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Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee) is the bassist for Warpaint. More focused than the last Warpaint record, her debut solo album is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock, but never feels like a direct tracing. | Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee) is the bassist for Warpaint. More focused than the last Warpaint record, her debut solo album is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock, but never feels like a direct tracing. | jennylee: right on! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21309-right-on/ | right on! | Her inventive bass playing grounds Warpaint’s lush, painterly compositions, so it’s little wonder that Jenny Lee Lindberg (aka jennylee)’s first solo album, right on!, is both spacious and intimate. More focused than the last Warpaint record, right on*!* is subtle, with the softness and density of cashmere. It owes quite a bit to '80s and '90s goth-leaning college rock but thankfully never feels like a direct tracing thereof. It’s a good record for the winter, reflecting long nights, and the search for comfort and safety, the desire to wrap ourselves in layers.
Where right on! sticks its landings—which it does more often than it falters—it’s in the moments where Lindberg’s bass work drives her songwriting. "boom boom" is a constant, tense pulse, a stutter in the chest; "never" has a classic goth club-floor feel. "bully", with its central, just-vague-enough threat of "I’m not playing around", moves like a shadow behind a theater scrim. "riot" has noise and discord at its core, with Lindberg’s howl buried in the mix and played to perfectly disturbing effect. It’s easy to overplay your hand with horror, the line between terror and corniness divided by camp, but that watery scream is genuinely scary.
The couple of tracks that meander, though, are frustrating. "blind" is a bleak highway drive to nowhere. "long lonely winter" begins with promise, articulating the flatness of isolating depression with remarkable accuracy, but trails off in layers of synth and desert haze. "he fresh" feels more like sketch than song. But right on! is an immaculately produced record—again, not a surprise from a member of a relatively technical band known for their attention to detail. It’s rare to hear a solo album by a bass player that highlights that instrument’s primacy but doesn’t feel overly filigreed. The bass is the butt of jokes; the bass is the instrument people pick in movies when the other rock instruments are taken, and so bassists often feel like they have to overcompensate. Lindberg, thankfully, never falls into that trap. Her voice as an artist, as brought to highlight via production decisions, feels uncluttered and distinct. | 2015-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | December 8, 2015 | 7.3 | a677f150-6771-406e-8bfb-b5e0275cbee8 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
Addressing faith, young love, and nostalgia, the songwriter’s autobiographical third album is empathetic yet unsparing, catchy and finely crafted. | Addressing faith, young love, and nostalgia, the songwriter’s autobiographical third album is empathetic yet unsparing, catchy and finely crafted. | Lucy Dacus: Home Video | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-dacus-home-video/ | Home Video | Lucy Dacus’ third album, Home Video, explores a slice of 2000s Christian youth culture from the perspective of a girl who lived through it. It was a time when kids had newfound access to prurient websites, movies, and music through the internet. Church leaders enforced rigid rules about anything a young girl might read, watch, or listen to. In a recent interview with Esquire, Dacus recalls a pastor who forced her to delete every secular song on her iPod. She mostly complied, but did fight to keep Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars.”
In the past, Dacus wrote songs that took their time, sometimes approaching their destinations only elliptically. The lyrics of Home Video are sharper and more direct. She employs tight rhyme schemes (“You used to be so sweet/Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street”) and shortens the average length of her tracks. The result is a set of finely crafted—and very catchy—pop songs. The bouncy gem “Brando,” with its witty, winking verses, could sound right at home alongside the diaristic hits on Taylor Swift’s Red. That Dacus has reached this milestone without sacrificing the subtlety at the heart of 2018’s Historian is a testament to her talent. The newfound focus on sexuality and spirituality is like a ribbon that wraps around the songs and binds them close.
Home Video is an autobiographical return to the streets of her hometown in Richmond, Virginia. The centerpiece, “VBS,” is a deceptively bouncy ode to the sorts of teen summer camps where archery and canoeing jostle for scheduling space with bible study. It’s unclear if God was ever truly real for Dacus; she’s after tangible rewards more than spiritual ones. “A preacher in a t-shirt told me I could be a leader,” she sings, in the manner of someone who’s folded up a compliment and tucked it away for years of safekeeping. She’s enamored of a fellow camper in need of salvation, who blasts Slayer and recites bad poetry while she struggles not to laugh. When her friend tells her, “You showed me the light,” she’s not sure if she believes them: “All it did, in the end, was make the dark feel darker than before.”
In these songs, we hear Dacus, who would come out as bisexual in early adulthood, struggling to square her queerness with her faith. She’s worried that she doesn’t even need to say the words—that something in her demeanor, her bearing, the lines of her palms, will give her away. After a judgmental parent bars her from spending time with a crush, she stares at her own hands, wondering, “How did they betray me? What did I do?/I never touched you how I wanted to.” Her desire is pulsing, alive, and limited entirely to fantasy. She imagines traveling to the future to disrupt a friend’s wedding: “If you get married, I’d object/Throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect.” Even her relationships with boys are defined by what doesn’t happen more than what does. A schoolyard flirtation culminates with a meeting on a park bench, the two afraid to even look at one another.
In the climactic “Thumbs,” Dacus imagines murdering a friend’s deadbeat father. The words are delivered not as a shocking aside but a calm insistence, repeated in each chorus, with virtually no instrumentation behind her voice. She makes this threat even as it’s clear that she is terrified. After meeting him, she and her friend “walk a mile in the wrong direction,” worried that he’s watching, that he might follow them home. These two young people are butterflies trapped under glass, and in this song, Dacus enacts a survivor’s fantasy of retribution: pulling the pins out of their abdomens, wielding the metal against the man who trapped them.
Though Dacus returns to places of isolation and despondency, it’s comforting to know she’s not making her journey alone. Her boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker make welcome contributions, providing gentle backing vocals in two songs. If the long list of collaborators credited on Home Video is any indication, Dacus belongs to a strong, supportive community of artists who’ve sharpened her arrows and strengthened her storytelling. The record’s only real misstep is Dacus’ decision to alter her voice with Auto-Tune on “Partner in Crime.” She says that she intended to channel the older man’s deceit with a sonic deception of her own, but in the otherwise cozy, acoustic world of this album, the effect is simply jarring.
Still, Home Video is a bold statement, a powerful post-adolescent text in its own right. Dacus looks to her past without judgment of her younger self, exploring years of rigidity and repression with empathy and care. Though she’s unsparing in her depiction of disturbing memories, she’s never caught in cycles of sorrow and regret. She gives her listeners permission to shake loose the beliefs they held as children and dive headfirst into the clean, cool waters of the future. Write your own moral code, she suggests; write your own worldly music.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 24, 2021 | 7.7 | a679e3da-015f-4d64-a3bb-800ce2e4465d | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
It's easy to take an artist like Kyle Bobby Dunn for granted; he’s made music for 12 years, and it’s all been ambient drone. Despite his consistency, Dunn's latest release is an especially notable release in its catalog, especially in how it's more focused, more laser-like in the way it hits its marks. | It's easy to take an artist like Kyle Bobby Dunn for granted; he’s made music for 12 years, and it’s all been ambient drone. Despite his consistency, Dunn's latest release is an especially notable release in its catalog, especially in how it's more focused, more laser-like in the way it hits its marks. | Kyle Bobby Dunn: Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19379-kyle-bobby-dunn-kyle-bobby-dunn-and-the-infinite-sadness/ | Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness | Consistency in art is a laudable goal, but also a risky one. Do the same thing over and over, no matter how well, and some will file you away as easily understood, even predictable. This is a bigger hazard when your chosen style itself relies on consistency. Take ambient drone: it’s all about held tones, sounds that change slowly (if at all) and demand patient focus. It’s easy to let ambient drone drift into the background, presumably safe in the assumption that it won’t suprise you.
So it's easy to take an artist like Kyle Bobby Dunn for granted. He’s made music for 12 years, and it’s all been ambient drone. It could be assumed that listening to just one of his albums is all you need to understand his art; he’s even encouraged that assumption by naming one of his stronger albums A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn. But all of his releases are worthwhile, and even if his consistency isn’t flashy or surprising, it’s rare. He’s continually found new ideas using the same sturdy M.O.
This doesn’t mean his records are all of equal quality: a few transcend his standard level, pushing his sound up to a singular plane, and *Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness *is one of those records. There are a lot of reasons why, one of them simple to comprehend: the songs are pretty short. Though the album lasts two hours, most of its 19 tracks hover in the range of five minutes, and only two are longer than ten, which gives the music extra urgency. Often Dunn gets right to the point, setting each piece’s structure quickly and succinctly, rarely messing with extended intros or sitting on a single idea for long. It’s not that his work here is more “song-like” than before—it’s just more focused, more laser-like in the way it hits its marks.
This focus has the added benefit of making the album’s few long pieces more effective. By carefully picking his spots, Dunn earns the right to stretch out when his ideas deserve it. The nine-minute “Variation on a Theme by St. Dipshit” (Dunn has a healthy knack for piss-taking titles) feels grand in a subtle, almost humble way, its high-pitched waves unfurling with patience but no stasis. The album’s best piece, the ten-minute “Where Circles Never Become Circles”, offers an elongated crescendo that grows at exactly the right pace; it would sound gratuitous if it reached its heights more rapidly.
Gratuitousness is always a danger with ambient drone; it’s easy, and often tempting, to go for a dramatic chord or a soundtrack-ready swell without the setup needed for a true payoff. But it’s just as easy to hold back and let the music become mechanical and bloodless, more conceptually admirable than emotionally engaging. Dunn knows how to find a range between those two poles, and here never loses sight of that rareified middle ground. Often he gets there through simplicity: take the binary rhythm of “Duck-Faced Fantasy”, the small variances of “Boring Foothills of Foot Fetishville”, or the gradual crest of “On Top of Timeless Hour.” At their best, those tracks suggest moods and images, but also offer open shapes for the listener to fill in.
The fact that Dunn can keep his sound so open after honing it for so long isn't really surprising, but it’s still impresssive. You may know what got him to this point, you may be able to guess what this record sounds like, at least on the surface, and you may even have a line on what he’ll do in the future—but Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness is proof that even the most consistent artists can still impress. | 2014-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Students of Decay | June 13, 2014 | 7.8 | a67e8a2c-a632-4463-87fe-57166a9ce785 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The erstwhile Doobie Brothers leader and Steely Dan associate’s first album in 20 years is more of an urbane R&B labor of love than an attempt to capitalize on his resurgent popularity. | The erstwhile Doobie Brothers leader and Steely Dan associate’s first album in 20 years is more of an urbane R&B labor of love than an attempt to capitalize on his resurgent popularity. | Michael McDonald: Wide Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/michael-mcdonald-wide-open/ | Wide Open | Were I listening to Michael McDonald’s “Hail Mary” for the first time as a 7” single, I’d have double-checked the speed setting to ensure it wasn’t playing at 33 rpm instead of 45. Clocking in at just shy of seven minutes, the opening song on McDonald’s first album of original material since 2000’s Blue Obsession takes its sweet time to get where it’s going. But I’m not complaining. At 65 years old, McDonald’s sui generis voice has grown thicker (and less dynamic) than the instrument that made him famous in the 1970s and early ’80s, and the track’s sedate pace allows him to burrow it into a syrupy bed of Hammond B-3 and jazz guitar, with his wife Amy Holland adding vocal harmonies. As the introduction to Wide Open, “Hail Mary” is by default a statement, and it’s easy to assume that McDonald would foreground the patina that his voice has acquired over the years. When he sings “Does the sound of my voice still carry/Any kind of message still important to you?” one wonders how much he’s addressing a fictive lover, and how much he’s questioning his own relevance.
Not that anyone really needs an introduction to the silver-haired erstwhile Doobie Brothers leader and Steely Dan affiliate anymore. This past January, McDonald and longtime collaborator Kenny Loggins featured on “Show You the Way,” the lead single from Thundercat’s marvelous third LP, Drunk, which the “What A Fool Believes” co-authors co-wrote with the Brainfeeder bassist after he mentioned his desire to work with the duo in an interview. Much more than a simple novelty gag, “Show” is a belated millennial coronation for McDonald, who, unlike any of his musical peers, has watched his public image re-emerge over the past couple decades to public and private reactions that oscillate between comedic hatred, ironic acceptance, and earnest appreciation. At the same time, R&B itself has morphed countless times, leading to Solange Knowles and Frank Ocean transfixing the music world in 2016 with albums that were as arty as they were soft and lathered with ambience—a kind of urbane smoothness that McDonald himself codified at his popular peak with “I Keep Forgettin’” and the Patti LaBelle duet “On My Own.” A month before he performed “Show” and “Fool” at Coachella, McDonald was, yup, joined by self-professed fan Knowles at another festival.
McDonald could have easily cashed in his cachet with the current titans of millennial R&B and released an album with Solange and Thundercat guesting, perhaps Raphael Saadiq or Mark Ronson brought in for production, and maybe even coaxed Frank Ocean into the studio for a feature. Maybe next time. Instead, Wide Open is more a labor of love than an attempt by McDonald to capitalize on his resurgent popularity. He’d been stashing away demos of new material for a decade, and harboring dreams of maybe earning some Nashville songwriting gigs. Shannon Forrest, a Nashville-based producer, current Toto drummer, and longtime friend of McDonald’s, started tinkering with his tunes, and the pair eventually recruited a handful of session pros to flesh them out. And out, and out: only one song on the 71-minute long Wide Open comes in under five minutes, and the first two tracks nearly crack the 15-minute mark between them. If the album has a flaw, it’s not its lack of hipness, but its need for some editing.
While Wide Open isn’t a masterclass in songcraft or production, it’s a well-executed attempt to show McDonald’s capacity to stretch into different styles that works best when his collaborators shine. Bassist Marcus Miller contributes a Sade-style funk groove to “Find It In Your Heart” and shreds on the R&B rocker “If You Wanted to Hurt Me,” both of which echo McDonald’s 1980s solo peak better than anything else here. Branford Marsalis’ saxophone threads throughout “Blessing in Disguise,” culminating in a two-minute solo that’s worth the wait. On the string-laden, nearly eight-minute B.B. King-style slow-burn “Just Strong Enough,” Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes and L.A. session vet Robben Ford, along with former Randy Newman and George Harrison bassist Willie Weeks, provide an elegant backdrop for McDonald’s scenery-chewing vocal. And the string section showing up halfway through the searching power-ballad “Dark Side” makes for Wide Open’s most satisfying surprise.
When Wide Open misses its marks, though, it’s the kind of drag that McDonald’s otherwise off-the-mark critics often pinpoint about his earlier work: it’s just kind of dorky. The middle of the album, in particular, sags quite a bit under the weight of McDonald’s attempts at rock: the country/modern-rock crossover attempt “Half Truth,” and the limp ballads “Ain’t No Good” and “Honest Emotion.” As it winds down, Wide Open expands geographically and politically, with mixed results. “Too Short” is a breezy, light piece of West African-inspired pop, while the uptempo “Free A Man,” despite McDonald’s best intentions, falls flat as social commentary. The refrain, “Free a man/And love will follow,” is a wan echo of Funkadelic, and it’s not clear what rhetorical point lyrics like, “For the sake of perspective we look back/On what it’s meant in this country to be black,” and, “Religion has not failed man/No, it’s the other way around” are supposed to have, because “inspiration” isn’t what comes across.
It’s laudable that McDonald stuck to his guns on this album after expressing his desire to work with his current favorites, like Ocean, or Alabama Shakes belter Brittany Howard. It’s worth holding out hope, though, that McDonald could pair up with a producer/co-writer who can better emphasize his inimitable vocal grain as it nears the 70-year mark, like Dan Auerbach did with Dr. John, Jeff Tweedy with Mavis Staples, and Richard Russell with Gil Scott-Heron. For now, when Wide Open works, it mostly functions to suggest what McDonald and the right collaborators could do in the future. | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | September 15, 2017 | 5.8 | a67ed4cc-d7bb-430c-834e-6943986d013c | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | |
Miranda Lambert’s double album arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, but it is refreshingly devoid of spite or anger—more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.” | Miranda Lambert’s double album arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, but it is refreshingly devoid of spite or anger—more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.” | Miranda Lambert: The Weight of These Wings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22680-the-weight-of-these-wings/ | The Weight of These Wings | Miranda Lambert’s music has always existed in extremes. Throughout the Texan’s previous five albums, she has established herself as a no-nonsense country-pop troubadour whose response to emotional turmoil could be separated neatly into kerosene-fueled revenge fantasies and “American Idol”-ready torch ballads. Right from the start, however, it’s clear that The Weight of These Wings is a different type of album for Lambert. “I’m looking for a lighter, I already bought the cigarettes,” she sings in “Runnin’ Just in Case,” the album’s majestic opening track. It’s a subtle lyric, but it’s indicative of her change in perspective: to put it simply, finding the fire has never been the problem for Lambert. Alas, things have changed.
Although it arrives in the wake of her high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton, The Weight of These Wings is a breakup album refreshingly devoid of spite or anger. Instead, it’s a thoughtful concept record, more focused on moving on and growing up than lashing out or telling all. Throughout its twenty-four songs, Lambert analyzes herself and her choices, often while on the road: It’s more Hejira than Blue, more “Shelter From the Storm” than “Idiot Wind.” The pensive tone of the lyrics is reflected in the album’s stark, unglamorous production. Despite coming from one of the highest-paid, most successful country artists on the planet, Wings makes precious few ploys for pop radio. There are no millennial whoops or 1989 synths. Instead, the album is distinguished by a rootsy stomp akin to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers—another long, post-divorce statement that used its sprawl to mimic the messy mental state of its creator.
While Wings is a double album in the traditional sense (it’s a good seventeen minutes longer than Metallica’s recent one), it does away with the clutter usually associated with the form. The album’s most experimental track is also its most traditional—the pitch-perfect classic country of “To Learn Her”—and it’s most throwaway moment, an easily editable false start to the groovy “Bad Boy,” is charming and self-aware. The mood throughout the album is staggeringly consistent, and its separate halves (titled “The Nerve” and “The Heart,” respectively) feel like less a means of distinguishing their sounds than identifying their subtle shift in tone. While “The Nerve” finds Lambert losing herself in travel (“Highway Vagabond”), drinking (“Ugly Lights”), and a pair of cheap sunglasses (“Pink Sunglasses”), “The Heart” is less hell-bent on escape. In “Six Degrees of Separation,” Lambert flees to New York City only to be haunted by an ad for a litigation attorney, plastered across a bus stop bench. Such is the narrative of The Weight of These Wings: the landscape of America starts to resemble your mental geography the more closely you identify what you’re looking for.
Even with the tremendous growth Lambert shows as a songwriter, she remains true to herself and her past work. The choruses still arrive precisely when you want them to. The references are cozily predictable (getting “on the road again” requires a Willie Nelson namedrop, naturally). “Kitchen sink” still rhymes with “diesel tank.” And Lambert maintains her trademark style of country-girl self-mythologizing in a way that feels both fresh and funny. In the boozy garage rock of “Ugly Lights,” she’s “the one who doesn’t need another one,” begrudgingly bumming smokes to folks younger and more sober than her. In “Vice,” one of at least five tracks on the album that feels like its show-stopping centerpiece, she leaves town simultaneously spitting in its face and winking at the camera: “If you need me/I’ll be where my reputation don’t precede me.”
While Wings is hardly a showcase for any kind of vocal gymnastics, Lambert’s voice remains the star throughout. She can switch from a soulful vibrato in “To Learn Her” to a scratchy howl in “Pink Sunglasses” with equal confidence. She drawls with eerie detachment in the snappy “Highway Vagabond,” which sounds a little like “Send My Love (To Your New Lover),” if Adele was less interested in letting go of her ghosts and more in letting them ride shotgun. “Get off one and get on the other highway,” she sings in the chorus, “Well if we ain’t broke down then we ain’t doing something right.” It’s a sentiment that’s echoed in the album’s closing song “I’ve Got Wheels,” when Lambert’s endless driving sounds like self-empowerment: an excuse to move forward. Alone at the wheel, she sounds steady and weightless, like she finally knows where she’s going. | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sony / Vanner | December 6, 2016 | 7.8 | a684c1ca-3b7d-4261-91ec-229b7f41c20a | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Soundtrack to Zach Braff's directorial debut is an indie-friendly pastiche of heartstring- tugging pop, with an occasional dab of dated electronica. Features Nick Drake, Coldplay, The Shins (twice!), Simon & Garfunkel, Bonnie Somerville, and Iron & Wine covering The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights". | Soundtrack to Zach Braff's directorial debut is an indie-friendly pastiche of heartstring- tugging pop, with an occasional dab of dated electronica. Features Nick Drake, Coldplay, The Shins (twice!), Simon & Garfunkel, Bonnie Somerville, and Iron & Wine covering The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights". | Various Artists: Garden State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7891-garden-state/ | Garden State | Garden State is a movie very suspicious of drugs, whether recreational or medicinal. Its protagonist, Andrew Largeman, has popped Prozac, Zoloft, and a whole smorgasbord of mood-altering and -enhancing medicines for most of his life, all prescribed by his well-meaning psychiatrist father. These drugs allow both men to overlook the central tragedy in their family-- the accident that left Andrew's mother paralyzed-- but as a consequence, Andrew is never able to experience the emotions that he comes to realize comprise an identity. When he takes ecstasy at a party, it only disconnects him further from himself and others.
Scoring this trip is "In the Waiting Line" by Zero 7, which sounds exactly how Hollywood thinks a drug trip sounds: languid, midtempo beat; sampled sitar; vaguely psychedelic atmosphere; and what sounds like a bong hit during the bridge. As partygoers try to talk to Andrew and he begins to question his experience, Sophie Barker sings, "Everyone's saying different things to me.../ Do you believe what you see?" It's an overly obviously choice, as is much of this soundtrack. On one hand, these 13 tracks, all of which are available on other albums or compilations, seem genuinely to be music the characters would pick to soundtrack their lives. On the other, the songs all tend to comment too directly and too blatantly on their situations and motivations. For a movie that manages to locate subtle humor and pathos in its visuals (all those shots of Braff standing square in the center of the frame, as if looking into a mirror), Garden State lets the music do too much work.
Coldplay's "Don't Panic", with its universal chorus ("We live in a beautiful world"), scores an early scene in which Andrew is driving to work amid all the maddening traffic of Los Angeles. This use is plainly ironic, but still work better here than it did in Igby Goes Down, where its earnestness was overkill. Nick Drake's "One of These Things First", however, speaks all too clearly to Andrew's identity problems: "I could have been a sailor/ I could have been a cook/ A real live lover/ Could have been a book." And the film's final song, Frou Frou's "Let Go", buzzes trippily to its chorus, "There's beauty in the breakdown," but its title and lyrics could have been written expressly for the movie's anti-drug message.
For Garden State, drugs are clearly not the key to a better life; Natalie Portman is. Barring that, try music. "They'll change your life," Portman's character, Sam, remarks of The Shins as she passes Andrew a pair of headphones playing "New Slang". She's almost right. The Shins' two tracks on Garden State (including "Caring Is Creepy") are both recreational and medicinal: Drawing on 20 years of college, alternative, and indie rock, they are musically playful and subtle enough to be emotional Rorschach tests-- each listener will draw a slightly different shade of meaning from them.
Similarly, the soundtrack's best songs are those that don't have such a direct connection to the story, that could have come randomly on the radio and just happen to fit the scene. Braff makes good use of tracks by Remy Zero, Thievery Corporation, and former Men at Work singer Colin Hay, whose song "I Just Don't Think I'll Ever Get Over You" is a surprisingly effective barroom lament.
When Andrew and Samantha have their first kiss (after literally screaming into the abyss, another testament to the movie's lack of subtlety), Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York" blares out of nowhere. It could be a sly nod to The Graduate, to which Garden State has been compared, but the song communicates a few very particular ideas about loneliness and connection without ever overstating them. Later, Iron & Wine's cover of The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights" plays as the camera pans slowly up the length of a bed to show Andrew spooning post-coitally with Sam. Sam Beam slows down the tempo and substitutes only his guitar for Jimmy Tamborello's beats, in the process turning Ben Gibbard's whimsical, sometimes saccharine lyrics into soft-focus images that unfold patiently and tenderly. Because its lyrics have little do with the action on the screen and its music supports the mood, Braff has created through character and image, "Such Great Heights" may be the most evocative song on the soundtrack-- refurbishing an upbeat song that sounds like a public declaration of love's exclusivity, this version sounds more like a whispered, consoling promise.
Perhaps due to the movie's basis in Braff's New Jersey childhood, or to some kind of film debut jitters, Garden State the movie tends to overexplain its characters' motivations, as if they're not already apparent in the images and performances. The final 10 minutes, for example, could have been shot with no dialogue at all, and not only would the meaning have still come across, it might have even had more impact. Garden State the soundtrack similarly spells out its intentions all too clearly, leaving little to the viewer/listener's imagination. The songs may be memorable-- some of them may even change your life-- but as a soundtrack for a movie that barely needs any music to convey its message, they end up being something less than their sum. | 2004-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sony | September 13, 2004 | 7 | a685ff17-2cc8-40cc-ac42-97ff3268cf96 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Channeling Old Testament themes of righteous fury and justice, the indie-folk singer embraces a pared-back sound that only amplifies the drama. | Channeling Old Testament themes of righteous fury and justice, the indie-folk singer embraces a pared-back sound that only amplifies the drama. | Anjimile: The King | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anjimile-the-king/ | The King | When Anjimile was a senior in high school, their conservative Presbyterian parents caught them emptying the household liquor cabinet. In response, they took Anjimile to church every week, even sent them to Christian counseling, hoping that the rebellious teenager would catch some religion and see the error of their ways. It didn’t take. But in that process, Anjimile discovered a newfound love for the words in the King James Bible, particularly its invocations of divine love. 2020’s Giver Taker—written in the early days of their recovery from alcohol addiction and at a time when they were still coming to terms with their gender identity—is littered with liturgical references and hymnal harmonies, as Anjimile draws on the vocabulary of their former faith to tell their story of survival, resilience, and spiritual rebirth.
Anjimile turns to the Bible again for follow-up The King, but this time they’re channeling the righteous fury and fire-and-brimstone vengeance of Old Testament apocalyptica. Written during times of intense persecution, Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic writings represented a “literature of the oppressed,” their message of divine retribution particularly appealing to those who saw no hope for redemption in earthly politics. Anjimile taps into similar feelings of hopelessness and despondency—and a yearning for catastrophic justice—on The King, offering up an unflinching portrait of the anger and grief that comes with being Black and trans in an America that remains lethally dangerous for both.
The opening title track sets the tone with needle-sharp arpeggios strobing in the sky like a celestial sword fight. Anjimile invokes the Old Testament story of King Belshazzar and Daniel in a stinging indictment of the arrogance of American white supremacy. “Your silence a stain/The marking of Cain,” they hiss, throwing Biblical condemnation back in the faces of those who used religion to justify the enslavement of Black people. “Judge and Genesis/Make an end of this,” they plead on the grief-stricken “Genesis,” written in the wake of George Floyd’s lynching by four Minneapolis cops. It’s hard to tell whether they’re asking for personal deliverance or millenarian Armageddon. The raw, stinging guitar solo that closes out the track is heartbroken enough to suggest either possibility.
Anjimile plumbed depths of personal and generational trauma on Giver Taker—hitting rock bottom in a hospital bed, grappling with the homophobia and transphobia they’d faced from family—but that record was buoyed by gratitude for their newfound stability, for the simple fact of their survival. The King, not so much. Working with producer Shawn Everett, Anjimile strips away all that was bright and airy in their sound—the sunlit piano chords, the shimmering synths, the bouncy African polyrhythms. In its stead, there’s just Anjimile’s voice and some modified acoustic guitars. They use these two building blocks, and an array of innovative effects, to create an entire cosmos of sound, maintaining an atmosphere suffused with dread even as the individual compositions move between post-rock grandeur, sepulchral dirge, and sepia-tinged folk.
“Harley” drenches Anjimile’s finger-plucked guitar in layers of reverb, each note ringing out as a lonely echo in the murky darkness. The bit-crushed guitar lead of “Black Hole” sounds like an acoustic wave disintegrating under the pull of interstellar gravity. The jagged, marching chords of the scorching police-brutality protest anthem “Animal” sound like something Pretty Hate Machine-era Trent Reznor would have dreamt up, if forced to trade his synths for an acoustic guitar. The meaty menace of those chords throws in stark relief the hard-fought restraint of Anjimile’s vocals, as they sing of the dehumanizing rhetoric of white supremacy and its corrosive effect on Black consciousness (“If you treat me like an animal/ I’ll be an animal”).
There are a handful of moments of grace and gratitude, like the soothing croon and intricate finger-plucked guitar of “Father,” a song about the support Anjimile received from their parents when they entered rehab. But even parental love does not remain untouched by the darkness. “Am I your son? Could I be one?” they tenderly inquire on the expansive, post-rockish “Mother,” a gut-wrenching portrayal of the bewildering sense of rejection caused by their parents’ transphobia.
The King offers no light at the end of the tunnel, no promises of inevitable redemption. Grief and anger only give way to more grief and anger. What it does offer though, is an invitation to feel deeply, even—especially—the heartbreak, fear, and anger familiar to not just American Black and trans youth, but anyone whose identity has made them a target, left them feeling hopeless and powerless. Anjimile tells you to accept your suffering, not run away from it, lest your unattended wounds drag you into the abyss. | 2023-09-08T14:12:52.825-04:00 | 2023-09-08T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | 4AD | September 8, 2023 | 7.5 | a68cc66a-d19b-4807-a740-513a0d56595d | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
A posthumous release from the experimental musician and Editions Mego label founder includes two live performances that function as scale models of his singular sound world. | A posthumous release from the experimental musician and Editions Mego label founder includes two live performances that function as scale models of his singular sound world. | Peter Rehberg: at GRM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-rehberg-at-grm/ | at GRM | As the founder of Editions Mego, the record label that he ran from 2006 until his death last year at the age of 53, Peter Rehberg mapped hitherto unknown dimensions in electronic music. A reincarnation of Mego, an underground Viennese label that had existed on the border between rave, computer music, and the avant-garde, Editions Mego was proudly unpredictable, allergic to anything as reductive as a stylistic signature. Fennesz’s sentimental feedback fugues, Emeralds’ psychedelic synth churn, Hecker’s mind-bending text-sound pieces, and Tujiko Noriko’s kaleidoscopic pop all fit comfortably beneath eMego’s infinitely extensible umbrella, along with scores of other styles, approaches, and emotional registers. Rehberg could be just as catholic in his collaborations: There was the ambient doom of KTL, with Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley; the gut-rumbling noise of his duo with Ramon Bauer; the free-spirited play of Fenn O’Berg, an improvising trio with Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke. (Let us not forget the conceptual hijinks of his Fridge Trax project alongside the duo General Magic, sourcing technoid pulses from the hum of the titular kitchen appliance.)
But on his own, usually recording under the name Pita, Rehberg displayed a determined sense of focus. Listen to any of his solo albums, from 1996’s Seven Tons for Free up through 2019’s Get On, and you’ll recognize a consistent set of sounds and ideas across the decades. Piercing digital feedback sputters in incidental rhythmic formations; gravelly tones vibrate like thwacked door springs; layers of fuzz fuse into intimidating beehive drones. On the surface, his work could vary, at times quite drastically, from track to track, but at the heart of it was a determination to reconcile opposing sensations: harsh blasts and soothing breezes, struck metal and weightless dust motes.
Rehberg harbored a contrarian, countercultural streak—he proudly described the original Mego as “punk-rock disco”—yet he was just at home in institutional contexts; in the last decade of his life he dedicated a significant amount of effort to preserving the legacy of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the Parisian research center for experimental electronic music that electro-acoustic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer founded in 1958. In 2012, Editions Mego partnered with GRM on a new sub-label, Recollection GRM, intended as a home for archival work from electronic-music titans like Schaeffer, Bernard Parmegiani, and Iannis Xenakis. In 2020, they launched Portraits GRM, dedicated to contemporary commissions from artists like Jim O’Rourke, Lucy Railton, and Kali Malone. (Following Rehberg’s death, Félicia Atkinson and Bartholome Sanson’s Rennes-based Shelter Press has taken both labels under its wing.) Marking Rehberg’s first appearance on his own Portraits GRM label, at GRM collects two of Rehberg’s performances at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, both of which function as scale models of his singular sound world.
Rehberg was an early proponent of the computer as a musical instrument in its own right; regularly appearing with nothing but his laptop, he helped revolutionize live performance in the 21st century, indirectly setting the stage for everyone from Radiohead to Skrillex. Yet “at GRM (2009),” a solo laptop performance at the Présences Électronique festival in March 2009, betrays little about its tools. The 21-minute piece begins in understated fashion, with a subaquatic array of hard-panned pops and pings—a flashback to the ear-prickling pulses of the “clicks + cuts” era around the turn of the millennium. After three minutes, industrial-strength buzz suddenly and unceremoniously floods the speakers, capped with a brain-scouring screech; briefly, we glimpse a reflection of Mego’s long engagement with noise musicians like Merzbow and the late Zbigniew Karkowski. Yet out of this aggressive rumble comes something gentle, as the scorched-earth low end gradually yields to soft, suggestive bell tones. Surging like seafoam, the piece’s penultimate stretch sounds like a more volatile take on Fennesz’s sandblasted distortion; a three-minute organ denouement drops us smack in the center of a medieval cathedral. It’s a journey.
Seven years later, Rehberg returned to Présences Électronique, but this time he swapped his habitual laptop for a modular synthesizer. “at GRM (2016)” is the harsher of the two pieces here: Where the ghostly frequencies of his 2009 performance recalled the tenderness and vulnerability of fan favorites like Get Out’s untitled track 3, there’s little grace to be found in the metallic clang and crunch of the 2016 piece. While it’s impossible to say just what Rehberg is doing with his machines, there’s a sense of audio sources being mangled and distended, strewn like radioactive mulch over barren ground. Blinding iridescence meets violent force, like a fistful of prisms tossed into a wood chipper. You can hear Rehberg’s debt to the spectral investigations of the tape-music pioneers of GRM’s early years, like Xenakis or Jean-Claude Risset, but you can also detect Rehberg’s signature in the careful balance between overload and restraint; as bewildering as it gets, it never quite tips over into full chaos. What’s ironic is that “at GRM (2016)” could easily be mistaken for a computer performance; brittle and disorienting, it displays all the hallmarks of Rehberg’s laptop work from two decades prior. Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson of his first posthumous release: No matter the tools, Rehberg’s distinct point of view is unmistakable. | 2022-08-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Portraits GRM | August 4, 2022 | 7.4 | a690ffbf-d5b1-456d-9261-9dcc28201047 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The songwriter and producer team for a loving, referential collection of new age music that doesn’t always color inside the lines. | The songwriter and producer team for a loving, referential collection of new age music that doesn’t always color inside the lines. | Devendra Banhart / Noah Georgeson: Refuge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devendra-banhart-noah-georgeson-refuge/ | Refuge | Just recently, the avant-garde composer William Basinski let his Twitter followers know that “some jackass has put up a lame new-age piano track” on Spotify under his name. Note the adjective he chose to distance himself from the imposter: “new age,” a neutral description or an implicit insult, depending on who’s playing and who’s listening. At best, it’s an experimental genre with respected practitioners like Tony Scott and Suzanne Ciani; at worst, it’s ambient music’s foil—a kind of spiritual muzak for yogis and masseuses.
Devendra Banhart’s unexpected turn to ambient piano and chamber drone with longtime collaborator Noah Georgeson falls somewhere in the middle of these two poles. Alongside guests like harpist Mary Lattimore and Vetiver’s Jeremy Harris, Refuge also features heavyweights from the worlds of mindfulness and Buddhism, which Banhart practices; two songs are available exclusively on the sleep and meditation app Calm. Though the album is staid and formulaic by design, it doesn’t always color inside the lines: It feels more like background music failing up than ambient music failing down.
It might be conventional to recap Banhart’s past as an inadvertent freak-folk progenitor whose fusion of rural American folk and Latin American rhythms grew from whispery acoustic origins into a broader psych-pop sound, but Refuge has little to do with any of that. It doesn’t even feature Banhart’s distinctively pinched voice, which sounds like that of a small, sweet, wizened goblin. The only through line to his past work is his reverence for Indian, Indigenous American, and West Coast spirituality: Banhart, a Venezuelan American who grew up in California, comes by these interests honestly enough, and it shows more tastefully here than in some of his pop music.
Georgeson, also a Californian, has worked closely with Banhart as a producer since 2005’s Cripple Crow. The pair initially bonded over childhood memories of the images of the Whole Earth Catalog, the smells of health-food stores, and the pastoral acoustic sounds of new age label Windham Hill, an often-overlooked influence on Banhart’s music. Georgeson has also cited as lodestars the new-age-adjacent composers Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros. “Coming from an academically rigorous world, I rejected this kind of music because it’s simple, gestural music,” he said. “It took me a while to come to a place where I was OK with that.” The coronavirus pandemic seemed like the perfect time to finally let their new age music flag fly.
Though Banhart’s strong artistic personality is inevitably suppressed here, he can’t keep it down entirely, and Refuge provides expressive takes on a variety of well-worn templates. “Book of Bringhi” has a gracefully falling piano figure torn from Harold Budd’s music stand. “A Cat” follows the infinity-sign drift of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and on “Rise From Your Wave,” mournful Ólafur Arnalds-style harmonies peal on and on, with some worrisome minor chords wrinkling the mostly smooth waters.
It’s not the only time when the gentle waves of harmony part to reveal more substance. “Peloponnese Lament,” a songful piano-and-woodwind performance, features some of the pair’s strongest compositional work. “In a Cistern,” meanwhile, covers a shadowy acoustic arpeggio with squealing pedal steel and an interesting, ambiguous piano part that contrasts with the other songs’ gallant twinkle. On “Into Clouds,” big harmonics and basses roll around like boulders in a dry arroyo, perfect for tripping in Joshua Tree. Sharon Salzberg, who helped introduce the concept of “mindfulness” to the West, adds a guided meditation to “Sky Burial,” and sometimes her voice blends so cunningly with the drifting plucks and shivery strings that it draws your attention to what the music is doing. That’s a fault in meditation music and a feature in art music, but Refuge’s pedigree and history reveal just how shaky the boundary between those assumptions can be.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Dead Oceans | August 16, 2021 | 6.2 | a6936a27-7c4c-4f98-a1d2-4fce1012d60d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
The Memphis post-punk band’s third album wages guerrilla warfare against the patriarchal surveillance state. | The Memphis post-punk band’s third album wages guerrilla warfare against the patriarchal surveillance state. | Nots: 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nots-3/ | 3 | We’re constantly being monitored. If you have a smartphone, this is as true as if you lived under the grip of a Communist regime. The Memphis post-punk band Nots aren’t alone in feeling suffocated by this—an omnipresent eye doesn’t usually cause a welcoming feeling. Even the gods can be vengeful. It’s been three years since their sophomore album, Cosmetic, which was influenced by both the Chilean leftist poet Pablo Neruda and the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s Human Landscapes, written while Hikmet was a political prisoner. Even after downsizing to three members, their third album, 3, continues their brawny, subversive, and self-assured stride.
Throughout 3, Nots remind us that no minor action or thought goes unnoticed. “Safety illusion/A neon net/A surveillance veil,” shouts Natalie Hoffman on “Surveillance Veil,” authoritatively but far away, as if through a long PVC pipe. She comes closer at the end of the song, yelling to wake us up: “Watching them, watching the rain, watching everything mundane.” Hoffmann’s guitar rings like a siren and Charlotte Watson’s drums keep an anxious, accelerated pace.
Under watchful eyes, our behavior changes, our personality changes, our reality changes. On album highlight “Rational Actor,” Hoffmann coldly sings about the power surrendered to technology: “Everything handed to an empty screen/A distracted sea/An elusive dream.” Images of vastness are conjured over wild-west percussion and bassist Meredith Lones’ roaming plucks. Intergalactic synths scatter in search of escape from the hollow glare of a computer. Nots remind us that omnipresent monitoring, whether by security cameras or online audiences, affects even our free will. Surveillance technologies and the institutions behind them not only track us; they influence our behavior and our choices, whether we want to admit it or not.
Psychedelic embellishments contribute to the uneasy mood. On “In Glass,” there are eerie, warping syths. Their trippy punk hybrid has a brilliant, hallucinatory effect. There are things lurking, looking over Nots’ shoulder. The trio thrashes and contorts in rebellion against their threatened agency.
At times, the intense feedback and warping synths weaken the frightening lyrics. The most striking song is the surreal and poignant “Woman Alone.” Women are taught to travel in packs: Whether walking home late at night or going on a blind date, we live in a world where women are cornered. A woman alone is a radical and vulnerable concept. “Woman in a landscape/Where eyes line the frame,” hollers Hoffmann, in an ominously vivid rendering of the male gaze. Guitar distortion wails in the background against a racing bassline that charges the song with urgency. “What’s that like?” Hoffmann spits. “What’s that like to be a subject analyzed?”
It’s been nearly fifty years since Roe v. Wade, and the battle for control over a woman’s body is still ongoing. There’s an anonymous quote that’s been circulating in recent years about how the United States might look if we were as strict with young men who buy guns as we are with women who seek abortions. In this light, the fight against surveillance is inherently feminist; Nots’ third album is a guerilla campaign against surveillance in the service of systemic control. With 3, Nots make fierce rock music equally apt for moshing in solidarity or smashing an Alexa—all forms of control in chaos. | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Goner | May 15, 2019 | 7.6 | a69f2c46-e828-4512-b6da-6c53c66061cf | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The French producer Ludovic Navarre released his multiplatinum album Tourist 15 years ago, and became synonymous with "French Touch." To revitalize his sound, he has turned to the music of Mali. | The French producer Ludovic Navarre released his multiplatinum album Tourist 15 years ago, and became synonymous with "French Touch." To revitalize his sound, he has turned to the music of Mali. | St Germain: St Germain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21150-st-germain/ | St Germain | A lot has changed since French producer Ludovic Navarre released his multi-platinum album Tourist in 2000 under the name St Germain. A wildly successful hybrid of dance music and jazz, it put St Germain on tour for over two years, sharing stages with the likes of Herbie Hancock and playing the likes of Glastonbury and Royal Albert Hall. Trend pieces lumped St Germain in with Cassius and Daft Punk as purveyors of "the French Touch." In the intervening 15 years, there have been three French presidents, and trends in dance music have moved far beyond the realms of nu-jazz and downtempo, Navarre's métier at the turn of the century. Consider that Navarre's closest peers, Daft Punk, released Discovery, Human After All, the Tron: Legacy OST and Random Access Memories in that same time period, and it's a drastically different world that St Germain returns to with this self-titled album.
Fans of St Germain's old work might find little that's instantly recognizable from Tourist, which was part of Navarre's strategy. "I had to stop completely, I just had to take a break from music," he told The Independent. "I realised that I didn't want to do something like Tourist again – I needed to do something new." And so he disappeared for most of the '00s until this past June, when the single "Real Blues" was released, built around a vocal sample of Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins and balafon. It turns out that even in his reinvention, much remains from St Germain's previous work; now, rather than dig for rare groove jazz for his source material, he's dug into the music of Mali.
He is landing on well-trod territory: Since 2000, any number of western musicians have traveled to Mali, to the sub-Sahara, or elsewhere in western Africa to collaborate with artists like Tinariwen and Amadou & Mariam. Musicians like Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Santigold, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Wilco's Nels Cline, TV on the Radio, Amp Fiddler, and more have already sought this fusion. Navarre did well to draw on the talents of kora player Mamadou Cherif Soumano and the fleet-fingered guitarist Guimba Kouyate, as well as Brazilian percussionist Jorge Bezerra, whose polyrhythms at the end of "Voila" make for a subtle blend of the two continents. Bezerra also helps move "Family Tree" out of the sluggish piano opening to something far more enticing by song's end.
But the most interesting results on the album seem as if they could easily exist without Navarre's so-called "French Touch." Perhaps if Navarre had returned circa 2007, these hybrids would sound revelatory. But much like his fellow countrymen Daft Punk did in RAM, he has dismissed loops and sampling out of hand for something more "organic" and "real", and in the process he has turned his back on his greatest strength. The result sounds like something that's already been comp'ed to death by Putumayo. | 2015-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warner Music Group | October 14, 2015 | 6 | a69f41a6-e296-4483-bb32-7d118999e20f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Toronto singer’s writing lacks the specificity that animates his best music this time around. | The Toronto singer’s writing lacks the specificity that animates his best music this time around. | PARTYNEXTDOOR: PARTYMOBILE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/partynextdoor-partymobile/ | PARTYMOBILE | There’s a running joke that PARTYNEXTDOOR only gets to release music once Drake passes on his records. If that’s true, Drake is doing him a favor by standing in his way, because almost every PARTYNEXTDOOR song would sound better if he weren’t the one singing. To PARTY’s credit, the appeal of his music has never been his bland and monotone vocals; he’s a writer. The Toronto-bred 26-year-old penned Rihanna’s “Work” and “Sex With Me”; his fingerprints are all over Drake’s arguable opus If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and his early albums P1 and P2 are loaded with the hyper-specific writing that made him a breakout star.
PARTY’s best music is all about the details. On 2014’s “Recognize,” PARTY’s signature record to this day, he doesn’t just tell us he’s obsessively in love, he shows it: he drives by his girlfriend’s condominium complex late at night to make sure she’s home safely. He even has conversations with the concierge about how she looks like a celebrity. He might seem like a great boyfriend checking in, but actually he’s paranoid she’s sleeping around just like he is. It’s like a good dark comedy—I’m sure Future has cracked a devilish smile to it at least once or twice.
On PARTY’S new album, PARTYMOBILE, he’s no longer the writer he once was. His songs are impersonal and shallow, which is a bad pairing with his sleepy, robotic coos. “My girl’s bad like a kid that just eat candy,” he sings weakly on “Eye On It,” which will probably rack up streams at an Applebees looking for white noise. “Split Decision” has the makings of a classic PARTY track—a voicemail interlude and production that wouldn’t be out of place on So Far Gone—but PARTY’s writing has no color. “Just got back from a trip, caught me with another bitch,” he croons. We don’t learn where he went, how he got caught—none of the melodrama that would bring the track to life.
“Savage Anthem” is a reminder of how great PARTY’s songwriting can be. Here, he gets caught cheating, not once, but three times—in a coupe, in his living room, in the VIP section of a strip club. But PARTY doesn’t apologize; instead he tries to manipulate his girl into thinking he’s a tortured soul that deserves pity. “I put the dirt into dirt bag/Still got your jacket in my bag/I stood you up, that was my bad/Gave me your heart, watch me break that,” he sings, as if enumerating his own flaws should equal forgiveness. He sounds like an over-dramatic slimeball, which is where he shines, but PARTYMOBILE doesn’t have nearly enough moments like this.
Instead, most of the time PARTY sounds soulless. He rips the heart out of the light and bouncy island rhythm of “Touch Me.” Rihanna gets dragged into the mess on “Believe It.” She turned in her hook four days before the release of PARTYMOBILE and I’m surprised she did, given the formulaic acoustic guitar pop production made to die on the back half of a Khalid album. But once Rihanna settles into her pineapple-sweet melody the lyrics don’t sound so dry anymore and the beat suddenly becomes tolerable. Then PARTY starts to sing again and you realize how much better the songs on PARTYMOBILE would be in someone else’s hands. | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | April 2, 2020 | 4.9 | a6a055b7-b52c-44ac-9a48-744e21f0d36f | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Comeback album from the Ninja Tune success story/90s museum pieces. | Comeback album from the Ninja Tune success story/90s museum pieces. | Coldcut: Sound Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1537-sound-mirrors/ | Sound Mirrors | Coldcut were incredibly overrated. Past tense is critical here because the moment in which Coldcut were feted feels like a hundred million years ago now. Concepts like trip-hop, turntablism, etc., aren't quite past tense enough to stir warm feelings of nostalgia. They're "what the fuck were we thinking?" ideas in 2006, and no one wants to listen to records that give them the feeling of looking at old photos of themselves with bad haircuts and stupid clothes. Sure, no genre is completely devoid of good ideas-- or even, more importantly, good records-- but there's a landfill full of "abstract beats" out there that no one's stepped up to reclaim. If you want a real laugh, read the second half of the Rough Guide to Drum and Bass devoted to big beat/downtempo. What the fuck were we thinking?
So, while, yes, better than the bulk of their Ninja Tune-affiliated peers, Coldcut were not as good as we once believed. That Eric B and Rakim remix that Eric B and Rakim hated-- it's really not that great, is it? I'd rather listen to "Pump Up the Volume" than "Beats and Pieces" for my kitschy sampladelic single fix. And while concepts like multimedia and chopping up the history of recorded music seemed like not just a good idea at the time but the very future itself, information overload isn't an exciting concept in 2006, it just is. (Plus their Journeys by DJ record is the most overrated DJ mix of all time.) So credit them for getting there first, but don't flog pioneer status to tell me why I should listen to the records.
Sound Mirrors isn't a cut-and-paste DJ record per se, but it's constructed in the same way. Instead of slamming chunks of disparate records together via sampler or turntable, they wrangle a few albums' worth of guest stars and hop from genre to genre like Q*Bert. (The video game sprite, not the Skratch Pikl. At least I think so.) "Walk a Mile" tries on the shimmering fabric of smooth, gauzy deep house, complete with vocals from the original voice of post-coital, outerspace ennui, Robert Owens. Saul Williams hectors "Mr. Nichols" from an era where we thought poetry slams and poetry slams on rap records were a good idea, and "This Island Earth" reminds you just how hard people worked the thin concept of a female singer over a mid-tempo rap beat in the late-90s. If you've ever wanted to hear Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd on the same track, Sound Mirrors is for you, and the pairing, or even just the concept of the pairing, will tell you whether or not you need to hear it. Coldcut acquit themselves well, in the sense that they pull off all of their various generic sleights of hand. But, as per usual, whatever off-hand virtuosity Sound Mirrors displays, there's no center here. No one likes a show-off. | 2006-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2006-03-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ninja Tune | March 12, 2006 | 6.5 | a6a07bd4-5a9a-44c5-ba28-c5a320fc4b40 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Though the Norwegian duo Röyksopp aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." The Inevitable End is devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts featuring guest vocals from the likes of Robyn and others. | Though the Norwegian duo Röyksopp aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." The Inevitable End is devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts featuring guest vocals from the likes of Robyn and others. | Röyksopp: The Inevitable End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19999-royksopp-the-inevitable-end/ | The Inevitable End | For Röyksopp, the end was contained in the beginning. Though the Norwegian duo aren't calling it quits, Torbjørn Brundtland and Svein Berge have billed their new album as their last in the "traditional album format." Still, the downtempo house of Röyksopp's slickly pleasurable 2001 debut, Melody A.M., with its countless licensing opportunities and compilation appearances, already foreshadowed the post-album era. Across subsequent releases, Röyksopp have evolved with the rest of Scandinavian electronic pop, but overall their best work has tended to be other than LP length, whether a remix for the Streets, a remix by Trentemøller, or a robot-romancing Robyn team-up.
