, are shaped like Steve Reich or Philip Glass compositions: Music that creates drama by swelling, shading and repeating, not carving out peaks and valleys. The album's longest, most arresting tracks -- "Forces at Work" and "Crazy Rhythms"-- don't seem to change as much as dilate.
The music on the album is rare, but the tone-- especially with the knowledge that it was never really replicated by any other band-- is rarer. Weezer, the Talking Heads and the Modern Lovers used their social eccentricities as badges of honor and safe vantage points for self-expression. The Feelies don't sound any more comfortable on Crazy Rhythms than you imagine they might standing in a room full of strangers or mountain lions. They sound commanded by inspiration, almost religiously single-minded. Mark Abel, who co-produced the album with Mercer and Million, called them "the most obstinate people I've ever met." According to Jim DeRogatis's liner notes for the reissue, they started telling adulatory interviewers that driving through the Holland Tunnel gave them headaches.
Crazy Rhythms is their big album. Their talked-about one. The Good Earth, produced by R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and released six years later, is their little one. Bassist Keith DeNunzio and Anton Fier left the band (Fier went on to play with Bill Laswell, Pere Ubu, John Zorn and a gymnasium's worth of notable avant-rock musicians). Dave Weckerman, Brenda Sauter and Stan Demeski-- all local musicians Million and Mercer had been tooling around in side projects with-- joined.
The tempos are relaxed, the percussion understated, the instrumentation largely acoustic. It's no less hypnotic than Crazy Rhythms, but it has a different notion of infinity: Wheat fields, Sunday drives, childhood bedtimes to the sound of adults murmuring from the living room. The cover image-- the band, slightly sepia-toned and standing in tall grass-- is a rural reconsideration of Crazy Rhythms, a stepping back. Mercer's vocals are a stream-of-consciousness hum under the shimmer of guitars. "Being a guitar player," he said, "I don't have much of a need to express myself as a singer" -- a claim that makes you think the guitar solos are going to be fireworks, and they aren't. Fireworks are not what the Feelies were about.
You don't hear too many people talking in hyperbole about The Good Earth is for the same reasons you don't hear people talking in hyperbole about taking a nap in the park. Listening start-to-finish, it sounds even more removed than Crazy Rhythms, an album that blurs together and exists unto itself-- different enough from their first album to be incomparable, different enough from a lot of other music-- even R.E.M.-- to be unmistakable as anyone else.
These albums have been out of print for several years. If you were lucky (or old) enough to own them the first time around, buy them again. The bonus material is nothing special: New live recordings from their recent reunion shows, a couple of demos, a couple of older covers (but not the cover of "Paint It, Black" appended to the last edition of Crazy Rhythms). And you have to download the songs using a little business card with a serial number because the band thought the albums should stand on their own, which they should.
But oh the glorious sound. I am not someone who relaxes on an animal hides in front of four-foot tall speakers and compares the relative merits of recordings, but I will tell you that these remasters sound fantastic-- crisp, nuanced, and all kinds of other luxurious adjectives. Apparently, there's a dog barking the background of The Good Earth interlude "When Company Comes". Someone mumbles during the guitar break on "Let's Go". And the coat rack, as clear and unexpected as ever. | 2009-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 14, 2009 | 9.1 | a248be9b-382a-4263-aa6c-f1c791d2d5fc | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Ariana Grande executive produces the latest entry into the pop-camp franchise, but the collection feels warmed over, too glossy, and only remedially empowering. | Ariana Grande executive produces the latest entry into the pop-camp franchise, but the collection feels warmed over, too glossy, and only remedially empowering. | Various Artists: Charlie’s Angels (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-charlies-angels-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Charlie's Angels (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Pop music shows up in prominent and irreverent ways within the Charlie’s Angels universe. The original TV show’s brassy theme song is as indelible as the image of the franchise’s three detectives in silhouette, and the campy film reboot in 2000 used a wealth of inspired syncs: a high-flying alleyway battle set to the Prodigy; Sam Rockwell shimmying in his evil lair to Pharoahe Monch; even Cameron Diaz doing the whitest Soul Train routine of all time to Sir Mix-A-Lot. That lovable version of the crime-fighting Angels, of course, also brought about “Independent Women (Part 1),” Destiny’s Child’s inescapable tie-in empowerment anthem that became the longest-running No. 1 of that year and the group’s most successful crossover single ever.
It’s an inevitably long shadow for Ariana Grande, who enters the fray this month by executive producing the soundtrack for an Elizabeth Banks-directed update coming to theaters. Brought in to represent “not just the theme of the movie but the audience,” Grande is a natural fit for 2019’s Angels, with enough effortless charm and cultural cachet to hold court over the soundtrack’s assembly of high-wattage, all-women guest stars. Yet for all of its promise in the wake of Grande’s slinky, accomplished thank u, next earlier this year, Charlie’s Angels instead smooths over any and all hard edges, opting for big-budget pop grabs and glossy filler that undermine the impressive lineup of talent.
Grande addresses the “Independent Women” elephant head-on with “Don’t Call Me Angel,” a drab pop collaboration between herself, Miley Cyrus, and Lana Del Rey. With a narcotized delivery and hammering metallic bells, “Don’t Call Me Angel” will absolutely be forgotten in each artists’ respective discographies within the year, and for good reason: Where Destiny’s Child organically drew on female empowerment by speaking directly to a generation of working women and encouraging them to command authority, Grande’s song slings demands exclusively at men in its confounding bid for control. It’s only empowering at the most remedial level.
The balmier pop-R&B cut “Bad to You,” with Grande regulars Normani and Nicki Minaj, coasts on better chemistry and Normani’s swooning voice, plus some outsized Max Martin production. Nevertheless, with Minaj sleepwalking through her verse and lyrics that once again exclusively chide male partners, it barely rises above mid-tier. The rest of Grande’s braintrust of collaborators fare better: Victoria Monét joins her for the trappy “Got Her Own,” bouncing featherlight vocal runs off each other like they’re in a round of badminton. And “How I Look on You,” Grande’s only solo feature, is a self-reflexive dark pop highlight, ripped through with a sluggish guitar line, trap snares, and sharp rejoinders to a character who finds her star power more appealing than her personality. It may be microwaved thank u, next, but it’s still a solid reminder of Grande’s songwriting finesse when she isn’t mobbed by guests.
Because for as stacked as the Angels tracklist is, listening to it in full feels unhinged: There’s “Nobody,” a forgettable house-pop song with Chaka Khan that somehow bears zero relation to “Ain’t Nobody” and which not even Khan herself can bother feigning excitement for. It’s as doomed as an obligatory EDM-lite remix of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” or the overproduced squad feature that opens the album with literal fanfare, “How It’s Done,” which finds Kash Doll and Stefflon Don trying their best under Kim Petras’ big, shouty chorus. That kind of keyed-up energy that spans the soundtrack might be electrifying—or at least make some sense—during an action sequence in the film. On its own, it just scans as low-grade exhausting.
The most vexing aspect of this Charlie’s Angels soundtrack is that the levity and camp at the heart of the series never comes into focus. The truth is that Grande is a perfect choice for the film and its audience: a bona fide pop idol, wunderkind, and businesswoman with a sharp sense of humor and a cohort of multitalented women in her inner circle—all elements that could have led to an artfully playful soundtrack that breathed new life into an iconic, female-fronted, big-budget action machine. But with an outcome this ordinary, it just sounds like Grande is cashing in. | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Republic | November 7, 2019 | 5.4 | a24c3a07-af94-4c99-8d3a-798fc9f231b7 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
DJ Koze is a big figure in electronic music, but he also appears to be its benevolent godfather. This compilation of tunes from his label Pampa runs the gamut of sounds, but always stays jubilant. | DJ Koze is a big figure in electronic music, but he also appears to be its benevolent godfather. This compilation of tunes from his label Pampa runs the gamut of sounds, but always stays jubilant. | Various Artists: DJ Koze Presents Pampa Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21835-dj-koze-presents-pampa-vol-1/ | DJ Koze Presents Pampa Vol. 1 | In its seven years of existence, Stefan Kozalla and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records label has been defined by its stance against purism. The techno and house artists featured by the German label, from DJ Koze himself to the underground king Isolée, from the madcap experimentalist Roman Flügel to the fan-favorite Dntel, shun conventional genre wisdom and of-the-moment sounds, instead favoring an approach wrapped in humor, warmth, and the pleasure of small surprises. “All the best things happen from mistakes,” Koze told Pitchfork three years ago, in a statement representative of the spontaneity that he’s embraced in heading up the imprint.
That’s not to say that the tasting menu represented by the new label compilation Pampa Vol. 1 is incoherent, even with the unexpected appearances of big-name guest stars including Jamie xx and Matthew Herbert. The 19 tracks that make up this confectioner's array sit in neatly ordered rows, most of them sweet, light, and pleasant, with novel ingredients often cropping in the middle or even near the end of tracks. With a running time of nearly two hours, the compilation shouldn’t be ingested in one go—doing so might bring on the overstuffed achiness of gobbling down a box of chocolates. The offerings on hand here are meant to be picked out at random and savored; Pampa Vol. 1 is the album as discovery machine, rather than completist’s task. It’s as good an album as any to justify the existence of the shuffle setting.
Starting at the beginning may run counter to the record’s freewheeling design, but Matthew Herbert’s remix of Lianne La Havas’ “Lost and Found” is irresistible as an album opener. In Herbert’s hands, the pain and beauty of the London singer’s 2012 ballad are transmuted, as staircases of bass elevate the track’s more hopeful qualities. If you feel like taking a side entrance, another possible point of immersion is the Swedish house producer Axel Boman’s offering, “In the Dust of This Planet.” Boman’s 2010 EP Holy Love was one of Pampa’s first big releases, and the new track is characteristic of the exploratory push that Pampa’s artists receive from the label. Its winding back half, considered by Boman to be its proper ending, interrupts what had been a climactic crescendo. That shift changes the song's entire direction, allowing it to evoke a sense of regret, an actualization of the wish to go back in time and start again.
Newcomers to Pampa may skip right to the Jamie xx offering, “Come We Go,” and thankfully, it’s as good a portal as any into the label’s core values. At first, the track seems as if it’s following the path of In Colour’s dance floor fetish. Then, suddenly, the walls close in and the bass becomes claustrophobic. It’s a left turn typical of DJ Koze’s sense of play, and although it’s not entirely clear, he appears to be Jamie’s collaborator on the track, working under the pseudonym Kosi Kos.
Other standouts include the cotton candy world built by the Swiss house veteran Michel Cleis on his contribution, “Un Prince,” Acid Pauli’s fractured beauty “Nana,” which dices its sampled melody into thousands of tiny pieces, and Die Vögel’s bizarrely lovely pastoral, ”Everything,” which features the American singer Sophia Kennedy, another track to which Koze contributed something essential (in this case, advising that the beat be pulled out altogether.)
Some tracks don’t make as much sense within the mix, including “I Does It,” a serviceable slab of funk-infused hip-hop from the electronic duo Funkstörung that’s aggressive and low-slung in a way that feels out of sync with its airy companions. The crooning that provides the centerpiece of Josef’s “I Wonder,” is so shrill that it makes the track hard to stomach; it seems like a joke that was pushed a bit too far.
The record is bookended by two versions of Roman Flügel’s “9 Years,” the original and Koze’s club remix, which fans may recognize from Flügel’s Essential Mix. Koze’s version is no mere ego trip; if anything he does more justice to the tracks core attributes—its pensiveness, its beauty—than the original. It’s the most obvious example of Koze’s influence on his collaborators, but in the statements included with the press copy of Pampa Vol. 1, several of the artists mention how a suggestion he made helped them finish their tracks. Koze has described the label as a __“__small family,” a “gang which makes you feel that you’re not alone.” If that’s the case, the new record suggests that he’s operating as the ideal paterfamilias, daring the artists he works with to go beyond their boundaries, to try something unfamiliar, to surprise themselves, and in doing so, to give listeners a taste of something new. | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Pampa | May 2, 2016 | 7.4 | a25670bf-1b42-4ac9-9918-0935d14e5be9 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The blues-rock supergroup comprised of Jack White, Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age's Dean Fertita returns for another exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies. | The blues-rock supergroup comprised of Jack White, Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age's Dean Fertita returns for another exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies. | The Dead Weather: Dodge and Burn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21035-dodge-and-burn/ | Dodge and Burn | It's entirely possible that when Jack White allegedly threatened to beat up Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney in a New York City bar earlier this month he was doing some street-team marketing for the new Dead Weather record. Because whenever White steps behind the drum kit of this scuzz-rock supergroup, he hits with a crazed intensity that suggests he’s looking to pound a different sort of skin. Since the release of the band’s previous album, 2010’s Sea of Cowards, White has embarked on a solo career that’s seen his work turn both more intimate and extravagant; in this light, the Dead Weather have come to represent the hanging side of beef on which he can unleash his pent-up aggression.
Tellingly, White and his mates—Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age guitarst/keyboardist Dean Fertita—have announced they have no plans to tour in support of Dodge and Burn. This news would reinforce the notion that this group essentially functions as an exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies before they return to their day jobs. Theirs is a blues defined not by chord progressions but physical reactions, embodying the music’s storied tradition of howls and moans and demonic possession into a fierce, physical sound. There’s a restlessness to Dodge and Burn, from Mosshart’s seething vocals and Fertita’s spasmodic guitar solos to Lawrence’s corroded basslines to White’s abrupt breakdowns. Even when songs are built around a shopworn sentiment, they’re given a twist: on the opening "I Feel Love", Mosshart answers the song’s titular declaration with a withering "every once in a while."
The Dead Weather’s cabin-in-the-woods creepiness can verge on the contrived—like on "Three Dollar Hat", where White makes like a young Isaac Brock taking on Nick Cave’s "Stagger Lee", and losing. But the band’s theatricality mostly complements the agitated tone of the songs and the dubby, dread-of-night ambiance of White’s production, particularly in those moments when Mosshart and White go head-to-head. The mid-album knockout "Rough Detective" sees the two trading verses and pushing one another to hysterical extremes; instead of dropping the typical guitar solo after the second shout-it-out chorus, the song yields a carnival-like melee of chopped-up chatter and pitch-shifted squeals. And when White asks, "what’s happening?", he sounds genuinely spooked by the song’s sudden descent into madness.
Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads—the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare, be it the frisky sing-speak of "Mile Markers", the predatory soul stomp of "Let Me Through", or the violent mood swings of "Open Up", which upends its desolate opening verse with a riff straight off an early Rush record. And given her commitment to staying in character, it’s doubly strange how, in the album’s dying minutes, the Dead Weather completely abandon their monochromatic schematic.
Dodge and Burn is capped by the ill-fitting "Impossible Winner", a sensitive piano ballad that’s practically Oasis-like in its orchestral ascent (and which, in light of the equally stately "The Last Goodbye" from the last Kills record, prods Mosshart further toward her destiny as a torch-song chanteuse). It’d be one thing if there was anything else on this record—or in the band’s entire discography, for that matter—that showed the Dead Weather had any interest in opening up their airtight rock-noir aesthetic. But tacked onto the end of another dependably dank Dead Weather record, the song feels less like a graceful break-of-dawn denouement than the musical equivalent of being awakened in the middle of the night by a flashlight to the face. | 2015-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | September 29, 2015 | 7.3 | a2580de6-0443-4429-a184-94f81f97bb66 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Issued just four months after their debut, the underrated 25-minute EP is a glorious distillation of their early sound, about harnessing the noise and directing it even if you can never hope to tame it. | Issued just four months after their debut, the underrated 25-minute EP is a glorious distillation of their early sound, about harnessing the noise and directing it even if you can never hope to tame it. | Stereolab: Low Fi EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-low-fi-ep/ | Low Fi EP | In Stereolab’s first few years they released an onslaught of material—singles, full-length LPs, a mini-LP, compilation tracks. It was one of those moments in music where a band is so creative and bursting with so many ideas there simply aren’t enough places to put them all. Being a record collector’s band, Stereolab decided to scoop up their copious non-LP material and compile it. They called the collections Switched On and issued three volumes of the series in the 1990s, each longer than the last. Almost all of their most significant early songs, no matter how obscure their initial issue, found their way to one onto one of these comps.
But one release included with that initial rush has so far fallen through the cracks. The Low Fi EP, issued in September 1992, four months after Peng! and a month before the inaugural edition of Switched On, hasn’t been compiled nor is it, as of this writing, available on streaming services. But Low Fi contains 25 minutes of focused Stereolab brilliance, the distillation of the minimalist rock side of their early sound.
For most of its runtime, Low Fi is a glorious streak of pure energy, leaving aside the exotica and motorik influences to focus on stomping rock’n’roll. Structurally, the first three songs, “Low Fi,” “(Varoom!),” and “Laisser-Faire,” are all homages to the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” each offering a variation on that song’s immortal two-chord chug. “The idea was a combination of naïve pop melodies melded with very simple rock minimalism,” Stereolab’s Tim Gane told TapeOp in 1998, discussing the band’s m.o. around the time of Low Fi. “Our innovation was to strip everything back.”
The key to that sound here is how the guitar, Moog, and Farfisa organ become a single roaring instrument, one hell-bent on transforming electricity into noise. You can feel the voltage surging through every stretched chord, the rumble of the circuitry and the waveforms being pounded into new shapes. From their hi-fi test record of a band name on down, Stereolab positioned itself as a refinement of existing musical ideas, a collective devoted to bringing earlier sounds and styles into the present moment with the precision of scientists. The records were assembled deliberately, using complicated musical instruments that required a regular maintenance.
So one part of the band’s image was as tinkerers, people in white coats working to perfect new formulations, somewhere away from the spotlight. Their kindred spirits were bands like Kraftwerk, laboring in Kling Klang for years, waiting for technology to catch up with their vision, or Kevin Shields, obsessing endlessly about the layering of guitar feedback. Stereolab were that focused on sound, but they were also moving fast, and they wanted to convey their findings to an audience as they discovered them. Low Fi shows that side of the group. Here, it doesn’t matter if every detail is in its right place; it’s about harnessing the noise and directing it even if you can never hope to tame it, the power of chaos over the power of knowledge.
The opening title track is the most obvious VU nod, adapting the precise changes and tempo of “Sister Ray” (years after Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers borrowed it for “Roadrunner”). Floating over this thick and sticky harmonic edifice are two voices—founder Lætitia Sadier, and a newcomer, the Australia-born Mary Hansen, who would be an important part of Stereolab’s sound until her tragic death in 2002. On “Low Fi,” the fundamental ugliness of the distorted chords is thrown into sharp relief by the clear, uninflected beauty of Hansen and Saider’s vocals, as they trill wordless “la-la-la” in unison, like mischievous sisters who share a secret. Sadier’s voice has an undercurrent of weight and seriousness—Nico was a frequent point of comparison in Stereolab’s early days—while Ramsay adds a note of lightness and warmth. They are yin and yang, and when they are heard together they reach a kind of perfection.
The following “(Varoom!)” is another effortlessly catchy pop song, until it’s not: halfway through, it fades down and a delicious feedback drone emerges, the kind of dense, woozy churn of sound that seems to be collapsing and expanding simultaneously. The chords are a slight variation on those on “Low Fi”—there are still just two of them, but now they take up equal space, rocking back and forth like a seesaw or a nodding head.
If Low Fi produced one Stereolab standard, it’s “Laisser-Faire,” a track that also exists in a brilliant version recorded at the BBC and collected on ABC Music. Once again there are only two chords, but now the pace is quicker, and Sadier’s vocals hover just above the guitars, touching down briefly with each vowel, while Hansen sounds far away, a memory of the song that unfolds at the same time as the experience of it. Though difficult to discern without a lyric sheet, the words outline a political struggle every bit as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1992: “History will only repeat itself once more/The Western world is going more and more right-wing/Yearning for some sort of protection, too scared to do anything.”
Stereolab’s political agenda was outlined by Sadier in an interview with Chickfactor shortly after the release of Low Fi: “To create a disturbance is the best way we thought of to make people and ourselves think.” Arguably the definitive early Stereolab song, “Laisser-Faire” captures all their fusion-of-opposites glory—forceful and delicate, direct and allusive, nostalgic and future-looking, crude and multi-dimensional. Low Fi stands as a tribute to a moment when Stereolab’s cup runneth over, when the songs were coming faster than they knew what to do with them. | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Too Pure | July 18, 2019 | 8.1 | a25b4316-8d6f-43ab-ada8-c7a2392c282b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
L.A. producer best known for his work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer folds in music from across the spectrum on this distinctive EP. | L.A. producer best known for his work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer folds in music from across the spectrum on this distinctive EP. | The Gaslamp Killer: Death Gate EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14768-death-gate-ep/ | Death Gate EP | At his Low End Theory parties in L.A., the Gaslamp Killer makes a point of playing whatever records he wants, whether it's obscure Turkish music or wobbly dubstep or garage rock. Like DJ Shadow and Madlib before him, the Gaslamp Killer's record collection is, presumably, so large and unwieldy that what we're listening to is the sound of someone being devoured by his own resources. Death Gate continues the trend: In just over 15 minutes, there are enough scraps of sound for another artist to create a whole album. But what's most intriguing about Gaslamp Killer is that, like early Shadow and Madlib, he has an understanding of restraint. With so much music to draw from, there's a tendency to want to throw out your whole arsenal. But if there's anything connecting these five tracks it's a sense of minimalism-- even tastefulness.
As you might guess, marijuana is a key inspiration here. In a recent interview with Resident Advisor, Gaslamp Killer professes that his aspiration is to have a weed hook-up in whatever city he's in; that way, he can get stoned as soon as he gets off the plane. Back when the mighty herb was half as powerful and half the price, you had dub and jazz and stoner-rock to get high to. Nowadays, with hydroponic technology moving as fast as the Internet, you have all of them in one. Which, at its best, is precisely what the Gaslamp Killer does.
"Shattering Inner Journeys" could serve as the Gaslamp Killer's manifesto, and it's easily his best track to date. In a strikingly raw six minutes, Raymond Scott-style library synth squeals creep over a drum break ripped out of a mid-1990s Mo' Wax vault, bleeding into an appropriately eerie Piper at the Gates of Dawn homage. And then in the last minute, the song chugs out on an oddly dubby proto-industrial pitter-patter. Snaky, whiny crunk-rap keyboard riffs twirl around a skittering synth-drum beat on opener "Fun Over 100", and the remainder rock gut-punch, battered hip-hop beats that sound like old Company Flow bootleg instrumental tapes. Though these tracks can be somewhat compressed, there is a noticeable paucity of instruments, typically relying on little more than drums and a keyboard or guitar lick.
The Gaslamp Killer's profile was raised substantially by his production work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer, and "When I'm in Awe" is like a lost track from it, almost to a fault. Within that album, the track would have fit into its whacked-out, garage-Rasta drug nightmare. But here it feels more like a bonus track, especially compared to the rest of the EP, which foregoes that album's Beefheart-hop sound for pronounced percussive instrumentals.
The era and sound that the Gaslamp Killer is going for is pretty easy to identify: the b-boy end of sample-heavy mid-90s hip-hop. But the way that he approaches his tracks is distinctive both in what he adds as well as what he leaves out. What will a Gaslamp Killer LP sound like? It's hard to tell, which, in this case, is an exciting prospect. | 2010-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-10-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Brainfeeder | October 20, 2010 | 7.5 | a25f5cfc-fe0e-424f-a755-d250197eaba5 | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | null |
Already known for crafting long, minimalist tracks, the Chilean-German producer here stretches his modus operandi to the limit, offering a 37-minute single, plus a 36-minute CD-only remix. | Already known for crafting long, minimalist tracks, the Chilean-German producer here stretches his modus operandi to the limit, offering a 37-minute single, plus a 36-minute CD-only remix. | Ricardo Villalobos: Fizheuer Zieheuer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9816-fizheuer-zieheuer/ | Fizheuer Zieheuer | To those who track the ambitious (and occasionally absurd) movements of the Chilean-German DJ and producer Ricardo Villalobos, his latest effort may seem like self-parody. While Ricardo Villalobos has always been known for crafting long, minimalist tracks, this one surely takes the cake, clocking in at 37 minutes and offering little in the way of development, surprise, or variation along the way. And though it may come as a bit of a shock, here that is not a bad thing.
At the risk of being reductive, Fizheuer Zieheuer essentially consists of a lone boom-tick pattern-- so basic it might serve as the house-music chapter of a beatmakers' tutorial-- overlayed with two interlocking horn parts. One is a minor-key, mostly ostinato figure that oom-pahs almost uninterrupted for the length of the track; a trumpet solo occasionally breaks through like a ray of light through low, grey clouds. A bonus cut, "Fizbeast", rounds out the CD release to bring total running time to more than 72 minutes-- downloader's value alert!-- but that remix remains even more restrained. Its own interior dubscape is so minimally variegated as to be almost dizzying, like playing hopscotch on a moving sidewalk in zero gravity-- in a blizzard.
And yet, any minimalist will know that no mere tabulation of the elements can get at the heart of repetition, and that's certainly the case here. Working more minimally than he ever has, Villalobos finds perpetual motion in seeming stasis, using judicious filters and delay to ensure that no two bars are alike. His pinhead moonstomping is like the sonic version of micropsia, in which traditional perspective fails and objects lose their scale: echoes outgrow their sources and offbeats shadowbox their downbeats to death. And while the chorused, beer-hall horns never quite cede the center, they're occasionally threatened by a lone percussive sound that hammers away at the Two and Four: a bright, metallic ringing, it sounds uncannily like a baseball bat struck against the frame of a chain-link fence. (Ricardo goes Little League? How oddly American.) Absurd as it may be, following that one sound and its bobbleheaded echoes is one of the track's great, hypnotic pleasures.
But it's the brass that give "Fizheuer Zieheuer" its real power. The horns, after all, are what most people use to identify the track, and they're what leap out and grab you when you hear it in a DJ set. But the horns have also become a sticking point. I don't think anyone ever seriously believed that Villalobos himself played or even commissioned the horns, but in recent weeks this already polarizing cut-- a critical darling, it's been panned in equal measure on forums like Discogs.com, where its length has invited terms like "pompous" and "pretentious"-- has become even more controversial.
In late December, a Discogs.com forum member uncovered a song called "Pobjenicki Cocek" performed by Blehorkestar Bakija Bakic, from the Vranje region in southern Serbia, and claimed that in it lay the key to "Fizheuer". The following week, when the Italian blog Batteria Ricaricabile posted the song, originally released on a 1999 compilation called Road of the Gypsies, the extent of Villalobos' borrowing became clear. The chugging refrain is taken from a moment where Blehorkestar Bakija Bakic's song pauses and marks time; with little percussion and no lead voices to get in the way, it's ripe for looping. The bright, bold melodic passage that leads Fitzheuer to its dizzying heights, meanwhile, comes straight from the intro to "Pobjednicki Cocek"-- dragged, dropped and left virtually unadulterated. "Fitzheuer Zieheuer", in other words, is basically a remix, if not an edit.
But the great question remains: So what? Leave the copyright questions to Lawrence Lessig; "Fitzheuer Zieheuer" remains a force to be reckoned with, not in spite of but because of its audacity. If Villalobos hadn't released a 35-minute track under his own name, somebody would have had to do it for him; better still that he did so with this brain-bungeeing, hair-raising, tortoise-and-hare race between call and response, downbeat and delay, that livens up any DJ set like a bolt from the blue.
"Fitzheuer Zieheuer" didn't need to be 37 minutes long; Villalobos could have made exactly the same point in 18, 15, hell, 10 minutes, and nobody would have felt shortchanged. But I'm glad he did it this way; if nothing else, the track offers a window into his creative process, where production and marathon DJ sessions merge in the form of 20- or 30-minute drum tracks that he records to CDR and plays out layered with other records. I suspect that that's how "Fitzheuer" got its start, as a private-press thing that Playhouse decided to make public. If I have any complaint about the release, it is-- perhaps paradoxically-- that they decided to release it at all. Heard in the context of one of Villalobos' epic sets, at lord-knows o'clock and with the crowd gone completely unhinged, a track like "Fitzheuer" is unbelievably special; the way those horns leaven the air after too many electrohouse synths, they're like sorbet. Or better still, grappa.
But debated to death on the message boards, ruling the charts at Beatport, and blasted at the most inopportune moments by warm-up knobs desperate to appear au courant, the tune wears out its welcome awfully quickly; its ubiquity works against it. I'm glad that Playhouse decided to share "Fitzheuer" with the world; love it or hate it, the discourse it generates enriches dance music. But with file-sharing sites like YouSendIt and Sendspace making a superstar's turn at Fabric or Panoramabar accessible to all and sundry, I wonder if Villalobos' private-press product needed to be taken public at all. Leaked online, it would have generated all the intrigue and rumor that it has anyway, and spared the overly public airing, it might have retained an air of mystery. Or maybe it's just disappointing knowing where the song comes from: No one really wants to find their Holy Grail, especially so soon after even being tipped off as to its very existence. | 2007-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-01-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Playhouse | January 26, 2007 | 8.2 | a264d144-32f0-4cd6-8159-edb79d1d8f0a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
After over three decades of drumming in the Melvins, Dale Crover has released a muffled, scattershot solo album. It comes on the heels of a new record from the Melvins themselves. | After over three decades of drumming in the Melvins, Dale Crover has released a muffled, scattershot solo album. It comes on the heels of a new record from the Melvins themselves. | Dale Crover / Melvins: The Fickle Finger of Fate/A Walk With Love & Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dale-crover-melvins-the-fickle-finger-of-fatea-walk-with-love-and-death/ | The Fickle Finger of Fate/A Walk With Love & Death | It took over 30 years, but it finally exists: a Dale Crover solo album. The legendary drummer of the Melvins, and even Nirvana for a time (he played on three tracks on Bleach), has long hinted at the possibility of a solo effort. In 1992, he and the Melvins released the aptly titled Dale Crover, a punk rock record that sounded more akin to Sonic Youth than their usual gush of sludge metal. The album is an odd but illuminating look into the mind of Crover, and a clear reminder of his musical origin: a garage band called Fecal Matter with Kurt Cobain (both are from Aberdeen, Wash.) in the 1980s. Crover’s always had the energy and savage edge to be a singular metal drummer. But he’s also a gifted grunge and rock artist, a genuine punk at heart. If The Fickle Finger of Fate proves anything, it’s that, for the better part of three decades, Crover’s been dreaming—reminiscing maybe—about the good old days with Kurt.
It’s easy, then, to imagine songs like “Hooch,” a track that Cobain himself produced on the Melvins’ 1993 album Houdini, as source material for Fickle Finger. In his work from around that time, Crover doesn’t overcomplicate his arrangements, nor does he steal the air away from the music’s dredging guitar; instead, he balances the heaviness of the soundscape. Simplicity is his preference, his greatest tool in doing so. He pulsates and thunders along, confidently letting the aftermath of his cannon-beat filter evenly throughout the rest of the distortion. He was rarely the focal point—he mostly ensured there was none.
But on The Fickle Finger of Fate, Crover is now front and center, and it’s a bizarre place for him to be. He wrote, played, and recorded most of the album himself, and in this way, it’s almost melancholic in how it plays like an old demo, like a tape your friend might’ve handed you in 1992. Only six of the 20 tracks are longer than three minutes. The production is muffled, Crover’s voice hooded with noise. While the album spans a few genres, it doesn’t develop them fully: some of the shorter tracks like “String Bean” and “Prismo” beg to be fleshed out into full songs. Others, like the 14-seconds-long “Our Supreme Leader,” have no business being slotted between a song crafted around noise-rock and another trying to be Pink Floyd.
In fact, the numerous short interludes on Fickle Finger end up disrupting the progression of the music more than connecting it. The hard-nosed, grinding anthem “Big Uns” is one of the album’s best tracks—but instead of carrying its momentum, the two jabbing interludes that follow take you to the slow and woozy (and acoustic) title track. In this regard, it’s difficult to see what the album adds up to beyond a mixed bag of half-baked rhythms and riffs.
As the fickle finger of fate would have it, the Melvins themselves now seem to suffer from the same indecisiveness and lack of focus. Their latest full-length, A Walk With Love & Death, was released earlier this year and it is formed by two distinct collections. “Death,” the first part of the album, delivers the usual wash of avant-garde drone and sludge that has boringly come to be expected of 21st-century Melvins. “Love,” the second part, is actually an original and interesting sound collage and soundtrack for a short film directed and produced by the band’s friend Jesse Nieminen.
“Love” is an intriguing assortment of samples, stray recordings, noises, sound effects, conversations, and Moog-esque tones. Experimental though it may be, it’s not unlike 2001’s Colossus of Destiny, an hour-long trek through the din and drain of stitched together samples. The colorful confusion of sound, the unpredictability of the coagulating fragments, makes the music almost imagistic and allows it to exist on its own terms both as a film score and as a sonic portrait of people, places, and scenes. “The Asshole Bastard,” “Park Head,” and “T-Burg” in particular offer up humor, urbanity, and warmth. It’s unusual stuff even for the Melvins, and for a band 34 years into an unusual career, that’s no easy feat.
Unfortunately, “Love” is preceded by “Death,” which, as a general rule of thumb in the universe, is rarely a good thing. The two distinct parts of A Walk With Love & Death are entirely weighed down by their own differences: they do not meet at any central point, motif, or musical concept. The darkness and fuzziness of “Death,” in many ways, counteracts the careful piecing together of “Love,” just as the meandering nature of “Love” pushes back against the groove-bound tightness of “Death.” They deflate and distract from one another to the detriment of the whole assemblage.
The Melvins, and of course Crover, may be determined to continue experimenting and wandering at this point. But they should be warned: not all ventures outward lead you to a better inward place. | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 12, 2017 | 7 | a26e4773-d6b2-4ede-90b6-a94c436d873a | Brian Burlage | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-burlage/ | 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 an uncompromising debut, pop music that ventures to the extremes of sound and emotion. | 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 an uncompromising debut, pop music that ventures to the extremes of sound and emotion. | Sinéad O’Connor: The Lion and the Cobra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sinead-oconnor-the-lion-and-the-cobra/ | The Lion and the Cobra | After the early sessions for her debut album, Sinéad O’Connor went home and studied the peak meter on her personal recording device, singing to herself, alone. The green light meant she was in the proper range to be recorded; yellow meant she was in danger of clipping; red meant she was too loud. Because the label had paired her with a producer she did not trust, or particularly like, the teenage songwriter from Dublin realized she would have to internalize these metrics in order to preserve her music the way it sounded in her head. “So I’ve made my voice into its own master fader,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings.
Even after she fired the producer and took his place—scrapping the sessions and starting over, putting herself in a hundred-thousand pounds of debt before the album’s release in November 1987—this would be an important lesson in control and self-reliance. These were songs that lived in extremes. The accompaniment was often barely there: a wash of ambience, layered acoustic guitars, a Bible passage recited in Gaelic by Enya. Or it was a full-on attack: shoegaze drones, blaring strings, military drums, and dance beats.
And then there’s her voice. It has the elucidating quality of light through stained glass but can just as easily become a tempest, shattering windows and leaving the interiors raw and wrecked. She would go on to record albums of traditional Irish folk music and roots reggae, transform a Loretta Lynn song into an apocalyptic showtune, rap about the Great Irish Potato Famine, and manage never once to sound ridiculous doing any of it. To this day, the best visualization of her gift remains a steady close-up of her face with a tear rolling down her cheek. She sings and you cannot look away.
The Lion and the Cobra, like all of O’Connor’s albums, requires active participation: a listener on the edge of their seat, a hand near the volume knob, a constant feeling of unease. O’Connor has confessed to furnishing the Irish mountaintop home where she lives alone with “deliberately” uncomfortable chairs: “I don’t like people staying long.” Her albums take a similar approach. They seem to peak with negative space. Even at her most accessible, O’Connor wants you to hear the way she summons this music from the dark, quiet places where it has been buried; it floods and calms and stretches beyond our sight, like the sky after a storm.
In songs like “Mandinka” and “Jerusalem,” the magic is in the interplay between O’Connor’s voice and the bed of cavernous rock music: how she stretches the titles into one-word choruses, weaving the syllables through their knotty arrangements. In the refrain of “Mandinka,” a song about a young woman refusing tradition, the guitar riff rises and falls as drum rolls echo in the right and left channel. Even with these flourishes, her voice, double-tracked and coated in reverb, is the center of everything. The song is delivered like a miniature symphony. You can sing along with every little moment, each placed just so in the soundfield.
O’Connor never considered herself a pop artist, but she immediately had a knack for getting in people’s heads. Before she broke through with a ghostly rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” she sought a different thrill in The Lion and the Cobra’s “I Want Your (Hands on Me).” It’s her rare song that feels modeled after hits of the era, an early attempt at blending her blunt-force, hip-hop influence with gentler melodic gifts. At the time, she called it a “tongue in cheek song about sex,” and it would eventually receive a dance remix with a verse from MC Lyte about how, despite the seduction in its title, “When I say no, yo, I mean no.” The hook feels almost preverbal as she finds ways to subvert the directness: “Put ’em on, put ’em on, put ’em on me,” O’Connor sings until the words bleed into the rhythm.
These simple pleasures exist in a different universe than “Troy,” a dark, ambitious ballad with lyrics ranging from Yeats allusion to dragon-killing fantasy, breathless apology to full-throated rage. On the album, her words are backed by a string section responding to each shift in her inflection. In concert, she would sing it with just a 12-string guitar, her voice trembling then crashing like something heavy dropped suddenly from above. It is one of the only songs on the album she admitted to being autobiographical at the time. The lyrics were addressed in part to her abusive mother who died in a car crash when O’Connor was 19, but who would haunt her life and work long after. “I couldn’t admit it was her I was angry at,” she would later reflect, “so I took it out on the world.”
During a troubled childhood, O’Connor escaped through the radio. She was sensitive to music: violently repelled by what she hated, like her sister’s Barry Manilow poster, and obsessively devoted to what she loved, like Bob Dylan. One of her favorites was his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, the start of the icon’s brief run as a born-again Christian songwriter, a polarizing and misunderstood period in his career. O’Connor counts herself as one of the era’s few disciples. As recently as this month, you could spot the record in her home, perched behind her shoulder during interviews—the patron saint of hearing the audience boo and cranking it up anyway. Which, of course, is precisely what she did when she had the chance to honor Dylan at his 30th Anniversary tribute show.
At the time of that performance in October 1992, O’Connor could count plenty of reasons why her audience might be dismissive—at first, she thought they just didn’t like her outfit. But there was also the controversy with the national anthem. She claimed she had been given the option for it to be played before a concert in New Jersey, and she had politely said no; media reports soon emerged that she refused to perform if she heard it playing. There was also, of course, the time she appeared on Saturday Night Live and tore a photo of the pope that once belonged to her mother—removed from the wall while she was cleaning the house after her death—and made an unrehearsed statement against the Church’s history of child abuse. “Fight the real enemy” was the clearest way she could think to communicate her message. Many viewers took it as a provocation to fight her directly.
But for a while, everyone was listening. When O’Connor performed “Mandinka” at the 1989 Grammy Awards—with the Public Enemy logo dyed into her hair in solidarity with the radical hip-hop artists snubbed by award ceremonies—she appeared genuinely gleeful, received by rapturous applause. Completely alone on an enormous stage, she swiveled around and shook her knees, singing pitch-perfect at the top of her lungs in a black halter top and jeans. The performance is radiant and definitive, delivered for an audience of insiders who would, at best, completely turn their backs on her or, at worst, actively derail her career, all within the next few years.
While O’Connor’s relationship with the music industry and press grew increasingly thorny, it was also a conscious retreat as she grew exhausted with the mainstream. On The Lion and the Cobra, you can hear her planting flags in the places where she would later take sanctuary. The piercing balladry of “Just Like U Said It Would Be” previews the pared-back exorcisms of 1994’s Universal Mother; the old-Irish mysticism of “Never Get Old” would be a refuge in 2002’s extraordinary Sean-Nós Nua. And like the fragmented opener “Jackie,” narrated by a woman waiting every day for her lost husband to return from sea, defying the warnings of her community, some of her best later work was delivered in the form of mantras, secluded from the noise of the world around her. “I am enough for myself,” she affirms in one of them, a lesson she would spend the following decades accepting.
Within a few years of its release, O’Connor was already distancing herself from the blinding rage and catharsis of The Lion and the Cobra: “Now I’m an old woman of 23,” she explained in a whisper, only half-kidding. “I don’t feel as angst-ridden as I did when I was 15.” She was adamant about not being defined by the pain in her songs. After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, she spoke about her desire to offer another path to her fans: “The tragedy is that he could’ve got out of it if he’d had more faith that he could,” she suggested. “I’m very conscious of wanting to show people it can be done, putting it right before their eyes.”
In 1987, O’Connor was beginning to accept this wisdom, but her faith was being tested daily. When she fell in love with her drummer, John Reynolds, and became pregnant with her first child, the label encouraged her to get an abortion. “I was very upset and very hurt. How could I choose between my career or a child?” she told Rolling Stone three years later, in a profile that coincided with “Nothing Compares 2 U” reaching No. 1 on the Billboard charts. “I wanted the baby—and I decided to have it.” And so she did: Jake was born that summer. The Lion and the Cobra arrived in the fall, and with it, O’Connor’s life in the public eye began.
O’Connor’s music became her armor during these battles, her fortress as the world slowly closed in on her. 1990’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got expanded the debut’s emotional canvas in ways that welcomed an entire record-buying public, but The Lion and the Cobra, dense as a dark cloud, proudly bent to the whims of only its creator. Consider the end of “Troy,” when O’Connor delivers one of its pivotal lines—“Every look that you threw told me so”—raising her voice to a harrowing climax. As the sound grows distorted in the mix, she prolongs the note, louder and louder, as if trying to break through the monitor—an early attempt at fighting the mechanisms that delivered her message, of testing her limits. Or maybe just to be heard.
Depending on where you live, there are two different covers for The Lion and the Cobra. For the American release, the label went with an angelic portrait of O’Connor with her arms crossed against her chest, eyes cast downward, mouth shut before a glowing, white background. It was an alternate option to the one she preferred, used throughout the rest of the world. There, her mouth is open, eyebrows arched, shoulders thrown back slightly, capturing her in constant motion and placing the image in a kind of blur. As a young artist’s introduction to a new audience, this depiction was deemed a little too angry, too provocative. In Rememberings, O’Connor recalls the shoot. The photographer was playing the album back, encouraging her to respond naturally as the cameras flashed. “I look like I’m screaming,” she writes. “In fact, I was singing.”
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Chrysalis / Ensign | June 20, 2021 | 9.1 | a26ea3be-4753-4a99-bd69-335c60fffd75 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Eight Bells is the doom metal project of Melynda Jackson, formerly of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space. Landless veers between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes. | Eight Bells is the doom metal project of Melynda Jackson, formerly of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space. Landless veers between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes. | Eight Bells: Landless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21524-landless/ | Landless | Instrumental music can accomplish a great many things, but one thing it’s not so good at is storytelling. It’s no wonder, then, that when Melynda Jackson of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space launched the heavy, stripped down doom metal project Eight Bells as singer/guitarist, she had a few stories up her sleeve. Or in the case of Eight Bells, one ambitious tale. The trio’s 2013 debut, The Captain’s Daughter, comprised four songs that formed a story arc about a character lost at sea; on Eight Bells’ new album, Landless, that character makes it home. Spoiler alert: Things don’t go well.
Landless is drenched in isolation. "Hating" scrapes its way across a gulf of despair, with wraithlike vocals and numbed melodies hanging over pinprick prog fretwork. The riffs are meaty and vast, but the pulse of ethereal '70s rock—from Pink Floyd to Hawkwind’s more celestial moments—haunts "Hold My Breath," which nods to more modern influences with an intricate, off-kilter, Isis-esque groove. There’s an ambience to Landless, bottled like smoke in numerous passages throughout the album, but it reaches track-length mass on "The Mortal’s Suite," an echoing exhalation of negative space and gothic grays. It’s as though Jackson has taken the flights of fantasy that SubArachnoid Space specialized in, edited them down, and folded them into an ashen doom.
For an album about aloneness, there’s a lush synergy to Landless. Dual vocal lines emanate from some unseen place, sometimes braided together in a conjoined plea for connection, sometimes adrift in solitude. On "Touch Me," that dynamic is brought to a stunning culmination; Jackson and bassist/singer Haley Westeiner whisper and drone in a fugue of hushed desperation, harmonizing but always just out of phase.
As for Landless’ narrative, it’s not exactly a solid one. The album’s title track, nearly 13 colossal minutes long, sheds wisps of images and ghostly chants that melt into the ether. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, veering between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes. Whatever has befallen Jackson’s protagonist isn’t entirely clear; all that’s certain is that the ending, like the beginning and middle, are lost in a fog of otherworldliness and doubt. Ultimately, the narrative isn’t about the words so much as the atmosphere—and in the saga that is Landless, voices are just one more glorious instrument spelling out an epic, tragic fate. | 2016-02-15T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2016-02-15T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Battleground | February 15, 2016 | 7.4 | a26f7cc1-b351-4146-a2ee-ae1f948e7741 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Ignoring calls to fold Erlend Øye's hushed beats into their hushed folk, the Kings of quiet return with their most whisper-soft-- and graceful-- record yet. | Ignoring calls to fold Erlend Øye's hushed beats into their hushed folk, the Kings of quiet return with their most whisper-soft-- and graceful-- record yet. | Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13553-declaration-of-dependence/ | Declaration of Dependence | Kings of Convenience made headlines last month. No, wait, Leslie Feist did. It's been an eventful five years since the Norwegian duo's previous album, Riot on an Empty Street, featured the Canadian songstress on two tracks. After Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambæk Bøe's recent New York show, that a surprise Feist guest appearance got top media billing underscores just how eventful. Sorry, guys, I guess royalty isn't what it used to be.
No longer does Quiet Is the New Loud, the title of Øye and Bøe's 2001 Astralwerks debut, sound like such an appealing mantra. The hushed politeness that Kings of Convenience and, earlier, Belle and Sebastian reintroduced to indie listeners around the turn of the millennium must've lost its fresh feeling somewhere between Natalie Portman big-upping the Shins and the Decemberists doing a prog-folk rock opera. Then there's the more than 400,000 copies Riot sold in Europe, a number that looks virtually impossible for a group of such modest stature today. Throw in Øye's two mostly solid albums fronting dance-poppers the Whitest Boy Alive, and, well, what do Kings of Convenience have left to say?
"Quieter is the new quiet," apparently. Despite calls for the whisper-folk pair to make Øye's house and techno background more apparent, Declaration of Dependence doubles down on hushed Scandinavian understatement. No drums, unless you count slapped fretboards or squeaking fingers: just two voices, two acoustic guitars, and occasional cello, viola, or one-finger piano plinks. Along with sharper songwriting focus, this go-for-broke softness makes for the most durable, rewarding Kings of Convenience album yet-- a Pink Moon to past efforts' Five Leaves Left. Barring a last-minute José González surprise, it's also probably the best new full-length of its style you'll hear this year.
The songs on Declaration of Dependence reveal everyday tensions with a cool, undemonstrative reserve. You can hear the spare but descriptive verses as about romance, the band itself, or global politics, depending on your preference. Where Riot opener "Homesick" offered the suggestive image of "two soft voices blended in perfection," the new album's first track, tender "24-25", declares, "What we build is bigger than the sum of two." Slowly shuffling "Renegade" uses bold, vivid brush strokes to carry out that old maxim, "If you love something, let it go"; "Why are you whispering when the bombs are falling?" a solitary voice asks, between slightly dissonant strums. "Riot on an Empty Street", a holdover since years before the album of that same name, finds a traveling singer lost for words, but not for delicate melodies.
Rather than become more electronic, Kings of Convenience here choose simply to apply dance music's minimalism and sense of texture more fully to their chosen acoustic-pop form. Bittersweet single "Mrs. Cold" has been compared to Jack Johnson, probably because both use percussive hand slapping, but the popular surfer-turned-singer has never recorded anything so perfectly poised, so deceptively depressing; a ringing lead guitar line repeats like a looped sample. "Boat Behind", a single in other countries, floats a melancholy violin line over a tangled tale about reuniting with someone but never belonging to them, sounding almost like another lost Arthur Russell demo. "Rule My World", which follows Sweden's González into forceful denunciations of theocratic zealotry, has the bouncy upswing of French house. Øye's smoky falsetto fills in for the absent Feist on songs like "Freedom and Its Owner". "Power of Not Knowing" neatly echoes Simon & Garfunkel's "April Come She Will".
Both halves of the duo now live back home in Bergen, Norway, after a multi-year absence by the Whitest Boy Alive singer. Whether inspired by lovers, each other, or the warmongers of the world, Kings of Convenience's latest is ultimately just what its title says: a bold and beautiful assertion that we are better off together than apart. Or, as "My Ship Isn't Pretty" wonderfully puts it: a series of "quiet protests against loneliness." If the album cover had you expecting 2009's umpteenth nu-Balearic cruise, be glad we got this eloquent message in a bottle instead. | 2009-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-10-19T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | October 19, 2009 | 7.9 | a270a48b-40eb-4c6c-b832-95308e2b15ba | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On his band's first album in seven years, Gary Lightbody aims for clarity, connection, and personal resonance but lapses into the pomp and incoherence that have plagued Snow Patrol for a decade. | On his band's first album in seven years, Gary Lightbody aims for clarity, connection, and personal resonance but lapses into the pomp and incoherence that have plagued Snow Patrol for a decade. | Snow Patrol: Wildness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snow-patrol-wildness/ | Wildness | In the early 2000s, Snow Patrol became inextricably connected with the ABC medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy.” Gary Lightbody and his band were a constant at Seattle Grace as the rotating cast of residents flirted with disaster, death, and (mostly) each other. Denny Duquette, Jr. took his final, swooning breaths to “Chasing Cars” in the Season 2 finale—and then the show’s cast performed it in the musical episode “Grey’s Anatomy: The Music Event.”
On their first album in seven years, Snow Patrol don’t need Shonda Rhimes to amp up the drama. Wildness was inspired by Lightbody’s struggle with sobriety, his father’s battle with dementia, a crippling fear of losing his edge as an artist, and—why not?—a headline-making new love interest for new guitar player Johnny McDaid. It’s a cruel twist of fate that Snow Patrol fail to come up with some worthy syncs for a “Grey’s Anatomy” script when they’ve practically lived in one.
This is a band that once gave silence at the breakfast table the gravity of a nuclear standoff. Their most personal album deals in matters of literal life and death and can get shrugged off like waiting room music. To some extent, this seems to have been Lightbody’s intention: He aimed for “clarity and connection” on Wildness, a familiar and canny pivot for intensely apolitical acts who want to acknowledge the world’s sad state of affairs without risking any blowback. “Friends and foes and princes/Are all just human in the end,” Lightbody preaches on “Empress,” before insisting, “This is so damn simple.” Perhaps it’s willfully naive as well, but you come to Snow Patrol for consolation, not confrontation.
No one’s asking the band to address the totality of life on Earth, although that’s exactly what they attempt to do on Wildness’ opener, “Life on Earth,” a by-the-book grasp at gravity. The intro is all shimmering acoustic guitars in negative space. Then a chorus lifts like velvet curtains. There are regal drum rolls, declarative lyrics about our collective existential predicament, and some well-placed profanity: “Shouldn’t need to be this fucking hard/It’s just life on Earth,” Lightbody snarls.
It’s bizarre to hear the same guy who’s begging for simplicity go on to compose an album whose lyric sheet can barely go one verse without herniating wordplay: “Now slip the tattoo on/Serenity it scorns your every mood,” he insists on “Wild Horses.” “Empress” has us “standing in the steady throne of restless hope.” On “A Youth Written in Fire,” he’s urging us to “Remember the first time we got high/We felt like the rabid lion’s roar.” Do any of these make sense, even to the lucky few who are capable of experiencing love and loss as intensely as Gary Lightbody? Did that first kiss really feel “like a planet forming,” or is he just happy to see us?
More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness. At the band’s peak, Snow Patrol albums were designed like Autobot Blaster: Even with U2 and R.E.M. standby Jacknife Lee’s battle-ready production, there was an intimate mixtape at the core of 2003’s Final Straw and 2006’s Eyes Open. And these guys are pros themselves now: McDaid is one of pop music’s favorite hired guns; he’s co-written for Shawn Mendes, P!nk, James Blunt, and Ed Sheeran. Lightbody is best known to some young pop fans as “that dude on ‘The Last Time,’” a duet with Taylor Swift that came in 121st out of 129 on a Rolling Stone ranking of her songs.
What’s remarkable about “Don’t Give In,” the lead single from Wildness, is that Lightbody’s vocals on the track sound even more mismatched to the music than they were on “The Last Time.” The incessantly repeated hook shows that he’s learned some things from his pop moonlighting, but, for some reason, the song also finds him abandoning his handsome Northern Irish burr in favor of a weak Springsteen impression.
It’s a fitting, if unfortunate, encapsulation of the confusion about what Snow Patrol are supposed to be that has apparently plagued Lightbody for more than a decade. The band initially came off as a scrappier, rawer version of Coldplay—but since “Chasing Cars,” they’ve sounded more like Coldplay with less conviction, only tentatively experimenting with pop and electronic music. Polished to an antiseptic sheen, without shine or sparkle, most of Wildness is squarely within the bland “young adult contemporary” realm in which McDaid and Lightbody operate outside of Snow Patrol. “A Dark Switch,” “Wild Horses,” and “A Youth Written in Fire” comprise the only efforts to live up to the album’s title, their jittery rhythms no spicier than a mound of Zatarain’s.
