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Eleventh Dream Day may not have found fame with the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been kind: widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with twelve good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. Works for Tomorrow, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever. | Eleventh Dream Day may not have found fame with the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been kind: widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with twelve good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. Works for Tomorrow, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever. | Eleventh Dream Day: Works for Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20906-works-for-tomorrow/ | Works for Tomorrow | Few—if any—indie rock bands have been subject to as much armchair quarterbacking as Eleventh Dream Day. They had the songs, they had the chops, but they just never quite got the timing right. Their brief dalliance with the majors was, by most accounts, an unmitigated disaster; Atlantic so badly botched—and then quickly abandoned—1993's would-be breakthrough El Moodio that the band issued a director's cut of sorts, New Moodio, in 2013. They may not've found the fame they deserved in the post-Nevermind land grab, but the years that followed have been awfully kind; widely beloved among indie rock's older guard, with 12 good-to-great records to their name, they've found the freedom to follow their own serpentine path wherever it leads. In the wake of New Moodio—a record that may've just put all that "what if?" talk to bed—EDD seem revitalized*: Works for Tomorrow*, their latest, is their fieriest record in years, and among their finest ever.
Produced by keyboardist Mark Greenberg, Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout. Works came together quickly; on their first day alone, they'd tracked 13 songs, 10 of which show up here. Works is also the first Eleventh Dream Day record in two decades to feature a second guitarist with Jim Elkington of Tweedy and the Horse's Ha. Elkington and singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo have an immediate on-record chemistry. Rizzo's gloriously ragged, Neil Young-jocking leads have long been EDD's signature, and with Elkington at his side, they can kick up twice the dust.
Works charges out of the gate with "Vanishing Point", in which Janet Beveridge Bean does her damnedest to earn whoever's listening a speeding ticket. Every time she wails "I'm gonna take it from the inside, I'm gonna take it slow," the song's taut, krautrock-indebted pulse seems to quicken. Bean's never held back, exactly, but the way she tears into "Vanishing"—and her searing mid-LP cover of Judy Henske and Jerry Yester's psych-blues stomper "Snowblind"—is something else entirely. Rizzo, as ever, is a quizzical, around-the-beat singer. The pair's frequent harmonizing has only deepened with time, so that the slightest shift in affect from either one changes the entire feel of the line. The raucous, gospel-tinged "Go Tell It" finds Rizzo doing his best Lou Reed, with Bean answering with an even-better Merry Clayton, while plainly gorgeous late-LP highlight "Deep Lakes" finds the pair sighing their way through a perserverer's anthem: "I'm alive, we survived," they sing, with striking calm.
Works, Rizzo's said in interviews, is his attempt to locate the source of some recent emotional turmoil. "My mom's side is northern Europe Swedish and my dad is Italian," he told the Chicago Tribune, "so you've got the Italian emotional half, and on the Swedish side, there's this attitude that you don't talk about the past. That warm front, cold front collision ends up causing a storm." Never is this clearer than on closer "End With Me", which finds Rizzo out east, visiting relatives' graves, trying to figure out why everything behind him seems to be getting in his way. By digging into—and then letting go of—that past, Rizzo can finally reckon with the present. Even if he hadn't spelled it out, that feeling's all over Works for Tomorrow: what's done is done, but right now, things are looking up. | 2015-08-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | August 7, 2015 | 7.4 | af1e5201-6cd0-4043-86f9-ed5c8cb44927 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Terius Nash's fourth solo album as The-Dream is packed with guest stars including Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and 2 Chainz. In one sense, it feels like a bold grab at the pop stardom that has eluded him in his solo career. But for the first time, it feels like he’s trying to keep up with everyone else. | Terius Nash's fourth solo album as The-Dream is packed with guest stars including Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and 2 Chainz. In one sense, it feels like a bold grab at the pop stardom that has eluded him in his solo career. But for the first time, it feels like he’s trying to keep up with everyone else. | The-Dream: IV Play | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18053-the-dream-fourplay/ | IV Play | “I know they ain’t gon’ play this on top 40 radio,” begins “Slow It Down", IV Play’s confrontational first single. An indignant backlash against the wave of EDM-R&B that’s been sweeping the airwaves of the past few years, it’s a ballsy, against-the-grain move that highlights the identity crisis that Terius Nash seems to be undergoing. But in truth, the song's dilemma applies to his entire career. While The-Dream has written some of the biggest hits of the past decade-- ”Umbrella,” “Single Ladies”, lots more-- his solo work has failed to take off. Instead, he's developed a cult and has become a fixation of R&B nerds everywhere. Packed with guest stars, IV Play feels like it’s finally vying for that elusive spotlight. And, while he’s still not making those “motherfucking dance songs,” for the first time it feels like he’s trying to keep up with everyone else.
IV Play starts off shaky with “High Art”, an awkward attempt at a club anthem. Nash has never done this sort of machismo well; his charm lies in his ability to string sweetly sung hooks together, but he forgoes his established style repeatedly in IV Play’s first half. Always a fan of references, he takes a thesaurus to Ginuwine’s “Pony” for the bizarre and plodding “Equestrian”, while the less said about the tepid mess of “Turnt” (with Beyoncé and 2 Chainz, no less) the better. The only decent guest appearance is Pusha T's on "Pussy", which is ruined by Big Sean's embarrassing appearance two minutes later. It’s the first time Nash has disappointed like this; he’s had a bum track or two, sure, but the early string of clunkers is discouraging.
Not that there aren’t gleams of brilliance. The title track is intriguingly out of character-- “I could give a fuck about the foreplay/ I’m talking straight sex,” this coming from the man who once described messing up his girl's hair like it was an elaborate courting ritual. But it falls into a despondent outro that edges on self-doubt. There’s been a string of self-loathing running through Nash’s music since his very public divorce (immortalized on 2011’s self-released 1977), which he can’t quite seem to shake. It’s there in the defensive “Slow It Down”, it’s there in the outro to “IV Play” (“I don’t deserve you”), and it’s there in another one of the LP’s most plaintive tracks, “New Orleans”. Like an outtake from 1977, the song’s subject (“this bitch”) is repeated at the end of every line, and while it’s undeniably affecting, the misogyny becomes grating.
Thankfully there’s at least one classic The-Dream track on IV Play-- the effortlessly airy “Michael”. And, though more questionable lyrics abound (“He say he love you/ I just wanna fuck you/ Over the weekend”), it has all the lilt and masterful vocalisms of his best work. But this song is an exception. For an artist that’s modeled himself so closely after Prince, it’s striking how IV Play resembles the Purple One’s late 80s transition phase when the Minneapolis artist tried to re-engage his black fans by self-consciously urbanizing his music (see The Black Album). IV Play has many of the same restless impulses, from the surprisingly excellent blues slow-burner “Too Early” to the two-songs-stuck-together shambles of “Loving You/ Crazy.” The brilliant auteur we fell in love with is still in here somewhere. He’s just buried under layers of pretense.
IV Play winds down with the epic “Holy Love,” which references his “Umbrella” height of 2007 and hints at emptiness in the wake of success. Where exactly his ire is directed is unclear, but it makes explicit a frustration obvious to anyone who’s been watching his solo career since it started, through record label ordeals, delayed release dates and scrapped albums. “Always with you baby/I’ll never sell out,” he sings in a verse to “Slow It Down,” which begins to feel like a coded message to his longtime fans. Sticking with him through the machinations of the music industry has never been more difficult than it is now, but IV Play still has its rewards. When the world finally heeds the plea of “Slow It Down”, he might achieve immortality all over again. For now, though, he’s merely human. | 2013-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | May 29, 2013 | 6.9 | af240988-2ccc-4387-8e97-54d33a4ff766 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
The noisy, cosmic trio of Philadelphia DIY lifers returns with an unearthed studio album. It’s an upgrade in fidelity and a shit-ton of fun. | The noisy, cosmic trio of Philadelphia DIY lifers returns with an unearthed studio album. It’s an upgrade in fidelity and a shit-ton of fun. | Birds of Maya: Valdez | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/birds-of-maya-valdez/ | Valdez | Birds of Maya are a band who don’t seem all that concerned with the formalities of being a band. The Philly trio doesn’t really remember when they formed—“somewhere between 2000 and 2004” is their best guesstimate. They took about half a decade to properly issue their first album in 2008, and then, after two follow-ups, checked out for most of the 2010s. And while the arrival of Valdez, their first record in eight years, might seem like an encouraging sign of life, it was actually recorded seven years ago, thereby blurring the line between a comeback effort and a reissue of a lost album.
Of course, there’s a good reason for their inactivity—all three members of Birds of Maya are pillars in the Philly DIY community, with multiple projects on the go. Singer/bassist Jason Killinger has stayed busy with his bands Spacin’ and Soft Crime; drummer Ben Leaphart has played with the Bardo Pond offshoot Aye Aye as well as Purling Hiss, the long-running indie-rock outfit fronted by Birds of Maya guitarist Mike Polizze (who also dropped an alt-country-leaning solo release, Long Lost Solace Find, last year). But if the sudden reappearance of Birds of Maya feels randomly timed at this juncture in their respective careers, Valdez’s origin date is ultimately immaterial because Birds of Maya deal in a type of rock music that persists like nuclear waste: the sort of sludgy noise that loses little of its skin-melting toxicity through the passage of time.
Valdez belongs to an exclusive fuzz-punk fraternity whose charter members include Funhouse-era Stooges, Spacemen 3’s “Revolution,” early Mudhoney, Monster Magnet’s Spine of God, Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, and the Men circa Leave Home: records that value blown-speaker distortion, runaway-train momentum, and sinister, brain-scrambling psychedelia above all else. But even as it follows a well-trodden trail of busted distortion pedals, Valdez abounds with thrills and surprises, the same way that standing in the middle of an 8x8 jam space while a band revs up will always give you a heart-palpating jolt.
Birds of Maya always aspired to bring that practice-room experience into your home through their largely improvised, no-fi recordings that were liable to spill past the 20-minute mark. Valdez, by contrast, was made at a proper studio in upstate New York, and although the whole thing was reportedly cut and mixed in 36 hours, there’s a much greater definition and thickness to these recordings that elevate the Birds from trashy basement noisemakers to omnipotent power trio. Most significantly, the album presents an opportunity to truly appreciate the relentless rumble that Killinger and Leaphart produce, through a combination of kosmische-rock velocity and soul-revue vigor that launches Polizze’s fretwork into the cosmos. The 10-minute instrumental centerpiece “Recessinater” epitomizes Valdez’s expansive, three-dimensional attack. As Polizze’s sun-warped, snake-charmer guitar line plays call-and-response with itself, the rhythm section sets the breakneck pace while providing the melodic undercurrent that gives shape and structure to the splatter.
On the tracks with vocals, the upgrade in fidelity doesn’t give us any clearer picture into what Killinger is actually talking about, but it does allow us to hear his voice in strange new contexts. While the opening “High Fly” peels out like Jimmy Page hitching a ride on Can’s “Mother Sky,” the song’s scorching midsection guitar jam is threaded with the uncanny murmur of his vocal track in the background, like a lone parishioner who refuses to snap out of his prayer chant even as his church is burning to the ground. Amid the acidic Crazy Horse churn of “Busted Room,” he breaks out of his diseased-Dylan snarl to deliver a spoken-word passage in a different corner of the mix, as if he were instantly transported inside your brain.
But for all its brute force and suffocating scuzz, Valdez is also a shit-ton of fun, whether it’s making you see stars from all the hypnotic hammering of “Please Come In” or blindsiding you with a two-minute proto-metal spurt like “BFIOU,” which is sort of like Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” for dirtbags on a joyride with a suspended driver’s license. As a seven-year-old recording slathered in redlining guitar squall, caveman stomping, and largely unintelligible lyrics, Valdez has absolutely nothing to say about the state of our world today. And yet the timing of its reemergence couldn’t be more perfect: This is a readymade soundtrack for humidity-choked summer nights spent getting up to no good and going crazy from the heat.
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. | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | July 1, 2021 | 8 | af246d85-3116-41f6-acef-dd44e8fda38a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
For the first five years of their existence, New York metal outfit Tombs sounded undecided about their sound, but their third album is one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan, they've mustered the heaviest elements of their sound for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. | For the first five years of their existence, New York metal outfit Tombs sounded undecided about their sound, but their third album is one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan, they've mustered the heaviest elements of their sound for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. | Tombs: Savage Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19421-tombs-savage-gold/ | Savage Gold | The past of New York’s Tombs feels, in retrospect, like a working laboratory for the success of Savage Gold, their third album and one of the year’s absolute heavy metal masterstrokes. For the first five years of their existence, Tombs felt undecided, a college kid cycling through survey courses while searching for a major. On a series of EPs, splits and albums, frontman Mike Hill moved through a half-dozen members (he’s now the only extant original) and twice as many modes, dispatching ideas in search of an identity. Their very good 2011 LP, Path of Totality, worked through turgid sludge and distant post-punk, seething black metal and prismatic psychedelia, forcing those forms into inchoate but intriguing shapes.
But Savage Gold betrays no such indecision, from the production choices to the stunning execution. Working with American death metal demigod Erik Rutan in his St. Petersburg, Fla., recording studio, Tombs mostly mustered the heaviest elements of its sound—breakneck blast beats and high-stacked guitars, irascible screams and punishing repetition—for a cohesive, propulsive, and definitive statement. Tombs made the decision to keep it relatively simple on Savage Gold, and that mandate has reanimated the band for 57 extreme and urgent minutes.
Tombs begins these 10 tracks with an ominous groan of organ creaks and doom guitar sweeps, but the lull is short-lived: Drummer Andrew Hernandez II slaps his kit twice and then steps on the double-bass pedal, commencing a blast beat that swells and shrinks but doesn’t actually stop for the song’s first two minutes. Across Savage Gold, Hernandez emerges as the hero, not only guiding the band through its twists between riffs and breaks between verses but also constantly redoubling each song’s intensity. He often sets a pace and then, at just the perfect moment, fills the space between the beats, acts of sudden escalation that push Savage Gold from a series of plateaus into a succession of peaks. “Ashes” nods to Darkthrone, particularly in Hill’s scabrous Nocturno Culto vocal homage.
But it’s Hernandez who does the heavy lifting, switching—seamlessly, repeatedly—between breathless blitzes, stuttering turnarounds and driving, four-on-the-floor wallop. Hill, guitarist Garrett Bussanick and bassist Ben Brand often split the leads and the distorted textures and counters that surround them. They pass the riffs around and decorate them in a way that emphasizes the momentum more than the melody itself. By shifting so much of the movement to Hernandez’s drums, Savage Gold is locked in motion that’s more felt than heard, more intuited than observed. The decision makes the eight-minute "Echoes" seem much shorter; the whole record becomes an unending rush.
Savage Gold has breaks in the armor, of course, moments where the drumming thunder and the piercing guitars acquiesce to less identifiable, less forceful sounds. The tripwire riffs of “Echoes”, for instance, decay into a slow cycle of feedback, while, just before the end, “Portraits” pulls back on its headlong rush to reveal a gale of bristling tones beneath the beating. But those passing moments—and even the cold, five-minute stare of the album’s only reserved track, “Severed Lives”—serve mostly as setups for a takedown, spreading a calm canvas for the band to soon rip through it.
Just when the electric whorl of guitars at the close of “Portraits” starts to feel almost safe, Hernandez leads the attack of “Seance”, his drums puncturing the reverie as the guitars coil around another militant meter. “Severed Lives” is a menacing drift of hissed vocals and slowly loping bass; after four minutes, it even sublimates into a bowed, sinister drone. It’s only a feint, a trap for the explosive finale of “Spiral,” the radiant and complicated closer that recapitulates the enthusiasm and magnetism of the entire album. Again and again, Tombs mitigate the rumble between a string of onslaughts, tempering one moment only to make the next more effective.
Tombs’ sense of timing, economy and impact throughout Savage Gold suggests the successes of Aesthethica, the second album by another similarly searching Brooklyn metal band, Liturgy. But Hill has no manifestos, no flashpoint politics, elements that would only distract from his band’s newfound decisiveness and direction. Still, Savage Gold’s energy suggests the same sort of “ecstasy” as Aesthethica, a feeling that also gives it concomitant crossover appeal. Maybe that’s a surprising suggestion, that the album where Tombs digs its heels into heavy metal and works with one of the genre’s bulwark producers might be the one that pushes its reputation farthest afield of metal itself. But you can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows. It seems like a valiant journey through what he calls “Shades of darkness/ Kingdoms of ashes”—triumphant and without trepidation. | 2014-06-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Relapse | June 9, 2014 | 8.3 | af2b327f-f929-4453-91d7-d13ea184111b | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The 14th solo release from the ambient musician and 12k label head is a refined display of his impeccable devotion to his craft. | The 14th solo release from the ambient musician and 12k label head is a refined display of his impeccable devotion to his craft. | Taylor Deupree: Harbor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-deupree-harbor/ | Harbor | If the title of Ambient Musician Laureate existed in the United States, Taylor Deupree would be a shoo-in. He’s not an indie-crossover success story like Grouper or William Basinski, nor does his work tend to challenge preconceptions of what ambient music can be, but he’s one of the genre’s most consummate professionals. As founder and head of the 12k label and engineering studio in New York, he’s the guy that people who master ambient albums hit up to master their own records. You can also find him working with David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto, composing music for photography installations and outdoor tea gardens, or releasing pristine-sounding, artfully crafted ambient albums united by his faded, organic visual aesthetic.
Harbor is the 14th and latest of these releases, and Deupree’s sound design ensures it feels as pristine as anything he’s released while creating an intriguing wrinkle. The surfaces of these eight tracks sparkle with effervescent leads clearly played on a synth but not far removed from the Rhodes pianos beloved by the Album Leaf. Meanwhile, a heavy, ominous low end weighs these tracks down and keeps them from floating into the ether. It adds fearful tension to this largely optimistic music. If Harbor is meant to evoke its title, it’s easy to imagine an idyllic surface of beaches and sailboats perched above the murky depths of the ocean.
But Harbor is less effective as a travelog than as a sculptural object, and the way the different layers of sound interact is more interesting than what they’re supposed to represent; it’s easy to marvel at all the individual noises as they flit about the stereo field. There are some wonderful effects here, like the fleck of Pastorian bass on “Mihto” and the moment when the gnarly low end takes over “Desaturation” and turns it into a rather vicious noise-drone. You get the sense that Deupree has been doing this for so long that sound is like bread and butter in his hands.
Deupree loves textural grit, and each track has a slightly different assortment of burbles and hisses emanating out of the depths of the mix. The effect is less to make it sound as if it’s glitching, as in the work of fellow Y2K-era sound explorers like Vladislav Delay and Oval, and more to capture “the imperfect beauty of nature” Deupree cites as essential to both his music and his photography. It’s as if Deupree has taken these eight finely-sculpted objects and left them outside for a while so the rain and wind can work their magic. (Leave this stuff outside for a little longer and you’d have Mike Cooper.)
At times, Harbor sounds uncannily similar to some of the music currently being put out by the West Mineral stable of musicians, especially last year’s self-titled debut from Picnic. But while those artists emphasize mystery and obscurity, as if their music is concealing all manner of shadowy secrets, there’s the sense with Harbor that what we’re hearing is what we’re seeing. This music is so high-definition, each element so precisely mixed and clearly emphasized, that there’s never a sense of anything hidden or left to the imagination. Luckily, what’s already there is more than sufficient to stir it. | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | 12k | June 14, 2022 | 6.9 | af2d6a98-04d6-4487-a13b-02f2bb687009 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Newly remastered and reissued, Instrumentals is an ideal entry point into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic. His early ideas as a downtown composer and cellist were both complex and joyful. | Newly remastered and reissued, Instrumentals is an ideal entry point into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic. His early ideas as a downtown composer and cellist were both complex and joyful. | Arthur Russell: Instrumentals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23035-instrumentals/ | Instrumentals | Getting a handle on Arthur Russell’s discursive career would be tough, even if everything had been well documented. But in the decade following his death in 1992, Russell existed not so much as an artist with an in-print catalog than he did as a rumor—one with the highest class of reputation. The 21st century has seen a boom of Russell reissues, most of which have come from the Audika label’s partnership with the Russell estate.
In 2006, on the set First Thought Best Thought, Audika compiled a few of the cellist-composer’s noisier, long-form experiments, along with Tower of Meaning and Instrumentals. The latter was intended as a double-album set, though the label that first released Instrumentals in 1984 managed to lose its opening half (and to master the second half at the wrong speed). First Thought Best Thought corrected the speed issue, and restored the album’s opening portion, thanks to an archival tape discovery.
While First Thought Best Thought was a gift for anyone immersed in Russell studies, its sonics weren’t as clear as fans might have hoped. Audika took a separate pass at remastering Tower of Meaning, in 2016. And this year brings a new remaster of Instrumentals, available on both vinyl and lossless-digital formats. The album has never sounded better, nor has it ever seemed so much like an ideal point of entry into Russell’s pre-disco, magpie aesthetic.
The downtown composer conceived of his Instrumentals series as a “modular” piece, in which separate passages of notated melody could be played by an improvising ensemble, in any order. In performance, a relatively spare portion of preconceived material could flower into a full set. But only after the musicians mastered the riffs—a process that took some doing. In the liner notes for this new release, saxophonist Jon Gibson writes that one of the core challenges of this music was Russell’s desire for his band to “improvise with unfamiliar chord sequences placed upon asymmetrical … time lengths.”
During the 1975 sessions that form the first half of Instrumentals, you can hear Russell joyfully rummaging through his toy chest of influences. The indeterminate nature of each performance calls on the theories of John Cage, while the long-lined melodies and rhythms pull from Russell’s study of Indian classical traditions. The fact that the harmonies are full of poppy, countrified accents reveals the bandleader’s Americana affections.
Any mastering job needs some delicacy if it hopes to bring across all the formal aspects contained on these tapes. This new remaster of Instrumentals dials back on the drum-and guitar-heavy sound that swamped some of the lighter timbres on First Thought Best Thought. The subtlety of this edition allows each instrument in the group to sing out in a fresh way. On “Vol. 1, Track 1,” Gibson’s soprano sax has a lustrous, lilting sheen that’s well-matched by Russell’s electric cello lines. Instead of sounding plodding, due to its center-stage presence in the prior mix, the honky-tonk percussion on “Vol. 1, Track 3” now registers as lightly humorous. The competing tempos of “Vol. 1, Track 6” and the mix of woodwind drones and funk-guitar flourishes on “Vol. 1, Track 7” now pass by with a greater Zen bliss.
Performances from 1977-78 make up the second volume of Instrumentals (the half originally issued at the wrong speed in 1984). The pace of these performances is generally slower, the improvisation less animated in nature. And the comparative unison among players in Russell’s ensemble offers a look at the variety of the composer’s underlying melodic progressions. During the half-hour duration of “Pt. 2,” the starkness of some initial patterns leads to concluding vistas of greater sweetness. As on the freshly mastered abstract pieces “Sketch for ‘The Face of Helen’” and “Reach One,” a slight reduction of tape hiss brings real benefits. There’s still no such thing as a prototypical Arthur Russell album, but the range of textures on this new master of Instrumentals gets us closer than ever to his stated intention to fuse the avant-garde with, as Russell put it, “the bright sound and magical qualities of the bubblegum.” | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Audika | April 1, 2017 | 8.4 | af2e0985-201c-4b09-a797-d3341a0e6fb0 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Irish DIY artist isn’t the first to note that while pop is fun, capitalism is perhaps a bit of a downer. But she’s uncommonly committed to the bit. | The Irish DIY artist isn’t the first to note that while pop is fun, capitalism is perhaps a bit of a downer. But she’s uncommonly committed to the bit. | Meljoann: H.R. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meljoann-hr/ | H.R. | Human resources, like much of the verbal suit-starch of corporate communication, barely conceals a double meaning. There’s the handbook definition: everything available in your confidential employee assistance plan. Then there’s the literal meaning—human as resource—as well as its logical extension: fodder that grinds easiest when raw.
Meljoann, an Irish DIY pop artist now based in Brighton, knows something about being raw. Her 2010 debut, Squick, won over the Irish music press with wonky self-produced R&B tracks about reptilians and office supplies. Although rough around the edges, it showed ambition and imagination you don’t often get one album in.
HR is the result of a decade’s worth of honing. Once again, Meljoann reverse-engineers the back catalogs of Janet Jackson, Jam & Lewis, and their peers, but this time her Janet album of choice is Rhythm Nation 1814, and more “Black Cat” than “Escapade.” The sound suits the subject matter: 11 dispatches from corporate dystopia. She isn’t the first artist to note that while pop is fun, capitalism is perhaps a bit of a downer. But HR commits to the bit. The first track is called “Assfuck the Boss,” and that’s one of the less angry ones. In its social venom and unsparing bleakness, the album’s closest peer is probably U.S. Girls’ In a Poem Unlimited. But HR is both a one-woman show and a far less heady one: too furious for subtlety.
This is the kind of album that delivers, in a cool R&B purr, lines like, “You’ve got no means of production, girl.” In another artist’s hands, it might be disastrous, and HR sometimes toes the line. The unrelenting pummel of the arrangements is exhausting, though so is a 70-hour week. Not every lyric works, and given their brashness, when the lines miss they miss hard. (There’s lots of careful storytelling; there’s also at least one “wack.”) Occasionally the irony becomes a bit obvious; “Consumer,” a confection of bright synths and candy-coated dreams, could be cut by your pick of extremely online pop star. But it’s about the only track here that could.
Take “O Supervisor,” a Laurie Anderson pun in the form of a new jack swing track, over which Meljoann flings video-game metaphors at turbo speed. The comparison is apt—gaming is a world of bosses, grinding, and power fantasies for the powerless, brought to you by rampant exploitation, and its silliness is its weapon. The titular trip of “Company Retreat” is the stuff of, as one recent exposé put it, “Bacchian nightmare”: team-building banalities and furtive corporate raids, followed by “mandatory blow.” Meljoann brings it to heart-racing life with an industrial beat, frantic chromatic runs, and frayed, high-pitched panting that recalls Britney’s Blackout—itself a hedonistic nightmare of a pop album.
Sometimes the bleakness sets in gradually. “I Quit” is a 1990s ballad in the Brian McKnight or Mariah Carey mold, each chord signaling a poised epiphany and each line a blunt dismissal. But it’s never really cathartic; the structure meanders and the bridge ends in an atrophied version of the “Emotions” run. “Business Card” opens on a doomy synth riff, swaggering like masculinity; next, pitched-down backing vocals akin to the Knife’s “One Hit”; then, a body count: “I’m on the golf course/And I shot 18 souls/Got my PR on it.” It’s the most spiteful take on the subject since Patrick Bateman fumed over his colleagues’ stationery. “Ventilation Shaft” sets Meljoann’s best, bleakest lyric to horror-movie ambience: the human groans and inhuman creaks sound like something grotesque done to people in a storm drain.
At the other end of the doomer-to-optimist spectrum lies “Personal Assistant.” The title brings to mind consumer tech, and the chorus pings out a two-note chime not unlike the yes-sir chirping of Siri or Alexa. But the song’s subject is a human who’s finally glimpsing real freedom. The sound is exhilarating, all celebratory “1999” synths and constant forward motion, and the bridge ends with purpose: “There’s some shit we’re not supposed to take.” It’s a manifesto delivered on letterhead, stamped in venom ink.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Boy Scout Audio | August 5, 2021 | 7.3 | af309f5d-efc7-412e-8b02-d551c18db1e3 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Hallucinogen Remixes follows on the heels of Kelela's last EP, a half-hour probe into the inner workings of love, lust, and codependency. Featuring work from DJ Spinn, Gaika, and others, the remixes here spin her style into footwork, grime, baile funk, and other genres. | Hallucinogen Remixes follows on the heels of Kelela's last EP, a half-hour probe into the inner workings of love, lust, and codependency. Featuring work from DJ Spinn, Gaika, and others, the remixes here spin her style into footwork, grime, baile funk, and other genres. | Kelela: Hallucinogen Remixes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21402-hallucinogen-remixes/ | Hallucinogen Remixes | Last year, Kelela returned with honed-in vision, sharpened songwriting, and 23rd-century production for Hallucinogen, a half-hour probe into the inner workings of love, lust, and codependency. Hallucinogen's amniotic take on club, R&B, and pop paired with a stronger vocal performance worked so well that it made her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me look like batting practice in comparison. But Kelela has always been an artist who works best when her unfettered voice is placed against unexpected backdrops: She brought effortless calm to Kingdom's metallic, bass-heavy club music on Cut 4 Me; sultry pathos to Kindness' loungey, sax-heavy sophomore LP Otherness; and a sense of gravity to Arca's nebulous electronics on Hallucinogen. This past Christmas, in a seeming bid to show off this versatility, Kelela dropped Hallucinogen Remixes, an EP containing remixes of four Hallucinogen tracks that spin her style into footwork, grime, baile funk, and other genres.
Remixes opens with a high-energy mix of "A Message," courtesy of footwork legend DJ Spinn. Spinn leaves the song's structure relatively as-is, adding fills of high-speed drum patterns beneath Kelela's verses to give the song a shuddering spark that puts it at thrilling odds against the original's languorous production. Brazilian baile funk artist MC Bin Laden's take on "Rewind" goes big, using a single line from the song and studding it with drops and verses from the MC to turn it into a towering baile number that wouldn’t sound out of place on the last Major Lazer record. It's riveting, but ultimately feels like filler against a vet like Spinn, who evokes the same urge to dance with significantly less pomp.
Elsewhere, Bristol producer Kahn gives Hallucinogen highlight "All the Way Down" an ominous grime re-do and recruits rising Brixton artist Gaika for a guest verse, whose elastic rapping and low-pitched voice work as a good complement to Kelela's diaphanous vocals. Melbourne producer Air Max ’97 gives the same song an undertow of fast-paced drumming and a few floating synth lines, focusing on vivid, key lines to dramatic effect: "I'm doing things that I don't do/ So comfortable when I'm with you... I'm staying over at yours tonight/ I'm calling late, let's exercise." The most distinct remix here comes from club and ballroom DJs Mike Q and Divoli S’vere, who strip away the reeling bass of Hallucinogen closer "The High" and substitute just a pounding heartbeat and skittering, sped-up samples of Kelela’s voice. It's a creative flip on the original that, alongside DJ Spinn and Kahn's entries, also makes a good case for this collection's existence.
That being said, Hallucinogen Remixes doesn't eclipse its source material by any means—it's probably only essential if you're already a Kelela diehard. Paired with the original, it at least makes for a good holdover until an official debut LP, which is slated to appear sometime this year. As a brief look at Kelela playing with genres we've yet to hear, however, Remixes is sufficient enough. | 2016-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warp | January 15, 2016 | 7 | af3eae65-1eab-4c58-8b83-1147c2b9d93f | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | null |
The English electronic artist pays tribute to his inspirations while maintaining his distinct, masterful sound. | The English electronic artist pays tribute to his inspirations while maintaining his distinct, masterful sound. | Nathan Fake: Crystal Vision | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathan-fake-crystal-vision/ | Crystal Vision | When Nathan Fake emerged in the early 2000s, he was part of a small, upstart crew making splotchy, rough-hewn dance music, a volatile amalgam of techno, trance, and IDM that sounded little like anything else in clubs at the time. The artists on James Holden’s Border Community label were feted by progressive-house jocks and championed by minimal-techno heads, but they didn’t slot easily into either scene. As if to prove his independence, Fake largely abandoned club conventions on his debut album, 2006’s Drowning in a Sea of Love, delving instead into shoegaze textures and krautrock beats diametrically opposed to the snap-tight DJ tools of the era. Over the past 20 years, the Norwich native has developed a highly idiosyncratic style: His drums are gnarled and overdriven, and his synths are as jagged and luminous as cracked-open geodes. The same qualities distinguish his sixth album, Crystal Vision, which, like 2020’s Blizzard, boasts a burly, percussive sound informed by his live sets. But for the first time, he now pays direct homage to his inspirations.
Fake has never made a secret of who his heroes are. Boards of Canada’s tape-warped synths have long been central to his aesthetic, and so have Aphex Twin’s brightly childlike melodies. But his tips of the hat feel more explicit, and intentional, than ever. In “Boss Core,” synthesizers inspired by Autechre’s generative processes twist and turn over a lumbering, serrated groove, changing shape and color with every bar—a scale model of evolution compressed into seven spellbinding minutes. The title track is also in thrall to Autechre, taking the plangent leads of the duo’s 1994 album Amber and pairing them with a shuffling breakbeat reminiscent of prime Boards of Canada; all that’s missing is a well-placed “I love you” sample. The square-wave synths and scratchy drums of “Hawk,” meanwhile, feel like callbacks to James Holden’s remixes of Fake’s 2004 underground hit “The Sky Was Pink,” while the gradually unspooling arpeggios of “The Grass” approximate the drawn-out chord progressions of Holden epics like “A Break in the Clouds.” Both tracks feel like attempts to reclaim emblematic sounds from Border Community’s formative days.
Yet no matter how unambiguous the references, these don’t feel like imitations; they feel like Nathan Fake tracks. In “Crystal Vision,” the breaks are noisier, the mood stormier, than in any of Boards of Canada’s bucolic etudes. “Bibled” also glancingly invokes the melancholy synths of Amber, along with Seefeel’s contemporaneous Succour, yet nobody but Fake could have put those elements together in quite the same way. As much as the harmonic dimension may dominate his music—the billowing chords, the smoldering tone colors—he typically begins with the drums, and you can hear as much if you lean in close. His micro-syncopations are cut with a craftsman’s care; every drum stakes out its own place in the spectrum, offbeat hits cushioning the groove like cells of bubble wrap keep a jostling object from rattling itself to pieces.
Other Fake hallmarks recur across the album. Chief among them is a hall-of-mirrors effect whereby he answers the principal synth riff—sharp, declarative, cutting—with a contrapuntal echo, usually smeared into chords, that makes it feel as if every melodic element were being trailed by a holographic echo. And no sound, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is ever static. Electronic music’s detractors have sometimes derided its practitioners as knob twiddlers, but Fake knows the power that lies in the simplest tweak of the pan pot. His knobs are always in motion. In “Vimana,” he takes a simple 16th-note arpeggio and proceeds to turn the sound inside out—veiling it with filters, dissolving it into a spray of harmonics, molding the trim, snub-nosed envelope into something wide and wheezy. Rather than predictable collections of loops, his tracks feel like 3D models that reveal shape-shifting contours as they spin on an invisible axis. His productions fall at the intersection of intention and accident, striking a delicate balance between control and chaos.
Crystal Vision’s most obvious tribute is “AMEN 96,” a pummeling drum’n’bass tune built from a chestnut of a breakbeat. To hear Fake tell it, writing the track was a lark, just an attempt to see what he could do with jungle’s hoariest trope. There’s no shortage of producers reworking classic jungle sounds these days, but “AMEN 96” doesn’t sound like the work of someone paying fealty to a bygone sound. Where most producers exploit the propulsive properties of the shopworn break, Fake smashes it to pieces, fashioning a brittle frame of snares and cymbals to go with his bright, stabbing synths. It feels less like a rhythm than a dazzling mosaic made of tiny mirrored shards. Nobody but Nathan Fake could have made a jungle track like “AMEN 96”—and at a moment when jungle is one of the most imitated styles in club culture, that’s saying something. Crystal Vision offers a useful reminder that in dance music, a culture built on collective “scenius,” being original is overrated. | 2023-04-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Cambria Instruments | April 12, 2023 | 7.6 | af3f9932-313f-423f-b230-cfb5af464b3b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Lorely Rodriguez’s third album, largely written and produced alone, refocuses her voice into an emotionally and aesthetically rich album of heartbreak, family history, and pop delights. | Lorely Rodriguez’s third album, largely written and produced alone, refocuses her voice into an emotionally and aesthetically rich album of heartbreak, family history, and pop delights. | Empress Of: I’m Your Empress Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/empress-of-im-your-empress-of/ | I’m Your Empress Of | Lorely Rodriguez has created an album that moves like oil in water. I’m Your Empress Of is more elegantly constructed and beats-focused, yet no less imaginative than the noise-pop wedgie she gave listeners on her 2015 debut Me. Muffled snatches of chatter, the voice of Rodriguez’s own mother, and a zesty club pulse bind the 12 tracks of her third album together to create a short, ambitious song cycle that reinstates Rodriguez among electronic pop’s auteurs.
Empress Of’s scattered previous album, 2018’s Us, took two and a half years and a cast of collaborators to make. In contrast, all but two of I’m Your Empress Of’s songs were produced and written by Rodriguez alone over two feverish months. Reeling from a recent break-up and the zig-zagging adrenaline of a relentless tour schedule, Rodriguez would wake early and set to work in her home studio in Los Angeles, using songwriting to release trauma and confusion. In purging emotional extremes, Rodriguez rises from the embers of heartbreak to hit on a personal and artistic truth: She is better off alone.
Thriving in solitude is cause for celebration, as a triumvirate of bangers makes clear. “Bit Of Rain,” the album’s first track proper, is a stormy flirtation with trap snares and imagistic fragments. “You closed your eyes/Heavy blinds to a house/I want everything inside to spill out,” she sings, like Pablo Neruda at the club. At other times, she is more direct. In the chorus, a forthright declaration is accompanied by a clap of thunder: “I want you under me.” Even more carefree is “Love Is A Drug,” a breathless, buoyant ode to carnal hedonism, while the dancefloor confection “U Give It Up” (produced by Jim-E Stack) feels like a poison-pinkie text dashed off to an ex on the way to the dancefloor. “When something bites/You pull back scared to fight,” Rodriguez intones. You can imagine her raising her hands to laser lights as she sings.
I’m Your Empress Of is a vivisection of heartache, as if Rodriguez is working through the five stages of grief in real-time. She beats herself up for her choices in “Should’ve” among blasts of static and high-pitched squeaks that sound like a moth’s legs stuck in molten rubber. At its most extreme, her self-examination evokes violence. “I get off on being awful to myself,” Rodriguez sings plainly in the album closer “Awful,” in which sharp thwacks bring to mind the slam of flesh into metal. “I need some help.” It’s a chilling moment delivered with flair, the kind of eureka moment that could take a year of therapy to hit on.
While poring over I’m Your Empress Of’s lyrics suggests an author with fresh wounds, the album is also a showcase for Rodriguez’s production abilities at this new peak. The lead single, “Give Me Another Chance,” is a rush of Eurodance, and in the balearic-inspired mid-tempo “Void,” Rodriguez Auto-Tunes her vocals to suggest weightlessness, her ennui dusted with clouds of powdered sugar. “What’s The Point,” is shot through with pitter-patters of drum’n’bass percussion, and you can imagine the song’s thick, creeping bass whipping crowds into a frenzy at a festival (failing that in the foreseeable future, your living room speakers will do the trick). In the hands of a less sure-handed artist the whiplash between emotional extremes could be jarring, but Rodriguez makes it feel delightfully dizzying. What is life in the digital age if not a constant pinball between joy and despair?
One of Rodriguez’s earliest ambitions as Empress Of was to be “weird.” The first music she shared was a homemade series of wonky electronic oddities titled Color Minutes, but by the time of her second album, she was drawing from the high gloss hip-pop of Ariana Grande. Yet the creative furrow she finds on I’m Your Empress Of is enriched by Rodriguez looking closer to home, an impulse literalized with the inclusion of spoken-word passages delivered by her mom, Reina, a first-generation immigrant from Honduras. Reina’s unguided reflections move from proud messages of survival to love and femininity, providing a guiding light while foregrounding the album as in conversation with shared Latinx immigrant histories. “It was not easy speaking English,” Reina says on the album intro, after Rodriguez plays a bright salsa piano line that she learned from her father. “It was not easy having to learn it,” continues Reina. “But I got it.”
I’m Your Empress Of vibrates with the contradictions that one person can contain: how mourning the loss of a partner is bound up with anger, the fatigue of resilience, and the pleasures to be found in escaping it all, if only for one lusty night. With unexpected production and left-field samples, Rodriguez’s album is powered by a heady rawness that bucks the trend for theatrical concepts in today’s electronic pop nonconformists, producing epiphanies like hot stones spat from a fire. You could say it is as addictive as modern love. | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Terrible | April 8, 2020 | 7.4 | af561833-d895-4d84-9eb3-15d06a089aa6 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
On its debut album, the Dublin-based post-punk band channels rage into communal uplift. | On its debut album, the Dublin-based post-punk band channels rage into communal uplift. | Sprints: Letter to Self | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sprints-letter-to-self/ | Letter to Self | Since forming in 2019, Sprints have released a series of short, ferocious singles and EPs. Songwriter and guitarist Karla Chubb’s dry, comical chants often give way to blistering screeds in a manner of seconds. Anger management worked to a point: On the 2022 single “Delia Smith,” she pondered taking the edge off her eccentricities: “Who wants to be special anyway?” Still, she couldn’t help but answer the question with a defiant scream: “Me, fucking me/And I’m not ashamed.”
On its debut full-length, Letter to Self, the four-piece attempts to channel its rage into communal uplift. “Anger doesn’t mean bad,” Chubb told DIY magazine. “Anger means you’re standing up for something; anger means you’re addressing an issue; anger also means collectiveness.” Letter to Self is a bracing, frantic record designed for both thrashing mosh pits and solo meltdowns, best heard with the volume turned up loud. The racing guitars and fuzzy distortion of “Ticking” and “Heavy” transform paralyzing fear into something that can be batted away with enough headbanging.
Sprints operate like a fitness trainer giving you some tough love—sure, you could take a breather, but it won’t make you any stronger. Letter to Self was produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, who have shaped the Ireland punk scene for almost a decade now. Sprints no doubt take much from Gilla Band, but their inspiration spans far and wide: “Adore Adore Adore,” Chubb’s tormenting screed on misogyny, is reminiscent of Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey. The band’s most manic songs, like the splintering Catholic-guilt noise rocker “Cathedral,” bring to mind the vicious feminist punk of Savages (whom Chubb often cites as inspiration).
The album isn’t locked into just one emotional register, though. Chubb and guitarist Colm O’Reilly play searingly bright pop melodies that pierce through the heavy buzz of stacked amps, bringing a bit of levity to their righteousness. Bassist and vocalist Sam McCann adds a wistful tone when he echoes Chubb’s lyrics, as in the grungy “Shaking Their Hands.” Even when you expect a rush of power chords, Sprints have a knack for breaking tension some other way. On “A Wreck (A Mess),” a humorous dance-punk ode to hyperactivity and social anxiety, Chubb sings with a Matt Berninger-like lilt over just a guitar strum: “Can you hear that sound?/Can you hear that silence?/Can you hear it surround?” Quiet is no reprieve: “It invites violence on me!” she yells, corralling the band for a rollicking chorus.
Occasionally Sprints spread the towering sound a little too thin, and the energy flags on “Shadow of a Doubt” and “Can’t Get Enough of It.” The upbeat tracks are more fun. “Literary Mind,” a re-recording of a 2023 single, remains a standout, capturing the jagged peaks of sapphic yearning with a flirty bassline and, of course, lovelorn screaming—“She Will” for the present decade. And on the sardonic “Up and Comer,” Chubb echos the voices of her critics—“They say she’s good for an up and comer”—before shattering through their doubts with noisy self-acceptance: “If you beat her like a drum/If you beat her like a heart/I bet she’ll fire for you still/I swear to God she’ll make a start,” she belts. Her rage builds toward a piercing climax that feels earned. | 2024-01-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang | January 16, 2024 | 7.1 | af5bdc53-d3df-41fb-b3f2-223f4c3f720f | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
The latest solo work from the Armand Hammer rapper is a tribute to his grandmother’s memory that doubles as a statement of identity. | The latest solo work from the Armand Hammer rapper is a tribute to his grandmother’s memory that doubles as a statement of identity. | Elucid: I Told Bessie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elucid-i-told-bessie/ | I Told Bessie | Chaz Hall grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and lays his head in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. But for a few years he lived with his grandmother Bessie in the Crown Heights family brownstone, crafting the sound and shape of the persona that would become Elucid, the rapper/producer best known for his work in Armand Hammer. Before her passing in 2017, Bessie was one of his earliest supporters, a confidant who first taught him about Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, and who listened from two floors below as he conjured beats and rhymes in their ancestral home. I Told Bessie, Elucid’s latest solo LP, is a record of those conjurations, a tribute to her memory that doubles as a statement of identity.
Most of Elucid’s work in Armand Hammer exudes a dark, murky mood informed by a pro-Black, anti-capitalist perspective. I Told Bessie feels more abstract yet equally expressive, with dissociative raps that are often rooted in narrative but free from the burden of plot. A latecomer to rock music, he’s professed a love for the chaotic lyrical stylings of the Mars Volta, a band whose disjointed storytelling can seem indecipherable both in spite and in service of the author’s intention. Elucid’s abstractions are similarly both dizzying and profound, obscuring metaphor and clever wordplay in a fog of loose association: “With emphasis, the spirits say/Every hole speak when the mirrors play/Fear of plague, sense-making stop/Hoof-and-mouth to pox, chasing clocks to bed/Spin your top and your TV's cut,” he raps on “Smile Lines.”
Elucid’s collaborators do more than just add color to his songs; they tend to pull him into their orbit, shaping his own style in the process. He’s said that he finds billy woods (his partner in Armand Hammer) to be more precise and calculated, while Rory Ferreira (his partner in Nostrum Grocers) is a bit jazzier, more comfortable with improvisation and embracing mistakes. You can hear Elucid split the difference on I Told Bessie, his precision ebbing and flowing with the music, growing more chaotic as the production unravels. The album’s production feels confrontational and uncomfortable, colored by warped vocal samples, off-kilter rhythms, and hypnotic loops. Even the smoother parts, like the funereal horn on “Impasse,” get disrupted by chaotic percussion and other subtle, unsettling elements.
Despite I Told Bessie’s status as a solo record, billy woods is deeply involved, with guest vocals on four tracks and an executive producer credit. woods’ gravitational force exerts itself on Elucid’s verses, which feel more focused and precise than on the tracks without him. Any of them feel like they could appear on Armand Hammer records, but “Nostrand” in particular—with its twinkling piano and horror-film bass line—feels like a Haram outtake. woods’ EP credit is more than just vanity; he manages to sequence tracks from eight different producers into a cohesive mood, climaxing with the analog static of “Betamax,” in which Elucid hints at finding meaning in rhythmic patterns.
As hard as he often sounds, Elucid’s music is informed by empathy: for his family, his neighbors, his collaborators. I Told Bessie’s strongest moments are with others, like the indica-laced posse cut “Sardonyx,” featuring woods, Pink Siifu, and Quelle Chris, all-stars from the art-rap cognoscenti. Chris gracefully stumbles through his verse, never quite losing his balance; woods manages to cut through the cloud of smoke with some of the sharpest bars on the record, a sardonic stab at avarice: “I can see it in the eyes of your oldest/I can see you just going’ through the motions, feel the coldness/Hop off the private jet, walk into the rotors, that’s new money/Old money mummified corpses, tryna stuff it in their coffins.”
More than a rap record, I Told Bessie is laid out like a book of spells, incantations called out to the ancestors. The conceit isn’t subtle—he spends half of “Split Tongue” chanting and the other half breathing “talking to myself and not listening” before admitting that “words mean things, but don't have to.” It’s the result of man peeling back layers of his spirit, and not necessarily finding any fundamental truths underneath—only a surge of disturbing, intoxicating dark energy. But by wrestling with his past, he may just have cleared the path for a more enlightened future. | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | June 17, 2022 | 7.3 | af62adda-30c9-48a6-ac3c-0f7365196af6 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On their first new album since 2010, the veteran art-punks sound surprisingly mature, even sentimental. Fortunately they still know how to rage. | On their first new album since 2010, the veteran art-punks sound surprisingly mature, even sentimental. Fortunately they still know how to rage. | Les Savy Fav: OUI, LSF | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/les-savy-fav-oui-lsf/ | OUI, LSF | It’s always ironic hearing Tim Harrington sing pleas for human connection after a career spent exemplifying the very qualities most likely to drive others away. The megaphone-voiced frontman of Les Savy Fav quills the band’s art-punk with brash volume and hectoring sarcasm. At the band’s legendarily rambunctious live shows, he sacrifices safety and dignity alike for the sake of an unforgettable spectacle. He’s as naturally gifted a showman as punk singers come, and one of the last guys you’d assume is all that concerned with whether or not he’s dating material.
Nonetheless, as Les Savy Fav have aged into an institution, Harrington has increasingly exposed his softer side, writing often about the difficulty of maintaining close personal relationships. It can be odd, hearing the same wildman famed for stripping down to a Speedo on stage and scaling the tallest object within sight earnestly sing lines like, “It’s hard to let love in when we’re so scared of getting hurt” on the group’s sixth album OUI, LSF (on a song titled “Somebody Needs a Hug,” at that).
Released after a 14-year recording hiatus during which the group occasionally toured but mostly focused on their day jobs, including bassist Syd Butler and guitarist Seth Jabour’s gigs anchoring the unlikely house band for Late Night with Seth Meyers, OUI, LSF continues the sentimental streak that ran through its predecessor, Root for Ruin. On the tender “Dawn Patrol,” Harrington finds solace in the reassuring touch of his partner’s hand. In its somber counterpart “Don’t Mind Me,” he croons about love that’s faded into mere tolerance over time. It’s the most naked, openly weepy ballad he’s ever attempted.
One could argue that Harrington’s growing sincerity has made Les Savy Fav a better-rounded band. It’s certainly given them a wider range of moods. Yet as with Root for Ruin, OUI, LSF can’t completely shake the sense that its comedown songs are taking up space that could have been filled by bangers. Thankfully, this band can still rage convincingly when it counts: The album opens with an absolute pressure cooker, “Guzzle Blood,” which funnels their heated art-rock through the Prodigy’s five-alarm noise factory, all bleating squall and blaring horns. “Void Moon” and “Oi! Division” are both economical pit-starters, showcases for searing riffs and Harrington’s frontman-as-Russian-roulette volatility.
At times, the maturity flatters. One of Harrington’s periodic forays into Penthouse Forum territory, “Limo Scene,” calls back to the lurid sex of “The Equestrian,” but this time amid all the touching and pheromones, the detail he lingers on is a simple gesture of consent and affirmation, a whispered “I’m into this.” The album’s stabs at youthful irreverence are less graceful. With its hokey appropriations of old LL Cool J and Usher lyrics, “Legendary Tippers” pushes the band into stale dad-joke territory. It’s a nod to an earlier, sillier era of the band, a past they can’t fully let go of even though they’ve outgrown it.
Like their peer Marnie Stern, who returned from a similarly long studio hiatus last year with an album that picked up exactly where the last one left off, Les Savy Fav aren’t humoring any notions of reinvention. When you’ve got a sound this singular, this established, this irreplicable, there’s no shame in letting it ride. Still, given how time has always intrigued Les Savy Fav—their essential 2004 compilation Inches flaunted their evolution by collecting seven years of singles in reverse chronological order —it’s a little disappointing that the latest album doesn’t have more to show for the passage of so much of it. Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter. | 2024-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss / The Orchard | May 8, 2024 | 7 | af68b9b3-9d0b-4d9c-94e0-983485af156f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On their third LP, the Montreal indie rock trio attempt to take unsparing inventory, offer sincere amends, and confront the responsibilities of adulthood. | On their third LP, the Montreal indie rock trio attempt to take unsparing inventory, offer sincere amends, and confront the responsibilities of adulthood. | Plants and Animals: The End of That | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16309-the-end-of-that/ | The End of That | No matter where Plants and Animals went on their first two LPs, they always came bearing good vibes: If Arcade Fire had set out to make Barbecue instead of Funeral, it might've sounded like the trio's 2008 debut, Parc Avenue, perhaps the last hurrah of shambling, collectivist Canadian indie rock as we came to know it last decade. And while follow-up La La Land traded the requisite Montreal orchestration for Hollywood namedrops ("Tom Cruz", "American Idol", "Kon Tiki"), there was a still a Lebowski-like insouciance to it, a projection from a place where beards and beer flowed equally free. Point being I never thought that whether Plants and Animals were good dudes was up for debate, but while The End of That doesn't go too far beyond the La La Land DMZ between indie folk and jam-band, they've got some dark and heavy shit on their minds this time out-- they attempt to take unsparing inventory, offer sincere amends, and confront the responsibilities of adulthood. But the unyielding geniality of the music and slackjawed lyrics show a band either unwilling or unable to commit to its own emotional ballast or offer a sense of real stakes, the result of which is The End of That confusing a bummy hangover with a full-blown existential crisis.
In a vacuum, it's admirable that Plants and Animals are finding inspiration in a life pivot that doesn't get much play in rock music: The characters in these songs are still partying and waking up on friends' couches, only now they come to while their buddy's wife is making breakfast for the kids. That's essentially the lyrical thread running through the title track, "Crisis!", and "No Idea", the three songs here which most explicitly delineate the titular catch-all of "that." On "The End of That", Warren Spicer admits, "I tried the cocaine just to know what it could do/ I had to try it again just to give it a second chance," and the mundanity of it is actually rather bold for a topic that often results in exploitative oversharing or impenetrable metaphor. But as soon as you want to pull up to Spicer's barstool, he loses the plot, referring to an object of affection as a "fucked-up bumblebee/ Headed for the potpourri," and continuing to spit game from there: "You turn me on so with your bee-sting lips/ And your pepper-grinder hips/ Like a thread in the needle/ We're just typical people/ We're hoping to be friends and do cool stuff and be equal." It's frankly pretty impressive how many different linguistic devices are used for the same cringeworthy effect.
