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Propulsive and winding, this collaborative album is a hypnotic exercise in reimagining the past and future of a Ugandan tradition. | Propulsive and winding, this collaborative album is a hypnotic exercise in reimagining the past and future of a Ugandan tradition. | Rian Treanor / Ocen James: Saccades | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rian-treanor-ocen-saccades/ | Saccades | Consider Saccades a fruitful experiment. It began in 2018, when Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes invited British producer Rian Treanor to hold a residency in Kampala. After hearing a recording from local fiddle master Ocen James, he knew they should collaborate. Though James has no previous recorded releases, he’s been a fixture in Northern Uganda for years, accompanying artists like Leo PaLayeng and Otim Alpha in their development of acholitronix, a 21st century take on the traditional music of the Acholi people. While albums from Nyege Nyege have documented this work before, Saccades takes a different tack, bringing together two artists from distinct musical backgrounds to find common, uncharted ground. The result is a collection of novel, fully-formed tracks that reveal how collaboration uniquely reconfigures Treanor’s labyrinthine productions.
Treanor wanted his work with James to feel like an even split between their individual inclinations, and that sentiment is clear from the jump. Opener “Bunga Bule” is all clattering percussion, and its embrace of unprocessed timbres strays from Treanor’s typical electronic textures. It’s even-keeled compared to his 2020 album File Under UK Metaplasm, a project inspired by the breakneck speeds of Tanzanian singeli. Understanding the roots of Acholi music is key here: Historically, it’s been defined by hemiola rhythms, and the instrument that James plays—the rigi rigi—is typically used in larakaraka ceremonies, which are social gatherings related to weddings or for imparting wisdom to children. These songs feature large ensembles with calabashes, drums, whistles, horns, and flutes. It’s the fiddle’s tense, winding melodies that help guide and hold everything together.
You can hear the rigi rigi’s commanding presence on “Agoya.” Its thunderous, machine-gun kicks pound over and over, until James’ fiddle arrives with playful squawks. These melodies would sound right at home in the hypnotic reverie of a Berlin nightclub, and the same holds true for a more traditional song like “Rigi Rigi.” Its syncopated beat tumbles forward with endless propulsive energy, delivering the album’s most masterful showcase of James’ trademark instrument. Every subtle shift in tone and pitch is palpable and its unpredictable raspiness is a delight. It’s rare to hear a recording that places the titular instrument so forward in the mix, making this an illuminating opportunity to experience the rigi rigi in all its glory.
There are moments across Saccades that skew towards avant-garde antecedents; take the noisy clatter in “As It Happens,” which resembles the work of cellist Okkyung Lee. Despite the unwieldy free-improv leanings of this track, there is a bridge connecting the two worlds. When the song climaxes with an extraordinary rumble—dramatic enough to sound like revving engines—the drum’s sheer force is undeniable; it recalls the authoritative role of the min bul (“master drum”) in Acholi music.
Even the most conceptual tracks on Saccades’ contain small production details worthy of admiration. On “Casascade,” James plays over moody synth pads, their swells befitting the ambient comedown of a long rave. While it’s among the album’s simplest assemblage of ideas, the fiddle is still thrilling. More complex is “The Dead Center,” whose brooding synths and cryptic chimes distill and transform larakaraka into a queasy, dystopian nightmare. “Naasaccade” forgoes the fiddle entirely, but is still exhilarating for how it remains true to Acholi music’s spirit—its polyrhythms sound like calabashes, drums, and gara (small bells attached to dancers’ legs) that have been reconfigured into one of percussionist Eli Keszler’s jam sessions.
Saccades closes with “Remo Rom,” an extraordinary remix that shouldn’t be mistaken for a bonus track. The song doesn’t otherwise appear on the album, but the Viennese electronic music group Farmers Manual tackles it here. There’s a fascinating sprawl of ideas in these two minutes: We have the “laptop music” pioneers of yesteryear reworking the album’s only track with vocals—an alarming fact given the importance of voice in larakaraka. “Remo Rom” is simultaneously embedded in generations of musical history while blazing ahead into a dizzying, unknown future. Saccades is a consistent marvel in this way: It’s reverential to its forebears, but in constant search of innovation. | 2023-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Nyege Nyege Tapes | January 23, 2023 | 7.7 | ace4931c-0a7a-4c78-b215-4ea814dd25a7 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
No longer content to deconstruct the droning sounds of his former band, the Emeralds alum gives Kompakt-style minimal techno a try. | No longer content to deconstruct the droning sounds of his former band, the Emeralds alum gives Kompakt-style minimal techno a try. | Steve Hauschildt: Dissolvi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-hauschildt-dissolvi/ | Dissolvi | Steve Hauschildt has spent the last decade deconstructing the sound his former band, Emeralds, reveled in. Rather than reliving their past glories, he has isolated distinct elements embedded in the drone mavens’ works—gossamer kosmische, fuzzily tactile swaths of noise, the cool glow of early electronic music, the rhythmic hum of synth-driven post-rock in the Trans Am mold—while pushing those styles to a pretty, fully-realized zenith. In a review of 2016’s Strands, Philip Sherburne noted the Cleveland artist’s remarkable consistency, and how that had brought a sense of familiarity to his latest works. Thus far, you’ve generally known what you were going to get from Hauschildt, and that has been a soothing virtue in its own right.
But his seventh studio album, Dissolvi, shakes things up a bit. He’s still spinning webs of synthetic beauty, but now they’ve taken on the more distinctly rhythmic form of minimal techno, a style Hauschildt only hinted at on Strands. The shift makes some sense: Dissolvi is his first record for Ghostly International, the Ann Arbor-born label that has mostly released a variety of rhythmically driven electronic music during an existence that has spanned nearly two decades. Ghostly’s most explicitly dance-oriented releases frequently have a distinctly Midwestern flavor, from the dirty Detroit techno-pop leanings of Motor City son Matthew Dear to Tadd Mullinix’s excursions into acid house and Dilla-esque hip-hop under various aliases.
What’s surprising is that the actual sounds on Dissolvi seem to come from somewhere else entirely—specifically, from Cologne’s Kompakt label, which popularized the album’s brand of exacting minimal techno. The ricocheting tones that open “M Path” sound ripped from one of Kompakt’s Total compilations, while “Alienself” pulses with an eerie calm akin to sometime Orb member Thomas Fehlmann’s solo output; shivering percussive elements and just a slight touch of acid run through the track’s framework. Hauschildt tackles this new aesthetic territory with clinical aplomb, as though he’s been working within this largely dormant subgenre of dance music for years.
The new sound isn’t his only left turn on Dissolvi: For the first time this decade, Hauschildt has also called in guest vocalists. Avant-classical experimentalist GABI appears on “Syncope,” and her operatic vocals pair nicely with its insistent build, in sky-scraping elisions that soar above the track’s 4/4 bedrock and glitchy synth work. Vocal-loop stylist Julianna Barwick’s contribution to “Saccade” is another ideal marriage of a collaborator’s skills and an overarching style: Her drawn-out notes complement the day-spa tranquility conjured by soothing synths and soft rhythms.
Comparing Hauschildt’s music to the aural wallpaper at a day spa doesn’t sound like a compliment, but he has a knack for taking on aesthetics that aren’t considered relevant or cool. Emeralds’ divisive 2012 swan song, Just to Feel Anything, adopted the chilly, booming trappings of synthetic ’80s rock, one of the few styles from that decade that still hasn’t attained an air of retro chic. His foray into minimal techno, a sound that has been out of fashion for more than a decade in the dance world, is similarly representative of that apathy toward coolness. On Dissolvi, Hauschildt breathes new life into the subgenre by taking it off the dancefloor—and reveals an unexpected facet of his artistry. | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | August 9, 2018 | 7.5 | acf10c7a-dbcd-44fd-8084-11e2c49085a8 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Speedy Ortiz’s third album is wry, acerbic, and full of hidden hooks. The songwriting of singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis has hit a new peak of clarity. | Speedy Ortiz’s third album is wry, acerbic, and full of hidden hooks. The songwriting of singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis has hit a new peak of clarity. | Speedy Ortiz: Twerp Verse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speedy-ortiz-twerp-verse/ | Twerp Verse | Sadie Dupuis has a knack for flipping the aperçu into self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m blessed with perfect pitch/I waste it on songs that you never even heard of,” the singer-guitarist taunts on Twerp Verse. Even better is: “You hate the title, but you’re diggin’ the song,” which isn’t actually prophetic because you can praise without equivocation Speedy Ortiz’s flair for the splendid title—this is a band whose digital self-released debut sported “Kinda Blew” and “Phish Phood.” Tense, knotted, suspicious of climaxes, their third official album is the right album at the right time for them.
For one, Dupuis hits a new peak of clarity. Self-composure distinguishes her from the competition; she would rather trace the filigrees of a wryness as endemic to her as it is to forebears Robert Forster and Liz Phair than give the impression that the inarticulate and often clueless men who populate these songs bother her. As her melody line follows the sinews of the intro riff of “Can I Kiss You?,” she seems to think out the degrees of lust necessary to make her jump through hoops for the sake of a boy. On “Alone with Girls,” drummer Michael Falcone’s harmonies complement a story of abjuring the company of dumb dudes.
The virtues of Twerp Verse may present a challenge to the uninitiated. There simply aren’t many hummable moments in the conventional sense; Speedy Ortiz don’t do those, or, rather, their songs act as Trojan horses from which hooks suddenly appear. Dupuis and occasional guitarist Andy Molholt love riffs, and when they tangle in the outro of “Moving In” the result is a beautiful cacophony. “Backslidin’” depends on a distorted slide riff. Although she has occasionally colored tunes with keyboards, Twerp Verse has explicit uses for them. The synth in “You Hate the Title” nods toward Sleater-Kinney’s kind of new wave, and is all the better for it. Suspicious of hysteria, Dupuis is content to repeat the title as if it were a mantra, not a hook. “Lean in When I Suffer,” almost as memorable, lurches like a car with bad shocks; its movement is the hook.
So, while Twerp Verse offers no tune as stick-like-glue as Foil Deer’s “The Graduates” or Major Arcana’s “Plough” it offers compensatory pleasures. They’re the kind of band whose lyrics, I like to imagine, would appear as witticisms in high school yearbooks—a shared passion of Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet’s otherwise incompatible characters in Lady Bird; a band out of which cults are made. Speedy Ortiz record albums as shared secrets between themselves and fans. | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | April 27, 2018 | 7.4 | acf27700-1b22-4875-a936-7cb3eb0d65ca | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
This five-track EP is a dazzling sampler for one of grime’s most promising young talents and a dismaying survey from inside the life of a small-time drug peddler in a British suburb. | This five-track EP is a dazzling sampler for one of grime’s most promising young talents and a dismaying survey from inside the life of a small-time drug peddler in a British suburb. | Slowthai: RUNT EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slowthai-runt-ep/ | RUNT EP | Kids in Northampton used to call Tyron Frampton “Slow Ty” because he’d zone out and float away into an observational bubble. He slurred his words, too. Through his music as Slowthai—a rap name that repurposes and reclaims the nickname—you get the sense he’s fed up with being seen and not heard. His verses shoot out of nowhere, bursting the seams of his beats; his voice slaps you across the face like an icy gust of wind. But he never lost that watchful eye, for better and for worse. “I’m paranoid all of the time,” he cries midway through RUNT, and by that point, he’s already shown you exactly why he has every right to be.
This five-track EP is a dazzling sampler for one of grime’s most promising young talents and a dismaying survey from inside the life of a small-time drug peddler in a British suburb. His scenes are urgent, but they’re rapped with an unnerving calm. He exists in an unblinking state of conflict through most of these songs. “They did the mannequin challenge when the feds come round/I ain’t standing there with my hands down my trousers unprepared—Let me make that clear,” he states on “Slow Down.” Syllables ricochet off one another as he reveals epiphanies earned from a life spent on edge.
The Dizzee Rascal comparison is right there for the making, but none of the rapping on Boy in da Corner was nearly as raw as this, and Dizzee could never wander into anything as pithy and powerful as the blunt force bombshell “now they’re dead like all of my dreams.” Slowthai’s writing is clever without losing any of the impact. He seeks solace even when he believes there isn’t any to be had: “Sometimes when I find myself low I look to the skies and pray/But there’s no God above me that can take my pain/And I cry out, ‘Why?’/I pray my enemies die.” The absence of God hasn’t stopped him from petitioning something greater than himself. That light at the end of the tunnel keeps him grounded, even when all seems lost.
Producer and frequent collaborator Kwes Darko lets the simple samples and arrangements breathe. Darko knows exactly what kind of sounds enable the rapper’s verses to snap right into your ear, and his productions are vivid composites that never get too busy. More than once, Slowthai hacks through between bow strokes in flittering string arrangements. Sometimes, midway through, a song will crack open to reveal a new sound that forces the listener to recalibrate and adjust to a shifted soundscape; on “Disneyland,” piano keys ripple quietly through the mix. About two minutes into “GTFOMF,” the weepy chords flip into what feels like a photo negative of the sample and he keeps stampeding through like nothing has changed. The two artists play off of each other to forge a chilling small-town mosaic.
The most gripping moment on RUNT comes at its close: “Slow Down” is Slowthai at his most perceptive and most persuasive—and grime at its best. The song is transporting and affecting, taking the listener through a joyless Christmas spent without warmth as a child, as apt a metaphor as any for the ways a lower-class existence can feel like it’s happening in isolation from the world. “Boiler broke on Christmas day/Ask Santa, ‘Why’s my life this way?’/Putting heating on my next wishlist/Fuck Santa, cuz we’re cold as shit,” he all but yells, his voice searing. Feeling profound sadness on what is the happiest day of the year for many, in a season for the jolly, is a remarkable microcosm of the Slowthai experience. He’s known joy and he’s known pain, and he’s lived enough to know that for some people those scales are dramatically imbalanced. | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Method | September 13, 2018 | 7.8 | acf58385-6ee7-448a-808a-6959c3b4ad81 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Now 83, the soul singer returns with his first album of new material since 2009, and he remains as fixated on love and lust as ever. | Now 83, the soul singer returns with his first album of new material since 2009, and he remains as fixated on love and lust as ever. | Smokey Robinson: Gasms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/smokey-robinson-gasms/ | Gasms | The first thing to know about Smokey Robinson’s Gasms is that it’s a proper album—not a live album, a Christmas album, a standards album, or a celebration of the soul legend’s songbook thronged with younger guests, but an actual record of new material. He doesn’t make these often anymore. His last real album came out in 2009, the one before that a decade prior. Robinson is 83. Even assuming his enviable run of good health continues, at this rate there’s no guarantee there will be another.
While the pace of Robinson’s new material has slowed considerably since the ’80s, the quality has rarely dipped. Few of his peers have stayed the course as admirably as Robinson. For the last 40 years, nearly all of his records have been variations on the smooth template he perfected with 1975’s A Quiet Storm—unhurried tempos, yearning vocals, laid-back licks, and velvet adornments. Where his doe-eyed Motown singles with the Miracles were the embodiment of youth, A Quiet Storm introduced the sound he’d grow old with.
Hearing Robinson’s eternal muses of love and lust animate him as thoroughly in his eighties as they did nearly a half century ago is one of the pleasures of Gasms, which at its best plays like the ultimate refinement of Robinson’s late-career output. Compared to 2009’s Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, which itself was a perfectly respectable victory lap, the songwriting on Gasms is better calibrated, the emotions more pronounced, and the production more sumptuous yet less intrusive, devoid of any tells about what year—or even decade—it might have been recorded. Like Robinson’s best work, it exists in a state of suspended timelessness.
Consider the title track fair warning for anybody uncomfortable about hearing an octogenarian work himself up about carnal pleasures: Things get heated. Nonetheless, Robinson has a tasteful way of rendering blunt expressions of lust, and he never lets his randiness get the better of him, as he sometimes can (see his 2009 single “Love Bath,” a cautionary tale of the thin line between sensual and ridiculous). Even Gasms’ thirstiest numbers are filled with grace notes: The red-lit “I Keep Calling You” smolders with nocturnal longing, while “You Fill Me Up” reimagines gospel music as sexual climax.
Robinson’s voice doesn’t do what it used to, but it still does what it needs to. He sings for the sheets, not the rafters, and what he’s lost in range he makes up for with tenderness. On the sorrowful “I Wanna Know Your Body” he mourns love he may never get to make; his wounded whisper makes the denial feel like a tragedy. A handful of songs like the peppy “Roll Around” and the lightly funky “If We Don’t Have Each Other” gesture toward his more ebullient pop with the Miracles, allowing him to get his pulse up a little without fully breaking the album’s mellow spell.
The list of notable musicians lucky enough to record into their eighties is small; the list of those with worthwhile albums to show for it is even smaller. But Robinson remains an indelible talent, and once again he’s made the kind of record only he can. What a treat it is, after so many years, to hear this pioneer remain in complete mastery of the format he created. | 2023-05-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | TLR Music Group / ADA Worldwide | May 2, 2023 | 7.2 | acfbc998-2f03-4079-bda8-ad2447f44e58 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Originally released in 1999 as a promotional CD-R, this collection of alternate mixes and non-album tracks bridges the gap between the band’s experimental hijinks and pop instincts. | Originally released in 1999 as a promotional CD-R, this collection of alternate mixes and non-album tracks bridges the gap between the band’s experimental hijinks and pop instincts. | The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin Companion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-flaming-lips-the-soft-bulletin-companion/ | The Soft Bulletin Companion | Over the Flaming Lips’ four-decade career, there was no more crucial turning point than the period spanning 1996 to 1999, when the Oklahoma group narrowly escaped their imminent fate as alt-rock has-beens and transformed themselves into the megaphone-wielding pied pipers of the 21st-century festival circuit. After their underperforming 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic failed to yield another “She Don’t Use Jelly” and guitarist Ronald Jones checked out, remaining members Wayne Coyne, Michael Ivins, and Steven Drozd liberated themselves from the pressures of writing hits—and the creative limitations of being a guitar-rock band—by conducting various synchronized-tape experiments with fleets of car stereos and battalions of boomboxes. Released in 1997, Zaireeka was the play-at-home version of those site-specific events, presenting eight unwieldy songs spread over four CDs that were designed to be played simultaneously on four different players. Then, just two years later, the Lips distilled all that free-ranging exploration into the pristine orchestral rock of The Soft Bulletin.
The two records represent the polar extremes of the Lips’ canon. The dense and difficult Zaireeka was released in a limited edition (due to its bulky four-disc jewel-case packaging) and has never been made available for streaming or download. The Soft Bulletin, by contrast, was a universally praised classic that’s been feted with a symphonic live-album remount and a Pitchfork-produced documentary. But a newly unearthed compilation reminds us that these oppositional releases were actually products of the same recording sessions with producer Dave Fridmann, and proves the two records really weren’t so fundamentally different after all.
The Soft Bulletin Companion was originally a limited-run promotional CD-R that featured alternate mixes, leftover tracks, and other oddities caught on tape between ’97 and ’99. While some of these recordings have since popped up as B-sides, compilation tracks, or bootlegs, The Soft Bulletin Companion’s reappearance—initially as a Record Store Day vinyl exclusive, now as a widely streamable set—restores a crucial chapter in Lips lore. For one, this is the only place where you can find traditional stereo mixes of five Zaireeka tracks, which confirm the album wasn’t just a huge sonic leap forward for the band, but a pivotal emotional breakthrough as well. When freed of Zaireeka’s logistical demands, songs like “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair” and “Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)” not only measure up to anything on The Soft Bulletin, their gravitas and smog-cloud atmosphere also point the way to later dystopian triumphs like Embryonic and The Terror.
Through this collection, we also get a clearer picture of all the fine-tuning that went into The Soft Bulletin’s HD vision. There’s a lovely alternate take of “The Spiderbite Song” that deemphasizes the original’s looped drum rolls for a gentle summery sway, and a dreamier version of “Buggin’” that effectively mutes Drozd’s drum track. “Buggin’” was the Soft Bulletin song that hewed closest to the “She Don’t Use Jelly” model of whimsical childlike sing-alongs (earning it an appearance on the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack), though it always felt a bit out of place in the middle of an otherwise weighty record. On the UK version of The Soft Bulletin, “Buggin’” was relegated to a bonus track, to make room for the equally splendorous yet less cutesy “Slow Motion,” and the latter’s inclusion here reminds us that the Brits got the better end of the deal.
Even a lighter track like “Slow Motion” underscores what made this phase of the Lips so impactful. As much as The Soft Bulletin turned Fridmann’s name into indie-rock shorthand for cinematic orchestration and heaven-sent harmonies, his production on these tracks is as raw it is radiant. If nothing else, The Soft Bulletin Companion is a golden opportunity to revisit Drozd’s past life as the John Bonham of modern psych rock before he went on to assume a more multi-tasking musical-director role within the group. His loose yet thundering style makes even the incomplete scratch track of Skip Spence’s “Little Hands” a pleasure to behold (although its intended recipient—Robert Plant—never ended up using it for his tribute-album version).
But there’s no better measure of the Lips’ late-’90s zenith than the stellar songs that never found a proper home. These include “The Captain,” arguably the most over-the-top gesture from a period of over-the-top gestures. In stark contrast to The Soft Bulletin’s serious tone, the song’s snowballing orchestration exudes an anarchic joy, like riding a rollercoaster that’s just tipped over its peak into a never-ending free-fall. And then there’s the divine “Satellite of You,” a sweeping serenade that could be the closing-credits theme of a Hollywood musical circa 1945—or a last-call standard at a karaoke bar circa 2045. It’s quintessential Lips, rife with down-home sentiments expressed in far-out imagery. However, for the Lips of the late ’90s, such space-age love songs were less the product of an overactive imagination than a simple reflection of the rarefied cruising altitude they occupied at the time. Now that billionaires are spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP to enjoy a few minutes in suborbital space, The Soft Bulletin Companion offers a much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to experience that fleeting, zero-gravity sensation of floating at the top of the world.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 20, 2021 | 8 | acfd846a-0b30-41e9-936b-4ba4c650ef70 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Meant as an introduction to 40 years of a prolific noise icon, this live recording moves between grating analog and prickling digital modes with unmitigated force. | Meant as an introduction to 40 years of a prolific noise icon, this live recording moves between grating analog and prickling digital modes with unmitigated force. | Merzbow: MONOAkuma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/merzbow-monoakuma/ | MONOAkuma | Merzbow occupies a unique place in the world of noise: He is one of the genre’s true icons and one of its real anomalies. As much as his crushing torrents of sound feel like the pure definition of noise, they also seem to exist apart from it, a constant regardless of how the larger scene evolves or shifts. Over hundreds of releases and, as of next year, four full decades, he has laboriously refined his approach. Listen briefly, and it might sound thrown together; listen deeply, and it sounds singular and meticulous. One of his most overlooked skills is his ability to warp time; during tracks that stretch beyond an hour, it becomes malleable, almost mercurial.
Witness Merzbow live, and you’ll feel the power and time-scrambling essence of his sound. There is a brutal euphoria to a Merzbow set, typically powered by a massive sound system and a frenetic light show that suggest both My Bloody Valentine and an EDM party. During performances that can feel like an instant or an eternity, he cracks white noise wide open, smearing its inner spectrum of color across the room. On the new MONOAkuma, the Australian label Room40, helmed by ambient maestro Lawrence English, offers an intended entry point to Merzbow through an especially strong live document—an introductory demonstration, as English puts it, of “the intense and complex audio world Merzbow has created.”
MONOAkuma captures a 2012 show English presented at the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane. It bridges two of Merzbow’s most distinct styles: the gravely analog recordings of his early days and the razor-sharp precision of his subsequent digital work. Those alternate analog and digital extremes juggle your brain. Its single 50-minute track assaults from the start, as sheets of noise work your eardrums like sandpaper. But this is the Merzbow-equivalent of a toe in the pool; the track begins to roil around the 10-minute mark. Over weighty industrial waves, MONOAkuma becomes a showcase for the higher end of Merzbow’s range, where pitches as sharp as needles jab like jackhammers.
Screeching tones spike and scramble, wobbling through filters that gradually trick the ears into finding rhythms and patterns, like a Magic Eye painting without an actual hidden image. That illusion makes the flickers of rhythm that do appear all the more satisfying; after half an hour, the smoke clears to reveal a single beat chugging menacingly beneath the surface. These moments may be just two percent of a Merzbow set, but they make all the difference, leaving you searching the chaos for more surprises.
MONOAkuma makes you wonder what, after 40 years, a proper entry point for Merzbow actually is. He has certainly offered more beat-oriented records. Door Open At 8 AM works wonders with jazz samples, while Merzbeat is practically a rock album. Collaborations with guitarist Richard Pinhas like the double-album Keio Line are nearly unrecognizable in their soft-focus beauty. There are introductions to Merzbow’s world that are easier on the ears than MONOAkuma, then, but this full-throttle blast still feels appropriate for newcomers. It’s an unfiltered, uncompromising dose of what he does best. And for those looking to explore that range even further, you’re in luck—he’s got a lot of records. | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Room40 | December 12, 2018 | 7 | ad03a72f-1e5f-4574-a3fa-1baf11fc523f | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The startlingly accomplished solo debut from the art-pop singer-songwriter is a world of birdsong, whistles, hums, and silence, anchored by her magnetic voice. | The startlingly accomplished solo debut from the art-pop singer-songwriter is a world of birdsong, whistles, hums, and silence, anchored by her magnetic voice. | Alena Spanger: Fire Escape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alena-spanger-fire-escape/ | Fire Escape | Alena Spanger prefers non-verbal communication. On her new album, Fire Escape, she is partial to birdsong, wind that chimes like Erik Satie, and the sound of rain hitting the roof at dawn. In Tiny Hazard, the experimental pop group she formed with college classmates, she whispered, giggled, gasped, and howled over feverish guitars and jagged basslines. Her elastic vocals, which evoke the kineticism of Björk on “It’s Oh So Quiet” and Karin Dreijer on “Heartbeats,” are often most powerful as wordless interjections—a sudden “ha!” mid-verse or a maniacal cackle at the end of a chorus. On Fire Escape, her solo debut, Spanger and a collective of fellow Brooklyn musicians construct a dreamlike atmosphere of wind instruments, harps, and synths around her operatic range.
When she does reach for words, Spanger takes inspiration from nature’s fury and splendor, rather than more muted human emotions. On the twinkling “Ines,” she’s not just paralyzed by apprehension—she is both underwater and on fire. On the slow-moving “Agios,” “a man’s pain” isn’t simply destructive—it “hollers down the mountain, with the grace of a giant.” Her loved ones are like “starfish,” and the ocean is as much an existential threat (“Fire Escape”) as a source of absolution (“Satie Song”). Spanger refers to herself in self-deprecating terms—“a fickle girl,” a “sly wicked child”—but withholds details, gesturing at seesaws and lavender fields as shorthands for shortcomings. She shades in the vagueness with sharp inhales, speechless stutters, and single syllables repeated like mantras. It is, as she sings on “All That I Wanted,” “illegible and whole,” her words more deeply felt as they shapeshift and disconnect from meaning.
Fire Escape covers a surprising amount of ground in just over 40 minutes—the slightly askew dance pop of “Sinking Like,” the impressionistic, ambient textures of “Fire Escape” and “My Feel,” the jittery rock of “Ines.” With Spanger’s voice at the center, discordant transitions, like “All That I Wanted” leading into the lullabye-esque, aptly named “Go to Sleep,” feel part of a whole, connected by synth pads and the slight rasp at the corners of her range. The surrounding instrumentation expands and contracts to fit Spanger’s many modes: the gentle rumble of Carmen Quill’s upright bass and Kalia Vandever’s trombone on “My Feel” echo the elegiac solitude in her voice; the harp on “Ines,” played by Kitba’s Rebecca El-Saleh, matches the fantastical elements in its lyrics. But often her voice needs very little additional accompaniment—like former tourmate Adrianne Lenker, Spanger is most evocative at her quietest: When she dips into a low, hushed tone on “Methuen,” the world around her grows silent to accommodate.
At the intimate Brooklyn venue The Owl in January, the crowd was laughing with Spanger, even if she wasn’t trying to be funny. Sitting at the keyboard, she sang the opening line of “Difficult People”—“You tricked me with your flickering eyes”—and the subsequent reveal—“I didn’t realize those were your everyday eyes”—landed like a punchline. Many of Spanger’s songs twist like this: an unexpected metaphor, an indecipherable vocal sample, a joke where one might expect a confession. For an album that might at first seem minimalistic—indeed, it resonates just as strongly performed on solo piano—Fire Escape is jammed full with whistles, animal calls, pitched hums, and crackling roars. It’s a remarkable debut that is both patient and restless, whimsical and wise, conveying whole worlds without saying a word. | 2024-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ruination | March 29, 2024 | 7.8 | ad063098-130d-4ccf-8d1e-066ca77164eb | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The majority of English/German singer Annika Henderson’s releases to date have comprised dank covers of pop and folk songs with BEAK> as her backing band. Her newest in this vein features her takes on the Kinks, Chromatics, the Crystals, Yoko Ono, and Shocking Blue, as well as a dub version of an original. | The majority of English/German singer Annika Henderson’s releases to date have comprised dank covers of pop and folk songs with BEAK> as her backing band. Her newest in this vein features her takes on the Kinks, Chromatics, the Crystals, Yoko Ono, and Shocking Blue, as well as a dub version of an original. | Anika: Anika EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17874-anika-anika-ep/ | Anika EP | Both of English/German singer Annika Henderson’s releases to date have been named Anika: her 2010 Stones Throw/Invada debut, and now this six-track EP. Note the single “n” in her stage name; she once described the difference as offering “part of me, not all of me,” stating, “You’re indestructible if you split yourself into little bits.” She’s succeeded in so much as it still seems hard to get an idea of the real Henderson. Sure, she was once a Berlin-based journalist reporting on education reform, and lived in Bristol before that, but the majority of her releases have comprised fantastically dank, intimidating dub covers of pop and folk songs with BEAK> as her backing band, which haven't immediately conveyed a great deal about her.
It’d be unfair to imply that there’s any lack of personality in Anika’s music, though. On the Anika EP, which features one original, there’s a divide between covers to which she brings a certain bloodlust, and those from which she strips it away completely. Her vocal on Ray Davies’ plangent, eerie midnight votive “I Go to Sleep” has a Weimar-like swoop that takes languid, elegant steps around the staccato waltz of the organ and the raw snaps that punctuate each line. The unusual lope in her brusque singing style makes it seem tragic, passionate even. She barks commandingly on a brilliant cover of “In the City”, one of Chromatics’ less impassioned songs, which becomes beefier and funkier in Henderson’s hands. She and her band evoke a Chic shimmy, a Pop Group tremulousness, and add nervy grit to the song that makes it relatable to anyone who doesn’t live in Chromatics’ pastel L.A. fantasy.
On a cover of the Crystals’ “He Hit Me”, Henderson's medicated, dispassionate vocal plays like a coping mechanism to recount the grisly details of an assault to a police officer’s notebook. The band match the surprisingly proto-dubby feel of Spector's original arrangement, but trade the Crystals’ sweet female chorus for a warped, lurching, seasick siren coven, and underpin the whole song with a buzzsaw drone. She maintains the slightest presence on Shocking Blue’s “Love Buzz”, singing in a taunting, distant tone, this time from the perspective of the emotional abuser, dissolving into the chorus as BEAK> push the original’s no-wave minimalism into an almost Eastern palette.
The final two songs on the Anika EP are adapted from the Anika LP, which may make this collection seem like an unnecessary purchase, but they help to solidify Henderson's creative political stance. A redux of her take on Yoko Ono’s “Yang Yang”, a song about the dehumanization of the sexes, is curdled and blurred, though her call to “join the revolution” leaps out from behind the lurching Doppler guitar. A dub version of her own “No-One’s There” isn’t quite as striking as the original, but on the chorus-- “Stop looking over your shoulder/ No-one’s there”-- Geoff Barrow’s production on her voice adds a spatial dimension that warns against her command. Suddenly, she’s cut off mid-line, as if she's been yanked by the throat by an undetected assailant.
Henderson has said that she never wants her music “to shy away from articulating what I believe in,” yet her original decision to release mostly covers was because she thought releasing an album of her political material “would have been far too heavy for anyone that wasn’t familiar with it.” It’s an intriguing juxtaposition, either indicating a lack of confidence-- and awkwardness is crucial to both her live show and her decision to make music in the first place-- or a stealthier attempt to grease listeners’ ears for an even more jarring collection next time around.
If there’s a political stance to be inferred from the distinctly unsentimental, aloof interpretations she places on songs, it recalls what Ellen Willis once wrote about “aesthete-punk” and “self-conscious formalist” Lou Reed, whose music she saw as “an attempt to purify rock-and-roll, to purge it of all those associations with material goodies and erotic good times.” (Though the Anika LP proved influential to a band who definitely do not do minimalism; Yeah Yeah Yeahs called it a huge influence on the sound of Mosquito, with Nick Zinner describing it as “totally fucking outsider, left-of-the-box music.”)
Henderson's few original songs rail against power-tripping cops and capitalism; as far as “authority sucks and everything’s fucked” sentiments go, she's concise, if not as challenging as she might think, especially in comparison to the intense political statements made by potential peers Savages. What’s more radical is Henderson’s ascetic approach, which divests music about emotionally and physically abusive behavior of emotion, and sets songs by acts like Chromatics on the same level as those she covers by Dylan. Releasing dub versions of her previous material is also a traditionally economical move that fits with her rant about excess in "No-One's There". There are several layers of ego-removal at work here, and although both of Henderson’s records to date are essentially named after her, it’s worth remembering that she originally responded to Geoff Barrow’s call for a weird female singer to do BEAK>'s bidding, though she seems to lead the direction more now.
Stones Throw have said that the ending of the video for “I Go to Sleep” “invites speculation about this phase in Anika’s career.” Okay, then: the clip is blurry and refracted, Henderson walking through a Brandenburg forest, and winding up ostensibly dead, buried beneath a pile of leaves. The most obvious impression is of some sort of rebirth; no more covers, no more keeping one “n” in reserve, reuniting the “little bits” to present a brittle, human whole. She's also intimated that her performances for the next album won't be as rooted in awkward stage presence. As the Anika EP shows, Henderson has a rare ability to convey a political stance without being overly hamfisted or explicit about it; how she brings that approach to music where she's the creative focal point is going to be seriously interesting to behold. | 2013-04-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-04-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Stones Throw | April 24, 2013 | 7.4 | ad07f02b-11f1-4cc8-8d82-015ed6073243 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Working with Neko Case drummer Dan Hunt, violinist Peter Broderick, and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, singer/songwriter Laura Gibson sounds newly invigorated, resulting in her best record to date. | Working with Neko Case drummer Dan Hunt, violinist Peter Broderick, and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, singer/songwriter Laura Gibson sounds newly invigorated, resulting in her best record to date. | Laura Gibson: Empire Builder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21660-empire-builder/ | Empire Builder | It takes roughly three days to travel on the Amtrak from Portland, Ore., to the East Coast. At a speed of roughly 50 miles per hour, the Empire Builder rumbles across the Willamette River and Columbia River Draw Bridge, past rolling hills and scenic landscapes. In theory, the trip gives plenty of time to rest and reflect, and for a calm spirit like singer/songwriter Laura Gibson, it allows her to pull from nature as it scrolls past the window.
The folk musician sketched the title track of her new album on that very train, as she traveled two years ago toward a new life in New York City. Gibson was headed for grad school to study creative writing at Manhattan’s Hunter College, leaving behind her family and a long-time boyfriend. Maybe that’s why the song—the centerpiece of Gibson’s new album—feels especially pensive, shaded by loss and isolation, with an eye toward new beginnings. “This is not, an escape,” she hums distinctively. “But I don’t know how to hold someone without losing my grip.” The track sets a strong tone for Gibson and Empire Builder as a whole: She’s using the past as a route toward joy and prosperity. Gibson pushes beyond her comfort zone, resulting in her most assured work to date.
There were obstacles along the way. Shortly after Gibson moved into a fifth floor apartment in the East Village, she broke her foot, which kept her at home and away from the studio. During breaks from school, Gibson went back to Portland to keep recording with producer John Askew, who’s worked on albums with singer-songwriter Neko Case and indie rock duo the Dodos. In March 2015, Gibson’s apartment building burned to the ground in a gas explosion incident that killed two people and injured 19 others. Gibson wasn’t hurt, but she lost all her lyrics and instruments. She couch-surfed for a while as she restarted her life.
You can feel Gibson’s despair throughout Empire Builder, even as she hopes for a brighter future. She doesn’t wallow in self-pity, instead using her sweet voice to assess her path, pulling scattered scenes from her mental scrapbook. “Now I’m staring at the Hudson, I am humming to the passing trains,” she sings on the acoustic “Louis,” following with “And I no longer miss the silence, but I miss your eyelids flickering.” It’s unclear who—or what—Gibson is talking about (maybe it’s her old flame, maybe it’s Portland in a figurative sense), but she has this uncanny way of drawing you into her ruminations, making you connect with her emotionally. She’s at a crossroads on this album; lyrically, she’s digging deeper to present a rich narrative. On certain songs, namely “Five and Thirty” and “The Search for Dark Lake,” her words feel poetic, wafting in from faraway places, gently floating along the melody.
Gibson reminds me of Marissa Nadler, in the way she needs very little behind her to make her songs come across. Her voice carried her work in years past, but on Empire Builder, the music is more fleshed out. Where 2012’s La Grande was filled with charming campfire songs that took a bit longer to sink in, Empire Builder makes an immediate impact: Aided by Neko Case drummer Dan Hunt, violinist Peter Broderick, and Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Dave Depper, the arrangements are strong but subtle enough to keep Gibson’s voice at the forefront. These songs feel more alive, full of nuance. On the title track, after Gibson has finished singing, a faint electric guitar arises, carrying the song to a soft landing. As a whole, Empire Builder rumbles along like that train that influenced its creative direction. The pace is unhurried, and Gibson offers a cathartic tale of loss and redemption, set against a gorgeous sonic backdrop. She sounds newly confident, invigorated, and free. | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Barsuk / City Slang | March 30, 2016 | 7.7 | ad0b3b65-acdd-4639-8e9f-493be29cff7b | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The “Get in With Me” rapper’s single-minded focus on getting money and spending it irresponsibly is a perfect distraction from the precarity of real life. | The “Get in With Me” rapper’s single-minded focus on getting money and spending it irresponsibly is a perfect distraction from the precarity of real life. | BossMan Dlow: Mr Beat the Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bossman-dlow-mr-beat-the-road/ | Mr Beat the Road | BossMan Dlow’s dope-dealing motivation rap exploded at exactly the right moment. Inflation is everywhere. Trips to the grocery store are backbreaking. Jobs would rather lay off workers than give them a couple extra dollars. Turn on the TV or go on social media and it feels like everyone is getting money but you. With these very real anxieties in the air, Dlow’s reckless, turnt-up anthems about chasing the bag and upgrading your lifestyle can feel damn near spiritual.
That was the case with “Get in With Me,” his January single that went from regional Florida rap barnburner to viral sensation and nationwide hit, mostly because he sounds like a life coach: “You wanna boss up your life? All you gotta do is get in with me.” This February, I was in Phoenix with a few friends for a wedding, and the nickel-and-diming of travel had worn us down. After a night at the club spent slow-sipping drinks to stretch our thin wallets, “Get in With Me” came on the radio during the drive home. We blasted his vivid imagery of jewelry, sports cars, and hibachi restaurant dinners and for a few minutes, we felt rich as hell.
“Get in With Me” is the lead single on Mr Beat the Road, the Port Salerno-bred rapper’s first mixtape since entering the mainstream fold. At 17 tracks, it’s a pedal-to-the-metal blur of hustler’s ambition and fantasies about all the irresponsible shit you can do with too much money. Dlow is not a versatile rapper. The Michigan-meets-the-South party beats are formulaic and his one-note celebratory punch-ins mean that the mixtape is full of lesser variants of “Get in With Me.” The good news is that “Get in With Me” is such a shot of adrenaline that even B-tier versions of it still make you want to act a fool.
When Mr Beat the Road brings to mind the grind and glory of Southern rap albums of the past, it’s not the emotionally complex ones that sound as if they’ve survived war, like Jeezy’s TM101 or Webbie’s Savage Life, but the hard-earned flash and opulence of a Big Tymers project. In that duo, Birdman and Mannie Fresh were two limited rappers getting by on swag and embellishment, with a deadeye focus on all the rims and chains their years of grueling work had gotten them, rather than the work itself. Mr Beat the Road is pretty similar. The recurring background sounds of scraped pots, flickering burners, and rubber on pavement remind you of the hustle, but mostly Dlow’s having a good-ass time. His greatest attribute is that he can’t wait to tell you how large he’s living, an excitement so contagious that rapping along feels like part of the experience.
Lyrical repetitiveness works in Dlow’s favor because the songs are so easy to memorize. I pop when he hollers about his shopping sprees—$1,300 at Prada, $1,250 at Lanvin, and $1,500 at Balenciaga, to name a few—or comes up with yet another way to say he’s liquid: “Pockets full of (clucking sound) I’m starting to walk like a chicken, nigga,” he raps on the uptempo “Talk My Shit.” Another recurring bit refers to blowing past the speed limit, like on standout “Mr Pot Scraper,” when he shouts, “The way I’m drivin’ the (vroom) I just might wreck or somethin’.” (Inserted sound effects are one of his preferred methods of communication.) Sometimes he gets so amped that his words bleed together, like when he raps, “I be pullin’ up in a, what kinda fuckin’ car is that?” on “Trippin’,” fumbling slightly through the bar like he can’t even believe it himself.
His guests are game, too. Rob49 sends the already fired-up “Lil Bastard” into another gear by doing that thing where he squeezes way too many words into one bar. Sexyy Red’s raunch shines on “Come Here” as they connect for a cut that should have strip clubs on lock. When Dlow slows it down a notch on “Boss Talk” and “Mike Smiff,” it’s a buzzkill—sacrificing that blast of charisma and motivation for something closer to Moneybagg Yo-core radio rap. That could be a glimpse into his future, though I hope not. Even if his current style is lean and samey, it’s rarely boring. The static mainstream rap landscape could use a voice who actually makes you want to crank the volume all the way up. | 2024-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | March 19, 2024 | 7 | ad0effe4-2dde-4b28-8ea0-154ab8f05338 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
This massive box set captures the British art-rock legends’ progression from Syd Barrett’s cracked-out psychedelia through the experimental song suites of the early 1970s. | This massive box set captures the British art-rock legends’ progression from Syd Barrett’s cracked-out psychedelia through the experimental song suites of the early 1970s. | Pink Floyd: The Early Years 1965-1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22663-the-early-years-1965-1972/ | The Early Years 1965-1972 | “Today’s underground may be the answer to tomorrow’s leisure,” intones an earnest British newscaster, narrating film of London’s U.F.O. Club circa January 1967 while its house band, Pink Floyd, jams amid the flashing lights. And darned if he wasn’t right: the black-and-white segment is now found on the massive new $550, 11-CD/9-DVD/8 Blu-Ray box set, Pink Floyd: The Early Years, 1965–1972. With over 27 hours of material, the package overflows with replica 45 rpm singles, gig flyers, posters, tickets, sheet music, and more, and the ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.
The Early Years tells the remarkable story of Pink Floyd’s career up through the moment they became part of yesterday’s underground and today’s mainstream, stopping just before the writing and recording of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. Charting the band’s progression from the wig-flipping baroque psychedelia of Syd Barrett’s songwriting through their wooliest jams and into the new space beyond, The Early Years doesn’t follow a straight path. It shows an astonishing capacity to turn corners and evolve, a long arc that might give hope to every band jamming away in its practice space in search of a voice.
Beginning as a blues combo with the perfectly British drug-punning name the Tea Set (“tea” being slang for weed, maaaan), the band rechristened themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound by the time of the 1965 demo sessions that open the box’s first disc. Though not particularly competent or interesting R&B players, as demonstrated by their cover of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” just as much as an untitled 1968 “Blues Jam” on a later disc, it’s fascinating to hear Barrett’s already distinctly bent rhythm guitar as filtered through the Bo Diddley beat of “Double O Bo.” Unheard before being released in 2015 as a double 7" for Record Store Day, the 1965 sessions also highlight the first fruits of Barrett’s songwriting, the playfulness of “Butterfly” displaying the stylist and singer he already was. “Along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent,” David Bowie would say of Barrett, a madcap permission-granter for a new generation of British musicians less beholden to imitating their American heroes.
Leaving the band in a haze of mental health issues in early 1968, Barrett’s legend would loom over the quartet for years. On the set’s volume from that year, titled Germin/Ation, Floyd’s earliest songwriting without their former leader sounds like a drab imitation, with keyboardist Rick Wright’s “It Would Be So Nice” anticipating the B-list ’60s twee-pop parodied by Spinal Tap on “Cups and Cakes.” Instead, Floyd would start to find themselves in the deep space of their early jam centerpiece, “Interstellar Overdrive,” the nearly 10-minute freak-out that closed their 1967 debut and whose descending chromatic riff dropped them into the beyond. With seven versions on the set, including a devastatingly weird DVD/Blu Ray-only 1969 take of the later slower arrangement featuring Frank Zappa on guitar, the song would provide the first portal for the band’s furthest explorations. (One of the set’s few big bummers is that it doesn’t offer audio-only downloads of the live performances featured on the visual discs.)
For fans of Floyd’s experimental tendencies, The Early Years offers enormous fun, beginning with a never-bootlegged soundtrack session. Recorded by the Barrett-era lineup in October 1967 to accompany an abstract film by John Latham, the nine takes are all light show swirl, star-splatter guitar, and primitively convincing free drumming by Nick Mason. And though, later on, Barrett replacement David Gilmour would rightly become known as a guitar hero, his playing throughout The Early Years is judicious when it comes to solos. Wailing some tasty space-blues on “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” during a jam-heavy August 1969 set from Amsterdam and a blistering “Atom Heart Mother” from Montreux ’70, Gilmour just as often fits into the band’s tapestry of gentle cymbal taps and moody keyboard filigrees.
Where their American countercultural cousins in the Grateful Dead found mind-manifesting wonder in their musical interpretation of cosmic space, the Floyd more often channeled the cold vacuum and existential tedium, perhaps a reflection of the post-psychedelic fate of Barrett. “Moonhead,” their soundtrack to the Moon landing performed live on BBC TV and captured on Bonus Continu/Ation, is a deliberate controlled float, more proto-symphonic than hippie jam. It’s this questioning sadness that the band starts to tap into during their 1969 sessions, the first mournful strains that would find their fullest expression on Dark Side of the Moon. The watershed event comes when Waters’ “Cymbaline” and “Green is the Colour” and Gilmour’s “The Narrow Way” all first turn up on the box, part of a May 1969 BBC recording for John Peel; it’s one of seven sessions for the DJ, all classic bootlegs in their own right.
In slightly different and renamed form, all three songs play a part in one of the box’s most enticing if imperfect pieces: a complete live recording of The Journey and The Man, the band’s first attempt at conceptual suites of music, performed as two halves of a show on several occasions in 1969. Though fans have attempted to reconstruct the performances as though it were a lost album, the actual product includes reworked existing pieces, going back as far as “Pow. R Toc H.,” from their 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, here becoming “The Pink Jungle.” Performed with onstage happenings and fourth-wall-breaking intrusions, the music is a fascinating forerunner to Floyd’s more successful theatrics. With sci-fi noir atmospherics (“The Labyrinths of Auximines”), live musique concrète featuring band-members sawing through wood (“Work”), overblown drum solos in disguise (“Doing It”), as well as genetic connections to the Anglophonic fun of the Syd era (Waters’ “Afternoon,” collected as “Biding My Time” on 1971’s Relics), the two suites are first drafts. That the band scrapped them and moved along to the next ambitious projects in the queue is yet another testament to their developing editing skills.
As career periods go, the seven years of Pink Floyd’s Early Years don’t exactly match other intense eras of classic rock creativity, like Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1968 or the Beatles from 1962 to 1969. But this set illustrates something about both Pink Floyd’s own path and the rewards of resilience. While remembered for their outsized onstage gestures like inflatable pigs and the disassembly of a giant wall, the real revelation of The Early Years is to hear exactly how slowly and modestly Pink Floyd came into themselves; despite the scale of their ambition, the box feels less a blueprint than a scale model. While Barrett’s contributions remain singular, the development of the band over these years wasn’t so much genius than inspired workmanship, not all of it successful. David Gilmour’s “Fat Old Sun,” appearing first on a July 1970 Peel session, is less compelling in its 15-minute jammed-out incarnation the following year. “Embryo,” though, develops from a three-minute post-Barrett psych-folk bauble on a 1968 BBC session to a fully realized 10-minute prog arrangement by 1971, the band’s restlessness apparent and worthwhile.
There’s plenty to gnaw on, from Barrett’s whimsy to the formless countercultural yearning of the middle years to the emergence of Waters and Gilmour as songwriters to the brilliant suite-making of 1971’s “Echoes.” While the band would shatter amid acrimonious lawsuits a decade after this set’s conclusion, the music is the sound of musicians working in concert towards an unseen and unknown goal. In the modern age of oversized vault-clearing and copyright-protecting box sets, there is something resoundingly human about The Early Years, which only makes the achievements more extraordinary. Concluding with a new mix of 1972’s Obscured by Clouds (excluding bonus material), one can hear all the pieces of their more iconic future albums clicking into place and the sound of space closing around them into something more fixed. But that’s the topic of another box set. | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Legacy | December 14, 2016 | 8.8 | ad0f9f4a-2b0e-45b7-853c-7e6054fd5eb4 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The eighth Black Lips album finds the band with a new five-piece lineup. Weighing in at 18 tracks, it assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium. | The eighth Black Lips album finds the band with a new five-piece lineup. Weighing in at 18 tracks, it assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium. | Black Lips: Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23164-satans-graffiti-or-gods-art/ | Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? | The Black Lips have been many things over their 18-year run: insolent garage-rockers and innocent pop balladeers; good-ol’-boy country crooners and bad-trip trainwrecks; lo-fi dirtbags and hi-fi hustlers. But ever since their four-piece line-up solidified in 2004—just in time for their first great record, Let It Bloom—the band always exuded a fraternal, last-gang-in-town sense of solidarity. Their catalog may be defined by dramatic shifts in fidelity and focus from album to album, but you never doubted their commitment to seeing each one through.
Their eighth album, though, is the product of some radically reformulated chemistry. The Black Lips are now a five-piece, only 40 per cent of which—guitarist Cole Alexander and bassist Jared Swilley—appeared on their previous record. Original drummer Joe Bradley (singer of arguably their most enduring anthem) and long-time guitarist Ian St. Pe are gone. Not all of the new faces are actually new—recent addition Jack Hines preceded St. Pe’s tenure in the group—but in addition to recruiting drummer Oakley Munson, the Black Lips also now have a full-time saxophonist in Zumi Rosow to thicken up their sound.
Whatever the reasons for it, the shake-up has altered the course of a band that was approaching a career crossroads. The Black Lips’ previous two records—2011’s Arabia Mountain and 2014’s Underneath the Rainbow—saw them make tentative tip-toes toward the mainstream with the help of some platinum-grade producers: the former tapped Mark Ronson’s retro-pop panache, the latter assumed Patrick Carney’s Black Keys bounce. But neither record really elevated the Black Lips beyond their club-level/cult-act station. And so with Satan’s graffiti or God’s art?, they essentially say “fuck it” and indulge their every scatterbrained whim. Like its immediate predecessors, the new album boasts some familiar names in the liner notes: Sean Ono Lennon served as producer, his mom provides (barely perceptible) backing vocals, and additional spiritual guidance was provided by Saul Adamczewski of anarchic UK slop-rock outfit Fat White Family.
As its title suggests, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? invites oppositional, Rorschach-test interpretations. It is at once the Black Lips’ most sonically elaborate album and its most aggressively primitive. The band wrap the songs in a cinematic, carnivalesque clamor, but shout themselves hoarse as if they were still trying to hear themselves over a blown-out church-basement PA. Weighing in at 18 tracks, Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? assumes the form of a concept album while making a complete mockery of the medium. There are overtures and interludes and reprises and spoken-word passages, but no discernible logic holding them together. Which could very well be the point—when a band as notoriously unruly as the Black Lips opt to make a double-album opus, don’t be surprised when they come off like a group of road-tripping teenagers who’ve scored a Groupon for a five-star hotel and opt to take a dump in the bidet.
