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The latest record from the So So Glos is driven by the tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview. | The latest record from the So So Glos is driven by the tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview. | So So Glos: Kamikaze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21929-kamikaze/ | Kamikaze | The So So Glos have always tied their identity to their native Brooklyn in a way few of their neighbors have. The band filled their 2013 breakout album Blowout with sketches of their borough’s streets, subways, skylines, and bodegas, guarding each reference with an insistence that in order to truly appreciate these things you had to have grown up there (as singer Alex Levine sees it, the city’s way of life is under constant threat from outsiders). More tangibly, the group’s members also co-founded two of Brooklyn’s big all-ages venues, Market Hotel and Shea Stadium. That’s the kind of legacy contribution to their music scene than few acts can claim.
Yet in the scheme of the city as a whole, the So So Glos are just a tiny blip. It’s one thing to nurture a music scene, but when condos and dog bakeries are pricing the people you grew up with out of your neighborhood, there’s not much you can do—one punk band alone can’t turn the tide of gentrification. On the group’s latest album, Kamikaze, they’re feeling the weight of that reality.
“The new New York that we’re living in now is almost unrecognizable to the gritty grime and crime-ridden streets that we grew up on as kids,” Levine lamented to Billboard. “It seems like we’re moving in a direction where the movements and art which sprung out of 1960s through 1990s NYC are being celebrated, but there’s very little respect for the environment that harbored the culture. It’s harder than ever to be a working artist in the city and the disparity between rich and poor is becoming greater and greater. People want to see graffiti in an art gallery but not in the streets; they want to see the CBGB toilet behind glass at the Met, rather than sit on it at an actual dive.”
On Kamikaze, Levine often comes across like The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Lillian Kaushtupper, a protector of the neighborhood’s endangered Biggie murals and policer of newcomers who look like potential Arcade Fire members. It’s a horrible thing, feeling like a member of a dying breed while you’re still in your 20s, and these songs convey a creeping sense that the band is waging a losing battle—not only against gentrification, but also against technology, the passage of time, and possibly even the shelf life on their own ideals.
Recorded with Rocket From the Crypt’s John Reis and mixed by Saddle Creek mainstay Mike Mogis, Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain. The tension between the band’s perennially youthful sound and their ever-more-jaded worldview that drives the record. Even when Levine rails against technology on “A.D.D. Life,” the sort of meat-and-potatoes, Undertones-styled anthem that John Peel would have loved, he does so with the keen awareness that he’s far from the first punk singer to touch on this stuff. “I’m a too-much-information-generation cliché,” he sneers.
That’s not the only time he makes himself a target. A Titus Andronicus-styled mini-epic set to an elbow-jabbing Op Ivy tempo, “Kings Country II: Ballad of a So So Glo” tells of the downfall of two selfie-snapping, phone-addled narcissists. In a final twist, though, Levine stops admonishing the strawmen he’s created and fesses up to his own hypocrisy. “I’m standing in some parking lot staring into my phone,” he huffs. “I guess I am a lot more like those two than I’d like to admit.” It’s easy to write a song condemning technology; it’s a lot harder to lead by example.
Kamikaze is filled with moments like these, tiny cracks in the seams of the band’s value system. The album’s title conveys not only a willingness to die for the cause, yet also a sense of predetermined defeat. So is it worth falling on the sword for something that no longer exists? And aren’t some changes for the better? Blowout opened with memories of rooting for the truly terrible New York Mets of Levine’s youth. The team has since rebounded—they’re defending National League champions now—yet to hear Levine tell it, he preferred them as underdogs. “I never cared too much for winning, so kiss my ass goodbye,” Levine sings defiantly on “Going Out Swingin’.” If he’s wrong, so be it. He’s chosen his hill. | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Votiv | May 24, 2016 | 7 | b1b51b9e-0a7e-4670-9f67-0e1d527d1422 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The storied career of the glammy singer-songwriter continues with a jangly, fuzzy, noisy album of bummer jams that sound like hugs from a pal who’s bummed out about boys. | The storied career of the glammy singer-songwriter continues with a jangly, fuzzy, noisy album of bummer jams that sound like hugs from a pal who’s bummed out about boys. | Seth Bogart: Men on the Verge of Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seth-bogart-men-on-the-verge-of-nothing/ | Men on the Verge of Nothing | In 1987, the sexologist and psychiatrist Richard Green published The Sissy Boy Syndrome, a sympathetic but, you know, problematic document of his search to find links between adult homosexuality and, as The New York Times then described it, “extreme cases of boyhood effeminacy.” Leaving aside the why of homosexuality—why not?—the twinned notions that gender-nonconforming boys are more likely to grow up gay and in need of medical help is retro in an ugly way.
Seth Bogart has been offering extreme cases of boyish effeminacy since his days in the fabulous mess that was Gravy Train!!!!, the electroclash outfit also featuring current Younger Lovers honcho and literary darling Brontez Purnell. As the Hunx in Hunx and His Punx, Bogart made retro, horned-up garage rock in such a beautiful way. Bogart’s world went Day-Glo for a slicked-up, self-titled solo album in 2016; since then, he’s launched a clothing line, the influential Wacky Wacko, staged art shows at NYC’s Participant Inc. and MoCA and MOCAD, and lately offered ceramic reproductions of queer classics like Cookie Mueller’s Garden of Ashes.
Men on the Verge of Nothing arrives at a time when much of California is in ashes and the rest of the world feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. But like many of us, Bogart has put his trust in the community of women, both real and imagined, assembling a band of sisters including Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail and Kathleen Hanna, Kate Nash, ex-Punx Erin Emslie and Alana Amram (who also plays in the terrific psych-rock band Habibi)—and, most prominently, Roxanne Clifford of Patience and the shoulda-been-huge Veronica Falls. Men takes a note from Veronica Falls’ fuzz-pop, and another from the sound of the late Patrick Doyle, the much-missed Veronica Falls drummer who made his own kind of queer noise-pop as Basic Plumbing.
Seth and friends have made an album of bummer jams that sound like hugs from a pal who’s bummed out about boys. It’s got jangle, two tons of reverb, and that Sunday-morning-stroll-through-a-cemetery-with-coffee pep. “Professionals” deconstructs the current use of “queerness” as currency among straight men in academia and the art world. “They love to breed us,” Bogart sings, both winking and rolling his eye. “You smell like an amateur.” Experienced allies of all sorts get a look over in “Brainwashers,” a spry little ode to how the political left eats itself alive. “Everybody wants to tell you/what you already know…I’m desperate, I’m a dog/Who’s the attention hog?”
Queer guys don’t get off much easier. “Lavender Heights” minces like vintage Magnetic Fields, and Bogart’s voice is closer to Stephen Merritt’s dolorous Eeyore than his usual bratty self, but his reminiscences of mushrooms and merriment in San Francisco’s gay enclave sour with the realization of how privileged they all were. “Sunday Boy” is similarly distrustful of losing yourself in the comfort of a lover: “We used to talk almost every day/You had so much to say/But now you feel like a waste of time…Every Sunday you hang with your Sunday Guy.”
As it happens, a friend of Bogart’s was sent as a boy for “treatment” from Richard Green. “Boys Who Don’t Want to Be Boys” is an ode to him, a surf-rock beast which drips with scorn for those who seek to strip the sissiness out of young men and replace it with—what? The clenched menace of Mike Pence? The forces that make men warp them. “Mr. Know-It-All is always right/And I think the only way out of this, is somehow they lose all their power,” Bogart sneers before sing-songing the title of the title track along with Clifford and an insouciant tambourine.
One reason there aren’t a lot of grown men to look up to is that so many died in the AIDS pandemic. “Sometimes I wonder where are all the older guys,” Bogart murmurs in “The Other Siders.” “I find it hard to imagine a world where they are still alive.” One could say, join SAGE; look to what that generation achieved rather than swoon at their absence; fight for your life to extend past what theirs could. Unless we throw the category of men right out the window, we need to envision male possibilities.
Until then, like Pedro Almodóvar, the director whose masterwork Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Bogart almost-inverts as his own, we’ll just have to follow the lead of women. Men’s tracks venerate a certain kind of gay guy’s icons: X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, whose classic “Oh Bondage! Up Yours” becomes, in Bogart’s hands, less enraged than engorged. And “Dawn’s Lips” doubles-up on the hero-worship, transposing the Vaselines’ perennial “Molly’s Lips” into a love letter to Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener. Let the boys sissy out and shimmy like Dawn danced to her garage rock crush. The alternative is sick.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wacky Wacko | October 2, 2020 | 7.6 | b1b9bbde-2d8a-4c85-b098-5b528bb0084c | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Tyler, the Creator goes green. | Tyler, the Creator goes green. | Tyler, the Creator: Music Inspired by Illumination & Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-the-creator-music-inspired-by-illumination-and-dr-seuss-the-grinch-ep/ | Music Inspired by Illumination & Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch EP | Tyler, the Creator has a somewhat weird relationship with Christmas. He released his debut mixtape, Bastard, on Christmas Day in 2009. He was arrested at Odd Future’s Christmas show for destroying equipment in 2011. It would be inaccurate to say he was ever Christmas averse (they were, ultimately, having Christmas shows), but he did write a song called “Fuck Santa.” Odds were likely against a rapper who once snarled, “If you’re the gift from God then I’m the Christmas wrap from Satan,” on a song called “Fuck This Christmas,” soundtracking an animated Grinch movie.
And yet, Music Inspired by Illumination & Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, a 10-minute, six-track EP, finds him getting even deeper into the holiday spirit, after contributing two new songs for the film’s official soundtrack. The Grinch, the second feature-length film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ 1957 book How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (following Jim Carrey’s live-action movie of the same name from 2000), follows a crotchety creature with a heart “two sizes too small” living on the outskirts of a town called Whoville during their holiday season. He subsequently—you guessed it—steals the town’s Christmas but is later moved by the locals’ displays of affection for one another without gifts.
After the soul-wrenching reveals of his 2017 album Flower Boy, it’s easy to understand why Tyler would resonate with a character like the Grinch. A one-time hellraiser who released a song called “Mr. Lonely,” Tyler undoubtedly must have a soft-spot for an outcast terrorizing a community out of frustration from not being seen. Which is probably why, in addition to collaborating with composer Danny Elfman on a reworked “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Tyler wrote a new song: “I Am the Grinch,” a first-person performance of the character’s cantankerous nature that at times blurs the lines between truth and fiction. (When on that song Fletcher Jones sings, “You’re so problematic,” Tyler responds, “Yeah, yeah.”) It’s less roleplaying than it is self-awareness.
Tyler is a Pharrell acolyte who has followed his mentor at many turns, so his pivot to 3D-generated feel-good cinema shouldn’t surprise anyone. (Both the Despicable Me franchise and The Grinch are produced by the animation studio Illumination. Pharrell soundtracked the former and narrates the latter.) This excursion into family-friendly content thankfully doesn’t produce whatever Tyler’s “Happy” might sound like; Tyler’s Grinch songs still sound like his, and not annoying, smoothed-down versions.
The songs on Music Inspired by The Grinch often scan as Flower Boy b-sides or updates on old designs, music from his traditional catalog given a moderately (if noticeably) festive twist. Tyler recently tweeted that his goal with the Grinch EP was to make Christmas music that wasn’t “too xmasy” and that he was keeping seven-year-olds and their parents in mind. Both “seven-year-olds” and “parents” are new audiences for Tyler (the latter being an audience he once actively raged against), and “Christmas music” is a template he’s never seriously explored.
In navigating that gap, some of the songs fall short of their intended effect. Tyler has always done what he thought best for the expansion of his sound (sometimes to his detriment), but here, perhaps for the first time, it sounds like he’s trying to rejigger some of his rudimentary practices to accommodate what he thinks this new audience wants to hear. “Big Bag,” the EP’s only real rap song, is almost patronizingly elementary in its lyrics (“Don’t make noise, my feet thin/I’m looking for the paper, same color my green skin”). Most tracks are sketches of songs, ideas stoked by his work on the movie but not necessarily seen to completion. He doesn’t quite have Pharrell’s ability to crossover just yet.
Setting aside Tyler’s wonky first forays into all-ages entertainment, which show modest growing pains for a musician hoping to branch out and reach a wider demographic, these snippets carry in them many of the hallmarks of Tyler’s most satisfying music. With Christmas as his backdrop, he gets to really unleash the chords without consequence. He tinkers with sounds in this low-stakes arena with all the excitement of a kid tearing through wrapping paper Christmas morning. Little songs like the subtly symphonic “Whoville” and the kazooing “Cindy Lou’s Wish” give him leeway to futz with arrangements and progressions, in service of an audience he’d never thought of before. Using the Grinch as his guide, Tyler finds inspiration in the unlikeliest place. | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Columbia | November 21, 2018 | 7.2 | b1bdd8a2-d8d3-480d-aad4-562e81a6424b | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are skilled harmonists and sought-after collaborators. Their latest album searches for its own identity in the neon haze of the dancefloor. | Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are skilled harmonists and sought-after collaborators. Their latest album searches for its own identity in the neon haze of the dancefloor. | Lucius: Second Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucius-second-nature/ | Second Nature | Second Nature is the first album by the Brooklyn indie-pop group Lucius since their 2018 acoustic collection, Nudes. You’ve heard them more recently, though: Frontwomen Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe have lent their vocals to bands like the War on Drugs, the Killers, and Black Pumas. The success of the shimmering title track of I Don’t Live Here Anymore, and of “My God,” a standout from Imploding the Mirage, owes a lot to Laessig and Wolfe’s silky harmonies. (They sang on Harry Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness,” too, though he declined to grant the pair a feature credit.) After nearly a decade buoying the work of better-established artists, the prospect of their own music, with those vocals front and center, is an intriguing one.
Produced by decorated Nashville stalwarts Brandi Carlile and Dave Cobb, Second Nature is frustratingly short on the heartland revivalism of which all parties are proven maestros. Outside of the excellent “Promises,” a bona fide country weeper, the album deals primarily in the sort of sultry, Studio 54-styled pastiche perfected by Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy. Lucius don’t rise to the level of those artists, but they offer their own serviceable spin on the genre.
Lead single “Next to Normal” is the record’s most successful song, rife with sticky electric riffs and a molten bass groove. Wolfe and Laessig pepper the no-holds-barred dance track with playful whoops and staccato laughs. When they sing, “I feel immortal/I’m high without the paranoia,” you believe them. They cut even looser on party anthem “Dance Around It,” assisted by Carlile and Sheryl Crow in a real embarrassment of vocal riches. The verses, choruses, and bridges don’t quite flow into one another, which hobbles this song but lends a richly dangerous quality to “Tears in Reverse,” a kitchen sink of sonic elements that makes a meal of its disparate dance-pop pieces. Skip around in its four-minute runtime and you’ll hear four or five different songs, each a banger.
Lucius love a midtempo moment, too. The aforementioned “Promises” is a bouncy acoustic highlight; drop the synths, and it’d be right at home on the next Highwomen album. “The Man I’ll Never Find,” another ballad, is home to one of the album’s best choruses, one for the divorcée to belt from her midlife-crisis Mercedes Benz. (Wolfe’s own ex-husband is a member of the band.) These songs are great showcases for the group’s range. Though they seem to have settled squarely in the neon haze of the dancefloor, they’re more truly in their wheelhouse in these mellower moments.
Sequencing, though, is a problem. Too often, the record plummets from a sugary adrenaline high to a last-call ballad. “24,” a fine piece of gothic chamber pop, is ruined by its placement on the heels of the joyful, excessive “Next to Normal.” The bones of Robyn’s best work are here, buried deep; the song would hit harder had it been engineered for crying in the club. “LSD” suffers from the same problem, slowing down after a stellar pre-chorus when it should be slamming the gas pedal.
It’s clear why so many other artists are drawn to Lucius for collaborations: Laessig and Wolfe have mastered harmony. They can make themselves at home in any era, at any tempo, and sound utterly authentic. They’re still searching for an identity as solo artists, though. They cast about on this record, veering from the Bee Gees to Bruce. It’s in that heartland pop space where they carve their mark deepest. Leave the glitter and the vodka sodas to somebody else, maybe; embrace Jack Daniels and dust. | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | April 15, 2022 | 6.7 | b1c4021c-19d8-41ca-b9fc-2a84b9f66a1f | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The sound of trio Palberta evokes the post-punk era’s great experimentalists, with overloaded glee and delirious energy. The 20-song *Bye Bye Berta *is their first attempt at doing so longform. | The sound of trio Palberta evokes the post-punk era’s great experimentalists, with overloaded glee and delirious energy. The 20-song *Bye Bye Berta *is their first attempt at doing so longform. | Palberta: Bye Bye Berta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22868-bye-bye-berta/ | Bye Bye Berta | Palberta take joy in confusion. Formed in New York’s Hudson Valley at Bard College, the trio of Lily Konigsberg, Anina Ivry-Block, and Nina Ryser has spent the last few years baffling audiences in the Northeast DIY scene with brief blasts of broken rounds, abstract nursery rhymes, and jittery haphazard rhythms that speed to cartoonish extremes or slow down to a crawl seemingly on a whim. Despite the anti-hero virtuosity that they each demonstrate on guitar, bass, and drums, Ivry-Block has said in interviews that she’s “never really learned how to play songs on the guitar or really any of the instruments.” Consequently, their sound is largely in line with the post-punk era’s great experimentalists—This Heat’s rattlesnake coils of toxic rhythmic interplay, Sun City Girls’ prankish melodies—but they approach these sounds with a sort of overloaded glee, crashing and careening through styles and sounds for little more than a couple minutes at a time. Then, they’ll awkwardly trade instruments before barreling through another sub-two-minute track.
They’ve released a couple of tapes and splits—most notably 2013’s My Pal Berta and 2014’s Shitheads in the Ditch—that attempted to bottle their delirious energy, but at 20-songs long, Bye Bye Berta is their first real attempt at doing so longform. The effect, even through just the first couple of bite-sized pieces, is jarring and deliberately so. Within five minutes, Konigsberg, Ivry-Block, and Ryser tunnel through dazed chorales (“Why Didn’t I?”), discordant speed blues (“Acoustic Rollup”), bracing noise rock (“Jaws”), and narcotized concréte (“Bells Pt. B”). The stylistic hopscotch is unsettling, but playful, something like attempting to hop onto a speeding carousel. Even as you start to feel sickly, you can’t help but hang on tight.
Compared to some of the more outré experiments they’ve slipped onto singles and splits since Shitheads, the sounds that make up Bye Bye Berta feel especially well-considered. It’s a strange thing to say about a record that has an intentionally misremembered—and largely off-key—rendition of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin Alive,” but it’s clear that Palberta are giving real thought to the diverse textures they can wring out of their instruments. “She Feels That Way,” for example, is presented first as a sparse, unplugged ballad. It’s then followed by a noisy, rumbling version of the same track—the original’s toy piano plinks are scoured by the brillo-tough, barely-in-tune guitar lines. These two versions of the same loose, spectral melody show it plainly, but Palberta never really repeat a specific sound between songs, even with their limited instrumental palette. It only adds to the euphoric disjunct of the record as a whole.
It’s happened elsewhere in Palberta’s catalog, but on Bye Bye Berta’s eighth track, “Trick Ya,” they finally break. As their atonal skronk and single line of lyrics—“Don’t trick me! I’m gonna trick ya”—accelerates toward a brick wall, the trio can’t keep up with the pace and then they one by one break down in laughter. The track descends into unplugged slow bass plucks, the wreckage of an effort toward ambitious playing. Amid all the intentionally awkward and off-putting melodies squeaked and squeezed from guitar, bass, and drums, that moment is the first outward indication that this isn’t a stone-faced attempt at some lofty goal, like pushing the boundaries of guitar music or something. Instead, they pause and laugh, letting listeners who aren’t already familiar with their occasionally goofy live shows know that their compositional efforts are as much a form of amusement for themselves as they are anything else. It’s hard not to chuckle along with them. | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat / Ramp Local | February 10, 2017 | 7.7 | b1c8c69a-6938-4abf-af53-6cdf7aea4029 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
Former Ultravox/Buggles keyboardist and current Hollywood film bigshot Hans Zimmer gets the call to score the Simpsons Movie. Meanwhile, Alf Clausen-- longtime composer of all original music for "The Simpsons"-- has probably fired his agent. | Former Ultravox/Buggles keyboardist and current Hollywood film bigshot Hans Zimmer gets the call to score the Simpsons Movie. Meanwhile, Alf Clausen-- longtime composer of all original music for "The Simpsons"-- has probably fired his agent. | Hans Zimmer: The Simpsons Movie: The Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10495-the-simpsons-movie-the-music/ | The Simpsons Movie: The Music | Alf Clausen, you will be avenged! Clausen, the longtime composer of all original music for "The Simpsons", has long had to suffer the indignity of being responsible for all tunes Groening except for the theme, which Danny Elfman receives exactly one giant money bag per day for. That theme is almost universally known and loved, but Clausen's work is in a way much more impressive; given the far-flung range of satire "The Simpsons" has reached in its 20 years, Clausen has had to be as versatile as any television/movie composer in the industry. Plus, he had absolutely nothing to do with The Simpsons Sing the Blues, which is definitely worth some points.
And yet, producers of The Simpsons Movie (you may have seen a commercial or two for it) chose to snub Clausen and go with former Ultravox/Buggles keyboardist Hans Zimmer. Well, okay, Zimmer's also done Oscar-nominated scores for stuff like The Lion King and Gladiator, but c'mon, who saw those? Clearly the idea was to give the movie a more cinematic feel via the score, an understandable priority for creators faced with making (as the opening sequence points out) a film version of a TV show you can watch for free 12 times a day. But as far as Simpsons loyalists are concerned, Zimmer could be one of the German guys who took over the Springfield Power Plant in "Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk", inspiring Homer's fantasy about the Land of Chocolate (music by A. Clausen).
The thing is, scoring the music for a Simpsons story, be it episode or feature, is no easy task. Thick with one-liners, subtle sight gags, and (in the case of the movie) flashy animation tricks, the music has to fight for limited space. Even after seeing the flick, the only pieces I recognize on replay are the surf-guitar spy-theme of "Release the Hounds" and the Elfmanish choral treatment of trailer gag "Spider Pig". The rest of the soundtrack is filled with stock orchestral scoring that befits the film's extra-wide aspect ratio without being intrusive, the only thing marking it as particularly Simpsons being the repeated appearance of variations on the central theme.
Granted, it's unfair to compare this collection with Clausen's magnum opus Go Simpsonic With the Simpsons, given the several dozen episodes that disc pulls from. Perhaps a better comparison is another TV-to-film conversion, 1999's South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, wherein Hollywood vet Marc Shaiman (from such classics as Sister Act and Hot Shots!) gleefully skewered the conventions of cartoon musicals with the show's creators. Miraculously and thankfully, The Simpsons Movie is not a musical (it's even less musical than several recent seasons), but the chance to add a level of orchestral parody to the joke-filled mix is flubbed.
But, then again, The Simpsons Movie isn't as good as the South Park movie either-- though it was surprisingly satisfying. More than any comedic failings (is the techno version of the theme, "Recklessly Impulsive", supposed to be a joke?), Zimmer's score is a snooze just because it's so bland and generic, with the only memorable bits coming from the 11-note theme that was already written for him. Who knows if Clausen would've done much better, but it's worth speculating that keeping things in-house, and using someone experienced at keeping up with the show's frenetic joke pace, would've run truer to the Simpsons spirit, or at least been more fun to listen to at home. | 2007-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Adrenaline | August 3, 2007 | 3.3 | b1c9fb2b-4b13-473e-b2d1-ff624d5b1a8c | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Three and a half decades on, Diamanda Galás still talks about her singing as an act of violence. She shreds the American songbook on two new records, with a restrained version of her deadly approach. | Three and a half decades on, Diamanda Galás still talks about her singing as an act of violence. She shreds the American songbook on two new records, with a restrained version of her deadly approach. | Diamanda Galás: All the Way/At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22975-all-the-wayat-saint-thomas-the-apostle-harlem/ | All the Way/At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem | Three and a half decades after Diamanda Galás’ first recordings as a solo vocalist, she still talks about her singing as an act of violence. Musing to Rolling Stone about her performance of the folk standard “O Death”—versions of which are included on both of her new records, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem—she describes it as a cycle of destruction. “You keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and desiccating it and putting it back together until it becomes a new life form,” she says. “And then you rip it apart again.” It’s an accurate description of that solo piano piece—which traffics in the California-born composer’s longheld affinities for bebop, blues, and stately morbidity—but it’s also a handy summation of the harrowing work Galás has made for her whole career.
Whether she’s offering abstract expressionism on her original compositions or shredding the American songbook—as she does on this pair of releases—the uniting factor is a sense of attack. Galás’ singing is most often clipped, multisyllabic, microtonal. Her bracing classicist techniques are employed with an executioner’s heavy hand. Galás’ bellow has added ever-darker textures to grim records about the specter of AIDS and the horrors of genocide. She has made more than one record with a titular nod to Satan. Darkness is kind of her thing.
By these standards—and even compared to her other efforts interpreting jazz and blues classics, like 1992’s The Singer or 2003’s La Serpenta Canta—her two new records are relatively muted. It’s a direction she’s been moving in for the last couple of decades. But in the nine years since her last album, the live document Guilty Guilty Guilty, Galás has finally perfected this restrained version of her deadly approach.
All the Way’s rendition of Lew Brown & Ray Henderson's “The Thrill is Gone” starts here with piano lines that feel as prim as gently struck wine glasses. Her sustained vocal tones mostly mirror the warm, slow simmer of the original, even when she pushes the melody to more frigid territory. Then suddenly, she strikes. Her soprano voice turns to sandpaper, scrubbing away at your eardrums with the limber microtonal bursts that have become her weapons of choice over the years. Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.
This structure is affecting, but perhaps even more so on At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem. Galás has made a number of live albums over the years (and even parts of All the Way were recorded at shows in Europe), and they’ve typically been highlights. They’re reminders that her streaking and arcing vocal feats are actually emitting from a real human. All the Way occasionally dabbles in vocal effects processing—like the dizzy delay that shades the title track—but At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person. The violence feels even more harrowing when you can sense Galás at the center of it, as author and subject.
As through most of her career, it’s striking to hear Galás’ splintered take on compositions that aren’t her own. There’s a cliché about covers pulling songs apart at the seams, but over the years Galás has become adept at outright dismemberment—irrevocably altering the silhouette of iconic moments in popular music. She makes familiar sounds feel unsettled and unfamiliar. Once conventions are shirked, a whole host of terrifying possibilities opens up, especially with the knowledge that Galás probably won’t show any mercy. Listening to these records is like catching a glimpse of an elongated shadow at the other end of a dark alley, not knowing what inhuman form awaits, but knowing there’s no escape.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the original version of “The Thrill is Gone.” | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | March 27, 2017 | 7.5 | b1d4b85e-e5c5-4bf7-bf49-4be51cda4c50 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The Montreal band’s fifth album finds them in musical and lyrical stasis. The pale, joyless songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it. | The Montreal band’s fifth album finds them in musical and lyrical stasis. The pale, joyless songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it. | Arcade Fire: Everything Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arcade-fire-everything-now/ | Everything Now | Arcade Fire became a new band for their 2013 album Reflektor, a prismatic, 75-minute carnival of genres about creating meaningful connections in a diffuse technological age. Before the album came out, they billed themselves as the Reflektors, with a fake website, a fake album, a bunch of secret shows, and some top-heavy papier-mâché masks. As this new band, they were reborn on the dance floor. No longer just po-faced helmet bangers and nostalgia merchants using Google Maps to make people cry, now they had synths and beats and a silver sparkle with James Murphy and Haitian kompa and rara music all celebrating with joie de vivre under the mirror ball.
Who Arcade Fire became on their new album Everything Now—a tangled, joyless record of Banksy disco and bloodless new wave that examines fear, love, and suicide in our modern media landscape—is anyone’s guess. Before its release, they created a fake “global media and e-commerce platform” called Everything Now, a brand play that spawned Creature Comfort cereal, engaged with KFC’s Twitter account, and published “fake news” websites, one of which was a satirical review of the record in question. The aim of their online theatre, apparently, was to bolster some of the record’s themes of infinite consumerism in media, the overwhelming anxiety of the moment, the recursive loop of technology—sex, drugs, and Marshall McLuhan.
It would be one thing if the tiresome rollout ran contrary to its music—a bit of cosmic brain Twitter irony to temper another earnest Arcade Fire album. But Everything Now attempts to capture life within and without the content loop—the paranoia, narcissism, and “creature comforts” within; the love and fear without. It’s a worthy undertaking because this kind of acute despair feels more pervasive than ever. Things have changed since OK Computer asked and answered a lot of these questions. Now it’s not a dread that looms large, it’s a pronounced daily trauma, one self-inflicted by simply logging on and making yourself available as a marketing target.
But on Everything Now, Arcade Fire aren’t lifeboats for our ennui, they’re scolds. Their self-reflexive mood and half-baked critiques have landed all over the record’s grooves. The “society, man” songs are riddled with cliche, and the love songs are a bore. If ever you faulted Arcade Fire for their unmoored passion, their art-school busking aesthetic, their words lousy with import and meaning, you have to admit at least they sounded like they gave a shit. The charmless air of Everything Now captured by Arcade Fire’s six-person lineup—with the aid of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, Beak>’s Geoff Barrow, and Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, among others—creates an atmosphere of self-loathing and dim romance, housing two separate songs whose lyrics are “Infinite content/Infinite content/We’re infinitely content.” For a band who discovered themselves in sincerity, they are thoroughly lost when they bet it all on cynicism.
Never mind that Win Butler—who once burst forth from the mix to holler from his heart, singing hallelujah—now just intones his words in this dry, accusatory tone. Never mind that he asks you if you “want to get messed up,” preaches at the pulpit about boys and girls who hate themselves, and then just raps all seven days of the week at one point. Never mind that the record falls off a cliff with the painful dub-synth disaster “Peter Pan,” a song so starchy and grooveless it seems impossible they could write anything worse. Never mind that they do write something worse with “Chemistry,” the sound of Billy Squier pouring warm milk over the concept of reggae.
These are all just bad omens on the way to realizing Everything Now is trapped in lyrical and musical stasis. Conceptually, the songs don’t transcend their social critique, they succumb to it. Musically, they don’t have momentum, they simply fight inertia. The warmer back half of the record is at war with itself, trying to pull real feelings up from arrangements that are topographically dull and looped out much longer than they need to be. “Put Your Money on Me” pulls off a neat melodic shift halfway through (cribbed from the chorus of “Dancing Queen”) but then runs out of ideas, relying instead on a tired synth bassline. It’s whiplash to go from the scrappy, orchestrated new wave-pop of “We Exist” to something this anemic, as if the only lesson they took from dance music is that songs should, above all, alternate between two chords.
Arcade Fire used to be goobers whose bombast and sanctimony were forgiven because their music was so dazzling. They made a simple blues progression seem like an ocean on “Keep the Car Running.” And live, I mean, to watch Richard Reed Parry go to war with a concert bass drum, or to watch Régine Chassagne stare transfixed as she sings of Haiti or to watch the entire band rev up a dance pit with “Here Comes the Night Time” is to see why they became iconoclasts 13 years ago, simply by giving so much space to people who didn’t care about being cool. Like U2 and Bruce Springsteen before them, Arcade Fire songs aren’t measured by their length or chart placement, they’re measured by their area, and how many people they gather to emote within it.
But here in the claustrophobic space of Everything Now, the warts of Arcade Fire are impossible to miss. Map the vocal melody on “No Cars Go” or “Sprawl II” with your finger in the air and you’ll arc it up and down in peaks and valleys. Do the same thing with the turgid and thoughtless “Creature Comfort” or “Peter Pan” or “Signs of Life” and your finger will barely move. Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies.
What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes. The title track, one last reverie before the darkness, shines much like its counterpart on Reflektor. Those unison strings and piano, that four-on-the-floor beat, the exalting choir behind the band, Patrick Bebey’s pygmy flute performance: it’s a treasure. Sure, the chorus is Win Butler getting wistful and bitter about how he, too, is allowed everything all of the time, but it’s upheld by the life of the music around it. Butler manages to fight through all his doubt on the touching finale “We Don’t Deserve Love,” a woozy, protracted sunrise, a full-band capitulation to feeling at end of a bleak, anti-celebratory album. These and the filigrees of Chassagne’s voice on the standout “Electric Blue”—specifically when it helixes up into the stratosphere near the end—are to be clung to and cherished as deeply human moments on a record desperately in need of them.
Which is to say that Everything Now succeeds in concept alone: It is an album about a once and possibly future great band trapped in its own feedback loop (the digital download is indeed sequenced for infinite content: the final track “Everything Now (Continued)” connects seamlessly with the intro “Everything_Now (Continued)”). But it belies to such a great degree what we’ve come to love about Arcade Fire in the first place. On “Creature Comfort,” Butler sings about someone attempting suicide while listening to Funeral. In the world of Everything Now, it works as this shocking, bemused moment of interconnectivity. The way he sings it—almost in passing—fits with the dazed and dead tone Butler conveys through his lyrics. But in the world outside the record, it’s callous and obnoxious, unpacked without grace or taste by a band who are historically committed to helping out those in need. Is this who they fear they’ll become, or is this who they have become? It’s a question the album fails to answer. | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | July 28, 2017 | 5.6 | b1d65313-f2b1-4e1e-93e3-956e650ef07f | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
On the crushing and glorious HOPELESSNESS, Anohni collaborates with Hudson Mohawke and OPN to create something new: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song. | On the crushing and glorious HOPELESSNESS, Anohni collaborates with Hudson Mohawke and OPN to create something new: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song. | ANOHNI: HOPELESSNESS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21819-hopelessness/ | HOPELESSNESS | What has been the price of my protection? This spring at New York's Whitney Museum, the artist Laura Poitras—best known for her 2014 film about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Citizenfour—offered a harrowing answer. Within her multimedia exhibition Astro Noise was a piece called Bed Down Location. It invited viewers to lay on a platform in the dark, assuming what in yoga is referred to as "corpse pose." The installation lulled you with doomy static and dispassionate male voices. The night skies of Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen were projected at the ceiling like a planetarium. The idea was to stare at them—the celestial expanses of countries in which the U.S. has launched drone warfare—and think. To imagine human lives reduced to coordinates on a grid, as if flesh and blood were part of an exercise in a math textbook. To imagine balls of fire falling onto us. To imagine death. A New Yorker might be struck by just how many stars those skies contained. Struck by how they look like sheets of glitter. By the beauty of an ornamented mustard-yellow building under our big Moon. By how nature could look like an oil painting. By how you want to be there. The emotion of Poitras' work did not just show the cost of our sense of protection—irrevocably, the cost was felt.
