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On her debut LP, British producer Nabihah Iqbal—fka Throwing Shade—has a rare touch with inky new wave synths and drum machines, emerging as a songwriter of impressive emotional heft. | On her debut LP, British producer Nabihah Iqbal—fka Throwing Shade—has a rare touch with inky new wave synths and drum machines, emerging as a songwriter of impressive emotional heft. | Nabihah Iqbal: Weighing of the Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nabihah-iqbal-weighing-of-the-heart/ | Weighing of the Heart | On May 3, 1993, New Order released Republic, their long-awaited sixth studio album. A month later, it was joined in the stores by Souvlaki, the second long player from Reading shoegazers Slowdive. The British producer and DJ Nabihah Iqbal was a child at the time, but her debut album sits on a stylistic shelf between them. Weighing of the Heart is first full-length from Iqbal to not bear her former moniker, Throwing Shade, the modish alter ego that she inhabited from 2009 to mid-2017.
Iqbal has explained that the decision to do away with the Throwing Shade alias was driven by a desire to stand as a British-Asian artist making music. But the move also feels appropriate on an album where Iqbal rolls back the fashionable club production of her previous work in favor of a sound that is more personal and emotive. Gone are the bleeding-edge electronic beats and globe-trotting influences that Iqbal previously preferred on tracks like “hashtag IRL.” In a recent interview, Iqbal said she avoided listening to new music while working on this album, reflecting instead on the music of her teenage years. She mentions Joy Division and Bauhaus as influences as well as "Sowt ‘Leiko Kamam Bian Tara Lod Biaran’" by R & R Zangeshahi, the latter not so much as a sonic marker as for the emotional response it brings from the listener.
The inky hands of Joy Division’s later incarnation as New Order are all over Weighing of the Heart. Album highlight “Saw U Twice” is a hugely satisfying retread of the early New Order sound, when the band bolted on synths to add dashes of color to their Mancunian morosity. “Saw U Twice” sees sparse guitar lines meet melodic bass counterpoint, airy electronic washes and drums that vacillate between post-punk dungeon and New York disco, each perfectly weighed. This combination, repeated on the album’s best tracks, may not appear particularly original in late 2017, when New Order’s influence is evident in bands from LCD Soundsystem to The Killers. But Iqbal lifts her music into rather more original territory thanks to vocals that borrow from the chiffon singing style of shoegaze acts like Slowdive or The Telescopes, her fusion of two popular musical influences creating something greater than the sum of its parts.
It helps that Iqbal is a frequently fantastic songwriter. The spaces and separation inherent in the New Order sound mean that there is no room to hide your dirty musical laundry; every component must be finely tuned to work, both individually and as part of the whole. Iqbal pulls off this delicate balancing act with aplomb, packing the album with wonderful instrumental touches, from the chiming guitar intro to “Something More” to the luminescent bassline that lifts the midsection of “Eternal Passion” to the dramatic cymbal crashes on “Saw U Twice.” To this, she adds vocal lines that combine earworm melodies with a road-worn melancholy, transforming lyrics such as “Saw you on the train/Will I see you again?” (from “Saw U Twice”) into the kind of quotidian lament that is inherent in the most relatable pop music.
Iqbal’s lyrical skills are particularly prominent on “Zone 1 to 6000,” a song that takes the influence of English poets William Blake and Matthew Arnold into the drudgery and release of 21st-century London. The combination of Iqbal’s deadpan delivery, brilliantly evocative synth chords, and lines like, “We wander through each other's lives/Just like the river's constant flow” make the song a dead ringer for a 2017 “West End Girls.”
When this combination of hooky, relatable songwriting works, Weighing of the Heart delivers some of the finest, most viscerally satisfying electronic pop music of the year. At times, though, Iqbal seems to let her winning formula get away from her. “In Visions” feels like two entirely separate songs meeting up and not getting along, the vocal sitting on top of the musical bed like a misconstrued mix you wish the DJ would put out of its agony. “Eden Piece,” which opens the album, foregoes a proper vocal melody in favor of rather formless “oohs” and “aahs” and a wandering piano line. “Slowly,” meanwhile, relies almost entirely on the vocal line, supported only by mopey synth chords and the kind of off-putting, twiddling guitar that might adorn a Scorpions B side. It’s a drag, in all senses of the word.
Weighing of the Heart is not perfect, then, but most New Order albums also contain their fair share of imperfections and missteps (and somehow it makes us love them more). As Throwing Shade, Iqbal was already one of electronic music’s most engaging polymaths, thanks to a resumé that included everything from vocalist on SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” to a stint as a human rights lawyer. With Weighing of the Heart, Iqbal adds another couple of strings to her bow, emerging as a pop auteur and songwriter of impressive emotional heft. | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Ninja Tune | December 6, 2017 | 7.7 | a8abdc9b-f51b-4db6-b59a-aecfdd4b3605 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience. | Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience. | Actress: R.I.P. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16544-actress-rip/ | R.I.P. | Darren Cunningham is one of those dance music producers who has spent most of his career moving away from the dancefloor. The London-based artist's first two albums as Actress, 2008's Hazyville and 2010's Splazsh, sounded like mid-1980s house and techno collaged together and played on a radio from under the freeway. Half of his newest, R.I.P., doesn't even have beats. Listening to him discuss his process making it-- which included reading John Milton, philosophizing about death, and smoking weed-- you'd think he was a PhD candidate.
"I want to make cool, classical stuff for a modern generation," he said in a recent interview. The phrase "classical stuff" alone will probably disqualify him from the academy. Good. It's not where he belongs. Like Oneohtrix Point Never, what makes Cunningham special is that he's an artist capable of referencing extroverted, populist music like house and rap in order to create a meditative, introverted experience.
In general, his productions are less about their build-and-release than their atmosphere, which hovers over the bones of the music like some sick gas cloud. The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like: By bringing the acidic sounds to the surface and keeping the air-conditioner hum somewhere in the depths, Cunningham takes the monolithic sound of his earlier productions and breaks them into layers-- compared to Splazsh, it's practically prismatic.
It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.
The thick crud over Cunningham's earlier albums mimicked a sense of loss and erosion, as though he'd found the music abandoned in an alleyway and brought it back to something resembling life. The disparate sounds on R.I.P don't need resuscitation, just room to breathe. Given that room, they arrange themselves. If the album could be called intimate, it's paradoxically because there's so much distance and disconnect to it. Listening to it can be like seeing the city you live in from a plane: You can't reach out and touch it but you're comforted by how manageable and well-planned it all looks.
Cunningham's scope is already wider than producers like Burial or Zomby, who tend to keep dance music's vocabulary intact, even at their most abstract. When Splazsh first started going around, Cunningham called it "R&B concrete," which, as marketing speak, was terrific, but as self-description was mostly aspirational. On R.I.P., the blending between the traditions of techno and the traditions of ambient and minimalist music are more apparent. Until he comes up with something better (or it ends up being used for a soda campaign), "cool, classical stuff for a modern generation" will have to work. As for his shift in focus, he confesses to not getting quite as stoned as he used to. The fresh air has done him good. | 2012-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | April 26, 2012 | 8.5 | a8ae319e-8e64-4ac9-ac5a-6a1146ff7baa | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The latest album from this L.A. session player to the stars reveals him to be a fascinatingly expressive keyboardist who doesn’t take himself too seriously. | The latest album from this L.A. session player to the stars reveals him to be a fascinatingly expressive keyboardist who doesn’t take himself too seriously. | John Carroll Kirby: Blowout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-carroll-kirby-blowout/ | Blowout | To immerse yourself in John Carroll Kirby’s mischievous amalgam of jazz, funk, and Herbie Hancock-indebted synth-soul is to enter a world of endless iteration. The songs on the Los Angeles-based pianist’s studio albums often feel like they’ve sprung from a plot of seemingly infinite permutations and potential melodic detours. With each solo project, Kirby creates a new aesthetic, adopting a specific conceit to anchor his and his bandmates’ limber jamming. Past projects have foregrounded ambient (2018’s Meditations in Music), dusty piano beats (2020’s My Garden), and ambling synth jazz (last year’s Dance Ancestral), but regardless of the genre, Kirby’s work is never rigid or fixed in place; it’s easy to imagine his pieces being completely reborn each time they’re performed. A lead piano or synth melody might hold steady, and flute, Minimoog, and percussion might carry from song to song, but Kirby’s work revels in play—the intuitive pleasure of wiggling into new shapes within otherwise steady structures.
Kirby’s latest record, Blowout, is his most energetic and immediately enjoyable release yet. He has earned a reputation as an artist’s artist, a beloved, if-you-know-you-know session player and producer who’s worked with some of pop’s biggest names (Harry Styles, Frank Ocean, Steve Lacy) and left-of-center stars (Liv.e, Blood Orange, Solange), but Blowout feels like Kirby’s first solo album capable of expanding his audience beyond jazz aficionados and study-playlist listeners. It’s an endlessly vibey, psychedelically tropical eruption of new-age electro funk and jazz. At its most affecting, it’s irresistibly fun, an impeccably arranged entanglement of soulful melodies and ecstatic synths and flutes; at its least convincing, it’s aimless and too winkingly cheeky. Yet Blowout still affirms Kirby’s status as a fascinatingly expressive keyboardist who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
The opening “Oropendola,” named after a bird whose call woke Kirby early in the morning during a stay in Costa Rica, establishes the album’s palette. Aqueous synths, tight drums, and sprightly flute mesh into a euphoric, hummable refrain before giving way to two fantastic solos. Kirby’s chops dazzle, and Sam KS’s drums and David Leach’s percussion add vibrant character to the record’s spare yet robust instrumentation. But it’s Logan Hone’s flute playing that steals the show throughout the album; there’s a palpable exuberance to his style that makes these pieces feel like more than mere mood music. Mid-album highlight “So So So” embodies many of Blowout’s best qualities. It’s a sturdy, simply structured song that grants Kirby and Hone the freedom to wiggle and warble over dubby percussion. Where some of Kirby’s work has tended to drift without purpose, on Blowout he and his collaborators construct tastefully breezy beats that encourage inspired improvisation around memorable melodies.
Kirby’s whimsical songs often strike a delightful balance between childlike wonder and elegant flair, but Blowout wobbles when the balance breaks. The campy “Vertigo” feels like a scrapped soundtrack cue that lacks the ambition or humor to offset its overwrought writing. Conversely, the minimal, meandering “Gecko Sound” can’t quite muster the energy or definition to assert itself as anything beyond a slightly more refined cousin of call-center hold music.
Still, as Kirby’s ninth studio album in six years, Blowout signals a compositional maturation: He’s tightening his skills and daring to experiment while also making more accessible, pleasure-packed pieces. Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe. | 2023-07-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Jazz | Stones Throw | July 6, 2023 | 7.1 | a8b67cd7-96e8-47be-be0f-02c103bf9732 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Spoon stay in their well-earned lane but tweak the formula just enough on their ninth album, keeping their reliably great songwriting and adding new, electronic textures. | Spoon stay in their well-earned lane but tweak the formula just enough on their ninth album, keeping their reliably great songwriting and adding new, electronic textures. | Spoon: Hot Thoughts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22990-hot-thoughts/ | Hot Thoughts | Despite remaining perennial indie rock favorites over the last decade, Spoon have always been about that small-stakes life. They aren’t going to alter the course of your existence—frontman Britt Daniel would probably smirk at such a claim—but occasionally Daniel’s hyper-specific details will creep into your mind unexpectedly. Is Dorian’s a real place? What’s the corner by Sound Exchange in Austin look like anyway? And why don’t more people talk about how much Garden State actually sucked?
This is not to say that Spoon’s songs don’t often overflow with sound, as they increasingly have. But there is no tortured myth surrounding the whole ordeal, no idealistic aims to be anything more than career band making themselves happy. Every few years, they put out a record that sounds like Spoon but offers some new little twist, they tour for long stretches after that, and then they go away for a while. Their last album, 2014’s They Want My Soul, was one of their best—soulful and swirling, with just enough teeth showing between the hooks. Their ninth album, Hot Thoughts, picks up that thread and takes it in a funkier and freer direction. There are loads of drum beats that sound indebted to hip-hop and dance music throughout, downbeat electronics, and two five-minute instrumentals, including a moody jazz coda that closes the record.
But Spoon also know their lane quite well: punchy, inconspicuously catchy songs, with choruses just vague enough to make them applicable outside of whatever stylized vignette Daniel has yelped out; bonus points if there’s a brief jam session that runs intoxicatingly off the rails for just a moment towards the song’s end. This dichotomy can make Hot Thoughts a little uneven, unsure if it’s trying to be arty or poppy while playing around with the drum machines.
There are the hit attempts: The repetitive title track, whose jittery energy is practically killed by its surface-level “hot thoughts” about a sexy girl, nary a hint of clever winking to be found. And there are the clear hits: “Can I Sit Next to You,” which proves they’re almost as adept as Phoenix at infectiously anxious dance-rock, and “Do I Have to Talk You Into It,” an instant classic that could only come from this band. Jim Eno’s swaggering drums—a key element of Spoon’s sound since the start—and Alex Fischel’s descending piano chords drive the song boundlessly forward, punctuated by Daniel’s selective rasp. It takes a certain kind of 45-year-old frontman to sing the phrase “knock knock” and still sound at least moderately cool, not like some phony in his first pair of Ray-Bans.
Eno and Fischel also shine on “First Caress,” a toe-tapping tune about one of those ghosts that linger in Daniel’s head. He shoehorns in one of his Britticisms, a dry parenthetical that somehow captures the whole life of a character: “Coconut milk, coconut water/You still like to tell me they’re the same/And who am I to say?” On “Pink Up” he mumbles about taking a train to Marrakesh while the production—via indie-psych go-to Dave Fridmann—grows hazy and primal. By the end, the looping piano line, eerie strings, and bleeps of gibberish leave Spoon sounding a little like Radiohead. If anything, “Pink Up” tees up the final track, “Us,” which returns to the same motif after dark via saxophone and bells.
All this is a far cry from the band who wrote clever little classic-rock paeans to their fathers’ fitted shirts, but even then they were throwing in touches of harpsichord. That’s the trick with Spoon: They make it seem more straightforward than it actually is. Over time, their slowly accumulated sonic excess has led them here, to what could be considered their electronic album. But they’re caught just slightly between who they used to be and where they’re going, and the songs don’t always find a musical common ground. There’s one point in particular where their maximalism serves their attempt at an anthem—“Tear It Down”—but what’s funny is that the song’s sweeping whoa-oh climax is reminiscent of Arcade Fire, not Spoon. The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities. | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | March 16, 2017 | 7.4 | a8b78b7f-2881-4474-9835-acea6de7617f | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | null |
GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music featured on his first mixtape draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house. | GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music featured on his first mixtape draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house. | GoldLink: The God Complex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19325-goldlink-the-god-complex/ | The God Complex | GoldLink is a 20-year-old rapper with a name that recalls a securities firm (he used be to be Gold Link James, but dropped the surname to avoid any Trinidad James comparisons) and a sound all his own. Brightly colored, hyper, and upbeat, the Virginia native's music draws openly from genres that street rap usually has no time for: bachata, go-go, classic house. When Diddy's Revolt.TV asked him to describe his style, he responded thoughtfully: "Rick James meets Justin Timberlake (*NSYNC days) with Backstreet Boys and a little D12 and Tupac." GoldLink is a unique creature in rap right now and he knows it.
He doesn't have much music to his name yet*—The God Complex*, his debut mixtape, is only 26 minutes and nine tracks long. Prior to that, there were six songs on his Soundcloud. But his sound is distinct and unusual enough to have snagged the attention of local tastemakers: Peter Parker, nighttime DJ at D.C. urban radio station WPGC, named him one of the DMV's artists to watch last year, and several of those early songs of his have surpassed 100k plays on Soundcloud. He's struck a nerve, even if no one knows exactly where that nerve is just yet.
There is a lot of information to parse on The God Complex, all of it happening at once. The BPMs are nearly twice as fast as current street rap allows, and glitzy house synths flutter everywhere. Louie Lastic, one of GoldLink's main collaborators and an architect of the sound that they've dubbed "Future Bounce", handles most of the production here; the resulting sound is wet and lubricious—there is a lot of audible licking and jiggling, both in the lyrics and the music. The Ronnie Foster sample behind A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation" peeks out furtively behind strobe lights and '90s R&B keyboards on "Bedtime Story". A slowed-down playback of Britney Spears' "Toxic" surfaces near the end of "How It's Done". You can imagine Azealia Banks wishing she'd corralled production from this crew.
And yet, GoldLink tramples through the music, his rhymes as hard as a shoulder check. This is one of the most fascinating pieces of GoldLink's sound—he skips through the minefield separating rap's ideas of "hard" and "soft". On "Bedtime Story", he calls out wearers of tight jeans and waves box-cutters at us. On "Hip-Hop (Interlude)" he reminisces about "masturbating to them porno flicks my brother gave me" and "popping guns" at age 11. His voice is high, hyper, and excitable, no one's idea of a tough-guy stereotype, but he keeps one foot firmly planted in street rap and the other in the club, tangling all the music's reference points and intentions like kite strings. The surfaces of his music are slick and slippery, and gaining purchase on what he's doing is like trying to hug a dolphin.
This confusion, and the endorphins it loosens, is presumably why people have been losing their shit about GoldLink. His music doesn't just make you hold two opposing ideas in your mind--it opens twelve tabs in one browser window. On "Planet Paradise", he raps in triple-time, allowing a single pinhole gulp of air to open between "everyday we pray to-" and "God" in the exact same place every time. His mind moves at a thousand miles an hour, as does the music. Nine tracks is more than enough to digest for now. | 2014-05-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-05-09T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 9, 2014 | 7.9 | a8c0c158-5916-4880-8012-6a07b50622e5 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Ohio rock band’s bleak, heavy, and ambitious third LP is a subtle signal that they’re a band their fans can grow up with rather than out of. | The Ohio rock band’s bleak, heavy, and ambitious third LP is a subtle signal that they’re a band their fans can grow up with rather than out of. | Citizen: As You Please | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/citizen-as-you-please/ | As You Please | Citizen announced their sleek, roaring, and aerodynamic rebrand with a song appropriately called “Jet.” It’s just about 2017’s most authentic simulacra of 1996; if it landed on MTV and rock radio back then, all kinds of hand-wringing from pop-punk diehards would surely ensue. But this is 2017: “TRL” is back and it doesn’t even play videos, while alt-rock radio playlists are created in the image of Imagine Dragons—they don’t go anywhere near young and loud guitar bands without major-label backing. This puts Citizen in a situation almost identical to that of their labelmates and colleagues in Balance and Composure, Tigers Jaw, Turnover, Basement or just about anyone else called “soft grunge” and/or produced by Will Yip in the past decade. Perhaps they’d try to “level up” in the past, but those elevated platforms are gone—their newfound ambitions on their third LP As You Please aren’t a matter of expanding their demographic reach, but a more subtle signaling that they’re a band their fans can grow up with rather than out of.
Citizen’s evolution isn’t quite as drastic of those of their peers. Since the diaristic days of their 2013 debut Youth, Mat Kerekes’ lyrics have taken on a protective layer of bulk (see: “Winsome through the void/Resound my everything”), but his moments of clarity match the relentlessly grim outlook of Citizen’s music. There’s also far more instrumental and textural frill to the prevailing, concrete-sky ambience—a psych-rock organ on “Ugly Luck,” a howling chorus of the damned on “I Forgive No One,” a wheezing drone on the title track—but their go-to move remains Kerekes gritting his teeth through a chorus that ratchets up the tension rather than releasing it.
This can work to Citizen’s advantage since most of Kerekes’ narrators find life to be one kind of resistance after another, struggling against the pull of drugs and despair that seem like the only things the economically depressed cities of America have to offer anymore. But with 12 songs of nearly equal tone, volume, and length, the nearly hour-long As You Please becomes its own endurance test. When As You Please is taken in smaller chunks, the minor variations between the songs where Citizen churn and the ones where they steamroll ever forward become more discernible. Taken as a whole, Yip’s sleek production flattens out the individual contouring of each track; the piano-led “Discrete Routine” and “Jet” have far different intentions but equal dynamic range, while the vocals and riffs that should lunge out of the speakers seem to be at the same volume as the verses.
It’s fair to ask whether the fatigue generated by As You Please is the entire point. Like many indie rock bands from the Rust Belt, Citizen spent most of the past year looking at their hometown and seeing little hope for redemption—beset by socioeconomic problems far beyond their control, while being scapegoated for the current state of American politics. How could As You Please speak truthfully on its surroundings without merely compounding the misery? It’s a question that’s inspired some of the most compelling indie rock of 2017, as previously apolitical bands have been forced into action—on Always Foreign, the World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die reinvented themselves as a vigilante posse, Cloakroom took solace in a cloud of weed smoke, Thunder Dreamer and Greet Death found bleak beauty in the urban ruins of Evansville and Flint.
While the honesty of Citizen’s dour outlook is commendable, the glimmer of light provided by “In the Middle of It All” is more compelling. This is the one that allows them to truthfully namecheck Queen as an influence, manifested entirely by Kerekes’ pitched-up falsetto harmony that serves as the most unconventional and catchy earworm on As You Please. It also contains Kerekes’ sharpest lyrics—a scrapbook of lost souls futilely hoping for a brighter tomorrow or living in the darkness of the past, all of it captured with clarity and empathy. It’s by far the best song Citizen have ever written, one that speaks directly to their unglamorous environs while transcending them all the same. | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | October 19, 2017 | 6.5 | a8c615ac-0ca2-48c3-aab1-66f998d6556e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Written and recorded in just 77 hours, the bassist and singer’s limited-release album is a heady, jazzy range of intricacy and improvisation, a monument to her skills as a composer and performer. | Written and recorded in just 77 hours, the bassist and singer’s limited-release album is a heady, jazzy range of intricacy and improvisation, a monument to her skills as a composer and performer. | Esperanza Spalding: Exposure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esperanza-spalding-exposure/ | Exposure | When singer, bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding announced the organizing conceit for a new album, it wasn’t immediately clear how to categorize her idea. Write, rehearse, and record a full-length set in only 77 hours—including naps, breaks, and meal-times?
The time limit was hardly unprecedented, given how artists schooled in jazz-performance practice have long been able to create memorable recordings in a single afternoon. Plans to livestream the entire studio session on Facebook Live provided a legitimately new angle. The radical transparency of that move also lent the forthcoming album’s title, Exposure, some extra conceptual depth. But none of these quirks were meant to be more important than the music resulting from the sessions. And Spalding’s fans had little way of knowing how the album might sound. Would it be akin to her more improvised gigs? Or patterned after the intricate singer-songwriter style that shaped prior releases like Emily’s D+Evolution? The implicit response from Spalding’s team was: “Watch and find out.”
For its part, Spalding’s label had to cover its own bet on the project. Before the studio microphones and cameras went live, Concord Music Group settled on a limited run of 7,777 copies, split between CDs and LPs. No digital purchases would be possible, and the album would never be available to stream—another somewhat radical move, for late 2017. With price points set rather high—$50 for a promised 2-CD set; $60 for the vinyl edition—Spalding entered the recording booth, on September 12, 2017.
This limited-edition run sold out well before the following 77 hours had elapsed. The livestream clocked 1.4 million views; those who stuck around for any real length of time watched Spalding put on a dizzying creative clinic. Her intensity and purpose were obvious, moment to moment. But her inspired pace did not carry a frazzled air. With the support of some quick-reacting audio engineers, Spalding could sketch out a melody on her double bass before beginning to create harmony vocal lines. At one point, when watching Spalding refine and re-record specific notes within a long-lined motif—only minutes after settling on the overall hook—I pre-ordered my copy.
In between watching the livestream and receiving the mastered, finished album in December, it was possible to wonder whether the multi-day rush of watching Spalding work might always loom larger than the experience of listening to a 10-track, 40-minute recording, no matter how good. Yet after a few weeks with Exposure in hand, the record clearly seems a worthy follow-up to the bold, theatrical Emily’s D+Evolution. It reprises that prior album’s interest in diverse stylistic reference points—with its first and last tracks containing obvious traces of jazz fusion and progressive pop. Though while the set is more compact—in terms of track-length and overall running time—Exposure also manages to range more widely.
Side B opener “Coming to Life” relies on the rich, wordless vocals of guest contralto Lalah Hathaway and acoustic guitar from Spalding’s bandmate Matthew Stevens. At first, the production sounds muffled, as it would if you were overhearing an intimate performance taking place in another room. As the song develops, the sound becomes crisper. The next track, “Geriment,” revels in some stark, marching piano progressions and Spalding’s comparatively lighter voice. A label executive might grimace at these two wordless, somewhat abstract pieces running on the same album, let alone back-to-back. But on a project like Exposure, you’re pre-committed to releasing what artists set down in the studio. Happily, these particular compositions come across as a graceful diptych in between some of the more obviously ambitious numbers.
Elsewhere, the material that stomps really stomps: “Public Trance It” contains some of Spalding’s most locomotive acoustic-bass riffing. The baroque pop colors of “Heaven in Pennies” suddenly give way to dreamy plumes of reverb-heavy rock, before the composer clears her canvas again—giving pianist Robert Glasper space for a darting jazz solo. Each guest-star appearance seems perfectly placed, as when violinist and vocalist Andrew Bird appears for an easygoing, seductive duet with Spalding, on “The Ways You Got the Love.”
A second CD, titled Undeveloped, accompanies the proper album (and helps make the price-point seem slightly more reasonable). As a document, the additional CD is fascinating, as it gives us a look into Spalding’s training process, ahead of the livestream session. The artist told Billboard that she “practiced this mode” of on-the-fly composition, but that she hadn’t completed any of her trial tracks quickly enough to feel confident with the 77-hour deadline.
Spalding’s irrepressible musicality is present throughout the earlier sessions but, tellingly, nothing as strong as Exposure songs like “I Am Telling You” pops up during rehearsal. Even this difference between the practice sessions and the for-real album helps her overall concept come into clearer focus. As tempting as it may be to think that disciplined artists like Spalding can just turn on a genius tap and let the product flow, Exposure reveals some measure of what is required when an established artist hopes to improve and innovate. | 2018-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Concord | January 6, 2018 | 7.7 | a8c64b57-e593-481a-9760-36382115309c | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
The Secret History, Vol. 1 is the first in a five-part rarity series that will cover Pavement's proper LPs. They’re being framed as "shadow albums" that illustrate how productive Pavement was in their heyday, and Vol. 1 collects rarities, live tracks, and other odds and ends from 1990-1992, the hallowed Slanted & Enchanted period. | The Secret History, Vol. 1 is the first in a five-part rarity series that will cover Pavement's proper LPs. They’re being framed as "shadow albums" that illustrate how productive Pavement was in their heyday, and Vol. 1 collects rarities, live tracks, and other odds and ends from 1990-1992, the hallowed Slanted & Enchanted period. | Pavement: The Secret History, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20747-the-secret-history-vol-1/ | The Secret History, Vol. 1 | Pavement haven’t released a proper album since Terror Twilight in 1999, but the industry around the band has consistently reminded you of their importance with a variety of compilations, live documents, and reissues. This was aided in part by the group’s reunion in 2010. The collection coinciding with that reunion was the 23-song compilation Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement (which came out in both regular and Record Store Day editions). The title was a clever way of saying no, you really never can quarantine the past. Especially not when you can make money from it.
The newest installment to the discography is The Secret History, Vol. 1, which is the first in a five-part rarity series that will cover the band's proper LPs. They’re being framed as "shadow albums" that illustrate how productive Pavement was in their heyday, and how strong the material was that didn’t make it onto the albums themselves. This one collects rarities and live tracks and other odds and ends from 1990-1992, Pavement’s hallowed Slanted & Enchanted period. I was a teenager then, and in love with Pavement, and it honestly was great. S&E was one of those albums I owned on vinyl and cassette (two copies, because one got burnt out), and then I found a third copy of the cassette in my backyard after I put on a show. It was everywhere for a certain small group of people, and it meant the world to them.
It still means a lot in 2015, though it’s tricky to calculate how much importance we can place on its B-sides and other miscellany, especially when all of these songs were available as part of the 2002 Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe 2XCD. Right, all of them. Even the liner notes included here—blurbs from Matador head Gerard Cosloy, Drag City head Dan Koretzky, Stephen Malkmus, Spiral Stairs, and the booking agent Boche Billions—are from the 2002 edition.
If you're looking for silver linings, it’s the first time 25 of the 30 songs have appeared on vinyl— purists, there’s that. And, of course, the music itself is mostly great. You won’t need to hear the entire 1992 Brixton set from Pavement's first European tour opening for Sonic Youth more than once, but there is plenty of slacker charm to Malkmus’ between-song banter—his references to Echo and the Bunnymen (who the band went on to cover in 1997) and the Beatles in the same sentence, his nods to the elder Sonic Youth in their The Year Punk Broke moment, the wisecracks and asides. But the studio versions of the same songs are undeniably better, and the live takes occupy 13 of the 30 tracks here. (That said, the way they rip through "Summer Babe" reminds you how important we all knew that song was, and it can still deliver shivers.)
Otherwise, you get their first and second Peel session, the 7" version of "Summer Babe", the fuzzed-out, grunge-nodding alternate take of "Here", and the rest of the Redux "Slanted Sessions" (a cleaner, more pristine "Here" shows up as part of Peel Session 1), "Sue Me Jack", "Greenlander", and "So Stark (You're a Skyscraper)" from the Watery, Domestic sessions (I love that EP, and wish it was here in full, maybe instead of the live material), and etc. It’s a bit like Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, though the sequencing is different from the 2002 version, and you get different cover art.
In the middle of the Brixton set, while introducing "Frontwards", Malkmus deadpans: "‘Frontwards’ is the name of this song, it’s about moving forward obviously." When Stuart Berman interviewed Malkmus (and Spiral Stairs) about these compilations and asked "Whose idea was it to go back and repackage these songs?," Malkmus answered "Not mine" and when asked if they added up to a proper album he replied: "No way. That’s just fuck-around shit, off-the-top-of-the-head stuff, and B-sides." Of course, the members of Pavement have moved forward: they're making music, writing about food, bartending, being horse racing buffs, and Gary Young. At this point, you wish the industry around them would, too. | 2015-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 12, 2015 | 7 | a8c87b7b-2635-45d0-8279-5a8943acb940 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
After their sudden dissolution last year, the Toronto noise duo return just as suddenly with a new album. Like their previous work, it’s full of pain, dissociation, and hopelessness—and surprisingly, a new tranquility. | After their sudden dissolution last year, the Toronto noise duo return just as suddenly with a new album. Like their previous work, it’s full of pain, dissociation, and hopelessness—and surprisingly, a new tranquility. | Black Dresses: Forever in Your Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-dresses-forever-in-your-heart/ | Forever in Your Heart | There’s a lot of pain, death, and destruction in the music of the Toronto noise duo Black Dresses. Across four full-lengths—as well as a smattering of EPs and other projects—Devi McCallion and Ada Rook detailed horrors both personal and cosmic, worrying about the end of the world and wondering how to trudge onward when it felt like everything was caving in. And yet, they always did. Rook put it memorably in the opening moments of their 2020 album Peaceful as Hell. “Even in the depths,” she sings. “I treasure everything that we’ve become.”
And then the project ended, or so it seemed. In May 2020, Black Dresses posted a statement on Twitter suggesting that the band would “no longer exist” as a result of “harassment” that McCallion had experienced from fans. It was a shocking announcement, given both those circumstances and the timing, just a few weeks after the release of Peaceful as Hell. But the bright-burning energy of their music—steadfast and focused—couldn’t stay extinguished for long. As suddenly as they broke up, they returned this year with Forever In Your Heart—a new album full of static-scoured and wounded reflections on the troubling present and unknowable future.
Like a lot of Black Dresses’ work, Forever In Your Heart can seem bleak. Especially in contrast to Peaceful as Hell, which found the duo dabbling in the swirling neons of a new industrial-pop sound, this new record is often heavier and more upsetting, full of digital hardcore, damaged metal riffs, and shrieking electronics. They sing about dissociation, hopelessness, and anguish, but they do so in a way that feels cathartic and transformative. It’s the sound of overcoming, of finding beauty amid the maelstrom.
The record even considers the possibility, however unlikely, that all the suffering they describe might reach an end. It’s a distant thought, buried in the distorted squeals of songs like “PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” on which Rook murmurs apocalyptic visions of messages from God burning in the clouds. Amid twisted industrial metal riffing—which underscores Rook’s avowed appreciation for Slipknot—they ponder what life would be like in a better world. “Could we make something beautiful?” Devi wonders. The ache in her voice suggests the answer, but the fact that she’s even asking implies a distant faith. Later, on the blown-out shoegaze ballad “Waiting42moro,” Rook offers a hopeful echo: “I can almost see, I can almost taste, I can almost touch that better place.”
It may seem surprising given the noisy, harsh tangles of their songs, but tranquility has become a recurring theme in Black Dresses’ music. And as much as Forever In Your Heart emphasizes the duo’s heaviest impulses, it makes room for quiet moments too. There’s moments of intimate studio chatter—like on “Silver Bells,” when McCallion tenderly interjects “Are you ok?” after a particularly grueling scream—and minimal ballads like “Mistake.” In the record’s closing lines, McCallion sums up her feelings with a sigh. “I couldn’t keep it together,” she sings. “But it’s not that bad.” So they’ll keep pressing on, just like they always have.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | February 24, 2021 | 7.6 | a8c94b17-fb7e-4124-86c2-c6c6814d68f6 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The Hessle Audio cofounder’s exuberant new album is stuffed with high BPMs, ribcage-vibrating basslines, and richly hued synths. Club music this banging is rarely so nuanced. | The Hessle Audio cofounder’s exuberant new album is stuffed with high BPMs, ribcage-vibrating basslines, and richly hued synths. Club music this banging is rarely so nuanced. | Pangaea: Changing Channels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pangaea-changing-channels/ | Changing Channels | A minute or so into the opening song on UK electronic musician Pangaea’s Changing Channels, something strange happens. Over a rubbery, insistent bassline and crisply swinging drums, an unidentified vocalist is spitting out a string of unintelligible syllables when a hissing refrain seems to materialize in the air, like a message left by an agitated ghost in a fogged-up mirror: “Hessle! Hessle!”
That might not be so odd—after all, Pangaea’s latest album appears on Hessle Audio, the label he co-founded in 2007 with Ben UFO and Pearson Sound. But the phrase’s sudden appearance is also unlikely enough to make you doubt your own ears. For one thing, Hessle Audio has never been one to toot its own horn. Though it’s one of the UK’s most respected club labels—beloved for its unflagging dedication to both crowd-moving rhythms and innovative, brain-bending sounds—Hessle has always let the music speak for itself, with little self-promotion or social-media bluster. More to the point, the vocal in question is pure gobbledygook, a glossolalic rush cobbled together from stray phonemes and gasps of breath. Pangaea, aka London-based musician Kevin McAuley, has used the same Frankenstein-like technique to whip up monster anthems out of sampled lyrical detritus before. The Changing Channels opener might not really be saying “Hessle! Hessle!” but once you’ve heard it that way, you can’t unhear it. Maybe Pangaea hit upon those fortuitously soundalike syllables and decided to leave them in, an Easter egg for the label faithful.
Pangaea does have a deep mischievous streak, after all. Though he got his start making shadowy dubstep derivatives indebted to the dark, silky garage of acts like Horsepower Productions, it didn’t take him long to begin adding sneakily unsettling elements, like a mad professor ominously pontificating about the soullessness of gray matter or a choir chirpily invoking the end of the world. In recent years, he’s increasingly gone all in on big, lapel-grabbing heaters, and Changing Channels contains some of his biggest and brashest yet; it’s a high-BPM, full-throated defense of fun as the most important ingredient in dance music.
The club scene has undergone massive changes since bouncing back after the pandemic doldrums of 2020-2021. Tempos have soared, and so have moods. Even in corners of the underground where more serious modes once reigned, an insouciant spirit has wormed its way in, yielding brighter colors and wigglier basslines. Two Shell might be considered the poster boys for that shift; they got their start making relatively restrained DJ tools on Livity Sound (a UK label whose leftfield mission and positioning loosely align with Hessle’s) before graduating to their more notorious, helium-fueled hijinks. Pangaea mines an adjacent vein of ’90s garage and 2-step, and he pursues a similarly playful approach with his serotonin-boosting vocal chops.
Whether on or off the dancefloor, Changing Channels is wildly and viscerally pleasurable, full of ribcage-vibrating basslines, richly hued synths, and adamantine percussive details. In “Installation,” rosy sunrise pads smooth out the choppy groove while a mosquito-beaked synth riff nods simultaneously to ’90s Eurodance and Y2K-era dancehall. In “If,” lush organs and jagged synth stabs dial up the contrast around the cut-up vocal, while dub-techno chords carve diagonally through the mix, as though opening up a shortcut to a different musical dimension. Pangaea delights in mixing up tropes from genres that are rarely seen together in public. “Hole Away” slathers the buzz-bomb synths of drum’n’bass over a Strictly Rhythm-style NYC house vocal, while the coolly driving title track might be the answer to a thought experiment: What if Basic Channel, but speed garage? That might sound like an arcane proposition, but there’s nothing nerdy about Changing Channels. Its ultra-vivid palette of tinkling bells and ASMR-grade shakers and hi-hats is practically Pavlovian, bursting with textures as crisp as the moment you put on new eyeglasses. Club music this banging is rarely so nuanced.
Subtlety comes to the fore on the penultimate track, “Squid,” where a spidery synth melody carefully picks its way across a gliding, four-on-the-floor house beat, while carefully manipulated delay and swing settings throw further kinks in the groove. The vibe is unexpectedly dreamy, almost bittersweet. The only song here that’s not angled at peak time, “Squid” is so good that it makes me want to hear a whole album’s worth of Pangaea in contemplative, dewy-eyed mode. But the way it differs from the rest of the material is part of what makes the song special. To underscore that point, Changing Channels goes out with a bang. The closing “Bad Lines” is so upbeat it’s practically cartoonish: a 160-BPM juggernaut of sped-up house pianos and candy-colored trance stabs. It feels almost tongue in cheek, although knowing McAuley’s roots—long before he got into more rarified styles, he taught himself to DJ with hard house and trance records from his hometown’s HMV—leaves little doubt that his homage is sincere. Notice how lovingly he has rendered the genre’s over-the-top supersaws and strafing filters: What at first scans as ridiculously extra turns out to be, upon closer inspection, just right.
It might seem surprising to hear Pangaea lock into a mode that’s swept clubs and festivals for a while now; Hessle Audio have prided themselves on being ahead of the curve. In a recent interview alongside his co-founders, Ben UFO explained how the label had managed to remain outside the blast radius of many dance-music fads: “Because we’ve always been focused on music that sounds new to us, we’ve ended up surviving those trend spikes. That’s a great position to be in—to have people expect that a shift in flow might be round the corner.” In his testament to the importance of letting loose, Pangaea doesn’t just offer a gentle rebuke to the glowering, stone-faced, arms-crossed gatekeepers of the underground. His record is also refreshingly free of a feeling that has plagued the recent craze for chart-pop samples and Eurodance classics: a vaguely guilty-pleasure insinuation of getting away with something naughty. Cheeky but never corny, Pangaea’s album proves that you can get silly without sounding stupid. Right down to its title, Changing Channels captures a welcome shift in flow. | 2023-10-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hessle Audio | October 6, 2023 | 8.3 | a8cb73b7-e7a1-475b-b401-3db7c928c424 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The buzzy New York City rock quintet’s debut taps into a vivid sense of place. Their keening intensity captures a snapshot of a city coming unglued. | The buzzy New York City rock quintet’s debut taps into a vivid sense of place. Their keening intensity captures a snapshot of a city coming unglued. | Been Stellar: Scream From New York, NY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/been-stellar-scream-from-new-york-ny/ | Scream From New York, NY | Somewhere between the release of Meet Me in the Bathroom (the book) and Meet Me in the Bathroom (the documentary), New York’s early-aughts rock revival entered the realm of classic rock. The Strokes are fêted with vinyl box sets and a decades-too-late Grammy. Interpol are touring behind the 20th anniversary of Antics. LCD Soundsystem are in their residency era, like an Eagles alternative for people who tried Four Loko twice. And perennial underdogs the Walkmen have shape-shifted into reunion darlings.
It’s all romance and mythology now. Those bands’ classic albums are as old now as Fear of Music and Parallel Lines were in 2001. Now the city’s been reborn after another world-shifting tragedy, but—amid exorbitant rents and the displacement of the creative underclass—it’s hard to imagine a new crop of bands reinvigorating the rock scene.
Enter Been Stellar, an NYU-formed quintet who’ve become a ubiquitous and ambitious presence in the downtown music scene. “All of those bands—the Strokes, the Walkmen, Interpol—were a galvanizing thing for us,” guitarist Skyler Knapp recently told an interviewer. Been Stellar’s career has accelerated with similar speed. Before releasing an album, they toured with the 1975 and opened for Interpol. When I saw the group at Mercury Lounge last year, they played with a bombast and gusto that signaled they were destined for bigger venues.
They may wince at being added to playlists with names like “Meet Me in the Bathroom Take 2” and grumble about Strokes comparisons, but can you blame depressed millennials for wanting to believe in the myth of rock renewal? Been Stellar may be victims of projection, but rarely has a young, hungry New York band made being a young, hungry New York band so central to their identity. On an early cut called “Manhattan Youth,” they pondered the NYC childhoods these transplants never had. Now they take inspiration from the wordless screams and chaotic sounds that define daily life in New York and title their debut album Scream From New York, NY.
In the urgent, combustible opener, “Start Again,” singer Sam Slocum wanders First Avenue, trading words with a well-dressed alcoholic, before yowling a climactic refrain of “New York wasted/Start again, start again!” It’s a thrilling statement of intent. The band’s strongest songs are often rooted in the city’s peculiar landmarks. Across its formidable six minutes, “I Have the Answer” marshals waves of shoegaze sludge as Slocum describes an epiphany at the American Museum of Natural History’s whale exhibit. (Noah Baumbach, eat your heart out.) The rousing title track summons an image of the East Village’s Middle Church burning in a 2020 fire as Slocum transforms a hokey Reagan slogan (“Morning in America”) into a refrain laced with noise and dread.
Funny thing is, Been Stellar don’t sound too much like the Strokes. Slocum’s throaty growl sounds a bit like Julian Casablancas, but he also sounds like a young Johnny Rzeznik or Joseph D’Agostino. He sings with earnest emotion, not disaffected cool, and injects each chorus with breathless urgency, even when it’s hard to tell what he’s so worked up about (“Passing Judgment”). After the roiling punk of the opening numbers the album’s tempos slow, and brooding standouts like “Pumpkin” and “Takedown” recall the grandiose angst and soaring melodicism of the mid-’90s UK wave—early Verve, Bends-era Radiohead. If Been Stellar seem like a nostalgia magnet, they can’t help but summon top-shelf influences.
Across these 10 tracks, Been Stellar make a claim as one of New York’s most promising bands, but they don’t always land on a clear identity of their own. “Can’t Look Away” summons the grit and swagger of their heaviest tunes, but much of the record’s latter half blends together in an indistinct mid-tempo haze. They lack the spiky eccentricity or creativity of rising NYC peers like Godcaster or Water From Your Eyes, and some of their songs (“Sweet,” “All in One”) carry a vague, imitative quality. No matter what, there’s an earnestness that belies the jokey, tossed-off band name.
Still, Scream From New York, NY harnesses the group’s keening intensity and taps into a vivid sense of place. They’re not the first songwriters to draw inspiration from the chaotic thrum of New York City, but they bring this literary tradition into a troubled new era. On the title track, Slocum sketches a compelling snapshot of a city coming unglued. That the song’s grim imagery—black smoke, people coughing through masks—evokes several very different real-life events only underlines how many crises of apocalyptic proportions New York has endured this century. To live here is to watch the city swing between collapse and rebirth and back again. Been Stellar may not usher in a full-scale rock revival, but at least they’re making the bad times sound good. | 2024-06-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | June 25, 2024 | 7.2 | a8d4fc2c-d938-4a1b-8ad8-cbd29ec57bcc | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
By bouncing among eras and albums, this enormous box set of sessions and broadcasts offers an elliptical, revisionist portrait of a band whose legacy is largely undecided. | By bouncing among eras and albums, this enormous box set of sessions and broadcasts offers an elliptical, revisionist portrait of a band whose legacy is largely undecided. | R.E.M.: R.E.M. at the BBC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rem-rem-at-the-bbc/ | R.E.M. at the BBC | Nearly a decade after they broke up, R.E.M. still elude final judgments. Weird but refined, popular yet coy, they confounded the dreary sellout-versus-purity narrative for so long that they seem now to go unnoticed in each context. With eight CDs and one DVD, the new box set R.E.M. at the BBC reveals moments of persistence amid that flux, from near-unknowns playing provincial towns to Glastonbury headliners at the end of the millennium. The first disc alone draws on five different radio sessions spanning 17 years, from the poised group courting MTV in 1991 to the exhausted one circa 2008, gamely playing their new single “Supernatural Superserious.” Recorded far from home, these tracks document a band made restless by history, the blur caught in a distant mirror.
The breadth of R.E.M. at the BBC does become a little absurd; as much as I love “Losing My Religion,” I’ve never wanted to compare six slightly different versions. (There are also more manageable two-disc or two-LP distillations, divided between sessions and broadcasts.) Such redundancy might be misleading: Due to R.E.M.’s delayed fame in Europe, the set often elides their commercial peak during the early 1990s. Rather than a coming-of-age story culminating in Automatic for the People, the tracklist circles around a disorienting crisis, the departure of drummer Bill Berry in 1997—he’d suffered a brain aneurysm onstage two years earlier and tired of touring life. Shifting back and forth in time gives the sequencing a sense of rumination, which dovetails with Michael Stipe’s own voice: opaque detachment, resolved by earnest need.
The rarest material here is the third disc, which captures an entire Nottingham concert from 1984. The host introduces them as “those boys from Athens,” as if Reckoning had just been released by Wham! instead of a band that would peak in Britain nearly a decade later. “We’re R.E.M. We’re here from Georgia, which is in the southernmost part of the United States. We’re not proud of our president. We’re sorry,” Stipe says before asking whether somebody can lend a 9.5-sized shoe to replace his broken one. I was struck by how raucous the band sounds, how young. They run through the chorus of “Hyena” like they’re baying at the moon. Bisexual anthem “Pretty Persuasion” gets introduced and interrupted by off-key harmonica as Stipe switches between pronouns, singing “god damn your confusion” with bratty frustration. The show doesn’t have the arena-filling scale of R.E.M.’s later performances, but you can hear their gaunt energy gathering itself into something more.
The subtle revisionism also highlights 1994’s Monster, adapted nearly in its entirety for a 1995 show divided across two discs. Following three platinum-selling records, that album was a back-to-basics move turned perversely false. The lyrics hint at intimate obsessions; the production smears guitar filters over Stipe’s vocals like bleeding lipstick. I love Stipe’s sardonic moue during “Crush With Eyeliner,” about characters failing glamorously at gender: “She’s a real woman-child.” All of these sleazy, lascivious songs sound fabulous live, their artifice translated to theater. Monster’s songs keep returning to the mutual dependency between fan and idol, and here the former can talk back, asserting a little dominance of their own.
As Bill Berry withdrew from R.E.M., the band recorded some of their most delicate work, sad and pretty songs of deepening ambiguity—like “Imitation of Life,” which I find intensely comforting despite or because it begins with the verset “Charades, pop skill/Water hyacinth/Named by a poet.” Whenever such tracks appear here, the lack of studio effects heightens the feeling of absence. During a 1998 Peel Session, the group plays “At My Most Beautiful,” an overt Brian Wilson pastiche written by bassist Mike Mills, who used to drive around Georgia with Berry singing along to Beach Boys 8-tracks. The whistles from the audience fall silent. For several long moments, the only noise is a piano melody and Stipe’s voice: “I count your eyelashes secretly/With every one, whisper, ‘I love you’/I’ll let you sleep.” Those guileless harmonies take over, their hum seeming to double as it meets the crowd. | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Craft | November 1, 2018 | 7.4 | a8d817d6-8cff-423a-b266-13d378c8770a | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
The London duo incorporate more varied and esoteric sounds to create an album of fun but flawed 1980s-inspired sophisti-pop. | The London duo incorporate more varied and esoteric sounds to create an album of fun but flawed 1980s-inspired sophisti-pop. | Trailer Trash Tracys: Althaea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trailer-trash-tracys-althaea/ | Althaea | Trailer Trash Tracys are a London-based duo who in name and in conversation almost beg you to judge a book by its cover. Of course, there’s their choice of name, which musicians Susanne Aztoria and Jimmy Lee have tried to spin silly, fantastical lies about the origin of, crediting everything from a troupe of Russian ballerinas to a caravan of wandering aborigines. Their first album, Ester, was inspired by Sufi poetry and they played their instruments in an obscure and mystical tuning scale called the Solfeggio. Of course, they were trolling.
The frontwoman of the band, Susanne Aztoria admits some of these stories were propagated by gullible journalists. And when you start listening to their songs, especially the ones that got them notoriety—a handful of fuzzy, fizzy dream pop demos from 2009—you’d realize they were about as complicated as a fistful of pop rocks downed with a swig of cola. Static and heavy guitars, blow- out drums, droll vocals, and a general too-cool attitude made them what could be the British answer to Smith Westerns.
Six years since their debut, Aztoria and Lee continue to bill their band as a rather esoteric pop project. Althaea, their second record, is supposed to pull from “Filipino carnival music,” “Latin rhythms,” and “Japanese tropical music.” On paper, that can be difficult to parse, and it's even harder to Google, but simply put, in all the time they’ve been researching how they’d like to reinvent their sound, Aztoria and Lee discovered polyrhythms and bright synthesizers.
If you ignore all of the things they have to say their music, what you get with Althaea is an album of fun but flawed 1980s-inspired sophisti-pop. It’s tightly produced and clean sounding but almost generic in its hipness, like the droves of artisanal Tiki bars that have opened up in your neighborhood. A gloss of tropical melody haunts every moment of this album in the form of acoustic percussion and bubbly synth rhythms. It renders almost everything Aztoria and Lee in a kitschy light.
When the music works—like the neo-new wave of “Eden Machine” or the lounge pop of “Money for Moondogs”—the players are gaudy but restrained. These songs allow Azoturia, the strongest member of the group, to use her chameleonic voice, the band’s greatest asset. She can as easily channel the hypnotic effect of Elizabeth Fraser as she can the dreamy trills of Lætitia Sadier. On “Eden Machine” specifically, with its shimmying bassline and Copacabana drums, the vibe is pleasing but not overwrought.
But, for the most part, Althaea, is filled with songs that are busy and overly thought. “Gong Gardens,” which, like its title suggests, is a gong-filled affair that’s heavy on the echo and far too silly too boot. In other places like “Betty’s Cavatina” or “Singdrome” they take their supposed Asian music inspirations a little too far, with stock sound effects and rhythms that sound pulled from an overdubbed martial arts film.
What is always going to be nagging about Trailer Trash Tracys (aside from their name) is how far they will go to willfully obscure the good time they’re trying to have. Baked into their music is also the weird rhetoric of being a band that would like be seen as difficult, or at the very least, super knowledgeable. Althaea tries to flex their bona fides or worldliness hard, but it feels flat in the end. And that’s because past all the talk, Trailer Trash Tracys are very component pop band, capable of writing a sugary hook and stringing together a sticky melody. Perhaps they’re too-smart-for-their own good, but in the moments they can get over themselves, Althaea, at least for a flash, can offer more than just a thrill. | 2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Double Six | August 19, 2017 | 6 | a8dbbde7-3d29-4174-9549-edd0ae4be656 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Solo record from ex-Lost Sounds singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Alicja Trout. | Solo record from ex-Lost Sounds singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Alicja Trout. | Black Sunday: Tronic Blanc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1164-tronic-blanc/ | Tronic Blanc | It's tempting and intriguing, but ultimately reductive, to hear Black Sunday's Tronic Blanc as a reaction to the collapse last year of Memphis up-and-comers the Lost Sounds. First, there's the name Black Sunday: Whether it refers to Thomas Harris (who wrote a novel of that name about a blimp crash) or to the Great Depression (a tremendous dust storm obliterated millions of acres on Sunday, April 14, 1935), the phrase evokes immense disaster, widespread destruction, and an aftermath of funereal grief.
Then there's the fact the Black Sunday is essentially Alicja Trout, who previously sang and played keyboards and guitars for the Lost Sounds and has recorded with various one-off lineups and incarnations, including the Clears, the River City Tan Lines, the Fitts, and, most recently, Mouse Rocket. Aside from a few guest musicians (including former Lost Sound Jay Lindsay, who plays drums on two songs), Trout plays all the instruments and wrote all but one of the songs, so Tronic Blanc (which she recorded in her Memphis studio, called Tronic Graveyard) sounds like her most solo album-- and, in some ways, the best realization of her unique aesthetic.
As such, Tronic Blanc's technofear and paranoia-- not to mention its jaded resentment-- can be attributed solely to Trout. "First, I cut my arms for you/ Then I cut my scars for you," she sings on "Torture Torture", with an immediacy that's chilling. Most of this personal angst surfaces in clone imagery-- not genetic regenerations, but mechanical substitutes. Songs like "Torture Torture", "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", and "Modulated Simulated" voice a very specific fear: That some enormous upheaval, like a bad break-up, will so overwhelm her that she might lose her emotional faculties and become a cold, metal-hearted machine.
This panic is reflected in the music on Tronic Blanc, which pits live instrumentation against synthetic noises. On "What I Think Is Wrong", live drums compete with meowing keyboards, while on "You're Gonna See Me", real guitars counter canned beats. But Trout complicates that tension by making the drums sound preternaturally rigid and the guitars electronically sculpted, while her keyboard runs-- which have been a trademark at least since her days with the Clears (their one album is well worth seeking out and prefigures the current New Wave revival by almost a decade)-- often give the songs their heartbeat pulse. The line between the actual and the artificial constantly blurs, mirroring her confusion over real and false emotions. In a sense, Trout is Dr. Frankenstein and Tronic Blanc is the monster she's created in her studio lab.