Following a brief, jazzy intro, the puffed-up Lips come out swinging with “Occidental Front,” a bracing, stormy blast of desert psych that sounds like the “Rawhide” theme rerouted through the Stooges’ Fun House. But the ceaseless paisley-pop stomp of lead single “Can’t Hold On” provides an early indication of this album’s nagging flaw: its tendency to hammer a simple two-minute tune into a laborious four-minute one. The sense of torpor is exacerbated by tossed-off intermission tracks that drag on for as long as the proper songs, as if branding the bloozy scuzz of “Got Me All Alone” and the warbled-out bongo soul of “Interlude: E’lektric Spider Webz” as “interludes” exonerates the band of aimlessly dicking around.
The album’s best songs are tucked onto Side Two. “Squatting in Heaven” imagines an alternate 1960s where the Stones got stuck in the toga-party circuit; “Rebel Intuition” supports the theory that the first punk album ever was Highway 61 Revisited. And then there’s the gleaming, Spector-like “Crystal Night,” the sort of sweetly subversive song that only the Black Lips could pull off. Just as their 2007 standard “O Katrina!” conflated a girl-done-me-wrong narrative with the worst natural disaster in recent U.S. history, here, the Lips set a typical brokenhearted love song against the backdrop of the 1938 Nazi raids that set the Holocaust in motion (thereby adding the gravest of subtexts to otherwise wistful lines like “Do you remember/The snow was falling/And I held you in my arms then we kissed/I think it was November”). The equally winsome “Wayne” has a similarly unnerving effect, its slow-dance swoon disrupted by an eye-opening lyric—“Is it true/Was it them or you/What you said about the man/Strung up by the Klan?”—that suggests the song could very well be about a certain controversial Southern rapper.
But such sublime moments are in scarce supply, as the album gets bogged down by repetitious mid-tempo rave-ups (“We Know”) and sluggish strip-club struts (“Come Ride With Me”) where Alexander overcompensates for the temperate pace by blowing out his vocal cords. Curiously, the closest thing Satan’s graffiti has to a climax is a random cover of the early Beatles classic “It Won’t Be Long.” It envisions what the song would sound like if it was recorded in 1966 instead of ’63, with Swilley lingering on the line “till I belong to you” until his anxious anticipation starts to sound more like a threat. And it’s a subtle reminder of what the Black Lips do so well, teasing the horror out of wholesomeness and recasting golden-age rock’n’roll in a strange, discomfiting light. But it’s a quality that often gets obscured amid this album’s unwieldy, unbridled sprawl. Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags. | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vice | May 8, 2017 | 6.6 | ad17fbc9-decd-46aa-b1ed-1409b4102ee1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The 20-year-old New Zealand singer follows up her ironic TikTok smash “Supalonely” with a surprisingly sincere album that only stumbles when it lapses into conventional pop. | The 20-year-old New Zealand singer follows up her ironic TikTok smash “Supalonely” with a surprisingly sincere album that only stumbles when it lapses into conventional pop. | BENEE: Hey u x | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benee-hey-u-x/ | Hey u x | The latest Gen Z pop star to emerge from TikTok and Chill Indie playlists into minor stardom, Stella Rose Bennett—aka BENEE—found success early in the COVID-19 pandemic with her Gus Dapperton collaboration “Supalonely” and its ensuing dance challenge. Unlike fellow youth alt-pop Billboard phenomenons like Conan Gray’s “Heather” or Clairo’s “Sofia,” “Supalonely” doesn’t even hint at a deeper meaning: The song depicts an alienated teenager post-breakup, reveling in self-pity with taunting backing vocals and slap bass. Fortunately, “Supalonely” (originally released on 2019’s Stella & Steve EP) is not indicative of BENEE’s debut full-length, Hey u x. Like an album-length version of Mean Girls or Easy A—high-school movies where underdog protagonists briefly become pariahs before realizing they must Be Themselves—Hey u x is at its best when it’s down to Earth, and only stumbles when it lapses into conventional pop.
When BENEE’s peers strive for profundity, the results can be as cheesy as any recent pop. Conan Gray’s “The Story” attempts to handle sensitive topics like teen suicide, but winds up exposing a lack of maturity (sample lyric: “They were just 16/When the people were mean”). Instead of trying to be a voice of a generation, BENEE finds depth by focusing on her own feelings and reactions. On “Happen to Me,” she depicts intrusive thoughts and ambivalence around death, but her tone is realistic rather than moralizing: “I understand why people leave/But leaving seems scary to me.” Though the lyrics aren’t especially innovative, there’s an honest, youthful plainspokenness to lines like, “Don’t sell yourself short/There’s something about you/Can’t explain but I can’t live without you,” from “Same Effect,” or “Driving inside your car/You put your hand around my heart/But I’m afraid/You’ll try to control me,” from “A Little While.”
Producer Josh Fountain is eager to match BENEE’s energy, whether borrowing a drum groove from Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes” on “Happen to Me” or indulging silliness like “Snail,” which feels primed for another TikTok challenge with nonsensical chants (“I’m like a snail/You’re a guy/Kinda mad/I can’t fly”), 808 cowbells, and vocal manipulations. Ironically for a major-label pop album, the most upbeat excursions are the weakest. “Sheesh” with Grimes (more or less a reprise of melodies from “Kill V. Maim”) aims for upbeat hyperpop but tops out at maybe 50 Gecs. BENEE’s deadpan choruses on “Plain” provide amusing contrast to Lily Allen and Flo Milli’s pettiness, but that pettiness feels at odds with the rest of the record. These songs play like concessions to anyone who wanted an album of “Supalonely” instead of an album of sincerity.
Yet “Supalonely” fits better than expected in the context of the record’s more thoughtful songs, to the point where its obnoxiousness feels endearing, even playful. It helps that the rest of the album contains none of the same smarmy aloofness—even if “Kool” sounds slick, it’s really just envious of people who can pull that off. There’s room here for wackiness like “Snail,” but BENEE gets better results by dropping the cutesy affectations. When the pace slows down, Hey u x strikes a balance between whimsy and moodiness, particularly on “A Little While” or the Frankie Valli-alluding ballad “All the Time,” a duet with New Zealand newcomer Muroki. BENEE can wink at the camera when she needs to, but Hey u x is most poignant when she doesn’t.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Republic | November 23, 2020 | 6.4 | ad1c6ba2-6dd7-4631-ac42-9e3b6aacad48 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
With the final TLC album, Chilli and T-Boz have crafted a conscious epilogue to their catalog and a love letter to their fans. It hits every style in their vast range and dignifies their career. | With the final TLC album, Chilli and T-Boz have crafted a conscious epilogue to their catalog and a love letter to their fans. It hits every style in their vast range and dignifies their career. | TLC: TLC | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tlc-tlc/ | TLC | As one of the top rewards for the Kickstarter that funded TLC’s fifth and final album, donors who pledged $5,000 or more were gifted a slumber party at the personal residences of T-Boz or Chilli. “We’ll put on our jammies,” read the description, “order some late night snacks, and have some #TLCPillowTalk. Mom and Dad won’t be there, so there’s no need to keep the volume down.”
Such an intimate prize—and its dishy, familial language—encapsulates the ethos guiding TLC since their first album, Ooooooohhh… on the TLC Tip, in 1992. In their music as well as their personas, they have cultivated their regular-girlness as an asset while retaining an aura of cool, a feat few if any pop stars have achieved with such massive success. (Katy Perry, who procured one of those T-Boz slumber parties, may have come close at an earlier point in her career.)
As feminist heroes, even TLC’s biggest hits have been a beacon for multiple generations of women and girls, delving into such topics as self-esteem (“Unpretty”), and not settling (“No Scrubs”), as well as social issues like AIDS awareness and the cycle of poverty and drug dealing (“Waterfalls”). TLC were practicing devoted “fan engagement” (and defining it) near-decades before the constant cheesing of social media, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that they would would freely offer up their own homes to fans, as well as set Kickstarter records for how quickly those fans raised and surpassed the $150,000 goal.
The resulting album, TLC, is a love letter to them. While not as explicitly directed as 1999’s Fanmail, it both hits on every style in TLC’s vast range and properly dignifies their storied career, incorporating songs that acknowledge their impact without waxing nostalgic (even if the boppy lead single was titled “Way Back”). After an intro jam declaring they need “No Introduction” while simultaneously introducing them in a heavy sub-bass clatter that seems tailor-made for opening arena concerts, Chilli and T-Boz begin with a pointed set of barbecue jams. The breezy “Way Back” calls to mind Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle’s R&B classic “Saturday Love,” and paired back-to-back with the Boney M-sampling disco rave-up “It’s Sunny,” TLC gives a nod to its influences, a statement that even icons have icons. As album openers, the throwback qualities of these tracks are significant on a recording-career-ending album, reverent goodbyes that also recognize the wide age range of their devoted listenership. And the unique symbiosis of the duo’s voices are as impeccable as ever, T-Boz’s smoky alto gliding beneath Chilli’s chirpy one. That sound is a symbol of round-the-way-girlhood so embedded into the cultural fabric that it’s hard to know when it ever wasn’t, and strange to think these are the last iterations of it.
Its finality certainly weighs on the album, as Chilli and T-Boz have crafted a conscious epilogue to their albums career (they say they will still perform together). While overall TLC doesn’t burn with the glossy sheen they created with longtime collaborating producer Dallas Austin, who’s notably absent here (he and Chilli have a son together), perhaps it doesn’t need to. The warmest tracks are centered on acoustic guitar or piano, letting the burning vocal take the lead—particularly in the sensual “Start a Fire,” a midnight bedroom track as satiny as the pajamas they donned in the “Waterfalls” video, and on the touching album standout “American Gold.” The latter is the song most obviously written about Left Eye, who was the eminently unique “crazy” in their CrazySexyCool trio before her death in a car crash in 2002. “I lost some friends, some friends I didn’t want to,” Chilli and T-Boz duet sublimely. But “American Gold” also serves as an antiwar song and a chance for spiritual uplift. “Feelin’ undefeated/From the ones who try to have power over you,” the duo intones. “Don’t let ’em control you.”
That message of self-motivation and self-sufficiency is central to any TLC album, and here T-Boz and Chilli include it on “Perfect Girls,” a rebuttal to the distorted worldview transmitted to women and girls via Instagram and the fashion world. It’s a gentle track, their voices deliberately soft like an arm around the shoulder, as they remind us that “Perfect girls ain’t real/They live a lie but it’s always on your mind/’Cause you’re online all the time/Know that perfect girls ain’t real… Gotta learn to love yourself.” At first glance, it might seem obvious, but with piano trills and a synth counter-rhythm the message truly hits in the heart and gut, a 2017 companion piece to “Unpretty.” TLC, again, has always been mindful of its audience, particularly targeting underrepresented black girls and other girls of color who lack representation in the media and have a comparative dearth of positive reinforcement about their physical beauty (and the beauty of their existences).
With the nuances of that track in particular, it’s tough to let TLC go, their position as role models so crucial to a pop/R&B landscape that needs them. And yet, TLC's letting-go is bittersweet and good, a sometimes somber, sometimes playful requiem for their time together (and with us). The duo’s official wave goodbye comes in the form of “Joy Ride,” ostensibly the album closer, and a cheerful, lightly funky appreciation of their career. Its first words are “thank you” and it sounds like a parade, a brass section fêteing T-Boz and Chilli’s gossamer harmonies. Their positivity never flags, and the melody is as infectious as any song they’ve written through the years; the Kickstarter funding of the album is less an indictment of the lack of institutional support from the music industry and more of a reminder that they’ve always had a special relationship with their fans. As they remind us: “I ain’t never left you, I accept you, I respect you.” TLC, an indelible part of pop history, will never be gone. | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 852 Musiq | July 6, 2017 | 7.4 | ad1ebca1-1a4b-469c-bfe3-181ae725e657 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
On their latest EP, the UK dance duo amp up their latent melancholy, luxuriating in a rather British strain of pastoral electronica. | On their latest EP, the UK dance duo amp up their latent melancholy, luxuriating in a rather British strain of pastoral electronica. | Overmono: Everything U Need EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/overmono-everything-u-need-ep/ | Everything U Need EP | Eight months into pandemic-adjusted reality and the netherworld of dance music has reached a critical point. Disco lights are gathering dust. All new techno releases have surely been completed with the present situation in mind: a home-listening scenario which favors melody over repetition, intricacy over seismic subs. On their latest EP, Overmono respond to the new normal by amping up their latent melancholy and luxuriating in a rather British strain of pastoral electronica.
Brothers Ed and Tom Russell, also known as Tessela and Truss, have grafted their way into the UK dance A-list with a rave-indebted sound that has one foot in Room 1 (pumping, ecstatic) and the other in Room 2 (disjointed, dicey). Older by 10 years, Tom brings the blood and guts, with a back catalogue of industrial-edged material as Truss, MPIA3, and one half of bug-eyed techno trolls Blacknecks. Kid brother Tessela is the drum machine, able to slice an Amen break 50 ways.
You’d think a hybrid of these impulses would be tough as a bouncer’s boot, but their releases as Overmono, mainly for the rave-rooted XL Recordings, are vivid and accessible, keeping ruffneck drums in check with smiley-face signifiers and notes of ’90s euphoria. Everything U Need goes brighter still, highlighting their way with a melody—a skill they may have honed through years of classical instruction at the behest of their orchestra-conductor father. So where Overmono’s earlier records hopped between contradictory moods and sketches, these four tracks unfurl as a continuous suite, more like the first side of an album than a club-targeted EP. Their sharp edges have been sanded down, their shiny bits polished up. It’s bijou enough to bring to mind a record like Boards of Canada’s In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country. Take the soft chimes that interrupt “Clipper (Another 5 Years)”—just the sort of saucer-eyed whimsy you’d associate with the classic Warp duo, along with the faux-mysterious snippets of speech.
Similarly, the title track is a bedroom anthem built on itchy minimal drums, a smear of waterlogged pads and a distinctive detuned synth lead: three ingredients that together reboot the kind of tear-stained techno that James Holden and Luke Abbott were perfecting in the late ’00s. With its yin-and-yang combo of creepy-crawly percussion and toy-box melodies, “Clipper” is a dead ringer for early Nathan Fake too, which points us towards an older lineage, a pastoral slant on techno that you can trace back to Aphex Twin—though in his hands, more like folk-horror than a caravan holiday. It’s a sound we haven’t heard much of lately; the mid-’00s revival is gathering pace.
The outer edges of the EP point to another ouroboros of influence, as the opening revs of “Aero” mimic Skee Mask’s “Dial 274” before accelerating into the wide-open sky, leaving trancey chemtrails in their path. “Verbosa” completes the record with a further nod to the cloistered breaks of Compro, as a rack of weary-sounding drum machines chatter under warm drones. Skee Mask is behind some of the only essential records of the breaks revival that Tessela and Overmono helped foment, and their shared genealogy can be traced back to the haunted terrain of Burial and, beyond that, Aphex Twin again. In these blue remembered hills are emotions that run deeper than nostalgia: this is where British ravers buried our collective joy and catharsis, allegedly in some forgotten field off the M4. It’s a powerful collective memory which expands to include each new generation of those who weren’t there.
Unlike the records it most resembles, Everything U Need is fundamentally straightforward—no strange time signatures here, no bait-and-switch drops, no glitchy stunts. In one sense, that feels like a cop-out given current conditions of prolonged boredom and insular listening. But if we’re doomed to stay in our corona bubbles for a whole winter, any record that revives the MDMA-zing after-party techno-glow of the mid-’00s might as well be labelled “functional.” No one can stop us staying up to watch the sunrise, anyway.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | XL | November 10, 2020 | 6.7 | ad22efbe-c2da-4d0a-a420-67e6b2b72100 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Though the Seattle band would produce more focused efforts, In the West is a fascinating document of nascent indie rock that sounds revelatory 25 years later. | Though the Seattle band would produce more focused efforts, In the West is a fascinating document of nascent indie rock that sounds revelatory 25 years later. | Silkworm: In the West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silkworm-in-the-west/ | In the West | The same year that the Missoula-born, Seattle-based band Silkworm released their In the West, Kurt Cobain killed himself, ending an entire phase of rock music as we understood it. 1994 was an inflection point for alternative rock: Soundgarden released Superunknown. Weezer released The Blue Album. Hole’s Live Through This came out, as did Green Day’s Dookie and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Silkworm’s album, despite being produced by Steve Albini, who finished In Utero for Nirvana the previous year, was lost in the shuffle. Much of that has to do with Silkworm’s sound, which gestured at popular rock music of the time, but used the form to create weird songs that sounded like they were scrawled on a napkin just before last call in a dive bar. Guitarist and vocalist Joel Phelps would soon leave the band, but In the West provided a blueprint for Silkworm’s entire catalog: discursive songs that devolved into twirls of feedback, mantra-like lyrics about escaping life, drinking, lost love, and feeling uncomfortable in your skin.
Though Silkworm would later produce more focused efforts—1996’s Firewater chief among them—In the West is a fascinating document of nascent indie rock that sounds revelatory 25 years later. In Silkworm’s world, loneliness is inevitable, happiness deserves suspicion, and nostalgia is extremely dangerous. “This is the place that I miss the most, but this town is full of ghosts and I always feel like I am inside the throat of the devil here,” bassist Tim Midyett sings on “Garden City Blues,” the first words on the first song.
One of Silkworm’s great tricks was that they managed to make overwhelming depression sound nimble. In the West is a heavy listen, but there is a deadpan quality to some of Phelps’ starkest declarations. There’s a nearly audible smirk in lyrics like, “Go into the woods and live with the bears/That way you can kill someone and nobody cares/And when we’ve had enough then it’s time to ascend to heaven.” There is no place for delusion in Silkworm’s world of hard-won epiphanies, and wherever there is clarity, there can be humor.
The band keeps the emotions as messy around the edges as the arrangements. The volatility kept them unpredictable, which means that when Phelps erupts into a brief gut-wrenching scream midway through album centerpiece “Raised By Tigers,” it is so genuinely startling that it sounds improvised, a moment of catharsis that disappears as soon as it surfaces.
In the West is a brief snapshot of a fascinating band hitting on a sound at exactly the wrong time. It was too heavy to slot next to other indie rock of the time, not heavy or self-serious enough to hang with the post-Nirvana grunge set. A lot of ‘90s rock music wallowed in misery, and Silkworm was certainly miserable. But they lived inside that pain with wry good humor and sang (and screamed) about it with a light touch. They didn’t point to a way through suffering, but they showed how to bear up under it with grace.
This reissue somehow manages to offer too much bonus material without much new context. They seem to include every possible version and iteration of songs recorded circa In the West, and while it’s mildly interesting to listen to alternate takes, live versions and an entire concert from 1993, none of the material feels essential to anyone but devoted fans. Even for us, this stuff is a curio at best.
Still, it’s worth calling out Albini’s rework of his own production here. The original’s density was occasionally frustrating: Phelps’ lyrics were sometimes lost in the mix, the bass overtook everything to the point that some of the more interesting guitar moments were muddled, and many tracks sounded like first takes cut right to tape. The reissue does a lot to clear that up, or at least more properly define what is supposed to be heard when. The bass is still very high in the mix—you can never not hear it, but thanks to Albini’s work on this reissue, you get a real sense that these songs were recorded in an actual room. The songs still resemble first takes, but they’re supposed to sound that way. Twenty five years later, it’s clear that In the West was the vital sound of a band of outsiders trying not to implode, and then realizing that sometimes imploding is part of human nature. In other words, it’s the sound of messy acceptance. | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Comedy Minus One | June 4, 2019 | 8.1 | ad2b03c8-5828-488f-8dcf-042c22fab5c4 | Sam Hockley-Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-hockley-smith/ | |
The zenith of Ronnie James Dio’s formidable career, reissued on what would have been his 80th birthday, is a heavy metal holy grail —a beacon of iconic riffs and ecstatic, empowering anthems. | The zenith of Ronnie James Dio’s formidable career, reissued on what would have been his 80th birthday, is a heavy metal holy grail —a beacon of iconic riffs and ecstatic, empowering anthems. | Dio: Holy Diver (Super Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dio-holy-diver-super-deluxe-edition/ | Holy Diver (Super Deluxe Edition) | Before the release of Holy Diver, Ronnie James Dio was merely the greatest hired gun in the history of rock’n’roll. In 1974, Deep Purple’s Roger Glover drafted the diminutive American, born Ronald Padavona, to sing on his bongwater-soaked rock opera, The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. Dio’s performance so impressed former Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore that he hired him to front his new neoclassical hard-rock band Rainbow. Dio made three albums with Blackmore, but left Rainbow in 1979 to join Black Sabbath, taking on the daunting task of replacing the newly solo Ozzy Osbourne for the band’s Heaven and Hell. Dio’s second album with Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, was another masterpiece, but Dio was growing tired of standing in the shadows of his more visible bandmates. (His debut with Rainbow was literally called Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.) When Sabbath showed him the door, it was a blessing in disguise. The midnight sea was calling.
There was no question what the 40-year-old singer would call his new band. Dio formally launched in the fall of 1982, with the eponymous rocker on the microphone and fellow Sabbath expat Vinny Appice behind the drumkit. After a brief dalliance with future Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee, the band’s lineup solidified: Dio, Appice, former Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, and guitarist Vivian Campbell, from the Belfast band Sweet Savage. Their first album, Holy Diver, came out the following spring. The supporting players were crucial, but they were just that: supporting players. At last, there was a recorded document of Ronnie James Dio as a true bandleader. On a new four-disc, super-deluxe reissue, his leap into auteurism sounds as visionary as ever.
Holy Diver opens with “Stand Up and Shout,”—or, more accurately, it opens with the main riff to “Stand Up and Shout,” one of the most iconic and ubiquitous runs of notes in metal history. That simple, blues-based power-chord progression is an object of totemic power, passed from metal guitarist to metal guitarist like a talisman. It just screams heavy metal. Variations on the riff showed up on Riot’s “Swords and Tequila” in 1981, Accept’s “Flash Rockin’ Man” in 1982, Mercyful Fate’s “Curse of the Pharaohs” in 1983, and Iron Maiden’s “2 Minutes to Midnight” in 1984. The urgent, double-time version that Vivian Campbell plays on “Stand Up and Shout” lands right in the middle of that timeline, and while its similarity to those other riffs is almost certainly coincidental, it’s fitting that it announces the arrival of Dio. First on Holy Diver, and then on the nine additional Dio albums he would make before dying of stomach cancer in 2010, the singer would bend the sound and aesthetic of classic heavy metal to his will.
All the ecstatic truths of Ronnie James Dio are in full bloom on Holy Diver. His rich baritone is in career-best form, clarion-clear even when he digs into his lower register for a little extra grit. By ’83, operatic tenors with soaring falsettos were becoming a new standard in metal. Singers like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, and Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate seemed like the future of the genre. Dio couldn’t always hang with those guys on pure technique, but he anchored his voice in a deep, convincing earthiness they couldn’t quite access. His clean articulation of every syllable was also key to his appeal. Audiences could sing along to a Dio song within a couple repetitions of the chorus, even if it was their first time hearing it.
The lyrics on Holy Diver frequently push metaphor beyond its breaking point. Dio sings about velvet lies, a truth as hard as steel, the palace of the virgin, the chalice of the soul, and a rainbow in the dark. He chose words that sounded good coming out of his mouth first, conjured a vivid image second, and made logical sense third—if at all. What the hell is a holy diver, anyway? The cover art, illustrated by Randy Berrett, suggests it’s a priest who’s been tossed into the sea by a demon, but the lyrics provide no such concrete evidence: “Holy diver/You’re the star of the masquerade/No need to look so afraid/Jump on the tiger.” Dio preferred piling on imagery to building a coherent narrative, but his overarching themes always came into focus. He liked to speak to people who felt alone in the world, who needed his songs to overcome whatever private adversity they were going through. “You’ve been left on your own/Like a rainbow in the dark” may not be the most cogent simile ever written, but when Dio sang it, its empowering beams shone through.
Holy Diver also helped codify traditional heavy metal as a recognizable sound, particularly in the United States. With thrash rising on the California coast and cutting-edge regional scenes emerging in Europe and the UK, Dio became a standard bearer for old-school metal. Bain and Appice formed a rock-solid rhythm section; Campbell’s style was firmly rooted in the blues, proficient but not overly flashy or technical. Their chemistry on Holy Diver belies the fact that they had only started playing together months prior. “Gypsy” swings like Zeppelin on amphetamines, “Caught in the Middle” crunches in groovy lockstep, and “Shame on the Night” wrings high drama out of a simple blues backbone. “Rainbow in the Dark” is a pop-metal banger before the vocabulary for such a thing existed, built around a lilting motif played on a cheap Yamaha keyboard. It's one of the best metal songs ever written, and according to Campbell, “we had the fucking song written in 10 minutes.”
There are six versions of “Rainbow in the Dark” on the new Super Deluxe edition of Holy Diver, released on what would have been Dio’s 80th birthday. Like most box sets of this size, it provides an overwhelming amount of music with limited replay value. A new remix by Joe Barresi (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age) unearths outros that were initially lost to the album’s deeply ’80s fade-outs, providing a small behind-the-scenes glimpse of the sessions, but his aggressive tinkering sterilizes the songs. Hearing Holy Diver this crisply feels uncanny and a little unnerving, like watching an old TV show with the motion smoothing turned on. The new remaster sounds much better, offering a beefier listen without sacrificing the character of the original recording. A recording from a 1983 Fresno concert shows off how great Dio sounded live at the time, but the dull drum solo and 20-minute version of “Heaven and Hell” don’t play nearly as well when you aren’t there in person. The outtakes and alternate versions are strictly heads-only.
None of that underwhelming bonus material can dampen the greatness of Holy Diver. Dio went into the sessions with something to prove, and he left with one of metal’s holy grails, a classic of the same magnitude as Paranoid and The Number of the Beast. His work with Rainbow and Sabbath was just as pivotal to the genre, but Holy Diver is his zenith—the most Dio album of all time. These are the songs that made Dio the avatar and patron saint of dorky metalheads everywhere. Here was a 5'4", middle-aged man, singing about rainbows and tigers and drinking red wine from a golden goblet. His very existence was a siren song for dweebs; if you were uncool, Dio was for you. Consider the virtuosic opening sequence of 2006’s still-awesome Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny: Our hero (Troy Gentile, playing a young Jack Black) is terrorized by his buttoned-up Christian father (played by Meat Loaf), who destroys all his rock’n’roll paraphernalia and slams the bedroom door. Only one poster survives the melee—the star of the masquerade, the rainbow in the dark, the truth as hard as steel. Ronnie James Dio, seated on his throne, comes to life and urges the crestfallen teen onward: “You will face your inner demons,” he instructs. “Now go, my son, and rock.” | 2022-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Rhino | July 9, 2022 | 9 | ad38f182-e5ff-4060-94f5-c2749a6a691c | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Over the last few years, the mysterious, much-hyped Swedish band formerly known as Ghost have cultivated an alluring persona of subversion and symbolism. Infestissumam, their first album for a major label, follows their 2010 debut Opus Eponymous, a collection of old-school "Satanic" heavy metal with hooks as addictive as sin. | Over the last few years, the mysterious, much-hyped Swedish band formerly known as Ghost have cultivated an alluring persona of subversion and symbolism. Infestissumam, their first album for a major label, follows their 2010 debut Opus Eponymous, a collection of old-school "Satanic" heavy metal with hooks as addictive as sin. | Ghost: Infestissumam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17807-ghost-bc-infestissumam/ | Infestissumam | It’s difficult not to pull for Ghost B.C.: During the last few years, the mysterious Swedish metal outfit formerly known as Ghost have cultivated a sterling, alluring persona of subversion and symbolism. Their leader is a papal parody named Papa Emeritus II, who comes cloaked in inverted crosses and a sinister skeletal mask. He's flanked by five Nameless Ghouls dressed in matching black uniforms that suggest Darth Vader using the force to infiltrate and overrun the Catholic Church.
Despite mounds of speculation and the exposure risk the band’s touring schedules involves, the identities of the musicians remain unknown (or, at least unconfirmed), furthering the allure of their at-large intrigue. Ghost have risen to popularity in relatively antiquated order, too, parlaying the buzz behind a single issued via social media (a move now more democratic than issuing a 7”) into a record deal and a licensing contract for the exciting Opus Eponymous, a debut that upended many 2010 and 2011 year-end lists. The old-fashioned label bidding war that followed led to a contract rumored to be as high as $750,000 with new Universal Records imprint, Loma Vista. To recap: A major label funds a band that poses as the Anti-Christ and his henchmen and plays old-school heavy metal with hooks as addictive as sin while also covering the Beatles and ABBA: Why wouldn’t you pull for Ghost B.C.?
One compelling reason to forego the Ghost B.C. fanfare is Infestissumam, the band’s mostly laughable second album. The ballyhoo for Ghost’s follow-up has been so strong that it landed them on the 100th cover of Decibel two months before it was issued. A name change, an album cover so controversial some manufacturers allegedly refused to print it, and the fortuitous timing of the actual Pope’s early departure have only ratcheted anticipation. And though these 10 songs seem to be a logical progression from Opus Eponymous, Infestissumam all but abandons the twin senses of danger and discovery upon which Ghost once depended. This is a pop-rock record underwritten with childlike Anti-Christian sentiment; the tension between those underdeveloped directions-- surface-level darkness and near-translucent accessibility-- creates little but an insufferable stiffness.
Sure, Infestissumam delivers a handful of hooks you won’t escape and a few zingers that’ll make you smile, but that’s about it. “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen”, for instance, is the record’s eight-minute centerpiece. Above forlorn piano and Coldplay-earnest guitar, Papa uses his best Ben Gibbard croon to mix Latin and empty Satanic jingoism. The song eventually sidesteps into surf-rock, black metal, and a “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” sing-along; it is one of the most awkward things you will ever hear. At its best, Opus Eponymous capably laced Ghost’s pop ambition with heavy metal’s sense of danger, as with the bracing crunch of “Ritual” or the hangman guitar tone of the simultaneously clever and goofy “Satan Prayer”. At its best, however, Infestissumam is only a reminder of that earlier record’s now-apocryphal promise.
With their label’s largesse secured, Ghost B.C. surprisingly headed to Nashville, Tenn., to record with Nick Raskulinecz, a regular Foo Fighters producer who’s also worked with the Deftones, Alice in Chains, and Velvet Revolver. If Ghost B.C. were going to be a major-label metal act, they needed to sound like a major-label metal act, right? To that end, Infestissumam is at least a crisp and full production, from the grand theatrical choir that invokes the black mass at the start to the pitch-shifting synthesizer that goads along album closer “Monstrance Clock”. But Raskulinecz brightens the band until the mystery and suspense disappear, turning these evil thoughts into baubles that sound safe enough for big money and rock radio.
The record’s back half, for instance, is a half-marathon of bad stylistic decisions that put Ghost B.C. in settings that they just can’t make convincing. “Body and Blood” is about necrotic cannibalism, but it sounds like something Sloan might have left on the floor of the editing room. Its affable jangle and eventual surge wilt under Raskulinecz’s spotlight. If They Might Be Giants decided to cut a funny little metal record (and why haven’t they?), “Idolatrine” and its jaunting organ might form the fourth single. And “Depth of Satan’s Eyes” offers neutered quips about flatulence and feces above a vaguely doom metal clip; it’s the sort of flimsy, silly, and safe pap that suggests Ghost B.C. might be a side-project for another band in costume, the motherfucking Doodlebops. Infestissumam is a great critique of how self-serious yet puerile heavy metal can get, but that’s probably not the point of a lucrative record deal.
In the heavy metal community, Ghost B.C.’s defenders often talk about the band as a gateway for young metal fans, a new chance to expand the musty dark legions. In his smart 2011 piece for Invisible Oranges titled “Why Ghost Matters,” Justin M. Norton argued that metal needs new converts, and that Ghost was the band to do just that. “I could play [Opus Eponymous] for my mother, a Carly Simon devotee, and she’d find something to like. … I see The Undead Pope becoming an effective recruiter, much like Eddie or Anton LaVey. He is metal’s own Uncle Sam.”
But, in 2013, to what exactly is Ghost B.C. a gateway? Back to old notions of rock’n’roll, where Jim Morrison is still a poet waxing above organs and major-label polish is a requisite of important music? To an excuse for a lack of substance in the presence of great style and pristine surface? To a worldview in which darkness and anger and frustration serve only to become a punchline and where the Anti-Christ “comes into the daughters of men” and creates silly portmanteaus like “Idolatrine”? Is that even a gateway anyone wants to offer anymore? | 2013-04-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Loma Vista | April 18, 2013 | 5.8 | ad3c9606-6e04-420a-afc8-226192ee9a71 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The New York singer-songwriter’s third album maps life’s changes to sleek, vibrant R&B that’s packed with 1980s soundtrack flourishes and big moments; it’s the perfect frame for her extraordinary voice. | The New York singer-songwriter’s third album maps life’s changes to sleek, vibrant R&B that’s packed with 1980s soundtrack flourishes and big moments; it’s the perfect frame for her extraordinary voice. | Emily King: Scenery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-king-scenery/ | Scenery | It’s the time of year to wonder: What would happen if we packed up our shoes and moved to grassier pastures? If we got some fresh sunshine on our bones, would everything be warmer and sweeter? With her new album, Scenery, Emily King reports yes, with delicate murmurs and melty calypso rhythms. King just moved from the Lower East Side block she’s lived on her whole life to Woodstock, got a car and some wind in her hair, like “one of those scenes from the ’80s.” Then she whipped around the next week and wrote “Remind Me,” the stirring electro-R&B first song on Scenery. The album could be a daydream soundtrack for King’s imaginary movie. There are twinkling guitars, earnest and anthemic resolutions, a silky touch, a backwards glance, and wistful sentiment for the present.
A decade into her career and now on her third album, King’s distinctive, breathy staccato seems to have found a suitable ecosystem. Since 2007’s sincere East Side Story and 2015’s flirtatious The Switch, King has stretched a bit. Having found a frothy groove in her intricate blend of R&B and soul, she sounds like she has room to breathe. The unassuming, seductive “Caliche” could be a study in vocalizing a soft touch. There’s a cotton-candy composition to King’s voice: It’s full and crystalline and sweet and floating. In Scenery, she skips around closely held R&B harmonies, navigating vintage synths in “Remind Me” and sparkling guitars “2nd Guess.” If King’s voice seems to flit on gentle tiptoe, it’s with balletic athleticism. She’s trained enough to make it look like she’s floating.
For all the softness of her tone, King has a taste for the declarative. In keeping with its ’80s-soundtrack DNA, Scenery has many big moments. On “Go Back,” King even does a touch of Springsteen. The guitars are rousing, the cymbals crashing, and the breaks are tough. Her controlled hesitations show the double bind of leaving home: regret and resolve. When she promises, “I’ll never go back,” you can hear that this might not be true, that she’s singing this because she wants it to be true. If King’s lyrics go for the universal, she relies on her extraordinary vocal skill to add lifelike texture. She also leaves room to get weirder, if she wants. The album is fantastic in its stranger moments: In the yearning, sexy “Foregiveness,” while lawn sprinkler clicks keep the time, King gearshifts between quick enunciations and desperate, elongated syllables. It’s fantastic.
Scenery rings with the thrill of a new start, with the nostalgic satisfaction of slotting moments of life into their respective chapters. The organization of Scenery scatters the notion that this all might be linear. It zigzags thematically, from a lover’s snuggle (“Blue Light”) to deeply felt reckoning (“Foregiveness”). The album closes with a fantastic oh-you’re-something-special-can-I-buy-you-dinner seduction (“2nd Guess”) and then the fist-clenched goodbye of “Go Back.” An album’s gotta end sometime, but these songs, two of the record’s most propulsive, seem to grab us by the arm to yank us into the shimmering neon starlight—and then it’s all over. If it’s good enough, the audience will linger through the credits. King could let it linger a little more. | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | ATO | February 1, 2019 | 7.7 | ad48033e-57f1-48ba-9cf3-3b4bbfa20397 | Maggie Lange | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-lange/ | |
Even with the help of outside songwriters and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, the blues-rock duo can’t help reverting to the same old same old. | Even with the help of outside songwriters and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, the blues-rock duo can’t help reverting to the same old same old. | The Black Keys: Dropout Boogie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-black-keys-dropout-boogie/ | Dropout Boogie | When the Black Keys coughed up their debut album, The Big Come Up, exactly 20 years ago this week, the smart money definitely wasn’t on them being the slow-and-steady victors of the early 2000s garage-rock rat race. Released on psych/punk speciality label Alive Records, The Big Come Up presented a camera-shy duo that wanted nothing to do with the thrift-store chic of the Strokes, the theatrical myth-making of the White Stripes, or the hammy showmanship of the Hives. Compared to their youthful, more photogenic peers filling up the pages of SPIN and NME, singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney already sounded like grizzled old men content to spend their evenings bashing away on Muddy Waters standards and de-psychedelized Beatles covers in their basement, with no ambitions beyond recreating the sound of a crackly AM radio stuck between two stations.
However, while those aforementioned acts succumbed to prolonged hiatuses, break-ups, or failed Pharrell collaborations, the Black Keys’ proverbial junkyard beater was gradually tricked out into an auto-show-worthy muscle car, complete with hydraulic wheels and neon under siding. With the wham-bam Grammy-scooping double shot of 2010’s Brothers and 2011’s El Camino, the Keys thoroughly rewired the sound of modern rock radio over the next decade, uniting wayward factions of 78-collecting blues traditionalists, frat boys, neosoul lovers, Southern rock die-hards, aging hipsters, and their teenage kids purchasing their first guitars. Now, after exhausting every play in the post-success playbook—the detour into cinematic psychedelia, the reactionary return to FM radio fundamentals, the covers album hat-tip to their roots—the Black Keys have finally achieved the ultimate marker of classic-rock sainthood: the luxury of coasting into middle age, coupled with the casual assurance that the arenas and amphitheaters will still be packed no matter what they put out.
Fittingly, the band’s 11th album arrives roughly at the same point in the Keys’ career as the Stones were at in the mid-’80s, when Mick and Keith became less concerned with chasing the zeitgeist and just settled into doing what comes naturally. Dropout Boogie may share its name with a classic Beefheart cut, but the good Captain’s corrupting influence doesn’t extend past the record spine—the Keys’ first album of originals since 2019’s “Let’s Rock” could’ve easily been titled “Let’s Roll.” After recruiting members of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside’s backing bands for last year’s Mississippi-blues retreat Delta Kream, the Keys carried that collaborative spirit over to Dropout Boogie, opening up their creative process to a team of guest songwriters for the first time. Certainly, the Black Keys are among the few bands on the planet with the both the star power and underground pedigree to corral garage-punk lifer Greg Cartwright (Oblivians, Reigning Sound), Nashville hitmaker Angelo Petraglia (Trisha Yearwood, Taylor Swift, Kings of Leon), and ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons onto their record. However, in this case, a few drops of new blood here and there can’t keep the Keys from reverting to a lot of the same old same old.
The opening track, “Wild Child,” was apparently kicking around for years until writing contributions from both Cartwright and Petraglia brought it to the finish line. But, despite its tantalizing disco intro, the song simply ticks off all the boxes for a boilerplate Black Keys radio single, with a main guitar riff caked in enough studio-sculpted fuzz to sound like a horn section; a huge shout-it-out hook that’ll give the band’s lighting tech ample opportunity to cue the crowd for a singalong; and lusty lyrics that find Auerbach once again pining for some vaguely sketched unattainable girl. (Only in this case, the sense of familiarity is compounded by the fact the big chorus sounds like someone dialed up the Troggs’ “Wild Thing” at karaoke but were too drunk to remember the words and had to adlib their own.) A similar sense of going-through-the-motions afflicts “Burn the Damn Thing Down,” which runs a distant second in this band’s recent attempts to hotwire T. Rex’s “Jeepster,” while cribbing its city-razing, road-warrior manifesto from Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band.” But even those lifts seem subtle next to “Baby I’m Coming Home,” where the Keys bank on the faint hope that the majority of their fanbase has never heard the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.”
Such par-for-the-course riff-nicking would be more forgivable if the Keys had anything new to say on top of it, but, co-writers or none, Dropout Boogie rarely strays from Auerbach’s wheelhouse of women who have done him wrong and/or who have got to do him right, and he doesn’t bring the heat where it’s most needed. The centerpiece ballad, “How Long,” mines the same ’60s-soul elegance and baby-come-back pleading as Brothers’ definitive cover of Jerry Buttler’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” but it can’t muster any of the latter’s down-on-my-knees desperation. Auerbach fares much better when the topic shifts from broken hearts to empty wallets: On “For the Love of Money”—a spirited hill-country blues that effectively licks the Delta Kream spoon clean—he uses his secret-weapon falsetto to convey economic anxiety, savvily updating the blues’ age-old themes of impoverishment and sell-yer-soul temptation for our current late-capitalist nightmare. Then again, as Dropout Boogie proves, the easiest way to allay such fears is to build your own money-printing machine: Honoring the Keys’ reputation as a TV-sync powerhouse, “Your Team Is Looking Good” repurposes an old cheerleader taunt into a gently choogling chant that all but guarantees its placement on NFL Sunday pregame shows in perpetuity.
But for all the audio upgrades and commercial fortunes they’ve reaped over the past two decades, the Black Keys can still resemble the same dudes from Akron who found their calling 20 years ago by tuning out the world and getting lost in their own greasy groove. Only now, they don’t have to settle for merely conjuring the spirit of their blues-rock idols—they can actually invite them to their studio. You need not read the liner notes to recognize Billy Gibbons’ presence on the seedy Degüello-worthy jam “Good Love,” and though he doesn’t stick around for the closing “Didn’t I Love You,” his Texan mojo still hangs thick in the air, as Auerbach and Carney lock into a steady dirt-road rhythm that feels like it could go on way longer than its four-minute runtime. They’re the sort of tunes that the Keys can pull off with ease, as satisfying as a perfectly tossed curveball landing in a beaten-up catcher’s mitt. But they also make you wish the Keys didn't spend the rest of Dropout Boogie lobbing underhand pitches right down the middle of the plate. | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 13, 2022 | 6 | ad4e5147-aaff-424e-99e7-8d14b60151e9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Seven years after the original, the two rappers deliver a sequel that is unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms. | Seven years after the original, the two rappers deliver a sequel that is unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms. | 2 Chainz / Lil Wayne: Welcome 2 Collegrove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2-chainz-lil-wayne-welcome-2-collegrove/ | Welcome 2 Collegrove | Here’s something that doesn’t seem like it should be true: 2 Chainz is five years older than Lil Wayne. Of course, in the mid-’90s Wayne willed his way into the Cash Money Records offices as a quasi-intern—and then onto radio and television—before he was old enough to drive; of course, the arc of 2 Chainz’s early career more closely resembles an EKG readout, to the point where the first song on 2007’s long-delayed Playaz Circle debut was a paean to missed release dates called “Dear Mr. L.A. Reid.” And still, this little piece of biographical data seems wrong.
When 2 Chainz finally became a star, in the early 2010s, it was in a distinctly post-Tha Carter III world. Mixtapes were still idiosyncratic and unmonetizable, but rap was in its brief flirtation with EDM, and the collapse of the CD sales economy meant only established megastars or exaggerated personas like his could cut through the din. Even the way the two close friends have processed, in their solo work, their relationships to the past are incongruent, with Wayne perpetually shadowboxing the greats of prior generations while 2 Chainz tinkers with prestige objects self-consciously positioned as modern successors to The Blueprint.
Unfortunately, Welcome 2 Collegrove, the second album to pair these two MCs, is profoundly unstuck in time, dotted with the vestiges of two bygone eras but imbued with few of those eras’ charms. The liner notes recall an entire era including SARS, Perez Hilton, and Iraq war protests through the Obama campaigns: DJ Toomp and STREETRUNNER, Bangladesh and Big K.R.I.T., Usher and Marsha Ambrosious. But the LP is frustratingly polished, defaulting to pristine mixes and beats that are crisp, thin, and wholly anonymous. (This extends, sadly, to those from the most beloved contributors: Mannie Fresh’s crowded, directionless “Big Diamonds” and Havoc’s pair of middling tracks, including a stale 36 Chambers riff.) Combined with verses that frequently prioritize competency over invention, these tracks make for an album that only intermittently gestures toward either rapper’s signature styles.
On Da Drought 3 or T.R.U. REALigion—even on the highlights from 2016’s superior Collegrove—there was an air of delirious impulsivity, the sense that Wayne or 2 Chainz might, in the next moment, conjure a flow or an image that no human being had ever before conceived of. There was a looseness of structure that allowed for hooks or high stakes but required neither. Welcome 2 Collegrove drags each artist into the middle of the road where even some inspired premises (the mutation, on “Crazy Thick,” of Wayne’s infamous deposition video into a strip club instrumental, or his tight little seesaw cadence on “Long Story Short”) are sanded down to their least memorable versions. This is true on the utterly rote “Millions From Now” and the practically narcotized “Transparency,” the schmaltzy “Can’t Believe You” and “Godzilla,” a song as “lukewarm” as 2 Chainz describes a particular woman’s mouth.
When Welcome 2 does click, it’s almost always due to Wayne, who seems to snap upright halfway through the album’s runtime. Near the midpoint, on the overproduced “Significant Other,” where the desperation in his writing and performance finally converge, his verse begins to sound—as on so much of his best work—like an impossibly complex house of cards, the tone and momentum of each line resting on not just one but four, eight, 12 bars that preceded it. But this verse just a precursor to his turn on the Benny the Butcher-assisted “Oprah & Gayle,” where he pushes the outer bounds of the beat’s measures in either direction, rapping at first at the extreme front end of every bar—and later dangling off their back end.
The moments that do stick in the mind—Wayne camping outside an enemy’s house for so long that he starts cooking s’mores, 2 Chainz boasting that he’s “been poppin’ since your first computer”—are scattered throughout dozens of placeholders. Where the mixtapes that saw these two find their footing often felt like first drafts, with all the excitement and jaggedness that entails, the songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine. | 2023-12-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | December 26, 2023 | 5.8 | ad5174b9-6f35-492e-bce6-25903734cf5f | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
After a life-threatening motorcycle accident, Jay Rock returns with his strongest album yet, a collection of rap songs that highlight his struggle and journey. | After a life-threatening motorcycle accident, Jay Rock returns with his strongest album yet, a collection of rap songs that highlight his struggle and journey. | Jay Rock: Redemption | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-rock-redemption/ | Redemption | Jay Rock’s music is consumed by his struggles; he wrestles with the granular details of street life and gangbanging. His clear-eyed accounts of surviving in the California ghettos are far from glamorous. “Struggle” is an operative word in the retelling of his story. When asked why he was the first artist to get signed by Top Dawg CEO Anthony Tiffith, he responded, “Me and him, we come from the same neighborhood; we come from the same struggle,” therein lying an unspoken bond. On the opener to his 2015 album, 90059, he rapped, “The struggle is real/You gotta do what you got to just to get over the hill,” over and over. In a bit of irony, Rock is the least heralded member of the Top Dawg crew, despite being the cornerstone upon which the empire was built. He toiled and fought and stumbled so those that followed could win Pulitzers. Redemption, his battle-tested and watchful third album, bears those bruises with pride, the way a soldier might be proud of their service record. All Jay Rock albums champion survival, but after a near-death experience, he finds new power in persistence.
In 2016, Jay Rock was involved in a debilitating, near-fatal motorcycle crash that left him with a broken leg and a cracked pelvis. He was flipped off his bike doing wheelies the same night he was supposed to attend the Grammys with Kendrick Lamar. The experience was humbling for the Watts rapper, who now has screws holding his body together. In the interim, he became uninspired and depressed, trapped in a death spiral. On Redemption’s “The Bloodiest,” he presents the accident as karma for years of robbing and dealing, the universe taking from him just as he took from others: “Flipped off that bitch, milly rockin’ the wheel/Two hundred thousand in the bank, straight to hospital bills.” Redemption, co-executive produced by Kendrick and TDE President Dave Free, is about Rock getting a second chance at life, a new opportunity to show his pedigree, and about seeking a sort of absolution. The album traces his path from hood survivalist to indie darling of modest means to TDE dark horse and crash survivor, in search of even greater heights.
Rock is obsessed with winning at any cost, even if simply by association. “I’m just part of a winning family, call me Marlon Jackson,” he raps on “Broke +-.” Over the course of the album, he comes to recognize something: if cheating death is its own victory, then navigating life’s challenges can present little triumphs, too. In his raps, Jay Rock can come off as a reclusive hard-liner with a remarkable storyteller’s acumen and an internal logic that always feels sound. Few gangsta rappers are better at illustrating just how limited their options were and how undaunted they had to be to overcome them.
On “For What It’s Worth,” Rock runs scenarios through his mind as a small-time rapper still hustling on the side. His decisions are carefully considered and well reasoned for someone stuck in a no-win situation: “I can’t have my babies walkin’ around in projects/While I’m on my bunk stressin’ through the process/I’d rather be a prospect, you know, God-like/But for now, many Tec’s: This is my life.” He surveys the Nickerson Gardens projects he grew up in on “ES Tales” with crisp, cold chronicling. On “OSOM,” J.Cole draws him into an even more introspective place: remembering his rocky rise with marked insight (“This system’ll give it to you when you gettin’ to it”). It took all those wounds to make him this formidable. Rarely has his writing about struggle been this painless in its execution, even as he expands his range. Celebration is a means of surviving, too, and there are a few songs on Redemption that revel in self-medicating as a way to escape, namely “Tap Out” and “Rotation 112th,” in turn producing some of the most ambitious and enjoyable music in his catalog.
Jay Rock’s Redemption was forced to compete with albums from rap legends upon release: a comeback from Nas entirely produced by Kanye West after a six-year hiatus and a surprise project from JAY-Z and Beyoncé. This record could easily be swept away by event albums and the conversations surrounding them. But the Jay Rock story amounts to more than a first-week sales total or a chart slot; his legacy brings to mind a Jay lyric from Everything Is Love: “Over here we measure success by how many people successful next to you.” In the “WIN” video, there’s a scene where the entire TDE roster is at Jay Rock’s back, standing with him. Listening to Redemption, it’s clear Rock knows exactly what he’s accomplished. Their wins were born of his struggle. | 2018-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | June 23, 2018 | 8 | ad58a100-ff4e-4e45-9187-87dd3c7167e7 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Writing with painful exactitude, El Kempner crafts a vividly rendered breakup album that’s always threatening to explode. | Writing with painful exactitude, El Kempner crafts a vividly rendered breakup album that’s always threatening to explode. | Palehound: Eye on the Bat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palehound-eye-on-the-bat/ | Eye on the Bat | Eye on the Bat is a defiant ode to being humbled. Life will do that, particularly during a breakup, and El Kempner’s incisive, diaristic lyrics are like coming up from a dive without your swim trunks. On Palehound’s fourth album, Kempner reveals all the tender facets of a split in evocative detail: regret, embarrassment, desperation. The band accompanies these thoughts with sinuous guitar riffs and driving bass lines, turning Kempner’s words into incantations, the sort of shout-sing anthems that beg to be replayed.
Kempner has outright declared Eye on the Bat a breakup record, and the imagery places us right at the center of the conflict, reliving the dissolution with painful exactitude. “Wind turbines and overpasses/Thirteen hours on our asses,” they sing on the title track, remembering cold sandwiches assembled from the trunk and puddles of piss behind the van. Romance dies but the memories refuse to, a specific kind of haunting you can hear in every forlorn vocal. “You didn’t need my help/You didn’t need my help,” Kempner repeats over Zoë Brecher’s raging cymbal crashes and the reverberating guitar chords on “The Clutch,” one of the record’s standouts. It’s easy to imagine them shouting it at a retreating car, livid in the rearview mirror.
Kempner’s conversational tone and deadpan delivery recall both Forth Wanderers and Aimee Mann, sometimes droll (“Bad Sex”) and sometimes smoky and melodic, a little exhausted (“Right About You”). The instrumentation—urgent and vital, more punk than plaintive—makes emphatic what might otherwise be subtle, heightening the emotional stakes, whether it’s the throbbing bassline of “The Clutch” or the anxious riff that jumpstarts “Independence Day.” In stark contrast to the icy silence of a long, pre-breakup car ride like the one in the title track, Eye on the Bat’s best songs are incendiary, kinetic, and restless. Things are always threatening to explode, like a shaken Coke bottle rattling around the passenger’s floorboard.
The momentum falters when the tempo slows and the rage turns contemplative, anger ceding to wistfulness. “Head Like Soup” is a goofy tonal pivot, with juvenile lyrics (“My head like a pot of thick soup/Stirred and tasted/I live to fill you up”) and skittering rhythms that can’t salvage the sluggish melody. Meanwhile closer “Fadin” might allude to Mazzy Star (“There’s nothin’ I can do to keep from fadin’ to you”) but its abstruse imagery and campfire strum skews more Moldy Peaches.
