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San Francisco musician Hannah Van Loon marries the dreamlike eeriness of the weekend’s final hours with the heaviness of shoegaze on a debut album co-written and produced by Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear. | San Francisco musician Hannah Van Loon marries the dreamlike eeriness of the weekend’s final hours with the heaviness of shoegaze on a debut album co-written and produced by Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear. | Tanukichan: Sundays | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tanukichan-sundays/ | Sundays | Sundays can be disorienting. The gateways from weekend to weekday, they wear many hats—Sunday Funday, Lazy Sunday, the Lord’s Day, Sunday Scaries—and possess a magical melancholy all their own. This mystique provides the name, and the inspiration, for the debut album from San Francisco musician Hannah Van Loon, who performs as Tanukichan. Through heavy distortion, bleeding basslines, and eerie lyrics, Van Loon captures the spirit of a day whose wide-open nature fosters anxieties as well as ambitions.
The late cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote that eeriness was characterized “by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence… when there is something present where there should be nothing,” and vice versa. Those sensations, of something elemental missing and of something ghostly lingering, permeate Sundays’ ten tracks. With help from co-writer and producer Chaz Bear—aka chillwave innovator Toro Y Moi—who also worked on Van Loon’s 2016 Radiolove EP, Tanukichan marries the eerie and dreamlike qualities of the weekend’s final hours with the heaviness of shoegaze.
The result is a thoroughly dazed album that conjures a daydream so immersive (if not always so idyllic), it precludes any intrusive thoughts. The instrumentation on Sundays feels sun-baked and toasty in its fuzzy beach towel of distortion. “Natural” is a car ride with the windows open and sunbeams kissing every exposed limb. “The Blue Sky” envelops Van Loon in the hazy heavens. The warped, spiraling guitar riff on “Like the Sun” recalls a wind-up music box whose overheated ballet dancer has begun to melt.
Sundays’ eeriness comes from its lack of specificity. There is a void at the center of its songs, filled only with a longing for something that remains unarticulated. Album opener “Lazy Love” is a tussle between agency and lethargy. Its chugging bassline and bouncy electronic drum beat battle the electric guitar’s grumpy wail. “For as long as I remember/Got up over and over/Does that mean anything at all?” Van Loon wonders. Her voice is serene and almost sleepy as she seems to question her apathy.
The bulk of Sundays deals with similar sentiments of lack of control or direction. “Hunned Bandz” revels in this freedom, while “Perfect” drips with uncertainty. “What am I doing/If I could just lay flat,” Van Loon sings on the latter. She wants to bathe in the brightness of morning sun (if she can wake up for it), but restlessness takes over and she becomes overwhelmed. Tanukichan comes closest to pinning down this peculiar sensation on “The Best,” where she frets that her growing numbness will isolate her. Although the backstory never surfaces, Tanukichan fully fleshes out the feeling. Sundays isn’t a record of Hannah Van Loon’s personal history—it’s a library of her emotions.
But the album doesn’t leave you stranded in its liminal space. Van Loon has said that Sundays’ title was meant to capture the “laziness, and dreamy clarity that you can feel after a late night, waking up having to face the world with a new perspective.” On its final track, “This Time,” the heavy reverb and distortion fall away, leaving a perky set of guitar chords, a cool-headed bassline, and an iridescent, organ-like synth. “Oh I know I can be so blind/Maybe it’ll be worth it this time,” Van Loon sings, finally sounding more relaxed than exhausted. | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Company Records | July 13, 2018 | 7.7 | aad6e8b9-75f3-4a3f-bd40-cd68a3cc37f5 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Mike Paradinas’ groundbreaking electronic label celebrates its 25th anniversary by looking not back but forward, presenting a daring selection of footwork, braindance, and experimental beats. | Mike Paradinas’ groundbreaking electronic label celebrates its 25th anniversary by looking not back but forward, presenting a daring selection of footwork, braindance, and experimental beats. | Various Artists: PlanetMµ25 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-planetmu25/ | PlanetMµ25 | Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq, probably didn’t have longevity on his mind when he launched Planet Mu back in 1995. Originally an imprint of Virgin Records, the label was intended merely as an outlet for µ-Ziq’s own brain-bending productions; there was little to suggest a new chapter being carved into history. Besides, most experimental electronic labels reach little further than their wooden anniversary.
Yet Planet Mu, long free from Virgin, celebrates its 25th birthday in rude artistic health, a glorious reminder that record labels can be held together by inspiration rather than genre. Over the last 25 years, Planet Mu has released key records in jungle (Remarc’s Sound Murderer), dubstep (Pinch’s “Qawwali”) and footwork (Jlin’s Dark Energy), while providing a welcome home to the kind of outsider IDM with which µ-Ziq made his name, notably the work of Venetian Snares. That none of these artists appear on anniversary compilation PlanetMµ25 demonstrates Paradinas’ admirable devotion to pushing into the future rather than sponging down the past.
Footwork has been key to the past decade of Planet Mu, after the label introduced the Chicago genre to European audiences on Bangs & Works Vol. 1. It seems right, then, that two of footwork’s leading lights should provide the most party-starting tracks on this birthday release. RP Boo’s “Finally Here (ft. Afiya)” is a sassy riot of well-worn samples and acidic squelch, while Londoner Basic Rhythm adds glitchy intensity to a remix of DJ Nate’s “Get Off Me (Betta Get Back)” a song originally found on Nate’s 2019 album Take Off Mode.
Taking its cues from Paradinas’ intrepid A&R, the compilation references Planet Mu’s recent adventures in grime (East Man & Streema’s menacing yet wobbly “Know Like Dat”) and outsider pop (the unsettling gloss of RUI-HO’s “Hikari”) while carving a small space for nostalgia. Meemo Comma’s gloriously gothic “Tif’eret” recalls the cinematic proto-hardcore of Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Radio Babylon,” while Konx-om-Pax and Bogdan Raczynski pay homage to Planet Mu’s roots in braindance and extreme IDM on “Rez (Skee Mask Remix)” and “tteosintae.”
True to the label’s ethos, it is the most adventurous, least genre-dependent artists who really shine on PlanetMµ25. Ripatti—better known as Finnish electronic auteur Vladislav Delay—delivers a sound so densely packed with rhythm and chaos on “Flowers” that it resembles five footwork records playing at once. This unholy melange fits surprisingly well next to Speaker Music’s “Techno Is a Liberation Technology (feat. AceMo),” a similarly genre-ambivalent track that sets haunting jazz licks against a drum machine in free fall. Chicago producer Jana Rush’s “Mynd Fuc” also dabbles in jazz, its low-key piano stroll doing little to soothe nerves frazzled by the black-hole turbulence of her drum programming.
Like any good party, PlanetMµ25 can get overwhelming at times; FARWARMTH’s “Shadows in the Air” is like listening to the jerk of a tickly cough, its stuttering production more defect than enhancement. But the compilation demonstrates with considerable panache that even as it passes the quarter-century mark, Planet Mu continues to break new ground. In 25 years, Planet Mu has gone from Virgin Records to virgin territory—a far healthier place to be.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Planet Mu | December 22, 2020 | 7.3 | aadc6940-a74b-4e73-9260-56f817f3b65b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Australian singer-songwriter uses the Unplugged format as a showcase for the community of musicians she’s cultivated. | The Australian singer-songwriter uses the Unplugged format as a showcase for the community of musicians she’s cultivated. | Courtney Barnett: MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courtney-barnett-mtv-unplugged-live-in-melbourne/ | MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne | Courtney Barnett has made her discomfort with pedestals clear. Even as the music press has heralded her as an icon, a wunderkind, the voice of a generation, she’s always worked to foster a second, quieter reputation as a humble collaborator. Fittingly, her appearance on MTV Unplugged functions not as a career retrospective, but a showcase for the community she’s cultivated. Of the eight songs in this set, only four see Barnett performing her own songs solo. Her focus remains fixed on the friends and artists who inspire her, providing powerful context for her creative mission.
Take, for instance, “Nameless, Faceless.” In the song’s original iteration, on 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett delivered glib verses with her tongue pressed firmly against her cheek—a jarring juxtaposition against the chorus’s dead-serious threats of rape and femicide. In this performance, Barnett enlists friend and labelmate Evelyn Ida Morris as a duet partner, slows the arrangement to a crawl, and adds a chilling piano line. These adjustments don’t elevate the track as much as clarify its purpose. As the piano descends its minor scale, the impotent internet trolls of the verses mutate, by the chorus, into material threats to women’s lives. The addition of Morris’ voice steels Barnett’s own, turning the song’s wry spin on an Atwood quote into a sincere expression of collective fear.
Equally revelatory is a cover of “Charcoal Lane,” the title track from the debut solo album of indigenous Australian singer-songwriter Archie Roach. It’s a near-certainty that Barnett’s North American fans are unfamiliar with Roach, best known for his 1990 single “Took the Children Away.” As infants, Roach and tens of thousands of aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in orphanages. Many were physically and sexually abused, and many more, including Roach, struggled with mental illness, poverty, and addiction. Dueting on “Charcoal Lane” with Paul Kelly, a longtime friend and creative partner of Roach, Barnett pays tribute to Roach while placing her own success on the same map as his suffering.
When Barnett performs alone, it’s clear she’s put great care into rearranging these songs for the Unplugged format. Each song gets an update that foregrounds some previously buried quality—like the low hum of camaraderie that warms “Sunday Roast,” or the bouncy violins that lighten the medical emergency of “Avant Gardener.” These renditions are distinct enough from Barnett’s well-loved recordings that fans will no doubt return to them. On the unreleased song “Untitled (Play It On Repeat),” Barnett’s voice cracks to engaging, expressive effect, but on “Not Only I,” a duet with New Zealand crooner Marlon Williams, she’s a poor match against his buttery baritone.
One musician who does complement Barnett’s gifts as both singer and songwriter is Leonard Cohen. Her set’s closer, a jubilant “So Long, Marianne,” places her voice in a nest of other voices, backing her up in soft harmony as she bids her audience adieu. When the time comes to say goodbye, when the pedestal crumbles and the bulbs in the spotlight burn out, she’ll be fine. She’ll be among friends. | 2019-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Milk! | December 10, 2019 | 7.3 | aae3faae-2723-4a59-997d-5f7bba454ee4 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The National frontman’s solo debut unwinds the nervous energy in favor of something more laid-back. The music is gorgeous and unfussy, but his performances and lyrics feel nondescript. | The National frontman’s solo debut unwinds the nervous energy in favor of something more laid-back. The music is gorgeous and unfussy, but his performances and lyrics feel nondescript. | Matt Berninger: Serpentine Prison | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matt-berninger-serpentine-prison/ | Serpentine Prison | Matt Berninger has not been the “average person out in the American heartland” for some time, but that’s not a bad thing. His main band, the National, has continued to release compelling, challenging albums long after they became a worldwide success. Much like his bandmates in underappreciated (and horribly named) experimental supergroups LNZNDRF and Pfarmers, Berninger has used the time between National records to blow off steam and explore new paths. With Brent Knopf collaboration EL VY, he sent up his own rock-star image with eccentric, upbeat new wave. The origins of Serpentine Prison are more sentimental: Berninger initially partnered with producer Booker T. Jones to pay tribute to his childhood love of Willie Nelson’s Jones-produced covers record, Stardust. Jones encouraged Berninger to flesh out some demos written with friends, including Walter Martin of the Walkmen and singer-songwriter Harrison Whitford, a member of Phoebe Bridgers’ touring band. These songs don’t have the nervous energy of Berninger’s main project, instead opting for something even quieter and more laid-back. That leaves Berninger to tie everything together—but his performances and lyrics feel nondescript. With Jones and frequent National collaborator Sean O’Brien co-producing, Serpentine Prison is technically accomplished, but Berninger’s looseness clashes with the record’s professionalism.
In his memoir Time Is Tight, Jones writes that the outside producer must “find and make a place” in a group’s pecking order, something he learned when he found himself lost in the pot smoke of Nelson’s Stardust sessions. (His defense, which sounds like a Berningerism: “I never correctly judged the potency of the grass.”) He certainly finds his place here; like Stardust, Serpentine Prison sounds gorgeous and unfussy. Most of the session musicians have played on National records, but under Jones’ direction they adapt to a jazzier, more organic sound, and Knopf sneaks some EL VY goofiness into “One More Second.” Even the more National-esque songs, like standouts “All for Nothing” and “Take Me Out of Town,” feel part of the new record’s world. “Distant Axis” stands out for its more conventional AOR trappings, but the polish favorably recalls early-2000s U2.
Early on with the National, Berninger’s lyrics often felt like honest sentiments filtered through layers of masculine repression until they came out mangled and esoteric. (See this Trouble Will Find Me-era Tumblr post, which documented normal phrases vs. their Berninger equivalents.) His lyrics became more direct, even lovelorn, by 2019’s I Am Easy to Find, but he still found creative ways to contrast his band members’ complexity; here, he and his band might as well be on different records. Opener “My Eyes Are T-Shirts” and Gail Ann Dorsey duet “Silver Springs” try to build something sultry, but Berninger’s lyrics lean so heavily into self-pastiche that they don’t connect the same way. Berninger can stretch himself: His morally ambiguous lyrics on “Loved So Little” (“It’s only God/Or the devil when you’re in it/I’m always getting caught in the middle”) and smoky delivery match the complexity of the other players.
Berninger’s sentimentality usually pushes back against the National’s reputation for self-serious art rock, but it doesn’t hold up as well on its own. “One More Second” was conceived as a response to “I Will Always Love You,” but the lyrics are so boilerplate (“The way we talked last night/It felt like a different kind of fight”) that it could be a response to just about anything. When Berninger ambles about, barely stringing together melodies on “Oh Dearie” as Andrew Bird’s violin soars and Mickey Raphael’s bass harmonica drones, he feels like the least talented person on his own album. He’s most at home revisiting familiar themes of intimacy and projection on the title track: “I feel like an impersonation of you/Or am I doing another version of you doing me?” It’s not that the emperor has no clothes, it’s that these don’t fit.
The fun of Berninger’s non-National projects is in seeing his quirks emerge in other guises: Is he really mumbling a Lauren Mayberry melody on a CHVRCHES album? Did he really reference Depeche Mode in a musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac? Even when he covered “Stardust” with Jones producing, he brought his mannerisms to an otherwise faithful rendition. But aside from the occasional sneaky homage to Kristin Hersh or Big Star, Serpentine Prison lacks that novelty; it sounds like he’s actively trying to write the kind of modern standards that “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and “I Need My Girl” improbably became. Jones and O’Brien’s production is engaging, but their work begs for something that isn’t so perfunctory and slight. Instead of the modern Stardust, Serpentine Prison is merely a prolific musician’s stopgap.
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. | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Book / Concord | October 20, 2020 | 6.7 | aae6f1c2-b766-483f-863f-0cad664a968b | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
Post Malone’s fourth studio album is slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that he’s taking himself more seriously, for better or worse. | Post Malone’s fourth studio album is slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that he’s taking himself more seriously, for better or worse. | Post Malone: Twelve Carat Toothache | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/post-malone-twelve-carat-toothache/ | Twelve Carat Toothache | Nearly a decade into his career, Post Malone has mostly shed the baggage of his younger years—the days of cornrows, gold grills, saucin’, and shortsighted remarks about rap music. He’s a nine-time Grammy nominee and a stylish guy who, at a quick glance, hasn’t gotten any more tattoos—at least not on his face. He’s become part of the pop music establishment, and his fourth studio album, Twelve Carat Toothache, is accordingly slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that Malone is taking himself more seriously, for better or worse.
For someone so outwardly colorful, Malone has long been a straightforward lyricist with funny and curious turns of phrases in his songs. There was, of course, the absurd saucin’-and-swaggin’ refrain of “White Iverson,” as well as his amusingly puerile mention of “beautiful boobies” on “Spoil My Night.” But he also incorporates unlikely people into his memorable moments, like eulogizing Bon Scott on “Rockstar,” or singing, “Come with the Tony Romo for clowns and all the bozos” on “Psycho.” Even when he flexes, Malone has a penchant for exposing the leeriness of his own desires, as on Beerbongs & Bentleys songs “Takin’ Shots” and “Same Bitches.” On Twelve Carat Toothache, he continues to play it straight, declaring on the opening song, “I was born to raise hell/I was born to take pills,” and, “I was born to fuck hoes/I was born to fuck up.” There are probably more artful ways to phrase those sentiments, but that’s not how he operates: He delivers directly what’s in front of him, whether that’s the front of his mind or a front-facing mirror, as on “Cooped Up” when he lists exactly what he’s wearing (“Gucci my Prada, Miyake/Louie, Bottega, and Tommy”).
The songs on Twelve Carat Toothache swerve between pain and joy, and while Malone has always fit lament into his albums, these new sad songs don’t feel tortured, labored, or ungracious. Instead, Malone deftly plays up bitterness with a wink on the jaunty “Lemon Tree,” trilling his voice with a playful hyperbole. Elsewhere, the wonderfully over-the-top “Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol,” made with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, opens with a cascade of vocal harmonies. The production booms and the drums thunder as Malone sings about getting too drunk and having all of his teeth knocked out. Though you can hear the sorrow in the tone and the lyrics, the song sounds triumphant—like something that could conceivably soundtrack a raucous night out.
“Love/Hate Letter to Alcohol” is also a rare instance of exaggeration on an album that is musically compact. While he’s great with a hook, Malone’s previous album, 2019’s Hollywood’s Bleeding, was bloated with too many ideas and genre forays. The good hooks remain on Twelve Carat Toothache, but now, the mood of the album is cohesive. “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “I Like You (A Happier Song)” make up an irresistible one-two pop combo, as frothy as Bud Light foam—the former wastes no time by opening with the chorus; the latter has him jovially singing, “Your heart’s so big, but that ass is huge.” But Malone’s tendency toward being crass is part of his appeal—his gift for melody and radio hits come unfiltered, and he doesn’t need to try to make his come-ons sound particularly attractive. The id is tamer on Twelve Carat Toothache, but it has not disappeared.
The missteps of Twelve Carat Toothache are clustered toward the end; the songs, even the pained ones, are disappointingly saccharine and don’t have strong hooks to overcome the lack of texture. Generally, Malone does not galvanize with big feelings or drill down with vivid descriptions and minutiae; he’s a much better songwriter when he leans on being a little off-kilter, making pop with some element of surprise, like when he sings “Some people got an apple/Some people got a tangerine,” on “Lemon Tree.” During the album’s weaker moments, it’s not just that Malone is writing in broader, blander strokes. He isn’t writing with his typical quirks—like the couplet on “Wasting Angels” that goes, “This is like when I was sane, before the fame/Uh-oh, uh oh, this life is crazy.” Uh-oh, uh-oh is right.
Malone is aware of his talents and even his limitations, but there’s a sense that he wants more, whether that’s earning the respect afforded to someone like Kurt Cobain or just escaping the box created by his reputation and success. He has spoken about how he wanted to make a shorter album without streaming filler, a telltale move from an artist looking to ascend to Career Musician—and the album closes with a demo, emphasizing the time and thought that went into the whole body of work. While a little gloom can go a long way, the rapper/singer’s congeniality is ultimately what makes Post Malone who he is—the type of guy who calls himself “that bitch,” as he does here. On “Reputation,” Malone nods to Cobain by singing, “You’re the superstar, entertain us,” an allusion to the weariness that fame breeds. For better and worse, Malone is still the entertainer. | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mercury / Republic | June 8, 2022 | 6.6 | aaea0b2c-a35c-43fb-9a9a-bf049dbb004e | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
During the gap between A$AP Rocky’s sophomore album, At.Long.Last.A$AP, and his major label debut, his mentor A$AP Yams’ died. With A.L.L.A.—executive produced by Yams, along with Danger Mouse and featuring Kanye, Lil Wayne, Future, and M.I.A. among others—a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work. | During the gap between A$AP Rocky’s sophomore album, At.Long.Last.A$AP, and his major label debut, his mentor A$AP Yams’ died. With A.L.L.A.—executive produced by Yams, along with Danger Mouse and featuring Kanye, Lil Wayne, Future, and M.I.A. among others—a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work. | A$AP Rocky: At.Long.Last.A$AP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20661-atlonglastaap/ | At.Long.Last.A$AP | We are in the age of the curator, from meticulously-arranged, aspirational Tumblrs to Drake’s recent stint at Sotheby’s. As it’s grown easier to translate our identities through these careful assemblages of stuff we fuck with, good taste has taken on a new leveraging power. A$AP Rocky, the baby-faced fashion killa and primary figurehead of zeitgeist-wheelie-poppin’ Harlem goon squad A$AP Mob, has always understood this better than anyone else in the rap game. As he should: his own success can be directly traced to early promo on his mentor and A$AP Worldwide co-owner A$AP Yams’ highly influential RealNiggaTumblr, one of the savviest indie-to-major reconnaissance missions this century. That triumph of personal taste has been one of the reasons Rocky’s resonated most with this generation of rap fans and beyond, but it’s also led to his most persistent critique: all vibe, no substance. In between the conceptual Instagram stunts and Harry Potter-themed sartorial wisdom, it’s hard not to wonder about the Rakim Mayers beneath the swaggy labels, and if we’d ever get a lasting impression of his point of view beyond the infinite affirmations that it is, indeed, lit.
There’s been a two-plus year gap between Rocky’s sophomore studio album, At.Long.Last.ASAP, and his chart-topping major label debut, during which he dabbled in fashion design, modeled for Ferragamo, and made his acting debut in Sundance darling Dope. But the most glaring change between then and now is the absence of Yams, or Steven Rodriguez, who died this January at 26 of a drug overdose. Yams’ presence was mostly behind-the-scenes (though he’d often appear in the videos, in all his jiggy splendor), but he was the heart and soul of the A$AP Mob, and Rocky’s success is no short of unfathomable without his guidance. With A.L.L.A.—executive produced by Yams, along with art-rap auteur Danger Mouse—he presents to the world one last relic of he and his best friend’s collaborative vision, and though the album was reportedly completed before Yams’ death, it still feels like an elegy to the closest thing the millennial generation had to its own Diddy or Dame Dash.
Rocky remained understandably private in the aftermath of Yams’ passing, but on A.L.L.A., he seems more open than ever: to the healing properties of hallucinogens, to be sure, but also to revealing parts of his personality that go beyond surface-level. To an extent, this may reflect his recent antipathy towards the much-hyped labels with which he once associated. But it seems more likely a result of growing up, gaining steadier footing in the industry his squad gate-crashed, and coming to terms with himself as more than just a sum of his inspirations and logos. At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.
"Ok, let’s get past all this swag, trapping, and fashion talking," he exhales on back-to-basics Kanye collab "Jukebox Joints". Turns out, Pretty Flacko’s got real shit to say—though not without the buffer of some par-for-the-course bits of pretty-sounding fluff—and he wastes little time getting to it. Album intro "Holy Ghost" serves as an indictment of the Christian clergy, a grasp towards his own jaded conception of a personal Jesus, and a plea to save his admittedly corrupted soul all the same. It’s clear he’s been sharpening his rap skills on a technical level, too. On "Pharsyde", over a screwed-up take on Danger Mouse’s loping Spaghetti Westernisms, Rocky punctuates a sideways glance at his rapidly gentrifying Uptown kingdom with a loaded "Harlem Shake" reference, the kind of nuanced writing absent from much of his older work. On "Max B", he turns a neck-snapping homage to the incarcerated Wavie One into a commentary on remorseless cops and the prison-industrial complex with newfound lyrical command: "Passed away from a stray from some fake-tough guy/ Now this the kinda story that should make doves cry."
A.L.L.A’s recent singles are among its least interesting moments. All that’s missing from "L$D"'s on-the-nose dorm room psychedelia are the dryer sheets MacGyvered around the smoke detector, though the track makes more sense in album context as something of an extended interlude than it did as a standalone. And "Everyday", with its headline-grabbing Miguel/Rod Stewart mash-up, feels like an overt attempt at a "FourFiveSeconds"-style genre-busting flex, though its transitions are as clunky and unresolved as PowerPoint slide changes. Not to say the album isn’t without hits: lead single "Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2 (LBFJ2)" is a monster, with its hulking, siren-heavy production from drill production duo Nez & Rio, and "Electric Body", with old partner in crime Schoolboy Q, seems destined for club tenure this summer. Still, it’s one of this year’s growing list of major rap releases—Thug, Drake, Kendrick—seemingly unconcerned with landing anything on the radio.
Even without the overt grabs for mainstream relevance à la "Fuckin' Problems", A.L.L.A. isn’t short on star power, and Rocky’s coaxed some impressive features from his sprawling guest roster. Lil Wayne steadily gathers momentum on "M’$", barrelling downhill through break-neck plug talk and landing breathlessly at a final fuck-you to Birdman ("I love my YM, ain’t no more CM"). On album highlight "Fine Whine", M.I.A. shakes up a syrupy half-time lurch to spit, "Tell your new bitch she can suck a dick!" with a mouthful of bad blood. On the same song, Future Hendrix (who’s been making it cool to be psychedelic and street for years now) delivers his realest post-Ciara guest verse yet. That "Wavybone" revives UGK over a Juicy J co-production—and that Yasiin Bey shows up at all on the closing track—are curatorial flexes in their own right.
But A.L.L.A.’s most unexpected presence is Joe Fox, a previously unknown songwriter and guitarist who Rocky scooped off the streets of London and fashioned into his protege, and who appears on almost a third of the album. It’s a weird move, on an album full of them. Until now, Rocky’s adhered to a painstakingly calculated idea of "cool." On Long.Live.A$AP, you got the sense his eclectic, of-the-moment features roster were a pointed statement as to how he’d like to be perceived, an itemized breakdown of the context in which he envisioned his own artistry. But A.L.L.A. frequently wanders from overt coolness towards choices that are emphatically off-trend: Danger Mouse, Mark Ronson, Rod Stewart, a sample from a '60s Christmas ditty on "Excuse Me". It’s a welcome change of pace for the former Raf Simons Murderer, as the self-aware tastemaking takes a backseat to hopes, anxieties, tremors of sociopolitical unrest—a beating heart beneath the Rick Owens linens. Instead of a hyper-curated tableau of swag, Rocky’s curatorial eye adopts a more intimate gaze, rendering his collage of disparate inspirations more like a mixtape made for a friend than a sterile exhibition space. This is where his late mentor’s influence shines brightest: Yams’ point of view was so piercing and confident it effortlessly transcended the sum of his influences, proving emphatically that you are more than the shit you like.
The last thing we hear, even after Yams’ ranted outro closes with a triumphant "ASAP, bitch!," is what sounds like an encroaching train, or a shrieking hangover due to hit any minute now, or maybe just reality about to set in. After the party, the afterparty, and the acid-fueled marathon orgy thereafter, the most surreal part of a trip is inevitably the moment you have to rub your eyes and go be a real adult. From the sound of A.L.L.A., Rocky can handle that. | 2015-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | May 29, 2015 | 7.8 | aaf1585b-cd5e-4fc1-a3d9-2546a2846d4d | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
On his second album for Nicolas Jaar’s label, the Russian producer continues to move away from footwork, building a gloomy world that is strangely welcoming. | On his second album for Nicolas Jaar’s label, the Russian producer continues to move away from footwork, building a gloomy world that is strangely welcoming. | Vtgnike: Steals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vtgnike-steals/ | Steals | “A picturesque story of gloomy worlds”—that’s how Moscow DJ Nikita Zabelin recently described his fellow Russians’ electronic music. Citing the alleged “loneliness” of the national character, he ticked off a list of qualities—“perpetual understatements, significant emptiness, an illusion of incompleteness, melancholy, alienation”—that could also apply to the work of Danil Avramov, also known as the prolific producer Vtgnike.
Born three hours east of Moscow in the city of Vladimir, Avramov has ties to the label Gost Zvuk and is a resident at Moscow’s NII (Science and Art) club. When he began producing in earnest near the start of this decade, Avramov was in obvious thrall to the tumbling rhythms and playful sampling of Chicago footwork. But by 2014’s Dubna, his first album for Nicolas Jaar’s Other People, his double-time beats slowly but surely filled up with ambient atmospherics and lo-fi detritus, like a leaky boat taking on water. Steals—his second album for Other People and first since being released from prison on drug charges—is his foggiest, most abstracted music yet.
Opener “Vechermix” shows just how far he’s come: A world away from dance music of any stripe, it’s a brooding miniature in which the primary elements—acoustic guitar, electric bass, and flute—circle each other like weary pigeons. This loop, lifted perhaps from some creepy Italian prog record or other obscure source, lasts barely two minutes, but it is a compelling introduction to Vtgnike’s world, allowing your ears to adjust to the darkness inside.
Things get mazelike from there: “Sentimental Geometry” pays homage to Midwestern American techno producers like Moodymann and Hieroglyphic Being, with a buzzing keyboard sequence bouncing from dissonant jazz piano. “Sweep” immerses harp plucks in a morass of low rumbles and Auto-Tuned a cappella, launching a stretch of fuzzy tracks with the sonics of a dying sound card. Both “Sausemix” and “VVK” recall the UK producer Actress’ queasy fusions of ambient and club music.
Only “Nervnii RnB” picks up Avramov’s old interest in footwork, but his origins are just a foggy memory here, too. The beat sounds like it’s been spliced together from coughs and sighs. After reaching that imperceptible peak, the back half of the album slinks into the murk, luxuriating in bell tones, lo-fi hiss, and disembodied vocal samples. “Enough of that slow shit,” slurs a dubbed-out voice in “Slowshit,” but the joke’s on it, since there’s not a stethoscope powerful enough to detect this pulse. Just like it began, Steals ends with a surprise: “Primechord,” an airy piano étude reminiscent of Debussy heard through concrete walls.
Steals’ release on Jaar’s label recontextualizes the music to an extent, taking it out of the narrower confines of the Russian electronic scene and resituating it along an international axis of electronic producers who don’t really fit in anywhere. There is a certain loneliness here, the sort you might expect to find in Russian electronic music, especially from a producer who just spent two years locked up. But there’s also considerable warmth, resilience, and even humor. Vtgnike’s world might seem hermetic at first, but step inside, and it proves to be surprisingly welcoming. | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Other People | February 22, 2019 | 6.9 | aaf3a7bf-f650-47df-b9e8-d3c66c4487fb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Producer Pat Thomas's loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Allen Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view. | Producer Pat Thomas's loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Allen Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view. | Allen Ginsberg: The Last Word on First Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21933-the-last-word-on-first-blues/ | The Last Word on First Blues | Apart from a few stray months in the ‘60s, it's hard to imagine any period in which Allen Ginsberg's *First Blues *might have found commercial success, the present one included. But in a somewhat more liberated world, Omnivore's *Last Word on First Blues *box set makes more sense now than any time since the double LP's 1983 release on John Hammond's eponymous indie label. A radical in Ronald Reagan's ‘80s as much in Dwight Eisenhower's ‘50s, Allen Ginsberg's open, gleeful, and articulate queerness bursts through here as clear as ever, a poet dancing with all the legal freedoms earned when a California State Superior Judge declared that Ginsberg's groundbreaking 1956 poem “Howl” was of “redeeming social importance,” and therefore not obscene—freedoms Ginsberg had declared himself to possess long before. While the poet's wobbling voice remains a hard sell in the 21st century (ditto, to some listeners, his sexploits), producer Pat Thomas' loving Last Word on *First Blues *reissue reveals Ginsberg as a missing link in the East Village's musical pathways, a secret alt-folk hero hidden in relatively plain view.
Recorded over three sessions in 1971, 1976, and 1981, the new *First Blues *comes with a third disc of supplementary material, including appearances by Bob Dylan on bass and jazz hero Don Cherry on kazoo. It opens with the Dylan-abetted sing-alongs “Going to San Diego” and “Vomit Express,” both sounding as if Ginsberg had visited Big Pink for a session in the Basement. Amid the surreal-hootenanny atmosphere, in which Dylan jams alongside Arthur Russell, Ginsberg's voice finds a comfort zone. But, just as much as Dylan, First Blues carries forward the sloppy and joyous folk-rock of Ginsberg's East Village neighbors in the Holy Modal Rounders and the over-the-top poetry of his friends in The Fugs, whose co-founder Ed Sanders appears in *Last Word *session photos from 1971. At the heart of the later recordings, too, is Steven Taylor, Ginsberg's long-term musical partner, who fixes the poet's anarchic spirit and wandering melodic tendencies amid a solid folk-rock sparkle—and who would go on to join the The Fugs when that band reunited in 1984.
Though released as one album, *First Blues *also represents three separate slices of Ginsberg's musical career: sex-positive folk romps like “Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag),” word-crammed investigative poetry anthems like “CIA Dope Calypso,” and less classifiable specimens of wise cosmic folk. The lines are blurry, but it is the latter category that is perhaps the most refreshing. Though Ginsberg isn't a singer by most traditional measures, he is a surprising and capable songwriter, finding charming melodies he can only get across in the broadest way, as on “Vomit Express” (from 1971), aided by big gang vocals on the chorus, and the Rounders-like “Old Pond” (from ten years later).
For all his legendary lack of inhibition, Ginsberg's singing is sometimes a bit (ahem) stiff, more a crooning poet than a singer-songwriter. The 1976 band is the most supportive, featuring David Mansfield on elegant pedal steel and Arthur Russell on cello, achieving an easy, swaying grace on “Gospel Novel Truths” and a cool existential swing on “Broken Bone Blues.” These songs and others seem primed for covering by a new generation of free weirdos, including the rambunctious “Guru Blues” (“I can't find anyone to fuck me in the ass”), the solemn “Father Death Blues.” It is on the demos disc, too, that the bed bugs and speed freaks of “NY Blues” provide a through-line to the hyper-local topicality of contemporary East Side songwriter Jeffrey Lewis, fitting in comfortably next to “Scowling Crackhead Ian” and other characters of Lewis' recent Manhattan.
Perhaps a more natural and capable freak-folker is Ginsberg's hubby, the poet Peter Orlovsky, who punctuates his ode “You Are My Dildo” with a game jug-band falsetto, and (on the bonus disc) delivers his fellatio-lovin’ “Penny's Farm” rewrite “Feeding Them Raspberries To Grow” in a convincingly olde-tyme warble. At their best, the players in the three different session bands featured here make a spot for Ginsberg and his voice to become one with the music, as on the 1976 outtake “Slack Key Guitar,” an anti-colonial nu-exotica lullaby that recalls a more chilled-out Van Dyke Parks.
For its numerous charms, Ginsberg's sexual openness continues to make *First Blues *an eyebrow-raising experience three-and-a-half decades after its recording. Nor is it without its complications. “Everybody's just a little bit homosexual whether they like it or not,” Ginsberg sings on the first line of the provocative and Fug-ly “Everybody Sing,” but “everybody” in the song's cosmology doesn't seem to include females. (Orlovsky is a bit more equal-opportunity.) As in his visionary poetry, all of Allen Ginsberg is on display during the the two-and-a-half hours of recordings, intentional and not, but always (and still) vital. As responsible for pop music's turn to poetry as anyone, Allen Ginsberg had more than a few songs of his own. | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Omnivore | May 27, 2016 | 7.9 | aaf7784e-42d8-494f-a14c-ab22384d050b | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
On her debut EP, South East London singer and DJ Blane Muise combines venomous lyricism with tar-boiling industrial beats to inhabit a fierce, sexual, pathologically impatient, and deeply cathartic alter ego. | On her debut EP, South East London singer and DJ Blane Muise combines venomous lyricism with tar-boiling industrial beats to inhabit a fierce, sexual, pathologically impatient, and deeply cathartic alter ego. | Shygirl : Cruel Practice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shygirl-cruel-practice/ | Cruel Practice | South East London singer and DJ Blane Muise recently explained that her Shygirl moniker had nothing to do with timidity. The alter ego Muise inhabits on her debut solo EP, Cruel Practice, isn’t afraid to approach others—she’s simply “not down for small talk.” In Shygirl’s world, “time is precious.” She hates when people waste hers, and it shows in a dark, seething persona that combines venomous lyricism with tar-boiling industrial beats.
That impatience has been Shygirl’s trademark since 2016’s “Want More,” her first release as one-quarter of London’s NUXXE collective. The single is a fierce declaration of what she does and does not like: “You wanna go slow, I ain’t into it,” she drawls. “You wanna fuck fast, I’m into it.” Her vocals hang back a bit from the top of the mix, and her bravado is still in the development stage, but the song contains all of the major elements of her style.
As he did on “Want More,” Shygirl’s NUXXE compatriot and go-to producer Sega Bodega fills Cruel Practice with enigmatic, anxious beats that traverse the horror spectrum, from Super Mario’s haunted mansion to Hitchcock. EP opener “Rude” begins with a nod to the iconic shower scene from the filmmaker’s 1960 classic Psycho, but this rendition makes the screeching strings sound bouncier and more pliable, primed to give way to the blown-out bass and stuttering grime sway that follow.
In contrast to the intense atmosphere Sega cultivates with his production, Shygirl’s vocals are unwaveringly deadpan without ever coming across as bored or passive. On the twitchy single “Gush” (co-produced by Sega and Dinamarca), Muise is as cutting as “Gossip Girl” queen bee Blair Waldorf: “If I was feeling you before, I’m not feeling you today/Or any other day/ In my feelings, that OK?” she asks, then adds, “I don’t need you to say.”
There’s an urgency to the assertiveness on display in all five tracks on Cruel Practice—a compulsion to outlast you, to let you know she won’t take your shit, to make sure you understand she’s a good fuck. No matter the circumstance, Shygirl is in complete control. Lead single “O” showcases her ruthless flow, unshaken by Sega’s clanking drums and synths that screech like a Jurassic Park Velociraptor. “Don’t get slack or I’ll ignore you,” she warns, savoring the momentum of the chase. On the EP’s final and best track, “Asher Wolfe,” she plays the scheming villain: “I got you right where I want you/Leave you where I got you/No one to help you.” It’s her eeriest track to date, but Muise wields her sadistic power with ease; her delivery sounds more fluid than ever.
At first listen, Shygirl can come off like the Regina George of grime. She wants to cause chaos. She likes to be underestimated. Cruel Practice could be the manifesto of a horror-movie psychopath. But the record and the character behind it are captivating because what they’re really doing is celebrating the agency of their creator. Dripping in fresh apathy, Shygirl’s blunt lyrics are self-protective shields more than weapons. When Muise feels out control and worries she’s lost her sense of self, songwriting is an outlet. She sees her music as a way of dispelling bad energy by pushing back at it. Muise isn’t transforming into a demon on Shygirl’s debut EP—she’s slaying them. | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | NUXXE | June 1, 2018 | 7.6 | aafb43d8-69c4-41dc-84e6-8c925fd783ed | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Japan's early house music scene has only found its way to the West in bits and pieces. Once Upon a Time in Japan, a new compilation, aims to change that. For new listeners unacquainted with early '90s house, the set could easily scan as just a dope set of unheralded tracks that thumped far from the fare of "Club MTV." | Japan's early house music scene has only found its way to the West in bits and pieces. Once Upon a Time in Japan, a new compilation, aims to change that. For new listeners unacquainted with early '90s house, the set could easily scan as just a dope set of unheralded tracks that thumped far from the fare of "Club MTV." | Various Artists: Brawther & Alixkun Present Once Upon a Time in Japan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21396-brawther-alixkun-present-once-upon-a-time-in-japan/ | Brawther & Alixkun Present Once Upon a Time in Japan | The sound of Japan’s early house music scene has only reached the Western hemisphere in the last few years. Even then, we only catch it in glimpses: An RBMA Radio show dedicated to pioneers like Ecstasy Boys and Frankie Knuckles' production partner Satoshi Tomiie; Rush Hour's illuminating Sounds From the Far East compilation, which gathered the crucial productions of Soichi Terada. But there is a wealth of Japanese deep house and dance music that never made it off the island, much less across the Pacific. Add to it now this set from two French DJs, Brawther & Alixkun, who have dug up their favorite tracks for ハウス Once Upon a Time in Japan, spanning the heyday of the Major Force label in the early '90s to the late '90s.
Scrub the ID tags off of the 15 tracks that comprise this set and you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between these tracks and their U.S./UK counterparts, so expert is their mastery of house music tropes of the era. For new listeners unacquainted with early '90s house, the set could easily scan as just a dope set of unheralded tracks that thumped far from the fare of "Club MTV." T.P.O.’s opener "Punk Inc. (Hiroshi's Dub)" dates from 1989, when the group was pivoting away from conscious rap toward hip-house (and a few years on, into deep house). Those hip-hop drums are subsumed on the remix in favor of a percolating kick and a phase high enough to give you a nosebleed.
Dig into some of the backstories behind these tracks and it gets slightly odd. The vocalizing that goes with Yutsuko Chusonji’s "Blessing (Magic Ware Remix)" scans as gospel house in the vein of the Sounds of Blackness, made all the more baffling by the fact that Chusonji is known as a famous mangaka rather than as a dance music producer. For those taken in either by the pan flutes and saxophones of Mood Hut (or, you know, Biebs), check YPF’s lone single, "Trance of Love (Tokyo Offshore Mix)" which scans as Balearic house complete with sax solo. Or else check the lovely flute that wafts over Akiko Kanazawa’s "Sawauchi Jinku (Terada Mix)." Tethered to a tough beat courtesy of Soichi Terada, it’s the most overtly Japanese-sounding track here, as Kanazawa is an enka singer whose career dates back to the mid-'70s.
The echoing piano figures that opens the Ecstasy Boys’s transcendent 10-minute epic "Chi Chi Chi Gan Kanon" could slot into almost any attendant Frankie Knuckles remix of that era. Which makes sense in that the trio of Mitsuru Kotaki, Shiro Amamiya, and Tatsuro Amamiya did have singles on N.Y. house labels Quark and Strictly Rhythm, and could have factored into the sets of the day. Throughout the track, the snares stutter, dive and then climb skyward, building until the midway point, wherein that piano returns and takes the track even higher. And even as the track slowly ebbs away, those drums reverberate and shoot up and down like swallows at play. As these 15 tracks suggest, no one comp can serve as a catchall for that country's dance history, but it's a thrilling overview nevertheless. One hopes that the story behind Once Upon a Time in Japan continues to be told. | 2016-01-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-27T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Les Disques Mystiques / Jazzy Couscous | January 27, 2016 | 8 | aafd5847-85b5-43a2-b97b-54735b89bdd0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Detroit band brings a light touch to the melancholic alt-country songs on this album, which emerged from a spontaneous session in the woods. | The Detroit band brings a light touch to the melancholic alt-country songs on this album, which emerged from a spontaneous session in the woods. | Bonny Doon: Longwave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonny-doon-longwave/ | Longwave | Sometime last spring, the four members of Detroit’s Bonny Doon fled to a house in the woods of Northern Michigan for a creative retreat near the auspiciously named Mystic Lake. Over the course of one very productive week, the band wrote their second album, Longwave, a sober, spartan folk-rock record with a spontaneous feel. “Sometimes we’ll just go up and bring and a tape machine and record sessions for four or five days,” said Bill Lennox, one of the group’s two singer-songwriters, in an interview last year. Remote in the wilderness, away from their routine, this verdant little album was abruptly born.
This narrative is so familiar that it’s made The Onion: “Man Just Going to Grab Guitar and Old Four-Track, Go Out to Cabin in Woods, Make Shittiest Album Anyone’s Ever Heard” was a howlingly funny headline as early as 2011. But Longwave, thankfully, is much less hackneyed than its framing device, and Bonny Doon exhibit less irritating self-seriousness than might be expected of a band that found its muse in the trees.
Lennox and his co-writer, Bobby Colombo, bring a light touch to their melancholic alt-country songs, staying moody but avoiding the overly stern or solemn. The surface appeal of their sound—the breezy, imperturbable nonchalance, what Lennox has called their “stoned sort-of minimalism”—has more to do with California than Detroit. Even so, darker tones of despair and casual cynicism come through in the lyrics. “And I should be happy, but I’m not/But I’m not/And I should be grateful, I know, but I’m not,” Lennox sings airily on “A Lotta Things.” On “Part of Me,” they make an effort to derive from the misery a kind of lesson: “Appreciate the harder times/To know what it feels like.”
After their wilderness writing session, Bonny Doon returned to record the album at the Key Club studio in Western Michigan, aiming to capture the vibe from the lake house as simply as possible. In this they’ve succeeded: There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.
A less generous listener might hear this album’s loose, easygoing quality as carelessness, and the band does little to dispel that impression. “Walkdown,” the closer, meanders on for three unfulfilling minutes. “Saved,” at nearly six minutes the album’s longest track, sputters into near-silence midway through before picking back up into an aimless several-minute jam session. The press release, tellingly, highlights this almost-flubbed take as “a candid moment that encapsulates the spirit of Longwave.” Their commitment to spontaneity is admirable, even if it’s not always fruitful. | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Woodsist | March 23, 2018 | 6.3 | aaff706e-9d3c-41bd-b8f3-24c71367c4b5 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
TK | TK | Quavo: Rocket Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quavo-rocket-power/ | Rocket Power | Listening to “Greatness,” the closing track to Quavo’s second solo album, Rocket Power, it’s easy to imagine him removing his trademark designer shades and staring himself down in the mirror. The song is one of the album’s several tributes to Takeoff, Quavo’s nephew and one-third of the Migos, who was murdered during a dispute at a Houston bowling alley in November 2022. But unlike the visceral single “Without You,” “Greatness” looks to the future. Over producer Al Geno’s mournful trumpets and skipping drums, Quavo interrupts his reminiscences on the trio’s early days with a command to not dwell on the past. But he can’t help himself—and why should he? Near the middle of the song, he splits the difference, saluting his fallen kin with as much confidence and lyrical agility as he can muster: “Never forget that the Migos amazin’/Look at the ice and the knot in my pants, you know that them young niggas made it.” It’s a lot to face behind a mic, and the tinges of sadness in his voice linger like tear streaks on glass. This tender balancing act marks “Greatness” as one of Quavo’s most affecting songs and a microcosm of Rocket Power at its best. The Migos we knew will never return, but Quavo honors them with old and new riffs on the flex rap that made them stars, and he honors himself by digging a bit deeper into his emotions.
Takeoff’s death looms large over Rocket Power—that’s his nickname, Rocket, in the title, and he’s featured on three songs. Beyond that, he is referenced or alluded to in some way on every track. Quavo is an athletic rapper who can stretch syllables as wide as the backseat of a Wraith, and it’s jarring to hear those schemes serve writing geared around his emotional grief. Quavo raps about crying himself to sleep thinking about Takeoff (“11:11”) and relapsing into a Xanax addiction because of his passing (“Disciples”). When you pair that pain with a fun-loving song like “Patty Cake,” where Quavo and Takeoff come closest to recreating the familial magic of their 2022 collaboration Only Built for Infinity Links, their easy chemistry makes a mundane call-and-response heartbreaking: “I won’t tell another nigga name,” Quavo says, to which Takeoff quickly responds, “Who is buddy?/What his name?” Even in a posthumous recording, it’s evident how much fun they had playing off each other.
Vulnerability is not a trait that’s often associated with Quavo, but Rocket Power suggests he’s been reflecting on his own life more than usual. His thoughts come up most explicitly in “Mama Told Me,” which builds on the hook from Migos’ 2017 single “T-Shirt,” as he lists off childhood memories and motherly advice that have guided him throughout life. On “Hold Me,” a ghostly vocal sample and reverberated keyboards echo as he solemnly calling on family members dead and alive to show him the way. But there’s only so much he’s willing to share, and eventually he defaults to factory settings: flashy, silly metaphors and designer flexes delivered in that choppy, AutoTune-slathered flow. He’s resolved to work through the pain, and as a result, some of Rocket Power plays like a slightly more engaging version of his 2018 solo debut, QUAVO HUNCHO.
At least Quavo sounds more comfortable handling songs by himself now, even if some of his ideas feel like they’ve been jogging in place for years. “Who Wit Me” and “Turn Yo Clic Up” sound like vintage Migos, and Quavo’s delivery is more animated than the generic nods to fashion brands and “[turning] your bitch up.” Most of the color and intrigue on Rocket Power comes from its production, which gives Quavo more musical avenues to explore. Alex Lustig and Pooh Beatz bring an Afrobeats-influenced shuffle and glittering keys to “Galaxy” that give Quavo’s quips about having sex in the back of Maybachs an urgent, anxious rhythm. “Back Where It Begins” and “Not Done Yet” lean into Polo G- and Juice WRLD-style pop rap, giving him space to belt and croon instead of his usual sing-rap cadence. None of them quite sound like hits, but it’s nice to hear Quavo moving outside of his comfort zone, shaking things up just enough to avoid the monotony of HUNCHO.
What Rocket Power makes most apparent is that Quavo has reached a crossroads. He earned superstar status by making his ascent seem as breezy and effortless as Versace linen, but the dissolution of the Migos and the death of Takeoff are cataclysmic events that have forever altered the course of his career. Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet. | 2023-08-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-23T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | August 23, 2023 | 7 | ab0aa276-e8ae-4093-90fd-ae2a30892082 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album, Loaded, is a perfectly conceived rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, this expanded 6xCD Re-Loaded collection is less about unearthing rare tracks than getting the story straight. | Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album, Loaded, is a perfectly conceived rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, this expanded 6xCD Re-Loaded collection is less about unearthing rare tracks than getting the story straight. | The Velvet Underground: Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21220-loaded-re-loaded-45th-anniversary-edition/ | Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition | Loaded is a perfect rock'n'roll record: 40 minutes long, five songs to a side, and not a single wasted note. Originally released in 1970, the Velvet Underground’s fourth album marked the moment where Lou Reed’s early gig as a Pickwick Records song doctor ceased to be an amusing footnote to the band’s story and became their governing principle. Loaded is the sort of proper album that feels like a greatest hits collection, with each track thoroughly inhabiting and mastering a dominant rock archetype: the hippy-dippy, harmony-rich singalong; the sneering, street walkin’ prowler; the cheeky honky-tonk throwback; the wedding slow-dance standard; the dirty blues grind; the lighter-waving, anthemic grand finale. Loaded remains the one Velvets album you can put on at a house party among mixed company without killing the vibe or sending people running for the door, and it contains the only song in their repertoire—"Sweet Jane"—that you have any hope of hearing on an oldies station today.
But being a perfect rock'n'roll album is a very different thing than being a perfect Velvet Underground album. Part of what makes the Velvet Underground’s official discography so unique is that each of the four dramatically different albums they released between 1967 and 1970 could be considered their definitive statement, and yet each could also be considered the outlier. However, in the latter sense, that distance is amplified with Loaded, and not just because Moe Tucker—the pounding heartbeat of the band—sat out the sessions to tend to her pregnancy, necessitating a drumming-by-committee approach. When stacked against the dark, droning psychedelia of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the flesh-melting distortion of White Light/White Heat, and the disarming quietude of The Velvet Underground, there’s nothing overtly contrarian about Loaded. It’s the album that plays least into the myth of the Velvets as transgressive avant-rock outsiders and speaks most loudly to their reality, as a working band playing half-empty bars, desperate to deliver a hit to their antsy major label minders.
That pressure was baked into the very title of the record, a directive from their Atlantic Records bosses to produce a record "loaded" with potential hit singles—and the band delivered on every count, except, of course, the sales part. In that respect, Loaded stands as one of rock’s first truly meta artifacts, prefiguring such label-baiting in-jokes as Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’ rebuke to Geffen Records and Nirvana’s "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter". This is, after all, a rock 'n'roll album that advertises its populist intent with a song about rock'n'roll called "Rock & Roll". Past provocations gave way to carefree kicks: "Head Held High" is "I’m Waiting for the Man" fresh out of rehab; "Train Round the Bend" is "Sister Ray" sent to the confession booth. But while Loaded may constitute a concerted effort to play by the rules, the Velvets come off like boarding school-bound delinquents who spend their class time stifling giggles and sneaking snarky notes. Whether answering the Beatles’ optimistic "Here Comes the Sun" with the withering "Who Loves the Sun?" or crashing the Byrds’ country-rock rodeo on "Lonesome Cowboy Bill", Loaded feels as much like a sardonic comment on pop’s ruling class as a bid to join its rarefied ranks. Atop the immortal riff of "Sweet Jane", Reed declares, "me, I’m in a rock'n'roll band," before adding a "huh"—and, after a million listens, it’s still hard to tell if it’s being delivered with a smirk or a shrug.
Alas, all that contradictory tension proved emblematic of deeper fissures running through the band. As this six-disc box set expansion of Loaded makes clear, the Velvets’ most airtight album ironically bears telling signs of their unravelling. Compiling remastered stereo and mono versions of the album, demos, alternate mixes, outtakes, a surround-sound DVD album mix, and two live sets, Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition highlights the painstaking tweaks and tinkering that went into making a seemingly effortless rock'n'roll album. Like the previous box sets in the Velvets’ current reissue campaign, Re-Loaded is less about unearthing rare tracks (much of the bonus material here first surfaced on 1997’s Fully Loaded) than getting the story straight, and properly contextualizing the output of a band whose official albums have been overwhelmed by a continuous stream of posthumous live albums, rarities compilations, and bootlegs. In the case of Loaded, the stereo and mono mixes don’t exist merely to satisfy differing listener preferences, but to present conflicting visions for the album. The former contains the extended versions of "Sweet Jane" and "New Age" that were eventually pared down for the official November 1970 release, much to Reed’s chagrin; he had left the band shortly after recording was completed, effectively sealing the album’s doomed fate before it even hit stores.
Tellingly, on Loaded, Reed already sounds like he’s handing the keys to the band over to bassist Doug Yule, who sings lead on four of the album’s 10 songs and plays much of the instrumentation. In contrast to John Cale, the band co-founder he replaced in 1968, Yule was never so much Reed’s foil as his eager understudy, with a more naturally melodic voice that buffed away Reed’s rough edges. But that’s no slight: Yule’s smooth-talker act yields the album’s most subversive moments, whether selling the bitter cynicism of "Who Loves the Sun?" as shiny, happy, ba-ba-da-ba pop, or playing the hotel bar-prowling hustler on "New Age" who sycophantically woos a faded movie star for a one-night stand only to cruelly discard her as "over the hill." And as the outtakes disc reveals, "I Found a Reason" could’ve easily wound up as a straight Dylan rip, before Yule’s angelic harmonies helped transform it into the most gorgeously celestial ballad in the Velvets’ canon. (Partially due to outstanding contractual commitments, Yule would soldier forth under the Velvet Underground name without any other original members for 1973’s largely forgotten Squeeze, an album unlikely to enjoy its own 45th-anniversary box set moment.)
