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The Lisbon producer returns to his hometown’s Príncipe label with nine new tracks of hyperkinetic, defiantly experimental club music. | The Lisbon producer returns to his hometown’s Príncipe label with nine new tracks of hyperkinetic, defiantly experimental club music. | DJ Nigga Fox: Cartas Na Manga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-nigga-fox-cartas-na-manga/ | Cartas Na Manga | In early 2015, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke posted a few tracks he was taken with at that moment, ranging from Kool A.D. to musique concrète master Bernard Parmegiani, pummeling UK techno to Caribbean soca. But even among these eclectic selections, DJ Nigga Fox’s “Weed” stood out. At a time when few knew about Portugal’s Príncipe label and their hand-painted 12” releases, Yorke helped introduce the rest of the world to the bewildering polyrhythms of Rogério Brandão and his labelmates, all of them representatives of Lisbon’s Afro-Lusophone diaspora. Their sound, batida, has since traversed the globe: Nídia appeared on Fever Ray’s Plunge, DJ Marfox has mixed with DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, and Nigga Fox released an EP on Warp last year. But for the most part Príncipe and its artists have kept their mix of kuduro, semba, and kizomba relatively close to home and defiantly undiluted.
Brandão has restlessly continued innovating—just see his 15-minute single “15 Barras,” an outlier in a scene full of two- and three-minute songs. But with the nine-track Cartas Na Manga, he returns to the label for the first time in two years to drop his most exploratory set to date. It retains the woozy instability of his prior work while folding in startling new timbres. “Sub Zero” shows off Brandão’s skill set from the jump, juggling a number of incongruent bleeps, claps, gurgles, and alien tones for its first three minutes and allowing them to build. Then, in an instant, he flips it all on its head like a Jello mold, whole and wholly coherent.
Nigga Fox’s gymnastic knack for inverting everything and still nailing the landing carries across the set. In that way Cartas Na Manga emulates its modular cover art, by in-house designer Márcio Matos, whose sticker shapes can be assembled in any number of ways. Throughout the album, new shards of sound jump out: horn fanfare, piano, electronically warped exhalations, even flute and synthesized woodwinds. The pummeling that opens “Nhama” soon careens into plonky piano, marimba, and flickering vocals, fracturing into numerous small elements yet still holding together as a track. “Faz a Minha” flashes a number of telltale sounds from different subgenres of dance—acid gurgle, house low end, itchy experimental electronics—then spins it like a carousel so that it all blurs into giddy release.
“Talanzele” is the most straightforward dancefloor track, but even then Nigga Fox makes it feel permeable, letting a flute amble in and then an array of kitchen-sink percussion march across it. “Água Morna” takes the trademark knocking Príncipe beats and injects the kind of minor-key apprehensiveness that Lalo Schifrin or Quincy Jones would add to a soundtrack to heighten tension.
If you ever wondered what Nigga Fox would sound like if he turned pensive and absurd, there’s closer “5 Violinos.” Thrummed metal gives the track its dreamy shuffle, while his voice is screwed up and down, cartoonish one moment, a drugged warble the next. Whether you make out the boast “Nigga Fox na maior” as “the illest” or “the chillest,” depending on your translation of Portuguese street slang, Brandão still sounds far out there, inviting the rest of us into his headspace. | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Príncipe Discos | November 8, 2019 | 7.9 | a46ac4e1-818f-4e3f-90ac-6b4ad32eb068 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Styled like a boxing match until they get bored with the concept and abandon it, the raucous mixtape still proves Flint, Michigan has another rap duo worth talking about. | Styled like a boxing match until they get bored with the concept and abandon it, the raucous mixtape still proves Flint, Michigan has another rap duo worth talking about. | GrindHard E : GrindHard E vs YSR Gramz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grindhard-e-grindhard-e-vs-ysr-gramz/ | GrindHard E vs. YSR Gramz | Flint, Michigan’s flourishing rap scene was built on duos. Particularly the smooth operating combination of YN Jay and Louie Ray and Rio Da Yung OG and RMC Mike’s unhinged team-ups. Together and solo, these four rappers have taken up most of the bandwidth, understandably since their personalities are huge and their singles centered around extremely detailed and darkly funny punchlines, heart-racing beats, and shape-shifting flows have come to define the city’s sound. But there’s a new pair with a bid to be spoken about in the same breath, GrindHard E and YSR Gramz.
Both E and Gramz have been floating around the Flint scene for a while. It was said that Rio and Mike started by laying down records at E’s place and Gramz emerged years ago with two-handers alongside local rapper KrispyLife Kidd. Though whenever E and Gramz jumped on a track with one of the big four, they often felt like afterthoughts: Gramz’s monotone delivery is frequently drowned out by Jay’s charisma on their shared singles and on E’s 2019 collab mixtape with Rio his punchlines don’t have the same level of imagery. Those weaknesses are still glaring, but their joint tape finds a sweet spot by leaning into the competitiveness of being a duo.
GrindHard E vs. YSR Gramz is conceptualized like a boxing match—each of the 12 songs is titled after a round, and instead of separating their verses, they’re intertwined to simulate the back-and-forth feel of a fierce prizefight. This theme may seem misleading considering they’re not exactly going toe to toe through battle rap-style punchlines, but instead by who can string together the hardest non-sequiturs or create the most vivid drug-dealing fantasy. “Round One” starts things out swinging, you can feel the sense of them trying to one-up the other with the best anecdote. They’re both getting ripped off. Gramz smacked a dude for shorting him on a deal. And E is unaware that trading drugs for meals at Applebee’s is bad business.
Throughout the tape this energy hardly wanes, each getting their moments in the spotlight. Over the pounding beat on “Round Six,” Gramz gets off a hilarious run of family-related vignettes: he clowns a guy for having no privacy because he lives with his mom; he does a deal while watching Lion King with his son; he labels himself the opposite of Tyrese in Baby Boy because he beat his stepfather’s ass. Then on the Enrgy-produced “Round Four,” he disgustedly raps, “You the type of nigga ask a bitch ‘Where my hug at?’” Meanwhile, E is much more exciting to listen to technically. His flow is high-pitched, erratic, and sometimes the words leave his mouth so fast that he fumbles through them and keeps going anyway. On “Round Seven,” I wish his tales were more lively but the flow has a new wrinkle every time he tags back in. Similarly on “Round Eight,” E trips up mid-verse and lets out a frustrated scream, then as the song moves on his delivery gets increasingly sloppy in the best way.
The final three songs on the tape are unnecessary, though. Aside from the titles, the format is dropped as guests join in for a few run-of-the-mill Michigan posse cuts. They’re not memorable or creative, especially “Round Ten” which is marred by Gramz casually dropping a homophobic slur—leaning on the ease of edginess instead of forming a well-thought-out punchline. Nevertheless, the first nine songs are consistently explosive. And even if the mixtape is missing the knockout or haymaker you might expect from a great boxing match, Flint has another duo worth talking about. | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grind Hard 4 Money Entertainment | March 22, 2022 | 6.8 | a46f51af-5626-43c1-8622-f1ccc1885b3f | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On her adventurous and melancholic full-length debut, the Nigerian pop star re-asserts herself as an imaginative producer and the author of her own lore. | On her adventurous and melancholic full-length debut, the Nigerian pop star re-asserts herself as an imaginative producer and the author of her own lore. | Tems: Born in the Wild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tems-born-in-the-wild/ | Born in the Wild | Tems was born in candlelight. “There was no electricity when my mom gave birth to me,” she told NPR. “It was night in my life for so long that, like, I just thought it was never coming.” Twenty-eight years later, the Grammy-winning Nigerian artist finds herself in the glare of the global spotlight. Born in the Wild revisits the shadows with clarity and confidence. In her earlier EPs, the Afro-fusion singer revealed her spellbinding prowess; with her debut full-length, she re-asserts herself as an imaginative producer and the author of her own lore.
Tems remains her own sole songwriter, confronting the pressures of stardom through a tender, melancholic exploration of pre-fame traumas. Each song evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions, but whether addressing a higher power (“Me & U”) or reflecting on an ill-fated romance (“Unfortunate”), Tems remains focused on gratitude. On the acoustic guitar-guided opener and title track, her voice emerges as if she’s singing beside a dying campfire, piano twinkling in the sky above.
Distilling her music to its essence, Born in the Wild opts for a stripped-down ’90s vibe, affording Tems the serenity to explore her innermost thoughts. Tems self-produced much of the LP alongside GuityBeatz, the Ghanaian Afropop DJ behind her 2021 EP If Orange Was a Place. The polyrhythmic soundscape, adorned with the earthy tones of conga drums, wind chimes, and shekere rattles, provides a counterweight to the homogenized sound of contemporary Afropop.
In songs like “Love Me JeJe” and the Diana King-interpolating “Gangsta,” she marries vintage African music with modern R&B, dancehall, and pop, writing a love letter to the past and a message for the future. The former song is a sparkly refresh of Nigerian singer Seyi Sodimu’s 1997 call-and-response classic: “All the old heads in Nigeria, they looove this song,” she said during a recent Tiny Desk concert. “Wickedest” features a sample from Ivorian quartet Magic System’s “1er Gaou”—an iconic zouglou hit from the early aughts that triggers memories for Africans everywhere.
Tems’ unembellished arrangements feel old-school and lived-in. Accompanied by jazz fusion guitarist Nsikak David on “Boy O Boy,” she conjures an ambiance of solitude as lavish as a hotel lounge ensconced in velvet. On standout “Burning,” she processes her inner turmoil in a lilting singsong, letting her vocals become the luminous core of the music. On “Forever,” which is produced by Brummie duo DAMEDAME* but sounds like a Kaytranada groove, Tems’ bassy timbre ascends to a floaty falsetto reminiscent of a young Michael Jackson. She channels 50 Cent and Lauryn Hill for the hip-hop track “T-Unit,” flexing her rap skills while staying true to the album’s melancholic mood.
Across a generous 18 tracks, Born in the Wild has the feel of a sprawling mood board, incorporating the undercurrent of Tems’ Christian faith, the melismatic cadences that mirror her fluctuating self-assurance, and refrains that blur affirmation and rumination. Her artistry is undeniable, though the album could’ve benefitted from a focused edit. The interludes, featuring snippets of her mother and managers, could have been pared back, or perhaps omitted. Afrobeats heavyweight Sarz produces “Get It Right,” a fun amapiano feature with Asake, but the song’s commercial sheen disrupts the album’s studied chiaroscuro. J. Cole’s verse on “Free Fall” also under-delivers; I would’ve much preferred Tems’ 2023 single “Not an Angel,” another Sarz production that surprisingly didn’t make the cut.
Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience. Closer “Hold On” sounds like the light at the end of the tunnel. “This is for the girl in the dark,” she sings, her voice now bathed in sun. “You’re gonna find it, it’s gonna find you…it’s the one in you.” In her past EPs, Tems ran from the darkness. On Born in the Wild, she makes peace with its permanence. | 2024-06-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Since ’93 / RCA | June 13, 2024 | 7.8 | a471ead0-134d-40e0-84b2-6f14be3d9675 | Boutayna Chokrane | https://pitchfork.com/staff/boutayna-chokrane/ | |
The husband-and-wife duo with an eclectic global sound find a home on revered techno imprint Kompakt but the resulting music is not inspiring. | The husband-and-wife duo with an eclectic global sound find a home on revered techno imprint Kompakt but the resulting music is not inspiring. | Rainbow Arabia: Boys and Diamonds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15231-boys-and-diamonds/ | Boys and Diamonds | Although it still has pretty amazing cachet, I bet most electronic music nerds would agree that Kompakt's facing a tough brief as it powers through its second decade as a label. For starters, it no longer seems to produce the kind of paradigm-breaking acts or tracks like it did when microhouse was in its heyday. For seconds, the parallel ascendancy of Kompakt-inspired labels like Brooklyn's Wolf + Lamb has hinted at a generational shift in techno; one could now argue that Kompakt is more revered than it is fashionable-- aging well, but aging nonetheless.
And while the label has always looked further afield than most gave it credit for, it's still tough to feel like the signing of California-based husband and wife duo Danny and Tiffany Preston isn't a quietly precedent-setting move, and one that's perhaps indicative of a more open mandate towards new kinds of sounds. Taken in isolation, that in itself is probably a good thing; after all, one need look no further than Warp to find a shining example of an imprint that refreshed itself by expanding on its initial remit. Here's the bad thing, though: Rainbow Arabia are kind of awful.
The elevator pitch is that Rainbow Arabia make post-punky, pan-global electronic synthpop. Between their polyglot of rhythms and singer Tiffany's array of no-wave vocal affectations, they're clearly making a play for the space between M.I.A., the Knife, the Slits and the kind of generalized 80s new-wave nostalgia that's quickly moving from a place of fashionableness and freshness into grim parody.
In fact, it's kind of hard to watch the video for lead single "Without You"-- in which Tiffany dresses up like a mime and pogos meaningfully around the streets of Serbia while Danny sits cross-legged in the background and sheepishly stabs away at a small Casio keyboard-- without feeling like it is some sort of parody. The art direction is so consciously oddball, the music so artfully spiky, the energy so telegraphed, and the global aspect so clearly worn like a badge that it's hard not to feel like it's some sort of nadir.
Boys and Diamonds bustles with African, Indian, and Caribbean rhythms, and boasts some genuinely interesting production in places. But the songwriting is ultimately too blocky and dull and slapped together for it to succeed as the thing it most wants to be-- a pop record. "Without You" aside, there's very little touch on display here; most of the tracks are blunt instruments that feel like they were composed in two stages-- the complicated but occasionally unfocused production first, the aimless caterwauling later. I listened to this record about 15 times and still had trouble retaining any of it, so I asked iTunes to randomly select one last song to write about and got "Papai", a dour, sorta-instrumental thing that's stuffed full of clattering sound effects, icy synths, bongo drums, and some fun-fair-haunted-house-ready chanting. It may not work as a song, but it's a perfect parable for why Rainbow Arabia miss: You can see what they were trying to do, but that's a long way from feeling it. | 2011-03-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-03-18T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Kompakt | March 18, 2011 | 4.9 | a47c03aa-04f9-43d0-9ea2-ad02b241e092 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
After parting ways with Matador, Cold Cave's Wesley Eisold has said that his band’s last LP, Cherish the Light Years, is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear.” This collection rounding up his subsequent singles suggests that, in the time since, he’s treated that record like a rejected transplant. | After parting ways with Matador, Cold Cave's Wesley Eisold has said that his band’s last LP, Cherish the Light Years, is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear.” This collection rounding up his subsequent singles suggests that, in the time since, he’s treated that record like a rejected transplant. | Cold Cave: Full Cold Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19338-cold-cave-full-cold-moon/ | Full Cold Moon | Shoot for the moon—even if you miss you’ll...probably end up making a total fucking faceplant. That’s a lesson many people in have learned the hard way in Hollywood, and to hear Wesley Eisold tell it, he's one of them. His last Cold Cave record, 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, was an explosive lunar launch that embraced every opportunity to tell you how awesome it was—nothing but souped-up goth-rock jock jams, bombastic lyrics and hyper-loud Brick Wall of China production. And yet, it failed to satisfy the one person most invested in its success: Wesley Eisold. Eisold told us that Cherish the Light Years is “the Cold Cave I can’t stand to hear,” and in the time since, he’s treated 2011 like a rejected transplant.
But in addition to separating himself from former collaborators, dealing with his internal demons and external demonization, Eisold got a prosthetic limb after spending his entire life hiding his missing left hand. The metaphor wasn’t lost on him—it’s a sign of being accountable, refusing to think of himself as a victim. These are themes that Eisold dealt with on the singles he intermittently released during 2013 as a free agent from Matador Records, and Full Cold Moon collects them to create an account of the imperfect progress of someone trying to take back control of his life.
So is Full Cold Moon the “new Cold Cave album”? Not really—though in a strange way, the familiarity of these songs make it far more “singles”-packed than the overtly commercial Cherish the Light Years. Eisold claims the new material is more “honest” as well, and that can be taken a number of ways, depending on whether you think the tag is a preemptive strike against the idea that he didn’t have much choice but to make more humble-sounding music. It’s clear that Eisold can’t stop writing anthems, as “Don’t Blow Up the Moon”, “God Made the World,” and “People Are Poison” are every bit as broad and striving as their titles indicate. But while the songs are fully formed, the production has a demo-like starkness and the underlying instrumentation is dank, rudimentary stuff that sounds like one man in his home studio, accountable to no one besides himself.
On opener “A Little Death to Laugh,” synths bleep like first-gen ringtones over unyielding, old-school machine beats and wormy bass while Eisold inverts his prior vocal performances, sounding like he’s being deflated rather than projecting outwards. “Oceans With No End” and “Black Boots,” two singles which immediately recall the rock dynamics of Eisold’s recent past than the New Romantic S&M of Loves Come Close, are among his strongest and most passionate work—but they’re also the songs on this release that could’ve used bolder presentation or a dynamic shift to turn their choruses into legitimate singalongs.
That said, even if Chris Coady’s hyper-compressed production on Cherish the Light Years is occasionally missed, over the span of an entire album, it was like a corset—meant to enhance and excite the onlooker, but it sure seemed painful for long periods of time. Eisold sounds freed on the first quarter of Full Cold Moon, which is almost an EP unto itself that reminds you Eisold is Cold Cave, and the project will sound however he chooses. After “A Little Death to Laugh,” “Young Prisoner Dreams of Romance” is a black-on-black leatherbound punk burner that’s over almost as soon as you read the title, immediately followed by the off-kilter, strangely beautiful coldwave instrumental “Tristan Corbière.”
But Full Cold Moon is more honest in the sense that Eisold is asking himself harder questions than he did on songs like “Underworld USA,” which were necessarily blank. It’s a shame that Eisold’s vocals are mixed curiously low; for one thing, they minimize the impact of his melodies, the immediate advantage he has over the hundreds of mid-fi coldwavers working in a similar range. Without the lyrics sheet, you can completely overlook his searching, often searing self-reckoning. During “A Little Death to Laugh,” Eisold mutters “I lost a limb on the left hand path/And I never ever got it back,” a double entendre with a hell of a lot of resonance considering Eisold’s life story as well as Cold Cave’s aesthetic. Meanwhile, “People Are Poison” sidesteps the potentially Reznor-esque notebook scrawling to flatly state, “You better die young or you will be me or something/And then they will say, ‘In your prime, you were nothing.’”
There’s a good chance your appreciation for Full Cold Moon will be inversely proportional to your appreciation of Cherish the Light Years’ flair for the dramatic, but remember that Cherish the Light Years is actually an outlier in Cold Cave’s discography—go back even further beyond the industrial New Order of Love Comes Close, to the days when Cold Cave was a noise project closer to former bandmate Dominick Fernow’s Prurient than Depeche Mode.
As to what Cold Cave is now, “Meaningful Life” is coincidentally stuck right in the middle of Full Cold Moon and is presented as a kind of spiritual crossroads for Eisold. It’s an eerie, free-floating meditation of organ and flutes reduced to 8-bit versions of themselves. As for Eisold: Some people live very meaningful lives, some don’t. Which one will he choose? And what does “meaningful” even mean? Eisold intimated that the next true Cold Cave album will be called Sunflower, so that probably gives an indication he’ll be choosing the right hand path out of the darkness. | 2014-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Heartworm | May 20, 2014 | 6.8 | a487b92d-a387-4852-b89c-4a8728cd8bf9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
His career revived by the 2015 anthology Sounds from the Far East, the Japanese electronic musician and video-game composer returns to the radiant deep house that won him fans like the late Larry Levan. | His career revived by the 2015 anthology Sounds from the Far East, the Japanese electronic musician and video-game composer returns to the radiant deep house that won him fans like the late Larry Levan. | Soichi Terada: Asakusa Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soichi-terada-asakusa-light/ | Asakusa Light | The past is sometimes said to be a foreign country, and for the mature musician, the chances of going there tend to be especially remote. If nations typically enjoy the assumption of stability, a music scene’s own monuments—genres, labels, magazines, record shops, nightclubs—are more easily toppled. Tastes change. Flats rise. Luck rots. What remains when the cliques and dancefloors of your youth have disappeared? Something along these lines seemed to cross Soichi Terada’s mind one day a few years ago in Wakasu Seaside Park, a waterfront he used to cycle to whenever he’d “run out of ideas to compose.” As he lay on the grass, his arms outstretched on turf where landfill once stood, he said, “I am trying to remember some of the places I used to go to during the ’90s. However, most of them are clubs that have closed or changed location… In the end, change might be the most appropriate word to describe Tokyo’s scenery.”
The passport to remembering is full of fading stamps. But Asakusa Light attempts to be the exception. Over an 18 month period, Terada challenged himself to “[recall] my feelings from 30 years ago” and distil them across an album of deep house, his first full-length of new material in more than two decades. In the early ’90s, Terada was making music with an impressive fidelity to the stuff circulating in New York (this 1987 classic, “The Morning After” by Lenny Dee and Tommy Musto, is what you might call proto-Terada). Soon, though, he emerged with a covetable sound of his own; in the year before his death, Larry Levan, one of Terada’s heroes, remixed the wonderful “Sun Shower,” which began with his own voicemail to the Japanese artist: “Mr. Terada, I need to know the key of your fuckin’ song.” (It’s B minor.) Whatever the mode, the thing about Terada’s music, and especially the karaoke perfection of “Sun Shower,” is that it sounds extremely grateful to exist.
You can hear this urgency even on one of Terada’s moodier classics, “Low Tension,” where, amid smoky trails of synth bass, flute, and horn, Rhodesy keys fluttered with a bird-of-paradise grace. This is more or less the mood in which Asakusa Light begins. “Silent Chord”—which, like “Low Tension,” has that deeply satisfying synth-bass chug—opens with a warbling minor chord and a tinkly iPhone alarm-clock tone, whose effect resembles a shy optimism for the day ahead. This generosity of spirit flows throughout the album. Terada shows it most obviously on the next track, “Double Spire,” whose inquisitive piano figures and glissing space-disco pads are surprisingly reminiscent of Lindstrøm, and the fourth, “Diving Into Minds,” where happy-to-be-here chords and another deep bassline glide through undulating synth canopies. Whenever Asakusa Light evokes a feeling of flight, the ride is reassuringly smooth.
An unusual feedback loop has brought Asakusa Light to being. It’s a new album inspired by old music, an opportunity set in motion by a reissue of largely forgotten work, 2015’s Sounds From The Far East. (The late-career revivals of Midori Takada, Hailu Mergia and the late Pauline Anna Strom took similar paths to fresh material). The comeback business is booming. As the music critic Ted Gioia recently pointed out, the growth area for music in the U.S. is in reissued vinyl, classic radio hits, and holographic resurrections. Instinctively, this must sound Problematic, particularly to those with a natural inclination for progress, or ideas that resemble it. But a renewed emphasis on the past has at least corrected some historical oversights, shining light on the niches in which Terada and his reissued peers were long hidden. And if fetishising novelty in the name of supporting new artists, as dance music tends to do, might mean fewer second chances for talents like Terada’s, then what, exactly, is better about that?
Terada does occasionally step beyond Asakusa Light's nostalgic concept. “Marimbau,” a vibey big-room ripper with celestial piano-and-synth filigree and 2-stepping bass pressure, is a remarkably fresh-sounding house track with a West Country accent, the kind of thing Roman Flügel often nails. A few tracks call back to Terada’s once-prolific career as a video-game composer. (In 1999, his soundtrack for the Ape Escape, a cult classic on the Playstation, introduced hundreds of thousands of teenagers to jungle and drum & bass.) Of these, “Bamboo Fighter”’s flicking 16-bit synth lead reflects that lineage nicely, and the bassline’s tough swagger echoes a similar feeling—something you could call main-character energy—in Yuzo Koshiro’s Streets Of Rage soundtracks. These tracks share a bias for cleanly drawn arrangements and vintage-synth dazzle. If the overall effect can at times feel too slick, “From Dusk” is a modest remedy, with off-key reversed playback and a bassline that churns like boiling mud.
On the deep-house spectrum, where one end is marked “bitter” and the other “sweet,” Terada’s music tends to sway to the latter. One of the pleasures of his work is his willingness to disrupt an aesthetically tasteful mood with outrageous cheer, like a bouncy castle at a cocktail party (listen to the contrast between “Soaking Dry”’s cool, nocturnal keys and its grinning thumb-piano melody). But more than the feeling of a good time, what lingers on Asakusa Light is a respect for innocence, a poignant note that Terada hits again and again, never more sweetly than on “Runners.” Its crystal chimes, teardrop piano breakdown, and, particularly, pan-pipe melody convey something emotionally sincere, even sentimental. Rather than being a flaw, that quality seems essential to such an affectionate record. Unlike so many ’90s house copyists, Terada brings more to this music than the muscle memory of a revered genre. As he recently told Crack, electronic music had saved his life “not once, but many times.” Asakusa Light shines not because it longs for the past, but because Terada knows that the past is worth celebrating.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | January 25, 2022 | 7.6 | a48af464-1c09-44af-bf60-648cf79e1655 | Ray Philp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ray-philp/ | |
The 21-year-old Bronx native belongs to an exciting new generation remaking NYC rap in their own image. On his third album, he grapples with present-day poverty and everyday life. | The 21-year-old Bronx native belongs to an exciting new generation remaking NYC rap in their own image. On his third album, he grapples with present-day poverty and everyday life. | Caleb Giles: Under the Shade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caleb-giles-under-the-shade/ | Under the Shade | For a while, it seemed like every rapper coming out of the five boroughs was a retro revivalist, tethered to the greats of the past, like a rookie NBA player pulling on the jersey of a legacy team. But young guys like MIKE, Medhane, Adé Hakim (formerly known as Sixpress), and Slauson Malone reside in a New York City where Earl Sweatshirt is a more powerful god than Chuck D. These rappers have run an insurgency campaign on the local scene, contorting elements of classic East Coast hip-hop into their own warped vision for the future.
Enter Caleb Giles. On his third album Under the Shade, the 21-year-old Bronx native engages with some core tenets of the classic New York sound—dusty samples, deep-thinking lyricism, soulful attitude—but with a bitter streak as cold as a winter ride on the top deck of the NYC Ferry. Countering the icy atmospherics, Giles’ flow is clean and youthful, his writing is resonant, and he has a way with a pleasing chorus. It adds up to a set that unites past and present more clearly than any of his contemporaries, adding a distinct ripple to this new surge of regional inventiveness.
Giles’s burgeoning rap career comes with an interesting peg: he also plays saxophone in Standing on the Corner, the jazz ensemble with credits on both Earl and Solange records. Yet Under the Shade never indulges in the freewheeling jazz meditations you might expect. Sure, there’s a decaying old trumpet here, a stoned bassline there. But they help form a neatly clipped set of percolating beats that compliment Giles’s plainspoken flows.
Under the dim light, Giles comes off as a burdened young man. He laments missed opportunities and describes poverty with grim clarity. Rap usually locates poverty comfortably in the past, but Giles wants you to know all about his present-day struggles. On the 50-second “Gather,” he lays out a pretty basic wishlist: He wants a car that runs, to hold down a job, and to simply have $100 in his pocket.
It’s fair to say that Under the Shade is a solid release, not a defining statement. At 24 minutes, it’s over too quickly, with shorter cuts like “Gather” and “Syl’s Song” begging to be developed into full-bodied songs. And as a rapper, Giles lacks a force of personality to match his nuanced lyrics. But Under the Shade excites anyway, another welcome shot in the arm for contemporary New York rap. | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 26, 2019 | 7.1 | a48c8a8c-add9-453e-9167-b4d6f81b987a | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The collaborative concept album from rapper Denmark Vessey and producer Azarias mixes Afro-Brazilian rhythms, grime, and bass to imagine a dystopian world in which desperation is the new normal. | The collaborative concept album from rapper Denmark Vessey and producer Azarias mixes Afro-Brazilian rhythms, grime, and bass to imagine a dystopian world in which desperation is the new normal. | Buy Muy Drugs: Buy Muy Drugs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buy-muy-drugs-buy-muy-drugs/ | Buy Muy Drugs: Buy Muy Drugs | Though they seem impossible to forget, here are a few facts: there’s a racist wrinkled orange running the United States; every day, the threat of nuclear war looms heavily above our heads; in 2017, cops can kill unarmed black people and get away with it, even if it’s documented on video. Things are pretty fucked up. Perhaps predicting the not-so-distant future, rapper Denmark Vessey and producer Azarias use their collaborative album, Buy Muy Drugs (“muy” is pronounced “my” here), to imagine a dystopian world in which agony prevails and desperation is the new normal.
The idea isn’t so strange if you’ve followed Vessey’s career. A Detroit native, the rapper/producer borrows his stage name from a former slave turned carpenter who, in 1822, planned what would have been the largest slave revolt in American history. While Vessey the artist isn’t so militant, he dissects current events in his own eccentric way, using off-color rhymes and peculiar imagery to criticize racial discrimination and spiritual constructs. On 2013’s Cult Classic, Vessey played the fictional role of Dr. Yessev, a failed rapper who establishes a cult in an attempt to become famous and wealthy.
On Buy Muy Drugs, Vessey navigates the Silk Road, telling the imagined tale of a black market narcotics dealer pushing his product to the working class. Throughout the album, it’s clear Vessey is talking about something far beyond marijuana or cocaine. This is high-grade, early ’80s crack epidemic level. “Take this shit, feel one-thousand times lighter,” Vessey groans on “MFKZT” (the song title is also the name of the make-believe drug being distributed on the LP). As it plays, though, the stimulant Vessey is referring to becomes increasingly unclear. Are we talking powdery substances, or something distributed by needles? Vessey and Azarias keep the narrative open ended, letting you choose your own adventure.
Perhaps hyper-consumerism is the drug in question. Lyrically, Vessey speaks to our collective insecurity, riffing on hopeless moments in which we buy unnecessary items to ignore the grief by which we’re surrounded. It’s a coping mechanism and a way to feel better when our personal lives go awry. At certain points throughout the album—namely on the Yasiin Bey-aided “Buy My App” and “American Robot,” featuring rapper Open Mike Eagle—Vessey mocks the so-called American Dream, using a wink and wry smile to assess the mind-numbing malaise of daily existence. “Wake up every morning and I brush my teeth!” the rapper exclaims. “Kiss the wife! Go to work!” The following song, “Pressure,” continues that theme. “Yeah I bet this yo’ dream job…,” Vessey raps sarcastically. “Fuck yo’ dreams, bitch, where the fuck is yo’ gold at/Chauffeur in my bulldozer, steam rollin’ your goals flat.”
Sonically, Buy Muy Drugs is noisy and tough to endure, far different from the more traditional rap aesthetic of Cult Classic and 2015’s Martin Lucid Dream (which Earl Sweatshirt liked a lot ). Drugs takes cues from contemporaries like Saul Williams and Busdriver, as something rooted in alternative rap but also influenced by acid-rock and punk. The music is grim, trippy, and dissonant, mixing Afro-Brazilian rhythms, grime, and bass, which adds urgency to Vessey’s unorthodox flow.
In his own unique way, the rapper is pushing us to look beyond the veil and to not take things at face value. Buy Muy Drugs examines our dependence on material possessions, and how being overly dedicated to superficial shit can erode social discourse. The album reminds us to stay the course and ignore the nonsense, to find some kind of peace in a world that’s become increasingly unstable. It seems to say: Human decency is under attack; do what you can to protect your soul. | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ether Jung | September 18, 2017 | 6.8 | a48cd6a4-348e-4639-99f7-7b42b00a9568 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
Almost two years after the release of the astonishing single "Wut", the UK producer is back with a new EP for Night Slugs: Can he make lightning strike twice? | Almost two years after the release of the astonishing single "Wut", the UK producer is back with a new EP for Night Slugs: Can he make lightning strike twice? | Girl Unit: Club Rez EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16580-club-rez-ep/ | Club Rez EP | The bar's been raised high for Philip Gamble, and it's almost entirely his own doing. Back in 2010, the UK producer who works as Girl Unit followed up "IRL", his debut single for the hip cross-continental poly-dance label Night Slugs, with an absolutely massive slab of electronic mania in the form of "Wut". Simultaneously frantic and spacious, with the kind of vocal hook that both burns itself into your brain and resists simple replication, "Wut" was six-and-a-half minutes of airhorn-slathered awesomeness that made the melodic tang of purple sound positively black by comparison. It was the type of single that didn't so much top year-end lists as it did absolutely wreck anything that came close to approaching its perch.
The single sounds as relevant now as it did in 2010, its all-everything-now sonic swarm and nods to Southern hip-hop rhythmic textures found in contemporary maximalist producers, from Araabmuzik to Rustie. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that, in another five years, either everything or nothing will sound like "Wut". The official release was backed by two accompanying cuts of Bayhem, "Every Time" and "Showstoppa", both of which sounded like Twisted Metal elevated into real-life status, with gnarled car crashes and warehouse explosions tornadoing through speaker systems. The only thing more surprising than all of the carnage Gamble was capable of creating was the silence that followed, as he essentially took from then until now as a vacation, rather than capitalize on the considerable momentum that the "Wut" single rewarded him with.
One year and seven months after "Wut"'s release, Gamble's back with a new EP for Night Slugs, Club Rez, and with its arrival comes the inevitable question: Can he make lightning strike twice? The answer's complicated, since there really isn't one to be found. If Gamble's aware of the deserved hyperbole that his previous work's been awarded, he certainly isn't interested in showing his hand; neither a disappointment nor a promise delivered, Club Rez finds him largely abandoning the chaos of his previous releases and seeking out different sonic territory that's unfamiliar to both the Girl Unit project and Night Slugs' general oeuvre. Some might feel let down that there's nothing here that's as singular or sonically comparable as anything on his previous EP, but once the shock wears off, there's plenty to sink your teeth into regardless, especially if you have a solid pair of headphones to tap into the at-times lush landscapes Gamble's constructed here.
Club Rez certainly sounds like a new statement of purpose for Gamble, as he showcases his previously untapped melodic ability by presenting hooks that stand sturdily when not propped up within an ace DJ set. His affinity for color is largely in full form here, as evidenced by the techno-fused French Touch flourishes of "Ensemble (Club Mix)" and the distant screaming flares of "Rezday"; elsewhere, he proves more than adept at evoking atmosphere, from the 48 Hours shake of "Plaza" to the cavernous dance-mecca trance of the title track.
The EP's most surprising moment arrives in the form of "Double Take", which starts off as a drip-drop slice of steam-machinery beat math that characterized label mate Jam City's early NS singles, before blooming into the type of gorgeous, slow-riding R&B hook that nearly deserves separate designation from the track it's attached to. Given his documented proclivity for aural insanity, the amount of restraint that Gamble shows here is more than impressive and certainly speaks to the great promise his talent possesses. He manages to satiate his obsession for thousand-detail soundscaping while creating pieces that walk the line of sensory overload, never overwhelming but always blurring the edges.
Club Rez is something of a marking point for Night Slugs as a label, too. Many of the imprint's releases take on a blocky, club-functional sonic guise; Club Rez, on the other hand, not only roosts in the Night Slugs catalog's small club of relatively straightforward releases-- "Wut", L-Vis 1990's Forever You EP, Julio Bashmore and Hyetal's collaboration as Velour, The Velvet Collection-- but also stands out as one of the label's most accessible releases to date. Perhaps that's why the EP falters when Gamble turns out productions that are more traditionally Slugs-y, like the pounding metal intensity of "Cake Boss" or the skittering bass drops of the title track.
About "Club Rez": the single proper has been floating around for a while previous to this EP's release, most notably making an appearance near the end of label co-boss L-Vis 1990's BBC Essential Mix earlier this year. Hearing it in its shortened form, I hoped that there would be some sort of Big Release leading up to the track's handstamped trance motif, the kind of logical progression that such a melodic buildup usually demands. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about "Club Rez" is that there is no such release, but then Gamble clearly enjoys playing The Waiting Game, even if there are no winners in the end. Let this be an open plea, then, that we don't have to wait so long to hear from him again, if only because the weight of expectations can crush even the most solid follow-ups. | 2012-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | Night Slugs | May 7, 2012 | 7.5 | a48e3a9d-aa6e-44ef-8d0e-67d72a563fdb | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
This time, the perennially chill Toronto musician‘s second album in as many years focuses on the guitar across a slow-motion, beatific collection of songs. | This time, the perennially chill Toronto musician‘s second album in as many years focuses on the guitar across a slow-motion, beatific collection of songs. | Sandro Perri: Soft Landing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sandro-perri-soft-landing/ | Soft Landing | Time is both our most omnipresent yet precious resource, always moving too slow or running out too fast. The convoluted career of Sandro Perri can be seen as an ongoing effort to find the right balance between those two states, to make time feel like it’s moving at just the right pace. Whether it takes the form of chilled acoustic pop, abstract electronica, or post-rock odysseys, Perri’s defiantly unhurried music asks that we savor the moment. His records are busy, vibrant, and bursting with life, but aren’t ever in a rush to get anywhere. But even an island-time adherent like Perri can appreciate that the seven-year layoff between 2011’s Impossible Spaces and 2018’s In Another Life was probably a bit too leisurely, so he’s followed the biggest gap in his solo discography with the shortest one.
Soft Landing arrives just a year after its predecessor and, on the surface, assumes a similar structure, in that it features one very long song followed by a handful of much shorter ones. But each of Perri’s albums to date have existed in their own distinct, discrete sonic universe, and Soft Landing is no different. Where past releases have showcased the tropical troubadour, the Arthur Russell-inspired avant-funk alchemist, and Eno-esque conceptualist, Soft Landing emphasizes a heretofore underrated facet of his personality: Sandro Perri, guitar hero. Sure, Perri’s sublime use of pedal steel has long been a signature of his work (both as a solo artist and as ambient-techno producer Polmo Polpo), but Soft Landing sees him plug in and work his six-string magic on a record that caters to WIRE and Guitar World subscribers alike.
Where many artists initiating conversations between pop music and the avant-garde deploy strategies from the latter to corrupt the former, Perri works the other way—he makes meticulously layered, experimental music that feels as breezy and inviting as the smoothest yacht rock. Soft Landing is his most traditional singer/songwriter-oriented release since 2007’s Tiny Mirrors, but it both embraces the melodic integrity and warmth of ’70s AM-radio standards while stripping away the pop-song packaging to let the contents unspool in unpredictable ways. The album opens with a tranquil, tiki-torch-lit love song, albeit a 16-minute one dedicated to time itself, as Perri grapples with the ultimate dysfunctional long-term relationship: “I can remember, not long ago, I said you move too slow/When people tried to tell me that you were on my side/Now that we’ve spent some years together, it seems like you’re more indifferent/You don’t take sides.” And so, four minutes in, he liberates himself from the limitations of time and redirects this wind-chimed beachside ballad into a gloriously messy, extended jam that suggests the Velvet Underground if Warhol’s Factory were relocated to a South Pacific cruise ship. But as the song swells into an all-consuming tsunami of tangled guitar lines, mutated piano plinks, and unidentified squeals, its slow-motion groove remains as steady as waves on a moonlit ocean, reminding us of time’s ceaseless march despite Perri’s best efforts to halt it.
If “Time (You Got Me)” is a masterclass in controlled, calming chaos, Soft Landing’s shorter tracks favor a formal and tonal clarity, using their surroundings to amplify their emotional undercurrents. With exception of the atypically irreverent sleepwalking soul of “God Blessed the Fool,” the remainder of Soft Landing features some of the most direct, affecting songs in Perri’s canon. “Wrong About the Rain” drizzles a clavinet-funk groove in luxuriant guitarpeggios, but that plush exterior can’t conceal a festering urban angst: “I need the sand, I need the swim, I need that thing that happens when, out there all day, time slips away.” And with “Floriana” and the title track, Perri applies his guitar wizardry to a pair of drifting yet dramatic instrumentals that conjure mid-’70s fretboard-squeezers like Santana’s “Europa” and Jeff Beck’s “Diamond Dust” with their tear-jerking technique.
Those aren’t the sort of names that normally come up in discussions about a Constellation Records release—or about any left-field indie artist for that matter—but as ever, Perri manages to filter these unexpected influences through his own humble, perpetually zen personality until they feel like a natural part of his meditative milieu. Accordingly, Perri counterbalances Soft Landing’s more audacious indulgences with the disarmingly simple and effortless “Back on Love,” a plaintive acoustic plea that not only echoes the melody of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but also its message of holding onto our compassion in a cruel world. In both sound and sentiment, the song epitomizes that cherished quality Perri has been chasing his entire career—it is, in a word, timeless.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country | Constellation | September 7, 2019 | 8 | a4978108-7173-4667-99f7-1b9e4080b3fd | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Returning with their first new album in 40 years, the Swedish pop titans attempt the seemingly impossible: balancing the lure of nostalgia with the pull of the present day. Amazingly, they pull it off. | Returning with their first new album in 40 years, the Swedish pop titans attempt the seemingly impossible: balancing the lure of nostalgia with the pull of the present day. Amazingly, they pull it off. | ABBA: Voyage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/abba-voyage/ | Voyage | Rarely has a reunion seemed as superfluous as ABBA’s. In Europe and Australasia, 40 years after they first broke up, ABBA remain omnipotent, an ever-present part of the pop landscape, like guitar solos and interminable Coldplay album rollouts. The band’s legacy may have dimmed slightly in the 1980s, after their split at the start of the decade. But since the early 1990s—and particularly following the release of ABBA Gold in 1992—ABBA’s traces can be found in every nook and cranny of cultural life, from musicals to movies, Madonna to museums.
That means the stakes for the band’s comeback, with Voyage, are both impossibly high and curiously low. (As ABBA co-songwriter Benny Andersson recently told The New York Times, “What is there to prove? They’ll still play ‘Dancing Queen’ next year.”) ABBA could return with a song as irrationally perfect as 1975 hit “S.O.S.” and it still wouldn't resonate with the same lived-in emotional significance as the 19 songs on ABBA Gold. At the same time, as long as ABBA 2021 sound vaguely in line with the classically inspired, slightly nerdy Swedish pop overlords of popular memory, their recorded return will be loaves and fishes to their fans, who have already forked out in their thousands to watch digital avatars of Agnetha, Benny, Björn, and Anni-Frid prance around a London stage.
Much like the forthcoming digital residency, the band’s new album falls somewhere between the lure of nostalgia and the pull of the present day. Voyage is a mixture of songs, old and (mostly) new, that have all the glam boogie, scandi-disco bounce, and epic pop construction of the band’s revered catalog, with some tentative nods to the passing of time. They may have kept the music on Voyage “absolutely trend-blind” to modern pop production, but Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad's vocals have a slightly world-weary, aged tone to them, their vocal range a touch lower than in their pomp, while the album’s lyrics frequently speak of old times, faithful friends, and the demands of parenthood.
It feels almost rude to ask for anything more. Voyage is as richly harmonic, smartly constructed, and satisfying as you might expect of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, two of the most talented songwriters in the history of pop music. “Keep an Eye on Dan,” “No Doubt About It,” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” are home to some of the best pop melodies of the year—vaguely unpredictable yet glaringly obvious once heard. They’re also fantastically arranged, with hooks piled on top of hooks, gently arranged on a bed of unusual musical choices, like the suggestion of reggae on “Don’t Shut Me Down” or the gnarled-around-the-edges electronics and irregular cowbell on “Keep an Eye on Dan.” The musical winks to the band’s past are a nice touch, too: “Keep an Eye on Dan” closes with the same piano melody that opens “S.O.S.,” while the soaring flute opening of “Bumble Bee” is surely a nod to “Fernando.”
But, as Benny and Björn’s very successful if never entirely satisfying post-ABBA musical Chess demonstrated, without the vocals of Agnetha and Anni-Frid—perhaps pop music’s most durable lead vocal combination—ABBA are just BB. Their voices are what make the group, and they’re still capable—both solo and in duet—of expressing melancholy and ecstasy within the same breath. On “I Still Have Faith in You” when Anni-Frid declares her enduring faith after all these years, as if through gritted teeth, you can feel the maculate defiance, her voice strong but still haunted by the passing of time. And Agnetha’s delivery of "Don't Shut Me Down”’s opening lines—“A while ago, I heard the sound of children's laughter/Now it's quiet, so I guess they left the park”—is nothing short of devastating.
ABBA understand, perhaps better than any other band, the epic importance of pop music against the humdrum rumble of everyday life. Pop matters to ABBA because people and feelings matter. But ABBA know that pop can also be ridiculous, and it is a relief to find that the band haven’t jettisoned the outlandishness that marked some of their best material, even as they reflect on the passing of the years. “When You Danced With Me,” the very second track here, is a crossover between pop and Celtic jig that even Ed Sheeran’s “Galway Girl” might consider just a bit too much. “Little Things,” which follows, is a Christmas song that ends with a children’s choir singing about “tiny elves with wings.” Maturity might bring wisdom, but Voyage proves you don’t have to be boring with it.
And yet, by ABBA’s own imperial standards, this is more ABBA Silver than ABBA Gold. “Just a Notion,” the album’s third single, was originally rejected for the band’s 1979 album Voulez-Vous (the Voyage version puts the original vocals over a new backing); winningly chirpy as the results are, that kind of knock back would never have happened to “I Have a Dream,” which places “Just a Notion” squarely in the second tier of ABBA recordings. “I Still Have Faith in You,” meanwhile, is two thirds of a brilliant song, let down by the rather earthbound melody in the song’s verse (if, indeed, it is a verse—these things can be hard to define with a band as hook-laden as ABBA), where Anni-Frid sings “Do I have it in me?/I believe it is in there.” “I Still Have Faith in You” is doubtlessly a great song. But you suspect it would not have passed the band’s titanium quality control in the 1970s, given the strength of some of their unreleased material. In ABBA’s best songs, every second is golden.
Still, a second-string ABBA record is far better than most pop groups can muster, and Voyage is the rare post-reformation album to build upon the band’s legacy without abandoning what we loved about their classic records in the first place. That makes Voyage a surprisingly necessary trip into the present from a band who could have coasted on the warm fumes of adulation ad infinitum.
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. | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | November 5, 2021 | 7.4 | a49fe822-acd2-4545-9083-c1dfd585e607 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The dancehall superstar’s latest mixtape is the best of every facet of his work, from slow-wine ballads to summery head-bangers. It’s a testament to his place at the forefront of the genre. | The dancehall superstar’s latest mixtape is the best of every facet of his work, from slow-wine ballads to summery head-bangers. It’s a testament to his place at the forefront of the genre. | Popcaan: FIXTAPE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/popcaan-fixtape/ | FIXTAPE | The version of Popcaan’s newest project Fixtape that’s on major streaming platforms is a star-studded, 19-track project that, in many ways, mirrors the music that the artist born Andrae Sutherland has released over the last six years. It’s dancehall that is aware of global trends, while still serving up tracks to the loyal core of listeners that have been around since he was a young protégé under the tutelage of Vybz Kartel’s Gaza. There are appearances from the rising Jamaican singer Jada Kingdom, Popcaan’s former Gaza teammate Tommy Lee Sparta, French Montana, and Drake, whose OVO imprint released Fixtape. There are peaks and valleys that see Poppy go from slow-wining to head-banging to a handful of uplifting ballads that detail his ascension to dancehall royalty. But to experience Fixtape in all of its glory, listen to the 90-minute, 30-plus track version that exists as a singular mix (handled by popular sound system Chromatic) on Popcaan’s SoundCloud. It is the best way to fully engage with and assess Popcaan’s stellar range, which encapsulates the dancehall of the past, present, and future.
In its mix form, Fixtape is framed as an epic tale in which Popcaan shares moments along his route to dancehall’s most prominent torchbearers. Instead of starting with the self-produced “Chill,” the SoundCloud version begins with melodramatic piano strokes, almost reminiscent of the theme song to The Young and the Restless. Those key hits grow into a symphonic instrumental adaptation of Popcaan’s 2011 hit “Only Man She Want,” and soon after, the first two non-Poppy voices you hear are a drop from incarcerated icon Vybz Kartel and audio of Drake’s praise at the first Unruly Fest in December 2018. Though even novice Popcaan listeners already know these affiliations, starting the project in this way is like flexing for the mirror, a moment of self-affirmation before proving it to the world. So it makes sense that the first song on this version of the tape, “Killy Dem Crazy,” is Popcaan trying his hand at Nas and Diddy’s Trackmasters-produced classic “Hate Me Now”—the perfect “fuck whoever don’t like it” gesture.
Unlike Popcaan’s earlier, more conventional releases, Fixtape is an all-access pass inside contemporary dancehall that explores how its reach spans across much of the global Black diaspora. His debut album, 2014’s Where We Come From, was guided by an autobiographical narrative and gained the favor of international listeners due to its incorporation of pop-leaning production. Four years later, his second album, 2018’s Forever, was mostly comprised of easily listenable stories about pursuing love interests and the spiritual favor he believes The Almighty has bestowed upon him. At the tail end of 2019, he released Vanquish, a low-stakes inaugural OVO release that, if dropped this year, could have followed the new in-quarantine trend of being a deluxe version of Forever.
Fixtape has elements of each of those releases. There are plenty of breezy, wine-inducing tracks like those that helped Popcaan break through to non-Jamaican markets. “Twist & Turn,” with production from dvsn’s Nineteen85 (responsible for “One Dance” and “Hotline Bling”), feels like it could be Popcaan’s breakout international hit. Were it not for this COVID-themed summer, the song likely would have enjoyed a “Work” or “One Dance” type of run at cookouts, bashments, and day parties. On “Suh Me Luv It,” he recruits singer Jada Kingdom for a seductive duet. By the time you get to the end of the project, Popcaan’s signature ballads serve as beautiful send-offs. On “Bank & God,” he’s distrustful of friends and family, but also reflective. “My Way” closes the project, where he sings, “Wi used to suffer, now ah everyday wi celebrate/Nuh money cyan ever mek wi segregate/Dawg man ah come from sardine, but nowadays, ah steak” while proclaiming that he is ready to accept all blessings. But in between these bookends are songs that demonstrate why Fixtape is arguably Popcaan’s strongest offering yet.
If you follow Popcaan on Instagram, then you’re well aware of how much his everyday life feels like a reality show: riverside excursions with friends, hilarious interactions with his mom Miss Rona, the clear indication that community (peers, collaborators, family, and beyond) is crucial to his well-being and that he never wants to be away from it. Before Fixtape, his ethos was never really displayed in the music. But at every turn of this project, you feel like you are either inside of the studio session or in the actual dancehall experiencing this firsthand. Contemporary Jamaican music stars like Protoje and Lila Ike check in throughout, while members of the Caribbean diaspora like Giggs, Kano, and Casanova show up to let Popcaan know just what a living legend he is. When whoever is on the mic hits their stride and wows everyone else in the room, you can hear the shouts of their peers in the background as Chromatic wheels the tracks back to their beginning. And when Popcaan goes over beats from stateside peers like Meek Mill’s “Uptown Vibes,” DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” or N.O.R.E.’s classic “Nothin’” you get a peek at his taste outside of the Jamaican music sphere.
Fixtape suggests a guide for contemporary dancehall artists (who, unlike Popcaan, rarely ever drop full-length projects) on how to cater to their base while simultaneously amplifying their voices internationally. It also challenges hip-hop artists in the States to get back to their underground roots for the sake of fun. Before this, Album Popcaan and Loose Track Popcaan acted separately. On the albums came the love songs, the songs that people who found Caribbean music through Drake could get down with. Loose Track Popcaan hops on popular riddims, gives you gunman tunes, and doesn’t care about who outside of the Jamaican diaspora gets it. But here, we get both, and it’s the best way to experience the full depth and grand scale of Popcaan.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Unruly / OVO Sound | August 18, 2020 | 8.3 | a4a14634-5a23-44bd-b47f-9fe6a37fcdac | Lawrence Burney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lawrence-burney/ | |
The Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights. | The Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights. | Danny L Harle: Broken Flowers EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21294-broken-flowers-ep/ | Broken Flowers EP | "Broken Flowers" is often cited as the most fully-realized PC Music single, a polished gem of a track released on a famously ephemeral label. Its author, Danny L Harle, is a shadowy figure, even by PC Music standards. We do know that he's a childhood friend of label head A. G. Cook (with whom he performs in Dux Content), a classically trained composer, and seems to have played a foundational role in defining the PC Music aesthetic. And yet, he's only released a few solo tracks since the label's emergence—he might be the least prolific SoundCloud phenom this side of Jai Paul.
Anticipation for new music from Harle is understandably high, a fact that clearly hasn't been lost on PC Music. The Broken Flowers EP marks PC Music's inaugural joint release with Columbia Records, the first shot fired in what the label has described as, "[a] multi-tier attack exposing the radical DNA of chart music, and the heart and soul behind every lab creation." Clocking in at 4 songs and just under 15 minutes, the Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights.
The EP is bookended by the titular single—closing track "Awake for Hours" is really just a remix of "Broken Flowers" that speeds up the original to a breakneck pace. Luckily, "Broken Flowers" is still a thrilling listen two years on. This is the closest thing the label has to a deep-house cut, a song that would feel at home on almost any dancefloor despite its winkingly maudlin lyrics. The track builds with impressive precision, with sinuous arpeggios, marimba notes, and reverberating vocal samples clicking into place atop a driving 4/4 beat. What's more, it sounds as if Harle has rebuilt the song from scratch for this release; where the original reveled in cliché house sounds, every element in this mix, including the vocals, feels cleaned up and refined.
The two new songs, "Forever" and "Without You", don't disappoint, even as they diverge from the template Harle sketched out on "Broken Flowers". Both tracks hew much closer to the PC Music playbook, with chirpy, pitched up vocals sitting atop glistening, Technicolor synths. "Without You" is a clear standout, surfacing the melancholic undercurrent that gave "Broken Flowers" its depth. Vocalist Emily Verlander pines for a lover over an airy track that heaves and sighs, exploring the tension between helium-inhaling vocals and confessional lyrics. The implication here is unclear—we're either being invited to dismiss the heartbroken pop song as naive or confront the infantilization of female narrators in pop. Harle's role as the male auteur behind the curtain further complicates our understanding, lending the song the sort of discomfiting air that's become a PC Music trademark.