Yet the most affecting tracks are among the least stylistically ambitious. “Soon,” a plainspoken tribute to Lightbody’s father, is as moving as it is critic-proof. “What If This Is All the Love You Ever Get?” is exactly what you’d expect from a Snow Patrol song of that name: a reverberating piano ballad on which Lightbody pleads with us to let go of regret, live for today, tell her you love her, goddammit, do not let this pass you by. The one song on Wildness whose title is phrased as a question is also the only one that demands a “Grey’s Anatomy”-level emotional response, finally delivering on Lightbody’s stated aim of connecting with his audience, loud and clear. | 2018-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polydor | June 4, 2018 | 4.8 | a27dc27b-3014-4c42-821a-d793437a381c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
On its first album in 11 years, the Damon Albarn-fronted supergroup tackles Brexit head on. In his “Anglo-Saxistentialist” reckoning, false nostalgia imperils a true vision of British identity. | On its first album in 11 years, the Damon Albarn-fronted supergroup tackles Brexit head on. In his “Anglo-Saxistentialist” reckoning, false nostalgia imperils a true vision of British identity. | The Good, the Bad & the Queen: Merrie Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-good-the-bad-and-the-queen-merrie-land/ | Merrie Land | Damon Albarn has been here before: examining the state of his nation from a place of great ambivalence. He’s been tangled in the Union Jack since his days at the helm of Blur, when he laced chart-topping pop with serrated critiques of British culture. In the decades since, the definition of that culture has become increasingly contested—particularly in the debates around Britain’s 2016 decision to leave the EU. Shaken and spurred by the Brexit referendum, Albarn’s supergroup the Good, the Bad & the Queen—also including the Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the Verve’s Simon Tong, and legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen—came back together after 11 years to make Merrie Land, a concept album about what it means to be British.
For Albarn, it’s part of a lifelong investigation into the nature of Englishness, or what he has called “Anglo-Saxistentialist.” In a recent interview, he referred to Merrie Land as “the next installment of [Blur’s] Parklife.” If the world of Parklife was rendered in crisp, saturated colors, Merrie Land is drab and strewn with debris. Albarn guides us through its greying sites, pointing out ruins of English identity along the way. “If you are leaving/Please still say goodbye,” he sings atop lullaby organ in the title track; “Can you leave me my Silver Jubilee mug, my old flag?” These obsolete symbols are typical of the album’s tarnished menagerie—evocative, Albarn says, of a “nostalgic, sentimental vision of how England used to be,” even if it “never really existed.”
This kind of nostalgic residue is smeared all over Merrie Land, which is shot through with sounds and images that feel haunted by age and irrelevancy. On “Gun to the Head,” belches of brass suggest the ghost of the royal marching band; on “Nineteen Seventeen” Albarn shows us curled, faded snapshots of “Pylons, rapeseed fields/Powdered skies and trees alone/Thousands of white crosses in a cemetery,” captured from a train leaving “a place we can’t remain close to anymore.” “My heart is heavy,” he sings, “because it looks just like my home.” The bloom of strings and pulsing Mellotron suggest Parklife’s “To the End,” though the magnitude of this ending feels far greater.
Merrie Land owes as much to Britain’s musical traditions as it does to its relics and geography; the first half of the album offers an absurdist vaudeville romp akin to the Kinks and Sgt. Pepper’s, whereas the late-album cut “The Truce of Twilight” touts a walloping bassline that recalls the Clash’s dreary “The Guns of Brixton.” “Lady Boston,” one of the record’s sparser tracks, is built upon ghostly layers of regal noise: Battle snares roll softly, and the wails of a Welsh choir are tempered as if wrapped in gauze.
While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here—from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants—they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain. In a passage from the title track, Albarn closes in on that isolation, to claustrophobic effect: “So rebuild the railways/Firm up all the roads,” he sings. “No one is leaving now this is your home.” Albarn’s plainspoken phrases hover above the mix, lending a blunt edge to the song’s loping circuit of strings and woodwinds. Simonon’s trudging bassline and Allen’s sparse snares imbue his words with an oppressive weight: In Merrie Land, national identity is not a promise but a trap—an estrangement from one’s own true past and the collective history that builds a country. | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Studio 13 | December 5, 2018 | 7.5 | a2827e26-019a-49a5-a6ed-3a93c7597f90 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Culled from a period of intense musical transition over the past decade-plus, these 27 songs offer an alternate window into the songwriter’s depravity and anxiety—and the quest to overcome both. | Culled from a period of intense musical transition over the past decade-plus, these 27 songs offer an alternate window into the songwriter’s depravity and anxiety—and the quest to overcome both. | Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-b-sides-and-rarities-part-ii/ | B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) | What is the point of a rarities collection right now, anyway? The world’s creative spoils seem fated for an eternal black box, an ever-expanding cloud where everything we make (and lots of what we’ve already made) will remain accessible forever. Why buy an artist’s flotsam when you can stream the lot for free?
This is especially true of someone like Nick Cave, who is not only halfway into his fifth decade of releasing records but has also cultivated a cultish allegiance among his faithful. With almost no work at all, you can watch the Bad Seeds rehearse in 1987 in a tiny Berlin room, see him transfix with an exquisite version of “Into My Arms” in 1999 in an all-star songwriters’ circle, or laugh as he roasts Billy Corgan during a 1994 interview by telling him he has the “mentality of a teenager.” Thanks to assorted EPs, singles, and soundtracks, nearly half of the 27 songs on Cave’s new B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) have already been available on YouTube for years. If something by Cave can be archived, his legion has likely done it.
But the internet’s black box doubles as a dustbin, a place where junk and jewels coexist because they’ve never really been sorted. That remains the purpose of a rarities collection—an opportunity for an artist to make sense of what they once assumed was ephemera or errata, to see if it can cohere with the rest. In Cave’s case, it absolutely does. He has, after all, spent his career flitting between the gutter and the gods, fighting through depravity in search of some higher meaning or, at the very least, a whiff of redemption. If his castoffs offer different perspectives on that same quest, why shouldn’t they be collected and ordered to tell a different version of the same story? Compiled by Cave and Bad Seed-in-chief Warren Ellis, B-Sides & Rarities (Part II) reveals alternate windows into the worries and insecurities behind Cave’s careworn face, then offers what little advice he can spare about how to overcome them.
Cave & the Bad Seeds released their first such compendium in 2005, consecrating their first two decades with a wild and disorienting 56-song ride. The Bad Seeds were young and wild then, a shambolic rock band as open to No Wave as they were the Delta blues. They scored Cave’s tales of gothic delight with mischief and messy power. Salvaged from singles, live recordings, and soundtracks (including, hilariously, Scream 3), the massive set felt as overwhelming as a YouTube wormhole.
Stretching from 2006 to 2019, Part II is more focused. It picks up when the Bad Seeds still had that scabrous rock-band glow, when they attacked a song as though intent on shaking it to death. They sound jubilant during opener “Hey Little Firing Squad,” a B-side from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the Bad Seeds’ final (for now) full transmission as unrelenting rockers. Cave traces the assorted anxieties that haunt even the best relationships, but the band turns it into an earworm, its shouted hook inescapable. “Accidents Will Happen” lifts an Elvis Costello title, but its lechery shapes a ringer for the same nervy, fun aplomb that defined Archers of Loaf. “Accidents keep happening/This old world was born from one,” Cave sings at one point, the wink practically audible beneath the sneer.
Much of the set, though, portrays Cave in a moment of profound musical transition, shifting from the acerbic leader of a menacing rock band to the contemplative mind at the center of the more esoteric electronic textures that shape 2016’s Skeleton Tree and 2019’s Ghosteen. When the Bad Seeds opened their 1984 debut with a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” it was noise-pocked, accusatory, and mean; the piano-and-strings version here, recorded for television in 2015, is tender, lachrymose, and almost defeated. This is the plea of someone who has found no suitable answers for urgent existential questions despite 30 more years of asking. He’s trying a new approach.
This struggle is the core of this set, same as it has almost always been for Cave. He stockpiles talismans against an unseen evil during the throbbing “Needle Boy.” He does his best to avoid a nervous breakdown amid the fried circuits of “Lightning Bolts,” a fraught contemplation of being a parent in a world so fucked that even “in the cradle of democracy, the pigeons are wearing gas masks.” Visions of gargantuan insects plague him during “Big Dream (With Sky),” a Ghosteen-era duet with Ellis that unfurls like a dirge. One of the most glowering works in Cave’s vast songbook, “Steve McQueen” considers murder, sexual predation, depression, and suicide over four minutes of an eerie synth drone. “I’m Steve McQueen, the atrocity man,” he deadpans after a death threat, “with my strap-on, blood-borne dream.”
Cave takes care to temper this despair, or at least peer around it when possible. The version of “Skeleton Tree” included here—one of four demos from recent albums—is despondent and lurid, with Cave taking potshots at Jesus that didn’t make the relatively sanguine final version. The first attempt was ostensibly too much. A pair of interconnected tone poems, “Euthanasia” and “Life Per Se” express cautious optimism in love, knowing that it can shatter or save you in an instant. “In the end, it is your heart that kills you/It’s all wrong, but it’s all right in its way,” he later warns before recommitting himself to the risk.
Both halves of Part II finish with singalongs. The first disc (or LP) concludes with an enchanting version of “Push the Sky Away,” an anthem of perseverance and individuality that’s lifted here by an Australian chorus and orchestra. Cave ends it by thanking everyone—the instrumentalists, the singers, Ellis, all corners of the crowd. It is an indulgent act of gratitude, Cave verklempt that his darkest thoughts have found people for whom they are beacons.
The second ends with “Earthlings,” Cave’s stoic reflection on art’s ability to deliver us from our own evil. “I thought these songs would one day set me free,” he offers with a hangdog tone. “I thought these songs had traveled here for me.” But as the song progresses, he notes that his pals are approaching, gathering together for his benefit. Perhaps they’re the ones who are there to set him free, to help him ensure this hard time passes, too. But is this a party or a funeral? When those same friends sing the coda in union, their harmony feels as bittersweet as an autumn bonfire with loved ones, dead leaves falling all around the warm blaze. Both tracks are perfect capstones for what Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have done for nearly 40 years, both on full albums and with the outcasts assembled here: Tell us about the bullshit, then try to find a way to withstand it.
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. | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | October 28, 2021 | 8 | a284d4c3-7ad8-49b8-bc3d-b6f46f3f71e5 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Nearly every moment of Chvrches' follow up to The Bones of What You Believe radiates with sky-high aspiration, the verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." The fine-tuning and craft is deeply embedded in the music, which exudes that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence. | Nearly every moment of Chvrches' follow up to The Bones of What You Believe radiates with sky-high aspiration, the verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." The fine-tuning and craft is deeply embedded in the music, which exudes that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence. | Chvrches: Every Open Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21104-every-open-eye/ | Every Open Eye | Anyone who has spent more than a minute in a clothing store over the past few years has heard dozens of bands making a calculated, charmless attempt to duplicate what came so naturally to Chvrches on their zeitgeisty debut The Bones of What You Believe. Which leaves the real deal facing a tremendous challenge three years after emerging anonymously from their basement with "The Mother We Share". "After making one record that people really like, some bands reject the things that everyone liked about them and make some really deep, thoughtful, dark record," Martin Doherty admitted to Pitchfork earlier this year. Fortunately, the hard work and meticulous fine-tuning of Every Open Eye is so deeply embedded in the finished product that Chvrches never come off as self-conscious. Instead, it manifests as that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence.
Chvrches toured The Bones of What You Believe exhaustively, so they don't have to overthink what things "everyone" liked about them and which parts were scare-quotes deep, dark, and thoughtful. You’ll be really let down if you hoped Chvrches would build on the proggier excursions of "Science/Visions" or if you believed Doherty’s expansive, nearly-six minute closer "You Caught the Light" justified a bigger role. Otherwise, the band rightfully assume that their unabashed embrace of pop's ruthless economy got them playing festivals in front of thousands of pop fans.
So, when Lauren Mayberry belts, "we will take the best parts of ourselves and make them gold," it can be read as the band's artistic edict rather than one of the examples of her occasional slip into Millennial Successorizing ("I am chasing the skyline more than you ever will"). Nearly every moment of Every Open Eye is filled with aspiration and there's not a false step or bum note, verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." Mayberry summed it up as "emo with synths in it" in a recent podcast while expounding on a teenage love of Jimmy Eat World, and you can suss out a structural similarity between Every Open Eye and Bleed American (five radio-friendly bangers, ballad, four more radio-friendly bangers, slow-dance closer). Even the obvious deep cuts have a functional purpose—"Afterglow" is a slight comedown that still feels necessary as exit music after nearly 40 minutes of constant peaks, while Doherty's light-stepping, funk-pop inclusion "High Enough to Carry You Over" is an allowable indulgence for a band that truly prides itself on being a band, rather than Mayberry and Those Other Guys.
There's also an irrepressible buoyancy and reassurance, even if it's not just in her head where Mayberry feels looked down on. Her detailing of the brutal rape threats and casual misogyny she faces as a female public figure are both shocking and sadly familiar; she's more cagey about the personal relationships that serve as the lyrical muse for much of Every Open Eye. Though Mayberry's background in law and journalism served as an early footnote in the Chvrches come-up, she draws on that as much as any musical thread here. Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.
With nearly all of mainstream pop's biggest acts looking toward the '80s for inspiration, Every Open Eye might be even more of-the-moment than its predecessor—Mayberry’s extracurriculars cast her lyrics in a feminist lens à la Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, while the arena-ready hooks justify the comparisons to pre-Violator Depeche Mode (the synth riff from "Clearest Blue" can't get enough of "Just Can't Get Enough") and the Pet Shop Boys. But minus the occasionally violent imagery of "Gun" and "By the Throat", Chvrches lack any of the qualities that made the aforementioned feel subversive or rebellious. This can actually work in their favor—"Leave a Trace" was memorably described by Mayberry as a "middle finger mic-drop," but her words are neatly manicured and polite enough to painlessly decapitate rather than bludgeon or incinerate. You can't have peak efficiency without formulas, though, and by the time "Playing Dead" and "Bury It" threaten to get mixed up on title alone, the similarly beaming melodies and diffident references to bones, crossed lines, and oceans start to render heartbreak, joy, resilience, and exhaustion interchangeable.
The minor flaws of Every Open Eye are much more acceptable in light of the hedge-betting sophomore efforts from Purity Ring and Disclosure, perhaps the two acts who've been more imitated over the past two years than Chvrches. They've moved past their earliest days when their competition was assumed to be M83 or Passion Pit or even the Knife, but in leveling up, they actually seem more conservative sonically, lyrically, and visually than the pure pop acts for whom they're used as a foil, i.e., Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Rihanna... hell, maybe Justin Bieber? If Every Open Eye is Chvrches taking the best parts of themselves and making them gold, I can't wait to hear them try to go platinum. | 2015-09-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Glassnote / Virgin EMI | September 28, 2015 | 7.7 | a28e567a-968a-4575-a257-29009e2ba4e9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A juke-filled, global set of songs compiled in Japan reflects the fear and uncertainty of the atomic age, recontextualizing the joy of footwork into ominous, often unsettling compositions. | A juke-filled, global set of songs compiled in Japan reflects the fear and uncertainty of the atomic age, recontextualizing the joy of footwork into ominous, often unsettling compositions. | Various Artists: Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22285-atomic-bomb-compilation-vol-4/ | Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 | Nuclear energy produces anxiety in Japan. Long a controversial topic, it became a renewed source of worry following the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi power plant during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Fears stirred by the aftermath—and of similar incidents occurring—caused a nationwide furor in subsequent years, leading citizens across the nation to speak out about how little they trusted the government tasked with harnessing a nuclear program. Anger over Fukushima even drew out a group that isn’t always eager to get political in Japan—musicians. Long constrained by commercial commitments, performers such as Ryuichi Sakamoto and Kazuyoshi Sato criticized the government’s handling of the situation online and appeared at protests against nuclear power. Still, many artists chose to express anger and worry through heavy metaphor rather than directly, if at all.
The Atomic Bomb Compilation series is direct with rage. Started in 2012 by Hiroshima juke producer CRZKNY, the project gathered dance songs around the theme of “the tragedy caused by abuse of nuclear energy.” The United States’ use of atomic weapons on CRZKNY’s hometown and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were remembered on these collections, both as memorial and reminder of nuclear energy's destructive past. The music, fittingly, is ominous and frequently chaotic. Although initially heavy on domestic artists and footwork, later releases brought in creators from around the world dabbling in a variety of styles. Vol. 4, released on the 71st anniversary of Japan’s surrender, is the best installment yet, featuring over a dozen electronic acts coming together to painfully reflect and highlight the paranoia of present-day nuclear power.
Protest sits at the center of Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4, but it also offers a snapshot of how international artists have absorbed the Chicago-born juke sounds in the years since RP Boo, Traxman, and the Teklife crew started receiving increased attention. This set features contributions from Japanese producers, members of Polish Juke, creators in Mexico and beyond, each giving their own perspective on the high-energy style. Jakub Lemiszewski pushes “Exceeding” towards suffocating levels with rippling synths, while Argentina’s Aylu makes good use of space on compilation closer “Y_Y,” a cut where every breath and skittery drum hit lingers in the air.
Although most of the tracks here at dance-floor speeds, the mood permeating Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 is rarely joyful. Opening number “e_i_r,” courtesy of Hyogo’s jue6ons, is an eight-and-a-half-minute warning signal that slowly grows in intensity. The following songs unfold more swiftly but use the cornerstones of juke to create uneasy atmospheres. “Bakushinchi,” a team-up between Kyoto’s Gnyonpix and Melbourne’s DJ Innes, takes a steely drum machine and places them next to synth gurgles that highlight the stiffness of the beat, making for a disconcerting feel. Organizer CRZKNY takes it even further on his three contributions, embracing sharp metallic textures that give footwork-ready cuts such as “Vida” a dangerous edge. When the album deviates from juke during the gutter drone of Black OPS’ “Ruins Lining” or “Hiroshima’s A-Bell” by Polish creator Paide—featuring a field recording of chirping birds slowly folding into harsh white noise—the end result still feels unnerving.
The bulk of Vol. 4’s tracks don’t call out nuclear energy or accidents directly, opting instead to create a paranoid atmosphere mirroring the worries of the atomic age. Yet other instances are far more direct, whether referencing former prime ministers who helped bring Japan’s nuclear industry to peak prominence (producer Franz Snake’s “Yasuhiro Nakasone Said,” a jittery track featuring the former PM’s voice sliced and diced) or being very on the nose with what they are trying to recreate (lililL’s “Atomic Explosion,” the comp’s most cacophonous moment). Juke’s use of repetition, meanwhile, drives home deliberate messages sampled from familiar figures. Chicago’s bahnhof::zoo takes a snippet of Barack Obama's speech during his historic visit to Hiroshima earlier this year and makes it the center of “Fell From The Sky.” On the very next song, UK artist Count Vanderhoff centers the piece around a soundbite of Scottish Parliament member George Kerevan asking new UK prime minister Theresa May, “Is she personally prepared to authorize a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children?” (She said, “Yes.”)
At 25 songs, Atomic Bomb Compilation Vol. 4 is an overwhelming listen given its intentionally bleak vibe. But this series isn’t meant to be an escape. It memorializes immense human suffering brought on by nuclear weaponry and looms high as a cautionary tale for catastrophic misuse of nuclear energy. There’s very little fun to be found in exploring the concept of man-made Armageddon. Instead, this collection highlights the urgency of a highly politicized issue and soundtracks an uneasy, uncertain life in the atomic age. | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | self-released | August 25, 2016 | 7.7 | a2907d83-82d3-4bad-9ac3-901bc5cba2e1 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
The trio of Canadian DJs’ unique “powwow step” turns the pulse of First Nations music into a modern electric dance soundtrack that is politically thrilling and immediate. | The trio of Canadian DJs’ unique “powwow step” turns the pulse of First Nations music into a modern electric dance soundtrack that is politically thrilling and immediate. | A Tribe Called Red: We Are the Halluci Nation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22384-we-are-the-halluci-nation/ | We Are the Halluci Nation | Back in 2008, A Tribe Called Red began a thoroughly popular night at a club in Canada’s capital, Ottawa. It is called Electric Pow Wow, and the group experiments with beats, singing, and samples to a frenetic audience. Combining the rhythms and traditional singing of powwow—music meant to accompany dancing—with an array of dance genres including dubstep, dancehall, drum‘n’bass, and electro, they create what has been labeled “powwow step.” Watching ATCR seamlessly jump from supercharged drums on a remix of Northern Cree’s “Red Skin Girl” to a sing-songy sample “Indians from all directions”—a clip from Jamaican dancehall artist Supercat’s “Scalp Dem”—underlines their iconoclastic politics in the name of First Nations. At the time, Ian “DJ NDN” Campeau has noticed, “We had a platform where people were going to listen to what we were going to say, and we should probably use that properly right now and just bring some sort of awareness.”
Their third album We Are the *Halluci Nation *ramps up the activism and accompanies it with some of the heaviest and most infectious sounds around. The patch on the cover of the album underlines the heart and beat of the album: “500 years and still drumming; Our DNA is the earth and sky.” Canada’s CBC radio promoted this album as “critical listening for all Canadians.” Given Canada’s history of cultural genocide, this is a given, but the statement should be expanded. This album is critical listening for everyone.
The Native producer and DJ crew are loud and direct about their politics. The words of the late Santee Dakota poet John Trudell open the record, defining their “Halluci Nation” as “the tribe that they cannot see” who “see the spiritual in the natural” vis-a-vis the oppressive ALie Nation, who “see the material religions through trauma [where] nothing is related, all the things of the earth and in the sky have energy to be exploited.” The record’s anti-colonial message is poetic and clear. This is dance music, which could also be classified as EDM, but it’s also a range of other genres. At its soul, however, this is music that demonstrates how protest takes on different forms and to connect the physically and spiritually displaced.
“We are the evolution, the continuation,” says Trudell in the title track, charting the course for an album and a philosophy that represents and respects indigeneity. Women’s voices are centered as much as men’s. Every song brings together a community of sounds and influences from various parts of the globe. The *Halluci Nation *is thus expansive and inclusive, from the *yoik *chants of Maxida Märak that sit atop the soft drums of “Eanan” to the rhythmic throat-singing of Tanya Tagaq on the infectious “Sila” to the pure pop bounce of Lido Pimienta on “For You (The Light Part II),” as well as features from Saul Williams, Shad, and Yasiin Bey.
The first single “R.E.D.” features rapper Yassin Alsalman (a.k.a. Narcy) and Yasiin Bey, whose recent border-crossing issues reflect the reality of “ALie Nation.” Narcy, an Iraqi-Canadian MC whose work has always been political, spits out the line “Coca-cola soul controller holy waters,” a five-word collage that both reveals and describes the popular impact of capitalism. The voices of the Black Bear Singers introduce the drum of the chorus, one that calls for “original nation.” It's a banging rap song that brings together the pan-African, Iraqi, and Indigenous.
There’s nothing small or subtle about ATCR because they deal in big issues. Two interludes feature the voice of Joseph Boyden, author of The Orenda. Just as this novel dug into the history of Canada’s settler colonialism—whose legacy extends through to the horror of assimilative residential schools and racist government policy—so too do these short monologues. Presented as phone calls to a prison, they provide stark images of the impact of settler colonialism.
But the foundation of ATCR, as well as the powwow, is the drum. In the past, samples have fueled some of the group’s biggest tunes, from the Black Lodge Singers on “Electric Pow Wow Drum” to Northern Voice on “Sisters”. The drum groups that ATCR sample are legends in their own right—crowds of spectators elbow their way close to these groups at pow wows, trying to capture the songs on phones and iPads. For Halluci Nation, ATCR worked with Manawan, Quebec’s Black Bear Singers, resulting in a clear, resonant sound that provides an approximation of the huge scale of a drum group if you don't have the opportunity to experience it live. It is to ATCR’s credit that they have been able to capture some of this size, whether through these recording sessions alongside Black Bear Singers or sourcing original a capella recordings from groups like Chippewa Travellers and Northern Voice. This comprehensive attention to sound makes *Halluci Nation *a relentless record: song after song of pointed commentary and heavy beats.
“Members of the Halluci Nation are anybody who is willing to accept they need to learn how to treat other people like humans,” says ATCR’s Bear Witness. At a time when isolationist nationalism seems in vogue—a nationalism that denies colonial histories while refusing refugees—A Tribe Called Red have created a landmark soundtrack for a world in which we all are connected. | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Radicalized | September 22, 2016 | 8.1 | a295ab08-4b21-4f70-92f6-f51a0ba06797 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
The Austrailian singer Simon Okely’s latest is a collection of crooning seduction, pop songwriting, and lush production. The breezy spirit of Laurel Canyon hovers around the album in a powerful way. | The Austrailian singer Simon Okely’s latest is a collection of crooning seduction, pop songwriting, and lush production. The breezy spirit of Laurel Canyon hovers around the album in a powerful way. | Slow Dancer: In a Mood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slow-dancer-in-a-mood/ | In a Mood | Simon Okely, the Australian man behind the wide-ranging guitar-pop project Slow Dancer, has often mentioned his childhood enthusiasm for Wilson Pickett, the 1960s soul singer best known for his restless energy and sparkling smile. Listening to Okely’s new album In a Mood, Pickett’s influence on the walking basslines and his warm vocal affectation is palpable. But where the soul man might choose exuberance, Slow Dancer goes mellow. Pickett’s 1966 hit “Land of 1000 Dances” is perhaps most remembered for appearances in commercials and late ’80s/early ’90s kids movies. Like so much of Pickett’s oeuvre, it’s incredibly fun. Okely’s slow dances, rather, are not the kind you find in Pickett’s land. He is more tentative, folksier, less inspired by the black American gospel tradition. The lyrical subject matter touches on topics beyond joy and relaxation, so it’s more introspective than your average jaunt to Margaritaville.
When white people take all the energy out of the blues, they usually wind up with reputations like Jimmy Buffett or John Mayer, two men with lasting brands despite a vague sense that they are deeply uncool. And while In a Mood could certainly please the “John Mayer is actually good” crowd, Okely’s tastes are more omnivorous and his ambitions are much higher. His last album, 2014’s Surrender, was composed primarily of deconstructed and metronomic blues studies. Here he ups the ante, embracing crooning seduction, pop songwriting, and lush production.
You can tell that Okely is the kind of listener whose ear picks out remnants, the little pieces of songs—hooks, guitar melodies, and the echo of a voice’s vibratos. Because of that, the reference points for the album seem almost infinite. The influence of Nick Drake shows up, most notably on “I Would,” a gentle folk song anchored by a pointillist guitar. “I’ve Been Thinking” evokes the spaced-out and wistful power-pop ballads of Big Star, and twangy “I Was Often” is essentially a way less extra version of “Hotel California.” But there are also production moves more reminiscent of recent folk-rock innovators like Band of Horses, Midlake, or Iron & Wine. The album wears 1970s throwback on it sleeve, but its love for the mid-2000s is how it gets its point across. Nowhere does this come to fruition more than on “Bitter.” The song starts out in a minor-key soul register you could imagine Isaac Hayes singing over, before the Rhye-like cool kids’ riff on smooth jazz takes over.
Like so much indie rock of the last five years—most notably Haim, Father John Misty, Mac DeMarco, and even Vampire Weekend—the breezy Laurel Canyon spirit of Fleetwood Mac hovers over In a Mood in a powerful way. The sound indie rock gravitates to now might have seemed outré to the leaders of a few decades worth of testosterone-fueled rock revivals. Their power over the culture waned to the point that when Rumours and Tusk were reissued in 2004, Slate called them the “least influential great band ever.” Times have certainly changed. Our palates are accustomed to blues pop now, so artists like Okely have more room to rehabilitate even cornier forms of soft rock. First single “Don’t Believe” is a polished slow jam with a syncopated bass line and string refrain reminiscent of the best AM radio hits. But it eschews the most unforgivable of yacht rock sins by resting on a chorus that is catchy without being overemphasized and irrepressible.
In a Mood is a referential album, but what ultimately ties it together is Okely’s lyrical simplicity and willingness to let his songs breath. The standout lines are plaintive and pointed, like on the subtly groovy “I’m Done Waiting”: “I always want your love, but I don’t need it anymore.” Despite the various styles and genres, Okely’s reverence for his influences and his earnest emotionality help the album cohere into a whole. It’s not an album you’ll do the Watusi to, but everyone has a few good slow dances in their repertoire. | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 15, 2017 | 7.2 | a295bbf1-9010-499b-9988-6874fd4c7dfc | Erin Vanderhoof | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-vanderhoof/ | null |
Now, Now trade guitar rock and raw nerves for slick, left-of-center pop on a deceptively upbeat comeback album whose intense lyrics and unsettling sounds stay true to the duo’s emo roots. | Now, Now trade guitar rock and raw nerves for slick, left-of-center pop on a deceptively upbeat comeback album whose intense lyrics and unsettling sounds stay true to the duo’s emo roots. | Now, Now: Saved | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/now-now-saved/ | Saved | “SGL” may have been the least expected of last summer’s pop bangers. A sumptuous and strange offering from Minnesota’s Now, Now, who’d gone quiet after releasing their second album, Threads, in 2012, the track heralded a reinvention. After losing guitarist Jess Abbott, the band seemed to have shed its emo bent: Where Now, Now’s music was once all exposed nerves and hushed confessions, “SGL” sounded bright, fun, and confident. As a duo, KC Dalager and Brad Hale layered Dalager’s airy vocals and brash lyrics over acoustic riffs and bouncy drum beats. The new track’s title—a cute abbreviation for “shotgun lover”—said it all.
It took Now, Now a year to follow up that release with their third full-length, Saved, although they did put out the fizzy, synth-powered “Yours” in the interim. On its surface, the album is exactly what its advance singles foretold: a lavishly produced collection of pop songs fueled by hedonism and desire. Hale backs up Dalager’s coo with a small army of synths and drum pads, churning out productions that feel soft, spacious, and mechanistic at once. Their ambition is obvious—glittery standout “MJ” nods to pop royalty, weaving references to his hits around the insistent hook, “I want it all.” It’s the second song on the album, following opener “SGL,” and Dalager sings those very same words on both tracks.
She isn’t a conventionally strong frontwoman—her melodies tend to hover within a narrow range, and she keeps her gaze lowered when performing, as if she’d rather be heard than seen. There’s a captivating quality to her voice, though, that has nothing to do with its force or dynamism. Dalager expels so much air with every note that each lyric sounds like a prolonged exhale. Often, her gulping breaths are left unedited, roughing up the glossy tracks and exposing the physical labor that goes into singing.
A handful of clever production tricks, like pitch-shifted vocals, add variety to her performance on the album. On “Saved,” the words “oh my god” are bent into a wobbly, repeated plea; on “AZ,” warped variations on the hook knock the song off-kilter once it hits the outro. More than just a trope of contemporary pop, this distortion feels purposely alienating. Hale’s odd flourishes mirror the loneliness that plagues Dalager on songs like “Window,” in which she describes waiting outside a distant lover’s house, hoping to be let in.
Even as it brings the flirtation and the fun, Saved doesn’t avoid dark sentiments. There’s an obsessive edge to Dalager’s bids for attention and affection that give the album a sense of danger. She often talks about her paramours in the language of religious devotion, equating physical love with salvation. Angels, demons, saints, and sinners pop up in her world as often as they do in scripture. “I’ve been drinking, baby/Won’t you come and save me/Like an angel waiting/I let you surround me,” she sings on “Powder,” a sweeping closer that vacillates between romance and violence. The album gets its name from an exclamation on the title track: “Oh my God, I’m saved!”
As it turns out, the band hasn’t lost its emo instincts—they’ve just been repurposed. Abstracted from the context of live guitar music, the genre’s lyrical intensity still fuels Now, Now’s digitally produced, left-of-center pop. Saved is faithful to Dalager and Hale’s roots but different—and good—enough to justify the six years the duo spent making it. “This feels like the first record where, if I was on the radio scanning channels, I’d be like, ‘What is that? I want to hear that,’” Dalager recently told an interviewer. She’s not the only one who will be tempted to listen. | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Trans | May 21, 2018 | 7.1 | a2997bdf-8ac6-4118-8686-73e9765e0ace | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:55:41 -0400
\n\ >From: Snake
\n\ >X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 (Win98; I)
\n ... | Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:55:41 -0400
\n\ >From: Snake
\n\ >X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 (Win98; I)
\n ... | Plaid: Rest Proof Clockwork | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6332-rest-proof-clockwork/ | Rest Proof Clockwork | Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 17:55:41 -0400
From: Snake [[email protected]]
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (Win98; I)
To: Tony Blair [[email protected]]
Subject: X-Plaid922-1; Request for Government Assistance
Dear Mr. Blair:
My position is as an undercover agent in London's secret police mafia. I have been hired to investigate allegations that two former members of Black Dog Productions, Ed Handley and Andy Turner, have illegally obtained official documents pertaining to the creation of a highly addictive, mind- altering chemical agent (referred to in goverment documents as X-Plaid922-1) which affects its victims via audio transmissions rather than means of physical intake.
I am concerned that Handley and Turner may have, under the alias of Plaid, not only unlocked previously unrealized secrets about the production of this chemical agent, but also discovered a way to digitally reproduce it onto compact discs, cassettes, and even vinyl records. As you know, it is the reproduction of the X-Plaid agent to compact disc that is of the utmost concern. In this technologically- advanced society, nearly every home has a compact disc unit. Handley and Turner must be stopped before every person on this Earth becomes an X-Plaid junkie.
The first piece of evidence I have obtained is their 1998 release Not for Threes. The music on this record is so painfully wonderful that even I, Snake "Nerves of Steel" Snakeman, was almost drawn into its tangled web of madness. The album is an excellent indication that Handley and Turner are not working alone. Not for Threes features guest appearances by a number of female vocalists, among them Talkin' Loud Records diva Nicolette and even Icelandic sensation Bjork. When tested for levels of the addictive X-Plaid agent, Not for Threes registered a 7.5 out of 10 on Pitchfork- funded equipment. Luckily, the album did not gain widespread mainstream acceptance, though the minds of a number of club- hopping e-consuming electronic music fans were utterly destroyed.
The greatest shock to me is how an album containing the X-Plaid agent, let alone such excessive amounts, was able to garner enough of a following for the band to appear on our own BBC- operated John Peel show! Thankfully, Plaid had apparently not yet perfected their aural narcotic, as Pitchfork equipment registered X-Plaid levels for the band's subsequent Peel Session EP at a slightly less potent 6.8.
Plaid's latest album, Rest Proof Clockwork, is another story entirely. Here, they seem to have enhanced and mutated the X-Plaid agent dramatically through more varied instrumentation and exploration of what is commonly referred to as melodic "ambient" music. This allows the listener to lose themselves completely in a world of X-Plaid- induced bliss, whether they're paying attention to the music or not. A key demonstration of this is the album's closing track, "Air Locked." The music begins with a series of percussive shuffles and squeaks before beautiful, highly melodic chimes and digital effects enter the mix. The sound is almost spiritual, invoking cinematic rainforest imagery.
The X-Plaid agent is planted throughout this entire record, making it difficult or impossible to resist addiction. For instance, the orchestral "Dead Sea" is an irresistable symphony of pure evil, recalling Jerry Goldsmith's timeless score to "Poltergeist." "Little People" is a blend of \xB5-Ziq's spacy melodic attack, and pummelling, cut-up hip-hop grooves. "Pino Pomo" combines backwards effects with the feel of a futuristic spaghetti western. Even the absurdly titled "New Bass Hippo" pulls through, incorporating shuffling percussion and a Stereolab- influenced piano line.
With every passing second I work on this case, I find myself becoming more and more attached to the sound of the music, but I must venture on... to justice. I will require government assistance-- backup, arms, further documentation from the X-Plaid922-1 file, and a free lunch at the Denny's in Golden Valley, Minnesota, USA-- in apprehending these two zany, madcap individuals. Please respond ASAP.
----
Snake Snakeman,
Secret Police Mafia
Check out my Simpsons website:
http://www.simpsons.secretpolice.co.uk | 1999-06-21T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 1999-06-21T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope / Warp / Nothing | June 21, 1999 | 8.4 | a29bc709-72fe-402b-bc34-98087ed143f2 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
John Cale's new studio album, featuring some work from Danger Mouse, is definitely strange. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order. | John Cale's new studio album, featuring some work from Danger Mouse, is definitely strange. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order. | John Cale: Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17120-shift-adventures-in-nookie-wood/ | Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood | On "December Rain", the sixth song on John Cale's new album, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood, Cale sings a line about "Google getting on your nerves." He fails to elaborate, so we never find out what he thinks might irk us about Google: Google Docs (which frequently erases important data, I've noticed)? Google Reader (cramped, visually unappealing)? He just says "Google." The fact that he sings it through Auto-Tune gives the moment a whiff of parody. Cale has been on art-rock's cutting edge for decades; he's the only person at the center of the tag cloud "John Cage," "Aaron Copland," "Lou Reed," "Patti Smith," and "Sham 69." His cover of LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends" rivals the original. You don't want to hear him sound out of touch.
Then, of course, there's that album title, which exists, magnificently, beyond the realm of normal taste and judgment. "Nookie Wood", to judge from Cale's heavy-breathing delivery on the titular song, is a dark, fearsome place where beasts roam and men are devoured whole. Nookie Wood is definitely strange, in other words. What it is not, sadly, is terribly interesting: Much like David Byrne and St. Vincent's recent Love This Giant collaboration, Shifty Adventures feels well-composed, immaculately arranged, and curiously inert.
Part of the problem comes from Cale's production choices, which feel less of this era than the late 1980s and early 90s: The boxy drum sounds, textured surface, and tacky-stiff keyboard sounds remind me, specifically, of Peter Gabriel's Us. The adult-contempo sheen doesn't do the songs here, which are crawling with interesting sounds, any favors. Cale works hard, banging pianos and MPCs, running drum sounds backwards, and filling the margins with glitches and loops. His viola snakes and mingles with often lightly Auto-Tuned voice. But the album's lacquered surface coats the chaos and imposes unwelcome order. It's like watching a man fail to tear his way out of an over-starched dress shirt.
If Cale had brought more memorable songs, Shifty Adventures might have fought its way out of this middle distance. But the songwriting is meandering and vague, feeling less written than whittled out of an arsenal of studio tricks. Like Brian Eno's recent solo work for Warp, Shifty Adventures has an all-frame, no-painting feeling: Lead single "I Wanna Talk 2 U" (co-produced by Danger Mouse), is rote, dutiful mid-tempo acoustic rock, without a single unexpected turn.
Cale sometimes pricks the air with a soulful line-- "I always held on to the thought/ That if they loved you long enough/ They'd find out what was missing when they finally called your bluff," is the mournful opening salvo on "Hemingway"-- but vast stretches of the album amble by without giving you a good reason to pay attention, other than to note a tactile, sticky-sounding drum loop here ("Face to the Sky") or a nice sunburst of acoustic guitars there ("Living With You"). This is what happens, sometimes, when a producer gets lost in the studio and forgets to write an album, and Shifty Adventures feels more like a collection of gadgets than songs. | 2012-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Six | October 8, 2012 | 6 | a29d723e-acd7-461f-bcf0-888e551abbdd | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On its seventh album, the Liverpool electro-pop band reaches for a lighter sound, capturing the passage of time in effervescent synths and impressionistic lyrics. | On its seventh album, the Liverpool electro-pop band reaches for a lighter sound, capturing the passage of time in effervescent synths and impressionistic lyrics. | Ladytron: Time’s Arrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ladytron-times-arrow/ | Time’s Arrow | Two years ago, Ladytron’s immortal “Seventeen” briefly went viral on TikTok. The track came out back in 2002—before many of the platform’s users had even been born—yet the Liverpool band’s brittle, dead-eyed electroclash struck a nerve. A barbed indictment of exploitation rendered in icy electronics, “Seventeen” was ahead of its time in sound and lyrics, paving the way for over a decade of darkly enveloping electro pop. In 2019, following an eight-year break, Ladytron returned with an agitated, apocalyptic self-titled album that cleared the table for a new era. Now, on their seventh album, Time’s Arrow, the band reaches for a lighter sound, with bright production, effervescent synths, and impressionistic lyrics that home in on the unrelenting march of time.
The production on Time’s Arrow renders escapism in gleaming tones. On “The Night,” over an upbeat groove and glowering synths, vocalist Helen Marnie takes a nocturnal trip that spins out of control; it maintains their seductive edge while morphing into one of the most joyously straightforward pop songs in their catalog. The band’s music works best in this propulsive mode: On the chiming standout “Faces,” Marnie’s lyrical repetition lends a throbbing pulse that accelerates alongside glassy synth lines. On the anthemic and shoegaze-y “California,” a downcast love letter to the state, distorted guitars and sturdy drums dial things up before dissipating beneath Marnie’s ethereal chorus. “California, make us happy,” she intones, letting the words drift weightlessly.
Evocative images recur throughout Time’s Arrow, which is full of flashing lights, water, and dreams that offer mesmerizing spaces for getting lost. “Flight From Angkor” revolves around a slow build of oscillating synth lines and clanging guitar, laying down an unsettled backdrop for Mira Aroyo’s gentle voice; memory, she sings, is a “hall of mirrors echoing for years.” Experiencing time as a one-directional force provides the album’s throughline, a theme that works in concert with the music’s swirling, atmospheric moods. The cinematic title track drives it home best: Set against jagged, feedback-heavy production and a menacing synth, Aroyo’s vocals grow increasingly restless, matching time’s irrepressible flow forward.
Time’s Arrow’s consistency also works against it. The record’s more placid songs bleed together: “The Dreamers” is a gauzy, shiftless ballad that circles a static chord progression and vague lyrics, while “Sargasso Sea,” a largely instrumental track that follows it, evaporates just as it starts to build toward a climax. “Misery Remember Me” fares better, a song that doesn’t wallow in the titular misery so much as sunbathe and luxuriate in it. Expressive washes of guitar and drums provide a warm, delicate comfort for the torment, captured in Marnie’s rich, layered vocals. Like the best songs on Time’s Arrow, it proves just how intoxicating Ladytron’s enduring brand of atmospheric synth pop can be. | 2023-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cooking Vinyl | January 23, 2023 | 6.9 | a2a14258-224a-4fbc-8069-dd41f53fa15b | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
James Brooks, formerly of Elite Gymnastics, returns with his first full-length under his Default Genders alias. This project uses basic A-B song structures, surging choruses, and grooves that recall 1990s big beat as a foundation for political lyrics. | James Brooks, formerly of Elite Gymnastics, returns with his first full-length under his Default Genders alias. This project uses basic A-B song structures, surging choruses, and grooves that recall 1990s big beat as a foundation for political lyrics. | Default Genders: Magical Pessimism 2014 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19676-default-genders-magical-pessimism-2014/ | Magical Pessimism 2014 | Magical Pessimism 2014 lives on the internet. For one thing, you cannot own a physical copy of James Brooks’ first full-length as Default Genders. More importantly, Brooks takes a principled, proactive stand against patriarchy, rape culture, rockism, and punk fascism in a way that should be familiar to anyone who discusses pop culture on Twitter or Tumblr. You almost feel obligated to say Default Genders is well-intentioned; being mindful of privilege is surely a good thing, no? But like much of the discourse confined to the internet, Magical Pessimism often substitutes accusation for empathy, conviction for coherence, and straw men for actual people to the point where you wonder whether Brooks’ intentions are to draw attention to the problem or just his own moral superiority.
This is an admittedly unusual way to begin a discussion about a pop record; Magical Pessimism isn’t a pamphlet. And though Brooks would likely claim Default Genders as a multimedia project, before the association with Grimes and before giving himself a feminist rebrand twice, he was gaining attention with Ruin, the intriguing collection he made as half of Elite Gymnastics. As with his politics, Brooks’ musical ambitions are bold and don’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny. He expressed a desire to invert the canon so it debunks Radiohead and deifies the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack—which conveniently ignores the 11th track on that CD. Moreover, Brooks’ statement was an attempt to distance himself from the supposedly “nerd-male” influences (New Order, Joy Division) he felt marred Ruin, a record that sounds a hell of a lot like Magical Pessimism.
That’s a good thing, since Ruin was onto something, combining harsh drum'n'bass beats, blown-out ambience, and shards of noise, yet still found ways to fit Brooks’ predilections for classical composition and non-Western pop into the crowded mix. It rarely gels here, but you hear why artists have taken a shine to Default Genders; Brooks is an "ideas guy" and the application of lo-fi and punk aesthetics to non-guitar music tends to be exciting on general principle.
But Magical Pessimism still abides by typical “rock” signifiers to provide its most satisfying moments: basic A-B song structure, choruses that surge on distortion (“The Trees in the Driveway”), and beats that more often recall Moby’s midtempo big-beat crossovers or even the blazingly hetero KROQ-core of the 1975 (“Stop Pretending”). Brooks is at his best making anthems, while his deconstructionist tendencies are easy to confuse with carelessness—on the high-NRG tracks, the EQing is boxy and the mixing is inconsistent, at times burying Brooks’ voice, something that barely works as texture. Tracks cut out and begin erratically, sacrificing any semblance of cohesion or flow. Only an extremely generous interpretation would be to assume these are part of Brooks’ greater aim to demystify or at least denigrate The Album, that totem of rockism.
Then you have Brooks’ vocals, a tuneless, meek mutter used for chest-poking confrontation, divisive by design. At times, they lend an ear-turning effect to otherwise basic melodies and a conceptual force that has endeared him to a young, plugged-in niche audience. Not only does Brooks' approach tell the listener, “anyone can do this, even you,” but he shares a teen’s tendency towards thinking in absolutes about their own perceived persecution and the failings of others. And besides, his conversational cadence is the only delivery in which his most angsty lyrics (“Fine, cool whatever, thanks for clearing that up”, “Fuck that, fuck them, fuck you, ugh...fuck my life”) can sound less awkward than they read.
The problem is that Brooks applies the same black and white thinking to some of the most mature and complex topics which prove to be way out of his depth. He’s a thoughtful, sincere person and that comes through in his interviews or an unadorned observation about a stock, upwardly mobile type from “The Trees in the Driveway”—“You have to take out your piercings before you get to work/ But otherwise they’re pretty cool about the way that you dress.” When he tries to convey unearned gravitas, it just results in leaden metaphor that hits with a dull thud—“The trees in the driveway start to shed all their leaves/ Some people would it’s cause they’re dying/ But to you it just seems like they’re focused on the important things.”
Worse is that he shows little interest in actually getting to know the enemy—“punk” and “the suburbs” and “pain” are shoebox dioramas in which the characters serve as action figures, free of agency and simply arranged by Brooks to demonstrate his place on higher moral ground. If you have any kind of lingering guilt about your own privilege, a line like, “Tell me again how heavy the crown is/ About the weight of the burden of being white and male” should decimate you. But in the context of Magical Pessimism’s pervasive self-congratulation, the takeaway is that Brooks would obviously never do such a thing.
This becomes almost impossible to bear during “On Fraternity”, originally recorded under Brooks' Dead Girlfriends moniker and raising the question of whether there’s a wrong way to do the right thing. It’s been understandably viewed as a companion piece to Grimes’ “Oblivion”, a brilliantly conceived pop song you can hear at malls, gyms and on the street—the same places where one could be subject to the harassment Claire Boucher speaks upon. “On Fraternity” is in a different, more checkered tradition of men writing songs about misogyny, which can go extremely wrong, but the risk can occasionally be justified by the reward. Fugazi’s “Suggestion” was both a bold strike against their peers and sensitive towards it subject, while on Pissed Jeans’ "Male Gaze", an average schlub showed that admitting his faults and changing his behavior can be a powerful display of allegiance.
“On Fraternity” got people talking about these things, and shouldn’t that be enough? Its Xiu Xiu-esque scree provides Magical Pessimism’s most arresting musical moment, but lyrically, it’s got the resonance of a #yesallmen hashtag. On its own accord, “The way they act like even bringing it up/ Means you’re the one with the problem” could be a powerful, concise acknowledgment of the presumptions of guilt and "blame the victim" investigative process that often prevents sexual assault claims from being reported in the first place. Instead, you’re seemingly meant to marvel at Brooks’ bravery here.
That’s how “On Fraternity” and much of Magical Pessimism comes across, and yet I don’t truly believe Brooks thinks that way—even he’s called the song a "total failure." I wouldn’t be surprised if Brooks comes up with a long Tumblr post about all the ways this record has been misconstrued and he could be right about all of it. After all, you live on the internet for long enough and you realize how often good intentions can be completely negated by ineffective communication; that in real life situations, you might be friends with the guy you’ve been beefing with for months, and a two-minute conversation can defuse a grudge that resulted in reams of Twitter dialogue and reblogs. Magical Pessimism is hardly a total failure, and like many talking points that live on the internet, it can cause a discomfort that feels productive. But it’s ultimately up to the speaker to make the best use of his limited communication tools and Default Genders reminds you why so many people are relieved that Twitter finally has a “mute” function. | 2014-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | July 30, 2014 | 5.6 | a2a3c5a4-3164-4541-9d86-1f8ab2581d78 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Who were Tolerance? A pair of new reissues reignites the mystery of the short-lived Japanese experimental act whose shadowy beats and detuned haze arrived years ahead of their time. | Who were Tolerance? A pair of new reissues reignites the mystery of the short-lived Japanese experimental act whose shadowy beats and detuned haze arrived years ahead of their time. | Tolerance: Anonym | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tolerance-anonym-divin/ | Anonym / Divin | The index of experimental musicians known colloquially as “the Nurse With Wound list” came printed on the inner sleeve of the British industrial pioneers’ debut album, 1979’s Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella. Its 236 entries (later expanded to 291) accounted for a motley crew of miscreants and iconoclasts from the 1960s and ’70s: UK improvisers AMM; German out-rockers Neu!, Can, and Amon Düül; musique concrète pioneers Luc Ferrari and Pierre Henry; mid-century composers John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen; and names with a less burnished patina of historical import, like Horrific Child, Ovary Lodge, and Sphinx Tush.
The list was intended, NWW’s Steven Stapleton would later say, as an “attempt to get in contact with like-minded people that were interested in the music we were interested in.” In those days, that was tough. There was no internet, for one thing. International distribution for underground music was spotty; obscure records could be hard to procure, and once out of print, they passed into a realm closer to myth. Books about the stuff were nonexistent—history was still being written. So the Nurse With Wound list functioned as a countercultural atlas, signaling backroads and byways that fellow freaks otherwise might never have known existed.
Today, the list is a relic of a very different era. Many formerly obscure names are now familiar to a wide swath of listeners. Successive developments—stores like Amoeba and Other Music, P2P platforms like Napster and Soulseek, mp3 blogs and YouTube—have patched holes in many seekers’ mental maps, if not their want lists. Yet one name remains shrouded in mystery: Tolerance, a Japanese artist who released two albums, 1979’s Anonym and 1981’s Divin, then disappeared.
That the world knows about Tolerance at all is thanks to Osaka’s Vanity Records. The short-lived label was run by Yuzuru Agi, a musician and journalist who founded Rock Magazine in 1976. Between 1978 and 1981, across 11 full-lengths and some flexi-discs and cassettes, Vanity charted the outer limits of Japanese avant-rock: Dada’s kraut-inspired prog; SAB’s kosmische new age; the gnarled post-punk of Aunt Sally, fronted by experimental lifer Phew; the synth-soaked rock’n’roll of Morio Agata, whose Vanity one-off suggests a Japanese Suicide. Even among those highly esoteric colleagues, Tolerance stood out for their singularity. Their peers worked within recognizable frameworks; Tolerance might as well have been channeling radio signals from the far side of the galaxy.
Anonym opens stealthily, skulking into earshot like some strange cave-dwelling creature emerging from a dank hole. Hissing white noise establishes a ghost of a pulse; desultory tendrils of slide guitar droop like the branches of a weeping willow. Beneath it all, a Rhodes piano shifts languidly between two chords. The effect is dreamlike but queasy, less a song than an inchoate, gelatinous attempt at marking time, a waterlogged metronome dredged up from a fetid swamp.
Track two, “I wanna be a homicide,” is more insistent but no less murky. Someone mashes at the Rhodes with their fists, and someone else plucks away at single strings of an electric guitar. An unbroken stream of oscillating static muddles the focus. For long stretches, dissonance reigns, until without warning both Rhodes and guitar fall into time and key for a bar or two, before once again drifting off into separate clashing dimensions.
The whole album plays out like this, tentatively burrowing its way through a detuned haze. The motorik “osteo-tomy” features indecipherable spoken-word vocals along with slash-and-burn guitar that prefigures the kind of thing Sonic Youth wouldn’t begin doing for another three or four years; the title track plays atonal piano off a dry rhythmic clicking, like a copy of John Cage’s Etudes Australes with a sharp knife dragged across the grooves. It wraps up with “Voyage au bout de la nuit,” which might almost be a Stooges or Velvet Underground song, were it not for the relentless and off-key bass ostinato hammering away underneath, emitting sickly dissonance with every 16th-note strike. If you told me it was a looped transposition of an electric eel’s high-voltage jolt, I’d believe you.