I thought of Anohni's *HOPELESSNESS *there. Both Anohni and Poitras have constructed monumental works this year dealing in the atrocity of post-9/11 America—drone warfare, mass surveillance, violent masculinity. These are the depths into which HOPELESSNESS demands that you swim or drown. HOPELESSNESS is a record where the American dream is a hallucination, where Big Brother lustfully becomes "daddy/ohhh," where we are all called out. It is the sonic equivalent of a burning Shepard Fairey painting and all its embers.
As leader of the chamber pop ensemble Antony and the Johnsons for two decades, the musician formerly known as Antony Hegarty has always been in dialogue with the present. But now, with co-producers Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, there are many more layers of rigor to that conversation. Anohni has undergone a musical metamorphosis, crafting another outlet for her vision: the electronic dance anthem as visceral protest song. So much has unfolded in the six years since Anohni's last studio album with the Johnsons—Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the trial of Chelsea Manning, the Black Lives Matter movement. Anohni—ecofeminist soul warrior, dramatist, a person who Lou Reed called an "angel"—it would be hard to find a more capable figure to lead us into a woke pop polemic.
Poignant political realities have always grounded Anohni's work, but now they are at the forefront, articulated with an incisiveness that stares you in the eye. You have never heard words like "chemotherapy," "child molesters," and "mass graves" crooned so gorgeously. HOPELESSNESS places Anohni alongside radical pop provocateurs like M.I.A., artists who propose difficult questions that mainstream America does not want to ask because it would not know what to do with the answers. But Anohni insists that we raise our stakes. "A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club," she said in 2012. "It's just so fucking boring and not useful. It's such a waste of our time... another reflection of how astray we are as a civilization."
*HOPELESSNESS *disrupts that. Anohni, HudMo, and OPN meet on an astral plane and construct a sleek salon there, where we can reflect on the current moment and perhaps be spurred to action. The elegant bombast of these tracks propels the issues forward with a clarity that is exacting and exhilarating. Anohni has worked with both of these electro sophisticates before (in June of 2011 OPN tweeted: "antony doesn't use the internet anymore") but HOPELESSNESS represents a new level of collaboration. The subject matter is daunting, but this is some of the most accessible and pristinely infectious music that any of these people have made. With that, HOPELESSNESS simultaneously broadens Anohni's appeal and brings that appeal into focus.
"Drone Bomb Me" is sung from the perspective of a seven-year-old girl whose family falls victim to a targeted killing. "Blow my head off/Explode my crystal guts," Anohni sings, describing toxic reality with a honeyed cadence, and as this body-music gets under your skin, its subject—which in life is too often abstracted—makes an appeal to the heart. In her singing I am reminded of what we mean by "soul" music: empathy, pain, sincerity, dignity, the truth of life. I am also reminded that Anohni covered Beyoncé years ago, that her voice crushes you like Adele's. This isn't the first time Anohni has overlapped with dance music—she collaborated with Hercules and Love Affair, and in 2013, the DJ Avicii included an electro house remix of "Hope There's Someone" on his album True. (Perhaps Anohni heard its hyper-masculine drops and thought: ummmm…..)
Production-wise, the HOPELESSNESS team did not take the obvious route, which would have been doomy post-Arca metal scraps from Yeezus' industrial wasteland. If HOPELESSNESS recalls any Arca song, it's the xen philosophy of 2014's unsettlingly beatific "Sisters." (That Mohawke, a producer on Yeezus, Pablo, and "All Day," should serve as a connective between Anohni and Kanye—who've both worked to infiltrate and subvert—makes a lot of sense.) The sinister rumble of "Violent Men" and the ominous "Obama" monologue makes them outliers here, texturing HOPELESSNESS with darker, episodic pieces. The maximalist slam-dunk beats of HudMo's TNGHT project are absent, but the burnt-rubber bounce that opens "Obama" hints at it. There's an impulse to place "Obama" in the tradition of scathing presidential take-downs—like Stevie Wonder's "You Haven't Done Nothin'" or Neil Young's "Let's Impeach the President"—but the way Anohni turns liberal subterfuge into a literal hex feels more complicated. "Obama" recounts how the world cried for joy when the President was elected and how furiously disappointing recent years have been, "all the hope drained from your face." These are menacing lyrics you would still more readily expect to be railed by a contemporary punk band like Downtown Boys or Priests ("Barack Obama killed something in me," Katie Greer succinctly put it in 2014, "And I'm gonna get him for it!") than any pop star.
"Violent Men"—an ambient, pitch-shifted meditation on the need to "never again give birth to violent men"—underscores the essential theme of these songs, which is the violence of patriarchy as the core of all oppression. And this leads to another tenet of HOPELESSNESS: ecofeminism. On the 2012 Johnsons live album Cut the World there was a poetic speech called "Future Feminism," which situated Anohni unmistakably into this context—the basic idea that feminism must extend its liberationist ethos from gender, race, class, and physical abilities into nature. Ecofeminism defines the stunning "4 Degrees," alluding to the impending global temperature-increase that will factually topple our ecosystem. "I want to see this world/I want to see it boil," Anohni sings, belting out a striking catalog of the dogs, lemurs, rhinos, and other creatures who are going to perish because of our selfishness and greed. The mood is heavy, urgent, dire—a fully-issued wake-up call bearing reportorial weight, an ultralight beam parting a cloud.
Anohni's vast environmental songs are like modern rewrites of Kate Bush's "The Big Sky," where the once-innocent vaults of heaven are more foreboding, sites of hidden remote-control murder, invisible all-watching eyes, gas emissions. And yet underlying these songs is a plea for a kind of love that implicates all life. As Anohni sings of our current apocalypse, her voice and these beats have some semblance of utopia in them. It is music about death and destruction that sounds deep-down infatuated by the forces that keep us alive.
The bracing "Why Did You Separate Me From the Earth?" is another ecofeminist epic, the no-future punk tradition born anew: "I don't want your future/I'll never return/I'll be born into the past." HOPELESSNESS makes the lethal clashes of capitalism and nature, of the industrial and the organic, impossible to ignore. Crucially, ecofeminism posits that a masculine sense-of-self considers itself separate of the world, whereas a feminine sense-of-self sees itself as fundamentally interconnected, with responsibilities. All violence and ecological crises, then, come from failing to make connections. Anohni poses a most pressing question of late-capitalism: "Why did you separate me from the Earth?"
"Watch Me," meanwhile, is possibly the most sensual piece of musical surveillance art ever. Crisp, cavernous beats boom over ambient noise, and our nightmarish culture of intercepted metadata floats into eerie seduction—there's a degree of absurdity to that, befitting the absurdity of our world. In "Watch Me" Anohni is being spied on in her hotel room: "Watch me watching pornography/Watch me talking to my friends and my family," she sings, gliding gracefully, "I know you love me/‘Cause you're always watching me/Protecting me from evil/Protecting me from terrorism/Protecting me from child molesters." With bone-chilling intimacy, Anohni reveals so much about how surveillance culture cuts out the potential of choice. "Watch Me" is the HOPELESSNESS song that is most likely to lodge itself into your skull with its euphoric melody, but plot-twist: you can't really sing it in public. Astonishingly, then, "Watch Me" is song about surveillance that might make you surveil yourself—an act of sousveillance.
One is reminded of Anohni's connection to former Johnsons member William Basinski. HOPELESSNESS should fall alongside his ambient classic The Disintegration Loops in the canon of music that responds to post-9/11 America. The songs constantly underscore Anohni's complicity—from a pained utterance that "I'm partly to blame" to how she cries through the ecstatic apology of "Crisis"—but HOPELESSNESS also comes with an embodied promise of change. The message is encoded into every note: If Anohni's music can manifest into something new, then perhaps we can. There is risk involved with moving from a timeless sound towards one that attempts to capture a moment, but without risk art is worthless.
Earlier this year, news broke that Anohni would not appear at the Oscars. She was the first transgender performer to ever be nominated—on the successes of a song she wrote about ecocide for a movie literally called Racing Extinction—but the honor was diminished when she was not invited to perform at the ceremony. In response, Anohni wrote an essay about the decision that is itself a remarkable document. "They are going to try to convince us that they have our best interests at heart by waving flags for identity politics and fake moral issues," she wrote. "But don't forget that many of these celebrities are the trophies of billionaire corporations whose only intention is to manipulate you into giving them your consent and the last of your money. They have been paid to do a little tap dance to occupy you while Rome burns."
*HOPELESSNESS *is not afraid to sway within the flames, to draw you towards the heat. The fact is that Anohni's dramas cannot exist in a world of Hollywood endings. They are too real for a silver lining. HOPELESSNESS communicates the horror of seeing that in so many ways we have been profoundly fooled by the fantasy of the American experiment. By how the stars are not just stars. By how they contain lies. By how the truest protagonist of HOPELESSNESS is us. | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rough Trade / Secretly Canadian | May 5, 2016 | 9 | b1d7a18a-c0ed-4cc9-8b2e-2397a0162b7c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The National’s second album of 2023 extends its predecessor’s subdued mood and reclusive purview. | The National’s second album of 2023 extends its predecessor’s subdued mood and reclusive purview. | The National: Laugh Track | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-national-laugh-track/ | Laugh Track | R.E.M. had been a band for 24 years when they released their worst album, 2004’s Around the Sun, a record that magnified that aging act’s growing weaknesses and succumbed to sheer tedium. The National, perhaps not coincidentally, were also marking 24 years together when they released First Two Pages of Frankenstein in April this year. While not as disastrously dull as Around the Sun, that record dragged in similar ways. Both albums over-relied on programmed drums, and both gambled on the misguided hope that studio refinement might prove a fair substitute for live energy. It’s hard to imagine many Taylor Swift fans introduced to the National through her feature on Frankenstein became converts.
R.E.M. responded to their misfire by taking a few years to recalibrate and returning with a rock record. The National have taken the opposite approach. Just five months after Frankenstein, they’ve released a companion album, Laugh Track, featuring material written alongside its predecessor. True to its mirrored cover art, Laugh Track plays largely like The Next Two Pages of Frankenstein, continuing its predecessor’s subdued mood and reclusive purview, with singer Matt Berninger further chronicling depressive withdrawal and deteriorating relationships (“Friendships are melting/Nothing is helping,” he despairs). That may disappoint fans hoping that the muted reception to Frankenstein might inspire the band to shake things up, but Laugh Track does fine-tune its predecessor’s approach, albeit subtly. The band recorded most of it after Frankenstein, using their tour behind that album to road test and refine the stray ideas from its writing sessions, so the execution is slightly tweaked, less rigid, more freeform.
Most noticeably, drummer Bryan Devendorf returns to a real kit after Frankenstein primarily relegated him to machines. That’s a huge upgrade: Devendorf’s drumming has long been the 5-Hour Energy shot that keeps this band from drifting into slumber. Even though he’s rarely granted much volume to play with, he packs drama into even some of the record’s slowest songs; you can hear where the applause is supposed to go. His fidgety, racing percussion introduces intrigue to the otherwise staid “Turn Off the House,” and he propels “Space Invader” toward the kind of cathartic outro this band used to throw down all the time but now reserves only for the rare nights when the sitters are free and nobody has work the next morning.
As has become the norm on National albums, there are some guests. Phoebe Bridgers returns on the title track, a sweet little song about looking on the extremely relative bright side, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon shadows Berninger on “Weird Goodbyes,” the string-kissed 2022 single conspicuously left off of Frankenstein. Big names, both, but they’re basically accompanists; their voices may be on these songs but their fingerprints are not. That’s not the case with Rosanne Cash, who plays Lady Gaga to Berninger’s Bradley Cooper on the late-album standout “Crumble.” It’s the rare late-period National song you can imagine somebody other than Berninger crushing at karaoke.
Laugh Track could use more changeups like this, because even when it locks into a blissful, easy groove that Frankenstein struggled to sustain, it can’t shake the sense of sameness that’s haunted the National’s last few releases. Did we really need this many more sullen piano ballads? Or another song about being no good at parties? The group’s last nine records have already so exhaustively excavated Berninger’s psyche that there’s not much left to reveal.
The album saves its biggest departure for last: “Smoke Detector,” a Velvet Underground–style jam where Berninger spits incensed, abstractionist poetry over gnarly guitars for nearly eight minutes: “Make a list of your loved ones in order of height/Laugh at the blackbirds in the knack of the night,” he seethes. Hastily written at a soundcheck just months ago, it was the last song completed for Laugh Track, and it feels like it came from a completely different album. After so much composed beauty, its rawness is a corrective, pointing toward a way forward now that they’ve purged the last of Frankenstein’s material from their system. This band still has a fierce rock record in them. Maybe next time they’ll make it. | 2023-09-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-18T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 18, 2023 | 6.8 | b1d7ecc9-27e2-429c-a1be-fbdede81dda4 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The new box set examines the early years of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, a soul-music label that defined its city the way Stax did Memphis and Motown did Detroit. | The new box set examines the early years of Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records, a soul-music label that defined its city the way Stax did Memphis and Motown did Detroit. | Billy Paul / Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes / The O’Jays / Dick Jensen / The Intruders / MFSB: Get on Board the Soul Train: The Sound of Philadelphia International Records Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-billy-paul-harold-me-get-on-board-the-soul-train-the-sound-of-philadelphia-international-records-vol-1/ | Get on Board the Soul Train: The Sound of Philadelphia International Records Vol. 1 | One of the biggest hits of the early 1970s was inspired by people watching. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, already titans of soul in Philadelphia, would sit at their favorite downtown bar and watch the same people order the same drinks every day. One couple stood out: The man and woman would meet at the same time, sit in the same booth, play the same songs on the jukebox, then go their separate ways. Gamble and Huff were songwriters, and they idly devised a backstory for the man and woman, something about two married people scheduling daily trysts with the sad knowledge that their love would never be more than that hour at the bar. They set the story to a melody and gave it to an artist on their Philadelphia International label named Billy Paul, a jazz singer they were trying to transform into an R&B star. He knew “Me and Mrs. Jones” was a hit as soon as he recorded it.
Projecting a very 1970s kind of cool, with a gravelly yet agile voice, Paul plays down his usual vocal improvisations on the song in order to elongate the notes. It’s a way of drawing out the moment: When he sings, “We got a thing going on,” he holds “thing” a few beats longer than expected, giving those adulterous lovers a little more time together. The billowy arrangement by Bobby Martin, full of elegant strings and weightless guitar, is similarly patient. Like the infidelity ballad “Dark End of the Street,” it’s a song that shuts out the whole world. “Me and Mrs. Jones” reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, selling more than 4 million copies—all the more impressive given that white radio stations routinely dismissed similar R&B singles as “too Black.”
The song established Paul as a sophisticated artist and a sensitive vocal interpreter, although he’d never again enjoy such a smash. “Me and Mrs. Jones” became his signature song; more than that, it became a signature song for the era and a paragon of Philly soul, a velvety strain of R&B whose opulent orchestrations added heightened drama to everyday predicaments experienced by Black Americans in this new decade. The style was pioneered by Gamble and Huff, a pair of sidemen turned songwriters turned businessmen, whose Philadelphia International Records (PIR) did for Pennsylvania’s largest city what FAME did for Muscle Shoals, Stax did for Memphis, and Motown did for Detroit.
Founded in 1971, their label is the subject of a new compilation that collects remastered versions of PIR’s first eight LPs, released from 1971 through 1973. Commemorating the label’s 50th anniversary, Get On Board the Soul Train will be followed by more volumes tracing its outsize influence throughout the decade. But this one is a good introduction to PIR in particular and to Philly soul in general, as it shows how the label and the genre were born out of the city’s secular and sacred music scenes. Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, small gospel groups and street-corner doo-wop ensembles alike relied on tight harmonies and theatrical spoken-word interludes, and a few of them survived long enough to work with Gamble and Huff.
Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, for example, were veterans of the touring circuit by the time they released their PIR debut, I Miss You, in 1972, playing to white audiences and Black audiences—but not at the same time. Their close harmonies provided a structured backdrop against which their two lead vocalists—Melvin and a rising star named Teddy Pendergrass—could improvise and testify. There’s a smooth theatricality to their album, whose songs are often interrupted by lengthy romantic monologues addressed to an imagined lover. On “Be Real,” Pendergrass gives us a one-sided argument, as though he’s practicing it in his head for whenever he finally musters the courage to confront her. Gamble and Huff may have written (or co-written) most of these songs, but the singers put their own stamp on them, especially on “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” It’s one of Gamble and Huff’s best and most heartbreaking compositions, and Bobby Martin’s string arrangement lifts the song a few feet off the ground, but it’s Pendergrass’ impassioned delivery that makes it a stone soul classic.
The O’Jays take that sound even further on their PIR debut, 1972’s Back Stabbers, simultaneously refining and deconstructing the R&B vocal group sound. “992 Arguments” and “Time to Get Down” are exciting in their taut vocal choreography, and “Love Train” churns up enough exuberance to make its hippy-dippy sentiment sound realistic, even feasible. But “When the World’s at Peace” takes everything apart, spiraling into a lengthy coda where the voices deliver disembodied rhythms. It’s a moment that echoes both the disillusionment of Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Going On and the beleaguered optimism of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It’s a genius bit of sequencing to follow that song up with the masterful title track, whose paranoia is lent credence by its funky, cinematic arrangement. “Back Stabbers” is the inverse of “Love Train”: ostensibly about romantic rivals making time with your special lady, it signals broader concerns about America in the ’70s. Especially when paired with Undisputed Truth’s 1971 hit “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” it sounds like a rebuttal of the ubiquitous smiley face that became the decade’s unofficial logo.
Both “Back Stabbers” and “Love Train” were big hits, but not everything that PIR did landed so well. Dick Jensen was a Hawaiian lounge singer who managed to parlay the public’s fascination with the 50th state into a Vegas residency and a handshake association with the Rat Pack. Sammy Davis Jr. had a smash with “Candy Man” in 1972, so perhaps the label thought there might be a market for a handsome crooner. Backed by what was solidifying into the label’s multiracial house band, Jensen sounds completely out of his element on “I Don’t Want to Cry” and “32nd Street,” like Engelbert Humperdinck collaborating with Isaac Hayes, and it’s not hard to see why he’s usually omitted from Philly soul playlists and box sets. Still, his version of “Going Up On a Mountain” is mighty, and he’s an intriguing discovery on this set, if only for making every other artist sound a little more exciting.
For the most part, PIR stuck with what worked. The Intruders had been singing locally since the ’50s, and Gamble and Huff had written and produced their 1968 breakout hit “Cowboys to Girls.” Their PIR debut, Save the Children, is a deeply eccentric take on Philly soul, starting with their cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s title track and extending to their disarmingly sweet “I’ll Always Love My Mama,” a song that ought to be unbearable but somehow isn’t. Their cover of “Mother & Child Reunion” makes good on Paul Simon’s world-music aspirations, and “I Wanna Know Your Name” stops everything so Sam “Little Sonny” Brown can recite his Tinder profile: “I drive a little red Volkswagen/I like to go horseback riding/I like all kinds of sweets/Cupcakes, currants, things like that.” It has the effect of grounding the song in reality; like “Me and Mrs. Jones,” it creates its own space separate from the larger world, this time with pastries.
Credited on Save the Children for the first time ever was PIR’s house band, MFSB (short for Mother Father Sister Brother), a group of veteran studio players that had gelled into its own distinct entity, not unlike Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra. Their self-titled debut, boasting some of the funkiest artwork in the label’s history, opens with a florid interpretation of Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddy’s Dead.” Where the original was fleet and street tough, MFSB’s cover is maximalist: a block party set to music. That applies to most of the songs on MFSB, including their cover of “Back Stabbers,” which is essentially the band covering itself. In fact, half the fun of this box set is hearing these artists comment so creatively on other pop trends, as they reach out and bring a little Philly to other cities and scenes.
MFSB in particular would prove prolific and highly successful throughout the ’70s, but the early years of PIR, the years covered by this box set, belonged to Billy Paul. He gets three of the eight albums here, which speaks to his breakout status as the label’s biggest star. As such, he’s the only artist to have much of a trajectory in this volume. On Going East, the label’s first LP, he establishes a sound and an approach, especially with his imaginative covers of Les McCann’s “Compared to What” and “Magic Carpet Ride,” a song so ubiquitous that you might think there’s no way it could ever sound new. But Paul and the studio musicians take Steppenwolf’s familiar riff and turn it into a jazzy shuffle, upbeat and inviting, especially when the flute comes in. Paul scats the lyrics, essentially rewriting them with his rat-a-tat delivery, turning a song about getting high into an anthem for getting down.
That confidence is even more pronounced on 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, which contains “Me and Mrs. Jones” along with another set of covers. Rather than sounding slow and self-congratulatory, his version of Elton John’s “Your Song” is bright, exuberant, witty, overjoyed—a declaration of love by a man who sounds like he can’t believe he’s found the real thing. It should have been a hit, but PIR was unprepared to capitalize on the success of Paul’s breakout single and released the “Am I Black Enough for You,” penned by Gamble and Huff. It’s a fantastic song, with a hip-shaking horn section and a tone somewhere between playful and angry, but it was not a song that was going to get the same kind of widespread radio play. And his follow-up album didn’t even contain new material. Instead, it was a reissue of his 1970 LP Ebony Woman (released on Gamble and Huff’s previous label, Neptune Records). Paul doesn’t show the same dramatic flair with lyrics as he does on his other two albums in this set, so there’s not much purpose to his deconstruction of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” With its meandering arrangements and stiff playing, it sounds like a step backwards for Paul as well as for this otherwise triumphant collection. (A better end point would have been the other album that was reissued at the same time, 1968’s Feelin’ Good at the Cadillac Club, but presumably that will kick off volume two.)
Get On Board the Soul Train, however, is the rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike. Too often soul music from this and previous eras is dismissed as a singles genre, a backhanded compliment that assumes Black artists couldn’t possibly sustain the longer or more complex statement that an album demands. Previous PIR reissues have served up some full LPs (most notably 2014’s Philadelphia International Records – The Collection), but by making room for every LP, this particular set argues persuasively that Philly Soul was a collaboration among songwriters, arrangers, producers, session players, and singers—which doesn’t diminish the work of the artists who got their name on the spines but elevates everyone else. Together, they established a sound that beautifully synthesized jazz, soul, funk, soundtracks, and avant-garde composition, and soon they would refine that concoction into disco. In fact, one of the earliest examples of the disco beat—you know the one, with the excitable 4/4 clip, heavy on the high hat—was played by MFSB’s Earl Young on Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ 1973 smash “The Love I Lost,” but that’s for another volume.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | null | June 2, 2021 | 8.5 | b1dbb0cd-7bd8-4a3c-acaf-a1ac2cd9d777 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Laetitia Tamko’s bright, dewy electro-pop album depicts growing up with candor and levity. | Laetitia Tamko’s bright, dewy electro-pop album depicts growing up with candor and levity. | Vagabon: Sorry I Haven’t Called | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vagabon-sorry-i-havent-called/ | Sorry I Haven’t Called | Laetitia Tamko opens her latest album as Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called, as if you're leaving a party right alongside her, finally free to debrief without looking over your shoulders. “Can I talk my shit?” the Cameroon-born, New York-based musician asks in her lilting falsetto, then without waiting for an answer, confesses: “I got way too high for this.” The song is whimsical and vibrant, her conversational words floating over the wistful ahs of an Auto-Tuned choir and bouncy drums. It feels like a reminder that being vulnerable doesn’t have to be scary: It can feel cheeky, bold, and even fun.
Tamko emerged from the Brooklyn DIY scene and became part of the new indie-rock vanguard after the release of her debut album, 2017’s Infinite Worlds, a collection of scrappy guitar anthems that felt pensive and ferocious in equal measure. She deviated from that sound on her second album, experimenting with slower, reverb-drowned R&B and indie pop. On Sorry I Haven’t Called, which was co-produced by Rostam, Tamko changes shape once more, resulting in bright and dewy electro-pop songs with more rhythmic dimension. She wrote the album while processing the death of her close friend and collaborator Eric Littmann, expecting to create somber ballads “But when I sat down to write,” she recalled, “I found that I headed more towards catharsis, more towards euphoria, more towards joy.”
Honesty, to oneself and to others, is a central theme throughout Sorry I Haven’t Called. On several songs, Tamko measures the growing distance between people, slipping into reveries about the conversations they might have once had: “We find ourselves taking different paths/I see you out and I miss your laugh,” she sings on the wistful ballad “Passing Me By.” On standout “Do Your Worst,” a slice of breakbeat-pop with flute-like trills, Tamko grieves an unhealthy relationship: “You turn me into someone I don’t fuck with/I don’t like myself when I’m with you.” Her subjects can be complicated, but her songs are breezy, inviting the listener to sing along.
Sorry I Haven’t Called illustrates a shift in Tamko’s storytelling: She sidesteps diffuse, open-ended imagery for blunt, informal observations. As a writer, Tamko refuses pity, always reflecting on her own role in a dynamic, or searching for a silver lining. This mentality is clearest during the buoyant, Afrobeats-influenced “Carpenter.” “I wasn’t ready to hear you out,” she sings over euphoric shakers and guitar, “but I’m more ready now.” You get the sense of a songwriter shedding her skin, accepting that these inevitable changes will allow her to learn new lessons. On Sorry I Haven’t Called, she depicts the process of growing up with an unflinching heart. | 2023-09-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | September 22, 2023 | 7.4 | b1e0d0dc-380a-4298-b1db-6c2efacb03b2 | Mary Retta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mary-retta/ | |
After 17 years, five albums, and numerous line up changes, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits with their final, self-titled LP, which looks back on things with surface cheeriness and tangible fatigue. | After 17 years, five albums, and numerous line up changes, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits with their final, self-titled LP, which looks back on things with surface cheeriness and tangible fatigue. | Hot Hot Heat: Hot Hot Heat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22027-hot-hot-heat/ | Hot Hot Heat | After 17 years, five albums, numerous line up changes, Hot Hot Heat are calling it quits with their final, self-titled LP–not that they expect you to care. The Canadian group are totally fine with their spiral into obscurity, because they’ve have nothing left to say, judging from frontman and principal songwriter Steve Bays’ comments to the press in the wake of the split. “I really have no idea what it means to put out a record out in 2016,” he admitted to The Independent, surprised that anyone even bothers about Hot Hot Heat anymore, or cares about their dissolution: “It feels like we’re getting a warm reception so far, and not any kind of… ‘What are you doing here?’”
Bays’ statement is ostensibly intended as a humble shout-out to the diehards, and yet the self-deprecating jokes belie gravely low expectations and a dearth of self-confidence. It’s not the best look for a triumphant farewell address, but considering the purgatory faced by Hot Hot Heat’s former peers and touring partners, can you blame him? (Anyone heard from Louis XIV? She Wants Revenge? The Bravery?)
Still, the quartet have reason be proud, or at least not so damn hard on themselves. While the bulk of their contemporaries have more or less fallen into a temporal tar pit in recent years, Hot Hot Heat started this decade out strong with 2010’s Ryan Dahle-produced, forward-thinking Future Breeds, a decidedly safe–but nonetheless enjoyable–update to the off-kilter, post-punk-y pop showcased on 2002’s Make Up the Breakdown, the group’s strongest album. As expected for a career-concluding LP, Hot Hot Heat does away with this progressive approach: instead, they’ve offered up a thirty-minute, ten-track retrospective that reflects on the past decade-and-a-half with playful fondness–and beneath the cheery surface, tangible fatigue.
Bays framed the band’s self-titled LP as a return to Hot HotHeat’s punkish early period, shortly before the runaway success of Make Up the Breakdown garnered the group international attention. At that time, Hot Hot Heat recalled a more unwieldy XTC, and between Bays’ energetic barks and squeals and since-departed guitarist Dante Decaro’s proficiency in choppy punk riffs, “Bandages’” short reign on the rock charts offered a refreshing dose of goofy new-wave à la Devo.
Sadly, despite his claims of the contrary, this familiar old spark rarely ignites Hot Hot Heat, musically nor lyrically. Bays’ usual tics–the high-pitched yelps, the glam posturing–have all but faded away, leaving us with Julian Casablancas’ long-lost Canadian cousin, all sneered soh-ries and throated mumbles on “Modern Mind.” Similarly, guitarist Luke Paquin sounds like he's spending a lot of time with the last two Strokes LPs, swiping swatches of Albert Hammond Jr.’s Thin Lizzy-meets-Daft Punk palette for “Magnitude,” “Mayor of the City”, and “Sad Sad Situation.” (I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: the incessant déja vu, or Hot Hot Heat’s uncanny ability to make those albums sound good.)
Hot Hot Heat’s curtain call isn’t all recycling–accordingly for its position in the band’s discography, the record entails a litany of wistful reflections. “It could’ve been you/It should’ve been you,” Bays laments on the chorus to the opening track, a hand-wringing portrait dedicated to a childhood friend who never rose to his glorious potential (arguably, a narrative one could extend to the band itself); on “Pull Levers,” he repeatedly reminds the audience that it's “too little, too late.” Regardless of the group’s intention, these contrite undertones are easily the album’s most compelling trait, and its best songs tackle that ambivalence head on: the nocturnal samba “Alaskan Midnight Sun,” a nod to the band’s early flirtations with world music, as well as the aptly-titled closing shuffle “The Memory’s Here.” It makes for an oddly bittersweet closing note: Rarely does a band bid you farewell and admit it overstayed its welcome in the same breath. | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Culvert Music | July 7, 2016 | 5.1 | b1e8d0a4-31d4-4159-8adf-d139730eebf4 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen, takes a scientific approach to experimental electronic music. His new album is a dynamic work of maze-like rhythms, trapdoors, and serenity. | Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen, takes a scientific approach to experimental electronic music. His new album is a dynamic work of maze-like rhythms, trapdoors, and serenity. | NHK yx koyxen: Exit Entrance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nhk-yx-koyxen-exit-entrance/ | Exit Entrance | A clinical, almost scientific air hangs over the work of Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen. He makes experimental electronic music that sounds like it is the result of an actual laboratory experiment. His textures crackle with electrical charge; his rhythms morph and multiply like bacteria. You imagine him pulling his beats from test tubes. His rickety structures are part Frankenstein’s monster, part Rube Goldberg contraption—rave heaters fueled by Bunsen burner. But unlike most products of the scientific method, Matsunaga’s music often seems deliberately inscrutable. In place of conventional titles, many of the releases in his voluminous discography make do with numerals. Whatever meaning names like “236,” “190409,” or “7” might have (to say nothing of “1057_S” or “862” or “Y”)—are they file names, parameters, snippets of code?—is left unsaid. If there’s an encryption key to his work, he’s hidden it safely away—soldered to the corroded guts of a malfunctioning Casio keyboard, maybe.
That Matsunaga trained as an architect might not be surprising. No matter how chaotic his music, at its base lies a lattice of intersecting vectors, like a crumpled blueprint. For 20 years, he has orbited the fringes of electronic music, recording for labels like Mille Plateaux and Important, and collaborating with musicians like Merzbow and Mika Vainio. But in the past few years he has come inching in from the cold. After the rhythmic free-for-all of his Dance Classics EPs for the PAN label, last year’s Doom Steppy Reverb, for Oscar Powell’s Diagonal imprint, was his most “techno” record yet. Now he turns up on DFA, of all places. Exit Entrance is hardly a dance-punk or a disco record. But it is a little less hermetic, a little less airless, than his previous recordings. (He has even shifted to word-based titles.) The beats are crisper, the structures marginally closer to traditional dance music. You can imagine DJs playing many of these tracks. The pastel thunder of “Outset” sounds like a Jeff Mills set heard from the alley behind the nightclub; the sludgy “Dignity” could pass for an electro track played back on a turntable with a 16 RPM setting.
The opening “Meeting” sets the record’s tone: As a chintzy keyboard melody plinks away, synthesizers drip like leaky faucets, and a syncopated beat crunches like boots in snow. Cautiously emotive, it is simultaneously playful and distant; it doesn’t quite pass the Turing test. The sequences evolve in such a way that it’s hard to put your finger on what the musician is doing to them; subtle tweaks make frequencies squirm as though alive. Driven by a bruising kick drum and nervous shakers, “Finding” barrels ahead at 140 beats per minute, its rhythm constantly reshaping itself, with no two bars exactly alike. Despite the heavy drums and the open throttle, there’s something coy about its rubbery plucks that sets it apart from most straight-ahead club fare. A similarly toy-like quality infuses the pinging “Intention,” which suggests a breakbeat rave tune modeled in Erector Set, while the drifting acid of “Mutually” conveys a kind of accidental whimsy. Over a scratchy, bare-bones beat, the arpeggio gradually comes unstuck from the scale and blossoms into unexpectedly beautiful harmonies that disappear before anything like sentimentality can settle in. If you told me that a randomized algorithm were responsible for 90% of the composition, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Even “Dented,” the 12-minute rave maelstrom that closes the album, has this simulacral sensibility: It bangs, but something about its squelch feels not quite right, and the longer it goes on, the more claustrophobic it begins to feel. That’s not to say that everything on the album is so tricky: The short, sketch-like “Notice” offers an oasis of blissful feeling. Rich synthesizer chords glisten like dewdrops and thick, humid reverb drifts upward; it all unrolls as calmly as a stroll in a glassed-in atrium. It’s tempting to hear it as an echo of Japanese environmental music, the ambient subgenre in which atmospheric music is composed with specific spaces—shopping malls, offices, etc.—in mind. In an album full of maze-like rhythms and trapdoors, our architect has penciled in a space of total serenity, one that makes the rest of the album seem all the more dynamic in comparison. | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | October 14, 2017 | 7.4 | b1ec9453-3d1d-4090-b944-2e797ccabe54 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
For whatever reason, psych-pop seems more prone to reductive descriptions than most other genres. For critics,\n\ it's all ... | For whatever reason, psych-pop seems more prone to reductive descriptions than most other genres. For critics,\n\ it's all ... | Of Montreal: Satanic Panic in the Attic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5954-satanic-panic-in-the-attic/ | Satanic Panic in the Attic | For whatever reason, psych-pop seems more prone to reductive descriptions than most other genres. For critics, it's all too easy: Just state the bandname and album title, discuss the intensity of the lead songwriter's Brian Wilson fixation, and critique him based on the effectiveness with which his band approximates Pet Sounds. For extra points, drop words like "hallucinogenic" or "sun-drenched" in the review as often as possible, and-- if you're really good-- throw in a well-placed Curt Boettcher reference. There you have it: Band X is another petty homage to 1960s California pop.