As compelling as the music on the Broken Flowers EP is, calling it an EP feels like a bit of stretch—it's really just a single, one that's anchored by a remake of a track that's been out for two years. Then again, it's hard to blame Harle and PC Music for playing it safe given the stakes here. At the core of PC Music's agenda lies a desire to simultaneously critique and embrace chart pop by mimicking its form; what better way to signal the fulfillment of the label's ambitions than with an actual charting pop single? "Sometimes I feel, maybe/ This could be real," Verlander admits on "Without You". She adds, ironically, "Trust me." | 2015-12-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | PC Music | December 1, 2015 | 6.9 | a4ab199b-ab64-41e5-85e4-d54dda27f021 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
This 1975 set captures the band reconnecting with the psych-rock fury of its primordial years, drawing from a cleaned-up recording of a super-fan’s tape. | This 1975 set captures the band reconnecting with the psych-rock fury of its primordial years, drawing from a cleaned-up recording of a super-fan’s tape. | Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/can-live-in-stuttgart-1975/ | Live in Stuttgart 1975 | The title of Can’s 1975 album Landed proved highly prophetic. Over the preceding six-album stretch from 1969’s Monster Movie to 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma, the German band had used the standard vernacular of rock music—guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums—to develop an entirely new language, one that embraced the hypnotic properties, intricate edits, and limitless textural possibilities of electronic music, long before such concepts became popularized. But with Landed, Can came back down to Earth and started to behave like a more typical ’70s-rock band (albeit still a highly idiosyncratic one). It marked the moment where these trailblazers became trendspotters, loading their subsequent records with au courant influences like disco and reggae, before they unceremoniously petered out in 1979. Or at least that’s the narrative told by their studio albums. The story was always different on stage.
The old cliche that albums represent a snapshot in time was especially true of Can, whose records functioned like frames placed atop a canvas that stretches into infinity. Listening to their most totemic works—“Yoo Doo Right,” “Mother Sky,” “Halleluwah”—always felt like you were joining a program already in progress, as if the band had been searching for the perfect groove for hours and would continue for several more after the track faded out. Live, Can didn’t so much draw upon a repertoire of songs as an arsenal of motifs, riffs, and melodies that they could drop into their largely improvised concerts at will, like logs consumed by a raging fire pit. And as the first instalment of Mute’s new series of Can live albums attests, the band was still flying high without a map onstage, even as its records had begun to take a more predictable course.
Amazingly, for a band with a reputation for never playing a song the same way twice, Can never issued a proper live album (aside from a bonus compilation of concert recordings included in the long out-of-print Can box set). As legend has it, any time Can set out to make a professionally recorded concert document, various technical snafus would scuttle the results. As such, Live in Stuttgart 1975 was pulled from the personal archive of super-fan Andrew Hall, who surreptitiously recorded several shows throughout the ’70s by concealing his gear in bulky oversized clothing, like piggybacking kids in a trench coat trying to sneak into an R-rated movie. The Stuttgart show has made the bootleg rounds for years, but under the curation of keyboardist Irmin Schmidt—Can’s lone surviving co-founder—the tapes have been greatly enhanced, displacing the surface hiss and tinny fidelity with a fuller sound that emphasizes the incomparable rhythmic thrust of bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit.
Recorded on Halloween night in 1975, the set captured on Live in Stuttgart 1975 took place not long after Landed’s release, but you would never know that without the date in the title. Not only is that record unrepresented here, Can also avoid the more cosmic and meditative sounds that defined Landed’s immediate predecessors, 1973’s Future Days and 1974’s Soon Over Babaluma. Still readjusting to life as a four-piece following the departure of vocalist Damo Suzuki, the Can we hear on Live in Stuttgart 1975 seem intent on reconnecting with the psych-funk fury that powered their primordial ’69-to-’72 phase. Doing away with vocals or recognizable songs of any kind, the five pieces here—demarcated numerically as “Eins,” “Zwei,” “Drei,” “Vier,” and “Funf”—provide exhilarating extended views of rock’s most forward-thinking band at their most unrestrained.
Live in Stuttgart 1975 makes the case that Can weren’t so much a jam band as an expedition team: Each member was given the complete freedom to explore his own path, but everyone was heading toward the same horizon, unified in their effort to breach the great beyond. That leads to some thrilling moments of intersection along the way, like when, nine and a half minutes into the warm-up exercise “Eins,” Czukay and Liebezeit lock into a taut groove that evokes Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” while Michael Karoli’s bluesy guitar jangle and Schmidt’s honking keyboards playfully joust overtop. Even when it seems like one player is seizing the reins, that only serves to egg on the others: “Zwei” plays out like a mash-up of Tago Mago’s “Oh Yeah” and Future Days’ “Bel Air,” before Karoli’s stargazing solo freezes the song dead in its tracks, only for Liebezeit to bring it back to life, roaring at double the speed.
Liebezeit has long been the sort of drummer that can send you down YouTube wormholes in search of any footage that might prove such loose yet powerfully precise backbeats came from an actual human being. You’ll want to take another deep dive after getting swept up in the cyclonic undertow of “Drei,” which is loosely based on Ege Bamyasi’s opening jam, “Pinch,” but carries on for 35 glorious minutes of relentless, fleet-footed funk and carnivalesque clamor, with the players displaying the kind of superhuman physical exertion that makes you want to hand them towels and cups of Gatorade. And just when it seems like Liebezeit is running out of gas around the half-hour mark, he uses the cooling-off period to his advantage, relaxing in the pocket and transforming Can into the world’s freakiest boogie band for the home stretch.
“Drei” is obviously Live in Stuttgart 1975’s unbeatable peak, but the comedown carries its own rewards: “Vier” is a spectacular showcase for Karoli’s deeply emotive playing, which, when combined with Liebezeit’s accelerated thwack, reinvents Can as the motorik Santana. And while the closing “Funf” occasionally gives way to aimlessness, Liebezeit’s militaristic drum patterns and Czukay’s bug-eyed basslines can invest even the most shapeless track with a dramatic intensity. Sure, 90 minutes of free-flowing instrumental workouts may seem daunting to more casual Can fans who prefer their kosmische musik spiked with more digestible doses of “Vitamin C.” But devoted heads who surrender to the tide will no doubt emerge from Live in Stuttgart 1975 with another Can maxim in mind: I want more.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mute / Spoon | May 29, 2021 | 8.2 | a4b0ef82-92f7-4c16-8e63-efb15cb59c33 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
In which instrumental post-rockers compose the score to a Hollywood adaptation of the popular book about Texas high school football. Makes sense to us! Bad Company also contribute a track. | In which instrumental post-rockers compose the score to a Hollywood adaptation of the popular book about Texas high school football. Makes sense to us! Bad Company also contribute a track. | Explosions in the Sky: Friday Night Lights OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2880-friday-night-lights-ost/ | Friday Night Lights OST | Located amid arid desert sprawl, Odessa, Texas is home to, among other things, the Globe of the Great Southwest, a replica of the original Shakespeare haunt; the Presidential Museum, a sizeable repository of presidential memorabilia (sorry, the arrival of empty warheads is taking longer than expected); and the Permian High Panthers, on whom Friday Night Lights is based. On the surface, this film adaptation of the popular novel of the same name appears to be a predictable entry in a continually unsurprising genre. But there are some notable differences between this and an infamous piece of bilge like The Program-- including the music, which was composed by Explosions in the Sky.
Explosions in the Sky have always made music of cinematic proportions, so it's fitting that they've found their way to the big screen. The bombast of their instrumental compositions is theatrical in it evocation of outsized landscapes and emotions, casting a colorful but somewhat phony sheen over their stellar playing. But even given EITS's penchant for excess, few could have seen this coming: a mainstream film soundtrack from an underground band whose fanbase is comprised mainly of scenesters with an aversion to contact sports.
On Friday Night Lights, the distortion and dynamism of Explosions in the Sky's erstwhile output has been excised in favor of a gentler approach, one that spotlights the band's skill for nimble interlocking guitar harmonies. On The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, the band took a less dire bent, emphasizing quieter, more optimistic instrumentals where its M.O. had previously been simply to "fucking destroy." Still, that album was a caterwauling racket compared to Friday Night Lights, which features predominantly hushed dynamics and only scant drumming.
All this makes for a rather soporific listen. Of course, soundtracks are designed to reach a synergistic effect with the movies they accompany, so to judge Friday Night Lights on its own is to slight it somewhat. Still, this album's movements are too genteel and calculated to achieve any real stand-alone emotional impact. Furthermore, Explosions in the Sky are guilty of the same paint-by-numbers sentiment triggering than the filmmakers themselves employ-- the band suffused its songs with flaccid MIDI string swells and other overwrought flourishes.
There are some worthwhile moments: "To West Texas" hails Odessa and other barren locales, and featuring a scrappy, ghost-town melody over Chris Hrasky's trademark heartbeat bass-drum pulse. "From West Texas", on the other hand, exalts the Panthers players' faint hope of one day leaving Odessa, providing one of the album's only upbeat tracks. Elsewhere, however, twinkling guitar melodies and dolorous tempos blur into one another and merely sound like tepid background music.
Curiously, the album carries a bleary pre-dawn aura, a tone that was consciously (and thankfully) chosen to avoid the kind of hard-swinging, soft-landing new-metal fisticuffs that accompany many cinematic depictions of athletic drama. At times it seems as if Explosions in the Sky might not be scoring the right movie, although their acquiescence comes is a nice change of pace from the typical Hollywood rock-based score. Had the band delivered the bluster of its previous work, this could have been a more compelling project; as it stands, it's merely an awkward curiousity. | 2004-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-11-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Hip-O | November 7, 2004 | 5.5 | a4bad4e5-c881-4253-91cc-690ea745cdff | Pitchfork | null |
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As the originators of UK post-punk enter their fifth decade, they write with a natural-born ease—uncomplicated music cruising under lyrics that question progress and our ability to move forward. | As the originators of UK post-punk enter their fifth decade, they write with a natural-born ease—uncomplicated music cruising under lyrics that question progress and our ability to move forward. | Wire: Silver/Lead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23011-wire-silverlead/ | Silver/Lead | This year marks the 40th anniversary of Wire’s debut, the post-punk landmark Pink Flag. Its combination of sharp minimalism and unorthodox approaches—especially in lyrics which drove at meaning while dodging it—formed a blueprint for a band who through many stops, rebirths, and realignments have remained hard to pin down. Even their latter-day, more straightforward records contain levels that take work to penetrate.
Musically, Silver/Lead is as straightforward as Wire gets. Every song is streamlined, with solid (mostly mid-tempo) beats, clear melodies, and smooth, subdued vocals (mostly from Colin Newman). There are few surprises in individual songs—some even sound like variations on each other—but each one holds something memorable. On that level, Silver/Lead is a well-made rock record by a band who knows how to make rock records well.
It’s in Graham Lewis’ lyrics where Silver/Lead becomes more of a puzzle. His lines are always tricky to decipher, yet they’re never so vague as to be meaningless. You get the sense that plots are furthered and points are made, but the messages and scenarios are too slippery to be locked into one interpretation. That effect is enhanced by Newman’s sinewy voice. He often sounds like he’s spinning a riddle rather than speaking directly to you.
There is one line that gives a clue as to what Silver/Lead is about: “The path that is progress is under repair.” Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, our narrator seems intent on moving forward, but is unsure how, or whether it’s even possible. References to roads and motion make the album feel like a travelogue; there are multiple songs featuring boats and rivers. But Silver/Lead also poses questions it can’t quite answer. As “Short Elevated Period,” one of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, puts it: “My reasons for living were under review...Standing in the road, where would I go to?”
This tension between wanting to move and wondering how to do it enlivens songs that might otherwise feel inert. The pep talk of “Diamonds in Cups” (“The course of creation is often quite strange/Keep your mind open, be willing to change”) gains energy from uncertainty. A similar pressure emerges in “This Time,” which admits that “some folks claim they know all the answers” yet still insists “This time it’s going to be better.” One track, “An Alibi,” is nothing but questions, though its pessimism feels buoyed by the music’s confident swing.
There are a few spots on Silver/Lead where Wire succumbs to its own subtlety, as words empty and the tempos deflate toward flatness. But the group catches itself quickly, producing the album’s best track, “Sleep on the Wing.” Another exercise in self-encouragement, the song projects conviction as an answer regardless of what the question is. In other hands, a chorus like “Upward and inward, outward and forward/Sleep on the wing, fly through the night” could sound like a Hallmark card. But for Wire, it’s the well-earned release on an album that’s much tenser than it appears. | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | April 4, 2017 | 7.1 | a4ce8633-f35b-47c1-b4c3-ddfe2bce898a | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Deep into their career, Yo La Tengo's sense of craft is intact. Fade, at a tight 10 songs and 46 minutes, is the band's shortest album since 1990's Fakebook; it may tread over some familiar turf, but the relaxed pacing and pleasing melodies belie just how much action is really going on beneath the serene surfaces. | Deep into their career, Yo La Tengo's sense of craft is intact. Fade, at a tight 10 songs and 46 minutes, is the band's shortest album since 1990's Fakebook; it may tread over some familiar turf, but the relaxed pacing and pleasing melodies belie just how much action is really going on beneath the serene surfaces. | Yo La Tengo: Fade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17501-fade/ | Fade | Yo La Tengo's classic mid-1990s run (Painful, Electr-o-Pura, and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One) perfectly embodied the era's collective embrace of the mix-tape-as-courtship-device. These records were sprawling yet intimate, stylistically all over the map yet purposefully constructed. And whether they took the form of earwax-melting noise freakouts or bossa nova lullabies, they always projected the unmistakable, endearing personalities of their makers. But technological changes over the past decade have rendered the mix-tape (or CD-R) an outmoded concept as the shuffled playlist has become the cornerstone of our contemporary listening habits. What was once a unique, painstakingly assembled listening experience has become our default mode.
And true to their quietly contrarian, trend-averse nature, Yo La Tengo have responded to our accelerated, quick-click culture with a more patient approach: Since 2000's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, their albums have mostly favoured calming consistency over unpredictable pastiche, while their more outre interests have been redirected toward side projects (see: the garage-punk goofiness of Condo Fucks) or improvised soundtrack work (2002's The Sounds of the Sounds of Science). And even though their most recent releases have shown a renewed interest in stretching songs past the 10-minute mark, these extended pieces are segregated from the more pop-oriented material on the tracklist, serving as bookends (2006's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass) or shunted off to separate sides of vinyl (2009's Popular Songs).
Fade takes the refinement process one step further, revisiting the brief, breezy-listening forms of Popular Songs' first two sides, but lopping off the backloaded free-form excursions entirely. And at a tight 10 songs and 46 minutes, it's the band's shortest album since 1990's Fakebook. But none of that is to suggest Fade is any more slight than its heftier predecessors. Even as Yo La Tengo lean to their quieter side here, the band's sense of playfulness comes through. Produced by John McEntire, Fade lets you appreciate the complexity of its simplicity. It may trod over some familiar turf-- Georgia Hubley's fuzz-pop standout "Paddle Forward" squeezes another drop of blood from "Sugarcube"-- but the relaxed pacing and pleasing melodies belie just how much action is really going on beneath the serene surfaces.
Truth is, Fade can be every bit as adventurous as the band's most eclectic albums, but applies its myriad layers in more subtle fashion: The opening "Ohm" locks into its shuffling, clap-along tabla-funk groove and repetitive, corrosive jangle riff for its full six-minute-plus duration, before gradually thickening the guitar noise and organ drone until the anodyne group-unison vocals transform from monotone to mantra. Centerpiece track "Stupid Things" is even more sublime, beginning with some tranquil, exploratory guitar noodling from Ira Kaplan that summons a brushed-snare beat resembling a krautrock skiffle, and sets its chorus aflight on a pillowy bed of strings. And the hazy, soft-focus balladry of "Two Trains" is beautifully bent out of shape by a wobbly, dubwise rhythm.
As ever, Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's lyrics assume the form of overheard, one-way conversations between intimates falling in and out of love. And even in Fade's most sanguine moments, there's a sense of unease creeping into Yo La Tengo's little corner of the world. The smooth Motown-by-way-of-Thrill Jockey moves of "Well You Better" belie Kaplan's anxious demands ("Baby, make up your mind"); "Is That Enough" tries to gloss over its sense of doubt and defeat with cheeky string-section fills, but the distant, distorted guitar line buzzing in the background offers a lingering reminder of the bitterness being suppressed. Fade threatens to become too preoccupied with understated details during its increasingly subdued second act, and yet that sense of restraint just makes the triumphant finale "Before We Run" soar all the more gloriously, elevating Hubley's humble melody with a euphoric brass-and-string fanfare. It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing. | 2013-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 14, 2013 | 8.1 | a4d29d9c-d95b-4775-96b1-116b45b3902a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With 63 previously unreleased tracks, this newly remastered version of Prince’s groundbreaking 1987 album is a trove of lost songs and dramatic lore, a jaw-dropping look into one of the most creatively fertile times in his career. | With 63 previously unreleased tracks, this newly remastered version of Prince’s groundbreaking 1987 album is a trove of lost songs and dramatic lore, a jaw-dropping look into one of the most creatively fertile times in his career. | Prince: Sign o’ the Times (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sign-o-the-times-super-deluxe/ | Sign o’ the Times (Super Deluxe) | Sign o’ the Times is probably the most complete exhibition of Prince’s talent. Almost every style he’d attempted up to that point in his career is presented in its most clarified and uninhibited form. It’s also one of the leanest-seeming double albums of all time—not a note across its four sides registers as indulgent or out of place. But the very notion of “place” is a complicated one on Prince’s masterwork; the sessions that produced the record lasted over a full year and were intended for multiple unrealized projects and albums. The songs themselves sometimes hail from even further back in time, closer to the beginnings of Prince’s career, when he was still exploring the slender shadow-space between funk and new wave.
Which is why it might be helpful to think of the original 1987 release of Sign o’ the Times as more of a network than an album—a small reservoir of music filled from many disparate sources. No wonder listening to it has always sort of felt like walking through the rooms of a house inside of Prince’s dream. And with the release of the new eight-disc, Super Deluxe edition of Sign o’ the Times, one can finally zoom out and glimpse the totality of its scale. Entire new floors and wings have been unlocked in the structure, revealing songs removed from the album’s original sequence, as well as tracks he intended for his forebears Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, free-flowing studio jams, and the tentative beginnings of a stage musical about roving gangs of musicians.
It’s an overwhelming amount of material. (There’s even a song called “Love and Sex” on the new set that’s completely distinct from the other Prince song called “Love and Sex” on the 2017 Purple Rain reissue.) Throughout 1986 and leading up to the release of Sign o’ the Times, concepts bloomed in Prince’s vision, only to shrink away when his attention drifted elsewhere. This didn’t mean he was unfocused. His burgeoning creative relationship with Revolution bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman produced complete gardens of songs, such that he could hardly keep them confined to one album; he sequenced both single and double-LP versions of a project called Dream Factory, a living archive of all the songs they made together that didn’t work on more focused album projects like the just-released Parade.
The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering. Wendy and Lisa added such lightness and complexity to Prince’s music, they made the ground disappear beneath its heels. “All of My Dreams” exemplifies this; from its first choral blossomings to its sophistipop chorus to Prince’s pitched-down vocal moving through the song like a lowered cloud; we hear him recount a sex dream where, for the umpteenth time in his work, the sensual grows indistinguishable from the surreal. It’s the platonic ideal of a lost Revolution track, a beguiling long-form experiment that is also undeniably pop, the strange, unbound invention of three true genre agnostics.
Also slated for Dream Factory was “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” the first song Prince recorded in his freshly-built home studio just a few hours after waking from a dream. A flaw in the installation of the studio console made the drum machine sound watery and distant, like a thumping beneath the hull of a ship, and the synths echoed like they were being bounced off sheet metal. Engineer Susan Rogers panicked, but Prince continued recording, impatient to get the idea down. The song ended up sounding half-asleep as he was, a trip through the unconscious world before waking. After finishing it, he asked one of the horn players in his band, Eric Leeds, to paste a horn arrangement on top of it. So many of Sign o’ the Times pleasures lie in Prince’s incorporation of horns—they blink like new sequins in the fabric of his music—but it’s mostly uncanny to hear the blear of “Dorothy Parker” suddenly studded with in-focus saxophone harmonies.
“Power Fantastic,” recorded live with the Revolution playing in Prince’s house, opens with Prince giving studio direction to the rest of the band from the control room. He’s in a relaxed, dreamy-sounding mood. “Just trip,” he says, “There are no mistakes this track. This is the fun track.” The instruments drift into each other in slow motion, gradually building to a free interplay between horns and piano and brushed drums that’s like waves crashing and foaming on rocks, before receding back into silence. Out of that quiet, Lisa plays the melancholy piano figure that begins the real song, the bones of which she wrote with Wendy, and Prince starts singing his vocal from the corner of the control room, only pausing to guide the band through the changes by saying “bridge” or “chorus,” the musicians pouring into each new part like water. It’s a gorgeous document of the chemistry the Revolution had at their peak, even as they were beginning to fall apart.
“Strange Relationship,” among Prince’s cruelest songs, had been around since 1983, but he decided to rework it with Wendy and Lisa for inclusion in Dream Factory. Their contributions to the original performance make it almost psychedelically deep. Sampled sitar buzzes swirl around the groove and make its borders fuzzier; Wendy and Lisa’s voices appear like hazy auras around Prince’s, which sounds wounded and grave, seemingly adrift between the song’s vectors of resentment and desire. When he sings “Baby I just can’t stand to see you happy/but more than that I hate to see you sad,” he sounds genuinely tortured about it. It makes for a more desperate and sad song than what appeared on the record; when Prince fired Wendy and Lisa from his band, he scrubbed most of their presence from the recording, and re-recorded his vocal, presumably so it would match the new lightness of the instrumentation.
With Wendy and Lisa gone, and the Revolution and Dream Factory both functionally over, Prince, tired of his own voice, fed it into a sampler and adjusted its pitch until it twisted itself into a high, androgynous peal. He named the voice Camille, credited his vocals to her, and planned to release a new solo album of pitch-shifted funk jams under the name. It was the apotheosis of all the gender play he’d worked into his visual appearance and his ambiguous and boundless sexuality on record, except Prince had erased himself from the picture: All that was left was the voice, this unknowable shriek exploding through the speaker. Originally designated as the opener for the Camille album, it’s remarkable to hear “Rebirth of the Flesh” in good quality (one of the distinct pleasures of these vault excavations is no longer having to decipher some of these songs through blown-out distortion or puddles of tape hiss). It’s like a lost statement of purpose for Sign o’ the Times, and it makes sense why Prince, after abandoning the Camille project, would retain it as the opening track for a triple-album concept that absorbed both Camille and Dream Factory into it, the different concepts now consuming each other like successively bigger fish. He called this new configuration Crystal Ball, and it contained almost every song that would end up on Sign O’ The Times, plus a few others.
What’s frustrating is that it’s impossible to rebuild Crystal Ball or Dream Factory just from the materials included in this box set. This is partly owed to the fact that Prince released several Crystal Ball songs when he was alive, on the confusingly-titled archival release, 1998’s Crystal Ball. But the segues and edits Prince had planned for each record are presumably still unavailable, and the albums themselves remain inaudible abstractions, something beloved in a form that’s just different enough to seem mysteriously new. When Warner Bros. asked Prince to edit Crystal Ball down into two LPs, it became the Sign o’ the Times we recognize today, and it’s a stronger album for that, even if it’s a compromised artistic vision.
As Prince finalized versions of each of these projects, more and more recording occurred around them; Prince practically seemed to live in the studio during this period. Tracks like “Adonis and Bathsheba” emerged, a fascinating and strange ballad poured out at a diagonal angle, and one of several vault tracks from this era that ends with a firework of a guitar solo. There’s a brief suggestion of Prince flirting with gospel on rave-ups like “When the Dawn of the Morning Comes” and “Walkin’ in Glory,” the grooves of which bring to mind an image of Prince strutting on high-heels through a congregation.
The most legendary, whispered-about lost song here is “Wally,” which Prince wrote for Wally Stafford, one of his bodyguards and dancers, who comforted Prince after his breakup with fiancée Susannah Melvoin. Prince reportedly thought the song was too personal to keep and asked Susan Rogers to delete the original track, despite her protests. He recorded it in a new arrangement a few days later, but this recording too went unheard. All of the sudden, here it is. It’s a Prince piano ballad that stops and starts like a conversation, pianos and horns lurching back and forth like their attention’s drifting toward each speaker, though we only hear one side: a playful question (“Wally/Where’d you get those glasses?/Those are the freakiest glasses I’ve ever seen”) that spirals out into Prince’s all-consuming loneliness without ever shedding the sense of humor that regulates their back-and-forth. Every other line is at least a joke or a confession; most of them are both. In the order of theatrically heartbroken Prince songs it feels posed somewhere between “Another Lonely Christmas” and “Purple Rain,” and there is yet another phenomenal guitar solo that coils and sparks through the final minutes of the track.
By the time Sign o’ the Times came out, Prince had replaced the Revolution with a band that responded to every flicker of his fingers. (They’re in great form in the Utrecht show and the New Year’s Eve performance at Paisley Park documented in this set.) He wasn’t a band member or a co-writer anymore. He was a conductor, a bandleader, like his hero James Brown. The music bent to his pressure, and the music was never quite the same. The grooves tightened up to the point where they could feel airless and mechanical, like pistons mindlessly hammering beneath a car hood. Even when the songs were good—and they often were—they started reacting to and absorbing popular sounds instead of dictating them. Sign o’ the Times is the strange, cracked compass that took him to this place, containing both everything he once had (his band, his relationship with Susannah Melvoin) and its dissolution. The path forked where it did. The album cover depicts him as a blur walking away from an unmanned drumset and an empty piano bench on a stage strewn with flowers. He wouldn’t look back, if he even could.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-03T01:05:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-02T21:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner | October 3, 2020 | 10 | a4e13211-1162-4c57-be8e-ba21c57ee99d | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Soundtracking Netflix’s Michelle Obama documentary, the Los Angeles saxophonist trades the sprawl of his albums for a more concise approach, wrapping pop-friendly motifs in big arrangements. | Soundtracking Netflix’s Michelle Obama documentary, the Los Angeles saxophonist trades the sprawl of his albums for a more concise approach, wrapping pop-friendly motifs in big arrangements. | Kamasi Washington: Becoming (Music From the Netflix Original Documentary) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamasi-washington-becoming-music-from-the-netflix-original-documentary/ | Becoming (Music From the Netflix Original Documentary) | That Los Angeles saxophonist Kamasi Washington was tapped to compose the music for Becoming, director Nadia Hallgren’s documentary-film companion to Michelle Obama’s 2018 memoir, feels almost like a given. While there is a vital, venerated, multi-generational jazz scene still thriving in Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama’s hometown of Chicago, Washington’s music epitomizes the Obama presidency’s once-in-a-generation vision, uplift, and sense of hope. Today, that period looks like a beacon of light in a time of incessant dolor. You might even feel a lump in the throat when the film shows 2008 footage of Michelle signing campaign materials as a brief reprise of Washington’s bittersweet 2015 song “The Rhythm Changes” plays in the background.
Becoming’s 15 tracks reveal a seldom heard side of Washington: concision. Barely topping a half-hour runtime, the record ends right where you would otherwise be deep into the third cut on The Epic or Heaven and Earth. Yet such brevity suits Washington here, letting him wrap pop-friendly motifs in big arrangements while also allowing him room to experiment with different approaches. In the film, it’s rare that Washington’s saxophone cuts through to the foreground. But as his records show, his charts and arrangements are every bit the equal of his horn, and the soundtrack allows him to fully embrace his inner Q. For all Heaven and Earth’s grand ambition, Washington tries on more styles and takes more risks across these cues.
With no room to sprawl, Kamasi cuts right to the melodic core. Sunday-service church organ blends beautifully with his breathy vibrato on “Southside V.1.” Atop subtle strings, he assumes a steamy Last Tango in Paris mode on “Take in the Story,” and slots in alongside the horns on the stepping AM soul of the title track. “Provocation,” which soundtracks a scene depicting the racist backlash that President Obama faced during his time in office, is full of fluttering reeds and suspenseful brass, and its contrapuntal movement makes it as dramatic a piece of music as Washington has recorded to date.
Some songs sound almost like snippets of Washington’s winding album tracks, cut into bite-sized chunks. “Connections,” “Detail,” and “Announcement” could easily be mistaken for excerpts from Heaven and Earth, yet they feel slightly anonymous in this context. As refreshing as it is to hear Washington working in a smaller scale, there are times you wish the compact form would give way to sustaining a mood. In “Fashion Then and Now,” just as the quivering strings, chiming piano, and warm woodwinds start to gather momentum, the piece abruptly stops.
The most gorgeous track here is “Song for Fraser.” It’s as slow and smoky as a Stan Getz ballad, and Washington’s tone is mellow and enveloping, touched with velvety vibrato. There’s a real ache when it draws down after just two minutes, but in the context of the film it’s even more heart-wrenching. It plays as Michelle Obama fondly recalls her late father, Fraser Robinson III, relaxing in his recliner, listening to his old jazz records. Washington’s score is the perfect evocation of those bygone golden eras—one long ago, and one still fresh in our memory. | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Young Turks | May 19, 2020 | 6.9 | a4e4b584-9e69-4420-8d3e-b88768a418ca | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Following records devoted to the Sounds of the Sounds of Science or years worth of WFMU pledge-drive covers, this is the latest intriguing low-key release from Yo La Tengo-- a compilation collecting their work on four indie films, including the critically acclaimed Junebug (starring Amy Adams) and Old Joy (Will Oldham). | Following records devoted to the Sounds of the Sounds of Science or years worth of WFMU pledge-drive covers, this is the latest intriguing low-key release from Yo La Tengo-- a compilation collecting their work on four indie films, including the critically acclaimed Junebug (starring Amy Adams) and Old Joy (Will Oldham). | Yo La Tengo: They Shoot, We Score | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12210-they-shoot-we-score/ | They Shoot, We Score | The awesomely titled They Shoot, We Score collects Yo La Tengo's film score work for four low-profile films-- a convenient way for fans to grab some unreleased tunes-- yet it doesn't lend itself to start-to-finish listens. After all, this CD compiles music composed for a range of flicks-- a drama centered around the 1986 World Series (Game 6), another about two old friends on a camping trip (Old Joy), a story about a big-city/small-town dysfunctional family (Junebug), and a ensemble piece about strangers in New York making connections through sexual exploration (Shortbus)-- and the music they wrote reflects the disparity between these films.
Though four films are represented, the majority of the disc is taken up with the work from Old Joy and Game 6. Junebug's presence is mostly comprised of a handful of minute-long interpretations of "Green Arrow", from I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. "Ashley" features the song's melody on piano, while "Madeline" features a string section, "George" a vibraphone, and "Meerkats" a woozy violin accompanied by maraca. They're all gorgeous, but it gets a little repetitive, even in small doses, and these interstitial bits also get in the way of the few actual pieces of original music from the film, like the whimsical woodwind-abetted (and very un-Tengo-like) "A Roomful of Ladies". Shortbus, on the other hand, is represented by only four tracks, one of which (the Casio-nova'd "Wizard's Sleeve") is available on the official soundtrack for the film. That leaves two nearly indistinguishable versions of the pensive and warbling "Panic in Central Park", and "Isolation Tank", a fantastic and all-too-short somber bit of jazz.
The Game 6 section of the disc includes a truncated version of "Spec Bebop" (another I Can Hear The Heart... track), and most of the music takes its cues from that track's smoky atmosphere. Whether the music is more rocking (like with the would-be rave-up of "Game Time") or more pensive (as on the dramatically swelling "Buckner's Boner", a track title that probably brings a smile to Mets fan Ira Kaplan's face), there's a sense of the grime and heart of a city that permeates this work. It's a sharp contrast to the tracks from Old Joy, which are imbued with a rustic, panoramic laid-back vibe. Though the tracklisting certainly make logisitcal sense, for such a low-key release, I wish the group had shook things up and reworked They Shoot, We Score to make it more album-like/ After all, co-mingling folky tracks like "Getting Lost" and "Driving Home" with the city-slick Game 6 offerings and some of the other highlights from this album (even a few of those "Green Arrow" rewrites) would create a pretty faithful facsimile of a legitimate Yo La Tengo LP, which speaks volumes about the quality of the work here. | 2008-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Egon | September 19, 2008 | 7.3 | a4ea760b-e2da-4ebf-80ad-d467304d3697 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
The celebrated pop star’s fourth album attempts a return to the carefree party pop that defined her early career. | The celebrated pop star’s fourth album attempts a return to the carefree party pop that defined her early career. | Kesha: High Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kesha-high-road/ | High Road | Kesha is a vocal supporter of underdogs and outsiders; she stands up for LBGTQ rights, women’s rights, the environment, songwriters, and gun control in a time when all are being threatened. She sews every seam of her brand with inclusivity and empowerment (“keep glowing, ur a fuckin rainbow,” she tweeted to a fan who came out as transgender). After years embroiled in a legal battle with her former producer, Dr. Luke, whom she accused of physical abuse and sexual assault, Kesha transformed her pain into the country-rock reckoning Rainbow and an emotional 2018 Grammys performance supporting the #TimesUp movement. In her colorful universe, you are believed and accepted, doused in glitter and moral support, perpetually reminded that neither tragedy nor socio-economic status define you, and encouraged to be your baddest bitch self. It’s hard not to root for Kesha.
Yet very little of this determination, maturity, or depth comes through on her fourth album, High Road, which regresses from Rainbow’s clear-eyed courage to Animal-era party-pop. It’s a tough pivot after everything that’s gone down, and she recycles the same innocuous frameworks she wielded a decade ago: that getting high and sleeping around don’t make you a bad person, that women are multidimensional (“You’re the party girl/You’re the tragedy/But the funny thing is I’m fucking everything,” she sings). Triteness aside, it would’ve been relatively easy to get behind an album of unfettered Kesha revelry, but High Road feels strained, scattershot, and loaded with tension, like someone trying to portray freedom and free-spiritedness–even a recovered sense of identity–who isn’t quite there yet.
“My Own Dance,” effectively a “TiK ToK” sequel, is the album’s closest thing to a centerpiece and lays out the challenge she faced: “So the internet called and it wants you back/But could you kinda rap and not be so sad?” Kesha is correct that our demands are unfair, but then she goes and fulfills them, insisting that she’s conforming by choice (“Hey! I don’t do that dance! I only do my own dance!”). This puts the listener in a confusing position: Are we to feel guilty or celebrate? It might be less uncomfortable if it felt like she’d made peace with her decision, but the song is coated in indignation: “I feel like I’m nothing/Somedays I am everything/Caught up in my feelings/Bitch, shut up and sing.”
This sense of uncertainty permeates the album, making it feel distant and erratic. Kesha has always covered a range of moods and styles—deep confessionals, party bops, twangy folk songs, bits of goofy banter—but High Road dials this up to an almost frenetic state, yo-yoing between tear-jerking ballads, overwrought empowerment anthems, and head-scratching moments of ironic nonsense. For every bizarre one-off (the chiptune inspired “Birthday Suit,” the lascivious “Kinky,” or the oddly childlike “BFF”), there’s a frothy, generic pop anthem pulling her back to the middle: “Little Bit of Love,” co-written by Nate Ruess, feels entirely anonymous.
She seems determined not to let you get too close. Enveloping emotional moments are often interrupted by puzzling production choices and lyrical contradictions. “Raising Hell,” a spirited ode to celebrating and forgiving yourself, featuring Big Freedia, is deflated by an insufferable horn synth that blares like a Major Lazer song. “Shadow,” an immersive piano ballad that exhibits her empathy and sheer vocal strength, is punctuated by a sour, flippant interlude (“If you don’t like me you can suck my—”, she chants). Even the title track, which attempts to frame her reaction to trauma as considered and mature, is itself defensive and sarcastic, stumbling from escapism into stoned denial. This is what makes the album’s hard-partying premise so difficult to accept: It doesn’t feel like moving on, it feels like running away.
There’s no question Kesha is capable of assured, sincere truth-telling. “Resentment,” a stunning confessional featuring Brian Wilson and Sturgill Simpson, is so personal and emotionally generous that it actually feels healing, leaving you to marvel at how arresting her voice is when you can actually hear it. The lightly mystical “Cowboy Blues,” which mentions her three cats, therapist, and tarot card reader, feels relaxed and spontaneous, as if she’s writing it right in front of you. When it swells into an all-together-now dive bar singalong, lit up by whistling ooh-oohs and sha-la-las, you remember that Kesha is the rare songwriter who can funnel big, existential ideas like destiny and chance into the casual story of a night out in Nashville. These aren’t hell-raising, stadium-sized bangers about blacking out and acting up, but they are at least about her. As anyone who has wrestled with self-acceptance understands, often the most rebellious thing you can do is be your unvarnished self.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Kemosabe / RCA | February 1, 2020 | 5.9 | a4edac21-8363-44a0-ac21-058c44ab6ddc | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
This low-key EP features songs from Julianna Barwick's gorgeous 2011 album, The Magic Place, remixed by Diplo and Lunice, Helado Negro, Alias Pail, and Prince Rama. | This low-key EP features songs from Julianna Barwick's gorgeous 2011 album, The Magic Place, remixed by Diplo and Lunice, Helado Negro, Alias Pail, and Prince Rama. | Julianna Barwick: The Matrimony Remixes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15926-the-matrimony-remixes-ep/ | The Matrimony Remixes EP | Quick question for anyone who's zoned out to Julianna Barwick's gorgeous 2011 album The Magic Place: Did you ever think to yourself, "This is cool, but I'd love to hear some beats laid on top of these tracks?" Me neither. But given that this EP is a low-key release being sold on Bandcamp for $5 (and available to stream for free), you can't begrudge Barwick or her label for wanting to extend the life of that album. If nothing else, given the strength of her last record, she deserves a victory lap.
One issue with remixing tracks from The Magic Place is that they're hard to pull apart. With their layers of voices, heavy reverb, and instrumental loops, they feel integrated and whole, each part gaining its meaning through its relationship to the others. That's true in all music, of course, but with immersive ambient tracks based on addition and subtraction and so dependent on harmony for musical content, it becomes that much more difficult to isolate one element and build something new out of it.
Four remixers here give it a try (the six-song set is rounded out by the album versions of "Vow" and "Prizewinning"). Diplo and Lunice's take on "Vow" is, in one sense, the most cookie-cutter version, in that it mostly does what remixes of indie music have been doing since the late 1990s: isolates a small section of the original and adds some programmed drums. By foregrounding an electric keyboard refrain, giving the tune more of a pulse, and adding a 1980s sheen, it actually bridges the gap between Barwick and Enya circa Watermark, but it feels more like an uninspired original track that happens to have some samples from Julianna Barwick than a proper song. Helado Negro's take is more interesting, as it condenses rather than separates, creating a compact loop of highly melodic sound that reminds me of early Four Tet remixes. On top of the loop is an original vocal, presumably from project leader Roberto Carlos Lange, and it has some relationship to the original but doesn't feel bound to it. It's solid, but not something I'm likely to return to.
The two remixes of "Prizewinning" include the set's high and low points. The duo Alias Pail cut up Barwick's vocals and fold in some tribal drums, and the result feels like an empty exercise. Prince Rama, on the other hand, take the track and amplify it, making it more in every respect-- surging sounds, changed vocals, extra-shimmery production-- and it works surprisingly well, almost brilliantly. To my ears, it's the best thing Prince Rama have ever done, and it winds up feeling like a proper collaboration that has a compelling reason to exist. That's ultimately all you can ask for from a remix, even if it doesn't happen often enough. | 2011-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-10-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | October 13, 2011 | 6 | a4ee10db-e908-491c-b25f-617166042978 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Now working solo, Liars’ Angus Andrew looks back on the dissolution of his group with a strange, often contradictory album conceived in self-imposed isolation. | Now working solo, Liars’ Angus Andrew looks back on the dissolution of his group with a strange, often contradictory album conceived in self-imposed isolation. | Liars: TFCF | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liars-tfcf/ | TFCF | To follow Liars’ long, prolific, often paradoxical career is to discover a band as erratic as it is true to itself. Across 17 years and multiple continents, they’ve remained contemporary avant-garde music’s household chameleon. Smirking punk-funk, acerbic drone-dance, existentialist bar rock, and disquieting synth pop find common ground in the band’s catalog, with each dissimilar form somehow catalyzing the next. On a granular level, no two Liars albums truly sound alike, even as they’ve all been unmistakably the work of core songwriters Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill. Pull back far enough, however, and a trend emerges. From their auspicious beginnings as four Brooklyn-based upstarts to their heyday as a convention-bucking trio to their reinvention as an electronic duo, Liars have progressively distilled their music down to its essence.
So maybe it was just a matter of time until that process reached its logical conclusion. In 2014, the undercooked dance tracks on Mess felt like a creative low point, and not only because WIXIW’s poignant electronica had been a more appealing display of their talents two years prior. It was as if Andrew and Hemphill had all but discarded their band’s beating heart: the tension that blooms when experimental music is retrofitted with pop structures. Mess was brash and obvious, a play at simplicity from artists who built their names on confounding expectations. It would also prove to be the last Liars album written as a group. Following the “death” of their creative relationship, the founding duo of Liars was reduced to a solo act. Andrew, the towering, de facto frontman, soldiered on with the project, relocating from L.A. to his native Australia and treating his newfound artistic autonomy like a golden opportunity for revitalization.
Whether as a result of the unusual circumstances or because he tends to thrive when adapting to the unfamiliar, Andrew’s first solo record is at once recognizable and unlike anything else in his catalog. Called TFCF, an acronym that stands for “Theme From Crying Fountain,” it’s an album about loneliness and heartbreak conceived in self-imposed isolation. During a recent AMA on Reddit, Andrew explained TFCF’s artwork and impetus: “I felt like I was married to Aaron [Hemphill] creatively, and now that he is gone I am alone in my wedding dress. The record is basically the theme music for our creative relationship deteriorating.” It was nestled away on an island off the coast of Sydney, reachable only by boat, that the latest and undoubtedly strangest phase of Liars was born. Opting for self-reflective nostalgia and internal turmoil over any sense of extroversion, it’s the ultimate fakeout for a band as restless as Liars.
In listening to TFCF, however, it’s obvious this wasn’t always the plan. The 11-song tracklist is riddled with tangents, one-off larks, and various stylistic indulgences, but it’s all nonetheless connected by the rampant use of recycled audio. The music is made in part from the scrapped recordings of what could have been the final Liars album, which only adds to the lyrical pathos. As Andrew said in an interview with The Skinny, he began recording ideas alone in an L.A. studio while Hemphill was living in Berlin, and wound up with “thousands of files” that would become the basis of TFCF. At the end of “No Help Pamphlet,” one of a few acoustic guitar songs here, Andrew shares a pre-recorded message seemingly meant for his distant bandmate: “OK, that’s it. Those are all the songs I really like… I hope that you have a really great break. And I’m thinking of you all the time.”
After the album’s downtrodden opening third, “Face to Face With My Face” introduces violent, brooding electronics like a reassurance that TFCF isn’t all sadness and bewilderment. Andrew also has some personal soul searching to do, and that’s where he excels. At his most thorny and mystic, Andrew seems to channel Thom Yorke’s solo work through the lens of Throbbing Gristle. Then there are tracks like the curious “No Tree No Branch,” a sort of kaleidoscopic folk-punk jaunt that’s one of the catchiest and most bizarre Liars songs in recent memory. But this is also where Andrew subtly weaves together the threads of his past. The singalong bridge in “Cred Woes” can be traced as far back as 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top; Sisterworld’s raw instrumentation and the ominous fragility of WIXIW fill out TFCF’s every corner; and even Liars’ lightning-in-a-bottle masterwork, Drum’s Not Dead, bears out its influence in the percussive blasts driving “Coins in My Caged Fist.”
If this all reads as a scattershot, stream-of-consciousness album, that could very well be the point. Andrew has offered a glimpse of his headspace during an especially pivotal time in his life; it only makes sense that what’s revealed is emotional and capricious. On paper, the jangly, medieval pomp of “Cliché Suite” couldn’t be further removed from the heavy boom-bap of “Staring at Zero” or the sullen dirge of “The Grand Delusional.” And the resonant bass drones and airy field recordings of “Emblems of Another Story” would seem to contradict that injured ballad’s heartfelt immediacy. But those glaring conflicts become one of the album’s strengths. We may not fully understand every awkward, splintered idea on display, but the closer we look at TFCF’s affecting exquisite corpse the more we can appreciate why and how Andrew stitched it together. This earnest, well-crafted jumble couldn’t be a more appropriate marker of the irrepressible project’s evolution, nor a more fitting testament to Liars’ legacy. | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | August 28, 2017 | 7.5 | a4ee8bde-1006-475a-b662-9bd55735af78 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
On their full-length debut, the Norwegian and Spanish experimental duo N.M.O. deliver a zig-zagging array of unnerving forms, evoking militarization and irreverent playfulness in equal measure. | On their full-length debut, the Norwegian and Spanish experimental duo N.M.O. deliver a zig-zagging array of unnerving forms, evoking militarization and irreverent playfulness in equal measure. | N.M.O.: Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22546-nordic-mediterranean-organization-numerous-miscommunications-occur/ | Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur | The duo N.M.O. is composed of free improvisation and noise rock drummer Morten J. Olsen alongside sound artist Rubén Patiño, but beyond those facts defining them gets tricky. They seem gleefully aware of this, and eager to compound the confusion: The first 100 physical copies of their debut inexplicably come with hot sauce housed in a poppers container. The album is also accompanied by an ooey gooey “Tim and Eric”-esque promo video telling the viewer, “You will not forget me” in both Spanish and English. Just like the different meanings they like to give their eponymous acronym—on top of the album title and several track names here, they’ve also interpreted it as “New Mexico Occult,” “Nederlandse Maatschappij Ontwikkeling,” and “Natalia Martínez Ordóñez,” each with its own unique set of associations—their provocations are suggestive less of an unequivocal statement than a customized index of entry points for playful, leftfield zones of thinking and feeling.
There is one obvious interpretation of the hot sauce gesture, though, and it’s as an analogy for the sound of this record, which evokes the stinging overstimulation of too much intense input in a compressed time frame. Synthesizing acid-house squelch, early European hardcore, and production techniques suggestive of dub and electroacoustic musics, the duo plays with club music’s titillation until it takes on a takes on a certain disgust. In this fascination, N.M.O. recalls the work of Patiño collaborator Roc Jiménez de Cisneros’ project EVOL. The similarity between the two projects—which have both released music on Powell’s Diagonal Records imprint—is this particular blend of anguish and delight.
On the surface, N.M.O.’s music evokes a now-familiar combination of dance floor beats with experimental, abrasive production techniques—labels like Hospital Productions or L.I.E.S. come to mind. But Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur sets itself apart in its grating insistence. Humor is a prominent theme on the record, and it could easily soundtrack a fantastically lawless episode “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” What makes the element of comedy work is that it’s liable to quickly turn into revulsion: the smudged viscosity of “New Bulgaria” is hard not to associate with puke, or a petri-dish science experiment gone horribly wrong.
The group describes its style as “Military Space Music AND/OR Fluxus Techno” in promotional materials, and while this might simply seem like psilocybin raver jest, a little bit of research proves there is some conceptual conceit backing it up. In a mix and accompanying essay for the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art last year, Olsen considered “the possibility of drumming” and how it might be a “universal, even innate” form of expression, noting in particular drumming’s historical use in military communications. Upon closer inspection, this theme of militarization suffuses N.M.O.’s work from the formal level—their snares pound out authoritative patterns like a drum brigade’s—to track titles, such as “German Trained Unit 1-4,” and the names of this record’s two halves (“Nordic Mediterranean Organization” sounds like a covert operation, while “Numerous Miscommunications Occur” might be a description thereof.) A recurring motto for the group is “As Strict As Possible,” which is itself suggestive of combat parlance.
When it comes to the question of what they’re militarizing and why, though, N.M.O.’s stance is blurry. Indeed, where music can be a useful site of staged antagonism between opposing social groups, the conflict here is free-floating, not tied to individual actors. In this way, the record channels something of our current moment’s topography of war, fought between overlapping and oftentimes contradictory configurations of nation states, corporations, insurgent militias, software companies, anonymous hacking collectives, activist groups, local police, and others.
Even though Nordic Mediterranean Organization / Numerous Miscommunications Occur defines itself in relation to a series of real-life references, even leaving a trail of cues temping the listener to decode an overarching approach or sensibility, at the end of the day the fundamental impulse seems to be towards wonkiness for wonkiness’ sake. Their emotional register is impulsivity held mid-squirm, constantly interrupting itself with cartoonish locked grooves (“Neoliberal Madness Offering 1-4”) and march-like vignettes (“German Trained Unit 1-4”). It’s all very fittingly closed out with “Abhaengen,” which suggests variously “to hang” or “to hang out”: tonally evocative much less that of a finale than an intermission, it conveys that Olsen and Patiño are already moving onto other things, deciding what else N.M.O. could stand for. | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Diagonal | October 27, 2016 | 7.5 | a4ef7dd3-2616-4dec-87ac-928d791effe6 | Alexander Iadarola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/ | null |
On her latest album, the South Korean singer-songwriter pairs warm, impressionistic lyrics with her most ambitious arrangements yet. | On her latest album, the South Korean singer-songwriter pairs warm, impressionistic lyrics with her most ambitious arrangements yet. | Minhwi Lee: Hometown to Come | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/minhwi-lee-hometown-to-come/ | Hometown to Come | Ten years ago, Minhwi Lee performed on South Korean public television with the freak-folk band Mukimukimanmansu, straining her voice as her bandmate Muki destroyed a traditional janggu drum with a hatchet and offered its pieces to a shocked studio audience. Since then, the songwriter and composer has channeled her creative fire into film scores, a jazz trio, and the sludge metal band Gawthrop, for which she occasionally plays bass. Her 2016 solo debut, Borrowed Tongue, combined chamber folk orchestration with a loose narrative around the limits of communication, winning the Korean Music Award for Best Folk Album. Inspired by the poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in “Dicteé,” she sang in Korean, “Father, I lost my tongue last night/I cannot even say those words because my mouth is empty.”
Recorded after moving back to Seoul in 2019, Hometown to Come, meditates on a different kind of absence. Accompanied by fingerpicked guitar and orchestral sweeps, Lee’s lyrics resemble the poetry of Kim Hyesoon, refiguring emotions into impressionistic parables. Both artists ruminate on the theme of phantom pain: The hometown that Lee remembers feels like an amputated limb that retains sensation, at once a “place that disappeared long ago” and a place where she’s already arrived.
Often the emotional payoff rests on lyrical ruptures which invert sadness to reveal warmth. Her language works in the space between opposites: “I find myself thinking of your smile, as you asked about grief/I find myself thinking of your grief, as you searched for a smile,” she sings in Korean, lying in her room alone at night. Resolving the tension—between keys and guitar, comfort and unease—she sends us off with a “goodbye” (“annyeong”). But every “goodbye” can also be a greeting: Lee uses the Korean language to complicate the binaries between escape and pursuit, meeting and separation, sadness and joy that condition our ideas of home.
Lee’s arrangements here are some of her most ambitious. On some tracks, there’s a 19-person orchestra that brings her songwriting into the realm of French singers like Françoise Hardy; on others, her classical guitar arpeggios acquire a medieval quality amid Jeseok Jedol Kang’s flute melodies. On “Returning,” she’s accompanied by saxophonist Kim Oki, a prolific collaborator in Seoul’s music scene, who brings out the jazz sensibilities in her songwriting. Lee maintains the melancholy of her early strummy, campfire fare, but she uses the fuller instrumentation to tease out an emotional ambivalence. Listen to how the timbral and melodic claustrophobia of flute and guitar in “Blue Flower” unfolds to reveal a swell of strings at the bass’ gentle guidance, like a projector switching to a wide 16:9 at the beginning of a film screening. And the bass solo that ushers in “The Station” is pure noir, with rhythmic white noise that barely obscures the sound of a speeding train.
Hometown to Come germinated for seven years, the same amount of time it took Lee to write Borrowed Tongue. But it was when she wrote the closing lines to the title track that she felt confident about compiling her scattered thoughts about “home” into an album. While Lee’s work has always explored the disjointed relationships with tradition, communication, and belonging, “Hometown to Come” offers her most forward-looking refrain yet: “The song I sing today will be the song I sing tomorrow.” Again playing with the ambiguity of the Korean language, she purposefully omits the subject in her final refrain: The “song I sing” can also be interpreted as the “song we sing.” If Borrowed Tongue questioned our ability to connect with one another, Hometown to Come suggests that it’s the only way forward. | 2024-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Mansu Inc. | January 5, 2024 | 7.6 | a4f0e4cf-c63c-4e82-9b93-67257daf8519 | James Gui | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-gui/ | |
On Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer and former Ween member finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived recklessly. There’s no easy emotional true north on Freeman, and for Ween newcomers, the record is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. | On Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer and former Ween member finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived recklessly. There’s no easy emotional true north on Freeman, and for Ween newcomers, the record is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. | FREEMAN: FREEMAN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19506-freeman-freeman/ | FREEMAN | For teenaged lo-fi diddler Aaron Freeman, the rarefied state of “brown” was the ultimate achievement. Starting with 1986’s home-recorded The Crucial Squeegie Lip, Freeman and his best friend Mickey Melchiondo, recording as Gene and Dean Ween, aimed to create a sound (and life) experience that was extremely “fucked-up, in a good way,” as Melchiondo describes it. What #based is for Lil B—a good-natured raison d’etre doubling as a foggy aesthetic manifesto and rallying cry for fans—“brown” was for Ween. Early on in the duo’s fledgling career, brown meant making themselves happy, often at the expense of their audiences. During an opening slot for Fugazi in the late 1980s, ex-Ween tourmate Matt Sweeney remembered in a recent book, “they were pelted with change by newly bald straight-edge kids as Aaron sang the same Cat Stevens song over and over."
Flash-forward 30 years from the DIY spirit of Ween’s early recordings and performances, past the decade-plus when they packed amphitheaters, played late-night TV, got Elvis’ old backing group to perform on an album with a song called “Piss Up a Rope”, and released a double-disc live album on Elektra called Paintin’ the Town Brown. Now, there’s FREEMAN: on Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived brown. “Covert Discretion” opens the album with a crushing level of vulnerability: “Another gig now, got an aching head, and I’m back on display,” he murmurs in a soft, folky voice that hasn’t deepened much since he was a teenager. “I’m your best friend, I’m your superstar/ Yeah, I’m down with the brown.” Despite it all, Ween could be a very reflective band, but “Discretion” is the first song sung by Aaron Freeman about the cost of living as Gene Ween.