Who were Tolerance? In the scant liner notes, Junko Tange—who has variously been described as a dental student and dental nurse in her daily life—is credited with synthesizer, effects, piano, and voice, while Masami Yoshikawa is credited with “effective guitar.” For years, the project was assumed to be a duo, but according to Justin Simon, whose Mesh-Key label has published the new reissue, a former employee at Vanity claims that Tolerance was considered Tange’s solo project—she was the only person that ever communicated with anyone at the label—and Yoshikawa merely a contributor. A dedication on the record’s inner sleeve—“to the quiet men from a tiny girl”—might seem to bear that out. (Nurse With Wound borrowed that phrase for the title of their second album, in 1980.) No matter how credit is apportioned—was the sepulchral gloom Tange’s idea alone? Was the guitar’s spiky randomness something she suggested, or a natural facet of Yoshikawa’s playing?—few artists were making music that sounded anything like this in 1979. Tolerance were way out on their own.
Were it not for the name on the sleeve, one might assume that Divin was the work of an entirely different artist. (This time, the credits read more cryptically: “LUMINAL: J-TANGE / INPUT: M-YOSHIKAWA.”) If Anonym offered a spindly, dissonant vision of post-punk, Divin proposed a smoggy proto-techno that was, in retrospect, uncannily ahead of its time. The opening “Pulse Static (Tranqillia)” thumps like a haunted drum machine in a soggy cardboard box, muted hits triggering tight spirals of analog delay. Lumpy, mechanized, and almost ruthlessly anhedonic, it sounds like the minimal techno that artists like Thomas Brinkmann would take up nearly two decades later—a glitch in the continuum, a wormhole made of solid-state circuitry.
Drum machines, and similarly technoid overtones, distinguish many of the album’s most entrancing tracks. “Sacrifice” dangles a bumbling bassline that sounds like a pre-echo of the “Sleng Teng” riddim, from 1985. “Sound Round” might be an ESG tape that has oxidized and been ground to dust; its glancing metallic accents hint at dub techno. Yet Tange’s electronics are not clean or precision engineered: They’re messy, fallible, dangerously out of control. In “Bokw Wa Zurui Robot (Stolen From Kad),” a fast, motorik drum-machine sequence gallops across a smeared bed of synths while Tange chants rhythmically into what sounds like a mic wrapped in sweat socks. Every now and then, a slightly too-loud hi-hat pattern bursts in, and you can tell from its timing that she’s punching it in by hand; it’s not quite in sync with the other drums, and the longer it runs, the further out of whack it gets.
Tolerance were the only artist to release a second album on Vanity, but while much of the label’s roster continued to operate after the label shut down, Tolerance never released anything again. Tange is credited on an unreleased 1986 recording that surfaced on YouTube seven years ago, but nothing else is known of her; the Japanese label that owns the rights to the recording is, apparently, holding onto her royalties, in the event that she materializes. Yoshikawa also vanished; few Vanity staffers can even recall meeting the guitarist back when the group was active. Yoshikawa has become as ghostly as those spectral guitar melodies.
Tange and Yoshikawa’s absence makes for a good story; it solidifies their standing as exactly the kind of artist the Nurse With Wound list was meant to preserve for posterity. Their disappearance also feels like a fitting complement to the mysteriousness of the records themselves. Tolerance’s music is enigmatic in its essence; it presents only questions with no good answers. What were they listening to? Why did their drums sound like a toaster being tossed in a bathtub? Why is Divin’s third track played in reverse? What did they know that we don’t?
And the biggest question, of course: Why did she, or they, quit making music? Did Tolerance simply express all they wanted? There’s a spontaneity and purity to these two records that makes that seem at least possible. Tange and Yoshikawa went into the studio on two different occasions, using two totally different setups, and lightning struck twice. Why take further chances? | 2023-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | May 6, 2023 | 8.3 | a2b8f4bf-7a88-4292-bc04-127289ef091a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, is a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing. | Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, is a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing. | Darkthrone: Arctic Thunder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22495-arctic-thunder/ | Arctic Thunder | Ever since they first slicked on the corpse paint in 1986, the seminal Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone have raged an unrelenting war on the Puritanical mores of the West: devout Christianity, blind patriotism to both God and Country, the status quo’s broader distrust of anything rock. Of course, as the original espousers of “True Norwegian Black Metal” and former associates of Burzum’s gun-toting, white nationalist frontman Varg Vikernes, they’ve had to swat off many an accusation of racism.
Considering Darkthrone’s anti-establishment mindset in tandem with their controversial past, it’s easy to label them outcasts–and yet, in 2016, Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell and Nocturno Culto are hardly pariahs. I’m not just speaking in terms of the metal community, either: just this year, Nagell’s neighbors in the Oslo suburb of Kolbotn elected him—the debauched king of KVLT!–to town council. (The musician, to his credit, did his best to dissuade voters; his “campaign” comprised but a single photo of the bearded axeman cradling his adorable cat, with the caption “Please don’t vote for me.”). “I’m not too pleased about it. It’s boring,” he later grumbled to CLRVYNT, later admitting, a bit begrudgingly: “I’m a pillar of my community.”
Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, bristles with a similar recognition of power, albeit over a far more hostile constituency than the prankish Norwegian suburbanites who stuck Fenriz in office. Like most of Nagell and Culto’s output since downsizing to a duo two decades ago, it’s an album tailor-made for a diverse metal electorate. Rather than Xerox their classic A Blaze in the Northern Sky, the pair express their longstanding aggression through a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing.
Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise; before arriving at the weepy pinnacle of lead single “Tundra Leech,” we must first power through the Pentagram-y crunch of both verse and chorus, its already-dramatic lurch made all the more queasy by otherworldly groans, trembling and liminal like a vengeful spirit howling from the other side of the void. That haunting catharsis seems downright generous, however, compared to cuts like “Throw Me Through the Marshes” and “Inbred Vermin,” which offer even less tangibility and resolution: the guitars’ firm-footed cadence does little to allay the mounting dread inherent in their creeping backbeats, Trojan horses to presage the duo’s imminent (but nonetheless unpredictable) sludgy torrents.
However foreboding their latest effort may be, Nagell and Culto aren’t out to scare us shitless—as with its predecessor, 2013’s excellent The Underground Resistance, Arctic Thunder’s predominant mood is one of playful, if unflinchingly perverse, glee: a thirty-nine minute, low-stakes stampede down memory lane, recorded at the Bomb Shelter rehearsal unit they utilized at the end of the ’80s, back when their nightmarish journey started. The album’s proliferation of feel-bad jams ensures an entertaining listen that’s bound to shut up the purists who consider the band’s downsizing a detriment—in fact, even as a duo, Darkthrone have never sounded more like themselves. Considering how important transparency is to politics, as well as music, it should come as no surprise that Nagell attained public office. Of course, being photographed with a cute cat didn’t hurt, either. | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Peaceville | October 18, 2016 | 7.2 | a2c3c897-41cc-4af6-99a0-6a7712c8ce84 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Russian electronic musician’s latest album turns pointillist quirks into erratic maximalism—call it pop music for people who enjoy both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank. | The Russian electronic musician’s latest album turns pointillist quirks into erratic maximalism—call it pop music for people who enjoy both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank. | Kate NV: WOW | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-nv-wow/ | WOW | Franz Kafka wrote about animals a lot: a monstrous bug, a young panther in a menagerie, a mouse named Josephine who wants to wow you with her song, a dog who sees a powerful triumvirate of other dogs levitating and has some thoughts about it. He wrote about these creatures in prose that is defamiliarized, exhausting, wickedly funny. The Russian composer Ekaterina Shilonosova, who performs as Kate NV, shares a similar sensibility with the Austro-Hungarian writer: On her excellent fourth record, WOW, there is a suite of animals, and she is both rigorous and whimsical about them.
On WOW, NV abandons the slightly more legible songs of 2020’s Room for the Moon, and the cohesiveness of 2018’s для FOR, opting instead for delightfully fractured inscrutability. WOW is dense and hyper-saturated with chintzy synths, field recordings, and heavily manipulated vocals. Call it maximalism; call it pop music for people who happen to enjoy both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lisa Frank. It exists in a zone that NV has been working in for a while, one that involves fermenting and reimagining everything from Japanese city pop to the ECM New Series to corny ’80s chart-toppers. Opener “oni (they),” which features Japanese-language lyrics written by Foodman, feels like being inside a pinball machine: Each flicker of synth lights up brilliantly, bouncing erratically from point A to B.
Each song is its own absurd room. Like previous records, WOW makes good use of Found Sound Nation’s Broken Orchestra sample pack, sourced from damaged instruments from Philadelphia’s public schools. On “confessions at the dinner table,” there are synths that sound like they’re giggling or yawning, field recordings of a door opening, the sound of clinking dishes. Violin and clarinet burst in at the midpoint. It is like a food fight, rendered in the aesthetics of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, where two girls in flower crowns stomp around on a table drinking brandy and throwing cake at each other, fucking with everyone they meet.
But NV’s music isn’t twee. Just because something is cute doesn’t mean it’s not rigorous, and her playfulness has a purpose: In upsetting expectations, it’s meant to keep you on your toes. Her songs are slanted, oblique. “razmishlenie (thinking)” builds in such a way that you’d think it would eventually depressurize, yet it does not; it stays at the same level of intensity for the song’s duration. There’s no payoff, but not in a way that is necessarily disappointing. Her music can be a workout; its self-containment can be almost alienating.
Perhaps that’s because there’s not necessarily a narrative. You couldn’t say that WOW is about anything. Instead, it’s defined by its aesthetic cohesion, a beautiful sense of formal seriousness that holds court over the record’s surrealistic menagerie. | 2023-03-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | March 6, 2023 | 7.6 | a2df018a-e6ea-403d-a9db-e90b1bfe8065 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
On his first song-oriented album, the Arcade Fire’s composer-in-residence folds folk music and dissonance into delightful odes to nature’s pleasure and power. | On his first song-oriented album, the Arcade Fire’s composer-in-residence folds folk music and dissonance into delightful odes to nature’s pleasure and power. | Richard Reed Parry: Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-reed-parry-quiet-river-of-dust-vol-1/ | Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 | Aside from being the easiest Arcade Fire member to pick out in a police lineup, multi-instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry has also enjoyed the most visible extracurricular career of his bandmates. A self-taught composer, Parry elevated the orchestral undercurrents of the Arcade Fire into the defining feature of his post-rock ensemble Bell Orchestre, a steady stream of commissions for the likes of the Kronos Quartet, and an album for classical bastion Deutsche Grammophon. But Parry is also the son of a folk-singer and a former hardcore kid who frequented the same all-ages Toronto haunts as future members of Fucked Up. On Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1, his first song-oriented solo album, he folds formative loves of campfire sing-alongs and disruptive dissonance into a meditation on nature's serene beauty and destructive force.
Parry’s classically inclined solo pursuits have often felt like understated answers to Arcade Fire’s arena-sized catharsis. The same holds here, even as he deploys some of the bigger band’s favorite tricks—exultant group vocals, thundering drum builds, dramatic crescendos. But Parry uses those devices to fashion a world a million miles away from the digital-age angst and dystopian disco of Arcade Fire’s Everything Now, instead taking a pastoral path toward similar themes of unplugging and savoring IRL experiences.
Alongside collaborators like the National guitarist Bryce Dessner and Little Scream leader Laurel Sprengelmeyer, Parry arrives at an earthy, elaborate sound that harks back to the golden age of mid-2000s blog-prog: the ornate art-folk of Sufjan Stevens, the high-beam harmonies of Dirty Projectors, the ritualistic abandon of Animal Collective. The album even stands as a rootsier counterpart to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, sharing DNA with its creator’s main gig but cultivating it in a more impressionistic manner.
Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 (yes, a sequel arrives next year) is also our first real opportunity to hear Parry sing outside of the Arcade Fire’s throat-shredding group choruses. His voice is gentle and graceful, reflective of his reverence for the natural phenomena he details. Within the first few seconds of opener “Gentle Pulsing Dust,” he’s treating his window as a cinema screen that frames some never-ending sylvan documentary. Overtop fluttering oscillations and circular acoustic patterns, he sings, “First the rain begins, and the quiet settles in/And it’s awesome.” Though that peaceful rainfall begets an apocalyptic seven-day storm, Parry’s sense of ecstatic wonder remains unaffected by the tumult, as if he were leading a cult-ceremony salute to nature’s higher power.
Shout-outs to barn cats aside, Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 transcends twee platitudes about our environment to amplify the raw emotions and introspection one can experience inside it. The album’s origin, after all, dates to Parry’s 2008 visit to Japan. Venturing into the woods near Mount Koya, he heard uncanny singing that reminded him of his late father’s folk band. “On the Ground,” the song that stems from that experience, feels like an attempt to communicate with those disembodied voices, Parry’s synth-modulated words echoing inside an unanswering void. Parry rallied members of his dad’s old group, the Friends of Fiddler’s Green, to help rouse those spirits, too. Together, they forsake the typical crescendo for a series of skyward surges, like fireworks being shot off one at a time.
For a guy whose band became famous for singing about perseverance in the wake of death, Parry spends much of Quiet River of Dust peacefully contemplating life on the other side, be it through the affecting ambient instrumental “Sai No Kawara (River of Death)” or the album’s staggering nearly 10-minute peak, “I Was in the World (Was the World in Me)?” As that song attests, communing with nature isn’t only a way to feel more alive; it offers a sneak preview of death, allowing you to imagine yourself as one with the earth. The song’s structure mirrors our departure, as Parry guides a Neil Young-like country-rock lick into a cyclonic swirl.
But the most telling moment emerges after the storm subsides, when only the hum and chirp of insects remain to remind us that the Earth will keep spinning long after we’re gone. Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1 is an enchanted forest of a record—deceptively tranquil, but always buzzing with hidden life. Parry’s other band famously told of us of a place where no cars go. This is what it feels like to actually be there. | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Anti- | September 26, 2018 | 7.7 | a2e7f8e3-c1de-41e0-854f-e2c062fe3a2b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
On his most introspective album to date, the everyman balladeer from Queens considers beachside sandwiches, making money from art, and what it means to be home. | On his most introspective album to date, the everyman balladeer from Queens considers beachside sandwiches, making money from art, and what it means to be home. | Juan Wauters: Wandering Rebel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juan-wauters-wandering-rebel/ | Wandering Rebel | By now, fans know what to expect from a Juan Wauters album. A folksy hodgepodge of short songs delivered in a nasal croon. Unpretentious lyrics observing the beauty of ordinary life, sung in English and his native Spanish. A warm, loosely plucked acoustic guitar as the central instrument. Oh, and he’ll probably mention something about being from Queens. But his biggest trademark is his freewheeling charm (à la Jonathan Richman), rooted in his love of community. Wauters’ focus has typically been outward, spotlighting his many collaborators and the people he’s met through his music and travels. But after canceling plans for 2020, he relocated to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay, where he found love, stability, and a new definition of home. He processes this reckoning throughout Wandering Rebel, his most introspective album yet.
As always, Wauters’ lust for life takes communal and corporeal form. His projects are laden with features, from indie darlings like Mac DeMarco and Homeshake to the traditional Latin American guitarists Alejandro Dominguez and Luciano Fuentes Borquez. On “Modus Operandi,” fellow New Yorker Greta Kline (Frankie Cosmos) observes sidewalks deserted during the pandemic and asks if the city will ever be the same again. “When it gets rough out here/People that have options go back to their suburbs,” Wauters laments in response. “To them, it was just like some kind of Disney World.” “Milanesa al Pan,” with Argentine singer Zoe Gotusso, is a joyful contrast. Accompanied by group vocals and sweetly textured guitars, the pair take on the roles of long-distance lovers who reunite on the beach to share the titular Argentinian sandwich.
Wandering Rebel skews insular, though, and its somber moments are the most resonant. Thunder cracks through “Nube Negra” (“Black Cloud”), where Wauters writes about changing his surroundings and finally coming to terms with his dark mental state: the globetrotting philosopher acknowledging that you take yourself everywhere you go. Y La Bamba’s Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos plays the role of the cloud, the watery mystique of their harmonies personifying the way depression lingers without a clear cause or solution. Dreams of settling down are also heavy on Wauters’ mind. “I’m looking to have a family/So if this music thing not pick up/We’ll have to make some changes up in here,” he confesses on the title track, his frank talk-singing taking center stage over John Carroll Kirby’s wistful piano. It feels vulnerable; Wauters has always favored straightforward thoughts, and here there isn’t even a goofy beat or quirky melody to hide behind.
In its latter half, Wandering Rebel takes on a more melancholic and contemplative tone, revealing a side of Wauters that his charisma as a performer sometimes conceals. But he maintains his slice-of-life idiosyncrasies. There’s still room for a song like “En un barrio de Montevideo,” the kooky rough cut of an album closer. Over looped synths that could’ve been a James Ferraro throwaway, it contains two slurred, Auto-Tuned voicemails. One is from a radio station requesting an interview about Wauters’ music; the other is someone hitting him up about a gig polishing floors. It’s weirdly out of place but quintessentially Juan: an unassuming document of the double-life realities of a working artist who never takes himself too seriously. | 2023-06-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-07T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | June 7, 2023 | 7.7 | a2e876c1-a43e-4c27-923c-c09dd08d51eb | Margeaux Labat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margeaux-labat/ | |
With celestial synth arrangements and heavy-lidded streams of consciousness, Bladee’s newest album offers a vision of pop that’s grounded in real emotion but shrouded in otherworldly mystery. | With celestial synth arrangements and heavy-lidded streams of consciousness, Bladee’s newest album offers a vision of pop that’s grounded in real emotion but shrouded in otherworldly mystery. | Bladee: Spiderr | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bladee-spiderr/ | Spiderr | In an interview in 2019, Bladee unveiled a key moment in his mythos: the time he was struck by lightning during a visit to Thailand. He was far away from his home in Sweden and felt he couldn’t go to the hospital, so he just decided to sleep it off. “I was sure I was gonna die, but I didn’t,” he remembered. “I felt like an angel or something.” It wasn’t the first time the young artist and Drain Gang co-founder—born Benjamin Reichwald—had taken a moment of negativity or trauma and turned it into an existential revelation.
Bladee has made his name on vast, genre-blurring pop music that’s shot through with a delirious, new-age-y optimism. Over euphoric synth arrangements that recall the colorful history of internet rap, the aqueous sounds of chillout rooms at clubs, and Arthur Russell’s first-thought-best-thought pop music, he sings of seeing divine beings, ascending to heaven, and sharing the peace and equanimity he feels with others. As he put it earlier this year, in a bar that feels like a mission statement, “Beauty is my drug, I’m the pusher.” Cryptic yet ecstatic, he's a true believer in the transcendent power of pop. On his new solo album, Spiderr, he continues to imbue every beat and breath with the urge to pursue a deeper spiritual truth.
Produced almost entirely by frequent collaborator Whitearmor—with some assists from Sad Boys affiliate Gud and Joakim Benon (best known as a member of the dreamy Swedish duo jj)—Spiderr works within a familiar palette of celestial synth arrangements and heavy-lidded, stream-of-consciousness emotion. Lead single “Drain Story” builds on the shapeshifting sound that Bladee has favored over the last few years, full of stuttering percussion, squirming synth, and breathy ad-libs. On paper, it’s not a lot different from PC Music’s pop prismatics, or the Adderall-addled anthemics of plugg, but Bladee’s gauzy falsetto is a calming presence amid the maelstrom, promising peace and answers to life’s most complicated questions. “Give you something to believe in,” he sings. “I got that something that you’ve been seeking.”
Spiderr is more dense and, at times, more compelling than other recent Drain Gang releases because it isn’t purely euphoric; Bladee digs into the darker side of his existential meandering as well. “I Am Slowly But Surely Losing Hope” is exactly what its title promises, a tenuous exploration of weakness, dejection, and despair. It’s one of the most tumultuous arrangements in Bladee’s catalog to date, pairing the chattering electronics that have become Whitearmor’s signature with ragged guitars—a reminder that the members of Drain Gang first united over the shredded sounds of hardcore punk. Though it’s a tense track, full of meditations on loneliness and a plea for a slow death, it makes the album’s lighter moments all the more striking.
Throughout his career, Bladee has occasionally tried to undercut these more moving moments with a brittle sense of humor (and he does so here too, proclaiming on “Dresden ER” that “Life is but a joke”). But he’s at his most affecting when he’s at his most sincere—offering enigmatic, koan-like wisdom over dreamy production that often threatens to drift away into the ether. It’s a vision of pop that’s grounded in real emotion but shrouded in otherworldly mystery. In the process, he re-establishes himself as a kind of musical mystic, unspooling hazy spiritual truths to an increasingly devoted cult of followers. | 2022-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Year0001 | October 4, 2022 | 7.7 | a2e93389-07b1-4686-97a1-14dbb684e093 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The drill rapper’s mainstream takeover continues with an engaging, guest-heavy, but otherwise run-of-the-mill album. | The drill rapper’s mainstream takeover continues with an engaging, guest-heavy, but otherwise run-of-the-mill album. | Lil Durk: Almost Healed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-durk-almost-healed/ | Almost Healed | It’s no exaggeration to say that Lil Durk has been constantly healing from trauma for over a decade. As a member of drill’s first wave in Chicago in the early 2010s, Durk’s music has always been rife with amped-up tales that rumble with intense gun-fueled action and the physical and emotional fallout that follows it. But the sheer amount of hardship and loss he’s suffered, like many from his background, is staggering—to the point where every new project is both a victory lap and a pressure-release valve. Life has not let up on this dude: He’s one of the most popular and successful rappers in the world but the PTSD from a constant drip of lost family and friends keeps him on edge.
Up until Almost Healed, his eighth solo album, the therapeutic benefits of his music have mostly been subtextual, relegated to his tone and the sheer weight of his stories. At least it’s never been as heavy-handed as it is on the opening skit “Therapy Session,” where Alicia Keys stiltedly asks him about the deaths of King Von, his brother DThang, and his ongoing beefs with YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Gunna with the airy chirp of an overeager guidance counselor. It’s a mawkish start to an otherwise engaging and scattershot album.
Whether he’s mean-mugging his way through the trenches or opening up about his broken heart, Durk brings his words to life like a comic book splash page. The proper opening track “Pelle Coat” foregrounds those talents with four minutes of traumatic memories, visceral action, and YouTubers on his shit list. Scenarios tumble out over Chopsquad DJ’s slight keyboards and hi-hats: snitches, bodies in the street, the guilt over the deaths of Von and his cousin Nuski, Durk’s mother suggesting he decamp to Detroit. But one observation near the beginning of the third verse is a one-two knock-out: “I send money to funerals/Even though they goin’ to hell for all them niggas they killed/You know I'm part of my brother 'nem forever ever, I'm goin’ to hell.” The trail of death he’s seen is harrowing enough, but Durk acknowledging that he’s essentially damned himself beyond salvation is chilling. It’s a heartbreaking moment in a discography full of them, the kind that only comes from the darkest forms of experience.
“Pelle Coat” is a hell of an opener, hitting heights that Almost Healed doesn’t reach again for the rest of its runtime. Every song doesn’t need to rip the listener’s heart out, but the rest of the album jumps between these personal revelations, sappy crossover treacle, and standard drill-and-pain tracks. Lead single “All My Life” walks a tightrope between the earnest sociopolitical pleas of Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture” and the goodhearted PSA hogwash of Logic’s “1-800-273-8255,” complete with a choir of children singing its hook.
That balance is upset a handful of times, most notably on “Stand by Me,” Durk’s second collaboration with country singer (and “reformed” n-word user) Morgan Wallen. Their dedications to faceless love interests are sapped of all the detail, urgency, and personality that drives Durk’s best songs. Both “All My Life” and “Stand by Me” are clear shots at crossover hits, but at least the former gives us some powerful words from guest J. Cole about the dead rapper media industrial complex to sink our teeth into.
The rest of Almost Healed is a grab bag of middling to pretty good Durk cuts from across the spectrum. The pretty good: Durk and New Orleans upstart Rob49 doing back-and-forths over a vicious LilJuMadeDaBeat production on “Same Side” and colorful threats to opposition on “300 Urus.” The middling: run-of-the-mill collaborations with 21 Savage on “War Bout It” and Chief Wuk on “Big Dawg.” “Cross the Globe” boasts a feature from the late Juice WRLD, and his somber and paranoid verse (“I got the juice, feel like 2Pac/They tryna kill me in the black Beamer like 2Pac”) doesn’t match Durk yelling about going deep into some young lady’s guts while screaming “Free Thug!” There’s no humor or fun parallel here—it’s a jarring distraction.
That clash of sound and content points to the big problem with Almost Healed: It never knows what kind of experience it wants to deliver. Its therapy-speak intro and gauze-wrapped cover art suggest this is Durk’s stab at a legit concept album, wrestling with his demons like a more violent take on Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. But about halfway through, it plays out just like any other Durk album, with all the sadness, anger, flashiness, and white-knuckle intensity you’d expect. This could all be chalked up to portraying the many sides of Durk, but there’s little narrative thread guiding that thought, and so it feels like a thin conceptual veil placed over things we’ve seen and heard before. There’s little differentiating this from 2020’s The Voice or 2022’s 7220 and it lacks the razor-sharp focus that made Just Cause Ya’ll Waited 2, a brutal and affecting listen. Durk’s presence is strong and his endurance is inspiring, but his intentions are as muddied as ever. | 2023-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | June 3, 2023 | 6.3 | a2f01f98-2f73-4581-a7e0-fd4bf46f0760 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
New Zealand psych rocker Connan Mockasin’s collaborative album with his dad, Ade, has bad jokes, stream-of-consciousness poetry, and an odd, undeniable appeal. | New Zealand psych rocker Connan Mockasin’s collaborative album with his dad, Ade, has bad jokes, stream-of-consciousness poetry, and an odd, undeniable appeal. | Connan Mockasin / Ade: It’s Just Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/connan-mockasin-ade-its-just-wind/ | It’s Just Wind | It only took 40 minutes without a heartbeat to resuscitate the project Ade Hosford and his son had joked about making for years. The younger Hosford, who records as Connan Mockasin, has spent the past decade as a refreshingly strange psych-rock outsider with a distinct pop sensibility and seemingly little concern for public opinion of his work. In summer 2018, a few years after Ade’s near brush with death, father and son convened in Marfa, Texas to record their debut as a musical duo. Reunited with one of his earliest influences, Mockasin has made his most grounded and intimate record to date, and also his funniest.
It’s Just Wind may sound like a profound title, but it’s actually Ade’s evergreen defense of flatulence. The decision to name a collaborative coup de gras after a fart joke tracks when you recall that Connan once made a whole album of tongue-in-cheek sex music. But while Connan’s helium-powered humor can eventually wear on the nerves, Ade’s seven decades of experience have honed his deadpan delivery. On opener “The Wolf,” he serves up clunker after clunker: The little piggy tells the big bad wolf that his house is “made of dope”; the wolf threatens to “burn it to the ground and smoke it, you porky little shit.” Bad as these jokes are, they’re told with such grandfatherly enthusiasm that they still elicit a smile. Meanwhile, Connan’s blissed-out guitar tangles with John Carroll Kirby’s synth keys and beat machine, suffusing Ade’s silly sentiments with an almost mystical aura.
“Te Awanga,” a nod to the tiny beach town on New Zealand’s North Island where Connan grew up, pairs a breezy neo-soul guitar lick and tropical keys with sung stream-of-consciousness poetry. It’s rare to hear the untrained voice of an older man paired with such pretty instrumentation, and the effect is a bittersweet dissonance. In fleeting moments, Ade’s raw expressive power evokes the greats—Leonard Cohen without the low end, Scott Walker without the spine-tingling quaver, Peter Murphy unplugged and exorcised of his demons.
The record’s midsection is made up of solo Connan tracks that work to varying degrees. “What It Are” is a tightly wrapped nugget of fast-paced funk that lasts exactly as long as it should. The “Maggot Brain”-biting “Edge of Darkness” outstays its welcome, a reminder that not everyone can play like Eddie Hazel. It’s a relief, then, when Ade rejoins on “Marfa,” singing in an honest, regretful tone about shitty jobs, retirement, and gradual decay. It never feels like grousing until Connan jumps in halfway through, harshing the depressive vibe with a bad Thom Yorke impression. Despite this interruption, the song is soul-wrenching.
A few recurring ideas surface in It’s Just Wind’s father-son free-association game, none more prevalent than the image of a round peg in the square hole. First introduced in “Te Awanga” to describe the difficulty of moving to a “new land,” the metaphor receives a full 14 minutes near the record’s end. “Round Peg in a Square Hole” fumbles for footing for a minute or two, but the steady pulse of Kirby’s automated drumming helps it find direction. Slowly, the song gathers momentum and slippery new timbres, until Ade comes rumbling in like a battle-worn Bill Callahan to drive it home.
Square pegs, as we all know, do not fit into round holes; but what of a round peg in a square hole? The significance of the words hangs just out of reach as the record comes to a close with the squirmy stops and starts of “Stuck” and the quiet, spacey ballad “Clifton.” Maybe they’re thinking of a drifter in a new town, or a father alienated from his son, or a romantic love that’s hopelessly run its course. Or maybe it’s just another thinly veiled sex joke.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | July 16, 2021 | 7 | a2f02649-f2f3-4f12-9d33-d0ef301016d8 | Raphael Helfand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raphael-helfand/ | |
Knit together with ambient passages and found sound, the teenage rapper and producer’s debut feels like a jumbled journey through folders of ideas that reveals new layers with every listen. | Knit together with ambient passages and found sound, the teenage rapper and producer’s debut feels like a jumbled journey through folders of ideas that reveals new layers with every listen. | quinn: drive-by lullabies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quinn-drive-by-lullabies/ | Drive-By Lullabies | quinn cares deeply about how she is seen. Few photos or interviews with the 16-year-old rapper and producer from Virginia exist online. Her body of work lives on the digital fringes, sprawled across alt accounts and aliases. Explore her SoundCloud page cat mother for her latest experiments in drum’n’bass, or user-574126634 for a data dump of 30-second freakouts, intimate demos, and a bizarrely great Westside Gunn/Machine Girl mashup. Browse her website to view her virtual gallery of liminal space photos.
This scatteredness suggests an artist distancing herself from the notoriety she achieved in 2020 as one of the faces of hyperpop, after blowing up online with her song “i dont want that many friends in the first place” and becoming the first artist from her SoundCloud scene to appear on the cover of Spotify’s hyperpop playlist. (Due to technical complications, the music she’s released on streaming is currently still listed under the name p4rkr, a moniker she deaded nearly two years ago after coming out as trans.) As labels swooped in to sign teenaged peers like Glaive and ericdoa, quinn, who then went by osquinn, soured on the hyperpop tag and the visibility she’d gained. For several months leading into 2021, she deactivated her Twitter. In the spring, she re-emerged, announced she had been going through serious depression and quit vocal music, and released several meandering drum’n’bass and dark ambient records under the aliases cat mother and trench dog. On Twitter, I watched her collection of gear grow: Day by day, she would add another sampler or camera or pedal or synthesizer, proudly posting a photo and sometimes even sharing the work she’d used it to create. It’s how we see her on the cover of her self-produced debut, drive-by lullabies: her face obscured by a Pioneer DJ controller.
The artwork hints at how this album is sequenced: a jumbled journey through folders of ideas, with notions of temporality and genre flattened by the mix. It feels like a terminally online teenager clicking through tab after tab on a web browser, digging into different rabbit holes. Need a lo-fi rework of “Hands on the Wheel?” Check. A song that sounds like a deep-fried remix out of SoundCloud’s dariacore scene? Check. A random riddim explosion? quinn’s got you. The vocals are back, but this album prioritizes mood over the hookiness of her bigger singles from 2019 and 2020. Some songs have the spare, anxious feel of last year’s “mbn”; some fold in quinn’s recent forays into dark ambient and drum’n’bass; and the sole interlude, which quinn says she freestyled in 2018 at age 14, sounds like a kid’s earnest take on Some Rap Songs. Even back then, quinn’s music was about understanding how she is seen, navigating a gaze: “I was way, way better than my mom told me.” This was the thrust of the music that catapulted quinn into the mainstream last year, and it continues to power drive-by lullabies, a portrait of a small celebrity navigating personal life.
The sound design reveals new layers with every listen, showcasing the meticulous detailing quinn picked up during her turn to instrumental music. Those explorations sometimes felt aimless and imitative on their own; anchored by her warbling voice, they gain direction and burst to life. Droning ambient passages and bits of found sound accompany, break up, and rope together drifting verses, acting as a kind of glue for genre experimentation. It recalls the way her inspiration Dean Blunt wove the sound of water through several tracks on The Redeemer. But where Blunt’s voice is deep and resonant, quinn’s is round and warmly robotic. When her voice first emerges on “The World Is Ending Soon!” it’s like a sprite flowing from fog, born from a mess of static and guitar strums.
On that song, she begins charting a complicated relationship to an unnamed other, imagining how they might find each other when the “stars burn out and explode.” This connection serves as the emotional core of lullabies, a way of tying together the record’s moving parts. Still, lullabies sometimes threatens to spiral into creative oblivion. There’s a lot going on here—maybe too much for an introductory record. The instrumental song “birthday girl,” where a warped piano segues into a physician’s monologue on depression, might scan as overindulgent to even the steadiest quinn fans.
But to open ears, this album is a quiet thrill. There are brash moments that recall quinn’s older music, like “perfect imperfection,” which shakes out a drill rhythm before constructing a wall of synth noise, but lullabies largely finds beauty in smallness and rawness. On “silly,” you can hear quinn’s take on the soft, JRPG-like sounds percolating through dltzk’s Teen Week, kurtains’ insignia’s manor, and other 2021 digicore records. “coping mechanism” is simply gorgeous, quinn’s crushed-up vocals drifting past tiny glitches and birdsong. But then there’s the calm refrain, almost hilariously morbid: “Have you seen enough people die? I didn’t think so.”
The ambiguous “you” in this line is a device quinn deploys often to unpack gaze. In her knotty single “and most importantly, have fun,” it captures how being online and interacting with fans produces cognitive dissonance. On lullabies, it seems to map onto DMs and text messages, channeling how even the most intimate digital spaces reduce our bodies to vague directives. “See I want something to do with you,” she sings to a romantic interest on the gurgling “Change That.” This introduces a quietly captivating three-song suite that concludes the album’s relationship arc. Through tender exercises in indie rock and soft, cryptic language, she teases out details of a lack of mutual understanding, of mess-ups and miscommunication, of two people seeing past each other.
Critics love to frame the reigning internet music of the moment as a snapshot of an online generation, but quinn’s songs do not approximate a vague generational trend or aesthetic; they feel wrought from a place of private meaning, directed to a shapeshifting subject. She’s at her poetic best on “mallgrabber p,” weaving complicated feelings between two people into endearing, nursery-rhyme verses. quinn has cited countless artists as influences, from 100 gecs’ Laura Les and JPEGMAFIA to Sybyr and Duwap Kaine, but when I hear how quinn tumbles through the words here, I’m reminded of Lucy, an artist from Western Massachusetts whom quinn loves to shout out. Lucy found an online following in the mid-2010s as part of a collective called Dark World Records. His music was weird and funny and, like quinn’s, disarmingly earnest. But right as that group was on the verge of a real breakthrough, Lucy left Dark World and retreated from the internet limelight. He pursued his joyous outsider music away from the press, bringing small crowds to basement shows around New England. Then, last spring, he re-emerged with an album called The Music Industry Is Poisonous. Listening closely to drive-by lullabies, you can imagine quinn feels the same way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | self-released | September 22, 2021 | 7.7 | a30154fe-69c9-4cba-a5a0-614b8c77825d | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
After surfacing three years ago with a fresh, powerful sound, the London dream-pop quartet release their debut LP. | After surfacing three years ago with a fresh, powerful sound, the London dream-pop quartet release their debut LP. | Trailer Trash Tracys: Ester | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16239-trailer-trash-tracys-ester/ | Ester | Almost three years ago a band called Trailer Trash Tracys surfaced on a No Pain In Pop compilation. Their song "Strangling Good Guys" stood out with its satisfyingly distorted drums and haze of lusty shoegaze pop. It was a cut that sounded fresh, powerful, and ended up feeling ahead of a curve that gave us the similarly fuzzy pop of the first Best Coast, Pearl Harbor, and Smith Westerns demos.
A couple of singles and a long delay later, the band finally arrives at its debut record, Ester. While it's not a bad record, it ranks as a disappointment. The re-recorded version of "Strangling Good Guys" acts as a handy capsule to illustrate its problems: The blown-out drums of before are now neutered and low in the mix, and the toothy shattered-glass guitars are muzzled by newly flat production. It sounds like a song recorded by committee and subject to endless revisions, each new take diluting the original's potency. The delight of the demo version was that it felt like it existed on instinct and gut feeling, whereas this just sounds over-thought and dull.
There's a minute of a great song in "Dies in 55", but that also falls apart beneath cluttered, confused elements. We're treated to awkward drum rolls, non sequitur bass drops, and a bassline that might well be offbeat, though in such a rhythmless environment it's difficult to tell. There's nothing solid to glue these stuttering ideas together, and what started brightly quickly becomes a mess.
Trailer Trash Tracys sound much better when they mine simple patterns. "You Wish You Were Red" is carried by a basic beat, nonchalant guitar, and a sparse bass pattern. The economy of ideas means that each good one has space to really work. The restraint lends the song an airy glow and also allows Susanne Aztoria's honeyed vocals to come to the fore.
"Candy Girl" is another high point. The song first emerged a couple of years ago and, unlike "Strangling Good Guys", sounds as good as ever. The booming electronic drums and dirty, crackling guitar still carry a feeling of effortless cool as Aztoria's vocal swoops and dives. Her impressive knack for a tune is the band's big strength, and it's a shame that too often those melodies are squeezed or thrown off course by unnecessary parts.
"Engelhardt's Arizona" is a perfect example of this. Aztoria's yearning vocal fizzes with intrigue, sounding a bit like Nina Persson of the Cardigans, but it's almost impossible to pick out any nuance beneath a maddening guitar part that feels like the product of somebody who just learned hammer-on techniques and wanted to show them off.
That the 30-odd minutes of Ester took so long to finalize makes for a slightly baffling proposition, given that its two best moments sound so casually off-the-cuff and effortless. At this point it's hard not to feel like the Trailer Trash Tracys who sounded pretty vital in 2009 have been left behind by a whole slew of bands that followed their starting gun and reached the finishing line quicker, and better. | 2012-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino / Double Six | February 3, 2012 | 5.5 | a3046062-dd85-4a55-b66b-bf7000f859e7 | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s as part of the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s. But he also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music. The shimmering, tropical Fratello Mare is one such album. | Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s as part of the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s. But he also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music. The shimmering, tropical Fratello Mare is one such album. | Mike Cooper: Fratello Mare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20793-fratello-mare/ | Fratello Mare | Mike Cooper isn’t widely known, but to the extent that the wider world has heard of him, it’s for a series of folk-rock albums that veer thrillingly towards free jazz and improvisation. Trout Steel, Places I Know, and T**he Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper were all reissued last year by Paradise of Bachelors, reasserting his place in the canon of exploratory singer-songwriters of the '60s and '70s, people who found unexplored corners on folk songs and pulled on them until they bent into new shapes.
But those albums are a footnote inside the wider, weirder world of Mike Cooper. He also provides live music for silent films, paints and does collage, and releases albums of experimental, loop-based guitar music that sound like tropical-kitsch recordings from the mid-20th century drowning in soup. Fratello Mare is one such album: Cooper’s chosen instrument is a 1930s National Resophonic guitar that he has rigged with a series of effects pedals and loopers. He generates a slightly nauseous, shimmery river of sounds with it, fragments of pearly guitar notes that resemble Hawaiian slack-key guitar floating in a viscous solution filled with chattering incidental noises. On "On Passing Bamboo", there is the woody thunk of some mallet percussion, and in "A House in Bali" some pre-recorded wind chimes loop nightmarishly.
Cooper has a fascination with Pacific culture, with tropical kitsch and folk music (he is a devoted collector of Hawaiian shirts), and the chatter of birds fills the background of almost every piece here, as well as the cries of other animals, while his improvisatory guitar peals quietly. The energy coursing through these warped recordings is that of a strange, terrible dream you might have after a luau. There are field recordings scattered through the album that Cooper made himself on the islands across South East Asia and the Caribbean, and they surface in fragments, sometimes recognizable (the riiip of a motorcycle engine tooling away from us), often not.
Cooper’s music, in any of its forms, seems drunk on the intermingling of folk traditions, searching for a spot between them all that renders the strange familiar and vice versa. He is an improvisatory musician, one who generates his music in sheets, loops, and layers, and he seems to accrete these found-sound albums like a spider spins silk, or a vine grows pumpkins. They just appear, fattened and ripe, the fruits of his memories, travels, and idiosyncrasies. | 2015-08-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | August 3, 2015 | 6.9 | a3090250-33ed-4e53-a511-1901d163ba60 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The second album from the soft-rock innovator is world-weary and contemplative—the music adopts a lush, earthy palette and his voice sounds better than ever. | The second album from the soft-rock innovator is world-weary and contemplative—the music adopts a lush, earthy palette and his voice sounds better than ever. | Westerman : An Inbuilt Fault | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westerman-an-inbuilt-fault/ | An Inbuilt Fault | Will Westerman can’t escape his head. Self-deluded and spiritually adrift, he’s wondering how to construct a meaningful life amid so much suffering. On his ambling, often brilliant second album, An Inbuilt Fault, the Athens, Greece-based singer-songwriter spins loping, tangled narratives of intense isolation, failed relationships, and broken power structures over quietly complex soulful folk. For an artist whose vision of pop-rock was once so bound and clean, Westerman now spreads himself wide across his music, forming a tapestry of rich textures and deep introspection. His songs become small fires on a starless night.
In 2020, Westerman released Your Hero Is Not Dead, a restrained, sophisticated debut that blended soft rock and electro-pop. His primary influences—Talk Talk, Joni Mitchell, and Arthur Russell—could be heard throughout the project, yet his approach to songwriting and production felt uniquely his own. And while Westerman continues to use electronic elements in his songs, the instrumentation on An Inbuilt Fault is earthy and plain, sparse and intricately arranged. After meeting Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia at a show in London, the two linked for extended jam sessions that eventually became the bedrock for the album. The guitar work, mostly handled by Westerman and Luke Temple, is deft and harmonic, and Krivchenia’s drumming introduces a limber physicality to Westerman’s music, a style more naturally fit for Westerman’s voice than the programmed kits he once favored. Built from these essential pieces, An Inbuilt Fault also adds woozy trombone, thin violin, and live keys to generate a unique palette of lush, contemplative sounds.
What really brings the record to life, though, is Westerman’s voice. On Your Hero Is Not Dead, his singing channeled the musky, gentle tones of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell, rarely opening up into unknown territory or mutating beyond his middle range. He now deploys his instrument in new ways: a quiver on the edge of an ascending note, a slight swoon when he loosely riffs at the end of a bridge, a silky falsetto in the upper reaches of his register. His pleading tenor anchors the closing soft-rock spectacle “Pilot Was a Dancer,” while the album’s title track swirls with spectral harmonies and raspy vocal runs.
Westerman’s consciousness must be an intoxicating and claustrophobic place, one with an ominous inner monologue and a healthy skepticism toward technology and politics. “Idol; RE-Run” is ostensibly a critique of the Capitol riots and Donald Trump’s presidency, but it hardly feels like on-the-nose commentary. When he sings, “That matador, survival/Ammunition front is all gone now/Like Mother’s love, it’s all gone now,” he appears to be psychoanalyzing the pathology behind all violent and fear-mongering men, not just Trump and his followers.
An Inbuilt Fault’s most affecting writing, though, arrives when Westerman turns inward. On “Help Didn’t Help At All,” he laments an increasing disassociation from any kind of identity. “I needed help/Help didn’t help at all/I only have myself/Now even that feels so ephemeral.” In the context of the album, lines like this evade grim navel gazing by considering that helplessness may be an inherent human trait: We want to leave our heads and enter the world of living things, but what do we do when therapy and exercise and happy hours and juice cleanses don’t help us feel better? What if we wind up feeling further from ourselves than ever before?
Despite its world-weary vibe, An Inbuilt Fault resists lapsing into nihilism or desolation. Moments of grace or catharsis emerge in brief, unexpected flashes, like on “Take,” when Westerman mutters what might be the most overtly moralizing line on the record: “Taking breaks the heart of love.” It’s not a condemnation but a reminder that there are still ways to transcend the pitfalls of everyday existence. In doing so, An Inbuilt Fault becomes a faithful companion for anyone emerging from the trenches of an existential crisis—it’ll loom on the outer edge of your worst days. | 2023-05-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | May 9, 2023 | 7.6 | a30a7f3d-ff92-4b9f-90a4-ce45ee3c8a3f | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The Australian pop icon has made several decades’ worth of great disco—yet her new album is a polyester-thin fabrication that sounds as if she’d only just heard of it recently. | The Australian pop icon has made several decades’ worth of great disco—yet her new album is a polyester-thin fabrication that sounds as if she’d only just heard of it recently. | Kylie Minogue: DISCO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kylie-minogue-disco/ | DISCO | Among the many perversities of 2020 is how much disco there’s been for a year without discotheques. From Róisín Murphy to Jessie Ware to Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga, musicians collectively longed for the unattainable dancefloor. Most of it is quite good, and none of it needs to advertise itself, with pay-attention ALL-CAPS, as DISCO. The idea of Kylie Minogue “going disco” is more than a little redundant: She’s made several decades’ worth of the stuff, including several modern classics. She has recorded (excellent) tracks called “Disco Down” and “Your Disco Needs You.” Kylie claimed in a recent interview that she never envisioned the album as “a concept”—dubious, since her next words were about how she imagined the title as DISCO from the start. But she built a home studio, immersed herself in deep cuts, leveled up her production skills, and engineered for the first time, all to prevent the album from becoming “a tribute record.”
Whatever the album was that she conceived, the album she recorded is just that: a polyester-thin fabrication that sounds as if she just learned of disco’s existence during quarantine. While making the album, she redirected her producers to Earth, Wind & Fire YouTubes whenever the record started sounding like “electro-pop”—i.e., like herself. The lyrics drop names like Wikipedia: Studio 54, “I Will Survive,” the Electric Slide. Kylie works against her voice, trying to studio-contort her vocal into a dancing-queen diva or multitrack herself into a gospel chorus. If Golden sounded like Kylie LARPing country music, DISCO frequently sounds like Kylie LARPing dance—which shouldn’t happen. No one better expresses the record’s essential uncoolness than Kylie herself: “Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves.”
Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes. Kylie front-loads the weakest material—maybe passable in a set, but fatal in an album, where there’s no club to leave. “Magic” has a fizzy, sparky chorus, the sinuous melody of “Miss a Thing” has a little “Confide in Me” to it, and “Real Groove” pulls Kylie’s voice into rubber and sends it ricocheting, but none of the tracks go anywhere, and lose their energy less than halfway. “Monday Blues” doesn’t bring up energy so much as yank it back, coating its spangles in flop sweat. A “Celebration” remake that’s lawsuit-level blatant, it’s so studied it forgets to celebrate.
Not everything is so doomed by comparison. “Last Chance” is also an obvious homage, this time to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” but the scenario comes with its own urgency, and while Kylie isn’t quite transcendent, she fills the role well. The album’s requisite appeal-to-deejay song, “Where Does the DJ Go?” is ridiculous (where does the DJ go after last call? Home, usually), but it’s an authentic kind of ridiculous, akin to the urgent, emotionally frantic, and absolutely real crises of raining men or blowing up a building with boogie. The overclocked “Voulez-Vous” arrangement helps; it’s brittle and a little too fast, sounding like stretching the night past its limits. On “Supernova,” Kylie’s voice has more bite and life than all the above tracks combined, even before the ecstatic soprano swoops toward the end. (It’s one of the few places on the album she works with her voice, not against it.) The metallic robo-chassis vocal effects, the intergalactic metaphor collision, and the desperate, high-key lust memorably evoke ’70s space disco novelties like “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.”
The next track, “Say Something,” is the strongest and also the least disco. The track loses its sequencer a third of the way in, and when it comes back it’s left quiet. There’s no real chorus and almost no structure at all. What’s left is a luxuriant amount of space for Kylie to spiral higher, buoyed by rocket-exhaust sighs and airy choirs and zero-irony affirmations: “Love is love,” “Can we all be as one again?” Finishing the track reportedly brought Kylie and longtime cowriter Biff Stannard to tears; they knew they were onto something. Perhaps they got caught up in the moment. Perhaps the lyrics hit a bit different in spring 2020 than fall 2019; Kylie’s said as much. Perhaps they heard the sparkling moment where Kylie stopped being DISCO and resumed being Kylie.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | BMG | November 16, 2020 | 5.6 | a30b35b5-9c41-4b12-a870-4c934a070868 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Through blunt lyricism and melodic delivery, the veteran rapper’s first album for Yo Gotti’s CMG label opens up about trauma and mental health. | Through blunt lyricism and melodic delivery, the veteran rapper’s first album for Yo Gotti’s CMG label opens up about trauma and mental health. | Mozzy: Survivor’s Guilt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mozzy-survivors-guilt/ | Survivor’s Guilt | After years as one of rap’s most prolific workhorses, Sacramento’s Mozzy has entered a new era. Now aligned with Yo Gotti’s label CMG—rebranded from Cocaine Music Group to the more presentable Collective Music Group—he joins a roster of young and hungry talent that extends far beyond California. While his sing-song West Coast delivery might sound laid back compared to the drawl of Moneybagg Yo or the pure grit of EST Gee, Mozzy shares a penchant for blunt lyricism and vulnerability with Gotti’s proteges.
Survivor’s Guilt, Mozzy’s latest solo effort and first for CMG, wears the heavy baggage implied by its title like a badge of honor, as Mozzy opens up about hearts broken, wounds unhealed, and time served. As a now 35-year-old who started spitting at age 16, Mozzy is a certified veteran when it comes to spinning stories and baring his soul. He never needs to raise his voice or act out just to grab your attention; his delivery is assured and consistent but never overconfident. But despite how second nature rapping is for Mozzy, he never lets that confidence tilt into arrogance. On Survivor’s Guilt, he makes a point of acknowledging how pride has often been a stumbling block in working on his mental health.
From the opening bars of “Not the Same,” there’s a lurking sadness underneath, but it’s more clear-eyed than dejected or defeated. Rather than hiding his scars from the world, Mozzy accepts them as an inextricable part of his skin and his story. On “Real Ones,” Roddy Rich sings his bleeding heart out: “Lost a lot of real ones/Never shed tears.” In lieu of crying or talking it out, rapping is the means by which Mozzy exorcizes his demons.
The delivery on Survivor’s Guilt is frequently melodic and the production ornate, but Mozzy’s music is never quite pop, working more with tightly-packed verses and emotional storytelling than with hooks. Graceful retro touches, like the chorus of vocoders on “Wouldn’t Be Us,” give his music a classic tenor without resorting to a deliberately throwback style; soothing vocals from Blxst emphasize the traces of R&B bubbling underneath Mozzy’s lightly sung raps. Spanish guitar, glistening piano, and mournful strings fill out a luxurious sound that balances out the despair and struggle in Mozzy’s lyrics. Despite the regional differences, it’s not unfair to compare Mozzy’s melodic delivery to the hybrid singing flows of Houston rap, given his extensive work with gravelly-voiced Texan legend Trae the Truth.
Part of why Mozzy has been able to remain so blisteringly prolific is his effectiveness as a collaborator—a substantial portion of his discography are joint projects, and mixtapes with the likes of Gunplay and YG contain some of his best work. Mozzy proves an effective tag team partner with EST Gee on “Lurkin’” and 42 Dugg on “Smoke Nuffin’”, his years of experience and confident flow weaving effortlessly with the forcefulness of his younger labelmates. Collaboration allows Mozzy to slide into a more uptempo and hook-oriented register than his solo introspections, like the club-ready “In My Face,” which recruits 2 Chainz, YG, and Saweetie for a sweet slice of hyphy.
But it’s when Mozzy speaks on his own that his music is most distinct and direct—searing monologues like “Ain’t Really Real” draw the listener close as in confessional. On “Open Arms,” Mozzy shares an aching story of growing apart from a childhood friend, only to reunite years later in the prison yard. After a lifetime of holding back tears, he lets it all out in a vulnerable flood, an ocean of regrets and trauma that threatens to drown him. The first step in processing any kind of emotional pain is acceptance, and Survivor’s Guilt is an album-length exercise in recognizing and acknowledging the wounds Mozzy has been too scared to heal. | 2022-07-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mozzy / CMG / Interscope | July 29, 2022 | 7.1 | a31481a7-a9d6-419f-b452-99e55edf69df | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Modeled after the NME’s scene-making C86 compilation, this 59-track collection captures the sound of British alternative rock in 1991, in all its glorious chaos. | Modeled after the NME’s scene-making C86 compilation, this 59-track collection captures the sound of British alternative rock in 1991, in all its glorious chaos. | Various Artists: C91 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-c91/ | C91 | What was 1991 for alternative music? If you’re American, you may know it as the year of Nirvana’s Nevermind and R.E.M.’s Out of Time; if you’re British, it is perhaps better remembered for My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless or Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. It was, by all accounts, a particularly potent year for people with guitars. But music has a cunning way of thwarting simple linear narratives, and C91—the latest in a line of compilations from UK indie label Cherry Red styled after the NME’s scene-making C86 compilation—perfectly captures the innate weirdness of one of the most fascinating years in UK alternative music, without leaning on any of those canonical works.