Still, Kempner’s songwriting is far from one-note, and the record’s winsome bombast finds the perfect foil in introspective details, moments of time trapped between the bars. “Right About You” slogs through the moments when the end becomes obvious, signs of doom peppered all around a Northern California beach town. “We came down here to see the sunset,” Kempner laments, “But we’re in a bad spot and I can’t see it,” an obscured vista as a metaphor for the closed-off potential of love. “Route 22” is a tender, strummed ballad, its tentative optimism highlighted and underpinned by doubt (“Would you mind if I get stoned?/Don’t wanna bore you with my teenage habits”).
The universe has a way of roasting us at every turn. There’s the everyday awkwardness, the odd fit of a corset on “Good Sex,” and then there’s unrequited love like an ember in your chest, the constant reminder that you are always, existentially speaking, alone. In “Good Sex,” Kempner takes a disembodied perspective to describe a bumbling attempt at seduction: “I started laughing at myself,” they sing, huffing out a genuine chuckle a few bars later. Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads. | 2023-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | July 18, 2023 | 7.3 | ad58e1ac-ebb8-4376-891c-1860b186663b | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Considering the gap between techno’s roots and its globalized, commercialized present, the writer, curator, and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr., posits alternate futures for the genre. | Considering the gap between techno’s roots and its globalized, commercialized present, the writer, curator, and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr., posits alternate futures for the genre. | Speaker Music: Techxodus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speaker-music-techxodus/ | Techxodus | Techno, in 2023, is far removed from its roots. It is a keyword for lifestyle playlists. It sells tickets to clubs and festivals. It is merch. But techno, for the musician and writer Deforrest Brown Jr., is worth saving.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture, Brown’s 2022 “critical history” of techno, aims in part to reclaim the term for its originators in Black Detroit and those in their lineage. In the early 1980s, when Juan Atkins coined the name for the futuristic music he and his friends were making with synthesizers and drum machines in their bedrooms and basements, the present-day notion of a techno club did not yet exist, and neither did the formal and unspoken conventions that emerged after such places began popping up in Europe in response to the Detroit sound: the premise that an uninterrupted journey from one track to another, accompanied by strobing lights, synthetic fog, and strong drugs, was the ideal context for hearing this music; the standards of tempo and structure, developed to aid the DJ’s seamless mixing; the presumption that most of the people dancing their way through this shadowy wonderland would be white.
Brown, who also releases albums as Speaker Music, calls himself a “theorist, journalist, curator, visual artist, and by necessity, a musician.” His artist biography offers no clarification for the mysterious clause that qualifies the last item on that list. One way to interpret it is that Brown feels compelled to create music that is truer to the spirit of Detroit techno than the stuff you might hear on any given night at Berghain or the Basement: to make techno that lives up to its name. He has positioned Techxodus, his latest album, as a musical epilogue to Assembling a Black Counter Culture, and its opening seconds, in which a disembodied voice offers a working definition of techno—“Black music that sounds technological, rather than music made with technology”—make no secret of his weighty conceptual intent. The music defies any expectations a contemporary clubgoer might have of its genre tag, but it doesn’t much resemble old-school Detroit techno either. Brown is not a reactionary or a nostalgist: The music he loves, after all, arose from an attempt to break with tradition and find the sounds of the future. Rather than simply recreating the past, he imagines a new trajectory for techno, a sort of alternate history in which the music continued to grow and change according to its original precepts as a form of Black sonic expression, instead of the norms that club culture imposed on it.
Brown is particularly reverent of Drexciya, the Detroit group led by the late James Stinson, which contextualized its music within an elaborate mythology involving an aquatic civilization descended from Black children and pregnant women who were thrown overboard from transatlantic slave ships, whose members wage secret war on the white capitalist world order. (Abu Qadim Haqq, who created Drexciya’s visual art, designed the covers of both Techxodus and Assembling a Black Counter Culture.) One distinguishing characteristic of Drexciya’s music was the way Stinson and his collaborators contrasted the metronomic rhythms of sequencers with the unsteady expressiveness of human touch. A bassline might repeat with unchanging precision while an improvisatory keyboard melody dips and weaves atop like a rider on a wave.
Techxodus radically expands on this dynamic. Bit-crushed samples and laser-like synthesizer sounds cut aggressively against the prevailing rhythmic currents of “Holosonic Rebellion” and “Futurhythmic Bop.” On “Jes Grew,” a sample of a saxophone solo is mangled by what sounds like an unconventional use of time-stretching, a feature of many digital audio workstations that allows you to change a sound’s tempo without affecting its pitch, or vice versa. Brown ignores this benign use case to instead explore what time-stretching does when pushed past its limits, twisting the sound of the sax into loops that stutter and spasm. These digital artifacts have their own rhythmic logic, separate from both the grid that organizes the rest of the track—and, I imagine, from the saxophonist’s original phrasing. But within their glitchy unpredictability, there is also the pained and ecstatic humanity of the blues, screaming to break through.
The drum patterns across Techxodus, whether programmed or played freehand, destabilize the very idea of a beat. In its rhythmic maximalism, and its uncanny juxtaposition of drums that are clearly synthetic with those that sound like crisply recorded samples of a live kit, the album often recalls the avant-garde footwork of Jlin, Brown’s Planet Mu labelmate. He has spoken movingly about the impact her music has had on him, and it’s easy to understand why. A former steel worker from the hollowed-out industrial hub of Gary, Indiana, making music whose mechanistic contours gesture ambiguously at a world beyond the toil of the present, she strikes a clear parallel to Brown’s heroes working in Detroit during the decline of the American automotive industry. But where Jlin’s music, even at its densest, seems highly ordered, carrying a certain balletic poise, Brown’s seems wild, impulsive, raw. I don’t know how he makes it, but I imagine him sweating it out over a bank of sample pads, hammering away at them like a technologically augmented free-jazz drummer.
In a 2020 interview with Tone Glow, Brown addressed white listeners, musicians, and critics who misapprehend Black music, techno included. “What they’re seeing with this Eurocentric view of sound and music composition is systems,” he said in part. “They're seeing nodes in a system moving along a linear path for satisfying or not satisfying rises and falls and conclusions—when what’s actually happening is a sort of speaking in tongues.” Where contemporary techno listeners are conditioned to expect that a particular element—a hi-hat, a bass drum, a synth—once introduced, will continue to perform small variations of the same basic function, Brown lets his sounds run free. A drone turns clipped and percussive, contributing to the rhythmic onslaught it once painted over. Midway through “Feenin,” a white-hot surge of electronic distortion arrives abruptly to envelop the entire mix, so loud and abrasive that I can’t help but wonder whether Brown had to lobby against a mastering engineer to keep it in. It sounds thrillingly, terrifyingly wrong, like your speakers might catch fire if you’re not careful. Then, just as quickly as it came, it recedes, but not entirely, hovering and menacing, barely audible behind the drums. You spend the rest of the track wondering: Will it come back? I won’t spoil it for you.
Techxodus doesn’t require deep knowledge of Brown’s work as a critic and historian in order to appreciate it, but it is a demanding album, unlikely to win over the club set. Given the polemical tone of Brown’s interviews and public appearances, I would imagine he prefers it that way. But the music isn’t antagonistic or standoffish; on the contrary, it wants to reach you, shake you, make you feel deeply. By sampling directly from free-jazz horn players on “Jes Grew” and opener “D.T.A.W.O. (Deprogramming the Atonist World Order),” Brown invites the comparison to that earlier rebellion against Eurocentric systems of rules that would enclose and govern Black art. It’s an apt one. Like those pioneers, he seeks to reconnect his music with its radical roots, and in doing so, push it toward the future. | 2023-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | September 11, 2023 | 7.7 | ad623d45-28a6-44f8-ab21-76fecdc5ee87 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On the third edition of Clan Way, the Los Angeles duo brings back the laugh-out-loud antics. It’s breezy and fun, bolstered by the pair’s flawless chemistry. | On the third edition of Clan Way, the Los Angeles duo brings back the laugh-out-loud antics. It’s breezy and fun, bolstered by the pair’s flawless chemistry. | BlueBucksClan: Clan Way 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bluebucksclan-clan-way-3/ | Clan Way 3 | For BlueBucksClan, popping bottles with models in the club isn’t a flex, it’s a religion. The Los Angeles duo is devoted to a life where every night sounds like a bachelor party that has gotten out of hand. This is deliberate—each of DJ and Jeeezy’s mixtapes is like an individual How to Be a Player handbook. A few of the guide’s tips would probably include: Rack up the room service charges like the kid from Home Alone, wear designer clothes at all times even if you’re chilling in the crib, and take your date to get her toes done. Take their advice, and you too will be leaving the club arm in arm with NFL wives and actresses.
On the third edition of their Clan Way series, BlueBucksClan stick to this blueprint. But their approach holds more weight than your standard lifestyle rap fare; on top of the wild, sex-fueled anecdotes and out-of-pocket extravagance is an ode to their brotherhood. Now in their late twenties, DJ and Jeeezy have been close since their teen years in the Pop Warner football program in South Central. They played together in high school, where DJ was a cornerback and Jeeezy was on the D-line. That chemistry is reflected in the music they’ve been releasing since 2019’s Clan Way: The pair is a pure rap duo in that they sound almost incomplete without each other, and at times, their connection feels nearly telepathic. DJ is the smooth talker, always using his inside voice, and Jeeezy has a rumbling but surprisingly nimble flow. When they rap, they function as each other’s sounding boards. It’s like they’re at the gym, recapping all the shit that they got into lately.
For the most part, there are no frills on Clan Way 3, just DJ and Jeeezy getting fly and sleeping around. Sometimes, the tag team shakes up the structure of their tracks, hooking their stories around a specific phrase. On “Have You Ever,” DJ and Jeeezy tie almost every line to the question in the song’s title. “Have you ever took a nigga bitch and left him scarred for life?” asks Jeeezy, like he can’t believe he did exactly that. Other times, it’s when they’re going line for line; on “FYM,” they daydream about the exes they can’t stop thinking about.
What’s missing here is the bouncy, hyper-regional L.A. production that they’ve sidestepped since 2020’s Clan Way 2. Popular producers from other cities, like Honorable C.N.O.T.E., Chopsquad DJ, and Buddah Bless, drop beats here, and they’re never poorly crafted. But the breeziness of the West Coast sound is what helps to hammer in the dissonance between their outlandish stories and blasé attitude. Still, beats aren’t entirely the point of BlueBucksClan; their production is usually pretty minimal anyway, purposefully directing most of the attention to their words.
And for much of Clan Way 3, the stories they tell are fun as hell. There’s an onslaught of pop culture references, including mentions of Pauly D and Bryce Harper; throwaway lines about lobster dates and shopping for Prada heels; and a casual phone call on “Jeeezy WYA” that perfectly encapsulates the duo’s relationship. In the song, DJ rings Jeeezy to let him know he’s at the Ritz Carlton with six women, but Jeeezy is out to dinner with his girlfriend and her family. Jeeezy ditches them and it’s not entirely worth it, so the two just go and do their own thing. Sure, it sounds like a bit in an early Jamie Foxx sex comedy that has aged terribly, but the way they bounce off each other is so natural and effortless that a struggling plot can be overlooked. With BlueBucksClan, you come for the antics, but stay for the brotherly bond. | 2022-11-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Out the Blue / Capitol | November 10, 2022 | 7.3 | ad66880a-1e02-4364-b03f-a7afcab5ac6d | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey, the fifth studio album by the Foreign Exchange, the group pays homage to old-school funk and R&B while remaining close to their own blend of Eurocentric soul. It's a victory lap and a step forward in the crew's creative process. | On Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey, the fifth studio album by the Foreign Exchange, the group pays homage to old-school funk and R&B while remaining close to their own blend of Eurocentric soul. It's a victory lap and a step forward in the crew's creative process. | The Foreign Exchange: Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20945-tales-from-the-land-of-milk-and-honey/ | Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey | If you are curious about Phonte and Nicolay’s mindset going into their fifth studio album as the Foreign Exchange, just look at their social media accounts. Phonte, the group’s affable frontman, feeds his Twitter stream with acerbic real talk and hot-take movie reviews. On Facebook, producer Nicolay posts videos of bobblehead dolls in his studio, and jokes about his paltry royalty checks from streaming services. After 11 years together, and several albums of grown folks' soul, it seems the two aren’t taking themselves too seriously. They're having fun and don't mind bringing you into the fold.
Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey is a delightful collection of sophisticated R&B and electronic dance, tied directly to the era of Morris Day funk grooves and Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing. As it plays, Phonte, Nicolay, keyboardist Zo!, and vocalists Carmen Rodgers and Tamisha Waden recall the storied Minneapolis funk sound while staying true to their own established blend of Eurocentric electro-soul. In a way, Milk and Honey feels like a concept record: The press photos resemble a parody of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and the title track evokes Sergio Mendes’ brand of airy Brazilian jazz. The lyrics pull from Stevie Wonder's songbook of imagined utopias and peaceful horizons. Then suddenly, on "Work It to the Top", Phonte sings in a nasal tone that channels groups like Ready for the World and Cameo over a vintage, computerized-R&B stomp.
Milk and Honey moves swiftly and has the same radiant mood as 2013’s Love in Flying Colors, the group’s previous album. But if Colors embraced the joy of a new relationship, Milk and Honey explores the comforts of sustained romance, where the urge to hit the club gives way to Netflix date nights and glasses of wine at the crib. "Body", a standout near the album’s end, says as much: "Nowhere to go and it’s nothing on these streets," Phonte sings, who addressed a similar notion on his 2011 solo album, Charity Starts at Home. The familiarity of the music is the best kind, and for anyone who has kept up closely with this project, it's both a joy and a comfort.
Ever since the group’s landmark debut, the Foreign Exchange has evolved into a roving crew of musicians who specialize in adult contemporary soul. They tend to focus on the day-to-day aspects of love and life, which helps them stay connected with their cult followers, some of whom have kept up with the crew since its inception on Okayplayer. Overall, Milk and Honey is a victory lap and a nice step forward in the group’s creative progress. Or maybe it’s a two-step. | 2015-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-20T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | FE/Hard Boiled | August 20, 2015 | 7.4 | ad690567-3cae-427b-9fb2-fa61d226015b | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The New Pornographers’ seventh album is a peppy team effort, rich with new wave synths and closely blended harmonies. It’s their first LP without Dan Bejar, and lacks his stranger inklings. | The New Pornographers’ seventh album is a peppy team effort, rich with new wave synths and closely blended harmonies. It’s their first LP without Dan Bejar, and lacks his stranger inklings. | The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23070-whiteout-conditions/ | Whiteout Conditions | Coming-of-age movies from the 1980s are joyous, singular quests of the ego. This explains their largely teen viewership—it helps to have archetypes to parse while determining your own identity. It can be comforting to hit the prom by proxy in a Pepto-pink tulle puff, or step into the shoes of a glib slacker as he leads a parade through downtown Chicago; it’s means to a self-actualized end.
So it’s notable that, as the New Pornographers inch ever-closer to the sound of a John Hughes soundtrack, they prove to be almost apologetically devoid of vanity themselves. (They still shrug off that they’re a “supergroup” despite A.C. Newman, Neko Case, and Dan Bejar’s considerable individual fame.) Whiteout Conditions packs the most blanket pep of the power-pop group’s seven albums, dense with that particular new wave brand of electronic two-for-one—insistent, tinny arpeggio synths pinpricking rich, sweeping base chords. The album also largely discards lead vocals in favor of closely blended harmonies, the type that practically huddle in their team spirit. This, plus a singularly bright and skipping tempo, creates an almost forcibly energetic mix—but like any 1980s production worth its salt, it betrays a deeper well of desolation. The color white may reflect light, but it doesn’t absorb it.
The balancing act is most apparent in the presence of the default lead Pornographer, Newman, a man who’s earned both a chuckle and our deepest condolences for sticking to this band name for nearly two decades. On Whiteout Conditions’ title track, his high, hardy vocals nudge out ahead of the busy synths and chipper drums to recall a depressive episode; he recounts days spent falling into a resentful hermitude, turning from windowpanes, before clawing his way back toward the light (a sunny day literally helps kick him out of inertia). The tale gets most grim in the chorus, but pivots on the natural buoyancy of Case’s voice. She makes its bitter pill lyric “The sky will come for you once/Sit tight until it’s done” peal like a tourism brochure tagline.
Elsewhere, Newman and Case stake out an uneasy duet in “We’ve Been Here Before,” as a reunited couple that sounds invariably doomed again, though the lilting guitars and hummingbird synths behind them offer a convincing gloss. In the closer, “Avalanche Alley,” they dream of “controlled demolitions” to wipe away the modern barrage of news, disappointments, vilifications. Case sounds near-saccharine here, with an innocent tang to her topnotes.
It’s Case who brings out the playful core of Whiteout Conditions. The group’s last record, 2014’s Brill Bruisers—a brisk, dance-pop nod to the Brill Building—was a turning point for Case’s role in the band. Before it, she’d largely posted up as lead singer in the ballads; onward from the band’s high-water mark 2005 album, Twin Cinema, her presence as a frontwoman felt strongest in the meditative dust-kickers. On Brill Bruisers, she paired her formidable country-folk pipes with swiftly paced electronics, and it felt intuitive from the first notes. On Whiteout Conditions, she sings with a clean minimalism in the comparatively clipped phrasings of pop music. On “This Is the World of the Theater” and “Darling Shade,” her lead moments are soon enough accompanied by Newman, but her gentle tones reel in those choruses, which are the album’s most memorable.
Dan Bejar is missing here for the first time (he was waylaid by the next Destroyer album) and with him go the New Pornographers’ strangest corners. He has often felt like his own island in the band, despite how smoothly integrated his tracks have been; his tongue is just too sharp, even when he seems otherwise pleased. His nasal screeds gave Brill Bruisers its surreal sheen—from envisioning a sprightly apocalypse in “War on the East Coast” to rasping an all-purpose paranoia on “Spidyr”—and have been a beguiling draw from the band’s start. In the absence of his Beat eccentricities, a stevedore, stalwart band remains—another approach to pop, if a slightly less romantic one. But working consistently with your friends, for the pleasure of it, can be a kind of poetry in itself. | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Concord | April 8, 2017 | 7.2 | ad6bd5bc-aae9-444c-9113-baba8ac2ec19 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Off the Wall is the sound of young Michael Jackson's liberation. Though he would become even more successful in the '80s, Off the Wall remains unabashedly fun to return to for its joy and lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death. | Off the Wall is the sound of young Michael Jackson's liberation. Though he would become even more successful in the '80s, Off the Wall remains unabashedly fun to return to for its joy and lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death. | Michael Jackson: Off the Wall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21548-off-the-wall/ | Off the Wall | In the summer of 1976, a variety show called "The Jacksons" debuted on CBS. The program came about during a relatively fallow period for the showbiz brood, after the Jackson 5 ignited nationwide fervor with hits like "ABC" and "I’ll Be There" but before Michael Jackson set out for solo superstardom. Their future success seemed in doubt, and the show—with its glaring lights, sparkling costumes, and rampant cheesiness—was a Vegas-style extravaganza that played to well-worn pleasures. One recurring segment called "On the Wall" saw Michael inviting various guest hosts to sign a fake brick facade and do a little dance before everyone eventually ended up in a frozen ta-dah! pose. Though Michael was all smiles on "The Jacksons," he later claimed that he "hated every minute" of it. During the show’s year-long run, he was smack in the middle of gangly teenagedom, acne and all. Raised in the limelight by an infamously strict father, Michael was painfully self-conscious, worried that he might never be able to shake his child stardom. He didn’t want to merely cling to his family’s fading notoriety. He wanted to break away from it completely.
Off the Wall is the sound of that liberation. And he knew exactly what he was doing. On November 6, 1979, just as the album was starting to take off, Michael wrote a note to himself on the back of a tour itinerary, a proclamation of self so ambitious it could make Kanye blush. "MJ will be my new name, no more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look, I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’ [and] ‘I Want You Back,’" he jotted down. "I should be a new incredible actor singer dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer… I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off."
Those words were eerily prescient in many ways, of course, but they also highlight one of Michael’s most important dualities: He wanted to be magical—to defy expectation and reality—but he knew that such skills could not materialize from thin air. He understood that exceptionalism took hard work. Growing up in the Motown system, he would often sit in on sessions, soaking up lessons from the greats: Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations. He studied the way James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., and Fred Astaire moved their feet onstage, in movies, and on TV. At 17, he counted hallowed masters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington among his favorite songwriters. He had released four solo albums in the early ’70s, but Off the Wall, which came out when he was 21, finally allowed him to flex all those hours of research into something that was his.
It also marked a moment of idealism. Around the time of Off the Wall, Michael’s musical and physical changes felt natural—joyous extensions of the black American experience. Disco was overwhelmingly popular, breaking down color lines and radio formats while offering utopia on the dancefloor. Coming from the segregated, working-class city of Gary, Ind., Jackson's achievements and acceptance represented a rosy view of the country’s future. But 1979 was scarred by the beginning of the quasi-racist "disco sucks" backlash; Michael also got his first nose job that year, narrowing his nostrils. And though he would become even more successful in the '80s, those astronomical heights sometimes catered to white tastes—in both appearance and sound—in a way that could seem effortful, cynical, and sad.
So part of the reason why Off the Wall remains so unabashedly fun to return to involves that lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death. This lasting affection is reiterated by a new Spike Lee documentary, Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, which is included in this CD/DVD reissue and finds Jackson family members and associates, along with more modern stars like the Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye, ?uestlove, and Pharrell, paying tribute to Michael’s earliest incarnations. "Off the Wall was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing," says Tesfaye in the doc, which was in part produced by executors of Michael’s estate and barely mentions anything about the artist’s life after Off the Wall.
The album was released toward the tail end of the disco era and it managed to encompass much of what made that style so infectious while also pushing out its edges. "Our underlying plan was to take disco out. That was the bottom line," the record’s producer, Quincy Jones, once said. "I admired disco, don’t get me wrong. I just thought it had gone far enough." Jones, a calm, jazzy Zen master who had worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, and Count Basie, helped Michael flesh out his own songs as well as tracks written by others, putting forth a record that is at once beautifully simple and sneakily complex.
Most of these songs follow the most basic disco tenet: Put all of your worries behind you and just dance. Michael took part in this type of ecstasy while filming 1978’s The Wiz in New York City, when he would spend his downtime brushing shoulders with the likes of Woody Allen, Liza Minelli, Steven Tyler, and Jane Fonda at Studio 54. By all accounts, Michael didn’t take part in the club’s notorious orgies of sex and drugs, but he observed it, standing by the DJ booth and noticing which songs drew the biggest reactions. And he would dance, getting high off of the music and movement around him.
Alongside Jones, Michael made his own disco anthems, but rather than merely copying what came before, he expanded the form with dense, orchestral arrangements that mixed in sophisticated layers of strings, horns, and syncopation while never never losing their underlying funk. This is heard on iconic opener "Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough," the first song Michael ever wrote by himself and the first of four record-breaking Top 10 hits from the album, which has now sold 30 million copies worldwide. It's an ode to the power of romantic love, something Michael had little experience with at that point. But the track’s intricacies, as well as the singer’s effortlessly rhythmic yelps and phrasing, suggest a deeper understanding, one that goes beyond words. Another Michael-penned track, "Working Day and Night," hints at the detrimental effects of his workaholic upbringing and an encroaching paranoia, though ricocheting guitar lines and exuberant horns keep the groove moving along smoothly.
There are more overt experiments here, too. "Off the Wall" begins with 15 seconds of sinister-sounding laughter and spaced-out instrumentation—a precursor to the high-wattage oddities of "Thriller"; co-written by Stevie Wonder and originally intended for Songs in the Key of Life, "I Can’t Help It" incorporates smooth jazz and twinkling synths—its influence on Pharrell’s off-kilter funk cannot be overstated. The ballad "She’s Out of My Life" risks stopping the album cold with its beat-less melodrama but ends up being a classic of the form, with Michael audibly moved to tears at the end of the song, his voice cracking. It’s an imperfect moment from a noted perfectionist, and Jones’ production handles the emotion with understated grace. "A lesser producer would have milked all that drama for all it’s worth," says ?uestlove in the doc, laughing. "Trust me, if Puffy was producing ‘She’s Out of My Life’ he would have had… Kleenex sponsor the tour."
The joke resonates. Off the Wall is the product of a boy who was reared by his father to be a product, whose idols were often found on his TV screen, who understood his own commodification enough to want to reject it—while also aiming to sell a gazillion albums and unite the world and become the ultimate entertainer. There are many contradictions in that quest and, in hindsight, Michael’s subsequent pitfalls almost seem inevitable. But Off the Wall was that unlikely moment of balance, when Michael Jackson’s purity and innocence still seemed holy, not stunted or distorted. When he cried on record, he was living his art, giving us a genuine performance. | 2016-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Legacy | February 24, 2016 | 10 | ad6d80f3-2003-48ee-bdc3-f53956d2b02b | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The Brooklyn band Lucius has been a stylish presence on the tour and festival circuit for the past few years. The quintet’s sophomore album sounds like everything at once but nothing in particular. | The Brooklyn band Lucius has been a stylish presence on the tour and festival circuit for the past few years. The quintet’s sophomore album sounds like everything at once but nothing in particular. | Lucius: Good Grief | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21730-good-grief/ | Good Grief | The Brooklyn band Lucius has been a stylish presence on the tour and festival circuit for the past few years. Though the group released one album before Good Grief—2013’s Wildewoman—this sophomore collection feels like one of those debuts that arrive preternaturally fully-formed, with songs as polished as the quintet’s outfits. Singer-songwriters Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, who met while studying at the Berklee College of Music, provide prominent, explosive close harmonies of the ’90s folk rock sort lately repopularized by the likes of Girlpool. Their voices are set to the sort of synthy, cavernous production that evokes an increasingly decontextualized version of the ’80s.
It’s hard to talk about this sort of music without mentioning Haim, who’ve refurbished a lot of sounds formerly consigned to adult-hits radio to great acclaim; meanwhile, mainstream pop has been setting acoustic toplines to synths for the better part of this decade. And after the notably crunchier Wildewoman, Lucius is clearly moving in that direction. It’s not a bad look. Parts of Good Grief resemble a Luscious Jackson record with the ’90s electronica swapped out for its 2010s synthpop counterpart. Times have changed, and what might have sounded hopelessly overproduced then, or during the late ’80s or whichever period Lucius is evoking on any particular track, comes off sparkling and large-stage in today’s musical world.
This is best demonstrated on the restrained “Truce” and exuberant single “Something About You,” both of which set folky hooks to spangly production. Most of Good Grief, however, leans more toward one end or the other. “You Were on My Mind” and “Madness,” with only minor adjustments for an acoustic setting, might work in an Indigo Girls set, while “Dusty Trails,” befitting its title, is a slow plod of guitar and high-lonesome harmonies. At the other end of the spectrum, “Born Again Teen” worships a Holy Trinity of “Kids in America,” ’50s rock, and hyper-compression. A breathless sprint much like Chairlift’s “Romeo,” it’s an easy standout. Bonus track “Let’s Dance” plays a neat trick of reproducing in acoustic form the stuttered and sampled textures that are near-ubiquitous in pop. Elsewhere, on “Gone Insane,” Lucius taunts you with the prospect of breaking out into The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles” before settling on more obvious multi-tracked wailing. It’s perhaps a cliché for the title, but it does make for a suitably ferocious sound that Wolf and Laessig’s voices are more than capable of stirring up.
As put-together as Good Grief’s presentation is, and as ingratiating as its songs are, the record suffers from a distinct lack of identity. “Some of the band wanted it to sound like an avant-garde, German experimental record, and some of them wanted a straight pop record, as far as referencing Taylor Swift,” producer Shawn Everett told the Village Voice. The argument seems to have been resolved via compromise, making Good Grief sound like everything at once but nothing in particular. In that interview, the band is very specific about their influences, the sort of disparate chunks on songs easy to isolate in an instant-streaming age: the drums from Beyoncé’s producer, the vocals on a Judee Sill track. Any one of these might make for a good, cohesive album, but like so many acts with newfound popularity and a sophomore record, the issue’s settling upon one. | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | March 22, 2016 | 6.3 | ad6feade-406e-41e4-ae0d-868906a99842 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
This 10-song EP scans like a means for the San Diego vocalist to transition into more personal territory. It's the rare album that feels meditative and cathartic all at once. | This 10-song EP scans like a means for the San Diego vocalist to transition into more personal territory. It's the rare album that feels meditative and cathartic all at once. | Gonjasufi: MU.ZZ.LE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16197-gonjasufi-muzzle/ | MU.ZZ.LE | Gonjasufi's 2010 release *A Sufi and a Killer *succeeded largely on the strength of an engagingly odd presence: the simultaneously croaky and sweet voice of Sumach Valentine, which sent initiates scrambling to identify fellow travelers, from Captain Beefheart to George Clinton to John Fahey. It stood up as a strong example of psychedelic rock rewired for an audience more attuned to *Madvillainy *than The Madcap Laughs. But it still scanned a bit more like a shared vision than an individual voice: The album was just as much a revelation for the Gaslamp Killer, who helmed the bulk of the production and laid down his own mark with a sprawling slate of beats that complemented Valentine's vocalizations.
When the album that introduces a unique vocalist to a newly expanded fanbase also happens to do the same for its equally distinct producer, you wonder how each will fare on his own. If last year's freebie *9th Inning *EP was a catch-up session of self-created, unreleased older tracks meant to remind newer fans of his broader repertoire, MU.ZZ.LE scans like a means to transition from A Sufi and a Killer's multiple-identity psych into more personal territory. And it does this in a way that reinforces what made that previous album great.
Gonjasufi and fellow San Diegan noise-break purveyor Psychopop have centered their production around a codeine-paced, heavy-headed swoon that still manages to bristle with an undercurrent of stress. Psychopop handles beats for four of the 10 cuts, and their half-speed wooziness is like the musical equivalent of the slow-motion running you might experience in an unsettling dream. The headswimming electric piano blues of "White Picket Fence" and the loping, pendulous guitar in "Feedin' Birds" set the pace, ethereal as it is, and get a surprising amount of pull from their downtempo floatiness. But Gonjasufi's own production is just as steeped in dubbed-out, crumbly atmospherics. The bass in "Venom" glows and throbs, peppered with a jingling percussion timbre halfway between a tambourine and a handful of change. "Blaksuit" sounds like a vintage funk 45 flipped to 33, its twangy loop pacing back and forth like a half-finished thought. And even when the snares pop, as they do on "Nikels and Dimes", they do so through a thick coating of resin and ash.
If you think that means MU.ZZ.LE is a passive, inert slog of an album, keep in mind that every trudging, straining step of the way is cut through with Gonjasufi's voice, which is still a hell of a thing. The unconventional cast of his voice might be Valentine's most immediately recognizable trait, but it's not his deepest. Every last creaking wail, blown-out mutter, and wounded drone is heavy with reflection, and after a few listens it all starts to sound less like altered-mind eccentricity and more like raw, unfiltered feeling. For all the talk about shroomed-out weirdness and otherworldly mysticism that's surrounded his music, there's a more crucial sense of a real, laid-bare emotional core here.
All those shaky notes and half-intelligible murmurs disintegrating into decaying echoes might run parallel to an oddball Lee "Scratch" Perry sensibility, but they evoke frustration and dejection vividly. The words aren't always clear through the fog of reverb, though this might be by design, some statement on how the plain truth of honest words can be sometimes hard to understand. But the agitated sentiments remain clear, whether castigating against the abuse of privilege in "Nikels and Dimes" or straining to maintain an interpersonal connection on "Rubberband". When Sumach's wife April has a wraithlike torch-singer turn in the second half of "Feedin' Birds" and distantly doubles up his lead on "Skin", it's to act as a sweetly voiced counterpart to lyrics that allude to guilt, death, and a search for love. And when the funereal lo-fi new wave of "The Blame" emerges near the end of the 24 1/2-minute running length, it's the late peak of a record that wrings out a devastated man's crisis of consciousness-- "You say I'm not supposed to kill/ Keep walking with my head high/ But every time I go somewhere/ I feel the dread inside their eyes." MU.ZZ.LE might be a transitional point on Gonjasufi's path and it shows just one face of an eclectic, multifaceted performer. But it's also that rare album that feels meditative and cathartic all at once. | 2012-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Warp | January 25, 2012 | 7.8 | ad746926-9da1-4f6e-b26c-68549184ed22 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The singer-songwriter's fourth full-length is both his most stripped-down effort to date and also his best. | The singer-songwriter's fourth full-length is both his most stripped-down effort to date and also his best. | Cass McCombs: Catacombs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13180-catacombs/ | Catacombs | Cass McCombs works quietly. Over the course of three full-lengths and five years, McCombs has quickly slipped in and out of scenes, skipping from one major American city to the next like he owed stacks of cash in every one. He's played with folk, grafting bedroom pop flourishes to sonic skeletons just strong enough to support them. He swam through 1980s Brit jangle and deep chasms of reverb. No matter how much mileage he accrued, one constant held firm: His lyrical shell games often kept listeners at arm's length, regardless of how well-crafted and inviting his melodies were. McCombs' songs were addictively opaque-- easy to hear, tough to digest, and even more difficult to describe to your friends over beers.
McCombs' slipperiness seemed as much like a rejection and re-routing of the traditional singer-songwriter tag as it did a refusal to meet a listener halfway, as though the dude were allergic to interpretation or the idea that someone, anyone, might want to peer inside his braincave. It all sounds like a carefully conceived blend between garden-variety male vulnerability issues and wild-eyed, guitar-toting-dude-who-fancies-himself-an-enigma bullshit. But on Catacombs, his fourth full-length and most stripped-down effort to date, the singer-songwriter steps out from behind the curtain that's cloaked his work in the past. And despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to.
Reportedly a tribute to his wife, these are songs for the heart more than the head. Opener "Dreams Come True Girl" is beautiful evidence of that. It's a straight-ahead chord progression that's just a minor chord kiss away from Bright Eyes' "First Day of My Life" and Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". McCombs washes it in Pacific surf, lets it dry, and then flips it into a late-blossoming duet with actress Karen Black of Easy Rider and Nashville fame. A stunt cameo like that could easily fog up a recording, but Black's turn and lower register compliments the feet-up vibe really well. "You Saved My Life" waltzes farther into territory, McCombs' croon swaying along to a bass line that never ever loses its way. Hammocks of pedal steel, duvets of synth, steady breaths of acoustic guitar-- it's a warm, understated arrangement that typifies music for sunlit rooms and Sunday mornings. Most impressively, there is not a trace of sap or slobber to be found anywhere.
"The Executioner's Song" takes the same approach to speech-song serenading and despite a defiantly mid-tempo pace that borders on drowsy, its heartbeat doesn't waver. "Harmonia" and "Prima Donna" are simple strummers that recall early-70s Dylan, the former an especially strong showcase for McCombs' voice. Smooth as river stones and perfectly evocative when dipping into baritone raps or twirling in falsetto, it's fit to carry songs so bare. "Lionkiller Got Married" traces narrative threads back to 2007's Dropping the Writ and signals a shift towards the outwardly old-timey and too well-defined-- a rickety template that only serves to box him in. In fact, the bounce of "Jonesy Boy" and Main Street shuffle of "One Way to Go" both run on and out of steam.
It's good reason to come back to the beginning though, to the track whose directness stands tall above a set with inches to spare: "Dreams Come True Girl". Given a song like this (the chorus straight up kills me every time), and a staggering mind/skill set like McCombs', it's remarkable that he's avoided being part of the greater discussion on great American songwriters. While Conor Oberst's been saddled/showered with New Dylan hosannas and critical tongue baths this decade, McCombs has fashioned himself a groove as new school rambler and pokerfaced tone poet totally under the radar. It's a space he seems and sounds to have been most comfortable in. Until now. | 2009-07-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | July 10, 2009 | 8.2 | ad758d68-32e9-48b1-86ad-664e2ea81d6f | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Following a sophomore slump, the eclectic singer-songwriter pairs with Timbaland for a pair of chartbusting singles and, uh oh, some duff ballads. | Following a sophomore slump, the eclectic singer-songwriter pairs with Timbaland for a pair of chartbusting singles and, uh oh, some duff ballads. | Nelly Furtado: Loose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9136-loose/ | Loose | Loose is the best and worst pop album of the year, scattershot in every respect, crippling in its inconsistencies, and just a regular pain in the ass if you're the kind of person who values listening to albums all the way through. Which is basically nobody these days-- so Loose is great! Except when it's not. Its post-new wave/slink-funk/pseudo-reggaetón/drippy ballads template signifies a few things, but most especially that Nelly needed a hit badly.
After the failure of her second album, Folklore, an adventurous-if-sappy globo-handjob, Furtado's been paired with rhythmic savant Timbaland and his protégé Danja Handz for all but two songs on Loose. And they've already provided international hits with "Promiscuous" and "Maneater", two doses of buzzbeater bass and clomping hi-hats right out of Tim's standard playbook. The songs fit snugly into Tim's oeuvre, but not Furtado's, who's best known for "I'm Like a Bird" and the manic Tim-produced remix of Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On". They sound unlike Furtado not because they're danceable or sexy-- her first two albums were those things-- but because they're about dancing and fucking.
It's hard to tell who is most responsible for the odd execution of this album, Timbaland, Interscope poobah Jimmy Iovine (as Pitchforker Julianne Shepherd has opined), or Furtado herself. But it's all over the place musically. The two singles come early and are surrounded by the album's other interesting songs, like the Madonna-aping swirler "Glow", which rises and falls under the swell of some stop-start keyboards. After "Glow" is "Showtime", a midtempo ballad that comes so close to Aaliyah's understated grace, vocally and emotionally, it's terrifying. Hearing Furtado-- usually a vocal berserker-- rein things in is gratifying for that moment, even when linked with Danja's Timbo4cheap production.
"No Hay Igual", which has presumably been called reggaetón because it's sung in Spanish and isn't salsa, is an aerial assault. But it never wears down the listener and actually uses a few vocal change-ups, unlike the much-maligned genre it's been compared to. Directly after that, everything goes to hell. With a series of groan-worthy, poorly sung ballads mixed with far inferior grasps at pop, the album fades hard down the stretch. If "Promiscuous" is one of the fiercest songs of lust in recent memory, "In God's Hands" is one of the limpest. It sounds like Paula Cole on Paxil singing Rob Thomas' throwaways. "Our love's floating up in the sky in heaven/ Where it began, back in God's hands". That's the chorus. The Chris Martin-penned "All Good Things (Come to an End)" is less painful, but not by much.
The strangest thing about Loose isn't its irregularity, but the simple fact that this doesn't sound like Nelly Furtado at all. Listening to her first two albums, Furtado developed a bizarre speed-slur in her hooks, one of the most unique singing styles in modern music. She digs melisma, but avoids showing off. It seemed like her voice just couldn't stop doing that bob-and-weave. Here, she coos and caws and crows, but she never lets, um, loose. Even the kinetic singles are sing-rapped or delivered in crisp turns. This makes for a very cold album, fatalistic in its sexiness but soporific in its soul-searching.
There's been much made of Furtado's referencing of NBA MVP Steve Nash and the knowing nod to Hall & Oates, but those are just pop-cult placeholders: Look! She's hip and Canadian! If anything, these feel like the most corporate moves on the record, a kowtowing to which Furtado never seemed to stoop. The only thing that speaks to the proposed offhandedness is the ghastly between-song banter between Furtado, her band, and Timbaland. Rather than the warm, strident girl that once sang, "I don't want ambivalence no more", the crush of sex and power and chart potential has got her chirping, "Move your body around like a nympho." It's not the worst outcome in the world, and as nearly all of Timbaland's music does, it makes you move. But maybe at the expense of a thoughtful songwriter. | 2006-06-23T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-23T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | June 23, 2006 | 6.4 | ad76037c-ed0e-4ce0-8749-c09f5c9fd7a5 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
The roaming, Americana-obsessed songwriter brings a sense of purpose to his zigzagging on his debut album, a collaborator-filled collection of heartbreak tales. | The roaming, Americana-obsessed songwriter brings a sense of purpose to his zigzagging on his debut album, a collaborator-filled collection of heartbreak tales. | Dijon: Absolutely | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dijon-absolutely/ | Absolutely | Los Angeles singer Dijon likes to roam. Since his alt R&B group Abhi//Dijon split amicably in the mid 2010s, he’s become a wanderer, his music accreting and discarding styles like a subletter acclimating to new quarters. In the past two years, he’s released a smoldering cover of Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing,” recorded a Prince pastiche in which he shouts out “Automatic,” and assembled Raveena, John C. Reilly, and Dan Reeder for what can only be described as a folk cypher. The latter song was purposefully eclectic, the guest list decided—in a strange echo of Pitchfork contributor Claire Lobenfeld’s review of Dijon’s 2020 EP—by throwing names into a hat. Dijon has never cast these ventures as ironic, kitschy, or audacious, but they could feel like diversions, gimmicks obscuring the anonymity of his songwriting. Absolutely, his debut album, moves more deliberately, his zigzagging purposeful.
Dijon’s pliant, raspy voice guides the record, shifting from coos to wails to murmurs as he sings of love and its complications over folk and soul arrangements. He tends to shun gloss and polish, instead crooning with no discernible enhancements or processing. Accordingly, even his prettiest notes sound physical and textured, like he’s fighting a cold. That strain defines “Many Times,” the powerhouse single about a breaking point in a relationship. “Strawberry, raspberry/Candlelight, satellite/Television, X-ray vision/Aw, what’s it gonna take for you to listen?,” he sings with frustration. His delivery quickens as he rattles off the items of the strange list, the syllables and rhymes running together, growing sillier.
For “The Dress,” a slow jam about a couple revisiting their glory days, Dijon turns pleading, drawing out his melodies. “We should go out/And dance like we used to dance/We should go out/And hold hands,” he sings. The character knows the spark has died but prefers to dream, a common choice in these tales of heartbreak. “Annie” is even rosier, Dijon’s narrator glumly telling Annie she can “change [her] mind.” There’s little outright storytelling on the album, but Dijon’s impassioned performances make the elisions feel loaded. Grievances lurk in every omission.
The production follows Dijon’s contortions, flickering and flaring in tandem with his theatrics. He recorded Absolutely with a revolving door of collaborators who he encouraged to show up at their leisure, an atmosphere captured in the compositions. Sometimes, Dijon is alone. On the self-produced “Did You See It?,” he floats in a drumless void of plucks as he wonders aloud whether the drugs have kicked in. Other times, the room is packed. “Big Mike’s” swells with instruments—slide guitar, organ, percussion, clarinet, piano—that accent Dijon’s yearning vocals. The singer on “Noah’s Highlight Reel” is just some guy. “He’s a great friend of mine, but also a real country boy—I couldn’t approximate that,” Dijon told NME. Compared to the calculated syncretism of his past music, the direction here is whimsical and open.
Dijon can feel closed off despite the bustle and personality of these songs. His love of Americana has deepened without any elaboration on why he’s so fixated. Though the unrequited love between a mechanical bull champion and his admirer on “Rodeo Clown” and the Friday football games and “honky tonk bars” mentioned on “Noah’s Highlight Reel” are well-rendered, they feel like stock images, revealing nothing about the characters’ perspectives. Although he avoids the empty provocation of RMR or Machine Gun Kelly, his heartland Easter eggs scan as souvenirs rather than symbols.
Absolutely works best when Dijon’s writing is as vivid as his performances, as on “Talk Down.” Over a breakbeat, Dijon tells a story of two people bickering during a car ride. His voice cracks as he details the fogging windows, tired eyes, and blushing cheeks. They listen to Gillian Welch, the Band, and Liz Phair as they trade sarcastic remarks and backhanded compliments. There are no gimmicks here, just people and the pulsing spaces between them.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly attributed “Credits!” to Noah Le Gros. He actually sings “Noah’s Highlight Reel.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | R&R / Warner | November 8, 2021 | 7.2 | ad95cb74-414a-499f-b0aa-e868f0652007 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Two versions of Michael Gordon's meticulously designed piano composition—one equal-tempered and one just intonation—played by Vicky Chow showcase the pair's crazed and brilliant obsession with rhythm. | Two versions of Michael Gordon's meticulously designed piano composition—one equal-tempered and one just intonation—played by Vicky Chow showcase the pair's crazed and brilliant obsession with rhythm. | Vicky Chow / Michael Gordon: Sonatra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23054-sonatra/ | Sonatra | Over the last three decades, composer Michael Gordon has done as much as anyone to promote and develop the tradition of minimalist classical music. Upon his arrival in New York, in the late 1970s, he plunged head first into the scene already established by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Along with his collaborators in the Bang on a Can collective, Gordon also helped push the style forward.
His interest in no wave and punk is plain to hear in the odd harmonies and stomping profile of early works like “Four Kings Fight Five.” By the time of his 1992 composition “Yo Shakespeare,” Gordon’s work with rhythm was unusual enough to earn the excited praise of Reich himself. (The elder composer had some memorable advice for Gordon, too: “The first thing you’ve got to do in this score is, on the front page, you’ve got to say, ‘This is the rhythm.’ Because if people look at this score, they’re going to think you’re an idiot. But if you actually tell them on the front page that you know you’re an idiot, then they’ll take you seriously.”) Ever since, one of Gordon’s great skills has been the way he keeps a crazed, obsessive concept interesting over long stretches.
In recent years, Gordon has explored some comparatively mellow textures—treading closer to the dream-state effect created by some other minimalists. Gordon’s popular piece for pitched percussion, Timber, was recently remixed by a variety of electronic music stars. But his new piece for solo piano finds Gordon reconnecting with his high-intensity mode. Played by the contemporary piano virtuoso Vicky Chow, Sonatra offers a fresh glimpse of classic Gordon. It’s meticulously designed, hard-charging and in an unusual way, addictive.
The 15-minute composition that forms the album’s core begins with single-note progressions, galloping up the length of the keyboard. Gordon uses both major- and minor-third intervals as his stepping stones—creating impressions of uniformity and unpredictability at the same time. When the final note in each successive line starts to change, you get a sense of how the piece will undermine its seeming emphasis on repetition.
With the manic feel of the piece well established, Gordon starts engineering new sonic effects. Soon, clusters of notes in one of Chow’s hands start to sound as though fully set apart from what’s going on at the other end of the piano. Chow carries off these distinct, interlocking parts with great poise, even at a great pace. Then the two motifs gradually merge back into an unbroken line—a great, cascading rampage of melody.
Keeping a sense of proportion in mind is one of the dozens of challenges facing a pianist who takes on this music. Aside from her obvious technical facility, Chow also has a poetic feel for the piece’s overall structure. The forceful quality of Gordon’s opening material sounds plenty loud, from the drop. But Chow has deep reserves of emphasis: the floor-rattling power she provides, when reintroducing some bass notes in the third minute, is gorgeous in its considered, hardcore force.
In the final third of Sonatra, superimposed piano lines start to embrace jazzy harmony—it’s as though a trace of cocktail-piano noodling has infiltrated the otherwise barreling music. Gordon says the title of Sonatra amounts to a sideways embrace of Frank Sinatra (as well as the classical sonata form). But in Chow’s hands, the riffs-for-days feel can call to mind other swing references; at times, her playing conjures a vision of some vintage piano genius like Art Tatum coming back to life and getting high on post-minimalism.
Gordon’s writing—and Chow’s execution—delivers a delirium state of rare potency. And then they do it all again, kinda. The album’s second half is devoted to another performance of the piece, with one significant difference. Instead of performing Sonatra on an equal-tempered piano (aka the kind of piano you’re probably used to hearing), Chow plays the second take on a “just intonation” instrument.
Differences between the “pure” intervals of “just intonation” setups and common tuning are complex (and fascinating to explore). But at their essence, “just intonation” tunings just sound plain odd to most of us, today. The first wave of minimalists—including composer-performers like La Monte Young and Terry Riley—also explored “just” tunings to fantastic effect. So Gordon’s alternate version of Sonatra is part of a long-running conversation in minimalist circles. For this performance, Gordon merged two different “just” tunings pioneered by the composer and keyboardist Wendy Carlos. As this version of Sonatra moves into the middle section—in which lines of notes are played in different octaves—and then the piece’s final, more complex harmonies, this tuning begins to produce strange new effects, even as the rhythmic energy remains familiar from the initial take.
Chow’s just-intonation performance of Sonatra doesn’t have quite the same jazzy exhibitionism as her first, equal-tempered take. But this makes sense—as the resulting harmonies of the “just-intonation” version sound a fair bit removed from mainstream jazz practice. And over the balance of the second performance, the composer’s snaking lines start to sound just as compelling in this alternative intonation. Gordon is used to pushing around received ideas about composition: fusing punk, jazz and classical accents. But this is the first time he’s pushed his own writing around every bit as forcefully. It’s a smart idea, executed with a thrilling degree of insight by one of our era’s most brilliant pianists. | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | April 17, 2017 | 7.5 | ad99d80f-e523-44fb-8035-a33c1adcfea3 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
On their liveliest album in at least a decade, indie rock’s most steadfast institution squares up against ubiquitous darkness. | On their liveliest album in at least a decade, indie rock’s most steadfast institution squares up against ubiquitous darkness. | Yo La Tengo: This Stupid World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yo-la-tengo-this-stupid-world/ | This Stupid World | To fully dig the manifold charms of This Stupid World, it’s best to take a single step back into Yo La Tengo’s 38 years-and-counting catalog. In July 2020, amid that first summer of extreme pandemic disorientation, the trio surprised devotees not only with a new Bandcamp page but also with a fresh album, captured at their Hoboken practice space just weeks earlier and offered up like a timely postcard from a friend you’ve missed—we’re OK, and we hope you’re OK, too.
Still, this wasn’t some coddling batch of covers or a soporific balm for the common weal. Instead, We Have Amnesia Sometimes gathered five casually beautiful improvisations, set decidedly on edge: a snapshot of listless and helpless terror. Really, Yo La Tengo’s entire enviable path owes to that impulse to put their shared moment to tape. Whether triumphantly covering Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” after 9/11 or dreaming of the stars and baseball from somewhere in suburbia, they have always played what they felt, sans commercial master plan or artistic safety net. Yo La Tengo are, after all, a band that would rather write new music for commercials than cash in on past glories.
On This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo are ready to sing again, to shake free of Amnesia’s uneasy torpor and charge ahead by reimagining and recharging some of the best parts of their history. Their mass of albums have collectively done a little of almost everything, from samba and soul to raw noise and regal country. For these nine tracks, they key on two specialties: Mostly there are the ironclad, soft but steely rippers that perhaps no band does better. And then, at just the right time, Yo La Tengo deliver extended astral jams that feel like invitations to disappear. Where other Yo La Tengo albums have often felt discursive, This Stupid World feels focused and lean, the work of a band that needs to tell you something now.
Yo La Tengo begin with that electrifying first category of rock songs, slicing straight into a galvanizing romp about the ruin that is sure to come. At the start of “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” Georgia Hubley and James McNew lock into a rubbery motorik throb, pushing against or easing off the accelerator as if navigating freeway traffic. Hubley and husband Ira Kaplan coo over the rhythm, their tuneful near-whispers fluttering like pillowcases on a clothesline.
But then there’s Kaplan’s scabrous guitar, which spends all seven minutes turning the nice little melody inside out and upside down, until all that’s left is a pile of rusted scrap metal. When he reaches the mid-song solo, he lunges at a few ragged chords, gives up, and then lashes out at individual notes, as if trying to remember how they fit together. He finally finds the riff and crawls back toward the song, resolving this riveting little melodrama. “Until we all break/Until we all break down,” Kaplan and Hubley harmonize again toward the end, the pieces of this anthem of oblivion slowly drifting apart.
This feeling of resignation powers much of This Stupid World, no matter how lively the bulk of its songs may sound. “Every day, it hurts to look,” Kaplan sings early into “Fallout,” one of their most effortlessly magnetic songs ever. “I’d turn away if only I could.” The trouble is everywhere, as inescapable as polluted air. And it’s not just outside: Kaplan laments his inability to overcome his ego during the wonderfully bittersweet “Apology Letter.” Irreparable destruction and inevitable death linger as miasmas, like when grief catches Hubley by surprise on TV during her lovely country sigh, “Aselestine.” Kaplan advocates for a sort of Swedish death cleaning of the mind above the warped canter of “Until It Happens,” a cautionary tale for those of us who sometimes want to believe bad things are only other people’s problems.
Even the McNew-led “Tonight’s Episode” playfully inveighs against a faddish world of self-help gurus and know-it-all advisers. Its chants of “guacamole” and games played with a yo-yo might feel like doggerel, but he’s just doing what he can to hold it together. “No need to cast the I Ching,” he sings like he’s sharing his own secret advice, noise ripping like a gale behind him. “Let the night astound/I don’t have to think.” If Yo La Tengo were on the edge when they cut Amnesia, the last three years have caused them to slip over its lip. Maybe the abyss isn’t yet in plain view, but reports from its depths are coming up more quickly now.