More than just a collection of song scraps, Re-Loaded’s demo stash lets us imagine how Loaded might’ve turned out without the hitmaking ambitions, from the rough-hewn takes of future Reed solo standards like "Satellite of Love" to the organ-swirled fantasia of "Ocean" (the most prog the Velvets ever got) to a molasses-slow version of "Sweet Jane" that anticipates the Cowboy Junkies’ codeined cover. Meanwhile, the first live disc—a remaster of Live at Max’s Kansas City—offers a glimpse of the arena-ready powerhouse the Velvets had become just prior to Reed’s exit. (The two sets that make up the show—one devoted to rockers, the other to ballads—were recorded by Factory regular Brigid Polk on August 23 1970, reportedly Reed’s last night fronting the band; the version included here omits two tracks from the 2004 double-disc reissue of the complete concert, presumably to make it fit on a single disc.) If Loaded is the closest the Velvets ever got to becoming the Rolling Stones, on Max’s Kansas City they practically turn into the Who, as Doug’s brother Billy propels "I’m Waiting for the Man" and "Beginning to See the Light" with thundering Moon-shot drum rolls. But the recording is ultimately a faded snapshot of a live act in peak form at a career nadir: from the infamous intrusion of Jim Carroll trying to score some Tuinal to the idle audience chit-chat about the movie Patton that overwhelms "Candy Says", the Velvets are rendered as mere background noise even for the few devotees who bothered to come out to their shows.
The second concert included here—and of most interest to Velvets completists—predates the Max’s Kansas City show by a few months, but exudes an even greater degree of finality. Recorded by a fan on a reel-to-reel, the May 1970 set at Philadelphia’s Second Fret club sees Reed, Yule, and guitarist Sterling Morrison performing without a drummer (though Yule would hit the skins on a couple of songs). The stripped-down, slackened presentation greatly distinguishes it from other live Velvets documents of the era, while emphasizing certain subliminal textures, like the krautrock pulse running through "Cool It Down", or the tremolo wash on "Train Round the Bend" that essentially invents Spacemen 3 a good 12 years early. (There’s also a rare Reed-sung version of "New Age" with considerably different lyrics.) These curios aside, Live at Second Fret is the sort of moldy bootleg you probably only need to hear once, that is, if you can even make it all the way through—the recording has the fidelity of a pocket-dial. But the decaying, desolate presentation feels like an appropriate way to capture a band on the verge of disintegration. The set ends, as Loaded does, with "Oh! Sweet Nuthin’", and the two versions crystallize the album’s story in miniature: one is the grandiose statement of a band with chart-topping aspirations, the other is the lonesome sound of a band that ain’t got nothin’ at all. | 2015-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | November 4, 2015 | 10 | ab0b0145-f51e-4497-8201-3c15f00e24ad | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra successors’ fifth album is a tribute to pandemic perseverance that’s long on uplifting strings but short on experimentation. | The Penguin Cafe Orchestra successors’ fifth album is a tribute to pandemic perseverance that’s long on uplifting strings but short on experimentation. | Penguin Cafe: Rain Before Seven... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/penguin-cafe-rain-before-seven/ | Rain Before Seven... | For most of its existence, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra didn’t much resemble an orchestra. They sounded more like the house band at a bacchanal in an imagined, druidic British past, and no matter how much jazz and classical and African music they folded into their sound, listening to songs like “Air à Danser” and “Pythagoras’s Trousers” still felt like attending a party where everyone knew how to play an instrument. On 1993’s Union Cafe, the final album before leader Simon Jeffes’ death in 1997, the band explored a stately, string-oriented sound better suited to a parlor than a party. Penguin Cafe, the successor led by Jeffes’ son Arthur, has largely continued in this vein while hinting at the folky exuberance of the earlier work. It’s funny that they should drop “orchestra” from their name given how much more they sound like one.
Arthur Jeffes plays a dozen instruments on Penguin Cafe’s new album Rain Before Seven…, not least the balafon, a West African xylophone with a terrifically raspy tone. Yet just as crucial to the record’s sound is Oli Langford, a string arranger with a steady gig supplying violin to the soundtracks of such blockbusters as The Batman, Divergent, and Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. This is a man who knows a thing or two about making music that sounds “cinematic,” and Rain Before Seven… plays like a compilation of the themes that accompany small-town protagonists as they arrive in cities bigger and grander than they ever imagined. This is music written in the language of excitement and adventure, all sawing strings, insistent rhythms, and curious mallets.
All this uplift leaves little room for mystery, psychedelia, or experimentation. Though Jeffes’ balafon and Andy Waterworth’s Eberhard Weber-like bass diddles inject pleasing eccentricity, tricky decisions like the 15/8 beat on “Galahad” barely register beneath the music’s twinkling cheerfulness. Even some interesting moments are defused by the album’s relentlessness, as when a crisp-sounding drum machine on “Find Your Feet” is immediately subsumed into a wall of strings cranking out a tried-and-true pop chord progression. With strings occupying nearly every inch of available space, there’s little sense of spontaneity or camaraderie between the players. The PCO had a way of convincing you their music sprung spontaneously from their heads, even when it was rigorously composed; Penguin Cafe songs sound like the product of endless rehearsal, a formality less conducive to the experimentation that led to serendipitous wonders like “Telephone and Rubber Band.”
Jeffes is not shy about labeling this music “optimistic,” and a Bandcamp statement equates the album’s tone with the English “national character,” the stoicism and perseverance the Brits are reputed to show in the face of a crisis—such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Jeffes found himself on lockdown in hard-hit Italy. The album’s lush but low-key tenor suggests a relief that collaborative big-band music like this can exist after the pandemic made it risky for musicians even to share a room. Rain Before Seven… is designed to feel hopeful and positive, reassuring rather than challenging: music for the world that should or could be, rather than the grim reality. But it’s ultimately a vision of a heaven where nothing much happens. | 2023-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | July 14, 2023 | 6.3 | ab0bdebe-a745-473d-a682-2e818494391d | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
On his third album as Call Super, Joe Seaton’s compositions feel more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts. | On his third album as Call Super, Joe Seaton’s compositions feel more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts. | Call Super: Every Mouth Teeth Missing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/call-super-every-mouth-teeth-missing/ | Every Mouth Teeth Missing | For fans mapping the output British-born, Berlin-based producer Joe Seaton, his Call Super handle was slotted for his pummeling house and techno output, while the Ondo Fudd alias was reserved for his weirder excursions into electro or ambient. But the club-ready Eyes Glide Through The Oxide 2x12" from last year as Ondo Fudd found that legend now inverted, his Call Super releases now more on the low-key end of the spectrum. His third album (and first for Anthony Naples’ Incienso label), Every Mouth Teeth Missing continues along a trajectory first laid out in a Red Bull Music Academy chat where Seaton envisioned “making stuff that is less to do with clubs” and it feels more casual, introverted, and low-stakes than previous efforts.
Truth in advertising, “An Unstable Music” opens with a jumble of disconnected sounds that jostle around with no attempt at coherence: distorted guitar, jackhammering noise, hushed piano, ponging electronics, and a sound like rummaging through a drawer of costume jewelry. Even when the sound palette is more coherent, a sense of restless skittering remains. The title track builds its rhythmic foundation from ever-shifting, rather dissimilar, elements: closed hi-hats, squelching electronics, crisp snares, a shutting door, chimes, distant rustling. The rhythm never quite coheres into something sure-footed or tactile, but something slippery as quicksilver, the commingled sounds closer to a mosaic, disparate yet all of a piece.
Zooming in, the craftsmanship is nuanced and highly detailed, but when you pull back, some of Missing’s tracks flow by without commanding too much attention or notice. On 2017’s Arpo, Seaton was already favoring twinkling sounds over bombast, drums that sound the size of contact lenses rather than oil barrels. But on Missing, he retreads similar ground to diminishing returns. His father, painter and Dixieland player David Seaton, again contributes clarinet and oboe. These woodwinds have become an earmark of many of Seaton’s productions –either as Call Super, Ondo Fudd, or in collaboration with Beatrice Dillon– the clarinet making a track like “Pay As U Glow” feel whimsical and light. But charming as it is to have father and son collaborating in the studio, it’s become such a common feature of his tracks that one wonders about Seaton casting a slightly larger net. What would Call Super’s circuitry sound like in dialogue with cello, harp, or saxophone (as when Joy Orbison grappled with reedman Ben Vince on a Hessle Audio 12")?
A glimpse of dramatic strings comes in on “Mouth Bank Bed,” a track that finds Call Super turning over new stones and taking a few risks. A garbled, disjointed voice emerges and recedes, with bits of electronics slithering around the edges. If Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing was just two minutes long, it might sound something like this. “Sleep All Night With Open Eye” draws from a similar sonic palette, the mood tipping towards the brooding and anxious, full of fidgeting little sounds. Even with the appearance of handclaps, they feel less celebratory and more like nervously picking at your cuticles.
For as often as Missing teems with a dizzying array of little glints of sound, the most effective track is also the simplest. “Welcome New People” is centered by little more than a slow arpeggiation lazily rising and falling, with flickering, ghostly chords hovering around the edges. There’s no obvious peak to it, no discernible melodic figure, but Seaton gives its atmosphere just enough of a charge. At a time when there’s no hope of safely entering into a claustrophobic, stale-air warehouse space, it makes sense that Seaton instead crafted something strange and insular, with nothing whatsoever to do with the clubs.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Incienso | October 26, 2020 | 7.1 | ab0cced4-e53e-45b2-8bb4-1d07f76520bf | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are is the first Beauty Pilly album in 11 years, as creative leader Chad Clark battled with heart disease. It is a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook. | Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are is the first Beauty Pilly album in 11 years, as creative leader Chad Clark battled with heart disease. It is a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook. | Beauty Pill: Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20514-beauty-pill-beauty-pill-describes-things-as-they-are/ | Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are | There are two tracks titled "Ann the Word" on Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are, the first album by Beauty Pill in 11 years. The difference between the two speaks volumes. The first "Ann the Word" is an original composition by Beauty Pill’s creative leader and core member, singer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Chad Clark; it features Clark’s longtime Beauty Pill partner Jean Cook on ghostly lead vocals as a shamisen is plucked, jōruri-style, in the background, accompanied by prickly dissonant and haywire electronics. The second "Ann the Word" is a cover of a song by Lungfish, a group that was Clark’s labelmate back when he fronted the Dischord Records outfit Smart Went Crazy in the late '90s; here, the primordial dread of the original is scooped out, and the void is filled with sample-heavy layering. After Clark chants Daniel Higgs’ eschatological poetry, Cook comes in at the end and gets angelic, repeating, "The world vanished in a gentle breeze."
In recent years, Clark himself almost met his end, and not so gently. In 2007 he was diagnosed with a viral heart ailment that he battled, off and on, for the next few years—up to and including multiple open-heart surgeries. For months on end, he didn’t have the strength to play the guitar. His struggles put the brakes on Beauty Pill, whose lone full-length for Dischord, 2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle, continued in the art-pop direction that Clark had established in Smart Went Crazy—with muddled results. But in 2006, Clark began exploring a new direction for Pill with a demo of "Ann the Word" (his song, not the cover), which broke from guitar-bass-drums to probe the freer domain of laptop arrangement, electro-acoustics, and samples.
On D**escribes Things as They Are, he finally fulfills the promise of this direction, which proves fruitful and wise. The album is a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook. He loves to unfold his songs as if they’re some kind of four-dimensional puzzle; "Ain’t a Jury in the World Gon Convict You Baby" launches on an almost industrially severe beat before the organic squish of drones and symphonic surges trickle in. It’s a big-screen anthem that addresses nationalism in a cultural climate of paranoia and recrimination, but it also packs scads of auditory information into a streamlined slither. Rather than milk his life-threatening illness for all of its lyrical worth, Clark uses it here more as a catalyst than source of raw material. In fact, in the few instances where he does address his illness—as on "Near Miss Stories", where he sings breezily over disembodied guitar, "Stethoscope on my chest, he says we better do this fast/ One of these beats of your heart is gonna be the last"—he speaks through hints and distances, and even a punch line: "The surgeon once practiced on a blood orange in an art class."
Clark performs his own kind of surgery all over Describes Things as They Are, which is filled with punchy, brassy scrambles of samples and skittering drums. *"*Drapetomania" sounds like Art of Noise spliced with New Jack Swing. But for every manic experiment there is a pulsing, pretty, pop collage like "Dog with Rabbit in Mouth Unharmed". Clark’s postmodern pedigree shows on "For Pretend", a clatter of percussion and pinging guitar that also sports one of Clark’s most arresting melodies. If there is a drawback to Describes, it is that a few songs rely a little too heavily on Beauty Pill’s limited back of sonic tricks, whose impact dims slightly after prolonged exposure.
"Ann the Word" isn’t the only cover song on Describes Things as They Are. Clark and crew also offer a rendition of Arto Lindsay’s "The Prize"—only in this case, it’s highly faithful, right down to the muscular beat, lush strings, and faint brushes of Tropicália. Compare this reverent cover to his radically deconstructed take on Lungfish, the album's only visible link to Clark's past, and you can see where Clark's inclinations lie. In "Exit Without Saving", he sings, with taunting sweetness, "You recognize that this is noise, right?/ You still want it?" Clark had to wait over a decade to offer us his vision for what Beauty Pill could be, and he poses this question on Describes Things as They Are with delicacy and daring. The restless, breathless music makes clear that whatever the answer might be, he's not waiting around for it. | 2015-04-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Butterscotch | April 24, 2015 | 7.5 | ab10580c-dd3d-49a8-8331-0fe7d474e0d1 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The comedian and musician’s breakthrough HBO special is full of songs about familial trauma that work just as well in an album format. | The comedian and musician’s breakthrough HBO special is full of songs about familial trauma that work just as well in an album format. | Whitmer Thomas: Songs from The Golden One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/whitmer-thomas-songs-from-the-golden-one/ | Songs from The Golden One | At 18 years old, baby-faced skate punk Whitmer Thomas decided to chase a dream, moving to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Shortly after, tragedy struck: Thomas’ mother passed away due to complications from alcoholism. In her final moments, she dubbed her youngest son “the golden one,” which, Thomas notes in his debut HBO special of the same name, “was awkward, because my brother was standing right next to me.”
The Golden One finds the now-30-year-old comedian returning to his hometown of Gulf Shores, Alabama to reckon with the unresolved familial trauma surrounding his mother’s death. Thomas filmed the special at the Flora-Bama Lounge, a beachside bar where his mother and her twin sister served as the house band under the name SynTwister, and he draws parallels between their artistic ambitions. Executive produced by Bo Burnham and co-directed by Thomas’ frequent collaborator Clay Tatum, The Golden One is one of the most unexpectedly moving comedy specials in recent memory and introduces Thomas, who has self-identified as a “pre-cum Jim Carrey,” as a bonafide star.
Songs From the Golden One is a compilation of expanded versions of the songs Thomas performs in the one-hour show. Though the album is perhaps best experienced after watching the special for the sake of context, it also works as a collection of great standalone songs. It’s worth pointing out that Thomas was a musician before he was a comedian; When he was a kid his mother helped him learn his favorite Green Day songs and he later performed in a variety of emo and hardcore bands in Alabama. His imitation of Blink-182’s melodramatic angst is so skillful that he ended up playing in a one-night-only cover band with Mark Hoppus. Setting jokes to song ends painfully more often than not, but Thomas’ songwriting talent carries him through.
Both Thomas’ comedy and music frequently go to dark places very quickly. The 10 songs on Songs From the Golden One cast him as a therapist’s pet project: he’s a codependent enabler laden with sexual performance anxiety and an abundance of trauma. But Thomas is self-aware, which saves his work from becoming self-pitying. “My identity is ‘my mother died’/Anything to distract from being straight and white,” he declares on opener “Hurts to Be Alive.” Though Thomas has a perfectly lovely natural singing voice, he tends to shift it down to the glowering, moody depths of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis or John Maus as a means of detachment. “Assuming the character of a rock’n’roll guy helps me get through it without having a meltdown,” he recently told AV Club with an uncomfortable chuckle.
Perhaps Thomas’ greatest skill as a comic and musician is his ability to let the tragic and comedic coexist. The lyrics of “Partied to Death,” a song about the effect of his late mother’s addiction on his identity, are painfully blunt: “Mommy drank herself to death/I know she tried her very best/Now I can’t party because my mommy partied to death.” And yet, thanks to a bunch of MIDI effects and some AutoTune, the song becomes a morbid singalong.
On “Dumb in Love,” which manages to evoke both “Strawberry Fields Forever”-era Beatles and landfill indie dance-punk, Thomas yearns for the blissful ignorance of a life unconcerned with the world at large. “Do I have to call my congressman?/I don’t even fucking know them…2016 didn’t affect me at all,” he sings with a snotty whine, sounding like a Peanuts character on MDMA. While the approach is obviously satirical—in The Golden One, Thomas performs this track after reminiscing about the often narrow-minded simplicity of Southern living—his delivery is earnest. “Hopes and Dreams,” a synthy surf-rock song about his father’s commitment to getting his act together and re-entering his sons’ lives, attests to the power of rehabilitation; It ends with the line “I hope my father knows he raised a little bitch,” just in case anyone was getting misty-eyed.
The record’s understated highlight is the organ-driven “The Golden One,” a meditation on the comedian’s life. What Thomas sees is imperfect: a floundering, sentimental comedian with a broken car and an obsession with The Dark Knight. And yet, he manages to find something resembling acceptance in the cards he’s been dealt: “I wipe away the steam and look at me/I’m just no fun/My mother’s son.” Songs From the Golden One concludes with “He’s Hot,” a cover of SynTwister’s would-be hit about a staggeringly sexy stud. Thomas has said that he recently found the band’s original tapes and plans to remaster and release them as a means of giving his mom her long-overdue moment in the spotlight. With this moving tribute, Thomas hits home the heart of Songs From the Golden One: it’s a labor of love and reflection.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Hardly Art | April 16, 2020 | 7.7 | ab145ee4-d194-44e2-875c-12c73219a24c | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Picking up the baton from acolytes like !!! and LCD Soundsystem, Brit-funk originals ACR enter their fifth decade with an energized take on an old sound. | Picking up the baton from acolytes like !!! and LCD Soundsystem, Brit-funk originals ACR enter their fifth decade with an energized take on an old sound. | A Certain Ratio: *1982 * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-certain-ratio-1982/ | 1982 | A Certain Ratio took to slap bass like Petrarch did to the sonnet. At the dawn of the 1980s, while many white UK artists emulated the endorphin rush of disco, the Manchester combo sounded more like lower Manhattan acts like Material, or the David Byrne of The Catherine Wheel. Fascinated by punk’s abrasiveness, they laid harsh guitars over flippy-floppy syncopations. Once a while they boogied, especially when Martin Hannett stopped producing their albums (the same thing happened with New Order); singles like “Bootsy” served up a serviceable secondhand shimmy. Alas, singer Jez Kerr makes Bernard Sumner sound like Nona Hendryx. ACR have kept at it, though, and 2020’s ACR Loco was a vibrant little surprise. Frenetic, well-paced, haunted by memories of sweltering clubs and new 12" singles, their new album 1982 is their best album since 1986’s Force.
The album sounds fabulous: It gleams like a freshly cleaned dancefloor. Every hi-hat hiss and rhythm lick asserts itself. Re-imagining themselves as a benign interstitial force between their influences and imitators like !!! and LCD Soundsystem, ACR enter their fifth decade with the vigor of a young opening act confident about kicking the headliner’s ass; it’s as if the UK group crafted a response to “Losing My Edge” two decades later, reasserting that no, in fact they haven’t lost one iota of it. And they have questions. “Am I just going through the motions?” guest vocalist Ellen Beth Abdi asks in “Afro Dizzy,” a vaguely Afro but not very dizzy track whose highlights include a call-and-response trumpet line and a clavinet solo. “Are you moving forward or are you on a constant curve?” goes a line sung over the chirping electronics of “Constant Curve,” a line they might’ve asked themselves in 1982 itself. On the “Fame”-like “Samo,” Kerr declares, “Jean-Michel and Andy was right,” as the song’s instrumental swirl invokes the totemic glamor of those figures.
Attractive in its distillation of received pleasures, 1982 functions as a history lesson about a fecund era, and, boy, they own the warts too. ACR aren’t one of those acts for whom listeners can separate the occasional clunk in the lyrics from the sinuosities of the grooves: The flattest tracks sport the worst lyrics (“A Trip in Hulme”), the shit-hot tracks are the funnest to sing along to (Donald Johnson’s percussion bed in “Holy Smoke” is a delight on headphones and definitive in the living room). A small-scale attempt at self-mythology, “Ballad of ACR” ends the album with a demonstration of what these people do best. A folky acoustic section eases into relaxed free jazz while Kerr poeticizes the artistic wanderlust of a band that in a knavish era risk failure for the cause of white funk. Most importantly, no bass guitars were harmed in the making of this track. | 2023-03-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute | March 29, 2023 | 6.7 | ab159023-1e92-4d35-8aab-d87f9e375397 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The Florida band's first proper release since early 2010's Astro Coast is a modest effort featuring four sturdy pop-rockers that breeze by in 15 easy minutes and introduces a bit of Anglophilia into the power pop mix. | The Florida band's first proper release since early 2010's Astro Coast is a modest effort featuring four sturdy pop-rockers that breeze by in 15 easy minutes and introduces a bit of Anglophilia into the power pop mix. | Surfer Blood: Tarot Classics EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15962-tarot-classics/ | Tarot Classics EP | "I'm not ready to look the other way," Surfer Blood frontman John Paul Pitts lets loose halfway through "I'm Not Ready". So it would seem. "Ready" launches Tarot Classics, Surfer Blood's first proper release since early 2010's Astro Coast. Title aside, it's a modest effort, four sturdy pop-rockers, 15 easy minutes. Blithely confident, Astro Coast's sunsoaked power-pop found Surfer Blood blowing through one breezily bulbous hook and escapist lyric after another. Tarot Classics finds Surfer Blood throwing a little shade.
With its so-bright-you'll-squint melody and bummer-in-the-summer vibe, "I'm Not Ready" would've fit just fine almost anywhere on Astro Coast. But its crisp handclaps and neon guitars belie a serious compositional sophistication, a seemingly endless string of bridges charting the path to the song's bounding hook. "Your mouth is running off now that you've seen a few things," Pitts admonishes, and "don't get too big for your britches" seems in some ways Tarot Classics' guiding principle. As on Astro Coast, they seem confident in their every move but unwilling to take on more than they can handle.
First single "Miranda" is a bit of a blur, highlighted by its a rousing guitar break, its one-word chorus (hint: it's a girl's name), and a more-than-passable Morrissey impression from Pitts. The hints of Anglophilia that emerge on "Miranda" and through the rest of Tarot Classics are, in many ways, their biggest step away from the distinctly American roots (Beach Boys, Weezer, Cheap Trick) of Astro Coast. Pitts' voice wears this somewhat dolorous tone every bit as well as he did Astro Coast's shouty Brian Wilsonisms, and the band follows suit, lending a richly textured, slightly overcast New Romantic lean to the proceedings that feels deeper-- if a bit less retina-searing-- than the brasher Astro Coast.
"Voyager Reprise" takes off slowly, eventually settling into a shuffly, somewhat morose melody and dance-night-at-the-pub groove pitched somewhere between the Strokes and those early Cure singles. It's aching melody amplified by that newfound gravity in Pitts' voice, "Voyager" certainly feels like Surfer Blood's first truly sad song, the longing in its simply stated chorus impossible to miss. Closer "Drinking Problem" is alternately Tarot Classics' highlight and its least characteristic track, a lush, staggering bit of New Romantic pop that finds Pitts switching out the Moz for a Bernard Sumnerian swoon not unlike that of Kisses frontman Jesse Kivel. A shimmering synth melody buoys the aching Pitts, reassuring himself with, "at least I know who my friends are," every utterance sounding less and less convinced of itself.
A year and change on the road finds Pitts seeming a bit guarded, picking at the long-term scars of short-term affairs, questioning everyone's motivations, starting with his own. But if he's undergoing some crisis of confidence, it's not shared by his bandmates; like Astro Coast, Tarot Classics' popcraft proves well beyond promising, and these songs are certainly sturdy enough to handle their lusher productions and knottier sentiments. Tarot Classics once again fixes the spotlight on Surfer Blood's insidious melodies, refining-- rather than reconfiguring-- their self-possessed sound. It's still summer where Surfer Blood come from, it's just a little colder there now. | 2011-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Kanine | October 24, 2011 | 7.2 | ab2af692-b0b4-4f2c-9f01-b6d56f854465 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Originally recorded a decade ago, these contemplative sketches are full of the complicated wisdom that only comes with time. | Originally recorded a decade ago, these contemplative sketches are full of the complicated wisdom that only comes with time. | Wayne Phoenix: soaring wayne phoenix story the earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wayne-phoenix-soaring-wayne-phoenix-story-the-earth/ | soaring wayne phoenix story the earth | In the hushed monologues that fill Wayne Phoenix’s debut album, the pianist, composer, and producer describes his stormy inner life with halting half-thoughts. He “doesn’t know what it means to be secure.” He’s “been living without the earth beneath [him].” He rejects the grandiosity of romantic love; he mulls the nature of loneliness. He doesn’t expand much on the circumstances that inspired these ruminations—nor has he publicly offered much biographical information about himself—which lends the record a ghostly quality. It’s a bit like finding an old photo album with most of its pages torn out. Phoenix trusts you to fill in the empty spaces.
soaring wayne phoenix story the earth is mostly muted and forlorn. Phoenix intones gravely at the start of the opening track “Mood” that he’s “singing the story of my life so far,” accompanied by washes of white noise, lapping electronics, and a vocal sample stretched and warped into an inhuman wail. Occasionally, he evokes the rain-slicked desperation of Leyland Kirby, and some of the synth work feels as cold and gleaming as those of his compatriots on Rabit’s Halcyon Veil label. But the way Phoenix treats his samples and sounds, swaddling them in blankets of hiss or warping them into unrecognizable forms, makes them feel personal and unique.
Only three of the record’s nine tracks are longer than two minutes, which lends the record a flickering, quicksilver energy, as if Phoenix’s mind is working too quickly to stick to a single thought. You can hear this restlessness in his vocal passages, the way he gives up on sentences halfway through, grasping for the right ideas, then undercutting himself by fading the volume in moments where it seems like words might fail him. This energy is what separates soaring wayne phoenix from ambient music; for as much meditating as Phoenix does on this record, he rarely sits still.
This approach allows Phoenix to try out more emotions than the overwhelming sadness of these compositions might suggest. While his spoken-word pieces often mirror the music, he also strikes notes of peace and hope. “Burn False Messages” opens with the assertion that he doesn’t “want to be anyone’s beloved,” but it closes with a reflection on the necessity of interdependence and the endurance of the human spirit. “Alone,” surprisingly, considers the happiness and sense of ease one can find in isolation.
According to an account provided to Boomkat, this music spent 10 years “filed away in a drawer.” Whether this was meant literally or not, there’s something poetic about these pieces sitting forgotten for so long. They are full of the complicated wisdom that only reveals itself with time. It’s the sound of a person slowly figuring the world out for themselves. | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Halcyon Veil | February 13, 2020 | 7.7 | ab350bfb-66c8-4174-9460-54634b838f8c | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
The Boo Radleys mastermind returns with a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record whose swagger belies deep-seated feelings of disillusionment, self-doubt, and paranoia. | The Boo Radleys mastermind returns with a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record whose swagger belies deep-seated feelings of disillusionment, self-doubt, and paranoia. | Martin Carr: New Shapes of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martin-carr-new-shapes-of-life/ | New Shapes of Life | On his 2014 album The Breaks, Martin Carr sang, “I got no money in my pocket/But it’s a lucky life for me.” It was a suitably humble declaration from a musician who, as the mastermind of Merseyside psych-rock alchemists the Boo Radleys, briefly joined Britpop’s class of 1995 at the top of the UK album charts—and who has since steadfastly refused to cash in on 1990s nostalgia by hopping aboard the reunion-tour circuit. Whether under his bravecaptain moniker or his own name, Carr has favored a more low-key, home-brewed approach on an increasingly sporadic series of solo releases. The Breaks was Carr’s first full-length release since 2009’s Ye Gods (And Little Fishes), and after a half decade away, he understandably reverted to what comes naturally to him: jangly, effortlessly melodic pop tunes sourced from the Rubber Soul/Forever Changes school of baroque ‘n’ roll. But as Boo Radleys fans know, Carr is at his best when he does what comes supernaturally. Where many of their Britpop peers were content to just sound like the Beatles, Carr and the Boos strived to be the Beatles—that is, a restlessly experimental outfit that could draw on sounds and textures from beyond the rock canon and mold them into instantly familiar yet thrillingly alien pop songs.
The Breaks enjoyed a positive reception from the British press, but one harsh critique stands out: “To me it sounded like an old man playing old man’s music for old men.” And Carr wouldn’t disagree; he’s the one who said it. It’s natural for artists to be hyper-critical of their own work, but Carr’s comment comes more from a position of authority than insecurity—one colored, perhaps, by the fact that he’s just put out a solo record that reminds us he’s not only one of the most redoubtable tunesmiths of his generation, but one of its most adventurous sonic architects as well.
For Carr, the wake-up call came in 2016, when he both lost one of his musical heroes—David Bowie—and watched his country whip itself into a xenophobic fervor over leaving the EU. Inspired by Bowie’s Plastic Soul phase, he reemerged this past spring on Brexit day with “Gold Lift,” a sprightly synth-funk salvo that cheerfully skewered the nationalist rhetoric and one-percenter politics peddled by the likes of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. That song doesn’t feature on Carr’s new album, but its audacious, subversive attitude remains: With New Shapes of Life, Carr has come up with a suave, sophisticated, rhythmically robust pop record, but one whose surface swagger belies deep-seated feelings of disillusionment, self-doubt, and paranoia.
Amplifying that sense of instability is the temporally dislocating quality of Carr’s productions. His songs come overstuffed with detail—on the opening track alone, he draws on bongo-disco grooves, meditative prog-folk melodies, sci-fi-flick synthscapes, and random jazzy squawks. But, remarkably, he makes these clashing elements sound like complementary qualities, smoothing out the cracks with a 1980s art-pop sheen redolent of Prefab Sprout and mid-period Talk Talk. As he did with the Boos, Carr never lets his experimentation overwhelm or topple his song structures; he’s more interested in seeing what he can get away with in the confines of a four-minute tune.
The eight songs on New Shapes of Life clock in at a tidy half hour, and sometimes you wish he’d give himself the space to stretch things out further: The ruminative piano ballad “Future Reflections” feels like the extended build-up to a big moment that never quite arrives, instead leaving us with a dramatic open-ended question (“Will the mind betray the body, or will the body betray the mind?”) that feels like an unresolved cliffhanger. But for the most part, New Shapes of Life leads us down a yellow-brick-road path from solitude to splendor: On “The Main Man” Carr builds a minimal beat and acoustic strumming into a grandiose, 21st-century glam anthem that ranks among his best with the Boos; the reflecting pool of Wurlitzer tones that opens “A Mess of Everything” gives way to hand-drummed raga rhythms and a gilded gospel chorus.
With its ironically ecstatic chorus (“I’ve made a mess of everything!”), the latter song marks the moment where New Shapes of Life’s internal tensions hit a fever pitch—this is an exquisitely crafted album made by a man on the verge of breaking down. Carr has admitted that making the record waxed a heavy emotional toll that at one point required a doctor’s intervention, and nary a moment goes by here when he’s not pondering his past or fearing for the future. At several points, Carr references living a life “behind the glass”: On the tense, bass-buzzed “Damocles,” it’s an allusion to the invisible prison of living with mental illness; on the spirited saunter of “Three Studies of the Male Back,” it’s a comment on the narcotic, disassociating effects of screen addiction. But the album’s most striking visual metaphor comes on “The Van,” which could pass for a string-swept early-1970s McCartney serenade, if the former Beatle had been wracked by an existential crisis. “Lost myself in the tall grass of time/Fixate on the errors of my past,” Carr sings, before delivering a dispiriting chorus—“Keep on ‘til the van comes/To take me away”—that speaks to both the drudgery of a touring musician’s life and the inevitability of death. But whether Carr’s trapped staring out a window, at a screen, or into a mirror, the vibrant, vivacious sound of New Shapes of Life presents him with a big, brightly colored brick to smash the glass. | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tapete | November 16, 2017 | 7.4 | ab3bfaaf-55bc-463e-938d-e85df3a30240 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
This 23-track career overview is a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about the Olympia indie pop band. | This 23-track career overview is a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about the Olympia indie pop band. | Beat Happening: Look Around | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21245-look-around/ | Look Around | The Olympia, Wash., trio Beat Happening were a band often labelled "twee" or "love rock" because of their stripped-down instrumentation and childlike art direction and song titles, but their music had a darker cast. I remember seeing them perform at Wetlands in New York City in the 1990s, and how unnerving it was when bandleader and K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson made eye contact with the crowd and held you in his gaze while he rubbed his belly and sang in his deep baritone. Johnson's presence carried weight. Beat Happening toured with Fugazi and were covered by Seaweed. Kurt Cobain got a tattoo of the K Records logo. There was an edge to this music, and it’s still there.
Beat Happening's lyrics, which included images of hand-holding and hot chocolate, scan as innocent, but the guy in "Hot Chocolate Boy" got his name because he’s "deep sweet and bitter," watching TV alone and wishing he had a girlfriend. The songs are populated with zombies, witches, blood sucking. Even on their most famous song, "Indian Summer", with its idyllic sense of longing, they are eating their breakfast of apples and cherry blossoms in a cemetery.
History is never complete, which is why compilations like Look Around are helpful. Easy downloads and streaming can definitely bring into question the need for compilations—why buy a collection of previously released songs when you can find most of them online? But what you’re paying for—or at least scanning the track list for—is the curation. The 23-song Look Around is perfect in that regard. There will always be favorites missing—it’s the nature of compilations—but there are no major oversights or head-scratching inclusions here. It’s a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about them. The songs are presented in chronological order, so it feels like a distilled time capsule, and it offers a chance to watch patterns emerge and themes continue in time-lapse.
It’s not the first compilation to focus on the band. There was the now out-of-print 7xCD Crashing Through box set contained all their albums, plus some rarities. The 15-song Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which focused on just B-sides, felt a bit thin. Here we get a taste of each era. The selections are pretty evenly distributed, with a few songs from 1985’s self-titled debut (the one with the cartoon cat driving a rocket ship on the cover), 1988’s Jamboree (featuring a drawing of a heart-shaped strawberry), 1989’s Black Candy (a simple drawing of black candy), 1991’s Dreamy (the only album featuring the band on the cover), and 1992’s You Turn Me On (which featured a tasteful artistic nude). They’ve also appended 2000’s "Angel Gone", from a single produced by Phil Elverum (the B-side, "Zombie Limbo Time", appeared on Music to Climb the Apple Tree By). These songs still sound fresh. Maybe because the arrangements are so basic and stripped down, without any overzealous studio tricks or instrumentation that ties it to a particular year, they feel timeless. Or, more accurately, out of time. I think the emotion is important, too, because these lyrics focus on simple human situations most of us have probably experienced.
For a lot of people, 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, a six-day festival organized by Johnson and his K co-founder Candice Pedersen that featured performances from Fugazi, Bikini Kill, Built to Spill, Unwound, L7, Bratmobile, Mecca Normal, and others, made more sense, and had more of a mythology to it, than Nevermind, which first hit later that same year. Beat Happening and their cohorts represented a part of the Pacific Northwest scene that was less interested in playing bigger venues or making it on MTV.
And this still matters now, in part, because 30 years after the release of their debut, there’s a lot of music that hearkens to the band and the K scene they helped spearhead. You can hear them in Girlpool, Frankie Cosmos, Quarterbacks, and in other bands who release a couple of songs and then disappear. You’ll hear them name-dropped in interviews by artists like Carrie Brownstein. This collection contains many of their best and most memorable songs, but their real legacy is found in basement venues and DIY spaces and groups just learning how to play but not being afraid to do so in public. | 2015-11-30T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-11-30T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | November 30, 2015 | 8.2 | ab528128-e02a-4b4f-ae6f-2ae4f369aaf5 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The biggest K-pop group in the world try to move their sound forward but spend too much time leaning on their past. | The biggest K-pop group in the world try to move their sound forward but spend too much time leaning on their past. | BTS: MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bts-map-of-the-soul-persona/ | MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA | BTS are the superheroes of K-pop, a group of seven young South Korean men—RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook—who have carried the boy-band torch into the global arena. Formed in 2013, BTS cut their teeth making rap-centric tracks at a time when hip-hop was just beginning to dominate the Korean music scene. Fans were quickly drawn to their musical self-sufficiency, socially conscious messaging, and the high-art references of their visuals. Last year, their studio album Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’ became the first Korean album to ever top the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, earning them a new level of acclaim rarely seen by “international” artists; the superheroes won the day.
With the seven-song MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA, BTS are trying to blaze a path forward, further securing their foothold in commercial pop while proving to diehards that they’re still high-minded outsiders who preface their music videos with Herman Hesse quotes and reference Carl Jung with the best of them. But the album suffers from sequel syndrome and suggests that the Bangtan Boys are too willing to lean on their past accomplishments. The arrangements on PERSONA are busy and convoluted, and many lyrical highlights are buried in meta, self-referential schlock rock.
The album is bookended with songs built around the kind of inelegant instrumentation you’d find in royalty-free music or internal corporate videos, with big guitars and drums that sound as if they’ve been airlifted in from a downloadable sampler pack. In the case of “Intro : Persona,” the production is built around a recycled beat from the opening track of BTS’ 2014 debut. But to a new listener lacking context, the song comes across as sour and stale, which is a shame considering bandleader RM waxes poetic about his imposter syndrome and recapturing his motivation to pursue music. Meanwhile, “Dionysus” moves from stadium-ready fuzz to a shoehorned trap section to a contrived breakdown, with the members sounding as if they’re being dragged along rather than leading with their voices. And yet this closing track contains the most fascinating lyrics of the whole project.
Like Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” a meditation on alcoholism that was co-opted by hedonistic teens, “Dionysus” is a moment of existential introspection disguised as a party-starter. The bridge, rapped by Suga in an Auto-Tuned drawl a la Travis Scott, comments on the banality of stardom, as he applies the drinking metaphor to his desire to create lasting art. “Breaking new records means a fight with myself, raise the glass for a shot but I’m thirsty as I ever was,” he proclaims. The obnoxiousness of the production might be the whole point, but the song’s otherwise compelling concept is rendered largely inert by the grueling music that guides it.
Where past BTS albums have been anchored by strong verses from the rappers (RM, J-Hope, and Suga), PERSONA feels more disparate. On the forgettable “Mikrokosmos,” members hop on and off an expensive but rickety synth-pop treadmill, never reaching the desired emotional apex. Jungkook, Jin, and J-Hope try to craft a dramatic ballad on “Jamais Vu” but again, the rapping doesn’t feel in lockstep with everything else that’s going on.
In contrast, “HOME,” the album’s highlight, demonstrates how thrilling BTS can be when all the members are on the same page. The flows are dynamic, the interplay effortless. There are callbacks to lyrics found in the band’s debut single (“No More Dream”), but you don’t need to trawl the BTS catalog to find “HOME” captivating, a song about pining for a real connection in the face of outward successes. Elsewhere, the collaborations are enjoyable, but far from spectacular: Halsey (minimally) guests on lead single “Boy With Luv,” and Ed Sheeran (thankfully) stays behind the scenes on the R&B tune “Make It Right.”
PERSONA is not a failure, but it’s tough to call it a triumph. BTS have a deeper understanding of how to capture global audiences than most K-pop groups would ever dream of: Together, the seven members are a mesmerizing unit. When they sound fully in control of their music and in tune with one another, BTS transcend language and culture barriers. PERSONA falters because the band and their producers lose sight of crafting airtight songs in an effort to further the mythos they’ve built within their massive audience.
The best superhero stories are written for the whole world: They speak to both diehard fans and newcomers, tackling the human condition while throwing in nerdy references, delivering an epic experience that unifies people who might otherwise not have anything in common. BTS have already proven themselves, but on PERSONA, the band spends too much time looking back and not enough time being the K-pop superheroes the world deserves. | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Hit Entertainment | April 15, 2019 | 6.1 | ab540c9b-316b-47e2-9315-da749e879b70 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Toronto musician Daniel Lee’s second solo album delivers a dark and relentlessly funky set of proto-industrial grooves with a sleek dystopian edge. | Toronto musician Daniel Lee’s second solo album delivers a dark and relentlessly funky set of proto-industrial grooves with a sleek dystopian edge. | Lee Paradise: The Fink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-paradise-the-fink/ | The Fink | A decade ago, Toronto band Hooded Fang specialized in the kind of jovial, sun-kissed indie pop that flourished in the mid-to-late aughts. Their 2010 debut, Album, was full of cheerful garage rock smoothed over with handclaps and horns; an accompanying music video featured colorful shots of a puppet playing the xylophone. Yet by the mid-2010s, the band had left the Sesame Street cosplay behind, dousing their sound in jagged noise-punk aggression on 2016’s Venus on Edge.
One missing link in that evolution: Water Palace Kingdom, singer Daniel Lee’s 2014 solo release under the name Lee Paradise, a bleak and underappreciated gem steeped in chilly krautrock precision and Silver Apples minimalism. Six and a half years later, Lee Paradise has finally delivered a follow-up. Yet neither Hooded Fang’s slide into dissonance nor anything Lee has done previously could quite prepare fans for The Fink, an uncommonly funky set of proto-industrial grooves topped with emotionless vocals drained of all discernible human qualities.
The album’s sleek dystopian edge may be fortuitously well-timed in 2020, but it’s not by happenstance. Lee’s goal was to summon the sound of “a wasteland where the sun doesn’t shine and humans have long ceased to be relevant beyond contributing to their own self-destruction.” In the tradition of generations of anxious punks before him, he succeeds in making such a grim vision danceable, plunging into staticky dance-punk (“Boogie”), an uneasy approximation of dub (“Maintaining Platitudes”), and queasy synths that shriek like those not-quite-real emergency alarms in disaster movies (“Positive Manifestations”).
But Lee’s main interest here is rhythm. His grooves have grown heavier and more sophisticated since Water Palace Kingdom, and with the help of some unlikely influences—the 1970s disco-funk of producer Walter Whisenhunt, early ’80s dub records by Scientist, the hard-hitting rap beats created by the Alchemist—The Fink trembles and quakes with a relentless, trance-like pulse. On “A Present to Ponder,” the musician prophesies a disturbing vision of climate apocalypse (“Oceans filled with bones of machines/All its guts in disarray”) over thick snare crashes and synth screeches worthy of the Psycho score. “Message to the Past” is even funkier; it’s got a taut, slithery bassline and a hypnotic vocal melody that resembles Damo Suzuki at his most disciplined. Clouds of alien noise hover around the fringes of the mix.
Lee has described the album as “cyborg-funk,” but owing in large part to its emphasis on kick and snare drum samples, the music isn’t synthetic or stiff. You can imagine it emanating from a group of warm-blooded humans onstage, and in fact these tracks took shape during live performances with Hooded Fang drummer Jonathan Pappo and Toronto electronic artist Michael Butler (aka Beta Frontiers), who squeezes squelchy textures out of a Yamaha CS-5 synthesizer. The analog aesthetic has plenty in common with another recent release from Canada’s Telephone Explosion label, Freak Heat Waves’ Zap the Planet. Only when Lee abandons the guiding funk pulse, as on the muddled, indistinct “Medicinal Magic,” does The Fink start to lose its charm.
Yet the album’s buzzing dread never quite lets up. Lee sounds like a grim soothsayer, forecasting a sunless world on “A Present to Ponder” and exhorting his followers to “run, run, run till the blood runs out” on “Maintaining Platitudes.” Play this stuff back-to-back with Hooded Fang’s sunny debut, and it’s like staring at opposite sides of a “me in 2010 vs. me in 2020” meme. On the bright side: Who knew the apocalypse would be this funky?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Telephone Explosion | December 7, 2020 | 7.4 | ab54be89-eecb-4c32-972c-5e2577b05d6b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Free of her stifling major-label contract, the Bay Area rapper sounds rejuvenated, delivering fiery screeds on self-reliance of all sorts. | Free of her stifling major-label contract, the Bay Area rapper sounds rejuvenated, delivering fiery screeds on self-reliance of all sorts. | Kamaiyah: Got It Made | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaiyah-got-it-made/ | Got It Made | Kamaiyah has had a tumultuous time since her Good Night in the Ghetto. In 2016, the Oakland rapper’s vibrant debut mixtape seemed to announce a star in the making. She signed to Interscope later that year, but her album was repeatedly delayed, and eventually shelved entirely. By the following year, she’d self-released the mixtape Before I Wake in mutiny against the label, a move she now calls a mistake. She was arrested after a TSA altercation, and for firing a gun in a private movie screening room.
On her new mixtape Got It Made, released independently on her own Grnd.Wrk label after her departure from Interscope, Kamaiyah sounds newly refreshed and self-reliant. Half act of self-care, half immeasurable flex, it places her in the lineage of Oakland mack rappers like Too Short and Dru Down. The tape is a multifaceted consideration of self-sufficiency—escaping the thumb of domineering labels, ignoring bad boyfriends, and confronting haters. As she puts it on “Pressure,” “I love myself, yeah, I trust myself/Don’t need nobody else/I don’t need nobody’s help.”
She does get some help from a crack team of local producers familiar with her uncomplicated, optimistic, and referential style. Produced primarily by Oakland’s CT Beats, the mastermind behind her biggest hit, 2016’s “Why You Always Hatin’?” with YG and Drake, and featuring additional production by Swish, DJ Banks, DJ Official, Trackademics, and more, Got It Made builds upon her established sound, which brings local music of the past into the present day. She slides through minimalist, oscillating reanimations of classic Bay Area rap forms, ghost riding the whip through the town she still has every intention of taking over.
Kamaiyah is far less melodic than on past releases here—the only way she seems to be holding back on Got It Made. For about half the tape, she is bars first, and for the rest, she isn’t singing so much as chanting, one note at a time. On A Good Night in the Ghetto, her buoyant singsong made casual moments of hood escapism sound like bliss, elevating Dionysian songs about staying out all night, cruising around, and emptying bottles. This time around, she takes a bare-knuckle approach, allowing you to feel the impact of every punch. “No you ain’t active/You just pop off the lips and that’ll get yo ass smacked quick/I’m relaxin’, big maxin’/And I talk my shit ’cause I can back it/That’s facts, bitch,” she snaps on “Intro,” absolutely swaggering.
“Still I Am” is a post-separation reestablishment of personal identity. “I done took plenty losses/That’s why I feel like I deserve to keep flossin’/This shit is exhausting/When you boss up and run your own office,” she raps. In her estimation, being independent isn’t just valuable for the freedom it provides, but also the ability to take responsibility for oneself. That’s the subtext of “Whatever Whenever,” a slow-rolling slapper about having a plan, executing it, and defending your position. She raps like a woman ready to bury anyone trying to take the plot of land she’s worked for. “Mood Swings” is trapped in an argument spiral with a toxic partner; “Set It Up,” a vengeful team-up with Trina, is about getting the compensation owed from a boyfriend’s cheating by robbing him. At nearly every turn on the mixtape, she reevaluates what it means to be reliant on others, and she sounds liberated doing it.
Got It Made is at its best when it shows its reverence for Oakland. Kamaiyah gets J. Espinosa, the official DJ of the Oakland Raiders, to scratch all over the bass-propelled “Get Ratchet,” an incredible twerk song. She matches the tune and tone of rising local yowler Capolow on the strutting, pick-up-line-filled “Digits.” On the mixtape’s centerpiece “1-800-IM-Horny,” she gets twerk expert and forefather Too Short to talk his shit over an interpolation of his own classic 2003 track “Shake That Monkey.” It feels like a passing of the baton: Oakland’s longest-reigning mack inducting the next great one. | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | GRND.WRK / Empire | February 27, 2020 | 7.8 | ab59deb8-0659-4c6c-a596-f3b07d7c093c | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Tobiasz Biliński's (aka Coldair) previous efforts were gentle Nick Drakean serenades. But his third album (and first in the U.S.) is full of frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps, transforming him from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass. | Tobiasz Biliński's (aka Coldair) previous efforts were gentle Nick Drakean serenades. But his third album (and first in the U.S.) is full of frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps, transforming him from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass. | Coldair: The Provider | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21447-the-provider/ | The Provider | The city of Warsaw has two (equally dour) associations in rock history. It was the original name of a certain morose Mancunian post-punk band before they got all inside-baseball with their World War II references, and it was the inspiration for "Warszawa," the haunting ambient symphony that heralds the foreboding second act of David Bowie's Low. As the first Warsaw-based musician in years to plug into the North American indie industrial complex, Tobiasz Biliński doesn't do much to dispel those grim allusions. He may possess the gentle voice of a sensitive folksinger and the byzantine mind of a composer, but at the core of his music beats the blackened heart of a goth.
The Provider is Biliński's third album as Coldair, but the first to land in the U.S. (through a publishing and digital distribution deal with Sub Pop). And from an aesthetic standpoint, it may as well be his proper debut, because it's less a full realization of what he's been working toward than a wholesale reformulation of it. Coldair's previous efforts were more like warm gusts: gentle Nick Drakean serenades guided by winsome, wandering melodies and buttressed by brass fanfares. But 2013's Whose Blood suggested a creeping unease, with digital jolts and foreboding, Swans-like percussion that poked black holes in the scenery. On The Provider, Biliński reaches into those fissures and tears them wide open, allowing that darkness to become all-consuming. Listen close and you can still hear the acoustic strums and trombone trills that underpinned his earlier work, but here they're subservient to frosty synth drones, icy 808s, and synthetic handclaps that sting like smacks to the face on a winter's night. As the arresting opener "Endear" emerges from a misty haze into an urgent, industrial-grade throb, Biliński is transformed from humble troubadour to the high priest at black mass, complete with an ominous church-organ hum that powers the song's intense finale.
But there's a bit of a Wizard of Oz effect at play on The Provider—the songs may project a majestic ultraviolet glow, but the dry ice eventually clears to reveal the lonely, wounded soul pulling the levers behind the curtain. Biliński's language has become brutally direct: "My whole life is falling apart so fast," he sings at one point, and The Provider can be heard as his attempt to put the pieces back together, resulting in songs that seem both fragile and imposing in their construction, all jagged edges and exposed wires. The overwhelming mood of distress is reflected in the unsettled arrangements—electro-shocked beats clash with militaristic drum fills, pianos and shoegaze guitar drizzle rub up against anxious tick-tock rhythms, meditative melodies hover above dirty dancefloor grinds. But that internal tension dissipates when the songs start to sprawl out, as on the synth-smeared title track or the sputtering bombast of "Suit Yourself."
The Provider is most compelling when its textural expanse induces claustrophobia. Beneath the clatter, The Provider elicits the discomfiting sensation of eavesdropping on Biliński's private conversations—with family members, with ex-lovers, with himself—about his feelings of inadequacy in the face of parental and societal pressures. But his voice remains as light as the subject matter is heavy, and is often double-tracked into angelic harmonies that help smooth over the songs' corrosive surfaces. And even when working with electro-sonics and brittle beats, Biliński's classically-trained approach to songcraft prevails—on strobe-lit standouts like "Perfect Son" and "Denounce," he builds big hooks out of scraps and shards, skilfully layering and arranging his minimal elements to maximize their dramatic impact. Ironically, the more oppressive environs of The Provider prove to be a more effective showcase for Biliński's emotionally charged songcraft than his heart-on-sleeve folkie phase. Because that's the funny thing about cold air—when the weather turns so frigid that your exhalation produces visible vapors, it feels like you're breathing fire. | 2016-01-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Twelves | January 11, 2016 | 7 | ab5c63cb-9c9e-4078-8902-d3f9d5846048 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Fueled by frontman Alexander Kent’s raging declamations, the Los Angeles band’s sprawling, 96-minute album is an incendiary fusion of noise, post-punk, metal, prog, and drone. | Fueled by frontman Alexander Kent’s raging declamations, the Los Angeles band’s sprawling, 96-minute album is an incendiary fusion of noise, post-punk, metal, prog, and drone. | Sprain: The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sprain-the-lamb-as-effigy-or-three-hundred-and-fifty-xoxoxos-for-a-spark-union-with-my-darling-divine/ | The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine | Across the 96 minutes of The Lamb as Effigy or 300 XOXOXOs for a Spark Union with the Darling Divine, Sprain’s Alexander Kent curls and shrinks and shrivels. He is consumed with guilt the way that a building is consumed with fire. Sometimes he throws it off in a fit of rage or pique, strengthened by the incredible, ugly heaviness his band generates. Sometimes, he cowers in the beneficent presence of the patient, gorgeous drones that hum the album into a temporary state of serenity. But mostly, Kent ruminates in long, uncomfortable, occasionally tedious passages, the urgency of his emotion goading him into singing more than he seems to want to. He strikes out at God and at the titular Lamb, who may or may not be the same being, but every dart he hurls skyward inevitably returns to pierce his head. He is Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, trying to tamp down his anxiety long enough to declare that a criminal’s conscience will inevitably cause him to suffer.
If that makes The Lamb as Effigy sound off-putting, uncomfortable, overwrought, and maybe a little boring, well, so is Dostoevsky. Sprain began as the somnambulant slowcore project of Kent and bassist April Gerloff, a style that suited the apartment setup where they recorded their first EP. They expanded to a quartet for 2020’s harsher As Lost Through Collision, and now, with The Lamb as Effigy, they appear to reject restrictions of any kind—genre, narrative cohesion, and the general principles of how an album should be constructed. But don’t let the pair of 24-minute songs fool you: While Kent’s lyrical vision is sometimes obscured by the steam his frustration generates, The Lamb as Effigy is expertly crafted. It’s symphonic in scope, operatic in delivery, and no wave in attitude.