And that's generally how most of The End of That goes, getting in a totally sincere and totally awkward sentiment before Spicer's lyrics perilously tailspin over endless Stones-y vamps. While the tone of the lyrics and music are jarringly discordant, the compositional methods for both align all too perfectly. "Crisis!" serves as the literal and figurative centerpiece of The End of That, a sloppy lanyard of guitar and vocal threads that barely tries for melodic structure and lyrics that similarly favor first-take immediacy. "Well holy matrimony!/ Everyone is gettin' married or breaking up/ And the stroller situation on the sidewalk is way out of control," Spicer sings, and like so much of the record, it initially sounds plainspoken and charming until you realize absolutely nobody talks like that. Preceded by a false count-off and some friendly studio chatter, everything is arranged so that you have no reason whatsoever to think "Crisis!" wasn't actually made up completely on the spot. And as these things usually turn out, it's the longest song on The End of That, even more forbidding back to back with the equally aimless six minutes of "2010".
Occasionally, as on solemn opener "Before" and the driving, minor-key "Control Me", there's enough drawn shades obscuring the sunlight so that intent and execution can properly parallel, and with Spicer's voice bearing a similar grain to Nash Kato, they hint at Urge Overkill's genuinely despairing Exit the Dragon. But for a record that sounds like memories of better times, there's a disheartening shortage of hooks or melodies that aren't hitched to lyrics you'd rather forget: "Lightshow" has a spunky riff but never advances past it, while Spicer barges into a McCartney-styled piano progression on "No Idea", asking, "Do you fear loneliness?/ Do you fear getting left behind?/ All your friends are getting married/ They're having... a time." Look, kudos to Plants and Animals for intervening on themselves without the help of the local authorities or concerned family members, but whether it's the trailer preview-friendly bop of the music, the utter lack of palpable conflict, or the stilted dialogue and shoulder-shrugging catchphrases, I can't shake the feeling that The End of That is ultimately a Matthew McConaughey character come to life. | 2012-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-02-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Secret City | February 28, 2012 | 5 | af6947ed-f741-40b0-8e09-b2d2bb4b7b16 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Last year, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a VIP private party for one of Canada’s richest men. Now you’re invited to hear their cantankerous takes on almost every song from 1990’s Ragged Glory. | Last year, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a VIP private party for one of Canada’s richest men. Now you’re invited to hear their cantankerous takes on almost every song from 1990’s Ragged Glory. | Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Fu##in’ Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-and-crazy-horse-fn-up/ | Fu##in’ Up | The significance of the Rivoli to Toronto music lore cannot be overstated. Upon opening in 1982, the Queen Street West venue became an epicenter of local bohemia, with a streetfront restaurant serving up pad thai to art students on first dates, a second-floor pool hall where you could wager away the last of your beer money, and most crucially, an intimate, 200-capacity brick-walled performance room where the city’s freaks had free rein. Through the ’80s, it was the space where queercore pioneers Fifth Column turned their gigs into Super 8 film happenings, the Cowboy Junkies perfected their brand of codeined country, and a pre-TV Kids in the Hall pushed sketch comedy to anarchic extremes. In the late ’90s, it was the place where a young Leslie Feist workshopped songs and tended bar. And a decade after that, you might’ve caught a teenage Aubrey Graham trying his hand at improv. Even now, long after the Queen West neighborhood’s cachet has diminished, the Rivoli is still a place where music history is made: Last November, it hosted arguably the strangest Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig ever.
There’s nothing that shocking about an artist of Neil Young’s stature playing a room as tiny as the Riv—the surprise small-venue underplay is a fairly common move for arena-level acts promoting a new album or warming up for a big tour. But the circumstances surrounding the Rivoli show—a private 50th-birthday party for billionaire Canada Goose parka poobah Dani Reiss—raised a few eyebrows, given that Neil’s spent a good chunk of his career putting corporations in his crosshairs. (Maybe, after spending his formative years in Winnipeg, Neil just really appreciates a warm winter coat.) What’s even more unfathomable is that Neil Young and Crazy Horse were actually the opening act—in keeping with the party’s theme of “age before beauty,” their set was followed by an appearance from Canadian rock-radio mainstays the Arkells. But the live-album document of the gig, titled Fu##in’ Up, is more than just a glorified souvenir from the sort of birthday party that presumably required its guests to sign NDAs.
At the Rivoli, Neil and the Horse performed a track-by-track (minus one) run-through of 1990’s Ragged Glory, and in a nod to the gig’s secretive logistics, all of the songs—save for the cover of the ’60s garage-band standard “Farmer John”—have been rebranded for Fu##in’ Up with new titles pulled from their respective lyrics. If 1989’s course-correcting Freedom offered an encouraging sign that Neil hadn’t completely lost the plot during his infamous ’80s wilderness years, Ragged Glory affirmed his elder-statesman status for a new generation of flannel-clad feedback addicts, prompting tours with Sonic Youth and a million “godfather of grunge” plaudits. The album topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll and was widely hailed as an electrifying display of vitality from a veteran band entering their third decade together—and that was 34 years ago. Now that Neil and his bandmates are pushing 80 (if not already there) Ragged Glory’s spirit of camaraderie, perseverance, and bittersweet nostalgia feels all the more trenchant. If a line like “There’s very few of us left, my friend, from the days that used to be” carried a whiff of melancholy in 1991, imagine what it feels like to sing it now.
But where Ragged Glory captured Crazy Horse rocking out with the volume and vigor of a band half its age, Fu##in’ Up highlights both the corroding effects and uncanny advantages of aging. For decades now, we’ve watched our classic-rock heroes grapple with getting old: The Stones would have you believe they’re still horny 20-year-olds; the tinnitus-plagued surviving members of the Who traded smashed guitars for orchestral embellishment; Paul McCartney is the hip grandad. But on Fu##in’ Up, Neil Young and Crazy Horse embody what it really means to age. They move a bit slower but sound a lot crankier. They’re blithely unconcerned with formalities—like hitting the chorus of “City Life (Country Home)” at the right moment—because they don’t really give a shit about impressing anybody anymore. And they rumble into Fu##in’ Up’s agitated titled track (aka “Heart of Steel”) with all the subtlety of an uncontrolled bowel movement.
The Crazy Horse heard here isn’t exactly the same one that cut the original Ragged Glory: Early ’70s-era member Nils Lofgren returns to the right-hand-man slot occupied by Frank Sampedro for several decades, while the perennial quartet appears as a quintet with the recruitment of Promise of the Real guitarist/pianist Micah Nelson (who’ll be taking over Lofgren’s position on the Horse’s 2024 dates). The piano actually adds some surprising grace notes to all the grimy guitarnage: “Feels Like a Railroad (River of Pride) [White Line]” acquires some saloon-door swing, while the ivory-boosted bounce of “Walkin’ in My Place (Road of Tears) [Mansion on the Hill]” more clearly identifies the song as a direct descendent of the After the Gold Rush rager “Southern Man.” Ultimately, Fu##in’ Up is less a snapshot of a specific event than a proudly moldy monument to Crazy Horse’s long-may-you-runitude. There’s no stage banter, and the between-song applause is edited out of the mix as it was on Rust Never Sleeps. The lack of contextual detail puts the focus squarely on Crazy Horse’s incandescent noise and slack yet unfailingly steady momentum.
As a result, Fu##in’ Up makes a convincing case for Ragged Glory as the definitive Crazy Horse album, showcasing the group in their purest, crudest state, without any of the counter-balancing pop singles or acoustic reprieves that colored more hallowed classics like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma. And with the Fu##in’ Up versions, the traditional divide between Neil’s melodic accessibility and avant-grunge odysseys is completely blurred, while the long songs get to grind on even longer. Whether it’s a withering anthem like “Broken Circle (Over and Over)” or a tension-wracked 15-minute workout like “A Chance on Love (Love and Only Love),” Crazy Horse approach each song as an extended late-night drive on a lost highway, with Neil’s needling solos serving as the high-beam guiding light, and each verse/chorus passage appearing like a fleeting sign of civilization before we slip back into the desert. On the cover of Ragged Glory, we see a photo of Crazy Horse jamming away at Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch in Northern California, transforming the vaulted, wood-lined space into their own private cathedral of sound. It’s a hermetic scene that couldn’t be further removed from a posh VIP-only party for one of Canada’s wealthiest men held at a popular downtown Toronto bar. But the beauty of Fu##in’ Up is that Neil Young and Crazy Horse play as though they’re still locked in the barn. | 2024-05-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-02T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner / Reprise | May 2, 2024 | 7.6 | af721fde-a310-4c60-9557-9e23f8d6e9b3 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
PiL's second album, Metal Box, is a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer. | PiL's second album, Metal Box, is a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer. | Public Image Ltd: Metal Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22374-metal-box/ | Metal Box | Out of all the fascinating alternate takes, B-sides, rare compilation-only tracks and never-before-released sketches that comprise this expanded reissue of Public Image Ltd’s post-punk landmark, it’s a live version of “Public Image” that is the real revelation. Part of an impromptu June 1979 concert in Manchester, the song keeps collapsing and restarting. “Shut up!” snaps John Lydon, responding to audience jeers. “I told you it’s a fucking rehearsal.” Another PiL member explains that the drummer, Richard Dudanski, only joined three days ago. PiL relaunch the song only for Lydon to halt it with “Miles too fast!” The jeers erupt again and the singer offers a sort of defiant apology: if the crowd really wanted to “see mega light displays and all that shit,” they should go watch properly professional bands who put on a slick show. “But we ain’t like that... We’re extremely honest: sorry about that... We admit our mistakes.”
This performance—an inadvertent deconstruction of performance itself—takes us to the heart of the PiL project as well as the post-punk movement for which the group served as figureheads. At its core was a belief in radical honesty: faith in the expressive power of words, singing and sound as vehicles for urgent communication. After the Sex Pistols’ implosion, Lydon was trying to find a way to be a public figure again without masks, barriers, routines, or constraining expectations. So it’s especially apt that “Public Image”—PiL’s debut single, Lydon’s post-Pistols mission-statement—is the song that fell apart at Manchester’s Factory Club. “Public Image” is about the way a stage persona can become a lie that a performer is forced to live out in perpetuity. Lydon sings about “Johnny Rotten” as a theatrical role that trapped him and which he’s now casting off. Starting all over with his given name and a new set of musical accomplices, Lydon was determined to stay true to himself. The group’s name came from Muriel Sparks’ novel The Public Image, about a movie actress whose career is ruined but who, the ending hints, is freed to embark on an authentic post-fame existence. Lydon added the “limited” to signify both the idea of the rock group as a corporation (in the business of image-construction) and the idea of keeping egos on a tight leash.
A comparison for Lydon’s search for a new true music—and a truly new music—that would leave behind rock’s calcified conventions is Berlin-era Bowie’s quest for a “new music night and day” (the working title of Low). Indeed it was Virgin Records’ belief that Lydon was the most significant British rock artist since Bowie that caused them to extend PiL such extraordinary license and largesse when it came to recording in expensive studios. That indulgence enabled the recording of three of the most out-there albums ever released by a major label: First Issue, Metal Box*, Flowers of Romance. But it’s the middle panel of the triptych that is the colossal achievement: a near-perfect record that reinvents and renews rock in a manner that fulfilled post-punk’s promise(s) to a degree rivaled only by Joy Division on Closer.
The key word, though, is reinvention. Lydon talked grandly of abandoning rock altogether, arguing that killing off the genre had been the true point of punk. But unlike the absolutely experimental (and as with many such experiments, largely unsuccessful) Flowers of Romance, Metal Box doesn’t go beyond rock so much as stretch it to its furthest extent, in the manner of the Stooges’ Fun House or Can’s Tago Mago. It’s a forbidding listen, for sure, but only because of its intensity, not because it’s abstract or structurally convoluted. The format is classic: guitar-bass-drums-voice (augmented intermittently by keyboards and electronics). The rhythm section (Jah Wobble and a succession of drummers) is hypnotically steady and physically potent. The guitarist (Keith Levene) is a veritable axe-hero, as schooled and as spectacular as any of the pre-punk greats. And the singer, while unorthodox and edging off-key, pours it all out in a searing catharsis that recalls nothing so much as solo John Lennon and the intersection he found between the deeply personal and the politically universal. There are even a few tunes here!
But yes, it’s a bracing listen, Metal Box, and nowhere more so than on the opening dirge “Albatross.” 11 minutes-long, leaden in tempo, the song is clearly designed as a test for the listener just like the protracted assault of “Theme” that launched First Issue had been. Absolutely pitiless music—Levene hacking at his axe like an abattoir worker, Wobble rolling out a looped tremor of a bassline—is matched with utterly piteous singing: Lydon intones accusations about an oppressive figure from his past, perhaps the master-manipulator McLaren, possibly his dead friend Vicious, conceivably “Johnny Rotten” himself as a burden he can’t shake.
“Memories,” the single that preceded Metal Box’s November ’79 release, is more sprightly. Like “Albatross,” though, the song is an embittered exorcism: Lydon could almost be commenting on his own nagging vocal and fixated lyrics with the line “dragging on and on and on and on and on and on and ON,” then spits out “This person’s had enough of useless memories” over a breath-taking disco-style breakdown.
With “Swan Lake,” a retitled remix of the single “Death Disco,” Lydon is possessed by an unbearable memory that he doesn’t want to forget: the sight of his mother dying in slow agony from cancer. If the wretched grief of the lyrics—“Silence in her eyes,” “Final in a fade,” “Choking on a bed/Flowers rotting dead”—recalls Lennon’s “Mother,” the retching anguish of Lydon’s vocal resembles Yoko Ono at her most abrasively unleashed. On the original vinyl, the song locks into an endless loop on the phrase “words cannot express.” But “Swan Lake”—named after the Tchaikovsky melody that Levene intermittently mutilates—is nothing if not a 20th Century expressionist masterpiece: the missing link between Munch’s “The Scream” and Black Flag’s “Damaged I.”
Just as placing “death” in front of “disco” was an attempt to subvert the idea of dancefloor escapism, the title “Poptones” drips with acrid irony. A real-life news story of abduction, rape and escape inspired the lyric, with one detail in particular triggering Lydon’s imagination: the victim’s memory of the bouncy music streaming out of the car’s cassette player. This juxtaposition of manufactured happiness and absolute horror is a typically post-punk move, exposing pop as a prettified lie that masks reality’s raw awfulness: for some post-punk groups, an existential condition (dread, doubt) and for others, a political matter (exploitation, control). On “Poptones” this truth-telling impulse produces one of Lydon’s most vivid lyrics (“I don’t like hiding in this foliage and peat/It’s wet and I’m losing my body heat”), supported and surrounded by music that’s surprisingly pretty, in an eerie, insidious sort of way. Wobble’s sinuously winding bass weaves through Levene’s cascading sparks as well as the cymbal-smash spray he also supplies (PiL being temporarily drummerless during this stage of the album’s spasmodic recording).
With PiL still between drummers, on “Careering” it’s Wobble who doubles up roles, pummeling your ribcage with his bass and bashing the kit like a metalworker pounding flat a sheet of steel. Levene swaps guitar for smears of synth, while Lydon’s helicopter vision scans the border zone between Ulster and the Irish Republic: a terrorscape of “blown into breeze” bomb victims and paramilitary paranoia. “Careering” sounds like nothing else in rock and nothing else in PiL’s work—as with several other songs on Metal Box, it could have spawned a whole identity, an entire career, for any other band.
“No Birds Do Sing,” unbelievably, surpasses the preceding five songs. Levene cloaks the murderous Wobble-Dudanksi groove with a toxic cloud of guitar texture. Lydon surveys an English suburban scene whose placidity could not be further from troubled Northern Ireland, noting in sardonic approval its “bland planned idle luxury” and “well-intentioned rules” (rolling the ‘r’ there in a delicious throwback to classic Rotten-style singing). For “a layered mass of subtle props” and “a caviar of silent dignity” alone, Lydon ought to have the 2026 Nobel locked down.
After the greatest six-song run in all of post-punk, Metal Box’s remainder is merely (and mostly) excellent, moving from the juddery instrumental “Graveyard” (oddly redolent of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ early British rock‘n’roll classic “Shakin’ All Over”) through the rubbery bassline waddle of “The Suit” to the stampeding threat of “Chant,” a savage snapshot of 1979’s tribal street violence. The album winds down with the unexpected respite and repose of “Radio Four,” a tranquil instrumental entirely played by Levene: just a tremulously poignant and agile bass line overlaid with reedy keyboards that swell and subside. The title comes from the U.K.’s national public radio station, a civilized and calming source of news, views, drama and light comedy beamed out to the British middle classes. As with “Poptones,” the irony is astringent.
Listening to (and reviewing) *Metal Box *in a linear sequence goes against PiL’s original intent, of course. As the flatly descriptive, deliberately demystified title indicates, Metal Box initially came in the form of a circular canister containing three 45 r.p.m 12-inches—for better sound, but also to encourage listeners to play the record in any order they chose, ideally listening to it in short bursts rather than in a single sitting. But what once seemed radically anti-rockist (“deconstruct the Album!”) is now a historical footnote, because anyone listening to a CD or other digital format can rearrange the contents however they wish.
And if you do doggedly listen to Metal Box in accordance with its given running order, what comes across strongly now is its sheer accumulative power as an album. That in turn accentuates the feeling that this is a record that can be understood fairly easily by a fan of, say, Led Zeppelin. It works on the same terms as Zoso: a thematically coherent suite of physically imposing rhythm, virtuoso guitar violence, and impassioned singing. Lydon would soon enough ‘fess up to his latent rockism on 1986’s hard-riffing *Album *(also reissued as a deluxe box set at this time) on which he collaborated with Old Wave musos like ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker. That incarnation of PiL even performed Zep’s “Kashmir” in concert.
Listening to Metal Box today, the studio processing—informed by PiL’s love of disco and dub—that felt so striking at the time seems subtle and relatively bare-bones compared to today. As the Manchester concert and some wonderfully vivid live-in-the-studio versions from the BBC rock program “The Old Grey Whistle Test” prove, PiL could recreate this music onstage (despite that fumbled “Public Image”). Levene, especially, was surprisingly exact when it came to reproducing the guitar parts and textures captured in the studio. Even the band’s debts to reggae and funk can be seen now as a continuation of the passion for black music that underpinned the British rock achievement of the ’60s and first-half of the ’70s—that perennial impulse to embrace the formal advances made by R&B and complicate them further while adding Brit-bohemian concerns as subject matter. If PiL’s immediate neighbors are the Pop Group and the Slits, you could also slot them alongside the Police: great drummer(s), roots-feel bass, inventively textured guitar, a secret prog element (Levene loved Yes, Lydon adored Peter Hammill) and an emotional basis in reggae’s yearnings and spiritual aches.
Metal Box is a landmark, for sure. But like Devils Tower, the mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s an oddly isolated one. In marked contrast to Joy Division, PiL’s spawn was neither legion nor particularly impressive (apart from San Francisco’s wonderful Flipper). Nor would PiL’s core three ever come close to matching the album’s heights in their subsequent careering (Wobble being the most productive, in both copiousness and quality). I was apprehensive about listening to this album again, fearing that it had faded or dated. But this music still sounds new and still sounds true to me: as adventurous and as harrowingly heart-bare as it did when I danced in the dark to it, an unhappy 16-year-old. Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time. | 2016-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 1, 2016 | 10 | af73199d-4707-4063-aa93-761b0b7952fc | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | null |
Ahead of his October LP, Sufjan Stevens issues an hour-plus "EP" that seems to accommodate a grab bag of disparate ideas and familiar sounds. | Ahead of his October LP, Sufjan Stevens issues an hour-plus "EP" that seems to accommodate a grab bag of disparate ideas and familiar sounds. | Sufjan Stevens: All Delighted People EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14618-all-delighted-people-ep/ | All Delighted People EP | Over five years ago, Sufjan Stevens' Illinois finally arrived in stores, with Superman stripped off the cover. But since then, he's played Clark Kent, mild-mannered, hiding in plain sight. A brief rundown of how he's stayed on our radar by doing everything except releasing a proper follow-up to Illinois: there was a collection of B-sides and alternate takes from Illinois that was damn near as long (The Avalanche), a boxed set containing five EPs of holiday music (Songs For Christmas), a multimedia celebration of a Brooklyn thoroughfare (The BQE), a 10-minute recording for Dark Was the Night, appearances on the last two National records among other one-offs and guest spots.
So while it wasn't surprising for him to drop the All Delighted People EP out of nowhere, the more people initially learned about it, the more it gained a worrisome quality. Stevens had gone on record bemoaning the strictures of the traditional album cycle, and a guy as unconventially prolific as he could certainly be expected to make his latest work available on Bandcamp the very day the public heard of its existence. But, the "EP" qualifier: It's over an hour long. About 95% of bands will never make an album longer than 50 minutes. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that all of this low-impact, hedge-betting was meant to lower the expectations for the "long-awaited follow-up to Illinois" by presenting it as an idea dump. A lot of people felt understandably let down: Why was the guy who won us over with his staggering ambition seemingly now afraid of failure?
Of course, we all know now that what Stevens considers his new album, The Age of Adz, awaits us in October, which oddly supports the notion that this EP is a clearinghouse of older ideas. Weighty and stuffed full of them, the record doesn't reveal all of its charms immediately, yet unlike his previous work it doesn't ask for total immersion. All Delighted People allows you to choose your own adventure: the sheer length of Illinois or Michigan could tempt you to shear off some of the instrumentals for a more streamlined listen, but that would sort of be missing the point. In contrast, if you think the "classic rock version" of "All Delighted People" is totally redundant (and you probably will), on this grab bag of a record it does nothing to upset its surroundings.
That approach does favors to the original version of "All Delighted People" and "Djohariah", self-contained song islands that would have been nearly impossible to include on Sufjan's cohesive albums. "All Delighted People" is a definitive Sufjan song, encompassing all his guises over the span of 11 deceptively brisk minutes: joyous overseer of big-top orchestration and intimate balladeer, preacher and confessor. "All Delighted People" feels capable of peaking at any given moment, which makes it a consistently gripping listen up to its pulled-taut outro of tremolo strings. Oddly, the much shorter re-edit is the one that feels like a chore to get through, largely because the second half enables Stevens' weakness for prickly and aimless short-circuited guitar soloing.
Though it employs the same choir cooing and brass fanfare typical of his past work, the supine "Djohariah" still comes off as a work borne of artistic freedom for Stevens, its simmering build, improvisatory soloing, and enormous runtime suggesting that he got a copy of Hot Buttered Soul and liked what he heard. Does it really need every single second to get its point across? Maybe not, but though "Djohariah" is allowed to expand to an impossibly billowy 17 minutes, it's still classic Sufjan at its core, an endearing love letter to his sister (named in the title), as she suffers through the indignity of an abusive relationship.
Between those massive bookends are the sort of humble short stories that represent what listeners have been missing in the midst of his prodigious post-Illinois experimentation. "Heirloom" and "Arnika" in particular have a comforting, early Sunday feel to them, not just in topicality, but in how you can practically hear the morning dew on the acoustics and delicate vocals. Throughout, Stevens is concerned about how you can connect with another individual without imposing yourself on them. "Arnika" is the most straightforward expression of this confusion, Stevens sighing, "I'm tired of life/ I'm tired of waiting for someone/ I'm tired of prices/ I'm tired of waiting for something," quiet and devastating desperation seeping out like from a deflating balloon. But framing them as a "return to form" sells them short; as affecting as his prior work in this range may have been, there was a certain compositional similarity to them, just four chords and a mellifluous melody. Here, you get Stevens taking more chances with structure and cadence, whether the stripped-down bluesy phrasing of "Enchanting Ghost" or the synth-spiked "From the Mouth of Gabriel" taking "Seven Swans" one step further by portraying God and possibly himself as a possessive, vengeful lover instead of just a devoted caretaker.
It isn't the mere existence of Age of Adz that puts this EP in perspective, though-- the electronic sonics of first taste "I Walked" are a blatant sign that we may ultimately have to retire the idea of Sufjan Stevens as a banjo-toting cartographer of the heart and the continental United States going forward. The scrapbook-like cover of All Delighted People makes sense then, as its contents serve as a humble and friendly keepsake, songs that deserve to be heard, but belonging to a chapter in Stevens' artistic livelihood that he needed to close to maintain his vitality. | 2010-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | September 7, 2010 | 7.6 | af874d76-4ad9-4868-b978-268514d6fa25 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their latest LP, produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Downtown Boys present their thundering political punk with a richer sound. Singer Victoria Ruiz presses deep into the poetics of confrontation. | On their latest LP, produced by Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Downtown Boys present their thundering political punk with a richer sound. Singer Victoria Ruiz presses deep into the poetics of confrontation. | Downtown Boys: Cost of Living | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/downtown-boys-cost-of-living/ | Cost of Living | “We are the surge,” sang Downtown Boys on “Wave of History,” the opening song on their 2015 album Full Communism. The record, the group’s breakout, was a punk-rock juggernaut of doubled-barreled sax blasts and bilingual call-and-response choruses that tackled themes like white hegemony, predatory capitalism, and police violence from a proudly Latinx, feminist, and working-class perspective. “Wave of History” made for the perfect summary of the Providence, R.I., punk band’s vision: furious and defiant, yet optimistic.
A lot can change in two years. These days, the waves are rolling in from the right, not the left, and they’re looking a lot more ominous. “The vibrations are very different right now,” acknowledged Victoria Ruiz in a recent interview with The Cut. “While all the lyrics were written before the current regime was inaugurated, we were writing about the feeling of being the target of white fragility, white supremacy, the police state, the homophobic state.” But what may have changed most for Downtown Boys might be their fortunes. Since releasing Full Communism, the group has played SXSW and Coachella and, crucially, signed to Sub Pop—putting them in a position similar to Fucked Up when they signed to Matador or Pissed Jeans when they joined Sub Pop. These are all big and, yes, risky steps for a crew with roots in labor activism (and links to Providence’s anarchist marching band, the What Cheer? Brigade) that built its reputation on confrontation and a refusal to compromise.
They’ve met those challenges with characteristic spark: Downtown Boys used their SXSW booking as a platform to call for the removal of a deportation clause included in performers’ contracts; as self-identified “workers for Coachella,” they assailed AEG founder Philip Anschutz for donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-LGBTQ organizations. But on their new album, they also sound like a changed band in certain respects. The record was produced by Guy Picciotto, of Fugazi (an ironic choice, if only because guitarist Joey La Neve DeFrancesco once told Wondering Sound, “We love Fugazi and Minor Threat, but they definitely propagated this punk lifestyle individualism that we’re grappling with now”), and while Full Communism boasted the unfocused din and no-fucks-given sound quality of a basement show, Cost of Living revels in the gleaming, multi-tracked expanse of a professional recording studio. It’s a richer, fuller sound; the stereo imaging is wider and the saxophone (they’ve stripped down to just one, now played by Joe DeGeorge, who also handles keyboards) has more presence in the mix.
The bigger, brighter sound often serves them well. “Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas)” begins with a thundering drum groove and a lean, serrated guitar riff, but horizons quickly open up as a second guitar line peels off from the first; it’s dissonant and searching in a way that seems to call into question the very premise of the song’s straight-ahead drive. That kind of melodic tension runs through the album. Locked into pummeling, no-nonsense grooves, drummer Norlan Olivo and bassist Mary Regalado make for a powerhouse rhythm section, while DeFrancesco’s guitar flashes like sheet lightning. And while their songwriting isn’t as complex as, say, Fugazi’s, it’s a step beyond hardcore’s conventional verse/chorus format, with most songs stretching out like long, rickety branches—intuitive yet unpredictable in their twists and turns. (Not everything bears such markedly hi-fi sound quality: The raging “Because You” and “Tonta” sound as gritty as ever, and classic minor-key hardcore changes and full-throated sax skronk actually come as something of a relief.)
At the center of the storm is Ruiz, whose voice carries like a megaphone on the front lines. Her lyrics remain one of the band’s greatest strengths. They’ve always been most effective when they’ve been least didactic and here, she presses deep into the poetics of confrontation. It’s easy to assume that “A Wall” is about Trump’s proposed border wall, but her line of attack stays wily, dodging and feinting like a guerilla fighter until she zeroes in on the song’s stark closing lines: “And when you see her there/I hope you see yourself/I hope you see yourself/And when you see him there/I hope you look/I hope you look.” Whatever she’s getting at—I hear in it a searing update of Embrace’s “As long as there are others held captive/Do not consider yourself free”—it feels like a way of humanizing the struggle, of implicating all parties in a conflict some would prefer to ignore.
Her best lines are full of this oblique, agile style of critique. “It ran so easily/Undone undone with mud and blood/Yes, I mind/Yes that’s ours,” she shouts in “I’m Enough (I Want More),” flashing a glint of the blade. “What about the table/Last I checked I built the table” she sings in “Violent Complicity,” a song about labor, exploitation, and, just maybe, their determination to be more than just another check-cashing indie band. Sometimes her lyrics go to the heart of how exhausting it can feel to perennially be drawing the arc of the moral universe down toward justice (“So when we're out there running all day who wins?/And when we’re inside crying all day who wins?,” from “Lips That Bite”).
Her lyrics aren’t always so successful. “Tonta” veers too far toward opacity, as if unwilling to lay all its cards out on the table. But such lapses are the exception, and on “Promissory Note,” a bouncy tune that filters X-Ray Spex’s dance-party punk through Fugazi’s knotty harmonics, she brings all her lyrical talents to bear on the feeling like you’ve been tasked with fixing all the world’s ills:
I won’t light myself on fire to keep you warm
I won’t carry you up that hill
I won’t carry you up that hill
I won’t light myself on fire
I won’t smile
I don’t care if you cry
Before you say hello,
Can’t fix you, fuck you too.
Before you say hello,
I don’t tread water to sip tea
And so I steal the watch
And so I steal the ring
In cleaning up their sound, have Downtown Boys lost some of their urgency? It’s a fair question to ask. But they have always put pleasure right up there alongside their anger—early on, they tagged themselves a “bi bilingual political dance sax punk party,” with an implicit emphasis on “dance,” “sax,” and “party”—and it’s worth remembering that in underground music, noise (harshness, ugliness, discord) often functions as a method of gatekeeping. You could certainly make the case that, right now, with brown people and working class people and queer people under concerted attack, what’s necessary is making music that invites a broad swath of potential fans and allies in from the cold. As DeFrancesco once said, “Love and rage together are greater than the sum of their parts.” Cost of Living is Downtown Boys’ way of proving that equation. | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 9, 2017 | 7.5 | af87c2a9-d374-4675-93f1-b6409aa03ced | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The San Jose band’s second album is a collection of gnarly emo epics that spotlight the underbelly of being a touring musician. | The San Jose band’s second album is a collection of gnarly emo epics that spotlight the underbelly of being a touring musician. | awakebutstillinbed: chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/awakebutstillinbed-chaos-takes-the-wheel-and-i-am-a-passenger/ | chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger | Life on the road may seem like an escape, but for awakebutstillinbed’s Shannon Taylor, in between sweaty gigs is ceaseless asphalt upon which to project one’s own disillusionment. “All the things I used to love before/How come they don’t feel like anything anymore?,” Taylor wonders on the San Jose emo band’s second album, chaos takes the wheel and i am a passenger, spending yet another night sleeping on the floor in a strange city. After years of failed starts in various bands around the Bay Area punk scene, Taylor found herself living what was once her dream with the success of awakebutstillinbed’s debut album, 2018’s what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way that other people see you, but discovered the complicated truth that achieving her goals could only stave off depression for so long. The emo epics on chaos aim a floodlight at Taylor’s inner demons, channeling diaristic despair over riffs that zoom by like yellow highway lines under passing headlights.
As Taylor journeys ahead, numbed by her neverending itinerary, she meets shadowy characters who magnify her sense of estrangement. On “airport,” she recounts her life story to a stranger on an airplane, feeling an uncanny detachment from the drunken adolescent she used to be: “I couldn’t connect to the person I was describing/As if I, long ago, wasn’t me.” When she plays a show, the people she encounters are a balm, until they’re just another person to lose: “clearview” opens during a tour date in Missouri, where Taylor meets a fan who soon after passes away. She mourns by taking this tragedy with her as she performs: “Every chord I strum/You'll always be there.”
The band’s raw, expository lyrics are accompanied by a gnarlier sound. On last year’s split EP with Ohio screamo band For Your Health, Taylor opened with a screeching cry, and her voice only got harsher from there. On chaos awakebutstillinbed push even further into the red, carving scorched-earth melodies through Taylor’s battered bleats. The band’s original lineup—save for bassist Ally Garcia, who gets a quick shoutout on opener “bloodline”—worked with producer Joe Reinhardt (Hop Along, Algernon Cadwallader) and engineer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Joyce Manor) to build towering catharsis around Taylor’s words. The sprightly, chiming guitar tones of their debut are largely gone, replaced by dense walls of distortion and clear-eyed finger-picked guitar. Taylor too leans into the darkness; her clean vocals always threaten to crack open into a piercing howl.
The band’s amplified sound comes to a head on the eight-minute “road,” the album’s closest thing to a mission statement. Over some of Taylor’s most visually evocative lyrics—“The pavement bathed in the winter’s light/ Betrays an unobstructed line of sight”—the band builds to a feverish peak, guitar refrains lapsing into silence then returning with twice the ferocity. But the song’s secret weapon is its percussion, picking up speed almost imperceptibly until the song takes flight. When the instrumentation slows to a near-stop halfway through, the song changes its tenor from anguish to something like hard-earned hope: “This is what I want,” Taylor says over and over, convincing herself of her desire to continue with her career as much as her audience.
It might be helpful to reframe Taylor’s pain as creative destruction. “bloodline” echoes her last album’s self-effacing title—“Do the people I care about care about me/Or do they see what I see?”—and by the end, it transforms into a life-affirming march forward: “Open your eyes/This is your life,” she sings, backed by a chorus of friends and bandmates. It’s an empowering cry, one that beckons towards inner reflection. awakebutstillinbed learned the hard way that wherever you go, you take yourself; Taylor seems finally ready to step away from the stage and meet that person head-on. | 2023-10-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-31T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | October 31, 2023 | 7.8 | af883299-1145-413a-86a7-88344114ddf6 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The box set collects the pure pleasures of Fleet Foxes’ early years including a smattering of B-sides and rarities that reveal the band’s long-running beatific spirit. | The box set collects the pure pleasures of Fleet Foxes’ early years including a smattering of B-sides and rarities that reveal the band’s long-running beatific spirit. | Fleet Foxes: First Collection 2006 – 2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fleet-foxes-first-collection-2006-2009/ | First Collection 2006 – 2009 | Fleet Foxes’ entrée to the greater world—2008’s Sun Giant EP and the self-titled debut from that same year—had an immediate impact on both indie and overground music at large. Critics adored Seattle singer-songwriter Robin Pecknold’s folk-pop project at a time when most of big-ticket indie’s more rocky and rustic fare was coming from the confines of Brooklyn; a considerable fanbase amassed seemingly out of thin air, coffee-shop playlists took to his breezy melodic grandeur like a barista to oat milk, and a “real-music” revival on the Billboard charts roiled on for several years after, with acts ranging from Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers to “American Idol” winner Phillip Phillips reaching for the folk-pop brass ring.
The instant success of these records was apparent to nearly everyone—except Pecknold himself. “Those are failures,” Pecknold told Pitchfork about Fleet Foxes’ first two Sub Pop releases, just five months after the release of Fleet Foxes. “I can hear every little thing that I would change.” Speaking alongside then-Fleet Foxes member Josh Tillman—who split from the band soon after the release of the 2011 follow-up Helplessness Blues—he professed admiration for the singularity of future tour mate Joanna Newsom while stating his belief that his band isn’t “anywhere close to where it should be musically...The sooner we can get started on another album the better. I don’t want to take three years off.”
As it turned out, he’d take three anyway; and Helplessness Blues indeed represented a massive leap forward when it came to Pecknold’s talent for musical arrangement and personal, image-rich songwriting. That record and last year’s dark and quixotic Crack-Up are so far removed from the pure pleasures of Fleet Foxes’ earlier outings that they practically sound like the work of a different band. So it makes sense that Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes have been packaged as part of First Collection 2006-2009, which also includes Fleet Foxes’ little-heard debut EP from 2006, a smattering of B-sides and rarities, and an array of photographs capturing the band’s early years.
In fleshing out the project’s late-2000s era, First Collection also serves as a clear delineation between Fleet Foxes’ auspicious beginnings and the fascinating, complicated-sounding music they’ve become known for today. It’s newly rewarding to revisit Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes 10 years after their initial release. Granted, both records have been so perpetually in-the-air that coming into fresh contact with them might seem as simple of an act as intaking oxygen, a qualifier that only further highlights the easy pleasures contained within.
Recorded with clarity and precision by Pacific Northwest production vet Phil Ek, it’s still remarkable how fully-formed the songs on Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes are. The sound of both releases—harmony-drenched and folk-indebted indie, equally capable of sounding sunlit or stormy—are similar enough to consider them a singular document, and together they represent some of the most strikingly tuneful indie of the previous decade. There’s little hint of what was to come in the band’s discography, save for flashes of mercurial moodiness (the multi-suite darkness of “Mykonos,” “Your Protector”’s foreboding woodwinds and wordless outro) that represent Pecknold’s affinity for on-a-dime tonal shifts.
Ek also handled the production of The Fleet Foxes, the ultra-limited-press (only 50 copies, sold locally) 2006 debut EP featuring a pre-Sun Giant lineup of Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson handling drums/percussion. In a 2008 Rolling Stone profile of the band, Ek told Austin Scaggs that “It was obvious [Pecknold] had talent coming out of his ass” after first hearing the band’s music; although The Fleet Foxes undoubtedly stands in the shadow of its immediate predecessors, it’s easy to hear what caught Ek’s ear in its six songs, more explicitly rock-y while still possessing loads of full-throated charm. Pecknold’s seemingly effortless ability of writing mood-shifting transitions stands out most here; “She Got Dressed” moves from whispered vocals and fingerpicked guitar to full-band swagger, while “In the Hot Hot Rays” bookends a cascading, forceful midsection with gentle drum fills and airy guitar lines.
The B-Sides and Rarities pulls together odds and ends surrounding the band’s inaugural Sub Pop releases, along with a few early demos and sketches. If you’re the type to dig through UK-only B-sides and one-offs, it’s likely you’ve heard some of these songs before: “Isles” and a cover of the traditional British folk song “False Knight on the Road” were B-sides on the respective 7” single releases of “White Winter Hymnal,” and “Mykonos” while the unfinished “White Lace Regretfully” was included on the accompanying 10” to his sister and manager Aja Pecknold’s limited-run The Unified Field literary journal. Also included is Pecknold’s take on American folk traditional “Silver Dagger,” which made the rounds under his since-dormant White Antelope project.
But the raw-material demos that close out B-Sides and Rarities count as the collection’s greatest revelations, affording a work-in-progress intimacy to the creative gestation behind songs that already feel as familiar as the back of one’s hand. The “transition basement sketch” version of Fleet Foxes’ “Ragged Wood” zeroes in on the song’s soaring back half, isolating a few unadorned acoustic guitars and a stripped-down vocal take from Pecknold accompanied by some endearingly wobbly harmonizing; closing sketch “Hot Air” is the briefest track included here—clocking in around three-quarters of a minute—but nonetheless offers an alluring fog of unexplored ambiance.
The “basement demos” of Fleet Foxes’ “He Doesn’t Know Why” and Sun Giant’s “English House” center around rambling placeholder vocals, the former taking on a previously unheard melodic shape and possessing a shaggy looseness that stands opposite to the original’s controlled bursts of melodic steam. It’s practically a new song crafted out of the skeleton of a clear standout from this era, highlighting the inherent value of First Collection 2006-2009 beyond fan service: catching Fleet Foxes’ beatific spirit in a new light can feel just like hearing them for the first time. | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | November 10, 2018 | 8.1 | af8cb3e9-d62f-4113-81a8-d29a89f76274 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The Toronto musician produces like a DJ: blending genres, playing fast and loose with BPM, and bringing club music’s promise of endless possibility to life. | The Toronto musician produces like a DJ: blending genres, playing fast and loose with BPM, and bringing club music’s promise of endless possibility to life. | BAMBII: INFINITY CLUB | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bambii-infinity-club/ | INFINITY CLUB
| On her debut EP, INFINITY CLUB, Toronto producer BAMBII bends time and space to her will. “Sydanie’s Interlude” opens as a nocturnal palate cleanser, the kind of after-dark R&B track that signals it’s almost closing time. But midway through, the tempo gradually slows, a supermassive black hole swallowing the beat. Within seconds, a jungle break bobs to the surface, and everything succumbs to its hard-charging drive. This is a kind of temporal insurgency: No expectation to conform to the demands of a particular BPM, no requirement to yield to the limits of genre at all. These are the moments when Bambii brings the promise of club music’s infinite iterations to life.
As BAMBII, Kirsten Azan has spent the last decade playing club music the way she wants: free of gatekeeping, pretension, or stylistic constraints. Her biannual rave Jerk, which she organized to disrupt the predominantly white electronic scene in Toronto, has become a staple for Black and brown club kids in the Canadian metropolis. You can sense her role as an agitator across INFINITY CLUB too, where 2-step garage loops meet Jamaican Patois vocals, or tenebrous synth stabs keep the tempo under adamantine R&B melodies. On the deliciously bratty “Wicked Gyal,” BAMBII contorts grimy synths and blaring airhorns over North London rapper and singer Lady Lykez’s playfully blunt verses. The lyrics are a warning to fuckboys and all clubgoers generally, with Lykez cautioning listeners that when she gets twisted, “anything goes.” But her laugh-out-loud admonition to her date is what makes the track a showpiece: “Thank the fool fi di wine and steak/Then belch in his face,” she sings over Azan’s warped synths, unleashing a booming, earth-shaking burp. These collages of dancehall, jungle, breakcore, industrial, and other sounds are a product of Azan’s Jamaican roots and of the famously multicultural milieu of her hometown. But they are not just a natural outgrowth of a scene’s specific cultural context; they double as an avowal of club music’s endless possibilities and an insistent reminder that Caribbean genres and electronic styles are far from distant, irreconcilable categories.
Azan produces like a DJ, which is to say that not a second is wasted on slowing down or catching your breath. Lead single “One Touch” is a rabid scramble of jungle and dancehall, a distorted voice warbling under the surface. Less than 45 seconds in, Azan is already pitch-shifting and chopping up vocals, which flash by like strobe lights. More layers of hard breaks crash into the production, and Azan adds a wobbly garage bassline to the delirium. Elsewhere, “Hooked,” featuring Aluna, begins as a slow-whining dancefloor tryst, but in the last 20 seconds, BAMBII introduces dapples of piano keys and the midnight march of a dembow riddim. You can feel Azan’s instincts as a DJ in these moments; the transitions across INFINITY CLUB are precise but fluid, like a seasoned selector fine-tuning the perfect blend.
In July, Azan told Crack Magazine that her ideal club experience is participatory. “I want chanting; I want dance-offs,” she declared. Even a passive listener will feel like a part of the party in BAMBII’s universe: There are frisky come-ons, gruff dancefloor commands, and all kinds of invitations to movement. On “One Touch,” someone exclaims, “I saw you with her!” while “Sydanie’s Interlude” closes with an anonymous declaration: “I’m living life right now bitch!” Then, on the title track, a glitchy voice asks the DJ to give them “something nice.” These details are small but potent, generating a sense of conviviality you can only find at the club: It’s as if you’re overhearing ambient chatter while you squeeze by people on the dancefloor on your way to the bar—or as if someone is yelling into their phone in front of you in the line for the bathroom.
It is easy to imagine these songs blasting at a certain kind of gritty underground rave in any cosmopolitan city. Sometimes, that universality is to the EP’s detriment; there are moments when INFINITY CLUB struggles to stand out from the sounds currently reigning over certain corners of the Internet (see “Body,” which invokes rap’s obsession with Jersey club). And in other moments, as on “Slip Slide,” it feels like the EP is retreading ground first paved by underground labels and producers of the mid 2010s—renegades who dared to dismantle hegemonic, monolithic ideas of what electronic music should sound like.
Even so, for BAMBII, these elastic club constructions are organic. When a chorus of overlapping, multilingual voices welcomes us into her world in the intro (“You are now entering the infinity club”), it doesn’t feel forced or spurious. Rather, it’s a notice of the globally minded vision that follows, and an affirmation that club music can be as mutable and boundless as the African diaspora that helped inspire it in the first place. | 2023-08-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | August 4, 2023 | 7.6 | af9315f1-0418-4b33-8699-d83168db7d50 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Kari Faux returns to her Southern roots on a raucous, eclectic rap album that pays tribute to the ancestors, loved ones, and inspirations that showed her the way. | Kari Faux returns to her Southern roots on a raucous, eclectic rap album that pays tribute to the ancestors, loved ones, and inspirations that showed her the way. | Kari Faux: Real B*tches Don’t Die! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kari-faux-real-btches-dont-die/ | Real B*tches Don’t Die! | Arkansas, 1957. Elizabeth Eckford walks to school. In her black shades, she emanates coolness. Upon arrival, a vicious crowd barricades the entrance, a moment now immortalized in U.S. history. White mothers, fathers, students, military men contort their faces. Some spit. Most hurl vile threats. All of them bank on this 15-year-old student not returning the next day. But she did, day after day. Four decades later, Kari Faux would attend Little Rock Central High School, too. Her new album REAL B*TCHES DON’T DIE! channels the resilience of Black Southern women. Its motto: “Y’all niggas ain’t stoppin’ shit!”
While it was on, you couldn’t watch a season of Insecure without hearing one of Faux’s liberated, self-affirming tracks. Lead single “Me First” would slot right into a scene of Molly and Issa hyping each other up on the way to the club after one of them sabotages yet another relationship. Over holographic pianos, Faux is unabashedly selfish. She fiercely guards her comfort against the vampires who would dull her shine. Her incredulous disgust is hilarious: “I ain’t fucking for no purse!” Bullied as a kid, Faux learned to disarm people with jokes. “The earth controls the moon, the moon controls the tide,” she muses before landing the punchline: “But I can’t control when you niggas go and tell a lie.”
Her 2019 EP, Cry 4 Help, planted a seed of emo-confessionalism that comes into bloom on B*TCHES DON’T DIE!. “My mama seen me cry, she wiped my eyes,” she opens the album in an almost childlike sing-song. Her good friend, rapper Chynna Rogers, passed away in 2020, a day after the release of Kari’s album Lowkey Superstar, and Kari also lost her cousin a year later. In a recent interview with i_D, she opened up about the way grief changes from day to day: “There are moments where you’re like, ‘I’m outside, I’m lit, I’m turnt up with my friends,’ and then the next day, you can be like, ‘Damn, I really miss so-and-so,’” she said. On this record, she memorializes her loved ones with uptempo, confidence-inspiring anthems, wielding the title slogan to reinforce her power. “Our ancestors made four ways out of no ways,” she says on “White Caprice,” reminding herself of the women in her bloodline who demanded the world for themselves and their kin—and still made time to party.
From chopped and screwed (“H-Town”) to funk (“Drunk Words, Sober Thoughts”), REAL B*TCHES DON’T DIE! showcases the richness of historically Black music. In her element in Southern rap, Faux is noticeably revitalized. Her country twang wasn’t as audible on previous projects, but here—in the way she pronounces “marijuana” on “White Caprice” or “blessing” on “H-Town”—it’s commanding. Her unique diction makes familiar phrases her own: “Young! Black! And gifted-ed!” Some moments she invokes the brash raunchiness of Crime Mob’s Diamond and Princess, particularly in the ad-libs. Other times, her voice embodies the husky androgyny of La Chat and Gangsta Boo. “Peace to the Black babies born below the Mason-Dixon,” she introduces “White Caprice.”
Producer Phoelix, a go-to for eclectic rappers like Smino, Saba, and Noname, contributes a masterclass in homage. Instead of copying successful Southern songs from the ’90s, he adds tinges of the indie psychedelia that are integral to Faux’s sound. Her hard raps over lo-fi horns and thumping basslines harken to OutKast’s Aquemini, while a melismatic, Arabian flute-esque sound in the middle of “Gemini+” builds upon Parliament-Funkadelic’s experimentalism. The effect is a hazy, humid atmosphere. “Drunk Words, Sober Thoughts,” “Past Life,” and “Borrowed Time” all stun with an immersive funk sound that Faux has never fully committed to in the past. Cringy singing is a rite of passage for plenty of up-and-coming rappers, but you can tell she’s been working on her voice. From the owl-like “who-who”s on the chorus of “Turnin’ Heads” to the way she emulates the soulful rasp of Macy Gray on “White Caprice,” she’s in full control.
Faux’s South is defined by raucous family reunions, subwoofers blasting on summer days, and classic Chevrolets that have both ferried families to church and supported women gleefully twerking on their hoods. Like many young creatives, she was taught to believe that Los Angeles was the mecca of music. The faux-artsy individualism thing lost its appeal quick. Her Southern roots, rich in maternal wisdom, hospitality, and familial comfort, proved bountiful. On the Gangsta Boo-assisted “White Caprice,” two generations of Southern rap cruise through Doberman-filled neighborhoods, taking in the scents of barbeque and mary jane. The late rapper’s presence ties perfectly to the reverential theme of the album. Real bitches transcend mortality. | 2023-06-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Drink Sum Wtr | June 1, 2023 | 7.8 | af96cbc5-0969-493c-9b98-5a207aa9da8a | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
Moving away from footwork conventions and playing with a wider range of tempos, the Yokohama producer focuses his attention on a scintillating of tiny, tactile, and childlike sounds. | Moving away from footwork conventions and playing with a wider range of tempos, the Yokohama producer focuses his attention on a scintillating of tiny, tactile, and childlike sounds. | Foodman: Aru Otoko No Densetsu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foodman-aru-otoko-no-densetsu/ | Aru Otoko No Densetsu | When the Yokohama producer Takahide Higuchi, aka Foodman, first began reaching Western listeners, it was thanks to his 2016 release Ez Minzoku and his peculiar mutation of footwork. “I get the same sort of sensation from footwork as I do from dub or punk,” he told one interviewer. “It’s about an expression, a way of approaching sound that transcends multiple genres.” Across an array of cassettes and SoundCloud uploads since then, Foodman has pushed at the constraints of the form, with glints of house, dub techno, pop ambient, and even Christmas music all getting minced in his 160-BPM mix.
After a string of tracks cropping up on Diplo’s Mad Decent, it may seem odd that Foodman now blips on Sun Araw’s Sun Ark label. But his restless, exploratory spirit jibes well with Sun Araw’s, and Aru Otoko No Densetsu finds Higuchi adrift in strange new sonic spaces. A steady hullabaloo of sound remains intact, but for the most part, the relentless speed of his previous work has been jettisoned. As the sputtering dub effects in the negative space of “Kakon” make clear, there’s an audible sense of patience here. Even as the track’s tocking starts to speed up midway through, it seems less suited for dancefloors than contemplation.
Toying with empty space, reveling in toy-like sounds, and inverting electronic music’s tropes remain some of Foodman’s deftest tricks, and Aru Otoko No Densetsu is his deepest exploration of the minutiae of such twinkling sounds, creating weird wiggling miniatures that defy expectations. In “Body,” a wailing diva shouting “Everybody” gets paired with furious bass for an instant, but its DJ-friendly qualities are undercut by anxious woodwinds and a chopped-up choir that turn it topsy-turvy. Same goes for the almost anthemic piano stabs of “Sauna,” which are continually sideswiped by woodblocks and gentle synths.
“Percussion” features handclaps and pinging drums along with its chimes, but rather than coalesce into a surefooted beat, it instead slides away. Its most telling sound is that of a cold, frosty one being poured, all foamy head and bubbling effervescence. “Clock” could have all the makings of a simmering Sade ballad, albeit one featuring Mario and Luigi. Foodman revels in such tiny, tactile sounds, and the effect is not unlike experiencing Charles LeDray’s small sculptures. Sounds blip up with all the connective tissue left out, so that descending keyboard jags, bass throbs, spiraling xylophones, and drum hits seem wholly disconnected—and discombobulating. Foodman’s approach now is as much about quickly wiping away sounds as fast as he can trigger them, as if he was making a soundtrack for a video-game version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Along with the children’s toys, wind-up monkeys, miniature xylophones, and video-game effects, the album’s artwork and attendant booklet of drawings and doodles underscore the kinship that Foodman shares with fellow countryman EYE, of the Boredoms: Both musicians’ work is largely about reconnecting with childlike wonder. Disjointed, spare, and nonsensical as Aru Otoko No Densetsu can be, it bears a thrilling sense of play. | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sun Ark | October 6, 2018 | 7.5 | af9bd58c-be8d-4a2e-90b2-3ceee44174c0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
With subtle electronic production tugging at the edges of her fingerpicked folk, the California singer-songwriter peers at the dark side of motherhood. | With subtle electronic production tugging at the edges of her fingerpicked folk, the California singer-songwriter peers at the dark side of motherhood. | Jesca Hoop: STONECHILD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jesca-hoop-stonechild/ | STONECHILD | In Anwen Crawford’s 33 1/3 book on Live Through This, one fan, Nicole Solomon, credits Courtney Love for introducing the concept of motherhood to a rock genre dominated by men. “Courtney made motherhood the most fucking intense, crazy, rock’n’roll thing you could be writing about,” said Solomon. “I was… so struck by what a necessary corrective that was in the history of rock music.”
In folk music, motherhood has always been a central theme; many a folk song was improvised by mothers to soothe crying children, and in turn, inherited by those children when they bore children of their own. Elided in this long tradition of lullabies is the darkness of motherhood—all the notions that might spur nightmares rather than abate them. With Stonechild, Jesca Hoop complicates centuries of feminized folk music by singing about the ugly, violent aspects of motherhood. Stillbirth, spousal abuse, sexism inherited from mother to daughter—all claim vignettes on this record of electro-folk, seeking, much like Love did, to render motherhood in fucking intense terms.