I often wonder why music fans aren't more resistant to this type of summary delineation; surely there's more to Jeff Magnum's twisted genius than a childish idolization of the Beach Boys, just as Will Cullen Hart's powers don't derive from something abnormal in the water he drank as a kid. I suppose this critical tactic is prevalent because there really are artists who fit this simplistic bill, ones whose records are about as essential to a pop fan as the work of a bad Zeppelin knockoff would be to a metalhead.
I've always pegged Of Montreal as one of those inessential bands. The only real adoration I've felt for any of their tracks is for "Don't Ask Me to Explain", a simplistic ditty from the band's debut LP that manages to do Weezer better than Weezer themselves. And although Of Montreal haven't released a real dud in the band's eight-year recording life, the most engaging thing about their songs is often their longwinded, quasi-literary titles. Evidently, the band has had trouble keeping the attention of record labels as well, spreading their seven-album yield amongst five different imprints.
Two years removed from Aldhils Arboretum, their last studio album of new material, the band has had-- by Of Montreal standards-- a relatively long time to hone their sound and explore a more cohesive approach to songwriting, one less encumbered by oblique concepts. Since 1997, Of Montreal have churned out roughly an LP a year, not to mention untold EPs, B-sides, and an effective collection of singles. The group's longest previous respite between LPs was the two-year hiatus between The Gay Parade and Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse. And while Coquelicot was clearly more ambitious than its predecessor, it wasn't a vast transformation in either quality or style. All told, there was no reason to expect any great strides from this dependably generic quintet this time out, which makes Satanic Panic in the Attic all the more surprising.
Satanic Panic displays a considerable maturation in Kevin Barnes' songwriting. Everything, from the Sgt. Pepper's-copping album art to the wontedly verbose lyrics and song titles, would suggest a predictable collection of spindly psych-pop. But when the music actually starts, the differences become apparent. "Disconnect the Dots" begins with a Doppler-affected drum sample, before the abrupt appearance of both handclaps and a verifiably indelible guitar riff. Seconds later, Barnes arrives, bearing an invitation: "Come disconnect the dots with me, poppy," he intones, before deliquescing into a blissful mini-chorus. From there, the song shifts effortlessly from section to section, orchestrating a dense but well-balanced array of organ drones, vocal harmonies, astral guitar peals, and interlocking electro-acoustic percussion. And this is all in the album's first 4\xBD minutes.
"Disconnect the Dots" is more than just an album pacesetter-- it's a mission statement for a band remade, or at least reconsidered. The new Of Montreal grab your attention, not deliberately invite it to wander, as the next track, "Lysergic Bliss", makes abundantly clear. The song is perhaps most reminiscent of the band's earlier work, sluicing through multiple time and key changes with operatic grandiosity. On a previous effort, the song's fragments might have either fallen apart from lack of a coherent vision or been mashed together to form a mottled soup of disparate ideas, but here, the track is handled with impressive finesse; even the bridge's extended a cappella harmonies have a natural flow.
Elsewhere, Satanic Panic frequently leans closer to Steely Dan than the Beach Boys, which lends a refreshing dose of realism to the implicit reverie of songs like "My British Tour Diary". Elsewhere, "Eros' Entropic Tundra" and "Erroneous Escape into Eric Eckles" are both delicately refined, while still retaining Of Montreal's psychedelic salience. And while the music hits with somewhat of a blunted edge, Barnes' harmonies are always unimpeachably catchy.
My naysaying of Of Montreal's earlier work is only meant to underscore the impressive growth displayed here. While albums such as The Gay Parade and Coquelicot often drowned in oppressive amounts of cheerfulness, it's possible to take Satanic Panic seriously while still enjoying even its stickiest melodies. It may lack the raw inventiveness of a potential peer such as Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, but Of Montreal are psych-pop of a different strain. Satanic Panic in the Attic is idiosyncratic without being hokey, and although the band has been stiffed recognition for the consistency of their previous work, this album should make the group much more difficult to ignore. | 2004-04-08T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-04-08T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | April 8, 2004 | 8.3 | b1eed471-2a60-4d2d-9540-2467d75a7f05 | Pitchfork | null |
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Produced by Mica Levi, Tirzah’s debut is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical. | Produced by Mica Levi, Tirzah’s debut is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical. | Tirzah: Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tirzah-devotion/ | Devotion | The imperfect piece of art has a sway all its own. To some, the blemishes and dimples on a handmade ceramic bowl will always be better than the machine-made replica. The Japanese call this kind of beauty wabi-sabi; some European thinkers refer to such ineffable idiosyncrasy as “aura.” But at this point, imperfection has been perfected and mass-produced in the form of distressed jeans, faux-vintage furniture, and certain lo-fi music. Encountering something genuinely, gorgeously flawed is elusive. Tirzah Mastin’s debut album Devotion is a compelling vision of what imperfect pop music can be—joyful in both sound and feeling precisely because both seem so out-of-step and asymmetrical.
Tirzah began to hone this vision in 2013 when she released I’m Not Dancing, an EP of eccentric dance-music ballads she made with the British producer and composer Mica Levi. The EP’s title track, one of Tirzah’s defining songs, sounds as unconventional and alluring now as it did half a decade ago: Wheezing, blown-out synthesizers and rickety drum hits mingle with her quietly loud voice—so pure, so raspy, so dogged and cool all at once. It begs you to lean in closer and make sure the speakers aren’t broken. Like Jai Paul or FKA twigs, her delivery is unguarded and messy in the way someone singing alone in the shower might belt out a song. Listening to her feels somehow both private and totally casual, a peculiar sort of shared intimacy. It’s this quality that makes Devotion so particular.
Working again with Levi, who has produced all of Tirzah’s past music, she’s moved away from the bright, ramshackle club music vibe of past releases, and together, they’ve honed a sound that’s lean and almost uncomfortably close. The spare style allows the listener to really zoom in on each little detail of Tirzah’s voice—and in that space, things get pretty intense.
On the opener “Fine Again,” Tirzah takes time to savor each word she sings—elongating every little detail of the word “fine” and unlocking new timbres as she goes. But the song doesn’t move along smoothly. It starts, stops, and hiccups, tripping you up once you’re comfortable. You look to Tirzah’s vocal as an anchor, but then the vocal line gets thrown across the room, multiplied into choruses, muted, pitch-shifted, sped up, slowed down, and torn apart. Serenity arrives when one heartstopping romantic phrase—“This feels so pure this feels rare”—rings clear. This all happens in under three minutes, and it’s representative of what Devotion does well: It’s an invitation to explore the nooks and crannies of adult relationships.
Tirzah has described the album’s 11 tracks as “straight-up love songs,” which elides just how gritty, lived-in, and straight-up strange these pieces can be. On “Guilty,” there’s a guttural crunch of distorted electric guitars that’s followed up by a gobsmacking use of Auto-Tune that doesn’t smooth out Tirzah’s voice, but rather accentuates its gravelly texture and breathy impurities. It creates a sensation that feels simultaneously alien and human, recalling Levi’s work scoring the unsettling 2013 horror film Under the Skin, where she made atonal string compositions feel fleshy and organic.
That spirit of surprise comes from Levi’s desire to make sparse backdrops that free up Tirzah’s voice to explore and make mistakes. The producer’s austere technique resembles Arthur Russell’s more minimal pop experiments: The world Levi builds for Tirzah is airy and open—her piano chords and drum hits float by like a paper bag caught in a breeze. When that spare sound doesn’t congeal with Mastin’s voice, though, it can make the songs seem unfinished, listless, or both: The quiet piano ballad “Say When” sounds like a scratch take; others work hard not to be noticed, like “Do You Know,” with its circular synths and shuffling drums.
When that simplicity does shine through, it’s cutting. It all comes together on the album’s striking title track a duet with the South London artist Coby Sey. The sound of Sey’s wounded hums wrapping themselves around every weary note Tirzah sings is electric. Her blunt writing—“I just want your attention/I just want you to listen”—only makes the song even more excruciatingly emotional. Surrounding her is just a simple drum and piano loop, letting every tired, stretched-out note luxuriate in sadness. To write and sing love songs this naked and uncompromising could be taxing. But nothing about Devotion feels like a burden. Instead, it’s so personable and candid that it feels like a privilege to spend a few minutes hearing what Tirzah has to say, imperfections and all. | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Domino | August 10, 2018 | 8.3 | b1f62916-ae61-4ced-b66b-413aa4dd4096 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
The colorful Los Angeles dance-pop trio’s second album, released on their Time No Place imprint with help from Kompakt, retains their 2010 debut’s feeling of youthful mischief, but reinforces it with tuneful songs and deluxe production that seemed only a distant possibility on that collection. | The colorful Los Angeles dance-pop trio’s second album, released on their Time No Place imprint with help from Kompakt, retains their 2010 debut’s feeling of youthful mischief, but reinforces it with tuneful songs and deluxe production that seemed only a distant possibility on that collection. | Rainbow Arabia: FM Sushi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17870-rainbow-arabia-fm-sushi/ | FM Sushi | A name like “Rainbow Arabia” comes armed with expectations: a childlike whimsy, a colorful disposition, and some sort of cultural appropriation are among things you’d likely chalk to up a group with the moniker. Their last album, 2010’s Boys and Diamonds, lived up to those first impressions: It was a collection of Orientalism-tinged ditties full of kid-friendly chants and West African melodies. But even when their songwriting was strong, they still felt more like an idea than a band. Their new album FM Sushi, released on their own Time No Place imprint with some help from Cologne techno giant Kompakt, retains that feeling of youthful mischief but reinforces it with tuneful songs and deluxe production that seemed only a distant possibility on Boys.
The Los Angeles husband-wife duo have undergone some changes since then. For one, they’ve brought in a live drummer to beef up their drum machine rhythm tracks. The pool of sounds they borrow from has also greatly expanded. While their reference points are still pretty identifiable, they throw sounds together in a much more interesting way than their old drowning-in-reverb indie pop. It’s noticeable early on, with the spry second track “He Is Sorcerer”, full of New Order grandeur and their most irresistible melody yet. Every phrase uncoils effortlessly from the last, like the stuff summer jams are made of. Tiffany Preston’s vocals sound unnervingly like the Knife’s Karin Dreijier Andersson, but her newfound confidence to play with her voice is almost enough to look past the resemblance.
Though the Prestons are definitely writing tighter pop songs this time around, their inspiration comes from an unlikely source: German synth and soundtrack music from the late 70s. Tangerine Dream and their many contemporaries have been a prominent thread in electronic music for several years now, often with guarded techno types, but the trio handle the influence in unusual ways. The puffy textures serve to make their pop songs plusher, but the inherently portentous tones provide emotional complexity as well. The title track is turned mournful heart-tugging, and they layer bluesy guitar licks over the the machine moans of “Moments I Had". Transplanting sounds from all sorts of genres, it would be easy to label them as record-collector pop or internet music dilettantes-- but their music feels too honest and eager for such cynical categorization.
That being said, it does feel like they’re piecing together bits from their favorite artists, intentionally or not. On moments like the arpeggio-drenched “River’s Edge”, or especially instrumental “Thai Iced Tea”, where MIDI sax rides a bumpy groove like a toy miniature “V-2 Schneider”, they’re their own band. But on “Lacking Risk” and “Three Moons”, they blatantly ape the chintziest of 80s pop. They do it well, sure, but so do countless other bands. And considering this is a group that apparently likes to re-interpret entire Tangerine Dream soundtracks in their spare time, it’s obvious that they’re capable of better. FM Sushi, then, is a stepping stone for a group suddenly poised to do great things, things their debut never even suggested. But looking over the precipice is different than actually crossing it-- so for now we’re stuck with them as they formulate their next move. At least it’s not a bad place to hang around. | 2013-04-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-04-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Kompakt / Time No Place | April 12, 2013 | 7 | b1f78143-cb78-49e9-93ca-f18bdea98a9d | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Dunedin, New Zealand-based singer-guitarist Kane Strang's songs have a way of making modest acts seem heroic. At his best, he comes off like Panda Bear doing a one-man garage-band remount of Pixies slow jams. | Dunedin, New Zealand-based singer-guitarist Kane Strang's songs have a way of making modest acts seem heroic. At his best, he comes off like Panda Bear doing a one-man garage-band remount of Pixies slow jams. | Kane Strang: Blue Cheese | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21623-blue-cheese/ | Blue Cheese | The Dunedin, New Zealand-based singer-guitarist Kane Strang traffics in off-the-cuff, off-kilter indie-rock songs that somehow sound like the products of great struggle and effort. Listening to Blue Cheese, his first North American release, feels like that hungover moment on a Sunday morning when you have to summon all your strength to hurl yourself out of bed and over to the bathroom. In the same way you might want to award yourself a medal for making it there without puking in the hallway, Blue Cheese's tousled charm has a way of making modest acts seem heroic.
Blue Cheese was recorded by Strang while house-sitting his parents’ house, but it’s hardly a reservoir of sensitive, singer-songwriterly introspection. Rather, it’s the sound of a young, restless soul taking full advantage of the empty environs by making an inspired racket and broadcasting his innermost musings to no one in particular. Kane Strang isn't just this guy's name, it's also a handily onomatopoetic descriptin of the odd jangle of his guitar. Strang actually plays all the instruments here, a fact betrayed by the sludgy, rumbling bass lines, the lumbering, drum machines, and the one-finger synths that feel like placeholders for the brass and string sections he can’t yet afford.
And though Blue Cheese is being billed as a proper debut in the wake of 2013’s demos collection, A Pebble and a Paper Crane, a certain slapdash aesthetic remains: songs have a tendency cut out before they even reach a chorus, and the uniformity of their sound, arrangements, and temperament suggests it was all cranked out sequentially in a single session, with the console settings untouched from one song to the next. Over its brief 28-minute run time, there are moments when you’ll be itching for a change of scenery, but Strang has a gift for pulling diamonds from the rough, and he’s careful not to let his winsome voice and finely cut melodies get overwhelmed by their surroundings.
In his most inspired moments, Strang comes off like Panda Bear doing a one-man garage-band remount of Pixies slow jams. He shares both acts' penchant for twisting innocent sing-alongs into bizarro meditations: On the surface, "The Web" is an optimistic, wide-eyed ode to blossoming romance, but it soon becomes clear Strang’s paramour is an online connection he’s never met IRL. He never quite works up a sweat—even the album’s lone rave-up "Never Kissed a Blonde" is more of a wallow than a romp. As per its DIY design, this album is about doing what you can with what you've got. But like the unattainable women Strang is fond of serenading, the album’s pop potential leaves you imagining all that could be under different circumstances. | 2016-03-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing / Flying Nun | March 8, 2016 | 6.6 | b21da76e-c52c-45c8-9fc7-a8bf7d9ba439 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The London rapper/singer Little Simz, who broke out with last year's A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, grows more engaging as she digs deeper into her emotions. Her new mixtape finds her at her most fearless and vulnerable. | The London rapper/singer Little Simz, who broke out with last year's A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, grows more engaging as she digs deeper into her emotions. Her new mixtape finds her at her most fearless and vulnerable. | Little Simz: AGE 101: DROP X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21448-age-101-drop-x/ | AGE 101: DROP X | Few young rappers are as explicitly vulnerable as Little Simz. Born Simbi Ajikawo, Simz shines brightest when leaning into her deepest emotions, and on her previous EPs, mixtapes, and debut album A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, she connected harder the deeper she dug. On "Gratitude," her single from her debut, she raps, "Put my feet in the studio and call it my home while others have got no way out," and the listener understands the severity of the stakes. Music is her escape and it is because of music that she is later able to dive deeper into her psyche and those of the people she uses as characters in her songs. "I ain’t never had a chance to do what I love," she says later in the song. "Ain’t nobody been encouraging me. I just stay indoors dreaming."
On her latest mixtape, AGE 101: DROP X, she peels back even more layers, discussing the scheming of her family and friends in an uncompromising world and the mounting pressures she experiences as her career continues upward. "Why don’t they like seeing women in charge? Shit I’ve seen left me mentally scarred" she raps on "Savage." Despite this, DROP X feels warmer and lighter than any of Little Simz' other records, and more confident. The production is sharper than anything she’s previously done, aligning with a more progressive electronic sound that weaves in between the Afrofuturism of indie R&B and post-dubstep experimentations. She also has more collaborators here than ever before, from the honey-voiced Jesse Boykins III to the slow and viscous flow of Chicago's Mick Jenkins.
"Interlude," which features Bibi Bourelly, is the strongest track, beginning with a warm guitar strum and a cold, steady coupling of drum machine and percolating synths. It sounds as fit for a singer as a rapper, and a large portion of the song is given to Bourelly. Like Dawn Richard’s "Adderall/Sold (Outerlude)," "Interlude" examine the pull of substances, the truth in things (pills, whiskey) that should only be temporarily enjoyable and not permanent solutions. Both songs are sad on the surface, but underneath is a level of hope: "Staying busy working on my shit/ How else can I be great?" Simz asks. More than most artists, Simz puts all her hope in her work; her work is her passion, the thing that helped her escape.
There is a lot of despair in Simz’s lyrics, pulling against that hope. She raps of the trials of the brutalized black body, stripped of its humanity before it has a chance to grow and thrive ("They ain't even have the one-off chance to become the greatest," she raps on "Kiki's Future") as well as her desire to keep going, regardless. She raps, "Still I'm hella angry at the system/ Young black woman, who the fuck is gonna listen to me now?" knowing full well the things stacked against her (her gender, her race) and still she keeps pushing. AGE 101: DROP X is her 10th release. By now, we should know she's not kidding. Thank goodness for that. | 2016-01-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 21, 2016 | 7.4 | b2355026-d4a8-449f-8f73-01ccb12e514b | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
On her new album, the Mexico City-based cellist and singer moves from abstraction toward more familiar pop and rock silhouettes. But her lyrics remain committed to the power of opacity. | On her new album, the Mexico City-based cellist and singer moves from abstraction toward more familiar pop and rock silhouettes. But her lyrics remain committed to the power of opacity. | Mabe Fratti: Sentir que no sabes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mabe-fratti-sentir-que-no-sabes/ | Sentir que no sabes | Mabe Fratti says her music is like looking at yourself in a “really good mirror” and staring at “all the pores in your skin.” Her charmingly idiosyncratic songs seem to caress every small hollow, every laugh line, every curiously located freckle. The Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based artist thrives on that kind of in-your-face freedom: She twists horns, drums, and cello into angular shapes, shifting between the structures and textures of experimental music, post-rock, jazz, and classical. Sentir que no sabes (Feel Like You Don’t Know), her third album in eight months, is a statement of self-definition—one that encourages you to be at peace with all your insecurities. It’s this propensity to let the irregular feel like second nature that makes Fratti so magnetic. Sentir que no sabes is a summons to make your own rawness a home.
On Sentir, Fratti moves closer to the silhouettes of pop and rock than ever before. These songs start to follow more discernible and familiar forms—although she continues to luxuriate in the oblique. “Oídos” begins with jagged, unsettling strings, plinking piano notes landing alongside Fratti’s plangent vocals. A lonely trumpet, played by Jacob Wick and arranged—along with all the album’s drums and strings—by Fratti’s Titanic collaborator Héctor Tosta, blares in the background, twisting into serpentine tendrils. It’s too meandering to be a proper pop song, but still cohesive enough to soundtrack a pensive montage in an art-house film. Lead single “Kravitz,” on the other hand, is full-blown rock, with a grungy bassline and thumping kick drum chugging alongside Fratti’s paranoid lyrics about ears in the ceiling. There are still a couple of jolts, of course: a shrill key; a portentous horn; a trembling vocal performance. Fratti has a gift for creating small dramas like this. She possesses the self-assurance of a viper, slithering through dissonance and harmony without hesitation. This capacious mode looks good on her.
On previous releases, it was easy to let Fratti’s words fade into the background—to be moved by a discordant blast of percussion, a spectral melody, or a strummed cello phrase. Fratti has always examined psychic interiors in her lyrics, but Sentir offers more urgent ruminations on the struggle to process emotions, make decisions, and not know what’s next. This often takes the form of self-interrogation. Under a plaintive plucked cello and ethereal, ’80s-inspired keys on “Pantalla azul,” she wonders, “No hay lección más que entender que todo se desordenó/¿Estoy en la razón?/¿Mientras los demás tienen otra historia?/¿Qué hacer con estos pedazos?/Seguir en la espera de un milagro.” Everything is a mess, but maybe it’s alright to feel lost in the pieces that are left behind, waiting for a miracle. In these moments, I feel a kinship between her lyrics and the digressive novels of Clarice Lispector. Like the Brazilian author, Fratti’s writing is sometimes inscrutable, but always self-scrutinous. It plunges into the confounding chaos of the psyche, seeking flashes of wisdom in all the muddle.
Fratti moves gracefully between apprehension and acceptance as she delivers these reflections. Moments of unknowing hold their own among moments of clarity. “Márgen del índice” begins with harsh clanking, electronics hissing in the background like heavy machinery as Fratti chants in sinister tones. But 15 seconds in, a gorgeous melody takes hold—it’s as if Fratti is holding our hands through her own uncertainty, her mind moving from confusion to relief and back again. The instrumental tracks “Elástica II” and “Elástica I” have a similar effect; Fratti echoes the plasticity referenced in the title, treating her cello like the stretchy slime you might find in an ASMR video. It’s a masterful interpretation of the mass of entangled—and often conflicting—feelings that live in our consciousness.
Sentir que no sabes is the kind of record that requires you to surrender to it, to listen meticulously and without expectation, regardless of how well you understand its themes. Fratti is much like Arthur Russell in that way—an artist who coaxes you to crawl into their alien world and make it your shelter. On the vocoder-laden “Alarmas olvidadas,” Fratti sings alongside a looping, growling cello. Everything is slow, loose, and lurching, like a strongman struggling to pull a big rig. Mint Field’s Estrella del Sol whistles in the background, but suddenly, there’s a brief respite from the tension: Arpeggiated keys and Fratti’s seraphic voice swell, rising above the unease. “La verdad es desafío,” she sings. Truth is a challenge. The unknown, she suggests, might not be something to avoid, but rather a place to immerse yourself. It might contain all the answers you need. | 2024-06-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unheard of Hope | June 27, 2024 | 8.4 | b239cf5e-41be-4a3f-a617-a2944987a7b9 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
The meme rapper’s debut album confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities. | The meme rapper’s debut album confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities. | Ugly God: Bumps & Bruises | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ugly-god-bumps-and-bruises/ | Bumps & Bruises | Prior to TikTok, viral rap stars took off through SoundCloud and Vine. Lil Yachty, Lil Pump, and OG Maco—this first generation of meme rappers paved the way for the success of Lil Nas X while handing corporations a ready supply of appropriation-ready rap lyrics to keep pace with millennial consumption habits at the same time. Now that the first batch is getting older, we are learning which of them can actually rap without resorting to gimmicks.
Ugly God belongs to this first wave. In 2015, the Houston rapper racked up more than 33 million hits on SoundCloud for the iPhone ringtone-sampling “I Beat My Meat,” spawning a mini-dance craze in the process. He hit the Billboard charts with his follow-up single “Water” and was inducted into the the 2017 edition of XXL’s Freshman Class. He appeared on singles alongside fellow XXL classmate PnB Rock as well as with rappers like Famous Dex, Lil Yachty, and Lil Pump. It was a good run, but two years is a long time in viral rap years, and Ugly God’s debut album Bumps & Bruises confirms everyone’s suspicions about the relationship between viral hip-hop fame and rapping abilities.
Ugly God raps over his own production for the project’s 14 tracks, which makes the whole thing feel a lot longer than it is. The music is tinny and piecemeal and the raps are dull and repetitive in the worst possible way: “Went to college for the hoes, blew up then I dropped out,” he mumbles on “Jaguar.” He shows his money off for “bitches” and “hoes” in the most tired patriarchal way imaginable: On “For Real,” he follows “My diamonds on fleek/I’m on her neck like a leash” with the chorus “My old bitch cold like ice/My new bitch hot for real.” (Shoutout to the apparent hordes of women getting their bills paid, hair and nails done, and overall expenses handled by Ugly God.)
Worst of all, he isn’t even funny, and humor was one of his only strengths. “I might make some Cajun/I fuck with Caucasians/My dick game amazing/Get served like a patient,” goes one numbing stretch from “Back to the Basics.” Not even the song called “HAHAHA!” gets a laugh: “Hahaha when you kiss your bitch right after she ate this semen, huh/Hahaha when you send me your music and I’m knowing I ain’t never gon’ stream it, huh.” Other than a guest feature from Migos’ Takeoff, the album’s only saving grace is “Bumps & Bruises (Interlude),” an under-two-minute track in which Ugly God raps about being one of meme rap’s pioneers and calls out the new generation for copying his playbook for success. Otherwise, it’s pretty clear that his social-media reign is over, and while it’s surreal to classify someone a has-been at the age of 22, Bumps & Bruises is a time capsule from the mid-2010s that should have stayed buried. | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Asylum | August 14, 2019 | 3.5 | b256bb75-52cc-457b-b073-9000d6604023 | Taylor Crumpton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/taylor-crumpton/ | |
Spastic, accessible indie rock from scrappy Hot Hot Heat soundalikes. | Spastic, accessible indie rock from scrappy Hot Hot Heat soundalikes. | We Are Scientists: With Love and Squalor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8805-with-love-and-squalor/ | With Love and Squalor | With Love and Squalor is the debut LP from We Are Scientists, and while they've been self-releasing material since 2000, the album shows the exuberance of youth on every seam: lyrics about girls and drinking and little else, rhythms rushed just past danceability, guitar-heavy verses with even heavier guitars in the chorus, more hooks, more riffs, more syllables than needed in the word "explode"-- about 11 instead of two-- on opener "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt".
Singer Keith Murray is the ringer of this scrappy crew. His calm, romantic delivery takes these constantly shifting tracks, with guitars filling every corner of the compositions, and makes them a little more palatable. For a band that's going to incur some Hot Hot Heat references for their spastic but accessible take on indie rock, his professional croon is a pleasant counterpoint to Steve Bays' yelp.
The band attempts to deliver a perfect single on every track, and expectedly, only a few deliver that rush. While "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt" comes on a little too strong, the following "This Scene Is Dead" and "Inaction" quickly find their groove. "This Scene Is Dead" plays like a cuddlier version of Les Savy Fav's "The Sweat Descends", a few notes of guitar reverberating over the verses before a churning chorus, and "Inaction" loses no momentum through its rhythmic twists and turns.
The band does their best to change the beat and keep it fresh between the three of them (bass, guitar, and drums) while straddling the line between indie and pop-punk. But somewhere around "Cash Cow", a pattern starts to emerge: a herky-jerk indie-safe verse meets with soaring stretched vowels and downstrokes on the chorus. It's an effective formula, provided it isn't used on 12 consecutive tracks.
There are a few songs that transcend the cut-and-paste approach, like the punk-inflected "Callbacks", Murray's Devo-like inflection on the giddy repetition of "The Great Escape", and the slower "Can't Lose". On "Can't Lose", the rhythm section stutters like an engine with one piston, and while the chorus pulls the same trick as all the others, the band comes up with a brief bridge that's so unassuming and tender it contrasts with the entire album. Most of these tracks have hooks aimed straight for your jugular, but "Can't Lose" shows the band could go even farther with a little restraint. | 2005-10-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-10-12T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin | October 12, 2005 | 6.7 | b259ac1a-0a06-4a5e-a7e5-81639e8cf16b | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The London hardcore band’s second album takes a bolder, brighter approach. Its embrace of self-love and community feels radical and hard-earned. | The London hardcore band’s second album takes a bolder, brighter approach. Its embrace of self-love and community feels radical and hard-earned. | Ithaca: They Fear Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ithaca-they-fear-us/ | They Fear Us | On the cover of Ithaca’s 2019 debut, The Language of Injury, a bright pink chef’s knife carved up a grayscale image of your standard raucous hardcore show. So too did the London five-piece make mincemeat of monotonous metalcore, skewering its exclusionary history while folding in adventurous tastes of other genres. The shirts emblazoned with “Stop supporting racist bands” and the press releases decrying metallic hardcore’s “lack of ambition” weren’t just a public-facing persona—the music went there, too. Language managed to incorporate doom, crust, black metal, and screamo, while vocalist Djamila Boden Azzouz threw down the gauntlet to contemporaries with lyrics like, “Nothing you say moves me/You’re not what you said you’d be.” Ithaca were a band on a mission, bursting into the genre and fighting their way out for 31 relentless minutes. Now they’ve reached the throne room.
They Fear Us, their second album, doesn’t lack aggression—it opens with Boden Azzouz spitting out the bones of her enemies over a windmill kick of a groove: “Don’t say you can take it/Don’t think I won’t break it.” But unlike Language, this isn’t an album focused entirely on pummeling the status quo into submission. In a recent interview, Boden Azzouz called They Fear Us “so much more triumphant” than its predecessor, and this change becomes obvious less than a minute into the album, when the clouds part for the soaring hook of “In the Way.” The guitars brighten, the drums accelerate from a stomp to a gallup, and Boden Azzouz’s clean vocals take the reins: “Here it goes/Aspiration holds.”
Throat-shredding hardcore vocalists pivoting to more melodic fare can be a sore subject among fans, but Boden Azzouz is better equipped (and qualified) for the transition than many of her reedy-voiced peers. She studied musical theater for a few years at the University of Leeds, and on They Fear Us, you can tell. Whereas her singing took a backseat to her screaming on Language, now the two vocal styles receive almost equal airtime. The rest of the band responds by building songs around brighter, dare-I-say hammier melodies. Language relied on the classic post-hardcore move of contrasting all-out assaults with quiet, pretty moments, but They Fear Us’ beauty is louder, bolder, and more drawn-out.
In the past few years, shoegaze has emerged as the destination of choice for heavy musicians seeking to pivot, and They Fear Us proves that Ithaca are not immune. The album’s lush sound and clean hooks pit them ever closer to UK forebears like Svalbard and Rolo Tomassi, and Ithaca wield the influence while maintaining their own unshakeable personality. “Fluorescent” in particular nails that gloriously synthetic Diamond Eyes sheen with its rich palette of digitized guitar effects and Boden Azzouz’s Chino Moreno-esque ability to switch from a keening wail into a screech at the drop of a hat. All the while, drummer James Lewis keeps the band’s heavy chops at the forefront with alternating double-pedaled breakdowns and peppy blastbeat/D-beat hybrids.
The only remnant of Language’s whiplash-inducing transitions is the band’s deft weaving between burly beatdowns and more buoyant, arena-ready fare. Check out the title track, where the lofty, clean lyrics “Bow to your blood/Your queen and/Your God” are paired with heavenward Coheed and Cambria guitar harmonies, before Boden Azzouz turns on her snarl and the guitars follow suit with nasty low-end arpeggios. The distorted squeal that hits right when Boden Azzouz lowers her voice at the end of the lines, “You think we’re lightyears away/You think we’re decades” exemplifies how the band’s skilfull play of tension and release mirrors her vocal approach.
Ithaca save their boldest trick for last, closing They Fear Us with the gorgeous, bald-faced pop song “Hold, Be Held.” Opening like a Bloc Party ballad with chiming guitars and a sparse drum machine, the song blooms into a full-throated chorus before Boden Azzouz cedes the mic to guest vocalist Yansé Cooper, whose fluttering voice is eventually woven into a rich round with backing screams and the original chorus. The song’s open-hearted cry is a radical choice for a closing statement, befitting a hardcore album so radical in its embrace of self-love and community. Musically, They Fear Us is bolder than its predecessor—more confident in its melodies, more unconcerned with heavy music posturing—and Boden Azzouz matches this evolution in her performance: She has shifted from seething outward angst to seeking strength within. | 2022-08-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Hassle | August 5, 2022 | 7.4 | b26d72b2-598f-43c1-87c9-e32420a24385 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
Stefon Alexander's fourth LP of clenched-fist, politicized, and proudly Midwestern hip-hop features production from Lazerbeak and Boys Noize, along with a Justin Vernon cameo. | Stefon Alexander's fourth LP of clenched-fist, politicized, and proudly Midwestern hip-hop features production from Lazerbeak and Boys Noize, along with a Justin Vernon cameo. | P.O.S: We Don't Even Live Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17214-we-dont-even-live-here/ | We Don't Even Live Here | The title of Stefon Alexander's fourth LP as P.O.S. conveys a self-deprecation and sense of displacement that reminds me of the last time I saw him perform live. Unfortunately, due to recent health complications, it could be the last time I see him live for a while. He was added to the 2010 Coachella lineup only days before the festival took place and he was quite literally the first person to perform that weekend, arriving to a sparsely-filled tent of curious foreigners and confused onlookers who almost certainly assumed they were supposed to see P.O.D. He acknowledged the obstacles, embraced the opportunity, and absolutely rocked that show-- he undoubtedly earned some fans in that half hour. Making the best out of a shitty situation is likewise a prevalent theme in P.O.S.' latest record of clenched-fist, politicized, and proudly Midwestern hip-hop. The problem is that the strangely smug We Don't Even Live Here feels more like P.O.S. preaching to the converted than attempting to make a believer out of anyone, lacking any palpable resistance necessary to justify the constant underdog pose.