Röyksopp's opulent, exploratory mini-album with Robyn earlier this year represented a possible way forward; by dropping the Swedish pop singer's singularly expressive vocals into a mixture of radio-ready directness and silky, groove-chasing breadth, Do It Again achieved a 35-minute whole just about equal to the sum of its parts. The Inevitable End, on the other hand, is a reminder of why the album is commercially moribund for the vast majority of artists in the first place. Despite capable guest vocalists, including Robyn herself, it's generally devoted to glossy, bittersweet electronic drifts that are too slow, too long, or too bland to hold interest for 60 minutes, though often unobjectionable in smaller servings. This, too, is a post-album album.
As such, The Inevitable End easily lends itself to other types of listening experiences. With a baleful filter-disco gallop and vocoderized call to "ride with us tonight," Daft Punk-like opener "Skulls" could, given the right speakers and onstage visuals, serve as a striking kickoff for a live set. The chiming, midtempo melancholia of "Sordid Affair", with a tender, electronics-kissed lead vocal by Ryan James, of Welsh duo Man Without Country, would neatly set a mood for a commercial, film, or TV show; for some reason I imagine it playing on an airplane as the passengers board. It should be added that Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør—who appeared on another disappointing 2014 album by a Robyn collaborator, Kleerup's As If We Never Won—acquits herself well enough again here, lending crystalline grace to the percolating "Save Me" and (especially) the credits-ready beat ballad "Running to the Sea", which dates back to 2012.
However, Röyksopp have said The Inevitable End is "headphones music" for "home listening," and with apologies to Brundtland and Berge, I must report that repeated, attentive listens at home, on headphones, have been at times all but maddening for me. Jamie McDermott of London's the Irrepressibles has a creamy, mannered voice that could lock down a concise dance-pop song by, say, Disclosure, but on each of his four guest appearances here, he's stuck intoning uncatchy magnetic poetry atop lugubrious, slow-motion expanses. He has to go and there's nothing left to say, he says more than once; his guilt is "just like a razor to my soul." As for the lover he hurt, the "rain" in her sorrowful mind falls mainly where it rhymes with "sane." Though the repetitive pulse of "Compulsion" convincingly evokes a monomaniacal desire for a place with "no anxiety or fear," it's as numbing as that sounds.
Robyn embodies both how The Inevitable End went off track and how it still goes right. On "Rong", a glacial synth arpeggio takes on an orchestral glaze; she does nothing but repeatedly ask, "What the fuck is wrong with you?," which could work but here comes off as no better than B-side material compared with her 2010 album Body Talk's Röyksopp-produced "None of Dem". The LP standout is a punched-up, streamlined rework of Do It Again's "Monument", a song that despite its monolithic theme actually demonstrates how all human accomplishment eventually crumbles into history. Also remixed recently to excellent effect by Kindness, it's a monument that exists without a single definitive version. That might've been an intriguing conceptual starting point for an album. What if The Inevitable End had been, instead of a form of closure, a new opening—a rebirth or reinvention? All good things must come to a smell ya later, sure, but Röyksopp didn't have to leave it quite like this. | 2014-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Interscope/Cherrytree | November 14, 2014 | 5.9 | a6a1b2c2-aa57-47d6-a2cd-05fc908d213a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Eighteen years into its existence, the Swedish band continues to find ways to make a familiar fusion of melodic death metal, crust punk, and d-beat sound fresh. | Eighteen years into its existence, the Swedish band continues to find ways to make a familiar fusion of melodic death metal, crust punk, and d-beat sound fresh. | Martyrdöd: Hexhammaren | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martyrdod-hexhammaren/ | Hexhammaren | It’s hard to think of another band besides Martyrdöd that has ticked quite so many boxes on the “Swedish metal/punk” checklist during its 18 years of existence. Debut album recorded at underground metal hub Necromorbus Studios? Check. Round two (and, after a brief dip into DIY recording for album number three, rounds four through seven) recorded at Gothenburg’s iconic Studio Fredman, arguably the birthplace of Swedish melodic death metal? Check. Bulletproof scene bona fides via members who have done time in a number of other local metal/punk luminaries like Skitsystem, Agrimonia, Miasmal, and Iron Lamb (and, in the case of bassist Daniel Ekeroth, quite literally wrote the book on Swedish death metal)? Double check. An evolving sound that’s perpetually described as “crust punk” or “d-beat” (“kängpunk” for the diehards) yet often shares more sonic similarities with melodic death-metal gods At the Gates’ mid-1990s output than crust legends Anti Cimex? Big honking check.
On their seventh album, Hexhammaren, Martyrdöd have doubled down on the melodic pattern they’ve been drawing from since the band was just a shared twinkle in guitarist Mikael Kjellman’s and drummer Jens Bäckelin’s eyes. The album opens with the title track (which almost-but-not-quite translates to “witch hammer”), whose dashing twin guitars, hoarse vocals, punchy d-beats, and appealingly warm, grimy production provide a strong indicator for how the rest of the album is going to unfold.
It can be difficult to keep this style of music from getting monotonous over the course of an album, and it’s true that Martyrdöd tend to stick to the blueprints they’ve laid out. When they push themselves harder and venture outside that comfort zone, though, the rewards are great. The guitar solos in particular deserve mention; their insertion never feels forced, but draws out the nuances of each song. That level of care really makes the end result sing, and Hexhammaren is liberally flavored with this kind of savvy, dynamic songwriting.
Their general approach has remained remarkably consistent over their nearly 20 years in the game, but that’s not to say they’re a one-trick pony; Hexhammaren does have its surprises. “War on Peace” is a straightforward punk banger with Disfear written all over it, while “In the Dead of the Night” is drenched in atmosphere from its onset, when a lone guitar calls the listener forward into the void. The vocals on “Helveteslarm” jump out, and for a moment, are nearly scrubbed clean during a spooky midsong break.
“Bait and Switch” features some truly lovely melodic guitar work, and the unexpectedly lysergic album closer “Sthlm Syndrome” interchanges furious d-beats with drips of threnodial doom and bouncy solos. That crusty intent is still there, particularly in the production, which is thick and fuzzy enough to withstand an onslaught of three-chord fury, but could just as easily have graced an early Entombed joint.
By now, these Scandinavian jawbreakers have settled into a groove, and that they’re still willing to experiment a bit with what is fundamentally a rather standardized genre just shows how seriously they take their craft. Martyrdöd are living proof that old punks never die—they just start metal bands instead. | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Southern Lord | May 14, 2019 | 6.5 | a6b730b4-d2f2-4cf0-8eea-ad26552b1613 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
On their newest EP, The Strokes continue to perform “The Strokes” for a new generation of younger and casual listeners. | On their newest EP, The Strokes continue to perform “The Strokes” for a new generation of younger and casual listeners. | The Strokes: Future Present Past EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21986-future-present-past-ep/ | Future Present Past EP | Although the Strokes are of the same era as once-flashpoint NYC guitar bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the National, and the Walkmen, they’ve become something their peers haven’t: classic rock. Tumble down enough comment threads, or check out the audience demographics at their infrequent shows—there are many listeners who idolize the Strokes as an actual first-generation 21st century NYC cool band, something like the aging, disheveled downtown '70s and '80s hipsters the band idolized in their youth. Becoming classic rock means a band can recycle their iconography without losing their edge, as far as casual and younger listeners are concerned. (Officially, the Strokes began their slow journey toward oldies stations when Shia LaBeouf wore their shirt in Transformers.)
It also means, weirdly, that they’re no longer expected to be good. A bad record wouldn’t diminish the enduring power of singles like “Last Nite.” In 2014, I met a person who said the Strokes were their favorite band. When I asked how they liked 2013’s Comedown Machine, the answer was “What’s that?” So it ends up being sort of nice that Future Present Past, their first new release in three years and first EP since 2001’s scene-starting The Modern Age, is only so long as an EP. On 2011's Angles and Comedown Machine, there was too much going on—and, quite simply, too much. Here, there’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period. The concept is present in the title: Here’s what the Strokes do sound like, here’s what they did sound like, and here’s what they will sound like.
The signposts of that classic “Strokes” sound are visible on “OBLIVIUS,” the EP’s immediate stand out: a guitar that sounds like a synth (but isn’t), intertwined with a guitar that sounds like a guitar (and is), backed by precise percussion and knitted together by Julian Casablancas’ bleary, strained voice. There are lyrics about alienation, a maybe semi-intentional, faux-deep *Wolf of Wall Street *ad lib, and a straining chorus vocal that cannot possibly have been delivered by someone who’s smoked as many cigarettes as Casablancas. (There’s also a remix from the band’s Fab Moretti, which is totally listenable.) “What side are you standing on?” Casablancas sings, which sounds like a challenge to anyone who might pretend the band hasn’t earned its right to screw around.
The benefits of screwing around, of course, could be challenged. “Drag Queen” is the so-called “future”—a more self-consciously “mature” song that opens with a ominous, decayed smear of guitars and continues with the high-concept of Casablancas singing to himself in dueling voices, sort of sounding like a hungover Phantom of the Opera. Halfway through, a Strokes-sian guitar refrain is copy-and-pasted into the flow. It’s a mess, but it’s an interesting mess. “Threat of Joy,” meanwhile, stretches all the way to their pre-fame days, when they sounded just bored and arrogant enough to be sexy. It’s an alternative universe take on what “The Modern Age” might have sounded like if they’d taken a record executive’s advice to slow it down, get a better studio, and play it straight. It’s not as good, of course, but it’s still charming, and has Casablancas’ most charismatic vocal performance.
At the very least, all three songs will fit seamlessly into their live show. In 2015, I saw the Strokes play a headlining set at Primavera Sound for a rabid crowd who ate up every song, even “Machu Picchu.” The band was just as well-dressed than they’d been in the early ’00s (except for Casablancas, who was cosplaying as a Planeteer, but hey, it’s a look), and they didn’t miss a note, even as I don’t think a single member came within ten feet of another during the entire set. They didn’t play “12:51” at 12:51 a.m., because fuck coincidences. A credible source told me their fee for the 90-minute set was more than the cost of your dad’s mortgage.
If their solo dalliances in the last half-decade have given weight to the idea that the Strokes are more of a business than a living, breathing band, it's still been fascinating to watch them shed their skin and become whatever it is they'll be for the rest of their career. And with the pivot of Casablancas’ Cult Records to functioning as a gatekeeper for the living, breathing culture that helped birth the band, they seem like a band that’s very aware of their legacy… as well as how easy it would be for that to stop mattering, should the context no longer exist. Maybe they didn’t mean to become iconic, but it happened, and there are still people who want to see what happens next. | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cult | June 7, 2016 | 6 | a6bbdc3c-8a10-4a72-8019-1b5875442ac7 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Rhino reissues the classic soundtrack, the most popular document of the disco era. | To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Rhino reissues the classic soundtrack, the most popular document of the disco era. | Various Artists: Saturday Night Fever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10428-saturday-night-fever/ | Saturday Night Fever | Disco's most popular document was, at the time of its release, also one of its least representative: Saturday Night Fever is disco for straight, white males. A phenomenon 30 years ago, John Badham's B-movie and its accompanying 2xLP soundtrack not only made John Travolta a star, but escorted the music out of gay discotheques and black nightclubs and into the glare of the mainstream. However, it did so by diluting disco's more extreme elements to create a safer, more marketable package. Even then, conservative audiences saw disco culture as a Sodom and Gomorrah rather than an alternative Eden. The recent surge of interest in the era-- specifically in Peter Shapiro's excellent history Turn the Beat Around, but also demonstrated by groups like Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand-- only sets disco's outsider nature, as well as this collection's shortcomings, in sharper relief.
The movie itself is seedy in a different way (rape, bigotry, death), but as film critic David Thompson writes, "Children ignored its...sordid suburban context. That film only existed when Travolta danced." In addition to his extraordinary dance moves, the actor's edgy, preening presence holds the camera's attention as it juxtaposes him with the lifeless neighborhood around him. Similarly, the soundtrack, which Rhino is reissuing on its 30th anniversary, is a showcase for hetero heartthrobs the Bee Gees, who contribute a third of the tracklist, get a writing credit for Yvonne Elliman's "If I Can't Have You", and even grace the cover as some sort of mirrorball Holy Trinity. It makes cynical sense: The Bee Gees played their own instruments; had a dubious history in sub-Beatles pop; and were white and handsome-- all of which made them more marketable to new audiences than their black, female, or homosexual peers. As such, they should be critical pariahs on par with Stone Temple Pilots or the Killers, but their six tracks on Saturday Night Fever are frequently brilliant and redemptively fun. With its snaking instrumental melody and sneaking beat, opener "Stayin' Alive" is all cocksure strut, even separated from Travolta's stroll through the credits, and "Night Fever" and "You Should Be Dancin'" have an urgency that makes dancin' seem like a life-or-death imperative. Their portion of the soundtrack forms a condensed hits package that few bands of the era can rival.
Saturday Night Fever is by no means the definitive compilation of disco-- Rhino's 4xCD Disco Box, for example, is obviously more comprehensive, and Strut's Disco (Not Disco) comps and Tommy Boy's The Perfect Beats help capture proto-, post-, and underground disco-- but even beyond the contributions of the Bee Gees, it does have the potential to be a gateway comp, exposing listeners to a small range of disco subgenres. There's funk: "Open Sesame" doesn't rank among Kool & the Gang's absolute best cuts, but its silly vocals and breakneck horns are nevertheless impressive. There's soul: The Trammps' 10-story "Disco Inferno"-- the extended cut, no less-- provides both the soundtrack's climax and its denouement. And of course there's novelty: Walter Murphy's "Fifth of Beethoven" is not just the height of disco-geek cheese, but also the precursor to "serious" undertakings by contemporary artists like Mirwais and Moby. Surprisingly, there are even Latin rhythms on Saturday Night Fever, most notably on M.F.S.B.'s "K-Jee" but also consigned to the souped-up incidental music by David Shire and Ralph McDonald.
Ultimately, Saturday Night Fever doesn't disregard disco's underground origins so much as it simply sublimates them to the mainstream white experience. As a soundtrack, it works perfectly well, immersing listeners in the music (and therefore the spirit) of the film while selling more tickets. But as a pop-cultural document, it is significantly flawed, not only linked to a midlevel movie but also unable to fully capture the movement with which it has been so strongly identified. Thirty years later, after the ugly DISCO SUCKS trend and countless revivals both sincere and ironic, the appeal of Saturday Night Fever seems squarely nostalgic, but whatever its impact then or now, there is some amazing music on here-- and even more beyond. | 2007-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-07-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Rhino / RSO | July 13, 2007 | 8.7 | a6c66d67-eb06-4e8e-b930-fc8ac87f24a7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On her 15th album, the R&B singer celebrates her ultimate-diva status by sticking to her core pop-soul aesthetic, despite collaborators like Poo Bear, Dev Hynes, and Skrillex. | On her 15th album, the R&B singer celebrates her ultimate-diva status by sticking to her core pop-soul aesthetic, despite collaborators like Poo Bear, Dev Hynes, and Skrillex. | Mariah Carey: Caution | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mariah-carey-caution/ | Caution | Mariah Carey is synonymous with grandiosity, whether she’s showing off her five-octave vocal range, arriving on the stage of Caesar’s Palace via Jet Ski, strenuously denying her knowledge of Jennifer Lopez, or simply sighing “dah-ling” in a way that only a diva could. That penchant for over-the-topness can be a blessing or a curse, but it’s always been there, whether it was used to propel “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to holiday-season ubiquity or to drag the 12th season of “American Idol” into a morass of Nicki Minaj-directed snippiness.
But Caution, Carey’s 15th album and first in four years, takes a different tack; instead, it derives its power from its central figure’s chilled-out attitude. It opens with plush synth tones before Mariah’s purr floats in from the heavens, ready to scratch out a former “knight in shining armor” using poison-pen lyrics. It’s the sweetest-sounding “please take your things and go” track since Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” using Carey’s breathy head voice and robust belt in tandem as a way of underscoring the lyrics’ take-no-shit stance—a no-nonsense attitude that gives much of Caution its lightness.
The roster of producers on Caution is varied, and at times surprising—“Hold On, We’re Going Home” producer Nineteen85 helps make “GTFO” sound similarly plush; Timbaland assists behind the boards and at the end of the sparkling “8th Grade,” engaging in a playful back-and-forth that recalls a gentler version of his “Promiscuous” parrying; and Skrillex and Poo Bear, who collaborated on tracks for Justin Bieber, are partially behind the calmly celebratory Ty Dolla $ign feature “The Distance,” a gorgeous addition to the anniversary-celebration canon that isn’t even dinged by Ty’s call-out of online commenters.
Of course, Carey has a producer credit on every track. Those credits on pop albums can feel like the music-business equivalent of vanity license plates, but the Caution’s cohesion does speak to an overall guiding ideal. It’s so strong that it persists through the closing ballad, “Portrait,” which frames Carey’s passionate description of her inner struggles in emphatic piano and glossy strings, as well as the dreamy, guitar-god coda appended to the simmering “Giving Me Life,” a bittersweet look back that glides through Barbra Streisand references and an extended face-off between Carey and hip-hop demigod Slick Rick before entering its final phase. Devonté Hynes (aka Blood Orange), a student of slow jams, is Carey’s co-producer here, and his ability to sustain a sumptuous groove then explode it into something completely unexpected clashes with Carey’s controlled charm in a spectacular way.
Moments like that help Caution, despite its relatively downtempo vibe, sound like Carey’s celebration of her ultimate-diva status—and of R&B coming back around to her aesthetic. Pop-R&B has rebounded from the commercial trough it fell into during the turn of the decade, which Carey experienced firsthand when the later singles from E=MC2, the 2008 follow-up to her 2005 career rebirth, The Emancipation of Mimi, flailed at radio. (She hasn’t had a new top-10 single since 2009’s “Obsessed,” despite the quality of releases like the sun-dappled Miguel collaboration “#Beautiful” and the sparkling yet regimented ballad “You’re Mine (Eternal)”; other singers straddling the line between pop and soul, like Beyoncé, have experienced similar discrepancies between their superstardom and their pop-chart fortunes.) Carey is 48 now, and her self-titled debut turns 30 in less than two years. She’s seen generations of singers follow in her stiletto steps as they attempt to reach her level of pop megastardom; the first “American Idol” era showcased her early career’s influence on 21st-century up-and-comers, while 2018 hits like Ella Mai’s fizzy “Boo’d Up” and Camila Cabello’s breathy “Never Be the Same” cribbed their breathy vocals and burbling beats from pages of Emancipation’s playbook.
Because of the hard youth focus of the Hot 100 in the streaming era, Carey may not add another chart-topping single to her entries in the record books. But Caution seems to signal that she’s okay with that fact—her music will find a healthy audience, chart positions be damned. She’ll employ of-the-moment producers to add current touches to her tracks, but the way she uses them on Caution results in her fine-tuning her aesthetic, not bending to current playlist-friendly trends; she’ll wink at her public persona during interviews, but approach her vocals on tracks like “The Distance” and “Portrait” with the same steely-eyed seriousness that fueled her meteoric rise nearly three decades ago. Those who don’t want to listen? They can, as she coos on Caution’s opener, “get the fuck out.” | 2018-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | November 22, 2018 | 7.5 | a6ce7997-4f5d-4386-af7b-2a5fdc0cbeac | Maura Johnston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maura-johnston/ | |
On two LPs from the mid 1990s, members of Oval and Mouse on Mars ask what lies beyond music’s borders. Their sonic abstractions are as bewitching as the most tightly composed song. | On two LPs from the mid 1990s, members of Oval and Mouse on Mars ask what lies beyond music’s borders. Their sonic abstractions are as bewitching as the most tightly composed song. | Microstoria: init ding + _snd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/microstoria-init-ding-snd/ | init ding + _snd | The two men of Microstoria, Oval’s Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, don’t particularly like to refer to their music as “music.” Popp prefers the term “audio,” as might be expected from someone who has scribbled on CDs as part of his creative process, while St. Werner copped in a 2018 interview to being uncomfortable with the mantle of musician. The sounds on their first two albums, 1995’s init ding and 1996’s _snd, initially seem to gel with that stance. They resemble something you might find lying under a rock or lurking beneath the surface of a tidepool: You don’t so much try to comprehend them as admire their contours and movements, marveling at their very existence. Yet there’s a thrilling tension between the Germans’ desire to remove human impulses from their art and their obvious delight in making it.
The two were in their mid-twenties when they made these recordings, and their stars in the electronic underground were rising. init ding came a year after Oval’s pioneering Systemisch, which placed Popp’s arsenal of CD skips and interference blats within the context of chord progressions that sounded almost like pop; the masterpiece 94diskont was just a week away. Meanwhile, Mouse on Mars were moving from the ambient techno of their 1994 debut, Vulvaland, toward something far less categorizable. October 1995 brought Iaora Tahiti, which took sharp-edged electronics and drowned them in the same ’60s space-age cheese that was enthralling artists all over the world, from Jim O’Rourke in Chicago to Stereolab in London to the Shibuya-kei scene in Tokyo. Small wonder O’Rourke and David Grubbs would enlist Popp to work on Gastr Del Sol’s post-rock classic Camoufleur—nor that both O’Rourke and Stereolab would appear on the 1997 Microstoria remix comp Reprovisers, a fantastic summation of this zeitgeist.
For all of Popp’s and Werner’s efforts to stand apart from their work, a spirit of possibility courses through init ding. The duo made much of this music by toggling between synth patches while playing, something anyone who’s ever owned an electronic instrument has done at one point, though rarely with results this spectacular. The underlying drones and chords seem continually to turn over on themselves, refusing to simply hang in the air. Meanwhile, Popp and Werner layer all manner of strange sounds, not least the whoops on opener “16:9” that sound like the carnivorous kin of the chintziest tropical bird effects from the exotica bin. There are sounds with analogues in the real world, like an organ on “Fund” or a creaky old upright on “Dokumint,” but they blend into the music’s overall tenor of alien sponginess. It’s all coated in a patina of noise and static—not the tactile crackles of Burial or the Caretaker but a sort of ferric crust that makes everything sound old and weathered.
If init ding sounds reasonably “played,” that’s not at all the case with _snd, one of the most beguiling albums of the glitch era. Here, the madcap experimentation of the init ding sessions gives way to a total control of timbre. The interference that once lay on top of their tracks has become completely absorbed into the music; everything appears smudged, damaged or otherwise corroded, threaded between massive sub-bass subductions and high-end scrapes that test both listening habits and the limits of perception. Listen to _snd at low volume and the gentler elements of the music might disappear. Listen to it through blaring speakers and the full force of _snd’s dynamic range emerges. But this is not an “ambient” experience, and those looking for one may come out of this album disappointed if not infuriated. _snd works less like Oval’s dulcet 24-minute ambient classic “Do While” than the drones of the late Phill Niblock, which lose something when treated as casual listening and which the composer himself demanded be played at deafening volume.
The two records have been packaged together as a 2xLP reissue from Thrill Jockey, with a crisp new remaster from Rashad Becker. On Bandcamp and most streaming services, the two albums segue into each other with no clear division between them, and they flow into each other easily, with the last strains of “Dokumint” dissolving into the flickers and howls of _snd opener “Sleepy People / Network Down.” The two work together as a classic-rock-style double album, with init ding as the more playful A/B sides and _snd as the moodier C/D where the artists get down to business. This is the type of vestige from vinyl-era orthodoxy the two professed non-musicians would undoubtedly scoff at. But if Microstoria set out to separate themselves from the world of music, they’ve failed: These records instead affirm great music’s ability to confound and enthrall. | 2024-02-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | February 7, 2024 | 8.3 | a6d2c60f-7e5d-48df-bbe6-1c4da6033221 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Released when she was just 19, and including songs begun four years earlier, Bush’s landmark debut is playful, experimental, and defiant: the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. | Released when she was just 19, and including songs begun four years earlier, Bush’s landmark debut is playful, experimental, and defiant: the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. | Kate Bush: The Kick Inside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-bush-the-kick-inside/ | The Kick Inside | That Kate Bush named her debut album The Kick Inside might make it seem like her music is the product of a maternal wellspring. Women artists likening their work to their children is one culturally accepted way for them to discuss creativity; it implies a reassuring process of nurture. Another is as a bolt from the blue, a divine phenomenon which they just happened to catch and transmit to a deserving audience; no need for fear of a female genius here. But Bush’s debut, released when she was 19, says “Up yours” to all that.
Yes, the song “The Kick Inside” is about childbearing, but the young woman is pregnant by her brother and on the cusp of suicide to spare their family from shame. Subverting the folk song “Lucy Wan” (the brother kills his sister in the original), it shows the depths of Bush’s studies and her everlasting curiosity for how far desire can drive a person. She was signed at 16 but her debut took four years to make, during which she engaged multiple teachers in a process of spiritual and physical transformation. She pays tribute to their lessons alongside rhapsodies on unexplained phenomena, delirious expressions of lust, and declarations of earthbound defiance. Rather than feminine function or freak accident, these are the cornerstones of creativity, she suggested: mentorship and openness, but also the self-assurance to withstand those forces. Her purpose was as strong as any of them.
Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies.
But provocation for its own sake wasn’t Bush’s project. EMI not pushing her to make an album at 15 was a blessing: The Kick Inside arrived the year after punk broke, which Bush knew served her well. “People were waiting for something new to come out—something with feeling,” she said in 1978. For anyone who scoffed at her punk affiliation—given her teenage mentorship at the hands of Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour and her taste for the baroque—she indisputably subverted wanky prog with her explicit desire and sexuality: Here was how she might intrude. The limited presence of women in prog tended to orgasmic moaning that amplified the supposed sexual potency of the group’s playing. Bush demanded pleasure, grew impatient when she had to wait for it, and ignored the issue of male climax—rock’s founding pleasure principle—to focus on how sex might transform her. “I won’t pull away,” she sings almost as a threat on “Feel It,” alone with the piano. “My passion always wins.”
The louche “L’Amour Looks Something Like You” treads similarly brazen territory though lands less soundly. She fantasizes about “that feeling of sticky love inside” as if anticipating a treacle pudding, and there is an unctuous gloop to the arrangement that makes it one of the album’s least distinctive songs. More complex desires tended to elicit her more inherently sensual and accomplished writing. “Moving,” her tribute to dance teacher Lindsay Kemp, is so absurdly elegant and lavish that its beauty seems to move Bush to laughter: There is deep respect in her admiration for him, in concert with piercing operatic notes and impish backing vocal harmonies that sound like they should have been handled by a chorus of Jim Henson creations. “You crush the lily in my soul” as an awed metaphor for the timidity of girlhood gone away is unimpeachable.
What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.
And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.
“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.
“Strange Phenomena” is equally awed, Bush celebrating the menstrual cycle as a secret lunar power and wondering what other powers might arrive if we were only attuned to them. She lurches from faux-operatic vocal to reedy shriek, marches confidently in tandem with the strident chorus and unleashes a big, spooky “Woo!,” exactly as silly as a 19-year-old should be. As is “Oh to Be in Love,” a baroque, glittering harpsichord romp about a romance that brightens the colors and defeats time.
She only fails to make a virtue of her naivety on “Room for the Life,” where she scolds a weeping woman for thinking any man would care about her tears. The sweet calypso reverie is elegant, and good relief from the brawnier, propulsive arrangements that stood staunchly alongside Steely Dan. But Bush shifts inconsistently between reminding the woman that she can have babies and insisting, more effectively, that changing one’s life is up to you alone. The latter is clearly where her own sensibilities lie: “Them Heavy People,” another ode to her teachers, has a Woolf-like interiority (“I must work on my mind”) and a distinctly un-Woolf-like exuberance, capering along like a pink elephant on parade. “You don’t need no crystal ball,” she concludes, “Don’t fall for a magic wand/We humans got it all/We perform the miracles.”
The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head. | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | EMI | January 19, 2019 | 8.4 | a6d81874-dcfd-49a9-b9f0-9ebf6f63af77 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band-- named for ... | Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band-- named for ... | Okkervil River: Sleep and Wake Up Songs EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5962-sleep-and-wake-up-songs-ep/ | Sleep and Wake Up Songs EP | Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band-- named for a river outside St. Petersburg, Russia-- filled last year's eye-opening Down the River of Golden Dreams with gentle ballads about beds and war criminals and forgiveness, but the songs on their follow-up EP, Sleep and Wake Up Songs, are more brittle and fragile, like a light sleeper's snooze. The EP condenses the album's best qualities and discards most of its weaknesses, and its brevity makes it all the more emotionally forceful.
"Rapt, in Star Wars sheets/ With my hand across your belly/ We waded through the watercolor," Will Sheff sings on opener "A Favor". The song hints at a life of sexual confusion and parental abandonment, hinging on a chorus that alludes to the impossibility of true human connection: "I would be anything that you wanted me to be...but how can I change my body?"
Plumbing the disappointment of unrealized dreams, these songs are bleak and often desperate. They traffic in deliberately nebulous narratives-- unnamed characters, unspecified relationships, vague actions, undisclosed emotions-- anchored by concrete details. The result is a dreamlike atmosphere, simultaneously blurred and lucid. "You're Untied Again" turns the adage "if you love something, set it free" on its head, but Sheff is more interested in evoking the chill of an unreachable beach or the darkness of a diamond mine-- both of which become potent metaphors for the confinement of a relationship.
With an acoustic guitar melody as prismatic as melting icicles, "Just Give Me Time" plumbs the tension at the heart of a relationship, but the lyrics are so opaque as to be coded: "I shut my eyes, ripped the train off the line/ But a sudden gust of snow blew through a hole in my girl's clothes." This is not necessarily a criticism: refusing to provide much context for their narratives, these songs are guardedly confessional, eager to elicit emotions but hesitant to reveal too much.
To compliment this mood, the instruments sound sleepily languid, lolling around the beat rather than hitting it precisely. "A Favor" builds gradually to a climax reminiscent of "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks" from Down the River of Golden Dreams, but only the vocals crescendo. The other instruments maintain the same volume, as if nonplussed by Sheff's display of emotion. As a result, the song's climax becomes airily anticlimactic, further emphasizing the sense of lonely futility described in the lyrics.
Closing the EP, "The Hidden Track" sets up an intriguing musical metaphor: Life itself is an album, but the afterlife is the unlisted bonus song. After questioning and doubting himself throughout the song-- and suffering through what sounds like tremendous uncertainty-- Sheff admits, "I think that there's a hidden track." The song provides an upbeat coda to match his hopefulness, then the EP abruptly and unceremoniously ends. | 2004-11-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2004-11-16T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | November 16, 2004 | 7.7 | a6d95687-b667-4991-a70f-0c423bb0329c | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Shields is Grizzly Bear's most compositionally adventurous record. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, it also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance. | Shields is Grizzly Bear's most compositionally adventurous record. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, it also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance. | Grizzly Bear: Shields | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17037-shields/ | Shields | "This is a foreground." That was the last lyric left hovering in the mist of Grizzly Bear's breakout 2009 album, Veckatimest, and it's a pretty good image to describe what it's like to listen to one of their records. The key word there is "a," signifying one of many. Whether it's the ethereal, friendly-ghost vibes of Yellow House or Veckatimest's pristine chamber pop, Grizzly Bear create music in deep focus; what's going on in the margins of their songs is just as important and expressive as the center. Taking cues from artists like Talk Talk and Van Dyke Parks, the Brooklyn four-piece make pop music with an ear for the ambient, asking us to notice the importance in detail, the beauty of texture, and the foregrounds that exist all across our spectrum of perception.
While there's no question that Grizzly Bear's last two records have sounded gorgeous, critics of the band have wondered if that's enough. Shields, the band's fourth and most compositionally adventurous record, should put those concerns to bed. Though full of baroque, detail-rich production and latticework melodies, Shields also offers an emotionally resonant core. The album is an excavation of loneliness, melancholy, and self-reliance. It's also a demanding record, without an instantly gratifying single like "Knife" or "Two Weeks" to hook restless ears. But the rewards that come from immersing yourself in it are odd and profound. Shields feels like a summation of Grizzly Bear's strengths, drawing a line from the muddy, minor key sonic palette of Ed Droste's home-recorded Horn of Plenty and stringing it to the heels of boundless ambition.
Shields' spectacular opener, "Sleeping Ute", is the lone track retained from an aborted early session in Marfa, Tex., and it feels like a continuation down the path Daniel Rossen ambled on his 2012 solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, which sought solace from a busy life in the elements. "If I could be still as that gray hill," Rossen pines, before giving into an admission of humanness: "But I can't help myself." Chris Bear's drum rolls emulate thunder while chords crest with the rhythm of waves. "Sleeping Ute" moves so evocatively and theatrically like water that it sounds like a big-budget radio play of The Tempest. But as grandiose as it often gets, "Ute", like Shields itself, always retains a certain intimacy. These are dark and anxious waters, the choppy and tumultuous movement of the sea inside.
Grizzly Bear have acquired a reputation for politeness; maybe it was the bow ties, maybe it was the passive-aggressive inflection of their most famous lyrics ("Would you always? Maybe sometimes? Make it easy?"), maybe it was just that Michael McDonald collaboration. But Shields serves as a visceral reminder of how unsettled and uncanny Grizzly Bear's music often feels. (Remember that superbly creepy video for "Two Weeks," full of smiles pulled tight enough to induce nightmares?) The pair of lead-off singles, "Sleeping Ute" and "Yet Again", each find a way of transcending the tension of "putting on appearances," one of Grizzly Bear's favorite themes. The lyrics of the Droste-led "Yet Again" detail repression and repose ("Take it all in stride/ Speak, don't confide"), which makes the payoff-- a final minute of instrumental fury lead by the torrent of Chris Bear's percussion and the squiggling lightning strikes of Rossen's guitar-- that much more cathartic. Dynamic shifts like this give the record an air of uncertainty that contrasts with the sheer beauty of the arrangements.
Grizzly Bear is a democracy. They stand in a horizontal row on stage, and you get this sense of intra-band egalitarianism from their records, too. By now, each of the four members has cultivated his own unique and expressive vocabulary, and each feels integral to the sound of Shields. Chris Bear's drumming is lyrical and swift, moving from delicately timed details to big, booming ruckuses (check out the way his percussive rumbles in the background of the verses of "Yet Again" foreshadow its avalanche of a conclusion), while Chris Taylor's penchant for haunting effects and gently buoyant grooves adds an otherworldly weightlessness to these soundscapes. Droste's voice resounds with ache and longing, and there's a newfound and welcome gravel to his vocals that add a raw, unvarnished quality to songs like "The Hunt" and "Speaking in Rounds".
But Shields showcases Rossen's growth most of all. The songs that sounded distinctly his on Yellow House-- "Little Brother" and "On a Neck, On a Spit" in particular-- were grounded in a familiar folk sound. But from the rollicking strums that propel "Speaking in Rounds" to the creaking, rusted textures he teases out of "The Hunt", Rossen's playing on Shields is a seamless blend of folksy textures, jazzy fluidity, and proggy imagination that feels downright inimitable. Joni Mitchell has called her own idiosyncratic tunings as "chords of inquiry," and this feels like an apt term for the tones and inflections that Rossen conjures too. They're stirring precisely because they're unresolved: the progression that ends "Speaking in Rounds"' chorus, for example, chirps like a series of unanswered questions, each one a little more urgent and insoluble than the last.
And that's a great part of Shields' emotional pull: The album reverberates with a sense of irresolution. This was present before with Grizzly Bear-- Yellow House's "Colorado" concludes with a fireworks display of unanswered pleas: "What now? What now? What now?"-- but never to such a degree. And it's that tension that makes returning to Shields so rewarding. The final one-two punch is a stunner, where the poignant grace of "Half-Gate" gives way to the magnificently epic "Sun in Your Eyes". If "Sleeping Ute" was the start of a sojourn from society, "Sun" ends not with a return but a transcendent kiss-off: "So long, I'm never coming back."
This closing pair of songs speaks to the album's complexity. Despite the formalism and easy-to-love production, Shields' best moments inflict a sense of unease that wriggles under the skin and lingers after the final crescendo. But this collection of unvarnished shipwreck-spirituals is after something more challenging than a feel-good ending. With Shields, Grizzly Bear make certain demands--hold still, listen closely-- that seem downright radical in a busy and impatient world. | 2012-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | September 17, 2012 | 9.1 | a6dbc4cf-a87e-4471-aa16-50ebac9626b2 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Cody Critcheloe’s witty multimedia alt-pop project exults in uncensored queerness on an album that fulfills the musician and filmmaker’s maximalist ambitions. | Cody Critcheloe’s witty multimedia alt-pop project exults in uncensored queerness on an album that fulfills the musician and filmmaker’s maximalist ambitions. | Ssion: O | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ssion-o/ | O | Cody Critcheloe has been vying for cult status ever since he founded multimedia alt-pop group Ssion in the early 2000s. With his early releases, the musician, filmmaker, and visual artist constructed a persona that incorporates a near-religious obsession with ’80s and ’90s rock and pop divas; a uniform of leather jackets, red lipstick, and a painted-on handlebar mustache; and an almost academic approach to dissecting and reconstructing queer culture into clever dance songs. Ssion’s third studio record, O, slickly sums up the many parts of Critcheloe’s career. It not only epitomizes his persona, but contains his best music to date.
An acclaimed music video director who has worked with Grizzly Bear and Perfume Genius, among others, Critcheloe makes clips for Ssion that serve as scrapbooks of the project’s aesthetic and musical touchstones. Madonna has been omnipresent in this pantheon since their 2001 debut album, I Don’t Want New Wave and I Don’t Want the Truth, which included the track “Madonna, Sean, and Cody Critcheloe” (whose title doubles as a Sonic Youth reference). On O, Critcheloe’s theatrically sensual vocals evoke the Queen of Pop circa Erotica. Slow burner “The Cruel Twirl” finds guest vocalist and left-of-center pop diva Róisín Murphy flatly stating, “Madonna still hasn't paid off her student loans, and you know what? Neither have I!”
It’s these witty, self-aware moments that have secured Ssion’s best-kept-secret status within underground pop for the better part of two decades, but what sets O apart from the rest of their records is the way it balances superfan Easter eggs with rock-solid songwriting and production. Although Ssion’s music has always been catchy, engaging, and fun, their DIY approach to recording kept them from fulfilling their maximalist ambitions on earlier albums. O embodies ultra-glossy mainstream excess without abandoning the band’s punk and experimental roots.
Critcheloe co-produced most of the album with Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy and Sam Mehran (Test Icicles, Samantha Urbani), and their ménage à trois of dance, pop, rock, and electro sensibilities gives O plenty of variety. Single “At Least the Sky Is Blue,” a slinky mid-tempo collaboration with Ariel Pink, is built around a keyboard melody that sounds like a malfunctioning busy signal. “1980-99,” which features vocals from Sky Ferreira and former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, is the kind of scuzzy pop-punk pastiche Avril Lavigne can only dream of recording. The album’s eclecticism is most apparent on “Tell Me About It,” a sultry funk track wrapped around a rubbery bassline and injected with the self-assured sexuality of a Top 40 girl group. “Like passion in your pride parade/I live to love and to get paid,” Critcheloe purrs. “Oh, can't you hear these faggots scream?”
As that lyric suggests, O’s greatest achievement may be the way it exults in unadulterated queer emotion. On “Marc & Me,” a track with a sing-song melody that imagines a night out with Marc Jacobs, Critcheloe declares, “Lookin’ at you is like lookin’ at me/Lookin’ in a mirror, liking what I see.” “I know it's not the ’70s/But I'm feeling mighty real,” he quips on the dark, minimal electro number “Free Lunch.” In 2018, so many new artists are embracing their queer identities and heritage, but Critcheloe has spent about 20 years honing Ssion’s droll, campy, dramatic aesthetic—and that work has paid off in their strongest and most timely album yet. O is the sound of the zeitgeist catching up with Ssion, not the other way around. | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dero Arcade | May 14, 2018 | 7.7 | a6e2d3dd-79d0-4448-8967-fa02d2cc950e | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The Cleveland rapper’s quietly intense new album is fueled by the constant churn of unrelenting self-examination, but that heaviness is offset by his nimble, natural flow. | The Cleveland rapper’s quietly intense new album is fueled by the constant churn of unrelenting self-examination, but that heaviness is offset by his nimble, natural flow. | Kipp Stone: 66689 Blvd Prequel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kipp-stone-66689-blvd-prequel/ | 66689 Blvd Prequel | It’s easy to imagine Kipp Stone in one of those videos rappers post of the recording process: vibey lighting in the vocal booth, headphones slightly askew, eyes focused just past the mic on the object in his outstretched arm. But instead of a phone opened to the Notes app where he’s jotted down his rhymes, he’s holding a mirror, maintaining unwavering eye contact with himself as he spills out an intricate flow. The East Cleveland emcee’s music is unabashedly confessional, interrogating his every thought to determine its legitimacy. That constant churn is the driving force behind 66689 BLVD Prequel, his sleek and quietly intense new album.
On “Passivist Prayer,” a multi-part opus at the album’s midpoint, he raps, “Where my therapists at?/That ain’t no shoutout, that’s an inquiry.” It’s a sly bar, as much a testament to his writing skills as a muted yelp of despair. The album has many such moments, as Stone unpacks notions of masculinity, his various insecurities, and occasional dips into suicidal ideation. As vulnerable and heavy as his subject matter can be, he never sounds fully weighed down; he also takes time to revel in tiny joys, creating a complicated and often beautiful document of how confusing it is to be alive.
Stone’s impressive agility as a rapper helps his sometimes harsh self-examination go down smoothly. His sound is deeply rooted in Cleveland, combining the light-on-its-feet flow of King Chip and elastic melodicism of Krayzie Bone into a nimble style. It’s remarkable how natural his delivery feels, and how easily he’s able to change patterns on a dime. On “The Sun Is Medicine,” aching lines (“Find the time to fill my lungs with life/Revive the gilded one, my time was bouta fill my cup with cyanide to feel for once”) bounce playfully across the synth bass riff, cleverly disguising the pain within. When Stone raps, “Shit you hate about yourself be what they love you for the most/Watching everybody shine and forgot about your glow,” on “BLVD Intro,” he stretches the ends of bars like taffy, finding a loose pocket inside Tunga’s circular jazz beat.
The palette Stone favors has a lush, inviting aura that tempers some of his more acidic explorations. Though he enlists a committee of producers—including himself on a couple of tracks—the beats all have a similarly airy, luxuriant vibe, consisting of silvery wisps of synth, rippling Fender Rhodes, and crisp, upfront percussion that keeps everything from drifting into the atmosphere. Some of that openness seems inspired by Stone’s first trip to California, a seemingly perspective-shifting vacation he documents twice on 66689 BLVD Prequel. The pensive, self-produced “Petrichor” wraps ghostly vocal notes around gossamer piano and sleepily shuffling snares. He finds himself back at home in East Cleveland, reflecting on the culture shock he felt across the country, feeling like an altogether different man. Over the buoyant drum patterns and cafe jazz of “Vanderhall Venice,” Stone describes the freedom he felt when driving through the Hollywood Hills, “high vibrational with the sun beaming.”
Stone wrote and recorded 66689 BLVD Prequel alone, often spending up to 15 hours locked in the studio in search of the perfect take. The solitary nature of the album—there are no guests other than a background vocalist on a couple of cuts—makes its breadth and technical prowess all the more extraordinary. Stone says he freestyled most of the lyrics, and it’s baffling to think that someone could simply pluck these flows and sophisticated rhyme schemes from the air. It also explains some of his cringier lines (“Keep a dick to your mind, fuck what y’all think” on “18 The Hard Way,” or “pouting like that meme in the corner” on “Lakeshore”), and knowing they came off the top makes them a little more forgivable. 66689 BLVD Prequel isn’t as outwardly angry as 2020’s HOMME, though it’s just as emotionally wrought. It doesn’t seem as though Stone needs to release his demons as much as he needs post-exorcism aftercare. His darkness isn’t all-consuming, but it lurks behind his shoulder, tapping every so often to make its presence known. | 2023-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Closed Sessions | September 15, 2023 | 7.5 | a6edbf5e-4c0d-492c-8193-f510406a8646 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The Nova Scotian power pop band offers a pleasant surprise-- this 30-track LP is its best since 1999's Between the Bridges. | The Nova Scotian power pop band offers a pleasant surprise-- this 30-track LP is its best since 1999's Between the Bridges. | Sloan: Never Hear the End of It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9798-never-hear-the-end-of-it/ | Never Hear the End of It | Frankly, I didn't come to Sloan's eighth album expecting a whole lot. The Nova Scotian quartet's last two albums were patchy and sounded like a band that had grown complacent with simply kicking out serviceable guitar pop punctuated by the occasional stab at hard rock. These weren't bad albums, exactly, but after 1999's great Between the Bridges, subsequent releases Pretty Together and Action Pact were disappointingly MOR. So Never Hear the End of It comes as a pleasant surprise. It's the band's best since Bridges and possibly even One Chord to Another, the mid-90s disc that set their standard.
The album is a creative shake-up, the type of thing bands need to do to keep fresh more than 15 years into a career: Never Hear the End of It consists of 30 tracks that mostly flow into each other like a suite, though there are a few more conventional transitions. It's not entirely new for the band-- Between the Bridges didn't have track breaks either-- but they've never taken it nearly this far, giving equal weight to snippets, weird one-off detours, and fully fleshed-out potential singles, of which there are many.
This is a band with four songwriters and four singers, so to a certain degree variety is a guarantee on their albums, but the way this one jumps from ballads to near-punk eruptions keeps it unpredictable. The band also seems very self-aware, especially on "Fading Into Obscurity", a song written from the perspective of a former star that's a mini-suite in itself, moving from section to section with ease, the basic rock sound augmented with mellotron. It could be bitter, but instead opts for sweet humor: "This cake is baked but I much preferred the batter/ Perhaps in part because it had so much potential/ To be delicious and still be influential."
One of my biggest complaints about the album is how little of Jay Ferguson we hear in the lead-- only two songs feature him up front throughout, and they're among the best tracks on the album. I've always loved his voice, a liberally honeyed tenor, and his songs have a melodic ease to them that first recalls, and then transcends, 70s AM Gold. His "Right or Wrong" is a jangling, harmony-stuffed song that touches on the album's underlying theme of self-awareness, while "Before the End of the Race" is a far less self-consciously mature take on the adultery theme of "The Other Man" from a few years back.
An overabundance of self-conscious emotional maturity was a big part of what hampered Sloan's last two efforts, and the band lets itself have more silly fun in this new format. The result is that their artistic maturity is more fully displayed, both on beautifully realized songs like closer "Another Way I Could Do It", which poignantly illuminates the never-ending adjustments required by moving to a big city, to wild leaps out of the band's usual bounds like the punky, almost Wire-ish "HFXNSHC". Even seemingly small things, like the way lead single "Who Taught You to Live Like That?" contrasts big harmonies with a pounding arrangement that makes great use of a limited chord progression signal a creative revival.
Which is all great to hear, because for all their talk of accepting a slow fade in these songs, these four musicians are too good together to go out with a whimper. As a late-career stirring of the creative juices, this album is mostly successful, though among the thirty songs there are naturally a few that don't fully take. Sloan could've just as easily kept churning out good-but-not-great albums forever. To their credit, they've chosen a more difficult, more rewarding path. | 2007-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-01-22T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Yep Roc | January 22, 2007 | 7.7 | a6f5d99d-3754-41d3-8aca-a509ba7cf6d5 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The first-ever official live document from brilliant 70s art-punks Wire is finally released on this CD/DVD set, which captures their 1979 performance on then-West Germany's "Rockpalast" show. | The first-ever official live document from brilliant 70s art-punks Wire is finally released on this CD/DVD set, which captures their 1979 performance on then-West Germany's "Rockpalast" show. | Wire: Wire on the Box 1979 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8714-wire-on-the-box-1979/ | Wire on the Box 1979 | The iconic London Calling cover shot-- Paul Simonon smashing his white bass-- stems from frustration. Not frustration at The Man or over crusty, narrow-minded punks accusing The Clash of selling out, but frustration over the audience response. Simonon was upset that a crowd at New York City's Palladium was made to remain seated, effectively eliminating the crowd/band synergy The Clash had worked so hard to perfect. Opening bands know this feeling well, and it must be incredibly difficult to play a great show if the audience is having no visible reaction to your music.
Watching the DVD portion of Wire's Wire on the Box, I was struck by the band's energy and passion in the face of a very nearly inert crowd. In an hour-long set filmed for (then-West) Germany's "Rockpalast" television program, the band are tight, focused, even demented in their intensity at times, but partly because of the rules in the television studio: the tiny audience scarcely budges, and only claps politely between numbers. The audience is only four rows deep, and they're sitting on benches. Some audience members even look confused when the camera pans their faces between songs, as if they weren't sure what to expect from a Wire show. Then again, perhaps you can't hold that against them; Wire were a notoriously unpredictable live act in their heyday, and nine of the songs they played in this set hadn't yet been released at the time.
Those songs that were new in February 1979 eventually became the bulk of Wire's third album, 154. But even as the band demoed them for live European audiences that spring (opening for Roxy Music, no less), they sounded fully formed, differing only from their studio versions in density and texture. That Wire were already hitting audiences with new material hot on the heels of their 1978 sophomore opus Chairs Missing is indicative of the kind of band they were and always have been, i.e. never dwelling on the past and constantly evolving. That unrelenting flux is also what makes Wire on the Box an odd release in the band's catalog. It's the second live recording to be released from Wire's original phase, but the first one, 1981's Document & Eyewitness felt like another step forward for the band (if at times an utterly confounding one), whereas this one is uncharacteristically retrospect, a sort of "Greatest Hits Live" album.
That said, if Wire felt the need to throw fans a traditional archival bone, they certainly could have done a lot worse. The performance here is spot-on and the sound is spectacularly clear, though I'd argue that the vocals are mixed a tad too high, which distances them somewhat from the guitars. And the packaging conceit is a brilliant one that should be employed more often: the hour-long show is available to watch on DVD (along with a mumbly but informative 20-minute interview with the band), but also appears in its entirety on a separate CD so that it can be listened to as an album, without the video feed. That makes it a more versatile release, allowing you to enjoy the music on its own terms or to take in the spectacle of late-70s German television with the goofy prog-rock "Rockpalast" logo and seemingly arbitrary camerawork that quickly cuts from shots of all four band members to close-ups of Colin Newman's facial pores.
Newman is in brilliant voice for the set, shouting, yelping, and singing with ecstatic abandon. He and bassist Graham Lewis occasionally acknowledge their meager audience or give the title of a new song, but otherwise, the lackluster assortment in front of them might as well be in another time zone-- you'd think they were playing Wembley the way they confidently range across material from their early output, dishing out a killer take on the Pink Flag title track and a stunning, breathtaking version of Chairs Missing's "Heartbeat". They're clearly most content with the new material, though, ripping through 154 gems like "The 15th" and "Two People in a Room", as well as giving the full apocalyptic treatment to the epic noise wall "A Touching Display", on which Bruce Gilbert's processed bass sears a quasi-melody that I'd previously imagined to have come from a guitar.