But complicating that literary comparison is the simple and overwhelming fact that despite the pain and fear the songs convey, Trout's music is exuberant, inventive, and full-to-bursting with ideas. As with previous projects, Trout's preferred m.o. is the restless, reckless conflation of genres: songs like "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", "Modulated Simulated", and "Little Bird" beat with garage-rock swagger and taut new wave grooves, while "Destroy Everything in Your Path" and "Next Girl Detour", with its shout-out chorus, swing with surf guitar momentum. Elsewhere, the DIY aesthetic lends "Little Bird" and "On the Way Downtown"-- about the dangers of the Mississippi River-- their rough immediacy, as if Trout recorded them as soon as the ideas popped into her head. All these elements belie the grim undertones of Tronic Blanc, suggesting that simple expression can be not only catharsis, but a powerful defense against the dehumanizing disappointments of other people. | 2005-06-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-06-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirtnap | June 21, 2005 | 8 | a8df9465-2d59-402d-bd0e-be6459d1a95a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Oakland producer finds a middle ground between her atmospheric tendencies and her more percussive productions, pairing raw, footwork-inspired drum loops with ethereal synths. | The Oakland producer finds a middle ground between her atmospheric tendencies and her more percussive productions, pairing raw, footwork-inspired drum loops with ethereal synths. | Tomu DJ: Crazy Trip EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomu-dj-crazy-trip-ep/ | Crazy Trip EP | In 1992, Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation launched a movement of cerebral, Byzantine techno rooted in proggy concept albums by ’70s visionaries like Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. Informed by the rawness of footwork, contemporary rap, and even indie rock, the work of California’s Tomu DJ extends IDM’s lineage by focusing its energies on emotional intelligence. Mostly recorded around the same time as her atmospheric 2021 album FEMINISTA and its more percussive follow-up, Half Moon Bay, Crazy Trip occupies a surprisingly straightforward middle ground of simple, intersecting loops and gentle drum programming. The synth patches and drum patterns she favors may be familiar to DJs and listeners tapped into club music’s international underground, yet the final product feels original. Where some artists with similar tastes may aim for transcendence, Tomu DJ zeroes in on grounding introspection.
Crazy Trip leads with its most traditionally arranged tracks: a pair of 120 bpm house cuts built around four-on-the-floor kicks. Despite their shared tempo, the two songs chart contrasting routes. On “Mewisc,” blocky, static drones resonate and overlap like singing bowls, forming a loop propelled less by melody than simple addition and subtraction. New elements are gradually revealed as silhouettes in the synth-pad fog: A bassline slips through like a nudging elbow, tamped down by soft kicks and claps. “Pretty Funny,” similarly constructed with basic modular parts, eschews this unfolding structure and instead creates an immersive space that persists for just over two minutes. The three-chord loop in the backdrop remains unaltered throughout, putting emphasis on the rhythmic interplay between chromatic tom drums and the syncopated snares and hats pulled into their orbit. Instead of following the linear structure of a typical house production, Tomu DJ is more interested in condensing an idea into its most emotive moments.
The EP’s most inventive offerings are those that allude to Tomu DJ’s formative years booking Teklife members like DJ Spinn and DJ Manny for college parties. “Band Man” filters the new-age-adjacent timbres of her more ambient work through the frenetic, mirrored lens of classic footwork, segmenting Rhodes chords into fragments to match an antsy kick pattern. Lightly edited, pitched-up breakbeats and steady claps hit with rudimentary charm, while rapid-fire hi-hats and atonal, groaning synth effects rush to fill the remaining space. The contrast between gritty repetition and more expressive decoration generates a comforting feeling of weightlessness, shifting the center of gravity in several directions until its focus lands amid a whirlwind of percussive debris.
“Bedroom DJ,” Crazy Trip’s best track, is an ambient reimagining of ghettotech motifs in which Brooklyn rapper Petty Getty turns DJ terms into double entendres over loose, cozy R&B instrumentation. Though this song also prominently features a dreamy chord progression, there’s a whole biome of strange harmonic interplay that lives beneath the surface. Sine waves slalom between the keys, taking short, strategic detours into dissonance or unexpectedly stuttering out of time, giving the song a loose, improvised feel.
Despite drawing from an array of regional scenes and subgenres, Tomu DJ’s self-taught production doesn’t quite fit the buzzy “post-genre” tag often applied to the new wave of club experimentalists. Instead, it re-interprets specific dance sounds from the perspective of the online enthusiast, piecing together a unique aesthetic that gives equal weight to the energy of the dancefloor and the mysteries of a hidden browser tab. | 2023-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | No Bias | August 14, 2023 | 7.2 | a8e1a32b-29ec-41a2-9e31-5463362eb711 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The East Atlanta rapper’s second album doesn't try to take on the world and is all the better for it, showing that J.I.D. has much more to offer than his formidable rapping chops. | The East Atlanta rapper’s second album doesn't try to take on the world and is all the better for it, showing that J.I.D. has much more to offer than his formidable rapping chops. | JID: DiCaprio 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jid-dicaprio-2/ | DiCaprio 2 | Four tracks into DiCaprio 2, J. Cole, shows up for a feature. Typically, on these sort of master-student collaborations, the less-experienced rapper’s strain is audible as he attempts to show he can hang. Here, it’s the opposite: J.I.D’s opening verse is so gleeful, so effortless and so fast, that when it comes Cole’s turn to rap, you can almost hear him brace for impact. Cole gets off a strong verse, and the song, “Off Deez,” is one of many standouts here. But you can just imagine them stepping out of booth, J.I.D pumped and ready for more; Cole relieved that he can still rap as well as his younger signee.
J.I.D’s confidence comes from years of work. Finally starting to get his due at the age of 28, Destin Route built up a head of steam in the old-fashioned way (circa 2007, or B.I.G., Before Instagram), releasing mixtape after mixtape until he turned heads with the first DiCaprio project, an EP released at the top of 2015. He signed with Cole’s label, Dreamville, in 2017 and his debut album, The Never Story, was released in March and converted rap fans all year mostly off the strength of the rapper’s technical ability and the delight that he takes in displaying it. That ability has been refined further on DiCaprio 2, but J.I.D’s second album has more to offer than simple rapping chops.
Let’s talk about those for a second though. J.I.D’s hyper-enunciated, high-pitched whine of a flow is initially reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar’s, but that comparison feels narrow. (He plays with the connection explicitly on “Despacito Too,” interpolating Kendrick lyrics in a narrative about his own individual development.) J.I.D’s melodic instincts are strong, sharing ties with Isaiah Rashad and even, occasionally, Bone Thugs, and he has the ability to get jokes off even in the midst of triple-time rapping, a la Big L or Lil Wayne. Though he can rap faster than almost any newcomer in recent memory, he uses the speed as one of several tools and his flow is chameleonic, suited to the given moment. (His pen name comes from his grandma’s chosen adjective for him, “jittery,” and it’s the right word for this restless rapper.)
And then, of course, there are little lyrical gems. The best lines here feel like J.I.D is performing acrobatics on a 20-foot tightrope; many of his lyrics operate on the basis of his speed jousting with listener's expectations and making his songs surprising and relistenable. A bizarre line zips by in “Westbrook,” an A$AP Ferg feature, “Live life like a baby that was dead at birth but came alive and fucked the nurses,” the deadpan absurdity hitting your ears so quickly that you want to hear it again, just to confirm that he really said it. He also makes great use of little switchbacks; on “Off Da Zoinkys,” an anti-drug anthem, he thanks Ronald Reagan (ostensibly for the War on Drugs) and as you’re gearing up to react, he immediately takes it back, calling the 40th president “racist as fuck.”
“Off Da Zoinky’s” gives a window into J.I.D’s appeal. Given that it’s an anti-drug sermon of sorts, it could easily have been sanctimonious. Instead, it’s self-aware (“I ain’t nosy but I know what I know, Mr. Know-It-All, oh here he go”) and it builds over time. J.I.D. eventually says that the reason he stays drug-free is that he wants his mind clear and his focus sharp because he’s trying to be the greatest. That higher purpose gives the song more in common with Andre 3000 on “ATLiens” (”No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day”) than with J. Cole’s album-long campaign against sin, KOD.
DiCaprio 2’s lyrical showcase takes a turn on “Workin’ Out,” and across the remainder of the album, J.I.D tries different things, usually successfully. (The clear exception is “Skrawberries,” a thick-headed treatise on gender relations that wastes a Mac Miller beat and comes complete with the line “[she] got a couple abortions, now that pussy’s a haunted house.”) “Tiiied,” a song about relationship drama, opens on J.I.D fighting with his girl at the movies sounding a little like Anderson .Paak with a fine eye for detail. The song is produced by Dreamville’s Elite and Ron Gilmore and it’s filled with jazzy musical flourishes that, like many of the beats here, catch your ear anew once you’ve become familiar with the verses. But the strongest song on the album’s back half is “Hot Box,” as J.I.D works out his New York fetishism with a head-turning guest verse from Method Man and some lovely neo-boom bap courtesy of Skhye Hutch (who’s produced for Ab-Soul and Kendrick) and Zorro.
J.I.D’s presence on Dreamville makes all kinds of sense. He shares Cole’s values and the priorities and pleasures of his music are those of an older generation. On the late-album standout “Just Da Other Day,” he says “I’m tryna get my fuckin goals, not a goyard,” and his anti-materialist outlook and low-key contempt for his contemporaries tracks perfectly with his label boss. But nothing about J.I.D is crochety or bitter. His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop. | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope | December 12, 2018 | 7.7 | a8e72c98-93e6-46a3-94b1-36c3d6a6b115 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Tindersticks have never released a bad album, never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character. | Tindersticks have never released a bad album, never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character. | Tindersticks: The Waiting Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21310-the-waiting-room/ | The Waiting Room | Tindersticks turn 25 this year. It’s a remarkable feat for any band, but even more impressive than the Nottingham outfit’s longevity is their consistency. Tindersticks have never released a bad album (or even a middling one), never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character. The skies in their world may be forever gray, but the clouds are always moving and morphing, letting in the faintest flickers of light that change the size and shape of the shadows they cast.
The richly atmospheric, nicotine-stained quality of the Tindersticks’ music makes it an ideal complement to TV shows and films, whether their songs are soundtracking pivotal scenes on "The Sopranos" or comprising entire scores for French art-house maverick Claire Denis. But on The Waiting Room, that dynamic is reversed: the band handed off its 11 tracks to various filmmaker friends (including Denis, Christoph Girardet, Pierre Vinour, and Gregorio Graziosi) as inspirational fodder for accompanying short films packaged with deluxe editions of the record. The album opens with a cover of Polish composer Bronislau Kaper’s "Follow Me," aka the theme song from the 1962 film adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty; in Tindersticks’ hands, the original’s tiki-torch splendor is given a gritty makeover that pushes it closer to Midnight Cowboy territory. It’s a perfect scene-setter—The Waiting Room may not feature any songs about oceanic expeditions, but the band sure know their way around tales of backstabbing and betrayal.
Yet for all the band’s filmic qualities, the action in frontman Stuart Staples' lyrics is always more psychological than physical. The weightless Wurlitzer tones of "Second Chance Man" and "Were We Once Lovers?" respectively set Staples’ inner turmoil against brassy swells and disorienting disco. And just as the latter track appears to achieve liftoff, Staples delivers a dispiriting chorus line—"how can I care if it’s the caring that’s killing me?"—that forsakes rapture for rupture.
The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain. On "Help Yourself," an uncharacteristically louche Staples shakes off his troubles by swaggering onto the floor of the Shrine in Lagos circa '72 (and the novelty of the Tindersticks going Afrobeat is savvily mirrored by Denis’ companion clip, which depicts French-Caribbean actor Alex Descas roaming the shopping-mall concourse of a French train station, nonplussed by the white European consumer culture surrounding him). An even more wondrous surprise arrives in the form of "Hey Lucinda," a wobbly-kneed waltz that finds Staples communing with the spirit of the late, great Montreal chanteuse Lhasa de Sela, an occasional Tindersticks collaborator who died of cancer in 2010. It’s like a fleeting reminiscence of someone who’s passed, but one that leaves you smiling from the warm memories rather than weeping over their absence.
The beautifully languid "Hey Lucinda" contrasts sharply with The Waiting Room’s other big-ticket matchup, "We Are Dreamers," which sees Staples joining forces with Jehnny Beth of Savages and the Tindersticks tapping into that band’s brooding menace. It’s the moment where all of The Waiting Room’s mounting tension is finally released, into an outsider anthem that recasts material impoverishment as spiritual empowerment ("You can rob us/ You can trick us/ Peer over our shoulders and steal our ideas") as Beth and Staples’ voices intertwine and overlap before locking into the song’s rallying cry: "This is not us/ We are dreamers!" But in the Tindersticks’ world, every dream is followed by a rude awakening; following that climax, the bitterly fatalistic closer "Like Only Lovers Can" pairs '70s soft-rock sway with a cutting chorus: "We can only hurt each other the way that lovers can/ So where do we go?" Appropriately, many of the visuals that accompany these songs emphasize distance and emptiness: black-and-white footage of a wedding from the '50s; a seaside fairground after the tourists have gone home; taxidermied animals. They’re moments and entities once bustling with life, but which now exist as faded memories or shells of their former selves. And for so long as we pine to make them real again, there will be exquisite Tindersticks songs to help us fill the void. | 2016-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-26T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | January 26, 2016 | 8 | a8ff904f-2f1f-4c2a-a088-8476cea218e5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Continuing his impressive run, MIKE links with the Brooklyn producer for a deliriously fun record of low-stakes raps and bubbly beats. It’s the most energetic project the rapper’s ever made, an unexpected but welcome vibe change. | Continuing his impressive run, MIKE links with the Brooklyn producer for a deliriously fun record of low-stakes raps and bubbly beats. It’s the most energetic project the rapper’s ever made, an unexpected but welcome vibe change. | MIKE / Tony Seltzer: Pinball | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-tony-seltzer-pinball/ | Pinball | MIKE’s been stepping out from the shadows lately. For years, he’s trafficked in a faded photograph sound, his rich baritone melting into beats that could disintegrate if you held them too long. His gluey flow often obscures the beauty of his lyrics, which can move from self-examination to nostalgia to empowerment within a few seconds. But beginning with 2022’s Beware of the Monkey, MIKE started to pry the boards off the windows, illuminating the darker corners of his work. Faith is a Rock, a contemplative collaboration with Wiki and the Alchemist, dropped less than a year later, and shone with the clarity of a bright winter’s morning. Three weeks after that, MIKE released Burning Desire, a meticulously crafted opus that signaled MIKE had fully entered his charged-up era. Now, continuing his impressive run, he teams up with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer for Pinball, a deliriously fun record of low-stakes raps and bubbly beats. It’s the most energetic project MIKE’s ever made, an unexpected but welcome vibe change.
MIKE and Tony Seltzer have worked together before, but not like this. Seltzer produced two songs on MIKE’s 2017 breakout, May God Bless Your Hustle. His work on that album was deeply chill: “STANDOUT” married mechanical drums to atmospheric pads, a nod to the bygone cloud rap sound, and “Paul” was glistening chimes and screwed-down boom bap, barely recognizable as a Tony Seltzer beat. The two stayed in touch over the years and reconnected while MIKE assembled Burning Desire. He’d wrap up a song for Desire at his apartment, then head to Seltzer’s studio to clear his head. Seltzer would play whatever beats he’d made that week and MIKE would stop him when he heard something that stuck. The two made “R&B” more as a fun exercise than anything else, but the work felt so effortless they decided to keep going.
On Pinball, Seltzer’s in top form, providing MIKE with cartoonish trap beats, candy-colored drill, and quiet storm snap music. His drums bounce around themselves with a raised-eyebrows energy, as if they’re friends who didn’t expect to see each other show up at the same party. They seem to scatter as they hit, leaving wide-open spaces for rappers and samples alike to ooze into. The barely-there percussion on “2k24 Tour” gives the orchestral loop ample breathing room, the occasional 808 downbeats providing a hypnotic propulsive feel. On “Lethal Weapon,” Seltzer’s sporadic hi-hats and rimshots turn chintzy MIDI instruments into a pastel swirl of Delta 8 psychedelia, and the ’80s synth pads of “Skurrr” drape over deep bass like satin sheets on a marble statue. The wild jump between sounds isn’t ever jarring, though. The longer you listen, the more lush and inviting it becomes.
MIKE folds himself completely into Seltzer’s production, radiating like he’s having an absolute blast making these songs. He’s been especially invigorated across his projects for the last couple of years, but this sounds like the most fun he’s had rapping lately, perhaps ever. He stretches his voice into new territory, mutating his aqueous delivery on every song. Every phrase sounds like it originates in the back of his throat, as if he’s rapping in concave, ducking and compressing syllables to fit into the pocket. Moments like the light Auto-Tune use at the end of “Two Door” showcase his willingness to experiment, while others, like changing the pitch of his voice to match Seltzer’s half-step modulation at the end of “Skurrr,” reveal his commitment to the craft. At 25, he’s an incredibly accomplished artist, understanding the impact small details have on a composition.
Though Pinball’s subject matter is much lighter fare than most MIKE albums—his writing largely revolves around his good weed, his sizable bank account, and how good he is at rapping—it’s no minor entry in his discography. MIKE is ultimately a thinking man, and still drops stark gems of wisdom here and there. For every material boast, there are flashes of unflinching reflection, like when he admits “I had to do a homie bad, I ain’t proud of it” on “R&B.” It’s astonishing how consistently great MIKE’s catalog has been, especially given how prolific he is. Pinball is celebratory, a victory lap in the middle of the game. It’s a deepening of MIKE’s skillset and a progression that feels natural and essential, yet another confirmation that he’s destined to be a legend. | 2024-03-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | March 18, 2024 | 8 | a903abbd-b758-4194-810e-3fc6e11bf901 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
Alice Coltrane teamed with Joe Henderson for this 1973 jazz classic, an album where each member’s playing is in service of a single, cosmic statement of music. | Alice Coltrane teamed with Joe Henderson for this 1973 jazz classic, an album where each member’s playing is in service of a single, cosmic statement of music. | Joe Henderson / Alice Coltrane: The Elements | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-henderson-alice-coltrane-the-elements/ | The Elements | The early 1970s were a unique time for jazz because the era was impossible to define. The major innovations of the previous decade, from free improvisation to the first stirrings of jazz fusion, had been embraced as part of jazz proper, and a new sense of possibility loomed. The electric groups that would move huge numbers in the decade were all rolling by 1973—Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra—but the avant-garde, though still vital creatively, was moving back underground. The commercial success of Impulse! in the ’60s, fueled by John Coltrane’s astonishing run during his final years, hadn’t been able to sustain itself, and “out” jazz became once again more of a niche concern, with some of the most exciting music emerging from the DIY New York loft scene. Meanwhile, the incorporation of non-Western instruments into jazz, helped along by John Coltrane himself in the early ’60s (see his piece “India”) was developing into something truly beautiful under the watchful eye of the late giant’s collaborators, including Pharoah Sanders and John’s wife Alice.
In this hothouse environment, Joe Henderson—a widely respected but relatively traditionally-minded saxophonist—could try his hand at flowing, impressionistic music with a decidedly global bent. On 1973’s The Elements, newly reissued in a Concord Music series that highlights out-of-print vinyl, he found himself with a band of visionaries that included bassist Charlie Haden, violinist Michael White, and percussionist Kenneth Nash. But the crucial energizing spirit behind the record is Alice Coltrane, who, in a rare role as a side musician, contributes harp, piano, tambura, and harmonium. After her husband’s death, the vast majority of Alice’s recorded output was recorded under her own leadership, but though this is Henderson’s record and these are his compositions, on The Elements, she and Henderson are essentially equal partners.
Henderson’s early background, dating to his emergence in the early ’60s, found him playing funky hard bop, and he was a regular fixture on dates for the Blue Note label. As the decade turned, he began to explore new settings for his music, including a brief stint in the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears. But The Elements was basically a one-off for Henderson as a leader. Arrangements like these, found on records like Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah, the El Daoud (the latter album features Henderson) are where Coltrane created her most stirring work, and this record has to be counted among them.
The Elements is a sort of concept album—its four tracks are titled “Fire,” “Air,” “Water,” and “Earth.” The music is an unusual assemblage of open-ended blowing, loping funk, and drone, with a heavy emphasis on sounds and scales from North Africa, the Middle East, and India. The live interplay is important, but a metallic studio crispness provides an intriguing tint: Henderson’s horn is often processed electronically and obvious tape splices and overdubs appear throughout.
The compositions range from horizontally expansive tone paintings to sample-begging groovers that touch on R&B. “Fire” is a percussion-heavy workout with a slight Latin tinge. Henderson’s horn is slathered with echo and delay, giving it an exploratory spaciness amplified by Coltrane’s dreamy comping on harp, while White’s violin sawing brings the piece back to the ground. “Air,” with Coltrane moving to piano, plays like an explosion in slow motion, as instruments cluster and swell and decay, riffing on tonal color rather than harmonic structure. “Water” begins with Coltrane setting the table with buzzing drone on tambura as Henderson plays a pinched and fractured solo, his horn heavily treated. The mix of electronics and drone and the strong feeling of studio creation brings “Water” into the realm of ambient pioneer Jon Hassell, whose album 1977 Vernal Equinox would lay the foundation for his future/past “fourth world” musical conception. The closing “Earth” incorporates aspects of the previous tracks, but adds a seriously sample-ready bass/drums groove to mix, bringing the album in conversation with contemporary developments in soul and funk. Each piece is distinct, but they lock together perfectly, offering different angles on similar ideas.
The reissue itself, newly remastered from the original analog tapes (not a given these days), is exceptional, with rich sound and packaging that focuses on quality and staying true to the original issue rather than offering sheer heavy-cardboard weight. And its attention to detail reinforces something important about the record as a whole: how well The Elements works as a single statement. There are no earth-shattering solos, no star turns, every musician is there to create this primordial sound-world. This collective approach is something Alice Coltrane did particularly well. Spiritually-minded cosmic jazz came into its own at the turn of the ’70s, and this is one of the best albums the scene produced. | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Concord Music Group | August 2, 2017 | 8.6 | a90abaf4-13ce-4a3c-b5e0-93af600f2c92 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film is given a lavish vinyl reissue by Sacred Bones. Thirty-five years later, the gorgeous sound design, built on the rumble and hiss of industry, remains a masterpiece of dark ambiance. | The soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film is given a lavish vinyl reissue by Sacred Bones. Thirty-five years later, the gorgeous sound design, built on the rumble and hiss of industry, remains a masterpiece of dark ambiance. | David Lynch / Alan R. Splet: Eraserhead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16948-eraserhead/ | Eraserhead | The first and most important thing about the soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film masterpiece is that it's not like any other soundtrack in your collection. This is no "music from and inspired by" set and it doesn't gather orchestral cues from the film's score. Eraserhead is a sound track (two words) in the literal sense. It contains 38 minutes of the sound that accompanies the 89-minute film's picture. When you are listening to this LP, you are hearing a movie. And it works, because Lynch and his late collaborator, Alan Splet, had a rare ear for the immersive and emotional possibilities of sound. The sound design in Lynch's films is consistently brilliant, brimming with details that enhance the mood and further the narrative. And here on Eraserhead-- Lynch's first feature, most personal film, and in many ways the strangest movie he ever made-- his and Splet's aural genius was already fully formed. Working with the analog technology available in the 1970s, they created a richly textured and evocative world.
The narrative details of Lynch's movie aren't essential to this set, but they do help to put the album into context. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer, a strange and quiet man with bushy hair who goes about his business in a parallel universe with a skewed relationship to our own reality. The streets in Henry's neighborhood are empty and dark, but you can hear dogs barking in the distance and you feel like something unpleasant might be lurking around every corner. Somewhere out of sight, enormous boilers and blast furnaces are constantly churning, belching soot into the sky and pushing tendrils of steam into cramped one-room apartments. It's a lonely, menacing place, modeled in part from Lynch's memories of his time living in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia. Eventually, Henry finds that his girlfriend Mary has given birth to...what, exactly, is never clear. "They're still not sure it is a baby!" she cries at one point on the soundtrack. Lynch and Splet render this setting with a varied mix of creaks, rumbles, hisses, and roars. Theirs is a place of polluting industry, clacking trains, dangerous electrical whirrs, and a screaming infant from the unknown.
Purely as a listening experience, you could file Eraserhead next to the ice cold drift of Thomas Köner's Permafrost, the tape-heavy pieces found on the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, the subliminal voice and sound-effect rumble of Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, and the fuzzed-out radio transmissions of Music for Nitrous Oxide-era Stars of the Lid. Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" channels a comparable nightmare, the swampiest and most decayed bits of Brian Eno's On Land might be found somewhere inside this world, and you could imagine the metallic drones of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith leaking out of Henry's floorboards. Eraserhead is dark ambient, in other words, a few years before that term had come into wide use. And despite its origins as the sound component of a film, it works terrifically well as music, provided your definition extends to the artists mentioned above. You'll hear some funny dialog about things like "man-made chickens" here and there, delivered in that distinctively Lynchian sing-songy deadpan. But the album as a whole is something you sink into, a shadowy vision of a frightening place.
Beyond the machines and industry, two more traditionally musical elements are found on the album. One recurring motif is the use of solo organ pieces from the 1930s played by Harlem jazz legend Fats Waller. The creaking organ tones, played by a man from years ago on a wheezing mechanical device, form a natural complement to the sound effects; they cycle in and out, bringing to mind a cracked memory of another time or place that never quite comes into the focus. And then there is the song "In Heaven", sung in the movie by a tiny woman with disfiguring acne who lives in Henry's radiator and serves for him as a source of warmth and comfort. "In Heaven" developed a life of its own outside of Eraserhead, most famously in the indie rock world when it was covered first by the Pixies and then, later, when incorporated into Modest Mouse's single "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'".
"In Heaven" still fascinates because of its ambiguity. It's both deeply creepy and somehow a little bit uplifting, never quite sure if it's celebrating life or death. On this vinyl reissue from Sacred Bones, it's also included as a 7", the flip side of which is an instrumental piece in a similar style laid out by "In Heaven"'s composer, Peter Ivers. Taken all together, this beautifully packaged reissue is a thorough and complete presentation of Lynch and Splet's soundworld, complete with photos and stills from the film set on heavy card stock. It takes something moving and important that is in danger of being lost and bring it to a new audience, which is exactly what a reissue should do. And there's something reassuring about knowing that Lynch's "haunting dream of dark and disturbing things" lives on, finding people willing to put it on the turntable and make their own pictures. | 2012-08-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sacred Bones | August 9, 2012 | 8.8 | a90b8ea7-a6e6-4978-a807-27544d93792d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Seattle duo Bell Witch aims for (and often achieves) symphonic grandeur on Four Phantoms, an album of very heavy metal that celebrates life by staring straight at death. | The Seattle duo Bell Witch aims for (and often achieves) symphonic grandeur on Four Phantoms, an album of very heavy metal that celebrates life by staring straight at death. | Bell Witch: Four Phantoms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20352-four-phantoms/ | Four Phantoms | The colossal pieces on Four Phantoms, the second album from Seattle duo Bell Witch, aren’t merely about death. Instead, they detail painful, violent ends inflicted by nature’s four forces—fire, earth, water, and wind—that the dead are forced to endure for eternity. There’s a suffocation, where the victim breaks teeth to keep breathing, and an immolation, where the narrator becomes "the blooming ash." One ghost falls into an endless canyon forever, while another buried at sea swims in salt water and skin. A case-by-case survey of horrible ways to go, Four Phantoms is appropriately and hyperbolically morose for the subgenre known as "funeral doom." But Bell Witch answers the extreme, existential despondency of these motifs with absolutely triumphant songs, built with heroic riffs and headstrong rhythms. Four Phantoms, then, is like second-line funeral doom—very heavy metal that celebrates life by staring straight at death.
Though Bell Witch were good from the start of their 2012 debut Longing, bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Adrian Guerra are great on Four Phantoms because they’ve recognized and addressed their own faults. Longing, a six-song set that also examined mortality, was promising but unfocused, moving between lethargic 20-minute slogs and mid-tempo marches, horror-sample instrumentals and tone-obsessed drifts. Desmond plays a six-string bass, meaning he’s able to elicit piercing, guitar-like leads and subdural lines from one instrument. On Longing, the capability felt like a compositional toy he was still learning to wield.
But the pair refined their approach for Four Phantoms, eliminating extraneous elements and moving fluidly between what remains. Recorded by resurgent metal impresario Billy Anderson, this hour is sharper, louder and brighter than the last one. Too often with doom or stoner metal, the mantra "everything louder than everything else" leads to self-defeat, where members crowd each other out of the mix and reduce the music’s overall impact. (See, for instance, Windhand’s Soma.) Due in part to the band’s slim configuration, Four Phantoms feels sculpted, each part perfectly visible and framed.
The result is a high-tension, high-contrast mix of ideas and idioms, where brutal doom and filmic post-rock share space with melodies worthy of glam-rock and manipulated textures similar to experimental acts like Locrian. These four pieces collectively suggest that metal is an incremental form: Substantial differences in how something sounds and in what niche it lands stem from subtle decisions about how fast, long or loud certain parts are played. Bits of opener "Suffocation, A Burial" sound like thrash metal drugged to stoner speed. "Judgment, in Fire" suggests Sunn O))) exploring liturgical music and adding a percussive pulse.
This hybridized scheme gives Bell Witch an uncanny appreciation of momentum. The type of low-and-slow music Bell Witch makes often requires a real commitment from the listener, a certain patience with songs that creep through half-hour spans to reach their high-volume peaks. But even during the pair of Four Phantoms numbers that break the 22-minute mark, Bell Witch don’t stall. Sure, they lock into loud, sustained roars, as with the start of "Judgment: In Air", and lurk in muted valleys, as when Desmond takes a glacially paced bass solo during "Suffocation, A Burial". But they emerge from that last reverie with a jolt so loud it’s terrifying, especially if you’ve fallen for the bass’s soporific sway. As the song marches toward its end, Guerra doubles and triples his steady beat, and Desmond plays a melody so radiant it seems like an isolated Van Halen lead. Like the album itself, the moment aims for (and often achieves) symphonic grandeur, both in scope and sound.
Bell Witch's commitment to progress is most obvious on "Suffocation, A Drowning", the longest song of their career and their best use of a guest musician to date. Both Guerra and Desmond sing, but their ranges are typically limited to ghoulish incantations, monstrous growls and terrified screams. So they recruited a real vocalist—Erik Moggridge, who sings solo and plays acoustic guitar as Aerial Ruin—to create what’s essentially a long-form power ballad. It arches and lifts, arriving at a hook so intoxicating you can envision lighters being raised. As Moggridge croons about "the strangling beast" of the ocean around him, Bell Witch turns funeral doom and its moribund focus into a beautiful hymn meant for the living. | 2015-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | April 30, 2015 | 8.2 | a91322d1-79c9-4783-b251-4d7a26c797c5 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Rico Nasty’s latest project skews wider and weirder, even for her. Combining patented rage raps and tender singing, its variety is overwhelming in every sense of the word. | Rico Nasty’s latest project skews wider and weirder, even for her. Combining patented rage raps and tender singing, its variety is overwhelming in every sense of the word. | Rico Nasty: Las Ruinas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rico-nasty-las-ruinas/ | Las Ruinas | Rico Nasty’s earliest and most recognizable songs, like the 2018 loosie “Smack a Bitch,” exist in the space between a hip-hop tribute to Lisa Frank and the mosh pit at a local dive’s pop-punk night. Genre-blending is a part of her musical DNA. Though Rico’s breakout project Nasty would be defined by the cathartic crunch of songs like “Bitch I’m Nasty,” its most interesting legacy has been as a foundation, the first time Rico’s influences—rap, nu metal, pop-punk, hyperpop—clashed and mutated against each other. She’s not the first artist to collapse these binaries, but her raw skill and enthusiasm make her output staggering. The thumping hardcore of Nasty’s “Trust Issues,” the murky boom bap of “Relative” from 2019’s Anger Management, and the jagged, sugary melodies of “IPHONE” from 2020’s Nightmare Vacation were all concocted by the same person.
At the outset, Rico compartmentalized her interests into personae like the softer, melodic Tacobella and the more aggressive Trap Lavigne. But after the success of Nasty, the alter egos became less useful as Rico began to embrace newfound stardom: Her musical and emotional range are elastic no matter what name she’s using. Even by Rico’s own grand standards, Las Ruinas—which she’s gone out of her way to label a “mixtape” and not an album—stretches her talents to their breaking point. Half the fun of a Rico Nasty project is seeing what spaces she’ll squeeze her vocals into next, and Las Ruinas skews wider and weirder than before. Its variety is overwhelming in every sense of the word.
Whatever you may think of her last few projects, particularly her last proper album Nightmare Vacation, her ability to host so many sounds without them dissolving into a mess is impressive. The first half of Las Ruinas continues to pit her patented rage raps against the wildest beats she can find. On “Vaderz,” Rico and guest Bktherula thrash their way through Ben10k, Danes Blood, and Dirty Dave’s 8-bit siren and craterous drums. Rico devours the scenery on standout track “Gotsta Get Paid,” which reunites her with Dylan Brady of 100 gecs. The duo, along with producers 18YOMAN and MXXWLL, use slinky drums and twangy synths—including a classic “dwoink” sound effect—to bridge the gap between rap bravado and Scooby-Doo: “Ain’t in my lane, what the fuck is you drivin’ for?/Pedal to the floor, they hatin’ because they bored.”
These slight deviations and tweaks to Rico’s formula are predictably tight, but the bolder experiments are a mixed bag. Las Ruinas is effectively split into two halves—the first one harsher, the second one softer—that have so little to do with each other sonically and thematically, they almost feel like separate EPs smashed together at the last minute. Right after her solid but unnecessary remix of electronic producer Fred again..’s “Jungle,” Las Ruinas’ tone shifts drastically. The put-downs and shit talk on the first half of the project disappear, giving way to a doomed love story told through bouts of electro-pop and grungy rap-rock that are raw at their best (“Into the Dark”) and fluffy and indistinct at their worst (“Focus on Me”). But “Easy” and closing track “Chicken Nugget,” in particular, strip away the bells and whistles to create two of the most tender moments in Rico’s catalog. Neither song features any rapping; instead, they lean on Rico’s soft singing voice for a lament about a past relationship with a manipulative partner and a touching ode to her 7-year-old son Cameron, respectively. They’re measured, pensive, and achingly intimate—firsts for any Rico Nasty song.
Las Ruinas’ best songs are sincere and heartfelt, regardless of genre, but it’s also the most unwieldy project of Rico’s career to date. The magnetic pull that held together Rico’s previous work feels less powerful. Transitions between songs can be stilted and awkward—the saccharine bubbliness of “Phuckin Lady” doesn’t flow into the metallic thump of “One on 5” and the “Jungle” remix has no business being the divider between the project’s two halves. Jumbled presentation can dull the impact of even the most sincere music, and Rico’s skill and imagination can’t save songs like “Black Punk” and “Dance Scream” from the filler bin. But beneath the technicolor pileup lies some of Rico’s most vicious (“Vaderz,” “Gotsta Get Paid”) and most sensitive (“Skullflower,” “Easy”) material yet. With a little finesse and better sequencing, it could’ve been greater than the sum of its parts. | 2022-07-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sugar Trap / Atlantic | July 27, 2022 | 7.1 | a917593c-d263-4897-90fd-79efe10bd600 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut; it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music. | Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut; it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music. | Liars: Mess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19121-liars-mess/ | Mess | Liars have been one of the 21st century’s most confounding and consistent bands because they make two kinds of albums: ones where they don’t know what they’re doing, and ones where they’ve figured it out. Since arriving in 2001 as inside operatives bent on dance-punk’s destruction, their career has alternated bizarre and divisive left turns with records that vindicated their artistic vision. This risk/reward dynamic is even more pronounced with the release of their seventh album, Mess. The sleek contours of 2012’s WIXIW betrayed Liars’ self-admission that they were learning how to use computers and sequencers on the fly, downplaying the extreme shift from the caveman garage rock and scabrous art-punk of Liars and Sisterworld. And now Mess feels like Liars getting their driver’s license after fumbling with a learner’s permit—you can have a lot more fun with this machinery once you stop worrying about totaling the thing.
If you didn’t care for WIXIW’s muted introspection, Mess is a welcome counterpoint; the dance-punk throwback “Brats” was tacked onto WIXIW seemingly as a random addendum, but Liars have a way of using late-album cuts as foreshadowing. And in fact Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut. As with They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music. A pitch-shifted Angus Andrew begins Mess demanding to be depantsed (as well as “eat my socks”), and after the pummeling beat of “Mask Maker” drops, it could be heard as an alternate history, one in which Liars continued on the path of electroclash subversives.
Liars have never been futurists, and a curious byproduct of their electronic shift is how it’s made them strangely retro. Their previous record’s clicks and whirs hearkened back to early 2000s IDM and lap-pop such as the Notwist and Dntel, where the first half of Mess takes its cues from the festival-EDM that was thoroughly trendpieced around the time of WIXIW—Hoovering bass, crowd-pleasing drops, air raid synth lines. Mess bangs from the start, albeit in a way that tends to flatten out the dynamics, as the introductory duo of “Mask Masker” and “Vox Tuned D.E.D.” could be mistaken for an eight-minute suite, a fairly predictable means of expressing their past physicality in an electronic setting. The relatively quieter moments are where Liars show their newfound confidence and instrumental facility: an organ break reminiscent of OutKast’s “Ghettomusick” pierces through “Pro Anti Anti”, while the frazzled, free-time “Can’t Hear Well” hints towards the second half’s turn towards more abstract composition.
Mess turns out to be an admirably diverse album that foregrounds the big-beat material: “Darkslide” and “Boyzone” find Liars imposing their will on electronic music rather than the other way around, the tribal rhythms and perverted vocals of Drum’s Not Dead updated with fancier software. The closers “Perpetual Village” and “Left Speaker Blown” actually revisit the unsettling atmosphere of They Were Wrong So We Drowned and contain some of Andrew’s most evocative lyrics if you can manage to suss them out. But at a combined 16 minutes of slow-moving murk and half-illegible, half-inaudible vocals, they’re more exciting as clues towards speculating Liars’ next move than they are in the present moment.
Which at least cuts against the narrative that Mess is a fully-realized mission statement; Andrew confessed to being riddled with spiritual and artistic doubt throughout WIXIW, but Mess is far more dilettantish and can register as being every bit as cynical as the murderous, anti-Los Angeles screed Sisterworld. At points, Andrew confesses “I am old/ Endless monotony dulls all alternatives/ Life is long, way too long” and “I heard the wild world is wicked/ And the modern one is out for blood.”
Seven albums in, the respectable qualities of Liars’ music have been well-documented, but it’s worth asking: do they make moving, ingratiating music or simply admirable art? Does anything on Mess have the capacity to inspire emotional investment? Does any of it stick with you? Or, more importantly, where is the Liars-ness in Mess? Mostly, it comes from Andrew’s voice, still intimidating in its lowest registers and frightening when given to wraith-like moans; we get both modes during obvious highlight “Mess On a Mission”. But it’s been 10 years since Liars were notoriously and short-sightedly called “unlistenable” by major publications. In 2014, Mess might be called "challenging" out of habit, but is anything here capable of scaring off the squares?
In fact, Mess can sound pretty tame compared to electronic acts which can be linked to their ultra-percussive, post-punk aesthetics such as Factory Floor or Fuck Buttons. As enjoyable as it can be, Mess is a centrist record from a band without a lot of centrist strengths and appreciating it can feel like a symbolic gesture: it’s easy to support a band who’s achieved their level of success while making conceivably challenging music. In other words, it’s easy to admire because Liars are easy to admire. | 2014-03-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-03-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | March 24, 2014 | 6.9 | a9287bf7-3a2c-42d9-9b63-c4fdb94da8d1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
With big hooks and breathless romance galore, Carly’s leftovers from last year’s Dedicated show off her range, even when the songs start to lose their spark. | With big hooks and breathless romance galore, Carly’s leftovers from last year’s Dedicated show off her range, even when the songs start to lose their spark. | Carly Rae Jepsen: Dedicated Side B | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carly-rae-jepsen-dedicated-side-b/ | Dedicated Side B | The Hulu television series Normal People, which follows a tenuous love affair between two academically bright but emotionally obtuse students, has everything your sophisticated millennial could want. Based on a Sally Rooney novel of the same name, the sexy Irish drama serves you wispy bangs, small boob representation, and—if you squint!—Marxist undertones. But it also offers a soft and stunning exploration of desire, the kind of intimacy that strips you of pretense, leaving you vulnerable to the world. The show features music of varying resonance: Selena Gomez’s too-precious “Rare” soundtracks a party scene when the doe-eyed ingenue meets a sadist, and Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”—hallowed season finale material—is sacrilegiously wedged into the second episode. But midway through the series is a perfect alignment of song and scene. The morning after sleeping together, two friends linger in the kitchen. Everything is new, provisional: their conversation is suffused with longing. Wafting in the background is Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Too Much,” about the tingly uncertainty of liking someone: “Is this too, is this too/Is this too much?”
This too much-ness, the spilling over boundaries of acceptable displays of emotion, undergirds much of Carly Rae Jepsen’s breathless music. Her songs brush against a scary reality. You may insist on your independence, your detachment, your self-conscious cool, but one day you will be unraveled by someone: their look, their memory, their touch. In Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs, there is always a “you” pressing against the “I,” a slippery object of yearning that colors its subject. Or as she sings on her last album Dedicated, “I think I’m coming alive with you.”
A year after Dedicated’s release, Jepsen has surprise-dropped a collection of outtakes from the album, just as she did for 2015’s Emotion. Side B arrives at the perfect time. For many, quarantine has stalled romantic intrigue; without someone to pine over, our cramped, dull existence seems even more confining. Whereas Dedicated started out low-key, its counterpart immediately explodes with feeling: ’80s-inspired opening track “This Love Isn’t Crazy” pairs a volcanic chorus with pleading “baby/crazy/save me” rhymes. It’s a little too conventionally CRJ, but it’s still a joyful reprieve, like a fizzy drink after some 9-5 drudgery. As Jepsen tells it, “I wanted to flip the switch and just be like, ‘Welcome to love, everyone! We’re going to have a party! Stop cleaning your house!’”
Side B demonstrates her range, teasing a few different lanes from the original’s “chill disco.” She originally wrote 200-something songs for Dedicated, and had such difficulty whittling it down that she floated the idea of a 50-track deluxe edition. With its tinsel synths and watery marimba, “Now I Don’t Hate California After All” sounds like Christmas on the beach; “Window” is buttery funk-pop that gestures toward her debut, Tug of War. Her lyrics venture away from shy flirtation, hinting at bickering, cruelty, and ambivalence. “I’m at war with myself,” Jepsen admits on the hazy, wistful “Comeback.”
Some songs, meanwhile, are unapologetically hot. The feathery, mid-tempo “Felt This Way” shows Jepsen obsessing over a lover’s touch; “Stay Away” is the same song after a shot of vodka. The double-hitter is a peek into Jepsen’s songwriting process, revealing how the same text can be manipulated in different but equally compelling directions. “Both our hands speak for us and complicate it,” she sings. “How can I stay away?” Equally sexy but weirder is “Fake Mona Lisa,” which recalls the reckless fun of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” For a brief moment, Jepsen’s lover is hypnotized by the lipstick-smudged woman in the DaVinci print, who becomes Jepsen’s sexual competition. Then he comes to his senses, and undresses her.
A few years ago, Carly Rae Jepsen proclaimed to “really really really really really really like you.” She thrived in this gap, between the intensity of the “really really”-s and the hesitation of the “like.” When she tries to bridge the divide on “Let’s Sort the Whole Thing Out,” it’s a little jarring. The song is about feeling insecure in a new relationship, only for your partner to ardently commit to you out of the blue. Its twinkly, vacant Mattel doll sheen makes his chirped “I love you” seem implausible, perfunctory—simultaneously too much and not enough. (It doesn’t help that it sounds like the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend theme song “Meet Rebecca!”) “Let’s Sort The Whole Thing Out” is one of a few deflating moments for an otherwise exhilarating artist; another is “Heartbeat,” a total snooze of a prom song. While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | May 29, 2020 | 6.9 | a92933f0-3d90-44d4-9af3-5e457b9c304a | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
Auckland bedroom pop artist Amelia Murray is the latest signee to Flying Nun. She honors her label’s history of making effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think. | Auckland bedroom pop artist Amelia Murray is the latest signee to Flying Nun. She honors her label’s history of making effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think. | Fazerdaze: Morningside | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23256-morningside/ | Morningside | Amelia Murray, the 24-year-old Auckland musician who records as Fazerdaze, is the latest signee to Flying Nun Records. On her debut LP, Morningside, it’s instantly clear that she is not beholden to the label’s signature style of Velvets-indebted guitar pop known as the “Dunedin sound.” Her potent indie pop of goes for a feeling of clarity instead.
Murray draws from a relatively limited pallet—guitars, drums, the occasional keyboard line—but Morningside is notably more confident than anything on her debut EP from three years ago. She moves through styles gracefully, from straight-ahead fuzz guitar riffs to more subdued collages of sound. Opener “Last to Sleep” begins with just Murray’s airy vocals and steady strums; the song steadily grows, adding in shuffling percussion and synth beeps as it zips by. The chipper lead single “Lucky Girl” amps up, layer by layer, from its acoustic intro to a sticky chorus (“I know I’m a lucky girl”), as if Murray is repeating the sentiment to make herself believe it. Closer “Bedroom Talks” would feel at home on the next Orchid Tapes compilation with its bubble-pop electronic drums, cricket chirps, and Murray’s sweet vocals dripping in reverb. It is a web of a song that sounds made to be played at dusk.
Behind all the bright melodies and earworms, Murray is frequently writing about worry. Low-level relationship anxiety is ingrained in the makeup of practically every song. “And I’m trying not to try so hard for you,” Murray sings over the melancholy of “Shoulders,” a song that builds several times over its brief three minutes and refuses ever let go of its tension. Murray may at times be a little too reliant on reverb as a default texture, evoking the nostalgic warmth of a summertime day. But she knows when to crank up the distortion for a good yelp of catharsis, as on “Misread” or the especially explosive “Friends.”
Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy. Whatever the destination, it’s unlikely Murrary is concerned. She sounds concentrated on the one thing every great Flying Nun band aims for: making effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think. | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Flying Nun | May 12, 2017 | 7 | a92991cd-93b5-4c8a-8097-c0e5bf6c316d | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | null |
On their sophomore album Soft Opening, Seattle indie rockers Posse imbue their no-frills, rumpled indie rock with a discernible point of view and more importantly, a personality. | On their sophomore album Soft Opening, Seattle indie rockers Posse imbue their no-frills, rumpled indie rock with a discernible point of view and more importantly, a personality. | Posse: Soft Opening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19132-posse-soft-opening/ | Soft Opening | Posse does not have some kind of marvelous origin story, there is no blood oath or volatile, undeniable chemistry. The songwriting duo of Paul Wittmann-Todd and Sacha Maxim met during a show at a Seattle lesbian bar and decided to collaborate because the former "didn't have a lot of other options." On their sophomore album Soft Opening, Wittmann-Todd and Maxim exhibit that same kind of non-committal camaraderie, as their vocals do not harmonize or intertwine or do battle; most of the time, they exchange one-sided conversations, acknowledging each other and going about their business. Every instrument is given enough space to do whatever it wants as long as it cleans up after itself. It's the musical equivalent of roommates who randomly linked up on Craigslist and totally worked things out. Whatever qualities this might suggest in Posse as people lend a lived-in bumminess to Soft Opening, imbuing its no-frills, rumpled indie rock with a discernible point of view and more importantly, a personality.
That’s important, because this is really no-frills indie rock. The most notable studio tricks Posse employ are a fuzz pedal, a tambourine, and the occasional echo on Maxim’s vocals. Either Wittmann-Todd is playing an extremely avant-garde solo during a portion of “Jon” or they simply didn’t feel like overdubbing a flubbed take. On the up-tempo numbers, Posse recall a rainy day Real Estate, a less bookish Galaxie 500, or Yo La Tengo driven by a equivocal, platonic friendship. On slower-than-slowcore “Talk", they’re all but mesmerized by their own torpor, situated somewhere in between Pavement’s “Stop Breathing” and Built to Spill’s “Cleo” in terms of uncomfortably numb guitar heroism. Similar to those bands, Posse make music that is lo-fi without sounding cheap, purposeful minimalism that can sound strangely expansive: Maxim and Wittmann-Todd’s vocals are barely projected without being off-key, and the guitar leads have an effortless melodicism whenever they take over. Even if most of these songs could be strummed out from a beanbag chair, Posse always add a chord that fancies things up just enough.
Posse describe their sound as “delay pedals and 27 years of disappointment”, which may not be factually correct; you hear a lot more of the latter than the former, and the second line of opener “Interesting Thing No. 2” is “You turned 25, so many things you haven’t tried.” It’s theoretically sound all the same, since Soft Opening’s self-deprecation is a big part of its appeal. For all of its invocations of 80s and 90s A-listers, Soft Opening is an of-the-moment record in the way it aligns with the sort of sitcoms that dominate the viewing habits of people Posse’s age: the actors involved are presented as friends, yet they don’t really seem to like each other all that much.
In the case of Soft Opening, nearly every song is a subtly hilarious metacommentary on some sort of communication breakdown. Maxim sings, “I know you’re gonna talk through this and not care,” and you can easily visualize the shoulder shrug, the eye-rolling, the internal defeat she anticipates with this interaction. With every repetition, it cuts deeper and deeper as an insult: you are someone who simply can’t handle sitting in silence with their own feelings. A song later on “Shut Up”, a drunk and bored Wittmann-Todd fantasizes about a time when he’s going to work up the nerve to tell someone to shut their yap, even if it’s himself: “I’m gonna watch you go outside now/ And make a stupid face/ And shut up."
And yet, none of this venting comes off as mean-spirited. In fact, most of Soft Opening unwinds with the casual bonhomie of three post-work beers over darts; the deleterious effects are minimal compared to the necessary release and bonding. And hell, if Posse seem to have a strange enjoyment for each other’s company in spite of it all, well, it’s because the outside world doesn’t have that much more to offer. “Cassandra B.” relates a date between overeducated, underfunded Seattlites as they down too much vodka, go to an “intelligent rap” show (“A bald white guy/ With a mumu onstage”) and lie about reading Willa Cather books that were bought at college and promptly shelved. As with every dryly hysterical line on Soft Opening, there’s never any “pitchiness”; it’s never trying to be any more droll and absurd than life itself.
Despite the litany of disappointments, misunderstandings, and aimlessness befalling the narrators in these songs, Soft Opening is a record of oddly stoic presence. For one thing, the austere sonics and plainspoken lyrics ensure that nothing gets glossed overso it's a tough record to tune out. But also, Posse sound exactly like the band they want to be—you don’t sense any musical ambition unmet, any word misplaced. It’s a modest record done confidently, enough to end with a six-minute guitar workout based around the lyric that perfectly encapsulates Soft Opening’s comforting sadness, its satisfied misanthropy: “Don’t touch me/ I’m in my zone.” | 2014-03-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-03-13T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Beating A Dead Horse | March 13, 2014 | 7.9 | a92d6dd1-1115-4282-b0d6-c857b12a93ba | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Returning home to Humboldt after 20 years of roaming, Ben Chasny finds new connections between the modes—fingerpicked guitar, hushed folk, experimental noise—that have long crisscrossed his work. | Returning home to Humboldt after 20 years of roaming, Ben Chasny finds new connections between the modes—fingerpicked guitar, hushed folk, experimental noise—that have long crisscrossed his work. | Six Organs of Admittance: Time Is Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/six-organs-of-admittance-time-is-glass/ | Time Is Glass | As with all Greek myths, there are several contradictory versions of the story of Hephaestus, but in each one, he was exiled from paradise and forced to toil at his craft on the Earth before he could go home, transformed into an artisan god. I’m sure Ben Chasny wasn’t making such lofty claims when he gave Hephaestus’ name to a song on his new album, but the parallels are plain.
Back when Six Organs of Admittance was a few years old and still fairly divisible by Leo Kottke and the No-Neck Blues Band, Chasny left Northern California as a stern fingerstyle guitarist with penchants for Asian modes, lo-fi noise, and occult antiquity. After 20 years of roaming, he returned to Humboldt as a more tempered songwriter and a superior sound artist of capacious scope. Alone, he drew the ancient redwoods around him like a curtain and set to work on Time Is Glass. Rather than adding new experiments to those spread across his dozens of releases, he resumed them, using all the powers he’d banked, from the special vantage of where it all began.
“Hephaestus” is just the latest time that Chasny has set an instrumental on Greek marble—he memorably put Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and eaten by his dogs for glimpsing Artemis bathing, in the first song on Luminous Night—and it’s probably the best. On Time Is Glass, the song is a dramatic outlier: a musky, supple, soul-shivering drone piece that credibly evokes sparks peeling from a divinely immense anvil. But this is what passes for a back-to-basics Americana record in Chasny’s expandable world, and most of the songs sink deep acoustic roots before growing in gratifying ways, whether subtle or surprising.
The bookends, “The Mission” and “New Year’s Song,” lay out his songwriting materials in their sparest pieces—the room tone chirring like cicadas, your ear right up against the hole in the guitar, and a thin, sweet, slightly aloof voice floating down from somewhere above. Replicating them four or five more times with some atmospheric interludes would have made for a fine record. But Chasny has never been content with fine, and with his unusual blend of restlessness and focus, he keeps breaking new connecting paths between leafy, well-worn ways.