To his credit, P.O.S. ensures We Don’t Even Live Here at least sounds celebratory. It features production from the likes of both Lazerbeak and Boys Noize that goes heavy on squelchy electro-funk, you get a Justin Vernon cameo on "Where We Land", while "Wanted/Wasted" and "They Can't Come" are near disco-sample rap, at least not that far off from something that could appear on a 97 Bad Boy record. For the most part, the aggro-punk abrasion of 2009's Never Better is jettisoned, but most of it is either overtly rock (the 5 Hour Energy-pounding opener "Bumper") or implicitly rock, the drums always knocking and often taking the tone of real snares and kicks. It could just as easily please a Rock The Bells purist as it could a Warped Tour onlooker. #47 debut on Billboard aside, no one would consider it pop-rap, yet there are catchy hooks throughout, even if their clunky verbiage make them difficult to actually sing along with.
But it's not really a crossover of any sort since the appeal of We Don't Even Live Here essentially comes down to whether or not you're already marching with P.O.S. The vast majority of the record is rendered from the perspective of "we" or "they," where "we" constitutes the Doomtree collective and anyone who has even some semblance of anger about the state of hip-hop or the economy. "They" are classic strawmen-- commercial rappers who are liars by definition, shady politicians, and anyone who has doubted Doomtree. So while We Don't Even Live Here is cerebral, not much of it stands up to intelligent debate, often vague and heavy-handed at the same time. The biggest problem manifests in a track like "Fuck Your Stuff", where a group chant promises that they'll be "scuffin' up your Nikes, spittin' on your whip." It's a weirdly dated image that's the first of many signs that P.O.S. has some kind of awareness of the mainstream. But other than brief mentions of OWS and terribly forced namedrops of Anonymous and Christopher Hitchens, you're left wondering about the last time he meaningfully engaged with it. Subliminals are thrown at the likes of "All I Do Is Win", "Stunt 101", "Diamonds from Sierra Leone", "Run This Town", and for fuck's sake, J-Kwon.
As a response, do you mention Jay-Z's involvement in the 2012 election, or Kanye's benefit concerts, or Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign, or that Young Jeezy made the definitive Barack Obama track? It hardly seems worth it, since P.O.S.'s reaction on "Wanted/Wasted" is the following: "black president, hooray for history/ but that shit's still totally pretend." What's "that shit," and how is it "totally pretend"? He leaves it at that, and "Fuck Your Stuff" is simply more food for thought filled with empty calories: "fuck dumbin' it down/ spit ice, skip jewelry/ Molotov cocktails on me like accessories." "Accessory" being a key term since P.O.S.' platform of revolution is so depersonalized-- "they on some nonsense/ we on some non-stop," "kickin' out your DJ," "this world's got a whole lot of locked doors/ we decided not to live here anymore"-- the homemade explosives and other instruments of mayhem mentioned throughout are rendered as much of a bauble and signifier as one of "their" luxury cars. Hell, the title of "Lock-Picks, Knives, Bricks, and Bats" might as well be "Beamer, Benz, or Bentley".
There can always stand to be more socially engaged musicians in any genre, but hip-hop has proven to be bountiful if imperfect on that end in 2012. You could hear the lived-in experience on Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music, a record which balances blanket statements with tough questions. El-P's Cancer for Cure conflated sci-fi with poli-sci. The Coup filtered absurdist humor through itchy new wave. Death Grips might not be saying a whole lot that's intelligible, but it sure as hell makes you want to smash something. Even the abhorrently violent hip-hop coming from Chicago can trigger real discussion as a necessary reflection of its environment. Ironically, We Don't Even Live Here creates a world where P.O.S. is all too welcome. You'll never go broke playing yourself up as the solution or alternative to the perceived mindlessness of pop radio, but it doesn't matter if you're going to the club to get drunk or simply reading post-election commentary that confirms whatever beliefs you held beforehand: They're both forms of escapism, and We Don't Even Live Here just doesn't seem aware of how content it really is. | 2012-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-11-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | November 20, 2012 | 5.7 | b273f18a-b4de-4798-b652-646888dc5df5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This Chicago trio makes the rare free-jazz album that goes down easy, playing with a grace that makes even the farthest-out moments feel accessible. | This Chicago trio makes the rare free-jazz album that goes down easy, playing with a grace that makes even the farthest-out moments feel accessible. | Jackson / Baker / Kirshner: So Glossy and So Thin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jackson-baker-kirshner-so-glossy-and-so-thin/ | So Glossy and So Thin | Keefe Jackson, Jim Baker, and Julian Kirshner are all lesser-known musicians in Chicago’s perennially rich jazz and free-improv scene, a trio of role players whose innovations have yet to receive their proper appreciation outside of the Windy City. So Glossy and So Thin, their second trio release following 2016’s The Noisy Miner, should change all of that. Taken from a pair of performances at Roscoe Village venue The Hungry Brain in 2018 and 2019, the album’s two 20-minute tracks are a showcase not only for their talents as individuals, but also for the depth of their connection. The ease with which they handle this music makes even their farthest-out moments feel accessible. The joyful spirit behind Jackson, Baker, and Kirshner’s explorations makes So Glossy and So Thin the rare free-jazz album that goes down easy.
Part of its charm has to do with how clearly these three enjoy playing with one another. They come off like they’re racing to an agreed-upon location by separate routes. Jackson’s sax and Baker’s piano tease and tickle in the opening moments of “Then,” rolling around like a pair of dogs in a yard. They shift in and out of time with one another, with the rapidly assembled patterns of Kirshner’s drumming providing a kind of mosaic-tiled ground for the other two to race over. At times they pump like a New Orleans funk band, full of footloose swagger and goofy gestures. At others, they bang out stormy pulses and thick, dissonant chords that would be at home on the experimental series of a major symphony orchestra.
What links these moments together and keeps So Glossy and So Thin from feeling disconnected is how smoothly they transition from section to section. Once they’ve exhausted “Then”’s opening, the trio deftly glides from all-out clatter to low-volume tinker with the grace of a pelican skimming the ocean, setting the stage for a gorgeous off-blue solo from Jackson. They make it work in reverse, too, raising “and again” from a simmer so slowly you don’t notice how hot things have become until they turn it back down again.
That low section in “and again” is one of the album’s most effective moments. It’s built around a long solo from Kirshner, who takes a note from Rashied Ali and treats his cymbals like hanging sound bowls; he keeps them at a steady ring while attending to a nervous pulse out of the kick drum, with a few strokes of tom providing the color. The motion is constant, but Kirshner’s playing is so deft —he taps the bell of the cymbal like he’s testing an egg — it feels like an ASMR recording, or the distant buzz and thump of a highly pitched synthesizer.
As if to not be outdone, Baker brings out an actual synthesizer in “and again.” While Sun Ra was incorporating electronics into his music by the early 1960s, and Patrick Gleeson’s modular synths were crucial to the success of Herbie Hancock’s wildest mid-’70s experiments, Baker has over his many years working with the ARP 2600 developed a mode of playing that gives the synth an expressive range as wide as any wind instrument. Stacked against the cough and yawp of Jackson’s sopranino sax, the ARP comes alive. Baker almost seems to be breathing through the machine, making it howl and groan, and teetering between tonality and atonality. Jackson picks around the ARP’s edges, goading Baker deeper and deeper, before breaking off and joining Kirshner’s rattling toms to create a pattern that itself feels like the product of a modular synth. They play in this free space — lines between sax, synth, and drums obliterated — for a few moments, then move on.
At its core, So Glossy and So Thin is nothing more than three musicians creating an environment where they can test out some of their best ideas. Remarkably, every single one of them pays off. While the music isn’t simple, it’s always convincing, like watching a movie in a foreign language: Even if you can’t follow the plot, the emotional contours are plain as day.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Astral Spirits | September 21, 2020 | 7.9 | b278ffba-3e22-4281-a684-1f40fc114207 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Star Wars Headspace is a new album of electronic music inspired by the Star Wars films. Executive produced by Rick Rubin, the record is alive with adolescent energy, thanks to a well-chosen roster of producers including Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, Baauer, and more. | Star Wars Headspace is a new album of electronic music inspired by the Star Wars films. Executive produced by Rick Rubin, the record is alive with adolescent energy, thanks to a well-chosen roster of producers including Flying Lotus, Shlohmo, Baauer, and more. | Various Artists: Star Wars Headspace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21601-star-wars-headspace/ | Star Wars Headspace | In April 2015, the emotional juggernaut that was the first two-minute Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer was released online. Drawing heavily on the iconography of the original trilogy—a beached star destroyer, Vader’s crumpled helmet, X-Wings soaring—it played on a few generations' worth of treasured memories, but what sent it over the top were the stirrings of that lovely old John Williams theme: Nostalgia, ultra.
Even more than the visuals, the sounds of Star Wars are what evoke the giddy soul of the films. Williams’ score does the heavy lifting, yes, but the whirrs and shrieks of assorted creatures, the laser blasts, and endless memorable lines are almost as important. (My sister and I would rewind the VHS tape of the first Star Wars film to hear the Jawa exclamation "Utini!" over and over again.) It’s this latter mix of sounds that animates Star Wars Headspace, a new album of electronic music inspired by the films. Executive produced by Rick Rubin, who was a teenager when Star Wars was released, the record crackles with adolescent exuberance, thanks to a well-chosen roster of producers. Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine. (Sorry.)
Flying Lotus, who contributes a track, said in an interview on Beats 1 that the producers involved were given access to a vast anthology of Star Wars sound bites but were cautioned away from Williams’ music. For that reason, random chirps, whirrs, and speech fragments dominate the proceedings, and many of the producers cash in as many of these chips as possible. Big-tent EDM DJ Kaskade kicks things off with "C-3PO’s Plight," a maximalist piece of novelty camp that turns one of the golden droid’s asides into a weirdly moving lament. The house producer Claude Von Stroke offers a goofy dance anthem that recalls the work of Todd Terje.
The musicians on the record’s latter half focus less on obvious tribute material. Flying Lotus and Shlohmo, both of whom have ventured outside of their comfort zones in recent years, incorporate droid bleeps and bloops into fresh versions of their older styles, as if they’ve walked into a childhood clubhouse and remembered all the best hiding places. "I feel real close to these sounds," Flying Lotus said in his interview, and you can tell.
This cozy nostalgia is a way of avoiding risk, and much like The Force Awakens, most of the tracks here are not particularly adventurous: GTA imitate Baauer with an imperial-style banger, while Baauer himself reaches into his usual explosive bag of tricks. Röyksopp, in one of the album’s few missteps, put together an 8-minute amalgamous mess that sounds patched together from their back catalog.
But like the new film, the tracks sound relaxed and self-assured, none more so than "NR-G7," one of Rubin’s two contributions. A successful synthesis of four or so different approaches, from pounding four-on-the-floor gristle to dazzling jet-stream synths and back again, it's a testament to the idea that sometimes indecision is the best decision. Rubin’s involvement, both as a musician and an artistic conscience, elevates the collection from crass tie-in (which, of course, it is) into something undeniably greater.
The most ambitious tracks on Headspace reach for the majesty of the original score, and Rubin places them near the end of the record where they can have the strongest emotional impact. "Sunset Over Manaan," produced by Attlas, has an aching melody that might remind you of "Leia's Theme." And the epic orchestration of Breakbot's final track taps directly into the neo-Romantic essence of Williams' music. It’s one of the only tracks that turns its back on nostalgia, striking out to explore new territory. | 2016-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | American / Hollywood | February 22, 2016 | 6.9 | b27acb9f-4d03-48c0-8506-230bc22a93d9 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
This anthology of self-released new age music from the 1980s captures a moment of spiritual questing, and it rightly rescues its creator from historical obscurity. | This anthology of self-released new age music from the 1980s captures a moment of spiritual questing, and it rightly rescues its creator from historical obscurity. | Pauline Anna Strom: Trans-Millenia Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pauline-anna-strom-trans-millenia-music/ | Trans-Millenia Music | Although it claims an international audience, the genre loosely known as new age has a special home in San Francisco. Cloaked in fog that cascades majestically over palm-dotted hills, the city’s microclimates, rolling landscape, and edge-of-the-continent setting make it an aptly evocative home for fringe dreamers, schemers, and seekers. Even prior to 1967’s headline-grabbing Summer of Love, the Bay Area had become a magnet for some of the avant garde’s most utopian voices: Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros both taught at Mills College, while Morton Subotnick’s San Francisco Tape Music Center helped develop the groundbreaking Buchla synthesizer. Organizations like the Esalen Institute and Synanon set up shop along the coast and pioneered the pursuit of alternative lifestyles, while the city’s strong anti-war, free speech, women’s rights, and gay rights movements flourished.
It was in this heady context that Pauline Anna Strom began making music. Blind since birth and a self-described “hell-raising flower child,” she arrived in San Francisco following her husband’s assignment at the Presidio military base with no plans of pursuing a career in the arts. But exposure to pioneering albums by Tangerine Dream, Kitaro, and other electronic artists from overseas soon led her to purchase a small complement of synthesizers and to set up a makeshift studio at home. Dubbing herself the Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom dove into her work, mapping an inner world of imagined pasts, possible futures, and alternate realities. Trans-Millenia Music is a survey of the most striking music she released throughout the 1980s. Variously ethereal, playful, and brooding, but always confident, the album captures the fervent experimentalism of Strom’s West Coast milieu and focuses attention on an artist who might otherwise have been relegated to history’s footnotes.
Of Strom’s seven albums released between 1982 and 1988, six are represented on Trans-Millenia Music. Rather than working chronologically, the team at RVNG has chosen to jump around freely, sequencing for flow and drama while leaning heavily on Strom’s mature phase, nodding to a few early highlights but keeping its eyes on the prize.
The album kicks off with “Freedom at the 45th Floor” and “Virgin Ice,” both taken from Spectre, her third album. Immediately engaging, the music’s mellow surface betrays a palpable urgency lurking beneath. There’s an audible connection to Cluster and Brian Eno’s 1977 collaboration, especially in Strom’s gentle vamping. Both exude a comforting coziness tinged with something more ambiguous. It’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence: “Spatial Spectre,” taken from the same album, could pass for an outtake from Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, released two years prior. As strong as anything from that record, “Spatial Spectre” answers Eno’s vaporous audio environments with a more muscular, overtly creepy workout that hovers and undulates while maintaining momentum.
Other songs veer, both for better and for worse, into tone-poem romanticism. “Rain on Ancient Quays,” a lightly overdriven work for electric piano and effects, is one of the anthology’s most arresting tracks. Unabashedly moody and grim, it evokes the lurking danger of a chintzy TV movie in the best way; I was particularly reminded of V.C. Andrews’ gothic fever dream Flowers in the Attic. “Warriors of the Sun,” on the other hand, indulges in kitschy exoticism, with synthetic flutes playing a sort of general-purpose spiritual melody before moving into a quasi-Japanese pentatonic march. “Bonsai Terrace” covers some of the same ground, although it benefits from a lurching, unsettling arrangement. Two of her earliest pieces, “The Unveiling” and “Gossamer Silk,” are perfectly lovely but would fit too comfortably in a massage parlor to make a serious impression.
Some of the very best tracks are from 1988’s Mach 3.04, a self-released cassette that Strom has yet to follow up: “In Flight Suspension” and “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet” glow with an exploratory power and depth that belie their modest initial release. There’s an uninhibited forcefulness to her arpeggios that takes these pieces beyond the confines of new age. In recent years, the genre has drifted back into style, though it is often viewed through the lens of semi-ironic detachment. That critical distance is understandable when approaching music that could be so grandiose in its proclamations. The liner notes to Strom’s debut album spoke in soaring terms of spiritual transcendence—bold claims, and possibly not what music actually does. But Trans-Millenia Music captures an artist expressing herself freely and without fear or hesitation, and it makes good on its title. Work like this may fade into obscurity, but it remains fresh to all who seek it out, still vibrant and pulsing with energy in any age—new or otherwise. | 2018-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | January 4, 2018 | 7.3 | b27b9ffc-c28d-4ce5-81d4-b3713066c562 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Bon Iver's classically trained percussionist crafts a debut solo record of austere folk and lush sonics. | Bon Iver's classically trained percussionist crafts a debut solo record of austere folk and lush sonics. | S. Carey: All We Grow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14569-all-we-grow/ | All We Grow | When he learned that Justin Vernon was expanding Bon Iver from a one-man project into a full band, Sean Carey retreated to his bedroom, broke down For Emma, Forever Ago into parts, and learned each one. After approaching Vernon at a show and briefly jamming together, Carey was hired more or less on the spot. That's not the most exciting chapter of the Bon Iver story, but it says a great deal about Carey and his first solo album, the shimmery, contemplative All We Grow. With a degree in classical percussion from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Carey approaches songwriting and recording as a student: obsessive and detail oriented, able to absorb a great deal of information and restate it not rotely, but artfully. He has obviously spent a great deal of time absorbing the works of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Mark Hollis, and Bill Evans, and on his solo songs he renders those sounds and influences into music that lies somewhere between folk and composition.
That approach places Carey among a loose group of musicians who are currently bucking folk's traditional emphasis on spontaneous performance in favor of a much more composerly tack-- musicians who give Glass and Reich the same esteem Dylan or Fred Neil usually enjoy. Carey doesn't build minimalist arrangements around vernacular tunes like Sam Amidon, deconstruct Appalachian traditions like Megafaun, or emphasize atmosphere to quite the degree that Vernon does. Instead, the distinguishing characteristic of All We Grow is its elemental quality: Using only a piano, guitar, and drums, Carey creates a sound that is simultaneously austere and lush, pitting each instrument against the others. On "We Fell", the drums and guitar create the suggestion of a self-sustaining groove, but the song really comes alive when Carey's piano flutters through the middle of it like a contrail, the theme becoming lovelier and more poignant with each repetition. Following the unraveling of the mournful "Mothers", "Action" lives up to its title as its jarring intro establishes an insistent percussion rhythm that punctuates the nettle-sharp guitar licks. Every element reinforces the sense of bittersweet nostalgia implied by that found-image album cover.
Of all the instruments on All We Grow, the least compelling may be Carey's voice. He possesses a sleepy whisper that has relatively limited vocal or dramatic range, but he compensates by mic'ing it very closely to capture its grain and texture. That technique-- used to good effect on opener "Move" and the mostly wordless "Mothers"-- emphasizes the sound of his voice over any lyrical meaning it might convey. For all practical purposes, All We Grow might as well be an instrumental album, so much so that it sounds best when Carey eschews vocals altogether. The title track opens with a prismatic intro anchored to perhaps the album's most structured melodies, but it's only after the music departs from the lyrics that the song really opens up. Carey unstitches it carefully, allowing each instrument to break away from the others gradually, even as the music threatens to dissipate into the air.
Not every song achieves such effortless drama. At times, Carey comes across as more a student than a master. He has obviously consumed a tremendous amount of music, but he hasn't fully digested some of his influences. "In the Dirt" employs fluttering woodwinds recognizable from the last few Sufjan Stevens albums, and several songs favor an almost mechanized piano theme that's practically quoted from Philip Glass. Yet these familiar elements ultimately inform rather than dispel the album's pervasive melancholy, making All We Grow a nice complement to, rather than a distraction from, his day job. | 2010-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-08-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 20, 2010 | 7.5 | b27e1f1e-3eb9-40a3-84f5-53f12d9bcb60 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Folk Time is the sound of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter absorbing their own set of influences, building their repertoires, and finding their voices. | Folk Time is the sound of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter absorbing their own set of influences, building their repertoires, and finding their voices. | Hart Valley Drifters: Folk Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22525-folk-time/ | Folk Time | For those who think of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter as major figures in American music, the Hart Valley Drifters’ Folk Time is a monumental discovery. Recorded in 1962, Folk Time is Garcia’s only known surviving studio recording from his banjo days before attaining electricity a few years later. The future Dead guitarist is clearly the quintet’s leader, or at least most charismatic, and the primary singing voice through most of the 17-song session, with the group’s vocal trio also including Robert Hunter on upright bass and future New Riders of the Purple Sage founder David Nelson on guitar. Folk Time captures three lifelong collaborators during their invaluable time exploring the roots of American music before making their own.
Though the front cover portrait of Garcia as an itinerant young Mumford with suspenders and bed-roll might read as a little doofy at first, it’s also accurate. Garcia and his friends took up bluegrass and old-time music in the early ’60s with the same bright-eyed bushy-tailed enthusiasm that young folkies have displayed in every decade since. The difference is what the soon ex-Drifters did with it. Garcia fed folk traditions into the Dead’s psychedelic maw and eventually became an influential figure in bluegrass in his own right, inspiring longhairs to take to the banjo after his participation in 1975’s best-selling Old & in the Way. Though Deadheads have traded hissy audience recordings of Garcia’s early projects for decades, the KZSU tape never even existed as a rumor. It was found by filmmaker (and liner note writer) Brian Miksis in 2008 and never circulated.
Taped in mono around a single microphone in the last months of 1962 at Stanford University’s KZSU, the Hart Valley Drifters were decidedly non-Stanford students and the opposite of radicals. The quintet hew strictly to the bounds of bluegrass and old-time music, even making sure to distinguish between the two styles during their band introductions, with Garcia playing guitar on the former, banjo on the latter. And it’s not that they’re especially breathtaking or groundbreaking traditionalists, either. They pick well together and know how to sing as a group. Even some notes don’t arrive in perfect harmony, the gospel back-and-forth of “Standing in the Need of Prayer” and dynamics of traditional foot-stompers like “Pig in a Pen” come off with jubilance, offering a hint of the charm that would (for some) carry the Dead through their most ragged moments.
The Drifters probably wouldn’t be of much interest if not for their personnel. Comparing the one track Folk Time shares with Garcia’s later bluegrass combo Old & In the Way, “Pig in a Pen,” reveals everything the Hart Valley Drifters lacked, but could taste. But, like Bob Dylan hoboing around Greenwich Village covering Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs, Folk Time is the sound of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter absorbing their own set of influences, building their repertoires, and finding their voices.
Containing the only extant recordings of Garcia singing Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby” (likely learned from Harry Smith’s fabled Anthology of American Folk Music) and winking, 19th-century sexual-political ballads like “Billy Grimes, the Rover,” Folk Time will be a delight for acoustic-minded Dead freaks. Eventually becoming one of rock’s most distinct vocalists, often getting by on charisma and expressiveness more than note-for-note accuracy, Garcia’s singing on Folk Time is far more developed than other circulating audience-made folk era tapes (and the earliest Grateful Dead recordings) would suggest. The 20-year-old Garcia fakes the slightest Southern twang on the opening “Roving Gambler” and elsewhere, perhaps involuntarily, but mostly his affable California reediness is in place.
Unquestionably the best performance on the disc is the closer, a blues arrangement of “Sitting on the Top of the World” featuring only Ken Frankel’s guitar and Garcia’s voice, and a sure stunner for Deadheads. There’s a touch more of the affected twang, but the performance and recording transcend Garcia’s age and experience, drawing from a quiet power and providing the only real glimpse of the singer he would become in the Dead. Perhaps even using the single microphone as an instrument, Garcia’s voice brushes down to a whisper. Moving with a lazy gait, Garcia catches the song’s carelessness with all the conviction of a California native. Though Garcia’s singing had a long way to go, it’s especially evident how the conversational instrumental details of the Hart Valley Drifters could turn into the improvisational pockets of the Dead, the traded lines of “Nine Pound Hammer” only a few volts away from the twining guitars of “China Cat Sunflower.”
Picking up the banjo after being discharged from the Army in 1960, Garcia immersed himself in folk music for a half-decade, practicing obsessively, working as a music teacher, and playing in a series of bands around the Palo Alto area, including the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Black Mountain Boys, and others. Like many other central ’60s musicians who would eventually plug in and freak out, Garcia came of musical age during the great folk scare, finding post-War solace in ancient (and ancient-seeming) songs. Only a few years from dashing headlong into the neon-pulsing present tense of LSD, Garcia and others first dove deep into a mythic past that seemed to come alive in the grooves of old records and zoetrope-like flicker between banjo rolls.
But they don’t always sound as if they believe it themselves. The album’s most unconvincing performance isn’t one of the mountain songs or labor tunes, but the traditional “All the Good Times Have Past and Gone.” Nelson was 19, Garcia was 20, and Hunter was 21 and who even could take that sentiment seriously coming from them? It’s perhaps the same reason why Garcia seems to occupy “Sitting on Top of the World” so effortlessly, a song he would sing as an ebullient bounce on the Dead’s 1967 studio debut and keep in his songbook until just before his 30th birthday in 1972. But with the Hart Valley Drifters in the early ’60s, the good times were only just showing the first signs of starting. | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | ATO / Round | November 15, 2016 | 7.8 | b2835c8a-e249-4aa3-a9e8-5b9e0d76013b | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
On a set inspired by his father’s death, jazz drummer Sebastian Rochford enlists pianist Kit Downes, a longtime collaborator, to help him tell a story about company and grief. | On a set inspired by his father’s death, jazz drummer Sebastian Rochford enlists pianist Kit Downes, a longtime collaborator, to help him tell a story about company and grief. | Sebastian Rochford / Kit Downes: A Short Diary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sebastian-rochford-kit-downes-a-short-diary/ | A Short Diary | On A Short Diary, Sebastian Rochford leads from behind. The jazz drummer’s first release under his own name for ECM is unquestionably informed by recent events in his own life, yet Rochford—a former member of Sons of Kemet and Polar Bear who also works with Brian Eno and Andy Sheppard—settles into a restrained, secondary role. Pianist Kit Downes is the main animating force on an album where the two celebrated British players coexist in a gentle place clouded by melancholy.
The past few years have brought a spate of solo or duo releases in jazz, whether recorded in the pandemic (Matthew Stevens’ Pittsburgh, Marius Neset’s A New Dawn) or released into a world particularly receptive to themes of isolation and mourning (Bheki Mseleku’s Beyond the Stars, Esbjörn Svensson’ HOME.S.). Rochford’s album—which he specifies is a diary “of loss”—works with similar themes. After his father, the poet and psychotherapist Gerard Rochford, passed away in December 2019, the drummer sat down at the old grand piano of his family home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and began to formulate a creative response. “Music just seemed to come to me, sing inside me every day, sometimes even as I woke,” Rochford said.
But on A Short Diary, sorrow is replaced with consolation, and, in responding to death, the duo also creates a parable of grief. A Short Diary is like a tranquil art-house film, telling a story that’s as much about company—two contrasting voices learn to mesh, rather than jostle—as summoning an artist’s innermost feelings. Rochford finds well-established support in Downes. Both were members of London’s influential Loop Collective, and Rochford later appeared on Downes’ 2019 ECM album Dreamlife of Debris. In 2012, the two recorded a 35-minute appearance together at London’s Upload Festival. But where that duo set is busy and bustling, the atmosphere is completely different on A Short Diary. Rather than serving as a sparring partner, Downes leans into the role of an old friend, letting Rochford’s compositions pass through him with only the smallest of elaborations.
Like many ECM releases, the album’s reference points are drawn from European classical music. Rochford writes chains of stark chords that just about link together. Sometimes, the effect is hymnal: Opening track “This Tune Your Ears Will Never Hear” is shaped like a Bach chorale prelude, with an anchoring phrase that spills out into mumbled variations. Other progressions—powerful, yet disjointed and keen to digress—could be cribbed from Mahler. Rochford’s careful yet characterful piano writing (in a score marking, he indicates that the opening track should be played “like a child calling out into the empty void”) brings out Downes’ tender side; the pianist realizes Rochford’s compositional voice simply and humbly, as a conduit for Rochford’s distinct melodic style.
The atmosphere is chilly, like listening to Feldman or Schnittke; A Short Diary rarely relaxes into a comfortable emotional space, though its mood is consistent in its muted qualities. The midpoint of the album—the gently grooving, Satie-esque “Love You Grampa”—is the only place that the duo drifts into honeyed nostalgia; Downes’ flash of primary-colored chords at the track’s close is as close as the album comes to a positive narrative upturn.
All tunes are composed by Rochford, except for the closer, “Even Now I Think of Her,” written by his father. That song offers another flicker of welcome contrast: a flavor of Charles Aznavour-like chanson, with harmonic melodrama, darkened tonalities, and a clear rhythmic form that both parties submit to expressive rubato. But any chance of a hopeful conclusion is denied as the track, and the album, finish in grave darkness. It’s a challenge to reach the end of a record that turns in on itself at every opportunity, but in that aspect, it’s as honest a depiction of grieving as you might hope to hear.
Rochford’s father might have been familiar with David Kessler, who in 2019 added a sixth stage of grief—meaning—to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ celebrated five-stage model. But Rochford and Downes aren’t quite ready to search for meaning just yet. Instead, they sit in close company, the place where absence is felt most profoundly. | 2023-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental / Folk/Country | ECM | January 19, 2023 | 6.8 | b28c7049-051c-4ac4-8b22-5c53c15c5d43 | Hugh Morris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hugh-morris/ | |
On her second consecutive album produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, the ever-adventurous former pop star takes on the moment’s social upheaval by getting personal. | On her second consecutive album produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, the ever-adventurous former pop star takes on the moment’s social upheaval by getting personal. | Neneh Cherry: Broken Politics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neneh-cherry-broken-politics/ | Broken Politics | Neneh Cherry’s fifth album in 30 years is called Broken Politics, a reflection of the ebullience lost in realizing that our politics have always been that way. Nearly three decades ago, Cherry topped international and stateside charts with “Buffalo Stance,” a diva dance and hip-hop hybrid that, like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising the same year, heralded bursts of color in every sense. On her second album in four years to be produced by Four Tet mastermind Kieran Hebden, Cherry creates a dozen landscapes where chimes and samples of various ringing objects act as reminders of other ways of living—offering, if not a way out of politics altogether, then at least a way of relying on our own devices.
Fans expecting an amalgam of Hebden’s beguiling microscopic electro-jingles or Cherry’s enduring exuberance won’t hear it here. Many of these dozen imagistic self-avowals have a discouraging sameness. So fluent is their collaboration that their weaknesses become complementary. Cherry’s melodies aren’t often up to Hebden’s beats, and his beats are frequently too genteel for Cherry’s ambivalence. Many tracks work at the three-minute mark but get tiresome by four. When the pair get contemplative, as they often do, it’s like watching numerators and denominators cancel each other out.
Yet when Broken Politics’ material matches the record’s title, it triggers a sense of unease, a tentative awareness of danger, like smelling something burning in the kitchen. “Natural Skin Deep,” the album’s strongest track, begins with mumbles, an anticipatory din before Hebden loops a steel drum and a percussive throb reminiscent of another Cherry collaborator, Tricky. Cherry sings the hook, “My love goes on and on,” with the tone of someone trying to cheer herself up or at least match the the mournful bleat of the accompanying Ornette Coleman sample. On “Deep Vein Thrombosis,” named after the blood clotting of a limb vein, Cherry’s verses are intentionally occluded. She follows “Like a female dog’s got a name/Life’s a bitch” with “How fragile is a life that can have everything now, too.” Meanwhile, Hebden and co-writers Cameron McVey and John Tonks pluck, trigger, and otherwise render a low thrum on guitar and piano over a shaker. Their efforts score a glimpse at an imagination too unquiet for coherence.
Broken Politics also contains moments when Cherry’s lyrical shorthand and Hebden’s discrete units of sound cohere into something bigger. Using a wall-of-sound approach to flutes in “Slow Release,” Hebden turns Cherry into a high, yearning wind instrument, much like the sliced-and-diced vocal of 2010’s “Angel Echoes.” “Slow release, no pressure, no pressure,” she affirms, perhaps a comment on her own leisurely recording career. Like Lucinda Williams’ “Side of the Road,” she carves a space where politics, broken or otherwise, don’t intrude on her thoughts—a temporary luxury at best. On “Kong,” Massive Attack’s 3D adds the hi-hats and synthesized rumbles of his former band to a lurking piano line, momentarily recalling the 1994 set piece “Karmacoma.” At the peak of Clintonism and the dawn of New Labour, Cherry’s confrères could afford the comas; with the world on fire, “goddamn guns and guts and history,” as Cherry puts it, have caught up to us. The effect is like stepping out of a burrow onto a prairie.
The crucial transatlantic precursor to Massive Attack—whose “Unfinished Sympathy” used strings, percussive loops, and Shara Nelson’s vocals for well-drawn melancholy as the basis for a remapping of Raw Like Sushi’s “Manchild” two years later—Neneh Cherry deserves bouquets, or, better extended appraisals. Her last record, the rumbling Blank Project, anticipated the current climate by four years. The thought of a hit such as “Kisses on the Wind” saving us all is like believing in the Easter Bunny, and, at 54, it’s not Cherry’s aim, anyway. Amid our tumultuous news cycles, the unevenness of Broken Politics is the best she can do, and it’s enough. | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Smalltown Supersound | October 24, 2018 | 7.3 | b29294e2-dd89-4981-af9f-0e49d1482a73 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Brooklyn experimentalist Taja Cheek adopted the stage name L’Rain in 2014, and her debut is a beautiful, untidy conduit of her grieving. The album’s unconventional structures lend it a pastoral feel. | Brooklyn experimentalist Taja Cheek adopted the stage name L’Rain in 2014, and her debut is a beautiful, untidy conduit of her grieving. The album’s unconventional structures lend it a pastoral feel. | L’Rain: L’Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lrain-lrain/ | L’Rain | Taja Cheek was already recording an album about grief when her mother Lorraine died. “It’s almost like I caused her death in some way—the feeling is absurd, bigger than myself, a premonition,” she told Afropunk. In 2014, Cheek adopted L’Rain as a stage name and has just finally released her self-titled debut as a beautiful, untidy conduit for the absurd synchronicity of her grieving. The album isn’t so much about Lorraine the person as it is about the crater her death imprinted on Cheek.
A lifelong Brooklynite, Cheek is a DIY artist and noise musician who glides around several scenes. She has a background in classical cello and piano, and throughout L’Rain she’s playing keyboards, synthesizers, and guitar, as well as manning tape delay effects and samples. She’s not alone; together with a small cast of session instrumentalists, Cheek builds swelling mounds of vaguely spiritual free jazz and ambient sound. L’Rain is a perilously busy record that’s open but not begging to be parsed. Sometimes it feels too cerebrally insular, like a barely-curated diary with all the scribbles and rough drafts springing out from the margins.