Despite all the fretting, This Stupid World exudes a loveable lightness, the byproduct of a band rooted in a triangle of trust and camaraderie since McNew joined 30 years ago. Catch, for instance, Hubley’s near-hidden giggle as the amplifiers whirr to life at the start of “Aselestine.” The sadness is easier when you’ve got friends around, it seems to say. You can hear that solidarity in “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” too, as Hubley and McNew stick with the rhythm while Kaplan wrestles through that amplifier turmoil. When he’s ready to sing, they lock back into shared softness.
The temptation to brand This Stupid World with a superlative or triumphant tagline is strong—Yo La Tengo’s best album in at least a decade (true), their most consistently compelling rock songs in years (ditto), a new triumph of indie rock’s old guard (facts). But such reductive critical capstones feel wrong for the steadfast march of Yo La Tengo, a band that’s been so indispensable for so long because they love making music together exactly how and when they want. Releasing a new album every two years or so for almost as long as the internet has existed, they have never indulged the illusion of scarcity by disappearing for a while, only to climb aboard the comeback circuit.
This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going. “This stupid world, it’s killing me,” the trio finally offers as one on the title track, a mighty shoegaze wonder where distortion and feedback thread together like a warm blanket. “This stupid world, it’s all we have.” It’s a mantra shared among pals holding each other up, now extended to the world beyond their cozy Hoboken studio. They know how this thing ends, and they play on anyway. | 2023-02-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-09T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 9, 2023 | 8.5 | ad9d9f37-c960-4b03-b7df-ce938e4a56eb | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The second album from the Brighton four-piece is the sound of a band mercilessly digging into itself with a stunning, dynamic performance from singer-songwriter Dana Margolin. | The second album from the Brighton four-piece is the sound of a band mercilessly digging into itself with a stunning, dynamic performance from singer-songwriter Dana Margolin. | Porridge Radio: Every Bad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porridge-radio-every-bad/ | Every Bad | When Dana Margolin repeats her lyrics like incantations—“I am charming, I am sweet,” “I’m bored to death, let’s argue,” “You will like me when you meet me”—it can be hard to gauge whether she wants to believe these facts, or decimate them with irony. This is among the frictions that power Every Bad, the sometimes twisted, often transcendent, always incendiary album from the Brighton four-piece Porridge Radio.
The band’s once-minimal sound—reminiscent, back in 2015, of Frankie Cosmos’ witty Bandcamp-as-diary style—has scaled colossally, transforming into a fever dream that lifts every song. Where 2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, recorded in their drummer’s shed, had a dark streak, Every Bad is unabashed sorcery. Margolin’s dusky voice and serrated riffs sometimes recall Polly Jean Harvey, sometimes the attack of early Karen O, but Porridge Radio has devised its own approach to guitar music. The songs balance stoicism with just enough cracked-open ache to feel human. In their quiet-loud dynamics are the exorcisms of a woman who knows that a whisper is often more tormenting than a scream.
Every Bad is the sound of a band digging into itself: On the opener, Margolin asks, “What is going on with me?” and she spends 11 songs excavating answers, turning them into melodies that hang gracefully aloft. In three-and-a-half minutes, “Don’t Ask Me Twice” pivots from Lou Reed-style lyrical exposition, to an infernal screamo blast, to seasick balladeering and back. But Porridge Radio’s alchemy is equal parts severity and humor. By the end of “Born Confused,” as Margolin chants “Thank you for leaving me, thank you for making me happy,” her tone devolves from cheerful to deranged to completely shattered, gasping for air, like an absurdist deconstruction of Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next.” And there’s no shortage of attitude on the breezy “Give/Take”: “How do I say ‘no’ without sounding like a little bitch?” Margolin low-key snarls. “I want want want want want want want.” It’s this unwillingness to stick to one sonic or emotional truth that gives life to Porridge Radio’s music.
A gothic grandeur courses through Every Bad, a reminder that Porridge Radio are from the same seaside England town where Nick Cave currently resides. Like Cave, Margolin channels vacancy and existential dread with flair—sometimes ornate, sometimes plainspoken—and Porridge Radio’s songs always reach at something just beyond their ending. On the expressive “Nephews,” Margolin sings of wanting to be unmoored like “two nephews under the sea” while watching another person “slip into unconsciousness.” She presents the sea as a place “where your head might explode, and the water is so dark you can’t feel your heart,” reflecting, as she does often across Every Bad, on the meaning of safety, family, and home.
Porridge Radio achieve sinister, soul-cleansing extremes, and never more powerfully than on “Sweet.” The dour woman at the center of the song is, in the eyes of her mother, a “nervous wreck” who “bites her nails right down to the flesh”—she could be the protagonist of a bleak Ottessa Moshfegh story. Margolin voices these perceptions of herself with an eerie stillness, augmented by echoes from keyboardist and backing vocalist Georgie Stott, and then her bandmates set them ablaze, unleashing a maximally rendered noise-rock onslaught. It sounds like a call-and-response between Margolin’s internal monologue and thundering abrasion of Sonic Youth proportions, or metal. “And sometimes I am just a child, writing letters to myself,” she sings in calm measures, “Wishing out loud you were dead/And then taking it back.” What could be more brutal? “Sweet” seems to narrate a specifically feminine dynamic, sending up the self-hating expectations so often placed on young women, incinerating them to ash.
Still, there’s a sense of togetherness in Porridge Radio’s arrangements—Stott was a fan singing all the words up front before Margolin asked her to join the band—and it adds levity to their heavy sound. A jagged post-punk dance banger, “Long” expresses the breathless agony of having someone waste your time, which is to say your life, but Margolin and Stott scream out “every bitter breath” until the tensions boil over, giving way to comfort: “I’m glad it’s not me.” And while the uncanny merry-go-round waltz that opens “Circling” seems to undermine its message that “everything’s fine,” it becomes a beautiful ode to the healing powers of the sea, which “takes me away/Puts me to sleep/Holds my hand and whispers gently.” “Lilac,” meanwhile, channels the desperation of trying to help someone, and its epic rave-up—“I don’t want to get bitter/I want us to get better/I want us to be kinder/To ourselves and to each other”—is, if didactic, a welcome feeling.
For every savage truth on Every Bad, there’s an equal and opposite moment of hope. “Maybe I was born confused,” Margolin speak-sings on the opener, “but I’m not.” Every Bad is full of small self-possessed triumphs like this, a portrait of reality in which neither struggle nor joy is denied, where little is abstracted or prescribed. Using words and noise to create mantras and blow them up, Every Bad is the inspired result of a rock band finding itself in 2020, inhabiting many ways of being. | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | March 13, 2020 | 8.4 | ada1fc89-4c46-493d-9c30-7a2bae4c5843 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The California surf-garage rockers extend their recent series of EPs, and succumb to their own sense of anhedonia. | The California surf-garage rockers extend their recent series of EPs, and succumb to their own sense of anhedonia. | Together Pangea: Dispassionate EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/together-pangea-dispassionate-ep/ | Dispassionate EP | Since their 2010 debut, Together Pangea, the Los Angeles trio behind songs like “Blood, Blood, Blood,” “Shitty,” and “Sick Shit,” have been heralded among their Southern California peers for blazing, surfy garage punk. Known for crude lyrics, boozy gigs, and tours supporting established rockers Alkaline Trio and Twin Peaks, the group arrived at a sweet spot on their most recent album, 2017’s striking rock’n’roll bruiser Bulls and Roosters. Rather than release a full-length follow-up, they opted to split a February 2018 recording session into three disparate EPs: the acoustic Sleeping Til Sunset, last October’s tizzied Non Stop Paranoia, and the milder Dispassionate.
The pleasant reworkings of older songs on Sleeping Til Sunset successfully highlighted Together Pangea’s mellower side, so it’s not as if the band loses all their appeal when they set aside their usual lawlessness. But in contrast to the full-bodied Bulls and Roosters, 2014’s fervent Badillac, and even the gaudy synths of Non Stop Paranoia, Dispassionate feels watered-down. Its retro influence sounds less like the work of Burger Records alumni and more like a squeaky-clean throwback to “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Opener “Bet You Wish I Would Call” is inspired by the real-life unreachability of frontman William Keegan, who went phoneless for years. His razor-sharp riffs carry the song, but they’re bogged down by cliches like “Summer days are meant to sleep ’em away” and “Listening to all my favorite songs,” Together Pangea’s own best crack at Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song.” The beachy “Never Said I Wanna” offers a seed of thematic development, but lines like, “Time is ash boy, I was 21/Crossing a great divide, trying to follow the one/It’s in the past boy, like a dying sun,” wind up more muddied than profound.
The EP’s title track is simultaneously its most glum and most kinetic, kicking off with a twee xylophone ditty before the lyrics lurch toward oblivion. “It’s Monday, vodka and cigarettes again/I’ve hell to pay, I’ll be inside this week,” Keegan sings, belting the word “dispassionate” a few times. It’s a recurring habit: Three of Dispassionate’s four songs make heavy use of their respective titles in the chorus. With so little substance elsewhere, it feels like a crutch.
“Moonlight Lately” brings the most muscle, as drummer Erik Jimenez saunters through flourishes that rattle with the gusto of Spanish folklorico. The lyrics detail a violent crash: “The screeching of tires, the burning of rubber/The breaking of glass, and the witness, my brother/That's when my baby hit the ground!” With a blown-out saxophone solo taking over halfway through, it feels like Together Pangea’s take on an ’80s action-drama soundtrack, and it’s the song most closely in line with the band’s traditionally reckless ethos.
Though Together Pangea are capable musicians and songwriters, Dispassionate succumbs to its own sense of anhedonia. The band attempts to mask the anonymity with their tried-and-true rumbling drums and animated guitars, but this time, their edge can’t cut it. | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nettwerk | June 1, 2019 | 5.9 | ada23113-3d27-465c-8b70-fc928b14a31b | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Bing & Ruth's debut album, first released in a tiny run in 2010, has been reissued. City Lake features an 11-person ensemble—two clarinets, two cellos, two voices, bass, lap steel, tape delay, percussion, and piano—and the large lineup brings David Moore's ambient-leaning compositions to life. | Bing & Ruth's debut album, first released in a tiny run in 2010, has been reissued. City Lake features an 11-person ensemble—two clarinets, two cellos, two voices, bass, lap steel, tape delay, percussion, and piano—and the large lineup brings David Moore's ambient-leaning compositions to life. | Bing & Ruth: City Lake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21256-city-lake/ | City Lake | City Lake is not a new Bing & Ruth record, but it might as well be. Only 250 copies of the chamber-ambient ensemble's album were pressed when it was first released on vinyl in 2010. It reappears now, on New York's RVNG Intl., as a sort of coda to last year's RVNG-released Bing & Ruth album Tomorrow Was the Golden Age. That record, a luminous affair for piano, cello, clarinet, bass, and tape delay, was many listeners' first encounter with David Moore's group, so it makes sense the label would want to dust off a recording that most people never got the chance to hear.
City Lake is very much of a piece with its successor, although there are subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences between the two. While Tomorrow utilized just seven players, City Lake features an 11-person ensemble—two clarinets, two cellos, two voices, bass, lap steel, tape delay, percussion, and piano—and the effect of the expanded lineup is notable. It's a fuller, richer sound with more definition. The piano leads the way, knocking out rapidly repeating chords that emphasize the instrument's percussive side, and the reeds, cello, and lap steel frequently twist into sturdy, vine-like shapes. Tomorrow, with its shimmering delay, has a wispier, more featherweight feel; City Lake, while still beautiful and tinged with melancholy, leaves more room for dissonance, and even flat-out chaos. If, already familiar with Tomorrow's calm, cozy atmospheres, you turn to City Lake to soundtrack your next dinner party, maybe don't use the fine china: Your meal may take an unexpected turn some 40 minutes in, when the music explodes into a buzzing, squealing maelstrom of insistent crash cymbals and earsplitting glissandi.
Just like Tomorrow, City Lake is built upon exceedingly simple musical figures, but the results are anything but. Moore is often compared to American minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and not without reason; he is fond of repeating patterns and stalwart pedal tones, and his chord progressions are usually content to stay in one place, shifting from foot to foot. And, just like Reich and Riley, Moore's own music doesn't easily square with a concept like minimalism. Immersed in the billowing harmonics of City Lake, you don't think of empty space, but of fullness. You don't think of absence, but of presence. The dominant motif of "Broad Channel" may be the piano's hollow open fifth, but the way he uses the rest of the instruments to color in that interval, you're left with the impression of a sound that can't be contained.
You feel it most in "City Lake / Tu Sei Uwe". Gentle piano chords, wreathed in glowing drones, create a sense of space that exists outside of time. The rhythm plays out only in the broadest of strokes, like the movement of waves. It builds imperceptibly, until, some 10 minutes in, cymbals and voices and a stream of gravelly feedback rise in a squall that, in the score, is notated as "HEADACHE INDUCING LOUDNESS." It might feel out of character for Bing & Ruth; in fact, if you dropped in unawares, you might mistake the passage for Swans. But it's over just as quickly as it's begun—a sudden cutoff, then silence. If Tomorrow Was the Golden Age corresponds to what Erik Satie termed "furniture music," City Lake is a glimpse at the raw materials before all the splinters have been sanded down—and it is all the more exciting for them. | 2015-12-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | December 9, 2015 | 7.6 | ada37326-e713-4ff6-9754-8dcd9e0f28fe | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
EPs have traditionally played a peripheral role in the Chicago group’s catalog, but this six-song release has both the vision and the range of their full-lengths. | EPs have traditionally played a peripheral role in the Chicago group’s catalog, but this six-song release has both the vision and the range of their full-lengths. | Wilco: Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wilco-hot-sun-cool-shroud-ep/ | Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP | Wilco have been a lot of things in their 30-year career, but they’ve never been an EP band. Where other acts use the format as a testing ground for new ideas, Wilco always performed their wildest experiments on their studio albums, and Jeff Tweedy has historically favored the LP and the lengthy live set as forums for working through big ideas and worrying over deep uncertainties. Their EPs have almost always been promotional tools, whether it’s their short live set for iTunes or the bonus CDs they’ve appended to proper albums. Even 2003’s More Like the Moon started out as a promo for the Australian edition of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before it received a standalone release. They’ve been dumping grounds for live cuts and leftovers rather than major statements in and of themselves.
Hot Sun Cool Shroud ostensibly serves a similar purpose: Wilco culled tracks from recent sessions and are releasing the EP to coincide with this year’s Solid Sound Festival, where concertgoers will have first dibs on exclusive vinyl before it gets a wider release later this year. But this feels like the first time the band has crafted an EP as a coherent statement with the purpose, if not the weight, of a full LP. There’s an intentionality here that wasn’t present even on More Like the Moon, an embrace of the possibilities of the shorter format. They use the medium surprisingly well, establishing and then elaborating on a “summertime-after-dark” vibe (to use Tweedy’s description). It doesn’t mean much to say Hot Sun is the best EP Wilco have ever made, because there’s not much competition. It means more to say that it feels complete, like a haiku.
Opener “Hot Sun” practically melts from the heat, guitar notes bending and warping as Tweedy sings about the physical pleasure of sunlight hitting skin. With that sensation comes a nagging doubt, possibly about climate change: “Shouldn’t I be doing something?” he asks himself. “What can I do? What can I do?” These two oppositional feelings sit in the song as equals, not just as things to experience, but to write about. “What’s the word I want?” Tweedy sings, as though concerned he might not fully convey either the joy or the fear. Few artists can break the fourth wall of a song so eloquently without sounding too clever.
With summer as a general theme, Hot Sun is structured in two acts, each side of the 10" featuring an instrumental bracketed by two vocal-centric tracks. In this setting Wilco sound more focused, the songs tauter in their melodies and more purposeful in their arrangements, even when those arrangements seem designed to be disorderly. The instrumentals move by their own logic—especially “Livid,” a collision of reckless post-punk guitars that recalls A Ghost Is Born—but every song makes space for a little bit of noise, a little bit of chaos. Even the relatively twangy “Say You Love Me” has a heatsick quaver as they offer up a rousing, reassuring, aching sing-along chorus that will no doubt sound great at Mass MoCA.
Especially for a short EP, there are a lot of different Wilcos on Hot Sun Cool Shroud. There’s Wilco the dad rockers on “Hot Sun,” still figuring out their responsibilities to their children and everybody else. There’s Wilco the noisemakers on “Inside the Bell Bones,” screwing around in the studio. There’s Wilco the frayed worrywarts on “Ice Cream,” wondering how anybody could love them. There’s Wilco the festival organizers, Wilco the migraine rockers, Wilco the country-rock band, Wilco the goofballs, Wilco the Wilcos. To this familiar parade, add Wilco the EP band, elevating a modest tracklist into something much bigger than itself, and demonstrating how they’ve kept in touch with all those different Wilcos for so long. | 2024-06-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | June 27, 2024 | 8 | ada85eb8-84a1-40a7-a35e-cba8450fff8b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Grammy winning jazz singer Gregory Porter shone on the Disclosure single, "Holding On." But he's got a big career of his own outside of the British brothers. His new album is sweet and serene. | Grammy winning jazz singer Gregory Porter shone on the Disclosure single, "Holding On." But he's got a big career of his own outside of the British brothers. His new album is sweet and serene. | Gregory Porter: Take Me to the Alley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21678-take-me-to-the-alley/ | Take Me to the Alley | In May 2015, Disclosure released a song called “Holding On,” a dance tune that put singer Gregory Porter on full display. The collaboration likely wasn’t a big deal for Disclosure fans: The group works with big name R&B singers quite often; compared to Sam Smith or Miguel, Porter is certainly under the radar. For Porter, though, the feature was somewhat surprising given his career path. He’s a jazz artist, the guy in the big hat who used to play football. But "Holding On" was a big success despite his low profile, in large part because of Porter's presence. He’s got that voice, so booming and majestic that it cuts through any instrumental, no matter how pronounced or easygoing. On his 2011 single “1960 What?,” for instance, Porter is especially demonstrative, tweaking his strong baritone to lament social injustice. Conversely, on the next year's “Be Good (Lion’s Song),” the vocalist took his time, carefully peeling off each word through a sweet, conversational cadence. With these songs and others, Porter thrives using a unique style, an ever-changing vocal magnitude you simply have to hear to appreciate. He sings with conviction, calmly drawing you in, like having a long chat with an old friend.
Despite two successful albums, 2011’s Water and 2012’s Be Good, Porter hit a high mark on 2013’s Liquid Spirit, which won the Grammy a year later for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Powered by songs “No Love Dying” and “Hey Laura,” Porter brought true pathos to sentimental tales. While Liquid Spirit was decidedly nostalgic, rooted in traditional jazz and soul, for his new album, Take Me to the Alley, Porter reconnects with long-time collaborator Kamau Kenyatta to create something more serene. With its scant, acoustic backdrop, the mood is overtly relaxed and the pace is low to mid-tempo, making for a record best suited for late night consumption.
Compared with Liquid Spirit, Alley feels more reflective, if not lovelorn. “Don’t Lose Your Steam” and “Day Dream” are coming-of-age tales meant for Porter’s three-year-old son, Demyan. The album’s middle songs—namely “Consequence of Love” and “Don’t Be a Fool”—seem preoccupied with regret, as though the singer wants to atone for mistakes he’s made along the way. “Insanity” speaks to the raw passion lovers sometimes feel for one another. It finds Porter in limbo, that point where the relationship is over but neither person wants to give up. “Sometimes a lover can be angry till the end,” he sings earnestly.
On “More Than a Woman,” Porter sings about his late mother who, while dying from breast cancer, encouraged him to pursue a full-time singing career: “She brought love to my life, gave love light … simple words, I love you, she made true.” Porter is a formidable songwriter with poetic flair, but Alley puts more focus on what he’s saying than the music itself, which lessens the album’s immediate satisfaction. Porter sounds best when his music has greater variation. His narrative stands up here, but without a broader spectrum of sounds, Alley feels a little flat. It’s more of a slow burn and a slight step backward from Liquid Spirit’s dynamic nature. The results are nice, but with too few standouts, Alley breezes by. | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note / Decca | May 11, 2016 | 6.7 | adaf8d11-69f5-4e20-bedc-f5c3267bb5d1 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The new LP from pioneering industrial band Godflesh is the duo’s best effort in over 20 years—a sinister amalgam of Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green’s collective work to date. | The new LP from pioneering industrial band Godflesh is the duo’s best effort in over 20 years—a sinister amalgam of Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green’s collective work to date. | Godflesh: Post Self | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godflesh-post-self/ | Post Self | “We understand the ordinary business of living, we know how to work the machine,” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1939’s “The Family Reunion.” “We are insured against fire, against larceny and illness, against defective plumbing, but not against the act of God.” Eliot’s play was a disaster, but it well illustrates the binaries written right into the name of pioneering industrial band Godflesh. Since the duo’s formation in 1988, their artistic underpinnings have encompassed human screams and assembly-line roars, hot blood and cold steel, the devil we know and the android we fear.
Multi-instrumentalist Justin Broadrick and bassist G.C. Green weren’t the first in heavy music to exploit these binaries through unbridled aggression; Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, and Einstürzende Neubauten are but three iconic groups that were active long before Godflesh. But in matters of sheer sonic magnitude, Godflesh’s juncture of man-made instrumentation (searing shouts, buzzsaw riffs) and artificial fury (militant drum loops, chrome-laden effects) was unprecedented upon arrival.
Three decades, six albums, and one 13-year hiatus later, Godflesh remain revered—and what’s more, they keep getting better. Post Self, the duo’s eighth LP and third release since reconvening in 2014, is easily the group’s best effort in over 20 years, not to mention 2017’s best industrial-metal album. Whereas the preceding A World Lit Only By Fire functioned primarily as a reintroduction to Godflesh’s primordial rage, Post Self represents a sinister amalgam of its creators’ greater body of work, especially Broadrick’s ambient project Jesu.
Broadrick and Green have tinkered with the scale of their musical modi operandi over the years, but they’ve kept their building blocks consistent. Broadrick’s drum machines and Green’s gnarled, rubbery bass riffs supply the music’s driving engine as well as its primary source of order, a rhythmic buffer against Broadrick’s animalistic grunts. Godflesh’s factory-floor soundscapes prove hostile and inhuman. “Be God” and “No Body” find Broadrick playing Iron Man’s murderous cousin, his full-throated bark distorted beyond recognition. “In Your Shadow” takes the mechanical suffocation even further, with vocals so compressed and static-ridden, you can’t help but wonder if the man moonlights as a Dalek.
Post Self’s violent detachment from the world of the living are certainly attention-grabbing, and on songs like “Parasite” and the title track, even ear-pleasing. But the disturbing ghosts haunting Godflesh’s machine aren’t as simple, or as static, as they seem. “Mirror of Finite Light” lights up the darkness with a shoegaze-y arc flash straight out of the Jesu playbook, awash in textured synths and hazy drone. “The Infinite End,” the LP’s closer, explores this liminality to majestic effect, condensing light and shadow down to a single, sublime point, like the Big Bang in reverse.
Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards. Broadrick and Green’s brutal alchemy has never felt more prescient in our current age of backflipping robots and—if inventor Elon Musk’s predictions hold true—global wars sparked by AI. If we’re barrelling straight towards the point of singularity, we might as well go out with speakers blaring. And we’d be hard pressed to find better sonic guides than Godflesh, industrial-metal’s most trusted duo, to carry us to the inevitable end. | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Avalanche | December 4, 2017 | 8.1 | adb5ad11-7337-4d57-8e95-732072a01c39 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
This twelve-track compilation celebrates the German label Tresor, a vital point in the Detroit-Berlin techno axis. Drexciya, Donato Dozzy, Jon Hassell, and others contribute. | This twelve-track compilation celebrates the German label Tresor, a vital point in the Detroit-Berlin techno axis. Drexciya, Donato Dozzy, Jon Hassell, and others contribute. | Various Artists: Dreamy Harbor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22757-dreamy-harbor/ | Dreamy Harbor | When Dimitri Hegemann set up an art space in the vaults under the Wertheim department store in East Berlin in the spring of 1991, it seemed unlikely that it would last out the initial three-month lease. But the club Tresor became a vital point on the Detroit-Berlin axis in the early ’90s, its lease was extended, and the underground club became a conduit that brought the first practitioners of techno over to Europe, introducing the likes of Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, and more to the continent, which in turn helped it become a worldwide force. The club has always been a more vital catalyst than the label of the same name, established the same year. But its heaviest releases—Robert Hood’s Internal Empire, Surgeon’s Basictonalvocabulary, Drexciya’s Harnessed the Storm, X-102’s Discovers The Rings Of Saturn, for starters—have maintained its international status.
While perhaps no longer at the cutting edge, twenty-five years in Tresor continues to stay relevant, tapping newcomers like Objekt and providing a home for the likes of Detroit’s Terrence Dixon. To help celebrate, the label presents Dreamy Harbor, a twelve-track assortment of older artists that helped establish the label, a few newcomers from the far corners of the globe, as well as a legendary composer not previously associated with the label. Veering from woozy ambience to clanging techno and back, it shows the label to be in a transitional space of sorts.
One of the first surprises is the opening track, Vainquer’s now-legendary “Solanus (Extracted 2).” Originally a B-side on the Chain Reaction label, it’s one of the defining beatless dubs to drift out in the mid-90s. It’s a bit difficult to tell just how much has been tweaked on this version from the original. Those chords that mimic exhalations from the void; that sense of serenity cut with the prickly buzz of cicadas—it remains intact here, save that its ethereal nod now lasts a precious three minutes longer.
It segues into a track from newcomer Shao, who released his first single on Tresor in 2015. Shao’s “Sensi (edit)” fidgets and slowly ratchets up a sense of dread on the track, but at times it feels like an echo of the old Tresor sound. Donato Dozzy, a longtime master of such chasm-like techno in Italy, also recalls that type of sound but with more nuanced results. Where the set fares best is in breaking from the merciless sound of techno and having its artists worm into the spaces between the beats. Recent signee Marcelus lets live, loose-metered drums skitter beneath the floorboards of the haunting “Odawah Jam.” Newcomer Claudia Anderson gives “Phase” a buoyant stutter step, and Terrence Dixon slips in some saxophone breaths and a beat that seems to just gathering loose marimba tone bars together like firewood.
It’s the shortest track on the comp, but the haunting voices that float across the spine-tingling keys of “Direction Asymmetry,” from Gerald Donald’s post-Drexciya project, Daughter Produkt, might be the most affecting, sure to pique Drexicya fans wondering what’s to come. Most curious is the inclusion of fourth-world composer (and Brian Eno compatriot) Jon Hassell to the mix. Recently, Hassell’s groundbreaking work has been getting a long overdue reassessment, and more and more new artists are drawing on his reimagining (and inverting) of indigenous and ambient sounds for their own work. Hassell’s piece is the odd one out here, but its flickering electronics and gorgeous piano and trumpet twinkle like lights on the far shore. Hopefully it hints at more work from Hassell to see light on the label in the near future. Dreamy Harbor might not be as handy or invigorating a comp as some of Tresor’s mid-90s sets, but it’s that rare release on the imprint that finds greater effect coming from the dreamier side of its telltale sound. | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Tresor | January 30, 2017 | 7.2 | adb9c6b0-0b2d-43bf-aa49-727ed95a2fae | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The jazz rap trio’s 1993 debut questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances. | The jazz rap trio’s 1993 debut questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances. | Digable Planets: Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/digable-planets-reachin-a-new-refutation-of-time-and-space/ | Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) | Seconds into any Digable Planets’ song and you’ll hear it: the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, the unorthodox free jazz of Albert Ayler, the black spirituality of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the spoken-word funk of the Last Poets. Freedom, progressivism, oneness, harmony, and serendipity are the core tenets that would come to define the rap trio and their ideology throughout their career. How fitting, then, that intuition and a kiss of luck would birth their first jazz rap odyssey, 1993’s Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), which is both a product of community and exploration.
Digable Planets followed in the conscious footsteps of the ’90s New York collective Native Tongues—spearheaded by A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul—which was cultivating a more positive-minded, jazz-influenced rap community. Linking from varying backgrounds, the three Planets MCs—Ishmael Butler, Craig Irving, and Mary Ann Vieira—sought to embody the inclusivity their forebears had brought to rap. Reachin’ tested the limits of hip-hop alchemy, creating otherworldly transmissions that sampled hard-bopping jazz acts. They turned Karl Marx, Sonny Rollins, and Parliament into pillars of their cool, communal space.
The group formed through chance encounters in 1987, as if by kismet. Each member was already active on local rap scenes: Butler was workshopping Planets, pretending he was a group on his demo, Irving was booking shows around Howard University and rapping in another Tongues-inspired group called Dread Poet Society, and Vieira was in a dance crew that backed up rap acts when they came to town. After repeatedly running into each other along the coast—in New York, Philly, and D.C., at venues, house parties, and hangout spots—Butler finally enlisted Irving and Vieira for the third iteration of his ongoing, fledgling Digable Planets project. They took on the names Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug Mecca respectively, and the group quickly congealed, with each member possessing their own effortless style and indelible flavor.
The newly-minted trio signed with Pendulum Records in ’92, and they started recording songs for their debut album almost immediately. They needed to cut records for a production demo, and Butterfly suggested they use an old Dread Poets Society song called “Skin Treatment.” With the blessing of Doodlebug’s old group mates, Digable combined the song with another called “Brown Baby Funk,” a fusion that birthed “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” the unfadable jazz rap record that won the group a Grammy and put them on the map. With both local jazz and rap clubs backing the single, the airplay-boosted cut continued to build momentum. They didn’t set out to be a “jazz rap” group; they simply made use of available resources, sampling what was around them and being as creative as their circumstances would allow. Their raps reflected their respective worlds merging: Butler’s jazz roots, Irving’s street savvy, and Viera’s cross-cultural identity.
Reachin’ is an album about freedom—from convention, from oppression, from the limits imposed by the space-time continuum. It envisions slick rhythms and grooves as emancipation from the natural order of the physical universe; as Ladybug Mecca puts it on “Last of the Spiddyocks,” “It’s simple: Swing be the freakin’ of the time/The spinnin’ by the kings good for speakin’ of the mind.” Its smoothness feeds the agency of its inhabitants, whose vivid, weirdo raps conceptualize life outside of the binary.
There’s some talk of confrontational inner city street politics, but Digable were foremost promoters of peace and unity, and both their rap names and their music bore out their messages. Reachin’ found a through-line from more philosophical thinking to pragmatic street-dweller wisdom and logic. References from big thinkers like Marx, Fromm, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche are scattered across the record, on songs like “Pacifics (Sdtrk ‘N.Y. is Red Hot’).” The album got its name from an essay by Argentinian writer and theorist Jorge Luis Borges. They, like Borges, theorized that time and space are conceptual, relating only to individuals. Outside of its obvious jazz homage, the title track was meant as a mark of their aspirations, as Butterfly put it, their efforts “trying to get to a new place.”
Reachin’ is at once vintage and futuristic, a vision for a new utopia influenced by the past, daring to imagine insulated black communities as separate from Earth—unified, Afrocentric, and untarnished by subjugation. It’s a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments and dogma—comparing New York to a museum, its graffiti as much high art as the work of Dadaist Salvador Dalí. Digable Planets make their own pre-internet information exchange, where traveling a few blocks could mean an introduction to a completely new milieu, where little ever gets lost in translation, where the inspiration for ideas occurs as spontaneously as a trumpet solo.
Butterfly produced Reachin’ alongside soundmen Shane Faber and Mike Mangini in basic, makeshift studios erected in their tiny Jersey apartments. They were each well equipped to help see the group’s vision through. (They had done programming and engineering work for Run-D.M.C., Sean Combs, Queen Latifah, and Leaders of the New School. Faber was the engineer for Tribe’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.) The album’s soundbed is warm and swinging. Carefully selected samples are sewn together at the hem. One sample might split open to reveal another, as on “What Cool Breezes Do.” Or they’ll all feed right into each other; the flutes, guitars, and bass that segue one into the next on “Nickel Bags” are all separate elements from separate songs. The samples they couldn’t afford, they recreated. Each track is unique, and yet every one is a puzzle piece completing the group’s cosmic take on transference.
As the album’s primary architect, Butterfly is at its center, but songs are often driven by Ladybug Mecca, who is silvery in her delivery, slipping promptly in and out of moments like a preternatural guru. Doodlebug imparts his wisdom as digressions, kicking facts in a wingman capacity. As a unit, they never miss a beat, constantly attuned to each other’s frequencies, moving in sync and sharing ideas. So much of the action is reliant on their ability to read each other and react accordingly, to big-up someone when the moment strikes or to cede the spotlight just in time. This awareness pays off on “Time & Space (A New Refutation Of),” where each verse latches into the next, every MC propelling the one that comes after. The other members even give Butterfly the chance to do a few solo cuts, somehow never sucking the wind out of the group’s sail. “La Femme Fetal,” an upright bass-led pro-choice parable, is written in the style of Butterfly’s idol, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of the Last Poets, with a loose, almost interpretive flow that ebbs and rises to suit the inflections of Nuriddin’s cosmic storytelling. The ode, one of rap’s earliest defenses of women’s rights, serves as a cornerstone of the group’s progressive sensibilities.
Reachin’ is among hip-hop’s greatest artifacts, the realization of the Native Tongues vision for perfect rap harmony. They personify the balance they promote. It’s an album that questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances. As Digable Planets refute the boundaries of their continuum, their imagined cosmology creates a jazzy, spatial anomaly full of sonic wonders and game theory. It is an enduring, inclusive work that helped usher in a wave of vibrant, oddball thinkers in rap, a funk dimension that envelops you and embraces all. In service of the collective, one of rap’s mellowest crews shared a heartfelt ode to soul and jazz that sought to open the gateway into a more enlightened future. | 2018-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Light in the Attic | February 23, 2018 | 8.7 | adc9db66-a6ae-4d96-94fa-60b2ad4347e6 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Ghanaian producer and DJ’s debut surveys contemporary African electronic music, uniting a breadth of influences and guest vocalists in a shadowy, clubby musical world. | The Ghanaian producer and DJ’s debut surveys contemporary African electronic music, uniting a breadth of influences and guest vocalists in a shadowy, clubby musical world. | GuiltyBeatz: Different EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/guiltybeatz-different-ep/ | Different EP | In recent years, popular African artists have received a few bright moments in the American spotlight. In 2016, Drake’s “One Dance” became the first song to reach one billion Spotify streams with the help of South African producer DJ Maphorisa and Nigerian supernova Wizkid. Two summers went by before another African artist made a real splash on U.S. charts. Finally, in 2019, Davido’s “Fall,” Afro B’s “Drogba (Joanna),” and Burna Boy’s “Ye” became day-party soundtracks. Then, last July, Beyoncé released The Lion King: The Gift, a compilation of songs inspired by the Disney remake that featured some of the continent’s key contemporary talents.
Ghanaian producer and DJ GuiltyBeatz was one of the talents Bey recruited. The three standouts he co-produced on The Gift were smooth, sauntering afrobeats, akin to hits that had gained traction in the U.S. already. His debut EP brings change: The predominately afro-house songs on Different demand more—both physically and mentally—than “One Dance,” “Fall,” or “Joanna.” This is not music to lounge or two-step to on a sunny day. These songs pulse and pull, building a shadowy, clubby world from echoing synths, pounding percussion, and slick, scant singing. GuiltyBeatz has been to Coachella, DJing for Nigerian Afropop star Mr Eazi; with Different, he sets his sights on Tomorrowland, where he can be an electronic maestro.
Different is loosely about desire—romantic, sexual, and economic—but most listeners won’t catch everything the cast of vocalists is saying. They’re from three different countries, and perform in at least four languages. Nigerian dreamboat Joeboy stars on “No Love,” sometimes warding off gold-diggers in Yoruba, sometimes skating across the beat with rhythmic punctuations. On “Condom Collector,” South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly powerfully professes her coital obsession in English. On “My Vibe,” Ghana’s J.Derobie seduces his lover in patois.
But it’s GuiltyBeatz’s thoughtful production and sequencing that speaks loudest. He moves between sentimental longing and brazen lust with transitions so sleek it’s hard to tell where one song ends and another begins. “No Love” slips into “Uthando,” where the sweet-voiced Nigerian singer Nonso Amadi beckons you deeper down Beatz’s mystic path. The drums sparsen to usher in “My Vibe,” whose final keys flow easily into “How Long.” Different is only 16 minutes long, but like a satisfying workout, it both exhausts and energizes.
Beneath the project’s electronic umbrella, Beatz shows off his genre dexterity. “My Vibe” is a sultry dancehall number. With a delicate piano melody atop galloping drums, “How Long” has the air of South African amapiano music. The EP’s most backbreaking track, “Condom Collector,” takes cues from gqom, a subgenre of South African house with BPMs around 126. It is relentless and exorbitant, but GuiltyBeatz manages a smooth comedown. Wisely saving the familiar for last, he caps Different with its months-old single, “IYABO,” an afro-house cut with pop flare. The kooky buzz of its synths suggests the twirling walls of a funhouse exit.
Africa to the world is a popular rallying cry of the continent’s artists, whose work speaks in every tongue to the breadth and universality of Africa’s gifts. Born in Italy and raised in Ghana, GuiltyBeatz imagines a global audience for himself and his peers. His debut is not just for Saturday afternoons at Everyday People, the popular dance party celebrating the black diaspora; it’s also made for voltaic raves, psychedelic highs, and steamy trysts. Different envisions a Western world that doesn’t relegate African and Caribbean sounds solely to warm weather and tropical vacations. With a six-song survey of African electronic music’s boldest and shiniest new ideas, GuiltyBeatz begins to draw the lines of a more interconnected future. | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Banku Music / emPawa Africa | April 21, 2020 | 7.6 | adcc42f3-bfd4-4230-a589-832bdb60e19d | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
The Architek-- the new record from Chicago juke icon Traxman-- is overlong and not always engrossing, but its range and confidence are impressive, further cementing Traxman as footwork's mischievous, elusive virtuoso. | The Architek-- the new record from Chicago juke icon Traxman-- is overlong and not always engrossing, but its range and confidence are impressive, further cementing Traxman as footwork's mischievous, elusive virtuoso. | Traxman: Teklife Vol. 3: The Architek | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18536-traxman-teklife-vol-3-the-architek/ | Teklife Vol. 3: The Architek | You've probably heard Lyn Collins before. A James Brown collaborator, the 1970s soul and funk singer's output has proven a small but deep well for samplers. "It takes two to make a thing go right"-- that's Lyn Collins. Her songs featured breaks that found their way into hip-hop and drum & bass. She's been covered by the Human League and sampled by Bruce Springsteen. "We Want to Parrty, Parrty, Parrty" was sampled on Charli Baltimore's "Stand Up". Chicago juke icon Traxman samples "Parrty" too, on Teklife Vol. 3: The Architek, a double album for DJ Rashad's Lit City Trax label and Teklife. He turns its harmless imperative, "Hey you! Blow your whistle!," into a barked command; by the end of the track, I'm tired of being yelled at.
Traxman's record collection is purportedly renowned amongst Chicago locals; he's been DJing house and juke and hip-hop for more than three decades. Obscurity, though, is not his game. Last year's Da Mind of Traxman featured AC/DC's "Let There Be Rock" amongst its absurd and hamfisted appropriations. The Architek makes hay with Juicy J ("Off Them Bars", exactly what you would expect) and, hilariously, Michael Jackson's "Earth Song", flipping the song's one ominous line-- "What about killing fields?"-- into nearly four minutes of eerie, melodic paranoia.
It's not the sample, it's how you use it. But Traxman albums are not for trainspotters: the train is 30 yards away, barreling down the tracks at you (blowing its whistle). Where DJ Rashad and RP Boo are menacing and soulful, and DJ Diamond is concerned with breaking rhythmic barriers, Traxman's guilelessness adds warmth and jes to his records. He's the footwork artist most willing to abandon the genre's hyper-rhythmic backbone to explore cheese and glitz. Elements of acid house, juke, and drum & bass meet schlock-pop, glam, and rap.
His tracks tend to conform to one of two templates: heavily deployed vocal samples over sparse drums and more intense, wordless rhythm attacks. Some of his most thrilling moments fall into the latter category. "Japan" utilizes a sparse beat and aquatic bass to underpin a wild, staccato squeak. "Manic" features a long, undulating synthesizer jam. Like last year's "1988", "Mobile Acid" reveals acid house roots, taking an already warped bassline and turning it over on itself until it's a mound of refried goo. "Electric Funk"'s deranged beeps sound like Shangaan electro retrofitted to Chicago juke.
It's those vocal samples that serve as signposts on The Architek, though, like the James Brown-sampling, DJ Rashad-collaboration "Bussin" or the self-mythologizing DJ shoutout "We Takin' Over". "Hold It", a longtime footwork favorite, samples a large swath of Psycho's title theme and adds a short, shrill vocal sample-- "Hold it!"-- over the top. The combination doesn't make a lot of sense, musically or thematically, but it succeeds at feeling both familiar and alien.
The middle of "Blow Your Whistle" features another short Collins sample. Traxman nabs her count-in to the track-- "1! 2! 3! 4!"-- and slices into a wild, disorienting breakdown. It's as fine a summation of Traxman's sound-- blurring the line between voice and rhythm-- as you're likely to find. At 21 tracks, The Architek is overlong and not always engrossing, but its range and confidence are impressive, further cementing Traxman as footwork's mischievous, elusive virtuoso. | 2013-09-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-09-27T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Lit City | September 27, 2013 | 7.3 | adcd83ac-c9ef-4236-80e7-1cf094b0a111 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Chris Cohen's warm, homespun albums are welcome throwbacks to introspective '70s singer/songwriter LPs. His latest is touched by the sting of loss. | Chris Cohen's warm, homespun albums are welcome throwbacks to introspective '70s singer/songwriter LPs. His latest is touched by the sting of loss. | Chris Cohen: As If Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21720-as-if-apart/ | As If Apart | Chris Cohen's quietly awestruck presence, straddling melancholy and yearning, is unmistakable, even if you don't really know who he is. It informs The Runners Four-era Deerhoof, Curtains’ impressionistic scrapes, and the gossamer, doe-eyed pop of Cryptacize, the quartet the Los Angeles musician fronted alongside fellow vocalist Nedelle Torrisi. His sensibility is theatrical in a generous, arresting way, as though his primary prerogative is to clear room on his futon for listeners to safely explore a broad spectrum of common emotions.
This ethos finds its fullest expression in Cohen’s solo albums. Overgrown Path, his warm, homespun 2012 debut, was a welcoming way to lose track of 33 minutes, a worthy descendent of introspective 1970s singer-songwriter LPs. Four years later, Cohen sounds lost in a different sort of wilderness; *As If Apart *trades the optimism, existential wonder, and woozy jangle of *Overgrown Path *for in for heartbreak. The disorienting sting of absence informs lyrics and vocals, while *Apart *is pointedly off in a musical sense: every hook shivering near the precipice of melody. Given Cohen’s CV, it can’t be a complete coincidence that this particular vision of splitsville often sounds a lot like an early Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti cassette.
A psychedelic carousel of slow-motion bad cheer, opener "Torrey Pine" sets the tone. Fanciful guitar chords circle and dog-pile one another, their colors fading out, every verse seeming to dead-end in the same two words: "without you." "In a Fable" glances back wistfully at the last days of an acquaintance, while the stark, minimalist "Sun Has Gone Away" confronts absence with doubled vocals and echoing pianos.
Single "Drink from a Silver Cup" appears to be As If Apart at its most engaging until you’ve really *heard *it. The laughter of children at play introduces a certain sadness at the outset; the metaphorical silver cup the narrator imagines could rekindle a romance is denial, hope, and fantasy rolled into one. The lyric is as achingly beautiful as it is painful. "Yesterdays on My Mind," meanwhile, preaches hope from the other side of despair "I’ll give it some time/but yesterday’s on my mind," he sighs on the chorus. Whether autobiographical or artistic, As If Apart is a powerful, exquisitely realized journey, the sort of bummer that sounds strongest in that alien hour between when you’re supposed to fall asleep and when you should be jerking awake. | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | May 9, 2016 | 7.4 | addfca71-ca9b-4bd6-872c-5fb9099e1565 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
The Berlin dub-techno icon reshuffles his trio’s lineup on its first album in six years. Alongside jazz drummer Heinrich Köbberling, Laurel Halo’s electric keys provide a surprising new focal point. | The Berlin dub-techno icon reshuffles his trio’s lineup on its first album in six years. Alongside jazz drummer Heinrich Köbberling, Laurel Halo’s electric keys provide a surprising new focal point. | Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Dissent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moritz-von-oswald-trio-dissent/ | Dissent | Moritz von Oswald has never cared much for the spotlight. In the early 1990s, his duo Basic Channel, with Mark Ernestus—and their whack-a-mole-like series of aliases Maurizio, Quadrant, Cyrus, and Round One through Round Five—were notorious for their tight-lipped nature. It figures that the Berlin duo’s contribution to club music was to project a brash, ebullient genre like techno through dub, a musical style that speaks in shadows. When von Oswald and Ernestus finally got around to putting vocals in their music, in the ambient-dub group Rhythm & Sound, they remained in the background, fingers pressed to the mixing desk, while singers like Paul St. Hilaire and Cornell Campbell took the mic. Even in the trio that bears his name, von Oswald has kept his head down. In the group’s early years, all three players’ input—Max Loderbauer’s amorphous modular synthesizer, Sasu Ripatti’s metallic percussion, and von Oswald’s hazy electronic treatments—came together in a porous weave in which no one voice stood out; pull any thread, and the whole thing would come apart.
On the group’s last album, 2015’s Sounding Lines, Ripatti ceded his seat to Tony Allen, the legendary Afrobeat drummer, and not only did the group’s sound shift, but so did its center of gravity. Allen wasn’t the star, exactly, but his drumming came to the fore; whole universes of biomorphic detail sprang into being in the tiny slivers of space carved out by his crisply controlled timing. Led by Allen’s more muscular sticks, the group sloughed off some of the ambient fog of its first three studio albums, digging into meatier jazz-funk fusions. On the Trio’s first album in six years, a double lineup change reshuffles the deck yet again, and the result is a record unlike anything in the group’s catalog.
Previous albums from the Trio were not quite techno, nor dub, nor jazz; you might call them “fourth stream,” after Gunther Schuller’s so-called third-stream synthesis of jazz and classical. Dissent continues down that hybrid channel, but it is also the jazziest album the group has made. Some of that comes down to Heinrich Köbberling, who has the unenviable task of filling Allen’s seat behind the kit. (Allen, whom Brian Eno called “perhaps the greatest drummer who ever lived,” died in April 2020, at 79.) A member of the ECM-signed Julia Hülsmann Trio, Köbberling has a lighter, more glancing touch than Allen did: While von Oswald’s steady drum programming drives the groove forward, Köbberling traces its edges, toying with slight shifts in direction and intensity. In “Chapter 2,” he turns a syncopated cowbell pattern into a taut rubber band; in “Chapter 1,” a thick swirl of electric jazz that confirms von Oswald’s fondness for fusion-era Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, he focuses his energies on tight fills that tear across the perimeter like dust devils.
But the real surprise on this record is Laurel Halo. The American-born musician is one of the most versatile figures in experimental music, with a catalog encompassing otherworldly electronic pop, razor-sharp club cuts, digitally deconstructed piano etudes, and post-classical soundtrack work. But she has never sounded like this: Replacing Loderbauer’s spongy modular-synth tones with the bright colors of the Wurlitzer organ and Rhodes electric piano, she takes over the music’s tonal center, laying out blocky chords and laying into smooth, elliptical runs. The Moritz von Oswald Trio has typically preferred a tenebrous palette—charcoal, gunmetal, petrol—but in Halo’s hands, the midrange is awash in berries and opals and blood, glistening against the darkness of von Oswald’s sullen bass synths.
As on previous albums from the Trio, the overarching vibe remains murky and muddled, like a strong joint on top of a hangover on a humid, overcast day. But they cover more range than ever before, answering the stiff-jointed frug of chapters 1 and 2 (all 12 tracks are untitled) with the diaphanous ambience of “Chapter 3,” and balancing the cobwebbed dissonance of “Chapter 6” with the wide-open spaces of “Chapter 7,” in which rainforest recordings are mirrored by Köbberling’s own cicada-like castanets. And if the tempo sometimes seems reluctant to get on its feet, they slip into a sleek dance groove on “Chapter 5,” a graceful fusion of deep house and dub techno. Contrasted with the album’s preponderance of sour, coppery tastes, it’s an ice-cold glass of sparkling water.
“Chapter 5”’s supple rhythm and rich, consonant tones mark it as one of the most immediate and inviting things that von Oswald has done in years. But some of Dissent’s more abstract moments are almost as thrilling. Closing out the album with “Epilogue,” they seem to pull apart everything they’ve so carefully constructed over the preceding 71 minutes, stretching Halo’s keys like taffy over an elastic, Villalobos-esque beat of flickering hi-hats and ungainly lumps of tone. In moments like this, it becomes clear that the record’s chief pleasures are neither its rhythms nor its melodies but rather what happens in the spaces in between, where von Oswald’s dub techniques tug his players’ sounds out of their customary orbits. Tones stretch; drum hits collide. In the shadows, sparks fly.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | BMG | September 2, 2021 | 7.3 | adeb6940-1620-410f-a73b-860c1eb073cb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Sebadoh's first step from four-track aesthetics to well-crafted songs is one of the key documents of 1990s U.S. indie rock, and the original Sub Pop release is now augmented by Domino with a handful of live cuts and songs from Bubble and Scrape-era singles. | Sebadoh's first step from four-track aesthetics to well-crafted songs is one of the key documents of 1990s U.S. indie rock, and the original Sub Pop release is now augmented by Domino with a handful of live cuts and songs from Bubble and Scrape-era singles. | Sebadoh: Bubble and Scrape Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11981-bubble-and-scrape-deluxe-edition/ | Bubble and Scrape Deluxe Edition | Bubble and Scrape marked the point at which Sebadoh's aesthetic evolved from "quick, where's the four-track?" to reasonably well-crafted indie rock, arguably, the defining sound of that perpetually slippery genre. The band's previous full-length, the scabby, schizoid III will always have its partisans-- as will Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney's early collections of sound collages and song scraps-- while casual fans typically gravitate to the post-Gaffney pop and polish of Bakesale. But this fourth official album, originally released in 1993, may be the band's holistic best. With actual arrangements, tracks longer than two minutes, and, partly courtesy of Bob Weston, reasonable production values (it's relative), B&S isn't as shiny and commercial (hey, I said it's relative!) as later records. Released on what was then the flannel-shirted nation's flagship label, Sub Pop, (on Domino in the UK), B&S is where Sebadoh began to sound like an actual band-- a sniping, self-mutilating three-headed hydra of a band. But a band nonetheless.
A handful of live cuts, including Necros' cover "Reject", several alternately worded album tracks, and other rarities augment Domino's deluxe re-release, along with three sets of (naturally) contradictory commentary. Fifteen years on, Barlow, Gaffney, and Jason Loewenstein are still performing their dysfunctional-family roles in the liners. Gaffney makes repeated credit-grabs; Barlow rationalizes Gaffney's exile from the band's fragile democracy; and Loewenstein offers what probably comes closest to verisimilitude in his account of Sebadoh's prickly dynamics. Welcome to the indie rock version of Rashomon.
Whatever the players' disputes, the original record is pretty fairly partitioned. Barlow is credited with seven tracks, Gaffney with five, and Loewenstein with four. Barlow's songs, though, were almost always the promotional focus (certainly after Sub Pop got the band on contract) and, for better or worse, became Sebadoh's defining sound. Album openers "Soul and Fire" and "Two Years Two Days" are prototypical: preternaturally melodic, verging on sing-song (I once heard someone refer to Barlow as a "tune machine," which exactly nails both the catchy genius and mechanical nature of his songwriting), and stacked with plangent guitar clang, flag-waving choruses, and 16-wheeler loads of romantic baggage.
Barlow named an actual track for girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend, then wife, Kathleen Bilius on III, but almost every song of this period directly or covertly negotiates that relationship's volatile power balance. Acoustic duet "Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)", boasts one of Barlow's most-affecting melodies, dexterously handling his signature subject ("Let tomorrow be/ I can't be so impatient/ Pushing every answer/ When there isn't any question"). As we learn from the reissue's extras, final studio takes emerged from much sappier drafts of high school poetry magazine fodder. The album version of "Soul and Fire" brims with self-esteem compared with Barlow's acoustic demo (one of the deluxe issue's few really intriguing add-ons). Like the most pathetic answering machine message you've ever heard, it swaps the original refrain "I think our love is coming to an end" for "call me if you ever want to see me again." The only thing missing is, "please pick up, I know you're there." Needless to say, Barlow's hurt/angry/sensitive/manipulative personality matrix worked like catnip on indie girls back in the day (not that I'd know anything about that).