More than anything else, this set highlights how singular and amazing Wire were at their peak. They could be flattening and catchy at once, and they were a visual oddity, with skinny-tied Newman and Lewis swirling wildly between drummer Robert Gotobed, who looks almost robotic, and Gilbert, who I swear never looks away from his guitar for all 58 minutes. And what makes the quality and ferocity of the show all the more impressive is the circumstances: How they mustered this much energy and focus for such a wallflower crowd I'll never know, but the end result is an excellent document of an essential band at the height of their powers. | 2004-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | November 17, 2004 | 8.1 | a6f6d1d8-2015-45d3-8fcc-33d52494d17b | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The New Brunswick musician learned collage techniques from a found reel-to-reel tape; here, he brings them to bear on a live-or-Memorex studio deconstruction of his own idiosyncratic songwriting. | The New Brunswick musician learned collage techniques from a found reel-to-reel tape; here, he brings them to bear on a live-or-Memorex studio deconstruction of his own idiosyncratic songwriting. | Jon McKiel: Hex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-mckiel-hex/ | Hex | Jon McKiel’s life and music changed forever when he bought a haunted reel-to-reel. When the equipment arrived at his home in rural New Brunswick, the singer-songwriter discovered a tape still wound into the machine, full of odd song fragments and guitar noodlings recorded by its previous owner. Who was he? When did he make those recordings? What dreams did he have for his music? Nobody could say. McKiel and his co-producer Jay Crocker (better known as JOYFULTALK) dubbed the anonymous artist Bobby Joe Hope, welcomed him as a full collaborator, and even named the subsequent album after him. The songs on 2020’s Bobby Joe Hope sampled snippets of his unfinished songs into unusual sound collages that disrupted McKiel’s solid, if familiar, guitar rock and inspired him to work new sounds and styles into his repertoire.
Hope doesn’t appear on Hex, but the ghost of his ghost lingers. McKiel and Crocker have further refined their recombinant techniques, only this time they sample McKiel himself, assembling his own studio experiments into unusual amalgams of blues, dub, soul, folk, tropicália, and more. The songs are compellingly disorienting; their melodies are as tight as the grooves are strange—hypnotic, slightly off. McKiel and Crocker continually blur the distinction between live performance and manipulated recording. “String,” which sounds like Paul Simon lost in the Bush of Ghosts, layers a crisp guitar over a slightly distorted one, their melodic lines twining together. It’s like listening to someone play along to the stereo in the next room, and in its uncanniness the moment is both unsettling and unexpectedly beautiful.
Everything on Hex seems both familiar and foreign. The title track stacks a distorted and truncated guitar lick over a busy bassline and a drumbeat that sounds like it’s been borrowed from a ’90s rap sample of a ’60s jazz tune, but it’s the free-floating saxophone that tilts the song just off its axis. The jangly pomp of “Everlee” is so recognizable as a Byrds reference that you might get that right-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue frustration from trying to name the tune. Closer “Memory Screen Pt. 2” warps a breezy guitar strum until it nearly breaks, then descends into windswept collage of guitar distortion, disembodied voices, and what might be whalesong, or static off an EVP mic. Each tinkers with a different idea, deploys voice and guitar toward new ends, yet they all fit together like puzzle pieces.
Otherworldly as it often sounds, Hex is primarily concerned with the fate of this world. McKiel’s cover of “Concrete Sea,” by Terry Jacks (an underrated singer-songwriter as well as an environmental activist), presents the city as an environment unfit for humans: “No one is meant to be living here in a concrete sea,” he chants. “Everyone, including me, wishes he could be set free.” McKiel resents the erasure of wonder, the mundane encroaching on everyday magic—a timely concern now that bands are proudly using AI to write songs. McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion, and on this oddly affecting album he comes across as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers missives from another plane. | 2024-05-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | You’ve Changed | May 3, 2024 | 7.6 | a6ff94a5-51b6-4460-b555-6246f116d0a9 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Chaz Bear’s latest is a loose and lively psych-funk melange—the sound of a one-man band learning how to jam. | Chaz Bear’s latest is a loose and lively psych-funk melange—the sound of a one-man band learning how to jam. | Toro y Moi: Mahal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toro-y-moi-mahal/ | Mahal | Although Toro y Moi surfaced as part of the slo-mo synth-pop movement lumped together as chillwave, the project’s sole member has always been an aspirational avatar for indie rock’s huddled masses. South Carolina’s Chaz Bundick, who later changed his last name to Bear and relocated to the Bay Area, has sung with equal detachment about bullshit jobs, breakup sex, and meeting James Murphy (“at Coachella,” he deadpans). But more than the often-fragmentary lyrics, what feels most representative of whatever remains of the indie zeitgeist is Bear’s unshowy eclecticism: He can remember when he first bought Radiohead’s OK Computer, but he’s also a house producer and heavyweight hip-hop collaborator. In a quiet victory for slacker SoulSeek jockeys everywhere, his work for EDM juggernaut Flume scored Bear a Grammy nomination. But it sounds like he’s on the job nonstop—“Everything is time management,” he told an interviewer—and he has enough existential anxiety about the point of it all that a 2015 album was titled What For?.
Mahal, Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album and first for indie stalwart Dead Oceans, posits convincingly that what Bear does is also supposed to be—as he told the same interviewer—well, “fun.” The title, a Tagalog word that can mean “love” but also “expensive,” is apparently an intentional response to the question posed by What For?. Bear, whose father is Black and mother is Filipina, further gestures to his maternal heritage with a cover photo that shows him perched in a decked-out jeepney—a colorful minibus that has for decades been the predominant form of public transportation in the Philippines. From an opening engine rev, the vehicle is a spirit guide across the album, a loose and lively psych-funk melange that transports him through styles and time periods with ad-hoc gaudiness and unassuming joie de vivre. It’s an album filled with jubilant funk-star yawps, goofier and more open than his previous full-lengths, with an uncharacteristic amount of guests. Instead of What For?, Mahal seems to ask, “Why not?”
Mahal is as fastidiously layered as the rest of Toro y Moi’s style-shifting discography, but Bear leaves the edges rough, connecting the tracks with radio tuning noises and relishing in unvarnished instrumental expression. Wordless opener “The Medium” has a pleasantly baggy glam-rock stomp, smoothed out by Bear’s psych-soul keys, but it really takes off thanks to a gnarly lead guitar part by Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson. “Millennium” is more disco-splashed, with Bear singing about champagne and celebration, but the payoff is a wonderfully wobbly synth solo by fellow chillwave lifer Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo. When the tempos slow, the playing evokes a muggy summer atmosphere, like the sweltering blues-guitar frug on “Mississippi”—one of several Mahal tracks performed entirely by Bear. But the album also has plenty of variety: Saxophone and flute waft over the woozy space-lounge ballad “Goes by So Fast.”
Although lyrics are usually secondary with Toro y Moi, Bear has found an endearing way to blend cryptic social commentary with wry humor. The enjoyably musty clatter of “Magazine” boasts a lilting hook sung by electronic-pop futurist Salami Rose Joe Louis, and Bear’s verses hint at corporate offshoring and environmental degradation as well as the death of physical media, a theme that carries over to the barcode-stamped album artwork—but what jumps out most is when he sings, “No more drama, please, no more dramamine/Imma throw up it up all over all the seats.” On the light-hearted, Archie Bell & the Drells-by-way-of-the-Marvelettes curio “Postman,” the indie-rock superman goes to the U.S. Postal Service and leaves empty-handed except for bills; if you can’t muster a stupid smile when Bear goes, “She forgot to put it in the mailbox…/What the fox?,” I don’t how to help you.
Because Bear has been so reticent about his personal life in his lyrics, the fleeting moments when he seems to allow glimmers through are sneakily thrilling. On “Last Year,” waltzing jazz-pop that lands somewhere between the Sea and Cake and Belle and Sebastian, he indirectly addresses the malaise that so many have experienced during the global pandemic. In an allusion to therapy, he sings, “I learned to love myself last year/Breakthroughs in conversations/Session went well/Yeah, I kept my chill.” With the inclusive imagery of “Déjà Vu,” a sauntering noise-rock anthem befitting Yo La Tengo or Stephen Malkmus, he nods toward a multi-faceted vision of America so casually that you might miss it. Musically, the record often sounds like a one-man band learning how to jam; lyrically, although still oblique, it feels like an introspective artist rediscovering the importance of community.
If nothing else, Mahal is a reminder that keeping time is better than relentlessly managing it. Bear has hopped between genres since his earliest singles, and he has already corralled his disparate influences into fully realized statements like 2013’s expansive Anything in Return and 2011’s taut Underneath the Pine. On paper, the Toro y Moi album that Mahal most resembles is the guitar-oriented What For?, but this time Bear sounds confident enough to relax. “Hustles got you losing touch,” Bear warns on the sweeping finale “Days in Love.” Less hustle, more flow. | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dead Oceans | May 4, 2022 | 7.5 | a7081dc4-de39-49f9-a856-a3658890051a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
On their fourth album, the Montreal trio begins a new chapter, one robust enough to hold the intense emotions in frontwoman Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s vocals. | On their fourth album, the Montreal trio begins a new chapter, one robust enough to hold the intense emotions in frontwoman Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s vocals. | Braids: Shadow Offering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/braids-shadow-offering/ | Shadow Offering | Braids’ fourth full-length was inspired by a solar eclipse, a phenomena that provides a neat metaphor for frontwoman Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s voice—at once dark and luminescent, fleeting and slightly dangerous. Over the course of their existence, the Montreal trio have evolved from a low-key synth-pop group into a daring orchestral ensemble, and Standell-Preston’s singing has led the way. With each record, the group further excavates the powerful clarity in her broad vocal range, treating it with a lighter touch and greater space.
Aided by producer and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, the band continues to expand their once-restrained electronic palette. On “Upheaval II,” they lean into the funk of the electric guitar, its low register a grounding foil for Standell-Preston’s vocal acrobatics. When songs include swarming synths, they’re for texture, not shape: “Just Let Me” layers them atop a steady foundation of piano before letting them fall to the background as a shimmering guitar arpeggio takes hold. Standell-Preston reserves her falsetto for sudden moments of grandeur, using her clear, full-throated vibrato to lend direction to the band’s more ambient passages. If 2015’s Deep in the Iris was a departure from the lighter fare of their early releases, Shadow Offering is the start of a new chapter, one robust enough to hold the intense emotions in their lyrics.
There’s a fiercely diaristic quality to the songwriting on Shadow Offering, an outpouring of grandiose metaphors rooted in personal experiences. On “Eclipse (Ashley),” Standell-Preston pairs images of the sun’s eclipse with the entirely earthly experience of self-actualization. It’s a relatable contrast, reflecting the human inclination to filter even rare astronomical events through the lens of personal milestones. Many of the songs center on Standell-Preston’s fraught relationship with men, moving from abstracted figurative language about a troubled relationship on “Just Let Me” to the entirely literal expression of anguish on “Fear of Men.” Her honest writing can make even well-trodden topics, which encapsulates most of the record, seem bright and novel. The confidence with which she discusses her poor taste in men on “Young Buck”—“Young buck 22-year-old who treats me badly/ The blaring example of what I am drawn towards/ And should strongly move away from”—would be funny, if the experience of doomed relationships weren’t so resonant.
However, Standell-Preston’s stream-of-consciousness honesty buckles under the weight of larger societal injustices. On the 9-minute epic “Snow Angel,” her enunciation sharpens as she rattles off buzzwords with the outsized confidence of an amateur slam poet: “Fake news and indoctrination/Closed borders and deportations.” She questions her own position in the oppression of others—“Am I only just realizing the injustice that exists/Cloaked in white privilege since the day I was born”—before returning to platitudes about global crises, conjuring images of polar bears on ice floes and young people glued to social media. It’s not that Braids are incapable of canny political commentary—”Miniskirt,” their glorious slow-burner from Deep In The Iris, built its power from explicitly calling out rape culture through personal anecdotes. But these shallow, unstructured critiques of hegemonic systems come across as ignorant, and, at worst, narcissistic, like an ayahuasca trip gone horribly wrong. Braids underwent a small reckoning with their own privilege in 2018 after former bandmate Katie Lee accused the band of performative allyship; “Snow Angel” comes across as a tone-deaf response, in which white guilt and self-hatred smother any possibility of genuine engagement.
While it’s hard to argue that Shadow Offering redeems itself from the bizarre ramblings of “Snow Angel,” it can perhaps be cordoned off as a misstep along the pathway to embracing maximalism. The remaining record reflects the band’s continued emphasis on Standell-Preston’s striking vibrato and range, the inclusion of more acoustic instrumentation fitting of the vacillations in her singing. Like U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light, Shadow Offering evokes excess and mania with the hip-swinging rhythms of funk and new wave, packing each inch of the record with small inflections layered for the greatest possible impact. The band’s effusiveness often feels torrential, which makes its more inane moments come off as collateral damage. On Shadow Offering, Braids isn’t afraid to steer dangerously close to the eye of the storm.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Secret City | June 22, 2020 | 7.2 | a70d36c6-dfa4-4afc-9ab1-25092f1fc733 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
In her debut theatrical work, the Philadelphia poet and experimental musician rails against the racist underpinnings of the housing crisis against a backdrop of free jazz. | In her debut theatrical work, the Philadelphia poet and experimental musician rails against the racist underpinnings of the housing crisis against a backdrop of free jazz. | Moor Mother: Circuit City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moor-mother-circuit-city/ | Circuit City | Across three days in June 2019, Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother, presented her first theatrical creation, Circuit City, at Philadelphia’s FringeArts. That Ayewa should stage such an ambitious multimedia work—part musical, part choreographed poem, part play—while also preparing Zonal’s Wrecked and her solo album Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes speaks to the Philadelphia poet and experimental musician’s work ethic. She has a good reason to be so prolific: Ayewa’s work is dedicated to the struggle against a system of oppression that spans generations. As she says early in the piece, “There’s been so much trauma, I don’t even know where to start…. I don’t even know what year/I got my momma’s years, my daddy’s years all mixed up inside of me.” Staring down “the cold way of life’s limitations,” her work is an acknowledgement that the fight against oppression must be as tireless as the inhumane systems that perpetuate such trauma.
Set in the living room of a corporate-owned housing complex, Circuit City may well be the first theater production ever to feature an essay written by an attorney from the Housing Unit of Philadelphia’s Community Legal Services. Like the production itself, the music addresses decades of neglect in low-income public housing, police brutality, redlining, and the fear of eviction—bleak topics that might not promise the most engaging listen. But such is Ayewa’s presence and steely delivery that the four extended pieces nevertheless lodge you inside the mind of someone who lives with such daily indignities. Paranoid, claustrophobic, yet determined to “circuit break,” the album forges ahead in a style similar to that of Who Sent You?, the smoldering free-jazz album she released last year as a part of Irreversible Entanglements. That band supports her here, providing a roiling backdrop of horns, drums, keys, and standup bass augmented by visceral electronics from Ada Adhiyatma and Steve Montenegro and backing vocals from Elon Battle.
On Who Sent You?, Ayewa’s voice fit neatly into Irreversible Entanglements’ pocket, glinting with wit and candor. She is more forceful and didactic here, pushing into the red when the music starts to boil. Amid the frenzy of frequencies and crashing cymbals on “Act 2 - Circuit Break,” Ayewa worries at the word “breaking” as Keir Neuringer’s alto and Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet shriek around her, sounding breathless, then frenetic. In the album’s cathartic final act of UFO bleeps and droning horns, she shouts, “You can’t time travel/Seek inner and outer dimensions/Without free jazz!” But while she blends visceral electronics with jazz, Moor Mother steadily moves beyond the confines of any one sound or discipline. The album might not be an ideal entry into her oeuvre, but it reveals Ayewa to be one of the most uncompromising artists in any field.
The most disarming voice on the album belongs to Elon Battle, who assumes the spotlight in “Act 3 - Time of No Time.” Against a backdrop of simmering electronics, echoing horns, and clattering percussion, Battle sings an alien torch song whose trembling falsetto brings to mind ANOHNI—a refreshing change of pace before Ayewa’s voice returns to the fold. As the tension builds, she reels off snatches of numbers and figures that feel disjointed at first (“20 million,” “70 thousand”) but build to a striking command: “Say my name/So my children will know where to find me/Once they take away our homes.”
When Circuit City ran last year, the accompanying notes referenced the 22,000 eviction filings recorded annually in Philadelphia, along with an unknown number of illegal evictions—a burden that primarily falls upon women of color. In the wake of the global pandemic, devastated city budgets, and widespread economic free fall, low-income housing is in even worse shape now. Even if COVID-19 were to vanish from the earth tomorrow, the urban housing crisis would remain unresolved. It will take a concerted, communal effort to even begin to clearly see, much less address, this issue that strikes at the very core of our humanity. Moor Mother’s Circuit City intently illuminates the threats facing poor people of color in their very homes. Putting avant-garde tactics to humanist ends, her album is a powerful indictment of a vicious, racist cycle that needs to be broken. As she reminds us at the album’s finale, “You can’t go to war without a drum.”
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. | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Don Giovanni | October 14, 2020 | 7.4 | a712ad02-5ad8-4ca0-a974-e27b2aeb0910 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his debut LP, the Toronto producer and singer/songwriter Tommy Paxton-Beesley, aka River Tiber, sums up the chilly, forlorn pop sound that has defined his city. | On his debut LP, the Toronto producer and singer/songwriter Tommy Paxton-Beesley, aka River Tiber, sums up the chilly, forlorn pop sound that has defined his city. | River Tiber: Indigo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22070-indigo/ | Indigo | A sample of River Tiber’s track “No Talk” floated in the back half of Drake’s “No Tellin,” sounding like it was playing in a room adjacent to the studio. After that, the Toronto producer and singer/songwriter Tommy Paxton-Beesley started appearing everywhere, collaborating with BADBADNOTGOOD (credited as a cellist on what might one of their best songs “CS60”), Kaytranada, Freddie Gibbs, Mac Miller, and Pusha T. A few weeks ago on Beats 1 Radio, before Zane Lowe played a River Tiber song featuring Kaytranada and Pusha T, he said “I don’t even know what is going on in Toronto right now, but I know that the music sounds like the city looks.” It’s a strange statement on it’s face. What does Toronto look like? On an architectural level, the city is notoriously brutalist and disquietingly postmodern, filled with imposing and amorphous grey concrete and anonymous skyscrapers. Standing from his perch on CN Tower, Drake (aka rap game Jon Stark), the King of the North expresses all the wistful aesthetic those kind of buildings exude. But then demographically it’s incredibly heterogeneous, even for a city on the eastern seaboard, rivaling, if not beating out New York in terms of diversity. Which makes its mix of genres an incredibly interesting melting pot.
So when Zane Lowe talks about the music and the look of Toronto being symmetrical or at least related, what are you supposed to conjure up? If there is any signature sound that is popular in Toronto right now, it’s a melancholic and atmospheric R&B centered around parties gone sour, vape batteries gone dead, and text messages from an ex, from dvsn to Charlotte Day Wilson to Alessia Cara. On his debut album, *Indigo, *Tommy Paxton-Beesley takes a deep swig of that syrup, delivering what is probably one of the best representations of a regional vernacular that keeps getting more and more interesting.
*Indigo *opens up with the “Genesis,” a very loud but perhaps overly ambitious statement song that mimics all the grandeur of James Blake’s Overgrown. It has the feeling and warble of a UFO tractor beam, slowing pulling up a man into unknown. It’s also a good litmus test for what to expect from the record’s rather eclectic combination of instruments. Beesley creates a chilly yet undeniably organic environment from a strange combination of cello, violin, tuba, trombone, percussion, synth, a Rhodes organ, guitar and his own heavily processed voice. “Genesis” is like a good night at a bar, perfectly crowded, but leaves room for chance, and ends just when you want it.
In the following song “No Talk,” (the one Drake sampled) Beesley emerges more clearly, letting his voice becoming more present, multiplying it into a purposefully asymmetrical chorus of inarticulate coos. And then in “Acid Test” the third song on the album, flaws slowly start to emerge. He shares the same jam-band impulses of his collaborators BADBADNOTGOOD, laying down hammy drum solos and full keyboard sweeps freely. It can make his music sometimes overly crowded, very busy, and almost distracting. This is most evident in a song like “Maria,” an uncomfortable echo chamber of off-the-mark vocal processing and dramatic synths. Or “Clarity,” which contains a chord progression that sounds lifted from a soap opera. He works best in pared down and cloudy accompaniments. “West” [ft. Daniel Cesar] pleasantly resembles Chance’s “Summer Friends,” and it creates the same feeling of sleepy nostalgia. In “I’m a Stone” his voice is at its clearest, and amidst slippery synth arpeggios and trickling guitars, his singing seeps through like codeine.
Overall, Beesley successfully gathers all the ambient influence of his city into a set of sounds that harnesses many of the best things we might expect from music in Toronto. It’s cynically romantic, urbane, and just a tad bit mopey. Like his city’s architecture, the music in *Indigo *can at times feel homogenous and out of reach, but it leaves a lasting impression, like leaving an air conditioned room for a humid street. You want to lay there, curled up, protected by the cavernous world that Beesley creates in Indigo. | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | River Tiber | June 30, 2016 | 7.8 | a7191642-20e7-4cc5-8b55-570aec2a9106 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Brooklyn electro-pop outfit TEEN offer dense, synth-swirling tracks about sexuality, love, and the cultural dictates of desire that can feel claustrophobic and exhilarating at the same time. | Brooklyn electro-pop outfit TEEN offer dense, synth-swirling tracks about sexuality, love, and the cultural dictates of desire that can feel claustrophobic and exhilarating at the same time. | TEEN: Love Yes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21466-love-yes/ | Love Yes | Analog synthesizers are too often used as signifiers of styles gone by, blunt aural semiotics that yell at the listener: "Hey, remember the ’80s?!" TEEN's Love Yes is packed with 'em—nothing new for the Brooklyn quartet—but the album is more than just a repackaged relic. While there are synthpop flourishes and occasional sonic nods to the Human League or post-hiatus Roxy Music, Love Yes is an evolutionary step forward for the three Lieberson sisters—drummer Katherine, keyboardist Lizzie, and singer Teeny—along with bassist Boshra Al-Saadi. After experimenting with ’00s indie and R&B on their last couple of records, TEEN is starting to find their very own sound rather than bogging themselves down with referential collage.
Though their first album, 2012’s In Limbo, dragged in many places, Love Yes feels like it's set on hyperspeed. There are so many ideas, tempo changes, and harmonies packed into some of these songs that they feel a little bit claustrophobic—but also exhilarating. Lyrical themes condense around the dizzying (and sometimes nauseating) experiences of sexuality, love, and the cultural dictates of desire, eliciting a heightened, visceral nervousness. Opener "Tokyo" is essentially a double-time waltz, with heartbeat-pulse syncopation at the chorus' core, and acrobatic harmonies arcing over intertwining synth lines. It is a lot, and it feels as terrifying as it is captivating.
Love Yes is at its best when it opens up some breathing room, as in "Gone for Good," an airy, harmonic meditation on what we're actually doing when we say we're letting someone go without truly doing so. "Another Man's Woman" has the cadence and percussion of a schmaltzy ’80s ballad as it examines jealousy from all sides, but the song takes so many lyrical and melodic left turns that it ends up tweaking saccharine clichés rather than embracing them.
The Liebersons are the children of innovative modern composer Peter Lieberson, whose influence and loss is addressed on the chilling, beautiful "Please," and TEEN have always had something of a prog core; the band’s jazz and classical structures have been both its greatest strength and weakness. Their lyricism and composition is agile, their communication is as taut and strong as 6-gauge copper wire, and their musicianship is unquestionable. They sound like no-one else, especially on Love Yes. But they also have an unfortunate tendency to get mired in the intellectual component of songwriting and performance. When their intricacies are played to effect, as on "Tokyo" or the ode-to-id "Animal," it's thrilling. On too-busy songs like "Example" and the title track, though, it's just frustrating.
That impulse to complicate is thankfully mediated more thoroughly and evenly on Love Yes than on previous efforts, only poking through here and there. It is also striking that this very complex album was recorded entirely live; the music seethes with precarious energy. But now that TEEN have grown into fully-fledged adults, they’ll have to stay vigilant and make sure that an overabundance of technicalities don’t override their music’s emotional connection. | 2016-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-22T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Carpark | February 22, 2016 | 6.8 | a719cfb4-ec45-48b9-bc8a-e62f241bf246 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Seth Bogart releases his first truly self-titled record. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. | After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Seth Bogart releases his first truly self-titled record. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. | Seth Bogart: Seth Bogart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21557-seth-bogart/ | Seth Bogart | "My name is Brittoni, I'm 22 years old, and I could not live without eating makeup," begins a testimony on an episode of TLC’s "My Strange Addiction." She continues, "You can kind of imagine it just coating your insides with whatever color you’re eating. It’s just like a craving of your favorite kind of candy bar." Consider, if you can, the feeling of those metallic and muted colors sliding down your esophagus, dripping a Pollockian masterpiece onto your stomach lining. The feeling might be queasy—and most likely dangerous for your health—but you’d look beautiful on the inside.
Queasy, vaguely illicit, and beautiful on the inside: This is a good way to describe Seth Bogart’s self-titled debut. After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Bogart has taken back his own name, trading the leather jacket for a hot pink suit and a sharply parted haircut. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. Bogart nods at the trendiness of his genre change on "Eating Makeup," which was inspired by the TLC episode, where he enlists Kathleen Hanna to sing about her growing preoccupation with the titular subject. What begins as a lick or a curiosity turns into a full-blown obsession, and all of a sudden, you’re sprawled in the center of Sephora, covered in opened concealer. Eventually, Bogart concludes gleefully, "everybody’s eating makeup."
It sounds like an appealing fantasy, though much of the album concerns how such fantasies can ultimately turn hollow. "Hollywood Squares" has the energy of a cheerleader rally, but its bombast masks a more tender sentiment as Bogart sings about his fascination with a celebrity culture he recognizes as poisonous: "And I can’t believe that I could be this/ Desperate for a lick of something that doesn’t exist." Elsewhere, he sings about being in love with a phony ("Plastic!"), his fascination with someone who he only sees on the screen ("Smash the TV"), and his failure to fulfill someone’s needs ("Forgotten Fantazy"). The latter is built around a restrained synthesizer melody ripped from the waiting screen of some old Nintendo game, as Bogart, his voice no longer gleeful, considers how his actual self has been consumed by another’s idealized vision: "It’s hard for me to know what you need/ I’m your forgotten fantazy."
The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to. (The neon synth-pop of "Club With Me," which shines like a cocaine-dusted disco ball, is a highlight.) Not all of the guest singers are as prominent as Kathleen Hanna, but they’re no less successful. Chela’s confident vocal on "Flurt," which is about a tug-of-war with a romantic tease, brims with concealed sadness juxtaposed against the upbeat tempo. I thought about Pool, the new record by Porches, which similarly traded guitars for synthesizers on an album that pondered the worth of going out. The difference here is that Bogart is doing his thinking after going out. The greater depths follow the sparkle of immediate pleasure—a dynamic that reflects the real life process of getting delirious at the disco before contemplating in a more private moment what that was really all about.
The most affecting moments come when Bogart starts off in a quieter mode. "Lubed" rides a hypnotic synthesizer line over piano and melodic distortions as Bogart makes a sensuous offer for some good, consensual fun in the bedroom. The first time we saw Bogart, his greased-up crotch was smack dab in the middle of his album cover, but outsized eroticism (I want to fuck) and burning bedroom eyes (Do you want to fuck?) aren’t mutually exclusive. Then, there’s "Barely 21," the sugar-sweet duet with Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson whose premise—an inconvenient but genuine affair with someone who’s "barely 21"—is loaned an ironic wink by the fact that Gevinson is 19-years-old. But Gevinson’s voice is as pure as the driven snow, temporarily dispelling the real world context. "Cry, baby," they sing, over and over, a reminder that despite appearances, some things just hit you in the heart. | 2016-02-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Burger | February 19, 2016 | 8 | a71a45bf-5fa0-40ae-b07f-d6e78122f248 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The second studio album from the staunchly insular Brooklyn rap trio is streamlined and crisp, carried by a newfound momentum missing on their debut. | The second studio album from the staunchly insular Brooklyn rap trio is streamlined and crisp, carried by a newfound momentum missing on their debut. | Flatbush Zombies: Vacation in Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flatbush-zombies-vacation-in-hell/ | Vacation in Hell | Flatbush Zombies know where they stand. “A lot of niggas is out here trying to be part of hip-hop, and I’m part of it so I’m fucking happy, it’s fine,” Meechy Darko said in a 2015 interview. “ As far as humblebrags go, “It’s fine” really leans into the humility, but there’s a hint of relief in that admission. In an era of dizzying genre shifts Meechy Darko, Erick the Architect Elliott, and Zombie Juice are stiff traditionalists. Removed from rap’s epicenter and comfortable at the margins, on Vacation in Hell, they rap for themselves and no one else. They sound both freed and confined.
Shedding the clunky cinematic husk of their previous album 3001: A Laced Odyssey, Vacation in Hell is streamlined and crisp. In lieu of skits and psychedelia, the Zombies opt for constant movement, passing the mic without ego, accenting each other with choice ad-libs, and avoiding dead air. All this motion produces a sort of newfound clarity. “Crown,” a glitzy collab with pop-rockers Portugal. The Man, punctuates John Gourley’s feathery vocals with fleet verses and builds to Meechy actually singing a beautifully spare bridge: “No one gets out alive/So we live like we already died/No one will ever understand but the sky.” On “U&I,” an ode to brotherhood, Erick Arc Elliott and Zombie Juice tenderly co-recite the chorus and briefly punch in before ceding nearly half the song’s runtime to a gripping Meechy verse. It’s a subtle and touching act of brotherly love.
The greatest generosity seems to have been extended to Erick, whose compositions are ornate and indulgent. Muted key changes are smuggled into percussion-driven slappers like “M. Bison” and “Headstone”; cosmic chords drift in and out of “Crown;” an interpolation of Three 6 Mafia’s “Stay Fly” blips in on “Big Shrimp” solely to accent a punchline; session vocalists and guitarists fill every crag. A$AP Mob producer Hector Delgado (“Misunderstood”), Pro Era stalwart Kirk Knight (“Big Shrimp”), and Macklemore associate Tyler Dopps (“HELL-O”) provide support, but the Architect’s blueprints fit everything together. Again, this is a refinement—Erick has always been the chief designer of the Zombies’ sound—but where 3001: A Laced Odyssey prioritized atmosphere, Vacation in Hell emphasizes configuration. Sounds are arranged with the aim of intensifying moments rather than prolonging them, creating a dynamic soundscape that pulsates and twitches.
These various level-ups make Vacation in Hell competent but not always compelling. Flatbush Zombies have always struggled to make their music as vivid as their logos and merch. Zooted videos like “Thug Waffle” and “Face-Off” and lively early interviews detailing ego-snuffing acid trips primed listeners and critics to label the group as “trippy,” but in reality the music was muddled and meandering, a sludge of halfway effective shock rap and new age trinketry. Lines like “Triple 6 on my coffin, I dance with the devil” (“Bounce”) and “I love brain, Zombie style” (“Bath Salt”) immediately flatline.
This is a constant through line in Flatbush Zombies’ work. From D.R.U.G.S. to Vacation in Hell, the Zombies have had a tendency to explain an image rather than evoke it. Juice is a habitual violator. On “M. Bison” he raps, “I’m so froze, everyday feel like February,” while on “Reel Girls” he raps, “We fucking in the mirror, can’t see it any clearer.” That’s...how mirrors work? Lead single “Headstone” is a total whiff. The lyrics consist almost entirely of canonical song and album titles. It’s presented as homage but it feels like Wikipedia moderators throwing a cypher. In passing, the lushness of the album can mask all this corner cutting, but as the record stretches toward the 75-minute mark, the rigor mortis sets in.
There will never be a shortage of New York rappers penning lifeless stan raps, and if hip-hop wants them around, it’s fine. But Flatbush Zombies have more to offer. Across Vacation in Hell, flashes of lucidity spirit the Zombies outside of their stiffened corpses and evoke a world of camaraderie and brotherhood amid loss and sacrifice. One of the most arresting images on the record is Meechy mourning A$AP Yams on “YouAreMySunshine.” His flow dragging and his signature croak raspy as ever, he turns grief into fantasy: “I know you’re smiling down sharing backwoods with Biggie/Rocking Aaliyah boat or taking a tab with Jimi/Pimping with Sweet Jones, gold grilling with O-D-B.“ No stan could have rapped that; these are the words of a brother. | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Glorious Dead | April 10, 2018 | 7.1 | a71cf215-9dbd-4c8c-9105-b5d88d7d5f9e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
In the first part of an ambitious compilation, the NON Worldwide label surveys club music’s avant-garde while confronting hegemonic power structures. | In the first part of an ambitious compilation, the NON Worldwide label surveys club music’s avant-garde while confronting hegemonic power structures. | Various Artists: NON Worldwide Compilation Trilogy Volume 2: Part 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-non-worldwide-compilation-trilogy-volume-2-part-1/ | NON Worldwide Compilation Trilogy Volume 2: Part 1 | In their three prolific years as a label, NON Worldwide have been responsible for some of the most thought-provoking experimental club music out there, highlighting African and African-diasporic voices worldwide. In politically charged multimedia art and joint releases with other like-minded collectives, the label's members have built a community untethered by genre or geographic borders. Their ambitious three-part compilation series is framed as a “genome-wide association study” of the 42 participating artists (or “citizens” of NON’s transnational republic) that outlines their supposed genetic commonalities.
Although co-founders Chino Amobi, ANGEL-HO, and Nkisi are absent from this first installment, Part 1 is a tightly curated collection of songs by both longtime NON associates and new citizens like Klein and Sporting Life. The compilation is front-loaded with its more melodic offerings, including Enterra’s hypnotic “Saskia e Chico” and Hyperdub associate Klein’s fractured R&B ballad “Brother.” After starring on NON and NAAFI’s collaborative 2016 mixtape, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Embaci further showcases her soaring vocals atop sparse percussion and gently fluttering wind chimes on “Hymnal Pine Heart.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the record’s best moments confront complicated racial histories. On “Untitled,” Free at Last takes a slogan (“The world is a ghetto”) not unlike one that’s been emblazoned on NON merchandise or album covers and turns it into an ominous battle cry complete with whirring sirens and militant drums. The Swiss-Congolese producer Bonaventure’s “BLACKFACE” goes one step further, weaving together seemingly disparate samples including ballroom staple “The Ha Dance” and a “Daily Show” segment about blackface minstrel shows into a jarring collage.
Similar to NON’s 2015 compilation—which featured early work from experimentalists including Gaika, Mhysa, and Yves Tumor—Volume 1 also serves as an introduction to a handful of new acts. You’re unlikely to hear DJ Lady Lane’s driving, industrial-edged “Bad Habits” on any streaming services’ electronic playlists, but it makes perfect sense here alongside former Ratking producer Sporting Life’s mournful instrumental “Bauhaus.” Same goes for John Glacier’s glitchy composition “Broken Macbook: Afflictions,” and Richard Kennedy’s layered, 10-minute epic “Men Are Weak,” which juxtaposes choral and mechanical voices and departs from the New York artist’s more song-oriented debut EP, Open Wound in a Pool of Sharks.
If there’s one voice that comes closest to capturing the disruptive ethos laid out in manifestos and interviews with its co-founders, it’s Californian underground rapper Gita (who’s set to release a full-length sometime this year). She’s said that “Ban Men” was partially inspired by her experiences attending all-black schools in Oakland, and the take-no-prisoners anthem’s subject matter couldn’t be any more current. “Watch out for the ban men, the ban men,” she warns throughout, which feels all too timely given the fact that millions of American immigrants are currently under threat of deportation by government agencies like ICE. NON’s message might promote a borderless world, but it’s clear that there’s still work to be done. | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | NON Worldwide | April 4, 2018 | 7.4 | a72cdcfa-d089-4704-ac65-41f1132a58ac | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
Kompakt records boss mixes another series of Speicher releases and finally issues his debut studio LP. | Kompakt records boss mixes another series of Speicher releases and finally issues his debut studio LP. | Michael Mayer: Touch / Speicher 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11781-touch-speicher-2/ | Touch / Speicher 2 | Michael Mayer's gift for the definitive statement has made him a worthy figurehead for microhouse. Sure, it helps that he owns Kompakt Records, but his expertly constructed mixes are so authoritative and lean that they read like blue-sky distillations of a point in time; he's one of few DJs who can communicate the full-bodied landscape of a scene and meditate on its past and future possibilities in the span of 70 minutes.
But despite being responsible for two such landmark mixes in 2002's Immer and 2003's Fabric 13, Mayer's original material has heretofore been consigned to 12-inches. Lost amidst the glut of pre-holiday releases last December, Touch is the full-length debut he has reportedly labored over for years. Dissatified with the album's many previous incarnations, Mayer recorded this final version over a three-week burst last summer; with its light, August atmospheres and simple, elementary sounds, Touch communicates the natural environment in which it was made. It also sounds like it was hatched in a relatively short timeframe, which is no bad thing-- where Mayer's studio mixes have been assembled with a painstakingly precise, scissor-cut aesthetic, Touch generally feels rounder, more casual and certainly more homemade.
Of the eight tracks, only one-- the wispy "Lovefood"-- contains vocals. The rest range from the by-the-books techno of atmosphere-setting opener "Touch" to the proggy (translation: epic and undanceable) no man's land of the album centrepiece "Slowfood". But, a few highlights notwithstanding (both "Heiden" and the previously released "Amabile" ooze slow-cooked energy), Touch never achieves liftoff, nor does it ever really threaten to. Instead, it just kind of blissfully floats around in its own self-contained environment, content to prettily fizzle out into an unceremonious anti-climax.
Mixed a few months prior, Speicher 2 comprises tracks mostly culled from Kompakt Extra's Speicher series, and shows Mayer the clinician at his best. With a small pool of strong source material to select from, Mayer's job is admittedly a lot easier here. As ever, he reveals himself to be a master of momentum, easing into the mix with dark rumblers like Wighnomy Brothers' "Wurz + Blosse", Wolfgang Voigt's "Nachschub", and the bubbling techno of his own brilliant "X". Thirty minutes down the line, he's dutifully moved on to bangers like Freiland's prickly "Jens Harke Mix", the schaffel stomp of Fuschsbau's "Null/Eins", and Naum's spangly "Ari"-- the final track in another functionally and technically sound set.
Like Touch, at times Speicher 2 suffers underneath the weight of Mayer's past achievements-- or maybe that's just microhouse beginning to show diminishing returns. But even if neither of these records ultimately match up to Kompakt's finest, they're still welcome outings, and proof that Mayer is the rare leader from whom "more of the same" is still a welcome proposition. | 2005-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-01-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | January 25, 2005 | 7.4 | a7337160-a6ca-43d8-9a0c-e365fbc91d02 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Yesterday, information came to me. It arrived in the form of a sentence, spoken\n\ by one of the esteemed ... | Yesterday, information came to me. It arrived in the form of a sentence, spoken\n\ by one of the esteemed ... | Grandaddy: The Sophtware Slump | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3545-the-sophtware-slump/ | The Sophtware Slump | Yesterday, information came to me. It arrived in the form of a sentence, spoken by one of the esteemed Pitchfork writers. It told of big-time music critics calling Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump "album of the year." Now, pardon me if I sound disturbed, but it's fucking March. Consider all the great bands with albums in the 2000 pipeline: Radiohead, The Wrens, Björk, The Beta Band-- do we really want to limit ourselves to Grandaddy this early on?
Atmospheric pop has dominated Critics' Lists for too long. How long ago did Mercury Rev issue Deserter's Songs? Is this all we can aspire to in the future? Where's the goddamn rock these days? Isn't anyone interested in volume? While no one may ever step up to answer these questions, one thing is for certain-- time is running out for this genre, and I have a feeling it's not exactly going to age like wine. However, even at this late hour, The Sophtware Slump manages to sound reasonably fresh, yields its share of unshakable melodies, and excels in production. This is quite possibly the last great entry in the atmospheric pop canon.
The lyrical content of The Sophtware Slump focuses largely on failed industrial machinery-- crashed airplanes, malfunctioning androids, and abandoned appliances-- returning to the earth, or just lying around broken. Undeniably, this is that blasted Radiohead influence rearing its twitchy eye. Yeah, since OK Computer, everyone wants to be them. Really, you can't blame people for attempting their own variations on the theme. OK Computer is, after all, one of the greatest albums our generation has experienced in its time. But bands need to realize that they're not Radiohead, and that no one ever made it into the history books by trying to do what another group had already done better.
The Radiohead influence seems obvious here, coming from a band whose last album, the 1996 (pre-OK Computer) debut Under the Western Freeway, was comprised of light-hearted, Weezer-inspired sing-alongs. But surprisingly, Grandaddy inject the album with an air-tight cohesiveness, and enough of their own personality, emotion and creativity to warrant looking past the fact that someone's already succeeded in recording the ultimate anti-technology album.
But Grandaddy do manage to stir up raw emotion and genuine sincerity over songs that are far hookier and more immediately accessible than Radiohead's. The album's anthemic opener, "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot" gives a glimpse into the album's multi-layered, airy, Godrich-esque production techniques, as well as its general disheartened feel and epic tendencies (the track runs almost nine minutes long).
For the most part, the album's songs are solid to the point that they'd have the potential of becoming indie rock classics if frontman Jason Lytle wasn't content to beat you over the head with them. Out of the gate, these melodies are all enjoyable to an almost surreal degree. And most of them remain that way. The problem arises when Lytle plays the same bars repeatedly without relying on choruses or bridges (as in the almost torturous third track, "Jed the Humanoid"). A few of these tracks also drag on just a little too long.
There are few upbeat tracks on the album, and most of them come toward the beginning. After the heavy-hearted weight of "He's the Pilot," the bouncy "Hewlett's Daughter" serves as a nice breather. "The Crystal Lake" stands as one of the album's highlights with its driving chorus and preprogrammed Cars-inspired keyboard scale. "Chartsengrafs" follows close behind, fueled by buzzing guitars and drawn-out harmonies. And finally, we come to the radio-ready "Broken Household Appliance National Forest," a track about "air conditioners in the woods."
But that's where the happiness ends. The rest of the album wallows in a depression so deep, it'd make your grandparents stock up on canned foods and dress in rags. The Radiohead influence really becomes apparent on the last four tracks. "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" resurrects a verse of "Jed the Humanoid," sung a cappella, before launching into a sparkling, glossy epic and finally settling into the menacing "Knievel Interlude (The Perils of Keeping It Real)." "Miner at the Dial-A-View" kicks in after two minutes, encapsulating the entire album with longing, regretful lyrics ("I dream at night/ Of going home someday/ Somewhere, so far away"), distant melodic beeping, and a female voice giving instructions on the proper usage of the "dial-a-view."
The Sophtware Slump comes to a close with "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky," a spacious five-minute epic that opens with discordant guitar lines over subtle technology-related sound effects. The song repeats four lines over dramatic strings, chimes in the vein of "No Surprises," and Jason Lytle's best Thom Yorke impression. And surprisingly, it's more effective and believable than derived and cloying. When the songs winds down, you're left with a feeling of genuine impact.
Now, I'm not saying The Sophtware Slump even comes close to touching OK Computer, though I can see what about it might drive someone to call it "album of the year" this early on. But we have nine months to go! If we'd said Built to Spill's Keep It like a Secret was the album of the year in January, 1999, we wouldn't have been taking the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I into account.
So, watch yourself now, 'cause it looks like there's gonna be some pretty crazy hype surrounding The Sophtware Slump this year. And yes, the record is good, but as music fans, we have a duty to expect more from bands than recreations of albums past. We need innovators, not imitators, goddamnit! Think of the children! | 2000-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 / Will | June 6, 2000 | 8.5 | a73507d4-ad8d-4604-b6be-4295e10271b3 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The Belgian duo’s debut album pairs punchy, propulsive electro pop with inventive sound design, absurdist wit, and sly jabs at racism and xenophobia. | The Belgian duo’s debut album pairs punchy, propulsive electro pop with inventive sound design, absurdist wit, and sly jabs at racism and xenophobia. | Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-adigery-bolis-pupul-topical-dancer/ | Topical Dancer | Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s Topical Dancer is as blunt and emphatic as pop art—if you don’t get its bright, assertive takedowns, you’re not paying attention. The Belgian musicians take as much pleasure in sardonically dressing down racism, misogyny, and xenophobia as they do in crafting effortlessly propulsive electro pop fit for warehouse parties. That mischievous friction is at the heart of Topical Dancer, a riveting debut from two artists whose music pokes you in the side as often as it makes you move.
Released on veteran Belgian duo Soulwax’s DEEWEE label, Topical Dancer openly draws on that group’s sweaty, mid-’00s-flavored blend of rock and electronic music. (Soulwax also contributed co-production and writing to the album.) Miss Kittin and Felix Da Housecat’s talky electroclash is also a prominent touchstone, but this isn’t a throwback by any means—the album’s brisk, burly synth lines and walloping beats are powerful weapons in Adigéry and Pupul’s arsenal. The pair met over a decade ago in Ghent, forming a friendship that became a working one after Soulwax paired them up to contribute music to the 2016 film Belgica. They put out the excellent Zandoli EP under Adigéry’s name in 2019; Topical Dancer reaffirms their music as the collaborative project it’s always been.
That close kinship is key to an album riddled with in-jokes and oddities. The funky “Making Sense Stop,” inspired by David Byrne, progressively chops up and rearranges each verse’s lyrics until they become gleeful, digital gibberish; the crawling, loungey “Huile Smisse” parodies French speakers who love to hear themselves talk (the title is the French phonetic spelling of Will Smith’s name). Later, on the endlessly replayable “HAHA,” Adigéry’s gut-busting laugh is sampled and rewired into a strutting hook, while the chorus crumples into a choked-up sob. Topical Dancer thrives in these irreverent moments, where the duo’s wry humor injects subversive surprises into dance music’s familiar forms.
In a recent interview, Adigéry and Pupul explained that the decision to focus on hot-button issues came from the pair’s daily experiences as artists from immigrant backgrounds living in Europe: nosy yet excessively apologetic reporters, white Belgians genuinely confused as to why they can’t use the n-word, and the cycle of outrage and finger-pointing that manifests when people get too insulted. Instead of chastising (or, god forbid, canceling), Adigéry and Pupul are more interested in gentle ribbing. Bustling electro-pop song “Blenda” recasts a racist line into a memorable singsong: “Go back to your country where you belong,” Adigéry sweetly intones. “Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” The album’s lyrics, which dart between English, French, and Creole, frequently underline the limits of PC culture with good intentions, even as they sometimes fall flat. “Are you as offended when nobody’s watching?” Adigéry ponders alongside a chattering drum pattern on “Esperanto.” “Are you an attacker or a victim?” Their tongues are planted firmly in cheek, but here it becomes didactic.
The occasional unwieldy lyric is a small, forgivable blunder for an album that rarely lets up its electrifying energy. They cram in as many overused lyrics as possible on “Ceci n’est pas un cliché” (“You’re cold as ice,” “Let’s dance the night away”), creating a Frankensteined earworm above a plucked bassline and fingersnaps. During the pummeling highlight “It Hit Me,” Adigéry and Pupul take turns recounting a coming-of-age moment in pitch-shifted voices against a taut, glowering backdrop of battering drums and wolf whistles. Adigéry remembers being catcalled by a group of men while waiting for a bus; Pupul recalls a love letter that led to a sexual awakening over a bottle of cologne. The song spirals into a delirious clatter of percussion once each of their stories end, succinctly capturing the uncomfortable, nightmarish punch of adolescence.
Even in its more earnest moments, Adigéry and Pupul never take themselves too seriously, which lends to Topical Dancer’s roguish charm. The duo are too busy setting up yet another punchline to make each other laugh, as they do constantly on the caustic six-minute closer “Thank You.” In a delightfully faux-appreciative tone, Adigéry lays into everyone who’s ever given them unasked-for advice: “Couldn’t have done this without you/And your opinion,” she sings; “Enlighten me with your vision/I count my blessings.” It’s a consummate kiss-off and a sarcastic declaration of purpose: You couldn’t tell Adigéry and Pupul what to think if you tried. | 2022-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | DEEWEE | March 8, 2022 | 8.2 | a736d442-b8ec-40d7-8059-a1c780c446f6 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Geir Jenssen’s return to ambient techno captures him at his frostiest. It’s his largest-scale and most meticulously crafted release in some time. | Geir Jenssen’s return to ambient techno captures him at his frostiest. It’s his largest-scale and most meticulously crafted release in some time. | Biosphere: Shortwave Memories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/biosphere-shortwave-memories/ | Shortwave Memories | Geir Jenssen greeted the last decade with 2011’s N-Plants, a highlight of his long-running career as Biosphere, before spending the next 10 years on low-key experiments in sampling and field recording. Some of these releases are great (Departed Glories, The Hilvarenbeek Recordings). Others are enjoyable if you can get behind the concept (L’Incoronazione di Poppea, half an hour of what sounds like opera samples being sucked up by a vacuum). But none seemed to involve much elbow grease compared to N-Plants or his “Arctic ambient” classic Substrata: They were passion projects, the products of curiosity rather than examples of the craftsmanship he’s capable of.
His new album Shortwave Memories could be seen as a bookend to this period, along with N-Plants. It’s his largest-scale and most meticulously crafted release in that time, and it picks up stylistically where N-Plants left off. He’s limited himself to synths from the late ’70s and early ’80s this time around, but sharp-eared fans will recognize many of the sounds as staples of his arsenal for a while (a chilly preset on “Infinium” first showed up on his two-part “Algae & Fungi” suite from 2000’s Cirque, for instance). Yet Shortwave Memories makes no effort to present itself as a tentpole release, a culmination, or a crowd-pleaser. This is Jenssen at his frostiest, and it’s tonally more akin to Substrata and Cirque than to the antiseptic warmth of N-Plants.
“Tanß” opens the album with nearly a minute of phased, clanking drums before a string synth reluctantly fades in. We hear a lot more of that patch throughout the album, usually ruminating sourly on minor chords. Shortwave Memories is sequenced so all the tracks flow into each other, but it doesn’t build like a DJ set; instead, it seems to continually disassemble and reassemble itself, ducking in and out of long, drumless stretches dominated by those synth strings. “Interval Signal” spends most of its runtime building momentum through subtle tweaks to the central bassline, and the drums don’t enter until two-thirds of the way in, disappearing shortly after as if they were never there. Shortwave Memories is so remote, driven by such strange logic, it’s almost funny.
One reason “Transfigured Express” is such a satisfying ending to the album is because it keeps a groove going for 14 minutes instead of stopping to kill its own momentum. Another is because it’s gorgeous, its bassline blooming into icy florets over a drone weirdly reminiscent of the Residents’ “Hello Skinny.” Technical skill is not usually high on the list of reasons to listen to ambient music, but Jenssen has been composing and playing synths for nearly 40 years, and his chops are obvious. Few artists in ambient electronic music use more interesting chords than he does: His harmonic sensibility verges on baroque pop, setting simple melodies against eccentric chord changes that vacillate between placid and panicked. There’s a whole lot going on here, but it progresses at such a glacial pace it’s easy to think this music is simpler than it is at first.
Shortwave Memories doesn’t come to the listener so much as confront them with an immovable object. Its obstinacy comes not from misanthropy or some affected lack of interest in its audience but from a confidence earned as one of ambient’s most respected figures for over 30 years; chalk it up, perhaps, to an accomplished mountain climber’s taste for a challenge. This is no less an experiment than anything Jenssen released during the last 10 years. It’s just that this time, he’s doing something that he’s really, ridiculously good at. | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Biophon | February 9, 2022 | 7.7 | a737ca3a-082d-4a29-bf6a-b01a29ff5444 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Over 72 minutes, the emo-rap star explores drugs, heartbreak, and the drugs that lead to heartbreak. | Over 72 minutes, the emo-rap star explores drugs, heartbreak, and the drugs that lead to heartbreak. | Juice WRLD: Death Race for Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juice-wrld-death-race-for-love/ | Death Race for Love | Though the speed of his ascent may have felt like it, Juice WRLD didn’t just appear on hip-hop’s doorstep in 2018 in an Interscope Records-signed box with the message, “Here is the new face of rap, get used to it.” The 20-year-old Illinois rapper has been developing his style since 2015, mixing his influences into the perfect recipe: the candor of Lil Peep, the delivery of Chief Keef, and the cheap acoustic guitars of XXXTentacion. That recipe alone doesn’t explain his success; one scroll through SoundCloud reveals thousands of artists blending those same ingredients with a fraction of the success. The truth is Juice WRLD can be magnetic: One line can sound like he found an iPod where the only song that works is My Chemical Romance’s “Welcome To the Black Parade” and the very next like he just finished spinning Bang Pt. 2.