Sprain have cited the intensely difficult music of Iannis Xenakis as an influence, and you can hear the blood-soaked chaos of the Greek composer’s Persepolis in the abyssal screeches of The Lamb as Effigy’s “Margin for Error.” Throughout the album, rapid streams of noise flood and overwhelm things, bursting the boundaries of traditional post-punk and either carrying the songs into oblivion or allowing them to stagnate in the heat of Kent’s anger. In “Privilege of Being,” unhappy electronics, rusty violins, and woodwinds whistle like suffering birds, their shivers echoed later in the twisted and pulsing guitars of “God, or Whatever You Call It.” These moments are chaotic, but they speak to the band’s ability to develop a musical idea over the (very) long scope of the album. When hollow keyboards phase across the opening of “Margin for Error” like Steve Reich’s Four Organs re-scored for a horror film, it feels like blame being shifted between two people.
But these ambitions also make The Lamb as Effigy an occasionally frustrating listen. As a singer, Kent is capable of channeling Serj Tankian’s righteous sputter, the spiritual rage of Isaac Brock, the direct provocation of Chat Pile’s “Why,” and the inarticulable bitterness of Gilla Band. But as a lyricist, he has a tendency to turn his back to the audience, falling so deep into misery that he sometimes struggles to get a message back up to the surface. Paranoia and surveillance dominate the lyric sheet, and listening to Kent rage can feel like watching guilt, fear, and self-loathing tumble together under a microscope: You get uncomfortably close, but it’s not always clear what you’re looking at.
Still, this is an album concerned with what can’t be said, and it’s at its best—and most nuanced—when it stops trying to explain itself. “Margin for Error” and “God, or Whatever You Call It” act as backstops for the album’s first and second halves. In both songs, Sprain work their way into massive drones that seem to glow with benevolence. They’re buoyant—candy-flecked and jewel-toned. But the longer the band plays them, the more their good charm starts to feel like a trap, their warm smile stretching into a rictus grin. Like someone whose good behavior masks a rotten interior, the beauty of the drone ultimately becomes oppressive. Without them saying a word, it’s Sprain’s strongest argument against the thumb that’s holding them down. | 2023-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-06T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Flenser | September 6, 2023 | 7 | ab67b7f9-c74a-4356-9cdc-3e8e935691ed | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Since 2010, Louis Vasquez of the Soft Moon has twisted his personal demons into songs, quietly breathing new life into gothy post-punk. New album Deeper finds him with his most assured production yet. | Since 2010, Louis Vasquez of the Soft Moon has twisted his personal demons into songs, quietly breathing new life into gothy post-punk. New album Deeper finds him with his most assured production yet. | The Soft Moon: Deeper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20411-deeper/ | Deeper | Because there will always be miserable teenagers and because nihilism and disaffection are just as much a part of the human condition as falling in love, there will always be a place—and a market—for explorations of abject darkness set to music. Since 2010, Luis Vasquez of the Soft Moon has twisted his personal demons into songs, quietly breathing new life into gothy post-punk. On his new album, Deeper, he pushes his foreboding synth-pop even further.
Given the nature of Vasquez’s music, it’s almost too perfect that Deeper was recorded in seclusion in the mountains of Italy at a studio simply called Hate. Even though the Soft Moon has always essentially been a one-man show, the tracks on Deeper are light years beyond the fuzzy bedroom recordings on the project’s 2010 debut. Working alongside producer Maurizio Baggio, Vasquez has married his old school goth pop sensibilities (imagine a dalliance between NIN’s The Downward Spiral, Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration, and Chris & Cosey’s Songs of Love and Lust) with production that positions the album firmly in the now. He still lays a thick sonic fog over these tracks but the songs operate with a kind of icy precision, leading to a record is both unrelentingly dark and amazingly fastidious.
Like its predecessors, Deeper leans more heavily on overall mood than it does on obvious hooks, but there are catchy moments. “Far” is the kind of hyper-morose electro pop that wouldn’t have been out of place making kids pogo at the Batcave back in the early ’80s, while “Wrong” has the kind of jackhammering synths and stuttering beats that could have dropped off an old Nitzer Ebb single. But Deeper is more than a collection of cleverly assembled references. It splits the difference between the more glacial dirges (“Without”, “Wasting”) and intricately-layered synth tracks (“Feel”, “Black”) without feeling too turgid or weighed down by the record’s decidedly bleak subject matter.
Vasquez himself remains a kind of cipher—a detached vocal presence too often content to float along the periphery of the songs. When he abandons the processed vocals or the Reznor-esque sing/speak and let’s his voice come through, the results are often surprising. On “Wasting” when he ominously intones “You’ve gotta take life by the hand/ Let the substance close you in/ Hope to one day come alive,” it provides what is one of the album’s few moments of emotional reprieve. And the record occasionally suffers a fate common to aggressively “dark” music—the lyrics, though undoubtedly deeply personal, tread a fine line between effectively bracing and the stuff of bad teenage poetry.
Occasional goth clichés aside, Deeper is a thing of beauty. Few contemporary artists have managed such a clever reimagining of post-punk and spooky new wave in a way that sounds both familiar and somehow fresh. Nowhere on Deeper is this more evident than on the album’s closing track, “Being”, a six-minute stunner that builds from bits of collaged tape loops and whispers before evolving into a pulsing industrial track and ultimately exploding into a wall of white noise as Vasquez screams “I can’t see my face/ I don’t know where I am.” For an artist who seems hell-bent on finding new ways to take listeners somewhere both beautiful and frightening, the song’s final three minutes of hiss and roiling noise seems like a perfectly appropriate place to end up. | 2015-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | April 3, 2015 | 7.8 | ab6c4d02-c22c-4164-861c-6f9160c80045 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Ikonika's new album Aerotropolis is a stated tribute to the old-school freestyle house and synthpop jams that soundtracked Sara Abdel-Hamid's 80s youth, a record thats feels like an innovative rulebreaker hitting the reset button and starting a completely new persona from scratch. | Ikonika's new album Aerotropolis is a stated tribute to the old-school freestyle house and synthpop jams that soundtracked Sara Abdel-Hamid's 80s youth, a record thats feels like an innovative rulebreaker hitting the reset button and starting a completely new persona from scratch. | Ikonika: Aerotropolis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18304-ikonika-aerotropolis/ | Aerotropolis | Whether listeners should hold artists to a standard of constant innovation is a knotty problem-- If a musician wants to express their urge to break free from their previous constraints by going back to their roots and influences, there's more than enough precedent to make that move something less than shocking. But if their early work was driven by a distinct disinterest in rules and predictability, especially in the middle of a wider movement's healthy bouts of iconoclasm, is it worth getting disappointed when that classic-homage sound rises up to take its place-- especially when the end result is fairly enjoyable on the surface?
That's a paradox that pops up in frustrating ways on Ikonika's new album Aerotropolis, a stated tribute to the old-school freestyle house and synthpop jams that soundtracked Sara Abdel-Hamid's 80s youth. And while the short answer to what would happen if Ikonika was old enough to make music at the time is "a pretty good record," that puzzling Mobius strip of inspiration and expression leans so heavily on the idea of pop as a historical waypoint that something feels a bit detached. Not on its own context-free musical level, granted, but in the larger scope of the reputation Ikonika's made for herself as one of late-period dubstep's more melodically subversive and off-kilter composers.
If that means the album's biggest flaw is that it nails a certain aesthetic too faithfully, that's not a very harmful problem to have. Early album cut "Beach Mode (Keep It Simple)", which recruits up-and-coming singer Jessy Lanza, is Ikonika's first-ever vocal track, and the coolly haunted tone it sets is immediately resonant as something deeply affectionate for a clearly remembered (and reassembled) past. It's a feel that runs a line through the whole album-- the burbling fusion of synthpop and boogie funk "Mr Cake", the Madchester throb of "Eternal Mode" and "Lights Are Forever", Class of 1987 house tribute "Manchego", and the upended cathedral chords of Optimum teamup "Mega Church". It's far from a cold and emotionless recitation of last generation's digital pop heritage; if those aforementioned tracks don't race pulses, "Cryo" and its foreboding minor-key stormcloud formations should call up shivers.
So why is there this nagging feeling that something's missing? Ikonika's transition to vintage sounds and signifiers, whether through old-school synths or uncluttered 4/4 patterns, is reverent enough to parallel their sources instead of update or subvert them. And even when she pulls back the curtain to nudge the listener over how much of a stylistic transition this album might be-- one of the shorter, more skeletal exercises in gaining her throwback footing with Hacienda-ready 808s and keyboards is called "Practice Beats"-- it sounds more like a history lesson than history in the making. Her 2010 LP Contact, Love, Want, Have was a thrill because it had the self-admitted playfulness of an artist learning as she went, leaving a trail of brightly smart-assed tweaks to formula-- she fit right in with that year's trailblazing class of gloom-defying bass artists like Rustie and Joker.
Even as last year's I Make Lists EP darkened her style a bit, it still had a similar unpredictable intrigue and sense of left-field jitteriness that was too lighthearted to be alienating. Aerotropolis' 180 pop move-- as comfortable and assured in its own niche as it is-- is so abrupt that it almost feels like an innovative rulebreaker hitting the reset button and starting a completely new, much more familiar persona from scratch. Where things go from here hinges on what happens if or when she finds a way to upend that end result in the same way she crashed the scene to start. No doubt it'll sound good-- but fingers crossed it'll also sound strange. | 2013-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | July 29, 2013 | 6.5 | ab7941a1-052a-46b0-ab3e-6b00efe03068 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On her fifth album, Sharon Van Etten conjures tempests and explores their subsequent calms. It is the peak of her songwriting and her most atmospheric, emotionally piercing album to date. | On her fifth album, Sharon Van Etten conjures tempests and explores their subsequent calms. It is the peak of her songwriting and her most atmospheric, emotionally piercing album to date. | Sharon Van Etten: Remind Me Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharon-van-etten-remind-me-tomorrow/ | Remind Me Tomorrow | Sharon Van Etten returns at the time of year meant for streamlining: Kondo-ing your frazzled mind, dysfunctional relationships, and sloppy habits into one efficient machine. Remind Me Tomorrow is not a product of this mindset. Just look at the mess on the cover: a tiny photograph of Van Etten barely visible amid the chaos of a kid’s bedroom. It’s an album made after she thought she had let music go for a while, until it crept back in as a reliable constant while she started acting and scoring films, studied for a degree in psychology, embraced a fulfilling relationship, and became a parent. A lesser artist would find a cheap fulfillment narrative in all this. Van Etten characterizes these complicated pleasures as a tempest, and it feels true.
It’s her first album made with John Congleton, a producer many acts have turned to in recent years under the guise of wanting to mimic his art-pop work with St. Vincent—a noble but futile game. That is, thankfully, not the case here; nor is it that Van Etten, tired of the guitar, just threw a few synths at the wall. Remind Me Tomorrow is as much a faithful reimagining of her muscular songwriting as last year’s Double Negative was of Low’s haunted spirituals, right down to the shared apocalyptic atmosphere. Corroded synths flicker like a helicopter rotor, cutting her characteristic grace with a sense of menace; the production and Van Etten herself often sound as though they’re asphyxiating. The aggressive sound meets its match in her cresting, torrid sense of melody.
More than ever, it’s these uneasy textures that do Van Etten’s storytelling for her. An abusive relationship she experienced in her early 20s has defined much of her songwriting to date, so much so that it started making her feel uncomfortable. “It’s cathartic to play, and people like it,” she told The Ringer of one old song, “but I also want to challenge people on why they like it, and how it makes me feel.” Remind Me Tomorrow starts with a disclosure, “I Told You Everything.” “You said, ‘Holy shit, you almost died,’” she sings, repeating the line throughout the song and peeling back layer by layer of shock factor until only sad starkness remains. The exchange forms the start of a relationship: held hands, knocked knees, total candor. Crucially, we never find out what she tells him. The restraint is more of a revelation than another addition to the grim details that litter her catalog, explaining everything about Van Etten’s hard-won control over her life.
And yet, Remind Me Tomorrow is not unyielding. It is the peak of Van Etten’s songwriting, her most atmospheric and emotionally piercing album to date. Often when it concerns love, it’s about how tentative it feels: “Turning the wheel on my street/My heart still skips a beat,” she sings on “Jupiter 4” (named for the synthesizer behind much of the album), a whirring dirge filled with ghostly cries and thunderclaps. “You’ll run,” she sings on “Memorial Day,” drawing out the words into a narcotic, sparkling haze. The album’s truest love song, “Malibu,” relishes the memory of a carefree romantic holiday, but Van Etten still highlights the transience of driving down the coast in “the little red car that don’t belong to you.”
The most traditionally robust songs on Remind Me Tomorrow are about Van Etten as a teenager, usually a time of confidence that is later revealed to be naivety. “Comeback Kid” has a puffed chest and a sense of ragged pride; the standout “Seventeen” exudes the reckless freedom of standing in the sunroof of a moving car and spreading your arms wide. It mixes despair for her poor decisions, nostalgia for that headstrong girl, and anxiety over what she would make of her now. “I know what you’re gonna be,” Van Etten taunts at full vocal power: “You’ll crumple it up just to see/Afraid that you’ll be just like me!” She gives no indication of who is right: the teenager disgusted at the thought of growing up and joining the straight world, or herself now, wanting to protect that girl who had no idea what difficulties were to come. What do you attempt to hold onto and let go of?
“I don’t know how it ends,” Van Etten sings dreamily on “Stay,” a reverie of rippling piano and bass that addresses the need for reciprocal support and independence between a mother and her child. It sounds like a resolution, or at least her making peace with how to develop trust when everything can slip away so easily, but the arrangement is still anesthetized, unresolved. Having more to live for, hence more to lose, is rarely soothing. But it’s worth the mess. | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 18, 2019 | 8.4 | ab79a9f8-3003-477c-bf02-8952447c0384 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Prolific producer Charif Megarbane mixes symphonic soul, grainy funk, and old European film scores to offer a relatively concise glimpse into his wide musical world. | Prolific producer Charif Megarbane mixes symphonic soul, grainy funk, and old European film scores to offer a relatively concise glimpse into his wide musical world. | Cosmic Analog Ensemble: Une Vie Cent Détours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cosmic-analog-ensemble-une-vie-cent-detours/ | Une Vie Cent Détours | Charif Megarbane makes music at a pace so rapid it would leave Lil Wayne circa 2007 in a daze. You can browse the Lebanese musician’s vast archives on Bandcamp, where, beneath the umbrella of his own Hisstology label and under many noms de plume, he drops new albums like Gary Oldman makes movies or Steph Curry hits threes—over 80 full-lengths since 2005. Such prolificacy sometimes precludes more casual listeners from entering this overwhelming orbit, but often operating as a one-man band, Megarbane comfortably shuffles between throwback genres at will, from nimble acoustic folk and Tony Allen-influenced Afrobeat to grubby funk and beat-tape boom-bap. He even wants the collection to look like your parents’ vinyl rack, self-designing a gloriously old-fashioned cover for each release.
Cosmic Analog Ensemble is Megarbane’s most potent moniker, under which you’ll often find his signature sound: a mix of the vintage movie scores of Ennio Morricone and Riz Ortolani and grindhouse cinema. You get the symphonic soul of David Axelrod and the airy charm of French yé-yé records, right through to Adrian Younge’s grainy funk and splatter-flick grooves. Megarbane plays on nostalgia and romance hardwired into our senses via pop culture. On Une Vie Cent Détours, one of his most polished efforts to date by any name, he toys with our notions of France and Italy—the ones instilled by quaint European pop fare and stylish black-and-white cinema. A devilishly simple piano underpins “Quiétude Inquiétude,” as lo-fi guitar lines, cheap organ riffs, and Megarbane’s deep harmonies (one of the album’s few vocals) guide you through the narrow alleys of a city you’ve never seen. The dramatic organ stabs of “Programme Original” score the most thrilling moment in some Paris-set movie you’re not really watching.
Despite this geographical specificity, Une Vie Cent Détours still trades in Megarbane’s endless appreciation for music from all over the map. (Having lived and thrived in Nairobi for most of his recording career, he’s now pitched up in Lisbon.) “Premiers Détours” offers a flavor of Middle Eastern pop. “Urban Safari” feels like a drive around the Harlem of 1970s Blaxploitation flicks, supported with the organ and bass of the scintillating Afrobeat that came from West Africa in the same era. “Ajournamento” seems summoned from the vast production archives of MF DOOM. A hip-hop head, Megarbane’s back catalog includes beats that sample his own original orchestration; rap producers looking to snatch a loop for their own beats should consider Cosmic Analog Ensemble.
Une Vie Cent Détours is Megabane’s second release for the French label My Bags, following last year’s excellent Les Sourdes Oreilles. Maybe it’s input from the label or the pressure that comes with spending other people’s money, but the relationship has prompted two of Megarbane’s most focused full-lengths. Through My Bags, Megarbane is building a streamlined version of his output. These are the records that newcomers should investigate before they dive into his robust archives. Une Vie Cent Détours is a major landmark on Megarbane’s musical travels; the next stop is right around the corner, location to be determined. | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | My Bags | October 29, 2018 | 7.7 | ab7a1363-c9a7-4048-85a0-caa42488772d | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
This live set captures Body/Head (improvisational guitarist Bill Nace and Kim Gordon) operating at a furious peak, reeling from no-wave to free jazz to pop hooks in an exhilarating blur. | This live set captures Body/Head (improvisational guitarist Bill Nace and Kim Gordon) operating at a furious peak, reeling from no-wave to free jazz to pop hooks in an exhilarating blur. | Body/Head: No Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22598-no-waves/ | No Waves | The highlights from the meticulously recorded 2014 Body/Head live set at Big Ears selected for No Waves clock in all together at only 40 minutes, which is exactly the point at which those of us with punk training start to get restless beyond consolation in live settings. No Waves is, in its essence, tenuously and perfectly balanced between experimental challenge and punk efficiency. At first listen, it may seem wild and free; under deep scrutiny, it’s extremely artful, no moment out of place.
This should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with either half of Body/Head, Bill Nace or Kim Gordon. Nace is an extraordinarily skilled improvisational guitarist who’s collaborated with contemporary greats like Chris Corsano, Jessica Rylan, Mats Gustafsson, Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Bill Orcutt, Okkyung Lee—the list goes on. What remains audible through all of these disparate collaborations is his core skill—as are all titans of improvisation, he is highly adaptable, and above all, an excellent listener. His style is unmistakable, but he never forces his collaborators to bend to it. Instead, he stretches elastic, copper, and rough twine sounds around the structures his collaborators build; it’s magical to observe. Gordon, for her part, has a noted ear for breaking apart pop songcraft; in Sonic Youth, in Free Kitten, and with Body/Head, she’s always written bass and guitar lines that are as indelibly catchy as they are inscrutable. There’s always a delightfully missing hinge to what she builds, urging the listener to push open the door instinctively only to watch the entire frame crumble.
Of the two shorter tracks, “Sugar Water” and “The Show Is Over,” only the latter has a studio counterpart, while “Abstract/Actress” takes two tracks from Body/Head’s debut, Coming Apart, and blurs them together into a thick, tense paste. If the versions of these songs on Coming Apart sometimes felt like never-ending spiral staircases from a surreal dreamscape, their mutated live representation paws the ground, less Escher-esque than Baba Yaga’s hut—dream gone nightmare; landscape gone mythic hell. The track takes up the bulk of the album, and yet it never becomes boring and never feels long. There are nods within to no-wave scrawl, to free jazz freakout, to pop hook, and to psychedelic drone. It’s exhilarating.
“Sugar Water” is nothing short of beautiful, Nace’s and Gordon’s guitars delicately chiming together, their clangor blending smoothly into a murky dissonance, like church bells. Gordon’s voice twists over the top, wordless, serving as an instrumental tone unto itself, as she has often deployed it. “The Show Is Over” ping-pongs between placid ambience and blown-out, quick-strummed frenzy; Raymond Pettibon’s cover art (far from the gnarly punk line work he’s perhaps best known for, but congruent with his lifelong usage of greens, blues, and yellows, as well as his fat scroll-like brush technique) depicts a seemingly calm lake (the No Waves title, after all, is not just a play on a a genre name), and one may be reminded of that art particularly by this song; how quickly the wind can kick up, how quickly a fresh-water monster could emerge.
The dynamism of all three tracks is another of No Waves’ greatest strengths; where Body/Head’s studio work is all matte-finished and fascinatingly horizontal, here their interplay stands up in full, palpable relief. The recording retains the crackling live energy and natural ease of the set without sacrificing clarity. No Waves stands as a memorable document on its own and a hopeful harbinger for new material to come. | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | November 21, 2016 | 7.4 | ab7a4f96-17e8-437b-8b21-bc93c4c211e1 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
On his solo debut, the Red River Dialect frontman explores personal, spiritual, and musical growth after his nine-month retreat at a Nova Scotia Buddhist monastery. | On his solo debut, the Red River Dialect frontman explores personal, spiritual, and musical growth after his nine-month retreat at a Nova Scotia Buddhist monastery. | David John Morris: Monastic Love Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-john-morris-monastic-love-songs/ | Monastic Love Songs | When David John Morris left his London home for Nova Scotia’s Gampo Abbey in October 2018, he knew he’d have to shelve his guitar for the next nine months. Life during his monastic retreat would consist of work, study, and meditation with the Buddhist monks in residence. The precepts of the community would also require him to abstain from sex, drugs, alcohol, and, most crucially for the prolific songwriter, playing music. Stepping away from his instrument marked the unlikely starting point of a process that yielded some of the strongest work of the Red River Dialect frontman’s career. His richly rendered solo debut, Monastic Love Songs, vibrates with the energy and intimacy of his stay at Gampo, and it seems to light a way forward for Morris as a songwriter.
A 2018 profile of Red River Dialect characterized Morris as someone who consciously tried to decouple his public persona as a musician from his professional, spiritual life as a Buddhist chaplain. Agreeing not to play instruments at Gampo tracks with this characterization of Morris as a kind of delineated self—the monk and the musician living in one body, but consciously kept separate. Yet in the final month of his residency, Morris requested a guitar and was granted permission to play it for one hour each day. The musician was becoming one with the monk, and the songs that flowed from that newly unified being reflect that harmony.
Monastic Love Songs feels like a reset button for Morris, whose albums with Red River Dialect had increasingly emphasized the rock side of the folk-rock equation over the past decade. As one might expect from an album written during a monastic retreat, his solo debut feels more meditative, its songs built around voice, acoustic guitar, and negative space. Morris has called Monastic Love Songs a spiritual sequel to Red River Dialect’s Tender Gold and Gentle Blue, another musically unembellished song cycle. Where that album’s palette often suggested desolation, the quietude of Monastic Love Songs evokes inner peace. “Rhododendron” sets Morris’s quavering vocal to a sparse but insistent guitar line as the sight of the title flower sends him into a reverie, an echo of Wordsworth with his daffodils. “I’ve been taking, now I’ll learn to give,” Morris sings, the vulnerability in his voice, once sorrowful, now recontextualized as openness. It’s one of many lyrics on the album that plays like a mantra.
With the exception of the slyly surrealist “Circus Wagon” and a new arrangement of the traditional ballad “Rosemary Lane,” every song on Monastic Love Songs is autobiographical. On “Purple Gold,” Morris recalls “listening to R.E.M., one earphone each” with his first teenage love, and on “Steadfast,” he finally finds brotherhood in a difficult relationship when he stops trying to force it. Elsewhere on the album, he sings directly of his experiences at the monastery. “Skeleton Key” narrates his journey through the self-discovery process Buddhists call the Bardo of Becoming: “Old self died, new self not yet born.” The luminous closing track, “Inner Smile,” was originally written as a poem of thanks to Morris’s beloved tai chi teacher. Set to music, it becomes an object of pure beauty and lightness. The common thread through the album is love—love for oneself, for one’s fellow humans, for the Buddhist practice.
The sessions for Monastic Love Songs took place at Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studios just days after Morris left Gampo. Thor Harris (Swans) and Thierry Amar (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) sat in on drums and bass, and their performances are quietly crucial to the album. They sound preternaturally comfortable staying in the pocket and letting Morris guide their playing, only swelling to crescendo when the emotions of the song demand it. Morris may consider the album a sequel to Tender Gold and Gentle Blue, but his collaborators, paradoxically, help make it feel like a true solo record.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Hinterground | May 21, 2021 | 7.4 | ab7a808f-c335-4638-8260-4b91ce714617 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Featuring habitual collaborators like Jamael Dean and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A. percussionist and producer’s sprawling, shape-shifting seventh album finds joy in unexpected connections. | Featuring habitual collaborators like Jamael Dean and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A. percussionist and producer’s sprawling, shape-shifting seventh album finds joy in unexpected connections. | Carlos Niño & Friends: Actual Presence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-nino-and-friends-actual-presence/ | Actual Presence | Carlos Niño has always been attuned to the atomic. Twenty-five years ago, when the prolific L.A. percussionist, arranger, and producer was merely a revolutionary teenaged DJ, he designed his radio show Spaceways as a method for tracing back the long lines that led to hip-hop. He’d play jazz and funk records whose samples formed the bedrock of the genre, eventually moving deeper into new age, folk, and recordings from around the world. Judging by the pan-genre music he’s spent his career perfecting, the process trained him to see songs as being made of discrete units: a series of moments that might one day lead elsewhere and connect to unrelated sounds in unexpected ways. On Actual Presence, the seventh album in his long-running Carlos Niño & Friends series, he tries to anticipate as many of these moments and connections as possible, traveling along with his collaborators as they open door after door on a staggering number of paths.
Niño isn’t a traditional bandleader; he’s more of a weather system, hovering over and influencing the events at hand. As it weaves through free jazz, ambient, new age, hip-hop, contemporary classical, and beat music, Actual Presence is often beyond its creator’s ultimate control, which is probably the point; listening to it is like being rocked to sleep in the abyss. Working with frequent collaborators like Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Iasos, Deantoni Parks, and Sam Gendel, Niño subjects these songs to a kind of musical Spirograph, spinning them along and finding joy every way he turns them. Consider it cubist healing music, presenting support from every possible angle.
Much of Actual Presence was cobbled together from live and in-studio improv sets, which Niño then edited and augmented in post-production. He manipulates the stereo space with ease, moving the listener through multiple dimensions as these songs unfold. “Explorations 7” opens with a gorgeous piano run from Dean that transitions into a Cecil Taylor mambo, which Devin Daniels cheerfully chases down with his alto sax. Niño takes us through a veil of gongs, plucking out Randy Gloss’ pandeiro and dunking it in reverb, then stripping away the rest of the band and dropping into a brand-new, crystalline space; when the musicians return, the air between them sounds polished. “Luis’ Special Shells,” meanwhile, opens in a lobby, where the titular shells hold court with a plonking keyboard. Niño kindly shoulders through, leading the way to a noticeably larger stage where fireflies of gong and cymbal flit around a spotlit Dean, who plays an aching lament. At any given moment, Niño seems to be thinking of where else he needs to take us, moving quickly from room to room as if he’s chasing the spirit through myriad incarnations.
Dean is both the album’s shooting star and its grounding point. He performs the same role Lonnie Liston Smith did for the early Pharoah Sanders groups, setting the scene with a few chords and hammering everyone back into tonality when necessary, and he gives Niño a solid place to return when the post-production excursions threaten to get too far out. Dean puts “Actually” in motion with a solo that recalls Girma Yifrashewa and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s blend of Ethiopian and Western classical modes, trickling his notes through the rocks of Niño’s hobbled bass synth. “Youwillgetthroughthis, I promise” glides to an end on the back of his organ, which emanates from Alice Coltrane’s ashram in one moment and Frank Ocean’s warehouse in the next. With field recordings of rain and waves splashing around him, the steadiness Dean provides for the song’s long denouement is the musical equivalent to the second half of its title—a sudden shift to standard grammar that signals how sincere we should understand the message to be.
When John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy overturned jazz conventions (and greatly annoyed jazz critics) with what would be called the “new thing” in 1961, Coltrane justified their moves by claiming they were “just another way of saying that this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is.” Though it was partially recorded before the pandemic and the uprisings that have defined 2020, Actual Presence is music for an unpleasant present. It’s discordant and fractured, and it frequently comes off as a long trip toward a salvation that’s just out of reach. But like Coltrane, whose spiritual influence runs deep here, Carlos Niño believes in a big, beautiful universe that exists in spite of the present suffering. The sprawling, ever-changing sound of Actual Presence is his best attempt yet to recreate the joy of losing yourself to it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | self-released | August 5, 2020 | 7.7 | ab8689ec-0739-4887-bad0-16b3f8c88e71 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Recorded over a period of just 10 hours, the future star’s breakthrough 1969 debut captured her idiosyncratic mix of soul, jazz, and folk and her singular vision as a bandleader. | Recorded over a period of just 10 hours, the future star’s breakthrough 1969 debut captured her idiosyncratic mix of soul, jazz, and folk and her singular vision as a bandleader. | Roberta Flack: First Take | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roberta-flack-first-take/ | First Take | Throughout most of the eventful year of 1968, the soon-to-be-famous Roberta Flack was ensconced in a residency at Mr. Henry’s in Washington, D.C., an unfancy but inimitably hip jazz club located at the corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, playing three nights a week to rhapsodic audiences. All around, the world was diligently unraveling. Following the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., riots broke out in several cities, including the District. Flack continued performing her sets, lines forming around the block. Those coming to hear someone make sense of the chaos chose astutely. No artist working in the moment was doing a finer job of chronicling those tenuous, terrifying, revolutionary times.
Her talent was otherworldly: The Black Mountain, North Carolina-born pianist and singer was admitted to Howard University’s top-flight music program at the age of 15, possessing prodigious jazz and classical chops and a voice splitting the difference between Sarah Vaughan’s elegant alto and Etta James’ deep-blue expressiveness. D.C. wasn’t a center of the music industry like Los Angeles or Nashville—places where gifted aspirants went to be discovered. But Roberta Flack wasn’t your average gifted aspirant. She spent some wilderness years teaching high school, but word of mouth spread, and soon enough they came to her. When visiting jazz legend Les McCann was dragged along by friends to see Flack perform one night, he immediately provided his most forceful recommendation to Atlantic, and soon after she was signed.
Flack’s debut, First Take, was recorded over a period of 10 hours at Atlantic Studios in New York, in February 1969. Her extraordinary backing band, consisting of stalwarts Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar, Ron Carter on bass, Ray Lucas on drums, and other heavy hitters gelled with seamless immediacy, as Flack lead them through a repertoire of brilliantly chosen soul and folk material she had spent countless hours perfecting at Mr. Henry’s.
An opening rip through the Gene McDaniels-penned standard “Compared to What,” with its stabbing horns and unyielding groove, anticipates both Marvin Gaye’s socially conscious landmark What’s Going On and Sly and the Family Stone’s negative-vibe masterpiece of a rejoinder There’s a Riot Goin’ On by two years. The elegiac second track “Angelitos Negros” is borrowed from the soundtrack of the 1948 Mexican social-realist film by the same name, which addresses the prohibition of interracial relationships. Flack’s interpretation—entirely in Spanish—is profoundly moving on its own merits and the more so for connecting inequities between two cultures over generations. A tremulous Donny Hathaway/Robert Ayers collaboration, “Our Ages or Our Hearts,” and an inspired slow-burning take on the traditional “I Told Jesus” round out Side One in bravura fashion, ably setting the stage for the album’s astonishing back half.
Beginning with a definitive take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”—a track that belongs on any short list in the competitive category of finest-ever Cohen covers—Flack raises the spiritual, romantic, and political stakes to towering levels on Side Two, ultimately rendering a song cycle which acts as both a spiritual cousin and equal to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, released the previous year. Her epochal reading of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” a composition by British folk singer Ewan MacColl, transforms the original’s tender devotions into an evocation of love so fixed and immutable it causes the firmament itself to tremble. Her devastatingly understated vocal conveys not so much pain or joy, but instead something like total awe at the power of two hearts in lockstep, be it mother and child, soulmates in tandem, or god and creation.
The supple groove of “Tryin’ Times”—a second collaboration with Hathaway, abetted by the Impressions’ Leroy Hutson—musically quotes Miles Davis’ “Freddie Freeloader” while depicting a Phil Ochs-worthy tableau of a society unraveling at the seams from its institutions to its family structures. Album closer “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” doesn’t explicitly mention Vietnam, but it may be the single greatest protest song written about that endless, insensible bloodbath. On first blush, it could be a stray track left off Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours—an agreeably purple, Runyonesque account of callow youths whiling the hours away in some urban watering hole. Only over the course of the song’s seven-minute run time does it begin to dawn on the listener who these men “trying to forget” truly are. Because the deferment system established in 1951 protected college-enrolled men from the draft until 1968, the vast preponderance of those conscripted into the first years of the war were poor, racial minorities, or both. “Who is burning?” John Fogerty wondered, in that same year, about that same conflict. “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” is the proportionately painful answer to that wounding question.
A generous new 50th year reissue is festooned with interesting tidbits. A spirited series of demos recorded in 1968 with a different group of musicians demonstrates the extent to which the idiosyncratic mix of soul, jazz, and folk that comprises Flack’s timeless sound is indeed the deliberate and singular vision of a taskmaster bandleader. Romps through everything from the contemporary Marvin-Tammi hit “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” to the traditional “Frankie & Johnny” are proof of Flack’s capacity to move seamlessly not only through genres, but entire eras, a profoundly rare skill shared by the likes of Dylan, Prince, and Joni Mitchell.
It took seven months for First Take to enter the Billboard charts, a testament to both the unbound-by-genre unusualness of her sound and the inevitability of its sheer brilliance. Over decades, Flack would enjoy a legendary and influential career and eventually the well-earned successes of a hitmaker and household name. But First Take was before all of that, recorded in the violent blinding flash of a moment when absolutely nothing seemed certain. “And it would last ’til the end of time,” she sang. So it has.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | December 26, 2020 | 9.5 | ab88d41f-a75e-4273-b450-887398ca3f3e | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
Brian Eno had a busy decade in the 1990s, including working on U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa and David Bowie's Outside, scoring Neil Gaiman's TV series Neverwhere, and recording the Windows 95 startup tone. He also released four solo albums that have now been reissued in expanded editions, with an extra CD appended to each. | Brian Eno had a busy decade in the 1990s, including working on U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa and David Bowie's Outside, scoring Neil Gaiman's TV series Neverwhere, and recording the Windows 95 startup tone. He also released four solo albums that have now been reissued in expanded editions, with an extra CD appended to each. | Brian Eno: Nerve Net/The Shutov Assembly/Neroli/The Drop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20032-brian-eno-nerve-netthe-shutov-assemblynerolithe-drop/ | Nerve Net/The Shutov Assembly/Neroli/The Drop | Brian Eno had a very busy decade in the 1990s. He worked on U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa, James' Laid, David Bowie's Outside, and innumerable other records by musicians from around the world. He scored Neil Gaiman's TV series Neverwhere. He wrote the fascinating diary published as A Year with Swollen Appendices. He published the fourth edition of his brilliant card deck of "worthwhile dilemmas," Oblique Strategies. And, of course, he recorded his greatest hit, one of the most-played compositions of all time: the Windows 95 startup tone.
Somewhere in there, he also released the four solo albums that have now been reissued in expanded editions, with an extra CD appended to each. Well, four and a half: in 1991, My Squelchy Life, his first song-based solo album since 1978's Before and After Science, made it as far as advance promotional cassettes. Then, as he told Audio magazine a few years later, he found out that the album was being pushed back from September to February, and decided to withdraw it and replace it with a newer recording that was more on "the cutting edge... my feeling is that things don't come with intrinsic and timeless value. Where you place them in time, the context they fall in, is what charges them."
The album that replaced My Squelchy Life in the context of 1992 was Nerve Net, which is more obviously a product of its time than any other Eno record. It's roughly half-vocal, half-instrumental, and half-baked. The vocals are generally not Eno's, and mostly spoken; the instrumental tone is cold and brittle (although a couple of Robert Fripp guitar solos briefly light a fire on its surface); the synthesizer tones are the presets of their moment. "Ali Click" even interpolates the "Ashley's Roachclip" break made famous by Milli Vanilli, as well as some iffy rapping. Also iffy: "What Actually Happened?", a Vocoder-distorted discussion of a rape, paired with a forceful beat. The album's home stretch features two consecutive mixes of the not-up-to-much instrumental "Web", totaling over 15 tedious minutes.
The bonus disc on the reissue, though, is its real draw: My Squelchy Life, Eno's most enjoyable solo album of the '90s by a wide margin. It's only "retrospective" (as he dismissed it) in the sense that it plays to some of the strengths he'd demonstrated earlier in his career, like songwriting and singing. (A couple of its songs were re-edited for Nerve Net, and most of the rest were parceled out on one release or another over the next few years; this is the first time it's all officially appeared in one place.) Its opening tracks, the dissonant stomp "I Fall Up" ("I'm sucking the juice from the generator! M**ore volts!!") and the slow churn "The Harness", are the proclamations of the King of the Weirdos come home to rule again, and for every failed experiment like "Tutti Forgetti" there's a delightful throwaway like "Stiff".
The 10 rhythmless, tuneless pieces that make up The Shutov Assembly, also released in 1992 but recorded between 1985 and 1990, are named after places where Eno had done image-and-sound installations—although presenting them outside those contexts also depleted whatever charge they might have had. Eno later described them as sketches for orchestral works: electronically generated tones that acoustic instruments were meant to somehow replicate. They are whooshy, and evaporate as soon as they're over. The bonus disc is seven more pieces from the same era, in the same amorphous vein, although a few of them have some sort of beat; "Storm" even incorporates what sounds like another Fripp guitar solo.
Eno likes to talk about his interest in perfume, and a scent provided the title of the hour-long, single-track 1993 album Neroli (although he'd already released a four-minute edit of the same piece as "Constant Dreams" on the 1989 album Textures). At the time, it might have been a riposte to the low-key dance tracks that were being fobbed off as "ambient": as the person who'd more or less invented ambient music, Eno knew well that the point of ambience is that it's just barely perceptible. But the softly echoing pings and plinks of "Neroli" are instantly overfamiliar; without the famous name on the cover, no one would have given it a second thought. The new reissue pairs it with a previously unreleased hour-long drone piece from 1992, "New Space Music", which mostly suggests that Eno had figured out how to hold down keys for a really long time.
1997's The Drop is a set of mostly brief instrumentals—and one very long one, "Iced World"—in a style Eno referred to as "Unwelcome Jazz" (because, he explained, "most of the people I played them to don't really like them"). They're semi-abstract or "generative" electronic pieces, made with instrumental sounds that already have cultural associations, like piano, early-hip-hop drum machines, and, on "Dear World," samples of Eno's own voice. It's not uninteresting to hear once. The extra disc here is a set of The Drop's outtakes and alternate versions, originally sold as a limited edition at a Tokyo exhibition of Eno's "77 Million Paintings".
Eno subsequently recorded a string of limited-edition soundtracks to installation pieces, but his next solo album to see wide release would be 2005's Another Day on Earth. It included the same version of the lovely, slowly pulsing "Under" that had originally been intended to appear on My Squelchy Life—a song whose "retrospective" character had apparently worn off in the intervening 14 years. | 2014-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | December 5, 2014 | 7.7 | ab8993b8-76c1-4631-ae69-e05402489695 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-decade underground's richest musical nodes, and this Barcelona electro-pop put a beautiful spin on the sound. | Sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-decade underground's richest musical nodes, and this Barcelona electro-pop put a beautiful spin on the sound. | Delorean: Ayrton Senna EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13339-ayrton-senna-ep/ | Ayrton Senna EP | Man, that Wavves "meltdown" really bummed me out. Not because a rising lo-fi rocker acted stupidly-- who doesn't sometimes?-- but because I'd always imagined being on ecstasy in Barcelona would be a lot more fun. After all, some of the most rewarding music from the last couple of years basically promised as much. Or was Swedish imprint Sincerely Yours being insincere? How about U.S. labels True Panther and Underwater Peoples? From Oslo to Melbourne, from indie rockers to club kids, sunny electronic euphoria has been one of the late-2000s pop underground's richest musical nodes.
Just as that endless blissed-out summery vibe unites everyone from Panda Bear to Todd Terje, Barcelona electro-pop four-piece Delorean pull up at the intersection between several disparate and exciting movements. Start with their remixes: In the U.S., the bedroom pop of Glasser and disco-punk of Lemonade; in the UK, the NME-approved guitar rock of the Big Pink and Mystery Jets; and, right in Delorean's hometown, the sample-heavy tropical psych of El Guincho. They can be as airy and suave as Air France or Phoenix, but their unremitting beats are also plenty huge enough to convert fans of Cut Copy or MGMT. John Talabot, a Barcelona DJ who's released cosmic disco grooves for Munich label Permanent Vacation, lends a house remix to the group's current EP, Ayrton Senna.
The third release on Fool House, the new label from French indie-dance blog Fluo Kids, Ayrton Senna represents a similar kind of convergence. In the early 2000s, Delorean originally set out to be something like Jimmy Eat World crossed with Elliott Smith, keyboardist Unai Lazcano confided to The Pop Manifesto magazine last summer. By the time of their promising Transatlantic KK album a couple of years ago, Delorean had absorbed the synth-pop sleekness of New Order and the echoey guitar spikes of post-punk revivalists like !!! or the Rapture, with one transcendent moment: so-called "breakhop" finale "Apocalypse Ghetto Blast". On the Ayrton Senna EP, the group's burgeoning dance-pop savvy comes into bloom with three unstoppable summer bangers, the Talabot remix, and a digital-only bonus cut.
Despite their rock roots, Delorean do tracks, not songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi is a Ph.D. candidate with a background in philosophy, but Delorean use his Factory-ready yelp more as just another element to loop than as a vehicle for delivering lyrical content. "Seasun" is the best example of Delorean's layered approach to composition, methodically building 1990s piano-house keyboards, disembodied female vocals, Baltimore club-ready handclaps, and a ringing guitar line into the ultimate beach house (not Beach House). But "Deli", with its breakbeats and youthful enthusiasm, and "Moonson", all 90s-house liberation and anthem-rock yearning, are almost as thrilling. Talabot's "Kids & Drum" remix of "Seasun" could well hold up after even more listens than the original version, its hand-percussion samples reaching closer to the islands but its vast, clean lines stretching out toward space.
Prior to Ayrton Senna, arguably Delorean's most compelling release was its remix for oft-misunderstood electro-pop Serge Gainsbourgs the Teenagers. On last year's occasionally brilliant Reality Check, the French band's "Love No" is a hilarious, sleazy, and brutally scathing snipe at a nagging girlfriend who disapproves of the narrator's self-absorbed internet stonerdom. Delorean's bass-heavy "No Love" version-- like Studio's "Possible" rework of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible", only more dramatic-- strips away all the negative lyrics, ditching a chorus of "I'm not in love" and instead repeating the big question: "Are you in love?" Well, that's a hell of a thing for a pop song to ask. The track promises dancefloor absolution, only to nag at the heart in a way the Teenagers' lame girlfriend never could.
Summer always ends too soon, and before long I'm sure beachy dance music will sound as cloying as rock fans considered the Beach Boys by the late 1960s. Like Wavves in Barcelona, Delorean recognize there's a dark side to their ecstatic vision, the aching truth that utopia-- literally, "no place"-- can never totally be fulfilled. As equally impressive bonus track "Big Dipper" puts it: "Babe, if you want to we could run away up into the sun/ But we would only fade from black to black." Delorean's similarities to other "sunny", "shimmering" new artists, ultimately, are far less important than their similarities to other practitioners of well-crafted and instantly gripping pop. | 2009-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Fool House | July 28, 2009 | 8.4 | ab8f66a4-bb71-4da4-8670-15b4110a10b1 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
On her second album, Meg dishes out disses, gets political, and grapples with her personal life. It’s an ambitious and uneven attempt to step into her most challenging role yet: herself. | On her second album, Meg dishes out disses, gets political, and grapples with her personal life. It’s an ambitious and uneven attempt to step into her most challenging role yet: herself. | Megan Thee Stallion: Traumazine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-traumazine/ | Traumazine | Ever since the inaugural Hot Girl Summer in 2019, Megan Thee Stallion’s rise to cultural dominance has been shadowed by grief, betrayal, media scrutiny, and online harassment. In response, she’s thrown up a series of alter egos, each fiercer, flirtier, and funnier than the last: Tina Snow, Suga, Hot Girl Meg. On her second album, the surprise release Traumazine, Meg takes on her most challenging role: herself. While albums like JAY-Z’s 4:44 and Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers are recent additions to therapy-rap canon, Megan takes on the daunting task of crafting a digestible and multifaceted album about her trauma in a society and musical genre that notoriously vilify Black women and dismiss their pain—all while allegedly being sabotaged by her team. Ultimately, her need to maintain an unbothered image takes precedence over real introspection and evolutionary risk-taking, a glaring misstep on an album marketed as her most vulnerable to date.
But Meg really does peel back layers and try to show us a different side to her. At certain moments, Traumazine follows the confessional style of a diary entry. On “Anxiety,” she opens up about her struggles with mental health and invokes the legacy of famous women whose hardships were likewise picked apart by the media: Marilyn Monroe, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston. But even when she conveys emotionally raw thoughts, the tone of the production does not match the gravity of her words. The yodeling instrumental and upbeat piano distract from Meg’s poignant musings about the apologies she’ll never get to make to her late mother. On “Flip Flop,” a closer tonal fit, Megan clings to the toughness and a bit of playfulness that has allowed her to survive in the industry and in life.
Although she’s talked about the interpersonal betrayal she experienced on Good News and Something for Thee Hotties, as well as in thoughtful op-eds and interviews, Traumazine marks the first time that Meg has fully infused socio-political commentary into her music, save for the brief “Justice for Breonna Taylor” mention in “Shots Fired.” On “Not Nice” she raps, “My skin not light enough/My dialect not white enough/Or maybe I’m just not shaped the way that makes these niggas give a fuck,” shining a light on the rampant misogynoir she endured these past couple of years. Meg’s known for her celebrating her body in visuals and lyrics, but in this context, it becomes a call-out to those who enjoy her sexualized image but refuse to acknowledge her personhood. She continues this thread through multiple mentions of embracing her natural hair and Blackness: “I’m Black, Biggie-Biggie Black … my Afro my Powerpuff.” She’s reclaiming her body from everyone who’s picked her apart, from the saltiest social media commenter to the United States Supreme Court, and she tops off “Gift & a Curse” with the line, “My motherfucking body/My choice.”
When it comes to disses, Megan still snaps. She delivers lines that make you grateful you’re not her target: “You got the roaches in your crib sharin’ snacks with your kids.” Although her punchlines are not as sharp as on previous albums, on ’90s-inspired tracks like “Plan B” and “Not Nice,” she taps into the ruthlessness of a battle rapper and the galvanizing force of Queen Latifah to prove that lyricism and delivery are her weapons. Even on sloppy production—the Murda Beatz producer tag jump scare in a “Gift & a Curse” and the gimmicky theremin sample on “Scary”—her voice remains steadfast and lethal. When she borrows the bouncy house beat and staccato vocals of ballroom music for a TikTok-ready chorus on “Her,” her delivery illustrates the effort she’s put in to match the inspiration.
The featured artists are a mixed bag. Megan and Latto are a true team on “Budget”: two Southern women whose braggadocious demeanors compliment each other and make it sound like they’re spitting on haters. At other times, it can feel like Meg hopped onto her collaborator’s song instead. She matches the pop energy of “Sweetest Pie,” a collaboration with Dua Lipa that follows a formulaic Future Nostalgia template. Lucky Daye shines on “Star,” a breezy Zara dressing room soundtrack where Megan sings in a style similar to her Instagram live karaoke videos. Although it’s a nice change of pace to hear Meg corny in love on a track, Jhené Aiko’s sweet harmonies are less than essential on “Consistency.” And Future’s lackluster feature on “Pressurelicious” is not worth the $250,000 it cost.
On “Southside Royalty Freestyle,” the Meg who caught the internet’s attention with standout verses in parking lot cyphers now leads her own. On an album marked by fears of betrayal and isolation, it’s refreshing to hear Houston rappers Sauce Walka, Lil’ Keke, and Big Pokey—the sound of Meg’s city backing her up. Sauce Walka’s stream-of-consciousness rant over sharp snares and an Isley Brothers sample give the track the feel of a live recording and further reinforce Megan’s status at the vanguard of a new generation of Southern rap. Like generations before her, she’s got the biting diss tracks, intoxicating charisma, and flexibility to swing between genres. Most importantly, she’s sincere as she continues to further a cultural interrogation of the mistreatment of Black women within rap. As a concept album, Traumazine is uneven. But as an embodiment of the phrase “healing isn’t linear,” its significance couldn’t be more clear. | 2022-08-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment | August 16, 2022 | 7.1 | ab93bf67-d44d-4100-b916-f7ae71373baf | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers, and it largely abandons heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines. | For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers, and it largely abandons heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines. | Dave Gahan / Soulsavers: Angels & Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21119-angels-ghosts/ | Angels & Ghosts | For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. As such, Gahan's voice has only grown stronger over the years—deeper, more controlled, and more iconic. During this time, that voice has mostly been employed in the service of someone else's songs, that person being Depeche Mode co-conspirator and the band's primary songwriter Martin Gore. It only makes sense that at some point—namely, around the time of 2005's Playing the Angel—that Gahan would want a more active role. Outside of the band, he would eventually release two solo albums—2003's Paper Monsters and 2007's Hourglass—and two collaborations with Soulsavers (aka British producer Rich Machin).
Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers. Much like 2012's The Light the Dead See, the record offers an opportunity for Gahan to stretch his legs creatively and shake off some of the baggage that a band with a 35-year history like Depeche Mode invariably has to carry around. In doing so, Gahan and co. largely abandon heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines.
The album opens with "Shine"—a kind of stomping, slide-guitar heavy slow burner in which Gahan imbues a ridiculous line like "when you look around, it's so profound, what we can do" with a kind of gravitas that only someone with his particular pipes can pull off, but it still feels like a lightweight version of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You". "You Owe Me" could be a distant cousin to Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game"—all midnight hues and romantic yearning—while "One Thing" is the kind of piano-driven ballad that you could almost imagine popping up on a Depeche Mode record. "Just lay down next to me," Gahan sings, "We can watch those tasteless shows on our TV." It's the kind of 'no one understands us and it's us against the world forever' track that Gahan has made a career out of perfectly articulating, but in the end the entire thing gets punched in the face by a chorus lyric so hackneyed that one wonder how on earth it actually made it onto the record: "You just need one thing/ Love."
As a frontman, Gahan is a marvel of preening and grandstanding, which means that he actually shines on tracks that aren't afraid to get all messianic and pump up the melodrama. In that sense, the album's lead track, "All of This and Nothing" (despite also famously being the title of a Psychedelic Furs song and album) is perfect for him. The song is populated by black waters, heavy storms, and ghosts that hover continuously outside of windows, which means it's classic territory for Gahan. "I'm all of this and nothing/ I'm the dirt beneath your feet/ I'm the sun that rises while you're sleeping/ I'm all you need" he sings, sounding for the first time like the kind of equally doomed and exalted kind of character that he embodies so well. If there's something decidedly lacking on Angels & Ghosts, it's more of his famously gothy bravado. Gahan clearly has a predilection for casting himself as the tortured sinner ("One hand in my pocket/ One foot in the grave/ Standing here, waiting to be saved"), but the nine tracks here—packed full of twangy guitars and tastefully deployed string sections—reach for a kind of holy redemption that they don't ever actually earn.
Angels & Ghosts isn't a bad record, but it's frustratingly tepid. Superfans will still find pleasure in hearing Gahan's voice tear through these songs. But at this point, a truly radical departure—or even some kind of insanely catastrophic creative failure—would be more interesting than another selection of songs half-heartedly playing around with tired blues and gospel motifs. One certainly can't fault Gahan for needing his own private creative outlet, but at this point just writing more flatly on-the-nose songs about sin and faith and redemption doesn't sound refreshing or the least bit fun, but instead like something you've already heard him tackle a million times already. | 2015-10-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-26T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock / Electronic | Columbia | October 26, 2015 | 5.7 | ab94ca58-890d-484f-b9aa-1654434f82d3 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
On the follow-up to his 2017 debut, the Chicago guitarist ventures beyond his folk roots, sounding looser and freer than ever. Despite the solo billing, he sounds more like a bandleader here. | On the follow-up to his 2017 debut, the Chicago guitarist ventures beyond his folk roots, sounding looser and freer than ever. Despite the solo billing, he sounds more like a bandleader here. | James Elkington: Ever-Roving Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-elkington-ever-roving-eye/ | Ever-Roving Eye | Ever-Roving Eye, guitarist James Elkington’s second solo album, opens with a brief acoustic overture—a short melodic theme repeated just a few times, followed by a volley of deftly, delicately picked notes, barely a minute long altogether—that could be a holdover from his 2017 debut, the spare and thoughtful Wintres Woma. But then it’s interrupted by the sharp thwack of a snare drum from Spencer Tweedy, and “Nowhere Time” abruptly takes off in another direction: The tempo quickens, and Elkington’s acoustic is joined by a taut rhythm section and even an electric guitar tracing loops and spirals around his vocals. There’s a lot packed into that transition from solo to full band; it sets up one of Elkington’s most elaborate arrangements to date, allowing him to sound freer and looser than ever. It’s as if he’s trying to shed the expectations of folk guitar as a restrictive genre, one rooted deeply in the past. “Nowhere Time” sounds like Elkington and his small combo are more interested in the present.
That moment also signals Elkington’s disparate musical influences. The intro is grounded in the stylings of UK folk players: the stateliness of John Renbourn, the directness of Davy Graham, the jazzy agility of John Martyn. But “Nowhere Time” is grounded in American soil—in particular Chicago, which Elkington has called home for some 20 years. After fronting the inventive indie-rock outfit the Zincs throughout most of the ’00s, he spent the ’10s entrenching himself in the local music scene and playing with pretty much everybody in town, including Jon Langford’s Skull Orchard, Eleventh Dream Day, and post-rock icons Tortoise as well as their offshoot Brokeback. He was the only member of Tweedy not named Tweedy.
Lyrically, Elkington remains an eccentric songwriter, given to playful turns of phrase as ornate as they are cryptic. There’s a menagerie of animals roaming around Ever-Roving Eye, hyenas and leopards and wolves; at one point Elkington even declares himself a malamute. Such odd imagery doesn’t distract him from the mortal dread that seeps into these songs. Rather, it magnifies it, as though he’s staring down death with a chuckle. “You’ll be underground in no uncertain terms, and dozing with the worms,” he prophesies on “Nowhere Time.” “There’s a master plan somebody understands, and I wish that one was me.” The unstoppable passage of time is his primary theme, and he’s found an intriguing way of addressing it through his music: Ever-Roving Eye collapses time as Elkington combines elements from previous projects into his current folk palette, as though he’s playing in all the above groups all at once.