“Discretion” is also the first public step of a drying-out process triggered by a sad January 2011 Ween show in Vancouver that would lead to the band’s dissolution the following year. In front of 3,000 fans who paid $50 per ticket, Freeman laid down on the stage during songs and slurred his lyrics when he could remember them. The same behaviors that a 20-something Freeman would use to antagonize audiences, and with which he accumulated a fanbase of countless suburban stoners, had become blatant symptoms of a serious problem—what made Ween also killed it. As is his wont, however, there’s no easy emotional true north on FREEMAN. After gently pirouetting on a “Dust in the Wind”-style guitar figure for a few minutes, “Discretion” suddenly shifts gears into a slick hesher anthem. “Fuck you all, I got a reason to live/ And I’m never gonna die,” he asserts, as the image of a New Age recovery facility gives way to a vision of a packed arena. Such balance of abject pathos and profane teenage-boy hardheadedness is a Ween trademark, which Freeman mastered on 1994’s “Baby Bitch,” a heartrending breakup song that had “Bitch” in the title and the line “Fuck you, you stinkin’-ass ho” gently inserted into the verse.
Indeed, part of what made Ween so great was Freeman and Melichiondo’s refusal to distinguish between sincerity and silliness, a mainstay of the druggy teenage boyhood that neither ever left. On “(For a While) I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like a Man”, Freeman toys around with a bluesy lament, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s aiming toward a Crossroads-style soul-selling or a 12-step-style soul search (or if, after Clapton, there is even a difference). Though “Black Bush” was inspired by the bucolic surround of the upstate New York region where the album was recorded, Freeman takes the opportunity to sing about the “crab man” and “woody-pecker” in his most cartoonishly mannered guru voice, even lapsing into Hindi on the chorus. FREEMAN is a thoroughly mellow—one might say anesthetized—recording, but throughout, Freeman’s gentle absurdity combines with the crack studio musicianship (Megafaun’s Brad Cook and the Foreign Exchange’s Chris Boerner contribute) to make an eerily soothing form of psychedelia bent on exploring the other side of getting fucked up.
Aaron Freeman’s search for brown has long faded, and what powers FREEMAN is his unique gift—audible since Ween sequenced the heartbreaking “Birthday Boy” two tracks after “Papa Zit” on 1990’s God Ween Satan—in his inability to compartmentalize his emotions in his creative work. For three decades, he sacrificed his sobriety and nearly his life so that people like me could soundtrack stupors and sentimental moments in equal measure. As a teenager, I watched my skater friends huff Redi-Whip in an attempt to really understand “Big Jilm” (perhaps the band’s brownest song), and 12 years later, I watched two of my best friends dance to “Stay Forever” at their wedding reception. For Ween newcomers, FREEMAN is bound to sound odd, even off-putting. I get it. But this is the promise and labor of appreciating a lifelong cult artist like Freeman: taking the time to engage him on his own terms. | 2014-07-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Partisan | July 23, 2014 | 6.5 | a4fbb533-1605-4dae-8eb7-95a023d5c4fe | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
With seven additional tracks and a Heba Kadry remaster, the ambient synth experimentalists’ landmark album is even more transportive than it was in 2010. | With seven additional tracks and a Heba Kadry remaster, the ambient synth experimentalists’ landmark album is even more transportive than it was in 2010. | Emeralds: Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Expanded Remaster) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emeralds-does-it-look-like-im-here-expanded-remaster/ | Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Expanded Remaster) | In January 2013, synth musician Steve Hauschildt wrote a series of messages on Twitter to share some sad news. His band of seven years, the beloved Cleveland-based trio Emeralds, had come to an end. He closed with a quote from legendary experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, writing, “Listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it.” The line is a prompt from her 1974 book of textual compositions, Sonic Meditations, which she’s referred to as “recipes” for listening. On its face the prompt is clearly prescriptive: Allow a sound to repeat until your perception of it changes. But maybe there’s another suggestion there, as well. Allow yourself to become so lost in the act of listening that the source and context of a sound disappear, leaving only the innate qualities of sensation.
For a group like Emeralds, whose members weren’t anonymous but did seem determined to melt away behind their gear, there was ever only the sounds themselves. Make it to one of their many storied basement performances in the early years and find three kids in their 20s on the floor, heads craned over an array of knobs and triggers, performing a delicate ritual to draw forth another uncanny electronic frequency: Hauschildt with his Novation Bass Station or Prophet ’08, John Elliott with his Korg MS-20 or Moog Voyager OS, and guitarist Mark McGuire running his Les Paul through any number of pedals. The band’s best work would blur the line between instrument and operator so far that it was impossible—not to mention pointless—to distinguish intent from accident.
Honing this mix of control and improvisation since 2006, Emeralds brought a uniquely personal magic to their exploratory synth music. But not until their third album, 2010’s awe-inspiring Does It Look Like I’m Here?, did the trio’s undercurrent of emotional resonance rise to the surface. It was a watershed moment, or as McGuire described it to XLR8R, “the culmination of scrambling in the studio constantly for four or five years.” The humanity of the musicians looms large in “Candy Shoppe,” the miniaturized melodic suite that trains its ambitions on the sky. Each shimmering layer of the densely orchestrated “Genetic” reveals a religious dedication to craft, while seemingly basic chord changes evoke an almost spiritual ecstasy. Even in more understated pieces, like the tumbling synth mulch of “Shade,” Emeralds underpin their tangle of sound with radiant drones and soft staccato notes that fall like raindrops. Thirteen years later, each recording sounds as alive and teeming with secrets as ever.
Now remastered and packaged with seven bonus tracks, an excellent new edition of Does It Look Like I’m Here? renews a monumental modern synth record. The remaster from renowned engineer Heba Kadry (Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tim Hecker) brings some added depth and fullness to the frequencies. Propulsive songs like “Double Helix” and the title track have a fresh airiness without losing their weight. “Now You See Me,” the closest we get to an Emeralds ballad, sounds more tender and gentle with a better balance of the central guitar chords, synth pads, and vocal swells. McGuire’s guitar strums in “Goes By” are warmer, nestled deep within the slow-moving synth drift. Such updates aren’t blatantly obvious, but they bring subtle details that reward deeper listening.
The bonus tracks joining the original 12 include languid ambient meditations (“Escape Wheel,” “Lake Effect Snow”) and slow-building electronic whorls (“August (Extended),” “In Love”), rounded out by two excellent remixes that Dan Snaith produced in 2012 under his club-minded alias Daphni. But the showstopper is the 28-minute “Genetic (Rehearsal),” a song that seems to encompass Emeralds’ sphere of influence. The proggy inclinations of Tangerine Dream shine through the circuitous guitar; watery synth noise and galactic drones reflect Klaus Schulze’s analog sound design. And when the core arpeggiations drop away and the music begins to bask in a spacey float, echoes of Cluster and Fennesz rattle across the spectrum. For all its indulgence, the extended version still doesn’t overshadow the more concise 12-minute original; none of the additional tracks here can compare to the main event. But having more readily available Emeralds music from the most important era of their career is no bad thing.
Since disbanding in 2013, all three members of Emeralds have continued to release their own music. Hauschildt’s six solo albums span kosmische, ambient, and synth-pop. As Imaginary Softwoods, Elliott has burrowed deep into the possibilities of psychedelic electronic music. And McGuire’s constant stream of cosmic guitar experiments unfolds like a collection of daily devotionals. Each has brought the supernatural essence of Emeralds to a different destination, and the expanded remaster of Does It Look Like I’m Here? is the ideal place to begin to retrace those winding paths. As a career inflection point and catalyst for contemporary synth music, it stands as canon. As a pure listening experience, it begs to be unrecognizable. | 2023-09-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | September 1, 2023 | 8.7 | a5039c66-b561-4a19-ba3c-170a035fa0be | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
Secretly Canadian introduces a solid new Americana band that-- althogh steeped in the usual influences (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Band)-- never burdens you with the stigma of roots music or reached-for authenticity. | Secretly Canadian introduces a solid new Americana band that-- althogh steeped in the usual influences (Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, the Band)-- never burdens you with the stigma of roots music or reached-for authenticity. | The War on Drugs: Wagonwheel Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11969-wagonwheel-blues/ | Wagonwheel Blues | The War on Drugs make excellent road-trip music. As its title implies, the Philly quintet's debut, Wagonwheel Blues, is Americana reimagined as blacktop and yellow lines, rubber tires, and overpriced gasoline. The album urges you along the interstate, but never burdens you with the stigma of roots music or reached-for authenticity. Of course, the band invokes the usual influences: Adam Granduciel sings like Bob Dylan, spewing a torrent of words in accusatory second-person ("Chasin' squirrels around your property/ Makin' sure that they know that this is your kingdom"), and the band nods to fellow Philadelphians Marah, to the Waterboys, and of course, to the Boss himself. The Felice Brothers drove the same roads on their recent self-titled album, but where those upstate New Yorkers treated their Band dynamic as a link to a past more imagined than real, the War on Drugs filter these elements through the noise of early Yo La Tengo and Sonic Youth. Their songs are tangles of guitar, distorted harmonica, and droning organ, all wrapped so tightly that they become indistinguishable.
Following a free digital EP, Barrel of Batteries, where two of these songs originate, Wagonwheel Blues sounds modern, outsize, and urban. On opener "Arms Like Boulders", guitars dart like tracers as Granduciel sings about...well, like Dylan, his lyrics demand some extreme parsing, giving few concrete details in favor of a general sense of subject matter and attitude. The War on Drugs' concerns, however, aren't necessarily narcotic, as their regrettable band name might suggest, but largely ecological and occasionally political: "And so now that you realize that planets are spheres with oil on the inside / And your God is only a catapult waiting for the right time to let you go into the unknown." On "Taking the Farm", Granduciel picks up that thought again: "You can feel it in the ozone-zone-zone/ You can feel it in my knees knees knees," he sings above the controlled din, savoring the scatlike repetition and the long vowels. He may be referring either to the general buzz of bad omens or to the song itself, which adds a drum loop to their established formula, speeds things up, makes it infectious, then implodes in an ominous guitar finale. Back to back, these two tracks make an enormous first impression.
Immediately following that pair of openers is the instrumental "Coast (Reprise)", despite the fact that the song it's nominally reprising doesn't come until much later in the album. It seems like such an odd choice in sequencing-- chasing two defining tracks with an atmospheric aside-- but their madness becomes more methodical with repeated listens. In fact, the War on Drugs have divided their debut into three sections separated by two instrumentals. It's a curious tactic: "Coast (Reprise)" and "Reverse the Charges" build open-road ambience with cascading guitars and synths, and although they can be repetitive and overlong, these buffer tracks generate an immersive lurch and lull, which makes Wagonwheel Blues distinctively roadworthy.
Beyond that, they reveal the band to be more than simply a backdrop for Granduciel's familiar singing and songwriting. Wagonwheel Blues is largely a collaboration between multi-instrumentalists Granduciel and Kurt Vile (whose own album, Constant Hitmaker, elaborates on this solid approach), and they emphasize sound and song equally, showing a wide musical range despite the limited elements. "Buenos Aires Beach" churns a trippy dread with filtered acoustic guitar, psych-rock organ, and a military snare rhythm. Slurred guitar notes hoist "There Is No Urgency" aloft, with only faint drums as ballast. And "Show Me the Coast" is a 10-minute epic that devolves into what might best be described as the E Street Band doing shoegazer.
On Wagonwheel Blues, the War on Drugs' approach comes across as not only natural, but imminently worthwhile, as if these revered sources needed to be roughed up a bit to sound new. So the Arcade Fire-sale organ on "A Needle in Your Eye #16" (one of the best approximations of that band's cathedral-size sound) may initially seem immodest against Granduciel's classic-rock vocals and the relentless snare rhythm, but the War on Drugs aren't just another indie band with arena ambitions. Instead, they craft a big sound for their big ideas, so that Wagonwheel Blues fills the space between horizons. | 2008-07-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-07-10T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | July 10, 2008 | 7.8 | a5061bd0-ac8f-4b79-a069-dbe6948011e3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Though fully charged with political fervor and booming metallic beats, Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s incomparable lack of subtlety make this another clumsy late-career outing. | Though fully charged with political fervor and booming metallic beats, Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s incomparable lack of subtlety make this another clumsy late-career outing. | Public Enemy: Nothing Is Quick in the Desert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/public-enemy-nothing-is-quick-in-the-desert/ | Nothing Is Quick in the Desert | Thirty years ago, when Public Enemy released their debut album, Chuck D was 26 going on eternal, a wise and booming authority from the start. In 2017, he has calloused slightly, sounding like the stodgy teacher who’s spent a career stuck at his own alma mater. His voice still booms, but his lesson plans have tightened into a passionately rote routine.
Late last month, celebrating their thirtieth anniversary as a group, Public Enemy released their fourteenth album for free and in secret, or at least as an unheralded surprise. Chuck D later confirmed the record, Nothing Is Quick in the Desert, as a limited-time download expiring on July 4th—a vaguely political gesture perhaps—and as a result, the album is no longer available through official means. (Chuck has been pointing fans on Twitter to a YouTube rip.) Fitting its shoddy build-up, distribution, and milestone marking, Nothing Is Quick in the Desert doesn’t call for much coddling, and it’s, unfortunately, another clumsy late-career Public Enemy outing.
Subtlety has never been in the band’s wheelhouse. Instead, even at their best, Public Enemy employs a bludgeoning, message-music approach to both their raps and sound. It’s a style that calcified their political urgency early on but has lately grown aimless and gawky. On “So Be It,” ostensibly a concept record, the vagueness of PE’s political criticisms veer into random rambling. “Y’all know it/So be it/Then be it so/So it be revolution/Then let it be known,” Chuck demands on a hook that doesn’t deserve half the repetition it endures. A more lucid, obvious target doesn’t help. Eyeing down Donald Trump on “Beat Them All,” Chuck blunders in his arresting, shouting baritone: “Hey dude, why you building a wall?/Think you got enough balls?” Nothing Is Quick in the Desert is full of humorless clunkers like these, even if they are delivered with an admirably persistent zeal.
Sometimes the rhymes aren’t just tired, they’re downright unwieldy. “I really never really dug ‘The Wire’,” Chuck D raps randomly on “Toxic,” not quite walking in step with the stuttery beat. You can almost hear him counting syllables on his fingers to force that second “really” into the bar. As ever, Flavor Flav’s drop-ins sweeten the pot for better and worse. On the same song, he yelps out an unadorned mention of the Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo on the hook, a delightful non sequitur in Flav’s croaky rasp. At the beginning of “Yesterday Man” Flav also sounds perfectly at home chanting over a conga break and shifty piano sample with an in-your-face refrain. But the beat whirls out of control and the song quickly devolves into a pair of old men yelling at clouds. “Kanye marrying Kim/Bruce Jenner turned to femme,” Flav raps, each bar eliciting a shouty “What happened?!” from Chuck. “Is rap still the Black CNN?” Flavor quips, covering up a pair of ugly lines by revisiting a decades-old PE proclamation without the tact to carry it forward.
For all the missteps, there are gratifying moments littered throughout. For the most part, the production, spearheaded by David “CDOC” Snyder, is patched together smartly and with regard to tradition. “Smash the Crowd” nails a classic PE sample barrage recipe, chunking the track into chapters of distinctly bulky loops. A couple of the album’s guest verses pop up here, and Ice-T benefits from a metallic breakdown, a crunching guitar charging up one of the album’s better verses. It sounds like frequent latter day PE collaborator Khari Wynn that’s constantly unspooling distorted metal guitar riffs, muddled if not dexterous solos that spin around themselves without any forward momentum or resting place. Those guitar runs are similar to the album they grow from. Throughout Nothing Is Quick in the Desert, Public Enemy have plenty of fuel left in the tank, but they seem to be breathlessly gunning for the horizon without a plan of attack or final destination. No matter how far they make it, they might as well be spinning in place. | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | July 12, 2017 | 6 | a50af592-d78c-4cab-a62b-631113c74aee | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
The New York producer’s latest album bounces between rolling grooves and dissolving basslines. It’s primed for both the dancefloor and for getting lost in a headphone fog. | The New York producer’s latest album bounces between rolling grooves and dissolving basslines. It’s primed for both the dancefloor and for getting lost in a headphone fog. | Beta Librae: Daystar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beta-librae-daystar/ | Daystar | Scientists call it the Goldilocks zone: the narrow band around a star where it’s neither so cold that liquid water freezes nor so hot that it vaporizes. Within this zone are the conditions needed for life to flourish. The porridge, in other words, is just right. New York producer Beta Librae (aka Bailey Hoffman) makes music that floats in a kind of Goldilocks zone. It’s bounded on one extreme by the alien chill of ambient music; on the other lies the searing heat of a roiling dancefloor. Her work channels both realms without belonging to either. It’s alive with rippling grooves, yet often feels as ethereal as it does physical. An adventurous DJ could absolutely use it to make people move, but it’s just as suitable for zoning out and getting lost in a headphone fog.
Over the years, Beta Librae has tended to follow an elliptical orbit. On certain tracks, or even full albums, she tugs toward one pole before canting back in the opposite direction. On her 2015 album Swope Park, fine-tipped frequencies often darted like the needles of an industrial knitting machine, offering a spine-tingling invitation to dance, while on 2018’s Sanguine Bond, tempos slowed and solid forms softened, dissolving into the murk. On Daystar—released, like its predecessor, on Anthony Naples and Jenny Slatterly’s Incienso label—her music moves markedly closer to the sun. It’s her heaviest release yet.
“Penny Universities” opens the album with knives sharpening in time to the rhythm of a UK garage-adjacent beat; the kick drum taps incessantly at your sternum, while a gravelly bass tone pulses ominously, lifting the dancefloor with every throb. It certainly wasn’t made for sitting down. With “Late at Night,” she feints sideways into dubby rumination, but with the bleepy techno of “Megafauna” and “The Dance Class,” she catapults us back into a landscape of explosive kicks and jagged shards. It’s not just that the album’s beats hit harder than usual, or that the drum sounds are more cutting, though both things are true. In the near-total absence of salient melodies, even the tonal elements—like basslines sculpted out of tuned kick drums—pack a muscular wallop.
The album possesses an almost architectural sensibility. Drum patterns and dissonant synth riffs criss-cross like load-bearing beams; reverb tails suggest the illusion of vectors cutting angled lines. Close your eyes and follow the way certain sounds pan across the mix, or consider how tracks come to resemble three-dimensional structures, scale models mapped out in sound. Some parts, like a clanging dub chord reminiscent of Horsepower Productions’ Y2K-era dark garage, turn up in multiple tracks, lending a sense of flow that is no doubt related to Beta Librae’s experience as a live performer, retooling and resequencing her productions on the fly. Despite Daystar’s propulsive intensity, it’s never obviously utilitarian, and it never falls prey to predictability. Grooves tend to roll on in waves, like broad swells; rhythms evolve almost imperceptibly, rewarding immersive listening. After a long, unexpected breakdown halfway through “Penny Universities,” rather than returning in a climactic, concussive drop, the beat instead simply reassembles itself out of thin air. It’s a gratifyingly sneaky twist on club convention.
If Beta Librae mostly leans into her rhythmic instincts on Daystar, she ventures further afield on “Late at Night,” where fellow Incienso signee James K’s voice swirls airily over dub chords and a choppy, syncopated beat. I’m not sure it works, at least within the context of the album; James K’s R&B-influenced singing feels grafted on, as though Beta Librae were trying to create a new pop hybrid out of her customary strain of experimental club music. A vocal as strange and singular as her productions might land better here. Still, it’s good to see Beta Librae trying new things and testing the limits of her zone. She may have her particular sweet spot all mapped out, but by the next time we hear from her, she’ll likely be coming to us from a different quadrant of the galaxy altogether. | 2023-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Incienso | May 12, 2023 | 7.3 | a50c4355-29da-40b6-b8bb-a1e7fb58d2ac | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The New Jersey jazzman combines hip-hop sensibilities with the precision of Count Basie in a collection of highly controlled compositions that are nonetheless warm, languid, and dedicated to the funk. | The New Jersey jazzman combines hip-hop sensibilities with the precision of Count Basie in a collection of highly controlled compositions that are nonetheless warm, languid, and dedicated to the funk. | Pat Van Dyke: Hello, Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pat-van-dyke-hello-summer/ | Hello, Summer | The New Jersey jazzman Pat Van Dyke is in his mid-30s, which means he’s part of a generation of players who grew up immersed in hip-hop. That has put the music he plays, composes, and produces in direct conversation with beatsmiths like Oddisee and Kev Brown, whose love for analog sounds gives their music an organic feel. Van Dyke doesn’t make beats, exactly. But he does favor repetitive, mid-tempo jazz that, although it occasionally features mild improvisation, often resembles the Native Tongues beats of the 1990s. It wouldn’t just be possible to rap over many portions of his compositions; it would be tempting.
For beatheads, Van Dyke’s Hello, Summer is easily his most compelling album since 2014’s Technicolor Hi-Fi, a cult favorite and spiritual ancestor to many of the lo-fi compositions that now circulate on YouTube. Composed and produced by Van Dyke, the new record is built on a series of melodic refrains that either grow or transform over the course of each track, undergirded by the artist’s alternately splashy and subtle percussive instincts. It also features a gang of Tri-State session musicians, including eight different brass players. They give the music the force of an ensemble, and the album comes to feel something like Count Basie directing a big band dedicated to lost Roy Ayers compositions; it is highly, almost restrictively controlled, but nonetheless dedicated to the funk. And though the songs are modest and predominantly bright, their surfaces ripple with small surprises.
Many of these come from Van Dyke’s cunning, low-key touches and abilities as a multi-instrumentalist. The bandleader started playing the keyboard when he was five, then switched to drums four years later. Though he has no shortage of collaborators on Hello, Summer, he plays many of its instruments himself. The album’s best tracks, like “Lotus” and “Go-Go,” are driven by melodies that emerge from unexpected places: an opening salvo of bass on the former and a current of earthy guitar on the latter, both performed by Van Dyke. Another standout, the funky “Blues for Benny” buzzes with mild psychedelia, making excellent use of David Stolarz’s organ and a charismatic trumpet solo from Eric “Benny” Bloom.
The eighth of 11 tracks, “Blues for Benny” initiates a stellar late-album run. “Stone Road,” which follows, may appear to be the simplest composition, but it builds to a comforting groove that feels as breezy as a short ride bike ride home from a long barbecue. And it brings us back to that feeling several times, punctuating the theme’s second arrival with another lovely solo from Stolarz. “Gutterball” and the closer, “All I Need,” are similarly evocative, the band putting all its effort behind bringing the soul of each song to fruition—coaxing, from a series of discrete sounds, a rich and complex essence. Naming an album after a season can be a gamble; if the tunes don’t fit, the whole effort seems flawed. But that’s not a problem here, as the brightness of the album’s opening half gives way to a dreamy sensation that exactly matches the vibe of a lazy August night.
Tracks like these rescue Hello, Summer from the easy-listening label some of its lesser compositions deserve, as Van Dyke permits solos on “Clockwork” and the title track that are almost too pleasant—lilting digressions that sap both songs’ energy. But while its pleasures may seem simple, the album’s effortlessness rewards repeated listening, which brings new snatches of melody and particular performances to the fore with each spin. Rich with funky, danceable melodies balanced by disciplined musicianship, it’s a feel-good instrumental record par excellence. | 2018-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Stereo Vision | August 30, 2018 | 7.2 | a50fa891-23f3-45a0-bd48-fde39654e268 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
After nearly a decade in the psych-rock group Quilt, Rochinski offers a bold, buoyant debut that mingles propulsive riffs with off-kilter instrumentation and lyrics that make heartbreak and disillusionment sound like a party. | After nearly a decade in the psych-rock group Quilt, Rochinski offers a bold, buoyant debut that mingles propulsive riffs with off-kilter instrumentation and lyrics that make heartbreak and disillusionment sound like a party. | Anna Fox Rochinski: Cherry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-fox-rochinski-cherry/ | Cherry | On her bold debut solo album Cherry, Anna Fox Rochinski makes heartbreak and disillusionment sound like a party, full of psychedelic rock guitar riffs, earworm bass lines and shiny pop vocals. The result is sometimes chaotic but ultimately fun, like having a conversation on a crowded dance floor about your place in the universe—you may not remember what you talked about later, but you remember how you felt.
That cacophony is especially tantalizing on the title track “Cherry,” which begins with 30 seconds of bubbling synths that sound like an extraterrestrial language before Rochinski sings: “How did I get so obsessive?/Watching me spiral on and on/They just say, ‘that’s too bad.’” The track builds to a climax of dissonant notes, bell dings, cymbal clashes, and synths, bringing to mind Robyn fronting Parquet Courts. It’s not immediately obvious what the bridge “Cherry til I die/ Cherry in my eye” means, but you’re too busy nodding along to care.
Cherry is full of propulsive guitar riffs that recall psychedelic rock bands of the ’10s like Temples, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, or Quilt, of which Rochinski was a member for nearly a decade. But on Cherry, Rochinski uses synths, marimbas, and keys to send shockwaves through those riffs, making playful, buoyant music that doesn’t take itself, or anything, too seriously. On “High Board” she explores existentialism, singing in a gooey ’80s pop timbre: “Does it even really matter?/ What are we ever after, what if we get something better?” before a robotic voice speak-sings what sounds like a line from a Twilight Zone script over dazed, space-age synths.
But for all the playful instrumentation on Cherry, there’s also a lot of precision and control. The comparatively sparse instrumentation of the ballad “No Better” showcases Rochinski’s slight vibrato and expansive vocal range, before the song cascades into a sitar-like psych-rock riff, moving from pop to psychedelia like a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat. Rochinski cherry-picks instruments and genres on a seemingly granular level: an ’80s synth for one measure, a steely ’60s guitar strum for another, leaving the impression that every single sound is there for a reason.
The beauty of Cherry is that it doesn't require a close listen to enjoy its tact and playfulness. You may not remember if Rochinski gets anything she yearns for, if any hurt is mended, or if any questions are answered, but you leave with her cooing voice and head-bobbing bass lines permanently etched into your skull. It’s like not knowing where to focus while watching a meteor shower — in a brief span of time, so much is dazzling.
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. | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Don Giovanni | March 29, 2021 | 7.2 | a517d19d-d824-4cf3-a471-dd31923755b7 | Sophia June | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophia-june/ | |
Recorded shortly before her move from New York to San Francisco, the Canadian club-pop musician’s third LP with Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan sounds sensual, understated, and effortless. | Recorded shortly before her move from New York to San Francisco, the Canadian club-pop musician’s third LP with Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan sounds sensual, understated, and effortless. | Jessy Lanza: All the Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessy-lanza-all-the-time/ | All the Time | Jessy Lanza’s music sits just at the fringe between club and pop. Her airy, embodied techno is mild and frisky as a spring day, effortlessly stylish and ever so slightly aloof. With a high, breathy vocal pop style indebted to Janet Jackson, she’s an electronic producer whose approach alights on the clubbier side of experimental R&B. All the Time, her third full-length collaboration with creative partner Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, rewards careful attention to the subtleties of a consistent sound. It lacks the muscularity of tracks like “5785021,” or the footwork edge of “It Means I Love You”; instead, its sunny swells and sanded edges recall the wistful electro-pop of Empress Of, or Robyn’s Honey. The golden glow feels easy to attribute to Lanza’s recent relocation to the Bay Area, even though the record was nearly finished by the time she left New York in March.
All the Time is a sound Lanza does well already, and it looks effortless. “Face” plays with breakbeats; “Like Fire” rolls out little siren peals of synth most immediately familiar from Jamie xx’s “Gosh.” “Alexander” and “Baby Love” swoon towards R&B, backed by a sublayer of synth that’s only intermittently interested in moving in the same direction. The opening “Anyone Around” feels deeper in conversation with hip-hop than Lanza’s previous work, and there’s a little deconstructed trap in its loud 808 claps, clattering hi-hats, and pavement-shaking bass. But once the melody comes in, her own aesthetic agenda is clear: curious squeals of modular synth to match the half-articulated question of the title, background coos that underline self-aware vulnerability.
More often than not, a Jessy Lanza song is also a sexy mood. Lanza’s songs—the title track of her 2013 debut, Pull My Hair Back; this album’s “Badly” and “Ice Creamy”—are full of understated gestures that sit just a notch beneath actively drawing attention to themselves. All the Time is full of pleas like “want ya, want ya” and “I do want you badly”; even more innocent refrains, like “over and over” or a whispered “do it baby, do it baby,” sound like variations on a theme. “I can’t deal without your love—and I really, really tried,” she confesses on “Over and Over,” with direct-to-the-camera, speak-sing sincerity. And “Like Fire,” which seems obviously sexy on its surface (“You know that I want your love/You know that I’m serious”), gradually reveals anger at unrequited desire: “You’re always holding out/All your cars and diamond rings/I can only blame myself/You burn me like fire.”
Though it’s a hard balance to strike, Lanza’s work is sensual, never titillating or ridiculous, which opens space to address other topics at the same time. She describes “Anyone Around” as inspired by the social isolation of moving from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City; “Face” began as a series of imaginary conversations between fellow subway riders. There is a sensuality inherent to this kind of craving for human contact, too. The sprightly single “Lick in Heaven” Lanza identifies as an expression of “cynicism”—particularly its video, in which she wears a magenta power suit and leads a business-casual dance party on the set of a morning talk show. It’s a simple concept with the brightly lit look of the small screen, and a subtler commentary on the environments and aesthetics of “women’s” media, with its many tacit boundaries and scripted models of authenticity.
But Lanza’s formula is simple, suggesting heavy emotions with few words and a light touch. Her muffled club bass, choppy vocal fills, and pitched-down, masculine-sounding gulps all feel like the work of humans, not machines. All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.
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*Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Hyperdub | July 24, 2020 | 7.8 | a51d5a72-c25d-448e-ac23-079d9eaed54e | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
This 2012 LP, newly reissued, is the Scranton punk band’s definitive album—the record that inaugurated a signature vernacular of doomed romance and self-loathing nostalgia. | This 2012 LP, newly reissued, is the Scranton punk band’s definitive album—the record that inaugurated a signature vernacular of doomed romance and self-loathing nostalgia. | The Menzingers: On the Impossible Past (10th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-menzingers-on-the-impossible-past-10th-anniversary-edition/ | On the Impossible Past (10th Anniversary Edition) | In 2011, after touring the country opening for Title Fight and Touché Amoré, the Menzingers went home exhausted to write their third album, On the Impossible Past. It was the record that eventually took them to the top of the bill. Cherished by fans, it’s the band’s definitive statement (although I’m as likely to reach for 2017’s After the Party)—the one that inaugurated a signature vernacular of doomed romance with diner waitresses and self-loathing nostalgia. Heartland rock for the world-weary and downwardly mobile, On the Impossible Past is (to paraphrase Dan Ozzi) a premature elegy for youth and for a child’s conception of America—the kind you might learn as a white kid from northeastern Pennsylvania, a false promise fading to adult disillusionment. “Maybe I’m not dying, I’m just living in decaying cities,” goes a prophetic-sounding line from “The Obituaries.” Spiritually, what’s the difference?
Buffing away the hardcore and Irish punk inspirations that flecked the band’s first two albums, On the Impossible Past is tragic, melodic pop-punk comfort food. The lines become clearer, the frames smaller, until the band is working in miniature, squeezing novellas into restaurant booths: “You’ll get seated as diners or lovers, you’ll get the check as friends for the better.” The tensions in their music arise in the space between literary aspiration and the urge to just scream, between abstract political circumstances and the mundane ways they encroach on life. So heady are the fleeting highs of “Ava House”—“You can’t touch us, we’re untouchable”—that you might forget it’s another elegy, for a recession-era Philadelphia punk venue with a shaky floor that had already shut down by the time they recorded it.
But the bigger picture is barely visible in On the Impossible Past, obliterated by sure bets on the short term. In Nabokov’s Lolita the phrase is “drunk on the impossible past,” and this is undeniably drinking music. The drink of choice is beer, cheapest you got, consumed on concrete stoops, Brooklyn rooftops, and behind the wheel of the “American muscle car,” a flashy symbol that only feels more obvious 10 years later. When the car drives into the first scene you already know it’s going to get totaled by the end of act two, and that it belongs to the singer’s friend, or ex-girlfriend, only serves to underscore this band’s narrative position as permanent underdogs. “I held the wheel while you drank and drove,” moans Greg Barnett on the title track, riding shotgun through a brief, disastrous interlude that ties together several of the record’s paralleling stories of self-destruction.
In the Menzingers’ lineup of dual guitarists and lead singers—Barnett’s tuneful, expressive vocals alongside Tom May’s rawer roar—there’s an inherent community that’s key to the band’s charm. At Le Poisson Rouge in New York City this month, May took over some vocal parts for Barnett, who’d lost his voice, but he didn’t sing them as himself; his timbre warped into the more melodious shapes of his bandmate, as if tapping into a shared consciousness. Within the world of the songs, though, you rarely have the sense that the two men are aware of one another; even in ragged harmony, they seem almost like two actors portraying the same role, with personas so sympathetic you’re afraid to ask what sent these ex-girlfriends running for the hills. Maybe it was all the drinking. Or maybe that’s just the way it goes, now; your friends grow up and move away for better opportunities, or they go to war and come home shattered, and you, in the words of a different band of tristate good-boy punks, will always be a loser. In “Casey,” another dedication to a restaurant server, I sometimes imagine a semi-unrequited crush on a coworker at a dead-end job, the person who when they finally quit left you wondering what you were even doing with your life.
That’s another unsteady comfort of Menzingers songs: the permission to have feelings even though it’s all been done before, the sound of machismo in retreat; this is the band’s most welcoming and quintessentially “emo” aspect. There’s no posturing, and (more Nabokovian of them) if the narrator is unreliable it’s only because he believes himself. As in America, the truth is hidden a little deeper, in the many allusions to “the shame, the fear, the guilt that’s tough to mention,” as Barnett sings on “Sun Hotel,” a memorial to another defunct local dive and a pretty good song in unfortunate violation of the rule that if you’re going to rip off Leonard Cohen, you’d better write an incredible one.
The new 10th-anniversary reissue is accompanied by a disc of acoustic demos, known as On the Possible Past and originally distributed in an edition of 1,000. Possible represents a rough draft of about half the final album, with the two opening songs in place and several key tracks (“The Obituaries,” “Gates,” “Nice Things”) yet to be added, and for the most part it takes the aggressively strummed approach of a Punk Goes Acoustic project. The biggest surprise—much remarked upon by fans over the years—is the early alternate “Sun Hotel,” which borrows even more from Cohen yet is strangely more affecting. It’s softer, reworking the intimate vignette of “Chelsea Hotel #2” as a behind-the-scenes portrait of friends of the band. “Dan played ‘Casey’ while sipping on a Mickey’s,” Barnett sings. Just then, the suggestion of companionship is so real it fills the room. Turns out “the loneliest corner in the whole world” has a corner store.
Upon the album’s release, Barnett described it as “essentially an accidental concept record,” which feels accurate to the self-contained storytelling, if not the poetic license the term often implies. Because even when the writing is more evocative than literal, the songs are realistic first, the type of fiction that’s truer than fact. If the band has struggled to move on from the fatalistic allure of the Impossible Past world—if “The plot does not develop/It ends where it begins,” from “Burn After Writing,” has at times felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy—consider it a failure of subject as much as author. The Menzingers’ colloquial punk forms and plainspoken lyrics situate personal disappointment and dysfunction in wider contexts, like a persistent societal failure to fix anything that matters to young people, then or now. That’s the world where we live. With On the Impossible Past, they located one crack in dystopia approximately somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania and tried to pry it open bare-handed. | 2022-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epitaph | November 19, 2022 | 8 | a5223748-9175-4e9a-80a6-9613207ff429 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
Three years on from Lucky Shiner and following his DJ-Kicks set, the new EP from Gold Panda finds him refining his approach and exploring familiar themes, mixing bell-like textures, slow-mo house, and foggy drone. | Three years on from Lucky Shiner and following his DJ-Kicks set, the new EP from Gold Panda finds him refining his approach and exploring familiar themes, mixing bell-like textures, slow-mo house, and foggy drone. | Gold Panda: Trust EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17701-gold-panda-trust-ep/ | Trust EP | Gold Panda arrived on the scene in fine style with 2009's "Quitter's Raga". As a statement of intent it sat comfortably with many of the preoccupations of the time, mixing hazy nostalgia with the dancefloor-referencing electronic pop of Mount Kimbie. Even ignoring its timeliness, the project's debut is a gem, a stuttering, maximalist joy-overload, infectious in its naivety. A handful of further tracks followed, cementing an aesthetic that was placeless, both in its stylistic touchstones and its persistent use of non-Western samples, but also intimate in its homespun feel, its imperfections and its repeated references to loved ones and missed places. While far from ground-breaking-- the twin forks of his family tree stretch back at least as far as Four Tet and J Dilla-- his dusty aesthetic was singular and tremendously easy to love.
An album, Lucky Shiner, followed on Ghostly International in 2010. It was a solid if not stunning debut, falling short only next to the the considerable promise of Gold Panda's earliest output. Comparisons to the twinkly sample-scapes of Four Tet and the Field's gauzy techno became perhaps a little too pertinent, and in streamlining his sound Gold Panda seemed, slightly, to dull its charms. In the wake of the album the producer's momentum appeared to falter. His 2011 DJ Kicks mix rummaged through an array of contemporary electronica but failed to come up with a statement of particular coherence. The original Gold Panda productions accompanying the mix, meanwhile, were among his most polished work to date, exploring glistening melodic techno in the Border Community vein. Looking back over the past four years, there's no doubt that he has refined his process. His shepherding of samples has become more assured, and their edges are often smoother these days, all the better to slot into a coherent whole. But with that refinement has come a mounting sense that the mild anarchy of those early recordings was a large part of their appeal.
The Trust EP is a case in point. Across its four tracks, he explores familiar themes, but with diminishing returns. The intro, a foggy, submerged drone, is the most confrontational thing here, though at barely a minute long, it functions as little more than a palette-cleanser. The title track, meanwhile, sees him at his most relaxed, its melodies nestled snugly in a slow-mo house framework. "Burnt Out Car In a Forest" draws on much the same sonic toolbox-- particularly the bell-like tones, themselves dangerously reminiscent of Four Tet-- though in a more energetic setting. Flurries of claps and hi-hats give the impression of density, but where previously he might have inundated the track with melodic content, here his repitched sample-melodies do the bare minimum.
The downtempo "Casyam_59#02", finally, is the outlier. It's more melodically forthright than its companions, but there's still a disappointingly maudlin quality to the way it unfolds. The fact is that for music like Gold Panda's to function-- music that trades in a kind of heartfelt, familial warmth-- you need to believe it utterly, be swept up by its strength of feeling. It's all too easy, otherwise, to read it as a succession of empty platitudes, a sort of limp unending niceness that gestures at profundity without ever quite getting a grip on the heartstrings. | 2013-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | March 4, 2013 | 7 | a522bf7d-67a9-437f-b6f9-30a1f368a954 | Angus Finlayson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/angus-finlayson/ | null |
The L.A. producer’s music is a fog of samples and clips warped into peculiar shapes that defy recognition but prickle with familiarity, like memories from a past life. | The L.A. producer’s music is a fog of samples and clips warped into peculiar shapes that defy recognition but prickle with familiarity, like memories from a past life. | Knxwledge: 1988 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knxwledge-1988/ | 1988 | Knxwledge is known for his omnivorous sampling and a work ethic that’s produced a scrollbar-shrinking Bandcamp page, but the L.A. producer is also a lover of mischief. “I kinda just test limits on how funky or smooth you can make some, like, super hood rap shit about shooting people in the face,” he once summarized. That playful approach characterizes 1988, billed as Knxwledge’s second album despite being the latest splash in an ocean of releases. The record is a fog of samples and clips warped into peculiar shapes that defy recognition but prickle with familiarity, like memories from a past life.
In terms of method, 1988 is virtually no different from the beat tapes and mixes Knxwledge releases with the regularity of software patches, but its warm, teasing aura sets it somewhat apart. Named after the year he was born and filled with pop culture ephemera like soundbites from Cooley High and radio interviews, 1988 celebrates Knxwledge’s origins and fixations. There’s always been a strong sense of nostalgia to his work, but he has an agnostic’s ability to cherish the past while shaping it to his needs.
This is the mood throughout 1988. On opener “dont be afraid” Knxwledge snips ’90s R&B group Kut Klose’s “Surrender” into a sensuous, yearning loop. “Don’t be afraid of the way you feel,” the group sings, their voices altered to waft over snappy percussion. For “amansloveislife_keepon,” another Kut Klose flip, Knxwledge rearranges the groove of “Keep On” around the instrumentation instead of the group’s harmonies. It's a simple change, but it unlocks the funk embedded in the song, which itself samples Patrice Rushen’s “Remind Me.” It feels less like a tweak than a correction.
While he’s clearly a student of J Dilla and Madlib, Knxwledge distinguishes himself with his special attention to the contours of the human voice. The feathery keys and faint percussion on “watchwhoukallyourhomie,” a flip of an old Meek Mill freestyle, trace the edges of Meek’s buoyant yelps, matching his bobs and weaves. Likewise, the soured horns of “solivelife” drift around a helium-laced Anderson .Paak vocal, freeing the crooner’s voice to drag and spill across measures. Knxwledge seems endlessly fascinated by the voice’s ability to spawn new rhythms or bind disparate ones together.
That said, while the loops and beats of 1988 are as hypnotic and outre as ever, other than the cleared samples and elevated sense of personality, there’s not enough about 1988 that distinguishes it from, say, WT15.8_, released a week before, or that rises to the devil-may-care attitude of Knxwledge’s Vimeo page. Read in sequence, the song titles spell out a mission statement of sorts, but the music here is ultimately standard Knxwledge. Knxwledge remains a distinctive and prolific sculptor of sounds, but consistency alone feels like a low bar to clear, especially for an artist with such reverence for the infinite forms music can take.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | April 8, 2020 | 7 | a5234bb0-b842-433f-8294-9815e06f8335 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked\n ... | Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked\n ... | Wolf Eyes: Dead Hills | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8729-dead-hills/ | Dead Hills | Dennis Cooper's novel My Loose Thread opens with a high school student named Larry seated in a parked car at dusk, on a hill overlooking his town. With him is the nameless boy he's recently been hired to kill by Gilman Crowe, a senior with a fake Neo-Nazi streak. The boy finds all sorts of aesthetic and emotional pleasure in watching people in the town below turn their lights on one by one as they realize it's getting dark. The distant and depersonalized movements become the patterns in a non-pictorial language: a flash here and a flash there. He does a similar thing with stars. As Larry says, "When you imagine the stars are a far away, upside-down city at night they seem more important." Larry later realizes, when reading the boy's notebook, that he just can't carry out the deed. As a reader of the novel, you get second-hand information about what's covered in the journal, but Cooper avoids offering too much about how the boy went about it or where his language took him. The aura of the unknown remains intact.
Wolf Eyes' latest is the aural equivalent of Cooper's aforementioned scene, another bold bit in the band's steady onslaught of material. Listening to Dead Hills, I saw Larry and the boy falling apart to AM radio hiss, barely recognizing the patterns around them, nonetheless sensing something sinking into and altering their emotional states. Current 93 channeled a similarly pre-lingual world of death and sex through their feedback, but where David Tibet evokes the haunting pre-Surrealist imagery of Lautréamont, Wolf Eyes act as the equivalent of three horror-obsessed punks in a forest, destroying a house by fire, watching their own homemade pitch-shifters burn and sing.
Since getting their start in the cassette underground in 1997, Wolf Eyes have produced over 40 releases, each archiving a beautifully troubling practice. With an approach to music akin to Vienna Actionism or a second-generation snuff film, Wolf Eyes bleed analog, mark their territory with piss, and shout all crazed over layers of sirens and random pulses. Aaron Diloway (Hanson Records), John Olson (American Tapes), and Nate Young (who builds much of Wolf Eyes' equipment) are Ann Arbor, Michigan's most interesting band, and the town's most explosive assault on regularity since Negative Approach busted up in 1984, or perhaps since John Brannon's post-Negative Approach act Laughing Hyenas hit their peak around 1990.
The title track from Dead Hills is its most impressive piece, launching from Colecovision explosions into tape loops running backwards before high-pitched rattling creaks like rusted gates over a stock horror film ding-dong effect, one of those incidental noises intended to signify that the person on screen should duck or run. It's equally reminiscent of suburban decay, conveying images of a pained girl drinking whiskey in a quilt-covered bed, hearts on her wall, a stuffed animal squirrel at her side, and a screaming wolf stenciled onto her headboard per Sue de Beer's Hans und Grete. In eleven minutes, "Dead Hills" shifts from tired video game rolls into rabid bugs and the screams of wounded animals. By song's end the shit has really hit the fan: a tempest of hijacked past-future laser guns run amok (and if you look closely to stage right you can spot Merzbow dancing with eyes closed-- he looks happy!). Like a nature recording of a forest in which each object has a contact microphone duct taped to its back, the agonizing, detailed noises define the lives of snowflakes' voices, screaming as they melt on the asphalt.
The next two seances-- "Dead Hills 2" and "Rotten Tropics"-- are more percussive, and kind of slinky, relying on overt shouts from their human singer to make their point. Unfortunately, the mystery of the first "Dead Hills" becomes a Big Black loop, like David Yow keeping apace with Cock E.S.P. But trying to find concrete musical analogies for the Wolf Eyes magic-- especially after being so fucking blown away by "Dead Hills"-- is unfair, and a bit of a letdown. The songs aren't weak, but they've already shown us what was written in the book. Never do that; keep shit hidden. Relegating the record to more obvious categorization, the entire offering seem less heroic and more human for its epilogue.
Despite this last-minute fall from the sublime, Dead Hills' 24 minutes are a briefly frightening fragment, a churning mass in the continually evolving oeuvre of one of the underground's most important tweaked-out bands. Outside any historical context, it force-feeds you, one by one, the screeching souls of those crickets you tortured as a kid. | 2003-04-09T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-04-09T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Troubleman Unlimited | April 9, 2003 | 8.2 | a5373681-f163-4ce3-b06e-96046807da63 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Recorded in Jerusalem in 1987, Riad Awwad’s protest album is part ode to the beauty of homeland, part historical document of Palestinian struggle, and part instruction manual for revolution. | Recorded in Jerusalem in 1987, Riad Awwad’s protest album is part ode to the beauty of homeland, part historical document of Palestinian struggle, and part instruction manual for revolution. | Riad Awwad / Hanan Awwad / Mahmoud Darwish: The Intifada 1987 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/riad-awwad-hanan-awwad-mahmoud-darwi-the-intifada-1987/ | The Intifada 1987 | On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck crashed into cars carrying Palestinian workers in Gaza, killing four. Israel had been occupying Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967, inflicting curfews, raids, deportations, and more on the Palestinians who lived there. The truck incident—which Palestinians interpreted as retaliation for the recent killing of an Israeli in Gaza—was the catalyst for a massive popular uprising demanding an end to the occupation. The widespread collective action of strikes, boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, as well as occasional stone-throwing and use of Molotov cocktails, was called the First Intifada. It went on until the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords of 1993.
One week after the First Intifada began, musician Riad Awwad met with his sisters Hanan, Alia, and Nariman, as well as famed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and recorded 11 songs that spoke to the conflict happening around them. Three thousand copies of the recordings were made and circulated, but most were eventually seized by the Israeli military. In 2020, Mo’min Swaitat, the founder of British label Majazz Project, traveled to his hometown of Jenin, in the West Bank, and purchased thousands of tapes from a shuttered music store he remembered from childhood. Among them was a copy of the album that Riad Awwad, Hanan Awwad, and Mahmoud Darwish wrote, now reissued as The Intifada 1987. Its 11 songs are part ode to the beauty of homeland, part historical document of Palestinian struggle to exist on that land, and part instruction manual for revolution.
The Intifada 1987 alternates between cherishing moments of personal joy and comfort, many of which arise from tending and nurturing the land, and advocating communal political agitation when that joy is disrupted. Directives to nation-build “with a Molotov, with rocks” (on opener “Intifada”) are followed by poetic dreams of planting flowers upon returning to one’s homeland and descriptions of Palestine as the land of love and figs (“My Land My People”). Political and national identity tied to what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (when 700,000 Palestinians were forcefully removed from their homes at Israel’s formation in 1948) coexists with more serene, individual documentation of Palestinian personhood: “I’m from Jerusalem/In the streets/In the farmers/In the factories/In the alleyway.” Together, these songs position rage and love as two sides of the same coin: The more you love your land and your people—the farmers and the factories and the alleyways—The Intifada 1987 asserts, the stronger your will to return.
While the lyrics convey the emotional urgency of the uprising, the music mirrors the DIY, community-based approach to organizing that made the First Intifada so impactful. The album was recorded in a living room on instruments that Riad Awwad made himself. There’s a captivating roughness and immediacy to the sound—usually just a twisting disco synth line and some light percussion—and a vocal rawness that makes it feel like you’re in the room with the singers. Their lyrics are often straightforward and repetitive enough to be sung in unison, like chants. “Uprising” and “The Graves” jolt forward as if leading a march out of the quiet of the living room and onto the streets.
Over 30 years later, The Intifada 1987 feels no less relevant. The militarized Israeli occupation of the West Bank continues, and millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain displaced as conflict over land, identity, and homeland continues. That these songs were confiscated and hidden by Israeli forces in 1987 speaks to their political potency then and now. This lost manifesto, unheard for years, is an enduring document of the power of hope, community, and collective action—how it worked in the past and how it will work in the future.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Global / Jazz | Majazz Project | January 19, 2022 | 7.6 | a5389949-80b3-48ad-a6dd-974ba881a46f | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
In the last year, former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released hundreds of tracks across multiple releases, and the latest zooms in on and explores a luxurious, off-kilter wooziness. | In the last year, former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released hundreds of tracks across multiple releases, and the latest zooms in on and explores a luxurious, off-kilter wooziness. | Kool A.D.: Have a Nice Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22605-have-a-nice-dream/ | Have a Nice Dream | Since July alone the former Das Racist member Kool A.D. has released more music than some artists do during their entire careers; September’s Peyote Karaoke was not Kool’s first but second 100-track project of the year (and including last year’s O.K., his third in less than 365 days). The common thread between these releases has been a sense of musical restlessness, and most of acted as folios for his omnivorous appetite. Have a Nice Dream, his eighth project of 2016, continues this trend of zooming in on one particular sound—or, in this case, less a formal style than a general and overarching mood.
A reflective and meditative release, Have a Nice Dream luxuriates in an off-kilter wooziness. Opener “Who Am I?”—the lone contribution from Bay Area beatmaker Trackademicks, who handled all of the production on August’s ode to hyphy Official—features dramatic strings, over which Kool A.D. guides himself through an existential crisis. Part ontological investigation and part braggadocio session, it’s vintage Kool A.D.: “Just like the leg on a centipede, everything’s everything/Look at my wings so feathery, look at my energy.” Kool’s vocals are slathered in layers of effects, creating the sensation of a hundred internal voices battling for prominence. Even so, it’s the most straightforward track on the EP.
“Who Am I?” also holds the distinction of being the only song where the primary draw is Kool A.D.’s rapping. “Just Like Magic” is a breezy electro-pop trifle as viewed through a funhouse mirror: a little goofy, its proportions exaggerated to near-comical level, and pleasantly disorienting. But its lack of structure gives it an amorphous first-draft quality that’s hard to shake. Kool A.D.’s collaboration with Francis and the Lights, the unhurried “It’s Alright 2 Cry,” boasts the most shape of anything on Have a Nice Dream, and it works because Kool manages to inject some irreverence into the self-seriousness that sometimes plagues solo Francis and the Lights material.
Kool A.D. is, after all, the kind of dude who opens a song titled “America Is Dead” by melodically singing “Swag swag/Bieber.” It’s this sort of no-fucks-given approach that lets him conclude the project with a straight-faced ambient track that stretches out for 32 minutes. Less “My First Ambient Song” than would might expect, the EP’s centerpiece drags on about ten minutes too long, but the title track’s first two-thirds do a good job of conjuring the kind of dread someone like Andy Stott is known for, albeit with a less suffocating (and less polished) lurch. It’s representative of Have a Nice Dream as a whole: expectedly unexpected, surprisingly effective if meandering, and decidedly low-stakes. | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | DUM SHINY | November 11, 2016 | 6 | a53df2c5-c3e7-44a7-aa49-f916560e04a3 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
Black Joe Lewis trawls the familiar intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock, but he's got a few enlivening strategies to make the old formula feel fresh. | Black Joe Lewis trawls the familiar intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock, but he's got a few enlivening strategies to make the old formula feel fresh. | Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears: Backlash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22853-backlash/ | Backlash | Black Joe Lewis trawls the intersection of blues, soul, funk, and garage rock—a well-traveled juncture. But he has a few strategies to make this timeworn mixture more tangy on his new album, Backlash. The first is vocal: Lewis can unleash a stirring scream, a cauterizing billow of noise that’s sure to flutter your nervous system. The second is compositional: he likes shifting dynamics so that a slack song suddenly stiffens and lashes out, like a horse kicking an inconsiderate handler.
That scream, coupled with his heavy reliance on guitars, has earned Lewis comparisons to blues institutions (Muddy Waters), soul shouters (Wilson Pickett), and funk innovators (James Brown). But he prefers a different descriptor. “It’s all about putting on a good show and getting everyone having a good time,” he said in 2013. “There’s no category for that other than rock’n’ roll, as far as I know.”
Lewis has shed collaborators and labels since releasing his full length debut, Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!, in 2009. After a pair of albums produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno on Lost High Way records, he jumped to Vagrant and worked with an almost entirely different band for 2013’s Electric Slave, while Stuart Sikes and John Congleton split duty behinds the boards. He’s back with a similar crew this time—Sikes produced the whole thing—on InGrooves. It’s been nearly three and a half years since the last record: his longest break as a recording artist, and maybe a sign that records don’t matter much if your stage show is an effective good-times machine.
In truth, the changes between the second and third album didn’t much alter the music coming out of your speakers, and the same rules apply to Backlash, where the foundation is still a selection of forms at most two degrees removed from the blues. When Lewis adds cement to the beat and irrigates his guitar with fuzz, there’s an outline of the Sonics, or maybe the Black Keys. Snappy rhythms and bright, highly enunciated guitar leads put Lewis in the neighborhood of the New York soul revival labels Daptone and Truth & Soul. There’s an “uh-ah” chant that might trace back to Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” and female backing vocals that hint at the Sweet Inspirations.