The album’s thesis statement arrives early, in the opening of “Old Fear of Father,” when Hoop sings, “I love my boys more than I love my girl/She knows like I knew.” What follows is a regretful portrait of a woman so limited by her own possibilities that she can only imagine the same small, dim future for her daughter: “I’ll shape and mold you so you can get the ring while you’re still pretty.” Like Lucy Dacus on her recent Mother’s Day single, “My Mother & I,” Hoop imagines a mother as both inheritor and progenitor of misogyny. Her songs about this vicious circle reach centuries into the past, deploying subtle historical imagery and traditional melodies to awaken something atavistic. “Shoulder Charge” is especially masterful on this count, walking the tightrope between modernity and ancestry. A line like “These leathers shield my sadness so nobody sees” could refer to a woman in a bar, wrapped in a motorcycle jacket, downing whiskey, or they could call to mind Boudicca on the battlefield, decked out in Celtic armor to avenge her daughters. At the song’s end, the numb alienation of waiting on a subway platform, “shoulder to shoulder to shoulder,” is transformed by a single cry—“Charge!”—into an ancient call to arms.
“Outside of Eden,” a duet with Kate Stables of This Is the Kit and, lately, of the National, is the record’s most overt melding of old and new worlds as they apply to women’s lives. Hoop and Stables pose as digital sirens, singing to the incels of the world: “Come, shut-in boys, for the girlfriend experience/Enter the code and I’ll taste real.” The Garden of Eden is the song’s central, ambiguous metaphor: Do these men seek virtual-reality porn because they feel unworthy of real love, or is their digital Eden a soothing fantasy that shields them from the mortifying ordeal of being known? There’s empathy in Hoop’s lyrics for isolated, alienated men who seek intimacy in digital space, and a heavy dose of contempt for those who regard violent misogyny as a balm for their wounds.
The record’s production, by PJ Harvey and Aldous Harding collaborator John Parish, complements Hoop’s lyrical tension between past and present through the careful, restrained use of electronic elements, many so subtle they pass without notice on first listen. On “Foot Fall to the Path,” a sudden surge of electric guitar ruptures Hoop’s careful fingerpicking, making narrator’s desperation—“Why love if loving never lasts? I’ll never have what other lovers have”—all the more vivid. The murky filter of Parish’s production lends a grim heft to Hoop’s lyrics, sending would-be nursery rhymes like “Death Row” into witchy territory.
The album’s title, Stonechild, refers to a gruesome—and mercifully, exceedingly rare—biological phenomenon called lithopedia: a dead fetus, too large to be reabsorbed by the parent’s body, grows a calcified shell to shield the mother’s body from infected fetal tissue. A parent can carry a stone child for decades without knowing, and carry on having successful, uncomplicated pregnancies all the while. Stone babies have been a grim constant for centuries, documented as early as the 10th century and diagnosed as recently as 2015. The word is eerily apt for Hoop’s work, which lays bare the visceral terror lurking behind the traditional, tender lore of motherhood.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Memphis Industries | July 9, 2019 | 7.7 | af9e9d90-d195-4268-a084-8033a028480d | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Post Malone is a rap charlatan for the digital age, and his debut mixtape, August 26th, is like falling down an acoustic rap cover k-hole. | Post Malone is a rap charlatan for the digital age, and his debut mixtape, August 26th, is like falling down an acoustic rap cover k-hole. | Post Malone: August 26th | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21928-august-26th/ | August 26th | In a post–Rick Ross rap universe, the repercussions for being outed as phony are lower than they’ve ever been. For artists on the come up, social media can be a digital journal of embarrassing missteps—think web sleuths unearthing Travis Scott’s disparaging tweets about his label boss T.I.—but in a time where catfishing can get you on a TV show, these mostly make for momentary hiccups, not career destroyers. These are ideal conditions for someone like metal-and-folk enthusiast-turned-singsong-rapper Austin Post, now known as Post Malone, to flourish. He is a rap charlatan for the digital age, and his debut mixtape, August 26th, is like falling down an acoustic rap cover k-hole.
It’s worth a quick glance back at the twisty road that led to Post Malone’s career. He found ubiquity on SoundCloud last fall with the novelty single “White Iverson,” an homage to the iconic NBA guard. A year and some change earlier, though, he was Leon Dechino, an over-the-top character with a Tim & Eric–style surrealist comedy music video called “Why Don’t You Love Me.” The song was created with help from his friends at TeamCrafted, a collective of gamers dedicated to playing and making tutorials for the sandbox game Minecraft. (In one of their videos, Post seems to denounce the song, saying “That’s it. That’s the one song. I’m done making music.”) Before that, he was playing Bob Dylan covers as Austin Richard. As a teen, he was in a hardcore band, a move spurred on by his love of the game Guitar Hero. It isn’t impossible for him to be all of these things at once—hardcore punk, satirist musician, folk singer, diehard gamer, and flex rapper—but there’s something a little disingenuous about going from prodigal son of the Dallas Cowboys corporate infrastructure to a cornrow-wearing, grill-bearing poster boy for appropriation. When asked about his place in the rap world in an interview with The Fader, he all but admitted this, saying, “At 40 years old, I’m gonna be a country singer. That’s down the line.”
Even if you were to overlook his questionable origins entirely, it’s difficult to excuse his shortcomings as a songwriter. Every song is a rap-cliche house of cards, built on some some basic variation on “balling”: how he’s doing it, who he’s doing it like, how you aren't doing it. On “Monte,” the spiritual sequel to “White Iverson,” named for Indiana Pacers guard Monta Ellis, he gets outrapped by Lil Yachty, of all people. He has no legible personality outside the confines of “marginally famous person excited to trade fame for sex”: On “Get Wit U,” he raps, “Wanna fuck? I’m almost famous”; on “Never Understand,” he raps, “Said they see me at the show, they was in the front row/ They wanna fuck, I told them bitches come and jump on my bus.”
The moments where Post Malone finds the most success on August 26th are when he highlights his schizoid background instead of trying to hide it. His cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” takes liberties with the melodies and structure before melting down into a backbone for the haunting thumper “Come Down.” The closer, “Oh God,” sounds like it could soundtrack a modern spaghetti western with chords that crunch under his distorted croons. Additionally, the 2 Chainz–featuring “Money Made Me Do It” is a nice tribute to slain Atlanta rapper Bankroll Fresh with floating harmonies that settle just below the surface of steel drum synths. Malone’s redeeming trick is his way with melody, and some of them are enchanting, particularly on the Jeremih duet “Fuck,” which vague alludes to the Chicago singer’s “Fuck U All The Time.”
The bulk of the production comes from the Atlanta duo FKi, the team behind songs like Travis Porter’s “Make It Rain,” Travis Scott’s “Sloppy Toppy,” the Rich Homie Quan and Young Thug duet “Get TF Out My Face,” and, more recently, 2 Chainz’s “Watch Out.” A lot of the beats do fun things with hollowed-out synths and dribbling hi-hat patterns, but there isn’t nearly enough firepower to overcome Post’s verses, which are a series of dead-end signs. It’s hard to know what Malone should be doing to strengthen his work; he doesn't really have an identity or a true north in his music, a more interesting direction to point towards. This is ultimately his biggest problem: Complete reinvention can be a fine and sometimes even necessary thing, but if you’re going to be someone else, at least be creative about it. | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 20, 2016 | 5.2 | afa513bc-196c-43f8-99cd-9f157787fa5e | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset are in a class by themselves when it comes to excavating brutality out of silence. | The Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset are in a class by themselves when it comes to excavating brutality out of silence. | Emptyset: Borders | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22837-borders/ | Borders | By its own description, the Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset makes music as a meta-study of the relationship between sound, surface, space, gear, and process. Given how freely Emptyset’s Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg expound on those relationships in academic terms, you might expect the pair's work to drip with intellectualism. Between them, Purgas and Ginzburg actually do have academic backgrounds—in art, design, and music. So it’s no surprise that they’ve turned to spaces such as London’s Ambika P3 testing bunker for commissioned installation projects, and that such spaces have served as one of Emptyset’s primary habitats over the project’s 12-year history.
Taken on its own, however, Emptyset’s music can be surprisingly single-minded. Borders, the band’s fifth studio full-length (its first for Thrill Jockey following a string of releases for electronic labels like Subtext and Raster-Noton) can be boiled-down to three words: throbbing, bassy, sinister. More aggressive and pulse-driven than Emptyset’s last studio album, 2013’s Recur, Borders hits your senses with a brute force that belies Ginzburg and Purgas’ conceptual approach to making sounds. The album opens with a flickering, short-lived wash of static that gets swallowed by a low-end thrum, a sound that pretty much persists from that point onwards until the final track concludes.
These repetitive bursts of bass-frequency shrapnel go through significant changes—the timbre, layering, tempos, and intervals all morph from track to track—but the central pattern and rhythmic attack remain constant as the pulses come one after another after another. And once the pattern shifts from album opener “Body” to a similar pattern on “Border,” Purgas and Ginzburg establish relentless repetition as one of the album’s primary features. It doesn’t take long before Borders induces a meditative effect not unlike when you stare at ocean waves for long periods.
Likewise, the music on Borders suggests a comparable sense of catching finite slivers within a greater pool of endlessness. With a bandname derived from the mathematical term for “a set of elements containing nothing,” it’s no surprise that Emptyset aim to bring a sense of physicality to empty space—or, as Ginzburg once put it, to identify the “thingness” at the heart of an empty void. When it comes excavating brutality out of silence, Emptyset sit in a class by themselves.
The album even comes close to tunefulness on “Dissolve,” where an unidentifiable sound source takes on the character of delicate guitar strumming. And though you'd never mistake Emptyset for dance music, theirs is still body music, in a way. One can only imagine that listening to Borders with a heavy-duty subwoofer would be a punishing affair. Similarly, even without one iota of percussion—Borders contains nothing by way of a traditional “beat”—the groove is undeniable. And the new material, perhaps more than ever, harbors ample evidence for why Emptyset continue to identify as a techno act, albeit one whose style hews much closer to Berlin than Detroit. Given their Bristol background, it makes sense that Purgas and Ginzburg see their work as an extension of sound system/DJ culture.
In truth, Emptyset haven’t evolved all that much since they began working in the full-length format in 2009. A microcosm of their overall progression, Borders essentially hovers in one mood, requires effort to recognize its contours, and ends on an anti-climactic note as the music simply ceases, without any sense of completion or finality. And whether it loses or gains flavor over multiple listens depends on the listener’s patience threshold for repetition. But by turning up the volume and menace this time, Emptyset manage to put new spins on dubstep and industrial—genres they don’t explicitly reference—as well. As such, Borders functions as a gateway between traditionalist dance forms and the artier end of the electronic-production universe. It also offers new ways of understanding both by reflecting each against the other. | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | February 9, 2017 | 7.4 | afa9d941-cf58-401d-9171-df8236dfe85b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Robert Forster's first release since the death of Grant McLennan, his late partner in the Go-Betweens, is also his best solo album. | Robert Forster's first release since the death of Grant McLennan, his late partner in the Go-Betweens, is also his best solo album. | Robert Forster: The Evangelist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11470-the-evangelist/ | The Evangelist | The Go-Betweens' initial break-up followed a fruitful span of six classic records, so when principals Robert Forster and Grant McLennan went their separate ways in 1989, there was at least a sense of mission accomplished. At the time, with solo careers embarked upon and new collaborators recruited, few expected the pair to reconvene as the Go-Betweens, which they eventually did roughly 10 years later. With the untimely 2006 death of McLennan came a sickening feeling of permanence, however; the excellent Oceans Apart would serve as the Go-Betweens' true swan song. Making the loss of McLennan all the more painful was Forster's reminiscence in Australia's The Monthly (for whom Forster has become a cultural critic), that "we were on the cusp of something," and that "album number 10 was going to be something special."
It's impossible to listen to Forster's The Evangelist without thinking of McLennan, but to his credit Forster has designed it that way. Three songs were in fact co-written with McLennan, bequeathed to Forster to reveal to the world and break our hearts all over again. "Demon Days" in particular works eerily like a self-penned eulogy, something that Forster was quite aware of: "I played it a couple of days after he died," recalled Forster in a recent interview in The Age, "and it was an extraordinary moment because I was the only other person who knew this song existed and I've got this thing, this masterpiece, which is so fragile, because if I'd died three days after him, the song wouldn't exist." It's a tough listen made all the more touching with the brief appearance of a muted chorus and a swooning string arrangement courtesy of Audrey Riley (who handled the same duties on Liberty Belle & the Black Diamond Express). It's also another indiciation, if another were needed, of the brilliance of the Forster/McLennan team.
It's similarly easy to imagine McLennan, not Forster, leading "Let Your Light In, Babe" and "It Ain't Easy", two more songs salvaged from the songwriter's works in progress notebook, and it's no surprise that his shadow spreads across much of the rest of The Evangelist as well. Forster, even though he occasionally collaborated directly with McLennan, is nonetheless a very different singer and songwriter, and his solo albums never hit the highs of McLennan's. Even here, after every great song like "If It Rains", "Pandanus", or the elegiac album-closing tearjerker "From Ghost Town", your mind is primed for McLennan's counterpart response. Aside from the aforementioned songs, they never come, of course, which partly explains why The Evangelist feels a little incomplete. It's not fair to Forster, of course, who rose to the occasion with his warmest and most welcoming solo album. But even beyond the imherant emotional baggage, songs such as "Did She Overtake You" or the slightly bombastic "Don't Touch Anything" still sound like they could have used a pass through someone else's filter.
Yet if anything the album's slight flaws work as sideways tribute to Forster's late friend and partner. "Something's not right, something's gone wrong," sings Forster, channeling McLennan, in "Demon Days". If anything's wrong with The Evangelist, it's not a problem that can be fixed. It's wrong like an empty chair at a banquet, unopened presents at a birthday party, a pile of uncollected mail on the front steps, or an unfinished novel that trails off into who knows where. It's wrong like even our fondest memories, cursed to fade with time. | 2008-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-07T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Yep Roc | May 7, 2008 | 7.6 | afb9d3bd-6dd4-4354-b409-14dbedb67fb0 | Joshua Klein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-klein/ | null |
Fusing elements of free jazz, breakbeat, acid house, dub, ambient, and more, the Tokyo producer’s second full-length album is simultaneously comforting and destabilizing. | Fusing elements of free jazz, breakbeat, acid house, dub, ambient, and more, the Tokyo producer’s second full-length album is simultaneously comforting and destabilizing. | Yoshinori Hayashi: Pulse of Defiance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoshinori-hayashi-pulse-of-defiance/ | Pulse of Defiance | Like so many forces of electronic music—see Warp co-founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell, or Kelly Lee Owens—Japanese producer Yoshinori Hayashi spent formative years working in a record store. Hayashi’s time at Tokyo’s Face Records comes through in his genre-melding music, which overflows with the encyclopedic passion of an enthusiastic cratedigger. Yet his sounds extend far beyond fandom or homage. His new album, Pulse of Defiance, takes styles forged by others—free jazz, breakbeat, acid house, dub, and other unclassifiable strands of electronic sound—and fills them out into complete worlds of his own.
Ambivalence, Hayashi’s 2018 Smalltown Supersound debut, made a clear insinuation about the artist’s relationship with any single genre or form. His first full-length dabbled in abstract, eerie multi-instrumentalism that only occasionally solidified into something dancefloor-friendly, suggesting a jazzy experimental composer as much as a DJ. But Hayashi is just as formidable a selector as he is a painter, and Pulse of Defiance gives both tendencies room to breathe.
Album opener “Callapse” begins with pensive, spacey piano that’s soon engulfed by scattered drums. Hayashi’s polymathic abilities are on clearest display when it comes to percussion; at slower tempos, his pounding loops have a trip-hop quality, while at higher BPMs, they metamorphosize into full-fledged breakbeat. The drumming on “Make Up One’s Mind” is fast and free, sounding unpredictable and open-ended while still controlled and precise.
The album’s first three cuts offer space to settle in; when the beat really drops on “Touch,” the rave begins. At its opening, the track’s four-on-the-floor pulse has an overpowering intensity, but it’s balanced out by the ethereal, almost vocal quality of the synthesizers, which sound more suited to an open-air dance party than a dark club—Hayashi’s dance tracks more often recall the technic optimism of British rave pioneers like Orbital, Underworld, or 808 State rather than contemporary minimalism. Though its energy is active and kinetic, Pulse of Defiance feels informed by the experiential nature of ambient music—as “Touch” stretches past eight minutes, you eventually forget about the underlying beat and lose yourself in its layers of crackling sound.
Though Hayashi’s work often suggests a restorative comfort, he’s not afraid to throw it off balance: “Twilight” oozes hyperactive hi-hats and cymbals, chopped-up voices, and a disorienting piano line. As the album progresses, Hayashi embarks on a restless journey through dance music history. “Flow” teeters between 808 cowbell-driven electro and acid-drenched bleep techno, with hues of LFO or Joey Beltram, and though less electro in its timbre, “Go With Us” recalls classics of the forward-thinking subgenre like the Jonzun Crew’s “Pack Jam” in its resonant kicks.
With the record’s final three tracks, Hayashi fully releases the breakbeats and turns towards classic rave. This is no nostalgia trip, though; his take on ’90s dance music is still thoroughly destabilizing. On “Shut Up,” a hazy vocal sample stretches to infinite dimensions and fractures into pieces as drums scatter and scramble. “Gallop” gleefully embraces ragga texture and jangly piano lines, while “I Believe in You” flips a dub intro into unrestrained jungle, its frenetic drum and bass infused with healing ambient waves and even a clean guitar line. In his synthesis of varied styles, Hayashi’s compositions feel less genre-defying and more genre-unifying.
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. | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | April 12, 2021 | 7.2 | afbac135-570a-4997-91c9-8c50439c5598 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
This long-running Nashville duo captures the essence of their name with a low-slung, low-stakes sway, tracing a line between languid indie rock and experimental atmospheres. | This long-running Nashville duo captures the essence of their name with a low-slung, low-stakes sway, tracing a line between languid indie rock and experimental atmospheres. | Hammock: Universalis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hammock-universalis/ | Universalis | Band names are often brain blurts that someone thought sounded cool, funny, or sexy in the moment, so it’s best not to make too much of them. But the nebulous nature of instrumental music—especially ambient—is an exception. We’re built to make meaning from abstraction and find concepts within chaos; when we encounter an artifact consisting of inkblot drones and a minimalist painting, a single word can become an interpretive skeleton key, however inadvertent. By any other name, a Phoenix song would sound as sweet, but would you hear GAS the same way if it were called SOLID? What if the Orb were the Cube?
And then, there’s Hammock. The enduring Nashville duo has a decidedly breeze-blown, down-to-earth take on Stars of the Lid’s cold ambience and Explosions in the Sky’s bright post-rock. The humble moniker fits their low-slung, low-stakes sway, but it also emphasizes their generic qualities. Still, after 15 years of recording together, Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson are fully in command of a narrow, placid lane that is in some ways self-made; they live outside of a major experimental hub and have self-released almost a dozen albums. On Universalis, they slowly unbraid loopy guitar arpeggios into spectral calls and currents, all swirled with pop-classical keys and strings. It’s the sort of album that has a credit line for “angelic vocals,” and there’s bound to be an EBow somewhere. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, nothing you mind hearing again.
After some brief constellation-spotting in the tradition of Eno and Fripp, Universalis arrives at its highlight, “Scattering Light.” Its weary crescendo, woven with threadbare drumming, will take old heads right back to the heyday of ramshackle post-rock bands like Dirty Three. In the dusky stormfront of drum splashes and tidy guitar intervals during “We Are More Than We Are,” there’s the slowcore trace of classic Low. Hammock gives such vintage indie a neoclassical tilt with songs like “Cliffside,” a melancholy guitar rumination that morphs into a dark scherzo.
But the closer that Universalis gets to pure ambient or chamber music, the less distinctive it becomes. The title track, with a string theme sitting still at the center of a web of misty pitches, is pretty but dull. “Clothed With Sky” is an obligatory piano-and-strings bagatelle. By the time “We Watched You Disappear” rolls around late in the album, it is the background soundtrack of an ordinary life.
Another key filter for interpreting abstract music is provenance. The same kind of microtonal sculptures might evoke Scandinavian ice, Berlin architecture, or Mojave flora, depending on the origin. On that score, Hammock give us something much more compelling. Because they hail from the American South, which is not exactly synonymous with ambient music, their sonic landscapes suggest green meadows, trembling oak leaves, and cool streams, dutifully established in a field recording at the start of “Tether of Yearning.” Those impressions lend a whiff of something fresh to an album that teaches you its repertoire of gestures early and then never surprises you, working out beauty like a math problem instead of harnessing the wild thing it is. | 2019-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hammock | January 4, 2019 | 6.2 | afbb6946-c302-42fd-9b74-94d20c29d1e3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Aesop Rock's sixth album, his first without any Blockhead beats or guest rappers, evokes the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. This is rap as Rorschach blot. | Aesop Rock's sixth album, his first without any Blockhead beats or guest rappers, evokes the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. This is rap as Rorschach blot. | Aesop Rock: Skelethon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16814-skelethon/ | Skelethon | "I am so completely off the goddamn grid/ It's not a question of addressing me, it's 'What do these symbols under the dresser mean?'" -Aesop Rock, "Crows 1"
Hack faith healers, stained glass Saint Peter's, black rainbows, ruby tides, jarred brains, magpies, hoarders, and allied forces licking zigzags while being dragged by horses. Antiquated gentlemen outlaws reduced to a Ferris wheel of vitriol. Miniature Raquel Welches, ghost crabs, butchers in bloody aprons, splintering motordrome walls of death, homemade mummies, bats, crypts, and Chuck Taylors with "Zulu" bombed on them in Buckle Font. Dope stone lions and maple donuts. There's no Rosetta to decrypt the Nighthawk Book of the Dead doubling as the mind of Aesop Rock.
Pick over Skelethon at your own peril. The portmanteau breaks down to the marathon of skeletons. 360 chambers of death, kid. Probably the most logical left turn for the Long Island-hatched rapper who warned "Abandon All Hope" on his first video: body splayed into a crucified scarecrow, blood and tar on the vocals, words loaned from the inscription above the Inferno.
By 23, he'd died 1,000 Deaths and vowed to die a thousand more. But time makes the melodramatic seem merely morbid and Aesop Rock is now 36-- old enough to have two eyes on the odometer and a psyche swamp-drained by the disintegration of labels, loves, and all carbon life around him. Skelethon is his sixth album, a retreat into the rabbit hole, the apartment as womb and tomb. Like he says on "Leisureforce": "don four walls like a wooden coat."
There is no clear autopsy for first single, "Zero Dark Thirty", where a "thousand virtues, kick the same bucket like Chinatown turtles." This is rap as Rorschach blot. I see it as one-part gentle eulogy for the early 00s underground scene that Rock once ruled, one-part requiem for the naïve certitude that cloaks all teen dreamers.
"Roving packs of elusive young, become choke-lore writers over boosted drums, in the terrifying face of a future tongue... Down from a huntable surplus to one."
Few eat off rap infinitely. Def Jux is dead and 93% of the Fat Beats generation scrounges rent money from increasingly rare spot dates, overseas collectors, and rich kids with money to blow on cameo fees. There were even rumors that Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox was panhandling uptown. Then there are those making dishonest moves to seem current, dudes who once penned purist "manifestos" and now collaborate with Ace Hood. Rock phrases it more tactfully: "folk being backed into what they most lampoon."
Nine years ago, Aesop Rock swore he'd never write another "Daylight". That's the closest thing he's had to a hit-- the three ring-hook that's closed out almost every one of his solo shows since 2001's Labor Days: "All I ever wanted to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way." Had he the desire to simplify his style and stay making off-kilter inspirational anthems for the artistically inclined, he could have been caking off independent coffeehouse baristas for decades. Instead, he created a surly alter ego named Bazooka Tooth and rapped about train bombers and acid trip adolescence. The Todd Solondz-grim cover of that album didn't help much. Picture a prep school Conan O' Brien Frankenstein in headgear being taunted by grotesque peers. Good times.
From jump, Rock said that he'd sanitize nothing for the sake of contemporary tastes and he's arguably more of a one-man solar system than ever before. Skelethon is his first real album without Blockhead beats. It's also his first without any guest rappers. In fact, the only real cameo is Kimya Dawson, who chants a necromantic hook on "Crows 1". Even then, she seems selected squarely because she was the best option to summon the spirits of the witches from Macbeth had they been into anti-folk. If anything, the semiotics have gotten subtler but more vivid. And he wasn't exactly churning out summer jams to start.
So there are no sequels. But "Zero Dark Thirty" may be the closest Rock is ever going to get to "Daylight" (save for maybe "Nightlight"). It offers a corollary: what happens when you get to arrange the pieces your way but the puzzle still doesn't fit. He sees "brown grass [on] both sides." The moral compass is "spinning batshit." He wonders if fans are "supporting the artist or enabling the addict." Both songs ultimately reject nihilism for the temporary salve of art. It updates the hero's plight to the present-day: resolved to evolve while retaining his claws. After all, claiming you've "failed all basic training, but have spent a couple Groundhogs Days with a Changeling" is really just a clever way to say "On to the Next One."
Other songs on Skelethon have spiritual ancestors. "Fryerstarter" merges the I Spy-the-LES approach of Float's "6B Panorama" with the toxic animism of "Basic Cable". The perspective revolves around Bob's Donuts on Nob Hill in San Francisco, Rock's home city for the last half-dozen years. The song's theme is faith via fried dough ("you can chew the eucharist in cruller form"), surrounded by an all-night zombie parade of insomniac sugar addicts, police, and thieves. While the self-assault of finale "Gopher Guts" is the most emotionally raw and confessional that he's been since "One of Four", the crack-up that haunted the end of the Daylight EP.
"Leisureforce" could pass for a less allegorical fraternal twin to Labor Days' "No Regrets"-- the cradle-to-the-grave story of Lucy, an artist who only wanted peace to paint her masterpieces. But rather than celebrate the joys of creation, "Leisureforce" catalogues its casual hair-pulling horrors. Yet Skelethon triumphs over those torments. It's the best-written rap album since Danny Brown's XXX, which it resembles in its ability to evoke the self-doubt, sleepless nights, and isolated focus required to finish something great. No surprise considering Brown said that he wrote out the short story raps of Rock's last solo album, 2007's None Shall Pass, to decipher their meaning.
It's always forced when people compare rappers to poets, but fuck it. Skelethon's imagistic processions of the damned remind me most of Ezra Pound's early Cantos and Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish", their own spiritual brine of burial rites, myths, pop culture, and personal anecdote. While the reaper-stalked motorcycle run of "Cycles to Gehenna" achieves the wind-blurred Bay Zen of "the edge" in Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels. If his claims are true and Rock rarely reads, then the influence is smuggled in second-hand via Tom Waits, his closest analogue and one of few admitted influences.
Should the misfits match, consider this Aesop Rock's Swordfishtrombones, a brilliant baleful experiment conducted by an ox-blade throated barker in his mid-30s, with a slant towards occult characters, and off beat percussion. Both share coffee-black humor and a gift for exploring the gopher holes of the underground. The man of Mule Variations would also appreciate the eccentric ghost of Camu Tao, remembered through Rock on "Racing Stripes". The ode to odd haircuts describes Tao's contingency plan to pay the rent: shaving his head George Jefferson-style to force himself inside long enough to make beats to acquire the bread to appease the landlord.
All weird scenes stress a recurring theme. "Grace" reveals the genesis of a stubborn disposition via the 11-year old Ian Bavitz enraging his dad by refusing to eat his vegetables. It also might be the funniest song Rock's written and a decade-late unintentional response to "Be Healthy". "Ruby '81" flashes back to a Fourth of July at five, when a toddler nearly drowned in a swimming pool while everyone was distracted by fireworks. "ZZZ Top" initially seems to only satisfy Ghostface's Killah’s basic requirement of tangled slang rap: get some official beats and say some fly shit over it. But upon repeat, you realize it’s the education of the young rebel, carving "Zoso" into his desk, "Zulu" on his Chuck's, and the Zeroes onto a bathroom stall. It grapples with the moment when childhood dies and permanent angst begins. Yet Rock gracefully dodges preciousness and melon-soft over-sentimentality.
Like Waits, Rock's lyrical gifts and cult-leader singularity often overshadows his musical prowess. Look at this review: 1,300 words on symbols and a paragraph to production. But Skelethon reveals how far Rock's come since the Bazooka Tooth-era, when his beats largely lacked swing and he hadn't yet fully synthesized El-P's industrial influence. His productions now switch between samples and live instrumentation, psychedelic guitars and fright night keyboards, 1980s 808s and beastly drum thrashes. Garage rock riffs married to phosphorescent synths exhumed from the same UFO graveyard as El-P and Black Moth Super Rainbow.
No one would've complained if Rock selected a few Blockhead beats for variety. But he compensates with the natural benefits of being a rapper/producer: these beats are bespoke. The rapping has never been better either, with the music tailored to wring maximum tension out of each bar. Drum slaps dive-bomb then disappear. Piano codas accentuate the disembodied poetics. Rock may claim to be manifestly unfit for the menacing grip of the day, but Skelethon is indelible, pagan torah to his period of exile and emotional maim. Everything dies. Everyone knows. Don't sweat the hieroglyphics, embalm what you can while you're still alive. | 2012-07-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | July 10, 2012 | 8.2 | afbd7541-2997-418f-99e1-64f8e8b3c615 | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The Portland rapper’s debut album balances playful verses and cheerful wit with more revealing moments of introspection. | The Portland rapper’s debut album balances playful verses and cheerful wit with more revealing moments of introspection. | Aminé: Good for You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amine-good-for-you/ | Good for You | On the cartoonish cover of his debut album, Aminé sits nearly naked on a bright blue toilet reading The Good for You Post, a newspaper—a real one, in fact—featuring writing by friends and peers like Steve Lacy, Taco, and Madeintyo, as well as his mom. As is often the case with Aminé, the playfulness of the image belies its actual content. In an essay of his own, he writes about the way an ex once served as an escape from the depression he refuses to name. “That word isn’t easy to say when ‘suck it up’ seems to be the only reverb that echoes with the feeling as a black man,” he writes.
But Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree. On opener “Veggies,” he claims to be “Andre's prodigy”—a lofty aspiration, to be sure—but that unapologetic ambition, coupled with his animation, drives the album. The songs are glossy, the melodies sunny, the flows smooth. “Spice Girl” is flutey and flirtatious pop-rap; “Wedding Crashers” features an Auto-Tuned Offset and a comically scorned Aminé rapping over tropical marimbas. Then there’s the multi-platinum “Caroline,” whose polyphonic synths and honeyed lines remain contagious as ever. (One line in particular—“‘Cause great scenes might be great/But I love your bloopers”—could double as a reflection of his attitude about #serious rap albums versus simple fun.) Despite the album’s overwhelmingly lighthearted mood, though, he doesn’t shy away from making a few more serious statements as well.
In the closing essay of his newspaper, he writes about the ways that Portland’s foodie culture has gentrified neighborhoods and pushed out his friends. On the percussive “Money,” he critiques material obsessions—“Money don’t make you happy, it just makes you wanna get richer,” he observes—while sliding in offhanded jabs like, “Saying you ain't racist really sound racist.” The video for “REDMERCEDES,” which got the remix treatment from Missy Elliott but didn't make the album, employs whiteface to satirize white people’s attempts at performing what they think is blackness.
That Aminé is socially aware (see his incisive remix of “Caroline” during a post-election performance on “Fallon”) and still finds a way to manifest joy is remarkable, the way any person of color finding a way to enjoy a life under attack is remarkable. At times, there's an inclination to write off a rapper's cheeriness as a corny gimmick at best and insincere at worst. Such buoyancy, or #BlackBoyJoy as it’s come to be known on social media, is still an under-appreciated aspect of rap, but every D.R.A.M., Lil Yachty, and Chance the Rapper brings that quality a step closer to acceptance. With Good for You, Aminé joins their ranks, basking in his own resilient sense of humor.
When he does let the reality of his pain win, it comes in the form of standout “Sundays”—the emblematic day of serenity and rest. Set to slow-burning snares and a harmonizing vocal, it’s a poetic series of pre- and post-fame revelations. “I bench press my problems like add another weight/And act like it’s all right when it's not,” he raps, falling into a layered hook. “Some days we get Sundays/But most days, the rain comes down/And I feel like I'm bound to drown/Jesus Christ.” It’s followed by the melancholic “Turf,” examining the things—the people, the mentalities—he left when he finally escaped his hometown. In these instances, he proves capable of more than a hit single or one-dimensional feel-good music; his joy becomes that much more meaningful when he explores the things that would constrain it.
There's a breadth of experiences contained within the 15 tracks of Good for You, most of which hinge on love interests old and new, underscored by a playful outlook that’s channeled into bubbly, off-center production. It's far from serious but stops just short of turn-up—more like the soundtrack for an almost-sober drive home. In the album’s final moment, the celebratory “Beach Boy” dissolves into an atmospheric chorus repeating, “I don't know when I'm gonna die/Hopefully there's hope in me.” The sentiment is remarkably similar to the closing note of one Post essay, where he writes, “The finish line to optimism seems to be getting closer." On his debut, it appears he’s a lot closer than he gives himself credit for. | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | CLBN | August 1, 2017 | 7.3 | afc1b275-e150-45d6-aa23-8f1db96a6dad | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
Parlaying creative independence into her best work to date, the R&B star’s latest self-released album is a showcase for her omnivorous tastes and supremely light touch. | Parlaying creative independence into her best work to date, the R&B star’s latest self-released album is a showcase for her omnivorous tastes and supremely light touch. | Tinashe: 333 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tinashe-333/ | 333 | For all the indignities that major labels subject R&B artists to—the constant album delays, retoolings, and forced-fit singles—life after the majors is rarely glamorous. Cut off from the resources and promotional budget of a label, many singers fade into B-list obscurity, their best work behind them. It’s a fate Tinashe might have met after she ended her stymying seven-year run with RCA, but instead, she parlayed her independence into the freest, most exuberant album of her career. Revealing a wider range than any of its predecessors, 2019’s exceptional Songs for You bounded between buoyant R&B, spry dance-pop, minimalist trap, Cali funk, and throwback roller skating jams with such capricious glee, it played as if it’d been sequenced by a giant game show wheel.
To the extent that Song for You’s “whatever feels good” approach could be considered a template, Tinashe’s follow-up 333 repeats it, leaning further into the singer’s two great strengths: her omnivorous tastes and her supremely light touch. The outline is the same—brisk songs with lots of movement—but the particulars are even more refined and surprising. “Let Go” introduces the album with a fake-out, a velvety, two-minute neo-soul fantasia that sounds precisely like nothing that follows. “Shy Guy” test-drives a jungle beat for 66 seconds before retiring the idea. The pivots continue one after another, often within the same song. “Small Reminders” is 333’s longest track at four and a half minutes—a veritable Ken Burns documentary by the standards of this album’s fleet pleasures—but it rewards every second, transforming from smoldering jazz into doobie-lighting funk at the flip of a breakbeat.
The album also indulges Tinashe’s growing interest in EDM and IDM. On “Unconditional,” her weightless voice triple axles over an intricate Kaytranada beat that continually folds in on itself. But even that song sounds downright understated compared to 333’s title track, a puzzle box that never stops molting its skin. There’s no chorus, or even a clear throughline, just a cosmic scope and a series of bombastic, staccato movements that keep one-upping each other. The song is a flex, a tease of all the fantastic avant music Tinashe could make if she wanted to.
But it’s clear she’s not interested in that. Whenever 333 threatens to skew too far left of the dial, it snaps back to instant-gratification R&B like “X,” a Hitmaka-produced sheet burner featuring Jeremih, or “Bouncin,” a gleaming, feeling-myself affirmation (“I been sending dirty pics/Hope they make it to the cloud”). As deft as her stylistic experiments are, Tinashe’s default is bright and poppy, and for all the chocolate ganache she puts on display, she doesn’t deny herself penny candy either. The dance workout “Undo (Back to My Heart)” and Rihanna-esque power ballad “The Chase” may not wow with innovation, but they’re both great jams.
Tinashe’s voice glides through much of the record as if she’s smirking at a private joke. Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums. Early in her career, Tinashe was uncomfortably lumped with the era’s alternative-R&B movement and was too often cast against vibey, overly serious production that snuffed out her natural ebullience. With its stodgy interludes and thick ambiance, even her excellent 2014 debut Aquarius occasionally dragged. But 333 never does. It’s Tinashe’s second consecutive triumph, another gregarious rebuke of the notion that R&B has to be difficult or demanding to be transcendent.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 9, 2021 | 7.8 | afcbf639-29f5-4a44-8187-afb2f5f11eff | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The Brooklyn metallic instrumental trio Sannhet make music for subway stations and unlit street corners, not winding hikes and idyllic vistas. Their second LP is rooted in metal but revels in outside influences. | The Brooklyn metallic instrumental trio Sannhet make music for subway stations and unlit street corners, not winding hikes and idyllic vistas. Their second LP is rooted in metal but revels in outside influences. | Sannhet: Revisionist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20098-revisionist/ | Revisionist | Revisionist feels grander than it is, and bigger than the band that made it. The second album from the metallic Brooklyn instrumental trio Sannhet lasts only nine tracks, or 38 minutes. But its overall density—of emotions and dynamics, of textures and melodies, of strengths and surprises—makes each moment so compelling that the record seems at least twice that length. The album’s brilliant centerpiece, "Empty Harbor", rises from a slow, electrified fusion that suggests ECM in the '80s to a blast beat-backed surge powerful enough to match the best codas of Temporary Residence Ltd. Driven by masterful drummer Christopher Todd, it sounds like a little symphony, both in execution and effect; looking at the clock, however, it’s shocking to find that the song lasts for less than five minutes.
Sannhet have always defied quick taxonomy. They are a byproduct of Brooklyn’s emergent metal scene; Saint Vitus, one of the city’s heavy hubs, issued their 2013 debut LP, Known Flood, which featured a tirade of screams from bar booker David Castillo. Although their new home, The Flenser, is an aggressively eclectic imprint, the core of its catalog remains metal, however soft or mercurial. From the pummeling black-metal drums during the exhilarating climax of "Lost Crown" to the tense rhythmic lock of death metal near the middle of "False Pass", traces of that pedigree populate Revisionist. But AJ Annunziata’s bass distortion during songs like "Enemy Victorian" implies the astral ascendance of space-rock. The same goes for John Refano, a guitarist who likes to widen the band’s sound with layers of background noise perhaps more than he prefers to lead with coiled riffs. There are astutely applied electronics that suggest the abstraction of Touch Music masters like Philip Jeck, and careful but brief drone passages that conjure Kranky. If metal made for the most convenient tag for Known Flood, it is at best an awkward fit for Revisionist, a record that revels and delights in a trove of outsider influences.
American post-rock and post-metal have often offered the scores of wide-open spaces, be they the football fields and Texas hills of Explosions in the Sky’s Friday Night Lights accompaniment or the rivers and valleys of their fellow Lone Star residents Balmorhea. Labradford, Red Sparowes and ISIS suggested settings more vast and hospitable than the cities they called home. But Sannhet take many of those same sweeping, cinematic impulses and apply them to cramped urban landscapes and lifestyles. They begin "Mint Divine" with a sample of voices, which blur into the mind-numbing chatter endemic to busy city streets. The band works to overcome the pervasive din, or to at least carve out a sheltered space within it. Refano and Annunziata deliver a delicate duet, their gentle guitar notes and pulsing bass competing with the hubbub. The voices waft into the next track, "False Pass", but Todd battles them back with his heavy hands and deep, floor-tom thuds. Together, Sannhet finally overpower their environment, finding solace in the solidarity of volume.
This metropolitan sense of setting also explains Sannhet’s concision. Only "Enemy Victorian", the album’s one listless point, breaks the six-minute mark. Otherwise, Sannhet push the parts together, moving at a rate that suggests they’re worried the city will swallow them if they don’t press ahead. "You Thy_" collapses feelings of romance, terror and longing into four breathless minutes, maximizing emotional impact and efficiency all at once. By oscillating between lumbering, loping patterns and sustained blast beats, Todd turns the three-minute "Lost Crown" into a frantic, crazed quest in an unsympathetic environment, where no one else cares if you ever recover your holy grail. Sannhet make music for subway stations and unlit street corners, not winding hikes and idyllic vistas.
If Explosions in the Sky and similar bands create accompaniment for Hollywood productions, Sannhet offer a vivid, real-life counterpoint. There’s no lighting, no scripting, no catering—just the exigencies and anxieties of existence, delivered by a band battling pedestrian frustrations with uncommon focus. Revisionist, turns out, is bigger than its 38 minutes or the trio that made it; these nine songs are as big as whatever life it is they soundtrack. | 2015-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-03-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Metal | The Flenser | March 3, 2015 | 8.1 | afcc9fd7-b13b-405b-b779-9b85476f77d0 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Sheffield boy-girl duo nail precious, vulnerable feelings over the course of their sweet (but not twee or saccharine) indie pop debut. | Sheffield boy-girl duo nail precious, vulnerable feelings over the course of their sweet (but not twee or saccharine) indie pop debut. | Slow Club: Yeah So | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13975-yeah-so/ | Yeah So | Slow Club, a folk-pop duo from Sheffield, England, write great songs for mixtapes. Specifically, the popular ideal of mix-making, i.e., the kind you make to express yourself to another person. As such, their songs tend to be kinda cutesy and obsessed with love and relationships. The world is one in which people are constantly falling in and out of love, and even when their lyrics stray into cynicism and self-deprecation, it's obvious they are true believers in old-school romance. Most of their songs come across like a young person putting up a jaded front to defend their wounded, open heart. It's very sweet stuff, but usually just shy of cloying. Their technique is mature and refined, yet loose and free-wheeling. More than anything, they're wholesome. That could be a damning term for some listeners, but if you're the type of person who does not reflexively recoil at reading the word "cuddle," you're probably going to find something to like in their music.
Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson co-write their songs, and in most cases, sing the songs together. Their voices complement each other nicely but are distinct in tone and personality. Most often, Taylor and Watson sing in unison, and generally avoid making it seem as though they are singing to one another. Whereas many male-female vocal pairings have a communicative quality and/or an apparent subtext of sexual tension, Slow Club have a more neutral dynamic. It's not sexless, but there's seldom an implication that Watson and Taylor are pining for each other. The major exception is the nearly-saccharine opening track "When I Go", which has them making a series of pacts to get married if they're both still alone at various ages. Perhaps putting that song at the top of the running order is in some way meant to have us question their relationship in the subsequent songs.
Though Watson has a pleasant tenor voice, Taylor is generally a better singer, and the songs come alive when her more expressive voice is highlighted in the arrangement, as when she takes the lead on the chorus of "Giving Up on Love" or the during climax of the jangly travelogue "Trophy Room". She gets a few spotlight songs, and the best of them is in an unlisted song on the same track as the finale "Our Most Brilliant Friends". It's the simplest, saddest song on the album, gently building up to their most heartbreaking lyric: "You say 'baby' a lot in your songs/ It takes all my courage not to sing along." It's a fragile moment, but it's not oversold or delivered with an ironic grin. It's almost unbearably earnest, actually, but sometimes that is precisely what you need. Slow Club nail these precious, vulnerable feelings without getting mawkish or melodramatic. Everything, from their cheery optimism to their crestfallen lovesickness is life-sized and lived-in, resulting in a crop of tiny, good-natured tunes that invite the intense identification of young romantics. | 2010-03-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-03-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | March 1, 2010 | 7.4 | afce7e67-38e0-4937-aa15-a912566c8725 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The UK post-punk pioneers’ influence always outshone their popularity, but a new box set makes a convincing case that stardom actually was within their reach. | The UK post-punk pioneers’ influence always outshone their popularity, but a new box set makes a convincing case that stardom actually was within their reach. | Gang of Four: 77-81 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gang-of-four-77-81/ | Gang of Four: 77-81 | Why didn’t Gang of Four become pop stars? Four and a half decades after the UK band began, the answer might seem obvious. From the start, their work was innovative and challenging, with politically aware lyrics that drew on academic theory and music that moved at razor-sharp angles. One reason why their early singles and first two albums—collected on this new 77-81 box set alongside a live 2xLP and a cassette of demos—still sound so vital is that the band never pandered to the mainstream or dumbed its songs down.
At the time, though, it wasn’t far-fetched to imagine Gang of Four as the next big thing. Their melodic and danceable music quickly snared them eye-opening gigs supporting the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees and landed them on the cover of New Musical Express before they had even been signed. Despite their art-school backgrounds, they were intrigued by the idea of popularity, and they chose a major label, EMI, to release their debut album, the half-ironically titled Entertainment! “We’re not trying to be difficult and hard-to-understand,” guitarist Andy Gill said. “There might be some pretty out there things that we’re doing, but we want our records in the charts or whatever. To us, that’s half the point.”
It’s hard to say exactly why Gang of Four didn’t top those charts. Maybe radio wasn’t ready; maybe timing and perception didn’t align; maybe their refusal to play on BBC’s Tops of the Pops when asked to censor their lyrics doomed them. (“Frankly, you could say [the BBC decision] was career suicide,” said drummer Hugo Burnham years later). Whatever the reason, 77-81 makes a convincing case that, based simply on their songs and performances, stardom actually was within their reach.
Early singles—tightly wound gems like “Damaged Goods” and anthemic shout-alongs like “Armalite Rifle”—had immediate power. Entertainment! and its follow-up, 1981’s Solid Gold, were filled with lyrical hooks that you could chant despite their sophistication. Take “Natural’s Not in It,” a jab at the commercializing of relationships (“Ideal love, a new purchase… the body is good business”), or “Why Theory?” a pithy argument to treat society as more than “natural fact,” or “He’d Send in the Army,” an indictment of the patriarchy couched in a child-like tale. With their words, Gang of Four encouraged thinking critically and systemically, while still leaving room for interpretation.
Their music matched that openness, inserting maximal energy into minimal sounds that allowed listeners to fill in blanks. As Gill put it, “Instead of guitar solos, we had anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.” The band’s working methods had a populist bent: Creative decisions were made democratically, and whoever wrote a song would usually sing it. Even their design—see the bold colors and cut-and-paste commentary on the cover of Entertainment!—had pop-art appeal. Altogether, the Gang of Four approach was accessible enough that legendary producer Jimmy Douglass, who had worked with Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and Hall & Oates, was convinced to oversee the recording of Solid Gold.
Alongside that oft-told part of the Gang of Four story, the unearthed material on 77-81 reveals new evidence of the band’s magnetism. The demo cassette—one side taken from three different late-1970s recordings, the other from a 1981 session at Abbey Road—shows how their exhilarating mix of spare beats, clockwork riffs, and high-stakes singing emerged fully formed. “No jamming—that was the J-word,” Gill said. “Everything was thought out in advance.” Hearing the band confidently sprint through songs that ended up on singles, then into previously unreleased tracks like the swinging “Silence Is Not Useful” and the funky “Disco Sound,” makes the term “demo” seem ridiculously insufficient. Even the more polished recordings on side two show how each song was a self-contained machine made of fast-moving parts. “We spent a lot of time stupidly pissed,” Gill admitted. “But when it came to the work we threw ourselves into it 100 percent.”
That ethic is equally borne out by Live at American Indian Center 1980, composed of 15 songs from a 1980 concert in San Francisco. Gang of Four more than earn their reputation as a great live band here—the songs shoot out quickly and with little pause, finding a speed that the studio albums never hit. That was by design, as they specifically avoided recreating their live sound on record, instead wisely using the studio to hone the more elemental aspects of their sound. As Curtis Crowe from Pylon—who opened Gang of Four’s first U.S. show—says in the book included in 77-81, “Gang of Four was first and foremost a live-wire act and I always felt the recordings failed to do them justice. It seemed like trying to photograph lightning.” The extra juice applied to the racing “At Home He’s a Tourist” and the stair-stepping “Guns Before Butter” adds a third dimension to songs that were already bursting.
Gang of Four didn’t stop in 1981, and subsequent work retained much of the band’s fervor, even as the lineup fractured (Gill, who was the only original member in the recent version of the band, passed away last year, likely ending the Gang of Four story). But the material on 77-81 is clearly a big bang, informing not just everything the band did after, but a lot of what other bands did, too. Though Entertainment! and Solid Gold have been reissued many times, this box set is the first release to fully capture the moment that created them, as well as the first reissue controlled by Gang of Four, who were recently able to reclaim rights to these recordings after many decades.
The history of post-punk is long and sprawling, but combine 77-81 with a remarkably similar archival box by Gang of Four’s comrades Pylon from last year, and you instantly get a clear sense of why post-punk mattered—as musical innovation, political movement, and DIY statement. In this band’s case, that came from blending complex ideas and radical music into something that landed a direct hit on the ears of anyone lucky enough to hear it. “What we were doing wasn’t intellectual,” Gill insisted. “It was from the gut, like painting a picture.”
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. | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | March 15, 2021 | 9.5 | afdeef4a-4d09-4ce6-8f20-77856ba5b5b7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The dance-punk duo Formation made the most 2003 album of 2017, and it’s co-produced by house mastermind Leon Vynehall. | The dance-punk duo Formation made the most 2003 album of 2017, and it’s co-produced by house mastermind Leon Vynehall. | Formation: Look at the Powerful People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23090-look-at-the-powerful-people/ | Look at the Powerful People | Let’s start with the name: whether it’s Hillary Clinton or some clueless piano bro posting covers on YouTube, many have been accused of co-opting the unimpeachable power of “Formation” under dubious pretenses. For Matt and Will Ritson, it is at least plausible that they’ve never heard the song. On Look at the Powerful People, Formation sound directly teleported from a time when Destiny’s Child was still Beyoncé’s main source of income. It is the most 2003 album of 2017, so convincing a simulacra that having a Mike Skinner-directed video is one of the least time-stamped things about it.
Anyone under 21 reading this review would’ve been in elementary school when “House of Jealous Lovers” dropped, so to clarify, “2003” essentially translates to “dance-punk.” It was a time where DFA lorded over cool, LCD Soundsystem mocked classic rock before they became it, the jeans were tight, the riffs were angular, bassists were minor celebrities, and cocaine use started to become a little too unironic. Regardless of how well any of it has aged, exciting things tend to happen when guitar bands intermingle with dance producers. And Formation’s got themselves a hell of a co-sign. Look at the Powerful People is co-produced by house mastermind Leon Vynehall and he’s not the kind of dude who just makes himself available. Take the C.V. of Formation’s live band into account, and they boast connections to Caribou, Floating Points, and Fela Kuti. One of their earliest singles basically ripped off “Dance Yrself Clean”; they’ve opened for Jagwar Ma and Foals. They’re a dance-punk band that isn’t hesitant about reaching the cheap seats and one that won’t set you back six figures on Stubhub.
Distill that last paragraph down to proper nouns and it looks like a screenshot from a pretty kickass festival poster, doesn’t it? And damned if Formation sounds like they can make good on that promise. Look at the Powerful People blasts off with gigantic, boom-clap synth-drums, soon overlain by syncopated cowbell and a cable-thick bassline, all of it saying, this is happening. This kind nostalgia might be about two years too early. But most indie rock is playing smallball right now, and suffice to say, Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017.
And then they start talking. “I’m on the list/Where do I sign up-uhhh,” brother Will sings, but that uhhh turns out to be the most interesting thing he has to say. “With no pain, on cocaine, you half-brain,” he goes on, “I got the cash, so don’t get tough/It’s not greed, just give me the stuff.” This song is called “Drugs” and it’s about drugs, probably. The greater likelihood is that it’s about something bigger than that—the frivolity of capitalism? The emptiness of festival culture? Is it about how drugs are actually bad? Is it not as smart as it thinks it is, or nowhere near as dumb as it should be? Either way, it carries about half of the resonance of Weezer’s “We Are All on Drugs” as a piece of social critique.
But is it really fair to harp on lyrical deficiencies in a style of music where Luke Jenner was once considered profound? It’s less of an issue when Formation hit the Hacienda during the album’s midsection, although their grooves make them come off like a flabbier Friendly Fires. The moralizing of “Buy and Sell” and “Gods” could damn near pass for backpack rap, and about that album title—“Look at the powerful people/Stuck in their wonderful world/Who is gonna to help them?” Ritson yells and, seriously, all the powerful people. Look at them!
It’s not like these guys planned to end up being a slightly more woke version of the Music: the bibliography of Look at the Powerful People includes Lightning Bolt, ESG, the Postal Service, John Coltrane, Rammellzee and that’s just the half of it. An awesome record collection doesn't make anyone a geopolitical expert, but c’mon: Ritson is somehow telling a crossroads origin story on the abysmal ballad “Blood Red Hand”—and that’s the one Formation said is influenced by “Purple Rain.” But even if their taste is impeccable, they’re a 2003 band with the most 2017 of problems—the current state of political affairs is making everyone feel a type of way and it’s easy to confuse that for actually having something to add to the conversation. Then again, the American military is just as deep in its 2003 nostalgia, so this probably is the political dance-punk the times demands. Or at least proof that every generation gets the Radio 4 they deserve. | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | April 24, 2017 | 4.2 | aff1cedb-df86-457a-9c18-864fd455a597 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Swedish pop star’s fourth album contains some of her most vulnerable writing inside her clubbiest record. | The Swedish pop star’s fourth album contains some of her most vulnerable writing inside her clubbiest record. | Tove Lo: Sunshine Kitty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tove-lo-sunshine-kitty/ | Sunshine Kitty | Tove Lo got big by breaking herself. She topped the charts with the stark, corrosive imagery of first hit, 2014’s “Habits (Stay High)”: vomiting in bathtubs, trapping her mind in a haze. Self-destruction has paved the way for self-care in much of mainstream female pop; you’re less likely to hear a woman on the radio brushing her teeth with a bottle of Jack than you are to hear her describing her skincare routine. Women are charged with empowering other women: Everyone’s a hot girl, no matter what the season.