That’s especially enlivening after Wintres Woma, whose combination of Albion folk and American Primitive occasionally sounded a little too tidy. The focus on that album was clearly on Elkington, but on Ever-Roving Eye he sounds more like a bandleader. These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here. He devises new tricks of phrasing and layering on “Late Jim’s Lament” to complement the song’s pulse, rooting deep in his lower register like he’s digging into peat. In this setting, even a more straightforward folk instrumental like “Rendlesham Way,” written and recorded for Wintres Woma, sounds more pointed, more purposeful, maybe even pricklier—as though Elkington is pushing against some expectation he has for himself. Or, as he sings on “Nowhere Time,” “It is time for you to move. You’d better get somewhere to go.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | April 15, 2020 | 7.7 | ab998bc7-b487-4ae8-99da-0dfb48a3fdfc | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Originally released as a 13-track LP in 1981, this compilation documents the fruits of New Psychedelia, which set the scene for glammy Britpop, nerdy twee pop, playful college rock, and more. | Originally released as a 13-track LP in 1981, this compilation documents the fruits of New Psychedelia, which set the scene for glammy Britpop, nerdy twee pop, playful college rock, and more. | Various Artists: Another Splash of Colour - New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21860-another-splash-of-colour-new-psychedelia-in-britain-1980-1985/ | Another Splash of Colour - New Psychedelia in Britain 1980-1985 | "We’re a reaction against the violence of London. Here you can be what you want to be. We’re carrying on where the '60s left off. We put jelly on the floor and ask people to eat it. The fact that they do shows that there is still hope for the world." These are the words of the Doctor, a glammed-up, pylon-haired oddball, speaking to the UK’s Observer magazine in 1981. The Doctor’s heady proclamations, made in the wake of punk and postpunk and at the dawn of Thatcherism, were typical of an idealistic new movement rooted in the mod revival. It antagonized both dreary realists, who were unforgivably bland, and the reigning New Romantics, whose pop-futurist stylings were considered elitist and played-out, stuck in front of the bedroom mirror. New Psychedelia, fomented ____in early-80s England, peered instead into the kaleidoscope of psych-rock—13th Floor Elevators, Traffic, the Nuggets compilations—and saw something momentarily more appealing.
A Splash of Colour, originally released as a 13-track LP in '81, documented the scattershot fruits of that vision, just as it began to spread beyond clubs and second-hand clothes stores in London’s Soho and Kensington. Reissued as Another Splash of Colour, the set has now expanded to three discs, comprising 64 songs recorded between '80 and '85. Ancestors of glammy Britpop, nerdy twee pop, playful college rock, and prime-era Creation Records rub shoulders, jostling for attention as each song pulls the rug from under the last.
What connects the groups is their investment in a collective, '60s-themed imaginarium, from Robyn Hitchcock’s inspired nonsense ("It’s a Mystic Trip") to the straight-faced period pieces of groups like Pink Umbrellas ("Raspberry Rainbow"). Though genre revivalism was hardly novel, New Psychedelia—which, besides this compilation, left few footprints in the British underground—was the first scene since punk to observe the widespread rejection of '60s Britrock, and to reject that rejection*.* Thanks in part to the "second Cold War," as well as the severity of Margaret Thatcher’s conservative politics, many would-be dissidents had drifted into a state of woozy social escapism*.* That musical response, writes one-time NME scribe Neil Taylor in Another Splash of Colour’s liner notes, "made a curious contrast, as the inimitable Dan Treacy was to later point out on 'She Was Only a Grocer’s Daughter': 'Relax your mind and float downstream/Pretend it’s all a very bad dream.'"
For New Psychedelia’s frontmen (and it’s curious to note that no group represented here had a frontwoman), those bad dreams were a creative goldmine. The compilation’s second track, "Just Like a Dream" by the High Tide, is a grim fantasy of nuclear apocalypse. It’s joined by escapist head-ventures from the Marble Staircase ("Still Dreaming"), Treacy’s TV Personalities ("The Dream Inspires"), and Naz Nomad & the Nightmares, who cover the Electric Prunes’ "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)." Rather than dream up a new world, the artists were scavenging and inhabiting the recent past—in this case the late '60s, already established as the unimpeachable golden age—because they considered their copious imagination an end in itself, rather than a weapon. Like their siblings in twee pop, the scene’s aggrieved youngsters saw no contradiction in protesting neoliberalist austerity by reviving the '60s idealism that failed to prevent it.
There’s much to enjoy in the free-spirited music that impulse wrought, even if it proved a bit of a dead-end. "Just 'cos the blank generation blew it/Don’t mean we have to," is a typically feisty missive from Miles Over Matter, whose kaleidoscopic "Something’s Happening Here" is the record’s closest thing to a manifesto. The Barracudas, who applied their psych fripperies and lyrical polemic more sparingly, contribute a neat, jangly anthem called "Watching the World Go By," which rallies disenchanted dreamers who believe "The world is just too crazy" and who "prefer being left behind." Cleaners From Venus, led by the great Martin Newell, offer "Wivenhoe Bells II," a more pastoral and poetic social commentary that could slide onto XTC’s Skylarking, with a reverb-heavy, alienated vocal that clambers over tumbling arrangements, like a child across beach rocks.
While wimpy eccentrics characterized the scene, the highlights here are diffuse. The militant urgency of Blue Orchids’ "Work," a hit on John Peel’s radio show, isn’t far off that of the group’s transatlantic contemporaries Mission of Burma and the Wipers. The Soft Boys' "Only the Stones Remain" and Julian Cope’s brilliantly haughty "Sunspots" are neo-psych heavyweights that have swaggered through the decades, while Glasgow band the Chicanes, on "Further Thoughts," identify and triangulate the best bits of all of it, corralling dingy postpunk, breezy Postcard pop, psych mystique, and post-hardcore dissonance into something surprisingly forward-facing.
In fact, listening through the comp, there’s a sense New Psychedelia’s weak link was maybe the psychedelia: When Another Splash of Colour drags, it’s thanks to emboldened hammer-ons, zealous chorus pedals, or stray jam passages—many of the fineries that another psych descendant, the shoegaze scene, ditched a few years later. Still, the cluttered, trove-like format suits the record. As is customary for sprawling retrospectives, listeners enter an unspoken pact in which they’ll persevere with, say, Firmament & the Elements’ "The Festival of Frothy Muggament" (sample lyric: "We played and they paid/And was it good?/Mmm, yay, verily, it was good") because forays into absurd theatricality are part and parcel of any scene sustained by LSD-fuelled boat parties and a fondness for shirts with Edwardian frills. Not only does the record’s scrappy, lived-in ambiance reflect the DIY necessities of that scene—it creates an intimate, densely packed time-capsule, in which strange aromas have mingled until even the minor curios are a source of wonder. | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Cherry Red | May 6, 2016 | 7.2 | ab9cffec-f304-43f5-a2dd-86d4214c92e0 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The Punjabi-Canadian MC returns from his eight-week retirement with a droning collection of listless would-be bangers. | The Punjabi-Canadian MC returns from his eight-week retirement with a droning collection of listless would-be bangers. | Nav: Bad Habits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nav-bad-habits/ | Bad Habits | When Nav announced his retirement two months ago, hip-hop fans, for the most part, could care less. The Punjabi-Canadian MC made the decision out of solidarity with his buddy Lil Uzi Vert, a far superior talent who had recently declared that he was “done with music.” In hindsight the move was predictable; Nav has always been a creature of imitation, cribbing the styles of his various peers to far less interesting results, whether it’s Travis Scott’s Auto-Tuned croons or fellow Torontonian Drake’s minimal production. He’s the artistic equivalent of the “I Made This” meme, only the sketched character throws up on the invention in the third slide, ruining what made it special in the first place. Bad Habits, his so-called comeback album, is more of the same, a hollow and magic-free entry into the trap-rap canon. At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.
The lone highlight of the project comes early on the chorus for “I’m Ready,” where Nav for once finds himself in the melodic pocket, humming about his congested chest from smoking too many Backwoods and leaving someone facedown in a plate of spaghetti after pulling a mob-style hit. It’s a ridiculous visual, but shows Nav making the most out of his limited vocal range, his nasally thrum coming off almost endearing in its frailty. Things go straight downhill from there, though. On the very next track, “Taking Chances,” Nav is back to dropping clunker boasts like, “Rockin' my closet, I can't tell you my favorite, I got plenty of clothes.” The chorus is even worse: “I don’t like taking chances/I like fucking hoes I already know,” he declares.
This paranoia shows up constantly on Bad Habits. Nav tells us constantly that he doesn’t trust anyone outside his circle, that he never leaves home without a weapon. It’s impossible to take this kiddie-pool Scarface routine seriously when his paranoid delusions are followed up by giggling admissions like “Got a little bad bitch/Got some work done on her butt (On her butt).” (Meek Mill, who’s featured on the track, takes Nav’s cue and one-ups him by rapping, “Put my thumb all in her A-hole.”)
It’s a contrasting dynamic made more taxing by the fact that Nav doesn’t lean into his weirdness nearly enough, something he could learn a thing or two about from Atlanta oddity Young Thug, who appears here on the song “Tussin.” Rather than highlight his own eccentricities, Nav’s songwriting is based in sinister tough talk, which doesn’t suit him and is boring to boot. By the time The Weeknd appears on “Price On My Head,” singing about, well, prices on people’s heads, you’re completely burned out. Combine this with painfully repetitive production—the drum patterns on two consecutive tracks, “Dior Runners” and “Vicodin,” are virtually identical—and that Bad Habits includes more blatant misogyny and homophobia than any project in recent memory (“She said you're such a fuckboy that you made her turn dyke,” is one particularly memorable blurt of ignorance) and you start to pine for a simpler time, only a few weeks ago, when Nav had supposedly put down the mic for good. | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XO / Republic | March 28, 2019 | 4.6 | ab9facbf-afc1-4283-b699-b8edcb1df0ea | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
With JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), ex-Royal Trux woman Jennifer Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the hair-metal 1988 she never got to experience the first time around. | With JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), ex-Royal Trux woman Jennifer Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the hair-metal 1988 she never got to experience the first time around. | RTX: JJ Got Live RaTX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12407-jj-got-live-ratx/ | JJ Got Live RaTX | Jennifer Herrema's former band, Royal Trux, released their first album in 1988 at the height of the hair-metal era, and at the time, their brand of lo-fi blues-concréte couldn't have been further removed from prevailing, poofy-coiffed rock trends. But with each new album from Heremma's post-Trux outfit RTX, it becomes clearer that former partner Neil Hagerty-- now releasing increasingly inscrutable albums under the Howling Hex mantle-- was holding her back from her true calling of denim'n'leather metal queen. Where 2004's RTX debut Transmaniacon featured a handful of Trux rewrites and last year's Western Xterminator detoured into strung-out psych-folk, with JJ Got Live RaTX (actually a falsely advertised studio album), Herrema exorcises every last vestige of her former band's avant-rock influence and finally gets to enjoy the 1988 she never got to experience the first time around.
But for Herrema, the real attraction to hair-metal isn't the panty-peeling riffs and wiggly fingered solos-- though those are in bountiful supply here-- but its androgynous implications. With her lean, statuesque physique and long blonde locks, no one is ever going to mistake Herrema for a guy, and yet, when she asks "are you a boy, or are you a girl?" on the track of the same name, you have to wonder if she's talking into a mirror, her gruff, three-cartons-a-day voice sounding several degrees more ballsy than those of the spandexed pansies who once populated "Headbanger's Ball". The irony of 80s cock-rock is that most of the dudes singing it sounded like they didn't have one, so leave it to a woman to correct that deficiency; with the talk-boxed strut of "You Should Shut Up" and the open-sunroof charge of "How'd You Do It?"-- RTX's most straight-up, no-bullshit rocker to date-- Herrema embodies the kind of ultimate rock chick that a young Vince Neil or Axl Rose aspired to be when they were applying their eyeliner and hairspray.
Where past RTX albums sometimes apologized for their heavy-metal love with deliberately messy production (as if still trying to appease Royal Trux's indie-centric fanbase), JJ Got Live RaTX unashamedly revels in authentically 80s details: The slowly swelling synth intro to "You Should Shut Up" that sounds like Giorgio Moroder's intro theme to Scarface; the squealing lead fills on "Are You a Boy or Are You Girl" that fly by like orange globulars on "Guitar Hero"'s expert level; the crunchy-riffed break in the middle of "Virginia Creeper" lifted straight from Scorpions' "No One Like You"; the brief, ZZ Top Eliminator-style techno-boogie denouement to "Mr. Wall" that's actually more interesting than the song that precedes it. RTX can't transcend all genre clichés-- namely, numbskull choruses ("Fuck that! We don't give a shit!") and intentional typos ("Too Badd")-- but they score where it counts: In the power-ballad department, though JJ Got Live RaTX's lone slow-dance moment, "Cheap Wine Time", is less "Sweet Child O' Mine" than "Sweet Jane" had the Velvet Underground been the house band at the Whisky in 88 instead of the Factory in 66. In a sense, RTX's de-cheesing of 80s pop-metal couldn't better timed-- provided that disgruntled GN'R fans spend their Chinese Democracy refund money on this. | 2008-11-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2008-11-12T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | November 12, 2008 | 7 | aba27f00-48f0-4024-b62c-4b0c913102c9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The exceptional second album from the London group plays like a slow burn to a triumphant finale. Softer and more melodic, the band remains just as challenging and delightfully confounding as ever. | The exceptional second album from the London group plays like a slow burn to a triumphant finale. Softer and more melodic, the band remains just as challenging and delightfully confounding as ever. | Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-country-new-road-ants-from-up-there/ | Ants From Up There | The Concorde jet: aeronautical disgrace, financial boondoggle, multinational embarrassment. Hell of a metaphor, though. Isaac Wood returns to it repeatedly throughout Black Country, New Road’s second album, Ants From Up There, most pointedly on the thematic centerpiece that bears its name. “I was made to love you, can’t you tell?” Wood pleads as “Concorde” reaches a dizzying altitude, desperately embodying a romantic sunk cost fallacy, throwing good love after bad.
Until about a week ago, Ants From Up There could be heard as a classic breakup album. All seven members of the London band amplify the dynamics of Wood’s every convulsion, from giddy infatuation to paralyzing despair, as he desperately sacrifices his serenity for a tragic and heroic cause. But on January 31, the band announced, through Wood’s own emotional letter, that he “won’t be a member of the group anymore,” and that the remaining members will carry on without him. So now the question is, “Break up with whom?” “Isaac will suffer, Concorde will fly,” he sings a minute earlier on “Concorde.” Perhaps he’s talking to the band he’d leave four days before they shared a triumphant album with the rest of the world.
For all of the doubt the circumstances around Ants From Up There casts on the band’s immediate prospects, they’re right about where they left off nearly a year ago to the day. Both of Black Country, New Road’s studio albums are final destinations, bringing closure to a yearlong stage of roadtesting new material. Almost 75 percent of their 2021 debut, For the first time, had been available and loudly celebrated before its release, and when the album came out, the band began to distance themselves from their “phase one.” “There will be a clear delineation between these first 18 months…and what follows,” saxophonist Lewis Evans stated nearly four months before their debut LP. “We’ve gone in a new direction and are writing with a new ethos.” Ants From Up There’s very first moments re-introduces a band that could not be more excited about where things were headed. Whereas For the first time began with an audacious and alienating six-minute instrumental, this “Intro” lasts 54 seconds before barging right into what the band has called the “best song we’ve ever written.” They’re not wrong.
“And though England is mine, I must leave it all behind,” Wood announces as the album’s opening statement, a newly handsome lilt bearing a quintessential BC, NR lyric: brash enough to double as a pull quote for an NME cover and subject to granular pop culture forensics. It’s definitely a reference to the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000, maybe a tweak of the Smiths’ “Still Ill,” and, hopefully, a shot at the wave of talky UK post-rock bands that Black County, New Road were once part of and have now graduated from. “Chaos Space Marine” might be better described as pre-rock, touching on klezmer, chamber music, jazz, or any form of pop that used strings or horns as primary instruments.
A few years removed from cheeky references to professing love at a black midi show and singing about how they’re “the world’s second-best Slint tribute act,” bassist Tyler Hyde claims that during the writing process of Ants From Up There, Black Country, New Road became obsessed with Arcade Fire. In the same interview, drummer Charlie Wayne implies that they set out to make an album full of hits, having run up debts that put them in grave legal and/or physical peril. Both statements speak to the band's wry sense of humor—of the 10 songs on Ants From Up There, two are instrumentals and five are at least six minutes long. The album’s purest pop moment—Wood crooning, “She had Billie Eilish style/Moving to Berlin for a little while” during “Good Will Hunting,” as a THX synth renders it appropriately cinematic—could possibly spawn an entire TikTok subgenre for the rest of 2022. Yet the song itself shifts rhythms almost constantly, its pop appeal as unorthodox as its lyrical inspiration.
Still, if they didn’t hit the mark of Arcade Fire’s Funeral, you could throw a dart at just about any critically lauded indie rock band from 2004-2007 and land on a potential comparative point. It was a time of strivers and try-hards, bands whose unwieldiness and anachronism were kinda the entire point. They worked with feverish literacy and earnest emotion, conservatory-trained musicianship and childlike whimsy. They gave themselves complicated names and used too many woodwinds and made life-altering and reflexively divisive music whose values seem wildly out of step in 2022.
A more warm and sentimental Black Country, New Road remains just as challenging and potentially confounding as their former selves; this isn’t due to any sonic alteration on Ants From Up There so much as their shift from the self-conscious remove of post-punk to the life-affirming extremity of emo. It’s not the sound, but rather the spirit of adjacent masterpieces like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, The Monitor, and Teens of Denial that extrapolate social and psychosexual turmoil to the scale of world wars—the kind that inspire painstaking Genius annotations, longing sighs of they don’t make ’em like this anymore, and also the recognition that we can only handle one of these things every six years or so.
Part of what is so effective about this style is how Wood and his bandmates manifest every glimmer of hope as a heaven-sent beacon and every letdown as a plunge towards the void. On “Bread Song,” Wood ponders the vulnerability of eating in bed while desperately squeezing his phone as if it can make his intentions more direct and compelling. The relationship dynamic is familiar, but it’s never been heard on a song that slowly morphs from vaporous, free-time improv to bouncy township pop. Similarly, “Haldern” can only sustain itself so long against Wood’s nuclear self-pity (“Ignore the hole I dug again/It’s only for the evening”); it ends with piano keys being mashed into splinters. Wood’s singing voice recalls icons of gothic grandeur while also homing in on the quotidian textures of normal lives—“Breathe in your chicken, broccoli and everything/The tug that’s between us, that long string.” The band’s commitment to recurring motifs and cross-references ensures that Wood’s world remains somewhat coherent, though trying to explain it by analogy results in absurdly incongruous and incredible dream dates: Los Campesinos! covering Feels? Nick Cave …Is a Real Boy?
In their new incarnation, Black Country, New Road wield something far more exciting than mastery: an open invitation to their process. The placeholder titles of “Bread Song” and “Haldern” reflect their origins as improv exploration; the latter emerged from a 12-minute jam in the middle of a half-hour festival live stream set, between “Athens, France” and a Weezer cover. Even without the YouTube archives, it’s easy to picture the evolution of “Snow Globes” in real time; a braid of harmonized guitars repeats until the strings follow suit, all while Wayne bashes away in a completely different meter, a provocation and also a fitting rhythm to Wood’s slow-motion implosion. What could’ve been a mesmerizing one-minute interlude expands to a nine-minute devotional. The 12-minute closer, the remarkable “Basketball Shoes,” is a kind of “True Love Waits” of Black Country, New Road’s Isaac Wood era, a song that’s been spoken of with hushed reverence by fans since the band’s early days and has gone through numerous versions and rewrites since 2019. His final line as the frontman of Black Country, New Road looks at a relationship—a lover, the audience, himself—and sums it up: “All I’ve been forms the drone/We sing the rest/Oh, your generous loan to me/Your crippling interest.”
Since the release of the lead single “Chaos Space Marine” in October of last year, Wood had been preparing us for a Viking funeral of an album—not just because he yelps, “So I’m leaving this body/And I’m never coming home again!” As shocking as Wood’s departure is right now, it just sped up the inevitable: Most bands eventually collapse, and most relationships between people in their early 20s do as well. Knowing how it all ends does nothing to detract from the joy Black Country, New Road have poured into Ants From Up There—not when they spend every second reminding us of why we let ourselves get swept up in these beautifully doomed fantasies to begin with.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ninja Tune | February 8, 2022 | 8.4 | aba45a52-4fd0-46f7-939a-a3562e293b41 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
DaBaby’s hypeman manages to make money sound boring on his first solo outing. | DaBaby’s hypeman manages to make money sound boring on his first solo outing. | Stunna 4 Vegas: RICH YOUNGIN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stunna-4-vegas-rich-youngin/ | RICH YOUNGIN | Stunna 4 Vegas has a great gig. He gets to be the hype man to DaBaby, one of the world’s biggest rappers: he pops up for a few guest verses, shows off his ice in the background of his Instagram snippets. But no rapper wants to be “the other guy” for long. Since DaBaby’s breakout a year ago, Stunna has been itching for a moment of his own. The North Carolina rapper’s latest album, RICH YOUNGIN, is Stunna’s attempt at scoring the solo spotlight.
There’s a case to be made that Stunna 4 Vegas’ songs aren’t that much different from DaBaby’s; they both rap over spare, bass-heavy beats with a barrage of puns and run-on sentences. They even have the same flaws: a narrow taste in production and unmemorable punchlines. One of their first viral singles as a duo was “Animal,” the trunk-rattling marathon that set the blueprint for DaBaby’s sound. It was technically Stunna’s song, but DaBaby got all of the attention. And that’s understandable, because DaBaby’s personality is magnetic. He can go viral without saying a single word; he’s suave like that uncle that has a new car every time you see him. Stunna 4 Vegas is far less interesting.
RICH YOUNGIN is supposed to be Stunna 4 Vegas’ rags-to-riches story—you know, the one where you announce that your pockets at one point weren’t fat, but now they are. “Nigga really got rich in six months, for real, I watched that shit with my own fuckin’ eyes,” says an unknown voice on the album’s intro. “Really three, but that nigga spend too goddamn much.” Stunna spends the rest of the time making money sound boring. There are no stories about the lavish purchases he’s made, no details about spending a rack on his family. He doesn’t even tell you anything about North Carolina, except that he lived there.
Most of the time Stunna 4 Vegas is going through the motions. His pop culture references are dated, like he hasn’t turned on the television since the second Bush administration: Robert Horry, Damon Wayans, Roll Bounce starring Bow Wow. And he shouts with little enthusiasm over production from up-and-coming beatmakers. Some inject the project with much-needed life, like 20’s flute-sampling “WET,” and others contribute to the mess, like the Beat By Jeff-produced “F*CKING UP FREESTYLE,” which sounds like Stunna trying to have a conversation in a truck with engine problems. But even when the beat is strong, Stunna has nothing notable to add. “Russian” only has that title because it’s produced by Rvssian, and if that wasn’t already clear, the hook goes, “I’m smokin’ West Coast Cure in a Russian/And I’m on a beat by Rvssian.”
When Stunna settles back into a complementary role, he thrives. “CHANGE MY LIFE,” alongside Blac Youngsta, is a heart racer. Then there’s “DO DAT,” the song that justifies the entire album. Next to DaBaby and Lil Baby, Stunna holds his own, even as Lil Baby teaches Stunna how to properly stunt with the line “My dollars and followers match.” RICH YOUNGIN isn’t the moment that Stunna hoped it would be, but at least his life is great. He’s got money and can afford Offset verses, and even as his music stumbles, he can always return to executing the perfect money phone alongside DaBaby. | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Billion Dollar Baby / Interscope | January 24, 2020 | 4.9 | aba496e8-b233-488f-b11d-bb6ea7faa99d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On a stopgap EP between album projects, the Brooklyn R&B musician sloughs off emotional baggage from a soured relationship. | On a stopgap EP between album projects, the Brooklyn R&B musician sloughs off emotional baggage from a soured relationship. | Yaya Bey: The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yaya-bey-the-things-i-cant-take-with-me-ep/ | The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP | Yaya Bey’s flow is poised and unhurried, a subdued technique she uses to analyze subjects both personal and political. On 2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’etta Brown and last year’s Madison Tapes, the Brooklyn multidisciplinary artist celebrated Black women and pushed for systemic revolution in guitar-laced R&B and neo-soul. Her new EP, The Things I Can’t Take With Me, is a soothing interlude meant to fill the gap between albums; it doubles as her first release under the recently revived hip-hop label Big Dada. Brooding and assured in equal measure, Bey sloughs off emotional baggage from a soured relationship.
Bey self-produced the six-song set, and she forges The Things I Can’t Take With Me with crackling surface noise and acoustic accompaniments similar to those on Madison Tapes. The spare approach suits Bey’s intimate lyrics, which dissect the ways that dealing with a shitty ex opened up revelations about her own past. “Surely surely I’m my mama’s child/’Cause surely surely I’m out here running wild,” she sings on the autobiographical “the root of a thing.” The song glows with plucked electric guitar and reverb, like she’s sharing confessions over a warm fire pit. Later, the wistful keys and trilling backing vocals on “we’ll skate soon” foreground some of her most cutting lines. “If it’s me or her/If you don’t feel you/We can’t do that shit for you,” she insists in singsong, finding common ground with the other woman before she follows it up with an exhale: “Damn.”
Bey mostly reaches for a sparse yet silky palette of moods. The two-part “industry love / a protection spell” is a carefully calibrated diorama for her free-flowing range, opening with a shuffling R&B beat and guitar chords as she cuts her ex down to size. “All that big dick and won’t bet on yourself/Your moral compass collapsed on itself,” she sings sweetly, having found a sense of self-assurance that gives way to the strummed, downtempo second half. “a protection spell” captures a mantra-like vision of moving on. “No weapon formed against me/Not even you, baby,” she sings, voice curling around the words “weapon” and “you.” The subtle emphasis links the subjects together in a pointed, honeyed harmony.
The Things I Can’t Take With Me may be slight, but Bey doesn’t need long to make a memorable impact. Where Madison Tapes hopscotched between improvisatory sounds and clips of recorded conversations, the songs here largely swirl together as a way for her to focus on lyrics about personal growth. On the fuzzy “september 13th,” Bey’s close-mic’d vocals lay out her intentions: “When I get out this hole that you dug for me/I’ma have a brand-new shiny new love for me.” Bey is disposing of those who no longer serve her, offering up soulful, empathetic music as an outlet for others to follow suit.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Dada | April 13, 2021 | 7 | abadbbbc-d9eb-4368-88fc-b1e41ec5623c | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Inspired by the grimness of the present moment and grief over a loved one’s death, the Detroit electro duo is at the height of its dark powers. | Inspired by the grimness of the present moment and grief over a loved one’s death, the Detroit electro duo is at the height of its dark powers. | ADULT.: Becoming Undone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adult-becoming-undone/ | Becoming Undone | “We think, we write, we paint under pressure,” wrote the seminal queer theorist Leo Bersani: “a pressure that is in part the ‘knowledge’ the body has of its own death… It is a powerful formalizing element of the energy passing through the extended arm.” Or, as the electro-goth poet Martin L. Gore once wrote, “Death is everywhere.”
The pressure passed through Bersani, who reportedly passed away recently. And it passed through Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, better known as Detroit electro lifers ADULT. As the pair began work on what would become their ninth album, and the pandemic swelled to take its toll, Kuperus’ father took ill. They served as hospice caretakers until he expired. Bereft, they reached out toward new equipment, including a vocal loop pedal and Roland percussion pads, and used the pressure to fashion Becoming Undone, a brief and blistering collection that finds their dark arts at full power.
Mostly, they turn to the kind of vicious pop that has kept rapt fans devoted for nearly a quarter century. Their minimalism is malleable but endlessly evolving. “Undoing/Undone” is their most bulbous jam in years, a bit of knob-twiddling while the world burns. “My body lies,” Kuperus snarls, as if the desire to lose yourself on the dancefloor isn’t just another death drive. “I Am Nothing” dissolves the ego in an acid bath as a way to free the ass so the mind will follow. But “Our Bodies Weren’t Wrong” resists such release, clenching tighter and tighter in a kind of rictus grin while ropes of acid and techno weave a black patent-leather noose. The nasty bit of bounce “Fools (We Are…)” pisses all over such self-seriousness—literally, in the video, a piss-take of the incoming indie-sleaze revival that reads like some abject Cobrasnake x Paul McCarthy collab. If death is everywhere, clowns are also all around us.
Becoming Undone works the dance nerve well. But it also includes their first song without the life force of drum machines: “Teeth Out Pt.II,” a thick miasma of scuzz that Kuperus wanders through, clutching strings of words like lifelines. “Suddenly I will be solitary,” she lashes out. Synths oscillate, seances conjuring the ghosts of cruddy futures. The expert placement of the echoes, a sturdy architecture of ruins, bring to mind the vocal tics and tricks of Robert Ashley, as fertile a reference for ADULT.’s content as the crunch and rush of peak Robert Armani.
The hysterical “She’s Nice Looking” loops Kuperus into a choir with the acrobatic vocal fury of Judy Tenuta, Kathleen Hannah, and Maria Bamford reacting to construction-worker catcalls; digital handclaps land like slaps to the face. “Normative Sludge” is an exhuming sluice of brown noise, an electronic body music for a world in which a pandemic can take out a million bodies and the bodies of power argue over masks. “The particular artfulness with which each of us moves through space,” Bersani wrote, is “the expression, or pressing outward, of death’s inscription within our bodies.” It’s autographed upon the new ADULT. album. Its pressure forced out a gem. | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dais | February 28, 2022 | 7.8 | abb31080-a736-4c63-ada6-2737caa1095c | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
T.I.'s scattershot 70-minute eighth album features guest spots from A$AP Rocky, R. Kelly, André 3000, Pink, Lil Wayne, Cee Lo Green, Meek Mill, and others. | T.I.'s scattershot 70-minute eighth album features guest spots from A$AP Rocky, R. Kelly, André 3000, Pink, Lil Wayne, Cee Lo Green, Meek Mill, and others. | T.I.: Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17525-trouble-man-heavy-is-the-head/ | Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head | The 13th song on T.I.'s awkwardly-titled new album Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head is called "Hello". This, in and of itself, is not noteworthy event: many rappers have made a song with that title. But T.I. has now made two: a completely different and altogether better song named "Hello" appeared on his world-conquering 2006 album King. "Hello" is not the worst song on Trouble Man, though its schlocky, "that guy from Goodie Mob ain't never coming back" Cee-Lo hook ensures it's not one of the good ones either. But the oversight of its title demonstrates almost every single design flaw of Trouble Man, which is simultaneously lazy and distracted, ignoring the lessons of the past and while offering reminders that it didn't have to be this way.
The real mystery of T.I.'s later albums is that there's no glimpse of the guy who can still absolutely destroy tracks when he's up to it. Witness non-LP one-offs like "Hear Ye, Hear Ye" or shift the "feat." so tracks like Rick Ross' "Maybach Music III", Drake's "Fancy", Future's "Magic" (Remix), "Big Beast", or "In the A", could all serve as a foundation for a phenomenal T.I. record that still manages to achieve the same goals of demonstrating his commercial clout as well as his artistic malleability. None of them sound anything like "24's", "Rubber Band Man", or "What You Know".
As with every studio album since King, Trouble Man promises a cohesive, thematically sound concept about The State of Clifford Harris that it can't deliver. At least he tries for a spell: Trouble Man is interspersed with re-creations of his multiple arrests and the introduction is indeed rapped over the Marvin Gaye original. But here's a list of the phrases that pop up within the first minutes of "The Introduction": "livin' on the edge," "push it to the limit," "catch me if you can," "I am who I am." T.I. has one of those voices where it's pleasure to hear him rap even if he's saying nothing at all, but is that really what you want?
If so, Trouble Man is 70 minutes and change of mostly that. "Trap Back Jumpin", "Go Get It", and "Addresses" are just more examples of the utilitarian trap muzik that pads out his recent work, the specificity and wisdom of which continues to have an inverse relationship with T.I.'s advancing age. More disheartening is how the tracks drawn from T.I.'s actual experience are sunk by cliché. "Wonderful Life" and "Hallelujah" close out Trouble Man by directly addressing T.I.'s prison bid, but whatever effect his personal disclosures may have is neutralized by taking the artistic path of least resistance: the latter leans on a Christ complex and Leonard Cohen, the former has Akon interpolating Elton John's "Your Song", which...I really do mind. And when Pharrell coined T.I.'s most famous accolade by calling him "the Jay-Z of the South," I don't think he meant it as a prediction that Tip would also make a track called "Guns 'N Roses" with an unbearable arena-rock chorus. Yeah, trading Lenny Kravitz for P!nk seems like progress on some level, but at least the one from Blueprint 2 was about McDonalds apple pies and hangin' with Bono, not a cheap-seats apology more suited to Eminem's Recovery.
The point was that T.I., like Jay-Z, can be a transcendental figure when he chooses, someone whose albums cause hip-hop to stop whatever it's doing so it can take inventory of where it currently stands. And to T.I.'s credit, he makes a few strides to get beyond a sound he basically perfected a decade ago. But he barely makes an attempt to keep up when he's trying to run with the kids: Meek Mill and A$AP Rocky have almost nothing in common stylistically, except for that they both outrap T.I. badly on their respective tracks. More worrisome is how T.I. gets lapped by his own peers. There's no shame in ceding the spotlight to Andre 3000, as he does on the phenomenal mea culpa "Sorry", but then you get the 2 Chainz-style molly & Red Bull cocktail "Ball", which answers the question of "man, how hard can that be?" with "harder than you think."
Part of the problem could be focus. The uneven and pop-oriented Paper Trail (Trouble Man's closest analog in the T.I. discography) had his biggest chart hits and even the long-forgotten No Mercy still went gold*.* Since then, T.I. authored a book, starred in a reality series, signed Iggy Azalea, curated a women’s clothing line, teased a collaboration album with B.o.B., and already promised a sequel to Trouble Man called He Who Wears the Crown. So in its own way, Trouble Man's scattershot approach makes it the realest album the guy could make in 2012, but that doesn't make it any good. | 2013-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Grand Hustle | January 8, 2013 | 5 | abb72997-12ac-42c2-85af-dc647fd45ee8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Rhiannon Giddens emerges as a peerless and powerful voice in roots music on her second solo album, a record that traces the power of African-American song from 200 years ago to today. | Rhiannon Giddens emerges as a peerless and powerful voice in roots music on her second solo album, a record that traces the power of African-American song from 200 years ago to today. | Rhiannon Giddens: Freedom Highway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22912-freedom-highway/ | Freedom Highway | In the middle of a record populated with sexual violence, police shootings, and church bombings, Rhiannon Giddens sings, “My heart it is a-shakin’ with an old, old song.” This has been the simple, guiding principle of her decade-long career in roots music. Her powerful interpretation of American folk reclaims its old vernacular and redistributes it among its oft-untold complex history. After years of soaking up American musical traditions with her long-standing string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens has emerged as a peerless voice of roots-minded music as a solo artist on her new album, comprised of original compositions alongside a few relevant covers, including the Staples Singers’ 1965 title track.
The album’s beauty and gravitas come from how Giddens collapses the last two centuries of American history, juxtaposing songs about antebellum slave plantations with 1960’s Civil Rights anthems and narratives of 21st-century state violence. The record opens with “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a title taken from a 1797 slave advertisement. The song—a tale of a mother considering the doomed fate of their child born into bondage—immediately establishes the primacy of family across the album. Despite its historical pretensions, Freedom Highway is fundamentally a story of black mothers and their children, a record that traces black women’s eternal labor as they sacrifice for and grieve over the uncertain future of their kin.
Giddens has always been interested in upsetting the continuum of African-American song. She began experimenting with more recent, mid-late 20th-century styles on her solo debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn, and she arrives at Freedom Highway with her most expansive and adventurous musical palette yet. Featured prominently are the banjo/fiddle string-band and Piedmont blues stylings she explored so deftly in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but Freedom Highway weaves hip-hop, gospel, Dixieland jazz, folk balladry, and guitar-driven rhythm and blues into a coherent whole.
It remains challenging to find the right environment that fully modernizes Rhiannon Giddens’ perfectly ornate soprano. But roots expert Dirk Powell, who produced the album, relies on understated, predominantly acoustic arrangements that end up humanizing her vocal approach more fully than the museum-piece elegance of T-Bone Burnett’s production on Tomorrow Is My Turn.
Likewise, the emotional intimacy of Giddens’ first collection of original material is better served by the close collaborators and assorted family members who appear on Freedom Highway than the array of well-chopped session pros who populated her debut. Giddens’ sister Lalenja Harrington, who co-wrote and shares vocals on “Baby Boy,” and her nephew, Justin Harrington, who raps a verse on the police brutality polemic “Better Get It Right the First Time,” provide moments of dramatic interplay that firmly contemporize Giddens’ creative vision.
As a songwriter, Giddens achieves immediacy by imbuing her stories with striking interpersonal drama and emotional depth. On the banjo tune “Julie,” one of several songs that take place during the Civil War, a heart-wrenching exchange between slave and mistress ends with a devastating narrative reveal. On the stomping “The Love We Almost Had,” an otherwise unremarkable tale of romance-that-never-was becomes a tragic statement on the far-reaching bonds of white supremacy.
But the record's most affecting moment comes during “We Could Fly,” a modern spiritual that traces a family’s multi-generational search for enlightened freedom. The song delivers a rare gift from a piece of music: the sense that it’s always existed, that it’s always been sung, that it must have been written in 1854, and in 1963, and in 2016. That shared sense of African-American tradition is the driving force behind Giddens' art as she lays bare the ugly symmetry of America’s history. Here is timeless, striking proof that what was once worth protesting in song 200 years ago remains every bit as vital today. | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | February 23, 2017 | 7.6 | abc5e46b-db1c-4a3f-89c3-4d7c249bce50 | Jonathan Bernstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-bernstein/ | null |
Kindness' Adam Bainbridge is a member of a group of voracious, industrious artists who consider themselves "pop." The project's latest album, Otherness, isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun. Robyn, Kelela, and others contribute. | Kindness' Adam Bainbridge is a member of a group of voracious, industrious artists who consider themselves "pop." The project's latest album, Otherness, isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun. Robyn, Kelela, and others contribute. | Kindness: Otherness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19937-kindness-otherness/ | Otherness | Adam Bainbridge is a member of a group of voracious, industrious artists—among them Devonté Hynes, Solange, Sky Ferreira, and Kelela—who consider themselves "pop." It's a group that values collaboration, guesting on one another's albums and who, increasingly, are dipping their toes into popular music as producers and writers. “You’ll never guess who I just worked with,” is, these days, a popular volley between Bainbridge and his former flat-mate Hynes, both now in-demand collaborators for more traditionally popular artists. They value the word "pop," presumably, not because they want to be judged against current popular music but because defining yourself as a pop artist means never having to say you're sorry: you can work in whatever idiom you want, with whoever you want, in whatever manner. There's a freedom to pop music not availed to anyone who defines themselves as an indie rocker, or a punk, or a soul singer.
One of the chief curiosities of Otherness, Bainbridge's second album as Kindness, is trying to understand what this freedom means in the context of his careful, quiet compositions. Bainbridge's music sounds nothing like the current maximalist strain of popular music, and it sounds only a little like certains kinds of popular music from decades past. It's more deliberate and varied than Bainbridge's debut album, World, You Need a Change of Mind, a pleasant indie-disco record lacking in ambition.
Bainbridge aims higher on Otherness, setting his sights on pristine studio gems. He expands his arrangements, enlists collaborators (Hynes and Kelela chief among them), and dispenses with the cover songs that buoyed World. Bainbridge constructs his tracks largely with piano, horns, and bass, free of guitar. His lyrical currency is that most pop of topics: love lost and found. On Otherness, Bainbridge is a descendent of artists like Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Bryan Ferry: self-serious rogues who whipped the undomesticated wilds of jazz, disco, and R&B into digestible platters. Such is the M.O. of Otherness: throw everything at the wall, very tastefully.
Bainbridge is a standout producer, and Otherness crackles with crisp filigrees and luxe baubles. The soft-pedaled funk of tracks like "Why Don't You Love Me" and "With You" show lovely restraint, while welterweight breaks and brisk hi-hats keep "World Restart" and "This Is Not About Us" from blanching. "I'll Be Back" is a lavish, slo-mo house lullaby. There is a rare clarity and fidelity to Otherness' arrangements.
But, beautiful as they are, no one inhabits them. The only source of tension on Otherness is the disconnect between the album's sumptuous vistas and the dull songwriting that roams them. Otherness burdens its precision with unimaginative melodies and plodding tempos ("For the Young", "It'll Be Ok"). Bainbridge moans wanly during "8th Wonder" ("I'm thinking about my baby now/ Yeah") before interrupting the track with a jarring guest verse (during which M.anifest shouts out Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car", lest you have any doubts about Otherness' smothering sincerity).
Bainbridge, doleful and even keeled on World, opens up his voice here but proves too thin and affectless for the kind of soulful interjections he wishes upon "This Is Not About Us" and "I'll Be Back". When Robyn takes lead on the jaunty "Who Do You Love?" the effect is like removing your earplugs at a concert, exposing yourself to an almost violent level of detail.
Most irksome is "Geneva", a musty, choral ballad that consists largely of one line—"If you could read my mind/ You know what you'd find"—repeated mantra-like through the song, something that initially scans as quiet reflection but quickly reveals itself to be gibberish (seriously: if you could read his mind—but you can't—you wouldn't even need to read his mind). "Geneva", one trifle repeated ad nauseam, is nearly six minutes long. Otherness is full of moments like this, drawn-out tiltings at romantic windmills that too often resolve themselves in near parody. When Hynes and Tawiah trade deep questions on "Why Don't You Love Me", they sound less like star-crossed lovers and more like two very confused people quixotically locked in song. "With You" features two sultry saxophone solos that mostly smack of The Simpsons and Bill Clinton.
Pop music has plenty of tolerance for vapidity and emptiness, but you've got to be able to sell it. Look no further than Hynes' "It Is What It Is" if you want an example of a banality contorted into substance. You wonder if Bainbridge recognizes that something's missing: "Making pop music that’s less immediate than other engineered pop, sometimes you need a helping hand that explains where it’s coming from or the emotional universe it lives in." Maybe Otherness' emotional universe requires context, but who other than Bainbridge would provide it? Otherness isn't just less immediate than other pop music; it's less self-aware, and way less fun. | 2014-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mom+Pop / Female Energy | October 16, 2014 | 5.1 | abccfaca-2935-4024-b9cd-0c490af5cf5c | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The British dance-funk group return with their first album in seven years, not so much cashing in on retro styles but leaning into it like they always did. | The British dance-funk group return with their first album in seven years, not so much cashing in on retro styles but leaning into it like they always did. | Jamiroquai: Automaton | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23062-automaton/ | Automaton | It’s been two decades since the British group Jamiroquai treadmilled into ubiquity. The British band—a rotating cast of characters with flamboyant frontman Jay Kay as their falsetto-scraping nucleus—reached peak cool with the acid jazz snap of “Virtual Insanity,” a hit from 1997’s Travelling Without Moving that marked the too-early crest of a band shedding the acoustic guitar-plucked pop of years prior. Though regarded as their most notable catalog notch, it never took off in the States beyond the canonical music video, winning the coveted MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year in 1997 but failing to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
It seemed like Jay Kay’s endless carousel of fuzzy hats was more of a talking point than the tightening song structures of the albums and singles that followed, from the clever interplay between string section and chorus on “Canned Heat” to the sizzle of disco ball fervor on “Starchild.” The subsequent projects didn’t change the formula of “Virtual Insanity” so much as continued to define it. A Funk Odyssey, which arrived in 2001, spiraled into tie-dye experimentalism, 2005’s Dynamite reeled it back to Studio 54 soundtracking, and five years later, Rock Dust Light Star edged into a contemporary feel. Finally, their sound was upgraded from the demo sketch haze of the 1993 debut Emergency on Planet Earth to something far more muscular and refined.
In the seven years since Rock Dust Light Star, preying on a public hunger for nostalgia has been a hallmark for chart-scaling ’90s fixtures like Pharrell Williams and Daft Punk, the latter of whom turned to Chic’s Nile Rodgers for authentic bulletproofing on 2013’s “Get Lucky” and its parent album Random Access Memories. Automaton, Jamiroquai’s eighth studio album, fills a similar gap, but comes to it far more naturally. It’s the highest rung on their ladder, nodding to the signposts of their former style without forgetting them, fuzzy hats and all.
At their best, Jamiroquai extend the thread of their discography to its next potential platform, with a sheen that emphasizes the co-production from Jay Kay and keyboardist Matt Johnson. On single “Cloud 9,” Jay Kay deals out romantic chest thumps over instrumentation that feels alive, from the electric guitars and string hits to the handclaps and vein-popping bass lines. “Something About You” is starry-eyed and mouth-puckering sour, while the urgent “Carla” invites a tired Stevie Wonder comparison that, for once in the band’s history, actually fits.
When they veer into uncharted waters, they tend to muddle the all the previously laid groundwork. The title track bobs and weaves with a vocal melody that doesn’t slot into place until its star-gazing hook, several moments too late. The space funk of “Dr. Buzz” offers political commentary on the laughable state of affairs in North America. Jamiroquai has always been at their best when they lean into the kitsch, even when they want to be taken seriously. Here, it comes across like a moment of unearned gratuitousness.
Beyond that, Automaton may somewhat feel like a return to form (it hit No. 1 on iTunes in 38 countries), but it’s the sum total of a veteran group so agile at their own self-constructed subgenre that it’s easy to miss how far they’ve come. The album is a testament of their talent: No band from the ’90s has stayed so true to its sound while modifying it in real time, yielding some of its best work more than 20 years after its inception. They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh. | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Virgin EMI | April 4, 2017 | 7 | abd307bc-9eb0-4263-a65a-e210cf53c763 | Steven J. Horowitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-j. horowitz/ | null |
The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s debut builds out her production while retaining the layered harmonies of her a capella work. | The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s debut builds out her production while retaining the layered harmonies of her a capella work. | Madison McFerrin: I Hope You Can Forgive Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madison-mcferrin-i-hope-you-can-forgive-me/ | I Hope You Can Forgive Me | Madison McFerrin has many sides: She is lonely, she is scared, she is godly, she is trying. On her debut full-length, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter explores the joys and pitfalls of evolving into new versions of yourself: the thrill of leveling up and the fear of losing people attached to the old you. She hopes that through the change, her loved ones will still be there to meet her.
McFerrin, the daughter of jazz icon Bobby McFerrin, debuted in 2016 with a collection of spare a capella anthems. They relied on little beyond her voice and light hand percussion, showing off her crisp, airy singing, curlicued melodies, and intricate harmonies. By her 2019 EP, You + I, produced by her brother Taylor McFerrin, she began fleshing out her tracks with bass, guitar, and synth. The result was a lusher electro-pop sound, the relaxed instrumentation accentuating the effortless quality of her vocals.
Her latest project is her most dynamic and elaborate, while retaining the vocal emphasis and layered textures of her a capella work. On the slow-burning R&B song “Run,” eerie harmonies crescendo into twitchy breakbeat-style percussion. On “Utah,” a nimble funk bassline and finger snaps keep a steady groove. Though the instrumentation adds depth and dimension, McFerrin’s delicate and probing vocals are still the focal point. On the opening track “Deep Sea,” her ghostly, languid vocal layers actually recreate the feeling of being underwater.
I Hope You Can Forgive Me captures the messy, confusing headspace that precedes future growth. Her anxiety is evident on songs like “Utah,” where a debate about where to live reflects suffocating tension in a relationship, and “OMW,” on which she asks another person to carry on, wanting her own time and space. But McFerrin also insists that others recognize her worth: “You gon see me and believe in God herself.”
In the music video to “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now,” McFerrin’s old self shows up for her new one. We see the singer, pale and cowering on the grass: She is lying in her grave. Another version of McFerrin, glowing and confident in a lemon-yellow dress, stares down at her. The song’s lyrics become a conversation. “Please don’t leave me now,” the living artist sings. “I ain’t ready,” says the dying one. Finally McFerrin rises from her grave and, in the company of friends, dances on it—a reminder that the closing of one chapter is an opportunity for celebration and rebirth. | 2023-05-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-16T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | MadMcFerrin Music | May 16, 2023 | 7 | abd66ca7-9393-4420-9ceb-d4ac5dc61417 | Mary Retta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mary-retta/ | |
In the last year of his life, David Bowie completed his remarkable final album, Blackstar, as well as this curious jukebox musical for which he wrote a few new songs. | In the last year of his life, David Bowie completed his remarkable final album, Blackstar, as well as this curious jukebox musical for which he wrote a few new songs. | Various Artists: Lazarus OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22567-various-artists-lazarus-ost/ | Lazarus OST | In the last year of his life, David Bowie completed a pair of linked projects: his remarkable final album, Blackstar, and a curious jukebox musical for which he wrote a few new songs, Lazarus. Bowie, the most theater-minded of rock stars, had had ambitions to mount a stage musical for a long time; Diamond Dogs, in fact, had evolved from a scrapped musical based on George Orwell’s 1984. Lazarus, co-written with Enda Walsh, also has a literary source: it’s a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth. Officially, to be more specific, it’s a sequel to the Walter Tevis novel that was the basis for the 1976 film in which Bowie starred, with Michael C. Hall (of “Dexter” fame) playing his role, the alien Thomas Newton.
Bowie recorded the three new Lazarus songs during the Blackstar sessions with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his group, but only “Lazarus” itself actually appeared on Blackstar; a second disc with all three recordings has been appended to the soundtrack album. The show’s cast recorded the first disc on January 11 of this year, immediately after they’d learned of Bowie’s death, and the solemnity of the moment mutes the hypnotic delight of his songs. (Near the end, we hear forty seconds of his original recording of “Sound and Vision,” and it’s as if a conference room’s ceiling has momentarily peeled back to reveal the sky.)
The central problem is that Lazarus is billed as an original cast recording, and it’s kind of not; it’s impossible to hear these “actorly” renditions of “Changes” and “It’s No Game” and “Love Is Lost” and so on without thinking of the cracked actor who defined them, and whose phrasing these performers ape at almost every turn. To put it more plainly: there is no song in Lazarus of which Bowie did not record a better version. And, despite some nicely considered arrangements (“The Man Who Sold the World” takes after Bowie’s mid-1990s reworking), a lot of these songs weren’t actually built for the stage: when Sophie Anne Caruso sings “Life on Mars?” as a scenery-chewing torch song, it’s suddenly clear how much of its power came from Bowie’s arch detachment. As translations of Bowie’s musical aesthetic to theater go, Lazarus lags far behind *Hedwig and the Angry Inch—*in which Hall also starred for a while.
The three previously unheard Bowie recordings on the second disc, a bit under twelve minutes of music in all, are of a piece with the Blackstar material, if not as audacious or as polished as “Blackstar” or “Lazarus” or “Sue.” “When I Met You” is the jewel-in-the-rough of the bunch—Bowie’s backing vocals body-checking his warbling lead out of the way, the band a little out of tune and too into stomping out the rhythm to care. The “Lazarus” performance, whose guitar riff eventually just turns into “Purple Haze,” is the strongest thing on the cast album, possibly because Bowie’s own performance wasn't casting such a long shadow.
Unsurprisingly, the newly released songs are full of intimations of mortality—but it’s also too easy to listen for farewells and forget that they were written for dramatic personae, by a songwriter who adored masks. “Killing a Little Time,” whose shuddering groove recalls the double-time tricks of Bowie’s mid-’90s records, includes a refrain of “I’m falling, man/I’m choking, man/I’m fading, man.” But the line that Bowie clearly relishes growling is “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing/To sting your soul/To fuck you over”—which would work just as well on somebody’s first record.
So is this it for Bowie’s music? Nah, there's still more in the vaults: there were several more songs recorded at the Blackstar sessions, and according to producer Tony Visconti, Bowie recorded demos for another five songs shortly before his death. This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute. | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Columbia / RCA / ISO | October 27, 2016 | 6.2 | abd93551-127e-41f5-a1d9-e206824bf837 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Australian garage rock band’s first album in eight years is a modest and welcome comeback even if they don’t crash out of the speakers like they once did. | The Australian garage rock band’s first album in eight years is a modest and welcome comeback even if they don’t crash out of the speakers like they once did. | Eddy Current Suppression Ring: All in Good Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eddy-current-suppression-ring-all-in-good-time/ | All in Good Time | Aside from an occasional one-off live set, Eddy Current Suppression Ring have been gone for eight years—a veritable lifetime in garage rock. That’s nine albums from Thee Oh Sees, a dozen by Ty Segall, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s entire 15-album discography. Before they walked away for nearly a decade, the Australian quintet built a reputation with three albums and a pile of singles that balanced regimented order with rock’n’roll disarray. Their often-motorik rhythm section offered a foundation for Mikey Young’s guitar fuzz and frontman Brendan Huntley’s slovenly speak-sung lyrics. At their best, they were wild and untenable, offering up the screaming tension of “Anxiety” and the fast-paced churn of “You Let Me Be Honest With You.” They had songs impressive enough to get placed in AT&T commercials and Spoon sets. When they went away, Young kept carrying the torch, crafting some of the decade’s best post-punk with Total Control while working feverishly as a prolific studio engineer.
All in Good Time is an apt title for ECSR’s unceremonious return—an acknowledgment of both their long hiatus and the patience required to appreciate this album for what it is. This is not the ECSR whose explosive guitar work defined their best album, 2008’s Primary Colours. They’re back with the same formula and aesthetic as their earlier work, but they don’t sound nearly as invigorated or inspired.
The song that announced the new album, “Our Quiet Whisper,” finds the quartet in a more reflective zone. Huntley—who performs under the name Brendan Suppression—sounds disenchanted and sensitive as he sings about an inconvenient political climate where “actions speak louder than words.” The band’s overall actions, meanwhile, are unhurried. The song adopts a gradual pace, and when a guitar solo does happen, it’s low-key. That’s the overall tone of All in Good Time: staid, steady, humming along.