You know this material well, and that’s where Lewis’ stand-at-attention strategies come in. He tends to ratchet up the energy just as his songs are ending, like a driver who speeds up to red lights. On “Global,” he hits you with the first howl just to straighten your spine in the song’s final minute, then wallops you with three of these in a row and adds another one low and far back in the mix for good measure. A comparable moment occurs during the bridge of “Freakin’ Out,” where the guitar quivers with enough agitation to merit a song of its own.
On “Prison,” Lewis generously gives you a 40-second lump of the really rowdy stuff. After a solo, he realigns with his band, and together they clobber their way out of the song with scabrous, cutthroat riffs and a dollop of defiance from Lewis: “I don’t mind being locked up!” But seconds later, the track comes to a close. It’s thrilling and enervating at the same time—Lewis gives the briefest glimpse of a supremely raucous affair, then shunts you out of a side door, all dressed up with nowhere to go. | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ingrooves | February 7, 2017 | 6 | a5409761-7003-4c18-8e53-d6b41d11ceff | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
The third album from the Philadelphia-based quintet, led by Dan Wriggins’ spare and transparent songwriting, creates a warm and disorienting mood. | The third album from the Philadelphia-based quintet, led by Dan Wriggins’ spare and transparent songwriting, creates a warm and disorienting mood. | Friendship: Dreamin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/friendship-dreamin/ | Dreamin’ | Anyone in Dan Wriggins’ social circle might soon find themselves in a Friendship song. Much of Dreamin’ finds the Philly-based singer-songwriter relaying frank conversations as they happen, occasionally edited to take the shape of lyrics and hummable melody. Friendship’s third album operates at the speed of an audiobook and is often just a feathery guitar or brushed drum tap away from being a cappella. A song like “Dusky” would earn every descriptor of “front porch” music—casual, faintly rustic, existing slightly out of time—even if it wasn’t literally about spending time on the front porch. Wriggins ordains a six-pack of Pabst, goes to get a smoke, appreciates the company, and the song ends. There’s no room for subtext in Friendship, except for its central songwriting principle: everything is exactly what it seems and it’s downright disorienting to confront this level of transparency.
It’s a similar formula followed on 2017’s overlooked gem Shock Out of Season, an arresting contrast of glacial synths and Wriggins’ convivial warmth, dropping life lessons and endearing pep talks (“It’s easy to tell that you’re doing right/If it feels like losing”) in a casual, calm tone as if his hand was constantly resting on your shoulder. Add in his bald dome on the cover, and it was easy to imagine Majical Cloudz reincarnated at a Philly house show. As with Shock Out of Season, Dreamin’ dropped with minimal fanfare last November, a record best enjoyed at one’s own pace, headphones on in the encroaching winter chill, reflecting on the past year.
But while the personnel and instrumentation remain similar, Dreamin’ is slightly more earthy and expansive, more drafty and dry than its predecessor. (Perhaps this is owed to Wriggins and drummer Mike Cormier serving as live-in groundskeepers on a pastoral Swarthmore property while writing Dreamin’). There’s still resonant drone and drum machine clatter adorning the edges of “I Don’t Have to Imagine Your Love” and “Clairvoyant,” which otherwise aspire for a timeless sentimentality honoring the enduring influence of Kath Bloom and Willie Nelson. But even the machinery sounds organic—they don’t sound like “synths” so much as small machines with corroded batteries, the kind of things you’d find in a garage alongside some rusted tools.
There’s a parallel between the band’s IRL handiwork and musicianship on Dreamin’, which is likely the quietest album of 2019 made by a quintet with guitars. Each member shapes, prunes, and manicures the surroundings of Wriggins’ curious musings on the minor pleasures that fill our lives: a wordless communication between friends, a resolution to be less judgmental, a belief in small moments of kindness, and honesty as the only effective weapon we have left. It’s no slight to say that the songs on Dreamin’ often don’t feel like songs, but honest human interactions that just so happened to be set to music. Yet while the intimacy of Friendship is their definitive quality, it also sets the limitations of Dreamin’, an album so focused on and trusting of its immediate circle that it forgets everyone else outside of it. “Low But On” more resembles switched-off Low, its brushed drums and cyclical riff circling the drain. And despite the foregrounding of Wriggins’ lyrics, “Hex on the Barn” and “Sure” too eagerly replicate a listless, porch-lit bull session that you can fade in and out of at will.
“Blessed are the places that grant us patience,” Wriggins drawls, and that’s Friendship’s energy: a desire to embrace the present, but without the exhausting urgency demanded by self-help books and futile New Year’s resolutions. He concedes to living on the verge of hopelessness in a world of hatred and lies within the first two minutes of “I Don’t Have to Imagine Your Love,” just like the rest of us. It’s kinda hard to believe the guy, but that’s not really a slight, rather a reflection of a kind of humanity on Dreamin’ so pure that it’s virtually superhuman. | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Orindal | January 14, 2020 | 6.7 | a552f761-3256-4424-ad93-de9ab63db095 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Dan Snaith’s latest is as sly and layered as ever, but he finds ways to be more direct with his songwriting. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched. | Dan Snaith’s latest is as sly and layered as ever, but he finds ways to be more direct with his songwriting. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched. | Caribou: Suddenly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caribou-suddenly/ | Suddenly | Over the past decade, Caribou has been whittling down his music. Dan Snaith’s songs were once a constant swirl of brightly colored baubles, as pleasingly jumbled as the view through a kaleidoscope. With 2010’s Swim, the muddle began coming into focus. The melodies were brighter, the beats more direct. Things got sharper still on 2014’s Our Love, which filtered the pleasures and anxieties of domesticity through the prism of house music at its most ebullient. That simple title spoke to Snaith’s growing interest in getting at the essence of things. The emotions he was grappling with were complicated—in interviews, he spoke eloquently about the trials of marriage and fatherhood—but he had a way of framing messy feelings in bold strokes. The album’s biggest song, “Can’t Do Without You,” featured few lyrics save its titular refrain, repeated over and over, turning its ambiguous double negative into a mantra-like affirmation.
Suddenly is more stylistically varied than Our Love or Swim, but it’s also the most direct that Snaith has sounded. Many of its standout songs are just two or three minutes long, perfect models of pop economy. The anthems are punchier: The dusty boom-bap of “Home” is the platonic ideal of a rare-groove edit, “Never Come Back” the epitome of a piano-house barnstormer. There’s nothing generic about even his most exacting genre studies: A Caribou song will always sound first and foremost like a Caribou song, thanks in part to Snaith’s distinctive falsetto, which graces every song here. There are no bum notes, no wasted motions, no corners of the audio spectrum left untouched.
Snaith’s beat-making has gotten more adventurous, too. He flits between rock, trap, UK garage, disco, and more, sometimes touching on two or three styles in the course of a single song. His drums are sharp and every hi-hat and cowbell is rendered in crisp hi-def and seems to hover in mid-air, like a 3D image. In this heady precision, Suddenly can be an almost dizzying listen. Caribou’s music has never leaped from the speakers quite the way it does here.
That outward clarity masks the growth in Caribou’s songwriting. Snaith has rarely been a strictly autobiographical lyricist, but not all of Our Love’s tales were as elegant as “Can’t Do Without You”. He has said that he’s the kind of person who might not know the lyrics to his favorite song, and on Our Love, you could tell. The lyrics felt more like placeholders, cue points where listeners might project their own more detailed experiences. Suddenly follows a period of turmoil in his extended family—a string of death, divorce, and other assorted shrapnel that falls within the blast radius of middle age—and, coincidentally or no, his writing has improved greatly. The stories he’s telling feel more substantial, as does his ability to assume the voices of a wider cast of characters. He still has a hard time resisting the pull of an easy couplet; the album is peppered with rhymes like “know” and “grow,” “in the past” and “here to last.” But he tends to use his voice as just another source of tone color. It is, truly, a lovely instrument, as limpid and azure as the photograph of water on the album’s cover.
Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer. There’s a marvelous moment in the opening “Sister,” in which the synthesizer detunes by just a few cents, almost imperceptibly, just enough to change the temperature in the room. “Like I Loved You” features a rippling jazz-guitar solo from Colin Fisher, the album’s only guest musician, that rolls like marbles on the deck of a boat.
In “Sunny’s Time,” tape-warp effects give the song’s central piano melody the texture of shirred silk, while a gruff hip-hop sample is chopped to ribbons and filtered in a way that accentuates the grain of the rapper’s voice, which is rendered all but unintelligible. It’s a fresh, surprising choice: Producers have been cribbing funk breaks like the one Snaith grabs for “Home” for decades. But by zeroing in on that gravelly vocal texture, “Sunny’s Time” gives Suddenly the feel of being in conversation with mainstream popular music—or eavesdropping on it, anyway.
Listen through enough times, and you may think you hear more songs than are listed on the sleeve. Time and again, songs feint left in their final minute or two. “New Jade,” a kind of psychedelic, maximalist R&B, suddenly flips into a gothic snippet of synth and flanged guitar, like something off the Cure’s 1980 album Seventeen Seconds. The chunky soul of “Home” gives way to fingerpicked folk guitar. And “Lime,” a jazzy house tune in the vein of Theo Parrish, abruptly stops and cuts to a much slower sample of Black Soul’s “The Sphynx,” a dirge-like meditation from 1975. This collage-like construction most likely reflects the way the record came together: Snaith has said that in the five years since Our Love, he amassed an archive of 900 loops and sketches, the products of his daily studio practice. The stragglers that seem to have snuck in here, under cover of the completed songs, are a big part of the record’s charm: They enliven the mood and keep things moving.
All these trap doors sometimes give the impression that there’s another album hiding in the shadows of Suddenly, like those vinyl records that have a secret track carved between the grooves of another song. It can be tempting to wonder what that hypothetical album might have sounded like, and where Snaith might have wandered had he given free rein to his experimental instincts. The mood throughout is so sweet, the harmonies so reassuringly consonant, that I occasionally long for a little more discord. In paring back, it sometimes feels like Snaith is holding back; I miss the occasional overload of Swim, where Caribou’s newfound discipline gave way to his psychedelic second nature, and it felt as if the tape couldn’t take all the input that he was throwing at it.
Suddenly, in contrast, is almost all business—with a few salient exceptions, the most moving of which comes right at the end. Album closer “Cloud Song” begins as a meditation for voice and unaccompanied synth, but it builds and builds—layers accruing, waveforms morphing, harmonies slipping out of tune. “I’m broken, so tired of crying/Just hold me close to you,” he sings, as a flood of frequencies gushes forth from his electronics. In this brief moment, all the control of the previous 40-odd minutes is washed away. Witnessing Snaith in full command of his talents is gratifying. But this moment where it all threatens to fall apart is what makes his music feel not just relatable but consequential.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Merge | March 2, 2020 | 8.2 | a55372d0-588a-4ae9-beb5-bdda7c0a0fcc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Offering an unparalleled collection of fresh talent, the rise of Ron Morelli's Long Island Electrical System is one of the most significant and encouraging developments in American underground electronic music in years. This sprawling 2xCD label compilation is a bewitching collection of underground dance, experimental, and analog ephemera. | Offering an unparalleled collection of fresh talent, the rise of Ron Morelli's Long Island Electrical System is one of the most significant and encouraging developments in American underground electronic music in years. This sprawling 2xCD label compilation is a bewitching collection of underground dance, experimental, and analog ephemera. | Various Artists: L.I.E.S. Presents: American Noise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17507-lies-presents-american-noise/ | L.I.E.S. Presents: American Noise | Implicit in the rise of the local, the handcrafted, and the artisanal is a sense of modesty, that things that were sourced and made locally are to be enjoyed locally. It's in this sense that American Noise, a compilation from the bubbling Long Island Electrical System (L.I.E.S.) label, feels like a shot across the bow. An obelisk of a title attached to a bewitching collection of underground dance, experimental, and analog ephemera, American Noise trumpets the breadth and creativity that Ron Morelli's upstart label has championed during its first two-plus years.
You could be forgiven for not having heard of L.I.E.S.. The New York imprint operates quickly and quietly, releasing singles and EPs on limited-run vinyl (but not always), replete with mysterious stamped labels, some of which are already quite rare. L.I.E.S.'s reach and reputation has outstripped its modest existence, and collector-allure is only a partial explanation. Influential European stores like Berlin's Hardwax have championed the label, and there is a fervor surrounding Morelli & co. that, frankly, few if any American labels have generated in the last decade. To speak plainly, the rise of L.I.E.S. is one of the most significant and encouraging developments in American underground electronic music in years.
Is it deserving of the attention? American Noise will not bash your skull in with newness. The styles it spans will be familiar to followers of electronic and experimental music. The music is held together by a sense of craft and a pervasive menace that ties the music to conjurers like Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never. What makes L.I.E.S. special, what makes it more than simply another boutique underground label, is its frenetic pace and Morelli's uncanny ability to unearth heretofore unknown producers to place alongside slightly more established names like Maxmillion Dunbar and Xosar (Dutch workaholic Legowelt is the label's weightiest name).
It is an unparalleled collection of fresh talent: for the last two years it's basically been possible to blindly dig the L.I.E.S. crate and unearth something really good. That L.I.E.S. has managed this without tapping into any zeitgeist sound or scene-- the label's offerings span house, electro, kraut, and noise among others-- is all the more impressive. These contributions range from the cauldron-black psychedelia of Jahiliyya Fields to the tipsy motorik of Torn Hawk. House classicist Delroy Edwards and Bookworms-- whose shimmering odyssey "African Rhythms" goes toe-to-toe with Daphni's remix of "Ne Noya" for the best use of an African vocal sample in a loaded year-- are just two artists who released their first-ever works for L.I.E.S. in 2012. Then there's "Journey I." by Unknown Artist, 12 unspooling minutes of pickled funk, possibly the finest example of the intersection between noise and dance music on the label. If there's been little speculation about who the hell these artists are, it's because it's a lot more fun to imagine Morellli having access to some heretofore unknown mine of talent.
It's instructive that one of L.I.E.S.'s best tracks is attributed to an anonymous producer. Central to the popularity of L.I.E.S. is its mythology. There's a secret clubhouse feel to the label, a sense that this is music made and presented the right way, or the old way, or at least in a way that is shielded from the constant deluge of novelty and bullshit that normally accompanies discovering a hot scene. That the music has been so uniformly good-- and that the label has cultivated this feeling naturally-- means this is a fun bonus and not some vague fetishistic moralizing.
Ultimately the only disappointing thing about American Noise is that it can't benefit from the evocative, imagination-stoking intrigue of the label's physical products. It's a 2xCD label compilation, not a message in a bottle. Mixing classics with some fresh productions, though, does give the label's output a sense of uniformity, and helps define "American noise" as basically anything that can result from someone sitting down with a synthesizer and a drum machine. It's a big, vague idea that is harnessed by L.I.E.S.'s comparative smallness. So if American Noise pulls the curtain back some, it's only because this music is simply too good not to share, which is presumably the impetus for the label existing in the first place. Come for the unearthed classics, stay for the next transmission from Morelli's mystic jam generator. | 2013-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Piccadilly | January 8, 2013 | 8.1 | a555fb65-c795-4da8-bc22-d0dd1f9873f1 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and longtime indie-rock journeyman John Petkovic team up on a graceless, unsubtle pastiche of rock’n’roll indulgence. | The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney and longtime indie-rock journeyman John Petkovic team up on a graceless, unsubtle pastiche of rock’n’roll indulgence. | Sad Planets: Akron, Ohio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sad-planets-akron-ohio/ | Akron, Ohio | Over the past decade, Patrick Carney has cemented himself as the rhythmic core of the Black Keys. While Dan Auerbach ambled outward with woolly, blues-tinged guitar riffs, Carney’s muscular pummeling rooted the songs with leaden precision. In the band’s current spell of quiet, he’s teamed up with John Petkovic, an alumnus of Guided by Voices, Death of Samantha, Sweet Apple, and Cobra Verde, to form a new project called Sad Planets. The two bonded over their love for music and mutual hometown of Akron, Ohio; together, one might suppose, the two could fashion a record that capably paired their grittier bona fides with the polish of seasoned professionals. But the pair’s debut LP, Akron, Ohio, is a gummy, overwrought mess, an insult to both its namesake and, quite possibly, rock music as a whole.
It’s hard to understand how two musicians whose résumés bear some degree of cool-rock-dude credibility managed to make such a clunker; then again, the project reeks of runaway self-indulgence. The songs on Akron, Ohio are garish, graceless, and unsubtle; at the same time, the record has an uncanny-valley-like blandness, as if an exceptionally horny bot processed a thousand hours of stuff labeled “rock music” and spat out its own attempt. Neither of the men are strong vocalists, not even in the Oberst-esque category of “bad singer but it works.” Petkovic sounds pained as he sings—not emotionally, but as if he were in serious physical distress during the recording process. When he and Carney duet on “Not of This World” and “Yesterday Girls,” it feels like a musical version of two dudes cornering a guest on their amateur podcast.
Petkovic and Carney seem desperate to transmit the idea that Akron, Ohio is a Real Rock’n’Roll Record, Damn It, yet the result is an unrepentant caricature of the genre. Their electric-guitar flexes are flaccid; occasional synths get the gleeful treatment of a kid’s new toy. The masturbatory two-minute denouement of “Bad Cells” features lackluster guitar solos that seem to exist with the sole purpose of taking up space. “Want You to Want You” follows the blueprint of an upbeat adult-alternative hit, breaking up punchy verses full of nothingness with a breezy chorus stuffed with elongated vowels, and topping it off with a gear-shift key change at the end. Though most of the songs hover around the radio-friendly sweet spot of three and a half minutes, they all seem to last an eternity. (The lines that open the album’s first track—“I just landed here/But it feels like a year ago”—make for an unfortunate self-own.) Even featured guest J Mascis, Petkovic’s Sweet Apple bandmate, does little to save the opening snoozefest.
More importantly, speaking as a woman who dates men and swoons at plenty of corny love songs: The unsexy enticements that Petkovic and Carney offer make me want to curl up and die. The songs’ primary themes revolve around wanting, nay, needing to be near a partner; to find a deeper connection with said lover despite struggling to see or hear them clearly. But their cringing attempts at come-ons make it clear that it’s the singers, and not the objects of their affection, who are to blame for their woes. In “(Falling into the Arms of A) Refugee,” Petkovic compares his infidelity to—can you guess? In “Heaven’s Devils,” there’s a line about eyes “wrapped in tender skin” that would be much better if it were about the Pale Man creature from Pan’s Labyrinth. And what woman doesn’t love being called a “helpless baby,” as on closer “Disappearing”? Surely these two adult men have interacted with real human women before, right? They make it disturbingly hard to tell.
With Akron, Ohio, Carney and Petkovic seem to be doing their best to gorge themselves on schlock-rock’s indulgences. The band’s press materials indicate that Akron, Ohio exists as a result of two good buddies hanging around the studio and seeing where the spirit takes them. But to insist that the rest of the world needs to hear their wankery is an assertion of rampant egomania, a condition they share with plenty of out-of-touch male musicians. Even in their failures, their efforts are not outstanding. Sad Planets are the latest curdled dregs of a trope that spoiled long ago. | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tee Pee | April 22, 2019 | 3 | a55bf89d-53e7-4423-b9fd-2c4d10fd0886 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The Iowa black metal quartet’s debut explores the mystery of the deep seas with shapeshifting, dynamic songwriting. | The Iowa black metal quartet’s debut explores the mystery of the deep seas with shapeshifting, dynamic songwriting. | Dryad: The Abyssal Plain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dryad-the-abyssal-plain/ | The Abyssal Plain | The opening guitar riffs of “Counterillumination” slither like a predator stalking prey. Named after the camouflaging ability of animals in the mesopelagic zone—the ocean layer where light becomes increasingly scarce—the track sets a foreboding tone for Iowa quartet Dryad to explore darker territory. Since debuting in 2017, the band has made dynamic black metal that screeches and pummels, but their debut album aims to terrify. The labyrinthine music of The Abyssal Plain is inspired by the animals and geological features in the 36,000 feet of water beneath us, and the band matches the mystery of its subject matter with unwieldy songs that teem with life.
Drummer Oliver Weilein kickstarts “Bottomfeeder” with four hits of the snare. An onslaught of rapturous noise rushes in, led by the searing guitars and dual vocals of Claire “Claw” Nuñez and Grimmtooth: The former’s screams are more traditionally black metal, piercing like shrapnel; the latter delivers deep, brooding growls. The band rounds out the clamor with a chiming ride cymbal, sustained guitar chords, and a quiet synth organ. Midsong, Nuñez lets out a resounding scream that pans across the left and right channels, as if rupturing the space for blast beats to enter, but soon everything fades into serene ambience. With each opportunity to catch your breath, the eventual body blows land harder.
Since their early EPs, Dryad have grown more adept at guiding their songs in unexpected directions. On “Brine Pool Aberration,” lumbering death metal riffs morph into black metal tremolos. Dryad’s seamless tempo and stylistic changes make traditional black metal characteristics feel elastic. “Pompeii Worm” begins with the record’s prettiest passage: a gentle unfolding of detuned guitars and choral synths. The band gradually revs up the tempo, adding tumbling drums and barked vocals, and then a flashy guitar solo as a well-earned moment of grandeur.
While Dryad have always hinted at their lofty ambition, the full-length format gives the band space to experiment. “Raptures of the Deep” is a dungeon synth piece with eerie microtonalities, while the cryptic interlude “Hadal”—named for the deepest ocean zone—glows with the spooky charm of classic John Carpenter soundtracks. “Chimera Monstrosa” is the band’s first lo-fi fantasy instrumental, with glistening keys that flit above a faint drumbeat and diaphanous guitar strums. A chintzy piano paints these waters as both mystical and arcane, an idea cemented with “A Nagging Thought,” where carnivalesque synths and a haunted, pitch-shifted sample close the album in an extended gothic reverie.
The music on The Abyssal Plain speaks to both the allure and fear inherent to the uncharted ocean. These twinned ideas befit a band with two vocalists, and their interplay is at its best when Nuñez and Grimmtooth strike as a team. On “Trenches,” the record’s most overwhelming track, they deliver repeated declarations against helplessness: “Although I’m alone/Inside my mind/The light in my head/It will serve as my guide.” Even if you tune out their words and surrender to the snarling sound, the overdriven guitars and propulsive beat telegraph their fiery determination. In creating these treacherous worlds, Dryad have modeled a way to survive our own. | 2023-02-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-06T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | February 6, 2023 | 7.4 | a55f4056-c3c4-4e5a-8eb2-e2afb2d1e389 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Icelandic group celebrates the 20th anniversary of its third album with an expanded edition. Sung entirely in the made-up language of Hopelandic, it sounds as sumptuous and suggestive as ever. | The Icelandic group celebrates the 20th anniversary of its third album with an expanded edition. Sung entirely in the made-up language of Hopelandic, it sounds as sumptuous and suggestive as ever. | Sigur Rós: ( ) 20th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sigur-ros-untitled/ | ( ) 20th Anniversary Edition | It’s not unusual for vocalists to make up gibberish to fit to a melody or a rhythm while workshopping a song. Sigur Rós’ masterstroke was to stop there and, more crucially, to dub their jabberwocky Vonlenska, or “Hopelandic” in English, putting a world-building veneer on what was essentially Icelandic babytalk. This isn’t, like, Dothraki—Hopelandic has no vocabulary, orthography, or grammar; it uses intuitive phonemes for liberating expression, not limiting description. But with shrewdness cloaked in naivete, Sigur Rós concretized the metaphor that they were writing their own musical language. And in the metaphorical sense, as the orchestral post-rock band that defines the rest, they did.
Sigur Rós dabbled in Hopelandic on Ágætis byrjun, their breakout second album. A hit in Iceland in 1999, it spread globally over the next two years via re-release on FatCat, a memorable sync in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, and the shiny new Web 2.0. It was greeted as both the last great record of the 20th century and the first vital one of the 21st, a prophecy borne out by its long diffusion, both directly and as a stylistic influence, through the new millennium’s increasingly edgeless landscape of music, entertainment, and advertising. It seems that there was no occasion that could not be elevated by luxurious folds and piles of bowed electric guitar; simple, sonorous orchestration; and Jónsi’s warm, teary, falsetto-prone tenor.
When they turned to Hopelandic in full on their expectation-laden third record, in 2002, it was but one tone in a deceptive ring of repudiation, as if they were giving their moment the cold shoulder. Instead of going to a fancy studio, they recorded in an empty swimming pool, and while the album came out sounding as upholstered and overwhelming as its predecessor, it was also sparser and sterner, and it lingered in more complicated moods. It had no traditional singles. The songs—all either long or very long—were untitled. Whereas the cover of Ágætis byrjun had been full of presence—a baby alien angel in utero, sure, but still—( ) portrayed an absence, a pair of empty, cut-out parentheses that gave it an ad hoc name.
Like many things about Sigur Rós, the Hopelandic conceit should be desperately corny. But it conveys unaccountable levels of banked power, stupefying beauty, and personal meaning for the listener, not despite but because it is untethered from authorial meaning. It generously furnishes palatial sets where we can play out our own stories, fill in our own poetry, doodle in the blank CD booklet, and post our own lyrics on the band’s website. There’s even a glimmer of something that Sigur Rós are not known for: humor, in that the language’s nonsensical nature made no difference to their new legions of English-speaking fans. But none of these gestures were about diffidence. On the contrary, it was evidence of the band’s intense belief in itself—and in listeners, who, entrusted with a blank, beautiful thought to use as they wished, rose to the effortless challenge in droves.
Last week, for its 20th anniversary, ( ) was reissued in a remastered edition with bonus tracks. It comes amid a spate of renewed activity for the band, which long lay dormant until it returned with a Nordic opera in 2020, just a raven’s feather too early for the Edda-based wave of Sandmen and Northmen and Odin-knows-what-all men to come. Reunited with prodigal keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson—who joined for Ágætis byrjun, helped professionalize the self-taught band, and left in 2012—they’re on a world tour, with a new album slated for next year.
Underlining its stature in Sigur Rós’ catalog, ( ) features heavily in their current setlist, and they say that its pounding, cresting, 12-minute finale, “Untitled #8,” has closed all of their shows since it was written. It was their first record with drummer Orri Páll Dýrason, who stayed in the band until he was accused of sexual assault in 2018. It also features Sveinsson; Georg Holm’s bass, keyboard, and glockenspiel; the string quartet Amiina; and Jónsi at the center, his voice a lonely candle leading through a dim, reverberating cathedral, his guitar the huge and dancing shadows it throws upon the walls.
The record was shaped in two halves, first light, then dark, but even the light is draped with heavy penumbra, to the pleasure of those who find Sigur Rós’ fearlessness of treacle both indispensable and sometimes cloying. More an awakening than a mere beginning, “Untitled #1” is a crepuscular piano hymn bathed in soft organ tones and yowling harmonies from which any trace of sourness has been charcoal-filtered out. The second track is mottled and eerie, and only with the third—which, with about 35 million Spotify streams, is the most popular song on the album by far—do we finally hear an undiluted example of the childlike, Yuletide splendor that made them famous.
Often, ( ) hints at a darker, more difficult Sigur Rós while remaining impeccably easy to listen to—especially the fifth track, which is saturnine and arcane, with Jónsi’s consoling candle now like an oily torch revealing inscriptions on obsidian. This side of the band initiates the second half of the record, where most of the bonus material comes from. In addition to the three tracks of the numinous non-album piece “Untitled #9,” which have long been available online, there are demo versions of the sixth, seventh, and eighth songs. (A forthcoming physical edition will include further bonuses, for better or worse.) These kinds of extras are obligatory for the artist and easily passed over by the listener, which is recommended here, because they’re kind of detrimental.
There is something intensely beside the point, even perverse, about listening to Sigur Rós demos. Their music’s magic lies in how it comes to us so polished and perfect, after all those murky, unruly sounds have been soothed and smoothed by producers and engineers until each one seems impossibly close and larger than life. Yet here’s “Untitled #6” without its crucial scratchy guitar tone, and “#7” with shakier time and an earlier ascent. None of it seems very revealing or flattering, and hearing Jónsi’s voice without its finery is markedly illusion-breaking. Who wants to see Santa’s belly in a plain undershirt? But that deliberate concession to the market is the only way in which ( ) has lost any of its cloudy, mirrored shine. The thing about made-up language is that it always keeps finding new things to say. | 2022-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Krunk | November 5, 2022 | 8.2 | a56145e3-3c9f-4b93-8452-22d14c5293b8 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Bringing roller-disco synth-pop out of mothballs gives the UK duo their most entertaining album since electro-glam juggernaut Supernature. | Bringing roller-disco synth-pop out of mothballs gives the UK duo their most entertaining album since electro-glam juggernaut Supernature. | Goldfrapp: Head First | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14063-head-first/ | Head First | Yup, another wardrobe change. Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have always valued style along with song, and on most of the fifth Goldfrapp album, Head First, pink spandex turns out to be a great look. Bringing 1980s roller-disco synth-pop motifs out of mothballs has given the UK duo their most immediately entertaining album since 2005 electro-glam juggernaut Supernature. The only problem: They fail to give each song a face as memorable as the overall album's Jane Fonda workout-video get-up.
Good thing Goldfrapp do spectacle like few else. No less a glamor lover than Adam Lambert was quoted recently saying he had wanted to work with the group for his debut, but couldn't because they were already busy with Christina Aguilera-- not exactly pop's dowdiest persona herself. Whether in the clown robes and animal masks of Goldfrapp's expert live shows, or the sharp-edged sound design of an eclectic discography, they treat pop as a form of not just communication, but presentation.
With sunny Van Halen synth tones, Xanadu-era Olivia Newton John optimism, and galloping Giorgio Moroder basslines, Head First marks as dramatic a shift from 2008's disappointing Seventh Tree as that album's moodily atmospheric folk did from the fembot stomp of Goldfrapp's prior two LPs (or those from the John Barry-soaked trip-hop of 2000 debut Felt Mountain). Alison's voice is still commanding, gaining a bit of Stevie Nicks huskiness while staying versatile enough to rise to a glassy peal or drop to a suggestive purr. So, too, are Gregory's electronics, from the fist-pumping opening trio of songs to the krautrock seduction and wordless vocal ambience on the second half.
First single "Rocket" shows Head First at its best, but it's also a reminder of where some of the other songs fall short. When Alison exhorts, "I've got a rocket/ You're going on it," the potential double entendre is obvious. This isn't a come-on, though; with suspicions about "how she got in the door uninvited" and a decisive "you're never coming back," it's a lot closer to a kiss-off. (Although not available on the album, Richard X's powerhouse remix is even better.)
Still, beyond "Rocket", few of the songs here are melodically or lyrically catchy enough to attain anything like the the popularity of the 80s songs they'll remind you of-- or of Goldfrapp's past highlights. An exception is "Hunt", which approaches the bedside intimacy of Beach House or White Hinterland through gorgeously breathy space disco. Another is "Shiny and Warm", full of Suicide-seeking synths and icy sensuality. Alas, a nine-song album doesn't leave much room for error. Goldfrapp remain excellent in the studio-- any future work they do for Aguilera or anyone else (they also recently scored the soundtrack for John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy) deserves watching-- and there's plenty of highly stylized fun to be had here. Just don't expect to remember many of the details when it's all over. You might be the best-dressed person at 80s dance night, but if there's nothing particularly noteworthy about you otherwise, nobody's going to recognize you out of costume. | 2010-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | March 25, 2010 | 6.6 | a56c37e8-df4d-4efa-a78d-3d55cbcad455 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is Madonna's link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop, including Timbaland, the Neptunes, Kanye West, and Justin Timberlake. | Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is Madonna's link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop, including Timbaland, the Neptunes, Kanye West, and Justin Timberlake. | Madonna: Hard Candy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11453-hard-candy/ | Hard Candy | Madonna is coming home: Having spent a decade working with producers drawn from European club culture, Hard Candy is her link-up with the American men who've come to define global pop. Five songs with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, six with Pharrell Williams, one with Williams and Kanye West. The best, this line-up announces, need to work with the best. But lead single "4 Minutes" doesn't sound like the best working with the best: It sounds complacent, like a pop supergroup high-fivin' each other.
The "4 Minutes" marching band rhythm-riff may be Timbaland's strongest idea on the album but the performers seem happy to let it do the work. He keeps shouting for "Mad-DON-nuh!" but she's a guest on her own track, singing from the margins of what might as well be a Timberlake outtake. Timbaland's productions are the weaker links on this frustratingly ordinary album. Partly he's a victim of his own ubiquity-- we know his tricks by now: the interlocking rhythmic hooks on his upbeat tracks, the bubbling claustrophobia on his ballads. "Devil Wouldn't Recognise You" is the third time-- at least-- that he's written "Cry Me a River", right down to the moody rainstorm breakdown and thunderclaps. But his less-typical productions don't all work well here either: "Dance 2Night" aspires to 80s funk slickness but lumbers where it should cruise.
The 1980s, specifically Madonna's 80s, haunt Hard Candy: It's been touted as a return to the spirit and sound of her earliest work, but her voice and delivery have changed too much for the comparison to hold. Her vocal training and singing lessons in the 90s broadened her range but she's never sounded as hungry since, and her phrasing on Hard Candy is frequently dreadful-- words so evenly spaced and emphasized that it sounds like she's reading aloud to a class. Or teaching you the choruses: You won't get "Miles Away" out of your head in a hurry but that's less to do with its quality than the didactic way she delivers it. Her biggest misstep is "Heartbeat"-- lyrics deliberately reminiscent of "Into the Groove" but sung so detached you might as well be at a Madonna Studies lecture.
The record's better tracks are, unsurprisingly, those where Madonna sounds more engaged. Second single "Give It to Me" has her delivering an imperious lesson on success and survival-- "Show me a record and I'll break it/ I can go on and on"-- over Hard Candy's most urgent tune, hard-pushing electro-ska whose keyboards break up trying to keep pace. Closing track "Voices" is gorgeously gothic orchestral synth-pop that she seems to relax and revel in. Centerpiece "She's Not Me" is a stirring piece of turf-defense, prowling between Chic-era disco and modern pop-house as Madonna slaps down a rival. It's taut and cold, easily Hard Candy's most emotionally compelling moment.
"She's Not Me" smoothly lays out Madonna's credentials: Twenty-five years at the top of the game. She doesn't reinvent pop; she defines it. Her strengths have always been her authority, and her smart sense of who to work with and when. So even if it's a summary of where pop's at rather than where it's going, Hard Candy should still be excellent. After all, if you're not going to do your best work for Madonna, who are you going to do it for? But after listening, the question's still open-- nobody involved in Hard Candy is anywhere near their creative peak. | 2008-04-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. | April 28, 2008 | 5.3 | a56d79a1-ab17-4271-a2aa-35021f4456cd | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
Nineties heads know Chicago’s Jamie Hodge for his leftfield productions on Plus 8 and Source. Sifting through his old DATs, Demdike Stare came up with a grip of vintage ambient-techno abstractions. | Nineties heads know Chicago’s Jamie Hodge for his leftfield productions on Plus 8 and Source. Sifting through his old DATs, Demdike Stare came up with a grip of vintage ambient-techno abstractions. | Born Under a Rhyming Planet: Diagonals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/born-under-a-rhyming-planet-diagonals/ | Diagonals | Despite the name, Demdike Stare’s DDS is no vanity label: Since 2009, they’ve used the platform to release not only their own albums and mixtapes but also the work of other artists with singular sensibilities. There have been avant-dancehall burners from Equiknoxx, dispatches from the outer reaches of Mica Levi’s soundworlds, two typically oddball sides of Jim O’Rourke. The label’s greatest feat so far might be facilitating the return of Shinichi Atobe’s ineffable techno, but this summer DDS has also guided the re-entry of Chicago’s Born Under a Rhyming Planet. Diagonals is somehow a belated debut album, greatest hits compilation, and mixtape of re-edits, all at once. Whatever it is, it’s a welcome return.
Chicago’s Jamie Hodge spent his teenage years fiddling with electronics, hanging out with Gastr del Sol as they made early recordings, and raving ’til dawn. The story goes that he made his mom take a long detour through Windsor, Ontario, while touring prospective colleges back East; his mom waited in the car while he knocked on Richie Hawtin’s front door, played him some demos, and secured a release on Hawtin’s influential Plus 8 label. That EP, 1993’s Digital:Hell/Analog:Heaven, is among the label’s finest. It’s also the only thing Hodge released under that name for nearly three decades. Meanwhile, he made himself a fixture of Chicago’s post-rock/experimental jazz scene. Around the turn of the millennium, as members of the groups Conjoint and Studio Pankow, he and David Moufang, aka Move D, put out a few fine records that bleep and swing.
For Diagonals, DDS dug into Hodge’s hard drives and came up with 14 tracks. Some, they apparently re-edited; others appear untouched. Almost to a one, they stun. And if they mostly sound like their respective moments—the mid-’90s fragmentation of Detroit techno into electronica, and subsequent early-2000s defragmentation into minimal techno—they also remind listeners of Hodge’s prodigious delicacy and sense of balance. Despite bearing the hallmarks of the era, they still sound timeless.
The brief ambient “Intro” readies ears before drifting into a pair of the album’s longer tracks. “Siemansdamm” stretches out unsteadily, a little tentatively. But there’s a clarity to the melody, and the bass boom always arrives on time, if rarely when one expects. “Handley” gurgles with analog bubbles that burst into refreshing sprays of rims and claps before sinking deep into the mix to form channels. And “Traffic” puts Detroit techno up on blocks, with a grating ping that spins its wheels while the undercarriage collapses. Each sounds like a lost classic that could have appeared on Warp or Clear or Mille Plateaux back in the day—because, of course, they are.
Other producers might have stretched miniatures like “Intermission” and “Skyway” into epics, but Hodge keeps them at 90 seconds or so. Sketches have their own dignity. If Bootsy Collins turned bass strings into rubber bands, “Trampoline” turns the frequencies into a rubber mat that offers a bounce less dizzying than its drop. Despite its wildly specific title, the ambient clanging of “Hot Nachos with Cheese, Cappuccino, Calling Cards” is vague, perhaps, but fully realized. “Menthol” and the lengthier “Fete” blow through with a particularly Windy City kind of noir, breezy like mid-period Tortoise but swapping out his famous neighbors’ candlelit vibe for flickering neon.
Longer tracks don’t overstay. “Hyperreal” constructs a rickety glitch to fence in pools of eerie sighs, thick pads of synth, and some theremin-esque incantations. This has been a sound of the future for decades now; it may still be. With an organ cutting through buzzing, hissing billows like a hand through a cloud of summer mosquitos and gnats, “Avenue” slaps. The true swoon of the set, though, is “Interstate,” a long run of cresting frequencies approaching the top and bottom of human hearing. The tones slowly doppler and pan; about halfway through, they splinter and crunch. The simple drama really takes you somewhere. It could be the fertile ground between Chicago and Detroit, or Sheffield and Cologne. But Diagonals suggests that Hodge, like the best of his DDS cohort, might be in an orbit all his own. | 2022-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | DDS | September 8, 2022 | 7.5 | a56f22ea-7579-4c68-ba02-6b3ea2a5b5a8 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Gleaming with ambient intent, melodic classicism, and clean lines, this 1996 classic bridges the gap between Detroit techno and Tangerine Dream. | Gleaming with ambient intent, melodic classicism, and clean lines, this 1996 classic bridges the gap between Detroit techno and Tangerine Dream. | The Detroit Escalator Company: Soundtrack [313] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-detroit-escalator-company-soundtrack-313/ | Soundtrack [313] | The elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun, the poetic swirl of the Messier 94 spiral galaxy, and the elegant curve of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird—these are the images beamed into the megacosm by Soundtrack [313], the 1996 debut album from Neil Ollivierra, aka the Detroit Escalator Company. It is a record that gleams with ambient intent, melodic classicism, and clean lines, bridging the gap between Detroit techno and vintage Tangerine Dream.
As the name suggests, Ollivierra hails from the Motor City, where he once worked at the center of the city’s techno scene as the promoter of legendary club the Music Institute. But Soundtrack [313], now re-released with bonus tracks, is far from the frantic propulsion of an underground after-hours party. Instead, Ollivierra specializes in a pearly clean and galaxy-deep blend of ambience that brings to mind fellow Detroit producer Carl Craig’s beatless excursions, the far-out electronic strands of 1970s kosmische, or the more relaxed side of early IDM acts like B12—all synth sweeps, chiming melodies, and faintly hissing percussion.
At its best, there is something perfectly poised about Soundtrack [313], an innate balance that suggests all is well in the universe. There is not a great deal to songs like “Abstract Forward Movement” or “Force,” both of which appear towards the start of this rather front-loaded album, but what there is is basically perfect. “Force,” in particular, is astonishingly complete in its minimalistic sound: Over nine minutes, the song uses little more than echoing hi-hats, astral synth swoops, and a couple of simple chord patterns whose hesitant evolution drives the song’s unhurried and rather melancholic progression. But this handful of sounds seems to expand to fill both time and space, as satisfyingly absolute as a Mark Rothko painting in good light.
“Abstract Forward Movement,” meanwhile, has a whiff of Manuel Göttsching’s minimalist electronic classic E2-E4 to it, as a gorgeously wistful central riff tumbles around, minimally supported by the faintest hint of percussion. At times like these, the half-speed mastering process that has been used for the Soundtrack [313] reissue sounds less like an audiophile indulgence and more like the restoration work that sharpens the faded colors of a Renaissance masterpiece. (The reissue’s six rather anonymous bonus tracks, where the constituent parts add up to less than their sum total, are considerably less essential.)
There is something very powerful about the confident, profound simplicity of the music on Soundtrack [313], like being confronted by the mysterious structural perfection of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The modest melodic cycle in “DELTA” has an emotional pull that transcends its limited musical scope, while the two harmonic ideas that coalesce on “Gratiot” have the structural solidity of the double helix in a DNA molecule. That this song ends in a kind of collapsed breakbeat shows the links between Soundtrack [313] and the work of early IDM pioneers like the Black Dog and Aphex Twin, who were finding inspiration in the UK’s hardcore raves, while the field recordings of street chatter that join the songs on the second half of the LP give Soundtrack [313] a fleeting metropolitan warmth among the deep-space vibes.
Neil Ollivierra’s roots in the urban steel of Detroit techno and melodic proclivities make Soundtrack [313] feel atypical in 2022, when ambient music is dominated by drones, fuzz, and fear on one side and hippy-dippy New Age wellness on another. But there is a sense of brilliant infinitude to Soundtrack [313] that makes it impervious to the demands of time. Soundtrack [313] is removed, rather than outdated, a musical guiding light beamed in from a more benevolent place. | 2022-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Musique Pour La Danse | February 17, 2022 | 7.8 | a573ed70-7189-4cb4-a71f-2cb1290f5e48 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Argentinian electro-acoustic composer has been exploring hidden worlds of sound since the 1960s; these three pieces, all from the 21st century, showcase her playful side. | The Argentinian electro-acoustic composer has been exploring hidden worlds of sound since the 1960s; these three pieces, all from the 21st century, showcase her playful side. | Beatriz Ferreyra: Huellas Entreveradas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beatriz-ferreyra-huellas-entreveradas/ | Huellas Entreveradas | For years, perhaps only the most attentive of musique-concrète listeners might have come across Beatriz Ferreyra’s name tucked away on obscure compilations. The Argentinian composer worked closely with Groupe de Recherches Musicales founder Pierre Schaeffer and served as technician on some of his 1960s compositions, but it was only when the illuminating Recollection GRM label reissued selections from her archive in 2015 that Ferreyra’s sound world came into crystalline focus for a wider audience. The rediscovery placed her alongside other belatedly appreciated female electronic composers, including Delia Derbyshire, Laurie Spiegel, and fellow GRM alum Eliane Radigue, whose pioneering work was just as invigorating as that of their more famous male colleagues. Ferreyra, now 82, has maintained her singular vision well into the 21st century.
Huellas Entreveradas collects three distinct sound works created between 2001 and 2018. Much like her mentor Schaeffer, Ferreyra is an exhaustive explorer of the smallest of sounds, continually unveiling new worlds tucked inside the briefest of moments. In the previously unreleased 1978 piece “Echos,” recently issued by the Room40 label, she utilized her late niece’s breaths and murmurs to create a profound meditation on our mortality. Here, Ferreyra’s detailed approach takes a playful—but no less intimate—turn. Across the 11 minutes of “La Baballe du Chien-Chien à la Mé-Mère,” Ferreyra turns canine growls, the patter of slippered feet, and rubber-ball bounces into a surreal composition, zooming in like an electron microscope to reveal alien topographies in the most quotidian of noises. The title translates loosely as “Mommy’s Little Doggy’s Little Ball,” suggesting the loving gibberish that people use to communicate with their beloved pets. It’s a bewildering exercise in abstraction that’s also endearing and deeply strange, like watching someone hold a long conversation with their pet, then feed it a treat out of their own mouth.
The longest and the most recent piece here, “Huellas Entreveradas” (“Intertwined Footsteps”) takes cues from landmark works of her venerated former colleagues, like Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang Der Jünglinge” and Iannis Xenakis’ “Diamorphoses.” It’s crafted from voice, flute, and percussion, though she strips them of their timbral familiarity and makes them into raw, startling sound. Ferreyra juxtaposes an expert sense of craft with childlike wonder throughout; the high frequencies of the flute flutter and whip about the stereo field like sparrows, only to plunge the listener into cavernous, rumbling bass tones. For nearly 15 minutes, Ferreyra guides us from the upper stratosphere down into subterranean depths and back up again, a journey that she describes in the liner notes as being like a “hike through an unknown landscape.” At the 11-minute mark, when the sounds of traffic emerge, it gives the sensation of a long-traveled nature trail suddenly opening up onto a paved road.
A four-minute homage to her GRM colleague Bernard Parmegiani closes out the album. Playfully mistranslating the title of his 1977 opus Dedans Dehors (Inside Outside) as “Deux Dents Dehors” (roughly translating as “two buck teeth”), it’s about as close as high-minded electroacoustic music gets to the dizziness of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Snippets of a bright, chirpy voice and marimba (cue an animated galloping horse) get transubstantiated into more ethereal forms before toggling back toward the giddy and antic. Whether working on a scale immersive or succinct, Ferreyra’s philosophy utilizes her oblique source material to deliver a tangible emotional payoff. | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Persistence of Sound | May 8, 2020 | 7.3 | a5786004-aeb1-42f0-8ad0-d446505f31fa | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Gucci Mane’s latest protégé, a smooth-talking rapper with a nonchalant charm, steps into the spotlight after a streak of well-liked mixtapes. | Gucci Mane’s latest protégé, a smooth-talking rapper with a nonchalant charm, steps into the spotlight after a streak of well-liked mixtapes. | Hoodrich Pablo Juan: Rich Hood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hoodrich-pablo-juan-rich-hood/ | Rich Hood | If you were making a random stage name generator for Atlanta rappers, Hoodrich Pablo Juan, with its suggestions of street bona fides and kingpins past, might sound like the type of output you design backwards from. But Hoodrich Pablo is a real guy—late 20s, born in New Jersey and raised in Atlanta—and he’s not posturing at all. Instead, he’s one of the best real-time mirrors into his city’s rap scene, a raspy-baritoned boaster who raps simply, often in triplets, and with a light-footed nonchalance. After a year of bubbling hits (“We Dont Luv Em”) and mixtapes that put him in a steadily growing spotlight, Hoodrich Pablo is poised to go even bigger in 2018.
Rich Hood is the second project he’s released since signing to Gucci Mane’s 1017 Eskimo label, and comes just a few months after last fall’s well-designed Designer Drugz 3, whose title and release strategy implied a fluid transition from mixtapes to albums. Hoodrich Pablo is not unlike his label boss in blurring the lines between the two formats, for better and worse. They both favor a fast-moving, stream-of-conscious release style that may ultimately make that a moot distinction. So while Rich Hood sounds a lot like the mixtape series its artist is trying to graduate from, that’s hardly a flaw.
The beats here are empty and rattling, to varied effect. On “Flawless,” with its atmospheric synths and booming bells, that sound feels sinister; on “Faygo Creame,” it comes across playful, rambunctious, almost bouncy. Pablo is an emcee who can engage a conversation endlessly without running out of things to say—or at least, one who doesn’t mind saying the same thing twice. As a result, many of his songs seem to bleed together. But then he’ll rap something unexpectedly goofy that sticks, like a threat to “put a hole in your head like a dolphin” (a memorable image, even if Juicy J said it first) or hit you with a quippy, extravagant non-sequitur, like “Drop off a bale in a pickup truck/Givenchy’s are very particular.” (More often he’ll share a clunker and make it sound slick: “Got powers like I’m Austin,” he shrugs on “Flawless.”) He’s obsessed with calling his weed “gelato” and often raps like he’s talking out a thought out for the first time. “The fuck you lookin’ at? Oh, that’s a fan,” he muses on “Walk Thru.”
Unfortunately, some of the songs are so poorly mixed as to render them missed opportunities. “Ball Like a Bitch” sounds like a shell of a beat, more rough draft than intentionally minimalist. “Homisquad,” by comparison, sounds like a fully-fledged hit played through a phone line. Elsewhere, songs like “Menace to Society” end with long stretches of overlooked silence. (Tellingly, the SoundCloud version doesn’t suffer this fate—it’s only on the big streaming sites, suggesting a SoundCloud mixtape sloppily ported over.) Still, there are enough polished tracks like the disquieting “1017 Ways,” which features a slurred but nimble verse from Lil Jay Brown, to pick up the slack as possible hits and vital Atlanta correspondence.
On Rich Hood, the A-listers who turned Hoodrich Pablo’s last album into a cameo showcase are mostly gone. With the exception of Lil Yachty’s appearance on “Street Punk,” the album casts Pablo as the center of attention, this time with his own tagalong crew of up-and-comers—by now he’s tapped deeply enough into Atlanta trap to open up his own faucet for the sound. It’s a role he comes to naturally, perpetually in the pocket and never at a loss for words. | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | January 20, 2018 | 6.8 | a5790b52-a848-4420-9297-b404fedc33c5 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
On their fourth collaboration, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid sound more in-tune with one another than ever before. | On their fourth collaboration, Four Tet's Kieran Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid sound more in-tune with one another than ever before. | Kieran Hebden / Steve Reid: NYC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12440-nyc/ | NYC | The recent Four Tet EP Ringer not only revealed Kieran Hebden to be a surprisingly dexterous techno producer, but also found him making an asset out of his greatest liability. For all the cosmic wonder he can evoke by placing electronics against naturalistic backdrops, Hebden has often gotten himsef stuck in ruts, even if just for a few moments here and there. In part, that's the fate of an improviser, but it's exacerbated by samplers and machines that can be slow to respond to Hebden's shifts, however smartly they're triggered. In improvised music, it's one thing to sound like you're in transition and another thing to actually be in transition.
None of that mattered on Ringer, thanks in part to techno's formalist grounding. But it matters a lot on NYC, the fourth album made by Hebden and jazz drummer Steve Reid. Ringer's functional dance-music accepts, even privileges, the kind of ruts that have tripped up Hebden in the past; NYC, meanwhile, puts them to work in settings that serve different purposes. On the duo's earlier albums, Hebden and Reid occasionally sounded like they were only barely aware of what the other was doing or might stand to do next. On NYC, they sound much more conscious and sympathetic.
"Lyman Place" starts the album with an unvarying few-note bass-line set against the sound of a jet engine rising in long, slow takes. It sounds like something Miles Davis would have done in the 1970s, and Hebden's relative understatedness helps set off Reid's drumming-- circular, splashy, coyly shrouded by the shimmer of persistent cymbals. "1st & 1st" follows with a fit of funk built around a guitar sample that Hebden makes sound twitchy, like a signal from a world away.
It sounds as if Hebden made a strategic decision to do less on this album, which heightens the impact when he does make a move. Reid benefits greatly from the space to breathe-- much of his drumming on the duo's other records sounds comparatively crowded and confused by how to connect with Hebden. And Hebden himself shows off a new sense of always being in the right place at the right time, without getting caught out in between. He hasn't lost any of the polyglot record-collector drive that has made Four Tet matter from the start: NYC wanders through spells informed by melodica-strewn dub, shoegaze rock, weird folk, and of course the clattering sense of purpose at work in free-jazz. But Hebden sounds considerably more easy-going now, like he's taking time to listen in to what comes out as it happens all around him. | 2008-11-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Domino | November 17, 2008 | 6.8 | a57a9c2a-206a-4036-90e2-59cbbadb99db | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
Mount Eerie's first studio album features a laissez-faire production that allows former Microphones leader Phil Elverum's vocals to float to the top of the mix. | Mount Eerie's first studio album features a laissez-faire production that allows former Microphones leader Phil Elverum's vocals to float to the top of the mix. | Mount Eerie: No Flashlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5596-no-flashlight/ | No Flashlight | No Flashlight, Mount Eerie's first studio album, comes with a huge poster/map/Farmer's Almanac thing, which is meant to help explain the music and look pretty doing so. It isn't the first time Phil Elverum, the band's inscrutable leader, has written an album with grandiose narrative threads and laid them out in liner notes. Mount Eerie, his last record as Microphones, tackled-- in language that was difficult despite its puerile concision-- the Sun, Solar System, and Universe, plus ol' Mount Eerie herself.
But while that record came with an attractive but relatively modest fold-out poster (all black ink printed on diaphanous wax paper), No Flashlight's visual companion is a freaking atlas, complete with beatific photographs and Elverum's wobbly prose. Window-dressing on an epic scale, its inclusion sends the message that understanding is required to access enjoyment.
No Flashlight is the most musically undistinguished Elverum-related project to date, including Microphones' intractable early albums and Mount Eerie's shoddily-recorded live and tour-only material. The album's laissez-faire production fails to anchor its quaint, melody-allergic songs. In turn, Elverum's retiring vocals float to the top, which is a horrible place for them. It's a textural trainwreck that sabotages the music before one can even focus on lyrics or guitar lines. So the distraction of an expository outpouring makes sense.
Demanding listener input-- as Elverum does here by not-so-subtly inviting us to ponder him-- isn't a bad thing. But courting ears with such esoteric hooey is disingenuous and annoying. Elverum used to be able to hide his most solipsistic moments behind ambitious music; he now makes boring music that is premised on his persona and the explanation thereof. This is theoretical music in a whole 'nother sense: Largely untechnical and musically staid, the meaning lies not in the notes, not in the colossal liner spread, and not even really in the words, which are feebly expository and largely unsatisfying. The value, we are led to believe, lies somewhere apart from the music.