He may have been reluctant to admit it, but Barlow was lucky to have a ballast in Gaffney, whose avant-garde impulses, skin-peeling screams, and unsentimental sentiments-- served up blunt and bruising on "Elixir is Zog", (Capricornnn rising!), "Emma Get Wild", and the hardcore via rockabilly of "No Way Out"-- dissipate any lingering self-pity fogging the windows. It's Loewenstein, though, who turns in the most surprising, most effective songs on B&S. "Happily Divided", a spare, dour, affectless folk-pop number is the best Barlow song Barlow never wrote. And the anthemic "Sister", with its incestuous insinuations and massive riffs, plays angry, cathartic id to "Soul and Fire"'s superego. Loewenstein also gets the last word when he pays thunderous tribute to band mascot/Northampton, Mass. scenester Mike Flood.
Plucked from the detritus of 90s independent music, B&S may noy be the generational touchstone of Slanted and Enchanted or Exile in Guyville (and if Liz was shadow boxing anything, it was exactly this strain of guy culture), but relegating it to the Indie Rock Era nostalgia ghetto, where a band's "cred" usually dictated the reception of its records isn't fair, either. These songs hold up just fine to repeated plays, particularly if you stack them next to today's Mac-enabled faux-low-fi. And if the bonuses to this reissue aren't exactly revelatory, the original album remains a critical document in the evolution of underground DIY. Don't listen to it for its historical value, though; listen to it because it's awesome. | 2008-07-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sub Pop | July 9, 2008 | 9.2 | adeda38e-2470-44bb-b931-4be399d2a4e4 | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
The indie band’s remarkably self-assured 1999 debut showed them already in possession of the wry, morbid sensibility that would define them. | The indie band’s remarkably self-assured 1999 debut showed them already in possession of the wry, morbid sensibility that would define them. | Rilo Kiley: Rilo Kiley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rilo-kiley-rilo-kiley/ | Rilo Kiley | Before she was one of the most beloved singer-songwriters of her era, Jenny Lewis was best known for her role as redhead girl scout Hannah Nefler in the 1989 film Troop Beverly Hills. While she was able to indulge in some of the trappings of child stardom, Lewis’ youth was anything but glamorous: She carried an immense pressure as her family’s breadwinner, which was made all the more difficult by her mother’s struggles with addiction. In the mid-’90s, when a teenage Lewis met Blake Sennett, a fellow young actor with credits on Salute Your Shorts and Boy Meets World, they recognized each other as kindred spirits, both disillusioned with showbiz and its associated pressures. “I was incredibly depressed, having grown up doing one thing and suddenly finding myself not interested in that,” Lewis told Spin in 2007. “I really had no idea what I was going to do with my life.”
For both Lewis and Sennett, music was an opportunity to explore creative autonomy; for the first time, they were pursuing their own visions rather than acting out someone else's dreams. (As Lewis’ sister recently told Pitchfork, “I think she didn’t want to be saying other people’s words anymore.”) Lewis and Sennett sat down to write songs together and soon were playing casual shows in their friends’ living rooms; later, they started dating. Somewhere along the way, the band formalized under the name Rilo Kiley. Sennett recruited his high school buddy Pierre “Duke” de Reeder to play bass and Dave Rock to play drums, a role that Jason Boesel later settled into.
In January 1998, Rilo Kiley played their first show at a Silverlake nightclub called Spaceland. If they were nervous, it didn’t show. “Between songs they were charming, smart and funny,” recalls The Kids in the Hall comedian Dave Foley, who happened to catch the set. “During songs they were brilliant.” Smitten, he offered to pay for a demo recording, which the band accepted. Many of the songs from the Foley-funded session would go on to form Rilo Kiley’s self-titled 1999 debut (later released with a slightly altered tracklist as The Initial Friend EP).
For two songwriters who grew up surrounded by Hollywood fakery, Sennett and Lewis’ songwriting is immediately, remarkably unselfconscious. Their twangy indie rock songs avoid flowery language in favor of conversational observations and winking wordplay. “I should’ve known/With a boy like you/Your middle name is always/I’d always love you,” Lewis swoons on a synth-pop ditty called—obviously—“Always.” Same deal with “I’ll be in your car/I locked the keys in your car/I’ll be in your car for now” off “85.” Perhaps there are more poetic ways of expressing these sentiments—of fateful infatuation, of resolve—but the directness of Rilo Kiley’s storytelling aims straight for the heart.
Lewis’ emotional candor, along with the band’s association with Conor Oberst and Omaha label Saddle Creek, have led some to describe Rilo Kiley as emo, a genre most commonly linked to whiny, vaguely ill-looking white boys. There are arguments to be made for both sides of the emo-or-aren’t-they question, but it is incontestable that Lewis’ capacity for vulnerability spoke to countless young women. Her expressions of sadness could take many shapes—wry, morbid, exhausted—but were always excruciatingly self-aware and sharp. “I’ve been a mess for some time now/I get what I deserve,” Lewis sings on “85.” “For someone who leaves a lot behind/I can do better.” On the pop-punk-lite “Glendora,” Lewis describes her own exploitation at the hands of a cruel boy who uses her for sex and a distraction from suburban malaise. “You know I always like to play the victim,” she sings plainly. “And would you fuck me? Because I’d fuck me.” It’s a disarming line, and “Glendora” lays the contradictions of womanhood out on the table, a whole bundle of flaws and strengths tied up in one complicated package. “When I sit down to write a song, there is no filter,” Lewis told ELLE years later. “I’m not trying to write for anyone or anything specifically. It’s just trying to capture a little piece of your soul—even if it’s a really ugly part.”
Though Rilo Kiley is rooted in indie rock, it’s clear that the band had not yet found their sound. The Sennett-led cut “Asshole” is broken up by turntable scratching and samples while Lewis straight-up yodels on “Gravity.” On “Teenage Love Song,” an aching Patsy Cline-indebted ballad, Lewis two-steps her way towards the tortured melodrama of a broken heart. “Oh Davey, why did you leave me/All alone when we went all the way?” she belts like a gale-force wind roaring through Nashville. “But maybe someday Davey/We’ll be together for more than a day.”
And then there’s “The Frug.” Despite the fact that they were unsigned, Rilo Kiley’s music made its way into the hands of director Morgan J. Freeman, who included two of the band’s songs in his 1998 film Desert Blue. Freeman’s video for “The Frug” landed the band on MTV’s alternative program 120 Minutes. It was a bit weird for everyone. As Sennett recalled in 2001, “It’s pretty random to see the most independent of independent bands on MTV.” Filled with handclaps and doo-wop harmonies, “The Frug” is one of Rilo Kiley’s sugariest songs and is unlike anything else on Rilo Kiley. As the song patiently explains, Lewis can do the Frug. She can also do the Robocop and the Freddie. She cannot do the Smurf. But this groovy laundry list gives way to a declaration of strength and empowerment: “I can take my clothes off/I cannot fall in love/You will never see my eyes/I will not call you back.”
After the release of Rilo Kiley—sold exclusively at their shows—the band spent the next few years searching for a label before signing with Seattle’s Barsuk and releasing their proper debut, 2001’s Take Offs and Landings. That same year, Lewis and Sennett split and songwriting responsibilities started to shift over to Lewis. Rilo Kiley’s final record and major-label debut, the sleek and divisive Under the Blacklight, came out in 2007. By that point, Lewis and Sennett were both branching out with side projects (Lewis’ solo work, Sennett’s band the Elected) and interviews with the group from that time suggest that Lewis’ independent success drove something of a wedge between the pair. When asked about the status of Rilo Kiley in 2011, Sennett said that if the band were a human, “he’s probably laying on his back in a morgue with a tag on his toe.” A few years later, Lewis drove the final nail into the coffin and confirmed that Rilo Kiley was no more. Since then, with only a 2013 rarities set to tide fans over, the band has existed as a treasured manifesto on how to live a truthful, if imperfect, life. If the breakup was a song, Lewis would probably point out that it was better that way.
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. | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Little Record Company | October 1, 2020 | 8 | adf989cf-397b-4824-bb15-faaa87dde547 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
The Norwegian trumpeter’s ninth album feels like an opaque and ambient jazz album you can walk right into. Truly, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking. | The Norwegian trumpeter’s ninth album feels like an opaque and ambient jazz album you can walk right into. Truly, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking. | Arve Henriksen: Towards Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23342-towards-language/ | Towards Language | Arve Henriksen makes jazz for people who like ambient music. This might sound like an unintentional insult—the Norwegian trumpeter is well trained and celebrated in jazz circles, and he often performs among Scandinavia’s most prominent younger players, such as Christian Wallumrød—but it’s also hard to deny. Towards Language, Henriksen’s ninth album under his own name, begins with a slumbrous murmur of bass and an unfurling trumpet theme, and this mesmeric register never wavers throughout the album. The melancholy saunter of Henriksen’s lines is isolated and sculpted by glimmering, whirring atmospheres full of emptiness and portent. Testing different ways to contrast eloquent material and enigmatic medium, the record plays like some lost collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and Brian Eno circa Ambient 4: On Land.
Henriksen’s long association with free-improv supergroup Supersilent and its influential label, Rune Grammofon, were his gateways to esteem in circles beyond jazz. But he has earned his wider attention with a trumpet tone so communicative it’s almost psychic, which he has described as being modeled on the breathy, insinuating timbre of a wooden flute. *Towards Language *would be the perfect album title imaginable for Henriksen if he hadn’t already made one called Chiaroscuro. Sometimes augmented by his ethereal vocalizations, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking, writing a smoky legato calligraphy on the air. If the language is obscure, the emotions are instantly legible—romantic seclusion, piercing beauty, and a steadfast determination.
Henriksen is joined by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, two old friends who’ve appeared on some of his greatest albums (Chiaroscuro, Cartography, Places of Worship), as well as the ECM-affiliated jazz guitarist Eivind Aarset. Together they gin up brooding, minimalist chamber music in which the simplest melodies whisper of unfathomable depths of feeling. The outstanding “Groundswell” is a dusky jungle seething with hidden birds and snakes, slow trap claps, and lapping waves of mysterious tonality, before Henriksen fills it up with his leafy curlicues and looping vines. “Demarcation Line” is a showpiece for his signature physics, how he swoons from interval to interval and bends pitches so sweetly it almost cuts.
*Towards Language *is also infused with a deep sense of history, like an excavation standing open in layers. It’s both personal—the atmosphere of “Hibernal” is tuned by a rusty harbor-bell clank, a device heard as far back as 2007’s Strjon, which suits Henriksen’s noir-ish style so well—and cultural. Album closer “Paridae,” turns a traditional song in the Kven language of Henriksen’s ancestral northern Norway (sung by Anna Maria Friman of Trio Mediaeval) into a waterfall leading to another world. Henriksen creates the feeling of an opaque jazz album you can walk right into, all timbre and feel instead of time and modality, the edges and angles sublimated into aching curves. You don’t need to be able to identify a head melody or count off arcane rhythms, but only to know the way you feel when you see fog slowly seeping through a valley, or smoke curling off a cigarette in the lonesome glow of a streetlight. | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Jazz | Rune Grammofon | June 10, 2017 | 7.6 | adfddec8-b944-4209-b954-bae109537ba9 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Stereolab's third album, the hardest-rocking and most hypnotic music the band ever set to tape, is the closest they came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows. | Stereolab's third album, the hardest-rocking and most hypnotic music the band ever set to tape, is the closest they came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows. | Stereolab: Mars Audiac Quintet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-mars-audiac-quintet/ | Mars Audiac Quintet | The sound is a long straight desert road. It’s a nursery rhyme that can bench press a city bus. It is a hundred-gallon jar of honey, a diamond-tipped jackhammer, a mouthful of pyrite Pop Rocks. Stereolab’s early records had toyed with all sorts of humble stuff—jangling guitars and poky home organs, French yé-yé and 1960s kitsch—but on 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet, they achieved something closer to transubstantiation, converting familiar materials into something sublime.
What’s funny is that on paper, at least, they had barely altered their formula. As they had since the beginning, Stereolab drew liberally from Neu!’s monochord chug and motorik pulse, Suicide’s coruscating Farfisa buzz, and the Velvet Underground’s holy modal drone, topping it all with sweet, sing-song vocal harmonies descended straight from ’60s bubblegum pop. But on Mars Audiac Quintet, those materials came together in a synesthete’s dream, a perfect merger of color and heft—a sound so chunky, so tangible, you could practically feel it in the palm of your hand.
Stereolab—the brain trust of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, surrounded by a fluctuating cast of collaborators (on Mars Audiac Quintet, they were actually a sextet assisted by a handful of studio musicians)—had surfed into the popular consciousness atop the easy-listening revival’s cresting wave. Their first few EPs and debut LP, Peng!, infused overdriven indie pop with mid-century camp and moon-shot optimism; by 1996’s John McEntire-produced Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they would begin pushing into new frontiers, twisting their sound into odd time signatures and exploring increasingly intricate arrangements. Dots and Loops, widely considered their masterpiece, is the pinnacle of their mature phase; when most people think of Stereolab, that record’s kinks and quirks are probably what first come to mind. Mars Audiac Quintet marked the end of their early years, the triumphant capstone to the run of albums stretching through Peng!, the singles comp Switched On, and Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. Mars Audiac Quintet is the hardest-rocking music Stereolab ever set to tape; it is the closest they ever came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows.
It is also their most hypnotic record, and there is no contradiction in that. Like Neu! and the Velvets before them, Stereolab taught a new generation the power of hammering away at the same chord until sparks flew and stones bled. “We’re about repetition, a riff, a chord, two or three notes going round and round,” Gane told Melody Maker in 1991. The goal, said Sadier, was “the trance.” On Mars Audiac Quintet, they drop straight into it, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers; the zone-out is practically instantaneous. “Three-Dee Melodie” is just three chords, one-note bassline, and methodical drumbeat; the voices of Sadier and Mary Hansen—the group’s second vocalist from 1992 until 2002, when she was killed cycling in London—circle each other in graceful counterpoint. Yet within those tight quarters, something like infinity opens up.
Stereolab had been playing with similar ideas for a while; on the Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements centerpiece “Jenny Ondioline,” they had drawn out their trance-inducing churn into 18 minutes of cotton-candy oblivion. But there’s something newly enveloping about the sound of “Three-Dee Melodie,” and the rest of Mars Audiac Quintet, that stands apart. Those bright, buzzing organs and Moogs, with their endless stacks of overtones, loom like gleaming skyscrapers; Andy Ramsay’s drum fills map a labyrinthine path atop the linear groove, a succession of trap doors and detours that always lead back into that endless tunnel.
The structure of the album is itself often maze-like; for all the captivating stasis of their most repetitive songs, they are also fond of sideways feints. The Neu!-inspired “Nihilist Assault Group” lays down four minutes of metronomic pulse and shimmer, stumbles across a false ending of gurgling oscillators, and then slips back into a groove that sounds nearly identical to the original—just ever so slightly different, as though you’d been abducted by aliens and deposited in an almost perfect simulation. Something similar happens on “Outer Accelerator,” another kraut-like standout, as the song abruptly fades into a wah-wah-streaked freakout jam unrelated to what preceded it, but complementary nonetheless. (Yo La Tengo fans may recognize the bassline here for its reappearance in Yo La Tengo’s “Moby Octopad”; given that the two bands toured together in 1995, it’s not hard to imagine that the latter song is an homage to the former.)
In liner notes to Mars Audiac Quintet’s recent remasters, Gane says that the original idea for the album was for every track to have exactly the same, barely modulating three-chord shape—“actually a single chord with two finger movements on top”—though the idea ran out of steam after five songs. Still, they got plenty of mileage out of it. “Transona Five” lumbers like one of T. Rex’s glam-rock stompers, while the Steve Reich-inspired “Anamorphose” puts Sean O’Hagan’s horn arrangements to spellbinding use, spinning off counterpoint after counterpoint and conjuring the interlocking gears of a perpetual motion machine.
Many of the album’s best songs—“Wow and Flutter,” “Anamorphose,” “Nihilist Assault Group,” “Outer Accelerator”—capture this sort of energy, stamping out recurring patterns with near-industrial precision. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that Gane was a Throbbing Gristle fan; rather than that group’s smokestacks and death camps, though, Stereolab’s Technicolor vision of heavy industry hews closer to the fanciful machinery of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.) What Stereolab held in common with their post-rock peers was the subversion of rock’s traditional hierarchies: The guitar is demoted from its usual lead role and relegated to texture and timekeeping; Moog and Farfisa ooze to the foreground, not so much hogging the spotlight as flooding the whole damn stage; the bass, pushed high in the mix, is less part of the rhythm section than a kind of thickening agent to hold it all together.
Even Sadier’s lead vocals resist sounding like rock vocals. If the rock canon imagines its singers as heroic figures, their voices like torches leading bravely onward, Sadier refused to play that role; her high, cool voice is more like a light rising from within her bandmates’ protective exoskeleton, suffusing it all in soft glow. Twinned with Hansen’s often wordless la-di-das, her singing was frequently all but indecipherable. The liberties she took with phrasing (singing “Need to examine/Uncritical times,” she stressed the final syllable of “examine” and drew out a long “i” sound to rhyme with “time”) could leave listeners without a lyric sheet adrift. But her Marxist critique is as trenchant as ever on Mars Audiac Quintet, and every now and then a refrain will float to the surface (“We can’t avoid dying”), a lullaby to raise the hairs on your neck.
In a voice about as threatening as strawberry milk, Sadier sings of military inscription, moral panics, censorship, autocracy; many of her songs seem even more timely now than they did then. “Transporte Sans Bouger” is a prescient look at the psychic damage wreaked by the internet, long before anyone had dreamed of social media; “Outer Accelerator” is directly applicable to the sorry state of representative democracy in 2019. And “Ping Pong” is as perfect a pop song about capitalism and the military-industrial complex that you will ever hear, with a refrain so catchy it can inspire the unlikeliest of singalongs:
Bigger slump and bigger wars
And a smaller recovery
Huger slump and greater wars
And a shallower recovery
A quarter-century later, Stereolab’s fatalistic protest music looks to have been remarkably on the nose. But what Mars Audiac Quintet offered was more important than a simple political program. It made good on the promise of alternative music in unusually physical terms, using repetition and volume as architectural tools to construct songs that doubled as a kind of refuge. The title “Transporte Sans Bouger” translates as “Traveling Without Moving,” and in the context of the song, it refers to the disquieting specter of telepresence, to a “sickness of the senses” where no one knows their neighbor and loneliness is a pandemic. You don’t need to be extremely online to feel the familiar force of that observation today, when there are millions more people online than in 1994. (In the crushing isolation sweepstakes, the people of the Bill Clinton/John Major years had it relatively easy.) But Stereolab’s first landmark album facilitates another kind of traveling without moving: a whirlwind sound that could—and still can, and does—wrap you up and carry you away.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Duophonic | July 18, 2019 | 9.1 | ae0234e6-2823-4fa8-97bc-8e681ba2786a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their second full-length, the Hudson duo continue to skate their own electric rail between prog and post-punk. A great sense of speed and combustion thrums through the music, which is offset by Arone Dyer's engaging, limber vocal performance. | On their second full-length, the Hudson duo continue to skate their own electric rail between prog and post-punk. A great sense of speed and combustion thrums through the music, which is offset by Arone Dyer's engaging, limber vocal performance. | Buke and Gase: General Dome | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17563-general-dome/ | General Dome | Being on the Dessner brothers' label helped Buke and Gase's 2010 debut Riposte get around, but even more intriguing was the appealing story built into the scrambled music. Beyond their much talked-about modified instruments, they forswore looping pedals at a time when everyone was pretty sick of looping pedals, putting emphasis on their creative chops. Their names were Arone and Aron, for god's sake. You couldn't dream up a more tempting lede, and it was covered to death by the time of the transitional Function Falls EP, where "Gass" was respelled for phonetic clarity. Their second full-length album, General Dome, feels like a testing ground to see whether Buke and Gase have the aptitude to hold that attention.
They continue to skate their own electric rail between the decorations of prog rock and the cold metallic contours of post-punk. The higher-voiced buke still mainly sings nervy, leaping leads while the snarling gase drives the low end. But some circumstantial changes have had a surprisingly meaningful impact. After Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York in 2011, Dyer took up motorcycling and replaced her wooden buke with a heavy-duty one made of salvaged automotive steel. Consequently, a new sense of speed and combustion thrums through the music. Majestic opener "Houdini Crush" is like a huge engine revving up, then riding wisps of shapely ambient tone. It's intricately structured, with cryptic moods contained in a shuddering shoegaze framework. But it feels like a pop song thanks to Dyer's engaging vocal performance. She can swing limberly between a Karen O yelp and a huskier croon, sounding just like Victoria Legrand when she breathes extra syllables through the word "inside."
Most of Buke and Gase's songs are built this way-- incidents and gestures swirling around a theme, above an unstable thud. They're difficult to navigate. Songs peak early to make way for extended elaborations, like the scratchy funk guitar lurching from the jungle rhythms of the title track, mighty and unresolved. It doesn't end; the big gears just catch and whir to a halt as if suddenly unplugged. The same thing happens at the end of "Hard Times", where their pointed interplay is suddenly sweetened as the buke echoes the vocal line. That sweetness is at odds with the violence and depravity that flickers discreetly through the lyrics, which are often deformed by Dyer's rubbery enunciation. The imagery can be compelling or perplexing if you focus on it, but the curious silhouette of her voice commands more attention.
Finely wrought moments are plentiful: Check out when Dyer's voice seamlessly rounds off into a gase lead on the explosively bouncy "Hiccup", or when the blocky descent of "Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard" slips into a dreamy skid, like a car losing traction on ice. But no amount of ingenuity on the duo's part can keep their limited palette from feeling constricted by the end. The bare-bones foot percussion, though resourceful, levels many songs to the same oblivious stomp. The thrilling onward surge of the melodies gradually comes to seem like a search for some vital mortar, a place to alight other than the grungy groove. My ears just get worn out by all the airless staccato, longing for more open chords or smooth continuous tones. But overall, General Dome's rewards are equal to its considerable demands, proving that there's more to Buke and Gase than a good story. | 2013-01-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-01-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Brassland | January 29, 2013 | 7 | ae061316-d976-448a-852f-ac59ca4a6a47 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The UK producer arranges classic dance tropes into a roadmap of euphoric self-actualization, creating some of the year’s giddiest, most assured electronic music. | The UK producer arranges classic dance tropes into a roadmap of euphoric self-actualization, creating some of the year’s giddiest, most assured electronic music. | I. JORDAN: For You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/india-jordan-for-you/ | For You | All the best club music rests on the thrill of combustion. Fusing opposing elements and watching sparks fly is what keeps dance culture alive and kicking today, even when there appears to be limited fresh ground to break. London-based, Doncaster-born India Jordan is, alongside compatriots Finn and Anz, part of a new alliance of DJ-producers who can zip between any number of rave-ish genres without blinking. Having grown up in South Yorkshire on the most x-treme fare clubland had to offer, that sense of kinesis never left Jordan, even as the 29-year-old producer siphons and smooths it into different avenues. For You, their second EP, is a testament to this instinct, fusing drum’n’bass, filter disco, breakbeat, and reflecting-pool synth shimmer into some of the giddiest, most assured electronic music of 2020.
India Jordan initially established themself on the British club circuit as a promoter of ambient nights and one-time president of Hull University’s DJ Society. 2019’s DNT STP MY LV was their first full record, though it was rinsed so hard by tastemaker jocks that it felt happily lived in by the time the year wound to a close. Jordan’s song titles typically speak to an act of movement, forever shuffling, warping, leaving, and traveling through. For You shifts along the axis, now concerned with arriving and becoming. It is an overtly queer record, even if it doesn’t explode with pride on the surface. The “you” in the title refers to Jordan; rooted and at peace in inclusive East London, they came out as nonbinary just before Christmas last year—revealed on Instagram with a chipper, quintessentially Yorkshire sense of humor—and present themself as a work in progress.
Jordan makes this lack of fixed definition work to their advantage. The opulent flourish of French touch and the chemical twang of drum’n’bass usually stand in high contrast to one another, but within the EP, Jordan makes them feel like two sides of the same rhapsodic coin. For You’s middle tracks are the hardest to throw a genre lasso around, yet might make the handiest transition tools in a DJ’s hands. Both glide forward as if carried by a jetstream, linear in structure though anything but trad in construction. “Rave City” is a soup of subdued breaks and smeared effects that suggest a dancefloor could be nearby while feeling wholly apart from it. The arpeggiated ripples on “Emotional Melodical” hit like a wonderful rainbow refracting off a chandelier, or taking a trip to the aquarium on acid.
Jordan allows moments of earned catharsis at the close. The headstrong “Dear Nan King” is a thank you to Tipping the Velvet, a tale of female lovers that drew complaints from puritanical Middle England when broadcast by the BBC in the 2000s. Twenty years removed, Jordan threads samples from the TV drama that sparked their sexual awakening through raging Reese basslines and thunderclap percussion, life and death snare-rushing before their eyes. And on the soaring “Westbourne Avenue,” Jordan casts back to student days in Hull, a place where friendships were formed but gates were guarded by recalcitrant men in the D&B scene. The song is a composite of the EP’s various moods, pummelling and beautiful, reaching for the ecstatic while being cleansed by a flamethrower.
The passion in Jordan’s music pays off most spectacularly on the opening one-two punch, a pair that would demand inclusion on any rundown of filter house’s greatest hits. They recall the glory era when Alan Braxe & Fred Falke, Joey Negro, and Bob Sinclar ruled the MTV Dance playlists and charts alike. “I’m Waiting (Just 4 U)” comes first, a ritzy whirl of mirror balls and chromatic LEDs. It elegantly tees up “For You,” an accelerated second stage which utilizes the same vocal sample as its predecessor—this time clipped, mechanical and insistent. We’re cruising now: The tension ratchets as “for” and “you” bounce back and forth, energy increasingly chaotic, sweet harmony in the thrum of human bodies. A filter sweep draws back the velvet curtain and reveals that the soft disco essence of “I’m Waiting” sample was resting there inside this tougher, more technoid track all along, before a kick thumps in and pandemonium breaks loose. Taken together, the songs are proof that you don’t need a star budget to make Stardust-sized bangers.
For You arrives with live events in suspended animation, a quirk of fate that might stymie its evident crossover potential. These six tunes should be perfect fodder for long summer nights that stretch ’til dawn, but will instead be judged soberly and with appropriate care, rather than becoming fond memories of an ecstasy honeymoon. For a roadmap of self-actualization, perhaps this is no bad thing—and when we’re released back into the wild, these songs will feel all the more celebratory. The animating idea behind For You is that the music is India Jordan’s gift to themself. The fun part is, it lifts the rest of us too. | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2 B Real | May 26, 2020 | 8 | ae06796e-20cc-4644-8a6a-b29db447cbd6 | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
With throwback beats and baroque pop embellishments, J. Lo’s first solo album in 10 years chronicles a real-life fairy tale that threatens to overpower the music. | With throwback beats and baroque pop embellishments, J. Lo’s first solo album in 10 years chronicles a real-life fairy tale that threatens to overpower the music. | Jennifer Lopez: This Is Me…Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jennifer-lopez-this-is-me-now/ | This Is Me…Now | Did you hear about the two Hollywood megastars who got engaged, broke up in the shadow of a notorious workplace accident, and then, 20 years and several partners later, finally got hitched? If you somehow missed it, Jennifer Lopez is going to tell you in detail. This Is Me…Now, her first solo album in 10 years, is a coda to 2002’s This Is Me…Then, her third most commercially successful album. Lopez co-wrote and released that record amid the first iteration of her high-profile relationship with handsome Bostonian Ben Affleck. This Is Me…Now is the culmination of Bennifer, the sequel, irresistible to tabloids and hopeless romantics, maybe in that order. “When I was a girl they’d ask me what I’d be/A woman in love is what I grew up wantin’ to be,” Lopez sings, rather depressingly, on the title track.
The album, and its accompanying $20 million movie, unfolds like one of J.Lo’s romcoms: Two former lovers, adrift, spend years searching for the right person, before reuniting with the wisdom of age and experience. The movie loosely follows the Taíno legend of Alida, the daughter of a Taíno chief who falls in forbidden love with Taroo, a Carib boy, on the eve of her arranged marriage; the god Yukiyú turns them into a red flower and a hummingbird, respectively. (The light pop joint “Hummingbird” bisects the album, though it doesn’t quite engage the mythology enough to be readily meaningful.) J.Lo is lovestruck as fuck, this album posits, though it is self-aware about its melodrama. “Mad in Love,” a mid-tempo R&B track, opens with a flute and string section out of a 1950s romance, nodding to This Is Me…Now’s Hollywood love story. Otherworldly harps, celestas, and violins weave through beats and production of a mid-2000s vintage, supplying a baroque quality that embellishes J.Lo’s own lovelorn legend.
Across eight previous studio albums, a cache of hits like 2001’s “I’m Real” and 2011’s “On the Floor,” a Super Bowl performance and a presidential inauguration, J.Lo’s voice is notoriously serviceable, airy and light with a very specific range. A major appeal of her pop stardom is that the one-time Fly Girl is consistently dazzling on the dancefloor and, at 54, she appears athletic, taut, cool as ever. She’s advanced her music career through will and sheer charisma, of which she has gobs—we’re talking about a woman who had many of us out here wearing newsboy caps and cargo knickers in the early ’00s. She is an all-around entertainer, a fashion icon, and an often-great actor to boot. (Most will cite Hustlers, Selena, and Out of Sight; I’ll agree with J.Lo that she deserved an Oscar nod for El Cantante.) And so the thinness of the voice has often been beside the point, if not a boon to her early career—a stand-in for her Bronx regularness on tracks like “Jenny From the Block.”
What Lopez has had in abundance, though, is terrific hooks: “All I Have,” “Still,” and the cultural touchstone (complete with Ben cameo) “Jenny,” from This Is Me… Then. She serves some of that here, too: “To Be Yours” includes one of Now’s catchier hooks, with J.Lo asserting her love in a chatty alto. “not.going.anywhere.” falls precisely within her pop oeuvre, light and primed for choreo, with a chill rap interlude and a purposeful throwback beat. (And, in case you forgot who this album is about, an intro by Ben Affleck.) Her voice is stronger than ever, honed on a succession of recent pop-reggaeton singles like “Cambia al Paso” and “Pa Ti,” though those styles are sorely missed on Now (even though everyone knows Ben speaks Spanish!). So “This Time Around” stands out for its synth marimbas and trunk-slapping woofers, and for the moment when the Nuyorican we know and love jumps out: “This time around, we gon’ make it real/We don’t give a fuck ’bout how they feel,” she sings vehemently.
This Is Me…Now is a multimedia memoir, meant to explore Lopez’s past relationship difficulties (“Rebound,” “Broken Like Me”) but more prominently displaying her fairy-tale perfect ending. If your friend were doing this, you might sit them down for a serious chat; evidently some of Lopez’s friends did. No detail is spared, if embellished. Do you need to know that the couple changed into their wedding outfits in the Vegas chapel bathroom? “Midnight Trip to Vegas” has you covered with a Chris Isaak sample and a lute, a sound that lands somewhere between Final Fantasy VII and an unexpectedly popping Renaissance Faire. “Dear Ben, Pt. II,” co-written by Raye, improves on the original with a grounded harp and even a little vibrato. I guess if your business is already on blast, there’s no harm in globally projecting your album-length love letter to your husband, but after a certain point the specificity is entirely too much. The lyric “said you love my body but it’s still my face” is cute; by the time she sings “slippin’ inside of me” on “Greatest Love Story Never Told,” the vivid imagery it conjures is unfortunately permanent.
That’s This Is Me…Now’s biggest issue: the narrative threatens to, and does, overtake the music. While the songs might be fun and even better with choreography, the Disney Princess angle becomes tiresome, and then cloying, especially from a woman who has notoriously worked her ass off to achieve her level of renown. “Hearts and Flowers” tries to mitigate that—it’s a boom-bap song about her dedication to the grind that somewhat awkwardly calls back to “Jenny From the Block”—but as her childhood dream apparently forecast, being in love with Ben Affleck is the primary focus. As a synergistic mythmaking effort, the album is certainly doing its job; as music to soundtrack your actual life, well, it’s about time lute pop got its shine. | 2024-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Nuyorican / BMG | February 22, 2024 | 6.6 | ae1367b8-b582-4e1a-9a3c-758fb12e2ceb | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
A stirring composite of choral hymns, progressive rock, and free jazz, the Brooklyn composer’s suite presents a fluid cycle of matter as sound. | A stirring composite of choral hymns, progressive rock, and free jazz, the Brooklyn composer’s suite presents a fluid cycle of matter as sound. | Charlotte Greve: Sediments We Move | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-greve-sediments-we-move/ | Sediments We Move | Before composing the seven-part suite Sediments We Move, Charlotte Greve mapped it out. The German-born, Brooklyn-based composer, singer, and saxophonist scribbled and sketched shapes, schematics, and musical charts. She plotted the album song-by-song, listing out each track’s core instruments, audible accents, and “tempo/vibe.” In her stack of notes and doodles, Greve pursued a philosophy of sediment, attempting to translate its various physical states into musical composition. Recorded with Greve’s band Wood River and the Berlin choir Cantus Domus, Sediments We Move carries an air of obsession, every measure committed to the theme.
By definition, sediment is matter transported by wind or water and deposited back to earth. Over time, it may accumulate on the ocean floor, or consolidate into microscopic tiers of rock. Greve is intrigued by these phases, as well as the incremental change between them. She conveys the transformation with fluctuating tempos and a blend of genres. A stirring composite of choral hymns, progressive rock, and free jazz, Sediments We Move is rich in detail but never overwrought. Instead, it presents a fluid cycle of matter as sound: building, dissipating, and crystalizing once again.
Greve was driven by the reality that any object is a collection of particles, capable of gathering and dispersing. She considered the construct of family: how it is a whole, but also made up of interconnected yet individual members. In conversations with her grandmother, she noted the intergenerational similarities between relatives. Greve eventually enlisted her older brother, Julius Greve, to pen lyrics for Sediments We Move, maintaining the theme of family in a literal sense. The knowledge of this process makes the songs more tactile. You can imagine their construction—experience the layers as they accumulate, like the sediments that inspired Greve.
Her interpretation of the sedimentary process is formal; though many of the instrumental parts are structurally simple, they layer to form grand obelisks of sound. Remarkably, the album credits list only five types of instruments: saxophone, synthesizer, guitar, bass, and drums. Greve’s lithe voice and alto often curve along the surface, but Cantus Domus’ massive, spectral melodies provide the most drama. The choir constantly changes shape: On “Part IV,” their vowels are elongated and their frictionless harmonies glide through the atmosphere. Greve’s saxophone ripples in the foreground, anchoring their voices to terra firma. On “Part V,” the choir fractures into dizzying, staccato measures, their incessant “la la las” buzzing like hornets. Neither state is permanent; what once was rock will again become silt.
Sediments We Move is more interested in transition than discrete forms. “Think of layers as always present but not always visible in their entirety,” Greve wrote on one page of her notebook. At times, the album’s faint layers are masked by heartier sounds: jagged guitar, pummeling drums, synthesizer sheen. But occasionally, Greve peels back these elements to reveal underlying activity. Toward the end of “Part III,” the choir and rhythm section become sluggish and eventually cut out altogether. What’s left is a nest of whispers, rustling like restless insects. Have they been there all along, hissing obscure messages? The words are only intelligible with the aid of a lyric sheet: “Molten crust, inner core, a salted rain drop.” The consonants stack up, light and crisp. Even Greve’s leanest passages contain strata to sift through.
The album completes its own cycle: The first and final parts are carried by the divine melodies of Cantus Domus. In “Part I,” the sopranos sing: “The sediment forms, no matter what, what matters….” (The repetition of the word “matter” feels like an inside joke.) At the end of “Part VI,” male vocalists join in a velvety lower register: “As sediments, we move,” they repeat. It’s as if the same particles have drifted down the album and, in this low, tranquil place, come momentarily to rest.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz / Rock | New Amsterdam / figureight | October 18, 2021 | 7.5 | ae16ce1e-427c-40e3-b0bf-98a6423c3f39 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Hyperdub 10.2 represents the second of four compilations documenting the label's first decade, focusing on the label's self-professed R&B offerings. Tracks from Burial, the late DJ Rashad, Jessy Lanza, and Kode9 make appearances, as does Ghostface Killah. | Hyperdub 10.2 represents the second of four compilations documenting the label's first decade, focusing on the label's self-professed R&B offerings. Tracks from Burial, the late DJ Rashad, Jessy Lanza, and Kode9 make appearances, as does Ghostface Killah. | Various Artists: Hyperdub 10.2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19639-various-artists-hyperdub-102/ | Hyperdub 10.2 | One of the most persistent trends to emerge from the dubstep diaspora has been a growing interest with American R&B—specifically, the turn-of-century eccentricities turned in by Timbaland, the Neptunes, and their acolytes. It was always in the style's DNA: dubstep forebears and 2-step monkey-patched glossy house tunes, with the type of ornate syncopations that Timbaland improbably turned into chart-topping pop. Somewhat inevitably, the interest in the productions fostered interest in the vocalists. Zomby's Aaliyah-jacking "Float", from 2008, is one of the earlier examples, and Jacques Greene's "Another Girl" seemed to put a point on the vogue in early 2011.
Hyperdub, intentionally or not, has served as one incubator of this style in its admirable quest to foster urban club music. Hyperdub 10.2 represents the second of four compilations documenting the label's first decade (but largely displaying its most recent five years). Focusing on the label's self-professed R&B offerings (the first volume having showcased the label's club music), 10.2 mixes new offerings from Kode9, Cooly G, and Jessy Lanza with older tracks from Burial, DJ Rashad, and Terror Danjah. A mixed bag, stylistically, 10.2's tracks are bound by rustling vocals, lights-low tempos, and sultry arrangements.
Having grown fond of sampling vocals from R&B divas, the UK underground took the next logical step and began singing themselves. Acts like Katy B and AlunaGeorge represent a generation for whom Aaliyah and Amerie typify pop normalcy, a generation who watched the avant-garde crystalize into the mainstream. So there are large swaths of 10.2 that, in 2014 (or, frankly, 2004), scan as fairly catholic takes on minimal, electro R&B.
This is where the material falters, at once hewing too closely to R&B's sonic template while pulling its emotional punches. Cooly G's "Obsessed" details an infatuation but censors itself: "Looking at me/ Watching me/ Wanna f--- me". Jessy Lanza's "5785021" turns a phone number into a chorus, tightroping the line between coy and corny. On tracks such as Terror Danjah's "You Make Me Feel" and Morgan Zarate's "Pusher Taker", the vocal performances struggle to keep pace with the tricky, intriguing productions. Too often, dubby reflections and breathy whispering are substituted for more traditional melisma and inflection; the effect isn't seduction, but apprehension.
10.2 fares better when it engages R&B on more ephemeral terms. Burial's inky transmissions dissolve the late-night, call-in loneliness of Quiet Storm R&B. The Inga Copeland tracks that bookend the album—first with Dean Blunt and then Kode9—are intoxicating, her flatlining, anti-diva voice bristling against seasick arrangements, the finest marriage of the label's avant-garde instincts with pop forms. DJ Rashad's "Only One" skirts the R&B conversation entirely: it's the rare footwork track that trades freneticism for tenderness. DVA's "Just Vybe" features Fatima, the best, most idiosyncratic singer on 10.2; she offers up a tart melody that feels like a proper UK take on welterweight R&B. Its charm exposes how labored and earnest much of 10.2 is.
Electronic music's interest in R&B mirrors a more general trend in underground music, one that has recently extended further into the past, touching most recently on Jam & Lewis' glassy funk (Kelela's Cut 4 Me mixtape being the most prominent example). But it's safe to say that, as yet, the songwriting and vocal components of the genre have failed to inspire the same unbridled creativity as the productions. Hyperdub's relationship to the form is less developed and less guided than their stewardship of footwork or UK club music, and it leaves 10.2 in the lurch, lacking clear purpose. At times it feels like dabbling, on the part of both the label and the artists (see Ghostface's bolted-on guest appearance on Morgan Zarate's "Sticks & Stones"). There's enough flair on 10.2 to justify further exploration, but it's premature to label this "future R&B" when its participants seem so uneasy with the genre's past. | 2014-07-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Hyperdub | July 21, 2014 | 6.7 | ae174c23-17e5-446d-8ce1-3ecc22ab6592 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The debut album from the Midwestern pow wow singer is arresting and unruly, centering his remarkable voice amid blasts of digital distortion, field recordings, and unrelenting rhythms. | The debut album from the Midwestern pow wow singer is arresting and unruly, centering his remarkable voice amid blasts of digital distortion, field recordings, and unrelenting rhythms. | Joe Rainey: Niineta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-rainey-niineta/ | Niineta | “No chants,” the title of the fierce and propulsive fifth track on Joe Rainey’s debut album Niineta, carries a double meaning. On one hand, it can be interpreted as a defensive posture, taken on behalf of pow wow singers like him against any outsider who might paint their musical tradition as simplistic by labeling it “chanting” as opposed to singing. But the phrase also has a more playful origin—adopted as a homonym, Rainey has said, for the catchphrase and theme song of Vince McMahon, the love-to-hate-him chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment: no chance. As in, you’ve got no chance in hell.
The double entendre is emblematic of Rainey’s sensibility: a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe people raised not on the Red Lake Reservation but 270 miles south, in Minneapolis, whose upbringing involved Ojibwe culture and pro wrestling both, and whose musical resume thus far includes stints in several celebrated pow wow ensembles—known as drums, a term that for the Ojibwe refers to the percussion instrument as well as the groups of singers who congregate around it—and guest spots on albums by Chance the Rapper and Bon Iver. Niineta is at once rooted in tradition and deeply idiosyncratic, fusing pow wow melodies with the timbres and rhythms of the 21st-century city: techno, industrial, hip-hop, dub, noise.
Listeners unfamiliar with pow wow could do worse for a starting point than Rainey’s own SoundCloud page, where he hosts the field recordings he has been making of intertribal competitions and other performances since he was eight years old. Even without the avant-garde accouterments of Niineta, it is arresting, unruly music. Accompanied only by each other and the insistent beating of the drum, singers weave wordlessly in and out of unison and counterpoint, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes baleful, conveying the meaning of a given song—which may involve honoring deceased relatives, celebrating tribal pride, or simply encouraging bystanders to dance—without verbal language. The emphasis on movement, and the steady rhythmic pulse, make pow wow a surprisingly natural fit for integration with the club, as Rainey and producer Andrew Broder demonstrate on Niineta, turning the pounding of a rawhide drum head into an unrelenting four-on-the-floor throb.
Rainey’s remarkably flexible voice sits at Niineta’s center, alternately consoling and foreboding, sometimes deep and gravelly and others high and androgynous. Backed by ascending strings on “b.e. son,” he sounds strong but weary, like he’s encouraging comrades in the midst of battle. At the end of “easy on the cide,” he breaks from a croon into a yelp, sounding, for a moment, a little like Young Thug. Broder’s production, punctuating magisterial instrumental arrangements with explosive digital distortion, recalls recent albums by Bon Iver and Low—another star in Rainey’s midwestern constellation of past collaborators—as well as Kanye West’s Yeezus. Like those artists, Rainey and Broder have no fealty to any particular recording fidelity, freely mixing the hiss and grain of iPhone voice memos with the blistering high definition of contemporary electronic music, treating the capture of the sound itself as one more malleable and expressive element of their work.
They sample liberally from Rainey’s library of pow wow recordings, a choice that enriches Niineta on multiple levels. Most obviously, it opens up the music to other voices, simulating the sort of togetherness—“that pow wow feeling,” as Rainey has called it—that might arise from a traditional performance. But they also adhere to the surface qualities of those field recordings, leaving the samples rough around the edges and highlighting the marginalia of a given performance as much as the music itself. They make room for stray sounds: introductory speeches from the singers, whoops of approval for the audience. As an outsider to Ojibwe culture, live recordings like Rainey’s might be the closest one ever comes to a genuine pow wow; Niineta both enshrines and subverts these recordings, asserting the power and presence of the singers while reminding us that an encounter mediated by earbuds or laptop speakers is still miles away from the real thing.
More than its glitchy digital production, Niineta’s greatest departure from traditional pow wow singing may be its use of chord changes to underpin its melodies. Songs like “bezhigo” and “ch 1222” are full of dramatic shifts that would be near-impossible in pow wow’s customary drum-and-voices setup, contextualizing Rainey’s vocal lines in a way that may make their emotional contours more legible to listeners who are accustomed to music with roots in Europe. Amid the clamor of “easy on the cide,” there are moments that feel as stately and triumphant as a power ballad. At first, I was mildly suspicious of this gilding, wondering whether it flattened the music’s impact, dressing it up as something else. I still prefer the album’s more percussion-driven tracks, like “no chants” and “phil’s offering,” which seem, to me, to allow Rainey’s melodies more freedom to wander where they will. But upon further listening, I came to view the adoption of European-style harmony as its own sort of subversion. Rainey has emphasized in interviews and press materials that Niineta is not intended to speak for Ojibwe music at large, but rather, to vocalize the perspective of one musician who “[wasn’t] from the rez, but [was] repping them.” If you grew up with one foot in a culture that has historically ignored you, stolen from you, attempted to eradicate you—why not take a few of their tricks for yourself? | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 37d03d | May 26, 2022 | 8 | ae1911f2-a150-46c3-8790-477f568b097a | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
With joyful house beats and emotive production, producer Joe Thornalley’s latest EP offers a more approachable side of his sound. | With joyful house beats and emotive production, producer Joe Thornalley’s latest EP offers a more approachable side of his sound. | Vegyn: Like a Good Old Friend EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vegyn-like-a-good-old-friend-ep/ | Like a Good Old Friend EP | In tarot, the flame-licked Tower card represents a mercurial period of upheaval and personal transformation. After producer and experimental artist Vegyn moved from London to Los Angeles last fall, the foreboding card became a regular appearance in his deck. The heavy symbolism seemed to fit. The producer born Joe Thornalley was battling depression and seeking to exorcise it by pushing his lopsided, woozy electronic music in uncomfortable directions—and the burning Tower suggested the process wouldn’t be easy. But though the cover of his new Like a Good Old Friend EP pays homage to the card, the music channels its volatile energy into a more approachable side of Vegyn’s sound, with joyful house beats and emotive production that gives way to some of his catchiest melodies yet.
Like a Good Old Friend has a clearer throughline than 2019’s glitchy Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds or the sprawling, 71-track Text While Driving If You Want to Meet God. The EP’s pensive works were born out of improvisation at the piano, an instrument that Vegyn picked up during quarantine. The strategy leads to winding songs that melt imperceptibly into different forms; on “Mushroom Abolitionist,” London artist Duval Timothy’s strings braid with Vegyn’s luminous keys for a searching, blissed-out highlight that cycles through uplifting moods. Timothy adds a similarly light touch to “Sometimes I Feel Like I’m Ruining Songs,” where snatches of conversations flit between a propulsive house beat and dancing keys. Together, the songs feel like processed nostalgia, served up with the same scratchy yearning as someone like Burial.
That sentimental impulse proves double-edged for Vegyn, who occasionally relies more on mood than melody. The cinematic title track ambles along a shuffling beat and keys until Owen Pallett quietly arrives with strings, but the song’s moving parts are too aimless to settle on anything memorable. The drifting, beatless “So Much Time - So Little Time” encounters a similar fate, with London artist John Glacier’s voice chopped up over introspective guitar noodling. It’s meditative, but the empty space renders it airless.
Like a Good Old Friend allows Vegyn to stretch his limbs and try a more wistful approach, which often suits his off-kilter stylings. His production choices are still unexpected and sharp, maintaining the self-assurance that’s turned him into a hotly tipped collaborator for artists like Frank Ocean, JPEGMAFIA, and Travis Scott. He’s at his best on “I See You Sometimes,” crunching East London rapper Jeshi’s shrugged-off rhymes through layers of distortion over a stuttering beat that sounds submerged in water. “I don’t know where I’m goin’ to/But I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jeshi intones, incidentally giving voice to Vegyn’s free-wheeling methodology.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PLZ Make It Ruins | March 26, 2021 | 6.8 | ae19846f-c6c7-44a8-a2d9-ac77439abb40 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
After a seven-year absence from rap, Mr. Lif returns with a sharp technical marvel of an album, and a meditation on all that’s brought him here. | After a seven-year absence from rap, Mr. Lif returns with a sharp technical marvel of an album, and a meditation on all that’s brought him here. | Mr. Lif: Don't Look Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21729-dont-look-down/ | Don't Look Down | Mr. Lif was a corner piece of the Definitive Jux puzzle, as important to its cause as co-founder El-P, Cannibal Ox, or Aesop Rock. The Bostonian nonconformist took an analytical approach to writing that attempted to drill home on-the-nose messages. His debut album, I Phantom, remains one of Def Jux’s seminal achievements and it is still his best work to date, a concept album on how black people are disenfranchised by the American system. He has always been equal parts revolutionary and educator, finding his way through carefully-articulated syllabic mazes in search of hard truths. He doubled-down on this in his last two albums, the surging class evaluation Mo’ Mega and its heavy-handed followup I Heard It Today. After a seven-year absence from rap, he has returned with Don’t Look Down, his first album on Mello Music Group, a sharp technical marvel and a meditation on all that’s brought him here. This is a record of the weary lecturer, one who has long been fighting the good fight with little to show for it. But Mr. Lif doesn’t ever wonder if it was all really worth it; he merely acknowledges the cost.
Unlike past sanctimonious lyrical displays, which read like condensed civics seminars, these raps are riddled with mentions of missed opportunities and internal self-doubt, and they’re delivered with a dryness that only enhances the candor. The what-ifs here are personal, not historical or conspiratorial. “Well I’m sitting at my table now, hands crossed, blast off/ Thinking ‘bout some opportunities that I had passed on/ Hindsight is 20/20, thinking isn’t helping any/ Drinking will just serve to end me/ Progress, am I making any?” he raps on “Everyday We Pray.” It's a peek into the exhaustion of the lifelong renegade: When your life’s work is beating your head against the walls of the political establishment, it’s natural to wonder if it has actually done any good.
Lif has sought to use his career to explain complex ideas to strangers, yet he’s spent just as much time making basic ideas complicated. “The goal is to search deeper and go smarter and think harder,” he raps on “Let Go,” but overthinking has always been one of his weaknesses. Don’t Look Down keeps things relatively simple, opting for narratives and wordplay that are far more approachable. What ties the whole experience together is his cautious optimism, along with his still-firm belief that struggle builds character. Don’t Look Down openly acknowledges doubt but never succumbs to it, instead using it as a balance for self-righteousness. There aren’t any regrets, only lessons learned. The emotional (and literal) centerpiece for the album is “A Better Day,” which opens with a snippet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” In it, Mr. Lif uses the full arsenal—his lyrical dexterity, his reflexive flow, and his observant eye—to paint a vibrant picture in broad strokes.
And yet the best moments on the album are the free-wheelers, records that aren’t anchored by any weighty concepts, allowing him to just be the proficient rapper that he is. On “World Renowned,” the fun-loving energy of Del the Funky Homosapien rubs off, and over a skipping loop it sounds like both tag-team partners are having a good time. Lif snuggles into the undulating wave on the Edan-produced “Whizdom,” which billows around him. The best of these is “Mission Accomplished,” which reunites the Perceptionists and finds the two emcees finishing each other’s syllabic yarns in call-and-response. It’s in the moments when he isn’t tethered to any belief system that Mr. Lif sounds most liberated. | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | April 18, 2016 | 7 | ae1cfa31-de8b-4251-ba39-5cc50546bb10 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Always one for gender subversion, the Toronto songwriter invites a cast of men to sing her songs, resulting in some of the project’s most deviously playful music ever. | Always one for gender subversion, the Toronto songwriter invites a cast of men to sing her songs, resulting in some of the project’s most deviously playful music ever. | Picastro: Exit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/picastro-exit/ | Exit | In the late 1990s, Toronto musician Liz Hysen began to use the alias Picastro to distance herself from assumptions about singing-and-songwriting women at the dawn of the Lilith Fair era. Hysen’s hushed, spectral songs tapped more into the stewing undercurrents of slowcore and post-rock than traditional folk, anyway. By the time she released Picastro’s first proper album, 2002’s Red Your Blues, the project had become a full band, one whose revolving cast of local mavericks (including, for a spell, Owen Pallett) reflected her music’s mercurial quality. Even as her tensely strummed missives acquired a more expansive sweep on two mid-2000s releases for Polyvinyl, Hysen’s voice remained at the core of Picastro, the resolute center of increasingly calamitous environs.