Tove Lo cracks this dynamic open on Sunshine Kitty, a title that she’s said is “a play on pussy power.” There are tote-bag-ready you-go-girlisms on the album, but they’re lit by neon and grounded in nuance. “Bad as the Boys,” a shiny single about the collapse of a queer relationship, has a fairly boring premise—women can break hearts, too! But the song surpasses its set-up, partly because of its shimmering production and partly because Tove Lo eloquently describes the specific pains of a bi woman trying to navigate a heterosexual-dominant dating culture. On the album, she sings about using women and being used by them, about competing for male attention with women she’s attracted to. “When I hate on you, I’m breaking the code,” Kylie Minogue confesses to Tove on one of the album’s best tracks. “Hard to be fair to you when I got my heart broke,” she admits seconds later.
Sunshine Kitty holds some of Tove Lo’s most vulnerable writing; it’s also her clubbiest record. The result is a cutting confessional line like, “I think you like the way she kissed you better/Maybe I’m mistaken,” thrown over thrumming bass. These are house anthems and each track has a unique texture: undulating drums, layered effects that sound like a chain being rattled. She churns through emotions—lust, shame, defeat—as each winding beat paves the way to the next.
Tove Lo once wrote a sardonic ode to the effortless “Cool Girl”; now, she revels in overthinking, highlighting the neuroticism that underpins each corner of a party. “I see you looking, so I turn my charm on, hoping I look awesome,” she sings on “Equally Lost.” She calculates when to ask someone for a cigarette. She deconstructs each kiss. There’s an entire track wrestling with whether or not to disclose an affair, another consumed with asking someone to stay over. Tove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original.
At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities. The last track shows Tove Lo in love, and she wreaths her emotions with generic hyperbole. “I’ll follow you anywhere you go,” she cries over a beat ready to be bastardized by the Chainsmokers. “Jacques,” a mostly fun song with British DJ Jax Jones, can sound like the worst kid in your study abroad program trying to get past a bouncer: “Je m’appelle Tove, get the show on the road,” she chants. These lines dissolve into the glitter, though; it’s hard to focus on any one moment in an album that yanks you through the dancefloor. In Tove Lo’s world, there is no emotion too grave or grand to take place outside the club.
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(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | September 24, 2019 | 7.2 | aff8ea06-e067-4187-992c-f431145022fa | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The 8xLP box set gathers the ’60s and ’70s studio recordings of a singer-songwriter whose melodically intricate work had a profound impact on Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and Steely Dan. | The 8xLP box set gathers the ’60s and ’70s studio recordings of a singer-songwriter whose melodically intricate work had a profound impact on Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and Steely Dan. | Laura Nyro: American Dreamer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-nyro-american-dreamer/ | American Dreamer | Laura Nyro’s first album was called More Than a New Discovery, and the message implicit in that title was indicative of the way people talked about the Bronx songwriter early in her career. The marketing was hyperbolic. The expectations were unreasonable. And, more often than not, Nyro lived up to all of it. Only 19 when her debut album was released in 1966, she soon became famous for writing hits for other artists—one week in November 1969, three of the Top 10 songs in the country were her compositions, as interpreted by the 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Three Dog Night. Her own music, however—performed at the piano and sung in a voice that galloped between octaves as if auditioning for all the roles in a musical at once—aspired to places beyond the charts.
History looks fondly upon artists who prove themselves commercially yet seek to occupy more artful territory. Like so many of them, Nyro’s greatest legacy is in the wide range of artists she influenced: Joni Mitchell was inspired by her inventive piano playing; Elton John found his voice within her detail-rich songwriting; both Todd Rundgren and the members of Steely Dan took early influence from her jazzy, meticulous melodies; Bette Midler wanted to sing like her; Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane spent studio time alongside her.
Some of these artists’ testimonies appear in Peter Doggett’s liner notes for a new box set, American Dreamer, which collects Nyro’s studio output from the 1960s and 1970s, all remastered on vinyl along with a bonus LP of familiar demos and live recordings. Reading her biography from beginning to end is intense, and it’s a little heartbreaking to realize the extent to which she was misunderstood despite her obvious, prodigious talent. But, as she always intended, her story is best told through her music. These albums are so melodically intricate, so carefully performed, so thematically ambitious—encompassing life, death, love, religion, addiction, politics—you can hear why so many musicians around her tore up whatever they were working on and decided to take their craft a little more seriously.
The key element to Nyro’s approach was freedom. Her songs would begin and end whenever she wanted, fragmented or extended into symphonic mantras. When one melody had done its work, she would shift to another one entirely, often with no warning. (It is no surprise that she preferred playing solo, without the constraints of explaining herself to collaborators.) Her primary influences were girl groups, soul music, and gospel, and what she seemed to admire was the way these styles were built to move an audience: Her most memorable songs, like 1968’s “Poverty Train,” would speed and slow abruptly, as if she noticed someone in the audience who seemed unmoved, and so she climbed out to meet them and adjusted her delivery to suit that particular person. She would not leave the room until everyone had been engaged.
Two of the albums in this box set are unabashed classics: 1968’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which offers a timeless survey of Nyro’s gifts as a songwriter and several of her most indelible songs (“Stoned Soul Picnic,“ “Emmie”), and 1969’s New York Tendaberry, which focuses on her more ambitious side with virtuosic, often solo performances. But the centerpiece is 1970’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, a two-part album that, for my money, stands as her finest work: Side A consists of music she performed with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, showing how easily she could have transitioned into the ’70s as a rock artist. On the second side is her most spiritual, visionary work: a suite of long, interconnected songs with harp from Alice Coltrane and piano performances that intend to sweep you away. Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers.
The surrounding records are also strong. 1971’s Gonna Take a Miracle, a tribute to her beloved era of girl groups, recorded with the vocal trio Labelle, remains a joyful exercise in one of her more crowd-pleasing modes. And her debut, More Than a New Discovery—the only album here created with blatant commercial aspirations—places her earliest compositions in chiming mid-’60s arrangements, smoothed out for radio play. The irony is that the message in its title wasn’t taken seriously: The label paired Nyro with session musicians, barring her from playing the piano herself, and while the music still resonates, its pop sound makes it an anomaly in her catalog. As if to prove that point, this new edition comes with an enormous hype sticker promoting the single “Wedding Bell Blues”—a retro attempt at reproducing the original packaging that ends up obscuring the gorgeous, stark photography on the cover.
If there’s another gripe I have with the set, it’s that it perpetuates a myth that Nyro’s career ended in the ’70s. After her hits dried up for other artists, and after the towering artistic triumphs of Eli and Tendaberry, the word on Nyro is that she retreated: Never mind that she still put out great albums while balancing live shows with the needs of her family, or that her work continued to influence singer-songwriters through each successive decade. The music she made during these later years was often remarkable—1976’s Smile, a quietly stirring tribute to her late mother, and 1978’s expertly written Nested represent this era in the box, but later albums like 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual and 1993’s Walk the Dog and Light the Light are just as essential to her story.
Like so much about Nyro, these subtle, joyful albums were destined to remain in the dark. Where plenty of artists become disgruntled with the music industry, Nyro refused to grow bitter: She instead decided to observe its mechanisms from a distance, to focus on her own evolution and take greater comfort in her journey. She began writing more sharply about capitalism—“Money,” on Smile, was an early stab—and feminism. “[S]ometimes I think being a star is kind of silly,” she told Melody Maker in 1976. “What does it make everyone else? I’d sooner be looked on as a comrade rather than a star.” And so she began living her life increasingly out of the spotlight: performing solo at clubs only when she felt like it, operating on her own schedule, and mostly avoiding public appearances.
For an artist who brushed so closely with the mainstream, this desire for complete control felt uncommon, and it can be observed throughout her career. As proposed release dates came and went, as she attempted to accompany her LPs with specific fragrances to better situate listeners within their settings, and as she tried to explain to her accompanists what particular color to conjure as they found their way around her words, Nyro slowly learned that the only person in the industry worth pleasing was herself. There is a story about Nyro that has been told to the point of cliche, but it bears repeating. When she auditioned as a teenager for Clive Davis at Columbia Records, she sat at the piano and didn’t take to the lighting in his hotel room. Instead, she requested total darkness, with just the television on, so that its glow would light the room. What might have seemed like an eccentricity turned out to be a keen awareness of the most natural environment for her music. As I sit listening to these records tonight, alone in my apartment with the television on mute, I can feel her worlds becoming real.
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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. | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Madfish | September 22, 2021 | 8.8 | aff98de1-d7c8-4bf0-b446-bb2645019343 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Two decades into his career, these songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word. | Two decades into his career, these songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word. | Damien Jurado: The Horizon Just Laughed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damien-jurado-the-horizon-just-laughed/ | The Horizon Just Laughed | During the past two decades, the singer-songwriter Damien Jurado has been tortuously restless. He first emerged in the late ’90s as a sensitive troubadour sort, sharing a curious traveler’s clutch of geographical ruminations and missed-connection laments with a confidant’s alluring wisp. Jurado was good enough to maintain the balladeer guise in perpetuity, but he pushed against the role’s tight fit almost immediately with an album of agitated indie rock, another of homespun experimental folk, and even a collage made from voice memos salvaged at garage sales. In 2010, Jurado finally seemed to have found his match in fellow singer and idiosyncratic soul Richard Swift, who framed Jurado’s endearing voice and emotional abstruseness in shades of neon and pastel on four sporadically stunning albums. Jurado, in turn, distanced himself from those early works: “My records,” he confessed, “all sounded like me trying to be everybody else.”
Jurado, it seems, has now disavowed those albums with Swift, too. For the wondrous new The Horizon Just Laughed, Jurado elected to produce the music himself for the first time in years, settling into a California studio with a modest band. The results are spellbinding: These eleven songs are among the most incisive but somehow most complex ones Jurado has ever written, lined up from end to end without a wasted note, layer, line, or word. And after his stint with Swift, Jurado has allowed himself the latitude to be both a simple singer and sophisticated stylist. Yes, there are devastating acoustic confessions and breezy folk-pop tunes, but there’s also a hypnotic samba meditation, a twilit tone poem, and a surging finale of organ-loaded rock’n’roll. For his entire career, Jurado has built good records from the bones of two or three staggering songs at a time, be they the early, acoustic “Ohio” or the later, lysergic “Museum of Flight.” The Horizon Just Laughed—Jurado’s best record to date and a magnetic middle-aged reflection on a lifetime of basic but profound changes in the world—funnels a quarter-century of trial-and-error into thirty-seven minutes of triumph.
The Horizon Just Laughed is an intricate personal diorama, teeming with characters and scenery culled from stacks of diaries and snapshots. Jurado takes us high into Wenatchee, that splendid forest impasse that divides Seattle from much of Washington, and down to Midwestern plains and South Texas towns, where “the skies are a firework show … the stars are a stanza.” He visits airports and train stations, marvels at the majesty of Mount Rainier, and considers the conditions of Brooklyn.
Some figures are anonymous—“Q,” who sits in the back of a cab during opener “Allocate,” or the outwardly tough and inwardly tortured man stalking the streets during the closer “Random Fearless.” Others are obscure, like the dual bit players from the ’70s sitcom “Alice” (and its sequel, “Flo”) who get their own song titles or the man who invented the stoplight’s yellow warning signal and prompts the record’s best joke—“Mr. Garrett Morgan, I’m always stop and go.” Still others are celebrities or celestial beings, recast in unusual roles. Peanuts creator Charles Schultz and his tragicomic star, Charlie Brown, are the stars of a tender suicide note, written by a man ultimately broken by his lack of breaks. Moroni—the angel who led Joseph Smith to the source material for The Book of Mormon and who you now see cast in gold atop Mormon temples—becomes Jurado’s companion for the apocalypse, which arrives here in nested waves of remorse and hope. You get the sense that these songs are stitched together from thoughts and feelings Jurado has jotted onto bits of paper or in text messages to himself, a patchwork testament to existence.
These specific references will likely mean very little to most listeners, but their power stems from Jurado’s ability to work through them in search for insight about himself and the world. These revelations sporadically appear, pulling what may have seemed like a haze of arbitrary events and ideas into a sudden bolt of focus. “Percy Faith,” for instance, strings together stanzas addressed to an assortment of ’60s easy-listening bandleaders and comedians, revealing vague discomfort with society. In the last verse, though, Jurado stares at people staring at their cell phones as they ride moving walkways and talk to their watches. “I know everything and yet no one at all,” he concludes, singing as if with a sad smile. After all these years, he’s simply more in search of connections than he’s ever been.
“The Last Great Washington State” beautifully drifts through discursive meditations on our cult of celebrity death and our impulse to search for the greener grass. But it crystalizes in an instant: “What good is living if you can’t write your ending?” Jurado sings, his pace quickening, as if he needs to say this aloud before he forgets it. “You’re always in doubt of the truths you’re defending.” The Horizon Just Laughed is an indispensable depository of perfect lines like this, keepsakes you can clutch closely when the world is set against you: “I can only exist so long as you last,” “Jealous is the dark that keeps me from you,” and the album’s wrecking ball, “Somebody shouted your name/And I swear they yelled fire.”
Considering how stuffed these songs are with Jurado’s peculiar interests and personal reckonings, his choice to produce The Horizon Just Laughed himself doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all; there’s simply too much to cover, too much baggage for anyone else to squeeze into any four-minute frame. How can you explain to someone in advance, after all, that the most important musical element of the exquisitely rendered “Over Rainbows and Rainier” won’t be the choirs, strings, or horns? Instead, it will be a moment of near-complete silence three minutes into the song, when we hear Jurado swallow hard before divulging his own vulnerability. It’s a striking moment most producers would have taken as a mistake. But here, the person who knows the most about what these songs are trying to say is the one deciding how to say it. He gets it right at every turn.
In March, when Jurado announced the May arrival of The Horizon Just Laughed, he declared that the album wouldn’t appear on digital platforms until July, two months after its release. He wanted to “foster opportunities for people to hear it in a way that it was created to be heard, from front to back in its entirety.” The patience, he hoped, might prompt them to listen a bit more closely.
At first blush, that’s too bad; more than any album Jurado’s ever made, these songs demand to be heard, and two months might as well be a year in an industry of instant streaming. On the other hand, these songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought. It took Jurado a quarter-century to make something this meaningful and half a lifetime to grasp and articulate these realizations. These truths—whose meaning becomes clear when you’re no longer listening, when one of these stunning lines creeps into your head during a nighttime walk—feel like his scripture. They aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. | 2018-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | May 10, 2018 | 8 | affb3bcc-1942-4a3a-9388-3327a40041b8 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On his third outing composing music for film, Anthony Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a welcome sense of playfulness. | On his third outing composing music for film, Anthony Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a welcome sense of playfulness. | M83: Knife + Heart (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m83-knife-heart-original-soundtrack/ | Knife + Heart (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Anthony Gonzalez has essentially been making music for movies his entire career. The widescreen pop of M83 has been effectively used in skate videos, Nicholas Sparks romances, Britney Spears documentaries, CW fairy-tale adaptations, and tear-puddled YA-novel adaptations; “Outro,” the mountain-scaling closer from the project’s massive and marvelous 2011 album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, has popped up in so many commercials and movie trailers that The Huffington Post once published an in-vain plea to cease syncs of the song entirely.
All this malleable retrofitting of the M83 catalog speaks to the project’s core values dating back to the total blowout that was 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us; specifically, nostalgia, the driving force behind so much popular culture over the past decade. Gonzalez may have not invented ’80s fetishization, but just the Breakfast Club’d cover art of 2008’s Saturdays = Youth is more than enough evidence that he anticipated the trend’s eventual cultural dominance years before Drive and “Stranger Things” became mass-cultural totems.
Gonzalez’s creative mind seems specifically attuned to the crafting of sounds that conjure distinct imagery—which is why it’s surprising that his official score work to this point hasn’t packed the same effectiveness. He did double-duty in 2013 with music provided for the sci-fi action film Oblivion and his brother Yann’s You and the Night; the former barely bore his imprint amid co-writer Joseph Trapanese’s orchestral blare, while the latter resembled variations on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’s starry-eyed theme and little else.
His third go-round in the scoring arena, for Yann’s latest Knife + Heart, was surprise-released last week in anticipation of the film’s imminent limited theatrical release; rather than engaging in watered-down retreads of his previous work, Gonzalez breaks from his own soundtracking habits with a sense of playfulness. Part of this new-feeling approach is undoubtedly owed to the subject matter of the film itself—an erotic slasher film that, when not inscrutably immersed in its own atmosphere, centers around a series of mysterious killings on a gay porn set and a leather-masked villain wielding a deadly blade tucked inside a black dildo.
With 1970s Paris as its backdrop, Knife + Heart is loaded with enough kitsch to suggest that nostalgia runs deep in the Gonzalez brothers’ bloodline—in order words, a suitable playground for M83’s own past-peddling tendencies. In a press release, Yann stated that he put forth to Anthony “straight and gay porn [film]” soundtracks as well as the scores that accompanied the filmic work of Giallo masters like Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava; the latter style’s melodramatic sweep shines through in the pounding-and-piping “Un Cocteau Dans Le Coeur,” while the freewheeling and groovy synth line of “Detective Rachid” radiates a grindhouse-esque seediness that mirrors the film’s bawdy-and-bloody approach.
More than anything else, though, the score for Knife + Heart—which encompasses bite-sized synth doodles, organ-grinding dread, and vaporous tone-clouds—finds Anthony Gonzalez again recalling his own work, this time in form instead of explicit sound. It’s hard not to hear Knife+Heart’s multifarious approach without thinking of Junk, M83’s quixotic 2016 LP that mostly traded the 4K synth-pop for stately French balladry, glassy keyboards, and schmaltzy, horn-laden hooks.
Junk represented a conscious retreat from M83’s signature style not unlike French electronic duo Air’s divisive 2001 album and Moon Safari follow-up 10,000 Hz Legend—itself coming off the heels of their shapeshifting, woozy score for Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. With his score for Knife + Heart, it’s almost as if Anthony Gonzalez discovered Air’s beaten path and chose to travel it in reverse—a fitting and successful approach for one of the most capable retro fabulists of the last 20 years. | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | March 14, 2019 | 6.8 | b000c2f5-ae78-44d6-8ec3-1d776d64230b | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Aided by Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Esperanza Spalding, the New York pianist and her band mix lyrical song form, turntablism, and avant-garde strategies in unusually fluid fashion. | Aided by Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Esperanza Spalding, the New York pianist and her band mix lyrical song form, turntablism, and avant-garde strategies in unusually fluid fashion. | Kris Davis: Diatom Ribbons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kris-davis-diatom-ribbons/ | Diatom Ribbons | Not long after Cecil Taylor’s death, the Tzadik label crafted a tribute album involving six pianists. To find Kris Davis among their number was likely little surprise to fans of contemporary jazz, given that her live performances at New York venues like Roulette and the Stone have long shown off her melodic and percussive mastery of post-Taylor pianism. But she is not just a star soloist. One recent, notated composition of Davis’ was included on an exciting set of contemporary classical pieces performed by the pianist Rory Cowal. She is also an adventurous collaborator, working in a wide variety of ensembles.
That range is one of the principal delights of Diatom Ribbons, Davis’ latest release on her own label. (Yes, she’s an impresario, too.) Wilco’s Nels Cline appears on several tracks, and sometime Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot also shows up on a couple. Both of those guitarists hold firmly established identities in the contemporary jazz firmament, though it’s not often that you’ll find them on an album that also features two guest spots from Esperanza Spalding (working only as a vocalist here). Davis’ organizational insight holds that all of these artists contain multitudes, and that it shouldn’t be so unusual to hear them grouped together.
That the stylistically diverse results flow so well, over the course of an hour and 10 tracks—all but two composed by Davis—is also partly due to a band within the band. The album gains a sense of unity thanks to a trio of players that shows up regularly amid the comings and goings of guest stars: veteran drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, rising-star DJ Val Jeanty, and Davis herself on piano.
The trio’s collective attack sets the pace during the first minute of the arresting title track, which opens the album. First Davis, on a prepared piano, plays riffs full of metallic timbres while Jeanty samples spoken—but highly musical—phrases from Cecil Taylor himself. Carrington settles into a groove not long before Taylor’s line, “For me, music saved my life”—a construction that inspires Davis to introduce new percussive figures. Soon after, Jeanty retreats for a bit, making room for a bassist (Trevor Dunn) and a pair of tenor sax players (JD Allen and Tony Malaby).
There’s a lot going on here, including melodically captivating soloing, an intergenerational shout-out, and various experimental textures. But instead of being a jumble, it’s a triumph. Spalding’s voice gets the spotlight on the next track, “The Very Thing” (written by Davis associate Michaël Attias). But Jeanty again provides crucial work during this performance, attaching delicate trails of whispery turntablism to some of Spalding’s highest notes.
Carrington, Jeanty, and Davis also construct the head-nod feel at the outset of “Rhizomes” (with the help of onetime Xiu Xiu drummer Ches Smith on vibraphone). But Carrington is soon ably shifting into rock-adjacent territory before Cline enters with an energetic solo of lightly distorted tones.
That covers about the first 16 minutes of the album. There are plenty of highlights yet to come, including “Corn Crake,” the core trio’s standalone number, during which Jeanty samples oration from the French modernist composer Olivier Messiaen. But no matter how unusual the compositional structures may seem, there is a consistent, songful style at the heart of most performances.
The major exception to this rule is “Golgi Complex,” a short tour through a chaotic complex of motifs. But even here, Davis pursues a variety of approaches: The composition is presented twice on the album, with the original, more forbidding version sequenced second, after another variation that has an air of funk-indebted swing. Even when Diatom Ribbons ventures into unapologetically avant-garde territory, there is a clear desire to make each choice communicate. When expertly realized by such a vibrant cast of collaborators, this suite of strategies brings several of Davis’ skills—as a player, composer, and bandleader—to a new, heightened state of expression. | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pyroclastic | October 8, 2019 | 8.1 | b006d930-0905-445f-87c4-1a31923be3bd | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
For their latest album, the Kansas City emo outfit again drafts the help of producer Bob Weston (Mission of Burma, Shellac). | For their latest album, the Kansas City emo outfit again drafts the help of producer Bob Weston (Mission of Burma, Shellac). | The Get Up Kids: There Are Rules | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15010-there-are-rules/ | There Are Rules | Perhaps no band has gone further to disassociate itself from emo than the Get Up Kids, which shouldn't be a huge surprise: Their brand of pining pop-punk, which became the predominant sound of early-2000s alternative rock, was probably more despised by punk and indie kids than any other chart-toppers at the time-- post-Disney pop, nu-metal, big beat electronica. No one got it worse than the Get Up Kids, attacked with the vigor of a scene that finally got to pick on someone its own size. Existing somewhere between the Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World-- but lacking the former's jittery roots and the latter's obvious pop ambitions-- they once worked with Bob Weston (Mission of Burma, Shellac) and chose not to leave Vagrant, and yet somehow an air of dishonesty was projected on them. Considering they were just some guys from Kansas City who wanted to write songs called "Anne Arbour" and cover Mötley Crüe, I'm not sure the churlish punishment fits the crime.
There Are Rules isn't a return to form sonically-- neither to the limp, acoustic bowouts of On a Wire or Guilt Show nor to the eager-to-please effervescence of Something to Write Home About-- but a return to results, a just-all-right record from a band that always felt a step behind even in their own genre. The announcement that Weston was brought back in certainly perked some ears, but anyone expecting his gnarly edge to improve much on their material is destined to be disappointed. "Tithe" and "Birmingham" are the most obvious beneficiaries of Weston's imprimatur, and they snarl more than anything the Get Up Kids have done in the past. But these dudes just can't do menace, in large part because Matthew Pryor's vocals are the literal embodiment of "snotty," emanating almost completely from his nostrils.
What they can do is momentarily remold themselves in the form of borderline-emo go-getters Hot Hot Heat on spasmodic word puzzles "Automatic" and "Pararelevant", or regain some of their caffeinated buzz on "Regent's Court". And though they have dabbled in synth-pop before, "Shatter Your Lungs" is a legitimate surprise-- Pryor's vocals soften and let the tumbling melody come to him rather than force it, hinting at the sort of maturity There Are Rules should have aimed for.
The title of the album's closer, "Rememorable", proves to be pretty ironic, considering they completely forget what made them popular in the first place: the hooks. There Are Rules drags toward its middle, relying more on repetition than snappy melodies for growth: "Rally 'Round the Fool" feigns importance with the sort of vague paranoia and electro dabbling that characterized alt-rock's post-OK Computer obsession, followed by a run of three songs that do little else but allow Rob Pope's grinding bass riffs to drill fruitlessly for paydirt.
Gone are the band's geographic puns and tales of the romantic rigors of college freshman, but they're replaced by a professional anonymity that kinda sums up the problem with There Are Rules: When you spent the prime of your career trying to document the contours of post-teen torment, what happens when you no longer have a first-hand view? Get Up Kids likely don't have an answer because none of their peers did either: Jimmy Eat World soldiered on with drastically diminishing returns, Saves the Day alienated almost their entire fanbase with the surprisingly sophisticated pop of In Reverie, the Promise Ring broke up, Hey Mercedes were dead on arrival post-Braid, and Dashboard Confessional just sort of became something beyond judgment. For those of us who spent the tumult of our teen years with their records, we can hear the Get Up Kids and just think of them kindly. | 2011-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Quality Hill | January 24, 2011 | 5.4 | b0189494-92a7-4bf3-a96f-4de6fe0568c6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sang spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities. | On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sang spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities. | Charlie Hilton: Palana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21444-palana/ | Palana | On her two albums with Portland dream-pop trio Blouse, Charlie Hilton sings spectral, spindly songs that bear a mortal burden. On "They Always Fly Away," from their 2011 debut, she stares gravely at a symbolic blackbird that returns over and over to the same telephone wire, and each time laments its next departure. "1000 Years," from its follow-up, is a dream of eternal life disguised as a pledge of undying love. But Hilton's morbid reveries recede without fail into the warmest and mushiest of mushy synth hooks, embracing human decay as if it were as alluring as a timeworn cassette. On Palana, her solo debut, Hilton turns her gaze to a renewable kind of death: that of our morphing identities.
Palana is the Sanskrit birth name Hilton left behind after high school, and she eulogizes it on the title track. "Palana, I always thought that you would be with me every morning," she sings in a lullaby melody, "Shifting with the wind, easily." Her tone hardens on "Something for Us All," in which "children disappear, their innocence a victim of time," so that we understand the pain, as well as the inevitability, of shedding one’s skins. "Is there anything that’s something all the time?" she wonders, with a sigh that suggests there is not.
Despite the songs’ homespun charm, there’s something faintly confrontational in Hilton’s phrasing–to precede the above line, for example, she sarcastically sings, "If happiness is something for us all/ Then go ahead and tell me what it's like." On "Funny Anyway," a lament for her lapsing memory, Hilton bemoans the social demands of small talk ("Why do they ask me what I’ve done?/ Do I have to say?"), in a way that could seem petty. Instead, you get the sense of a dormant intellect being perpetually roused into action—when the quietest person in the room suddenly speaks up, people tend to listen. Hilton's voice has a similar effect: It's pitched between Trish Keenan (or a slightly wooden impersonator) and Cat's Eyes’ Rachel Zeffira. Through the record she is elegantly detached—not disinterested so much as preoccupied, focused somewhere beyond the scope of the song.
Occasionally Palana will burst open, revealing churning undercurrents beneath Hilton’s surface calm. In the chorus of "Let's Go to a Party," she pairs a silly, splashy Europop beat with a deceptively naive mantra, sung like a curse: "I’m only happy when I’m dancing/ When I’m dancing for you." That she dances "for" and not "with" is intriguing, but true: sometimes it is easier to perform for others than honestly engage them. It’s perhaps a lonely way to be, and that melancholy floods out through the record—yet to Hilton’s characters, it feels like home. She dances alone in the company of others, and allows her many selves, simultaneously, to live. | 2016-01-26T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-26T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | January 26, 2016 | 6.9 | b01cf291-59cc-4dff-a7e9-0b1a5a40e43e | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The second album from the enigmatic duo is equally nauseating and joyous, like binging on several decades of euphoric pop and hurling it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl. | The second album from the enigmatic duo is equally nauseating and joyous, like binging on several decades of euphoric pop and hurling it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl. | Macula Dog: Orange 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macula-dog-orange-2/ | Orange 2 | Macula Dog didn’t set out to be freaks. The enigmatic New York duo, who’ve become known for stumbling pop experiments in off-kilter time signatures, performed live with sculpturesque puppets strapped to their backs, have repeatedly claimed that their music isn’t meant to sound like it’s falling apart. The delirious, queasy tracks that the pair issued over the last decade are the result of a kind of compositional naivety: “We’re not musicians,” they once said in an interview. “I don’t know what a note is.”
As a result, Macula Dog’s music is led by instinct and interpersonal chemistry, following wherever their unique pop sensibility and their haphazard collection of drum pads, synthesizers, and salvaged “garbage” leads. Early records, like their 2015 self-titled release for New York abstract pop label Haord, drew deserved comparisons to previous generations of electro-weirdos like Devo and the Residents, but that was never their aim. They told Vice in 2015 that they mostly just wanted to sound like T. Rex. As they began to work on their second album, Orange 2, they doubled down on this goal, attempting to make, as they put it in a press release, “a ‘proper’ record…with a distinct, great lead singer, and music you could dance to.”
They failed, by their own admission. That much is clear from the moment an insectoid voice enters on Orange 2’s opening title track, singing clipped non-sequiturs about beverages that disintegrate the koozies that contain them. Onomatopoeic electronics sproing and splort and splash around the vocal melodies in delicately balanced chaos. If Orange 2 mirrors pop music, it’s only in its dedication to too-much-ness. Macula Dog dip and dive between icy 1980s synth-pop, the rhythmic precision of krautrock, the noisy disaffection of no wave, and more vertiginous sounds—“Go Green” sounds equally like a dial-up internet connection stuttering to life and Strawberry Jam-era Animal Collective. It’s nauseating and joyous in equal measure, as if the duo had binged on several decades’ worth of euphoric pop then hurled it onto the floor of a Tilt-A-Whirl. They sum up their philosophy with a one-liner on “The Novice”: “It’s cool to be confused.”
Despite the delirium, Orange 2 illustrates the group’s formal ambitions. Off-kilter and strange as each melody is, they all snap together into a kind of locomotion. For every careening synth line, there’s carefully sequenced percussion keeping it on the rails. Tracks like “Neosporin” roll from one section to another seemingly unpredictably, but deft synth flourishes and recurring vocal affectations lend each track a sense of continuity and purpose. It might be too disjointed for a sing-along, but you can follow the logic in a way that feels even more satisfying than a traditional verse-chorus-verse.
Like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in operation, you can never quite be sure how one component of Orange 2 will tumble into the next, but through some miracle of physics, momentum, or magic, it always does. See the way “Smart Man Do” jump cuts from chattering industrial electronics to hopscotching techno inversions—plastering the whole track in unsettling electro ephemera as they narrate with a gasping vocal about, in part, a conversation with God. Somehow it all congeals into something propulsive and energetic. It isn’t pop perfection, as they once imagined, but it demonstrates what Macula Dog do best: They turn trash into treasure. | 2022-10-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Wharf Cat | October 11, 2022 | 7.7 | b022f143-2c09-48f4-9c58-e517ec8eef45 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Esperanza Spalding’s eighth album is a strangely romantic, sometimes didactic effort to mold the often private experience of listening and feeling the healing power of music. | Esperanza Spalding’s eighth album is a strangely romantic, sometimes didactic effort to mold the often private experience of listening and feeling the healing power of music. | Esperanza Spalding: Songwrights Apothecary Lab | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esperanza-spalding-songwrights-apothecary-lab/ | Songwrights Apothecary Lab | It’s been 15 years since Esperanza Spalding’s auspicious debut Junjo. After that largely jazz-rooted recording, the multi-instrumentalist singer/songwriter collaborated with Janelle Monáe, Bruno Mars, and Harry Belafonte while composing and releasing six more albums. Spalding’s projects have reflected her compulsive need to expand the range of her artistry beyond jazz, and each collaboration reveals an artist invested in both the heart and craft of music. The bones of her releases still lean on improvisation and sparkling tones. Yet the sinew of her art-making has evolved—a shift audible on her eighth album Songwrights Apothecary Lab, which showcases a musician reluctant to embody any single mode of expression. Spalding has honed in on a lyricism that is psychologically tougher, less concerned with pleasure, and more aligned with revealing tiers of hurt and how they cling to our bodies.
Spalding recorded the album over several months this year and created a guide that describes the intended uses and effects of its 12 compositions, sequentially numbered Formwela 1, 2, 3, etc. The assigned healing properties of each song came from Spalding’s conversations with music therapists and neuroscientists whom she intentionally sought out for a record meant to have a specific healing effect on the listener. SAL is a strangely romantic, sometimes didactic effort to mold the often private experience of listening and feeling music. Taking a note from Alice Coltrane’s own healing melodies on her albums Divine Songs and Infinite Chants, Spalding offers the type of medicine that comes from days moving through nature or intentional solitude. The recipes here are as ancient as they are intuitive.
It’s remarkably unconventional and, at times, stifling listening to an album that comes with a how-to manual, though the concept isn’t unfamiliar. Music has long been a tool for healing, whether as therapy for patients or to commune with gods and ancestors. Spalding has turned those rituals into direct action for listeners seeking solace in her voice. Opener “Formwela 1” is a slow build of layered harmonies that slip into her crystal clear vocals, sitting atop a strumming guitar and gentle piano. The guide labels this song as one for “an acute moment of stress in the home,” and it’s that specificity of place that sets Spalding’s intention from the beginning. Her meeting with multi-instrumentalist Ganavya Doraiswamy on “Formwela 2” is ethereal and deeply rooted in the traditions that shaped it: the movement and philosophy of Harikathā; the poetry and elasticity of jazz.
The album’s three back-to-back collaborations with trombonist Corey King are dynamic and intrepid in balancing both artists’ skills. “You know we all see and make-believe, please, yes/What do you need, babe?” Spalding sings on “Formwela 4” before proceeding into a tender call and response with King, both singing, “Dare to say it,” as they urge us to love ourselves enough to dream our peace into existence. There are elements of Sade’s “King of Sorrow” in the acknowledgment of pain, but where the latter sinks further into despair, Spalding’s acceptance of that feeling is a reawakening. On “Formwela 5,” the duo perform pirouettes around each other’s vocals, spinning and spinning without stuttering or losing sight of the rhythm. “Promise while I’m working at it/I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” they offer as an urgent chant. On “Formwela 6,” Spalding leads while King is a ready and capable partner, adding the right amount of heart to a track that’s restrained and almost unsettling in its rhythmic simplicity.
Where the album falters is when formwelas lose the sense of space and intimacy crafted at the beginning. “Formwela 8,” a nearly 12-minute track, trudges at the same pace and never finds footing, its harmonizing bookended by drums and saxophone. After a few bars, the repetition starts to lag, weighing down the gentle piano notes. According to the guide, it’s a “formwelation” meant to foster the “buoyancy of a secure, comfy, and same home-place.” But the track has none of this lightness and assurance. “Formwela 9” plays off the confusion stirred up in the preceding track, and while Spalding’s improvisation takes center stage, the song feels unfinished and cold compared to the album’s first half. Spalding returns to form on closer “Formwela 13,” whose lyrics confidently hang over the horn and impatient percussion. It’s playful and unpretentious, making room for both silence and activity in relationships: “Love the way I do that thing we do/Smile with me, ’cause you do it, too.”
I found myself wondering if “formwela” is the combination of “form” and “well”—whether they function as sounds to help us form well the ties that bind us. While unmoored in parts, SAL compels listeners to find meaning in places they never looked; and in their most well-formed states, the songs lightly probe without being intrusive. Spalding is determined to reach you, even if she can’t touch you.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Concord | September 30, 2021 | 7.5 | b023ef18-fba8-444e-b758-ffa9b90f46f8 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
Indiana’s Thunder Dreamer embrace their Midwest roots on Capture, mixing elements of emo, post-rock, and pop. It’s a summer album with thick atmosphere and a dusk that seems to last infinitely. | Indiana’s Thunder Dreamer embrace their Midwest roots on Capture, mixing elements of emo, post-rock, and pop. It’s a summer album with thick atmosphere and a dusk that seems to last infinitely. | Thunder Dreamer: Capture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23295-capture/ | Capture | Evansville, Ind. is the Hoosier State’s third-biggest city, but its metro area spills over into southern Illinois and northern Kentucky, making for a jumbled geographic identity. Compared to its surroundings, Evansville is an urban hub, but its economy has traditionally thrived on shipbuilding and refrigerators, symbols of erstwhile American greatness. Evansville is a unique corridor between the Rust Belt and the south; it voted Trump by a wide margin. “Everything seems to die here... People get discouraged and stop trying,” said Thunder Dreamer drummer Corey Greenfield in a recent interview, reflecting on a city that’s so quintessentially American, it can seem invisible at times. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why a young rock band would have broken up with Evansville. Some of Thunder Dreamer did just that. But Capture is all the more powerful as a story of their eventual reconciliation.
Whatever Evansville lacks in industry infrastructure, it’s clearly been a tremendous incubator for a band looking to avoid the sonic hivemind of a scene. Capture echoes geographically-evocative artists from its Midwest surroundings while maintaining a singular center. Within Thunder Dreamer’s sound are the fidgety dashboard confessionals of Boys Life’s road-trip cult classic Departures and Landfalls; the mesmeric stoner emo of their northwest neighbors in Cloakroom; and early Mark Kozelek, Jason Molina, and My Morning Jacket, with the latter stepping outside the grain silo to take in the boundless vistas.
Thunder Dreamer have embraced “Midwestern” as a descriptor, identifying with its underlying humility and landlocked yearning. The bands they recall made grand, expansive, sprawling music that no one would call grandiose or epic. Most of the eight songs on Capture push towards five minutes and beyond with post-rock patience and the force of pop. They take after the landscape with slow, sloping escalations towards welcome pockets of bustle rather than relying on codified crescendo-and-crash dynamics; it’s less Explosions in the Sky than slow-burning bonfires in a secluded rural clearing. The songs are all given proper heft through analog production, capturing firefly flickers of guitar, misty reverb, and crackles of heat lightning to create an overall ambience of an overcast July night. It’s a summer album for the way most experience it outside of the coasts: a thick, palpable atmosphere that feels enveloping rather than oppressive and a dusk that seems to last infinitely.
Singer Steven Hamilton has noted that bands in Evansville actually do a disservice to themselves if they play too many local live shows. So while Capture is a traditional rock record, it lacks that dynamic of crowd-sourced pressure. Thunder Dreamer benefit from this in ways, though: “St-Malo” juxtaposes calm and claustrophobia, appropriating the walled-in, battle-torn beauty of its namesake, while the brisk and chiming single “You Know Me” has an unusually developed musculature for dream pop. Still, Capture’s standout quality is Hamilton’s forthright and crystalline vocals, a surprising contrast when “heartland rock” typically evokes the realm of mutters and drawls. It’s not slick by any means, but Hamilton lends Capture an alluring elegance, particularly on the luxurious mope of the title track. At points, it does slightly resemble their heroes in Mock Orange, the only band of note to previously arise out of Evansville and also one that rarely toured and never settled on a specific sound.
Hamilton’s voice is an effective instrument for what he calls “sad words to fit sad notes.” And whether he’s delivering plainspoken, classic emo heartbreak (“Why Bother”) or local xenophobia against refugees (“Living Like the Rest”), it’s never heavy-handed. However, Hamilton admits lyrics sometimes came at the last minute, and there’s certainly a discrepancy between them and the group’s painstakingly crafted instrumentals. But Capture benefits from its reliance on ambience for evocation. It’s a record of young men learning to live with the implacable fear emanating from the crossroads of America, rather than running from it. | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 6131 | May 31, 2017 | 7.7 | b02b9569-216f-435b-a3ea-8f638bee9ece | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Scott Herren follows two LPs of pioneering glitch-hop with a more guest-heavy third full-length, one that includes appearances from the Books, El-P, and a handful of Wu-Tang Clan members. | Scott Herren follows two LPs of pioneering glitch-hop with a more guest-heavy third full-length, one that includes appearances from the Books, El-P, and a handful of Wu-Tang Clan members. | Prefuse 73: Surrounded By Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6452-surrounded-by-silence/ | Surrounded By Silence | If Surrounded By Silence were a movie, it'd be one of those Technicolor Cecil B. DeMille epics that boldface hype "A Cast of Thousands." If it were a concert, it would be an indie-verse Live Aid. If it were a story, it'd be that chapter of Ulysses where James Joyce introduces the reader to just about every goddamn person in Dublin. We're talking a big canvas here, with so many guest stars you can't spit without moistening someone who has spent time on the (CMJ) charts.
All of which is somewhat of a U-turn for Scott Herren's best-known pseudonym, as the Prefuse 73 catalog has been distinct among its IDM environs for being emotional, intimate, and focused affairs. Prefuse albums have had guests over for dinner before, but rarely so marquee (sorry, Prekop) and never in such numbers...hell, I'm hard pressed to think of any non-compilation that has featured so many interlopers. Whether Herren is using Surrounded By Silence to spread the word about some of his favorite acts, or to insta-build a portfolio of outside production work, or a little of both, it's a much different-- and far more inconsistent-- affair than previous Prefuse efforts.
Much of the blame for this unevenness lies with Herren's attempts at hip-hop production, a role with tantalizing potential that so far had only been teased at with isolated, underwhelming efforts for Diverse, MF Doom, and others. Silence's first taste of Prefuse on the decks, "Hideyaface", finds Herren brokering a backpacker's dream summit of Wu-Tang and Def Jux municipalities. Sadly, it's outperformed by the instrumental reprise that appears down the tracklist, containing a merely routine showing by Ghostface that nevertheless still manages to embarrass the cottonmouth delivery of El-P, who lamely titles himself "Laserface" and follows the Def Jux party line of substituting hyperlogia for talent. (See also: Aesop Rock's blunder through "Sabbatical with Options".)
Only charismatic tracks with Jux defector Beans ("Morale Crusher") and relative unknown Camu ("Now You're Leaving") manage to fulfill the concept's promise, leaving one to wonder whether Herren is the victim of phoned-in MC work (looking at you, Masta Killah and GZA) or whether his considerable talents just don't adapt to background duty. Indeed, the composition of tracks like "Just the Thought" seems neutered compared to usual Prefuse material, short on ideas and compromising complexity. Ironically, it might be Herren's knack for atmospherics and jazz-like swing that keep his hip-hop dalliances from liftoff, as they tend to amplify rather than alleviate the dreary bookishness of underground rap emcees.
Appearances by artists from the rock and electronic side of the indie fence score slightly better on Surrounded By Silence, ranging from the disastrously shrill performance by Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino to the delicious laptop jam between Prefuse and ihe Books. That latter track, "Pagina Dos", is pretty much exactly what you would expect from its constituent parts, but no less entrancing for it; an all-too-brief mixture of fractured banjo, chop-chop dialogue, and an itchier, funkier beat than the Books would normally allow themselves.
"And I'm Gone" somehow manages to squeeze another Herren alias (Piano Ovelord), Stereolabbites Broadcast, and Mexican outfit Café Tacuba into a less-than-three-minutes package, but makes it work as dense, dreamy psychedelia Caribou/Manitoba would envy. The two appearances by Claudia Deheza from On! Air! Library! (one with twin sister Alejandra) similarly make me reach for the "ethereal" meme, breezy like Herren's Savath + Savalas project, but without sacrificing the trademark Prefuse lope-swing and scissorhands editing.
Almost lost amidst the collaboration addiction are a handful of Prefuse-only tracks, the placement of which makes even the longer compositions feel like interludes. That's a shame, because while Herren shows signs of recycling old ideas (the album-opening fanfare, the wandering bassline of "Ty versus Detchibe"), some of these solitary works outshine the superstar vehicles. "Expressing Views is Obviously Illegal" is the Prefuse concept at its best, with jazz, hip-hop, and IDM elements all colliding in a granola-bar musicology lecture. Similarly, "Minutes Away Without You," reprises the One Word Extinguisher trick for juicing sentiment out of loops and samples, a slow jam tempo complimented by late-night noir horns.
Yet, if I may be albumist for a moment, it's this emotional core that's lacking from Surrounded By Silence, which is so caught up in the red-carpet procession that it loses the flow and cohesion of Prefuse's prior efforts. Like John Wayne popping up as a Roman guard in the crucifixion scene of The Greatest Story Ever Told, any momentum achieved by the music gets tripped up by another celebrity appearance and the ensuing reach for the liner notes. Getting by with a lot of help from his friends is clearly Herren's goal on Surrounded By Silence, but that doesn't keep the fulfillment of that goal from making the album his least rewarding effort yet under this name. | 2005-03-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-03-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 24, 2005 | 6.8 | b0416dc1-2bc3-4cd9-8dc0-8aae1bf385b7 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Inspired by a stint in silent meditation, these two sidelong pieces attempt to wrest orchestral order from real-life chaos. | Inspired by a stint in silent meditation, these two sidelong pieces attempt to wrest orchestral order from real-life chaos. | Matchess: Sonescent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matchess-sonescent/ | Sonescent | In the Summer of 2017, Whitney Johnson realized she had a critical problem: She could hear vivid new music in her head, but she had no way to record it—in fact, the very idea was verboten. Years earlier, Johnson, an enthusiastic collaborator who has long made spectral pop as Matchess, emerged from a near-fatal medical catastrophe with renewed clarity and urgency, wielding an appreciation for life and the art she might make with it. As seasons passed, those feelings faded; Johnson slipped back into the humdrum soup of daily existence. She decided to stanch her existential recidivism with an extended stay at a Mojave meditation center, where she would live in the “noble silence” of the Vipassana tradition. But then the music—rich orchestrations for a little symphony, curious little melodies—came. She couldn’t write them down, let alone sing them. She simply tried to remember.
Sonescent, Matchess’ debut for Drag City, doubles as Johnson’s fascinating document of that experience and the most absorbing piece of an already interesting catalog. When Johnson emerged from silence, she scored the sounds she’d heard in her head, then assembled a chamber ensemble of Chicago ringers (Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Joan of Arc’s Tim Kinsella, Bitchin’ Bajas’ Rob Frye, and so on) to play them alongside her own viola and inscrutable but arcing vocals. The result, though, didn’t reflect how she’d first heard the sounds inside the din of her own mind, surrounded as it was by silence, or the anxiety of hoping to hold onto them. So she suspended them inside a complex web of electronics, from the steely purr of sine waves to the murmur of a no-input mixer. The two sidelong pieces are a slow-motion seesaw between low-volume hums and symphonic rapture, or, really, between the way the chaotic world actually exists and our attempts to order it.
Johnson’s work as Matchess has always lived behind one scrim or another, with thin layers of noise or distortion warping her shifty pop. Her songs seemed to echo down long, dark hallways or up spiral staircases, her voice always arriving from … over there, somewhere. Despite the process, though, Sonescent paradoxically steps through that scrim, perhaps even tearing it down. This is the clearest manifestation of Johnson’s musical mind yet, as she works to wrest sound from silence, music from meditation. You can hear her find an idea and try to hang onto it, to spot a melody she likes and not allow the exigencies of the world to obliviate it before she can share. Sonescent feels incredibly vulnerable, as if Johnson is allowing you a perch inside her head.
From that position, Sonescent’s two pieces unfurl like a desert landscape—subtle or even listless at first, but truly alive and rich given time. Silence slowly rises into a harmonic hum during “Almost Gone,” like an extended invocation of “om.” Johnson’s viola joins at a distance, eventually tugging the full band into a classical march that gives way, in turn, to a roaring drone. The strings sigh above dancing drums and, then, phantom bass notes; it is ghostly, as if you’re conjuring the sound of some long-dead military band on a centuries-old battlefield. “Through the Wall” works in the other direction, the stately string orchestrations that begin it gradually giving in to corrosive electronics that peel away the layers until only crumbs and fragments are left. Just on the edge of disappearing, though, the band returns to play what could have been the theme song from some silly ’70s sitcom through the noise. Brian Sulpuzio’s electric guitar lick slices into the mix, a knowing wink that provides a playful bit of reassurance just before static finally swallows the band.
Silent meditation, Johnson told me recently, provided a way to return to the present, to not dwell in nostalgia or fret too much about the future. “What’s happening in this moment is the entirety of existence,” Johnson said. Sonescent, in turn, recalls the potential complexity of every moment, the way that layers of meaning—and, in this case, music—sometimes hide in plain sight. Are those drums that canter in after three minutes of “Through the Wall,” or a trick of the ear? What is the line between sonority and dissonance eight minutes later, when curdled electronics and crystalline strings occupy the same space?
Sonescent slips between Reynols’ brilliant Blank Tapes, where you imagine musical shapes coming from re-recorded sleice, and Ned Lagin’s immersive Seastones series, where there’s so much music you have to tease out the hidden figures. I find myself listening a little closer during those above instants, paying more attention to the present than I was just a second before. That’s what Johnson sought in the Mojave; it is, generously, what she extends in return during Sonescent. | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | March 10, 2022 | 7.5 | b041b5ea-31c2-4655-a531-d45169caca19 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Brooklyn punk-rock duo Hilly Eye features onetime Titus Andronicus member Amy Klein. On their full-length debut, songs are built on simple, opaque lines that are transformed into stinging slogans. | The Brooklyn punk-rock duo Hilly Eye features onetime Titus Andronicus member Amy Klein. On their full-length debut, songs are built on simple, opaque lines that are transformed into stinging slogans. | Hilly Eye: Reasons to Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17536-reasons-to-live/ | Reasons to Live | On Reasons to Live, the full-length debut by the Brooklyn punk-rock duo Hilly Eye, singer-guitarist Amy Klein repeatedly returns to images of emotional violence in her lyrics that initially seem like postcards from the edge of an especially awful and parasitic romantic coupling. But Klein, an ex-member of New Jersey rockers Titus Andronicus, tilts her hand just enough to imply that it could also be nation, rather than just a person, that’s left her feeling equal parts enraged and empathetic.
Amid the scuffed-up beauty of dime-store guitars rubbing up against Catherine Tung's brutalized drum kit, Klein seethes about deception in "American Rail" with a personal sense of betrayal: "In my dreams/ I believe all the lies you told me," she sings, in a voice that sounds both confessional and accusatory. On the dreamy travelogue "Louisville", she echoes the pleas of a forgotten underclass: "Don't bring me down/ Higher than the water/ Don’t bring me down/ I don't want to lose my ground." This neglect explodes into physical abuse on "Double Dutch", where Klein spits, "I can see all the marks that your arms left on me/ I can see what you are."
Or, you know, Klein could be singing about some asshole she's happy to have rid herself of. Even when she tiptoes precariously close to making A Statement-- like on the album-opening "Way Back When", a lilting folk-rock number that alludes to a returning soldier's difficult homecoming-- she always keeps one foot tucked safely in ambiguity. Hilly Eye songs are built on simple, opaque lines that are transformed into stinging slogans; on "Animal", the money line is "All the boys who get beaten up/ all the girls who get beaten down," which Klein delivers as a manic yelp and a churlish taunt over guitars that similarly oscillate alternating shades of pretty and ugly.
Lyrically, Reasons to Live is pitched somewhere between an angry breakup record and an ethereal, post-psychedelic protest screed. Musically, it seems to have been purposely constructed to deny easy satisfaction-- or satisfaction of any kind, really. If the meaning of these songs is difficult to pin down, so is their emotional core. Hilly Eye's primary musical characteristic-- the soft-loud dynamics of Klein and Tung's untrained harmonies and their pummeling, near-amateurish instrumental attack-- is the oldest trick in the indie-rock handbook. The lack of technique gives Reasons to Live an unfinished quality that suggests there's either more depth than there appears to be, or an underlying emptiness deriving from too much feral energy and not enough songwriting.
Given Klein's track record, I'm inclined to believe the former. Hilly Eye's emaciated sound is about as far as you can get from the all-fists-on-deck expansiveness of Titus Andronicus. It seems like a shortcut to something more singular to Klein's own experiences. What's left unresolved on Reasons to Live is what, exactly, Klein has to say about those experiences. It's a record borne of confusion-- though, to its credit, it's about confusion as well. "I am too young/ I am too old," she sings on "Almanac", which meanders aimlessly for a few minutes before magically producing the album's most rousing riff. Klein might still be figuring herself out, but the identity she seeks is definitely worth finding. | 2013-01-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-01-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Don Giovanni | January 18, 2013 | 6.1 | b0455ce5-4b4b-4d82-8db3-cbb518640d71 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
BJ the Chicago Kid's first major-label release is a tender update on classic Chicago soul, featuring guest spots from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Big K.R.I.T. | BJ the Chicago Kid's first major-label release is a tender update on classic Chicago soul, featuring guest spots from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Big K.R.I.T. | BJ the Chicago Kid: In My Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21544-in-my-mind/ | In My Mind | Bryan James Sledge, who goes by the moniker BJ the Chicago Kid, has a soft, gentle voice, which is perfect for delivering multiple love letters. On In My Mind, his first major-label release, he doesn’t sing as much as he coos, adoringly, at the object of his affection, whose identity is renewed in each song. He might bring on current rappers like Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and Big K.R.I.T., but the real wellspring of his inspiration is Chicago soul music, and on In My Mind he both honors and renews the classic form.