Elverum sings in an quietly anguished voice-- like a cult leader, it's only as powerful as what he puts behind it. Here, Elverum's a lone sojourner; Mount Eerie's gray performances put the diffident singer cruelly in the foreground, where he founders.
Has his voice changed? Hardly. Coy, lethargic, and almost drunkenly tuneless, this is the same guy from Microphones. Only now he has nowhere to hide. On "The Glow," pt. 2, his former band's penultimate and best album, Elverum wrapped inner-sanctum ruminations in warm, whooshing instrumentals, rich in assertive melodies. No Flashlight is comparatively ascetic. Melodies are sparse but the music isn't quite minimal. Opener "I Know No One" subdues a plaintive guitar line in accordion swell and excessive, frequently mic-clipping percussion. Unaccessorized, the six-string would sound brilliant-- a counterpoint to Elverum's ugly-beautiful vox-- but the line is swallowed up.
On "How?", notes cluster in disorganized spurts, while the 1st Mt. Eerie Tabernacle Hummers fill the voids with their closed-lip sounds. "Stop Singing" opens beautifully-- flashes of guitar tussle with clarinet vapors, evoking an unlikely forebear: Talk Talk. But it's just an intro, soon to be supplanted by a bass/drums vamp that dispenses with lo-fi's anchoring warmth, keeping the shabbiness.
Elverum previously espoused a very un-singer/songwriterly preference for sound over persona. But No Flashlight is quick to dispel any confusion around its focus. "I Know No One" drops the mission statement bombshell: "Knowing no one understands these songs/ I try to sing them clearer/ Even though no one has ever asked, 'What does Mount Eerie mean?'". The best tracks are those on which he's mollified: by Glow-sized guitar wash and skittish drums on "The Moan", or gusty tuba and a second-line beat on "The Universe Is Shown".
I revisited my Microphones LPs, which I haven't spun regularly for a couple years, to see if evolving tastes, globalization, or something else isn't to blame for my indifference to Mount Eerie. Verdict? "The Glow," pt. 2 is still fantastic; It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water still very good; and Mt. Eerie still trippy as hell. If the forthcoming Singers is any indication, Mount Eerie got some moxy in 'em yet. But your enjoyment of No Flashlight will depend on your interest in Phil Elverum, and whether or not you've the patience to wade through this sonic tub-full of Jonestown juice. Once you find him, he's just as fetchingly impossible. But when the pleasure is this conditional, it becomes fuzzy what all the fuss is over. | 2005-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | August 15, 2005 | 5 | a58358c6-6e91-4237-95fd-db18c1ca1856 | Pitchfork | null |
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The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album is a trilogy-completing, podcast-augmented three-part intergalactic techno-libertarian rock drama! | The Smashing Pumpkins’ new album is a trilogy-completing, podcast-augmented three-part intergalactic techno-libertarian rock drama! | The Smashing Pumpkins: ATUM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smashing-pumpkins-atum/ | ATUM
| No one can accuse William Patrick Corgan of skimping on lore. He’s produced reams of it as a bandmate, interviewee, blogger, Infowars guest, wrestling impresario, and tea-shop proprietor. His musical output with the Smashing Pumpkins is also lore-heavy, albeit haphazard: The band’s album discography has both a Vol. 1 without a Vol. 2 and a II without a I. That II, however, was a turning point for the Pumpkins, as Corgan (a notoriously prolific writer whose B-sides have shipped platinum) began setting formats and concepts loose upon each other. A singles campaign became an album; an album became “an album within an album”; that outermost album became an abandoned project. With ATUM: A Rock Opera in Three Acts, Corgan raises the stakes. He’s pitched it as the third in a retconned trilogy of concept albums that began with 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and continued with 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.
Corgan’s previous attempts to cast Mellon and Machina as something more than good-to-magnificent alt-rock albums—he once teased Mellon Collie as The Wall for Gen Xers, and recruited professional animators and amateur sleuths to flesh out the story of Machina—were, in wrestling terms, a work. But on ATUM (pronounced, maddeningly, like the season) he sells the storyline like never before. The cover art suggests a space-rock album illustrated by Roger Dean; the stuffy subtitle places it in the distinguished lineage of Corgan’s beloved Savatage. Over 33 songs and two-plus hours, he presents the saga of Shiny, a has-been rocker (and incarnation of a character known on Machina as Glass, and on Mellon Collie as Zero) exiled into space for unspecified thoughtcrimes. As Shiny makes his unexpected return to Earth, a cadre of admirers and hackers desperately tries to remind the public of his significance, while the perfidious ruling class schemes to co-opt him for its own ends.
The full story is sketched out in ATUM’s “lyric handbook,” but throughout this album’s protracted rollout (Part I was released in November, Part II in January), Corgan has been recapping the narrative on his debut podcast. Thirty-Three combines buzzy guests like Willow Smith and the voice of Roger Rabbit with Corgan’s Twitter Blue-grade takes on current events. When discussing ATUM with his solicitous co-hosts—both employees of the Corgan-owned National Wrestling Alliance—Corgan lavished far more attention on the text than the compositions.
All that extracurricular effort is necessary, because almost none of the narrative makes it to the actual recording. Even the larger plot points—or just the characters—of Corgan’s techno-libertarian saga are submerged at a level below subtext. Always inclined toward quaint turns of phrase, he’s reached a syntactical point of no return. His couplets scan like palindromes extracted from Coheed and Cambria lyrics. “In parried odes to thy mountains/The spirit of us was pungent laughter,” he declares on “Intergalactic.” On the squelchy, plaintive “Night Waves,” he muses, “Are we null at keel/Where mistakes appeal?” Oh shit, are we?
The result is a rock opera that coasts on vibes. Sometimes that vibe is simply Muse, as on the bombastic, backing vocalist-heavy “Empires” or “That Which Animates the Spirit.” Other times, it is unexpectedly peculiar. “Hooray!” is squelchy high-plains Hi-NRG, replete with Syndrum hits and an organ tone I last encountered on the Carrie Cleveland reissue. Within the story of ATUM, it’s performed by an animatronic band in a shuttered amusement park. (Discussing the song on the podcast, one of Corgan’s co-hosts asked him—in all innocence—“Is there a part of you that had an experience at an amusement park?”) The song is followed by the yearning synth-pop of “The Gold Mask,” which successfully lashes Future Islands to the delay effect from “I Ran (So Far Away)”. Doomy power ballad “The Culling” rides a slide guitar solo into a three-way conversation between Moog, soaring wordless vocals, and some of Jimmy Chamberlin’s most dramatic drumming.
Chamberlin gets his best opportunities to show out during ATUM’s final act, the set’s proggiest. The pace slows; the songs creep past the five-minute mark. It feels like Corgan and company are savoring their stroll to the finish, or maybe straining to leave a good impression. But this section stretches more than it soars and relies on invocation as a dramatic effect. There’s something fascinating, I suppose, in Corgan hollering “Zero! Zero! Zero!” like it’s a Saturday-morning superhero cartoon theme. But what do we get out of him whining “Glory glory, hallelujah”? Or “Agnus Dei”? (For fans of Pumpkins pronunciation, we get a “deus ex machina” sung like do sex machine.) It’s a relief when they invoke “Zero” as a song instead of a callback: There’s as much fun to be had in the oompah thrash of “Harmageddon” or the sighing groove metal of “In Lieu of Failure” as in the transparently goofy “Hooray!”
The stylistic flexes are enjoyable, but the bulk of ATUM is aimed squarely at modern rock radio. If you’re familiar with 2020’s CYR, you know the drill: streamlined synth-rock, only this time Chamberlin’s not platooning with an 808. Even so, the formula produces pleasures. Chamberlin stomps around Corgan’s sequencer on “Neophyte,” turning the singer’s rueful trudge into a disco strut. It’s almost as bold a choice as Corgan pronouncing the phrase “Philistine or Elohim” so it doesn’t rhyme. Penultimate track “Spellbinding” resolves the meter-shifting dream-pop pulse of its verses with a fist-pumping power pop chorus. “Take me away/I’m going to find you!” Corgan cries, trailed by a nice little .38 Special twin-guitar sting. “To the Grays” plays like a keening, synth-spangled take on “Dancing in the Dark”: The snare sound is more wack and there are a couple more references to burning fields of cosmic space. But the nervy pulse is there, and so is the romanticism, which is the true echo of the Pumpkins’ older work.
ATUM doesn’t necessarily suffer by comparison to past albums. Its highs are more modest. The ferocity is long gone. (At the end of the saga, having riled up allies and enemies alike, Shiny yeets himself back into space.) But in its own ponderous way, it is generous. And anyway, comparisons to past albums are kind of a Smashing Pumpkins trademark: Corgan has already announced that the band’s next project will be a “straight up rock’n’roll record” in the vein of Siamese Dream and, um, Mellon Collie. Perhaps the release of a fully realized—if obliquely written—rock opera has freed him from the gravitational pull of conceptualism. That, more than anything, would guarantee ATUM’s place in Smashing Pumpkins lore. | 2023-05-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Martha’s Music | May 11, 2023 | 6.3 | a5858ff1-05e4-4a40-aed0-a5b7833767e6 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
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 masterful chamber-pop of XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking and the fraught story behind the bucolic songs. | 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 masterful chamber-pop of XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking and the fraught story behind the bucolic songs. | XTC: Skylarking | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xtc-skylarking/ | Skylarking | Late one morning in 1986, Todd Rundgren awoke at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood to ominous news: A space shuttle had disintegrated in the stratosphere, killing the entire crew on live TV. The same morning, he received a message from the British wing of Virgin Records, concerning a wily pop band from rural England. In the label’s view, XTC were in dire need of a no-nonsense producer, arranger, and authority figure, preferably all in one—somebody with an American touch and a hint of the madcap and... well, how did his schedule look?
Rundgren’s appointment secured the savvy pairing of two brilliant and doomed minds. Between the anglophile producer and songsmith Andy Partridge were a thousand common interests and one great chasm that would subsume egos and tear up the studio floorboards. The rift did not concern taste or etiquette so much as—how else to put it—vibe: In one corner, the shaggy-haired, acid-frazzled Philadelphian whose passive-aggression belies a loose, honky-tonk approach to life; in the other, a three-piece reputed for 1) turning down their record label’s cocaine and 2) crafting technically brilliant pop. It was a match made in some 5-star hotel-lobby hell, and the calamity of it all enriches every second of Skylarking.
Rundgren was optimistic about working with XTC. A few years earlier, he had caught the Swindon group in their element, twisting from off-brand punk toward whip-smart new wave. Soon after, in 1982, Partridge suddenly quit touring, suffering from valium withdrawal and on-stage panic attacks. He announced XTC would join the ranks of Steely Dan and late-phase Beatles as a studio outfit—a commercial disaster, to nobody’s surprise. Singles flopped, fans lost faith, and before the year was up, the group shrank to a trio when drummer Terry Chambers stormed out for good during a rehearsal.
But by 1985, Partridge, at least, believed XTC were in the form of their lives. Though recent LPs Mummer and The Big Express lacked a hit to follow 1982’s “Senses Working Overtime,” the frontman’s studio indulgence (and bossiness) finally had free rein, even as the band entered free-fall. A parachute opened when the Dukes of Stratosphear, their cartoonish side project, released a period-psychedelia EP that briskly outsold the previous XTC record.
Virgin hoped an American producer would collar the firebrand and hammer the new album into the transatlantic mold of U2 and Simple Minds—a notion that, like almost everything involving the label, Partridge found laughable. Consider the demos: Back-garden symphonies like “Summer’s Cauldron” and “Season Cycle,” among his ripest compositions to date. Fellow songwriter Colin Moulding, inspired by his move to the ancient Celtic settlement of Marlborough Downs, was clomping down the same path, composing pastorals like “Grass” and “The Meeting Place” from sampled lathes and thrums of pagan folk. If anything, Partridge reasoned, the album would be their most English ever.
Caught between a quixotic artiste and a label tapping its watch, Rundgren was diplomatic. Who was he, a producer extraordinaire whose second home was a spacecraft-style recording bunker, to mock a studio fiend like Partridge? Hatching a plan, he accepted Virgin’s $150,000 fee and quickly discarded dozens of the band’s demos, assembling a tracklist around a concept of his own. The song cycle would plot a lifetime over the course of a day: daybreak in “Summer’s Cauldron,” then a suite of infatuation, heartbreak, marriage, temptation, and existential reckoning that concludes—on “Dying” and “Sacrificial Bonfire”—in the dead of night.
All this was news to the band. To Partridge, it was virtually treasonous. The 32-year-old was still on the mend from a 14-year addiction to valium prescribed for erratic school behavior, and had landed in an enlightenment phase, philosophizing over nature and “questioning things deeper: God, existence—the chewier questions,” he later said. The transformation in his lyrics was undeniable; and his voice, once a rabid yelp, had softened into serene hysteria, like a rescue puppy outgrowing its trauma. Despite their media portrayal as backwater bumpkins, XTC were brewing a new identity—something a star producer would surely dilute.
Partridge’s bandmates felt differently. Guitarist Dave Gregory, a Rundgren superfan, was thrilled, and the docile Moulding—by now immune to Partridge’s arm-twisting—sided with Virgin, reasoning they all had mouths to feed. If only to humor them, Partridge held his nose and acquiesced.
At his Utopia studio in the Catskills, Rundgren insisted on recording the songs in order, so sessions commenced with “Summer’s Cauldron.” His fingerprints are instantly visible: Skylarking opens in the nervous charge of dawn amid dog barks and crickets. As Rundgren’s melodica smears sunlight across the horizon, Partridge swans in from the wings and belts out a Broadway-sized croon, duetting with the lazy arc of a Moulding bassline. Just as the song builds to fever pitch, the producer plays his ace, scooping you out of “Summer’s Cauldron” with the summer’s-breeze strings of “Grass,” Moulding’s ode to al-fresco romance. A dreamy riff plays off his West Country burr, fizzles and dies like something unsaid.
Beneath Skylarking’s twin sunrise, optimism was dimming. It’s hard to pinpoint when hell broke loose, but within a few days the studio had descended into extravagant pettiness. Partridge says Rundgren had sarcasm down to “an extremely cruel art,” mocking everything from his lyrics to his trousers; when the singer flubbed a vocal take, he impatiently offered to record him a guide track. Partridge, in turn, deemed Rundgren’s keyboard skills “incredibly primitive,” nicknaming him Old Banana Fingers. Whenever the producer hulked toward the studio, weary and long-faced, the band had taken to jamming the “Munsters” theme tune.
One flustered night, Partridge gathered his bandmates. “I’m thinking of knocking the album on the head,” he confessed. “It’s like having two Hitlers in the same bunker.”
As war raged, the sessions remained a spring of wonder. Moulding, a psych-pop reformist, came into his own with songs like “The Meeting Place,” reflecting Swindon’s rituals and industry in gorgeous stained glass. Partridge specialized in the melodic trapdoor, establishing awkward patterns and flooding your serotonin receptors at unexpected moments. The lyrics are just chewy enough to distract from each incoming sugar rush, creating endless replay value. (“Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” he quips wonderfully in “Season Cycle.”) Themes and images trespass between songs, from the vaudevillian pomp of “Ballet for a Rainy Day” into the melodramatic “1000 Umbrellas,” whose Dave Gregory string arrangement makes heartbreak seem an ancient, noble fate.
In all this, Skylarking expresses a comic, cosmic apprehension of the natural world—not the banal site of ready-made tranquility but the arena of psychedelia, godliness, and permanence. Partridge and Moulding grew up on the border between urban and rural Swindon, ever ready to abandon the cinema of smalltown life, hop a fence, and explore a fantasyland of wildlife. Their formative years account for two XTC archetypes: the put-upon breadwinner and the serene observer of nature. That contrast—as much as Partridge and Moulding’s divergence—is a crux of the band’s character.
Part of the tension with Rundgren was that his pastoral concept snubbed Partridge’s trademark social commentaries. Though his politics were fuzzy, the songwriter took pride in penning morality plays that skewered Middle England’s delusions of grandeur, sending up the bootlicking class that was then rallied behind Margaret Thatcher.
Before parlaying that skill into songs like the anti-fascist operetta “No Thugs in Our House,” young Partridge had been famed for caricaturing schoolteachers, and it was this hobby that established creativity as his lifeline: initially to distract bullies, then simply to show off, drumming up attention he lacked at home. Though Partridge’s father played in a Navy skiffle band, his periods of absence and violence afforded little investment in his son’s artistic pursuits; his mother, whose mental health struggles led to electro-shock therapy, dished out verbal abuse and often sent Partridge to stay with other families, giving him “no sense of permanence about anything,” he explained in the book Complicated Game. Music and satire were pillars of Partridge’s identity that Rundgren would threaten to demolish.
The songwriter’s roots in social antagonism deepened in his teens, which he spent pottering between oddball bands in a tasseled suede jacket, observing Swindon’s social and cultural trends from afar. XTC missed the 1976 punk rush because he had a job as a window dresser in a Victorian emporium. While the band had contemporaries in Elvis Costello and Robyn Hitchcock, the late-’70s new wave stopped short of welcoming Leonard Bernstein nostalgists.
Assembling the Skylarking tracklist, Rundgren had shot down all but one addition to the band’s catalog of smalltown vignettes. To his credit, it may be their very best. Grounded by a snare that sounds airlifted in from a quarry, “Earn Enough for Us” spins a power-pop yarn pitting love against the material restrictions of poverty: “So you’re saying that we’re gonna be three/Now, a father’s what I’ll be,” Partridge sings between snakes-and-ladders hooks. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m so proud, but the belt’s already tight/I’ll get another job at night...”
Despite rankling Partridge, Skylarking’s departure from sociology frees space for wildcards like “That’s Really Super, Supergirl,” a reject that Rundgren rescued, sped up, and made garish. His funhouse keys and a helter-skelter bassline lean into the lyrics’ comics-nerd pathos, Partridge sarcastically commending a girlfriend who presumes to ditch him for his own good. On tape, it came out as a burbling blast of Disneyfied pop. Partridge was horrified.
“Could you play it a bit tighter?” he yelled, exasperated, as Rundgren perched behind the keyboard.
“That was good enough!” the producer replied.
Rundgren was gallivanting about like a ludicrous child savant—one moment darkly inscrutable, the next digging out cobwebbed keyboards and swaggering into the light. While Partridge fumed, Moulding and Gregory wrestled with their own frustrations. A month into recording, relocating to San Francisco for overdubs failed to heal rifts cleaved between the trio years earlier. During bass sessions for “Earn Enough for Us,” Moulding briefly quit the band, collateral damage in a Rundgren-Partridge power struggle that was now crescendoing. At one point, says the producer, Partridge fantasized aloud about plunging an axe into his head.
Occasional stabs at communication worked miracles. Rundgren’s ability to brandish spectacular arrangements from his back pocket freed the band to reinvent songs on the spot. On a whim, he flipped a dirge called “The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul” into something fancy and louche; the recorded version saunters like a Scott Walker Bond theme. Partridge was justifiably wary of Rundgren’s exhibitionism, but in the wonderland of Skylarking, where Moulding’s bucolic songs are right at home, it is Partridge’s—bedecked in half-drunk keys and Vegas suave—that astonish.
For a while, Partridge feared the completed album was ruined. He lambasted “Herr Rundgren” in the press and, as usual, fought bitterly with the label—but this time, with roles reversed, it was Virgin selling him on his music’s merit. As Skylarking awaited its fate, he and Moulding sulked in his Swindon loft and, on a giant board spread across the floor, set about re-enacting the great battles of 18th Century Europe.
Lead single “Grass” bombed in the UK, and the album stalled at No. 90—a death sentence even by their commercial standards, albeit grim vindication for Partridge. But in America, a one-time single contender demoted to a B-side was making hay. On college radio, “Dear God” had sparked a moral panic: its narrator, griping with an absent god, appalled Bible Belt Christians and prompted a bomb threat to a Florida radio station. Everyone else seemed to love it. In a sheepish U-turn, the band’s American label, Geffen, smuggled the track onto the U.S. release of Skylarking. Over six months, the album outsold XTC’s entire prior catalog three times over.
For all “Dear God”’s histrionic conviction, Partridge remains skeptical of his biggest hit, a pedantic screed that itches with a trite, secular holiness of its own. As a college-rock time capsule, it’s delightful; as for its moral import, Partridge was spitballing more soulful takes with interviewers. “If you can create Heaven for yourself without creating Hell for somebody else, fine,” he told the fanzine Limelight. “Try and create Heaven for somebody else as well, but don’t create Hell for anyone, ’cos that’s less than animal.”
Partridge had finally earned the cachet to pursue a better contract with Virgin. But negotiations faltered and, after two more albums, the band went on strike, eventually winning the right to release elsewhere in 1997. Partridge never lost his air of thwarted ambition, drifting into the future for which he seemed destined: tinkering away in his home studio, mostly free of expectations and interlopers. (That includes Moulding, who stepped back from XTC in 2006, effectively ending the group.) Among his arsenal of guitars, Partridge now keeps company with a legion of toy soldiers, battle-prepped and awaiting its master’s command.
In Skylarking’s immanent grace, you sense the perverse chemistry of warmongers relishing a battlefield bloodbath. A sweet photo from the sessions catches their repressed innocence: Gregory, Rundgren, and Partridge in fleeting unity, mouths agape, serenely piping out vowel sounds. Here you have Skylarking’s ideal form: three adult boys accidentally in their thirties, pooling harmonies for Partridge to plunge into, like something beautiful shot from the sky. | 2020-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Geffen / Virgin | April 26, 2020 | 9.3 | a58680ea-ad05-483d-930f-48338e52f389 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
With saucy charm and ruthless takedowns, motor-mouthed Brooklyn rapper Cakes Da Killa claims center stage on a collaborative EP of house bangers with producer Proper Villains. | With saucy charm and ruthless takedowns, motor-mouthed Brooklyn rapper Cakes Da Killa claims center stage on a collaborative EP of house bangers with producer Proper Villains. | Cakes da Killa / Proper Villains: Muvaland EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cakes-da-killa-proper-villains-muvaland-ep/ | Muvaland EP | Cakes da Killa knows there’s nothing more lethal than a deep cut swiftly dealt. The Brooklyn rapper is a master of unrelenting flows and skewering affronts, made all the more ruthless by his razor’s-edge humor. On the new EP Muvaland, Cakes teams up with New York producer Proper Villains, whose vigorous house beats don’t rival Cakes’ intensity so much as egg him on. The music is pumping, primed for Cakes’ motor-mouthed takedowns. His endless digs—at squares, lesser MCs, and unworthy beaus—are served at top speed, but it’s Cakes’ saucy charm that makes them land just right.
Muvaland clocks in at a trim 14 minutes, including two clipped interludes. Cakes’ takes are so spicy that the first song starts with a sizzle, a high hiss that precedes the spitfire sax licks, aluminum high-hats, and circular French touch bassline of “In Da House.” Cakes bounces through, asserting dominance in the art of playful insults. “How you never gettin’ fucked but keep a stick up your butt?” he asks. Forget kicking a man while he’s down—Cakes will dance all over the sucker.
“Don Dada” elevates Cakes’ knack for provocation. Easily Muvaland’s best track, it’s a turbocharged banger with the same ecstatic, scrappy energy as “212”-era Azealia Banks. Buoyed by Proper Villains’ crisp hip-house, Cakes growls, snarls, and snaps—and still manages to enunciate every sharpened consonant. He dethrones MCs with “flows softer than marshmallows and goose feathers” and razes skanks with the EP’s most memorable line: “All you dick riders on my body like vultures/You did it for the clout, I did it for the culture.” Filthy, joyful, and fearless, “Don Dada” captures every facet of Cakes’ style.
Hercules and Love Affair alum Nomi Ruiz joins for “ICU,” Muvaland’s most blissed-out offering, a late-night club cut that doubles as a mating call. Cakes rattles off dedications and instructions, as if beckoning a boy across the dancefloor. Ruiz plays wingman and jumps in on the insatiable hook: “Ooh baby don’t ya just stand there, I know you like what you see/Paws pressed all over my body.” The final line is a succession of “de dee dees” more satisfying than they have any right to be: In a record packed with syllables, these nonverbal ones communicate the most pleasure.
Muvaland came together in the first weeks of lockdown, when Cakes and Proper Villains found themselves in need of creative collaboration. Proper Villains supplied the beats, and Cakes laid down the entire EP in the span of one afternoon—a testament to the speed and precision of all Cakes’ records, as well as his arresting freestyles. Present circumstances are hardly ideal for club music, but Muvaland bangs on with searing beats and scalding verses. Cakes decks himself in pink lace and diamonds, tosses off the haters riding his ass “tighter than True Religions,” and becomes the only rapper to successfully rhyme “quarantine” with “guillotine.” It’s a 14-minute flex parade leading straight to the throne.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Electronic | Classic | November 19, 2020 | 7.5 | a58bc3ac-9671-4d11-9bca-d17d3fe413b4 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
This out-rock supergroup featuring Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and Chris Corsano doesn't disappoint. | This out-rock supergroup featuring Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls), Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and Chris Corsano doesn't disappoint. | Rangda: False Flag | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14249-false-flag/ | False Flag | The question of what to release first is a dilemma for any new group, but especially so when the individual members already have recognizable styles. They can test the waters with a quick, don't-hold-us-to-this EP, or roll the full-length dice and hope their sound stands up without pinning them down. Rangda-- the trio of guitarists Sir Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and drummer Chris Corsano-- have figured out a way to do both. False Flag is like two three-song EPs checker-boarded into one stellar album. Each odd-numbered track offers improvised blare, while the evens are all structured songs. That division may seem pretty Jekyll/Hyde, but False Flag never feels like play-acting. Together only half a year, Rangda is already making music that sounds both fully developed and open-ended.
Which means that the trio's noisier leanings are just as drenched in thought and interaction as their melodic side. Their all-out improvisations could have easily sounded like weekend workouts, but intense concentration and muscular effort course through these escalating jams. Most impressive is the telepathy between Bishop and Chasny. On opener "Waldorf Hysteria", their racing chords have a rhyming quality, as if the pair were playing catch with a ball of noise. Corsano fares just as well. His cascading drumming on "Fist Family" is so entrancing, it locks the guitars like charmed snakes into long, humming tones.
Snake charming and other Eastern rituals factor in everything Bishop does, and there are traces of his worldly influences throughout False Flag (the band name comes from a Balinese demon queen). But those influences are never played up as exotic or grafted on like a fake accent. Raga-ish guitar figures are mostly just hinted at, and the ritualistic breaks in "Serrated Edges" are as natural as those in the best Sun City Girls blasts. In fact, the most intriguing influences here are Western. "Bull Lore" sounds like Earth's dusty twang mixed with the hypnosis of the Beatles' "Because", while the soft "Sarcophagi" evokes the halting minimalism of Loren Connors.
False Flag ends with a blissful vista called "Plain of Jars", perhaps the closest thing here to a Six Organs/Sun City hybrid. Again, Western influences poke through, particularly the drifting, we've-got-all-night excursions of Sonic Youth's "Rain on Tin", Neil Young's "Down by the River", and Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun". But what's most striking about "Plain of Jars" is how much shorter it feels than its 15-minute length. Close your eyes and you can practically see all the different paths Rangda might have trekked down were they not restricted by the confines of a recording. The same is true of False Flag as a whole-- its fertile sounds suggest a wide-open future for a band that hopefully has a long life planned. | 2010-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | May 18, 2010 | 8.2 | a58fcd59-3b0a-4bca-83a9-10546a1206a7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
Da' Nic is a new five-song EP meant as a warm-up for the forthcoming Dime Trap, which will be the first album T.I. will record under his original TIP nickname. Though it's a short release, Da' Nic is a strong record from one of the better rappers we have these days and a breath of fresh air from a guy who was treading the path of "reality show dad" just a few years back. | Da' Nic is a new five-song EP meant as a warm-up for the forthcoming Dime Trap, which will be the first album T.I. will record under his original TIP nickname. Though it's a short release, Da' Nic is a strong record from one of the better rappers we have these days and a breath of fresh air from a guy who was treading the path of "reality show dad" just a few years back. | T.I.: Da' Nic EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21075-da-nic-ep/ | Da' Nic EP | Here is your weekly reminder of time's unending march: 2016 marks 15 years of music from Clifford "T.I." Harris. Since 2001, the Atlanta rap icon has been churning out hits—be they of the "mixtape street classic" or "mainstream feat. Rihanna" variety—and thanks to those hits, he has resisted a slow fade into obscurity. In fact, he has packed his dance card to the gills, what with his recent appearance in Marvel's Ant-Man and the usual busywork that a globe-trotting, "Blurred Lines" appearing, Iggy Azalea co-signing (and then disowning) Grand Hustle label head has to slog through. While his hardcore fans remain supportive (did you know that T.I. has never had an album that didn't sell at least 250,000 copies?) it wouldn't really shock anyone if he decided to phone it in as an artist by now.
In recent interviews though, Harris is adamant on returning to his old ways and Da' Nic, the new five-song EP meant as a warm-up for the forthcoming Dime Trap, showcases this shift effortlessly. Trap will be the first album Harris will record under his original TIP nickname, which he eschewed for T.I. way back when in order to avoid confusion with Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. As a release, Da' Nic isn't going to pacify any longing you might have for Trap-A-Holics voice REAL TRAP SHIT, but it's a strong record from one of the better rappers we have these days and a breath of fresh air from a guy who was treading the path of "reality show dad" just a few years back. If the last few T.I. releases have sounded complicated and unnecessarily heavy, Da' Nic sounds like the guy most of us met on 2003's Trap Muzik finally heading back to his old neighborhood to sit on the porch and talk some shit.
Like many others, T.I. has occasionally fallen beneath the weight of the Major Label Rolodex. (Just because you can put Usher or Chris Brown on a song doesn't mean you should, dig?) On Da' Nic there's only one feature: The London on Da Track-produced toe-tapper "Peanut Butter and Jelly", which features guest verses from "Young" rappers both new (Thug) and old (Dro).
More than anything, this record sounds like the work of a seasoned veteran who's annoyed that everyone isn't giving him his dues as a good rapper. Even on his most bloated releases—2007's T.I. vs. T.I.P being the best example—count on T.I. for at least one moment where he showcases his ability to ramp up his verses when he even senses that people are sleeping on him. On Da' Nic, that moment is "Ain't Gonna See It Coming" ("No, I'm not that old nigga think that he run it/ And talkin' bout what he did back in the day/ I'm just as vicious as ever, I'm brilliant and clever and still 'bout that action today"). It's refreshing to hear him serve notice.
Let's be honest: While the EP is a welcome return to form, it's still five songs. You aren't going to find hidden treasure here. However, for those who have said they want the old T.I. back—the Lil' Flip- and Shawty Lo-obliterating King of the South who spit acid when he wasn't making the girls dance, all while wearing a Braves fitted cocked on his head at an angle that doesn't make any logical sense—Da' Nic promises some hope for his upcoming The Dime Trap. | 2015-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Grand Hustle | September 24, 2015 | 6.9 | a58fe0ce-0415-4aa3-a610-30ce5cbb7c2b | Ernest Wilkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ernest-wilkins/ | null |
The debut solo album from the Raincoats bassist is adventurous and collaborative and vibrant and furious. | The debut solo album from the Raincoats bassist is adventurous and collaborative and vibrant and furious. | Gina Birch: I Play My Bass Loud | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gina-birch-i-play-my-bass-loud/ | I Play My Bass Loud | Gina Birch is frustrated with her friends, fuming at the neighbors, and spiteful of the in-crowd—but she saves her deepest and most abiding rage for the patriarchy. Birch unwittingly became a feminist icon in 1977 when she formed the Raincoats, a groundbreaking post-punk band who influenced Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, and the larger riot grrrl movement. Only when violinist Vicky Aspinall joined the group did Birch and co-founder Ana da Silva realize their project’s political power. “Vicky said, ‘You may not call yourselves feminists but what you’re doing is a feminist act. You’re doing, rather than being done to,’” Birch remembers. In a career spanning over four decades, Birch embraced this philosophy in an unending torrent of creativity as a musician, film director, and painter. I Play My Bass Loud, her debut solo album at age 67, is both a celebration of her status as a godmother of feminist rock and a furious protest against the persecution of women.
The album’s cover is a self-portrait of Birch from an art school Super 8 film in which she screamed directly into the camera lens for three minutes. She carried that spirit of dissent through her work in the Raincoats, the Hangovers, and the Gluts, but rarely has she been so forthcoming about the source of her indignation. “When you ask me if I’m a feminist/I say to hell with powerlessness, to hell with loneliness/Damn all those people putting women down,” she sings on the anthemic single “Feminist Song.” For all her outrage, Birch is aware of her role as a mentor to a younger generation of activists. On “Pussy Riot,” her tribute to the Russian collective, she reminds us, “We have to remember freedom’s not a given/It’s something to fight for every day/We have to remember it’s our duty to fight for those who’re still in chains.”
Birch kept the files for the songs that would become I Play My Bass Loud on her computer for years, occasionally adding vocal lines like an ongoing audio diary. The effect is of a conversation with herself: whispering, howling, dictating, and declaiming, sometimes repeating herself and sometimes adding commentary. Her voice doubles and triples and pans across the stereo field. “I Will Never Wear Stilettos,” a song that is as much about the threat of violence as it is about fashion, features a running monologue about footwear. “I’m not saying the city is a warzone/But can you run in them?” she asks and then answers herself with a list of shoes that are comfortable (and safe) for the streets. On “Big Mouth,” a witty reproof of gossip, Birch autotunes her voice high and low to turn herself into a whole group of feuding friends.
Despite its long, solitary genesis, I Play My Bass Loud is anything but a lonely bedroom-pop album. Birch recruited a host of collaborators to expand the palette, including Thurston Moore, whose feedback-drenched guitar animates the ’90s alt-rock jam “Wish I Was You,” and da Silva, whose monotron lends “Feminist Song” a spacy ambience. The producer Youth helped Birch find the final form for tracks like “I Am Rage,” a slow burner a la Jesus and Mary Chain that began as a spoken word piece.
For all its adventurousness, I Play My Bass Loud is fundamentally a bass album. Birch chose her instrument in the Raincoats because it seemed easier than guitar or drums, but she grew to love how the low end takes up space in genres like dub reggae. On this record, she calls attention to how women players have used the instrument to make space for themselves in rock music. The rollicking, feel-good title track features four women bassists—Shanne Bradley, Emily Elhaj, Helen McCookerybook, and Jane Crockford—in addition to Birch herself. On an album about oppression and injustice, the song is a welcome reminder of how art can change individual lives, if not the world. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder, what is my job?” she asks. Her answer joyfully affirms their collective freedom as artists and as women: “I play my bass loud!” | 2023-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Third Man | March 8, 2023 | 7.5 | a591e6e5-9499-4dab-a5a3-6872fa5ff8d3 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Philadelphia tweegazers keep up ambient-pop's ethereal flame, losing themselves in the trebly haze of early Creation Records, pop melodies barely shining through all the layers of noise. | Philadelphia tweegazers keep up ambient-pop's ethereal flame, losing themselves in the trebly haze of early Creation Records, pop melodies barely shining through all the layers of noise. | A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Scribble Mural Comic Journal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10005-scribble-mural-comic-journal/ | Scribble Mural Comic Journal | A review of The Velvet Underground & Nico in Boston's first rockzine, Vibrations, suggested listeners put themselves in the frame of mind they might assume for Indian music. Of course, the Velvet Underground's narcotic repetitions-- influenced by John Cale's association with minimalist composer La Monte Young-- struck the mainline for a new style of pop, similarly connected to raga's enveloping drone. Uh, maybe you've heard of Can, Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, or My Bloody Valentine?
When listening to A Sunny Day in Glasgow, it's perhaps best to put yourself in the frame of mind you might assume for those bands, too. Sure, this brother-sister trio aren't in the same league, but they're one of several exciting young acts keeping up ambient-pop's ethereal flame (a few years after M83 and others put their electronic spin on Loveless swoon). Where Atlanta's Deerhunter echo the psych-rock meditations of Spacemen 3, these Philadelphia tweegazers lose themselves in the trebly haze of early Creation Records, pop melodies barely shining through all the layers of noise. Then they kill you with ramshackle C86 adorableness.
On Scribble Mural Comic Journal, A Sunny Day in Glasgowsculpt fluffy electronic textures, overdubbed funhouse-mirror guitars, and Kate-Bush-down-a-well vocals into a debut album that warps (and greatly improves upon) last year's self-released The Sunniest Day Ever EP. The project's founder, Ben Daniels of local "supergroup" King Kong Ding Dong, twists the sweetness in identical twins Lauren and Robin's voices into eerie new forms, whether off-kilter dial tones to open the thick-- and, hey, ringing-- "A Mundane Phonecall to Jack Parsons", echoing raindrops on "Our Change Into Rain Is No Change at All (Talkin' 'bout Us)", or stereo-panning schoolgirl chants amid alien guitars on "C'Mon" . The sisters' soft breathiness is most, well, breathtaking on cosmopolitan teenage lament "The Horn Song", or with gliding guitar, pebbly beats, and a moonstruck melody on album highlight "5:15 Train".
Within A Sunny Day in Glasgow's aesthetic, their singing is less the point than the sonic environment they help create (for those gorgeous, submerged tunes!). So deceptively casual opener "Wake Up Pretty" dreams up the surreal-life dance party that is the ensuing "No. 6 Van Karman Street", and "Ghost in the Graveyard" begins with the pounding drums and background dissonance of an impassioned anthem by actual Glaswegians the Twilight Sad, then never develops into one. Meanwhile, "Panic Attacks Are What Make Me 'Me'" swells into a jingling alarum, shifting the details gradually enough to encourage what Eno called "perceptual drift," and then suddenly changing direction. Dizzy? No, dazzled.
As with Deerhunter's Cryptograms, A Sunny Day in Glasgow's debut becomes clearer as it nears an end. Album closer "The Best Summer Ever" at last distills the band's meteorological whorls into a psych-pop sunburst befitting its title. One of the band's older songs (it opened The Sunniest Day Ever EP) this track illustrates a notable divergence: While Deerhunter have moved toward tightly focused songs, the most recent recordings on Scribble Mural Comic Journal venture further into nuanced atmospherics. From a certain point of view, their journey is the same. | 2007-03-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-03-16T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Notenuf | March 16, 2007 | 8 | a59802fc-4793-47e8-8b2b-8e651253f080 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On their third album as a trio, the prog metal band refines their interplay and finds a sweet spot between technical precision and human flourish. | On their third album as a trio, the prog metal band refines their interplay and finds a sweet spot between technical precision and human flourish. | Animals as Leaders: Parrhesia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animals-as-leaders-parrhesia/ | Parrhesia | Animals as Leaders began after the disbandment of guitarist Tosin Abasi’s prior band Reflux in 2006, when he was approached by heavy metal label Prosthetic about creating a solo project. A mostly self-trained guitarist—he picked up early skills by watching old hair metal instructional videos—Abasi only agreed to the proposal after taking a year to study at the Atlanta Institute of Music. When he was ready, he returned to the label with one condition: He wanted to include other perspectives besides his own. While Abasi recorded guitar and bass for Animals as Leaders’ self-titled 2009 debut, Misha Mansoor—engineer and founding member of prog metal band Periphery—programmed drums and synths. From the beginning, collaboration was key.
Animals as Leaders developed a reputation for mixing the precise rhythms and hi-fi crunch of djent metal with subtle flourishes of jazz and classical. Guitarist and engineer Javier Reyes joined shortly after the first album’s release, followed by drummer Matt Garstka in 2012, fulfilling Abasi and Mansoor’s initial vision for a trio (Mansoor, who occasionally still produces for the group, has been dubbed their “silent fourth member”). Parrhesia is their third album together since 2014, and their most unified work since that year’s The Joy of Motion. Their music is at its best when the trio taps into the soul and feeling within the exacting precision of their compositions, and if 2016’s The Madness of Many occasionally tipped the balance too far toward robotic technicality, Parrhesia readjusts its footing, finding a sweet spot between technical precision and human flourish.
The average Animals song can feel like hearing the soundtrack to a grungy sci-fi epic before you see the movie: waves of synthetic and organic sounds crash against each other with post-apocalyptic flair. Occasionally, the totality of the sound can overwhelm—the sheer amount of textures generated by just three musicians is as impressive and exhausting as a trip to the quantum realm. Parrhesia is still an assault on the senses, but Abasi, Reyes, and Garstka have refined their triple act so that their interplay pops in beguiling ways. Garstka’s drum patterns form a lattice with Abasi and Reyes’ hammered fretwork on standout “Gestaltzerfall” and “The Problem of Other Minds,” and all three streak across the twinkling synth arrangements on lead single “Monomyth.” Their dynamic sounds comfortable without feeling stale. On Parrhesia, the trio’s decade’s worth of camaraderie allows them to subtly prod at the foundations of djent with jazzy (“Red Miso”) and industrial (“Micro-Aggressions”) flourishes while still providing rhythms to keep necks bouncing.
Abasi and Reyes’ guitar work continues to be a marvel. Their 8-stringed arrangements are as flashy and technical as ever, but their relationship morphs from song to song. On “Monomyth” and closing track “Gordian Naught,” they’re dueling dragons jockeying for position in open skies; in the first third of “The Problem of Other Minds,” they play call-and-response with gossamer chords and rhythm. This kind of intricate highwire act is the group’s bread and butter, but it’s rarely been so unpredictable. That foundation is solidified by Garstka’s awe-inspiring work on the drumkit. One minute, his double-kick drum shots rattle like cannon fire across “Gestaltzerfall”; the next, snare and cymbal crashes accentuate the smooth notes of “Thoughts and Prayers.”
A sense of freedom and curiosity courses through Parrhesia. Animals as Leaders aren’t redefining the formula they’ve spent the last 13 years perfecting, but there’s a buzz to every distorted guitar lick and machine-gun drum roll that proves the trio is still pushing each other to new ground. The subtle markings of their growing bond—of their trust in each other’s skill and imagination—help to unearth the soul of their synthetic wonderland. | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sumerian | April 5, 2022 | 7.3 | a59855c5-dfd8-48b7-b572-0c3ef7fae45f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
By embracing the detuned bass and dope boy cool of state-of-the-art trap, Lupe Fiasco delivers his most subversive album yet. | By embracing the detuned bass and dope boy cool of state-of-the-art trap, Lupe Fiasco delivers his most subversive album yet. | Lupe Fiasco: DROGAS Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22882-drogas-light/ | DROGAS Light | Lupe Fiasco’s new album introduces itself with a shocking display of force: “Dopamine Lit (Intro)” is two minutes and 49 seconds of foghorn bass, fiery bars, and a half-joking, half-drunken chorus that includes a Billboard flip-off, a Lord of the Rings reference, and some self-consciously nonsensical trap grunts, for good measure. The song especially feels like a pleasant surprise attack when held against the eternally put-upon rapper’s consistently inconsistent delivery over the last few years. DROGAS Light may not surpass his auspicious debut, 2006’s Food & Liquor, but it is easily the least scattered statement he’s made in about a decade.
Not coincidentally, it is also the first album he is releasing independently after concluding his long and unhappy relationship with Atlantic Records. So rather than turning in a collection of songs that are easily sorted into column A (safer, radio-playable, label-approved) and column B (self-indulgent and somewhat superior), Lupe goes hard at a coherent sound on every single track, most pointedly on the album’s stellar first half. But coherence is not the only or most important difference here. There’s also an unexpected sonic strategy that finds Lupe unleashing a relentless assault of huge 808s, bomb-tick snares, and constantly chopped’n’popping vocal samples; he’s simultaneously trying on sounds of the moment while retaining his contrarian viewpoint on modern trap trends.
Unchained from major-label groupthink, Lupe doesn’t go completely left with a set of stiflingly dense art-raps. Instead, many of these tracks seem purpose-built to compete with Rae Sremmurd and Migos for sheer bumpability, while lyrically running laps around them. The trap-heavy production is a major asset; 808s and psychedelic ambience provide Lupe with a vehicle for his worldview, which is critical of the genre’s gangster tropes. “You seen the movie/They killed the n***ga/Why you still wanna be like Scarface?” he raps on “NGL.”
This novel collision of style and substance is a welcome switch in approach for the rapper. Lupe never quite felt comfortable in the boom-bap lineage of backpacker rap that some fans and critics have wanted him to stick to ever since “Kick Push” cast him as an unlikely torchbearer of the Native Tongues ethos back in 2006. He soon found his own mold—a mix of West Coast and Midwest gangsta rap influences with an emo/goth-pop aesthetic that never quite worked for anybody except diehard fans. Unfortunately, a few DROGAS cuts, like “Made in the USA” and “Pick Up the Phone,” still fall into that underwhelming category. The filter house outing “It’s Not Design” and dance-rocky “Wild Child” also feel like throwbacks to the days of base-covering radio singles—concessions to a label boss he’s already fired.
DROGAS’ bold new sound, however, demands to be measured, less against Lupe’s own catalog than the current field of sources he’s drawing from and bouncing off of. The best songs on the album feel kindred in spirit to some of Kanye’s The Life of Pablo but are nowhere near as original, transgressive, or transportive. Run the Jewels have combined 808s with subversive strains of anger and paranoia to stronger effect, not to mention Kendrick. And even compared with artists like 2 Chainz and Migos, Lupe’s bars lack a certain snap. That’s because he is only here to flirt and subvert—he is not really in the moment, not really about that life. Plays on drug slang provide this album with much of its imagery—“Tranquillo,” in particular, serves as sort of a key to the record’s central conceit—but overall the listener gets the sense that is Lupe still too self-conscious to truly loosen up, get lifted, and achieve the altered state that is so key to Future’s screwed soul or Kanye’s gospel-inflected high.
Ultimately, DROGAS Light reaffirms, rather than fundamentally alters, Lupe’s place in the rap pantheon. He’s always been too lyrical and heady to count out as an innovator in the game, even if his moves sometimes make you want to do just that. But here, with a newfound urgency to his sound, he proves once again that he is still the brainy smurf of rap. | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 1st & 15th | February 14, 2017 | 7.4 | a59a1687-692a-4169-9b1b-903f360e5e11 | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | null |
Marina Diamandis’ first album since shedding her “Marina and the Diamonds” identity slides from affecting poetry to cold calculation. | Marina Diamandis’ first album since shedding her “Marina and the Diamonds” identity slides from affecting poetry to cold calculation. | MARINA: Love + Fear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marina-love-fear/ | Love + Fear | The fourth album by Marina Diamandis, and her first without the mantle of “Marina and the Diamonds,” arrives after four years spent battling depression and self-doubt. Her first priority in composing Love + Fear seems to have been returning to a place where music could be enjoyable, and generative, and healing; in a word, safe. Listening to the record is like slipping into a meditation exercise, with Marina as soft, soothing sloganeer: Close your eyes, and imagine you’re on a beach; just breathe, and let your worries disappear.
Marina’s devoted following, and her many LGBTQ listeners in particular, rely on her for complex, indrawn alternatives to hollow empowerment anthems. But the qualities that so endeared her to fans—her vulnerability, her appetite for risk, her unflinching handling of misogyny and mental illness—are absent here. “We don’t have the time to be introspective when there are more important things happening,” Marina recently told Fader. Without introspection, the lyrics of Love + Fear feel fully incidental to the songs swirling around them.
Safety, as an artistic priority, can shield creativity from anxiety. It can also dull an artist’s edges. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marina’s newfound dependence on “melodic math,” the Max Martin-pioneered songwriting technique that involves slotting syllables into an instrumental track, even if the resulting lyric is semi-incoherent. This can be a useful compositional tool; it can also be the reason Ariana Grande sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are.” Though melodic math is wildly incompatible with Marina’s verbose, literary sensibility, Love + Fear is redolent of the stuff. Lyrics are occasionally nonsensical (“Stuck in fast forward, always on the rewind”) or simply sloppy (“My love is a planet revolving your heart”). The chorus of “Emotional Machine” consists of facile rhyming: “I’m a machine/An emotional bein’/Since I was a teen/Cut my feelings off clean.” When Marina covered similar territory on 2010’s “I Am Not a Robot,” she wrote: “Better to be hated/Than loved, loved, loved for what you’re not/You’re vulnerable, so vulnerable/You are not a robot.” This is a staggering slide, from affecting poetry to cold calculation. How to account for it?
It’s tempting to blame new co-writers like OzGo, a producer who’s worked extensively with Martin, for pushing Marina toward a more easily digestible pop product. But 2012’s Electra Heart also featured a battery of powerhouse collaborators, and still Marina’s distinct observations shone through. Greg Kurstin, who produced much of Electra Heart, may work with mega-stars like Adele and Ellie Goulding, but it’s hard to imagine either of them singing, “Wish I’d been a prom queen fighting for the title/Instead of being 16 and burning up a Bible/Feeling super, super, super suicidal.” Love + Fear’s gratuitous use of melodic math seems deliberate and freely chosen.
When Marina’s vocal delivery allows a glimmer of personality to shine through the genericism, the results are lovely. “Baby,” a collaboration with Clean Bandit and Luis Fonsi, stands head and shoulders above every other track, even though it already appeared on Clean Bandit’s own album last fall. On “No More Suckers,” Marina’s bratty, schoolyard-taunt delivery recalls Cher Lloyd’s excellent 2011 single “Want U Back,” elevating standard break-up fare into something witty and winking. “Too Afraid” is an aching counterpoint to anodyne lead singles “Handmade Heaven” and “Orange Trees.” When Marina sings, “I don’t know what to do/I hate this city, but I stay ’cause of you,” she grounds the earlier songs’ wide-eyed daydreaming in deeper meaning.
Elsewhere, though, Marina finds herself unable—or maybe afraid—to offer any originality. “True” is little more than a string of bland body-positivity slogans, too stale for a Dove commercial a decade ago. “Superstar” hints at substance by pairing foreboding minor-key synths with the opening lyric, “Before I met you, I pushed them all away,” then devolves into a standard, sugary love song. On “To Be Human,” Marina stretches the bridge of U2’s “Beautiful Day” to the length of a full song, and fills the space with a bizarre reference to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse. Though Marina has called “To Be Human” the album’s “most political song,” she resists making any definitive statements. When she sings, “There were riots in America/Just when things were getting better,” she doesn’t deign to place the lyric in context. Which riots? What was getting better, and for whom? By contrast, “Savages,” a standout from 2015’s Froot, offered a blazing indictment of human aggression that simultaneously demonstrated Marina’s strength as a songwriter: “I’m not afraid of God/I am afraid of man.”
In the past, whether Marina was working in a diaristic mode or a fictive one, she never caved to normality. That Marina—the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek—has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk. | 2019-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | April 29, 2019 | 5.4 | a59cfcdf-0a11-4cab-aaa2-820765371da8 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
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 2005 solo LP from the Dipset rapper, who rendered his brusque New York City experience in surreally unnerving style. | 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 2005 solo LP from the Dipset rapper, who rendered his brusque New York City experience in surreally unnerving style. | Jim Jones: Harlem: Diary of a Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-jones-harlem-diary-of-a-summer/ | Harlem: Diary of a Summer | Jim Jones doesn’t sound exactly like a human being. The way the Harlem rapper had begun, by the middle of the 2000s, to double his vocals was not quite a 1:1 recreation of the technique 2Pac used to summon a half-disembodied doom, no matter what little homages cropped on up on Jones’ tracklists. Nor was it in the same mold as No Limit artists like Master P or Young Bleed, who reimagined Pac’s fatalism as the tics of men too preoccupied to worry about technique. Both of those effects were achieved by drawing the listener’s ears to the incongruity of the takes. Jones’ increasingly claustrophobic records came to sound, instead, like the imperfect transfer of a muscular voice across rocky ethernet; only the most forceful notes survive.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer, Jones’ second album, was released in 2005 as the stranglehold he and the Diplomats had held over New York City was beginning to loosen; as New York itself was becoming decentered within hip-hop; and as the stylistic hallmarks of Dipset’s early run—deliberately chintzy soul samples, gleefully telegraphed wordplay and onomatopoeia—were being replaced, by competitors but also by the Dips themselves, with bigger, darker, and more industrial elements. Diary of a Summer runs the traditional rap blockbuster through that filter, its childhood memories turned oddly urgent, its concessions to emerging styles bent back toward post-9/11 Manhattan. Through that process Jones, the least-discussed core member of the group he co-founded, emerges as an auteur of the ordinary, his unfussy writing and uncanny vocals rendering a world just a few degrees off from the one the rest of us inhabit.
Speaking—stay with me—of 9/11: In 2001, as Jay-Z was enlisting Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Bink! to polish the soul-sample production style of The Blueprint to a high shine, Cam’ron was finalizing an agreement with his childhood friend Dame Dash that would bring him and the Diplomats to Roc-A-Fella. The quick-and-dirty approximation of “Never Change,” “Heart of the City,” and “Girls, Girls, Girls” that Cam preferred—its samples more mischievously obvious, its seams barely concealed—would help vault him and his partners to stardom. By the end of 2003, Jones, Cam, Juelz Santana et al. had not only compared themselves on record to Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, but had become the most popular and consequential rap group in the city. The five-volume series of Diplomats mixtapes, hosted by the late DJ Kay Slay, distilled their appeal: playful but bludgeoning, cartoon villains obsessed with little language games. Cam’s third solo album, Come Home With Me, and Diplomatic Immunity, the group’s studio debut, formalized that dominance.
When the Roc-A-Fella deal was signed, Cam was already one of the planet’s best rappers, where “rapping” means bending the language into newer, vibrant, more menacing shapes than anyone had yet dared. Juelz, the deliberate and inelegant Cam imitator, was earmarked as his successor. Jones had not been a figure of serious artistic importance. In fact, when he began appearing on records, Jones was not even presented as Cam’s creative peer, but rather as a vestige of his childhood. On “Me, My Moms & Jimmy,” the Tom Tom Club-sampling lark from 1998’s Confessions of Fire, Jones follows Cam in skittering across the top of the beat, with a verse that was either written for Jones or written by him as a direct imitation of his friend. He all but stumbles through lines like, “Do you know how to scuba? I got a house in Aruba/But you keep it on low cause my spouse got a Ruger.” Jones’ turn reads as just slightly less of a novelty than the verse from Cam’s beloved mother.