Hysen has long resisted autobiographical interpretations of her writing, and she’s often sung from a male perspective to emphasize that these songs are stories, not confessionals. On the appropriately titled Exit, Picastro’s first album in five years, she largely steps away from the microphone to let others do the singing, farming out most of the album’s eight tracks to a predominantly male cast of guest singers culled from her Toronto peer group and beyond. And instead of simply applying their voices to Hysen’s songs, the singers push their personalities to eccentric extremes, driving Picastro toward their most tumultuous, unpredictable, and deviously playful music to date.
Hysen, for instance, has Great Lake Swimmers leader Tony Dekker perform his best imitation of her on the opening “Mirror Age,” his honeyed voice proving the subtlest salve to lyrics that blur the line between relationships and addiction: “I don’t feel much of anything/All because of you.” But Hysen’s acoustic finger-picks ultimately rally Matthew Ramolo’s sunbeam synths, Nick Storring’s trembling cello, and Germaine Liu’s clattering percussion through a series of turbulent ascensions and peaceful plateaus toward an ecstatic rekindling of the senses. Unlike most post-rock outfits, Picastro aren’t interested in working themselves up into volcanic crescendos; instead, they conjure those early moments of a windstorm, where the dead leaves and street debris start to coalesce into circular patterns, though everything could drift off at any moment.
These songs move slowly, often following a similar path from calm to chaos. Still, each singer makes the songs their own, like a parade of guests taking turns house-sitting the same abode and rearranging the furniture to their liking. “From Come the Speak” oozes gothic dread, with Irish raconteur Adrian Crowley’s sinister moan suggesting the grimmest of reapers. On “Blue Neck,” Xiu Xiu founder Jamie Stewart’s muffled, trembling delivery embodies the anxious nature of a song that starts out like an acoustic doom dirge before getting swept up in a torrent of cosmic klezmer. Even the album’s quietest track judders with mischief and unrest: The album’s only female guest, Alexandra MacKenzie (aka electro-pop agitator Petra Glynt), absolutely devours the early, Thurston Moore-sung Sonic Youth standard “(She’s in a) Bad Mood.” Swapping the guitar-charged throb for a piano-based dronescape, MacKenzie displaces Moore’s icy cool with a haunted theatricality, reframing his ominous diagnosis as an apocalyptic clarion call.
But Exit’s unsettled essence doesn’t always serve such a dark vision. On the closing “This Be My Fortune,” Hysen teams with Chris Cummings, the art-pop auteur who calls himself Marker Starling (fka Mantler), for a track that qualifies as a romantic duet by Picastro standards. Granted, it’s the sort of romantic duet where they seal their pact by harmoniously singing the chorus of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” as if they were serenading each other with “Islands in the Stream” at a karaoke bar. But a synth-flushed swirl dramatically uproots the song like a tornado swallowing a home, a moment that feels as liberating as it is arresting. Where Picastro was once a means for Hysen to sidestep stereotypes, with Exit, she’s now successfully redefined what it means to be Picastro at all. | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sleeping Giant Glossolalia | April 27, 2019 | 7.8 | ae28f29e-2493-4e02-9e60-6f75061f4fe7 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The Berlin-based artist’s first full-length solo release in over a decade is a stylish, sexy record where not much happens. | The Berlin-based artist’s first full-length solo release in over a decade is a stylish, sexy record where not much happens. | Anika: Change | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anika-change/ | Change | Just over a decade ago, Annika Henderson debuted with an album that was riveting, freaky, and lo-fi in an almost extreme way. Anika sounded aqueous, like it was recorded in a nightclub bathroom on a tape-deck found in the garbage. After the release of Anika, Henderson further explored the limits of lo-fi on a 2013 EP and later joined the art rock supergroup Exploded View, where her velvety alto ping-ponged off drums and synthesizers. Her first full-length solo record since her debut, Change is just as sparse as her past work, but it’s slicker and less urgent. What once seemed like abrasive, outsider minimalism now sounds slightly anemic.
Change is a sexy record where not much happens. Time moves slowly. The emphasis on these songs tends to be Henderson’s chilly, cosmic voice. She sounds similar to Nico, and a more contemporary analog would be fellow Berliner Molly Nilsson, or Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr. On “Critical,” synthesizers bob like a little wooden boat. Henderson steers the ship; her voice is clear and stoic, expansive in its ability to conjure feelings of longing and loneliness. Like her best work, this song makes you feel like you’re alone with her in a quiet and intensely intimate space. She can make it feel like she’s staring at you.
These songs gain their power from subtle textural flourishes. Henderson’s lyrics are like a little lemon zest sprinkled on a really nice cut of fish. When done well, they enhance the experience, but not in a particularly noticeable way. The title track is gorgeously modulated, krauty and languorous. The words are like vignettes; they filter through the song like slats of light in a coral reef. But when Henderson struggles with her lyrics, her choices can seem a bit goofy, a touch too dramatic. On “Rights,” she sings aimlessly about power and “raucous screams.” It’s meant to incite passion, but instead it rinses over you. The arrangements are so sparse that you’re forced to engage directly with her words, which are often absent of connective tissue.
Anika’s songs are soft, ambient, dreamy. But they also feel like they could be much bigger, compositionally. It can sound like pop music, but instead of bursting and blooming and moving through peaks and valleys, Change flatlines. In the past, Henderson has gone weird and raw: Change is pleasant and breezy, a cozy place where she can explore the outer limits of her voice. Listening can feel like walking into one of those gallery shows with just three sculptures, where everyone is wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of mustard-colored slacks. It sounds cool, and you feel cool listening to it—but that’s about as much as you feel.
Buy: Rough Trade
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*Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Sacred Bones | July 28, 2021 | 6.3 | ae3133b7-c845-4a12-8d08-09cdc7abac17 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
This digital-exclusive album from the Berlin-based Kenyan artist sounds blank and unrevealing but opens up to reveal a wealth of detail. It’s prickly, insidious, and at times grueling. | This digital-exclusive album from the Berlin-based Kenyan artist sounds blank and unrevealing but opens up to reveal a wealth of detail. It’s prickly, insidious, and at times grueling. | KMRU: Glim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kmru-glim/ | Glim | KMRU’s 2020 album Peel was a formidable addition to the long list of great electronic albums released on the Editions Mego label. The shadowy six-track release established the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based artist (aka Joseph Kamaru) as one of ambient music’s most exciting young talents almost overnight. But though he’s only been releasing music for a little over five years, Peel was just one point in the arc of a prolific career that includes fiery collaborations, ambitious meditations on colonial violence, and cryptic Bandcamp exclusives that arrive with little context. Glim is the latest and one of the longest of the latter, its intentions hidden behind a smattering of cryptic one-word track titles and an eerie photograph from Berlin’s Claudia Mock showing reeds along a shoreline that can only be faintly glimpsed in the darkness.
That photo is the most useful key to unlocking the depths of Glim: The ocean may look blank and lifeless from above, but it conceals countless ecosystems. Likewise, though Glim sounds at first like an austere experiment in pure drone, the mix is permeated with human sounds that may escape the ear on a first listen. The sound of kids playing on opening track “motley” is easy to pick out—less so the snap of a camera about a minute and a half in, or the sound of a car revving on “line.” Kamaru has never been showy with field recordings; he weaves them into the fabric of his music rather than using everyday sounds as readymade signifiers, but he’s said he’s “very intentional when I record and why I’m recording the space.” Knowing there’s an intent behind Kamaru’s choice of source material, no matter how obscure, deepens the intrigue.
In opposition to the vast, rainy desolation of Peel or the soothing sounds of last year’s Epoch, Glim is prickly and ominous, rarely deviating from minor keys. Kamaru likes bit-crushed distortion that makes his music sound like it’s echoing out of the busted speakers of a Game Boy Advance, and he likes drones that are damaged or serrated in some way. The interference on “strain” might prompt listeners to check their headphones; on “its,” a speeding and slowing oscillator warps the linear sense of time implied by the piece’s impassive, glacial progress. Rather than the contented bliss Kamaru summoned on Epoch, Glim offers bleak, even menacing soundscapes that bristle with the possibility of danger, as though a predator lurked nearby, unseen.
Glim sounds monolithic at first yet opens up to reveal cracks and details. Played in the background, the music’s complexity will probably be lost as the sounds of everyday life blend with the field recordings in the mix. More focused effort is required to pick up on all the details, but giving Glim your undivided attention can be a grueling experience. It’s too unnerving to allow you to sink back and get lost. It’s not texturally detailed enough to provide any kind of psychedelic brain massage. And given its length—12 tracks in 56 minutes, all fading in and out as if at random—it never sustains a mood for long. Glim is like an abstract painting that rewards being looked at from all angles, but no matter how much you squint, its secrets remain just out of sight. | 2023-03-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | self-released | March 15, 2023 | 7.1 | ae3f3b04-5bee-4a88-b08e-cca236cdb4d3 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
On his second solo album for Drag City, the Philadelphia guitarist continues to develop his singular style, incorporating tape loops, taishōgoto, and hurdy-gurdy into his sculptural approach. | On his second solo album for Drag City, the Philadelphia guitarist continues to develop his singular style, incorporating tape loops, taishōgoto, and hurdy-gurdy into his sculptural approach. | Bill Nace: Through a Room | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-nace-through-a-room/ | Through a Room | It has become de rigueur to describe Philadelphia guitarist Bill Nace as an inveterate collaborator, and with good reason. Until his 2020 solo album Both, most of Nace’s high-profile releases were in duos or trios with longtime friends like Chris Corsano and John Truscinski, out-music legends like Joe McPhee and Thurston Moore, or surprising connections like Susan Alcorn or Graham Lambkin. His long-running group with Kim Gordon, Body/Head, has itself featured occasional third members like Michael Morley and Aaron Dilloway. If a listener encountered Nace’s bristling, shapeshifting guitar on a recording from the 2000s or 2010s, it was likely in company with noisemakers of a very high pedigree.
This is only part of Nace’s story, however. Dotted throughout his discography are solo recordings from 2006’s Solo Guitar to this year’s PM/FM, released on cassette or lathe-cut vinyl in short runs on his own Open Mouth imprint or noise labels like Throne Heap. These outings—usually brief and difficult to find—provide a glimpse into a lesser-known history of Nace as a guitarist, from the wild, feedback-driven chaos of his early years to the more varied approach he has mastered recently. They show Nace’s artistic trajectory with other musicians to be intertwined with his experiments as a soloist, with techniques generated in one arena snaking their way into the other.
Nace’s recent efforts for Drag City have offered more polished takes on his experimental work for smaller labels, refining his blend of improvisation and composition. On Through a Room, he builds on the sculptural approach of Both, incorporating tape loops as well as instruments like the taishōgoto and hurdy-gurdy. Not that you’d necessarily know—each sound is drenched in enough reverb and static to obliterate its origin. For Nace, the relevant musical unit is not the note or the chord but the burst of noise. Having produced towering blocks of vibration, he rearranges them into structures based more on their inherent timbral quality than any notion of traditional songcraft. Walls of distortion are decorated with filigree traceries of treble as if to guide the eye across a Brutalist facade. Co-producer Cooper Crain, of Bitchin’ Bajas, deserves credit here for helping to realize Nace’s blueprints by recording and editing his tracks, as he did on Both.
Nace approaches the guitar as an object to be explored as much as an instrument to be played. In addition to fingerpicking and strumming, he uses bits of wood or metal to generate a spectrum of tones that, with practice, he can manipulate with precision. Once he has perfected a technique it may be redeployed, as in the resonant metallic sawing that first appeared on PM/FM and now makes up “When Orange.” Some tracks have a clear precedent in the world of noise, as in the Dilloway-inspired tape warp of “Outro” or the granular grinding of “Les Echos (Piece for Tuba),” which would fit wonderfully on a Load Records compilation. Others are unclassifiable. On “Ann,” Nace apparently wants to recreate a nature recording, complete with squawking birds and chittering monkeys. Across its eight minutes, the listener is guided through a darkening jungle where ominous echoes bound overhead. Nace achieves a remarkable variety across the album, but his distinctive guitar sound is always identifiably his.
Nace’s body of work with improvisatory duos and trios is vast and enviably good, a testament to his adaptability to a range of contexts and performers. On his own, meanwhile, he is steadily honing a singular personal style. With Both, it was exciting to see an underground lifer finally getting his due; Through a Room confirms Nace’s inquisitive spirit and formidable skills. | 2022-11-11T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-11T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | November 11, 2022 | 7.6 | ae49ade2-134f-4258-827f-77631e4fe545 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The New York duo's debut EP sounds uncannily familiar-- a little tweaking and they could be Lana Del Rey, Poliça, or even Florence-- lingering in a much-mined seam of clichéd teenage misery. But somehow, it works, MS MR racheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels. | The New York duo's debut EP sounds uncannily familiar-- a little tweaking and they could be Lana Del Rey, Poliça, or even Florence-- lingering in a much-mined seam of clichéd teenage misery. But somehow, it works, MS MR racheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels. | MS MR: Candy Bar Creep Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17234-candy-bar-creep-show/ | Candy Bar Creep Show | It's hard to know what to make of New York duo MS MR at first. Partly it's deliberate. Like more and more would-be breakout acts, they've been as generous with biographical details as eyedroppers are with water, down to their photographss and names: Lizzy Plapinger of boutique pop label Neon Gold is the MS, and Max Hershenow her corresponding MR. Partly it's because the context around them swirls as thick as their music's atmospherics. They've been associated with Tumblr primarily on grounds of using it, which can lose you an hour or so among their Addams Family screencaps and photographed pills, but it's meaningless when it comes to the music. Distribution methods and single-art tastes don't constitute a genre.
Everything on Candy Bar Creep Show, MS MR's first proper EP, has been released before. (Yes, via Tumblr.) But that's not the only reason these songs sound instantly familiar. The bands they've been compared to are somewhat more telling, although none fits exactly. A little more sashay and they'd be Poliça; more rapture and they'd be Florence; throw in some trolling and they'd be Lana. Their closest analogue, in fact, might be Toni Halliday's solo project Chatelaine, even if "Bones" didn't so closely echo their "Broken Bones". Every song is steeped in gloom, yet not so much as to sully their hooks. Plapinger's vocals are shaded brittle, confident, or spooky as is called for. She'll turn a folk curtsy for a sparrow metaphor, strut her melisma through a verse like the Sugababes' Siobhan Donaghy, or give up words entirely; the one commonality is that they're always a shade too vulnerable, too clear in a busy mix, or too hesitant where she'd otherwise be belting. She's the figure lit like a spotlight amid the dusk, lost but compelling.
This effect works best when the lyrics merit such illumination, as on "Hurricane", the band's breakout and the most fully formed track here. The strings are churning up something, specifically a relationship wrecked out of fear. "Welcome to the inner workings of my mind, so dark and foul I can't disguise," Plapinger sings, and if it's melodramatic, the fog of reverb certainly backs her up. There's more levity on "Ash Tree Lane", a march set to brass and a wordless hook that'd be exuberant in any other context, but then Plapinger gets to singing again about plagues and wrong choices, eventually cutting the whole thing off with a gasp after--again-- "my mind's a mess." "Bones" isn't as strong; the pile of fractured guitar and strings works well enough, but it's unclear whether "dark twisted fantasy" is a Kanye reference (or whether it'd be preferable if so), and the lyrical admission "marinate in misery like a girl of only 17" doesn't excuse the clichés of teenage misery: empty churches, broken dreams paired with silent screams, madness paired with sadness.
A good way to tell whether a group's succeeding on style or substance is to see how they handle a concept that could be bigger than them. On Candy Bar Creep Show, that's "Dark Doo Wop", a title that might as well have been kept on reserve behind glass labeled "Break in Case of Aesthetic Drought". The throughline is simple, a mainstay of pop through the ages: This world is gonna burn, so you might as well stick around. It's simple enough to execute, too; all you need are a few diffident doo-wops and coquetry on "that's my man," and as for the part where the world burn, burn, burns, the juxtaposition's obvious on its own. But it only works if it's delivered with a preacher's passion, or at least with Skeeter Davis' pathos. MS MR deliver, ratcheting up the rapture to near-thunderstorm levels: seething percussion, steely vocals, and a sonic fog that buries any lingering pleasantries. | 2012-10-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-10-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Creep City | October 5, 2012 | 7.4 | ae4e9643-1b95-40dd-84f7-a12bf7b6bcd7 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The debut from the young Atlanta rapper is a low-stakes cool-girl joyride that hits best when it’s laid back. | The debut from the young Atlanta rapper is a low-stakes cool-girl joyride that hits best when it’s laid back. | Anycia: PRINCESS POP THAT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anycia-princess-pop-that/ | PRINCESS POP THAT | If you ever wanted to live a day in the life of an Atlanta cool girl just listen to an Anycia song. That’s been the appeal since last summer when the grainy snippet for “So What” lifted her from a life of partying and working odd jobs (bottle service, babysitter, hair stylist) to a life of partying and rapping. Produced by ATL underground gatekeeper Popstar Benny, the addictive “So What” features Anycia’s raspy-voiced, flirty-with-an-attitude raps over a beat that tosses Ciara’s hook on Field Mob’s hit of the same name into the pluggnb blender. The short visual added to the dreamy seductiveness, as Anycia and her clique—including fellow overnight sensation Karrahbooo—get drunk and turn up poolside; the handheld feel of a GoPro making it seem as if you just stumbled into a random Tuesday night of hers.
Less than a year later, Anycia is on a Flo Milli album, coasting in a vintage muscle car with Latto, and teaming up with proven music industry hitmaker Jetsonmade for her debut album PRINCESS POP THAT. Compared to “So What,” which sounds like it was made on the fly as the video suggests, the album is more buttoned up, but the sense that you’re riding shotgun with her through all the drama and excitement of being poppin’ in Atlanta is kept intact.
The more laid back, the better. Cruising over the generic yet smooth g-funk groove of “Bad Weather,” trickling in little details like “I’m in the Lamb’ tryna’ put my lashes on.” On “Nene’s Prayer,” wishing the worst on an ex (“I hope your barber push your shit back/I hope you get up out the car and then your phone crack”) over one of those breezy beats a Detroit rapper uses when they want to be a family man all of a sudden. Her relaxed, monotone recalls a wide array of hangout flows: The haze of Dom Kennedy, the easygoing stunting of Tony Shhnow, when Gucci or 50 do some sweet talking.
But a delivery as low-key as Anycia’s relies so heavily on beats. They have to be a vibe, or else her same-y flow can wash over you. Jetsonmade is not the guy for that. The South Carolina native is a malleable, trusted hand, who is decent at booming, minimalist instrumentals that give big personalities the space to do their thing. That worked just fine on DaBaby’s “Suge” or Jack Harlow’s “Whats Poppin,” big hits that I would not lose any sleep if we left them in the pre-COVID days forever. But with Anycia, too much weight is on his production, and it’s too dry and derivative to handle that. (It’s worth noting that all of his beats have three or four other producers credited, but his producer tag gets the star treatment.) For example, the steel-drum bounce of “Call” just makes me want to fire up the summer anthems on Trapnificent. Jetson’s mid-aughts trap revival on “Back Outside” is solid, but is blown out of the water by other recent beats in the same lane such as Baby Kia’s “Od Crashin’” or JT’s “Okay.” On paper Anycia and Cash Cobain seem like a good match because they both are masters of sexually charged, locally-minded, lifestyle rap, but it’s not dirty enough and the airy instrumental lacks the sauce.
When the beat is right, Anycia is a fun rapper. “I fuck yo’ nigga to Detroit-type beats,” she jokes on “Type Beat,” over a thudding, serviceable instrumental by Jetson and his team. (Only thing worse than getting cheated on, is getting cheated on while a Teejayx6-type beat is on in the background.) She’s outshined by the punchier Karrahbooo on their bouncy back-and-forth “Splash Brothers,” but Anycia’s insults are still venomous. The album standout is “BRB,” a lush single where everything in town seems to be getting on her nerves; the girls copying her, the guys in her messages: “Blowin’ up my phone I know yo’ baby mama whack.” It’s the perfect Anycia song: Low-stakes, short enough to be a snippet, rapped as if she’s unimpressed, possibly even burdened, by her Atlanta cool girl status. | 2024-05-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | UnitedMasters | May 1, 2024 | 6.8 | ae55efd6-27ee-455e-9900-a33260db8470 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Australian singer-songwriter’s fourth album has the directness of a collection of demos. Barnett sounds characteristically laconic; she’s at her best when she lets her guitar take the lead. | The Australian singer-songwriter’s fourth album has the directness of a collection of demos. Barnett sounds characteristically laconic; she’s at her best when she lets her guitar take the lead. | Courtney Barnett: Things Take Time, Take Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/courtney-barnett-things-take-time-take-time/ | Things Take Time, Take Time | When Courtney Barnett takes a solo in the last half of “Turning Green,” it evokes the two-note grubbiness of guitarist Pete Shelley’s work on the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom.” Barnett’s songs depend on moments when she trusts her instrument to become more than an extension of herself: Her guitar work functions as a pungent second voice, more demonstrative than the Daria-style talk-sing in which she’s most comfortable. Things Take Time, Take Time doesn’t have enough of these moments. Wedded to the percussion-and-singer-plus-accompanist format, Barnett sounds marooned. It’s her least interesting album.
Accompanied by Stella Mozgawa on percussion and additional instruments, Barnett offers 10 songs with the directness of demos. On “Oh the Night,” the simplicity of Mozgawa’s plonkety piano line complements Barnett’s insistence on back-to-basics, and also her tight budget for question marks: “It takes a little time for me to show how I really feel/Won’t you meet me somewhere in the middle.” It’s characteristic of Barnett that her line readings avoid any hint of pleading. On her debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, and the excellent follow-up Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett gave her angst the same attention she did origami, and she lingered on cityscapes as a means of toughening her anecdotes. “Watching all the movies/Drinking all the smoothies,” from “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York),” remains a favorite. Hell, sometimes the city was so alive she stayed in her room to avoid it.
Things Take Time’s lead single, “Rae Street,” portends an ominous development: The storefronts and garbage trucks and other phenomena of urban life don’t excite this heir to Jonathan Richman like they once did. “Time is money/And money is no man’s friend,” she advises, but to make the lyric stick would require the kind of vocal commitment that her laconic sensibility regards with suspicion. Amiably blank gets you only so far. “If I Don't Hear From You Tonight" and “Sunfair Showdown” show Barnett’s strengths: riffs and toplines married to a wryness as chronic as a scowl. On others, the barren melodic landscapes expose the loss of bassist Bones Sloane and percussionist Dave Mudie, never mind second guitarist Dan Luscombe. The sparkling hook on “Here’s the Thing” calls for the kind of instrumental embellishment she and Mozgawa can’t provide alone. Things Take Time settles on a midtempo churn that isn’t up to the speed of Barnett’s wit; the slowest songs sprout weeds.
Still, I’m glad Barnett hasn’t written sequels to “Depreston” or “Walkin’ on Eggshells.” If Things Take Time, Take Time sounds tentative, it’s the tentativeness of a febrile imagination working out its next steps; she’ll be back. Besides, it works half the time. “Take It Day by Day” hits quivering bullseyes with each garnish: handclaps here, bass syncopation there. Then it shuts up in less than two minutes. Pithiness suits her, especially when offering unsolicited advice. We need artists who write lines like, “Don’t stick that knife in the toaster.” The album’s strongest songs evince an attitude best described in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight”: awful but cheerful.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | November 12, 2021 | 6.5 | ae565fa6-d11f-4826-aae4-55ca4ed1d208 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
At last, the band’s 10th album restores their creative momentum. If the songs don’t feel as lived-in, at least they unlock the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie. | At last, the band’s 10th album restores their creative momentum. If the songs don’t feel as lived-in, at least they unlock the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie. | Death Cab for Cutie: Asphalt Meadows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-cab-for-cutie-asphalt-meadows/ | Asphalt Meadows | These days Ben Gibbard is often seen as synonymous with his band, which itself is often synonymous with an entire moment in aughts pop culture. Gibbard has been admirably candid about the personal turmoil he suffered while creating Death Cab for Cutie’s most beloved music, in contrast to the sobriety and equilibrium he experiences now—challenging fans to consider what they miss about “the old Death Cab.” But the existential burden of being in a massively popular band with dwindling acclaim has lightened over the past three years. Gibbard was one of the first artists to embrace quarantine livestreaming in early 2020, airing 22 “Live From Home” episodes where he revisited deep cuts from early LPs like We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes. The outward commitment to fan service proves clever cover for Death Cab for Cutie to make the kind of record they’ve strived for since the departure of guitarist and producer Chris Walla in 2014: a restoration of their creative momentum when a mere “return to form” would have sufficed.
Though life in quarantine informs the bulk of Asphalt Meadows, nothing is as direct as Gibbard’s 2020 solo track “Life in Quarantine”—what could be? If the “Live From Home” project didn’t produce any essential solo material, its goodwill carries over to the opening of Asphalt Meadows, lending humanity to lines that might otherwise read as generalities: “These nights, I don’t know how I survive,” “I am learning to let go of everything I tried to hold.” After nearly a year of letting fans inside his house, Gibbard grants himself permission to be the main character of his own music. It’s a marked contrast to everything Death Cab has done since 2011’s Codes and Keys, the band’s weakest album according to Gibbard and also the one most closely associated with his personal life.
The introductory duo of “I Don’t Know How I Survive” and “Roman Candles” position Asphalt Meadows as a clean break from the slick competence of Kintsugi and Thank You for Today. The former teases itself as the kind of Silly Putty funk-pop that shared space with their 2010s singles “Northern Lights” and “Black Sun” on New Indie playlists before rupturing into the loudest guitar buzz ever heard on a Death Cab for Cutie album. A flurry of martial drum rolls breaks through the fuzz bass exhaust on “Roman Candles,” reflecting on how long Death Cab have been described as “indie rock” and never rawked before.
It’s tempting to grant the bulk of credit to producer John Congleton, whose CV immediately resituates Asphalt Meadows into a flattering lineage of cerebral, populist indie rock. It’s a canny pairing—Congleton’s taste for textural, handcrafted intricacy and judicious distortion isn’t all that different than Walla’s studio approach, and Congleton likewise understands the importance of feel in Death Cab for Cutie’s music; past songs could’ve relocated you to the back of a gray subcompact or a tomblike Seattle apartment even if they were instrumentals. Whereas Kintsugi and Thank You for Today sounded primped for alt-rock radio, Asphalt Meadows goes places: The Canadian prairie basks in a warm, amber glow on “Wheat Like Waves,” and eerie sampledelia mirrors the collaging of digital memories on “Fragments From the Decade.” The despondent title track stares blankly upon urban bustle, recreating the sound of being stuck on the I-10 even better than the Death Cab songs explicitly written about Los Angeles.
Still, you don’t do guest spots with Chance the Rapper and Noah Cyrus without picking up a few things. “I’ll Never Give Up on You” neatly resolves Gibbard’s public stances on clean living and politics over a concussive electro-pop stomp more suited to close out a Mission Impossible movie than a Death Cab for Cutie album. It’s an allowable indulgence on a record that mostly satisfies through course correction. “Here to Forever” and “Pepper” are pleasant exemplars of the band’s new default mode, exchanging the ocean spray of the Pacific Northwest for the silvery cool of New Order and the Cure, verses flecked with quintessential Gibbardisms in contrast to the broad and occasionally blasé hooks (“Kiss me just this one last time/Tell me that you once were mine”).
Likewise, while Gibbard returns to familiar images throughout the more cinematic tracks—analog maps, endless highways, ’80s pop playing on a busted car stereo—they don’t feel as lived in or lived through. Inevitably, he’s writing at a degree of remove from the stoned and starving road trippers on “Rand McNally” and “Wheat Like Waves”; anyone who’s been listening to Death Cab for the past 20 years is in the same position. But if Asphalt Meadows doesn’t amplify the stakes of forty-something romantic misunderstandings the way “A Movie Script Ending” or “Title and Registration” did in college, it at least unlocks the repressed memory of what it was like to be deeply moved by Death Cab for Cutie songs.
Yet Asphalt Meadows’ fuzzy glow of nostalgia is outshone by the halo effect of “Foxglove Through the Clearcut.” Though Gibbard’s lyrics are frequently conversational—written in complete sentences that stretch melodic containment to its breaking point—this is the first time he’s actually talking. In a bemused, cosmic mutter akin to Aaron Weiss or, more likely, Cassandra Jenkins’ “Hard Drive,” he accompanies a man of enormous ideas and few words. They ponder eternity, the grim jest of mankind, and the limits of manifest destiny. “He said he’d driven all the way across America/And when he got to thе edge, therе was nowhere left to go,” Gibbard recites, as if to say: Tell me more. Where previous Death Cab epics would edge toward the vast unknown and stop short, “Foxglove Through the Clearcut” bursts into unrepentant post-rock fireworks, creating a late-career masterwork that might finally knock “Bixby Canyon Bridge” or “Transatlanticism” out of their roles as set-closers. Death Cab have made plenty of great songs in the past decade, but “Foxglove Through the Clearcut” stands alone as proof of what Gibbard has worked so long to accomplish: The scope of Death Cab is so much bigger than anyone, including himself, could imagine. | 2022-09-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-21T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | September 21, 2022 | 7.4 | ae56db63-d4ce-4d99-be3c-6578b70538f3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The latest EP from the Irish singer is a set of introspective, velvet-crushed balladry, as much a cohesive mood piece as a collection of individual songs. | The latest EP from the Irish singer is a set of introspective, velvet-crushed balladry, as much a cohesive mood piece as a collection of individual songs. | Biig Piig: The Sky Is Bleeding EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/biig-piig-the-sky-is-bleeding-ep/ | The Sky is Bleeding EP | Biig Piig’s music has always had a certain informality. Since 2016, the Irish singer born Jessica Smyth has moved in short bursts: a prolific stream of singles and EPs. But there’s been a transience to the tunes, too. She has made rough cassette-tape hip-hop and slow jams, hazy music for the last gasps of a house party. She has dropped witty trinket-box raps, sometimes in Spanish—evidence of the years she spent growing up in Spain before moving to West London—while her writing focused on the conditions of young adulthood: heeding her mother’s advice (“Dinner’s Getting Cold”), kicking it with cigarettes and wine (“Perdida”), and sipping Hennessy next to the boombox (“Vice City”). Even the more serious songs had a sense of playfulness: Last year’s “Oh No” sounded like Smyth challenging herself to blend a Britney Spears chorus with a Radiohead-style guitar line.
Smyth’s outlook is more gloomy on her latest EP, The Sky Is Bleeding. Through these six songs, she favors quiet introspection, velvet-crushed slowcore, and new wave balladry. It’s muted and understated in texture and tempo. Her voice is no longer fluttering and soulful but smoky and hushed. This is weighty, well-crafted music, as much a cohesive mood piece as a collection of individual songs. Two years into her major label deal with RCA, you can hear Smyth moving on from her more casual approach, maturing into the role of an industry professional.
Take, for instance, “Drugs,” a highlight where Smyth plays with doomed allegories, like extinguishing flames and dancing with darkness, over a downbeat guitar line and trickling bass riff. On “Lavender,” an artist who previously captured the stoned wisdom you can only find at the end of the sesh seems scared of what the night might bring: “If I wasn’t so complacent, I just might/Wake up with a taste of the good time.” Whereas she once made being young sound fun, these songs are now littered with suffering and cynicism.
The mood is set in the torchy opener “Remedy,” with a lilting melody that conjures the image of a 1980s sports car cruising down a rain-streaked street at 3 a.m., lit only by neon light. Smyth only breaks the spell for the final song “American Beauty,” where a chugging guitar riff closes the EP with a little something for indie radio. The sullen turn in Smyth’s catalog makes for enjoyable chill-out material for the warming nights, but it occasionally downplays her personality and ability to capture the beautiful mess of young adulthood. For an artist who has spent her career zooming forward, it’s hard to say if she has found a long-term destination or merely the next stop on her journey.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony UK | June 3, 2021 | 6.5 | ae730bf5-c4dd-4625-bb97-02783d460f6b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On her 14th album, the pop star teams with Stuart Price and rolls back the clock; her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace. | On her 14th album, the pop star teams with Stuart Price and rolls back the clock; her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace. | Madonna: Confessions on a Dance Floor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5030-confessions-on-a-dance-floor/ | Confessions on a Dance Floor | Twenty years ago, Madonna was a postmodernist's dream. Her ability to transform herself from song to song and from album to album became a proclamation of self-nullifying empowerment, giving her the ability to create a stationary persona out of shifting identities. However, by the start of the 1990s, Madonna's transformations appeared more calculated as she aged and fell behind the curve, trying to predict the next dominant style instead of confidently setting it.
With Confessions on a Dance Floor, her 14th album, Madonna again reinvents herself, and it appears she's nearly lapped herself. Her latest iteration is a pre-Madonna (prima donna?) disco vixen, basking in a '70s musical style that she herself, among others, helped to morph and displace in the early '80s. Allowing her to accessorize creatively (love that wrap-around top), this new persona has the potential to be immensely entertaining, but there's something a little sad about it too. At 47 Madonna is playing the role of someone 25 years younger, and those retro space leotards and that feathered hair only make her look more mature and matronly, like your friend's mom dressed up embarrassingly for Halloween.
If the outfit depresses, the music on Confessions accomplishes the feat of making her sound young again. Kicking off the album, "Hung Up" is an impressive and enjoyable single, strong enough to have everyone trying to figure out if it's her best since "Ray of Light" or since "Like a Prayer". The main groove is lifted from ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme (A Man After Midnight)", but used in such a way that it resembles a brilliant mash-up rather than a lazy sample. Credit is due Stuart Price of Les Rhythmes Digitales, who builds a warehouse-size wall of sound for Madonna's songs, allowing her to revel in the shameless mirrorballsiness of it all.
That collaboration stays strong over the first half of Confessions. On "Get Together", as Price's synths ebb and flow moodily, Madonna asks the eternal pop question, "Do you believe in love at first sight?", over a tripping vocal melody. The cascades of sound wash directly into "Sorry", setting up the song's panlingual apologies and shifting bass tectonics. These songs have a deceptive lyrical vacuity that hints at greater depths, but leaves them to the listener to consider. On the other hand, "Future Lovers" begins with similar escapism, as Madonna warmly exhorts, "Let's forget your life, forget your problems, administration, bills, and loans." But it's no simple call to the dancefloor: Over a prismatic vocal theme, she unequivocally equates music with spirituality, dancing with religious ritual.
This impressive momentum, unfortunately, is interrupted by "I Love New York", which stumbles over mad-glad-bad rhyme schemes and dumb-ass lyrics like "I don't like cities but I like New York/ Other cities make me feel like a dork." It sounds like a transparently targeted post-9/11 valentine to the Big Apple-- odd coming from an ex-pat. Inanities like "If you don't like my attitude/ Then you can eff off" are at least partly excused by Price's production, which builds from the beat up to incorporate rock elements that could be a nod to Brooklyn hipster dance punk.
Despite Price's best efforts to infuse these songs with motion and finesse, Confessions never quite reaches its earlier heights after "I Love New York". When Madonna actually starts confessing, the album loses its delicate balance between pop frivolity and spiritual gravity. "Now I can tell you about success, about fame," she intones at the end of "Let It Will Be", as if that's all she knows anymore. She proselytizes the Kabbalah on "Isaac", but despite the controversy that song has created, it's remarkable only for Price's two-note pendulum string sample and a hummed melody that could have been lifted from "Frozen".
The young Madonna pops up repeatedly on Confessions, a foil to her older self. "How High" plumbs the motives behind her headline- and crotch-grabbing behavior of yore, but it only reveals how deeply she has embedded herself into the establishment. The album title recalls her contentious relationship to Catholicism on "Papa Don't Preach" and "Like a Prayer", and that pop visionary subversiveness makes her reverence to the Kabbalah seem tame by comparison. There's no conflict between her and her new faith, so there's no journey. As Confessions weighs down with more of her personal baggage, the songs become, despite Price's inventive and mercurial production, less inviting and less danceable, as if Madonna wants the dance floor all to herself. | 2005-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. / Maverick | November 14, 2005 | 6.2 | ae76a2d1-d7b0-43d6-a8b5-c475dcb57728 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Pac NW coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, but this Portland-based singer shouldn't become lost in that crowd. | The Pac NW coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, but this Portland-based singer shouldn't become lost in that crowd. | Laura Gibson: Beasts of Seasons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12816-beasts-of-seasons/ | Beasts of Seasons | The Pacific Northwest coughs up folksy, understated singer-songwriters by the coffeehouseful, which puts Portland-based Laura Gibson at risk of getting lost in the crowd. That would be a shame: Gibson has more to offer than vague descriptors like "folksy" and "understated" would suggest, and besides, her music is far better suited to a fireplace and a cup of warm apple cider than to your local Starbucks. Raised in a tiny coastal town, the soft-spoken songstress inched quietly into the scene in 2006 with If You Come to Greet Me, her refreshingly homespun if sometimes staid full-length debut. At first blush, the follow-up, Beasts of Seasons, doesn't appear to mark a significant departure from its predecessor. But unravel its seemingly rudimentary façade and you'll find an affecting study in contrasts from a songwriter a good deal more sophisticated than she's generally willing to let on.
At the core of this study is a thematic concept of Gibson's own design. She's divided the record roughly in half; "Communion Songs" comprise the first part, while the second is made up of "Funeral Songs". Yet the two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive, a notion Gibson makes evident in the opening song, seven and a half minutes of gently cascading majesty entitled "Shadows on Parade". Apart from evoking the passage of time, the song's central image-- "I will watch the shadows on parade"-- suggests the solitude, repose, and even isolation of the lonely and the waiting. With Gibson's "parade" description, however, the solitary activity of shadow-watching becomes something contrastingly communal and celebratory, a point underscored by the sample of a distant drum corps and crowd she and producer Tucker Martine (the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Mudhoney) use to close out the song. It's the first of many little moments on the record that illustrate Gibson's willingness to see an image through at a time when a lot of similar songwriters are content to settle for what "feels good" or "sounds good" and move along.
Shadow-watching gives way to other pensive activities as Beasts continues: reminiscence, daydreams, diary-like appeals to an unnamed "other", and the meditations on mortality that mark the "Funeral" half of the record. "If these bare walls could sing," Gibson begins on the transitional track "Funeral Songs"-- is she still watching and waiting for something even after the sunset has extinguished that parade of shadows? Indeed, a line about a body "swaying like a drunkard" and a trio of ruminations on Gibson's mother, father, and sister on closing track "Glory" are among the few moments where we're transported from Gibson's head to someplace outside. Yet for all of the singer's insularity, she never sounds alone on Beasts of Seasons, thanks to a mostly exquisite array of backing arrangements courtesy of a host of PDX luminaries, including Laura Veirs, labelmate Shelly Short, and members of the Decemberists, M. Ward's band, Menomena, and Norfolk & Western. "Spirited", easily the record's liveliest track, gets a boost from a chorus of "OOH-ooh-OOH"s and booming percussion-work that keep things moving at a steady cantor, while "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?"'s fatalistic imagery rubs up against foreboding timpani rolls and chilly fiddle-playing that calls to mind Death bowing the buried to life in Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre.
As a singer, Gibson treats syllables with the same patience and loving precision a mosaic maker might put into cutting and arranging his/her tiles. It comes as little surprise, then, that words are a lyrical preoccupation of Gibson's throughout Beasts of Seasons. On "Come By Storm", the singer recalls how she "took great care with words," and, later, how she loses herself to them. "Spirited" finds her describing how "morning tends to... turn our words to smoke," while the aforementioned "Where Have All Your Good Words Gone?" has her grappling with the loss of a loved one by asking, "Where are all the pleasures from the timbre of your tongue?" Yet for all her talk of words, Gibson allows herself a fairly limited lexicon on Beasts of Seasons. If she knows some "good" ones like her sesquipedalian-prone onetime tourmate and fellow Portlander Colin Meloy, she wisely forgoes them in favor of repeated references to bodies and bones, trees and tongues, pictures, poems, and stories-- all of which lend the record a reflexivity that rewards repeat listens. | 2009-03-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-03-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Hush | March 17, 2009 | 7.2 | ae80663e-d409-4c38-b830-596409b00727 | Matthew Solarski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-solarski/ | null |
Reviving his dormant Micron Audio label, Detroit’s Sherard Ingram—also known as the chief architect of Urban Tribe—returns to the high-octane techno and electro that are his stock in trade. | Reviving his dormant Micron Audio label, Detroit’s Sherard Ingram—also known as the chief architect of Urban Tribe—returns to the high-octane techno and electro that are his stock in trade. | DJ Stingray 313: Molecular Level Solutions EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-stingray-313-molecular-level-solutions-ep/ | Molecular Level | “This music started around futurism,” Sherard Ingram told DJ Mag back in 2018. He was talking about the type of Detroit electro that Gerald Donald and the late, much-missed James Stinson had synthesized as Drexciya. But Ingram could also have been talking about the shapeshifting techno he made alongside Carl Craig, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, and others as the collective Urban Tribe, who spent the turn of the last century releasing increasingly explosive tracks on labels like Mo Wax, Rephlex, and Mahogani Music—the latter run by Moodymann, who taught Ingram how to DJ in the early 1980s. Or the dozens of releases of his own, after Drexcyia waved him in as their tour DJ and anointed him Drexycian DJ Stingray. Those tracks apply a scientific rigor to rhythm, distilling histories of Black music into politically minded dancefloor fuel. Over the last 30 years, Ingram has earned his place in history by staying on the move.
This year, Ingram—now known as DJ Stingray 313—has revived his Micron Audio label, with plans to reissue his storming 2012 album F.T.N.W.O. This is no nostalgia act, though. While Ingram could coast on his reputation, the label marks its relaunch with a new EP, Molecular Level Solutions, that kicks into instant overdrive.
“Bioplastics” feels streamlined yet integrates a massive number of components, from a kick drum that kicks up clouds of smoke to little melodies spattering like rain on a windshield. It passes through a few wind tunnels and peels off into the distance. Detroit techno has a long history with transportation, but Stingray here sounds uncommonly revved up.
Things get even rougher for “Carbon Neutral Fuels,” in which great clouds of dub techno ignite. Cymbals burst in hisses of white noise that sound positively iridescent. Two-thirds in, everything burns up and only a brutal kind of rattle remains. I had the very good fortune of hearing this on a very loud soundsystem on a hot summer afternoon a few months ago; it felt like the air inverted around me. “Construction Materials From Organic Waste” takes that rattle and hammers it into a teetering, vertiginous power station. It just works. Ingram once told The Wire that, while working in Detroit’s famed Buy Rite record store, he had an argument with Gerald Donald over an early Drexcyia song’s unusual arrangement, which made it tough to mix. The next day, James Stinson came in and they had the same argument. Stingray’s productions don’t have the uncanny funk Drexcyia’s oddness enabled. But a long faith in rationality has served him well: It takes discipline to sound this unhinged.
Closer “Enzymatic Detergents” rinses the EP in some tightly controlled reverb and delay, just enough to imply that things could go on forever. Its limber five minutes could easily work themselves into 10. But he shuts it down and moves on, right on time. Today, in a world where prospects seem so dim that even pessimism feels Pollyanna-ish, Stingray offers brutal beacons of hope. The future arrives each time you play it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Micron Audio | September 24, 2021 | 7.6 | ae820d70-5e24-4289-acd7-5b01accb72ce | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On his latest double album, the Vallejo vet remains free-flowing, wise, hilarious, and unstoppable. | On his latest double album, the Vallejo vet remains free-flowing, wise, hilarious, and unstoppable. | E-40: Practice Makes Paper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/e-40-practice-makes-paper/ | Practice Makes Paper | On record and in conversation, E-40 remains the same—free-flowing, wise, hilarious, and unstoppable. Ever since he emerged from Vallejo, California in the 1980s, he has churned out high-quality albums with ease. And yes, some of the 26 tracks on Practice Makes Paper, his 24th or 26th solo release, depending on how you keep count, are merely average, or at worst, trite. But nothing this man does is half-baked, and the most surprising thing about the latest multi-volume addition to an already-intimidating discography is that most of the songs are actually pretty good.
The sprawling double album is E-40’s follow-up to 2018’s lean, 38-minute The Gift of Gab. While that record kept a laser focus on the funk-influenced sounds 40 does best, Paper is considerably more ambitious, inviting artists from across the map to get hyphy. The guest list is dizzying: There are certified stars like Migos’ Quavo, Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross, and TDE’s ScHoolboy Q, but also Houston City Council candidate Scarface. The West Coast is well-represented, with G-Eazy, Ty Dolla $ign, Iamsu! from HBK, and the 20-year-old Compton MC Roddy Ricch, but so is Detroit (Tee Grizzley, Payroll Giovanni, and Sada Baby) and New York (Fabolous, Method Man, & A$AP Ferg).
Some of these collaborations bear ripe fruit. Payroll Giovanni’s stone-cold verse on “I Come From The Game” evokes E-40 compadre Too $hort. “Chase the Money,” (produced by... ChaseTheMoney) shows 40 flipping a Migos flow harder than his guest Quavo. On “I Don’t Like Em,” 40 recruits Bay area MCs Cousin Fik & Laroo to channel Chief Keef and Silky Johnson’s love for hating over a trapped-out G-funk beat.
Despite featuring dozens of different producers, the record is remarkably consistent. The most egregious misstep, “1 Question,” is a saccharine Chris Brown/Rick Ross/Jeremih collaboration that never should have been. “Bet You Didn’t Know” could’ve been a cute moment for E-40 to drop knowledge on youngsters were it not plagued by the only beat on the record that makes him sound old.
But it’s 40’s lyrical gifts that make him special. He understands the evolving nature of language and communication like few others, with constantly updated references that connect him with each new generation of rap fans. He fires off hysterical one-liners with aplomb (“Knock his tooth out, make ’em look like a cook at the Waffle House,” from “Another One”) and references his mentions (“Don’t @ Me”) and memes (“Make a hater cry like a Jordan meme,” he raps on “Imma Find Out”) with the same comfort with which he doles out sarcastic financial advice (“Should I buy it off the lot or should I lease and write it off?/Or pay cash like a rapper and watch the value decrease?” he muses on “In the Struggle”).
There have been plenty of legendary MCs who never figured out how to maintain relevance through middle age, awkwardly surfing trends or losing touch with reality completely. But 40 has persevered by staying within himself. “I make sure I don’t outdate myself,” he told Ebro on his Beats 1 show. “I stay within my jurisdiction, and whatnot, but I’m also me.” With dozens of albums under his belt, E-40 has had a lot of practice. It’s rarely perfect, but few others can make it sound as joyful. | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Heavy on the Grind | August 3, 2019 | 7.4 | ae82a9be-1729-4123-9b44-408865736117 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Male Bonding's surprise-released third LP is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. | Male Bonding's surprise-released third LP is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. | Male Bonding: Headache | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22542-headache/ | Headache | If time heals all wounds, as anybody who has ever suffered heartbreak has been reassured, that’s scant comfort when time won't move. On Male Bonding’s 2010 debut Nothing Hurts, a high watermark of the era’s fuzz-punk boom, the London trio stared at the clock, wondering when, exactly, the healing was supposed to begin. “Year’s not long,” singer/guitarist John Arthur Webb repeated to himself on the band’s breakthrough song, unconvincingly—because in the wake of trauma, a year is an eternity. On the band’s fuming third album Headache, Webb stops straining to find a bright side and just leans into the misery. Opener “Wrench” begins by laying out the kind of worst-case scenario that even the most dejected scorned lovers try to resist considering: What if 15 years pass and you still don’t feel any fucking better about things?
It’s been five years since Male Bonding’s last album, Endless Nothing, though it just as well could have been 15, given how off the radar they’ve been lately. At some point after that record, they split from Sub Pop, the label that aided their swift rise, and ceased touring. Their social media accounts sat dark for more than a year before they surprise-released Headache, and at this point even its existence does little to clarify whether they have or haven’t broken up. Releasing a new album for free, with no promotion or any live shows to support it, is the type of thing a band does when they’re over. The no-frills Facebook post announcing the record reads like a farewell note: “Have our third album for free—see ya.”
Was another Male Bonding record necessary after all these years? The band’s debut so effectively laid out their formula—fizzy hooks, neurotic tempos, 1990 production values—that there wasn’t much room to improve on it. Endless Nothing faced the same burden justifying itself, too, and good as it was, that album didn’t add much to their legacy, either. But then again, in the post-No Age age, where this kind of purist noise-rock generates a fraction of the interest it did just a half decade ago, Male Bonding have fallen so far from the public consciousness that they barely have a legacy to protect. There was nothing to lose by giving it another stab.
Perhaps the best thing about Headache, then, is the reminder that this band even existed in the first place, but the album stands on its own merits, too. Since the band once touted the youthful fallacy that nothing ever changes, there’s a curious poignance in hearing how they’ve aged—and, to be sure, they have aged. They’ve grown angrier, crankier and, fittingly, grungier. The boyish harmonies of Nothing Hurts are mostly gone; the band can still turn a hook, but they aren’t nearly as sweet or nimble as the old ones. There used to be something vaguely anti-gravitational about the band’s songs, a lightness, but these tunes hang low to the ground, collecting dirt.
What hasn’t changed is the emotional charge. If anything, Webb’s conviction comes across more pointedly than ever. “Why does this keep happening? I cannot feel the way I want to feel,” he shudders over helter-skelter guitars on “What’s Wrong?” On “Chipping Away,” a sloppy, half-finished sketch of a song, he curses his writer’s block, blaming it on his inability to move on from an estranged ex, but he saves his harshest accusation for the Dinosaur Jr.-heavy “I Would Say”: “Why did you leave when I needed help?”
So on the surface, Headache is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. It’s also about growing older and, for all the wear, still feeling like yourself, something that anybody who's been shocked to discover that they connect as deeply with In Utero in their 30s as they did as a teen can relate to. Sometimes there’s comfort in feeling sad, simply because it can remind us of times when we were younger and felt the same. Judging from these cloudy songs, Webb needs all the comfort he can get. “What deserts me cannot hurt me,” he sings on the closer “Out to Sea,” but once again, he’s deluding himself. It already has. | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | self-released | October 24, 2016 | 6.8 | ae82d657-55f6-4535-b6ae-4d11228c5741 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Reinvigorated with a whole host of new members, the metal outfit prove there's plenty of life left in their road-trip rock. | Reinvigorated with a whole host of new members, the metal outfit prove there's plenty of life left in their road-trip rock. | Black Mountain: Destroyer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-mountain-destroyer/ | Destroyer | Like a bitchin’ phoenix airbrushed on the side of a tricked-out ’78 Dodge B200 van, Black Mountain is a band always in the process of being reborn. Turnover has been almost constant in the metal outfit’s 15-year history, with each album boasting a slightly different lineup. Founding members Joshua Wells and Amber Webber left the group in 2016, shortly after the release of their fourth album, handily titled IV. That leaves frontman/chief songwriter Stephen McBean and keyboard player Jeremy Schmidt as the sole founding members, and that makes it all the more tempting to label this something like a solo project, one whose mission is to realize one man’s vision of heavy rock in the new millennium. But the remarkable thing is how much Black Mountain remains a band, how vital each member’s contributions are. What in the early 2010s looked like it might be a one-note project has pulled out of the skid to redefine itself and its relationship to crunch and riff.
Conceived and sequenced as a soundtrack to an epic desert road trip, Destroyer introduces a new gang of Black Mountaineers, most of whom are actually replacing Webber. That includes one singer, Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun, and three drummers: Adam Bulgasem of Dommengang, Kliph Scurlock formerly of the Flaming Lips, and Kid Millions from Oneida. Their version of the band has a lot less boogie but a lot more swamp, a lot more Frank Frazetta fantasy, a lot more majestic doom. As on IV, Jeremy Schmidt stands out as a co-writer and arranger, and his synths taunt McBean’s sludgy guitars, adding friction to the gnashing opener “Future Shade” and dystopian menace to “Closer to the Edge.”
As befits a band that imagines a Ballard-esque tower block as “the loneliest cock in the sky,” this version of Black Mountain have a healthy sense of the ridiculous, which is food of the gods where heavy guitars roam. McBean can deliver a line like, “One thousand horses form in a Flying V” with no smirk of irony and no Darkness-style in-joke. On one of the album’s gnarliest moments, he ends “Pretty Little Lazies” with a coda of menacing, tortured la la la’s, each one sounding more regurgitated than sung, his voice distorted with metal poisoning, like Zardoz puking up an arsenal of assault rifles.