Where they found prior success by striking the balance between organization and wildness, All in Good Time could stand to be a lot more combustible. Huntley, whose voice is historically among the band’s wildest and most energizing forces, sounds pensive on several songs. There are attempts at ratcheting up the energy, but while Huntley shouts and Young leans into distorted power chords on “Vicariously Living,” the band’s overall mid-tempo approach keeps the pace sluggish. Young’s guitar often adds weight and volume to the album, but on “Medieval Wall,” his chutzpah only reinforces the same lackluster hook instead of diversifying their approach.
ECSR were always a band who excelled at building anticipation; “I Admit My Faults” was a master class in distributing Huntley’s shouts and Young’s shredding in the perfect spots here and there while otherwise letting the groove take its time. All in Good Time’s best songs are longform expressions of that same restraint. “Voices” builds quietly from silence, and as Young’s guitar varies up enough to move the song in new directions, it’s the perfect backdrop for Huntley’s nonchalant observations about writer’s block and nagging doubts. He sounds tortured when he’s asking for some quiet—the perfect sentiment on a song where Young’s well-placed licks repeatedly interrupt the album’s best groove. “Shoulders,” meanwhile, is all simmer and no boil, and as a result, it just spins in place. No riveting individual performance from any of the band’s members dives in to rescue a tepid melody that repeats again and again.
When the energy and momentum drag, it’s Huntley’s reflective and empathetic lyrics that stand as the album’s greatest strength. There’s a song where he encounters Brendan Suppression from the future; he’s not offered a grim warning, but encouraged to take better care of himself. Huntley extends that care outward as well, singing on “Like a Comet” about how someone came into his life and reshaped him completely. So much of the time, Huntley’s observations are insular, which colors the album’s overall tone. But as Danny Young’s drums rev up and Huntley sings about the tremors running through him, the music becomes celebratory, and the album suddenly feels light, like it’s inches above the ground.
That lightness sticks around but curdles slightly on the closing track “Modern Man.” Huntley sings about making a wish on a dandelion, and then he talks about how you shouldn’t trust your neighbor and should maybe padlock your garden hose. The band breathes life into a gradual jam by carefully picking the right spots for synthesizer stabs and guitar licks. The key to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s most successful music is balance, and while the band struggles to recapture some of their old magic, Huntley finds that same sweet spot in his lovingly unromantic storytelling.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Castle Face | January 2, 2020 | 6.3 | abdbe566-2206-4ef4-89d4-7a6d091b750a | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
Mary Chapin Carpenter's lean and haunting songs often sound best when they're given room to breathe. The production here by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson) is just the ticket. | Mary Chapin Carpenter's lean and haunting songs often sound best when they're given room to breathe. The production here by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson) is just the ticket. | Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Things That We Are Made Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21878-the-things-that-we-are-made-of/ | The Things That We Are Made Of | “What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” a key song from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s 2012 album Ashes and Roses, tells the story of a recent divorcee sorting through her ex-husband’s belongings. With its sparse, second-person narrative and hushed fingerpicking, it plays something like a passage from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking put to music. Heard in the context of Carpenter’s remarkable recent work, this song is perhaps her defining track: a propulsive series of quiet thoughts expressed with a novelistic eye for detail in her immaculate, articulate whisper. But it also feels like a mission statement.
Just like the narrator of “What to Keep and What to Throw Away,” Carpenter followed Ashes and Roses by taking stock of her own career, reimagining some of her finest compositions backed by a symphony orchestra. Songs from the Movie from 2014 was a pleasant enough album but, like Joni Mitchell’s similarly-minded Travelogue, it couldn’t help but feel like an epilogue: the kind of statement an artist makes once she’s said everything she set out to say. That album’s sense of finality may be partly why the arrival of The Things That We Are Made Of—Carpenter’s 14th album and her first produced by David Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton)—feels like such a pleasant surprise.
Cobb’s sparse, raw production is a welcome change of pace for Carpenter, an artist whose lush, country-leaning work has often slipped comfortably into adult contemporary radio, belying her characteristically complex songwriting. On Things, Cobb knows exactly how to complement Carpenter’s work to make her music sound as urgent and intimate as her lyrics. The minimal electric guitars that linger in the background of “The Middle Ages” are sparse and haunting, while “What Does It Mean to Travel” floats with a spacey Ghosts of the Great Highway weariness. Single and centerpiece “Map of My Heart,” meanwhile, is the jauntiest song Carpenter has put her name to since the ’90s and serves as a reminder of just how influential her particular intonations have been for today’s crop of country-pop crossovers.
It is in this song that Carpenter summarizes the theme of the album in two crucial lines: “I learned how to travel/Just what I can carry.” From the literal journey at the heart of “Livingston” to the more symbolic one in “Deep Deep Down Heart,” nearly every song on Things is tied to the road, giving the album the feel of a long, lonely late night drive. Like many long drives, however, this one gets a little dreary near the end: “Note on a Windshield” tries and fails to transcend the banality of its central metaphor, while the closing title track aims for hymnal and lands closer to lullaby.
The album does itself no favors by stacking all of its most exciting moments at the beginning, and crowding the five-minute ballads together at the end. Still, these are small concerns for a record whose very presence feels like a refreshing return to action. With 11 songs in just under one hour, Things is Carpenter’s briefest collection of new material in over a decade and serves as a fine entry point for newcomers. It is not her most revelatory work, but it is a strong, concise statement from an artist moving more swiftly and confidently than ever—carrying only what is absolutely necessary, and leaving the rest behind. | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Lambent Light | May 11, 2016 | 6.8 | abe1b08c-aca8-46b2-b3fb-41a7d437cf63 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow ... | Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow ... | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3489-lift-your-skinny-fists-like-antennas-to-heaven/ | Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven | Jeremiah is Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s prophet. The Hebrew emblazoned in dirty copper on the cover of their Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP belongs to him: tohu-va-bohu, it reads: void and waste. The lengthy passage on the sleeve of that EP is lifted from his book. Blase Bailey Finnegan III, the Providence street preacher whose rantings appear on the two first Godspeed You Black Emperor! releases, is his avatar. The music of Godspeed, for all its bombast and lament, extends Jeremiah's ministry into a new millennium. Preaching in a vocabulary drawn from Boston hardcore, in a spidery array of radical leftist rhetoric, Godspeed You Black Emperor! have delivered a blistering (albeit politically imprecise) homily on the new world order.
That said, the Canadian nontet's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is a massive, achingly beautiful work, alternately elegiac and ferocious. However, Lift plays like an oddly transitional album: much of the first disc presents a refinement of the sound that crystallized on 1999's Slow Riot EP, while the second disc flirts with moments of vertiginous shoegazing, looser rock drumming and reckless crescendos of unalloyed noise. Succinctly, the first disc is easily continuous with their earlier work; the second disc might just be the future. The disparity is immediately striking.
This is not to suggest that the first disc is not wonderful-- it is, but mostly as a cultivation of ideas and sounds embedded in F#A#oo or Slow Riot. The waltz-like grace of the opening part of "Storm" (titled "Levez Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heaven") is dominated by rising cello and violin which evolve, with the addition of guitars and martial drum taps, into a loud triumphal procession. Blaring trumpets seem to announce the advent of some head of state, and the whole affair proceeds with military discipline and measured effect. The violent explosion never comes: the parade merely approaches and recedes.
The second part, "Gathering Storm," begins in entwined guitars: one bowed, one screwdrivered, one gently plucked. With the entrance of the cello, violin and rumbling toms, the guitars begin to shriek in distortion. The effect is amped-up slowcore sludge that's all tension and no release, merely dissipation and noise reminiscent of Cale-era Velvet Underground performances. Seven minutes later, "Cancer Towers on the Holy Road Hi-Way" ends the track in crushing paranoia with locomotive percussion thundering toward breakdown. (It is also Jeremiah who predicted that destruction would come from the North.)
The second track, "Static," opens with a looped recording of a supermarket welcome message, giving way to indecipherable megaphone vitriol. Sparse piano and drone frames the static-drenched field recordings with mournful effect. "Chart #3" is treated guitar drone and distant buzzing similar to records released by the Fatalists or James Plotkin. Piercing static and high frequency ambient yields to the monologue of a fringe Christian preacher. "When you see the face of God," he intones, "you will die and there will be nothing left of you, except the god-man, the god-woman, the heavenly man, the heavenly women...," girded by skeletal string arrangements.
Near the end of the first disc, "World Police and Friendly Fires" initially reminds me of Erik Frielander's Watchman compositions, and his work with Greg Feldman on John Zorn's Bar Kokhba. Eventually, however, "World Police" erupts into thick, layered drone rock (think the Dirty Three, but less dispersed) that sounds like a heavy metal riff slowed to quarter-speed and suddenly accelerated into wailing guitars and slashing strings. It is, I think, the first disc's finest moment. The final part, "The Buildings They are Sleeping Now," is a quiet whoosh of fragmentary strings and deep noise. The disc simply falls apart; the last moments are so inaudible that you're never sure when the music has actually stopped.
Murray Ostril introduces the second disc with his reminiscing on the heyday of Coney Island. The sentiment is so politically and religiously neutral that it stands apart from other Godspeed field recordings: nostalgia for the good old days. Nothing more. The second part of "Sleep," "Monhein," is dominated by Efrim Menuck's wailing screwdriver-on-frets effect. From this plodding dirge comes an incredible air raid siren of sound, flagging and rising over the military percussion. But instead of the familiar tension and release, Godspeed opts for maddening sustain. When the drums die out, all that remains is the tremulous scream.
After a Labradford-like introduction of repetitive guitar and subtle chimes, "Broken Windows, Locks of Love Part III" erupts into sheets of noise somewhere between Loveless and Pangea. The advent of nimble, almost hip-hop drumming, is a shock, and a loose, raucous jam coalesces, recalling Cul de Sac's country-surf-kraut concoctions. Part of you will say: why can't it all be like this?
The final track, "Antennas to Heaven," begins with an old mountain folk tune, which is inevitably consumed in processed machine noise. Echoey chimes and looped glockenspiel reverberate through "Edgy Swingset Acid" while Francophone children dreamily play and sing. The playground, however, is weirdly menaced by liturgical organs that soon give way to a momentary burst of dense, jangly rock. On "She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field," guitars and bells tick-tock over delicate dark ambient, counting the moments as the instruments flare up on fire and descend like a sunset. Godspeed You Black Emperor! have apparently expanded their emotional repertoire of indignation and grief to include joy. But the appropriately titled "Deathkamp Drone" is ghostly electronic gloom. The track's final moments are a wash of humming synths, echoing guitars, and pins-and-needles noise that comes just a little too close to human screaming. By the time the piece ends, the tide is way out.
Real innovation in a leaderless nontet must be geologically slow. Lift Your Skinny Fists succeeds precisely because it utilizes Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s numbers in a way that previous works did not. Lift opens up its sound to various voices and influences within the collective, letting moments of pop/rock, ambient and even hip-hop blossom where once there was only gravelly symphonics and aural landscape. Those moments were, for me, nothing short of thrilling. This is why Lift shouldn't be accused of merely preaching to the converted fan who has long since accepted the grandiosity of their sound and the vague rhetoric of their dissent. They show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Godspeed You Black Emperor!-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse. | 2000-10-25T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2000-10-25T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Kranky | October 25, 2000 | 9 | abe3baac-d16d-4e66-b1f5-075ec95bd62d | Brent S. Sirota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-s. sirota/ | null |
Michael is Chaz Bundick's (Toro y Moi) first full-length as Les Sins. It finds Bundick turning away from his thin, genial voice and natural melodic gifts, choosing instead to embrace rhythm and lean, shadowy beat construction*.* | Michael is Chaz Bundick's (Toro y Moi) first full-length as Les Sins. It finds Bundick turning away from his thin, genial voice and natural melodic gifts, choosing instead to embrace rhythm and lean, shadowy beat construction*.* | Les Sins: Michael | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19977-les-sins-michael/ | Michael | Like his contemporary—and occasional label boss—Dan Snaith, Chaz Bundick is a curious and intellectual pop craftsman whose heart can’t help but push him toward the dancefloor. As part of the chillwave vanguard making blurry, wistful electronic pop at the tail end of the '00s, he wrote songs like “Blessa” and “Talamak” under the name Toro y Moi, staining slow-motion house party jams with young adult angst; even as he graduated to more cosmopolitan, mature songwriting with follow-up efforts Underneath the Pine and Anything in Return, his interest in danceable music lingered, and he refracted it through the prisms of funk (like on the winning "Still Sound") and R&B. While his star continued to rise, he quietly released a handful of singles under the name Les Sins, pulling from the sounds of French touch and British bass music on songs like "Lina". The humbly covered Michael is his first full-length as Les Sins, and it finds Bundick turning away from his thin, genial voice and natural melodic gifts, choosing instead to embrace rhythm and lean, shadowy beat construction.
Bundick has name-checked influences like German producer Danilo Plessow (who records deep house as Motor City Drum Ensemble) and Four Tet in interviews surrounding the release of Michael, and the similarities between their work and his are evident throughout the record. He likes to cobble beats together from a wide assortment of percussive samples, including fragments of his own familiar voice that have been chopped up and warped beyond recognition, and he’s more than willing to craft hooks and engaging passages using unconventional means and sounds. Opener "Talk About" and highlight "Bother" both hang on aggressive spoken samples, the former cribbed from Nas cut "One Love" and the latter delivered by Bundick himself; the skittering "Toy" is built around a spectral, cycling flute-ish melody that’s tonally incongruous given the menace of the rhythm that surrounds it. Choices like this grant the record a playfulness and lightness that serve to balance its darker, occasionally amelodic tendencies.
With that said, the best moments on Michael are the ones that hew closest to Bundick’s work as Toro y Moi, which remains his flagship project. If you imagine a spectrum anchored at either end by the sonic extremes Bundick has explored—perhaps a piece of lounging, bachelor pad pop like "How I Know" at one end, and the shocking, guttural assault of Michael’s "Call" on the other—it’s clear he does his best work somewhere near the middle. The irresistible "Why", featuring vocalist Nate Salman, would slot in perfectly alongside dance-oriented Anything in Return highlights like "Harm in Change" and "Rose Quartz" if Bundick was singing it instead, and it’s the most memorable moment on Michael by a wide margin. A handful of songs scattered throughout the album’s back half succeed in large part because they embrace tones and textures that Bundick is clearly comfortable deploying, from the spacey synth line gliding through "Bellow" to the bold, bright piano melody that stars on closer "Do Right". These tracks feel distinct and separate from his work as Toro y Moi, but without completely forgoing the skills and unique palette that makes those songs stand out. And although Michael is likely destined to end up a minor effort in Bundick’s expanding catalogue, his talent and radiant passion for new musical ideas and a wide breadth of sounds render the album a worthwhile effort for even casual listeners. | 2014-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Company | November 12, 2014 | 6.6 | abe74ad1-a5eb-4d7c-8e86-e3a75237c066 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
The One Direction member’s solo debut pays fine tribute to classic rock’n’roll and shows off his exceptional voice, if not his enigmatic persona. | The One Direction member’s solo debut pays fine tribute to classic rock’n’roll and shows off his exceptional voice, if not his enigmatic persona. | Harry Styles: Harry Styles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23204-harry-styles/ | Harry Styles | Harry Styles is a master of the middle distance. Look at him turning his right cheek to the camera, strands of wet hair hanging lank, a rogue petal clinging to a clump above his ear: “Sweet Creature is available now. Album is available in ten days. I am available always.” He remains an enigma after spending a half-decade in the world’s most popular boy band and dating one of the world’s biggest pop stars. And yet there’s something about Styles’ combination of roguish charm and eagerness to please that renders him exactly that: available. Leave the right Instagram comment at the right time, and he might show up on your doorstep the next morning with a bag of bagels and coffee with room. The ability to tap into this liminal space between intimacy and detachment is what makes Styles—and Harry Styles, the solo debut he’s releasing about a year and a half after One Direction’s dissolution—so captivating.
If you only know one thing about Harry Styles, it’s probably that the album bucks the established trends governing bids for young male solo pop stardom. Styles is uninterested in walking the trail blazed 15 years ago by Justin Timberlake’s Justified, the one along which young male stars signal their newfound maturity by embracing hip-hop, R&B, and overt libidinousness (c.f. Justin Bieber, Nick Jonas, Zayn Malik). He doesn’t seem to care for the Sheeranesque stadium-folk being churned out by One Direction bandmate Niall Horan, either. Instead, Harry Styles wants to be a rock star—your father’s rock star, or maybe even your grandparents’ rock star. And so this sounds like the work of a musician whose desert island discs include Revolver, Tattoo You, and Vinyl: Music From the HBO Original Series - Vol. 1.
Styles’ debut isn’t subject to the same pressures that defined late-period One Direction, and its songs don’t need to hold up over a year-long stadium tour. It’s still exceedingly easy to hear Styles and his band—spearheaded by jack-of-all-trades executive producer Jeff Bhasker—tip their caps to a wide variety of rock legends and also-rans. “Sweet Creature” catches Styles taking a crack at his very own version of “Blackbird”; the laughable “Woman” opens with a piano flourish out of Prince’s “Do Me, Baby” before settling down into an Elton John strut. Styles’ stabs at hard rock (the one-two punch of “Only Angel” and “Kiwi”) sound like the Rolling Stones and Wolfmother, respectively. And lead single “Sign of the Times” is a skyscraping Bowie ballad that manages to sound like both fun.’s “We Are Young”—one of Bhasker’s biggest hits—and Coldplay’s “The Scientist.” Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness.
His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs. Styles has described his stint in One Direction as “a democracy,” and every song featured a fight for breathing room between four or five hungry young singers. Here, he has space he can use. “Sign of the Times” jumps out of your speakers when he shifts into his thin falsetto, and it climaxes with a series of desperate howls. He makes a convincing alt-country troubadour on “Two Ghosts” and “Ever Since New York” by throwing on a little twang and a healthy helping of world-weariness. The down-home boogie of “Carolina” tests the limits of his nascent swagger. And I’ve never heard someone record their own backing vocals with the enthusiasm and panache Styles brings to Harry Styles. Every hoot, yelp, and chant are delivered with an impish grin, one that makes it hard not to crack a smile of your own.
Going it alone gives Styles the space he needs to soar as a vocalist, but it also throws his shortcomings as a writer into sharp relief. Vague allusions, stock characters, and cliché turns of phrase aside, Styles struggles most with writing about women, a shame given that *Harry Styles *is supposed to be “a song cycle about women and relationships.” The subject of “Only Angel” turns out to be a “devil in between the sheets.” The irrepressible Southern flame at the heart of “Carolina” ends up a “good girl” out of the Drake playbook. “Kiwi” is devoted to a “pretty face on a pretty neck” with a “Holland Tunnel for a nose” (because it’s “always backed up,” he quips). “Two Ghosts” only succeeds because it leans on a handful of references to Styles’ most famous ex, and it’s not even the best Taylor Swift song in his catalogue.
This parade of sexy badasses is amusing but unmemorable, and Styles’ reliance on trite depictions of wild women is disappointing in part because he seems otherwise unbothered by the demands of traditional masculinity. He shrugs off his imagined secret love affairs with other members of One Direction and wins plaudits for the respect he shows his largely female, largely teenage fanbase. Harry Styles might tell you plenty about its namesake’s aesthetic interests and his grown-up turn-ons, but it’s lacking the emotional depth that’s so readily ascribed to him. You finish the album waiting for his pen to catch up with his persona.
There’s one moment in which Harry Styles transcends its big-name influences. Closer “From the Dining Table” opens with a startling scene: a horny, lonely Styles, jerking off in an opulent hotel room before falling back asleep and getting wasted. “I’ve never felt less cool,” he admits. The writing is frank and economic; it sounds like Styles is singing softly into your ear, a bashful mess. It’s the only song on the album that invites you to consider what it must be like to be Harry Styles: unfathomably famous since before you could drive, subjected to unrelenting attention everywhere except bunker-like studios and secluded beaches, forced to zip around and around the world for half a decade when you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are and what you want. And yet “From the Dining Table” sounds less like a complaint than a confession meant for you and you alone. It’s intoxicating, and it ends Harry Styles on the most promising possible note. | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | May 16, 2017 | 6.8 | abee8e6f-4a39-4626-9f02-4062dd6cc673 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | 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 Arizona band’s third album, a giant canvas of rock and pop songwriting that wears its heart on its sleeve. | 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 Arizona band’s third album, a giant canvas of rock and pop songwriting that wears its heart on its sleeve. | Jimmy Eat World: Clarity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jimmy-eat-world-clarity/ | Clarity | When Jimmy Eat World started recording their third full-length LP, Clarity, they suspected it would be their last. Formed in Mesa, Arizona during the era when major labels were absorbing alternative rock bands as if through osmosis, they signed to Capitol in the mid-’90s, and the first album they recorded for the label, 1996’s Static Prevails, performed below expectations. They knew if they didn’t sell significantly more on the second attempt, the label would drop them.
They also assumed this would be the last chance they’d have the budget to make a really big album—not “big” in the sense of volume and speed, but more in the way even a small painting can seem big, the enormity of the subject suggested by how finely-wrought its details are. They would record every idea they had in search of this effect. Organs, synthesizers, vibraphones, and any kind of percussion instrument they could find—including timpani—blanketed the floor of the studio like unruly houseplants.
The band’s sound was also in a state of mutation. When they were teenagers, they debuted as a skate punk band, but after hearing the glacial prettiness of Denver emo band Christie Front Drive, the spaces between the chords and even the individual notes in Jimmy Eat World songs started to grow. By the time they recorded Static Prevails, their songs were unknown landscapes, the ground giving way to sudden pitfalls. Their inner dynamic was starting to change too; during the writing of Clarity, their original lead singer, guitarist Tom Linton, whose scorched Jawbox-y growl featured on at least half of Static Prevails, withdrew from the microphone almost entirely, ceding lead vocal duties to Jim Adkins on all of Clarity except for one song. It wasn’t a conscious choice; Adkins just tended to have the first idea for lyrics as the songs were forming in the band’s practice space. But Adkins’ vocal register also hovers at a considerable distance above Linton’s; it is birdsong high, conveying more emotion and energy and way less exhaustion. Listening to him sing was like being tuned into someone’s innermost thoughts and hearing them echo off their chest cavity—nothing gets in the way between you and the ache in his voice.
By this point, Jimmy Eat World had been categorized as an emo band. Not that they welcomed it. Like a Groucho Marx routine on loop, emo was a club no self-respecting punk would belong to. Guy Picciotto, member of flagship emo bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi, said he never recognized “emo” as a legitimate genre of music. “I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands,” he said. “What, like the Bad Brains weren’t emotional? What—they were robots or something?” Other bands acted as if they’d been accused of something unseemly when it came up in interviews, putting as much distance between the genre and their music as they could. Whatever reverence or weight it may have acquired in the past decade, “emo” still sounds pejorative on a phonetic level—the kind of word that triggers an eye roll as you say it, like a muscle spasm. There’s something inherently immature and unformed in the designation, evoking the miseries of the hopelessly teenaged, voluntary adolescents adrift in torments they should’ve outgrown by now.
But at the tail end of the ’90s, the rock music people thought of as emo wasn’t even beginning to live up to that expectation. It was mostly still just different groupings of former hardcore kids writing records that were dynamic in mood and sound, anchored in punk but taking cues from dub and space rock records, sinking into every pocket and gap that opened up in their songs. (It’s a phenomenon that can be heard on records from 1996, like Texas Is the Reason’s Do You Know Who You Are? and Boys Life’s Departures and Landfalls.) Emo didn’t have the classic rock pretensions of grunge and alt-rock, nor was it anywhere near as crisp and accessible as pop-punk, which was then growing exponentially more popular. Emo, instead, was rock music in a confused state, made by and for confused people.
I hated emo in high school—Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, all the sad boys with guitars getting airtime on MTV2. Any band that wielded emotions I felt acutely every day made me feel like a vampire exposed to daylight. Resentment, alienation, unrequited love—these already made up the emotional landscape of one’s teenage years, high school hallways without end. There was something mortifying about listening to music that echoed that experience so directly back at me. I preferred indie rock bands whose lyrics were opaque enough to disintegrate in your grasp. This, it seemed to me, was fundamentally more adult and dignified, as if abstracting your angst instead of contending with it was obviously the more mature thing to do.
On first contact, Jimmy Eat World can sound too simplistic and straightforward, all text and no subtext, all dumb feeling with no mediated surface, which made liking them automatically embarrassing yet difficult to resist. When I saw a copy of Clarity in my high school library, though, something about the cover—four cryptic photographs taken from a grid of sixteen, the rest of which revealed themselves as you unfolded the booklet—made the band feel complicated all of a sudden, as if these were shadow realms that loomed beyond their popular hits. Some of the images were captured at such a microscopic level of detail it’s hard to grasp the whole they must have been cropped from: pinholes of light playing on a watery surface; a flashlight illuminating what looks like a cave interior; the net of a screen door, possibly after rain, making the world beyond it look like wet squares of paint. The photos so often resist interpretation, it’s like they’ve captured something in the midst of being remembered, a lost detail of someone’s life gradually coming back into focus.
Instead of being greeted with the loud rasp of a guitar, Clarity begins with an organ drone slowly filling the room with its single note. (According to Adkins, this was the band’s “punk rock” way of opening the album, punk in this instance being less about loud music than a devotion to the unexpected.) A snare drum and a ride cymbal sway evenly out of the mists of the drone. Before Adkins sings, it could pass for a Low song, and was in fact inspired by the emptiness of Low’s early sound, frail and temporary in its construction but deliberate in its every movement, like the hem of a dress floating above the ground.
When Adkins was working in an art supply store between tours, he went to a coworker’s art installation and saw a woman cleaning a flight of steps with the skirt of her white dress. She ran past him, across a courtyard, toward a table set with candles and glass tumblers, and patiently brushed the dirt from her dress into the glasses. It took Adkins a moment to register that he was watching performance art, that what he saw had some kind of meaning beyond its own momentary occurrence, though he also had trouble settling on what that was exactly. By the time he set the scene to music in the first song on Clarity, “Table for Glasses,” everything had burned away from the memory, leaving only the image of the woman in the white dress stamped in his mind: “It happens too fast/To make sense of it/Make it last,” he sings in the chorus, each second being eaten away by the next, until the original context is gone, and the song cracks open and blooms.
Each song on Clarity feels this dense and intentionally constructed, each instrument settling over the previous one like a new layer of paint. The band wasn’t hostile to glossy production styles; they grew up on the popular rock and metal music of the ’80s, and drummer Zach Lind routinely cites Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood as the gold standard of rock production, the refined texture of the instruments and the impact they have when they’re all roped together in the mix. You can see this approach bearing out in Clarity’s “Believe in What You Want,” where synthesizers fill up the guitar tones with glare like overexposed light in an old photograph.
But they also knew when to scale back, when their slightest gesture would have the greatest impact. The verses in “A Sunday” are played by the full band, but in the chorus they retreat, leaving Adkins in isolation like the universe has tightened around him, and even though the song itself doesn’t slow down, the world seems to spin a little slower. “12.23.95” shrinks the world of Clarity down even further, to the dimensions of something a musician in the present day would likely record in their bedroom. Synthetic percussion whirs like film in a projector and synths chirp like they’re emitting from a video game cartridge. And the song itself is small: two identical verses (“Didn’t mean to leave you hanging on/I didn’t mean to leave you all alone/I didn’t know what to say”) and a chorus (“Merry Christmas, baby”) and it’s over. But it’s this very smallness that makes the album so big; you can feel all the darkness closing in around Adkins’ voice as he sings this song, as if he were recording it at 4 a.m. and trying to pack as much genuine feeling into a four-track recorder as possible.
It’s in this mid-section of Clarity that one gets the sense that the songs are trying to freeze a moment in time, to trap the briefest glance or gesture in its own frame and preserve it there. The two-song climax of the album, “Just Watch the Fireworks” and “For Me This Is Heaven,” feels like it takes place at the same emotional scale as “12.23.95,” quiet and stirring, but the songs flare up around this feeling like the edges of a parachute. “Fireworks” starts and stops like an interrupted thought that keeps building on itself, strings sawing forcefully in the distance like they’re filing down a raw nerve. “Heaven” is a feat of miraculous clockwork, each section of the song seeming to trigger a new spiral of notched countermelodies which fit perfectly into the phrases beneath them.
Even though they were dumping most of these elaborate overdubs directly into ProTools, the band still wanted to incorporate the older innovations of analog tape—the drum loop that hovers over “Ten” like a pointed crown was cut from tape, and they plotted the length of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” according to the length of the reel they were recording it to: 16 minutes. Adkins, inspired by the Anthrax songs based on Stephen King’s work, lifted the lyrics directly from the John Irving novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, taking up the diminutive title character’s perspective, queasily aware of the date and circumstances of his own death and believing himself a direct instrument of God’s will. The acute timing of the guitars and drums in the verses make the song feel like it’s inclined away from the earth, like an airplane taking off. Then after three minutes, the song ends, drifts, unravels, and loops around itself, arranged so that every new development would register a measure after the listener expected it. Elements are introduced then stripped away. When almost every inch of sound has been deleted except for Adkins’ wordless vocals, something sputters like an old engine block, rapidly ascending in pitch and resembling the rat’s nests of snare rolls you might hear on an IDM record from the same year.
When the band finished Clarity, Capitol didn’t schedule a release date for it, which made the band fear they’d never get one. They took what seemed the most likely lead single, a perfect crystal of power-pop called “Lucky Denver Mint,” packaged it with “For Me This Is Heaven” and a few songs that weren’t going to make the Clarity tracklist, and released them as a self-titled EP through an emerging punk label called Fueled by Ramen. As a result, “Lucky Denver Mint” got playlisted by the Los Angeles alt-rock radio station KROQ, and shortly thereafter it was acquired for the soundtrack of the Drew Barrymore-led romantic comedy Never Been Kissed, complete with a movie tie-in music video. Capitol, as if responding to this sudden flutter of attention, awarded the album a release date, and Clarity came out; it was received well critically, but even with a soundtrack placement, it gained little traction on rock radio or MTV. Jimmy Eat World were unceremoniously dropped from Capitol.
But the band saved enough money from touring to record a follow-up to Clarity without the assistance of a label. Their songwriting was getting sharper, the songs more direct with fewer moving parts. One of them, “The Middle,” inspired by an email they received from a fan who was having trouble fitting in at her school, addressed the pressures of youth in such a compact, cathartic way that it did figure-eights through the charts, spending 36 weeks there; it remains their signature song.
Yet, for all of the commercial and aesthetic success that came out of 2001’s Bleed American, Clarity’s influence looms larger; you can hear it working into the finer threads of Julien Baker’s recent production choices, in nearly every honeycomb of compressed feeling that pronoun makes. It’s a touchstone because of how carefully made it is, refinement the seemingly anti-punk rock move that ultimately registers as punk. You can tell the band wanted to make something deep enough to wander through, to find a place for yourself inside. Clarity may have been a transitional record, catching a band that hadn’t quite arrived blurring in mid-movement, but that blur had more depth than the band ever did in perfect focus. The closer you examined it, the more you could glimpse the entire world within it.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | June 6, 2021 | 8.6 | abf27266-7ee0-4af4-9560-f9e080ad7e35 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
The underrated British folk icon Michael Chapman collaborates with Steve Gunn on what he is calling his “American” album. | The underrated British folk icon Michael Chapman collaborates with Steve Gunn on what he is calling his “American” album. | Michael Chapman: 50 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22735-50/ | 50 | 50 serves a number of roles in Michael Chapman’s gargantuan catalog, which encompasses nearly that many albums. As the title suggests, it is a commemorative album, in this case marking half a century as a performing artist. In 1966, the young guitar player finagled his way into a show at a Cornwall jazz club, an unknown talent who turned his audition into a residency. Three years later he recorded his debut, Rainmaker (recently reissued on Light in the Attic), and played the same stages as some of the most inventive and influential folk guitarists of the era—although Chapman bristles at the categorization. He may never have achieved the notoriety of Bert Jansch or John Martyn, and his exploits in the rock world (connecting Mick Ronson and David Bowie, nearly joining Elton John’s band) may overshadow his music, but Chapman’s accomplishments aren’t that of a professional hanger-on. His playing was progressive even for the most progressive era of British folk music, showcasing a complex grammar of picking and strumming based on a vocabulary that commingles blues, jazz, country, raga, and rock.
Chapman has described 50 as his “American” album, and it seems remarkable that he has not recorded on this side of the Atlantic before. Throughout his career, he has been enamored with and inspired by American music and mythology, writing songs like landscape paintings of the West. He’s recorded not one but two albums called Americana, but this is the first time he has actually conceived and recorded a full album in the States, which makes 50 sound like the culmination of a lifetime’s fascination with the former colony. The Yanks he recorded with suggest an attempt to secure his legacy, to trace it from one generation to the next: Steve Gunn produces, plays guitar, and leads a band that includes most of the Paradise of Bachelors roster: James Elkington and Nathan Bowles, along with Jimy SeiTang and Jason Meagher.
There’s some intricate give-and-take between Chapman and the band, as the musicians he has influenced take the opportunity to influence him. Because this is Gunn producing, the songs are focused and succinct, with no little jamming or rambling. More than anyone else in this new generation of folk-derived guitarists, Gunn is less concerned with solo artistry and more fascinated by the chemistry between a band of distinctive musicians, and he brings that dynamic to 50, which isn’t too far removed from his last two albums. The riffs sound coiled and compact, as though propelled by some outside source, and the solos rarely announces themselves as such. Somehow the album sounds American, especially on the high-lonesome “That Time of Night” and the haunted “Falling from Grace,” and that suits Chapman’s brusque cadence and seen-it-all voice perfectly.
Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit. “Memphis in Winter,” which he originally recorded for 1999’s The Twisted Road and revisits here, depicts a hellish urban landscape “where the river comes a-rolling/where the levee tends to break/where to walk the streets at night well it’s not a risk that you would take.” Convoluted syntax aside, it’s a dread-filled update on the crossroads mythology, and Chapman’s guitar shudders with either fear or frost. Even direr is “Sometimes You Just Drive,” which sounds like a roadtrip through Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Chapman’s guitar slices and stabs, unsettling the listener as he ponders a harsh world and wonders if he’s lucky to still be alive: “Sometimes you live, and sometimes you just drive.” Chapman is still doing plenty of both. | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | January 14, 2017 | 7.7 | abf53aa1-92cb-4c31-8dd5-69b0bcb517bd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his second LP, Lapalux forgoes the patchwork approach of his debut, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul. | On his second LP, Lapalux forgoes the patchwork approach of his debut, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul. | Lapalux: Lustmore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20331-lustmore/ | Lustmore | On his debut album, 2013's Nostalchic, producer Stuart Howard (aka Lapalux) showed a strong affection for 1990s R&B. He sifted the era's body-rolling sensuality through computerized filters, piecing the threads into cryptic slow jams and bastardized dance tracks. His music, across Nostalchic and several EPs, thrives on a patchwork approach, a mismatched blend of glued-together tape strands, heavy drums, and warped vocals. It's wonky enough to fit alongside that of Brainfeeder label mates Daedelus and Gaslamp Killer, but it's distinguished by a cosmopolitan sophistication, conjuring images of pretty people in dark clubs, sipping mixed drinks in trendy clothes.
The producer establishes a more aquatic vibe throughout sophomore album Lustmore. The compositions are more straightforward than those on Nostalchic, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul. "We Lost", in particular, resembles a Musiq Soulchild track—the instrumental is decidedly Soulquarian; the vocals are mostly indecipherable. "Whenever I think about the album I think about the bar scene in The Shining," Howard told FACT in January, speaking of Lustmore. "There's something about that strange, hallucinatory psychological madness that relates to the music." To that end, Lustmore doesn't really move; it lingers like dense fog until it slowly dissolves.
In a way, the disoriented mood better aligns with another Kubrick flick—1999's Eyes Wide Shut. But Lustmore suffers from a lack of coherence. Its various feint and detours feel purposeful, but the album buckles under the weight of Howard's ambition, leading to a leading to a disjointed listen. Sultry numbers like "U Never Know" and "Closure" fit into Howard's overall aesthetic, but the mix of straight-ahead singing and woozy ambience feels outdated and timid alongside the more fluid, strange "Sum Body" and "Midnight Peelers".
The guest singers aren’t filtered so heavily, which makes for an easier listen, yet the output feels staid compared with his previous offerings, where he achieved the right mix of airy and bizarre.Nostalchic was tough to get into, but there was a certain charm to Howard’s esoteric style that set him apart. Lustmore doesn’t feel honed in; it sounds like a vast collection of songs that never quite go anywhere. Much like The Shining, there’s no telling what you’ll get from one scene to the next on Lustmore, but it ultimately ends with a thud.
Howard shows flashes of ingenuity on Lustmore's "Don't Mean a Thing", the album's most realized offering. Here, Howard finds a nice groove and stays put, looping the vocals into sporadic bursts while forgoing the stilted patterns of other songs—namely "Push N' Spun" and "Make Money". On "1004", Howard builds a nice shape-shifting atmosphere; the track smoothly transitions into a spacey upbeat gem that punctuates the LP. Ultimately, though, it's tough to discern just what Lustmore aims to be. It's dubbed as a hypnagogic release, but in Howard's quest to explore the void between sleep and alertness, the album frequently veers off the path, leaving me to wonder if there were clear directions to begin with. Instead of a full movie, Lustmore is a collection of half-edited scenes that don't quite gel. | 2015-04-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | April 6, 2015 | 5.9 | ac04f01f-2bb3-43c1-847d-5b670cd97b17 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The New York curator and multimedia artist uses droning Farfisa organs and arpeggiated synths to tap into a tripped-out spirit of wonder. | The New York curator and multimedia artist uses droning Farfisa organs and arpeggiated synths to tap into a tripped-out spirit of wonder. | Gryphon Rue: A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gryphon-rue-a-spirit-appears-to-a-pair-of-lovers/ | A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers | Gryphon Rue taps into a specific type of psychedelia on his latest album. It’s the kind of ceiling-staring, mouth-agape feeling you only get from classic droolers like Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes or fantastical obscurities like Randall McClellan’s The Healing Music of Rana: albums built entirely around the endlessly hypnotic capabilities of an electric organ in the right hands. Throughout A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers, the Farfisa organ is the main object of Rue’s worship; its delightfully bubbly, buzzing tone cycles in all directions, climbing up and down the scale and doubling back on itself in hallucinogenic fashion. Listening to it feels like going on a trip you may have taken before, albeit not in a long, long time.
Rue, a New York-based multimedia artist who also happens to be the great-grandson of sculptor Alexander Calder, is a student of the old avant-garde. He has curated gallery exhibitions and published essays, and on his radio show Earmark, he’s conducted numerous interviews with classic experimentalists like “Blue” Gene Tyranny and David Berhman. On A Spirit Appears, he works like a distiller, carefully crafting miniature trances that kick in as quickly as they evaporate. Unlike artists like Riley or McClellan, who might allow their drones to unspool into hour-long meditative descents, Rue takes a more streamlined approach, opting for shorter track lengths that spiral like shimmering dust in a crystal ball before settling in order to move onto the next phase. Though he walks in the footsteps of voyagers who came before, Rue’s command over this realm is enticing, his sense of dynamics and texture revealing a finely honed craftsmanship.
A Spirit Appears’ playfulness sets it apart from the many other modular-synth outings crowding the ambient field these days. While there are dizzying arpeggios aplenty, Rue’s sensibility feels more in line with late-’00s new-age disciples like Sun Araw and Dolphins Into the Future—artists who twisted their synthesizers into vehicles for whimsical marriages of sweet, glowing ambience and otherworldly noise. After the spiraling notes of “Watercolor Virus” and “Rainbow Serpent” launch the album with a joyfully lysergic smile, “Acoustic Temple” immediately dives into more haunted territory, hanging on a deep, raga-like drone that feels as if it’s going to swallow the listener whole. After building for a few minutes, the track slowly shifts into an ancient, ritualistic drum circle, conjuring the hypnagogic jams of Monopoly Child Star Searchers with its pounding rhythms and noodly, fluttering keyboard. By the time the track’s over, you might feel like you just got off the tunnel boat in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Though Farfisas and alien synthesizers dominate, as the record nears its end, Rue adds a drop of the real. On “Grass Light on Flesh,” after cruising on a slowly morphing squarewave tone for five minutes, Rue slowly introduces a field recording of a lone coyote howling in the night. It’s a grounding moment, yet it feels as mystically wondrous as any other sound on the album, as chirping crickets immediately transport us to the starry night this recording was captured on. Even if Gryphon Rue isn’t exactly breaking new ground on A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers, he manages to tap into a wide-eyed spirit of adventure, one that calls back to a chapter of basement-show DIY that feels like it’s becoming more and more distant. There’s a cozy warmth that comes from wrapping yourself up in its warbly, tripped-out blanket. | 2022-08-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Not Not Fun | August 30, 2022 | 7 | ac06eed9-40cf-43a1-abad-d220da558dc5 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first ... | Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first ... | Patrick Wolf: Lycanthropy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8773-lycanthropy/ | Lycanthropy | Patrick Wolf certainly has his drooling admirers; not a glowering, baleful eye is cast on this 20-year-old on the first three pages of a Google search for his name. It's easy to see why. For one, the encumbering folklore that drags heavy about Wolf's skinny shoulders is intriguing in all the right ways: He casts himself as a neo-Dickensian laptop minstrel, a wandering electro-folk organ grinder, and a pacifist werewolf bent on a nomadic musical existence. Whether or not you buy into his mythology, though, his debut album confirms better reasons to check his music, not least of which is that the stockpile of personal issues he doles out here contains enough agony and energy to fuel the fires of several puberties.
When Fat Cat Records discovered him four years ago, and saw fit to kit him out with his own mini-studio, he was just 16, but had already chalked up ten years of musicianship. He toured Europe with an orchestra, before going on to form the now-defunct punk band Maison Crimineaux in Paris. (The alias "Patrick Wolf" was conceived there shortly thereafter, with the assistance of a local clairvoyant.) And this impressive background has paid off with Lycanthropy, on which he wraps his folk-pop musings in lush blankets of violin, viola, harp and harpsichord, and tricks out the mix with aggressive electronic textures. His singing voice is fantastic as well, with a broad British accent recalling the caustic androgyny of Suede's Brett Anderson.
Late British author Angela Carter played a formative role in Wolf's thematic development; her novel, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, inspired his lycanthropy obsession. Carter based much of her work on themes of adolescence embodied in erotic folklore metaphor, and here, Wolf occasionally paraphrases or condenses some of her passages in lyrics like, "I was once a boy/ Until I cut my penis off/ And grew a hairy scar of stubborn fire." But if his transformation from boy to wolf is complete, he's still marked by a mortal vulnerability-- a result of an unsettled childhood of bullying and rejection.
"A Boy Like Me" is a perfectly sculpted pop song for the ubiquitous dissolute youth: "A boy like me is told he is both nine and ninety/ And a boy like me should shut those books and join the army." Alienation and teen misery are not rare commodities in music, but Wolf throws up such provocative contrasts ("I want total chaos/ And a holiday home in the east") that his naivete often seems acknowledged-- possibly even a put-on-- just another undercurrent in the clever, serpentine narratives that guide us through this densely self-aware work.
When Wolf brings his considerable sequencing skills to the forefront, Lycanthropy echoes Warp Records prodigy Chris Clark's raw and uncompromising 2000 release Clarence Park. But then, Wolf's influences are so numerous that if occasional snatches of Clark or Nick Cave or Joni Mitchell are briefly detected, they quickly give way to fusions of other artists, or combine to create a sound of their own. Meanwhile, the music itself is polarized and raw, with (naturally) lycanthropic juxtapositions of rustic/urban, ordered/chaotic, naive/cynical.
It may be tempting for some to judge Wolf in terms of his age, but this would be doing a disservice to a lyricist of such courage. If any complaint could be lodged against Lycanthropy, it's that it sometimes lacks subtlety, as it's possessed by a heady, pubescent intoxication that can result in some indiscriminate vocalizing. Still, witnessing such breathless unraveling of the heart and such thoughtless conviction that never quite sounds arrogant is exhilarating-- not to mention rare. Indeed, with Lycanthropy, Wolf has constructed a themed record that deftly manipulates myths while brazenly striding into new, tumultuous territory. On the eve of his virgin U.S. tour this May, it would seem he has more in common with the Pied Piper than with Peter Pan, and his eerie playing will surely seduce many into his following. | 2004-04-28T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2004-04-28T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Tomlab | April 28, 2004 | 8.2 | ac098263-da39-4563-acc6-dbc53dba9cdf | Dan Lett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dan-lett/ | null |
Binga's second proper record stands as his most realized and bountiful work yet, synthesizing two decades of UK bass music into something vigorous and modern. | Binga's second proper record stands as his most realized and bountiful work yet, synthesizing two decades of UK bass music into something vigorous and modern. | Sam Binga: Wasted Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21084-wasted-days/ | Wasted Days | Sam Binga's defining characteristic as a producer seems to be generosity. To his fans—he's maintained a frenetic release pace since early last decade (often under his Baobinga alias)—but mostly to other artists, as the majority of those releases feature collaborations with vocalists or other producers. This tends to be the first thing anyone mentions about Binga, and while it's refreshing, especially in electronic music, to see an artistic approach other than Genius Lone Wolf, it's also resulted in a highly variable catalog that has obscured anything resembling a signature touch or sound. Wasted Days, Binga's proper debut record, again features a host of MCs and offers a robust 17 tracks (a four-sided LP version is trimmer) but stands as his most realized and bountiful work yet, synthesizing two decades of UK bass music into something vigorous and modern.
Binga is a child of UK rave culture, and his production style has flitted between drum'n'bass, grime, and dubstep. Grime's resurgence, as both a pop and underground phenomenon, has refocused UK music's relationship with dancehall culture, as MCs have increasingly stepped back into the booth. Before grime, though, MCs played a large role in DJ sets, toasting over jungle and UK garage sets. It's this loose, improvisational feel that defines Wasted Days, as vocalists shuffle through tracks Binga has tailored to showcase their slurring patois. Their muddied taunts and boasts offer crucial texture and melody to Binga’s drum-heavy chambers, leaving the tracks in a liminal space between structured song craft and narrative-driven rap.
Putting a precise name on Binga’s productions proves difficult. They have the tempos and streamlined tech-y-ness of modern-day drum’n’bass (the album is on Critical Recordings, the pre-eminent home for underground drum’n’bass in 2015), eschewing cut-up breakbeats in favor of sound design. Its slithering melodies and dub-heavy sound recall grime and dubstep, and rap and footwork has seeped into Binga’s work just as it has general UK dance culture. It’s the rare record for which the imprecision of the term "bass music" is a positive.
At times Wasted Days feels like someone shined a spotlight into whatever dungy corner Kevin Martin’s the Bug project has inhabited the past few years, fumigating the living room and disinfecting the kitchen. The two share a love for UK soundsystem culture, but Binga’s version is far less blunted and menacing. On tracks like "Mind and Spirit" and the title cut (featuring frequent Martin collaborator Warrior Queen) Binga’s productions advance in sustained, athletic bursts, moving explosively between verses. Opener "Believe" largely consists of a rapid bursts of sub-kicks, leaving plenty of headroom for MCs Redders and Rider Shafique’s id-driven swagger.
On "Stormy Weather" and "Reclaim" (which features fellow bass explorer Om Unit) Binga manages to ease off the gas and offer more contemplative work without sounding lame or maudlin. They offer just enough variety, even if the combination of Binga and the MCs suggests harder/better/faster/stronger is the correct impulse. What’s remarkable though is how well Wasted Days comes together, and how easy it is to return to a 17-track collaborative album of indeterminate style; the degree of difficulty in actually pulling this off shouldn’t be understated, and you need look no further than the last Bug album to see how easily this kind of project can bog down. Wasted Days manages to provide a grand stage not just for the MCs but, at last, for Binga’s talents as well. | 2015-09-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Critical | September 21, 2015 | 7.4 | ac0b7ef7-d0f2-4a72-8886-9b133e69e4ac | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The new Foals LP feels like the completion of an unplanned trilogy—Total Life Forever embraced commitment, Holy Fire yearned for liberation, and this is the band recoiling from the blowback. At this point, Foals have mastered an arena-funk hybrid that others have only touched on. | The new Foals LP feels like the completion of an unplanned trilogy—Total Life Forever embraced commitment, Holy Fire yearned for liberation, and this is the band recoiling from the blowback. At this point, Foals have mastered an arena-funk hybrid that others have only touched on. | Foals: What Went Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20971-what-went-down/ | What Went Down | Unlike Foals’ two previous albums, What Went Down does not require a drawn-out introduction to explain its intentions. "Blue Blood" captured the surprising progression of Total Life Forever in miniature, slowly evolving from the pinging, prickly riffs that defined Antidotes to a cloudbursting crescendo. By 2013's Holy Fire, Foals were a legitimate arena act and acted like they've been there before, hence, the four-minute, crowd-stoking "Prelude". At this point, Foals have nothing left to prove—they are a big-ticket rock band until further notice, so the opening title track of What Went Down gets right to it with blunt-force, pitch-shifted riffs and Yannis Philippakis promising that you’re gonna hype him up and make him catch a body like that: "So don’t step to me kid, you’ll never be found."
The lyrical aggression is curious, but the confidence is warranted—after planning on an extended hiatus after Holy Fire, What Went Down came together in relatively quick fashion after something "clicked" during preliminary sessions. No surprise that they’re locked in, as Foals are basically a genre of one at this point. This appears more obvious when you consider the bands who’ve ascended to their level in the UK over the past few years; if they’re not adhering to the most obvious NME-bait lad-rock template, they’re following some kind of obvious precedent. Meanwhile, Foals have mastered an arena-funk hybrid that others have only touched on—post-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me Cure when they wanted to be silly, latter day Red Hot Chili Peppers when they wanted to be serious.
But unlike those bands, Foals aren’t fronted by a self-fashioned icon. The presumptive medley of "London Thunder" and "Lonely Hunter" find Philippakis jetsetting between gigs and considering the ocean as a reflection of his emotional emptiness, the first time he’s directly addressed what it means to be The Guy in Foals. But while Foals are considered the "thinking person’s alternative" to most mainstream UK guitar bands by default, the knuckle-dragging of the title track and "Snake Oil" isn’t that much more cerebral than Royal Blood or Drenge. More often, Foals are a "feeling person’s alternative"—"Mountain at My Gates" and "Birch Tree" are defined by an all-purpose spiritual and/or romantic longing and spacious production, meaning they’re walking the same path as Coldplay ca. X&Y with more pep in their step. What Went Down revels in lurid imagery—love is a gun in Philippakis’ hand, he runs through the streets bloodied from a fistfight, his heart is an old pole dancer and an old black panther.
In that regard, What Went Down feels like the completion of an unplanned trilogy—Total Life Forever embraced commitment, Holy Fire yearned for liberation, and this is Philippakis recoiling from the blowback. "Give It All" initially comes off like an inert songwriting exercise in lyrical juxtaposition, before Philippakis cleverly twists the title into an ironic burn ("Give me the time but not an age/ Give me the look but not the rage...you give me it all"). But by "Lonely Hunter", the tables have turned on Philippakis—he gets lost in foreign cities and makes perfunctory late night calls, only to get back and recognize how it’s not the same as being there ("why must I wait in line for what is mine?").
It’s not a particularly unique viewpoint, though it’s unique in relation to other Foals records. In fact, it’s about the only way to truly distinguish What Went Down from Holy Fire and Total Life Forever. There are superficial differences in aggression—slightly more electronic buzzing, harsher vocals, gristly guitars. It’s Foals’ raw record, but it’s still filet mignon tartare, as raw as you can get when your producer’s two other gigs in 2015 were Florence and the Machine and Mumford & Sons.
Otherwise, What Went Down is the latest example of Foals’ uncanny ability to make records whose basic musical trajectory and quality are nearly equal regardless of the band's intentions going in. And What Went Downis their most consistent, steady-handed work yet—the distance between their purest pop moments ("Miami", "My Number") and their opulent ballads ("Spanish Sahara") has virtually disappeared. It's also significantly less exciting than Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, dynamic records because of their unevenness and ambitious strain—while Foals have realized a sound that's truly their own, they sound far too comfortable in it. | 2015-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Transgressive | September 2, 2015 | 6.7 | ac127a8f-7389-4e7e-8363-1f6705798214 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Floridian singer-rapper delivers tender anthems about his pain and inner demons on his debut LP, executive produced by Kevin Gates. | The Floridian singer-rapper delivers tender anthems about his pain and inner demons on his debut LP, executive produced by Kevin Gates. | Rod Wave: Ghetto Gospel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rod-wave-ghetto-gospel/ | Ghetto Gospel | Fifteen years ago, Rod Wave probably wouldn’t have been a rapper. Like so many new artists coming out of the Deep South, the Floridian mostly croons about his pain and inner demons in two-minute ballads featuring Instagram caption-worthy one-liners like “Heart been broke so many times, I don’t know what to believe.”
As far as singing rappers go, Rod Wave is much more Kevin Gates, say, Young Thug. Rod grew up on Gates’ tender street rap, and paid tribute to his idol in a recent interview: “You made me understand people like us could actually go far, people like us could actually do it in the game. Just the fact that you could take your pain and turn up with it.” Rod Wave’s Ghetto Gospel is very much in the mold of the Baton Rouge star’s music; Gates even executive-produced it.
Like YoungBoy Never Broke Again, JayDaYoungan, and other Southern rappers belting about their struggles, Rod Wave was amassing millions of plays on YouTube even before Kevin Gates’ involvement. The sound of Ghetto Gospel—bloodletting over somber pianos and country guitars—isn’t far off from earlier singles like “Popular Loner” and “Heart 4 Sale.”But his storytelling has a new clarity, and his voice has developed so much range that I’m surprised he hasn’t already recorded an NPR Tiny Desk. The heaviest single on the album is “Close Enough to Hurt,” touching on the PTSD that he’s mentioned on-record before. On “Poison,” he digs deep to tell tales of the terrors that keep him up at night. “Late at night, I been roaming, I ain’t getting no sleep/It’s hard to stay focused when that pain running deep,” he wails.
Ghetto Gospel features two Gates collaborations. These moments feel like Gates passing the torch in real time, as Rod Wave howls like he’s stuck in the begging-for-love-in-the-rain era of ’90s R&B: “When I think about my past, that shit give me chills.” Compared with Gates, Rod’s hooks are glossy, but he can also strip his music down, like the drumless, acoustic guitar-heavy “Chip on my Shoulder,” that sounds like his street spin on a country-pop record.