Two years later, on S.D.E., Cam wielded Jones in a similar way, on the similarly sunny, Destiny’s Child-featuring “Do It Again.” But almost immediately afterward, Jones snapped out of the paint-by-numbers process and started deepening his voice, then barreling through beats with a fixity of purpose. Perhaps it was the triangulation of Cam’s finesse and Juelz’s blunting of it: On Come Home With Me’s title track, Jones follows those two with a missive about the place he grew up, where the “buses don’t run” and where Steve Francis and Queen Latifah had been mugged; where the addicts lingering in the halls and the cops surveilling them pose comparable threats; where “grandmothers is 30.” Sometimes the rhyming syllables are stacked in cascades the way Cam’s are, but on the whole the writing has turned cool and epigrammatic. Later on that same album, over Kanye’s “Dead or Alive,” the passage
I’ll hock my chain
For a block of cocaine, now it’s back to my block with cocaine
You know, re-in’ up and filling up them pots with cocaine
Then you chop it up and bottle up and top the cocaine
Gotta watch for them cops and they chains
doesn’t scan as a parlor trick, the way it would if it came from Cam—look at what I can do with a single word!—but rather as the literal, necessary diagramming of a situation.
This sinewy style doesn’t always hit. On Jones’ solo debut, 2004’s overstuffed On My Way to Church, he tries to kick it into double-time or exaggerate it to the point of near-genuflection. The album’s big commercial play has the distinct feel of an overmatched MC struggling to keep up with shifting trends. When the verses grow anonymous, there’s nothing to hang onto—especially on an album so sonically directionless, where Jones’ increasingly uncanny voice is not yet the dominant texture. Despite this, Church is frequently effective and dotted with moments, like the venomous Eazy-E homage “Certified Gangstas” or “Only One Way Up” (where he says “I contradict whatever the government says”), when Jones’ way of expressing himself is entrancingly but almost imperceptibly alien.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer goes to significant lengths to reframe Jones as someone around whom other emerging styles would orbit. He was no longer going to make songs called “Crunk Muzik” to shore up support among listeners disinterested in the finer points of Harlem politics; he was going to bare his past, his self. Its opening song is called, literally, “My Diary,” and sounds as if a child opened a music box and found Ed Koch’s New York.
That song practically sweats; Jones bursts in with a string of sparsely rendered details, the smug beat cops, the cautious senior citizens, the blocks “hot like saunas.” When Diary of a Summer is at its best, Jones and his collaborators treat neighborhood gossip like ancient myth, both for its mammoth stakes and the way it grows from generation to generation like a game of telephone. Later on “My Diary,” Jones promises to show the listener the spots where specific men and women died, and where they’ve been commemorated in murals. “Like who?” a disembodied voice—Jones, of course—asks. “Like Porter and them,” he mumbles, the rote facts (Rich Porter, b. 7/26/64, d. 1/3/90, murdered with $2,239 in his pocket) a point of assumed familiarity.
If you were to describe any component part of Harlem: Diary of a Summer, it would fail to communicate just how odd the record is. Two tracks after “My Diary,” Max B, then recently released from the prison sentence he began serving as a teenager and about to embark on one of the stranger, more rewarding creative tears in rap history, delineates 139th and 140th Streets as if they were distinctly different environments. “Harlem” is a trove of this sort of information, with cross streets punctuating nearly every bar, with men sitting on crates like La-Z-Boys, with shuttered nightclubs and cacophonous dice games and “fly jackets from Carlos at the mall.” Senses flood back unpredictably: On “Penitentiary Chances,” Jones marks a time period as having run “since chicken lo mein and rice.”
Unlike in his formative, pre-9/11 work, when his voice would bounce into the higher register usually occupied by Cam—and unlike the songs on On My Way to Church, which feature the lower tone but can’t figure out how to use it as an anchor—Jones’ voice on Diary of a Summer is totalizing. It’s able to tie together such disparate beats as Pete Rock’s shimmering Dionne Warwick sample on “G’s Up” and “We Just Ballin,” which flips Fearless Four’s “Rockin’ It” in a slightly more frenetic manner than Jay and the Hitmen had for “(Always Be My) Sunshine.” Jones’ voice actually has a lot in common with the “Rockin’ It” instrumental, in the way it leaves a slightly metallic aftertaste.
Diary of a Summer is occasionally overproduced, with the inharmonious “Penitentiary Chances” being the worst offender. But Jones flourishes in the numerous pockets of negative space. So much air flows through Develop’s ominous beat for “Ride Wit Me” that the intermittent gaps in my terrible Bluetooth connection only heightened its tension. “Ride Wit Me” is the best argument for Jones as a technical rapper and as one who understands his limitations. Excising the stilted double-time he had lapsed into on Church, Jones here leaves himself enough space to speed up then slow back down while retaining the grit and agita that makes his verses unmistakable. He complicates the patterns just enough to arrest the listener, but never to the point of distraction: The swing he adopts beginning on the line “Let’s go sightseeing” actually reemphasizes the text. This comes after an opening verse from Juelz who, at the other end of the spectrum, is at his best precisely because he works himself into a pique where each bar sounds as if it might send him careening off a cliff. That a song this razor-sharp can be made to flow naturally out of the lewd, swaggering “Honey Dip” is a testament to the unifying power of Jones’ part-robotic baritone.
When it comes to more classic strains of production, one of the signature examples of big-budget, post-G funk sampling is Chucky Thompson’s flip of the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” for the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa.” On Big’s song, the Isleys’ classic is rich, luxurious, unhurried. But Jones’ version, “Summer Wit’ Miami,” turns it delirious. An ode to the city where he would often escape to write, record, and sit in pleather club booths, the single feels like one of the till-dawn nights Jones raps about—expensive but never classy, a wave of pleasure that makes no attempt to mask its attendant comedown. It’s indulgently shameless, and the obviousness of its source material is merely one of its audacious embellishments.
Speaking of audacious embellishments: Too few albums tuck true heat checks at the very end, sneaking their best songs in right as time expires. “Baby Girl” is the most electric thing Jones has ever recorded; he finds a bounce early and never lets it go. Elsewhere on Diary of a Summer, Jones had ironed out the kinks in his clumsier, earlier style. But here he sounds downright nimble, dancing just ahead of and then just behind the drums, pausing, sneering. It’s built around a Max chorus, but for once he’s merely the architecture—Jones has landed, at last, at the intersection of muscularity and verve.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer was released as New York began wringing its hands about the city’s role in 21st-century rap. The news that Nas was planning to call an album Hip Hop Is Dead was treated either as confirmation that the genre’s birthplace and old guard were returning to save it, or that they’d fallen painfully out of touch. Emerging subgenres, like the snap music pinging out of Atlanta, were derided as catering to cell phone providers, new stars like Young Jeezy seen as insubstantial and cynical. This was an odd time for mainstream rap in general, in part because the evaporating CD-sales economy was changing the way money flowed into artists’ recording budgets. But the uneasiness of this transition was pathologized in the five boroughs like nowhere else.
The most interesting thing New York-made rap had to offer in this period was, in fact, Max. Despite being behind bars from the beginning of 2007 on—the bulk of his catalog was recorded at breakneck pace during a roughly 18-month period of freedom—Max’s mixtapes warped 50 Cent’s pop sensibilities into something delightfully atonal and even more fatalistic. It sounded as if his material boasts, musings on death, and askance humor were all poking out of a swamp. He was both more musical and more guttural than Jones, and quickly revealed himself to be, in his way, one of the most colorful writers in rap—and a frequent, chronically underpaid ghostwriter for Jones, as Max would allege in interviews once their relationship began to deteriorate.
A little over a year after Diary of a Summer, Jones dropped his third album, Hustler’s P.O.M.E. (Product of My Environment), which features Max on seven of its 16 songs. It’s not exactly Ghost on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, but his influence looms just as large: “We Fly High,” which became the biggest hit of Jones’ career, leans so heavily on Max’s croaking style that Jones has been dogged for years by questions about its authorship. The pair fell out over the sort of arcane business details that ended up litigated ad infinitum on then-thriving rap blogs; Jones’ later singles, like 2008’s Ron Browz-produced Auto-Tune odyssey “Pop Champagne,” sound like an artist chasing the protégé.
By the end of the 2000s, Jones’ status in New York rap had somewhat receded. Artists like Max and Stack Bundles had carried his steam-engine style to divergent extremes: Where Max had made elastic the rigid frameworks of what Jones was doing, Stacks, a remarkable rapper who was murdered in 2007, coiled it around him like a snake, rapping in a booming, slightly processed voice as he wended through complicated technical passages and staccato bursts of syllables, all arranged into arch DJ Clue-era punchlines.
At the beginning of the 2010s, it briefly seemed that French Montana would be the one to keep Jones’ brand of brawny linearity in the mainstream. Instead, New York rap splintered: into the woozy, slight psychedelia of A$AP Rocky’s work with Clams Casino; into the minimalist revision of ’90s mafia rap that Roc Marciano pioneered; into the drill music ported over from Chicago and London. When stone-serious punchline rap by men approaching middle age came back into vogue, it was via Buffalo natives Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher, whose songs sound beamed in from an alternate timeline where Dipset never existed.
Though not technically his debut, Harlem: Diary of a Summer is Jones’ version of the widescreen, cinematic introduction that rappers had been making for two decades, scanned through a thousand Xerox machines until the degradation and distortion became part of the work itself. Whether it’s “My Diary”’s conflation of the innocent and the rugged or “Harlem”’s refusal to cater to the uninitiated, Jim Jones made his one truly essential record by isolating what was at his core—what was no longer reducible. | 2023-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Koch | October 22, 2023 | 8.1 | a5b90857-ba52-4376-9b6d-3ba06afb1567 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
One of the all-time great indie rock records is reissued in 2xLP form, with new liner notes and an extra disc of rare tracks. | One of the all-time great indie rock records is reissued in 2xLP form, with new liner notes and an extra disc of rare tracks. | The Dismemberment Plan: Emergency & I [Vinyl Reissue] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14979-emergency-i-vinyl-reissue/ | Emergency & I [Vinyl Reissue] | The liner notes for the reissue of the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I come as an oral history: interviews with the band, label types, and D.C. scene staples, touching on everything from the death of singer Travis Morrison's father shortly before the album's conception to the band's oft-repeated, ill-conceived goal to cross-pollinate Radiohead and De La Soul. Among the best bits is Morrison's story of sketching the album's now-famous cover on his computer, then showing it off to skeptical friends. "People would just stare at me," he remembers. "It's a weird image. I've seen people with tattoos of it in the last few years."
To a certain segment of indie kids, many now indie adults, branding ourselves permanently with that weird sunset scene seems no stranger than an older dude's Black Flag bars or a youngster's Funeral laptop wallpaper. To many, Emergency & I, first released in 1999, is that record; breakup balm, to be sure, but also the voice in your head, the thing that seems to say as much about us as we know about ourselves. Though its influence on music at large has been difficult to chart, if we're to gauge a work's import by what it's meant to the people that come across it, Emergency & I is one of indie's key LPs. Its songs-- nervy, cacophonous, uncomfortably real-- actually mean something to people, whether they came to the record recently or have been letting it run through their lives for the last decade and change.
The history of Emergency & I isn't contained in the particulars of Eric Axelson's bass tone, or the band's brush-up with Interscope, or how much they liked Brainiac, or what was or wasn't going on in D.C. in the late 1990s. That stuff is just the prelude. Fact is, the history of Emergency & I lies with the people; people who hear too much of themselves in "The Jitters", who've vented spleen to the tune of "What Do You Want Me to Say?", who've cast off all shackles to the strains of "Back and Forth". Morrison claims not to grasp the significance of the album's title, but it's always seemed fairly obvious to me: There's the encroaching chaos of modern life-- the emergency-- and then there's you, standing outside it, yet inextricably linked. Emergency & I is a record about learning how to live with both.
Better than anyone, Morrison captures that awful, driftless, locked-up feeling you back yourself into sometimes; bored at work, unlucky in love, low on friends, lower on prospects. You're unsure where to move, be it another city or into another room, or whether either is worth the effort; that feeling, so perfectly articulated in "The City", that "something seems to happen somewhere else," yet for reasons financial and social and geographical alike, you're powerless to do anything about it. Call it self-insult to existential injury: You're so down, you start counting yourself out. That's "Spider in the Snow", in which a change of scenery still means the "same VCR, the same cats"; the same rut. That's "Memory Machine", in which eternal life seems little more than an excuse to chain-smoke. That, especially, is "The Jitters", in which our sick and sad protagonist can't bring himself to do much more than 10,000 push-ups a day.
But allowing himself to wallow or pointing fingers at everyone but himself, Morrison assesses the situation, turns over the problems in his head, sorts out what's in his control and what's out of it, and moves along. He sometimes invents elaborate metaphysical devices-- the all-access pass of "You Are Invited", the memory machine of "Memory Machine"-- to explain away what a more rational observation couldn't, but he's a strikingly realistic, austere lyricist, detailing just how dull feeling like crap can be, encouraging action even when he's not so certain he can manage it himself. He's not striving for perfection, just normalcy. That's struggle enough.
All this, Morrison delivers deftly, elastically, switching up cadence to match the mood. In 2011, an indie rock frontman copping to liking rap doesn't merit mention, but Morrison's MC-inspired delivery was and is rather novel; his voice alone is just a few notches above merely okay, yet he's never less than a commanding presence on the mic, able to pull off sharp tone-switches and jutting asides with the unusual clarity of a guy who's picked up just as much from Rakim as Ian MacKaye. Drummer Joe Easley's gifts are immediately apparent, his beefy, hyperkinetic style owing as much to dusty rock royalty as the then-contemporary drum'n'bass the band were clearly keen on. Axelson's basswork is unparalleled in both speed and tone. Jason Caddell's guitar weaves in and out of the tunes; they're a rock band, but not a guitar band per se, and Caddell's reserve is a big reason why they rarely get lumped in with the glut of D.C.'s spazzy post-hardcore contemporaries. And that woozy synth, a frequent presence throughout Emergency, beautifully echoes the weary resolve of Morrison's lyrics. Nearly as much as his voice and their explosive rhythm section, that keyboard smear is the sound of Emergency & I.
The Plan's melodic sense was unusual, borderline dissonant, and their arrangements curiously spare and well-considered. It's a busy record but never cluttered; weird but not altogether alien; lush and constantly transmogrifying. It is a perfectly realized sound-- difficult if not impossible to imitate. Not even the band itself ever quite sounded like this anywhere else. As the liners explain, at some point during the sessions, all assembled parties came to the realization that what they were working on was really something special. The reissue comes with a smattering of enjoyable singles, but even the best of those-- the barnstorming "B.O.B." rewrite "The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich"-- feels thin and frenzied next to the vibrant, remarkably self-assured Emergency & I material.
That tension between musical perfection and lyrical uncertainty is the heart of Emergency & I; here you have these incredibly exacting musicians playing this gorgeous, frantic, hyperstylized pop who then let some neurotic chart his insecurities over top. And yet the two disparate sides form an electrifying symbiosis. The music seems to alchemize around Morrison's lyrics, throbbing and melting to match the mood: "The Jitters" is the most downtrodden in tone and tempo alike, steady closer "Back and Forth" echoes a kind of acceptance with the state of things, frantic Brainiac hat-tip "Girl O'Clock" feels like the murderous sexual frustration it depicts. "8 1/2 Minutes" is positively apocalyptic, its whirring keyboards and Axelson's humongous bass runs akin to sonic blitzkrieg, and while the world ends around him, all Morrison can talk about is how beautiful it is. It's a survival strategy, the self-obsessive's way of navigating the world, a way to keep the emergency at bay. That's what Morrison seems to be positing throughout Emergency & I, urged along by its crazy rhythms: Retreat is as good as defeat. Bad as it gets, you've gotta keep moving.
I was a teenager when I first heard Emergency & I, still months from college, in a relationship I sensed then was shaky and know now was doomed. Back then, it was a constant. It deepened further for a couple years afterward, after I'd discovered all sorts of instincts I couldn't trust, after I'd found that I too can put myself on pause the way Morrison does in "The Jitters". I set it aside for a while in my mid-twenties, convinced I'd juiced the thing of all its meaning; then I lost a job and a best friend in quick succession, and I buried myself in it again, uncovering untold solace in the same old lines. Talking about these songs with others over the past few weeks, arguing over their slippery meanings, there's precious little in the way of consensus; we've all used it for breakups, for family emergencies, for nights when we're feeling low and can't quite settle on the source. But there's so much in these songs, so many situations to which they seem to hold up a mirror, what we take from them seems forever in flux. Their history, like ours, is constantly changing. One thing keeps coming up, though: Everyone I've talked to mentions that they can't imagine getting through their twenties without it. I certainly couldn't have. Bet those guys who made it feel the same way. | 2011-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | January 11, 2011 | 10 | a5bf4fb3-3aa3-41c8-925c-471657acde05 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Working with classic hardware synths, the Russian musician makes dark, dreamlike techno infused with her ethereal vocals. | Working with classic hardware synths, the Russian musician makes dark, dreamlike techno infused with her ethereal vocals. | Kedr Livanskiy: Ariadna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kedr-livanskiy-ariadna/ | Ariadna | After the release of her arresting debut EP last year, Moscow’s Yana Kedrina (aka Kedr Livanskiy) had us guessing where she would turn next. Pairing chunky beats with delicate, shape-shifting synths and her cloudlike vocals, Kedrina summons a sense of nostalgia that permeates her lo-fi techno-pop. Kedrina has cited numerous artists that have influenced her sound, and while she channels the otherworldly IDM of Boards of Canada, the rudimentary electro of Kraftwerk, and the resplendent atmospheres of Cluster & Eno on her new album, Ariadna, she’s more in line with the current wave of idiosyncratic techno producers like Patricia and Huerco S.
There’s a whisper of reverb around almost every element on Ariadna, which glues the tracks together with a well-worn patina. Transitioning from a software-only approach to classic analog synthesizers like Roland’s SH-101 and Juno 106, Kedrina maintains the aesthetic she embraced on January Sun while using era-specific equipment better suited to the windswept air that characterizes her tracks. This shift toward hardware allowed Kedrina to feel out her music differently than before—“a flow of live interaction” that she says feels more “raw and sacred” than making music purely on the computer. On Ariadna, her synths sound sweeter than ever, though her rich ideas are sometimes tripped up by a fixation on grainy texture that can feel like a crutch rather than an artistic choice.
“Ariadna” opens the album with a brightness that remains for the ensuing nine tracks, although Kedrina’s lyrics take introspective turns that belie the vastness of her production. The tunnel-vision techno on “Za Oknom Vesna” (“Spring Outside”) plunges into weightless splendor. The lush arrangement evokes a foggy, chilly spring evening, and Kedrina sings about her isolation as the earth comes back to life: “За окном весна, не зови меня, / Я всегда одна, я гуляю одна” (“Spring is in the air/Don’t ask for me/I always roam alone”). Every song on Ariadna (save the instrumental “Sad One”) references natural phenomena, and Kedrina’s techno-infused pop suggests the intimacy of a confined space while reaching toward the ineffable, like staring through a skylight in a tiny apartment.
In the moments when Kedrina holds back, as on “Sunrise Stop” and “Love & Cigarettes,” her disaffected monotone fails to highlight her talents as a vocalist. But on the title track and the vinyl-only bonus “Sunset,” she gracefully layers her feather-light voice with driving techno, conjuring dark, dreamlike atmospheres. When she lets the drums rest, the album’s ambient turns are refreshing: Both “Mermaid” and “Sad One” feature aquatic synths that are gentle and enveloping.
When Kedrina lets loose, she makes some seriously punishing tunes. The booming electro of “ACDC” features Cleaners From Venus frontman Martin Newell reciting an 18th-century William Blake poem while a crisp breakbeat rolls across buzzing synths. “Za Oknom Vesna” is dubby warehouse fare that’s both wistful and life-affirming. Both of these tracks capture the same raw power of artists like Marie Davidson or Moscow’s Buttechno (who designed the album cover), but they are subdued by gentle currents that are more suited for headphone listening than in the club.
Across Ariadna, Kedrina deftly balances punchy beats while exploring diverse rhythms and moods. She incorporates a number of styles—snappy electro, rolling jungle, thumping techno—all anchored by her wispy voice. Kedrina sings in her native Russian, which means that for non-Russophones, her vocal scan primarily as emotional resonance and sonic texture. On her 2015 single “Sgoraet,” and elsewhere across January Sun, Kedrina’s ethereal performance hinted at her talents. On Ariadna, Kedrina proves that while her voice can comfortably rest front and center in the mix, it’s just as compelling when it hides behind tumbling beats in a gorgeous, subdued haze. | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2MR | September 7, 2017 | 7.4 | a5bf814a-a816-48ed-98a7-e6e491faba0f | Jesse Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-weiss/ | |
The Detroit rapper and the famed producer rejoin forces for a spare, melancholy, and psychedelic album, solidifying their partnership as one of the most rewarding team-ups in hip-hop. | The Detroit rapper and the famed producer rejoin forces for a spare, melancholy, and psychedelic album, solidifying their partnership as one of the most rewarding team-ups in hip-hop. | Boldy James / The Alchemist: Bo Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-the-alchemist-bo-jackson/ | Bo Jackson | The four collaborative projects Boldy James released over last year—The Price of Tea in China with producer Alchemist in February, Manger on McNichols with jazz musician Sterling Toles in July, The Versace Tape with comedian-turned-producer Jay Versace in August, and Real Bad Boldy with the music/fashion collective Real Bad Man in December—appointed different set dressings to James’ stone-faced corner-boy tales. He doesn’t recall memories of stained prison windows and being dehydrated on drug runs so much as he actively relives them, every fragment a scar on his brain. The sheer amount of stories he has, combined with his deep pool of references and relaxed voice, makes him a deceptively capable rapper, switching flows and speeds on a dime. “I let the beat tell me what to do,” he once told me during an interview with DJBooth. “I got enough game and life experiences to fill in the blanks.”
Of all the producers he’s worked with over the last two years, none have enhanced his raps more than the Alchemist. Their relationship stretches back to at least the early 2010s, but the duo reunited as Alchemist’s beats began morphing into more psychedelic patterns. Tea in China brought a widescreen flair to the double act first established on 2013’s My 1st Chemistry Set and 2019’s Boldface, with James bending his memories around the corners of Alchemist’s smokey creations. Bo Jackson, the duo’s latest collaboration, continues to match James’ descriptive paranoia against Alchemist’s ever-expanding palette.
James’ ability to switch between passive and active voice during his stories is staggering. Bo Jackson’s most explicit example is the opening song “Double Hockey Sticks,” which begins with a jump from his jewelry “cuttin’ up like I’m Mike Myers” to an isolated memory of bagging drugs in the basement like the Dungeon Family. The jumpy beat-switch midway through telegraphs a new direction without spoiling the specifics. Over Alchemist’s wailing siren and syncopated drums, James stitches together a grandmother’s advice, successful bail hearings, and laceless Dolce & Gabbana sneakers into a wavy tapestry. He doesn’t dwell on his victory over the court system, he glosses over it like a found item on a grocery list, just another footnote on the path to his next mission. The story of “Double Hockey Sticks” is fleet and nonlinear, drawing the ear with trap rhythms that keep pace with Alchemist’s equally erratic style.
This is the great trick of Boldy James and Alchemist’s union: As opposed to his more formalist boom-bap with rappers like Prodigy or Conway the Machine, Alchemist’s work with James is dynamic and kaleidoscopic. That’s not to say that the boom-bap and bare loops are gone, but James always tests their boundaries. He waltzes through the creaky piano of “E.P.M.D.,” slightly staggering his delivery in the middle of what seems like a predictable scheme. The drums on “Speed Trap” and “Flight Risk” sputter and pop in unexpected places, and James skips effortlessly across them. Bo Jackson isn’t as baroque as Alchemist’s work on Armand Hammer’s Haram, but it certainly taps into the same playful and melancholy atmosphere.
No matter what kind of sounds James rides throughout the project, his words cut through the clutter. His monotone voice amplifies the details in his writing: every lost friend, every Xanax popped to forget the unforgettable, every second taken to thank God he made it out of the life he was born into. “All this pressin’ is depressin’, the pressure is still pressin’/Against a nigga flesh, it’s beyond measure,” he says on closing track “Drug Zone.” On “Illegal Search & Seizure,” an entire friendship—from playing Double Dragon and smoking weed with a friend to dealing with the fallout of said friend snitching years later—plays out in just under two minutes. Like Vince Staples on his recent self-titled album, James’ sharp eye says more than a change in voice or a maudlin vocal sample ever could: The pain is in the details, no matter how numb they may sound. It’s gripping to the point of paralysis.
Much of the credit for Bo Jackson’s stellar mood-setting will go to Alchemist for continuing to push the boundaries of the modern hip-hop underground, and some of these beats are among his best (“Turpentine” and “Photographic Memories,” in particular, are masterclasses in sample collage). But Boldy James consistently stands ten toes next to his legendary partner. In fact, he’s only getting better. A producer with Eminem, Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and Teejayx6 on speed-dial doesn’t just work with anybody. James has been holding his own for a decade, and Bo Jackson is more proof that the spark of their creative reunion was no fluke.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ALC | August 17, 2021 | 8 | a5c61907-e180-40b4-b269-35e84ed0360f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Lil Yachty-led rap crew’s debut mixtape has a handful of memorable moments, but its members are mostly on autopilot. | The Lil Yachty-led rap crew’s debut mixtape has a handful of memorable moments, but its members are mostly on autopilot. | Concrete Boys: It’s Us Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/concrete-boys-its-us-vol-1/ | It’s Us Vol. 1 | First, Lil Yachty spent a year doing so-so Michigan rapper cosplay. Then he moved on to his Tame Impala wannabe vanity project. Now, his next racket is a rap crew. That group is Concrete Boys, a five-member collective that, with Yachty as their frontman, includes the rappers Camo!, Draft Day, Karrahbooo, and Dc2trill (the latter is from Texas, and the only one of the five without any ties to Atlanta). In the last few months, the clique has formally introduced themselves with a string of pretty music videos, a viral On the Radar freestyle, and color-coordinated photo shoots. All of these efforts have led up to their debut compilation album It’s Us Vol. 1, where they seem to be presenting themselves as a modern-day version of the kind of rap crews who would have had a spread in a mid-’90s issue of The Source. That homage is loose and mostly sartorial instead of musical: On the album cover, the five are dressed in vintage Polo Sport and Tommy Hilfiger, Timberland boots, and jean shorts—outfits that make them look like they’re extras in Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga.
It’s Us Vol. 1 has much less of an identity than Concrete Boys’ fit pics. Their thing is that they’re cool, I guess. That wouldn’t be a problem if the music itself oozed cool. The album just doesn’t do that. In fact, the main appeal is that it’s an innocuous, easy-listening collection of songs—perfect to throw on in the background while you chat with your friends or pass time on your commute. Like Drake, Yachty has become an expert at dissecting and shaving the rough edges off regional and internet sounds. Here, he’s streamlined the highly collaborative, shit-talking spirit he picked up in Michigan, giving that style a neater, smoother, and more widely accessible sheen (If you’ve wished for music with the structure of Michigan rap, but with less chaos, then this is for you). For instance, the tape is heavy on punchline-based rhyming, but the bars are fairly tame and only mildly clever. And there are a decent number of beats that bring to mind the chill bounce of Detroit producer Topside’s instrumentals for Baby Smoove and Babyface Ray, except they’re not as funky (see: “Playa Walkin”). One way or another, it’s hard to get worked up about this music.
Each member of Concrete Boys has their moments. Draft Day has the most memorable voice of the crew, like he’s rapping with strep throat. It’s best in spurts, but when he pops back in on “2 Hands 2 Eyes 10 Whips/Rent Due” for a second verse after a hardened beat switch-up, his strained vocals reach Lil Wop levels, which gives the song an energy boost. Camo! is the most anonymous of the bunch—not sure what’s going on with that Jersey club flip of Pinegrove he sings over on the intro—but he can sometimes drift into a Lil Wayne-influenced zone of wisecracks. “Put my fingers inside her holes, I’m tryna bowl you,” he spits on “Hit Diff.” That’s about as funny as he gets. Dc2trill is the clique’s smooth-talker; he’s decent at it, gliding with a Curren$y-like ease on the jazzy “My Life.” Yachty is pretty much on autopilot, but he seems to have a good time when he raps with Karrahbooo. Surprisingly, her bored, deadpan flow on highlights like “Where Yo Daddy?” and “Not Da 2” has a way of making pretty simple flexes and quips stick.
It’s Us Vol. 1 mostly works as a launchpad for Karrahbooo; she’s the only one of the bunch who will leave you wanting to hear a solo mixtape. The video for their On the Radar cypher—the recording of which is included on the tape—is a solid glimpse at that potential. For four and a half minutes, the boys spit inoffensive and fine-enough verses that eventually blend together over a hypnotic, naked sax sample. It’s all build-up for the final minute, where the song really comes alive. There, Karrahbooo takes the floor, as the skittering Michigan drums kick in and her unbothered, sleepwalking flow elevates a show-offy trip down memory lane: “I was sellin’ lemonade while y’all would double dutch/I used to scam, I used to trap, I never cuddled much.” In that minute, you almost forget anything that came before her verse—aside from the fact that the guys had on nice outfits. | 2024-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Concrete Rekordz / Quality Control | April 15, 2024 | 6.1 | a5caeaee-2e57-4245-b3f1-82df5e1eb616 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Sunny Day Real Estate singer returns from a long hiatus with a crowd-funded solo album that reconciles his singer/songwriter instincts with his lavish orchestral ambitions. | The Sunny Day Real Estate singer returns from a long hiatus with a crowd-funded solo album that reconciles his singer/songwriter instincts with his lavish orchestral ambitions. | Jeremy Enigk: Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremy-enigk-ghosts/ | Ghosts | Jeremy Enigk’s distaste for self-promotion is a relic from a time when reticence was an invaluable asset. Emo bands in the 1990s tended to be accessible and relatable, but Sunny Day Real Estate shunned press and for a time even refused to tour California; Enigk’s enigmatic nature, an extension of his otherworldly vocals, only added to the mystique that set the band apart from its peers. But while they made the record that tops basically every “Great Emo Albums” list in existence (and a subsequent one that’s more deserving), they spent most of the past decade on the sideline, about the only major act from their time that failed to capitalize on rejuvenated interest in the genre. Funded by PledgeMusic and supported with a living-room tour, Ghosts is entirely reliant upon his hustle. Not surprisingly, a common response to news of a new Jeremy Enigk album has been something like, “There’s a new Jeremy Enigk album?” But this works to Enigk’s advantage: When an indie-rock legend returns from a long hiatus with his finest album of the 21st century, it should feel like a bolt from the blue.
Keywords like “emo,” “DIY,” or even “Sunny Day Real Estate” won’t provide much guidance on Ghosts. When Enigk is left to his own devices, the sonic hallmarks of punk or hardcore have always been exchanged for the exact things they once opposed: the earnest, stately sprawl of artists like U2, Big Country, Peter Gabriel, and even Seal. This music tends to sound spiritual by default—devotion expressed not so much by quavering human vessels as by the magnificent architecture surrounding them. This was a logical trajectory, as Enigk’s vocals and religious leanings became more pronounced over time, but rarely was he bigger than the sound. Sunny Day Real Estate could’ve passed for a Tooth & Nail band on the bombastic The Rising Tide, and without that album’s counterbalance of heaving Guitar Center riffs and melodic sweep, the Fire Theft and his 2006 album World Waits were either too bloated to achieve liftoff or toppled over from their own clutter. His most recent solo album, OK Bear, appeared to be a course correction: a humble collection of zippy modern rock, as if that’s what anyone actually wanted from Jeremy Enigk.
Enigk is done trying to reconcile his orchestral ambitions with his singer/songwriter instincts; they’re now the same thing. The lavish, awe-inspiring design of Ghosts might be unexpected, given the album’s crowd-funded origins, though less so considering its eight-year gestation period, a complete lack of external pressure, and no apparent desire to acknowledge any contemporary trends. Rather than retracing familiar crescendos and dynamics, the songs on Ghosts levitate from the outset and maintain their altitude, anachronisms meant to be marveled at like zeppelins. The elements are familiar, just upscaled. Ruminative acoustic guitar figures are played on 12 strings, not six; the drum kit booms and swells like tympani; if there’s a violin in the mix, there’s probably a whole string section.
Rarely does Enigk sound like he’s fronting a power trio. The curiously cynical “Amazing Worlds” is the one instance that recalls the sad songs and waltzes of The Rising Tide, only given a luminous, stained-glass polish. But Ghosts never gives the impression that Enigk is trying to force majestic arrangements on songs that either don’t need them or can’t support them. “What else can I say but I miss you?” he sings over harp-like plucks on “Ancient Road,” which sounds like it was workshopped in cathedrals and arenas rather than on a 4-track in his bedroom; in these situations, it’s fun to imagine whether ecclesiastical emo advocate Julien Baker’s albums were inspired by Jeremy Enigk or vice versa. It’s even more fun to hear Enigk when he’s set it motion; “Sacred Fire” may hew a little close to the coffee-shop electronica of Dido and Beth Orton, but the self-explanatory “Onaroll” is a career highlight, emerging from a pulsing, muted house beat to a crescendo worthy of How It Feels to Be Something On. It’s worth considering what a vocalist with Enigk’s ecstatic capacity could accomplish collaborating with a savvy and open-minded dance producer.
Conversely, those who found tear-stained ballads like “Rain Song” and “The Ocean” to be a renunciation of SDRE’s emo roots rather than an evolution will almost certainly find Ghosts to be cloying—if titles like “Sacred Fire” suggest Enigk getting a little too precious, lyrics like “Open the secret door to your heart” and “In a game of give and take, you always take too much” aren’t here to make an argument. “Victory” sounds like exactly that, and would be a more appropriate contribution to a superhero flick than his last one. “The Long Wait Is Over” is every bit as transparent: The hi-def reverb and patient pace are proof enough that whatever we were waiting for, it was for a long-ass time, and the insistent cymbal crashes and octave leaps towards the end are the relief. While Enigk’s 21st-century albums have been criticized as overly bombastic, Ghosts proves in hindsight that they weren’t big and direct enough. Diary is his past; becoming an open book is his future. | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Lewis Hollow | January 3, 2018 | 7.4 | a5d23d3e-3bb0-4711-83a2-093a37457a99 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Providence-based Downtown Boys create fiery punk rock with a sharp political edge. Their lyrics challenge white hegemony, entitled bro culture, and more while the music offers a distinctive mix of buzzsaw guitars and saxophone. | The Providence-based Downtown Boys create fiery punk rock with a sharp political edge. Their lyrics challenge white hegemony, entitled bro culture, and more while the music offers a distinctive mix of buzzsaw guitars and saxophone. | Downtown Boys: Full Communism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20584-full-communism/ | Full Communism | If you want to know why Downtown Boys sound so angry on their debut album Full Communism, watch the music video for "Wave of History". In the clip, the Providence-based band outlines the realities of prison overcrowding, the racial divide in U.S. arrest rates, and the number of people killed by police—very real problems that, for many, are remarkably easy to ignore. Our screens offer countless alternatives to anything remotely "unpleasant" or "depressing"; even as militarized police line city streets and 24-hour news networks, they're forced to compete with a bottomless pit of interspecies friendship GIFs.
Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys engages with the country's broken systems and the resulting frustration fuels her lyrics. The 28-year-old worked for the Rhode Island Public Defender, aiming to combat racist and classist policing tactics. She currently works with Demand Progress, and she recently wrote an op-ed on Ferguson. Joey L DeFrancesco, 27, was her co-worker at a hotel; they attempted to start a union since the employees were, as he described it, "treated...like garbage." (DeFrancesco later quit that job with magnificent flair.) "Sometimes people ask, 'Don’t you get sad worrying about this stuff all the time?'" Ruiz said. "It upsets me because it is negative and absolves the person of the responsibility of realizing that we all have to think about these things."
Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you. The title "Break a Few Eggs" pretty well encapsulates the nature of the project. Songs challenge white hegemony, entitled bro culture, and more with churning rock'n'roll lined with Adrienne Berry and Emmett FitzGerald's saxophones. (Between this album and that Pill EP, it's been a good year thus far for the rock sax.) DeFrancesco's guitar, Norlan Olivo's drums, and Dan Schleifer's bass lock in for a fuzzy, chugging barrage. Racism and homophobia are alluded to in shouts but the music isn't cynical; everything seems to be underpinned with the sincere desire that things actually get better. "We make, we made, we will make freedom," Ruiz sings in rapid succession on "Desde Arriba". They've talked about how they encourage a "space of collective power" at their live shows, which makes sense—Full Communism, both in message and mayhem, has the power to whip a roomful of people into a frenzy.
And that's the important bit—this music is saying some real shit, yeah, but it's doing it with a completely unhinged voice. As advocates of human rights, Downtown Boys are well-versed in the history of bland protest songs. "Political music is often cheesy or boring, so no one listens to it," DeFrancesco has said. "As much as we hate on aesthetics by themselves, they obviously matter." Matching substance with style is easier said than done—Downtown Boys could easily fall into punk's trap of loud and fast monotony. They don't, though, keeping things diverse and well-sequenced. Where the horns on "Monstro" lend a soft, beautiful counterbalance to DeFrancesco's jagged guitar, "Traders" is bookended by silence and goes full speed punk at the center.
Full Communism's songs are performed in both English and Spanish—Ruiz said the band approach music "with the intention to speak to as many people as possible." The album's last two tracks are covers—one in each language. There's "Poder Elegir" by Los Prisioneros, a song the Chilean band recorded as an effort to urge people to fight conformity and complacency during the rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The other: Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". When Ruiz shouts the Boss' world-weariness, she sounds as though she's already started a fire of her own. The covers are effective—the ideal pairing of pop infectiousness and calls to action. Downtown Boys insist that nothing's going to change unless people actually get up and do something, and they've offered a soundtrack that makes positive action feel both attainable and liberating. | 2015-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | May 8, 2015 | 7.6 | a5ddcd35-65ed-44f5-9c7e-59d613921f43 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The first album in 22 years from seminal New York post-hardcore band Quicksand is a structurally-obsessed work where beauty and brutality coexist. | The first album in 22 years from seminal New York post-hardcore band Quicksand is a structurally-obsessed work where beauty and brutality coexist. | Quicksand: Interiors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quicksand-interiors/ | Interiors | “Behind every tough guy is a little Smiths fan,” mused Walter Schreifels, Quicksand co-founder and post-hardcore pioneer, in a recent interview. Few would consider his observation controversial in 2017. If anything, it’s obvious—meatheads need their melodies too, you know. The 48-year-old Schreifels, on the other hand, came up amid New York City’s hardcore boom in the late 1980s: a time when punk relied more heavily on radical politics and performative masculinity than sonic risk-taking, when most tough guys would be too embarrassed to admit that they’d listened to the Smiths, much less considered themselves fans.
Not that Schreifels ever fancied himself a joiner. Calling his 32-year-career a “trajectory” is like calling a lightning strike “logical.” His end-game isn’t a question of aesthetics or style, but rather melodic energy, showcased in an ever-rotating array of short-lived projects over the past three decades: Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Moondog, CIV, and Rival Schools, to name a few.
Schreifels’ biggest claim to fame remains the seminal alt-metal outfit Quicksand, who joined the aforementioned tough guy and Smiths fan in unholy (and unprecedented) matrimony during their first run from 1990 to 1999. They may not have been the first hardcore band to peddle a contoured, measured version of their genre (that honor belongs to their onetime tourmates Fugazi), but they were definitely the heaviest. And as evidenced by their open embrace of shoegaze, space rock, and pop, they were also among the most forward-thinking groups of their scene, thereby ensuring the immortality of Quicksand’s first two albums—1993’s Slip and 1995’s Manic Compression—not just as cult classics, but as shoe-ins for the post-hardcore canon.
With the arrival of Interiors, Quicksand’s third LP and the band’s first recorded output in 22 years, it seems that Schreifels’ frenetic days have mostly come to an end. That’s not to say that he and the rest of the band—bassist Sergio Vega (currently of Deftones), drummer Alan Cage, and guitarist Tom Capone—have gone soft on us. With the help of producer Will Yip (Title Fight, Tigers Jaw), the group give their rusty machinery a much-needed upgrade befitting of their pit-starting gravitas—and prone to the odd glitch in pacing.
As the title suggests, Interiors is far and wide a structurally-obsessed work. Its 12 songs comprise a hard-rock triptych separated by spacey guitar interludes. Its three-track opening salvo, a hard-rock suite that’s propelled almost entirely by Vega and Cage’s percussive push-and-pull, hews the closest to the band’s pre-established MO. The pendulous “Illuminant” is one of the year’s most explosive icebreakers; “Under the Screw” is a queasy, deadpanned noise-rocker à la the Jesus Lizard. And the jittery “Warm and Low” is an anxiety-ridden ripper tormented by snarling bass, howitzer drum fills, and foreboding bursts of guitar.
What a pity, then, to find the band more or less dozing off after their spectacular opening tantrum, drifting aimlessly in a space-rock black hole for the bulk of Interiors. In the percolating refrain on “Cosmonauts,”’ Schreifels’ wailed “Where you are’s” swirl about the surrounding abyss like emo stardust, and it’s a sweet escape. But not so on the limpid title track, an approaching meteor strike that disintegrates long before impact, or “Hyperion,” which is basically “Cosmonauts” without the anguish (and by extension, the gravitas). Quicksand give the twitchy crushers another go-round following the second interlude, but by that point, the space sickness has long since set in.
Quicksand’s grungy alchemy, however spectacular in its own right, has always existed as the means for a transcendent end—or in the case of the New Yorkers, a sort of hardcore utopia where beauty and brutality coexist, harmoniously and symbiotically. Dynamic snags aside, Interiors’ lush, layered arrangements, coupled with the stellar opening run, stand as ear-catching testament to this noble mission, and the passion inspiring it. Even after two decades apart, Schreifels and his bandmates are still a force to be reckoned with, so long as they stand terra firma—half moshers, half Morrissey, wholly unmatched. | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Epitaph | November 15, 2017 | 6.4 | a5de589c-a37b-4b97-92f0-ec9ae6806bed | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
Evocative, emo-ish lyrics and Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents of noise once again color the work of this Scottish band. | Evocative, emo-ish lyrics and Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents of noise once again color the work of this Scottish band. | The Twilight Sad: Forget the Night Ahead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13493-forget-the-night-ahead/ | Forget the Night Ahead | Brooder James Graham is not a great storyteller. His mission-- along with his band of post-Mogwai Scottish noisemakers-- is to evoke. When Graham repeated lines like, "the kids are on fire in the bedroom," and, "in my dreams I watch Emily dance," on the Twilight Sad's debut LP, 2007's Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, the specifics were left hauntingly up in the air. It's a tactic used by several of the singer's self-serious forebears-- from Joy Division's Ian Curtis to Interpol's Paul Banks-- but one step too far into the abstract and there's too little for listeners to hang their own shared dilemmas upon. With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile-- especially when coupled with guitarist Andy MacFarlane's still-overwhelming Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents.
Since Fourteen Autumns contained many (albeit vague) references to a severely traumatic childhood, it often sounded like a form of coded primal scream therapy. The album cover showed a cartoon mother angrily waving her masked son away; the album's companion EP, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did, showed the masked son suffocating the same mother with a pillow. With his mommy and daddy issues sufficiently exorcised, Graham moves onto more adult worries with Forget the Night Ahead-- there's still no summer or spring in Twilight Sad World, and the days are even shorter this time around. And there's no youthful spirit to balance out the dread, either, as it's allowed to run amok throughout the album's 11 punishing tracks. To wit, the closest thing resembling a love song, the roiling "Interrupted", is topped off by Graham murmuring, "you and I will bury them all." It will not be played at weddings. Funerals, maybe.
While Graham has done many interviews over the last few years, he likes to keep mum when it comes to the meaning of his words. "I've never told anyone what my songs are about, and I don't intend to," he once said. And, in a recent Pitchfork interview, he had this to say about Forget the Night Ahead: "Things happened to me and [the album is] basically about trying to forget what happened." Such tactics are hardly enlightening, but they are smart. Because this band's tempest of meat-slap drums and fire-engine-from-hell distortion makes the mind go to disturbing places with very little provocation.
"The Room" is not a particularly detailed song title, but given the track's shadowy images of "nails in our feet" and a creepy "grandson's toy in the corner," it's pretty clear this four-walled space is not all that welcoming. "Look what you have done," says Graham on the song, without telling-- its central offense is as diabolical as you want it to be. The same fill-in-the-blank logic goes for careening stand-out "That Birthday Present", which is not about a Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Possibly alluding to an alcohol-addled friend/lover who can't help but miss their own candles burning out while going "nowhere," the track is a fireball of frustration and anger and gliding guitar corrosion. "The curtains closed again," sings Graham, offering an apropos visual to his own writing style-- listening to Forget the Night Ahead is like looking at silhouetted neighbors through a draped window; the shapes are there but it's hard to say whether someone's being murdered or preparing the family dinner.
With any sort of levity galaxies upon galaxies away, the LP's non-stop direness can read like a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e., while it may be hard to tell each song apart, the overall effect is not easy to shake. "You'll never have some honest fun," goes Graham on "Made to Disappear", perhaps offering a bit of self-flagellation for his own sins. And there is an almost puritanical streak running through the record-- shame, ghosts, and "people downstairs" are constantly encroaching on the singer's consciousness. So is Graham really such an immaculate downer? Guitarist MacFarlane gave his front man up ever-so-slightly in a recent interview, admitting that Graham often "sits in his hotel room on the Skype and we all go out partying" while on tour. While the hopeless, unrequited pair in the middle of "Seven Years of Letters" could seemingly end up simultaneously sipping poison, in reality, they just might be bawling through a webcam. We'll never know. Luckily, the Twilight Sad deal with the real world on their own heavily shrouded terms. | 2009-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | FatCat | September 24, 2009 | 7.3 | a5e5b66d-92e5-4da2-9103-5605ec0af931 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
After two astounding EPs last year, half of the droning duo Mountains returns with an intimate, affectionate album inspired by the birth of his child. | After two astounding EPs last year, half of the droning duo Mountains returns with an intimate, affectionate album inspired by the birth of his child. | BEAST: Ens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beast-ens/ | Ens | To paraphrase Kraftwerk, listening to Ens—the first full-length album from musical polymath and visual artist Koen Holtkamp as Beast—means contemplating the humanity of machine music. That issue is especially relevant these days at the intersection of much electronic, experimental, and modern classical music, where technology can often sink into or overload the mix. Holtkamp has operated in this space for nearly two decades, but the balance of virtues he achieved on a pair of 2017 EPs as Beast seemed to reframe the conversation entirely.
Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 retained the sweeping investigations of sonic space and tonal juxtapositions that Holtkamp has long pursued as part of the duo Mountains and in an extensive list of solo projects and collaborations. Holtkamp mapped music so broadly that meaning often dissipated into atmosphere; there’s an entire ecosystem of this kind of post-post-rock, not-really-classical, quasi-electronic music thriving in corners of Bandcamp. Yet Beast’s first seven pieces, created as soundtracks for Holtkamp’s laser projections, transcended the cliches of this environment. By abandoning string instruments and de-emphasizing his fascination with drone and dissonance, Holtkamp foregrounded a pulse as precise as the visuals it accompanied. Rhythmic lines wrapped around each other like digital ragas; though they were some of the least human sounds of Holtkamp’s career, they brimmed with deeply soulful movement and melody. The best kind of audio riddle, it was as if Steve Reich’s hand-played loops and Carl Craig’s synth arpeggios had merged.
On the surface, Ens exists in the same deeply electronic, heavily rhythmic sandbox, but human fingerprints are easy to discern here. Acoustic guitars help shape downsized compositions like “Boketto” and “Edb,” speaking to a more handmade listening experience. And for good reason: Holtkamp says Ens is a response to the birth of his child, an occasion that traditionally arouses a deeply intimate inspiration. Many of Holtkamp’s choices on Ens dovetail with the scenario of creating private music for young ears or shaping environments attuned to those needs. Closer “For Otto” invokes the wonder, exhaustion and apprehension of an old home taking on a new life not only with its title but also with its layers of treated sound, broad keyboard chords, and grey noise beneath a lightly pulsing music-box melody. The crux of loving the very domestic Ens, then, is how to engage with a project whose very inhumanity recently made it exceptional.
Depending on one’s inclination for the melodically gifted “pop” side of the classic IDM spectrum—WARPists such as Plaid and Plone, the first Morr Music releases, the Four Tet of Pause or Rounds—there is plenty to love on Ens. “Paprika Shorts” begins with a continuous synth-keyboard figure and adds a plucked acoustic string as a beat before a macro-processor sews all the rhythmic and tonal threads together into a gorgeous tapestry suited for folktronica purists. “Color Feel” folds an instrumental line that evokes both a harpsichord and a kora into a trotting piano rhapsody. Synths underpin the structure and add a futurist patina. “Color Feel” is the closest that Ens comes to democratizing propulsion for both concert hall and club.
It seems unfair that the primary drawback of Ens is a contempt bred by familiarity, especially when the inspiration for these seven pieces is so joyous. Yet there’s no doubt that where Beast’s EPs offered what felt like fresh answers to half-century-old questions about the relationship between composition and technology, Ens tables the queries, at least temporarily, for a strictly personal statement. However you approach its aesthetic beauty, that is a much less satisfying response. | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | December 1, 2018 | 6.8 | a5f05c8f-3e40-4f3b-b80a-1a58e5786c63 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
On their latest EP, the band crumples up angst and complacency and offers a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but fight. | On their latest EP, the band crumples up angst and complacency and offers a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but fight. | Show Me the Body: Survive EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/show-me-the-body-survive-ep/ | Survive EP | Last year, as the pandemic flared in New York and pundits declared the end of the city, as wealthy residents fled in droves, Show Me the Body’s Corpus collective of artists and musicians started offering self-defense classes on Zoom. “TRAIN TODAY,” one caption beckoned urgently. They may end up the last band in New York, but they’ll go out swinging, and on their latest EP Survive, they invite listeners to do the same.
While concepts like burnout and fatigue have become ubiquitous, vocalist Julian Cashwan-Pratt can’t relate. Flipping through TV channels, he sees gory beheadings on network dramas smeared together with footage of grand-standing presidents all as one big pageant of ginned-up emotion. He can only stand a few seconds before putting his foot through the screen. Or, as he sings on “Rubberband,” over the teeth-grinding pulse of synthesizers that sound like they were peeled off the bottom of a sneaker: “It’s no longer enough to survive.”
Show Me the Body crumple up angst and its accompanying complacency and give a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but train. As ever, every “you” in their lyrics is a coward, a scumbag, or a target of Cashwan-Pratt’s accusations. His voice is acrobatic across the EP, every spit, shriek, bellow, and burble used to mock, shake, and pull the listener out of their reverie into the living, bleeding world he inhabits.
On all three tracks, he rhymes “cry” with “die,” welding the concepts together as the EP progresses. “People on TV” starts, as the band’s songs often do, with an innocuous enough observation: “People on TV sure know how to die/Everyone at home knows how to cry,” he sings. Banjo and bass screech and creak ominously; and by the next lyric, the rage starts seeping through: “People who talk sure know how to lie.”
The EP’s title track is the culmination of this juxtaposition between death and tears. Cashwan-Pratt deadpans: “I never cry watching pigs die.” But as the sludgy bassline and shredded banjo pick up, he admits: “Cry for my people, man, I cry all the time.” He’s unable to participate in the trance of angst, the gray washout in which tragedy is directionless and accountability is just another casualty.
The music video for “Survive” is like a montage from a boxing movie or a shounen anime. Subjects do push-ups and sit-ups in kitchens that barely fit their bodies. Cashwan-Pratt, who directed the video, never instructs the actors to reflect the fury of the music on their faces; they stare, expressionless and glassy-eyed, past the viewer. The band is unendingly suspicious of farce—before mourning lost loved ones on “Rubberband,” Cashwan-Pratt stops himself, scoffing that “the words just cheapen the cost.” Instead, Show Me the Body recommits to the real and tangible: the heat of blood, of tears and concrete, and a reality worth fighting for.
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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. | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | March 23, 2021 | 7.7 | a5f5612c-ea22-47b7-9172-291513c9e443 | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
The Rochester band’s debut is a vicious and nauseating blast of classic death metal: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed. | The Rochester band’s debut is a vicious and nauseating blast of classic death metal: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed. | Undeath: Lesions of a Different Kind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/undeath-lesions-of-a-different-kind/ | Lesions of a Different Kind | Death is their chief lyrical concern and avowed metal subgenre, but the members of Rochester, New York’s Undeath share a decidedly life-affirming outlook. “I think all of us love death metal so much,” vocalist Alexander Jones explained to Invisible Oranges, “because when it’s done well, it sits right at the intersection of pure musicianship and mindless fun.” There is a specific type of fun he is referring to: the spine-tingling thrill of campy horror movies, of screaming unintelligibly for no reason at all, of song titles like “Kicked in the Protruding Guts” and “Chained to a Reeking Rotted Body.” It is the restless, ridiculous heartbeat underlying their music.
After a few well-loved demos, Undeath’s debut album, Lesions of a Different Kind, never leans too far to either side of the death metal pendulum. It is a vicious and nauseating blast: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed. What appeals about a song like “Acidic Twilight Visions” is the immediacy—a pummeling groove, a climactic solo, an honest-to-god chorus. But the closer you listen, the more you hear the virtuosity underlying their chaos, a complex web of interlocking parts that can turn on a dime from jackhammer shredding to guttural dissonance.
This old-school death metal, akin to the early work from fellow breakout revivalists like Tomb Mold and Blood Incantation, involves a purposeful lack of dynamics, indecipherable lyrics, and melodies that seem in danger of dissolving into a murky, low-end drone. The strength of the songs largely comes down to the riffs, which are remarkable throughout. Nearly every track opens with a memorable guitar part from Kyle Beam, and he guides his bandmates through an album that brings to mind plenty of the greats (Autopsy, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and more are saluted in the liner notes) but coheres into a singular force.
This confidence allows Lesions of a Different Kind to stand out in the field of gory death metal worship. It also helps that the band has leveled up on the production, resulting in an album built for repeated listens. On their early demos, part of the excitement was hearing exceptional death metal rising from the fog: their killer interplay buried beneath layers of fuzz and gnarly tones at war with the songcraft. But on Lesions, Undeath give their music a visceral, lived-in clarity. Drummer Matt Browning, who also illustrated the cover art, comes through the speakers sounding particularly vicious: His manic performance in the title track plays like someone tasked with replicating the sound of aerial warfare.