Together, this iteration of Black Mountain allows the songs to take on new shapes: “Horns Arising” opens with a robotic voice delivering apocalyptic lyrics, breaks down into an ambient section that borrows liberally from Schmidt’s Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack, and finally ends with a fanfare that tries to raise the dead out of hell. It’s all the more bracing for being so unpredictable. Unfortunately, some of that energizing ridiculousness leaks out of Destroyer by its second side. The most memorable thing about “Boogie Lover” is its title, and “Licensed to Drive” goes nowhere but at least breaks the speed limit getting there. Just when it sounds like they’ve run out of gas, “FD 72” actually manages to keep this hotrod between the ditches. Wherever Black Mountain are headed, they’re not out of road yet. | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 29, 2019 | 7 | ae8db207-74ab-415a-a362-3ca4517116af | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The first full-length album from the British songwriter and producer Kyle Molleson is dark and dissonant, electronic rock that captures the thrum of cities and the solitude of the country. | The first full-length album from the British songwriter and producer Kyle Molleson is dark and dissonant, electronic rock that captures the thrum of cities and the solitude of the country. | Makeness: Loud Patterns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makeness-loud-patterns/ | Loud Patterns | Makeness is the name of a hilly ridge located south of Edinburgh, near the stone-barn studio where Kyle Molleson records his music. Certainly, the fact that the studio belongs to his father makes it an attractive (and presumably cost-effective) destination, but then Molleson is naturally at home in isolated spaces. Though he’s now based in London (following an extended stint in Leeds), he spent the first 11 years of his life growing up on a tiny island in the Scottish highlands, raised in a family of folk musicians. The dark, dissonant electronic rock he creates as Makeness bears little relation to those fife-band roots, but it is nonetheless emblematic of an artist who has spent his life adapting from rural to urban spaces and back again. Claustrophobic and expansive in equal measure, Makeness’ mélange of trembling melodies and strobe-lit intensity suggests a sheltered soul being exposed to inner-city life for the first time and absorbing the shocks to his system.
Loud Patterns isn’t just Molleson’s first full-length release as Makeness, it’s his first to make his vocals the central compositional feature after flirting with pop forms on two largely instrumental EPs. Molleson cites Caribou’s Swim as a transformative influence, in terms of demonstrating how concise songwriting and electronic experimentation can co-exist. Certainly, there are parallels to be drawn between Dan Snaith’s evolution and Molleson’s own: Makeness has followed Caribou’s path from hermetic solo studio savant to rock-band ringleader, and the two share a similarly soft, vaporous vocal style that infuses their productions with a vulnerable human core. But if the two artists work from similar blueprints, they use very different materials to realize their visions—where Caribou orbits the intersection of psychedelia and house, Makeness builds robust songs out of industrial and techno inputs.
Loud Patterns’ opening title track sets a tense, suffocating mood that rarely relents over the course of the album. “It’s a mess, but I’ve been told there’s no way out,” Molleson sings obliquely yet ominously—and, as such, he delights in piling on disorienting textures to give the impression of walls closing in. Throughout Loud Patterns, Molleson takes great care to build up his rhythmic motifs, only to do everything in his power to destabilize their foundations: He subjects the taut techno throb of “Gold Star” to a sustained laser-beam synth attack as if trying to blow up a boss-level spaceship in a videogame, while the 4/4 thrust of the instrumental “Rough Moss” is gradually overcome by blasts of distortion and brain-scrambling oscillations.
Though Molleson’s vocals are the most prominent feature of Loud Patterns, he’s not one for in-depth lyrical narratives—be it the haunted “Day Old Death” or the atypically playful bounce of “14 Drops,” he opts for minimalist phrasing and repeated incantations as if mimicking the looped vocal snippets on classic house records. But his melodic graces are given more room to flourish on “Stepping Out of Sync,” whose smooth chorus hook and luminous synths suggest Rhye’s sultry soul given a Junior Boys remix. Fitting for an album that frequently channels the foreboding atmosphere of Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, Loud Patterns yields a “Teardrop” to call its own in “Who Am I to Follow Love,” a tropical pop reprieve with a soothing guest vocal from Nancy Andersen of London indie-R&B group Babeheaven.
But for all the songwriting strides Molleson makes on Loud Patterns, the album’s carefully sculpted beatscapes ultimately result in a reactionary act of noise. The closing “Motorcycle Idling” is a most unsubtle display of truth in advertising, with a thundering barrage of distorted electronics that approximates the engine rev of a chopper. Molleson has said he enjoys recording out in the country because he doesn’t have to worry about pissing off any neighbors, and “Motorcycle Idling” is the most devious, gratuitous exercise of that freedom, with all the queasy undercurrents bubbling up throughout the record being unleashed in a dam-burst of woofer-blasting anarchy. Sometimes the best way to capture the clamor and chaos of the big city is to head out to the sticks. | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Secretly Canadian | April 10, 2018 | 7.2 | ae9020ce-c823-4ece-ab09-6500ccf3f8af | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The defining strength of the Oakland-based artist’s debut album is its mood: an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds. | The defining strength of the Oakland-based artist’s debut album is its mood: an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds. | Maria BC: Hyaline | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-bc-hyaline/ | Hyaline | Maria BC is a classically trained vocalist, a dexterous guitarist, and a songwriter with an innate gift for vast, stately melodies, but the defining strength of their music is the mood: an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds. The Oakland-based artist’s debut EP, Devil’s Rain, arrived in the dead of winter 2021, and its five songs—consisting entirely of electric guitar and vocals, recorded alone in their apartment, hushed so as not to disturb their roommates—had the feeling of a stripped-back demos collection from a 1980s dream-pop band. Ghostly and spare, the songs let you imagine how they might bloom if they were cleared of cobwebs and brought into the light.
Their full-length debut, Hyaline, doesn’t expand their approach. Instead, Maria BC further deconstructs and twists the music to feel even more vaporous. In the most fleshed-out songs, like the breathtaking “The Only Thing,” their voice and guitar are accompanied by distant whirring, layered harmonies, and clattering percussion—never quite reaching the peaks of a pop song but showing hints of what would be the emotional climax. “I find I can’t think back so far/Fogging up windows of cars,” they sing in the chorus, describing the limits of memory and offering a visual representation of how these songs feel: familiar and opaque, distant and bittersweet.
The abstract approach, ironically, brings us closer to the spirit of the music, helping the songs stick in your head. Maria BC has a knack for wordless hooks—the operatic ahs in “April,” the inquisitive huhs of “Rerun”—and they gravitate toward textures that reward a good pair of headphones: panting and whispers, clicks and scratches, amplifier fuzz and room tone. And while the lyrics are rarely the focal point and sometimes indecipherable, the strongest ones resonate without building to anything approaching a narrative. In “Good Before,” their depiction of an internal transformation is mirrored by a few key images: a locust swarm, the drift of stars, “traveling alone when the trees stretch dark in the morning light.”
Hyaline is a beautiful record, but these lines allude to an undercurrent of horror—the quality that, along with their subtly catchy songcraft, distinguishes Maria BC from other artists making dreamy ambient pop in the shadow of Grouper and Cocteau Twins. Occasionally, they outright summon ghosts. The clipped, orchestral stabs in “Keepsakes” suggest a scary film score, while their low, quivering vocals in “The Big Train” have the unnerving quality of someone either about to break into tears or a primal scream. As with the spectral performances on Devil’s Rain, Maria BC recorded Hyaline alone in their apartment. The difference is these songs refuse to stay still: They drift through the halls, restless and disoriented, drawing your attention to the unfilled space around them.
Accordingly, there are very few guests. Some friends add backing vocals and rhythmic accompaniment; their father plays organ. The latter appearance speaks to some of Maria BC’s formative memories, taking comfort in the communal intensity of church music. Sometimes, the hymn-like quality of their songs and the tragic, almost gothic delivery recalls the work of Sarah McLachlan in the ’90s, particularly her Fumbling Towards Ecstasy highlight “Fear,” whose stark opening verse is sung nearly a cappella in the highest reaches of her falsetto before the full arrangement kicks in. (Like McLachlan during this period, you can imagine Maria BC’s music, with its scene-setting lyrics and sweeping melodies, lending itself well to dance remixes.) For now, however, the solitude is the point, and the homespun setting is inextricable from the compositions. “I remember starting to write songs as a way of keeping myself company,” Maria BC explained of their earliest inspiration. On Hyaline, they push this inclination a step further, writing songs so the rest of us can close our eyes and brush up against them, to stand among them ourselves. | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | Father/Daughter / Fear of Missing Out | June 2, 2022 | 8.1 | aea61b2b-3cac-4709-aee6-4e7f7ed26b13 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Blackalicious' Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are among the most diligent and reverent technicians in hip-hop, so it feels ... | Blackalicious' Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are among the most diligent and reverent technicians in hip-hop, so it feels ... | Blackalicious: The Craft | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/788-the-craft/ | The Craft | Blackalicious' Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are among the most diligent and reverent technicians in hip-hop, so it feels oddly appropriate that their third album, The Craft, should bear such a workmanlike title. Painstakingly detail-oriented and lyrically dense, the record is another labor of love that puts as much emphasis on the labor as on the love. With an ambitious expanse that falls somewhere between the eclectic sprawl of 2000's Nia and the more-streamlined funk of 2002's Blazing Arrow, it appears as if every square inch of The Craft has been fussed over to such an extent that Blackalicious's calculated risks and controlled experiments can sometimes make the album seem more science project than artwork.
Following the release of Blazing Arrow, both group members spent time with other projects-- Gift of Gab with his 2004 solo album 4th Dimensional Rocketships Going Up and Xcel with his underappreciated Lateef and the Chief collaboration Maroons: Ambush. And evidently this time apart allowed the two to approach their partnership rejuvenated and ready for some serious woodshedding, as they reportedly recorded dozens of tracks before pruning down to these relatively lean 14 songs. Despite this strenuous editing process, however, The Craft can remain a frustratingly uneven listen. Brimming with confidence, the duo plows through ideas both familiar and novel. Fans of the group's previous work-- and of Solesides/Quannum-related material in general-- will find treats within The Craft's many folds, but its irregular terrain will likely prevent consensus about which tracks represent the peaks and which the troughs.
The most noteworthy change to Blackalicious' sound is a pronounced increase of live instrumentation. On paper, the extensive use of live drums, guitars, and strings might seem a nod toward creating more conventional songs, but in practice this blend has unquestionably resulted in some of the weirdest tracks of the group's career. Xcel integrates the instruments so seamlessly into his samples that it's often difficult to pinpoint what's what. On opener "World of Vibrations" the mix segues abruptly from the song's daffy, almost Joe Meek-like chorus into a sultry breakdown of rippling guitars, impassioned female vocals, and shimmering dub effects; it's an interlude as beguiling as it is unexpected.
Much more straightforward is "Powers", the album's effervescent first single. With its bouncy layers of new-wave guitars, strange Manfred Mann keyboards, and Go! Team exclamations, this track resembles an outtake from a failed hip-hop Broadway revue, but is salvaged by Gift's adroit melodic work on the verses and Xcel's rubber-limbed production. Even better are adventurous tracks like "Side to Side", which features Lateef and Pigeon John exchanging verses with Gift of Gab over a loony, oboe-fed sway, the unrelenting pound of "Egosonic War Drums", or the bracing prison reform drama "The Fall and Rise of Elliott Brown", which is fortified by Xcel's well-doctored horn samples.
Throughout the album Gift of Gab showcases his still-astonishing verbal dexterity and enunciation, chiseling every syllable into the pavement despite rarely breaking from a full sprint. But if you've tired of his "I still think abstract/ Stay metaphysical/ And challenge what is really real" act in the past, it's unlikely that anything here will alter your viewpoint, particularly on tracks like "Rhythm Sticks" where he resorts to the tired riff of spelling out the name Blackalicious. ("...A is for the absolute that dwells everywhere you can't see/ C is for creating...") Such missteps aside, Gabby is at his most persuasive when he slows down a bit and lets the game come to him, especially on autobiographical numbers like "My Pen & Pad" or the set-closing title track. And though these numbers must overcome some threadbare "This ain't music, it's my life" clichés, there can be little doubting the emotional heft in Gift's delivery, or in the inspired connections that Blackalicious manage to discover whenever they're hard at work together. | 2005-09-29T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2005-09-29T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Rap | Anti- | September 29, 2005 | 7.4 | aea77249-7ead-444c-8082-8e900c01e861 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
T-Pain’s first album in six years cashes in on the good graces he’s received in the interim, but also retreads vastly familiar territory that is more fun than illuminating. | T-Pain’s first album in six years cashes in on the good graces he’s received in the interim, but also retreads vastly familiar territory that is more fun than illuminating. | T-Pain: Oblivion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/t-pain-oblivion/ | Oblivion | It’s somewhat unbelievable that T-Pain would ever feel the need to reintroduce himself, but here we are. Six years removed from his last proper album, he opens Oblivion in grand fashion, kicking open the casket at his own funeral. He offers his gratitude to loyal fans and fuck-yous to those who wrote him off—all before he settles into his lead verse with a succinct reminder of his resume: “I hit the Billboards with a baseball bat.”
The charismatic “rappa ternt sanga” dropped his debut single “I’m Sprung” in 2005, setting off the Midas touch era of T-Pain. His signature Auto-Tuned voice landed in the the Hot 100 over 30 times in a five-year period, and everyone from Kanye West to Black Eyed Peas adopted their own renditions. It feels like a musical lifetime has passed since then, but nostalgia and excitement still follow him wherever he goes. The wave crested with his 2014 Tiny Desk concert when a portion of the world learned T-Pain can actually sing without digital assistance. The moment spawned a brief acoustic tour this year and, probably, a glimmer of hope that Oblivion would follow suit. Instead, it finds him channeling the ghosts of past. Nearly every song sounds like it could've been a smash several years ago which is, both, admirable and disappointing.
On the one hand, his ability to churn out earworms remains untarnished. The selection is everything T-Pain does best: intoxicating computerized crooning mixed with gratuitous sex and flash. On the other, there’s the admittedly unreasonable expectation that one of Rap&B’s most influential artists would hint at the genre’s next horizon or, at the very least, his own. While there may be a few seeds here, Oblivion settles mostly in his established wheelhouse. Songs like “Straight” and “2 Fine” are low-stakes affairs that find T-Pain playing around with his assorted vocals, flows, and ad-libs—it’s genuinely fun. But his ingenuity shines brightest on the Mr. Talkbox-assisted standout “May I.” Running like two passionate robots serenading a jazz lounge, it is the peak use of a computer to make the voice an instrument unto itself—nearly eight minutes of finesse that only T-Pain could pull off.
Oblivion’s most unexpected feature is its mix of sub-genres that T-Pain chameleons himself into perfectly. From trap rap (“Goal Line”) to Latin-flavored pop (“No Rush”) to the percussive lands of go-go (“Cee Cee From DC”), it’s almost like a best-of but with all new music. In his grasp, the respective genres end up sounding poppier rather than like true interpretations, but it's nice to hear an artist push his own creative boundaries—even if the source material is a bit watered down. There’s a masterpiece somewhere in the colors of all these disparate sounds if only it were trimmed just a bit more.
As such, Oblivion feels like a “business decision” album: it’s a casual affair that frees him from his label obligation to RCA. It isn’t exactly phoned in, but T-Pain has more in his tank than what he shows here, even though the tracks that reflect his past eras display his versatility and allow for optimistic glimpses of a career resurgence. The free-spirited energy that earned him ubiquity a decade ago remains intact despite his fall from glory. This album reflects the best of what we know of him, but the unknown remains the most intriguing. Projected ambitions aside, this release typifies just how ahead of his time he was and how much those melodic blurred lines influenced the generations that followed—sing-raps can‘t be fully attributed to him, but he certainly played a substantial part. The genre fluidity he shows here helped lay the foundation for artists to come. And even in a landscape that outgrew him or outran him or both, Oblivion T-Pain sounds like a teacher who still feels welcome in his own classroom, and he’s owed at least that. | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | RCA | December 2, 2017 | 6.7 | aeaaa8b6-17b9-476b-adcf-b39095b578b3 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
null | The first time you hear the Twilight Sad, a four-piece band from just outside Glasgow, they already sound familiar. It's like they've been around a while, even though their debut EP only came out last September. You might think of Arab Strap's Aiden Moffett when hearing singer James Graham because he's got a feel for concrete imagery and does nothing to hide his thick Scottish accent. Shoegaze comes to mind because guitarist Andy MacFarlane favors billowy curtains of white noise that dominate the sound field. And, as Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan has already pointed out, the Twilight Sad sometimes bring | The Twilight Sad: Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10111-fourteen-autumns-and-fifteen-winters/ | Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters | The first time you hear the Twilight Sad, a four-piece band from just outside Glasgow, they already sound familiar. It's like they've been around a while, even though their debut EP only came out last September. You might think of Arab Strap's Aiden Moffett when hearing singer James Graham because he's got a feel for concrete imagery and does nothing to hide his thick Scottish accent. Shoegaze comes to mind because guitarist Andy MacFarlane favors billowy curtains of white noise that dominate the sound field. And, as Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan has already pointed out, the Twilight Sad sometimes bring to mind U2, with their shared fondness for huge choruses that occasionally verge on histrionic.
All that said, the Twilight Sad are pushing these familiar elements in some unexpected and exciting directions. Graham may sound a bit like Moffett but he doesn't sing about getting wrecked in the pub while trying to forget. His focus is primarily the concerns of adolescence, and he even narrows it down to a specific age. In the first line of the key track "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", Graham sings "...14, and you know..." and you want to stop him right there. (Fourteen. Yes, we know how awful it can be.) But what follows is a portrait of a miserable kid that's both touching and cathartic. Graham sounds angry, with sarcastic barbs about a "loving mother" and a "lovely home," but "That Summer..." is anything but a tantrum. He's got about four different levels to his voice in the song, from a calm articulation to a throat-shredding wail, but he's never so clouded by rage that he forgets the details.
And the details are what make the track, and the album, so compelling. The song titles suggest a writer trying to find the profound in the mundane, and in that way they remind me a bit of the Clientele, even though the tone couldn't be more different. There's lots of weather, elements like earth and fire. There are train rides and long walks to nowhere that offer plenty of time to think. "Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard" reads one, and the structure, a canon of Graham's multi-tracked voice swirling around a single piano chord that sounds like the opening of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for My Man", reflects the sadness streaked with hope. In "Walking for Two Hours", Graham sings about being "so far from home" as bass drum, crash cymbal, and guitar strums merge into a tightly coiled implosion that drives the loneliness home.
The shifts in volume, though not exactly surprising, are crucial. Peter Katis and the band produced, and the sonic arc they construct tracks the lyrics beautifully. There's a "big moment" on most songs where the music gets ridiculously loud and the guitar distortion crowds almost everything out. There is, of course, no trick in this sort of surge; a couple clicks on a floor pedal is all it takes. But the Twilight Sad know how to use dynamic range to advance the plot.
With songs so direct and the band's hearts on their sleeves, the music's debt to shoegaze only goes so far. Instead of tying the overdriven fuzz to a blissed-out sense of surrender to noise, the Twilight Sad uses the guitar as another kind of yell. The instrumental title track closing the record touches on My Bloody Valentine's "glide" guitar drone, but the almost martial drumming, with the snare seemingly vibrated by the guitar amp, keeps the track intimate and grounded. And when the band gets ethereal, it's in a loose, folky way, as with the braid of ringing guitar sounding during the coda of "Talking With Fireworks/ Here, It Never Snowed." Regular use of accordion, also played by MacFarlane, imparts an appropriately street-level earthiness to the sound.
As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over. If one were to consider only the widescreen sound while scanning the titles, you might think the Twilight Sad were overwrought and sappy, another example of a band overly concerned with childhood, too young to know how good they really had it. But that's not the way these songs come across at all. The Twilight Sad approach the darker side of growing up with consideration and dignity, and manage to maintain a proper perspective. "As my bones grew, they did hurt/ They hurt really bad," an angst-filled songwriter from another generation once sang; the Twilight Sad do a tremendous job of remembering that ache. | 2007-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | FatCat | April 12, 2007 | 8.6 | aeaf3970-a47f-4dcc-80e1-92f6c8fe7593 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Harlem veteran’s long-promised collaboration with producer A-Trak is a laid-back shot of charisma. | The Harlem veteran’s long-promised collaboration with producer A-Trak is a laid-back shot of charisma. | Cam’ron / A-Trak: U Wasn’t There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camron-u-wasnt-there/ | U Wasn’t There | You won’t see Cam’ron jacking trends or chasing clout these days. Forget recruiting Fivio Foreign to administer the drill treatment—Cam’s still laying down records that feel half art installation, half in-joke. He’s not going to clip his rhythmically complex bars to introduce more languid melodies when he can drop classic Cam diction by rhyming “lump sum” with “yum yum.” He’s settled into life as a rap veteran by eschewing what’s in vogue to make music that feels designed to please exactly one person: Cameron Giles himself. Though his output has slowed, he’s still tremendously fun when he raises his head above the purple parapet.
U Wasn’t There, Cam’s first full-length since 2019’s joyous Purple Haze 2, is a joint project with beatmaker A-Trak after their promised Federal Reserve EP failed to materialize. A few of these songs have likely been on A-Trak’s hard drive in various forms for a while: The pair’s 2014 single “Dipshits,” featuring Juelz Santana and some Just Blaze & the Blazettes drums, helps to pad out a still-lean 27-minute runtime. But the out-of-time nature of the production means the record doesn’t feel past its sell-by date.
A-Trak has been a useful ambassador of old forms in the past—a turntable champion who was once recruited as a Jam Master Jay surrogate to help Run-D.M.C. hawk Adidas. Here, his role is to deliver pitched-up soul sample-leaning beats to one of the greatest rappers to ever flow over pitched-up soul sample-leaning beats. A chipmunk’d vocal loop squawks the title of single “All I Really Wanted,” to which Cam responds with his list of rap game fundamentals: “Money, cars, clothes, hood respect.” The triumphant brass of “Ghetto Prophets,” co-produced by DJ Khalil and Lakim, resuscitates a form of orchestral street rap from the 2000s—think “Cam’s gon’ give it to ya!”
His writing is still sharp, funny, naturally ridiculous. The “Hard Knock Life”-esque piano line of “Cheers” gives it a relaxed, back-in-the-day vibe, yet Cam eschews nostalgia to complain about a girl correcting him for liking too many of her social media snaps. “I liked the picture ’cause I liked the picture,” he objects. On “All I Really Wanted,” Cam delivers a typically unconventional warning to potential hostiles: “Dying’ll make you way more famous than your publicist.” There’s no overhanging concept or deeper intent to U Wasn’t There’s boasts and threats: It’s just a pure shot of charisma.
The laid-back nature of the album invites Cam to consider some career highlights. On “What You Do,” he remembers challenging Fox News on their own platform, revealing his famously inflexible anti-snitching rules to Anderson Cooper, beefing with Nas, and purchasing some of the most opulent pink items ever conceived. He also uses the song to repeat boorish claims about Monica Lewinsky, probably the album’s nadir. And while we already knew that Cam’s voice is showing signs of weathering, it’s still a vital instrument. His increasingly heavy vocal style hangs over the hot, crunchy reggae of “Dipset Acrylics,” leaning into a half-patois and stuffing vibrant wordplay, internal rhyme patterns, and a nod to old collaborator Kanye West into a bar like, “You superficial, I’m super-official/Coupe to coupe, still I be on the stoop with a pistol/And I got it, who need meth, I’m still moving the crystal.”
Then there’s the presence of Damon Dash, who serves as one of the album’s executive producers. On “Dame Skit,” he leans back in his chair and takes stock of his three-decade journey with Cam: “We had dreams and we made ’em come true. And now we have more dreams—there is no ceiling, the sky is the limit.” There’s nothing revolutionary about this all-time great egoist gassing himself up, but it’s comforting to hear Dame (51) and Cam (46) still dreaming, still focused. It underlines the warm feeling of familiarity that U Wasn’t There elicits. “We looking overseas,” says Dame. “Or rather, over galaxies.” | 2022-09-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Electronic | Empire | September 28, 2022 | 7 | aeb08625-a8fc-4099-91b7-40dd74b78de3 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The drummer builds on the transnational foundations of his last ambitious album, making the case for global citizenship and international solidarity through culture-spanning music. | The drummer builds on the transnational foundations of his last ambitious album, making the case for global citizenship and international solidarity through culture-spanning music. | Sunny Jain: Phoenix Rise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunny-jain-phoenix-rise/ | Phoenix Rise | On last year’s Wild Wild East—Sunny Jain’s first album for Smithsonian Folkways—the Red Baraat bandleader recast the quintessential American cowboy in the image of the immigrant, a tribute to the courage and tenacity it takes to uproot yourself and build a new life in a new country. Drawing from disparate influences, Jain wove together an audacious soundtrack for this multi-cultural reboot of one of America’s most cherished myths. On his follow-up release, Phoenix Rise, he builds on those transnational foundations to make a new case for global citizenship and international solidarity, once popular ideas that have fallen out of fashion in these times of resurgent nationalism.
Written and recorded against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the turbulent end to the Trump era, Phoenix Rise is breathtaking in the sweep of its ambition, spanning continents and centuries of musical tradition. The list of collaborators is impressive and diverse, a multicultural constellation of talent from the worlds of jazz, hip-hop, soul, rock, Punjabi folk, Hindustani classical, Zimbabwean mbira, and even kathak dance.
When it clicks, Phoenix Rise’s combination of technical brilliance and grand concept is electric. The compositions whirl their way through a multitude of sounds and genres, performing head-spinning feats of musical acrobatics with grace. On the title track, Jain’s trademark dhol holds down a steady rhythm as Lauren Sevian’s free-form saxophone unfurls in smoky spirals that circle gently rising vocals. A minute in, the rhythm picks up pace as Marc Carey’s discordant keys add an element of conflict and tension to the mix. The track then quickly builds up to a fire-and-brimstone crescendo, the long-awaited moment of spiritual renewal that is at the heart of the record.
Written in solidarity with the global LGBTQIA community, “Pride in Rhythm” is a jungle-paced percussive piece that offers a fresh take on a classic Asian Underground staple. Vijay Iyer’s oddly sinister synth lines snake their way through the rhythmic maelstrom thrown up by the dhol and mridangam. The aggressive machismo of the dhol is offset by a rhythmic structure that evokes the expressive grace and beauty in motion of kathak dance, weaving endless permutations and combinations over a repetitive rhythmic motif.
Another highlight is “Where Is Home?, written while vocalist Shilpa Ananth was temporarily stranded in Dubai on her way home to New York from India. Joe Russo’s drums and John Falsetto’s glittering mbira lock in together and provide a foundation of Ananth’s Tamil vocals that drip with longing and melancholy. It's a powerful meditation on community and belonging, elevated by the emotive power of Ananth’s voice.
But, as on Wild Wild East, Jain’s lofty aims can occasionally be too much weight for the songs to bear. Perhaps the worst offender in this regard is opener and lead single “Heroes,” an ode to ordinary people all around the world fighting for social, economic, and environmental justice. The song starts off promisingly, with the mbira and drums setting a bright, jaunty tempo matched by Tawanda Mapanda’s smooth tenor saxophone. But the trouble starts when John Falsetto’s lilting shona vocals give way to Malik Work’s well-meaning but painfully on-the-nose rhymes. Clunkers like “every activist that be activating out in the streets” only serve to highlight the awkwardness of the lyrics, like a student activist proclaiming their ideals with such straight-faced earnestness that it’s hard to take them seriously.
Its dense web of transcultural collaborations makes Phoenix Rise a thrilling, unpredictable ride, but occasionally Jain overdoes it, stuffing the tracks so full of twists and turns that they sometimes feel disorienting, even claustrophobic (although the songs are short enough that the feeling quickly passes). “Say It” features Arooj Aftab singing “Black Lives Matter, say it” in Urdu, a mantra she repeats over and over, a plaintive invocation of our shared humanity. Initially, Jain’s amphetamine rhythm and Bubby Lewis’s electric bass add a jittery edge to the track that complements the meditative beauty of Aftab’s vocals. But he keeps adding on layers of keys, violin, and dhol that by the time the bass solo comes in, I find myself wishing some of Aftab’s minimalism had rubbed off on Jain.
Still, Phoenix Rise succeeds far more often than it stumbles, offering up a treasure trove of pleasures both cerebral and emotional. My favorite moment of the album is when the frantic chaos of “Wild Wild East (Recharged)” gives way to “Hai Apna Dil,” a re-work of a 1958 Bollywood song about unrequited love. Jain enlists his wife, Sapana Shah, to play the duff, while their two daughters sing in lightly accented Hindi. The song invokes both the joyful campfire sing-along and the evergreen South Asian tradition of embarrassing your kids by making them perform at family gatherings. In an album full of songs about fighting the good fight, “Hai Apna Dil” is an important reminder of what we’re all fighting for—a world full of warmth, community, and camaraderie.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sinj | May 27, 2021 | 6.8 | aeb39974-e7bd-474e-ae05-d5ab64ad4b75 | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
Writing for a five-person group with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi at its center, the composer-guitarist finds fresh inspiration slipping between diverse genres and songwriting modes. | Writing for a five-person group with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi at its center, the composer-guitarist finds fresh inspiration slipping between diverse genres and songwriting modes. | Mary Halvorson: Code Girl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-halvorson-code-girl/ | Code Girl | Mary Halvorson’s ambition has followed a clear trajectory. On albums designed as showcases for her own tunes, the experimental guitarist has steadily added additional instrumentalists to her crew, beginning with a power trio, early in her career, and winding up with a group of eight players on 2016’s Away With You. As Halvorson has developed her skill as an arranger, her varied interests in jazz, rock, and other styles have found new ways to interact. When all her influences click into place, the result is like little else, in any genre. The pileup of melody often feels luxuriously imaginative, instead of complicated for its own sake.
Even after some unexpected moves, such as her solo covers album, it’s always seemed reasonable to expect this bandleader to keep fielding ever larger groups. But it turns out that increasing the number of chairs on stage isn’t Halvorson’s only strategy for pushing herself. Her latest record, Code Girl, introduces a new band of the same name, and this time, she’s back to writing for only five players. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara and bassist Michael Formanek are longtime collaborators. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, usually heard playing on the Blue Note label, is a more recent associate. But more than any other member of the group, it’s vocalist Amirtha Kidambi who helps Code Girl feel like a fresh aesthetic zone for the guitarist.
The singer’s creative practice is impressive in its range. Trained in the South Indian Carnatic tradition, Kidambi is an artist you might also find interpreting a Nina Simone song as part of a contemporary opera festival’s takeover of a New York City mall. Elder Ones, a fiery and focused group that Kidambi leads, has an incantatory power that distinguishes it within New York’s improv-noise community. She is a perfect fit for Halvorson’s arrangements, which often thrive on internal contrasts. When the leader’s guitar progressions turn ominous, in the final minutes of “My Mind I Find in Time,” Kidambi unleashes some galvanizing melisma that slices through the gloom.
She can also blend into the group. “The Unexpected Natural Phenomenon” starts out in mournful melodic territory that Kidambi observes with chill solemnity, but when Halvorson lets rip with some wild lines, the vocalist follows with finely controlled yowls and raspy vocalizations that fit the new mood of abandon. And before a field of grungy distortion hits, during “Possibility of Lightning,” the group’s initial, sprightly approach is matched by some of Kidambi’s most playful phrasing.
The potential of the entire ensemble seems to fire Halvorson’s imagination. Over the course of this double album, she pursues a few songwriting modes that are new to her catalog. The mordant balladry of “Accurate Hit” is a sound Kim Deal could love. The opening stomp of “Drop the Needle” aligns with the world of new-classical groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, or Buke and Gase.
There’s also plenty of the improvisational intensity that fans of modern jazz have come to expect from a Halvorson project. In his solo during “Pretty Mountain,” Akinmusire ventures some harsh textures on his trumpet while managing to keep Halvorson’s melody in view. And no matter the number of twists each song proposes, the rhythm section sounds as brilliant with the guitarist as they do in Thumbscrew, their collaborative trio.
Halvorson’s lyrics manage the difficult task of wearing Beat poetry’s influence without seeming like a pale imitation. Crucially, ambiguity doesn’t seem like a placeholder for absent meaning. There are often clearly identifiable emotional stakes here, even when the narrative particulars are obscured. The first song of the album turns noticeably on the line, “Status is an obstacle”—a phrase that might come easily to someone whose career has taken off over the last decade. But in a group, and on an album, that goes by the name Code Girl, words aren’t meant to say everything. The pleasure of this kind of text comes from the way it invites active listening as a means of interpretation. | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Firehouse 12 | March 30, 2018 | 8.1 | aec538ee-d925-460a-8989-f267abf6ea0e | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
This set from Rhino Handmade augments the former Big Star member's posthumous collection of solo material with an extra disc of alternate versions and mixes. | This set from Rhino Handmade augments the former Big Star member's posthumous collection of solo material with an extra disc of alternate versions and mixes. | Chris Bell: I Am the Cosmos [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13498-i-am-the-cosmos-deluxe-edition/ | I Am the Cosmos [Deluxe Edition] | History is written by the winners, but in the case of Big Star it's the losers-- the quiet obsessives, the hopeless romantics "in love with that song" (to quote Paul Westerberg)-- who kept the band's legacy alive under the threat of perpetual obscurity. Certainly Big Star itself (current iteration aside) didn't really last long enough to bask in any belated good will. Alex Chilton's writing partner Chris Bell was gone by the time the band released its second album, 1974's Radio City, and by the next year Chilton had essentially pulled the plug on the group, leaving behind a few loose ends later collected as the once-abandoned, later-resuscitated masterpiece Third/Sister Lovers.
Bell died in a car accident not long after that album's eventual 1978 release. Prone to serious depression and chemical indulgence, he began fitfully working on solo material as soon as he exited Big Star (though he reportedly participated in at least some of the Radio City sessions), and if there was every reason to expect good things from him, Big Star's own bad luck was indication enough he'd have just as much trouble getting people to hear it. In fact, it wasn't until Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers showed up on shelves (however haphazardly) that Bell made his solo bow: the single "I Am the Cosmos" backed with "You and Your Sister", songs coincidentally (or not) steeped in the same sense of sadness and loss that marked Big Star's swan song.
That's all most heard of Bell's solo work until 1992, when Rykodisc compiled his extant studio material on I Am the Cosmos, which fittingly showed up alongside a spiffy definitive reissue of the scattershot Third/Sister Lovers and followed some renewed interest in Bell's writing (This Mortal Coil covered both "I Am the Cosmos" and "You and Your Sister" on 1991's Blood, the latter song sung by then-Breeders Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly). It turned out that Bell, between demo sessions, working in his parents' restaurant, gigging around Europe with various pick-up bands, and dealing with his ongoing depression, had amassed more than enough strong material to make him a cult hero, almost akin to an American analog of Nick Drake, another struggling songwriter lost too soon but unearthed and embraced later (thanks, in no small part, to his own reissues).
Granted, Bell never got his Volkswagen moment, and admittedly he remains on the cultier end of the cult act spectrum. Case in point: while Big Star gets its own four-disc Rhino boxed set, an expanded reissue of Bell's I Am the Cosmos gets relegated to Rhino's Handmade imprint. It's there for people to buy it, but only if they know where to look first. In some ways it's almost fitting that, finally given his moment in the spotlight, he's stationed just left of the bright beam, still illuminated but not totally out of the shadows, either.
But seeing as the original CD issue of I Am the Cosmos was, by necessity, cobbled together from Bell's remains, what, exactly, was left in the vaults? The new reissue features the original album (as such) on the first disc, 12 songs presented in a slightly re-sequenced order. To call most of these songs "down" would be as unjustly reductive as calling Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers "depressing." It may be true on one level, but it fails to get at the soulful essence that makes Bell so special.
Back in Big Star, Chilton and Bell shared a "Chilton/Bell" writing credit, but that was as illusory as "Lennon/McCartney." Away from Big Star, Bell's solo work proves him Chilton's equal, or at least equally inclined toward a sort of melancholy but melodic proto power-pop (the "pop" part echoing the Beatles, of course, but with the emphasis on "power," at least in terms of the emotions it contains and evokes). Here, "Better Save Yourself" hangs heavy and haggard, and Bell's vocals on "Look Up" are downright heartbreaking, giving songs such as it, "Though I Know She Lies" and "There Was a Light" the same sense of shaky, tragic inevitability that pervades Third/Sister Lovers. "Speed of Sound", "Get Away", "I Got Kinda Lost", and "Make a Scene" surely could have found a place in Big Star's oeuvre, too, given their due in the studio.
The second disc is where the barrel scraping begins, but to the set's credit, much of what's included-- 15 tracks, all but two previously unreleased-- actually helps expand the history of Bell and Big Star. Yes, the bulk comprises alternate versions and mixes (including a version of "Get Away" featuring Chilton on guitar), but as with the rarities on Big Star's box, the different perspective proves an invaluable annex to the band's limited catalog (just as fleeting captures of Bell's slow, Southern drawl of a speaking voice proves a fascinating contrast to his sharp, British Invasion-inflected singing voice). Fleshing out the still oddly incomplete Big Star portrait are a few tracks from Bell's pre-Big Star bands Icewater and Rock City (whose early version of "My Life Is Right", essentially the same as Big Star's version, underscores Bell's talents), subsequent collaborations with Memphis scene fixtures Keith Sykes and Nancy Byran, and a sleepy solo instrumental, "Clacton Rag".
"There were cool things all over Chris' tapes," said Ardent Studios engineer Adam Hill recently in the Memphis Flyer, referring to "Clacton Rag". "I found one thing they weren't initially gonna put on the Cosmos reissue, this acoustic guitar demo that theoretically could've been cut anytime, although I think it dates to the mid- or late-70s. No vocals, just pure Chris." Considering that Bell's tragically limited life and output precludes a fuller portrait, this edition of I Am the Cosmos comes closest to capturing "just pure Chris" as we're likely ever going to get. | 2009-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Rhino | September 29, 2009 | 7.9 | aec7b952-4402-42a8-b45a-89d15d3f7f17 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
As he explores the banalities and oddities of tour, Kristian Matsson seeks answers to a bigger question: How best should he move through the landscape of his life? | As he explores the banalities and oddities of tour, Kristian Matsson seeks answers to a bigger question: How best should he move through the landscape of his life? | The Tallest Man on Earth: I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-tallest-man-on-earth-i-love-you-its-a-fever-dream/ | I Love You. It's a Fever Dream. | Last summer, Kristian Matsson lamented that steady touring had slowed the arrival of I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream., his fifth album as the Tallest Man on Earth. “I can’t write good stuff on tour,” he complained. “I can’t write about life on a tour bus.” Ironically, Fever Dream arrives as a focused and frequently lovely rumination on life lived on a tour bus. Songs unfold in hotel bars, on open roads, beneath vast blue bowls of rural sky. The rhythms of perpetual travel pulse beneath acoustic melodies that lie somewhere between Dylan and Sufjan—a few gentle, a few forceful. With depth and delicacy, Matsson explores the banalities and oddities of tour, like the phenomenon of performing for an adoring audience to whom you are a stranger.
If Matsson’s last album, 2015’s Dark Bird Is Home, was a sharp, urgent diegesis of divorce, Fever Dream represents the dull aftermath of separation. How, he asks, should he now move through the landscape of his life? Is it best to remain in familiar places, where painful reminders mingle with the comforting residue of what once was? Or is the answer terra incognita, where familiarity can neither sting nor console?
Matsson engages with these questions on each of Fever Dream’s 10 songs. He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows. “Hotel Bar” spans from Brooklyn to southern Africa, where he imagines himself as a cheetah, scaling a “shaky tree” in search of friends on the savannah. Sometimes, he is trapped beneath the sky; sometimes, he imagines, he is the sky. He stumbles through a featureless dark on “There’s a Girl,” and recedes “deep into the forest” on “I’m a Stranger Now,” wondering if anyone else feels “just like a map of where you’ve been.” To end a partnership is, in effect, to depart from the home you made in another person. The daily churn of the tour bus only compounds the problem. Constant travel makes real the emotional disorientation of divorce.
We hear, too, of the less perceptible effects of this lifestyle. On the stand-out “I’m a Stranger Now,” Matsson sings of himself as such; on the following song, he becomes a ghost, expanding the anonymity of road life past alienation and towards something more like death. “Why do the hours disappear when I speak so loving of where I have been?” he sings on “Waiting for My Ghost.” Even in his present, he seems captive to fond recollections of the past. He yearns, more than anything, “for my ghost to return”; failing that, he hopes to learn from his suffering. On “There’s a Girl,” he aches for a new love to liberate him: “She will find me in the dark, where I used to stumble/And then I won’t be there no more.” The slippage in tenses is an impressive lyrical feint, gliding from future to past to the final, subtle admission that he is still, presently, in the dark.
Matsson’s music mirrors his lyrical themes. Though he remains devoted to sparse arrangements of guitar, banjo, and harmonica, these songs begin to veer into more adventurous territory. “Hotel Bar” introduces a horn section, and “The Running Styles of New York” is bookended by momentary blips of electronics. These new elements are deployed sparingly and selectively, a sprinkle of salt to draw new flavor from familiar sound. Tempos vary, too, from raucous stomping to slow, plaintive fingerpicking—as if he’s stretching, sprinting, growing fatigued, slowing down. As in his words, he wrestles with the question of where to go, and how quickly.
Listening to Fever Dream recalls Joanna Newsom’s observation about the moment she decided to marry Andy Samberg. “It was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life,” she said. “The idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose.” Real love, she said, “contains death inside of it,” and death, in turn, “contains love inside of it.” Divorce is not death, but it is a weighty loss—of home, of partnership, of personal identity—that must, somehow, be borne. On Fever Dream, Matsson awakes to a world that has re-formed seamlessly around his loss. The task of laying down roots, of building a new, stable identity, seems unfathomable when the very architecture of his life is one of impermanence. Perhaps Matsson isn’t up to writing about life on a tour bus; perhaps the spinning wheels below make him seasick. But he has written about life on a tour bus, and in so doing, located the love contained within. | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Rivers/Birds | April 23, 2019 | 7.3 | aec87444-a1d1-4235-a158-0289700c1c30 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The methodical arrangements and uncomfortably close whispers of the experimental French musician, poet, and visual artist bring us further inside her surreal world. | The methodical arrangements and uncomfortably close whispers of the experimental French musician, poet, and visual artist bring us further inside her surreal world. | Félicia Atkinson: The Flower and the Vessel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/felicia-atkinson-the-flower-and-the-vessel/ | The Flower and the Vessel | On Félicia Atkinson’s 2017 solo album Hand to Hand, she said, “I wanted to make sounds like cacti, with water and secrets inside.” She succeeded: Pairing almost unnervingly intimate whispers with heavily abstracted synthetic tones, the album guarded a vivid interior life beneath its prickly exterior.
But as Atkinson began recording the music that would become The Flower and the Vessel, her perception of the relationship between inner and outer realms began to shift. She was pregnant at the time, and she found herself feeling estranged twice over, caught between her surroundings and the new life growing inside her. In hotel rooms at night, as she composed on her laptop and murmured voice memos into her phone, she asked, “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?”
The Flower and the Vessel is Atkinson’s answer to that question. It is, she says, “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” The music carries within it the idea of form coming into being; it moves away from the freeform drift of her previous albums and glides toward a nascent kind of order.
Though the album uses sumptuous sounds like a Fender Rhodes, marimba, and vibraphone, its essence remains pensive and sometimes unsettling. Many of the record’s hushed, interwoven elements guard their identities. Contrasting rhythms form a lattice of complementary pulses: On the ominous centerpiece “You Have to Have Eyes,” a deep boat-engine throb mixes in with rapid-fire insect oscillations, creaking doors, and a voice looped like lapping waves. “You had to have eyes in the back of your head,” she murmurs, her voice turned strange and glassy by digital distortion.
As always, there are Atkinson’s uncomfortably close whispers—lips practically brushing the mic, the grain of her voice rendered in molecular detail. She slips between English and French, and though the meaning of her words is not always apparent, the tone of her voice lends a dead-of-night intensity that renders the music’s pockets of silence all the more potent. It is as though you were locked in urgent conversation with her, or even eavesdropping on her very thoughts. But the invasive nature of the tactic—“Whispering is a way to get inside your ear,” she has said—puts an ominous, alienating spin on what we normally think of as an intimate sound.
With many of her texts repurposed from found sources, the precise meaning of most of these songs remains hidden. In “Shirley to Shirley,” she reads excerpts from a conversation between the artists Shirley Kaneda and Shirley Jaffe in Bomb Magazine in an electronically processed voice. In “Un Ovale Vert,” she reads a portion of one of David Antin’s improvised “talk poems” and then, in French, intones images from her own visual art (“a white ball, a green oval”). She is fascinated by the way ideas pass from medium to medium; the methodical way she arranges her sounds is almost painterly. (She also cites ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, as an influence on the album’s careful sense of balance and proportion.)
The album closes with “Des Pierres,” an 18-minute collaboration with Stephen O’Malley, of Sunn O))), which threads Atkinson’s whispers through nebulous clouds of milky drones and guitar feedback. She calls it an “open reading” of a history of images in stone—that is, the accidental “landscapes” found in gems and geodes—written by the French literary critic Roger Caillois. It’s a characteristically erudite reference, but its presence can be traced throughout the music: the guitars roiling like cloudy agate or glistening like an expanse of obsidian. Again, Atkinson returns to the idea of inside (the crystalline image revealed in a cross-section) versus outside (the rock’s nubby exterior). In the album’s opening track, she whispers a poem to her unborn child, meditating on the way that her voice travels through her body to her baby’s ears, and here, at the album’s end, she plunges us deep into that amniotic world. | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | July 9, 2019 | 7.8 | aec96ddc-7bfa-44ca-a8d9-e6b418600043 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The 90s dance titans follow their best album in years with the soundtrack to an action film. | The 90s dance titans follow their best album in years with the soundtrack to an action film. | The Chemical Brothers: Hanna OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15289-hanna-ost/ | Hanna OST | Hanna is a film about a "badass survivalist girl"; the Chemical Brothers have never seemed particularly badass, but it's fair to count them as survivalist, both because last year's Further was their best record in ages and they're the only act from the late-90s electronica boom making music anyone would want to listen to. The Chems are known for welding techno beats to a distinctly rock aesthetic, and for much of the past 10 years they have functioned exactly like a rock band: standard album-tour-relax schedule, few collaborations, monster festival-headliner gigs. (And they can refer to themselves as "superstar DJs" all they like, but their last widely available DJ mix came out in 1998.) For fans of the Brothers, Hanna represents the shockingly rare opportunity to hear a work by the duo whose intentions fall outside their longtime M.O. of making techno for rock fans.
I haven't seen Hanna; it appears to be a thriller set in Eastern Europe with a young female protagonist-- gifted in the art of action-- who eludes a ruthless intelligence operative. Digitized techno mysticism has been a go-to soundtrack of choice for this genre ever since The Bourne Identity rubber-stamped Moby's "Extreme Ways" as the perfect mix of heady paranoia, Euro style, and kicking things. The Chems-- with their widescreen sound, relentless bravado, and sturdy belief in entertainment-as-art-- are well suited for this kind of work.
Hanna sounds a lot like a standard Chemical Brothers album-- [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| saturated, acidic keyboards; thundering drums; styles and signifiers used to bludgeon-- but with a bit more room to breathe. The band isn't deft enough to avoid the mewling vocals and tinkly music-box of the repeated "Hanna's Theme" (pathos: noted) but it's also not deft enough to apply any subtlety or grace to the Eastern scales and pulsing 2-4 beat of "Escape 700", which is kind of the point. This is a band accustomed to soundtracking a light show that would put most stadium rock bands to shame; the chances of them easing off the gas or thinking too hard about the marriage of music and cinema were slim.
The soundtrack offers some of the hard-charging thrills the Chems avoided on Further, and it does so in an environment in which the onus of excitement isn't placed solely on the duo. This results in some terribly limp interstitial "atmospheres"-- the Chems have never had the stomach for this kind of track; they sometimes seem bored (I am)-- but they add welcome contrast to their car-chase songs. Hanna aims for mystery and portent, a slight but welcome tonal shift from the band's urban, galactic edginess. The louche grooves of "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" are a bad fit for the steadily gaining tension they refer to, but its beefy synthesizer roundhouse is the album's most head-nodding moment. They can't help but pepper "The Devil Is in the Beats" with the type of goofily serious vocal nonsense ("Rock the beat!") they've always traded in.
Hanna mostly wins in the sea of Hollywood action soundtracks, but it's marginal as a Chemical Brothers album (I prefer it to their dry, overstuffed mid-decade works). The Chems have rarely acknowledged anything outside their own blinding neon aesthetic, which is to say that not only would the Chems never know they were in a creative rut, they would be unlikely to believe in ruts. Hanna doesn't represent anything more than a slight change-up from a group used to throwing fastballs. | 2011-04-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-04-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Back Lot | April 7, 2011 | 6.2 | aec9a9b4-a4d7-45d2-a101-416d852e2c27 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
null | Michael Azzerad's *Our Band Could Be Your Life*\-- a book of profiles of 1980s bands who grew up and out of hardcore punk-- makes the polemical decision to cut each chapter off at the moment if and when each band signed to a major label. On the one hand, this is understandable. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, American indie bands began being sucked into the maw of WEA/Sony/Megahyperglobochemcorp at quick clip. But before Nirvanania found CEOs courting such obvious hit makers as Daniel Johnston and the Jesus Lizard, this was less a cultural given than a leap into the dark | Dinosaur Jr.: Green Mind / Where You Been / J Mascis Live at CBGB's: The First Acoustic Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11871-green-mind-where-you-been-j-mascis-live-at-cbgbs-the-first-acoustic-show/ | Green Mind / Where You Been / J Mascis Live at CBGB's: The First Acoustic Show | Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life-- a book of profiles of 1980s bands who grew up and out of hardcore punk-- makes the polemical decision to cut each chapter off at the moment if and when each band signed to a major label. On the one hand, this is understandable. Between roughly 1986 and 1991, American indie bands began being sucked into the maw of WEA/Sony/Megahyperglobochemcorp at quick clip. But before Nirvanania found CEOs courting such obvious hit makers as Daniel Johnston and the Jesus Lizard, this was less a cultural given than a leap into the dark for both band and label alike. Azzerad's decision is problematic, however, because it ignores the thorny realities of what happened when each band engaged with the major label machinery-- whether it imploded (like Hüsker Dü) or thrived (like Sonic Youth).
Dinosaur Jr.-- featured in one of Our Band's most entertaining chapters-- imploded when they were still on an indie. And now majorhyperglobochemcorp Rhino reissues Dino's first two albums after they signed to Sire/Warner Bros. at the turn of the 90s-- Green Mind and Where You Been?-- as well as a previously unreleased acoustic solo set from the same period by Dino frontman J Mascis. (The preceding records, Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me and Bug, were reissued last year by Merge.) The two reissues add a handful of bonus tracks-- singles, live takes, stuff from the vault, none particularly revelatory-- as well as typically erudite liner notes from Byron Coley. Green Mind was recorded mostly by Mascis after the original Dinosaur Jr. shook itself fitfully apart following Bug and he had played through a series of temporary lineups. Original bassist Lou Barlow had already formed Sebadoh and would spend the next decade or so badmouthing Mascis in print. Original drummer Murph only plays on three songs. But the music is just a step on from where Dino had arrived at on Bug: ripcord solos, waves of feedback, jetties of New Order/Cure-style jangle, and Mascis' slack yowl delivering lyrics utterly bewildered by human contact. Opener "The Wagon" snarls with nearly as much pop hookcraft and gnarly guitar spizz as Bug's opener "Freak Scene". But throughout the album, Mascis' solos become more controlled bursts of classic rock, less spirals off the dirt track into the ditch of fuzz and mud. Inspirational verse: "There's a way I feel right now/ Wish you'd help me, don't know how/ We're all nuts, so who helps who/ Some help when no one's got a clue." Inspirational song title: "Puke + Cry".
Where You Been was released in 1993, the high grunge moment. It's a bit cleaner than the earlier recordings and somehow also a little less jangly and a bit more, well, grungy. Mascis' guitar is now a Ouija board channeling the King Biscuit Flower Hour heroes of his youth. Recorded with a full band-- bassist Mike Johnson and drummer Murph-- the record has a "three dudes in a room" beefiness that was somewhat lacking on Green Mind. The guitar on "Out There" snarls and the vocal is one of the Mascis' most plaintive. His voice actually improved with age, his youthful cracked mewl deepening into a cosmic yawn-- even if the vocal on "Not the Same" is so high, nasally, and lonesome that it probably still owes Neil Young royalties a decade later. Speaking of nasally: "Start Choppin" was the closest thing the band ever got to a hit until the modern rock staple "Feel the Pain" a year later, and no one can ever say Dino lacked a sense of humor when they hear that ridiculous falsetto note on the chorus. "What Else Is New" adds a pretty string section outro as if the band hadn't been doing pretty since the beginning. When it comes to early 90s major label guitar albums, you could do a lot worse than Where You Been and as someone who lost his Columbia House-purchased copy when he went to college, I was glad to revisit it.