Throughout Death Race For Love’s 72 minutes—there’s no reason a Juice WRLD album should be the length of a podcast and a half—Juice WRLD’s lyrics fall into two categories. Fifty percent of the lyrics are bad (“Back on my bullshit, devil emoji”) and the other 50 percent are also bad, but then they get stuck in your head and ultimately turn good (“Tell me your darkest secret shit you wouldn’t even tell Jesus”). On the album opener, “Empty,” Juice WRLD uses drugs like a Band-Aid to cover up his issues (“I problem solve with styrofoam”) over imitation Zaytoven keys from his go-to producer Nick Mira. That same bluntness carries over into other piano lead tracks like “Robbery” where he chants like an open-mic slam poet and channels John Cusack in Say Anything attempting to get his girlfriend back: “I’m throwing rocks at your window, I need to go home.”
Whenever Juice WRLD is emotional (which is all the damn time) he sounds like he’s on the brink of breaking down into lean-fueled tears, but then on a whim will swerve into bitterness. Like Future, with whom he released a collaborative album, Juice WRLD’s openness has its limits, afraid of having his masculinity questioned—to that point, there is a song here literally titled “HeMotions.”
Juice WRLD is living the Jekyll and Hyde experience. He’s erratic, never committed to his feelings, and still infatuated even when overcome by hatred, as his world revolves around love, until it suddenly doesn’t.
Death Race For Love features three guests: The first is an out-of-place but welcome interlude from R&B singer Brent Faiyaz, another is a zany Young Thug, and the third is a hokey feature from Clever. Next to Clever, it becomes apparent just how elevated Juice WRLD is from his so-called “emo-rap” peers. Juice WRLD isn’t a punk or rock artist trying to make hip-hop once he saw the dollar signs; he’s a rapper with influences outside of the genre. He could have easily taken his music further down the pop-punk lane and left rap in his past. But he didn’t, and it’s why Death Race For Love feels like the real Juice WRLD, wearing his influences and heart on his sleeve, putting his ups and downs into the music in real time. | 2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Grade A Productions | March 13, 2019 | 6.8 | a73f58a2-a35c-4404-bf4f-0539255aea94 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On this covers EP, the country singer digs into the roots in some of her favorite dark love songs, from Sheryl Crow to Nick Lowe to Hank Williams. | On this covers EP, the country singer digs into the roots in some of her favorite dark love songs, from Sheryl Crow to Nick Lowe to Hank Williams. | Esther Rose: My Favorite Mistakes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esther-rose-my-favorite-mistakes/ | My Favorite Mistakes | During a month-long tour opening for Nick Lowe, country singer Esther Rose spent each night enraptured by his ambling 2019 deep cut “Blue on Blue.” Her breakout album from last year, You Made It This Far, originated from feelings of lovesickness and loneliness similar to those in his song, and realizing such inspired her to reimagine the track. Soon after, Rose recorded My Favorite Mistakes, a four-track EP featuring covers of Lowe, Sheryl Crow, Hank Williams, and Roy Orbison. Through these covers, Rose refines her identity, turning the comfort of other artists’ dark admissions into a map where she can find her own space.
On her previous two albums, Rose turned heads with her poignant specificities and nonchalant candor. The songs on My Favorite Mistakes fit naturally in her repertoire, perhaps because these downer anthems were already embedded in Rose the way our favorite songs eventually merge with our DNA. There’s a hint of a smirk to her wispy drawl in “Blue on Blue,” implying that this is a tale of heartbreak as old as time. That’s the thing about dark love songs: “You can sing your guts out and be as creepy and sad as you want,” Rose told Talkhouse, “and then after three minutes, you’re done and you’re OK.”
The EP opens with a deceivingly sunny ray of lap steel and fiddle on “My Favorite Mistake.” While contemporary indie rock artists are turning Sheryl Crow into a belated pop totem, Rose is reaffirming her status as a country luminary. By removing the blues-rock production of the original version and digging up its folk roots instead, she shifts the focus from a cheating partner to the larger question of how to maintain self-worth after treachery.
For someone who grew up in punk rock, Rose is at her most powerful when mimicking country greats. On “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You),” she captures the spirit of Williams in a faithful duet with Lee Walker. She launches into Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar, the barren nature of which makes each whisper-sung octave hit hard. Rose wasn’t exaggerating when she called herself a “reckless optimist.” That’s the unique appeal of My Favorite Mistakes: these are songs for a sore heart, and Rose leans into the sting, but only so her croons can act like a warm compress to soothe the pain. | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Father/Daughter | June 5, 2020 | 7.4 | a7445885-65b7-4f84-a6bc-b33c593abb22 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
After seven years, the Flaming Lips' Christmas film finally comes to DVD; not surprisingly, both the movie and its soundtrack reflect the Lips circa 2001 more than the group's post-millennial output, which has emphasized the band's cute and quirky qualities while submerging the strange. | After seven years, the Flaming Lips' Christmas film finally comes to DVD; not surprisingly, both the movie and its soundtrack reflect the Lips circa 2001 more than the group's post-millennial output, which has emphasized the band's cute and quirky qualities while submerging the strange. | The Flaming Lips: Christmas on Mars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12515-christmas-on-mars/ | Christmas on Mars | Astronauts with vaginas for faces, a baby's head crushed like a watermelon, Fred Armisen singing "Silent Night"-- the Flaming Lips' maiden foray into DIY filmmaking, Christmas on Mars, features no lack of bizarro imagery for fans who've been patiently waiting the past seven years for its release. The film essentially encompasses everything Wayne Coyne has ever sung about-- the future, outer space, stressed-out scientists, heroism, insanity, the inevitability of death, hope in the face of disaster, the perseverance of the human spirit, mankind's miniscule standing in the universe at large, and, yes, Christmas. And as ridiculous as the idea of Coyne making a sci-fi film in his backyard may be, it was a logical step for a band that's historically found its stage-show inspiration in the local hardware store. But compared to the orgiastic circus of balloons, confetti, and dancing mascots that has come to define the the Flaming Lips' live set-up, Christmas on Mars is a starkly rendered, sometimes ponderous, rather bleak affair. Starring multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd as a Mars-station major trying to salvage Christmas celebrations on the red planet after a Santa-suited colleague's suicide, and Coyne as the mute alien who helps him, the film plays like a 2001 that looks like it cost $2,001 to make.
Its accompanying score likewise marks a break from the Lips' post-millennial recorded output, which, consistent with the band's live evolution, has emphasized the band's cute and quirky qualities while submerging the strange. And yet, even with the complete absence of the band's signature devices-- namely, Coyne's creaky croon and Drozd's earth-quaking drum beats-- Christmas on Mars still feels very much like a Flaming Lips album, fusing synthetic orchestral elements, choral harmonies and electronic effects to create a soundtrack that, like the film, captures both what we imagine outer space to be (a wondrous expanse of psychedelic splendor) and what it really is: a cold, dark, desolate place that's so vast, it's suffocating. Not for nothing is the soundtrack book-ended by an eerily Lynchian ambient piece called "Once Beyond Hopelessness".
Given that the film's production began in 2001, it would follow that the score's origins date back to that post-Soft Bulletin/pre-Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots era. In a sense, Christmas on Mars could be heard as a parallel-universe product of what the Flaming Lips could've turned into had they decided to further experiment with The Soft Bulletin's background orchestral textures instead of streamlining them into Yoshimi's compact electro-pop. With the two-part "The Distance Between Mars and the Earth", the Disneyfied acid trip of "The Horrors of Isolation", and wordless harmony haze of "In Excelsior Vaginalistic", you can imagine what Bulletin standards like "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" and "The Spark That Bled" would sound like without the actual songs on top of them.
But the score is also a reminder of a time when the Lips were more interested in provoking their audience than pleasing it: The power-drilled drones of "Your Spaceship Comes From Within" play like a one-minute distillation of the half-hour electronic-noise oscillation they tacked onto 1992's Hit to Death in the Future Head, while the slow-motion tribal build of "Suicide and Extraordinary Mistakes" is accompanied by an ear-piercing, high-pitched frequency that harkens back to 1997's four-CD mind-fuck Zaireeka.
As the soundtrack progresses, it actually acquires a logic and momentum that isn't necessarily experienced watching the film, which tends to use this music in brief bursts-- for example, "The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia" is a swell of Wagnerian pomp that soundtracks the aforementioned baby-crushing. On record the track is made more effective by an aftermath come-down with "The Distress Signals of Celestial Objects". In turn, the muted reverberations and droning crescendo of "Distress Singnals" sets the scene for "Space Bible With Volume Lumps", which manifests the film's claustrophobic tension with a ticking glitch beat, analog-synth loops and blaring trumpets.
In Christmas on Mars' closing credits, The Flaming Lips include a special thank you to the band's fans for their support and patience with the film; but for long-time followers of the band, that patience is truly rewarded by the soundtrack album, which-- following a series of tours that have more or less stuck to the same nightly script-- reassert the Flaming Lips' ability to surprise, experiment and freak us out. Tellingly, the Christmas on Mars DVD/CD package is housed in a regular CD jewel-case as opposed to the standard DVD long box-- the implication being that Christmas on Mars is as much a film in service to a soundtrack as a soundtrack in service to a film. | 2008-12-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-12-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | December 12, 2008 | 7.1 | a7526078-09a1-499b-82c1-04802909695b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Every aspect of the Texas rapper’s personality locks into place on his latest album, the most deeply personal statement of his career. | Every aspect of the Texas rapper’s personality locks into place on his latest album, the most deeply personal statement of his career. | Maxo Kream: Weight of the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxo-kream-weight-of-the-world/ | Weight of the World | On paper, Maxo Kream has a lot to celebrate. In 2011, he turned a remix of Kendrick Lamar’s “Rigamortis” into a flurry of mixtapes and internet hype that, by 2014, had him opening shows for Chief Keef. All of this was before he released his 2015 breakout, Maxo 187, which shoehorned traditional Houston hip-hop values into rap’s then-current commodification of aesthetic in the wake of A$AP Mob and Raider Klan’s respective come-ups. Maxo’s studio debut Punken and follow-up Brandon Banks established him as a stylist unafraid to mix modern Texas bounce with deeply personal stories tackling the complicated web of crime, family, and lineage. For his trouble, he signed a massive $1.5 million record deal with RCA in 2019, and earlier this year, he became a father.
Rap’s spoils have pushed Maxo far, but on “Cripstian,” the intro to his latest album, Weight of the World, his mind is on anything but. The general paranoia that comes with his well-established Crip ties is bad enough, but his status report is packed with sorrowful snapshots: a cousin who recently died by suicide; a grandmother hospitalized due to COVID; a friend with a million-dollar bail. The beat—a storm of percussion, vocal samples, and synths courtesy of producers teej and Dom Maker—accentuates Maxo’s personal and familial anxieties, especially his attempt to bargain with God to visit his brother in Heaven: “Life without you is a struggle, I even had to scuffle, fight/They say I sacrificed your life like I had joined Illuminati.”
The moment is raw and tender, even by the standards of an artist whose last two albums have all the drug-pushing minutiae and family strife of a season of The Wire. As emotionally forthright as it can be, Weight of the World isn’t content to simply be a Brandon Banks redux. In fact, there is no broader concept or family tree narrative tying these songs together. On Weight, Maxo isn’t just a link in the chain; he’s become the whole piece, his successes, failures, pains, and triumphs forming the paisley patterns on the blue bandana wrapped around his heart.
Maxo’s music is deceptive because of how often he floats heavy subjects across varied beats. A song like Punken’s “Grannies” plays like a modern nursery rhyme, a light and bouncy melody paired with images of neighborhood stabbings, shootings, and illicit secrets. The trunk-rattling 808s and synths Maxo made his name on are still active and booming, but Weight expands his boundaries. His voice cruises over vintage soul samples on “Cripstian” and standout track “11:59.” Live bass and guitar bring new color and dimension to his thoughts of being robbed on “FRFR” and the frank admission of his drug problem on “Worthless,” while “Greener Knots” and “Mama’s Purse” are effectively boom-bap cuts. The fact that Weight features so many different kinds of rap across its 44 minutes and very little of it feels overwhelming or out of place is a testament to Maxo’s growing vision.
Maxo has never shied away from describing how familial ties have bound his life and forged his place within a network of criminals. But while Brandon Banks uses his father’s history and shortcomings as a framing device for Maxo’s coming-of-age story, Weight is told almost entirely through Maxo’s eyes. He’s surveying the battleground of his life with more honesty and maturity than ever. “I boast and brag ’cause it was not supposed to last,” he says at the start of “Whole Lotta,” summing up the album’s ethos. The most arresting record, “Mama’s Purse,” is dedicated to his mother, an examination of her trauma and history of shoplifting that fills in the gaps left by her absence on Brandon Banks. His admission that he “put a price tag on her love but can’t afford how much it’s worth” adds a tinge of sadness to every flex on the album.
And while Weight comes with plenty of trauma to unpack, it never feels portentous or gloomy. There’s still fun and plenty to be thankful for within Maxo’s chaotic world. He’s cutting up, even glowing, on tracks like “Big Persona” and “FRFR,” rhyming about getting his family out of the projects and how he’s moved more bags than Gucci. The secret to keeping every song so effortless and flowing, regardless of subject matter, is in the phrasing. He can boil something as complicated as friends betraying each other down to a simple and clever line like, “Seen niggas turn 12 like 11:59.” The rhyme scheme at the beginning of “Greener Knots” is an intricate chain of connecting memories: an uncle smoking a crack rock for the first time while watching The Rock before Maxo changes the channel to an episode of Rap City featuring the New York rap group the Lox. It’s a smooth first-person recounting of a traumatic experience buoyed by a pop culture reference and Maxo’s clear appreciation for wordplay.
Maxo’s love for rap and all the things it’s helped him accomplish is the beating heart keeping Weight of the World alive. For all the problems plaguing his mind—every family member he’s had to bury, every time he’s had to look over his shoulder for an unknown shooter—Maxo is thankful to have beaten the odds and to be rapping over Tyler, the Creator beats while building wealth for his newborn daughter. Weight is a complicated tapestry of pride, betrayal, and Houston hip-hop glory, every aspect of Maxo’s personality locking seamlessly into place to create the personal statement of his career.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Big Persona / 88 Classic / RCA | October 19, 2021 | 8 | a755ae9b-edb6-41ff-a7d0-a4675593dbe5 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Todd Rundgren continues to play to extremes with two new records, solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans, made in collaboration with Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen. They couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, but they show an iconoclast continuing to indulge his every whim. | Todd Rundgren continues to play to extremes with two new records, solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans, made in collaboration with Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen. They couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, but they show an iconoclast continuing to indulge his every whim. | Todd Rundgren/Emil Nikolaisen/Hans-Peter Lindstrøm / Todd Rundgren: Runddans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20349-runddans/ | Runddans | Todd Rundgren had mastered the art of writing the perfect pop song by the time he was 23—so he’s spent the next four decades trying out pretty much everything else. While his early-'70s chart success posited him as a stateside McCartney, his subsequent career more closely resembles that of an American Eno: a musician-cum-conceptualist who didn’t so much forsake rock stardom for the avant-garde as inhabit both worlds simultaneously. Rundgren is forever at the center of infinite extremes: proto-punk instigator and prog-rock architect, celebrity and cult hero, casino-circuit nostalgia act and remix-ready electronica enthusiast, autocratic auteur and promiscuous collaborator, bitter cynic and spiritual humanist, genius and jester. He’s the iconoclast revered by everyone from Daft Punk to Prince to Earl Sweatshirt; he’s also the guy arguably responsible for inventing Smash Mouth.
As he gets older, these internal contradictions have only become more pronounced—this spring sees the release of two albums that respectively play to his accessible and exploratory impulses. But while the song-oriented solo release Global and high-concept progasaurus Runddans couldn’t be more different in sound and scope, they leave similar impressions: while it’s reassuring that Todd Rundgren is still with us in 2015 indulging his every whim, the batshit-bonkers music often misses the mark on "inspired irreverence" and lands directly in outright embarrassment.
Global is Rundgren’s small-u utopia album, dressing up his meditations on the environment, feminism, civil rights and community in synth-slicked rock and post-rave sonics, recalling 1993’s techno manifesto No World Order—albeit, mercifully, without the attempts at rapping. (And much like his tour for that album, Rundgren’s current stage set is more superclub throwdown than a rock show, with the singer flanked by Dâm-Funk and choreographed dancers.) But it’s an album where the timely, ripped-from-Twitter lyrics—complete with references to Miley Cyrus and Malala Yousafzai—clash awkwardly with the dated sound.
For a record so topically consumed with the here-and-now, Global feels like it could’ve come out over a quarter century ago: with its gated-reverb drums, robo-filtered vocal hooks, and arena-rock chug, the opening "Evrybody" recalls the Reagan-era moment when '60s veterans started lacquering up old standards with '80s production gloss. "Blind", meanwhile, rails against bible-thumping, climate change-denying Republicans over boudoir-summoning soft-rock, complete with a Sanbornian saxgasm. Perhaps Global’s anachronistic sound is Rundgren’s way of emphasizing that the issues he’s addressing were just as pressing three decades ago and we’re still no further ahead. But even more tasteful production couldn’t redeem the goofiness of "Earth Mother", a salute to famous female activists torpedoed by rote songcraft and hackneyed lyrics. ("We got a little bit too much testosterone/ Need a little more progesterone.")
Rundgren was the rare rocker of his vintage to embrace electronics early on (he was eagerly heralding the death of rock'n'roll as far back as 1975), but Global finds him trumpeting the music’s transformative, communal virtues like a neophyte who’s just come back from his first Burning Man, resulting in tracks (see: "Global Nation") that resemble advertising jingles for Euro-trance compilations. Likewise, the acid-house throb of "Flesh and Blood" doesn’t simply flaunt the influence of EDM, it’s about EDM; as Rundgren marvels at "the bang-bang-banging of a drum machine" and "the thunderous groove," he comes off like a glowstick-twirling Marv Albert doing play-by-play from the middle of a rave. When Rundgren dials down the bluster, Global yields moments of understated beauty: the addiction-themed "Fate" boasts a dreamily ascendant chorus, and the soft-focus "Soothe" has enough genuine ache to cut through its '80s movie-montage sheen. But for an album preaching a message of unity, Global just doesn’t hold together very well.
If Global overwhelms its four-minute songs with conflicting aesthetics, Runddans encounters the opposite problem: it unfurls across an IMAX-sized canvas, but struggles to stretch out its concept to fill the space. The product of a mutual-admiration society forged with Norwegian space-disco dynamo Hans-Peter Lindstrøm and Serena-Maneesh mastermind Emil Nikolaisen, Runddans is a 39-minute album broken up into 12 tracks, meant to be experienced as a single continuous piece. Cleary modelled after the side-long cosmic-fusion suites Rundgren fashioned on 1975’s Initiation or with his contemporaneous art-rock ensemble Utopia, the album is an exciting proposition on paper. While Rundgren regularly communes with classic-rock peers—he’s a long-time member of Ringo Starr’s All-Star Band and appeared on the ex-Beatle's recent solo album—Runddans marks a rare instance of working with younger spiritual kin less interested in his catalog of hits than his excursions into futurist psychedelia.
For its first half at least, Runddans lives up to its big-event billing. Its movements are arranged along a loose cycle-of-life narrative that conflates childbirth with spiritual awakening (sample title: "Liquid Joy From the Womb of Infinity"), with the scene set by an entrancing swirl of oscillating electronics, gong-crash eruptions, and wordless vocals. The moment of birth is marked by Rundgren’s first utterance of Runddans’ central lyric—"I have waited for this moment for what seems like nine lifetimes/ You will never be closer than you are now/ Put your arms around me"—like a parent casting his eyes upon his newborn for the first time; tears of joy spring forth in the form of a gushing guitar solo set atop a celestial disco groove.
But once it achieves lift-off 15 minutes in, Runddans must grapple with the same question all new parents face after the immediate thrill of birth wears off: What now? The trio’s answer is to instantly deconstruct what they’ve so carefully crafted, randomly fiddling with console levels and chopping up the beat to bring the piece crashing down. It’s not unlike the sudden tape-slice change-up Tortoise introduced 14 minutes into their own art-rock colossus, "Djed", violently disrupting the song at its hypnotic fever pitch. But rather than use the opportunity to open up Rundanns to new structural possibilities, the trio and their small orchestra of supporting players cycle through endless variations on the piece’s main melodic motif, dressing it up variously in space-age bachelor pad exotica, sci-fi Beach Boys harmonies and West African rhythms all while the throughline turns evermore hazy.
By the time Rundgren’s incessant vocal line slips out of sync with the Pompeii-scaled Pink Floyd lurch of "Wave of Heavy Red (Disko Nectar)", Rundanns starts to feel like the prog rock version of Too Many Cooks: one idea repeated and reformulated past the point of absurdity into the realm of insanity. And sadly, there are no great rewards for your endurance here: unsure of how to end the thing, the trio opt to build the penultimate house workout, "Ravende Gal (Full Circle)", around their phone conversations about how to end the thing. Maybe that outcome isn’t too surprising, given Rundgren’s long-standing fondness for breaking the fourth wall. But while Rundanns has all the makings of a late-career triumph, it’s less a new watermark for Rundgren’s sprawling discography than an analog to it: beautiful and baffling in equal measure, all over the map, and beholden to nothing but its own inexplicable logic. | 2015-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | May 5, 2015 | 5 | a75f1fbf-bd06-4d03-b6b3-0ac719a4b601 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
For their third album, Ra Ra Riot enlisted producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello) and incorporated more keyboards and synthesizers to help them move away from the bittersweet violin and cello they felt had come to pigeonhole them since their first release in 2006. | For their third album, Ra Ra Riot enlisted producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello) and incorporated more keyboards and synthesizers to help them move away from the bittersweet violin and cello they felt had come to pigeonhole them since their first release in 2006. | Ra Ra Riot: Beta Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17513-beta-love/ | Beta Love | Over the course of their seven-year career, Ra Ra Riot have, for better or worse, been known as the indie band with orchestral strings. It was a bit of a shock, then, when in 2010 the Antlers' Peter Silberman remixed short samples from their entire sophomore album, The Orchard, into a four-minute glitchy electronic track that by his admission sounded "pretty foreign from the source." He was actually remarkably prescient: for their third record, Beta Love, the quintet enlisted producer Dennis Herring (Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello) to help them move away from the bittersweet violin and cello they felt had come to pigeonhole them since their first release in 2006. Along with a lyrical focus inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, which the band had been reading before they made the album, Ra Ra Riot incorporated more keyboards and synthesizers into many of the songs on Beta Love. This new technology-informed attitude represents a necessary change for a band known mostly for one thing.
The group might have felt hemmed in by a formula, but it was one that worked for them. For instance the deep cello moans that opened The Rhumb Line's "Ghost Under Rocks" are still viscerally affecting years and countless indie chamber-pop imitators later. The keyboards stabbing at Beta Love opener "Dance With Me" set the tone for the album's overall harder, faster tempos, which peaks during the machine-gun drums on "Binary Mind", one of the songs that speaks most directly to Ra Ra Riot's concern with Kurzweil's transhumanism: "Why, tell me why/ I want to read you with this binary mind/ 'Cause if I do/ I'm sure that we'll be complete." Later, "Angel, Please" picks up where that track's hi-NRG left off, bringing out singer Wesley Miles' similarity to Phil Collins in pitch, intonation, and the use of "angel" as romantic epithet (the tambourines and handclaps don't hurt, either). To his credit, Miles definitely pushes his vocal range higher on Beta Love, even if he strains it to Jemaine Clement levels of absurdity on the R&B-leaning slow jam "Wilderness". And Miles takes sexy too far on "What I Do For U", sinking his delicate vibrato behind bass hits so incongruously deep they sound poorly mixed.
Ra Ra Riot are best when they stick with what they wanted to get away from. "Is It Too Much" pulses with a metronome tick, a slight piano melody nestling between violinist Rebecca Zeller's judicious peals. The track would slot perfectly next to Discovery, Miles' electronic side project with Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij. "When I Dream", the album's haunting high point, provides a template for how Beta Love could have worked. Instead of overcrowding with layers of instrumentation, Ra Ra Riot play off a similarly minimal heartbeat pulse, filling the spaces between with single piano chords as opposed to a continually bursting synthesizers. When they do build to the subtle climaxes, Zeller's violin swells and the finger snaps click into place at precisely the right time. But the moment is lost on the rabid drum fills on follower "That Much", which returns to the bombast that relentlessly drives the rest of the album.
It's unclear where Ra Ra Riot will go from here. After some bad tours and the departure of cellist Alexandra Lawn, the brasher tracks on Beta Love come across as cathartic, as though the band is doing a silly dance or yelling obscenities as a necessary release from a stagnant situation. If that is the case, then the album's understated moments are a reassuring reminder that Ra Ra Riot still have some of The Rhumb Line in them. | 2013-01-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-01-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | January 21, 2013 | 5.2 | a764a4ab-5b14-47cc-8265-229eab68766d | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | null |
Cian Nugent is the type of guitarist who can dazzle with his attention to detail on the fretboard, but he is also content to ride out on one chord for several measures if the song calls for it. Each song on his third album (his first as a singer/songwriter) unwinds unhurried and his backing band, the Cosmos, take their time asserting their sound. This is patient music at its best. | Cian Nugent is the type of guitarist who can dazzle with his attention to detail on the fretboard, but he is also content to ride out on one chord for several measures if the song calls for it. Each song on his third album (his first as a singer/songwriter) unwinds unhurried and his backing band, the Cosmos, take their time asserting their sound. This is patient music at its best. | Cian Nugent: Night Fiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21383-night-fiction/ | Night Fiction | The key to understanding Cian Nugent is "Things Don't Change That Fast." That's the title of the first single from Night Fiction. To begin, the Irish guitarist delicately strums the same chord five times, one for each time he sings a word in the title, demonstrating quite plainly that no, things don't change that fast. This ethos applies to Nugent's career—Night Fiction is his third album, but his first as a singer/songwriter—as well as his technique. On his earlier instrumental releases, he sometimes let the spaces between notes breathe so long that you'd be likely to find yourself checking the headphone jack to make sure you hadn't somehow become disconnected. These spaces don't appear much on Night Fiction; instead each song unwinds unhurried and the members of his backing band, the Cosmos, take their time making their presence known.
Nugent is the type of guitarist who can dazzle with his attention to detail on the fretboard, as on the album's sole solo instrumental track, "Lucy," but he is also content to ride out on one chord for several measures if the song calls for it. At first, the guitar feels too high in the mix—it's appropriate that the leadoff track is called "Lost Your Way"—and the licks he plays sometimes feel like muscle-memory fills that could have come from the Jeff Healey Band, incongruous with the rest of the album. His voice is an "if Kurt Vile can do it, so can I" approximation, but Nugent makes braver and more inspired melodic choices. Even if his voice doesn't hit all of the right notes, there's an appealing warmth and conviction to his singing.
Nugent also makes up for those irritating suburban-blues licks with his exquisite chordings and inspired solos. It also helps that the Cosmos are an especially dynamic backing band, sounding alternately as ferocious as Dirty Three or as mellow as the Section. His subject matter seems mostly to be interpersonal strains, and his words are simple, but wise and wide open for interpretation. The aforementioned "Things Don't Change That Fast" could be a monologue a practicing addict delivers to a recovering addict: "There may be only one difference between the hopeless and the brave, one's too specific and the other's too vague," he sings.
As with Nugent's previous releases, many of the songs start in one style to become something else altogether. "Year of the Snake," the glorious final track on Night Fiction, spends its first minute with the guitar gradually uncoiling before the organ and viola eventually enter the fold. The cymbals and bass arrive by the third minute, and by minute four it has morphed into a "Sister Ray"-like rave-up. Nugent is singing out by the seven-minute mark, sounding more like Pete Shelley than the occasionally flat voice he uses on the rest of the record. This is the catharsis promised at the beginning of the album: Things don’t change that fast, but when they do, they change dramatically, and for the better. | 2016-01-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-27T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Woodsist | January 27, 2016 | 7.3 | a772927a-48a0-4bd4-962d-275d3c761a17 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
The prolific Sacramento rapper’s latest has that bass and funk-heavy production but is deeply haunted by death. It unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun. | The prolific Sacramento rapper’s latest has that bass and funk-heavy production but is deeply haunted by death. It unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun. | Mozzy: 1 Up Top Ahk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mozzy-1-up-top-ahk/ | 1 Up Top Ahk | Toward the end of Mozzy’s latest album, over a synth and sax-laced beat, he admits, “Day in, day out I would beg for this life/Lot of misfortune that came with this life.” In the moment, he sounds at once grim and grateful. After 30 years on this earth, he isn’t shameless about his misfortunes—some of which were carried out by his own hand—but he’s not apologetic either. It seems his only regret is that his life may have come at too high a cost, and on 1 Up Top Ahk, he offers the receipts.
It opens with a recorded message from a club owner attempting to shut down a performance at his venue. “I know most of them are thugs, but this dude’s got a problem with guns,” the owner says, insisting they return his call. Guns were part of the reason the Sacramento rapper found himself locked up in 2014, but that’s only one chapter of a story far more complex than the “thugs and guns” cliche gangster rappers (really, any rapper) are reduced to. 1 Up Top Ahk peels back the layers alongside a carefully selected cast of features from Boosie, Lil Durk, and Jay Rock. Though the features broaden the perspectives, the prolific Mozzy is the unequivocal star here.
Sparing no details, the album unfolds like the diary of a man haunted by a past he’s trying to outrun. There’s a West Coast tinge to most of his production from his longtime collaborator June on the Beat, all bassy and funky, but there’s no audible sunshine here. This isn’t a man who needs sympathy—just an open ear as willing to listen without believing themselves a judge and jury. On “Sleep Walkin,” Mozzy confesses, “I miss my brother Deezy/Only if them bullets grazed ’em/Wasn’t no hatred in my heart until that happened/That’s what changed me.”
Rap has a way of humanizing those whom society has rendered deplorable or altogether invisible. Where others have chosen glorification as their mode of resisting—destructive trauma tucked beneath a club banger, sounding like a good time—Mozzy avoids that. Nothing on this record, not the production nor the tenderly sung hooks, overshadows what it is he has to say. He counts on his vulnerability to compel the album forward; his jagged voice and clear-eyed lyrics are pensive and pain-filled. He’s seen a lifetime’s worth of tragedy, and as the title of “Take It Up With God” suggests, sometimes the Lord feels like the only refuge in some of the worst storms life has to offer. Set to a harmonizing vocal and percussion, the hook and verses are as much a genuflection for mothers of the fallen as they are an attempt to come to terms with the fact their loved ones are never coming back.
“It’s like I’ve got a shoebox of obituaries, and they’re all young,” Mozzy told The Sacramento Bee last year. As the Reaper lurks in 1 Up Top Ahk’s shadows, Mozzy often appeals to a higher power. “Took a seat in church/My family told me it don’t hurt to try/It’s therapeutic for you baby/It don’t hurt to cry,” he raps on “M.I.P. Jacka,” an homage to the Bay Area rapper who was killed two years ago. The Jacka, himself, features as well over aptly somber, sparse production.
Death and religion become uneasy bedfellows in the streets, but as is the natural order, where something dies, something else is given life. In this way, there’s a restorative element to the album that makes it feel like the end of a troubled beginning. The artwork is the mugshot from Mozzy’s first case as an adult, a tribute to the trials that ultimately built up to this last trip to San Quentin and the one he says saved him. In between, he had a prolific run, dropping upwards of 26 projects over six years—12 of them last year alone. But he slowed it down (only two prior this year), and this slower pace pays off. No longer the villain, he’s become an anti-hero whose done all the wrong things for the right reasons finally ready to turn a corner, and it’s hard not to cheer him on. 1 Up Top Ahk elevates the stories from those who have been silenced. As much as the album deals with struggles in the streets and the trauma that comes with it, it’s also about loyalty and brotherhood and pride in a world that says you’re undeserving and the refusal to break. It’s about someone who made it to where many others didn’t—in rap or otherwise—and, as Mozzy says himself, someone who deserves to shine. | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mozzy / Empire | August 21, 2017 | 7.6 | a772a7ef-08a5-4902-a5d1-6eb852713dbc | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
Usher and Zaytoven’s “collaborative project“ is a solid homage to the duo’s beloved Atlanta roots and the city’s sound that has permeated just about every corner of popular music. | Usher and Zaytoven’s “collaborative project“ is a solid homage to the duo’s beloved Atlanta roots and the city’s sound that has permeated just about every corner of popular music. | Usher / Zaytoven: “A” | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/usher-zaytoven-a/ | “A” | In 1997, when he was still a baby-faced teen, Usher’s voice sounded like it had weathered the storms of a thousand failed relationships. His breakout album, My Way, cemented his place among then-peers who have since gone on to become legendary reminders of a bygone era of R&B. But Usher has played the long game by reinventing himself over and over, a heartbreaker balladeer turned mega pop star. Just shy of his 40th birthday, he found a new form, a splashy composite of youthful aesthetics.
“A”, his “collaborative project” with iconic producer Zaytoven, is an homage to their beloved Atlanta roots and the city’s sound that has permeated just about every corner of popular music. The pair first connected on the 2009 Raymond v Raymond single “Papers” for a smoldering elegy of a marriage turned sour. Back then, the singer was figuring out his crossover act while the producer was trying to cement himself outside of trap circles. Now, they have witnessed and inspired several eras of Atlanta-propelled music. (Consider that this year alone, Zaytoven has worked on several rap albums, a gospel album, and now, an R&B release; we’re a long way from “Icy.”) But longevity can be a bittersweet pill: fail to evolve and get phased out, adapt too much and nostalgia becomes the enemy. Usher has stared down the dilemma for over 20 years, but here, he sounds liberated from expectations and outcomes.
Opener “Stay At Home” presents a loosened-up Usher, less concerned with proper singing than channeling the blistering energy of the A. Future sounds right at home among Zaytoven’s racing hi-hats, but braggadocious Usher is jarring. It’s not so much that he sounds dated or inept; it’s that the teacher taking lessons from his students always feels like regression. The R&B coming out of Atlanta—6LACK’s hybrid soul, Jacquees’ referential crooning—is immediate. It may owe plenty to Usher, but it remains a more swaggered version of the genre that doesn’t exactly deal in tact or displays of raw vulnerability.
“Peace Sign” is a steamy sex song that finds him propositioning a lover over an astral synth line. The risque track—named for the position of his lady’s legs—is a logical progression from 2016’s “No Limit,” which featured another ATLien, Young Thug, and saw Usher leaning into more of a melodic sing-rap cadence. He deploys that style all across “A”: on the confident flirtation of “ATA,” the club-ready “Birthday,” and the Gunna-assisted “Gift Shop.” But occasionally, he does return to form. “You Decide” sounds like vintage Usher, ever convincing as he pleads for another chance. However, the production, which went well with the bravado, is a little too bright for his lyrics of atonement.
Ultimately, Zaytoven’s minimalist trap isn’t always the ideal match for Usher’s traditional R&B capabilities, but when they push both to their extreme, something magical happens. On the standout “Say What U Want,” Usher’s buttery voice floats between a cool falsetto and a warm tenor, sliding up and down a bed of dreamy keys. It’s here that the pair find the sweet spot. It’s Zaytoven’s most stripped beat and Usher’s most balletic vocal performance, a reminder that the two of them have plenty to offer outside of imitation.
Legacy artists folding in what’s hot right tend to make things uncomfortable because it forces us to take stock of what a genre has become. In Usher’s case, he’s up against the towering legacies of his 8701 and Confessions and a period of R&B that the new generation idolizes. The odds were never in his favor, but he masters the concept. Whatever “A”’s shortcomings, they are perhaps not an indictment of Usher or Zaytoven but of what R&B—or at least the perception of it—has lost along the way and only recently begun to correct. | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | RCA | October 18, 2018 | 6.7 | a7766938-0155-46ea-82c3-e9075b6847c4 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Former Roxy Music singer-- long adept at transforming other people's material, e.g his fantastic take on Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"-- here attempts an entire record of Dylan covers. | Former Roxy Music singer-- long adept at transforming other people's material, e.g his fantastic take on Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"-- here attempts an entire record of Dylan covers. | Bryan Ferry: Dylanesque | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10375-dylanesque/ | Dylanesque | It's really not that tough to do a good Bob Dylan cover, which is one of the reasons he's been covered so well so often. His lyrics have lots of room for a singer to find a personal angle, and their melodies are durable enough to sound just fine no matter how far they're pushed-- the farther the better, really. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", which led off Bryan Ferry's 1974 solo debut These Foolish Things, is one of the most awesome Dylan covers ever, the kind of interpretation that leaves its source bruised, hung over and covered in Sharpied taunts. Ferry ripped apart Dylan's apocalyptic tapestry fiber by fiber and reconstructed it in Day-Glo plastic thread; his performance's deliberately affected mannerisms seem to have made an enduring impact on the young David Byrne.
Ferry's returned to the Dylan songbook a few times since then, including two tracks on 2002's Frantic, and the marketing hook for his tedious new record is that it's all Bob: 10 covers of the master, plus "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down", an oldie that Dylan learned from Eric von Schmidt. The chief joke of the album is that Dylanesque isn't particularly Dylanesque, aside from a couple of harmonica solos plunked in for symbolic purposes. Anything resembling a rough edge in the arrangements has been buffed away; Dylan's wicked vocal backspin has been replaced by Ferry's touch-my-velvet-dinner-jacket-baby default croon, sometimes backed up by characterless backup chicks. A Dylanesque choice of repertoire would've been perverse and deep-diving, maybe borderline inscrutable, but Ferry sticks to the hits.
He also hermetically seals the hits off from meaning. Ferry can be a subtle ironist when he feels like it--he's made a career out of blurring the line between romantic and "romantic"-- so maybe it's another joke that he treats the opening song here, the despondent "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", as if it were just an assemblage of syllables and notes like anything else he could rubber-stamp the "Bryan Ferry" brand onto. But compared to, say, Nina Simone's blood-in-the-bathwater rendition of the same song, it just seems lazy.
When he recycles the same blasé, prefabricated technique for virtually every other song here, it's not just lazy-- it's infuriating. The band isn't much help, either: They play polite, foursquare rock with the occasional "tasty" lick at the end of a line. "All Along the Watchtower" lifts the Jimi Hendrix arrangement, just like the version Dylan plays on stage almost every night, but Ferry and company amble through it as if its central line is "no reason to get excited."
There's something in Dylan that Ferry is attached to, obviously, but it's not clear what. He's talked about how interpreting these songs is like reading Shakespeare. That's true, in a way; bad actors perform Shakespeare as if the text were a jeweler's pillow to display their star presence to best advantage, and that's the way Ferry mostly sings Dylan now. He doesn't really address the songs on their own terms, or even wrestle with them the way he did with "Hard Rain". He just runs them through the Ferry-izer, treating them all like they're "Slave to Love". Which means that, as much as he tries to capitalize on his voice's suaveness and seductiveness and hauntingness, he can't sing "All I Really Want to Do" as suavely as the Byrds, or "If Not For You" as seductively as Olivia Newton-John (no, seriously!), or "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" as hauntingly as just about anyone else who's ever attempted it.
There's only one glimmer here of Ferry's old interpretive wit. He murmurs "Positively 4th Street" in a gently mournful tone, backed up by power-ballad piano and whooshing movie-soundtrack synthesizers. The song is one of the most vindictive, venomous kiss-offs Dylan's ever written; gentle mournfulness wouldn't seem to suit it. But Ferry phrases it as a regretful glance back at a relationship that somehow didn't work out, and keeps a straight face all the way up to the last line, "you'd know what a drag it is to see you"-- whereupon he gives "drag" the bitter snap he's been saving up. Thanks, Bryan; the feeling is mutual. | 2007-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin | June 29, 2007 | 1.9 | a778805a-d56d-498f-bf82-b0edb55c1815 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
James Leyland Kirby, the British producer also known for his work as V/Vm, returns as Caretaker with a haunting and gorgeous series of edits from old 78s. | James Leyland Kirby, the British producer also known for his work as V/Vm, returns as Caretaker with a haunting and gorgeous series of edits from old 78s. | The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15518-an-empty-bliss-beyond-this-world/ | An Empty Bliss Beyond This World | An Empty Bliss Beyond This World sounds like a collection of edits of prewar parlor-room music because that's what it is. "This Caretaker album is built from layers of sampled 78s and albums," James Kirby told me in an email recently. "Things have been rearranged in places and other things brought in and out of focus. Surface noise"-- which is abundant-- "is from the original vinyls."
Kirby is an artist whose concepts are sometimes more fun to engage with than his music. As V/Vm-- a project he started in the early 1990s-- he made grotesque edits of soft-pop songs and released an entire 7" of the sounds of pigs feeding. His albums as the Caretaker have been comparatively more subdued, tending toward ambient music made from preexisting recordings.
Bliss was inspired by a 2010 study suggesting that Alzheimer's patients have an easier time remembering information when it's placed in the context of music. What makes it unique isn't that Kirby resuscitates old but vaguely familiar source material; it's how he edits it. Several of the tracks here take pretty, anodyne phrases and loop them mindlessly; several stop in what feels like mid-thought; several reach back and then jump forward. They never feel filled-in from start to finish, and they tend to linger on moments that feel especially comforting or conclusive: the last flourishes of a song, maybe, the pat on the shoulder, the part when we're assured everything is drawing to a close. Kirby isn't just making nostalgic music, he's making music that mimics the fragmented and inconclusive ways our memories work.
Unlike Kirby's last few albums, whether as the Caretaker or Leyland Kirby, Bliss isn't dissonant or heavy-handed. Nobody has to remind me that losing my memory is upsetting, or that I'm losing it as I type, or that the loss will probably accelerate as I get older, or that I'll probably spend my final hours sitting by a window repeating myself. What I like about Bliss is that, as the title suggests, there's something at least metaphorically beautiful-- even slightly funny-- about living inside a locked groove, dancing with nobody.
The last five years or so have been filled with music that feels haunted by an unresolved moment or looks at the past from a crooked perspective. The Ghost Box label has been consistently good at making jigsaw puzzles from cultural memories; Ariel Pink's grotesque soft-rock finally has an audience-- even music by a producer like Burial relies on the intrusion of a voice that sounds more part of history than the present, something reaching forward from a time we thought was gone. Kirby isn't unaware of what he's doing here-- everything he's put out in the past few years plays around with these ideas directly, down to his choice of titles (2009's Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was being the most impressively gymnastic). Even calling himself "The Caretaker"-- a reference to the endlessly recurring ballroom parties of The Shining-- feels like an effort to suss out the inherently psychedelic properties of memory.
Bliss reminds me of Ekkehard Ehlers' "Plays John Cassavetes 2" and Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", two pieces that transcend high-concept nostalgia. "Cassavetes" is a layered loop of the opening string figure from the Beatles' "Good Night", and the Bryars piece-- which was explored in a column here last year-- is a loop of a homeless man singing a hymn as an orchestra gradually builds behind him. In both cases, the actual amount of musical material is relatively small, and the "work" done on the part of the composer is minimal-- even Bryars' 30-minute build consists mostly of consonant drones.
Bryars' and Ehlers' conceptual leap was to wear their moments out as completely as possible. Repetitive music has a way of dissolving a listener's ability to pay attention to it: by the end, Ehlers' and Bryars' pieces sound different from the beginning, but there's no part I can point to in them and say, "here, here's where things change for good." They're constantly changing. They're also constantly returning. With Kirby, the effect is even more subtle and confusing. "Libet's Delay", sounds like it confuses its end for its beginning (or vice versa), and "Mental Caverns Without Sunshine" appears twice, with a two-minute song in-between: It's as though Kirby is trying to trick you into experiencing déjà vu. In all three cases, the source material is music designed not only to comfort, but to sound like it existed before you: hymns, love songs, lullabies. Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile. | 2011-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | History Always Favours the Winners | June 14, 2011 | 8.2 | a77e0662-82a1-43e1-8cd4-37a42ea4a02b | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Indie legends' first new album in four years-- widely tipped to be the group's return to a more guitar-centric sound-- is stylistically diverse and colored by distant, queasy prodcution. | Indie legends' first new album in four years-- widely tipped to be the group's return to a more guitar-centric sound-- is stylistically diverse and colored by distant, queasy prodcution. | The Flaming Lips: At War With the Mystics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3086-at-war-with-the-mystics/ | At War With the Mystics | There's a moment in last year's documentary, The Fearless Freaks, where Wayne Coyne is playing a song he was writing during the time of the Clouds Taste Metallic sessions. With only his strumming to accompany him, Wayne sings, "Cats killing dogs, pigs eating rats..." The song is "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles", and on its way to actualization, it will acquire a weird intro and a stranger instrumental bridge, and will be puffed up large and colorful enough to suit the rest of that big, glowing album. But even as Coyne plays it alone on guitar, you can hear something special.
Listening to At War With the Mystics-- the Flaming Lips' first new album in almost four years, and the product of many months in the studio-- it's difficult to imagine a similarly inspiring glimpse into one of these songs' construction. Much of the record sounds like chords and melodies were written later, as an afterthought to flesh out production experiments. The goofy noises, glitches, and wafts of Wilsonian harmony in "Haven't Got a Clue", for example, seem to be more central to the track's focus than the melody (of which there is almost none) or the lyrics ("Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face"). But the sounds are certainly interesting.
At War With the Mystics has already been discussed as the band's Return to Rock or Return to the Weird, but I don't really hear those things. Some of this talk arose because among the first of these tracks to emerge was "The W.A.N.D.", a good song built on a gnarly guitar riff-- a combo we haven't heard from these guys for some time. It doesn't approach the force of, say, "Slow Nerve Action", but this is the best guitar rock they've produced since Clouds Taste Metallic. Still, it's not indicative of the record as a whole.
Instead, At War With the Mystics is a grab bag of musical styles, without ever seeming like a retread of any particular album or sound they've explored during the course of their 20-year career. Though the themes are cut from the same cloth as the last few records-- meditations on fear, death, love, one's place in the universe, and so on-- musically, the band is up for experimenting. The production is distant, queasy, fuzzier, and less direct than any of their recent outings; the vocals are often manipulated and toyed with-- Coyne goes from singing in a register so low you can hardly recognize him (the single "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song") to one so high that he sounds like Beck doing Prince ("Free Radicals"). Musical mastermind Steven Drozd even sings his first lead, on "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung", one of the record's better songs, a peculiar amalgamation of several strands of krautrock and Pink Floyd's "One of These Days".
While the band has always played around with a variety of sounds, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of songwriting, most of Mystics doesn't measure up. It's telling that their best melody since The Soft Bulletin was written by Cat Stevens, and when the Lips make more traditional song compositions their focus, the results here are rarely engaging. At War With the Mystics leaves me wondering whether making good records is really the point for the Flaming Lips at this juncture. With this album, I'm struck by the possibility that the Flaming Lips are an idea and a project as much of a band, and records are just one of the organization's many concerns. This doesn't seem like any great tragedy, and I've no question that many tens of thousands more people will get into them this year for the first time and find their lives enriched by what the Flaming Lips have to offer. But for the first time in more than 15 years they've made an album that is difficult to consider great, regardless of how it's approached. | 2006-04-02T01:01:29.000-05:00 | 2006-04-02T01:01:29.000-05:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | April 2, 2006 | 6.7 | a791c84d-757d-4b2d-91a2-b6d2b2f3ba7e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The first compilation album from the Brooklyn beatmaker is an entertaining ride through the sounds of one of New York’s most underappreciated producers. | The first compilation album from the Brooklyn beatmaker is an entertaining ride through the sounds of one of New York’s most underappreciated producers. | Tony Seltzer: Hey Tony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-seltzer-hey-tony/ | Hey Tony | The producer compilation album is a rite of passage within rap music. It’s one thing to create instrumental albums that stand on their own or collaborate on a project with a single artist, but the compilation album comes with a different set of requirements. Catering beats to different artists across one project requires sharp balancing skills that not every producer possesses, and great recent examples—like Metro Boomin’s 2018 album Not All Heroes Wear Capes or Black Noi$e’s 2020 effort Oblivion—use several voices and styles to create mosaics grander than the sum of their parts.
Brooklyn-raised producer Tony Seltzer has spent the last few years proving he’s worthy of the mantle. He started making beats for friends as a Meshuggah and J Dilla obsessed 16-year-old, and he spent the next decade establishing himself within New York’s rap underground. Though he’s recently spread his wings on collaborative albums with artists like D.C.’s WiFiGawd and Atlanta tastemaker Key!, he still retains a strong connection to the city that raised him. Hey Tony, named for his eponymous beat tag, is Seltzer’s first attempt at bringing a variety of artists together under his name. It’s an entertaining ride through the sounds of one of New York’s most underappreciated producers.
Seltzer brings a jagged approach to his compilation, purposely avoiding easy flowing transitions. Several tracks bleed into the next but unlike a typical DJ set, not every transition on Hey Tony is seamless. Opening track “Reloaded” featuring Cleveland rapper Zelly Ocho segues into the brooding Lucki-featuring “One Minute,” but the thread is cut before “Wyd,” a showcase for North Carolina rapper Mavi, can begin. This staggered flow splits the project into sections, neatly spacing out the staggering amount of talent across its 14 tracks.
Matching the unique nature of his production, Seltzer embraces a diversity of voices on the album, leaving equal room for vocalists and rappers of all stripes. There are regional stars who Seltzer’s worked with before like Key!, Virginia rapper-producer Lil Ugly Mane, and fellow New Yorker Wiki. There are up-and-comers like Mavi, Atlanta firebrand SlimeSito, and Inland Empire firestarter Hook. Formal vocalists like HAWA and Eartheater even get in on the action. Culling so many performers from across genres with different styles is a tall order, but Seltzer allows each one to breathe, utilizing each artist as a disparate building block as opposed to a symbol of his wide-ranging music taste. Seltzer’s beats definitively run the gamut without ever ceasing to be the framework of the piece.
Similar to New Jersey producer GRIMM Doza (who has a co-production credit on “Keep It Low”), Seltzer can adapt his sound to match a particular artist’s sensibilities without having his voice made indistinct. The chirpy synths and warbling drums of “Wyd” and “Dun Dun” gel with the muted thump of “New Drip” and “Keep It Low.” The wailing horn sample at the center of “Whatever” feels like it’s in conversation with the chopped guitar sample fueling “Blood Covered Tiles,” even though they’re split by the relatively sample-free but still raucous “Keep It Low.” I expect nothing less from someone who’s successfully made beats on the fly while sampling from video cassettes.