This exploration unfolds with intense patience, each song striking out a little further. An electric guitar glints like light through the clouds in “Slip Away” before “Theophany Song” reminds us exactly why Chasny was once so associated with Devendra Banhart, and then the forge heats up for a spectacular second half. “My Familiar” is a haunting dirge until an electric guitar appears, the muted riffs and sailing leads structured tightly as a proof. It continues the uncanny chimera of Steve Stevens and Bill Frisell solos that Chasny concocted on his last album, The Veiled Sea. “Summer’s Last Rays” seems like a pure technical showcase of fanning runs, leaps, and trills until an invasive species of reversed, gurgling effects starts tugging at the relentless figures, refuting their rigid account of linear time. The two and a half minutes of wistful acoustic sprays that open “Spinning in a River” set up a drop so good, so unguessable yet fitting, that I genuinely don’t want to spoil it.
Lyrically as well as musically, Chasny accretes meaning in thin layers of glaze. His words don’t look like much on the page but drench the music with emotional color. It would be unseemly for any one line to stand out too much; everything he makes is shaped to its purpose, without extra parts or redundant functions. After 25 years of Six Organs, you almost have to wonder what deal he made with the gods to keep him from either settling into a rut or taking ill-considered detours. Being so well established, he could easily spend a few years here and there just strolling through his richly timbered guitar playing. But he hasn’t. You still never know from one song what might appear on the next, or even where the song you’re listening to might go, and it keeps the music fresh even when it’s retreading hallowed ground. | 2024-04-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | April 29, 2024 | 7.7 | a93d9670-3858-4e8b-9fd0-d731c4146a1d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Clarence Johnson—better known as DJ Roc—is one of Chicago footwork's more underrated veterans, despite having made some of the scene's most approachable projects. More than any other footwork release this year, Practice What U Preach a study in control, all of its rough edges polished into sharp points. | Clarence Johnson—better known as DJ Roc—is one of Chicago footwork's more underrated veterans, despite having made some of the scene's most approachable projects. More than any other footwork release this year, Practice What U Preach a study in control, all of its rough edges polished into sharp points. | DJ Roc: Practice What U Preach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20832-practice-what-u-preach/ | Practice What U Preach | Clarence Johnson—better known as DJ Roc—is one of Chicago footwork's more underrated veterans, despite having made some of the scene's most approachable projects. In a genre often pigeonholed as repetitive and raw, Roc's production style throughout his nearly 15 years in the game has maintained a fine balance between streamlined minimalism and organized chaos. He favors clarity over experimentation for its own sake, and often, his tracks are formatted in the style of a pop or rap song, with distinct bridges, choruses, pre-choruses. His 2010 Planet Mu debut, The Crack Capone, was one of the first great footwork full-lengths, a subtle and often overlooked gem from the era in which footwork began to seep into the global dance underground.
His latest, Practice What U Preach, is a concise, eight-track mini-album on Swiss footwork label Duck 'N Cover Records. More than any other footwork release this year, it's a study in control, all of its rough edges polished into sharp points. Roc's strong suit has always been deft, tricky sample manipulation. He has a keen eye for detail, and a knack for successfully juxtaposing clips that seemingly shouldn't work: on Crack Capone, he made Kid Cudi's hokey Lady Gaga-sampling "Make Her Say" barely recognizable, interspersed Evanescence with the "Twilight Zone" theme and crunk adlibs, and gave edge to Robin Thicke's pillow-soft "Lost Without U". The latter track remains one of Roc's best, and its ethos—making easy listening just a touch harder—guides much of Practice What U Preach.
The title track is built around an extended sample of Barry White's 1994 song of the same name, and serves as the ultimate example of Roc's eye for raw material. Halfway through the original, White's delivery edges just slightly out of time on the pre-chorus, chopping up his own rhythm in real time in a pattern that uncannily suggests footwork. It's a window into Roc's seemingly gut-driven sampling instincts; elsewhere, on "The Worst", he molds Jhené Aiko's mellow break-up song of the same title into something desperate and urgent. "Lowend Unity", a shout-out to the Low End neighborhood on Chicago's south side, gathers choppy snares and syrupy sax solos into neat, tight knots and then lets them unravel and ride out. It's the smoothest a footwork album's sounded in 2015, though it's not without its moments of catharsis: "Destruction" pounds organ loops into Lex Luger-style blasts, a battle track in the Spartan sense. Roc's style has often intersected with hip-hop, albeit never quite as overtly as DJ Rashad's (though he is perhaps the only footwork producer to have been sampled multiple times by Lil B).
But Roc's a juke producer as much as he is a footwork producer, and perhaps his closest parallel is to DJ Slugo, the juke pioneer with whom he's frequently collaborated. Both make finely crafted, approachable, and surprisingly subtle tracks that know when to build momentum and when to let things unfold organically. "Ready or Not", a sleek but dramatic orchestral juke track, is perhaps the album's best demonstration of how much Roc can do with so few components, its intricate structure a counter to anyone who still thinks footwork tracks are simple. | 2015-07-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Duck N' Cover | July 27, 2015 | 7.5 | a9406b50-e36e-4308-a1f7-c9aa4fb5763c | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
The 26-year-old sounds reinvigorated on his latest—the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine. | The 26-year-old sounds reinvigorated on his latest—the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine. | Gunna: WUNNA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunna-wunna/ | Wunna | Gunna’s lifestyle is less like a rapper and more like one of Bravo’s Real Housewives. He shops, travels, hangs out with his rapper friends, and has few issues outside of what color Audemars Piguet watch he should wear on his wrist or if his new pair of Amiri jeans will fit nicely around his waist. Among his Atlanta peers, he’s the most predictable. Listening to a Gunna album or tape is easy and familiar, like turning on the television and landing on a marathon of your favorite sitcom.
The difference between Gunna’s best verses and his worst is at the molecular level: The best are easily recitable and bring color to his lavish lifestyle; the worst are basically the same except it just sounds like he’s going through the motions. On WUNNA, the 26-year-old’s latest, Gunna has the heart and is the most engaged he’s sounded since his 2018 breakthrough, Drip Season 3. (Insanely, WUNNA is an acronym—“Wealthy unapologetic nigga naturally authentic”—and as you would expect he explained the title in an interview as, “Honestly, I was just high, bro.”)
WUNNA is more than an endless barrage of boasts about his designer clothes and foreign whips; the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine (new-age Atlanta beat-making royalty Wheezy and Turbo are mainly behind the boards). On the calm, Turbo-produced single “Wunna,” Gunna’s flow is patient, every word is emphasized. And then on the intro, “Argentina,” he changes paces with ease. Thanks to his bank of deliveries and melodies, his flexes stick. “It’s easy to slip, don’t want you to fall/Walk in with the drip at Met Gala ball,” he croons on the “Met Gala” hook. It’s a simple line that could have been generated by a bot, but through sweet vocals, it becomes something more.
WUNNA hits a stride when it becomes a family affair. Much like “Sold Out Dates” and “Drip Too Hard,” “Blindfold” is like hanging out with Gunna and Lil Baby as they partake in a fashion duel: Gunna has a new pair of Rick Owens jeans and Lil Baby can’t decide if he wants to lace up his Dior or Jordan sneakers. Similarly, the album revolves around a pair of collaborations with Young Thug. “Dollaz on My Head” is ripped by Thug and Gunna is smoothly rapping about spending a bag on Prada. Followed by “Far,” their second collaboration, a welcomed disruption, and a rare moment of introspection. “I ain’t tryna talk down ’cause I know niggas be hardhead/Thinkin’ about how they put my brother in the ground, had to pour up more red,” wails Gunna, as it slides into a vulnerable territory he should go to more often.
But, of course, at 18 tracks, there are moments when Gunna lapses into monotony. The nearly four-minute two-parter “Nasty Girl/On Camera” is tiresome, and guest features by Roddy Ricch and Travis Scott seem like nothing more than formalities to juice streaming numbers. Yet it’s hard to not have fun when Gunna is telling posh tales in a rushed melody over Wheezy and Turbo beats that sound like an elevator ride up to a penthouse. Like “I’m On Some,” where Gunna reflects about the moments he truly cherishes: a New York trip to buy baguette diamonds from celebrity jeweler Elliott Eliantte and purchasing his latest girlfriend liposuction just to brighten her mood. Who else can sound so unrelatable, materialistic, and superficial, and still remain charming? Only Gunna. | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | May 28, 2020 | 7.2 | a9440ba4-76d2-4037-b39c-f527274c1d9b | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The resurrected Pixies' EP-2 dates from the same recording sessions as last year's EP-1. The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, but the gulf between the feel this music has on the mind and the name on the cover remains jarring. | The resurrected Pixies' EP-2 dates from the same recording sessions as last year's EP-1. The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, but the gulf between the feel this music has on the mind and the name on the cover remains jarring. | Pixies: EP-2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18875-pixies-ep-2/ | EP-2 | Many groups go away then return to us diminished—Goodie Mob, Black Flag, the Stooges, Smashing Pumpkins. We have more or less reconciled ourselves to this phenomenon. But very few bands come back wiped clean of their basic essence, as the Pixies did with last fall's EP-1. Their mystery, their fidgety precision, their peculiar tensed grin, was simply erased, replaced by an utterly indistinguishable modern rock band. The severity of the cognitive dissonance was almost fascinating, or it would have been if the music weren't so brutally anodyne. Had any legendary band returned with new material this limp and attenuated before?
We have another chance to consider the question. EP-2, released this week, dates from the same recording sessions as the first. (There is one more on the way.) The four new songs here are less blank than the four on the first, if only marginally: "Magdalena" and "Snakes" arouse the faint suspicion that you might be listening to the Pixies, or at least vaguely Pixies-inspired music. The minor-key chorus and stairstep chord progression to "Magdalena" is the most harmonically rich moment they've managed since reuniting. Black's lead vocal is muted and sensitive, and it sounds, passingly, like a lesser track from Bossanova or Teenager of the Year.
They are the only moments, however. The appealing, smeary lead guitar line on "Green and Blues" introduces a thin, banal rock song, both melodically and lyrically devoid of interesting ideas—the chorus turns on “I'm wasting your time just talking to you/ Maybe best to go on home/I’ll leave you alone.” Black sings of being an alien, a visitor, but his eccentricity, his fundamental strangeness, has never been less evident. The Pixies traded in unpredictability and startling outbursts—they were pixies, for god's sake. Mischief, subversion, and nonsense were part of their job description. Frank's scream used to be vivid in part because it emerged out of nowhere, a teddy bear that suddenly became a golem. On"Blue Eyed Hexe", he screams like a Brian Johnson imitator over a foursquare riff with no wit or play in it, the clonking woodblock hitting like a kid brother socking you repeatedly in the arm. It is arguably worse, more slow-witted, and painful than anything on the original EP.
The gulf between the feel this music has on the mind and the name on the cover remains jarring. Frank Black has been making more traditional, MOR rock recordings under his own name since the Pixies disbanded, but even his most meat-and-potatoes solo offerings had something—a flutter of vulnerability, a darker streak beneath the riffs that suggested mischief and imagination. When he played with country and roots-rock tropes on quickly assembled, low-stakes creative projects like Paley & Francis, the crooked grin was legible beneath the surface. The songs collected on these two EPs display almost no creative vision or signature.
Black and the remaining original members—Joey Santiago, David Lovering—seem intent, above all, on pushing their brand forward. They recently dismissed Kim Shattuck, the bassist hired in Kim Deal’s conspicuous absence, and hired Paz Lenchantin. In all of this, they are moving with a bracing, almost refreshingly blunt cynicism: the Pixies are a franchise now, and franchises need to keep moving. Fair enough. But even the most mercenary-minded, craven reboot works if there is some evident love of the source material, and this is where these EPs fail so pitifully. These eight songs would be subpar, unremarkable work for a band with no reputation or mythology to live up to; for the Pixies, they are an increasingly mournful asterisk affixed to a beloved legacy. | 2014-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 10, 2014 | 2 | a947a499-ab6c-4752-96b9-7864077d3a5b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the power-pop trio’s 1991 debut, a scrappy, diamond-sharp, hook-filled attempt to become the biggest rock band out of Chicago. | 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 power-pop trio’s 1991 debut, a scrappy, diamond-sharp, hook-filled attempt to become the biggest rock band out of Chicago. | Material Issue: International Pop Overthrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/material-issue-international-pop-overthrow/ | International Pop Overthrow | The rise of Material Issue seemed almost predestined. Their music lived in the realm of girls, cars, and hanging out with girls in cars. They sounded instantly familiar yet slightly wild, like a radio playing Top 40 hits in a dream. Jim Ellison, the band’s gangly and remarkably self-possessed frontman, was sure of their success from the very start: “Most people would enjoy our stuff,” he told the Los Angeles Times just a month after the release of their 1991 debut album, International Pop Overthrow. It was that level of faith in the purity of his project—the way he treated pop like a religion, the unshakable belief in the categorical goodness of his vision—that made the band’s eventual failure impossible to accept.
Material Issue, by their own admission, “reeked of Chicago”: The trio formed in 1986 when Ellison found bassist Ted Ansani at the city’s Columbia College (“We both had leather jackets,” Ansani later explained). They soon recruited drummer Mike Zelenko through an ad in the local music magazine, Illinois Entertainer, in which Zelenko professed his love for Buzzcocks, the Replacements, Tom Petty, and the Beatles. “The most important thing about Mike was the fact he had a van,” Ellison later said, which gave them access to studios and gigs around the city. The band was Ellison’s brainchild, down to its name, a reference to a request form from his job installing home security systems. He had a specific vision for Material Issue’s public image—shag haircuts, psychedelic fonts, and American flags—as an homage to Merseybeat bands from three decades prior. Ellison called it “psycho pop,” which meant the simple rhythms and sun-soaked melodies about being sad, perfected by power-pop bands like Raspberries and the Romantics.
Material Issue strived for the platonic ideal of pop, music that was as much about nodding to its predecessors as it was about hooks and harmonies. For Ellison, songwriting was the pursuit of perfection, a chance to craft something so affecting and catchy that it was almost scientifically guaranteed to break big. The band didn’t want to peg their sound to a specific place or era, and they weren’t interested in political music or the folksy alt-country that was overtaking their city at the time. Nor were they fully in step with the outgrowth of the peak of ’70s power-pop, which had morphed into jangly twee and “alternative pop” in the form of Matthew Sweet, the Posies, and the K Records extended universe. Those bands wrote about talking to the wind and the sun—Ellison wrote about talking to girls, or at least, dreaming about talking to girls. If punk was an attitude and pop was a style, power-pop was its commentary, a layer of self-awareness that made lovelorn songs about waiting by the telephone into high art.
The three booked studio time at Short Order Recorder, the Zion, Illinois studio owned by Jeff Murphy of local power-pop heroes Shoes. There were Chicago studios closer to the band, but the legacy of Shoes—who went from recording their 1977 debut in their living room to premiering on the first day of MTV four years later—represented the self-made pop explosion Ellison wanted to capture. Material Issue’s first singles share Shoes’ scrappy enthusiasm: “Renée Remains the Same”—one of four Material Issue song titles to feature a woman’s name on their eventual debut—places the band in the lineage of power-pop greats in the first 30 seconds: someone else’s girl, someone else’s car, and a fuzz pedal. The band released “Renée” and a B-side as The Super Sonic Seven-Inch on Ellison’s Big Block Records in 1988.
By the end of the ’80s, Chicago had become a hub for house music, but the Second City lived up to its nickname when it came to rock, trailing its coastal counterparts. But due to investments in the once hollowed-out industrial neighborhood of Wicker Park, by the middle of the decade, the city’s DIY scene was taking shape. The rise of Material Issue mirrored and bolstered Chicago’s overdue reckoning as a bona fide destination for innovative bands, built from new venues like the Empty Bottle, new labels like Drag City, Wax Trax!, and Touch and Go, and groups like Urge Overkill, Smashing Pumpkins, and Tortoise.
Surrounded by a typically humble Midwestern scene at odds with his prideful, self-aggrandizing personality, Ellison clashed with his fair share of local acts (one Chicago Reader column from 1995 details Ellison and members of Red Red Meat getting into urine-soaked skirmishes). At the same time, he put his hustle and sense of importance back into his hometown, working the door at long-dead local venues like Batteries, booking shows at Gaspar’s, and supporting local acts at spaces like Phyllis’s Musical Inn. The city returned the favor: Before long, the band’s first singles were in heavy rotation at local rock station WXRT, and they were packing spots like the Cubby Bear and what was then called Cabaret Metro. Their success was the city’s success: “It may be Chicago’s turn” in the spotlight, Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot wrote in February 1991, spurred by the news that two local bands had recently inked major label deals: Eleventh Dream Day had released Beet on Atlantic Records in 1989, and Material Issue had just signed to Mercury for their debut.
International Pop Overthrow is a debut album by way of a collection of singles. Ellison, Zelenko, and Ansani made the record piecemeal with Murphy over the course of three years at Short Order Recorder. Songs were written in four-hour sprints when they could afford studio time with the money earned from gigs; they tracked songs on rented tape. After the band signed with a label, Ellison asked Murphy if they could remaster the recordings, but their songs had long been taped over—their demos would have to serve as their debut. All told, the album’s 14 songs were recorded for under $6,000.
Material Issue excelled at creating a sense of incandescent melancholy, decorating heartbreak in arpeggios and chorus pedals. Album opener “Valerie Loves Me” is an unrequited lover’s manic breakdown, equal parts exhilaration and desperation. Written about Ellison’s childhood crush on his downstairs neighbor, the song’s verses are sung as an outsider looking into a life he dreamed of attaining, peering from his bedroom window, hopelessly obsessed: “I would give my whole life to her,” Ellison croons. But it’s the chorus—a gnarled, almost pained shout of “Valerie loves me!”—that launches the song into the stratosphere. With each screaming refrain, Ellison seems further detached from reality until by the end he’s praying poor Valerie winds up alone forever. The song—and its music video, in which an anonymous woman waltzes around in sunglasses while the band awkwardly tries on their best beatnik impressions —entered heavy rotation on 120 Minutes and rock radio, eventually peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Modern Rock charts.
Like “Valerie,” the songs on International Pop Overthrow bend familiar lyrical and musical tropes into mangled, alien reflections. On “Very First Lie,” Ellison opens by listing all the little things he’d like to do with a girl—staying up late listening to records (“phonograph” and “better half” is an especially memorable rhyme) and meeting her parents—before dropping the song’s title: “I would like to tell the very first lie.” It’s a sly twist that takes its lyrics out of the realm of fantasy and into a more subversive kind of love song: Even an unrequited love is still love; a lie to a lover is still its own curdled form of intimacy. Elsewhere, Ellison gets closer to Ric Ocasek as carnival barker: “Diane” describes a woman who’s “got everything: a helicopter, a submarine!” We don’t learn much more about Diane—she’s maybe 19—but in her anonymity, she becomes an avatar for the eternally elusive dream girl. The song’s chorus, just an increasingly emphatic repetition of her name, conjures a woman who just might own multiple motorized helicopters and submarines. He makes it sound like Diane could stop the world.
In the world of power-pop, the goal isn’t to get the girl, it’s to write the best song about the girl. Ellison is not just in thrall to his subjects but to the history of pop music, from the rollicking country of “Chance of a Lifetime” and the swaggering morality play “Trouble” to the slow, shimmering soft rock of “A Very Good Idea.” Whenever the songs threaten to veer too far into paint-by-numbers romance, small interjections—“But hey, it was your birthday” on the bridge of “Li’l Christine”—bring them into Material Issue’s unique lane of punk and Brill Building pop. Material Issue built a pop universe that sounded fully formed from the start, as if its rhymes and rhythms had always existed in the ether and had just been waiting for Ellison, Ansani, and Zelenko to track it to tape.
International Pop Overthrow was released in February 1991, and by the next month, they were performing “Diane” for a group of neon-clad fraternity brothers on MTV’s Spring Break. Ellison and his band thought it was ambitious when their record shipped at 60,000 copies, but by the end of the year, Mercury had sold over 200,000; they instantly went from local scenesters to one of Chicago’s most successful new rock bands. They headed back to Zion to work with Murphy on a second record on Ellison’s request, returning to the familiarity of Shoes’ studio out of Ellison’s devotion to Murphy’s self-made melodies, despite their label advance providing them the freedom to leave Illinois. The result, 1992’s Destination Universe, sounded like a prime-time remake of their debut—the same hooks, the same layered vocals, the same girl-crazed lyrics, but without the come-from-nothing exuberance that made International Pop Overthrow so electrifying.
The band still found success—the boldly assumptive single “What Girls Want” landed them on The Dennis Miller Show—but the album didn’t sell. Despite recruiting a new producer, Mike Chapman (who had worked with Blondie), and including contributions from Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen for their third record, 1994’s Freak City Soundtrack, it failed to lift the band out of their slump. Ellison’s ideas in their purest form were strong enough to carry an album without a budget or expensive mastering, and their sound was hampered by additional money and time. The album sold less than 50,000 copies, and Mercury dropped the band within a year.
Material Issue was so predicated on forward momentum that Ellison couldn’t reconcile their fall from grace. He might have been a notoriously boastful frontman, but that was because he believed his music spoke to a collective pop truth that transcended the band. “He thought he had tapped into something universally great,” Steve Albini said later in the 2021 Material Issue documentary Out of Time. Ellison had tapped into what he thought was the core of the great American pop subconscious and found its heart beating in 4/4 time, yearning for someone to come along just to feel anything, even heartbreak. And though the band continued to work on new music in the years following Freak City Soundtrack—including several covers with Ellison’s close friend, the newly ascendant post-Exile in Guyville Liz Phair—there was a sense that Material Issue had stalled.
“Anyone who knew Jim personally knew what it was to be touched by the light of his star,” Phair said later. It seemed surreal, then, when the news came that he had died by suicide on June 20, 1996. By all accounts, it wasn’t meant to be the end for Ellison. He had just joined a local supergroup Wild Bunch with members of Guns N’ Roses and Blondie, and was co-writing songs with Phair at the height of her success. Appropriately, Material Issue played what would be their last show at Metro, one of the Chicago venues that helped launch their career five years earlier.
Two years after Ellison’s death, fanzine writer David Bash founded the International Pop Overthrow festival in Los Angeles, in tribute to Ellison. For International Pop Overthrow’s 20th anniversary, the band reunited at the festival, fronted by local musician Phil Agnotti, as “Material Re-Issue.” And though their debut has been remastered in the years since its release, their original recordings sound just as vital as the day they were made. The band’s debut crackles with the energy of a fighter finally getting his chance in the ring, shining with a glimmer of that universal truth Ellison eternally strived to reach. Of course, Ellison put it briefest and best: “We just rock—that’s it.” | 2023-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mercury | April 16, 2023 | 7.9 | a9585888-ffa3-4e86-9dfa-8a41f2666628 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Young’s fourth album of the century with his most famous band is simple and heartfelt, gritty and tender. | Young’s fourth album of the century with his most famous band is simple and heartfelt, gritty and tender. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: Colorado | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-crazy-horse-colorado/ | Colorado | Many have tried, but no one plays guitar quite like Neil Young. He solos like something’s buried under the fretboard that he’s trying to dig out. When he transposes to acoustic settings, the inertia of his playing can cause his legs to cycle up and down wildly, a source of energy traveling through his entire body, dissipating in the lonesome exhaust of his fragile singing voice and harmonica playing. Even when he was a young man, this sound expressed a world-weariness that complemented his lyrics. But his music always seemed engineered to age with him—to rust and burn and keep on going.
No group better suits this sensibility than Crazy Horse, the pared-down accompanists he first recruited for his sophomore album, 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. The band—which then featured the late guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina—were built to tear things up. They kept it simple. Young’s guitar solos sometimes consisted of just one note, looped and clipping until the whole band seemed to lock in place with him. And while Young explored a wide variety of genres in the following decades, from pastoral country to arena rock to instrumental guitar, this primal sound will always be the one most closely associated with him.
So when Young reassembles Crazy Horse for new music, there are always heightened expectations. Colorado marks their fourth studio album of the 21st century, following a dense concept album (2003’s Greendale), an unremarkable set of royalty-free cover songs (2012’s Americana), and a brilliantly meandering double album (2012’s Psychedelic Pill). Situated around those releases have been a spotty run of albums (even by Young’s standards), building toward his most inscrutable era since the ’80s. Young himself seems to acknowledge his current standards in the accompanying documentary Mountaintop, as he instructs his reunited bandmates to work quickly but meaningfully during its 11-day sessions. “It doesn’t have to be good,” he instructs. “Just feel good.”
Despite his empowering mantra, a dark cloud hangs over Colorado. Its songs are furious (“Help Me Lose My Mind”), haunted (“Milky Way”), and remorseful (“Green Is Blue”). In “She Showed Me Love,” the closest thing this album has to a characteristic Crazy Horse epic, Young sings about a new generation carrying the torch for climate change and imagines how they might view him. “You might say I’m an old white guy,” he speak-sings. “I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature.” It goes without saying that the “she” in the song title refers to our planet, and the past tense refers to the shortening timelines of both the narrator and subject. The long jam eventually slows to a trudge and makes sure you feel every passing minute.
The rest of the record is shaded with subdued tones. In addition to Young’s old bandmates Talbot and Molina, he’s accompanied by Nils Lofgren—the E Street Band guitarist who also played with Young on career highlights After the Gold Rush and Tonight’s the Night. While Lofgren is best known for a near-athletic virtuosity, here he mostly colors in the lines. (His tap-dancing percussion in the sweet, Sleeps With Angels-referencing “Eternity” is the clearest showcase for his gifts.) Even for Crazy Horse, the music is simple but heartfelt. On tracks like “Olden Days” and “Rainbow of Colors,” Young’s basic folk melodies are rendered grittier and heavier by the band, if no less tender.
“When you see those geese in the sky, think of me,” go the album’s opening lines, and Young often sings from this distance, watching over a world without him. Outside a few words of gratitude in the gorgeous closing track “I Do,” his lyrics rarely seem autobiographical, but they do seem newly focused and reflective. And while the documentary is certainly not the most riveting film Young’s put his name to (highlights include a story about producer John Hanlon getting poison oak), it does occasionally offer a pure snapshot of his creative process. Seeing how ecstatic Young gets over a subtle tambourine part in “Olden Days” may permanently alter how you hear that song. It offers a reminder of his passion, how the studio remains a source of excitement and joy after all these years.
And yet, if it were up to him, none of us would be listening to this album in its final form. “I get to hear it the way we made it. Too bad about most of you,” he wrote on his website, bemoaning the current state of sound quality via streaming. The concern speaks to a lifelong battle with the industry, also discussed in his new 240-page book, but it also speaks to the struggle he’s faced as a solo recording artist this decade. Whether food justice or the destruction of the planet, his muses have often seemed muffled or misconstrued when they finally reach the market. Colorado surpasses those recent works by speaking directly to that ephemeral nature of life, our tragedies and joys and disappointments. “There’s so much we didn’t do,” Young and his bandmates sing together, their ages averaging around 73, in a ballad called “Green Is Blue.” And if one thing has remained unwavering about them, it’s that you know they mean every word.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | October 30, 2019 | 7.4 | a95feae5-26bf-416f-a971-e208edfff64e | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The British producer’s debut full-length illustrates her gift for rewiring jungle into arena-sized pop catharsis. | The British producer’s debut full-length illustrates her gift for rewiring jungle into arena-sized pop catharsis. | Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nia-archives-silence-is-loud/ | Silence Is Loud | The self-described “emotional junglist” Nia Archives sings cursive melodies over some of the most relentless breakbeats you’ve ever heard. It’s the sound of 100 thoughts racing through your head when you realize your situationship lied to you. A few years ago, she was balancing school with a job at the UK pub chain Wetherspoons, paying out of pocket for Instagram ads to promote her first song. Soon, she became a leader of a widespread jungle and drum’n’bass revival alongside artists like dazegxd and SHERELLE. The scene has had a slew of TikTok hits and bite-sized EPs, but no defining project—until now.
Silence Is Loud injects jungle with the glittery immediacy of pop ballads. It’s emo and elated, a diary blown up into sleek yet sensitive anthems made for arena-sized catharsis. Nia is a jungle obsessive, but she’s more concerned with honoring its culture and history than imitating any one of the myriad strains spawned in its ’90s golden age. In one interview, she describes her broad interpretation of the genre as “modern-day punk music in a dance space.” This loose understanding explains why her style has always been so malleable and unruly (for starters, on her last EP, she rewired the genre with bossa nova and sped-up Brazilian body music).
She’s keen to reshape a genre historically piloted by men, in which producers rarely reference their personal lives. Nia sings fiercely about things like unrequited desire, spinning out into soulful melodies and gleaming trills. The percussion simultaneously buries and intensifies her voice, giving her cover to unleash distressing fears. On “F.A.M.I.L.Y,” Nia talks about feeling alienated from her relatives, but the molten bass and singalong chorus nearly trick you into thinking it’s a positive power-bop. “Nightmares” possesses the vitriol of a novella-length hate text: Nia disses a lying man with such jaunty keys and cheeky moxie that it’ll make even the fuckboys smile.
While the music aspires to feel both clubby and confessional, many songs offer only vague sketches of emotional conflicts, trading concrete details for catchy rhymes. This works on “Cards on the Table,” where she somersaults across the guitars’ spindly groove. But it can also feel too neat and radio-packaged; the smooth vocal rhythm sometimes misaligns with the prickly worries she’s sharing. In the absence of nuanced insights or anecdotal texture, her struggles can come across trite at times—like, who hasn’t felt lonely in a crowded room?
But maybe emotional specificity isn’t the whole point. Instead, it’s this combo of party-hard sincerity that makes her music so punchy, like she’s animatedly telling secrets to a friend while wildly raving. And unlike the madcap cyber junglists of today, who adorn beats in delirious fuzz and frazzled digi-chaos, she hews closely to the pristine angularity of classic jungle percussion, each drum hitting with a satisfying sharpness. She’s the modern link between the genre’s past and present, palling around with new-gen producers and ’90s pioneers alike; Goldie makes a brief cameo on the dizzyingly lovesick “Tell Me What It’s Like?” to pump her up.
In the process of supersizing her sound, Nia has lost some of the subtle charm that made her early music so addictive. Where listening to tunes like 2022’s “Gud Gudbyez” felt like peering into a raver’s daydream reveries, these songs sound like they’re built for a massive loudspeaker. And the instrumental flourishes that made her wilder music feel thrillingly delirious, like eclectic samples and pockets of wistful ambience, have been replaced by flashy guitar and synth.
Nia’s jungle R&B reaches peak intoxication when the tunes feel less calibrated to bounce around your brain forever and more like misty hallucinations. There’s “So Tell Me,” a complaint about mistreatment that sounds like she’s addicted to the ouroboros of overthinking. Shimmery, reversed synths and Nia’s reverb-laden lilt conjure the image of an angel skating across the plush surface of a cloud. The entrancingly eerie “Forbidden Feelingz” shatters her voice into high-pitched shards, its dusty Columbo sample charging the air with a kind of haunted electricity like the Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist.” It makes Nia’s music feel like an aural lenticular print superimposing the 2020s onto the ’90s.
The most moving tune might be the only one without drums. It’s a reprise of the title track, an affectionate ode to her brother Zac that convulses with neon vocal fragments and a pulse manic enough for a hyperpop street carnival. The sequel opens with a voice note from her brother asking after her and praising the music, before dissolving into a piano ballad with a closing sample of ecstatic crowd cheers. A canny triumph of self-remixing, the song foregrounds community warmth and celebrates the people who make her happy. It’s tricky to revive a genre closely associated with a brief time period and specific sonic attributes. Haters say you don’t make real jungle. Critics constantly compare you to the genre’s pioneers. There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed. | 2024-04-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hijinxx / Island | April 15, 2024 | 7.3 | a9602257-5c5f-480a-9e96-9bc64b610e30 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
The latest from Roberto Carlos Lange's electronic pop project is a melodic and beautifully produced meditation on identity and the difficulty of connection. | The latest from Roberto Carlos Lange's electronic pop project is a melodic and beautifully produced meditation on identity and the difficulty of connection. | Helado Negro: Private Energy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22445-private-energy/ | Private Energy | In Isaac Asimov’s short story “Runaround,” a robot in 2015 AD named Speedy becomes caught in a feedback loop; programmed to follow the laws of robotics, it becomes disabled when a command from a human (law no. 2) puts its own existence at risk (law no. 3). Stuck between the moral principles that guide it, the robot oscillates between being close enough to danger to require retreat and being far enough that it deems it safe to carry out its orders. Drunk off the cognitive dissonance, its speech becomes nonsensical, and Speedy becomes unable to accept new commands.
In the summer of 2014 AD, Roberto Carlos Lange, fresh off a tour performing as Helado Negro in support of his 2014 album Double Youth, was exhausted and weary about his future. St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch had just announced that there would be no indictment of the officer that killed Michael Brown, and Lange watched as his country publicly fractured along racial lines, wondering where he fit in. A child of Ecuadorian immigrants, the Florida-born musician had a decidedly pluralistic American experience, straddling both the old world and the new while never being fully accepted by either. Unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the idea of being on the front lines and protesting in the street, he looked inward, and started writing songs.
The songs he sat down to write would become Private Energy, Helado Negro’s fifth LP. The quandary faced by Asimov’s robot Speedy—a being conflicted by contradictions in his own identity—is mirrored by Lange’s experience. “Runaround,” one of the first cuts he wrote for Private Energy, is directly inspired by Asimov’s story, and even cribs some of its lyrics from Speedy’s nonsensical musings (“Hot dog, let’s play games/You catch me and I catch you/no love can cut our knife in two”). Lange has recorded music under a few monikers—Epstein, OMBRE, his own name—but for the last decade, he’s used the Helado Negro project to explore his sense of self. From his debut Awe Owe through Double Youth, most of his lyrics have been in Spanish, and most of his shows performed for people who speak English. It’s a quirk of the Latin diaspora, with artists such as Algódon Egipcio, Xenia Rubinos, and Ela Minus sharing the experience of finding an English-speaking audience for their Spanish-language music.
For Lange, it helps that sonically, the album might be his most accessible yet; half the lyrics are in English, and the abstract sound sculptures that dotted his earlier work are carefully arranged into an orderly sequence as instrumental interludes (“Obra Uno”-“Obra Cuatro”). He takes license with his Spanish, twisting words and phrases to fit his melodies, and he changes the gender of his perspective (“porque soy una mujer/porque sigo siendo tu hombre”) as easily as his adjectives (“tus ojos tan claras”). It’s difficult to find artists with a comparable sound, but the puzzle pieces feel familiar—some Blood Orange horns here, some Peter Bjorn and John bass there, even a dash of some Erlend Øye synths. The music is confident but unaggressive; Even as he experiments with abrasive textures that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Arca record (“Mi Mano”), the songs are draped in a shimmering sheen. The album is anchored by Lange’s soothing croon; it’s not hard to hear echoes of Julio Jaramillo, a “sappy Ecuadorean crooner” that was a favorite of his father’s. He plays guitar and the keys, samples records, live players, and field recordings, manipulating them beyond recognition and arranging them in pop song structures, and with considerably more skill than on 2009’s Spanish-language beach soundtrack Awe Owe.
Lange’s songwriting process has always been a solitary one—even when he collaborates, players will track music and then leave him to his own devices, to assemble the puzzle pieces. And while every Helado Negro record has been made at Lange’s home, he spent most of 2015 workshopping Private Energy in public. The songs were essentially finished in January 2015, but he took them on the road—including nine dates with Sufjan Stevens—pulling feedback from the crowd’s energy in real-time, fine-tuning the compositions. He used a $50,000 prize from the Joyce Foundation to help fund an 18-piece ensemble in St. Paul, Minnesota, working with his composer friends Jason Ajemian and Trey Pollard to meticulously arrange his oeuvre for the big stage. Seasoned from a year on the road, he finally re-recorded the Private Energy songs in January 2016.
Private Energy may gaze inward, but its themes are rooted in these connections with others. When he sings of waking up feeling “Young, Latin and Proud,” that pride and power is rooted in a shared history and culture. He has an intimate relationship with the skin that covers his body, but it’s an experience shared by every brown person on earth. He seeks to reconcile the transference of energy involved in recording and performing music (“We Don’t Have Time for That”) and the celebration of everything about being Latinx that feels great, terrible, or even just confusing. That same dark skin that protects him from the sun’s rays makes him vulnerable; too dark for white people, too light for black people, his Spanish too foreign for some Americans but too gringo outside the U.S.
This desire to connect with others is fundamental, but it’s the parts we choose to share that define our relationships and, ultimately, ourselves. On “Transmission Listen,” Lange sings paradoxical couplets to a lover as starry synths twinkle in the background (“And I feel invincible without your wisdom/But I feel invisible without your wit”). Human ingenuity has joined them via satellite, but they can’t be honest enough with each other to actually come together. Here, and throughout the album, he probes the depths of his own psyche, masking the painful process with a velvet voice. Lange seems to be asking if it’s even possible to let other people in without first reconciling your own identity. Which parts should be private, and which parts should be shared? He’s caught in between the incongruous parts of himself, and the sentiment permeates the entirety of Private Energy. | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Asthmatic Kitty | October 8, 2016 | 8.1 | a97c8a3f-1948-4a69-a90d-1f8f6b0f8901 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
The Bristol native, now a London resident, maps the links between the two cities’ dance-music traditions in a four-track EP that infuses club energy with headphone-friendly nuance. | The Bristol native, now a London resident, maps the links between the two cities’ dance-music traditions in a four-track EP that infuses club energy with headphone-friendly nuance. | Otik: Thousand Year Stare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otik-thousand-year-stare/ | Thousand Year Stare | At the end of last year, a new high-speed train started running from Bristol to London. Touted as a win for commuters and the environment, it also piqued the interest of the real estate market, which is rarely good news for renters—some of whom are the artists that gave Bristol its appeal in the first place. The two cities have long been linked; historically by the long shadow of British colonialism, and culturally by a shared heritage of black British music. While their music scenes are indebted to much of the same sonic DNA—most notably, Jamaican soundsystem culture—having some distance from the bright lights of London allowed something different to sprout in the West Country. From trip-hop to purple to UK techno permutations that imagine new journeys between the U.S., the Caribbean, and the UK, Bristol has long been on its own wave.
Otik grew up in Bristol but now lives in London. Over the past six years, he’s put out a string of 12"s and EPs that each dip into a different facet, and era, of the music that grew from the seeds sown by dancehall soundsystems: jungle, UK garage, grime, dub techno. His new four-track release, Thousand Year Stare, is both a culmination of his stylistic exploration and a break from that pattern. While it was clearly designed with dancefloor dimensions in mind, what lifts the record up out of solely DJ tool territory is the storytelling detail that headphones illuminate.
The sound design of the EP’s title track—moving water, birdcall, and expansive effects like echo and reverb—sensually describes a bodily experience of standing in nature. There’s an all-back-to-mine ambient-house spirit to the song, one that speaks to dancing as a form of meditation. The name of the track remixes a phrase that describes the dissociative stare of a person with extreme trauma.
Where “Thousand Year Stare” created an endless horizon, “Antihero” is awash with a sense of towering dread. The eerie techno track’s central see-sawing creak of a synth line evokes the claustrophobia of a cornfield, something that decades of horror movies have amped up. In comparison, “Ghost Mole” plays on ideas of interiors. The bass, drums, and digital percussion—including what might be pitched-up rave whistles—sound like they are bouncing off the plastic and concrete surfaces of a built environment. Around the halfway mark, the treatment of the bass and the higher frequencies suggests a second interior: the one inside your own chest. These augmented sounds call to mind rushing air and pounding blood.
If the rest of the EP speaks to a sense of physicality, the final track, “Means Nothing,” performs an act of transcendence. Folding dream-state dancehall energy into the sunrise moment of a rave set, it takes interiority to its ultimate conclusion. Otik has called Burial, an artist whose music is closely associated with the wandering-wondering experience of traversing London by night bus, his “all-time favourite musician.” Thousand Year Stare does not sound like Burial, but it does paint a picture of a Bristol producer coming into his psychogeographic powers. | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Gobstopper | April 28, 2020 | 7.3 | a97dd5a6-8645-4481-8eae-845812df073b | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
The new collaboration between the prolific Dan Melchior and Austin’s Spray Paint make mountains out of mantras across a jammy, post-punk album that barrels like an 18-wheeler down the highway. | The new collaboration between the prolific Dan Melchior and Austin’s Spray Paint make mountains out of mantras across a jammy, post-punk album that barrels like an 18-wheeler down the highway. | Contributors: Contributors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/contributors-contributors/ | Contributors | The music of Austin trio Spray Paint is simple but potent. Relying heavily on repetition, they use clanging guitar, motorik beats, and nervous singing to make music that can both wind you up and give you the chills. In just six years, they’ve mined this formula for six gripping, high-strung albums. If their distinctive post-punk hasn’t gotten its due, maybe that’s because Spray Paint aren’t easy to keep up with.
That’s a situation Dan Melchior knows well. Since the late ’90s, the British-born musician has generated over 30 solo releases and with his bands Broke Revue, Dan Melchior Und Das Menace, and the Lloyd Pack, a sprawling oeuvre that’s difficult to sum up. His sonic signature is more varied than Spray Paint’s, but he shares with them a knack for picking an idea and sticking to it. That single-eyed patience is a key to Contributors, a new collaboration between Spray Paint and Melchior (along with Will Slack from Austin band Soft Healer). During their self-titled album’s six tracks—most of which last six minutes or more—the group make mountains out of mantras, propelling forward like an 18-wheeler barreling down a highway.
The fuzzed out, driving pulse of Contributors is there from the beginning. Opener “Aiport Girl” starts with a single beeping tone, soon supplemented by a pounding beat and a chiming guitar note. Over the top, Melchior repeats questions about the song’s title character—“Why does she work so hard? Who is she working so hard for?”—until they become unanswerable Zen koans. As the tune progresses, none of its basic elements change much, but building momentum helps Contributors shift into ever higher gears. “Airport Girls” gains gravity through sheer centrifugal force.
The rest of Contributors follows a similar path. Simple loops of beat and melody escalate throughout. Small modulations in guitar volume and density help each song avoid monotony while maintaining stability. Melchior’s semi-spoken deadpan—which isn’t far from Spray Paint’s flat shouts—adds to the perpetual motion, but his wry bite is also surprisingly subtle. He’ll repeat a phrase as if photocopying the one before, then alter his tone slightly, poking bubbles of drama through the music’s steely surface. This works best on “Reef of Regret,” as Melchior attacks the title from enough angles that the effect is both smoothly hypnotic and oddly disturbing.
It can be easy, and enjoyable, to settle into Contributors’ grooves as if you’re cruising the Autobahn. But along the way, there’s always something slightly unsettling going on. That’s why even when they let up on the gas—take the slow, echoey “Clumsy Hands” or the near-bluesy plod of “Lazy”—the tension doesn’t recede. (The way Melchior bites off the lines in “Lazy” is particularly creepy, like he’s stalking the music). In that sense, Contributors lives up to the pedigree of its participants, working on different levels while merging into one unified lane. | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Monofonus | November 18, 2017 | 7.3 | a9830947-0c1a-4d4d-a77c-b6121c08281e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The Los Angeles composer—son of late Fluxus composer Yoshi Wada—flexes his avant-garde instincts on a surprisingly song-driven new album, moving from abstraction into more expressive forms. | The Los Angeles composer—son of late Fluxus composer Yoshi Wada—flexes his avant-garde instincts on a surprisingly song-driven new album, moving from abstraction into more expressive forms. | Tashi Wada: What Is Not Strange? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tashi-wada-what-is-not-strange/ | What Is Not Strange? | Tashi Wada was born into the avant-garde. Growing up in a building shared by Fluxus artists, Wada lived next door to the choreographer Simone Forti. Video artist Nam June Paik was in the apartment upstairs. His father, legendary composer Yoshi Wada, worked as a plumber by day and an artist by night, stretching the limits of minimalism by incorporating Scottish bagpipes and Indian ragas. Tashi’s own work is rarely described without reference to those pioneering drones, but he shrugs off questions about paternal influence. “Sometimes I have a sense of how my work is perceived in relation to my father’s, but I tend to limit my understanding to my own personal space and how I feel about it,” he said in a 2019 interview. “I leave the rest to the world to sort out.”
While the younger Wada’s musical output is certainly related to the elder’s, it’s no imitation. Yoshi tended toward grand gestures, recording bagpipes in an empty swimming pool or composing for startlingly loud auditory flares normally used for nautical emergencies. Tashi is more academic, preferring to generate microtones with unusual tuning systems rather than through massive volume. After studying with James Tenney, he forged a link between the Fluxus movement and a newer generation of artists centered around the CalArts music program. The 2018 album Nue, credited to Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada and Friends, represented a passing of the torch: Yoshi and Forti featured alongside CalArts alums Julia Holter and Corey Fogel. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada takes the next step, moving from the periphery of his father’s community to the center of his own and demonstrating a newfound maturity as a composer in the process.
The biggest surprise here is that Wada has written honest-to-goodness songs, albeit rather strange ones. This shift is due in part to life events that drew him away from abstraction and toward more expressive forms. In the years after Nue, Yoshi passed away and Tashi had a child with Holter, his partner. “Grand Trine,” a sprightly chamber-pop number, celebrates their daughter. Its title refers to three planets forming an equilateral triangle on her astrological chart, but the trio of father, mother, and daughter is clearly the song’s subject. “She is my star,” Holter croons over elegant harpsichord and strings. The instrumentation leaps to abrupt climaxes only to fade away again and again, like surges of joy that dissipate only to return with renewed vigor. But the mood is troubled in the following song, “Revealed Night,” which is built on an urban field recording of sirens in the distance, evoking the pandemic into which she was born.
The microtonal minimalism of Wada’s early compositions appears as well. The back half of the album drifts away from song-based pieces into an ocean of drones that uneasily ebbs and flows, with seasick synths tuned in an obscure 18th-century temperament that makes even a triumphant crescendo sound dissonant to modern ears. The nadir of this section is “Calling,” a dead-calm wash of strings and synths, but the wave crests again with “Plume,” which patiently builds into a dramatically spiraling finale.
Wada is best as a bandleader who lets his extensive knowledge of alternate tunings inform, rather than dictate, the shape of his tracks. At times, he trades his austere minimalism for rambunctious maximalism, letting his bandmates—experienced noise-makers all—explore the parameters he has set. “Flame of Perfect Form” is a sizzling freeform workout that, at its peak, recalls the psychedelic barrage of Acid Mothers Temple, while “Subaru” deploys just intonation in the service of a slightly off-kilter earworm melody that’s all the more memorable for its odd tonal character.
The album ends with “This World’s Beauty,” a delicate miniature that again combines Holter’s vocals with Wada’s harpsichord. Its graceful and compact form, just 1:40 long, is the closest to a standard verse-chorus-verse tune in Wada’s discography. But on an album full of surprising detours, it represents his breakthrough: a simple statement of purpose from a composer newly confident in his abilities. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada honors his father’s legacy, but he also begins to carve out his own. | 2024-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Rvng Intl. | June 8, 2024 | 7.8 | a9859f8d-8787-49c1-aea6-ee9fdc2155a4 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/6655f890b50d9b866165f5be/2:3/w_2000,h_3000,c_limit/Tashi%20Wada-%20What%20Is%20Not%20Strange |
Mike Hadreas' powerful second album addresses personal traumas like physical abuse, drug addiction, and desperation, but, unlike his 2010 debut Learning, some light shines through the darkness. | Mike Hadreas' powerful second album addresses personal traumas like physical abuse, drug addiction, and desperation, but, unlike his 2010 debut Learning, some light shines through the darkness. | Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16335-put-your-back-n-2-it/ | Put Your Back N 2 It | How do we deal with personal trauma? After it's over, what comes next? These are some of the Big Questions Seattle singer/songwriter Mike Hadreas addresses on his second album as Perfume Genius. Put Your Back N 2 It follows Hadreas' overlooked 2010 debut, Learning, and it feels like a proper sequel to that album's suite of dysfunction and devastation. On his first album, Hadreas tackled subjects such as molestation, substance abuse, suicide, the complications of inappropriate sexual relationships, and the struggle for acceptance from those you love. The morose subject matter and melodic simplicity of Learning's piano-based songs drew comparisons to indie-pop artists like Stephin Merritt and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth. But Hadreas' ability to set a scene and convey detail, which brought to mind Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, lent the songs extra force. There were moments of impressionistic, synth-smeared beauty on that first record, but the overriding sense of despair and hopelessness could be overwhelming. On Put Your Back N 2 It, there's a crack of light coming through the darkness.
Hadreas is still exploring the more harrowing corners of human behavior. "Dark Parts" details the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of her grandfather; opener "AWOL Marine" takes inspiration from a tape of homemade pornography that Hadreas viewed, in which one of the participants admits, camera still rolling, that he's just trying to get medication for his wife. "Floating Spit" also deals with drug addiction, "Take Me Home" explores prostitution in the context of the need to be loved, while "17" uses a metaphor of a body stuffed into a violin, covered in semen, and hung up on a fence to shine a light on corrosive self-loathing. So don't let the whimsical album title fool you: If you're looking for something low-key to vibe out to, you've come to the wrong place.
The "light" the album allows has to do with how Hadreas approaches the material. He has a brilliant feel for poetic imagery ("The hands of God were bigger than grandpa's eyes/ But still he broke the elastic on your waist," from "Dark Parts", is particularly haunting), but he's mostly moved away from storytelling to explore emotional themes at their most fundamental. Put Your Back N 2 It is an album about love-- what happens when we feel sheltered by it, how we fail to love ourselves and the people around us-- but amidst the heartache and bruised tenderness, there's hope, too. Hadreas sums it all up in the hollowed-out torch song "No Tear": "I will carry on with grace."
For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation, from the swooning, countryish guitar bends of "Take Me Home" to the interspersed snare rolls on "No Tear". The brutal low fidelity of Learning is gone, replaced with clarity and sonic intimacy that, when paired with these rich songs, raises every hair on the back of your neck. The more expansive sound gives room for experimentation, from the submerged electronic percussion on "Floating Spit" (contributed by UK producer David Edwards, aka Minotaur Shock) to the robust and surprising full-band blast of "Hood". The latter, with its bloom-and-burst structure, is the perfect example of Hadreas' growth as a melodic songwriter, having moved well beyond the the functional melodies that marked Learning.
Many of these songs-- "Hood", "All Waters", "Take Me Home", "17"-- forego resolution and basically build tension and drop everything, in silence. Hadreas likes to steer clear of cathartic release, since in this world, there is no easy way out. On "All Waters", he begins singing in a low register and ends in his highest falsetto, as the song dissolves in wordless cries and frissons of far-away distortion. The song is a wish for a world where he and his boyfriend, Alan Wyffels (who also serves as his main musical collaborator), can hold hands in public without fear, and the lyrics ("When all waters still/ And flowers cover the earth") suggest that it's not going to happen any time soon.
Mike Hadreas is gay, and many of the songs here focus on the issues that young gay men face in their lives (he referred to "17" in a press release as "a gay suicide letter"), even as Back's sustained exploration of love and hate has resonance for anyone. There is a lot of him in this music, the minutiae obviously pulled from a single person's life and experiences. But the album is less about confession as a form of release and more about trying to bring something positive into the world. "I don't want it to seem like I've been through more than other people...", he says in promotional materials for the album. "Staying healthy can be more depressing and confusing than being fucked up. But I want to make music that's honest and hopeful."
With so much recent conversation about marriage equality and gay teen suicide, and with the predictable election-year demonization of homosexuality, Mike Hadreas' work is not only satisfying on a purely musical level, it also feels of-the-moment and above all necessary (it's so topical, he found himself in the middle of a standards-of-decency "family values" battle earlier this year between his label, Matador, and internet-media titans Google and YouTube). Independent music has woefully few artists dealing with these issues and asking difficult questions, and doing so in a context that never forgets about the importance of songwriting. That's a disappointment, but at least a handful of people like Hadreas are doing something about it. | 2012-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | February 27, 2012 | 8.4 | a99322c5-96fb-41d6-b5c7-1b314586bf32 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
On her second album, the Texas-born, Charlottesville-based singer-songwriter traces generous circles around nebulous feelings; her songs seem to emerge from deep stillness. | On her second album, the Texas-born, Charlottesville-based singer-songwriter traces generous circles around nebulous feelings; her songs seem to emerge from deep stillness. | Jana Horn: The Window Is the Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jana-horn-the-window-is-the-dream/ | The Window Is the Dream | When Jana Horn was writing songs for The Window Is the Dream, she had almost no access to music—her record player, laptop, and phone were all broken. “I didn’t hurry to have them fixed,” she admitted. The only CD in her car was the Fall’s 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong, to which she listened on loop until it lived in her memory and she didn’t need the CD anymore. “I just think I require quiet,” she told Paste. “I need to be able to hear myself think.”
The Window Is the Dream, the Texas-born, Charlottesville-based singer-songwriter’s second LP in two years, has an exquisite clarity. Even more than on Optimism, the songs seems to emerge from deep stillness. It feels like music made by a mind washed clean by restorative silence.
If Optimism was mostly focused on Horn’s quizzical singing and jewel-cut lyrics, The Window Is the Dream is a band-in-a-room record. To assemble it, Horn recruited an extraordinary group of Austin musicians, including experimental guitarist Jonathan Horne, percussionist Adam Jones, and multi-instrumentalist Jared Samuel Elioseff (piano, synth, bass, and classical guitar). Together, they holed up in a barn that was halfway along its conversion to a studio; Horn would sometimes set down her guitar between sessions, then get down on all fours to lay bathroom tile.
The longer The Window Is the Dream goes on, the more clearly you can perceive the contours of that room and the presence of the musicians playing in it. On “Song for Eve,” Horne lets off a remarkable solo, a speckle of notes high on the neck that feels as vivid as a cameo. Jones’ simple cross-stick drumming pattern on “After All This Time” is hypnotizing. The implied light in the room is late-summer, every instrument framed by its own clean shadow. You hear the whisper of Horn’s thumb calluses on the bottom strings, feel her breath as it touches the pop filter.
On record, Horn cuts an unassuming presence. Her inflections are conversational, and her impressionistic guitar playing usually consists of just a few bass notes. But something in her tone and sensitive touch suggests technical skill intentionally held in reserve. For Horn, the words are the thing, and she delivers her words as if coaxing dark shapes to the surface.