I had my own indie awakening in 1991: It was the year I first read NME, went to my first proper concert, and bought the first record that made my parents wince. I find it impossible to look upon 1991 with anything approaching a disinterested view. But even far more impartial critics could agree that 1991 at the very least constituted a provocative pivot point for alternative rock, as rival (and often ideologically opposed) shades of guitar music—baggy, shoegaze, grebo, and grunge—competed for attention.
All four subgenres are accounted for here. Baggy—the largely Manchester-based blend of guitars and dance beats—is represented notably by the floppily plink-plonk piano of the Charlatans’ sublime non-album single “Over Rising,” along with London thug weirdos Flowered Up’s expansively chaotic “I’ll Be Your Dog (Introducing Barry Mooncult).” They are joined by connoisseur’s choice second-tier baggy acts like Paris Angels and World of Twist, whose cheerily experimental natures and ravers’ instincts teeter between grunge’s nihilism and shoegaze’s beautiful forlornness.
Shoegaze, then very much in the ascendant as an antidote to the excesses of baggy, is represented by early singles from the likes of Catherine Wheel (the supremely moody “Black Metallic”), Lush (the yearning and utterly charming career highlight “For Love”), Slowdive (“Morningrise”), and Chapterhouse, whose nebulous “Pearl” is sandwiched—both awkwardly and appropriately—in a perfect indie-disco trio between Liverpudlian psychedelic also-rans Top and the exemplary London pop of Saint Etienne’s “Nothing Can Stop Us.” Lush, Slowdive, et al. may be familiar to shoegaze fans internationally, but the spattering of lesser-known acts like Revolver, Bang Bang Machine, and the Steamkings, in all their fuzzy, haphazard glory, gives a fascinating sense of what a grassroots movement shoegaze was in its early years.
Grebo, a short-lived but much-loved strain of indie that vacillated between punk, dance, psychedelia, and even hip-hop, is remembered by the bafflingly successful, dual-bass-guitar Midlands band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and their crying-into-your-long-sleeve-t-shirt near hit “Until You Find Out,” an awkward and overly sincere song that reminds us why no band since has been influenced by the Neds. Grunge, still largely an American thing in 1991, finds its echo in grunge-adjacent acts like Daisy Chainsaw (essentially Babes in Toyland meets Monty Python), Drop, and Wilmington, Delaware’s Smashing Orange, the rare American band among C91’s crooked-toothed Brit parade.
The quality of the 59 songs across C91’s three CDs is gob-smackingly varied, from (relatively) well-known local classics like the Manic Street Preachers’ incendiary “Stay Beautiful” and Saint Etienne’s “Nothing Can Stop Us” to a host of songs better left forgotten. (Sorry, Horse Latitudes’ “Northern Country Lie” and Raintree County’s “Here It Comes,” both of which appear on CD3, when the album’s jig is pretty much up.) No one will love all 59 songs here, but few open-minded alternative fans will go away without discovering (or re-discovering) something to cherish. I had entirely forgotten how much I liked both the Dylans’ spunkily kaleidoscopic indie chart hit “Godlike” and the scruffy Who-lite R&B of the Stairs’ “Weed Bus (Flower Shop Demo)” until I heard them again on C91.
More than simply a nostalgic power trip, C91 is frequently fascinating, a Nuggets for the UK’s early-’90s alternative bloom that shows the fluidity of musical lines and the beautiful chaos of musical evolution. Arch shoegazers Chapterhouse’s “Pearl” has a baggy dance beat, for example, while Bleach and Moose—shoegazers both, in theory—sound suspiciously close to proto-grunge. Then there are the bands who don’t fit in anywhere. Sultans of Ping F.C.’s “Where’s Me Jumper?” is a comedy glam-punk number about mislaying a favorite sweater; Sweet Jesus lay claim to operatic shoegaze; and Kingmaker are one of the quaintest groups to enjoy UK chart success in the early ’90s, their smart-assed and vaguely folky indie pop both utterly un-groundbreaking and not really like anyone else. As if to rub in the disorder, the Cranberries turn up among the ultra-indie hordes with “Them,” a dodgy and distorted song from their debut EP, Uncertain, that gives absolutely no indication of the globe-conquering band they will become once Dolores O’Riordan masters her microphone technique.
Out of Time, Nevermind, and Screamadelica were doubtlessly among the most important alternative albums of 1991. But they were outliers, one-off works of outstanding brilliance that even their authors struggled to recreate. This—the sprawling, wildly varied trolley dash of C91—is what indie music was actually like in 1991, at least in my corner of Eastern England. That makes it catnip for music fans of a certain age and a vital document for pop historians who want to go beyond the obvious hits; it’s like digging up a humble Roman insula after Nevermind’s opulent villa urbana. Rather than the winners, C91 is musical history written by the also-rans, kind-of-weres and might-have-beens. And it proves far more interesting that way. | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Cherry Red | February 8, 2022 | 7.2 | a3155b2d-0e45-452d-8820-6b5b5e70d12a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After years on the DIY circuit, the Philly group condenses its freaky energy into 14 art-punk vignettes about Stevie Wonder, satanic snakes, a hallucinatory Virgin Mary. | After years on the DIY circuit, the Philly group condenses its freaky energy into 14 art-punk vignettes about Stevie Wonder, satanic snakes, a hallucinatory Virgin Mary. | Godcaster: Long Haired Locusts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godcaster-long-haired-locusts/ | Long Haired Locusts | The subtext of every favorable rock album review in 2020 is a wistful “Man, I bet this album would sound great live right now...,” but with Godcaster, the sentiment bears stating outright: Man, I bet this album would be incredibly fun live. In fact, I know as much. Godcaster, an eccentric weirdo-punk five-piece, has spent several years honing their raucous performances in the Philadelphia DIY scene, opening for bands like Of Montreal and Guerilla Toss, whose high-octane outbursts are a likely influence on this debut. When you watch pre-pandemic clips of the band playing, you can see them compress their energy into a semicircle, shrieking in unison and raising their fists and tambourines in the air, as though engaged in some strange fertility ritual.
Long Haired Locusts, the band’s recent album, condenses that freaky energy into 14 art-punk vignettes about Stevie Wonder, satanic snakes, a hallucinatory Virgin Mary, and a perilous journey to the deepest known spot of the ocean. It’s Godcaster’s first album, although the band’s prehistory dates back at least 15 years: The earliest iteration of the band formed when lead singer/guitarist Judson Kolk and bassist Bruce Ebersole were, respectively, eight and 11. Within a few years, the young musicians were recruiting school friends to participate in their Beach Boys-inspired racket. “We had a gang of about 12 banging on things and providing horns acquired through 8th grade music classes,” Kolk said in a recent interview with Melted Magazine. “At one point a propane tank was used as a kick drum.”
The band’s lineup has evolved considerably since then, arriving at its current form in 2017. But Long Haired Locusts retains that sense of communal wonder and chaotic glee. The briefest tracks are often the most packed with ideas. In less than two minutes, “Dirtbike Bike (Vaccine Girl)” shifts from a flute-driven staccato-funk groove to a comically sweet acoustic ode to a mysterious entity known as “vaccine girl.” (Oddly, the song was written well before vaccine distribution became a daily conversation topic.) “Sexy Heffer” lasts two minutes and contains just two words (the titular phrase), morphing from an agitated call-and-response vamp to a breakdown so outrageous you can actually hear one of the musicians howling with laughter.
Godcaster’s colorful imagination, evidenced by Kolk’s garish cover artwork and by the album’s steady supply of religious imagery, is key to the album’s appeal. The group’s songs veer in so many directions at once that you can sense influences popping in and out like Whac-A-Mole heads: the pulverizing stomp of band favorite Led Zeppelin (“Serpentine Carcass Crux Birth”), the sing-songy aggression of Deerhoof (“Christ In Capsule Form,” “The Skull!!!”), the insular jokes and chaotic stylistic shifts of Mr. Bungle (“Even Your Blood Is Electric,” “Escape From the Challenger Deep”). The group’s best track, “Don’t Make Stevie Wonder,” hinges on a quick-footed groove worthy of early ’90s Fugazi, but the song’s punny humor (“wonder” as in the verb—get it?) and cartoonish cascade of voices is pure Godcaster goofiness.
The band has a knack for teetering right on the edge of irredeemable obnoxiousness, daring you to resist their charm and lightning-fast musicianship. When a song doesn’t quite land—such as the hookless cacophony of “Apparition of The Virgin Mary In My Neighborhood” or the gratuitous “Outro”—it’s usually because it’s stuffed with too many ideas rather than too few. And even then, Godcaster’s tightness as a groove engine is enough to overcome occasional dips into silliness. Recorded live to tape in a basement in Philadelphia, Locusts is the kind of record a band makes when the musicians have been performing the songs for years and can simply feed off that live energy in the studio. And someday, by the grace of Vaccine Girl, they’ll get to bring it to a DIY basement other than their own.
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. | 2020-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Ramp Local | December 19, 2020 | 7.4 | a31901bb-d205-49d4-9f01-f2ea4d3eeec5 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
With their latest album, the Japanese band Heaven in Her Arms prove there’s still life in post-metal. They take a textured attack, mixing guitar guitar shimmer and aggression. | With their latest album, the Japanese band Heaven in Her Arms prove there’s still life in post-metal. They take a textured attack, mixing guitar guitar shimmer and aggression. | Heaven in Her Arms: White Halo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heaven-in-her-arms-white-halo/ | White Halo | It makes sense that Japanese post-hardcore/metal group Heaven in Her Arms named themselves after a song from Converge’s Jane Doe. There, Converge saw hardcore as a wider palette, and Heaven in Her Arms also have an expansive view. While there’s a constant use of post-metal in their works, they’ve shifted styles often—the common thread is a mix of 1990s emo influencing heavier elements. With White Halo, which is receiving a North American release through Translation Loss, they’ve ditched the doom metal that was the foundation for 2010’s Paraselene, instead building upon the spacious, more textured attack of their split 12” with COHOL.
After “Ray of Light at Dusk” brings the record in with delicate piano and tempered swells, “Abyss of the Moonbow” comes raging in with double bass and tremolo riffs. While the COHOL split hinted at this direction, it comes into the fore here, marking yet another transition for them in an affirmative fashion. They’ve taken up the mantle of Envy, their main contemporary, who pioneered a mix of post-hardcore and emo with post-rock’s sweeping gestures. You can hear the influence of Insomniac Doze, Envy’s influential 2006 record, all over Halo. It comes through in the hushed spoken word section of “Moonbow,” and in how—for all of the album’s changes in volume and tempo—the “hardcore” or “metal” is always more prevalent than the “post.” For as many shimmery guitar breaks as there are, Halo is constantly charging forward.
Closer “Turbid Fog” is where their experimental edge comes out, starting with dour synth strings obscuring a skittering IDM beat, which leads to their lush pummel delivered in a more hardcore fashion. There are stop-start breaks that sound like muffled breakdowns, slamming into foam instead of other bodies. It takes something direct and aggro and makes it welcoming without lessening its impact. “Entangled Torus” features a similar stuttering pattern in its latter half, but it’s not quite as stark as the one on “Fog.” That song isn’t without its peculiarities, though, as its intro comes in with a hooky Swedish death metal riff à la Tribulation, giving it a slight flamboyance that is rare in post-metal. “Glare of the End” also takes on this flair with its ending lead—as with the vast majority of exceptional heavy music of recent times, it’s not about breaking paradigms so much as it is twisting traditional forms in unexpected ways. With music as dense as this, sometimes you just don’t expect a sweet guitar solo.
A lot of Halo sounds like Deafheaven (they toured together in 2014) or another black metal-shoegaze fusion, but Heaven in Her Arms are not black metal. In fact, they and Envy existed for quite a while before Deafheaven formed and have been a strong influence on them. Envy’s most recent record, 2015’s Atheist’s Cornea, saw them toning down the longform post-rock and moving back towards post-hardcore; Halo is the opposite, with Heaven in Her Arms going in a more outwardly aggressive direction. It does sound like they’re aiming at Deafheaven’s audience, maintaining a strange balance of absorbing their sound and showing how they’ve influenced bands like them. They deserve the attention—while they and Envy have shown how fertile the cross-pollination between post-hardcore and metal is, neither have received enough credit for it. And with most post-metal bands of yore either breaking up or still trotting out the same Explosions in the Sky worship, Halo proves there’s still life in that form. | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Translation Loss | July 10, 2017 | 7.7 | a31ccbed-ffc2-41b5-9c20-b734351f77f8 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The drummer/producer blends personal mental-health struggles with the subjugation of black America in a many-voiced, trap-jazz singer-songwriter opus. | The drummer/producer blends personal mental-health struggles with the subjugation of black America in a many-voiced, trap-jazz singer-songwriter opus. | Kassa Overall: I Think I’m Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kassa-overall-i-think-im-good/ | I Think I’m Good | We live in a golden age of storytelling, however chaotic it may feel. Despite social fractures, amoral media platforms, and historical blindness (willful and otherwise), more individuals are telling their stories—in audio, video, words, images, sounds, computer programs, and new combinations—than ever before. Challenging assumptions about who is empowered to tell these stories and how, a more thorough picture of the world emerges, including truths that long lay unacknowledged. With access to a growing range of narrative tools and methods of distribution, the floodgates of rumination have opened—algorithms, copyright restrictions, and genre quarantines be damned.
So it’s hard to imagine Kassa Overall’s I Think I’m Good as the product of any other age but this one, yet it’s also a timeless tale. A high-gloss, trap-jazz, Auto-Tuned singer-songwriter cycle about multiple consciousness, it’s a fragile diary of a young artist’s escape from the comforts of fear, aided by an incredible community of musicians who have his back. More broadly, it’s a kaleidoscopic cut’n’paste opus that bypasses prior, drier conversations about jazz and hip-hop sharing space—even Overall’s masterful 2019 debut, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz—to express something much more personal, yet also universally relatable.
Some of the greatness of I Think I’m Good comes in the blending of its design and function. The story that 36-year-old Kassa tells, integrating his own lifelong mental-health struggles with the incarceration and subjugation of black America, is in many ways completely novel; even more so is the way he tells it, in expansive song-rap compositions that have the intimacy of bedroom indie-folk murmurs. Until recently, Kassa’s rep rested on being a great young jazz drummer (with an overflow of credits—Geri Allen, Christian McBride, and Arto Lindsay, to name a few—and a stint in Jon Batiste’s band on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert). He also dabbled as a rapper and producer, including collaborations with Francis and the Lights and Das Racist. But his desire to synthesize collective improvisation, electronic production, and rap vocals has been the core of his recent live residencies at New York’s Zinc Bar and the Jazz Gallery, and Go Get Ice Cream approached the jazz/hip-hop discourse from this holistic live-playing-with-rapping-and-electronics direction. It also featured a great song called “Prison and Pharmaceuticals” (chorus: “What’s the best stocks?”) that is a direct thematic harbinger of I Think I’m Good.
Another key precursor was the series of panic attacks that Overall experienced as a young Oberlin Conservatory student in the mid-’00s—one led to his temporary institutionalization—and his subsequent overmedication that went from stabilizer to long-term crutch. I Think I’m Good soundtracks this quiet, numbing struggle in tones both unsettled and empathetic. Beyond simply documenting his own interior dialogues, the album connects them—lyrically, but also sonically—to those of black men’s realities in dealing with Amerikkka’s criminal-justice system. Kassa’s narrative takes the shape of a hallucinatory collage, an almost-old-school mega-mixtape where themes and visions—of personal memories and familiar melody lines, song and sound fragments, a list of confidants from his life and career—flow effortlessly into one another.
The blurring of his own medical experience with notions of incarceration begins with Kassa’s opening line: “I hope they let me go tonight,” he intones on “Visible Walls,” as Brandee Younger’s harp, Jay Gandhi’s bansuri flute, Courtney Bryan’s piano, and a chopped, hummed Auto-Tune melody set up an ominously hushed new-age mood. The childlike delivery of his opening plea in the follow-up (“Please don’t kill me in your sleep”) lands into the same unnerving atmosphere; Joel Ross’ vibraphone adds both melodic beauty and further textural destabilization, compounding Kassa’s chilling words that conflate the real and surreal (“Please don’t mind those chalk lines/They don’t know what’s inside of you and I”). Yet the songs also have musical escape hatches arranged into the claustrophobia. When Younger and Ross play short lead solo lines—the latter in a quick conversation with Theo Croker’s flugelhorn—the spaces unlock in ways that one can imagine growing expansive on stage, supporting evidence that, like the hesitant blues of the album title, Kassa doesn’t mean for it to be a completely dark ride.
One thing that makes such glimmers of hope feel so poignant is the work’s insistence on biography, which grounds it as proof that, despite the lures set by society and individual minds, solutions are also within our grasp. There’s a personal touch in the disassociated and affected voices that litter the album’s landscape, and on the trap production strategies that simultaneously communalize the experience and compound the theme of schizophrenia, whether they take the form of nightmarish asides, philosophical musings, or in-studio instructions to musicians. There’s also a kind of natural narrative flow between the parts of I Think I’m Good that really are diary entries (young Kassa’s cover portrait, or “Landline,” a poetic youthful reminiscence of a kid wondering about “normal,” featuring his brother Carlos on the tenor) and those that are out-and-out role-playing. “Show Me a Prison,” a cautionary tale of the prison industrial complex, features an inmate character named Kassa, a guest turn by activist Angela Davis, and one of the album’s key role-switching lyrics, “There but for fortune, may go you and I,” courtesy of Phil Ochs. In the final biographical projection, “Was She Happy (for Geri Allen),” Kassa and Vijay Iyer eulogize the late pianist, who passed away in 2018 and who collaborated with both men. It closes the album on a psychedelic note, a light drone guiding their Rhodes-drums duet, punctuated by the answer to the songtitle’s question: “Was she happy?” “She was on a quest!”
And what are quests but stories we construct ourselves, for ourselves, even if just by clicking “record” on a smartphone—or in Kassa’s words, on a “backpacker producer” setup he used to document a lion’s share of the raw materials here. It’s heartening that, even in what seems like a limited category, he’s hardly alone in doing this. It’s curious that I Think I’m Good is one of three extraordinarily ambitious recent albums by artists initially recognized as jazz drummers—alongside Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter and Jeremy Cunningham’s The Weather Up There—that combine internal monologues about their own lives with reflections on the social breakdowns happening all around them. In doing so, they have produced musical therapy sessions that chronicle the world as it actually is, and not as it is sold to us.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Rap | Brownswood | March 6, 2020 | 7.9 | a31d6136-c9de-42e8-8bb7-c8caf110a560 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
Drummer and jazz legend Jack DeJohnette pairs up with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison, to spellbinding and haunting results. | Drummer and jazz legend Jack DeJohnette pairs up with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison, to spellbinding and haunting results. | Jack DeJohnette / Ravi Coltrane / Matthew Garrison: In Movement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21817-in-movement/ | In Movement | Jack DeJohnette knows how to turn traditions inside out. He can invest light-touch cymbal playing with the feel of pulsing funk. His freer patterns of blast can sound like some of the most refined avant-percussion you've ever heard. Though while DeJohnette is obviously an original, he's not bent on tearing down all the boundaries between jazz sub-genres. His engagement with various aspects of blues and swing flows from an evident reverence for each specific style. Even when pushing his own creative language to new places, DeJohnette manages to keep the inherited forms in view.
His half-century discography suggests how invaluable (and how rare) that philosophy of performance has been. DeJohnette played on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, was part of an acoustic trio led by pianist Bill Evans, and also collaborated with experimental visionaries from the Chicago scene, many of whom were active in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM). In decades since, he's worked with Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny, while recording frequently as a leader for the ECM label.
DeJohnette's 2015 release on the imprint, Made in Chicago, referenced his deep relationships with various AACM musicians while staying mostly focused on recent compositions from that all-star group of players. The drummer's latest album follows a broadly similar path, by affording DeJohnette a chance to create some new pieces alongside two scions of jazz: the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and the bassist (and electronics whiz) Matthew Garrison. The aura of history is inescapable on a project that includes them both, given that their fathers were members of the “classic” John Coltrane Quartet. And DeJohnette's new trio plunges right into the deepest of jazz-legacy waters by tackling one of the classic Coltrane quartet's most iconic tunes, at the very beginning of In Movement.
“Alabama” was the elder Coltrane's response to the 1963 white-supremacist terror bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. The studio take is a piece that can stand with any work of tragic poetry, from any artistic discipline. When the climactic tenor line breaks through, there is an emotional transition—from a state of mourning to one of wrenching, cathartic protest. (Spike Lee used this portion of the song to shattering effect during 4 Little Girls, his documentary on the murders.) It's one of the great compositions and performances of music history. As a consequence, it's a risky thing for anyone else to touch.
Here, after a few seconds of cymbal work from DeJohnette, the trio's performance begins in earnest when Ravi Coltrane plays a closing portion of the song's main theme. This needle-drop, in media res choice conjures up the haunting suggestion of “Alabama” playing on an everlasting loop, as a mandated accompaniment for each and every occurrence of racially motivated violence. This sense of disquiet is also promoted by Garrison's electric bass playing. His clouds of fuzz-tone thicken noticeably when Coltrane moves up to the famous high-register cry. The purgatorial (or else eternally damned) quality of this “Alabama” feels even even grimmer than the original. There's no swinging, breakdown section (as in the originally issued album version). And even DeJohnette's rollicking percussive moments have a pensive air. Still, the liberties taken here feel well thought-out, while also keeping the performance from seeming backward looking.
The mood brightens considerably during the pair of lengthy (and jointly composed) original tunes that follow “Alabama.” “Two Jimmys” is a joint tribute to Garrison's father as well as Jimi Hendrix, and it has a variable-but-intense groove pitched somewhere between Sun Ship and Band of Gypsys. But the real stomper on In Movement is the trio's Earth, Wind and Fire cover, “Serpentine Fire,” which this trio stretches with abandon. Similarly refashioned is “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis' Kind of Blue**, which finds DeJohnette moving from behind his kit to offer some rich support on piano. Along with two lyrical ballads by DeJohnette, this cover also offers a respite after some of the album's noisier material.
The only cut on the 50-minute set that feels a little too beholden to the past is “Rashied,” a tribute to Coltrane's hookup with drummer Rashied Ali on the duo set Insterstellar Space. It's certainly an energetic performance—and both DeJohnette and Coltrane avoid sounding like they're directly copying the players this piece sets out to honor. But the duo-setup that animates this performance doesn't feel as freshly conceived as the trio's performance of “Alabama” does.
That may sound like a high critical bar, but it's one this group sets for itself. Despite the grand shadows cast by their forbears, In Movement shows how both Ravi and Matthew have emerged as distinct instrumentalists on the contemporary jazz scene. And they have skills that match up with DeJohnette's own. No one in this group has to run from history, or overly fetishize it, in order to sound like an individual—a shared skill that makes In Movement a frequently spellbinding experience. | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | ECM | May 9, 2016 | 8.3 | a31df232-b926-4aa6-9b33-79b00a260760 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
This set of rare and unreleased Dilla instrumentals spans many of his styles, but the flat sequencing doesn’t do justice to his history of deeply focused vibe-building. | This set of rare and unreleased Dilla instrumentals spans many of his styles, but the flat sequencing doesn’t do justice to his history of deeply focused vibe-building. | J Dilla: Motor City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23108-motor-city/ | Motor City | We’re not remotely likely to get another Donuts out of the J Dilla archives. But even with the one-a-year pace we’ve been getting posthumous releases—the floodgates opening in earnest around 2012, concurrent with the release of embattled mixtape Rebirth of Detroit—one can’t help but wonder if there’s something deeper hiding in his vaults. We keep getting new fragments of Dilla’s work, and we try to piece together a narrative that makes sense. Each collection adds another layer. The music might not tell us much, but it does provide a nice reminder of his impact and hopefully some funds to keep the bills paid for the Yancey family.
Through the seams of their after-the-fact assemblages, these releases cull styles from a decade or two ago, shaped into an approximation of the art Dilla was aiming for. On the all-instrumental Motor City, all 19 rare and unreleased tracks were picked by Dilla’s mother herself, with Ma Dukes including a letter to her son in the artwork. Still, for every fleshed-out beat that would make for the backbone of a solid deep hip-hop album cut, there’s a piece of scrap music that barely registers as an interstitial. For every track that points to a certain highlight of Dilla’s idiosyncratic griminess, there’s another that comes across like something he kept filed away because he didn’t feel it was ready for the public.
There’s a few highlights on Motor City, even if the untitled nature of the tracks and the individually-wrapped, flat sequencing don’t do much justice to Dilla’s history of focused vibe-building. “Motor City 13” glows with Dilla’s late-’90s clouds-of-bass warmth, and “Motor City 8” goes woozy with garage soul that feels at once delirious and peaceful. Some of the beats are audacious in their experimentation, even if the execution’s a little dicey. It takes some real razor-walking finesse to try and chop such an instantly recognizable piece of Creedence like he does on “Motor City 7,” turning the familiar swamp-trudge groove of 1970’s “Run Through the Jungle” into the jumbled rhythmic gait of someone trying to jog on ice.
As the tracks go on one after another, the jarring moments and back-to-the-drawing-board segments jump out as mood-breaking nuisances. Even though we get Dilla in most of his stylistic phases—from Detroit boom-bap to Soulquarian meditations to the choppy rawness of his final L.A. years—you can hear a couple dead ends. Some are not-quite-right precursors to more familiar tracks, like “Motor City 9,” a less-immediate alternate version of future Mos Def The Ecstatic beat “History.” Others seem directly at odds with his production personality, like the hokey “Motor City 12.” And as is the fate of a lot of stand-alone hip-hop instrumentals, some of the longer cuts—which is to say, ones more than 90 seconds—fall into a sort of simple-loop stasis. They feel intended for a particularly animated MC to complete them. The briefly stirring “Motor City 4” makes 1:40 feel like an hour and 40 minutes.
The best context for a collection of tracks like this does play out. James Yancey’s close friend J.Rocc—a World Famous Beat Junkies vet and Stones Throw labelmate—has built a strong history of Dilla dedication mixes, particularly the one he released three days after Dilla’s passing. And Motor City includes a worth-the-admission mix of the album’s material, sewing it all together into something that feels more profound. He drops sharp-timed vocals and classic rap verses into the fold to breathe deep life into the tracks, switching up and distorting beats just as you’re lulled into thinking you know where they’re going. So even if you don’t know what to do with the collection of cuts on Motor City, it’s at least a relief to know what Dilla’s family and friends are capable of doing with them. | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Vintage Vibez Music Group | April 20, 2017 | 6.8 | a334892f-f3b8-4ab1-9b0f-c8c23d1b5aaa | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The indie-pop duo Girlpool's debut LP, Before the World Was Big, brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. With it, Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker have created a quiet album of uncommon intensity. | The indie-pop duo Girlpool's debut LP, Before the World Was Big, brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. With it, Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker have created a quiet album of uncommon intensity. | Girlpool: Before the World Was Big | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20465-before-the-world-was-big/ | Before the World Was Big | The tiniest notes, the biggest sentiments: Girlpool make songs that feel audaciously small, like an eyedropper pointed toward the heavens. The 10 songs on Before the World Was Big not only employ a bare minimum of chords (two, pretty much always) but a minimum of notes. If you’d never held a guitar, or even seen one, you could be gently coached to play "Ideal World", the album’s opening track, within three minutes of being handed one. The same is true of many others.
And yet, Before the World Was Big brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. Focusing on the clean bones of the songs only leads you to be astonished by how full they feel. This is music with no corners, no hidden places in the arrangements, and the emotions emerge with gratifying clarity. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker—who sing occasionally in harmony and occasionally in unison, but always together—seem to be singing in the center of an empty, well-lit room, staring directly at you. To listen to Before the World Was Big is to meet their gaze and feel slightly unnerved and exhilarated. It is a quiet album of uncommon intensity.
Tividad and Tucker formed Girlpool when they were 17 and 18, and they told anyone who asked them at the time that they were drawn to each other for their shared sense of purpose: "We wanted something that was honest and straightforward," Tucker said. "We both wanted to be super vulnerable…Because of the stripped down nature of our music, if one of us messes up, it’s incredibly noticeable. We’re not trying to hide." In part, it is this clarity of purpose that resounds from the empty spaces on their debut LP. Their EP was shouted, and in its hardy squall, you could hear two powerful voices honing in on some way they might make a dent in the universe. Sometimes, it felt like watching a kid run into a wall.
They sound calmer and infinitely more assured here. The final song’s title, "I Like That You Can See It", stands as a simple manifesto. The song is about harnessing nerves and vulnerability as sources of power, and it repeats the striking image: "Is it pouring out my body? My nervous aching?/ I like that you can see it." The arrangement performs the same act. There are two chords, played with two fingers, and yet the song feels bigger every time you listen to it.
Somewhere between their formation and now, Tividad and Tucker have divined the starry-eyed power of the purest indie-pop. It is a romanticism that thrives on potential energy, on the contemplation of things that haven't quite happened. Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space. "I feel safest in knowing that I am true/ When I look in your eyes, the idea of you," they sing with clarion force on "Ideal World". "I just miss how it felt standing next to you/ Wearing matching dresses before the world was big," they chant on the title track, a line that doubles into a round-robin singalong.
Tividad and Tucker’s voices are foregrounded, always. They sing about real-life friends, by their first names. They reference each other by first name in their lyrics. "I am still looking for sureness in the way I say my name," they sing on "Chinatown". Their twinned vocals gives the album a powerful and traceable through line—these are songs about two specific friends who have realized that the world is a less frightening place, that you feel surer and safer in it, with someone else by you. | 2015-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita | June 5, 2015 | 7.8 | a335fce4-f346-4e0f-bdea-1b663c0872cd | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
It’s fitting that the Avett Brothers’ most disappointing record yet bears the title of True Sadness. Is this some kind of play for the Top 40, or just instrumental bloat and trite sentiment? | It’s fitting that the Avett Brothers’ most disappointing record yet bears the title of True Sadness. Is this some kind of play for the Top 40, or just instrumental bloat and trite sentiment? | The Avett Brothers: True Sadness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21985-true-sadness/ | True Sadness | The Avett Brothers once seemed to hold an infinite amount of promise. They were a hardworking group of young men who traded in songs that were as poignant as they were ragged. The titular Avetts, the older Scott and younger Seth, wore their bleeding hearts on their sleeves, and they always came off as earnest, honest, regular fellas from North Carolina who were thoughtfully dedicated to their craft.
The band’s tide started to turn toward the big time in 2007 with the sparkling Emotionalism, and the subsequent I and Love and You found the band working with the famed Rick Rubin as their producer. But the band’s work with Rubin has yielded records scrubbed of the rawness and grit that made the band so compelling in its early years. It’s fitting, then, that The Avett Brothers’ most abysmal and disappointing record yet bears the title of True Sadness.
True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation. Several songs are smothered with baffling layers of synthesizers in what feels like a ploy to push the Avetts into clear Top 40 territory. They were never a bluegrass band, of course, and always existed in the interesting overlapping gray areas between folk, Americana, and rock circles. But the synths and electronic beats that burble up on “You Are Mine” and “Satan Pulls the Strings” don’t make sense for the band in any context. The shift isn’t even bold enough to warrant a “Dylan goes electric” comparison. Instead, it sounds like a half-baked bad idea that no one had the guts or sense to veto. The slathered-on saccharine arrangements sink to their most unfortunate low on closing track “May It Last,” which aims for elegance and intensity but instead comes through as a ham-fisted and embarrassing attempt at something serious.
Somewhere along the way, the Avetts lost a grip on their lyrical skills, too. True Sadness presents some astonishingly bad turns of phrase, as when Seth Avett sings about wishing to be “a tune you sang in your kitchen,” so that he “could float around your tongue and ease the tension.” Elsewhere, songs manage to be preachy and completely self-unaware, as the Avetts sing about being tempted by Satan, struggling with belief, and being victimized by the grand scheme of life itself. Losing love was once an occasion for collapsin’ and screamin’ at the moon, but the Avetts got all of that drama out of their system in 2008, it seems. Now, they offer the likes of the self-explanatory “Divorce Separation Blues,” which feels like a dopey “Oops, my bad” at best—goofy yodels don’t much help the song’s case for sympathy, either. Scott and Seth Avett sing about guilt and feeling bad, but these songs ring hollow. It’s as if the Avetts knew folks might expect heartfelt confessional material—especially in the wake of Seth’s slightly scandalous split from his wife—and wrote a clutch of songs that half-assedly check the box.
The band does find itself making one short breakthrough with “Fisher Road to Hollywood,” an intimate track that feels like being snapped from a bad dream. The song, buried on the back half of the record, is almost a sincere mea culpa, an admission of regret for the way that things went seriously wrong for the band as a unit and as individuals. The band returns to its early strong suit: Gentle acoustic strums, mournful cello, plaintive vocals. There’s the sense that all hope isn’t lost for the Avett Brothers, that maybe they could scrap all of the messy baggage they’ve acquired in their rise from grimy clubs to sold-out arenas and major label dealings. But then, those four-and-a-half minutes are over, and you’re forced to reckon with the empty misery of True Sadness once again. | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Republic | June 27, 2016 | 3.8 | a340e630-1875-461c-9e6f-0454eb8c7ede | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
The Chicago band’s second album strikes a balance between the spartan chaos of noise rock and the soft melodicism of bedroom pop. | The Chicago band’s second album strikes a balance between the spartan chaos of noise rock and the soft melodicism of bedroom pop. | Melkbelly: PITH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/melkbelly-pith/ | PITH | Melkbelly—the project of married couple Miranda and Bart Winters, plus Bart’s brother Liam on bass and non-relative James Wetzel on drums—is a noise rock band on its surface, but a pop act at heart. Miranda and Bart met through the Chicago DIY scene, eventually forming Coffin Ships, a pop-oriented group that showcased Miranda’s sweet but firm delivery. Meanwhile, Wetzel took inspiration from Providence noise weirdos like Daughters and Lightning Bolt—his own project Ree-Yees suggests a truckload of drums swerving through traffic. On PITH, their second full-length, Melkbelly strike a robust and surprisingly warm balance between the spartan chaos of noise rock and the soft melodicism of bedroom pop.
Melkbelly songs don’t so much expand the boundaries of these genres as shift between them. On “THC,” revving guitars and spoken-word vocals give way to circuitous chord progressions and honeyed sighs. It’s tempting to reduce these patterns to the “loud-quiet” dynamics that make grunge forebears like the Breeders so exhilarating. But where the Deal sisters delineate their modes with dramatic pauses and thick reverb, Melkbelly’s transitions are more freewheeling. When the guitars slow from a blitz to a meander, Miranda’s deadpan rasp fills the vacant space. By the time “THC” reaches the closest thing to a chorus, the band has traversed three time signatures. Miranda’s voice meets the challenge, sounding enraged and disaffected at once as her voice rises and falls to keep pace with the dense instrumentation.
As they did on 2017’s Nothing Valley, Melkbelly set up daring rhythmic changes and layers of sludge—massive, overdriven guitars, sudden shifts in tempo—that find improbable reconciliation in driving counter-melodies. It can feel like the band is battling itself, goading one instrument (the drums on “Mr. Coda,” or the rhythm guitar on “Take H20”) to take the reigns. At the climax of “LCR,” Miranda’s vocals and Wetzel’s manic drumming both rise to a crescendo, wordless screams and razor-sharp snares each gaining power from the other, like two converging storms. But unlike Nothing Valley, which often came dangerously close to derailing, PITH reigns in its song structure, replacing the previous record’s instrumental drum tracks with tightly wound melodies. The overdriven guitars and reverberating vocals of “Season of the Goose” would sound at home beside post-punk revivalists like Interpol or the Strokes.
Melkbelly expends so much energy ripping through verses, it can be easy to miss one of the band’s strongest assets: Miranda’s absurd and graphic lyrics, which address body horror and petty indie rock spats with equal ferocity. It’s her careful, almost precious delivery that keeps these topics—like food stuck between teeth and omelettes wedged under fingernails—from conjuring sheer disgust. On “Little Bug,” she sings the biography of an insect with the proudly precocious energy of an only child performing to an audience of dolls.
When Melkbelly take aim at human pests, they’re less effective. “Kissing Under Some Bats” scolds a scene-going groupie: “Stop introducing yourself as ‘just a girlfriend’/Because it’s twee/And unnecessary.” From a band whose lyrics are typically so removed from reality, it comes across as cruel and bizarrely personal. “Humid Heart” similarly frays at its seams, the vocal breaking as the song stutters to a halt on what is ostensibly a chorus. On an album shrouded in such graphic and fantastical imagery, the lackluster moments stand out.
But PITH always manages to regain traction. At its best, Miranda’s voice recalls the cutting dryness of fellow Chicagoan Liz Phair, sharing a wry intonation that lifts even the densest basslines to climactic peaks. When her performance matches the surrounding velocity, as on the pummeling “Stone Your Friends,” the militant intensity and drive resembles “Immigrant Song.” As an album, PITH begins to drag towards the end, closing with a track rightfully called “Flatness.” But as a series of singles, its meld of ’90s grunge and early-’00s noise is delightfully strange.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wax Nine / Carpark | April 3, 2020 | 7.4 | a34416e6-c7b2-4274-8202-14084da51aea | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The Cincinnati folk-rock quartet’s third album is artfully and interestingly composed, a snapshot of four people figuring out their identities both as individual humans and as a subtly defiant band. | The Cincinnati folk-rock quartet’s third album is artfully and interestingly composed, a snapshot of four people figuring out their identities both as individual humans and as a subtly defiant band. | The Ophelias : Crocus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-ophelias-crocus/ | Crocus | For a folk-rock quartet that doesn’t rely on electronics or lush production, the Ophelias are hard to pin down. They can sound like Painted Shut-era Hop Along, early 2000s folk, or John Darnielle’s string-heavy modern releases as the Mountain Goats. Even the band’s story eludes catchy signifiers: Initial press claimed the band was made up of former “token girls” in their Ohio bands. Now, the Ophelias return as two women, one newly-joined non-binary bassist, and one trans male drummer. On their third album, Crocus, the band reflects this fluidity; the tense “Spirit Sent” starts out like toned-down PJ Harvey before concluding with layered strings; “Sacrificial Lamb” has adult-alternative hooks inside a lo-fi frame. Frontwoman Spencer Peppet grounds her bandmates’ kinetic energy with introspection, revisiting toxic relationships and dealing with her own self-worth. Crocus is a snapshot of four people figuring out their identities both as individual humans and as a subtly defiant band.
With all the constant movement of the quartet, it is entirely possible to miss the thoughtful, calculated journey Peppet makes across 37 minutes. It’s not officially a concept album, but there is something of a loose narrative: The album follows a series of desperate attempts at closure, devaluing and ruminating about an ex only to wind up missing them even more. Peppet’s legato delivery often abruptly switches at the end of a line, like someone about to escalate a fight before meekly changing course. There are conventional barbs like, “Holding you feels like a bomb went off in my chest,” or, “I was happy with the you in my head,” but the most intriguing depictions of post-breakup grief are the most abstract. “Twilight Zone” stretches the “you’re everywhere to me” trope to low-key absurdity (“I walk down my street/And the trees look like you”), before reprising the theme. On “Spirit Sent,” the first chorus whimsically describes a man witnessing Peppet’s soul traveling through the sky to meet an ex-partner. The ending of “Twilight Zone” is the one time where Peppet doesn’t stop her voice short and plainly admits, after the previous half-hour of moving on, “I’d love to see you.”
Drummer Mic Adams takes greater prominence than previous records, with a roomier sound recorded in a converted Masonic Lodge. Slow-burners “Vapor” and “Vices” in particular benefit from his newfound intensity, his urgency lending more weight to Peppet’s vocals. The band’s approach to arrangements is most effective on highlight “Becoming a Nun,” where a complex beat complements Andrea Gutmann Fuentes’s violins and Jo Shaffer’s three-note bass line. The auxiliary musicians, mostly Cincinnati locals, also play an important role, whether it’s Kate Wakefield sending “Nun” spinning or Jake Kolesar’s ominous melodica over an affectionate, backmasked voicemail from Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad on “Mastermind.” There’s a feeling that anything can happen in a song, but nothing that would detract.
If anything detracts from that feeling, it’s the recording and mixing itself, which often undersells the band’s capabilities. The piercing cymbals and midrange-heavy violins tend to drown out Peppet’s soft spoken melodies. “Neil Young on High” borders on sensory overload with the addition of guest vocalist Julien Baker’s harmonies. To some extent, the production style lines up with the intention of revisiting their early music, but it’s at odds with Peppet and the band coming into their own at the record’s best. The chorus of the final song goes “I wanted to be the one that you would take home to your parents/You called me up at two a.m. when I had no other vices,” and especially after the self-loathing of “Sacrificial Lamb” (“At my best, I’m a second-rate plan”), that individuation from a toxic ex is a quiet, unassuming achievement. Forget becoming a nun, becoming a spirit, becoming respectable for somebody’s parents: There’s nothing like chucking those roles aside and presenting yourself as you are.
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. | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | September 29, 2021 | 7 | a3475bfd-13aa-4e34-8cbc-1c7fb13beab3 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The UK producer’s first EP for XL is a throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. After all these years, Burial’s still got the touch. | The UK producer’s first EP for XL is a throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. After all these years, Burial’s still got the touch. | Burial: Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burial-dreamfear-boy-sent-from-above-ep/ | Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above EP | Things we know Burial likes: video games and old-school rave; doleful R&B melodies twisted into strange new shapes; the warmly nostalgic sound of a needle plowing through a dusty groove. One thing he could take or leave, on the other hand: change.
That might sound counterintuitive. Since the ghostly UK garage of the Untrue era, Burial’s music has opened up to encompass trance chords, ’80s synth pop, anime soundtracks, Christian rock, and samples of British cultural touchstones like EastEnders and royal weddings. Following the beatless atmospheres of 2016’s “Nightmarket,” he has increasingly turned his hand to ambient music; his last two major releases, 2022’s Antidawn and Streetlands EPs, totaled 78 minutes of windswept atmospheres and eerie melancholy, abandoning dance music so completely that one wondered if he’d ever return. Yet no matter how he recalibrates his sound, Burial’s hallmarks—omnipresent vinyl crackle, melancholy synth pads, wistful spoken-word samples, and diegetic sound effects like crashing thunder and flicking lighters—remain so central that they make his stylistic shifts seem almost incidental.
After the minimalism of Antidawn and Streetlands, the new EP Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is maximalist in the extreme: a full-bore throwback to the early days of rave that folds together breakbeat hardcore, hip-house, techno, electro, and freestyle. The 26-minute two-tracker plays out like a pair of multipart suites—an epic night of raving distilled into two sides of vinyl. It’s not the first time he’s used that technique; many of his tracks, since at least 2013’s “Rival Dealer,” have carved a serpentine path through multiple tracks and fragments, with vinyl hiss and spectral samples holding it all together.
The time-stretched declaration that opens “Dreamfear”—“I am the high one/I am the lord of ecstasy,” lifted from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla—mimics the double-entendre drug references of rave’s golden era. Yet the voice of this dark lord is terrifying, a world away from the warm fuzzies that ecstasy’s proponents believe it inspires. Simon Reynolds has written at length about the period when, after a few years of heavy MDMA use in the UK, the drug’s rosy effects on nascent rave culture began to wear off, ushering in the mind-melting sounds of “darkside” hardcore and the jungle that would follow. “Dreamfear” plunges into that haunted history, pocked with riffs that scuttle like silvery insects in the gloom. The sound quality is thick and hissy, like a YouTube rip that’s been subjected to some occult enhancement. Parallel breakbeat juggernauts compete for attention, and every sound feels like it’s trying to save itself from asphyxiation.
Periodically the beats drop out, making way for moments of crackling near-silence interrupted by a murmured voice or shaken can of spray paint, but even with these pauses, the track is exhausting. As muscular as the grooves may be—in the peak-time tradition of many classic hardcore records on XL, the veteran UK label behind this EP—it feels more like a record about clubbing than for clubbing. Burial’s narrative instincts eclipse any interest in dancefloor functionality; he’s a storyteller who spins yarns partly with walloping sonics and partly with carefully selected vocal samples: “This love, like a drug”; “Only if you knew the things I’ve done”; “This is who I am”; “Once it gets inside of you it takes over the bloodstream”; “There was something else in the drugs.” One of the last sounds we hear is a low voice, digitally abraded almost to the point of unintelligibility, wheezing simply, “Death.”
“Boy Sent From Above” is sleeker and more hopeful, swapping the A-side’s pummeling breaks for the sidewinding syncopations of techno and electro. Like “Dreamfear,” this one wends through multiple tracks, like a clubber slipping from room to crowded room, but the bulk of its 13-minute running time is given over to a wistful freestyle synth arpeggio—in which you might hear an echo of Harold Faltermeyer’s theme to Beverly Hills Cop—paired with major-key chords stabs that glint like icicles in the sun. The mood is summed up by a plaintive scrap of a cappella that’s heard several times when the music pauses, joined by spray can rattle and ruminative synths: “We were running through the city/In the dark.” One of Burial’s chief fixations has long been nostalgia for a halcyon era of renegade freedom, and here, the image of a graffiti writer pining for wild youth feels like the epitome of the artist’s worldview.
Or is it becoming a shtick? It can be hard to say. If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.
But newness isn’t the point. Using not just the same tropes but even many of the same samples he’s used before, Burial seems to be pursuing his long-running project of world-building and self-mythology to increasingly hermetic ends, burrowing deeper into a state of déjà vu—as though if by recreating the memory from every possible angle, he could preserve it forever. Incidentally, it’s the more compelling track, “Dreamfear,” that pushes against the ease of nostalgia, even if it’s also harder to listen to. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above is that Burial sounds almost as though he’s arguing with himself—lingering contentedly in a memory one moment, looking frantically for a way out in the next. | 2024-02-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | XL | February 6, 2024 | 7.6 | a34a83f6-fd9d-49c5-ade1-3c857c348bb8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Second album from this Bay Area psychedelic pop duo-- which features Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson-- is an exercise in accessibility and concision. | Second album from this Bay Area psychedelic pop duo-- which features Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson-- is an exercise in accessibility and concision. | Moon Duo: Mazes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15245-mazes/ | Mazes | For artists from David Bowie to the Birthday Party to Liars, seeking refuge to record in Berlin has resulted in some very dark, very far-out releases. So when psychedelic pop twosome Moon Duo-- which features Wooden Shjips' Erik "Ripley" Johnson on guitar and fellow San Franciscan Sanae Yamada on keyboards-- decided to head to the German capital to craft their second proper full-length, Mazes, one could reasonably expect the results to be a bit tortured or mysterious. Where their noticeably toothy debut, Escape, often threatened to slip backwards into the scuzz-laden heavy-psych of a Wooden Shjips record, Mazes is an exercise in accessibility and concision, using familiar, melodic pop templates to support their drone and krautrock tendencies.
Mazes operates very simply, with Yamada setting up the repetitive, unexpectedly hooky keyboard patterns (usually using a variation of organ sounds) and Johnson, displaying some of his best guitar work to date, dropping monstrous, zoned-out sounds over her backdrops. While there are plenty of gnarly effects pedals being stomped all over Mazes, Johnson for the most part refrains from using his guitar to blanket these songs in trance-inducing washes of noise. Moon Duo are still able to achieve awing levels of depth here, but it's made more impressive considering how easy these songs are to follow. Where some of their output (and the same can be said about Wooden Shjips) is about getting lost in the fog, the band helpfully lays a trail of breadcrumbs.
This is also a much more consciously rhythm-focused album that its predecessor, and when songs fall flat ("Scars") it's usually because Moon Duo haven't taken the time to make sure the groove is properly locked in place. The one you'll hold on to tightest is "When You Cut", a deranged sock-hop that rains a torrential boogie on Mazes with such force that it threatens to wash everything else out. Yamada and Johnson work with such precision and symbiotic rigor, going ape over the handclap-filled drum programming, it's a mystery as to why Johnson keeps singing, "I feel the walls closing in on me." Instead, it feels as if the doors have been flung wide open. | 2011-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-03-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | March 25, 2011 | 7.5 | a34e7c85-fa4d-4fc8-9add-779a6e29f5ae | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The Memphis rapper’s posthumous album honors his legacy by spotlighting his unmatched charisma, technical prowess, and storytelling flair. | The Memphis rapper’s posthumous album honors his legacy by spotlighting his unmatched charisma, technical prowess, and storytelling flair. | Young Dolph: Paper Route Frank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-dolph-paper-route-frank/ | Paper Route Frank | Young Dolph’s straight-faced authenticity was his calling card. “Remember used to rap about weed/he didn’t sell pies,” Gucci Mane reminisced on his 2021 tribute to the Memphis-raised artist. In a genre of Scarface-like fairytales, only Dolph could be celebrated for something as innocuous as selling weed. He rapped constantly about his enemies and defying death, but his car was actually riddled with 100 bullets in 2017, and four years later, he was murdered during a shooting in his hometown at the age of 36. Like 2Pac’s Makaveli persona or Drakeo the Ruler, Dolph was brash, paranoid, and confrontational in his shit-talking, already clear-eyed about the inevitable consequences of being outspoken and targeted for it. And like the murders of 2Pac and Drakeo, another generational voice was forcefully silenced.
Paper Route Frank is the first posthumous Dolph album, one that honors an enormous legacy in the best way possible: by sounding precisely like a project Dolph would have made when he was alive. The songs here reflect not just Dolph’s unflinching tenacity, but everything else that made him special: his charisma, deadpan humor, technical prowess, vulnerability, and unflappable dedication to the rules of the streets. In short, Paper Route Frank is a reminder of what a complicated, singular star Dolph was.
Dolph also had one of the best ears for beats in the game, knowing exactly what type of production would support a voice as lead-heavy and nimble as his. Here, he makes light work of everything he touches. Standout “Woah” sounds like something Pimp C would have produced for early 2000s UGK, thick with syrupy bass and horror-movie piano lines. Dolph switches flows with flair, always sneaking in a dose of humor (“In high school, I had more money than everybody, includin’ the faculty!” he spits). Longtime collaborator BandPlay provides many of the strongest beats, particularly the sitar-centered firecracker “Uh Uh” and the blown-out, violin-heavy “That’s How.” The latter is an effortless collaboration with Dolph’s cousin Key Glock that echoes their fantastic collaborative tapes from 2019 and 2021.
The few collaborations are just as fitting: There’s no opportunistic tack-ons, only friends. In addition to Glock and a posse cut with two protégés, Paper Route Frank features Gucci Mane (“Roster”) and 2 Chainz (“Beep Beep”), both of whom turn in some of their most memorable guest verses in recent memory. Gucci, who recorded two separate collaborative projects with Dolph, is almost in hardened pre-prison form on “Roster,” rapping with determined menace, like he’s swimming upstream. The best verses still belong to Dolph. If the songs themselves sound somewhat like retreads of past material, his rapping does more than enough to keep them gripping. He tells a remarkable story of turning down a deal with Roc Nation, but still having $2 million dollars to pay Jay-Z for a verse on “Hall of Fame,” and reiterates his commitment to street codes on “Always,” leading, per usual, by example: “I look my plug in the eye,” he raps somberly, “Then I hand him the bag.”
Dolph was guided by fierce emotion; his love of family in particular was always on the flipside of his bombast, and was further proof of the realness Gucci and so many others so admired. “I had my lil’ boy, that shit changed my whole world/A couple of years later now here come my lil’ girl,” Dolph remembers on “Old Ways” with heartbreaking earnestness. It makes the details of his murder—he was shot while buying cookies for his mother at a bakery in Memphis—all the more crushing. The focus on the raw facts of his reality is the only way a posthumous album could do right by an artist as beloved, independent, and layered as Dolph: the trash talker and storyteller, the devoted father of two, the martyred spokesman for a city, and a movement all on his own. | 2023-01-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | January 5, 2023 | 7.6 | a3575778-c68f-405d-8d84-f10dab08daf6 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
Though it sometimes follows rags-to-riches templates a little too closely, the Texas rapper’s debut is a compelling blend of theater and technical intricacy. | Though it sometimes follows rags-to-riches templates a little too closely, the Texas rapper’s debut is a compelling blend of theater and technical intricacy. | BigXthaPlug: Amar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bigxthaplug-amar/ | Amar | With his viscous, authoritative baritone, impenetrable Southern drawl, and hard-earned street smarts, BigXthaPlug’s trap tales possess candy-painted Texas cool. Most importantly, the Dallas rapper is a dramatist. He taps into his inner playwright on “Dream,” a cut from his debut album Amar, where he documents the everyday misfortune he experienced when he couldn’t afford Popeyes. His granular details evoke the type of desperation you can taste: “Was so fucking broke couldn’t even buy me a biscuit/Couldn’t clear out my throat, ’cause the drink was $2.50.”
As heartfelt as it is hyper-specific, the song captures the best of Amar, a new project named after BigX’s son. While it’s sometimes stifled by repetition and lapses in imagination, the album stands as a compelling exercise in cinematic street rap. Over 13 tracks, BigX swerves through solemn R&B and soul samples, dismissive boasts, and lucid memories, letting loose percussive flows and tightly coiled rhyme schemes—the kind that can only come from a true technician. Like some of the best writers, he can be convincingly charming, poignant, or irate. Often, he’s all three at once.
On “Safehouse,” he slides across militaristic percussion and a foreboding piano loop, unloading menacing one-liners that would make Dirty Harry blush. Meanwhile, on “Bacc to the Basics,” he reflects on a trap survivor’s baser instincts before lamenting the roots of a fractured familial bond. With his penchant for piling writerly details and altering the velocity and intensity of his tonal inflections, BigX’s best songs bring an emotional immediacy that’s impossible to fake.