Though Hey Tony displays his curatorial powers and his sheer range as a producer, the project’s collaborative nature remains its strongest highlight. Seltzer has a sole production credit on only three tracks, giving room for friends and collaborators like A Lau, Capncrunch, and Vinny Fanta to flex their talents. He’s produced for everyone from Princess Nokia and Jay Critch to Ski Mask The Slump God and Rich The Kid, so it’s not exactly surprising that he was able to bring two dozen artists together on this album. Yet the fact that the end product does not run amorphously like a spilled Slurpee is proof that he is as cohesive as he is conceptual. It’s a testament to a vision that’s been eagerly awaiting its just due.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | NSP | September 21, 2021 | 7.2 | a793d8ce-bd1f-4cc3-98b7-e6201e47baf0 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The second album from Mary Timony's band suggests that the hard rock of debut Rips was no dalliance: This time, they mine the denim-clad AOR of Billy Squier and Foreigner. | The second album from Mary Timony's band suggests that the hard rock of debut Rips was no dalliance: This time, they mine the denim-clad AOR of Billy Squier and Foreigner. | Ex Hex: It’s Real | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ex-hex-its-real/ | It's Real | During her days leading indie-rock stalwarts Helium during the 1990s, Mary Timony specialized in oblique angles. Listen to “Superball,” the single from 1995 breakthrough The Dirt of Luck: it drifts into focus as Helium studiously avoids a direct riff. This elusiveness meant that her sudden shift toward bold lines and primary colors came as something of a shock when she unveiled her power-trio Ex Hex in 2014. Named after her 2005 solo album, Ex Hex appeared to be tightly connected to Wild Flag, her 2011 collaboration with Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney—a record that kicked with a visceral rock’n’roll energy Timony only hinted at in her earlier music. This same spirit drove Ex Hex’s debut, Rips.
It’s Real, Ex Hex’s second album, suggests with its very name that this dalliance with hard rock is no passing phase. Reuniting with producer Jonah Takagi, the band doesn’t abandon the formula that fueled Rips, favoring heavy hooks and a cavernous big beat that conjures a neon-lit ’80s AOR fantasia. Ex Hex mine the areas of arena rock that have been forgotten to pop history, pledging allegiance to echo, overdrive, phasers and harmony, the very things that powered the airwaves in the days before MTV. Forget such stylish New Wave touchstones as Blondie or metal perennials as Van Halen: Ex Hex is all about the big beat of Billy Squier and the high-octane strut of Foreigner, the pounding hard rock that made thousands of burnouts raise their denim-clad fists in solidarity.
The key to Ex Hex’s success is that despite all these echoes, their music feels refreshingly free of both nostalgia and commercial calculation. The oversized, shiny sound of It’s Real has no imaginable antecedent in either mainstream or underground rock in 2019: its sheen is too bright for the latter and the guitars are too thick for the former. The songwriting resists big hooks, opting for a prickly and patient approach to big payoffs.
Part of this may lay in the fact that Timony is, by her own admission, “just not a pop person.” Melody isn’t alien to her, but the grand gestures she makes in Ex Hex don’t come naturally. They’re studied and conscious, the work of a musician who is making herself uncomfortable by writing her most accessible-sounding music. Timony has several skilled allies to assist her in this task, including Takagi, bassist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura Harris. Wright, Takagi and Timony all picked up guitars, the producer also plays some bass, while Dave Christian is credited with some drums. These musical chairs suggests how Ex Hex opened up their formula, letting the music breathe without ever changing its classic rock core.
Back in the early ’80s, the era which It’s Real so often conjures, such stretching would often be assessed a sign of maturity, but arriving after the lean, fearless Rips, the album can sometimes seem a bit lax. Rips rushed through its 12 songs in 35 minutes, while It’s Real takes 40 minutes to get through 10. The first three songs—“Tough Enough,” “Rainbow Shiner,” and “Good Times”—are all longer than the longest songs on the debut, gaining their length through chunky vamps. They never move slowly, yet they rarely move fast.
It’s an odd sensation, listening to a raucous arena-rock album made by such straight-A students, but it’s ultimately a rewarding one. Everybody involved sculpted the songs of It’s Real with care, while also not losing sight that the album should sound immediate and bracing. Such sober reconstructions of beery frivolity can’t help but recall Rivers Cuomo, who dissected KISS and Oasis hits like so many biology-class frogs, trying to figure out what made them “work.” But Ex Hex’s work isn’t bloodless or stylized. Somehow, they’ve retained all the messy spirit of the vintage classic rock they venerate. That It’s Real feels so exciting and alive only shows how thoroughly they’ve absorbed the lessons they’ve learned. | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 29, 2019 | 7.8 | a794ad09-418f-4c8f-9056-beb1febc9f48 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The latest mixtape from Destiny Frasqueri pulls from her love of emo and alt-rock. It’s an underdeveloped but strangely addictive left-turn. | The latest mixtape from Destiny Frasqueri pulls from her love of emo and alt-rock. It’s an underdeveloped but strangely addictive left-turn. | Princess Nokia: A Girl Cried Red | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/princess-nokia-a-girl-cried-red/ | A Girl Cried Red | “Everybody wants to put on this façade that they all have it together,” Princess Nokia told fans during an Instagram Live chat this past January. “And I wanted to write a mixtape that was about falling apart and being a fucking mess.”
Enter A Girl Cried Red, an inchoate but strangely addictive 21 minutes of pure and messy emotions from the shape-shifting New York City rapper born Destiny Frasqueri. Having already covered lo-fi house, trip-hop, disco-soul, Erykah-meets-Lana-Americana, boom-bap-meets-trap, and many points in-between, Princess Nokia has now leaned into the formative sounds of her middle-school years to make an emo mixtape that doesn’t sound like emo or rap or even emo-rap. Rather, it’s as if pop-punk and cloud-rap got caught in a flash flood of melancholy and were forced to share an umbrella.
In the hands of another artist, A Girl Cried Red might seem like a gimmick, but Princess Nokia’s strongest currency has always been her realness—she’s the kind of performer who’d hop offstage to slap a heckler, the kind of straphanger who wouldn’t think twice about tossing soup at a subway racist, the kind of granddaughter who’d step upstairs to the roof for a smoke break and Instagram Live chat with her fans so as not to bother her Puerto Rican grandfather taking refuge in her apartment post-hurricane. So when she says that rock is her favorite genre, which she often has, you believe her.
She’s traded her signature stream-of-consciousness flow and honeyed-soul vocal stylings for a Midwestern monotone. It’s not a seamless transition: “Flowers and Rope” has the brevity of a punk song, leaving its ends frayed and waving into the next track rather than resolved and resonating from an explosion of angsty screams and cymbal crashes. Something’s missing, but maybe intentionally so—it’s a song about emptiness after all, and this is communicated effectively, both lyrically and aesthetically.
“Your Eyes Are Bleeding” is a bit more realized, awash in textures and sentiments of heartache and loneliness that bore into the brain like an earworm that’s all mood. “Look Up Kid” and “Little Angel” find Princess Nokia drawing from her own troubled past to connect with young fans that might be hurting in new but familiar ways with a message of hope and understanding. Both tracks make effective use of warm guitar tones melting in and out of icy beats.
A trio of less rock-driven songs feels more self-reflective, touching on how Frasqueri’s life has changed since last year’s reissue of her 2016 breakout mixtape 1992. The tidy production leaves room for her to lay bare the most tangled aspects of the “fucking mess” she finds herself in these days. In a way, they serve as a solid argument that money buys sadness: The heavily Auto-Tuned “For the Night” contains the mix’s most candid (and satisfyingly shout-along-able) line—“I make money to replace you/Used to love you, now I hate you.” The appropriately titled “Morphine” is the biggest downer, full of concrete cries for help like, “I’m an emo little boy and I want someone to hold me/Got my money like a blanket and I hold it when I’m lonely.” The glitchy “At the Top” finds the songwriter at her most self-assured but still on message—it’s lonely up there after all.
Considering the wide left turn this mixtape is taking—her fourth in a series of eclectic swerves from 2014’s Metallic Butterfly to 2015’s Honeysuckle to 2016’s 1992—it feels as if Princess Nokia is still in an experimental stage, hasn’t found her authentic voice. Perhaps “change” is her voice as much as it is punk, evidenced by an unwavering “girls to the front” ethos, bruja feminism, and independent spirit—not to mention the middle finger salute with a smile she’s serving on the cover of A Girl Cried Red.
Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.” But, then again, it’s inevitable that an emo-inspired mixtape would have fewer bops than one inspired by classic NYC hip-hop. And the enthusiasm with which she revisits the music that made her is contagious. | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rough Trade | April 18, 2018 | 5.9 | a7a0bf3e-0c9f-4432-836a-ea5656d18124 | Melissa Giannini | https://pitchfork.com/staff/melissa-giannini/ | |
The 2015 documentary Rubble Kings depicts the truce between gangs in the Bronx in the 1970s as the catalyst for an artistic explosion that presaged the birth of hip-hop. The soundtrack was produced by Little Shalimar, splitting its time between instrumental tracks and rap cuts featuring Run the Jewels, Bun B, Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, Ghostface Killah, and others. | The 2015 documentary Rubble Kings depicts the truce between gangs in the Bronx in the 1970s as the catalyst for an artistic explosion that presaged the birth of hip-hop. The soundtrack was produced by Little Shalimar, splitting its time between instrumental tracks and rap cuts featuring Run the Jewels, Bun B, Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, Ghostface Killah, and others. | Various Artists: Rubble Kings: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21394-rubble-kings-the-album/ | Rubble Kings: The Album | The 2015 documentary Rubble Kings is one of many pieces of cultural ephemera about New York City in the '70s to emerge recently. It focuses on the chaos of the Boogie Down Bronx at a time when the borough was dealing with turbulence so intense that it was liable to burst into flame, but it avoids lazily conflating the chaos of the city and the beauty of the culture that emerged around the same period. Instead, it points to the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, a truce between gangs in the Bronx, as the catalyst for an artistic explosion that presaged the birth of hip-hop.
The soundtrack was produced by Little Shalimar, who scored the documentary and has worked as a producer with Run the Jewels among others. The music splits its time between rap tracks and instrumental music by Shalimar that take inspiration from various sonic flavors that were percolating through the Bronx in the '70s. Perhaps attempting to imitate the arc of the film, the album stumbles in the early going with the tough-talking track "Savage Habits," which, even though it features Killer Mike and Bun B, doesn’t quite pound in the way you might hope. (Also, it’s bullshit provincial homerism, but honestly: New Yorkers should open a New York album!)
But Little Shalimar makes several clever curatorial choices. Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire hasn’t never quite managed to echo the success of 2011’s Lost in Translation, but he sounds energized on "Warrior Thing," as do indispensable voices like Ka and Ghostface Killah, who show up on later tracks. For the most part, lyrically, the actual bars being spit here are less moving than the voices and vibe. That’s a credit to Shalimar, who has assembled worthwhile soundscapes for at least a couple of rappers who have had a below-average record in the booth in recent years. The Run the Jewels track "Rubble Kings Theme (Dynamite)" is the high point of the rap cuts, Killer Mike spitting steel-toed syllables over a concrete staircase of a beat, El-P gleefully playing with sibilants in the second verse.
The best moments come when Shalimar sticks to instrumentals. His work with the musician Jeremy Wilms (together, they call themselves King Mono) on "Bouncy 3" is a standout. "Partytime" is a tribute to the breaking culture of outdoor block parties, a mix of hard funk rythms and riffs, and snazzy ballpark synths that sound imported from a Dire Straits song.
The narrative arc of the album isn’t quite as arresting as that of the film, but Shalimar does make an effort to say something with the song structure here. That comes into play most notably at the album’s close, with the one-two punch of "The Piano District (Gentrification Boogie)" and "Phoenix." The first is an instrumental track, part lament, part testimonial to the inexorable movement of money into the Bronx. (That a borough with such a venerable nickname should be renamed so casually by developers is the kind of Gotham micro-tragedy to which city-dwellers are consistently subjected.)
"Phoenix" broadcasts its message through its name. The artists featured, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio and the singer/songwriter Roxiny (who sounds a little like early Santigold which is to say, amazing) sing an anthem of rebirth, a hopeful song that corresponds with the message of Rubble Kings. But here, as on the album as a whole, any kind of explicit statement has been wrested from a canvas of evocative sonic ideas. The music comes first every time, ably conjuring up the milieu that served as hip-hop’s cradle. | 2016-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Mass Appeal | January 13, 2016 | 7.4 | a7a3b368-e802-443a-97d2-aa4041683135 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The baile funk artist known as MC Bin Laden is becoming a real-deal pop star in his native Brazil. His first U.S. release collects his biggest hits from the last three years, and shows why. | The baile funk artist known as MC Bin Laden is becoming a real-deal pop star in his native Brazil. His first U.S. release collects his biggest hits from the last three years, and shows why. | MC Bin Laden: É Grau EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23259-mc-bin-laden-e-grau-ep/ | É Grau EP | Jefferson Cristian Dos Santos De Lima, the 23-year old baile funk artist known as MC Bin Laden, has over 3.5 million likes on Facebook. For perspective, that’s a larger following on the site than Chance the Rapper or Diplo. Dos Santos De Lima is likely one of the most popular funkeiros in Brazil (one of his videos have over 90 million views on YouTube). In his native São Paulo, Dos Santos De Lima is a real-deal pop star, who bears a striking look of two-toned dyed hair—half-black and half-blonde—and endearing braces.
Though his songs have percolated in North American clubs in the past few years, and he had enough crossover fame to perform with Skrillex and Diplo at last year’s Lollapalooza Brasil, he is only now becoming more known stateside. Unfortunately, the narrative that has surrounded Dos Santos De Lima has become one of controversy—in the last year he has been denied entry visas into the U.S. twice—which some of have pinned to his choice of name. But Dos Santos De Lima’s difficulties have more likely been due to the Brazilian government’s known distaste for the kind of baile funk that he is associated with, the sub genre funk proibido (“prohibited funk”). In reality, Dos Santos De Lima’s music is no more provocative than most of what’s on the radio nowadays. (His lyrics talk about sex, motorcycles, and partying—not all that controversial.) The É Grau EP is his first for a U.S. label, collecting his biggest hits from the last four years. It’s a wonderful sampler and glimpse into why Dos Santos De Lima’s music is so popular.
É Grau contains just six songs, and except the closer “Ombrinho com Romano,” the rest were released from a period of 2014-2016. The earliest, “BOLOLO HAHA,” was one of Dos Santos De Lima’s breakout hits, introducing his signature ad-lib (“bololo haha,” which has no translation in English) and his arresting sound. Even for a three-year-old song, the production Dos Santos De Lima chooses here is aggressively new—it’s a stripped down version of baile funk, with its touches of Miami bass and cumbia influences—injected with extreme industrial horsepower. Motorcycles revving, clanking machinery, and dissonant sirens are the leitmotifs in Dos Santos De Lima’s songs. His delivery, too, is both speedy and measured: his singing pushes the pace of these songs to the brink, but he delivers each syllable and phoneme carefully, making sure each vowel has the right amount of energy behind it.
There are also touches of lightheartedness, though. What sounds like a pan-flute comes midway through to add a dash of levity, and as in-your-face as the song is, there is a silly catchiness you can’t deny. “BOLOLO HAHA” is the archetype for the songs on the EP: hyperkinetic and propulsive, but fun and unserious. His songs make you feel like you’re riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle and going past the speed limit.
The EP also contains his most popular song to date, “Ta Tranquilo Ta Favorável” (“It’s calm, it’s favorable”). In the song’s music video, watched over 90 million times, Bin Laden, a goofy guy, is cavorting around a beach shirtless as he sings smoothly about being calm and enjoying life. It's a carefree message that reverberates throughout his music, and explains in part why he’s the fastest growing pop star in Brazil. In 2016, he was even able to perform this song on daytime television with the global soccer star Ronaldinho, showing just how far this guy has come since he emerged three years ago.
When I first heard Dos Santos De Lima’s songs last year in the middle of a DJ set in Ridgewood, Queens, I reached for my phone immediately, stuck my arm into the air, and hit the Shazam button to find out what it was. His songs were still unknown to me, and I couldn’t help but feel flabbergasted by how joyous they were. That feeling comes through again on É Grau. | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | True Panther | May 18, 2017 | 7.7 | a7a97ea2-d36c-4686-8d0a-c9468e6f6674 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Recorded in their parents’ basement, the second album by Long Island brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario is a musical about a monkey that features Todd Rundgren as the primate’s father. | Recorded in their parents’ basement, the second album by Long Island brothers Michael and Brian D’Addario is a musical about a monkey that features Todd Rundgren as the primate’s father. | The Lemon Twigs: Go to School | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-lemon-twigs-go-to-school/ | Go to School | Go to School, the sophomore album by Long Island duo the Lemon Twigs, is a musical about a monkey, but there’s a twist: It’s actually about us. Like the cinephilic siblings of The Wolfpack and the precocious outcasts of “Home Movies,” the brothers in the Lemon Twigs—19-year-old Michael and 21-year-old Brian D’Addario—see the world most clearly when it’s filtered through their own charmingly warped lens. Listen to Go to School on a surface level, and you’ll get the tale of an adolescent chimp, raised by humans, who gets his dreams crushed and his heart broken before returning to nature in a symbolic blaze of freedom and destruction. Give the album your full attention, however, and you’ll hear two young musicians settling into their gifts as they challenge the rapidly expanding worldview they share.
There’s a frenzied, competitive energy to the D’Addarios’ songwriting, which cycles through melodies and moods at a hyperactive pace. Their debut album, 2016’s Do Hollywood, resembled a solid acting reel, showing glimpses of narrative without ever offering a full story: Their range was the point. They’ve been associated with revivalists like Whitney and Foxygen, but the charm of the Lemon Twigs is in the unabashed, theater-kid fun they have with their record collection, an energy that guides their work more than any particular style. It’s a whimsical take on what we categorize as “classic rock” that feels more akin to turn-of-the-millennium Elephant 6 acts—particularly Gay Parade-era of Montreal—than to the Lemon Twigs’ self-consciously serious peers on the festival circuit. They value costume changes over fancy light shows, bargain bin novelties over the Rolling Stone canon. They have five favorite Beatles songs, and all but one of them are pre-Revolver.
Following the Jonathan Rado-produced patchwork of Do Hollywood, Go to School plays like an exercise in conceptual and musical focus. The D’Addarios recorded the whole thing directly to tape in their family’s basement and enlisted both of their parents as collaborators. (Their father, songwriter and session musician Ronnie D’Addario, helped track the record; their mother, Susan Hall, voices the chimp’s mom.) The resulting album is less dynamic than Do Hollywood, but its scuzzier, live-band approach brings the Lemon Twigs’ sound closer to that of their heroes. “Queen of My School” could pass for an Alex Chilton solo trifle, while the swirling chorus of “The Student Becomes the Teacher” would be at home on an early Todd Rundgren LP. In fact, Rundgren and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens guest on the record, the former gamely assuming the role of the primate’s father. Their participation feels as much like a flex on the brothers’ part as a gesture toward authenticity: These are our peers, the D’Addarios imply, with devilish confidence.
Occasionally, the Lemon Twigs put too much emphasis on imitation. As evidenced by the connection Michael has cited between his burgeoning Neil Young fandom and his interest in army jackets, their influences can feel like superficial touchstones without a unifying inspiration to link them. And sometimes the brothers lose the plot. The pace of Go to School should be familiar to anybody who’s gotten too stoned with a friend and spent an hour riffing on the same joke: One moment you’re choking with laughter; then, suddenly, you’re sighing, inexplicably exhausted, unable to remember what you found so funny just a second ago. A stretch of songs in the middle of the record pairs familiar melodies with rote morality in a way that feels oddly detached for a band known for expressing its enthusiasm in sets studded with high kicks.
Whether the D’Addarios are indulging in pure plot exposition (“What a big mistake/My taking in an ape”) or twisting clichés to keep things interesting (a bully is surprisingly sentimental, a love scene humorously vulgar and nonsensical), individual tracks can suffer under the weight of the narrative. What’s more unfortunate than the monkey musical’s excessive length is that you might not find yourself humming any of the melodies after it’s over. Only when the Lemon Twigs go for broke do you hear what they’re capable of. The album’s climax arrives with “The Fire,” six minutes of proggy, theatrical Southern rock that feels distinctly heartfelt—a quality the duo often downplays throughout these songs.
Despite their new penchant for storytelling, the Lemon Twigs aren’t seeking wisdom in Go to School (and thank god for that). But there’s more going on here than initially meets the eye. Michael recently confessed his aversion to contemporary rock music, and you can hear why he might find less resonance in the genre’s current torchbearers than in its early underdogs—artists who weren’t made for their times but found a way to transcend them anyway. Go to School portrays the D’Addarios’ fellow human beings as sad, helpless, and, at their worst, brutally ignorant. In their lyrics, the brothers whiplash between cynicism and wonder, earnestness and absurdity. While the Lemon Twigs’ sound is far older than their years, this set of concerns is remarkably age-appropriate as they enter their 20s and look toward the future: Where is our place in the world? How do we find our way without losing our spirit? They raise these questions repeatedly, then answer them with a goofy solo and a joke about bananas. Sounds about right. | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 25, 2018 | 7 | a7ab1559-e3a7-426f-ab52-171d1c1bb5b9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’ black-and-white photographs of clouds, the Canadian ambient musician reworks piano samples into one of the most monochromatic albums of his career. | Inspired by Alfred Stieglitz’ black-and-white photographs of clouds, the Canadian ambient musician reworks piano samples into one of the most monochromatic albums of his career. | Loscil: Equivalents | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loscil-equivalents/ | Equivalents | Many of the dozen albums that Scott Morgan has produced over the past two decades utilize two volumes: quiet and quieter. Morgan’s music as Loscil is defined by subtlety and understatement: His records tend to recede from the foreground, enmeshing themselves in their surroundings without demanding much attention. He has a rich compositional style that is intricate and deliberate, as well as an ability to conjure immersive atmospheres whose surprising depth is hidden by the music’s supine, almost narcotic, qualities.
Equivalents, Loscil’s first album in three years, is remarkably monochromatic music, full of wispy high pitches that swirl around waves of pink noise and slowly moving tone clusters. Almost all of the sounds were created by heavily processing and layering samples of piano that were originally intended for a Glenn Gould tribute curated by Japanese ambient legend Ryuichi Sakamoto. By focusing so intently on one source, Morgan has made one of the most homogenous albums of his career. It’s easy to regard Equivalents as one long composition that moves through several distinct but related movements. It has a lulling effect that allows space for the mind to wander.
Yet what Morgan can do with that limited palette can be stunning. There are elusive melodic lines spread throughout the album, often so slow that they unfurl over the course of an entire track. “Equivalent 5” creates an effect similar to a Shepard tone, the buried melody, cloaked in hiss, rising but never quite reaching a climax before dissolving into nothingness. Each element seems purposefully placed, and sounds often ping between the left and right channels, such as the delicately pulsating static on the closer “Equivalent 4.” Morgan frequently juxtaposes blocks of sound shrouded in reverb with crisp, light tones that dance around the swirling mass.
Loscil’s albums typically draw inspiration from the environment (rain on Endless Falls, pollution and degradation of the natural world on Monument Builders), and Equivalents uses clouds as a conceptual nexus. The album takes its name from a series of the same title created by Alfred Stieglitz in the early 1920s, in which the photographer attempted to locate musical qualities in abstract forms found in nature. Stieglitz captured images of clouds mid-swirl, printing them in stark black and white, connecting their strange contours to his own “emotional and philosophical” states.
Like clouds, the music on Equivalents is in constant motion but appears to be caught in stasis. Unique and beautiful contours appear and disappear without fanfare, smeared into other sounds or pure silence. What seems simple on the surface is detailed and textured under close attention. Like Stieglitz’s photographs, the music evokes a calm melancholy and surprising emotional resonance.
Because of its indistinct nature, Equivalents feels infinitely deep, with details left undiscovered even after repeat listens. It is easy to get lost in its doldrums, and can sometimes feel inconspicuous to a fault. Brian Eno famously said that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” On Equivalents, Morgan’s careful attention to both those extremes continues to yield fresh ideas.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | August 16, 2019 | 7 | a7b19728-0a5c-421b-8220-f7162ed3a046 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Blue Wave is the sound of Dan Boeckner and his latest band discovering the secret ingredient missing from so much of the music meant to reawaken the new wave sound of the 1980s: paranoia. | Blue Wave is the sound of Dan Boeckner and his latest band discovering the secret ingredient missing from so much of the music meant to reawaken the new wave sound of the 1980s: paranoia. | Operators: Blue Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21851-blue-wave/ | Blue Wave | It's ironic that Dan Boeckner sings so specifically about dreaming on four of the 10 songs that make up Operators' full-length debut. While Blue Wave showcases enough synth-centric production to meet all of the requirements to recreate a genre once widely referred to as dream pop, the songs on this album teem with such agitation that it could be the photo negative of that style: nightmare pop.
Operators is the latest act from a man who has played vital roles in Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, and Divine Fits. With this project, Boeckner—along with bandmates Sam Brown and Devojka—has discovered the secret ingredient missing from so much of the music meant to reawaken the new wave sound of the 1980s: paranoia, at a peppy tempo. Between fear of Orwellian prophesies coming true in 1984 and the Cold War machine springing to life, there was plenty to be paranoid about in the 1980s, and the current political climate demands that more music be spiked with anxiety.
There's plenty of that to spare with Blue Wave. Throughout the album, Big Brother is watching as a pervasive "they": "They come to correct you" in "Control"; "They wanna see you moving underground" in "Cold Light"; and "While we were sleeping, dreaming in our beds they moved the Earth" in "Evil." And like the best alarmist music of the Reagan era, this is all delivered with super danceable beats and synth sounds so fat and fizzy that they feel like the original analog instruments, rather than imitations by computer plug-ins. Boeckner's melodies are precise and the choruses show moments of bright clarity cutting through the foggy verses: not unlike fleeing a bleak reality to find asylum in a dream. He hasn't sounded this committed and angry since leading Atlas Strategic a decade and a half ago.
Boeckner captures a mood well, and his approach to the past is one of aggressive repurposing. Operators do à la carte shopping for 1983 tones and lyrical inspiration, boldly loading up at the buffet to get their money's worth. What could be a more fitting tribute to a decade of such excess? The title track borrows the flangey echo guitar of "I Ran," the chugging rhythm of "Major Tom (Coming Home)" and the ba-dada ba-dada sax punches of "Modern Love," a song from which Boeckner generously paraphrased lyrically on the single "Ecstasy at My House" last year. Boeckner has a history of brazenly overindulging on influences: with Handsome Furs' "All We Want, Baby, Is Everything," he borrowed so heavily that the need to legally clear a song with New Order reportedly delayed the Furs' second album. Speaking of New Order, Peter Hook's bass sound is all over Blue Wave too.
There are times when Boeckner's phrasing feels so stylized that it borders on unnatural: nobody really says "gown" in a way that rhymes with "phone." But this is what dedication sounds like. Towards the end of the album, Boeckner delivers a telling line in the song, "Nobody," when he sings, "I rip my life up and tear it apart/Before I start." This is his thing, violent reinvention, and he'll likely do it again with the upcoming Wolf Parade reunion. Here's hoping that he comes back to Operators, though if the last line of the album is any indication, it won't be for a while. "Wake up with me," he sings. And like that, the dream is over. | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Last Gang | May 4, 2016 | 7.5 | a7b5169e-421a-46c6-982b-9acd4a5fedd2 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
A collaboration between an improvising pianist and the ambient icon yields an unusual fusion of acoustic and electronic ideas—a meeting of minds that is full of rewarding surprises. | A collaboration between an improvising pianist and the ambient icon yields an unusual fusion of acoustic and electronic ideas—a meeting of minds that is full of rewarding surprises. | Tom Rogerson / Brian Eno: Finding Shore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-rogerson-brian-eno-finding-shore/ | Finding Shore | Asked about the use of chance in his music, Brian Eno once perfectly summed up his nearly five decades of work as a performer and producer: “I’m going to set up something that can surprise me.” That simple idea can be applied to much of Eno’s art. The renowned Oblique Strategies cards, which Eno created with Peter Schmidt, feature ambiguous phrases and ideas meant to shake artists out of a creative rut. And he’s spent decades seeking out technology to produce “generative music,” a stream of ambient sound that “[is] there as long as you wanted it to be” and never plays the same thing twice.
Those attempts to astonish himself are one of the reasons why he gets second billing on Finding Shore. The principal composer and performer is the British pianist Tom Rogerson; the sound of his playing is further manipulated by Eno by way of an instrument called a Moog Piano Bar. Created by synth pioneers Don Buchla and Robert Moog in the early 2000s, it sits right above a piano’s keyboard, shining an infrared light on each of the 88 keys. When one is played, the beam gets interrupted and triggers a MIDI signal, which can in turn trigger all kinds of noises. In this case, as Rogerson improvised on the piano, Eno was messing about with the signals he was receiving. Finding Shore, the result of that collaboration, is a record that beautifully smears together modern classical, ambient, and jazz.
On some tracks, the producer doesn’t do much at all. The opulent “On-ness” is given only a light dusting of reverb, so as not to distract from the song’s Satie-like delicacy and emotion. And on album closer “Rest,” there are nearly two minutes of unadulterated piano before its melody and rhythm lines are echoed by synthesized chiming. When Rogerson hits his final chord, Eno completely takes over, dissolving the sound into a glossy decay, as though a Rothko painting were slowly fading to black. It’s the mirror image of the opening track, “Idea of Order at Kyson Point,” which begins with a slowly repeating batch of notes processed to sound like a slightly out-of-tune vibraphone. Eventually, the curtain is pulled aside to reveal the piano behind the noises, with Eno shifting tones just so.
A member of the explosive avant-rock group Three Trapped Tigers, Rogerson tends to favor space and openness that allow for the natural resonance of the piano to hang in the air. That leaves plenty of room for Eno to manipulate sounds on the fly. But throughout Finding Shore, there are sharp bursts that stir these dreamy tracks quickly awake. The bulbous low note that closes “March Away” is forcibly rent asunder by the shattering chords of “Eastern Stack.” There’s a strange Cecil Taylor-esque fury to that track that is eased only by Eno’s low simmering hues moving beneath it. The short, jagged “Red Slip,” on the other hand, is all energy, a seeming homage to the pulsing minimalism of Philip Glass given an acidic tang via tones that sound like a bad mobile phone connection.
By and large, the two musicians strike a balance on Finding Shore, fluidly intermingling the acoustic and the electronic. But some of the best tracks are those where Eno completely subsumes the sound of the piano. “Marsh Chorus” warps into focus to reveal bits of birdsong and a lovely drone intercut with jangling melodies reminiscent of Eno’s 1997 album The Drop; “The Gabbard” imagines a repeating four-chord sequence as the blinking eyes of a dozen androids while little flutters of electricity and long pulses flow through the room.
Putting his music in Eno’s hands and ears proves to be a wise decision by Rogerson—just as his own playing turns out to be the ideal raw material for Eno to sculpt with. Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous. | 2017-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Electronic | Dead Oceans | December 18, 2017 | 8 | a7b5fd24-8d08-4aa5-bfb1-117841d3f42d | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The 20-year-old rising star was the voice of Brooklyn drill when he died. On his debut album, executive-produced by 50 Cent, his voice shines through despite a raft of unnecessary features. | The 20-year-old rising star was the voice of Brooklyn drill when he died. On his debut album, executive-produced by 50 Cent, his voice shines through despite a raft of unnecessary features. | Pop Smoke: Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pop-smoke-shoot-for-the-stars-aim-for-the-moon/ | Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon | Nearly every New York neighborhood has a character like Pop Smoke: flashy, cocky, trash-talking while hitting a dance, all jokes until suddenly he’s deadly serious. Born Bashar Jackson in Canarsie, Brooklyn, Pop Smoke was raised among blocks so rich with Caribbean culture that his breakout music video was partially filmed at Peppa’s, a local Jamaican jerk chicken hotspot. During the year or so his career lasted, he was the centerpiece of the borough’s drill movement, a subgenre born and popularized in Chicago, and adopted and personalized by New York. By the time he was shot and killed at 20, Pop Smoke wasn’t just a rapper, he was the voice of Brooklyn drill.
In the winter of 2018, a teenage Pop Smoke arrived with one of his first-ever recordings, a thunderous remix of Sheff G’s “Panic Part 3.” By the summer, kids across the city were emulating his bellowing voice and signature dance, using any opportunity to shout the quotables off of his instant classic debut mixtape, Meet the Woo—“Bitch, I’m a thot, get me lit,” should replace “Fuhgeddaboudit” on the leaving Brooklyn sign. His breakthrough single, “Welcome to the Party,” was so hot that Nicki Minaj hopped on the remix to assure that Pop would bring Brooklyn drill to the masses. Soon enough, he was riding around the borough in a Bugatti with Travis Scott, in Paris with Virgil Abloh, and shutting down shows in the UK. When his second mixtape rolled around in February, he was a borderline superstar. He was dead less than two weeks later. It went so fast he never even got the chance to perform an official hometown show.
Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, Pop Smoke’s debut album, released posthumously, attempts to cement his legacy by expanding his world. Executive produced by his would-be mentor 50 Cent, it’s big, polished, versatile, feature-packed, and loaded with radio and playlist-friendly records. It’s the type of album that will boost streams, but it runs counter to what made Pop Smoke appealing in the first place. When “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” first began to play on the radio, it was like the airwaves had been hacked. There was no way this Canarsie rapper with the hulking voice, chanting on nightmarish UK drill beats, was supposed to be playing in between Drake and DaBaby, right? Yet there he was.
On Stars, Pop Smoke’s animated personality and charisma are drowned out. We didn’t need Pop Smoke’s wannabe Cali-strip-club anthem with Tyga and Mustard on “West Coast Shit.” Or a hollow Astroworld retread on “Aim for the Moon.” Or a forced Rap Caviar-bound marathon with Lil Baby and DaBaby on “For the Night.” Pop Smoke’s music came to life most when he made a couple of blocks in Canarsie seem like the only place that mattered—a subway ride to SoHo might as well have been a private jet to Bora Bora.
Buried under the fluff somewhere is a good album. “44 BullDog” is a return to Pop gliding on sinister drill beats, and it’s his sharpest song since his debut. Some of Pop’s risks pay off, too. “Something Special,” a flip of Fabolous and Tamia’s “Into You,” is the type of macho love song that hasn’t been done this well since 50 Cent’s “21 Questions”: Pop’s idea of romance is sneaking into his girlfriend’s crib when her parents are at work and letting her call him by his government name. And on “Make It Rain,” Pop unites with Brooklyn drill founding father Rowdy Rebel for a cinematic celebration between two rappers who had their moments unfairly stolen from them.
Crucially, Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon doesn’t take into consideration that Pop Smoke’s legacy was already cemented. He didn’t need this glossy, high-budget experience. But Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon ’s flaws become an afterthought, and the good moments here will outlast them. Having new Pop Smoke music to play at backyard BBQs and out of car windows is good enough. All the album needs is his voice, which will last forever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | July 7, 2020 | 6.5 | a7ba3470-1606-46ce-8023-9dc0d0d6051c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The second album by this Canadian electronic indie pop band finds vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark but in greater command of his elegant melodies, exquisite pacing, and marvellously tensile voice. | The second album by this Canadian electronic indie pop band finds vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark but in greater command of his elegant melodies, exquisite pacing, and marvellously tensile voice. | Junior Boys: So This Is Goodbye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9301-so-this-is-goodbye/ | So This Is Goodbye | My first introduction to Junior Boys was in autumn 2003. I had taken half a year off to travel alone, and I'd just left London, where a friend had given me a copy of the Birthday EP. I'd heard the single once or twice in passing before, but my first meaningful interaction with it wasn't until later that week, on a nine-hour night train ride from Austria to Budapest. I listened to the whole EP on repeat that night, its brittle rhythms and gleaming synths coalescing with the dark shapes and city lights in constant renewal on the other side of my window, the unfamiliarity of my surroundings giving it all a further resonance.
There are special songs, and there are special memories, but if you're one of those nostalgia-bitten people for whom neither seem quite vivid enough on their own, nothing matches what happens when the two dovetail. The beauty of these moments is they refuse to be architected-- we can't force them any more than we can explain them. And while the Junior Boys aren't magicians, they speak the language of that magic as well as anyone making music today. (In the band's official bio, K-Punk blog's Mark Fisher writes that So This Is Goodbye is a "travel sick" record-- I'd go him one further and say that specific sensation of travel sickness is at stake every time they set out to make music.)
Just their second full-length overall, So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year. The first complete album made by vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark, it finds the Boys (now rounded out by onetime engineer Matthew Didemus) working within comparatively streamlined song structures, the rhythmic capriciousness that so strongly informed their debut all but erased from the whiteboard. And yet, despite this radical formal departure, Goodbye draws out so many of the same sensations and colors that it feels like a natural next step. If anything, the absence of those slippery rhythm tracks puts the focus even more squarely on Greenspan, who delivers with a record full of elegant melodies.
Beyond the glowing synthlines, frigid percussions, and Greenspan's marvellously tensile voice (imagine Ben Gibbard with much higher cheekbones), the Junior Boys' greatest weapon is space. With an economical 10 tracks spread out over nearly 49 minutes, the pop in So This Is Goodbye is hardly immediate; instead, its songs are allowed to percolate and unfurl. On paper, especially to the average thrillseeker, that might sound a bit offputting, but it's not like these are all ballads, either. Opener "Double Shadow" begins with a gentle pattering sequence of synth beads but blooms into a smartly melodic slice of electrohouse that Booka Shade would be proud to call their own. Elsewhere, with its serrated analog lead, gushy pads, skipping rhythms, and pressurized vocals, "The Equalizer" accounts for one of the album's finest arrangements, while the uptempo first single "In The Morning" finds Greenspan merging icy r&b with 4AD's warm guitar sounds to beautiful effect.
In the end, though, the biggest goosebumps come courtesy of the slowburners. The penultimate track "When No One Cares" recasts the Sinatra standard as a wobbly space ballad, closer "FM" crosses the finish line in an unhurried cloud of staccato arpeggios and warm harmonies, and standout "Count Souvenirs" marries liquefied synths and keening minor-key melodies with the album's starkest imagery ("Empty stalls and shopping malls that we'll never see again/ Hotel lobbies like painful hobbies that linger on"). Finally, the album’s title track finds Greenspan singing: "So this is goodbye, no need to lie/ This creature of pain, has found me again/ So this is goodbye," possibly in reference to Dark, or to his departed former label head Nick Kilroy, or to someone else entirely. It's the album's heartbeat, as well as one of its weightiest moments-- an acknowledgment that in times of despair the best course of action is often just to keep moving. Wanderlust never sounded so good. | 2006-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | August 10, 2006 | 9 | a7bc3a66-5a69-475b-94bb-d6f53df33580 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Skilled though he may be, J. Cole’s surprise mixtape makes good on its promise to negate its relevance in real time. | Skilled though he may be, J. Cole’s surprise mixtape makes good on its promise to negate its relevance in real time. | J. Cole: Might Delete Later | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-cole-might-delete-later/ | Might Delete Later | Evidently, J. Cole is not the kind of rapper he would like to be. Since the beginning of his career at the peak of the blog era, the North Carolina native has staked his reputation on being an out-and-out, bar-for-bar rapper’s rapper, the model for the genre, the control in the experiment. Though a talented singer with a pliable voice, he’s always been reverent (sometimes to a fault) of legends from the 1990s and early 2000s, writing about his life in long, mythic arcs and dotting his albums with radio singles that are anchored by neuroses and character details seeded on his earliest mixtapes. He delivers all of this in a manner designed to clear space for determined bursts of setup-punchline showmanship—a magnetic mode if you can hack it. Cole often cannot.
Might Delete Later, released as a “mixtape” without warning last week, exists solely to underline this competitive streak in Cole’s music. How else are we to receive a record that, in lieu of a single, took shaky aim at Kendrick Lamar, who had very lightly jabbed at Cole on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” weeks before? But this past weekend, less than 48 hours after its release, Cole went on stage at his own Dreamville Festival in Raleigh and apologized to Kendrick for “7 Minute Drill” and its clot of repurposed Jay-Z bars and creaking metaphors (“Fly pebbles at your dome, we the Stone Temple Pilots”; “He still doing shows but fell off like the Simpsons”), calling it “the lamest shit I ever did in my fucking life.” Maybe! What’s certain is that Might Delete Later makes good on its dated title as a record that, for reasons apology-related and not, seems to negate itself in real time.
Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct: By the middle of “Huntin’ Wabbitz,” his flow has settled into a sleepy seesaw, and his boasts about being “too locked in” don’t read quite the way they’re intended.
And still, Might Delete Later has plenty of compelling elements—rhythmic, textural, even personal. Opener “Pricey” is weighed down by an unnecessarily frilly interlude and equally strained references to John Gotti and Rick and Morty. But its drums sound like they’re dragging themselves through quicksand, and Cole darts nimbly through them. A track later, on “Crocodile Tearz,” he’s rapping through his teeth in a way that makes him sound more composed and more menacing than nearly ever before; “H.Y.B.” is an exceedingly rare thing, a subtle integration of drill’s wobble into a less industrial sound palette. On “Stickz N Stonez,” The Alchemist provides the sort of irresistible hop that forces rappers to snap upright and find new pockets.
Which Cole does—sort of. His takes on “Stickz N Stonez” are animated, but the first verse is stuffed with so many syllables that it suffocates the swing and syncopation that makes the beat alone so memorable. On the Cam’ron-featuring “Ready ’24,” a sequel to the classic from Diplomatic Immunity, Cole begins by approximating Juelz Santana’s style (spare, epigrammatic), then ratchets up the pace and word count. There is an indelible quality to the best Juelz verses that few rappers could ever replicate, but this is one of Cole’s best showings on Might Delete Later—and recalls certain stretches of To Pimp a Butterfly, where Kendrick grafted more syllables onto airy P-funk beats than many of that style’s originators ever had. In each case, a studious rapper dug to the core of the music he loved, trying to find new nooks and crevices in which to carve his name.
This is why the apology Cole offered over the weekend is particularly deflating. Since Big’s death in 1997—and certainly with the almost unbelievable rash of rapper murders over the past several years—there have been frequent and persuasive calls for rap beef to stay on records, or to be tamped down entirely. But “Like That” is not “Hit ’Em Up,” and “7 Minute Drill” is not “The Takeover,” whatever the latter’s publishing splits say. These aren’t even really disses: They’re the kind of quasi-friendly sparring that has characterized rap since its beginnings. And so the frequent, pointed declarations of greatness, demands for respect, and nonspecific threats that litter Might Delete Later are rendered vacant and vaguely sad, gestures to an ethos that is nowhere to be found. | 2024-04-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-09T16:09:11.105-04:00 | Rap | Interscope | April 10, 2024 | 5.1 | a7bdeed2-581a-48dd-9786-480a367a64dc | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/661008700069106e97a1eeb6/2:3/w_1364,h_2046,c_limit/https-::www.youtube.com:watch |
The hyperactive New York sibling duo embraces genuine presence and warmth on its second album of the year. It feels like a radical reinvention. | The hyperactive New York sibling duo embraces genuine presence and warmth on its second album of the year. It feels like a radical reinvention. | Frost Children: Hearth Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frost-children-hearth-room/ | Hearth Room | Angel and Lulu Prost aren’t known for their light touch. Since joining forces as Frost Children, the siblings have embraced face-melting maximalism as a guiding principle, drawing inspiration from the least subtle strains of EDM, electro-punk, and hardstyle as much as they do Spongebob Squarepants. Their wildly unstable approach to hyperpop is equal parts sugar and spice and knees and elbows; a riot of cartoon violence designed to climax in 15-second bursts of shout-along chaos. What supposedly distinguished them from high-octane acts like 100 gecs or the Garden boiled down to their location (New York City), frame of reference (aughts pop), and a spate of trend pieces situating them at the intersection of indie sleaze and (depending who you asked) the death or rebirth of downtown nightlife. But the music alone was proof enough that the Prosts were talented producers whose many good ideas waged war fruitlessly against each other.
This spring’s SPEED RUN revealed Frost Children’s potential as hard-partying shit-starters while also highlighting the limits of their thinly drawn, attitude-heavy approach. But nestled among the pinging video game samples, shredded punk vocals, and Richter scale-moving drops were hints of a gentler and sweeter sound, one that swooned rather than sneered. You can hear flickers of it in the winsome Eurohouse beat of “All I Got” and the disarmingly romantic lyrics of the earlier “Worship U,” moments when the duo seemed to drop the act and grow a heart. Though recorded alongside SPEED RUN, Hearth Room is an infinitely more agreeable collection that introduces a new level of feeling to their work.
Hearth Room feels like a radical reinvention but it’s the product of brutally effective fine-tuning. Gone are the meme lyrics, the relentless dance beats, the bratty antagonism. The songs follow more conventional pop structures and don’t get derailed by verbal or musical non sequiturs. When “Birdsong” peaks with a screamo wail, it feels like a moment of loving surrender rather than random dissonance. The Prosts play to their strengths as rock musicians while using electronic flourishes sparingly and strategically. On the stuttering, agitated “Stare at the Sun,” the siblings take turns spitting out visceral romantic disillusionment, as Lulu’s guitar and Angel’s bass lock horns in a tricky math-rock melody. As the beat fades, a flurry of jagged synths enters the mix before shifting suddenly into a punishing breakdown.
Hearth Room reflects a set of influences that were not apparent from the sugar rush collage of SPEED RUN, specifically the windswept moodiness and passionate upsurges of Modest Mouse and Alex G. Much of the album concerns raw nerves and butterflies, the agony and ecstasy of longing for love and only fitfully getting it. Opening track “Lethal” bleeds out its dejection with bruising power chords before exhaling into the anguished couplet: “If I had a spine/You’d be mine.” The gentle synth-pop of “Marigold” sounds like a straightforward love song, and it peaks with Angel’s desperate plea: “Tell me lies, tell me lies/I believe you.”
Fortunately Frost Children haven’t sacrificed their sense of humor. On “Oats From a Mug” and “Got Me By the Tail,” they express tenderness as a non-stop flow of absurdist sweet nothings. And then there’s “Bob Dylan.” Over twinkling guitar, Frost Children eulogize the decrepit state of urban bohemia by narrating the Nobel laureate’s journey through the now-vapid and over-commercialized sites where he first became an artist. “Tribeca/Hudson Yards/Bedford Ave and 7th/Rue Charlot in the Marais/That canal that’s in East London,” Angel intones, as if narrating a bitterly nostalgic Adam Curtis supercut. When she pauses to take in a poster advertising a (fictional) Jack Harlow-branded salad from Sweetgreen, it’s funnier and sadder than anything in the duo’s catalog.
For years, hyperpop put on a shiny reflective front to baffle anyone who didn’t get the joke—if there even was one. But as a genre that once made such a play of flirting with capitalism gets subsumed by it, there’s never been a better time to prioritize emotional immediacy. With Hearth Room, Frost Children take a leap beyond ironic club-kid mischief to create a record that radiates genuine presence and warmth. | 2023-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | True Panther | November 20, 2023 | 7.4 | a7c21c67-0998-4c3f-b25a-17bbc824950e | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
German deep-house technician Gunnar Wendel’s new album for the Workshop label clears away the murk of his early work, achieving disorienting effects with its oddly pristine palette. | German deep-house technician Gunnar Wendel’s new album for the Workshop label clears away the murk of his early work, achieving disorienting effects with its oddly pristine palette. | Kassem Mosse: workshop 32 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kassem-mosse-workshop-32/ | workshop 32 | Long before “lo-fi house” was blowing up play counts on YouTube, Kassem Mosse, aka Gunnar Wendel, was making hazy, low-visibility house jams that seemed to creep through a sooty midnight fog. Tarnished and corroded, betraying hints of line noise and vinyl hiss, his music sounded like he’d made it on machines that had lain buried for a decade in the dirt. It wasn’t just the omnipresent murk that made his tracks distinctive; it was the ominous, ungainly way they moved, skulking heavily around the edges of the dancefloor like a hunched beast lurking in the underbrush. At once sensual and sullen, it was a vision of club music charged with danger—a kind of inclement weather that could turn nasty at any minute.
Wendel was prolific in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but he slowed his output after 2016, around the same time that he began moving away from the dancefloor. That year’s Disclosure, for London label Honest Jon’s, was chilly and aloof, draping atonal synth loops over brittle machine beats. The following year’s Chilazon Gaiden, for his own Ominira imprint, was more energetic but nearly as forbidding; its speedy, spaced-out techno suggested an unheated warehouse rave in deep winter. workshop 32 is his first solo work as Kassem Mosse in six years, and it is his most immediate and enveloping release in ages. (Like all of his releases on Lowtec’s Workshop label, its catalog number doubles as its title.)
This isn’t the Kassem Mosse palette of yore. He’s vacuumed up the muck, swept away the cobwebs, and even air-dusted the faders on his mixing desk, from the sound of things. His synths have the airy quality of wind chimes, and his pristine, undistorted drums sit like islands in a sea of empty space; the stereo panning is so disconcertingly precise, a bat could echolocate each tom, snare, and clap. Still, barring the odd wash of warmly nostalgic pads, a sense of emotional blankness prevails. No matter how physically engaging these tracks may be, they maintain a stone-faced remove.
At times, the mood is downright unsettling. Competing polyrhythms resist parsing; the occasional burst of out-of-sync beats suggests a DJ losing control of the mix. Synths throw off icy dissonance. “D1” (as is typical for Workshop releases, all but one of the tracks are titled only by their position on the vinyl) is set against a high-pitched whine that rises and falls like wind whistling through the window frame.
Very little actually happens in these arrangements. Each track offers just a handful of sounds—truncated drum hits and ribbons of synth, but also scraps of background noise, speaking voices, and sourceless clatter—that spin as elegantly, and ceaselessly, as clockworks. There’s no development, no growth, barely any change to speak of. These are less songs than spaces, three-dimensional environments in which to wander for as long as Wendel deems necessary, and from the outside, the tracks’ lengths might as well be arbitrary. (What are the chances that he hit upon running times of 6:06, 7:07, and 9:09 by pure coincidence?) But while you’re immersed in it, the groove feels both infinite and unusually intricate.
Even in his scuzziest early years, Kassem Mosse’s music flickered like a candle flame, and the best tracks on workshop 32 are among the most propulsive in his catalog. The C- and D-side cuts are especially nimble, perpetually switching up the rhythm with ghost notes and stray bursts of keys or voice. There are echoes of Moodymann and Theo Parrish in his stubbornly soulful syncopations, and of Pépé Bradock in his gauzy weave of tones. Mostly though, he just sounds like Kassem Mosse, even if Kassem Mosse has never sounded quite like this before. In the closing “Provide Those Ends”—the only track to bear an actual title—a scrap of what sounds like film dialogue features a man muttering, “I’m trying, I’m working, I’m saving, I’m trying to do the best I can—provide those ends! I gotta work, you know what I mean?” Kassem Mosse is back on his grind, and he’s never sounded sharper. | 2023-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Workshop | February 6, 2023 | 7.7 | a7c7204a-f8b5-4d03-8882-a4b10f51d396 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The proper, widescreen debut from Quavo is filled with passable, professional songs that pale when compared to nearly any full-length Migos record. | The proper, widescreen debut from Quavo is filled with passable, professional songs that pale when compared to nearly any full-length Migos record. | Quavo: QUAVO HUNCHO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quavo-quavo-huncho/ | QUAVO HUNCHO | This was always inevitable. The laws of physics and commerce and Spotify guaranteed, from the moment they vaulted into stardom, that the Migos would try to conquer the world as solo artists. From the jump, Quavo was thumbed as the breakout star. His voice was (and is) lighter and more slippery than Offset’s or Takeoff’s, and he seemed better-suited for the rap/R&B hybrid songs that have dominated the charts for much of this decade.