Her lyrics often read like prose on the page, but she finds ways to bend them into melodic shapes it’s difficult to imagine anyone else finding. Take this stretch from “Days Go By”: “Maybe one thing doesn’t lead to the next;/Two sides of a coin are not the head leading to the tail./I didn’t mean to say that; on a different note/I’m listening to the sound of everything going on without you.” It sounds unsingable, like something from a Robert Ashley opera, and yet she finds a way to make you hum it.
Horn has called her lyrics “thoughts about thoughts.” She traces generous circles around nebulous feelings, allowing you to step into them. She wants, more than anything else, to get out of the way of something bigger than her. On the almost-title track “The Dream,” she offers something close to a mission statement: “The last thing I want in this breath of existence/Is not to throw myself into it/As any bird might stop flying/When the window is the dream.” Is this an ambiguous statement of surrender? A warning? A vision of her own death? Horn is generous enough to allow us to dream our own way through. | 2023-04-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | April 19, 2023 | 7.8 | a9961e37-2a6e-49c6-890e-e2f03638371c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The former Ought members’ second album balances economy with exploration, reaffirming their place in a lineage of prickly, leftfield guitar rock. | The former Ought members’ second album balances economy with exploration, reaffirming their place in a lineage of prickly, leftfield guitar rock. | Cola: The Gloss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cola-the-gloss/ | The Gloss | In the dozen or so years that Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy have been playing together—first in Ought, and now, with drummer Evan Cartwright, as Cola—their music’s defining characteristics haven’t changed much. The two still specialize in a knotty, post-punky brand of indie rock embedded with cryptic yet conversational observations about maintaining one’s sanity in the modern world. But when you compare Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, to the music Cola are making now, it’s like listening to completely different musicians—and the contrast goes beyond the fact that their current trio seemingly has no use for a keyboardist. Ought always sounded like a band in flux, unfurling their tightly wound sound for deeper explorations in drone and groove, while Darcy wielded his mercurial voice with theatrical aplomb. But Cola’s second album, The Gloss, is a model of focus, precision, and economy—the sound of players who know exactly who they are and what they want to do.
Listening to The Gloss feels a lot like sitting in on a practice session in a windowless jam space the night before a gig—a nervous, claustrophobic tension hangs in the air, but everyone is completely locked in and buzzing with energy. Unlike like their pandemic-spawned, file-swapped 2022 debut, Deep in View, The Gloss was recorded as Cola came into their own as a touring act, and as such, the album foregrounds their intuition and rapport and keeps their spoken-word piano-jazz proclivities at bay. But while The Gloss renews Cola’s membership in a fraternity of prickly, leftfield guitar rock that runs through Television, Sonic Youth, and Women, they use their discord less to agitate than ingratiate.
These tracks are largely confined to three-minute bursts, but each exhibits that special sense of discovery that results when close friends instinctively follow one another’s lead, and a simple chord change or strategic pause can instantly transform a song’s essence. Cuts like “Tracing Hallmarks” tick all the boxes on the contemporary post-punk checklist—jabbing guitar lines, propulsive rhythms, staccato phrasing—but they also shift into surprisingly congenial choruses that lend Cola uncommon lightness and levity. On “Albatross,” Darcy sings, “I’m a lame horse with an optimistic mind,” making explicit a theme running throughout: In a world that’s constantly trying to beat you down, staying positive constitutes an act of radicalism.
Like Stephen Malkmus, Darcy favors language that’s equally evocative and enigmatic, routinely blurring the line between the sardonic and sincere. His most pointed social commentary comes through on “Down to Size,” which suggests an urban activist version of the Strokes: the song revisits the topic of gentrification previously referenced on Ought’s 2015 slow-burning masterpiece “Beautiful Blue Sky,” but at a more frantic pace that mirrors the ruthless breakneck speed of development. More often, he takes delight in overarching metaphors that simultaneously obscure and amplify his intent, whether using journalist lingo to frame a couple’s communication breakdown (“Pulling Quotes”) or invoking film-set imagery to highlight the performative aspects of daily life. (“My taste is avant-poor,” he cheekily declares on “Pallor Tricks,” and somewhere, a slumming trust-fund kid weeps.)
If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur. When you hear Cola cruise on the perfect-sound-forever groove of “Nice Try” or unleash the clang and clamor of “Bell Wheel,” the effect is as poignant as it is powerful. The Gloss is a reassuring reminder that, however many iconoclastic rock heroes have recently fallen, their legacies are in good hands. | 2024-06-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | June 21, 2024 | 7.6 | a997356e-5f9a-4170-9990-2b1afef06489 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The country singer was “raised on heartache,” but her latest album is a triumphant testament to the way that Wyatt has outpaced her demons. | The country singer was “raised on heartache,” but her latest album is a triumphant testament to the way that Wyatt has outpaced her demons. | Jaime Wyatt: Neon Cross | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaime-wyatt-neon-cross/ | Neon Cross | The last time we heard from Jaime Wyatt, she was at the start of a bad spiral. Covering Merle Haggard’s “Misery and Gin” at the end of her 2017 debut Felony Blues, the Nashville country singer succumbed to her loneliest thoughts, “sitting with all my friends and talking to myself.” Now, she’s all but abandoned. Her latest album, Neon Cross, begins with the slowest of slow burns: a lush, stately piano ballad called “Sweet Mess.” Even more than its hopeless lyrics or gentle rainfall of piano and pedal steel, you’re left hanging onto her voice—a smoky, one-of-a-kind instrument. Just from a few notes, you might imagine it echoing from the darkest corner of a bar, from someone with a troubled past and a long, sad story to tell. And you would be right.
Raised in rural Washington, Jaime Wyatt headed to California as a teenager with the hopes of breaking into the music industry. Instead, she found herself in personal and professional hell. She turned to hard drugs and, at 21, was arrested for robbing her heroin dealer. After serving eight months in jail and getting clean, her marriage fell apart; she relapsed after the death of her father and several of her closest friends. Some of these experiences, soundtracked by boozy, swaggering outlaw country, made their way onto Felony Blues, a tight, seven-song introduction that confirmed her as one of the genre’s most exciting and skillful storytellers. But “Sweet Mess” is her first song that suggests a darkness from which she can’t escape. It is beautiful, enveloping, and totally bleak.
It is also an outlier. For the most part, Neon Cross is another triumphant record that speaks to the ways in which Wyatt has overcome these situations. She wrote most of its songs after recovering from addiction and coming out as gay: “I lost years of my life being in the closet and living a lie and trying to be someone else,” she explained. “I just can’t do it anymore.” The title track immediately feels like her defining song. Over a galloping rhythm and jangling acoustic guitars, she allows for winking, momentary self-pity: “So sad, goddamn/I’m wearing some pitiful perfume.” But the way she sings it, it seems more like a rallying cry, an effort to turn the car around and make the most of the night. A refrain of “Oh, poor me!” has never seemed so hopeful.
The rest of the songs follow suit, searching for silver linings, or at the very least, a good punchline. She recorded the album with fellow outlaw revivalist Shooter Jennings, who expands on the old-school blueprint of Felony Blues to match these songs’ wide-ranging emotions. You can sense the pair digging through their record collections to find just the right texture. A brief twinkle of keyboard at the end of “Just a Woman”—a duet with Jennings’ mother, country legend Jessi Colter—sounds straight out of an ’80s jukebox classic, while the ghostly fiddle and pedal steel in her rendition of Dax Riggs’ “Demon Tied to a Chair in My Brain” make it sound more like an unearthed Carter Family standard. There is a cumulative feeling to the music, like Wyatt is placing herself within a deep history of folk wisdom.
While Neon Cross highlights the versatility of Wyatt’s gorgeous, commanding voice, she finds her comfort zone in singalong anthems like “Goodbye Queen.” It’s got a sunny, windows-down charm that feels perfectly suited to the timeless grain of her singing. She mines similar territory in “Make Something Outta Me,” a callback to her last record’s more overtly autobiographical material. This time around, she embellishes her past with self-effacing humor as she zooms through her last 15 years, cracking jokes about her regrets, her online dating profile, and her fatalist tendencies. “I was raised on heartache,” she sings, “So I like to suffer slow.” It’s a clever lyric that should ring true for anyone who, like her, gravitates toward sad songs with dark, inevitable endings. But Wyatt wants you to know that’s not how she sees herself. On Neon Cross, her story is just beginning.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | New West | June 1, 2020 | 7.6 | a999a3f3-f67d-4a2f-b2e0-17dc1c93e6c2 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Nearly 50 years after he recorded perhaps the first country album by an openly gay person, Seattle folk singer Patrick Haggerty returns with a follow-up. In all of his songs, he’s equal parts empath and scold, a soft touch with a sharp tongue. | Nearly 50 years after he recorded perhaps the first country album by an openly gay person, Seattle folk singer Patrick Haggerty returns with a follow-up. In all of his songs, he’s equal parts empath and scold, a soft touch with a sharp tongue. | Lavender Country: Blackberry Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lavender-country-blackberry-rose/ | Blackberry Rose | When the North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors first contacted Patrick Haggerty about reissuing his 1973 album of openly gay country songs, he was 70 years old. Lavender Country, as he’d called the project, was ancient history to him—after recording it with friends, he’d pressed about 1000 copies, sold them in the back pages of gay newspapers, and then, when they were gone, went about his life. He had two children, got married, and ran for Washington State Senate on the Socialist ticket. His musical career was mostly confined to performing at old folks’ homes, where “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” presumably didn’t make the setlist.
When Lavender Country was reissued in 2014, the same 10 songs he’d recorded and released to resounding silence in his late twenties suddenly sent him on his first national tour, often supporting punk bands one-third his age. He became the subject of an award-winning documentary. In 2020, RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Trixie Mattel covered his tender cruising ballad “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You.” Hollywood came calling, interested in a biopic. Four decades later, Haggerty’s plaintive, defiant statement on gay American life had finally entered the national conversation. Haggerty, once a footnote, was now a pioneer.
Now, Patrick Haggerty is 78 years old, and for the second time in his life, he’s in a recording studio. The songs on Blackberry Rose, the second-ever Lavender Country album, were written at all points in his life. The oldest (“Red Dress”) predates the first record by four years, while Haggerty came up with “Sweet Shadow Man” and “Don’t Buy Her No More Roses” in 2019. As the follow-up to a nearly 50-year-old album, Blackberry Rose has few precedents: The psychedelic folk artist Linda Perhacs, who returned to recording after a 44-year absence, comes to mind. But unlike Perhacs, who shifted more definitively into new age with her comeback The Soul of All Natural Things, Haggerty returns to recording virtually unchanged: His voice, which was unaffected and childlike in its simplicity in 1973, is unaffected and childlike in 2022. His band is a touching assortment of regulars, people who have been playing with him for decades, and his perspective remains consistent. In all of his songs, he’s equal parts empath and scold, a soft touch with a sharp tongue. His vision is clear enough to see the good, or at least the pain, in everyone.
Like the radical feminist Clara Fraser, to whom Blackberry Rose pays tribute, Haggerty is a true-blue Marxist, one who views the world as a series of oppressed underclasses, united by more than what divides them. The 10 songs on the original Lavender Country, written and recorded shortly after the Stonewall riots, focused on the injustice and pain of gay American life in the 1960s and ’70s. The material on Blackberry Rose ranges far wider: On these songs, Haggerty is an overworked Wyoming housewife one minute, a white Baptist boy sneaking off for dalliances with a young Black man in 1962 Louisiana the next. But even when he’s playing the role of the conniving strikebreaker on “Clara Frazer, Clara Frazer,” there’s a playfulness to the portrait that suggests, if not redemption, than a certain sardonic understanding. Haggerty’s songs contain villains, but no monsters.
Haggerty often plays a soother, a lover, one whose playful tenderness is a balm. “Lay all of your yearnings and all your concerns/In that pretty head down on my pillow,” he sings on “All Disillusions Behind.” “Let me blow them away with the dust of the day/They are dandelion fluff on the billow”—and it’s that last clause, “dandelion fluff on the billow”—that tells you everything you need to know about the mind at work. Language is a site of play for Haggerty, and he writes like he’s trying to outdo himself. On “Red Dress,” a wronged-woman lament written for his divorced sister and sung by Kassi Valazza, he offers up a doozy: “Lately when you look at me, you been seeing a trinity/Your mama, the Irish washerwoman, and a whore from gay Paree/But I’m from Enid, Oklahoma and my name is not Marie/And I don’t like the aroma of your third-hand ecstasy.” Like he did with “Back in the Closet,” a rewrite of “Back in the Saddle,” Haggerty revises a country standard with winking new lyrics: This time it’s “Stand on Your Man” (“Give him your boot heel to lick on”).
The only place his pen gets slightly away from him is on the story-song “Blackberry Rose.” Haggerty has said it took 30 years to write, and it’s consequently the album’s most labored-over song. A vivid and disturbing account of an interracial love that ends with terrible consequences—a lynching, a miscarriage, a beating—it veers closer to pulp than anything else here. Even this, though, is a testament to Haggerty’s intentions: He’s an antenna for human suffering, able to probe his way into the particulars of just about any life. He may have risen to his late-breaking renown as a “gay country singer,” but Haggerty has his sights set on something deeper: He’s a folk artist, a singer for everyone.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Don Giovanni | February 19, 2022 | 7.7 | a99f7c73-d270-4f90-9d12-9174b446f435 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter's mesmerizing third album is her interpretation of Gigi-- the musical and the original 1944 novella. The collection's learned and erudite, but not in a way that talks down to the listener: Loud City Song is breezy, contemporarily resonant, and flutteringly alive. It's her first record for Domino, and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers. | L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter's mesmerizing third album is her interpretation of Gigi-- the musical and the original 1944 novella. The collection's learned and erudite, but not in a way that talks down to the listener: Loud City Song is breezy, contemporarily resonant, and flutteringly alive. It's her first record for Domino, and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers. | Julia Holter: Loud City Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18378-julia-holter-loud-city-song/ | Loud City Song | In an early scene in the still-fascinating, delightfully bizarre 1958 MGM musical Gigi, a few characters enter a restaurant called Maxim’s. The vibe is Moulin Rouge meets Cheers: a frenetic, turn-of-the-century Parisian haunt where, for better or worse, everybody knows your name. When each couple enters Maxim’s-- yes, couple; somehow you get the sense that it would be social suicide for a respectable lady of the time to step foot in the place unaccompanied-- a crowd of patrons begins to chant in a hushed, gossipy tone. As they whisper the kinds of things that people rarely say aloud (even when they’re thinking them), and the scene draws a bleak, ironic contrast between people’s private thoughts and the outward demands of polite society. “Isn’t she a mess? Isn’t she a sight?” they say as one pair enters. “Let’s invite them out tomorrow night!”
“There’s something kind of creepy about that scene that I wanted to bring out,” L.A. avant-pop musician Julia Holter said in a recent interview, talking about “Maxim’s I & II”, a gorgeous (if slightly sinister) pair of songs that appear on her mesmerizing third album, Loud City Song. Holter’s said that the album is her own loose interpretation of Gigi-- both the musical and the original 1944 novella by the French writer Colette (the plot, in the expert, proto-Twitter brevity of a Turner Classic Movie blurb: “A Parisian girl is raised to be a kept woman but dreams of love and marriage.”).
Plenty of other songwriters might fumble or stiffen when drawing on source material from decades before they were born, but not Holter. Maybe it’s because making a record based on a 1950s MGM musical is actually her idea of keeping things new-school: Tragedy, her 2011 debut, was an ambitious yet intimate meditation on ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Hippolytus, while her dreamily crystalline follow-up Ekstasis (also a nod to ancient Greece) sounded like bedroom pop made by somebody with pin-ups of Heidegger and Virginia Woolf (and also maybe Laurie Anderson) papering the walls. Holter’s music is learned (she studied musical composition at CalArts) and proudly erudite, and yet not in a way that feels like it’s talking down to the listener. Still, she’s never made a record quite as inviting as Loud City Song-- her first album for Domino and the one most likely to turn skeptics to believers. From the panoramic ballroom swoon of “Maxim’s I” to the twinkling, kinetic chatter of its sequel, there’s an energy coursing through Loud City Song that makes it feel-- more than anything she’d done so far-- breezy, contemporarily resonant, and at all times flutteringly alive.
Loud City Song is the first album that Holter recorded outside of her bedroom, and-- like a 19th century French literary heroine seeking the therapeutic air of a seaside vacation-- the change in scenery seems to have loosened her up a bit. If Ekstasis had the serene intimacy of home recordings made with the apartment curtains drawn, Loud City Song finds her flinging open the drapes and taking rhythmic cues from the bustle of people below. Much of this newfound dynamism comes from adding new collaborators (and returning to trusted old ones: like Ekstasis, the record was mixed and co-produced by Ariel Pink collaborator Cole Mardsen Greif-Neill) and embracing a more jazz-oriented instrumentation-- trombones, strings, and a double bass all add a little drama, agility, and even playfulness to her sound.
Holter name-checks old Parisian landmarks like Maxim’s and says she was also inspired by the disconnectedness and buzzing anonymity of her hometown ("In L.A., it's like everyone's invisible. That's why I like it here."). But what gives these songs an emotional resonance beyond the confines of her own imagination is the way they capture something universal about the joys and anxieties of living in any modern city. As Holter's nimble voice skips between her siren-song falsetto and a more percussive delivery closer to spoken word, the mood of the album is in constant flux: in the menacing “Horns Surrounding Me” the brisk footfall of her fellow passersby evokes claustrophobia, danger and paranoia (is she being chased? Or is it all in her head?), but by the next song, the playful pop-cabaret “In the Green Wild”, she’s looking at her fellow pavement-pounders with a sense of bemused wonder.
Still, it’s the album’s centerpiece, a hypnotizing six-and-a-half minute rendition of Barbara Lewis' “Hello Stranger”, that might just be the most uncomplicatedly gorgeous thing Holter’s ever done. It’s risky to tackle a tune that’s been covered enough times to make it feel like a modern-day standard, but Holter’s atmospheric take finds a particular strain of longing and serenity in the song. It's a heart-stopper. Amidst the rest of Loud City Song’s chatty, high-concept vitality, “Hello Stranger” is a moment of comfort and instant connection, like suddenly spotting a familiar face on a busy street.
Though there’s definitely a narrative arc to the record, it doesn’t stick so close to the Gigi script to become tedious; Loud City Song moves with an internal logic that’s more impressionistic than literal. Some of its pieces do stand sturdily on their own, but taken in one sitting the album unfurls like one long, thoughtfully arranged composition-- lyrics and images recur, and characters gradually evolve. The narrator at the center (Gigi? Holter? Some kind of poetic hybrid of the two?) begins as a detached, observant outsider-- just another anonymous face gazing curiously at the city below from the perch of her fifth-floor walk-up ("I don't how why I wear a hat so much," Holter sings beneath the sparse groan of a cello on the opening song, "World", "The city can't see my eyes under the brim.") But by the end-- the second-to-last track, “This Is a True Heart” prances like a lazy-Sunday carousel ride-- she sounds not only more vulnerable but lighter, too. In a way, the arc of Loud City Song mirrors Holter’s artistic evolution: Ekstasis found kindred spirits in statues and goddesses (“I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry,” she repeated on “Goddess Eyes II”, cloaked in a vocoder), but the psychologically complex narrator at the heart of Loud City Song moves like flesh and blood.
“There’s a flavor to the sound of walking no one ever noticed before," Holter chants in a rapt whisper throughout "In the Green Wild". It's a telling line: Loud City Song is one of those records so full of un-jaded wonder and attuned to the secret music of ordinary things that the world looks a little bit different while it's playing. I don't think I fully appreciated it until I listened to the whole thing while looking out a second-story window onto a crowded street during rush hour, watching an endless procession of people with eyes hidden to the city under the brims of hats (or, to update Holter's image, staring down at their iPhones). To the tune of "World", I started wondering who they all were, where they were rushing, and what they were thinking. Though it draws upon the distant past, Julia Holter's made a timeless people-watching soundtrack: an acutely felt ode to the mysteries of a million passersby, all the stars of their own silent musicals. | 2013-08-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | August 16, 2013 | 8.6 | a9a57b2c-bb99-4aec-8017-faff65caab4f | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The path Underworld took to get to Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their extraordinary “first” album in the second phase of the band, was full of dashed hopes and improbable left turns. This five-disc reissue serves as a reminder of why the record is a key release in both that journey and the planet-sized thinking of EDM, which plays out as a further manifestation of its ideas. | The path Underworld took to get to Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their extraordinary “first” album in the second phase of the band, was full of dashed hopes and improbable left turns. This five-disc reissue serves as a reminder of why the record is a key release in both that journey and the planet-sized thinking of EDM, which plays out as a further manifestation of its ideas. | Underworld: Dubnobasswithmyheadman (20th Anniversary Remaster) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19906-underworld-dubnobasswithmyheadman-20th-anniversary-remaster/ | Dubnobasswithmyheadman (20th Anniversary Remaster) | The path Underworld took to get to Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their extraordinary “first” album in the second phase of the band, was full of dashed hopes and improbable left turns. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, to this day the nucleus of the band, were previously known for being in the synth inflected new wave band Freur, whose “Doot-Doot” was a minor hit in 1983. A couple of albums as Underworld followed, until that phase of the band flopped quietly to a close after a 1989 North American tour supporting Eurythmics. It’s unlikely many people noticed the band had gone on hiatus, although Smith in particular appears to have seen it as a fresh start rather than an ignominious close. While Hyde stayed behind in New York, hurtling toward anonymity as a guitarist in Debbie Harry’s band, Smith was holed up in his studio in Essex, arguably the birthplace of rave, working on material with a much younger collaborator, DJ Darren Emerson.
The backwards way Underworld evolved was typical of similar UK acts of the era, most of whom were similarly inclined toward blowing dance and electronic music out into bigger spaces. The Orb’s Alex Paterson backed into ambient music through stints as a roadie for Killing Joke and work as an A&R man; Primal Scream went from pleasant Byrds-inspired jangle merchants to acid glazed indie-dance pioneers; Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, got his start playing bass in the politicized effete rock of the Housemartins. The effect worked in reverse, too: the Prodigy were dyed-in-the-wool ravers who blew up by taking on certain characteristics of rock, even hiring a live guitarist with the none-more-punk name of Gizz Butt. Underworld’s roots were also in rock, giving them a sensibility that looked far beyond dance music's insular white-label culture, coupled with an approach that was more album oriented than the average dance act. In short, despite past mishaps, their ambition was completely off the charts.
It’s easy to ascribe this in retrospect, but Underworld’s ascent fits perfectly with the surge of confidence that flowed through both overground and underground music in Britain in the early-to-mid '90s. You can hear it in the sharply defined angles of jungle and drum'n'bass, or in the masterfully lethargic grooves of trip-hop, or, of course, in the major Britpop acts. In 1990, the KLF launched their “stadium house” trilogy (“What Time Is Love?”, "3 a.m. Eternal", “Last Train to Trancentral"), giving it a name that suggested house was moving beyond the club and chart environs it had largely existed in up to that point. They weren’t wrong; by the end of the decade, bands such as Orbital, the Prodigy, and Underworld were headlining major stages at festivals in the UK. Dubnobass, released in 1994, is a key release in both that journey and the planet-sized thinking of EDM, which plays out as a further manifestation of its ideas.
This five-disc release offers an exhaustive trawl through Underworld’s archives from the era, presenting a fuller picture of where the band were at immediately prior to the release of this record. There’s a disc of singles, including vital pre-album tracks such as the version of “Dirty” released as Lemon Interrupt, and the all-encompassing “Rez”—the latter such a strong part of their identity, especially in its live incarnation all wrapped up in “Cowgirl”, that it shows what riches they had on their hands that it didn’t make the final album. There’s also a disc of remixes, a disc of unreleased takes, and, most curious of all, an entire disc devoted to a series of live rehearsals that would become the Dubnobass tracks. The idea that these weren’t studio creations, but actually came out of something approaching live improvisation, feels improbable when hearing the strongly executed final product, although it’s likely a key part in explaining how adept Underworld were at pushing this stuff out into a live context.
The album itself has been considerably sharpened in its remastered form, with Smith taking it to Abbey Road and subtly pulling out textures that occasionally sounded muted on the original pressing. Hyde’s lyrics can still be problematic, with his cut-up style veering wildly between inspiration and moments of corniness, although the force of ideas on Dubnobass largely covers up the lyrical patchiness in ways other Underworld albums haven’t always managed. Here, he imbues the songs with a feeling of seediness, of bad sex and nights slumped in regret, giving the album a deeper undercurrent than something you can just get mashed off your face to in a club (although it also serves that purpose). Hyde’s at his best when lost in short mantras, such as the repeating verses of “Spoonman”, where he matches the trance-like flow of the music, his voice tweaked so it barely sounds human at times, becoming totally subsumed in groove and forward momentum.
The stretch through “Spoonman”, “Tongue”, “Dirty Epic”, and “Cowgirl” shows what acute listeners this band were, but it also highlights how skilled they were at assimilating contrasting ideas into their sound. “Tongue” borrows something from the ambient drift echoing through chillout rooms at clubs during this time, with Hyde multi-tracking his vocals in a way that makes him sound not unlike future collaborator Brian Eno. On “Dirty Epic”, Underworld demonstrate their mastery of subtle builds and strange fusions, cutting plinky-plonky house piano across needlelike bursts of electric guitar, with Hyde’s central lyric (“I get my kicks on channel 6”) suggesting someone lost in a world as lonely as it is unsavory. “Cowgirl” remains their most carefully honed club banger, drawing on screaming acid lines and dense drum patterns that feel like a precursor to LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah”. It’s not hard to see some of Hyde in James Murphy and vice versa, especially as both were old hands coming to this game, bringing a dose of reflection to music that’s so often focussed solely on the now.
There are highlights in the rest of the material here (the Irish Pub in Kyoto mix of “Cowgirl”, the big beat workover of “Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You” in its “Telegraph 16.11.92” mix), along with things that are little more than historical curios (the 18-minute version of “Spoonman” on the rehearsals disc; the country-fied, Thrashing Doves-indebted “Bigmouth” from the same disc), and an admirable willingness to put things out there that don’t appear to fit anywhere in their career (the lite pop/reggae of “Can You Feel Me?” on the disc of unreleased material, which feels like an unexpected callback to the Freur era). It’s a well put-together set, with a logic to each part that offers insight into Underworld’s working method, but never falls into the kind of barrel-scraping to which reissues like this sometimes have to resort. Mostly it’s worth it to hear how hard Dubnobass still resonates: this was an album about community, about coming together through shared experiences—a chance to take club culture out of the club without losing a shred of nuance or sheer visceral excitement. | 2014-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Interscope | October 8, 2014 | 9.2 | a9a59226-5190-4b75-9a6d-871660d5fc80 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was R.E.M.'s most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement. | If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was R.E.M.'s most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement. | R.E.M.: Document | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17079-document/ | Document | Released in September 1987, R.E.M.'s fifth album, Document, contained something no one ever expected to hear from the Athens band. It wasn't the Wire cover or Steve Berlin's saxophone skronking through "Fireplace". It wasn't Michael Stipe singing what purported to be a love song, which he had sworn at one point never to do. The record packed an even bigger surprise: an actual radio hit. Before the year was over, "The One I Love" had peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, and this was back when that meant something. It was R.E.M.'s first foray into a mainstream crowded with hair metal bands, mall-pop acts, and AOR interchangeables. Few of these acts would survive the decade, but this unlikely smash signaled only the start of the group's prolonged ascent.
How did this Southern rock band, who had more in common with Wire than with then-popular Peach Staters Georgia Satellites, find a spot in the public consciousness alongside U2, Guns N' Roses, and George Michael, who all more or less owned 1987? R.E.M. cultivated an air of mystery that extended from their music (the obscure lyrics, the refusal to lip sync in videos) to the packaging (mismatched tracklists, head-scratching instructions to "File Under Fire"). And "The One I Love" was an odd choice for a hit: Peter Buck's guitar possesses a rich, strange grain that charges the song with vague menace, especially when he unspools that psych-rock solo, and the mosaic hook itself is split between Stipe shouting "Fire!" in an empty theater and Mike Mills adding a descending countermelody. Lyrically, the song is one contradiction twisting into another: "This one goes out to the one I love/ A simple prop to occupy my time." Twenty-five years later, it remains nearly impossible to parse the implications of that particular couplet; on the other hand, 25 years later, it's still worth trying, as the latest in Capitol Records' reissue series proves.
If 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction was their most self-consciously Southern record to date and 1986's Lifes Rich Pageant their most overtly political, Document maintained both their regional self-definition as well as their indirect social engagement, even going so far as to sample Joseph Welch reprimanding Joseph McCarthy. ("At long last, have you left no sense of decency?") The album is a prolonged meditation on the idea of labor, opening with "Finest Worksong" before teasing out the implications on "Welcome to the Occupation". The defiantly chipper "Exhuming McCarthy" opens with the clack of Stipe's typewriter, connecting the work of the band with that of the journalist, and even "Fireplace" is less about the dance party than the preparations for it: "Hang up your chairs to better sweep, clear the floor to dance," Stipe sings, twisting his lines with each repetition until the entire building has been dismantled in an act of constructive destruction.
And yet, R.E.M. never sound openly angry or at all condescending here. They may not have had day jobs by then, but they saw their art as labor and their labor as art. Engaging with politics and social issues in their music emboldened and arguably ennobled them, although this lyrical mission didn't alter their general approach to their work. The band's democracy was not only a professional strategy but a musical one as well: R.E.M. always worked best when the four members had equal representation in the songs, and producer Scott Litt helps them find the right balance. Bill Berry is still the backbone, a one-man rhythm section that allows Mills to play ingeniously melodic basslines. Stipe continues his trajectory toward extroversion, bending his voice into a reedy sneer on "Lightnin' Hopkins" and rattling off a weird history of the 20th century on "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)". That may be his best vocal performance, spirited and goofy and ecstatic. The album's most direct line-- "I'm addressing the realpolitik," from "Exhuming McCarthy"-- may also be his funniest; this was, after all, the man who made a virtue out of mumbly obscurity.
But Document is Buck's album, from the chiming fanfare that opens "Finest Worksong" to the sludgy trudge that closes "Oddfellows Local 151". He sounds intent on summing up more than three decades of rock guitar in these 40 minutes. Jangle was only the base from which to venture into surf, post-punk, country rock, even a little rockabilly. This is R.E.M. at their most rock: more targeted than Green but less self-conscious than Monster. Still, despite the thematic throughline, Buck's heroics, and a predictably excellent remastering job on the reissue, Document still sounds like the band's least satisfying I.R.S. album (says the Fables apologist), with an especially ragtag second side that starts almost perfectly but drifts off as it proceeds. As covers go, Wire's "Strange" proves less revelatory than the Clique's "Superman" on Lifes Rich Pageant, and the moody "King of Birds" and "Oddfellows Local 151" leave the album tattered at the ends.
However, saying Document is their weakest indie-label release is like saying Mothra was the least of Godzilla's foes: That big bug could still level Tokyo. Even five albums into their career, R.E.M. managed to sound both confident and unsettled, always pushing into new territory but galvanized by what they could do together. Whether they knew it at the time, Document represents a band readying itself for the spotlight as though preparing for a fight. That much is apparent on the bonus disc, which-- like the reissues for Murmur and Reckoning-- documents the band's live show and emphasizes the life of the song rather than the creation. The band wrangled them into new shapes every night, whether by adding new space and momentum to "Oddfellows" or appending "Exhuming McCarthy" with Mills' new vocal line: "Meet me at the book burning!" Recorded during a European tour, the live disc ends not with a Document number, but with a lovely, hymnlike performance of "So. Central Rain" featuring only Buck's guitar and vocals by Stipe and Mills. It's a moment fraught with tension and precariousness, especially when Stipe rolls in a few lines from "Time After Time (Annelise)". Some might find the absence of Berry on the song eerily prescient, but truly it shows a band fearlessly embracing its own newfound success. "The time to rise," as Stipe sings on "Finest Worksong", "has been engaged." | 2012-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | September 25, 2012 | 8.2 | a9a65cd9-acec-412d-a581-fe6d6f39279d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The English musician and actor’s second album places her spectacular vibrato front and center, shadowed by subtle but effective orchestration. Listening feels like a bracing walk through winter moorland. | The English musician and actor’s second album places her spectacular vibrato front and center, shadowed by subtle but effective orchestration. Listening feels like a bracing walk through winter moorland. | Keeley Forsyth: Limbs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keeley-forsyth-limbs/ | Limbs | Few records have so palpably captured the sense of a life in wreckage as Keeley Forsyth’s 2019 debut, Debris. Sifting through it, it was hard to glean exactly what caused this turmoil. But you got the broad shape of it: a trauma so vast it was paralyzing. The title of Forsyth’s second album, Limbs, feels similarly appropriate. Listening to it feels like watching a body slowly dig itself out from a pile of rubble. “Let me begin again,” she sings on “Bring Me Water,” first at a whisper, then at a cry.
If you’ve watched primetime television in the UK, you may not know Forsyth’s name, but you will probably recognize her face. A veteran actor from Oldham, Greater Manchester, she has appeared in drama and soaps (Happy Valley, Holby City, Waterloo Road), bringing to the screen a pale-eyed gaze that is both vulnerable and strangely penetrating. Forsyth says she has long made music in private. But it was the events documented on Debris, in tandem with a blossoming creative partnership with the pianist and composer Matthew Bourne, that prepared her songs for wider consumption. Her voice is a spectacular thing: a cut-glass vibrato that brings to mind ANOHNI, or the unearthly tremble of late-period Scott Walker. Limbs places her voice front and center, shadowed by subtle but effective orchestration from Bourne and new collaborator Ross Downes—a cluster of piano notes here, an icy sheet of synth or a slow rhythmic pulse there.
Limbs feels like a bracing walk through winter moorland: cold yet undeniably alive. Like Debris, it is often lyrically oblique, opening wide to emotion while remaining discreet about the details. Forsyth roots certain moments in the domesticity of parenthood. On “Wash,” a hollowed-out dub filled with fearful sounds from percussionist Evelyn Glennie, she sings words of threadbare comfort, keeping it together through a sense of duty to another. The presence of a baby banishes dark thoughts; somewhere nearby, a pan boils over.
But Limbs contrasts these glimpses of home and family life with more protean imagery. On the title track, she first sings, then recites words that set her body against the elements: “Skin becomes divorced from air/Gravitation becomes apparent/Nobody sees these limbs underwater.” She addresses the following “Land Animal” directly to another, tracing out the vague shape of something threatening; an intrusion. “A foreign element/Metaphor,” sings Forsyth, as synths wrap and twirl around her like smoke.
Forsyth’s grounding in the theatrical arts feeds directly into her music. There’s no sense of pretense on Limbs—quite the opposite. But her training seems to give her the command to channel difficult emotions with the steely composure of a ballet dancer. Talking of “Bring Me Water,” Forsyth mentioned the influence of Pina Bausch, the German dancer and choreographer whose dramatic, physical pieces drew their power from the raw material of trauma. You can hear that sense throughout Limbs; that drama of the everyday, accentuated into something carefully measured but utterly intense.
This is not a particularly warm record, so when a flicker of sentimentality creeps in, the effect is shocking. Debris ended with a glimmer of hope in the shape of “Start Again,” and Limbs does much the same. “Who will be my friend? As the day comes to a close,” she sings on “I Stand Alone” to a gentle wheeze of harmonium. It’s the one moment on the record where you feel she is inviting affection, treating love as something reciprocal. Throughout much of her music, we hear Forsyth grappling with what it is to be human. Here, for a minute, we hear her simply be.
Limbs is not always easy to untangle. In places, it feels like it is running on instinct, an enigma even to itself. It is short, just 26 minutes, and a few songs feel rather lean. “Blindfolded,” a procession of dislocated nature imagery, rests a little too heavily on the sharp contours of Forsyth’s voice. But she could sing a shopping list and make it emotionally resonant. If in places the album feels somewhat transitory—a sequel to Debris, rather than a new statement in its own right—it lands with a grace and power that’s hard to deny. | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | The Leaf Label | February 24, 2022 | 7.2 | a9a71820-0022-473b-acc0-04500c1d3212 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Five years after Camera Obscura’s last album, Tracyanne Campbell returns with a new musical partner and a more mannered, slightly cautious sound, but her voice is as singular as ever. | Five years after Camera Obscura’s last album, Tracyanne Campbell returns with a new musical partner and a more mannered, slightly cautious sound, but her voice is as singular as ever. | Tracyanne & Danny: Tracyanne & Danny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tracyanne-and-danny-tracyanne-and-danny/ | Tracyanne & Danny | Camera Obscura are synonymous with the lonesome voice of Tracyanne Campbell, so it’s a little startling to remember that their identity formed around duets. Near the turn of the millennium, they were a cuddly new indie-pop band with two singers, a woman and a man. This was in the Glasgow of Belle and Sebastian, to whom Camera Obscura were incessantly compared, especially because Stuart Murdoch cosigned their early efforts. Even when the two bands’ paths diverged, they ran parallel. In 2002, as Belle and Sebastian shed their female side, Isobel Campbell (no relation to Tracyanne), Camera Obscura shed their male side, John Henderson, who left after finishing their beloved second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder.
Both bands went on to play hopscotch with pedigreed indie labels on both sides of the Atlantic—Merge, Matador, Rough Trade, 4AD—but they finally differentiated themselves. As Murdoch veered toward writing showtunes for imaginary musicals, Campbell, amid some country-and-western and orch-pop dalliances, tuned her band’s purring motor to run a golden-age rock ‘n’ soul chassis. Camera Obscura ceased to resemble Belle and Sebastian. Their new touchstones were old: doo-wop and shag music, Phil Spector and Motown, AM radio and Time-Life oldies. Their pert, glittering, 20th-century citations centered on a singer whose dulcet tone and willful naivete had filled in with something wiser and steelier over the years, and who had developed a surer compass than Murdoch as a songwriter.
All this history comes flooding back with the self-titled debut of Campbell’s new project, Tracyanne & Danny. It’s not just that the names-and-an-ampersand thing calls to mind Camera Obscura’s former doppelgangers. With Campbell once again overshadowing a male singer who valiantly hangs in there, it’s like Underachievers Please Try Harder but with better production, sharper musicians, and time-tempered tastes—an older musician answering her own youthful edict: “I did.” Campbell still sings about insecurity, but it’s been a long time since the music sounded insecure. If this is full circle, it ends somewhere higher than where it began, like a spiral staircase—one that passed through tragedy as it rose.
It’s easy to imagine why Campbell, to get back to music, might need to return to the start. Camera Obscura went out on a high note for listeners and a low one for the band. As 2013’s excellent Desire Lines was being recorded, Carey Lander, their keyboardist and Campbell’s best friend, had cancer. She finished the album and died in 2015. Tracyanne & Danny represent Campbell’s relatively low-key comeback. The Danny in question is Bristol’s Danny Coughlan, who creates fastidious pastiches of music from dusty 45s as Crybaby. He and Campbell became friends around the time of Desire Lines, and friendship and music seem inextricable to her. “Our friendship is not a replacement, but Carey left a space as big as it possibly could be, and now I have a best pal again,” she told The Daily Record. “I think she would have been so glad I got off my arse and didn’t mope about. I think she would have loved the music.”
If Tracyanne & Danny harks back to Campbell’s past in one way, it seems to leap into the future in another. There’s an alternate universe where Camera Obscura continued uninterrupted and made an album like this 10 years after Desire Lines instead of five, as if grief accelerated a certain kind of maturation. There’s no turbocharged rush like “French Navy” that really stands out from the mannered material. The tempos are slower, the arrangements broader, the indie-rock pep recessed. “Home & Dry” sets the pace, its trotting melody conveying us through trim passages of tickling guitar reverb: a little mariachi here, a little soft jazz there, the orchestration fluid and mild. The album is discreetly crammed with producer Edwyn Collins’ vintage gear, with glockenspiel and woodblocks, piano and horns, strings and winds blowing across the songs like weather. The pedal Collins used on “A Girl Like You” is supposedly lurking around. Eventually, someone breaks out a clavioline. It’s all very tasteful and well-turned, a little remote.
Coughlan sounds like Morrissey crossed with Roy Orbison, with twinges of both Elvises and a smidge of French lech. Strong and clear but with a narrow expressive range, he’s the kind of singer who stubbornly wins you over, rubbing elbows with one who effortlessly bowls you over. Campbell’s voice is perfectly hers—a strip of emerald-green ribbon, matte on one side, iridescent on the other, slowly tossing on a breeze. On “Home & Dry,” she starts husky and then slowly swings upward in her particular way, like something stumbling learning to fly. I’m not certain she gets the most mic time, but it feels that way. Still, on “It Can’t Be Love Unless It Hurts,” Coughlan ably holds down the brisk, romantic melody so Campbell can explore melisma more than she usually does alone, and he strikes on a sweet, inviting style on “Deep in the Night,” much more appealing than his Jacques Brel bray on “Jacqueline.”
Tracyanne & Danny peaks with “2006,” whose space-folk setting offers the album’s most inspired music and clasps the most quintessentially Tracyanne self-references: “I can’t believe this life was me/Now my passion is gone/I put my life in a song/I sing the words, they are true/I was as mean as you.” The album peters out in the home stretch, where more aggressive period mannerisms don’t entirely paper over the wispiness of the songs. But mostly it cruises in a sturdy vintage mode, down to the video for sugary country-rocker “Alabama,” which is shot like a 1970s buddy comedy, with Tracyanne & Danny driving around a crossfading map of the U.S. This timeless snapshot blur characterizes the record, too; its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back. | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | May 30, 2018 | 7.4 | a9ac9064-19c8-4d6b-bcc4-0fb64e317bff | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Toronto musician and U.S. Girls associate Carlyn Bezic’s disco meditations and euphoric, mechanical dreamscapes hint at the mysteries of linear time and perception. | Toronto musician and U.S. Girls associate Carlyn Bezic’s disco meditations and euphoric, mechanical dreamscapes hint at the mysteries of linear time and perception. | Jane Inc.: Faster Than I Can Take | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jane-inc-faster-than-i-can-take/ | Faster Than I Can Take | It’s a familiar story for working musicians: In March 2020, the world shut down, forcing artists to cancel tours, push back album releases, and wonder how they’d ever make up the losses. For Toronto-based indie rocker Carlyn Bezic, who had played only a few shows as a touring member of U.S. Girls before COVID hit, the shutdown offered an opportunity to shift priorities to a long-gestating solo project. Cobbled together from unreleased demos she’d written as a part of the pop-punk duo Ice Cream and rock quintet Darlene Shrugg, Bezic’s 2021 debut as Jane Inc., Number One, was an eclectic whirlwind of funky rock and electro-disco that critiqued capitalist structures and tried to reckon with living through digital personas.
Her second album, Faster Than I Can Take, comes a little over a year after the first and has a clearer thematic throughline. Over nine tracks, she crafts disco meditations and euphoric dreamscapes that blur together past, present, and future. “The laws of time have changed,” Bezic sings on glossy opener “Contortionists,” and each song shudders with a cosmic realization. From Bezic’s vantage point, time is porous and shimmering, a fluid entity that’s hard to parse yet easy to embrace. “Oh, I can feel it changing/Oh, the sky is rearranging/Faster than I can take,” she sings on the breezy title track. “Human Being” is a pointed exploration of how others’ perceptions affect our own self-image. “Building a face/Pretend I’m in a public place/Surrounded by strangers/And no one knows my name,” she muses over bouncing synths and a tugging bassline; a vocoder effect makes her voice sound like an actual group of strangers.
Bezic has described her musical persona as “a machine or an entity,” a distinct headspace punctuated by the “Inc.” in her stage name. Likewise, Faster Than I Can Take occasionally conjures the sound of factory automation: Each drumbeat falls into place with precision, and Bezic’s dry vocals sometimes evoke an industrial robot seeking human consciousness. On the abrasive, clattering “2120,” she imagines an invisible force shoving her through time itself: “The days rush past like a dollar bill/That you try to grab but it flies right past you.” Over a resonant cowbell rhythm that rings like an alarm, she chants about a reckoning, desiring to “forge a new infinite fuel/made of anger, and hope, and refusal.”
At other moments, the regimen of the factory fades away. In the sweet bossa nova groove of “Picture of the Future,” a simple acoustic arrangement slowly builds into a heavenly synthscape. Bezic is joined by backing vocalist and arranger Dorothea Paas (also a U.S. Girls touring member), who lifts the track to an ethereal plane. Paas’ vocals appear all over the album with a bright, almost metallic sheen, and her arrangements provide a pillow of moral support for Bezic to rest her frenetic anxieties.
The highlight of Faster Than I Can Take is also seemingly the most stuck in linear time: “Dancing With You” is a seven-minute ’80s-pop opus about Zoom dance parties, a reference that might be annoying if it wasn’t such a bizarrely fun listen—around minute four, a distorted, robotic voice briefly visits the club to deliver a guided meditation. Leaning into the absurdity of those early pandemic moments, Bezic plays the part of a glamorous, Madonna-esque guide. “Use the power of your mind/To bring you to the time of your life,” she sings as synths whizz off to alternate dimensions. It’s the album’s silliest lyric, but it’s strangely compelling in its sincerity. In Bezic’s view, we’re already dancing on a suspended temporal fracture—might as well confront the chaos head on. | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Telephone Explosion | April 29, 2022 | 7.4 | a9acbc8b-9875-4bb7-a8be-f32956ccf5ae | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
The UK singer refines her muscular take on lovers rock. She’s at her best when she’s veering from tradition. | The UK singer refines her muscular take on lovers rock. She’s at her best when she’s veering from tradition. | Hollie Cook: Happy Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hollie-cook-happy-hour/ | Happy Hour | The beating heart of Steve McQueen’s mighty historical film series Small Axe was the music of Black England during the mid-to-late 20th century, and its best episode was Lovers Rock. A celebration of the titular reggae subgenre, the hour-long film pivoted on a London house party dancefloor scene gloriously soundtracked by Janet Kay’s 1979 courtship referendum “Silly Games.” For some it was a reminder, for others a revelation, of a style that, in its heyday, got little traction beyond the UK and Jamaica—a Philly soul sibling less concerned with politics or Rasta theology than with battlefields of the heart. While men certainly distinguished themselves in lovers rock, it was a less male-dominated space than roots reggae, especially in the UK, where lovers rock fully bloomed and where women shone brightly, even if they were often denied agency. English artists beyond the genre felt its sweet and sultry pull: Sade reflected its influence on an album named after it, as did the Clash on a highlight of London Calling.
Hollie Cook, a London-raised singer in her mid-30s, missed the music’s golden era, but over the past decade she’s become its most notable booster, expanding its possibilities the way Sharon Jones revitalized 1970s soul. Her fourth LP (fifth if you count the Prince Fatty-remixed Hollie Cook in Dub), Happy Hour refines her muscular sound, which echoes tough British roots acts like Aswad as much as the silk sheet approach of Janet Kay and Caroll Thompson. The daughter of Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook and Culture Club backing vocalist Jeni Cook (Boy George is Hollie’s godfather) started her career as a latter-day member of the Slits—all of which might explain her taste for rough edges. The tension between soft and hard animates her sound. Happy Hour’s title track bolts on Ben Mckone’s hot-stepping drums and cymbals, which bushwhack through clouds of reverb, conjuring the wooziness of being two or three drinks in, as the singer laments how margaritas can’t cure her jilted ache. In “Moving On,” she pledges to ditch a toxic mate while a tart string quartet telegraphs a queasy, echoing uncertainty.
Weed paeans are reggae tradition, like whiskey ballads in country, and “Kush Kween” advocates the psychic benefits of home gardening, as well as consuming the harvest, with a guest appearance from Jamaican singer Jah9. But the best moments veer from tradition. On “Gold Girl,” Cook side-eyes a femme fatale with old-school vocal drama, unfurled over strings and mixing-desk antics like a triangulation of British touchstones Shirley Bassey, the Slits, and Soul II Soul. “Move My Way” updates the mix with a touch of ’90s UK garage, suggesting a new direction Cook’s sound could take, situating lovers rock in a continuum of Black British musical invention like the outstanding recent Soul Jazz compilation Life Between Islands.
Cook co-produced Happy Hour with Mckone and keyboardist Luke Allwood, taking the reins from Youth, the bassist and post-punk dub master who produced Cook’s 2018 Vessel of Love, though he returns to help out on the mix here. But the most notable guest spot is the most subtle. Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell, known for his landmark work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, is an architect of UK dub and lovers rock who wrote “Silly Games” and even had a cameo in McQueen’s film. On “Praying,” the legendary producer joins Cook’s backing vocalists to express collective resilience in the face of heartbreak, wondering “what now?” and ruing “the mistaken hope that we were blessed.” With Cook insisting that “somehow we’ll make it through,” the song hints at the stealth cultural politics of lovers rock, while nodding to a creative forbear. But here, it’s Cook calling the shots, and carrying the torch with style. | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Merge | June 27, 2022 | 7.4 | a9b19ed0-6196-49f0-b607-4055dc9d7085 | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
As Com Truise, the producer Seth Haley works within an especially constrained 1980s aesthetic. But he pushes himself towards a higher level of sophistication on his new LP. | As Com Truise, the producer Seth Haley works within an especially constrained 1980s aesthetic. But he pushes himself towards a higher level of sophistication on his new LP. | Com Truise: Iteration | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/com-truise-iteration/ | Iteration | If you’re looking for music that recreates the synthesizer ambience that was so emblematic of the 1980s, there’s no shortage of current artists to turn to. But electronic producer Seth Haley’s work under his most well-known pseudonym, Com Truise, is arguably the closest you can come to a TRON-like experience of total immersion. Like his previous two full-lengths and four EPs, Haley’s latest Com Truise album Iteration immediately brings to mind the feel of low-budget exercise-video soundtracks and VHS tapes whose pitch would warp when your VCR’s tracking control would kick in and it sounded like the tape was getting chewed up in the player.
Of course, these are sounds that immediately evoke their accompanying visuals. If Com Truise’s source of inspiration wasn’t obvious enough, though, his first two albums, 2011’s Galactic Melt and 2012’s In Decay spelled it out for you with album covers featuring the vintage fonts, crude computer design, and murky color saturation that once proliferated across film, TV, music, and advertising. Where artists like Boards of Canada, Tobacco, and Julian Casablancas have used ’80s aesthetics as one of several tools in their creative arsenal, Haley’s palette has been especially constrained.
Whether this is intentional rather than unimaginative, you can’t get around Com Truise’s limited range. Haley does stretch out somewhat on Iteration, though, in contrast to previous releases, and he’s learning to emphasize composition over sounds alone. Opener “...Of Your Fake Dimension” begins with a stately keyboard figure that could have worked as a hook on acoustic piano or guitar. Likewise, the electronic drum pattern, bass-register synth line, and the extra keyboard fills that pepper the song all point to an increased awareness of band dynamics, as if Truise had live players in mind.
There are numerous other examples like this, and Iteration certainly gives the impression that Haley has started to care about arrangements as much as he does about mood and tone. “Dryswch” starts out, as so much of Com Truise’s music does, with a keyboard haze that feels like looking out onto a thick blanket of fog, where you can’t clearly discern the boundary between the fog and anything else. A coiling sound effect that recalls the early days of Atari pogos across the stereo field—nothing new so far. But then the track quickly flowers as an actual song.
Had “Dryswch” contained vocals, you could easily imagine it as a pop single; in fact, you almost can’t listen without hearing a vocal hook atop it. Still, Haley manages to invest the tune with a tension. At several points, the music pauses to hover, creating still pockets to reflect. “Dryswch” shows what Haley is capable of when he doesn’t lay things on quite so thick. It wouldn’t quite be fair to say that “Dryswch” rivals ’80s music as complex and cerebral as Seeds of Love-era Tears for Fears, but it’s certainly encouraging to see Haley pushing himself towards a higher level of sophistication with its sliding, interlocking parts. The album also features key moments—“Isostasy,” “Vacuume,” “Ternary”—where Haley goes for the gold with hooks so big and melodic they cause a kind of auditory sugar rush. The fact that he’s able to do so without a single vocal in sight shows what a skilled craftsperson he’s become.
Of course, there are times throughout Iteration when Haley sounds trapped in the same old rut. Overall, though, the album balances between bombast and gestures that are a little harder to read. That contrast gives Iteration a texture that’s missing from previous Com Truise releases. In the past, Haley has steered the experience in one direction with such a singularity of focus that it felt like being engulfed in synthetic kitsch. Even if you weren’t averse to its overwhelming ’80s flavor, it didn’t take long for the music to get flat or even queasy. This time, Haley works around his limitations just enough to stave off one-trick irrelevance. Good on him, as it’s only a matter of time before ’80s retrofuturism becomes a thing of the distant past. | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | June 24, 2017 | 6.7 | a9b32b13-127c-4811-859e-e670fc24fc8e | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The brief odds and sods charity EP from Ty Segall brings both the eternal comfort of his garage rock and the joy of something new and mellow. | The brief odds and sods charity EP from Ty Segall brings both the eternal comfort of his garage rock and the joy of something new and mellow. | Ty Segall: Fried Shallots EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ty-segall-fried-shallots-ep/ | Fried Shallots EP | It seems Ty Segall only looks ahead. He cares about cranking out the hooks, not the critical reception of them. He cares about always performing with vigor, not the size of the mosh pit. Above all else, he cares about creative improvement, this muted confidence that’s beginning to define his career. It’s the type of confidence that brought Segall here, standing before his miraculous Jenga tower of songs, a precarious wonder of a catalog that shows no signs of collapse.
Fried Shallots, Ty Segall’s latest EP, consists of six tracks from “different times and places over the past few years” and all profits from its sales will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s an organization he’s clearly fond of, and he offers up a comfortably familiar set of songs to guarantee some traction. “Dust” sounds like Goodbye Bread filler that’s vaguely unmemorable but saved by a blissful, classic rock guitar solo. Opener “Big Man” stomps through ‘60s fuzz with hushed “oohs” to balance the warped electronic synth that punctuates it. Even the lo-fi, scuzzy vocals on “Is It Real” feel right at home. Fried Shallots isn’t Segall’s best work, but it stays on par with the rest of his garage rock catalog.