Most of the album seems to hover in a haze levitated by the haunt of Cheek’s voice, whether it’s manipulated to sound removed and choral, or delayed and reversed as a noise element. Either way, the effects often render her lyrics murky and the entire album can slip by without a discernible phrase. “Heavy (But Not in Wait)” opens the record with a clean swell that grows into soulful folk once it’s crescendoed to final form. Here and throughout, L’Rain’s songs seem to softly wander and change shape. There isn’t a single track with a straightforward structure, so the nine songs on L’Rain meander to the point of feeling more like a dozen.
Cheek and company often seem possessed by repetitive guitar riffs and churn them into meditative motifs that lend the entire record a pastoral feel. “Stay, Go (Go, Stay)” has a twinkle at its heart, and while it sounds like L’Rain is singing about love, it’s obviously just slipped through her fingers. “Bat,” a yearningly nostalgic track about a bat trapped indoors, chugs along like a sleepy lullaby. “Benediction” is a chanting, ambient intermission that sounds like Cheek walking around in a heartbroken daze. Skittering saxophone darts across the tracklist to dizzying effect. “Which Fork/I’ll Be” is the most rambunctious track here, taking a gentle ode and giving it a softly pulsating disco vibe that almost seems goofy alongside the serenity of the rest of the album.
Several shorter tracks—conversational field recordings, a voicemail that’s borderline uncomfortable to listen to in its intimacy—break up larger ideas. It’s rarely a pained sadness that pierces through L’Rain, but rather a wistful fog hovering over every moment. The whole thing feels like bouncing around Cheek’s head. She hums, whispers, coos, and chants so hushedly that she renders many of these moments as scattered background noise. Certainly, these things mean something to her, but it can be difficult to find their meaning from the outside. It sounds like she’s recorded this album for herself as a personal offering for the world to try untangling. Of course, all art is meant for this type of prodding. But L’Rain sounds first and foremost like self-therapy, and even from the outside, it’s convincingly cathartic. | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Astro Nautico | September 28, 2017 | 6.8 | b2930489-6454-483d-a167-4838268600cb | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The sheer strength and breadth of Mary J. Blige’s voice is like comfort food. Her 14th studio album mixes soaring, soulful affirmations with some confusing collaborations. | The sheer strength and breadth of Mary J. Blige’s voice is like comfort food. Her 14th studio album mixes soaring, soulful affirmations with some confusing collaborations. | Mary J. Blige: Good Morning Gorgeous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-j-blige-good-morning-gorgeous/ | Good Morning Gorgeous | Last Sunday, Mary J. Blige performed in front of 112 million viewers and seemed to leave part of her soul onstage. Blige’s brief segment during this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, where she sang “Family Affair” and “No More Drama” dressed like a glamorous, leopard-print mirrorball, reflects the R&B and hip-hop icon’s current place in pop culture. Capable of reducing listeners to tears with a single vocal run since the 1990s, Blige is an unimpeachable talent who’s now evolving into a legacy act. That’s not a knock—her stage presence is unmatched. By the time she finished “No More Drama,” she had collapsed to the floor, arms and legs outstretched, a dramatically triumphant moment captured in a swooping aerial shot.
Blige’s appearance at the halftime show coincides with the release of Good Morning Gorgeous, the singer’s 14th studio album. Though it’s easy to peg as a commercial tie-in, Blige’s latest LP stands on its own as a celebratory record that mixes uplifting, soulful affirmations with exercises in contemporary rap and R&B. Blige succeeds in the former category, with plenty of pathos and technical bravado. But her collaborations with a wide cast of stars, including DJ Khaled, Fivio Foreign, and Anderson .Paak, come across as scattered, an unfortunate side effect that hinders the album’s invigorating self-empowerment.
Good Morning Gorgeous picks up on the other side of Blige’s divorce, a seismic life event the singer used as a conduit for self-discovery on 2017’s stellar Strength of a Woman. Now she’s ready to get back in the saddle. The title track, a torchy cut co-produced by H.E.R. and longtime Blige collaborator D’Mile, is quintessential Mary: an anthem of self-love to lift yourself out of the darkness, gilded with fingersnaps, leisurely guitar melodies, and dynamic backing vocals. The song recasts a personal low as a vulnerable, revitalizing pep talk to herself and thus everyone else: “All the times that I should’ve been careful with me,” she laments, “Why did I hate myself?” Opener “No Idea” is another standout, with a thick bassline, energetic drum patterns, and one of her best lines in years: “I ain’t never been the type to talk about some shit I never really been through,” she sings, laying out her ethos as an artist in one fabulous swoop.
The album’s assorted collaborations range from solid to baffling. For every strong team-up, like the silky throwback R&B she whips up with Usher on “Need Love,” there’s something like “Amazing,” a DJ Khaled production that blows up a sample of Dawn Penn’s “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No)” to garish proportions. When Blige dabbles in drill, the effect is similarly awkward: “On Top” is a boastful victory lap at its core, but the staid production makes both Blige and Fivio Foreign sound bored by the time it’s over.
Nonetheless, Blige draws poignancy from Good Morning Gorgeous’ highlights. The sexy grit she adds to “Come See About Me,” the way she casually finds the pocket on the sumptuous “Love Without the Heartbreak,” the full minute and a half when she simply riffs over drums and cinematic strings during the title track’s climax—the sheer strength and breadth of her voice is like comfort food. Even with a side of arena-sized bombast, it remains a pleasure to hear Blige effortlessly rise above the drama.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 300 Entertainment | February 16, 2022 | 6.5 | b298cf1c-f55e-4e11-806d-4a80b09af5e9 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Dark Bird Is Home is Kristian Matsson's most personal record as Tallest Man on Earth, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees. | Dark Bird Is Home is Kristian Matsson's most personal record as Tallest Man on Earth, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees. | The Tallest Man on Earth: Dark Bird Is Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20481-dark-bird-is-home/ | Dark Bird Is Home | The music of Kristian Matsson (who records as the Tallest Man on Earth) doesn't carry the same loneliness of other heartbroken folkies; Matsson's music, instead, has solitude. Loneliness is a condition, a place you end up and from which you are eager to leave, but solitude is a choice. Like Henry James or Emily Dickinson, who best detail the workings of their mind when they are cloistered away from the world, Matsson is more concerned with a wellspring of autonomous thought rather than the chirpings of modern society. His voice and his guitar jig around some distant forest maypole, out of touch and out of sync with everything 21st-century. Instead, he's loosely moored to his dreams, his wanderlust, and all the other broad stuff of poetry that glows brightest in total seclusion.
It used to be easy to hear this solitude in Matsson's music. His first few albums featured only his rich, bleating voice and his acoustic guitar, and listening to his early records can feel like hearing someone rediscover the unfettered joy of playing music in real time. Naturally, for the last few albums, Matsson has been adding tiny layers of instrumentation behind him and the fire of his early days has dwindled into the mist of the songs' arrangements. Dark Bird Is Home, his first album since 2012's There's No Leaving Now, continues in this vein, and Matsson's persona fades even more into the tapestry he's made with his music.
Matsson handles most of the performances, including keyboards and drums. He has some extra players—most notably background vocals and strings from Bon Iver's Mike Noyce—to fill the songs out, but the majority of the starry musical textures are Matsson's. He recorded the album in odd places in his native Sweden and surrounding countries, and the dusting of synths, pedal steel, french horns and trumpets on the album say a lot by saying very little. "Timothy" turns on a winsome clarinet figure played by Matsson, and it's the perfect amount of simplicity to ornament his songs without upsetting the whole equation. Matsson still hasn't "gone electric," and blessedly still avoids the MOR folk-rock tropes of stomping and big-ticket whoa-oh'ing. Behind all the arrangements, front and center on every track, is still his voice.
That voice undersells nothing: There are no wanly delivered lines, no flat and dour stretches of singing. His voice is prismatic, used like an old-guard storyteller who hews his words to any kind of feeling he wants. He does bittersweet reassurance on the stunning title track, and the way he tip-toes down the phrase "Still we're in the light of day" is hypnotic. He does sockless campfire guy on "Beginners", a song so whimsical it could land a three-movie deal with Disney. He even does the soft-rocking-through-the-sadness on "Sagres", where whispers for the audience to "come on" at the end of the chorus feel like the coyest Bruce Springsteen impression in history. Words come out of his mouth brimming with so much emotion, they land just shy of over-singing.
Matsson has always been a little obtuse with his lyrics, and that can be charming or intriguing: The ballad "Little Nowhere Towns" is Matsson half-drunkenly retelling a tale of heartbreak, languishing in the imagery, nearly impossible to pin down. There's some bitterness about his own songwriting, perhaps: "And I'm racing through my pockets now/ 'Cause I'm starting to believe/ Selling emptiness to strangers/ A little bit warmer than my dreams."
Elsewhere he's more inscrutable. The chorus of "Singers" goes "But we're only gone like singers are till springtime/ Let them out, if they should let them out," which never opens up on repeated listens to reveal more than a tangle of words. The big choruses feel undercut by the sometimes-tangled poetry of the words, which get lost in metaphor en route to making their point. On "Sagres", he cuts through all the artifice with a striking moment: "It's just all this fucking doubt," he sings, barely squeezing out the line. It feels like everything he's been trying and failing to say elsewhere.
Which is why Matsson seems like someone who writes songs for himself alone. There's plenty of second-person on the record—a "you" who he walked some trails with, a "you" he's letting go of—but these are songs too caustic and bittersweet to be odes. If his last record was about putting down roots, here he's picking them back up again. It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike. He flits between our reality and his own, a world of only dreamers and travelers, flickering lights of towns, shadows and ghosts, birds and trees. It's his way finding joy in his solitude. | 2015-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | May 11, 2015 | 6.7 | b29fea45-9245-478c-b6ec-153483db3762 | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. | Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. | Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4961-van-lear-rose/ | Van Lear Rose | Like so many honky-tonk singers of her own and previous generations, Loretta Lynn was always a little country-come-to-town, a rural-raised girl in the big city whose pre-fame struggles lent her music grit and authenticity. Born in a Kentucky mining town called Butcher Hollow, a teenage bride and a mother several times over before she even arrived in Nashville, Lynn sang with a hill-country accent (notably different from typical Music Row stars) and with the unchecked candor of her toughening experiences. In this smoothly defiant voice, she sang of her man's and her own cheating ways, as well as the hardships of motherhood, wifehood, and celebrity as if each were one and the same-- and they probably were.
In Nashville, she was a rough in the diamond: Her hard-edged songs like "Fist City" and "Rated X" were backed by pristine countrypolitan production-- mostly courtesy of Owen Bradley-- which helped sell her to a wide audience. At the same time, the disparity between her voice and her accompaniment created a fascinating rural/urban friction that never let listeners forget that she was less a superstar than a small-town girl at heart. Crucial to her image and her success, the depth of Lynn's noncelebrity is perhaps why her old material still bristles and burrs even today.
On her new album, Van Lear Rose, producer and admirer Jack White (who dedicated White Blood Cells to Lynn in 2001) immediately erases that friction with a rawer, in-one-take live sound that adds texture to her songs without overpowering her voice. White's intention isn't to update or revise Lynn's music or her persona, but simply to recast her voice in a new setting, to make her sound like she's right back in Butcher Hollow.
To this end, White has corralled a backing band that consists not of Nashville veterans, but of young 'uns from the decidedly non-rural locales of Detroit and Cincinnati. Dubbed the Do Whaters by Lynn ("I named them that because they got in there and did whatever we needed them to!" she explains in the liner notes), the group consists of The Greenhornes' rhythm section Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, with Blanche's Dave Feeny adding elegant pedal steel and slide guitar flourishes. Together, they prove a dynamic backing band, able to set a warm country atmosphere but not afraid to make some rock noise.
And they do just that on the first single, "Portland, Oregon". Lynn and White exchange verses about sloe gin fizzes and drunk lovin', recalling her adultery duets with Conway Twitty but with more of a boisterous sound, courtesy of White's Zep blues riffs. On "Mrs. Leroy Brown", the band bang out a bar-stormer to match Lynn's adventures riding around town in a pink limousine. Even bigger than that limo, though, is the unmistakable smile on her face as she disses her man and his floozy: "I just drawed all your money out of the bank today/ Honey, you don't have no mo'."
If Van Lear Rose recasts Lynn's sound, it also revisits the subject matter of her earlier hits, following her stories through to their sometimes dire ends in songs like "Women's Prison" and "Family Tree". But on the album's most memorable songs, Lynn tells her own story, singing in no other voice but her own, and it still soars with surprising grace and with all the sass and intimacy of her younger self. Most of Van Lear Rose is autobiographical, relating her life in both Butcher Hollow and Nashville with evocative detail and steady candor. The title track, for example, recalls her father's stories about her mother and "how her beauty ran deep down to her soul." Her voice trembles with a tender, nostalgic wistfulness, especially when she remembers how the miners teased her dad: "You're dreamin', boy, she'll never look your way/ You'll never ever hold the Van Lear Rose."
After the spoken-word reminiscence "Little Red Shoes" and the devastating widow's lament "Miss Being Mrs.", Van Lear Rose ends with "Story of My Life", which is exactly what its title purports. The coal miner's daughter happily relates the events of her life-- early marriage, motherhood, stardom-- leading up to the present, but instead of dwelling on hardship and tragedy, she sounds satisfied, even joyful. It's perhaps a testament to her modesty that she winds up this autobiography in less than three minutes, but by song's end, her contentment feels undeniably hard-won and admirable: "I have to say that I've been blessed/ Not bad for a country girl, I guess."
Lynn's triumphant return on Van Lear Rose isn't exactly unprecedented: Ten years ago, Johnny Cash won a younger audience with the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, and George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson have all released strong albums late in their careers. Nor is it surprising that fans would flock to such sturdy music, that critics would celebrate such a comeback or pursue such a great story. But the rating above does not reflect critical sentiment as much as it does critical amazement: Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record. | 2004-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Interscope | April 29, 2004 | 9.3 | b2a701fe-9622-4723-a4fd-cb2569d54f39 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s music gets a beat-oriented makeover in a collection of remixes from Skrillex, Omar S, Lafawndah, and other club producers. | The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s music gets a beat-oriented makeover in a collection of remixes from Skrillex, Omar S, Lafawndah, and other club producers. | Kelsey Lu: Blood Transfusion EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelsey-lu-blood-transfusion-ep/ | Blood Transfusion | Singer-songwriter Kelsey Lu makes dense, baroque music that seamlessly fuses pop, electronic, and R&B. Her earliest work was built from mournful cello loops and vocals that crackled with electricity, making it feel like you were discovering her music in a dimly lit living room every time. But on her debut album this year, she filled out her sound with guitar, piano, and touches of synthesizer. She has pushed even further outward with Blood Transfusion, an EP in which a diverse cast of remixers brightens and accelerates her songs, most of them from her debut album.
These six producers take vastly different approaches to Lu’s music. From German DJ Dixon’s deep house to Omar S’ techno to two distinct takes on “Due West,” the songs establish an array of sounds and moods. A club mix of “Shades of Blue,” Lil M (aka frequent Fade to Mind designer Miles Martinez), fragments and repeats staccato, glittery slivers of words and exclamations, gleaning new textures rather than meaning from them. Lafawndah’s remix of “Due West” similarly layers fragments of phrases, albeit longer snippets, as sonic building blocks, focusing largely on the soaring titular phrase. By repeating the most intense moments of the song, the remix magnifies and extends the euphoria that was previously reserved for the chorus. By contrast, Skrillex’s remix of the same track builds upon much of the song’s structural integrity—unsurprising, as Skrillex produced the original as well. It’s a new look for the former EDM troublemaker: The song leans into Lu’s sedated croons with a murky mix of sparse percussion and churning synth that’s more hypnotic than frantic.
These remixes generally cut to the chase faster than the originals. Curved, elongated choruses transform into chants that stomp through your brain, immediate and unrelenting. On Detroit producer Omar S’s remix of “Poor Fake,” the contrast feels productive and exciting. Where earlier, the song was buoyed primarily by strings, on the remix, Lu’s chopped vocals thrillingly trip and sputter over grating synths. The slight electronic flourishes that already existed in the song transition seamlessly here.
On her debut, Lu’s husky, symphonic vocals and dramatic lyricism imbued her music with a mythological quality, as if plucked from a fairy tale. But the details of Lu’s voice and the stories she tells are often lost in these remixes. Though her falsetto peeks through on Omar S’s “Poor Fake” rework and Dixon’s “Why Knock for You” remix, her expansive, exploratory crooning and quaint production flourishes—like the fluttering bird calls sampled on “Due West” and “Kindred”—are largely buried under layers of distorted percussion and synth. Though Lil M’s “Shades of Blue” remix is exciting as a standalone piece, it’s hard not to miss the original’s gorgeous lyrics about love and longing.
More than anything, Blood Transfusion exhibits the range and potential of Lu’s sound. Some of these songs lack the vulnerability and immediacy of her earlier, stripped-down pieces, and it would be nice to see more of that emotional weight brought to these fast-paced, rhythm-heavy tracks. Nonetheless, it’s remarkable hearing her work stretched from hushed string arrangements to synth-forward mixes, from your living room to the club. And it’s exciting to think of the doors this EP opens up—the spaces and sounds she has yet to occupy. | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Columbia | December 11, 2019 | 6.9 | b2ab2349-7da8-49ba-a200-274befd2af96 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Scottish post-rock band embraces restraint and shorter song lengths on its economical yet still sometimes powerful new album. | Scottish post-rock band embraces restraint and shorter song lengths on its economical yet still sometimes powerful new album. | Mogwai: Mr. Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5371-mr-beast/ | Mr. Beast | The longest song on Mr. Beast, Mogwai's fifth studio album, runs 5:46. The entire LP clocks under 45 minutes. Ordinarily, this isn't the kind of thing you'd bother pointing out in a record review, but it bears mentioning because Mogwai are typically at their best when they let their music breathe, ebb, flow, and stretch, rather than constrict it or force it into smaller boxes. Their first and still greatest album, Young Team, showed no compunction regarding songs that extended beyond 10 minutes to make their point, and on that scale, they made the best points of their career. Last year's phenomenal BBC Sessions disc drove this home even further. Simply put, restraint does not become them.
Unfortunately, restraint is a major point of order on Mr. Beast, as it has been to varying degrees on their past few studio efforts. Though the record is at no loss for power, it mostly stores it as unrealized potential: This doesn't sound like the same Mogwai that flattens audiences and then asks if the show was loud enough. Opener "Auto Rock" begins with a quiet piano that gains intensity as other instruments join in, phaser and distorted guitar rising like dust as the volume grows. The drumbeat verges on childlike-- a simple whack on every beat and no embellishment of any kind. But after building for just over four minutes, and then coming to an unremarkable close, it fails to leave much of an impression.
The album recovers somewhat with "Glasgow Mega-Snake", which economically distills the essence of the band's crushing live show into three-and-a-half minutes of gut-punching nastiness. Its buildup pays off with a wrenching tempo shift and vicious guitar riff that leaves behind a weightless groove, proving it's possible for Mogwai to sustain their intensity in bite-size packages. Penultimate song "I Chose Horses" gets a lot of mileage out of the juxtaposition of an evenly spoken Japanese dialogue (courtesy Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japanese hardcore band Envy) against a fluctuating, mournful backdrop whose guitars are nearly indistinguishable from its synths; the primary asset of closer "We're No Here" is its sheer deafening loudness.
The other vocal tracks switch things up nicely: "Acid Food" offers one of the album's most unexpectedly beautiful moments when a pedal steel enters after the second chorus, which is sung through a vocoder. But that song's aesthetic partner, "Travel Is Dangerous", is considerably more unruly, with two-part harmonies being doused by a wall of screaming guitar in the chorus. In combination, the two songs serve to remind that post-rock can come across as more sketched than fleshed when not properly unleashed.
Mr. Beast's shortcomings lie not with what's present, but with what's missing. Mogwai are capable of tremendous beauty, poignant gloom, and ear-splitting sonic pyrotechnics, but only transcend when they combine each of these elements. Here, they rarely give themselves enough building room to conjoin these moods and styles. Resultantly, despite its peaks, the album is no match for Mogwai's best work. | 2006-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 5, 2006 | 6.8 | b2acc209-c1dc-42ad-a8d7-7ceaa60b3946 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Baltimore musician Michael Collins had to give up his Run DMT moniker to a dubstep crew of the same name, but the music he's creating as Salvia Plath is suited to the change: On The Bardo Story, he's shed his early chillwave tendencies, bringing his 60s psych influences into sharper focus. | Baltimore musician Michael Collins had to give up his Run DMT moniker to a dubstep crew of the same name, but the music he's creating as Salvia Plath is suited to the change: On The Bardo Story, he's shed his early chillwave tendencies, bringing his 60s psych influences into sharper focus. | Salvia Plath: The Bardo Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18269-salvia-plath-the-bardo-story/ | The Bardo Story | Michael Collins is a Baltimore musician with a fondness for making pun-happy drug references in the names he assumes for his recording projects. He had to give up his last moniker, Run DMT, to a dubstep crew of the same name, so now he's trying Salvia Plath on for size. The music is suited to a new name-- Collins has shed some of the chillwave tendencies that made Run DMT sink into a gauze-y morass of bands around the time of his Bong Voyage in 2009. Instead, he's chosen to bring his 60s psych influences into sharper focus, making everything just a little leaner, although low production values and sloppy playing are still key tenets of his sound. Underneath it all is a sharpening of Collins' songwriting skills, not quite turning The Bardo Story into the parent-friendly record he hoped for in a recent interview, but certainly lending a feeling that he's getting somewhere, one bong hit at a time.
Something that's immediately apparent from listening to this album is how well versed Collins is in 60s pop, both of the psychedelic variety and beyond. Initially it's hard to hear certain songs as anything other than pastiche, as so often happens when someone is deeply immersed in a particular era. Collins is the kind of guy who probably thinks that Lenny Kaye didn't dig hard enough when researching the Nuggets compilations. But, to be fair, he's not adverse to rooting around in the mainstream, finding plenty of room for inspiration in John Lennon's Beatles songs, pinching a sigh or two from the Beach Boys, even heading into the 70s to steal a few tricks from Randy Newman. He does it so well that it's hard not to be swayed in his direction, taking an approach reminiscent of another Newman acolyte, Chicago musician Liam Hayes (aka Plush), whose songwriting is so strong that he transcends the music he's so transparently sourcing.
Of course there are flaws, too. The Bardo Story is a messy album, riddled with a looseness that's either there on purpose or happens to be the consequence of Collins' admittedly limited skills. When he gets it to work, on the sunny foot-stomper "This American Life", for example, it's extremely endearing, coming off as the work of someone with a vision far beyond the audience this record is likely to attract. Collins might not be aspirational in that way, but there's a sense here that the grainy production values are becoming a hindrance rather than a valuable part of the picture, especially as he appears to have put a great deal of thought into the overall sound he's trying to express. He covers a decent swathe of ground, but the transitions are rarely jarring, even when he passes the baton from the swirling Olivia Tremor Control moves of "House of Leaves" to the spaghetti western whistle of "Stranded".
"Bardo" is a Tibetan word meaning "intermediate state," which provides a less-than subtle nudge toward the idea that this is a transitory album for Collins. It's a new name, a refinement of his vision. The great leaps it takes sometimes feel less like an aesthetic choice and more like the work of someone figuring out where they want to go. It's a cut above most public attempts to undertake such a journey, if indeed that's what Collins is doing. In among it all is a superior songwriter trying not to be wrestled out of the frame by all the limitations imposed upon him, including some spectacularly awful sub-Dali cover art. But even that's fitting in its way, a low rent imitation of Surrealism housing a collection of scuzzy sub-psych songs, all of which probably sounded like a great idea when conceptualized through a billow of weed smoke. Fortunately, it still sounds pretty good when the fog clears. | 2013-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Weird World | July 24, 2013 | 6.4 | b2b1c5f8-65b7-45ec-ae86-804c9b6fba27 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Reverb is the sole ingredient on the German-Bulgarian artist’s latest conceptual record, in which vintage pedals and digital processors are used to mimic the properties of sound in impossible spaces. | Reverb is the sole ingredient on the German-Bulgarian artist’s latest conceptual record, in which vintage pedals and digital processors are used to mimic the properties of sound in impossible spaces. | Stefan Goldmann : Call and Response | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stefan-goldmann-call-and-response/ | Call and Response | In 1947, Bill Putnam discovered the future of music in the men’s room of Chicago’s Civic Opera Building. Putnam, a World War II veteran, was an electrical engineer and a born tinkerer, and he had recently set up a cutting-edge recording studio on the top floor of the Art Deco office tower. Searching for a way to add lifelike echo to a harmonica quartet’s rendition of the 1912 standard “Peg o’ My Heart,” he set up a loudspeaker in one of the building’s marble-walled bathrooms. Piped in from down the hall, and subsequently picked up by an auxiliary microphone, the band’s instruments were bathed in an eerie shimmer, like wraiths in an enchanted cave. Artificial reverb was born, and popular music has never been the same since.
Reverb’s psychoacoustic properties are as old as humans’ connection with the supernatural itself; they are engineered into Byzantine churches, Mayan pyramids, and Neolithic burial chambers. But Putnam’s gambit was a development befitting the coming Space Age. To add artificial reverb to a recording is to bend the rules of spacetime—to abduct the listener from the room they inhabit and deposit them in a cathedral or a canyon or a catacombs, while slowing or even freezing the ticking of the clock, smearing milliseconds into the illusion of infinity.
Echo chambers such as Putnam’s soon gave way to plate and spring units capable of sculpting even more dynamic effects. By 1976, $20,000 could buy you a digital gizmo armed with real-time controls; two decades later, Sony made it possible to “sample” real-world spaces, applying mathematical models of the way that sound travels through a bounded set of dimensions. Today, wildly inventive plugins for DAWs such as Logic and Ableton do everything from mimicking Motown’s legendary echo chambers to allowing producers to invent perpetually shifting spaces, turning caverns into tin cans and back again.
Stefan Goldmann’s Call and Response is a tribute to this evolution of space as an instrument in its own right. Plenty of contemporary electronic music uses reverb as seasoning, but Goldmann’s album might be the only record in which reverb is the sole ingredient. Across nine tracks bearing titles like “Brick and Mortar” and “Glowing Walls,” Goldmann deploys a range of techniques on vintage and contemporary devices, “playing” the reverb as he adjusts parameters like density, damping, diffusion, and decay. There are no conventionally musical tones; the only inputs are short, neutral clicks deployed to trigger the resulting reverb, and even these are often rendered inaudible, smothered by the charcoal puffs of dust kicked up around them.
The record’s subtitle—Nine works for reverberation devices, impulse signals and feedback—carries the faint whiff of a laboratory experiment, and the music is correspondingly ascetic. The German-Bulgarian artist frequently works along similarly conceptual lines: On one album, he cut up dozens of canonical recordings of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps; for another, he utilized only factory presets from obsolete Japanese workstation synthesizers from the 1990s. But Call and Response is by far his most austere undertaking. Philosophically, the idea is similar to no-input music, a Japanese noise subgenre in which performers route a mixing desk’s output back into its input, sculpting the resulting feedback into stark filaments. If no-input music attempts to capture the sound of nothingness, Call and Response might be an answer to the question, “What is the sound of nothing turning itself inside out?”
Still, this is not a clinical study but a fantastical journey; its purpose is not didactic but psychedelic. The opening “Quarry” lays out the palette utilized across the entire album: one thousand shades of gray. Short clacks are stretched into the caws of robotic crows. The crunch of metal turns into a gunshot booming across a valley. For all its yawning sense of absence, Call and Response is often vividly imagistic; in the absence of musical cues, your brain struggles to fill in the blanks. You imagine thunderclaps, artillery shells whizzing overhead, slow-motion avalanches dissolving into wispy plumes. Extended passages of white noise are stretched into long, thin wires; deep inside the asphalt-colored churn, train whistles sing.
The preponderance of gray sometimes makes Call and Response feel aggressively drab; it’s not a very fun exercise, despite artificial reverb’s potential to evoke purely imaginary spaces. The music is at its most engrossing when feedback chains create steady rhythms. In “Traction,” what sounds like the dull throb of a boat engine is followed by what might be a foghorn tapping out Morse code, while “Two Shelves” begins with elastic undulations that sound like kneading metal. And in a few places, bizarre acousmatic effects may make you doubt your own perception: There’s a quick flicker of buzz in “Quarry” that briefly sounds like it’s emanating from inside your own skull, and in “Relic,” I could have sworn that the music was vibrating the pull tab on the Coke can sitting on my desk. (It wasn’t.) But by and large, there’s little opportunity to get comfortable in these renderings of what Goldmann calls “impossible architecture”: The halls may be enormous, but the abiding sensation is overwhelmingly claustrophobic. | 2022-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ash International | December 15, 2022 | 6.8 | b2b35eec-4aa3-496b-8045-06ae82c557bb | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On their new record, the California group remain deliriously unhinged but indulge in prog-metal fantasies. | On their new record, the California group remain deliriously unhinged but indulge in prog-metal fantasies. | Oh Sees: Smote Reverser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oh-sees-smote-reverser/ | Smote Reverser | For the past half decade or so, we’ve seen the great unravelling of (Thee) Oh Sees. That is less a comment on the band’s sudden dissolution in 2013 than the aesthetic disintegration that’s transpired ever since ringleader John Dwyer started rebuilding his group in 2014 around bassist Tim Hellman and a double-drummer tandem (now made up of Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone). But even as recent Oh Sees albums fell under the spell of Afrobeat, cosmic jazz, and proggy synth soundtracks, Dwyer seemingly recognizes that each new record needs to include its fair share of warp-speed rock-outs to keep his circle-pit faithful satisfied. As such, the band’s post-2015 output has been an ongoing game of tug-of-war between the Oh Sees’ desire to satisfy their audience and their desire to satisfy themselves.
With Smote Reverser, they make their most concerted attempt to reconcile those diverging impulses. The album is a predictably loud reaction to last fall’s Memory of a Cut Off Head, a stripped-down psych-folk pastorale (released under the OCS handle) that saw Dwyer sharing harmonies with singer Brigid Dawson. She lends her voice to this record as well, but don’t expect a return to the adrenalized corkers that defined the band during her previous 2010-2013 tenure with the group. Smote Reverser rocks out in a decidedly different manner than the band’s usual fuzz-pedal freakouts. There are no motorik rippers, no brain-zapping guitar blitzkriegs, no routine deployment of Dwyer’s signature, echo-drenched “Wooooo!” Instead, we discover that the fantastical medieval elements of Dwyer’s previous full-band release, 2017’s Orc, were the actual seeds that have allowed Oh Sees to blossom into a bona fide prog-metal outfit—complete with album art just begging to be airbrushed on the side of a van.
Oh Sees albums have long reveled in the tension between the band’s aggression and Dwyer’s frisky, mischievous vocal style, but on Orc, it became evident just how well his voice sincerely lent it itself to the theatrical exposition of prog. On Smote Reverser’s opener “Sentient Oona,” he continues to blur the line between singer and narrator, weaving a tale of sleeping spells and all-seeing eyes atop a coolly rumbling drumbeat; you can practically picture him communing with a crystal ball. But even as the song erupts into jolts of organ (courtesy of Memory alum Tom Dolas) and burning arpeggios, the production feels dryer and more chiseled. The heaviness is not in the volume and distortion, but rather in the force with which hands are hitting the instruments.
“Sentient Oona” also finds Oh Sees continuing to develop their double-drummer dynamic in exciting ways, with Rincon and Quattrone laying down interwoven patterns that both propel and disrupt the momentum. For a band once content to lock into a pulsating groove and blaze out for the horizon, Oh Sees have become adept in the art of the curveball; Just as the dreamy Dwyer/Dawson duet “Last Peace” seems like it’s going to dissolve into a hookah-bar haze, it blasts off into an exhilarating space-bound jam. And sounding not unlike the wiggy breakdown in Edgar Winter’s 1972 prog-funk novelty “Frankenstein” stretched out to 12 minutes, “Anthemic Aggressor” is Oh Sees at their most deliriously unhinged, all solar-flare synths, short-circuiting guitar twitches, and furious jumpy-jazz rhythm.
These epic odysseys are counterbalanced by brief shocks like “Overthrown,” where Dwyer’s gnashed-teeth growl teeters toward thrash metal. But even as he seems more comfortable bringing his childhood love of Dungeons & Dragons and latent love of Rush-worthy guitar solos to the fore, Smote Reverser remains unmistakably Oh Sees by virtue of Dwyer’s clockwork, chorus-resistant songwriting style—you can always count on each verse to tee up another berserker instrumental break. Like Orc before it, Smote Reverser can’t help but lose some of its power as it approaches the hour-long mark—the wandering Floydian instrumental “Flies Bump Against the Glass” and whimsical, Wakeman-esque synthphony “Beat Quest” don’t quite deliver the grand finale this castle-storming record deserves. But by that point, Oh Sees have put forth more than enough Progasaurus gusto to rightfully earn their capes. | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Castle Face | August 23, 2018 | 7.6 | b2b502d1-4903-4a7b-9349-a734eafcfc71 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Hersh's latest solo album is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair, rich with dense but frank allusions to the dissolution of her 25-year marriage. | Hersh's latest solo album is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair, rich with dense but frank allusions to the dissolution of her 25-year marriage. | Kristin Hersh: Wyatt at the Coyote Palace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22636-wyatt-at-the-coyote-palace/ | Wyatt at the Coyote Palace | Listening to a Kristin Hersh album is like receiving, unfiltered, a direct feed of someone’s thoughts, with all the internal symbols, memories, private jokes intact before they apply all the translation and explanation and interpretation to the outside world. One gets the sense she’s still trying to sort through it all herself. For this reason, her music inevitably is called “abstract”; it’s an understandable reaction, but totally inaccurate. Kristin Hersh writes in specifics. Her memoir Rat Girl—alternately titled Paradoxical Undressing, a typically allegorical reference to hypothermia patients stripping off their clothes even as they freeze to death—sheds light on a couple dozen of her and Throwing Muses’ tracks. Her songs are full of references to her own material,anecdotes that slip out in interviews and on stage, blunt and hyper-specific wisecracks. Singer-songwriters, particularly women, are often accused of writing confessional material even (especially?) when they’re not, but Hersh’s material generally is. “I haven’t got the kind of brain to invent anything, so I just write the stuff down that happens,” she told Soundblab. “The things that happened are so bizarre, you can’t make those things up.”
Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (named for one of her sons) is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair. Like all her solo and Throwing Muses studio releases since 2010’s Crooked, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is accompanied by a book of essays and artwork: less commentary on the tracks, and more another set of puzzle pieces to put together. (As well as a recipe for “hooker gazpacho.”) Like 1999’s Sky Motel, the sonics are rich; in addition to acoustic guitar, Hersh plays bass, drums, piano, horns, and cello, and engineer Steve Rizzo helps make it among her slickest-sounding recordings. After five years of tweaking results, she builds many of the arrangements to the beefiness of a typical Muses track; others are interspersed with muffled field recordings, an effect like hearing songs through mental fog. Like the Throwing Muses comeback album Purgatory/Paradise, the album is fragmentary and self-referential; songs reappear throughout the album in reprises, or reworks of and callbacks to past material.
And like her 2001 solo effort Sunny Border Blue, the album is viscerally preoccupied with loss: “I’m so fucking tired of dissolution,” Hersh says in “Sun Blown.” Sometimes it’s general loss—the running joke throughout the album’s accompanying essays is Hersh and her bandmates’ brushes with death, both funny and sneakily serious (a fair amount of essays end in the hospital). A few years ago Hersh divorced from her husband of 25 years. It’s crept into all her work since—last year’s book Don’t Suck Don’t Die started out as a eulogy for singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt but became a concurrent eulogy for the two songwriters’ marriages. But “Sun Blown” is perhaps the most explicit she's been: “The bailing mate dance, failing patience, fool's silver...” Like most of Hersh’s imagery, it’s not oblique at all when you get the reference: in this case, silver being the traditional 25th anniversary gift. The verse appears as a refrain throughout the album: leading into “Green Screen” and its descending counterpoint of a melody: “Red skin blackening, what is happening? The Art of Kissing, the heart of missing you.”
Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening. “Shaky Blue Can,” “Shotgun” (reminiscent of “Terra Nova”) and “Secret Codes” are up there with “Listerine” and “Flooding” as among the most fragile material Hersh has recorded. But her work is always threaded through with levity; these songs resist easy classification. “Detox” breaks through into anger—confrontational lyrics, distorted guitar solo—but the almost poppy “Wonderland” recalls the Muses’ midcareer singles; “Hemingway’s Tell” could easily be adapted into one. For every bracing line like “everyone like me’s a dead man,” there’s a gnomic one-liner like “Incense, strawberry candles and soap—way to butcher a street.” The former track, “Killing Two Birds,” is deceptively cheery—the essay accompanying it sets it during a teenage coke-fueled jog. The latter, “Between Piety and Desire” (like Purgatory/Paradise, a play on street names) becomes a “we don’t like the shit, ‘cause we belong in it.” The “we” is key. As memoirs, her albums are so intensely personal it’s little wonder she’s amassed a cult fanbase (and cadre of crowdfunders); as art, they’re arguments for the value of unapologetic individuality. | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Omnibus | November 23, 2016 | 7.5 | b2b65afa-9974-4a5a-b939-eb80a99427f8 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
On their debut album Tempest, the Oakland death doom quartet Lycus sand down the rough edges of their 2011 demo and embrace a unique take on European funeral doom. The quartet refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow. | On their debut album Tempest, the Oakland death doom quartet Lycus sand down the rough edges of their 2011 demo and embrace a unique take on European funeral doom. The quartet refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow. | Lycus: Tempest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18224-lycus-tempest/ | Tempest | There's an immense sense of satisfaction that comes with watching a band progress. It’s exhilarating to see talented, hardworking people take those first steps out of the practice room and into the world armed with only a handful of riffs and ambition. Sometimes it takes awhile, and sometimes the rewards come fast. The excellent Oakland death doom quartet Lycus have taken the latter path. Their first release, 2011’s Demo MMXI, made the rounds quietly, catching underground attention with three gutted paeans simmering beneath a stark, skeletal Bryan Proteau cover. It felt raw and honest, and captured the imagination in a way that’s rarely seen from metal’s extreme outliers. On Tempest, their first proper album, and first for 20 Buck Spin, the rough edges have been sanded down, and the light shines through.
Often used interchangeably with "death doom," funeral doom is more accessible than the most perverse, impenetrable corners of black metal, death, and grind, but don’t be fooled-- the punishing lengths, torturously slow tempos, and disquieting emotional heft it offers still inflict plenty of damage. Those who enter into the darkest depths of this suicidal subsect are asked to abandon all hope, and given little choice in the matter. Lycus approach the void carefully. Though they’ve had the funeral doom tag lobbed at them already, it’s not entirely accurate: 11 minute songs do not a funeral doom band make, and Lycus show no interest in following genre conventions. They refrain from histrionic, death-worshipping self-hatred and instead embrace a more cosmic, organic take on sorrow. Given their Bay Area lineage, it’s not hard to connect the dots and see that their proximity to like-minded acts Asunder, Graves At Sea, and Noothgrush has made an impact.
Their approach eschews the classic European emphasis on keyboards and overly flowery gothic influence, focusing instead on the sludgier, more straightforward sound that American bands often gravitate towards. Think Samothrace, not Skepticism. Opening dirge “Coma Burn” sets the tone down low, with rumbling vocals and ominous chords. Their penchant for tremolo (as heard on the effortlessly, engagingly dynamic “Engravings”) speaks of a faint black metal influence, one that intensifies into mania during the epic closing track. After the listener is taken through peaks and valleys of howling black metal, slavering sludge, and contemplative doom, “Tempest” lets us down gently, fading out in a gentle blur of noise. Punctuated by mournful violins, each of the album’s three compositions flows beautifully into the next, allowing for a force of movement seldom seen within the style. Melancholia reigns, yet there is no gnashing of teeth or soot-smeared wails permeating the monolithic riffs. They are better than that. Lycus have entered the next stage of mourning with this release, and their early stages of grief have matured into dignified resignation and graceful acceptance. | 2013-08-05T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2013-08-05T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | August 5, 2013 | 7.9 | b2b88b01-42ef-42d7-9d9b-e37ed0f6212d | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | null |
The glorious third album from the Swedish metal band Tribulation is a sprawling, compulsory tale that doesn’t turn dull. Psych, prog, thrash, and classic rock commingle, bearing echoes of not just Mercyful Fate and At the Gates but Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, the Doors and dub. | The glorious third album from the Swedish metal band Tribulation is a sprawling, compulsory tale that doesn’t turn dull. Psych, prog, thrash, and classic rock commingle, bearing echoes of not just Mercyful Fate and At the Gates but Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, the Doors and dub. | Tribulation: The Children of the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20329-the-children-of-the-night/ | The Children of the Night | The Children of the Night, the glorious third album from Swedish metal charmers Tribulation, begins with an invitation. A backdrop of cello, church organ and piano gives way to a midtempo full-band rumble, and then Johannes Andersson grunts like a mad old man curling a finger and commanding you to come along. "Beckoning the children of the night, the spirits of the undead and the lesser lights," he sings on "Strange Gateways Beckon". These first two minutes suggest the beginning of some grand adventure—a Tolkien-like walk through the woods, a Dante-like descent into depravity. And they are: A heavy metal record that wanders beyond any comfort zone, the hour-long The Children of the Night is a sprawling, compulsory tale that doesn’t turn dull.
Tribulation have never made an album quite like this: More than a decade ago, most of the band played adolescent, hair-whipping trash as Hazard. Five years after a name change, they re-emerged with The Horror, a claustrophobic mixture of death metal, black metal and thrash, intertwined by arty interludes that suggested major ambition. They pursued it unapologetically and even to excess on 2013’s The Formulas of Death, which began with a tambura drone and ended with a shape-shifting 13-minute mess called "Apparitions".
On The Children of the Night, Tribulation push all those influences and ideas toward the center. It’s as if they’ve pondered the relatively populist successes of their fellow countrymen—Ghost B.C., In Flames, even Watain—and rediscovered the value of concision and motion. Psych rock and prog metal, thrash and classic rock commingle in three-to-seven-minute songs, bearing echoes of not just Mercyful Fate and At the Gates but Led Zeppelin and Hawkwind, the Doors and dub. Led by brilliant guitarists Jonathan Hultén and Adam Zaars, these ten incisive songs cut away tangents and bristle with urgency. “Holy Libations” is heroic and surging, with one seeming crescendo and dashing solo piled atop another. The racing “Melancholia” powers through death metal before cresting with a rock-god solo that feels forever on the verge of falling apart.
By and large, though, it’s the band that makes these songs so stunning, not Andersson. He sings in a perpetually gruff monotone, offering morose observations and dramatic revelations. During "Holy Libations", he delivers a dense verse about the solidarity of misery and then tries his best to break his typical pace with a sort of staccato half-rap. He stumbles around the beat, straining with effort. Tribulation, then, are a little like metal’s the Hold Steady—a righteous rock band burnished by high-flying guitars and big keyboards but led by a singer who seems to have shown up late for practice with a notebook full of quips and a belly full of booze.
Tribulation let Andersson’s thorny vocals stand alone, backing him only occasionally with harmonies; for a band that composes with near-classical rigor, he remains the scratch that can’t be buffed. This tension becomes apparent when it disappears. Mid-album instrumental “Själaflykt” moves from doom-like dirge to mid-tempo boogie, like The Ventures penning a summertime special for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. But by song’s end, the action feels bloated and defanged. When his growl bullies its way into “The Motherhood of God,” the friction is newly welcome.
Metal critics sometimes snipe at each other for preferring extreme or arty metal to the sort of music to which actually raise beers and fists. There is no way to arrive at a consensus artist who will satisfy everyone, of course, but The Children of the Night comes close. On one hand, the irascible Andersson sounds like the kind of bandleader who hopes to follow you into an alley with a lead pipe. But the organ-loaded, solo-bejeweled “Strains of Horror” is an anthem. The hook of “Strange Gateways Beckon” just begs to be shouted back at the band. Sure, Andersson is a bit too brusque for complete crossover success, but the exceptional The Children of the Nightextends an open invitation to a very wide audience. | 2015-04-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Century Media | April 21, 2015 | 8.4 | b2bb8c48-113f-4757-a83e-bb08ce505e10 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On her debut album, the British singer-songwriter Amber Bain lets go of her self-consciousness and, with some help from the 1975, makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star. | On her debut album, the British singer-songwriter Amber Bain lets go of her self-consciousness and, with some help from the 1975, makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star. | The Japanese House: Good at Falling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-japanese-house-good-at-falling/ | Good at Falling | When Amber Bain began releasing music as the Japanese House in 2015, the British singer-songwriter kept her identity a mystery. She avoided photos and interviews, maintained a low social-media profile, and let her distorted, androgynous vocals fuel the rumor mill. The tactic generated plenty of hype—many wondered if the songs were a secret side project of The 1975’s Matt Healy—but Bain wasn’t fully committed. After a few months, she ditched the gimmick and pulled back the curtain. Behind it was a soft-spoken, queer 19-year-old girl with Kurt Cobain hair and boyish style who played guitar left-handed and upside down, and who used rich, romantic production to fill out her timid voice. She was an indie ideal.
Bain offered a variety of reasons for the stunt—she wanted to avoid gender classifications, she hated having her picture taken—but in the end, withholding her identity made it the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. “It just became this thing,” she told NME. In the years since, Bain, now 23, has kept a steady foot on the gas, releasing three more spellbinding EPs that established and expanded her sound: a mix of sumptuous synths and vocals with muted drums that sound like they’ve been wrapped in felt. Each release felt bigger and brighter than the last, and marked a gradual progression from glitchy, off-kilter electro-folk (Clean) to mournful synth-pop rooted in mainstream structures (Saw You in a Dream). On her confident and intoxicating first full-length, Good at Falling, she lets go of any lingering self-consciousness and makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star.
There are many technical reasons this spacious, unfussy record excels, but it’s Bain’s unrelenting heartache that lifts it from bedroom pop into something bigger. The songs are profoundly personal, detailing the tragic and tumultuous experiences that shaped her recent past: the death of her first love, the grieving that followed, the relationship that saved her (with musician Marika Hackman) and its eventual dissolution, and the ultimate realization that she’ll be okay. “Lilo,” a graceful ode to Hackman that has a perfectly floating melody, finds Bain on the other side of suffering, looking back. “It’s a reminder to me that I’m good at falling in love,” she told i-D, “and I can survive falling out of it.”
Hope powers the album with playful synths and vivacious rhythms, but a heavy sense of existential gloom is always looming. In a tone that’s tender but frustratingly detached, Bain throws questions into the cosmos (“Now tell me something/Is there a point to this?”) and seems to give up before they’re answered (“Sometimes I stop believing in things that are real,” she sings, and later, “All these things don’t matter/All these things don’t matter”). There’s something about her resignation that feels at home in 2019: It’s the ultimate nihilist canvas for Trump-era fatigue. Even her confession about a lukewarm relationship sounds numb and deflated: “We don’t fuck anymore/But we talk all the time so it’s fine,” she sings. “Can somebody tell me what I want? Cause I keep changing my mind.”
Such sunken, Gen Z listlessness can get exasperating—you almost want to shake her awake—but it shouldn’t be confused with surrender. Nobody ever said breakup records have to be confrontational. Bain’s approach is more introspective and brooding; she doesn’t march right up to pain so much as circle it, admiring its scrapes and bruises as though they were works of sculpture.
Much like avant-pop peers Robyn and Christine and the Queens, Bain uses dancefloor rhythms to loosen up her emotional muscles. But these aren’t cry-in-the-club anthems, they’re lullabies. With a voice so soft and low that it feels like she’s whispering in your ear, she nudges you to stay home, take a breath, and get lost in the dreamy glimmer of a Mellotron.
The album, recorded partly at Bon Iver’s Fall Creek Studio, was produced by BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Francis and the Lights) and George Daniel (the 1975), and “f a r a w a y” features Healy on backing vocals. It’s impossible not to hear his band’s influence—the soaring melodies, schlocky 1980s nostalgia, and sudden bursts into stadium-sized drums or growling electric guitar. Bain attributes this largesse to playing bigger shows; after Healy signed her to his home label, Dirty Hit, he invited her on their arena tours as the opening act. Still, even with huge, lush arrangements and a growing toolkit of instruments, the songs never sound cluttered or overwrought. “Follow My Girl,” an ethereal yet pummeling song about forgetting what it feels like to feel good, blurs synths and vocals together like light trails in a nighttime photograph.
Bain is not a powerhouse singer, and she often beefs up her vocals with Auto-Tune or thick harmonic layers. But on “Saw You in a Dream,” a stripped-back version of the previously released single, she peels off the flotation devices and jumps in. A strummy, surfy tribute to her late first love, the track was recorded in two teary takes. Her voice quivers and cracks along as she wrestles with conflicting feelings of agony and acceptance. “It isn’t the same but it is enough,” she sings, the perfect epilogue to a project about life after grief. | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | March 4, 2019 | 7.5 | b2c4a039-dbef-431f-86ba-8c150a33bfc3 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name. Her debut LP Badlands arrives with undeniable momentum, but it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production, so that the details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself. | Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name. Her debut LP Badlands arrives with undeniable momentum, but it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production, so that the details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself. | Halsey: Badlands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20951-badlands/ | Badlands | Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name, last year's Room 93. With a shock of blue hair and vocal control beyond her years, Halsey arrived with just five songs and a buzzed-about live show. Since then she became the most tweeted-about artist at SXSW, toured with Imagine Dragons, and was the subject of a fascinating New York Times profile that explored her identity as a "biracial, bisexual and bipolar" artist. To boot, Halsey's debut album, Badlands' latest single, "New Americana", recently premiered on Apple Music's Beats 1 with an enthusiastic endorsement from Zane Lowe: "There’s a new icon there," he said, possibly making it so by fiat.
The momentum behind Halsey is undeniable, but Badlands mostly falls flat. At its best, the record plays like a conflagration of a half-decade's worth of alt-R&B—catchy, dark, spottily engaging. But it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production: The details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself, which is a weird place to be for a superstar-in-the-making.
Badlands opens with "Castle", an unhurried track with a trip-hop backbone that serves as a meditation on Halsey's growing fame. "Sick of all these people talking, sick of all this noise," she sings, ready to reject celebrity like an industry pro from the get-go. "And there's an old man sitting on the throne that's saying that I probably shouldn't be so mean," she sings, taking a jab at the patriarchy; it's one of the occasional moments on Badlands where Halsey's personality emerges and the knives come out. But sonically, "Castle" is dull; a misguided plainchant interlude threatens to derail the track early on and the soupy production never quite congeals.
Elsewhere, Halsey's choices are even clunkier. "New Americana" reconstitutes Lana Del Rey's Hollywood Babylon-isms and Lorde's tongue-in-cheekiness as a millennial call-to-arms: "Viral mess, turned dreams into an empire/ Self-made success, now she rolls with Rockafellas," Halsey sings, piling on the Gen Y bromides. She runs down a "big issues" checklist, from social media fame (good? bad? maybe both!) to wealth inequality (a problem, no doubt!), and her concerns come across as plasticky and surface-level.
"New Americana" isn't the only time Halsey evokes Del Rey. "Drive" hews close to the Lizzy Grant playbook, with saccharine strings and West Coast anhedonia that has Ultraviolence written all over it. The more successful tracks tend to be the ones that feel personal and specific. "Ghost", which also appeared on Halsey's EP, gives you a sense of what she can do when the scale is smaller. The track is a sinuous synth-pop love song whose economical runtime plays in its favor; one can almost forgive the music video for being yet another Enter the Void knockoff. "Hurricane", a bonus track that doubled as an early single, also has a striking specificity to its unusually bleak lyrics: "He's got an eye for girls of eighteen/ And he turns them out like tricks," Halsey sings, painting a troubling picture of a traumatic youth.
Reading interviews with Halsey or scrolling through her Twitter feed, you get the sense of a canny and talented performer, one who legitimately wants to connect with fans. But the public persona only comes through on Badlands in fits and starts, and there isn't a single subversive or original second on the album. "We are the new Americana/ High on legal marijuana/ Raised on Biggie and Nirvana," goes the chorus on "New Americana." Like most of Badlands, it's calculated, defiant, and, ultimately, hollow. | 2015-09-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-09-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Astralwerks | September 2, 2015 | 4.9 | b2c70f5d-0a46-4855-ab2d-2f8a1d7e3296 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Nas executive-produced the film and soundtrack The Land, the sort of coming-of-age tale that hip-hop once produced in abundance. The soundtrack features Nas, Erykah Badu, Kanye, Pusha T, and more. | Nas executive-produced the film and soundtrack The Land, the sort of coming-of-age tale that hip-hop once produced in abundance. The soundtrack features Nas, Erykah Badu, Kanye, Pusha T, and more. | Various Artists: The Land OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22202-the-land-ost/ | The Land OST | Steven Caple Jr.’s t**he Land is the kind of movie that hip-hop once produced in abundance, but has shied away from in its corporate and commercial expansion. It’s a small and intimate coming-of-age story: four friends, avid skateboarders with dreams of going pro, get caught in the sights of a local drug baron after taking a risk they probably should have left alone. There’s not much original to the premise, but what makes it worth consideration are the small visual touches: a multi-chromatic cast that feels like real life as opposed to “diversity;” Caple’s eye, which lingers on small details and zooms out for moments of moving portraiture; and the setting—Cleveland, OH, a city pop culture forgot from the time Bone Thugs-N-Harmony left Uncle Charles at the crossroads up until LeBron James took his talents and a championship back to the city.
The Land tells the type of story hip-hop was made for—Cleveland itself is a character, neither antagonist or protagonist, judge nor accomplice. The city just is—an unfeeling but not disconnected observer. It’s important to keep all this in mind when approaching the soundtrack to the film. Both were executive-produced by Nas—who is still making an argument for mature, textured rap a quarter century after being let out of a cage by the Main Source—and there’s a sense of nostalgia to everything here that treats the internal forces at play during life decisions with care and youthful wonder. In line with the movie’s meaning and ethos, these songs are incredibly topical and on-the-nose. Most play like cinematic scores—if their inclusion on a soundtrack didn’t announce these offerings as movie numbers, they’d still come off as backdrops to a larger tale, and the contributions seem happy to be bit players, never calling too much attention to themselves.
Machine Gun Kelly’s rock-powered “Dopeman” is the adrenaline rush of copping drugs for resale; Stalley’s “Frequency High” is an interstitial moment of happiness that feels like the last sunny day before a storm; Nas and Erykah Badu’s “This Bitter Land” is a requiem for hope and a dirge for innocence with mournful strings that’s overly dramatic in another context, but understandable as a motion picture accompaniment. “Paid,” by Pusha T and Jeremih isn’t the sinister and abrasive coke talk that Pusha’s known for, but rather the kind of cautious social uplift he breaks into every once in a while to justify his choices. “The treasure’s inside of the trunk/Help momma with the first of the month/Baby mama get to buy what she want/Baby sister get to buy the free lunch/It goes down when the poverty’s up/See the difference is had to get it, no privilege,” he raps.
There’s much thematic and personnel overlap here—contributors Stalley, MGK, and Fly Union’s Jerreau have never been shy about alleging themselves with their Ohio hometowns; relative newcomer and Clevelander Ezzy, who gained some notice for Sway in the Morning freestyle last year, has two appearances on the soundtrack, as well as supporting role in the movie (as does MGK); Badu serves as a co-executive producer. But, even with all this skin in the game, nothing on the Land emerges as fresh or novel. It’s enjoyable, but not essential, as no one seems willing to contribute their best efforts to an independent film soundtrack. The highest profile song here—“Figure It Out” by French Montana with Nas and Kanye West—was released earlier this Spring as an appetizer to French’s upcoming MC4; the video featured product place for headphones, energy drinks, vodka, vaporizers, and possibly at least one airline, but no reference to the movie.
In many senses, listening to t**he Land is like a trip back to simpler times. But so much here feels like a retread and much of it lacks boldness to contribute to or invigorate the conversations that it aims to be a part of. It’s coming-of-age music for a genre that’s generations deep. Just weeks ago, downtown Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention at the 3rd largest arena in the NBA (which happens to be named after a mortgage company). The RNC was a convergence of cynicism and naked ambition that was garish, even by the standards of electoral politics. That may not be the Cleveland that the Land wants to depict, but it’s the world in which we live. The innocence has long been lost, and the world feels to be running out of time. To ignore that comes off as hopeful, but also out of touch. | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Mass Appeal | August 10, 2016 | 6.1 | b2cbd709-53d8-450a-9f9b-1f5dbba70683 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
On his third solo LP, the Cologne producer Michael Mayer collaborates with a different artist on each track. The album plays to his strengths, balancing strict grooves with faint hints of mischief. | On his third solo LP, the Cologne producer Michael Mayer collaborates with a different artist on each track. The album plays to his strengths, balancing strict grooves with faint hints of mischief. | Michael Mayer: & | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22457-ampersand/ | & | The founders of Cologne’s Kompakt label have grown into their established characters: The silver-haired co-founder Wolfgang Voigt is the stern but affectionate paterfamilias. Reinhard Voigt, his younger brother, will forever be the excitable teen. Superpitcher, with his scarves and propensity for torch songs, is the dandy with Romantic leanings, prone to locking himself in his room with a copy of Baudelaire. Michael Mayer, on the other hand, has always seemed like the sociable, comparatively well-adjusted one—outgoing, generous (he specializes in marathon sets of eight hours or more), sensitive, fundamentally upbeat, plays well with others. The good son, in other words, the golden boy.
He has never been the most prolific artist—&, released on the long-running electronic clearing-house !K7, is only his third solo album in 13 years—but his easy charm offers a crucial counterbalance to the more difficult tendencies of Kompakt, the label he co-founded. While Wolfgang Voigt has sampled Kafka audiobooks and foraged glumly through the German Wald, Mayer specializes in self-evident anthems like “Good Times” and the no-frills “Speaker” (with its so-brainless-it’s-brilliant refrain, “I am your speaker/Speaker, speaking to you/I am not talking/I’m speaking, speaking to you”). Above all, he has endeavored to remind techno fans of the centrality of pop and disco, even at the humorless height of the minimal techno craze.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that while many producers thrive on solitude, Mayer tends to draw his energy from other people. It’s part of what makes him such a sharp DJ and such a talented producer of euphoric, good-natured fare. Much of his earliest work was collaborative. He, Reinhard Voigt, and Tobias Thomas used to record as Forever Sweet, while he and Thomas comprised the short-lived Friends Experiment. In 2007, after a considerable spell in which it seemed he’d never get around to following up his debut LP, Touch, he and Superpitcher teamed up for the gonzo, not entirely satisfying SuperMayer project. His new album translates that round-robin approach to the studio, as Mayer teams up with a different artist on every song.
The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed. The opening “We Like to Party,” a collaboration with Roman Flügel, is among the best things he’s produced. Goofy name notwithstanding, the track offers the perfect blend of over-the-top thrills and subtle details. This is the kind of craftsmanship that doesn’t show its hand: A funny little ersatz sax riff goes sailing over artfully layered percussion that fills up every available space without ever feeling cluttered. There are snippets of vinyl scratching and crowd-stoking shouts reminiscent of hip-house’s heyday. It is joyous, faintly ridiculous, and versatile: It would work wonders on a festival stage, but it’s clearly made with 200-capacity rooms in mind, for parties where everyone knows everyone else and the floor is sticky with prosecco.
The rest of the album follows in similar fashion. “Disco Dancers,” a reunion with core labelmates Jörg Burger and Wolfgang and Reinhard Voigt, balances loose-limbed, good-times disco with a gently unhinged clarinet solo in the psychedelic breakdown. “State of the Nation,” with the trance-leaning Brazilian producer Gui Boratto, tips into the latter musician’s rich, creamy chord progressions with a delirious grin; if you could bronze a sunset, it’d appear something like this. “Gemination,” with Kompakt labelmate Kölsch, does an admirable job of translating Depeche Mode’s sweeping dramatic gestures via punchy, precision-engineered techno. (If “We Like to Party” is aimed at small rooms, this one’s meant to be supersized.) And the Agoria collaboration “Blackbird Has Spoken” might top them all. The chord progression feels simple at first—just sumptuous strings, slathered on liberally. But the longer you listen, the more it feels like a riddle, in which ascending and descending voices leave you twisting in midair. It’s ecstatic and not a little dizzying, like the feeling of coming up on a drug, but it’s also comforting. You want to stay inside it and linger. As new harmonies keep piling up, the sense of physicality intensifies, like a dream of running underwater.
Sometimes the craftsmanship outstrips the expression. “Voyage Interieur,” a throwback electro jam featuring Miss Kittin, is a note-perfect period piece, but its cool is so studied you find yourself checking for a pulse. At the same time, even though Joe Goddard’s voice is full of quirk and character, it isn’t quite enough to make his song interesting. “Comfort Me,” a Prins Thomas co-production featuring husky vocals from Irene Kalisvaart, aims for Fleetwood Mac, but from the Spanish guitar to the vocal harmonies, it’s an uphill slog. And while the Hauschka collaboration, a freestyle/chamber-music fusion, is clever enough—Fairlight orchestra hits meet actual orchestra—it doesn’t feel as necessary as the album’s best material.
Mayer is far better working alongside Barnt on “Und Da Stehen Fremde Menschen” (“And There Stand Strangers”), which folds a folky sample of what sounds like a German Nick Drake into a tough, moody swirl. Dissonant organs mash and hits of helium tilt toward the stratosphere, but the crisp beat never falters and the doleful vocals keep us grounded. It goes to the crux of what Mayer does best, balancing a strict, buttoned-up groove with the faintest hint of mischief. | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | !K7 | November 16, 2016 | 7.7 | b2ce1b92-2b3a-472b-9c79-0409fa5ceffe | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
As the instrumental guitarist’s work develops, it has moved further away from something resembling instrumental Americana and toward ambient soundscape. | As the instrumental guitarist’s work develops, it has moved further away from something resembling instrumental Americana and toward ambient soundscape. | William Tyler: New Vanitas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-tyler-new-vanitas/ | New Vanitas | During the late Renaissance period, a style arose among Dutch and Flemish painters called the “vanitas,” a sort of memento mori that foregrounds the inevitability and absurdity of human mortality. Usually still lifes, these paintings sardonically collapse symbols of decadent lives and grim deaths into a single, grotesque image: a skull surrounded by precious jewels and goblets of wine, flowers that will eventually decay among human remains that already have.
The idea of life and death, co-existing as one experience, is the defining principle of New Vanitas, a new EP released with minimal fanfare by instrumental guitarist William Tyler in September. Vanitas as a concept speaks directly to 2020, a year defined by the collective whiplash of attempting to process staggering death and unforeseen catastrophe while still being forced to carry on with much of life “as usual.” Though not a quarantine album per se, New Vanitas was shaped by and inevitably reflects the uncertain conditions of the times.
The project is the result of Tyler’s return home to his native Nashville during the pandemic, of looking inward, sifting through childhood memories, and stripping back to essentials. The musical vocabulary he pulls from—both stylistically and sometimes literally, with samples of radio monologues broadcast to no one in particular and intense feedback on tracks like “With News From Heaven”—owes more to avant-garde esoterica than his previous records. His inspirations are as much about the materiality and texture of sound as the actual content: He cites “old cassettes, slightly warped records, nature recordings, southern Protestant hymns of childhood, homemade music.” As Tyler’s work complicates and develops, it has moved further away from something resembling instrumental Americana and toward ambient soundscape, closer to the KLF’s Chill Out than the post-country noodlings of Lambchop.
Tyler has long been a confident and skilled multi-instrumentalist, but with New Vanitas he comes into his own as a composer and designer of sound. This year’s Music From First Cow was Tyler’s most Spartan effort, a work defined by silence and pauses as much as by notes, and New Vanitas continues to explore sparseness. In Tyler’s hands, it’s not just the guitar that lives and breathes, but every string; his playing imbues each strum on songs like “Big Sky Waltz” with a unique interiority.
There are still traces of melody, like the light percussive pattern on “Four Corners” that turns it into a shuffling slow dance, but New Vanitas is Tyler at his most meditative. The EP reaches an apex with “Slow Night’s Static,” a 12-minute tone poem that dissolves sustained notes and snatches of radio chatter into a single, swirling pool of sound. “Pisces Backroads,” the final track, is a purifying, euphoric drone, a ceaseless build of sensation. Static seeps out of the margins of the composition and soon envelops the whole.
In a written reflection accompanying the EP’s release, Tyler credits filmmaker Kelly Reichardt as an essential component of his artistic evolution. During their collaboration on the First Cow soundtrack, Tyler writes, “She challenged me to confront some of my own melodic and compositional tendencies towards, as she put it, sentimentality: ‘Don’t tell people how to feel with this. Be open to the moment.’” Though Tyler’s music reaches beyond clear boundaries of genre or traditional songwriting, his music has in the past been undergirded by a sense of sweeping melodrama—an emotional narrative expressed even in the absence of lyrics. The songs on New Vanitas don’t tell stories as much as they mutate and unfold naturally.
Vanitas paintings express the impermanence and temporality of human existence, a theme Tyler explores in his turn away from standard melodies: No note is stable, because each fluctuates and abstracts itself the longer you hold it, constantly becoming something new. When life may feel more unsteady than ever, New Vanitas seeks peace in uncertainty, drawing a blurry horizon line by which to anchor yourself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | December 4, 2020 | 7.5 | b2cf11c0-e909-40b9-877a-ef6caf774d64 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
As West Coast hip-hop renegotiates its past through party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, Sacramento underdog Mozzy offers a blunt style of gangster rap that feels shockingly new and alarmingly bleak. | As West Coast hip-hop renegotiates its past through party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, Sacramento underdog Mozzy offers a blunt style of gangster rap that feels shockingly new and alarmingly bleak. | Mozzy: Yellow Tape Activities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21154-yellow-tape-activities/ | Yellow Tape Activities | From blockbuster biopic Straight Outta Compton to the Game's latest throwback, Documentary 2, California hip-hop history is big business nowadays. YG adapted LA gangster rap tradition to a modern production palette on My Krazy Life, while Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples deconstruct the genre’s tropes and ideologies. Yet far from Southern California's party-driven nostalgia and cerebral critique, a Sacramento-based underdog on a shoestring budget has exploded underground, offering a bleak, confrontational take on street rap that’s at once urgent and unsettling. Yellow Tape Activities is Mozzy's third solo full-length this year, and his snowballing fanbase suggests grim realism still speaks to present conditions.
Although young, Mozzy didn't arrive overnight; he's been recording for half a decade. As far back as 2010 tape Mozzarella Fella, he displayed the skills of a gifted writer, latching onto vivid imagery: "Pour the Patron in the Ocean Spray cran-grape/ I'm well-buttered like a Grand Slam pancake." But over the past two years his style really snapped into focus, becoming leaner and more direct. Along with producer June on the Beat, he cultivated a sound defined mainly by narrative style rather than melody or sonic technique.
And this focus is one perpetually shaped by violence—think of Chicago's drill scene, although Sacramento has a long history of its own brutal reality rap. Yet Mozzy takes his own path. His rapid evolution over the past few years reached an apotheosis with 2014's "Next Body on You", on which Mozzy’s disconcerting lyrics insistently pressure the listener into the role of a crew hitman: "Next body on you, 'cause you don't never do it." June's production, a canned loop that sounds like a forgotten arcade game theme, sounds worlds away from the booming maximalism of Lex Luger; the song's teeth are entirely lyrical, not musical, and this juxtaposition backlights Mozzy's unflinching audacity. His unprecedented directness makes murder less abstract, an absurdity transformed, seen through the more familiar lenses of peer pressure and shared burdens.
Yellow Tape Activities lacks the immediate highs of previous Mozzy tapes Bladadah and Gangland Landscape, but the album retains the rare consistency for which the rapper is known. There are no Mozzy filler verses. Nothing here seems aimed at the pop charts, although Mozzy's gift for a potent chorus suggests this isn't far from his reach. Opener "Property of the Ave" epitomizes his gift for morbid hooks, tossing off sticky lyrics with unbothered ease: "He ain't never bodied nobody on our behalf."