The truth is that Quavo’s early lurches into solo work were uneven at best. He laced 2 Chainz and Gucci Mane’s excellent 2017 track “Good Drank” with a very good hook and turned in a superb verse for Travis Scott and Young Thug’s “Pick Up the Phone,” and has also been grafted onto sure bets by Post Malone, Lil Yachty, and DJ Khaled. But his collaborative album with Scott last year was a quickly-forgotten dud, and his true solo efforts have so far have been merely fine, tepid, there.
QUAVO HUNCHO, the proper, widescreen debut, sees Quavo trying to shoulder long stretches of a 66-minute record by himself. What the experiment yields are passable, professional songs that are barely moving and pale when compared to nearly any full-length Migos record, including this year’s Culture II—which, flab aside, was a showcase for the trio’s interplay and 2+2=5 alchemy. By contrast, QUAVO HUNCHO is flat and nearly anonymous.
There are a couple of deeply bizarre successes, though. “FUCK 12” calls on Offset (and Malcolm X, and a disembodied voice shouting lyrics from Boosie’s “Set It Off”) for a woozy, hallucinatory anti-police anthem. The following song, “LOSE IT,” features yet another star turn from Lil Baby, and “CHAMPAGNE ROS´´É makes excellent use of Cardi B and, quizzically, Madonna. But the collaborations on QUAVO HUNCHO are, almost uniformly, stronger than the tracks without guests. Quavo’s voice works best as a foil for others, and the competition seems to bring out the best in his writing: On the Drake duet “FLIP THE SWITCH,” Quavo gives his take on the Juvenile “Ha” flow, making for one of the album’s more interesting passages.
The production comes from a smattering of stars and near-stars in the Migos extended universe: Dun Deal, Murda Beatz, Buddah Bless, Wheezy, Tay Keith, WondaGurl, etc. It’s darker and muddier, with less snap or playfulness than can be found on either Culture installment. In a way, this is good: The grim feel is a welcome counterpoint to Quavo’s voice, which tends to waffle and warble rather than force the listener to lock in and engage with it. Unfortunately, amid the competent-if-indistinct beats are a few inexplicable clunkers. The worst offense is the Pharrell production “GO ALL THE WAY,” which is so digitally glitzy that it sounds like a video game where the final boss is a teenager who buys and resells Supreme to pay for more Supreme.
At least QUAVO HUNCHO is not a complete trainwreck—it works fine as a stopgap or as background music. It sounds like license-free 2010s trap, for which there always seems to be a market. But it is so ordinary, so uniquely uninspiring that it makes it difficult to imagine a solo work from Quavo that would truly grip our attention (or our club nights or car stereos). The gap in quality between the collaborations included here and the solo songs is a gulf. The interplay of voices is sorely missed, as are the more consistently engaging pens that Takeoff and Offset provide. At least the cover art is great. | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Capitol | October 18, 2018 | 5.9 | a7ca92d2-b80e-40d0-a943-4491f1d15396 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Confessional singer-songwriter abandons the personal tragedies that inspired his debut in favor of an astoundingly original twist on the loner-folk template. | Confessional singer-songwriter abandons the personal tragedies that inspired his debut in favor of an astoundingly original twist on the loner-folk template. | Strand of Oaks: Pope Killdragon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14567-pope-killdragon/ | Pope Killdragon | Timothy Showalter has a beard, an acoustic guitar, and a heartbreaking backstory-- on the surface, the confessional singer-songwriter start-up kit. But he'd prefer not to talk about his heavy history even if it would make you root for him. For one thing, he'd rather not relive some of the personal tragedy (a bad breakup, a house fire) that inspired his debut, Leave Ruin. But it also would obscure the otherworldly mythology he creates on Pope Killdragon, an astoundingly original twist on the loner-folk template.
He begins the mesmerizing "Sterling" like he's keeping an especially heavy secret, but Showalter is merely an observer and a confused one at that. If his lyrics are occasionally too loopy to pin down what it's "about," they're perfectly suited for an unreliable narrator trying to piece together lost time. In the darkly comic "Daniel's Blues", he inhabits Dan Aykroyd, racked with depression after the death of John Belushi. I won't spoil the ending, but it's by far the most pathos-laden song ever to recall the decision to take a role in Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, the spare "Alex Kona" is the stuff of Mastodon epics-- 12-foot monsters, sermons from the mount, mothers wailing in the streets-- and to drive that point home, it's immediately followed by "Giant's Despair", an honest-to-god doom-metal instrumental.
Those are the attention-grabbing tactics, but Pope Killdragon maintains these strange juxtapositions throughout: historical fact with whimsical fiction, a mournful delivery of absurd lyrics, an odd allure to the bifurcated sonics where synths sidle up with acoustic guitars. It's easy to envision the "next Bon Iver!" plaudits-- Showalter looks and sounds the part, but that would miss the deeper commonality. Auto-Tune, Gayngs, rolling spliffs with Rick Ross-- Justin Vernon has made the most of the spotlight by cutting against an image that requires him to continually hurt harder than others. Similarly, Pope Killdragon's playfulness and sense of humor allow it a broader range of emotion than the typical sadsack folkie. Showalter did a good deal of bloodletting on Leave Ruin, and now Strand of Oaks' horizons are limited only by his fantastical imagination. | 2010-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | eMusic | September 10, 2010 | 8.1 | a7caa808-7e90-46af-8059-399998bfa96b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The no-holds-bar rapper and producer weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce. | The no-holds-bar rapper and producer weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce. | Cakes da Killa: Muvaland Vol. 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cakes-da-killa-muvaland-vol-2-ep/ | Muvaland Vol. 2 EP | Muvaland Vol. 2, the second collaborative EP from Brooklyn rapper Cakes da Killa and house producer Proper Villains, starts with a bang: “This is for f**gots,” Cakes drawls before nary a rhyme has been spit. He repeats the statement again and again, in case you misheard it the first time. Then, about 30 seconds in, a pulsating beat drops, and Cakes unleashes his signature military-grade precision flow, which resides comfortably between Lil’ Kim’s confident snarl and Busta Rhymes’ full-chested bravado. The track in question, “Stoggaf,” sets the tone for what Vol. 2 is all about—unabashed club music, unrelenting lyricism, and attitude.
By his own admission, Cakes da Killa came up in the so-called queer hip-hop boom of the early 2010s, counting the likes of Zebra Katz, Mykki Blanco, and Le1f among his peers. In retrospect, the fervor around this purported scene seems misplaced—they were all very different artists with different destinies. At the same time, queer culture has shifted dramatically from a decade ago: Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race wouldn’t be snatching Emmys for years to come, giant corporations never mentioned Pride, and Gen-Z superstar Lil Nas X was still in grade school. While the recent mainstreaming has its pros and cons, Cakes now has the space to create something with his community in mind, decidedly shunning the hetero gaze.
Muvaland Vol. 2 isn’t just a house record with entertaining verses thrown on top—Cakes and Proper Villains deftly weave a tight tapestry of musical references that only hundreds of hours spent sweating to music by queer elders could produce. The intro to “What’s the Word” is reminiscent of a bitch track (a kind of shady diss record made popular in the ’90s ballroom scene), with Cakes exasperatedly coaxing a nameless friend into a night out (“Yeah, girl, what? Yo! Yeah, girl, just yeah. Girl? Girl!”). In Proper Villains, Cakes has found the type of collaborative partner who comes around once in a career. Villains’ nuanced dance production is the perfect romper room for Cakes to go crazy in, his incessant wordplay bouncing off the structure of booming bass and diamond-sharp hi-hats. “Lite Werk” is where their partnership shines the brightest. The beat is almost unsettling, shifting from muffled pounding to rimshots until the last minute when the music shifts tempo and drops into a clattering polyrhythm. It’s these moments that turn Vol. 2 into a statement and not merely a handful of fun club tracks. It’s about who’s at the club, why, where they’re from, and what they have to say.
The closing track, “Spinning,” changes the mood completely. A love song, it features vocals from Australian pop singer Sam Sparro, and for the first time in the EP’s 15 minutes, Cakes lets his guard down. Singing softly, “I’m sinking in sand, and I can’t feel my feet/I’m lost in your dance,” he sounds like he’s about to slo-mo death-drop into a lover’s arms. The song unlocks yet another facet of Muvaland Vol. 2: that when it’s all said and done, the comedown can be just as sweet as the build-up. These pair of Muvaland EPs started as quarantine projects, but within the canon of rap music, queer or otherwise, they will be remembered as the shift in Cakes da Killa’s career when it all came together—when both his persona and his talent went supernova.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | HE.SHE.THEY. | July 20, 2021 | 7.5 | a7ce43e1-e031-43d4-bd74-d32d1e0fde97 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The debut solo album from the 45-year-old, would-be rock’n’roll savior fails to match the charm of his cantankerous public persona. | The debut solo album from the 45-year-old, would-be rock’n’roll savior fails to match the charm of his cantankerous public persona. | Liam Gallagher: As You Were | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liam-gallagher-as-you-were/ | As You Were | Liam Gallagher was made for viral stardom. His flawless insults anticipated an era where celebrity reactions became shorthand for shade, and they’ve mostly been his internet currency until recently. Gallagher started promoting his debut solo album, As You Were, in a very early interview with Britain’s Q magazine last August. It wasn’t his jabs at older brother Noel (“that cunt”) that orbited Twitter, but signs of a more meditative outlook. “I was running on [Hampstead] Heath and I thought, ‘That looks like a nice tree, I’m going to climb that fucking tree,’” he said. “Climbed it and sat there with my hood up for about 10 minutes.” He reached peak dad malapropism back in August, referring to A$AP Rocky as “that bloke, WhatsApp Ricky.” More recently, his theory that real rock stars don’t make tea did big numbers, along with his approach to flying. “I just sit there and stare out the window,” he said. “Pure mind control, mate. I’m a Zen cunt, me.”
The promotional campaign for Gallagher’s solo debut has been going on for 14 months. When critiquing bands’ unwieldy album cycles has become a genre unto itself, it is borderline remarkable that nobody in their right mind would complain if the Liam Gallagher press tour went on forever, lighting up our timelines with a never-ending stream of the 45-year-old bon vivant’s observations on the beautifully mundane. We cannot all spend the afternoon getting drunk in the back of the butcher’s, as he does in that fairytale Q feature, but we can all climb a tree and mellow with age without forsaking our idiosyncrasies. Who really needs a Liam Gallagher solo album? How can you improve on perfection?
But given that rock’n’roll transformed Liam’s life, it’s not surprising that he takes his self-appointed role as its last protector very seriously, though his staunch commitment to Real Rock Music over the last 25 years makes As You Were an interesting contradiction. He’s always accepted his limitations as a songwriter, mostly singing Noel’s songs in Oasis or writing with former Oasis bandmates Gem Archer and Andy Bell in Beady Eye. But those are plausible Proper Band formations. About a third of As You Were was co-written with pop songwriter Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt and produced by Greg Kurstin. There are two songs with no Gallagher writing credit at all. The prospect of a strong Gallagher album—him at the peak of his powers, backed by songwriters who understand how to pair the best of him with punchy production—is tantalizing. But the diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.
As You Were starts promisingly enough. Lead single “Wall of Glass” is easily the record’s best song, cresting on a big, hairy harmonica blast that leers with intent. It’s as much of a hodgepodge as anything on 1997’s abrasively multi-tracked Be Here Now—a wall of guitar, gospel choirs, brass—but it leaves space for Gallagher’s voice to catalyze a snarl of disapproval into the belief that there’s something better just out of reach, that unique quality that’s let him outlast two decades of terrible albums after just two years of great ones. He briefly regains his vocal power here after several years of sounding utterly shagged. But it doesn’t last throughout the record: He sounds uncomfortable at higher tempos (“Greedy Soul,” “You Better Run”) and mawkish on syrupy numbers like “Bold,” a semi-acoustic apology for bad behavior that is neither contrite nor cocky. John Lennon died at 40; at 45, Gallagher has no vocal compass.
His lifelong musical preoccupations are laced through the record: Beatles grandeur (“Paper Crown”), T. Rex (“You Better Run”), self-referential Oasis nods (“For What It’s Worth” sounds like “Stand by Me”). But As You Were lacks direction and plays out as a series of inoffensive dirges. The rocking motion of the raucous “I Get By” makes it feel seasick, and “When I’m in Need” lumbers from stodgy prog madrigal to endless attempts at an ornate pay-off, none of which land. “Paper Crown” sounds like Cast, “Come Back to Me” like Radiohead, “Universal Gleam” uncannily like nemeses Blur’s “Tender”—an identity crisis if ever there was one. Aside from “Wall of Glass,” As You Were never convinces you of its reason to exist, and there’s little more purpose to be found in the lyrics.
Searching for clarity in a Liam Gallagher lyric is like looking for artistic depth in a coloring book, but a brief summary anyway: Everyone who’s ever let him down had better watch it, because they’re gonna get their just desserts, but when he apologizes, you best believe God is on his side. “In my defense all my intentions were good/And heaven holds a place somewhere for the misunderstood,” he shrugs on “For What It’s Worth.” Fine—imagine how pointless a humble Gallagher album would be. If he’s writing in his typical classic rock madlibs (“Angels, gimme shelter/‘Cause I’m about to fall/It’s all gone helter-skelter,” he swaggers on “You Better Run”), then his co-writers are having fun reassembling his greatest tropes as Gallagher fridge poetry.
It’s probably no coincidence that As You Were’s silliest song is also an unmitigated highlight. “Chinatown” was written entirely by Andrew Wyatt and Michael Tighe, who have an uncanny ear for Gallagher’s surrealist worldview. “Well the cops are taking over/While everyone’s in yoga/‘Cause happiness is still a warm gun,” rock’s best anorak-wearer drawls over a steady beat and soft finger-picked guitar. “What’s it to be free, man? What’s a European? Me, I just believe in the sun.” Fortunately, there’s little time to contemplate Gallagher’s searching inquiry into Britain’s post-Brexit identity as a huge, beautiful, meaningless chorus comes to blow it all away, just as it should.
After some impressively boilerplate material, the last few songs offer a tiny bit of insight into Gallagher’s sense of purpose on an unmemorable album. On “Come Back to Me,” he could be pulling himself back from the brink. The laconic “Universal Gleam” feels like his promise to keep on playing this role for fans, a middle-aged “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” about his ability to galvanize and reflect unheard lives (“I’ll help you fix your broken dreams/I’ll give you something you can shout about/I won’t ever let you down”). And although the gooey “I’ve All I Need” apparently takes its lyrics from inspirational quote montages (“Tomorrow never knows/The winds of change must blow”), as a tribute to his girlfriend’s unwavering support, it’s unusually vulnerable. As You Were isn’t, as Gallagher billed it last year, “chin-out” music. It’s more chin-up, a faltering effort from an artist whose voice continues to drown out his music. | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 5, 2017 | 4.9 | a7d3f8b1-ca04-4483-9db4-755d9ebe7ea8 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Despite its jacked-up end-times framing, the former Majical Cloudz singer’s third solo album mostly hews to the melancholy synth pop and emotional interrogations of his previous solo work. | Despite its jacked-up end-times framing, the former Majical Cloudz singer’s third solo album mostly hews to the melancholy synth pop and emotional interrogations of his previous solo work. | Devon Welsh: Come With Me If You Want to Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devon-welsh-come-with-me-if-you-want-to-live/ | Come With Me If You Want to Live | There’s no better time than the apocalypse to get jacked. That’s the none-too-subtle takeaway from the presentation of Devon Welsh’s third solo album, the threateningly titled Come With Me If You Want to Live. Welsh is lifting weights in every press photo; the garish album art exaggerates his muscles even further; the only thing in the way of a bio is a short story written by Welsh from the perspective of a journalist being shepherded around a hellscape called America 2 by a writer using the alias Max Paragon that looks like “Rambo meets Arnold, with a dash of Houdini.” Pre-release singles “You Can Do Anything” and “That’s What We Needed” mirror this burly chaos; their thunderous breakbeats are easily the loudest drums Welsh has ever sung over. But beyond the imagery, the imagined backstory, and those two singles, Come With Me If You Want to Live is a far less aggressive listen than it might seem, one that remains squarely within Welsh’s wheelhouse.
As the vocalist of the now-defunct project Majical Cloudz, Welsh radiated a deadly seriousness amid the duo’s lush, ambient-inspired soundscapes. “I’ve always dealt with revealing myself, and intimacy, and trusting people,” he said in a 2015 Pitchfork cover story. “It’s scary shedding those layers and saying, ‘This is who I am, this is how I feel.’” On the surface, Come With Me If You Want to Live’s thematic underpinnings suggest a departure from the brutally honest, autobiographical mode that persisted on Welsh’s previous solo outings, but his depictions of the end times—set to plaintive synth pop and dramatic, reverb-soaked vocals—still favor the hyper-personal, even the mundane.
The album’s lyrics are predominantly directed at friends and family, treating the wreckage outside less as an excuse to make sweeping declarations about the state of the world than a final chance to say what needs to be said to the people that matter most. There are songs titled “Brother” and “Sister.” “Before the Moon Was Full” is a misty-eyed, fatalistic look back at a romance that bloomed before the shit hit the fan. “Best Laid Plans” addresses Welsh’s late father: “Hey man I’d really love to see you/I feel so far away from you/I really miss you.” Even the angrier-sounding singles revolve around calls to action to those close to Welsh: “You Can Do Anything” argues for shrugging off the shackles of societal pressures, and “That’s What We Needed” advocates for stewing in your feelings.
Welsh kicked off his solo career with 2018’s Dream Songs, an album built around string-heavy live instrumentation provided by multiple collaborators, which starkly contrasted with Majical Cloudz’s spartan, synth-heavy palette. The following year’s True Love reverted back to the mean, and despite the aforementioned breakbeats, the bulk of Come With Me If You Want to Live could also be easily mistaken for Majical Cloudz material. As on True Love, Welsh is largely left to his own devices, with his plaintive baritone and penchant for moody atmospheres suggesting John Cale recording an album inspired by the Blue Nile’s late-night masterpiece Hats. The meditative second half of the album treats percussion as a form of sketchwork rather than a propulsive backbone, and wispy, reverb-laden synths serve as the sole melodic accompaniment to Welsh’s straight-faced vocals.
There are moments when this vibe serves the theme. The gothy “Fooled Again” reeks of appropriate desperation. “Twenty Seven” is an intriguing story about an aspiring musician that strikes an uncanny-valley connection between Welsh’s own trajectory and the dismal, not-so-fictional music-industry landscape that he lays out in the album bio. The scorched-earth intensity of the two lead singles was enough to prop up Come With Me If You Want to Live’s powerful, if slightly preposterous, fanciful backstory. If Welsh had continued to pursue that slight stylistic shift, the album might have pulled off an improbable balance between a pulpy sci-fi vibe and its creator’s gift for stoic realism. Instead, it’s a strangely somber Rambo reboot in which our muscular hero spends most of his time staring pensively out of rain-soaked windows.
Correction: An earlier version of this review erroneously stated that “Best Laid Plans” is about a friend; it is about Welsh’s late father. Also, it erroneously stated that the bio was written by Welsh; in fact, Max Paragon is a pen name for a different (unidentified) writer. | 2024-03-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | American Dreams | March 19, 2024 | 6.8 | a7d59713-da8d-413f-b065-334afa9ff670 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
Once a model who appeared on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire, the singer's debut is the first music she's ever shared with the world, having written in private for years. Sleeper evokes the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth, and has a disaffected air. | Once a model who appeared on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire, the singer's debut is the first music she's ever shared with the world, having written in private for years. Sleeper evokes the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth, and has a disaffected air. | Carmen Villain: Sleeper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17773-carmen-villain-sleeper/ | Sleeper | Carmen Villain's first single, "Lifeissin", was a placid ballad with something dark and evasive at its core: Over a faint glimmer of guitar, Villain murmured sour nothings about closing the blinds, going to hell, living in fear. Even the song's run-together spelling suggested something slurred from the corner of the mouth. Like R.E.M.'s "Perfect Circle", the song danced in the middle distance, defying you to twist the lens and sharpen its edges.
Carmen Villain, aka Carmen Hillestad, is a similarly blurry prospect: The fact that she was once a model, appearing on the cover of magazines like Vogue and Marie Claire, seemed to be the only available scrap of biographical information. One of few exceptions, an interview she posted to her own Facebook page, was conducted entirely in Swedish. Google Translate helped to extract a few intriguing morsels: She chose the stage name Villain to help distance herself from her modeling career. Her debut album Sleeper is the first music she's ever shared with the world, after writing in private for years. And much of the album, she said, "is about indifference, being in a kind of emptiness."
This foggy unease and blankness communicates itself everywhere on Sleeper, a frustratingly imperfect record that nonetheless holds onto the essential mystery that sparked my curiosity. It is gloomier than "Lifeissin", which surfaces through the murk here as a lone moment of clarity. Hillestad surrounds her bored, flat-as-earth vocals with a smeared wall of half-tuned guitars, evoking the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth. There are strong hints of bad drugs, and the unpleasant sensations that accompany them.
The songs with strong, legible vocal melodies carry themselves the best, transforming all of this disaffection and spiritual emptiness into something worth making your own. Hillestad has a knack for curdled, nursery-rhyme melodies, like the late-album highlight "Dreamo", which walks up and down the same four half-steps like someone humming to themselves. "They caught me staring out the window," she sings, a lifelong dysphoric on guard against another well-meaning intervention from the outside world. She hits this note repeatedly in her lyrics, which seem to regard regard human interactions through a thick pane of bulletproof glass. "People keep telling me, real life can be real nice," she sings on "Two Towns".
This noncommittal shrug occasionally prevents Sleeper from hitting harder. Without pushing further into her exploration of despair or sharpening her songwriting, Hillestad sometimes lets her music just sit there. Stretches of the album simply drift past, like the cut-and-paste interlude "Slowaway" or the six-minute drone piece "Obedience", during which there isn't much left to focus on save for the album's rich, reverb-heavy production. "What is love, but a second hand emotion?" Hillestad sings on the haunting "Dreamo", quoting a beloved Tina Turner line. In my attempts to gather some surrounding context, I ended up corresponding briefly with Hillestad, who told me the quote was a tribute to the lifting power of a memorable song. "That Turner lyric is a sort of reference to the type of cultural noise, for example heard through the radio, that could momentarily drag me out of the detachment I could quite often find myself in," she wrote. It's a neat object lesson in where she should go next: Music expressing detachment is easy, but music that addresses it requires some heavier lifting. | 2013-03-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-03-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | March 13, 2013 | 6.6 | a7d866d3-099a-4e1e-94ed-b313cc3c8c86 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, who Schoolboy Q has called a "human dictionary" and Kendrick Lamar "a wizardish genius," releases his exhilarating debut. | The least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, who Schoolboy Q has called a "human dictionary" and Kendrick Lamar "a wizardish genius," releases his exhilarating debut. | Ab-Soul: Control System | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16784-control-system/ | Control System | Here's what Schoolboy Q said about Ab-Soul, the least visible member of the Black Hippy collective, when I interviewed him for Self-Titled magazine last winter: "I write a line, and I bring it by him. He's like my actual human dictionary when I'm in the studio rapping." Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar told Andrew Noz something similar in last February's issue of The Fader: "When I first met [him] I thought he was a nerd. A nerdy, wizardish genius." These two aren't slouches in the eloquence or intellect departments: To hear them speaking with hushed reverence about Ab-Soul was interesting, to say the least.
Now here's Ab-Soul, speaking for himself, on the opening track to his resounding new full-length Control System: "Said I was the underdog/ Turned out I was the secret weapon." The album opens with a quote from Janet Jackson ("This is a story about control/ My control"), and Control System similarly feels like a young artist discovering his voice. Ab-Soul is the only member of Black Hippy from the suburbs (Carson, Calif.); he throws around terminology like "paradigm shift" in his lyrics. He is probably the member of Black Hippy who has spent the most time in a headlock. But Control System booms with self-possession and confidence. "I used to wanna rap like Jay-Z, now I feel I can run laps around Jay-Z," he tells us matter-of-factly on "ILLuminate", and I think of Lil Wayne explaining why he called himself "Best Rapper Alive" on Dedication 2: When you are busy mastering your craft, you should absolutely feel like you are the best at it in the universe. Ab's record is an exhilarating real-time document of that process.
All of the Black Hippy full-lengths are powerfully internal experiences: To spend time with Kendrick's Section.80 or Schoolboy's Habits & Contradictions is to walk around wearing that rapper's head on top of yours for a while. Wearing Ab's head proves to be a particularly intense experience: "You should see the shit in my cerebrum," he tells us on "Showin' Love", comparing his synapses to "lightning" at another point. Being an "actual human dictionary," Ab hasn't chosen these words lightly: His lyrics reel from wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing (at one point, Hitler's face appears in the burning Twin Towers) to egg-headed abstractions (Sumerians, Saturn, third eyes, Andromeda) to powerful, lucid observations. Ab sums it up neatly for us on "Track Two": "Just imagine if Einstein got high and sipped juice/ Broke rules, got pussy, beat up rookies on Pro Tools," he offers. Oh, sure, one of those.
This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group. There is a song called "SOPA" on Control System, named for the Stop Online Piracy Act; Ab-Soul includes a pointed lyric about Trayvon Martin in his verse. But the beat, which shudders and lurches like a dying car, will make you scrunch your face and jerk your limbs like you are suffering neurological crisis. Schoolboy Q is on the song, too, and he would like you to know that he fucked your girl.
The song "Terrorist Threats", meanwhile, is prefaced by an incendiary quote from the documentary Slavery By Consent about imprisonment through debt. The beat sounds like the world’s loneliest single-person ping-pong game, being played in an abandoned car garage. "If we could link up every gang/ And niggas is willin' to bear the pain/ We could put the White House lights out today," Ab-Soul barks, an echo of Dead Prez's "run up on them crackers on the White House lawn" call to arms. But what is that Jhene Aiko is coolly chanting in the background? A paraphrase on the "spit yo flow" hook from Jay-Z's "Nigga What".
Ab sees politics everywhere, even in the drink being mixed up in front of him ("Hennessy and coke, 1800/ We mixin' dark and light like the 1800s," he quips on "Bohemian Grove".) But politics are never all he sees. "Genius idiot, best description of myself," he raps on "Showin' Love", and over the hour-plus course of Control System, he touches, lightly, on almost everything: heartbreak, cockiness, righteous anger. On "The Book of Soul," he tells of being diagnosed with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, the origin of his unlikely nickname "Black Lip Bastard." On "Beautiful Death," he assures us that while we die as individuals, we will rise as a nation. On the song here actually called "Black Lip Bastard", he accuses other rappers of "eating yogurt in bed." By the time it's over, he still sounds like he's only getting warmed up. | 2012-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | June 5, 2012 | 8.1 | a7e149da-ec8a-4c0a-a5a4-77e727b4c1a5 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Chrystia Cabral gives her old highlights new studio arrangements, lending them the immediacy and clarity of live versions. | Chrystia Cabral gives her old highlights new studio arrangements, lending them the immediacy and clarity of live versions. | SPELLLING: SPELLLING & the Mystery School | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spellling-spellling-and-the-mystery-school/ | SPELLLING & the Mystery School | As SPELLLING, Chrystia Cabral dances the line between straightforward dream pop and aquatic, experimental electronic folk, creating music that both roils the soul and inspires whimsical daydreams. She expanded upon her tactile sound on 2021’s audacious The Turning Wheel, using rich instrumentation to animate her folkloric stories. Working with her touring band on new album SPELLLING & the Mystery School, Cabral reshapes previous album cuts with fresh arrangements, giving them the rhythmic, freeform feel of live versions. Her voice has never sounded better, even as some of the album makes you want to turn back to the delights of her charmingly shambling earlier work.
Most of the reworks clear away the originals’ hazy production and make drastic vocal changes. Whereas before Cabral could sound like she was singing from another room, here her voice is clear and concise, with vocals mic’d up close. Her more expressive, colorful tone on the new “Walk Up to Your House” adds a heightened sense of drama to the song’s hallucinatory lyrics. She also trades the song’s lurching synths for a trembling string section from the Del Sol Quartet, a San Francisco-based chamber group that embellishes Mystery School’s songs with subdued flourishes. They’re especially resonant on the update of Turning Wheel’s “Boys at School,” which opens with a theatrical prologue that gives one of SPELLLING’s most memorable songs new, rousing intention.
Throughout Mystery School, the murky synth chords and drum machines that define Cabral’s catalog are replaced with streaks of piano and violin and audacious guitar solos that complement her playful vocal delivery. While previously Cabral’s roaming melodies were occasionally lost beneath low-lit production, they are front and center throughout Mystery School, whether on the slow-burning, psych-rock deluge of “They Start the Dance,” the spartan, chilling “Cherry,” or the closing “Sweet Talk,” which starts at a barroom croon and escalates into a swinging, sweetened falsetto. These slight but meaningful makeovers make Mystery School a worthwhile endeavor, like listening in to Cabral rethinking her craft in real time.
Nonetheless, some songs on the album don’t quite have the same ghostly, evocative glow as the originals. The shuddering “Phantom Farewell” moves at the same crawling pace, only straying during a frantic, searing guitar solo that’s less climactic than its predecessor’s psychotropic, clattering synth stomps. The revised Mazy Fly highlight “Under the Sun” strips the song of its watery, implacable groove, leaving behind an overly histrionic recreation. Despite the occasional misstep, Mystery School overall succeeds in enhancing the most spellbinding aspects of Cabral’s music: her winding, changeable voice and unpredictable melodic left turns. | 2023-08-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | August 24, 2023 | 7.2 | a7e84636-5384-4784-a59a-3b011c3f0811 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius moves through grief in a profoundly moving and generous way on her spare debut as Bnny. | Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius moves through grief in a profoundly moving and generous way on her spare debut as Bnny. | Bnny: Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bnny-everything/ | Everything | The debut LP from the Chicago indie-rock band Bnny has the sound of an empty bedroom. Everything features a solitary lead electric guitar that gasps, reverberates thickly, and then deadens, as if resonating between walls recently stripped of room-softening decor. Jessica Viscius, the songwriter behind the project (and former Pitchfork graphic designer), barely allows her voice to vibrate above a whisper, like she’s committing song ideas to a recorder alone at night in a window-side chair. In the moments when her full band does show up to keep time or add some texture, they seem to materialize like a figment of her imagination that she can summon when she shuts her eyes. Multiple songs sound a lot like the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes.”
On those minimal characteristics alone, Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom. In September of 2017, Viscius’ former partner, Trey Gruber, died of an accidental overdose of heroin that was laced with fentanyl. Gruber was also a gifted musician who had formally released just one song and played only a few shows under the name Parent, but they were enough to ignite a rolling word-of-mouth buzz through the city about the soulful, wounded-sounding singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. After his passing, Viscius spent the next couple of years preserving Gruber’s recorded output alongside his mother, compiling and releasing the 25-song double LP Herculean House of Cards for Numero Group. With that chapter now closed, Viscius finally takes her turn to sing. Everything is a long-awaited debut that resembles a journal spanning five years, its first half consisting of songs written during her relationship with Gruber and its second half of ones after it. It is worth every year that went into it.
When Viscius first began writing songs, a waterlogged sound was emerging from Chicago indie-rock. A proudly lo-fi recording quality gave a satisfying wobble to both the wilting grace of Angel Olsen’s Half Way Home and the tinnitus-inducing crash of NE-HI’s self-titled debut. Some songs here bear the distinct markings of that mid-decade time and place: “Sure” takes notes from Olsen’s “Lights Out” but flips the idea from an encouraging nudge forward to resigned acceptance of a slow freefall. “Time Walk” is a masterclass in economy, barely running over 90 seconds but somehow rocking extremely hard through muted breath, nicely punctuated by a jagged, seven-second solo from Tim Makowski, who plays some fantastically cracked and frail lead guitar lines throughout the album. Seconds later, on “So Wrong,” his solo falls somewhere between Yo La Tengo’s “Today Is the Day” and a slowed-down sample of a cat groaning to its sleeping owner for breakfast. In sequence, they make for a binge-worthy three-song run.
But it’s the back half of Everything that reroutes its course from a restless exhibition of stripped-down songs to an affirmation of the will to press on. For all the album’s stillness, there’s not much tranquil about the place where Viscius was writing these final songs from, and collectively, they serve as a twofold love letter: they’re about Gruber, but also about the complicated love for his memory. She calls out to him by his name on “Dreaming” and finds peace in planting a flower and replacing a young life on “Little Flower.” Then, in a gutting final step, she ends the album with a voice recording of the two, slowly singing a song fragment together over three acoustic chords. It’s a vivid representation of the fleeting memories that she learns to live alongside on Everything, and a final moment for the two songwriters to sing together.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | September 7, 2021 | 7.5 | a7f1c50d-1edc-4e50-89d7-812181ab19b4 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Autechre have surprise-released nearly four hours of music, spanning five volumes. It is the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge, and it posits the duo as a sort of post-human jam band. | Autechre have surprise-released nearly four hours of music, spanning five volumes. It is the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge, and it posits the duo as a sort of post-human jam band. | Autechre: elseq 1-5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21950-elseq-1-5/ | elseq 1-5 | Arriving in a month thick with surprise album releases from A-listers like Beyonce, Drake, James Blake, and Radiohead, Autechre’s Elseq might not surpass its peers in terms of buzz or anticipation. But it has definitely got them beat in sheer volume. The five-part series—which was posted to the UK-based electronic duo’s webstore last week—adds up to more than four hours of music, out-clocking its peers by a significant margin. Taken at once, Elseq 1-5 is a mammoth hunk of listening, the IDM equivalent of a Netflix series binge. It is twice the length of Autechre’s last—and previously, lengthiest—album, 2013’s Exai.
Musically, the collection seems to advance the argument for Autechre as a sort of post-human jam band, with members Rob Brown and Sean Booth improvising at length within an opaque world of custom-designed music software. Free from the limitations of a physical format (there is currently no CD or vinyl release planned for Elseq), Autechre are free to sprawl and wander. And wander they do. Elseq 1-5 are as heady and frustrating as anything the duo have ever released. In some stretches, the music is glacial and serene (“eastre”). In others, the Brown and Booth’s violent squelches suggest machine-on-machine violence in the spirit of Survival Research Laboratories (“c7b2”). Absorbing the whole thing requires a bit of commitment. Or maybe it just takes a giant bag of weed and a lot of free time. Thankfully, Elseq is also available to purchase in installments.
Active since the late ’80s, Autechre’s early full-lengths—Amber, *Tri Repetae—*could be more clearly understood in the context of dance music, as the duo relied on similar hardware, like drum machines and analog synthesizers. Even still, their output has always embraced and amplified electronic music’s eerie otherness. “We had heard these Latin Rascals edits with these fast bits with drums that sounded weirdly robotic, taking electro into this other zone,” Booth told Thump last fall. “Half of the tracks that we do as Autechre are about recreating the actual sensations I used to get from those things—just getting post-human and next level.” As the years have passed, the duo’s music has become ever more idiosyncratic and abstract. The DNA of techno and electro are in there somewhere, but Booth and Brown have largely abandoned traditional melody and harmony in favor of raw sound design.
Elseq 1-5 is not Autechre’s first foray into download-only releases. 2008’s Quarstice was followed by a series of digital EPs that offered expanded and alternate mixes, which were often superior to that album’s edited material. Last year, the duo posted a series of nine recent live recordings of new material for sale online. An important part of Autechre’s identity has been the duo’s willingness to mess with its audience’s perceptions. A track might register as repetitive, yet never actually repeat itself. Another might repeat the same phrase for 20 minutes at a stretch. Other works have been so chaotic that it is nearly impossible to retain them in your memory.
The set’s second installment is the most extreme, with Booth and Brown delving into crunchy, headache-generating digressions in 10-minute chunks that will feel either exhausting or exhilarating. “eastre” kicks off the third grouping with nearly a quarter-hour of droning, unearthly string tones. Not all of it is engaging, but if you ever wondered what it would really mean for Autechre to take an uninhibited plunge into the weirdo void, now you have your answer.
Elseq feels like an advancement of the duo’s recent live sets, offering a similar ratio of rhythm to noise and order to chaos, but a richer palette of sounds. There aren’t a lot of melodies to be heard, but there are a number of distinctive tones and tricks—percussive thumps that sound like collapsing cardboard boxes, gritty woofer-busting bass tones. At the start of “pendulu hv moda” a reverb effect seems to move rapidly between wet and dry, spacious and tight, creating the dizzying sensation that space is expanding and contracting in time with the music. The best tracks land perfectly in the DMZ between the mechanical and musical. On “foldfree casual,” shimmering chords at first register as sentimental, but become more repetitive and emotionally vacant as they are pushed into the wings by jittery and alien rhythms.
As a live act, Autechre is pretty much without parallel. In concert, the duo’s music feels un-gridded and spontaneous in a way that few computer or drum machine-backed performers can manage. In its best stretches, Elseq seems like a document of this aspect of Booth and Brown’s process – the part that’s just two dudes taking pleasure in real-time collaborative music making. Which, in a way, might serve to deflate the futuristic vibe a little. All talk of robots and post-humanity aside, it’s hard to think of anything quite as earthly as a jam session. | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | May 28, 2016 | 7 | a7f5318e-60fe-48b8-bd0e-c796fa785d92 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
Newly reissued as a boxed set, the Smiths’ 1986 masterpiece still stands as an enduring testament to England in the ’80s, the complex relationship between performer and fan, and the ecstasy of emptiness. | Newly reissued as a boxed set, the Smiths’ 1986 masterpiece still stands as an enduring testament to England in the ’80s, the complex relationship between performer and fan, and the ecstasy of emptiness. | The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smiths-the-queen-is-dead/ | The Queen Is Dead | The “imperial phase” is a nifty concept coined by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys that describes the point in a pop performer’s career arc when they can do no wrong—that Midas-touch stretch when creative risks and commercial heights keep peaking. Signaled by its aptly regal name, The Queen Is Dead is when the Smiths crest into their own imperial moment. Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. For believers, the release of The Queen Is Dead in June 1986 proved that the Smiths were the greatest group in the world.
Trouble was, there weren’t that many believers in those days. Imperial in their own minds, the Smiths could never convince enough of the pop public to agree with them that they were the crucial group of their era. It’s now so commonplace to bracket the Smiths and the Beatles together that you forget just how marginal Morrissey and his minions were in their time.
Because they believed in the Top 40 as pop culture’s central arena, the Smiths reactivated the ’60s practice of releasing lots of non-album singles. But they never came close to dominating the chart like the Beatles or the Stones. After a flurry of good-sized hits at the start of their pop career, by 1985 their singles had fallen into a disappointing pattern. Fan sales would propel “How Soon Is Now,” say, or “Shakespeare’s Sister” into the lower middle of the chart—but then the single would quickly plummet, its rapid exit seemingly hastened by the group’s appearances on “Top of the Pops,” where Morrissey’s ungainly dancing felt mesmerizingly subversive to fans but grotesque to regular eyes.
Increasingly grandiose and paranoid, the singer alleged there was a conspiracy of radio silence to suppress his profoundly serious lyrical content in favor of the trite and trivial. “In essence, this music doesn’t say anything whatsoever,” he declared of the competition. “It’s an absolute political slice of fascism to gag the Smiths.” A month after the release of The Queen Is Dead, the quartet threw down the gauntlet with non-album single “Panic,” whose war-cry chorus proposed to “hang the blessed DJ” for constantly playing music that “says nothing to me about my life.” Along with the broadcast media, the band blamed its record company, Rough Trade, for a perceived weakness on the promotional front. Geoff Travis, sorely tried boss of the illustrious independent label, remarked waspishly that Morrissey seemed to believe “he had a divine right to a higher chart position.” His wording is revealing: Divine right is something possessed by kings and queens.
The conception of Morrissey as the unacknowledged ruler of pop—as a spurned savior who could restore to British music the urgency and relevance it had during punk—is one of the shadow implications of the title The Queen Is Dead, lurking behind its overt anti-royalism. On one level, the exhilarating blast of the title track is meant to be taken as the long-awaited sequel to “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols.
But if this is punk reborn, it’s a radically camp version of it, starting with the song’s name, which is borrowed from a section about a drag queen in Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. Rather than Johnny Rotten’s full-frontal assault on the “fascist regime,” Morrissey is impertinent, declaring himself a distant relation to the royal family and breaking into the palace only to engage in arch banter with Her Majesty. (The inspiration here came from a 1982 incident in which a mentally unbalanced man snuck into the Queen’s bedroom and chatted with her.) Morrissey further suggests to Prince Charles that it would be a lark if he cross-dressed in his mother’s wedding clothes and posed on the front page of the right-wing, royals-obsessed newspaper The Daily Mail. The absurdist fantasia of Morrissey’s lyric recalls the black comedies of ’60s gay playwright Joe Orton, in which every kind of conventional propriety is riotously inverted. But under the frivolity, there’s a plaintive seriousness to the lines about castration and being tied to your mother’s apron strings: Morrissey seems to identify with Charles, who’ll never become the man he’s meant to be until his mother finally kicks the bucket.
A complex allegory about arrested development on the individual and national level, “The Queen Is Dead” starts with a sample from The L-Shaped Room, one of those British black-and-white social realist films of the early ’60s that Morrissey adores. A middle-aged woman sings “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” a First World War ditty of patriotic homesickness. Nostalgia folded within nostalgia, the sample—even if intended as bitterly ironic—shows Morrissey’s fatal attachment to the past. Like Rotten in “God Save the Queen,” Morrissey knows there’s no future in England’s dreaming; the country will never move forward until it abandons its imperial legacy of deluded exceptionalism. But the outlines of a future Brexit supporter are already becoming clear.
From Prince’s “Controversy” to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do,” it’s always perilous when pop stars start to address their own position as public figures. Where “The Queen Is Dead” is the sort of Big Statement a band makes when it acquires a sense of its own importance, “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” is one of a group of full-blown meta-songs on the album. Morrissey appeals to the sympathy of his disciples by lamenting the far larger number of indifferent doubters out there: “How can they hear me say those words still they don’t believe me?” There is a hint of reveling in the martyr posture in “Bigmouth Strikes Again” too, what with its references to Joan of Arc going up in flames. It doubles as both a relationship song and a commentary on Morrissey as the controversialist forever getting in trouble for his caustic quips and sweeping statements.
“Frankly, Mr. Shankly” is petty as meta goes: At the time, nobody but a handful of music industry insiders could have known that it’s a mean-spirited swipe at Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis. What’s more interesting now is Morrissey’s admission of his insatiable lust for attention—“Fame fame fatal fame/It can play hideous tricks on the brain”—but nonetheless he’d “rather be famous than righteous or holy.” Couched in a jaunty music-hall bounce, the song also serves as a preemptive justification of the Smiths’ decision to break with Rough Trade for the biggest major label around, EMI.
The cleverest of the meta-pop Smiths songs of this period, though, can be found on this reissue’s second disc of B-sides and demos. Originally the flipside to “Boy With the Thorn,” “Rubber Ring” gets its name from the life-preservers you find on ships. Although his songs once saved their lives, Morrissey anticipates his fans abandoning him as they grow out of the maladjustment and amorous ineptitude in which he will remain perpetually trapped. The empty young lives will fill up with all the normal sorts of happiness, he predicts, and the Smiths records will be filed away and forgotten. “Do you love me like you used to?” Morrissey beseeches, as if he’s actually in a real romance with each and every one of his fans, acutely aware of the perversity and impossibility at work in pop’s psycho-dynamics of identification and projection.
Two other loose categories could be formed out of the songs on The Queen Is Dead: Beside the meta, there’s the merry and the melancholy. Despite the morbid (and misspelled) title, “Cemetry Gates” is sprightly and carefree. Even though they’re strolling among the gravestones quoting poetry at each other to show how intensely they feel the sorrow of mortality, the life-force is strong in these precocious youngsters. As so often with Morrissey, the frissons come with the tiny quirks of unusual word-choice or phrasing—the little jolt of the way he pronounces “plagiarize” with an incorrect hard “g,” for instance. Featuring the album’s second instance of cross-dressing, “Vicar in a Tutu” is a slight delight with just a casual twist of subversiveness in a passing reference to the priest’s kinky antics being “as natural as rain”: This freak is just as God made him. Almost cosmic in its insubstantiality, “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” seemed at the time an anticlimactic ending to such an Important Album. Now I think the understatement is just right, rather than the obvious curtain-closer, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—the glide and glisten of Marr’s playing on “Some Girls” is that never-fading light.
And then there’s the life-and-death serious stuff. Both songs of unrequited love, “I Know It’s Over” and “There Is a Light” make a pair: The first spins majesty out of misery, the second transcends it with a sublime and nakedly religious vision of hope-in-vain as an end in itself. The writing in “I Know It’s Over” is a tour de force, from the opening image of the empty—sexless, loveless—bed as a grave, through the suicidal inversions of “The sea wants to take me/The knife wants to slit me,” onto the self-lacerations of “If you’re so funny, then why are you on your own tonight?” and finally the unexpected and amazing grace of “It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” Not a strong or sure singer by conventional standards, Morrissey gives his all-time greatest vocal performance, something ear-witness Johnny Marr described as “one of the highlights of my life.”
As for “There Is a Light”—if you don’t tear up at the chorus, you belong to a different species. The scenario involves another doomed affair, a love (and a life—Morrissey’s) that never really started. But here Morrissey hovers in an ecstatic suspension of yearning that becomes its own satisfaction, an emptiness that becomes a plenitude. The greatest of his many songs about not belonging anywhere or to anyone, it so very nearly tumbles into comedy (and there are those who’ve laughed) with the melodramatic excess of its image of the double-decker bus and the romantic entwining-in-death of the not-quite-lovers. But the trembling sincerity of “the pleasure, the privilege is mine” keeps it on the right side of the gravity/levity divide in the Smiths songbook.
Marginally more robust and shiny than the last time it was remastered, this new Queen comes with a couple of extra discs and a DVD that contains a promo directed by British filmmaker Derek Jarman. The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards. “Never Had No One Ever,” the album’s one real dud, is enhanced by an unlikely trumpet solo and some strange moaning from Moz. Elsewhere, you hear the singer trying out different word-choices and phrasings: The demo of “I Know It’s Over” lacks the “oh, mother” address and its bed is “icy” not “empty.” For those who like that sort of thing, there’s a live album, recorded in Boston in August 1986. Having seen them twice in their quasi-imperial prime, I never thought the Smiths were that potent as a live band: The delicate flower of Marr’s playing fared better in the studio, Morrissey’s voice strained to compete with amplified music, and the electricity came mostly from the audience’s ardour.
Being a Smiths fan during the band’s actual lifetime felt like an aesthetic protest vote signaling your alienation from both the ’80s pop mainstream and the political culture it reflected. As that context drops away with the passage of the decades, what endures is the peal of exile in Morrissey’s voice, a timeless plaint of longing and not-belonging. Without Morrissey’s tart wit and strange mind, Marr can be merely pretty, as shown by the instrumental B-sides of this era. Equally, without Marr’s beauty, Morrissey can be unbearable (as much of his post-Smiths career bears out). But when Morrissey’s sighs are caressed by Marr’s serene, synthesized strings on “There Is a Light,” or when the singer’s wordless falsetto flutters amid the guitarist’s golden cascades in “Boy with the Thorn,” there’s something miraculous about the way their textures mesh. It’s a great musical tragedy that barely a year after releasing The Queen Is Dead, this odd couple went their separate ways, for reasons that still feel not fully explained. These boys were made for each other—and surely deep down they still know it. | 2017-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 22, 2017 | 10 | a7f7da02-1240-4537-905a-95bbfd4b43e2 | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | |
Drawing on the sounds of ’90s Eurodance and classic rock’n’roll, these six songs are light, lush, and streaked with melancholy. | Drawing on the sounds of ’90s Eurodance and classic rock’n’roll, these six songs are light, lush, and streaked with melancholy. | Mykki Blanco: Postcards From Italia EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mykki-blanco-postcards-from-italia-ep/ | Postcards From Italia EP | It took Mykki Blanco years to bloom into their current arc. After almost a decade of putting out raucous, multi-modal hip-hop collections, the artist’s sound softened and brightened for 2021’s Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep. The LP that followed, 2022’s gorgeous, guest-spangled Stay Close to Music, deepened Blanco’s range even further. Joined by the likes of Saul Williams, Ah-Mer-Ah-Su, and Anohni, Blanco luxuriated in introspection, juxtaposing playful club romps like “Ketamine” with clear-eyed musings on queerness, Blackness, and femininity, like “Carry On” and “Your Feminism Is Not My Feminism.” Their latest release, Postcards From Italia, features six songs recorded in the same rush as their past two albums, continuing their prismatic collaboration with producer FaltyDL. Clocking in at just 16 minutes, Postcards is light, lush, and streaked with intermittent melancholy. It hits like a breeze on a top-down drive along the Mediterranean coast.
With bright, crisp guitars and shuffling beats, Postcards edges closer to classic rock’n’roll than Blanco’s ever taken us before, replete with the genre’s originating burst of sexual delight. Opener “Magic on My Back” layers multiple eras of rock’s historical resonance. A Bo Diddley guitar strum flowers over a wobbling bass line that immediately summons up Lou Reed’s tribute to the trans girls of 1970s New York, “Walk on the Wild Side,” itself a warm but muted rehash of 1950s rock’n’roll ingredients. And then, at the fore of the mix, a punchy kick-snare drum pattern calls in “Wild Side”’s 1990 reinvigoration as a sample in the hands of A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” All those decades coalesce to set the stage for one of Blanco’s most joyful, exuberant tracks to date, a song about sex so good the whole world floods with pleasure. “You do it slow/Can’t help but smile,” they sing on two simultaneous vocal tracks, playing both the smooth, sultry backup singer and the charismatic, off-the-cuff bandleader.
Darker, more ambivalent notes waft through the middle of the EP, though the production’s sheen never dulls. Across a handful of mostly bite-sized tracks, Blanco considers all the ways people can fall out of synch with each other, even while standing in the glow of real love. The twinkling R&B ballad “Love Fell Down Around Me” renders a breakup through precise, tactile details: “Your tears on blue jeans/My coffee on the living room floor.” On the hazy, psychedelic “Just a Fable,” Blanco sings about kissing a tearful white lover in the midst of the 2020 uprisings after the killing of George Floyd. "It was a fable of the city/It was a fable of the U.S.A.," they sing over a bounding bass line. The vignette collapses and expands its scale from thousands of people in the streets to two people in a room and back again—intimacy huddled inside a world-historical movement, ballooning to the size of myth.