It’s the genre-traipsing songs like “Talkin’” that contribute to Segall’s evolution, one ripe with power-pop melodies and McCartney-styled basslines. Before that, he gets caught in a quintessential Ty Segall chord progression on “Another Hustle,” where the acoustic guitar tangles itself in a bass line, climbing up a blues scale with an R&B swing. If Segall's self-titled full-length from earlier this year was new material disguised as a sampler of what he's been up to for the last half-decade, Fried Shallots is old material disguised as a sampler of what he could be up to in the future. After all, full-throated folk is a side of Segall worth welcoming, especially if it brandishes banjo the way “When the Gulls Turn To Ravens” does.
It’s these moments where the EP hits a notable stride. With over a dozen releases to his name since he started back in 2008—not including his work in Fuzz, GØGGS, and a handful of other groups—Segall re-earns the “prolific” badge each year. His talent isn't built on rehashing garage tropes, as it may seem, but rather his evolution. He freaks out morning news programs. He masquerades as an animated squirrel. He hosts an art exhibit of his paintings. Segall is at a point in his career where a random collection of outlier tracks and potential B-sides still sound fresh, and, once again, the way he stacks them makes for a marvelous listen. | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | August 8, 2017 | 7.1 | a9b71566-bf1a-4af9-adad-ad8d2590fc7e | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
Released with little fanfare, the new album from Olympia punks Milk Music is full of pure kinetic joy. It’s fueled by a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness. | Released with little fanfare, the new album from Olympia punks Milk Music is full of pure kinetic joy. It’s fueled by a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness. | Milk Music: Mystic 100’s | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23103-mystic-100s/ | Mystic 100's | After releasing their debut full-length Cruise Your Illusion with help from Fat Possum in 2013, Olympia punks Milk Music dropped their new Mystic 100’s LP with no fanfare, on appropriately mysterious label Dom America. And as with Cruise, it’s full of pure kinetic joy. Take its second track, “Twists & Turns & Headtrips,” a quintessential driving song. It starts on a keyed-up four-to-the-floor drum beat and careens through waves of scuzzy guitar, which all makes a line like “take the crazy paisley lizard/on the freeway for a spin” feel right at home. It’s meant for a West Coast open road: an old car, long hair blowing through the hot wind.
This is the oldest trope in the American road-cowboy book, but one that holds a deep power over everyone that steps into it, and one that frontperson Alex Coxen holds in great esteem. It’s not just the lizard king—Milk Music makes no secret of worshipping the old gods, from hat tips to Neil Young and Meat Puppets to a disaffected golden-age nostalgia that once drove the band to hide out in Joshua Tree, take acid, and “shoot a gun at the moon.” America’s most revered rock’n’roll came from the same “no rules, man” libertarian ethos: the premise that radical counterculture can come from isolation rather than organizing. It’s a legacy of escapism that sent white people to the desert in droves in the ’60s to drop out and make art in canyons while civil rights movements struggled against state violence that turned cities into war zones. The conditions that enable this—along with whatever ethos compels white men to uncritically invoke Eastern spirituality motifs—are due for a long line of critical inquiry that requires more column room than is possible here. In the meanwhile, the aesthetic of freedom rock is still potent.
The high-octane “Dare to Exist” is the other major scorcher. It carries a vibrant, swinging ’70s blues riff, the kind your local rock dad would swear harkens back to Zeppelin or Stevie Ray Vaughan, thrown into an ornery garage track. Like “Out of My World,” from debut EP Beyond Living, or any major track from Illusion, it’s what Milk Music does best, with Coxen’s voice now even more front and center, sneering about the audacity of existence.
Mystic 100’s references Beyond Living more directly by using the same closing song. “The Burning Light” was left as an instrumental track on Living, but on Mystic 100’s, there are newly added lyrics that make it anthemic. Milk Music want to give birth to burning light, Milk Music hate the shadows (“I don’t want to be a punk, it’s so sad, you know?”). Like their soul siblings Merchandise’s iconic “Become What You Are,” “The Burning Light” is simultaneously world-weary and desirous of pure life.
Scuzzy California sun-rock has come back into prominence in the last decade or so (Ty Segall, King Tuff), but the core of this album lies in the kind of deep psychedelia that sets in around the Northwest and Northeast alike (Gun Outfit, MV & EE). “Dramatic Exit” is a gorgeous freaked-out psych odyssey: the pleasurable ooze of Pure X intertwined with the heaviness of Sun City Girls’ “Blue Mamba.” It’s a desert mirage complete with paroxysms of searing, agonized saxophone. Then, clocking in at almost nine minutes, “Crying Wand” fully unwinds into a headscape of searching guitar passages and elegant progressions. It rides waves of exuberance and longing before crashing into abrupt, fuck-it catharsis: a tension between nihilistic fun and heady expansiveness that fuels the heart of Mystic 100’s. | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dom America | April 5, 2017 | 7.6 | a9bbd962-e351-4502-8a06-c2c2a3629b08 | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | null |
The double album from the Bronx rapper is a bloated, grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden. | The double album from the Bronx rapper is a bloated, grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden. | French Montana: MONTANA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/french-montana-montana/ | MONTANA | There’s an only-in-America charm to French Montana, the Casablanca-born Bronx rapper who—through persistence and the imprimatur of whichever label is behind him—has failed steadily upward into a world of fast cars, Kardashian trysts, and tigers on leashes. As New York’s Bloomberg-era mixtape circuit imploded, he curried favor with tastemakers from Atlanta and points south before emerging as a curator of blockbuster singles in the tradition of his indefatigable neighborhood elder Fat Joe. If his full-length collaborations with Fetty Wap, Max B, and Waka Flocka feel like ancient history, it’s because French is, improbably, the last man standing.
It’s possible that no one was exactly clamoring for a French Montana double album in 2019, even if, at 67 minutes, MONTANA’s two-disc packaging is simply a stylistic choice. Montana’s longtime producer Harry Fraud, an acolyte of melodramatic ’80s rock and contemporary foreign pop, helms Disc One. Whatever the joke is, Fraud’s always in on it, and his expansive productions comprise a self-referential universe reminiscent of a Tarantino flick. The title track’s smoky chords and weeping guitar build to one of his signature second-verse beat switches, but lacking a bright narrator like fellow Fraud clients Curren$y and Action Bronson, the unwaveringly lethargic tempo makes a slog of MONTANA’s front nine. “That Way,” a reimagining of Das EFX’s “Looseys,” neither reinterprets nor builds upon the 1992 original, and French stumbles over Cool & Dre’s stuttering beat on the listless “What It Look Like.”
Although Montana has a habit of sounding like a guest on his own tracks (you’ll be forgiven for failing to notice that he even clocks in between Kevin Gates and Kodak Black on “Lifestyle”), his better mixtapes feature moments in which opulence is less a taunt than an honest tribute to peers who never got to enjoy it. This can hardly be said of MONTANA, in which wealth’s depiction is surface-deep and kneecapped by French’s autopilot punchlines. The eponymous opener finds him “masturbatin’ on a scale for a hundred million, asking God how we made it”; he’s “militant like the Middle East” and “Big like the kid from Bed-Stuy.” There’s a lot of empty space in his bars.
Disc 2 is the big-tent attraction, picking up where 2017’s Jungle Rules, a trap-lite affair headlined by various Migos and Sremmurds, left off. It’s star-studded, dancefloor-ready, vaguely Caribbean. “Writing on the Wall,” a delectable serving of Hot 97 kibble, stands tall among Montana’s considerable singles catalog, with a Cardi B verse that ends with her “Rollin’ down the freeway, talkin’ ‘bout a three-way/Started workin’ out but he gon’ eat me on his cheat day.” The Swae Lee-featuring “Out of Your Mind” aims to recapture the magic of “Unforgettable” and gets most of the way there, whereas “Wiggle It” conscripts City Girls for a tried-and-true barnburner.
Despite the second disc’s upbeat highlights, it’s clear the well runs dry before the album’s over. “No Shopping” and “Lockjaw,” both singles from 2016’s MC4, reappear on MONTANA, as does the Drake duet “No Stylist” from mid-2018. “Hoop” sounds like a Quavo throwaway, and the Blueface and Lil Tjay feature “Slide” only perks up when the beat is briefly switched out for the “Serial Killa” instrumental halfway through.
French can be enigmatic, in that his strengths and shortcomings tend to blur together: He’s a citizen-of-the-world dabbler at best, at worst an uninspired cover artist. As a grab-bag of singles made for Hornblower cruises and thirty-second timeouts at Madison Square Garden, MONTANA is effectively too big to fail. But it’s perplexing that a project this market-tested came out so flimsy. | 2019-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | December 19, 2019 | 5.8 | a9c4831b-13a7-4e39-8a8e-8eb35e249b9e | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Across two albums that function as one stunning piece of music, the Big Thief singer approaches familiar themes of loss, solitude, memory, and regret in some of the most vivid songwriting of her career. | Across two albums that function as one stunning piece of music, the Big Thief singer approaches familiar themes of loss, solitude, memory, and regret in some of the most vivid songwriting of her career. | Adrianne Lenker: songs / instrumentals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adrianne-lenker-songs-and-instrumentals/ | songs / instrumentals | When Big Thief pick up their instruments, they like to face inward, standing in a circle. That is how they rehearse, and how they have recorded all of their albums: eye to eye and practically elbow to elbow. Even when they perform, they face each other as much as possible. Much has been said of Big Thief as a family, an organism, a self-sustaining ecosystem. But what happens when the circle narrows to a single point? On the two-part songs and instrumentals—billed as a pair of standalone albums but really two inextricable parts of a whole—Adrianne Lenker, the group’s singer and emotional fulcrum, stands alone, a solitary figure learning to shoulder a burden of fresh absence. Here, inside a “circle of pine and red oak/Circle of moss and fire smoke,” she strips her music down to just an acoustic guitar and voice with minimal overdubs, all recorded straight to tape. She wrote nine of the first half’s 11 songs right there on the spot. The second half is purely instrumental; the final side is mostly windchimes.
Lenker made the record in a one-room cabin in the woods of Western Massachusetts where she holed up in spring, waiting out the early days of the pandemic and reeling from a broken heart. The simple pinewood planks of the shack’s interior reminded her, she said, of “the inside of an acoustic guitar,” which is to say it felt like home. Her friend Philip Weinrobe, a recording engineer, was summoned with a truckload of gear: half-inch tape machines, XLR cables, a binaural mic. They spent a couple weeks setting up and another three weeks recording, and the sense of presence they captured—in two cases, recording directly to Weinrobe’s Walkman—is almost overwhelming. The guitar sounds so close that you can hear the ridges of Lenker’s fingertips rubbing against coiled steel. Occasionally, her chair creaks or her foot brushes against the floor. Some songs wear a halo of birdsong or rainfall. Fragments from the sessions—orphaned chords strummed in the silence before a take begins, the thunk of what might be fingers pressing down on the keys of the tape machine—litter the final mixdown like leaves strewn across the cabin floor.
Given its modest origins, this album could have been just a detour. (“I really admire Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen—how they have such a breadth of material throughout the years, into old age,” Lenker told The Ringer last year. “They seemed to follow their own thread of curiosity and creativity, even through some weird phases when people were like, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing.’”) Instead, it sounds like the essence of her music distilled, steeped in grief. In addition to the pain of Lenker’s own breakup, Weinrobe’s grandmother was dying; he was saying his farewells to her over Zoom. Big Thief’s tour had been cut short by the pandemic. And no matter how far you went into the woods, there was no ignoring the ambient ache in the nation’s bones, all that death and neglect and malevolence. Colored by all these overlapping shades of pain, songs and instrumentals are about leave-taking, solitude, and self-reliance; about memory, longing, and regret; about the “mystery of lack.” None of these are new themes for Lenker, but she has never explored them quite like this.
Where Two Hands looked outward, songs tends to dwell in the space between Lenker and her absent lover. She begins the album with a plea: “Lay me down so to let you leave/Tell me lies/Wanna see your eyes/Is it a crime to say I still need you?” This naked second-person form of address is all over these songs, like “I’m not afraid of you now” and “You are changing me/You are changing.” They sound like private thoughts tested on the tongue, the sorts of solitary ruminations shared with the four walls of an empty space—the room tone of loss. It is an invitation to move through pain, to disappear into sound alongside her.
Some of these songs are as lovely as any Lenker has ever written: lush and verdant, chords fanning out like ferns, their major-key tonalities at odds with the heartbreak at the album’s core. On “anything,” she trades the cosmic sweep of U.F.O.F. for the microscopic detail of a moment of stillness: “I wanna listen to the sound of you blinking.” The wounds of her breakup are still raw, peppered with the buckshot of memory. She sketches the arc of a doomed affair in a series of disconnected images: wet skin and dripping mango, a Christmas Eve argument, dog’s teeth biting through flesh, “unchecked calls and messages.” But the chorus is sweet and unburdened, and toward the song’s end, Lenker lets out a soft little “Whoo!” as though carried away by the music. It’s a remarkable moment: In the midst of an unshakable sadness, the beauty of this thing she has created elicits a whoop of joy, a tiny fist pump of affirmation. Solace arrives in the form of a momentary adrenaline rush.
Lenker’s writing has never been as vivid as it is here. In “ingydar,” she sings of a horse lying naked in the barn while flies “draw sugar from its head,” her voice tumbling over itself in a rush of sticky-sweet detail. It is an image of decrepitude so richly rendered that, rather than suggesting decay, the impression is one of extraordinary fullness, like a meadow exploding into bloom:
His eyes are blueberries, video screens,
Minneapolis schemes and the dried flowers
From books half-read
The juice of dark cherries cover his chin
The dog walks in and the crow lies in his
Jaw like lead
Everything eats and is eaten
Time is fed
Throughout songs, life and death are locked in an embrace, as opposites collide and subsume one another. Violence is never far from the life force. Several times she sings, ambiguously, of motherhood. Her partner’s “dearest fantasy/Is to grow a baby in me.” Yet in “ingydar,” as she picks her way carefully over the bright-red carcass of memory, she pauses and sighs, “Six years in, no baby.”
In the almost unbearably beautiful “not a lot, just forever,” she sings, “I want to be your wife/So I hold you to my knife,” her voice growing thin like the air leaving a body. Her voice becomes even more diaphanous in “half return,” which seems to be a story about revisiting her childhood home. Images drift across the listener’s vision, unmoored from their origins, until she arrives at the chorus: “Standing in the yard/Dressed like a kid/The house is white and/The lawn is dead the lawn is dead the lawn is dead.” The sing-song melody and repeated words sound almost like a playground chant; the way she sings, “The lawn is dead”—her voice multiplied on the tape, harmonies rippling like cirrus clouds above the broad, flat Midwestern landscape—it sounds almost ecstatic.
Unlike the A-side, the B-side is devoid of overdubs, giving the songs a more intimate, stripped-down character. The crux of the record, “zombie girl,” begins as she awakens from a dream about her absent lover, but it turns into a conversation with absence itself. “Oh emptiness/Tell me ’bout your nature/Maybe I’ve been getting you wrong.” Her guitar sounds almost like a music box, and the recording is wreathed in chirps and chiming metal. “What’s on your mind?” she asks, repeatedly, and you can hear her gasp for air between the lines; the longer she holds each note, it is as though she were emptying out, becoming emptiness. As her voice trails off, a buzzing fly enters the frame, and the ambient sound swells to fill what is left. It is a song about emptiness but also fullness, about the way the self can disappear into what surrounds it.
Lenker began and ended each day’s session with an extended improvisation on her guitar. A collage of these recordings comprises instrumentals’ two songs, “music for indigo” and “mostly chimes,” which together run more than 37 minutes. They are not showy pieces, but the depth of her relationship with her instrument is clear. Channeling folk and bluegrass, she mulls over series of notes, sounding out melodic ideas, nudging forward and then doubling back; it feels less like composing than dowsing, like she is responding to the smallest variations of the weight of the wood in her hands. “She gives a lot of significance to that moment where she’s holding her guitar,” Big Thief’s Max Oleartchik told the New Yorker. “I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy.” That glimmer of something sacred shines through here: Set against the sounds of nature, her playing has a devotional quality. Toward the end of “music for indigo”—composed, she says, as something for her ex-girlfriend to fall asleep to—she murmurs, “I’m starting over,” and it is unclear whether she is talking about the song, or her life.
If “music for indigo” is spacious, “mostly chimes” is mostly just space. It begins with tentative playing, but after four minutes, her guitar gets quieter and quieter, and then drops off to silence. What is left is just the swirl of chimes and birdsong, 11 minutes of pure dreamspeak. That might seem inadvisably precious or indulgent, but Lenker’s atmospheric coda has a purpose: It completes the process of disappearing that has taken place across the course of the record. On side A, there may be as many as three guitar parts, plus overdubbed vocals, in play at any moment. Side B loses the overdubs but retains the vocals. Side C is just guitar and chimes. Side D, on the other hand, is just a suggestion of what will be left when Lenker packs up and leaves. It is the wind in the trees, the sun through the branches, the robin’s egg lying cracked and hollow on the ground, a half-moon of sky blue nestled against black loam. The barely-there conclusion of this remarkable pair of records is a memory frozen in tone, absence given form. “Oh, emptiness/Tell me ’bout your nature,” Lenker asks in “zombie girl.” Taken together, songs and instrumentals provide an answer.
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. | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | October 23, 2020 | 8.8 | a9c6ffaa-0d8f-44d4-95bd-6a02e548e6e6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
After a quiet few years following her 2016 debut, the Chicago rapper returns sounding self-assured, wrapping her sharp flow in lush yet punchy beats. | After a quiet few years following her 2016 debut, the Chicago rapper returns sounding self-assured, wrapping her sharp flow in lush yet punchy beats. | Dreezy: Big Dreez | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dreezy-big-dreez/ | Big Dreez | It’s been a quiet few years for Dreezy since she released her appealing 2016 studio debut, No Hard Feelings. She’s released four non-album singles since, but none of them really stuck. She was anointed the Princess of Chicago rap upon her arrival as a fresh-faced 20-year-old in 2014, but other artists moving into the same sonic spaces she’s occupied—Cardi B, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Tierra Whack—have covered more ground in less time, commercially and creatively. But those paying closer attention know Dreezy’s potential, and how it’s still paying out returns. She was recently invited to J. Cole’s rap summit for his Revenge of the Dreamers III uber-compilation, a nod from her peers to her obvious talent in what otherwise felt like a boys’ club; she played Rolling Loud, a festival notorious for underbooking women, two years in a row. Now 24, the Chicago rapper and singer has reemerged with Big Dreez, her second studio album on Interscope Records. “Made a name but ain’t chase the fame/Bitches trade respect for a paid gimmick,” she raps on opener “Chicken Noodle Soup,” as if to explain her current position. The album is a lesson in earning respect. Within these songs, Dreezy seems not just self-assured but gratified.
Tightly cut into scenes from an unraveling love triangle, No Hard Feelings was a more ambitious storytelling exercise; it was also more discerning about segueing from combative bars to sumptuous R&B songs. Big Dreez is a bit aimless by comparison, but it also feels like an evolution in Dreezy’s songcraft. The writing is tighter, the verses tauter, the hooks snappier. Edited down to 10 songs and 31 minutes, the album is a distillation of her abilities and an first-rate exhibition of her skill set.
Big Dreez has its flex anthems and its songs about trysts on the verge (of either collapse or combustion), most of which neatly fit into their respective categories. The Jeremih-assisted “Ecstasy” is like a sequel to their platinum hit “Body”; “RIP Aretha” channels the perpetual “Chiraq” freestyle burning within her. Dreezy is effective in both spaces, but she is still working toward finding a middle ground to connect these disparate elements of her sound. She’s getting closer: Three years ago, she couldn’t have made songs like “Cash App” or “Where Them $ @,” tracks that perfectly fuse her natural sing-songy tendencies with her silver-tongued technique. There isn’t much flow in the sequencing, but she delivers with consistency.
Dreezy can go rapid-fire with the best of them, hurtling into cadences with reckless abandon but sashaying in and out of them with an unwitting finesse. This is still her default setting, and when all else fails, she feeds off that aggression to relentlessly taunt the challengers in her rearview. “Niggas askin’ me stupid shit like who my competition. Ain’t no fuckin’ competition. Y’all in 2018, we in 2020,” she says in the album’s opening seconds, and her raps abide by this principle. Her design for pointing out her own progress is to treat her competitors as benchmarks she’s already passed; she’ll rap something like, “I ain’t goin’ back to what I used to do/Bitches hatin’ on me in an Uber Pool,” or “Just spent a light 30/I got enough bread to feed you lil birdies,” where the proof of her success lies in just how far ahead of rivals she is.
This tactic is aided by the album’s lush yet punchy soundbeds from trap mainstays Southside and London on da Track, along with producers of the moment like Take a Daytrip (Sheck Wes’ “Mo Bamba,” Juice WRLD’s “Legends”) and OG Parker (Migos’ “Walk It Like I Talk It,” Tory Lanez’s “B.I.D.”). The beats sound pricey and in your face without being obtrusive or compromising her carefully timed show-offs and put-downs, all performed with a sneer or a scoff. In the Pi’erre Bourne-produced “Chanel Slides,” an obvious standout, Dreezy and stunt mate Kash Doll put their degrees from “the U of Finesse” to good use as handbells crash all around them. It seems unlikely Dreezy will ever scale rap’s greatest heights, but it’s in these moments, on another impressive album, that she proves success doesn’t look the same on everyone. | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope | February 6, 2019 | 7.3 | a9d379d8-56b5-48c7-b8d5-161553c9a534 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
What starts as an homage to John Cage, soon shifts into an increasingly honest and heartfelt album of solo piano by the young composer. | What starts as an homage to John Cage, soon shifts into an increasingly honest and heartfelt album of solo piano by the young composer. | Peter Broderick: Partners | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22249-partners/ | Partners | As a love letter to John Cage, multi-instrumentalist and composer Peter Broderick based most of his seventh solo album Partners on Cage’s concept of chance-based composition. Before writing any of the album’s original material, Broderick learned to play Cage’s solo piano piece “In a Landscape” by listening to various recorded versions and breaking them down note for note. That process inspired him to look beyond Cage’s musical ideas and deeper into the venerated composer’s philosophical leanings and overall approach to living. In a contemplative message that Broderick sent to his label Erased Tapes upon handing in the finished record, he explained that he was particularly drawn to the way Cage stripped his music of a composer’s presence. In like-minded fashion, Broderick set out to remove himself from Partners. That he fails to do so ends up being one of this album’s greatest triumphs.
In Broderick’s own bio, he declares his love for all living things “from donkeys to dandelions” and then switches in an instant from a goofy romanticism to the sublime. Over a discography that ranges from piano, to minimalist drone scores for film, to singer-songwriter folk (along with a heap of accompanist/session credits), Broderick wears his heart on his sleeve, even in his instrumental work. Had he succeeded to remove himself from these pieces, *Partners *would no doubt have ended up as a more remote, perhaps impenetrable work of solo piano. But unlike Cage’s more radical subversions of conventional definitions of music, his “In a Landscape” disarms you with its simplicity and warmth. Those qualities provide the perfect space for Broderick’s sensitivity to shine through in his playing.
The first real piece on the program is Broderick’s own rendition of “In a Landscape.” Faithful to Cage’s original instructions, Broderick keeps his foot on the sustain pedal the whole time, while a cloud of natural reverb creates the acoustic ambiance of a conservatory music hall. One can nitpick this rendition against Stephen Drury’s quintessential recording , but that would defeat the purpose. Broderick nails the lyricism and flow at the piece’s spiritual center and brings a sense of pathos that casts “In a Landscape” as more than the Satie-influenced backdrop Cage envisioned it as.
Broderick may sound like a lovestruck stoner fresh out of Asian philosophy class in his spoken-word album intro, but what follows resounds with genuine adult heartache. He works through four original compositions, breaking up the solo-piano format with his own singing, chanting, and discreet touches of post-production, while still keeping the piano center stage throughout. He even riffs on Cage’s “Landscape” motif several pieces later on “Up Niek Mountain.” By then, you’re in a rather different terrain from where the music started, yet you may not notice because Broderick has shown such mastery of temperance and consistency. When he gets to the final tune, a cover of Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power’s “Sometimes,” Broderick lets his hair down and breaks the mood after such a long spell of controlled stillness.
First, in a nod to the floppy-eared exterior of the title track, Broderick stops himself after a false start and says, “Dang, it! I’m gettin’ nitpicky.” Then, over a stately, bittersweet piano melody, he performs the album’s only bona-fide lead vocal: “Sometimes,” he sings, “I just want to collapse into you/But I don’t know if you want me to.” His voice croaks, clearly privileging emotion over perfection. In just about anyone else's hands, such naked earnestness would verge on embarrassing. In Broderick’s, it’s a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself. | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | August 25, 2016 | 7.6 | a9d6775f-055e-455c-8c64-a44b767e5ce1 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The duo continue their drift from lo-fi throwbacks to crisp modern pop, while maintaining the preoccupation with marital love that has animated their records since the beginning. | The duo continue their drift from lo-fi throwbacks to crisp modern pop, while maintaining the preoccupation with marital love that has animated their records since the beginning. | Tennis: Swimmer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tennis-swimmer/ | Swimmer | Tennis have never shied from kitsch. The duo founded their sound on a mix of nostalgic ’60s pop and schlocky soft-rock, and packaged it with album covers styled like art from a ’70s hair salon. Even their backstory was like a relic from a bygone era: Lovers Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley spent seven months sailing the Atlantic, and documented their leisure voyage on their 2011 debut album Cape Dory. That Seinfeld quip about nobody liking a kid with a pony applies doubly to adults with sailboats: In another world, the perfectly prim and preppy couple could’ve been antagonists from an ’80s summer camp movie. In their telling, they were the stars of their own paperback romance.
It’s better to be a divisive band than a forgettable one, though. And exempting Vampire Weekend, no 2010s indie act weaponized their own privilege quite so provocatively. Tennis have outlasted most acts from the mp3 blog era in part because they were more audacious than most of them, but also because they’ve had the songwriting craft to back up all the shtick. Each record since Cape Dory has introduced new ripples to their fundamentally breezy sound, with producers like Richard Swift, Spoon’s Jim Eno and Black Keys’ Patrick Carney challenging the duo just enough to keep things interesting without upsetting their escapist appeal.
Swimmer, Tennis’ fifth album, is self-produced, but even more voluptuous than anything they’ve recorded with a name producer, continuing their drift from reverby lo-fi throwbacks toward crisp R&B-laced pop. It’s not exactly a scarce sound—from Grimes to Tei Shi to Haim, plenty of DIY acts have channeled their humble inner Mariah Carey over the last decade or so—but Tennis’ take has moxie, and Moore’s deceptively pliable voice stands up to Swimmer’s production-driven aesthetic. The snappy “How to Forgive” is pure bubblegum, dreamy and limber, while “Need Your Love,” with its halting stop/starts and vampy pianos, is the catchiest track the duo has ever recorded, the showstopper that even Cape Dory didn’t deliver.
Where 2017’s Yours Conditionally teased fissures in Moore and Riley’s once-faultless romance, Swimmer’s conflicts stem from external forces: toxic presences, aging parents, failing bodies. “Once I was young, those days are long gone, suddenly I’m 33 and on a gurney,” Moore sings on the album’s centerpiece “Echoes,” recounting the hospitalization that nearly derailed the group’s 2018 tour. The song is bright and peppy, with a tropical lilt—the good-humored response to the situation that Moore was apparently unable to muster in the moment. As her panicked husband rushes her to the hospital, she tries to lighten the mood with a quip and realizes she can’t. “It looks like I won’t be going down stoically,” she concedes.
Tennis’ privileged worldview periodically bleeds through in offputting ways (Moore scoffs at “all the tourists as they flock to the sea” on the title track), but Swimmer is mostly sweet and personable. Any listener who’s followed Moore and Riley for five albums running is probably somewhat invested in their relationship, and once again, they’ve rewarded that interest. “I only have certainty when you hold my hand,” Moore sings tenderly on the closer “Matrimony II.” Domestic bliss may not be the flashiest muse, but Tennis commit to documenting it lovingly.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mutually Detrimental | February 20, 2020 | 6.9 | a9d99506-2725-4551-a3f3-d0f2bf42b90d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The latest album from the Vietnamese pop artist is an empowering statement of purpose, at its best when pairing evocative storytelling with theatrical, large-scale production. | The latest album from the Vietnamese pop artist is an empowering statement of purpose, at its best when pairing evocative storytelling with theatrical, large-scale production. | Hoàng Thùy Linh: Link | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hoang-thuy-linh-link/ | Link | Hoàng Thùy Linh has spent the better part of her adulthood reclaiming her narrative. The Vietnamese actress and V-pop artist was a teenager in 2007 when her sex tape leaked online, causing nationwide uproar. The television show she starred in, Vàng Anh’s Diary, was immediately canceled and the resulting farewell program caused further outrage. People said her crying was an act, that her attitude wasn’t sufficiently repentant; many assumed her career was over. She began making glitzy electropop a few years later and would increasingly weave her life story into her art, crafting some of the most satisfyingly conceptual records in V-pop history. In 2018 she wrote a tell-all autobiography that detailed the incident and its aftermath. It was called Vàng Anh & Phượng Hoàng (“Oriole & Phoenix”); in publicly revealing her old story, she was ready to begin telling a new one.
Her 2019 album, Hoàng, cemented the transformation; “Duyên Âm” in particular was an arresting showcase of her ability to merge traditional Vietnamese culture with contemporary pop production. Its video made various allusions to her life but ends with her in royal garb, representing the phoenix’s second meaning in local mythology: an empress. Three years later, her fourth album, Link, is another empowering statement of purpose. A riff on her first name, the title also points to the invaluable relationships that have sustained her all these years. (Notably, it was released on the day of the Vu Lan festival, a ceremony honoring parents.) “Today I’m sitting here, fully healed,” she said in February. “I’m genuinely starting to feel love, to crave a connection with other souls.”
At 34, Hoàng writes songs replete with messages about finding joy in every moment. On “Lúc Thấy Lúc Không” she fawns over a guy who was once affectionate but is now nowhere to be found. Its lively synth pulses capture the incomparable high of pursuing a crush, but its underlying message is a celebration of how early flings can help you become wiser in love. “Life will have sad times, happy times, in-between times, or times of unnamed feelings,” she said in a press conference about Link. “Just treat yourself and indulge, because every choice will make you more complete.” Hoàng summarizes this sentiment on “Hạ Phỏm,” where racing synth melodies and trap drums bolster a message about treating life’s challenges not as something to win or lose, but as opportunities to grow. Her slick maneuvering between rapping and singing sells her assurance.
Link’s most convincing moments arrive when sonic experimentation matches lyrical conceit. The theatrical epic “Trưởng Nữ Chạy Trốn” begins with a warped rendition of the “Wedding March” before transforming into a runaway bride story that’s part Cardi B, part BLACKPINK. In her autobiography, Hoàng confessed she was plagued with self-blame in the year following the leak, and that things didn’t change when she found her next partner. He was 20 years her senior, disparaged her profession, and saw other women on the side; still, she stayed for four years filled with self-hatred, convinced nobody else could love her. It’s a delight, then, to hear such gleeful sneering across “Trưởng Nữ Chạy Trốn.” She mocks this former lover and his empty words by chanting “blah blah blah,” while pounding drums and dramatic strings assert her dominance. The rattling percussion and pogoing electronics that close the song are taunts pouring salt in the wound.
Large-scale production and evocative storytelling return in “Đánh Đố.” Produced by Triple D, who specializes in jaw-dropping EDM spectacles, it incorporates grandiose instrumentation to depict self-discovery as an unwieldy, tumultuous process. Hoàng’s voice is nearly overwhelmed by operatic performances by vocalists Tùng Dương and Thanh Lam, both of whom sing with so much vigor that listening to “Đánh Đố” borders on anxiety-inducing. Much easier to swallow is the buoyant jubilance of “Gieo Quẻ.” Released on New Year’s Day, the single is Hoàng’s attempt at creating an “escape route” from the grim realities brought on by the pandemic. The chorus’ cheerful drop and flute melody feel like a moment to pause, reflect, and look to the future.
As Hoàng has become more confident, her music has become more distinctive while encompassing inspiration from a wide range of cultures. Take “See Tình” (“See Love”), whose title is a play on “si tình,” which means “lovesick.” Its breezy disco-funk channels Funk Wav Bounces, its chorus recalls K-pop’s love for onomatopoeic hooks, and the sped-up remix that blew up on TikTok (accompanied by one of the most famous K-pop choreographies) is closer to nightcore than Vietnam’s own vinahouse. Still, listen closely and you will hear variations on the word “tình” meant to resemble the filler words—the “la la la”s of Vietnamese—used throughout traditional folk songs. Her playful navigation of Vietnam past and present, something central to her art, exists even here. On Link, Hoàng’s music evolves thanks to this deepening web of influences and the strong community of friends and collaborators around her. | 2022-08-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | The Leader Entertainment / Sony / Times | August 18, 2022 | 7.2 | a9dc41be-70c4-44cd-b80e-14fd283ddb9f | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
With classic rock ambition and full-hearted sincerity, the 27-year-old British songwriter hits his stride when looking inward but fumbles when casting his gaze toward society at large. | With classic rock ambition and full-hearted sincerity, the 27-year-old British songwriter hits his stride when looking inward but fumbles when casting his gaze toward society at large. | Sam Fender: Seventeen Going Under | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-fender-seventeen-going-under/ | Seventeen Going Under | In “Seventeen Going Under,” the title track of Sam Fender’s second album, the 27-year-old British songwriter meditates on anger, fistfights, an ailing family member, and the rising debt accrued from a pitiless Department of Work and Pensions. Paired with a jangly electric guitar part and an unrelenting backbeat, his words conjure both angst and beauty, holding your attention from start to finish. It is his best song yet. As a child, Fender idolized Bruce Springsteen; now his work attempts to outrun his long shadow. But while Seventeen Going Under excels when Fender looks inward, the intimacy is disrupted by scattered political musings.
In the album’s most successful moments, Fender reexamines his teenage years. He confronts his father on the moody heartland rocker “Spit of You,” which features dazzling interplay between guitars, saxophone, and mandolin. Witnessing his father’s vulnerability after the death of a grandparent, Fender embraces a new perspective on their strained relationship: “You kissed her forehead and it ran like a tap,” he sings. “And I’d never seen you like that.” On the title track, he returns to a pivotal memory—“The boy who kicked Tom’s head in/Still bugs me now”—and reflects on his own growth: “I was far too scared to hit him/But I would hit him in a heartbeat now.”
Fender’s lyrics shine when putting his adolescence under a microscope, but they flounder when aiming binoculars at the world. On “Paradigms,” Fender tackles oligarchs, pedophiles, and “marketing masterminds.” In the style of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Aye” jumps from Jesus’ crucifixion to the atom bomb, from Boudica to Jeffrey Epstein, but it never sticks the landing, with Fender saying everything and nothing at once. Perhaps it’s a symptom of being a rock star in the age of Instagram infographics: He often defines himself by what he isn’t rather than what he is. (“I’m not a fucking singer anymore,” goes one lyric. “I’m not a fucking liberal anymore.”)
Sometimes Fender’s big ideas are better achieved through his arrangements, as in the slow-building tension of “Get You Down,” which erupts in a guitar-saxophone duel and climaxes with a swarm of strings. There’s no hiding the influence of Springsteen’s lyrical prowess and the E Street Band’s orchestral grandeur on Fender’s work, as well as the Boss’ 21st-century acolytes like the War on Drugs and the Killers. As clearly as he follows in the legacy of these influences, however, Fender’s full-hearted sincerity feels refreshing and entirely his own.
Fender’s singing ranges from a Glastonbury yawp to a thick-accented sprechgesang, and he accompanies himself on a wide range of instruments including bass, piano, mandolin, glockenspiel, and harmonica. But while Seventeen Going Under attempts to conjure a full spectrum of memories and emotion, the sterile production sometimes limits its effect. The record closes on its rawest song, and also one of its most affecting, “The Dying Light.” It opens like a late-night confessional, played on a dusty piano after everyone else has left the pub, but it quickly transforms into a cathartic singalong. It plays like an encapsulation of Fender’s entire life to this point, gaining speed and confidence as it proceeds.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | October 13, 2021 | 6.6 | a9dc6ad3-6d4b-43cc-aae8-f5f38396d096 | Ethan Shanfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ethan-shanfeld/ | |
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 Elliott Smith’s big 1998 album, both a transformational landmark and a logical next step for the restless composer. | 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 Elliott Smith’s big 1998 album, both a transformational landmark and a logical next step for the restless composer. | Elliott Smith: XO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elliott-smith-xo/ | XO | When Elliott Smith sat down to lunch with Lenny Waronker, he hardly spoke a word for 40 minutes. The fact that he’d even been coaxed into a meeting with the co-CEO of DreamWorks—the glittery new entertainment venture founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, and Steven Spielberg—was a testament both to Smith’s own quietly undeniable ambition and his codependent relationship with his then-manager, Margaret Mittleman, who had coaxed and cajoled him into place. Smith was the kind of guy who had to be ordered sternly to go back out in front of a crowd of 50 when his stage fright overwhelmed him. Now he was at a white-tablecloth power lunch with the guy who signed Randy Newman, and things were going poorly.
Waronker had handled some difficult singer-songwriter types in his day, but with the painfully shy Smith, he found himself at a loss. Finally, he pointed to the orchestration primer he noticed Smith clutching to his chest like a child’s security blanket and asked him about it. The tension finally broke; Smith began regaling Waronker with his grand visions for what would become XO. For his next record, Smith confided, he wanted to use an orchestra.
Up until then, Smith was known for playing music so quiet it almost died away before it reached your ears. He made most of his first three albums in friends and loved ones’ bedrooms, and it was his 1993 debut Roman Candle, which he recorded in then-girlfriend JJ Gonson’s basement by pressing his guitar strings against a low-quality microphone, that transfixed Luke Wood, DreamWorks’ A&R. The thought of Smith singing over a full orchestra might’ve seemed as unlikely in that moment as collaborating with Metallica.
But Elliott Smith had already lived several musical lives before he became “Elliott Smith.” Starting as a freshman at Hampshire College, he co-fronted the distortion-soaked alternative rock band Heatmiser, striking lip-biting guitar-god poses and riling up beery crowds at punk clubs. As a high schooler in Portland, he’d written and recorded multiple album-length art-rock opuses with his music-nerd friends, testifying to his childhood love of Rush and Yes. It was only when he set out to make his solo debut that he tested out a whisper—maybe to see how it felt, maybe because he sensed that was his truest register, or maybe because he’d already spent years trying to snarl like Elvis Costello. This was the sound that had started winning him converts—fanatical ones—but he had other, bigger sounds in his head. Now that he’d just become labelmates with George Michael and John Williams, it was time to try them out.
XO captures Smith on the cusp of his biggest transformation. He became famous during its recording, not after—a strange state of affairs owing to the fact that he’d given a few of his songs to the indie filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who used them in a movie called Good Will Hunting. That movie went on to gross $138 million, making stars of everyone involved, and then “Miss Misery” was nominated for an Oscar. Suddenly, Elliott Smith was fielding phone calls from People Magazine reporters in between sessions where he was laying down drum, bass, piano, and guitar tracks. He was scheduling back-to-back interview blocks in the studio lounge as he tracked vocals. His compositional ambitions were flowering. His career was exploding. He was at the center of it. Somehow, it didn’t crush him.
The most remarkable thing about Smith’s career is the degree to which pressure—even the overwhelming kind, which might be expected to break a soul as sensitive as his—never once stopped the flow of his songwriting. “Songs would just come up,” marveled Rob Schnapf, the producer he worked with on both Either/Or and XO, of Smith’s writing process. “Maybe they weren’t necessarily written in the studio, but they’d be written while we’re making the record.” The songs that went on to comprise XO seemed to pour in from every corner imaginable, and no matter what else was happening in his life—suicidal ideation, addiction, paranoia, finding himself backstage at the Oscars being comforted by Celine Dion—he never once seemed to struggle with writer’s block. In an interview with The New Yorker, Neil Gust, his bandmate in Heatmiser, struggled to understand his friend’s prodigious genius: “He got to a place where it just lined up. He just couldn’t not nail it.” Luke Wood remembers how Smith would write “four or five different sets of lyrics” for each song, and Smith’s rarities are littered with examples. Perhaps he’d spent so long cultivating that channel that it stayed open, or perhaps because he wouldn’t know how to shut it off if he tried, songs flowed through him from the first moment he tried writing one in middle school to the end of his life.
Most people look back at XO, his DreamWorks debut, as his big break, but really, it was just his next logical step. Before XO, he’d suppressed his instincts towards grander gestures, maybe to strike a contrast with his Heatmiser music or from some allegiance to punk rock purity. Maybe he associated those gestures with his youthful prog-rock misadventures, which embarrassed him. He’d allowed a few bigger sounds to seep in at the edges on 1997’s Either/Or, like the crashing rock guitars on “Cupid’s Trick,” and they hadn’t spoiled the mood. “We could have blown it up more, but he wasn’t ready to do it just yet,” producer Rob Schnapf remembered. Now, armed with his orchestration book and Waronker’s blessing, Smith stepped into the studio where both Exile on Main Street and Led Zeppelin IV had been recorded and went for broke.
The songs were still recognizably his—you could strip them back to just acoustic guitar, as he often did live, and they fit neatly alongside his earlier material. But glorious new sounds welled up everywhere: the Mellotron that turned the chorus of “Bottle Up and Explode!” sunset-pink; the bass saxophone honking its way through on “A Question Mark”; the George Harrison-style acoustic slide guitar on “Oh Well, OK” or the “Getting Better” guitar chimes of “Baby Britain.” On album opener “Sweet Adeline,” he even indulged in some Dorothy-enters-Oz playfulness—for a full minute and a half, the song resembles a slightly cleaner, crisper, take on the hyper-intimate folk of his previous records. But then, just as the lyrics land on the title phrase, Smith’s voice reaches for a new, louder register, and then—what’s this?—a full band crashes in, complete with huge, pounding “When the Levee Breaks”-style John Bonham drum hits and multi-tracked vocal harmonies, all of them recognizably Smith. His songs had been a lot of things—lucid, tender, angry, brilliantly constructed—but they had never before been showy.
Smith moved from instrument to instrument in the studio with the laser focus of someone possessed, testing songs out songs in different registers, keys, and arrangements. On day one of recording, he demoed and finalized a sickly, twirling lullaby in 3/4 time that he just called “Waltz #1.” He’d written it after listening to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on mushrooms for 18 straight hours. Foggy, staggering, and fragile, the song never breaks from its simple rhythm but seems to exist in a world outside meter. There might be no more naked moment in his catalog than the tipsy stagger up the Db-major scale to his pleading line, “What was I supposed to say?”
The other, more famous song on XO with the word “Waltz” in its title also explored childlike feelings of fear and helplessness. Something about 3/4 time seemed to stir primal feelings in Smith, and he returned to the time signature whenever he found himself staring into the dark pool that waited in his subconscious memories of childhood in Cedar Hill, Texas. Maybe it was a method of self-soothing, a sort of musical EMDR that allowed him to revisit the childhood ghosts that never entirely left him. But “Waltz #2,” Smith’s lead single, deals rather conspicuously with the troubled dynamic that Smith observed between his stepfather, Charlie Welch, and his mother, Bunny.
The song is set in a karaoke bar, the characters a man and wife taking turns on the stage. The woman selects “Cathy’s Clown” (”Don’tcha think it’s kinda sad/That you’re treating me so bad?”), while the man returns the message, with a vengeance, choosing “You’re No Good.” “Waltz #2” is a song about people singing subtext-loaded songs to each other. It is also, itself, loaded with subtext. Smith wasn’t typically eager to encourage biographical readings of his songs, but in live performances he seemed to have no compunction about making this subtext clear, subbing the sign-off lyric “XO mom” with the plainly sung “I love you, mom.” For this song, at least, there was no alternate reading.
Smith’s relationship with his stepfather was always fraught with uncertainties. Welch wrote Smith more than one pained letter of apology after Smith left Texas for his father’s home in Portland halfway through his freshman year in high school. Later, Smith wrote a sort of acknowledgment and apologia of his own, another waltz-timed number called “Flowers for Charlie” that borrowed the melody from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over).” Whatever else Smith’s childhood meant, XO was a moment for him to dredge up bits of his past, holding them up to the light of Sunset Studios to see what they might yield.
It was by way of this method that he came to revisit one of those old songs from his high-school band days, those formerly mortifying years of extended whammy-bar solos and mullets. “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands” began life as a tough, snarling rocker called “Catholic,” when Smith and his friends were recording under the name Harum Scarum. Now, it was “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” and again, the target of the song was unusually direct: Smith wrote it as a rebuke of the friends who had staged his 1997 intervention and insisted he go to rehab. The song climaxes with that string orchestra arrangement Smith had dreamed of. Smith arranged it himself on a MIDI keyboard as a reference to hand to the professional arrangers, Shelly Berg and Tom Halm, only to revert to his original when he didn’t like the results. As the strings surge into the foreground, the song enters a phantasmagorical space, one where new instruments seem to be sprouting off the song’s walls like vines. Smith had grown up idolizing the Beatles; now, he was orchestrating his very own “A Day in the Life” within a song written with one group of close friends, rewritten to chastise another.
Dreams and grievances, biography and metaphor, truth and fiction—it all swirled together in Smith’s music until every throwaway line seemed like a secret. Smith fans were spooked into lifelong identification because of the purity of that voice, its unmistakable sadness, its seeming simplicity. But the deeper you peered into Smith’s music the more elusive and diaphanous the portrait of “Elliott Smith” became. Behind “Elliott” was, always and forever, Steven Paul Smith, the guy behind the guy behind the guy who had been working out his childhood songwriting visions for a lifetime and arrived at a point in which his ambitions and his talent synced up in one tall, clean line. The “Elliott Smith” of Smith’s solo records was not a person; it was a project. And XO was a testament to how far that project could go.
The breadth and depth of XO astonished even his benefactors. “The clarity and continuity of [his] thought is amazing,” said Wood. “He can take a metaphor…and sing about it for three minutes and never leave.” Waronker himself said that Smith was “as good as it gets when you’re talking about layers within lyrics.” On the stunning closing chorale, “I Didn’t Understand,” Smith sighs the line: “My feelings never change a bit, I always feel like shit/I don’t know why, I guess that I just do.” It sounds like a pure depiction of depression, in all its weariness and ingrained fatalism. It sounds, as it always does, like confession, like the truth that remained after exhaustion had burned away all artifice.
And yet behind even this song, you can find ghosts of previous versions, with implications of different meanings, dancing behind it. Early versions—on piano, rather than poised against Smith’s stacked vocal harmonies—reveal alternate lyrics: “My feelings never changed a bit/I’m waiting to get over it, but I know what it is I have to do.” The shifting tense of “changed” to “change”; the gap between “I know what it is I have to do” and “I don’t know why, I guess that I just do”—somewhere in the elongating shadow space between them, Elliott Smith the draftsman, the songwriter, the notoriously shy performer who never brought his eyes up from a spot a few feet away on the floor, seems to flick his gaze up to meet you head-on. There were no confessions on Elliott Smith records, but there were moments, like this, where he put every single nerve and sinew of his being on display. | 2023-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DreamWorks | July 30, 2023 | 9.5 | a9dc76bb-eb97-42bc-9c3b-d8dd3446ca1f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Catalan folk duo makes music full of unnameable longing and buzzing with portent. The remixes included, from John Talabot and Mans O, cannot compete with the simple sound of their voices. | The Catalan folk duo makes music full of unnameable longing and buzzing with portent. The remixes included, from John Talabot and Mans O, cannot compete with the simple sound of their voices. | Tarta Relena: Pack Pro Nobis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tarta-relena-pack-pro-nobis/ | Pack Pro Nobis | Time and distance collapse in the music of the Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena. With little more than their two voices, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella connect the far corners of the Mediterranean, drawing on traditions stretching back more than a thousand years. Pack Pro Nobis, an expanded edition of two EPs released in 2019 and 2020, gathers songs from Crete, Corsica, Mallorca, Menorca, and Andalucía; the two women sing in Spanish, Catalan, Greek, Latin, English, and even the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, also known as Sefardí.
Tarta Relena’s spellbinding harmonies root their singing in the deep past: This is music of primal essence and unnameable longing, full of frequencies that seem to tap an ancient ache in one’s bones. But the occasional smidgen of artificial reverb, synthesizer, or digital editing snaps us back to the present. Their vision of folk is no museum piece; it is contemporary, alive, and buzzing with portent.
The opening “Ma ezevgarósan,” a Cretan song the duo learned on a visit to the island, plants us in humble, quotidian terrain. Singing in Greek, their voices circle each other in a round, mimicking the courtship of birds, their wide-open harmonies evoking the loneliness at the song’s core: “The birds mated/The wild ones are paired/But my destiny has no bird/Nor the wilderness of the mountain.” From the echoing room tone, it sounds like they recorded the song in a courtyard, perhaps a quarry; the incidental clanking of construction noise punctuates the background, along with the occasional passing car. While these sounds lend an overwhelming sense of place, subtle backmasking unsettles, as though the axis of the song’s world had come unbalanced.
Tarta Relena draw upon both liturgical and secular sources. The luminous “Tota pulchra” is a Corsican polyphonic treatment of a fourth-century Catholic prayer; “Morenika” is a melancholy Sephardic love song; the flamenco standard “Tres morillas” dates back to the 15th century songbook Cancionero de Palacio, though Tarta Relena flesh out the villancico’s rhymes and palmas with drum machine and bass synthesizer. Regardless of provenance, many of these songs are shot through with profound mourning, and not just for the subject matter, which is full of dying brides, heartbroken widows, and weeping mothers. Ros and Torrella have a stark purity of tone which, combined with their electronic treatments, sets their music apart from other interpreters of the same material.
Not everything here is old. The airy “Desigs,” which falls halfway between Arca’s operatic vocal work and the ECM New Series, is based on a Catalan translation of the contemporary Greek poet Kavafis, and “D’ençà” interpolates elements of songs by the Catalan guitarist Toti Soler and the rising duo María Arnal and Marcel Bagés, who interpret Catalan folk music through a contemporary prism. These nods to their peers situate Tarta Relena as part of a broader reappreciation of folk traditions across Spain, placing them alongside the Catalan singer-songwriter Sílvia Pérez Cruz, flamenco iconoclast El Niño de Elche, and even Rosalía, whose debut album drew heavily upon the flamenco canon. An additional disc locates Tarta Relena even more explicitly in the present, gathering remixes that range from Mans O’s glitchy, North African-inspired beats to John Talabot’s acid dub. Despite their strengths, they pale in comparison with the simple power of the duo’s own singing. The best of the bunch is the Barcelona experimental musician Ex Continent’s chilling “Morenika (Rework),” which harnesses the same spooky energy as Beatriz Ferreyra’s 1978 composition “Echoes,” pulverizing the singers’ voices until the stereo field swims with ghosts.
One of the album’s most fascinating songs seems at first to break with the Mediterranean theme. The lyrics of “Infans qui nascitur,” written in Latin, are by Tarta Relena’s own hand, but the melody, paired with a darkly shimmering drone, comes from the traditional Georgian lullaby “Chela.” The Caucasian nation of Georgia lies nowhere near the Mediterranean, of course; it is separated from the region by Turkey, Syria, and the Black Sea. But some believe that prehistoric ties link Georgia, once known as the kingdom of Iberia, and Spain, which occupies Europe’s Iberian Peninsula. Whatever the truth of these speculations, the melancholy splendor of Georgian polyphony makes for a striking counterpoint to the duo’s mix of influences. Beyond the song’s uncanny beauty, its slippery contours and intricate modal shifts feel symbolic of music’s fundamental refusal to be fixed in place. Like everything Ros and Torrella do, their adaptation of “Chela” is a celebration of musical exchange. At a time of rising nationalisms across Europe, Tarta Relena’s songs are a testament both to the porousness of borders and the ideas that unite disparate cultures, running beneath the centuries like a pedal tone.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | The Indian Runners / Urpa i musell | March 3, 2021 | 7.8 | a9dd70cd-2617-4fd0-bc4f-78aa4269fffe | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his new album, the Awful Records founder trades his groggy rapping for smooth crooning. | On his new album, the Awful Records founder trades his groggy rapping for smooth crooning. | Father: Come Outside, We Not Gone Jump You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/father-come-outside-we-not-gone-jump-you/ | Come Outside, We Not Gone Jump You | Father’s early music was defined by sharp contrast. Over minimal, bass-heavy beats, he spearheaded Awful Records’ raunchy, misanthropic take on Atlanta’s nightlife and sounds, constantly juxtaposing the turn up with the flame out. Key to his style was his groggy voice, which sounded permanently hungover yet clear. He honed that style on 2018’s polished Awful Swim, which showcased his cheeky writing. On subsequent EPs Hu$band and Tha Thingz I Do 4 Money, Father started trading his syncopated rapping for a syrupy singing voice that turns syllables into slurry. Come outside moves further in that direction, every song awash in melody.
The turn is conscious. “Back in the day it was just like, “let me say some wild shit, put some bass over it, and let that shit blow the fuck up,” he’s said of his old approach to songwriting. “Now I wanna make chill, contemporary, calming-ass records.” His reference points for that shift are what he calls “old R&B” and Drake, influences audible in the production. On “Backbreaker,” produced by trio Bankroll Got It, he croons over crisp finger snaps and a dreamy Spanish guitar loop reminiscent of mid-’00 beats by producers like The-Dream, T-Pain, and Bryan-Michael Cox. And the dulled drums and lithe, slow-moving chords on the title track and “Spell Book” recall T-Minus and Noah “40” Shebib’s atmospheric work on Take Care. These production choices work well with Father’s singing, smoothing his coarse bangers into catchy, almost cutesy lullabies.