Rod is at the forefront of an unofficial subgenre of rap called “pain music,” and it’s been developing since the days of Boosie and Webbie. Artists working in this vein have also found a way to integrate country and pop sounds into their hip-hop in a way that’s considerably less performative than that song about horses. What’s next is a superstar. Numbers-wise the answer is YoungBoy Never Broke Again, though legal troubles will always hold him back. And Kevin Gates is now a thirty-something that’s sliding into a Gucci Mane-like role. Rod Wave may or may not be that person. If Ghetto Gospel makes anything clear, it’s that nobody sings about their pain like him. | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Alamo / Interscope | November 13, 2019 | 8 | ac191818-161f-4066-a9ad-bc7f142b5b84 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
This joint project from Efrim Manuel Menuck and Kevin Doria has an overwhelming radiance to match Menuck's work in Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | This joint project from Efrim Manuel Menuck and Kevin Doria has an overwhelming radiance to match Menuck's work in Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | Efrim Manuel Menuck / Kevin Doria: are SING SINCK, SING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/efrim-manuel-menuck-kevin-doria-are-sing-sinck-sing/ | are SING SINCK, SING | Efrim Manuel Menuck’s solo recording career began as a counterpoint to his primary projects’ grandiosity. In contrast with his two main bands—the instrumental post-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the more vocal and visceral Thee Silver Mt. Zion—his 2011 solo debut, Plays “High Gospel,” was a brittle and frank rumination on the deaths of loved ones and the dawn of new fatherhood. The reedy voice that gave Thee Silver Mt. Zion’s epics their edge sounded wounded and frail when stripped of bombast. But amid High Gospel’s piano hymns and meditative mantras, Menuck also unleashed “A 12-Pt. Program for Keep on Keepin’ On,” a blinding snowstorm of digitized drones and processed vocals that disrupted the otherwise-somber mood. In hindsight, Menuck was building himself a trapdoor—one that’s allowed him to reorient his solo efforts deeper into the realm of experimental electronics.
His latest effort stems from the tour for his 2018 solo album, Pissing Stars, where Menuck performed alongside Kevin Doria of avant-ambient vets Growing. Their onstage collaboration has blossomed into a new entity with the coming-attraction-billboard name “Efrim Manuel Menuck & Kevin Doria are SING SINCK, SING.” Recorded with, by their count, “six oscillators and three large amplifiers,” the duo’s first album together is practically blinding in its radiance. The result feels as overwhelming as anything in the Godspeed/TSMZ canon.
Across his myriad projects, Menuck’s ideological concerns have remained constant: the humiliating effects of capitalism, the authoritarian power of the state, the strength and solace of community. And since becoming a father at the start of the decade, Menuck has regularly invoked his son, reframing these macro ideas through an intensely personal lens. If Pissing Stars reflected the cruel, chaotic world that every new parent worries about bringing their child into, then SING SINCK, SING emits the fragile hope that the next generation will be able to steer toward a better future.
You can immediately sense that change in tenor on the album’s engrossing opening track. Rather than simply rail against abuses of power, Menuck instead asks “Do the Police Embrace?”—a quizzical entreaty delivered inside a carnivalesque swirl of electro-loops. It’s the sound of someone who’s momentarily hit pause on the outside world to get lost inside their own curious thoughts. When Menuck asks, “Do they dance and do they love” and “Do they even have friends,” it feels like an attempt to disarm the oppressor by appealing to whatever’s left of their basic dignity. As his mind drifts toward his family (“I worry for my son”), “Do the Police Embrace?” starts to feel less like a protest song than a sincere plea for love and empathy in a world that so often denies it.
“Fight the Good Fight” and “We Will” are companion affirmations of perseverance—tender, comforting folk hymns that sound like they’re being beamed up into a UFO. But the album’s uncanny fusion of brutalism and bliss reaches its apex with “Joy Is On Her Mount and Death Is On Her Side.” Unlike some of Menuck’s previous work, SING SINCK, SING makes no explicit reference to his Jewish heritage, but with “Joy Is On Her Mount,” he’s effectively reciting yizkor for the natural environments ravaged by the ceaseless march of capitalism. As is the case with all the songs here, Menuck’s voice is only intermittently legible, his words momentarily acquiring definition like a radio station your car stereo catches as you’re driving between cities. But on SING SINCK, SING, that obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. As Menuck and Doria remind us, there is still beauty in this world—you just have to cut through the dark clouds to find it. | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Constellation | May 11, 2019 | 7.8 | ac19683f-d822-4398-9e37-524c5ce82fcc | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
O’Rourke’s latest drone project, running to over four hours, is darker and more dreamlike than his Steamroom series, and one of his most meditative releases yet. | O’Rourke’s latest drone project, running to over four hours, is darker and more dreamlike than his Steamroom series, and one of his most meditative releases yet. | Jim O’Rourke: To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-orourke-to-magnetize-money-and-catch-a-roving-eye/ | To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye | For more than a quarter century now, Jim O’Rourke has been sculpting shadows. For some, the American musician is best known for the lush, psychedelic Americana of albums like Bad Timing, or his production work for bands like Wilco, Stereolab, and Sonic Youth. (He was also a member of the latter for a spell, during the Murray Street and Sonic Nurse years.) But since the early 1990s, beginning with albums like Scend and Disengage, the secret heart of O’Rourke’s music has been dedicated to pure electronic abstraction. To call this minimalist output “ambient” or even “drone” doesn’t capture the subtleties of his broad expanses of shimmer and hum. Listen carefully to these pieces, and it sometimes seems that he is molding feedback into storm clouds, or milking frequencies out of thin air.
In recent years, O’Rourke’s drone activities have begun to assume center stage. His practice appears intense, even monastic: He typically devotes five or six hours a day to recording on the Serge, an arcane modular synthesizer from the 1970s; he might spend weeks editing a given session down, mixing it with homemade field recordings, and massaging it all into the desired shape. (“I wish the days were longer,” he has said.) Since 2013, the fruits of his labor have been trickling out under the Steamroom imprint, the digital-only Bandcamp series named after his Tokyo studio. It’s an evocative name, and not so far off from the sounds he achieves. That there are currently 46 releases after just six years—some of them reissues, but most of it new and previously unreleased—says something about his dedication.
To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye is a kindred spirit to that series. Even by O’Rourke’s standards, it is a mammoth undertaking. Steamroom releases typically consist of a single track that’s somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes in length, but the new album, a four-disc affair, totals nearly four and a quarter hours. The sounds within can be just as daunting. These are not the soft, consonant tones of Streamroom 40, a fan favorite; this music is woven together from ominous rustling noises, glowering low-end throb, and white-hot waves of piercing feedback. The dividing line between musical tone and pure atmosphere is porous: O’Rourke’s synthesizers are more gestural than melodic, and at their edges they dissolve into a vivid, four-dimensional soundscape.
There is an unmistakably dreamlike quality to the music, with hints of birdsong and distant traffic, old trains creaking to life and spaceships powering up, boots in snow and high-voltage power lines overhead. It sounds not just haunting but haunted—not malevolent, necessarily, but terrifying nonetheless. In places, it sounds like O’Rourke came across Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and decided to take the title literally, coaxing from his matrix of tapes and circuitry a sound equal to that of blood drying on matted pine needles.
There are few repeated motifs, but for the most part, elements rise into the mix, spread out like inkblots, and are subsumed back into the murk, never to appear again. Some nine minutes into “Part II,” there is an unexpected eruption of feedback, a sustained explosion of surprising force, as though O’Rourke had set fire to Sunn O)))’s backline, but otherwise, recognizable events are few and far between. Seismic rumble melts into glassy shimmer, and vice versa; the music is constantly shape-shifting, yet it all converges into a low, sustained hum.
City-dwellers may recognize this as the standard frequency of the modern metropolis. It is as though O’Rourke had captured and amplified the sounds of everyday life, from the inaudible (magnetic fields, cell-phone signals) to the visceral (rainfall, rumbling subways), rendering them almost womblike. Despite the album’s intimidating scale, it is a strangely welcoming, even enveloping listen. “It’s not a question of patience,” O’Rourke has said, when asked why he likes longform composition so much. “It’s just my taste. I like longer music. It all really comes down to breathing.” In its controlled pacing and deep interiority, To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye also resembles a kind of breathwork. It is one of his most meditative pieces yet. | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sonoris | December 9, 2019 | 8.1 | ac2238a7-55eb-4468-ae6c-d2bf080e1713 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The grunge act's first LP in 20 years fails to summon the revolutionary fire that made them such a force of nature in the mid-'90s. | The grunge act's first LP in 20 years fails to summon the revolutionary fire that made them such a force of nature in the mid-'90s. | L7: Scatter the Rats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/l7-scatter-the-rats/ | Scatter the Rats | Donita Sparks, the fearless vocalist and guitarist for the Los Angeles grunge four-piece L7, likes to trot out a pet sound bite during interviews. “We’re a meat-and-potatoes rock band with a conscience and some humor,” she told The Current last year. “We just want to [be] meat-and-potatoes L7,” she said in 2015, around the time the band embarked on a reunion tour. To promote Scatter the Rats, their first new material in 20 years, she’s quoted in an updated band bio saying, “I think it’s good for people to enjoy a meat-and-potatoes rock band for a change.”
Any L7 fan could easily identify what constitutes the group’s potatoes: heavy, take-no-prisoners power chords backing blistering solos; bratty vocals often sang (and occasionally shouted) in call-and-response style; solid, no-frills, beat-keeping drums. The meat, on the other hand—the stuff that gives L7 their substance —has shifted slightly over their 24-year career. When they formed in 1985, they were four women from the art-punk scene obsessed with Motörhead, the Ramones, and Black Sabbath. The substance was overtly political and unapologetically aggressive. In their 2019 return, Scatter the Rats, the potatoes are still there, but the meat has gone a little off.
In the early to mid-’90s, they were a force of nature—all scuzzy makeup and wild hair, searing guitar solos and squealing vocals, and stage antics that exemplified their contentious relationship with the very male world around them. (In a frequently cited incident, Sparks once pulled her tampon out on stage and threw it into a crowd of hecklers, shouting, “Eat my used tampon, fuckers!”) In 1991, L7 launched Rock for Choice, a series of concerts that raised money for pro-choice campaigns—Nirvana and Hole headlined the first one.
But while their grunge contemporaries became mainstream darlings, L7 struggled to survive. “At our peak, I really don’t know where the money went,” Sparks told Billboard in 2017. By 1998’s The Beauty Process: Triple Platinum, their revolutionary fire had dwindled to embers, and they were dropped from their label. 1999’s Slap-Happy was a critical flop, and in 2001, L7 went on an indefinite hiatus. Sparks attributed their lack of mainstream success in part to critics pigeonholing them for their gender. “We were not on a political platform,” she said in the same interview. “We formed Rock for Choice, but we were not riot grrrls. We were grown-ass women, not college kids. And riot grrrl was very serious, and we had a lot of fun.”
Scatter the Rats hopes to reinvigorate this legacy. In 2017 and 2018, L7 released their first new singles since Slap-Happy, and hopes ran high: “Dispatch From Mar-A-Lago” was a call to storm the gates of Trump’s private country club, while “I Came Back to Bitch” was an electrifying announcement of the group’s return to fighting the patriarchy. L7, in all their mighty, angry, fuck-you glory, was back.
If Scatter the Rats had sustained the momentum of these singles (neither appears on the record), it would be a resounding triumph. Instead, the 11-song record lacks the forcefulness and murderous moxie that gave L7 their early power. There are hints of it in the frenetic lead guitar line of “Stadium West” and in Sparks’ “Lock us up, lock us up” chant on “Burn Baby,” one of the few subtly political references on the record. “Garbage Truck,” written by the band’s original bassist Jennifer Finch, has Misfits energy with L7’s signature sense of humor. And “Holding Pattern” is an uncharacteristic departure, with minimal distortion and lyrics detailing stuck-in-cement depression. It’s remarkably nuanced and vulnerable, and by far the album’s best track.
Which is why lines that resort to cliché or grab at low-hanging cultural fruit feel not only dated, but cringeworthy. “Murky Water Cafe” somehow falls on both: “Free Wi-Fi come on down,” Sparks sings, grumbling “We’re emojifying our every move/It’s painting bad pictures in my head.” The title track is weighed down by bewildering observations like “Some people say pigeons are rats with wings/These can’t fly, get rid of these things/Leaving a trail, destructive wake/Get ‘em gone, for heaven’s sake.” They sell themselves short by assuming they were just another meat-and-potatoes rock band, and on Scatter the Rats’ weakest moments, they actually sound like one.
The L7 reunion skeptic would say that the Buzzfeedification of media (“Only 90s kids will remember…”) has left the public so beholden to the 20-year nostalgia cycle that they will seize the opportunity to revisit just about anything. But the true shame of Scatter the Rats is that L7 are better than that: They were subversive, they were dirty and mean, and they deserve more than to be just another pop-culture trivia question. | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Blackheart | May 3, 2019 | 6.6 | ac278d09-4d3c-4372-a3a2-562bc7be8d12 | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
As far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, this is a pretty breezy listen. | As far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, this is a pretty breezy listen. | The Flaming Lips: King’s Mouth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-flaming-lips-kings-mouth/ | King’s Mouth | If there’s been one constant in The Flaming Lips’ careening four-decade evolution from Okie goth-punk weirdos to festival-conquering freak show, it’s that Wayne Coyne loves to tell a story. Back on 1989’s Telepathic Surgery, he hit pause on the album’s acid-fried garage rock to relate a childhood encounter with UFOs. Throughout the ’90s, he specialized in the sort of musical tall tales (”Put the Waterbug in the Policeman’s Ear,” “The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now”) that required narrative exposition nearly as long as the tunes they were teeing up. And even as he started writing more serious songs about humans with wives and children, he was just as likely to dress up heavy themes in fantastical yarns about fighting droids and killer mechanized canines.
But, oddly enough for a Pink Floyd-worshipping band that’s introduced us to enough colorful characters to fill several Lewis Carroll novels, the Flaming Lips have never released a proper, front-to-back narrative song cycle. (A handful of robot-populated tunes on Yoshimi doesn’t quite count.) And their first attempt at such, King’s Mouth, arrives with muted fanfare, falling somewhere between a proper Lips studio album and one of their many extracurricular novelty releases.
King’s Mouth was initially conceived as the soundtrack to a synchronized light-art installation—or rather, an “immersive head-trip fantasy experience”—staged by Coyne. (This is, of course, is what the viewing chamber looked like.) It was then developed into a 12-song storybook album that was released in a limited-vinyl run last April on Record Store Day. Like many of the projects the Lips have debuted on RSD, it boasts some inspired celebrity stunt-casting: The album is narrated by The Clash’s Mick Jones, who delivers the particulars of its outlandish plot with the tone of a kindly old granddad.
I’m not really spoiling anything by telling you King’s Mouth is about a royal baby born to a queen mother who perishes during labor, presumably because the kid has an abnormally massive noggin, which is put to effective use when he saves his city from an avalanche by devouring the universe whole with his giant chompers only to die in the process, after which his followers chop off his head and live inside of it for all utopian eternity. Ultimately, it’s just an elaborate ruse for Coyne to lean into his favorite topics once again——the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, the perseverance of the human spirit, the inexplicable wonders of the universe. Likewise, King’s Mouth is a musical patchwork of familiar Lips flourishes: the operatic exultations of The Soft Bulletin, the campfire electro of Yoshimi, the glitchy textures and simple, sanguine balladry of Oczy Mlody. But the pieces don’t always come together in a satisfying way—scene-setting track “The Sparrow” aims for the multi-sectional splendor of past triumphs like “The Spark That Bled,” but feels too fragmented to take flight.
That song provides an early indication that King’s Mouth is not the sort of album you’ll be stripping for playlists—only the winsome acoustic sing-along “How Many Times” functions as a stand-alone track. But as far as concept albums about magical, abnormally sized severed heads go, King’s Mouth is a breezy listen. And at 42 minutes, it’s also the Lips’ shortest album since 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head.
More than simply reaffirming the Lips’ flair for bizarro storylines, King’s Mouth reminds us that Coyne can draw poignancy and pathos from the strangest sources. On King’s Mouth he voices the title character’s inner thoughts from birth to afterlife, steering the cosmic lullaby “Giant Baby” from Jones’ quizzical observations about the difficulties of sourcing oversized toys into a somber rumination on losing a parent. In moments like these, King’s Mouth may seem a touch too dark to replace Goodnight Moon or Each Peach Pear Plum as an evening storytime staple. But by reimagining the weighty concept record as light, escapist entertainment, King’s Mouth is as strong a candidate as any for Baby’s First Prog Album.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 22, 2019 | 7 | ac2a13b5-ac3a-40b2-8a46-b5476a0e7989 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Unified by its abundant lo-fi charm and with lyrics referencing the Butthole Surfers, Dexedrine, and Taco Bell, the squirrelly New York alt-country duo sounds more playfully idiosyncratic than ever. | Unified by its abundant lo-fi charm and with lyrics referencing the Butthole Surfers, Dexedrine, and Taco Bell, the squirrelly New York alt-country duo sounds more playfully idiosyncratic than ever. | Frog: Grog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frog-grog/ | Grog | For two people in a city of eight million, Frog garnered a respectable New York following in their early years. But the Queens alt-country duo found fandom—real fandom, where people queue to buy your music and the faces in the front row aren’t your longtime friends—overseas. Audio Antihero, a British boutique label that signed the band after discovering their 2013 debut record, boosted Frog enough to warrant a full-fledged UK tour before they ever plotted a regional U.S. leg.
Since then, Frog have spent the past decade enjoying life as a cult favorite. When not going for $250 on the resale market, their records draw comparisons to Townes Van Zandt and Silver Jews—fitting, as the late David Berman once wrote Frog a letter of admiration—while smudging the edges of barren indie rock, low-key emo, and hearty Americana. In the lead-up to Grog, the band’s fifth album and first in four years, their situation changed. Singer-guitarist Daniel Bateman moved to New Rochelle and welcomed twins, while longtime drummer-bassist Tom White moved to England and was replaced by Daniel’s brother Steve Bateman. The new album kicks off the band’s fraternal era, but Frog’s sound remains as squirrelly as ever.
Sounding as if they were still holed up in their parents’ garage playing for nobody but themselves, Daniel and Steve Bateman are all unbridled inspiration and freeform spontaneity, be it the last-minute glockenspiel in “Ur Still Mine” or the spectral piano haunting “Goes w/o Saying.” Their comfort with one another is audible. Daniel namedrops Butthole Surfers and Metro-North tickets with the tongue-in-cheek tone of someone fluent in the shared language of a sibling canon. When he opts for a more straightforward approach in “DOOM SONG,” a slog of discordant chords and ominous cymbal crashes, Daniel encourages his brother to cut loose: “Take pride, young bro/You should sing as in a dream/Stop the show, break a string.”
Daniel’s emotional delivery has always been one of Frog’s strongest assets, and that still holds true with Grog. On “Maybelline,” he sings about a Dexedrine-dosed woman in a car crash like he’s pouring one out for someone he’s known all his life. He injects “New Ro,” an ode to his new hometown, with vocal harmonies to match the retro romance of his banjo plucks. As if the simplicity of how he sings the love song “So Twisted Fate” wasn’t enough, it evolves into a voice note of his children attempting to sing while a synth chord morphs into focus. There’s no exact science to Daniel’s singing, but his untrained voice has a purity that’s difficult to fake and moving to hear.
Grog’s tracklist may appear scattered; in reality, it reflects a newfound confidence. His brother’s influence affords Daniel the conviction necessary to see more varied ideas through, even if they deviate from Frog’s alt-Americana tag. “420!!” is an extrapolation of Animal Collective’s “College” in sound and sentiment; Daniel romanticizes cutting class for Taco Bell and questions the purpose of school en route. His hasty acoustic strumming pantomimes a cartoon dog following the visible scent of a Crunchwrap Supreme, his gait giddy and liberated. On “U Shud Go 2 Me,” he amplifies drums and bass over his own guitar work, an unexpected mix that proves to be the right focus come its end, mimicking his lyrical fixation on creeping insanity as it nears a breaking point. Even the most out-of-place track, “Black on Black on Black,” still fits within Frog’s aesthetic, despite its blues-rock spin on disco. The brothers recorded the song with the same 1979 Otari MX5050 tape machine from Count Bateman, originally purchased because Elliott Smith used that exact model, and it lends the single a hissing warmth and lo-fi charm that unifies Grog.
The record opens with a 20-second exposition about the album’s namesake, a sailors’ term for diluted rum rations, lifted from a YouTube explainer by 18th-century obsessive Townsends. The album originally featured additional samples from American Movie, the 1999 documentary-turned-cult film cherished for its depiction of DIY passion amid setbacks and a creeping sense of failure, but the band scrapped them in fear of licensing troubles. Listen closely, however, and you can hear those themes take shape in a different configuration; Daniel’s humdrum American portraiture and embodiment of passionate persistence have defined Frog’s sound for nearly a decade, and on Grog, a brotherly bond encourages those songwriting traits to get louder, bolder, and weirder without sacrificing any of the heart. | 2023-12-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-05T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Tape Wormies / Audio Antihero | December 5, 2023 | 7.4 | ac2b3acc-ceb0-47b6-9a62-9ce98fd78354 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
English Little League is Guided by Voices' fourth LP since their comeback, meaning they've now made as many post-hiatus LPs as they managed during their "classic era." Amidst the booming arena-rockers, swift power-pop, proggy bluster, and wads of bubblegum, it marks the first appearance of recordings from Bob Pollard's new home-studio. | English Little League is Guided by Voices' fourth LP since their comeback, meaning they've now made as many post-hiatus LPs as they managed during their "classic era." Amidst the booming arena-rockers, swift power-pop, proggy bluster, and wads of bubblegum, it marks the first appearance of recordings from Bob Pollard's new home-studio. | Guided by Voices: English Little League | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17944-guided-by-voices-english-little-league/ | English Little League | Guided by Voices were back; now, they're just here. Two years into their reunion, and the news that the lo-fi titans' 1993-1996 lineup would be returning hardly even qualifies as news anymore. English Little League, their latest, is GBV's fourth LP since their comeback, making as many post-hiatus LPs as they managed during that fabled "classic era." Sixteen months back, when they cut the ribbon on Let's Go Eat the Factory, a narrative seemed to emerge: beloved band's finest-ever incarnation returns with a spotty but satisfying LP. Three fitfully gratifying LPs later, however, and the story's much the same.
English Little League, like so many GBV albums before it, gathers a couple all-timers and a few respectably jagged pop-rockers together with several total trainwrecks and calls it an LP. First, the good: the exceedingly generous lead single "Flunky Minnows" is brimming with so many hooks, it spends its two minutes and change running around in circles, begging you to take them off its hands. Opener "Xeno Pariah" is the best first-shot of GBV's second act, a sharp, clear-eyed rocker with a head-lodge hook all its own. Highlights are everywhere, from the sway-and-spill chorus of "Send to Celeste (And the Cosmic Athletes)", to the goofball rumble and Zero Mostel gags of "Crybaby 4-Star Hotel" and the gnarly heft of bruiser "Know Me As Heavy". The playing's shrewd, the recording's warm, and frontman Robert Pollard's vocals are rousing, even brash; with the right songs in front of them, these guys are as good as they've ever been.
English Little League marks the first appearance of recordings from Pollard's new home-studio. Which is not to suggest that he's somehow gone slick; even amidst Little League's booming arena-rockers, swift power-pop, proggy bluster, and wads of bubblegum, it's on these late-night home-recordings that you can hear the figurative scrape of the tattered Tascam the loudest. Most of the home-brewed stuff takes the form of drunken 3 AM ballads, howls-at-the-moon likely inspired by those nights when the beer's all gone and every liquor store in 20 miles is closed until the morning. In the right mood, these ballads'll knock the wind out of you. But English Little League's got four of them-- "Sir Garlic Breath," "Biographer Seahorse," "Reflections in a Metal Whistle" and "A Burning Glass"-- and with every passing weeper, the album sags a tad more.
Still, I'll take a glut of ballads over something like "Noble Insect", the dismal co-write from Pollard and Tobin Sprout that leaves neither side off the hook. Over a lunkhead riff, Pollard bleats "Japan, Japan" semi-tunelessly for a while before sliding into chorus so good-- and so effortless-- you'll wonder why they'd ever think to burn it on a song that dopey. Really, it might be best if GBV stay out of Japan for the time being: the record's other lowlight, the jaunty, underwritten "Reflections in a Metal Whistle," also shoehorns in a incongruous (albeit less annoying) mention of the country. Tobin Sprout spends Little League with his head in the clouds; whether he's harping on Jesus on the far-too-sweet "The Sudden Death of Epstein's Ways" or talking about a girl who chats with refracted light on "Islands (She Talks in Rainbows)", his ageless voice and crisp melodies are typically a smart counterpoint to Bob's ragged glories. But these songs he brings to English Little League are pure cotton candy, sticker and more saccharine than they are satisfying.
Guided by Voices weren't even this prolific back when they made their rep for being prolific. So, after unloading so much music in such a short time, finding a moment to step back and consider each album on its own takes some doing. It's clear now that Let's Go Eat the Factory was the weird one, Class Clown Spots a UFO the one with the most range, and The Bears for Lunch the flat-out catchiest. Little League's harder to draw a line around; even with all the ballads, there's not a prevailing mood or a dominant sound. So, while it's perfectly pleasant from moment to moment, the whole never congeals. With 17 songs in just under 46 minutes, a good number of them ballads, English Little League seems to unfold at an unusually relaxed pace; songs that would've been 75 seconds long now get two verses and a repeat airing of the chorus, not always deservedly. Tobin's songs have that gloopy faux-chestra thing going for them, and Pollard howler "A Burning Glass" is almost crowded out by echo, but for the most part, the production's spare enough, it doesn't especially feel like production.
Song for song, League's about par with the three LPs that preceded it: The Bears for Lunch is a bit more consistent, but its highs certainly weren't any higher. Still, as with the three LPs it follows, something's holding the very good League back from greatness; in this case, its lax pacing, its over-reliance on balladry, and whatever the heck "Noble Insect" is supposed to be. Great as it is that GBV are still knocking sounds like "Flunky Minnows" into the stands, it's a shame they're not popping off 20 such songs a year the way they did way back when. The hits still connect, but the batting average is a little lower these days. In many ways, GBV's revamp is still one of the indie-rock comebacks to beat: they didn't return for a quick cash-grab, but as a fully functioning band, willing to risk whatever legend they'd built up in their absence by flooding fans with new material. But, triumphant as the return itself has been, the records themselves have really only skirted triumph. English Little League is no different. | 2013-05-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | May 1, 2013 | 6.8 | ac2c1369-4c4e-41f6-a36e-bbc7db100544 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
With a newfound penchant for slow jams, the Detroit rapper’s latest emphasizes his emotional depth, cartoonish humor, and attention to detail. | With a newfound penchant for slow jams, the Detroit rapper’s latest emphasizes his emotional depth, cartoonish humor, and attention to detail. | ZelooperZ: Get Wet.Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zelooperz-get-wetradio/ | Get Wet.Radio | “Skinny Dip,” a song on ZelooperZ’s new album Get WeT.Radio, is a study of contrasts. It begins with a languid sample of a flamenco-inflected acoustic guitar solo that, along with the Detroit rapper’s opening lyrics, conjures a luxurious, balmy setting—say, a yacht anchored off of a private beach in the Mediterranean. “Baby girl said she wanna dip/Take her ass on a trip,” he half-sings. An instant later, producer Black Noi$e throws in a double-time beat that completely interrupts the mood, its nu-disco pulse transporting us a few miles away and a few hours later, into the middle of a club in Ibiza. The song alternates between these two paces, and Z’s delivery follows suit; by the end, he sounds exhausted, unconcerned about the destination so long as it’s far away. It’s at this strange nexus of romance, escapism, and pervasive moodiness that Get WeT.Radio stakes its territory.
Get WeT.Radio is inspired by a Spotify playlist which was, by ZelooperZ’s own admission, “the only thing I got left from my pops before he passed two years ago.” The “Get WeT. Radio” playlist mostly comprises songs released between the ’80s and the early ’00s that wouldn’t be out of place on R&B and smooth jazz FM stations. Like the playlist, the album is deeply horny, but it’s also ruminitive and even melancholy. Many of the reference points on the playlist—such as Ginuwine’s “So Anxious” and Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes”—come from a school of pained R&B in which sadness and horniness are nearly inseparable. Grief is never ZelooperZ’s main focus on Get WeT.Radio, which he surprise-released on his father’s birthday, but it colors his words as much as those musical reference points color the artfully curated beats.
The cartoonish charm that’s become Z’s calling card is still present in the album’s many pickup lines. But unlike previous releases, Get WeT.Radio’s slow jams make it hard to ignore the stark realities lurking among the free-associative jokes and outlandish voices. “Head 2 the sKy” contains the most explicit reference to ZelooperZ’s father, quoting some of his nuggets of wisdom alongside an uplifting gospel sample. When Z talks to or about women, which accounts for most of the lyrics, it’s usually playful, but it can also be sensitive. On closer “Who U Love,” which depicts an it’s-him-or-me ultimatum in a crumbling relationship, Z sees hope through the pain: “When your tears hit the concrete grew a bouquet of flowers.” Even though his lyrics aren’t preoccupied with death, his tone is colored with the heightened empathy that often comes with loss.
ZelooperZ’s grounded approach is bolstered by the cohesive sound of the record. The late-night ambience of his father’s favorite music is recreated via samples that are flipped into impossibly smooth beats, mostly by the central brain trust of Dilip and frequent Bruiser Brigade collaborator Black Noi$e. Guest vocalists like Fousheé, SuperCoolWicked, and duendita are an impeccable fit as well. Alongside underground hip-hop stars MIKE and Hook, they’re the exact type of R&B singers whose music would fit on a 2020s version of the “Get WeT. Radio” playlist.
Slick curation is the main thing that separates Get WeT.Radio from its predecessor, last year’s excellent Van Gogh’s Left Ear. With its Rxk Nephew guest spot, Crash Bandicoot sample, and quotable non sequiturs, that album thrived on the unpredictability that has defined much of ZelooperZ’s output to this point. Get WeT.Radio loses some of that spark amid its weight and commitment to retro sounds, especially when it forces Z out of his comfort zone, which ironically is when he sounds most laid back, as on opener “Sorry.” But the album paves the way for a future in which Z isn’t best known as Danny Brown’s similarly wacky protegé. His vibrant talent has been apparent for years, but Get WeT.Radio emphasizes a depth and attention to detail that’s often been overshadowed by its creator’s outsized personality. | 2022-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 30, 2022 | 7.5 | ac3c302c-f529-4054-a8d6-d3884139dfa4 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The Brownsville MC's newest LP puts weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in. | The Brownsville MC's newest LP puts weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in. | Ka: Grief Pedigree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16447-ka-grief-pedigree/ | Grief Pedigree | Critics tend to think big-picture when it comes to hip-hop reminiscent of an older tradition. They question what it means to Bring New York Back, whether the early-mid 1990s looms too large over a genre and a lifestyle that never stops evolving, and if there's a point in reviving a moment that's almost universally agreed upon to be impossible to replicate. But lost in that debate is the smaller, more individual picture: what it means for specific artists with their own sets of expectations and influences to come to terms with their formative experiences.
The rapper Ka came up as a 1970s baby out of Brownsville, New York, a crucial place and age to live through a wave of creative revolution that spanned from Slick Rick to Wu-Tang and onwards. But as he's mentioned in recent interviews, he didn't feel like he was at the ideal talent level to put in his own voice. He's been quick to self-identify as the weak link in Brooklyn crew Natural Elements, he's chalked up the stalled career of his one-12"-wonder group Nightbreed (1998's "2 Roads Out the Ghetto") to being overwhelmed in a talent-rich field of peers, and he hung up his mic for the better part of the 2000s out of a combination of frustration and personal day-job necessity. By the time 2008's Iron Works finally got his career catalyzed again after years of struggling with his own creative ambivalence, the means of expression he carried with him for most of his life had the added weight of a well-documented style's celebrated past.
But Ka's an artist who's put a lot of thought into what it means to be a rapper past your thirties, and Grief Pedigree is an album that puts a lot of weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly enough, it's the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in. Ka's voice is a bit subdued, often affectless, and quietly straightforward-- not an easy way to get a fickle listener's attention. You can get a grasp of his thought process and the nuanced emotions that drive them, but the thousand-yard-stare flow that clinically unspools incidental corner-hustle details is the same one that mourns lost friends, holds on tight to the thankful moments, and claims his own resilient parcel of Brooklyn hip-hop territory. It might take some dedicated listens for opinions on that flow to shift from "deadpan and repetitive" to "focused and hypnotic," so the more immediate draw in the meantime is his lyricism. And these are the kinds of verses that stand out bluntly in the cold light of a matter-of-fact flow, giving equal time to agile internal rhymes and frank, unobscured sentiment.
On the surface, you could thematically peg Ka on a continuum that ranges from Mobb Deep's bleak threats to the sinister comedy of crucial collaborator Roc Marciano; the latter's complement paid off on Marcberg's "We Do It" and gets a returned favor here on the defiantly survivalist "Iron Age". (An announced upcoming teamup, Metal Clergy, is both inevitable and promising.) But there's more introspection and ambivalence at work, the sense of a man who's survived a lot but still feels like there's little he can control about his own destiny. That ambivalence stands out in a self-contained moment like "Decisions", a for-the-seeds track that underscores just how much can hinge on a single judgment ("Blood or Crip/ honor my moms, or who I'm thuggin' with/ is this lust or do I love this shit/ keep it gutter, or get butter dip") without getting didactic about which path's always the correct one.
It also scatters conflicting emotions across tracks in a way that ties them together, like how the bravado in "Cold Facts" is inseparable from spiritual self-doubt and regret. It's the kind of lyricism that doesn't technically need hooks, but benefits from the care put into them anyways-- the almost shellshocked way the fatalist refrain of "Summer" plays out in particular is especially hard to shake ("This goin' be the summer they come for me/ guns for me/ tryin' to put food in my young tummies/ this goin' be the summer the cops get me/ shots fit me/ tryin' to push whips off lots swiftly"). And once the words work their way in, that delivery starts to feel more and more like a pure expression of low-key intensity.
Finding a blatantly 1995 precedent for the juxtaposition of Ka's stark voice and similarly stark production is a bit trickier than it seems, though-- he'll spot you the odd 1970s Hi Records loop ("No Downtime"), but even with a full litany of circa-DITC sounds to compare it to there's still something a bit more contemporary at work. There's not much that really knocks non-stop in the way golden-age, Hot 97-geared classics intended-- imagine the insomniac feel of Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II interstitial "Pyrex Vision" dissipating across 37 lean, hazy minutes-- but that's by design, and in the right mindset it can be as devastatingly evocative as any speaker-rattling break.
A number of the loops are simple but well-chosen: an icy, twinkling guitar/electric piano lick for the reverie of "Every…"; a woozy,swaying bell/wah-wah concoction to back up the tightly-knotted verses on "Collage"; a couple stray chords reverbed to the point of decay on "Cold Facts". It's as though he found a way to build an entire production backbone off the parts of records that lead up to the big crescendos, and that looped all-prelude-no-payoff feel is the kind of friction the album needs for its confessional release to hit home. Yet as uncomplicated as these beats are, something about them sticks in a way that leads to the suspicion that they come from well-worn records that Ka listened to hundreds of times long before he even got the idea to sample them. And if sticking with music for a while doesn't pay off immediately, that only makes it more of a revelation when it finally does. | 2012-03-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-03-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Iron Works | March 30, 2012 | 7.7 | ac3f9273-2752-4660-81ba-d802f69634a8 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Featuring production assistance from Yoni Wolf of WHY?, the Cincinnati quartet’s second album uses bright surfaces to obscure sinister intentions, clothing dark songs in indie-pop innocence. | Featuring production assistance from Yoni Wolf of WHY?, the Cincinnati quartet’s second album uses bright surfaces to obscure sinister intentions, clothing dark songs in indie-pop innocence. | The Ophelias : Almost | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-ophelias-almost/ | Almost | “Fun always comes at a cost,” Spencer Peppet warns in the opening line of the Ophelias’ “General Electric.” On paper, this sounds like good-faith advice, but in the context of the song, it’s creepy and menacing, delivered like a deke toast to an enemy Peppet is about to poison. Considering that the frontwoman and lyricist named her band after a tragically peripheral Hamlet character, perhaps the play and its many stealthy murders were on her mind again as she was composing the Ophelias’ second album, Almost. While the Cincinnati quartet’s 2016 debut, Creature Native, never hid its overcast mood, this follow-up uses brighter surfaces to obscure sinister intentions, clothing surprisingly dark songs in indie-pop innocence.
Almost is rooted in sounds from early 2000s: Peppet’s affection for clever, confessional lines paired with propulsive melody make Rilo Kiley-era Jenny Lewis an obvious reference point. But the Ophelias push their songwriting further, deconstructing each musical element and distorting these constituent parts with a fun-house mirror approach that occasionally recalls the Books. Two of the album’s first three tracks are in a 6/8 time signature, and the other is in an even less common 6/4; drummer Micaela Adams treats each of the six notes per bar as an opportunity to improvise, playing hopscotch across her tom, snare, and cymbals. “Lover’s Creep” stitches sections together with unintelligible snippets of a male voice, ghostly and screwed up, in a faint but haunting touch of weird nostalgia.
A collaboration with fellow Cincinnatian Yoni Wolf of WHY?, who first happened upon the Ophelias playing in a park, Almost has moments that vividly recall his band’s poppy 2009 album Eskimo Snow. Wolf is credited with co-producing, mixing, engineering, and contributing percussion to the Ophelias’ record, but it’s easy to see how the mere presence of a xylophone-happy veteran songwriter whose best work airs what he’s characterized as “shit I won’t admit to my head shrinker” might also have nudged their mood and sound in unexpected directions. You can hear Wolf’s influence in the album’s first big break-open moment, on “General Electric,” when a flock of shiny glockenspiels swoops in from out of nowhere.
But not even a metallophone can establish the twee atmosphere that the Ophelias make it their mission to disturb and debase as effectively as violin. So it makes sense that the contributions of violinist and pianist Andrea Gutmann Fuentes form the backbone of Almost. By the album’s final track, “Moon Like Sour Candy”—as Fuentes’ plaintive violin underscores cute-then-revolting lines like “Tongue like bubbles floating down my rotten skin”—that spine is in desperate need of a chiropractor. | 2018-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | July 26, 2018 | 7.1 | ac4084d6-0369-4e55-acf0-ea2d0682c22e | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Fire still comes easy to the Joy Formidable, but Hitch is the first time they've seemed at a loss for how to use it. | Fire still comes easy to the Joy Formidable, but Hitch is the first time they've seemed at a loss for how to use it. | The Joy Formidable: Hitch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21550-hitch/ | Hitch | Though they certainly didn't intend to, the Joy Formidable have captured the trajectory of '90s alternative rock in just three albums. The Welsh trio's bravura 2011 full-length debut The Big Roar recreated the moment when underground rock crashed the mainstream with a sonic boom. It contains the band's only significant radio hit, "Whirring," and it probably could have spawned two of three more of them if it hadn't arrived at a time when the public's appetite for herculean guitar rock was at an all-time low. 2013's Wolf's Law was the group's sprawling "let's put our major label budget to use" record, the work of a band spreading their wings *Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness-*style, attempting even bigger, proggier sounds and hiring a string section just because they could. It was spottier than their debut, but no less exciting, if only because it teased the new directions that might come next.
Unfortunately, that makes their third album the disappointing realization that nothing new comes next. Hitch isn't just a retread of the band's previous work; it's a summation of all the ways the Alternative Nation has under-delivered since the new millennium. It's Billy Corgan throwing everything he has into a new album and coming up with the merely good-enough Oceania. It's the gradual realization that Dave Grohl had always been more into classic rock than he was punk. It's the Toadies securing a prime spot at Lollapalooza because they were the only reunited act of their era playing that year.
It might not be a shock to see Joy Formidable eventually fall into the same pattern of diminishing returns as their predecessors, but it still stings, because they've been one of the genre's brightest young exports. Their magnificently loud yet melodically supple vision of big-tent rock has filled a void, and on their earlier albums their blustery sound paired fabulously with singer/guitarist Ritzy Bryan's relatable songwriting. Her gargantuan riffs could make lyrics about routine personal experiences—miscommunications, slights, and romantic letdowns—sound like they were of enormous cosmic importance. And although it's never defined their image, the group also has a righteous feminist streak. Many of Bryan's songs capture the frustration of being talked over; their sheer volume served as a kind of pushback to every man who presumed to know what she's trying to say without having the consideration to actually listen to what she was saying. Alternative could use more bands like this.
But Hitch finds them in a holding pattern. "Radio Of Lips" is a virtual rewrite of the Wolf's Law lead single "This Ladder Is Ours," right down to its propulsive tempo and fluttery, caffeinated-Cure guitar riff. It could be a knock-out song, if it didn't linger for a full six and a half minutes. "The Last Thing On My Mind" dabbles in Zeppelin-y blues, but similarly outstays its welcome. Bryan's guitars have always been the band's selling point, but in such prolonged exposures they become downright numbing. The band self-recorded the album over 12 months in a self-built studio in their remote hometown Mold. They clearly spent a lot of time cooped up with these songs, and it's as if they want they listener to feel cooped up with them, too.
Wolf's Law had the proggy ambitions to justify its bloat, but Hitch's songs take much longer to do far less. Unsurprisingly, then, one of its highlights is one of its shortest. The song that most directly addresses Bryan's break-up from bassist Rhydian Dafydd—a break-up that could have easily ended a different band—"Fog (Black Windows)" has the tight focus and light bounce of one of Bossanova's torch songs. "These sheets are haunted / Not by you, but by a moment that's long gone," Bryan sings. And though she worries that "a love like you will never come again," she grasps at a silver lining: "Maybe we're not alone after all." It's a sweet moment, a woman grieving a cherished relationship, while the very ex she's singing about coos supportively in the background. Everything that comes after it feels mechanical by comparison.
It's hard hearing a band with this much raw talent pour so much into an album that rarely gets off the ground. At times it almost sounds as if they know they've taken their current sound as far as it can go and seem palpably frustrated they can't figure out their next move. Near the end of the record—well into its 67-minute runtime—there's a song called "Blowing Fire" where Bryan vents about "blowing fire for too long and getting nothing," and the line sums up the band's newfound stagnancy so aptly it's as if they're daring critics not to throw it back at them. Fire still comes easy to the Joy Formidable, but Hitch is the first time they've seemed at a loss for how to use it. | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline / Membran / Maplemusic / C'Mon Lets Drift / The Orchard | March 22, 2016 | 6.1 | ac521dbd-23da-46bb-a19e-d955522a4253 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On the newly reissued 1974 live album It's Too Late To Stop Now, Van Morrison discovers his peak as a performer. The band builds an environment; Morrison wanders through all of its available space. | On the newly reissued 1974 live album It's Too Late To Stop Now, Van Morrison discovers his peak as a performer. The band builds an environment; Morrison wanders through all of its available space. | Van Morrison: It's Too Late to Stop Now... Volumes II, III, IV & DVD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22004-its-too-late-to-stop-now-volumes-ii-iii-iv-dvd/ | It's Too Late to Stop Now... Volumes II, III, IV & DVD | Van Morrison was and is an irregular live performer. “I do music from an introverted space…in an extrovert business,” he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2009, describing the profound alienation he often experienced onstage. But by 1973, he’d had finally found something approaching comfort and fidelity as a performer. “The last gig on the East Coast was Carnegie in New York, and something just happened,” he said at the time. “All of a sudden I felt like ‘You’re back into performing’ and it just happened like that. Click.”
Morrison documented this breakthrough on It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a 1974 live album culled from various performances throughout the previous year. Too Late has been reissued along with a box set of previously unreleased gigs (Volumes II, III, and IV) along with a DVD portraying a fraction of one of his shows at the Rainbow Theatre; none of the recordings overlap with the original album. What the newly issued concerts reveal is the night-to-night dynamic of Morrison and his then-band, a group of 11 musicians called the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Caledonia was a name originally assigned to Scotland by the Romans; though the geography it describes still exists, “Caledonia,” as a word, has a kind of mystical aura. It combines history and myth until they produce a kind of transcendent space.
History and myth are also two forms of context Morrison is determined to combine in his music. His sets in 1973 juxtaposed original material from throughout his career with established soul and blues songs by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon and Sonny Boy Williamson. His own songs are composites themselves: blues, jazz, folk, and rock forms all appear in his music, sometimes at once, collapsing into a slipstream of associations. This feeling of endlessness, of the language of a genre losing its shape and blending with others, gives even his straightest R&B numbers the shape of a whirlpool.
This sort of free association flows into his lyrics. One rarely feels, listening to a Van Morrison record, as if they are sifting through a metaphor. He doesn’t reference authors; he names them, and tells us what they’re doing. On “Wild Children,” he sings “Tennessee Williams/Let your inspiration flow.” It’s one of his most permissive compositions, and in the performance at the Rainbow, his band is responsive and sensitive. They construct a flow around him, John Platania contributing soft coronas with his guitar, Bill Atwood’s muted trumpet issuing crisp phrases, like light fluttering on the surface of a lake. The band builds an environment, and Morrison wanders through all of its available space.
The Caledonia Soul Orchestra were as capable of knitting hypnotic grooves as centerless landscapes. “In Van’s best music, all the instruments, including his voice, are wholly integrated,” M. Mark wrote in her 1979 essay on the original live album. “They become one big instrument, perfectly tuned, expertly played.” This big instrument is audible in the precise interlockings of Jeff Labes’ piano, David Hayes’ bass, and Dave Shaw’s drums in “I Paid the Price,” a Van composition that has never been included on a studio album. “You’re as cold as ice,” Morrison sings, and Hayes’ and Shaw’s instruments thrum like a rabbit’s heartbeat. On “Domino” Shaw’s snare and hi-hat combinations are so sharp they have the depth of a snap.
You can also hear the specificity of the band’s interplay in the rendition of “Moonshine Whiskey” performed at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the verses stretch until it feels like they’ll separate into components: strings, drums, Van’s kinetic interjections. “I Just Want To Make Love to You” could radically shift its own anatomy from night to night. On the original album Morrison approaches the riff as if he is approaching the edge of a cliff. At the Troubadour it contracts into a sly shuffle. Perhaps what’s most stunning is that a band of this size and scale could sound so crisp and organized. The band are pulled gravitationally by Van, who is as much of a bandleader as soul singer on this collection.
But the band also pulls him; they act as shadows of each other, advancing and receding harmonically with the other’s movements. Van exhibits a feline sensitivity to the phrases arcing around him. There are moments where he seems to get lost. Words multiply and cluster; “I would nevernevernevernevernevernevernevernevernever be so meek,” he sings on the recording of “These Dreams of You” at the Troubadour. On “Listen to the Lion” his words deteriorate into individual vowels, molecular components of language. When he sings “Bein’ Green,” a composition originally performed by Kermit the Frog, he introduces a cavity of silence into his gig at the Rainbow. “And it’s what I…” he whispers. Four seconds pass. The audience doesn’t even clap. “…wanna be.” (“Bein’ Green” is a song that’s about confusing yourself with your environment, one of Van’s preferred forms of transcendence.) “The best way to describe it is…a kind of a light trance,” he says in the CBS interview. “If the musicians can follow me…I can go anywhere.”
Every performance of “Caravan” available on the box set features an instance of Morrison losing himself. Toward the end of the song the band will give way to the string section; the strings diminish in volume until they resemble the gentle tremble of waves. Then, out of the relative silence, Morrison shouts, “Turn it up!” The band recombines. “Just one more time!” Morrison screams at the end of each phrase, his face glossy with sweat. At this point he seems to experience a kind of weightlessness, as he leans his entire body into several fluid high kicks. (In the video of the Rainbow gig, he unconsciously boots one of the saxophones onstage.)
He’s also audibly lost in the recordings of “Cyprus Avenue,” the centerpiece of his 1968 album Astral Weeks. The Caledonia Soul Orchestra reverse the song’s polarity; it’s slowly put back together as raving soul (though the strings maintain some of its native drift). He sings, “And you said France!” and the audience responds: “France!” The venues from which the recordings on It’s Too Late to Stop Now were drawn generally seated around 3,000; in all of the performances of “Cyprus Avenue” I’ve heard, the atmosphere is so intimate that it sounds as though there are maybe 14 people in the theater, including Van and the band. The music gathers force and builds to a single note, atop which Morrison shouts “Baby!” Then: silence.
The crowd starts yelling at him. “I said…” he mumbles. There’s an audible restraint, the air having tightened from movements he hasn’t made yet. Tension generates from these long, empty fermatas; there’s a power and menace to this landscape of mere flourishes. On the original live album there’s a famous crowd/performer exchange; a member of the audience says “Turn it on!” and Van replies, “It’s turned on already.” Then he yells, “It’s too late to stop now!” and the band crashes in around him.
It’s a moment Lester Bangs isolated in his essay on Astral Weeks, in a performance he saw on television in 1970; he classifies the end of “Cyprus Avenue” as “the hollow of a murdered explosion.” The cover of It’s Too Late to Stop Now is a photo of Van cutting the band off, his fist raised, drawing them down into the hollow, the stage lights carving shapes out of the dark, just as Morrison gives shape to the silence. | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | June 16, 2016 | 8.8 | ac59b2f3-499c-4276-93d4-051f8d991aa8 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | 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 dawn of metal, a document of dreary working-class blight and anti-war screeds. | 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 dawn of metal, a document of dreary working-class blight and anti-war screeds. | Black Sabbath: Paranoid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-sabbath-paranoid/ | Paranoid | From a moonlit thicket, a soldier wielding a scimitar and a pointy shield approaches, his eyes bulging with terror beneath a bright white helmet. He wears pink leggings and an outlandish orange blazer, an outfit that becomes, in Marcus Keef’s clumsy long-exposure photograph, a garish streak of glowing neon across the midnight scene. These were meant to be “War Pigs,” autocratic henchmen Black Sabbath lampooned during their second album’s bellicose opener and its intended title. From a distance, they look like an errant splotch of paint across a sheet of construction paper; up close, they just look absurd.
Still, in all its grainy ignominy, Paranoid’s cover is one of the most transformative moments in the early history of Black Sabbath and, by extension, heavy metal. In 1970, Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut did something few were expecting—it sold very well, charting both at their home in the UK and in the United States. Their label, Vertigo, soon dispatched Black Sabbath back to the studio to record a follow-up, stretching their already-indulgent impulses into eight-minute songs about war and heroin and the glory of the guitar. When they needed one more tune, the band headed to the bar while guitarist Tony Iommi stayed behind and spent a few minutes writing a simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal. They recorded the song in a flash and called it “Paranoid,” the fulfillment of a legal obligation.
Vertigo didn’t hear filler; it heard a hit, a trouncing three-minute assault by a young band that still favored excessive jams. Six months after releasing Black Sabbath, they issued the song as Black Sabbath’s second single and demanded that the album’s title be changed from War Pigs to Paranoid. They wanted to remind potential customers of the song they’d seen four long-haired weirdos headbang to on “Top of the Pops” while avoiding the nasty business of saying something controversial in an era already fraught with civil unrest. But in the sprint to get the record into stores, Vertigo never bothered to commission an image that fit the new name. The soldier simply stands there, an embarrassment in neon. After nearly 50 years, bassist and songwriter Geezer Butler (and most everyone else) still hates it: “The cover was bad enough when the album was going to be War Pigs, but when it was Paranoid it didn’t even make sense.”
The label was right about “Paranoid,” at least. Propelled by its lead single, Paranoid was the only Black Sabbath album to top the British charts for the next four decades. In the U.S., where it nearly broke into the Top 10 mere months after the band’s small stateside debut, it has gone platinum four times. Record labels realized that heaviness and spookiness could sell and that Led Zeppelin, Sabbath’s favorite band, were just the beginning. In ceding to Vertigo’s commercial instincts about “Paranoid,” both as a single and album title, Black Sabbath helped launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also as a veritable industry.
But “Paranoid” itself foregrounds an adolescent sort of worry—about being depressed and not understanding the symptoms or root of it, about crying when others laugh, about breaking up with someone because “she couldn’t help me with my mind.” At the heart of Paranoid, however, are very adult concerns about the raging war in Vietnam, the button-push annihilation of atomic weapons, and the oligarchic structures that suppressed the working class in the band’s benighted hometown of Birmingham and beyond.
Paranoid is rightly seen as an essential metal template, but it should also be seen as an essential document of its time and place. Despite the pugnacious sound (“the new standard in power rock,” one early advertisement called it) and macabre promotional images of these proto-heshers stalking churchyards and cemeteries, it is a reflection of a troubled globe teetering on the brink of another world war or even a nuclear apocalypse, made by four blue-collar kids from a tough city. Those who worry about end times are ignored, while those who do the government’s dirty work are born to suffer. These are laments for a world gone wrong, coupled with calls to battle back and fix it.
Still, for decades, that’s not what the critics heard: In his 1971 review for Rolling Stone, Nick Tosches conjured Satanic clichés and misogynist Manson family jokes before mistaking Black Sabbath for their peers in Black Widow, anyway. The same year, The Washington Post wondered, “Your choice: Is the worst rock band Grand Funk Railroad or Black Sabbath? It’s getting harder and harder to decide.” As late as 1997, Rolling Stone still insisted it was “a campy farce … lumbering, obnoxious, and a total gas.” Had the album been called War Pigs a year after Altamont and months after Kent State, though, would critics have heard it differently? Would they have understood that, even if it sounded like spooky fantasy, this steely strain of rock could address real-world worries—and would even do so for the next half-century?
Of course, Paranoid’s high sales and wide reach, not this critical repudiation, made it heavy metal’s chrysalis. You can point to any of the eight songs here as the partial inspiration for an entire subgenre of metal or rock at large, each prompting decades of creative exegesis. More than the eponymous anthem that began their debut, the drifting verses of “Hand of Doom” are direct arrows into, well, doom metal, turbocharged by sections that feel like nebulous hardcore. The italicized pummel of “Paranoid” itself is the link between Zeppelin and thrash. The starts and stops of “Rat Salad,” and the way Iommi’s guitar line runs like razor wire between the rhythmic shifts, presage the instrumental ecstasy of math-rock, in spirit if not in skill. The beginning of “Fairies Wear Boots” keeps folding and rising, only to empty into declarative verses, like the skeleton of power metal awaiting eventual flesh. Ozzy Osbourne, his voice routed through a whirling Leslie speaker, delivers images of romantic escapism over circular bass and hand-drum patter during “Planet Caravan”—alongside electric Miles, a clear antecedent for metal’s exploratory psychedelic side.