Tenderness is as inherent to Chicago soul music as the bass drop is to EDM, and BJ is surpassingly tender here, but that doesn't mean he's shy. Some of the tracks on In My Mind are so overtly sexual they could redden a teenager's ears. The adult and NSFW "Love Inside," for instance, is not about someone being beautiful on the inside, à la Bruno Mars. It is about uncensored intimacy, as is "Resume," "Church," "The New Cupid," "Woman’s World," "Heart Crush," and "Turnin’ Me Up". That’s almost half the album.
These songs represent the best of In My Mind. Sledge is in the zone when he’s singing to women, about women, and especially in praise of women, as he does on "Woman's World." A clever inversion of James Brown’s "It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World", the track features Sledge doing his best Smokey Robinson impression atop doo-wop tones and a frenetic, electronically rendered string section.
It’s one of the highlights on In My Mind, alongside "The New Cupid," in which Sledge laments what he sees as a lack of romance infecting his generation. Above a mellow sampling of Raphael Saadiq’s "Oh Girl," Sledge wonders where Cupid has gone, before ultimately deciding that he must be "too busy at the club." It’s up to Sledge, then, to play matchmaker, because "without a love song, something’s gonna go way wrong." Both in subject matter and style, the song is similar to fellow Chicagoans Carl Thomas’ stunning but slept on single, "Don’t Kiss Me," and R. Kelly’s saccharine "When a Woman Loves."
On "Turnin’ Me Up," Sledge enumerates the ways in which his lover satisfies his every need over an ever-thickening beat. On "Church," the woman Sledge adores is determined to ruin his Sunday. It’s Saturday night and she wants to "drink, do drugs, and have sex," and she doesn’t care that Sledge has to go to church in the morning. As Chance the Rapper says in his slick guest verse, "She always say, 'hey, I don’t wanna be saved.'" It's an interesting dynamic for a soul song: The woman is the protagonist, and the listener learns more about her likes and dislikes than Sledge’s. She is self-assured in her hedonism, happy to be the devil perched on Sledge’s quivering shoulder.
Sledge is a very straightforward lyricist; he doesn't stunt, he yearns. His lyrics favor plainspoken confessions over catchy turns of phrase, and when the album falters, it's because his words reduce a pair of lovers to their mouths and hands. Tracks like "Man Down" and "Crazy" make clear that Sledge is at his worst when he tries to reinvent the R&B wheel. He knows too well what goes into a great soul song to be able to dismember it. He’s too much of a traditionalist, stubborn in his devotion to Chicago soul music and its unpretentious approach to sex, love and everything that happens in between. | 2016-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Motown | February 25, 2016 | 7.6 | b05250e8-94cb-4cb5-b8ea-4a3a46a2b4d6 | Abigail Covington | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abigail-covington/ | null |
The Sarah Records-like Swedish indie pop label celebrates its 10th anniversary with a 4xCD collection that features one song from each of its first 100 releases. | The Sarah Records-like Swedish indie pop label celebrates its 10th anniversary with a 4xCD collection that features one song from each of its first 100 releases. | Various Artists: Labrador 100, a Complete History of Popular Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9988-labrador-100-a-complete-history-of-popular-music/ | Labrador 100, a Complete History of Popular Music | A complete history of Swedish popular music would strain even the most long-winded reviewer. The Scandinavian nation responsible for the coolly melodic pop of the Concretes, El Perro del Mar, Jens Lekman, Love Is All, and Peter Bjorn & John also brings us the unguarded cuteness of Hello Saferide and I'm From Barcelona, the danceable insecurities of Robyn and Sally Shapiro, the visceral psych-rock of Dungen, and the Knife's 2006-defining haunted house. Blame Sweden, too, for Soundtrack of Our Lives and Yngwie fucking Malmsteen. Good thing they're peace-loving, right?
Stockholm's Labrador Records has helped define the "Swedish pop" sound now heard in club nights from London to Berlin. Cheekily titled Labrador 100: A Complete History of Popular Music celebrates the influential indie label's 10th anniversary with one song from each of its first 100 releases (including a new track from dream-poppers the Radio Dept.). At more than five hours, the four-disc set contains more than enough overlooked gems for indie-pop fans to obsess over, argue about, and fall in love with. Labrador specializes in sweetly chiming pop in the old Sarah Records mold; its sound has broadened considerably over the years, but don't expect any of the macho garage-rock that put Sweden on the NME's pub-crawl map in the early 00s.
Girlish whispers and Morrissey-esque enunciations are the norm. Early Labrador 100 tracks by bands like Starlet or Airliner display echoes of the Field Mice's bedsit lo-fi, while Pelle Carlberg and his band Edson apply self-conscious wit to Belle & Sebastian's initial hushed tones. The compilation also makes room for Laurel Music's country-inflected yearning, Douglas Heart's shoegaze twilights, Irene's bubblegum soul, the Legends' noise-swathed Northern soul, the homemade electro-pop of Club 8 or Waltz for Debbie, the Pulp archness of Corduroy Utd. and Loveninjas, and the shimmering new wave of newcomers the Mary Onettes.
Out of such gentle nostalgia, Labrador 100 presents song after song of would-be Perfect Pop Songs-- and plenty of them are pretty near perfect indeed. Suburban Kids With Biblical Names set forth a manifesto on their devastatingly catchy "Rent a Wreck": "I want to turn all their dance floors into a burning inferno of ba-ba-ba." Their labelmates have similar designs. Jangly Labrador standouts Acid House Kings ba-da-da on the gorgeous "Say Yes if You Love Me", breezy synth-poppers Mondial na-na-na on "Undeserved Potential", and New Order-echoing dance-pop duo Tribeca ooh-ooh-ooh on defiantly adolescent breakup tune "Teenage". Hell, [ingenting] sing in Swedish, but language clearly isn't the issue here.
For all their world-conquering melodies, Labrador 100's best songs have an uneasy relationship with mass appeal. They're shy. "It's my favorite song, but I don't like the crowd," Sambassadeur explain on one of my favorite songs here, the Velvet Underground-via-C86 "Between the Lines". This is pop, but it's also personal: I might not see the appeal of Wan Light's glassy-voiced space-pop or Hurray's nose-plugged twee, but surely someone will. In Jude Rogers' exhaustive liner notes, Acid House Kings' Niklas Angergard describes Labrador's essence as "quality pop music which sometimes no one likes, but hey, it doesn't matter that much as long as you like it yourself." No wonder Sweden doesn't have wars. | 2007-03-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-03-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Labrador | March 19, 2007 | 8.2 | b05330bf-a51b-4373-ad81-ec65085279d9 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
In 2012, Beck published a book of sheet music called Song Reader. This collection features versions of those songs by artists including Jack White, Norah Jones, Jeff Tweedy, and Jarvis Cocker, and the set was executive produced by Wes Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster. | In 2012, Beck published a book of sheet music called Song Reader. This collection features versions of those songs by artists including Jack White, Norah Jones, Jeff Tweedy, and Jarvis Cocker, and the set was executive produced by Wes Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster. | Various Artists: Beck Song Reader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19667-beck-song-reader/ | Beck Song Reader | At every stage, Beck's music has reflected Los Angeles: The hodgepodge jigsaw of Odelay and Mellow Gold; the temperate melancholy of Sea Change and Morning Phase; the posthuman decadence of Midnite Vultures; and the all-purpose sunshine of The Information and Modern Guilt, which convey joy in the muted way only Southern California can. He is ratty palm trees and rolling hills; he is five-dollar coffee and hand-stitched fedoras; he is a Burbank strip mall jammed with sundry and outdated business catering to everyone and no one at the same time.
Warby Parker Presents Beck Song Reader is part of his showbiz phase; a laid-back benefit album that if nothing else reminds you that Beck may have started as an outsider but has long since become part of the establishment. Executive produced by Wes Anderson music supervisor Randall Poster, it features 20 interpretations of songs written for his Song Reader project, which was originally released as a book of sheet music by the indie publishing cottage McSweeney's. Contributors include alt-Grammy types like Jack White and Norah Jones; budding national treasures like Jeff Tweedy and Jarvis Cocker; and curiosities like Swamp Dogg and Sparks, who skirted the mainstream but never quite assimilated to it.
Then there's Warby Parker, as in Warby Parker Presents Beck Song Reader, a sunglasses company whose chunky, bohemian frames look like the kind of things an Upper West Side intellectual might have worn during the 1960s or '70s. Proceeds from the album go to 826 National, a nationwide nonprofit committed to helping school-aged kids with creative and expository writing, co-founded by Dave Eggers, who, is also the founder of McSweeney's. At some point describing the project becomes a Russian nesting doll of branding and attribution, brought to you by someone in conjunction with someone else for the benefit of yet someone else. Between Parker, McSweeney's, and the album's lineup itself, Song Reader crystallizes the maturation of the white indie set to the new ruling class—an arc traced by Beck's own career. This is a world of people who are mellow, organized, emotive within reason, a little retro and graced with just a zest of modernity.
Of course, there's no point in giving numerical grades to charities or sociological phenomena. Though the cause behind Song Reader is vital, the album is mealy, governed by some strange centripetal force that manages to pull a group of otherwise interesting artists toward a mean of midtempo Americana and light roots music. If you'd never realized how much fun. could sound like Jeff Tweedy or Norah Jones like Laura Marling, you soon will. Instead of highlighting the differences between its contributors, Song Reader makes them all feel roughly the same.
Speaking of fun., they emerge sounding inspired, shedding the Kevlar of their White Triumph routine for something more vulnerable. Same goes for Bob Forrest, who manages to capture the rooty, mahogany implications of the music better than just about anyone here. Most striking is Swamp Dogg's "America, Here's My Boy", in part because it's hard to imagine it being written by Beck. A gutted, funereal ballad built on piano and voice, it plays like a black hole in a wide swatch of beige—the kind of transformation of source material to final product that makes a prospect like Song Reader exciting in the first place. It reminded me of the first time I heard Johnny Cash sing "Rowboat", a modest country song from 1994's Stereopathetic Soulmanure. Not only did it suit Cash's talents, but also it revealed in Beck a capacity for music people hadn't yet expected from him. Both came out looking good.
Beck's last five or six years have been rife with experiment. Most of these experiments don't lie in the music, but how it's made. His Record Club projects gathered loose groups of interesting people to cover entire albums in single days; his dedication to the maverick composer Harry Partch was written in Partch's own 43-tone scale; and his contribution to the Philip Glass remix album ended up being a sprawling, 20-minute dream consisting of passages of Glass' music with Beck drifting in and out over top.
And, of course, there's Song Reader, a project that pushes against the instantaneity of how we consume art in the digital world. On the one hand, nothing is as old-fashioned, or in particular a songbook, which speaks to ideals of music as something generated between live human beings around parlors and campfires. On the other, no digital stream could ever be as ephemeral as something that was never recorded in the first place. The idea is clever, and very Beck: a mix of the modern and the antiquated so fluid that you start to see how they're not that different to begin with. The execution feels out of his hands, and really, out of everyone's—just another project whose purpose seems lost in the labyrinth of production. | 2014-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Capitol | July 30, 2014 | 4.5 | b055a0dd-239c-4c54-abff-e4aed5b5d64a | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from J. Cole's Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, has the same problems as much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots. | Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from J. Cole's Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, has the same problems as much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots. | Various Artists: Dreamville II: Revenge of the Dreamers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21416-dreamville-ii-revenge-of-the-dreamers/ | Dreamville II: Revenge of the Dreamers | If nothing else, J. Cole has made it abundantly clear that he wants to be judged alongside rap's all-time greats. So let's do that: Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from his Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, is not The *Dynasty—*it doesn't have the color, the heart-wrenching personal asides, the 1-900 numbers that teach you how to sell crack. Nor does it have the slick condescension of any Bad Boy collaboration, the virtuosity of Soundbombing, the knowing sneer of anything the Diplomats made on their worst day.
The problem with Revenge of the Dreamers II, beyond the absence of a "This Can't Be Life" or a "Dipset Anthem," is the same as the problem with much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots. His performance on a song-by-song basis from his debut, Cole World: The Sideline Story, to last December's 2014 Forest Hills Drive oscillates wildly, but never shakes the feeling that it's checking boxes, doing X because Kanye did and Y because Pac did.
Take the opener, "Folgers Crystals," where Cole compares himself to Bob Marley and Nat Turner in the first handful of bars. In many ways, his background is remarkable; the Fayetteville, N.C. native has detailed his experiences in schools with various socioeconomic makeups, including his time at St. John's University in New York. (As always, his rapping on Revenge owes more to the latter locale.) His plan to turn his childhood home—on Forest Hills Drive—into a shelter where single mothers can live rent-free is not just admirable, but is a sincere, inspired way to alleviate the conditions he grew up in and around. But in Cole's more serious writing, most of that personal touch is filtered out, replaced by blunt aphorisms: "'Cause still I rise, it's ill-advised to bet against him/ Raised in hell but heaven sent him/ Let 'em diss him."
That kind of toothless penmanship might slide if it weren't delivered so deliberately. Cole's always been at his best when the stakes are low, or at least self-contained; when he's rapping for its own sake, or reveling in the fact that he signed his friends ("Night Job"), he can be a well above-average technician. (To be fair, that song is nearly derailed when he says he's "Horny like that Coltrane album," one of a handful of sex-centric bars that he and his Queens-bred signee Bas inexplicably cling to.) But when he's moralizing or getting somber, it's robotic, as with "Caged Bird"'s refrain, "Freedom's just an illusion/ That's my conclusion." On "Crystals," he punctuates a particularly intense, clumsy passage with, "So you can take my cock and chew on it," a line that needs a wink or some levity to redeem itself, but is given neither.
Fumbled legacy-building though it is, Dreamers is not without its bright spots. The tape introduces the label's two newest signees: the Washington, D.C.-bred singer Ari Lennox and lute, a rapper from Charlotte who joins Cole in representing North Carolina. Each artist contributes one song here, both of which are among the best on the tape; lute's Dilla-cribbing "Still Slummin" in particular is superb, throwing you immediately into his world ("Took off my work badge, realized I'm back in the hood") and dispensing plaintive, delightfully un-cinematic notes: "Lost more friends to bullshit than a bullet."
Lennox's introduction comes in the form of "Backseat," a song that racked up tens of thousands of plays between its October 2014 release and when it was scrubbed from the Internet last month. It's a knowing, slinking cut that succeeds on almost every front: fun, warm, a little sleazy. Cozz, the Los Angeles rapper who inked his Dreamville deal last year, updates the single with an uncharacteristically flat verse; fortunately, his later contributions to the tape, "Tabs" and especially the introspective closer "Grow," are excellent. (His pre-Interscope singles "Dreams" and "I Need That" remain two of the most delightfully menacing street rap songs of the past several years.)
Bas—whose braying "Housewives" is the weakest cut by a country mile—is joined in Dreamville's relative old guard by Omen, a Chicago native. He and Cole mostly sleepwalk through "Caged Bird," but his headlining song, the Donnie Trumpet-assisted "48 Laws," is a welcome contrast; Omen finds the kind of pocket that always seems to elude his more famous partner, and it makes for a sleek, collected track that feels immediately more vibrant than any of the tape's weightier material. And that, in many respects, is Revenge of the Dreamers II: compelling when its focus is at its most narrow, leaden and impersonal when it reaches for the Very Serious and Very Important. It's like Bleek said: "The strong move quiet, the weak start riots/ We know you got a brick but sell 'em 20s 'til they tired." | 2016-01-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Interscope / Dreamville | January 6, 2016 | 6.2 | b067327e-8e15-4902-b84e-69a3db866392 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Daryl Groetsch’s style is distinguished by its deeply expressive sensibility. Few ambient composers can fit quite as much feeling into such a small curlicue of tone. | Daryl Groetsch’s style is distinguished by its deeply expressive sensibility. Few ambient composers can fit quite as much feeling into such a small curlicue of tone. | Pulse Emitter: Swirlings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pulse-emitter-swirlings/ | Swirlings | At a recent performance in Portland, Oregon, Pulse Emitter’s Daryl Groetsch sat behind a low table coaxing otherworldly noises out of a handful of devices. A few were pretty humdrum: dented guitar pedals, a Sony Walkman, a Roland Space Echo from the 1970s. Then there was an odd, homemade contraption that looked a little like a cribbage board fitted with phono jacks; stranger still was a wood plank with three long springs screwed to it, the kind you might find affixed to a screen door. While it was hard to figure out exactly how Groetsch was generating such a cosmic swirl with his little boxes, there was no mistaking the sound of those springs: They cut through the mix like the thunder you might hear in a horror film, or a nightmare.
Pulse Emitter’s Swirlings is a more placid affair, and a world away from the steampunk hodgepodge strewn across his gear table. If the murky turbulence of his live set suggested a bumpy ride through an asteroid belt in a battered escape pod, the new album—the latest in a discography more than 80 records deep and his first solo album on Hausu Mountain—evokes more blissful and hi-tech vistas, like gazing through the portholes of a gleaming spacecraft at the sweep of the Milky Way.
It’s easy to fall back on science-fiction metaphors when discussing Pulse Emitter’s music. His rippling arpeggios and buoyant pads are part of a cosmic-music tradition that stretches back through new age and prog to stargazing synthesists like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis. These aren’t uncommon reference points; they’ve been dominant modes in left-field electronic music since the late ’00s, popularized by artists like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never. But Pulse Emitter easily holds his own against his better-known peers. Since 2002, he has developed a style that’s distinguished by its deeply expressive sensibility.
That instinct is at the center of the opening “Electron Central,” in which tumbling arpeggios spin against a beatific backdrop of held tones. There’s not much to the track, just a bright, glassy FM synth lead and those fizzy background pads, but the way Groetsch teases the balance between the two, fading elements in and out, lends an almost narrative shape to its seven-minute run. Throughout the album, the tension between form and formlessness keeps things engaging. In both “Fairy Tree” and “Cloud Refuge,” minimalist pulses and rain-stick gurgle alternate with heartstring-tugging chord changes—a tactic that invites zoning out and then sneakily brings you back to the here and now, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers.
At their best, Pulse Emitter’s tracks trade ambient music’s aimless drift for deep compositional structure. The dark, droning harmonies and flashes of dissonance in “Space Frost” recall the most desolate moments of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, yet the twisting of his whale-song melody is sketched with a calligrapher’s grace. Few ambient composers can fit quite as much feeling into such a small, off-handed curlicue of tone. “Ripples,” which sets a shape-shifting mallet and harpsichord-like melodies against characteristically bucolic chords, is even more affecting, paced to periodically deliver a tidy dopamine hit every time it lands upon a particularly plangent chord. In moments like these, Pulse Emitter feels less like a noise tinkerer or an ambient musician and more like a bona fide songwriter—just one working with some rather unconventional tools. | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | January 22, 2020 | 7.3 | b06ee8f3-4cdc-4a82-9fca-9ec2de7d8c3d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Connecticut quintet’s debut is the work of pop-punk professionals, modeled after the genre’s mainstream breakthroughs in the early 2000s. | The Connecticut quintet’s debut is the work of pop-punk professionals, modeled after the genre’s mainstream breakthroughs in the early 2000s. | Anxious: Little Green House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anxious-little-green-house/ | Little Green House | Anxious have been variously described as hardcore, pop-punk, and emo, but they’re also rooted in the classic rock of their parents’ generation: “My dad would play me a lot of early aughts power pop/indie music…like Fountains of Wayne and Death Cab for Cutie,” 19-year-old guitarist Dante Melucci revealed in a recent interview. It’s a frankly mind-blowing statement until some quick math confirms that “Radiation Vibe” and “A Movie Script Ending” are equidistant from today as they are from Led Zeppelin IV and The Wall. Even if none of the bands that Melucci and the rest of Anxious grew up on are liable to crack any 4th of July marathon rock block, “classic rock” still feels like an accurate appraisal of the influences on their debut, Little Green House: Their heroes can be found in the back catalog of their new label Run for Cover, but the bands that cracked MTV2 are gods.
The quintet threw themselves in “the next Title Fight” royal rumble with 2019’s Never Better, an EP of emotive, melodic, and slyly ambitious hardcore. But they have since cleared the lane for One Step Closer, the Wilkes-Barre straight edge crew that shares two members with Anxious and likewise followed the Triple B-to-Run for Cover pipeline. OSC frontman Ryan Savitski and rhythm guitarist Grady Allen trade roles on Little Green House, and Anxious wisely cater toward Allen’s cleaner, more approachable vocals, creating as much distinction as possible between the two acts without turning them into incompatible touring partners.
As opposed to the raw, point-and-shout melodic hardcore of Never Better, Little Green House is the work of pop-punk professionals, craft and sophistication smuggled in through unexpected countermelodies and actual harmonies—not just two vocalists singing in vaguely related overtones. The band gives most of the credit on that front to Melucci, who’s legitimately born for this shit: At 14, he performed on Broadway as Freddy Hamilton in School of Rock: The Musical. There’s a little vocal melisma at the end of “Growing Up Song” that’s kind of a throwaway joke but also kind of stunning within a pop-punk track called “Growing Up Song.” Put it together with the wholesome “In April” video, and it’s not far-fetched to think of them as a boy band.
Chris Teti of the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die produces, as Mark Trombino might have in 2001—a post-hardcore veteran sympathetic to bands reaching toward the mainstream. Tambourines linger deep in the mix, and acoustic guitars emerge during the bridges: evidence of Anxious working with a budget and seeing Little Green House as something distinct from their live show. It’s sleek but not slick—as with TWIABP, Teti cranks the rhythm section, emphasizing a velocity and propulsion that becomes integral to the songwriting. “In April” or “Call From You” would probably hold up if they were covered in any other genre, but Anxious’ strident urgency reminds why people gravitate towards this style of music for melodic thrills.
By “this style of music,” think Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American: a paragon of well-proportioned, immaculately sequenced emo records that could pass for pure pop-rock. Little Green House seems to explicitly follow their model: Start at a full sprint, alternate jangling chords with palm-muted chunk, throw in just enough screaming to come across as both bashful and brash. In their brief existence as a touring band, Anxious have opened for both Boston hardcore titans Have Heart and pop-punk defenders Knuckle Puck, and “Your One Way Street” ensures that they’ll win over either crowd from the jump. From that point, Anxious deescalate toward the mid-album acoustic ballad, immediately reestablish momentum with the thrashiest songs, and come down with a five-minute power ballad with a featured guest vocalist.
That power ballad, the closing duet “You When You’re Gone,” might be better described as “Stella Branstool ft. Anxious.” After the breathtaking Side B medley that aligns their backgrounds in pop-punk and musical theater, Anxious spend five minutes in a complete remodel: The tempo is dialed down to a mall-walking pace, Allen’s vocals are relegated to textural trimming, and the guitars glimmer, twist, and turn. It’s an interesting show of range within the context of Little Green House, but in the broader scope of indie rock, Anxious have transformed into a solid band among many that have taken a poppier approach to templates set by Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. Ironically, if Anxious truly wanted to have a Bleed American-type success in 2022, all of Little Green House would’ve sounded like “You When You’re Gone.”
That may very well happen on LP2: Anxious have anointed “You When You’re Gone” as the best song on Little Green House, which gives more insight into their view of growth than the one literally titled “Growing Up Song.” Like many albums of this age, Little Green House is finally seeing release after being completed for nearly a year and a half, an eternity for a pop-punk band with actual teens in it. Even before “You When You’re Gone,” their enthusiasm for melodic hardcore has been tempered by a belief that more exists beyond its quintessential lyrical themes: wishing some friends could stay the same, wishing some friends could be more than friends, wishing some friends would just fade out of view. Anxious may get there in time; for now, they’re in the middle of the ride.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | February 2, 2022 | 7.4 | b06f9e1f-c534-48c0-9c61-9eb553f74f95 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
CHOOSE LIFE. (Again.) | CHOOSE LIFE. (Again.) | Various Artists: T2 Trainspotting: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22845-t2-trainspotting-the-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | T2 Trainspotting: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack | “Nostalgia: that’s why you’re here. You’re a tourist in your own youth.” When Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) sneers this midway through T2 Trainspotting—his bleached-blond tufts thinner since we last saw him, his pretty brooding more intractably carved at the temples—he’s lashing out at his estranged mate Renton (Ewan McGregor) and the two grim decades that have passed since they parted. He’s gazing ruefully across the same desolate, outer-Edinburgh moors that mirrored their youths in the original Trainspotting, where they bemoaned their lots as needle-pocked nihilists, subpar grifters, and residents of Scotland (not necessarily in that order). But really, he’s breaking the fourth wall, all but short of winking into the camera and waggling a cigar, Groucho Marx-style—because T2 knows exactly why its audience has returned, and what we want from it.
Happily, the film delivers: T2 rings true to the spirit of the original—the grubby lad humor, the graphic wastrel extracurriculars, the creeping desperation of consciously inert lives—with an unhurried fondness that still raises stakes for its heroes. (It’s also not shy about embracing Trainspotting’s most zeitgeist moments, slotting in copious footage from the original.) T2 is a best-case scenario for nostalgia, bowing to the diehards while squaring up to present—and its soundtrack fares similarly, offering a loose-limbed mash of callback remixes and fervent young upstarts that echoes the glee of the original without laboring to eclipse it.
The 1996 Trainspotting soundtrack has been rightly celebrated for merging the Britpop bests of the era (Pulp, Elastica, Blur) with big-beat rave (Leftfield, Underworld). Championing dance music, especially in the power-ballad techno of Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” introduced it to new audiences while it was edging up from the underground stateside. Proto-punk was the other bloodline, Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” the de facto theme, all joyous and seductive id; the wistful, near-sarcastic flow of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” under Renton’s overdose scene, leant pathos.
T2’s mix stokes these moments as merrily as Renton, Sick Boy, and Spud (poor, hapless Spud) slide back into degeneracy. Underworld debuts “Slow Slippy,” a canter update to “Born Slippy”’s sprint; splintered mutters replace the prior’s yelps for “lager lager lager lager,” but when those same gentle, sunrise synths nudge to the fore, they are a pensive homecoming. “Lust for Life” gets a gnarled remix from the Prodigy, slicing a peppy group yelp between Pop’s brays, though the scuzzy synth thrum tapers off into a curious shrug of a conclusion. Underworld’s Rick Smith, T2’s composer and soundtrack curator, also offers “Eventually But (Spud’s Letter to Gail),” a lovely, glacial runoff of an ambient ballad that folds in somber film dialogue; Blondie gets a return of sorts in “Dreaming,” after their “Atomic” was covered by Sleeper in the original. (“Perfect Day” earns a piano reprise in the film that’s not included here.)
T2’s soundtrack doesn’t just smack of the past, though; it gets a timely revamp alongside that seminal “choose life” speech. Edinburgh’s Young Fathers appear three times, magnetic in their scrappy ardor; despite winning the 2014 Mercury Prize for their debut, Dead, the Scottish-Liberian-Nigerian trio remain undersung for their high-velocity, socially astute experimental hip-hop. Director Danny Boyle has called their new track here, “Only God Knows,” the “Born Slippy”-style “heartbeat” of T2; it shares that adrenaline, their own rough-and-tumble abandon (“Only God knows that the people are cheating/Only God knows you don’t need him”) merging smoothly with a gospel choir.
In fact, hip-hop—absent from Trainspotting—scores the best scene in T2. As Renton accidentally reunites with the homicidal Begbie in a club bathroom (one of T2’s many winking callbacks to toilets), Jason Nevins’ rattling remix of Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” thumps with palpable humidity, unyielding in four-to-the-floor rigor. (The 1997 track, a UK hit at the time, feels singularly like a return to roots for Boyle; his last film soundtracks have been tempered affairs, anchored by Bob Dylan and the Maccabees, Moby and Unkle, and Bill Withers and A.R. Rahman.) Elsewhere, the Welsh drum’n’bass DJ High Contrast whips up a fatalistic film opener in “Shotgun Mouthwash;” the acidic staccato mimics the drums of “Lust for Life” and abets a series of fitting poor-bastard asides. (The bleakest: “Last night I dreamt I went to Woodstock but I only saw Sha-Na-Na.”) The dusky London shoegazers Wolf Alice, the British surf-rockers Fat White Family, and the bawdy Irish comedy duo the Rubberbandits round out the new class ably.
The success of T2’s soundtrack, and the film itself, lies in its sense of contentment; it doesn’t lobby to be seminal again. It’s as exuberant as its predecessor, with some honest grit flaking against the more mannered sentimentality; it keeps a popular hearth warm and has a kicking, striving spine. To paraphrase an old friend: T2’s still got a great fucking personality. | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Polydor | February 7, 2017 | 7.5 | b08bcbd5-bcf9-4b40-9f6a-3a8943cefefa | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
Even when Bruce sticks to the script in a playhouse, he can deliver a ranging and intimate performance full of the history and emotion befitting his long career. | Even when Bruce sticks to the script in a playhouse, he can deliver a ranging and intimate performance full of the history and emotion befitting his long career. | Bruce Springsteen: Springsteen on Broadway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-springsteen-on-broadway/ | Springsteen on Broadway | Before the Boss hit the boards at the Walter Kerr theater in October of 2017, no one really knew what to expect. While Springsteen has toured solo acoustic before, such as for 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad or 2005’s Devils and Dust, those were still concerts, within the established framework for such. And even though he has a reputation for storytelling even within E Street Band shows, the concept of what he intended—“My show is just me, the guitar, the piano, and the words and music. Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work,” as he stated in the press release for the Broadway run—wasn’t clear until opening night.
Springsteen on Broadway meets all the criteria of a traditional Broadway show, or at least one that could have potentially qualified for a Tony award: It’s staged in a theater, its run was of sufficient length, and the show was scripted, e.g., there was a “book” which was the same night after night. The latter might seem like a pejorative, especially in the context of Bruce Springsteen, whose live shows are well-known for their spontaneity and unpredictability.
But a large portion of the impact of Springsteen on Broadway comes from the juxtaposition of the script and Springsteen’s delivery of the material, combined with the quality and depth of the emotion in the musical performances. Intimacy isn’t simply a function of size and proximity; it’s about connection, about vulnerability and the ability to effectively tell a story. For Bruce, it’s both a talent and a learned skill. (Or as he tells us twice in the course of the evening, “That’s how good I am.”) All of that comes through like an electrical charge if you were fortunate enough to witness Springsteen on Broadway live, but it also transmits in a similarly visceral way on record.
The setlist of the Broadway production changed very little over the course of the stand. Some of the songs, like “Thunder Road,” or “The Promised Land,” are delivered uninterrupted, others are used as active vehicles to support the story, like “Growin’ Up” or “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” “Born in the USA” is preceded by a story that artfully takes you from the song’s genesis to an elegy for Springsteen’s friends who were killed in action in Vietnam; unsurprisingly, the performance that follows is angry, bitter, and every bit as powerful as a full band version would be.
As she has through the run of the show, Patti Scialfa joins her husband for “Tougher Than the Rest” and “Brilliant Disguise,” but the impact of her appearance is slightly muted on the audio artifact as her contribution is limited to acoustic guitar and vocals; the glow the two emit when side by side, and Bruce’s smile as she walks onstage, isn’t something that comes through as well on album.
On a similar note is how Springsteen interacts with the physical space of the theater. He moves between center stage and a standing microphone, or the piano, with a similarly stationary microphone. But the size of the theater and its acoustics are such that, combined with the physics of projection, allow Springsteen to step away from the microphone and still be completely audible, though lower in volume and not directly amplified. This is something that’s not going to be immediately obvious to the listener who hasn’t seen the show and takes a bit of getting used to on this recording, as it initially comes across as a glitch in the recording, rather than a deliberate device.
The recording is slightly longer than the Broadway show with the inclusion of “Long Time Comin’” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which were originally substituted for the husband-and-wife duet towards the end of 2017 when Patti was under the weather and couldn’t appear. The former is responsible for a deeply emotive passage about Bruce’s father, where he is audibly moved to tears for what feels like forever, but is only a minute or two. Understandably, Springsteen is also somewhat misty earlier in the set, when speaking movingly about his friendship with the late Clarence Clemons; “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is, as it has been since the Big Man’s passing, here both elegy and celebration.
When you view the tracklist for Springsteen on Broadway and evaluate it from the perspective of one night’s performance, it’s an impressive list of songs. But when you look at it as representative of a body of work spanning four decades—which this production decidedly cannot escape representing—it is a more than suitable tribute to what Springsteen himself refers to as both his service and his “long and noisy prayer.” Amen to that. | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | December 14, 2018 | 8 | b08e86b3-27b8-484b-8c70-b7f167880a13 | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
Mildly captivating, occasionally repetitive, and frequently ridiculous, the 13th studio album from the fabulous sulk turned red-pill pharmacist is Moz’s vision of radical truth-telling. | Mildly captivating, occasionally repetitive, and frequently ridiculous, the 13th studio album from the fabulous sulk turned red-pill pharmacist is Moz’s vision of radical truth-telling. | Morrissey: I Am Not a Dog On a Chain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morrissey-i-am-not-a-dog-on-a-chain/ | I Am Not a Dog On a Chain | The intoxicating, mostly-celibate, square-jawed Steven Patrick Morrissey carries on. Crotchety and vegetarian, and here on the release of his 13th studio album, Moz remains a bitchy, fabulous sulk turned something of a red-pill pharmacist, dealing anyone within earshot a long list of forces to be wary of. Across the past few decades, these include, but aren’t limited to: Muslims, Britain’s immigration policy writ large, the editorial staff of The Guardian, global safety precautions surrounding COVID-19, allegiance toward political parties other than one headed by someone with the “guts to be honest about Islam,” et cetera, et cetera.
Once known for perverting pop music by way of a beautiful, excessive and unsmiling universe of both art and devotee, Morrissey’s vistas have since shrunk. His present fanbase is survived by the morose, the nostalgic, the unaware, a large number of Latinxs, and those who have actively chosen to forgo Morrissey (the man) for Morrissey (the feeling). It’s the heaven you might find in misery, the forgiveness the heartbroken feels for the heartbreaker, the mental calculus one undergoes when realizing the hero who once made you cry and perhaps saved your life might, at some fundamental level, find your existence repugnant. “Imagine,” finishes a breathless review of a concert in late 2019, “being hit by the world’s most beautiful fist.”
That fist, pink-knuckled and beefy, sails across I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, starting at its title and traveling across its tracklist. (You see, the dog is Morrissey and the chain is society.) As with all documents by obsessives fixated on their targets, the album can be frequently ridiculous, mildly captivating, and occasionally repetitive, pocked by moments of goofiness that come from the runoff of a man eager to chase old miseries and find new ones to berate.
As if he could be anyone else, Morrissey is entirely Morrissey across the piece—relishing in characteristically aggro songwriting, taking decadent, hairpin turns from caustic to maudlin, and lyric sheets as funny and belligerent as the mind from which they flow. “Jim Jim Falls,” for instance, an electroclashy anthem about living life full-assed, climaxes sweetly with, “If you're gonna kill yourself, then for God's sake, just kill yourself.”
Moz regularly points out what he dislikes in the world, much of it tinted with a contemporariness that somehow already feels stale. In “What Kind of People Live in These Houses?”—a track posed as a rhetorical question, a favorite Moz device—we find a “duckface in a duplex,” those who “look at television thinking it's their window to the world,” and those who “don't know how to change.” Elsewhere, as in the hammy “Knockabout World,” the tone swerves from an invective on how big and irritating society can be into a standard-issue Morrissean plunge into deliciously saccharine romance: “Congratulations, you’re still OK. I’d kiss your lips off any day.” The effect is, after all these years, still charming.
Morrissey spends his time at odds with himself, unsure whether he is a decadent Wildean type, a devious free-thinker, or a shock dispensary here to alert the masses that their world is ugly, misshapen, and obscene. Nothing tires as quickly as shock. Some bits are wonderfully embarrassing: “Oh, maybe I'll be skinned alive...because of my views,” goes the title track, warningly, wincingly, waggingly. “Listen out for what’s not shown to you. And there you’ll find the truth.” Most songwriters dodge these tropes out of either decorum or boredom, but this is Moz’s vision of radical truth-telling.
Victim to the inner rash that grows in many writerly men over a certain age and of a certain mind, Moz’s existential chafe against the world is not without good company. “I’ve grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised,” author Bret Easton Ellis writes halfway through White, a book-length treatise that asserts how much he doesn’t care about his public perception in the wake of tedious, performative, and inflammatory claims. Or, it’s like Michel Houellebecq, French enfant terrible and bestselling writer whose novels veer indefatigably provocative and more than a little Islamophobic. “If I am notorious,” he notes, “it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be.”
The three men—American, French, and English—are kin in their infamy for one reason. It is an attitude that’s absolute, ancient, and marked by a peculiar, helpless assertiveness. The stuff of one who might, in any language, but in the same universally-understood shrug, note that they are “just being honest.”
But “just being honest” is both an indulgent and tendentious idea. In reality, Morrissey would like you to know that he is still here, that his lifelong bile has not yet settled, and that his refusal to fall into wimpish modern orthodoxies remains unscathed. One has the right to nag—it’s part of the unspoken artistic birthright to provoke—and bitterness isn’t even necessarily unattractive. But Morrissey’s bitterness is firm and stolid, an adamance to self-righteousness that creates a moral and aesthetic compass by which to navigate a system that—as he wails in “Knockabout World,” the second single—turned him “into a public target.”
In his fat, florid autobiography—hilariously published directly on Penguin Classics, a literary imprint that doesn’t normally canonize living authors—Moz describes a passion for the early punk band the New York Dolls as an ultimate and totalizing sum of everything he wanted to embody, both as performer and as a body. “Their eyes are indifferent,” he writes. “They have left the order of this world." His admiration comes from their strange way of floating out of space, out of time, out of care—a freedom to exist entirely on their own terms. Morrissey, whose eyes are far from indifferent, has managed to achieve the total opposite: He has become exceptionally of this world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | March 25, 2020 | 6.1 | b093af1b-d51f-444e-b1b2-f0e7c869f0e3 | Mina Tavakoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mina-tavakoli/ | |
The experimental D.C. duo’s latest album is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals, but they use their DIY chaos as a radical force against all hierarchies. | The experimental D.C. duo’s latest album is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals, but they use their DIY chaos as a radical force against all hierarchies. | Model Home: One Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/model-home-one-year/ | One Year | Model Home’s music would blend right in with a dystopia. The deteriorating sounds of Patrick Cain’s electronics would be impossible to distinguish from the constant construction that is the score of any contemporary city; NappyNappa’s enigmatic missives would be lost in the roar of public service announcements, personalized advertisements, and omnipresent sirens. Of course, the experimental duo is from Washington D.C., which has always produced bands that reflect the inherent paradox of fighting for freedom in a city pockmarked with monuments to the slave trade. Model Home’s One Year mirrors this conflict; NappyNappa’s urgent spoken word breaks through the waves of Patrick Cain’s synthetic distortion. Built on the edifice of dub sound systems and DIY basement clatter, this monument to a year-long experiment in collective improvisation is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals.
On the world-weary “Faultfinder,” a woozy number that sounds like it was recorded on a warped tape, Nappy’s vocals expand and shrink to a steady drumbeat. His voice buzzes and squeaks through the haze of a merry-go-round-like melody, yet the fuzz clears when he finds it necessary to deliver a pointed statement of contempt: “Ain’t no equality/Inequality only leveraged to disperse.” Heard through the warbled drum loops, his observations are like futurist road signs. On “Push Thru,” Nappa narrates a series of thoughts he has while riding a bus route in a deranged Auto-Tune: “Just got to have faith in my surroundings/I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.” He manipulates his voice to match the acceleration and deceleration of the percussion; Cain will cut his voice up, slow it down, and hollow it out till it sounds like a voicemail.
This creates the illusion that you are hearing Nappa shout on a soapbox in a city full of automatons, mixing prophetic judgements with dispassionate inquiry in an attempt to wake the dead. On “Grip” Nappa shouts, “Processed prescriptions, polluted perceptions/Dirty lenses makes for a cruddy vision,” balancing biting critique with quotidian observation. His calls for self-actualization are jammed between corrupted drums and satellite blips. You hear his voice attempting to break through the insipid chatter of a digitally distracted society, filled with people convinced that they are communicating through “social media,” while they numb themselves and proudly declare that they are unable to concentrate.
To reduce fuzz around the words would provide a clarity that rings false in an increasingly obfuscated world. So they surround Nappa’s words with clutter, noise, trash. Take “Baya Style,” an ESG-influenced caper lying in the middle of the album; its pots ’n’ pans rhythm and Mantronix production are ’80s boombox material. Feedback propels Nappa’s testimonial—“Buy now, buy now/1-800-Buy Now”—to blurry heights; the squeals his keyboards make cut through Nappa’s words, which are slowly blunted by reverb. The two musicians mutually agree to disappear the false boundary between producer and speaker.
“No Barcode & Boundless” is the final word from this conflict-prone alliance, fusing two songs that appeared on separate mixtapes. “Boundless” comes first, built on a sound that mimics a revving car and Nappa’s mutterings. In the next section, Cain creates a horrorcore atmosphere by lengthening wind-chime notes and dividing them with a snare that comes in at the oddest of intervals, while Nappa swerves from lines about destroying your foes to respecting your mother. In this muck, he delivers his most clear statement of ethics: “No barcode you can’t buy me/I don’t even write cursive so you can’t sign me.” This selection of songs from their catalog is an edited transcript of a vital dialogue. Their music is messy and intoxicating because it was forged in this fire of equity. It’s not possible to ditch long-held identities without conflict and without conversation; often, the latter leads to the former. What NappyNappa and Patrick Cain say is that we should embrace rupture if we ever want to truly partner with each other.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | Disciples | July 11, 2020 | 7.8 | b0a3155f-2647-4191-a7d2-84b265a6d4ef | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
Once considered too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, this obscure 1972 masterpiece gets a long-overdue reissue—a testament to its creators’ faith, perseverance, and genius. | Once considered too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, this obscure 1972 masterpiece gets a long-overdue reissue—a testament to its creators’ faith, perseverance, and genius. | Lal & Mike Waterson: Bright Phoebus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lal-and-mike-waterson-bright-phoebus/ | Bright Phoebus | If you’ve never heard Bright Phoebus—or never even heard of Lal and Mike Waterson, the British sister and brother who recorded the obscure masterpiece with contemporary folk royalty in 1972—its opening will still feel immediately familiar. “I’m the leader of the Rubber Band,” a choir proclaims as a trumpet dances in the distance. “It’s the finest band around/The best band in the land/Isn’t it grand?” The ebullient beat, the harmonies, the bold pronouncement: It is nothing less than a reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” delivered half a decade later, complete with a jaw-harp-and-cornet tangent in the middle. “Rubber Band,” like its predecessor, functions like a set of brightly decorated gates standing before one of the most musically imaginative and emotionally sophisticated albums ever made. That’s right: Bright Phoebus deserves canonical status, and perhaps a new reissue from Domino will get it there.
The Watersons—properly, orphaned siblings Lal, Mike, and Norma and a rotating coterie of collaborators—emerged under various names in the early ’60s as part of the great British folk revival. They sang old songs in eccentric fashion, and their unaccompanied interpretations soon pushed the group into their scene’s vanguard. But a life of touring Europe’s assorted dens for, at best, modest pay and attention proved unsustainable. The Watersons split just as their star seemed to be rising. They started families and careers.
Lal and Mike began writing original songs separately, though, and soon realized that they missed singing together. They collaborated in sporadic sessions at home, finding fun in making music once again. That casual setup changed when Martin Carthy, an old friend who had found recent success solo and in Steeleye Span, heard Lal’s songs during a visit. He helped recruit a top-tier cast, including Fairport Convention cofounder Ashley Hutchings, who in turn contacted guitarist Richard Thompson, to transform the musings of two singers who had rarely played with instrumentalists into full-band arrangements. Lal’s idiosyncratic approach to the guitar, for instance, had to be translated into a system that the rest of the band could actually understand.
Recorded in a week in what sounds like a convivial, communal fever dream, Bright Phoebus distills lessons learned from centuries of British folk into deeply personal songs that sound only vaguely like their predecessors. Too weird for the folk crowd and too pastoral for the rock crowd, the album flopped. Only 1,000 copies were sold. Still, its reputation grew, especially among fellow musicians, from Jarvis Cocker and Billy Bragg to Hiss Golden Messenger and Arcade Fire, who may have recognized the risks the Watersons took in an oft-conservative field. For decades an expensive collector’s item, it steadily gained new disciples through bad bootlegs and YouTube streams. Domino’s long-overdue reissue should help to spread Bright Phoebus’ renown. The remastered voices spring from the speakers, while extended liner notes from the journalist Pete Paphides provide both historical clarity and modern context. And 12 bonus tracks offer low-key demos, intimate laughs between Lal and Mike, and a few songs that never made it into the album’s basement sessions.
Mostly, there’s the original album itself. In 12 tracks, Bright Phoebus side-winds from playful psychedelia (“Rubber Band”) to moribund folk balladry (“The Scarecrow”), from country-rock kickers (“Danny Rose”) to keening acoustic laments (“Child Among the Weeds”). There are shout-along tunes worthy of the Summer of Love and moments of quiet brooding fit for Nick Drake. The Watersons and their all-star band tweak each of these forms just so, cracking the conventional structures they’d spent a lifetime learning with revelatory nuance. It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods. Norma’s guest turn on “Red Wine Promises,” a perfectly balanced pendulum of drunken self-pity and self-confidence, is stoic and staggering.
What’s most remarkable about Bright Phoebus, however, is the way in which it’s striated with all sorts of sadness. “Winifer Odd” portrays a lifetime of disappointment through a child who was born waiting for events that never came; it’s devastating. “To Make You Stay” perfectly captures the bile that bad love can produce. Innocence disappears forever in “Never the Same,” a cello-chased lament of the atomic age. In Lal’s dystopian vision of dead birds, murderous priests, and a drooping sun, children are too sick to play. “If we live another day,” she sings in a perfect deadpan, “we’ll never be the same again.”
Still, there is a glowing sense of optimism. During the indomitable country-rock rollick “Shady Lady,” which sounds like a Neil Young holdover from his Buffalo Springfield days, the Watersons implore the subject to live a bit more freely, to “get yourself some sunshine while you can.” The sun rises again in the title track and closer, a graceful anthem of individual redemption shared with friends. At first, only Mike sings of his bright awakening: “Today, Bright Phoebus, she smiled down on me for the very first time.” Lal joins for the next round. And then, after the drums drop in and Richard Thompson’s electric guitar restates the theme, everyone in the room seems to join the choir impulsively. It’s a celebration of shared friendship, devotion, creation, and, true to the Watersons’ lifelong bond, singing one’s way through hardship. For a record whose sheer existence seemed so unlikely, it’s a beaming testament to faith and perseverance.
Indeed, almost half a century after Bright Phoebus’ release, its reintroduction at this moment offers a few urgent takeaways, especially for artists struggling to eke out a livable income in an economy of streaming media and short-term gigs. It remains relevant—awe-inspiring, really—because the Watersons weren’t beholden to careers, orthodoxy, or fitting in with a scene they helped shape. They had taken a break and come back with the realization that they had more to contribute to the songbook than a bold interpretative language. The move cost them fans and sales, but it allowed for a record that, so many decades later, is the figurative needle in a haystack: a singular piece of innovation from a cadre that was too often compelled only to preserve the past. Hearing Bright Phoebus, it’s hard not to think of Dylan becoming “Judas,” Radiohead becoming “pretentious,” or any other artist who boldly shrugged off expectations to leave us with something worthy of outlasting their own lives. Lal Waterson died in 1998, Mike in 2011. But Bright Phoebus, now thankfully back in print, deserves to last forever. | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | August 11, 2017 | 8.5 | b0a7d49d-2e87-47a8-b80f-432e826e207a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Floridian emo band channels a sense of boundless possibility on their new LP, which has the heft of a manifesto despite its compact length. | The Floridian emo band channels a sense of boundless possibility on their new LP, which has the heft of a manifesto despite its compact length. | Home Is Where: *I Became Birds * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/home-is-where-i-became-birds/ | I Became Birds | Throughout 2020, punk bands and fans wondered how anyone could generate and sustain a wave of excitement without the usual dues-paying opening slots, five-band gigs or breakout Fest sets. The brash Floridians in Home Is Where might still do that eventually, but they’ve excelled in the compact spaces that serve as proving grounds in 2021: TikTok, Twitter, and 18-minute albums. On their bracing first official LP I Became Birds, Home Is Where talk a big game—about power structures, trans rights, and especially about fifth-wave emo. Brandon MacDonald mostly expresses themselves in uncanny bursts of imagery, so the few times they are direct are rare enough to quote in full: “cops are flammable, if you try,” “Look at all the dogs/I wanna pet every puppy I see,” “How long has it been since a president got assassinated?” (mind you, “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” was initially released in October 2020). These lines don’t represent contradictory impulses so much as poles on a moral continuum, a coherent worldview of good and evil that lends I Became Birds the heft of a manifesto despite the length of an EP.
I Became Birds is often simple enough to be performed as folk or punk, but please don’t call it “folk-punk.” “The Scientific Classification of Stingrays” repeats a two-bar melody over a single teeth-clenched riff, its urgency modulated by MacDonald’s howls about being immersed in an ocean of splinters and a “uniform of gasoline.” “Assisted Harakiri” achieves perpetual motion despite repeating the same two chords at the same speed; during its four and a half minutes, a simple lead octave fissions into a flurry of tapped notes, MacDonald’s lysergic lyrics visions escalated by a runner’s high. With its strings, its so-called “puppy petter choir” (ID’ed as such in the credits) and mid-song screamo break, “Sewn Together From the Membrane of the Great Sea Cucumber” is an outlier, and also the album’s centerpiece. It’s the most immediately impressive thing on I Became Birds, perhaps because it’s the only song that immediately recalls the most ambitious revival-era bands.
A list of consecutive Bandcamp tags on their 2019 debut our mouths to smile reads “bob dylan worship” and “emo,” and they mean it—witness their @bobdylansmells Twitter handle and our mouths to smile’s “Dob Bylan,” where he’s MacDonald’s best friend, leader, savior, dealer, comrade, mom and dad. MacDonald sees Dylan as part of a lineage that includes more traditional emo influences like Tim Kinsella and Jeff Mangum—singers with unconventional voices and a surrealist take on the way our bodies have minds of their own. “Oh! The treachery of anatomy,” MacDonald screams on “Assisted Harakiri.” Though MacDonald favors language as much for its phonic impact as its literal meaning, they never equivocate. MacDonald renders history, memory and the sweltering atmosphere of Palm Coast, Florida with tactile, ripe imagery (“Preservative sun showers trickle down,” “Sunday school in a bug spray June”). But they convey the most meaning through their unhinged delivery— when they yell “hey Samantha!” throughout “Long Distance Conjoined Twins,” it carries the same ecclesiastical fervor as “I love you Jesus Christ!”
No matter how abstract MacDonald gets with their imagery, the title of I Became Birds is the decoder key—they’ve described the album as the retelling of their gender transition and, perhaps not coincidentally, it evokes ANOHNI’s I Am a Bird Now, which explored similar themes of heartache and deliverance in a completely different style of music. “Let’s trespass vacant properties we claim are our bodies,” MacDonald howls, comparing their heart to an unused power grid waiting to be activated; a fitting image for a song that makes honking harmonica over acoustic guitars still sound like the most electrifying music of 2021. Even if they’ve bristled at comparisons to Joyce Manor or the Hotelier, this is who I hear when I listen to I Became Birds. It’s not because Home Is Where sound much like them; it’s because they channel the same sense of boundless possibility, of horizons expanding in real time. With Home Is Where, it’s all about feel, and I Became Birds feels like emo once again flipping the switch on its eternal energy source.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Knifepunch | April 13, 2021 | 8 | b0ac2c2c-eeb8-40b9-8df1-d75542dc9bc7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Reintroducing her band as a solo project, Alicia Bognanno follows the tried-and-true: sticky hooks, shoutalong lyrics, and walloping, caffeinated riffs. | Reintroducing her band as a solo project, Alicia Bognanno follows the tried-and-true: sticky hooks, shoutalong lyrics, and walloping, caffeinated riffs. | Bully: SUGAREGG | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bully-sugaregg/ | SUGAREGG | At 29, Bully’s Alicia Bognanno could teach a master class in grunge rock. She knows how to write hooks that grab you like a rip current, she was a star intern at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, and her raspy howl could pierce metal. She’s got such a firm grasp on the part that director Alex Ross Perry asked her to write the music for the fictional ’90s rock band led by Elisabeth Moss in his 2019 film Her Smell. But Bognanno knew that something was off, that there was a block in the system, and before embarking on her third record, SUGAREGG, she addressed the personal issues that shadowed her last album, 2017’s Losing.
Her fresh start was both professional and personal. She parted ways with her bandmates and landed on the right treatment for her bipolar II, which she credits for SUGAREGG’s groundedness. Liberated from some anxiety and feelings of imposter syndrome, she was able to take a step back. SUGAREGG is the first Bully album to be engineered by someone other than Bognanno, in this case John Congleton (known for his work with Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, and Moses Sumney). It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.
For the most part, SUGAREGG sticks to the tried-and-true: sticky hooks, shoutalong lyrics, and walloping, caffeinated riffs. (“Oh yeah, I just wanted to pick up the tempo,” Bognanno ad-libs at the beginning of one song.) It’s the sort of album that can inject a jolt of adrenaline into even the most spudly couch potato. Unlike its predecessor, SUGARGEGG has moments of genuine musical levity, even if the subject matter retains its heaviness. The lethargic “Prism” is a sun-streaked daydream tinged by lingering memories of pain; “Where to Start” turns frustration with a partner into jangly rocket fuel. (Bognanno told Rolling Stone that the melody was inspired by Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping.”)