But between the death threats and daily struggles, he’s having fun here, too. On “Texas,” he coasts over Southern blues as he serves up a playful yet vivid glimpse at the sociology of his home state. It’s not as anthemic as Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” or Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris’ “Welcome to Atlanta,” but its easygoing sensibility reflects the parking lot pimpin’ of its inspiration. There’s a disarming warmth that makes you feel his sincere admiration for the place that raised him.
While BigX’s rhymes are usually sharp, sometimes, he inadvertently dulls them down by losing specificity. This renders some of his trench bars bland; they end up carrying the redundancy of countless other rags-to-riches platitudes, like the celebratory come-up of “Change.” (“Remember them days being a hood superstar/Now the whole city saying my name.”)
As his longest project yet—2020’s Bacc From the Dead and 2022’s Big Stepper were just six songs each—BigX sometimes struggles to carry the weight of the extra material. Some moments resemble generic versions of tracks other artists infused with more individuality, like “Thick,” which includes a drab hook that’s got all the originality of a Google search for “twerk song.” It’s even more glaring that Erica Banks, who’s featured on the track alongside Tay Money, already made a better rendition of the same thing last year.
There are some unexpected production flourishes here, but on the whole, Amar doesn’t do much to elevate the rapper it’s hosting. BigX is still figuring out how to help himself, too. Pairing a screenwriter’s knack for harnessing histrionics with a freestyler’s ability to stack intricate rhymes atop emphatic punchlines, he always knows how to deliver captivating individual verses. The next step is merging them with less predictable song structures and more memorable hooks (as is, they often feel like placeholders meant to bridge the gap between one verse and the next). But that’s fine; after all, he’s only dropped three projects. With his storytelling know-how and mic presence, BigXthaPlug is worth a re-up. | 2023-03-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | UnitedMasters | March 2, 2023 | 7 | a362c374-9735-47e2-9a05-49c7ee109295 | Peter A. Berry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-a. berry/ | |
Air France's No Way Down-- currently available either digitally or as a Swedish import-- conjures an idyllic world similar to the one on the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in sincerity and beauty. | Air France's No Way Down-- currently available either digitally or as a Swedish import-- conjures an idyllic world similar to the one on the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in sincerity and beauty. | Air France: No Way Down EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11933-no-way-down-ep/ | No Way Down EP | Gothenburg, located on the west coast of Sweden, averages highs in the upper 60s in June; in recent years, however, the city has produced some of the sunniest music in the world. Tropical rhythms and warm-weather themes color releases by Jens Lekman, the Tough Alliance, Studio, and the Embassy-- all of whom have recorded for Gothenburg-based label Service. TTA and Studio have since founded their own labels, each with its own cryptic website. Signed to TTA's Sincerely Yours, Air France invited listeners to their "Beach Party" with last year's too-good-to-be-true On Trade Winds EP. Air France's latest, the 23-minute No Way Down EP, is better.
The seaside disco of the Gothenburg groups shares many traits with the DJ-ing style named after the Balearic archipelago, off the coast of Spain. Dreamed up on the Balearic island of Ibiza by Argentina-born DJ Alfredo Fiorito in the mid-1980s and soon brought to London, the sound spanned laid-back, groove-oriented music ranging from conga-accented Italo disco and the iridescent proto-techno of Manuel Göttsching's classic E2-E4 to hypnotic indie rock by the Woodentops and offbeat selections from soft-rock, prog, and global pop music. As a DJ-centered art, Balearic house was inherently based on manipulations of other people's music.
Balearic is far from the only musical perspective that can unite an eclectic variety of records without regard to genre or historical context. As the KLF observed in their book The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way, "All records in the Top 10 (especially those that get to #1) have far more in common with each other than with whatever genre they have developed from or sprung out of." That's true from "Take Five" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit". What distinguishes the music of Air France and their Sincerely Yours colleagues from the more rock- and groove-oriented sounds of Studio or Norwegian cosmic disco DJs like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje is that they've taken to heart not only Balearic, but also the teachings of chart pop.
Air France use elements of both Balearic and pop to create their sumptuous, sincere fantasy world. In that respect, Air France's No Way Down-- currently import-only outside of Sweden except as 320 kbps mp3s-- is reminiscent of the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in silly stuff like truth, beauty, and fun, as well as Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala and the Tough Alliance's A New Chance. It imagines an impossibly idyllic place through sounds that probably could never have been performed that way in real life. Though it's been said, many times, many ways: Welcome to paradise.
Unlike Balearic disco contemporaries such as Studio or A Mountain of One, No Way Down does childlike joy, not hypnotized headiness. Typewriter-like clicks and John Williams-ready horn fanfares, complete with tympani, introduce the opener, "Maundy Thursday". This track soon settles into chilled-out synth washes and sober piano melodies, establishing a tone of sincerity without sacrificing lush outdoor beauty. The swooning string flourishes on finale "Windmill Wedding" aren't far off from the introduction to hip-hop producer Bangladesh's ubiqitous beat for Lil Wayne's "A Milli". Electric guitar and piano ripple across each other like waves, giving way to Spanish-tinged guitar, percussive human breaths, broken-up female vocals, church bells, and bird chirps. The coup de grâce: the whinnying of a horse. You can almost picture someone's gallant lover galloping across the surf.
Other tracks are more in the foamy wake of the group's breakout indie late-2006 track "Beach Party". "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" is gorgeously produced, stupidly catchy, and totally affecting, with an elegant dance groove and an infectious hook. The verses throw lyrics to the wind in favor of wildlife sounds, congas, and woodwinds, which bask in harp glissandos and Göttsching-esque guitar filigrees, plus some string and horn samples. "No more, no more, no more, no morals anymore/ Throw bottles, throw bottles, throw bottles at your door," a woman seems to be singing, followed by children's voices: "Sorta like a dream?" "No -- better." Nearly as perfect is "No Excuses", with handclaps and a yearning chorus: "No excuses left/ Waiting to fail, but not quite yet." It's like Saint Etienne for an endless summer.
As with many other gifted pop and Balearic artists, Air France also happen to be sticky-fingered. Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-existence. "Beach Party" lifted its hook from Lisa Stansfield. The No Way Down title track directly quotes the Happy Mondays. The melancholy intro that precedes Go! Team-esque horns and cheers on "June Evenings" is from late-1980s TV fantasy-romance "Beauty and the Beast", as are the children's voices on "Collapsing at Your Doorstep", describing both the show's fantastical underground world and the joy of being with someone you love. If No Way Down is about a place that doesn't exist, it's a place where fairy tales are true and where old pop culture ephemera can-- in Air France's fertile musical imagination, at least-- live happily ever after. | 2008-06-26T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-26T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sincerely Yours | June 26, 2008 | 8.6 | a3631832-5cf8-4a74-90bc-4b22e8f10ee1 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Emo hip-hop group displays a sense of hard-earned competency. | Emo hip-hop group displays a sense of hard-earned competency. | Atmosphere: You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/344-you-cant-imagine-how-much-fun-were-having/ | You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having | You can't imagine how much fun I wasn't having listening to this album. Atmosphere's MC, Slug, he of the tortured romantic life, intriguing racial politics (half-white, half-black), and "aw-shucks, he's rapping, wait, stop shouting" rhyme style, is getting boring fast. Let us count the ways: Reverential past-peddling. Degenerative flow. Lame Mohawk. Weak follow-up to the breakthrough album. All the ducks, lined up in a row.
At the risk of sounding like one of those kids who watches "The O.C.", Atmosphere was always for those moments when a woman ripped your heart out, then punched you in the neck. I won't say "the hip-hop Death Cab," but you get the picture. Nothing wrong with the raw sadness and fury Slug conjured, but you weren't exactly throwin' your sets up for Minneapolis' finest. I always put that Lucy Ford record underneath the M.O.P. album in the crate. So the abandonment of that form here, that "guilty pleasure," hurts my feelings. Mr. Heartache, where you at? In its place, I guess, is the sap of another tree: Nostalgia.
Nothing can illuminate the pomp and circumstance of You Can't Imagine better than this couplet from "Watch Out": "When I was younger, I wanted to be LL Cool J/ But then he started makin' records for the girls and shit/ So I ripped up the Kangol and threw it away." Uh, what? Forgetting that's just a wack rhyme for a moment, anyone who's been to an Atmosphere concert surely knows the kind of estrogen jam they can be. Even worse than the desertion, though, is that this record lacks any growth or good humor. Which is a shame because their previous album, Seven's Travels, while flawed, started to find a balance (wink) between the political leanings that have crept into Slug's raps with his wounded-puppy raps.
This is not to say the album's a mess. Like Blackalicious' recent The Craft, it displays a real hard-earned competency, something a decade of recording together will get you. But the lyrics lack transcendence or resonance. Conversely, producer Ant's production is full and springy. His growth has never been in question, exploding with complicated chops and orchestrations on every album. Whether flipping operettas on "Say Hey There" or dropping pianos from five floors up on "Musical Chairs" he's got sundry abilities. The songs here are melded beautifully, making the eventual instrumental wax a must-cop. In all honesty, I never understood why Ant wasn't lacing dudes like Freeway and Young Buck years ago. He could do it.
There are exceptions as the album moves, like "Angelface" which quivers with panging guitars and (gasp) a politically snarky jab at Uncle Sam, masked as the kind of love letter this dude used to kill something lovely five years ago. "Pour Me Another" oozes barfly grease. And "Little Man" is pretty and loopy. On it Slug says "I'm over 30, can't maintain relations/ All these women wanna hurt me/ And I just don't have the patience." This is not something you hear much on a rap record. It's refreshing. Of course, if you want to be a dick about it, Juelz Santana murdered the same sample used on "Little Man" on the first Diplomats album back in 2003 without sacrificing his diary entry. Pity.
On their fifth proper, the attempts to merge Slug's emotionally aware, sneering theatrics with the sort of nostalgia-4-cheap malarkey that passes for "conscious" hip-hop these days is a crashing failure. Like Edan and Little Brother's reminiscent melancholy from this year, listening to Slug disregard hip-hop's sonic development is like stuffing a chloroform-soaked Shelltoe in your mouth. Don't you know we rockin' Bapes these days, mang? | 2005-10-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-10-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | October 3, 2005 | 5.9 | a372aead-6b14-4262-95bb-d10b5997b05b | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
All but unknown in the US, the adventurous trio Syrinx was among the first groups to embrace the Moog. RVNG has reissued their two albums along with a stunning live document. | All but unknown in the US, the adventurous trio Syrinx was among the first groups to embrace the Moog. RVNG has reissued their two albums along with a stunning live document. | Syrinx: Tumblers From the Vault (1970–1972) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22462-tumblers-from-the-vault-19701972/ | Tumblers From The Vault (1970–1972) | On the same freezing February day in 1968, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani, and John Mills-Cockell all stopped by Robert Moog's studio to acquire his latest prototype, the Moog Modular synthesizer IIP. And with it, all three trail-blazed new paths for electronic music. Carlos went on to bring the strange synthesized sound into public consciousness with the epochal Switched-On Bach. Ciani went on to use her Moog and Buchla synthesizers in commercials, creating unimaginable sounds that slyly infiltrated the public's subconscious.
Mills-Cockell’s contribution to electronic music, though, was a bit harder to parse. That’s changed this year. The first person to have a Moog in Canada, Mills-Cockell used it to heighten the psychedelic weirdness of Intersystems, whose work was compiled earlier this year. A short-lived multimedia ensemble, Intersystems’ installations and be-ins melded abstract visuals, eerie spoken word and otherworldly electronics from Mills-Cockell in a manner that rivaled the sensory overload of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. (Mills-Cockell also provided synths for the likes of psych-pop outfit Kensington Market, Bruce Cockburn, and Anne Murray.)
Now comes a look at Mills-Cockell's adventurous trio Syrinx, which pitted his Moog against the drums and hand percussion of Alan Wells and the electric saxophone of Doug Pringle. Syrinx released only two albums in the early ’70s before disbanding. And while RVNG’s wont is to plunder and cull unreleased tapes, so singular are these two studio albums that with RVNG's handsome 3xLP set, the label reissued them intact, with a third disc given to unreleased takes and a stunning live document of the trio performing with the Toronto Repertory Ensemble. All but unknown in the US, Syrinx carved out a niche for themselves in Canada, sharing bills with the likes of Miles Davis and Ravi Shankar, while the brief cha-cha whirligig of “Tillicum” became the opening theme for a CTV Network documentary program, “Here Come the Seventies,” embedding its curious mélange of brass and circuitry into viewers’ ears.
If the small number of composers and academics who got their hands on the Moog synthesizer wound up defining the early electronic music cannon, even fewer of them integrated the unwieldy instrument in a band or pop music without being labeled a novelty act. Silver Apples and the United States of America might be Syrinx’s closest contemporaries, but there’s a nimbleness and grace to the group that gives the sense of the group dancing beyond the confines of genre. It’s there from their very first number, “Melina’s Torch,” which feels wistful rather than weird.
While electronics during this era were often deployed to mimic psychedelic mind states at their most intense and immersive, Mills-Cockell’s use of them instead suggests the contemplative comedown. There’s gentleness and elegance to numbers like “Journey Tree” and “Chant for Your Dragon King” that make for some of the most disarming experimental music of the era.
The buzzing sine waves snaking through the uptempo “Appaloosa-Pegasus” suggest that the band could also venture into stranger climes. By the time of 1971’s Long Lost Relatives, they had abandoned the pastoral airs of their debut for a more imposing sound. “Tumblers to the Vault” is an apt title, suggesting a precision and physical prowess you can hear in the songs: Mills-Cockell’s Moog is as luminescent as jumping jack firecrackers while Wells’ hand drums and shook bells do pinwheels around it, all of it capped by Pringle’s sax lines nailing perfect somersaults between the two.
The better part of Tumblers is given over to three versions of “December Angel,” a nearly ten-minute journey that appears in studio version, demo and live rendition with an orchestra. Weird squalls introduce the studio version, Mills-Cockell getting his Moog to chime like a celeste. The demo version of the song, on piano, lays bare the melody at the heart of the trio’s music. But the live performance might be the most surprising, with space that allows for violins and bells to swell and sparkle in the firmament. Midway through, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Syrinx wasn't a groundbreaking group using the newfangled Moog to make mutant pop, but rather forward-thinking scholars of Debussy. Beyond being merely Switched On, Syrinx envisioned where electronic music would go decades later, being a pliant thing that at once eluded and embraced other genres, making them into a singular, impressionistic sound. | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | October 31, 2016 | 8.2 | a3774ae0-d9a4-43db-8b52-54ee57caf886 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
After making a great album despite himself, the former Dr. Dre protégé has hardened his quirks into a likeably bizarre personal style and replicated the playfulness of his mixtapes on this, his sophomore LP. | After making a great album despite himself, the former Dr. Dre protégé has hardened his quirks into a likeably bizarre personal style and replicated the playfulness of his mixtapes on this, his sophomore LP. | The Game: Doctor's Advocate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9620-doctors-advocate/ | Doctor's Advocate | Game's been busy ever since he released his gazillion-selling debut The Documentary early last year. After a very public falling out with his G-Unit crew, he's waged an endless quixotic war against 50 Cent, hitting the mixtape circuit and unleashing torrent after torrent of deeply entertaining disses. He played an arm-slicing villain named Big Meat in the horrendous ghetto-action Tyrese vehicle Waist Deep. He got a butterfly tattooed on his face and then covered it up. He reportedly got engaged and then un-engaged. He launched a line of sneakers that I see prominently advertised every time I ride the subway, even though I've never actually seen anyone wearing them. He dropped former mentor Dr. Dre's name more times than anyone could count, even though, by all indications, Dre isn't even returning his phone calls. He got bounced around record labels like a virus. And he learned how to rap.
There were a lot of great things about The Documentary, but most of the time Game wasn't one of them. With all the album's glimmering, widescreen big-budget beats and nagging singsong 50 Cent hooks, the rapping grandma from "America's Got Talent" could've at least gone gold. A ton of money went into The Documentary, which turned out to be one of last year's best rap albums despite the guy who actually rapped on all the songs. Game had a gruff, clumsy cadence, and he obsessively namedropped every rapper he could think of; it was embarrassing. But on mixtape tracks like the 15-minute freestyle "300 Bars N Running", Game discovered how much fun it could be to play around with words. On The Doctor’s Advocate, Game mostly just updates the hamfisted style of the first record, still obsessively dropping names and making ill-advised proclamations about how he's the West Coast Rakim or whatever. But those quirks have hardened into a likeably bizarre personal style, and he's added some of the playfulness of his mixtapes. His constant self-mythologizing feels a little more convincing now that he can bring a certain vividness: "From the first clap I hurt rap; now watch the earth crack/ Bring the hearse back and take a lyrical dirtnap."
He's also found a much more interesting context for himself. On The Documentary, he was that new West Coast G-Unit guy. On The Doctor's Advocate, he's the guy who sold millions his first time out but still found himself abandoned by all the people who brought him into the world. And so he's become an army of one, a perennial underdog with a big mouth and a lot to prove. He makes contradictory claims all over the album, dissing 50 Cent and saying that he has no beef with him on the same song. The album, after all, is named after the guy who refused to have anything to do with it. On some songs, Game talks about how down he is with Dre: "The protégé of the D.R.E./ Take a picture with him and you gotta fuck me." On others, he casts himself as a victim of forces out of his control: "I was the Aftermath remedy till friends turned enemies." And on the title track, he's drunk and on the verge of tears: "Dre, I ain't mean to turn my back on you/ But I'm a man, and sometimes a man do what he gotta do." To make things even weirder, fellow Dre beneficiary Busta Rhymes shows up on the track to cosign Game's pleas for attention: "You gave him something that could make or break a nigga; you should face it/ So big I don't even think he was ready to embrace it." It's an expensively produced track from two star rappers, but it's apparently intended for an audience of one, and listening to it feels like eavesdropping.
To make matters even more complicated, the actual sonics of the album feel like a further entreaty to Dre. There might not be any Dr. Dre tracks on The Doctor's Advocate, but it sounds more like a late-period Dre album than The Documentary did. Game enlists Dre imitators like Scott Storch and Jonathan "JR" Rotem to steal Dre's chilly guitar plucks and screaming organs and smeary synths. On "Compton", the Black Eyed Peas' Will.I.Am., of all people, pulls off a great little simulacra of Dre's chunky, menacing N.W.A beats. Even the video for "Let's Ride" is basically a remake of "Nothin' But a G Thang".
The whole album is like that; Game airs out his dirty laundry and hopelessly tries to work out all his issues with rap and fame and failed relationships, and we try to figure out what the hell is wrong with him. "Why You Hate the Game", the epic nine-minute closing track, has a sparkling piano-heavy Just Blaze track and a guest appearance from an on-fire Nas ("Pro-black, I don't pick cotton out of aspirin bottles"), and Game ends it all on a note of unresolved ambivalence: "I still think about my nigga from time to time/ Make me wanna call 50 and let him know what's on my mind/ But I just held back cuz we ain't beefing like that/ He ain't Big and I ain't Pac and we just eating off rap." As rap music, The Doctor’s Advocate is good; as tangled psychodrama, it's better. | 2006-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Geffen | November 14, 2006 | 8.1 | a37762dc-f81e-4ed9-b5b1-0c4e9f95ecc5 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
A 1985 album from two Ivory Coast musicians explores the sounds of 1970s country and folk; it amounts to a joyful vision of a world without borders. | A 1985 album from two Ivory Coast musicians explores the sounds of 1970s country and folk; it amounts to a joyful vision of a world without borders. | Jess Sah Bi / Peter One: Our Garden Needs Its Flowers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jess-sah-bi-peter-one-our-garden-needs-its-flowers/ | Our Garden Needs Its Flowers | In 1985, Jess Sah Bi and Peter One’s debut album, Our Garden Needs Its Flowers, launched the two Ivory Coast musicians into regional stardom across greater West Africa. Like many recordings of its era and location, Our Garden eventually went out of print, available only to determined collectors and scavengers. Finally, reissue label Awesome Tapes From Africa has given Sah Bi and One’s folk masterpiece its first official re-release. Thirty-three years later, this unusual recording of Côte d’Ivoire country ballads still sounds like a work of pure joy.
There is an innate sense of travel in Our Garden; it is an album of journey music that gallops all the way from the Ivory Coast to the vast expanses of the American Southwest. In a way, Sah Bi and One’s bridging of musical genres and disparate continents foretold their own separate voyages to the United States: Today Peter works as a nurse in Nashville, while Jess teaches African music to children in San Francisco. Though Our Garden is heavily steeped in Americana, it retains sonic stamps of its original geography. Early song “Katin,” for instance, is more reminiscent of 1980s Afro-pop than it is 1970s country, and it is one of the record’s most buoyant offerings. Its muted scrapes of electric guitar and peppering of drum machine make for a cheerful rhythm that carries Sah Bi and One’s entwined vocals. Like most of the LP, “Katin” is sung in Gouro, a Mande language of the Ivory Coast; even without understanding that tongue, listeners will pick up on the music’s abundant bliss.
If songs like “Katin” and “Kango” successfully transmit a sense of celebration across language barriers, lullabies such as “Clipo Clipo” and the title track paint the album with rich scenery. The former glides to the pace of a slow-rolling car on a leisure cruise. Papery taps on tightly drawn drum skins hover overhead while Sah Bi and One’s harmonies sound like well-tuned, exquisite instruments of their own making. “Our Garden Needs Its Flowers,” meanwhile, is a steady amble through desert plains. Its rattling percussion sounds like spurs clicking across a dry stretch of earth, and a howling harmonica calls to mind Townes Van Zandt’s “Like a Summer Thursday.” Sung entirely in English, “Our Garden” is an entreaty for “peace on Earth,” using flowers as the metaphorical core of the song. It is a masterful rendition of languid country and western, brightened by Sah Bi and One’s synchronized, Simon & Garfunkel-like harmonies.
“Our Garden” isn’t the only song on the album that wraps political idealism in the silken fabric of Sah Bi and One’s vocals. The upbeat “Apartheid” calls for an end to the horrific racial segregation laws in South Africa, nine years before they were eventually abolished, while “African Chant,” and “Solution” (the latter sung in French) ponder notions of freedom and unity. Perhaps what’s most astonishing about Our Garden Needs Its Flowers is how well its songs have endured. The album has traveled a long way in the past three decades, and it arrives now like a delightful gift. | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Awesome Tapes From Africa | August 20, 2018 | 7.7 | a37f390b-7644-493d-8007-ac5bc40ef244 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Michigan electronic hip-hop producer returns to his best-known project after a decade-plus break. With Danny Brown, MF DOOM, and more. | The Michigan electronic hip-hop producer returns to his best-known project after a decade-plus break. With Danny Brown, MF DOOM, and more. | Dabrye: Three/Three | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dabrye-threethree/ | Three/Three | Tadd Mullinix wasn’t sure if he’d ever make another Dabrye record. A decade ago, after the deaths of his mother and his major inspiration and one-time collaborator J Dilla contributed to a feeling of writer’s block, the Ann Arbor producer put his electronic hip-hop project on ice. He didn’t quit music entirely—he’s since made leftfield techno, house, and jungle under aliases, and formed his own label, Bopside—but diehard fans of 2001’s One/Three and 2006’s Two/Three were left holding out hope for a follow-up. Now he’s delivered with this sprawling collection of 19 tracks, a notably looser and more organic listen than its predecessors.
In a world where dance beats have been thoroughly embraced by mainstream rappers and Jay Dee acolytes run labels and headline stadiums, the question that looms over Three/Three is whether Mullinix’s once-futuristic productions still sound innovative. “Never affected by new sellers,” gruff-voiced Stones Throw mainstay Guilty Simpson vows on opening track “Tunnel Vision,” an affirmation that could easily double as Dabrye’s own mission statement. Instead of bowing to current trends, he burrows further into gritty ’90s boom-bap and proto-electronic influences (you can hear traces of Daphne Oram, Mort Garson, and Morton Subotnick), weaving internationally-sourced samples into his intricately layered compositions.
Three/Three is stacked with features from Detroit area MCs (Danny Brown, Clear Soul Forces) and heavy-hitting veterans (MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah), but only a handful of his guests truly rise to the occasion. On “Pretty,” Los Angeles journeyman Jonwayne effortlessly delivers tongue-in-cheek punchlines overtop muffled horns and jazzy keys. Elsewhere, the eerie, Sunday morning cartoon-sampling “Lil Mufukuz” reunites the producer and DOOM, who gleefully schools SoundCloud stars and “snotty-nosed club rats.” Less successful are the relatively unknown trio of Kadence, Intricate Dialect, and Silas Green, whose clunky socio-political musings on “Culture Shuffle” will make listeners wish somebody had gotten Mullinix a landline to Jay Electronica instead.
What’s frustrating about the amount of mic time ceded to lesser talents over the record’s 57 minutes is that the producer clearly knows how to self-edit: Look no further than “Electrocutor,” his Motor City take on the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s experimental electronic scores from the ’60s and ’70s. Most vocalists would get bowled over by the track’s industral clangs and hard-driving percussion, but Dabrye knows better than to touch a sparking live wire.
The album’s highest peaks, directly contrasting the frequent hey-kids-get-off-my-lawn sentiments and cliché battle raps that bog down its second half, come courtesy of Mullinix’s collaborations with younger Michiganders. It’s not hard to hear his DNA in the music of artists like the jazz-trained producer Shigeto—especially on last year’s adventurous ZGTO project A Piece of the Geto with Bruiser Brigade rapper ZeelooperZ—and Brown, whose 2016 record Atrocity Exhibition fit in well with its labelmates on Warp Records. When the latter MC bats cleanup after Roc Marciano and Quelle Chris on “The Appetite,” his ecstatic yelps perfectly complement the song’s ominous, video-game-synth-loaded beat. Shigeto, meanwhile, shines on the languid, cut-up funk instrumental “Sunset,” which deftly juxtaposes shimmering piano loops with staticky Jamaican soundclash echoes.
In a recent interview with the Detroit Metro Times, the 39-year-old producer said that while he has no plans to retire the Dabrye moniker again, 2018 will also see the release of music under his new alias X-Altera. (The name is a reference to techno luminaries Robert Hood and Jeff Mills’ Underground Resistance projects X-102 and X-103.) Three/Three might be the conclusion of one trilogy, but its strongest ideas suggest that Mullinix’s next round of spinoffs will be well worth the price of admission. | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Ghostly International | February 27, 2018 | 7 | a386b170-af49-40fc-ab18-94399f801294 | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
Nigerian drummer's highly influential 1959 debut is remastered and packaged with its 1966 companion piece and well-chosen extras on this 2xCD reissue. | Nigerian drummer's highly influential 1959 debut is remastered and packaged with its 1966 companion piece and well-chosen extras on this 2xCD reissue. | Babatunde Olatunji: Drums of Passion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13258-drums-of-passion/ | Drums of Passion | Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji enjoyed a rich musical legacy during his lifetime. He is credited as being one of the first musicians to bring genuine African music to Western ears en masse, having burst on the scene in 1959 with his debut, Drums of Passion. It was the first known album of traditional West African drumming and chants to be recorded in the United States (Olatunji moved to Atlanta in 1950 before relocating permanently to New York City), and was released during a high tide of political and cultural change-- including appearing alongside epochal jazz recordings by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman. As listeners were exposed to different styles and the collective interest in world music and jazz continued to grow in popularity, Olatunji helped turn people's attention away from the corny melodies that dominated the exotica genre fad by offering authentic, captivating songs from his native homeland.
Six years after Olatunji's death at age 75, and 50 years after its original release, Drums of Passion has received the deluxe treatment as a beautifully packaged 2xCD containing its companion album More Drums of Passion (1966) and a well-chosen smattering of jazz-influenced bonus tracks, some of which were previously unreleased in the U.S. It also benefits from considerate remastering: the sound snaps with color, defining the rhythmic fabric with greater clarity while illuminating the integrity and magnetic intensity of Olatunji's arrangements. In some ways, the impact of this sonic resuscitation feels even more vital on a recording that is structured primarily by multiple tiers of voice and percussion, as the distinction between them were often tricky to capture, particularly in studios with comparatively limited equipment.
Olatunji frequently drafted a vivacious, disparate ensemble of musicians and vocalists to contribute to his recordings, and many of these people drifted in and out of the studio unknown and unaccredited. By its very nature, his music is designed to be performed by large groups-- it is this communal input that gives Drums of Passion its infectious vitality and relentlessly entertaining energy. The elated female and male chants on "Odun De! Odun De! (Happy New Year)" glide over a knot of polyrhythms, while the call and response vocals on "Baba Jinde (Flirtation Dance)" are injected with so many whoops and jeers that the song ends up sounding like a pack of copulating hyenas, pinned down by a surge of ecstatic Afro-Cuban rhythms.
"The spirit of the drum is something that you feel but cannot put your hands on," Olatunji once explained to an interviewer. "It does something to you from the inside out. It hits people in so many different ways, but the feeling is one that is satisfying and joyful." This zeal lay at the root of Olatunji's music, and is arguably felt more ferociously on Drums of Passion than any other of his many recordings. It may not be as immediately accessible as some of his later work, but in terms of improvisational liveliness and the sheer animation of his rhythmic phrasing and arrangements, it’s hard to beat. Over the last several decades, fans of world music have had access to a plethora of material from all over the globe. But it's worth retracing the steps to this virtuoso, who not only brought genuine West African music to popular attention but also influenced musicians such as Quincy Jones, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. Olatunji was a remarkable entertainer, whose impression on world music is as enjoyable and significant now as it was in the early 1960s. He has achieved a gold standard in music: Timelessness, and an ardor that does not simply simmer but glows fiercely, and joyfully, from within. | 2009-07-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-07-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Global | Sony | July 13, 2009 | 8.2 | a3897491-829b-441b-a8c4-2b11dc60033e | Pitchfork | null |
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On the Vein.fm side project’s full-length debut, these hardcore musicians melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of alt-rock classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants. | On the Vein.fm side project’s full-length debut, these hardcore musicians melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of alt-rock classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants. | Fleshwater: We’re Not Here to Be Loved | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fleshwater-were-not-here-to-be-loved/ | We’re Not Here to Be Loved | We’re suddenly in a world where every hardcore band can emulate the styles and sounds that only the most privileged of their 1990s forebears could afford: the Butch Vig crunch, the Ross Robinson bite, the Flood/Alan Moulder atmosphere. Former scrappy upstarts Turnstile and Code Orange have garnered Grammy nominations for their populist alt-rock and glitchy metalcore, respectively. And while Vein.fm maintain a caustic quality that excludes them from the heights of their former tourmates, their nü-metal-tinged sound has found an audience among DIY crowds that might’ve once disparaged that maligned genre’s flashy signifiers.
Less than two years after the Massachusetts group’s 2018 breakout, Errorzone, they unceremoniously dumped a demo by a side project called Fleshwater onto their social media accounts. Compared to their primary project, these three rough-hewn but impressive songs were sexier, more melodic, and choosier about flashing their hardcore credentials in service of brutal beatdowns. The methodical back half of Vein’s pandemic-delayed 2022 follow-up, This World Is Going to Ruin You, suggested spillover between the projects. But even after the Fleshwater demo and Vein’s recent album, the sleek beast that is We’re Not Here to Be Loved shatters expectations.
The demo definitely had songs—hooky, kinetic compositions that went far beyond snoozy “hardcore band goes shoegaze” stereotypes—but it lacked the crisp precision that the style demands. For We’re Not Here to Be Loved, the group enlisted Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou to record and mix. Fleshwater—which consists of Vein members Anthony DiDio, Jeremy Martin, and Matt Wood alongside singer/guitarist Marisa Shirar—prove themselves capable of mimicking eclectic ‘90s influences at a mile a minute. Paired with Ballou, they form a too-big-to-fail braintrust among a sea of likeminded hardcore castoffs.
Play a random five-second clip of We’re Not Here to Be Loved and you can spot the touchstones. Opener “Baldpate Driver” immediately shoves Hum and Deftones’ hi-sheen shoegaze down your throat. “The Razor’s Apple” is a mini-symphony of anthemic riffs that recall both Thrice and “Everlong.” The one demo holdover, “Linda Claire,” boasts a grungy strut that sounds impossible to play without a bass slung as low as Krist Novoselic’s. Every young rock band apes the ‘90s now. Yawn. Fleshwater melt down an entire CD binder’s worth of classics and sculpt an alternate timeline out of the pliable remnants.
With their basements-to-breakbeats trajectory, Vein have made it clear they are uninterested in the boundaries of bygone scenes. That mindset carries over to We’re Not Here to Be Loved, rendering it an alt-rock playground where rock-radio power chords leech momentum from squeals of feedback, blastbeats punctuate the half-time choruses, and a bold cover of Post’s “Enjoy” bolsters the theory that Björk could’ve been the queen of nü-metal, had she wanted to. The range of influences might be limited to a specific era, and Fleshwater are anything but “genre-mashers,” but they’re such exacting synthesists that their innate hardcore energy wrings new life out of these dated-but-trendy sounds.
Where other revivalists’ strengths come from carving a niche, Fleshwater’s execution is more quicksilver. Matt Wood, already one of hardcore’s most dizzying drummers, is their slithering backbone, guiding grooves that are thicker than Vein’s but constantly peppered with nimble flashes of his standard breakdowns and blastbeats. And while We’re Not Here to Be Loved doesn’t quite reach its influences’ big-budget collage of guitar tones, DiDio and Shirar explore the fertile territory between gnarled distortion and digitized glassiness with Ballou ensuring that all of it explodes out of the speakers.
If there’s one thing that sets the album apart, it’s the uninhibited vocal approach. DiDio is a solid supporting actor, his close-mic’d mumbles providing the moody songs with a necessary glumness, but he’s really here to complement Shirar. She flat-out goes for it in a way that’s rare among modern grunge and shoegaze bands. Try to imagine how the gripping first line of the song “Closet”—“I’m sorry for the things I can’t undo”—would sound with someone half-assedly moaning it. On the album’s most anthemic cuts, like “The Razor’s Apple” and “Kiss the Ladder,” she wails like Diary-era Jeremy Enigk, sharing the Sunny Day Real Estate frontman’s fondness for fragile, descending melodies and his ability to imbue them with pain and passion. On the songs where DiDio takes center stage, Shirar opts for more of a sun-coming-through-the-trees shoegaze keen, which she also nails, but Fleshwater are never more invigorating than when she’s in the spotlight.
We’re Not Here to Be Loved is a great reminder that ‘90s bands’ success usually had more to do with their frontperson than their producer. Now that the playing field between four-track recorders and million-dollar soundboards has been considerably leveled, the gap between contemporaries more often concerns charisma. With a deft ability to blend influences, a formidable roster of hardcore-trained musicians, and a singer who doesn’t fade into the background, Fleshwater bound ahead of their peers by making the familiar exciting again. | 2022-11-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Metal | Closed Casket Activities | November 16, 2022 | 7.5 | a38cfdad-b25e-4a73-8e4a-138bff63581d | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
On their spectral new album, the Oakland musician explores the promise of connection and the terror of the past. | On their spectral new album, the Oakland musician explores the promise of connection and the terror of the past. | Maria BC: Spike Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-bc-spike-field/ | Spike Field | Since the 1980s, teams of engineers, anthropologists, and other specialists assembled by the U.S. government have attempted to warn us about nuclear waste repositories. A field known as nuclear semiotics was developed around the challenge of relaying danger in the distant future when our existing modes of language might become obsolete. One proposed method was creating a “spike field,” or demarcating a hazard zone with giant, ominous granite prongs jutting from the ground at odd angles. This unshakeable image struck Maria BC, whose overcast music explores the complexities of human communication, the promise of connection and the terror of the past intruding.
On their second album, Spike Field, they balance raw beauty and digital destruction. They recorded it at a family friend’s home in San Francisco instead of their cramped Brooklyn apartment, and the album’s languid, widescreen sound reflects a newfound sense of space. Listening to Spike Field is a paranoia-inducing experience: all eerie ambience, punctuated with unexpected moments that are small but explosive. A melodic guitar line will reverse without warning, an acoustic squeak will jump from the mix, and an out-of-tune Steinway will dissolve into oblivion. Those glitches play like brain zaps, momentary electrical pulses that alert the senses even at the record’s most serene. There are moments of reprieve, like the fog lifting on the soaring chorus of “Mercury,” but it takes wading through the murk to get there.
What ties everything together is Maria BC’s mezzo-soprano, a lilting, trembling guide through the wreckage. After adopting a hushed tone in their early music to avoid disturbing their roommates, the classically trained singer gets to display their full range as they sort through old, unresolved memories. “Return to Sender” dwells on a lost connection with a friend who went through a psychotic episode; “Still” expresses an ambivalent relationship to a younger self. “You’re looking good now, double crossing every line still/In the blue light of my mind,” they sing. These are blurry snapshots that Maria BC explores by stretching out every detail to the edge of comprehension. On “Watcher,” they regret being a bystander to someone’s pain, chanting the words “I saw” as harmonies from Dear Laika and G. Brenner accentuate the angst.
In these songs, we hardly know the specifics; disembodied thoughts are charged with emotion but devoid of context. On “Haruspex,” Maria BC invokes an ancient Roman practice that involves inspecting the insides of sacrificial animals. “Is my body right?/A pound of flesh/A dime for the haruspex,” they sing. The impressionism of the lyrics precludes easy understanding, but the unsteady terrain is what makes Spike Field intoxicating. The tension between abstraction and emotional intensity comes to a head on “Tied,” a song that shifts from dissonant guitars to hopeful, major-key melodies with cello accompaniment from MIZU. Spike Field is a lonely record, but it demands close listening for the moments when the light breaks through. | 2023-10-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 26, 2023 | 7.8 | a398385c-1885-4358-898b-153110a39591 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Aesop Rock's second album on Rhymesayers and his first in several years is the most specific he has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling. | Aesop Rock's second album on Rhymesayers and his first in several years is the most specific he has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling. | Aesop Rock: The Impossible Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21687-the-impossible-kid/ | The Impossible Kid | Rakim once famously said he thinks of 16-bar verses as a grid and measures out exactly how many syllables can fit neatly within it. If this is true, then Aesop Rock’s grid must look like the cascading sea of glyphs from The *Matrix. *He has a wickedly extensive vocabulary, once deemed by a study to be the largest in rap, and he uses it to warp time and disrupt balance with phonetic pairings that sprout out unpredictably, an idea best articulated on the Busdriver collaboration "Ego Death": "I am ivy up the goddamn lattice/March to the math rock."
On "Rings," the single from his latest album *The Impossible Kid *and his second on indie rap mainstay Rhymesayers Entertainment, he eulogizes the visual art career he abandoned. "I left some years, a deer in the light/I left some will to spirit away/I let my fears materialize/I let my skills deteriorate," he raps, splitting all of the syllables on the back end. But he still is a visual artist in his way, coiling carefully articulated sentences into diagrams, each syllable a pixel in the frame of an image. He sketches in vibrant detail on Impossible Kid, balancing heavy verbiage with sharp clarity. This is what it sounds like when rap’s greatest wordsmith only uses the ones that count.
It's also the most specific Aesop Rock has ever been about what he’s thinking or feeling, and it borders at times on confessional. "Question: If I died in my apartment like a rat in a cage/Would the neighbors smell the corpse before the cat ate my face?/I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain/I’m trying to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste," he asks on "Dorks." That doesn’t mean he’s making it easy; his yarns are still sometimes purposefully written like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. But the album loosely outlines the series of events and strained relationships that led him to abandon San Francisco for the seclusion of a cabin in the woods.
"Get Out of the Car" is a poignant reflection on loss and grief that points to the death of close friend and rapper Camu Tao as the starting point for much of his anguish. "Ah watch the impossible kid, everything that he touch turns promptly to shit/If I zoom on out I can finally admit, it’s all been a blur since ‘Mu got sick," he raps before diving down a rabbit hole of depression, explaining his withdrawal in expertly articulated tidbits and snapshots ("Into the woods go his alien tongue/It was that or a textbook faking of funk, and I can’t"). Then there’s "Blood Sandwich," which casts his brothers in starring roles in two memorable vignettes: In the first, his younger brother plays in a Little League game interrupted by a wayward gopher, a rodent that suffers a bloody end at the hands of the enraged coach. The second is a remembrance of his older brother's teen angst at being denied the opportunity to go to a Ministry show, resulting in a suicide threat. Later on, he studies the actions of his cat on "Kirby" before psychoanalyzing their relationship and society’s larger relationship with the felines as a whole, which have been everything from gods to memes. Each one of these songs constructs little worlds out of simple ideas using dexterous lyricism.
But The Impossible Kid is measured by more than its virtuosity. The soundbeds of dizzying synth abstractions, ominous piano crawls, and slow-strutting garage rock samples, all provided by Aesop Rock himself, are monuments to his growing skills as a producer. He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple, like "Lotta Years," giving Aesop the room to set up dialogue. Then there are beats that are simply hard-hitting, like "Rabies" and "Water Tower," with slapping drums that seem traditional until they stagger. These all supplement his writing, which is as crisp and as fluid as it has ever been, bending breakbeats to the whims of his strung-out cadences. Aesop Rock has yet to run out of words. After nearly 20-years in the rap game, he is still finding new means of self-expression. | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | May 4, 2016 | 8.2 | a39a14cd-a33c-44a8-806d-6114de37e210 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Unearthing 11 lost recordings from the late ’90s, the Suicide co-founder’s newest posthumous release frames him as a doomsday prophet of the information age. | Unearthing 11 lost recordings from the late ’90s, the Suicide co-founder’s newest posthumous release frames him as a doomsday prophet of the information age. | Alan Vega: Insurrection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-vega-insurrection/ | Insurrection | Hell is real, Suicide often seemed to suggest, and it sounds like an anguished Elvis Presley gurgling for dear life, half-submerged in raucous, reverbed waters. For a good amount of his time on Earth, Alan Vega was drowning, too. Long before he was Suicide’s vocalist, he braved a bleak version of New York, sleeping on sidewalks and subsisting on one-dollar tuna sandwiches. He saw the potential of expression to pierce through his oft-barren reality—an itch that led him to the gallery, then the studio, then the No Wave circuit, then the nightmares of innocent concertgoers. (Come for the music, stay for the masochism: If you were lucky, the sharp object he used to slash his chest could have been your shattered wine glass!) As Alan Suicide, a short-lived moniker that preceded his musical career, he exhibited garish pile-ups of light bulbs and wires, like Rudolf Schwarzkogler pieces sans the corpse. The music he made as a solo act felt similar in effect: hazy hellscapes that combined styles like ’50s rockabilly and ’80s synth pop into concoctions that loomed in your head, often for reasons you couldn’t put a finger on.
In the years since, it’s become much easier to locate that finger—maybe because his stuff sounds so familiar in retrospect. There are lines to be drawn between Suicide and a number of successors, be it Crystal Castles or Death Grips, but those connections, particularly with Vega’s late-career work, are rooted more in approach than attitude. He was an ideas person, like most denizens of the information era, and decades before SoundCloud, or Kim Gordon avant-rap albums, or distortion-happy hip-hop underclassmen, he gave shape to the impulse to combine those ideas as loudly, and unforgivingly, as possible. That’s what makes Insurrection, his newest posthumous release, such a thrilling listen: Here’s this guy who grew up on Elvis and the Stooges slurring strange, ghastly aphorisms over headbusting drum loops and fighter-jet ASMR. Relentless as it can be, it also sounds like he was having a blast.
Since his death in 2016, Vega’s estate has bolstered a scattered catalog with more straightforward collections, their shared tumult less diluted by the happy-go-lucky attitude peppering his earliest efforts. Insurrection unearths 11 punishing, industrial lost recordings from the late ’90s, throwing his radiant vision and wretched reality into direct combat. More often than not, the reality is winning. There’s something both wrenching and invigorating about his gothic, moaned lamentations—“Oh, the angels bleed”; “Where is the light?”; “Oh, the words don’t exist”—on “Mercy,” a trench fight of a track with downbeats that blast like bombs. Vega was never so much a singer as a drawler; on songs like “Sewer” and “Murder One,” he’s rustling unnerving dictums, somewhere between streetside heckler and mythic doomsday prophet.
Should you need any further proof that doomsday is now, the music here—co-produced by Jared Artaud and his widow, Liz Lamere—is a mammoth, earth-shaking messenger. Listening to Insurrection feels like being trapped in an insurgent wasteland, where arson fires scorch corpse-ridden backstreets and police helicopters whir overhead, searchlights blazing. The gurgling Elvis of Suicide fame is present on “Crash,” except instead of doggy-paddling through a sea of reverb, he’s writhing beneath a heap of scrapyard metal—clipping drums, blaring static, single keys that detonate like a dystopian funeral dirge. The one time the background noise settles, and for just one moment you can clearly make out what he’s saying, it’s “Who should we kill?” “Fireballer Fever” rattles like a lawnmower that chewed up a thousand wah pedals and went rogue; Vega isn’t controlling the beast so much as running from it, wailing in anguished, breathless desperation. Again, it’s difficult to parse what he’s saying, but that’s beside the point. The point is that you’re in fucking Hell. Vega’s Inferno is loud, clamorous, and largely homogenous, but in a bludgeoning, performance-art way. It feels like the sort of immersive war exhibit you have to sign a waiver for.
Insurrection’s track titles invoke varying levels of death, torture, and superlative injustice: “Chains,” “Invasion,” “Cyanide Soul,” “Genocide.” Born into a brazen New York underworld, Vega spent his career taking evil, masticating it to its sonic rudiments, and spitting it back out, often directly in people’s faces. Half of experiencing his work is allowing yourself to suffer, to be under his control. This newest collection is an oppressive, nauseating roller-coaster ride. Once you get off, you’ll want to do it again. | 2024-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | In the Red | June 1, 2024 | 7.8 | a39f55dc-ea53-4b95-b046-9d7fdcf8ff2e | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
The European philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said, "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." It's high time hip-hop finally figured this out, too. | The European philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said, "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." It's high time hip-hop finally figured this out, too. | Run the Jewels: Meow The Jewels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21145-meow-the-jewels/ | Meow The Jewels | Cats are the Internet's favorite pets for many reasons, not least of which is their endless mystery. By some estimates, felines were first domesticated around 12,000 years ago—and yet, even now, we humans don't fully understand something as simple as their purr. There are theories. A purr can translate to contentment, sure, but it could also indicate hunger, or fright. Most intriguingly, those low rumbles may double as a healing mechanism for cats and people alike: purrs vibrate at frequencies between 20 and 140 hertz, which happens to be ideal for mending bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. If purrs do indeed have such powers, Run the Jewels' new cat-sampling remix album could very well be the most physically restorative record ever made—there are a lot of fucking purring sounds on this thing.
Before it became an IRL curio featuring the production talents of everyone from Prince Paul and Dan the Automator, to members of Portishead and Massive Attack, to hip-hop heavies Just Blaze and the Alchemist, Meow the Jewels was merely another LOLcat goof. In the runup to last year's Run the Jewels 2, El-P and Killer Mike decided to have a bit of fun with online feline culture as well as fan-gouging pre-order-package culture by offering to “re-record RTJ2 using nothing but cat sounds for music” for $40,000. Soon enough, modern crowdfunding mentality kicked in and a Kickstarter raised $66,000 to get the idea off the ground. The way in which this project lines up with the duo's paradoxical ethos, where they're able to spit the most cartoonish puff-chest bars alongside deadly serious tales of death and strife, can be observed in a recent El-P tweet: “did we make the silliest, occasionally most grating possible remix album? of course. and we did it for you, mike brown and eric garner.” (All profits made by the album will go to charity.)
It's easy, and not wholly inaccurate, to dismiss Meow the Jewels as a well-meaning wisecrack that went several steps too far. Even El-P himself told Deadspin, “I would never even insult the world by saying [the album is] 'good,' but it's certainly the high-water mark for cat-sound records, I think.” So while the way these remixers warp meows, hisses, scratches, yelps, and purrs into passable rap beats is impressive, only a few songs rise above the level of novelty. Part of this has to do with the fact that, you know, this is 42 minutes of rapping over cat sounds, but it's also hard to compete with El-P's original Earth-scorching production, perhaps his finest beatmaking in a career that has spanned two decades.
While some tracks unwisely try to replicate the source material's dystopian energy, the best moments come when remixers go blissfully off-script. Portishead's Geoff Barrow empties out the beat of “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)”, replacing it with a disorienting, subwoofer-shaking purr, a tiny cat-collar bell, and some stray yowling for good measure—it sounds like what “Grindin'”-era Neptunes may have done with this odd opportunity if given the chance. But best-in-show honors goes to frequent Grimes collaborator Blood Diamonds, whose featherlight beat for “All Due Respect” injects some appropriate, non-corny levity into the proceedings, which can otherwise feel weirdly dark.
But Meow the Jewels isn't really about music at all; instead, it's a major milestone in cats' slow-but-inevitable climb to the status of Hip-Hop's Favorite Animal. In the '90s, I grew up with Snoop Doggy Dogg (whose grace and ease in life and on record always seemed more cat-like anyway) and DMX espousing canine superiority. It was a particularly masculine—and perhaps, um, overcompensating—pose during an era of unparalleled hip-hop machismo. There was a sociological element to this: The use of snarling pitbulls as a way for underprivileged men to exhibit control while caught in an unjust system of power. But, for DMX at least, the obsession could also get strange and ugly—the rapper has been charged with dozens of counts of animal cruelty since his heyday.
This century, as hip-hop continues to grow up and expand its borders, the genre's once-strong walls—between mainstream and underground, masculine and feminine—continue to crumble into dust. Run the Jewels itself is a sterling example of this, a duo that could bury any given meathead rapper with outlandish tough talk while also out-smarting any indie-rap dork with vitriolic politics and heart. Meow the Jewels is the result of what happens when cats are afforded more respect and notoriety (largely thanks to umpteen YouTube videos) as hip-hop's subversive streak is allowed to flourish (largely thanks to umpteen YouTube videos). Paving the way to this moment were fellow rap rebels Lil B—the form's most committed rule-breaker—and his adopted tabby cat KeKe, who released a wild, purr-sampling track three years ago; Danny Brown and his beloved bengal Siren; and Tyler, the Creator's tendency to put cat heads on every shirt he can sell. Cats are fascinating in part because of their autonomy: They will most certainly lie down, but not on your command. This is the same independent spirit we desire in our artists. The European philosopher Albert Schweitzer once said, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” It's high time hip-hop figured this out, too. | 2015-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | October 2, 2015 | 7 | a3a2fbe4-d86a-4490-b251-bbc4596a384b | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Gold Panda’s Derwin Dicker adopts a new alias and a new sound, trading his typically lush, sampledelic style for clean-lined house music with a dry sense of humor. | Gold Panda’s Derwin Dicker adopts a new alias and a new sound, trading his typically lush, sampledelic style for clean-lined house music with a dry sense of humor. | DJ Jenifa: Jag Trax | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-jenifa-jag-trax/ | Jag Trax | You might not guess that the YMCA in Chelmsford, Essex, a commuter hub about 30 miles outside of London, is a hotbed of electronic music talent. It’s where town native Tom Jenkinson, aka Squarepusher, allegedly played his first show, in 1987, as a 12-year-old with his old band Sub Zero, according to an old bio quoted on the We Are the Music Makers forum. Years later, it’s also where Derwin Dicker, better known as Gold Panda, saw Squarepusher and Aphex Twin perform for about 50 people, even though he didn’t recognize the artists at the time. “They were both completely under camouflage in a DJ booth,” he recalled in a 2013 interview. “It was only later that I found out who they were.”
Chelmsford makes an appearance at the top of Jag Trax, a full-length Dicker surprise-released this month under his new alias DJ Jenifa. On album opener “Dresscode,” a male voice deadpans, “Chelmsford on a Saturday,” over a three-chord keyboard motif with sad-trombone blasts bent wildly out of shape. “White shirt. Blue jeans. Brown shoes,” he continues, as though he were Mike Skinner just getting started on yuppie brunch crowds.
The track reveals a smirking side of Dicker he hasn’t really shown before, except in interviews, unless you count him titling a track on 2011’s Companion “I Suppose I Should Say Thanks or Some Shit.” While Gold Panda owes as much to Four Tet’s warm, intricate electronics as J Dilla’s masterful sampling, “Dresscode” is closer to sardonic house productions like Santiago Salazar’s cool and cutting “Your Club Went Hollywood.” Opening Jag Trax with such a distinctive statement is meant to clearly separate Dicker’s main gig from his side hustle.
As Dan Snaith’s Daphni side project is to Caribou, DJ Jenifa is more club-oriented than Gold Panda. Jag Trax is a sleek and propulsive alternative to Dicker’s historically sample-stuffed style. The breathlessly hypnotic single “You,” off of 2010’s Lucky Shiner, cherry-picks elements from bargain-bin vinyl pressed in India, Mexico, and Japan, while 2013’s Half of Where You Live name-checks Brazil, Hong Kong, and the Japanese island Enoshima. Running these samples through his S950 and Akai MPC, Gold Panda conjures ecstatic, pan-global pinwheels of moods, tone colors, and textures. It’s dance music that can’t be traced to time or place.
DJ Jenifa’s genealogy is more self-evident. He pledges allegiance to Chicago house (“ES1A31Flora”), plays with the intersection of disco and garage (“Trainfilters2”), and serves up lush, hands-high rippers (“Whyileft122”). Still, he doesn’t attempt to fully camouflage who’s behind the moniker. The chiming cymbal taps and beguiling violin figures on “MLL” briefly tricked me into thinking my iTunes had shuffled to Gold Panda, and “Whocares808_7B” wouldn’t be out of place on 2016’s nostalgia collage Good Luck and Do Your Best.