These eight songs have become scripture because they are breathless explorations of possibilities, unfettered by expectations or half a century of heavy metal history. Paranoid, after all, captures Black Sabbath at a moment when the future must have seemed suddenly tantalizing and limitless. The humble adolescent vision of making a living through anything other than going to war or going to the factory were suddenly within reach, if only for a spell. Iommi, Osbourne, Butler, and drummer Bill Ward had nothing to lose now except hard jobs. They write, sing, and play with the zeal of liberation, the incandescence of potential.
During World War II, Axis bombs had splintered Birmingham, stripping the city of its economic engines and making existence odious for decades to come. In the 1960s, Birmingham suffered spates of anti-immigrant racism, desolate storefronts, and miserably cramped living conditions. The Brummies of Black Sabbath were the sons of factory laborers and office cleaners, shopkeepers and strict Catholics. When he was a teenager, Osbourne worked in an abattoir and went to prison for burglary; Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his last day at a sheet metal factory and made his own prosthetics so he could play guitar. At home, they had seen stabbings and street brawls. “It had constant steam and smoke,” Ward remembers of the city and the way it shaped Sabbath’s sound, “so it has a very drab-looking landscape.” A career in rock’n’roll was not only a way out of Birmingham but a way to circumvent this cruel industrial order.
The most terrifying thing about Black Sabbath in 1970 shouldn’t have been the ostentatious chrome cross strung around Iommi’s neck, Osbourne’s hand tattoos, or the talk of evil and witches and Lovecraftian horror. It should have been that here were four kids from the lower ranks of bombed-out Birmingham’s society, gaining a popular foothold by openly hoping the ruling class would fall to their knees and beg for mercy beneath the blows. “Day of judgment/God is calling,” Osbourne sings in the immortal opener, triumphantly stretching the syllables until he’s almost out of breath. “On their knees, the War Pigs crawling/Begging mercy for their sins.” In this scene, God and Satan provide the same salvation—the sweet deliverance of overdue vengeance. Black Sabbath spend the next three minutes dancing on the graves of the self-proclaimed mighty, Iommi’s guitar curling upward into an infinite grin.
“We wrote ‘War Pigs’ because many American bands were frightened to mention anything about the war,” Butler later said. “So we thought we’d tell it like it is.” Though Osbourne has insisted that the band knew little about Vietnam, Butler says he paid closer attention to the war than most Americans did, in part because he feared Britain would join. Osbourne even calls the war by name during the second verse of “Hand of Doom.” The song became infamous as a supposed endorsement of heroin, but it’s a warning for deployed soldiers taken with the newfound hobby of trying to kill time with drugs but only killing themselves.
At the end, Osbourne pushes his voice to its early falsetto limits, sharing the pain of the prescription: “Price of life is high/Now you’re going to die.” Despite the indignation for the soldier’s bad choice, there’s a strong sense of pity here for the “fools” following orders, the real judgement reserved for the leaders who have put their people in this position. It’s the hand of invisible doom, of a free market at war with its own citizens.
The members of Black Sabbath had been born in the wake of World War II, some even the sons of veterans. They had lived much of their lives surrounded by its fallout, the Cold War, and were teenagers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, an existential flashpoint about whether we valued pride more than survival. They began to play music together just as the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and just as the Cold War began to spill into more territories. Anchored by a hangman riff and guided by Osbourne’s best sorcerer vocals, “Electric Funeral” lashes out at the woe of that atomic age and the endless destruction it enables. The song feels entirely uneasy, wobbling at the lip of a future where “Rivers turn to mud/Eyes melt into blood.”
Perhaps that’s what the deathless “Iron Man” has seen in his intergalactic voyage. Though the song has nothing to do with the Marvel comic of the same name, it is a surreal fantasy. A man has been shot into space to look backward at Earth’s future (that’s how time travel works, right?) and share some insight on how to make it better. He sees disaster, but the journey back through the atmosphere renders him mute, unable to share the dire truth. He’s ostracized and ignored until he lashes out, iron fists falling on the city with the weight of Iommi’s monstrous riff and Ward’s colossal Bonham drums. Black Sabbath again delight in revolt, from the relish in Osbourne’s voice as he sings “Now he has his revenge” to Iommi and Butler’s hyperkinetic score for the imagined fight scene.
The sense that these kids are almost always looking for a brawl during Paranoid comes to fruition at the end. According to band lore, the long-haired, heavy-drinking members of Sabbath encountered a crew of skinheads sporting boots after an early gig, as they often did. These weren’t the skinheads of the neo-Nazi variety; this was just a different set of working-class youth with alternate values and fashion choices, making for an S.E. Hinton-styled clash of subcultures. They fought, and Sabbath won. On what’s thankfully the only song he penned here, Osbourne immortalized the victory by calling the skinheads fairies, which had become a vogue insult for an image of gay men before World War II.
Sure, “Fairies Wear Boots” boasts one of the best grooves of Sabbath’s entire discography, some of Osbourne’s most effortlessly soulful singing ever, and a bridge and solo that feel every bit as triumphant as their alleged victory that night. But it plays up the budding egos of 20-somethings from a rough town now on the verge of rock’n’roll stardom with a lazy insult, an early flash of the machismo that would become hard rock’s lifeblood during the next decade. Youth is the perfect fuel for most of Paranoid; here, it is the puerile folly, getting the best of Black Sabbath’s armed hippie vision.
But Paranoid began to make stars of Black Sabbath, and the music of the boys from Birmingham reflected that almost instantly. Butler once (suspiciously) insisted that, during the salad days of their first two albums, they couldn’t even afford cheap booze, let alone a lot of weed; a year later, Master of Reality launches stoner metal with its first track, “Sweet Leaf.” The next seven years with Osbourne hinged largely on songs about feeling low on breakups, high on cocaine, irritated at the record label, and irate at one another.
Political songs didn’t entirely disappear from Black Sabbath’s catalog, but they did become more sporadic and ham-fisted. A year later, on Master of Reality, the bracing and relentless “Children of the Grave” offered a rallying cry for the kids, as society’s supposed heavy metal boogeymen urged the kids to organize and “show the world that love is still alive.” There is an odd rendering of an Orwellian world on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and, improbably, a very bad piece of political theater about a cross-dressing woman who becomes president of the United States on 1976’s sleek and largely miserable Technical Ecstasy. What’s worse, a thread of class condescension began to ripple through Black Sabbath’s songs, too, criticizing the commoners and their inability to just cut free of society, to get wild. By then, Black Sabbath played from the pedestal of fame, not from the pit of Birmingham turmoil that had made Paranoid so timely and vivid. And slowly, the élan at work during Paranoid began to fade, too. The band made records because it was now a career.
At the start of the millennium, the original Black Sabbath quartet that created Paranoid and a map for heavy metal to come reunited in the studio alongside Rick Rubin. It took a decade and Ward’s acrimonious departure, but they eventually finished 13, their final album and first with Osbourne since their initial eight-album volley ended in 1978. In the interim, Black Sabbath had become a microcosm of behind-the-music melodrama, with Osbourne and Iommi infamously spending the better part of their adult lives trying to one-up each other by searching for a better singer or guitarist. There were reality shows, patrician lifestyles, and, presumably, more money than Satan.
In those sessions, Iommi later said, they wanted to recapture the essence of Paranoid—four kids locked in a room, letting off existential unease by plowing through tunes about everything that has gone wrong in the world. The best songs on 13 excoriate wicked demagogues and fret over the Earth’s precarious existence, like the best of Paranoid. The plan worked, intentionally harnessing some of the accidental urgency that helped make Black Sabbath famous 40 years earlier and shaping a reunion album better than anyone had a reason to expect. That is the strange power and sad relevance of Paranoid, a record whose technophobe fears and atomic anxieties are as salient in this age of brash politicians and international blunder as they were in that one. | 2018-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal / Rock | Vertigo / Warner Bros. | December 9, 2018 | 9.5 | ac5ea72a-2520-463f-b9b6-5989d6b8340d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the sweetest melodies, throw in a ... | Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the sweetest melodies, throw in a ... | The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8380-who-will-cut-our-hair-when-were-gone/ | Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? | Pop music gets off way too easily; so long as groups stick to only the sweetest melodies, throw in a couple of ba-ba-buh's and sing about how Stacey's mom "has got it goin' on," or some other such timeless verse, they're valued as somehow above the fray. It seems even the most venomous rock elitists can be defanged by a few simple hooks, turned endlessly forgiving by some easy harmonies. If Stalin himself had ruled with less of an iron fist and more Beach Boys-style harmonies, he might be remembered as much for his keen songwriting chops as for the wholesale slaughter of millions of his own people; such is the inexplicably titanic redemptive power of pop. That self-same blinding power is also why it takes a band as innovative as The Unicorns to throw the complacencies of pop into stark relief, to finally hold it accountable for such casual abuses.
When it's so easy for bands to stay behind the indie-pop curve that you'd think someone's handing out ice cream back there, The Unicorns are ahead. In fact, they're so far ahead that superficial distinction becomes virtually unnecessary; they're striking at the most fundamental structure of the pop song itself. Without scrutiny, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, their debut album for the otherwise experimental Canadian label Alien8, can pass for the same sort of sugar-glazed jangle-pop that's been done to death, but has nevertheless been beloved for years in indie circles; all the elements I just derided are present in abundance, right down to a rare few instances of smarmy lyrics. The band traffics in the occasional oooh's and aaah's, and relies on retro-basic keyboards for the requisite flourish above and beyond the standard guitar fuzz. And yet, The Unicorns toe the line of bedroom intimacy and heart-swelling wonder as perfectly as any of the modern masters of the form.
In that sense, they rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely. Songs shift effortlessly from segment to segment, never relying upon the crutch of repetitive composition to create the illusion of a powerful hook. That's not to say that motifs aren't revisited throughout a song, but elementary concepts of A-B-A structure are abandoned in favor of brilliant, sprawling whole-song compositions.
These days, when "epic" describes a line at the bank, it doesn't seem adequate to describe the scope of some of these tunes, but it'll have to suffice. "Jellybones" is a titanic wreck of styles and forms, offering glimpses of hooks that would serve other bands as whole songs like so many kittens; "Tuff Ghost" builds around two simple rhythmic shifts and never looks back, burning through a dozen variations of the song's central keyboard line. And the intricate plucking to open "I Was Born (A Unicorn)" gives way to a bizarre fiction: "I was born a unicorn/ I missed the ark, but I could've sworn/ You'd wait for me," then, "So how come all the other unicorns are dead?" This hilariously morbid variation on a typical theme of loss or abandonment is par for the course on Who Will Cut Our Hair, exemplifying how The Unicorns continually and effortlessly sap the drama from rock's favorite, most maudlin topics, and transform them into simple, charming, light-hearted fun. It's a big part of what separates them from all those careerist indie rockers getting by on everyday hooks and affected disinterest; even at their goofiest, The Unicorns' level of comfort with their material-- and the obvious confidence that engenders-- makes it all seem totally natural and new. | 2003-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2003-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Alien8 | November 11, 2003 | 8.9 | ac62ff45-2a84-423b-8962-ba57bcb8e9f1 | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
The latest from the pair of Italian experimental musicians marked by its simplicity, distilling their music down to its most lyrical and affecting form yet. | The latest from the pair of Italian experimental musicians marked by its simplicity, distilling their music down to its most lyrical and affecting form yet. | Bellows: Undercurrent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bellows-undercurrent/ | Undercurrent | The two Italian experimental musicians that comprise Bellows arrived at their aesthetic in a manner as oblique as their music. Giuseppe Ielasi, schooled in Derek Bailey and hardcore punk, started out as an improvising guitarist before moving into computer music, electroacoustic drones, and mischievous sampling. Nicola Ratti followed a similar path from guitar abstractions to minimalist electronics. The duo’s sound and methods have remained in flux from record to record. On Bellows’ 2007 debut, they piled soft, amorphous sounds, presumably of their own creation—glinting electric guitars, lopsided percussion, sourceless rustle and chirp—into unsteady heaps. On 2010’s murkier Handcut, they pioneered a twisted form of turntablism, applying contact mics directly to vinyl LPs, which destroyed the records’ grooves after a few rotations—a little like using a rusty scalpel as a musical instrument. But the loop has typically been Bellows’ principal unit of measurement, and on Undercurrent, their first release for Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label, they deliver their most focused music yet.
For a while, Bellows’ recordings were growing in complexity. But Undercurrent is marked by its simplicity. Elongated tones drip against a backdrop of silence and tape hiss; in place of melody, they might offer a silvery curlicue of tone. Occasional tape warble leaves their sounds curling up at the edges. The notes are less important than the way they seem to swoop up or down to the desired pitch.
The music’s constituent parts are typically opaque. To create Undercurrent, Bellows recorded short instrumental parts on guitar, drums, and synthesizer, then cut them into tape loops to be played and manipulated in real time. The most hypnotic tracks, like “01” and “04,” evoke the slow rolling of waves at low tide, or ropes slapping against the masts of moored boats. Others are more harmonic: The placid “02” smears a single organ chord into an analog approximation of Oval’s glitch etudes, while in “05,” a buried humming sound recalls the modal groans of Georgian folk music.
The pace is so slow, the form so repetitive, it’s easy to overlook the subtle ways these constructions shift as they wander. In “06,” two chords modulate back and forth, conveying a sense of resignation as they curl and crumple, like slumping shoulders. And in the closing “08,” the album’s quiet climax, a steel drum makes a plaintive creaking sound, like a rusty gate swinging on its hinges, while faint bursts of Morse-code bleeps telegraph news of an advancing storm. It’s a testament to Bellows’ sleight-of-hand that they can spin such spare materials and subtle movements into something that feels almost like storytelling. With Undercurrent, Ielasi and Ratti distill their music down to its most lyrical and affecting form yet.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Black Truffle | August 31, 2020 | 7.4 | ac654f56-36d4-4005-a770-e263205d6b97 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their fourth installment, Killer Mike and El-P are back to tune up the ruling class and the racist police state, this time streamlining the process and settling into their most natural rhythm. | On their fourth installment, Killer Mike and El-P are back to tune up the ruling class and the racist police state, this time streamlining the process and settling into their most natural rhythm. | Run the Jewels: RTJ4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/run-the-jewels-rtj4/ | RTJ4 | RTJ4 begins at war with the police. The titular duo—Killer Mike and El-P—work to evade a swarming force of militant cops. They draw the mob in. They shoot back. They escape. It is a fantasy. The reality comes later.
“You so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper—‘I can’t breathe’/And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV,” Killer Mike raps on “walking in the snow,” his voice urgent. The lyric is about Eric Garner. Now it’s about George Floyd, too. That these two unjust killings occurred under tragically, uncannily similar circumstances (out in the open; with other officers standing by; with a man being suffocated to death; on camera) nearly six years apart only underscores the unending flow of racist violence in America. The state of heightened rage such violence induces is untenable and corrosive. Yet love needs fury to fight hate. Clearly none of this is lost on the pair of indie, old head, no-fucks-giving, chain-snatching, self-professed menaces to sobriety behind this project. Their boisterous new album, RTJ4, makes time for trash-talking and chin-checking amid insurrection.
RTJ are still taking it to the streets to fight a tyrannical ruling class and racist policing. But after the taxing process of making Run the Jewels 3, a vitriolic album in a race against doomsday, they’ve leveled off to a manageable degree of righteous indignation. To maintain equilibrium, the punchlines are less juvenile, too, and there’s a noticeable decrease in dick jokes. Fortified with lessons learned from their “blue” album, the duo conjures up the album closest to who they are as rappers and fans, activists and husbands, goofballs and go-getters: weary but unbroken, wary but not hopeless, eager to knuckle up.
By now, at the fourth installment of this series greenlit by an Adult Swim programmer, it’d be easy for them to just punch in and deliver their mandated hour of outsized, kick-in-your-teeth braggadocio—obviously, there’s still plenty of that: “Until you rob a hypebeast you ain’t seen sadness/Clockwork Orange madness, left the scene laughing,” Mike raps on “holy calamafuck”. But on RTJ4, the pair has settled into a nice rhythm—Mike, standing his ground, gun in tow, atop a soapbox; El, the truther following every red string across a tack board. RTJ4 re-engineers their music to its most critical components, as if extracting its essence. They scrap any dead weight to maneuver more freely, finding the balance between mischief-makers and agitators.
RTJ3, released under the looming shadow of Trumpism, featured a quote from the 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. speech “The Other America”: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” What remained unsaid was what, exactly, the “other” America had failed to hear: that “large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.” The pursuit of justice is active here, and it’s loud as shit and shaking the table. These guys don’t do tranquility. They don’t even do subtlety. Ain’t shit fly but the drones. (One El-P assessment: “This whole world’s a shit moat filled to the brim like GitMo.”) But they are noticeably more measured, both in trying to portion out their fury more carefully and choosing their words more precisely. “Used to be a time I’d see it and I’d say it/Now I understand that woke folk be playin’,” Mike raps on “goonies vs. E.T.” That forethought brings concision that plays into their personas as pithy, shit-talking government watchdogs.
While his real-world politics aren’t as anarchic as his songs, sound bites, and even shirts suggest, and his black capitalist position does defang his “eat the rich” sloganeering some, Mike is still capable of reeling off devastating combinations in that rubbery voice of his. He forgoes some of his quotability this time to better serve the flexibility of his rapping. He establishes his priorities on “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” through his wife: “Friends tell her, ‘He could be another Malcolm, he could be another Martin’/She told ‘em, ‘Partner, I need a husband more than the world need another martyr.” For him, now, staying active in his community is paramount, and he raps like someone lit a fire under him. His closing verse on “goonies vs. E.T.” is one of his best, at once dauntless and precise, like watching someone skip across a minefield and survive.
El-P, for his part, has rarely sounded so animated. He is in a near-constant state of agitation, appearing through plumes of weed smoke to kick up dust, like some whistleblowing anti-hero in a dystopian YA novel. “You see a future where Run the Jewels ain’t the shit/Cancel my Hitler-killing trip/Turn the time machine back around a century,” he raps on “the ground below.” It’s that kind of highly self-referential, bluntly political, fun-loving pulp fiction mash-up bar that keeps the project so viable.
There are fewer back-and-forth exchanges than on previous albums and the verses don’t dovetail as much but the two still move well in tandem. They cover each other, their writing well-sequenced, their rapping finely staged. There’s a section on “never look back” where Mike punctuates every one of El-P’s thoughts. Mike’s bluster can cover El’s evasiveness, and El’s tendency to hang back and observe bolsters Mike’s aggression. In one exchange, El strings out a sentence like a line of train cars, “You covet disruption, I got you covered, I’m bustin’/My brother’s a runner, he’s crushin’, it’s no discussion,” crafty in and around the corners, to which Mike adds, frankly: “People, we the pirates, the pride of this great republic/No matter what you order, muhfucka, we’re what you’re stuck with.”
The banter holds RTJ’s music together at the seams. Even when serious, it never runs the risk of becoming dour or unbearable, because they feel like they’ll always get the last laugh. This commitment to wordplay as wisecracks birthed the characters Yankee and the Brave, an imagined buddy comedy action thriller (that may or may not actually come to fruition on the screen), and manifests on the bobbing, 2 Chainz-aided “out of sight,” the slap-happy “holy calamafuck,” and in moments when Mike compares himself to Godzilla or El has “a Vonnegut punch for your Atlas shrugs.” For two rappers in their 40s, they sound so liberated and timeless, all without a chip on their shoulder about the younger class. This ability to stay true to who they are feels as radical as anything else they do. “Two dudes who were born in 1975 are not supposed to be allowed to be at the cutting edge of music,” El-P told GQ, after establishing the M.O. of this dynamic duo: “We’re using our powers for good.”
They have always been historians—2014’s RTJ2 was a classicist fever dream—but RTJ4 exists in tribute to the old school. Those intentions are clear: DJ Premier and Greg Nice guested on a single. There’s scratching across the record from Trackstar the DJ and Cutmaster Swiff. “Run the Jewels has always been an homage to a degree, to a feeling that we had, to the classic groups that we came up with,” El-P explained earlier this year. “Not trying to recreate them, but to just live in that feeling when we’re making music.” He likened this run that they’re on to raucous New York duo EPMD’s, and the comparison seems apt. Some of the songs embody vintage hardcore funk rap. Others sound like sci-fi boom-bap. “out of sight” is like an ever-mutating version of the D.O.C.’s “It’s Funky Enough.” Afforded greater financial freedom by the group’s success, El-P’s songs are layered with stunning and meticulous sample work, but the beats are no less forceful. These are hard-hitting throwbacks with an ear to the ground.
RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential. The in-your-face commentary of “walking in the snow” and “pulling the pin,” with Mavis Staples seemingly transmitting from another era, bring the most out of the two rhymers. All of the surveying seems to come to a head on closer “a few words for the firing squad (radiation),” where both Mike and El rattle off personal reflections from inside a dying empire. In their verses, it’s the love for those closest to them and the losses they’ve sustained under the current order that fuels their fury. The song builds, the rage builds, and as it draws to a close, Mike makes clear who all this is for: the do-gooders that the no-gooders abused; the truth-tellers tied to the whipping post; the strange fruit left hanging from trees—the Eric Garners; the George Floyds.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Jewel Runners / BMG | June 5, 2020 | 8.3 | ac68f610-daf0-4ac9-8518-c0e8b0255239 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Meg Duffy sharpens their slow, perceptive songwriting into a vulnerable and compelling meditation on creativity and human connection. | Meg Duffy sharpens their slow, perceptive songwriting into a vulnerable and compelling meditation on creativity and human connection. | Hand Habits: Sugar the Bruise EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hand-habits-sugar-the-bruise-ep/ | Sugar the Bruise EP | For Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, creativity is a ritual of connection that reconciles the innumerable unknowns within and beyond human existence. Over the years, they’ve come to understand that it’s the questions, not necessarily the answers, that provide color to life. “The container of a song can be a safe place to pose questions or take risks,” they said in an interview about their 2021 album, Fun House. “The ritual of performing the songs helps me become more comfortable with not knowing the answers.” For their latest EP, Sugar the Bruise, Duffy builds worlds around a multitude of unanswerable queries.
Duffy recorded earlier albums like 2019’s Placeholder entirely on their own, feeling like they had “something to prove.” Now, moving with more curiosity and openness, they’ve brought on more collaborators, co-producing with Luke Temple, Jeremy Harris, and Philip Weinrobe. Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.
Duffy examines creativity’s mysterious layers, using art to talk about art itself. They confront the hardships of a touring musician and their struggle with artistic integrity on “Andy in Stereo,” then marvel at a historic artwork on “The Bust of Nefertiti.” In the former, Duffy is an omnipresent narrator, a patron saint of workaholic performers who advises the song’s protagonist, Andy, as the track morphs from a melancholic ballad into a tinkling waltz. Later, glistening chimes rain down like a sunshower. “If the music’s in your hands,” Duffy urges during the epiphanic moment, “You could play it on your own again/Just like before you could afford the band/You were lighter then.” The song’s structure transforms alongside Andy’s shifting career, emphasizing that life and creativity are not meant to be stagnant or linear. Both are as malleable and fluid as the song’s mutations.
Although the majority of these songs explore the complexities of art and imagination, the two strongest tracks on Sugar the Bruise focus on human connection. On opener “Something Wrong,” Duffy aches for a new friendship to take hold, or for a previous relationship to move into platonic territory. “Is there something wrong with that?” they ask stubbornly during the chorus, as pounding drums stomp their feet in frustration. It’s the simplest song on Sugar the Bruise, both in structure and sentiment: the pure, guileless desire to connect with another. But Duffy transforms a simple chord progression into a pilgrimage towards intimacy, adding thick, neon synths, a corroded guitar solo, and high-pitched, wormy background vocals. It’s a new, unflinching tone for Duffy, who’s well-known for slow and perceptive songwriting, and it draws us in even closer to Hand Habits’ already intimate reflections.
Still, the most heart-wrenching moment on Sugar the Bruise is a return to form. Duffy slowly shrinks away from their lover on the vulnerable ballad “Private Life.” “Morning, talking to your mother/Only moments after making me cum,” they divulge, alongside delicate piano keys and subtle white noise. “I heard you tell her there was no one else here/How much shame you place between me and our love.” Their vocals evoke mixed emotions—yearning and acceptance. Being alive means both pain and love; being human means embracing the dissonance. “This is your private life/I don’t belong here,” goes the chorus. Throughout, Duffy’s tone rides a fine line of detachment and somber assent, but in the song’s final line, a tender bruise begins to develop: “This is your private life/I wish I belonged there.”
These tracks showcase Duffy living in the marvelous, painful unknown in the most evocative ways. On closer “The Bust of Nefertiti,” a bobbing bass and honeyed acoustic guitar strum excitedly alongside a stomping house beat. After Duffy softly sings about witnessing the legendary work, the song transports us out of the Berlin Museum where the bust is held and onto a technicolor dance floor for a transcendent two-minute outro. Years ago, Duffy said, “Music is a catalyst for the divine, and a vehicle in which to disappear.” On this song, Duffy glimpses something otherworldly. It may seem like the musician we’re familiar with has disappeared. Instead, they’ve just transformed into something more sublime. | 2023-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | June 20, 2023 | 7.3 | ac68f675-e286-4dba-8d48-2536492c722b | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Speckled with guest stars and produced by Andrew Watt, the Stones’ second original album this century is a bunch of hackneyed duds, polished until the character has disappeared. | Speckled with guest stars and produced by Andrew Watt, the Stones’ second original album this century is a bunch of hackneyed duds, polished until the character has disappeared. | The Rolling Stones: Hackney Diamonds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-rolling-stones-hackney-diamonds/ | Hackney Diamonds | Before he was the drug-smuggling, skull-ring-wearing pirate of rock’n’roll lore, Keith Richards was the Rolling Stones’ amateur accountant. A working-class kid born into mid-war England, the fussbudget immediately began documenting the band’s finances: how much they made from those early gigs (often zero), how much sessions cost (not much), and how Bill Wyman was more valuable as a guy who owned a Vox amp than as a bassist (ouch). The Stones subsequently became not just one of the world’s biggest bands but also most ostentatious—a merchandising machine with lips-emblazoned jumbo jets, rented French mansions, and outsized stadium shows. The Stones helped define rock stardom’s swaggering ethos. They also turned it forever into a big fucking business.
On Hackney Diamonds—the second album of original material by the Rolling Stones this century and the first since the death of drummer Charlie Watts, the band’s bedrock for more than half a century—these titans of industry flail as they try to act their image rather than their age. Alongside producer Andrew Watt, they turn every trick they can to conjure just one more hit, one more chance to cash in. They try and fail to reinvigorate themselves in the rock’n’roll fountain of youth they helped create, only to emerge with a dozen hackneyed duds. Hackney Diamonds, named for the shattered glass left by a burglar, reinforces the worst part of the Stones’ once-aggressive outlaw image: eternal avarice.
To that end, Hackney Diamonds lands right on time for the two American bonanzas for which it seems algorithmically rendered: holiday spending and Super Bowl advertising. This is exactly the sort of album you gift a middle-age, mid-divorce dad who’s flailing for direction as he speeds around town in his post-split sports car, cranking the Stones’ anti-romance rants. A petulant ex for 60 years now, Mick Jagger is so pouty about being put out here it scans as absolute arrogance. Sneering opener “Angry” is the theme song for the pops who reminds everyone how hard he’s worked, how little thanks he gets, and how he’s also, inexplicably, “still taking the pills” and “off to Brazil.”
You can picture Dad pounding his hand against the steering wheel in time to “Bite My Head Off,” four minutes of punk so patrician that it takes a blown-out bass solo by Sir Paul McCartney for it to sound remotely tough. During “Driving Me Too Hard,” Jagger threatens to escape to Morocco or the corner bar, then concocts neologisms for crying, an emotionally unavailable man too afraid of these things called feelings to name them. What’s more, it sounds like the Eagles trying to be bland.
The other half of Hackney Diamonds feels like an advertisement for advertising placements, songs meant to be sold to sell something else. As The New Yorker’s David Remnick noted in 2010, the Stones grossed $2 billion in the prior 30 years, largely buoyed by big-ticket syncs for beer and software. The priapic pleas of “Get Close” seem customized for Cialis, its buoyant hook perfect for the smiling silver couple. James King’s throbbing sax solo makes an apt bed for the side-effects legalese at the end. “Dreamy Skies”—an interminable and illogical country blues about escaping to the woods “with no connections or a satellite phone”—presages a potential bidding war between Jeep and Subaru. It barely matters that these aren’t primo Stones cuts and that they are as bland as talcum powder. Touched up by tech, Watt, and a half-dozen assorted engineers, Jagger’s lissome tone remains instantly identifiable, a marketing team’s dream.
This is the first Stones album Watt has produced—not bad, since it’s only the fifth they’ve released since his birth. Still, he’s been here before. Apart from albums by Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber, Watt has helmed sessions by Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, and Elton John (a frequent guest on Hackney Diamonds). In this realm, Watt is the antithesis of Rick Rubin. Rather than lean into the age and experience of his elders, he drags them toward the present, goading them to sound like their younger selves within ill-fitting contemporary settings. For the Stones, Watt favors the molds of circa-millennium alternative rock, from Collective Soul to Franz Ferdinand, then buffs the results until they gleam like sickly wax figures. Jagger, terrifyingly, has never sounded so youthful. Keith Richards has rarely sounded so normal, his solos all exercises in convention and efficiency. Imagine upgrading a classic muscle car, say the MG Midget or a 1967 Shelby Cobra, with cheap but shiny plastic parts. Posed, patched, and polished until the actual character has all but disappeared, that’s how Hackney Diamonds sounds.
The Stones are so tightly wound for the album’s first nine songs that they risk snapping, their famously ramshackle indulgence supplanted by the need to be quantized and mechanized. They blessedly let up near the end, when Richards steps forward to lead “Tell Me Straight,” a vulnerable little query about a relationship’s odds of survival. With its dim flickers of dissonance and bedraggled tone, it is a welcome reprieve from Hackney Diamonds’ exhausting and ageless quest for perfection. (What’s more, it’s a reminder of how the looseness of Richards and the Stones at large helped inform bands like Slint and Sonic Youth.) This is as unmitigated and honest as the Stones have sounded in years, the age showing through Richards’ licks and lyrics. Good thing for Keef, too, as his solos on Hackney Diamonds are among the most routine and forgettable of his career.
Aside from a post-scripted cover of the Muddy Waters mantra that gave the band its name, Hackney Diamonds ends with “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a horn-lifted gospel number that mostly seems like an excuse to riff with Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. Jagger contemplates nationalism, poverty, and his own mortality, trying to resist the sirens’ call for just a bit more hard living. “No, I’m not going to hell in some dusty motel,” he rails, Gaga buttressing him as actual feeling and fight well up in his voice for the first time all album. “And I’m not, not going down in the dirt.” Jagger spends the first 30 minutes of Hackney Diamonds cosplaying a younger version of himself, all cocksure and strutting and fake. He is only convincing when he sings of what is real and nearer every day.
Richards turns 80 in December. Jagger beat him to octogenarian status by five months. It is possible, at least, that these Glimmer Twins will be the first two of our species to last forever. But probably not. And if Hackney Diamonds, despite the ever-impetuous Jagger’s protestations to the contrary, lands as the final Stones’ album, it won’t be a worthy farewell from the band that once made sex, danger, and bitter honesty so integral to rock’n’roll. Available in so many vinyl, CD, and Blu-Ray variants it should give Taylor Swift new ideas, Hackney Diamonds suggests that the key component of rock’n’roll as the Stones now see it is that it moves units. They have nothing of consequence to say here, even after losing the band’s anchor, nor no indelible riffs to play, even after two decades to write them. Just like the image of its title, Hackney Diamonds isn’t at all full of rare gems; it is, instead, the mess made in the attempt to get easy money from someone else. | 2023-10-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | October 20, 2023 | 4.5 | ac7125a1-fd3b-4bf5-b4dd-a7203f548443 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Julie Ruin’s second album, Hit Reset, is bandleader and punk icon Kathleen Hanna's most commanding release since her manifesto-writing days. | The Julie Ruin’s second album, Hit Reset, is bandleader and punk icon Kathleen Hanna's most commanding release since her manifesto-writing days. | The Julie Ruin: Hit Reset | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22073-hit-reset/ | Hit Reset | No sooner had Kathleen Hanna made her comeback than she was gone, struck down once again by the Lyme disease that had kept her out of the public eye for a decade. It was an authoritative return—documentary The Punk Singer cemented her legacy while the Julie Ruin’s debut album, Run Fast, started a new chapter of her life, or at least what seemed then like a period of remission. But while the band’s new-wave romp didn't lack energy, some of Hanna’s lyrics were unusually tentative. Not the title track, with its brutal truths about girls using butter knives to install locks on their bedroom doors, but elsewhere Hanna transferred her feelings to a nameless “you,” and anguished over “fake-forgiving... over-giving.” “Right Home” was about seizing the right to leave a crappy party, though it wielded a double edge. “I still wanna sink into some kind of hope,” she sang. “But I'm not real sure what the fuck I'm here for.” Hanna's relief at being well was palpable, but—understandably—she hadn't quite galvanized its purpose.
Three years later, Hanna is now fully recovered from her illness, and the Julie Ruin’s second album, Hit Reset, is her most commanding release since her manifesto-writing days. It’s a clean slate. Not a steady accumulation of baggage, but the chance to tip her experiences onto a sterile surface and assess each memory’s impact before dropkicking it into oblivion; the kind of process that’s often only possible when you’ve looked death in the face. It’s Hanna’s most personal work, interrogating the demands that have been placed on her her whole life: during life under duress as a kid in an abusive home. As the uneasy de facto spokeswoman for an anti-hierarchical scene. As the feminist trailblazer whose scholarship and trauma are perceived as a free resource and commodity, even more so now than when she sang “Starfish” 23 years ago. On Hit Reset, Hanna says no like only Kathleen Hanna can say no.
Hit Reset is bookended with songs about Hanna’s parents, one as chilling as the other is poignant. In the first three lines of the opener and title track, she distills her abusive father’s disregard for life and nurturing: “Deer hooves hanging on the wall/Shell casings in the closet hall/Drunk from a mug shaped like a breast.” Hanna dredges up her childhood fears; how she “slept with the lights on, on the floor/Behind a chair that blocked the door/Walk of shame from bedroom to plate/Stability just words of hate.” From that alone, you could understand how she became a feminist insurrectionist, but none of it would have been possible without her mother, to whom she pays tribute in final song “Calverton.” Named for the Maryland town where she grew up, it’s a ballad where Hanna sings endearingly off-key against ornate piano. The ugly-pretty contrast only makes the content more affecting; her mother’s whispered encouragement for everything Hanna’s father denigrated is what made her “think I could fly,” validating her voice. “Without you I'd take the fifth,” she sings. “Or be on my death bed still full of wishes.” The maternal aspects of Hanna’s own activism come into focus—the quality that made her an icon and a limb for leeches.
Hanna excavates that other trait we inherit from our mothers on Hit Reset: the emotional labor that can save and drain you, often at the same time. On “Be Nice,” she wails through distortion about the kind of guy who demands that you accept his aggressions with a smile as he calls you a bitch for refusing to satiate his grim desires, her hissing delivery and the band’s monochrome clatter evoking Grimes fronting Wolf Eyes. “Mr. So and So” is its opposite in sound: a tart sing-song against serrated guitar that could have fit Sleater-Kinney's No Cities to Love, where Hanna clowns the “male feminists” who mistake entitlement for enlightenment, damning female artists with faint praise.
Much of the rest of Hit Reset finds Hanna giving an acid bath to the toxic friends who offer nothing but needy narcissism and underhanded insults. “START A KICKSTARTER FOR YOUR HEART!” she and Kenny Mellman howl on the brilliantly ridiculous “Planet You,” which jolts on handclaps and new wave zaps. On B-52’s rager “Hello Trust No One,” Hanna ditches a frenemy, simultaneously celebrating herself and mocking expectations of feminist musicians: “Cause I can play one-handed guitar/While braiding my hair on a shooting star!” “Cause I can play electric guitar/While shaving my legs in a moving car!”
Any Hanna-related project is prone to vanishing beneath her mighty specter, but the deeper collaborative process that went into Hit Reset shines through. Kathi Wilcox, Sara Landeau, Kenny Mellman, and Carmine Covelli sound virile and versatile, digging into dank, bile-drenched sludge on “I Decide,” but keeping it classic on the curdled-Lesley-Gore vibes of “Rather Not.” There are indie-pop strains on “Record Breaker” and “Let Me Go,” where Hanna sings about her husband saving her from the pit of her illness when she would otherwise have given up. It builds from starry keys and jagged guitar to all-out sugar-laced chaos, bringing out the bittersweet qualities in her voice. Across Hit Reset, Hanna’s voice is as good a bill of health as any doctor could provide: On “I’m Done,” she wails on her cords like Pete Townshend windmills his guitar.
“I’m Done” falls towards the end of Hit Reset, where Hanna rejects the demands that have weighed her down all her life, and claims what’s rightfully hers. Funk riff-o-rama soundtracks her rampant pillaging on “Time Is Up”: “I come, I come, I come not to turn back time,” she taunts. “I come, I come, I come not for crown or throne/I came, I came, I came just to claim what’s mine/To glow like, to glow like a mountain of fireflies.” She lights up “Roses More Than Water,” with its tidy organ-dappled verses spilling into Hanna’s chattering chorus: “Maybe I want roses more than water and to be a loving father's daughter,” she sings. “Maybe I want something much more like a brownie sundae party behind closed doors or a typewriter palace with a shark filled moat,” she rambles on, voicing uninhibited childhood desires. “Maybe I’ll be hoaxed by my own demise; ‘I hear she saw a cliff and kept on driving.’” The pace slows to let her resolve emerge in perfect clarity: “Maybe I’m more hell-bent on living than I am just surviving.” | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | July 16, 2016 | 8.2 | ac7386c2-291d-4bcd-9fe1-09d0f701b0cd | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On their debut, Steely Dan brought pop instincts and studied musicianship to rock radio, putting a smooth spin on several hits that would prove to be a Trojan Horse for their esoteric ideas to come. | On their debut, Steely Dan brought pop instincts and studied musicianship to rock radio, putting a smooth spin on several hits that would prove to be a Trojan Horse for their esoteric ideas to come. | Steely Dan: Can’t Buy a Thrill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steely-dan-cant-buy-a-thrill/ | Can’t Buy a Thrill | In December 1972, one month after releasing their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill, Steely Dan got eviscerated in the pages of The Los Angeles Times for looking like a bunch of car mechanics who had somehow wandered onto the stage at Whisky a Go Go. “Live rock’n’roll is supposed to be a show, and how long can one look at a pair of denim overalls without becoming utterly bored or downright repulsed?” wrote critic Richard Cromelin. He offered a modicum of praise for the band’s “moderately energetic” stage presence, and then immediately tempered it: “If only they can find some time to go shopping.”
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona had made his debut that same year. Lou Reed issued Transformer, a glam rock album with a heavily made-up portrait of him on the cover, in November. Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, and Alice Cooper were all busy injecting danger and androgyny into American rock, which at the beginning of the ’70s was still finding its feet after the totality of the British invasion. And there were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, professional songwriters turned curmudgeonly bandleaders, playing jazz-rock with a group of like-minded nerds, wearing overalls and oozing contempt for their glitter-spangled peers.
A dark cynicism hardened around Becker and Fagen during their stints as songwriters-for-hire in Brooklyn and Los Angeles in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Both musicians were born on the East Coast—Fagen in Jersey, Becker in Queens—and carried an Atlantic saltiness with them to the streets of California. They had met as undergrads at Bard College, bonding fast over a shared love of jazz and Frank Zappa. Few other white kids in their orbit attached as fiercely to black music at the time: “I thought I was the only person in the world who was into this little secret about jazz,” Fagen said in a 1974 interview. He found Becker, his musical soulmate, and the pair began writing songs together on the upright piano in the lobby of their dorm.
After graduating, Fagen and Becker shopped their demos around various record labels, most of which laughed them out of their offices. Producer Gary Katz landed them a job as staff songwriters at the L.A. label ABC Dunhill, known for putting out records by North American rock bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night. The work was steady but boring, and Katz soon encouraged the two musicians to form their own band. Fueled more by a distaste for the early ’70s rock milieu than anything, Becker and Fagen ganged up as Steely Dan, a band named for a rubber strap-on in William S. Burroughs’ surrealist novel Naked Lunch.
They must have had some idea of what they were about to become. “The newly formed amalgam [of Steely Dan] threatens to undermine the foundations of the rock power elite,” Fagen wrote under the pseudonym Tristan Fabriani in the liner notes to the band’s 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill (they got the title from Bob Dylan, one of the few contemporaneous American musicians they could stand). “Amalgam” is right; rather than adhere to a standard rock formula, Steely Dan overloaded their sessions with players who could do Latin jazz or hot electric solos. They were a band who wanted more of everything: more guitarists, more drummers, more singers, spiraling out in a fever dream of excess. Fagen and Becker were the only writers in the room, but the credits for Thrill number a dozen musicians on instruments as far-flung as electric sitar and flugelhorn. Having escaped the sterile confines of commercial pop songwriting, Steely Dan were hell-bent on making a mess.
On paper, Thrill sounds as thorny as Italian prog, the product of a bunch of noodlers fiercely guarding their niche. But the record’s core hums with Fagen and Becker’s meticulous admiration for everything that makes pop tick. Bitter-mouthed contrarians in interviews, they wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise. The members of Steely Dan appeared to take themselves as seriously as long-suffering jazz purists in a world drunk on three-chord ditties, and then they shot up the pop charts with sunny, flippant ear candy-like “Reelin’ in the Years.”
As badly as they felt the need to differentiate themselves from mainstream rock’n’roll, it was always a part of Steely Dan. They claimed the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Dylan as influences before doing so became an outrageous cliché. Echoes of Zombies’ psychedelia and Beach Boys’ sunshine also waft through Thrill. Fagen and Becker stockpiled their debut with hooks aimed straight at your dopamine receptors, with vocal harmonies and gleaming guitar lines braided tight. The weird was there, embryonic, waiting to unfurl on later, more adventurous albums. But it curled itself up in service of pleasure.
Take “Dirty Work,” basically an Eagles song, or the “na-na-nas” of the post-hippie strutter “Change of the Guard”: No matter how detached they felt from it, Steely Dan put out pop music. They tried to make a ruckus and ended up polishing gems for broad consumption. “We’re a strange band y’know. The music is all WRONG,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1974. “Our songwriting process is not unlike the creation of junk sculpture.” If they identified with the gritty combines of mid-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, the songs they turned out were more like the sardonic baubles of Jeff Koons: fun, often hilarious, easy on the senses, and full of an unwavering disregard for the concept of authenticity.
Decades into their career, Fagen and Becker would claim the early hits as Trojan horses for complex musical ideas. “It was better to have our songs pass as pop songs and then have whatever else we wanted in them afterwards,” Becker said in 1995, as if the shimmering surface of Thrill were merely an excuse to smuggle their real musical passions into the mainstream. But the cresting harmonies and the guitar solos on “Reelin’” don’t sound like a front. They sound like a blast, like a group of young and insecure jazz dweebs egging each other on until they’ve made something so absurd even they can’t deny its allure.
Steely Dan crouched behind irony for much of their early career, and their popular legacy remains steeped in it. The hits from Thrill, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years,” blare out from classic rock stations right next to Black Sabbath, Yes, and all the other peers they shit-talked at the time. Their flair for melodrama, humor, and quick compositional turns got sucked right up into the most vapid (and delightful) of late ’70s hair metal hits, like Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” and Styx’s “Renegade.” They were so skeptical of rock music they ended up gilding it, breaking it down, and piecing it back together strangely enough for it to approach perfection. | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ABC | November 20, 2019 | 8.6 | ac7749d3-2221-4433-92fb-1bc034d24bce | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The Besnard Lakes have committed themselves to the “studio as an instrument” mentality of Brian Wilson on each of their sweeping, meticulously crafted albums, but their fifth effort draws from natural surroundings, fixating on the skies, the elements, and animals, both real and imagined. | The Besnard Lakes have committed themselves to the “studio as an instrument” mentality of Brian Wilson on each of their sweeping, meticulously crafted albums, but their fifth effort draws from natural surroundings, fixating on the skies, the elements, and animals, both real and imagined. | The Besnard Lakes: A Coliseum Complex Museum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21454-a-coliseum-complex-museum/ | A Coliseum Complex Museum | The Besnard Lakes are named for a real lake, but they’ve always been more closely associated with a studio. During the great Canadian indie rock boom of the mid-'00s, singer/guitarist Jace Lasek’s Breakglass Studios hosted bands like Wolf Parade, the Unicorns, Stars, and Land of Talk, capturing the imagination of music writers eager to pinpoint a connective thread behind Montreal’s music scene. Few of the acts that passed through Breakglass’s doors, however, put the studio to use quite like Besnard Lakes, who committed themselves to the "studio as an instrument" mentality of Lasek’s idol Brian Wilson on each of their sweeping, meticulously crafted albums. They’re the type of records that could have only been made by a band with a producer in its ranks.
The studio’s influence remains as strong as ever on the Besnards’ fifth album, A Coliseum Complex Museum, but this time the band’s namesake lake also makes its presence felt. For the first time, Lasek and bassist/co-lead Olga Goreas began demoing songs at the remote lake in Saskatchewan, where the couple had often discussed music but as a rule had previously resisted recording it. "It’s a great place for contemplation," Lasek explained in an interview last year. "There’s nobody up there, it’s really hard to get to and you could spend a whole day not seeing anybody, just standing on a beach surrounded by trees and water." Coliseum’s lyrics draw from those natural surroundings, fixating on the skies, the elements, and animals, both real and imagined (the album opens with "The Bray Road Beast" and "Golden Lion," each about a fantastical creature).
So A Coliseum Complex Museum is the band’s nature album, but mostly it’s another Besnard Lakes album, and more or less a mirror of 2013’s Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, right down to its refrigerator magnet poetry title, glimmering guitars, and Floydian ambitions. "The Bray Road Beast" wastes no time channeling Dark Side of the Moon, with a star-gazing guitar line traced from "Eclipse," while "Pressure of Our Plans" and "Towers Sent Her to Sheets of Sound" each culminate in a thicket of swirling psychedelia. These songs run a bit shorter than those on Until in Excess, but they’re every bit as dense.
The album lightens somewhat in its second half, as Goreas takes on a greater role vocally. Her game spotlight turn on the slick, unusually groove-oriented "The Plain Moon" is the closest Coliseum comes to matching the hooky rush of Until in Excess’ standout "People of the Sticks." The Low-esque "Necronomicon" is even dreamier, a respite from some of the album’s busier tracks that shows how good this band can sound when they dial things back. As if to make up for that relative restraint, though, the album closes on a note of excess with "Tungsten 4: The Refugee," six minutes of heaving classic rock that signs off with a purge of blustery guitar solos.
Coliseum stacks everything in the right place, and it’s all executed with the usual precision, so why doesn’t the album dazzle quite like the last few? Like the four albums before it, the Besnards self-recorded and self-produced this one at Breakglass, and more than its predecessors, it begs for an outside collaborator, somebody to shake up the band’s routine and perhaps lend some new tricks to their shrinking playbook. The joy of a great space-rock album, after all, comes not just from the sense of vastness, but also from the potential for surprise, the possibility that a thrilling reveal could be hiding behind every turn. After five albums, the Besnard Lakes don’t have many of those big surprises left in them. They still have galaxy-sized ambitions, but the galaxy they’re constructing is beginning to feel like a very small, overly familiar place. | 2016-01-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 18, 2016 | 6.5 | ac810e17-c6a1-4332-9c55-ebafa697efa1 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Fool is a playfully left-field electronic-jazz hybrid from Dutch artist Mitchel Van Dinther. It bursts at the seams with ideas, and at its best recalls the free spirit of late '90s electronic music. | Fool is a playfully left-field electronic-jazz hybrid from Dutch artist Mitchel Van Dinther. It bursts at the seams with ideas, and at its best recalls the free spirit of late '90s electronic music. | Jameszoo: Fool | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21911-fool/ | Fool | In experimental music, a lack of formal training is usually less a liability than a badge of honor. Not knowing exactly what you're doing, or claiming you don't, opens up new worlds of possibility, whether you are John Cage studiously applying thumbtacks to piano strings or George Crumb dipping cymbals in water. Dutch artist Jameszoo, aka Mitchel Van Dinther, calls his debut album Fool a collection of “naive, computer jazz," but while he may be untrained as a performer of jazz, he’s no naif as an artist, establishing himself clearly in the tradition of creative, mischievous tinkerers who sometimes hide behind the tag of “naive” as a means of avoiding heavier scrutiny.
Fool is the latest release by Brainfeeder, the label founded in 2008 by Warp’s experimental savant Flying Lotus, whose stated goal for the label was to “do the leftfield stuff no one else wants to do in the beat-driven world.” Since then, Brainfeeder has been home to a great number of warm, wonderful and weird records, some of which has been awesome and inspiring and others which were not. It’s clear from first listen that Fool too is without doubt an “out there” disc, both in the most literal and clichéd ideas of the term. Not only does the record burst at the seams with ideas, but nearly each song does so, with each of the free-flowing tracks careening internally from moments of austere beauty to jazzy breakdowns, to burbling bleeps and blaps and even Pierre Boulez-style musique concrete. It’s a lot of ideas and sounds to cram into a 43 minute record in general, made only a little bit easier to digest by the fact that there are hardly discernible pauses between most of the eleven tracks.
Despite the clutter, there are a number of moments on Fool where everything clicks, in particular the album’s bookends. Opener “Flake” begins with traditional IDM electronic/synth tones that belie the rest of the record’s feel, before falling away to a startling hybrid of G-Funk and chiptune. The beautiful noise here hearkens back to some of the more effervescent and fun experimental electronic music of the late '90s and early 2000 (Plone and early Jamie Lidell in particular come to mind). Closer “Teeth” starts slowly from a lovely interplay of reverbed organ and bass underneath some creaking metal sounds and a soaring violin, before building to a sort of tiny toy orgasm, similar to (but shorter and humbler than) the climax of Daft Punk’s “Contact” from Random Access Memories*—*and all in two-and-a-half minutes. It's the most focused track on the record, and perhaps not coincidentally the shortest.
There are other great moments on Fool as well, though Van Dinther’s haphazard compositional style means the record seesaws frequently from the sublime to the mundane, and vice versa. “Lose” follows the killer “Flake” intro but loses its momentum with what sounds like a synthetic orchestra tuning up. However after two-and-a-half minutes of dithering, the noise suddenly builds and breaks way to a gorgeous and alluring melody. The synths continue bleating but the melodic underpinnings take what were tedious sounds and turn it all into something worth remembering. Penultimate number “Toots” is structured similarly, with a warm church organ penetrating 3 minutes in, turning unfocused chirps into something powerful and direct.
Two other tracks of note on Fool feature noteworthy albeit obscure guests: “The Zoo,” featuring undersung '70s jazzbo Steve Kuhn and “Flu” featuring Brazilian bossa nova player Arthur Verocai. The former is a bit of a Take 2 on Kuhn’s original “Pearlie’s Swine” from his 1971 self-titled record, featuring a similar musical approach and with Kuhn repeating some of the spoke-sung lyrics from that song. Despite a nice and very Arthur Russell-esque electric cello intro, “The Zoo” is one of Fool’s most straight-forward jazz tracks, with some lovely vibraphones and mellifluous bass from Brainfeeder staple artist Thundercat. But for this reason it’s also less experimental, and comes off as a lesser version of the jazz which it apes. And unlike “Zoo,” which channels Kuhn directly, “Flu” seems like another Jameszoo fusion except two brief and pretty 20 second bursts of Verocai’s samba guitar in the middle of the song. But after each of the 20 second parts, the guitar disappears and the fusion returns, making Verocai’s contributions seem to be swallowed up by the earth.
Jameszoo's work is strongest when he tones down the overt jazz and instead parses the genre for specific sounds and ideas to embellish his electronic experimentations. It’s easy to imagine how a creative, introspective artist like Van Dinther might be able to harness his ample curiosity and ability in the future, but for now, a lack of focus keeps him grounded. Hopefully next time he gets there. | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | May 17, 2016 | 6.9 | ac87b352-9113-4e5f-ace0-bfe8e07560c8 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The legendary filmmaker and soundtrack composer John Carpenter began releasing standalone albums last year with Lost Themes. The followup is a reminder that the man was not known for sequels. | The legendary filmmaker and soundtrack composer John Carpenter began releasing standalone albums last year with Lost Themes. The followup is a reminder that the man was not known for sequels. | John Carpenter: Lost Themes II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21694-lost-themes-ii/ | Lost Themes II | The only direct sequel John Carpenter directed in his career was Escape from LA, and the critical reaction to his follow up to anti-hero Snake Plissken's New York adventures in the post apocalyptic millennial hellscape of urban America was a mixed bag. In 1996 for the New York Times Stephen Holden wrote that the movie barely kept afloat amidst its conceit of "hopelessly choppy adventure spoof." In his over forty-year film career Carpenter has cultivated a reputation that rests on a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to camp glory. Either it touches your or it doesn't. The oodles of corn syrup blood, saccharine thrills, and canned dialogue to some is secretly self aware and to others confoundingly corny.
His career as a musician is about as long as his film career, having scored almost all of his movies on his own with an admirably spare set up of minimal synths, and he's been widely praised for the sound design of his films. One could make an argument that his ability to foreground scenes with haunting sonics saved otherwise-faltering cinematics. He used repetitive synth notes as dramatic puppet strings, yoking reactions and scary moments for all their worth. He hasn't produced a score that has lived up to this billing since his early- and mid-career work in Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, or The Thing (when he went toe-to-toe with Ennio Morricone, no less). Lest we forget, he split music duties for one of his last scores with Anthrax. But that doesn't discount the fact that film scoring is irrevocably different because of what Carpenter did, and if anything his easily imitable minimalist style is in vogue again. Disasterpeace's luxuriant soundtrack/Carpenter love letter It Follows, or Mica Levi's spare soundscapes for Under the Skin, are living examples of Carpenter's enduring legacy. And outside of film, you can hear the whispers of Carpenter in the work of an artist like Oneohtrix Point Never.