The EP’s closing bookend “Holidays in the Sun” spikes the BPM to a club pulse. William Eaves’ production calls back to the blunt abandon of flash-in-the-pan Eurodance acts like Haddaway and La Bouche, whose maximal sound ricocheted back to the United States with comic frisson during the mid-’90s. Blanco’s pitch-shifted voice swings across the song’s title in a repeatedly triggered sample; on the verses, they curl their consonants to affect a country drawl. Blanco has always approached their vocals with a generous sense of play, quick to don and shed exaggerated characters on a dime, and their Eurodance persona is no different. “I believe in love and I believe in going hard,” they proclaim over the dance floor in a hypnotic Sprechstimme. The beat throbs, incessant, leading all the loose threads and fractured hearts throughout the EP to sweet release. | 2023-09-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-25T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Transgressive | September 25, 2023 | 7.1 | a7f99927-60e2-4864-9c72-7a6a7cbec9c8 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
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 1969 album that provided a pioneering experimental composer with his own scales and instruments to make music that elevated stories from the fringes of American life to mythological status. | 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 1969 album that provided a pioneering experimental composer with his own scales and instruments to make music that elevated stories from the fringes of American life to mythological status. | Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-partch-the-world-of-harry-partch/ | The World of Harry Partch | The world of Harry Partch was a difficult one. Over the first three-quarters of the 20th century, he moved through it mostly sick and broke, with little sustained attention and even less money paid to his extraordinary world-building. Out of step with the various artistic movements his work would prefigure or refuse, the pioneering experimental composer was mostly viewed as too arcane, too complicated…too much. In truth, he was one of American music’s great inventors: of entirely new scales; of massive, sculptural instruments whose material and form looked back to antiquity and toward nuclear war; of a way of singing he felt more accurately replicated the rise and fall of everyday American speech.
And of ways to thwart himself: He drank excessively, and frustrated friends and patrons alike with his combination of ambition and self-defeat. He died in 1974, in unrequited love with a young man who was working on a documentary about him that was supposed to change it all. (That shuddering sound you just heard was a thousand gay men in ecstatic melancholy at the prospect of such a fate.) Partch left a body of work that is extremely difficult to perform or otherwise reproduce, because it requires the use of his custom-made instruments and the highly specialized knowledge of how to play them. For a long time, the world barely seemed to notice.
Five years before Partch’s death, in the July 12, 1969, issue of Rolling Stone, Columbia Records ran an ad for a compilation called The World of Harry Partch. The album’s cover showed him silver-haired and tucked into a dapper plaid shirt, surrounded by his instruments and staring down the viewer. “That’s why this album will shock you,” the ad copy proclaimed in bold letters. It seemed as much a dare as a promise, a bet that the same rock-oriented audiences getting their minds blown that year by the bohemian Moondog’s self-titled album and Terry Riley’s synth-bliss A Rainbow in Curved Air just might dig this avant-garde composer as well. The World was a strange choice for appealing to Rolling Stone’s rock-oriented audience, no matter how thoroughly the exploding psychedelic movement had primed them for musical exploration.
There is a shivery, side-long interpretation of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, set to marimba arpeggios in an ever-changing rhythmic meter. On the flip, “Barstow - Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions From A Highway Railing At Barstow, California” roams for 10 minutes, its instruments sounding like massive motorized Slinkys gunning their engines and looking for adventure, while men sort of yodel and scat and intone personals messages that Partch found scrawled on a roadside in his years of transient life.
The final track is perhaps the album’s most challenging: The 16-minute “Castor & Pollux - A Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini from Plectra & Percussion Dances” incorporates what might strike American ears as kind of sonic Chinoiserie, with drums and bells and strung instruments doing little duets with each other, one playing rhythm and the other playing melody—now, switch. The music might be exotic but it is decidedly not exotica. Every now and then, it might make one think of a Looney Tunes character tiptoeing or scrambling their legs, but Partch was very serious, if not without a wit. The songs didn’t seem to care if you listened to them or not, but if you did, they’d reveal what can be found when you follow your muse past all rhyme and reason: a world of glittering echoes, both decadent and punk in its own way, born of intellectual sweat and flamboyant rigor.
Partch was born in 1901 to a pair of Christian missionaries who had just returned to the United States from China and soon settled in the remote Arizona desert, driven there by the father’s new job in the federal immigration department and the mother’s tuberculosis, which the dry climate helped to mitigate. In his 1949 book explaining his musical theories and instruments called Genesis of a Music, he recalled that “my first and most poignant aural memories are the whistles of the trains which ran across that valley, from one mountain range to the opposite range.” From the start, his world was an instrument.
The family moved to Phoenix, then Albuquerque. The young Partch gave himself an informal education in global music via Edison cylinder recordings: “Hebrew chants, Chinese theater, and Congo ritual,” he later recalled. As a teenager, he found work playing mechanical organs during silent movies, and another job delivering prescriptions on his bicycle, with many orders going to the sex workers in Albuquerque’s red light district, who became his friends. He soon began composing for the piano. He also realized he was homosexual. After his father died three months before he graduated from high school, Partch moved to Los Angeles and began studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Music, its fealty to European classical music bored him. A year after he arrived, his mother came to see him and was killed by a trolly.
As detailed in musicologist Bob Gilmore’s empathetic, authoritative Harry Partch: A Biography, Partch quickly left the academy, and Los Angeles, heading north to San Francisco to teach himself music theory at the city’s libraries. One book, a foundational text on human perception of sound called Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz, enthralled him. So did a young actor named Ramon Novarro, with whom Partch took up until Novarro’s career pushed him back into the closet. Partch may not have had another love affair in his life, though he was certainly not celibate.
Mostly, though, his energy seemed to have gone into rejection. He rebuffed the classical music world as stuffy and pretentious. He renounced the traditional European system of dividing the octave into twelve equally spaced pitches as an arbitrary constraint—“twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom,” he later called it—and researched an older tuning system known as just intonation, which could more purely replicate the simple ratios between frequencies that occur naturally in pitched sounds, and had been used by ancient Greek and Chinese composers. Eventually, he rigged up a viola to compose similarly, the first of many one-of-a-kind instruments. Finally, just before turning thirty, he burned everything he’d ever written on a stove in New Orleans. It was time to build something new.
In May of 1944, the New Yorker published an account of a recent performance at Carnegie Hall by a “pale bachelor who in June will be, as he puts it, the same age as the tones in his scale.” Now forty-three, Partch and his musicians had performed a quartet of compositions on a series of contraptions he’d developed over the years: that “adapted viola”; a “chromelodeon,” or adapted harmonium; and, most distinctively, Partch's take on a Greek instrument called a kithara, with 72 strings and a set of sliding glass rods used for tuning. All of them were tuned according to a complex system Partch developed which allowed for 43 distinct pitches, as opposed to the standard 12. Partch would become America’s foremost proponent in the esoteric field of just intonation and alternate tuning systems more generally. The rising stateside popularity of Indian music in the late ’60s, thanks to crossover artists like Ravi Shankar, might have helped adventurous American ears adjust to the sound of just intonation by the time of The World of Harry Partch’s release. But in 1944, per the New Yorker, the audience was bemused at best.
They were also put off by his singing voice, and perhaps what he was singing about. Despite some funding from the Guggenheim and the Federal Writers’ Project, Partch had spent the 1930s mostly homeless, riding trains around the Western U.S. in search of work. Instead, he found a community of men in similar straits, who looked to each other for friendship and sex as they tried to make their mark on the world. At Carnegie Hall, Partch performed “Barstow,” which would later appear on The World, and used graffiti he’d seen on California highway railings during those hobo days as its lyrics. Some of the messages are heartbreaking in their specificity: “It’s January 26. I’m freezing. Ed Fitzgerald. Age nineteen, five feet ten inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston, Massachusetts. It’s 4 p.m., and I’m hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.” Others are ribald: “Looking for a millionaire wife. Good looking, very handsome, intelligent, good bull thrower, etc. All you have to do is find me, you lucky woman. Name’s George.”
Partch sang, and spoke, in tune with his instruments, with a vocal presence somewhere between musical theater exposition, rap, and the deceptive plain talk of later performance artists like Laurie Anderson. “He believes that with his forty-three-tone scale, he can duplicate the tones of human conversation,” the New Yorker said, then added with a touch of dry condescension: “He made a pretty good stab at this.”
“Barstow” eventually grew into an epic, multi-part work Partch called The Wayward. In a better world, it would have been heralded as a sort of Americana amalgamation of The Rite of Spring and Grapes of Wrath, with a bit of Our Town mixed in. But because it could only be performed on his cumbersome instruments like the Boo (bamboo marimba), which were expensive to ship, it was hard to stage and impossible to tour. Few ever heard it. Typically, Partch reacted to these difficulties by going even bigger. By 1952, he’d made a great leap forward with “Castor & Pollux,” one of three pieces comprising a work called Plectra and Percussion Dances written for even larger iterations of the kithara; various custom marimbas; and the terrifically-named Harmonic Canon II, which looks to be something between a pedal steel guitar and a dulcimer, and produces a metallic uproar when played.
One day, Partch visited the radiation labs at the University of California, Berkeley, which were investigating cosmic rays by cutting discs out of large Pyrex jugs and running particles around them. Partch took the discarded tops and bottoms of the jugs, resized them so they produced his desired tones when struck by soft mallets, and then suspended them via ropes across a seven-foot wood frame. He called these instruments Cloud-Chamber Bowls, and they produced bell tones both hellish and heavenly. In “Castor & Pollux,” their ringing announces the arrival of Zeus in the form of a swan, and also soundtracks a swarming of sperm around an egg. Even in its abbreviated form on The World, “Castor & Pollux” shudders with immense, erotic violence.
If listening to Partch’s music could be difficult, realizing it as a performer could be brutal. He had lately hit upon a notion he called corporeality, a unifying idea that intertwined the practices of playing instruments, dancing, and acting. The musicians who first had to learn how to play his wild musical inventions also had to be dancers and actors. For live performances of “Castor,” they were tasked with conveying, with movement and spoken word, his take on the Greek and Roman myth of a pair of twins conceived by different fathers who eventually became the constellation Gemini, while also playing the demanding music. Partch asked much of himself, too. For decades, he’d been scrambling to record these herculean efforts on vinyl, even starting his own labels to sell them directly to those listeners who were able to find him. In Partch’s world, everyone had to do everything.
Partch seemed destined for cult status. Sure enough, the underground came calling, though not always with fruitful results. Kenneth Anger asked Partch to soundtrack his 1954 queer occult fantasia Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, but Partch, who trusted almost no one and wasn’t about to start with the likes of Anger, never sealed the deal. A proposed collaboration with modern-dance titan Martha Graham kept falling apart due to their inability to communicate. More fortunately, he composed a major work about witches, The Bewitched, and in trying to get it produced met Danlee Mitchell at the University of Illinois, who went on to be his longtime conductor, confidant, and heir. By 1966, he’d produced six more major works, each bigger in staging and instrumentation than the last. But he was drinking more, and the university residencies he began earning often went unrenewed when his uncompromising attitude didn’t produce the easy results the institutions were after. He needed a break, and The World of Harry Partch should have been his big one.
One day in 1969, the curious and the cognoscenti alike lined up down the block outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had invited Partch for a pair of performances and an exhibition of his instruments—though, Gilmore notes, the museum didn’t pay enough to cover shipping them or travel for their thirteen expert players. The assembled watched him and his troupe play his Gourd Tree, his radiating Cloud-Chamber Bowls, and the Spoils of War, which he’d made in 1950 of Pernambuco wood, steel springs, and brass shell casings, and required the players to keep different kinds of mallets in each hand and use them simultaneously. This is the genesis of The World of Harry Partch: with instruments and players at the ready, Partch booked a studio with Mitchell as conductor and recorded three compositions. The back cover of the album shows handsome men at work, striking and stroking objects of uncommon beauty to produce unsettling sounds that fill the empty space with temporal signals, like a train whistle between the mountains.
Shockingly, the world didn’t come around to Harry Partch upon the album’s release. He made one last work, 1972’s horny, crepuscular The Dreamer that Remains–A Study in Loving, to soundtrack a documentary about him made by Stephen Pouliot, the young filmmaker with whom he had fallen into unrequited love. With its cruising men and corpse choirs, it’s one hell of a swan song. Two years later, Partch would die of a heart attack in San Diego, unmoored and impoverished. He left his vast archive of manifestos, musical instruments, and mementos to Mitchell, who has found various homes for them at institutions across the country and kept the Harry Partch Ensemble playing them. In 2015, the German group Ensemble Musikfabrik performed his work at Lincoln Center on their extensive recreation of Partch’s instruments, with the blessing of Dr. Charles Corey, the director of the Harry Partch Music Institute at the University of Washington, which holds many of the originals. They and others are managing the tricky business of keeping Partch in our ears.
Back in his 1949 book Genesis of a Music, Partch wrote: “And every lonely child builds worlds of his own, both with objects and in fantasy, a dozen a year, or even a dozen a day.” The World of Harry Partch remains an incomplete but inspiring portal to the world of a prodigious talent, a man who grew up on the outskirts of America and stayed there. No single recording could sum him up. But these moments sound furiously, fearlessly of themselves. They’re proof, maybe more welcome now than when Partch was alive, that even a man not at home in this world can nonetheless build new ones of his own. | 2024-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Columbia | March 17, 2024 | 9 | a8022f9f-6b17-45d8-891f-84dd8943309c | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The teenage newcomer’s latest EP is a maximalist maelstrom of frothy hi-hats and hazy synths. It contains flashes of brilliance, but sometimes falls back on cheap imitation. | The teenage newcomer’s latest EP is a maximalist maelstrom of frothy hi-hats and hazy synths. It contains flashes of brilliance, but sometimes falls back on cheap imitation. | che: Crueger EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/che-crueger-ep/ | Crueger EP | In a studio vlog from 2022, rapper-producer SEBii is gobsmacked as he talks to the comparatively reserved 16-year-old che. He reflects giddily on the “new genre” they’ve created with “euphoria,” one of che’s first songs to break through the SoundCloud rap underground. (Spongebob narrator voice: It wasn’t a new genre.) The track is still incredible: tactile and minimal, built on shards of digital glass. It offered a respite from the blaring rage beats that everybody was hopping on after Playboi Carti dropped Whole Lotta Red and LA-via-Portland rapper Yeat forged a real path to stardom in this lane.
A year later, che has all but abandoned that stripped-back brand of hyper-rap, exploring a maximalist and orchestral sound with producer Natecxo. The songs on his Halloween EP Crueger continue the creative partnership established on last summer’s dizzying album closed captions. These are frothy geysers of hi-hats and synth work, and che’s voice is the glowing orb that guides you through the haze. You’ll catch a decent line here and there, but his approach is less about bars, more about texture—hitting a turn of phrase like that. When he weaves his vocals through the laser beams of “Badu,” he sometimes disappears in the storm, but his punched-in melodies are so fluid and hypnotic that it doesn’t really matter. In the studio, che will hunch over a laptop with the mic next to him and engineer himself meticulously to achieve this level of detail, one hand on the mouse as he raps, a smattering of presets smeared on his vocals.
Peep the original artwork for Crueger, a clear homage to Chief Keef’s Dedication, and it might start to make sense: che is just another teenage Sosa disciple, pushing the Chicago rapper’s atmospheric and electronic hits into wall-of-sound territory. Unlike the glut of producers emailing Keef-type “glo” beats to Summrs and Sexyy Red, Natecxo and che go for something riskier behind the boards, often just by cranking everything up. See the bombastic “Sayso,” which throws a marching band stomp into a maelstrom of melodies; the blooming organ and bass is turned up to speaker-detonating levels, like one of those DMV rap beats from hell. On the following track, “Busan,” che’s vocals—submerged under big, blocky bass—struggle to come up for water, but the payoff is the swathe of chaotic, button-mashed filters at the end. It’s head-spinning music, for better or worse.
che has a shrill, lean voice that helps him land his more ambitious melodic moments (the soaring “Right Now”). He’s got the formal technique down to a science, but you only wish that some of Keef’s raw charisma rubbed off on him, too. At his most creatively deficient, he tends to lapse into straight Sosa karaoke with none of the swag. See, for example, “Gah Damn,” which is powered by a dazzling hi-hat barrage reminiscent of the 4NEM cut “See Through.” That song was great because Keef was funny and menacing; the chaos of “Gah Damn” doesn’t feel earned, just like cheap imitation. “Call Me” is a Thot Breaker-type dancehall song, but that only worked for Keef because he did an unhinged “No Scrubs” interpolation. che’s song, by comparison, is stiff and aimless, crunching up any of its island breeziness like dead leaves.
Even when the biting is blatant, there’s something beautiful about Keef being a bottomless well of inspiration for so many rappers of this generation, with still more flows and concepts to discover. When che and Natecxo successfully experiment with those ideas, they arrive at a cavernous, claustrophobic sound that, like the young artist’s breakout hits, feels a few degrees weirder and more adventurous than the new vanguard of online rap. | 2023-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-14T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 14, 2023 | 6.5 | a80cf8ae-d2da-4747-9d99-4150faa1d5e0 | Mano Sundaresan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mano-sundaresan/ | |
The Tucson duo traveled to New Orleans to record its latest album, named for a neighborhood on the southwest banks of the Mississippi River, home to krewe dens, Catholic churches, jazz clubs, and Katrina-flooded homes. | The Tucson duo traveled to New Orleans to record its latest album, named for a neighborhood on the southwest banks of the Mississippi River, home to krewe dens, Catholic churches, jazz clubs, and Katrina-flooded homes. | Calexico: Algiers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17033-algiers/ | Algiers | Geography has always played a big role in Calexico's music, even back when they were apprenticing with Howe Gelb in Giant Sand. Since going duo in the 1990s, Joey Burns and John Convertino have evoked the Southwest United States in heady, careful detail-- not only in sad stories about border crossers, doomed drivers, and restless wanderers, but in slyly adventurous music that combines Latin American traditions with North American rock'n'roll sounds. Impossibly, they showed such a keen facility with those styles and such a commitment to that sound-- and, by virtue, to that place-- that these two gringos never came off as exploiters or tourists. So it makes sense that Calexico would be involved in immigration reform efforts: For one thing, how could you live with yourself in Arizona and not be involved? For another, their music has proved that the borders between styles can be as blurrable, as mutable, as porous as those separating countries and cultures.
Burns and Convertino have recorded nearly every Calexico release at their WaveLab Studio in Tucson, which has proved popular with acts like Amos Lee and Neko Case as well. They've been so associated with those concentric locales-- the studio within the city within the state within the region within the country-- that it seems especially significant that they chose to record their latest album, Algiers, elsewhere. The duo, along with producer Craig Schumacher, trekked east across New Mexico and Texas and set up shop in perhaps the most storied and tragic city in the United States: New Orleans. The album is named for a neighborhood on the southwest banks of the Mississippi River, home to krewe dens, Catholic churches, jazz clubs, and more than a few Katrina-flooded homes.
It doesn't sound like they left Tucson at all, which is slightly disappointing but which might actually be their deftest trick: Algiers carries very little of the city's baggage. No one is going to argue for this as a post-Katrina album (or even a post-Isaac album). There are watery allusions peppering these songs, as when Burns exhorts, "Take it all the way down/ below the water line," on first single "Para", but that has more to do with burying the past than reviving it. There's something refreshing about this approach, as it opens up the city to new ideas and new moods and new meanings, placing that horror into a larger historical continuum.
On the other hand, if place defines Algiers as much as that album title signals, it must have done so in the creative process, as these songs never sound too far removed from Tucson or from the raft of Calexico's catalog. On one hand, there are no Mardi Gras trinkets on this album, no street bands or zydeco flourishes, no Quintron or Trombone Shorty or Dr. John, no hoodoo charms or Saints gear. Burns and Convertino went east to make another western record, one that even indulges Spanish-language lyrics and songs about sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl ("Puerto" may be the most overcooked thing Burns and Convertino have set to tape). Algiers sounds great, with a noticeable sensitivity to instrumental interplay and an emphasis on Burns' conspiratorial vocals, but the album is haunted by the missed opportunities to absorb the particulars of this neighborhood and reflect that in the music.
What we're left with, after a few spins have dispersed expectations, is another solid Calexico record, impeccably conceived and imaginatively crafted. Such consistency may gnaw at any excitement over a new installment from the band, which means Algiers never sounds quite as momentous or as immediate as 2003's Feast of Wire or even 2008's Carried to Dust. But that may only be a way of saying that the record demands more time and more spins before it burrows into your head. There are certainly enough moments to hook your interest: the dissonant cascade of strings that ends "Para" and hints so vividly at something horrible; those lovely ghost vocals on "Fortune Teller"; the sparkling tango theme on "Sinner in the Sea" that rises into a tense and fractious crescendo.
Opener "Epic" even manages to live up to its title, beginning with a single, steady, insistent acoustic strum that just hangs in the middle air, suggesting a kind of weightless motion-- as though Burns and Convertino were positioning the listener just out of the way of song's action. It's a sound and technique they've used on nearly every Calexico album, and as such it's become instantly recognizable as Calexico. While it may sound familiar, it's nevertheless effective, ushering you you into the world of this album. And ultimately, it is a different world from those evoked on previous albums, one thoroughly shaken by the tectonic cello rumble that undercuts the violent squalls of electric guitar. Perhaps this is the power of New Orleans working on a musically subatomic level, determining decisions made just out of earshot. The result is an album that never sounds settled or still, defined not by one or another place but by the tumultuous spaces in between. | 2012-09-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-09-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | September 17, 2012 | 7.3 | a815a68f-5e2c-4ecf-b71d-fdff3fcbdcc3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The German producer tests the balance of bleak ambience and diamond-tipped breakbeats on an introspective EP that remains true to his own idiosyncratic style. | The German producer tests the balance of bleak ambience and diamond-tipped breakbeats on an introspective EP that remains true to his own idiosyncratic style. | Christoph De Babalon: Hectic Shakes EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christoph-de-babalon-hectic-shakes-ep/ | Hectic Shakes EP | A faraway foghorn calls out a warning in the first minute of Christoph De Babalon’s new EP, Hectic Shakes. The air is thick with echoes of “Opium,” the veteran German producer’s 15-minute opener to his 1997 opus If You’re Into It, I’m Out of It, which got a fitting reissue last year. Two decades on, he restages its theatrics for a more distracted generation: the dense atmospherics of the five-and-a-half-minute “Harakiri” are intermittently sliced open, spilling jungle’s glistening entrails into the gloom. (The track’s title is another word for seppuku, the Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment.) Back in the late 1990s, when a dozen imported and home-grown permutations of house, trance, and techno ruled the main rooms of many European clubs, jungle and drum ’n’ bass were often viewed as the murkier alternative. In the context of De Babalon’s heavy ambient sound, however, it’s the breaks that let in the light.
Now into his 25th year of releasing records, De Babalon has never made music with the rave in mind. As he explained to his one-time label boss Alec Empire in a 2008 interview, he was influenced by jungle and techno rhythms, “but the atmospheres I wanted to work with come from deep within me. Some sort of melancholical [sic] longing. A sea of tears, a universe of sadness, a romantic apocalypse.” Outside of a long hiatus in the 2000s, De Babalon has released pretty consistently over the years, but as critics have long noted, he has never strayed far from his sonic palette of chaotic breaks and horizonless ambience. That’s not a slight: Some artists paint the same scenic view their whole life, finding deep satisfaction in the shifting of time.
Hectic Shakes might suggest a departure but its arc is familiar. From the perforated despair of “Harakiri,” the four-track EP moves through themes of introversion, thaw, and solace. “Endless Inside” sends synth flares into a sky of white noise before erupting into anxious drum breaks and towering bass. The hi-hats cut through, the crispest feature in a dubbed-out world. Things get even livelier on “Shivers and Shakes,” which has both feet in the ambient drum ’n’ bass world, but it’s the EP’s closer that’s the real scene-stealer. “Raw Mind” sits somewhere between the original Solaris soundtrack and a worn-out copy of Orbital’s “Belfast” in spirit, almost wholly ambient with just two short runs of breaks. The forward motion is palpable and poignant.
“Musically, I am mostly exploring the past,” De Babalon said in 2015. “Generally, I have been trying to make as much music as possible while staying as far away from the music scene as I possibly can.” The producer’s relative self-isolation from the revolving door of the music industry has no doubt contributed to the stalagmite-like growth of his sound. As he quietly created his doom-laced discography, around him others have stepped into the foreground. Fellow German producer DJ Healer, for example, has enjoyed underground success in the last year or two with his own ambient recontextualization of the hardcore continuum, albeit occasionally straying into Enigma territory (incidentally, another German act with a history of cheesy appropriation). What makes Hectic Shakes feel fresh in comparison is its dedication to introspection. In a landscape saturated with well-worn tropes, it’s an artist’s willingness to embrace their own idiosyncrasies—no matter whether the sounds they work with are trending or not—that makes for truly satisfying work. The devil, as they say, is in the details. | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Alter | January 18, 2019 | 7.8 | a817e4df-fa0a-4184-9a18-ab4dca0e69f2 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
Popcaan is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill, he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. With his latest LP, he's made the best dancehall album of the year so far, as well as one of the best pop albums of the year. | Popcaan is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill, he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. With his latest LP, he's made the best dancehall album of the year so far, as well as one of the best pop albums of the year. | Popcaan: Where We Come From | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19426-popcaan-where-we-come-from/ | Where We Come From | The best dancehall album of the year so far is also, interestingly, one of the best pop albums of the year. Popcaan, aka Andre Jay Sutherland, is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill (most recently, Mavado and Vybz Kartel, the latter who also has functioned as Sutherland’s mentor) he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. He’s a lover, not a gangster, and it’s an impressively broad kind of love that he’s putting out. Where We Come From is a party, and everyone’s invited.
The album was executive produced by Brooklyn beatmaker and Mixpak label owner Dre Skull, aka Andrew Hershey, who’s become an unlikely heavyweight in the Jamaican music scene thanks to jubilant compositions like the Kling Klang and Loudspeaker riddims. He also worked on Snoop Dogg’s reggae rebrand as Snoop Lion alongside Diplo and Ariel Rechtshaid, and Where We Come From feels like another attempt at doing what last year's Reincarnated failed to do: connect dancehall with an American pop audience that hasn’t seen an actual dancehall artist on the pop charts in years.
Sutherland and Hershey make a great team. Sutherland has a super-melodic flow (he’s what is sometimes referred to as a “singjay”) and nimble sense of melody, so Hershey's beats offer a lot of opportunities to exploit both talents, even as they stick to chord progressions that don't stray from dancehall's conventions. Hershey's production skills also make a good platform for Sutherland's expressive delivery, converting the plaintive strings and funereal tolling bells of “Hold On” into triumphant uplift and the stroboscopic rave synths of “Ghetto (Tired of Crying)” into a meditation on violence tinged with hint of hopefulness.
Overall, Where We Come From isn’t animated by solemnity, or even the salaciousness that infuses “Number One Freak” and “Love Yuh Bad”, but an ecstatic joy that transcends genre. Sutherland is a massively charismatic character, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the elation that he so obviously feels when he gets from finding the perfect groove. That feeling permeates every corner of the album, but it comes through strongest on two particular tracks. The thematic concerns of “Everything Nice” are right there in the title, and it’s easy to feel the same way while the song is playing, thanks to a buoyant, bliss-inducing beat by Mixpak-affiliated producer Dubbel Dutch (who’s responsible for five of the 13 tracks).
“Waiting So Long,” on the other hand, bursts with kinetic energy. The beat, by Swedish producer Adde Instrumentals (who also produced Sutherland’s 2011 Jamaican hit “Ravin”), is a techno-bubblegummy pileup of whining synths, string stabs, and handclaps that, boosted by Sutherland’s recursively loopy vocal melody, constantly reaches higher and higher towards giddy new levels of euphoria, exploding kaleidoscopically like the all-out finale of a fireworks explosion that lasts three straight minutes. It’s the type of song that can push everything else completely out of your field of attention for its entire duration, one of those pop moments that fully deserves to be called “transcendental.” In a perfect world, it would be a smash; as far as the one we live in now, it’s noticeably better for having this song and Where We Come From in it. | 2014-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mixpak | June 10, 2014 | 8 | a824beda-0ee8-43a8-a20e-ff4da61e9e3a | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Featuring nothing but piano and his voice, Julia With Blue Jeans On is Spencer Krug's starkest, most gripping Moonface record to date. It's also one of the finest LPs of his prolific, unpredictable career. | Featuring nothing but piano and his voice, Julia With Blue Jeans On is Spencer Krug's starkest, most gripping Moonface record to date. It's also one of the finest LPs of his prolific, unpredictable career. | Moonface: Julia with Blue Jeans On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18764-moonface-julia-with-blue-jeans-on/ | Julia with Blue Jeans On | As 2010 crept into 2011, Spencer Krug's life changed. In that two year span, Wolf Parade—one of the most celebrated indie rock bands of the 2000s—announced their indefinite hiatus. Around that same time, Krug dissolved his much-loved Sunset Rubdown, forged a new solo project called Moonface, saw the end of a particularly intense romance, and left Canada for Finland. There, Krug linked up to Finnish rockers Siinai for the seething breakup record Heartbreaking Bravery. Krug's pre-Bravery Moonface efforts—2010's Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums and 2011's Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped—found him training his focus on a particular instrument, a fascinating process that nevertheless yielded mixed results. Krug's maintained a commitment to making every Moonface record very different than the last, and with Siinai's help, Bravery was the closest thing to a full-on rock record he'd been part of since Wolf Parade's 2010 swan song, Expo 86. Julia With Blue Jeans On, his latest, is another sharp left turn: with nothing but piano and Krug's voice, it's the starkest, most gripping Moonface record to date, and one of the finest LPs of Krug's prolific, unpredictable career.
In his work with Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, Krug, a classically trained pianist from a young age, shied away from the acoustic piano used throughout Julia. In interviews, he's claimed the choice to return to the piano was an attempt to refold some simplicity into his oft-knotty work and to bring more clarity and optimism in the wake of the ruminative Bravery. The stripped-back sound of Julia is never less than striking; Krug, whose agitated compositions and operatically addled vocals have often been marked by wild leaps and jittery flourishes, has never made a record this well-shorn. True, Julia's got its share of dramatically cascading melodies and plenty of big chest-bursting flare ups; although Krug's claimed Julia's inspiration came from sources as disparate as modernist icon Erik Satie and Rachel Grimes' solo effort Book of Leaves, even the most serene songs here couldn't have come from anyone else. Still, it's not just Julia's denuded piano-and-voice constructions that keep it feeling considerably less frantic than much of Krug's work; both lyrically and compositionally, he's not jamming as much information into every stanza, which makes every note—and every word—count.
"I am a barbarian sometimes," Krug sings a minute or so into the album's opening track, and time and again throughout Julia, Krug returns to this kind of brutal self-examination. Although the bile that underlined much of Bravery is gone, there's plenty of regret and self-loathing to go around. It's as though Krug, looking back on the relationship he spent Bravery deconstructing, has newfound perspective on just what went wrong, and rather than casting aspersions elsewhere, he's looked inward and found himself every bit as at fault for its downfall. "I have a way of bleeding dry anything you'd call a rose," he sings on the album's title track; on "Love the House You're In", he likens himself to a "well-intentioned demon" and "a ghost lighting up in the courtyard." Julia's lyrics find Krug—long fond of vaguely fanciful, sometimes impenetrable imagery—retreating from metaphor, retelling the story of love's end with often shocking clarity. A thread of Biblical imagery runs throughout Julia, but by Krug's standards, these allegories aren't difficult to parse. "Everyone has to gather souls around them to feel useful, and loving, and loved," he sings on "Everyone is Noah, Everyone is the Ark", still trying to navigate the storm without a partner at his side.
Most of Julia is at least semi-autobiographical, albeit somewhat out of order; "November 2011" comes fairly close to a blow-by-blow recount, but spend enough time with the disc, and the narrative starts to fully unfold. Centerpiece "Dreamy Summer", the out-and-out loveliest of Julia's 10 tracks, seems to describe a time before the troubles. On "Barbarian", Krug confesses "darling, it's finally the fall, and finally, I've not destroyed anything at all." But by the time closer "Your Chariot Awaits" rolls around, Krug admits "we got way too close way too quickly." Where Heartbreaking Bravery's Siinai-assisted bloodletting pushed Krug's feelings outward, Julia's quieter, more reflective sonics illustrate the time he's spent looking inward. "Set fire to my music, it wasn't much good anyway," he sings on "November." That's far from true, but Julia is clearly Krug's attempt at burning it all down and starting anew.
Compositionally, Julia's marked by a marvelously uncharacteristic simplicity. For every intricate right-hand construction, there's a series of blunt, forceful chords, better suited to enhancing emotion than inspiring awe. Krug's music has, in the past, sometimes felt overly showy, often using three notes when two would do fine, shifting rhythms and enjambing lyrics to onerous effect. On the whole, Krug's Moonface records—like the early Sunset Rubdown EPs, which also centered around a single instrument—are less dizzying than some of Sunset Rubdown's more circuitous work, but they've occasionally seemed more conceptually clever than genuinely captivating. There's an urgency at work throughout Julia that keeps convolution at bay, a sense that these songs had to come out this way, commanding and unadorned. On paper, the piano-centric Julia may appear to be another of Krug's experiments, stripping back as a means to stave off boredom. But Krug, in foregrounding his voice and minimizing the instrumentation, is clearly trying to limit the distance between himself and these songs, resulting in his most immediately gripping work in ages.
Chances are, you won't put on Julia very often; it's emotionally exhausting, 48 minutes of soul laid bare. Between the spartan presentation and the deep wells of longing, it's not an easy listen, not made for the background, which means you're going to have to find yourself in a mood a lot like Krug's to want to sit there and get swept up in it for the better part of an hour. Though Julia ends with a bit more optimism than it begins with, whatever streaks of hopefulness Krug promised after the frothing Bravery aren't easy to find here. That fairly restricted emotional range proves both Julia's best quality and its only limitation. Even still, Julia's impressive discipline rarely gets in the way of its ability to affect; it's all so deeply felt, it's impossible not to feel it, too. | 2013-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / Paper Bag | November 12, 2013 | 7.7 | a8274bda-eec9-49c3-a3a3-11cfd8fb49e2 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Seattle pop-punk band shape-shifts through ‘90s alt-rock but sacrifices its personality in the process. | The Seattle pop-punk band shape-shifts through ‘90s alt-rock but sacrifices its personality in the process. | Dude York: Falling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dude-york-falling/ | Falling | At their best, Dude York sound drunk with unbridled joy. With two full-length albums, a Christmas record, and a handful of EPs, the Seattle pop-punk band has carved out a spot beside Charly Bliss and Diet Cig, indie rock bands suited for sleepover dance parties. On their third proper album, Falling, the trio loses its individuality in a wash of generic hooks and half-hearted lyrics that only recall contemporaries who did it better.
Guitarist Peter Richards and bassist Claire England split songwriting and vocal duties for the first time, sequencing the album so they take turns. On “Longest Time,” England turns in an alt-rock anthem, and Richards answers with the psychedelic power pop of “Doesn’t Matter.” Drummer Andrew Hall pulls it all together with streamlined, uptempo rhythms and quicksilver drum fills.
Over the course of 13 songs, though, Dude York wind up mimicking their idols as opposed to referencing them. “How It Goes” is decent by-the-numbers Weezer, while “Should’ve” huddles in the shadows of Dinosaur Jr.’s towering amp rig. And it’s almost surprising to learn “DGAFAF (I know what’s real)” isn’t a Bright Eyes cover. Falling shape-shifts through ’90s alt-rock, but the band sacrifices its personality in the process.
No track captures this problem like “Box.” The glossiest song on the album, it leans into the synth-pop melodrama of the Cure while Richards elongates his vowels, doing his best Robert Smith. The rhythm section is sprightly and the chorus is catchy, perhaps because it is uncannily similar to Janelle Monáe’s “Cold War.” It’s a decent dance song, and the protagonist in the song’s music video does exactly that, jumping and spinning feverishly by herself as band members occasionally join in. Eventually, it’s revealed that the woman is dancing on a stage for approval—a single person sits in the empty crowd, bored and gazing at his phone screen, while she breaks a sweat. It’s an unfortunate metaphor for a band that has lost its voice. “I wish I was someone who could stick up for themselves,” Richards sings on “:15.” It’s hard to disagree with him.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | August 1, 2019 | 5.2 | a8310258-1215-46b7-8ee3-6c123ef5cca1 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The last album from Virginia-born band Turnover found a sweet spot between pop-punk and dream pop, but their influences are more sedate and smooth this time. | The last album from Virginia-born band Turnover found a sweet spot between pop-punk and dream pop, but their influences are more sedate and smooth this time. | Turnover: Good Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/turnover-good-nature/ | Good Nature | Pop-punk and lush, lovelorn indie rock were enjoying a slow and steady undercover flirtation long before Turnover released their second LP in 2015, but Peripheral Vision was the one that took it public. Awkward reminders of their Warped Tour-friendly formative phase occasionally popped up, but that was OK: Peripheral Vision became a surprise hit because there were apparently plenty of other pop-punk kids who were transitioning towards shoegaze and dream pop, and they now had a band of this ilk to call their own. But on Turnover’s new album, Good Nature, getting on frontman Austin Getz’s level requires more than an updated vinyl collection. He turned vegan, moved with his girlfriend from Virginia Beach to California wine country, and made a record that sounds like he’d been there all along.
“I found my religion/When nothing was ahead of us/That week in California,” Getz sighs on the starlit carousel ride “Super Natural.” It’s an extremely low-key way to begin an album, but it’s still a bold introduction if only in contrast to where he was two years ago with Peripheral Vision’s thrilling streaks of self-loathing, “Cutting My Fingers Off” and “New Scream.” Regardless of his current location, Good Nature is SoCal to the core, a warm embrace of the area’s soft-focus spirituality and the optimism of young, beautiful creatives without much to worry about.
The flaws of Peripheral Vision derived almost entirely from the times Getz’s aggrieved point of view clashed with the newfound, sleek elegance of Turnover’s music. But there are zero moments on Good Nature that have to be enjoyed through gritted teeth, and plenty that can be paired with your favorite Sonoma Valley grape. The influences are more sedate and smooth this time out, Getz’s softened take on life accompanied by Tango in the Night harmonizing and brisk Brit-pop. With its limpid jazz chords, “Pure Devotion” is the first Turnover song that could work at a poolside cocktail party.
Therein lies the conundrum for Turnover: though Peripheral Vision likely broadened the horizons of people who caught them opening for The Story So Far or New Found Glory, it was also uniquely appealing to seasoned indie rock listeners who found Real Estate a little too complacent or wished Wild Nothing could really kick out the jams. But the perfectly lovely and interchangeable shimmers of “What Got in the Way” and “Curiosity” threaten to define Good Nature by passing without incident or much impact. So what exactly distinguishes Turnover now?
Well, for one, none of their indie peers could write a song like “Breeze.” Taking advantage of Will Yip’s most verdant production, Turnover revisit the rhythmic propulsion and harmonized guitar sparkles that defined Peripheral Vision. Catch a few stray lines from the chorus—“I can’t stop you running through my head,” “it just makes me wanna go away, I’ll do it”—and it captures a perfect moment of dizzying infatuation between Bleed American’s summer swelter and the back-to-school wistfulness of American Football. And then there’s the last line that ties it all together, “Let you keep eating my heart out with your silver spoon,” which could very well be an admission of defeat from a guy who’s way out of his league. The hooks might need more massaging to emerge this time out, but the twist on “Breeze” reveals that Turnover are still the same band, talking about how to quantify success, how we get in the way of our own happiness, and of course, the way romantic fortunes can make the future seem as vast as the California coastline or as small as the room in your parent’s house. | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | August 25, 2017 | 7.3 | a83373fc-546e-4d3d-8cb7-1c89f1348c96 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Ahhh, if I only had a Latin Grammy for every time some hot air-bloated rock pundit wrote that Bob Dylan ... | Ahhh, if I only had a Latin Grammy for every time some hot air-bloated rock pundit wrote that Bob Dylan ... | Elvis Costello: When I Was Cruel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1614-when-i-was-cruel/ | When I Was Cruel | Ahhh, if I only had a Latin Grammy for every time some hot air-bloated rock pundit wrote that Bob Dylan's "still got it," that Bruce Springsteen's late-90s social posturing is any more convincing than his Reagan-era material, that the small army of background singers and synthesizers required to create Brian Wilson's Imagination really sound any fresher than, say, "Kokomo." For the last seven or eight years, Elvis Costello fans have had great reason for concern.
After a stellar showing with the reunited Attractions on 1994's Brutal Youth, Costello released a trio of disappointing releases. 1996's All This Useless Beauty barely used the Attractions, wandering in several different directions at once and recycling material originally written for other artists. 1998's Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory seemingly aged Costello an extra twenty years, with its preponderance of crooning ballads and arrangements that might as well have been recorded for a Dionne Warwick comeback. And last year's pairing with Anne Sofie von Otter, For the Stars, barely qualified as a Costello release at all, with a predilection for Costello's iffiest material ("Shamed into Love," anyone?) and a pair of Tom Waits' more forgettable castoffs.
When I Was Cruel, happily, finds Costello tuning his compass with two excellent reference points: his 1986 masterwork Blood and Chocolate and the eclectic showmanship of 1989's Spike. Once again, Costello drafts Attractions Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas into the fold, but with a breath of fresh air in the form of Cracker's Davey Faragher on bass. Costello harnesses some of his Useless Beauty period's greatest strengths-- the wet percussion from Tricky's remix of "Little Atoms," for instance, and the tremolo guitar that dominated "Complicated Shadows"-- to give his new compositions a contemporary edge while anchoring the music to the ragged, rough-edged guitar sound that's been the signature of Costello's best work.
The result is an immediately engrossing and challenging collection of moody, evocative songs-- an entire album of "I Want You" and "Watching the Detectives" for those so inclined. The cinematic noir of "When I Was Cruel No. 2," with its point-of-view narration and looped female vocal, plays like the torch song from some as-yet unmade David Lynch film-- Twin Peaks meets Portishead in a smoky Italian nightclub. The faux-Beat rhythms of "Dust" and outright scat on the jazz-damaged "Episode of Blonde" succeed both as prose and dramatic bits of music, easily upstaging Tom Waits' hit-and-miss homages to Kerouac and Ginsberg.
The balls-out rock textures of Blood and Chocolate are re-explored on "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)," with its thick guitar hooks and powerful blasts of cleverly flanged bass, and "My Blue Window," a cheeky nod to Blood and Chocolate's "Blue Chair." The guitar-driven "Daddy Can I Turn This" and the meaty, dissonant "Dissolve" are Costello-by-the-numbers, tightly wound pop gems that seem to spring painlessly from Costello's loins when he's on a roll.
But it's the more experimental pieces on When I Was Cruel that are the most consistently rewarding. The percolating rhythms and locomotive bass on "Spooky Girlfriend," augmented by horns and tight background harmonies, almost sound like Costello backed by Oranges and Lemons-era XTC. Likewise with the complicated pastiche of programmed beats, organ and horns on "15 Petals," a confident and infectious detour into Latin rhythms (think Tito Puente, not Ricky Martin). The measured swells of backwards guitar and deep bass hits on closer "Radio Silence" send When I Was Cruel out on an optimistic note-- for the future of music and for Costello's own relevance in the post-modern blipscape of Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Perhaps When I Was Cruel's sweetest punch is that, at 47, Costello sounds pretty much exactly as he did at 27. Unlike Dylan, Springsteen, Wilson, or Waits-- or, god knows, Lou Reed-- he hasn't had to compromise his music to fit his aging pipes. Costello's at his most entertaining when he cleverly sidesteps an issue rather than confronting it head on, as on the slight misfire of "45," which makes the trite connection between Costello's age and the number of revolutions per minute made by a hit record.
Faragher's hyperactive bass proves a savvy addition to Nieve's blasting organ and noodling piano, Thomas' busy rhythms, and Costello's spy-film guitar riffs. Some of Costello's most interesting work has been fatally injured by poor chemistry; When I Was Cruel is a self-confident return to form-- sharp, solid and, though Costello should have nothing to prove-- completely relevant. | 2002-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | May 5, 2002 | 8 | a847d776-9ef3-4867-aae0-05912efc02be | Pitchfork | null |
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On their second album since founding member Edgar Froese’s death in 2015, the German electronic maestros continue to supersize their signature brand of cosmic synth music. | On their second album since founding member Edgar Froese’s death in 2015, the German electronic maestros continue to supersize their signature brand of cosmic synth music. | Tangerine Dream: Raum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tangerine-dream-raum/ | Raum | Tangerine Dream are a vast, elemental force, an electronic music group whose grandiloquent synthesizer soundscapes tower over the pithiness of pop convention. Wherever you look, Tangerine Dream operate at scale: They have released more than 100 albums since forming in Germany in 1967, surround themselves with prodigious racks of synths on stage, and their songs routinely nudge the 20-minute mark. They are, in many ways, the Grateful Dead of electronic music: a hippy band of brothers, eternal and somehow always themselves, their music an endlessly extending ray of cosmic light.
Even the death of founding member Edgar Froese in 2015 could not stop a band as enduring as Tangerine Dream. Raum is the second album the group has released since Froese’s passing, and he features in both spirit and sound. According to Thorsten Quaeschning, who has been with Tangerine Dream since 2005, Froese and his wife Bianca made plans for the band to continue after his death, and Raum was produced with access to Froese’s Cubase arrangements and tape archive of recordings from 1977 to 2013.
Like the Dead, Tangerine Dream were once innovators, a kind of proto-Kraftwerk best enjoyed semi-horizontally while ensconced in a bean-bag chair. Their first studio album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured eerie found sounds among more conventional rock instruments, and from 1971’s Alpha Centauri onward—three years before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn—Tangerine Dream threw themselves into electronic instrumentation. In the late ’70s and early ’80s their sound became slicker and more cinematic, soundtracking films like Sorcerer, Thief, and even Risky Business. Raum doesn’t really break any barriers, but nor was it intended to. After 2014’s Phaedra Farewell Tour, Froese decided that the group should return to the formula of synths, sequencers, and electric violin that Tangerine Dream employed in the ’70s and ’80s, “not copying it but recreating that style with present technology,” said Quaeschning.
Raum’s 15-minute title track, in particular, is a throwback to the omniscient ambience of 1972’s Zeit, a shimmering Moog bassline summoning forth synth sweeps as potent as rocket fuel, slowly tapering off into the elegant, dreamy drones of Hoshiko Yamane’s electric violin, before the Moog returns to guide the listener home. Tangerine Dream are grandmasters of space and melody, and “Raum” shows them at their architectural best, their work as airily palatial as a castle made of cloud.
“You’re Always On Time” makes up for its weakling eight-minute runtime with one of the album’s strongest melodies, a mournful synthesizer riff that is just unpredictable enough to keep it from lapsing into parody, while “Along the Canal” combines a gloomy chord sequence with a synth effect that patters like rain along a gutter, a mixture of form and function so emotively epic it could paint the Grand Canyon blue. By contrast, the opening “Continuum” sounds almost hemmed in by the conventions of percussion, its rather strait-laced drum-machine beats unworthy of the synth sprawl they sheepishly try to rally into place. And “In 256 Zeichen” spreads its melodic ideas too thin; the song’s mammoth stretch is an indulgence that soon grates.
For a band as endlessly prolific as Tangerine Dream, it’s hard to argue that Raum is in any way essential; it’s essentially a recreation of past glories that never quite hits those heights. As a piece of the Tangerine Dream continuum, however, Raum satisfies: Its unashamed drift and scale pay a tribute to a world where music is huge, omnipresent, and never ending. | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kscope | March 7, 2022 | 6.7 | a84adcda-39ed-4a87-a237-79f24481d869 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After years of mostly solo projects, the indie legend releases his first LP under his own name. | After years of mostly solo projects, the indie legend releases his first LP under his own name. | Lou Barlow: Emoh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1149-emoh/ | Emoh | Given the amount of material that Lou Barlow has issued under sometimes misleading monikers (Sebadoh, Sentridoh, The Folk Implosion, The New Folk Implosion, Lou's Wasted Pieces...), it's sort of odd to consider this record-- the first released under his full name-- his solo debut. Barlow has recorded countless songs at a prolifc rate, paying little attention to recording (and, arguably, any other kind of) quality. Barlow writes songs like some people smoke cigarettes or pick their nose: Compulsively, and without regard to who's paying attention. However, Emoh is the most consistently strong record he's released since The Folk Implosion's One Part Lullaby-- and it could be his most melodic: There's no tape hiss, awkward count-off's, dialogue, or noise experiments here. Even if much of it was recorded at home, Emoh's 14 unassuming folk songs sound like they were created in a professional setting.
The album moves in whiter shades of pale lullabies, between acoustic grunge-lite ("Caterpillar Girl"), private backroom square-dances ("Holding Back the Year", "If I Could"), and traditional story songs like "Mary", a clever jibe at Christian folklore ("Immaculate conception/ Yeah, right") written from the POV of the real babydaddy-- he and Mary saved from retribution by history's (supposedly) most infamous lie. As melancholy or as victimized as Barlow has painted himself in the past, it's possible that all this time he just wanted to write campfire sing-alongs about his cats (see "The Ballad of Daykitty"). Sounding as direct and spontaneous as a living-room rehearsal for friends, these songs don't pretend to be much more.
The instrument that gets the most attention is Barlow's own voice. Whether it's the recording quality or just increased confidence, his voice is stronger and deeper here than on any of his earlier work, and self-harmonizing occurs frequently-- even dominating many of these songs. There are a few holdovers from his lo-fi past: "Holding Back the Year" closes with some sloppy vibrato from a lead guitar, and a Casio keyboard blurts out a solo in "Monkey Begun". But along with the occasional use of drum loops, these touches are used clinically and sparingly, only to add a bit of color to the otherwise spartan arrangements. For better or for worse, we're left with a little acoustic guitar and a whole lotta Lou.
Perhaps then that's why most of these songs never seem to rise above a whisper. The bubbling electro-folk of "Home" manages to stand above the rest, but while this new batch of songs is pleasant and often charming, they're not as memorable or passionate as Barlow's best. Emoh is a record that will please longtime fans-- and maybe bring back a few he's lost. | 2005-01-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2005-01-25T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | January 25, 2005 | 7.9 | a85757f6-b502-445d-b81c-33901210b454 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Recording with John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile), the British punks clean up their sound a bit on their latest Sub Pop LP. | Recording with John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile), the British punks clean up their sound a bit on their latest Sub Pop LP. | Male Bonding: Endless Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15756-endless-now/ | Endless Now | From an early age, boys are taught to avoid wearing their hearts on their sleeves. The more you open yourself up, the greater the chance that you'll get yourself hurt. Male Bonding like to explore the tension between TMI and musical aggression. They kick up dust and make a lot of noise but then write of pain, jealousy, depression, and loss. The title of their fine Sub Pop debut, Nothing Hurts, was a succinct summary of their contradictions.
It took some time to get the whole picture on Nothing Hurts-- for one, you had to get past the heavy British accents (to say nothing of the album's trashcan production values). The band's songwriter, John Arthur Webb, and co-singer/bassist Kevin Hendrick had problems with speaking up, too, obscuring some of their scattered thoughts. Some have cited this unintelligibility as a telltale sign of Male Bonding's lack of personality; while that's an understandable conclusion to reach, their distance ultimately comes across as a self-defense mechanism-- emotional armor, if you will.
Considering the circumstances that surround Male Bonding's second album, Endless Now, you'd assume the stage for this self-hatred and confusion would be a little more well-lit. The record was produced by 1990s-throwback-indie producer du jour John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile) and recorded in Woodstock, New York's Dreamland Recording Studio, a converted 19th-century church. The results are (slightly) more polished, with more room for the band's bashing guitars to stretch their legs. As a songwriter, though, Webb hasn't changed-- if anything, the new sonic spread just provides more hiding places, the dense thickets of melodic hum that drive "Can't Dream" and early single "Bones" functioning as curtains to sing behind. His cloudy outlook is still noticeable-- despite its title, "Tame the Sun" is about not being able to tame the sun-- but it takes some digging through the sheets of noise in "Bones" to unearth its futile core: "Be careful what you dream about/ There's not always ways out."