Your enjoyment of J Mascis Live at CBGB's will be dependent on how much you enjoy his voice, his guitar playing, and his songs minus the fuzz. (And, in the case of "What Else Is New", the strings.) The set stretches back to "Repulsion" off the first Dino album and up to material from the about-to-be-released Where You Been, as well as Skynyrd and Wipers covers by request. For someone who claims to have never played a solo show before, Mascis' voice and guitar are in fine form throughout, and for someone with a reputation as a grump, he's got a good line in personable stage patter. Still, even without bonus tracks it's strictly for fans only. The other two reissues, however, are recommended to anyone too young to have heard them the first time around or anyone who wrote off the band's post-SST work. Or maybe just to anyone who thinks being an autistic depressive can always be improved by a really kick ass guitar solo. | 2006-05-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-05-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 19, 2006 | 7.1 | aecb14e3-0c78-4ccb-b97f-adf71a632d68 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
These folklorists and singers take an audacious step forward on album three, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do. | These folklorists and singers take an audacious step forward on album three, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do. | Anna & Elizabeth: The Invisible Comes to Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-and-elizabeth-the-invisible-comes-to-us/ | The Invisible Comes to Us | Nearly halfway through “Jeano,” the ruminative opening track on the third album by folklorists and folksingers Anna & Elizabeth, there is a quiet burst of chirruping birds. They don’t sound like real birds; more like a sample of birds looped into the music, reinforcing the song’s burbling outdoor ambience. It’s both naturalistic and blatantly synthetic, which may be the whole point. “Jeano” is about yearning for the impossible—a lover’s return from the bloody battlefield, a world untainted by war—and that piped-in birdsong, evoking someplace long ago and far away, only increases the sense of loss. It’s as much of a transporting daydream as the lyrics of the chorus: “If I were Queen of France or still better Pope of Rome/I’d have no fighting men abroad, nor weeping maids at home.”
Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle are fascinated by such curious sounds, and they’ve filled The Invisible Comes to Us with drones and loops, sequencers and synthesizers, post-rock woodwinds and migraine distortion. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis (Okkervil River, Cuddle Magic), they set “Virginia Rambler,” a tale of sexual treachery, to a needling drumbeat that gradually turns itself inside out, as though leading the singers into the deep woods. “Irish Patriot” opens with a shimmer of sound like sunlight through bare trees, then adds a flutter of saxophone and a cacophony of distorted voices. Deconstructing and then reconstructing itself, the song has the feel of journey and arrival, subtly enacting the theme of the lyrics.
Coming after their self-titled 2015 effort, which set Anna & Elizabeth’s voices in an almost entirely acoustic setting, the wider, weirder palette of The Invisible Comes to Us is much more audacious, subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do. They’re not the first artists to marry the old and the new or to insist that the electronic might sound right at home with the acoustic. Rather, they’re part of a larger wave of folk acts like House and Land in North Carolina, Lankum in Dublin, Stick in the Wheel in London, even Bon Iver up in Eau Claire—all of whom are reframing old folk music for the present moment. Like those groups, Anna & Elizabeth don’t write songs so much as they unearth them, researching old compositions in dusty songbooks and academic collections—in this case, the archives of song collector Helen Hartness Flanders, housed at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Moreover, they insist that these old songs can hold an array of sounds, that the arrhythmic skronk of a saxophone or the Doppler rhythm of a sequencer might sound as natural as the crunch of dead leaves underfoot or the chirp of birds overhead. Anna & Elizabeth’s most extreme experiment is “By the Shore,” a cut-and-paste collage of spliced voices, spoken incantations, and excerpted noise (and one of several songs on The Invisible Comes to Us whose lyrics feature roaming men and pining women). It’s exhilarating to hear a folk song chopped and screwed, fragmented like a Laurie Anderson composition, ripped and torn at the seams, even if this particular arrangement is ostentatious by design, too showy on an album that makes such subtle and sophisticated use of sound.
The Invisible Comes to Us ends right where it begins: Closer “Margaret” is built on an excerpt from Flanders’ field recording of a Vermont woman named Margaret Shipman singing “Jeano” circa 1940. It certainly sounds 80 years old, with all the ambient hisses and scratches that old 78s accrue with age. Whether those are native to the recording or whether they were added later with the organ and guitar is beside the point. What matters is the singer and her husky, tender, graceful voice echoing through the decades. It’s a surprisingly poignant moment, exploring the mysteries of the past and the unchanged realities of the present. | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Smithsonian Folkways | April 14, 2018 | 7.2 | aecd63f2-1111-4077-b06b-59e2c0048ba7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Featuring his eternal hit “Boom Boom,” the blues legend’s 1962 classic gets an anniversary reissue that showcases how rock’n’roll took shape around his timeless, elemental boogie. | Featuring his eternal hit “Boom Boom,” the blues legend’s 1962 classic gets an anniversary reissue that showcases how rock’n’roll took shape around his timeless, elemental boogie. | John Lee Hooker: Burnin’ (Expanded Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-lee-hooker-burnin-expanded-edition/ | Burnin’ (Expanded Edition) | Burnin’ upends many myths orbiting John Lee Hooker, one of the iconic blues musicians of the 20th century. Whether you know either his name or his records, you know his heavy-footed boogie, a rollicking rhythm absorbed and assimilated by such acolytes as George Thorogood and ZZ Top, who once faced a lawsuit from the copyright holder of Hooker’s 1948 breakthrough hit “Boogie Chillen,” claiming the Texas trio ripped off Hooker with their 1973 single “La Grange.”
ZZ Top won the lawsuit with the court claiming that the rhythm is in the public domain, a ruling that in a perverse way proves how deeply entrenched Hooker’s music is in popular music: It’s impossible to imagine rock’n’roll would sound without him. Hooker’s boogie is so endless, it not only survives long after his death but seemed to exist prior to “Boogie Chillen.” Critics picked up on this eternal essence early in Hooker’s career. Charles Shaar Murray, the author of the definitive John Lee Hooker biography Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American 20th Century, cites the French blues critic Jacques Lemetre as the first to describe the bluesman as “one of the most primitive (from a musical point of view) and, I would say, one of the most African of blues singers” back in 1964, a framing that’s echoed through the years.
Calling Hooker’s music primitive obscures a crucial trait, one as essential to understanding his art as his slippery sense of timing: He was a modernist, not a traditionalist. He wasn’t anchored to his birth state of Mississippi: He hightailed it up north as soon as he could, settling in Detroit where he played an electrified update of Delta blues for factory workers in the 1940s. “Boogie Chillen” captured how Hooker played not for a rural audience but for city folk: He bent the bars of a blues vamp, extending the groove to gin up the energy in the room. He didn’t sing laments; he played dance music.
This essential distinction comes into sharp relief on 1962’s Burnin’, a record released in the thick of the folk-blues revolution. In Boogie Man, Murray argues that the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival—the one headlined by Muddy Waters, in a performance distilled on a Chess LP that year—is the point where blues was formally accepted by the “(mainly white) jazz and folk establishments, and its passing as the indigenous voice of the ghetto.” Hooker was hardly above pandering to this trend. Vee-Jay released an album called The Folk Lore of John Lee Hooker in 1961 and he’d later issue an installment in Chess’ ongoing The Real Folk Blues series in 1966. This isn’t a reflection of Hooker's folk roots—indeed, when Riverside approached him to record an album dedicated to Lead Belly, it became clear the bluesman didn’t know the subject of his intended tribute—but rather how he’d go wherever the audience went.
To an extent, that's what happened with Burnin’, the fourth album he released on Vee-Jay. Unlike its Windy City rival Chess, Vee-Jay wasn’t primarily known for blues. They specialized in harmony groups, gospel, jazz, and soul, finally landing a major blues artist when the lackadaisical bluesman Jimmy Reed started racking up big hits for the label in the late 1950s. Reed opened the door for Hooker, whose rambling 1958 hit “I Love You Honey” and lazy 1960 stroll “No Shoes” both demonstrate a clear debt. That’s not the case with Burnin’. For this session, Vee-Jay hired a group of Detroit musicians who were toiling away at the various imprints helmed by Berry Gordy, Jr., the impresario who was working hard to keep his Motown label afloat in the early ’60s.
Many years later, these musicians would be called the Funk Brothers, a group immortalized in the 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, but back in 1961 they were struggling to make ends meet, so they were happy to head to Chicago to make a bit more money than they would in Detroit. Hooker had a connection to the Funk Brothers through Joe Hunter, a pianist who worked the same Motor City circuit as Hooker. This familiarity let Hooker ease into the rhythms laid down by drummer Benny Benjamin and bassist James Jamerson. The grooves were streamlined when compared to the idiosyncratic beat Hooker played on his own, but they felt vibrant and vital, pitched halfway between contemporary R&B and the dwindling urban blues market.
On this 60th anniversary reissue, Burnin’ has been remastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes; there’s an audiophile vinyl edition of the stereo mix, along with a CD that has both stereo and mono mixes, plus an alternate of the lively shuffle “Thelma.” Listening now, it’s striking how mid-century modern the album seems. Jamerson and Benjamin keep the beat bouncing, Hunter decorates the margins with runs that also push the rhythm, and guitarist Larry Veeder adds texture and color to Hooker’s bedrock boogie, while Hank Cosby and Andrew “Mike” Terry punctuate riffs, rhythms, and melodies with their greasy saxophone. All the extra instrumentation doesn’t allow Hooker to burrow deep into his grooves, a loss that doesn’t seem especially painful while Burnin’ spins. These club-tested musicians allow Hooker to take such unexpected detours as vamping on the riff to the Champs’ “Tequila” on “Keep Your Hands to Yourself (She's Mine),” which in turn allows him to sing about all manners of eccentricities: He gripes about women processing their hair, swears he’s about to turn over a new leaf now that it’s 1962, implores a paramour “Let’s Make It,” then runs down a list of his domestic needs on “Drug Store Woman,” claiming he’d rather have bathwater waiting than a woman “wearing lipstick and powder, her hair all fixed up.”
Anchoring the whole affair is “Boom Boom,” which wasn’t merely his last big hit—it was arguably his greatest. The Funk Brothers help keep his three-chord stomp lean, so slinky and hooky that it reads not as backwoods blues but downtown pop. “Boom Boom” became his only crossover Billboard hit—it peaked at 60, compared to 16 on the R&B chart—eventually making its way to both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a position assisted by its embrace by such British Invasion blues-rockers as the Animals and the Yardbirds. ZZ Top surely heard it too: With its “aw-haw-haw-haw” refrain, it’s more clearly an antecedent to “La Grange” than “Boogie Chillen” itself. As pivotal as “Boom Boom” is, Burnin’ isn't merely a single surrounded by agreeable also-rans. The Funk Brothers helped Hooker hone into his modernity, letting him play off contemporary trends in a way that accentuates how he always existed within the moment, letting the times take shape around his elemental boogie. | 2023-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Rock | Craft | March 1, 2023 | 8.5 | aed25d81-4b33-4287-b47f-15fadee34e28 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Jaded, nihilistic, and heavy: Dylan Baldi leads his band into one of the most self-immolating and intense albums of his career. | Jaded, nihilistic, and heavy: Dylan Baldi leads his band into one of the most self-immolating and intense albums of his career. | Cloud Nothings: Last Building Burning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cloud-nothings-last-building-burning/ | Last Building Burning | On their last album, 2017’s Life Without Sound, Cloud Nothings dialed back the rage and softened their bite. It’s not as if they went full R.E.M. circa Around the Sun or anything; it still delivered the riffs, and frontman Dylan Baldi’s songwriting was typically sharp, but the performances were strangely flat compared to its feverish predecessors. Where the guitars previously would have erupted, they merely preened and sparkled. It was Cloud Nothings’ one album since becoming a bona fide band that never quite achieved liftoff.
Life Without Sound fundamentally misunderstood what makes Cloud Nothings such a rare commodity: that tremendous full-throated release their loudest, fastest songs provide. Without that catharsis, they’re just another solid guitar-rock band. That said, Cloud Nothings have always been one of the most adaptive bands in their scene, and on their pressure cooker of a fifth album, Last Building Burning, they rebound with a magnificent course correction. Volume and fury? Sure, they can do that. Still, they meet the demand with almost passive-aggressive relish.
In spirit, Last Building Burning marks a return to the self-immolating intensity of their 2012 breakthrough Attack on Memory, yet it’s even more jaded than that record was. On Life Without Sound, Baldi dared to offer something constructive, an earnest commentary on our divided world and the value of looking beyond our self-imposed bubbles, but it didn’t resonate. So here, he takes a more nihilistic approach, retreating back into his head and indulging his ugliest thoughts. On “So Right So Clean,” he cuts down a partner’s ambition with a brusque “I wish I could believe in your dream,” singing as if choking up tufts of barbed wire. “Nothing’s gonna change!” he barks on “Offer an End,” another track fogged by thick coats of murk.
As always, Baldi is one of indie rock’s great sloganeers, a lyricist with a gift for mantras that read like they’ve been inked across two fists. “They won’t remember my name/I’ll be alone in my shame!” he repeats on “In Shame,” hammering the hook until his failure sounds like a triumph. And while the album interrupts its fleet pacing for one 11-minute goliath, “Dissolution,” the real showstopper is quickie “Leave Him Now,” where Baldi bluntly implores a friend to leave an abusive relationship before things get worse. “You gotta go right now/Or never at all,” he pleas. If ever a voice were equipped to sell the stakes, it’s his.
The track is Cloud Nothings at their best: direct, visceral, vulnerable. It hits in the gut and rings in the head, striking that golden ratio of ferocity and tunefulness that this band does best. It would be a waste for them to mellow out when they still have music like this in them. | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | October 19, 2018 | 7.6 | aed9f2b7-3433-4b31-a286-0c816a917834 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The gale-force frontwoman of Shannon and the Clams collaborates with producer Dan Auerbach on a sparkling debut solo album that sounds like Roy Orbison lost in the Brill Building. | The gale-force frontwoman of Shannon and the Clams collaborates with producer Dan Auerbach on a sparkling debut solo album that sounds like Roy Orbison lost in the Brill Building. | Shannon Shaw: Shannon in Nashville | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-shaw-shannon-in-nashville/ | Shannon in Nashville | Underground sensations like Shannon Shaw are anomalies these days. As the gale-force singer of Oakland trio Shannon and the Clams, her name has become synonymous with askew glamor and miscreant soulfulness: She and her misfit bandmates have spent nearly a decade sounding like the nails-tough Shangri-Las reborn and resembling hairsprayed-and-glittered John Waters movie extras, crying their eyes out and ready for a fight. (Waters has called them one of his favorite bands: “They’re like my wet dream!” he once proclaimed.) The Clams mixed punk and girl groups with more conviction and maladjusted, leather-clad character than any other band of the late 2000s. Much of the appeal of their raw early records was in the friction of Shaw’s powerhouse pipes—the agony, the mania, the desperate longing they conveyed—as they tore through a busted-up boombox fog. The Clams’ star has never risen too high, and so it has never fallen.
Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was in a record shop when he first heard their blown-out doo-wop on the stereo and was won over straight away. But the Clams didn’t know of his fandom until an Australian promoter flew them across the planet and relayed that Auerbach had insisted he book them. One DM led to another. Soon Shaw was in Nashville at Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio to work on her glowing solo debut, Shannon in Nashville, with his all-star house band—guys who’d played with Elvis. Shaw hasn’t ditched the Clams: The band also recorded its latest LP, February’s Onion, at Auerbach’s studio and signed to his label. Rock revivalists as famous as the Black Keys are practically nonexistent these days, which makes the serendipity of the story feel a bit fairytale-like. It’s a heartwarming plot twist for an underdog band who recorded their first LP in the living room of a punk house called Telegraph Beach.
Shannon in Nashville is a diamond; it sounds like Roy Orbison and his musicians lost in the Brill Building, and its twinkling, Auerbach-helmed production is IMAX-level vivid within Shaw’s catalog. These old-school masters meet Shaw at the top of her mountain, and she belts out her boldest Aretha-summoning exorcisms of heartbreak and suffering to match their splendor. The vintage sound of Shannon in Nashville is sturdy, warm, and immaculate, from the fireworks of opener “Golden Frames” and the smoky shuffle of “Bring Her the Mirror” onward, with nary a misplaced horn or clap. Through the polished edges and ecstatic backing vocals, the tortured melodrama of Shaw’s songs cuts deeper than ever. She curls the edges of notes like Dolly and maintains the composure of Lesley Gore.
Shaw is an artist who clearly respects the hellish, earth-shattering gravity of tormented emotions. But the greatest song on this wrenching breakup album is not about another person. The simmering ache of “Broke My Own” centers Shaw’s own self-loathing, as she peels back her layers and faces compounded inner demons—faces the fact of breaking her own heart. It’s the most devastating performance she has ever committed to tape. “Don’t worry about this heart of mine,” she sings with chilling resolve. “It’s been busted for a long, long time.” When Shaw lands upon her brashest truth—“My worst enemy is my own flesh and bone”—it is the sound of a person who has dug to the core of her soul and uncovered a lifetime of buried anguish.
Shannon in Nashville never quite scales the heights of “Broke My Own” again. Though the record contains some eccentric edges—“Freddies ‘n‘ Teddies” is her hard-boiled, punk-spirited version of a song like “Irreplaceable,” and “Lord of Alaska” is a bemusing tale of fleeing home—the lyrics can sometimes sit at the surface of a feeling, and you wish the stories said more. Still, Shannon in Nashville feels humbly victorious. The soul-baring piano ballad “I Might Consider” evokes the desperation of the Chantels’ “Maybe,” and when it opens with a fizzy Auerbach blues lick, it’s a reminder of his presence—and of how unlikely it is for the underground and the perilous rock mainstream to intermingle in 2018. Shaw has earned this: For all the dazzling instrumentation here, none comes close to matching her colossal, resilient voice. It’s a thrill to hear Shaw not soundtracking a hypothetical film, but rather starring in her own. | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Easy Eye Sound | June 11, 2018 | 7.5 | aedbe875-cdd6-4969-b813-0b636fbc58a3 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The Toronto R&B singer’s second EP charts the collapse of a relationship through six downcast tracks. | The Toronto R&B singer’s second EP charts the collapse of a relationship through six downcast tracks. | Charlotte Day Wilson: Stone Woman EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charlotte-day-wilson-stone-woman-ep/ | Stone Woman EP | The Toronto singer Charlotte Day Wilson has spent the last couple of years lending her considerable voice to other artists. Since her first EP, a soulful 2016 project with her initials as its title, Wilson has appeared on albums by Daniel Caesar, River Tiber, and BADBADNOTGOOD—fellow Canadians with a predilection for simmering R&B and jazz. They’ve all found different ways to drape the velvet of Wilson’s voice onto their production styles, from the comforting support role she sings on Caesar’s folk-soul track “Transform” to the tranquil siren she plays on the swanky lounge of BBNG’s “In Your Eyes.” In her own music, Wilson most often cultivates a powerful stillness. In the case of her downcast new EP, that means she flirts with stoicism to the occasional point of numbness.
Stone Woman charts the crash of a relationship, from Wilson’s nagging inward “Doubt” to the “Falling Apart” and “Funeral” that follow it later in the tracklist. She treats the opening title track like a mantra to stay grounded, but it has the early and troubling effect of fixing her in place, her voice hovering without anywhere to go. (This is ironic, given that the song’s plot involves her constant travels on the road.) Wilson’s voice is typically the strongest draw to her solo act, its power amplified by the hushed restraint of her performances. Yet that voice has often overshadowed the fact that Wilson writes and produces much of her own music. If her production on Stone Woman sometimes fails to pay her voice optimal service, it’s ample proof of a soft, smart touch behind the boards.
“Doubt” is one of the more gorgeous entries in Wilson’s small catalog, a lush pace-setter for the type of smoky R&B she does best. Synths gurgle over a crisp snare, and Wilson’s voice comes out as a deflated gasp: “Oh, what have I done for your love?/Oh, I’m selfish and dumb for your love.” “Nothing New” fidgets in the wake of that rift and trades in the live rhythm section for a programmed beat and an array of gloomy synths that build to a spacey crescendo. These were the right single choices for Stone Woman, showing off a range between tracks that’s not quite there on the rest of the EP.
On the closing track, Wilson attends a funeral before orchestrating one for her own relationship. First she’s emotionless: “I went to a funeral so I could feel something.” Then she shrugs: “Welcome to our funeral, it’s nice that you came.” The sequencing makes the EP read like an effective songwriter exercise, pushing through a trauma in chronological order, but moments like this feel oddly flat; her detached tone obscures something in the process. It’s proved an asset elsewhere, and the highs on Stone Woman are some of Wilson’s most memorable work, but that measured stillness feels like it’s starting to hold her back. | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | March 2, 2018 | 6.7 | aee37eba-aa44-4703-8df9-f04d79780a73 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
This score for Justin Peck’s 2017 ballet, performed by the pianist Timo Andres, is a knotty but welcome addition to the singer-songwriter’s growing set of compositions for dance. | This score for Justin Peck’s 2017 ballet, performed by the pianist Timo Andres, is a knotty but welcome addition to the singer-songwriter’s growing set of compositions for dance. | Sufjan Stevens / Timo Andres: The Decalogue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sufjan-stevens-timo-andres-the-decalogue/ | The Decalogue | It’s hard to believe, but over the last 10 years, Sufjan Stevens has soundtracked twice as many ballets as he’s recorded solo albums. He and choreographer Justin Peck began working together in 2012, when the rising dance star asked Stevens to rework selections from his experimental electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit for the New York City Ballet. Stevens balked at first, but after George Balanchine’s Stravinsky-scored classics (namely Agon) opened his ears to the expressive possibilities of the form, the singer-songwriter relented, which led to the blossoming of a meaningful creative relationship with Peck.
Stevens’ initial hesitation around entering the world of ballet stemmed not only from his qualms with Enjoy Your Rabbit—he downplayed it as “a ramshackle little personal hobby project”—but also his perceptions of ballet itself. “Ballet seemed so anachronistic, so formal and classical and archaic and irrelevant to pop culture,” he said in 2014. Everywhere We Go, the first collaboration with Peck to feature all new, original music, was defined by its intricate arrangements and emphasis on melody, a pointed repudiation of that perceived stuffiness. By contrast, The Decalogue—a borderline academic suite for solo piano, inspired by the Ten Commandments—suggests a self-conscious attempt to compose according to a notion of what contemporary ballet music should sound like. The result is a knotty but welcome entry to Stevens’ discography, albeit one that feels like the result of the artist immersing himself in Peck’s influences rather than the other way round.
This new studio recording of The Decalogue, which arrives two years after the debut of Peck’s ballet, does not actually feature Stevens in a performing role. The composer instead opts to have the pianist and contemporary classical composer Timo Andres interpret the score. In Andres’ skilled hands, the pieces move and breathe dynamically, and it’s easy to imagine a cadre of dancers performing pirouettes to the constantly modulating chords. Still, as a standalone piece of music, Decalogue may come across as unusually atonal for any Sufjan fans expecting familiar motifs from their favorite baroque pop polymath, who culled from approximately 50 “impromptu improvisations” to assemble the score.
With some exceptions, Decalogue’s piano passages wash over the listener and disappear almost as soon as they materialize. That isn’t to say there are no affecting scenes: The ascendant arpeggios at the beginning of “V” provide an immediately arresting structure for the rest of the piece to flow into. Andres’ execution of the skittering downward runs at the end of “VIII” prove a breathtaking display of musicianship, and the thunderous grand finale in “X” is stirring, if a bit rote. But the album never reveals any whole greater than the sum of its parts, and those parts suffer from a lack of focus.
Stevens has said he wanted The Decalogue to be “more pensive and more cerebral, and less explicitly harmonic and melodic” than Everywhere We Go, and he certainly achieves his goal. He’s since moved on from such exercises, describing his most recent work with Peck, Principia, as a middle ground between those prior scores. That new ballet just so happens to feature orchestrations by Andres, a link that implies the pianist isn’t merely a gifted hired gun. Their collaborations may bear more fruit in the years to come, but ultimately The Decalogue is a Stevens curio like Enjoy Your Rabbit and The BQE before it: riveting to diehards, an agreeable footnote for anyone else.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Asthmatic Kitty | October 25, 2019 | 6.5 | aeedc236-2956-4be7-9f0f-9b6613c1073d | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley and Chicago drill alum Lil Durk team up for a promising mixtape that showcases their considerable chemistry. | Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley and Chicago drill alum Lil Durk team up for a promising mixtape that showcases their considerable chemistry. | Tee Grizzley / Lil Durk: Bloodas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tee-grizzley-lil-durk-bloodas/ | Bloodas | Imagine how hard it must be to get a word in edgewise against Tee Grizzley. On his formidable 2017 debut My Moment, the surging Detroit rapper came across as the loudest, most opinionated guy at the Thanksgiving table, the uncle you know you shouldn’t get started on the prison-industrial complex, but whose rants are so passionate, so colorful in their conviction, that you can’t resist. That the album didn’t feature a single guest spot may have been as much a practical decision as a creative one: Grizzley’s rugged yammer consumes so much oxygen that it simply doesn’t leave much of an opening for anybody else.
Given how territorially he guarded his podium on My Moment, it came as a surprise that for his sophomore outing Grizzley opted to explore his collaborative side, partnering with a known quantity at that, Chicago drill alum Lil Durk. It’s a symbiotic alliance: Lil Durk gets to hitch his wagon to one of hip-hop’s most vital rising stars, and he’s given a shot at reclaiming some of his own buzz after a run of projects that, solid as they’ve been, all seemed to bleed together. Grizzley, in return, gets paired with one of the few rappers on the planet who can match his intensity. After a career spent alongside fierce personalities—Keef, Herbo, Bibby, Louie, Reese—Durk has a long record of coaxing top performances out of his sparring partners.
None of that is meant to imply that Bloodas is just a marriage of convenience, or some cynical attempt from two regional rappers to consolidate their market share. It seems to exists for the sole reason that these rappers have such ridiculous chemistry, and it would be criminal if they didn’t take advantage of it. “Bro show me love like we grew up together,” Grizzley wrote on an Instagram post of the two palling around, and despite the Great Lake separating them you could be forgiven for mistaking them for old childhood friends.
Even without the shared upbringing, the two have plenty in common. Each came up amid tragedy, in neighborhoods marred by violence, and neither apologize for the ways that it shaped, and in some cases soured, their worldview. “I’m from the city of Hoover/Bump and slide, we was robbin’ the jeweler/I was in school but shit had made me a shooter,” Durk raps on “WhatYo City Like.” That song begins as a barstool debate over whose city is rougher—both make compelling cases, rapping in furious four-bar blasts that pick up on the threads of the other’s last verse—but ends with extended hands and congenial offers from each to visit anytime.
The tape is never better than when it invites its principals to riff on the same idea. On “3rd Person” they take turns rapping from the perspective of judgmental outsiders. Grizzley assumes the role of the relatives who never bothered to so much as write him a letter while he was in prison, mocking their grievances that he no longer gives them the time of day. He doesn’t disguise what an open wound their abandonment is. Durk, meanwhile, touches on his own insecurity, voicing the casual listeners who gave up on him a few years back: “He tryna rap like Meek/Why he sing like he Future?/He should’ve signed with Keef/He probably be like Future.”
Rappers turn out so much music so fast these days that these kinds of collaborative efforts tend to fade from memory fast. In an age when rappers can paste entire projects together without ever entering the same room, though, Bloodas radiates a real sense of shared creation, suggesting Grizzley and Durk’s pairing has the potential to become something more career defining than just a pit stop. These two don’t just complement each other. They push each other, prodding and coaxing each other to one-up the last verse, which more often than not they do. Bloodas is the work of two elites who admire each other’s craft, but mostly who just get a kick out of each other’s company. | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | December 15, 2017 | 7.4 | aef62c46-dc66-44e5-8dff-554f0f1202ba | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On its debut EP, the sax-and-drums duo forges a signature sound that proves anti-pop experimentation can be a real good time. | On its debut EP, the sax-and-drums duo forges a signature sound that proves anti-pop experimentation can be a real good time. | O.: Slice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/o-slice-ep/ | Slice EP | This past September, O. were the first act to perform at the 10th-anniversary showcase of South London indie label Speedy Wunderground. While the label—which has released music from black midi, Squid, and Lewsberg—has grown far beyond its mission to be a quick-turnaround singles factory, O. are perhaps the most demonstrative showroom model for that expedient, plug ‘n’ play philosophy. Formed two years ago, the duo was already opening large theater concerts when they could still count their gigs on one hand. With their debut EP, O. make an even more convincing case for why you should have them kick off your show: For an often-abrasive instrumental band, they know how to start a party.
As the term “post-punk” has increasingly become shorthand for aggrieved shout-speak and stern-faced severity, O. reassert one of the genre’s original, oft-overlooked facets: Anti-pop experimentation can be a lot of fun. The four songs on Slice hit you with a delightfully disorienting array of sounds. At various points, you might think you’re hearing a hockey-rink buzzer, or a swarm of insects, or a doom-metal drone, or a squawking sea animal, or a police siren, or a brown-note synth frequency, or an incoming ocean liner, or a tectonic-plate shift. And that sonic spectrum is all the more impressive when you consider all those effects emanate from a single source: Joseph Henwood’s baritone saxophone, which, when filtered through Speedy figurehead Dan Carey’s production wizardry, is rendered equally boisterous and monstrous. Henwood’s sax attack is O.’s undeniable focal point, the novelty that would make an unsuspecting black midi fan heading toward the venue bar stop and wonder, “What the fuck is that!?!” before turning around and making a beeline for the stage. But drummer Tash Keary’s frenetic stickwork is the mortar that holds O.’s wall of sound together, ensuring a harmonious balance of improvisation and rock-solid composition.
On Slice, O. are already in the enviable position of possessing both a signature aesthetic and the confidence to stretch it out without worrying about losing their sense of identity. Where jazz instrumentation in a punk context often favors atonal skronk and splatter, O.’s brand of sax ‘n’ violence largely forsakes free-form anarchy for a more disciplined attack that rallies around muscular riffs and fleet-footed rhythms. Slice’s opening title track burrows a tunnel from The Mudd Club dancefloor to a Reading Festival mosh pit, with the song’s aggro-funk breakdowns and build-ups betraying the influence of Primus on the UK’s current post-punk pack. By contrast, on “Moon,” the duo wades into dubby waters without losing their sense of mischief—even as the beat slows and Henwood’s snark-charmer melodies start to ooze like molasses, Keary continues to ride her hi-hat and kick-pedal as if leading a disco band. Not surprisingly, the most mid-tempo tune, “Grouchy,” is the least interesting one of the bunch, its mutant-metal grind suggesting a pub-rock King Crimson. But the duo save their best for last with “ATM,” which affords them the extra space to deploy their full arsenal of effects for maximal drama. Over six white-knuckled minutes, the duo seesaws between ticking time-bomb tension and earthquaking eruptions, as if waging a war between their avant-garde inclinations and their irrepressible urge to just rock the fuck out. And from that chaotic collision, O. forge a sound as unmistakable as their name is unGoogleable. | 2023-12-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Speedy Wunderground | December 6, 2023 | 7 | aef77f83-19da-4d8f-af6f-b723edde5882 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Christine and the Queens is the project of the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. Her bold, empowering, and danceable 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine, which features a collaboration with Perfume Genius, has been repackaged as a self-titled debut for her introduction to the American market. | Christine and the Queens is the project of the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. Her bold, empowering, and danceable 2014 debut Chaleur Humaine, which features a collaboration with Perfume Genius, has been repackaged as a self-titled debut for her introduction to the American market. | Christine and the Queens: Christine and the Queens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21147-christine-and-the-queens/ | Christine and the Queens | The Christine and the Queens project is guided by one woman, the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. At home she is a known quantity: She capped off a string of EPs and touring gigs with Lykke Li and Woodkid with her debut Chaleur Humaine in June of 2014. But the U.S. release this fall of Humaine, repackaged as a self-titled debut, marks her introduction to the American market: Some of the French lyrics were redone in English, accompanied by a couple of Anglophone bonus tracks. As with the French edition, the record starts with an unequivocal declaration of her arrival. "I'm a man now," she sings in a bold voice on "iT", "And there's nothing you can do to make me change my mind."
A few verses later, she offers up a line whose regal, gory quality seems worthy of Lorde or Kanye: "I'll rule over all my dead impersonations." Out of context, it sounds like a very 2015 pop move: burying past incarnations of yourself that the public never even witnessed and calling yourself king from the off, fueled by nothing but divine belief in your own selfhood. Letissier has the chops and charisma to pull off this role, too: "iT" has gorgeous minimal production—just a sputtering beat, tarnished synth glimmers, and canny employ of sprite-like backing vocals. Her expressive voice leads the lone melody, at first vulnerable and then rasping with defiance.
But it's a feint: Letissier spends the next 11 songs pulling back from this grandstanding (which was inspired by her discarding her feminine identity as a teenager) to explore the nuances of her queer identity and what that means in private and public spheres. On the way, she comes out with some pin-sharp lyrics to rival collaborator Perfume Genius' "no family is safe when I sashay," full of daring and vulnerable truths. "Science Fiction" unravels on spacey burbles that underpin the alienation she and her partner feel when out in public: "They look at me when I stare at you... In this sea of eyes, every move's a coup." Letissier reclaims the discrimination she experiences for not passing as a prescribed gender ideal on "Half Ladies", which moves between percussive gasps indebted to Michael Jackson and pared-back, angular funk: "Every insult I hear back/ Darkens into a beauty mark."
That particular image seems to reference the source of her own liberation. A few years ago, beset by depression, Letissier ran away from college in Paris and crossed the Channel to London, where she was taken under the wing of three Soho drag artists. They heard her humming and encouraged her to make music, so she locked herself away for weeks, garret-style, as she taught herself to write. Letissier named her act Christine and the Queens in tribute to her saviors, an act that also highlights her knack for self-mythologizing. At the end of Christine and the Queens, there is a second arrival, "Here", a work of unbroken tension hooked around disintegrating, crackling beats and an organ's glow. She sings, in French, "I evolve in living trace."
The production of Christine and the Queens follows that mystical sense of becoming. Most of the songs are built from tapestries of microbeats that have an organic, sinewy feel, unfolding with the intricate flow of a centipede's spine. She often forms strong rhythms from a surprisingly delicate percussive backbone—"No Harm Is Done" has a feather-light, trap-indebted beat that sounds as though it was sampled from recordings of magnesium fizzling across water. Tiny shifts in impact or intensity can have a massive effect: The simple beat that hardens halfway through "Tilted" adds a new level of confidence to Letissier's tale of a wonky but thriving relationship. It's a constellation of experience, the sense of a body being animated, twitching and jerking into existence. Letissier literally espouses the power of movement on "Safe and Holy", but the heavy beat and synth-scapes drown out the effect that flows naturally elsewhere.
Letissier's melodic sensibility is as strong as her subtle percussion. "Paradis Perdus" is the work of a real pop scholar, an interpolation of Christophe's 1973 song "Les Paradis Perdus" and the chorus of Kanye West's "Heartless" that unites their common sense of loss over soft piano and a knocking beat. "Jonathan", Letissier's duet with Perfume Genius, confronts a lover whose internalized shame means that their relationship is only acknowledged by night. It's a song of immense grace, the funereal pace guided by exquisite synths and expanding strings. "Can you walk with me in the daylight?" Letissier asks, her head held high.
Christine and the Queens is a beautiful, important negotiation of these liminal states at a time when the media is quick to bandy about the term "post-gender" as if the hard work is done. Her music is bold and fully formed, but Letissier unpeels the façade of outer confidence to shine a light on the way that queer identity requires constant negotiation, to deal with the world's often unforgiving gaze and the one that can come from within—on "Safe and Holy", she admits that her own eyes "mock and judge" her. It's empowering, bold, and vulnerable, and made for dancing. Chaleur Humaine translates as "human warmth", and the album makes good on that intimacy. You get the sense of Letissier guarding her own precious, burgeoning fire, and inviting listeners to share in its glow. | 2015-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Because Music / Neon Gold | October 26, 2015 | 8 | af0c5c63-4bab-4303-9b92-b6586f802d37 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Earlier this week Death Grips dropped another free album without warning, this one featuring vocals by Björk. But nothing is quite as it seems in their world, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus. | Earlier this week Death Grips dropped another free album without warning, this one featuring vocals by Björk. But nothing is quite as it seems in their world, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus. | Death Grips: Niggas on the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19472-death-grips-niggas-on-the-moon/ | Niggas on the Moon | If you need proof that "bad press" as a concept is largely a thing of the past, look no further than Death Grips. The shifting collective—sometimes a trio, occasionally a duo, and at one point consisting of no members at all—have spent the last two years staging a public, low-level coup on people's attention spans that, in terms of subversiveness, has fallen somewhere between egging someone's house and stealing your neighbor's WiFi. Their actions have scanned as humorous, aggressive, contemptible, and puerile—sometimes all at once—and despite any high-minded claims, the ends to the means have been excellent promotion for a body of work that's proved increasingly confounding. Their first record, 2011's Exmilitary, remains their most overlooked work even as it represents Death Grips at their most elemental, a potent, nasty mix of blasted rap figures, percussive mania, and corroded noise that smacked of a modern-day Judgment Night soundtrack featuring collaborations beteween Dälek and Lightning Bolt.
A year later, Death Grips returned with The Money Store, a dizzying rush of an album with a title that likely referenced the group's short-lived major-label contract with Epic. At the time, band mastermind Zach Hill—a veteran drummer who, after a decade-plus of alternating between the roles of reliable sideman and unsung noise-scene hero, has undoubtedly benefited the most from Death Grips' notoriety—claimed that label honcho L.A. Reid air-drummed to the band's music upon signing and compared them to Whitney Houston. The former is a funny image, the latter ostensibly a tasteless joke, but upon engaging with The Money Store, all attendant information becomes irrelevant. A thrilling document of puckered melody and blue-screen-of-death chaos that stands as the project's strongest release to date, The Money Store resembled the revolting, ultra-violent conclusion to director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films: a dead body hung upside down, its contents drained and shoved into a garbage disposal.
Later that year, NO LOVE DEEP WEB arrived without warning and free of charge, triggering a well-documented war between Death Grips and their cash-flow overlords. Quite possibly the most dissonant album ever recorded at the Chateau Marmont, NO LOVE DEEP WEB found Death Grips doubling down on sonic viscera. It's a thick, sludgy record in which the group's wild-eyed mouthpiece Stefan Burnett sounds like he's trapped in hell, dragging himself through a landscape of destruction. Rather than capitalize on the comparatively bright accessibility of The Money Store, it suggested Death Grips were prepared to get weirder. Last year's Government Plates headed even further into left-of-center territory, drawing inspiration from the glitchy terror of IDM's more aggressive elements.
Like its predecessor, Government Plates was released suddenly for nothing—and so it goes, too, with Niggas on the Moon, the project's latest missive that arrived last Sunday evening. An eight-track release that stands as Death Grips' shortest effort to date, Niggas on the Moon comes bearing a title that possibly references Gil Scott-Heron, along with claims of a high-profile collaborator: Björk, who's no stranger when it comes to working with inhumanly talented drummers from the noise scene.
But nothing is quite as it seems in Death Grips' world, so within 24 hours of Niggas on the Moon's release it emerged that rumors of Björk's contributions may have been greatly exaggerated. "i am proud to announce my vocals landed on the new death grips album !" she exclaimed in an official statement the day after Niggas on the Moon dropped. "i adore death grips and i am thrilled to be their 'found object' !" The phrase "found object" suggests that she wasn't so much an active artistic partner as much as a passive supplier of source material, another sound thrown into Death Grips' culture-wiping meat grinder. Her presence on the album is, similar to Venus Williams' guttural cries sampled on The Money Store cut "System Blower", mangled and distorted beyond recognition.
Whether Björk's presence is the result of Death Grips' sampling her previous work or her providing fresh vocal takes for the band's disposal, Death Grips largely lean on her propensity for ecstatic crescendos. On "Have a Sad Cum" and album closer "Big Dipper", her cries are looped in perpetuity, producing a hallucinatory effect not unlike the trippy repetition of Chicago footwork; "Billy Not Really" opens with a perpetual build anchored by glottal coos, while "Say Hey Kid" opens with hyperspeed bass-and-drums a la Squarepusher before twisting Björk's voice into what sounds like panpipes, over a bed of rustling electronics.
Death Grips have remixed Björk before. They contributed takes on "Sacrifice" and "Thunderbolt", two songs taken from her 2011 album Biophilia, to 2012's remix collection Bastards; their remix of the former tune is especially notable in that it recycles the march-of-death bassline from "System Blower". Similarly, Niggas on the Moon finds Death Grips drawing from themselves rather than pushing things forward, a deviation from their mission statement. Anyone familiar with the band's mix of aggressive electronics, barked non-sequiturs, and collapsing song structures will find plenty to like here. After three years of aiming to confuse and shock, Death Grips are approaching reliability, and the presence of truly thrilling moments has decreased accordingly.
Complacency doesn't suit Death Grips very well, but Niggas on the Moon's high points suggest regardless that, for now, Death Grips-as-Death Grips occasionally yields satisfying results. Opener "Up My Sleeves" is a prime slice of mania that, should the band ever release a "Greatest Hits" collection (imagine that), would fit right in with their highest highs. "Black Quarterback" possesses a gleeful skip punctuated by inside-out percussion that hits like repeated punches to the abdomen; the processional gait of "Big Dipper" sounds like poisoned marching-band music, as Burnett throws out bon mots that highlight Death Grips' still-undervalued sense of humor: "I'm a bullshitter/ I'm a shitty stripper...I'm a fucking downer."
As a vocalist and lyricist, Burnett draws strength from his surroundings. When chaos engulfs him, he thrives on the energy; during Death Grips' more downtempo moments, he sounds adrift, his anti-sloganeering coming off as ridiculous and deflated, his audience laughing at rather than with him. Niggas on the Moon is, as a whole, Death Grips' least intense album, which doesn't work in Burnett's favor. Many of the record's songs have midsections that dial down the intensity before revving up again, and while Burnett's phonetic emphasis occasionally pulls him through, elsewhere he sounds listless. Death Grips achieve potency when sounding frantic, untamed, and unstable; Niggas on the Moon's more subdued moments, comparatively, resemble a brisk walk on a treadmill, and as a result it's less immediate than their previous work.
With the arrival of Niggas on the Moon came the news that the record is part of a forthcoming double-album, The Powers That B, set for release later this year on the band's own label, Third Worlds, as well as Harvest, a subsidiary of major-label entity Capitol. Death Grips are, indeed, featured on Harvest's website, so their second flirtation with the music industry's explicitly corporate arena seems to be as structurally legitimate as their first time around—then again, this is a band that prides itself on the capability to catch its audience off guard, so who knows how the rest of the year will play out for them.
With Niggas on the Moon, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that Death Grips might benefit from a change in aesthetic and conceptual focus. Even setting aside the creative stasis the music embodies, the major-label affiliations and surprise-release gimmick produces a stale whiff of deja vu. Without new tricks and fresh aggression, Death Grips risk coming across as safe and ordinary, a mess of broken teeth summarily replaced by a gap-toothed smile. | 2014-06-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Harvest / Third Worlds | June 13, 2014 | 6.7 | af11c3cb-19c3-4650-8acc-fbc0b0db771f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The late trumpeter’s third and final album opens dazzling new paths in her work. It’s a heartbreaking glimpse of where she might have gone next, but more importantly, it’s a joy to hear. | The late trumpeter’s third and final album opens dazzling new paths in her work. It’s a heartbreaking glimpse of where she might have gone next, but more importantly, it’s a joy to hear. | jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jaimie-branch-fly-or-die-fly-or-die-fly-or-die-world-war/ | Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) | Midway through “burning grey,” from her riotous third and final album Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)), jaimie branch issues an exhortation that could serve as her artistic mission statement: “Don’t forget to fight.” Whether leading her Fly or Die quartet or working as a prolific collaborator across scenes and cities, the trumpeter, composer, and vocalist, who died of undisclosed causes at 39 last year, made music from a position of joyful defiance.
Her background was in jazz, but she had little regard for putative genre distinctions, pulling in the syncopated rhythms of Latin and Caribbean music, the melodic clarity of folk song, the swirling textures of psychedelia, the abstraction of free improv, the swagger of hip-hop, the pugilism of punk rock. Her commitment to each note didn’t just make these connections between various canons seem plausible; it made the notion of their separation seem absurd. There are inherent risks to such agnosticism about style. For the enthusiastic amateur, it can betray a lack of focus; for the dispassionate professional, a belief that idioms are exercises to be mastered by rote. For branch, whose consummate technical ability never got in the way of her raw passion—or vice versa—it is simply evidence of the conviction that all of these ostensibly divergent branches grow from the same tree. And at its root, as she and her collaborators demonstrate on ((world war)), is the will to fight, to dance, and to survive.
branch had very nearly completed ((world war)) when she died. Her family members and bandmates consulted her notes to finalize details like mixes and track titles before its release. Given those circumstances, it is tempting to hear the album as a requiem, or a grand finale for her brief but impactful career. Its structure, opening with a heroic fanfare of timpani and electric organ and closing with a funereal dirge, does not initially discourage that interpretation. But on further listening, it feels less like an ending than a blossoming cruelly cut short. Though listeners of branch’s previous recordings with Fly or Die will have no trouble recognizing ((world war)) as the work of the same bandleader, they may also be struck by the number of new paths the album opens in her music.
Ideas that showed up in the margins of previous records now assume central positions. The calypso-inflected major-key melodies that came across like a lark on “simple silver surfer,” from Fly or Die II, reach nearly symphonic proportions on “baba louie,” ((world war))’s nine-minute centerpiece. branch’s roughshod and vehement vocals, absent from the first Fly or Die album and tentatively present on the second, are a driving force of the third. She is decidedly not a jazz singer, at least not in any traditional sense: She shouts, beseeches, howls wordlessly, even croons a sort of country song. The lyrics mostly favor pragmatism over poetry, plainspoken calls for resistance to the status quo. Like previous Fly or Die albums, ((world war)) often has the feeling of a raucous block party. As its master of ceremonies, branch never lets us forget that there is not just escape to be found in coming together and letting loose, but solidarity, too.
((world war))’s most striking departure from branch’s previous work comes in “the mountain,” the aforementioned country tune, a reworking of “Comin’ Down” by Arizona twang-punks the Meat Puppets that is drastic and inspired enough to merit its new title. In stark contrast to the rest of the album’s rollicking maximalism, its instrumental accompaniment consists almost entirely of Jason Ajemian’s pizzicato double bass. Ajemian sings lead, and branch harmonizes. Neither is a virtuosic singer, but showiness is not the point. The lyric, about the fitful search to transcend everyday toil, monotony, and misunderstanding, benefits from the humility of their performance. The recording is as sparse and unslick as could be: We hear collective deep breaths, a bit of branch muttering to psyche herself up, the sound of the two musicians physically shifting around the microphone. Given the bare-bones arrangement, branch’s trumpet solo, when it arrives near the song’s end, comes as a delightful surprise, even on an album by a trumpeter. There’s something jaunty and insouciant about the solo’s plainness, especially the simple three-note run that provides its emotional climax, coming at a spot where another player might have attempted a more impressively elaborate gesture. Its self-assuredness and refusal to bow to anyone else’s ideas about presentability obliquely bring to mind the cocked baseball cap that branch often wore onstage.
The hushed intimacy of “the mountain” is the exception on an album otherwise characterized by jubilant ensemble playing. One easy reference point is Miles Davis’ electric music of the 1970s: avant-garde and populist at once, following the certainty that even the most complex dissonance will go down easy if it’s set to a good enough groove. Where Davis took inspiration from the sturdy 4/4 of James Brown or Sly and the Family Stone, branch favors the slippery polyrhythms of reggaeton and dancehall. Like Davis, she is the clear star of the show when she picks up her horn, but she also knows when to lay out, focusing instead on guiding and conducting her accompanists’ gale force.
Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor play as if the fate of the universe rests on their ability to get you dancing. Cellist Lester St. Louis flits between roles, one moment contributing to the rhythm section’s unstoppable churn and the next spinning out melodic leads or sul ponticello cyclones of noise. At one point in “borealis dancing,” he ascends through a series of sustained single notes, the increasing frenzy of his bowing creating an almost unbearable tension against the conversational calm of branch’s trumpet lines. The ensemble often works like this: While one person shreds like crazy, another stays cool. It’s part of what keeps ((world war)) feeling so dynamic, giving the music space to breathe despite its instrumental density and full-throttle tempos. Within the larger trajectory of each piece, there are many smaller overlapping arcs of excitement and comedown, each following the chaos logic of a four-person improvisatory mind-meld.
The rowdy camaraderie of the improv is so powerful that it can be easy to overlook the care and sensitivity with which branch composed and arranged these tunes. Themes reprise unexpectedly; formerly dueling voices slide without warning into choreographed tandem. The longer pieces tend to follow a rough A/B structure, with a burst of body-moving energy to get them going and a turn into headier territory to bring them home. In “borealis dancing,” the band downshifts on a dime into head-nodding half-time; in “baba louie,” calypso melts eventually into ghostly dub. “take over the world” begins on a dembow rhythm played with the addled ferocity of hardcore; in branch’s stuttered declaration of intent to “Take over the world/And give it back to the land,” the song’s fusion of punk and Caribbean music comes across like Bad Brains if they were more focused on the dancefloor than the mosh pit. In its second half, Taylor takes up an effortlessly funky New Orleans-style snare-drum groove, St. Louis begins bowing an insistent two-note figure on his cello, and a delay pedal mutates branch’s voice into increasingly alien shapes. The rhythms keep the music rooted in the traditions of the Afro-Caribbean and Latinx diasporas, and the electronic contortions send it toward some imagined utopian future.
Music of all kinds suffered a significant loss with branch’s passing last year. ((world war)) provides a precious document of her artistry at the end of her life, and a glimpse of where she might have taken it next. Even more important: It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end. | 2023-08-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | August 28, 2023 | 8.5 | af1420e3-c0fe-45ef-bfd3-26181909ea20 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Chicago house legend Larry Heard's new Outer Acid EP is his first release as Mr. Fingers since 2005. But his return isn't to rehash or cash in on his old work, but rather to elucidate it, to carry on this dialogue with his machines in a new century. | Chicago house legend Larry Heard's new Outer Acid EP is his first release as Mr. Fingers since 2005. But his return isn't to rehash or cash in on his old work, but rather to elucidate it, to carry on this dialogue with his machines in a new century. | Mr. Fingers: Outer Acid EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21573-outer-acid-ep/ | Outer Acid EP | 1985 and 1986 were rather productive years for the Chicago producer Larry Heard. Using a wide array of aliases—be it Disco D, The It, Gherkin Jerks, Fingers, Inc. or Mr. Fingers—he pressed up singles like "Mystery of Love," "It's Over," "A Path," "Donnie," and "Bring Down the Walls," almost all of them epochal, codifying dance music in their wake. Heard did jack, acid, and house like few before him and fewer since, to where his decades-old productions still jerk the heartstrings, from new love to heartache, well into the present.
If you were a rock band with that many sterling singles in your arsenal, you'd release a deluxe edition and put the band back together 30 years later to cash in, but Heard's re-emergence now feels different. Late last year, he finally reissued Another Side on his own Alleviated label, rightly considered the greatest vocal house record of all time, and this month sees his first release as Mr. Fingers since 2005.
Which is not to suggest that his label has been dormant in the intervening years. Just last year, Alleviated released two strong singles from newcomers Ken Gill and Lee Pearson Jr. Collective. Heard sounds emboldened by the new blood; the four tracks that comprise this EP don't scan as old tracks dusted off and spruced up for a new generation of deep house fans, nor do they sound like Heard dabbling in the newfangled so as to prove his relevance on the EDM market. "Outer Acid," metered by closed hi-hats and canned claps, has the telltale gurgle of a 303 flowing underneath it. But Heard programs the track at the pace of a babbling brook rather than a Warehouse rager, acid house as dulcet and calming, with Heard judiciously adding a metallophone melody to give the track a buoyant charm.
"Nodyahead" is a clattering, upbeat house track while "Aether" is downtempo with a nimbus about its fringes. With its spotlight sweep of chords across the patient house beat, "Qwazars" is luminous, from its subject matter to its melody, the sample of "What’s going on?" "Quasars" dialogue (purportedly lifted from a Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture) a nice touch. It shows that Mr. Fingers’ return isn't to rehash or cash in on his old work, but rather to elucidate it, to carry on this dialogue with his machines in a new century.
Correction: The original version of this review incorrectly stated the title of the EP*. It is the* Outer Acid EP, not the Mr. Fingers EP. | 2016-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Alleviated | March 1, 2016 | 8.1 | af1de478-330a-48b4-a339-dbe020e977b8 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
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