Emerging from the renewed interest, he's begun a late-career revival as a solo musician, and last year released his debut studio album Lost Themes. It was the first time Carpenter made music not directly tied to any visual accompaniment. He said that the process was freeing, and the album was quite good, extracting the best sides of his scores over the years. All that being said, Carpenter is not a man known for his sequels. And his follow up to Lost Themes, the aptly named, Lost Themes II, goes to show that some ideas, some sounds, and some themes have legible and reasonable expiration dates.
Listening to the opening minutes of the album's introduction "Distant Dream" you miss the quieter and more restrained aspects of his music making. Brow-beating synth walls and a breathy chorus open the song at backbreaking pace, and then right in the middle you're treated with a drum solo so bombastic that it sounds copy-and-pasted from a Neil Peart practice sessions. And the album never slows down from this opening salvo. The second track "White Pulse" starts on a lighter note, and features a chord progressions that would have sounded fantastic in any of Carpenter's films, but quickly descends into a confusing midsong tempo change, filled with fat drum beats, belching pulses, and more choruses. Tracks like "Dark Blues" feature frolicking hair metal-style guitar solos. And others like "Angel's Asylum" or "Hofner Dawn" made me think of light shows at a local planetarium.
Songs in the album's back half, especially the penultimate track "Utopian Facade" make the experience worth it. Listening to it, even on a long, mundane bus ride, can make you feel the hero of your own movie. It's the perfect closing credits for the journey of a normal day. But these moments are few and far between. It pops up again in brief snippets of "Persia Rising" and "Last Sunrise," but it's not enough to detract from an overwhelmingly cheesy experience. You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand. | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | April 23, 2016 | 5.6 | ac87d403-bb6d-4a42-b05a-d3a684fc9024 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Trent Reznor’s third EP-length NIN release in the last two years is the best of the lot, with a raw and rough sound that feels both unfinished and alive. | Trent Reznor’s third EP-length NIN release in the last two years is the best of the lot, with a raw and rough sound that feels both unfinished and alive. | Nine Inch Nails: Bad Witch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nine-inch-nails-bad-witch/ | Bad Witch | Most Nine Inch Nails albums play like documents of sharp, turbulent mood swings. Bursts of rage give way to creeping anxiety; momentary ambience begets nihilism and noise. It’s a routine so familiar by now that fans should be able to predict Trent Reznor’s shifting temperaments like weather patterns. So when he recently announced plans to release his new music in a series of interconnected EPs, there was hope that he might, in this condensed format, locate his best angles, find a few new ones, and leave us wanting more.
Depending on who you ask, the refreshingly cohesive Bad Witch is either the final EP in that trilogy or his first full-length in five years. Even Reznor himself seems slightly bewildered by it: “It wasn’t necessarily what we thought it was going to be when we started,” he explained coyly about the project. While the six-song, 31-minute record is easily the shortest thing to ever pass for a NIN album, it’s hard to deny that it does feel distinct. Its preceding releases, 2016’s Not the Actual Events and last year’s Add Violence, were concise and sporadically thrilling surveys of Reznor’s oeuvre, but Bad Witch stands on its own. Like his greatest albums, it works best as a whole, played loudly on headphones in a dark room. Like his celebrated film scores with bandmate Atticus Ross, it successfully creates an atmosphere and invites us to explore every inch of it.
Coming from one of the ’90s most notorious perfectionists, this music has a startling roughness. Breakbeats enter and cut abruptly. Rattles and buzzes predominate. Melodic motifs recur like the whole thing’s being hammered out as the tape rolls. Reznor, who recently turned 53, sounds like he’s driven by new energy, taking pleasure in embracing unfamiliar or long-abandoned textures. Both the brevity and raggedness work in his favor, evoking in spirit if not sound the recent political records by PJ Harvey. If her artistic ideal involved allowing listeners to literally gaze upon her creative process, Bad Witch attempts to provide a similar portrait of the artist. It feels proudly like a work in progress.
Reznor plays saxophone throughout the record—he’d previously buried the instrument in the mix or relegated it to one-off soundtrack work (namely “Driver Down” from David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway, an obscure gem of a song that feels like a signpost for his new direction). In the opening “Shit Mirror,” he layers his sax blasts in mournful counterpoint to the thrashing, lo-fi electric guitars. In “Play the Goddamned Part,” one of two instrumental tracks, he uses the horn for hypnotic, dissonant effect. His treatment of the instrument is a reminder of a dormant tendency for subversion—the same skill that, many years ago, allowed him to twist the components of dance music into goth anthems that could win over rock radio and mud-soaked Woodstock stages.
“God Break Down the Door” is one of a few songs where the ghost of David Bowie looms large. In that single and the extraordinary closer “Over and Out,” Reznor approximates his hero’s haunted croon from Blackstar to convey a similarly cryptic omniscience. “You won’t find the answers here,” he sings, and his warning rings true. While the album title recalls the president’s favorite metaphor, Reznor’s lyrics rarely address current events beyond a general weariness and disgust. The vicious “Ahead of Ourselves” finds him cursing humanity and debating the existence of God: Just a few songs later, he introduces a divine presence for the sole purpose of fucking us all up.
As usual, he doesn’t let himself off the hook in this envisioned apocalypse. No matter the constant, accusatory use of second-person throughout his songbook, Reznor has always been the primary target of his own antagonism. At its most beautiful and most violent, his music suggests a desire for forgiveness blocked out by crushing static of his own design. “Can this world really be as sad as it seems,” he asked in a Charles Manson-echoing early lyric. That adjective choice—not frightening or cruel, but sad—seems crucial to his outlook. In the sprawling and genuinely unsettling instrumental track “I’m Not From This World,” it’s hard to say whether the title conveys a feeling of escape or total alienation. If the catharsis of NIN albums once came from exorcising all your demons in a row, this music suspends you in discomfort.
A sense of cosmic ambiguity permeates Bad Witch. These are neither his most inviting new songs nor his most immediate, but they rank among his most urgent. While he’s not the only artist from his generation to test out the potential of abbreviated releases (Pixies precede him in this trend; My Bloody Valentine and Smashing Pumpkins are set to follow), Reznor might be the first to land somewhere unexpected through the process. “Time is running out/I don’t know what I’m waiting for,” he sings in “Over and Out,” after a long, atmospheric build-up. History weighs heavily on his mind, but for the first time in a long time, Reznor sounds like he’s got his eye on the future. | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | The Null Corporation | June 23, 2018 | 8 | ac8e5f68-0ce7-436a-9cdd-544fbbc68d78 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Field's Axel Willner is among electronic music's most doggedly consistent musicians. Virtually all of his songs are built atop techno's steady pulse, but they share ambient music's domestic utility: If Satie's "furniture music" was meant to decorate rooms, the Field's music is the room. | The Field's Axel Willner is among electronic music's most doggedly consistent musicians. Virtually all of his songs are built atop techno's steady pulse, but they share ambient music's domestic utility: If Satie's "furniture music" was meant to decorate rooms, the Field's music is the room. | The Field: The Follower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21628-the-follower/ | The Follower | The Field's Axel Willner is among electronic music's most doggedly consistent musicians. This consistency, and his awareness of it, is right there in his unshowy and uniform album covers, the design of which has remained entirely unchanged since the beginning of his career, save for a switch from beige to black two albums back. That steadfastness is entirely suited to the work itself: Repetition, extreme repetition, is its modus operandi, its bread and butter, its raison d'être. All of his songs follow same method: to isolate a single, suggestive loop within a piece of recorded music and to spin that thread out into a gauzy cocoon, warm and protective. Virtually all of his songs are built atop techno's steady pulse, but they share ambient music's domestic utility: If Satie's "furniture music" was meant to decorate rooms, the Field's music is the room.
At the base of his songs, he typically favors loops that are richly, sensuously textured—a typical snippet might consist of a millisecond-long mishmash of guitar, voice, and the merest sliver of hi-hat, to give it bite—but the source isn't important; on previous albums, he's used Kate Bush's "Under Ice," the Cocteau Twins' "Lorelei," Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere," the Flamingos' 1959 recording of "I Only Have Eyes for You," and, perhaps most famously, Lionel Richie's "Hello," which reveals itself only at the end of 2007's "A Paw in My Face" after five minutes of anonymous shimmer, a startling kind of reverse sleight-of-hand. He's also created his own band and carried out the same techniques on them, for 2011's Looping State of Mind—the closest thing to a departure from the norm in his entire catalog. But on 2013's Cupid's Head, he abandoned his flirtation with song structures and delved back into sample-heavy web-weaving, resulting in what was then his most darkly enveloping album to date. The Follower follows its lead: It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured.
"The Follower" worms its way nervously between major and minor keys, torn between a burly bass loop and gossamer choral pads. "Pink Sun" teases stuttering whispers and pealing guitar tones over a synthetic background that shimmers like Kevlar; the reverberant voices that give shape to "Soft Streams" suggest the echoing interior of a vast cathedral. But while his details are as wispy as ever, Willner also occasionally flexes more muscle here than we're accustomed to hearing from him. The bulbous low end and hard snare thwacks of "The Follower" recall Kompakt's classic brand of techno at its most potent and no-nonsense; the yearning "Monte Verità," the album's emotional peak, distracts you with gauzy, wordless vocals and then knocks you senseless with bruising, overdriven drums.
One of the reasons that Willner's devotion to his chosen method has proven so productive is that repetition is such a powerful device. Loops can do funny things to your perception; especially when layered, they can conjure sounds that may or may not actually be present in the music—the ghostly byproducts of colliding frequencies. And with an average track length of nearly 10-and-a-half minutes, such extreme duration plays tricks upon the attention span. Take "Reflecting Lights," the hypnotic, 14-minute closer: Sculpting a ringing loop of guitar, tabla, and delay into a hypnotic moiré pattern, it's so unchanging and ruthlessly reduced that it can be difficult to orient yourself within it. It's the techno equivalent of whiteout conditions. (Perhaps that's why my computer's Shazam app had a temporary meltdown during the song, spitting out a half-dozen erroneous matches—shiny digital reggae, Italian singer-songwriter pop, minimal techno—that didn't sound anything like it. Given recent advances in artificial intelligence, it seems heartening, somehow, that Willner's heavily abstracted electronic music is apparently so human that the algorithms can't quite wrap their heads around it.)
The loop is also the perfect vehicle to experiment with tension and release, and that's where Willner really excels. His arrangements favor long, monotonous stretches precisely in order to set up the emotional payoff that comes when a chord pivots and hangs, briefly, vibrating intensely, before coming to rest where it began. The feeling is akin to two small magnets held in reverse, so that they strain each other with a seemingly impossible force, before being flipped and snapping back together again. These tensions contribute to the overwhelming physicality of his music, so viscous that it feels like running underwater fully clothed. Perhaps it's because of their sampled provenance, but his sounds have an unusual sense of material weight, of drag—you can feel the stylus carving its way through the groove, shaving off a few microns' worth of wax, with every pass of the loop.
Even on an album premised on plateaus, there are peaks and troughs; the queasy buzz of "Pink Sun" is not as immediately satisfying as the pitched desire of "Monte Verità" or the rosy glow of "Raise the Dead." And it's worth asking whether "Soft Streams" really needs to be 11 minutes long, instead of, say, nine, or even seven. Still, for these pieces to work their magic, they need to pull you in, to blot out the world outside. And just as those moments of tension need something to pull against, highlights like "Monte Verità" require a muted background against which to shine. The Field's very first album set a high bar with its title, From Here We Go Sublime, and the truth is that he got there a long time ago. But even if, at this point, he's just rearranging the furniture in God's own living room, it's still an environment unlike any other. | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | April 4, 2016 | 7.9 | ac99cd95-4acd-48c6-9546-ab5c3c156968 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The final album from the punk trio captures everything that was bratty, tender, and unforgettable about its leading force, Kim Shattuck, who passed away earlier this year. | The final album from the punk trio captures everything that was bratty, tender, and unforgettable about its leading force, Kim Shattuck, who passed away earlier this year. | The Muffs: No Holiday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-muffs-no-holiday/ | No Holiday | Kim Shattuck started the Muffs in the early ’90s as a reaction to the self-serious West Coast alternative music scene blowing up around her. “I was getting really bummed,” she remembered years later. “Stuff like the Red Hot Chili Peppers were happening and I was like, ‘I fucking hate them so much, I have to write the anti-Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.’” So she did, burying shards of Beatles and Kinks melodies in sneering three-chord punk ditties. Once she started, she never stopped.
The Muffs signed to Warner Bros. for their first three records, but despite Shattuck’s sticky melodies and instantly recognizable sing-scream, success on the level of California contemporaries Green Day and the Offspring eluded them. Their biggest mainstream moment remains their disaffected cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America”—it plays during the opening credits of Clueless. (Shattuck hated that, too. “The lyrics are not good. Like, they talk about East California. What is that?” she told TIME in 2015.) Shattuck seemed to know her band wasn’t cut out for the big time, and was unfazed: “[Our label has] this job to break our band,” she told Rolling Stone in 1995. “And I totally feel sorry for them because it’s not going to happen.”
Instead, the Muffs attained a cult status that grew steadily over the years. By the time Shattuck briefly joined the reunited Pixies—and was subsequently kicked out, possibly for being too extroverted—there was hardly a punk songwriter alive who hadn’t been touched by her throat-shredding screams, lively melodies, and bratty, tender songwriting.
So when, two weeks before the release of their seventh album No Holiday, Shattuck’s husband of 16 years shared that Shattuck had died of ALS, the world briefly stopped. Shattuck had never publicly talked about her diagnosis, so her passing came as a devastating shock. An outpouring of grief came from her contemporaries and those she’d inspired. The forthcoming record suddenly took on new meaning: This would be the final time we’d ever get to hear Shattuck’s wail.
The songs on No Holiday were written throughout Shattuck’s career, from 1991 to 2017, so it feels like a best-of record, or a retrospective. “We wanted to create something lasting and special,” drummer Roy McDonald said of No Holiday. If a young person hadn’t heard of the Muffs, it would be a safe bet to hand them this record and say “start here.”
Shattuck’s voice feels raspier and more raw on some of the album’s 18 tracks, a little less energetic, but the musical chemistry between her, McDonald, and bassist Ronnie Barnett remains untouched by time. At the end of “Lucky Charm,” her voice twinges upward with distinctive snideness: “You should be in the mooo-vieesss, yeeeeah.” It’s good to have her back.
On a few songs, it feels as if the full band has been retrofitted onto Shattuck’s acoustic demos. That mix-and-match sound is an interesting but confusing choice: Some of those songs, like “Happier Just Being With You” and “Too Awake,” would have sounded just fine with just Shattuck’s voice and acoustic guitar. The full band makes it harder to hear her, which is—now more than ever—what listeners want most.
The most unexpected moment on No Holiday comes in its final track, “Sky.” In contrast to nearly 30 years of sneering, eye-rolling, screeching, and fighting back, on “Sky” Shattuck offers earnest lullaby over just an acoustic guitar and a church organ. “I am laying on the nice cool grass and now I’m thinking/Wondering if the birds can fly straight up and there’s no ceiling,” she sings, tenderly. “I know I can’t touch the sky/I know I’ll wonder why.”
“Sky” is a tragically perfect way to close out what is now the Muffs’ final record. Shattuck will be remembered for many things: her outsized-but-undersung contribution to the punk lexicon, her lyrics that were mean and sarcastic and sensitive and sweet, all at once. But “Sky” is a poignant reminder that she was an unforgettable songwriter and a buoyant spirit.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Omnivore | October 18, 2019 | 7.8 | aca009ee-65bb-4d8c-946c-ea55c30e3df9 | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
Here Come the Rattling Trees is the 11th album by the baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas. Scored for a play of the same name originally presented in London, the album scales back on the sumptuous orchestral colors of their work while staying true to their classic blend of '60s pop and exotica. | Here Come the Rattling Trees is the 11th album by the baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas. Scored for a play of the same name originally presented in London, the album scales back on the sumptuous orchestral colors of their work while staying true to their classic blend of '60s pop and exotica. | The High Llamas: Here Come the Rattling Trees | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21458-here-come-the-rattling-trees/ | Here Come the Rattling Trees | Here Come the Rattling Trees, the 11th studio album by baroque pop ensemble the High Llamas, exists as a means to an end. As the cover says, the music on this short and sweet LP was written by the group’s leader and principal songwriter Sean O’Hagan to accompany a theater production of the same name, with the brief interludes and tunes meant to be woven between monologues by the play’s six characters. Initially presented in October of 2014 at the Tristan Bates Theatre in London’s Covent Garden, the intention is to eventually take the show on a tour through Europe and the U.S. But since O’Hagan has no theatrical bona fides to speak of, the only way to make it happen is to treat it like the promotional campaign for a new record.
Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.
It’s a shame, too, because the play happens to be quite affecting. Rattling Trees uses extended anecdotes to comment on the rapid changes happening in London, particularly in Peckham, a region in the southeastern part of the city where O’Hagan has lived for over 20 years. As the performance moves along, we hear from a plumber, a cafe worker in her sixties, a decorator, a housewife, and a health fanatic, each lamenting or appreciating the monied middle class pouring into the neighborhood and bringing with them higher rents and expensive tastes.
With just the music to go by, the lyrics lose much of their impact. The references to the "slogans splashed above the mess that they made" in "McKain James" don’t stick as deep without first hearing the decorator tell of his youthful days spray-painting anarchist jeremiads on the walls of apartments he was contracted to work on (before covering the graffiti with wallpaper or a coat of paint). So, too, does the sparkling "Livorno" need the context of the plumber marveling at the pretentious attitudes of the bourgeois couple he’s working for to really give the song some weight. Other tracks fare better: The lovely "Jackie" leavens the melancholy of the cafe worker’s rather drab day-to-day existence with a bouncy, harpsichord-driven swing and an impeccable chorus, and the title track recalls the early solo efforts of Paul McCartney with bulbous bass tones and electric piano.
During the Covent Garden run of Rattling Trees, the members of the High Llamas were set onstage in a semicircle,with actors standing in the middle delivering their lines. This meant that O’Hagan was forced to strip back the instrumentation considerably, and he really rose to the challenge: Even without those extra Van Dyke Parks-like splashes of symphonic color, the album is still instantly recognizable as a High Llamas production. Instead, the space gets filled with quick stabs of upright piano or wah-wah-ed guitar lines or, on the plucky "Mona’s Song," some tight vocal harmonies repeating a single phrase.
The play is set in front of an old leisure centre that has been bought up by a larger company and rebranded with a new name and look. As each character enters the show, they comment on this change, often wondering why the change needed to happen. Though O’Hagan surely didn’t mean it as such, that stands as a tidy metaphor for the pop music landscape that he and his Llamas enter into every few years or so. For 25 years now, the project has wondered aloud why the songwriters of the world needed to step out of the warm bath of the orchestral pop and exotica sounds of the '60s and '70s. We can admire him for staying the course all this while, but we also need to ask: Even when the music is wrapped up within the framework of a theater performance, will there be anyone listening? | 2016-01-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | January 20, 2016 | 6.7 | aca91d65-9563-4155-92e8-06bdc5d68180 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
On her second album proper, the Scottish producer/composer/singer-songwriter dials up her rock band’s dynamic power, creating a nervy, chaotically controlled embodiment of contemporary uncertainty. | On her second album proper, the Scottish producer/composer/singer-songwriter dials up her rock band’s dynamic power, creating a nervy, chaotically controlled embodiment of contemporary uncertainty. | Anna Meredith: FIBS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-meredith-fibs/ | FIBS | The clarion sounds that opened Anna Meredith’s first pop recording—a Novation synthesizer’s brass and tuba presets and a cello, on “Nautilus,” from the 2012 EP Black Prince Fury—simultaneously created her musical trademark and set her on a fresh path. The phrase is a bold, symphonic fanfare that, once the rock drums hit, announced a genre-free space while helping Meredith ascend from the contemporary classical sandbox. The song became something like the Scottish composer/producer/singer-songwriter’s sonic signature, returning on subsequent releases (her 2016 full-length debut, Varmints, as well as Bo Burnham’s 2018 film Eighth Grade, which also features her gorgeous original score); variants now reappear throughout her new album FIBS. Most importantly, it highlighted how Meredith brings musical tropes familiar to the masses—in this case, marches of cinematic elephants and stormtroopers, or textures of grime and Southern hip-hop, or the pulse of Carnival parades—into rarified arts spaces, challenging assumptions about class, meaning, and volume inherent to both concert halls and clubs, while trying to keep the fun and the seriousness in both.
These are also among the social and narrative tensions at the heart of FIBS. With her second proper album, Meredith shelves the notion of a small group making symphonic dramas and instead takes increasing advantage of the dynamic power that a synth- and guitar-driven band can generate, in the way that some downtown New York composers did during punk’s heyday. The shift also informs her music’s sentimental upheaval, giving it an increasing immediacy and wrapping it in a vaguely political air. FIBS never stoops to proclaim itself pro- or anti- any forces currently in diametric opposition (in the UK or around the world). But it is music that embodies this precarious historic juncture, mirroring the chaos and instability of the contemporary moment in its very form. In this, Meredith has written a set of pieces that better speaks to our era than her classically trained peers’ middlebrow drones and respectful sit-down music. FIBS is just too loud and nervy for that—kinda like the newsfeed.
Even before “Nautilus,” Meredith seemed predestined for this terrain, with one foot in pop and another in new classical, and choreographing those limbs to brilliant effect. Her catalog—a solo for bassoon amplified like punk guitar; a Steve-Reich-meets-Stomp “Body Percussion” orchestral piece; an IDM mash-up of a brunch classic, etc.—is recommended to anyone bored by much of what passes for contemporary repertoire. After “Nautilus,” Meredith’s pop miniatures also reflected an art-school nature. It’s in her non-traditional instrumentation and songwriting, whose complex structures and crisp lyrical narratives have precedents throughout the UK’s post-punk, art-prog, synth-pop timeline. Varmints was a wonderful embrace of this space, full of sinewy pop songs and instrumentals that echoed the propulsion of Pixies and New Order, often heavy on the backbeat, always rightfully assured in their own greatness.
Yet from its title on down,Varmints also hinted that, while the drums and instrumental runs were intent on activating the serotonin, more diseased thoughts about the state of our institutions were also present. “Taken,” which featured Meredith amid a trio of voices and has the dark, muscular feel of synth pop on steroids, was unsparing in its take on a world that the sun once never set upon: “What seemed a good idea has fast become a fraying waste of time.” FIBS picks up the sentiment three years later, when those words not only don’t sound the slightest bit dated, they’re the foundation for the current rot. “Inhale Exhale” is FIBS’ own propulsive sequencer-and-toms prologue, but Meredith sounds like she’s singing from an island, exasperated: “You say you're dancing in the deep end/But to me, it looks like drowning/All this talk of saving, but I'm out of my depth.” Her wordless vocal ushers in the song’s primary melody, and a title-repeating chorus arrives with the kick drum and a stuttering bass synth; when the song rolls on, with all the layers working as a single mechanism, it explodes as a trebly pop runaway, at once hyper-vivid and hyper-tense. It is an expertly produced rush that foresees an imminent crash, delivered in a voice that has already lived its consequences.
That chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe. The feverish “Sawbones” is a prog-rock hallucination, fluidly Frankensteining one sonic caricature onto another, juxtaposing high-pitched staccato keys with bass-synth splurges, mutating into guitar arpeggios that interact with disco hi-hats, and so on. “Calion” could easily qualify as a beatless techno piece, its muted kick appearing beneath undulating melodic percolations; yet soon enough a dubwise low end appears like an earthquake to destabilize the whole thing, as the swirling mass tumbles all around. “Bump” brings back the signature “Nautilus” textures with an even more egregious “Imperial March” nod, as Jack Ross’ guitar drills into its structure to make this song too fall apart before reconstituting as a mammoth one-note guitar-synth riff. “Paramour” tacks that familiar brass fanfare (tuba now courtesy of Tom Kelly) onto a hyperactive, electronics-driven instrumental, pairing them with a squealing guitar in the closest thing to funk syncopation that Meredith can be accused of. All of it is intense music of supreme control and a designed anarchy, full of loud proclamations that go a long way toward embodying the album’s title.
The parts of FIBS that lie on the outskirts of these Technicolor spasms of pandemonium bring meaning and reprieve—on occasion, simultaneously. “Killjoy” musically quotes the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” while applying Meredith Monk-like vocal repetitions to wonderful verses that showcase a confrontation with modern life (“Thanking you for leaving/Do what’s best to save face…/Thanking you for stealing/What's left of the daytime”); the chorus follows these up as an assertion of personal will. “moonmoons” and “Limpet” are two of the softest and most musically straightforward instrumentals Meredith has set to record—the former a lovely duet between electronics and cello in which clouds gather and dissipate, the latter a guitar-heavy ride with a hook that features Meredith’s take on a Clearmountain pause. Those songs’ simplicity suggests the deep breath required of survival. Yet survival is not at all assured on the closing elegy “Unfurl,” where a suddenly vulnerable Meredith intones, “Something's bound to break/It better not be me.” And who could blame her?
There is, throughout FIBS—and Anna Meredith’s career—a necessary act of pretension at play. Not the act of putting on airs or simple mimicry, but of pretending, what Eno once called the “thought experiments [of finding] out what it would be like to be otherwise” for culture’s benefit. What began with Meredith turning the Novation presets up to 11 and seeing how they fit with Bonham-like drums has, rather strangely, ended up a musical expression of dancing through a world full of lies, not wanting to stop, and seeing where else it takes her. Back around “Nautilus,” Meredith said that, to her, “honesty is more interesting than originality.” Her acts of pretension have seen her wind up with a fair bit of both. | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Black Prince Fury | November 5, 2019 | 7.7 | acab4277-8717-4ee7-9234-542aba82dcac | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
There are glimpses of Vitalic's old energy on Voyager, but he's dialed back on the maximalist energy that made his dancefloor anthems radiate. | There are glimpses of Vitalic's old energy on Voyager, but he's dialed back on the maximalist energy that made his dancefloor anthems radiate. | Vitalic: Voyager | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22744-voyager/ | Voyager | Pascal Arbez-Nicolas has spent years trying to wriggle free of Vitalic’s 2001 breakthrough debut Poney EP. It still casts a long shadow; the chain-driven turbo-fluttering hiss of “La Rock 01” and the horror/euphoria grind of “Poney Part 1” were the early alley-oops to the monster jams of Ed Banger’s mid-’00s heyday. But after OK Cowboy fleshed out his geeked-out aggro electro-house and Flashmob let it grow even wilder, Rave Age revealed the limits of his overblown attack: sooner or later, like any powerful drug, all you get from ramping up the dosage is a baseline feel of familiar getting-by normality.
Voyager comes more than a decade after OK Cowboy amplified Vitalic’s thrilling role in the French Touch scene, and it feels like it. There are glimpses of the old feverish energy on the record—Arbez can still bring the no-fucking-around 4/4 with big stompy kicks—but to what end, it’s never entirely clear. The one thing you could definitely expect from a Vitalic record, good or bad, was abrasion. But Voyager power-washes all the distortion away, leaving a shiny surface that feels anonymous in its spotlessness.
Without that leviathan hum, a lot of Voyager’s cuts stall out at “mildly exciting.” Most of the music’s your standard uptempo placeholder dance, detached from fleeting trends but also uninterested in finding a new niche. It’s not like Vitalic-Goes-Synthwave would be a guaranteed improvement over the water-treading stasis of tracks like “Levitation” or “Use It or Lose It,” but it’d at least hint at something besides an effort to carry a torch for blog house when everyone else has moved to different platforms.
The ostensible anthems on Voyager range from meaningless sincerity (the downtempo loneliness-cliche checklist “Don’t Leave Me Now”) to meaningless goofiness (“Sweet Cigarette” is more or less what would happen if “Warm Leatherette” was about Christopher Buckley’s “Thank You for Smoking” instead of JG Ballard’s “Crash”). And the closest things get to an engagingly scuzzy headfirst dive into the weirder corners Vitalic used to skulk around in is “Hans Is Driving,” another downtempo navelgazer that sounds like a cruel parody of Drive-chic and features Miss Kittin evoking Euro-club aimlessness. It’s the kind of stuff that really works when there’s no shame and no half-measures, but Voyager’s attempts to pay homage to disco ancestors while paring his maximalism way back make it all feel like a dance night in an unfurnished room, all speakers and no lighting. | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Citizen / Clivage | January 26, 2017 | 5.4 | acac1ee2-a8a5-4d85-963e-99db4200b069 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The French electronic titans’ fourth album is sleekly aerodynamic, expensively appointed, and stacked with bold-name guests like Tame Impala and Thundercat. If only there were some real drama. | The French electronic titans’ fourth album is sleekly aerodynamic, expensively appointed, and stacked with bold-name guests like Tame Impala and Thundercat. If only there were some real drama. | Justice: Hyperdrama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justice-hyperdrama/ | Hyperdrama | For a brief spell on Hyperdrama, Justice’s fourth studio album, it’s 1991 all over again and the rave gods are raining down lightning bolts from on high. Justice have always been time travelers, and on “Generator,” the album’s second track, they zap us back to the past with a serrated synth that tears across the stereo field like the Jaws of Life ripping through a crumpled Delorean. The sound is a reference to Joey Beltram’s oft-sampled “Mentasm,” a cornerstone of early-’90s hardcore techno and everything loud and rude—jungle, gabber, breakcore, and, however tenuously, Ed Banger itself—that followed. It might be the heaviest thing the French duo has ever set to tape; given their history (hard-rock riffs, Marshall stacks, a song called “Heavy Metal”), that’s saying something. But that very heaviness also makes the song an outlier on the album, because Justice have never sounded more polished.
Magpies in leather jackets, with cigarettes forever dangling from their lips, Justice used to make a point of being provocative. Their records were awash in jagged sawtooths, clashing frequencies, and bit-crushed drums. They brought playground swagger to hits like “D.A.N.C.E.” and winkingly channeled stadium-rock dinosaurs on prog behemoths like “New Lands.” But on Hyperdrama, their first album in eight years, they sound professional, meticulous, and surprisingly grown up. This time, rather than the ersatz hard rock of their debut, the ostentatious prog of Audio, Video, Disco., or even the disco AOR of Woman, they channel the cocktail of dance and ’80s pop developed in the 1990s by their French touch forebears, particularly Alan Braxe, whose “Music Sounds Better With You” (made with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and the singer Benjamin Diamond, as the trio Stardust) set the gold standard for Gallic dance pop.
It’s a slick sound, sleekly aerodynamic and expensively appointed, and buffed to an ultra-vivid sheen. On the opening “Neverender,” Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker floats atop a sumptuous bed of pulsing keys; the claps and cymbals are so crystalline that they might be jewels in a vitrine. The choral pads, car-chase arpeggios, and starry-eyed crescendo of “Dear Alan”—surely a tribute to Braxe himself—are as sumptuous as the wriggly disco-funk bassline is spry. Track after track is bathed in a hyperreal glow that’s a world away from the duo’s scuzz-encrusted early work. At some point, Justice apparently traded their cigarettes for vapes, and something of that transition feels palpable in the toned-down sound of Hyperdrama: the discreet tug instead of the defiant drag, the blue LED in place of the burning ember.
Incongruous mash-ups, like the disco vamps and grueling techno of their 2007 single “Stress,” have been part and parcel of Justice’s music from the beginning, but on Hyperdrama, digital/analog hybrids—like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, or, indeed, a gleaming, futuristic vape pen—assume subtler forms. In “Generator,” the duo offsets the apocalyptic “Mentasm” stabs and pumping piano-house chords with sprightly disco bass, as though flickering between Fantazia and Studio 54. It’s a novel juxtaposition, and skillfully executed, though something about its “Hey! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” setup feels slightly too clever, better suited for a creative director’s mood board than the messiness of an actual dancefloor.
“Afterimage” performs a similar bait-and-switch, balancing doomy techno synths with the breathy rapture of guest singer Rimon’s ecstatic sighs, but the contrast isn’t quite provocative enough to save the song’s expression of bliss from sounding generic. It doesn’t help that most of the guest singers Justice employ here—Parker, Rimon, Miguel, Thundercat, and Manchester electro-pop duo the Flints—opt for a similar falsetto range, making them all sound interchangeable. The clash of the totems is more interesting on “Moonlight Rendez-Vous,” a two-minute sketch that poses an unusual thought experiment: What if Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” had been recorded in the style of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack?
The album’s best tracks are the most audacious: the unbridled joy of “Dear Alan,” a veritable fireworks display of pinwheeling arps and halo effects; the over-the-top prog-disco fusion of “Incognito,” which builds to a distorted climax reminiscent of Justice’s rebellious early hijinks, now rendered in state-of-the-art hi-def. But too much of it is simply too smooth—ploddingly mid-tempo, curiously risk averse. Nine songs into a 13-track run, “Explorer” bogs down in a morass of Phantom of the Opera synths; “Muscle Memory,” which follows, could have been a chance to show off their analog chops, but instead it feels like a Stranger Things retread—a synthwave set piece that’s been done many times before.
Justice don’t call their guest performers features; instead, the singers are credited with “starring” roles. A minor detail, perhaps, but one that speaks to the duo’s aims. Like Daft Punk, they’ve always understood the power of a strong visual, and those “starring” credits suggest they’re thinking of Hyperdrama in terms of spectacle—if not a movie, then a headlining festival slot. At Coachella this month, the duo stood stock still and let their light show do most of the work, while the disembodied voice of Kevin Parker looped into a crescendoing approximation of the kind of techno that’s only fleetingly audible within Hyperdrama’s carefully tended grounds.
It’s hard to escape the sensation that, beneath the album’s pristine surface, there are two dynamics at war: the insouciant energy of “Incognito” versus predictable, frictionless, strangely inoffensive anthems like “Neverender.” The eccentric versus the consummate professional; the maverick versus the safe bet. Yet for an album called Hyperdrama, actual tension—the kind of friction that once made Justice’s music feel so vital—is otherwise frustratingly hard to find. | 2024-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ed Banger / Because Music | April 26, 2024 | 6.3 | acb1f8bc-29e5-45a0-bc29-5c0762c9dbb4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Four decades in, Jad Fair retains his innocent abandon on Half Japanese’s sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. | Four decades in, Jad Fair retains his innocent abandon on Half Japanese’s sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. | Half Japanese: Hear the Lions Roar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22770-hear-the-lions-roar/ | Hear the Lions Roar | For over four decades now, Half Japanese have been one of indie rock’s most reliable sources of positivity. Jad and David Fair started the band in the mid ’70s as a giddy experiment in the limits of guitar pop songwriting. They didn’t tune their instruments properly and they chose not to play chords, embracing the infinite possibilities that the electric guitar can offer if you approach it without regard for the patterns and scales most players find themselves locked into. Freed from the shackles of traditional pop songwriting, the Fair brothers embraced something a little shaggier, using their freedom as the basis for ebullient songs about love and monsters, as David once put it, each as unrepentantly gleeful as the gap-toothed grin of a young child. Their 2014 album was, appropriately, called Overjoyed.
All of that innocent abandon is still at the heart of the band on their sixteenth studio album Hear the Lions Roar. Within the first 30 seconds of the album opener “Wherever We Are Led,” over brillo-scoured guitar work, Jad begins wailing, “Refuse to bend, refuse to break, only good we will take.” It scans as an unwitting mission statement for the record—a promise to follow their their muse and tell the good news through posi-pop sloganeering and slapstick surrealism. There’s little on the record in the way of anxiety or fear, unless you count the sci-fi Southern rock of “Attack of the Giant Leeches,” which recounts a bungled science classroom prank that results in the unwitting creation of bloodthirsty worms several stories tall—all soundtracked by the gentle wheeze of a distant slide guitar. It’s somewhere between genius and moronic, which is pretty much where the band have always set up camp.
As the years have gone by, they’ve become more proficient as musicians, transforming their early instrumental scribbles into legible riffs, at least if you squint at them right. Jad even admitted in a recent interview that even tunes his guitar sometimes. This goes a step further on Hear the Lions Roar, on which Jad is only credited with vocals, and the rest of the current lineup—John Sluggett, Gilles-Vincent Rieder, Jason Willett, and Mick Hobbs, all on multiple instruments—beef up the vibrant playing that’s come to define the last couple decades of Half Japanese releases into more standard indie rock.
The taut shuffle of “On the Right Track” or the gentle lilt of “Do It Now,” in particular, feel compact, tight, and forceful in a way that their material often hasn’t. But because they built their name on idiosyncrasy and spontaneity, that straightforwardness of *Hear the Lions Roar *can cut both ways. Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.
But whatever the result of the newfound muscle, they never really slip into mundanity, solely on the strength of Fair’s voice and songwriting. After all these years, his wiry voice is still hits every song with a shock that’s equal parts joy buzzer and defibrillator, each barely in-key bleat alternating between laughable and life-affirming. That’s a big part part of what makes Fair’s music worth following, both with Half Japanese and on his own. He’s always succeeding in spite of his limitations—even when they’re self-imposed. As with all of their records, the worst you’ll come away with is a smile, and most days that’s enough. | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire | January 16, 2017 | 6.9 | acb6f1ac-42cc-40bc-8bb8-e3ca340f315c | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The Chicago-based indie rocker beefs up her sound on her third LP. Foregrounding her confident voice and formidable guitar skills, it’s a compact, muscular record guided by a single-minded intensity. | The Chicago-based indie rocker beefs up her sound on her third LP. Foregrounding her confident voice and formidable guitar skills, it’s a compact, muscular record guided by a single-minded intensity. | Squirrel Flower: Tomorrow’s Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squirrel-flower-tomorrows-fire/ | Tomorrow’s Fire | For the past few years, Ella Williams has been relentless. The Massachusetts-born, Chicago-based songwriter released her debut album as Squirrel Flower in 2020 and then, after contracting COVID and recovering, recorded and released a follow-up in 2021. Last year, she gathered enough material for a self-produced EP. For a young musician—Williams is 27, and started recording music when she was 18—such a sustained level of output could be exhausting, in many senses of the word: It might lead to burnout, or empty the reserves of what she has to say. But on Williams’ new record, Tomorrow’s Fire, all that effort has only intensified her ambition. It’s a beautiful, searing record in which Williams channels listlessness and desperation into sweltering, explosive rock songs.
When she first began releasing music on Bandcamp, Williams winkingly tagged Squirrel Flower’s output, recorded when she was a student at Iowa’s Grinnell College, as “cornfield-folk,” “prairie-pop” and “post-Monsanto.” That early songwriting and her debut album, I Was Born Swimming, were promising if somewhat fragmentary folk-tinged indie-rock, and her music became bolder and more brooding on her sophomore record, Planet (i). But Williams’ true strengths have long been her fierce guitar skills and powerful, confident voice, and on Tomorrow’s Fire, she and producer Alex Farrar (known for his work with artists like Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, and Snail Mail) push both to the fore. The resulting album—made with a sharp studio band, including MJ Lenderman, storied Asheville collaborator Seth Kauffman, and members of Bon Iver and the War On Drugs—is compact and muscular; Williams refines her singular voice as a songwriter, bringing a focused, single-minded intensity to her songs without giving the impression that she’s ever repeating herself.
Throughout Tomorrow’s Fire, Williams combines graceful vocal harmonies and big, reverb-laden guitars in a way that makes her songs feel cavernous, as at the cathartic end of “Almost Pulled Away,” or on the fuzzy, blistering “Canyon.” “When a Plant Is Dying,” a slow-burning ode to perseverance under grueling conditions, features a full minute of guitar solos that burn bright with indignation and pent-up frustration. But Williams knows her way around a hook, too: “Intheskatepark” is buoyant and sunny, verging on indie pop, and “Alley Light” has a catchy heartland-rock sensibility. Tomorrow’s Fire’s opener is actually a reworking of one of Williams’ earliest songs. Here, what was originally spare and lonely becomes hypnotic and lush, washing Williams’ voice in a cascade of harmonies—a testament to her creativity in the studio and increasing command of her sound.
These songs feel ambitious but not unbridled—Williams’ vision has depth and purpose, and her lyrics tell of a willingness to confront the forces standing in her way. “You hate when I do that,” she cries in “Stick,” before fighting back: “But I hate when I change/So I won’t be changing.” “When a Plant Is Dying” and “Full Time Job” both tackle the exhaustions of working as an artist: “There must be more to life/Than being on time,” she sings on the former. On several songs, she resists domestic boredom with aplomb: “Never wanted to be someone’s wife/Give up my whole life,” she sings on “Full Time Job” as the band thrashes beneath her; on the aptly titled “i don’t use a trash can,” she warns, “I’m not gonna change my sheets/I’m not gonna clean the floor.”
The album’s title comes from a novel written by Williams’ great-grandfather, who named it after a line by the Medieval French poet Rutebeuf: “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner/Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight.” That aching tenacity is reflected across the record. In “What Kind of Dream Is This,” Williams sings longingly of the moment when “the night’s so dark it’s almost light again.” “When a Plant Is Dying” takes as its central metaphor the wind picking up fresh seeds released by moribund vegetation: Struggle or suffering, the song offers, can create the possibilities for new growth. The problems around and within us may be relentless, but Williams’ fire leaves her emboldened, rather than exhausted, by the process of pushing back against the things that seek to hem her in. | 2023-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | October 18, 2023 | 7.4 | acc1a410-cc25-4581-a5a5-31cdcf102590 | Marissa Lorusso | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marissa-lorusso/ | |
Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is the first album of truly new material Godspeed You! Black Emperor have released since reforming after their long hiatus. The album is Godspeed to its core, moving from thin drones to Wagnerian pomp and circumstance and back again over long, patient stretches. | Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress is the first album of truly new material Godspeed You! Black Emperor have released since reforming after their long hiatus. The album is Godspeed to its core, moving from thin drones to Wagnerian pomp and circumstance and back again over long, patient stretches. | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20334-asunder-sweet-and-other-distress/ | Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress | When Godspeed You! Black Emperor returned to record after a long hiatus with Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! they weren’t quite releasing new music. The album consisted of pieces the Montreal collective had composed during the early 2000s, back when they were at their most prolific, and the album was simply a matter of getting long-performed work down in the studio. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress contains music of a more recent vintage, which is potentially significant because following Godspeed has always meant grappling with a basic question: When you have one of the most distinctive sonic profiles in music—that trademark quiet/loud mix of soaring guitars, epic strings, and field recordings—how important is it to branch out beyond it? Do we want a Godspeed album that sounds like anything but Godspeed?
Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, conceived a decade after their initial run, when they defined everything this band is and should be, does not offer a new wrinkle. There is nothing about this album—from the particulars of the recording to the riffs to the arrangements—that would have sounded out of place if they had released it in 2002. Change is not Godspeed’s way, but the other side of that coin is that, despite many imitators, there’s also nothing else out there that sounds quite like them. The shifts on this record involve pivots more than actual movement: At points, guitars are unusually prominent and the music feels a bit heavier. It’s also their shortest album. But beyond a few such tweaks, the album is Godspeed to its core, moving from thin drones to Wagnerian pomp and circumstance and back again over long, patient stretches.
As much as any record they’ve made, the music here is meant to work as one, and sequencing and flow is everything. They’ve been working out this material live for some time now, and fans have taken to calling the whole "Behemoth", an appropriate descriptor given its heaviness. Though there are four tracks, the album really happens in three movements. The first and third contain the slowly building refrains and crashing climaxes, and the middle two tracks are more of a single 16-minute piece consisting of drones, gushes of guitar feedback, and fragments of strings. On the vinyl version of the album, the A-side cleverly ends with a locked groove to suggest a sense of continuity, but the CD version finds the two middle pieces flowing one into the next.
Sandwiching the drone section between the two crashing fanfares makes good sense, allowing the album to breathe and suggesting more variety than it might otherwise. Opening track "Peasantry or ‘Light! Inside of Light!’" is the album’s highlight, and ranks with Godspeed’s best work. The guitar riff has serious weight and crunch to it, and the piece unfolds with a modal sweep. But the transformation the main line gradually undergoes, where a dramatically beautiful desert vista becomes a setting for a melody that suggests a drunken holiday singalong, shows that there’s still a lot they can do with their basic ingredients.
"Peasantry" and the closing "Piss Crowns Are Trebled" are so intense and grandiose they skirt self-parody, always a risk with this band. But it's possible to give Godspeed the benefit of the doubt, in part because of how they’ve conducted themselves throughout their career. In 2015, music like this is usually used to sell things, whether it’s a product or a television show. There’s so much feeling in it, huge washes of sound that could easily be regarded as manipulative, and capitalism inevitably strives to pair these kinds of sounds with product. As a listener, to give yourself over to this kind of soaring music, allowing yourself to be carried away, implies a certain amount of trust. Godspeed You! Black Emperor record and play instrumental pieces that exist to move you, using only the force of music, and in a space where sound is the primary context. It's a different kind of transaction. You have to let your guard down, and Godspeed have to transform feelings into compelling records. They're still on track. | 2015-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation | April 1, 2015 | 7.6 | acd09fa5-f65a-49b8-9284-33b930619413 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The third album from studied Brooklyn chamber-pop ensemble San Fermin benefits from a sharper focus. But its lyrics signify depth and meaning without quite delivering. | The third album from studied Brooklyn chamber-pop ensemble San Fermin benefits from a sharper focus. But its lyrics signify depth and meaning without quite delivering. | San Fermin: Belong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23159-belong/ | Belong | The basic conceit behind San Fermin, the Brooklyn chamber-pop ensemble led by songwriter and producer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, has an obvious if not unlimited appeal. Like Sufjan Stevens circa Illinois, they bring classical flourishes to indie and folk conventions, bolstered with soaring choruses and spirited performances. This studied approach lost some of its charm on 2015’s bombastically scattershot Jackrabbit—and with over five decades of baroque-pop history, from the Beach Boys to Rostam, they could be drawing from a much deeper well of influences. But San Fermin are still an unusual act. They’re an eight-piece in a music economy long removed from the heyday of huge collectives. And though he guides the group, Ludwig-Leone—who is music director and resident composer for a ballet company, and also had a premiere at the New York City Ballet in 2015—doesn’t sing. Lead vocal duties are rather shared between the capable two-pronged attack of Charlene Kaye and Allen Tate.
Their third album, Belong, benefits from a sharper focus, though San Fermin’s setup continues to distinguish them more than their songs. Belong’s lush instrumental passages are the most consistently pleasant aspect of the record. Where on Jackrabbit those tended to be broken off into minute-long interludes, here the bustling breaks are neatly interwoven into the songs. Along with guitars, synths, and drums, the band has violin, trumpet, and saxophone, and it’s when the full array unfurls, especially on the expansive opus “Palisades/Storm,” that San Fermin sound most engaged. Of course, these ingredients can also bring to mind the most famous rock group with an in-house saxophonist and violinist, the Dave Matthews Band, as on the honking bridge of “Dead,” but on the festival circuit that may be a feature, not a bug.
Ludwig-Leone’s songwriting is billed as more personal this time around, which works in Belong’s favor. The album feels more direct and pop-minded than its predecessors, and the shift is best represented in the catchily surging “No Promises,” which uses cooing vocal loops. The daintily chiming “Bride” is sung from the viewpoint of an anxiety-suffering bride at a wedding who has a dissociative experience. The fluttering opener, straightforwardly titled “Open,” is sung from the perspective of “a ghost at the controls.” The words to these songs can appear cryptic or stilted, and the conflicts that arise in them pale beside the problems found in a spare minute of social-media catch-up, but as emotional entry points, they get the job done.
The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle. “Bones,” ostensibly a soulful ballad, is too vanilla to really have an impact—less Marvin Gaye than “Marvin Gaye”—and the lyrics, despite references to the physical, have a similarly antiseptic effect. “If I could take you home/Bodies tell the rest of the story/Maybe we’d resolve ourselves,” Kaye and Tate intone in sweet harmony, as if sex were as clinical as a server error. Old-timey son-of-Mumford stomper “Cairo” and the off-puttingly romantic title track (if someone ever sighs to you, “I miss you even when you’re here,” run as soon as you stop gagging) are similar missteps. A more intriguing clunker is ornate finale “Happiness Will Ruin This Place,” a story-song that pulls together some of the album’s lyrical motifs, and includes deft touches such as circus-like oompahs when the narrator visits the zoo, but ultimately seems to signify depth and meaning without quite delivering either.
If I haven’t said much about Kaye and Tate, the two lead singers, that probably makes sense, too. Both give fine performances, both noticeably improved in some ways—Kaye pushing past her typical politesse for a less restrained vocal on “Dead,” Tate edging a tiny bit away from his dead-ringer the National impression for a folksier tinge on “Oceanica.” But, perhaps because of the band’s very construction, neither comes across as the star of the show. For her part, Kaye has been compared to ex-Dirty Projectors singer Amber Coffman so many times you almost root for her own ambitious solo album. (She does have an EP, 2016’s Honey, as Kaye.)
With Belong, Ludwig-Leone has said he wanted “to write music you could smell,” and arguably he succeeds; already, it has been compared to “a wall of flowers blooming at once.” This is an album with a lot going on—“bones,” “bodies,” a “little blonde ghost,” and a homey habit of calling people “honey” recur in a way that hints at a greater significance. But maybe Belong is best enjoyed like a passing fragrance, a scent you vaguely recognize but can’t quite place, a whiff of a particular ’00s Brooklyn varietal of an orchestral-pop tradition that neither began nor likely ended there. | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | April 19, 2017 | 5.8 | acd7bc0b-c990-4d52-8823-ef5074557e91 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
This hours-long, 199-song compilation of mostly instrumental work is a canny product of our current streaming era. But at its best, it offers a glimpse into Mac DeMarco’s unique and evolving process. | This hours-long, 199-song compilation of mostly instrumental work is a canny product of our current streaming era. But at its best, it offers a glimpse into Mac DeMarco’s unique and evolving process. | Mac DeMarco: One Wayne G | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mac-demarco-one-wayne-g/ | One Wayne G | Given his reputation as a thought leader in the dirtbag space, it’s ironic that Mac DeMarco’s most recent projects are essentially lo-fi jams to study to. This year’s Five Easy Hot Dogs only represented a trickle of his instrumental work. Now, the unfathomably long One Wayne G unleashes the full torrent: At 199 tracks and over nine hours, the massive archival dump is like an indie rock version of Lil B’s 05 Fuck Em. It is a work that almost dares you not to pay attention to it, stretching out to a duration that inevitably necessitates background listening, which, in many respects, also makes it feel resistant to conventional music criticism. The proposition of reviewing One Wayne G even feels like a throwback to an earlier era of stunt journalism, that post-Klosterman style of culture writing where the author subjects themselves to 50 hours of non-stop Lil B songs or spends an entire day at a TGI Friday’s.
On one hand, DeMarco’s instrumental turn, along with the listless shuffle-ability of One Wayne G, seems like a play for the ambient gold rush, supplying casual listeners with a limitless horizon of vibey busy-work soundtracks. But DeMarco’s compilation thumbs its nose at the very market it taps into. While One Wayne G might look like a disposable afterthought, all unfinished drafts and near-identical file names, it’s hardly arbitrary or accidental. Where so much instrumental or ambient music that baits the streaming algorithm is anonymous to the point of feeling machine-generated, Mac’s giant box of loosies confronts you at every turn with the personality of its maker, for better or worse.
Taken in chronological order, One Wayne G offers a glimpse into DeMarco’s evolving process from 2018 and January of this year, as we see him adopt and abandon certain whims and trends. Early cuts like “20191215” feature little more than acoustic fingerpicking, but by 2022, he’s picked up a harmonica and started toying with woodwinds. There’s an ever-so-light jazziness to the organ riffs on “20221217” that resembles the French exotica you’d hear in a Jacques Tati film; many of Mac’s demos on One Wayne G feel more uniquely suited to soundtrack placement than even his previous instrumental work.
Just when you think you’ve forgotten the author, Mac chimes in to remind you what his voice sounds like, whether that’s filling the space with nonsensical riffing that sounds like Simlish, or the few times he actually sings proper words. (These tracks are thankfully easier to differentiate thanks to more legible song titles like “20200819 She Get the Gold Star” and “20210215 Ball for the Coach.”) On songs like “20200816 She Want the Sandwich” or the would-be Toyotathon anthem “20200817 Proud True Toyota,” Mac’s whimsical and occasionally pitch-shifted vocals recall the lo-fi cartoonishness of Ween more than the Japanese composers like Haruomi Hosono or Shigeo Sekitō he normally credits. Unlike the demos he’s released as companions to every studio album, One Wayne G is a collection not so much of songs-in-progress but strays and spare parts, which function more like Adult Swim bumpers or public radio interstitial music than rough drafts.
The 22-minute long “20190826” lands somewhere between James Ferraro and Art of Noise, with cresting synth tones shattered by the occasional triggering of a heavy drum kick. These sparse, deliberately avant-garde compositions account for the collection’s most compelling material and suggest new directions, with the lurching percussion and distorted strings of “20190826” echoing the structuralism of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sometimes, One Wayne G feels like an unexpected tribute to Sakamoto, its method of labeling songs reminiscent of the timestamped titles on Sakamoto’s final album, 12. And like Sakamoto’s later work, which left his heavy breathing intact to confront you with the musician’s living presence, you can hear DeMarco sniffling on tracks like “202201.” Sakamoto’s music moves like the air through his lungs; it’s only fitting that DeMarco’s music moves like the phlegm lodged in his throat or the snot stuck in his nose.
A few years ago, this type of long-form project, filled with unfinished sketches and off-the-cuff musings, would have been a deluxe-edition download or splashy anthology box set for only the most hardcore fans. Today, One Wayne G deliberately courts a casual listener, accustomed to never-ending, mood-dictating playlists. More than anything he’s made, it’s a product distinctly of its time. Part of why leftfield Japanese pop and soft rock of yesteryear has found a new audience in the streaming era is precisely because of its smoothness, which makes it ideal for algorithmic shuffling, much like the American AOR it was influenced by was suited for FM radio play. Even if there’s a playful disposability to One Wayne G when contrasted with the work of Hosono or Sakamoto, DeMarco attempts to navigate a similar line, finding room to push at the edges of sound—and remind us of the artist’s existence—even if he’s only in the background of your consciousness. | 2023-05-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mac’s Record Label | May 11, 2023 | 6.1 | ace372fa-ab28-4f9d-98be-2d974bf71fce | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ |
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