Bognanno’s songwriting has always been personal, but here she digs deeper. On “Like Fire,” she illustrates the ups and downs of bipolar disorder, especially the overwhelming, disruptive bouts of euphoria. The bouncy “Every Tradition” rejects the biological and social roles (parenthood, marriage) impressed upon women, describing these expectations as dissociative. “Something’s off, you’re wrong about the dream/And I’ve been fucking up/Wasting my time second-guessing what I need,” she proclaims over a blast of noise. The thoughts that run through her mind in the bass-heavy “Stuck in Your Head” are earnest in their desire for clarity: “I wanna be in touch/Feel a little less disconnected/Without the crutch.”
Uncertainty reappears over and over on SUGAREGG; “I don’t know where to start,” “I don’t know what I wanted,” and “don’t know what you wanted” are common refrains. But whether she is addressing an absent parent or giving up on the exhausting emotional rollercoaster of a relationship, by acknowledging that she doesn’t know all the answers or reasons, Bognanno learns to loosen her grip. “I’m not angry anymore,” she sings on the smoldering “Hours and Hours.” “I’m not holding on to that.”
Midway through the album, on “Come Down,” Bognanno offers loving advice, maybe to herself, maybe to someone else: “I hope you come to realize your worth/Tired devotion, passion is a curse.” Delivered over a mid-tempo melody and punctuated by the barking of her dog, Mezzi, there’s little noise to distract from the message: Self-love can be life-changing. SUGAREGG’s confidence and candor suggest that Bognanno is taking those words to heart.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 24, 2020 | 7.7 | b0ae7e7a-cb12-4a8c-a7ed-7428c773d940 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Following on the heels of last year's O.K., the indie-pop outfit Eskimeaux releases a sweet little gem of an EP, fraught with indecision and insecurity. | Following on the heels of last year's O.K., the indie-pop outfit Eskimeaux releases a sweet little gem of an EP, fraught with indecision and insecurity. | Eskimeaux: Year of the Rabbit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21697-year-of-the-rabbit/ | Year of the Rabbit | Listening to Year of the Rabbit is like stumbling across a cache of hidden journals that Gabrielle Smith wrote five years ago, hid in a box, and recently rediscovered. It trails on the heels of 2015’s O.K., and the declarative agency found on that album has been swapped for a heavy barrage of indecision. The title track drills a series of repeat phrases into your head; "Are you mad?" and, "Are you home?", and "I don’t know" layering over one another, replacing the absolute knockout precision of lines like, "And everything I said, spewed like sparklers from my mouth/ they looked pretty as they flew, but now they’re useless and burnt out," from O.K.’s "I Admit I’m Scared." On "WTF," Smith continues to ask, "What the fuck is a kiss anyway?/ What the fuck is this feeling?" which are the type of unanswerable questions that – if you choose to dwell on them long enough – could cause your sense of humanity to unravel.
She’s always been one to thread anxiety through her work, but her keen ability to size up the situation, quickly and decisively, kept the songs razor-sharp. Year of the Rabbit is lacking in determination, and its hesitancy– all fuzzy around the edges – eventually becomes draining. With a running time of just over 15 minutes, it’s a sweet little gem of an EP, but pop a valium if you play it several times in a row.
However, there’s still a great deal of merit buried amongst Year of the Rabbit’s insecurities. Smith’s voice returns to the hushed intimacy of her earliest recordings. Even if she’s too timid to raise it and ask the questions, the overall sound is lush and warm and soothing. She’s cut back on the synths in favor of a rawer feeling of intimacy. You’re not listening to a studio recording, you’re locked in her bedroom, watching her pen the tracks.
Overall, the EP is strewn with enough tiny, beautiful moments to satisfy. By far, the sweetest and most relatable recollection occurs right at the end of "Drunk" as the music cuts out and Smith’s voice dangles on the track with a lone bass note before gearing up again. "See you at Myrtle Broadway/ I’m shy and keep walking/ Your eyes as sad as tree stumps/ A nose just like a ski jump/ I don’t just wanna fuck/ I wanna show you love," she sings. It’s a powerful snapshot of desire and lust, a reminder that in order to stay with any one person for an extended period of time, you need to rediscover things about them you thought you already knew.
It’s important to note that the title is a reference to 2011, the last Year of the Rabbit and the year Smith and her friends formed the Epoch collective—the Brooklyn-based community of artists which includes artists such as Florist, Told Slant, and Bellows .(The EP was recorded with fellow Epoch collective members Emily Sprague of Florist and returning drummer Felix Walworth—who also plays in Florist and is the frontperson for Told Slant.) Smith’s descriptions of long-distance relationships and lengthy separations, of shaky stops and starts, of "trying to be open to whatever," mark that year as an intense period of personal growth. Taking the time frame into consideration, Year of the Rabbit can be viewed as a retrospective, an artist piecing together bits of her past to gain further clarity and insight into whatever comes next. | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | April 14, 2016 | 6.8 | b0aebd59-76b8-418d-a282-efa0c78eeb5a | Lindsay Hood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-hood/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we offer a first-hand account of the brilliant chaos of PiL’s The Flowers of Romance. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we offer a first-hand account of the brilliant chaos of PiL’s The Flowers of Romance. | Public Image Ltd: The Flowers of Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/public-image-ltd-the-flowers-of-romance/ | The Flowers of Romance | The saga that led up to the recording of Public Image Ltd’s third studio album, 1981’s The Flowers of Romance, was as lurid as a telenovela. It was hailed as a defiant tour de force, a pivotal forerunner of techno and industrial music, one that set the bar for post-punk, and all of “uneasy listening” to come. Making the record was an exercise in alienation, more painful than getting and removing the same tattoo in one afternoon.
The sickly-sweet irony of The Flowers of Romance hid a time bomb. In its thunderous, distorted drums, hear PiL tick towards their own explosion. If you feel at odds with the world, know there’s a better way, but no one will listen to you—put The Flowers of Romance on repeat. It may not soothe your soul, but it will make you feel you’re not alone in your angst or your need to keep going.
Incidentally, Public Image Ltd were actually an incorporated company. This professionalism was a big fuck-off to punk’s chaos that had camouflaged how lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, the former lead singer of the Sex Pistols) was being ripped off by the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, financially and emotionally. PiL was to be a fresh concept, one based on trust, non-hierarchical, primed to supply the 360-degree needs of a music industry adjusting to videos and CDs.
Along with Lydon, PiL’s Directors included Dave Crowe, one of his old North London mates; the anguished, gaunt guitarist Keith Levene, who had helped start the Clash; and, in a brilliant stroke of Lydon’s, sparky Jeannette Lee as a non-specific band member. Witty and level-headed, Lee was the glue, the friendly face, responsible for just about everything except actually writing and playing, and even then, her savvy imprint was palpable. The petite heartthrob had previously run Acme Attractions, a progressive style and culture stall/salon in King’s Road, Chelsea’s Antiquarius market with her then-boyfriend, filmmaker Don Letts. She thought of re-purposing the name, The Flowers of Romance; Lydon had suggested it for a short-lived band of Sid Vicious, future Slits members Palmolive and Viviane Albertine. Lee would quit the band in 1982, while PiL goes on, still compelling today; but her tenure is immortalized on the LP cover. A red flower between her teeth à la Carmen, she appears to be about to bash the photographer with a blunt object—actually the pestle from then Vivienne Westwood stylist, Yvonne Gold’s kitchen. The hectic glamour that the über-stylish Lee projected stopped PiL from being perceived as all grumpy white boys—and never forget that even a pestle can hurt. Today, Lee is one of the music industry’s most powerful women, as co-owner of Rough Trade Records.
For two weeks in the fall of 1980, these hardcore Londoners were off to the exotic Oxfordshire countryside. The stately neo-Elizabethan 17th-century home that Virgin’s Richard Branson had converted into an unusually grand studio was a readymade stage for breakdown/breakthroughs both artistic and mystic; it came complete with a ghost, whose visitations were yet another good reason to put off recording. The cast of this musical mystery experience included myself for some days; drummer Martin Atkins, younger, less tormented than Lydon and Levene, his bouncing presence let some air in; and a slight charmer nicknamed Shooz, aka the late guitarist Steve New. Years later, Shooz said he had been hiding from his transvestism; but then he shared Levene’s career-stunting fondness for smack, contributing to the general tension.
The waking hours, which mostly happened at night, were a tug-of-war between everyone’s chosen stimulants or deadeners. In those times, cocaine was non-existent and weed had not yet been genetically modified into its current monster testosterone THC; so we can blame the paranoia on the speed. Among other things. Lydon was well known for being paranoid; but then, sometimes they are out to get you, as life had shown him. That uncomfortable knowledge crawls through every bar of The Flowers of Romance. Has any other LP been dragged from its makers so slowly? The album is a breech delivery that needed forceps to scream its way into the world, those indentations on the skull, that bruising—you can hear it all.
Lydon’s Pistols experience was always tainted by the contempt of coulda-been father figure McLaren. Naturally, Lydon had been impressed at first with the worldly older man’s naughty charisma. Convinced that he had not only assembled the group, (which, in fairness, he had), McLaren also thought he had invented Lydon’s creativity. Wrong answer! Actually, McLaren had lucked out but did not appreciate Lydon, who was a true untapped performer and poet with his own concept of sound. This dismissiveness had caused Lydon to retrench and seek to surround himself with those he knew and trusted, in the new, equitable PiL model.
The old Pistols construct had become its own sort of prison, one which Sid Vicious had not escaped alive. The loss of Sid, known as Beverley when he befriended Lydon at college, could never really heal. And now, another key figure was also missing— banished, in fact: amiable bass player Jah Wobble, another longtime friend, whom Lydon had talked into learning to play because he wanted him around. Who knows what was in Wobble’s mind, but he felt entitled to use some PiL tapes for his own recordings, without discussion. Off with his head!
There was a garrison mentality. You were pro-PiL or not. If punk meant a tabula rasa, a clean slate, Lydon now found it necessary to re-make the slate. Without Wobble, a solution had to be found, and the fewer people that were let into the besieged inner decision-making core, the better.
Frankly, I benefited from their creative scramble. As a rock scribe, I had often covered Lydon, but having been an original Flying Lizard, the early ’80s experimental new-wavers, I was now invited to use PiL “down time.” (In the hours when the studio was not in use, I recorded my own indie 45, “Launderette/Private Armies,” which Lydon and Levene co-produced with me.) Did Lydon already suspect that the studio would often lie idle?
Lydon and I had first bonded over a shared passion for reggae bass. Bob Marley called the rickety liaison between the music of two oppressed tribes, black youth and white punks, the Punky Reggae Party. With the Rastas’ numbering of corrupt, controlling capitalist systems as Babylon, and Jamaican dub remixes shattering predictable reality, reggae was our religion.
Back then, I was a music journalist, often covering reggae. My interviews with artists like Big Youth and Dennis Brown sometimes happened at Lydon’s terrace house in Fulham’s Gunter Grove, where dub pumped through giant speakers and the session never stopped, a playground run on vampire hours. Apart from work, and even then, people mostly stirred when day bled into night. I doubt any of us had ever had that much space to cavort in before. For a while, we took over the asylum.
Hence my presence at The Manor. We lived in a topsy-turvy twilight zone. Rather than milking every precious moment of studio time, there was a lot of sulking and/or deep thinking going on with everyone alone in their bedrooms. Result being, for me anyway, that the glorious moment when I laid down my vocals for “Private Armies,” (on which both Levene and Shooz play,) was somewhat marred by the engineers’ annoyance. Having waited for hours—days?—for PiL, they were underwhelmed at Lydon thrusting me upon them. (It all worked out OK in the end!)
But bit by bit, The Flowers of Romance’s confrontational, epic tracks assembled, despite it all. A musician would wander in, play a riff, amble off, and another would show up, add another dimension to the fragment and so on. Lydon had reams of notes and could scribble down and deliver a new song fast, if the track moved him. Thus, the nine songs were assembled, a bit like a big communal jigsaw left out in the living-room. But two weeks at The Manor only produced one finished track: the ambient instrumental, “Hymie’s Him.” The rest of the rhythms were taken back to the city and molded at Virgin’s Townhouse Studios, in a somewhat more disciplined fashion
Yet even while PiL members were brooding alone in their rooms at The Manor, subconscious work had been done, wrestling with a metaphysical question: when your entire aesthetic has been rooted in bass culture, how to even make sound without it? Those still newfangled synthesizers were part of the answer when the album was completed. Levene almost invented the jagged, jangly post-punk guitar sound. Now he was testing digitized music, with his cumbersome Prophet synthesizer. When it came to music, Levene was fervent, obsessive. The key to The Flowers of Romance lies in his anguished cry, so loud I could hear it in the early hours in my bedroom next door, “I only want to make music like no-one has ever heard before! Or I can’t be fucked.”
Of course, that epic ambition has always meant tempting the gods, and Greek-wise, Levene—who left the band in 1983—was Sisyphus, doomed to keep pushing, not a boulder up a mountain, but a guitar or synthesizer’s sound, till the new is no longer novel and the cycle starts again.
Doom and how to deal with it is the message of The Flowers of Romance, which unsettles from the start: an itchy insect sound is swatted down with a harsh swipe of one drum, making the listener the mosquito, followed by Lydon’s startling muezzin-like wail. Disillusion and rejection infuse the title track, caught in this exquisite banality: “I sent you flowers/You wanted chocolates instead.” Attraction keeps tussling with repulsion, especially at women’s bodies in the primal scream of “Track 8.” Repulsion wins on “Go Back,” when PiL tackles the Babylon system that tries to make us all trot down one narrow track forever, led by debt and doubt :”Left/Right/Left/Right/Don’t look back/Take second best/Number one, protect self-interest/Here every day is a Monday…”
But the overall effect is not rage or despair. The music is on the attack. This was PiL fighting for existence, collective back against the wall. No wonder they felt almost paralyzed. How to top yourself, if your first band had become a global, culture-busting sensation; your own band’s first two studio albums—1978’s Public Image: First Issue and 1979’s Metal Box—were hailed as game-changers, crashing through the primitivism of punk to deepen the template for post-punk’s angular experimentation. Then the live official bootleg album from 1980, Paris Au Printemps, album got a severe backlashing from the press. PiL had to get its groove back.
The Flowers of Romance spat at their critics with intensity and twisted clarity. In “Phenagen,” Lydon stubbornly intones, “Empty promises help to forget/No more, no more/Repair the damages you made/Amen, amen, amen, amen.” He massacres the Mass as only a Catholic can, and the record’s pain might be a form of expiation, cathartic confession of damage done.
It’s an album that itches in its skin, restless for oblivion. Rather like punk’s perverse mode of communication—insult your best mates the most—Lydon’s lyrics at first appear misanthropic, certainly suspicious of other humanoids. But a doubly perverse flash of humanism nonetheless illuminates the work. To mess with our heads, Lydon offers us just enough light.
The remorseless “Banging the Door” shows this duality. It starts out curmudgeonly: “What do you want? You’re irritating, go away/It’s not my fault that you’re lonely.” Then Lydon bracingly concludes, “Why worry now? You’re not dead yet/You’ve got a whole lifetime to correct it/You’re wasting, admiring hating…”
The track reads more autobiographical than the rest. Against the world, PiL and cohorts would often ignore people pounding. With no security cameras or minders, they were wary. Lydon had often been beaten up in the street. More than once, he came home to find his apartment ransacked by the police Special Branch. He was a subversive rabble-rouser with Irish roots; IRA bombs were a regular menace; perhaps inevitably, some people and authorities projected their racism and/or security fears onto Lydon’s anti-leadership.
But for those that were there, “Banging the Door” will always be associated with the tempestuous early courtship between Lydon and his wife, the striking blonde German scene-maker, Nora Forster, mother of the late Ari Up, singer of the Slits. In retrospect, Lydon, who was quite a shy guy, might not have wanted to be seen as slushy in front of our fiercely cynical, free-thinking coterie. After all, “This Is Not a Love Song,” would be one of the band’s biggest hits two years later, in 1983. Yet the barbed bouquet of their stormy young relationship has lasted for almost half a century.
Which is a metaphor for the continued meaning of The Flowers of Romance today, for the mood of survival despite betrayal that it has bequeathed us. Come to that, it captures where we find ourselves now: all lurching through dark Babylon towards an uncertain future. But there is some light ahead, if we keep banging away. | 2018-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | May 6, 2018 | 9.3 | b0bd9ecb-7f24-4a2e-93f0-d8a000d3e730 | Vivien Goldman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vivien-goldman/ | |
David Cohn, aka Serengeti, and Open Mike Eagle have recorded a brief-but-deep hip-hop album under the name Cavanaugh. On it, "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence in a Florida mixed-income project, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike. | David Cohn, aka Serengeti, and Open Mike Eagle have recorded a brief-but-deep hip-hop album under the name Cavanaugh. On it, "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence in a Florida mixed-income project, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike. | Cavanaugh: Time & Materials | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21239-time-materials/ | Time & Materials | Michael Eagle and David Cohn knew each other years back as a couple fellow Southern Illinois University students. Both were interested in doing nervy hip-hop that rendered personal neuroses into allusive, bittersweet comedy (and vice-versa). They know each other now as transplanted Angelenos with deep mutual respect, a faithful cult fanbase, and a creativity-stoking environment of collective support—but those neuroses can still be hard to shake. They keep finding successful ways to exorcise those frustrations, cracking jokes and facades at the same time. Naturally, they'd have a lot to ricochet off each other, something that sporadic teamups only hinted at.
Time & Materials gives that dynamic a shot over the course of 26 short minutes, proving more than anything that there's more depth still left unexplored. The album's recorded under the name Cavanaugh, and the setting of this brief-but-deep album is intriguing, in a J.G. Ballard-via-The Coup kind of way: the inhabitants and social structures of a Florida mixed-income project featuring units for both luxury condos and subsidized housing tenants. "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike. And in the process, they channel the residents' class-war conflicts into their own combative moods, fueling their own stress over money, relationships, and an uncertain future that keeps them from being the assertive successes they want to be.
Time & Materials tackles sociological themes that would be sledgehammer-obvious in less-nuanced hands. But the duo draws you in by skimping on or misdirecting details. Serengeti disappears deeper into his lyrical role than Mike does—understandable from an MC who's been known to do half a live set in the guise of a cranky, bellowing 50-year-old. But for his first full-length production job, Mike sets a tone as raw-nerved and abrasively contemplative as the concept demands. A soupy drone on "Typecast" evokes the stress and sweat of the escape-seeking protagonists, including guest turns by P.O.S., Busdriver, and Future Islands' Sam Herring in his purposefully-awkward rap alter ego Hemlock Ernst. The creaking sludge of opening track "Zorak" underscores the TV-casualty free association of the lyrics.
The big drawback of the production's distorted, synthwave-on-codeine atmosphere is that it threatens to muffle the rewind-demanding intricacies of both MCs—Serengeti's motormouthed turns of run-on worldbuilding in particular get trickier to grasp. It's also not always clear whether the characters Mike and Serengeti inhabit are the maintenance guys or the people they cross paths with and intrude on by necessity. Of course, the larger question is whether they're really inhabiting or observing outside characters at all—"I" heavily outnumbers "you" and "they" in the whole narrative pronoun department, and the fraying seams of their own mind states stand out no matter who's being profiled. | 2015-11-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | November 19, 2015 | 7.2 | b0d24777-0091-4da7-8d2d-5685f7c812df | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The influential singer-songwriter returns after many years with a powerful album that mixes spoken word, folk, and blues over roughed-up sonics. | The influential singer-songwriter returns after many years with a powerful album that mixes spoken word, folk, and blues over roughed-up sonics. | Gil Scott-Heron: I'm New Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13893-im-new-here/ | I'm New Here | There were few voices that articulated the anxious, fractured state of America in the 1970s and early 80s as well as the clear baritone of Gil Scott-Heron. As a spoken-word artist and poet, he could pinpoint the fissures in the American dream and exorcise them with a wit that blended righteous anger and arch sarcasm. As a singer he could envelop those same uncomfortable confrontations in a rich, emotional tone that brought out the empathetic face of unrest. Yet except for a chorus cameo on Blackalicious' "First in Flight" and a memorable shout-out on LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", he was rarely heard or cited in the early years of America's great post-traumatic decade, even if his pained depiction of "a nation that just can't stand much more" in "Winter in America" rang as true in 2002 as it did in 1975.
Instead, Scott-Heron spent much of the 00s in and out of prison on drug charges, adding onto a long hiatus that saw him turn away from the record industry in favor of live performance and writing. Between 1983 and 2009, he released only one studio album, 1994's Spirits, so issuing his first in 16 years could've been rife with potential for a pent-up analysis of everything that's happened in the process of race relations and American culture over the last couple decades. Yet I'm New Here sees an incisive political voice turning inwards, not protesting the doings of the greater world but crafting a frank confessional over the state of his own. He does this allusively, through cover songs and short soundbite interludes and original compositions that feel like sparse flashes of a deep, once-dormant creative impulse. Yet it still feels honest, like something said out of necessity instead of opportunity, and the result is an album that engages with the idea of loneliness in exceptional ways.
I'm New Here is bookended with a two-part spoken-word track that sounds like a metatextual stunt: the quintessential hip-hop prototype discussing his upbringing over a loop of the intro to Kanye West's "Flashing Lights", returning the nod towards "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" that underpinned Late Registration's "My Way Home". But "On Coming From a Broken Home" is a powerful mission of purpose that sets the tone for the rest of the album, a reflection of his upbringing that made him the man he is today. "Broken Home" pays homage to the women in his family and the strengths they passed on to him; other interludes hint at darkly comic acknowledgements of wrongdoing, modest but defiant statements of enduring survival, and an admission that even his less desirable personality traits are an inseparable part of his identity.
Those brief interstitial statements link pieces of brain-wracked guilt and anxiety that rank as truly haunting moments: "Where Did the Night Go", a study in lonely insomnia and the inability to communicate with someone he loves, and the confession in "New York Is Killing Me" that the city that held him in an alienating grasp for so long-- "eight million people, and I didn't have a single friend"-- only makes him long for the home in Tennessee he left at 13 after his grandmother died. It's an interesting contrast to the sentiment of his 1976 song "New York City", where he sang of a metropolis he loved because it reminded him of himself. Either the personalities of the man and the city have diverged too much, or they've gotten too close for comfort.
But the most noticeable thing about Scott-Heron on this album to anyone familiar with his work is how worn his voice sounds. It's raspier and age-weathered, less agile, and occasionally prone to letting words slur and melt into each other instead of leaping out as they did back in the 70s. But Richard Russell, the album's producer and owner of XL Recordings, hit on the idea of recasting a man who came up through soul-jazz as a grizzled blues performer, and setting Scott-Heron against sandblasted folk and heavy, borderline-industrial beats augments the rawness of his voice well. Three songs reveal him as an adept interpreter of three generations' worth of roots music: Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" rendered as vintage Massive Attack, a minimalist, piano-driven orchestral reworking of the Brook Benton-written Bobby "Blue" Bland classic "I'll Take Care of You", and the unexpected but deftly claimed title track, sourced from Smog. And two spare, static-textured cuts late in the album, "Running" and "The Crutch", give his equally-gritty voice a fitting place in the post-Burial strain of bass music.
For an album that comes so far after its creator's last trip to the studio, it's a bit of a relief that the only cause for disappointment is its brief length. I'm New Here is less than half an hour, though in that short span it does the impressive job of reviving an artist that's been out of the spotlight far too long and setting him up for a new incarnation as an elder statesman of modern roots music. Comparisons have been made to what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash in the 90s, and the parallels are there: I'm New Here and American Recordings are both cover-heavy, starkly-produced releases where rebellious icons become reflective as they hit their sixties. If Gil Scott-Heron's creative resurgence continues after this reintroduction to his poignantly aging voice, we could be looking at one of the most memorably resurrected careers of our time-- a man renewed. | 2010-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | XL | February 10, 2010 | 8.5 | b0d4d030-a207-4724-be76-e49ee0167343 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On his latest album, None Shall Pass, Aesop Rock's most distinguishable characteristic, his relentless verbosity, shows no signs of slowing for anyone-- be it the mainstream, the uninitiated, or even fans who couldn't keep up with Bazooka Tooth. | On his latest album, None Shall Pass, Aesop Rock's most distinguishable characteristic, his relentless verbosity, shows no signs of slowing for anyone-- be it the mainstream, the uninitiated, or even fans who couldn't keep up with Bazooka Tooth. | Aesop Rock: None Shall Pass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10583-none-shall-pass/ | None Shall Pass | Aesop Rock's most distinguishable characteristic, his relentless verbosity, shows no signs of slowing-- for the mainstream, the uninitiated, or even fans who couldn't keep up with Bazooka Tooth. If anything, his lyrics are harder to follow now, and even with the 80-page lyric booklet from his last EP or the transcription of "Citronella" on his myspace, having the words spelled out for you doesn't mean it's going to be easy. When you've got a delivery this dense, all that's left for the confused or the impatient is the tracks, and the Definitive Jux roster has often (if not always) served particular tastes on that front. Luckily, Aesop Rock's latest album, None Shall Pass, is a diverse collection of beats-- from his classical-sampling comfort zone courtesy of the invaluable Blockhead, to looser more traditional hip-hop, to more than a few things we haven't heard him try before. None Shall Pass even throws in some laid-back rock riffs, some futuristic funk, a generous dash of psychedelia, and, of course, Aes' favorite ingredient: paranoia.
That isn't to say Aesop Rock has become impenetrable; that would imply he's no fun. He's got enthusiasm, enunciation, and even hooks this time: The "how alive/too alive" call-and-response from opener "Keep off the Lawn" is custom built for audience participation, and "Catacomb Kids" begs listeners to follow the bouncing ball even if you can't make out every young, suburban misadventure he wedges into the lyrics. The title track quickly steals the show here, however, a stunning shake-up in both beat and delivery in Aesop Rock's oeuvre.
"None Shall Pass" itself slides past on a near-disco beat layered with eerie, broken children's keyboards and ominous clean guitar that Aes wraps his words around nimbly and capably in a way old-school nods like "11:35" only hinted at. The atmosphere is grim, certainly, but with generous bounce and a wry grimace, and it's a microcosm for the vibe of the whole record in addition to being its best track. I often miss the Aesop Rock who strolled through the grimy back alleys of his city just looking for a story to tell on old tracks like "6B Panorama" and "Skip Town" (both from Float) but "None Shall Pass" is like a quick drive through the same city years later when it's become too dangerous for anything more than a glance out the window.
Abstraction is an easy screen, however, and you may not notice the dark co-dependency tale of "Fumes" move over the line from frank slice-of-drug-life narrative to insensitive and bitter through the hissing wet consonants of his delivery. Thankfully, it's overshadowed by songs that are straight-up playful: The bongo-augmented beat to "Bring Black Pluto" is a return to what Aesop and Blockhead do best, and while the connection between demoting Pluto as a planet and Pee Wee's Big Adventure are tenuous to me right now, anyone who fits in a reference to Large Marge and the eye of Cerberus in the same song surely earns extra points in heaven. Of course, there's guest spots from the Def Jux roster, and while Cage talks about his fucked-up childhood and El-P talks about his fucked-up adulthood, the former absolutely tears it over the irrepressible drumbeat of "Getaway Car", and El-P is still potent when he's just shouting a few choice words for a hook on "39 Thieves" and elevating"Gun for the Whole Family" amongst the record's often sluggish second half.*
*
None Shall Pass is a little longer than it needs to be; much as I like his slippery but assured flow on "Five Fingers", cutting everything from acidic groove of "Citronella" straight to closing track "Coffee" would have made the point just as easily. That final track is the biggest jump for Aes, with what's basically a live-band track of slippery bass and chiming guitar with shades of the Fixx, which he bounces merrily over. This is the one John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats guests on, and he serves as the sort of fat lady of the record: he speak-sings his strangely evocative verse in his pinched and equally distinctive voice, and then it's over. I applaud Aes' willing to experiment and his taste in songwriters, but it ends the record on an uncertain note, and sort of the wrong foot... that is, until you get to the hidden track, another seeming live track of gutbucket slide-guitar funk, once again darting sideways in the face of expectation.
What you can glean from a surface listening is an Aes who's still paranoid but almost loving it, grown somewhat bemused at the looming apocalypse. Part of the shine for None Shall Pass stems from goodwill earned by earlier albums that were more quotable and more focused, but another very large part is his artistic restlessness and his adaptable flow-- you know, the part that makes you want to listen to a record more than once. Beats-first, lyrics-second people have enough here to return to, and lyric freaks know there's plenty here to unpack. None Shall Pass is not a case to make him famous, but more a hyper-speed revision of what makes him worth following. Neophytes start elsewhere, but make sure to catch up at some point. | 2007-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-28T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | August 28, 2007 | 7.5 | b0d69406-fb9e-47cf-8bce-1991c30a0ef2 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
On the UK trio’s first LP for Kill Rock Stars, the band fleshes out its riot-grrrl-meets-girl-group sound with electronics and strings while singing of strength and vulnerability. | On the UK trio’s first LP for Kill Rock Stars, the band fleshes out its riot-grrrl-meets-girl-group sound with electronics and strings while singing of strength and vulnerability. | Big Joanie: Back Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-joanie-back-home/ | Back Home | UK trio Big Joanie make music that doubles as an act of resistance, drawing on riot grrrl’s raucous energy and ’60s girl-group harmonies to carve out space for Black feminist punks in London and beyond. Following the release of their debut, 2018’s fortifying Sistahs, vocalist and guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri, and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone signed to Kill Rock Stars in an ideal alignment of the planets; the influential Washington label’s catalog of underground punk rock is a lodestar for Big Joanie’s sparse, fuzzed-out style and DIY ethos. On Back Home, their first LP for the label, the band expands its palette with electronics and strings while focusing its lyrics on gaining strength through vulnerability, making for some of the trio’s best songwriting to date.
Back Home revolves around conceptions of home, whether in a domestic or psychological sense. The lilting ballad “Count to 10” loops tinkling Casio keys as Phillips sweetly weighs the pros and cons of nesting with someone: “I would like to come home with you/I know that you might be untrue,” she sings; “Take a chance/What else should I do?” On the grungy bruiser “Happier Still,” Phillips zeroes in on a way to get through the worst depressive episodes: “I feel happier/Happier/Happier still,” she repeats against pummeling power chords; “There’ll be no fear/No fear/No fear here.” The bellowed mantra grows increasingly invigorating as she wills herself toward peace of mind.
Once again working with producer Margo Broom, Big Joanie have augmented their sound for bigger stages, accompanying muscular riffs with modulating synths and atmospheric instrumentation. On the late-album standout “I Will,” Phillips aims piercingly for the heart over an electronic organ: “You build a house, you build a roof, you build a happy home,” she chants, keeping pace with Adeyeri’s melodic bassline. “You make it bigger, make it stronger for another soul/And if it doesn’t make it better it’ll fill a hole.” The band circles around Phillips’ voice, evoking a similar slow-burning build to its stripped-back 2020 cover of Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky.” The stuttering “Sainted,” meanwhile, pulls from darkly alluring ’80s synth pop; the unsteady drum machine beneath Phillips’ voice patters like a nervous heartbeat, giving the song a delectably gothic tinge.
Back Home’s lyrics are wry and loaded with self-reflection. “I always make the same mistakes/Don’t tell me I should learn from them,” chirp the backing vocals on the chugging “Taut.” The trio carries the same thread on “Today,” where swooning backing harmonies and violin (played by No Home’s Charlotte Valentine) bolster Phillips’ crooning, bittersweet appeals to know where she stands in a relationship. “Just let me know if I’m in the way,” she begs, lending further weight to an emotional haymaker.
On the dreamy centerpiece “In My Arms,” Big Joanie reach an anthemic high. “I’ve compromised too many times in my life,” Phillips insists, surrounded by backing harmonies and surf-rock guitar, “One day I’ll make the great escape/And send another you away/But now I dream/Of only you in my arms.” On the song’s reprise, the group slows the song down to a crawl with a thudding, Ronettes-style backbeat and feedback-heavy guitar, cushioning each yearning word in echo. Back Home provides heart-rending moments alongside its punk grit, expanding on Big Joanie’s sound without loosening their bite. | 2022-11-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Daydream Library Series / Kill Rock Stars | November 7, 2022 | 7.6 | b0d91fe1-6f5e-41a3-bb9e-f332d727c7ee | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
After a four-year absence, U2 are once again re-applying for the position of World's Biggest Rock Band with their brash, grungy 11th proper full-length (and 14th overall). | After a four-year absence, U2 are once again re-applying for the position of World's Biggest Rock Band with their brash, grungy 11th proper full-length (and 14th overall). | U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8330-how-to-dismantle-an-atomic-bomb/ | How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb | U2 has been crowned the biggest band in the world so many times that, at least conceptually, they've finally managed to transcend themselves, ditching their earthly digs and assuming cartoonish proportions. And that might be why the four silhouettes currently twitching across America's TV screens, jerkily promoting U2-branded iPods over big, neon expanses, seem so eerily apropos: the flesh and blood members of U2 have been reduced to signifiers, mock-ups, representatives. They are bigger than their band.
Produced by arena-guru Steve Lillywhite (with help from longtime twiddlers Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Flood), U2's 11th LP, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is brash, grungy, and loud-- everything R.E.M. tried (and failed) to be on Monster, and everything U2 opted out of being on 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind. Still, Atomic Bomb is not an especially surprising record. It's a classic mix of colossal ballads and jerky rockers-- part-The Unforgettable Fire, part-Achtung Baby. Theoretically, Atomic Bomb weds classic U2 (echoing guitars, big sound, soaring vocals) with nu-U2 (experimental tweaks, electronic flourishes) but, high aspirations aside, the only marriage the record ultimately achieves is the union of good U2 and bad U2. So take a deep breath and prepare for a tiny handful of outstanding tracks and a whole mess of schmaltzy filler.
U2 may be a staunchly democratic machine (ask Eno), but Bono is still singularly responsible for propelling U2-as-uber-group forward, leering out from behind oversized yellow goggles, crusading righteously to reduce Third World debt, campaigning against AIDS, spitting post-Beat induction speeches from Jann Wenner's Hall of Fame podium, bobbing stupidly for Apple, talking and talking and talking about himself. Publicly, U2 are overblown and decadent, sporting silly, abstract monikers and booking colossal stadium tours, calling presidents, wearing sunglasses in the dark, anchoring the Super Bowl, pushing products. Bono is 43 years old, boasts remarkable sway both inside and outside the pop culture sphere, and fronts one of the most universally recognizable rock bands of all time: He is a neo-superstar-- global, important, impossibly entertaining, and forever tiptoeing the line between wholly extraordinary and idiotically self-obsessed.
Despite a deliberately leading album title-- and one lone, overtly suggestive song title ("Love and Peace Or Else")-- How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is a curiously apolitical record, more about love and loyalty (and the 2001 death of Bono's father) than impending global doom. The decision to sidestep bold politicking and instead highlight feelings-and-guitars is a particularly compelling one right now, given the super-charged months preceding the record's release (and the melange of global conflicts now escalating to new levels of absurdity). Listeners are left wondering if Bono's elbows-deep international activism has somehow turned him off to the (comparably nebulous) effort of writing protest songs-- has all the dirt under his fingernails made the act of emoting into a microphone seem a little less urgent? "Saving the world is now a daily chore," Bono joked to The New York Times-- even in jest, it's a completely ridiculous thing to say. And yet?
Deliberately or not, Bono-as-bespectacled-celebrity-crusader seeps into nearly everything U2 does, sometimes to significant aesthetic effect: When Bono starts cawing urgently about a place called "Vertigo", declaring it "everything I wish I didn't know," it's possible that he's talking about girls or his father or his band-- or Bono might be squealing about something far worse, something awful, something most of us are lucky enough to have never witnessed. The problem is that it's extraordinarily difficult to ever really know exactly what Bono is talking about. Almost without exception, Bono yowls vague, cliched observations, his sentiments always awkwardly bombastic or hopelessly maudlin (check "Miracle Drug," where we are invited to ponder how "Freedom has a scent/ Like the top of a newborn baby's head," or "A Man and A Woman", where we contemplate "the mysterious distance between a man and a woman," or even just repeated-- seriously!-- "Where is the love?" demands.)
Loads of listeners have already noted that opener "Vertigo" bears an odd resemblance to The Supremes' gorgeously desperate "You Keep Me Hanging On", except "Vertigo" is framed by a classic punk shout-down where-- get this!-- Bono's totally singing in Spanish! Wait, he said catorce! It's a classic U2 moment: worldly, frantic, irritatingly deliberate. But when the Edge slams into his guitar, hollering a smirky "Hola!" to Bono's quasi-confrontational "Hello, hello!" it's awfully easy to forgive: "Vertigo" is hopelessly appealing, somehow growing less stupid and more compelling with each listen.
"Vertigo" is followed by a pair of swirly half-ballads, the plodding, overblown "Miracle Drug" and the super-sappy "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own", before we're mercifully handed "Love and Peace Or Else", a snarly, throbbing bit of solace. "Love and Peace" opens with a platter of ominous noise, shaky guitar grumbles rubbing up against high-pitched whines. Drums rumble, and Bono lodges his best semi-seductive demand: "Lay down, lay down." "Love and Peace" is chased by the equally exhilarating "City of Blinding Lights", an earnest and galactic fight song, and the sort of track that's best enjoyed in cars and airplanes, simply because it encites so much giddy movement. But "City of Blinding Lights" is the record's climax, and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb begins its gnawing descent almost immediately, culminating with disastrous closer "Yahweh", a whiny, monotonous mess that's easily one of the worst songs U2 have ever recorded.
Maybe the biggest problem with Atomic Bomb is just that it sounds so much like U2, and their semi-absurd, totally unparalleled ubiquity has left all of us just a tiny bit tired of listening to things that sound like U2. This isn't completely their fault-- they tried to change (see the questionable Zooropa or the disastrous Pop), and we didn't like that, either. Bono has talked publicly about U2's longevity and quasi-diversity, crediting their shape-shifting to his band's unbreakable internal bonds-- U2 can afford to mess around, because the "spirit" of the band is so strong, so infinitely recognizable. But maybe U2's immortality is also their biggest curse-- and now they're forced to wallow in superstardom, forever perpetuating their own colossal myth. | 2004-11-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-11-21T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 21, 2004 | 6.9 | b0e361ae-8c84-437d-a66b-0b46c3e30899 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Nike enlists James Murphy to craft an entry into its iTunes-only "Original Run" series, and the DFA leader turns out a 45-minute disco track. | Nike enlists James Murphy to craft an entry into its iTunes-only "Original Run" series, and the DFA leader turns out a 45-minute disco track. | LCD Soundsystem: 45:33 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9539-4533/ | 45:33 | Fucking working out. How I hate it. How I hate stepping out the door only to come back sweaty, vaguely pissed off, and not much more in shape. It's not that I don't have the gear: running shoes, iPod, neutral tee, the wherewithal to notice girls while praying the finish line was just a little closer. However, even with an array of devices and strategies, everyone knows that working out only works if you, uh, work. In short, there's no easy way out of stretching, running for half an hour, and stretching some more. I've heard it's all about your attitude. I also read somewhere that I should "just do it," but frankly, that always seemed like borderline-sarcastic taunting.
And now that LCD Soundsystem have sold out to the greatest American shoe company ever to co-opt popular culture, I really have no excuse. Okay, "sold out" is harsh, especially considering Nike's advertising and marketing track record: 1987's "Revolution" spot by Portland-based ad tycoons Wieden & Kennedy (who'd also worked with Lou Reed for Honda), the "Bo Knows" campaign of the late 80s, Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon wondering how MJ put so much height into his jump ("must be the shoes")-- at this point, they're less stealing from pop culture than contributing to it. And it doesn't hurt that these campaigns were wildly successful, so if James Murphy and company can condescend to the corporate ranks, far be it from me to cry foul.
Put simply, "45:33" (would that John Cage needed to shed those unsightly post-Columbus Day lbs.) is an original workout mix by LCDS. Commissioned by Nike and available at iTunes, the piece is purportedly based on "an arc designed for running," featuring new music by the band, pieced together like a DJ mix in a fashion that's apparently supposed to help me forget I'm hating life on the jogging trail. And somehow, it almost manages to do that. After taking it on a test run, I can attest that the music really does move forward similarly to my own metabolism, gradually building, holding a modest climax in the middle, and ending on a long, fluffy comedown. None of the music really qualifies as "songs," as there isn't much in the way of lyrics or big hooks beyond unobtrusive chants like "shame on you" or "no fun in space"-- though, as I see it, that's a plus for a running mix. There's nothing like being bogged down by music that demands too much attention while you're trying to exercise.
Things begin slowly with an unassuming analog synth line that gradually speeds up and introduces a hyper-tasteful, jazzy house piano line. A few minutes of building morphs the tune into DFA-flavored soft disco-rock, with Murphy's pronouncements, "You can't hide... your love away from me! Hey!" Subtly, the track is peppered with tambourine and a little extra kickdrum, and further morphs into a section I call "treadmill disco," crossing kinetic motorik and what sounds like the mechanical wheeze of exercise machines. When the bells enter with the melody, I start to wonder when this is going to be fleshed out for a new LCDS 12". That goes double for the following section, wherein Murphy opts for mid-tempo disco-funk (a la the first part of "Yeah"), eventually adding horns and the "no fun in space" refrain.
Things really take off at about the 28:30 mark with a horn break, and fast, glittery disco-rock that PAGING DFA PRODUCTIONS really should be expanded into a single. The cutting bassline and relentless, stone-faced pulse are almost perfectly tailored for the most active part of a workout-- although, even if you wouldn't come within a mile of a jogging trail on a bet, the hi-NRG is tough to deny. In fact, just when you might be ready for extra oxygen and an IV, the bottom falls into the first of two (!) cool-down sections, beginning with the "shimmering, harmonious tinkerbell cooing" section, followed by the merely "harmonious cooing" part. It's debatable whether or not a mixtape should be 20% comprised of the comedown, but then again, Nike is a big company: Never underestimate the unfit nature of the American consumer. In any case, my trial run ended with me all in one piece, and a lot of this music still in my head. Nice mix. | 2006-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | iTunes | October 20, 2006 | 8 | b0e3f18b-4b53-4c83-b2f1-a808cf9495c1 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 is the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—the Dance Mania label churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest. | Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 is the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—the Dance Mania label churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest. | Various Artists: Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18947-hardcore-traxx-dance-mania-records-1986-1997/ | Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 | Club music is easy to mock. Most people know someone skeptical or dismissive of it, a class clown-type who'll derisively mimic a cut by huffing "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" while goofily nodding his head. Heed this warning: Paul Johnson's "Feel My M.F. Bass" will be a boon to this person. Shrill and stone-stoopid, the song's refrain repeats as such: "Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face/ Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face." The rhythm, composed on a then-cheap, probably discarded drum machine, goes "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" except when it goes "unt-uhnt-uhnt-uhnt." The bass line sounds like...well, there is no bass line. But if you dropped this little chunk of rhythmic coal on the South or West side of Chicago in 1994, or if you drop it just about anywhere in Europe in 2014, people go wild.
"Feel My M.F. Bass" is a standout track from Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—Dance Mania churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest. The label was, essentially, primed to run as a modest small business: attract a dedicated, local following by using its paltry resources to shake as many asses as possible.
Ray Barney and Duane Buford started Dance Mania in 1985, running it through the 1990s. When Barney resurrected the label recently, he did it for the same reason he made so many of the choices that shaped Dance Mania: it seemed like a practical business decision. European DJs, it turned out, were paying hundreds of dollars for Dance Mania 12"s, and Barney had shelves full of unbought records in his basement.
This uptick in popularity found influential Russian DJ Nina Kraviz saying things like, "Sometimes I think that my only purpose of DJing is to play Dance Mania records!" to anyone who would listen. (Her loving, abstract ode to the label, "Ghetto Kraviz", was a smash.) Boysnoize curated a tribute album. When art-damaged misfit Actress toured America late in 2013, he brought Dance Mania mainstay Parris Mitchell with him. The label's earliest shoutout remains its biggest: "Teachers", Daft Punk's 1997 ode to their producer heroes not only namechecks many of Dance Mania's principals, it openly apes the Parris Mitchell Project's "Ghetto Shout Out!!"
The first third of Hardcore Traxx traces DM's early years, when it was releasing good but familiar first-wave Chicago house: diva-scorched anthems that implore you to jack your body and submit yourself to "house nation." After failing to land the type of European hit that buoyed peer labels like Traxx and DJ International, Barney—who, after college, helped turn his father's popular South side record store into a record distribution hub—leveraged his network of DJs to cater to the local market. Unable to afford studio time, Dance Mania producers recorded their tracks in their homes, often with little more than a drum machine and a sampler. The crass mantras needed not appeal to radio jocks and helped attract an audience increasingly interested in hip-hop.
Like garage rock or blues or any art that's trying to accomplish a lot with very little, a surprising amount of weirdness ensued. There's lots of grunting and wheezing on Hardcore Traxx; rappers sound like cartoons and MCs like carnal preachers. Dance Mania is a testament to the power of the riff. In the best DM tracks every single element functions as a hook: Uhn-chk-Uhn-chk-Ride-me-baby. Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.
For much of the 90s, DM's local focus shielded it from Europe's abandonment of first-wave American dance musics. The label just kept churning out tracks, eventually fostering ghetto house offshoots juke and footwork (footwork legends RP Boo and Traxman recorded for the label). Declining vinyl sales shuttered the label in 2001, but even that seems like a blessing. Dance Mania is one of the few early house labels to remain on good terms with most of its artists.
The success of ghetto house and Dance Mania was built on a really simple concept. You could hear Traxmen & Eric Martin's "Hit It from the Back" in a field rave in Wisconsin for the same reason you could hear it in a seedy Chicago club: it was (and still is) really good at making people grind their bodies against one another. The surge in popularity overseas no doubt stems in part from the fact that ghetto house is perhaps the only large American dance subgenre not to have been co-opted by Europe in the 1990s. But the local flavor—that of a neighborhood shop—persists. To hear "Ghetto Shout Out!!"'s call and response—"Cabrini-Green in this motherfucker? Hell yeah!"—is to hear how DM helped get off a lot of people who really, really needed to get off. And those who didn't need to get off, too. Say this about anyone who mocks "Feel my M.F. Bass": he will be feeling this lethally catchy, modestly conceived motherfucking bass in his face for days. | 2014-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Strut | February 11, 2014 | 8.5 | b0ee3e69-04f6-4404-a83f-7a84e124258b | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Rheia not only transforms the Belgian metal band's own abilities, but the breadth of the much heralded—and derided—black metal-shoegaze fusion. | Rheia not only transforms the Belgian metal band's own abilities, but the breadth of the much heralded—and derided—black metal-shoegaze fusion. | Oathbreaker: Rheia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22373-rheia/ | Rheia | A couple years ago, Belgium’s Oathbreaker were just another band that had some skill in merging shimmery melodies with blastbeats: an alluring and even comforting sound, if not the most original. In the three years between Eros|Anteros and their latest record, Rheia, they’ve expanded their scope without losing their rage. The album transforms their own abilities and the breadth of the much heralded—and derided—black metal-shoegaze fusion.
Unlike many of their peers, Oathbreaker play with a hardcore directness, and even their more melodic moments draw more from post-hardcore than Britpop or shoegaze. “Second Son of R.” and “Being Able to Feel Nothing” in particular are two of the most furious tracks the band’s ever recorded, blazing through and never losing momentum even when the pace settles down. Comparisons to Deafheaven are inevitable (they were labelmates at one point), and they’re not always accurate, but there’s no denying that the surging breakdown towards the end of “Immortals” is modeled after “Luna.” Oathbreaker make it their own by suggesting an ultimate payoff, only to cut off before ultimate ecstasy. They’re vicious with their metal, albeit more discerning with how it’s dished out.
Caro Tanghe’s vocals are where Oathbreaker really distinguish themselves, and it’s her awakening in particular where Rheia makes the biggest leap. She can scream her ass off, no question, but she’s able to lead the band by changing her tone. “Nothing” relies more on her choral sensibilities, which never make the rest of the band feel bloated or frilly. The acoustic refrain “Stay Here / Accroche-Moi” sees her taking on a ghost-country approach: She slyly suggests pain that she’s more explicit about elsewhere. And even her screaming is varied—the end of “Second Son” is a constantly escalating hysteria, different from her more straightforward attack most of the time. By not defaulting on a raspy yell all the time, she fills in the band’s softer sections, which would be awkward with merely a hushed screech.
“Needles in Your Skin” is Oathbreaker at their most dynamic, and makes for the album's centerpiece. It skews the “loud-soft” formula of post-black metal; Tanghe howling over clean guitar isn’t any less of a force than the full-on black metal blast that follows. In the middle, the band transitions to a hardcore chug, and layered under Tanghe’s hopeless mantra, “How could you go without me?” her desperation shines through. It’s simply devastating. Tanghe makes such a simple question, one we’ve all asked, harrowing in its relatable power.
On Rheia’s second half, Oathbreaker break down structures even further, sometimes drifting away from metal altogether. “I’m Sorry, This Is” ushers in the shift, where the unease comes not from the guitar but from the wordless voices of Tanghe and added field recordings. It knocks “Where I Live” off its axis, making the raging black metal tempos that the album’s built on seem alien. “Begeerte” closes the record with airy vocals and submerged industrial drums, like Triptykon’s “My Pain” minus the goth-metal schmaltz. It’s an unsettling counterpart to intro “10:56,” which features Tanghe at her most soothing. “Begeerte” is different enough to where calling it and “10:56” bookends isn’t quite right. It’s more akin to returning to your hometown after a devastating disaster—or a devastating exposure to life outside it. Rheia never really returns home, and that’s the point. It’s meant to capture how our bodies fail us and the wandering nightmares that result with no neat resolution.
While still fairly beholden to black metal, Rheia shares a core ideal with Cobalt’s Slow Forever and Deafheaven’s New Bermuda: They broke out of black metal’s stylistic confines, using it as a launching pad more than a set of totalitarian marching orders, and in the process became emotive, powerful metal albums. Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound. It’s not that genre records don’t hold their own power; it’s that an album like Rheia can do so much more by crossing and uniting several paths. | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Deathwish | October 4, 2016 | 7.8 | b0ef8441-376b-4965-9c86-0eebfc2b738d | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The soulful and enigmatic UK singer Jamie Woon brought the textures of the post-dubstep UK bass scene into his sophisticated debut Mirrorwriting. It got lost in the clamor around peers like Jessie Ware and James Blake. Now, on Making Time, he's pared away his music to focus on his stunning voice. | The soulful and enigmatic UK singer Jamie Woon brought the textures of the post-dubstep UK bass scene into his sophisticated debut Mirrorwriting. It got lost in the clamor around peers like Jessie Ware and James Blake. Now, on Making Time, he's pared away his music to focus on his stunning voice. | Jamie Woon: Making Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21163-making-time/ | Making Time | A classic singer-songwriter never goes out of style. The soulful and enigmatic crooner Jamie Woon rediscovered this in the four long years between his charming-but-uneven debut album, Mirrorwriting, and the release of his second, Making Time. Rising with a fresh crop of UK-based, slightly experimental vocalists and collaborators in the London bass music scene (think Jessie Ware, James Blake, and Sampha), Woon’s debut produced sophisticated music that ultimately failed to catch on as strongly as his contemporaries.
Like many artists in his position, Woon could have become a victim of the time, a footnote to a rising scene. But Woon took the opportunity to realign with his musical origins. In a 2011 interview with BBC, Woon said "At the heart of what I do is R&B; it’s groove-based vocal-led music." On Mirrorwriting that "R&B" was partially obscured in production atmospherics, but Making Time exhibits a renewed focus. The album sounds loose and organic, revealing layers of precision in the production and recording on repeated listens.
Inspired by D'Angelo’s Voodoo, Woon was interested in recording with a live band in the room for Making Time, a far cry from the electronic-roots of his debut. "My starting point was that I wanted to hear a funky rhythm section," Woon offered to Pharrell Williams in an interview on Beats 1. Mirrorwriting was distinguished in part by collaborations with revolutionary musician and producer Will Bevan (otherwise known as Burial), but Making Time reduces songs to their core elements: a perfect harmony, strong melodies, and a crooning voice that is unlike any other.
Woon's vocals are rare and stunning, the kind of sound that washes over its listeners, and no synths or heavy-handed production is needed to make that effect possible. The instruments here play supporting roles. "Movement" transforms halfway through its length into a groovy, throwback jam, and the slinky, snake-like bass guitar cocoons Woon’s voice without overpowering it. Later the horns gradually stomp in. Their sound is elastic and ominous, pushing and pulling against the light fluidity of Woon’s ad-libs. And on "Sharpness", the album’s lead single, the bass pops in and out of the song just as much as the steady drums. The result shouldn’t surprise, but still does.