The darkness of his world is one brought to life by its unapologetic, almost ascetic discipline, focusing on a few major themes: loyalty, purposeless murder, and drug abuse. All are linked by an ever-present pain which can be spoken of in art but never expressed in reality. This comes through on the fatalism of "Ain't Shit Happen" ("You don't slide for your niggas like I do for mine/ Living on the borderline of suicide") and the way he considers his mother's concern as just another threat ("I don't care about my life like my momma care"). These are strict parental-advisory raps. The very visual and ever-present violence is disturbing, an art form pressed to its limit. He pushes gangster rap tropes in your face, placing them in unexpected, discomforting formulations.
That this remains gut-wrenching despite years of gangster cliches is one aspect of his artfulness; that we keep listening despite the shock is another. In part, this is owed to the musicality of his flow, the particular way in which he packs in syllables and slant rhymes in memorable patterns. The stitching is wholly unique and feels brand new. It's present in the density of his slang, which adapts nearby Bay Area terms and Chicago street slang but submerges them in a local dialect that takes time to decipher. Mozzy slides, slithers, wiggles; his illas will wolf on 'em, back door 'em, breathe on 'em; guns become drum sticks, chop stixx, yop sticks. This isn't simple decoration. Every verse is written with bar-to-bar purposefulness that leaves listeners hanging onto each line. Its as if his ideas were carved from cliche with a straight razor.
Mozzy’s art is at once shockingly new and alarmingly bleak. Or really, the situations he describes are bleak, as Mozzy is an artist whose feet may still be intertwined with the world that shaped him. Rather than a glorification of violence, the unremitting effect of his music is ceaselessly dire—the upsetting vision of one man from Sacramento's tough Oak Park neighborhood. | 2015-11-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-02T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Black Market Activities | November 2, 2015 | 7.5 | b2dccc9e-9826-4350-abbb-f4164fce10d5 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
Given all the recent shoegaze reunions—My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive—it makes sense Lush would make a comeback. Rather than simply embark on a nostalgia tour, Lush recorded this 4-song EP. | Given all the recent shoegaze reunions—My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive—it makes sense Lush would make a comeback. Rather than simply embark on a nostalgia tour, Lush recorded this 4-song EP. | Lush: Blind Spot EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21791-blind-spot-ep/ | Blind Spot EP | In his review of Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995—the recently released 5xCD box set that strives to illuminate/explain the so-called “Scene That Celebrates Itself”—Simon Reynolds describes the experience of hearing Lush’s 1991 single “De-Luxe” as something akin to “being buffeted by flower petals in a wind-tunnel.” It’s an apt description for a band that, over the course of four full-length albums, managed to strike a delicate balance between shimmery guitar squalls and jangly pop hooks. Though they were often unfairly regarded as sonic lightweights in regards to their peers—perhaps due to their airy vocal harmonies—Lush were always a formidable live act, capable of delivering sweetness and noise in equal measure. And while so many of their shoegazing brethren wrote lyrics that were as amorphous as their guitar effects (and then buried them deep in the mix), Lush traded in emotional intelligence, crafting songs that were as lyrically sharp as they were sonically adventurous.
Given the recent spate of shoegaze-era reunions—My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive—it’s something of a no-brainer that Lush would finally be making a comeback. Rather than simply embark on a cash-grabbing nostalgia tour, the band recorded Blind Spot—a sparkling 4-song EP that marks their first new output in two decades. Hewing closely to the ephemeral vibe of 1990’s Gala and the more plaintive tracks sprinkled across 1994’s Split, these new Lush songs are instantly unmistakable—the pairing of co-frontwomen Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson’s voices and chiming guitar tones sounding every bit as diaphanous as they did over 20 years ago.
“Out of Control”—the EP’s first single—offers the kind of romantic yearning that made old songs like “Last Night” and “Desire Lines” such compelling listens. “I can’t understand why you won’t take my hand,” sings Berenyi throughout the track, “Out of control but I love you so much.” Elsewhere, “Burnham Beeches” bubbles with the same kind of lovelorn effervescence of Spooky’s “Untogether” (“I’m so shy, I never speak a word till we’re on our own,” admits Berenyi. “That’s just fine, as long as everybody leaves us alone.”) Closing track “Rosebud” is an oddly beguiling take on a Grimm "Sleeping Beauty" narrative in which the threat of eternal slumber is both ominous and strangely tantalizing: “Goodnight my baby girl and dream of Paradise/ My thorns will cradle you with love.” It would sound more sinister if the song itself wasn’t so lovely—all gently strummed rhythm guitar, gently shaken tambourine, and quietly employed strings.
It’s important to note that while many of the Lush’s dreampoppy peers and 4AD labelmates either dramatically crashed and burned or simply fizzled into obscurity, Lush ended their first career run on a tragically bittersweet note. The band’s last full-length, 1996’s Lovelife, was a commercial and critical high—a razor sharp feminist kiss off and hook-filled antidote to the laddish mentality of late '90s Britpop. At a moment when they might have parlayed the success of songs like “Single Girl” and “Ladykillers” into even bigger mainstream success, drummer and founding member Chris Acland took his own life. It proved to be a loss so profound that it appeared as though it would essentially silence the band forever. It’s hard not to think of Acland when listening to “Lost Boy,” the EP’s simplest and most haunting track. “I should have never let you out of my sight,” sings Berenyi. “Desperate to be beside you, I didn’t know I’d never see you again.” Whether or not the song is an oblique reference to Acland’s passing, it hints at the kind of abject heartbreak that is often impossible to overcome, making the band’s poised return all the more remarkable.
If there’s a weakness with Blind Spot it might simply be its brevity, or perhaps the marked absence of the kind of swaggering sonic guitar bombast the band unleashed in old songs like “Sweetness and Light” or “Superblast!.” Regardless, Blind Spot feels like an assured—albeit somewhat tentative—way for the band to dip their toes back in the water. It would be great if the EP served as something more than just a primer for the band’s forthcoming reunion tour. Hopefully it will provide the kind of emotional throat-clearing they need in order to set about recording another full-length record. Clearly, they still have plenty to say. | 2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Edamame | April 19, 2016 | 7.6 | b2ea76ce-7d88-4c65-b33b-a57f284c29c5 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
In a year in which Frog Eyes leader Casey Mercer has already delivered a solo record and his band's acoustic LP, Ego Scriptor, the Canadian foursome have now harnessed the power of their live show and delivered their most anarchic statement to date. | In a year in which Frog Eyes leader Casey Mercer has already delivered a solo record and his band's acoustic LP, Ego Scriptor, the Canadian foursome have now harnessed the power of their live show and delivered their most anarchic statement to date. | Frog Eyes: The Folded Palm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3267-the-folded-palm/ | The Folded Palm | It's too late for Frog Eyes to change their name to Wolf Eyes, but in the past year, the band's frontman, Carey Mercer, has turned spitty, snarly, and lupine. Where he once sounded like David Bowie, he now seems to channel Tim Buckley-- he's no longer a singer so much as a yelping, rasping, contorting spectacle.
Mercer's throaty kabuki made both Frog Eyes' limited, acoustic LP Ego Scriptor and his solo album, Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, so thoroughly spooky that few listeners could digest them without a seventh-track stretch. Unsurprisingly, Xiu Xiu comparisons have steadily surfaced. While Jamie Stewart has become subtler, more musical and less vaudevillian, Mercer is becoming flashier, extra-musical, and terrifically affected. They're moving in opposite directions, but both men have arrived at the same crossroad-- expect a Frog Eyes/Xiu Xiu seven-inch split any day now.
The rest of Frog Eyes have always proved an excellent supporting cast to Mercer's Lear. Their buggy leader has the hooks and crazy headshake thing, so the band simply focuses on dutiful playing, giving both The Bloody Hand and The Golden River an unearthed lost-scrolls-of-Gallus glow which never would have materialized had the Frog Eyes worker bees left Queen Mercer and squirreled up their own private honey pots.
And yet, there now seems to have been a bit of a revolt. Frog Eyes' newest effort, The Folded Palm, is at times complete anarchy: Mercer chews up his own melodies and spits them out with nary a tone left, drummer Melanie Campbell plays her most violent set to date, piano man Grayson Walker insists on spelling out chords that mirror the band leader's, and bassist Michael Rak is either transgressing well into guitar and key ranges or competing with their volume. That's not to say the band isn't playing together-- as usual, they're tight as hell. What they're doing is matching Mercer bite for bite and catcall for caterwaul, like a four-headed dog feasting on the same coin-eyed meal. As a result, The Folded Palm is the band at its loudest and most menacing.
To say the album "starts off strong" is only half the story-- the opening three-song suite is a fucking firebomb. Campbell calls the band to arms with a tricky stomp and a crack at her trashcan cymbal, and a barrage of sound named "The Fence Feels Its Post" follows her command. Mercer's howls barely break through the mix, and when they do, they tend to the frantic and imagistic. The song bleeds into "The Akhian Press", a more musical, less theatrical return to past Frog Eyes tracks such as The Golden River's "World's Greatest Concertos". "I Like Dot Dot Dot" is the shortest of the opening three tracks (which is saying something when you consider that the longest is only 1:52), and the closest Frog Eyes come to punk on this album-- it's all fast strums, headless chicken deliveries, and Mercer's gorgeous chorus-pedal lick. "The Akhian Press" and "I Like Dot Dot Dot" debuted earlier this year on Ego Scriptor, but the fuller The Folded Palm recordings make those versions seem like mere footnotes.
The rest of The Folded Palm shares in the tri-partite opener's fury-- the best songs smartly stay short of the three-minute line, and some don't even stretch over two. It's a shame that, since the band has diffused song emphasis from the Mercer core and kicked up the energy, the truly memorable melodies that made each of The Golden River and The Hand a success have trouble finding their place amidst the new jitter. Whereas substance used to take precedence over style, Mercer's theatrics now often obscure potentially beautiful lines. "New Soft Motherhood Alliance"-- one of the most successful songs on Mercer's solo album-- now drowns in its own cheap make-up and gaudy Meat Loaf melodrama.
Frog Eyes have played live more often in 2004 than in years past, and The Folded Palm benefits from the band's wealth of on-stage energy. Naturally, their yelps and instrumental overloads work better when they are not only heard but also seen and felt; yet it will be exciting to discover how Frog Eyes makes good on the implicit commitment they make on The Folded Palm to mirroring their live and recorded personas. For the time being, three solid records in one year will more than suffice. | 2004-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-10-12T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Absolutely Kosher | October 12, 2004 | 7.5 | b2ee4c9b-2f62-4886-9e80-d02fbc6746ee | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
After two decades of tinkering, the art-rocker’s first album since 2002 arrives in an array of different mixes. Yet the songs are refreshingly uncomplicated, reconnecting with Gabriel’s pop instincts. | After two decades of tinkering, the art-rocker’s first album since 2002 arrives in an array of different mixes. Yet the songs are refreshingly uncomplicated, reconnecting with Gabriel’s pop instincts. | Peter Gabriel: i/o | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peter-gabriel-i-o/ | i/o | If you are someone who struggles with perfectionist tendencies, then you can maybe understand how Peter Gabriel is feeling right now. He has been working on an album called i/o for more than 20 years—and teasing it in the press for even longer—and, as of today, it is finally available to hear in full. But before we listen, we must decide which version of the 12-song album we want to play: the “Bright-Side” or the “Dark-Side” mix, each containing the same tracks in the same order, but featuring small adjustments. And if you check out both and enjoy them well enough, but decide that neither is quite right, then you can opt for the “In-Side” mix, available separately and on the three-disc deluxe edition.
It’s a funny way to place listeners in the shoes of the artist, asking you to consider the tiny tweaks that build a song’s atmosphere and identity. Listening to i/o, you might find yourself asking: Is the trumpet in “Live and Let Live” a crucial component to its climax or a subtle texture in the background? Do the guitars in “Road to Joy” need to blast from the mix or ride alongside the bass groove? You may become frustrated. And Gabriel is right there with you. There he is on the cover—“one of life’s ummer and ahhers,” as his Genesis bandmate Phil Collins once put it—with his head in his hands, fading into a grim, colorless mass.
To even reach this point, the 73-year-old artist had to take some baby steps. First was releasing a new song on each full moon of 2023: a recurring, self-imposed deadline that drip-fed the album steadily to his ever-patient audience. He also booked himself a world tour, where he performed nearly every song from the as-yet-unreleased record each night. Delivered between long monologues about the state of the modern world and the potential benefits of artificial intelligence—and, of course, in between the select hits from his back catalog—Gabriel asked fans to confront this work-in-progress material as a living, breathing art project before encountering it a long-awaited entry in his discography.
Beyond the fact that it actually exists, one of the big surprises of i/o is how uncomplicated it is. His last batch of original songs, 2002’s Up, was dense and depressive, and his orchestral diversions—2010’s covers album Scratch My Back and 2011’s reimagining-the-classics set New Blood—transformed their source material into the kinds of melodramatic slow-burns you hear in trailers for big-budget action films. But i/o reconnects with Gabriel’s pop instincts. For the first time in a long time, he is singing big choruses, writing in simple verse about human nature, and trying to uplift. From the sparse balladry of “So Much” to the horn-accompanied bounce of “Olive Tree,” the music reflects little of its arduous recording process. It sounds natural, intuitive.
Back in 2002, Gabriel introduced the themes of the record as “birth and death and a little bit of in and out activity in between,” which is kind of like saying, “For dinner I’d like something available and edible and tasty.” But he does have a knack for articulating universal experiences in novel ways. “So Much” portrays the scope of our life’s work with two warring sentiments—“So much to aim for” and “Only so much can be done”—while the funky “Road to Joy” offers insight into a raging existential battle: “Just when you think it can’t get worse/The mind reveals the universe.” Other songs tell their story through the arrangements themselves, like the starry, Eno-assisted “Four Kind of Horses” and the steady march of “This Is Home.” With nuanced performances from trusted accompanists like bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché, you can understand why Gabriel treated these recordings with so much care and attention.
Of course, the long wait and intricate presentation open Gabriel up to some criticism. A lot of the weaknesses come down to the lyrics. When reaching the chorus of the anthemic title track of an album he’s been tinkering away at for so long, could he really not think of a more elegant refrain than “Stuff coming out/Stuff going in”? And in “Live and Let Live,” an empathetic protest song that’s less about world peace than forgiving ourselves, does he really need to invoke an old chestnut about what happens when the whole world takes an eye for an eye? Usually critics hear these types of lyrics and suggest the solution is to spend a little more time in the oven. i/o offers a strong counterargument.
With so much context to consider, it can be easy to take for granted a quality as simple as Gabriel’s voice, which sounds brilliant and remains his defining strength as an artist. What other singer could be equally authoritative delivering one of prog rock’s most notoriously complex concept albums, a couple of the sweetest love songs in rom-com history, the wordless vocal incantations in a Scorsese Bible epic, and angsty Y2K industrial music warranting a Trent Reznor remix? And while many artists Gabriel’s age wind up pivoting to new genres or coating their voice in unearthly effects to accommodate their loss of range, his singing is the most unaffected element of these new songs: bold and melodic, equally clear and prominent in each edition. (For what it’s worth, I prefer the “Dark-Side” mix, which seems more suited to the cohesive full-album experience versus the “Bright-Side,” which caters more to each individual song.)
As history leaves the long rollout in the dust, I imagine his singing will be the quality that distinguishes i/o: a reminder that, for all the endless stress, our simple emotional connections are what perseveres. And, what do you know, this is precisely the subject of the best song on the record, which is called “Playing for Time.” A piano ballad inspired by Randy Newman, it squarely addresses the aging process, how our race against the clock gives us both an increased sense of urgency and a stronger appreciation of the present. Gabriel sings from a zoomed-out perspective about our time on Earth (“There’s a planet spinning slowly/We call it ours”) and the shifting relationships among family members (“The young move to the center/The mom and dad, the frame”). The arrangement is beautiful and precise and a little heavy-handed after the drums come in, but it’s easy to forgive once you lock into the earnest beauty of the words, the tender pull of his delivery. “Any moment that we bring to life—ridiculous, sublime,” he sings, first bellowing then softening his delivery, as if to only remind himself. | 2023-12-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-01T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Real World | December 1, 2023 | 7.4 | b2eeddad-afd9-4783-9c90-555eedc3378c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn post-punk band’s latest is a novella-like EP whose shoegaze blur and metallic twang animate a dreamlike world of seedy characters and half-forgotten pasts. | The Brooklyn post-punk band’s latest is a novella-like EP whose shoegaze blur and metallic twang animate a dreamlike world of seedy characters and half-forgotten pasts. | Bambara: Love on My Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bambara-love-on-my-mind/ | Love on My Mind | Bambara sit at the heart of an American triangulation—birthplace in Athens, Georgia, operations in Brooklyn, punk blues worthy of 1970s California. Appropriately, the band’s conceit encompasses a wide-spanning, grotesque vision of Americana. Their stories are self-contained, recursive gothic narratives with butterfly-effect surreality: 2018’s Shadow on Everything explored the fallout of an accidental disembowelment in a fictional Western town, and 2020’s Stray traced the supernatural, generational scars left in the wake of a long-dead Southern eunuch. The fiction of Bambara’s latest EP, Love on My Mind, strikes closer to home—set within New York City, its violent heart takes the form of a bloodless breakup narrated with bitter omnipotence.
Since 2008, Bambara have reined nigh-unintelligible noise into something more artfully restrained, but the wildness remains intact, and it buoys frontman Reid Bateh’s dark storytelling. When the band reaches for a shoegaze tone, it acts more as physical weight than airy padding—tangibly metallic, like Preoccupations’ “Continental Shelf.” Skillful discordance washes over closer “Little Wars,” drenching the tortured duet between Bateh and Drew Citron, bassist of fellow Brooklyn post-punks Public Practice. Across their discography, Bambara have seemed to understand the power of the female voice to counterbalance Bateh’s scowls: When Citron sings, her falsetto delicately pleading, “Wash this filthy city from your skin with me/We’ll cut our hair and burn our things and leave by spring,” you can feel something wordlessly waver. Bateh’s resentful narrator seems to hesitate, and by its denouement, the song no longer feels so hostile. Lead single “Mythic Love,” which pairs Bateh with FRIGS’ Bria Salmena, follows the same formula: The duo’s impassioned exchange invokes the rawness of a duet between Peter Peter and Lydia Lunch, but carries itself with a cowpunk suavity, the same swaying coolness that threads together opener “Slither in the Rain” and closer “Little Wars.”
Bateh approaches his work with the formality of an author—even his lyric sheets are formatted in the style of a novel, rather than poetry. Recurring elements bleed across the tracklist and confer a dreamlike continuity: doves with broken necks, the camera at the heart of “Point and Shoot,” the scattered photographs it produces. Similarly, a series of bizarre, O’Connor-esque characters litter the pages. The memory of an old friend sleepwalks through parties like a “junkie Lady Macbeth”; the narrator snaps a picture of a homeless man wreathed in a crown of MetroCards and derisively dubs him the “King of New York.” Most scenes play out in abstract flashback: Love on My Mind itself opens long after the chronological events of the EP conclude, its narrator reduced to a pathetic “godhead of the two-step” as he drunkenly dances alone, trapped in a city that mocks him. His long-lost love interest is hidden behind the protective lens of her camera, and though he proclaims his affection for her, when he recalls her speaking, it’s always in the context of death: the quiet confession of, “‘When you’re asleep, sometimes I check your pulse,’” or the callous observation in, “One night, we saw a Boeing trailing flames/And you said, ‘They make it or they don’t.’”
Post-punk seems to draw a particularly verbose kind of confession: the close-teethed anthology of the Birthday Party’s Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave, the sprechgesang of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith and his manifold imitators, Bambara’s fellow revelers in the profane and grotesque like Protomartyr and Diät. But while Bateh’s storytelling sounds as vivid as if he’d lived it, Love on My Mind remains grounded in narrative. The ugliness isn’t only misanthropic; the author’s care for his subjects shines through every word. The EP’s narrator, after all, returns to approach that vagabond King of New York, begging for forgiveness and wisdom. When Bambara hold out a story at arm’s length, they weave something more mythically admissive.
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | March 4, 2022 | 7.5 | b2f38bc0-b18e-491f-888c-74a616db29f2 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The newly reissued landmark debut from the Amityville emo band takes heartbreak, jealousy, and depression to an operatic intensity, but does so with sharp wit, a knowing wink, and oh so many hooks. | The newly reissued landmark debut from the Amityville emo band takes heartbreak, jealousy, and depression to an operatic intensity, but does so with sharp wit, a knowing wink, and oh so many hooks. | Taking Back Sunday: Tell All Your Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taking-back-sunday-tell-all-your-friends/ | Tell All Your Friends | If there was ever a visual metaphor for emo’s second wave, it’s a gang of women in tank tops kicking the shit out of a skinny white guy. That iconic image, a flip of David Fincher’s Fight Club from the video for Taking Back Sunday’s “Cute Without the E (Cut From the Team),” broadly symbolizes a wave of early ‘00s bands who’d been downhearted and used pop and post-hardcore to expose their freshly picked scabs. But the video’s scene was also on-the-nose to the point of being camp, marking the divergent path that Taking Back Sunday took from their peers. Their music described all the ways of being an emotional punching bag even as it sent up bleeding-heart stereotypes. The balance between wit and sincerity courses through their newly-remastered, still gripping debut, 2002’s Tell All Your Friends.
Taking Back Sunday’s members came from the kind of suburban towns that have a way of magnifying anxiety, isolation, and paranoia into high-stakes urgency. In 1999, the five-piece formed in Amityville, New York, leading their then-label Victory Records to proclaim that “a city that has been synonymous with nothing but horror since the 1979 release of The Amityville Horror is about to be redefined.” But given the near-universal concerns of their landmark debut Tell All Your Friends—heartbreak, jealousy, and depression, elevated to an operatic intensity—the five-piece could have come from just about any out-of-the-way place in the U.S. The stretch of grey highway depicted on the cover of their debut album Tell All Your Friends is about as region-specific as a McDonald’s.
Their sound, though, had tell-tale antecedents in Long Island’s thriving late-’90s punk scene and post-hardcore across the nation. The hooks of the Get Up Kids, the intensity of Thursday, and the post-rockish flourishes of Cap’n Jazz come together in Taking Back Sunday’s taut, poppy anthems, while also leaving a breadcrumb trail for fans to go deeper into the genre. Guitarist Eddie Reyes had played in bands including the Movielife, and the call-and-response vocals of another former band, Clockwise, inspired Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s fevered duels.
On Tell All Your Friends, every instrument pushes against each other. Frontman Adam Lazzara—a microphone masochist with the swooping hair of a Funko Pop! figurine—delivers the album’s opening lines as if he’s been waiting his whole life to do it. “So sick so sick of being tired, and oh so tired of being sick.” Later, a chorus-slash-manifesto arrives alongside guitars that hit like an electrical current’s surge. “We won’t stand for hazy eyes anymore.” It’s a sublime bit of chest-puffing nonsense, a stake in the ground that’s twisted until it holds fast.
The psyche of young, white, cis straight men is dissected with startling candor. “Ghost Man on Third” is a brutally vivid chronicle of addiction and suicidal ideation, on which Lazzara wrenchingly repeats the line, “It’s a shame I don’t think that they’ll notice.” Meanwhile, “Bike Scene,” with gorgeous backing vocals from Nolan’s sister Michelle DaRosa, fits in a hundred hooks while it evokes post-heartbreak depression. “The Blue Channel” takes a sleazy riff and soaks it in screams, before Lazzara’s taunting whisper at the song’s close: “Do you know what your girl’s been up to?”
At times like this, author Jessica Hopper’s description of women in emo songs comes to mind. They are, she wrote in a 2003 essay, “denied the dignity of humanization through both the language and narratives [...] only of consequence in romantic settings.” It’s hard to deny this read of Tell All Your Friends’ lyrics. But the band knowingly play into emo’s tropes—by 2002, already well-worn—with a knowing wink. Women are addressed as “sweetie” and “princess,” terms that endow their songs the satirical register of screwball comedy. You can imagine Cary Grant delivering a quip like “Cute Without the E”’s “don’t bother, angel,” through a plume of cigarette smoke. And “You’re So Last Summer”’s unforgettable line—“You could slit my throat/And with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt”—is both achingly real and downright absurd, a humorous quality hammered home by Flava Flav’s bizarre lip-sync to the lines in the song’s video.
In a 2003 Absolute Punk interview, Nolan explained his and Lazzara’s psychodramatic reenactments of a straight couple’s dialogue in their music: “Me and Adam had an idea originally to have some of the lyrics written like a play where one line is the boy and the next line is the girl,” he said. This fluidity, coupled with Lazzara’s slash fic-catalyzing hangouts with other emo frontmen, allows for delightfully queer readings of songs like “You’re So Last Summer,” on which Lazzara belts, “These grass stains on my knees they don’t mean a thing.” (He’s recounting the speech of a woman. But he’s still the one saying it.) Taking Back Sunday’s innate flamboyance, coupled with their songs’ willful slippage of gender binaries, makes them a complicating outlier in a largely straight scene which privileged cis male voices even as their lyrics ultimately upheld its supportive pillars.
Even so, the most compelling relationship cataloged in Tell All Your Friends is the flame war between Taking Back Sunday and Brand New’s Jesse Lacey (2017 reports alleged that Lacey is a sexual abuser and pedophile). A former member of the band, Lacey was allegedly kicked out of Taking Back Sunday after romancing Nolan’s girlfriend, and responded with 2001’s cruelly catchy DUI fantasy, “Seventy Times 7.” The Amityville band turned Lacey’s words against him in the math-y anthem “There’s No ‘I’ in Team,” but everyone involved seemed to revel in the drama; the bands came together to perform a mash-up of the two songs a few months after Tell All Your Friends’ release. Real-life context seemed to undermine any real threat of lyrics like “best friends means I pulled the trigger,” stoking the mythos of both groups. Adding credence to the theory that the rivalry was only skin deep, you could buy the Team Brand New or Team Taking Back Sunday shirt.
Unbeknownst to the band members who made the album while just grazing legal drinking age, Tell All Your Friends was a pivot point for second-wave emo. The genre exploded in late 2004 and into 2005 as Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance became TRL staples and Taking Back Sunday’s second album, 2004’s Where You Want to Be, sold 163,000 copies in its first week, a staggering number even in the CD era. But Tell All Your Friends still stands for being young, being horny, being a troll. It was a high-water mark at a moment just before everything changed.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Craft | October 10, 2019 | 8 | b308293f-8987-4ddb-b3b8-3fee6daa9843 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
Gerald Donald—one-half of Detroit techno legends Drexciya—continues to dive deeper into his Dopplereffekt project, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes. | Gerald Donald—one-half of Detroit techno legends Drexciya—continues to dive deeper into his Dopplereffekt project, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes. | Dopplereffekt: Cellular Automata | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23071-cellular-automata/ | Cellular Automata | Where does a novice begin with Gerald Donald’s sprawling discography? Since the early ‘90s, he has approached almost every facet of his career with shadowy evasiveness. Outside of his widely celebrated work with James Stinson as Drexciya, Donald has rotated through at least a dozen projects, creating aliases that veer between stone classics like “Formenverwandler” and twisting cyberpunk abstractions. Muddying the waters where credit is concerned, cover art and press releases deliberately lead people astray with imagined backstories and nebulous collaborators.
Tying all this together is a unique and consistent sonic signature, immediately identifiable across decades and as entrancing as it is deceptively simple. Built on a bedrock of snappy electro drum programming, twinkling synth arpeggiations, and ominous cinematic harmonies, Donald’s work in Dopplereffekt, often in collaboration with fellow traveler To Nhan Le Thi, is his most widely known. 1995’s debut Fascist State featured some of the project’s most notorious outings, with songs about sex with a mannequin, pornographic voyeurism and a disconcerting fascination with eugenics. While Dopplereffekt was welcomed at the time by the electroclash scene, the project has since moved further and further from the dance floor. Cellular Automata is their first LP since 2007’s thorny and mesmerizing Calabi Yau Space, and it follows a recent surge of activity that includes festival appearances and standout EPs for Leisure System. If you’ve waded in the waters of Drexciya and are curious for more, Cellular Automata is as good a place as any to dive deeper into the abstract, unsettling corners of Donald’s world.
Not that he uses that name; on this LP, he goes by Rudolf Klorzeiger, though for years he identified as Heinrich Mueller (named after the Nazi Gestapo chief). This self-mythologizing is a big part of what draws people in, but it wouldn’t mean much if the music weren’t up to snuff. Automata doesn’t upend expectations—it could have easily been released one year after Calabi rather than ten—but its nine beatless mood pieces, each approximately the length of a pop song, sound great. The blend of tingling, neon-hued ’80s futurism and sinister drone place it halfway between Tangerine Dream’s film work and the OST’s for anime classics like *Akira *or Ghost in the Shell.
The titles, however, all tell of scientific fact. “Isotropy,” “Pascal’s Recursion,” “Exponential Decay,” and others evoke the world of mathematical principles, theorems, and proofs. It’s up to the listener to decode precisely how the chunky bassline and haunting moans of “Von Neumann Probe” relate to its namesake theory of self-replicating spacecraft, but it certainly sets a striking tone. An early standout is “Gestalt Intelligence.” Following a vaporous synthetic breath, the song pulls a sly 1-2 on listeners when its initial dawning harmonies are suddenly darkened by a menacing lower note. It’s a simple gesture, but a chilling one. As the song builds, more dissonance is introduced, conjuring a malevolent hivemind plotting its insurgency. “Pascal’s Recursion” meanwhile sounds like an abandoned factory come to life, rusty pipes and all.
The album’s only weakness is perhaps its uniformity. The tracks bleed together, evoking a teeming futuristic landscape cruised over at low altitudes. Automata is an unpopulated world, one of cold precision, pregnant pauses and nameless dread. According to a 2014 interview, Dopplereffekt is “representing concepts and abstractions with music data. In other words, physical reality can be represented by musical arrangement and atmosphere.” While an early track celebrated scientists with the rather unsubtle lyrics (“Sitting in a laboratory/Conducting experiments/Analyzing data/I am a scientist”), Automata expresses the type of awe that comes with deeper knowledge of our universe’s magnitude and unfathomable complexity.
Tooling their synthesizers to mirror natural phenomenon, these songs can be seen as attempts to understand our place in the cosmos, a musical response to and interpretation of scientific and mathematical breakthroughs. Each component works as simply as possible to channel as much of life’s mystery as possible, keeping any trace of melodrama at bay. While in the past Dopplereffekt have drawn on some of the 20th century’s darkest moments, perhaps drawing parallels between the Nazi’s ruthless mechanical efficiency and Detroit’s own automation age rise and fall, here they look past the world of human affairs and the effect is profound. This is music to get lost in, and the more one explores Dopplereffekt’s world, the harder it is to remember why you would ever want to find a way out. | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Leisure System | April 6, 2017 | 7.3 | b30ad372-36c4-4d58-a856-b75e3d2990b4 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit SWV’s 1992 prodigious debut, a stylish album that added a singular realness to the sound of R&B. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit SWV’s 1992 prodigious debut, a stylish album that added a singular realness to the sound of R&B. | SWV: It’s About Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swv-its-about-time/ | It’s About Time | It’s possible that the only person in the world who didn’t like SWV’s “Weak” was the woman who sang lead on it, Cheryl “Coko” Gamble. She didn’t understand it—in fact, she “hated” the song when its writer-producer Brian Alexander Morgan presented it to her during their first recording session together. So strong was her reaction that she hid in a bathroom and had to be coerced out of it to record the track.
Good thing she got over it. The ’90s slow jam against which all ‘90s slow jams would be judged went on to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1993, dislodging Janet Jackson’s megahit “That’s the Way Love Goes” from its eight-week run at the summit. By that point, R&B’s commercial prowess was apparent—Boyz II Men spent 13 weeks at the top spot the previous year with “End of the Road,” written and produced by the trinity of Babyface, L.A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons. “Weak” clearly didn’t leap out to its singer as the era-defining ballad it would become, but then, nor did SWV immediately scan as the pop stars they would turn into months after the release of their 1992 debut, It’s About Time.
A certain scrappiness was key to their appeal. They were three self-described around-the-way girls from New York who often handled their own wardrobe. They blended classic girl-group harmonies and church singing (Coko was an alum of “hip-hop pastor” and gospel great Hezekiah Walker’s choir). They embodied the ’90s ideal of not trying too hard—there was no indication of crazy, and they were intermittently sexy, but they were full-time cool. When asked in an interview what their secret was, Leanne “Lelee” Lyons shot back, “There’s no secret. We’re real.” Their debut was home to simple, direct bangers that said what they meant and meant what they said. The album exudes a kind of bluntness you’d expect from New Yorkers.
It was Lelee’s idea to start the group with Coko, a friend she knew from her hometown of the Bronx. Before moving there in her teens, Coko lived in Brooklyn, where she got to know Tamara “Taj” Johnson-George (née Johnson). The group that would become SWV went through some format and lineup shake-ups before tapping Taj to audition. They also had a few names before settling on SWV: One of them, TLC (for Taj, Lelee, and Coko), was dropped upon the emergence of another girl group that would become a juggernaut in their own right. Their manager Maureen Singleton came up with SWV—Sisters With Voices—because their harmonic blend was so tight they sounded like actual sisters; Coko initially thought the name was ugly.
With Singleton’s help, they sent out their demo to a host of record labels with birthday cards (who could resist opening?) and bottles of Perrier (they couldn’t afford champagne). RCA bit and they were signed to a multi-album deal, a process that Taj described as “real simple.” Their fast break had been a long time coming. The women of SWV hadn’t lived easy lives. Lelee has described experiences with eviction and homelessness in her youth; she was a mother of two by age 17. Taj’s father died when she was 9, and before her wheelchair-bound mother died when she was 14, she used to carry her up the stairs of her Bed Stuy apartment building. Both have talked about surviving sexual abuse. “If we got out the ghetto, anybody could get out the ghetto,” said Coko.