Though the release seems casual and off-the-cuff—it’s a pay-what-you-wish download with track titles that read like file names—Jag Trax is focused and functional. Kick-and-clap workouts “Tuesday” and “TuesdaySTRINGSMIX” are dancefloor tools, for selectors by a selector. But it’s tough, if not impossible, to distinguish the Shazamable highlight of a DJ set on an album’s worth of serviceable house jams. It’s like a toolbox full of screwdrivers: No matter how many variations, or how pretty the candy-colored handles, they’re limited in their utility. Under the guise of DJ Jenifa, Dicker has sacrificed a little bit of the worldly, whimsical charm that makes Gold Panda’s sampledelic Shangri-La worth returning to. At least if you hear one of these tracks pumping out from the DJ booth, you can say you know who’s behind it. | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Derwin.FM | March 21, 2019 | 6.8 | a3a61ba4-21d8-4b99-9324-b2c70d0711e9 | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | |
Feigning coupledom, the two singers offer a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it. | Feigning coupledom, the two singers offer a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it. | Bobby Gillespie / Jehnny Beth: Utopian Ashes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobby-gillespie-jehnny-beth-utopian-ashes/ | Utopian Ashes | Utopian Ashes is not the most obvious record Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie and Savages belter Jehnny Beth could have made together. A cross between Primal Scream’s frothy, beat-driven psychedelia and Beth’s scorched-earth punk would have been their path of least resistance, and it’s easy to imagine how great it might have sounded. But instead the two opted for something higher risk, higher reward, and much higher concept: a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. It’s a side project in the truest sense, a departure from anything either has attempted with their primary bands.
Utopian Ashes gambles everything on its contrivance. Gillespie and Beth are not a couple, nor are either of them going through a divorce. But while history romanticizes divorce albums born of real-life decouplings—Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights—in truth many of the best breakup ballads were written by songwriters for hire who happily went home to their spouses at the end of the day. Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” wasn’t written about a real divorce, either, but that doesn’t diminish its impact any. Gillespie and Beth were so enamored of the form they had to invent a marriage just to kill it.
Indebted particularly to the soured-love duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, Utopian Ashes commits fully to its premise, flaunting the many ways that a sad song can be dressed up. On opener “Chase It Down,” it’s with disco strings and a wah-wah pedal right out of a Tom Jones record. For “Remember We Were Lovers,” it’s with bluesy Memphis horns, and on the Summer of Love-hued “Stones of Silence,” it’s with kaleidoscopic the Mama’s & The Papa’s vocal projections. Each arrangement is staged for maximum melodrama. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it.
Only once, on the wallowing “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” does the record get so caught up in its imagined misery that it becomes an actual buzzkill. Otherwise, Gillespie and Beth execute these songs with the tact of seasoned studio pros and the vigor of a couple crushing shared Righteous Brothers favorites at karaoke. Gillespie is fantastic; his pleading, ornately cracked voice tests every millimeter of his range. But Beth is the record’s real revelation. Removed from the brutalist intensity of Savages’ records, her wooly voice is tender but unyielding, all smoldering resolve. “You wonder why I never have sex with you anymore? Well, without trust, how can there be love?” she sings on the harp-swept “Living a Lie,” in a seething whisper that cuts just as deep as any howl on a Savages record.
It helps, of course, that they’ve got such strong songs to back them up. At its best, like on the rangy Sticky Fingers callback “Your Heart Will Always Be Broken,” Utopian Ashes sounds every bit as timeless as the classics it emulates. Of all the album’s feats, the most remarkable may be that it never feels like a gimmick. Gillespie and Beth have taken a concept that’s audacious on paper, even frankly unappealing, and they’ve made it soar.
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. | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | July 22, 2021 | 7.3 | a3a830ed-dd2d-4b33-9429-27fddcfa26a7 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Hunee, the South Korean-born, Berlin-based DJ gathers a dozen of his favorite dancefloor cuts from across the decades, surveying South African funk, Chicago house, and fusions galore. | Hunee, the South Korean-born, Berlin-based DJ gathers a dozen of his favorite dancefloor cuts from across the decades, surveying South African funk, Chicago house, and fusions galore. | Various Artists: Hunchin’ All Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-hunchin-all-night/ | Hunchin’ All Night | In 2012, the South Korean-born, Berlin-based DJ Hun Choi felt stuck in a rut as a dance-music producer. He put aside the tracks he had made under his Hunee alias to work for a technology startup. He relocated to Los Angeles the following year, thinking his DJ gigs would soon dry up and he would do something else with his life. “But I realized what I had built as a DJ and in music was more solid than I thought,” he has said. His Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 from last year is as eclectic and as seamless as they come, somehow finding the through line from Japanese new age to Argentine minimal wave, tingly Caribbean zouk to experimental techno. Anyone who makes it to one of Hunee’s sets can testify to his ability to find emotional resonance in the unfamiliar.
In that regard, Hunchin’ All Night, a collection of the DJ’s favorite dancefloor cuts from across the decades, has its work cut out for it by asking 12 standalone tracks to conjure the same magic as a wee-hours DJ set. But Hunee’s deft touch remains intact. He not only spans the globe and makes connections across eras; he also pays tribute to the masters of house and techno along the way, often using the music of Africa as conduit to connect all the dots. And he overlays his earthy grooves with many more ephemeral patterns and resonances as well.
Take the opener “Blu Terra,” by the Portuguese musicians Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro. Originally released in 1991, it’s a bittersweet blend of Indian tabla, Brazilian cuíca, hiccupping pan pipes, mbira, and wordless voices whose converging ethnic tonalities suggest a kind of utopia. That sensation reappears later in the set with Mappa Mundi’s ambient house classic “Trance Fusion,” recorded during the same era. This Belgian duo also conceives of an imaginary place, this one along the ethno-ambient axis, at a time when the Orb and Future Sound of London were just beginning to use electronic pulses to mimic tribal rhythms and to use samples to create surreal new topographies.
Maybe such selections speak to Hunee’s own background as an émigré from South Korea who grew up in Germany, spent time in the U.S. and now calls Amsterdam home. He gravitates toward the thundering Senegalese mbalax of Aby Ngana Diop, but in the form of a slow, chugging remix by Australia’s Michael Ozone, and he prefers mantra-like vocal hooks that add another rhythmic layer to each deep selection.
Hunee has a keen ear for African music. He unearths a South African funk track from the 1980s that anticipates Blood Orange’s heartbreaking boogie by a good 30 years, and he digs up a squiggly, disco-tinged highlife goodie from Ghanaian legend Pat Thomas. He even finds a thrilling 2016 track produced by Bill Laswell that matches an upbeat groove and group chant to the sawed melody of a Ethiopian masenqo.
But the set ultimately isn’t just a collection of African curios, as Hunee deftly switches to stomping electronic and crisp techno tracks in the blink of an eye. He burrows deep to come up with unexpected selections from some of the form’s greatest craftsmen, like Ron Trent, Larry Heard, and Kenny Larkin. Heard’s “Burning 4 You” is a mid-’90s rarity featuring vamping piano atop sampled voices and a deep-house groove. And with a Trent remix of Blak Beat Niks’ ludicrously rare Chicago house cut “Ritual of Love,” Hunee reveals a deeper truth about nightlife. “A dream brought into being, escape from entrapment,” intones a voice; it might be describing the religious experience to be found in the presence of the right DJ, one capable of transforming a night out into a ritual of love. | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Rush Hour | March 10, 2018 | 7.3 | a3aeedb3-1ca6-4097-adad-32bd51f5e8d6 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The boy band graduate remains desperate to remind you that he has sex, eager to insist that he smokes. His falsetto is beautiful, but he’s never sounded like this much of an amateur. | The boy band graduate remains desperate to remind you that he has sex, eager to insist that he smokes. His falsetto is beautiful, but he’s never sounded like this much of an amateur. | Zayn: Nobody Is Listening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zayn-nobody-is-listening/ | Nobody Is Listening | Amid the constant political turmoil that has shaken the foundations of American democracy, Zayn tweeted his phone number in an attempt to break the internet. Callers could listen to snippets of each track from the former One Direction star’s latest solo album, just long enough to hear him breathe the words “fucking on the windowsill” and launch into his falsetto. Moments after hanging up, a text would appear—“yoo, Zayn here!”—offering the singer’s alleged contact number and a promise to “stay in touch :-) x.” The gimmick revealed a larger gambit: that in the middle of… all this, fans will still leap at the illusion of proximity to a pop star.
This next iteration of Zayn’s music has no hour-and-a-half-long concept albums tenuously based in Greek mythology, no sweeping intermissions or inane opening statements. Nobody Is Listening begins with a wincing mumble of spoken word: “My brain lives with the cannabis/Can I resist the dark abyss/Leave a mark on this with no start, just exist,” he intones, punctuating the words with dramatic piano chords. He oscillates between brooding and breezy, different shades of the sound he’s strived for since he started recording on his own. He remains desperate to remind you that he has sex, eager to insist that he smokes—well-trodden themes in Zayn’s solo music. But he’s never sounded like this much of an amateur, the shimmer and sheen of his earlier music reduced to the rumpled nonchalance of another stoned guy who thinks he can rap.
Nobody Is Listening is a record born of the Justin Bieber school of R&B: blathering and diluted, a derivation of a derivation. “Hope I only leave good vibes on your living room floor,” Zayn croons over Starbucks-core guitar chords on “Better,” before floundering into a mangled O.J. Simpson metaphor: “Like it’s a crime on trial, I got acquitted/Me and you wasn’t meant, we wasn’t fitted,” he cries. “Like it’s a glove, I hated to admit it.” These are billed as confessional songs, supposed windows into his breakup and reunion with Gigi Hadid, but Zayn’s plodding self-seriousness contaminates any sense of closeness. He agonizes over whether to keep his dog after a split, wailing that “when I look at him, I think of you”; he marvels that his “connexion” with a lover can be “digital, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, but physical, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.”
The album’s most tolerable songs fixate on the physical, a pulsating goo of slow drums and reverbed descriptions of skin mashed against skin. “When Love’s Around” builds on a Views-era Drake beat that’s catchy enough to distract from the sound of Zayn moaning about his aura. “We are who we are when we’re alone,” he hums on “Tightrope,” between trickles of guitar and accounts of wrapping his legs around someone’s torso. His words slosh together on “Windowsill,” an indistinct slush of vowels over hazy synths and bass. Then the British rapper Devlin barrels in and punctures the song’s trance, sputtering about Satan and mimicking Zayn’s ridiculous phrases.
In 2015, months after Zayn became the first to leave One Direction, he told The Fader that he disdained the boy band’s music, that he would never listen to it at a party. “If I was sat at a dinner date with a girl, I would play some cool shit, you know what I mean?” he said. “I want to make music that I think is cool shit. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.” Nobody Is Listening makes a painstaking attempt to disguise an endless supply of sweat and sex and cigarettes as a love story. “Baby, this far from mediocre,” Zayn brags about his relationship on a song called “Vibez.” It’s yet another low bar he congratulates himself for clearing—knowing that no matter what he sings, legions of fans will listen.
Editor’s note: This review has been updated for clarity.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | January 20, 2021 | 5.6 | a3b00afd-3e56-4ca5-8546-e35f8151a6c4 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The rising Dominican star carries dembow into the mainstream on this mammoth double album, sanding down some of the grimy genre’s rough edges in the process. | The rising Dominican star carries dembow into the mainstream on this mammoth double album, sanding down some of the grimy genre’s rough edges in the process. | El Alfa: El Androide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/el-alfa-el-androide/ | El Androide | Urbano’s various genres and styles come from across the Americas: Latin trap was born in the U.S., reggaeton in Panama and Puerto Rico, champeta in Colombia, and baile funk in Brazil. Dembow is the Dominican Republic’s urbano export, but unlike the others, it has not yet had its mainstream moment. Amid the mainstream success of reggaeton and Latin trap, the rising Dominican artist El Alfa has remained steadfast, churning out dembow hits and becoming the go-to guest feature for other urbano artists looking to dabble in the genre. He’s also responsible for dembow’s highest-profile moment to date, the stunning trap/dembow/bachata megamix that was Bad Bunny’s “La Romana.” If anyone was poised to carry the dembow torch into the 2020s with a massive dembow album, it was him.
El Androide is not that record. El Alfa is still a dembowsero, but his latest LP is all over the sonic map, with romantic trap vibes (“Besalo,” “Enamore”), hints of Jamaican dancehall (“Un Dia Si,” “Singapur”), hip-hop en Español (“El Lobo de Wall Street”), Mexican folk and Colombian vallenato (“Chapon”), and even Detroit techno (“Tecnobow”). And even the dembow tracks have had their rougher edges sanded down with slick production, in stark contrast to the grittier nature of the genre’s underground roots.
At 20 tracks, El Androide is essentially a double LP, with the first half consisting of 11 new songs, and the second half cobbled together from previous releases, many of which can be found on last year’s Dembo$$ EP. It’s a somewhat cynical marketing ploy to boost streams of the album with established hits, but does offer the most complete snapshot of El Alfa’s output over the past year.
And that output has been mostly impressive. One of El Alfa’s—and Chael Produciendo’s, who produced much of El Androide—more impressive skills is a preternatural ability to sequence musical DNA, finding the common ancestry of different subgenres and mating them together to make something new and fresh. Beyond the trapbow, he recruits Yandel and Myke Towers for the line-blurring mashup “Dembow y Reggaeton,” and taps legendary cultural colonizer Diplo to tie the common threads between Detroit techno and dembow on “Tecnobow,” a track that effortlessly interweaves dembow’s machuqueo with a four-on-the-floor beat, lacing a Spanish dembow flow with analog electro textures. And it’s hard to pin a genre on the buoyant “A Correr los Lakers,” a goofy romp with mostly inconsequential lyrics that nonetheless sports an impossibly catchy hook and horn melody.
This is the way you “cross over” in 2020; not by releasing English-language milquetoast pop with Anglo superstars, but by using the global internet to assimilate sounds from around the world into your music and make them your own. It doesn’t always work—Lil Pump’s dogshit verse ruins the otherwise catchy “Coronao Now,” and the straightforward hip-hop beat on “El Lobo de Wall Street” makes for El Androide’s most tepid offering. And dembow purists will likely be disappointed that El Alfa didn’t drop a record with the nostalgic rawness of Bad Bunny’s Las Que No Iban a Salir. But he hasn’t completely abandoned the heads; they can take solace in the fact that he makes a concerted effort to give Dominicans a signal boost, especially those whose music never gained traction off the island. “Hablamos Nunca” is a stripped-down dembow cut that features two OGs (Kiko El Crazy and El Fother) who weren’t always down with dembow—a bellwether of the genre’s sea change. The entire beat consists of drums, a bass line, and what sounds like a truncated guitar sample—and of course, the trademark repetition that makes the genre so danceable. And “Jalapeño,” one of the grimiest songs on the record, features the duo Doble T y El Crok, who hit their zenith as teens as the first artists to bring dembow to the ubiquitous variety show Sabado Gigante, but could never quite match the success of their first hit “Pepe.”
If the expectation was for El Alfa to carry dembow into the mainstream, he most certainly has: El Androide debuted in the top 10 on Billboard’s Latin Albums chart. It might not look or sound exactly like the grimy old school jams that persisted in the underground while battling a classist and racist stigma on the island, but it pays homage to its roots in a different way—songs like “Singapur” and “Un Dia Si” draw directly from the Jamaican dancehall toolkit upon which dembow was originally formed. And most importantly, the beats still knock, and are sure to make even the most determined demagogos—the Dominican version of a “hater”—move their bodies. So even if his sound has veered from the streets, it’s aimed directly at the club, and is poised to dominate the dance floor. | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | El Jefe | May 30, 2020 | 7.4 | a3bb193f-339f-41fd-ac0b-5ee75ada7c3a | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s guitar duo collides with noise icon Aaron Dilloway’s inscrutable electronic methods, resulting in a thrilling mutation of all three artists’ signature sounds. | Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s guitar duo collides with noise icon Aaron Dilloway’s inscrutable electronic methods, resulting in a thrilling mutation of all three artists’ signature sounds. | Body/Dilloway/Head: Body/Dilloway/Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bodydillowayhead-bodydillowayhead/ | Body/Dilloway/Head | Open the gatefold of Aaron Dilloway’s 2012 album Modern Jester and the phrase “SHATTER ALL ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES'' is unmissable, its bold letters splayed in stark monochrome. Dilloway’s music abides by this chaotic imperative, ranging from warbled abstractions and barely-there tape hiss to crushing loops of found sound mangled beyond recognition. But he also acts as the fulcrum of a dynamic community of experimental musicians from the Midwest and beyond. His label Hanson has provided a platform for countless noisers, and he has released dozens of collaborative albums over the past two decades. Despite the hermetic impulse that drives his solo tape music, Dilloway is always drawing others into his surreal mirror world, where his collaborators’ artistic visions are splintered and reassembled in bewildering ways.
This is especially true of Body/Dilloway/Head, his first collaboration with Kim Gordon and Bill Nace’s guitar duo. The union makes a great degree of sense. All three musicians are some of the most accomplished improvisers in the American underground, and in the decade since Sonic Youth split, Body/Head’s three albums have masterfully deconstructed rock music by saturating it with negative space, much the way Dilloway has reimagined noise. But few could have predicted the way this collaboration seems to unravel their respective styles into a miasmic swirl with a black hole tugging at its center.
It’s unclear exactly how this music was made, but all clues (including a statement by Gordon insinuating as much) point to Dilloway being handed a grip of unreleased Body/Head tapes and feeding them through his various apparatuses and effects. Looped snippets of distorted guitar sputter alive and recede just as quickly, and the queasy sound of tape speeding up and slowing down is a dominant feature from the album’s opening to its final minutes. Still, it would be reductive to describe this as a Dilloway album with Gordon and Nace’s music as the source material. Their singular guitar tones, open chords ringing behind sheaths of distortion and delay, remain intact and are pushed dramatically to the fore at various points. And then there’s Gordon’s voice, its oracular drawl made even more mysterious as it is sliced up and reassembled into an inscrutable mosaic.
Music made primarily with magnetic tape has an inherent sense of time-shifting, which Dilloway tinkers with repeatedly. The more he lets entire sections of entwined guitar drift play out, allowing the listener to momentarily forget there’s an extra layer of manipulation at play, the more shocking are the moments of disruption. Are we listening to Body/Head ruminate on this strange riff, or is that one of Dilloway’s loops, generated long after their amps shut off? That ambiguity, as well as the startling passages where time seems to fold in on itself—or stop completely as the tape cuts out—is central to the disorienting nature of the album. We’re left constantly wondering if our ears are playing tricks on us or if, perhaps, our own playback device is malfunctioning.
The bleak negative space that extends across Dilloway’s and Body/Head’s discographies often manifests as quietness. Quietness is one of those magical qualities in music that draws you closer, inviting more attentive listening. The first five minutes of “Body/Erase,” which stretches over Body/Dilloway/Head’s entire A-side, consists of a low, droning hum that spits up soft crackles of noise, almost inaudible if you’re hearing it on speakers without much bass response. Each time I listen it pushes me to the edge of my seat, straining to hear every muted slip of magnetic tape against the head; only once it has my undivided attention does it coalesce into a cathartic mass of sound. This music is demanding—of your patience, of your attention, of your tolerance for cacophony—but the reward is a fascinatingly confounding journey through the fragmented mirror world.
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. | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-29T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Three Lobed | November 29, 2021 | 7.4 | a3bc453c-2332-4d57-8b72-58f040d619fd | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Max Richter's score for the narrative dance piece Woolf Works shows how the minimalist composer has become obsessed with storytelling in the later years of his career. | Max Richter's score for the narrative dance piece Woolf Works shows how the minimalist composer has become obsessed with storytelling in the later years of his career. | Max Richter: Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22783-three-worlds-music-from-woolf-works/ | Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works | Two years ago, the choreographer Wayne McGregor premiered “Woolf Works,” a narrative dance piece based on three Virginia Woolf novels (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves) at the Royal Opera House. He enlisted Max Richter to pen an original score for over two-hour, three-act affair. The production, by and large, was polarizing, eliciting high praise and violent rebuke. The New York Times singled out Richter’s score, which “frequently veer[ed] into cinematic manipulativeness.” It is hard not to read this an indictment of Richter, but in reality, it highlights how his score is able to stand apart from the piece it belongs to. Now available for the first time, a slightly truncated version of Richter’s score proves something he has been talking about quite a bit in the later years of his career: that his work is unified by an obsession with storytelling.
The score opens up with “Word,” the first movement in the first act (inspired by Mrs. Dalloway). The piece is composed of a chorus of bells, gongs, and sampled human bustling (the bell of Parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, traffic in Gordon Square). Seconds later, through the haze, the only known recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice plays. She reads a portion of the essay part of a BBC broadcast called “Words Fail Me,” waxing poetic on the ghostly nature of the English language (“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations”) and the impossible negotiation between private meaning and public discourse in prose writing. It is a stunning way to open the score, and gives credence to Richter’s invisible hand shaping the narrative of the dance.
After the introduction, the next three pieces cleave closer to convention. Apparently, much like Dalloway, the sounds are supposed to evoke the novel’s revolutionary focus on the “texture of the ordinary day,” and here, Richter takes that to mean something closer to rote string arrangements, where dips and dives are telegraphed like a routine ballroom dance. Some of it is quite beautiful, foregrounding his graceful piano playing. “War Anthem,” in particular, is quite similar to some of his earlier work, like “On the Nature of Daylight,” epic scale and all.
The more adventurous side of Richter is made more apparent in the dance’s second act, based on Orlando, Woolf’s most personal work. Inspired by the novel’s transformational conceit, (it tells a fictional biography of a 16th-century male poet who turns into a woman, and lives till the present day) he turned to the “La Folia,” a Portuguese folk dance so wild and noisy that it was associated with madness. Richter's singular ability to meld electronics into classical arrangements breathes life into this idea, and on pieces like the “The Explorers” or “Modular Astronomy,” he deploys electronics that are both silken and pointedly mechanical. He uses glitches, hiccups, and washes of noise to elevate pockets of lonely strings and keystrokes to heights of anachronistic beauty. Other works like “Entropy” recall the squeamish grace of Oneohtrix Point Never.
The score concludes with the sounds of waves lapping in the middle of the ocean, and Gillian Anderson’s voice floats into focus, giving dramatic reading of Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband Leonard. After almost 40 minutes of instrumental music, the introduction of an august British voice is startling. For a second, it can feel too on-the-nose (of course the section about The Waves has waves), and maybe even manipulative to use the letter to elicit an emotional response. But, as Anderson’s voice dissolves into the oceanic strings, the next 21 minutes build to a plaintive, melancholy peak. Richter said that his 8-hour piece Sleep was a much easier work than Woolf Works, and it shows; he was asked to make a musical world for three vastly different novels, united by an almost private language of symbols and themes. His goal with the score was to “evoke the experience of jumping between languages” in order to mimic what Woolf so often does in her writing. Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless. | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Deutsche Grammophon | January 30, 2017 | 7.4 | a3bc7925-3099-4782-beb4-93e9fb07f7fd | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Eight years after his last album and seven since the crowd-pleasing “New for U,” the Detroit house and hip-hop staple shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of soul, disco, and Latin music. | Eight years after his last album and seven since the crowd-pleasing “New for U,” the Detroit house and hip-hop staple shows off his encyclopedic knowledge of soul, disco, and Latin music. | Andrés: Andrés IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andres-andres-iv/ | Andrés IV | Kenny Dixon Jr. and the late James Yancey represent opposite ends of Detroit’s musical spectrum: The former, better known as Moodymann, makes murky house music; the latter is revered for the hip-hop productions he turned out under the aliases Jay Dee and J Dilla. But both native sons are branches of the same musical tree. Humberto Hernandez knows that nexus well. Working at Detroit’s legendary Buy Rite record store, he would play Jay Dee’s early beat tapes in the shop and dare co-worker Dixon to bust moves to them. Using the handle DJ Dez, Hernandez was the DJ for Yancey’s group Slum Village, but he also dropped soul-flecked house tracks as Andrés on Dixon’s labels KDJ and Mahogani Music.
Like his more revered peers, Hernandez is encyclopedic in his knowledge of the African American pop vernacular, be it obscure deep soul, smooth jazz, or roller-rink standards. Catch one of his sets and you can hear Andrés confidently traversing these genres and more at a dizzying clip. His previous albums were just as dynamic, spinning like a restless radio dial and never staying on one sound for long. Coming eight years after his last album, Andrés IV captures all of the above while catching him at a professional peak, coming off a run of singles that was among the decade’s most pleasurable.
Across the first four tracks, Andrés toggles between percolating Brazilian and Cuban grooves, ethereal vocal R&B, and soul jazz. On “Mighty Tribe,” he lifts snatches from Doug Carn’s jubilant “Mighty Mighty” and a Motown dancefloor classic, twines them together, and then sends them soaring. Hear him chop what might otherwise be a coherent phrase into seductive gibberish on “Truth Serum” and the lineage connecting him to both Dilla and Moodymann becomes clear: Andrés cuts through an otherwise familiar groove to find something tantalizing and novel in its depths. And on “Waist Deep,” the way he flips the overly familiar Parliament classic “(Not Just) Knee Deep” is akin to hiking a well-trodden path in a handstand.
In 2012, Andrés inaugurated his own La Vida label with “New for U,” an anthem built from little more than a gorgeous garland of Philly disco strings, one-note Rhodes throb, and a tough house kick drum. Simple and elemental, it would go on to become one of the decade’s most delectable dancefloor cuts, selling out multiple pressings and introducing Andrés to an audience well outside of Detroit. It’s included here, but to say that nothing else on the album approaches its heights would be unfair, since little from the last decade of dance music does. A live version of the song adds a few more wrinkles and Andrés’ own drumming, but it feels unnecessary.
He comes closest to matching the resplendent “New for U” with “Free,” a celebratory house number that rides an echoing gospel organ, tapped hi-hat, and buttery group harmonies. You can imagine it being a crowd-pleaser no matter the occasion: skate-rink birthday party, club night, or wedding reception. Later tracks veer into 132 BPM club fare (“Learn 2 Love”) and screwed-down hip-hop instrumentals (“Run Dat Shit”), highlighting his versatility more than his mood-building. But for most of IV, Hernandez makes clear that he’s a vital part of Detroit’s musical lineage. | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mahogani | December 10, 2019 | 7.6 | a3bcb602-6fdf-4c41-94da-7c5ac6582e03 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Chicago producer Jamal Moss has explored techno's outer limits for years, under various aliases. With his latest release as Hieroglyphic Being, he assembles a powerhouse group that includes Liturgy drummer Greg Fox and members of the Sun Ra Arkestra: Together, they travel to some truly interstellar reaches. | Chicago producer Jamal Moss has explored techno's outer limits for years, under various aliases. With his latest release as Hieroglyphic Being, he assembles a powerhouse group that includes Liturgy drummer Greg Fox and members of the Sun Ra Arkestra: Together, they travel to some truly interstellar reaches. | Hieroglyphic Being / J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Buhl: We Are Not the First | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21130-we-are-not-the-first/ | We Are Not the First | When it comes to techno's outer limits, there are dabblers, there are explorers, and then there's Hieroglyphic Being. Few have ventured further out than Jamal Moss, a Chicago producer and DJ who also records as the Sun God, I.B.M. (Insane Black Man), and under various permutations of his main alias, like Hieroglyphic Being and the Configurative or Modular Me Trio. Moss' roots lie in drum machines and synths and four-to-the-floor rhythms, but he's equally interested in Sun Ra's Afrofuturist flights of fancy, and his music has been getting more and more free-form in recent years. On We Are Not the First, a top-notch group of collaborators—the J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Bul (or the Journey Into The Unexpected Ensemble; Moss loves his wordplay)—help him travel to some truly outerstellar reaches.
Moss and his ensemble recorded the album during a week of sessions in New York, and while the lineup shifts slightly throughout, it consists mainly of Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen on saxophone and keys; Elliott Levin, a longtime member of Cecil Taylor's ensembles, on flute and saxophone; and Shahzad Ismaily, a member of Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog, on guitar. Ben Vida pitches in with modular synths on a few tracks, and Shelley Hirsch and Rafael Sanchez both contribute vocals—swooping, birdlike incantations and spoken-word, respectively. And then there's Greg Fox, the lightning-handed drummer for Liturgy, Zs, and Guardian Alien, who plays on eight of the album's 11 tracks, and whose contributions are the first indicator that we've left the limits of dance music far behind.
A few tracks still feature Moss' trademark drum-machine chug. "Cybernetics Is an Old Science", strafed by echo-soaked clatter, sounds a lot like the kind of techno that Moss has been producing for the past two decades, just slathered in a three-way duel of squealing saxophones and modular synth. On "Fuck the Ghetto / Think About Outer Space", Moss' loping toms and hi-hats provide the frame for Sanchez' exhortation to choose space over subjection, to think one's way out of the "ghetto of the mind." "Pussy Thumper" rides atop hypnotic, hi-hat-heavy programming that flits between an andante 100 BPM and a dizzying double-time tempo, depending on how you hear it. And on the strutting "Cimitière des Innocents", Fox restricts himself to filling in the space around Moss' programming while synth and reeds run circles around each other.
Elsewhere, though, Fox's liquid timekeeping sets the pace, and that's where the album really takes off. The title track is an 18-minute jam featuring Carter (flute, saxophone, trumpet), Ismaily (guitar), Vida (modular synth), and Fox along with Moss' synths and electronic drums. It is a pulsing, clanging din of chirp and squeal; it feels like eavesdropping upon a dozen conversations at once. The rhythm holds it together; it's chaotic, but it's also meditative, in the same way that being alone in a crowd can be meditative. For all its length, it doesn't really go anywhere; you just drop in and drift along, buoyed by its steady turbulence. We Are Not the First is an album deeply invested in the idea of evolution—of apes becoming upright and then heading offworld. But in its relationship to dance music as it's conventionally understood, the album is less an evolutionary step than a quantum leap into the unknown. | 2015-10-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | October 28, 2015 | 7.2 | a3c23d59-9131-4ce7-8576-ce14698549a1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The German minimal house producer returns for his first full-length since 2005's We Are Monster and his sound is as distinctive as ever. | The German minimal house producer returns for his first full-length since 2005's We Are Monster and his sound is as distinctive as ever. | Isolée: Well Spent Youth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15054-well-spent-youth/ | Well Spent Youth | Rajko Müller's unique gift as a producer is his sense of play. His best tracks are the sonic equivalent of page-turners, constantly making room for new sounds, melodies, and rhythmic half-thoughts, constantly in motion without ever sounding like they made a radical departure. When they work, it's in subtle ways: All their parts sound like they belong even when their entrances feel unexpected. Müller tends to stick to house music's basic pattern of one bass-drum thunk every beat and one snare every other, which is another reason it never seems like he's up to anything overtly unusual: There's always a simple rhythm to tie you down if the other ones-- the sneaky, evaporating ones-- don't. In between the beats are sweet, detuned melodies, computer wheezes, and flashes of dissonance. That his experiments don't always work makes me like him more-- it seems like he'd rather hear a track fall short than bend to the rules.
Müller's last full-length as Isolée, 2005's We Are Monster, sounded like a cluttered dollhouse, micro in scale but overflowing with ornaments. It's still an amazing album for listeners who'd prefer a parade of tiny surprises to a few skullcrushing ones, and probably my favorite piece of legitimate dance music to crossover to an indie audience in the past several years. Since then, he's released a few singles and EPs, and an early works collection called Western Store-- basically, a total of maybe nine or 10 new tracks over the past six years.
For people who've followed him-- through the "Albacares" single, "October"/"Nightingale", and "The Fantastic Researches of Yushin Maru"-- the feel of Well Spent Youth will be familiar. It's less cheerful than We Are Monster, still soft but more dissonant and evasive, and significantly more invested in that recurring fascination of contemporary techno, the squelchy noise.
Its most unusual tracks--"Going Nowhere" and "Transmission"-- are so littered with sound that they feel almost random, and while Müller manages to tie them together for a few seconds at a time, the coherence is mostly exciting because of these wild, slippery moments on either end where the music appears to come in and out of focus. He reprises melodic and rhythmic ideas, but to my ears the tracks themselves are never cyclical-- it's flux-music, and music that sounds better when you're willing to be patient with it than when you're not.
In other places, he lapses into moody, low-key house, and in a couple of instances-- "Thirteen Times an Hour" and "Taktell"-- revisits the bright slow-plays that marked We Are Monster. While this record doesn't feel as spirited as his last full-length, I think it's also a different album with different aims. I'd imagine Isolée fans who thought the pretty, toy-like tracks on We Are Monster bordered on twee will prefer the open-ended and more mysterious sound of Well Spent Youth.
The album is the first full-length on Pampa Records, a new label run by the prankish and wonderful DJ Koze (about whom I have a lot of nice things to say, almost all of which can be summed up in a "commercial" he recently made for the music tech company Native Instruments). The label that put out We Are Monster, Playhouse, is still around but has receded into a happy routine. At this point, Müller's music isn't really part of a conversation about the future of dance music. "Microhouse"-- what We Are Monster was classified as-- is an old-fashioned term.
And I doubt Müller cares. He's a venerated producer with a style that people can probably recognize but nobody can imitate well. Hearing him come off a fairly quiet six years with something that doesn't sound at all anxious about being an Isolée album is a show of confidence-- warranted, of course. | 2011-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Pampa | February 10, 2011 | 7.9 | a3c50e7c-f091-489a-870d-50ff717f0171 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
On his deeply expressive debut album, the electronic artist SW. refuses to adhere to any one style, covering atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass, deep house, lush techno-jazz, peak-time floor-fillers, and more. | On his deeply expressive debut album, the electronic artist SW. refuses to adhere to any one style, covering atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass, deep house, lush techno-jazz, peak-time floor-fillers, and more. | SW.: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sw-the-album/ | The Album | The artist known simply as SW. doesn’t really do titles. Most of his tracks don’t have them; neither do most of his records. His debut album is called The Album. This edition, via R&S Records’ ambient sub-label Apollo, is actually the reissue of an untitled 2x12” from late 2016 that fans tend to refer to by its catalog number, SUE015—SUED being the Berlin-based, vinyl-only record label where the spotlight-shy electronic musician releases most of his music. Most of SUED’s releases don’t have titles, in fact; tracks on the label tend toward identifiers like “Track 1” and “Track 2.” And SUED’s artists go by aliases that don’t even sound real: SW., SVN, XI, PG Sounds, Club No-No. The lone exception in SW.’s catalog is Reminder, a trio of EPs released between 2013 and 2015. The title is simple, he explained to Resident Advisor: It’s meant as a “reminder of the good things” that have come out of Detroit, Chicago, and the UK’s dance music scenes.
We can only guess at the reasons SW. is so tight-lipped, and what that might have to do with his particular style of electronic music, which is at once ecstatic and guarded: a distrust of flowery language, a delight in tripping up search engines, a desire to keep the focus on the sounds alone? Because his music is anything but generic. These aren’t identikit club tools, but deeply expressive machine jams that draw from the breadth of dance music’s history—particularly the mid and late 1990s, an often-overlooked period for which SW. displays a particular fondness.
Much like DJ Sports’ recent Modern Species, which covered similar territory, SW. refuses to restrict himself to any one style. The album’s 11 cuts cover atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass, deep house, lush techno-jazz, peak-time floor-fillers, and pure, pulsing ambient. A few of the record’s tracks are suffused in chirping birds and insects—a tantalizing bit of rainforest ambience that only contributes to the music’s humid, enveloping feel—and if temperatures run a few degrees hotter than usual, so do tempos. On the mellow end of things, tropical fantasias like “Untitled A2” and “Untitled B1” bubble along around 130 beats per minute, a generous clip by any standard. Full of brushed cymbals and snares, rippling hand percussion, and shimmering synths, they feel a little bit like drum-circle variants of Detroit techno and classic IDM. The bookending drum ‘n’ bass tunes are somewhere around the 140-BPM mark, and so is “Untitled D2,” a bone-shaking techno anthem that’s part “The Bells,” part broken beat.
But the lively way SW. sculpts his rhythms, with an emphasis on syncopated offbeats and glancing accents, means they rarely feel as fast as they are. With a few exceptions, the bass drum is seldom the center of attention. Even on the peak-time techno of “Untitled B3,” the four-to-the-floor kick drum only occasionally breaks through to the surface, leaving it to pumping chord stabs and supplementary percussion to carry the groove. It’s a small but significant detail that sets SW.’s music apart from the vast majority of club-oriented house and techno.
A few cuts never leave the chill-out room—another relic of ’90s dance culture that one suspects SW. would like to bring back. The half-speed “Untitled B2” recalls the moody downbeat of Urban Tribe’s The Collapse of Modern Culture, an oft-overlooked Detroit touchstone from 1998. The drum-free “Untitled C3,” all eddying arpeggios and swirling delay, is reminiscent of Vainqueur’s dub techno on the Chain Reaction label. And “Untitled C2,” one of the record’s understated highlights, evokes the spacey frequencies of Ken Ishii’s early-’90s ambient-techno records—also released, fittingly enough, on Apollo.
SW. has come a long way from the kind of music he was making five or six years ago. Where his contributions to SUE001 and SUE002 are dry, lo-fi drum tracks, The Album is rich, enveloping, and unusually dynamic. No brick walls here: Turn it up loud on a proper rig, and you’re treated to a dizzying array of detail, as drums and synths and samples tumble like a kaleidoscope’s transparent baubles. His tracks don’t develop much: Each one is essentially a long, wide plateau angled, at most, a few degrees upward. But drop the needle wherever you like, and no two points of any given song will sound quite the same. SW. and his SUED colleagues have a reputation for recording their music in free-form jam sessions, and you can hear the influence of that approach across this record: With filters and faders always in motion, the landscape is constantly shifting, yet you’re rarely made aware of any one musical event—say, a new sound entering the mix, or a particularly dominant melody line. Instead, you’re wrapped up in the totality of it all. Hypnotic and immersive, The Album is easy to get lost in. It’s a place that doesn’t require much in the way of words, because all of the essential signposts only point deeper into the music itself. | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Apollo | July 17, 2017 | 8 | a3cd58d8-373c-4f54-8520-308b9dbc5a22 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On these five mostly instrumental recordings from between 2000 and 2010, Sonic Youth dig in and stretch out. | On these five mostly instrumental recordings from between 2000 and 2010, Sonic Youth dig in and stretch out. | Sonic Youth: In/Out/In | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-inoutin/ | In/Out/In | “I want to tour with Phish,” declared Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore in 1998. “The kind of music we make is more in tune with their aesthetic than it is with any K-Rock or Geffen rock aesthetic. So it’s only fair to us, and to that audience. We deserve each other.” Fellow guitarist Lee Ranaldo later claimed that Moore “has probably never even heard Phish… Ninety percent of that is just him bullshitting.” But Moore had a point. Sonic Youth had always had a proclivity for long, improv-leaning songs, from their self-titled debut’s “The Good and the Bad” to EVOL’s “Xpressway to Yr Skull” to Washing Machine’s “Diamond Sea.” If there was any space for that kind of rock experimentation in the mainstream, it was what Moore called “the arena that the [Grateful] Dead created, and that Phish have bit into. We want in.”
Sonic Youth never really entered into that circuit, but the posthumous, nearly-all-instrumental In/Out/In shows the New York band to be spiritual kin with the post-Dead tradition that has held remarkably steady since the 1990s. Taken from various recordings made between 2000 and 2010, the five tracks here could be called “jams,” though Ranaldo (an avowed longtime Dead fan) recently demurred, preferring to label them “extrapolations.” That’s fair, since these sometimes repetitive, often solo-less pieces owe more to Glenn Branca’s forward-driving guitar symphonies than to the Dead’s spacier excursions.
Still, these songs revel in their freedom, and the first decade of the millennium was an especially free time for Sonic Youth. They settled into their Geffen contract, without much pressure to score hits; they owned a studio, Echo Canyon, built with Lollapalooza headliner money, so they could record anything they played; and they ran their own label, SYR, through which they could release music that might not fit on major-label albums. That all explains not only why the tracks on In/Out/In exist at all, but also why they sound so coherent together despite being recorded in different years, locations, and situations. Having room to explore—or simply just to do what they wanted—helped Sonic Youth deepen their distinctive sound.
Hence the floating, Kim Gordon-hummed “In & Out,” recorded in 2010 at a soundcheck in California and the band’s New Jersey studio, sounds like a dream version of the more nightmarish “Out & In,” recorded a decade earlier at Echo Canyon. (Both tracks appeared on Three Lobed’s 2010 compilation Not The Spaces You Know, But Between Them, for which I wrote liner notes.) In turn, “Machine,” an outtake from 2009’s The Eternal, plays like a condensed version of “Out & In,” with Ranaldo and Moore’s chopping chords punching through drummer Steve Shelley’s beats like they’re dodging traffic. In/Out/In’s best track is opener “Basement Contender,” an escalating journey that recalls prime Velvet Underground outtakes, and—no doubt because it was made at Moore and Gordon’s Massachusetts home—exudes a mood of happy playing with no goal other than to play happily.
In fact, much of In/Out/In’s charm comes from the feeling that you’re hanging out in Sonic Youth’s practice room, watching them improvise the day away. The band’s demise was surprising, leaving no chance for a farewell album or tour. Ranaldo and Shelley have diligently tended to their archives, and Shelley mentioned recently that there’s not much studio material left, so it’s possible that this will be their last non-live full-length. If so, it’s an apt one. Sonic Youth were always a very social band—supporting fellow musicians, self-releasing records with fans in mind, and generally making people feel part of an informal club that the four members provided a soundtrack for. In that sense, In/Out/In is as Sonic Youth as it gets. | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Three Lobed | March 24, 2022 | 8 | a3d0338c-525a-467e-9cff-7ec2fac4e808 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
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 UK duo’s second album, a groundbreaking avant-garde pop collage from the early years of the AIDS epidemic that grapples with the nature of death. | 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 UK duo’s second album, a groundbreaking avant-garde pop collage from the early years of the AIDS epidemic that grapples with the nature of death. | Coil: Horse Rotorvator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coil-horse-rotorvator/ | Horse Rotorvator | Pier Paolo Pasolini had reason to believe that he might be murdered. The gay Italian filmmaker and writer was a breathlessly outspoken critic of Catholicism and his country’s post-war economic boom, an undying champion of the impoverished teenagers and young people that Italy duped with dreams of capitalist abbondanza. He was also hounded by sexual scandals and the ire of political reactionaries. In 1975, weeks before the premiere of his antifascist epic of eroticism and abuse, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini was slain on the beach in the Roman district of Ostia. The assailant, a 17-year-old sex worker Pasolini solicited while he cruised town in his Alfa Romeo GT, used the sportscar to run over the 53-year-old after he crushed his testicles with a metal bar.
Pasolini’s 1959 novel, Una Vita Violenta, eerily foreshadowed these events: The book mentions Ostia and features scenes of adolescents who target horny older gay guys for violent robbery. His fellow director Michelangelo Antonioni called him “the victim of his own characters.” In fact, he was probably the victim of a political assassination carried out by a few goons and a scared, blackmailed kid. The trial was a circus; the culprit recanted his confession decades after he finished serving his sentence. Today, it’s widely acknowledged that Pasolini’s prolonged torture and slaughter were premeditated and motivated by grander aims.
Coil vocalist John Balance pointed toward the cosmic character of this homicide on “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” a highlight of his band’s second album, Horse Rotorvator. Balance fixated on the idea that Pasolini anticipated his own demise in his art: Had he come to terms with it, and might he even have wanted to die this way? The song came out in 1986, when AIDS was massacring Balance’s milieu, and he searched for ways to make heads or, more likely, tails of the carnage. “Killed to keep the world turning,” Balance sang in a world-weary croon that seemed to offer Pasolini up to the great churning gears of humankind as it plowed forth at all costs, like the rumbling rotavator of his record’s title.
Coil braid the track with field recordings that Balance’s musical and romantic partner, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, made at Chichén Itzá, an ancient Mayan city whose inhabitants ritually sacrificed their young. While Coil claimed to resent political music, an activist energy suffused their decision to openly mourn in a society intent on shrinking from disease. Splicing ancient custom and contemporary tragedy, “Ostia” feels like tears poured into civilization’s motor—if the dead were going to be used as fuel, then the grief of the living would give this reckless vehicle some really bad engine problems.
Coil avoided politics, but they were politicized anyway. Balance and Sleazy were perhaps the first queer couple in the wider world of pop to speak frankly about their sexual desires and fantasies. They exemplified candor during a hypocritical era when straight bands donned fetish hats, leather harnesses, and other flamboyant garb on stage, enjoying sexual ambiguity’s frisson, while even the period’s many successful gay male singers either sang love songs to the fairer sex or remained carnally evasive.
From the start, Coil were inspired by the thrill of rattling the establishment’s bars. Born to an academic family (his father, Sir Derman Christopherson, OBE, was a master at Magdalene College, Cambridge), Sleazy came to the United States in the early 1970s to study at SUNY Buffalo, an avant-garde haven. There, he became obsessed with Robert Mapplethorpe and produced a photographic portfolio of boys with ghastly injuries he fabricated himself. Legendary British design firm Hipgnosis hired him when he dropped out: The photos were well lit and, according to the firm’s co-founder Storm Thorgerson, he offered a “sexuality” and a “phallic,” “moody” quality that the company lacked. Sleazy was one of the first photographers to capture the Sex Pistols—Malcolm McLaren deemed his shoot, which took place in a public restroom, too disturbing and homoerotic.
As a designer of LP sleeves, Sleazy became a musical Zelig of the 20th century’s final quarter, sprinkling his poison fairy dust all over the business. He worked on some of the most striking album covers in rock history, such as Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Led Zeppelin’s Presence, and simultaneously all but invented industrial music as a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, a group so iconoclastic that even the punks found them offensive. Sleazy was among the earliest musicians to work with a sampler, which he designed and built with band member Chris Carter. It was during this ascendant phase of his career that he met 17-year-old Geoffrey Rushton.
Rushton, who would change his name to John Balance (and sometimes spell it Jhonn), was the son of a farmer in Nottinghamshire. In his book of collected interviews, Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil, writer Nick Soulsby cautions against trusting all of Balance’s childhood tales, but his background was clearly miles away from Christopherson’s. Balance was a troubled dreamer who developed a precocious diet of psychedelic drugs at a young age, purportedly taking mushrooms constantly, at school, from 11 to 18. Doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia and he spent time in a mental hospital. Though Sleazy never responded to any of Balance’s bountiful fanmail, they became romantically involved when the younger man was 19. Soon after, both joined the cultish collective Psychic TV with former Throbbing Gristle frontperson Genesis P-Orridge.
The relationship between Balance and Sleazy was one of complementary opposites. Balance, Sleazy’s junior by seven years, was a poetic lyricist and an intuitive musician, wielding a Chapman Stick like a wizard’s staff. Sleazy was a kitchen-sink alchemist, rigging a rudimentary Fairlight digital synth into a sequencer on the groundbreaking Horse Rotorvator. Both experimented with psychedelics and amphetamines while composing, but Balance always ventured farther out, using liquor to reel himself back from desolate, spaced-out mornings. Sleazy crafted their music videos, including the heartbreaking clip for their 1984 cover of “Tainted Love,” set in a man’s hospital room, which ends with a title card informing viewers that the song’s proceeds all went to the Terrence Higgins AIDS Trust—a charity that still goes strong today. The film was one of the first times the music industry made significant mention of the virus. Balance and Sleazy signaled the future of HIV activist art by using their dais to impart an agitprop message, and with a public donation of their own money, they also lit a beacon for concerned peers.
Sleazy was Coil’s anchor, and eventually seemed to play the role of Balance’s caretaker. More even-keeled than his significant other, he funded both their lives and their outré collaborations with his day job directing TV advertisements for global clients like Nike and Pan Am and music videos for mainstream acts, among them kindred spirits Nine Inch Nails and polar opposites Hanson.
Coil offered the two men common ground: a moonlit lair of sex and gloom, papered by woozy tape experiments, ordered by the lockstep beats of emergent dance music and thrumming with a deep mutual desire to upend social mores. Horse Rotorvator’s pummeling opener and single “The Anal Staircase,” like the band’s debut LP, Scatology, was banned in major retailers across their native United Kingdom because it references butt sex. The song contrasts erotic joy with found recordings of a little boy giggling and a backwards, pitch-shifted loop of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. This fricative soundscape elicits uncomfortable jolts of static electricity from individually gleeful elements. Coil sought out juxtapositions so sharp they sliced away pop surfaces and revealed queasy cores, hand-carved for queer listeners—just like their contemporary, the novelist Dennis Cooper. The Christmas fanfare on “Herald,” the drag show-style intro of “Circles of Mania,” and guest Marc Almond’s operatic backing vocals on “Slur” and “Who By Fire” are high camp when considered in their own right. Yet Horse Rotorvator paints a defiantly post-camp tableau by setting these qualities against solemn melodies and Balance’s theatrical sprechgesang. It’s as though the costume ball just ended and the attendees were all found dead on the dancefloor.
The album benefits from a New Order-sized budget and no pressure to produce hooks or hits: Their label, Some Bizarre, was famous for securing chart-climbers like Soft Cell and Cabaret Voltaire huge advances from major record companies after bankrolling the recording sessions themselves. Coil later accused the label of stealing the royalties from their early work, but Some Bizarre had both the sensibility and the capital to finance a weirdo outing like Horse Rotorvator.
These funds pay off spectacularly on the widescreen “Penetralia,” which also happens to be the album’s most direct interrogation of the nascent pandemic. “In the future you’ll learn that survival depends on how much, or how little, you leave to chance,” Balance intones, hardly audible underneath a tumult of programmed drums. He alludes to a “kiss that kills” and free-associates two devastating noun phrases in succession: “Funeral music” and “gay bar.” The song’s bruising percussion benefits from the brass whimpers of Stephen Thrower, who joined Coil in 1984 as more of a supercharger than a third wheel and kept powering the band until 1993. Thrower’s horn pulls krautrock into the age of Thatcher and Reagan, positioning “Penetralia” as a clamorous precursor of Radiohead’s “The National Anthem,” but desperate rather than disaffected.
Sandwiched between the stratospheric highs of “The Anal Staircase” and centerpiece “Penetralia” are a series of quieter tracks, a melange of field recordings and finespun orchestrations.“Babylero” is named for a 12-year-old child Coil met in Acapulco, who sings a snatch of a song by the Spanish group Los Payos, while the diaphanous strings on “Ostia” have unexpected echoes of George Martin. The organization of the disc’s first half mirrors the composition of many of the individual cuts. Layered, often thunderous beginnings part for delicate middle thirds, only to resume their march at the end.
The B-side disperses into electroacoustic experiments that leave us profoundly in the dark about what exactly we’re taking in: the timpani pulses of “Ravenous,” for example, or the reptilian bleats of closer “The First Five Minutes After Death,” which sound like some mystery creature you hear through the brush at night in a rainforest. The Leonard Cohen cover “Who by Fire” draws out a harsher depression beneath the original’s melancholy. Rattling off means of perishing in his Robert Wyatt-indebted deadpan, Balance highlights how Horse Rotorvator is an urgent speculation on the very phenomenon of dying, and the varied ways that cultures across the world tell this universal tale.
His concept culminates in “The Golden Section,” a spoken threnody that attempts to answer the enduring, often weaponized, question of whether the circumstances of death have any existential meaning. The song centers on anarchist thinker Peter Wilson’s writing about Rumi, as read by television personality Paul Vaughan. Was Coil acknowledging, by filtering a world-famous Sufi poet through the scrim of a British narrator, their lives of spiritual as well as narcotic tourism? “We are told that Azrael, Death,” Vaughan recites, “Appears to our spirit in a form determined by our beliefs, actions, and dispositions during life.” He describes how the “soul” is smitten by this so-called Angel of Death who “great prophets” witness in “corporeal form.” This notion—that the nature of a life determines its demise, which might arrive in the guise of a desirable person—feels like a potential rationalization for the cruelty of a lethal STI. Of course HIV is irrational and random, despite the traumatized suspicion among queer people, particularly those who lived through the ’80s and ’90s, that they will inevitably be punished by a higher power for their sexual transgressions.
Throughout their foreshortened lifetimes, the members of Coil received letters from AIDS sufferers and their caretakers, thanking them for making a record that attempted to address the isolation, doubt, fear, social rejection, and pain of their predicament. Meanwhile, Balance never stopped exploring death’s mysteries. Coil kept shape-shifting, from 1991’s acid-house flirtation Love’s Secret Domain to 1999’s ambient landmark Musick to Play in the Dark, and his lyrics sporadically settled on one specific method of dying: by falling. “Ostia” itself uses the image of a beach to connect Pasolini’s end to a friend who threw himself from the cliffs of the English seaside town of Dover. A 1992 non-album track, “Who’ll Fall,” features lyrics lifted from a voicemail message left by another friend. “One day, you know, you’re gonna fall,” the voice on Coil’s answering machine warns us. “Or I’m gonna fall, or something’s gonna happen.”