Channeling pieces of piano jazz and folk as well as R&B, Making Time feels philosophically similar to Jessie Ware’s restrained 2014 sophomore effort, Tough Love. Many described the work as "adult contemporary"—an insult, if not entirely untrue. But that sort of designation fails to engage with the work at hand, lumping it all together. And while it never hit as hard as "Running" on Ware’s debut, songs like "Kind Of … Sometimes … Maybe" and "Champagne Kisses" offered surprises brimming underneath the surface. It’s smart music that doesn’t beat you over the head with its intelligence. If Woon’s last album was an attempt to incorporate the contemporary sounds he favored at the time, this current album is a testament to the strength of traditional music composition: simple guitars, slinky bass lines, and sophisticated songwriting. Woon has, from the start, been his strongest when he lets his voice say everything that’s necessary. This might come across as traditionalist, but that is OK. With songs this good, little else needs to be said. | 2015-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor / PMR | November 17, 2015 | 7.4 | b0fd6c04-4dfe-4422-983c-eec1a39f5ef4 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
With their signature 10-ton riffs and glacial tempos, few bands do what YOB do-- marry Black Sabbath's heavy and psychedelic sides. | With their signature 10-ton riffs and glacial tempos, few bands do what YOB do-- marry Black Sabbath's heavy and psychedelic sides. | YOB: The Great Cessation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13327-the-great-cessation/ | The Great Cessation | Infinite shades of black exist even within metal subgenres. "Doom metal," for example, has diversified so much that the term doesn't mean much beyond down-tuned guitars and slow tempos. The tree from which all doom (and metal in general) springs is Black Sabbath. Sabbath lead to the bluesy stylings of "stoner doom" of Sleep and Electric Wizard. The doom tree also has stranger branches-- "death doom" (death metal + doom metal) hybrids like Coffins and Hooded Menace; "sludge doom" like Eyehategod and Sourvein from the American South; the astral density of the UK's Esoteric; grandfather clock bongs a thousand years wide from their compatriots Moss.
Oregon's YOB have carved out a niche of "cosmic doom," which is a descriptor, not a subgenre. Few bands do what YOB do-- marry Black Sabbath's heavy and psychedelic sides. Sabbath did both equally well. But when they wheeled out acoustic guitars and bongo drums, they were just taking a break. YOB keep the pressure up, driving riffs into subterranean depths, yet sending melodies spiraling skyward. 2005's The Unreal Never Lived perfected such duality. It found the intersection among roaring guitars, yoga class, black light dreams, and white light ecstasy. Black Sabbath with Dio as singer changed their name to Heaven and Hell for legal reasons. Had they followed through sonically, YOB might have resulted.
YOB's discography is variations on this theme-- again, shades of black. The band is mostly a one-man project by singer/guitarist Mike Scheidt, with different rhythm sections over the years. Even a detour in 2007 as Middian was YOB-like, with more diverse speeds and tones. Middian lasted only one album due to a trademark dispute with Wisconsin metal band Midian. The lawsuit took a lot out of Scheidt, both financially and personally.
The Great Cessation perhaps reflects this. It has YOB's signature 10-ton riffs and glacial tempos. But their delivery is more vulnerable now. The band sounds a little weary. Scheidt's Dave Mustaine-esque wail is ragged and desperate. The theme of damaged vision recurs throughout: "burning eyes brim with tears"; "thorn in the eye, gods that are blind"; "tears of lead"; "eyes like magnets." At one point, "The Lie That Is Sin" breaks down to a single, naked guitar. Of course, it builds back up to surging peaks. But the attack is no longer a galactic wall of sound. Sanford Parker's production is partly responsible. It's more rock and less metal. The tones are darker and leaner than before. All this makes for a surprisingly human YOB record. Before, the band strode on astral planes. Now heaven and hell are closer to earth. | 2009-07-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-07-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | July 17, 2009 | 7 | b100216d-9c43-4ff4-86ca-386d89332b77 | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
Keeping one foot in grindcore while the other plays a game of Twister with electronics, noise, and feints at jazz, Ottawa's Fuck the Facts have created their heaviest album yet. | Keeping one foot in grindcore while the other plays a game of Twister with electronics, noise, and feints at jazz, Ottawa's Fuck the Facts have created their heaviest album yet. | Fuck the Facts: Disgorge Mexico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12392-disgorge-mexico/ | Disgorge Mexico | As their name implies, Fuck the Facts can be hard to grasp. (Even Amazon is conflicted about whether to spell the band's name with the full expletive.) Their moniker comes from a Naked City song, and the band is similarly freewheeling. One foot stays in grindcore, but the other plays a game of Twister with electronics, noise, and feints at jazz. Over the band's 10-year history, it has amassed an astonishingly lengthy discography comprising dozens of splits, singles, EPs, and full-lengths. With a revolving door of personnel totaling eight ex-members, the band's sound has mutated in an ad hoc fashion. Current vocalist Mel Mongeon, a woman with a man's growl, and increasingly powerful production have stabilized the band somewhat; 2006's Stigmata High-Five was merely spastic in comparison to previous epileptic leanings.
Disgorge Mexico was written during a two-week road trip from the band's native Canada to Mexico. The title comes from a Mexican death metal band, but it also describes the record's creation. Burnt out after the road trip, the band went on hiatus and left the album unfinished. Gradually, after months of personal issues, they reconstituted themselves. The result reflects the angst and uncertainty of that time. Mongeon's lyrics and album artwork are rife with images of construction and destruction: "The entire walls were built with sand bricks/ As everything piled up, the architect was left drained." Related are themes of betrayal and refuge denied: "How could it be?/ The same hands that gave peace and shelter to the ones that they are about to destroy." Mongeon isn't slave to her printed lyrics, often glossing over lines to emphasize crucial words rhythmically. Sound is the weapon; text is simply its icing.
Fittingly, Mongeon's bandmates wrap her in walls of dread. The production is monstrous, and Fuck the Facts now sound like they are exploding instead of imploding. "No Return" careens through hairpin turns; "Dead End" bulldozes like a slowed-down Slayer. Electronic dalliances are at a minimum here; big riffs are not. This is the heaviest Fuck the Facts have ever been, which suits Mongeon's buckets of black paint. "Driving Through Fallen Cities" glints with Metallica-esque clean tones, complete with melodic solo, then drops into "La Culture du Faux", a doomy soundtrack for end times. "The Storm" is an exhilarating steeplechase through anthemic melodies, chugging hardcore punk riffs, and a limber jazzy break. While such diversity is not new for Fuck the Facts, it now comes in a huge metallic exoskeleton. It's scary because it's scared, a nightmare amplified and multi-tracked. Instead of slipping through fingers, Fuck the Facts now engulf. | 2008-11-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2008-11-07T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | November 7, 2008 | 8 | b1016157-5684-4f84-ac48-dbdd1a20262b | Cosmo Lee | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cosmo-lee/ | null |
The experimental guitarist’s latest piece thrives on tension—between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix. | The experimental guitarist’s latest piece thrives on tension—between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix. | Oren Ambarchi: Shebang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oren-ambarchi-shebang/ | Shebang | As a composer, Oren Ambarchi tends to think like a drummer. That’s what he started out as, before an encounter with the noise titan Keiji Haino inspired him to pick up the guitar. For the past decade, most of the Australian musician’s solo recordings—which are in fact often densely collaborative affairs—have been headlong tumbles into spirals of texture and groove. The first of these pieces was “Knots,” the 33-minute centerpiece of 2012’s Audience of One: He began by asking drummer Joe Talia to play an extended sequence in the style of legendary jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette, then recorded himself in conversation with Talia’s playing, laying down cascades of feedback. Over the years, “Knots”—which he and Talia debuted on the 2011 live album Hit & Run—has continued to unspool, yielding two live albums (one with orchestra) and supplying the flexible backbone of virtually all his longform studio work. Quixotism, Hubris, Simian Angel, and now Shebang have all been modeled after its sprawl.
Listening to duo recordings of “Knots,” it can be hard to imagine that there are just two people involved; Ambarchi’s playing, assisted by digital effects, sounds bigger and unrulier than anything you might expect to hear coming out of a single instrument. On his subsequent albums, meanwhile, he is everywhere and nowhere at once: Disappearing into the producer’s role, he wrings a carefully distilled chug out of the most unwieldy virtual ensembles. Between 2014’s Quixotism and 2016’s Hubris, his collaborators have included minimal-techno producers Thomas Brinkmann and Ricardo Villalobos, improvising pianist John Tilbury, tabla player U-zhaan, computer-music number-cruncher Mark Fell, and guitarist Arto Lindsay, whose work spans no wave, jazz, and Brazilian music. It can be hard to believe that these albums were collaged together from multiple sessions and players scattered around the globe; there’s a real live-in-the-room feel to their shape-shifting permutations. That’s particularly true of Shebang, Ambarchi’s most ambitious and absorbing piece to date.
In keeping with Ambarchi’s predilection for longform works, the 35-minute Shebang is a single composition divided into four parts that seamlessly fuse together. Part I begins with Ambarchi—credited on “guitars and whatnot”—playing a chiming melody so simple it could almost be a nursery rhyme. Bright, consonant notes glisten like dewdrops, and over the first couple of minutes, contrapuntal lines multiply, like a spiderweb revealing itself in the path of the morning sun. But even at the outset, the guitar’s burbling accidentals offer cause for curiosity; there’s some kind of digital trickery afoot, even though its precise nature is unclear.
Shebang thrives on tension—between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix. The piece reaches its first climax some five minutes in, as Ambarchi’s percolating guitar is engulfed in a cloud of almost Stereolab-like ahhhhs. Paring back the thicket of guitars, a Hammond-like thrumming rises from below; steady cymbal taps announce the arrival of Talia’s drums. Then the soundfield stretches and smears as Sam Dunscombe’s bleating bass clarinet tugs against a snare flam, and dissonance leeches into the background, suggesting a momentary flash of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock.
A succession of players each gets time in the spotlight. In part II, pedal-steel player BJ Cole—a session veteran whose credits include Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” as well as records with T. Rex, Cat Stevens, and Björk—paints on a slow, patient melody that drifts untethered to Talia’s stuttering groove, whose brisk hits and wandering pulses mirror the pointillism of Ambarchi’s playing. Part III belongs to pianist Chris Abrahams, of Australian improvising trio the Necks: While Ambarchi’s frequent collaborator Johan Berthling sketches out a dub-techno bassline on upright bass, Abrahams lays down staccato chords with his left hand and lights into a ruminative, searching solo with his right. Finally, in part IV, Julia Reidy turns their 12-string guitar into a fistful of icicles, emphasizing the brittleness of Shebang’s 16th-note groove. It’s anyone’s guess what else is going on in the finale, as the sound thickens and churns; Abrahams’ piano is in there somewhere, along with Cole’s pedal steel, both a liquid presence presaging the melting tones of Jim O’Rourke’s synthesizer in the minute-long denouement.
On a measure-by-measure level, Shebang is an embarrassment of riches. Talia’s supple clockworks suggest that he’s a machine made of flesh; O’Rourke’s playing, however brief, is so expressive you could build an entire album around it. But as gripping as any solo highlights may be, they’re always folded back into the whole. The evolution of the piece is so gradual that it may come as a shock to realize that the opening section is in a completely different key than the bulk of the piece. The groove is endless, the focus constantly shifting. Even when Ambarchi’s instrument is hard to pick out, his vision is unmistakable. He once described his interest in the pursuit of “sound as a landscape”; on Shebang, armed with a kaleidoscope in place of binoculars, he takes us further into the wilderness than ever before. | 2022-10-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | October 4, 2022 | 8.1 | b103aced-f3fe-48e6-99d6-5e672cd89f81 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
R.E.M.'s pivotal 1986 album is remastered and reissued with an intriguing bonus disc of full-band demos. | R.E.M.'s pivotal 1986 album is remastered and reissued with an intriguing bonus disc of full-band demos. | R.E.M.: Lifes Rich Pageant (25th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15625-lifes-rich-pageant-25th-anniversary-edition/ | Lifes Rich Pageant (25th Anniversary Edition) | The cover of Lifes Rich Pageant features the handsome forehead and full eyebrows of drummer Bill Berry, whose face is cut off at the nose by a low-contrast picture of two buffalo. It's a curious image, embedded with a Buffalo Bill pun, and it playfully nods to the band's refusal to practice expected music-industry behaviors like appearing prominently on their album covers, lip-syncing in videos, writing love songs, or generally revealing too much of themselves beyond the music. Even four albums into their career, they still cultivated an enigmatic presence on Lifes Rich Pageant, starting with that cover and extending to the dropped apostrophe in that title and the mismatched tracklists. Furthermore, the mysterious painted figures and roughly sketched symbols in the liner notes presented the album as something more akin to folk art than folk rock.
In direct conflict with that visual impression, Lifes Rich Pageant was R.E.M.'s most pop-oriented and accessible album up to that point. Recording frequently and touring almost constantly, the band had been nurturing a grassroots audience throughout the early 1980s, and Pageant is a pivotal album in their career, representing the moment when their Southern post-punk sound anticipated larger venues and began expanding to fill those spaces. It was also, strangely, their most overtly political collection, with songs addressing environmental crises and political malaise. Rather than sounding sanctimonious, however, such dissent energized R.E.M. and injected more pep into Berry's drumbeats, more incisive jangle into Peter Buck's guitar, and more charisma into Michael Stipe's performance. The album barrels along in just over 30 minutes, lending the songs a sense of purpose. This is music that has to be somewhere.
Lifes is celebratory rather than commiserative, with tense tempos fueling heraldic choruses and shout-outs to Woody Guthrie ("Cuyahoga") and Cole Porter ("Begin the Begin"). Stipe's lyrical dodginess, such a formidable weapon on previous albums, allows the band to come at these issues from obscure angles: With its rousing chorus and pensive bass line, "Cuyahoga" mails postcard dispatches from a museum where rivers and plains are artifacts, consigned to diorama and memory rather than reality. "Fall on Me" mixes spiritual and consumerist language to deliver a knotted ecological message that takes some unpacking: "Buy the sky and sell the sky," Stipe sings, then changes the Wall Street phrasing: "Lift your arms up to the sky. Ask the sky and ask the sky, don't fall on me."
Maybe that's why the band chose to close with Mike Mills-sung cover of the Clique's "Superman". Seemingly out of place on such a serious-minded album and certainly jarring after the Civil War fever dream of "Swan Swan H", it's been derided as R.E.M. at their most superfluous. But that's how they must have felt at the time-- like supermen taking on the world's problems and finding they had unknown powers. In that regard, they're aided significantly by producer Don Gehman, who was then famous for helming John Cougar's early albums. Who knew that Gehman would handle R.E.M. better than folk-rock legend Joe Boyd, who nearly made a muddle of their previous album, Fables of the Reconstruction? In addition to giving the melodic leads their own space, he emphasizes the muscle in Berry's beats and the intricate interaction between the rhythm section. No wonder the drummer's on the album cover: Berry's responsible for the furious pace of the album and enables its abrupt detours into salsa and Nuggets pop.
That dynamic makes the remaster on this 25th anniversary reissue sound even livelier and warmer, reinforcing the balance between excitement and gravity that illuminates these songs. It also makes the second disc of demos all the more intriguing, presenting these familiar songs in their most skeletal format. The small flourishes that didn't make the studio versions sound charmingly off-handed: Stipe hums most of "I Believe", then punctuates the end with a sing-songy la-la-la. He tries out a harmonica solo on an early version of "Bad Day", then uses the instrument to cover for forgotten lyrics. This is R.E.M. at their most ramshackle, a vibe that makes Dead Letter Office a fan favorite even today.
Lifes is R.E.M.'s first transition album, one that builds on the innovations of their early releases while hinting at the territory they would cover on Document and Green. It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later. | 2011-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol / IRS | July 13, 2011 | 8.8 | b104f35b-e03e-4e67-a8e4-53e682cd0966 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
This electronic collaboration pairs Dylan Carlson of pioneering drone metal band Earth with UK producer the Bug. It’s one man’s sprawling open space versus another’s sonic claustrophobia. | This electronic collaboration pairs Dylan Carlson of pioneering drone metal band Earth with UK producer the Bug. It’s one man’s sprawling open space versus another’s sonic claustrophobia. | The Bug Vs Earth: Concrete Desert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23031-concrete-desert/ | Concrete Desert | Despite the similarities between noise and heavy music, the pairing of the Bug’s Kevin Martin and Earth’s Dylan Carlson still makes for a bit of a curious contrast. The UK-born Martin traffics in chest-compressing beats, drawing on a lineage spanning from dancehall through grime and dubstep. Earth, meanwhile, is a Washington state doom band that trudges with an ambient, codeine-hazed pace. In other words, this electronic collaboration, Concrete Desert, is one man’s looming sonic claustrophobia versus another’s sprawling open space.
But dig into the nuances of their catalogs—like the sparse first-half of the Bug’s 2014 album Angels & Devils, or the low-end of Earth’s heatstruck churn on that year’s Primitive and Deadly—and it begins to make sense. Forget genre or even structure: Martin and Carlson value pressure. They revel in the attack and release of slow-building drone grooves and the contrast between thumping bass and a floating tempo. Concrete Desert sees them finding common ground, though there’s more debt to minimal, tense electronic music than dust-bleached rock. The beats themselves are sparer than most of what you’d expect from a producer like Martin, who is so steeped in dance, and Carlson adds a pensive quality, showing what Martin can build when he makes music to stop moving to.
Concrete Desert leaves space for the sounds to sink in, and you can really absorb the individual qualities of both artists. The album feels crucially airy—not breezy, but rather a stinging dry heat. A few songs let booming basslines take on the role of Carlson’s droning riffs, or echo them, like the tense “Snakes Vs Rats.” Given room to wander, the feedback and reverb become instruments themselves. Lower frequencies heave like rusted cellos on “Broke.” And a decayed quality brings out the static in the beats on “Don’t Walk These Streets” and “Hell A.” When the songs really take advantage of the record’s dynamic—ambient contemplation jolted by a rattling bassline or scalpel-jab guitar strum—the idea of this music as a doom-metal dubplate sinks in. On a track like “Agoraphobia,” the lowrider subs are laced with guitar echo, and it feels less like a meeting of bass music and drone and more like bass music as drone.
If the album’s title weren’t enough, Martin has stated that Concrete Desert is a specifically Los Angeles kind of album, and not just because it was recorded there, in Daddy Kev’s studio with DJ Nobody at the console. Even if all the words are in the titles—“Gasoline,” “City of Fallen Angels,” “Other Side of the World”—the music itself is laden with a Brit’s half-awed, outsider take on L.A. It feels a bit like the sonic equivalent to English punk iconoclast Alex Cox turning to the grimier outlying regions of L.A. to depict a lawless and unpredictable concrete landscape in 1984’s Repo Man. (Concrete Desert’s spiritual resemblance to the film’s score doesn't hurt, either.) It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam. | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ninja Tune | March 22, 2017 | 7.4 | b107e14f-9cc7-490d-b83e-e72ede73b4fd | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Pittsburgh band’s throwback emo revivalism casts a hometown identity crisis in the harsh light of climate change. Their debut has the conceptual heft of an album twice its length. | The Pittsburgh band’s throwback emo revivalism casts a hometown identity crisis in the harsh light of climate change. Their debut has the conceptual heft of an album twice its length. | Short Fictions: Fates Worse Than Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/short-fictions-fates-worse-than-death/ | Fates Worse Than Death | In the public eye, Pittsburgh may forever be the “home of the Steelers,” the embodiment of a bygone blue-collar economy weaponized in Bruce Springsteen songs and MAGA agitprop alike. If that’s the case, its reputation hasn’t caught up to reality: It’s a meds-and-ed mecca where the gentrification rate compares to San Francisco, Denver, or Austin—fast enough that a young band like Short Fictions can look back on 2014 with nostalgia. “The kids in Oakland have such joie de vivre and it makes me sad because all I ever think about is dying and everything that I love in Pittsburgh is quickly vanishing or getting gentrified,” Sam Treber sings deep into the band’s debut full-length, Fates Worse Than Death, which, like Greta Thunberg playing a round of “This City’s Makin’-a-Comeback!” bingo, casts their hometown’s identity crisis in the harsh light of irreversible climate change.
“Think globally, act locally” is Short Fictions’ ethos on a political and musical level. Fates Worse Than Death is essentially emo-revival revival, a throwback to the turn-of-the-decade moment when DIY emo became too ambitious to be confined to basements across the Keystone State. Just count them among the growing number of bands for whom Whenever, If Ever might as well be Sgt. Pepper’s. Treber’s vocals are immediately reminiscent of either of TWIABP’s leads, somehow both pointed and rubbery like a sour AirHeads candy, occasionally balanced by Alex Barkeley’s harmonies or a random scream. There are trumpets, tubas, glockenspiels, and spoken-word interludes; guitars that draw equally from college rock, post-hardcore, and band camp (not Bandcamp) emo and twee; and lyrical Easter eggs that span Pittsburgh’s cultural legacy from Mr. Rogers to Code Orange.
If the familiarity of Fates Worth Than Death is the immediate draw, it also can border on a liability. “Property of Pigeons” begins with a telltale drumroll leading to an ascending twinkle riff so reminiscent of “Never Meant,” it has to be an inside joke—which would explain why they spend the rest of the song pummeling it with metallic guitar chokes and d-beat drumming. But Short Fictions evade mimicry by internalizing the most important aspect of their influences—an exploratory approach to arrangement and song structure that lends a record just shy of a half hour the conceptual heft of one twice its length. On the fantastically titled opener, “Fates Worse Than Death Pt I: I Don't Want to Wait Out the Apocalypse With Anyone But You,” Treber longs for the voice of an ex or a neighborhood that he loved just as futilely. “I’d hear it sing through apartment walls/Niagara Street, South Oakland, Pittsburgh, 2014,” he wails, before his own voice is replaced by that of an old-fashioned newscaster warning of 110-degree temperatures and “more of the same, only hotter” tomorrow.
The twisty nature of Fates Worse Than Death aligns with the band’s ambivalence over whether to muster the motivation to change the present, hope for annihilation, or maybe pull a Doctor Manhattan, living forever just to look upon humanity with distant scorn. “You should only write songs about girls and your friends,” Treber mocks on “Nothingness Lies Coiled at the Heart of Being (It’s Such a Good Feeling).” The ensuing “Really Like You” does exactly that, constructing a sweet-and-sour homage to Los Campesinos! that solidifies their bid to be grandfathered into modern emo. The pop efficiency of “Really Like You” initially feels like an outlier, rather than the centerpiece that grounds Short Fictions’ apocalyptic visions. Yet sincerity carries the day. Towards the end of the album, the band yelps together, “I’m a liar and I’m a hoarder, I love every brick and mortar in this house/And we built this home together, I could live here for forever/I’ll have money when I get older and I can love again.” The fleeting optimism is countered by the song title—“Living in Places Like These Can Be Bad For Your Health (Can’t Live Here Anymore)”—but it’s still a love letter to Pittsburgh, the people in it and those getting pushed out, who can’t live here anymore but have nowhere else to go. | 2020-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Acrobat Unstable | January 2, 2020 | 7.6 | b10c4405-6f47-4eab-b993-4aee3b60ef08 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The debut album from Yorkshire house producer Ewan Smith is a collection of daydreamy mood pieces. Stepping up the sound design, these melancholy tracks highlight Smith’s expressive sensibility. | The debut album from Yorkshire house producer Ewan Smith is a collection of daydreamy mood pieces. Stepping up the sound design, these melancholy tracks highlight Smith’s expressive sensibility. | Youandewan: There Is No Right Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22410-there-is-no-right-time/ | There Is No Right Time | Ewan Smith’s style of house music often seems to belong to everywhere and nowhere at once. Smith—aka Youandewan—hails from Yorkshire but is based, like so many of his peers, in Berlin, and his productions mirror the way that the house and techno of the 21st century have long since pulled up stakes. It’s not that there are no longer any local signatures in dance music, but they don’t tend to stay in one place for long. Sounds dreamed up in one place soon slosh back and forth between cities and scenes like volatile ocean currents.
Since he began putting out records in 2009, Youandewan’s music has variously shown the influence of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Berlin, Bristol, and London, along with his native north of England. Moodymann’s fogged-up sample soul; Phuture’s wriggly 303s; the Burrell Brothers’ cool pads—you can hear all of those vintage elements darting through Smith’s tunes. He also draws on more contemporary sounds: Levon Vincent’s scuffed reductions, skipping grooves indebted to UK garage and Thomas Melchior, and the airy vocals that have decorated so much UK bass ever since “Hyph Mngo.” Sometimes it seems that he’s not simply absorbing these influences, but reverse-engineering them: Just compare N.Y. House’n Authority’s classic 1989 tune “Apt 3A” with Youandewan’s “Alright Son,” from 2014, which blurs the line between homage and cover version. At its best, though, his music gives the impression of an artist using a dog-eared archive as the springboard to more personal expressions.
There’s always been a melancholy cast to Smith’s music, and that’s especially true on his debut album. There Is No Right Time focuses the emotional content of his singles into a concentrated form. We’re told the bulk of the songs have their roots in a lonely winter a few years back, after a rough breakup and a move to Berlin, and you can believe it: It’s easy to imagine Smith sitting bundled up next to the space heater in his home studio, translating the rivulets of rain trickling down the windows into the brooding piano melody of “Time to Leave,” a despondent hip-hop instrumental that sounds like it’s been rescued from a water-damaged box of memories he regrets having opened.
Taking inspiration from artists like Four Tet and Leon Vynehall, Smith has stepped up his sound design—a rich mixture of synthesizers, scratchy samples, and physical instruments like electric guitar and a drum kit—and he explores a broader-than-usual range of tempos and rhythms. In addition to his habitual deep house, we hear sluggish boom-bap, snapping electro, and, on the standout “Be Good to Me Poly,” even rolling drums patterned after jungle’s signature groove. That range underscores the fact that this isn’t really a club album; as a collection of evocative, daydreamy mood pieces, it’s better suited to evenings in and weekends on the couch, to packing bowls and thumbing the morning paper.
It’s actually a more diverse LP than it seems at first, despite his foregrounding of forlorn melodies and wistful atmospheres. The album’s back half is particularly active. Sleek and energetic, “Earnest Kelly” mixes up Metro Area-style electronic disco with Japanese new age atmospheres. The quick-stepping “Left on Lucy” reshapes similar sounds, like those DX7 chimes and flutes, into the kind of optimistic anthem that sunrise beach raves were invented for. “Something Keeps Me Real Quiet” is a Smallville-styled romp through the insides of a snow globe that smartly offsets its twinkling keyboards with gruff, overdriven drums and bass. Even the closing “4D Anxiety,” despite its languid tempo and shuffling beat, sneaks in a playful boogie groove borrowed from Floating Points’ early singles.
There’s no shortage of highlights, really: The silvery accents on “Be Good to Me,” a tune that sounds a little like a jazz-funk Radiohead cover; the delicate synth and guitar counterpoint of the brisk, snapping “Waiting for L”; and especially the all-encompassing swirl and searching chord changes of “Our Odyssey.” They’re all evidence of Smith’s remarkable production talent and also, more importantly, his expressive sensibility. The album’s only real flaw has less to do with the uniformity of its mood than the uniformity of its structures. No matter the style, tempo, or instrumentation, Smith’s tracks—nothing here ever quite makes the leap from “track” to “song”—all develop the same way. They begin with a ruminative loop and then take on new layers until, some imperceptible peak having been reached, they start slimming down again. The denouement is as gentle as the buildup, and while it may make for profoundly enveloping listening, heard enough times in a row, it leaves you wanting something different: something jarring, something jagged, something to break the flow.
It’s a tough thing to ask; Smith’s album is so carefully and tastefully balanced, a sudden wrong move could ruin the mood. But as anyone who has lived through a cold, despondent winter in a strange city can tell you, every now and then you need something to jerk your head out of the fog. Still, as wistful ruminations go, both on and off the dancefloor, they don’t come much sweeter than this. | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Aus | October 13, 2016 | 7.6 | b1213372-e2e0-4e3f-9668-005db5f42cc5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A month after calling it quits, the inventive British art-rockers bid farewell with a revealing EP drawn from the sessions for their final album. | A month after calling it quits, the inventive British art-rockers bid farewell with a revealing EP drawn from the sessions for their final album. | Wild Beasts: Punk Drunk and Trembling EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-beasts-punk-drunk-and-trembling-ep/ | Punk Drunk and Trembling EP | When Wild Beasts announced their split in September, many fans responded with a gnashing of teeth at the disappearance of such a fantastically improbable guitar group—tempered by a muted acceptance that their last album, Boy King, showed a band running out of gas.
It wasn’t so much that Boy King was a bad album. The problem was that for the first time since debuting in 2008, Wild Beasts sounded behind the times, offering up a cloying R&B fusion that wasn't nearly as good as, say, Arctic Monkeys’ AM. The result was overcooked and under-weird, quite the antithesis of the fierce experimentation that Wild Beasts had made their own.
The news of one last Wild Beasts EP, gathering up two tracks from the deluxe vinyl edition of Boy King plus an unreleased track from the same sessions, felt something like a soccer player bowing out in a special post-season exhibition match. It meant a chance to say goodbye, even if the circumstances aren't hugely alluring.
Sure enough, the two formerly bonus tracks sound like just that: addenda, inessential and fairly unenlightening. “Maze” is an indistinct cut whose promising idea—pairing organ drones and airy guitar lines with Tom Fleming’s earthy baritone—is smothered by an unmemorable melody. Had Wild Beasts continued, maybe this vaporous torch song style would have been the start of something new. As it is, “Maze” is the runt of the litter.
“Last Night All My Dreams Came True” may be more conventional than “Maze”—it feels very much in line with Boy King’s rubbery synths and spartan drums—but it benefits from an impassioned vocal turn from Hayden Thorpe, who swoops and soars all over the chorus like the ghost of tormented lust. The distorted guitar line that underpins the chorus is another lovely touch, ruffling up the rather staid musical backing.
Still, Punk Drunk & Trembling would be an underwhelming send-off were it not for the title track, which rivals anything in the band’s history for ecstatic release. You can understand why the song was left off Boy King, as it doesn’t really fit with that album’s machine-tooled sleaze. But whereas the LP’s sound felt ill-fitting, “Punk Drunk & Trembling” soars with apparently effortless ease. You wonder if the song suffered from being almost too effortless, too reminiscent of the illustrious past for a band who, by 2016, had decided instead to “don the leather jackets and embrace the chaos and carnal force of rock’n’roll”.
Whatever the case, “Punk Drunk & Trembling” is a thrilling song, marrying the melodic contortions of Wild Beasts’ first two albums to the electronica-brushed production of Present Tense, their fourth. It adds up to a showcase for the best elements of the band’s sound. Start with the drums: Chris Talbot understands the power of experimental restraint, tailoring his patterns to subvert the band’s songs. He drives this one with a subtly disruptive rhythm that often hits when you don’t quite expect it, peppered with flashes of echo and other effects.
The song’s instrumental structure rests on a simple yet effective bass line and breathy synth notes; Thorpe’s and Ben Little’s guitars lend spare rhythmic touches, slowly branching into melody as the song progresses. The effect is one of quiet power, like a swan floating across a pond while its feet thrash furiously beneath the surface. When the band do finally cut loose, they unleash a four-note bridge that has more in common with the ecstatic communion of techno than their indie-rock peers, threatening to take the top off your speakers in joy.
The best thing about “Punk Drunk & Trembling” is Thorpe’s falsetto vocals, which shower the song with drama, torment and soul. His voice makes you believe in his words even as you marvel at his powers, like Minnie Riperton or Kurt Cobain before him. He sounds like he's singing to save his life: His voice, hushed and mysterious on the verse, slowly builds in determination, waiting for the euphoric release that the chorus provides.
For this performance alone, the Punk Drunk & Trembling EP is worth the price of admission. It’s a fitting end to one of indie rock’s most distinctive groups—a band that, in the end, knew to leave us wanting more. | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 30, 2017 | 7 | b122dc84-8fea-4cee-891a-a050c3ebb29c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Lovitt Records' flagship post-hardcore band relocates to Lookout! and sets Thrice producer Brian McTernan behind the boards to capture a more polished sound. | Lovitt Records' flagship post-hardcore band relocates to Lookout! and sets Thrice producer Brian McTernan behind the boards to capture a more polished sound. | Engine Down: Engine Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2789-engine-down/ | Engine Down | With their new self-titled record on Lookout!, Engine Down seem poised to join Pretty Girls Make Graves, Sparta, and Taking Back Sunday in the mainstream niche occupied by bands who've planed away the rougher edges of screamo (or "post-hardcore," if you like) and conflated edgy indie deportment with radio-ready pop dynamics, catchy adrenaline-soaked melodies, and a healthy dose of youth culture lifestyle branding (you know-- cute boys, great hair, sensitive yet hard, punk rock as corporate-backed package tour and soundtrack for extreme sports). Often, these kinds of traits pose problems for rock critics, but I'm not going to sling a dour screed that calls for a return to fatuous indie ethics. This is a diagnosis, not a lament.
In terms of creative trajectory, Engine Down have traversed a remarkably tidy arc, with a foreseeable terminus toward which they're decidedly aimed (it will be marked by full-on major label support and promotion, MTV rotation, and frequent soundtrack placement). The progression has been accomplished with precisely measured gestures of smoothing and softening. To wit:
Engine Down's debut LP for Lovitt Records, Under the Pretense of Present Tense, was prototypical, screamy post-hardcore (to a tee-- the superficially abstruse yet intrinsically meaningless syntax of its title is characteristic of the micro-genre). It was an exercise in stark opposites and crisp corners, with its pronounced loud/soft instrumental binary and Keely Davis' whisper-to-a-scream vocals. While pretty standard stuff, and no more worthy of mainstream attention than spiritual brethren like Four Hundred Years, its sharp melodic sense and inchoate cello arrangements augured evolutions to come.
It required two records for Engine Down to bridge the gap between the indie-screamo of Under the Pretense and the radio-hardcore of this new album; they were the roughly coequal Lovitt releases To Bury Within the Sound and Demure. Both of these albums were solid, if slightly strange due to their transitional state, as Engine Down got busy with the chisel and began hewing the sharp corners from their sound. Davis' reedy (yet bell-clear and resonant) vocals rubbed rather oddly against the still lo-fi (if more ambitious, thanks to J. Robbins) production-- the songs weren't quite the easy-to-swallow capsules they would become, but neither were they the quadrangular slabs of the band's debut, and the amorphous shapes were difficult to quantify. The albums retained post-hardcore trappings, but were more melodic, moodier, poppier, screamless, slower, subtler in terms of volume and tempo shifts, and anchored more centrally around the piano and string arrangements. While these records were not of the same caliber as this, their self-titled Lookout! debut, their ambition made it easy for anyone with a little intuition to see a departure like this mounting on the horizon.
And so we arrive at Engine Down, wherein the quantum leap the band was clearly straining toward on their previous two records is somewhat achieved. Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon. Indeed, the production is going to be the deal-breaker for Engine Down fans, and if you're usually biased against vaguely hardcore bands who put extra coats of lacquer on music that you feel should be raw and untamed, I'd suggest dropping the rating above by a full point. By the same token, if you feel music is well-served by a high production value and view recording techniques as an integral component (Flaming Lips and late Modest Mouse fans, here's looking at you), you may do well to boost the rating into the low eights.
Because on this record (for which they've left Lovitt for the somewhat larger Lookout!, which one assumes to be a stepping stone toward Interscope or Epic), Engine Down have employed producer Brian McTernan (Thrice, Hot Water Music, et al.) to achieve starker sound separation, richer tones, and their most dark and rumbling atmospheres to date. The upgrade is most apparent in Davis' vocals, which no longer cut through the arrangements like a dorsal fin, but nestle deeply into their terrain-- instead of being nasal and keening, they're lower, more variegated and shaded, and seem summoned from the diaphragm rather than torn from the lungs.
The band is easily recognizable-- Cornbread Compton's primal and syncopated percussion, Davis' vocal theatrics, Jason Wood's metronomic bass, and Jonathan Fuller's winnowing minor-key guitar dirges are all intact-- but recognizable in the way you recognize a childhood friend upon reconnecting with them in adulthood. Paradoxically, in perfecting a music that should resonate in teenaged breasts across the land, Engine Down have grown up.
All the earmarks of the new Engine Down are distilled in the opening track, "Rogue". It's leaner, more propulsive and snarling than anything they've heretofore produced. Davis' now-restrained vocals dart amid a swirl of feedback and unremitting, distorted bass, climbing a ladder of intensity toward the explosive chorus. The staccato bursts and lilting, plaintive vocals of "And Done" recall Sunny Day Real Estate's more expansive moments. "Cover" unfolds with relentless intensity as Davis glissades over meaty power chords and tricked-out guitar scribbles with an undeniable vocal authority. Such aggressive fare is juxtaposed by morose torch songs like "In Turn", which wafts an ominous arpeggio over swelling strings and Davis' gentle vocals, as the arrangement ramifies in a crescendo of mounting pageantry.
"Etcetera" is a haunting chamber-song of night sounds and smoldering piano-man emoting, which, of course, gradually builds into a spine-shivering guitar climax that puts the record to rest. Its tone is consummately elegiac and mournful. Given Engine Down's history and implicit future trajectory, it's hard not to perceive "Etcetera" as a literal elegy, instead of a figurative critical construct: a requiem for the band they were, which must be interred and memorialized before they can embrace the band they clearly want to become. | 2004-08-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-08-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Lookout! | August 24, 2004 | 7.7 | b1264197-8f80-4f32-b781-2b00fa3a1e31 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Willis Earl Beale's Noctunes is a bedroom recording in the truest sense: as it plays, you can almost see Beal sitting in a dark room, calmly peeling off each note. That makes Noctunes a pretty heavy listen from a guy coming off a raw divorce and a very public falling out with his record label. He's got a lot to sing about. | Willis Earl Beale's Noctunes is a bedroom recording in the truest sense: as it plays, you can almost see Beal sitting in a dark room, calmly peeling off each note. That makes Noctunes a pretty heavy listen from a guy coming off a raw divorce and a very public falling out with his record label. He's got a lot to sing about. | Willis Earl Beal: Noctunes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21002-noctunes/ | Noctunes | In the 2013 film, Memphis, Willis Earl Beal stars as a singer who drifts through the woods and walks the streets alone. He visits a church and a strip club, soaking in the city by himself. Beal’s recent work feels born out of that movie, its meandering pace and self-assessing narrative a direct complement to the flick’s equally meditative theme. In Memphis, Beal’s character hits a minor breakthrough, his face bathed in blue light as he sings in one of the film’s pivotal scenes. Beal never achieves such catharsis on Noctunes, his latest album. Instead, he casually floats by in a billowing wave of airy soul that never quite lands.
Noctunes, Beal’s seventh album in five years, moves slowly—very slowly—as he tries to channel the same ethereal ambience Marvin Gaye once did. Like the album title suggests, these are evening tunes. That they induce sleep if played at low volume is perhaps on purpose. The music just sort of hangs around without any progression, making the album seem longer than its already not short 63-minute runtime. This is a bedroom recording in the truest sense: as it plays, you can almost see Beal sitting in a dark room, calmly peeling off each note. That makes Noctunes a pretty heavy listen, except these songs aren’t as structured as previous efforts. The light melodies accentuate Beal’s best feature—his dynamic, gospel-inflected baritone—as he sings about personal struggles. And while he draws you in by the sheer magnitude of his timbre, Beal gets lost in the tracks too often, making Noctunes tough to sit through.
He’s got plenty to talk about, though: In August, Beal was arrested in Portland, Ore. on charges of criminal mischief and harassment. He’s struggled with alcoholism, been homeless, and was plagued with health complications that forced him from the Army. Last year, Beal had a very public fallout with his then-label, XL/Hot Charity, and spent time couch surfing on the West Coast following his divorce. He addresses those romantic perils toward the middle of Noctunes—on consecutive tracks "No Solution", "Stay", "Say the Words", and "Love Is All Around". On "No Solution", in particular, Beal sounds especially contrite. He references a "lost" wedding ring and the dissolution of his marriage. By "Love Is All Around", he gives in to some sort of finality: "Those haunting words that she said/ ‘Go the fuck away.’" The singer processes these emotions on Noctunes, though his thoughts don't always shine through, given the album's milieu and paltry backdrop. These should be great deep blues songs, but they’re missing the cohesion of that genre at its best. Noctunes is muddy and unfocused, and not inspirational at all. Instead, the tracks are drab and make the album almost impossible to endure.
Beal's output has never been polished, but at least on his fascinating debut, there was a certain earnestness to his music. With Beal, there was something alluring about the lo-fi hiss of "Sambo Joe from the Rainbow" or "Too Dry to Cry". Noctunes resembles a half-baked effort to recapture some sort of personal peace. A noble exercise, but in Beal’s attempt to exorcise old demons, the LP comes off way too moody and far too methodical to resonate long term. | 2015-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Tender Loving Empire | September 16, 2015 | 5.7 | b12e0fd9-25b4-489e-99cf-c8b980b1e955 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Intimate and unadorned, these five recordings from the Melbourne-based artist sound like the dying embers of torch songs. | Intimate and unadorned, these five recordings from the Melbourne-based artist sound like the dying embers of torch songs. | Sarah Mary Chadwick: Flipped It EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-mary-chadwick-flipped-it-ep/ | Flipped It EP | You can sense Sarah Mary Chadwick’s commanding presence from the audible breath that opens her new EP, Flipped It. “I hung my dreams on you,” she sings on the opening title track, after gathering that air like ammunition, piano joining tentatively. It’s a stark introduction with the confrontational immediacy of a punk song. It makes sense: The New Zealand-born chanteuse carved a niche fronting noise-rock outfit Batrider during the early aughts, later pivoting to a solo career with a softer set of tools but the same feral delivery. In her raw vocals and unadorned production, heartbreak becomes discomfitingly intimate, something painful, beautiful, and occasionally transcendent.
The five songs on Flipped It are a mix of new and old material, some salvaged from the cutting room floor and others recorded specifically for this project. Together, they sound like the dying embers of torch songs, throaty reflections warbled as though they’re being sung from the closet floor. In the title track, she describes her body “wide and open bright with fear,” and then, on “All Those Things We’ll Never Do,” she notes, “I’ve fallen down real bad, or who knows, maybe I’m just tired/But when you’re tired are you also deathly sad?” For the most part, contentment is out of reach, whether it’s because of her inherent nature or a deck stacked against her. In “The Impossible Task,” she forces herself to assume the roles of both “the abusive drunk and the nagging wife,” refusing, ultimately, to accept her partner’s insistence that she’s free enough to flip this script.
Even in moments of levity, Chadwick’s arresting alto—smoky like Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, but tattered and ominous like a bank of clouds—casts a sense of foreboding. “Lay Your Body on Mine” is ostensibly a celebration of love’s ephemeral nature, an urge to simply “let this diamond glisten now.” But the slow progression of organ chords alongside Chadwick’s melancholy voice turns things funereal, like she’s already looking back from a future where things didn’t work. It’s one of the weaker songs on the record, a mopey disjunct between style and substance that never quite coheres, whose vision of love feels blurry at best.
It follows, then, that the real diamonds on the EP are the songs where Chadwick’s inimitable voice finds a complement in instrumentation, like the willowy flute smuggled into “All Those Things We’ll Never Do.” The combination of the particulars of a breakup—having to reimagine every ritual, no matter how pedestrian—pairs especially well with the sparse piano, vocals, and woodwind. The same proves true for the accordion in “People Shouldn’t Set You Up,” a perfectly jolly contrast to the song’s defeatism. In this spate of introspective tracks, some unexpected texture lets air into an otherwise claustrophobic room. The EP’s best arrangements sprinkle dejection with glimmers of curiosity or defiance, a path to transcendence littered with the refuse of grief. | 2022-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Kill Rock Stars | December 1, 2022 | 7.2 | b13570e2-f291-4cdb-972a-b4c6d6654044 | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
Spencer Seim and Zach Hill's shapeshifting unit records its first album for Ipecac, and here their once freeform compositions tend to concede more readily to conventional rock structures. | Spencer Seim and Zach Hill's shapeshifting unit records its first album for Ipecac, and here their once freeform compositions tend to concede more readily to conventional rock structures. | Hella: There's No 666 in Outer Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9828-theres-no-666-in-outer-space/ | There's No 666 in Outer Space | By the time you finish reading this review, Sacramento experimental outfit Hella could be broken up. Or they could be releasing a 12-hour DVD concert box set. Hell, they could even have ditched the experimental math rock and become a Tom Jones cover band in Vegas. In other words, when an insanely talented band, frenetically producing material with an endless frontier mentality towards experimentation, operates under the auspices of a cultish fanbase, said band's career path takes on the unpredictability and inconsistency of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. While Hella's longtime, close-knit lineup of founders Spencer Seim and Zach Hill allowed for such a fluid shifting of gears, last year's Acoustic marked the first time the band recorded as a quintet. On There's No 666 in Outer Space, Hella's first release on Ipecac, that quintet gets completely revamped (save for Seim and Hill) and the band's sound gets jacked up.
Although difficult to tell with such a protean group, 666 seems to represent a shift for Hella. This is their first release to feature vocals on every track, and as a result of new singer Aaron Ross' caterwauls, Seim and Hill's once freeform compositions tend to concede more readily to conventional rock structures. Also, Ipecac's hallowed studio walls apparently instilled a sense of the dramatic in Hella's songwriting, as many of the songs-- while not wholly earnest or dire-- soar to lofty heights whereas previous tongue-in-cheek compositions would have them fall flat on their face.
Hmm, carefully deliberate sections? Sprawling compositions? Emotionally intense vocals? If it sounds like Hella's gone prog, they kinda have, veering close to the Mars Volta's shopping mall prog with Eastern-tinged guitar riffs, arcane lyrics and Ross's soaring voice, which eerily resembles Volta frontman Cedric Bixler's. For example, even the most sycophantic fans will experience mild cardiac arrest when, on songs like "The Things People Do When They Think No One's Looking", the band implodes at the four minute mark, only to neatly regroup for a closing chorus featuring Ross' charged lyric "Money doesn't make the world go round."
That said, this is still the freewheeling band that recorded a song titled "Welcome to the Jungle Baby, You're Gonna Live!" On "Hand That Rocks the Cradle", Hella parody monolithic acts like Rush or Yes, farting out goofy synth lines while Ross vacillates between Geddy Lee falsetto and slack-jawed Les Claypool hokum. At times 666 even flashes a calmer, gentler Hella-- relatively speaking. The verse on "Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun" ripples around Seim's muted faux-Fugazi riff and Ross's sing-song melody, while "The Ungrateful Dead" parlays the 8-bit Nintendo epics covered by Hella side project the Advantage into a stomping opus that'd fry any Castlevania cartridge. Tracks like these don't give 666 a free pass solely because they combine the histrionic with the cheeky. Hella jampacks each song with riffs and hooks at almost the same clip as magnum opus Chirpin' Hard, avoiding the ham-handed ten minute build-ups that Mars Volta trudges through, arriving at a chorus hardly worth the wait. Excusing the album's inherent garishness, 666 expands Hella's core sound to new heights that, although at times hard to stomach, finds the band both at their most playful and regimented. | 2007-01-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2007-01-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ipecac | January 31, 2007 | 7 | b13adde9-ffb4-4fbc-ab9f-1019ed525d89 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
Fetty Wap’s new tape doesn't quite answer the question of whether the New Jersey rapper will sustain his success or remain “Trap Queen Guy” forevermore. | Fetty Wap’s new tape doesn't quite answer the question of whether the New Jersey rapper will sustain his success or remain “Trap Queen Guy” forevermore. | Fetty Wap: Zoovier | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22675-zoovier/ | Zoovier | New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap reached complete cultural saturation with his surprise hit “Trap Queen,” a love story with a crack core that swept through suburbs and schoolyards all the same. Before long it was getting Vox explainers and an Ed Sheeran cover, and then Fetty was singing it on stage with Taylor Swift at stadiums. It charted in the Top 10 in Belgium and Denmark. His success ballooned enough that he started crossing milestones only held by megastar rappers like Lil Wayne and Eminem: Three songs charted in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 and three in the Top 20. But a fourth single never caught hold, and soon he was making a mixtape with French Montana, Coke Zoo. This February, he received a few cursory Grammy nominations and his self-titled debut was finally certified platinum, but his visibility was waning. By August, he was guest starring on “Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood,” alongside Nicki Minaj’s spurned ex Safaree Samuels. Ubiquity can be a fleeting thing.
It isn’t the most precipitous decline in rap history or even the most unusual rap career arc for a would-be star, but it would appear Fetty Wap is nearing a crossroads. What Fetty does next is crucial to whether or not he sustains his success, or just becomes the “Trap Queen” Guy. Though promising sales and streams for his debut appear to indicate a healthy base eager for a proper follow-up, it’s just as likely that the album was merely the beneficiary of the house of mirrors that is “album-equivalent units.” His latest release, Zoovier, is a 19-track sampler mixing his trap balladry with more traditional trap bangers. To avoid a Fetty Wap retread, there is significantly more rapping, which, unfortunately, produces more than his fair share of bars like “Bitch I’m Papa Smurf, I got my money right/Got a Super Soaker for her water ride.”
But if you wade through some of the cringy lyrics (on “King Zoo”: “I put the molly in her shit hole/And watch it light up like a disco”), the straight-up boring ones, the more grating moments, and the lulls here or there provided by songs like “Bad Lil Bitch,” there’s a more compact offering that recalls his most invigorating uses of Auto-Tune and his most charming performances. A song like “Instant Friends,” with its harmony fills and subtle come-ons, is magnetic in its delicate use of social cues, yet it’s lined with DM-violating blunt talk. “Don’t Love Me” and “Hate You,” a pair of gummy synth delights, are perfect complements, in sound and subject. The only true ballad on the tape, “Shorty,” is a reimagining of Plies and T-Pain’s “Shawty” that is as much an exhibitions for the ad-libs as it is for his full-bodied croons.
When it hits, Zoovier is a reminder of just how malleable Fetty Wap’s voice is, flipping from flirtatious to tender to outright lovestruck in a blink. But this is a bloated release that doesn't play to those strengths enough, and his boasts all start to run together after a while: exotic cars, exotic women, having sex with exotic women in exotic cars. It isn’t just that he’s a ball of rap cliches; it’s that he doesn’t make any of them seem fun. Fetty isn’t a very imaginative writer, and he relies primarily on feel, so it’s odd that he would intentionally tie one hand behind his back with so many melody-less raps. Zoovier is further evidence that Fetty is best (and perhaps solely effective) as a trap romantic. Why ruin a good thing? If this tape is some kind of beta test for the Next Gen Fetty Wap, here’s hoping he opts to just stick to the formula that swept the nation. | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 6, 2016 | 6.4 | b144582d-58cb-411e-a53f-7b5d7f6f528b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
This Toronto band’s best songs have just the right amount of rage to get them out of the shadows of PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth. | This Toronto band’s best songs have just the right amount of rage to get them out of the shadows of PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth. | FRIGS: Basic Behaviour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frigs-basic-behaviour/ | Basic Behaviour | FRIGS have been described many ways: “swamp rock,” “sludge-pop,” “doom and atmospheric gloom.” Most frequently, though, they’re compared to PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth. The Toronto band makes no attempt to mask those influences on its debut LP, Basic Behaviour—indeed, they’re cited in FRIGS’ own press releases—and their presence can at times be stifling, like a fragrance that lingers long after someone has left the room. The most compelling songs on this album occur when the group reconfigures these component parts into new shapes. Vocalist Bria Salmena’s gnarled growl is the main force shaping their sound, while Duncan Hay Jennings’ shrieking guitar doses it with frenzy. These warring frequencies imbue otherwise prosaic songs with depth, texture, and just the right amount of rage.
FRIGS have released only a handful of songs since their inaugural split cassette as Dirty Frigs in 2013, but their sound has made noticeable strides in five years. If they’re not quite fully formed, the music resonates with potential all the same. Opening track “Doghead” is a concise example: Its initial guitar and bass notes volley in conversation before Jennings interjects with a metallic scratching, as if he’s sliding a hacksaw down his fretboard. Salmena butts in last, deploying the record’s most memorable phrase. “He put his tongue in sordid pies,” she snarls. Her lyrical palette is evocative but limited—the whole of “Doghead” contains only 15 distinct words.
Salmena’s vernacular doesn’t expand much throughout the record. She relies heavily on simple language and repetition, and these stunted verses can undermine otherwise punchy singles. Take “II,” which endlessly reminds us, “This is shit, just admit it.” But every once in a while, Salmena spits allusive verbiage that prompts interpretation. In the middle of the same song, she tells us: “It’s bleak/I can barely speak/My instincts or what’s left of me, heat.” This admission conveys a rare sense of vulnerability in Salmena, who sounds so broken down that her vital signs are the only indication of life.
The first three songs on Basic Behaviour—“Doghead,” “Talking Pictures,” and “Waste”—are dynamic and pithy, spiked with shards of guitar and bone-rattling bass. It’s evident that the band paid close attention to arranging this trio, and Jennings’ contributions are palpable: a squeal of feedback here, a slash of distortion there. Unfortunately, a stretch of filler follows, exemplified by tracks like “Solid State” and “Gemini.” Both feel overtly derivative, the former of Kim Gordon, the latter of Mazzy Star. These songs aren’t bad, but they lack the defining traits necessary to differentiate FRIGS from any number of other latter-day post-punk bands.
Where “Gemini” drags its feet to generic, swaying dream-pop, “Heavyweights” is the most successful slow song on Basic Behaviour. Salmena’s multi-tracked vocals, as dark and viscous as motor oil, ooze over tangy guitar and skeletal drums. The result is eerie, and FRIGS’ music is most effective when leveraging this kind of sonic discomfort.