Father is no less brash and outrageous over these calmer backdrops. “Came through front door so slick/Niggas thought I was the locksmith/Fuck blue lives, fuck them coppers/Them boys can’t stop this,” he says on “Brighton Beach Flow,” floating over a spare drill beat. “Bought baby mama that brand new Rihanna/Her makeup don’t run when I’m dickin her down,” he sings on the anime-referencing “Fist of the North Star,” his Auto-Tune-slathered voice somehow generating a slant rhyme between “Rihanna” and “dickin her down.” Like Lil Wayne (who, coincidentally, Father interpolates on “Fist of the North Star”), Father uses melody more to mutate sounds and flows than to emote, an approach that produces verses that feel loose and stream-of-conscious despite being tightly metered. He’s always been a dexterous rapper; his embrace of melody highlights his precision.
The downside to Father’s singing is that it sometimes feels too reserved. As outlandish and detailed as his writing continues to be, his performances are often controlled, avoiding schmaltz or passion. The exceptions are “Backbreaker,” where he goes full heartthrob and laces his verse with squeaks and purrs, and album closer “Uncut,” where he completely lets loose. On the latter, swinging betweens coos, mumbles, and whines, he issues brazen threats, an earnest marriage proposal, and horny come-ons. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that in these more unhinged moments, his writing turns more personal, referencing parenthood (he became an actual father in 2020) and relationships alongside debauchery.
It’s overly even keel aside, Come outside, we not gon jump you is a breakthrough for Father, bringing out the color in his writing and forging a new direction for his music. In internet years and in rap years, there’s enough distance between now and Awful Record’s emergence for Father to coast on legacy and influence or pivot to empire-building, but he continues to prioritize fun and adventure. Though his new music is more suited to slow-dancing than moshing, the party continues.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Awful | January 8, 2021 | 7.4 | a9e2e766-7fd8-4319-b5a1-3b6813c7f834 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly's second album as Fergus and Geronimo continues the pair's preoccupation with lampooning hipster indie, proving to Williamsburg what Zappa was to San Francisco-- though with a slightly more conservative pallette. | Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly's second album as Fergus and Geronimo continues the pair's preoccupation with lampooning hipster indie, proving to Williamsburg what Zappa was to San Francisco-- though with a slightly more conservative pallette. | Fergus & Geronimo: Funky Was the State of Affairs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16903-funky-was-the-state-of-affairs/ | Funky Was the State of Affairs | Andrew Savage and Jason Kelly have recorded several singles and, with the arrival of Funky Was the State of Affairs, two albums as Fergus & Geronimo. They've drawn inspiration from the Mothers of Invention, 1950s doo-wop, Motown soul, 60s British Invasion pop, and garage rock. Their musical vision is expansive, but their perspective is narrow and specific: Savage and Kelly live to take the piss out of indie rock. What Frank Zappa was to San Francisco, these snarky Texans are to Williamsburg; they're outsiders pointing and laughing at the self-serious shenanigans perpetrated on the other side of the window. With Funky, Fergus & Geronimo have created a concept record of Big Ideas-- something about alien invaders and cultural paranoia-- that plays like a gag on indie pretentiousness. Whatever else can be said about Fergus & Geronimo, Funky is a worthy record for this moment in time, even when its weaknesses get in the way.
Speaking of weaknesses, Funky isn't as enjoyable as Fergus & Geronimo's full-length 2011 debut, Unlearn, even if it is more musically focused and muscular. Unlearn had better jokes, which were aimed with deadly accuracy at the trust-fund babies and trend-chasing yuppies currently populating the hippest realms of rock music. Beyond the quips, Unlearn made its most persuasive argument against the current state of indie with its very form: Misshapen, tossed-off, and unprofessional sounding, Unlearn seemed like a statement against the slick-ification of underground music. Savage and Kelly were clearly conversant with various musical styles, slipping in and out of genre guises with ease, but it was the ease (rather than the skill) that was emphasized. It recalled a time when self-identifying indie rockers made records on a lark, not to make a career.
It's tempting to compare Fergus & Geronimo to Ween, especially since we now desperately need a new group that can be funny while also being musically credible. Like Ween, Fergus & Geronimo have rooted their latest record in a specific time and place in music history. Funky is Savage and Kelly's "late 70s art-punk" record, and the reference points are as obvious as they are keenly observed. The chugging "No Parties" is a perfect melding of the first B-52's record with the first Devo record. "Roman Tick" barks nonchalantly in a rapid-fire 90 seconds like Pink Flag-era Wire. "Spies" sends the mid-60s Kinks through a Paul Weller filter. Toward the end of Funky, the album finally lives up to its title by pumping up the African polyrhythms of "Marky Move" in a nod to Talking Heads.
If Unlearn seemed like two smartasses laughing into a tape recorder for 30 minutes, Funky suggests that Savage and Kelly are in the midst of turning Fergus & Geronimo into an actual band. And, again, the Ween comparison looms; perhaps on the next record, Fergus & Geronimo will finally display some serious Eddie Hazel-level instrumental chops.
But here's how Fergus & Geronimo are not like Ween: Savage and Kelly don't go far enough. Where Ween were sick and dark and genuinely off-putting, fearlessly bounding down avenues of bad taste and full-on sociopathic rage, Fergus & Geronimo are only slightly less polite than the groups they're mocking. Funky Was the State of Affairs is a nice record with some quality laughs and catchy songs, but it doesn't cut as deep as it could. Fergus & Geronimo's goofiness belies its musical vision; it should leave a mark, rather than be easily brushed off. | 2012-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-08-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Hardly Art | August 3, 2012 | 6.8 | a9edd6b7-9805-4290-829f-c50684442c68 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The Super Furry Animals frontman’s latest is a concept album about an ancient volcano on the China-North Korea border that ranks among his most imaginative solo records. | The Super Furry Animals frontman’s latest is a concept album about an ancient volcano on the China-North Korea border that ranks among his most imaginative solo records. | Gruff Rhys: Seeking New Gods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gruff-rhys-seeking-new-gods/ | Seeking New Gods | Gruff Rhys could have been a schoolteacher—one of those unconventional educators who regale students with skits about historical oddities and scoff at standardized testing. The Super Furry Animals singer’s academic interests are as eclectic as the freewheeling Welsh band he spent most of his adulthood fronting. That’s been particularly clear since 2008, when Rhys began digging his way out of a songwriting rut with biographical albums about historical figures. First came a concept album by Rhys side project Neon Neon, about the bizarre life of car designer John DeLorean. Then, after SFA drifted into a lengthy hiatus, Rhys discovered he was a descendant of an 18th-century Welsh explorer named John Evans and proceeded to write a solo album, documentary, and book about the little-known saga. He’s the sort of songwriter who could read a newspaper article at 9 o’clock and have the outline for an album by noon.
You could characterize Seeking New Gods, a record drawn from the same well of madcap curiosity, as a loose follow-up to that 2014 record, American Interior. But Rhys’ seventh and latest solo album is not as aggressive in its genre-hopping, nor is it about an explorer. It’s not even about a human. It’s a concept album about a volcano—Mount Paektu, a desolate stratovolcano on the North Korea-China border that’s thought to hold mythical properties, and with which Rhys became obsessed after reading about it in a book. Coated in Rhys’ signature candy-sweet psychedelia and rippling with the immediacy of his touring band’s performances, Seeking New Gods ranks among his best and most imaginative solo albums, powered by the fervent drive of one determined to make an esoteric obsession legible to others.
The concept, to its credit, never feels tedious. It would be a fool’s errand to strive for scientific rigor, or a thorough accounting of Mount Paektu’s qualities. (That was Rhys’ first strategy, and the songs were, by his account, “pretty bad.”) Instead of bending his music to fit Mount Paektu’s story, Rhys shamelessly anthropomorphizes the volcano to suit his songwriting. He’s at his whimsical best crooning about the imagined emotional life of an ancient peak; on “Loan Your Loneliness,” he turns a song about the isolation of mountains that outlast entire human civilizations into a honeyed rumination on loneliness. A thumping piano shuffle makes the song a lively standout, and the pleasant buzz of a vintage Solina synth hovers over the mix like a high-altitude fog. (Rhys deliberately applied the instrument to every track, envisioning the synth pads “as weather systems wrapping around the mountain.”)
Musically, Seeking New Gods slots neatly between the orchestral grandeur of Rhys’ excellent Babelsberg and the lush, laidback psychedelia of Phantom Power- or Love Kraft-era Furries. Recorded in live sessions with the group Rhys assembled for the Babelsberg tour, the album feels like a solo record in name only. It pops with the collaborative energy of Rhys’ supporting cast: “Can’t Carry On” coaxes celestial beauty from the swooning vocal harmonies of Mirain Haf Roberts and Lisa Jên, while even the prettiest moments are offset by the energetic drumming of longtime Rhys collaborator (and former Flaming Lips drummer) Kliph Scurlock. “Hiking in Lightning,” an obligatory nod to stormy weather on Mount Paektu, evokes the raucousness of early SFA; it’s a rare miss, never quite committing to its punkish abandon. Still, the crisp, live sound of Seeking New Gods is a welcome change from the pitter-patter beats of 2019’s Pang!
As a songwriter, Rhys has a knack for locating the emotional center of surrealist subjects, whether it be a love story about Albert Einstein’s parents or an optimistic vision of Earth after human extinction. With Seeking New Gods, he’s found a particularly malleable target. He writes in the liner notes that he hopes the songs sound “like they come from a very personal place,” despite having been inspired by “events relating to Mount Paektu, from 2333 BC to present day.” The paradox thrives on “Mausoleum of My Former Self,” an ambling psych-folk meditation on how volcanoes inevitably linger long after they’ve erupted. Is Rhys envisioning himself as a volcano reflecting on past glories, or an aging songwriter pondering past lives through the prism of his old records (“As the mausoleum of my former self/My songs displayed upon the shelves”)? Naturally, it’s both. Centuries from now, when eccentric musicians stumble upon the long-lost figure of Gruff Rhys, they could pick a worse place to start.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | May 25, 2021 | 7.6 | a9faa1a3-dd85-4c8d-b58c-186dde199fe8 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Sunny Day Real Estate admired Fugazi's ethics, but dreamed of being Led Zeppelin and U2, bands that aspired for total transcendence—something they finally achieved on How It Feels to Be Something O**n. | Sunny Day Real Estate admired Fugazi's ethics, but dreamed of being Led Zeppelin and U2, bands that aspired for total transcendence—something they finally achieved on How It Feels to Be Something O**n. | Sunny Day Real Estate: How It Feels to Be Something On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22186-how-it-feels-to-be-something-on/ | How It Feels to Be Something On | Put aside their status as the genre’s definitive act and perhaps the only one who didn’t find it necessary to apologize for the term: Sunny Day Real Estate don’t make a very convincing case to be considered an emo band at all. If they had any kind of punk ideals, they were agents of mythmaking rather than social change—avoiding interviews and restricting their promo to a single, out-of-focus photo at a time when that made coverage a major pain in the ass for press; refusing to play shows in the entire state of California; presumably posing for a Nordstrom ad as a form of trolling before the word “trolling” existed. Their extracurriculars had more in common with Death Grips than Rites of Spring. Jeremy Enigk’s vocals were passionate and earnest, but he only occasionally screamed and the lyrics were often inscrutable, intentional nonsense or plainly about Jesus Christ. And while Diary drew on the earliest ideas of true “post-hardcore,” it was filled with grand and expansive anthems that weren’t all too far removed from what was on the radio at the time; the video for “In Circles” was filmed in the same sound studio as “Sex Type Thing,” and they sold over 200,000 copies on Sub Pop, a label that really hasn’t come anywhere near this stuff ever since.
Maybe their greatest demerit: even the most revered bands of emo’s first two waves were accessible and dorky, whereas Sunny Day Real Estate were the only ones that had an aura of actual magic about them: The incomparable triad that began Diary are supposedly the first three songs they ever wrote together, while some even consider LP2 to be the band's highest peak despite it having to be forced into existence with placeholder lyrics and cover art. Sunny Day Real Estate admired Fugazi’s ethics, but dreamed of being Led Zeppelin and U2, bands that aspired for total transcendence—something they finally achieved on How It Feels to Be Something On.
Even with their past accomplishments, this kind of a growth was unexpected specifically from Sunny Day Real Estate. Most engage in their quest for spiritual enlightenment alone, and SDRE were no exception: Jeremy Enigk’s devotion to born-again Christianity was announced in one of the first indie-rock open letters to the internet and was assumed to be a serious wedge issue for a band that had reservations about him joining in the first place. Guitarist and co-lyricist Dan Hoerner would often retreat to a Waldenesque parcel of land in rural Washington to engage in sustainable farming. And it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Sunny Day Real Estate broke up after each one of their four albums. “All our problems had been personality based...musically, we never had a problem,” drummer William Goldsmith claimed in a 1998 interview. Rumor has it that their 2009 reunion was on the verge of producing an entire record rather than the one-off “Lipton Witch” before said problems reemerged.
How It Feels came after their most eventful breakup; in 1996, Enigk released his stirring, under-appreciated solo album Return of the Frog Queen, which indulged in psych-pop leanings, prog, and obtuse spirituality that had little place in Sunny Day Real Estate at the time. Meanwhile, bassist Nate Mendel and Goldsmith had chanced upon the opportunity to join Foo Fighters as Dave Grohl’s solo project started to take off and both contributed to The Colour and the Shape, which should probably be grandfathered into emo the same way Pinkerton has been— its gleaming production, razored dual guitars and the gooey, awkward romanticism of lyrics were a more accurate predictor of the genre’s alt-rock takeover than anything Sunny Day Real Estate ever did.
But if you ever want to counter the idea of Grohl as the Nicest Guy in Rock, ask Goldsmith about the Colour and the Shape sessions—the passive-aggressive bullying and ensuing disillusion led to him rejoining Sunny Day Real Estate, while Mendel, who perhaps knew the band dynamic all too well, wasn’t willing to give up one of rock music's cushiest gigs: He’s still the Foo Fighters bassist to this day.
How It Feels To Be Something On still sounds like a reinvigorated band entering a tentative détente. Enigk’s voice had developed into a much more confident and voluminous instrument, one that didn’t need to rely on basic grunge dynamics: when hitting the high notes of “Two Promises” or “100 Million,” the throaty heft of the title track or the weightless, joyous chanting of “Every Shining Time You Arrive,” Enigk communes with Jeff Buckley and Robert Plant. The band predicted their future entries into straight-up prog rock with the 9/8 verses of “Roses in Water” and ditching Brad Wood’s deadening thud on Diary for a production best described by closer “Days Were Golden,” It’s a honeyed, ambered record with a timeless, autumnal glow.
There are still clear remnants of each member’s idiosyncratic sensibilities; Hoerner’s social conscience had always been intrinsic to Sunny Day Real Estate, as the band name itself—wisely revised from Chewbacca Kaboom—stemmed from his concern that eventually, anything could be sold, even a sunny day. The Hoerner-penned “100 Million” is definitive SDRE in its own way, a mantra of “pay for everything” unifying every part of the life cycle in a consumerist society, from the hospital to the hole you’re buried in.
As with so many earnest frontmen conflicted about commercializing art and the messianic role thrust upon them in the ’90s, Enigk looked east for spiritual sonic inspiration: His melodies are almost microtonal during “Roses in Water” and “Two Promises,” and the supposedly improvised, one-take “The Prophet” is a straight-up channeling of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Originally intended for Enigk’s solo album, “Every Shining Time You Arrive” easily translates to an acoustic, ecclesiastical strummer, a devotional to that certain someone who’s always there when you need them.
This all could’ve very easily resulted in a try-hard, pedantic exercise, i.e., emo’s answer to No Code—and perhaps you could argue that’s what Sunny Day Real Estate unintentionally achieved on their alternately bracing and bombastic swan song The Rising Tide. But as with Diary’s “Song About an Angel”—which the band has stressed should be taken literally—How It Feels rarely scans as evangelical, even when it clearly is. Sunny Day Real Estate’s willingness to actually engage with the press during the lead-up to How It Feels helped to tease out a sense of humor to their work that would’ve almost certainly gone unnoticed given their reputation. That euphonious, evocative phrase of “mondrary fields” during …“Guitar and Video Games?” Completely made up. “The Shark’s Own Private Fuck” underwent the same song-titling process as B-side “Bucket of Chicken,” the band’s ill-fated submission for the soundtrack of The Crow 2: City of Angels.
Hell, they might even have gotten kinda meta about where emo had gone since Diary. Enigk could be referring to his older, more dramatically chest-clutching self from “In Circles” on the opening “Pillars”: “I walk in circles, I’ve seen a million things that tell me so.” And is it possible that Enigk is mocking performative sadness on “Two Promises?” (“He thinks, ‘I gave her my heart, she tasted my soul, now she’s gone again’”).
This could all be speculation, of course—Sunny Day Real Estate certainly loved to keep things open to interpretation (just witness the futile LP2 lyric analysis on Songmeanings.net). But Enigk quickly abandoned that quality after How It Feels to Be Something On: 2000’s The Rising Tide is thrilling in points, but closer to the Jesus Christ pose of Creed than most would care to ever admit. Meanwhile, the Fire Theft was essentially The Rising Tide minus Hoerner, plus dry ice and black lights.
So as Sunny Day Real Estate started sounding like mystical rock beings, their actual legend receded. Diary still tops nearly every “best albums” list, yet the contemporary influence of Sunny Day Real Estate has become secondary to that of American Football, the sprawling, exploratory ambience of the Appleseed Cast or even the rawer Mineral, who were often tagged as a SDRE ripoff in their time. And the newer bands that have a religious component are more likely to tap into the distinct dichotomy of the sacred and profane, of heaven and hell, that was clearly expressed on Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me.
Despite it being a quantifiable improvement in many ways over Diary, the importance of How It Feels is far more difficult to ascertain than its predecessor. Diary, from its title on down, is basically a textbook, something tangible: bands who want to target a host of RIYLs can easily draw on Enigk’s grainy howl and/or limpid mewl, tune their guitars down to D, write endless variants on diaristic confessionals like “I dream to heal your wounds, but I bleed myself."
But how does a band conjure warmth, empathy, scope, worldliness, the essence of How It Feels to Be Something On? The only indie rock record that’s come anywhere near the pastoral, passionate splendor is the Hotelier’s Goodness, which should explain any question regarding the oft-remarked fanaticism of their audience. “When this began, this was a thing that we could both share/A bit of shade, the goodness fades, and we begin there,” Christian Holden brays, echoing Enigk’s like-minded assessment of the edenic promise of the romantic and religious: “All this time looking for love and you want to find peace, but you find me.”
It’s kind of a funny lyric, especially given Sunny Day Real Estate’s reputation, but not as funny as their most beautiful, essential ballad being called “Guitar and Video Games.” “What if we refused to follow the rules of fashion,” Enigk asks. As counterculture mission statements go, “Guitar and Video Games” isn’t exactly “Out of Step”—in fact, drinking, dancing, making out and video games were the exact opposite of what Minor Threat stood for. But isn’t that how “emotional hardcore” got started to begin with? In that sense, How It Feels to Be Something On is proof that Sunny Day Real Estate is emo after all—total transcendence is a never-ending quest, but as in guitars and video games and your relationship to that certain someone, you can fence in your own plot of heaven on earth. | 2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 6, 2016 | 8.8 | aa009e79-d409-4a4f-b70d-975f49ac4b02 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the Kinks’ wistful 1967 classic Something Else. | 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 explore the Kinks’ wistful 1967 classic Something Else. | The Kinks: Something Else | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-kinks-something-else/ | Something Else | If you were an average American pop consumer in 1967, you very likely had a confused impression of the Kinks. If what you knew were the hits you heard on Top 40 radio, you knew them as prophets of the power chord, or by contrast wry social satirists. There was even “Tired of Waiting,” a softly undulating plaint that could plausibly have worn a Motown arrangement. The Kinks were one of those British moptop bands, but unlike the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, they seemed to lack a clear narrative.
There were several reasons for this. You couldn’t hear album cuts without actually buying the thing yourself. Many songs, released as singles, tanked before you got a chance to hear them. The British still liked EPs—box-office poison in the States—and Americans favored shorter LPs, so the Kinks’ U.S. albums were randomly-sequenced jumbles of songs from different British platters. And then, crucially, in mid-1965, the Kinks were banned from touring for four years by the American Federation of Musicians, following a brawl on the set of Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is.”
Would the great picture of the Kinks have been clearer if you had had a chance to hear the raga-drone “See My Friends”? Or “Stop Your Sobbing,” hidden deep inside their first album and ignored by all until Chrissie Hynde (onetime Ray Davies paramour) scored a hit with her cover 15 years later? Or the potentially groundbreaking “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” which got its first American release seven years after it was recorded? Well, yes, actually. For one thing, you might have noticed that lead singer and chief songwriter Ray Davies was establishing himself as a sensibility—an auteur—at a time when the Beatles were still addressing themselves to teenagers and the Rolling Stones still working their way through the Chess back catalog.
Ray could and did address teenagers, but he primarily dwelt in an adult world, so adult that it comprised the dead past as well as the drab present. He addressed potentially everybody (at least everybody in the United Kingdom; he made no concession to American listeners and their points of reference). He was sometimes taken to task for condescension to his subjects, but although he could stiffly upbraid a well-respected man, he clearly felt deep sympathy and compassion for the woman who bought a hat like Princess Marina, and the tenants on Dead End Street, and the little mortgage-holder of Shangri-La, which might not be much but at least has indoor plumbing. He wrote songs about “Rosy” and “Arthur”; he had a sister named Rosie, who married a man named Arthur, and they emigrated to Australia—he wrote a song called “Australia.” He spoke about, and perhaps for and to, the working class, the lower-middle and middle-middle classes, the old and feeble, and—strikingly for the time—women.
He had just begun exploring this rich vein of character-driven songwriting when the band’s fifth official LP Something Else came out in 1967. The liner notes of the U.S.-only Kinkdom (1965) imagined the Kinks as “national heroes” of a land of mods, where there are no “waltzes, acne, grinds, anemia, eggplant, curfews, alarm clocks, violins, loneliness, diets, make-up exams, squares, callouses, [or] losers,” but within a year, Ray had begun building a lyrical world that encompassed all those things. The band’s previous album, 1966’s Face to Face, was the turning point, when Ray decided to make music entirely in his own image rather than for an imagined audience of mods.
The story is that Ray began writing the songs when he was coming out from under a nervous breakdown, presumably brought on by too much high life. On Face to Face, they include songs in the voice of a toff (“Dandy”), and more significantly, a ruined toff (the trio of “House in the Country,” “Most Exclusive Residence for Sale,” and “Sunny Afternoon”). The theme of failure shades the record, from the downmarket protests “Party Line” to the oceanically sad “Too Much on My Mind” to the elegiac “I’ll Remember.” Musically, Face to Face still hews very much to rock’n’roll, although the old sounds of music hall are beginning to creep in. Something Else, by contrast, is deeply and thoroughly colored by the musical past.
In 1960s Britain, music hall was the sound of the grandparents’ generation, but it was still a living thing. Your mods would have seen relics of the scene sharing stages with the forebears of beat music Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Music hall is not a style or a genre as much as it is an enormous circus tent, which takes in the demonically earworming sing-songs of the 1890s, the ragtime that started coming in around 1910, the various jazz forms that arrived after the Great War, children’s songs, saloon-bar ballads, patriotic anthems, and the often dark and even noir lounge-crooner styles that prevailed during the 1930s. Most significant beat combos had their stab at the form at some point, including the Who (parts of “A Quick One, While He’s Away”), the Stones (“Something Happened to Me Yesterday”), and the Beatles (“Yellow Submarine,” at least half of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and much, much more). Music hall was not only redolent of grandparents, and memories of stacked bills seen at the Kursaal in the late ’40s; it also suited the thrift-shop look that mods started sporting when they remade themselves as hippies, from top hats to ballgowns to brass-band uniforms.
Although Something Else is colored by music hall and its historical coevals, its explicit musical references are few: the galloping, Cossack-dance “David Watts”; the closing-time singalong “Harry Rag”; the oleaginous “End of the Season,” on which Ray sometimes sounds as if he’s singing through a megaphone. Nothing on the record is as proudly and emphatically nostalgic as the next single the band produced, “Autumn Almanac,” let alone the next album, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. And even though this was a time when the musical vocabulary was expanding dramatically and rock’n’roll had receded to become merely one of a vast selection of stylistic possibilities, the word that popped up in almost every contemporaneous review of Something Else was “nostalgia.”
What is nostalgic about Something Else is something that runs far deeper than mere style. As much as Face to Face was concerned with ruin and failure, this album is about loss; the passage of time hovers over every cut. The loss is personal, historical, societal, existential, even anticipatory. While the momentum of change was sweeping across Western society, gathering the steam that would result in a wave of abortive revolutions the following year, four guys in their early 20s were meditating on the transience of all things. They don’t seem especially reactionary about it—they do remain hippie mods, after all. And they are not protesting change, at least not yet; their attitude toward the historical past is rather more nuanced. The so-called Little Englanders that are evoked tend toward the pathetic: the easily-mocked conformist (“Tin Soldier Man”), the man whose life is systematically destroyed by his mother-in-law (“Situation Vacant”), the degenerate smokers in “Harry Rag” (which is rhyming slang for “fag,” as in cigarette).
Even the paragon David Watts, the schoolboy hero character, does not quite exemplify the Edwardian Boy’s Own verities. He spurns the girls’ advances ostensibly because he is “of pure and noble breed,” but really because he is “gay and fancy-free.” There’s “Afternoon Tea,” a hard-sell promotion for that ritual, as if it were endangered. But it is “Death of a Clown,” a rare collaboration by Ray and his brother Dave, that truly tolls the bell for the demoted ex-empire. The lions and tigers have given up, the fleas have deserted, no one bothers to get their fortunes read anymore, so we might as well break up the crown.
An even deeper loss is inscribed in “Two Sisters,” a memorial to the sacrifice of autonomy. The single sister looks into her mirror on a rising note, the married sister into the washing machine on a falling one; among triumphal chords, the married sister imagines her sibling’s liberty, then muted resolution arrives as she regards her children. An analogue to the carefree party-going single sister (who turns up in various guises in the Kinks’ repertoire, e.g. “Polly” and “Big Black Smoke”) can perhaps be glimpsed in Dave’s “Funny Face,” her “pill-shaped eyes” now blurred behind frosted hospital glass, access to her forbidden by doctors, and although Dave is insistent that she’s “all right,” we don’t entirely believe him.
At this point, Ray is still tinkering with the Tin Pan Alley dictum that every song be required to accommodate romance, but he is doing increasingly odd things with the assignment. “No Return” is a bossa nova, the last word in middle-class drinks music, evocative of sandy beaches bestrode by young women in colorful wraps, but it casts its heartbreak in the subjunctive (it begins with the word “if”). It only broaches the declarative in its non-bossa nova bridge with few quintessentially Ray bars that appear like a parenthesis. “End of the Season” superficially pretends to concern itself with lost love, but it’s really a portrait of a rich twat who has been cast into the cold by time, too old for the “chicks” and too right-wing for clubland. Ray affixes an audible pencil mustache, pushes his larynx upward to achieve a croon, and lets fall the crocodile tears. “Lazy Old Sun” romantically teases the listener with its gliding notes, double-tracked answering lines, and fervent chorus, but, like Mayakovsky and Frank O’Hara, Ray is literally addressing the sun. As he once said, it’s a joke, but it’s also not.
But true love does appear, resoundingly, on the record’s concluding number and hit single, “Waterloo Sunset.” American listeners perhaps did not appreciate that Waterloo is a large and not terribly picturesque train station, but they instinctively understood how the song binds together the ordinary and the transcendent. For all the talk about how Terry and Julie were Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd, they were fill-ins (“I wanted to use the names Bernard and Dorothy,” Ray claimed to Jonathan Cott in 1970). “Waterloo Sunset” is a hymn to the kind of workaday beauty that lies beneath notice but can hold its own in the cosmos. It makes the heart swell, and unlike most such pop songs does not turn out to consist mostly of corn syrup. Coming at the end of this album of romantically buoyant mourning, “Waterloo Sunset” is both immediate and far removed, forever contemplating its loss even as it celebrates its actuality. | 2018-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pye | March 25, 2018 | 9.3 | aa07294c-1493-48ff-8b39-bbc05e169c99 | Lucy Sante | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lucy-sante/ | |
Fusing ultra-vivid digital production with hazy vocals and acoustic guitars, the Irish-Chilean producer makes music inspired by sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the omnipresent internet. | Fusing ultra-vivid digital production with hazy vocals and acoustic guitars, the Irish-Chilean producer makes music inspired by sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the omnipresent internet. | Sega Bodega: Dennis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sega-bodega-dennis/ | Dennis | On March 12, 1951, Hank Ketcham debuted Dennis the Menace in the Post-Hall Syndicate, which supplied content to newspapers across America. In the UK, on the same day, David Law published a comic strip of the same name in The Beano, a children’s magazine. The odd anecdote inspired the title of Sega Bodega’s third and latest album, Dennis. For Sega, aka Salvador Navarrete, the coincidence is a precursor to what today we might call the internet hive mind. “I have this theory that all of our brains are connected to a machine that is pumping out information to all of us all at the same time,” Navarrete told Interview. His statement might bring smartphones to mind, but the Irish-Chilean producer means something more enigmatic, predating Google and social media—closer to divine fate than a viral meme.
Dennis is the most recent entry in Sega Bodega’s increasingly personal body of work, framed through his singular lens of murky, club-ready pop and confessional lyrics. Where Navarrete has always balanced ballads and euphoric production, often in the same song, on Dennis the line is practically nonexistent. From the one-two punch of early standouts “Adulter8” and “Elk Skin,” Dennis puts dark pop in the service of visceral pleasure, pairing addictive, tactile synth arpeggios with muffled vocals and acoustic guitars. Inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (see “Tears & Sighs,” whose title comes from two of the Three Mothers), sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the internet’s omnipresence, Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.
Where other artists might shy from fusing acoustic and electronic sounds so closely, Navarette embraces them as equally worthy of attention, although his palette is distinctly digital in color. Much as in his contribution to Caroline Polachek’s “Sunset,” trance motifs and acoustic guitars effortlessly converge, particularly on “Elk Skin” and “Tears & Sighs.” Dennis is more playful than Navarrete’s first two albums, incorporating cryptic spoken-word “sleep talking” interludes from Miranda July and others. “Elk Skin” opens with a Greek fan asking Navarrete to sample her voice; “Dirt” concludes with July repeating, “My water bottle is bird transition”—the kind of “beautiful nonsense,” Navarrete has said, that “comes out when someone is absolutely comatose.” He seems to be using these voices more for their sonics than for the words’ literal meanings; the same applies to Navarrete’s lyrics, which take a back seat to his dazzling, sometimes unpredictable production.
While pulling inspiration from Dennis the Menace, the album’s title is also meant as a reversal of “sinned,” since Heaven, angels, and salvation have always been some of Navarrete’s lyrical preoccupations. But for cosmic, existential concerns, Navarrete is equally drawn to macabre body horror and foreboding titles that suggest a suffocating sense of dread. “Humiliation Doesn’t Leave a Mark” and “Set Me Free, I’m an Animal” both convey a vague kind of emotional harm that’s largely left unexplained. But dig deeper into the album’s dream logic, and a wounded desire for intimacy and connection emerges from its byzantine, watery depths. An expression of Navarrete’s search for communion in the global collective consciousness, Dennis—with its euphoric trance synths and nods to club music’s global lingua franca—speaks to the utopian potential of electronic music’s hive mind. | 2024-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ambient Tweets | May 1, 2024 | 7.2 | aa12d825-e3c0-4b28-92db-ab660043b14b | Peyton Toups | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-toups/ | |
Years in the making, U2’s 14th studio album finds the band straining to reassert its relevance in a world where rock music has long since ceded its vanguard status. | Years in the making, U2’s 14th studio album finds the band straining to reassert its relevance in a world where rock music has long since ceded its vanguard status. | U2: Songs of Experience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/u2-songs-of-experience/ | Songs of Experience | In the late 1980s, en route to Memphis on the mission that would be dubiously immortalized by the documentary U2: Rattle and Hum, Bono hitched a ride with a stranger whose car stereo dashed his spirits. The young driver had been listening to Def Leppard’s Mutt Lange-produced glam-metal opus Hysteria—and it sounded magnificent. Bono was awed. When at last it dawned on the driver who exactly he’d picked up, he switched out the Def Leppard tape for some vintage U2. By comparison, it couldn’t help but sound dull. “I think we were a little out of touch,” Bono reflected later, having heard what U2 lacked. “We weren’t as great as we figured we were.”
It is hard to believe that U2 were galvanized to write Achtung Baby! by a chance encounter with “Pour Some Sugar on Me” on cassette. But then that’s U2: Their art is fundamentally, inveterately emulous. The pursuit of relevance seems above all what motivates them to create. What are they doing, really, when time and again they endeavor to reinvent themselves, if not trying to remain fashionable—or, more precisely, to stave off obsolescence? In 1989, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. told Bono he worried the band was “turning into the world’s most expensive jukebox.” The band could not abide it. “They became so bored playing U2’s greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward,” Bill Flanagan writes in his biography U2 at the End of the World. “It didn’t seem to make any difference.” It’s this inclination toward boredom and restlessness that has always secretly been U2’s animating force.
The fear of seeming “a little out of touch”: Nearly 30 years after Bono declared on stage that the band had to “go away and dream it all up again,” this is still the prime creative catalyst. And on Songs of Experience, U2’s 14th studio album, the anxiety is more apparent than ever. Bono, it seems, has been spending a lot of time around a lot of strangers’ car stereos, and what he’s concluded U2 lacks he’s undertaken resolutely to embrace. Behold the album’s many hallmarks of the modern: There are contributions by Kendrick Lamar (“American Soul”) and Haim (“Lights of Home”), and there are flourishes that conspicuously recall the xx (“Red Flag Day”) and Arcade Fire (“Get Out of Your Own Way”). Opening track “Love Is All We Have Left” invokes a distinctly Justin Vernon-ish vocoder, an homage we might dub “Bono Iver.” And “Summer of Love”—on which Bono croons “I been thinkin’ ‘bout the West Coast/Not the one that everyone knows”—suggests someone just discovered Born to Die.
Bono and the Edge have said that lately, innovation has been less evident in rock music than elsewhere—in “R&B, hip-hop, and pop,” according to a profile of the band in the New York Times. This academic interest in other genres is manifest across Songs of Experience. It’s clear in the subwoofer-trashing bass that undergirds “The Blackout,” the liveliest Adam Clayton has sounded in ages. It’s clear in the thick slabs of lurid distortion that course through “American Soul,” which last appeared, in much different form, as “XXX” on Kendrick’s DAMN. And it’s clear in the sumptuous, waterlogged beat that concludes the final track, “13 (There Is a Light),” reminiscent of Noah “40” Shebib and his legions of imitators. These are brazen attempts to capture the zeitgeist, even by U2’s standards. Their combined effect is dire: Songs of Experience is the shameless effort of four men in their late 50s to muster a contemporary, youthful sound.
Of course, the band’s aspirations toward relevance are tempered by a competing pursuit: Here they strive, as usual, to guarantee longevity. They want to seem in touch; they also want to canonize another classic. This, one presumes, accounts for the inclusion of more familiar-sounding U2 barn-burners such as “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in its Way,” which sounds almost exactly like one expects a U2 song with that title would, and lead single “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” which has already failed to take hold of the popular imagination.
“The problem with rock now is that it’s trying to be cool,” Bono said recently. “But clear thoughts and big melodies—if they come from a true place, they not only capture the instant, they become eternal in a way.” The Edge, meanwhile, said the band was concerned with whether these songs would “be played by people in a bar in 25 years.” Well, Songs of Experience does not much “capture the instant,” hunger to as it might, and it is safe to assume that while, say, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” or “New Year’s Day” have proven something like timeless, “Red Flag Day” and “The Showman (Little More Better)” will fall rather short of eternal. “How long must we sing this song?” Bono asked on “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—and they’ve been obliged to sing it nightly since 1983. With these songs, about a single tour should do.
Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same. Bono still writes Bono-brand howlers: He still lapses into prosaic platitudes (“Are you tough enough to be kind?/Do you know your heart has its own mind?”), moony cliche (“Free yourself to be yourself/If only you could see yourself”), and arena-rock patois (“You! Are! Rock’n’roll!”—the “you” there is America, naturally). Politics are addressed in earnest, to ludicrously ill-judged effect. Which is more vicariously embarrassing: the stretch of “Red Flag Day” that contrasts a tryst on the beaches of the Mediterranean with the deaths of Syrian refugees (“Baby let’s get in the water… so many lost in the sea last night”), or the portmanteau punchline that ends “American Soul,” which is simply: “refujesus”?
It is tempting to praise Songs of Experience on the basis of its mawkish wholeheartedness. It does indeed seem like the product of considerable toil: This thing has been in progress for something like three years now, and between its revisions, reconstructions, and post-election rewritings, it plainly benefits from more attention and effort than any U2 album since All That You Can’t Leave Behind. But it’s precisely this manifest ambition that makes Songs of Experience dispiriting. The music itself isn’t any better merely because this time around the band actually cares; all the industrious fervor amounts to meager flailing. It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything. | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | December 4, 2017 | 5.3 | aa13d5c1-01b0-4713-9d4a-7664299b0f9e | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The second collaboration between the two experimental metal bands feels necessary. They bands flood the gap between doom and grindcore with all kinds of stunts, risks, and tricks. | The second collaboration between the two experimental metal bands feels necessary. They bands flood the gap between doom and grindcore with all kinds of stunts, risks, and tricks. | The Body / Full of Hell: Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-body-and-full-of-hell-ascending-a-mountain-of-heavy-light/ | Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light | The very idea of a second full-length collaboration between the Body and Full of Hell seems laughably redundant. Just last year, the two bands reached across the aisle of experimental metal subgenres for the malevolent and strong One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, an overwhelming outburst that distilled and forcibly synthesized what had long been best about both bands. The depth-charge doom of Portland duo the Body supplied the foundation, with drums that rattled like cannon fire and guitars that groaned as if from an abyss. The menacing grindcore of Maryland quartet Full of Hell shot and scattered across that frame, with blast beats arriving unannounced and high-treble riffs jutting from the din. The pitched squeals of the Body’s Chip King and the feverish vitriol of Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker made for excellent foils, just as both bands’ embrace of electronics allowed one to warp the other. It was a powerful doom-and-grindcore hybrid, built on a mutual fondness for overloading the senses and the speakers at every appropriate moment. So, why do it again?
But Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light bests its predecessor by doing something much different—acknowledging the fundamental rift between the bands’ respective styles and flooding the valley between them with all kinds of stunts, risks, and tricks. Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, for instance, helms a drum orchestra during “Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft,” a riot of sound so aggressive it would make John Zorn blush. Full of Hell bassist Sam DiGristine even adds squawking soprano saxophone at the close of “Light Penetrates.” Harsh noise outbursts, stroboscopic electronic editing, drum & bass beats: The Body and Full of Hell lace them throughout Heavy Light, unexpected oases in a disorienting musical minefield. If Ache was an obvious intersection between these two prolific and restless bands, Heavy Light documents wild detours taken to get back to the same place.
The Body and Full of Hell are avid collaborators, and they funnel those collective experiences into these eight tracks. “The King Laid Bare” combines both bands’ respective doom and grindcore powers, but buttresses it with a bludgeoning four-on-the-floor beat. King’s screams and Walker’s growls crisscross frantically, a duet for broken angels. Lined with feedback and caked in static, closer “I Did Not Want to Love You So” is an uncommon exercise in restraint, both bands locked into a dirge that terrorizes only through suggestion. In a sense, it’s a heavy metal reprise of the Haxan Cloak’s “Excavation” suite. The Body and Full of Hell at last manage to make one another more interesting and involved.
While Heavy Light itself is a strange delight, there’s an implicit lesson to these eight tracks that’s perhaps more important and enduring: For a decade, the Body have sometimes seemed like the most absurdly dark band around, whether that meant appearing armed in promotional photos, naming a record No One Deserves Happiness, or putting Japanese terrorist Shoko Asahara on T-shirts that also read “Hate All Life.” On the surface, they’ve never seemed for the faint- or light-hearted. But on stage and in conversation, Lee Buford and King are playful and even cartoonish, two fundamentally approachable people who explore the dark to share the light.
Heavy Light might be their clearest recorded indication of that complex personality, of how there’s often a sense of zeal and color in what seem like obscenely dark moments. The Body and Full of Hell sound delighted while making this record, new partners becoming comfortable enough to admit just how weird they are. Yes, Heavy Light is destructive music, streaked with shrieked lyrics about prey and death, age and tears. But it’s also an inspiring, instructive record, too, where two brutal bands find solidarity and something to celebrate in the darkness. Even if every thought here isn’t complete, Heavy Light is as exciting as either band has ever been. A second collaboration between the Body and Full of Hell seemed unnecessary; the third, somehow, now seems imperative. | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | November 16, 2017 | 7.8 | aa1630b0-2132-49ed-99bf-67b0fc5e2da3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
La Luz's second LP was inspired by Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, in which the teenagers of 1970s Seattle spread a bizarre sexually transmitted disease with varying symptoms. Produced by Ty Segall, the album brings surf-rock riffs and girl-group harmonies to songs that are darker than they seem. | La Luz's second LP was inspired by Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, in which the teenagers of 1970s Seattle spread a bizarre sexually transmitted disease with varying symptoms. Produced by Ty Segall, the album brings surf-rock riffs and girl-group harmonies to songs that are darker than they seem. | La Luz: Weirdo Shrine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20781-weirdo-shrine/ | Weirdo Shrine | In Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, the teenagers of 1970s Seattle are spreading a bizarre sexually transmitted disease with varying symptoms. One might grow a tail or shed their skin, or sprout a tiny mouth below the collarbone that whispers secrets while you sleep. Some kids become extremely deformed, while others manage to hide their disfigurement beneath bandages and clothes. Black Hole was the inspiration behind La Luz's Weirdo Shrine, and there are oblique references to Burns' work littered throughout: its title alludes to the artwork built out of trash and human parts that Black Hole's characters stumble upon in the forest, and lyrics like "Cool kids/ Telling lies/ I can't hold their gazes in mine," (from opening track "Sleep Till They Die") hint at the shame and deceit in Burns' world.
What makes Weirdo Shrine interesting is that all this existential dread is wrapped up in classic-sounding surf rock, topped with enough "ooohhhs", "aaahhhs", and vocal harmonies to fill your girl group quota for an entire year. Lead singer and guitarist Shana Cleveland tosses out bright, airy guitar riffs, tinged with just the right amount of reverb, as easy as breathing. But the surfer girl guise is a front. If La Luz are a rum punch drink served in a pineapple, be careful lifting the tiny drink umbrella: There's probably a black widow spider underneath.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the ballad, "I'll Be True". Cleveland croons, "No one else treats me like you do/ And I'll be true to you/ Just as long as you want me to," while keyboardist Alice Sandahl tries to wrestle the good name of organ solos from the hands of Ray Manzarek. But the lingering effect of the song is not the declaration of loyalty, it's the minor chord progression that blends with the ladies' descending voices. It begs the question: If the love in the song is so pure and innocent then why does it come tinged with such eeriness?
La Luz recorded It's Alive in the back of their friend's trailer. For Weirdo Shrine, producer Ty Segall constructed a makeshift studio out of an old surfboard factory. At first, this tactic can come across almost like a cheap gimmick, a soundbite for press releases. But once you realize Segall also chose to keep a persistent hissing overlay on the entire record (it's hard to ignore once you hear it)—the occasional, lingering odd note or glitch will also tend to appear during the transitions between tracks—his methods become less a cute anecdote, and more a way to keep the group firmly grounded in their DIY roots. The ladies might have perfect pitch, but this is not an album for cleaning up mistakes.
It's frustrating that the record doesn't fully convey the energy of La Luz's live shows, where the band members will crowd surf and request the audience make space for a line dance à la "Soul Train". But if you choose to focus on La Luz's doo-wop harmonizing, then you're only looking at the frilly, pink bow that tops the whole package. The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz's music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent. You could blink and miss their sneaky, underhanded way of slipping unease into their cheerful-sounding songs. Which is why you should give them more of your attention. Much like a car accident, it's always the ones we didn't see coming that hit the hardest. | 2015-08-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | August 4, 2015 | 7.1 | aa164ce8-b020-4105-bb49-462841129f71 | Lindsay Hood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-hood/ | null |
After two records of democratic production and sampled voices arranged inside compositions for sliced-and-diced guitar, banjo, and cello, the Books make vocals and song structures this LP's centerpiece. | After two records of democratic production and sampled voices arranged inside compositions for sliced-and-diced guitar, banjo, and cello, the Books make vocals and song structures this LP's centerpiece. | The Books: Lost and Safe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/856-lost-and-safe/ | Lost and Safe | Over two albums, the Books have plucked sampled voices from their original context and arranged them inside simple compositions for sliced-and-diced guitar, banjo, and cello. They've taken moments of contemplation-- when one understands something on an emotional level but can't quite articulate his thoughts-- and dressed it up in a melodic frame. By transmitting at the frequency of pre-conscious association and intuition, Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink were immediately accessible despite absences of obvious reference points. Both records felt like gifts, demanding little from the listener but paying out handsomely.
With their fresh sound and economic construction (the first two releases were each under 40 minutes), the Books did well to stick to a similar template on back-to-back records. But in preparing for their third album, one senses Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong felt as if they'd mastered this approach and needed to try something different. On Lost and Safe, the Books take the vocals and song structures hinted at on Thought for Food and fleshed out on The Lemon of Pink and make them the centerpiece.
This time it's Zammuto alone on the mic; Anne Doerner, whose spare vocal contributions to The Lemon of Pink wound up being a highlight, doesn't sing any lead. There's more processed electric guitar (often used in a clicking, repetitive manner reminiscent of classical minimalism) and far less cello. Despite live vocals on nearly every track and the shifts in texture, the approach is still very recognizably the Books. In a way, the original lyrics aim for the same level of engagement as the odd samples, finding and skirting the edge between different meanings. "Yes and no are just distinguished by distinction, so we chose the in-between" are the first words Zammuto sings in his hushed whisper on the opening "A Little Longing Goes Away", and that sort of ambiguity sets the tone for the record. Words for the Books have been a subject in and of themselves, worth hearing purely as sound, and the written lyrics here have a similar character.
Most of Lost and Safe is pleasant enough but not much more. "Be Good to Them Always" is the record's lone great track, one that hints at potential interesting directions down the road. As clicky electric guitar with some backward reverb pans across the stereo field, Zammuto sings in concert with the sampled voices, finding the hidden melody in the deadpan newsman deliver of lines like "I can hear a collective rumbling in America" and "This great society is going smash." Reminiscent of Steve Reich's "Different Trains", which built tunes from the speech inflections of interviewed holocaust survivors, "Be Good to Them Always" is a fantastic reminder of the musicality of the spoken word, an idea that lurks constantly inside the music of the Books.
One of the more interesting things about the Books first two records was their democratic production; the music never seems to push the listeners ear toward any one element. But now Zammuto's voice is clearly the focus, and though his quiet and half-spoken phrasing works well with the arrangements, the "tunes," as such, don't necessarily warrant the added attention. It's as though, with a few exceptions, the Books weren't quite sure what they wanted to do and they wound up stuck halfway between proper songs and the ambiguity of samples. Though the Books do a nice job here bending lyrics to fit the open-ended tone of their compositional style, the original vocals wind up draining their sound of mystery, and Lost and Safe seems by far more conventional than their previous two records. | 2005-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Tomlab | April 4, 2005 | 7 | aa16cf46-0d2a-4fbf-b228-76d1b4140f3e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The band’s open-armed fifth album looks to make amends, situating our human responsibilities within a natural world no less powerful and vulnerable than we are. | The band’s open-armed fifth album looks to make amends, situating our human responsibilities within a natural world no less powerful and vulnerable than we are. | Pinegrove: 11:11 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pinegrove-1111/ | 11:11 | Pinegrove released their breakthrough record Cardinal in early 2016, a moment which, in rose-colored retrospect, we might call the good old days. An air of promise hung around these newcomers from New Jersey, a certainty that they were the next big benevolent thing in indie rock. It didn’t last. “Reality explodes,” goes one lyric on the band’s new album, 11:11, “and suddenly, we’re sinking/And I’m singing/And I’m old.”
No band’s longevity has ever been certain, least of all Pinegrove’s, after a member of the band’s crew accused lead singer Evan Stephens Hall of inappropriate conduct. At her request, Hall completed a course of therapy and suspended the band’s touring schedule for 12 months. 11:11 is Pinegrove’s third release since that hiatus, and the first to clarify what Hall learned from it: When you hurt somebody, you make amends. “I’m not gonna let you down,” sings Hall, in the closing moments of “Respirate,” before opening the next song with, “I let you down today.” It is hard to reckon with having hurt someone; these songs understand that repairing that hurt is both possible and necessary.
But Pinegrove aren’t just looking inward on 11:11. There are sweeping indictments of the ruling class on this album that would have been wildly out of place on the cozy Cardinal. Their scope extends back and forward in time—long before “corona hit” (“Respirate”) and far ahead, on “Orange,” to climate apocalypse. The record is open-armed, inclusive, with instrumentation echoing comfort-food folk and the rootsier elements of recent indie rock. Anyone from a teenage Alex G devotee to an older generation brought up on Neil and Joni will find themselves welcome into this broad musical tent. (Hall’s father plays throughout the album, contributing piano and a particularly stirring organ strain on standout “Alaska.”) The band is reaching out, both asking for support and extending it to anyone who wants in.
Pinegrove’s chief lyrical focus, the place where they see the most urgent need for repair, is the vulnerable space of nature. The album’s scenes—an old-growth forest where “trees repeat like numerals do,” a beach circled by birds, an “opalescent open road” of a sky—are situated in vivid outdoor spaces. We are a long way from the smoggy Port Authority of “Old Friends.” Human beings are animals, the band argues, integral moving parts of the natural world rather than interlopers within it. We have the power to choke the ocean with trash, but the ocean has the power to choke us, too. The best song on this record, “Swimming,” narrates a small child’s narrow escape from drowning. After emerging on the beach, “sputtering,” coughing into the sand, the child takes stock of the scene around him: “the moving trees, and birds above, and clouds.” Hall sings, “I wanna be a part of it/I’m not ready to die/Yet.”
Within this advocacy is the understanding that nature is not a panacea. It is a powerful force, occasionally a malevolent one; it can create sadness as well as cure it. In the lyrics of “Flora,” a depressed person takes “a blue meander into the woods,” only to find that “nothing’s shining like I feel it should.” He collapses—“bowing down,” “bending down”—beneath the trees, and ends the song on the floor. The scrubby undergrowth assumes the texture of Tracey Emin’s blue rug. The birds sound “dissident”—he may have meant “dissonant”—and the sun, in the grass, is red.
Still, the band urges, though “nothing feels good” even in the splendor of nature, to stand by and allow its destruction like so many do-nothing senators is not an option. “Today, the sky is orange,” Hall sings. “And you and I know why.” 11:11 is replete with pilots asleep at the wheel and elected officials ignoring the obvious. Yet the record’s most compelling figure is that dazed child on the beach, vomiting sand and seawater, insisting, “I want to be alive.” Hall, in working to make amends, and working once more to make music, seems to have reached the same conclusion as this child: Healing the world requires one to remain in the world.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | February 3, 2022 | 7.1 | aa1804f8-c6fe-47a2-a53d-e3e4ff5bdcf4 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The Kenyan noise band’s debut is inventive and abrasive, a timely distillation of global chaos and techno-dystopian dread. | The Kenyan noise band’s debut is inventive and abrasive, a timely distillation of global chaos and techno-dystopian dread. | Duma: Duma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duma-duma/ | Duma | The duo of Martin Khanja and Sam Karugu make music that’s manic, heavy, and impossible to categorize. It’s electronic and caustic, though it can also feel pensive. Machine-gun drums and piercing shrieks form the foundation of most songs; there are occasionally little ribbons of melody to cling to, but more often than not, static, synth drones and sculpted feedback provide the only adornment. This is music that comes apart at the seams, that glitches and convulses, that revels in the sounds of people and machines stretched to their breaking points.
Both Khanja and Karugu are veterans of Nairobi’s thriving metal scene. Khanja’s previous band, Lust of a Dying Breed, pushed speed metal into industrial territory: their final release traded in blast beats for the jittery sound of programmed drums. Duma goes even further, dispensing with any allegiance to genre, though the band draws liberally from black metal, power electronics, grindcore, drone and even hip-hop. As a composer, Karugu is an agent of chaos: these songs are crammed full of pummeling bass hits, stacked polyrhythms and other violently rhythmic sounds—it’s easy to picture an Ableton grid crowded with overlapping drum tracks. He sometimes employs recordings of hand drums as well, though even these are usually played at inhuman tempos. Khanja, meanwhile, can howl like a black metal vocalist, bark like a metalcore singer, or even yelp with a kind of frenzied glee. His throat-shredding vocals are often the only constant in these songs as tempos shift, tracks drop in and out of the mix, and waves of noise advance and recede.
With a few exceptions, Duma has two distinct halves: the most frantic songs are front loaded while the songs on the back half are more meditative, though just as unflinchingly dark. In practice, this can feel a bit like putting on a soothing face mask after an exfoliating scrub. “Omni” opens with a skipping pulse that feels like it could induce tachycardia, eventually settles into a trap beat and then plunges back into discord—it sounds a bit like a corrupted MP3 of a TNGHT song. Lead single “Lionsblood'' buries black metal vocals under an assault of manic hand drums, while “Uganda With Sam” sounds like minimalist electronic music overlaid with hardcore growls. There are spookily atmospheric songs as well. “Pembe 666” marries mechanical-sounding drones to a spoken word piece, a reading of Revelation 5:6 in Kiswahili. It sounds every bit as haunting as the verse it quotes (“...[A]nd in the midst of the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes”).