People who wish to moralize the lives of artists might consider these pals to be Azrael, signaling the finale of Balance’s mortal existence. He and Christopherson split up in the late ’90s, not as a musical duo, and certainly not as friends, but merely as lovers, concluding a romance that spanned nearly 20 years when the virus was all but a terminal sentence. As Balance’s lifelong bouts with alcoholism ballooned, he hooked up with a new boyfriend, the artist and Coil collaborator Ian Johnstone (1967-2015); meanwhile he and Christopherson continued to compose, record, and, somehow for the first time, tour as Coil. Sleazy was watching TV at Balance’s place in 2004 when Balance drunkenly plummeted from a 12-foot landing, only to die in the hospital after his ex-paramour and eternal buddy managed to get him help.
Sleazy subsequently moved to Thailand, where he completed some unfinished Coil recordings, kickstarted a Throbbing Gristle reunion, and immersed himself in a propulsive, dancey project, the Threshold HouseBoys Choir, inflected with the sounds of his new home. In 2008, two years before Christopherson died in his sleep, he made a video for “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini),” a song that continued to figure heavily into Coil’s mythology. The clip turns away from his late beloved’s uncanny fixations, toward another tragedy from the 1970s: the Khmer Rouge and their heinous reign over Cambodia, focusing in particular on the Tuol Sleng Interrogation Camp where children were often tortured and murdered, sometimes by guards who were themselves kids. A wizened Sleazy found an affection, perhaps enabled by the second act he was afforded in life, for the young who were imprinted with the awful understanding that they were vectors for death. It’s not your fault, he seems to comfort Pasolini’s accused killer, Balance, himself, and all of the queer and afflicted people who stumbled upon his art: You are not the operator at the helm of this evil world. | 2023-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Relativity | June 4, 2023 | 9.5 | a3d18c99-2622-4451-92d2-57b90af00081 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The-Dream crafted an absolutely exquisite album for his 2007 solo debut. It is a defining moment for the collision of rap and R&B and a pillar of technical songwriting and soulful expression. | The-Dream crafted an absolutely exquisite album for his 2007 solo debut. It is a defining moment for the collision of rap and R&B and a pillar of technical songwriting and soulful expression. | The-Dream: Love/Hate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dream-lovehate/ | Love/Hate | It was Terius Nash’s mother who taught him to feel music: Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, and Michael Jackson, of course—“Man in the Mirror” was the one he’d always come back to. Some fans had never considered MJ’s mortality until the day he died; but for Nash, that was exactly his appeal. “I’d completely seen all the stars, growing up, as human beings,” he remembered in a career retrospective last year, “and the first person I made human to me was Michael Jackson. If I would have ever seen him, I knew in my heart that I would treat him like a person.” Artists, to Nash, were not untouchable beings whose lives were confined to the stage or the screen; where would the soul fit in all that? It was not Michael’s death, but his mother’s—in 1992, when Nash was 15—which drove that point home. “That just kinda changes your idea about human beings an just living, period: and what you can touch, and what you can’t,” he said. “I’m never going to get her back, the same way we can never get Michael back... These are people.”
Nash had never really dreamed of being the star himself; he just wanted to write perfect songs. He did that best with Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, an already-established writer and producer Nash had met through his brother, Laney—a ’90s R&B veteran who’d worked closely with Babyface, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis. Laney had given Nash his first publishing deal in 2003 when Nash was 26 years old, but it was Tricky who taught him how to produce, how to use an MPC, how to do everything himself. Throughout the early 2000s, the two developed a signature style that, by the end of the decade, would dominate a significant chunk of pop radio.
Most music fans would consider “Umbrella” the essential work Nash (and Tricky) released in 2007, and through the lens of cultural relevance, they’d be right. The song redefined Rihanna as an icon in the making; it spent seven straight weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 (and ten on the UK Singles Chart), had the biggest debut in iTunes history, won a Grammy. All this from a prefab GarageBand loop—“Vintage Funk Kit 03,” which immediately implanted in Nash’s conscious a single word: “umbrella”—and some “ella”s and “ayy”s, “the most insidiously catchy string of nonsense syllables this side of a-wop-boppa-loo-bop, a-wop-bam-boom,” according to Blender’s 2007 “Song of the Year” designation. Those strangely endearing ad-libs would become the signature of Nash’s search-engine-optimized stage name that he would soon create: The-Dream.
The best thing about “Umbrella,” though, was that its commercial triumph finally gave Nash the freedom to develop his vision—start to finish—through a new outlet. He was tired of the process of shopping his songs around and creating strictly in the context of singles, so he met with L.A. Reid to float the idea of The-Dream as a solo artist. Two days later, Nash was signed to Def Jam; “Shawty Is a 10,” his debut single, was on the radio within a week, and, according to Nash, he’d completely written and recorded his first solo album Love/Hate in just nine days.
“Shawty Is a 10” is the polite name, but in spirit, Nash’s first single—and Love/Hate’s opening track—belongs wholly to its uncensored title, “Shawty Is Da Shit!” Perhaps Nash’s solo turn seemed like a quick post-“Umbrella” spotlight-grab; as if to preemptively squash that idea, the song immediately launches into a charmingly dorky Fabolous verse, with Nash merely providing a safety net of background “ayy”s. (These trademark ad-libs play different roles, depending on how Nash sings them: here, they come in punctuative little bursts—“eh, eh”—and screwed-down, stretched-out layers— “ayyyy!”—) Still, it’s a thorough introduction to Nash’s aesthetic: that plinky, two-note doo-wop piano and the sweet, approachable falsetto. His voice is by no means what you’d call “powerful” like R. Kelly’s; rather, it is a luxury vehicle for his purposefully replicable melodies to which most listeners could easily sing along.
But the most charming part of “Shawty Is Da Shit!”—and the most essentially “The-Dream”—is Nash’s built-in meta-commentary on his own writing process. The hopeless romantic’s answer to JAY-Z’s “No Hook,” Nash’s chorus goes the Magritte route: “Man, I don’t need no hook for this shit!/‘Cause shawty right there is the shit!” It’s my favorite recurring theme in Nash’s writing: these winking gestures that direct a song’s themes reflexively back towards the song itself. It’s a glimpse into Nash’s worldview, a dissolution of boundaries between life and art, where writing a melody is as intuitive as falling in love, and great sex is its own creative triumph. (Moments on Love/Hate remind me of a passage from Eve Babitz’s memoir Slow Days, Fast Company, where she invites a date to a notoriously vibey restaurant: “I thought that going there with Shawn with the rain outside would be an opportunity for high art, if you believe, as I do, that sex is art.”) And in that sense, songwriting isn’t something relegated to the background so that the entertainer might better entertain; to Nash, the presentation is glued to the process.
If Nash’s earliest musical influences were his mother’s soul and R&B records, by the mid-’90s he’d come to idolize Tupac and Biggie for their wit more than anything else. And he’d taken note when Jodeci’s lead songwriter, DeVante Swing, produced Pac’s “No More Pain”, a song that sounded nothing like New Jack Swing—it sounded gangster. Not that the second track “I Luv Your Girl” sounds particularly gangster, with its wispy finger-snap percussion and tender Rhodes chords. But it’s a song that captures, even in its delicate form, the essence of the rap in Nash’s hometown of Atlanta in 2007: an impressionist take on snap&B, straight out of Bankhead. And while the melodies on “I Luv Your Girl” sound angelic, Nash’s lyrics grow more out-of-pocket with every Patrón shot—and more hilarious too. “Part of me feels so bad, but (oo-oooh) not that bad!” he hums to himself as he strolls out of the club, hand-in-hand with your girl. On her birthday, no less.
There’s another seemingly simple line on “I Luv Your Girl” that gestures towards Nash’s broader convictions. Eyes locked with another man’s girlfriend from across the club, he exclaims, in half-rapped melodies: “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing.” You could read that as a straightforward reinforcement of Love/Hate’s blend of R&B and hip-hop, in form and attitude—a development that was still a few years ahead of the game, T-Pain aside. 2007, bear in mind, was a strange year for both genres, sandwiched between the mid-’00s run of hyper-regional ringtone rap breakthroughs and that retrospectively cringey late-00s phase of blog-era electro-pop hybrids (think “Low,” “Lollipop,” and one million Akon features). Like Timbaland or the Neptunes before him, Nash felt completely of this moment in spirit while standing apart from it in sound, coyly incorporating what was happening on the charts in a way that felt built to last—it took me a decade to hear the hints of Yung Joc in his “I Luv Your Girl” delivery.
However, using “influence” as a value metric—placing the focus not on the point of innovation, but the after-effects—can obscure what made the original work so special. In the case of this hugely influential album, it was not just the merging of classic R&B with Atlanta rap, but the way Nash did it—thoughtfully, with constant consideration towards what each form brought to the table. When he raps, it is to set a tone; the rapped third verse of “She Needs My Love” is a defensive squaring of his posture. When he sings, his voice is a piano, hitting notes with the perfect clarity of an idea brought precisely into reality.
In 2013, the Grammys introduced the Best Urban Contemporary Album category to the awards; it’s a purposely vague title, but it’s also a way to make room for records that follow in the wake of Love/Hate—records that sound like what modern R&B sounds like. Although, as Love/Hate’s influence has bled into the fabric of popular R&B, a bit of its thoughtfulness has been lost. “The gatekeepers now don’t know the difference between what R&B is and what rap is—that’s my disservice,” Nash has said. “Every night out the week can’t be fucking hip-hop night at every club.” And so “You might wanna rap, but she’ll make you sing” becomes more than just a fusionist manifesto: It is a testament to the distinct meanings behind both forms, corresponsive but never interchangeable. It may be thanks to Nash’s influence that today’s rap and R&B overlap to an indistinguishable degree.
But it might be Love/Hate’s sense of ambition, more than anything, that’s had the most profound effect on what R&B sounds like today. “I Luv Your Girl” kicks off a fully integrated five-song run—each song transitioning seamlessly into the next. These transitions were by no means afterthoughts; they’re a function of Nash’s writing process that forms a unified composite. As if to further delineate his songwriter résumé from his solo artist ambitions, The-Dream was here to bring you a full-on, carefully curated album experience. “I Luv Your Girl” fades into the sounds of dusk—evening crickets, stilettos clicking down a driveway, the engine rev of a little red Corvette—and we are launched into “Fast Car,” the most brazen Prince pastiche in Nash’s catalog to date. For Nash, creative influences are points of pride—something to honor, to wear on your sleeve: synthesized within his work is the quick wit of Atlanta rap, the heady sensuality of Prince, the melodic precision of MJ.
As “Fast Car” wanes into “Nikki,” its harmonies shift from euphoric to desperate; Love/Hate’s opening suite of fun, sexy bops has ended, and shit has gotten real. After three years of marriage, Nash left his wife Nivea, whose third album he’d executive produced; she filed for separation the day before Love/Hate’s release. On “Nikki” (another unsubtle Prince nod), Nash’s melodies slant downwards, the kick drums land with angsty thuds, and he is insistent that he’s totally over the breakup and has moved on. The tempestuous layers of sound suggest otherwise. “You’ve died in my heart, so g’on ’head and live in his arms,” he spits, hardened. “She Needs My Love” continues the icy mood, even in the bloom of new romance. Territorially defending his relationship against interlopers, the hook’s Jodeci-style vocal harmonies are scuzzed up by martial drums and synths covered in static, and Nash’s allegedly love-sprung lyrics land as paranoid. It’s a post-breakup song whether or not Nash intended it to be—a vulnerable document of navigating the world with your heart smashed.
The final piece of Love/Hate’s breathless five-song run might be the most essential. “Falsetto,” on paper, is a straightforward sex jam—simpler in composition than the dense songs that precede it. But it’s also the slyest example of Nash’s reflexive mode of songwriting, where love and sex and music blur indistinguishably. The song’s basic concept—that Nash’s stroke game can make his partner hit high notes—isn’t exactly groundbreaking creative territory. But the brilliance lies in the interplay between the lyrical themes, formal structure, and the way Nash delivers it all: his ability to make his girl hit a falsetto is as much a hook construct as it is a callback to his own vocal register, which he modulates on the fly to emulate a gently-exaggerated female tone, playing his own voice like an infinitely variable instrument. “It’s all over now, you can come back down, we can talk in this key right here,” he sings playfully on the outro in a satisfied lower register. Stuff like this could easily come off as deal-breakingly cheesy—as could “Luv Songs,” later on the album, an R. Kelly homage that presents its “sex as songwriting” concept with surprising grace. “Let me get that 808 (ayyy!), then a snare, then a kick, then a cymbal,” Nash coyly requests, mid-sex session, and as he does, those elements come stuttering into the track itself. He pulls it off wholeheartedly—a holistic celebration of passion.
Love/Hate’s intensity fades a bit for a pair of cute, crisp love songs, Atlanta-centric and pro-woman: “Playin’ in Her Hair,” a mid-tempo homie/lover/friend anthem that sounds like something Nash might write for Ciara, and “Purple Kisses,” which essentially goes: “You look bomb without makeup, but when you put that M.A.C. lipstick on…” The most fascinating part of Nash’s songwriting career has been his uncanny ability to write not just capably but empathetically from a woman’s perspective. He’s better at it than he is at writing songs for men (see: Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”; Mariah’s “H.A.T.E.U.”; Kelly Rowland’s “Dirty Laundry,” a song that relives, in painful detail, a physically abusive relationship.) It’s a perspective Nash didn’t know he was capable of until he started writing songs, but in retrospect, he knows where it came from. “My mother gave birth to me when she was 19,” Nash described. “All her friends, were there at the house, talking about women problems—with men, usually. But I was just previewed to a lot of conversations and a lot of sensitive points, from a woman’s standpoint.” But his desire to understand more fully how a woman might see the world goes beyond growing up surrounded by women. “I felt like I lost my best friend, in one way,” he said of losing his mother so young. “In another way, that was the love of my life.”
After 11 tracks of love, lust, and heartbreak, Love/Hate closes with a tribute to Nash’s late mother. “Mama” is not just a necessary element of Nash’s debut but the album’s emotional core. “This is an interpretation of what a mother tells her son—her only one,” Nash sings on the piano ballad’s intro, his voice aggressively modulated unlike anywhere else on the album, an effect that sounds like being choked by tears. (It’s just ahead of the 808s & Heartbreak curve, stylistically and spiritually.) He sings from the perspective of a mother to her child, echoing his own words with his human reverb: “Sometimes, this road will bear no signs of direction, so rely on your heart to lead the way.” This is the crux of his creative empathy, the driving force behind his songwriting ethos at large: through music, he is trying to remember his mother, to speak through her, to speak to her, in the language she first taught him.
In the voice of his mother, Nash tells himself: “You know that it will be okay. Don’t wander off.” And he tells her back, speaking as himself now, singing through tears: “I wanna let you know how I’ve been thinking of you. Always thinking of you.” And then: “If I could bring you back, I’d do it in a split second.” But in that moment, he already has. | 2018-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island Def Jam | January 21, 2018 | 9.1 | a3d6c190-215d-4547-8417-d57afe5d5ef2 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
Martin Gore of Depeche Mode's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair, and in its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward. To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts. | Martin Gore of Depeche Mode's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair, and in its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward. To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts. | MG: MG | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20410-mg/ | MG | The best bits on Depeche Mode's 2013 album Delta Machine were the intros. Once the songs got underway, the band mostly just went through the motions, dutifully recreating the same arena-ready hooks and overblown saints-and-sinners metaphors they've been dealing in for decades. But for a few sweet seconds before the bombast began, there was just the zap and gurgle of Martin Gore's synthesizers.
For anyone who heard the distant promise of a far different, more interesting record in those moments, you're in luck: Gore's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair. No guitars, no drums, no blues riffs, and, most important of all, no vocals—which means no tangled religious conceits, no BDSM analogies, no rhyming "soul" with "control." Gore has done solo records before—1989's Counterfeit EP and 2003's Counterfeit 2, both collections of synth-pop covers of songs by Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Vini Reilly, et al—and he's done instrumental electronic music in his duo VCMG, with his onetime bandmate Vince Clarke, later of Yazoo and now Erasure. But MG is something new. These are sketches rather than songs, and, unlike VCMG's visceral, sternum-punching, 10,000-watt techno throb, they're designed mostly to fade into the background.
Some tracks feature subtle beats, but for the most part this is ambient music the way Brian Eno envisioned it, as a kind of sonic wallpaper. That's no slight: the record's low stakes help make evident what it excels at, which is sound design—a careful sculpting of electricity and air. It feels less like fine art than exceptional craftsmanship, but that's OK; the world needs beautifully thrown pots as much as it needs Picassos.
A few tracks here began life as demos for Delta Machine; Gore finished MG in 2013, after the band finished touring. He recorded it in his home studio on, principally, a modular synthesizer system. Modular systems are something like the Legos of electronic music: Users build their own, custom synthesizers by patching together various devices into mazelike configurations, the functionality of which is often pretty fuzzy even to the person cabling them together. That unpredictability is important: it means that the process of wiring things together is largely inseparable from the process of composition. It is experimental in the most basic sense—Let's see what happens when we plug this into this—and that sense of curiosity is at the heart of MG. It sounds pretty much like what it is—someone alone in the studio at night, twisting knobs, feeling his way gingerly along the signal chain. In both its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward. To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts.
Gore has described the album as "kind of atmospheric and filmic," and he's right; it would be easy to imagine almost anything here working as a soundtrack cue. The average track length is around three minutes, just long enough for an idea to blossom and shrivel, like a flower in time-lapse. The gnarled arpeggios and general menace of tracks like "Spiral" and "Stealth" recall Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks, while elsewhere the album suggests a grittier, more minimalist answer to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' soundtrack to The Social Network. And it's impossible not to think of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis in the context of the album's most dramatic tracks. "Crowly", with its slow, stately melody, is a gleaming hovercraft of a tune, pretty clearly modeled after the Blade Runner soundtrack, and the closing track, "Blade", doesn't even try to hide its inspiration, as augmented chords dissolve into fizzy streamers.
For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety. "Pinking", which opens the album, is the lone track to feature something like vocals, in the form of the gauzy choral pads familiar from New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies. It's a wisp of a thing—just two-and-a-half minutes of harpsichord-like chimes and celestial sighs. It would be easy to imagine it as the basis of a Depeche Mode song, and who knows, it might have made a great one. But it's pretty much perfect as it is. Too much music is led astray by its creators' attempts to add more; the great beauty of MG is that at a certain point while he was plugging in cables and twisting knobs, Gore simply said, "Enough," and it was. | 2015-04-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | April 29, 2015 | 7.2 | a3e398eb-45a7-4365-979a-90f93d8bd01c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest. | The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest. | For Tracy Hyde: Hotel Insomnia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/for-tracy-hyde-hotel-insomnia/ | Hotel Insomnia | You could characterize the sound of For Tracy Hyde as cinematic, breathless, love-at-first-sight dream pop, with a seamless melding of influences from Shibuya-kei to shoegaze to grunge. But there’s something more difficult to describe at the heart of the young Tokyo band. Azusa Suga (alias Natsubot) serves as the band’s primary songwriter, lyricist, and guitarist, and his history colors the group’s latest record, Hotel Insomnia. Suga grew up in the States, and the specter of American suburbia lingers in the background of the record like a mirage. Previous albums Ethernity, New Young City, and he(r)art shimmered with nostalgia, but the collage of ’90s influences on Hotel Insomnia feels more connected to the past than ever before.
Beyond writing for and producing a large quantity of modern Japanese shoegaze—RAY, Dots, AprilBlue, and even pop artists like Niiyama Shiori—Suga’s hitmaking process has produced a decade of dense, captivating music under For Tracy Hyde. The band has built a reputation for twee jangle pop, but Hotel Insomnia leans further toward the grunge coarseness of bands like Catherine Wheel or Chapterhouse than the gauzier Pains of Being Pure at Heart. These influences lend a heavier, more opaque sound, partly ushered in by Ride’s Mark Gardener, who mastered the album. And in between Hotel Insomnia dense, exuberant wall-of-sound are interstitial spaces and things left unspoken. The characters never intersect at the right times; “Subway Station Revelation” breathes longing across a backdrop of an overstimulating, transitory subway station, while the love interest at the center of “Lungs” is defined by her namelessness. From the thoughtful whimsy of “Natalie” to the tremendous “Lungs” and “Estuary,” Hotel Insomnia has a restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest.
For Tracy Hyde’s ambitious, always nearly hour-long albums, have a tendency toward drifting in the third act. Here, the band’s focus unspools between “Friends,” its melody sweet but jejune and formulaic, and “House of Mirrors,” with an incongruous rapping section that marks it as the album’s most bizarre experiment. The longing, spirited vocals of Eureka, who joined the group in 2015, breathe life into tracks like “Estuary,” but she often capitulates to the instrumentals, like how her delivery melts too thinly into the chorus of “The First Time (Is the Last Time).” The record’s end, however, whirls back to life; “Milkshake” and “Subway Station Revelation” are among the best tracks of For Tracy Hyde’s career and standouts in modern shoegaze.
Other For Tracy Hyde releases were gorgeous concept records, coursing through cinematic stories; the otherworldly New Young City opens with a retro movie company jingle, and he(r)art’s cover is formatted like an enticing movie poster. After a decade of these narratives, however, Natsubot has grown tired of the band’s usual modus operandi, instead deciding to “create a playlist rather than a story” with Hotel Insomnia. But there’s no less effort put into For Tracy Hyde’s magic: Each song resides in its own world, individual and distinct both in image and sound. In Natsubot’s search for a world that no longer exists, these tracks race through hotel-hallway liminality—in mirrors, or the almost warm space someone once was. Its sound is dreamlike, but Hotel Insomnia feels clear and vivid. | 2023-01-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | P-Vine | January 5, 2023 | 7.6 | a3e8897a-d96a-47dd-baef-104b667dc6b3 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
Modern Baseball's Holy Ghost asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance—but demonstrates them as a band with an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience. | Modern Baseball's Holy Ghost asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance—but demonstrates them as a band with an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience. | Modern Baseball: Holy Ghost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21677-holy-ghost/ | Holy Ghost | Modern Baseball became a popular band writing songs about Facebook and Instagram and emulating the selective communication of those social media platforms: revealing personal minutiae without ever having to be vulnerable. Throughout 2012’s Sports and 2014's You’re Gonna Miss It All, Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens sang mostly about girls, social insecurity, and punk rock hypocrisy—nothing that the average person in their audience hadn’t experienced themselves.
Since then, Modern Baseball have unexpectedly evolved into an *important band. After canceling an Australian tour last fall, Lukens went to rehab and was diagnosed with manic depression, alcoholism, marijuana addiction, and cutting behavior, all of which was unsparingly detailed in their Tripping in the Dark *mini-doc. Every Modern Baseball interview in the time since has doubled as advocacy for destigmatizing mental illness and encouraging the seeking of medical treatment. They’re not alone: Along with Sorority Noise, the Word Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the Hotelier and basically any leader of emo’s 4th-wave, Modern Baseball demonstrate an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience in a genre still reduced to a “Sad as Fuck” T-shirt. Their extracurricular candor is a necessary complement to Holy Ghost, which asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance.
In the past, MoBo’s appeal often lied in how they looked like guys who came to their shows straight from a Drexel lecture hall, singing about things that happened to them just that day. On Holy Ghost, Ewald and Lukens admit that even a wholly unpretentious, image-free band like Modern Baseball might have to put on an act sometimes just to make it to the next gig. “The glare from our stupid, spineless words just whining, every fucking day/what do I really want to say?,” Ewald spews on “Note to Self,” one of the many road-weary tracks here. Throughout Holy Ghost, Lukens and Ewald mostly want to say “I miss you,” “I love you,” or, “I’m sorry.” But with their friends, family and Philly often hundreds of miles away, Modern Baseball either internalize or end up directing their anxieties at each other.
There was a point where it was unclear whether Modern Baseball would make it to Holy Ghost,* and the tension is audaciously presented in a Speakerboxxx/The Love Below-style split condensed into less than a half hour. Ewald is given the first six tracks, while the remaining five are Lukens’. Even up to last year’s excellent MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast EP featuring Modern Baseball, *new listeners could be forgiven thinking the band only had one singer. At this point, Ewald and Lukens seem like total inverses of each other.
*Holy Ghost *will inevitably take on a new life as its lyrics become status updates. All the zingers will be Ewald’s, but since his hooks are as densely worded and occasionally unwieldy as his verses, the shoutalongs come from Lukens. Ewald’s side builds towards “Everyday” and “Hiding,” the most compositionally complex and ornately arranged Modern Baseball songs to date. Lukens, meanwhile, claims he wrote all of his lyrics in the last three days of recording. His songs are urgent, frenzied and compact, with titles that read like inside jokes used as placeholders (“Breathing in Stereo,” “Coding These To Lukens," “Apple Cider, I Don’t Mind”).
The format serves each writer as an individual. While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs *Holy Ghost *of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness. Taken together, *Holy Ghost *feels inevitably unbalanced. Modern Baseball probably didn’t have much of a choice; shuffled in any way, it just becomes nonsensically disjointed.
The sequencing makes more sense upon hearing the closing “Just Another Face,” whose chorus alone more than makes up for any denied catharsis. Based on The Perfect Cast and their live Killers covers, an album full of this kind of bombastic arena-emo would be certainly welcome. It consolidates every improvement over You’re Gonna Miss It All: Ewald’s compositional ambition and patience, Lukens’ newly theatrical high range and for both, a desire to recognize the bittersweet way in which the relationship between them and their audience has changed.
The self-pity of the verses are simply and petulantly worded to recall MoBo’s earlier phase and Lukens’ real rock bottom (“I’m a waste of time and space,” “entering a well-known phase, I scream ‘get lost, I hate everything’”). A number of people might be the voice talking to Lukens during the unabashedly uplifting chorus. Perhaps it’s his family, or Cam Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman Lukens credits with pushing him to seek help. Maybe it’s a girlfriend, as the title references a lyric from the first song Lukens ever wrote ("How Do I Tell a Girl I Want to Kiss Her," naturally). It could be the other members of Modern Baseball, who Lukens claims “saved my life.” Earlier on "Note to Self," Ewald hoped to build “something that cannot leave the ground/unless we lift it up together,” and Holy Ghost makes good on that desire: Every performance of "Just Another Face" will end with Modern Baseball and their audience yelling at each other, “I’ll be with you the whole way.” | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 16, 2016 | 7.7 | a3e9fd6a-98e5-405b-8cd4-032762dba71e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Malian singer/songwriter returns with another album produced by John Parish. The music is an intimate and minimalistic mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences, and Devendra Banhart guests. | The Malian singer/songwriter returns with another album produced by John Parish. The music is an intimate and minimalistic mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences, and Devendra Banhart guests. | Rokia Traoré: Né So | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21556-ne-so/ | Né So | “Né So” means “home” in Bambara, Mali’s primary lingua franca. The album, Rokia Traoré’s sixth in a career spanning almost two decades, hangs loosely around that same theme. The concept of home has long been fluid for the Malian singer/songwriter, who grew up traveling the world with her diplomat father and who today splits her time between Bamako, Brussels, and Marseille. Before that, not long after the Mali conflict erupted in 2012, she relocated temporarily to Paris but continued to grapple with personal difficulties that had pushed her to consider quitting music. As a result, on Né So, home encompasses the personal and the political, from refuge and nostalgia, to love and freedom.
Né So opens with a benediction. On “Tu voles” (“You fly”), Rokia Traoré sings in French, “You fly/ From every hurt/ You release yourself/ And you swim through the air/ You fly…” Her raspy, quavering voice floats untethered over a spritely reggae guitar and lilting blues figures. By all accounts, she’s trying to sing you, and herself, to a freer place, where, “Body and soul are aligned” and “You glimpse your ideal.”
Working with producer/musician John Parish (PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Eels), who also produced her last album Beautiful Africa, Rokia keeps Né So intimate and minimalistic. Her music is, as ever, mainly a mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences. But this time around, she sounds tired, even as she doubles down on giving moral lessons throughout. On “Ile,” Rokia sings in Bambara over lithe Afrobeat guitars and a drum kit imitating calebasse rhythms: “You there/ Why inflict on others what would be woe for yourself?/ I don’t like violence.” And on “Kolokani,” she sings a soft lullaby reminiscing about her hometown of the same name while paying her respects: “Those who stayed at the source give meaning to our past.”
Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another. “Kenia” is the most dynamic track on the record vocally, as Rokia switches her airier singing style in for a more strident Wassoulou-esque sound à la Oumou Sangaré or Fatoumata Diawara. The guitars buoying her alternate between Tuareg and American blues. But Traoré herself has pulled this off before to similarly charismatic effect, so while it’s a perfectly good song, it remains unremarkable outside the context of the album. It’s telling, actually, that the one standout track here is a cover. In Traoré’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, a solitary bass lumbers beneath a guitar line that bends and wavers like heat over asphalt. Her voice aches and shudders, giving way in the end to a ngoni solo that hovers in the middle distance, like a ghostly reminder of ancestors past.
This is the album’s turning point; the remaining two tracks are less songs than they are speeches set to music. On the title track, Rokia says (in French), “In 2014 another five million five hundred thousand people fled their homes/ Forced to seek refuge in towns and countries far from home.” It’s an important message, to be sure. But the track comes perilously close to feeling like the soundtrack to a TV fundraiser special, of the kind where important people appear on screen reciting statistics and platitudes about the human condition over melodramatic background music.
It doesn’t help that label-mate Devendra Banhart joins in to represent the voice of the displaced, delivering lines like, “Where to place my dreams/ Where to hold a heart opened to joy/ Opened to hope.” It only gets worse on the album’s closer, “Se Dan,” which sits somewhere between TED Talk, overwrought spoken word poem, and a lecture from your mom (who loves you but is concerned and wants you to learn some respect). On it, Rokia is joined once more by Devendra to pontificate, this time in English, about how we all have, “One world/ One destiny/ One aim/ One thing to never forget: respect." The sentiment is heartfelt but it verges on the trite, which can be said of the album as a whole. | 2016-02-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Global | Nonesuch | February 16, 2016 | 5.8 | a3ea22bf-e70c-49fa-b943-9bbd1a9ecf89 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | null |
By resisting the bluster of past efforts, the Montreal band emerges with its most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity. | By resisting the bluster of past efforts, the Montreal band emerges with its most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity. | Suuns: The Witness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suuns-the-witness/ | The Witness | Suuns are almost maddeningly consistent. Over a decade-plus career firmly wedged between the “experimental” and “indie” sections of your local record shop, the band’s instantly identifiable brand of vampiric electro-rock has unraveled like a scroll, revealing new dimensions in an expanding universe of existential dread. Held together by singer Ben Shemie’s ghost-in-the-machine croon, the Montreal trio (formerly quartet) doesn’t so much innovate with each new release as restlessly explore the same familiar, walled-off territory.
Their last full-length, Felt, showed hairline cracks forming in that dam. Purging some of their obsession with grim avant-pop provocation, they brought a generousness of spirit that gave the album a warm sense of psychedelic intimacy. Even as they lashed out with abrasive, rushing energy on tracks like “Look No Further,” the tempered, even honeyed nostalgia of centerpiece ballad “Make It Real” suggested the cooling passions of a band making peace with uncertainty.
But growth is messy, and the grainy rumblings of 2020’s FICTION EP flashed like a warning sign that the band was ready, if not eager, to reopen the portal and relapse into the haze. So it’s a welcome surprise that on The Witness, Suuns are in full communion with a calmer approach to anxiety. Their latest is fundamentally chilled out, plunging the band into frigid landscapes that they softly crawl over with post-rock-like delicacy recalling fellow Canadians Badge Époque Ensemble. Sprawling and beat heavy, the album’s drift is a perfect staging ground for Shemie’s sentimental explorations of the sicknesses inherent in embodied life. Like a spirit forced into corporeal form, Shemie painstakingly unpacks his alienation, and with the band tightly reined in around gentle electronic lullabies, he’s never sounded better. By resisting the bluster of past efforts, Suuns emerge with their most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity.
The instrumental palette of The Witness reflects the (relative) ease with which they’ve mellowed. On “Timebender,” synthesizers that once hissed and groaned now curl gently around your ear, trading fours with sampled birdcalls. Guitars that once rushed with nervous aggression quietly trickle into the mix; when the dreamy chords that close out “Witness Protection” finally arrive, they slowly drift into focus from far out in the stereo field, like sunlight tapping at a window. There’s a newfound fixation with lowering themselves into a groove rather than trying to tear themselves out of it. It’s hard to imagine a band like Suuns improvising like a jazz trio, but the way their ideas expand and contract over the six minute micro-odyssey “The Trilogy,” it sounds like an unrehearsed nocturnal jam session.
These changes reflect back onto Shemie, who paradoxically has never sounded more like a frontperson than he does here. His voice presides over everything, so much so that when he slips into the background to allow Erik Hove’s saxophone space to riff on the romantic meditations of album highlight “Clarity,” you feel the absence acutely, craving his inhuman warmth. Shemie’s lyrics usually telegraph his own disgust from a comfortable distance, but the band’s steady pacing has relaxed him into confessional confidence, an acknowledgment of how long he’s put up a steely facade. “I don’t want to wear this mask/To conceal/The way I feel,” he moans on “Third Stream,” before defeatedly admitting that he’s finally “seen too much” as the track spins off into the night. When his tender whine fades in on the penultimate track, “Go to My Head,” crying out for “no more tears,” it’s as if he’s speaking to you from across a shared pillow, peering into your eyes at the end of a long night of the soul. Embracing the sweetness pulls out a different side of Shemie, one you wonder if even he knew he had in him.
The swarm of cicadas that opens the record reappears to close out the album, trapping these tender emotions in a locked groove. As the album spins back upon itself, Suuns seem almost to revel in the consistency of mood and texture that they’ve achieved on this record. The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.
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. | 2021-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | September 4, 2021 | 7.5 | a3ed3931-9630-4e98-89ce-96826a41c905 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even ... | For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even ... | Mr. Lif: I Phantom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5474-i-phantom/ | I Phantom | For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even say the words "concept album" without wincing and imagining the elves and druids of prog-rock past. The only thing less palatable than a concept album is an annotated concept album that explicitly states each song's plot and theme. So when I cracked open the new Lif and discovered the aforementioned attributes in brazen attendance, it was difficult to fight back the urge to toss it into the trash bin. However, after giving I Phantom a few spins, I must say that Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.
Lif's success can largely be attributed to his focus on themes that other, more timid emcees wouldn't even touch; the album tackles the dehumanizing dysfunction of capitalism and its dramatic effect upon a b-boy everyman, including a dissection of commerce's influence upon art, family and spirituality. The phantom of the title is the individual personality/soul that has been drowned in a flood of media-fueled consumerism, empty labor, and abandoned relationships. Explaining his themes in a recent interview with SOHH, Lif commented, "Our identity is essentially wiped out in many ways. Under the code of professionalism, you do not bring your slang or culture into a place of business... there's a code of conduct which wipes out any flare that we have as individuals."
The plot of I Phantom has four acts: an initial dream state where Lif is killed and resurrected; a second act where Lif awakens and struggles with poverty and social alienation; a third where Lif achieves financial success only to find it emotionally and spiritually bankrupt; and a final, surreal postscript where he and his friends lyrically navigate the apocalypse. As you can imagine, this sure as fuck ain't Nellyville. In fact, the album's thematic and narrative scope has more in common with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections than it does with a hip-hop album.
In the first two songs, Lif cops a gun from Cannibal Ox's Vast Aire and is killed while robbing a store. "Return of the B-Boy", the album's third track, finds Lif resurrected as a hip-hop messiah. "Return of the B-Boy" is a nearly eight-minute epic that is the most lyrically and musically accomplished track Def Jux has ever released. Beneath a noisy mosaic of turntable scratches, squealing effects and bass-heavy beats, El-P drops Guru rapping, "Hip-hop, Im'a bring it back, hip-hop..." Then, as the noise reaches a crescendo, the beat drops and the track transforms into a fast and funky boom bap revival, replete with James Brown grunts and an '89-style fast rap.
On "Mic Check," Lif declares, "How the fuck did you figure you could interfere with a music so potent?" "Mortal Kombat" style, Lif steps up and destroys the Pharisees, Uncle Toms, and Jiggas who've transformed hip-hop from a culturally relevant lifeforce to an aural billboard for excess and self-destruction. In a particularly vivid confrontation with a subpar emcee, Lif raps, "I step to him slow and look deep in his eye/ Say the prison is within 'cuz he's living a lie."
The song ends suddenly, and a ringing alarm carries over to provide a segue to the next song where Lif awakens to find himself preparing to go to the "slave quarters" where he toils for a "trifling hourly wage of $6.50." In the spiritually arid atmosphere of "Live from the Plantation", Lif is confronted with the working man's irony: "Life is a gift to be enjoyed every second.../ Yet I find myself looking at the clock, hoping for the day to fly by." Once again, the song shifts in the middle and we're treated to a beatbox breakdown that sounds like Doug E Fresh remixed by Autechre. The juxtaposition between the b-boy heroism of "Return of the B-Boy" and the everyday struggle of "Live From the Plantation" reveals that the tensions provided by the crippling minutiae of real life are just as dramatic and compelling as any superhero theatrics.
After failing at work on "Live from the Plantation", and being socially spurned due to his economic condition in "Status", Lif turns his eyes to the cash prize in "Success" and becomes a professional slave who's "forced to give [his] life away while [he's] earning a living." Putting forth the professional's mantra, Lif raps, "Smile, don't be too proud, too wild/ You can suffer, but just don't be too loud." Fellow Def Jukie Aesop Rock guests on the track, returning to many of the same themes he dealt with on last year's Labor Days. In a stinging chorus, Aesop raps, "Daddy had a name tag that said 'busy working'/ Mommy had a milk carton that said 'missing person'/ John had a new baseball glove, but nobody to learn with/ The oil left the water and the water kept searching."
Over the course of the next two songs, our narrator sees his family dissolve due to his workaholism. After divorcing his first wife, the narrator remarries and focuses on having the perfect (read: fictional) family and ignores his first, unsuccessful family. The subsequent pressure to succeed causes his daughter from the second marriage to commit suicide. On "The Now", Lif flips the script and raps from the perspective of the abandoned child from the first marriage. It's a creative and revelatory point of view that showcases Lif's incredible narrative skills.
Unfortunately, Lif abandons the concrete details of his narrative on "Iron Helix" and answers the question as to "how we got here, meaning how did we [get to] this point in human existence where these types of social ills are common." For the next song, "Earthcrusher", Lif provides "a visual for the nuclear holocaust." Um... Druids, anyone?
Still, Lif's point has been made, and the last tracks' interesting, yet misguided forays into ponderous sci-fi don't ruin Lif's masterpiece. On his previous EPs, Emergency Rations and Enter the Collosus, Lif showed a lot of potential. I Phantom is the big payoff, the album that we knew Lif had in him. While there are those who accuse Lif of being unpatriotic and overly didactic, a searing social critique in this time of unchecked nationalism and media disinformation is not only refreshing, but absolutely necessary. Whether out of fear, complacency or self-absorption, there have been far too few voices of dissent to emerge from the world of independent music. That Lif is willing to be the odd man out-- especially in a time when publicly questioning the actions of our administration is considered rote, despite the fact that we need it now more than ever-- is exemplary. 'Nuff respect due. | 2002-09-29T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2002-09-29T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | September 29, 2002 | 8.3 | a3f26347-71b5-4cc0-a26d-1fac6b851257 | Pitchfork | null |
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The revered and ridiculed DIY legend makes a brisk power-pop record about loving what you do but hating the toll it takes. | The revered and ridiculed DIY legend makes a brisk power-pop record about loving what you do but hating the toll it takes. | Juiceboxxx: It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody When You’re Living in The City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juiceboxxx-its-easy-to-feel-like-a-nobody-when-youre-living-in-the-city/ | It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody When You’re Living in The City | To his converts, Juiceboxxx is a DIY legend, celebrated for the intensely physical shows he’s been performing since the early ’00s, when he was a 14-year-old getting dropped off at gigs from the Milwaukee suburbs by his parents. One journalist was so moved by Juice’s devotion to his craft he penned an entire book about him. In other corners of the internet, though, Juiceboxxx is more infamous for a disastrous TV news performance that’s forever branded him in Google searches as “the worst rapper ever.” Bloggers ripped him mercilessly, and within weeks comedians Chelsea Handler and Chris Hardwick were dunking on him, too (“Yo, Pewaukee in the house!” Hardwick quipped on @midnight).
Six years later, that fail footage is no less painful to watch, although in a certain light Juiceboxxx’s performance is also strangely inspiring. After offering the anchors a complimentary can of Thunder Zone, the energy drink he was hocking at the time, he doesn’t just bomb. He bombs with gusto, committing fully to his affable party-starter routine even as he wrestles with a sadistic sound mix and the sinking realization that an act that slays in a basement full of sweaty fans doesn’t translate to an empty stage of a news broadcast.
That down-with-the-ship attitude has defined everything he’s recorded since—if public humiliation on that scale doesn’t shake your dedication, then maybe nothing can. These days Juiceboxxx no longer tours the country on a Greyhound with an iPod as his DJ, though. He’s traded it for a two-piece backing band, which conjured the guitar-drenched rap early Beastie Boys on his 2017 effort Freaked Out American Loser. His new It’s Easy To Feel Like a Nobody When You’re Living in The City goes one step further, ditching hip-hop almost entirely but keeping the guitars.
Recorded with Wavves/Jay Reatard bassist Stephen Pope, it’s a brisk power-pop record about loving what you do but hating the toll it takes. “Have I wasted all my life in the basement?” Juiceboxxx wonders on the lifer’s lament “In The Basement,” a typically revved-up number featuring some unmistakable synths from The Rentals’ Matt Sharp. It’s Juiceboxxx’s catchiest song yet, though the album gives it some competition. Pitched somewhere between Sum 41 and the Ramones, opener “Coinstar Song” is all fist pumps, while “Running So Deep,” with its crunchy riff and giddy cowbell claps, plays like a mall-punk homage to ’80s John Mellencamp.
These songs find Juiceboxxx down and out, surviving on frozen pizzas and the adulation of an audience that isn’t growing any bigger.
And while he mostly plays his defeats for entertainment, his lyrics make enough references to mental health to imply that it’s not only his career at stake. It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody walks a fine line, taking Juiceboxxx’s quandaries seriously without disrupting the stay-true-to-yourself positivity that’s always been the heart of his act. Even the title track, despite its bummer sentiment, plays out as uplifting Lou Reed-style testimonial about the rejuvenating power of rock ‘n’ roll.
Throughout the album Juiceboxxx ponders trading it all in for something closer resembling a normal life, but always just as quickly rules out the option. “Kids Are Looking” speaks most directly to the heart of his decision to keep at it, an obligation to pay forward the feeling of belonging he found at punk shows as a teenager. “It’s like a call that’s telling us we’re not alone,” he sings. A touring artist’s life might not be glamorous, It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody argues, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t noble.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | March 13, 2020 | 7.1 | a3f9fc82-8971-4518-b161-acd64b566667 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. He’s been experimenting with Americana for 14 years now, and his new album, featuring vocals from Will Oldham, strips away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums. | Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. He’s been experimenting with Americana for 14 years now, and his new album, featuring vocals from Will Oldham, strips away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums. | Elephant Micah: Where in Our Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20082-where-in-our-woods/ | Where in Our Woods | Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a 33-year-old singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. Take "Slow Time Vultures", the 7-1/2-minute centerpiece of his Western Vinyl debut Where in Our Woods, which describes the time O’Connell’s childhood home in Pekin, Indiana, attracted a giant flock of vultures. The song anthropomorphizes the birds, who use the barn roof as a soapbox to lament Indiana’s conforming to Daylight Savings Time. (Prior to 2006, most of the state disregarded DST, and locals often referred to its singular zone as "slow time.")
The vultures question and criticize fast-paced progress ("We can’t afford to go forward any more"), and O’Connell sanctifies their words in a sparse, patient arrangement. It takes about 20 seconds for him to sing the first six words—"Vultures on our old barn roof"—and he spends much of the song hypnotically plucking the low E of a nylon-stringed guitar that permeates the album, becoming its signature instrument. The effect is stark and haunting and entirely vulture friendly.
O’Connell has been experimenting with Midwestern Americana for 14 years now, but most of the 11 Elephant Micah releases prior to Where in Our Woods were primitively recorded and distributed on tiny labels or self-released on CD-Rs. Elephant Micah isn’t exactly a secret (you can find most of the releases for pay-what-you-want prices on Bandcamp), but O’Connell has remained on the margins more than friends like M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger (the two covered each other’s songs for a 7'' release a few years ago). All that, plus the folklorist thing, has contributed to Elephant Micah’s outsider/not-of-this-time rep. You get the feeling O’Connell doesn’t get worked up about iTunes updates or the appropriate context for leggings.
If 2012’s Louder Than Thou refined the Elephant Micah sound, Where in Our Woods continues the distillation until, after stripping away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums (courtesy of O’Connell’s brother Matthew), the minimalism becomes the album’s calling card (think Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s unadorned but crisply rendered Master and Everyone). The album isn’t so decorous that it doesn’t take chances, though. It’s a risk, in fact, to present O’Connell’s voice so nakedly, since it’s neither a showstopper nor terribly eccentric. He doesn’t whisper, doesn’t yell. It’s smooth, almost to a fault, but the clarity of his tenor fits the pace and spareness of these eight songs. And just when you start yearning for something more, the bonnie prince himself, Will Oldham—an obvious inspiration here—shows up to add some harmonies.
Often, folk singers are either storytellers or read-into-it-what-you-want poets, but some of this generation’s best (Oldham, Jason Molina) fall somewhere in the middle. Elephant Micah stands firmly in that middle ground, not shying away from small details nor lofty, ambiguous ideas. Without some background explanation, it would be impossible to know that "Demise of the Bible Birds" refers to an Indiana man who trained birds to perform Christian-themed tricks. Or that O’Connell ripped the three stories in the gorgeous "Albino Animals"—hunters killing an albino deer, athletes capsizing on a boat, and meth cooks avoiding prosecution for a trailer fire—from the headlines of his hometown newspaper. O’Connell, though, gives us all the details we need to ponder ignorance and the unknowability of life while falling under the spell of a bewitching, repeating guitar line that somehow communicates both the tragedy and mercy in the stories.
The songs on Where in Our Woods were all written in 2006 and 2007, and while the Elephant Micah albums of that period have an experimental, homespun charm to them, O’Connell was wise to set these songs aside until he found the right setting for them, even if that didn’t become clear for several years. As the slow time vultures sing, "Ours are the spoils and the things that we can find on our own time." Maybe those birds are onto something. | 2015-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-01-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Western Vinyl | January 21, 2015 | 7.6 | a40a2ecc-d6a0-4650-b34b-fb7111010815 | Joel Oliphint | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joel-oliphint/ | null |
A former jazz prodigy emerges with a clever and heartfelt indie rock debut that pays winking tribute to adolescence in all its agonies and small glories. | A former jazz prodigy emerges with a clever and heartfelt indie rock debut that pays winking tribute to adolescence in all its agonies and small glories. | Kate Davis: Trophy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-davis-trophy/ | Trophy | If you were a tightly wound perfectionist who spent her formative years shuttling from award ceremony to award ceremony, conducting life as if it were graded by rubric, then you probably stumbled into adulthood craving freedom. The former jazz prodigy Kate Davis graduated from high school a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, scored a full-ride to the Manhattan School of Music, and performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. But she wasn’t satisfied, sneaking in time to experiment with more emotionally liberating indie rock. Now 28 years old, Davis has resurfaced with the clever and heartfelt debut, Trophy.
Trophy is a winking salute to adolescence, that chaotic period when your body is illogically proportioned and you’re not sure who you’re supposed to be. This turbulence has been fertile ground for sharp, empathetic indie rock for approximately forever. Davis has a good ear for it: she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s howling masterpiece “Seventeen,” and her own work basks in that wide-eyed nostalgia, radiating a sincerity that feels almost anachronistic in these bitter, irony-poisoned years. Unlike the pouty adolescents now seen on television, Davis’ teenagers aren’t sarcastic, lewd, or indifferent. A nervous boy spots a girl he likes at a party in “Dirty Teenager,” a droll Courtney Barnett-like track that finds poignancy in Miller Lites and scattered trash. Davis, cutting through swirling electric guitar and drums, sings “I just want to be your friend” so sweetly and earnestly that it‘s devastating.
Everything about Davis screams early 2010s — both the kindly, sincere messaging and the Pandora-approved singer-songwriter flavor of her music. Davis’s songs often start languorously, wading into gentle, lapping folk before plunging into noisier grunge-rock. She has a pleasant, lilting voice to listen to while resting your head against a window. But these slow-moving repetitions—a few plucked strings, a murmured confession—leave you hungry for grittier self-scrutiny. Romantic metaphors of open heart surgery and stars aligning can come off saccharine, as do melodramatic declarations to a lover to “meet me in the morning, indigo skyline twilight.”
The stakes often come into focus halfway through, paving the way for urgent, earnest questioning. After much toothless meandering on “Burning Accidents,” Davis growls at the thought of “wanting more”; the guitars swerve into a drone, and tender hopes of reconciliation splinter into visceral anguish at breaking apart. On “Did You Love Somebody,” Davis’ voice leaps and thins as she repeats the question. You can imagine someone avoiding her gaze, a little unnerved by the directness.
The emotional centerpiece of Trophy is “Daisy,” a wrenching song Davis wrote following the death of her father. Launching with the same guitar chug as Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” it charmingly captures the aimlessness and dread of growing up. Davis lists off virtues she doesn’t have: “Neither am I good nor pure, neither am I wise.” When she repeats “I keep fucking up,” she reminds us that we’re all little kids with lipstick smeared on our faces, masquerading as grown-ups. | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Solitaire | November 16, 2019 | 6.9 | a40ebb56-fbbf-48ae-b756-0240c861f793 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Oregon metal band's latest record is their hugest, most artful collection to date. | Oregon metal band's latest record is their hugest, most artful collection to date. | Agalloch: Ashes Against the Grain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9338-ashes-against-the-grain/ | Ashes Against the Grain | I lived in Portland, Ore., for six months in 1997: It didn't stop raining, until, eventually, the rain just turned into snow. Coffee shop regulars told me it was an especially bad winter for the Pacific Northwest, but even amid the sleet breezes, I made plenty of treks to Mt. Tabor. When the weather was good, I jumped fences to pick fruit. If you were lucky enough to find a car, you could make a quick jump to the coast. Of all the cities I've temporarily called home, Portland coexisted best with the land it was built upon: Trees didn't feel like decorative afterthoughts.
Named for the fragrant, incense-burnt Agarwood, dark-metal quartet Agalloch are the perfect Portland band. Beginning as an idea in Montana sometime in late 1995/early 1996, founding members John Haughm and Jason Walton relocated to Oregon in 1996, where they met guitarist Don Anderson. Currently a quintet with drummer, Chris Greene, Agalloch's functioned as a proper group since releasing the 1997 demo, From Which of this Oak. The band's third album, Ashes Against the Grain, the first full-length since 2002's The Mantle and sundry EPs, is their hugest, most artful collection to date. It features an endless amount of hooks-- songs appear to be going out to sea when things pause and change direction, ushering in another lap. If you think this stuff's boring, you aren't listening.
Ten-minute opener "Limbs" floats Godspeed striations atop an Isis crunch. Gaining momentum, the swirl eventually moves toward an acoustic interlude, which offers a breath-catcher before the next spiral of echoing water-logged guitar and distorted drums. Floodgates open, close again, reopen. Lyrically, the "limbs" of the title refer to both human arms/legs ("Hacked, severed and forgotten") and branches/roots: "Earth to flesh, flesh to wood, cast these limbs into the water." Time gets cast, "Whispering from tree to tree/ Through every lonely bough it sings."
Speaking of words, Agalloch might lose a few less hardy souls when vocalist John Haughm enters the mix: Instead of Slint speak/sing, buried shoegazer wails, or the by now acceptable doomy Ocean scowl, Haughm's gruff, slick, snarled black metal-style voice seethes above the sound. Once he clears his throat, everything else becomes a backdrop to his dry-rot laryngitis: "The texture of the soul is a liquid/ That casts a vermillion flood/ From a wound carved as an oath/ It fills the river bank, a sanguine fog." (Unless you have a degree in black metal, good luck getting that without a lyric sheet.)
But then, to my ears at least, where groups like Godspeed and Mogwai function merely as background music to my daily occurrences, Agalloch consistently engages and overrides. Some name-check arboreal, less urban Swans-- especially when Jarboe stopped by the garden-- but Michael Gira was never about riffs like this. Comparisons to Opeth can and will also be penned. They work to some degree, but Agalloch add a shoegaze element to their intricate compositions: Unlike Ghost Reveries, the pieces don't feel as stitched together, and songs are long only if you pay attention to the display on your stereo. Keep your eyes closed and the anthemic "Limbs" could be divided into four pieces of occasionally proggy, neo-folk doom.
Same with "Falling Snow", which locates a catchy 1990s alterna-wavelength, as sludge guitars nestle behind psychedelic licks. The expressive, poppy notes make for a wonderful contrast between Haughm's cackled naturalistic lyrics: "Red birds escape from my wounds and return as falling snow/ To sweep the landscape/ A wind haunted; wings without bodies."