If Undeath sound hyper-focused on one style, their commitment to this vision is also part of their appeal. The lyrics, mostly penned by Beam, take delight in exploring death, torture, and general disfigurement from every angle. When the Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad accompanies Jones on the title track, their call-and-response helps the subject matter ascend toward something communal, ready to be shouted back at them. The message is plain: The human body is disgusting. Man’s capacity for evil knows no limits. The end is near and always looming closer. Undeath excel by soundtracking these thoughts through pitch-perfect metal bursting with energy. For them, death is only the beginning.
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. | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | December 8, 2020 | 8 | a6005376-2ec1-4a10-a238-01c3d505dd82 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Over an hour and a half, he advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises. | Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Over an hour and a half, he advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises. | Mac Miller: Faces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19390-mac-miller-faces/ | Faces | On last year’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Mac Miller earned an elusive measure of cachet among rap diehards by burrowing into his record collection and trying on the irreverent frenzy of Odd Future, the offbeat whimsy of MF Doom, and the gonzo electronics of the Brainfeeder squad. He ended up with the best work of his young career, a satisfying leap from the bushy-tailed, eager-to-please kid brother raps of his early work towards tighter rhymes fixated in a knottier headspace.
Mac has since worked tirelessly to prove Watching Movies’ gains were no fluke, showcasing his range on a series of off-the-cuff side projects: Delusional Thomas featured an impishly pitched-up Mac cutting loose on a half-hour mixtape of gutbucket murder raps, while Live from Space documented the plush sonics of Miller’s summer 2013 Space Migration Tour, which fleshed out Watching Movies’ spacier cuts with the help of Syd tha Kid and Matt Martians’ project the Internet. Odd Future associate Vince Staples’ Stolen Youth featured Mac in the producer’s chair unfurling hypnotic soundscapes under his Larry Fisherman pseudonym.
Mac Miller’s most ambitious post-Watching Movies project arrived in the form of a Mother’s Day mixtape called Faces, which advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises. Where Watching Movies was equally concerned with refining his writing skills and presenting a personality you wouldn’t mind sparking up a j with, this mixtape prizes frankness over curation. On cuts like opener “Inside Outside” and “Here We Go”, the latter in which Mac pridefully scans his growing empire and notes that he “did it all without a Drake feature”, the joy is infectious.
Mac gets downcast for the midsection body shot combo of “Happy Birthday”, “Wedding”, and “Funeral”, a passage that moves seamlessly from excitement to fear and uncertainty (“Do you ever reach to touch her, but there’s nothing there?/ Do you tell her that you love her, but she doesn’t care?”) into despair (“Doing drugs is just a war with boredom, but they’re sure to get me”). Faces goes where Watching Movies wouldn’t, picking over the fallout from a teen rap sensation suddenly becoming nouveau riche.
Much of the time, that means picking apart Mac’s infatuation with drugs. Hard partying bleeds into unexpected corners of the proceedings, from the debit card covered in “snowflakes” on “Friends” to the cautionary PCP comedown tale of “Angel Dust”. Miller catalogues reckless substance use like a news anchor would a traffic jam: he matter-of-factly calls himself a “drug absorbent endorphin addict” with a “drug habit like Philip Hoffman” on “What Do You Do?”, and even “Therapy”’s lightweight account of a night out with a girl contains a bout of self-medication. “Malibu” warns that “The good times can be a trap” and toys with the idea of checking into rehab before resolving to just save the remainder of the coke for another day. There's a troubling sense that Mac is tiptoeing down a well-lit path toward self-destruction and that he either feels too helpless or else too enrapt to change course , but if Faces’ good-times-are-killing-me terrors seem overbearing, they’re often offset by a sense that music is his salvation.
On the technical end, Faces is Mac Miller’s high watermark. The wordplay is limber and odd, as flows shift mid-verse and imbue otherwise nonsensical turns of phrase with jerky life. It’s enough to make unrepentantly dark lines lively. When “Polo Jeans” opens with “I give no fucks when I go nuts cause I smoke dust, overdosed on the sofa, dead/ Woke up from the coma, pulled up in a Škoda, smoked, went back to bed” you’re more likely to run it back for the deft internal rhymes than the plot point about a potential overdose.
Miller’s finally able to play ball with his esteemed rap friends, too; where he once played outfield for guys like Earl Sweatshirt and Staples, here he’s matching them bar for bar. By the time Rick Ross shows up for verse three of “Insomniak”, Mac’s already run the beat ragged. Miller’s advances as a self-taught auteur also extend to production: he crafted the majority of the beats here, and he’s arrived at an unfussed, sample-based melodicism that both harkens back to the jazzy boom bap of the 75 Ark and Fondle ‘Em Records era and stays the hell out of the way of the raps.
Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Its 24 tracks run nearly an hour and a half, each restlessly tinkering with his songwriting and production talents. The sprawl gives Faces a directionless feel, so it’s doubtful you’ll ever play it all in one sitting—regardless, the kid’s turning out the best work of his career, transforming adversity and discouragement into intriguing art. It might seem daunting, drug-crazed and unwieldy at the outset, but given the proper time and patience, the mixtape proves to be Mac’s most consistently honest and personal work to date. Early on “Here We Go” advises that he “ain’t little Malcolm with the baby face” anymore, and whatever memory of that goofy, affable kid remains, Faces is its slow and methodical death and dismemberment. | 2014-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 22, 2014 | 7.3 | a60c2ef7-e0fe-4c67-8a9b-56938f48410d | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | |
The art-rock auteur’s latest album is a glistening, richly detailed world that feels like a culmination of their ever-escalating talent and ambition. | The art-rock auteur’s latest album is a glistening, richly detailed world that feels like a culmination of their ever-escalating talent and ambition. | Yves Tumor: Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-tumor-praise-a-lord-who-chews-but-which-does-not-consume-or-simply-hot-between-worlds/ | Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) | Yves Tumor began their career in the low-ceilinged world of experimental noise, but from the outset, their yearning—for bigger stages, sweeping statements, limitless horizons—was palpable. “I only want to make hits,” they said with a laugh in 2017. “What else would I want to make?” Since signing to Warp, Yves Tumor has scaled upward so quickly that it sometimes seemed their own music was racing to contain their ambitions. As 2018’s darkly sensuous Safe in the Hands of Love gave way to the sex-god theatrics of 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the only true constant was Tumor’s near-religious devotion to the possibilities of recording—for the careful placement of perfect sounds within implied space. For Tumor, headphone space is holy space, a sanctuary in which all sorts of transfigurations become possible.
With Praise a Lord Who Chews but Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), Tumor reaches an inflection point in their arms race with their own talent and ambition. They’ve got Noah Goldstein on board, a one-time Kanye engineer who worked on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, alongside Alan Moulder, one of the most celebrated architects of guitar sounds in rock history. From the sound of it, they’re pursuing an ecstatic fusion of alt-rock and R&B, seeking the mysterious nexus where Loveless meets Purple Rain. The guitars roar with jet engine propulsion, threatening to consume everything in their midst, a clear trademark of shoegaze pioneer Moulder, while Tumor’s doubled vocals ring out in an unmistakable echo of Prince. On “Operator,” Tumor even lets out the pained, wordless eros-yip—more feline than human, equally childlike and adult—that was one of Prince’s aural markers.
Countless bands have turned to Moulder over the decades, hoping some of the comet-trail dust of his famous shoegaze records would settle on their project. But only someone with an imagination as glittering and generous and expansive as Tumor’s can tap Moulder and make a record like this. Purely in sensory terms, it’s difficult to imagine many richer-sounding rock records being released this year.
Tumor treats sounds so lovingly they sometimes resemble a director framing and lighting a beloved actor, and every sound on Praise enters the mix with near-visible entrance and exit cues. The wall of guitar distortion that kicks in on “Meteora Blues” only lasts a few moments on each chorus, but it is the most exhilarating evocation of the Smashing Pumpkins guitar sound that has ever existed outside of Melon Collie or Siamese Dream. Once you hear it, you spend the rest of the song yearning for it to return. Ditto the synthesizers that well up in the last minute of “Echolalia,” so dimensional and detailed it feels as if you could reach and put your fingers through them like mist. It’s a testament to Tumor’s loving touch that none of these gestures feel empty or formal: Each one resounds with the fullness, somehow, of a life lived.
The mix on Praise a Lord is dark and viscous, with reverb so thick that every sound—the drums, the keyboards, and above all, the guitars—seems to swim through organic muck to reach your ears. In this superheated mix, all waveforms denature and melt—the gasps hit like snares, the drums feel like breath on your hand. There is a little Kevin Shields in the way Tumor manipulates sounds; the way the triggered samples detonate on late-album highlight “Purified by the Fire” recalls MBV’s “Touched.” On “Parody,” Tumor’s keening falsetto could just as easily be emitting from a synth pad or an amplifier. Within the glistening world constructed on Praise a Lord, they’re just another beautiful, alien life form streaking past our sight.
Tumor’s lyrics, when they break the surface, feel engineered to flash against your eyelids—“Stare straight into the morning star/With lips just like red flower petals,” goes an evocative line from “Meteora Blues”—more than to tell stories. “You’re still a friend of mine/We met on Chapman and Catalina,” they sing in “Lovely Sewer.” The line seems less like the beginning of a story than marooned flotsam from someone’s life, a scrap torn from a journal or the first sentence of an overheard conversation. The lyric sheet to Praise a Lord is a wishing-well of “I’s” and “we’s,” an ocean of private lives observed from celestial height. “It’s a version of myself and everyone else I’ve loved,” Tumor sings on “God Is a Circle,” providing a clue as to the source of these private lives. It feels like the most personal admission on the album.
There are stray moments across the 12 tracks where the songwriting briefly thins out, letting the tremendous atmosphere do the heavy lifting. The slower numbers, by and large, are less captivating. But everything comes together with “Ebony Eye,” the final track and the realization of all of Tumor’s ecstatic visions. The guitars advance like a battalion and Tumor’s voice replicates itself until they are a chorus of supplicants, palms turned skyward and begging for deliverance. It suggests, improbably, that there are even bigger places for Tumor yet to go.
Listen to our episode on Yves Tumor on The Pitchfork Review podcast | 2023-03-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-17T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | March 17, 2023 | 8.4 | a60f79ea-53e5-4daf-8253-1b55f7c72d9a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
This collaborative album from the punk-influenced composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn noise-jam heroes Oneida builds on power and cosmic eruptions. | This collaborative album from the punk-influenced composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn noise-jam heroes Oneida builds on power and cosmic eruptions. | Oneida / Rhys Chatham: What’s Your Sign? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22531-oneida-rhys-chatham-whats-your-sign/ | What's Your Sign? | Through most of What’s Your Sign?, the new album by veteran maximalist composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn DIY drone-blasters Oneida, Chatham takes only minimal steps into the spotlight. Perhaps inverting the usual super-session logic, Chatham’s guitar and trumpet blend convincingly into Oneida’s 15-year-running noisenik dynamic, while the quintet channel the power of Chatham’s work. The 35-minute LP never achieves the epic scale that both can work at—Chatham with his armies of up to 400 guitarists, Oneida via their rigorous eight-hour-straight Ocropolis performances—but each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.
Missing a monumental centerpiece, What's Your Sign? comes closest with the nine-minute “Well Tuned Guitar,” its title referencing the microtonal work of Chatham’s one-time teacher, the psychedelic minimalist La Monte Young. Building towards slashing chords—and Chatham’s big spotlight—the drama draws from the rhythmic language Chatham has been refining since 1977’s “Guitar Trio,” written after seeing the Ramones at CBGB. It’s perhaps the only place the pairing doesn’t completely click. In the hands of Oneida, while still sounding convincingly enormous, the approach also feels slightly contained, as if following a map instead of the terrain itself. Oneida’s semi-formalist mind-exploding can be heard more vividly on the disc-opening “You Get Brighter,” an exercise in forward motion driven by drummer Kid Millions, a propulsion that seems as if it could keep expanding outwards forever. Chatham’s guitar bends and freaks with the rest of the Oneida brahs, his voice adding to the song’s one-line refrain, both a signpost and conductor’s baton.
Oneida sometimes function more like a liquid light show than a traditional rock band. They most often concern themselves with a swirl of repetition, the type of music where—watching live—it’s not always possible to tell who is making what sound, perhaps not even for those playing in the band, either. Chatham and Oneida’s music feels most natural in these places, using the change of texture as a form of a movement. On a pair of drumless jams, “Bad Brains” and “The Mabinogian,” the music never stops pressing into the unknown, the driving pulse only heard in the negative space between oscillations. The music itself could be coming from any combination of the three guitarists and two keyboardists, a free improv counterpoint to the full-throttle rhythmic spectacles heard elsewhere.
The balance of What’s Your Sign? makes it feel like an Oneida album, built on power and cosmic eruptions. Besides the Positions EP (featuring a driving cover of This Heat's “S.P.Q.R.”), it’s the band’s first proper release in four years. In the interim, they’ve transformed even more fully into a live act; in 2013, a 48-minute set-opening incarnation of “You Get Brighter” did almost expand outwards forever. Besides the touch of Chatham’s compositional hand on “Well Tuned Guitar,” What's Your Sign? is another sliver of Oneida’s ever-jamming life, a place both unpredictable and consistent, where collaborators like Chatham might arrive and make themselves at home. Even tracks that start out sounding nothing like Oneida fall easily into the band’s gravity well. On “A. Phillip Randolph at Back Bay Station,” after Chatham strikes a gentle keynote with layered flute, the band quickly lifts into a group glide over a rolling snare drum sea.
Chatham’s trumpet loops finally break through and take over the four minutes of the album-closing “Civil Weather.” It’s a mode that one wouldn’t expect to find Oneida exploring, more Jon Hassell-like Fourth World bliss than kosmiche fire music, a trumpet clearing a central path down the middle of Oneida space. But in plenty of other ways—sure, why not? It’s a new place they find together, the kind of spot they might get to for a few minutes one night when the tapers didn’t make it out, and then never try again. With more than one What’s Your Sign? track fading to delighted in-studio laughter, it’s only a surprise when it ends so soon. | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Northern Spy | November 26, 2016 | 7.8 | a60f7e82-61d4-44fd-86b6-e9e4ce24afe7 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The Los Angeles musician’s fifth studio album is the most joyous, daring realization of her experimental tendencies yet: a sprawling, 90-minute search for meaning in a dehumanizing age. | The Los Angeles musician’s fifth studio album is the most joyous, daring realization of her experimental tendencies yet: a sprawling, 90-minute search for meaning in a dehumanizing age. | Julia Holter: Aviary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julia-holter-aviary/ | Aviary | At the heart of Julia Holter’s pristine chamber pop there exist a felt wisdom and a profound poise. Like a deep breath on a subway car, or a private meditation amid a bustling city street, her songs exude an elegant calm, but they do not often stay still. They dramatize; they swarm. Her work frequently references and even quotes such writers as the Greek playwright Euripides, the French novelist Colette, and the poet Frank O’Hara, but never at the expense of her own composed voice. Classicism and chaos rarely glide together as easefully, or as eloquently, as in a Julia Holter song. “Try to make yourself a work of art,” she sang in bold, augmented measures on her 2011 debut, Tragedy, and there was an innate humanity in that “try.” Holter’s music ushers us along.
Holter’s new album, Aviary, is an odyssey stretching, sky-like, across 90 glorious minutes. She says the title came from a line in a book by the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan—“I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds”—and is meant to evoke the way memories, beautiful and horrifying, fly around in our minds, echoing the grating noise of the world. That sense of muchness makes for the purest and most daring realization of Holter’s experimental tendencies yet. In the wake of her enchanting trio of singer-songwriter LPs—2012’s Ekstasis, 2013’s Loud City Song, and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness—this feels like gleeful anarchy. Evoking Holter’s live performances, her seriously locked-in ensemble brings an improvisatory energy to Aviary, weaving together strings, trumpet, and the fantastic drone of bagpipes. The whole album seems to vibrate.
If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning. Songs seem to exist within other songs. Exploring the album feels like walking through a house, where each of its 15 tracks is a room, a repository for another brilliant idea: medieval polyphony, Tibetan Buddhist chanting, the poet Sappho, Dante’s Inferno, even the outer limits of new wave. Each Aviary track is an extreme and immersive sensory experience. “Chaitius” could soundtrack a ballet; “Everyday Is an Emergency” sounds trapped inside a haunted mansion. Holter is often in conversation with ancient realms, and she sings words like “bubonic,” “hysteria,” and “stunning architecture” with disarming ease. (She recently expressed an interest in “the way monks would make art.”) These eccentricities are thrilling to move between. Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.
The ascending, ecstatic centerpiece “I Shall Love 2” finds an unlikely predecessor in the space-rock romanticism of Spiritualized. The galactic piano ballad “Les Jeux to You” recalls Kate Bush, and is but one Aviary song where Holter makes her lyrics—reminiscent, on the page, of a dense Gertrude Stein poem—sound like an IMAX movie. “Voce Simul,” which evokes Meredith Monk’s extended vocal technique and contains the quintessential Holter lyric, “I always find myself dead, from a 14th century,” is another. Opener “Turn the Light On” is an awe-filled microcosm of Aviary as a whole: Rejecting conventional pop structure in favor of rolling, nonlinear majesty, it flutters from one burst of euphoria to another, like cosmic jazz. (Holter sings of eating “Sierra stars.”) “Turn the Light On” feels like something breaking down on its way out of the solar system—astral, endless, but with a spirited wrongness.
A most unlikely highlight, “Everyday Is an Emergency”—not “every day” but “everyday,” hinting at the terror in the quotidian—centers the droning, atonal bagpipe playing of Tashi Wada before turning into a brutal twisted-fantasy ballad. Playfully apocalyptic, it is a soundtrack for the end times, as Holter sings, “Heaven in the Human in the Arches in the Weather in the Table in the Somber in the Clanging in the Kingdom in the Wretched […] in the Excess […] in the Burning.” The bagpipe sound, in particular, is shocking. Holter also joined Wada—as did her drummer, Corey Fogel—on a recent Frkwys album celebrating and featuring Tashi’s father, the Fluxus musician Yoshi Wada. This is a telling intergenerational connection. It’s not hard to imagine Holter drawing inspiration from the elder Wada’s 1985 bagpipe drone epic Off the Wall—a loud, almost alarming music that Wada himself said at once can conjure “a dreamlike world” and “keep [him] awake.” Holter does something similar.
Aviary’s sprawl reflects the chaos of 2018, in which linear thinking and conventional structures of any sort can feel no match for nonsensical unrest, violence, and unspeakable tragedy. Sometimes, the wisest thing anyone can do, in such a crisis, is acknowledge the complexity of being a person—and, if only for an hour and a half, search for beauty in the unresolvability of it all. “In all the human errors, there is something true,” Holter sings on “I Shall Love 2”: “What do the angels say? I shall love.” Spiraling towards the heavens, it sounds like a prayer for the human race. In the overwhelmingness of human life there is also infinite possibility. Holter, sage-like, makes that clear on Aviary. | 2018-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | November 2, 2018 | 8.2 | a611b85f-2bd1-44f7-a5a3-b8b69ded2bde | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The subdued solo debut from the Fontaines D.C. singer feels alluringly timeless. It’s a combination of novelty and tradition, artifice and honesty. | The subdued solo debut from the Fontaines D.C. singer feels alluringly timeless. It’s a combination of novelty and tradition, artifice and honesty. | Grian Chatten: Chaos for the Fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grian-chatten-chaos-for-the-fly/ | Chaos for the Fly | In concert, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten cuts a gruff and slightly two-dimensional figure, strutting around stage like Liam Gallagher who has recently lost an argument over child care. His band’s more thoughtful recent album, Skinty Fia, may have brightened the singer’s public image a touch but, even so, it did little to suggest the introspective depths we see on Chatten’s debut solo album, Chaos for the Fly, a record of rumination, folk instrumentation, and the odd electronic flicker that feels alluringly timeless.
Out go Fontaines’ nerve-wrecking post-punk and driving rhythm section; in come lilting acoustic guitars, strings, synths, drum machines, and backing vocals from Chatten’s fiancée Georgie Jesson. Chaos for the Fly is not just different musically from Fontaines’ three albums to date, it’s more adventurous. “East Coast Bed” has a drum beat that cocks a wink to trip-hop and a synth-arpeggio climax; “Last Time Every Time Forever” employs an unusual, clipped waltz time and occasional dub-style reverb; and “Bob’s Casino” has the rueful jauntiness of a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra dance number.
What really makes the record vibrate, however, is the combination of novelty and tradition, artifice and honesty. It is Chatten’s unadorned delivery, devoid of knowing looks and pop flippancy, that brings Chaos for the Fly into the long lines of folk tradition. Two of the album’s best songs—“Fairlies” and “Salt Throwers Off a Truck”—could be tunes passed down through generations of public houses, their melodies simple but sharply effective, as if carved into rock. But the album is never entirely in thrall to the past: “Fairlies” employs a muted programmed beat alongside its acoustic guitar strum and rousing string rushes, while “Salt Throwers Off a Truck”’s opening couplet “When February came, it came straight for New York/Any colder, they said, we’ll be skating to work” would be equally at home in a 19th-century ballad or a tweet from your local news station.
Chatten’s vocals sound newly mature, expansive, and tender. With Fontaines D.C., his nasal and stony voice pushes melodies around in a way that dares you to judge them out of tune. On Chaos for the Fly, this bluntly effective tool feels like it has bent without giving, capable of doleful melancholy (“The Score” is Nick Drake with a vicious hangover), whimsical wonder (the fantastic “Fairlies,” with its anachronistic references to ferries and fairies) and Music-Hall yarn spinning (the anecdotal and almost garrulous “Bob’s Casino”). This new-found vocal dexterity helps Chatten sound genuinely at home in lonely waters, in a way he didn’t necessarily do on Skinty Fia’s accordion ballad “The Couple Across the Way,” an otherwise useful antecedent for this album’s adventures.
The effect is unsettling at first, as you grapple with Chatten’s new and rather alien dimensions. You can always go back to Chatten’s cocksure and perhaps more exciting post-punk snarl within the confines of his band—nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past. | 2023-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | June 30, 2023 | 7.6 | a616a300-defd-472f-9095-19ba66a0109b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The GothBoiClique affiliate takes a Lynchian journey through trap beats, dusty drum breaks, and shoegaze guitar; his vaguely emotive lyrics suggest horrors lurking in the shadows. | The GothBoiClique affiliate takes a Lynchian journey through trap beats, dusty drum breaks, and shoegaze guitar; his vaguely emotive lyrics suggest horrors lurking in the shadows. | Wicca Phase Springs Eternal: Full Moon Mystery Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wicca-phase-springs-eternal-full-moon-mystery-garden/ | Full Moon Mystery Garden | Like his friends and collaborators in GothBoiClique—the emo-rap iconoclasts who counted Lil Peep as a member—Wicca Phase Springs Eternal has never been afraid of the dark. The singer-songwriter born Adam McIlwee fills his songs with shredded self-loathing and grim atmospheres, elements no doubt informed by his past membership in the openhearted emo band Tigers Jaw. But Wicca Phase’s music has always been a little more opaque and otherworldly than his peers’. The feelings are raw, but his songs aren’t didactic—he wants you to lean in close, to get lost in the mystery.
On Full Moon Mystery Garden, Wicca Phase Springs Eternal deepens the enigmatic air he’s cultivated in the decade or so that he’s been releasing songs under the alias. The images that recur throughout the record—lonely roads, quiet nights, portals to other realms—are emotionally evocative but never too specific; they’re mundane enough to be comforting, but with enough horrors lurking in the shadows to remain unsettling. It’s a Lynchian journey down a lost highway soundtracked by shuddering trap beats, dusty drum breaks, and the dizzy haze of shoegazing guitar lines. On the gauzily poppy “Tonight I’m in Love on My Own,” he sums up record’s allure in a single couplet: “The ambience, the air that I’m after/Is cryptic, it’s mystic, it’s true.”
McIlwee’s misty abstraction has rarely been as moving as on “Dark Region Road,” where he readies himself to descend into an underwater portal, letting love wash over him. Throughout, his writing feels heavily labored and self-consciously poetic, but in a way that suits the grave intonation of his voice. He’s always favored a rough low register flanked by creeping harmonies, and he does here too, in a way that evokes medieval sacred music—when he sings about being chased by shadows or prying open a “forbidden door,” it’s almost as if he’s chanting profane verses, the foreboding consequences of which remain unclear.
This approach, shrouding almost every lyric in darkness, makes for some incisive moments of emotional clarity when McIlwee does allow himself to open up. The simple, direct opening of “I Was on a Back Road by Myself” is a placid meditation on solitude that recalls the unvarnished vulnerability of Phil Elverum’s first records as Mount Eerie. It’s affecting and earnest in a way that much of Full Moon Mystery Garden isn’t, which makes it feel like McIlwee is confiding in you—a small kernel of truth amid the swirling uneasiness of the record as a whole.
This satisfying use of contrast is echoed in the record’s instrumentals. McIlwee and producer Garden Avenue alternate between the bruised beats that defined past Wicca Phase releases, heavy drum’n’bass refractions, and euphoric pop. In part, that’s no doubt to accommodate the wide variety of guests, who run from similarly downcast GothBoiClique regulars like Fish Narc to kaleidoscopic pop mutators like 8485 and blackwinterwells, but the emotional effect is profound. Tension and release exist in a delicate balance—for every moment of ecstatic abandon, like the dreamy “Hickory Grove,” there’s something a little more curdled and unsettling, like the hazy witch-house memories of “I Am the Edge.” As a result, the record feels inviting in places, terse and cold in others. It’s a compelling document of uncertainty from an artist who’s unafraid to offer a guided tour of the muddled headspace where he lives. | 2022-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 20, 2022 | 7.3 | a618c619-bb41-4110-babb-ae60503ef572 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The ECM Recordings collects some of the minimalist composer's finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. | The ECM Recordings collects some of the minimalist composer's finest works, including the definitive recording of his undisputed masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. | Steve Reich: The ECM Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22346-the-ecm-recordings/ | The ECM Recordings | There was a time when Steve Reich had few champions. Now he wins the Pulitzer Prize, collaborates with Jonny Greenwood, and on various anniversaries of the composer’s birth, concert halls the world over schedule celebrations of his catalog. But in the late ’60s and early ’70s, during his hardcore minimalist period, labels offered only sporadic commitments, including one-and-done relationships with both Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon. Before the American vanguard of minimalism would be canonized in classical circles, someone would have to demonstrate long-term confidence in Reich’s art.
In 1978, Manfred Eicher’s ECM imprint offered the first issue of Music for 18 Musicians, after famously spiriting the tapes away from a tentative Deutsche Grammophon. (The latter had been sitting on the album for years, after paying to record it in 1976.) Eicher’s trend-spotting sense proved keen: The jazz label’s first “classical” release eventually sold over 100,000 copies. ECM followed up this success as soon as they could, with a collection of shorter Reich pieces from his past, one of which was already more than a decade old. After a third LP—the recorded debut of Tehillim—Reich moved with onetime ECM employee Bob Hurwitz to the label Nonesuch, his recording home ever since.
Thanks to the early ECM albums, three twists in the composer’s early development were more widely appreciated. Here you could identify Reich as the stylistic upstart, the composer achieving a breakthrough, and the artist who—in the aftermath of that breakthrough—needed to plot a new course. Instead of moving chronologically by date-of-composition, the reissue works in order of original release, starting with the event that was Music for 18 Musicians.
Though some classical critics of the era objected to what one described as Reich’s “robot or zombie music,” Music for 18 Musicians has always inspired an enthusiastic response. The piece contained the steady pulse of early minimalism—an influence on all manners of electronic subgenres. There are likewise elements from Reich’s pioneering works with “phasing,” though these do not overwhelm the piece. The harmonic movement that keeps each section of Musicians feeling active was a relatively recent development in Reich’s sound, as well. Musicologist Keith Potter describes the overall effect as “on-the-edge” Reich—with the composer delighting in the apotheosis of his prior techniques while at the same time discovering new ones.
It also helped that his band was in fearsome health. Over 59 minutes, they whip through the opening (which introduces the 11 different chords that will be explored), progress through twelve different meditations on those chords (the third chord inspires two “movements”), before quickly revisiting the initial tour through the sequence and then fading away into silence. Every quality performance of Music for 18 Musicians is capable of unearthing some fresh-sounding detail from Reich’s nests of rhythm and harmony. But this inaugural recording excels in two aspects that make for an unlikely pair: it’s one of the fastest renditions ever, and also one of the most tender.
One moment of power-plus-poetry comes in the thirteenth minute of this recording, during the piece’s “IIIA” section. After this movement has established fast, interlocking patterns for violin, piano, marimba and xylophone, there is a dramatic addition of slow-moving pairs of notes for the cello. When set against the antic performance of the other parts, the melancholic feel embedded in the ensemble’s low-string instrument becomes all the more affecting. The constant churn of the work can tempt you to think of its appeal as ethereal, fit for background listening. But then some unexpected change—a complication of the suggested tonal center, or a transmutation of instrumental color—winds up commanding your attention.
This wealth of textural variation rebuts those objections to Reich’s work as being somehow on auto-pilot. Late in the piece, the melodic construction may seem familiar, but changed—reflecting Reich’s metaphor in the liner notes about the relationship between sections being like “resemblances between members of a family.” Each individual entity within this “family” of movements also possesses multiple humors and whims. It’s the consistently malleable quality of this music that has made the capstone to Reich’s purely minimalist period so fiercely loved by separate and overlapping communities of classical and pop artists. In his book The Rest Is Noise, New Yorker critic Alex Ross recalled observing the fast-spreading appeal of this sound, writing that in the ’80s and ’90s, “...you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.”
Where to go next? Reich took some time to figure this out—eventually composing a piece called Music for a Large Ensemble two years later. It’s shorter and not as formally impressive as Music for 18 Musicians, though Reich continues his quest to slowly investigate all the instruments of the conventional orchestra (adding double bass, this time around). It wasn’t long enough for a recording on its own, even when combined with 1979’s more inspired Octet (later rearranged and retitled Eight Lines). So ECM paired these compositions with a much older one: “Violin Phase.” Eicher’s production of that late-’60s composition has a luxuriant stereo separation that makes it an ideal way to experience the rhythmic ambiguity of Reich’s electro-acoustic layering.
This spare and resonant production aesthetic carries over to the final Reich recording on ECM, on 1982’s Tehillim. Based on his study of Jewish cantillation, it represents the composer’s next big leap forward to the realm of melody. His settings of biblical psalms are flat-out catchy. The rhythmic play is still complex and engaging, but this is the piece that proved Reich’s career would outlast the burst of minimalism’s first widespread acceptance by popular audiences in the ’70s. The recording released by ECM is the chamber version of Tehillim; a later recording conducted by Alan Pierson for Nonesuch has a more vehement force. But vehemence isn’t the only lens through which to explore Reich’s lovely writing. Produced during Reich’s 80th birthday year, this reissue package includes all of the composer’s original liner notes to those three LPs, as well as several session photos and a new essay. But the principal draw is the same as ever. Better than any other comparably sized collection, this trio of albums offers a crisp overview of 15 dramatic years in the composer’s development. | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | October 1, 2016 | 9 | a61ac1f8-0bd6-44b3-8eb0-3ed000ff8834 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The experimental guitarist who made his name on collaboration steps into the spotlight with a meditative, ominous solo LP. Each of these eight pieces is like a pitch-black room, easy to enter but tricky to navigate. | The experimental guitarist who made his name on collaboration steps into the spotlight with a meditative, ominous solo LP. Each of these eight pieces is like a pitch-black room, easy to enter but tricky to navigate. | Bill Nace: Both | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-nace-both/ | Both | More than any of his peers in his experimental-music scene, the guitarist Bill Nace has built his career on collaboration. Of his 45 entries on Discogs, only seven are solo, and they’re mostly limited-run, self-released affairs. He’s been much more interested in playing with people across the avant-garde spectrum, from free jazz veterans Joe McPhee and Mats Gustaffson to rock musicians Steve Gunn and Thurston Moore to polymaths Okkyung Lee and Kim Gordon (partner in his most well-known venture, Body/Head).
All this collaboration has defined Nace, but it’s also made him something of a cipher. Because the records he plays on are usually instrumental and abstract, it can be hard to locate exactly which sounds and ideas are his. That keeps his work varied and fresh, and means he sees his comrades as equals rather than supporters. But Nace’s musical personality is oddly undefined for someone who’s been on over 40 releases. Though it’s long overdue, a full-fledged, higher-profile solo album raises the question: Can Nace maintain his shadowy persona all by himself?
As the title hints, the answer provided by Both is yes and no. On eight instrumental, guitar-only tracks—all with plain, numbered names—Nace makes bold, loud noises and active, committed moves. Despite being wordless and non-melodic, each track has a discernible structure. They begin with sounds that at first seem random but, by warping into waves or clipping into rhythms, eventually become motifs. In “Part 2,” what sounds like a guitar cord being pulled out and plugged back in becomes a kind of subconscious beat, while “Part 7” offers two oscillations whose variations in volume build them into mantras. Even on the longest track, the nearly 11-minute “Part 6,” a wide range of sounds gain momentum—and verge on chaos—through basic rhythmic panning. Each piece is like a pitch-black room, easy to enter but tricky to navigate.
Nace’s guitar tone is rough and gritty, continually generating tactile waves that you can grab onto and ride, and the result is both meditative and ominous. Both shares an eerie, hypnotic quality with the unhinged loops of Aaron Dilloway and the darkened seances of Marcia Bassett, aka Zaïmph. But Nace’s repetitions rarely hammer you with a single unwavering sound. Instead he dodges and darts, creating space for you to fill in blanks. In that sense, Both might be more about its listener than its creator. If by the end we still don’t know exactly who Bill Nace is, we certainly have a better idea of how much he can do. | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | May 26, 2020 | 7.9 | a635d130-bf44-4b6c-9e21-c15a5b31e030 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The breathtaking songs of Angel Olsen’s fifth album are fleshed out by a 12-piece string section and deliver grand gestures about romance, authenticity, and being simply at the mercy of how we feel. | The breathtaking songs of Angel Olsen’s fifth album are fleshed out by a 12-piece string section and deliver grand gestures about romance, authenticity, and being simply at the mercy of how we feel. | Angel Olsen: All Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-olsen-all-mirrors/ | All Mirrors | Angel Olsen is a natural at writing mantras for jaded souls. Burn your fire for no witness. Unfucktheworld. Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind. No one’s gonna hear it the same as it’s said. While her music has evolved from lamp-lit folk to boisterous rock’n’roll and ritzy synth-pop, she has always emphasized the importance of self-conviction. This steadfast philosophy, coupled with how wryly she appears to withstand heavy emotional weather, has made Olsen talismanic to fans. But halfway through the tour for her 2016 album My Woman, a messy fallout from a breakup made Olsen realize how disconnected she had become from herself. She decided to make her next album as she had her earliest releases, working almost alone (in remote Anacortes, Washington) to focus on bare-bones songwriting. It also meant trying to elude the accrued weight of her identity: Olsen has said that she and her friends often “joke about how dumb ‘Angel Olsen’ is.”
In the songs Olsen wrote in Anacortes, love and, consequently, her identity became an illusion. What ended up on her fifth album, All Mirrors, are bemused questions about why she would suppress her needs, why she had to deny what she was going through, why the past must keep repeating. The lyrics are often softer and less certain than on her first four scalpel-sharp records. If there is one mantra among them, it’s in the stoned ambivalence of “Spring”: “I’m beginning to wonder if anything’s real,” she sings. “Guess we’re just at the mercy of the way that we feel.”
We don’t yet know what the music from those Anacortes sessions sounds like: A few months after its completion, Olsen recorded a second version of the album with show-stopping string arrangements from Ben Babbitt and Jherek Bischoff (and production by John Congleton). She intended to release both records simultaneously, then realized the power of the orchestrated version meant it had to come first. The two incarnations, one lavish and one threadbare, embody that lyric about how feelings shape reality and identity, and pose a striking challenge from an artist variously misunderstood in the past as “sad girl at the bottom of a well,” feminist autodidact, and silver wig-wearing “character.”
Once both takes on All Mirrors stand side by side, they’ll offer an intriguing case study in interpretation and how form suggests content: Is authenticity regarded as a magisterial group effort or just a lone voice and a guitar? Does devastation hit harder at volume or a whisper? The two albums are also a massive, meta juxtaposition of the feminine archetypes that Olsen has wielded over the past decade—fragility and excess, interiority and high drama, submission and rage—that dares us to distinguish between the person and the performance.
For now, though, all we have is the first part, which would be revelatory in any context. The atmosphere suggests a wracked Cassavetes heroine wandering onto a sparkling MGM set and sinking right into its whipped-cream luxe. Eight of its 11 songs feature a 12-piece string section, with modes ranging from gallant high-romance to Gainsbourg hat-tips to twilit softness. Plenty of acts skew symphonic at some point in their career, and it’s hard for any artist to hold their own against such overwhelming staging and the constant threat of pastiche. But everything from the songs’ surprising dramatic arcs to their granular textures feels integral to Olsen’s songwriting. Take the title track, where she sings about being trapped by her past romances and youthful beauty: The backmasked backing vocals intensify that sense of imprisonment; the synth sparkle that follows it takes an unexpected dip from major to minor, like a sudden changing of the light. And that moment in “Spring” where she sings about being at the mercy of her feelings pushes the song from twinkling lullaby to barbiturate reverie, a total surrender to sensation on a record so recklessly physical it should come with its own parachute.
Not that All Mirrors is just a strong wind that blows in and leaves you undone. Olsen has described All Mirrors as an “angry” record, and even when she isn’t explicitly cursing “DREAM ON DREAM ON DREAM ON” on the skyrocketing “Lark” at an ex who failed to register her desires, the synth-abetted production seethes and shudders, grandeur and ruin existing side by side. But it’s a playful album, too, one that traces the full scope of heartbreak. “What It Is” canters along as Olsen mocks herself for giving in to love’s charade: “You just wanted to forget/That your heart was full of shit!” she sings in a cadence that suggests a sarcastically wagged finger. With its elongated violin notes, “Tonight” is fit for the last flush of romance in a silver-screen love story.
Yet Olsen’s tenderness is directed at herself, having arrived at a clarity where she no longer cares to explain “all the things you think you’ve come to understand about me.” Her composure as she sings these words is as still and inky as the sea against the night sky. The remark could apply just as much to the public as her former lover. Each of Olsen’s artistic developments has been heralded as some sort of permanent shift in her work or her commercial aspirations: Now she’s an indie star. Now she wants to be a pop star. Oh, she’s collaborating with Mark Ronson? She must really want to be a pop star. But the wild range of All Mirrors and Olsen’s vocal performance fly in the face of the idea that identity and artistry are fixed, and consequently turn over how much we can ever know each other, and ourselves.
She finds the nuance and enduring pleasure in her game of faces. While “Too Easy” sends up undying devotion, with moony girl-groupisms to spare, Olsen willfully dedicates herself to someone else on “New Love Cassette”—and the lusty mood, lifted directly from Gainsbourg’s 1971 album L’Histoire de Melody Nelson, indicates her pleasure in doing so. We fall in love again and again because a little self-sabotage never stopped anyone. Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn. | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | October 4, 2019 | 8.9 | a6380f02-fb4e-4b48-9087-18b03ef70627 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The ambient, intimate debut from singer Conner Youngblood uses layered folk impressionism to evoke the kinds of feelings that elude easy definition. | The ambient, intimate debut from singer Conner Youngblood uses layered folk impressionism to evoke the kinds of feelings that elude easy definition. | Conner Youngblood: Cheyenne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conner-youngblood-cheyenne/ | Cheyenne | Unlike the old saying, Conner Youngblood doesn’t write what he knows. He is a 28-year-old Yale graduate, born in Dallas and currently living in Nashville. You would not, however, learn that information—or anything that describes his personal lifestyle—from listening to his full-length debut Cheyenne. “I tried to write songs about chicks... and I think it’s just kind of boring,” he once quipped, eschewing the need to fit what might be on his mind into his work. Instead, Youngblood creates ambient folk soundscapes—songs that blossom gently with intricate musical details and enigmatic lyrics.
He sings with the intimacy of a bedroom artist whose eyes are focused solely out the window at something a bit too far away to make out. Cheyenne, as a result, is impressionistic—when you look closer and closer, it’s not as astounding as it is from a distance. But he imbues these songs with a sensory feeling—like he’s figuring out an event’s significance simply by recalling whatever tiny memories stick in his head. A track like “Los Angeles” sets only a bit of the scene in the actual city. He recalls some moments (“Wednesday morning/Miss an early flight”) and an ever-telling “she,” but it’s largely ambiance. What’s more telling is the contrast between Youngblood’s hushed half-falsetto and a melody that occasionally soars with piano and horns; a tambourine shakes forcefully throughout. There’s something or someone he misses, but he does not seem to be sure how it affects him. The track exists as its own realm for contemplation. And that area is probably not really in Southern California.
The contrast between a real location and its role on Cheyenne is even sharper on “The Birds of Finland” and “Stockholm,” songs Youngblood said he wrote before ever visiting Scandinavia. “I’m a lot of times influenced by places I’ve never been, and just, like, imagining what the place could be like, and writing my version of it,” Youngblood said in 2016. On the triumphant “The Birds of Finland,” Youngblood names a variety of birds: the wren, the hooded crow, the eider. Here, he allows his voice to boom through echoes, as if to suggest he’s more comfortable transposing his thoughts onto birds than speaking them directly.
It’s difficult not to think of Bon Iver. Youngblood’s disappearing voice resembles Justin Vernon’s, and there is a similar bent toward the fake-world-building of Bon Iver. But where Vernon sang verbosely on songs like “Michicant,” rendering a fake place real, Youngblood does the opposite, turning the Swedish capital, for instance, into a figment of his mind. In this light, it is hard to glean much from Youngblood’s lyrics. On “Stockholm,” he repeats the title through an opaque lens and adds few other tangible lines.
Even without a specific time or place—because “Stockholm” is certainly not set in Stockholm—the song resonates. Conner Youngblood’s words fade away and slowly embed themselves into your mind like an already distant memory. His lyrics typically range from bluntly simple to esoteric to borderline nonsensical. On “Lemonade” alone, he sings lines as disparate as “I’m human francium” and “Let me be your lemonade.” There may not be much behind the abstractions, or at least nothing Youngblood chooses to reveal, but they’re connected by an overarching idea that truth exists in feeling and sense, not literal meaning. In this way, Cheyenne is both pleasant and precious: an album that embodies impressionism and idealism and asks for little in return beyond an open mind and a willingness to see the forest through the trees. Even when the picture is still coming into focus. | 2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Counter | August 21, 2018 | 7.2 | a638ad81-7f2c-4b84-9cc1-cee14621fb81 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Panopticon is the Minnesota-via-Kentucky solo project of Austin Lunn. On his new album Autumn Eternal, he borrows from genres like atmospheric black metal, prog rock, post rock, and bluegrass while simultaneously honoring them. | Panopticon is the Minnesota-via-Kentucky solo project of Austin Lunn. On his new album Autumn Eternal, he borrows from genres like atmospheric black metal, prog rock, post rock, and bluegrass while simultaneously honoring them. | Panopticon: Autumn Eternal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21200-autumn-eternal/ | Autumn Eternal | For all the fervor that's supposed to define its spirit, black metal essentially amounts to a set of affectations bundled together into a genre. This is especially apparent when artists outside of Scandinavia adopt hallmark signifiers like facepaint, illegible band logos that look like cobwebs, Satanism, ratty production values, and a harsh, staticky brand of guitar distortion that sounds like static. Not unlike the way rappers across the globe aspire to a constellation of mannerisms that first coalesced in the Bronx, today's black metal artists, regardless of where they're from, mold themselves after an attitude that blossomed within a distinctly Nordic headspace during the genre's early-'90s Second Wave.
Still, it comes as something of a surprise that Austin Lunn of the U.S.-based solo act Panopticon harbors such an open fascination with vague, mythical notions of "the North." His last album was titled Roads to the North, this new album Autumn Eternal includes a track titled "Into the North Woods", and several Panopticon releases feature wintry, foreboding landscapes as cover art that will immediately strike a chord with aficionados. But the "North" that Lunn invokes is actually his adoptive home of Minnesota. And, though the multi-instrumentalist has made a personal principle out of staying reclusive, his isolation shouldn't be mistaken for the misanthropic fury that has driven black metal's most notorious antiheroes.
As Autumn Eternal, Panopticon's seventh full-length, again makes clear, Lunn is an artist capable of appropriating core aesthetics from a number of genres while simultaneously honoring them—a balance that requires no small measure of dexterity. Lunn's manifesto-like notes on Bandcamp betray a sensitive heart that he wears on his sleeve. Clearly, Panopticon's music isn't motivated by hate or nihilism, and one can easily imagine a Henry David Thoreau-like figure retreating to the woods to contemplate personal, spiritual, and environmental concerns while Bon Iver's Justin Vernon nurses his love wounds in the cabin next door. More importantly, Lunn's work lacks the creepy jingoism that some of his Nordic peers have embraced on the slippery slope to Nazi/white supremacist sympathies. The bands that have flirted with ugly racial undertones have, of course, enjoyed the twin benefits of titillating fans and repulsing detractors, cultivating an aura of danger while hiding safely behind suggestion.
Lunn has no need for such coyness because his heart is in an entirely different place. To be fair, it's not like you can understand what he's singing about. And whether or not his intentions truly give this music a more humanistic vibe than other black metal fare is debatable. But his musical agility certainly does set Panopticon apart, Autumn Eternal in particular. As he has in the past, Lunn infuses atmospheric black metal and European melodic/symphonic death metal with prog rock, post rock and, perhaps most audaciously, bluegrass. On paper, those combinations reek of calculation, but Lunn has long proven his ability to blend them into a seamless, irony-free sound, a sound he continues to forge ahead with on Autumn Eternal. Black metal bands have been paying homage to Viking folk tradition for years now, but the results have often been laughable. When Lunn incorporates acoustic roots expressions from the hills of Kentucky, it comes off neither as an academic exercise nor as an attempt to parody his overseas counterparts.
In fact, there's no denying the earnestness of Autumn Eternal opener "Tamarack's Gold Returns", which prominently features violin work by Johan Becker of Chicago's Austaras alongside Lunn's own dobro playing. Where artists following the metal playbook would have fashioned the tune as a one-minute intro, Lunn and Becker go on for a full three minutes-plus before the music gives way to a minutes' worth of a found-sound ambient recording of Lunn spending time in nature. After that, a hail of ornate, baroque-style metal kicks in with lead guitars wailing dramatically over double bass drum rolls before Lunn makes his vocal entrance. Piercing but also bottom-heavy, Lunn's voice emanates brute animal power. He also allows for long instrumental sections where he refrains from singing, which only highlights its impact when he starts to howl.
Autumn Eternal concludes the trilogy that Lunn started with 2012's Kentucky and continued with Roads to the North. Listeners who have followed Panopticon since that point or before will no doubt quibble over whether he's gone too far—or maybe not far enough—with the stylistic variety this time. Other than the myriad twists and turns on the epic "Sleep to the Sound of the Waves Crashing", Lunn generally approaches the new material as if he's streamlining his approach rather than going for more audacious or pointed ways to combine his influences. During one of the blast-beat sections on "Waves Crashing", the mix suddenly strips down to the point where it feels like you're listening to the drums from inside the unflattering acoustics of a rehearsal space while the guitarist tests a new reverb pedal from the adjacent room. Becker's violin on the song switches gears from a rustic Scottish/Irish vibe to film score melodrama. "Pale Ghosts", meanwhile, finds a space for Mono-esque shoegaze within the DNA of furious black metal riffing before the song takes flight into a dreamy passage anchored by a melancholic guitar arpeggio.
Lunn has a way of making these and other elements sound perfectly at home with one another. In truth, nothing on Autumn Eternal jumps out as incongruous, which suggests that Lunn is simply expanding—not trying to radically alter—the black metal formula. Still, by renouncing its obligatory celebration of malice, Panopticon gives the form a much-needed makeover, and with Autumn Eternal, Austin Lunn further uncovers musical potential that's long been overshadowed by too much bad-boy posturing. | 2015-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Bindrune / Nordvis | October 20, 2015 | 7.5 | a6393d29-e738-485a-96de-d9ee0e9dcccb | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The imposing, experimental 18-minute piece from the Tehran-based composer draws upon noise, drone, musique concrète, and the poetry of Xavier Villarrutia. | The imposing, experimental 18-minute piece from the Tehran-based composer draws upon noise, drone, musique concrète, and the poetry of Xavier Villarrutia. | Siavash Amini: The Sweat of Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/siavash-amini-the-sweat-of-earth/ | The Sweat of Earth | Siavash Amini makes music of almost unfathomable complexity. Like a weather system, it might appear relatively static from afar, but inside, it churns. On his recent album Eidolon, released in early July, the Tehran-based composer found inspiration in a 17-note scale formulated by the 13th-century scholar Safi-al-din Urmavi. But even the most technically adept listener might have trouble picking out those tones. In Eidolon’s endless pitch and yaw, there are no fixed points, no hard edges, no firm ground at all—just seasick glissandi and perpetual slippage.
The otherworldly sound of that record, shorn of anything as reassuring as a major triad or a perfect fifth, suggests an interstitial state, placing unexpected and unstable frequencies in between familiar intervals. On his new EP, The Sweat of Earth, a companion to the album, Amini continues to pry open the cracks. The title of the record comes from a poem by the 20th-century Mexican writer Xavier Villarrutia. “Nocturnos,” a meditation on eros and death, turns its gaze upon negative space, envisioning the forms revealed by shadows and the sounds caught in stillness. (“Everything that the silence sends fleeing from things,” Villarrutia writes: “The fog of desire/The sweat of earth/The nameless scent/Of skin.”)
The Sweat of Earth spends its 18-minute run in pursuit of similarly ephemeral sensations. While its dark, glowering tones might, at first blush, scan as noise, upon closer inspection they open up to reveal a sensuousness in keeping with Villarrutia’s richly imagistic poem. The piece begins with a minute of pure white noise, like steam hissing from a grate, before ushering in an expansive buzzing sound, a shapeshifting fusion of prop planes, beehives, and distant foghorns.
The sound comes in waves. There are cycles of crescendo and denouement, so slow they barely register as repetition. In the moments of greatest clarity, clusters of dissonance vibrate at conflicting speeds, at frequencies impossible to parse; the drone gleams like well-scoured stainless steel, a riot of overlapping lines. At its peak, the low end rumbles violently, and background static grows in volume until it resembles shopping carts trundling down a stairwell. From that climax, the piece tenderly flatlines. The final seven minutes are a soft plateau of bell tones, but what appears unchanging on the surface bristles with detail, and the longer the piece runs, and the quieter it gets, the more vivid its depths grow. The paradoxical finale brings to mind another line from Villarrutia’s poem: “Everything that the shadow/Makes heard with the hard/Blow of its silence.” | 2023-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | August 9, 2023 | 7.4 | a63abf72-33c2-4039-8d1b-ebbf7a2f6291 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On her confrontational fourth album, Merrill Garbus wades into the politics of being white in America. It is musically and lyrically ambitious, but its grander themes land with an uncomfortable thud. | On her confrontational fourth album, Merrill Garbus wades into the politics of being white in America. It is musically and lyrically ambitious, but its grander themes land with an uncomfortable thud. | Tune-Yards: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tune-yards-i-can-feel-you-creep-into-my-private-life/ | I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life | Merrill Garbus has an ear for the insidious forces that shape a person’s sense of self. She’s written complex songs that allow pleasure, guilt, and confusion to coexist without contradiction. Her music understood that you could be a feminist and hate your body, bemoan gentrification while enjoying the spoils of its sprawl, loathe violence yet find it incomprehensibly liberating. Moreover, she conveyed that you could wholeheartedly adore and respect the music of other cultures while still feeling a profound moral ambivalence about being a Connecticut-raised white woman releasing records that draw liberally—and ultimately, profit—from African and Caribbean rhythms and singing. These messy nuances were a tonic.
Tune-Yards’ ascent over the past decade parallels a huge shift in social consciousness. Garbus released her debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, in 2008. The follow-up, 2011’s w h o k i l l, brought discussions about police brutality, race, and social inequality to the fore in an indie-rock arena that was hardly talking about these issues, much less making the space for musicians of color to explore them on their own terms. Its prominence was simultaneously a biting indictment of a myopic culture and genuinely valuable for listeners who had never before been challenged to consider these topics. But were Tune-Yards to debut now, perhaps they wouldn’t get a pass. Black artists now have a long overdue voice in alternative music, and consumers (particularly of the kind of music Garbus makes) are hyper-conscious of representation and who has the right to tell a story.
Garbus is also acutely aware of this—how the platform her identity has afforded her and the cultures on which it was built look right now—and sets out to explore these tensions on I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. It’s a purposefully confrontational piece of work, mercifully aimed more at destroying her ego than buoying it like Macklemore or Amanda Palmer have done in the past. But the subtle “creep” that was once her specialty becomes a deluge. The voices of white guilt are practically the totality of the work. It’s frequently a difficult listen, and not for the reasons Garbus intended.
On Tune-Yards’ third album, 2014’s Nikki Nack, Garbus and collaborator Nate Brenner added R&B to their joyful noise, making for a slower, stronger record. For I Can Feel You..., Garbus immersed herself in the history of dance music, and the breadth and delight of her studies often shows. “Heart Attack” opens the record with a fiery disco whirl full of drama and opulence, spiked by Garbus’ rat-a-tat vocal assault. “Honesty” turns her sampled vocals into clarion chaos, fragments of lyrics occasionally blooming out from the choppy rhythm: “Do you really wanna know?” she wails, and it plays like a wickedly sly challenge to remember the music’s radical black, queer origins.
Lead single “Look at Your Hands” also makes heavy use of a sampler, but it’s strangely prosaic for Tune-Yards—the gated drums pop, but fail to enliven a tedious vocal hook about ownership that sounds more like being in the club with a very high friend who’s truly appreciating his fingers for the first time. The slow songs also feel a little indolent and uncertain. “Who Are You” drifts on a gauzy dancehall chirrup, and “Home” is dread-less dub. There are moments of sensuality—the mournfully slinky “Coast to Coast,” “Now As Then” with its libidinous anxiety—but the music’s bodily satisfaction jars against gauche lyrics that kill the vibe. Perhaps that’s the point.