Lest you think Endless Now sounds like one big pity party, it's not. Nothing Hurts had a big, beating pop heart underneath its scrapes and bruises, and here the hooks are plentiful, to the point where touring guitarist Nathan Hewitt was enlisted to handle the overflow of sweet, sticky stuff. The phrase "pop-punk" has been thrown around with these guys, and with good reason (besides those Rivers Cuomo recording sessions, that is); if you took the swaying chorus on "Seems to Notice Now" and plunked it in the middle of a pre-misery-and-maturity Blink-182 album, I'm not sure how many would know the difference. A possibly more apt comparison would be Thirteen-era Teenage Fanclub or even vintage Fountains of Wayne in terms of sparkly power-pop goodness, with just a little grit (fittingly, the band's been known to do a cover of FoW's "Radiation Vibe" every now and then).
Comparisons to such bastions of relative "uncoolness" is a surefire way to break out of the "lo-fi" holding cell that the band complained to Pitchfork about earlier this year. Although the outgoing sonics of Endless Now represent a considerable leap in sound, it's those same qualities that could very well repel those drawn in by the burnt-ends glory of Nothing Hurts-- not because that previous record is necessarily better, though. It's just... different. And there's nothing wrong with that if you approach Endless Now with an open mind. Bands grow and evolve, and that means shedding some old habits for new ones-- even if they're not ready to drop all of their defense mechanisms just yet. | 2011-08-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-08-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Sub Pop | August 30, 2011 | 8 | a8592680-78ff-4026-bdf2-49a8cc6decd4 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Beneath its sharp edges and heavy drums, the producers’ second collaboration takes a gentle, humanistic approach. | Beneath its sharp edges and heavy drums, the producers’ second collaboration takes a gentle, humanistic approach. | Croatian Amor / Varg2TM: Body of Carbon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/croatian-amor-varg2tm-body-of-carbon/ | Body of Carbon | Loke Rahbek has always thought a lot about vulnerability. In 2014, the Copenhagen-based musician released an album under his Croatian Amor moniker that could only be purchased by sending him a nude self-portrait. A year earlier, his band Vår—a collaboration with Iceage’s Elias Bender Rønnenfelt—released a record with a mirror for a cover; picking it up off the shelf meant implicating yourself in the music, the listener implicitly becoming part of the product. These sorts of gestures can seem like marketing gimmicks, but there’s a sincerity in the message behind them. He’s willing to bare his soul to you if you’ll do the same.
With the exception of some noisier releases early in the project’s lifespan, Croatian Amor’s music has largely mirrored that warmth. Consider his 2016 album Love Means Taking Action, which he’s said was about “a quest to love strangers so that they stop being strangers,” and consisted mostly of glittering ambient instrumentals and heavenly vocal samples. It glowed with surprising humanity, and it has been a tone-setter for much of his work since. Body of Water, his 2018 collaboration with the Swedish producer Varg2TM, was the furthest he’d pursued his more tranquil interests. Its four tracks were misty and abstract, not unlike the cosmic excursions of Steve Roach or the synth-led naivete of ’80s new age labels like Valley of the Sun.
The sequel, Body of Carbon, appears quite dissimilar on the surface. Like its predecessor, it’s driven by abstract synth work, but the mood is different—more inky and earthy. The title track opens with squealing synth work, which on its own is enough to separate it from the wispy pieces on Body of Water, but the track quickly tacks on gnarled layers until it reaches a freakish approximation of a grime beat—replete with a barking kick drum that might otherwise echo through Thunderdome.
Heavier music isn’t unfamiliar territory for the duo, though. Rahbek’s other projects often include tortured industrial excursions, and Varg2TM’s catalog is frequently dancefloor-adjacent—even if he holds some reservations about that whole scene. So when their wheezing ambiance is accompanied by kick drum punishment, like on “Tell Your Tale to the River,” it’s not necessarily so unexpected. They know how to rage when the occasion calls for it.
But the stylistic left turn is ultimately an act of deception. Despite its sharper edges, Body of Carbon finds a way to further explore the gentle, humanistic approach demonstrated on Body of Water. You can hear this guiding principle in even its most twisted tracks. Outside of the hopscotching bass drum, the gasping synths and soaring trance leads of “Tell Your Tale to the River” feel full of air and light. In approach, if not in sound, it recalls some of Coil’s best records, in which tenderness and torment lock in embrace.
The record’s most striking moments come in the delirious haze of the second track, “God’s Face in the Water.” The foggy instrumental echoes all kinds of emotional electronic music—from Slowdive’s windswept ambient work on Pygmalion to the devotional miniatures on PAN’s Mono No Aware compilation—as a digital voice murmurs mantra-esque phrases about finding miracles in the mundane. “I see God in the water in my water bottle,” the voice says. “God in the strobe lights.” It underscores the same point Rahbek was making with those idiosyncratic releases earlier this decade. Even in a harsh, cold world, there’s beauty if you’re open to finding it. | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Posh Isolation | December 6, 2019 | 7.4 | a86935d8-fad2-47c7-a0f2-772ea757b7b2 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
If Bristol-based songwriter Ellis Jones’ witty yet melancholy final album as Trust Fund has an overarching theme, it’s how deeply disenchanted he feels with making music. | If Bristol-based songwriter Ellis Jones’ witty yet melancholy final album as Trust Fund has an overarching theme, it’s how deeply disenchanted he feels with making music. | Trust Fund: Bringing the Backline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trust-fund-bringing-the-backline/ | Bringing the Backline | How witty is Ellis Jones? Here is how the Bristol-based songwriter describes Bringing the Backline, his latest album as Trust Fund, in a wry effort to mitigate the “risk inherent in committing to the purchase of a somewhat unknown quantity,” while exhorting fans to pre-order: It contains “details specific enough to feel frank and confessional, yet non-specific enough to allow for the listener to substitute in their own life experiences.” This is a succinct and accurate description of, well, art. A pithy bon mot that both touches on some essential truth and self-deprecatingly trivializes it is Trust Fund’s trademark. Ellis Jones is very witty—perhaps too witty for his own good.
Like Art Brut and to some extent Weezer, Trust Fund is a pop-rock band too self-aware and self-reflexive to ever seem entirely in earnest. This is not a shortcoming; it’s what makes the music droll and amusing, and what endears Jones as a comedian eager to invite you in on the joke. He shares with Rivers Cuomo the inclination to play against frontman type, dwelling on his weaknesses instead of adopting the traditional rock-star swagger as he exaggerates his dweebiness for ironic effect. Fond of recherche constructions (“Essay not upon the self uncovered/But document the work of others”) and naming songs after lauded novelists (“Carson McCullers”), he has the literary zeal of an unapologetic intellectual like Colin Meloy. Trust Fund is highbrow comic rock meant to make you feel clever and discerning.
Jones likes a good quip—his lyrics often turn on a witticism or humorous observation—but his writing tends toward the dry and is rarely what you would call jokey. He has a strong command of tone; his eye for detail is almost novelistic in its keenness. “I was boastful, I was boring, we were queuing for the toilet/In the cramped corridor of your friend’s house,” he sings on “King of CM.” “You took a picture of me for your girls in the group chat/And now I want to tell all my secrets to you.” The same group chat reappears, with more urgency, elsewhere: “All her messages I would read aloud/But the girls in the group chat, they alone can help her now.” It’s just as Jones promised: equal parts confessional and nonspecific.
A shadow of melancholy hangs over the droll vignettes on Bringing the Backline—a certain low-level distress or anguish about which Jones remains characteristically sardonic. “Got that sad Sunday suicidal ideation eight days a week,” he sings with a kind of mordant gaiety on album opener “Blue X.” “And listening to your band/Crying at the back/Made me think about my band/How boring is that?” A song called “Embarrassing!,” meanwhile, is a rousing, Pavement-ish indie rock anthem about depression. Breakups are lamented, until they aren’t: “I can’t remember why we broke up… Oh yeah/Of course I do.” Feelings verge on the sentimental, until irony cuts in: “One thing a song can do/Is tell you with a terrible sureness/Exactly who your heart belongs to… Not that it can belong to anyone.”
Shortly after Bringing the Backline’s release, Jones announced that “for various non-dramatic reasons” it would be Trust Fund’s final record. For anyone who’d listened to the album, the news would hardly be surprising. If these songs have an overarching theme, it’s how deeply disenchanted Jones feels with making music. Sometimes this sentiment has the wistful quality of reminiscence. Other times, he sounds as if he’s accepting defeat. Occasionally his lyrics convey nothing short of despair.
In the end, though, he can’t help but reflect on his time as Trust Fund with wit and good humor: “The best thing about touring is a week in a van with your friends,” he kids on “King of CM.” “The worst thing about touring is a week in a van with your best friends.” You get the sense that however badly Jones may miss life in the studio and on the road, he will miss these opportunities for dry punchlines and trenchant witticisms more than anything. | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 1, 2018 | 6.9 | a86a268b-e206-44f8-939c-b6a6fa668543 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
On her debut album, Montreal visual artist-turned-electronic pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie makes vital protest music that summons collective strength to overcome existential fear. | On her debut album, Montreal visual artist-turned-electronic pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie makes vital protest music that summons collective strength to overcome existential fear. | Petra Glynt: This Trip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/petra-glynt-this-trip/ | This Trip | There have been no lack of colorful terms used to describe life in a post-Trump world. Take your pick: “horror show,” “shit show,” “nightmare,” “dumpster fire,” “end times,” and so on. The debut album from Montreal-based visual artist-turned-electronic-pop provocateur Alexandra Mackenzie—a.k.a. Petra Glynt—offers a different take: To her, it’s all a trip. (And judging by the phantasmagoric nature of both her illustrations and music, it’s safe to assume the hallucinogenic interpretation applies here.) “Trip” is a word that hits with the same visceral impact as those mentioned above, yet it doesn’t quite carry the same apocalyptic connotations. Trips can certainly be frightening and traumatic, rendering the world before your eyes as something horrible and grotesque. But, if you can keep your shit together, they ultimately do come to an end, and their most turbulent stretches can be more easily navigated with a supportive guide at your side looking out for your well-being.
Throughout This Trip, Mackenize assumes the mantle of Pied Piper, leading us through this waking nightmare toward the light. It’s a role she’s accustomed to—activism and community have always been central to her music and art. A product of the same experimental Toronto scene that yielded fellow avant-pop radical Lido Pimienta, Mackenzie approaches performance as if preparing for war—against patriarchy, against environmental neglect, against austerity economics. Bathed in intensely psychedelic projections, she’ll lay down thundering rhythm tracks using a floor tom and loop them through pedals, before layering on distorted, disorienting electronics in rhythmic swells. And then she unleashes her most powerful weapon of all: a striking, sonorous, opera-schooled voice that’s part stern school headmaster, part veteran soul diva. On strident early tracks like “Sour Paradise” and “Of This Land,” that voice had to bust through the surrounding clamor with the force of a battering ram in order to get their eco-conscious invectives across. They were the sort of songs that, 40 years ago, you could imagine being belted out by a hippie busker trying to get the attention of aloof white-collared businessmen on their way to work. But Mackenzie’s music can’t help but reflect the manic, sensory-overloaded nature of 21st-century life, and her voice is the blaring megaphone that modern protest music requires.
This Trip’s title-track centerpiece actually dates back a few years, long before Trumpism became an American epidemic. However, at the time, Canada was being weighed down by its own political albatross. Sure, these days, Canada’s universal healthcare system, copious arts funding, and hunky prime minister can make the place seem like a socialist utopia compared to the U.S. But from 2006 to 2015, the country was headed by Stephen Harper, a staunch conservative whose divisive rhetoric, disregard for the marginalized, and single-minded belief in economy over environment provided a sort of soft-launch/focus-group teaser of the turmoil currently infecting the U.S. During Harper’s final year in office, Mackenzie released “Murder,” a slow-burning cauldron of bilious spite and barely contained rage directed at the prime minister. But “This Trip,” written around the same time, feels like the response track where dispiriting anger gives way to tangible action. Atop a vibrating bed of bass, Mackenzie admits, “It’s easy to wander, to waver under thunder/Sink further underwater.” So she uses everything at her disposal—from intensifying 808 clatter to gospelized call-and-response refrains to heart-throttling techno—to ensure that doesn’t happen.
The fact that “This Trip” can now be easily applied to the political strife festering beyond her country’s border is oddly emblematic of Mackenzie’s own burgeoning ambitions. The new album complements Mackenzie’s DIY productions with mixes by Damian Taylor, whose credits include the Killers, Björk, and the Prodigy (as well as some acts closer to Mackenzie’s immediate circle, like Austra and Doldrums). Though built from her trusty toolkit of drums and drones, the recordings rebuild Mackenzie’s wall of sound as a three-dimensional space, bringing greater definition to her melodies and encouraging more subtly soulful vocal performances to better harness the juddering energy of rattling bangers like “Fell in a Hole.” A handful of these tracks surfaced in rawer form on Bandcamp or on label compilations over the past couple of years, and the differences are substantial. In its original form, “This You Need” drowned its tropical thrust in waves of disembodied voices, with Glynt frantically reading out a list of demands (“I don’t want to just with anyone/But with everyone!”) as if she were about to get swept up in the tide. On the finely chiseled, beat-heavy version that closes out This Trip, those words become the song’s climactic, rabble-rousing mantra.
The production here also emphasizes a quality that could sometimes get obscured in Mackenzie’s sonic assault: joy. Through the R&B-rubbed “Propaganda” and finger-snapped, heart-racing rush of “Up to the People,” Mackenzie envisions her protests as street parties: “How many of us are scared shitless?” she asks on the latter track, not to amplify our anxieties, but alleviate them, by summoning collective strength to overcome existential fear. And nowhere is that process more explicit than on the album’s most epic, dramatic track, “The Cold.” Over the course of almost six slow-roiling minutes, Mackenzie uses her breathy vocals to thaw the song’s icy surface and her jittering drum sticks to break the pieces away, revealing the beating proletariat heart that’s been frozen by the numbing despair these times engender. As the song’s blood-pumping beat gets harder and stronger, we’re hearing more than a simple quiet-to-loud crescendo—it’s the sound of Mackenzie mobilizing her army one thump at a time. | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Vibe Over Method | November 18, 2017 | 7.8 | a86c55f6-83c1-4e3b-9dbc-f08b75bb357a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
A box set of the UK pop/punk quartet’s 12 7" singles comprehensively documents the band’s rapid evolution, capturing the group’s energy in short, controlled bursts. | A box set of the UK pop/punk quartet’s 12 7" singles comprehensively documents the band’s rapid evolution, capturing the group’s energy in short, controlled bursts. | Buzzcocks: Complete UA Singles 1977-1980 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buzzcocks-complete-ua-singles-1977-1980/ | Complete UA Singles 1977-1980 | Over the past few years, Domino Records has put welcome effort into the continued canonization of UK pop/punk quartet Buzzcocks. The label has lovingly reissued the group’s studio output from its inception in 1976 to its initial split in 1981, including a formerly bootlegged collection of demos, the self-released debut EP, Spiral Scratch (both featuring original vocalist Howard Devoto), and three studio albums.
To kick off 2021, Domino returns to the well with Complete UA Singles 1977-1980, a set of 12 7"s—all the singles that the group released on United Artists—packaged in a handsome red box. It’s an archival effort redolent of a period in which booming vinyl sales have led labels big and small to mine the past for deluxe reissues in formats that are often as inconvenient as they are attractive.
The aesthetic appeal of this collection is easy to grasp. Each disc is a recreation of the original 7" release, including reproductions of the eye-catching sleeves created by graphic designer Malcolm Garrett. Whether anybody actually needs this set is another matter entirely. Domino Records’ 2019 reissue of the 1979 anthology Singles Going Steady is still readily available, with nearly all the same material on one LP. And in the playlist era, is anyone going to be happy hurrying to the turntable every three minutes to flip over the record or swap in the next disc?
Contextually, though, Complete UA Singles is a perfect document of the band’s dizzying creative output and rapid evolution. During the short span of time that the set covers, Buzzcocks released these dozen singles as well as their three full-lengths (Love Bites and Another Music in a Different Kitchen, both from 1978, and 1979’s A Different Kind of Tension). When they weren’t in the studio, they promoted each release heavily, touring and making multiple appearances on Top of the Pops as their singles stormed the UK charts.
During that stretch, Buzzcocks went from the horny agit-punk of debut UA single “Orgasm Addict” to the power pop (complete with brass section!) of “What Do You Know?,” their final release for the label. What happened in between those bookending singles is where the band made its most lasting mark. The quartet—singer/guitarists Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, bassist Steve Garvey, and drummer John Maher—harnessed the energy of punk and applied it to the pure pop and glitter rock they loved. Their irresistibly catchy music slashed, spurted, and jangled—and provided a suitably squirmy backdrop for Shelley and Diggle’s lyrics, which picked through personal and societal frustrations.
Buzzcocks’ UA tenure produced indelible classics of punk’s first era. “What Do I Get?” perfectly embodies the restless sensations of loneliness and jealousy with each pleading line (“I’m not on the make/I just need a break”) and shaky drum fill. “Promises” and its B-side, “Lipstick,” are paired laments about a relationship gone sour, taken to hysteric levels by their fleet tempos. “Autonomy,” written by Diggle, sets a tumbling guitar melody against anthemic lyrics of self-reliance. And the band’s creative and commercial peak, “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?)” pairs the jagged and sweet of romantic torment like rock candy.
Keep in mind: All of those singles mentioned in the previous paragraph came out in 1978, the same year Buzzcocks recorded and released their first two albums. Everyone involved with the band knew they were on a creative hot streak, and capitalized on it. They reaped the benefits, too, as all the ’78 singles charted, with “Ever Fallen in Love” getting as high as No. 12.
This also gave Buzzcocks the leeway to stretch themselves creatively during the next two years. Their first single of 1979, “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” felt more lyrically and musically open, with Shelley wondering aloud about his lack of personal contentment. The B-side, “Why Can’t I Touch It?,” was an even bolder departure. Apparently inspired by the liquid groove of the Rolling Stones’ “Fingerprint File,” the band settled into a similar mode, with Maher and Garvey locking into a slippery yet firm rhythm and Diggle and Shelley sawing through it with each guitar chord.
By 1980, Buzzcocks seemed hungry to upend everything they had built up to that point. As Shelley told an interviewer a few years later, “We… took a lot more risks that we’d done before. I was beyond concern about the commercial side of things.” That meant deciding to link their final three UA singles by labeling them “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and “Part 3,” as well as using random symbols to differentiate the sides rather than using A and B. “We’d… leave it up to the radio DJs to play the side they liked the best,” Diggle wrote in his 2003 memoir Harmony in the Head. “Looking back, I realize it was fucking commercial suicide.”
Buzzcocks didn’t help their sales much by choosing Martin Hannett as the producer for their final sessions. Until then, they had recorded everything with Martin Rushent, who perfectly captured the clean, urgent snap of the band’s sound. Hannett, best known for his work with Joy Division, stained the music with a thin layer of reverb that seemed to approximate the feel of the acid that both he and the band were gobbling at the time. Synths began to creep into the mix of “Airwaves Dream” and “Running Free”—a precursor, perhaps, of the synth-pop turn that Shelley would take in his early solo work.
Beneath the fevered tension of the previous three years, exhaustion was audibly setting in, as borne out by lyrics like “I’ve had enough of the day job/I can see farther than that,” from “Running Free.” Little wonder, then, that the band decided to part ways in 1981. (The original lineup would reunite for a tour in 1989 and three shows in 2012; Shelley and Diggle played off and on with different rhythm sections as Buzzcocks until Shelley’s passing in 2018.)
The possible annoyance at having to wrestle with so many individual singles with this set may end up being a net positive. Like many bands of this period, Buzzcocks had its greatest impact in short, controlled bursts. As good as the band’s studio albums from this period were, they didn’t pack the same wallop in a half hour as they did in the 2:19 of “I Don’t Mind” or even the generous six and a half minutes of “Why Can’t I Touch It?” These 24 tracks are like concentrated elixirs—sometimes one shot is all you need.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 16, 2021 | 7.9 | a86cb306-c896-4d80-8078-dea15b6e4a8e | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
On their first duo recording together, the veteran guitar improvisers find a shared language in slanted melodies and clouds of dissonance. | On their first duo recording together, the veteran guitar improvisers find a shared language in slanted melodies and clouds of dissonance. | Alan Courtis / David Grubbs: Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alan-courtis-/-david-grubbs-braintrust-of-fiends-and-werewolves/ | Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves | Alan Courtis and Davis Grubbs’ dual guitar record Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves zigzags between blown-out riffs and sunny strumming, spiraling and breaking into spiky shards. Exploration is second nature here, as it is across the two artists’ practices. Courtis’ band Reynols, active since 1993, is known for frenzied noise, while his improvisations with artists like Pauline Oliveros grow from heady, static-infused drones. In the genre-hopping post-rock ensemble Gastr del Sol, with Jim O’Rourke, and his numerous solo and collaborative endeavors, Grubbs has taken a winding approach, letting phrases spin out and meander. As a duo, the two improvisers traverse a variety of styles, sculpting Courtis’ looming squalls and Grubbs’ sloping melodies into songs that balance frenetic and balmy moments.
The two guitarists recorded Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves during a once-in-a-blue-moon meeting in Brooklyn, while Courtis, who hails from Buenos Aires, was visiting New York. According to the album’s liner notes, the matchup was seamless and fruitful. “Each time we stopped and started again it was a different gig, a different situation,” marvels Grubbs. “Even after laying down a couple of hours of recordings, it felt like we could have kept going and going.” That ease comes through in their music—the two artists bounce off of each other’s ideas like they’re deep in conversation.
Yet Courtis and Grubbs’ songs are often rocky, juxtaposing clashing textures. One guitarist will play a razor-sharp chord that slices through the other’s rounded and delicate shapes, or one will pluck a simple, bluesy tune as the other makes a swarm of buzzing noise. These unexpected pairings create turbulence, driving the album’s drastic shifts from gentle ruminations to foreboding howls.
Despite such contrasts, the music moves fluidly. Even the most jagged refrain is pleasing to the touch, and the dense fuzz that swirls around each rhythm and riff feels organic. The forlorn strumming of “Hinterhalt” simmers amid feverish feedback and psychedelic fraying and devolves into a raspy, spun-out drone. On “Room Tone of One’s Own,” each guitarist picks a sunny theme, weaving them together into a buoyant, lyrical instrumental. “Varsovia y Esparta” darkens the bright-hued thrums of “Room Tone of One’s Own” and morphs them into an eerie lullaby fit for a horror film.
But the apex comes when Courtis and Grubbs stretch out. The sprawling, 16-minute closer “Airborne Particles of the California Central Valley” unites the fragmented ideas that appear throughout. It opens with spooky scratches and menacing, wobbling plucks, grows into a web of blues riffs cloaked in cloudy noise, and falls away with lightning-bolt chords. The song sputters and spurts, revs up and puts on the brakes. And in all those twists and turns, Courtis and Grubbs find a hypnotic groove, letting their guitars lead them to whatever comes next. | 2023-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Husky Pants | September 8, 2023 | 7.4 | a87a9c9a-6098-44e1-814d-4ef448981d09 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
SOB X RBE is already a compelling rap machine, a potential powerhouse in waiting. But this solo outing suggests that there’s plenty of life outside the group, too. | SOB X RBE is already a compelling rap machine, a potential powerhouse in waiting. But this solo outing suggests that there’s plenty of life outside the group, too. | Yhung T.O.: Trust Issues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yhung-to-trust-issues/ | Trust Issues | There’s a touch of the Wu-Tang Clan’s careerism to SOB X RBE’s unfolding ascendance. Early in the Wu’s saga, RZA artfully strategized a five-year plan to establish clan members as solo stars. SOB X RBE’s blueprint might not be quite so clear, but even in the infancy of their careers, the Vallejo rappers have dropped a number of solo projects and started to establish themselves as viable individual artists. If there’s any justice in The Bay—dubious, as local stars from regional godhead Mac Dre to young showman Nef the Pharaoh have never received the fame they deserved—the four young vocalists could be a kind of reverse rap supergroup. Call them the anti-Slaughterhouse.
It’s Yhung T.O., though, who has always always seemed like “the one.” With distinct Bay Area swagger, he’s as fluid a vocalist as T-Pain or Ty Dolla $ign, his polished, catchy voice adding a pop sheen to his group’s bounce. Had he pursued his recent assertions that he was leaving the collective, it would have been a disaster for his fellow comrades. Released as part of a solo deal he inked with Interscope earlier this year, Trust Issues makes it clear T.O. can thrive on his own. A successful distillation of his strengths, it’s a melodic West Coast party record thanks to production that complements his tuneful style. With hooks for days, T.O. foregoes guests on these largely three-minutes-or-less showcases, delivering the melodious performances of a potential breakout star.
Still, he has a tendency to stud his writing with references to internal pain and external conflict—even the title of this ostensibly fun diversion seems barbed. On “Fuck the Opps,” HollaTheTruth’s fat, funky beat scores tales from the neighborhood, shrouded in dread. T.O.’s oblique shout-outs to homies, smack-downs for unnamed enemies, and vicious yells of “Middle finger to the Feds/Nigga it’s still fuck the cops” sit right next to jubilant declarations about the new Maserati he’ll be riding this weekend. “No Time,” a catchy highpoint, aims scorn at fake friends.
T.O. named a recent mixtape Lamont “Young L” Davis for his late uncle, and he reflected on family deaths often on the comparatively somber release. Trust Issues is less shrouded by the gloaming, but his voice retains a warmth that makes everything sound personal. During “Grandma’s Lincoln,” an ode to the car he used to drive, T.O. thinks about his old life and the former flame who probably rode shotgun. It’s a real pity, though, that “Anxiety” was cut from the final product; included on an unreleased early version of the album, T.O. details the drugs he used to self-medicate, the regrets of ignoring medical advice, and the strains it put on his family, including an incident when he held a gun to his head in front of his mother. Such trenchant depictions of mental illness are rare but necessary in rap; let’s hope “Anxiety” finds its own life.
There are moments of levity, too, as when “Diamonds” channels Young Thug at his most pop-focused. A few skillfully deployed verses from Yhung T.O.’s group-mates would have added even more slants to Trust Issues—though perhaps at the expense of establishing his solo strength. This is T.O’s showcase, after all, his harmonious performance and fiery writing rounding out our understanding of SOB X RBE’s hook machine. By extension, the group now feels more than ever like a hip-hop superpower in waiting. | 2018-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | SOB X RBE / Rule #1 / Interscope | December 17, 2018 | 7.4 | a880cfde-3fca-44f3-8adc-d8933f2c9928 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
null | The first thing that comes to mind when considering Tim Hecker's work is his sense of scale. The Montreal-based drone composer has, over the course of the decade, built oceans of ambient noise capable of submerging his listener. His last album, 2006's *Harmony in Ultraviolet*, took this large-canvas technique to its logical end, so for his latest project, Hecker focuses instead on shorter individual pieces-- albeit with the same deliberateness and meticulous detail we've come to expect from him.
*An Imaginary Country* is, as its title suggests, an otherworldly landscape. Serving as our tour guide, Hecker uses each track to dream | Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12707-an-imaginary-country/ | An Imaginary Country | The first thing that comes to mind when considering Tim Hecker's work is his sense of scale. The Montreal-based drone composer has, over the course of the decade, built oceans of ambient noise capable of submerging his listener. His last album, 2006's Harmony in Ultraviolet, took this large-canvas technique to its logical end, so for his latest project, Hecker focuses instead on shorter individual pieces-- albeit with the same deliberateness and meticulous detail we've come to expect from him.
An Imaginary Country is, as its title suggests, an otherworldly landscape. Serving as our tour guide, Hecker uses each track to dream up one of its distinct regions, necessitating his more tightly focused approach. Take this journey with Hecker and you'll be introduced to the coastal tide ebb and flow on "The Inner Shore", the track's synths inhaling and exhaling to mirror the current's natural rhythm. On "A Stop at the Chord Cascades", a wall of descending chimes recalls the titular waterfall. And while there isn't much human life on this predominantly instrumental voyage, "Utropics" brings you closest to Hecker's imagined natives: A choir of haunted voices far off in the distance. Hecker is able to achieve this transportive quality because he paints these portraits in painstaking three-dimensional detail; the music is strikingly colorful. That said, An Imaginary Country isn't purely concept-driven or a kind of ambient-techno pop-up book. Like all worthwhile atmospheric music, there's a sense of choose-your-own-adventure here that allows the listener to build his own interpretations.
Alongside his more vivid storytelling, Hecker also wisely brings a broadened emotional palette to the record. A primary criticism of his prior work was that, while gorgeous and immense, his compositions often came across as studied and technical to the point of feeling impersonal. (See Harmony in Ultraviolet's academic "Harmony in Blue" suite.) With An Imaginary Country, though, Hecker appears willing to address those concerns and more eager to convey drama. On "Paragon Point", he juxtaposes dissonant shoegaze chords with feathery choral synths to create a poignant, hopeful heartache. Like stepping into the sunlight after a long, depressive stretch indoors, the song expresses regret at time lost but also a sense of optimism for a new day.
Together with these displays of deeper sentiment, Hecker also showcases here a capacity for coaxing natural textures out of his electronic arrangements. Album centerpiece "Borderlands" demonstrates it best, where he establishes a plane of twinkling, piano-like synths and lets gentle gusts of organic noise drift above it. The digitally rendered effect feels remarkably untreated, somehow indistinguishable from the earthly gust of wind it mimics. This naturalism, combined with Hecker's sense of fantasy and mirage, is part of what makes the album such a satisfying listen. Most impressive, though, is that Hecker has built for us this make-believe area to inhabit, to explore with him. While there's a bit less room in this space than those he's constructed before, it's still very much an achievement, and one to be celebrated. | 2009-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-02-25T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kranky | February 25, 2009 | 7.7 | a8814baa-7467-4767-bc24-86aa3f75321f | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The Masculin Féminin box set is a scrapbook made from early records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a rich and vibrant portrait of the ’90s indie rock icons. | The Masculin Féminin box set is a scrapbook made from early records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a rich and vibrant portrait of the ’90s indie rock icons. | Blonde Redhead: Masculin Féminin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22315-masculin-feminin/ | Masculin Féminin | As the band that convinced Nirvana to sign to DGC Records, Sonic Youth were one of the immediate beneficiaries of Nevermind’s game-changing success. They may not have received an official finder’s fee, but the spillover spoils were undeniable: heavier MTV rotation, six-figure record sales, and enough Letterman appearances to usurp Paul Shaffer as the house band. But, at the same time, Sonic Youth’s talent-scout acumen wasn’t just a boon to the DGC A&R department. In 1992, drummer Steve Shelley launched his own imprint out of his Hoboken home to nurture the next sedimentary layer of the underground. With tongue planted somewhat in cheek, he gave his label a name—Smells Like Records—that honored the very phenomenon that allowed him to wield his kingmaking powers.
But if the Smells Like name was a bit of a joke, then Blonde Redhead seemed to be the punchline, given that their music exuded a pungent whiff of Shelley’s main gig. If Sonic Youth had come to view Nirvana as their baby band, Blonde Redhead were the NYC-bound foreign-exchange students—two Japanese women and a pair of Italian twins—who had their own peculiar interpretation of the host culture. Revisiting the two albums Blonde Redhead released on Smells Like, it’s easy to hear why Shelley was drawn to the band—and the reasons go beyond imitation-as-flattery. Where Nirvana showed how Sonic Youth’s sturm-and-clang could be streamlined for mainstream rock audiences, Blonde Redhead made it seem oblique and exotic once again, rendering post-no-wave squall with a European art-house sophistication.
Masculin Féminin compiles Blonde Redhead’s Smells Like catalogue—1994’s self-titled debut and 1995’s La Mia Vita Violenta—along with associated singles, outtakes, and radio sessions. And the box set arrives via Numero Group, a reissue label best known for its archival digs through regional ’70s soul scenes from Ohio to Belize. But these days, the ’90s New York indie rock era feels equally remote. The Big Apple sounds of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s have been thoroughly canonized in books, documentaries, fictional biopics, and ill-fated TV shows. But while contemporary music—from indie rock to R&B—is now awash in ’90s nostalgia, the trend has mostly passed over the vibrant activity happening in New York at the time.
Through the 1980s, indie rock was built on American infrastructure: interstates and college towns and community-radio stations and Kinko’s. But by the mid-’90s, it had become something more cosmopolitan, and New York, naturally, served as the primary melting pot. The Beastie Boys were its most eager ambassadors, with a multi-cultural messthetic that filtered down to peers like Luscious Jackson, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Soul Coughing, and Cibo Matto, while their *Grand Royal *magazine packed a whole internet’s worth of global esoterica into its handsomely bound pages. At the same time, Matador Records were less interested in looking for the next Pavement than scooping up Japanese pastiche-pop acts like Pizzicato Five and Cornelius.
Blonde Redhead weren’t as outwardly irreverent as the aforementioned artists—after all, they took their name from a song by no-wave iconoclasts DNA. And their standard four-piece rock-band lineup seemed traditional compared to the prevailing genre-hopping cut-and-paste style. But even on their 1995 debut, they were severing the abrasive sound of indie rock from its hardcore roots and refashioning it into something more impressionistic and enigmatic.
In discussing the band’s early years with the* Big Takeover* in 2011, singer Kazu Makino said, “I never thought we were violent or angry or post punk.” But you might get a different impression from their debut’s caterwauling opener “I Don’t Want U,” a he-scream/she-scream anti-love song scrawled with a bloody razor blade. While the deceptively calm mise-en-scène bears evidence of brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace’s jazz-schooled backgrounds, it’s soon vandalized by the former’s strangulated verse vocals and a frenzied climax where Makino unleashes a voice like a squawking saxophone.
The rest of *Blonde Redhead *is likewise built from serrated shards and sudden expulsions, with Kazu and Amadeao prodding and jousting one another in an attempt to figure out how their voices can interlock. There are touches of the melodic finesse that would flourish on later releases, but on songs like “Mama Cita” and “Astro Boy,” the staccato, circular singing often mirrors the needling guitar lines. Tellingly, the album’s most transfixing song is its most atypical, both in the context of this record and everything Blonde Redhead did after. On the eerily propulsive “Sciuri Sciura,” Kazu’s funhouse-mirrored voice refracts atop a hypnotic bass groove from long departed bassist Maki Takahashi (who only stuck around for this one album).
Given the lushness of their post-millennium output, the stern-faced severity of* Blonde Redhead* seems even more jarring today than it did in ’95. But the singles and outtakes compiled here hint at a more gentle, playful side: “Big Song” bears the shoegazing glide of late-’80s My Bloody Valentine; “Vague” is a stab at hooky, Pixies-esque fuzz-pop. And it’s funny how much Blonde Redhead’s most radical attempts to draw outside the lines mirror Sonic Youth’s efforts at the same. In the drum-machined scuzz-hop experiments “This Is the Number of Times I Said I Will But Didn’t” and “Woody,” Blonde Redhead essentially adopt their own Ciccone Youth alter ego, right down to the latter track’s “Lucky Star” references. But while 29-second drum-loop snippet “Slogan Attempt” initially seems like a superfluous throwaway, its brief quote of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “La Décadanse” drops the tiniest bread-crumb clue pointing to the band’s future.
*La Mia Vita Violenta *yielded the first real evidence of Blonde Redhead’s art-pop aspirations—the guitars still buzz and drone, but the hooks are sharper, the bee-swarm onslaught more focussed. The difference is immediately apparent on the album’s exhilarating opener “(I Am Taking Out My Eurotrash) I Still Get My Rocks Off,” where Kazu’s restless verses and Amadeao’s melodic counter-vocal provide a perfect balance of tension and release. On the whole, the two singers sound more complementary than combative, with the soothing influence of ’60s Franco-pop loosening up the discordant tangle of songs like “Bean” and non-album A-side “Flying Douglas.” And with “Violent Life,” Amadeao tapped into the perpetually yearning singing style that would become his signature.
The seams are still showing here: the cool maraca rhythm of “U.F.O.” abruptly gives way to a thundering drum coda that you wish the band had explored further. And the record’s transitory nature sees distorto-pop blurts like “I Am There While You Choke on Me” and “10 Feet High” collide with the clock-melting sitar odyssey “Harmony” (also presented here in its shorter, more unsettled seven-inch version) and the creepily whispered lullaby “Jewel.” The outtakes here venture even further afield, with tentative toe-dips into sad-eyed electro-pop (“Not Too Late”) and lonesome-cowboy blues (“Country Song”).
But that unorthodox approach is what liberates this music from the realm of ’90s time capsules. Taken as a whole, Masculin Féminin is a scrapbook made of records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a portrait of a band more multi-dimensional than their Sonic Youth Jr. rep suggested. Listening now, the differences between the two bands seem as pronounced as the similarities. Compared to Sonic Youth’s tightly coiled art-punk epics, early Blonde Redhead were far more scrappy and impulsive, and they were more willing to exploit the frisson between their male and female leads (compared to Thurston and Kim’s often segregated vocal turns). And when you consider the kind of music Sonic Youth were making at the time and thereafter, it’s not a stretch to suggest the influence was mutual.
Blonde Redhead recorded La Mia Vita Violenta around the same time Sonic Youth were finishing up Washing Machine, and the records share a disquieting nocturnal atmosphere infused with ghostly echoes of pre-psychedelic pop. In hindsight, both albums were also situated at the same crossroads: La Mia Vita Violenta saw Blonde Redhead starting to shed their scabrous skin en route to a more expansive sound, while Washing Machine served as Sonic Youth’s gateway from their Lollapalooza-headliner halcyon days into their more experimental SYR EPs phase. And where Sonic Youth once fixated on American icons from Madonna to Manson, from this point on, they started giving songs titles like “Contre le Sexisme” and “Slaapkamers Met Slagroom,” while packaging records to look like European library music. It’s hard to say if Blonde Redhead were responsible for stoking the Youth’s internationalist affectations. But the great strides they made on La Mia Vita Violenta at least instilled Blonde Redhead with enough confidence to title their next record Fake Can Be Just As Good. | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | September 29, 2016 | 7.3 | a89214f5-521d-4cd5-96e0-8bb7708e5e48 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The acclaimed South African pianist meets Los Angeles’ ambient-jazz ringleader for a session that shuttles between atmospheric studio experiments and gorgeously unadorned solo takes. | The acclaimed South African pianist meets Los Angeles’ ambient-jazz ringleader for a session that shuttles between atmospheric studio experiments and gorgeously unadorned solo takes. | Thandi Ntuli / Carlos Niño: Rainbow Revisited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thandi-ntuli-carlos-nino-rainbow-revisited/ | Rainbow Revisited | Pianist-singer Thandi Ntuli is not the only South African artist reinventing a modern music that some critics want to keep locked in a box called “jazz.” The sound of contemporary South Africa is a global beacon for potential musical futures precisely because so many artists entrenched in the country’s great improvised tradition, with its beautiful Xhosa and Zulu melodies, keep pushing beyond the accepted meaning of that four-letter word.
Ntuli, a 36-year-old emissary of a Johannesburg scene gone global, is a standard-bearer for experiments at jazz’s margins. A classical piano prodigy who turned down a Berklee scholarship to study at University of Cape Town, she has collaborated with house producers and joined London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ Ancestors group for a spell. Ntuli’s previous studio albums as leader—The Offering (2014), Exiled (2018), and Blk Elijah & the Children of Meroë (2022)—exhibited visionary scope: piles of instruments and musicians, arrangements that took advantage of their broad tonal and harmonic ranges, and compositions that veered between pop standards, spiritual thought bubbles, and theatrical narratives, plus a voice and musical leadership to carry them all.
Rainbow Revisited edits down such big-budget ambitions. It is primarily a solo piano-and-voice session, recorded one Venice Beach afternoon with percussionist/vibes’n’chimes orchestrater Carlos Niño lightly guiding and participating, at times bringing minor overdubs and post-production into the mix. The music is spare, laser focused on those incandescent gospel melodies that feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on ways to minimally ornament them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and otherwise) audience.
Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It shows her power in a different light—in this case, bathed in the Golden State’s sunrises and sunsets. Ntuli must have been all in, because she named new original tracks after both. The opening “Sunrise (in California)” is a crisp take for piano and voice, abstracting those gorgeous melodies into cubes; later “Sunset (in California)” focuses on folky, melancholy vocal improvisations that draw a direct line between Ntuli’s approach and that of her onetime employer, the great singer Thandiswa “King Tha” Mazwai. On the other side of the spectrum, there are studio experiments whose titles nod to their construction: “Breath and Synth” and “Voice and Tongo.” These airy, atonal rhythm miniatures, straight out of the Carlos Niño & Friends almanac, allow for playful exhalation. In all this newfound space, Ntuli seems unencumbered, free from the constraints often imposed by jazz’s institutional trappings.
Yet despite the very different context in which she’s presented on Rainbow Revisited, this Thandi Ntuli is no different than the South African jazz star in the making. Experimenting using traditional tools is at the core of her practice. The title track is a testament to such a strategy. It’s an emotional strip-down of “Rainbow (Skit),” from the sprawling Exiled, rethinking electric bassist Benjamin Jephta’s dexterous runs, along with her own synths, drum-machine programming, and, especially, lyrical literalism. The revisit is a slowed-down acoustic-piano reading that foregrounds the song’s core melody, modally improvising on its chords, akin to Abdullah Ibrahim’s forceful solo-piano turns. Here, the vocal is almost completely wordless, save for a yearning, twisting expression of the titular refraction (the “rainbow” being South Africa’s national post-Apartheid metaphor).
There is also “Nomoyoyo,” a gorgeous kwela-like melody written by Ntuli’s grandfather, Levi Godlib Ntuli, that is her family’s anthem. In Ntuli’s hands and throat, the song exudes heritage, and age, but also simple harmonic beauty. It is a sonic reflection of the past century, and one wonders at the associations a song like that might bring when publicly performed in South Africa. Here, in between two edit collages—full of synths, samples of waves lapping a shore, piano, and backwards percussion—“Nomoyoyo” feels like an immovable rock, definitively more “jazz” than most sounds here, but unwilling to be bound to it. | 2023-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | November 21, 2023 | 7.8 | a89793e8-51b3-4677-b2bf-672bdfbb26c2 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
In the late ’90s, two art students in Detroit formed the heavily Kraftwerk-inspired electro/techno group Le Car. This new compilation from Clone Records surveys their curio of a catalog. | In the late ’90s, two art students in Detroit formed the heavily Kraftwerk-inspired electro/techno group Le Car. This new compilation from Clone Records surveys their curio of a catalog. | Le Car: Auto-Reverse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22849-auto-reverse/ | Auto-Reverse | Adam Lee Miller and Ian Clarke met as art students in Detroit in the late 1990s, and from ’96 to ’98, they released four projects as the electro/techno group Le Car. The titles of those releases betrayed their vehicular interest: Auto-Fuel, Auto-Graph, Automatic, and Auto-Motif. Le Car’s entrance into the city’s nightlife came a full decade after the Belleville Three (Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May) invented Detroit techno, which May once colorfully described as “like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company.” In that sense, Clarke and Miller (later of the electronic duo ADULT.) draw influence from this local lineage. Le Car, if it is not obvious in their choice of names, are heavily inspired by the sleek, robot automation and cybernetic tendencies of Kraftwerk.
In practice, Le Car’s work demonstrates an almost endearingly uncool attempt to reinterpret “The Robots,” if they were reborn in the bodies of Detroit area art students. And if that either sounds bad or good to you, both the worst and best outcomes are available in Clone Records’ new compilation and survey of their discography, Auto-Reverse.
The opening track, “Car Scene One,” begins with a question. A helium-inflected voice pulls up to a stranger and asks if they’d like a ride. The stranger, with a deeper, metallic, but equally inhuman baritone, cheerfully agrees. Then they turn on the radio, and a brief gurgle of electric noise plays. It’s percussive, vaguely groovy, but rigid: the kind of music the robot overlords in The Matrix might play at parties. The car stalls, the radio stops—barely a minute and half in, it is immediately clear things are not what they seem to be. This gesture of artistic malfunction makes their connection to Kraftwerk even more apparent. It recalls the German group’s own 1970s electronic epiphany: During one show, Ralf Hütter put so much weight down on his keyboard that the wild crowd just kept on dancing “to the machine.”
The compilers of this collection cleverly recognize that so much of Le Car’s music feels like the afterglow of such a moment. The cheeky loops of “Aluminum Rectangles” or “Warm Humans” conjure up seconds of late-night sound that unintentionally hang in the air, playing out when no one is behind the board. That’s not to say that Le Car’s songs are shapeless, but they are in so many ways formulaic. There is something about the music of Le Car that is distinctly campy, simple, and repetitive in the way arcade games are. Even though their synthesizer loops sometimes lose steam, and some of the tracks feel more like fragmentary studies than club-oriented experiences, their music represents an earnest attempt to make real life feel virtual. But as the endless march of technology can attest, their experiments feel hilariously anachronistic in the light of the present day.
While there are a number of standouts in the 20 tracks—including the triumphant early chiptune of “Malice,” and the acidic beat of “Audiofile 10”—the compilation presents Le Car in an incidentally satirical light, like a caricature of techno. But the exuberance of Miller and Clarke is undeniable. There is a relentlessly cheery aspect to their music that makes it hard to hate. Even if Auto-Reverse might just be a curio, it documents a brief pocket of time that feels feels quaint, fun, and fresh today, like that pair JNCO jeans hidden deep in your closet. | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Clone Classic Cuts | February 11, 2017 | 6.8 | a8a30fca-65ce-4852-b135-ab1476f630fd | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Some music begs to be explored. Promising fascination and intrigue beyond your wildest dreams, its distant melodies beckon you towards ... | Some music begs to be explored. Promising fascination and intrigue beyond your wildest dreams, its distant melodies beckon you towards ... | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Source Tags and Codes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/178-source-tags-and-codes/ | Source Tags and Codes | Some music begs to be explored. Promising fascination and intrigue beyond your wildest dreams, its distant melodies beckon you towards it while you try your very best to discern every distinct element that presents itself to you. As you get closer and closer, you begin to relax, letting yourself become completely enveloped by the entrancing tones.
Of course, it's all a trap. Just as you begin to lose yourself, you become vaguely aware that the sound that soothingly beckoned you has now transformed into something vastly different-- something powerful, dangerous, and merciless. What was so beautiful at a safe distance is still beautiful, but what was once tranquil and peaceful has metamorphosed into a vicious, violent glory. Before you can even respond, you're flat on your back, pulverized by its sheer force.
Making music that is both delicate and dangerous requires a level of skill that most musicians can barely even fathom. While some bands, like the Microphones, succeed at capturing the simultaneous beauty and rage of nature, what And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have encapsulated on their third full-length, Source Tags and Codes, is something distinctly human. Anger has always played a central role in the band's music, but with this record, they've finally managed to capture all the subtle shades of disappointment, melancholy, frustration and hope that often accompany it.
Of course, capturing all this with music is no small feat. Source Tags and Codes is massive in its execution, bursting with layered percussion, deftly arranged strings and, most importantly, songs that are simply epic. "It Was There That I Saw You" opens the album with squealing static and a clean guitar playing a simple, tickling figure. There's a palpable sense of excitement as the song suddenly explodes into a frenetic blast of crashing cymbals, screeching guitars, and thumping bass. Amidst the swell of sound, Conrad Keely's voice takes on a sharp, almost crystalline quality that cuts through the mix with biting force.
"Another Morning Stoner" mimics "It Was There That I Saw You" in its opening moments, but rather than exploding with pure energy, it builds slowly and deliberately to an absolutely astonishing finale. Melodic guitar lines ricochet back and forth, brought to new sonic elevations by soaring string arrangements. The call-and-response section that finishes the song, in which two members of the band exchange the phrases, "What is forgiveness?/ It's just a dream/ What is forgiveness?/ It's everything," is one of many absolutely indelible moments on Source Tags and Codes.
"Baudelaire" follows the haunting "Another Morning Stoner" with a blast of pure rock and roll. Catchy and incredibly sinister, "Baudelaire" builds upon a central, immensely powerful guitar and trumpet riff with handclaps, driving percussion, and barely audible voices engaged in conversation. Eventually, the song trails off into a single submerged guitar line accentuated by reverb-soaked bells.
Just as the hypnotic ending to "Baudelaire" pulls you into a trance, "Homage" picks you up by the hair, smacks you around, spits in your face, and leaves you gasping for breath, before imploding into a symphony of static. "How Near How Far" and "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" are the highlights of Source Tags and Codes' center, utterly alive with energy and texture. "How Near How Far" uses vocal harmonies and strings to reinforce a sense of violent melancholy, and the unforgettable chorus to "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" ("I'm so damned, I can't win") is enlivened by the contrast between gritty guitars and clear, ringing piano.
After another expertly produced segue, "Monsoon" pulls together the rock swagger of "Baudelaire" and the sentimentality of "Heart in the Hand of the Matter" to wonderful effect. The songwriting on Source Tags and Codes is inconceivably elegant-- never predictable, but never gratuitously dissonant. Parts of songs wind seamlessly into each other, each one full of brilliant sonic nuances that are every bit as compelling when taken as part of the entire song as when examined individually. Fragmented feedback heralds the arrival of "Days of Being Wild," a song that hosts some of the most creative instrumental interplay to grace this album, before building to yet another utterly awe-inspiring finale.
Source Tags and Codes is an album big on finales-- thus, it makes sense that its three final tracks are quite possibly its best. "Relative Ways," which was released earlier this year as a single, is the most exquisitely constructed song here. Conrad Keely's voice breaks and spits as he pleads, "It's okay/ I'm a saint/ I forgave/ Your mistakes." An unexpected chord shift heightens the dramatic tension of the song just in time for it to return to its original theme and fade into "After the Laughter," the only segue on Source Tags and Codes to be given its own track. A stunning concoction of dreamy vocal harmonies, radio noises, pianos and strings, "After the Laughter" is wonderful in its own right, but taking into account the fact that the song perfectly bridges the melodies of "Relative Ways" and the album's closer, "Source Tags and Codes," it seems utterly brilliant.
As with any epic album, Source Tags and Codes demands an epic closer, and the record's title track delivers masterfully. Both a lyrical and melodic high point, "Source Tags and Codes" captures the complex emotions of the album in a brief glimpse of pure paradoxical beauty. A perfect arrangement of the guitars, piano, strings, bells, and percussion that help make this record so intricate and powerful, the song sounds almost like a bittersweet reunion with old friends. A few seconds after last guitar has faded, a string ensemble plays a brief, gorgeous piece that is at once hopeful and somber. The strings end in unison on a single note, which is sustained for a few moments before fading out. The impact is immediate: you know without a moment's doubt that you have just heard something that is absolutely classic.
And while Source Tags and Codes does seem to carry with it a certain knowledge of its own brilliance, it never tries to cheaply impress. Simply put, it doesn't need to. Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion. Source Tags and Codes will take you in, rip you to shreds, piece you together, lick your wounds clean, and send you back into the world with a concurrent sense of loss and hope. And you will never, ever be the same. | 2002-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2002-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | February 28, 2002 | 10 | a8a3126d-c28b-4431-b452-2f365e310b78 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
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