While it's hard to point to any one act that Duma sound like, their music does have some analogues. The breakneck polyrhythms of Tanzanian singeli music (as heard on their label, Nyege Nyege Tapes’ releases of artists affiliated with Sisso Studios) aim for a similar sonic overload. And in ethos and ambition, Duma seem to draw from some of the most iconoclastic acts from the past decade of extreme music: they are elementally similar to early Fuck Buttons and as willing to fail the black metal purity test as Deafheaven and Liturgy. But where all of those bands aim for some kind of transcendence, Duma is content to frolic in the ugliness found here on earth. The textures they employ on Duma evoke overloaded circuits, corroded machinery, and heavy metals leaking into groundwater. This is the sound of human dread and misery, soundtracked by devices destined for the trash heap. Few records released this year better capture both the chaos and anxiety of our current moment.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nyege Nyege Tapes | August 7, 2020 | 7.5 | aa1ae9f3-5e8d-4219-8632-6eda2a8803e0 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
One of Kompakt's cornerstone artists returns to making slow, bleary, moody, spooky sounds just as they find favor in the U.S. electro-pop underground. | One of Kompakt's cornerstone artists returns to making slow, bleary, moody, spooky sounds just as they find favor in the U.S. electro-pop underground. | Superpitcher: Kilimanjaro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14617-kilimanjaro/ | Kilimanjaro | Of the formative sounds most associated with the epochal electronic-music label Kompakt, none has had as long a shelf-life as the zoned-out house of Superpitcher. Worthy competitors have crept up and either faded away (shuffling "schaffel" techno) or been assimilated so fully as to become part of the general dance-music weather (Wolfgang Voigt's minimalism, Michael Mayer's precision trance). But Superpitcher-- nobody does what he does quite as well. Nobody even really tries. What he does has also proven very prescient, especially as we hear more and more slow, bleary, moody, spooky sounds from the haunted and/or wasted outer edges of genres like chillwave and witch-house. Such is the style that Superpitcher has worked within since breaking out in 2001 with a single called "Heroin". And such is the style of his fine return to form, Kilimanjaro.
It's been a few years since Superpitcher churned out his last essential material, having chosen instead to mess around in the studio and explore ideas of "singing" and playing "instruments" on a string of admirable but ultimately disappointing projects, most notably his Michael Mayer-collaboration album Supermayer Save the World. None of his work was ever exactly bad, but none of the energy or joy evident in the making of it found a corollary in the energy or joy receptors of those of us who endeavored to listen to it. Worthy lesson for all aspiring music-makers: Just because you can play a slide whistle doesn't mean you necessarily should.
But there's a slide whistle early on Kilimanjaro, and it sounds great-- and not only great but integral, as if time spent playing slide whistle and sounding a little lame in the past paid off in the form of a sound now worth exploring even more down the line. Not to overstate the slide whistle, though. It's just one tool among many used in "Voodoo", a track that opens Kilimanjaro on a notably dubby note, with all kinds of sounds-- sensuous singing, falsetto yelps, ominous chimes, rattling trash-can taps-- spread across an incredibly deep sound-field and arranged in time with a sort of lilting quasi-reggae beat.
There's a lot going on, but one of Superpitcher's strengths as a producer is the way he employs everything he does, big and small, in service of a consistently melancholy and often menacing mood. His drum tracks, like the ones in "Country Boy", are great examples of how subtle changes of timing and inflection can affect machine music as much as strings or piano. And the rhythms have a way of accentuating the weariness at the heart of Superpitcher's sound by falling invariably behind the beat, always a little slower and gloomier than they should-- like a slump-shouldered teenager clomping a few steps behind his mom at the mall while humming Cure songs in his head.
The mood comes across explicitly in lyrics that center on loneliness and disconnection with a breathy simplicity. But the mood proves even more unmistakable in the music, whether loping at an almost Portishead-like speed or amped up in the sultry, suggestive funk of "Black Magic" and the anthemic rave-piano torch song "Joanna". It's hard to imagine anyone not being moved in some divergent but certain way by those last two tracks in succession. And it's even harder to imagine Superpitcher being gone again for as long as he was. | 2010-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | September 9, 2010 | 7.8 | aa1bbd68-92a7-43eb-9cf6-ee4d9db4a1b6 | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
After nearly two decades of on-off collaborations, the veteran musicians finally reach the finish line with their first full-length together, yielding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop. | After nearly two decades of on-off collaborations, the veteran musicians finally reach the finish line with their first full-length together, yielding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop. | Danger Mouse / Black Thought : Cheat Codes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danger-mouse-black-thought-cheat-codes/ | Cheat Codes | Producer Danger Mouse and rapper Black Thought have both made careers out of bridging cultural gaps. Danger Mouse first broke big as a producer with 2004’s The Grey Album, his mashup of vocals from JAY-Z’s then-swan song The Black Album with the instrumentals from the Beatles’ self-titled ninth full-length—colloquially known as The White Album. The Grey Album’s success led to production work with rappers like CeeLo Green—with whom he released two albums as the soul group Gnarls Barkley—and the late MF DOOM, as well as indie-rock polymaths like Damon Albarn and Beck. Black Thought, meanwhile, is a 30-year rap veteran and lead MC of the Roots who draws connections between capos, politicians, and pop culture in ruthless freestyles as often as he soothes and tickles audiences on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street. They each use music to bend time and history to their respective wills, finding the playful and the profane in every space they occupy.
The pair recognized each other as kindred spirits as far back as the mid-aughts. After working together on what would ultimately become a campy bonus track for Danger Mouse and DOOM’s 2005 Adult Swim collaboration The Mouse and The Mask, they began crafting an album originally called Dangerous Thoughts. Busy schedules eventually forced them to shelve the project for over a decade: Danger Mouse formed the duo Broken Bells with James Mercer of the Shins and produced albums for the Black Keys and Karen O, while Black Thought settled into his role in Jimmy Fallon’s house band and began his Streams of Thought EP series in 2018. After several false starts, the duo finally reaches the finish line with their first full-length collab, now called Cheat Codes. Their faith in each other is well placed, breeding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop.
A reunion at this point in their respective careers is peculiar because they’re approaching it from different ends. The three volumes of Streams of Thought have rendered Black Thought more prolific as a solo artist than ever before; and while Danger Mouse has certainly worked with rappers since The Mouse and The Mask, he hasn’t produced an entire album for one in nearly 20 years. Luckily, they have natural chemistry. Mouse dives back into grainy loops that will be familiar to fans of his older rap work, though they’re generally less playful than you may be expecting. Tongue-in-cheek flourishes pop up every once in a while, like the twangy guitar lick grating against the crisp drums on “No Gold Teeth” or the patch of rhythmic hums on the hook of “Strangers.” On “Saltwater,” he even takes a stab at the sloping rhythms associated with Griselda to accommodate guest Conway the Machine. But most of these beats are standard boom-bap, handsome but not particularly adventurous.
Take opening song “Sometimes,” which turns a bed of violins, piano, guitar, and maudlin vocals into a pulpit for Black Thought to draw lines across Black history: “Images of grandeur from Jamel Shabazz, Dapper Dan/Clap your hands whether you’re in Paterson or Pakistan/Richard Wright, Black boy who grew into a Blacker man.” Black Thought’s flows are more rigid than those of a rapper like DOOM, whose syllable count and meter phase through dimensions, and the beats reflect his steady posture. This puts as much emphasis on his words as his technique, and Black Thought continues to rap his ass off. On “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine,” he taps into the same energy well as his famous Hot 97 freestyle to flip Public Enemy references and the constant struggles between science and religion into short parables of preservation. There’s a buzz to Black Thought’s rich baritone that amplifies each song’s sense of scale, whether he’s proclaiming his greatness from the mountaintops or sifting through personal trauma on a track like “Identical Deaths.”
And yet, as entertaining as this project is, there’s a sense that it could’ve been bigger, more substantial. Some songs are hampered by the decision to turn Black Thought’s vocals way down in the mix. Sometimes, it lends his voice a ghostly affect that serves the mood (“Because”). Other times, he sounds like he’s recording while standing 10 feet away from the mic (“The Darkest Part,” “Strangers”). Black Thought has gone on record as saying Cheat Codes isn’t another entry in the Streams of Thought series, but the album is so structurally and thematically similar to that series, it often becomes difficult to see the difference. Outside of its length and nearly two-decade incubation period—which, granted, resulted in an excellent posthumous DOOM verse on “Belize”—this would comfortably fit as Streams of Thought: Vol. 4.
But regardless of its scope, Danger Mouse and Black Thought bring good things out of each other. At Cheat Codes’ best, it’s electrifying to see the ways their respective obsessions with history and time inform the whole. Over the strobing synths and strings of “Saltwater,” Black Thought claims he’ll be “over 70 flipping the script regularly” before comparing himself to the late actor and activist Dick Gregory. Like that song, the album feels both modern and vintage—a swirl of distant touchstones happening all at once. | 2022-08-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | BMG | August 11, 2022 | 7.2 | aa1e8bab-0e2e-4d2a-9495-2dad7dda5c24 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
These New Puritans aren’t ones to half-ass anything and that holds true for their new live set: they perform with a 35-piece orchestra, at "Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue." They play songs from across their catalog in addition to their album Field of Reeds in its entirety. | These New Puritans aren’t ones to half-ass anything and that holds true for their new live set: they perform with a 35-piece orchestra, at "Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue." They play songs from across their catalog in addition to their album Field of Reeds in its entirety. | These New Puritans: Expanded (Live at the Barbican) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19852-these-new-puritans-expanded-live-at-the-barbican/ | Expanded (Live at the Barbican) | These New Puritans are "post-rock" in an unusually literal way—since encrypting post-punk on 2008’s wiry, caustic Beat Pyramid, they’ve been an avant-garde band with a major-label budget, integrating classical composition, jazz instrumentation, musique concrete, primitive folk, dancehall, basically everything but rock'n'roll. More importantly, while they’ve maintained something of a power trio lineup, no one asks them a question so often posed to “rock bands”—“How are they going to pull this off live?” The apt comparisons to the otherwise incomparable Talk Talk are warranted, as the creation of Hidden and Field of Reeds were similarly defined by the trio’s isolation—from trends, from budgetary constraints and from the mundanity of the album cycle. Likewise, they use near-mythical tales of studio trickery to tease fans rather than singles, as Victoria’s Secret money gets funneled into Foley effects and falconry, Britain’s lowest voice and eight-foot Japanese taiko drums. But if they are going to pull this off live, These New Puritans aren’t ones to half-ass anything and so, this is how we arrive at Expanded—performing with a 35-piece orchestra, at "Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue."
This isn’t just the best means of presenting Field of Reeds live, it might be the only way. Another commonality These New Puritans share with late-period Talk Talk is a status of being commercial non-entities in the States and believe me, no matter how suave they look on stage, this is awkward as hell in a rock club that might otherwise host, say, Finch or Marilyn Manson in 2014—earlier this year, I saw an impeccable performance interrupted by Sunset Strip stragglers and a Brazilian guy on Molly who kept requesting “Elvis”. By comparison, the polite clapping that accompanies Expanded may puncture the hermetic seal, but it doesn’t take all of the air out; if anything, it serves as a reminder that this is not a typical rock show.
Jack Barnett has been forthcoming about his lack of instrumental or compositional knowledge, but he is an exacting boss; these musicians are trained to not fuck up and they are not held to lower standards because These New Puritans are technically a pop band. So the alterations are minor, if any: “Fragment Two” was Field of Reeds’ most conventional moment and that’s obviously relative. And so it’s subject to the most conventional effect of live performance, which is that it plays slightly faster and looser than its studio counterpart. Meanwhile, “Island Song” goes straight into the incantatory portion of its mesmerizing coda rather than teasing it out as it does on the record.
Even the most inscrutable sounds on Field of Reeds evolved from an organic source and the most “how’d they do that?” moments are captured with startling clarity—the undulating, magnetic resonator-piano melody that snakes throughout “Island Song”, the hypnotic motifs of “Organ Eternal”, the glass-shattering crescendo of “The Light in Your Name”. In fact, Barnett and his charges are so adept at recreating the subtle complexities of Field of Reeds, that they don’t just render Expanded a total misnomer. They call its entire reason for existence into question.
With the exception of a two-minute “Intro Tape”, These New Puritans play Field of Reeds almost verbatim—in its exact order, with little, if any variation from the original versions. So why listen to this instead of Field of Reeds? Barnett considers Expanded to be on the level of TNP’s albums and called these performances improvements over the originals; but it’s too close to call even for those who’ve completely immersed within Field of Reeds’ otherworldly environs, which is even more disappointing than the typical refractory release, i.e., the well-intentioned and often terribly-executed remix album. Considering the austerity of its arrangements and their open-ended structure, Field of Reeds actually stands as a rare instance of a record that could lend itself to total teardowns.
The price of admission is warranted once the record-setting basso profundo of “Field of Reeds” fades out; new composition “Spitting Stars” is another lovely, pastoral collaboration with Graham Sutton, but considering the long latency periods and wild deviations from one These New Puritans record to the next, it’s likely an appendage to Field of Reeds rather than an indication of where they might go next. There are also two selections from Hidden, the more intimidating, less “orchestral” predecessor to Field of Reeds and the record that would have been better suited to this format.
For all of its stunt sonics—smashed watermelons, sharpened knives, M.I.A. interpolations—much of it was proudly composed on cheap keyboards. As such, “We Want War” embodies the entire timeline of human combat, from sticks and stones to modern digital strikes. But with the addition of Portuguese fado singer Elisa Rodrigues and the orchestral replacements for those digital dancehall patches, the textures of “We Want War” and proto-Yeezus banger “Three Thousand” are too cohesive, sounding closer to the overblown bombast of Michael Bay or Metallica’s S&M.
But it's more of a disappointment than a failure—at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans. But there is precedent for bands just as studiocentric properly utilizing this style of live performance: Kraftwerk's Minimum-Maximum, Portishead’s PNYC, Spiritualized’s Royal Albert Hall, October 10, 1997: Live —and if Expanded doesn’t reach that level by any means, at least it’s more worthwhile than the track-by-track, aggressively redundant cash-ins of the Cure’s Trilogy or Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion Live. But if it takes a classic rock cliche to emphasize how far beyond rock These New Puritans really are, then Expanded is a total success. | 2014-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | The Vinyl Factory / Infectious | October 23, 2014 | 6.4 | aa33068d-f03e-47ea-86b3-afa9f7ca7b0f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Belo Horizonte-based producer has developed an eerie, minimalist take on Brazilian funk that’s a world away from the heavier strains associated with Río de Janeiro or São Paulo. | The Belo Horizonte-based producer has developed an eerie, minimalist take on Brazilian funk that’s a world away from the heavier strains associated with Río de Janeiro or São Paulo. | DJ Anderson do Paraíso: Queridão | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-anderson-do-paraiso-queridao/ | Queridão | Once associated mainly with Río de Janeiro, Brazilian funk has exploded stylistically in recent years; countless tributaries have branched out across the country’s vast landscape. DJ Anderson do Paraíso hails from Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest metropolitan area. While Belo Horizonte’s funk scene is as raucous and lyrically scandalous as those in the larger cities, it has become defined by an almost elegant minimalism, sparser and more refined than the heavy distortion of Paulista bruxaria or Río’s more hip-hop-oriented sound. Back in 2017, when the more experimentally minded BH scene was still getting started, Brazilian critic GG Albuquerques described its sound as resembling “ambient space funk.”
While many of these tracks have been previously available as loosies, Kampala, Uganda-based Nyege Nyege Tapes has collected DJ Anderson’s work into a single package. Queridão is part of a growing wave of compilations that translate the lawless edges of Brazilian funk into an album format that’s more easily accessible to curious listeners far removed from the local scene. Anderson’s skeletal tracks are more conducive to armchair listening than a great deal of funk, which typically compels the body to move. His slightly more downtempo style reduces the music to its barest necessities, hollowed out into a spacious cavern of metallic clanks and unsettling moans.
Anderson regularly incorporates classical instrumentation, like the razor-sharp cello on opener “Sadomasoquista” or the muted horns on “Joga Leite.” “Se Faz de Samantha” opens with strings that almost sound like they’re about to break into “Amazing Grace” before the sample cuts off and loops back. On “Paty Trem Barbie,” which incorporates a plunky bassline and the seductions of vocalist MC Magrella, he triggers the infamous squeaking sound effect familiar to fans of Jersey and Baltimore club—commonly misidentified as a mattress spring, but actually the sound of a chair in the studio where Lil Jon was working on Trillville’s “Some Cut.” Typically, though, when he deploys contemporary hip-hop tropes, like the drill wubs and trappy hi-hats on “Pincelada de Angolano,” they sound more off-kilter than familiar, drums scattering into chaos.
The voices are mixed more cleanly than many of the bass-boosted funk transmissions that go viral stateside, but the repetition—like the chant-like delivery of MC PR and MC Bim on “Todas Elas ao Mesmo Tempo”—is hypnotic, and so are Anderson’s robotic loops. On “Quarenta Cheio de Odio,” a haunted vocal sample and choral chants echo back and forth over a trance-like instrumental that recalls new age-tinged rave from the 1990s. But instead of building to a cathartic drop or ecstatic chorus, Anderson keeps us in a state of perpetual motion.
What’s most disarming about Queridão is the way Anderson plays with silence. In contrast to the extremity inherent in the genre, whether in the parties’ sensory overload or the production itself, he constructs an almost reflective space amidst the fray, voices frequently hanging in midair. While DJ Anderson do Paraíso’s music is sweaty and horny—both trademark qualities of the music—it frequently toys with the listener by denying release, like the apparition of a lover that you can’t reach. On Queridão, Anderson translates funk’s physical intensity to the heady rush of an out-of-body experience. | 2024-03-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | March 11, 2024 | 7.8 | aa40eedf-a6d9-407a-862d-8538b45c40c3 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Assembled by Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman and filmmaker Nick Dwyer, this 34-track compilation offers a retro-futurist deep dive into a lost world of incidental music of surprising power and poignancy. | Assembled by Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman and filmmaker Nick Dwyer, this 34-track compilation offers a retro-futurist deep dive into a lost world of incidental music of surprising power and poignancy. | Various Artists: Diggin’ in the Carts: A Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-diggin-in-the-carts-a-collection-of-pioneering-japanese-video-game-music/ | Diggin’ in the Carts: A Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music | Electronics are today so thoroughly and seamlessly integrated into our daily lives that it’s difficult to imagine a time when video games were silent. In Red Bull Music Academy’s six-part documentary Diggin’ in the Carts, the game-music expert Haruhisa Tanaka, aka Hally, pinpoints Atari’s onomatopoeic “Pong” as marking the advent of sound in game consoles in the early 1980s. Those blips gave way to “Space Invaders”’ four-note melody, and from there, an explosion of musical and technological innovation was unleashed across Japanese video-game music. The extreme limits of the games’ 8- and 16-bit chips forced the in-house composers at Nintendo, Sega, Konami, and other companies to push their creativity in making music that would enhance the player’s experience without overstaying its welcome. Now Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, and Diggin’ writer and co-director Nick Dwyer have culled the best of that work into this 34-track compilation. Gleaming with optimism and imagination, Diggin’ in the Carts is a deep dive into a lost world of incidental music that retains surprising power and poignancy.
From the first note of “Opening,” from “Cosmic Wars,” there’s a sense of the uncanny that lingers over the music. Though humble in their construction, these miniatures gesture toward the grand statements of classical, progressive rock, and film soundtracks. With only a handful of simple waveforms at their disposal, the composers drew out something essential in these short pieces. They hint at the driving funk of reggae, the playful swagger of jazz, and the aggression of heavy metal and industrial. There’s a marvelous economy at work: Momentum is driven by crisp arpeggios and only a fraction of a drum kit, and ingenious flourishes and turnarounds keep the energy from lagging. On paper they might seem slight, but once you acclimate, they fill out, growing in scale by virtue of their clarity and space.
Diggin’ can be divided roughly into two camps. On the one hand there are tracks that seem purely synthetic, using warm waveforms to create the sorts of rich, moody sounds that “Stranger Things” now fetishizes. Elsewhere there are tracks that seek to faithfully mimic acoustic instruments. Texturally complex pieces like “Mister Diviner” (from “The Mahjong Touhhaiden”) or “Temple” (from “Actraiser”) go for a symphonic flavor, with strings, brass, winds, guitar, timpani, and voice. They press right up against the limits of the format, with nuanced details sitting next to jagged cuts and unavoidable artifacts. For a young gamer at the time, perhaps the music went unnoticed in the excitement of play. (For parents it was almost certainly an irritant). Now it sounds like a message in a bottle, not an inch of paper wasted.
Certain tracks stand out. Hiroto Saitou’s work for “Metal Stoker” is a great place to start: The shimmering melodies recall Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator,” pinging and chiming with infectious artifice, while the drum programing owes a debt to King Crimson’s Bill Bruford. Tadahiro Nitta’s contributions to “Xak II” and “Illusion City,” “An-Un (Ominous Clouds)” and “Metal Area,” both pulsate with gritty aggression worthy of Chuck Norris’ Delta Force movies. And Manabu Saito’s whimsical “Telepathy,” from the game “Chatty,” is one of the sweetest earworms I’ve heard in recent memory. Its hollowed-out square waves and skipping rhythm telegraph an ephemeral lightness.
RBMA’s series interviews a handful of producers and musicians, including Flying Lotus and Thundercat, who sing the praises of these soundtracks and declare their lasting influence. There’s certainly a direct link to grime’s spartan first wave; some of that genre’s earliest tracks were made on Playstation consoles, and this track from Wolverine: Adamantium Rage directly prefigures the genre by almost a decade. More recently, the hazy memory worlds of Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never feel inexorably tinted by these past futures.
But there’s something in Diggin’ in the Carts that defies interpretation or modernization. As with library-music treasure troves, beloved hold music, and even certain pared-back DJ tools, the commercial, functional nature of this work sets it free from from the stranglehold of auteurism. The juxtaposition of undeniable ambition with now-discarded and obsolete technology makes for a potent and nostalgic listening experience. Even if you never played these games, it’s hard to resist the music’s allure. Yet its combination of ingenuity and earnestness makes for a formula that’s difficult to recreate. Artists may reference, reinterpret, or sample this material; they may modify their old Gameboys and perform with them, or spend thousands on the vintage synths of the era. Yet our reflections on the past remain skewed by our own biases. Diggin’ is a remarkable transmission: a document of a wave of heady creativity swept under our headlong rush toward tomorrow. | 2017-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Hyperdub | December 16, 2017 | 7.5 | aa46e5da-55b5-4957-b5da-8bbf03b88966 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Opeth's first album in three years lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work. These eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalogue custom-made to overwhelm. | Opeth's first album in three years lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work. These eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalogue custom-made to overwhelm. | Opeth: Pale Communion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19520-opeth-pale-communion/ | Pale Communion | Can you name a band that's less cool than Opeth? For a quarter-century, Mikael Åkerfeldt’s ever-amorphous set of Swedes has let the effort show with every sound, song, and surprising genre twist. At various points in Opeth’s career, their style has been categorized as progressive rock, death metal, or progressive metal, though each of those terms felt, at best, like undersized umbrellas for a band actively coercing bits of jazz, Romanticism, blues, British folk, pop, and new age into their musical madhouse. Opeth is so demanding that, a decade ago, they opted to issued two separate albums—the clenched Deliverance and the much more calm Damnation—rather than package them as an intended, insurmountable double album; still, sold separately, each half of the dichotomous pair broke or pushed the one-hour mark and twisted and turned with a maniacal and delightful zeal. Åkerfeldt’s work has never sounded unaffected or effortless; Opeth have, instead, worn labor and fastidiousness as badges of honor, open rebuttals to any sense of classical cool.
In turn, Opeth is one of modern music’s great paradoxes. They are one of the world’s most popular and enduring heavy acts, having charted every album they’ve made since Damnation in at least half-a-dozen countries. And their international following is a cult of often-unwavering allegiance. To wit, should you arrive at an Opeth show without an Opeth shirt printed in thick and vivid paint, you’ll find that the aforementioned code of cool has been temporarily reversed. Even among the faithful, though, the feeling that Opeth can be forced, overindulgent or obtuse is an abiding one; it is the baggage concomitant to the band’s audacity, the side effect of the quest to shoehorn a dozen things into ultra-dynamic metal. But that same effort enables one of Opeth’s greatest unifying assets: the overwhelming rush that their best music can provide, where a tizzy of elements sends the listener into a tailspin. Line up their catalog from one end to the other, press play, and be stunned by the number of moments (however calculated and meticulous they may be) where audience orientation vanishes. Their complications are their bait.
But Pale Communion, Opeth’s first album in three years, lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work—that is, the core that made the awkwardness sufferable. This is only the third album where Åkerfeldt foregoes his versatile death metal vocal delivery, following the path of 2011’s Heritage and 2003’s Damnation. He alternately supplants it instead with a singsong lilt, a folk-rock affability and an alt-rock theatricality. Notably, this is the first Opeth LP to arrive since Storm Corrosion, Åkerfeldt’s 2012 full-length release with longtime collaborator Steven Wilson. Half of that album featured the London Session Orchestra, an influence that resurfaces throughout Pale Communion.
In fact, such strings web together the record’s two-song finale—and, really, the 16 minutes of music that save Pale Communion from abject disappointment. “Voice of Treason” is dramatic and lunging, with tumescent strings providing the ballast beneath the song’s seven-minute rise toward the thrall. Just ahead of the end, there’s a momentary blast beat, an enormous wash of strings, and a burst of heroic vocals from Åkerfeldt. “Have you ever seen the aftermath of giving up?” he howls, the band exploding around him. And the stately strings that sweep beneath closer “Faith in Others” are the platform from which Opeth lifts toward a post-rock surge. It dissipates slowly, as though the sound is being peeled apart layer by layer. Opeth surprises and engrosses here, ending this album better than they do most anything else.
Pale Communion often feels too polite to overrun and too guarded to sustain Opeth’s familiar sense of total upheaval, where the listener struggles to remember which end is up and which way is forward. Take opener “Eternal Rains Will Come.” The song first weaves complicated rhythmic shifts against spools of sharp guitar and distorted organ, a compelling mix that suggests a florid spin on math-rock. But after a pause, the quintet springs ahead into a straight beat, flimsy funk dancing beneath quick harmonies cribbed from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." The instruments coil again toward the end, with the guitar and drums pirouetting in sudden sync. But it’s a hyperactive soft-rock climax, an effete attempt to reach new heights.
Much the same holds for “Elysian Woes,” a trickle of acoustics backed by flute-like synthesizers and led by Åkerfeldt in a rather miserable crooner guise. And “River” is the stiff Swedish approximation of fluid Southern guitar rock. Padded again by acoustic guitar and generous organ, the first half is more pure prairie league than Allman Brothers anthem. But even the ricocheting instrumental midsection and spring-loaded coda feel preordained, like the very blatant ends of Opeth’s Southern rock trial. Likewise, “Goblin,” Opeth’s carousel-like horror score tribute, is as obvious as its name, while “Cusp of Eternity” implies Bono taking an acute, unfortunate interest in the power of djent guitars. Even as it twists and turns through several solos, the destination feels fated, Opeth’s usual inexplicable intricacy given over to plug-and-play automation.
These arrivals of the expected are Pale Communion’s most damning symptom. In the past, Opeth have made their inspirations and aspirations obvious, but their avid recombinations suggested an array of infinite possibilities. Even if you couldn’t abide the inflexibility of their methodical grandeur, it was hard to condemn the immense effort and imagination involved. But Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other. It’s not that Opeth isn’t cool here. It’s that these eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalog custom-made to overwhelm. | 2014-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-08-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | August 28, 2014 | 4.3 | aa4dc84f-e3f7-44be-9597-880c797c1892 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Minimalist force is what Seattle punk band So Pitted does. They excel at it. On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it. | Minimalist force is what Seattle punk band So Pitted does. They excel at it. On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it. | So Pitted: neo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21465-neo/ | neo | Punk is officially over the hill at this point, having passed its 40th birthday: Blow out the candles and buy it some gag gifts. As the oldest musicians reckon with maturity in a genre that was developed for and by their young and reactionary selves, and successive generations of musicians discover the grit and power of an increasing number of subgenre styles, the dialogue about what's punk and what isn't gets increasingly tangled. At the core of every single one of those subgenres, though, and therefore residing somewhere at the core of punk itself, is minimalist force—sometimes pure id, sometimes reflexive egoic commentary thereon, sometimes both at once. Minimalist force is what Seattle's So Pitted does. They excel at it.
On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it. Guitarist Jeannine Koewler's melodic lines, lower on the scale and blown out through a bass amp, bulk out their nasty sound. Drummer Liam Downey, who also shares some of the vocal duties, is what a punk drummer needs to be: both a hard hitter and nimbly able to keep quick time when necessary. Vocalist and guitarist Nathan Rodriguez snarls his way through his scratchy, dissonant, percussive instrumental work just as much as he does in his robotic, distorted singing.
There's certainly a lot of Touch & Go and AmRep (and early Sub Pop, too, which makes their choice of label perfectly logical) back catalog mining to what So Pitted does, as there is for any contemporary noise rock band. But songs like "i'm not over it," which is half sludgy instrumental and half incitement to circle pit; "the sickness," which slides from noise-rock gnarl to post-punk precariousness in a way that seems wholly natural; and "holding the void," in which layers of noise and screel are added and peeled away to reckless effect, pay their homages without walking in the footsteps of those who came before.
Best of all, So Pitted sound like they move as a unit. This is where their true energy derives—from their internal communication. You don't hear the gears grinding or see the wires—you only see the bull in all its terrifying, joyful glory and the destruction it causes. | 2016-02-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 16, 2016 | 7 | aa51c568-11af-4c8e-b43e-4a5f1727ef5b | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
The singer and guitarist takes a new, rangy, proggy direction with an artful touch, finding some psychedelic wisdom between the profound and the mundane. | The singer and guitarist takes a new, rangy, proggy direction with an artful touch, finding some psychedelic wisdom between the profound and the mundane. | Ryley Walker: Course in Fable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryley-walker-course-in-fable/ | Course in Fable | There is always some undiscovered land in Ryley Walker’s vast world. In one hemisphere resides a full-album reinterpretation of Dave Matthews Band’s The Lillywhite Sessions that the New York-based guitarist covered with unerring reverence and sincerity; in another, he is a living historian cum poet of bathrooms. Just this February, he released Deep Fried Grandeur*—*an improvised live set that’s like a kosmische ramble cut with Japanese psychedelic explorers Kikagaku Moyo. Course in Fable exists somewhere new, yet again, as if the freedom afforded by releasing music on his own Husky Pants label has spurred him to always be creating on the frontier. Produced by Tortoise’s John McEntire (who also contributed synth and keyboards), Course in Fable is Walker’s most ambitious and satisfying solo album to date.
Another factor in Walker’s artistic resurgence has been resolving his substance abuse problems. As he admitted in an interview conducted in early April, he’d been sabotaging himself for years, saying that “redemption, joy, and gratitude” inform Course in Fable. After a failed suicide attempt in 2019, Walker sought help through meds, therapy, sobriety, and he saved himself. He got happy, but, mercifully, not sappy.
On opening track “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” though, you may gasp at the outrageously bold intro that leads into a motif of Keith Emersonian grandiosity, bolstered by rococo, fiery guitar riffing from Bill MacKay. The song soon downshifts into a dulcet burble of folk-rock with an earnest, Sebadoh-esque melodic contour that later splays out into surging proggy climaxes. “We’re all lot lizards parked outside your door,” Walker sings, later concluding, “Always shit-brained when I’m pissed.” Longtime fans may wonder, how did we get to this pomp? But “Rang Dizzy” floats things back to Earth with cello-augmented baroque ’n’ roll. The refrain, “I am wise/I am so fried/Rang dizzy inside/Fuck me, I’m alive,” points to Walker’s amazement at reversing his downward spiral. These are undoubtedly the album’s most straightforward lyrics.
Elsewhere, it’s clear that Walker has developed into a writer who turns the mundane into the profound. He obliquely poeticizes around his subjects, speaking in riddles as esoteric as they are memorable. None of the lyrics on Fable lands as bluntly as “I’d rather be dead than to see you cry” from Primrose Green’s “Sweet Satisfaction.” Rather, idiosyncratic details abound and veiled meanings reign. “A Lenticular Slap” exemplifies Walker’s sloshed-on-words approach. Sounding like an homage to the big-vocabulary rock of Slovenly, SST Records’ unsung ’80s heroes, the track writhes with rhythmic switchbacks, unexpected acoustic flourishes, and eccentric vocal phrasing. It appears to chronicle a drug-induced breakdown, but lines such as “A lenticular slap/To the cross-eyed seeker/The bridge written off the map/News crawl from a goddamn tweaker” don’t telegraph it. The mantra “Hold on to the loose ends” chanted as a freaky wah-wah guitar exults to the fadeout ranks as a harrowing highlight. “I’m not a good storyteller,” Walker said in an interview this year. “I write couplets in a journal and stitch them together. It’s all sort of non sequitur, stream-of-consciousness crazy talk. I don’t have any big revelations or answers.”
Another promising new direction emerges on the weird epic “Pond Scum Ocean.” MacKay’s electric guitar skitters in strange directions and in odd modes, then shifts into trance-inducing chimes hinting at both The Twilight Zone theme and John Berberian’s Middle Eastern Rock. Who else writes like this? Perversely, Fable’s last song is its catchiest—“Shiva with Dustpan,” a gorgeous orchestral folk tune and a testament to strings arranger and cellist Douglas Jenkins’s delicate touch. Shiva is an ascetic Hindu god known as “The Destroyer,” but also as a prodigious creator with world-transforming powers. Walker equips the deity with that most humble of implements, another contrast of the mundane and profound.
Up through 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, Walker was on course to become a 21st-century Tim Buckley, or John Martyn, or Bert Jansch. But he soured on being beholden to freak-folk masters and going through the indie-rock golden-boy grinder, so he diversified and started jamming with musicians such as drummer Ryan Jewell, who helped to nudge him down stranger paths. Course in Fable bears the ripe fruit of this impulse, cohering into the most impressive of many surprising recent triumphs from an artist who’s faced down oblivion and has emerged more inspired than ever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Husky Pants | April 7, 2021 | 7.6 | aa571bea-060b-45b6-b571-40bf491f6348 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
The Brooklyn band's seventh album features more disciplined songwriting, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time. | The Brooklyn band's seventh album features more disciplined songwriting, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time. | Woods: Bend Beyond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17047-bend-beyond/ | Bend Beyond | In the world of Woods, minor refinements mean a lot. Bend Beyond is the Brooklyn band's seventh album in seven years, and in broad terms it isn't all that different from Woods' other records. The group's reference points remain the same: 1960s sunshine pop, the Grateful Dead's improvisational explorations, and 90s lo-fi. The most immediately distinctive attribute of Woods' music-- and its most decisive point of demarcation-- is singer Jeremy Earl's childlike falsetto; if you can't appreciate Earl's voice, Woods' rapidly growing discography (which is also rounded out by various EPs and singles) will be a non-starter. Otherwise, that body of work is among the most consistently enjoyable from any young indie rock band in the past several years, and Bend Beyond is Woods' most approachable gateway yet.
As for the minor refinements made on Bend Beyond, they aren't all that minor at all, actually-- the songwriting is more disciplined, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time, with only one song running past the four-minute mark, and only by 25 seconds. That song happens to be the foreboding title track, already one of the all-time great Woods tracks and an in-concert highlight that runs two or three times longer live than on record. But even in truncated form, "Bend Beyond" is a thrilling example of Woods' ability (in spite of living thousands of miles away on the opposite coast) to conjure the spirits of L.A. folk rock and the dark vibes emanating from the scene's seamy underbelly. If "Bend Beyond" is the album's best song, "Is It Honest?" sounds like the record's surest hit, opening with a shimmering electric-guitar riff that might be the single catchiest moment on any Woods album. (Though it's rivaled by the harmonica blowing like a train whistle through "Cali in a Cup".) But darkness lingers in "Is It Honest?", too-- "It's so fucking hard to see," Earl spits in the chorus, an uncommonly aggressive moment in this group's otherwise peaceful, pastoral universe.
Whatever battles are being waged in the lyrics against demons real and imagined don't carry over to the music, which is effervescent and sweetly touching and unmistakably presented with well-earned confidence and new-found polish. On past records, Woods might have obscured the delicate campfire ballad "It Ain't Easy" in layers of tape hiss. (Tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane is mostly absent throughout Bend Beyond.) But here it shines in crystal-clear fidelity, and the stunning melody earns such treatment, carried on sparkling acoustic guitar and Earl's tender, heart-tugging vocal.
In an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, Earl said the idea on Bend Beyond was to spend a little more time on the songs than usual, as opposed to the extemporaneous approach of past releases: "That was always our style: embrace the spontaneous energy of recording a song the minute after it's written, do the overdubs really fast, mix while recording. For this album, we decided to re-record stuff more." You can hear that extra care in the fantastically menacing organ riff on "Find Them Empty" and the chiming guitar riff that lifts the chorus of the charming "Impossible Sky". For the first time, Woods have given their own songs their full due on record.
Fans of Woods' "spontaneous energy" might lament the relative straight-forwardness of Bend Beyond (even if the band's recent self-titled split release with Amps For Christ suggests they haven't entirely left that approach behind). But Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies. Besides, it's about time this chronically undervalued group broadened its audience a bit. After Bend Beyond, there are plenty of other great Woods records that await neophytes. | 2012-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | September 18, 2012 | 8.1 | aa5895b6-9282-4d4a-aa6d-9e006dbf92c0 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The second installment of a planned trilogy is a fleet-footed journey throughout many styles and moods, yet frames the 23-year-old artist fully as herself. | The second installment of a planned trilogy is a fleet-footed journey throughout many styles and moods, yet frames the 23-year-old artist fully as herself. | Tkay Maidza: Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tkay-maidza-last-year-was-weird-vol-2/ | Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2 | The line between what is alternative and what is mainstream becomes blurrier every day, which is good news for artists who don’t occupy one space or another. Things have especially been opening up for Black women, who historically have had to contend with even narrower expectations from the music industry than other female artists. It’s hard not to see this trend in the trajectory of Tkay Maidza’s career. Initially signed to Universal Australia and moving among smaller labels tied to majors, the Adelaide-based singer and rapper is now signed to the London indie label 4AD. Maidza’s first release with them, Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, is an EP/mixtape that feels like a second debut at a moment when the world might be more ready to process an artist with her unique combination of ambition, pop aptitude, and quirkiness than it was when she released her actual debut four years ago.
During her early development as an artist and slow rise to international recognition, Maidza seemed at times unsure of how to position herself. As a Zimbabwean-born Australian with a knack for gliding across the borders that separate pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, she can be forgiven for her uncertainty. On her 2016 debut album, Tkay, she channeled Santigold and M.I.A. in a sing-song derived from soundsystem culture on electro-rap party jams. Her rapped verses were fluent and vivid but a bit too indebted to Azealia Banks. “Castle in the Sky,” leaned strongly in the direction of Little Dragon’s sound at the time.
Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, the second installment of a planned trilogy, frames the 23-year-old artist fully as herself. She’s reunited with Tkay and Last Year Was Weird Vol. 1 producer Dan Farber for this release, who crafts eight varied tracks that allow her to showcase her versatility. “Awake,” featuring JPEGMAFIA, and “Grasshopper,” two dark and filthy trap productions with a case of UK drill envy, give Maidza the opportunity to rap hard while nimbly switching up flows. On the minimal, mid-tempo “Shook” and bouncy house number “24k” she goes for speed. Amid these different modes, she finds room to move freely, eventually touching down in terra firma of her own.
Movement, particularly flight, is a motif on Vol. 2. The album opens with a lo-fi hip-hop track titled “My Flowers” where Maidza drawls reflectively about her petals taking flight. Later, “24k” is introduced by an announcer for “LYWW radio” speaking from “30,000 feet in the air.” It’s a theme that suits her well in this moment, where the first-generation Australian who has spent the past several years touring and travelling displays a sensibility that’s a little bit of everywhere and also nowhere specific. While a hint of grime creeps into her style on “Grasshopper,” she strikes a distinctly Californian tone when crooning cooly to the sunny bedroom pop of “You Sad” and the trippy funk of “PB Jam.” You can almost hear Maidza’s passport getting stamped as she goes from song to song.
Adventurous as it is, Vol. 2 ultimately lands in a pop space and Maidza is, indeed, a pop star — albeit a habitually code switching one making third-culture pop music. It’s something her influences pioneered and something she’s learning to do her way in this series of mixtapes. In addition to flight, metaphors of blossoming and emerging from a chrysalis crop up throughout this release, underscoring themes of growth, lessons learned, and flexing newfound confidence. The narrative is convincing. Well into her career at 23, she sounds wise but not jaded, armed now with as much self-knowledge as raw talent.
Vol. 2 arrives in an era where self-created alt-pop stars such as FKA twigs and Grimes are commonplace, left-field rappers like Princess Nokia, with whom Maidza has toured, have real clout, and electro-flamenco artist Rosalía wins Grammys. Each artist who bends the conventions of their genre widens the possibilities for the next artist who enters the field, allowing them to work without worrying as much about how they will be categorized. It’s an atmosphere more conducive to the expansion of Maidza’s gifts than the one she started out in, which bodes well for Vol. 3.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | August 13, 2020 | 7.5 | aa5ad7cc-4eb4-4dcb-9b39-6993c81f30e3 | Beverly Bryan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/beverly-bryan/ | |
The British indie rock duo have hooks stuffed with bait and a keen eye for assessing self-delusion. Their debut is the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness. | The British indie rock duo have hooks stuffed with bait and a keen eye for assessing self-delusion. Their debut is the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness. | Wet Leg: Wet Leg | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wet-leg-wet-leg/ | Wet Leg | If you don’t already love Wet Leg, chances are their swift rise and self-deprecation induce a particular kind of cynicism. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers arrived fully formed with the kind of infernally catchy indie rock hit not heard since the days of Franz Ferdinand and were instantly everywhere: played to death on British alternative radio; on Jools Holland and late-night U.S. talk shows; the subject of approving texts from your dad. They repel seriousness, claiming they only started the band for fun—on top of a Ferris wheel at a music festival, no less—and their songs mean next to nothing. Apparently they barely had time to meet their future label, Domino, because they were too busy “rolling around in the grass doing teddy bear rolls with the guitars.” Their lyrics cringe with embarrassment on behalf of anyone deluded enough to be in a band, with their warm beer and crap patter and arty parties. (It’s often said that their home of the Isle of Wight lags 20 years behind the rest of the UK, and Wet Leg’s suffocating social circle sounds straight out of 2005: the Cribs’ “Hey Scenesters!,” Art Brut’s “Formed a Band” and Arctic Monkeys’ “Fake Tales of San Francisco” writ large.) You might wonder whether Wet Leg embraced indie rock as part of their larky shtick—what could be more ironic than messing around with a destitute genre?—if they weren’t such a good study.
Teasdale and Chambers are carpetbaggers in the ultimate carpetbagging genre: You can play Magic Eye with their speed-addled guitars, tilting the music this way and that to spot flagrant trace notes of the Breeders, Parquet Courts, Wire, Pulp, Pavement, MGMT, the Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Blur, Elastica and a billion more bands besides. (On “Convincing,” the album’s biggest tonal outlier, Chambers sings wryly devastated Angel Olsen cosplay.) But it’s a sound that endures endless retreads as long as the hooks are good. For years, that bubblegum melodic facility seemed to have deserted bands of this ilk. The 2004 British wave stopped wanting to make “music for girls to dance to” and got sophisticated (read: boring), and the space they left was quickly filled by lumpen “whoa-oh-oh” football terrace chanters. Wet Leg have hooks stuffed with bait—and beyond convincingly consolidating past eras of guitar pop, they ply an idiosyncratic line in wild-eyed choruses that unspool in run-on bursts of mania, building to terminal velocity, tripping on internal rhymes, and dragging you down with them.
Exhibit one: that hit. “You could ask 100 people to sing it and it wouldn’t sound the same,” Iggy Pop said approvingly of “Chaise Longue.” The way Teasdale sings it is one of the defining qualities of Wet Leg’s self-titled debut. As she chants about being trapped in bad scene after bad scene, her vocals lurch and spiral, sidling away from the unrelenting rhythm section and canine guitars like a child going floppy to escape her parent’s arms. Her seditious tenor moves songs with slightly pathetic subject matter—wanting to leave a party, getting sucked into your phone—beyond the tediously hymned woes of messy white twentysomethings to lead the charge against succumbing to existential hell. It’s the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness, scratching at the yellow wallpaper. “It all used to be fun/Now you’re swinging a gun round your head/Seeing red/Can you please repeat what you just said? Or leave a message at the beep,” Teasdale sings on “I Don’t Wanna Go Out” in a tone that suggests a weary smile held up by fish hooks. The riff nods knowingly to Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” a song he said he wrote about “how you feel when you’re young, when you know there’s a piece of yourself that you haven’t really put together yet.”
“Chaise Longue” may have “no deeper meaning,” according to Teasdale, yet it turns out to presage a pointed interrogation of passivity (and with it, expectations of femininity) across Wet Leg. You can hear their recumbent anthem as a jab against the idea that music, especially music made by women, should be introspective and tortured to be taken seriously; or against the type of indie sleaze who wants women supine and supplicating, ideally on his backstage fainting couch. There are plenty of the latter type across the album, expecting adulation for starting a band, as if it’s something that anyone couldn’t do on a whim at the top of a fairground ride; or banking on a quick and convenient transition from exes to friends; or romanticizing denied consent as a sign of mysteriousness. The worst offender is the subject of would-be indie disco staple “Wet Dream,” a well-observed perv who tries to entice a girl home to watch Vincent Gallo films and has a sub-dom fantasy of her in the driving seat—though naturally, she’s only in control in his dreams. “You climb onto the bonnet and you’re licking the windscreen/I’ve never seen anything so obscene/It’s enough to make a girl blush/It’s enough it’s enough it’s enough…” Teasdale sings, repeating the last line as if trying to scrape something foul off her tongue. She dials up the absurdity until the words transform from coquettish brush-off to disgusted protest, pinpointing the feverish moment when polite tolerance snaps.
Wet Leg jab with humor to disrupt these expectations. The glee that greeted the Mean Girls references and basic innuendo in “Chaise Longue” seemed a bit overdone—proof of a listenership desperate for levity (and presumably having overlooked the absurdism in Dry Cleaning’s debut)—but there are genuinely funny moments elsewhere on the album. It works best to amplify the various states of existential horror they find themselves in, though they occasionally land a devastating insult. The moody surf of “Piece of Shit” fields a call from a raging ex, and at first Teasdale stonewalls their accusations, using passivity to rile them even further: “I’m such a slut?/Alright/Whatever helps you sleep at night.” Then she turns on them, joined by Chambers in a strange, mousy little harmony that adds insult to injury: “Yeah, like a piece of shit you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat.”
Otherwise, there’s lots of suck-my-dick, pubes, and wanking, and mocking references to mummy and daddy that can wear thin as Wet Leg lean on the banality of outrageousness. Sometimes when they take the low road, it’s just the low road: “You’re so woke/Diet Coke,” they taunt on “Oh No,” a lyrical nadir that deepens as they consider excessive phone use, a topic nobody needs to write about ever again. (At least they offset it with some thrillingly purgative chaos.) And the last song, “Too Late Now,” is a doubtless surely felt panic attack about the point of it all that concludes: “I just need a bubble bath to set me on a higher path,” a skewering of self-care that already feels passé.
More acute is their keen eye for assessing self-delusion: how what used to feel fun curdles by one’s mid-20s and thrill-seeking simply blunts the lows. While none of these are new observations (they’re the bedrock of the emotional indie-rock that followed the old party-starting kind) Wet Leg approach them with sly nuance. “Being in Love” suggests a permeable barrier between the feelings of total depression and infatuation, a risky romanticization that they sell on the strength of a big, dumb, knees-first mudslide of a chorus. When a squall of noise boils over at the end of “Angelica,” a song about a shit party, Teasdale sings blithely about “Good times/All the time”—it’s “We Can’t Stop” with Red Stripe and wallflowers.
Some dork at another shit party on “I Don’t Want to Go Out” is moving to L.A. with his band. “Are you gonna stay young forever?” Teasdale asks in a daze, before delivering a spot-on Jarvis impersonation: “You said yeah—and I just walk away.” Much as Teasdale and Chambers sometimes delight in childish oblivion (the shambling “Supermarket” revels in the whoops-a-daisy chaos of stoned grocery shopping) you get the sense they can’t imagine anything worse than being condemned to eternal youth. Their debut doesn’t skimp on outlining the horrors of being a youngish woman—but its giddy, wild-eyed pleasures are also a testament to creating your own reality to survive. | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 8, 2022 | 7.2 | aa5fa8df-65ad-446c-825d-7ca6f989ad94 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The Oregon songstress spreads her wings and tries a few new styles on for size while keeping her earthly vision intact. | The Oregon songstress spreads her wings and tries a few new styles on for size while keeping her earthly vision intact. | Laura Gibson: La Grande | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16226-la-grande/ | La Grande | Simple suits Laura Gibson. The Oregonian songstress knows the power a few well-chosen words and clear images can carry-- all the better when complemented with an economy of instrumentation-- and she put this know-how to good use on her two previous solo outings, 2006's If You Come to Greet Me and 2009's Beasts of Seasons. Those records also benefited from their intimacy and frankness, both embodied in Gibson's voice. It's a gentle thing, wise but vulnerable, and it wraps itself around the vowels with a nasal quality that calls to mind the earliest decades of recorded music. That voice returns more versatile than before on La Grande (sorry Francophones, it rhymes with "demand"), which finds Gibson shedding some of her characteristic simplicity, spreading her wings, and trying a few new musical styles on for size in the process.
A newfound momentum is evident from the moment the opening title track rolls in, all galloping drums, see-saw bass, dust-bowl guitars, and spectral moaning. It ain't exactly "Rawhide", but it's a more assertive move than we're used to from Gibson, whose previous records began quietly and gracefully. From there La Grande dips and sways, holes up and sprawls out again, not unlike the rugged terrain of the northeastern Oregon locale from which the album derives its name. Gibson's quiet moments are still her most striking: "Crow/Swallow" comes close to capturing the elegant melancholy of Greet Me standout "Broken Bottle", while on closing track "Feather Lungs" Gibson makes use of a cappella 1940s vocal-group harmonizations to soften the edges of a song plainly about final repose. However it's thanks to more upbeat tracks such as "The Fire", "Skin, Warming Skin", and the aforementioned opener that these more intimate offerings shine in contrast. This, perhaps, is a lesson learned from Beasts, where a stream of pared-down tracks on the record's latter half, while each affecting on its own, tended to smear together in succession.
New sounds of yore continue on "Lion/Lamb", with its bossa nova rhythm, and "The Rushing Dark", which drifts in and out like an old spiritual sung from a passing river barge. "Skin", easily the record's most momentous track, is, appropriately, also its sex jam: Lines about "secrets... hidden in the hems of summer dresses" and leaving "seeds to break and swell" alternate with a rousing wordless chorus of "ooh-ooh-oohs" while our narrator must keep reminding herself, "it's only skin, warming skin, warming skin." Meanwhile, the romance that may well have led to such skin-warming is given its due on "Red Moon", which has Gibson expressing her desire to "drink up" her lover's "poetry" on what sounds like a vintage microphone. This comes served over Latin-inflected guitar and a recurring sample of an old waltz record, all new looks for the usually more restrained Gibson.
Rather than another exercise in genre-dabbling and dilettantism, La Grande succeeds as a cohesive work thanks to the persistence of Gibson's vision. As a songwriter she's preoccupied with those timeless questions of the human condition, but seldom if ever stumbles into pretension or self-satisfaction. Themes of love, loss, regret, and mortality crop up often, and, significantly, they're well-served by the surrounding songcraft. One wouldn't expect Gibson's latest to bowl over any audiophile chasing the wow!-factor, but for the patient, contemplative listener, La Grande-- much like the campfire depicted on its cover-- is a record worth warming to. | 2012-01-31T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-01-31T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Barsuk / City Slang / Jealous Butcher | January 31, 2012 | 7.4 | aa65253f-2cf6-403b-994c-7c0f44e8949e | Matthew Solarski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-solarski/ | null |
Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny invites some friends (members of Mount Moriah, Sunn O))), and more) to help put his arcane guitar theory into thrilling action. | Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny invites some friends (members of Mount Moriah, Sunn O))), and more) to help put his arcane guitar theory into thrilling action. | Various Artists: Hexadic III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/six-organs-of-admittance-hexadic-iii/ | Hexadic III | A few years ago, Ben Chasny reckoned his guitar playing needed a break or a breakthrough. Over the last two decades, recording as the superb Six Organs of Admittance and in a messy web of collaborations, Chasny had become one of the instrument’s most exploratory new masters. He had woven dizzying acoustic fantasies through psychedelic fever dreams, summoned stately solo meditations on poets and landscapes, and led full bands with cutting electric leads. But after a quarter-century, he detected a complacency that stemmed from endless cycles of recording, rehearsing, and touring. So he made the obvious choice: Combining his interests in chance, games, mysticism, and number theory, he invented an entire personalized system for composing that relied on a deck of cards to determine the notes he’d play on the guitar and, hopefully, force him out of old habits. He called it Hexadic.
Three years have passed since Chasny unveiled his Hexadic system with two records, both released in 2015. The first, Hexadic, is a scabrous, powerful noise rock statement, its arching distortion proclaiming that Chasny hadn’t somehow lost his edge in his new role as a theorist. Hexadic II, however, is cocoon-soft, its fluttering acoustic notes and nearly hummed words stretched like strands across each song. The LPs serve as testaments to Hexadic’s intrigue and versatility. Elsewhere, Chasny has sometimes struggled to explain the system, even as he’s led classes on it, written a book about its order of operation, and designed a deck of playing cards for interested musicians. He’s often had to talk about what it is and isn’t or who influenced it and who didn’t. For Hexadic III, he’s finally asked his friends for help with the demonstration.