Garbus educated herself on whiteness while making the album by reading, joining activist groups, and undertaking a “six-month-long workshop on whiteness at East Bay Meditation Center.” When the United States is ruled by a UN-certified racist, it’s a pretty good idea for any white citizen to learn about issues of racial privilege and injustice, to do their best not to perpetuate them, and to listen. But there is a fine line between accountability and aggrandizement, and I Can Feel You... often succumbs to the latter.
Much of what Garbus addresses is true but without inquiry. “Coast to Coast” impugns liberals (herself among them) who waited until it was too late to speak out against injustice and mocks their blinkered utopian suggestions to “build a sky, build it big enough to hold us all.” “Colonizer” sounds like Mr. Oizo’s “Flat Beat” reassembled in a haunted junkyard, accurately detailing the dominance of Caucasian beauty standards and the racial stereotypes that give white women the benefit of the doubt not afforded to women of color. Despite its unarguable premise, it is a uniquely indigestible song: “I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of travels with African men,” Garbus sings in a sour sing-song. “I comb my white woman’s hair with a comb made especially, generally for me.” She continues, “I turn on my white woman’s voice to contextualize acts of my white women friends/I cry my white woman tears carving grooves in my cheeks to display what I meant.”
These are not new themes for Tune-Yards, but they are newly inelegant. Compare “Colonizer” to a verse in Nikki Nack’s “Water Fountain” where some change from a slice of cherry pie is a “blood-soaked dollar” that “still works in the store,” a sweet, violent parable about American capitalism. The title of “ABC 123” is a joke about how nothing is simple in the “new reality,” and is accordingly muddled. The relentless tirade spins like a runaway disco ball and touches on wildfires, white centrality, Garbus’ “pre-polluted fetus,” greed, the NSA, and how only unity can win the next election. She acknowledges the deep roots of racism (structural and internalized) on “Honesty” and “Private Life,” and wonders what community looks like in a godless society on “Who Are You?,” asking, “Communion is old, but what makes a community whole?” Some subsequent lyrics about global warming suggest that this universal environmental catastrophe will ultimately unite us. Perhaps it will.
It’s a bleak, complex prospect that’s more appealing to parse than the fear of being berated for one’s complicity that colors much of the record: Discussing internalized racism with the Financial Times, Garbus said, “In a callout culture, where the most horrible thing is to be shamed online, it still feels scary to talk about that.” Talking about systemic racism is crucial; centring white helplessness in its face, as Garbus does here, less so: As soon as a white person frets that they’ll never be enough to bring down an unjust system, she saps energy from a more important conversation. And for all Garbus’ emotional risks, her adventurous music no longer feels like the place to have it. | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | January 23, 2018 | 6.2 | a63e97ab-ddf8-43e3-ba37-753c71738d29 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Twenty years ago, U2 graduated to superstardom with The Joshua Tree, an album that's survived all those years in the spotlight as a masterpiece. Now the disc gets the requisite set of B-sides and rarities, plus a DVD. | Twenty years ago, U2 graduated to superstardom with The Joshua Tree, an album that's survived all those years in the spotlight as a masterpiece. Now the disc gets the requisite set of B-sides and rarities, plus a DVD. | U2: The Joshua Tree: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10953-the-joshua-tree-deluxe-edition/ | The Joshua Tree: Deluxe Edition | U2 started out as a scrappy band riding the punk wave out of Ireland, but from the beginning they clearly had their sights on America. And indeed, the States ate up U2's bombast, landing both War (1983) and The Unforgettable Fire (1984) in the U.S. top 20. The group fed off that enthusiasm, criss-crossing the country as much as its schedule allowed. The more the band's fan base grew, the harder U2 worked to get even bigger, and in 1987 they enjoyed their breakthrough into superstadom thanks to The Joshua Tree, which went on to sell 10 million copies in the U.S. alone.
Funnily enough, while The Joshua Tree once and for all catapulted U2 to permanent superstardom, the album marks something of a conscious refinement of the group's sound. The album was nowhere near as strident as War or as radically overwrought as The Unforgettable Fire (which was, lest one forget, recorded in a frickin' castle). Reunited with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it's as if the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years and applied those musical and cultural observations to its songs. It's an album made for dusty, empty flyover country.
U2 have always flirted with charismatic Christianity, and the Joshua Tree songwriting process finds the band in a particularly reflective mood; "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and" "With or Without You" are steeped in religious imagery, but even their constant radio rotation hasn't robbed these introspective songs of their potency or effectiveness. Smartly, U2 balanced those personal songs with more universal tracks, often with an emphasis on forgotten people and forgotten places around the globe: "Red Hill Mining Town" (about the mid-80s UK miners strike), "Exit" (inspired by Norman Mailer's Gary Gilmore tome The Executioner's Song), "Mothers of the Disappeared" (about Argentina's murdered political dissidents), and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (about U.S. meddling in Central America).
"Bullet" is one of the few Joshua Tree non-singles to remain a live U2 staple-- its bluster hints at the band's current broad aesthetic-- but it's slightly out of place among a record mostly characterized by its grace, subtlety, introspection, and beauty. That holds especially true for its more mysterious (or at least less overplayed) second half, which roughly begins and ends perfectly with the ballad "Running to Stand Still" (about heroin addiction) and gentle outro "Mothers of the Disappeared". In between, "Trip Through Your Wires" is the rare blues track to prominently feature co-producer Eno's favored novelty, the Omnichord, while "One Tree Hill" and the apocalyptic "Exit" showcase wickedly screwed up and uncharacteristic guitar solos from the Edge.
No question, the disc deserves this anniversary treatment, but other U2 albums need the remastering more. As for the 14-tracks disc of B-sides and extras, it's best to keep expectations firmly in check. U2 aren't known for hiding away gems, or for that matter, sharing their studio experiments-- not even the reggae-tinged version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" shows up here. What we get instead is mostly the usual array of previously released tracks and familiar rarities-- best among them are "Spanish Eyes", "Silver and Gold", the original version of "The Sweetest Thing", and "Deep in the Heart"-- plus a handful of tracks new even to hardcore fans. Of those, "Beautiful Ghost/Introduction to Songs of Experience" and "Drunk Chicken/America" are moody spoken word pieces. The Patti Smith-styled "Wave of Sorrow (Birdland)" is similarly a bit out of character for the band, which explains what it's doing here.
While the haters were already on board, it was with its next album, Rattle and Hum, that the group's egos finally overtook their ambitions, and it took a near fatal break and the resounding triumph Achtung Baby to set the band back on track. But to this day U2 's Joshua Tree breakthrough-- and, in particular, Bono's insistence on living up to the messianic role his fans and admires foisted upon him-- still resonates as a lingering source of scorn, suspiciousness, and ridicule. If you don't doubt that, then try to sit through the (videotaped, not filmed) July 4, 1987 concert at an outdoor venue in Paris, the 40-minute Outside It's America documentary, and the music videos stuffed onto the set's DVD.
About the only remarkable thing about the concert is that it starts with "I Will Follow" rather than "Where the Streets Have No Name". As for the doc, it plays like a Rattle and Hum test run that will leave you throwing things at your screen as the band goes shopping, signs autographs, and poses for photos. There is, however, a rare glimpse of U2's sense of humor that teases their future neo-ironic rebirth hidden on the DVD: footage of the fames Dalton Brothers, the band's country alter-egos, who opened a few dates on the Joshua Tree tour (replete with Adam Clayton in drag). But after a couple of minutes of their shtick, you'll want to throw stuff at them, too. | 2007-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | December 3, 2007 | 8.9 | a64063bb-3e3b-4e81-8087-2419b0c8bba8 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Setting tinnitus-inducing noise-pop against a tension-wracked Joy Division-meets-Ministry backdrop, this Brooklyn trio drenches lovesick indie pop in sheets of deafening static and distortion. Plenty of bands may have tapped the trebly, ecstatic side of shoegaze in recent years, but none have imbued it with this band's frustrated aggression or lacerating, industrial feedback. | Setting tinnitus-inducing noise-pop against a tension-wracked Joy Division-meets-Ministry backdrop, this Brooklyn trio drenches lovesick indie pop in sheets of deafening static and distortion. Plenty of bands may have tapped the trebly, ecstatic side of shoegaze in recent years, but none have imbued it with this band's frustrated aggression or lacerating, industrial feedback. | A Place to Bury Strangers: A Place to Bury Strangers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10595-a-place-to-bury-strangers/ | A Place to Bury Strangers | Never underestimate the power of the perfect guitar effects unit. The Jesus and Mary Chain's landmark Psychocandy would have sounded vastly less godlike without its use of a discontinued (and allegedly broken) Japanese fuzz pedal. Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis dredged his mythic decibel levels from road-worn Marshall amps, but his stoner racket wouldn't have been the same if he hadn't funneled it through the grinding fury of a Big Muff. In the right hands, one little black box can mean the difference between pummeling and decimating.
Few people understand this better than Oliver Ackermann, frontman for thunderous Brooklyn three-piece A Place to Bury Strangers: Under his catch-all company name Death by Audio (it's also a music venue, recording studio, and collective), he custom-builds and designs his own hand-wired pedals, which are used by everyone from Lightning Bolt and Serena Maneesh to Wilco, Spoon, and TV on the Radio. Not coincidentally, anyone looking for a quick description of his own band can look to the names he gives these things: Interstellar Overdriver, Supersonic Fuzz Gun, Total Sonic Annihilation.
With a bandname that's linked to both the Gospel of Matthew and the writings of British occultist Aleister Crowley, A Place to Bury Strangers represents something of a second coming for Ackermann. He was previously a member of defunct Fredericksburg, Va., dream-pop revivalists Skywave, whose records were all but baptized in the drones of (don't jump out of your checkered Vans!) the JAMC and My Bloody Valentine. After their breakup, Skywave's remaining members formed the like-minded two-piece Ceremony, and Ackermann moved to New York where he hooked up with drummer Jay Space and bassist Jono Mofo, turned up the volume, and began masterminding the wrecking-crew colossus that would become this album.
Compiling mastered versions of the band's early CD-Rs and mp3s, A Place to Bury Strangers' self-titled debut LP sets tinnitus-inducing noise-pop against a tension-wracked Joy Division-meets-Ministry backdrop. Plenty of bands have tapped the trebly, ecstatic side of shoegaze in recent years, but none have imbued it with this band's frustrated aggression or lacerating feedback.
What hits first is the reverberating distortion: The brutal textures announce themselves in pangs of blown-out guitar, crunching against the propulsive bassline and distant, static-soaked drums of opening track "Missing You". Thirty seconds in, the tempest recedes, revealing the song's love-wasted verses and murky, chiming guitars (think the Chills' "Pink Frost" and you're close), only to sneak up again for a shattered, metal-twisting chorus. The group's versatile squall can crumble majestically, as on the slow-motion starfighter explosions of "The Falling Sun", or growl like a wounded mountain lion, as during the pitch-shifting tumult of "My Weakness". And on "To Fix the Gash in Your Head", it even evokes the late-80s peak of Wax Trax! industrial bands, fleshed out by treble-heavy synth, buzzsaw guitars, and primitive, pre-programmed drum loops.
For a dude creating such awesome bedlam, Ackermann's uneven monotone comes off Ian Curtis-bummed. The hammering, Factory Records-esque beats and blistering effects-pedal descent of "She Dies" take place on a "white-letter day" ("There's nothing for me now," Ackermann wearily intones). Finale "Ocean" barely glimpses its bassline's steady shore through waves of resigned heartbreak. But the epic atmospheres are rarely as dense as I might be letting on. What matters most is the substance behind the style, and here, even morose falling-out songs like "Another Step Away" are saturated with slender indie-pop melody, notwithstanding the occasional weak lyric about how there's "no photograph that can capture who you are" (totally rhymes with "shooting star").
A Place to Bury Strangers can pull beauty out of eardrum-puncturing bleakness, but the most tuneful offering here, "Don't Think Lover", is gentle and romantic-- when not exploding at the seams. "Don't think lover/ Love lasts forever," Ackermann sings, and it's never quite clear whether the sentiment is optimistic or misanthropic. The stalking "I Know I'll See You" seems to play off the know-my-love-too-well urgency of the Smiths' "Hand in Glove", with Ackermann even warning, "Don't take my hand/ 'Cause I'll take it away." Like the Italians Do It Better label's similarly moody After Dark compilation, A Place to Bury Strangers may not be easy for would-be record buyers to find-- it's currently limited to 500 copies and put out by, um, Killer Pimp Records-- but it's worth every effort. | 2007-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Killer Pimp | August 31, 2007 | 8.4 | a6460a15-0686-4432-8d5e-1c43e302ca32 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On her arid and beautiful debut, the dancer, actress, and composer charts her climb out of paralyzing depression. | On her arid and beautiful debut, the dancer, actress, and composer charts her climb out of paralyzing depression. | Keeley Forsyth: Debris | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keeley-forsyth-debris/ | Debris | The dancer, actress, and composer Keeley Forsyth released her debut album at age 40, after almost half a lifetime spent acting in Saturday night soaps, children’s television, and most recently, a Marvel film (she played “Mottled Prisoner” in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy). In 2017, Forsyth experienced a physical and psychological malaise so intense that it resulted in the temporary paralysis of her tongue. Her turn to music—that cooing thing we recognize in our mother’s bellies long before we understand speech—makes a certain therapeutic sense. Forsyth rediscovered her voice through the medium, and Debris charts the laborious process of making herself heard. It’s the musical equivalent of emerging half-paralyzed from a car wreck and relearning to wiggle each toe.
Forsyth’s voice, by some distance, is the most remarkable and beguiling sound on the album. Forsyth has Peggy Lee’s vibrato, Nico’s asperity, and some of the avant-garde operatics of Diamanda Galas, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a comparison that does her justice. Her voice is intuitive and somber, and occasionally, the instrumentation on Debris fails to contend with it.
Forsyth first heard Matthew Bourne, the experimental jazz musician and composer who collaborated with her on Debris’ largely accordion-led arrangements, while listening to BBC Radio 3’s left-field show “Late Junction.” Bourne is known for his spare and spartan solo work, but he and Forsyth struggle to find common ground occasionally on Debris. The problem is most pronounced on the string-heavy track “It’s Raining,” which sounds more like a score for a BBC period drama than something from Forsyth’s arid world. Typically, the starker the instrumentation, the more effective the song. Producer Sam Hobbs seems to understand this; he takes care to leave in the sticky sounds of Forsyth’s mouth, the pulsing of machines, the tap of a spacebar when the recording’s complete; anything that brings Forsyth, and her desire to be heard, to the fore.
Bourne’s arrangements work best at their most ambient, as on the album highlight “Lost.” “Is this what madness feels like?” Forsyth asks. Echoes of her voice drag for so long that they become circular and indistinguishable from the rest of the arrangement. The listener experiences a terrifyingly accurate simulation of Forsyth’s trauma. We are immersed; we are implicated. Nothing on this album is intended to be heard from a distance, and at its best, it’s terrifying.
For an album that’s largely about depression, there’s very little interiority on Forsyth’s part. She is not a self, but a sound. The lyrics document her shifting relationship with the natural world, as depression transforms her into a voyeur of her own life, rendering people into puppets, angels into mocking spirits. Her bleak poetry verges on cliché: Forsyth’s “shadow” is “engulfed”; a broken house is rendered into a “house of thorns,” and, in a moment of juvenilia, she waits for “volcanoes to melt us into oblivion.” It’s a forgivable lapse; what Forsyth lacks in poetic originality she more than makes up for with intensity.
We are conditioned to expect a note of resilience or redemption at the end of a despondent piece of art. There’s a slight hint of hope when Forsyth sings “A large oak/Descended/Grew/Roots” on the album’s penultimate song, and titling the final track “Start Again” certainly signals some potential for change. In it, Forsyth goads herself towards the direction of something new: “Oh Lord, where should I go?” she asks. The relief isn’t found on the album itself, but in the fact that with it, Forsyth can finally be heard. | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | The Leaf Label | January 22, 2020 | 7.6 | a654abe1-b505-40d3-84a9-6f016fd600e7 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Recording deep underground in a West Virginia cave, Haley Dahl creates vivid, ambitious chamber pop with a flair for the grotesque. | Recording deep underground in a West Virginia cave, Haley Dahl creates vivid, ambitious chamber pop with a flair for the grotesque. | Sloppy Jane: Madison | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sloppy-jane-madison/ | Madison | Several years back, Haley Dahl was nursing a broken heart. So, in a poetic gesture, she became obsessed with a different type of void: caves. Dahl, who performs as Sloppy Jane, realized that a cave—a natural echo chamber—would be a great place to record an album. After exploring many options, she chose West Virginia’s Lost World Caverns as her underground recording studio. Over two weeks in 2019, Dahl, 21 fellow musicians, and a film crew trekked below the earth between 3 p.m. and 8 a.m. to record. The descent was only the first logistical difficulty: Getting a piano underground took a day in each direction, and the humid conditions required stationing the recording equipment in a car aboveground and dangling the wires through a hole.
Dahl possesses grand visions but also, crucially, the determination to actually realize them; Sloppy Jane is exhibit A. Dahl started the band as a Los Angeles high schooler, working with a series of collaborators that at one point included Phoebe Bridgers, whose Dead Oceans imprint, Saddest Factory, is releasing Sloppy Jane’s new record, Madison. Now based in Brooklyn, the band has evolved from a punk project to something more like avant-garde chamber pop, with performances that have featured Dahl spewing blue paint in a suit that she one day plans to eat.
Dahl has said that Madison was “written as a grand gesture for somebody who I was trying to make love me.” Time and again, the songs feel caught between the hoped-for romance and a hard-to-swallow reality. “Party Anthem” is trapped in a prison of unrequited love, but the band’s rousing orchestrals makes Dahl’s regret sound bombastic. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be/Everything I needed to be,” she belts. On the downcast piano ballad “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor,” she wonders if it’s easier to be appreciated in the afterlife. As the music gradually expands into dramatic distortion, it’s apparent that the effort of underground recording was worth it: Every instrument, from a thick drum to the careening guitar that eventually joins in, sounds massive.
Madison is full of beauty, but Dahl’s explorations of heartache and insecurity don’t shy away from ugliness. She pictures herself collapsing on the ground covered in ants, or swallowing fast-setting concrete and plunging into a lake; her voice quivers as she describes herself as “imprisoned in a wedding pigeon body with a tin-can face.” On “The Constable,” she spots a man cruelly kicking a dog, and rather than recoil, she’s aroused: “And God/I wanted that dog to be me.” The anguish she wrings out of that “God” is a gut punch.
Dahl often juxtaposes her grotesqueries against whimsical instrumentation, making them feel especially twisted, but also a little romantic. “Judy’s Bedroom,” a grim singalong that evokes the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours,” recounts the real-life murder of the titular character by her husband. “Judy does whatever she pleases/Cause she’s with Jesus now,” Dahl sings with macabre warmth. “Lullaby Formica,” a dreamlike, horse-themed take on the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, ends on a grim but touching note: “If you become a carousel/Or if you’re sold for glue/Or if you’re cold to me/My tongue will stick to you.”
Dahl is an imaginative lyricist and her imagery, while hardly direct, is always delicious. But it is testament to her strength as a composer that her instrumental arrangements are equally evocative. “Bianca Castafiore” (like the opera singer from Tintin) is a topsy-turvy instrumental in which Dahl performs wordless vocal acrobatics, “whoo-hoos” and “oohs” somersaulting through the air. “How come you only touch me when you brush my hair?/You don’t care,” sings Dahl on the title track with jaunty, theatrical desperation. A third of the way through, the song’s symphony sours, and the audience lets out an “aww.” But Dahl is more than capable of carrying the show.
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. | 2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddest Factory | November 23, 2021 | 7.5 | a6559d8f-cbd8-45b2-93ae-6ba7863b5b28 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. The Brooklyn rapper’s two new albums set hard-earned wisdom to the lushest music of his career. | The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. The Brooklyn rapper’s two new albums set hard-earned wisdom to the lushest music of his career. | Ka: Languish Arts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ka-languish-arts-woeful-studies/ | Languish Arts / Woeful Studies | The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn depicted in Ka’s music is stark: bleached of artifice, enhanced by religious levels of penance and gratitude. There’s constant talk of being damned, of making the best of bad situations brought about by poverty, police, drug dealing, and the irrevocable nature of street ties that bind. But the beats and bars that Ka conjures never feel one-dimensional. His voice flows through cracks in the street corners where friends were shot down, the directness of his writing birthing dark, cavernous alleyways and cupboards reeking of instant soups and desperation. The scope of early projects like Iron Works and Grief Pedigree is vast and gutting enough on its own, but Ka’s work grew more potent once he began using themes and concepts to canonize his story as an epic in its own right.
The trials and tribulations of Ka’s life—and the wisdom and trauma that accompany them—receive new context on every album, recycled like rainwater. In 2013, he redrew his stories under the guise of chess and other strategy games on The Night’s Gambit, then did the same with the Bushido code on 2016’s Honor Killed the Samurai. He’s looked to literature for framing devices, including The Manchurian Candidate (2015’s Preservation-produced Days With Dr. Yen Lo) and Greek and Christian mythology with 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens (a team-up with California producer Animoss) and 2020’s Descendants of Cain. By 2021’s A Martyr’s Reward, he’d turned the lens on himself, examining his legacy as one of rap’s most consistent auteurs. Many rappers have likened their music to therapy, but the blunt minimalism of Ka’s words evokes the catharsis of uncomfortable revelations unearthed in years of deep thought.
Languish Arts and *Woeful Studies—*his ninth and 10th studio albums, released back-to-back earlier this month—combine the self-analysis of A Martyr’s Reward with an examination of how learned behaviors can fester and exacerbate the seemingly endless cycles of poverty and oppression that affect Black people specifically. Hard-learned lessons of cops who could be “vegan, how they plant base” and kids who go an entire school year with one pair of pants brush up against his hunger for truths both emotional and circumstantial. “The astute listener hear every soup kitchen and bread line,” he says on Languish’s closing track “Last Place.” Having embraced his upbringing, Ka commits his music to clearing the cobwebs for those walking similar paths. Compared to his other albums, the relative brightness of the beats here—all self-produced, except for three by Animoss and one by Preservation—calls more attention than ever to the melancholy in his stories. Healing from trauma takes time; Languish and Woeful continue the slow unspooling in typically beautiful fashion.
Ka’s way with metaphor and prose is genuinely staggering. On Languish opener “Full Cobra,” he communicates his place within hip-hop and his community with consummate efficiency: “I do this quaint rap, true; it ain’t trap, I brung escapes.” The “escape” is both literal and figurative: Fortunate enough to have made it out of the trenches, Ka writes songs that purge bad thoughts from his present as they contextualize his past. The clever wordplay of bars like “I was in a hole, you don’t know the half” (“Eat”) or “We not innocent, we into dollars” (“We Not Innocent”) never overshadows his triumph in being here to say them at all. Every song across these two albums is peppered with lyrical gems like these, delivered in the trademark raspy whisper of a weathered sage.
The minimalism of Ka’s voice and production brings attention to the open space in his songs. Where the typical Ka beat sounds dingy and worn, as if lifted off Turner Classic Movies, Languish and Woeful contain the lushest music of his career. The orchestral strings and occasional bolt of electric guitar that back “Ascension” recall Jay Electronica rapping over Jon Brion’s score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Flutes and a throbbing theremin sample give the counted blessings of “Touché” a queasy mood, while triangle, bass, and horns punctuate Ka’s memories of the comfort of dinners turned celebrations and the anxiety of monitoring police scanners on “I’m Tired.” The second half of “Eat” sets a soulful piano loop against Ka’s poignant ruminations on neighborhood ciphers from his childhood and confronting the bad habits he’s held onto: “From the brokest neighborhood, where you can get a fix/Could’ve easily been there now, instead of pitching this.” It’s a bittersweet moment, his relief at having made it out chafing against the reality of others still suffering.
The world Ka lives in is suffocating in its emptiness, yet his presence and perseverance fill the field with cinematic breadth. The broad perspective manifests in Languish Arts and Woeful Studies’ status as separate albums. Both have clear beginnings, middles, and ends, but there’s no symbolic yin and yang relationship between the two, no dovetailing moments or differentiating production quirks. Setting the records side-by-side simply emphasizes the point he’s trying to make. The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. For the first time, he steps fully into the role of teacher, claiming the title of griot for his era of wounded street soldiers. His growing confidence in his role as a forebear of the New York City underground seeps through the subtle changes that give both albums their meticulous luster. But it’s the glimmers of hope throughout that make them standouts in Ka’s catalog. To him, those who don’t know their history—of race, of family, of rap music—are bound to repeat it. He’s never sounded more committed to leading by example. | 2022-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | September 28, 2022 | 8 | a65b8ff5-d404-475e-a4ff-a8294a489e39 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
In certain circles, Jeff Rosenstock is one of the most important figures in modern punk, and with WORRY., he has made his magnum opus. | In certain circles, Jeff Rosenstock is one of the most important figures in modern punk, and with WORRY., he has made his magnum opus. | Jeff Rosenstock: WORRY. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22622-worry/ | WORRY. | If you know the feeling of being jolted awake at 3 AM by every outstanding obligation in your life, you'll recognize the paralyzing anxiety embedded in the lyrics of Jeff Rosenstock’s third solo LP. To wit: “Ignorance is bliss until the day/The things you ignored all come into focus.” When those things emerge, they will waylay you with the same nagging, needling and relentless tone that knows every single pressure point in your system. Rosenstock has always sung like this, so WORRY. isn’t a case of an artist finding his voice. Rather, it’s an artist finding his muse—it's right there in the title—and making the record of his life.
Rosenstock didn’t really need a magnum opus to solidify his reputation as one of the most important figures in modern punk music—in certain circles, he’s basically an Ian MacKaye figure, a paragon of ethics whose web-based, pay-what-you-want record label gave him legitimate reason to feel salty when Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead were called revolutionaries for doing the same thing years later. However, he was doing this as the leader of a ska-punk project called the Arrogant Sons of Bitches and, later, Bomb the Music Industry! As the names of these acts might imply, this stuff wasn’t bound for mainstream acceptance, though Rosenstock’s sonic and philosophical influence has been acknowledged by verbose and principled young acts like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, and Mitski.
WORRY. isn’t an obvious crossover attempt. Rosenstock touches on almost every intersection of pop and punk, whether or not it’s credible: there are flashes of Jawbreaker’s real-talk scene reportage, the synth-spiked sugar rushes of the Anniversary and the Get Up Kids, but also previously canonical touchstones that have become relegated to Boomerism nostalgia: the Beach Boys, the Clash, and Abbey Road. After the beer-hoisting nostalgia of “Blast Damage Days,” WORRY. unexpectedly (and hilariously) hits double time and tries to cram Rosenstock’s entire discography into a Side B medley, breathlessly running through Twista-paced spitfire punk, 30-second blasts of D-beat hardcore and an unashamedly infectious ska song.
WORRY. is rife with similarly invigorating and wildly unfashionable touches—the Reggie and the Full Effect-style electropop intro of “Festival Song,” his voice cracking on the line, “So we made out foooooor the entire ride” like drunken Rivers Cuomo karaoke. “I wanna listen to the Cribs my dear, while we make out in your car,” he sings on “Pash Rash.” Among other things, Rosenstock is mounting a rousing defense of genre—“Stop sneering at our joy like it’s some careless mistake,” he snarls on “We Begged 2 Explode,” where a swaying piano ballad erupts into a kitchen-drinking singalong at a house party.
Punk usually has to sound serious to be taken seriously, and WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here: it’s a record about New York gentrification, the internet, police brutality, liberal guilt, DIY idealism—crucial subject matter that typically inspire chin-stroking appreciation or eye-rolls because of their self-serious delivery.
Instead, WORRY. is an absolute blast and its heaviest stories are presented as some of the most devastating breakup songs of the past year. “Staring Out the Window at Your Old Apartment” plays on the “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” trope: “Someone hung a decorative surfboard up where your records and movies belong,” Rosenstock yells, but they still can’t hide the cracks in the wall that the landlord was never going to fix and the tacky renovations that followed. “You’ve got nowhere to go now,” he moans, in a lyric that exhibits scorn-free empathy for New Yorkers and the shitholes they’ve somehow been been priced out of. Rosenstock fondly reminisces over drinking tallboys by the water on “Wave Goodnight to Me,” written in memory of shuttered Death By Audio (and accompanied by a dead-on video). “I wish it didn’t hurt. I wish I didn’t care,” he brays, knowing that all DIY spaces are living on borrowed time and this one would eventually become the new *Vice *office: “They spent the last five years, yelling, ‘Come on! Come on! Come on! Get out of here!’”
Much of WORRY. is put in this “us vs. them” battleground, but Rosenstock isn’t a scold—he realizes you might not figure out you’re them until it’s too late. “Festival Song” takes easy licks at “dorm room” music, “sweatshop denim jackets,” “department store crust punk chic,” and, well, you name it: “They wouldn’t be your friend if it wasn’t worth it/If you didn’t have something they could take.” His ire isn’t just limited to AEG and Live Nation pumping more hot air into a bubble that already burst, or Funyuns sponsoring whatever the hell this is. WORRY. was fittingly released right in the middle of October; it began with the NFL “going pink” as a meek gesture towards women jersey-buyers while treating domestic violence cases with less gravity than touchdown celebrations, and ended with Twitter shuttering Vine, a seemingly utopian mode of expression that in reality repeatedly exploited people of color (and still didn’t make a dime).
As much as WORRY. deals in financial insecurity—the #1 worry of all—it speaks to the unshakable notion that American society is one giant game of big-bank-take-little-bank and we’re all “born as a data mine for targeted marketing,” discarded when we’re no longer in a demographic worth exploiting. Needless to say, it's become even more resonant in the past month.
If this all sounds exhausting, well—would WORRY. live up to its name if it wasn’t? But there’s something reassuring about worry, how it is inextricable from daily existence, how it can reveal what’s actually meaningful when total nihilism is always a tempting option. Dropped in the middle of Rosenstock’s surveys of urban cultural decline, “I Did Something Weird Last Night” turns out to be the neurotic punk’s answer to “It Was a Good Day”—“I made out in the van with a girl I like/We were kinda drunk but it seemed alright,” Rosenstock yelps, explaining the title and returning to his apartment, sleeping through classes the next day and wondering when he’ll ever see her again. It’s a beautifully written song about the brief moments when irrational, giddy emotion can shout down the Voice of Worry and allow good things to happen despite everything—and also about the way people can talk themselves out of good things immediately afterwards once worry returns: “if I see you soon, will you want to see me?”; “I hope I’m not reading into this too much, it’s a kiss.”
Rosenstock wrote “I Did Something Weird Last Night” about his girlfriend at the time, who is now his wife; the album’s cover art is taken from their wedding photos. But at the time, he admits, “I was preoccupied with how the magic would end/Because nothing intangible remains sustainable/Hope is a scheme.” It ties into the worry that pervades every interaction on this record, whether it’s with peers, corporations, political causes, anything—if you actually give a shit, have expectations and get your hopes up, you’re going to get played for a sucker. But later on, he shouts WORRY.’s most cathartic and reassuring line and like most others, if you’re not paying attention, you might miss what this album is really about: “Love is worry.” | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | SideOneDummy | November 23, 2016 | 8 | a65d71b4-7734-4f05-a658-c568225e605f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Spotlighting over a dozen vocalists on a suite of airy, upbeat collaborations, the Canadian producer’s big mainstream moment showcases his slick sound in a variety of different settings. | Spotlighting over a dozen vocalists on a suite of airy, upbeat collaborations, the Canadian producer’s big mainstream moment showcases his slick sound in a variety of different settings. | Kaytranada: Timeless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaytranada-timeless/ | Timeless | Time was, producers could keep secrets. Samples and drum kits were subjects of intense speculation, while draconian copyright laws pushed crate-diggers deep into obscure backlists. Equipment was expensive and quickly outdated; studio time cost $200 an hour. But Kaytranada arrived in the era of demystified production, with advanced engineering tools and infinite audio libraries mere clicks away. In developing his signature sound, he focused less on discrete elements—his peers could replicate those anyway—than their intricate arrangement. On his 2016 breakthrough, 99.9%, the tempos, syncopation, and layering techniques were Kaytranada’s own, even when the instrumentals and melodies came from elsewhere.
By now, you know a Kaytranada beat when you hear one: The drums are foregrounded with a papery rasp, loud but rarely abrasive. His is such a specific trademark that he risked reaching an artificial ceiling if each record was just an iteration of a theme. 2023’s Kaytraminé preempted any stagnation, pairing Kaytranada’s kinetic drum patterns with Aminė’s chatty rhymes, keeping the temperature low while indulging a shared nervousness. On Timeless, Kaytranada builds on the fusion of 99.9% and 2019’s Bubba, spotlighting over a dozen vocalists on a suite of airy, upbeat collaborations.
True to form, Timeless is structured and sequenced like a DJ set as finely chopped instrumentals cross-fade into the next. The jazzier numbers, like “Video” and “Stepped On,” have a mathematical precision reminiscent of Kaytranada’s earlier work with Robert Glasper. And while the songs themselves lack big dynamic trajectories, the tracklist orbits around “Drip Sweat,” a climactic fireworks display featuring Channel Tres. The simplistic melody recalls early-’90s claustrophobia, augmented by Kaytranada’s stuttering rhythm breaks. Channel Tres leans into his role as a glowering emcee, directing dancefloor traffic between muttered verses.
Timeless is a dance record, but it can be easily adapted for kicking back at home. The busy drum patterns are offset by soft chords and engineering—the whispery snares land like an air conditioner’s muffled rattle. Kaytranada’s touch is also accentuated by a corps of fluttery-voiced R&B stars: Tinashe and Ravyn Lenae are flanked by Canadian counterparts Rochelle Jordan and Charlotte Day Wilson, grounding the electronica with more classic phrasing. On “Still,” Kaytranada’s heavy kicks propel Wilson’s wistful ballad; the rimshots scattered throughout “Hold On” contrast Dawn Richard’s smooth vocals with spiky edges. The intersection recalls a late-’00s moment when hip-hop producers like Dela and DJ Jazzy Jeff were huffing neo-soul’s last fumes, dousing their rustling MPC drums with turntable cuts—a short interim bookended by more decisive movements, condensing techniques drawn from disparate, bygone eras.
And that’s what makes a good DJ set—there’s a little something for everybody. On Timeless, Afrobeat rhythms and funk licks are dressed in R&B elegance; Childish Gambino and PinkPantheress meet the lively tempos with alacrity. If anything, the parade of blends and collaborations dulls the record’s highlights. A winking and mischievous Anderson .Paak supplies the album’s most charismatic performance on “Do 2 Me.” Don Toliver echoes .Paak’s vocal register on “Feel a Way,” yet it’s missing the sly intimacy, bogging down the set’s breezy opening passage.
An angsty Thundercat duet, “Wasted Words,” is limited to 90 seconds and buried on a bonus disc. Over Kaytranada’s hypnotic shuffle, Thundercat scales into falsetto, lambasting his neighbors (“You need to take that hat off/’Cause your whole ‘fit is trash”) for innocuous offenses. It’s a bit out-of-place on Timeless, yet the moody chords and harmonies are tantalizing in context, exposing a tiny hole in the record’s block-party itinerary. But if Timeless feels slighter than its predecessors, it’s no less assured, its purpose no less profound: to get you moving, even in quiet moments. | 2024-06-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 12, 2024 | 7.3 | a65f0355-a164-4d97-8b36-5fe73129a03b | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
On her second album, the country-pop singer remains a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell of out every middle-of-the-road style going. | On her second album, the country-pop singer remains a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell of out every middle-of-the-road style going. | Maren Morris: Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maren-morris-girl/ | Girl | If you want a representative sample of pop music in 2018, something to throw in a time capsule so that future explorers scouring Earth’s climate-wrecked mess would know exactly how good the radio was on average, you can’t do better than Zedd and Maren Morris’ “The Middle.” The hit is a slightly snazzier version of Zedd’s previous hit, Alessia Cara collaboration “Stay,” with the same vocoder chorus and clock ticks. For Morris’ part, the writers also auditioned Anne-Marie (the former front-runner, who lost it because of the music jobbing equivalent of a non-compete agreement), two members of Fifth Harmony, Carly Rae Jepsen(!), and more than 12 other singers.
This is how plenty of songs are made and Zedd’s career has consisted of making these inoffensive tracks over which singers can belt and yearn and seize the stage; Morris is great at all three. But as the litany of not-quite-A-listers considered suggests, it’s more a conduit for royalties than for star-making: not an A Star Is Born, more a star borne ceaselessly into the pop machine.
And by doing “The Middle” at all, Maren Morris became a flashpoint whether she liked it or not (spoiler: not) for the perpetually nasty debate over country music becoming “too pop,” and what that even means. Last year, she tweeted in her defense after a semi-influential blogger accused her of “[conducting] herself like she is an absolute superstar and hot shit,” on grounds of existing. Girl is full of this reluctant defensiveness, which shouldn’t have to exist but does, both on record and in its promotion. “I’m not setting out to make an EDM album or a big, you know, pop-diva record,” Morris told The Ringer. “I just wanna make a record that sounds like the inside of my head.”
Judging by Girl, the inside of Morris’ head sounds like a Hobby Lobby. An EDM album it is not. A pop-diva record it could be, if the diva is LeAnn Rimes or Faith Hill. It is also not Morris’ dreaded full-Ariana Grande turn. Songwriters Greg Kurstin (Kelly Clarkson, Pink) and Sarah Aarons (Camila Cabello, Khalid)—already well-toward the acoustic side of songwriting teams—only contribute two songs, “Girl” and Brandi Carlile duet “Common.” The rest are written by mostly Nashville songwriters. But it isn’t really a country-country record either; remove the unmistakably twangy verse by the Brothers Osborne, and there’d be no strong tells.
This is less a sign of Morris’ poppiness than just where the music industry is now. Mainstream pop is increasingly welcoming country artists, no doubt noticing the success of one Taylor Swift and, even more, the fact that country radio is now more popular overall than “contemporary hits”/Top 40. Whether this is a sign of boom times or just a sign that the kids have fled to streaming, it’s resulting in stuff like Florida Georgia Line and Bebe Rexha’s “Meant to Be” or the Chainsmokers’ recent single with Kelsea Ballerini, “This Feeling.” Meanwhile, country today increasingly just sounds like ’90s pop-rock: like “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” or “Semi-Charmed Life.”
Country music tends to process this in their music: as Rob Harvilla wrote in The Ringer, “a fun and casual and not-at-all contrived thing country music stars love to do is name-drop pop stars in their songs,” in order to lyrically crash its party. Morris did it in breakout hit “My Church,” and does it on Girl too. On the title track, she does it implicitly, turning country’s “halo” trope—recently done growlingly by Chris Stapleton and hilariously by Keith Urban—into a Beyoncé interpolation. In “A Song for Everything,” she’s more explicit: “What’s your time machine? Springsteen or ‘Teenage Dream’?” she sings, alongside a five-note piano bit that makes it sound like a jingle for the very concept of music. She reminisces about when “Coldplay still played clubs,” like “Losing My Edge” by someone with the edge of a pillow. By lavishing so much time on the identity of her faves, Morris barely has any left for her own.
Too much of Girl is like this. Where Taylor Swift crossed over by writing deeply personal songs, like heart-emoji texts sent to millions of girls directly, and Kacey Musgraves crossed over with a warm, earnest and doggedly untrendy record, Girl crosses over by demonstrating Maren Morris is a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell out of every middle-of-the-road style going. One of Morris’ best traits is her goofy streak, as heard on singles like “Rich” (“If I had a dime every time that you crossed my mind/Well, I’d basically be sitting on a big-ass pile of dimes.”) Girl is best when it can peek out, as on the guitar chug swaggering stomp of lead single “Girl,” or “The Feels”: effervescent bubbly pop-country at its best, words spilling out at the speed of feelings. “RSVP” is the closest the album comes to R&B, particularly in Morris’ vocals, and done coyly, with whirring percussion. “Great Ones” slams into its Southern-rock chorus too inevitably, but the verses do suggest a twitchy novelty that could have been.
But too much of Girl is stifling repertoire: suggesting all genres at once, excelling at none. “Make Out With Me” is undeniably tender, but it’s also basically a Meghan Trainor song, from its retro-repro stylings—the song begins with a faux-crackly “this is the end of side one of this record”—and doo-wop lilt to the bowdlerization of a song clearly about a booty call but lyrically stuck at first base. Taken as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the audience who enjoys every corner of this album. It’s even harder to imagine the artist Morris really wants to be. | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Sony | March 9, 2019 | 6.3 | a6640b14-7898-4ff8-9b7a-03413f44db40 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
After spending decades creating music out of undiscovered noises, avant-garde composer William Basinski lets his hair down on this joyful, funky release. | After spending decades creating music out of undiscovered noises, avant-garde composer William Basinski lets his hair down on this joyful, funky release. | Sparkle Division: To Feel Embraced | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparkle-division-to-feel-embraced/ | To Feel Embraced | Disintegration, decay, black holes… these are a few words that might spring to mind at the thought of ambient composer William Basinski, who has somehow made music from all of the above in the past few decades. Two words that probably wouldn’t? Sparkle Division. The unlikely moniker brands Basinski’s creative partnership with his collaborator and studio assistant Preston Wendel. Basinski and Wendel have spent the past four years conceptualizing and recording their debut album To Feel Embraced, and the result is a heady cocktail of free jazz, exotica, dub-lounge, disco, and just about every genre that could be described as “vibey.” Conceived and largely completed in 2016, Basinski and Wendel paused the album’s release due to the onset of a bleak political climate and ongoing environmental catastrophe. But now that things have become inconceivably worse, Sparkle Division figured “fuck it.” To Feel Embraced has floated in like a Golden Record from a distant planet, where things are relaxed, joyful, and funky.
The star of To Feel Embraced is Basinski’s saxophone, which the composer picked up again following Wendel’s persuasion. Known for his ambient masterpiece The Disintegration Loops, in which the record’s sound is derived from the continual decay of magnetic tape strip, Basinski with a saxophone feels like a white-coated scientist ditching his lab to ride a wild horse. He paints freely with his instrument, unbeholden to the confines or high concepts of his previous work. You can glean from the song titles alone that Basinski is having fun here. On “Mmmmkayy I’m Goin’ Out Now and I Don’t Want Any Trouble From You!” Basinksi’s relaxed phrases melt into a codeine calypso fortified by canned strings and sparse percussion. He is similarly lax on “You Ain’t Takin’ My Man” and “For Gato,” a pair of lounge lizard ballads seemingly born of otherworldly settings; the former could score one of David Lynch’s seedy Twin Peaks scenes, and the latter sounds more akin to Flying Lotus’ spacious, astral jazz.
To Feel Embraced is not a project that promotes stasis in any way shape or form—Sparkle Division are far more interested in presenting you with an assortment of vivid scenery. In addition to their flirtations with lounge noir and celestial jazz, Basinski and Wendel dabble in swinging big band (“You Go Girl!”), new age (“To Feel”), and vaudeville (“Queenie Got Her Blues”). “Queenie Got Her Blues” features vocals by Leonora Russo, the late Queen of Williamsburg who died in 2016 and was mourned by locals across the borough. On the brief track, Russo sounds like she’s leading a ragtag marching band, singing and laughing through a tin can while her disciples back her with spirited brass. It’s a sweet and affectionate send-off from Basinski, who referred to Russo as “my Brooklyn mom” (Russo is the stylish nonagenarian gracing the album art, decked out in shining accessories and red lipstick).
“Oh Henry!” is another tribute, this time for the late avant-garde jazz bassist Henry Grimes who died in April. Basinski’s simple, clean saxophone passages are chopped with rattling snare fits and unexpected, staccato bass rhythms, which demonstrate Grimes’ unique command of the instrument. Displaying his technical proficiency on the track was not Grimes’ only priority, he was also concerned with the song’s practical application. “Lotta babies gonna be born from this one,” he said of the track prior to his passing—another indication that To Feel Embraced is an album of serious artists making music that is more concerned with immediate joy and emotional exploration than decay or deep space. After spending decades creating music out of undiscovered noises, William Basinski lets his hair down on To Feel Embraced.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Temporary Residence Ltd. | August 15, 2020 | 7.6 | a66d22ec-13cd-40f7-ad18-5453b7e4677e | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
A new six-disc box set featuring performances from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s offers the definitive document of the latter-day Jerry Garcia Band. | A new six-disc box set featuring performances from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s offers the definitive document of the latter-day Jerry Garcia Band. | Jerry Garcia Band: Electric on the Eel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-electric-on-the-eel/ | Electric on the Eel | One way to find Jerry Garcia the last weekend of August 1987 was to open an issue of Billboard, where Garcia and the Grateful Dead lingered on both the singles and albums charts. The MTV-assisted hit “Touch of Grey” peaked at No.9, while parent album In the Dark climbed to No. 6—the only two Top 10 hits of the Dead’s career. Another way to find Garcia that same weekend was to pack the car and drive three-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco, deep into the Emerald Triangle, northern California’s much-contested cannabis-growing region, until Route 101 ran along the Eel River. There, at a secluded spot known as French’s Camp, Jerry Garcia and his long-running Jerry Garcia Band jammed on a simple tapestry-draped stage while naked hippies frolicked in the water, a benefit for Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow.
A new box set, Electric on the Eel, captures the Jerry Garcia Band on their three visits to the idyllic French’s Camp in 1987, 1989, and 1991. They show Jerry Garcia at both the height of his fame and simultaneously escaping into his not-so-secret identity: himself. Since 1970, Garcia had played outside the Dead in various musical guises, hiding in plain sight at regular no-name jam sessions in Bay Area clubs that—with bassist John Kahn—consolidated into the Jerry Garcia Band by 1975. Though the Garcia Band would remain most at home playing in dark bars, they also became an outlet for the kind of laid-back musical opportunities the Dead could no longer accommodate, like playing for a few thousand hippies in the summer sunshine while Wavy Gravy MCed.
In more ways than one, The Jerry Garcia Band functioned as an escape hatch from the creative and financial chaos of the Grateful Dead—Kahn, Garcia’s frequent musical second-in-command outside the Dead, also served as Garcia’s longtime drug buddy. In the summer of 1986, Garcia fell into a diabetic coma and nearly died. Years of addiction and ill health had taken their toll, and when he came to, he had to relearn how to play guitar. When he took the stage again, in decent health for the first time in nearly a decade, he had a new sense of agency and purpose. You can hear that ravaged clarity even in these low-key sessions.
As Electric on the Eel documents, the Jerry Garcia Band was as unpretentious as the Grateful Dead were convoluted. With the repertoire of a deep bar act, they were a platform for Garcia’s endless guitar variations over a more straightforward rhythm section, plus backup singers to support Garcia’s scarred voice. It is uncomplicated and often sweet, lying at the blurry intersection of rock, R&B, Motown, and gospel, cushioned by the enveloping warmth of Melvin Seals’ Hammond organ and Gloria Jones and Jacklyn LaBranch’s backing vocals. It is music intended for dancing or, at least, feeling good.
The box set dips into Garcia’s bag of trusted extra-Dead originals, including 1982’s charging “Run For the Roses,” 1976’s redemptive “Mission in the Rain,” and 1977’s apocalyptic “Gomorrah.” But most of Electric on the Eel is devoted to a songbook of covers in the emerging jam-band vernacular that Garcia was helping to define. Among the 31 different songs on Electric on the Eel, more than a dozen were new to the songbook since Garcia’s coma, including Bruce Cockburn’s “Waiting For A Miracle,” which became a late-career staple, and “Twilight,” a pining and lonesome deep cut by The Band. Garcia’s voice is especially strong and confident on crisp versions of Los Lobos’s “Evangeline” from 1987 and 1989, neither version cracking four minutes, both bouncing like the streamlined early ‘70s Dead.
Garcia’s vocals, despite ample wear and tear, are in arguably the best shape of his later years. Nearly every track is a sterling example of how someone with a damaged voice can also be an incredible singer. Scratched from years of cigarettes and freebasing Persian heroin, Garcia’s voice flutters and shakes. He doesn’t always sustain notes or land on the right pitch. Sometimes, he transposes verses or forgets lyrics. And yet, his singing is as much a reason to listen to Electric on the Eel as his guitar playing, both filled with a rejuvenating brightness mirrored in Melvin Seals’ buoyant organ, and capable of clarity, articulation, and even power. Garcia had been singing spirituals since his folkie days in the early ‘60s, but—in its post-coma return—his voice finds more grace than ever.
Of course, every track makes its way to the inevitable guitar solo. “I’ll take a simple C to G and feel brand new about it,” Garcia sings on a cover of Allen Toussaint’s “I’ll Take a Melody,” perhaps a rare bit of boasting on Garcia’s part. A staple of his solo shows since the early ’70s, it’s also a song that became his own, in part through his brilliant variations on it. To those tuned in, Garcia’s guitar could unlock the language of the cosmos even on generic bar fodder like Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally.” When Garcia was tuned out, though, as he was for much of the early ‘80s, it could also sound closer to a musical screensaver. By 1987, Garcia’s playing and singing had both regained their former urgency, the cosmos once again within reach.
Compared to the languid Garcia Band extravaganzas of the ’70s, the Electric on the Eel shows are fairly concise. There is one excellent exploratory jam—a 14-minute “Don’t Let Go” from 1989—but most performances fall under the 10-minute mark. Anchored by drummer David Kemper, who once described the band’s particular groove as simultaneously “having the foot on the gas pedal and foot on the brakes,” the band is flexible and easy, sliding with Garcia as his improvisations stretch.
Most of the music on Electric on the Eel has only circulated as fan-made audience tapes, so these recordings will provide upgrades for deeper heads. But the scope of the set is also a fine way for the Jerry-curious to take a deeper dive into what many consider to be the Garcia Band’s golden period. For some Deadheads, as for Jerry Garcia himself, the Jerry Garcia Band became their own escape from the Dead, and Electric on the Eel shows why, moving with a lightness the Dead had long since lost. Its six discs are both a comprehensive document of the group’s penultimate lineup and a fine introduction to the Jerry Garcia Band at their best, music to make the hassles disappear. | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Round | March 22, 2019 | 7.8 | a66f4e93-5200-4774-ade4-03c2e45e2816 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
This collaborative mixtape between Gqom Oh! and the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective showcases some of the best music that gqom—a raw, brash dance music coming from Durban—has ever produced. | This collaborative mixtape between Gqom Oh! and the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective showcases some of the best music that gqom—a raw, brash dance music coming from Durban—has ever produced. | Various Artists: Gqom Oh! x Crudo Volta Mixtape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22126-gqom-oh-x-crudo-volta-mixtape/ | Gqom Oh! x Crudo Volta Mixtape | A brash and intriguing sound emerged from a Soundcloud hashtag 18 months ago. It was called gqom (pronounced “gomme”), and the raw, underground-beloved and house-adjacent genre has spread from Southeast South Africa’s shores to the world, partly due to the efforts of the Gqom Oh! label. This collaborative project, following up on that label’s breakthrough mixtape The Sound of Durban, Vol. 1, matches Gqom Oh! with the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective, whose name translates from Italian-to-English as “raw time.” Together the two have assembled this mixtape, which serves as the soundtrack of the *Woza Taxi *documentary, in which Gqom Oh! boss Nan Kolè visited his artists and their families in Durban, providing both depth and context for both the sounds and the genre itself.
Watching the doc as well as listening to its soundtrack alone, we get the sense of pride in Zulu culture in the face of bleak realities and a taste of the free-styling hlanganisa, a Zulu word meaning “putting together.” Kolè’s ability to curate music that both celebrates and honestly assesses Durban’s raw and harsh societal realities makes these 14 tracks potentially the best collection from the genre-to-date. Producers like Dominowe and Mafia Boyz are here, and it’s their respective works like “Africa’s Cry” and “6 to 6” upon which the genre’s breakout was predicated.
However, in “Bhengi yoKhalipha,” a Mafia Boyz contribution whose name translates from Zulu-to-English as “dance retarded,” there’s a definite feeling that you’re getting something more from gqom than ever before. Chopping vocal snatches and heavy grooves breaking against ambient depths make the track sound like it’s Jersey club being played in one of Dante’s circles of hell. As for Dominowe, his tracks “Darbuka Tribe” and “Dark Valley” are respectively songs that push the classic Baltimore elements of 2015’s “Africa’s Cry” into more of an angry wail via harrowing synths and breaks that clang against the deep nothingness of the missing bassline below.
There’s also some work here that hearkens to Baltimore-based producer Rod Lee’s famous single “Dance My Pain Away.” Citizen Boy’s track “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” means “who cares if we dance under the influence of drugs,” hinting the pain expressed in gqom that isn’t “danced away,” but more so reveled in to the point of seeming madness. “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” warms up with crunching staccato drums like another classic Baltimore cut, Debonair Samir’s “Samir’s Theme,” but instead of falling into a manic series of horn stabs, this track meets up with demonic bell tolls and snatches of tribal chants that fall much more in line with the scariest stereotypes of warehouse raves.
There’s tons of excellent underground club fodder on the mixtape, like “Hennesey,” a track in which Emo Kid and WorstHood combine forces and brilliantly answers the hypothetical “What if you put Crime Mob’s 2004 rap hit ‘Knuck If You Buck,’ tech house, and Afro-beat in a blender?” However, it's Julz Da Deejay’s “Quantums and Qo” that hits harder than “just another club anthem.” The white noise, simmering synths and overwhelming series of vocal samples add up to something like the gqom equivalent of MARRS’ 1987 pop-crossover house single “Pump Up the Volume.”
The mixtape and related film exist in order to recontextualize gqom from a genre of music made by scads of producers on Soundcloud into the Zulu face of Durban, South Africa’s urban underbelly. From a city where murders happen at a rate that rivals that of Detroit’s, the idea that 20-plus Zulu youths would be inclined to create music that both revels in said violence while also discovering a progressive sonic space is inspiring. Here, a culture foreign to most is portrayed in it’s most nuanced and honest light, and impressively shines through its own darkness. | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Gqom Oh! | July 22, 2016 | 7 | a675d63e-28ec-4308-b910-6a0e8a81a7b9 | Marcus K. Dowling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-k. dowling/ | null |
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