These musicians are great interpreters of human unease, and nothing on Basic Behaviour conveys that better than “Chest.” Based on the 2016 Brock Turner rape trial, this ripping track finds Salmena at her most impassioned. “What would you do if they said they found me laying out back with legs round my neck,” she sings. Salmena’s voice gets coarser with each depiction of assault. “Stay asleep as you spoil me... /Lower me down to the depth of my sex,” she groans, before unleashing her scream: “Am I wide enough for you?/... Father, am I safe?” These succinct questions implicitly hold all men accountable for tragedies like the Turner case—not just the men who abuse women, but also those who are meant to protect them. “Chest” makes it clear that FRIGS’ strongest asset is their own anger. | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | February 28, 2018 | 6.7 | b14b21f1-e4f2-4352-9366-e94b31875f11 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Taylor McFerrin's debut Early Riser has been in the oven for a little under four years; his debut for Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint tends to float away into the atmosphere long before you even notice it's gone. | Taylor McFerrin's debut Early Riser has been in the oven for a little under four years; his debut for Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint tends to float away into the atmosphere long before you even notice it's gone. | Taylor McFerrin: Early Riser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19406-taylor-mcferrin-early-riser/ | Early Riser | Taylor McFerrin's debut Early Riser has been in the oven for a while. In the fall of 2010, a three-track sampler briefly made the rounds, and then not much else was heard in the intervening years from the composer/multi-instrumentalist and son of improv legend Bobby McFerrin. Now the album's arrived on Brainfeeder—Flying Lotus' ever-expanding imprint that has become a haven for artists who consider themselves neither round nor square pegs—there are traces of that original sampler that remain. That link to an earlier incarnation of Early Riser is "Place in My Heart", a pleasing if somnolent dollop of funk that finds most of its structure in vocalist RYAT's contributions.
As a straight-up producer, McFerrin has a knack for knowing just how many elements he can balance before things topple over, which speaks to his proclivities as a jazz fusionist; but Early Riser is by no means the kind of affair that'll leave you struggling to orient yourself. The majority of the album passes by in a pleasant swirl, to the point that McFerrin's efforts could be mistaken for complacency. For every moment of undeniable beauty, such as the more recent single "The Antidote" and the moving "Decisions", there are just as many that feel like closing your fist on a handful of sand. When "Degrees of Light" finishes, any imprint it left evaporates immediately with it. Without a strong anchor, much of Early Riser floats away into the atmosphere long before you even notice it's gone.
On Early Riser McFerrin often builds towards an unforseen point without reaching a clear resolution, but this approach occasionally yields positive results. "Postpartum" gradually swells, picking up pieces along the way like a musical Katamari; it never quite achieves liftoff, but the slow, exaggerated stretch is pleasing regardless. The aforementioned "Stepps" circles higher and higher over five minutes without ever finding a release.
That moment of release finally arrives on the album-closing "PLS DNT LISTEN", a necessary jolt of adrenaline on an album that otherwise takes its time thawing out. At its conclusion, *Early Riser'*s title proves a misnomer—this is an album built for slow weekend mornings spent in bed with a loved one more than brisk, early-morning runs. | 2014-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Brainfeeder | June 5, 2014 | 6.8 | b16b6d1f-1ba4-4a70-b391-a31c702c9030 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
The songwriting from Laura Hermiston on her latest indie-pop album is noisy but lucid, reflective of the sound and vision coming from Toronto’s Buzz Records. | The songwriting from Laura Hermiston on her latest indie-pop album is noisy but lucid, reflective of the sound and vision coming from Toronto’s Buzz Records. | Twist: Distancing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/twist-distancing/ | Distancing | Buzz Records was born in a house off Spadina Avenue in Toronto’s Chinatown as a way to release cassette tapes of concerts held in the garage. Over the last seven years, it’s grown to become one of the most prominent record labels in the city—as indispensable to the burgeoning indie scene today as Arts & Crafts was to the indie rock renaissance that fostered Stars, Feist, and Broken Social Scene in the early 2000s. From Weaves to Dilly Dally to Odonis Odonis—whose bassist Denholm Whale founded the label with friend and roommate Erik Jude—the Buzz roster has a sound and vision, as punk and DIY as you’d expect from its origins. The aesthetic is represented well by Twist, whose second album, Distancing, is entirely typical of the Buzz aesthetic and the philosophy that has brought it forth from the underground.
Twist is singer-songwriter Laura Hermiston, who shares with Dilly Dally’s Katie Monks and Weaves’s Jasmyn Burke a similar attitude of rock abandon and creative invention. She makes an expressive indie-pop that uses a sound-expanding echo to fill out her otherwise straightforward compositions. Distancing is an album full of counterintuitive decisions with an elusive spirit—playful and sometimes slippery—that makes this record a compelling listen.
Her songwriting has something of the pop simplicity of the girl groups of the 1960s: sunny vocal melodies, big pop punch, understated lyrics with familiar sentiments both cheerful and melancholic. On Distancing, she develops a number of simple, lucid themes: cold lovers, long roads, open doors. She might be “waiting for the feeling of love” on “Tides,” or else reflecting that she’s “been in love so many times” she’s lost count on “Waves.” (It’s no coincidence that both titles work the same image.) She finds ways to poke and prod these lines with her voice, like the way it curves up toward the end of each sentence in the middle of “Towers” as she asks simply, “Does it make you feel good?” She gets a lot out of that little “good.”
The production is dense, busy, and prominent throughout, to the point that many of these songs are unrecognizable from how they’re performed live. Brian Borcherdt, of the beloved Canadian instrumental electronic band Holy Fuck, comes on as producer. He has an obvious, even ostentatious influence, so much so that he seems more active collaborator on the album’s soundworld than merely the technician shepherding it to fruition. Still, his deft touch, most clear on the strikingly dancey “Waves,” gives Hermiston the latitude to be more adventurous, and she integrates even the most unmistakably Borcherdt-ish flourishes into her work with ease and intrigue.
This approach—simple songwriting juiced up with a complicating frisson on the backend—is rewarding even if it exhausts its potential just as the album draws to a close. Still, resourcefulness and imagination are Twist’s key strengths, the reasons for her place on Buzz, and what lifts Distancing above common underground rock and into rarer air. | 2018-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Buzz | December 20, 2018 | 7.2 | b1707c70-3266-4a84-83c9-bc22b8b026b2 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world\r\n\ crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric ... | Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world\r\n\ crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric ... | Ugly Casanova: Sharpen Your Teeth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8332-sharpen-your-teeth/ | Sharpen Your Teeth | Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric old men: a legitimate redneck. Hailing from a rural logging town thirty miles east of Seattle, Brock grew up in a rusty trailer, doomed to the blue-collar nightmare of foundry life or some other back-breaking eternity. Over the past ten years, he's seen the backwoods town's tall pines and muddy soil swallowed alive by the corporate monster and shit back out as duplexes and strip malls. What little nature remains there now is permeated with the death stench of ChemLawr yards and Wendy's drive-thrus. So, after the success of Modest Mouse's classic The Moon and Antarctica, Brock packed up and moved to Cottage Grove, Oregon, another even more remote logging town-- one whose chances of becoming a suburban hellhole are about as likely as his mother's of winning a Powerball jackpot.
Brock is extremely candid in interviews about his love of drugs, particularly psychedelics and uppers. As everyone knows, there's not a lot to do out in nature but get high, and there's nothing like getting high in nature. It gets you thinking about the broader picture-- typical hippie shit like your place in the universe, and the usual depressive shit like your own mortality and irrelevance. This kind of environment can't be good for a guy who, beneath his surly exterior, is about as depressed as a motherfucker comes. But it helps him write, and when that's all you've got going for you, you go where it comes easiest.
I have little doubt that Brock wrote a great deal of the lyrics for The Moon and Antarctica on psychedelics, as many of his insights were so disconnected and profound that they could only have come to him in a moment of altered consciousness. But recently, including during the recording of that album, he's spent a lot of time in stone-sober Chicago, where psychedelics are considered hideously lower-class and drink is the drug of choice. None of this affected his magnum opus-- presumably because he was still hanging mostly with his druggy bandmates-- but Brock's solo debut as Ugly Casanova reeks of mental clarity, sacrificing the great philosophical lyrics of records past for pleasantly poetic, but never revelatory, subject matter.
Brock recorded Sharpen Your Teeth with Red Red Meat's Briar Deck, Califone's Tim Rutili, Pall Jenkins of Black Heart Procession, and a few random others at his Portland home studio, Glacial Pace, which he built using the advance Sub Pop offered him to record this very record. But let's consider his company here: Deck-- producer of the last Modest Mouse album and the first installment of Brock's Ugly Casanova side project-- for all his culvert reverb and glistening, interstellar software tricks, strikes me immediately as a man who has either never ingested a poisonous mushroom in his life or has long since outgrown such leanings. Rutili's work with Califone is marked by its junkyard percussion and Budweiser Americana. Jenkins sounds like he walks around in graveyards all day praying for inevitable death to just get it all over with. This is no company for abusing prescription tranquilizers.
But maybe that's the purpose of this project, to step away from the pursuit of universal knowledge and convey a simpler desperation. Or maybe he just wanted a new cast of characters to collaborate with. And this is indeed a collaboration. Though the songwriting-- which all members had a hand in, right down to the lyrics-- sounds unmistakably like Modest Mouse, you can hear the distinct marks of all the other players. It's initially evident on "Spilled Milk Factory," and later on "Pacifico," both of which feature clanging percussion and sparse background peripherals echoing Califone's Roomsound.
The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps, the worst of which stumbles backwards and breaks it neck: "Diamonds on the Face of Evil" is an awkwardly loping experiment in which Brock recites a few lines of nonsense padded with the ceaselessly hollered refrain of "shey shaw shey shaw!" Likewise, "Parasites" comes on like some absurd postmortem parade, with blaring synth trumpets and Isaac morbidly insisting that "the parasites are excited when you're dead/ Eyes bulging, entering your head/ And all your thoughts... THEY ROT!" "Ice on the Sheets" is, at 6\xBD minutes, repetitive and overlong, and "Bee Sting," though surely intended as a segue, hinders the flow of the album-- a tuneless interlude with Isaac offering some of the least thought-provoking lyrics of his career.
There are some damn fine moments here, though. Brock seems to have been born with an innate talent to impart the sourest dejection. His approach is more akin to Arlo Guthrie than to the mop-headed, crybaby adolescentry that presently dominates our rock. If he stuffed his shit with 75-cent dictionary finds, it'd be one thing, but he uses plain English to communicate complex meditations, analyses that could as easily be grasped by drunken farmhands as by world-class poets. The finest of these crops up on "Hotcha Girls," when Brock, at his most austere, sings, "Don't you know that you'll rust, and not belong so much, and then get left alone.../ Don't you know that old folks' home smells so much like my own."
The opener, "Barnacles," has Brock referencing classic Rolling Stones amidst antisocial daydreams: "I don't need to see/ I don't see how you see/ Out of your window/ I don't need to see, I'll paint it black." Then there's the killer two-song punch that ends the record: "Things I Don't Remember" recalls the very best upbeat and rhythm-oriented Mouse moments, with truly propulsive percussior hitting with ferocious thwacks, as if trying to better the Pixies' "U-Mass." When the song springs to life out of the pleasantly countrified "Smoke Like Ribbons," it hits with such caffeinated urgency that its surrealist lyrics actually become incredibly fun where they might otherwise have been fatally clumsy. This guides us to the reflective closer, "So Long to the Holidays," which evokes both wistful memories of past Christmases, and going off somewhere to die-- and with just two simple lyrics.
Sharpen Your Teeth was undoubtedly a therapeutic outing for Isaac Brock, giving him some time to recuperate from his band's definitive statement and temporarily alleviating the pressure of making the next one. And lucky for us, the final product fares far better than these things generally do. Rutili is an able guitarist and lyricist, as is contributor John Orth (who got his start in the Florida-based band Holopaw), and Brian Deck's production, though sometimes excessively spacy, is always warm and nicely balanced. That said, I'm looking forward to Brock falling back in with his old crowd. The drugs might not be good for him, but the inspiratior is. | 2002-05-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2002-05-12T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 12, 2002 | 7.3 | b170d4f6-54cd-40af-9a21-f8d58d8f5f00 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
On their debut album, this Portland quartet demonstrates their old school death metal bona fides, even when they’re more interested in evolution and atmosphere. | On their debut album, this Portland quartet demonstrates their old school death metal bona fides, even when they’re more interested in evolution and atmosphere. | Ossuarium: Living Tomb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ossuarium-living-tomb/ | Living Tomb | Ossuarium are a very new band with a very old sound, very quickly approaching the vanguard of modern death metal. Since forming in Portland, Ore., two years ago, the sepulchral quartet has released a gnarly demo and a compelling split, enough to earn them a spot on the roster of current underground tastemakers 20 Buck Spin. In recent years, 20 Buck Spin has become a one-stop shop for crucial death metal releases, alongside its rich past of metals black, classic, doom, and sludge. Recent signings like Tomb Mold and Ghastly have positioned the label at the top of the post-millennial heap, even challenging institutions like Relapse for the throne of skulls. Ossuarium’s full-length debut, Living Tomb, offers welcome reinforcement.
Living Tomb is a tight 40 minutes of ugly, bottom-scraping death and doom, firmly rooted in the past but cognizant of the need to evolve. Ossuarium understand how important atmosphere—that most slippery quality—can be in the conception and execution of truly great death metal. The skill slithers through in the 30-second prelude, where foreboding synths and thin feedback set the stage for the onslaught of “Blaze of Bodies,” a fast dive into Floridian swamp stomp. With its perfectly roiling churn of old school death metal, “Blaze of Bodies” makes it clear that Living Tomb won’t be just another garden-variety, OSDM platter, all murk and no meat. For a death metal album, it sounds startlingly alive.
“Vomiting Black Death” solidifies that promise, stretching the parameters of classic death-doom hybrids like rotten taffy. Ossuarium add a heady dose of melancholy, bell-clear melodicism, and thrumming weirdness inside this gloomy premise. There’s an off-kilter, low-end-focused Finnish sensibility to the otherwise straightforward parts of tracks like “Corrosive Hallucinations.” Ossuarium’s understated but incredibly muscular technicality proves they can play like the Devil damned their fretboards, though they are more interested in banged heads than shredded strings. “Writhing in Emptiness” adds gnarled solos and a wink of industrial metal crunch to OSDM’s most visceral, knuckle-dragging impulses. Then, though, they segue into an eerie break that’s unexpectedly pretty, a scintillating breath of fresh air among blasts of crematory miasma.
Even when Ossuarium shift toward traditionalism, as on “End of Life Dreams and Visions Pt. 1,” they still slow down and melt into elegant doom before song’s end. Its counterpart, the finale “End of Life Dreams and Visions Pt. 2,” reinforces that element. A doomed ode executed for maximum morbidity, it comes crowned in phantasmagoric atmosphere, one that allows maudlin notes—with their aura of classic European doom—the space to undulate and prowl without burying their rock’n’roll simplicity.
Living Tomb is a solid death metal album, no question. But in moments like the end, when Ossuarium show their willingness to experiment and think more holistically in their pursuit of creeping heaviness, their real promise shows. At this point, new old school death metal is best when it’s approached not just with veneration about also a sense of evolution. A genre founded on gore and teenage apathy can afford to get a little messy, purists be damned. Ossuarium are here for it. | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | February 14, 2019 | 7.6 | b17140bd-0b31-4c1c-8675-0a05917ac635 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
A woozy, raw, magical, and extremely short album from hip-hop’s most tantalizingly inscrutable rapper. | A woozy, raw, magical, and extremely short album from hip-hop’s most tantalizingly inscrutable rapper. | Earl Sweatshirt: Feet of Clay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-feet-of-clay/ | Feet of Clay | Last year, around the time he released Some Rap Songs and ended his deal with Columbia Records, Thebe Kgositsile said he was looking forward to “doing riskier shit.” Apparently, that meant turning his already-insular music darker and more inscrutable. The rapper, better known as Earl Sweatshirt, doesn’t offer much direct commentary on Feet of Clay. Instead, he pushes further into the murky territory he began mapping on Some Rap Songs, loosening up his flow, letting down his guard, and wandering ever-further into the recesses of his mind.
Kgositsile has described Feet of Clay, his latest seven-track, 15-minute project, as “a collection of observations and feelings recorded during the death throes of a crumbling empire.” The title references the Bible’s Book of Daniel: in it, the prophet interprets a dream of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, in which he sees a colossal statue made of four metals: a head of gold, arms and chest of silver, body and thighs of brass, and feet of iron and clay. Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar the statue represents the kingdoms of the Earth, starting with Babylon, and that a stone cut by non-human hands will fall on the statue’s feet and destroy it, a metaphor for the end times. “We at the feet of clay right now,” Kgositsile told Apple Music. “We posted up live from burning Rome.”
His verses don’t give much clarity to that ambitious context so much as they offer fragments: “I beat you to the point/My noose is golden/True and livin,’ lonesome/Pugilistic moments/Riveting, come get to know me at my innermost/My family business anguish, now I need atonement,” he raps on “OD.” The line hints at Kgositsile’s grief over his father, who passed in 2018. This is the project he made in the wake of that loss. The pall of death haunts the edges of his rhymes; birds of prey circle carrion on “74,” and on “OD” he raps, “My memory really leaking blood/It’s congealing, stuck.” If these are confessions, they are delivered in code, and the meaning comes from the sounds of the words themselves.
As a teenage prodigy, Kgositsile leaned hard on his technical skill. Now an adult, he still cares deeply about craft, but he seems to be thinking differently about delivery and performance. There are moments on Feet of Clay when he seems to be actively subverting ideas of what being good at rapping sounds like. On “East,” which pairs blunted raps with a harsh accordion-like wail, he mutters “had a story careen against the bars,” and it’s the closest he’s come to defining the style he’s striving for: narrative and emotional, physical and abstract.
As with Some Rap Songs, this project is heavily influenced, in aesthetic and tone, by the New York City rap underground; not just recent Earl Sweatshirt collaborators like MIKE, Medhane, and Ade Hakim but also minimalist Ka, dialectician billy woods, and impressionist Akai Solo. Kgositsile has adapted rather quickly to this gloomy, withdrawn world of distorted jazz and R&B loops supporting his talky cadences. This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing.
The warped, bassy “4N,” which accounts for nearly a third of the project’s running time, partners him with fellow recluse Mach-Hommy, the brusque and enterprising Jersey rapper Kgositsile has long admired. As the beat winds like a skipping record, they keep everyone at arm’s length. There is some more traditional production: the Mavi-assisted “El Toro Combo Meal” dusts off a vintage soul sample, and the Alchemist-produced “Mtomb” bends Mtume’s “Theme For the People” into a sputtering hymn. But even these are merely cushions for wrestling with deep-seated trauma. On the latter: “Piscean just like my father, still got bones to pick out/For now let’s salt the rims and pour a drink out.”
There is a punch-drunk quality to Kgositsile’s verses that occasionally makes them seem like stoned spitballing. But they have the looseness of freestyles, a nonlinear flow he may have picked up from Mavi, a pupil turned sparring partner. They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins. Nearly a decade after becoming a prodigal rap savant, Earl Sweatshirt is still burning old selves in effigy, figuring out who he wants to be in real time. | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Tan Cressida / Warner | November 5, 2019 | 8.4 | b171ec07-50bf-4aa7-ab4b-d94f5e8d716a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Canadian producer laces glow-worm synths and house beats with vocal snippets culled from indie-folk gems and Billboard hits. | The Canadian producer laces glow-worm synths and house beats with vocal snippets culled from indie-folk gems and Billboard hits. | Loukeman: Sd-2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loukeman-sd-2/ | Sd-2 | Toronto-based producer Loukeman’s winsome dance tracks are an elevated take on the cheeky DJ edits and remixes that litter the annals of his longstanding SoundCloud account. He plucks vocal earworms out of folk, pop, and R&B songs, bending them into familiar yet malformed shapes that titter mysteriously at the margins of his booming house beats. As in the work of Todd Edwards, it’s not so much what Loukeman’s unwitting guest stars say as it is how they say it: the timbre of an errant syllable, the percussive musicality of a phrase repeated until it fractalizes. Since his 2021 debut, Sd-1, he’s earned cosigns from Vegyn and Jacques Greene. His latest album, Sd-2—the second of a planned trilogy—is more of an expansion pack than a sequel, a fresh suite of wistful trinkets that slot seamlessly alongside their predecessors.
Loukeman’s identifiable samples offer an answer key to his inspirations. He regularly pulls from intimate, romantic performances, using their pleading registers to lend even his highest-energy tracks a bittersweet edge. Sd-1’s “Shadowww” is instructive in this regard, flipping the weary strums of Lomelda’s “Hannah Sun” into an easygoing, uptempo groove that belies torrents of feeling. Sd-2 is quick to draw from this same emotional playbook: Album opener “Baby You’re a Star” complements folkish acoustic riffs with the sonorous vocal runs of Mario’s “Let Me Love You,” chopping and stretching his libidinal cries into abstract warbles. “Winzzz” uses the distinctly robotic, chattering artifacts of stem separation to great effect as it strips PARTYNEXTDOOR’s “The News” down to a single echoing chorus—Do you deserve me? No way—illuminated by a glowing bassline.
Part of Sd-2’s charm is the plasticity Loukeman wrings from his fairly defined style. While he clearly knows what he likes, he’s not afraid to introduce new, off-kilter elements, throwing well-adjusted ears into disarray. “Ride”’s strobing synth lines are supplemented with furious drum breaks and bed squeaks that override the track’s chipmunk vocal squeals with manic, indulgent irreverence. The same anything-goes spirit creeps into Loukeman’s erratic DJ sets, where you’ll catch him mixing synthwave instrumentals into Chief Keef or playing the Shins’ “New Slang” atop a thundering techno beat. When “Real Life Man” whirls together acid-house toplines, chalky guitars, and the plaintive lead of Bryson Tiller’s “Exchange,” the cocktail is both patently ridiculous and effortlessly cool.
If Sd-2 has a fault, it’s that its general breeziness feeds into a subtle but pervasive reticence. Songs plateau rather than peak, lounging in moody states that conclude with little fanfare. Not every piece needs a defined rise and arc, especially in a dance context; Loukeman plays to this angle by emphasizing his production chops, embroidering subtle background details and stutters that jump out on repeat listens. But the unfocused compositions become a problem as the album slips into a comfortable, anodyne lull in its back half, splitting time between interludes and longer tracks that both invoke atmosphere without resolution. On a better-paced project, a small song like “Won’t U” might have a real purpose as a breather between set pieces; instead, its operatic, thrumming synthwave swells ebb into filler. Though the case for Loukeman’s raw talent is airtight, Sd-2 doesn’t quite transcend his worst habits. Even so, it remains a compelling, if occasionally insubstantial, document of an emerging artist with undeniable presence. | 2024-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | SD Music Group | January 22, 2024 | 7 | b17c2b95-26c1-4040-bb32-ca55d8b5dc81 | Maxie Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maxie-younger/ | |
Newly reissued and remastered, the Gallagher brothers’ 1998 B-sides collection remains a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that stands among their finest work. | Newly reissued and remastered, the Gallagher brothers’ 1998 B-sides collection remains a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that stands among their finest work. | Oasis: The Masterplan (Remastered Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oasis-the-masterplan-remastered-edition/ | The Masterplan (Remastered Edition) | The Masterplan poses one of the great “what if?” scenarios in rock history. What if Noel Gallagher had saved all the A-side-worthy B-sides he was cranking out between 1994 and 1997 for a proper Oasis album? What if they had released that batch of songs as their third full-length instead of the overblown and underwhelming Be Here Now? What if, instead of sounding Britpop’s death knell, Oasis’ third album kept the party going into the new millennium, thereby negating the need for dejected fans to take solace in Travis and Coldplay? Who knows, maybe Oasis still would’ve traveled up their own arse en route to “All Around the World” anyway, but at least that indulgence would’ve felt a little more earned.
Be Here Now didn’t exactly derail Oasis’ career—we should all be so lucky to flop at 8 million copies sold—but the album effectively fast-tracked the band’s transition from zeitgeist-shaping force to heritage act. (The stats don’t lie—15 years into their career, Oasis were still pulling two-thirds of the setlist from the Definitely Maybe/Morning Glory era.) So when B-sides compilation The Masterplan arrived a year after Be Here Now’s big boom and bust, it effectively dumped salt onto a still-fresh wound. And to this day, it stands as a taunting totem to what Oasis’ third album could’ve been. “The Masterplan should have been Be Here Now, and Be Here Now should have been a bunch of B-sides,” Noel admitted in a 2019 interview. “Somebody should have been fucking bright enough to stand up and say: ‘You can't fucking put these out as B-sides, you’re fucking mental’… The one major regret I have in my professional life is I wasn’t aware enough.”
As such, UK fans could be forgiven for thinking The Masterplan was just a cash grab, a hastily assembled collection of B-sides that were already widely available on CD singles, some barely a year old. But in North America, The Masterplan was a crucial act of fan service. In the ’90s, the stateside singles market had been all but snuffed out by a music industry that had conditioned consumers to pay $23.99 for a full album to get the one or two songs they liked. By contrast, fans in the UK were receiving a steady stream of singles every few months, accompanied by B-sides that formed an entire parallel shadow discography to the popular favorites. But The Masterplan had no designs on being a comprehensive collection of Oasis castaways. Rather, it’s a smartly curated, thoughtfully sequenced set that can stand proudly on the shoulders of the band’s unimpeachable first two albums. (The fact that this reissue/remaster contains no additional tracks or alterations suggests an undying respect for its original form.)
The Masterplan instantly validates its existence by promoting the band’s most beloved B-side into the momentous album opener it deserved to be. Originally appearing on the stopgap “Some Might Say” single released between Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory, “Acquiesce” is the ultimate Oasis song: a sibling rivalry in musical form, a dramatic title-fight showdown between Liam’s swagger and Noel’s sweetness that sees the brothers trading verses and choruses instead of insults and fisticuffs. After Noel had ceded all lead vocals to Liam on Definitely Maybe, “Acquiesce” was the first real sign that the elder Gallagher wasn’t just the silent tunesmith communicating via his brother’s megaphone wail: He was an equally vital voice within the songs as well.
Given that Noel was the one entrusted with writing all the B-sides, often when no other bandmates were around, it’s no surprise that The Masterplan features a higher ratio of Noel-sung tunes than any other Oasis album. And since Noel knew he could never out-snarl his brother, he carved out a lane as the humble counterpoint to Liam’s cocksure charisma. His Masterplan turns are by the far most tender tunes here, and in the greater Oasis discography for that matter: “Half the World Away” (reportedly Paul Weller’s favorite Oasis choon) and “Going Nowhere” exude a Bacharach-esque elegance that’s defiantly at odds with this band’s lager-lout reputation, while the string-swept solemnity of “The Masterplan” manages to expand Oasis’ musical and emotional vocabulary without tipping the scales into Be Here Now-level bombast.
There are several other fine B-sides in this vein that were excluded from The Masterplan, probably because, at a certain point, an Oasis record with too many ballads and acoustic serenades wouldn’t really feel like a proper Oasis record anymore. The Masterplan’s sensitive turns are balanced by corkers like “Headshrinker,” which sounds like Oasis pummeling the Faces’ “Stay With Me” until it resembles Raw Power. That said, they could’ve easily swapped the bloozy “Swamp Song”—an elongated version of Morning Glory’s mid-album interstitial—and their droning distension of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” for snappier selections, like the joyous brassy “Round Are Way” or the early rave-up “Alive,” the closest this band ever got to shoegaze. But if The Masterplan’s murky midsection reminds us that aimless jamming was never this band’s strongest suit, the album is ultimately a testament to Noel’s fine-tuning skills. Just as T. Rex could rewrite “Bang a Gong” as “Telegram Sam,” and the Kinks could clone “You Really Got Me” into “All Day and All of the Night,” Noel was a master at refreshing his winning formulas: Surely, there’s a parallel universe where “Talk Tonight” is a karaoke anthem on par with “Wonderwall” (right down to the similar “you saved me” sentiment), and if you’re sick of hearing “Supersonic” for the millionth time, soundalike sibling “Listen Up” is there for you the next time you want to do it with a doctor on a helicopter.
But even when the songs sound the same, their perspectives tend to shift: If Definitely Maybe’s iconic opening track, “Rock and Roll Star,” was like Oasis’ version of The Secret—a self-fulfilling prophecy of imminent success—then “Fade Away” is its equally energized but spiritually dejected flipside, a vision of an alternate timeline where the Gallaghers’ arena-conquering aspirations gave way to day jobs. “While we’re living, the dreams we had as children fade away,” Liam cautioned, back at a time when Oasis’ destiny had yet to be written. But if that song was born of a hardscrabble past they’d never have to revisit, by 1998, it spoke to a different kind of lost idealism. At the time of The Masterplan’s release, all of Oasis’ dreams were made—even after the critical drubbing they took for Be Here Now, they were still the biggest band in Britain. As the subsequent decade of diminishing returns would show, even if Oasis’ rock-star dreams never faded, the hunger and passion that fuelled those fantasies—and, by extension, these songs—certainly did. | 2023-11-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Brother | November 3, 2023 | 8 | b180ff68-aee0-4d06-9b72-8e06da4ee56c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Fronted by the Irish troubadeur Conor O'Brien, Villagers start with humble folk and build outward with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. The band's second album is filled with big ideas and sentiments. | Fronted by the Irish troubadeur Conor O'Brien, Villagers start with humble folk and build outward with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. The band's second album is filled with big ideas and sentiments. | Villagers: {Awayland} | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17509-awayland/ | {Awayland} | Conor O'Brien earned comparisons to the likes of Conor Oberst, Damien Rice, and Glen Hansard on Villagers' 2010 debut Becoming a Jackal, and they were deserved on a musical level: as with Bright Eyes, the Frames, and Rice's solo work, Villagers start with humble folk and build outwards with daunting orchestral arrangements and subtle electronics. Implicit in those comparisons is the assumption of O'Brien as a similarly young old-soul, a world-weary troubadour who lives to fight an eternal struggle: How does one convey the truth to the listener without sounding like a pedant, or worse, a fool? Success is typically achieved in a way that parallels the expansive demeanor of the music: starting with the knowledge that everyone is at the very least an expert on their own experience, and using your own truth to project outwards towards larger ideas. That's where O'Brien breaks rank, as Villagers take the opposite approach on the occasionally charming but mostly frustrating {Awayland}, an album which too often has big ideas and little proof of how he arrived at them.
The charms are there, though. O'Brien's voice is expressive and controlled, hitting every quiver and quaver just right and there's an astringent, citric quality that allows the smallest amount to pierce through. His tone rarely rises above a conversation, yet it always manages to forefront itself no matter how grand the arrangements get behind him. And they certainly are grand, or at least the sound that Mercury Prize nominations were made for, folk-rock earthy and glossy as a gemstone, but grounded in an earnest presentation that counters any temptation to call it "slick." He's claimed the influence of film composers such as Lalo Schifrin, which mostly manifests in strings pulling all sorts of dips and derring-do over tense, tight minor chord progressions. (My guess is O'Brien would be disappointed if the two-minute instrumental that bisects {Awayland} was described as anything other than "cinematic.")
{Awayland} demonstrates admirable range in more traditional formats: "The Waves" is genuinely surprising, evolving from Morse code blips to a satisfying, frothy climax of distorted guitars, while "Nothing Arrived" situates a pat lyrical resolution ("I waited for something/ and something died/ so I waited for nothing/ and nothing arrived") amidst easygoing pianos and acoustics like a wordy rendering of Travis ca. 12 Memories. O'Brien does have a knack for melodies that hit squarely, but too much of {Awayland} prides itself in lyrical misdirection that renders his tunefulness an afterthought.
The misappropriated ambition is charming in an undergrad sort of way, and believe me, it will find an audience as long as college kids rubber-stamp indie-folk with poetic pretensions and the authenticity assumed from an Irish accent. O'Brien prefers giving his songs titles and choruses that are declarative ("Judgment Call", "Earthly Pleasure", "In a Newfoundland You Are Free") and images that suggest permanence-- trees, waves, and guns as loaded metaphors. And they often come across as trenchant out of context, such as "The Waves", which claims "one man's innocence is another's chance" in a way that overstates its profundity. Likewise, any one of these fragments from the unconvincingly sinister "Passing a Message" could evolve towards an insightful conclusion, but O'Brien structures his stories like Jenga puzzles, a lattice of solid pieces that feel intentionally and ultimately fated to crumble once shared: "I was carving my name out of a giant sequoia tree/ I was blind to its beauty now it's all I can see/ I learned how to listen to the folks on TV/ They are passing a message that means nothing to me."
"The Bell" is paradoxically the most overt demonstration of the strangely smug tone, an inverse "Bigmouth Strikes Again" that tries to find humor out of having nothing new to say. It is also a song about the futility of communication that is five minutes long and features lyrics like "there is a passenger in every useless word/ can never be twisted or sold/ senator of my skin/ a body of discipline/ must be a million years old." An extremely kind reading of it would be required to believe lines like the aforementioned are supposed to be self-deprecating, an intentionally purple exaggeration. Especially in light of a confession like "there's a sleeping dog under this dialog/ obedient only to rhyme/ but if I could beckon her/ if I could find the words/ all they would be is lies," which comes off like more of a boast than apology. To its credit, {Awayland} rarely comes across as false, but O’Brien's affinity for cleverness over clarity ensures it rarely comes across in any real way. | 2013-01-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-01-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 14, 2013 | 5.5 | b18a49c0-4326-4a4e-a293-2c711d67730a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
After brushes with extroversion, the final installment of their EP series finds singers Sarah Martin and Stuart Murdoch turning inward with songs that take you inside its characters’ private lives. | After brushes with extroversion, the final installment of their EP series finds singers Sarah Martin and Stuart Murdoch turning inward with songs that take you inside its characters’ private lives. | Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-how-to-solve-our-human-problems-pt-3/ | How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3 | On the first two editions of their EP trilogy, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Belle and Sebastian catalogued all manner of psychological stressors, from the fear of aging into irrelevance (“Sweet Dew Lee”) to parental pressures (“I’ll Be Your Pilot”) to soul-crushing despair over the state of the world (“The Girl Doesn’t Get It”). But on the final song on this final installment, they explore the root—and remedy—of all these maladies. Amid the ’60s girl-group throwback track “Best Friend,” singers Stuart Murdoch and guest Carla Easton momentarily defuse the song’s cheeky exuberance with a sobering admission: “It’s only human not to want to be alone.” As the band’s principal songwriter, Murdoch has always waded into a maelstrom of unrequited desire and emotional isolation. And in light of the political unrest that has gradually seeped into Belle and Sebastian’s intimate, sepia-toned universe, that need for interpersonal connection has become less a matter of happiness than survival.
But as Murdoch admitted in a recent interview, his dalliances with more topical songwriting are on the wane: “I’m no Billy Bragg, that’s for sure,” he quipped. Fittingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 3 feels insular—it’s more interested in taking you inside its characters’ private lives than exposing them to the outside world. The musical extroversion of recent Belle and Sebastian remains: as “Poor Boy” tries to mend its protagonist’s broken heart with a shoulder-rubbing Tom Tom Club bounce, Sarah Martin wields her gilded disco-diva hook like a dagger. (“Poor boy, I could never live up to your imagination/Poor boy, I was a crush that killed.”) But while Belle and Sebastian have been spending more time on the dancefloor of late, they inevitably retreat to the bedroom. The folksy acoustic serenade “There Is an Everlasting Song” is the sort of rainy-day rumination that would be right at home on If You’re Feeling Sinister, as it twists optimistic affirmations into ominous threats: “There is an everlasting sadness all around/It’s bigger than the news, from this you cannot run/A woman’s magazine, a column in the Mail can’t help you now.”
On early Belle and Sebastian records, Murdoch-sung lullabies like “There Is an Everlasting Song” dominated. Here, it’s a rare moment when his vocals aren’t intertwined with Martin’s, who’s gradually outgrown her auxiliary-singer status to become a defining feature of the band’s sound. At this point, she’s come to represent more than just Murdoch’s foil, but his conscience as well. The first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems closed with the slackadasical group sing-along “Everything Is Now”—and if it felt like little more than the backing track for an unfinished song, well, that’s because it was. On Pt. 3, we get the vastly superior sequel “Everything Is Now (Part Two),” which uses the original’s gently swaying rhythm as the springboard into an increasingly dramatic orchestro-pop showdown between Murdoch and Martin where they seem to interrogate the very idea of writing about love through a male gaze. “Melody, my greatest friend, be comforted to know I need you more,” Murdoch sings wistfully, to which Martin bluntly retorts: “I am not an idea, I’m not a melody.”
When the How to Solve Our Human Problems series was first announced last fall, Murdoch expressed his desire to shake up Belle and Sebastian’s usual recording and release strategies. But with the band successfully upgrading “Everything Is Now” from its most frivolous song to one of its more probing, you have wonder if they ultimately would’ve been better off whittling down the EPs’ 15 tracks into a tight 10-song album. Like each of the previous installments, Pt. 3 is a hodgepodge of stunning standouts that boldly push the band into new territory, quality comfort-food callbacks to their late-’90s classics, and middling turns that could’ve been easily excised (in this case, “Too Many Tears,” which oversells the ironic distance between its lovelorn lyrics and jubilant jangle-soul arrangement and winds up running in circles). Belle and Sebastian have a history of eagerly welcoming fans into their creative processes, so it only feels right to honor that tradition: We may be no closer to alleviating the collective anxieties chronicled on these EPs, but at least some problems are easier to solve than others. | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 21, 2018 | 7.2 | b18e5455-2ae9-453a-a7e6-3a95f7ce8287 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
M.C. Taylor’s fourth full-length as His Golden Messenger mixes regional folk and country traditions with strains of rock and R&B, striking a tone of convivial toil. William Tyler and members of Megafaun and Mountain Man contribute. | M.C. Taylor’s fourth full-length as His Golden Messenger mixes regional folk and country traditions with strains of rock and R&B, striking a tone of convivial toil. William Tyler and members of Megafaun and Mountain Man contribute. | Hiss Golden Messenger: Lateness of Dancers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19681-hiss-golden-messenger-lateness-of-dancers/ | Lateness of Dancers | M.C. Taylor is working for the weekend. “When Satuday comes, I’m gonna rock my soul,” he promises on Lateness of Dancers, his fourth full-length as Hiss Golden Messenger. “I might get a little crazy, I’m gonna drink some whiskey.” As the piano pounds out an insistent bundle of chords and the guitars carouse and stumble against one another, Taylor draws out that last word, savoring the syllables as though they’re the only thing getting him through the week. The song is less about raising hell and more about chucking your woes aside, unburdening yourself of your trouble and finding precious freedom in merriment.
Harvest is the general theme of Lateness of Dancers, not only marking one season’s labor to ensure survival through the next but also celebrating that work with a bit of whiskey and soul-rocking. Mixing regional folk and country traditions with strains of rock and R&B, these songs strike a tone of convivial toil. Taylor has been working in the music business for nearly twenty years: first in the hardcore band Ex-Ignota, later with the San Francisco outfit the Court & Spark, and most recently and most productively as Hiss Golden Messenger.
Lateness of Dancers, named for a Eudora Welty short story, marks a transition commercially, if not creatively: Taylor’s first three albums were issued by North Carolina upstart Paradise of Bachelors, but this new one is his first for Merge. Taylor may have recorded these songs well before he signed that contract, but compared to previous albums, the arrangements on Lateness are airier, the tempos bouncier, the playing brisker. Largely absent from Lateness of Dancers, however, is the uncertainty that frayed the homespun Bad Debt (recorded at Taylor’s kitchen table), the prodigal rambling that mapped out Poor Moon, and the spiritual inquisition that made Haw one of the hardiest country records of the decade. These songs are more about the reward that a Saturday provides.
At times Lateness of Dancers may sound too light, but after so many albums made during and about crises of faith, that tone is not unappealing. Taylor invited some of his North Carolina neighbors to back him on these songs, including guitarist William Tyler, brothers Phil and Brad Cook from Megafaun, Mountain Man’s Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and occasional Messenger member Scott Hirsch. They give the lightness of Dancers a real-stakes feel. On the would-be AM radio hit "Lucia" and the holler epic "Day O Day (A Love So Free)", the rhythm section in particular instills these songs with a not-quite-carefree spryness that sounds more like Memphis than North Carolina—but generally, they sound charmingly unrehearsed, as though they’ve simply gathered on someone’s back porch for the evening. There’s even a chorus of crickets in the interlude between the title track and “I’m a Raven (Shake Children)”.
Even when things turn dark, the music sounds unbowed. “The misery of love is a funny thing,” goes “Mahogany Dread”. “The more it hurts, the more you think you can stand a little pain.” Yet Taylor’s delivery is not anguished—more curious than rueful about the travails of romance—and when Hirsch’s organ and Tyler’s Stratocaster take over on the coda, that little pain actually sounds inviting, perhaps even a reward in itself. For some listeners, especially those who might discover Hiss Golden Messenger through this Merge debut, this persistently breezy tone may render the songs inconsequential, and certainly Lateness lacks the gravity of its predecessors.
But that just means this album sounds best in the context of the Hiss Golden Messenger catalog—as a comment on and a celebration of the spiritual and creative toil on the previous albums. It's a much less private record than what came before; in fact, Taylor relishes the company of his fellow Tarheel musicians. “I beat my drum, everybody to come running,” he sings on closer “Drum”, a new recording of a song that he first set to tape years ago. On Bad Debt, it sounded like a quiet folk manifesto, as though he was laying out plans for a new chapter in his career. On Lateness, the song has the feel of fellowship, although not merely because the band elaborate on his sentiments with fiddle, tambourine, and banjo. Taylor sounds like a country preacher greeting parishioners as they leave the sermon some bright Sunday morning, bidding each of them to “take the good news, spirit it away.” He no longer carries the burden alone; we all shoulder it together. | 2014-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | September 9, 2014 | 7.6 | b18f7087-b1a2-4408-8513-0b5e98101bdc | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Two early documents from Modest Mouse are reissued on Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint, offering a portrait of a very young band with a lot of promise. | Two early documents from Modest Mouse are reissued on Isaac Brock's Glacial Pace imprint, offering a portrait of a very young band with a lot of promise. | Modest Mouse: Sad Sappy Sucker / The Fruit That Ate Itself EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14862-sad-sappy-sucker-the-fruit-that-ate-itself-ep/ | Sad Sappy Sucker / The Fruit That Ate Itself EP | Isaac Brock and his friends were teenagers when they wrote the songs on Sad Sappy Sucker. Think about the shitty poems you wrote when you were young (I have one that plagiarizes Green Day's "Longview"!) and then listen to the splintered and elusive songs collected on this Modest Mouse release. Clearly, Brock had a head start on seeing things differently from the rest of us.
That is one of the more profound takeaways from the so-called Great Lost Modest Mouse album, a 24-track collection of occasionally brilliant odds and ends that was spared the fate of being the band's introduction to the world. Delays forced them to move on and record This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About before Sad Sappy Sucker could be released. From a historical vantage point, they lucked out-- Sucker has its moments, but they would take a quantum leap from here to This Is a Long Drive.
Nonetheless, a few facets of Modest Mouse's unmistakable sound glint through on these songs, recorded with Calvin Johnson for K Records. There are those eerily pinging bent guitar harmonics, for one, a noise that sounded entirely alien at the time, as well as the way the guitar and bass circled warily around each other without locking, two halves of an endlessly spiraling argument. Jeremiah Green was already an astoundingly talented drummer, one who could fill every inch of available space without overwhelming Brock's harmonically simple songs.
And Brock-- well, first of all, he sounds astoundingly young. His lisp, which would grow a little less noticeable over time, is almost painfully pronounced on Sad Sappy Sucker-- "Mice Eat Cheese"'s title is rendered "mithe eat cheethe." His singing is frail and nervous, and the words are often obscured by mumbling. The lyrics that do surface are like little placeholders for all of Brock's future lyrical obsessions-- "you can see that birds and worms don't get along," in "Worms Vs. Birds"; "Looks like accounting's not accountable for anything or anyone at all/ Jonny took the fall," he yelps in "Race Car Grin You Ain't No Landmark". The ringing opening guitar figure for "It Always Rains on a Picnic" would pop up almost unchanged on *Long Drive'*s "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset"-- in fact, the former song sounds like a dry run for the latter. It's absorbing listening, but hardly consequential.
When Sad Sappy Sucker first saw release in 2001, on the heels of the monumental The Moon & Antarctica, it felt more like a yellowing sketchbook of curiosities bequeathed to diehard fans than a proper album. Nine years later, now on Brock's Glacial Pace label, it still feels that way. It's being reissued at the same time as the 1997 EP The Fruit That Ate Itself, and taken together, you get a pleasantly bracing aerial view of a young band's gradual development. The Fruit That Ate Itself has some of the band's most abrasive moments-- the title track, in particular, is harrowing, just a descending bassline and Brock's screaming his unhinged napkin poetry ("Take a drive in the wrong hand lane/ Got bad breath talking about fresh rain") until he's hoarse. But it also had the first hints of the band's fascination with sound effects and overdubs-- the skirling backwards guitars that show up repeatedly point to the frozen-tundra ambience of their later works.
Brock and his bandmates didn't alter a thing for these reissues; there are no bonus tracks, no new songs. Neither of them is an essential Modest Mouse release, but if they provide anything new to us in 2010, it's a useful window back into the pre-Internet era of indie rock. The songs on Sad Sappy Sucker dribbled their way out into the world on 7"s and compilations-- 500 or 1,000 people bought them, and that was exactly the right audience for the music. Modest Mouse then moved on to the next project, honing their voice. In the Internet hothouse, improving your way into a larger audience is a more fitful, lurching affair, one that often happens in combustible bursts. For a young, unsteady group like Modest Mouse, being able to kick around the Pacific Northwest while working on their songwriting feels crucial to their development-- they had a long way to go from Sad Sappy Sucker to The Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon & Antarctica, and it's hard to imagine they would have gotten there the same way today. Obscurity smarts, but sometimes it can be a useful cocoon. | 2010-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 12, 2010 | 7.2 | b1a4de4b-72d4-4e9f-a49a-1e5b38c9a157 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Halifax punks kick out the jams with plenty of distortion on their exhilaratingly rowdy second full-length. | Halifax punks kick out the jams with plenty of distortion on their exhilaratingly rowdy second full-length. | Booji Boys: Weekend Rocker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/booji-boys-weekend-rocker/ | Weekend Rocker | It’s nearly impossible to decipher what Booji Boys singer Alex Mitchell is screaming most of the time. According to the five-piece Halifax band, their songs deal with “fun in the sun, the class war, and shameful fantasies.” Really, though, that’s beside the point. Lyrics aren’t necessarily a top priority when making a great punk album. What’s important is the energy, the barely-controlled noise, the sheer thrill of hearing someone validate your pent-up friction—and in this, Booji Boys excel. On Weekend Rocker, their second full-length, they continue to make music that burns as wildly as an overflowing ashtray at an erupting basement party.
The band, whose cited influences span ’70s punk and classic rock acts from Dead Boys to Creedence Clearwater Revival, have been grouped by some into a mostly Midwestern mini-genre dubbed Devo-core. That’s fair enough, given that their band name references an iconic character from Devo’s satirical new-wave mythology. In fact, though, the group’s origins in the tight-knit Halifax DIY scene among peers like Grump and Alienation have given them a sound that’s closer to brash hardcore with a catchy twist. “Most of the other bands we’ve been in have been straight-up hardcore or d-beat bands, so Booji Boys was our attempt at making pop songs, I guess,” ringleader Cody Googoo said of his initial bond with guitarist Steve Earle. Booji Boys’ self-titled debut, released in February 2017 on the UK punk label Drunken Sailor, had a lo-fi, distortion-drunk urgency, and their follow-up takes that intoxicating fuzz to another level.
Weekend Rocker opens with the title track, the album’s fastest and shortest. It’s not much of a song, but it’s a good preamble for the pure mania that’s about to go down. Only 18 minutes later do Booji Boys crash headfirst into their seven-minute closer, “Oh Yeah.” The song begins with a somber marching beat, then jumps off its hind legs. Earle’s riffs are lucid and tightly coiled, while the vocals sound alien, like Mitchell is drifting away on a cloud of nuclear fuzz. Where the previous 11 tracks stick with a single, gnarled mood, “Oh Yeah” is long enough to encompass at least four distinct feelings: depleted, rowdy, bacchanalian, and resolute.
At times, the fierce pop melodies of Weekend Rocker resemble the late garage icon Jay Reatard, though their sound is less crisp and piercing than his—the dense distortion that Booji Boys favor feels like suffocating in a humid mosh pit, rather than taking a kick to the head in one. Even so, Weekend Rocker’s upbeat spunk is one of its most appealing qualities. “Crowe’s Kitchen” is a propulsive two minutes of reverb-soaked psychedelia; “Locked Up in the City” is crusty ’80s rock verging on the Buzzcocks. “Sister” is a riff-heavy diamond in the rough, as is the curiously titled “Mr. Nazi’s on the Beat” (perhaps a warning about the predatory and corrupt powers of authority).
Although Booji Boys don’t sound much like the music that Devo made, they do mirror those Ohio weirdos’ strange, infectious energy. It’s a different strangeness than, say, performing in a crib alongside Neil Young, but the spirit remains more or less the same. Back in 1982, Mark Mothersbaugh whined the words “rock ‘n’ roll can never die” from behind an unsettling latex mask. It remains an apt unspoken motto for these unendingly loud Canadians. | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Drunken Sailor | January 13, 2018 | 7 | b1adb2b5-1aae-4df7-b59f-afc6d8f9d45e | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
In a genre known for singles, Kingston’s Jamar McNaughton offers a complete collection of hits, a confident mix of conscious reggae, pop, hip-hop, and lovers rock. | In a genre known for singles, Kingston’s Jamar McNaughton offers a complete collection of hits, a confident mix of conscious reggae, pop, hip-hop, and lovers rock. | Chronixx: Chronology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chronixx-chronology/ | Chronology | In the fall of 2011, live music bubbled up in small places around Kingston, Jamaica. From Veggie Meals on Wheels at Regal Plaza, Crossroads to the backyard of a now-shuttered vegan restaurant a little further uptown, a group of young people would get together about once a week to play some tunes—often accompanied by little more than an acoustic guitar. Artists like Kabaka Pyramid, Jah9, the Gideon, Selah, Kelissa, Hempress Sativa, Pentateuch, Infinite, and Micah Shemaiah would make up the “reggae revival” (a term coined in 2011 by writer Dutty Bookman). One of these nights, Chronixx sang “Warrior,” “Start A Fyah,” and “Capitalist.” The next day, I couldn’t get the melodies that this 19-year-old named Jamar McNaughton sang out of my head. He had a knack not only for hooks and lyrics, but the ability to channel it through a vocal performance that belied enthusiasm and an encyclopedic knowledge of star quality. His voice never wavered, his confidence was preternatural.
It’s been more than a half-decade wait for Chronology, but in a genre known for singles, Chronixx has produced a complete, solid album. In the lead up to this point, he’s produced modern conscious reggae hits like the anti-colonial “Captureland” and the anthemic “Here Comes Trouble.” But there’s also been a demonstrated desire to push the envelope through “Like a Whistle”—not straight reggae but a poppy earworm. Chronology features a couple of these previously released tracks: it’s tough to think of a tune that can brighten up a room like “Smile Jamaica,” produced in 2013 by Germans Silly Walks Discotheque, and the recent single “Majesty,” which demonstrates an ability to craft R&B/lovers’ rock confection. Chronixx’s penchant for blending a range of styles with born-in-Jamaica genres is sure to irk reggae purists, but this mix couldn’t be more true to his roots.
It seems obvious to say that Jamaica has influenced and been influenced by a wide range of music, but Chronology is an object lesson. Yes, “Loneliness” is a clear R&B single with its soft bass, sweet vocals, and guitar flourishes; there’s an uplifting pop ditty in “Legend” and Chronixx demonstrates his hip-hop prowess in “Ghetto Paradise.” But there are examples of Jamaican genres from the sway-worthy one drop of “Skankin’ Sweet” (begging for a dub remix) to the Cordel “Scatta” Burrell-influenced dancehall tune “Likes” (it has a touch of the Martial Arts riddim).
And the record as a whole kicks off with “Spanish Town Rockin’,” a track that shows off Chronixx’s range as singer and deejay. It has a bouncy, biographical hook combined with ’80s-style conscious chatting on the verses. This is followed by the bass- and horn-driven “Big Bad Sound,” a catchy combination tune featuring Chronicle—Chronixx’s father and namesake. It is obvious right from the start both from where Chronixx hails and his commitment to foundational sounds. Name-checks throughout shed light on not only luminaries of all genres of Jamaican music (“Likes” places focus on a range of Jamaican artists and producers, underlining that “nuh Drake a control dancehall”) but also the Kingston musical community—from I Nation, whose book table is a fixture at reggae-oriented events, to Mikey Bennett of Grafton Studio.
Some of the most inspiring lyrics come from conscious reggae—if you want upliftment, look no further than the words of Garnett, Dennis and Bob—and Chronixx wields this power. “I Can” uses what could be platitudinous tropes, but his Rastafari grounding (the track’s epigraph is a blessing from Peter Tosh) and plaintive, honest vocal fry makes this surpass pop motivation, allowing the accompanying balearic bass to fuel a unique and addictive sound. EDM production duo the Picard Brothers (no surprise: they’ve worked with Diplo) is behind the slow-build backup voices and hand claps here. It’s impossible not to wheel and come again with this one. This style might have been a risky move, but it’s as if Chronixx is laughing at the whole brouhaha about Justin Bieber, Drake, and everyone’s du jour use of “tropical house.” “I close my eyes and smile,” Chronixx sings, like a little wink at the audience: Here’s “tropical house” by a Jamaican. The best reggae (and, arguably, the best pop) always comes straight from yard. | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Virgin | July 11, 2017 | 7.6 | b1b16601-bfb1-42fd-95ef-20248c28b6ab | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
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