Curated by Chasny, the new album collects seven diverse interpretations of the system from his inspirations and collaborators. Heron Oblivion’s Meg Baird and Charlie Saufley float through a gauze of gentle piano and guitar, while Richard Youngs wrestles the system into a surrealist collage of acidic distortion and vocals that flip between chants and rants. It all ends with the gorgeous and haunting “Zoa Pastorale,” a wordless keyboard hymn written by one of Hexadic’s earliest champions, British composer and theorist Phil Legard. Stuck somewhere between the fugues of Bach and the psychedelic extremes of Terry Riley, it’s a stunning little piece and an unexpected application for the guitar-centric Hexadic. Indeed, for the neophyte or the casually curious, Hexadic III illustrates the potential and promise of Chasny’s obscure method in a way that a dozen blog posts or even an instructional manual cannot.
Hexadic’s use of chance means that the relationship between notes likely isn’t what you’re used to hearing in familiar Western scales—it was created, after all, to disrupt those thought patterns. The system’s best results, then, suggest a maze of music, a stream of sound that the players simply seemed to have slipped inside. Moon Duo’s “Square of the Sun,” the smoldering krautrock jam that opens the album, epitomizes this feeling. The notes hang together loosely, conjuring recognizable guitar chords but never quite landing on them. The sensation is that of an ellipsis, suggesting this music might go on forever in search of resolution. It’s so perfect that perhaps it should. Likewise, a trio led by Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley seems set to drift forever toward the horizon; they eke out distorted chords and squeeze and stretch the rhythm, as if examining the output of Chasny’s system in real time, with genuine shared surprise. You can feel them searching for some end or climax, all the while knowing it doesn’t truly exist. Tashi Dorji condenses the quest into two tidy minutes of prepared acoustic guitar, a welcome proof of economy for a system that doesn’t favor it.
The most remarkable track here is the one that most fully rescues Hexadic from the realm of esoterica. On “The Hanging Man,” Jenks Miller begins with a riff that sounds like a sun-warped version of something he might play in his country-rock band, Mount Moriah—a crackling electric lead, all moaning and elegant. There’s a demented calliope organ line and distant vocals that seem to arrive on the wind. These threads gather across four minutes, then coil into a tight, delightful passage, with both the riff and the rhythm reflecting off of Miller’s singsong melody. It may be the first Hexadic song with a legitimate hook, a rarity in Miller’s slanted oeuvre, too. If Chasny’s goal was to help himself and others snap their habits, this is indisputable evidence he’s done it. | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Drag City | March 2, 2018 | 7.6 | aa68e7e1-5a64-4931-8821-bba6b11a9088 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Hungarian producer’s first album for Planet Mu picks up the deconstructive thread of recent left-field electronic music, splitting the difference between academic inquiry and rave hedonism. | The Hungarian producer’s first album for Planet Mu picks up the deconstructive thread of recent left-field electronic music, splitting the difference between academic inquiry and rave hedonism. | Gábor Lázár: Source | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gabor-lazar-source/ | Source | In a 2015 interview, Hungarian sound artist Gábor Lázár said that in his creative process, he is “trying to give different answers to my own questions”; composition, in other words, is inseparable from research. Experiencing Lázár’s music can offer a jolt to your own inquisitive state. His tracks are crafted in such vivid detail, it is as though they were organisms viewed through a powerful microscope. At its extreme, this technique can induce a gratifying kind of existential dread.
But Lázár’s first album for Planet Mu, Source, isn’t necessarily designed for dissecting. His 2014 record ILS, on Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!?, was rooted in Lazar’s background in sound design, while his 2018 release on Powell’s label the Death Of Rave, Unfold, invoked club aesthetics and rarefied rave production similar to the style Rian Treanor would pursue on his 2019 album ATAXIA. Source picks up the deconstructive thread running through much recent left-field electronic music—Senni’s trance pointillism, Beatrice Dillon’s interrogation of dub techno—in a playful, danceable manner. Caustic synths, hyperventilating cadences, and skittering pads make for a heady interpretation of soundsystem rhythms, neatly placing Lázár between hedonism and academic inquiry—a feat that’s often difficult to execute with this much charm.
“Phase” is particularly frenzied, with mutated 2-step rhythms and oscillated bass notes stretched to their limits, while “Excite” executes flighty synth lines alongside leaden clang. To craft these complex algorithms, Lázár uses the software Max/MSP, also a favorite of collaborator Mark Fell, who worked alongside Lázár on 2015’s simultaneously jarring and meditative The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making. Source indicates a newfound maturity in Lázár’s sound and spotlights a more palatable application of rhythm and melody, which his past records, for all their virtuoso sound design, sometimes lacked.
Source feels bolder, sharper, and more emotive than the last record; that’s especially true of tracks like “Effort,” where the swiveling bass contorts and jumps almost like dubstep. But where Source falls short is in its uniformity; there are moments where it is difficult to distinguish one track from the other, particularly in the case of “Phase” and “Route,” but the disjointed rhythms and mind-bending curves still make for a hypnotic affair. The energy lets up with the introspective ambient closer “Return”: Gentle keys work a daybreak melody that wouldn’t feel out of place on Squarepusher’s tenderer early-’00s output, as if providing a cathartic breathing space from the earlier delirium.
Source is unrelentingly stimulating, lighting up the full spectrum of sound like the blinking signals on a circuit board. Lázár picks apart dance music’s tropes and investigates how far such forms can be pulled while remaining recognizable. The intellectual detail from past records remains, but the brutalist rhythms make for a stellar execution in futuristic dance.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | July 8, 2020 | 7.1 | aa6ba3f2-c9f4-4966-abf9-db0df38636c7 | Esme Bennett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/esme-bennett/ | |
The Talking Head and A-list dance producer gather 22 vocalists-- including Santigold, Tori Amos, and Florence Welch-- for a tribute to Imelda Marcos. Really. | The Talking Head and A-list dance producer gather 22 vocalists-- including Santigold, Tori Amos, and Florence Welch-- for a tribute to Imelda Marcos. Really. | David Byrne / Fatboy Slim: Here Lies Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14113-here-lies-love/ | Here Lies Love | Here Lies Love should have been truly great. Or at least truly awful. A 2xCD album, with 22 guest vocalists, devoted to the life, loves, and sartorial obsessions of the infamous Imelda Marcos, wife of equally infamous Filipino despot Ferdinand Marcos? Masterminded by two of music's most inventive nerds-- David Byrne and Fatboy Slim? Oddball subject, high-profile collaborators, unchecked ambition: a combination that should guarantee either a left-field classic or a cringe-inducing misstep. A grand or gaudy approach that fits the garish, romantic, obsessive arc of its heroine's life.
Instead we get efficient dance-pop and tropical-tinged adult alternative given the routinized sheen of Broadway showtunes. For a few songs the combination's curious enough to maintain semi-passive interest. Persevere through all 22 tunes, and you'll find an EP's worth of keepers, mostly thanks to strong performances by the usual suspects: Róisín Murphy transforming a just-funky-enough disco pastiche into another of her patented conversational come-ons; Sharon Jones as New Jack Swing-era rent-a-diva. But less than an hour in, the album's initially exquisite-sounding production starts to feel weirdly oppressive. It smothers the playfulness and rough edges of Byrne and Slim's respective obsessions-- Bahia-meets-Bacharach romanticism and shamelessly big beats-- in a layer of icky showbiz schmaltz.
Imagine a Vegas producer staging an all-star tribute to Caetano Veloso, or the Lawrence Welk band rearranging the Jam and Lewis songbook. Or maybe just imagine two oddball pop geniuses choosing to collaborate on a pet project in the waning days of the album era. But once in the studio, the pair contracts some kind of airborne soft-rock virus. Thus infected, they can only manage to write the kind of unthreatening but unfailingly pleasant filler designed to pad out department store playlists when programmers run out of Train songs. How else to explain the weakest songs on Here Lies Love, especially the second half of disc one? And even they're not bad, per se, unless the very idea of bland competence offends you.
Byrne and Slim never misstep here, but they also never surprise. At best you may wind up distantly admiring their craftsmanship. But if musicians are going for scale and spectacle-- and a project like this all but demands it-- shouldn't they, like, go for it? True, most overlong and overambitious concept albums wind up total trainwrecks, but at least then they're sorta enjoyable for it. But like a middling 1,000 page novel, or a three-hour cinematic epic that's just kind of okay, a competent 90-minute mini-musical serves only one purpose: To reinforce the precious finitude of human life. Devote an hour-and-a-half to this? Why? You could listen to Remain in Light twice with time to spare. Or just play "The Rockafeller Skank" 13 times in a row. | 2010-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Nonesuch / Todomundo | April 8, 2010 | 5 | aa70de57-9bcc-4695-a338-ba87b5253972 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Christopher Taylor’s genre-colliding mutant pop proves everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong. | Christopher Taylor’s genre-colliding mutant pop proves everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong. | Body Meat: Truck Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/body-meat-truck-music/ | Truck Music | Is Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” a country song or a rap song? Does it matter either way? Genre is useful to understand musical lineage, but beyond that it starts to become a game of semantics. What does it mean for a song to be country, or rock? More perplexing: What, exactly, is pop music if pop music is always changing? Can music that isn’t popular still be called pop?
That’s the question posed by Truck Music, the seventh release from Philadelphia’s Christopher Taylor, who records alongside a rotating cast of musicians as Body Meat. He appears mostly solo here, with some percussion help from Matthew Anderegg. At times Taylor wields noise like a weapon, allowing cut-up vocal snippets to stutter over blown-out synths and skittering percussion. Each song sounds like six songs being played at once, and not a single second is clean or overly fussed over. Taylor seems dead-set on fitting every possible idea in his head onto this album, resulting in a mutant pop record that sounds at various moments like Chicago footwork, post-Young Thug melodic rap, or a less bummed-out James Blake.
That Body Meat apply rules from multiple genres to create a warped new sound is not inherently interesting. What is interesting is Taylor’s ability to create synthetic music with real heft. The songs on Truck Music are, for the most part, chaotic, but as they progress they reveal a skewed logic. A dense mass of video game plings and broken keyboards lock into a recognizable pattern; something clicks in your brain, and the rhythm, which has been there all along, makes itself known.
On Truck Music, that chaos can be purposeful. Album opener “Combo” sounds huge in the same way that an ant hill is huge: Hundreds of tiny sounds pile on top of one another, each individual piece essential to the whole. Single “Nairobi Flex” unravels so quickly that if it weren’t so robust, so present, it would be easy to assume it was a one-take improvisation. The roughly chopped samples on “Shopping” never quite cohere, but they’re weirdly beautiful anyway. In Taylor’s approach to music making, everything can fit if you don’t give it enough time to sound wrong.
Taylor uses pop’s sonic experimentation as a road map, whether evoking a busier version of Missy Elliott’s collaborations with Timbaland, or accelerating the starkly alien sounds of vintage Neptunes to warp speed. The genres he pulls from on Truck Music are sort of beside the point, because the point seems to be: How unrecognizable can an experimental song be while still reading as pop? Though these tracks are too unpolished for radio play, they have all the right reference points to make sense for radio, and that’s part of their magic. Sifting through the wreckage of genre touchstones, Body Meat use the musical language of right now to point toward possible futures. | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | April 26, 2019 | 7.5 | aa74a2b3-125e-4d08-87a5-970c8d5a4eec | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | |
Collaborating with Rosie Lowe, London-based multidisciplinary artist Duval Timothy translates his chordal sensibility to a short but expansive choral suite where sound means more than words. | Collaborating with Rosie Lowe, London-based multidisciplinary artist Duval Timothy translates his chordal sensibility to a short but expansive choral suite where sound means more than words. | Rosie Lowe / Duval Timothy: Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosie-lowe-duval-timothy-son/ | Son | Young Duval Timothy struggled through piano lessons, but when a friend taught him the chords to Amy Winehouse’s “Stronger Than Me,” something clicked. Suddenly, he realized how powerful “just a few chords, repeated, looping round,” could be, he has said. As a multidisciplinary artist, Timothy works with a wide array of materials: His projects have encompassed textiles, food, and interventions in public space. But as a musician, he has remained doggedly focused on a singular tonal language, with the chord at its center. I don’t think that’s accidental; the chord, as a structural device, is a kind of musical distillation of his interests. British-born and of Sierra Leonean descent, Timothy divides his time between London and Freetown, and his art is rooted in issues of identity, migration, and the ways people and objects navigate borders. His project Weaving in Sierra Leone, for example, focused on women who painstakingly unravel secondhand sweaters imported from abroad, then weave the unwound yarn into dazzling new fabrics. Fusion, translation, transposition—these notions all underpin Timothy’s work, and they are also part and parcel of chords and their changes.
On Son, joined by the British singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Rosie Lowe, Timothy translates his chordal sensibility from piano to voice, swirling Lowe’s multi-tracked singing into vast harmonic nebulae. There are precedents for Son in both artists’ catalogs. On “No,” from 2017’s Sen Am, Timothy drafted a blueprint for the new album’s airy architecture, layering a single sung word—“no”—into rich, perpetually evolving harmonies. And on “Freedom,” the minute-long opening song from her 2021 mixtape Now, You Know, Lowe’s vocals are re-pitched into whimsical curlicues similar to the forms they take here. But Son is more complex. In some places, there are more than 100 vocal layers in play. Exploded into countless reflections of itself, Lowe’s voice assumes cloudlike shapes—chords—that hover in the air, morphing like murmurations of starlings on the move. Sparingly fleshed out with piano, standup bass, backing vocals, and environmental sound, Timothy’s music has never sounded more expansive.
Longtime friends, Timothy and Lowe began working on Son in London in 2018, bonding over a shared love for choral pieces like “Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)”—a stunningly intricate avant-garde mass for the Black Peruvian saint, written in 1962 by jazz pianist and Catholic convert Mary Lou Williams. They recorded the bulk of the album during a week and a half in Sierra Leone, working out of Timothy’s studio there but also taking their gear outside, where the sounds of their surroundings—traffic, birdsong, playground ruckus—occasionally sneak onto the tape. Back in South London, where Timothy grew up, they sought out architectural spaces with boomy, reverberant sonics. There, they played back rough drafts on a Bluetooth speaker and used a portable recorder to capture the reverb, which mixing engineer Marta Salogni then folded back into the final mix. The results entail a virtual collision of distant spaces: the wooded grounds of Fourah Bay College with a Bermondsey pedestrian underpass; the remote Bureh beach and a Georgian-era chapel in Peckham. You won’t be able to identify any of that by ear, but the way the duality has been encoded into the waveforms themselves feels integral to Timothy’s work.
Though Lowe’s voice plays the leading role, sounds take precedence over words. The first two songs are largely monosyllabic: “Da” explodes its titular syllable into dizzyingly rich a cappella harmonies, creamy as meringue; “Don” arrays plaintive scat singing around the repetition of a terse, percussive outburst. Like Matthew Herbert, whose Big Band both musicians have sung in, Lowe and Timothy revel in the artifice of recording, truncating their loops in jarring ways: In “Don,” background voices captured on tape create an incidental hiccuping rhythm with every looped piano riff. And in places, Lowe’s vocals have been sampled and stacked into chords on the keyboard, resulting in an uncanny quality—the harmonies are too perfect, the vibrato too seamlessly mirrored between voices. But that’s not always the case. In “Play Along,” Lowe’s bluesy solo branches into two parts, first sung in quavering unison, then tipped queasily out of key. And in “He Hu,” in the middle of a seemingly uniform two-note refrain, Lowe seems almost to giggle, just once, as she falters for breath and catches herself—a profoundly human moment on a record of superhuman beauty.
“Son” is the album’s musical and thematic centerpiece. Lowe plays a mother cautioning her son never to listen to anyone who tells him he can’t be whatever he wants to be, but her character sings from the sorrowful perspective of someone all too familiar with self-doubt. “Don’t let somebody tell you you can’t/Dream, dream, dream/Not even me,” she sings, as her ghostlike vocal harmonies sigh behind her. The song was inspired in part by Malcolm X’s autobiography and the 2006 Will and Jaden Smith film The Pursuit of Happyness; its lyrics interpolate lines from Ted Joans’ poem “The Sun My Son.” But behind its languid, ecstatic harmonies lurks a hint of the Afro-pessimism that Timothy has folded into prior songs like “TDAGB”—an abbreviation of the phrase, “Things don’t always get better.” “You think/You’re free,” sings Lowe mournfully: “I was so green/You’ll ripen up like me.”
A brightly colored children’s book that Timothy and Lowe wrote and illustrated to accompany the album is more optimistic. And so, fortunately, are the album’s sonics, which take the blues, a style born of impoverishment, and turn it into an abundance of harmonic riches. The album’s sheer sound is astonishing in its breadth: the cicadas and trembling barbershop harmonies of “Furah Bay,” as soft and natural as breathing; the cresting drama of “Say,” built atop Timothy’s trademark piano arpeggios; the almost cartoonish, Chipmunks-like tremolo of the pitched-up voices in the closing “Gonna Be,” which hiss and wheeze over heartbreakingly beautiful double-bass accompaniment from Tom Herbert.
No one knows when or why humans invented music, but some theories say its origins lie in the communication between mothers and newborns. Perhaps that’s why “Gonna Be,” singing sweetly of future promise, is so powerful: Mimicking a mother’s sotto-voce song to her child, set to the gentle pulse of a heartbeat, it suggests a return to the source, to the origin of all songs—and then refracts that whisper-soft point of light a thousandfold, offering countless paths to follow.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | Carrying Colour | November 18, 2021 | 8 | aa7cdd2a-5887-4b72-87a1-bd29a6e99241 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Australian drummer Alex Knight’s dry, beautiful debut pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, textured, more interesting terrain. | Australian drummer Alex Knight’s dry, beautiful debut pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, textured, more interesting terrain. | Brightness: Teething | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brightness-teething/ | Teething | Of all the onscreen depictions of Australia’s natural environments, only George Miller’s 1979 apocalyptic classic Mad Max really captures the solitude and brutality of it all. The film evokes the dry, hot winds and terrifying silence like little else. Teething, the debut record by Brightness (28-year-old Newcastle musician Alex Knight) taps into a similar sense of Australian gothic. It’s a dry, beautiful debut that pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, more interesting terrain.
After years as a sideman playing drums, Knight set off on his own to write and record Teething. Stylistically, the album recalls other messy, lo-fi debuts like On Avery Island and This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. When he does expand beyond the tried and true palette of guitar and drums, it’s in clever and affecting ways, like when an organ emerges to underscore the second half of “Waltz,” or in the synth that augments the main guitar line in “Queen Bee.”
Rather than employing these instruments to make his work seem more baroque or polished, Knight uses them to make his songs dirtier, weirder. That synth line on “Queen Bee,” for example, pushes Knight’s vocals lower into the mix; as the song progresses, his voice becomes more and more distorted until it’s nearly one with the guitar. The use of horns towards the end of “Talk to Me” recalls Feist’s brilliant 2011 record Metals, another album that channels the brutality of nature. The work of these two musicians both has a beautiful mania about it, like they’ve been left to fend for themselves in the wild.
Knight’s lyrics sketch portraits of people on the brink of unraveling. On “Oblivion,” the album’s best song, Knight is less a narrator and more the voice in his subject’s head, poking and prodding at their anxieties: “You say the neighbors, they’ve been spying, that you can feel their ears pressed against the wall/And just how long have you been lying there, with bed sheet covers for a pall?” These kinds of unhinged and desolate characters recur in each song. “Surrender” deals with a figure who has to “neck a few more pills” in order to deal with the tedium of life, while the persistent repetition of the title phrase on “Talk to Me” conveys obsession. These lyrics fit with the album’s overall aesthetic, and while Knight isn’t above occasionally falling into cliche, he is never trite in his writing.
The odd result of all of this—Knight’s perfectly measured vocals, the often abrasive edge of his instruments—is that the songs can instill a kind of delirium after a while; Teething feels claustrophobic at times, especially because Knight’s concept of space seems to range between “sounds like he’s standing one inch from you,” to, “sounds like he’s standing one foot from you.” But he doesn't mind committing to the creation of a somewhat punishing work—Knight knows, after all, that nature doesn’t compromise to make its inhabitants more comfortable. | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | I Oh You | July 10, 2017 | 7.4 | aa86fb42-d777-4863-ab6e-e3840f4f9ec5 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | null |
When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he\n\ usually goes by Mike Ink, Love ... | When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he\n\ usually goes by Mike Ink, Love ... | GAS: Pop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3402-pop/ | Pop | When German techno artist Wolfgang Voight makes music for the dance floor, he usually goes by Mike Ink, Love, Inc, or M:I:5. Indie rock label whores may remember Voight as one half of Burger/Ink, whose hypnotic Las Vegas was Matador's inaugural electronic release. The ambient side of Voight's personality is revealed by his work as Gas.
Voight suppresses the playful streak he exhibits as Mike Ink when he sits down to make Gas music. Previous releases like Zauberberg and Köenigsforst adhered to a strict formula of sampled symphonic passages (sometimes described as Wagnerian, though they could be from anywhere) swirling atop an incessant 50Hz bass thump. This steady 70-80 bpm bass pulse is the Gas trademark. Though it seems a bit comical at first (and definitely would have turned me off a few years ago), the bass anchor becomes mesmerizing over the course of an album, lending the intricate string patterns needed thrust and clarity.
On Pop, Voight switches things up. Gone are the gloomy samples, and the signature bass heartbeat appears on but two of these seven long tracks. Instead of containing linear motion, Pop is an exercise in sonic texture. UK music scribe Simon Reynolds pointed out that electronic music labeled "IDM" frequently has a marked fascination with timbre. Much of Pop takes this idea to its logical extreme, backgrounding things like melody and rhythm in favor of pure sound.
I read an essay about Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopédies that compared the famous piano pieces, all very similar in melody and structure, to viewing a sculpture from different angles. Just as a few steps to the left gives insight into a visual work, identical musical elements can be shuffled slightly to provide a deeper look. I'm reminded of this analogy when I hear the first three tracks on Pop (no titles, natch). Each of these contains a warm synthesizer drone that wobbles gently between two pitches and several layers of fuzzy electronic distortion that trigger images of wind and trickling water, but slight tweaks in the arrangement of each track casts light on the construction of individual sounds.
Together, these carefully placed packets of noise blend into an immersing, downright amniotic environment, especially at sufficient volume. The delicate synthesized drones will veer too close to new age music for some, but fans of Eno's dreamiest ambient work and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II will find Pop easy to curl up in. The fourth track finally brings the familiar bass drum, paired with a loop of a gorgeous ringing sound that could be a sampled electric guitar (similar in tone to passages of Burger/Ink's Las Vegas). The fifth cut is pure sonic velvet, the layered drone radiating a palpable warmth. I wouldn't have complained if this track had been stretched to the length of a CD; sadly, it lasts a mere eleven minutes.
But while it begins cozy, uneasiness begins to creep into Pop just after the halfway point. By the sixth track, the mood becomes downright eerie. Though many of the textures from the first three tracks are present, the mix feels all wrong, with the synth punched up to ominous levels, and the temperature seems to plummet. Here, the cover art of Pop seems to come into play.
The photographs in the liner notes consist of extreme close-ups of tree branches. At this vantage point, the twigs take on another quality, and we get a small glimpse of the worlds that exists between knots on a twig. This change in perspective reminds me of the opening montage in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, where the camera moves from the placid long shots of Lumberton to the guy having a heart attack while watering his lawn down to the horror happening at the microscopic level of the soil. Greater detail makes the world increasing unpleasant.
Similarly, as you move deeper inside the world of Pop, it changes. The closer adds a marshal kick drum (this time complete with hissing high hat) to the previous track's drones, finally fleshing out the threatening scene. It's an unsettling end to a fascinating sound ride, and when it fades out, you'll enjoy the silence with sharpened ears. | 2000-04-04T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2000-04-04T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mille Plateaux | April 4, 2000 | 9 | aa944dd6-dbd9-460f-81e2-fa16b8f85568 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Perth's Methyl Ethel makes dream-pop for insomniacs—shadowy, nocturnal music whose surface shimmer barely conceals the fidgety, restless soul lurking underneath. | Perth's Methyl Ethel makes dream-pop for insomniacs—shadowy, nocturnal music whose surface shimmer barely conceals the fidgety, restless soul lurking underneath. | Methyl Ethel: Oh Inhuman Spectacle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21691-oh-inhuman-spectacle/ | Oh Inhuman Spectacle | As one of the most isolated cities on the planet, Perth has proven fertile ground for autonomous eccentrics and studio shut-ins, from Sleepy Jackson/Empire of the Sun impresario Luke Steele to Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker. And to that list we can now add Jake Webb, who launched his equally wiggy outfit, Methyl Ethel, as a solo home-recording pursuit in 2013. But while mounting acclaim prompted Webb to turn his private concern into a flesh-and-blood touring band, Methyl Ethel’s debut full-length, Oh Inhuman Spectacle, is reflective of the project’s humble, hermetic beginnings, with Webb handling all the production and instrumentation.
Webb is clearly a devout student of 21st-century art-rock, where old-school psychedelia converges with modern technology—think Radiohead circa Kid A (complete with a song called "Everything Is As It Should Be"), Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the more meditative end of MGMT. But he melts these sources into something more intimate and claustrophobic, with a distinct, disarming voice that infuses his deceptively serene soundscapes with a nervous tension. Through the haunted-house fog of "Also Gesellschaft," he delivers his mission statement with Gollum-like creepiness: "Sometimes, I want to dig a hole and then crawl into it/ I don’t even know if I will come out again/ but I invited you inside." The result is dream-pop for insomniacs—shadowy, nocturnal music whose surface shimmer barely conceals the fidgety, restless soul lurking underneath.
In spite of the obvious attention to getting the mood right, parts of Oh Inhuman Spectacle feel like works in progress. "To Swim" introduces an entrancing, quiet-storm R&B groove but breaks its spell after a too-brief two minutes where "Depth Perception" takes its sweet time building up only to sputter out after a single verse. Webb is still working out the difference between channeling his influences and mimicking them: from its space-bound harmonies to its pulsing backdrop, "Unbalancing Acts" is such a blatant act of AnCo karaoke that some disillusioned fans may actually prefer it to anything on Painting With.
But if Webb is still mastering the finer points of songcraft, he’s got a handle on melody, the most important piece. The trembling guitar line of "Rogues" is pure ’80s dream-pop, but the song’s vacuum-sealed groove and confessional vocal hew closer to "Dreams." On the jangly highlight "Twilight Driving," Webb lets in a little sunlight through the drapes. "It’s the early morning baby, I say, why don’t you hit the snooze," Webb sings, before the relationship is consummated with a bedsheet-rustling sax solo. On an album that’s mostly consumed with paranoid, paralyzing 3 a.m. thoughts about unfulfilled desire, alien abductions, and fever dreams filled with "10,000 screams," "Twilight Driving" extols the virtues of staying in bed for the right reasons: because you have someone there to share it with. | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | March 11, 2016 | 6.7 | aa952f55-f923-4fcf-ab69-5552afebfe8a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Shlohmo is part of a new wave of producers who make use of every musical ingredient available to them; they source samples and influences from any decade, genre, or style that they’re interested in. His latest EP makes brilliant use of vocal processing and has a guest spot from How to Dress Well. | Shlohmo is part of a new wave of producers who make use of every musical ingredient available to them; they source samples and influences from any decade, genre, or style that they’re interested in. His latest EP makes brilliant use of vocal processing and has a guest spot from How to Dress Well. | Shlohmo: Laid Out EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17735-shlohmo-laid-out-ep/ | Laid Out EP | Shlohmo (real name is Henry Laufer) is the flagship artist of Friends of Friends, a label whose artists are making it more and more difficult to distinguish between genres. The producers in FoF's stable draw on every musical ingredient available to them; they source samples and influences from any decade, genre, or style that they're interested in. What's most impressive about what Shlohmo and his peers are doing, and what's epitomized on Laid Out, is the way that they can transform vocal samples into instrumental elements while retaining the immediacy and accessibility we normally associate with pop vocals.
Two sections of the Shlohmo's new EP, Laid Out, have an uncanny catchiness. The first is from the single "Don't Say No", featuring Tom Krell of How to Dress Well singing in his most desperate falsetto. The other sticky section is the loop from the best track on the EP, "Out of Hand". There's an obvious difference between the two: one features a singer emoting as best he can, with provocative, romantic lyrics. The other has just the ghost of a vocal, with words that are difficult to make out. But there's no difference in the intensity of the emotion that both songs conjure and the instrumentation in both is geared towards emphasizing those central refrains.
"Later" the six-minute centerpiece of the album is similar to "Out of Hand" with its looped, anguished vocal sample. Only here, the voice is blurred beyond the point of recognition. The track doesn't have the same kind of grab as its predecessors (perhaps because the repeating loop is less recognizable as a human voice), but it's equally intense, with waxing and waning drum machines that surround and heighten that go-for-broke sample.
Laufer's last project, the Vacation EP, played around with these kinds of melodies and samples, but that record largely avoided pop leanings. It was withdrawn, soft, pretty, akin to Nicolas Jaar's debut Space is Only Noise or to Teebs' Ardour. And while it was solid, Vacation was made for people who were already comfortable listening to electronic music. The first three tracks on Laid Out have far more ambition: they're meant to pull in pop and R&B listeners who might not otherwise be drawn towards electronic music.
The last two songs on the EP, "Put It" and "Without", hold more back and function almost as sketches of the songs that come before them. Each has an instrumental through-line that one can imagine being replaced by a stronger sample. They're smart and well-constructed but they can seem out of place, and dwarfed by what came before. Still, those first three: Shlohmo's already one of the better producers of his young generation and Laid Out should add substantially to his growing reputation. | 2013-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Friends of Friends / Wedidit | March 5, 2013 | 8 | aaaab481-9eda-4ce5-973b-881d87adc7f2 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Swedish artist’s new mixtape is the next step in his shedding the mantle of wannabe rapper and fully embracing a more comfortable role as a pop experimentalist. | The Swedish artist’s new mixtape is the next step in his shedding the mantle of wannabe rapper and fully embracing a more comfortable role as a pop experimentalist. | Yung Lean: Stardust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-lean-stardust/ | Stardust | Since the release of his breakout single “Ginseng Strip 2002” almost a decade ago, Swedish artist Yung Lean has fought to be treated as more than a gimmick. Though the song’s dreamy instrumentals signaled that it wasn’t just comedy rap, Lean was unquestionably imitating his favorite American rappers, dropping profane bars about sex acts and drug trips swaddled in an ironic vaporwave aesthetic. But as much as the record seemed tongue-in-cheek, there was always an obscured sincerity at the core, perhaps exemplified by Lean’s stage moniker: On the one hand, “Yung Lean” is something of a joke about carbon-copy rap names, but it’s also a legitimate play on his government name, Jonathan Leandoer.
Stardust is the next step in Lean’s shedding the mantle of wannabe rapper and fully embracing a more comfortable role as a pop experimentalist. After blowing up stateside, his early work suggested an attempt at a more mainstream rap career. He scored a feature from Travis Scott and a cameo on a Gucci Mane mixtape, but his flow and voice were still developing, and his attempts at straight-up rap felt awkward and out of place. Like many who experience sudden onset virality, he had to learn how to be a musician, working out his creative and personal growing pains in the public eye. Fame in America came with easy access to drugs, and Lean’s early success was marked by a series of tragedies, including the death of his manager, Hippos in Tanks founder Barron Machat. Lean opens up about his time in rehab and inpatient facilities in the documentary Yung Lean: In My Head, and it’s evident that he’s worked to find the clarity and strength now mirrored in his music. On Stardust, he exudes newfound confidence, but he’s also learned to make the flawed vulnerability of his voice work in his favor.
Lean’s voice has often been unfairly described as inaccessible or grating. But the very dissonance of his delivery and persona explains his appeal: the emotionality of the sad boy aesthetic juxtaposed against material flexes, a frequently imperfect voice over ornate and beautiful beats. On the outright ballad “Waterfall,” he stretches into a yearning falsetto, while on “Lips,” his voice withdraws into a more intimate mumble. His direct rapping now has a considerably more developed sense of cadence, like on “Nobody else,” where he flips effortlessly between a vocal-fried sing-song delivery and a more clipped flow. Set against the glistening voices of his Drain Gang associates Bladee and Ecco2k on “SummerTime Blood,” Lean’s tone is rougher and more down to earth, whereas his collaborators tilt toward the angelic. On “Starz2TheRainbow,” featuring Thaiboy Digital, several layers of overdubs circle and collide with one another, transforming Lean into an erratic choir.
Though promoted somewhat modestly as a mixtape, Stardust contains the most high-profile collaborations of Lean’s career. Alongside FKA twigs on album opener “Bliss,” Lean approaches post-punk, channeling New Order with guitar tones and a drum machine. Lean is a hopeless romantic, but twigs gives the song an outright sensuality, making it less a feature and more a duet where the two artists circle each other in a heated frenzy. On “Lips,” Skrillex lays down a smooth instrumental somewhere between UK speed garage and jazzy lounge piano, a leftfield sound for the EDM monolith and Yung Lean alike. The palette Skrillex employs on “SummerTime Blood” recalls “Where Are Ü Now,” but Yung Lean’s voice could not be more different from the spick-and-span choirboy vocals of Justin Bieber. If you took a time machine back to 2013 and told a music writer that the face of brostep and that weird Swedish kid who raps about AriZona Iced Tea would work together, they’d probably laugh you back to the future. In 2022, the union sounds natural.
The appearance of Salem’s Jack Donoghue on “All the things” is less surprising. Witch house influenced and ran parallel with American cloud rap from groups like Raider Klan, TeamSESH, and Green Ova, who laid the groundwork for the sound of Yung Lean’s Sad Boys production collective. A woozy trap ballad that turns into a stomping rave banger midway through, “All the things” retrofits the chorus from “All the Things She Said,” the signature hit from queerbaiting Russian duo t.A.T.u. The infamous trance-pop duo is, in many ways, a symbol of the kind of career Yung Lean could have had: an imported one-hit wonder mainly remembered for their lost-in-translation take on American pop. The t.A.T.u. reference almost knowingly places Lean in a lineage of global pop, but his work stands apart as a genuine melange of international influences that’s found an organic audience across borders rather than a blatantly commercial product.
Every musician is inevitably shaped by their origins, but Lean’s music has never been regionally specific, and he’s always performed in English. Stardust acts as a bridge between two worlds, uniting English-language pop stars with a long tradition of Swedish hip-hop known as “Svensk rap,” which conforms much more squarely to traditional rap beats than Lean does and is generally performed in Swedish. “Paradise Lost” features fellow Swedish singer Ant Wan, whose music reflects his mixed heritage as a Swede of Assyrian descent, blending reggaeton, Afrobeats, drill, and R&B with a bilingual flow. That Lean’s music is distinctly Swedish yet more popular than ever indicates pop’s global turn; Ant Wan’s sound isn’t too far off from a multilingual icon like Bad Bunny.
Though Lean first gained exposure through mimicry, he’s found his own voice, and a clear confidence in it, by abandoning imitation as a form of flattery. Rather than emulating Travis Scott or Drake, he’s found a niche more like that of FKA twigs, a pop provocateur and distinctive visual stylist who glides seamlessly between the mainstream and the esoteric. Memes still contribute to his success, with “Ginseng Strip 2002” recently worming back into the public consciousness as a TikTok phenomenon, but Lean has moved beyond the limits of genre and easy gimmicks. Stardust shows his potential for invention. | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | World Affairs | April 20, 2022 | 7.5 | aaadcec8-c14e-4302-8ae3-65cd31f6a2aa | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The Brooklyn band’s 12th album explores new ground and blossoms within the social, spatial, and economic confines of New York. | The Brooklyn band’s 12th album explores new ground and blossoms within the social, spatial, and economic confines of New York. | Oneida: Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneida-romance/ | Romance | Over the two decades the Brooklyn-based kosmische noise-crew has unleashed their experimental ephemera, it’s hard to find two moments on an Oneida record that resemble one another. Their 12th album, Romance, explores new ground yet again, literally and metaphorically, as an examination of where one fits in the tumult of suddenly inhospitable environments. Across 11 tracks clocking in at 72 minutes, Romance offers a comprehensive yet concise survey of the best of Oneida’s vast and varied catalog—transfixing ambient loops, expansive krautrock jams, and even straight-ahead rock, while taking less time than ever to get to the point.
Romance blossoms within the social, spatial, and economic confines of New York’s constantly morphing music culture. For better or worse, Oneida’s story is tied up with a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn, where cultural institutions (and this band is An Institution) foster the very energy and excitement that attract the forces conspiring for their downfall. From around 2006 until 2011, the band called the Monster Island complex on the Williamsburg Waterfront home. Long before 285 Kent or Death By Audio, Oneida was woodshedding there for hours upon hours in their dedicated studio the Ocropolis. Romance has only remnants of two tracks recorded there, with the rest spanning a variety of locations in New York and one in Barcelona.
Losing their dedicated space seems to have forced the band into a new mode of introspection, where they don’t ruminate on ideas quite as obsessively as in years past. Romance is their most chiseled effort since the mammoth 2009 triple-album Rated O, possessing a mode indelible to Oneida, one of strong self-awareness, an intimacy both immediate and lurid, and—most importantly—loads of fun. The hilarious and raucous “Cockfight” takes a barebones ultimate punk riff, atop which singer Hanoi Jane sounds like he’s sparring with a hell-raising alter ego. It is an honest-to-goodness moving song, particularly the sudden coda of swirling electronics.
Whether the Romance referenced in the title is that of love, actually, or the imagined, Wildean lifestyle of The Artist, is still up for debate. But the band zones in on vocals and lyrics in a new way that offers a narrative of language, and, perhaps, a manifesto: “Repetition is resistance,” chants Bobby Matador on the hazy, heady “Reputation.” There are also plenty of Romantic motifs to explore, here, where cedar groves offer metaphors for patience (“Cedars”) and murders of crows hover over the entire affair (“It Was Me”).
Opener “Economy Travel” transforms a classic repeated psych organ riff into an abstract, fractured colossus, perhaps a loose metaphor for the hierarchy of experimental music cultures. Here, a Kung-Fu “grasshopper” implores an elder while placed quite literally underground, “Beneath the lava/Beneath the crust.” The repeated phrases are disrupted by impossibly heroic drum fills, made that much more impossible by double-tracking Kid Millions in stereo. The split-stereo technique is repeated on “Lay of the Land,” another expansive track that subsumes to a swell of guitar, ebbing in like an evening tide and storming out like a tsunami.
The first real semblance of groove comes three tracks in, on the three-minute “All in Due Time,” where a motorik beat propels billowy synth over a vocal lament on things happening as per the title. “Good Lie” is a surprisingly gentle, Wayne Coyne-inflected meditation on saving face. Moreover, there is no bitterness to Romance. There are occasional flurries of rage and anger but Oneida confronts what comes to them head-on.
Their closest kin these days spreads throughout the New York diaspora, with shades of endurance-jam champions the Psychic Paramount, and corollaries to the many directions taken recently by Liars (not for nothing, Oneida and Liars did a 2003 split). But there’s still something so very Oneida about Oneida. The band’s last appearance on record, the 2016 Northern Spy release with Rhys Chatham, What’s Your Sign?, cemented them in an echelon of avant-minimalist outliers. But Oneida are the rare experimentalists who can hammer away at a riff or idea incessantly and somehow make it really last. | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | March 17, 2018 | 7.4 | aaaf89b1-3500-4070-80a3-9a4e395ad3c3 | Dale W Eisinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dale-w eisinger/ | |
The two distinct, exceptional songwriters in Wolf Parade-- Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug-- combine to create a record that seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, 2005's Apologies to the Queen Mary. | The two distinct, exceptional songwriters in Wolf Parade-- Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug-- combine to create a record that seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, 2005's Apologies to the Queen Mary. | Wolf Parade: At Mount Zoomer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11616-at-mount-zoomer/ | At Mount Zoomer | Any proper insomniac can recite the consequences of a few frantic, sheet-twisting nights: lethargy gives way to elation, reason falters, your teeth start to throb, and a vague sense of uneasiness gradually mutates into weird, wild-eyed paranoia. Wolf Parade doesn't seem like a band that routinely logs its eight hours: Apologies to the Queen Mary, the group's 2005 debut, was riddled with allusions to sleeplessness, and its follow-up, At Mount Zoomer, is no less restless-- it's a fraught, expansive ode to being way too awake. "We're tired," vocalist/guitarist Dan Boeckner admits, voice defeated. "We can't sleep."
While prepping At Mount Zoomer for release, the band reportedly promised Sub Pop "no singles," which-- no matter how attached you are to the notion of the LP as a singular document-- seems like a self-defeating vow. Paradoxically, for a statement of cohesion (take these tracks together, or don't take them at all), At Mount Zoomer is inherently disjointed, very much the product of two distinct, if exceptional, songwriters. Unluckily for Wolf Parade, the success of Boeckner and co-frontman Spencer Krug's side ventures (Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown, respectively) means their stylistic tics are now public information, and, as effectively as these dudes co-exist onstage, they're still singular creative forces.
The band's resolve to enlarge and intensify itself-- At Mount Zoomer seems focused on skewing darker, on sounding nastier, more perilous, and less straightforward than its predecessor, with elaborate arrangements and, you know, no singles-- translates into a lot of proggy diddling (and, ironically, less theremin). The approach yields predictably mottled results: At Mount Zoomer is both captivating ("Call It a Ritual", "Language City", "California Dreamer") and a little bit exhausting.
Recorded in Petite Église, the Quebec church owned by Arcade Fire, and produced by drummer Arlen Thompson, At Mount Zoomer is free from the influence of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, who produced the bulk of Apologies. Lyrically, familiar themes abound: multiple allusions to funerals, cities, dreams, empty rooms, and things that mean nothing. Wolf Parade are uniquely skilled at skewering contemporary (see also: urban, digital, accelerated) culture, and these songs relay a sense of being stuck in the wrong spot at the wrong time-- it's a tense, tenuous place to live.
"Soldier's Grin" opens with punchy keyboard and guitar, before Boeckner steps up to outline the scene: "In my head, there's a city at night," he sings, voice clear and desperate. Although the song's objectively optimistic, full of twittering synths and mewling guitars, it's also deeply anxious, and when Boeckner promises "what you know can only mean one thing" it seems pretty evident that that one thing's no good. "Call It a Ritual" is equally uneasy; Krug's quiet, opaque vocals are spectral and strange-- less piercing than Boeckner's, but way more atmospheric-- and the track descends into a dreamy, muddled haze that feels a little bit like sleepwalking. "California Dreamer", another Krug-penned cut, is epic in scope: Although it's only six minutes long, it's relentlessly squirmy, flitting from quiet, guitar-driven dirge to full-band throwdown.
Whereas Apologies to the Queen Mary closed with an unimpeachable tract of songs, from "Shine a Light" on, At Mount Zoomer fizzles and sags after its sixth track-- the record's grueling backend culminates with the contentious, 11-minute "Kissing the Beehive", a stubbornly unmelodic finale marked by a mush of throbbing guitars and histrionic vocals (ironically, it's the only track that Krug and Boeckner co-wrote). At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second-- that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution-- is as thrilling as it terrifying. | 2008-06-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 17, 2008 | 7.7 | aac11efa-e6a0-490d-a07c-f5abe17cee7f | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The young rapper’s typically erratic nature is missing from his latest EP. Instead, he is just hurried and sluggish. | The young rapper’s typically erratic nature is missing from his latest EP. Instead, he is just hurried and sluggish. | Lil Tracy: Sinner EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-tracy-sinner-ep/ | Sinner EP | The internet is special, not just because our entire lives revolve around it, but because Lil Tracy is allowed to exist there without much question. Online, Tracy has gone through the gauntlet of erratic name changes like Yung Bruh, Lil Tracy, Tracy, Tracy Minaj, then back to Lil Tracy. He once threatened on Twitter to shoot up his own concert, which was subsequently shut down by the NYPD; Tracy was then placed under psychiatric evaluation for a week. And whenever his loyal fanbase plead for new music, he normally responds by purposely giving them the songs they least desire, like when he dropped his country-rap track, “Like a Farmer”—which of course, became one of Tracy’s signature tracks. Tracy is a hip-hop personality who works best when he’s at his most confusing, which is why a straightforward EP like Sinner falls flat.
Since migrating from the Raider Klan offshoot THRAXXHOUSE—which featured rapper Key Nyata and Lil B’s main producer Keyboard Kid—into the cult phenomenon internet crew Gothboiclique—which includes members like Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, and the late Lil Peep—Tracy’s music has been unpredictable. Tracy’s success stemmed from embracing the style of Gothboiclique, which incorporated themes of heartbreak, death, and drugs, into production based around cheap guitars and eerie synths. He set himself apart from the other members by pulling cadences and flows from similarly turbulent internet icons like Lil B, Spaceghostpurrp, and Black Kray, and making them more accessible. But that erratic nature of Tracy is absent on the EP, exchanged for a rushed project that often sounds like a parody of Gothboiclique music.
On Sinner, Tracy’s lone moment of unpredictability comes on closer “LIL WHORE!” in which his disgust at his erasure from the legacy of Lil Peep manifests. It results in a track where Tracy is unleashed on a rant about how in the year since Peep’s passing he has gone from his closest collaborator to a footnote: “They separated me and my friend, that made me mad/Then they had the nerve to go and run off with the swag.” Disappointingly, the effect of the tirade is lessened by Tracy’s off-pitch vocals and a lazy instrumental that feels unfinished.
The remaining four tracks on the EP feature a Lil Tracy that doesn’t seem engaged—at all—in the music he’s creating. Songs like “tattoos,” capture none of the heartaching pain that initially drew so many to the cult of Tracy: “My heart is cold, I just wanna make you shiver.” When Tracy taps into his moody, death anticipating, sad boy lyrics like, “I feel like I’m gon’ die before my grandma,” he immediately upends it with an unbearable hook, “Used to ask my homies for a couple bucks/Now I’m onto better things chewing on zucchini.” The tracks that portray Tracy’s unstable personality best like “bacteria” and “heart,” lean too strongly on the amateur guitars which would work better as an element of the production, not the main attraction.
Part of the Lil Tracy experience is that occasionally a project as hurried and sluggish as Sinner sees the light of day. But Tracy is an artist impossible to reach a conclusion on, because as soon as next week or maybe a year from now he could impulse drop a mixtape that showcases the complete deranged personality of the rapper, like 2017’s Tracy’s Manga. Tracy just operates in his own headspace, which sometimes leads to aimless music, but, like always, he’ll eventually stumble into something. | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 20, 2018 | 6 | aac661d2-27c2-4ffd-93bc-4a44c97a958a | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Adopting an oblique, exploratory approach to bolero, hip-hop, and synth pop, the Puerto Rican artist’s third studio album meditates candidly on political and personal endurance. | Adopting an oblique, exploratory approach to bolero, hip-hop, and synth pop, the Puerto Rican artist’s third studio album meditates candidly on political and personal endurance. | iLe: Nacarile | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ile-nacarile/ | Nacarile | Inspiration came to the Puerto Rican artist Ileana Cabra, or iLe, out of the gloom of 2020. The confinement and lack of social interaction of the early days of lockdown left her feeling adrift, with lots of downtime to reflect on her life and the forces that stir her creativity. The uncertainty of the world felt suffocating, and the only thing she could do was turn to music.
Looking to release these feelings, the singer-songwriter decided to write Nacarile, her first album in three years. The project is her most ambitious and experimental work yet—a cornucopia of art-pop tinged with bolero, hip-hop, protest music, Caribbean folk rhythms, and psychedelia. It is a testament to the strength of her will; she channels her emotions into 11 tracks, illustrating her deep commitment to social justice and desire for personal fulfillment and genuine love. Above all, iLe cares, and it shows in every one of her graceful lyrics.
iLe has always collaged genres, and across Nacarile, she and her longtime producer Ismael Cancel inventively marry and intertwine styles, often within the same songs. Her politics step into the spotlight on tracks such as “ALGO BONITO,” where, alongside reggaeton royalty Ivy Queen, she addresses patriarchal triggers and reappropriates common sexist catcalls, flipping them into urgent demands for progress toward women’s rights. She takes a similar approach in “traguito;” under an entrancing bolero melody, she and the Chilean singer-songwriter Mon Laferte push against the stereotype of a hard-headed, “difficult” woman. They assert that there’s nothing wrong with being free to make their own decisions, or refusing to serve men’s tissue-soft egos. The defiant lyrics don’t pull any punches either, leaving the track’s thesis up for zero debate: “It’s not that I was difficult, it’s that I was how I wanted to be,” she sings. It’s an authentic take on bolero, and the contemporary, rousing theme makes it all the more special.
iLe is the younger sister of brothers René Pérez and Eduardo Cabra, who are individually known as Residente and Visitante, and together as the rap duo Calle 13. She began her career as a background vocalist for the group before slowly earning a larger presence in their live shows and albums. She went solo in 2016, eventually releasing her Grammy-winning debut album iLevitable the same year. From a young age, iLe had close proximity to her brothers’ politically charged songs, as well as the wealth of Latin American icons they grew close to over their career, like Rubén Blades, Susana Baca, Silvio Rodríguez, and Totó la Momposina. These experiences helped nurture her innate activist sentiments and sharpen some of the values she holds most steadfast, such as her feminist advocacy. That political impulse feeds many of the tracks and imbues them with honesty.
Nacarile has more featured artists than all of her previous LPs combined, but their presence only heightens the throughline of the album. Take “Ningún Lugar,” which includes the Argentine rapper Trueno; his deliberate delivery resembles both a Tommy gun and sledgehammer, and reflects the emotional experience of wrestling with political anguish and seeking resilience to carry you into tomorrow. “(Escapándome) de mí” and “Paisaje” are immediate standouts; iLe sings solo, but just as innovatively as her accompanying guests. The former’s Auto-Tune manipulates timbre and pitch, giving her voice an airy quality that helps convey the vulnerability of the lyrics and the fear that accompanies a new relationship. She slips into a more romantic spirit on “Paisaje,” this time trading trepidation for the sincerity of love and all its butterflies.
From the opener’s mood-setting theremin sounds, Nacarile immediately demonstrates iLe’s ambition. The album is an audacious sonic endeavor from an artist who has never been interested in staying on the same worn path others have taken, not even her own. Whether she’s machete-rattling against colonialism, as on “donde nadie más Respira,” or slowing down to a storytime lilt as she passive-aggressively admonishes a toxic ex on “Lo Que Yo Quería,” iLe is devoted to creating the most honest music she can. It’s no secret that despondency can, ironically, inspire an artist’s sharpest senses, but Nacarile is another reminder of just how elegantly melancholy can foster poignant art. | 2022-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony Music Latin | October 31, 2022 | 7.6 | aacff364-bc94-4856-a591-a7dbc27a2263 | Juan J. Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/juan-j. arroyo / | |
Joe Williams' first solo project is a breath of fresh air for vaporwave. | Joe Williams' first solo project is a breath of fresh air for vaporwave. | Motion Graphics: Motion Graphics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22257-motion-graphics/ | Motion Graphics | “Does the internet dream of itself?” asks Werner Herzog in his new film, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. If it does, that subliminal soundtrack might be something like Motion Graphics, the debut solo album from the New York electronic musician Joe Williams. Until now, Williams has been known best as a sideman; he lent his hand to the squirrelly electronic textures of Co La’s 2013 album Moody Coup, and he also plays in Lifted, Maxmillion Dunbar and Co La’s drift-loving beats-and-improv ensemble. Only now, with his debut album as Motion Graphics, does the musician step out on his own—although “step in” might be a better way of phrasing it, as Motion Graphics is an album largely about inner space, virtual reality, and the infinite expanses that unfold behind computer screens.
You might guess as much from his alias, and it’s clear from his titles, too: “Minecraft Mosaic,” a tribute to the blocky world-building computer game, or “SoftBank Arcade,” which references the Japanese multinational telecom company. It’s also clear from his lyrics, which weave sticky semantic webs that join the natural world with its digital analog. In a cool, clear voice, he sings of rewiring leaves, of windows and screens, of birds-eye lenses flying overhead. “Heaven sent the GUI,” he sings in “Minecraft Mosaic.” In “City Links,” he muses, “Links accelerate/Rendering a time zone/Moving in a mobile home.” It seems likely those aren’t double-wides he’s talking about, but rather our own peripatetic second homes, as we scuttle about like hyperconnected hermit crabs living out of our phones.
But this isn't an album about words; first and foremost, it is an album about sounds. And here, too, Williams’ digital preoccupations are self-evident. Motion Graphics’ palette glows with a vivid, hi-def sheen: faux-choral synthesizer pads and ethereal, new age tones; digital sound effects like birdsong and splashing water; hyperkinetic chimes and pings that mimic your computer's alerts. In Motion Graphics’ universe, a sound is rarely just a sound; it’s often an avatar for something else, too. Nimble hi-hats dance across the gleaming surface of his music like long-legged water striders, but they’re also obvious nods to contemporary hip-hop production, just as his fluttering, phasing clarinets and MIDI-driven Debussy runs invoke classical references.
Those classical influences run deep: “Anyware”—a dynamic relay race of short, staccato phrases passed between marimba, clarinet, and sampler—nods to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, while the gorgeous, freeform “Forecast” dials up a forest clearing on the holodeck and pipes in an ersatz rendition of Astor Piazzolla’s tango nuevo for added atmosphere. It’s rare to encounter references to both DJ Mustard and Steve Reich in the same piece of music, but that’s presumably part of the point of Motion Graphics, an album inspired in part by the seamless (yet jarring) experience of the infinitely scrolling media feed.
Though these kinds of themes might not seem terribly novel—James Ferraro broached many of them with Far Side Virtual, and legions of vaporwave musicians have continued to beat that dead electric horse since—Williams renders it all so vividly and so lovingly that it hardly matters. Listen to the complexity of a track like the pulse-minimalist “Anyware” or the footwork-tempo “SoftBank Arcade” and it becomes clear that he is a proper composer, not just a cut-and-paste artist. And Motion Graphics’ contradictions—simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant—make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt. As vaporwave grows stale, his album offers a breath of fresh air. | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | August 29, 2016 | 8 | aad47a53-6662-43a5-aa8a-e017ef764d62 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
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