Yup, the first two tracks require fist pumping, but Agalloch are much more than dog-and-pony rockers. "This White Mountain on Which You Will Die", a minute-and-a-half of sleepy, somber ambience, is a swath of Gregorian chant minus the chanting. A quintessential embodiment of that 1997 Oregon chill, the 10-plus minute "Fire Above, Ice Below" places watery guitar over acoustic strums. As it grows, the whispery vocals contrast with the more mannered folk-metal sound. The end of "Fire Above, Ice Below" sinks and recedes, blending into the AM static-ocean of the next track, "Not Unlike the Waves". It builds from that midst to major guitar-chug riffs, balancing a heaviness and a fragile sort of beauty. Like the forms made when a stone's dropped in a pond, the layers keep coming. For instance, acoustic interludes often signal things are about to grow exponentially magisterial: Multi-track vocal drone; a Malefic-mixed dry rot howl (lyrically, "the midnight wolves who watch over the dawn" makes perfect sense); submerged double bass drum. It's a Medieval doom madrigal built on a sea bed fault-line.
As if none of this was huge enough, the album closes with the grandiose three-part "Our Fortress Is Burning". The crux? Overall ambient submersion. The opening section moves from piano to strumming-n-drumming against falling stars and fuzz bath; a drum roll links it to the second part, and the track ends where Agalloch often does-- in melancholic triumph. The finale, subtitled "The Grain", is the one time the record lags a tad: It's pretty, but it lacks the propulsivity of what came before it. Agalloch squeeze enough "epic" into each "endless horizon of ice" that appending a self-consciously three-part finale could be taken as superfluous.
I've used the word "metal" a few times, but don't let that scare you off. I'd offer more qualifiers and nifty neologisms, but that seems equally tired. No matter what you call it, Ashes finds Agalloch burning down the forest, replanting it, watching shit re-grow. In the process of that intense musical exploration they've become an intriguing band, regardless of genre designation. | 2006-08-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-08-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | The End | August 30, 2006 | 8 | a41036fb-c232-4284-8db1-1d43d990ca80 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Like most good DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro. | Like most good DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro. | The Juan MacLean: The Future Will Come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12853-the-future-will-come/ | The Future Will Come | If you wanted to hear an askew semi-counterpoint to Hercules and Love Affair's longing, unrequited "Blind" last year, all you had to do was jump back a couple of weeks and one DFA catalogue number. The Juan MacLean's "Happy House" might have been comparatively overlooked in the wake of their labelmates' widespread critical success, but it's hard not to hear it as the weight on the other side of the scale. It jumps a decade or so past H&LA's Larry Levan-minded disco into a style alluded to in the song's double-meaning title, Nancy Whang's voice dripping with a cool, almost aloof exuberance that seemed content to ride along with that pulse-raising piano. It figures that its biggest refrain and most memorable line hints at an arch sort of romanticism: "you are so... excellent." Yet "Happy House" is a stylistic fluke in a discography that got rolling with the jagged yet warm electro-house of the 2002 single "By the Time I Get to Venus" and aimed upwards with 2005's Less Than Human. With more than a year to build on the goodwill accumulated by a potential career-changer, the Juan MacLean have already gone in a completely different direction on their new album.
The Future Will Come does at least aim to join "Happy House" in its lean towards pop-music structure, even if it gets there through an era-spanning synth-pop pastiche rather than the euphoria of late-80s (and early 00s revival) house. That shouldn't be too out-of-nowhere, especially if you've already been primed by "The Simple Life", which followed "Happy House" in single form late last summer and points towards the Human League-gone-disco sound John MacLean hinted at during interviews in the run-up to this album. But that song, a gradually-building, subtly-mutating piece of Moroder-meets-Yaz(oo) that spans over eight and a half minutes in opening the album, is a red herring in its own way. That's because with the exception of the 10-minute "Tonight", which blends dubby T.K. Disco rhythm with Derrick May bass in the service of a song filled with strangely mournful-sounding anticipation, every track on The Future Will Come that hasn't already appeared as a single last year is a relatively short and succinct piece of work; think a bunch of radio edits instead of the 12" mixes.
The good news is that brevity keeps some of these tracks from getting stretched thin: The rubbery bongo-driven percussion and mutating, unraveling synths in the title track sound like they reach peak powers just before the song ends a few seconds shy of the five-minute mark, the midtempo electro-funk of "Accusations" fits in enough ebb-and-flow atmosphere to explore its Balearic-tweaking turf thoroughly, and cuts like "A New Bot" and "The Station" bypass gradual-build club dynamics entirely to focus on straightforward post-new-wave hookiness, whether it's frenetically anxious or brooding respectively. Yet a couple of other songs feel rudely truncated before they can build to the bigger, arm-waving moments that seem just over the horizon. The seething acid-house of "No Time", which sounds like the Human League's "Being Boiled" on heavy stimulants, ends too quickly, but it stings particularly hard when the 81-meets-89 rave-pop of "One Day" simply drops off a cliff after just more than four minutes when it sounds like it should go on for another six. Like most quality DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro; too much of it leaves you wondering if it could've gone even further with a bit more breathing room.
Still, what could another four minutes here and there really do about the dour mood? That's the other gag The Future Will Come springs on the unsuspecting listener hoping for an hour's worth of "Happy House" giddiness, with Whang and MacLean sniping at each other in character like the Oakey/Sulley dynamic in "Don't You Want Me" pushed to a barely repressed loathing. It makes sense, since their vocals are incompatible with each other in the most basic respect. Whang is all coquettish detachment and reserved emotion, singing as though she just happens to be pretty good at expressing these feelings (but, y'know, not showing off or anything), while MacLean stretches his flat voice into attempted overenunciations and hiccupy quirkiness that are beyond the ability of his ideally-monotone voice.
As they sing with clashing voices about how hard it is to get along with anyone, this is ebullient, frequently exciting music that trades on the concept of love as irritating farce. The first verse on "The Simple Life" opens with the Whang-sung couplet "Promises you gave but never kept/ Apologies to save for last regrets"; "One Day" sees both singers trading embittered breakup barbs with the promise that "I'll tell you what you wanna hear if you try" the closest it gets to reconciliation; "No Time" drains all the empathy out of post-one-night stand ennui and brings out the casual cruelty in the typically-innocuous pop-lyric standby "shut your mouth." It's all a bit exhausting, but it does lead to a knockout bit of sequencing: from the sourly regretful back-and-forth relationship burden complaints of "The Station" to the sparse, false-ending-filled, self-pitying solo-piano dirge of "Human Disaster"-- and then, to finish the album, "Happy House" in its complete 12-and-a-half minutes of ecstasy. That single hardly represents how the rest of the album turned out sounding, but you couldn't pick a better flash of light at the end of the tunnel. | 2009-03-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-03-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DFA | March 27, 2009 | 7.4 | a41a4d19-990b-4a44-b0e4-9e016c107e47 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was one of the most generous records of the 90s. Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed. This mega-deluxe box set pads the original with an additional 64 tracks. | Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was one of the most generous records of the 90s. Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed. This mega-deluxe box set pads the original with an additional 64 tracks. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17389-mellon-collie-and-the-infinite-sadness/ | Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness | Billy Corgan hasn't done a very good job speaking on his own behalf over the past decade, so let me feed him a line from the Greek philosopher Pittacus that would make a much better case for his legacy: "The measure of a man is what he does with power." In 1995, nearly every other band at Smashing Pumpkins' level was in some way turning its back on its audience: Pearl Jam had started their principled retreat from the spotlight; U2 and R.E.M. were deep within their stagiest, most ironic phases and making their least satisfying music to date; Rivers Cuomo was well on his way towards making Pinkerton; Metallica discovered nail polish; and, of course, Kurt Cobain gave up on life itself. On a much smaller level, even Corgan's eternal rival Steve Malkmus had just released Wowee Zowee, a record whose sloppy sprawl was taken by Rolling Stone as proof that "Pavement are simply afraid to succeed."
Given this mid-decade valley, it's understandable that the 2xCD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be sneered at as self-indulgent. The Smashing Pumpkins hadn't made their appearance at Hullabalooza yet, so many were unaware the band had a sense of humor*.* Still, their reputation was played for laughs. But Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turned out to be one of the most generous records of the decade. During a time when rock heroes were hard to come by, Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed.
I suppose it's worth mentioning I was 15 when Mellon Collie came out and I would've told you at the time it was my favorite album ever made. Finally, I thought, here was our White Album, Physical Graffiti, or The Wall, but we could watch its legend being constructed in real time without all the received wisdom. It's true, a double album reeks of 70s-style excess that tries to edify its creators. It was meant as Smashing Pumpkins' monument to itself. But in the case of Mellon Collie, it was the only format that could contain the songwriting streak Corgan was going through at the time. Anything shorter would've done his fans a disservice.
This is not an exaggeration. Cull the 14 best tracks from the concurrently recorded The Aeroplane Flies High singles collection and you either have the fourth best Smashing Pumpkins album (behind the perpetually underrated Adore, ahead of Pisces Iscariot) or a strong third disc that would've made Mellon Collie the greatest triple-LP ever made. What becomes more obvious with time is that Mellon Collie, unlike its most common comparison The Wall, has no conceptual framework. There is no plot, almost no filler, and the organization of its two discs is iffy at best: The second song on the seemingly chronological first disc Dawn to Dusk is "Tonight, Tonight", while disc two, Twilight to Starlight, contains all of the ugliest metal songs. So Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.
This is perhaps the only Smashing Pumpkins record where they acted like an actual band rather than Corgan and his resentful charges. It's hard to pinpoint where the influence of James Iha or D'Arcy came into play (not so with the phenomenal drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin), but with the oversight of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, Mellon Collie was developed through protracted jam sessions and personal interplay. Siamese Dream, for all of its symphonic grandeur, was a fairly standard rock album and a solitary one-- nearly all of the guitar and bass parts were rumored to have been performed by Corgan himself. Meanwhile, Mellon Collie indulges in styles more associated with hermetic artists-- ornate chamber-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), mumbly acoustic confessionals ("Stumbleine"), and synthesized nocturnes (mostly everything after "X.Y.U."). And it does so while feeling like the work of four people in a room.
Mellon Collie's remarkable breadth is the best indication of Corgan's ability to let loose. You could pick five songs at random and still end up with a diverse batch of singles that would make a case for Smashing Pumpkins being the most stylistically malleable multi-platinum act of the 90s. Maybe it wouldn't sell as many copies, but picture an alternate universe where heavy rotation met the joyous, mechanized grind of "Love", "In the Arms of Sleep"'s unabashed antiquated romanticism, the Prince-like electro-ballad "Beautiful", "Muzzle"'s stadium-status affirmations, or the throttling metal of "Bodies".
The ubiquity of the five songs that did become singles overshadows just how idiosyncratic and distinct they were in the scope of 1995. Has there been anything like "Tonight, Tonight" since? Orchestral strings typically signify weepy balladry or compositional pretension in rock music, not wonderful, lovestruck propulsion. While "Tonight, Tonight" is now inseparable from its Le Voyage dans la lune-inspired video, that the music existed without its guidance only stresses the Pumpkins' sonic creativity. "Thirty-Three" was the final and least heralded of the singles-- where on alt-rock radio was there room for a slowpoke, time-signature shifting country song with phased slide guitars and shuffling drum machines?
"Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" are the ones that riled up the older folks and, yes, the lyrics are pissy and juvenile and fairly embarrassing. That said, they're far more interesting from a sonic perspective than they're often given credit for. They're the songs where Flood's digitized production fits better than the saturated, analog warmth Butch Vig lent to Siamese Dream. They're basically new wave performed as pop-metal.
And of course, there's "1979", the one everybody can agree on. On a record that reveled in 70s prog and pomp without being restricted to it, it sounds futuristic. And while just as youth-obsessed as everything else here, it's one of the few times where high school sounds like something that can be remembered fondly. Corgan loves to stress how it was the last song to make the record, and while its chorus does have an effortless charge embodying the "urgency of now," it's the only Mellon Collie song that functions best as nostalgia. That reading is no doubt abetted by another fantastic video, but while "1979" is an unimpeachable song, the rush to praise it as an outlier does its surroundings a tremendous disservice. While Mellon Collie is the realization of all Billy Corgan's ambitions, most of the criticisms surround the lyrics for not being as personal as those on the tortured Siamese Dream. It's this way by design.
The terms "sad machines" and "teen machines" are interchangeably used during "Here Is No Why", a pep talk to the outwardly sullen mopes who Corgan urges to break free of either and ascend like its heroic guitar solo. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is notorious for its chorus, but teen angst doesn't fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it. The mudslide of distortion that ushers in its bridge leads towards two minutes of the most viscerally exciting music that Smashing Pumpkins produced. Then immediately after, the mournful "To Forgive" devastates with a personal detail that gives Corgan credibility in all of this: "And I remember my birthdays/ Empty party afternoons." This is the kind of youthful, inexplicable emotional whiplash that can result in an immolating hatebomb called "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" being followed by a giddy proclamation that "love solves everything." It's clearly not a mature way of dealing with life, but that's only a problem if you somehow believe Mellon Collie isn't meant as rock 'n' roll fantasy. When Corgan declares "I know that I was meant for this world" during "Muzzle", it's your happy ending.
So, yes, most people who have developed a meaningful relationship with Mellon Collie did so in their youth. The question is whether you can get anything new from this in 2012. As with all of the Smashing Pumpkins reissues, Mellon Collie is giving: the Deluxe boxed set justifies its sticker shock by containing "re-imagined cover art, velvet-lined disc holder and decoupage kit for creating your own scenes from the Mellon Collie Universe," which is everything you'd imagine and thensome. There are an extra 64 tracks and only a few of them appeared on The Aeroplane Flies High, though most of these inclusions are demos or alternate takes, the sort of thing that should only be listened to multiple times by people who are being paid to do so, i.e., music critics and Flood.
But there is a way of hearing the same album differently as you refract it through your own experiences. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" is rumored to have contained 70 guitar tracks; it's a wedding vow punctuated by Corgan snarling "youth is wasted on the young." This isn't meant to negate the intent of the 90 minutes that preceded it, it's a reminder of how Mellon Collie can communicate different things to someone who's 30 as opposed to 15. Revisiting it can feel like leafing through a high school yearbook-- not necessarily your own, just somebody's. And there's solace in how, for all of the navel-gazing that went on, the ridiculousness of it all somehow escapes you. What you wore, how you spoke, what you felt not so much seeming normal as just the way it is. You look at each person, thinking that they might hope to achieve the self-actualization promised by "Muzzle", to lose themselves in another person in the manner described by "Beautiful" or "In the Arms of Sleep", or to embrace their own awkwardness as a rallying cry like "We Only Come Out at Night". Those events were all right around the corner, as they are for just about anybody growing up, but when you're locked up in your room listening to Mellon Collie for hours on end, they seem as distant and fantastical as the album cover. When Corgan sings "believe in me" during "Tonight, Tonight", you don't have much of a choice if you want to escape.
I'd like to say "they don't make 'em like this anymore," which is true if you want to talk about rock bands who make double-LPs that sell 10 million copies thanks in part to lavish videos that air constantly on MTV. They do make 'em like this, in spirit, albeit very rarely-- 2012 appears to be just as hostile as 1995 was towards embracing the life-altering possibilities of classic rock or pursuing actual populism. It's no wonder Corgan is so agitated about the state of rock music these days, since his critics won. But every now again, there will be something like M83's Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and Japandroids' Celebration Rock-- that get there in their own way and express what the Pumpkins did on "Tonight, Tonight", that "the impossible is possible tonight," as in right now. They have little to do with Mellon Collie except that they sacrifice being cool to show a deep respect for the way teenagers interact with music. When the world is a vampire, you don't want history lessons or a list of influences, you want fucking magic. You don't want lifestyle music, you don't want Our Band Could Be Your Life. You want music that you can live inside. Damn right Smashing Pumpkins shot for the moon on Mellon Collie, but only because they wanted to give you the sun and the stars. | 2012-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | EMI | December 5, 2012 | 9.3 | a41ef3b1-d606-4223-9a4b-1aabdcab6d63 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The enchanting singer enlists ANOHNI, David Byrne, Brandi Carlile, and more for an interesting collection of covers ranging from traditional folk songs, to Neil Young tunes, to children’s lullabies. | The enchanting singer enlists ANOHNI, David Byrne, Brandi Carlile, and more for an interesting collection of covers ranging from traditional folk songs, to Neil Young tunes, to children’s lullabies. | Rufus Wainwright: Folkocracy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rufus-wainwright-folkocracy/ | Folkocracy | The folk tradition looms large over the work of Rufus Wainwright. Approaching the craft as a white gay Canadian man for whom the canon of his own folkie dad was there to be overcome, Wainwright lavishes the cover material he recorded for Folkocracy with the appetite of a weary traveler sniffing a bounteous feast. This is an artist who set Shakespeare’s sonnets to music and belted “Over the Rainbow” at Carnegie Hall: He ain’t afraid of shit. Like his stylistic and artistic compass Bryan Ferry, Wainwright can inhabit the cobwebby artifact “Oh Shenandoah”: He’s a habitual tourist with an appetite, growling in a foreign country’s terrain.
And, I must point out, he has never sung better on record, wresting control from a vibrato too often besotted with its own purring, like a cat stroking itself. Even on his self-titled 1998 debut, an album that elbowed me into coming out a few weeks after my first listen, his dolorous way with a syllable occasionally smothered its chansons. He had more fun on 2001’s sprightlier Poses, one of the period’s few documents about a gay urban life where too many cigarettes, cocktails, and muzzy mornings don’t quash his insistence on more cigs, cocktails, and mornings, or on improving the songcraft that particularized his experiences.
Toughened by decades’ worth of incident in Wainwright’s life—from vices to kids—Folkocracy queers these ancient prayers and subterranean croaks without Wainwright or the band, assembled by co-producer Mitchell Froom, fussing them into inertness. Folkocracy is a fun listen. Froom, known for treating keyboards like bazookas, keeps things spare, not parched: He knows his client requested condo-sized voices like ANOHNI, Chaka Khan, and Brandi Carlile. For once the advance PR is correct: the album sounds like a party to which the birthday boy invited his favorite people. For precedents consider Neil Young’s Americana, where he plugged the likes of “Oh Susannah” into the blown, bleary amps of Crazy Horse.
These projects are worthless if they don’t surprise, so, happily, Folkocracy offers several. Andrew Bird plays a violin line as old as Tennessee mud and harmonizes with Chris Stills on “Harvest,” the best Young cover since Lee Ann Womack’s poised “Out on the Weekend” almost a decade ago. The Chaka Khan who impressed with versions of “All of Me” and other standards long ago contributes a vocal to “Cotton Eyed Joe,” whose finger-brushed delicacy suggests the lyrics remain a mystery she longs to solve. John Legend has never sung with less ham-on-rye than on “Heading for Home.” A performer who sounds least human when conventionally crooning, David Byrne invests Moondog’s “High on a Rocky Ledge” with a tremulous intensity; I imagine him pledging his troth to his lover instead of shoving her off the cliff.
The above-the-title star holds up his end. For his next project he should write original kid songs like “Hush Little Baby,” joined here by siblings Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche on the mic. As if inspired by the gently fierce Hawaiian protest rhetoric of “Kaulana Nā Pua,” he includes his own lamentation. The highest compliment to offer “Going to a Town” is that it belongs in this company. Val McCullum strums basic guitar chords over which Wainwright and ANOHNI mourn the promises their fellow citizens persist in breaking. “I’m so tired of you, America,” Wainwright sighs, but in a sigh inflected with the expectation that he’ll hope again—just like the rest of us will break the promise again.
The concentration and breath control he demonstrates on “Going to a Town” are triumphs. It’s not like he couldn’t ever sing: he’s got “I Don’t Know What It Is” and “Foolish Love” in his catalog. But a newly jazzed Wainwright has learned from the company he keeps. Folkocracy is as generous as a utopia. | 2023-06-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | June 6, 2023 | 7.3 | a42239a1-f6ab-40ae-b54e-b7052772af18 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Steeped in ’80s revivalism, the New York dance-rockers’ eighth album is a hazy tapestry of half-remembered sounds and shopworn tropes. | Steeped in ’80s revivalism, the New York dance-rockers’ eighth album is a hazy tapestry of half-remembered sounds and shopworn tropes. | We Are Scientists: Lobes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/we-are-scientists-lobes/ | Lobes | We Are Scientists were never the center of the zeitgeist. The California band arrived in New York City just as the post-millennial party was winding down; they released their debut album in 2005, by which point it was apparent that the Strokes hadn’t changed the world after all. But where their peers fell by the wayside, guitarist/vocalist Keith Murray and bassist Chris Cain persevered, doubling down on melody while embracing humor, if not outright silliness, taking pains not to be confused with Weezer.
It was a blueprint that could sustain a career, generating such tuneful records as TV en Francais, the 2014 album where they unveiled their neo-power-pop formula: Underneath the spiky rhythms and shards of guitar, the band was guided by hooks. They clung tight to their blueprint, finding variations on familiar themes all the way through Huffy, a 2021 album propelled by post-pandemic urgency; they seemed intent on rushing through their songs, giddy that they were getting back to the grind.
Ostensibly, Lobes is the album where We Are Scientists dive into strange waters, a record where the pent-up energy that fueled Huffy drives the group into new territory. Keith Murray explained to DIY Mag that where Huffy was a “’‘guitar-rock’-focused record,” Lobes swings the pendulum to “electronic, synth-based dance-rock songs.” It’s a difference without distinction, partially because We Are Scientists have always traded in dance rock. “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” and “The Great Escape,” a pair of singles from their debut, neatly fit into the fashionable dance-punk revival at the time, and they’re not all that far from the stylized thrum of Lobes. It’s just that the emphasis has been flipped; synthesizers lead the charge, with guitars functioning as coloring and texture.
The thick layers of keyboards and pulsating drum machines conjure ghosts of new wave, all performed by a group almost old enough to have experienced it firsthand. Curiously, nothing on Lobes feels born of personal experience. Rather, it’s a hazy tapestry of half-remembered sounds and shopworn tropes, all absorbed secondhand through persistent exercises in nostalgia, whether retro radio revivals, vintage MTV broadcasts, video games, or other bands who got around to resuscitating the sounds of the 1980s first.
Many of the building blocks on Lobes feel purposefully familiar. With its glistening synths, “Turn It Up" echoes New Order; “Settled Accounts” is driven by a chicken-scratch guitar that tips its hat to Nile Rodgers; and “Less From You” throbs to a disco beat straight out of the glitter-ball glory days. While the insistent rhythms help give the album a retro-futuristic pulse, even on such ballads as “Lucky Just to Be Here,” Lobes is essentially mood music. Neither the frenetic melodies nor Keith Murray’s flat affect—on “Settled Accounts,” he’s a dead ringer for Julian Casablancas—can pierce the production’s gleaming, neon veneer. Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion. | 2023-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Masterswan | January 27, 2023 | 6 | a42916fe-af0a-40ee-aaf0-051516ff3b55 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Gqom (pronounced Gome) is a blistering variant of South African house which finds its roots in the coastal city of Durban. Like lots of the home-brewed genres of music in South Africa and beyond, a treasure trove of tracks is easily available on the Internet. The 15 tracks that compose Sounds of Durban Vol. 1 successfully capture the very essence of gqom: the rough-and-tumble vibe, the impressionistic and asymmetrical kickdrums, the hypnotic chanting, and the music's brash youthfulness. | Gqom (pronounced Gome) is a blistering variant of South African house which finds its roots in the coastal city of Durban. Like lots of the home-brewed genres of music in South Africa and beyond, a treasure trove of tracks is easily available on the Internet. The 15 tracks that compose Sounds of Durban Vol. 1 successfully capture the very essence of gqom: the rough-and-tumble vibe, the impressionistic and asymmetrical kickdrums, the hypnotic chanting, and the music's brash youthfulness. | Various Artists: The Sound of Durban Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21381-the-sound-of-durban-vol-1/ | The Sound of Durban Vol. 1 | The Rome-based DJ/producer Nan Kolè discovered gqom late one night last January when he saw a friend tagged in a link with the mysterious hashtag: #Gqom. Luckily he clicked on the link and committed to a deep dive, staying up 'til the next morning downloading hundreds of songs. Gqom (pronounced Gome) is a blistering variant of South African house which finds its roots in the coastal city of Durban, and like lots of the home-brewed genres of music in South Africa and beyond, a treasure trove of tracks was easily available on the Internet. The plentiful and vibrant community on the free file-hosting site Data File Host, the dozens of Facebook groups (IGqomu, Gqomu Music, Gqom Nation to name a few), invite-only WhatsApp group chats, and most importantly KasiMP3—South Africa's answer to Bandcamp and Soundcloud—can make a newcomer feel like he's uncovered an embarrassment of riches.
But good luck cataloging any of it, let alone compiling a "best of" when so many tracks are titled with cellphone numbers/BBM pins, and available mostly in low bitrate formats. Kolè met Lerato Phiri through mutual friends in Rome, and she moved back to South Africa to find and meet with young producers in Durban, convincing them to contribute to a compilation. A year later they've co-founded the record label Gqom Oh! and have released their first full-length release, The Sound of Durban Vol. 1.
If there is an origin story for gqom it all begins on the Internet, probably on the Pirate Bay or a similarly clandestine digital backdoor. Emo Kid, an artist featured on Sounds of Durban, said that he he thinks the style "was invented when some unknown guy from elokishini, the ghetto, got hold of production software and began experimenting and making something he could dance to, and gqom was born." Gqom comes from a Zulu word meaning drum or hit, and in the local slang it's an onomatopoeia that mimics the abrupt sound of a rock hitting a tile floor. The sound of gqom is one literally of rupture and force, or as Kode9 has said, "like being suspended over the gravitational field of a black hole, and lovin' it." The entire aesthetic of gqom is steeped in a swashbuckling DIY attitude. Nothing about these productions feels slick or highly processed. The music proudly shows its seams by remaining highly tactile, off the cuff, and very confrontational. Back-breaking tracks like "Zulu War" and "Gunz & Soulz" make this quite evident.
What Kolè found so attractive about gqom in the first place was that it felt like a perfect artistic expression for the political, economic, and urban contradictions so apparent in Durban and South Africa as a whole. It is among the most Westernized and developed countries on the continent, but the living conditions for the predominately black communities in the townships of South Africa remain dismal. Gqom is still being produced in townships and suburbs, marginal communities by and large where access to Internet, gear, and everything young musicians need is still a struggle. And for the most part gqom artists and gqom music is not played on local radio, nor has it reached any significant popularity outside of Durban, which is often seen as secondary in the music scene to the larger and more visible Johannesburg. While it might seem specious that someone who has never been to Durban become the spokesperson for the genre, Kolè's intentions feel heartfelt and earnest. He's said the artists (whose ages range from 15 to 22) call him "Malumz" which means "uncle" because he's too old to be a "bro."
Phiri and Kolè want gqom to have the same connection to Durban that juke and footwork has to Chicago, and by helping bring the genre international recognition they hope to route investment toward better access to technology and greater cultural infrastructure in Durban, which should continue fostering artistic production. They aren't the only group trying to make gqom a big deal on international dance floors. Kode9 included gqom tracks in a Resident Advisor mix last year, and the London-based label Goon Club Allstars released an EP by the group Rudeboyz last summer. That same summer, up-and-coming grime rapper Stormzy traveled to South Africa to learn about gqom. According to Johannesburg music journalist, Lloyd Gedye, you can even hear strains of gqom's signature stylings in Jamie xx's "Gosh," which he might have heard in the now-popular gqom nights that are popping up in South London. Even with all the hype attached, it still feels like we're learning more about gqom, and Phiri and Kolè's project is the largest and most thoughtful survey of the genre available to western audiences to date.
The 15 tracks that compose Sounds of Durban Vol. 1 successfully capture the very essence of gqom: the rough-and-tumble vibe, the impressionistic and asymmetrical kickdrums, the hypnotic chanting, and the music's brash youthfulness. Originally referred to as "Broken Beat" in the community, gqom is a pushback against spiritual predecessors like Kwaito, where melody and other harmonic qualities are dissolved away and only the hard beat of a song remains.
Much of the music on the album can feel amorphous and shapeless because it's difficult to identify and differentiate artist from artist as songs bleed into the next. In that way, it's more a well-wrought mix than an album. The album pleasantly bludgeons you with what makes gqom different from other kinds of house music: it's raw, it's tougher, angrier. It presents a case for a minimal version of house which is never restrained—the music is always exuberant and riotous. This also means the album can easily move from relentless to tiring, because as a whole it lacks pacing, and it is instead a trial by fire.
Although that is not to say that artists don't stand out. Dominowe's "Africa's Cry," the album's second track, sets the bar impossibly high. Cruel Boyz's "Umeqo Emagqomini (Dub Mix)" was the lead single for the record, and it might be the album's best song. It feels like the strongest argument for gqom being the heartbeat of club music in Durban, with its addictive combination of polyrhythmic claves and vigorous, almost painterly, use of kickdrums.
Some of these songs might feel like prototypes for who these artists might become. But it's also the first major salvo in a genre that will only get more dazzling and compelling. Ultimately, Sound of Durban is the story of a talented group of friends as much as it is a sampler into a new and fast-moving genre of dance music. All the things that are carefree and rebellious about being young find a way to be showcased in these songs. And if there is any resolution that can feel doable in this new year, it's to rep this group of young people in Durban as hard as possible when you decide to hijack the speakers at the party you find yourself at tonight. | 2016-01-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Gqom Oh! | January 26, 2016 | 8.1 | a42c2408-a66c-4d56-9d11-f414423f3bbb | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
On his debut, this Swedish artist submerges psych-rock instrumentals into one low, bubbling groove. | On his debut, this Swedish artist submerges psych-rock instrumentals into one low, bubbling groove. | Sven Wunder: Eastern Flowers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sven-wunder-eastern-flowers/ | Eastern Flowers | Last year, the Swedish artist Sven Wunder quietly released his debut album Doğu Çiçekleri on a freshly minted label called Piano Piano. Intentionally mysterious, the project was crafted to resemble an obscure ‘60s or ‘70s library record, the kind of purposefully anonymous mood music used by TV shows and movie houses to cheaply soundtrack their productions. In a vacuum, most library records are campy and awkward, but a select few feel like mystical accidents, cross-genre laboratory experiments that yield bizarre new life forms. Sven Wunder has successfully aimed Doğu Çiçekleri in this direction, and so it feels less helpful to describe the music as jazz or funk than to back away and simply call it heavy.
The most memorable and reliable lead voice is a saz, a shimmering, sure-footed metallic sound that helps cast Eastern Flowers in a Mediterranean folk hue. Whoever is playing it is shredding, and helps give the album its restrained funk. The album clearly wants to transport you somewhere, but Wunder is refreshingly unclear about where that might be, and Eastern Flowers is never too on-the-nose about evoking rare-groove nostalgia: “Daisy” opens with some surf-rock spy-theme cliches before a saz overpowers the guitar and snowballs into glitchy organ stabs and beeps. That surf-rock tone pops up as the pecking bass effect on “Red Rose” alongside a wah-wah that sounds like a laser. These are dramatic production choices, but Wunder submerges them into one long, lazy, bubbling groove.
Things get much weirder: “Hyacinth” coaxes a polka-like trot out of a Seinfeld-theme bassline and douses it in spaghetti-western toppings. “Lotus” and “Lily” are brooding psych-folk jams, apropos of nothing else on the record. But no matter how outré the sounds get, the intensity of Wunder’s productions sneaks up on you. Many grooves dig in so deeply they seem to form a drone, an intoxicating effect that sinks in slowly over the course of the album. Snap out of it and step away, and the whole album seems to buzz in the same vibration, like a single plucked string. It’s a testament to Wunder’s vision that he’s created something so self-contained out of such wild ingredients. | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Piano Piano / Light in the Attic | May 8, 2020 | 7.4 | a42d48ec-ed83-45d9-9cc6-69a5fc2739c8 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The British electro pop artist sings of love, loneliness, and solo partying across an album built in and made for this very moment. | The British electro pop artist sings of love, loneliness, and solo partying across an album built in and made for this very moment. | Charli XCX: how i’m feeling now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-how-im-feeling-now/ | how i’m feeling now | How I’m Feeling Now, the album Charli XCX conceived and created entirely at home in quarantine in Los Angeles over the past six weeks, is instantly familiar to a lot of us at the moment. “I’m so bored/Wake up late, eat some cereal/Try my best to be physical/Lose myself in a TV show/Staring out to oblivion/All my friend are invisible,” she deadpans on “Anthems,” a song workshopped during a recent session on Instagram Live, the celebrity platform du jour. “Sometimes I feel OK/Some days I’m so frightened.” Say it louder for the people stuck in a depression nap.
Launching a creative endeavor in public feels somewhat incomprehensible right now, when conditions for creating art are so uniquely discouraging. Charli began with a mid-March Twitter note, pondering questions that have become increasingly pressing as the music business scrambles to adapt to pandemic culture: When might it be safe to tour? Who will pay for artists’ work until then? Charli, a self-identified workaholic, forged ahead: She performed at the Minecraft music festival organized by 100 gecs and hosts a weekly video conference with appearances by famous friends.
For those who’ve kept up with Charli’s unusually transparent creative process via interviews, livestreams, and screenshots, part of the joy of the new album is simply seeing how her song sketches and Notes app lyrics turned out. Those just tuning in may have missed the stress of a self-imposed May 15 deadline (she only just made it), and how quarantining with her boyfriend strengthened a previously strained long-distance relationship. How I’m Feeling Now is simultaneously a hopeless cry and a celebration of love recorded steps away from its object, with songs like “forever,” “claws,” “7 years,” and “i finally understand” devoted to sincere, immediate romance and pleasure.
Though How I’m Feeling Now doesn’t have the same reflective gloss or celebrity guest list of 2019’s Charli, its sound is true to the sugary bounce of the club pop she’s explored since the Vroom Vroom EP in 2016 (A. G. Cook, Bon Iver collaborator BJ Burton, and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady all receive co-production credits). While life shuts down, this music bursts out. Busy synthetic arrangements snake their way around Charli’s vocals, unmistakable even after they’ve been repeatedly pitch-shifted and filtered. “Claws” sounds like it’s being assembled in a canning factory, ascending a euphoric EDM build to a gaggle of dissonant, bionic vocal vibrations.
Opener “Pink Diamond,” a standard-issue Charli banger, makes only passing mention of pandemic life (“In real life could the club even handle us?”). But though Charli might role-play as a party-time pop android, the most enjoyable parts of How I’m Feeling Now come from a vulnerable person in conspicuous glitter armor. “I’ve been reeling for 12 days/When I start to see fear it gets real bad,” goes the tender-voiced first verse of “detonate,” a dispatch from the anxious early weeks of lockdown, when the days were still few enough to count. Even the simplistic premise of “party 4 u” takes on new meaning under the circumstances: “I only threw this party for you/For you, for you, for you.” Hey, it’s not like anybody else can come.
The sentiments read simply, but with the collective fear and uncertainty of pandemic still surrounding us, their meaning feels profound. As Pitchfork contributor Shaad D’Souza wrote last week, Charli’s music is not the pop of the future, but a pure expression of the present. By design, How I’m Feeling Now is so current that it’s hard to imagine its message resonating the same way when life begins to feel normal once again. It’s a cultural artifact from the ultimate liminal space, between the old, pre-pandemic world and an uncertain new landscape—why should it live anywhere else? Right now, even “forever” comes with a bittersweet caveat: “I will always love you/I love you forever/I know in the future/We won’t see each other.”
But Charli makes a lot of sense here, and she deserves credit as our most fully online pop star. She’s the ideal choice for a festival in Minecraft, where glitchy, pitched-up vocals and the occasional free-association nonsense lyric seem to extend naturally from the game’s surreal, hyperactive world. More than just an autobiographical document or a manifestation of Charli’s impressive work ethic, How I’m Feeling Now is her answer to questions about the viability of music in a crisis. It works better than anyone could have anticipated. | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 19, 2020 | 7.7 | a437b199-1951-489d-92ce-e71bfaa0020d | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Remastered and reissued editions document Dan Bejar's early period, when he grew into the unique, beloved songwriter he is today. | Remastered and reissued editions document Dan Bejar's early period, when he grew into the unique, beloved songwriter he is today. | Destroyer: City of Daughters / Thief / Streethawk: A Seduction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14141-city-of-daughters-thief-streethawk-a-seduction/ | City of Daughters / Thief / Streethawk: A Seduction | "Find something difficult to do and do it," says Destroyer's Dan Bejar a few tracks into Streethawk: A Seduction. Which is more or less the story of Bejar's early albums, now reissued-- City of Daughters, Thief, and Streethawk. In a few years, the tentative bedroom auteur grew into one of indie rock's most distinctive voices, and these three records laid the groundwork for his career. The extravagant glam-pop that would become Bejar's trademark is hinted at, whittled down, and then perfected over the course of these albums. Every record since Streethawk has felt like either an extension of its successes or an outright rejection of its excesses.
City of Daughters found Bejar playing with others for the first time, but it's still plenty homespun; its songs are rough around the edges and not always sure what to do with themselves. Most of these tracks are simple and occasionally quite direct, but with less drama and fewer of the flashes of brilliance Bejar's often built songs from and around. Still finding his voice as a singer, Bejar alternates between sounding meek and going in just a tad harder than the songs seem to deserve. The wordiness that would become something of a trademark is in full effect, but he was only just starting to get the sloganeering thing down; unlike much of what came later, not every line is worthy of examination.
His work with the band, too, results in some fairly perfunctory arrangements; in hindsight, it's easy to see where a big crescendo might have gone had they had the means to pull one off at the time. The bouncy synth-pop breakdown in "The Space Race" is the first real evidence of his penchant for throwing a lot of unexpected elements into a song and making them stick. But the most successful tune here is one of its most bare; "You Were So Cruel" describes some manner of abuse, and while the specifics aren't crystal clear, Bejar's delivery is devastating. A good writer can explain themselves in any number of words; a great writer needs only a couple. With a few dozen words, the song drags you through about as many emotions. It's possibly his first masterpiece, though more would follow.
Thief, originally issued in mono, benefits the most from remastering. It's Bejar's first stab at matching his grandiose, idiosyncratic vision to a showier sound, and it's never sounded better. It's also the first Destroyer LP to feature a full band on every track, and it displays a far better understanding of how its moving parts should fit together than the more fleshed-out numbers on Daughters. It's more patient, more deliberate, and much more confident; the singing improves vastly, and the songs cease feeling like vehicles for spitting out lyrics.
All the hallmarks of Destroyer as we know them now are here: Rousing instrumental passages, lots of la-da-da's, effusive underlining of key phrases. But the sense of drama-- that teetering-on-the-brink feeling that marks his best stuff-- only occasionally rears its head; he still seemed to be getting comfortable having other people around, and there are times when the band seems to be playing him, rather than the other way around. As much as Destroyer is about excess, Thief sometimes bites off more than Bejar could chew at that point, and the duller bits obscure the moments of graceful abandon.
But then there's Streethawk, a record of practically nothing but graceful abandon. Each line seems immaculately crafted, every note falling into perfect order, every word sung with the proper bite and bile. This is what Bejar was building to, why he became a songwriter in the first place, and he reaches quite a precipice. Songs move effortlessly between bits of received wisdom, the drama is amped up to almost unthinkable levels, and these tunes feel like a long series of exclamation points. The guy got really good really fast, and he knew it-- his wit is sharp, his observations are keen, and his gaze is withering.
Bejar's pop songcraft gets a real shot in the arm here; instead of burying his best lines in verses, he builds his rave-ups around them, and the songs feel like a series of unlikely peaks that, in less able hands, would topple in seconds. You could study this music at academy; you can also pump a fist to it. It can at first feel overwhelming or overstuffed, but the salty poetry and barrage of hooks eventually starts to make its own kind of sense; beyond brimming over with ideas, if it's got a flaw, it's that it wasn't issued with a glossary. This is the payoff for years of head-down dedication to craft-- all these monstrous choruses and anthems-to-be; all those difficult years of working and reworking to make himself a better songwriter until, finally, he was one of the best we've got. He still is. | 2010-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 19, 2010 | 7.1 | a439da0b-b9c0-476b-9698-21d19c35dcac | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The singer and producer’s dazzling new EP is a subtle gesture about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark Chris as a true star. | The singer and producer’s dazzling new EP is a subtle gesture about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark Chris as a true star. | Christine and the Queens: La vita nuova EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christine-and-the-queens-la-vita-nuova-ep/ | La Vita Nuova EP | Chris is gentle and tough, masculine and feminine, subtle and direct, a pop singer with high-art ambitions. La vita nuova, a five-song EP and its accompanying short film, is about the psychic effort required to maintain the balance. On the cover, Chris appears pensive, part Ziggy Stardust, part Degas portrait. She calls it a project about vulnerability, though it’s also about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark her as a true star.
If you’re looking for the party, you’re in the wrong place: Shorter and sadder than 2018’s Chris, La vita nuova has fewer big synth swoops and slower tempos. Produced by Chris alongside debut album collaborator Ash Workman, its cool, aquatic surface ripples with subtle vocal manipulations and whispery background samples. “People, I’ve been sad” is an open apology to a world its author can’t bear to face, like a note from the friend who misses you but still won’t return your calls. “You know the feeling,” Chris offers, opening a door within herself to reveal a mirror.
Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages. Last year was the year of “Gone,” Chris and Charli XCX’s duet about sadness and sexual tension; the Caroline Polachek duet “La vita nuova” is a worthy successor. Their verses in Italian are a mutual affirmation of passion, but the chorus, in English, mourns the partner who won’t dare to show their love. “Heartbreakers,” Chris cries, “I never take their answer for sure.”
Throughout, she seems like someone who’s just emerged from a breakup, still sorting through the raw emotion. “Do you think there’s only one thing to do/To write a song about you?” she asks on “Mountains,” a wistful sketch of a lapsed connection. Other times her stance is not so clear-cut: Perhaps the selfish, possessive lover she addresses in “Je disparais dans tes bras” is not a lover, but the flattening gaze of fame—not merely the pain of unrequited love, but of the impossibility of being her full self in the eyes of others.
Most spectacular is the accompanying short film, a five-song music-video narrative set in Paris’ sumptuous Palais Garnier opera house. Directed by Colin Solal Cardo, the story is a supernatural drama of a performer’s life, following Chris through a rooftop dance solo and a group rehearsal to a climactic vampire ball that pairs her with Polachek for a lusty duet. Chris appears in virginal white and then in shiny black pleather, a heavily symbolic heroine uniting the sacred and profane.
It is astounding to watch Chris’ particular vision play out in this location—a genre iconoclast defining her own scene in a lavish 19th-century Parisian theater. It recalls a story from her youth that she relayed to The Guardian a few years ago, how once, at drama school where only boys were permitted to direct plays, she defied the administration by staging her own. With its Thriller-esque flash and tomato-red fake blood, the film La vita nuova looks like a kind of theater-kid fever dream. But that’s what theater is for: The emotions that feel too unruly, too ambiguous, to survive in the real world. They need space, just as dancers do, and Chris’ could fill the house.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Because Music | March 3, 2020 | 7.8 | a43c45f6-dfd2-4f85-ac70-0dbb7d7d7b20 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Maroon 5’s seventh album sets out to experiment beyond their comfort zone. It sounds like a band trying desperately to appeal to as many markets as possible. | Maroon 5’s seventh album sets out to experiment beyond their comfort zone. It sounds like a band trying desperately to appeal to as many markets as possible. | Maroon 5: Jordi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maroon-5-jordi/ | Jordi | The most you can hope for from Maroon 5 is oblivion. The band hummed and strummed their way into perpetual background music, cooing sanded-down soft rock in every Starbucks, Adam Levine’s signature whine pleading for love and rain and Sunday mornings. It was anaesthesia. Levine became a bland, steady presence in pop culture, preaching banalities and judging TV singing competitions. In the nearly 20 years since the band debuted with Songs About Jane, they’ve clawed at pop trends—EDM-inspired beats, strategic collaborations with rappers—occasionally finding a hook so sugary, a drum pattern so blunting, that you surrendered to the rush of it. You don’t turn to Maroon 5 for their baggy, overcommitted metaphors or their sappy ballads. You listen so you can submerge.
The band’s seventh record comes up short. They continue to fumble for relevancy with mismatched features and plastic-sounding pop, but these tracks are more scattered and chaotic than on past albums. Jordi’s title is a tribute to Maroon 5’s late manager, who died suddenly in 2017, and there are pockets of mourning on the record. “Doo doo doo doo doo, memories bring back you,” Levine hums over a cloying guitar line on “Memories.” Maroon 5’s take on love has always been doused in cliché; their response to tragedy is equally pallid. When the band released “Nobody’s Love” as a single in July 2020, Levine wrote on Instagram that he made the song with “the whole world in mind,” urging essential workers and social justice activists to remember the “potent power of love” as they listened to him croon. “Ain’t nobody want to live in this world today,” he proclaims on “One Light,” an Afrobeats-lite collaboration with pop songwriter Bantu. Elsewhere, there’s a jarring posthumous Nipsey Hussle verse on a remix of “Memories” and an uncharacteristically anodyne appearance from the late rapper Juice WRLD, on a track otherwise devoted to Levine begging a love interest to talk to him.
This is not about a band experimenting beyond their comfort zone; it is the sound of a band trying desperately to appeal to as many markets as possible. blackbear delivers an almost identical flow to the chorus of his hit “hot girl bummer” on “Echo,” and Levine tries on the rapper’s trap drums and fluorescent production. He’s his own guest feature on the streaming-service bonus track “Lifestyle,” which is actually a Jason Derulo song. “Can’t get your lipstick off my col-la-laaaaa,” he babbles. “You do that thing that keep me calling ya.” The band attempts a sweeping, theatrical ballad on “Convince Me Otherwise,” Levine and H.E.R. trading verses about a lovers’ argument, but the song caves in under the weight of self-seriousness. Jordi bounces between smeary electropop haze, wobbles of tropical house, a forgettable Stevie Nicks appearance. It’s too cluttered to sink into, too limp for catharsis.
The album credits a whopping 47 writers, and there is a vague comfort in how precisely these songs are formulated, hooks and synths and predictable rhymes snapping into place. But if past Maroon 5 songs addressed convincing-enough emotions (misery, longing, horniness), Jordi has few discernible narratives. Levine goes from wondering how he can “save my mama” to deeming a love interest his “starlight and moonshine and burning sun.” “I’m not holding on, I’m just depressed that you’re gone,” he lilts on “Beautiful Mistakes,” by far the most palatable track. It’s a simple admission, dissolving into chants of “na na na” and clean, frictionless chords. The song builds to a Megan Thee Stallion feature, but like the band’s past collaborations with the biggest female star of the moment—the Cardi B-featuring “Girls Like You,” the SZA duet “What Lovers Do”—it feels flimsy and transactional, an excuse to briefly join Megan’s orbit. This, too, is part of Maroon 5’s time-tested strategy: offering a reprieve from Levine’s internal monologue, then fading back into it. The band’s grief flares up through the pop formulas in discordant flickers—“Live young, die fast,” Levine breathes on “Remedy.” Making an album to address the darker sides of life is an honorable intention; it also means making a Maroon 5 album, sleek and glib and synthetic.
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. | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope / 222 | June 16, 2021 | 4.7 | a442c88c-fa58-47fd-87ef-426bb3432d1d | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The new EP from Pender Street Steppers collects five tracks of the Vancouver duo’s breezy, hazy house music. It finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone. | The new EP from Pender Street Steppers collects five tracks of the Vancouver duo’s breezy, hazy house music. It finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone. | Pender Street Steppers: Pender Street Steppers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pender-street-steppers/ | Pender Street Steppers | On the insert for their 2013 cassette Life in the Zone, Vancouver’s Pender Street Steppers thank their MPCs, all the star signs, even “everyone that never supported us.” For good measure, they added that they were cool with it if you decided to dub the cassette and give it away to your friends. Part of the city’s media-averse Mood Hut collective, the duo of Jack Jutson and Liam Butler come across as fairly chill individuals in words and sounds. The duo has since leisurely released three singles, most of them choice selections from that original mixtape. With this new five song EP, Pender Street Steppers nearly double their available tracks.
With little of the Mood Hut catalog available digitally, the label’s sound is a slippery one to pin down. There are traces of boogie and funk to be had, but dub, smooth jazz, and new age also blip up. Though the beats hew closest to house music, they are by turns breezy and hazy, and you may find yourself zoning out to them rather than moving. The crew often toys with expectations, as when they released a compilation of dance edits entitled Disco Mantras: mellow and woozy, they drew from unlikely sources like new age reedman Paul Horn. Listening through the Mood Hut catalog, you’re not quite sure if they are ideally suited for bobbing on a dancefloor or else strolling across the quad, and “Raining Again” strikes that balance.
Despite the inherent dejection in its name, “Raining Again” is perky, full of the crisp hi-hats and dubbed-out toms that give their productions a heady feel. The melody is carried by what might be an electric saxophone from a 1980s infomercial, its cheesy, cheap tone closer to a duck quack. But whereas previous PSS productions would have just ridden that sound around and around, now Jutson and Butler deftly fold in more elements. Clean-picked guitar lines enter against a fluttering arpeggio (and upon repeated playback, a voice humming along in harmony). Soon another sax line swoops in, sending the track even higher into the rain clouds.
For Mood Hut obsessives, the most notable track here is “Molto Bene,” which was pivotal when the duo first slotted it into their Resident Advisor mix back in 2015. Built around a shuffling snare and kick pattern with fidgety bass and organ keys that flutter around the beat, it’s the kind of track the duo excels in, catchy yet still fuzzy. A voice mutters in the background and a jaunty whistle winds through.
As good as the duo can be at taking a nagging little sound and looping it to the point of mesmerism (think back to the “um” sound that runs through their track “Bubble World,” or the hiccup of “Openin’ Up”), the back half of this EP finds them retreading a few tropes. “Blackboard” utilizes a grimaced “aye!” as its vocal, which becomes redundant and needling, taking away from its playfully ponging drums. “No Need”’s clap and snare veer so close to Jack J’s own “Looking Forward to You” that you half-expect the song to stumble into it. The half-mumbled vocal delivery that Jutson also deployed on his own single reappears here, this time murmuring “baby don’t stop.” But rather than come across as a dance music command, it’s so laid-back as to be inert, the keys around incrementally slowing and spacing out around the vocal. It makes for a relaxed closer, but the EP finds the Steppers not venturing very far outside of their comfort zone. | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Mood Hut | December 8, 2017 | 7.2 | a4492acb-643b-4cef-8e37-e985d26c96c1 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The London producer pays tribute to his musical and familial heritage on a sophomore album that makes vintage Roland gear sound new again. | The London producer pays tribute to his musical and familial heritage on a sophomore album that makes vintage Roland gear sound new again. | Steven Julien: Bloodline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steven-julien-bloodline/ | Bloodline | Bloodline is a record whose roots run deep. Steven Julien’s follow up to his 2016 debut album, Fallen, is named for the influence the London producer’s family has had on his music. But Bloodline resonates even more profoundly as a callback to Julien’s musical heritage, with each track featuring a piece of Roland equipment—most notably the iconic TR-808 drum machine—in honor of Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who died in April 2017.
Julien may be the ideal musician to pay tribute to Kakehashi. Julien’s productions, while inventive in execution, are relatively simple in sound, using a basic palette that would have been familiar to the Detroit techno innovators of the 1980s who did so much to enhance the reputation of Roland’s TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303 machines. Bloodline takes this minimal approach even further than the nearly skeletal Fallen: The new album’s title track is built on 808 drums and a daub of spectral melody from a Roland Juno synth, while opener “Hunt” uses little more than shifting synth drones, the ominous clanging of a bell, and a noise that resembles the nervous rustle of a thousand wind chimes in a desecrated church.
What makes an impression here are not so much the individual sounds—there are few of those jaw-dropping set pieces that you get in the work of Arca or Katie Gately—but what Julien does with them. This is where the bloodline of the title comes in: Julien recently claimed that his drum programming “ain’t coming from just me, it comes from a long line of ancestors” that includes “rhythm from tribes in Africa and natives from the Caribbean.”
It would take a musicologist to comprehensively trace this evolution, but there is something unique about the way Julien programs a drum machine. On “Roll of the Dice,” his 808 sounds like it’s on the verge of a funk-strained nervous breakdown, its rhythms punctuated by brutal bass drum rolls that seem to want to punch their way out of the 808’s casing. The beat breathes new life into the acidic squiggles of the TB-303, one of the most overworked instruments in techno, constructing a ramshackle acid house that patrons might fear to enter. “Queen of Ungilsan” pushes the electro snap of the 808 in weirdly syncopated directions, with drum hits darting into the mix with the precision of a production-line robot playing jazz.
The liberated feel of Julien’s drum programming extends to the way the songs are arranged. While much electronic music is tightly constrained, programmed in blocks for maximum dancefloor response, sounds on Bloodline come and go freely, with a drum roll or a cymbal crash introduced because it feels right, rather than simply to mark the passing of 16 bars. Tempering these hard machine rhythms is a liberal sprinkling of melody that brings to mind the work of Detroit techno pioneer Derrick May. As May did on late-’80s tracks like “Nude Photo,” Julien scatters impassioned, jazzy touches on “IDK” and “Queen of Ungilsan” to offset his percussive thrust.
This is an album equally suited for swooning or raving, six tracks with enough thump for the dancefloor and enough brain food for the couch. Julien claims that Bloodline “feels more in your face sonically” than Fallen, and there is a certain raucousness to the drum sound on “Roll of the Dice” that wasn’t obvious on his debut. But the new record is more a companion piece to Fallen than a giant leap forward, a reminder that musical bloodlines runs deep and that simple machines can sing with soul. Ikutaro Kakehashi, who built his machines to favor ease of expression over virtuosity, would have approved. | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Apron | April 28, 2018 | 7.1 | a45d1b22-4ce7-4606-811e-5d0f613713f9 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ |
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