Looking back at the state of the group upon signing, Coko said, “I don’t think we really realized what we could be,” but RCA’s Skip Miller did. He signed them in 1991, the year before Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? forever changed the sound of R&B, making it de rigueur to combine soulful singing and boom-bap beats. Miller said that he figured such a fusion was coming and primed his new signees to help lead the charge. He had been looking for a group with “a street feel” and saw SWV as “a female version of male groups like Jodeci and Guy,” he said in Billboard. In an interview with BET, Coko said they considered themselves a “female version of Shai.” In that same interview, Taj spelled out her group’s unique place in the market: “We’re not as glam as En Vogue, and we’re not as really street as TLC. We’re like in the center with our own flavor.”
They situated themselves within soul history, as well. References to R&B classics—direct and inadvertent—are strung throughout It’s About Time. Its bubblegummy second single, which would become the group’s first Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, “I’m So Into You,” shares a title with a 1978 slow jam by Peabo Bryson, and contains lyrical allusions to Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing,” as well as the Stax standard “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right.” Elsewhere, invocations of Stevie Wonder’s “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” Jackson 5’s “All I Do Is Think of You” (remade by Troop in 1989), and Bloodstone’s “Natural High,” float by like clouds. The album also features writing from new jack swing heavyweight Jeff Redd and Philly soul great Gene McFadden.
As if guided by destiny, SWV found themselves in a sweet spot, conversant with R&B radio’s contemporary trends and a greater soul tradition, while offering flair distinct enough to make them really pop. Theirs was not a reinvention; it was a prodigious riff. Much of the group’s uniqueness can be chalked up to Coko’s candied voice: so guilelessly chirpy as to be surreal, so tender as to recall the heights hit by Ralph Tresvant in the early phase of New Edition’s career (SWV loved New Edition). Coko could put sweet on sweet and have it make sense—her vocal approach on “Weak” works like a teaspoon of sugar that helps the sugar go down. A perpetual source of melisma, she renders short words multisyllabic as a matter of course—“true” at one point unfurls to hit about six syllables; at another, she spreads “gone” out to eight or so.
When asked in an interview why Coko was SWV’s lead singer, despite the clear aptitude of her groupmates, Taj responded, “Listen to her!” Further carving out Coko’s singularity were her signature nails, which extended her wingspan several inches and were prominently featured in the group’s videos. Coko maintained that they were her real nails. They were the product of youthful rebellion as her religious mother, Lady “Clyde” Tibba Gamble, didn’t allow such adornments growing up. Her mother’s influence was evident in her career path: Lady Tibba sang backup for the likes of Lou Rawls and Sylvester during Coko’s youth.
The group’s lyrics also traded in edginess. “I’m So Into You” is among the most joyous songs about cheating ever committed to tape—that would become something of a brand for the group as the first single from their sophomore album, “You’re the One” was similar in subject and exuberance. Additionally, It’s About Time featured not one but two paeans to cunnilingus in the aforementioned “Downtown,” a jeep-knocking slow jam, and “Black Pudd’n,” a boom-bap rap duet between Taj and the song’s writer-producer, Sahpreem King. Between Madonna’s Erotica, which had been released one week prior to It’s About Time, and the “Lick U Up”-containing Fever for da Flavor by H-Town, which would come out the following spring, the period marked a big time for pussy-eating in pop.
“Downtown” finds the girls, who were in their late teens and early 20s when It’s About Time was released, educating their object(s) of lust on how to make sex better for them: “Ya gotta go downtown/That’s the way to my love/Take it round and round/Ooh you can’t stop till you find my love.” “Downtown” is one of three songs on the album in which SWV express their collective desire for hours-long sex (their entry on the Babyface-produced Waiting to Exhale soundtrack was aptly chosen: “All Night Long,” a highlight of that collection). Taj told an interviewer the forwardness of their songs was what the group liked about them. “It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” she added. “We’re just telling the fellas what we want.”
That assertiveness stands in sharp contrast to the submission that SWV express elsewhere—It’s About Time opens with “Anything,” a verse-less songlet that finds the women on simmer and features a repeated hypnotic hook that begins: “Anything you wanna do, I am gonna try to/Boy, my body’s just for you.” That one, like many of the album’s hits, was produced by Brian Alexander Morgan, a singer-songwriter from Wichita, Kansas, who’d recently been dropped by Warner Bros., with whom his act Cachet De Vois had signed. Morgan was inspired by his former labelmate Chanté Moore when he wrote “Weak,” which details the physiological effects of a crush and spells out how useless words are to describe such matters (“Can’t explain why your lovin’ makes me weak,” goes the hook’s last line). He hadn’t written “Weak” or the new jack swing cut “Right Here” with a girl group in mind, but once he met and worked with SWV he was able to tailor his talents to their sound.
It was during the recording of the ebullient “I’m So Into You”—whose bopping keyboard sounds like it could have inspired much of The-Dream and Tricky Stewart’s peak material—that the collaboration really gelled. In an interview with Pitchfork, Morgan said they knew they had a smash on their hands while recording that one. He deliberately avoided programming a swing pattern in its percussion, figuring that R&B was ready to move on from new jack swing. He was right, though his aforementioned “Right Here” and choice album cut “Think You’re Gonna Like It” swung hard and effectively.
Much of It’s About Time has the kind of crunchy snares and nearly subliminal basslines that nonetheless characterized the sound of the day, but the productions are crisp and spacious enough to retain their freshness. There’s not really a slow spot on this collection of hits and shoulda-beens—several album cuts, including the title track, would have worked well on radio. Morgan seeded his productions with unique signatures—the hi-hat on “I’m So Into You” is a sample from the ’60s that the producer declined to specify, while “Weak” has a bending bass line inspired by uptempo hits from Zapp & Roger and Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ 4 Jamaica.”
The album was just the jumping-off point. SWV were nothing if not savvy, and so they were fully invested in the power of the remix at a time when the form was gaining a foothold on the charts. That was apparent in further hits—the smoothed out “Right Here (Human Nature Remix)” (by Allen “Allstar” Gordon and Teddy Riley) that was tacked onto subsequent pressings of It’s About Time offered a glimpse into the future as a near mash-up that combined a rerecorded version of the group’s first single (a minor R&B hit) and Michael Jackson’s Thriller-era “Human Nature.” It also features an early recording of Pharell Williams, who spits the tag “S…Double…U…V” and whose falsetto sails in the background. In 1994, “Anything” was transformed (again by Allstar) into a stomping hip-hop track featuring Wu-Tang Clan members Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, and U-God (and over a year before Mariah Carey would release the “Fantasy” remix with ODB). Even single versions would have minor tweaks—the “Weak” video version did away with the echo on Coko’s lead vocal and added even sweeter harmonies and more robust ad libs, achieving the impossible: It made a perfect song more perfect.
Coko did eventually find love in her heart for “Weak.” “We will forever work just ’cause of that one song,” she said. So far, that’s been the case. In the ensuing decades, SWV would make more hits, break up, reform, and do a whole lot of reality TV, but they remain a touring act largely based on the phenomenal success of their hit-laden debut. Even taking into account the grown-up subject matter and the many edges that the group members were rough around, there’s an innocence on It’s About Time that would be, by definition, impossible to replicate. We can only return to it and marvel at how three young women had the drive, confidence, talent, and taste to stroll right into the music industry, as though it were some building in New York. The hits, the union of hip-hop and soul, the allegiance to the remix, the street style, and conscious elegance all contribute to their status as a quintessential ‘90s R&B group, but more than anything, it was their ability to make it all look easy–attainable, even. It’s About Time is as much a relic as it is a model for projecting cool, at once very much of its time and timeless. | 2024-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | March 10, 2024 | 8.6 | b31a3c12-66b8-42bb-9e95-3edd81933ff4 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
Teebs' 2010 debut Ardour had a way of flooding your ears with lush sonic environments. On his new E S T A R A, he aims for a more concise approach. | Teebs' 2010 debut Ardour had a way of flooding your ears with lush sonic environments. On his new E S T A R A, he aims for a more concise approach. | Teebs: E S T A R A | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19152-teebs-e-s-t-a-r-a/ | E S T A R A | In case you were wondering, Ardour still sounds immersively gorgeous three and a half years later. Teebs' debut had a way of flooding your ears with greenery, lush environments seeping out of speakers and making it feel like the ambient temperature was 68 degrees no matter where you were. As low-intensity and mellow as it was, the warped instrumenation and crackling undercurrents of static and accelerated-aging decay seemed immediately tactile, doing for your ears what a look up into sunlight filtered through a canopy of leaves does for your eyes. After the fatigue of the most endless-seeming winter in ages, a followup feels sorely needed.
And yet it seems like something's been lost in the intervening years, considering how concise and relatively unadventurous E S T A R A has turned out to be. Unadventurous in this case doesn't necessarily mean derivative, least of all derivative of himself; the departure from the sprawling warmth of Ardour into more straightforward beats is at least transitional. And it's not necessarily boring, either—it's appealingly pretty music that's still a bit too attention-getting to recede into the background. But this is one of those cases where little manages to stick after repeated listens: slow builds, subtle shifts and clever juxtapositions reward close listening, but it doesn't do much to actually pull listeners in.
Meeting the music more than halfway isn't that strenuous, thankfully, and the early advance singles are enough to get a sense of the album's strong points. Jonti collaboration “Holiday” has the neat trick of smearing and smothering its notes to the point that there's little distinction between where the melodic progressions end and the sustained drones begin, thickly layered walls of percussive melody and melodic percussion concocting a blurry haze for bird chirps and sun-bleached vocals to stream through. “View Point” is more upfront in its structure—a beat that sounds like a muted, underwater tabla, offset with distorted ringing-bell chords that oscillate between sharp chimes and dissipating waves—and, with its parallel senses of deep rhythm and medidative drone, does a lot to advance Teebs' strengths as someone who can put together a dance track with the nuance and delicacy of an ambient composition.
There are other moments of arresting beauty, like the bossa-tinged beat on Prefuse 73 collab “NY pt. 2” that pairs airy woodblock and heavy-elastic kicks with crystalline acoustic guitar notes, or the sustain-drenched keys that make “Piano Days”/”Piano Months” feel like Overlook Hotel muzak if the ghosts were more Miyazaki than Kubrick. But there are just as many songs that slip through your ears. “Shoouss Lullaby” is little more than windchimes over foot-dragging bass rumbles that eventually drag themselves out of bed to join a woozy-headed beat, and “SOTM” runs off the jittery momentum of a gathering-steam burble of rapidfire click-boom-cymbal percussion. But even at opposite ends of the energy-level spectrum, they're both too gauzy and vague to resonate much further than the last moment of fading reverb.
E S T A R A is almost hypnotic in its tendency to make each individual track blur itself into an indistinct piece of a loosely memorable whole, one with little impression actually retained even if it jumps from mood to mood. Melancholy, bucolic relaxation, and agitated giddiness all run through this record, but its emotionally calming effect comes at the expense of anything truly revelatory or exciting. It's only when the clarinet of Jaga Jazzist's Lars Horntveth wafts its way into an almost snarky song- and album-ending moment at the conclusion of “Wavxxes”. There the sustained momentum finally all winds down in a flurry of missed notes and stray chuckles— the humanity finally piercing the surface. The mood is broken, the past 40 minutes vanish into the ether, and the loose sense of having just experiencing something fairly pleasant is all that's really left. Still, that elusive moment's worth trying to recapture with each listen. | 2014-04-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | April 4, 2014 | 6.7 | b31b10ca-cc75-4de6-b78c-e2d7edddf877 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Gabrielle Herbst studied composition at Bard with new-music heavyweights like Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld, and she also has an unabashed love of pop. The vocals on her intriguing debut evoke both the pointillist harmonies of '60s girl groups and the contrapuntal clockworks of Meredith Monk. | Gabrielle Herbst studied composition at Bard with new-music heavyweights like Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld, and she also has an unabashed love of pop. The vocals on her intriguing debut evoke both the pointillist harmonies of '60s girl groups and the contrapuntal clockworks of Meredith Monk. | GABI: Sympathy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20409-sympathy/ | Sympathy | What if the voice weren’t the original instrument? What if it all began with breath? That’s one question at the heart of Gabrielle Herbst’s debut album as GABI, in which the singer and composer takes gorgeous, gossamer songs—songs that feel all but a cappella, even when they rest upon a spongy cushion of chamber instruments—and blows them out until they pull apart. Sympathy is a vision of music as free-flowing as air.
Pop records written with this kind of academic rigor are rare. Herbst studied composition at Bard with new-music heavyweights like Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld; later, she was an artist-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, and she has written a short opera. At the same time, she’s identified as someone who "loves listening to loud, simple, unabashed, healing pop music."
Sympathy gets its meadowy textures from violin and viola, undistorted electric guitar, steadying piano, and vibraphone; loosely woven background vocals evoke both the pointillist harmonies of '60s girl groups and the contrapuntal clockworks of Meredith Monk. But it’s not always so dulcet. Major- and minor-key passages pivot into dissonant drones and unstable frequencies. The album resembles the quieter moments of Julia Holter’s Ekstasis and Loud City Song, and it also brings to mind Julianna Barwick’s Nepenthe. But Herbst’s adventurous arrangements and occasionally white-knuckled sonics set it apart from Barwick’s more genial sound, and Herbst is less influenced by the pop standards and densely imagistic narratives that drive Holter’s music.
Ultimately, Herbst’s voice is the main attraction. It is the first sound you hear, in fact, a clear soprano wreathed in natural reverb: "I wait for you." Embodied with the language of romantic yearning, her voice provides the through-line that holds the record together, whether foregrounded in soaring cadenzas or multi-tracked into dazzling, kaleidoscopic arrays.
Thematically, Sympathy follows an arc so faint it might as well be traced in sand, one that takes us from desire to fullness, from "I wait for you" to "Hallelujah." Her images are both hyper-specific and deeply symbolic, overdetermined by centuries of song: wilting willows, stardust, a golden fleece. The haunting "Love Song" offers only nonsense syllables punctuated by a few concrete phrases: "blue zero," "electricity," "I am yours." It feels like a snapshot of the mind/body divide: blood pumping through the veins, current zapping through the central nervous system, the occasional flash of language.
Herbst’s lyrics frequently take the shape of mantras or koans, but she seems aware that language has its expressive limitations. The text of "Home" is just five words long ("Stay with him/ I’m home") and the closing "Hymn" even shorter: "Hallelujah! Blood and water." But words on the page are hardly the point. The magic is in the way she embodies them—in the idea of breath incarnate. In repetition, they take on the weight of ritual, and as she extemporizes, she frees the voice from the shackles of speech. The bulk of "Home" is an extended, wordless cadenza that loops in the air like a bird, only to finally alight on the phrase, "I’m home."
"I have recently been trying to build rhythms by imitating the way that light reflects on walls or leaves reflect on the ground," Herbst told an interviewer in 2012; "constant fluctuation, random but with a sense of purpose and believability. I seek to make organic rhythms with an internal logic even if that logic is not obvious or straightforward." In Sympathy, that takes the form of tidal forces: phrases imperceptibly speeding and slowing, and glassy depths turning roiled and opaque. "Over to the sea!" she cries in "Fleece", and in "Falling", she points to "phosphorescence floating… love as debris." In "Da Void", she addresses the sea and her lover as one being: "Your eyes/ Your tides/ Breathing/ You still/ Water I want to hear you breathing." Strings swell, and a fingerpicked guitar sends ripples across the surface. It’s so beautiful it’s almost frightening, a sneakily sweet treatise upon the sublime. There’s nothing to do but sigh. | 2015-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Software | April 7, 2015 | 8 | b31e4ad1-b7d7-42aa-852d-2598c497e340 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The fabled noise-rock outfit paint an ugly world on their second post-reunion release, but they have never sounded freer or more purposeful. | The fabled noise-rock outfit paint an ugly world on their second post-reunion release, but they have never sounded freer or more purposeful. | Cherubs: Immaculada High | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cherubs-immaculada-high/ | Immaculada High | The fabled Austin noise rock band Cherubs have always had a close relationship, imagined or otherwise, to hard drugs. Their 1994 release Heroin Man earned them a permanent cult following with the same people that worshipped The Jesus Lizard, Butthole Surfers, and Cows. Their new label, Relapse, cheerfully characterizes them as drug music for drug people. The video for “18 the Number,” a track off their new album Immaculada High, is a choppy, mutated trip down memory lane, and won’t help dispel that well-worn association. But flying high or not, Cherubs has never sounded more lucid or purposeful.
Perhaps this has something to do with their 20-year hiatus, or the reasons behind it. Heroin Man is famously a record for and about Dave DeLuna, a close friend of the band who died of a heroin overdose. Its cover depicts a man facedown in a bathtub. The band broke up following a pre-show brawl in San Diego the night before its release. Despite its place in the noise-rock canon, moving on from Heroin Man was probably necessary for survival, for the art and for the artists.
Immaculada High, the band’s fourth studio album and fifth overall, is a larger leap from the band’s early years than their last reunion effort, 2 YNFYNYTY. Kevin Whitley’s syrup-thick guitar is as punishingly beautiful as ever, and his lyrics, sacrilege as it may be for the genre, verge on audible, thanks to production from Erik Wofford (My Morning Jacket, Explosions in the Sky). And even if Whitley’s words aren’t about the epidemic of drug overdoses that swept their once-sleepy Austin hometown in the mid-’90s, they’re still inherently fatalistic. Across 11 tracks, Cherubs paints an ugly world—pigs in filth, hissing insects and serpents—to convey the anxiety of inevitable death: not just their own, but of all of humanity. “This recording feels like the soundtrack to a movie about Mother Nature exacting dark revenge on the nasty homo sapiens,” reads the band’s only comment thus far on the album.
“I like being doomed with you/Life is better slipping through your fingers,” a resigned Whitley wails on “Full Regalia.” On the opener, “Turista,” Whitley looks at himself as if detached from his own body: “Give it a home/But barely a home.” “We’re just passing through!” he yells. As with the double meaning in the song title—either a tourist or the type of diarrhea that afflicts some of them—this can be read two ways: a realization of his own mortality, or, as read in the context of the rest of the album, a eulogy for a dying planet.
The record’s lead single, the crawling, crumbling “Sooey Pig,” is a tug-of-war between the prettier side that Cherubs hinted at on 2 YNFYNYTY and the wall-of-noise past they can’t escape. Sub-two-minute shredders like “18 the Number” and “Pacemaker,” both underscored by Prager pummeling his tom-toms, reveal that Cherubs is just as content to make noise as ever, and that growing older doesn’t mean getting softer. Immaculada High is simultaneously the band’s most accessible and its most bombastic release.
In Immaculada High’s closer, “Nobodies,” Whitley croons for nearly two minutes: “Up, up they float,” he sings. He could be singing about the tense legacy of Heroin Man, or merely our inevitable shuffle off this mortal coil. Whatever the reason, he has never sounded more free. Those are the spoils of moving on. | 2019-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Relapse | July 27, 2019 | 7.9 | b32836e0-f5fb-46b9-8843-d0071bbdaea4 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
The Notwist's first full-length since 2008's The Devil, You + Me is their first for Sub Pop. On it, the German electronic band's identity feels increasingly cloudy. | The Notwist's first full-length since 2008's The Devil, You + Me is their first for Sub Pop. On it, the German electronic band's identity feels increasingly cloudy. | The Notwist: Close to the Glass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19054-the-notwist-close-to-the-glass/ | Close to the Glass | The Notwist do a good job of shrinking into the shadows, making it feel like they could stop doing all this and drift away without any kind of announcement or farewell note. On hooking up with Sub Pop for their first full-length album since The Devil, You + Me in 2008, the label made such a big deal that it felt positively un-Notwistian. This is a band that operates without fanfare, favoring the periphery over the spotlight. Even their brightest moment—the elevation in stature following the release of the gorgeous Neon Golden in 2002—led to more than half a decade of inactivity prior to its follow-up. The Notwist may feel like they know how to disappear completely, but there's a weight of expectation when news of resumed activities comes through, a sense that a return to the bittersweet sentiment of "Chemicals" or "Pick Up the Phone" could be careering around the bend.
At their peak this is a band that can make disparate feelings feel positively orderly, with singer Markus Acher's approach emotional yet strangely distant, resembling someone trying to open up but keeping a handful of key thoughts to themselves. In theory the Notwist should be a big mess, with nascent thrashings in hardcore circles, attempts at bridging technology and indie-rock long before Thom Yorke tripped over a sampler, and Acher's non-voice floating along on top of it all. Instead, like all bands who've had at least one Neon Golden moment in their careers, they have a way of making it seem remarkably uncomplicated, establishing this as a space they inhabit alone despite the legions of laptop-tapping acts with an ear for pop melody, some of whom seeped deeper into the public consciousness than the Notwist will presumably ever do at this point.
Initially things seemed promising for Close to the Glass. Releasing the title track with its detuned beats underpinned by familiarly fussy electronics and Acher subsumed somewhere in the middle of it all was a smart move, resembling the kind of dubbed-out pop structures Margaret Fielder was practicing with her band Laika circa their excellent Silver Apples of the Moon. Better still was the release of "Kong", which comes stamped through with a forthright guitar clang, irresistible organ drone, and Acher hitting some wavering high notes not dissimilar to J Mascis' falsetto. It's this album’s equivalent of "Day 7" from Shrink—finding the spot where their brainiac approach merges perfectly with their fondness for abandon, resulting in a catchy moment that's a far better realization of their anthemic tendencies than similar efforts from The Devil, You + Me.
There's a sense of confidence installed by placing "Close to the Glass" and "Kong" early in the tracklisting, although what follows never gets back there. The drop in quality isn't sharp—instead it's like watching a group of people kicking around a ball that's slowly deflating. There's an acoustic campfire misfire ("Casino"), Nick Drake wistfulness ("Steppin' In"), an attempt at Kevin Shields' glide-guitar sound that feels like it was regurgitated from a dusty old rehearsal tape from the mid-90s ("7-Hour-Drive"), and a go-nowhere instrumental that quickly crosses the line from Eno-esque beauty to boredom ("Lineri"). It would be a little cruel to hold up the title of "From One Wrong Place to the Next" as symbolic of where the second half of Close to the Glass ends up; instead, there is no sense of place at all, just a series of loose strands that never reach a point of cohesion.
A version of Shrink was released on Stereolab's Duophonic label when it initially surfaced, and it's easy to trace links between the approach and trajectory of both bands—both fascinated by the meeting point between pop and technology, both keen to maintain an emotional distance from their audience, both quietly working away with little regard for reception. Arguably Stereolab's later career produced more uneven results than their earlier work, and it feels like the Notwist are in that phase now, where change comes off as forced and unnecessary, and the bigger picture of the band's identity becomes increasingly cloudy. There was always a tendency to divert into different styles on their prior albums (at least from 12 onward), but always with a feel of continuity underpinning it all, as if each path they took was firmly routing off the same road. Here, their razor-sharp sense of direction feels strangely blunted. | 2014-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Sub Pop | February 27, 2014 | 6.4 | b32bc670-1d83-4dc7-8e0a-2e827b6830b6 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
As you read this, there are likely a number of people in your midst summoning up all the backlash powers ... | As you read this, there are likely a number of people in your midst summoning up all the backlash powers ... | Interpol: Turn On the Bright Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4113-turn-on-the-bright-lights/ | Turn On the Bright Lights | As you read this, there are likely a number of people in your midst summoning up all the backlash powers their mortal frames can bear, those who believe the boys from Interpol to be the latest shock troops in the battle of PR style over artistic substance. And who can blame them? After the veritable shitstorm of publicity drummed up by a certain New York City band-- one that had the audacity to not be the denim-clad messiahs of rock and roll we'd been promised-- directing a little skepticism toward NYC's buzzmongers is probably healthy. Plus, at a glance, Interpol's snazzy suits and expensive haircuts seem symptomatic of a carefully spun image designed purely to separate money from wallets. It's okay to be suspicious.
But back up. These guys are on Matador, not RCA. The hypester division of Matador is a guy in a closet (and he's only part-time); the 'spin' budget for Interpol wouldn't even be a down-payment on Julian Casablancas' designer leather jacket. The fact that these guys see press at all can only be attributed to their die-hard contingent of fans (I'm only recently converted), and was earned purely through legwork and a handful of underpublicised EPs. And now that they've won our attention, after three years of toiling in obscurity, it's mere icing that their debut full-length delivers upon what the whispers only hinted at.
Interpol's debut full-length is wrought with emotional disconnection and faded glory, epic sweep and intimate catharsis. Inevitably, the hype exceeds return (that's why it's hype-- and, to be fair, Interpol has largely flown under the radar compared to most other NYC acts), but there's no getting around that Turn On the Bright Lights is an incredibly powerful and affecting album. Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts-- and although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights.
Speaking of Closer, Interpol can't seem to shake being likened to Factory prodigies Joy Division. The cause, however, isn't necessarily evident. Indeed, Daniel Kessler's sublime, angular downstrokes follow the smooth confidence of Carlos Dengler's basslines, and Paul Banks sings with Ian Curtis' downcast delivery and dramatic flair. The difference, however, lies in the music itself: what Joy Division played was sparse and jagged-- punk with a melancholy, but often minimalist bent. Interpol, meanwhile, are punk in ethic alone; their music bears few of that genre's signatures, with the band instead immersing themselves in a grander, more theatrical atmosphere with lush production that counters their frustrated bombast.
"I will surprise you sometimes/ I'll come around/ When you're down," Banks gently affirms over echo-drenched guitar simplicity and rolling bass, as "Untitled" hovers on artificial strings to open Bright Lights. The words are plaintive yet assertive, in agreement with the unsteady warble of the background, and they set the tone for an album that is equally paradoxical-- often bleak, but surprisingly uplifting. Each of the album's eleven tracks evoke raw, unsettling need suffused with delicate serenity. It can be difficult to absorb this much emotional relentlessness, as Banks unflinchingly confronts you with it at all times, but it's precisely this challenge that makes this record so staggering.
The visceral punch of the thematic content is backed at every turn by melody among serrated riffs and amorphous percussion. Discussing the highs and lows of Bright Lights would just be splitting hairs, given its consistency, but a few tracks stand inches above the others. Of the two songs to be carried over from their self-titled EP, "NYC"'s conflicted show of conditional love for the streets of Interpol's hometown is still one of the most brilliant cuts present. And as tight as the EP was, Interpol show how much more they're capable of with "Obstacle 1" and "The New," the range between which is striking. "Obstacle 1" is as close to Joy Division as Interpol gets, coupling harsh, restrained outbursts of aggression with disturbing imagery as Banks clearly gasps, "You'll go stabbing yourself in the neck." The tense lead guitar is a counterpoint, giving these explosive bursts added depth, just as Ian Curtis' emotional collapses were made more poignant by the fragile guitar that cradled them. By the time the album reaches "The New," the anger has dissipated, leaving only the calm sound of sober acceptance.
The tragedy of music press is that when the buzz spirals out of control, people are apt to question a great band's validity, whereas if the band went largely unknown and was 'discovered' independently, so to speak, folks would be less likely to reject the praise out of hand. Whether that will happen with Interpol remains to be seen, but as a member of the press, it's my duty to tell you, from one music fan to another, what I personally think of an album, and in this case, it's that Turn On the Bright Lights has been one of the most strikingly passionate records I've heard this year. That other people I've spoken with have the opportunity to experience it, and that they feel similarly about it, can only be a good thing. | 2002-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 18, 2002 | 9.5 | b33ea4cf-f866-4894-8fdf-63fadba32cbe | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
On her second album, the Welsh electronic musician leans into both her loops and her lyrics, seeking something spiritual in the act of repetition. | On her second album, the Welsh electronic musician leans into both her loops and her lyrics, seeking something spiritual in the act of repetition. | Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-lee-owens-inner-song/ | Inner Song | Few artists are as adept at fusing electronic music’s warmth and coldness as Kelly Lee Owens. What makes Owens’ work so distinctive is her equal proficiency as a songwriter and producer; her vocals are as confident and captivating as her beats. Inner Song, her second album, boasts a variety of styles, floating between tight pop structures and extended club grooves. What ties the record together is her unusual ability to join the physical with the emotional.
Straight-up techno bangers, like “Night” and “Melt!,” juxtapose the ethereal calmness of Owens’ voice with the commanding presence of a throbbing bassline. Dancefloor tracks like “Jeanette” are more intense than on Owens’ first record, with driving synths over hard, unfailing kick drums. She occasionally approaches R&B territory: “Re-Wild” is slow and pulsating, as waves of her voice cascade over a grinding beat. “On” weaves an introspective style somewhere between dream pop and trip-hop into a long and vibrating rhythm, without a seam to be seen. Even on the tracks that veer toward more conventional pop structure, pockets of experimentation still exist—on “L.I.N.E.” her voice trails off and fades away, leaving nothing behind but a simple synth sequence.
Owens’ self-titled debut album played with sounds that felt spiritual, almost new age, like the tablas on “S.O.” and sitar drone on “8.” On Inner Song, that meditative quality comes less from instrumental texture and more from the actual form of the songs. Though she drifts across tempos and dabbles with a variety of drum patterns, loops—both instrumental and lyrical—provide the record’s through line. On “Wake-Up,” life’s circular patterns are made explicit: “Wake up/Repeat again/Again.” Owens writes with clarity and simplicity, using her own voice as something like a synthesizer, processing a phrase and then repeating it as she sings subtle variations in timbre and tone. Her lyrics are, in their own quiet way, a celebration of the pleasures of solitude and self-love.
The unexpected opening track, a wordless cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” offers a sort of formal thesis statement. Owens’ interpretation emphasizes the Steve Reich-like qualities of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar line, stretching it into an undulating synthesizer pattern. Forgoing vocals, she distills the song’s harmonic essence, stripping it down to emphasize a single part of the whole, evoking a state of trance-like contemplation until a jittery breakbeat crashes through.
The framework of Owens’ sound may be familiar now, but plenty still surprises—particularly an appearance from fellow Welshman John Cale on “Corner of My Sky.” Like so many of her songs, the track swirls a handful of chilly synthesizers as it imperceptibly rises toward a fully embodied emotional climax that reaches for the sublime. Cale’s fragile, weathered voice lends a different texture from that of the album’s other tracks, though its underlying production is similar in tone. Toward the end of the song, Cale sings in Welsh, and it feels almost as if Owens is speaking through him to conjure the landscape of their homeland. Throughout, Cale’s words spin in mantra-like loops, becoming one with the programmed sounds that surround them.
For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.
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. | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | September 1, 2020 | 7.7 | b3493831-1a19-48e8-890a-b376ce1a62ad | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
After 17 years, Wolfgang Voigt returns to his GAS moniker with a new album of unsettling and symphonic ambient music that has become deeper, richer, and more luxurious. | After 17 years, Wolfgang Voigt returns to his GAS moniker with a new album of unsettling and symphonic ambient music that has become deeper, richer, and more luxurious. | GAS: Narkopop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23083-narkopop/ | Narkopop | In the year 2000, Wolfgang Voigt released Pop, his fourth album of ambient music under the name GAS. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear that there needed to be a fifth. It’s not that Voigt had run out of ideas. The three prior GAS full-lengths Voigt had released since 1996 had focused mostly on drone-laden synth washes, dark and swirling samples of Wagnerian strings, and a deep, insistent, and often disconcertingly fast 4/4 kick drum that did nothing to signify “relaxation.” Pop’s sonic universe—a natural world rendered in an eerily synthetic manner—was actually the outlier of his discography at that time, a sharp left turn after four years of steady, incremental progression. The fact that GAS seemingly ended on such a strong and radically different note lent the record the feeling of punctuation: It seemed as though there could be nothing else on the other side of the Pop’s hard stop.
But here we are 17 years later, and Voigt has returned with a fifth GAS full-length, Narkopop. Like so many musical projects that seem to end on a high note, GAS has only grown in stature in its absence. In the years since Pop, GAS has become an ambient touchstone, and Voigt has become one of a small handful modern artists—see Fennesz, Oval, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker—who put a personal stamp on the music as distinctive as Brian Eno’s. Though Voigt has kept busy releasing various solo and collaborative projects and running Kompakt (the label he owns with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape), GAS never quite left the frame, and Voigt seems to recognize its iconic stature, given the release of two box sets and a the well-received GAS shows he’s put on over the last decade. Perhaps there was, after all, a sense of unfinished business. Narkopop doesn’t precisely pick up where things left off (there’s nothing here that sounds like Pop’s alternative Earth), but it does add another chapter to the story, with deeper, richer, and more luxurious sound that feel appropriate given GAS’ place in the ambient firmament.
Narkopop’s textural range approaches 1998’s Königsforst, as it mixes pure drone, symphonic grandeur, and industrial clang, but it goes even further into the realm of evocative film music. Angelo Badalamenti’s score to Mulholland Drive seems to be a particular inspiration, and the tense crawl of Narkopop’s opening track (as with almost all GAS tracks, these are distinguished only with numbers) almost has to be a direct reference to the film’s main theme. Narkopop is also the most “live”-feeling of the GAS records—not because it seems like the result of improvisation but because, no matter where you are hearing it, you imagine these tracks playing in a vast room, or maybe an airplane hangar. Cavernous reverb is a constant, and the tracks are layered with the kind of hiss and electronic noise that bring to mind the frighteningly high noise floor of a massive sound system waiting to explode. Where the kick drum appears, it becomes a tool for sketching out the dimensions of the imaginary space. “Narkopop 5”’s rhythm is alarmingly martial, like it comes from a sinister marching band circling around the interior edges of a warehouse. “Narkopop 9” adds an extra octave to the lower end, giving the anchor beat a deep physicality to contrast with the deeply romantic string melodies. And sometimes the space is inverted, but it takes you on a trip just the same: The bass pulse on the more muted “Narkopop 2” brings to mind not walls but a rib cage, suggesting an interior journey.
There’s no major reinvention here, but the sheer scale of Narkopop feels bigger and richer than what came before. GAS’ origins can be traced to the raw dub techno coming out of Berlin in the early and mid-’90s. Basic Channel were taking dance music and stripping it bare, to where a bass drum and a bit of echo might be all that’s left of a given track. Voigt rebuilt dub techno from the ground up, filling in the empty spaces with drones and classical touches but keeping the tension of the pulse. If early GAS felt homemade, a snapshot of where bedroom production was in the ’90s, this record sounds expensive, the product of someone with the time and resources to get every sound just so. It takes the basic grainy GAS approach and blows up the crude raw materials to a sparkling 70mm, an epic ready to be projected onto the wall of a canyon.
But despite its grand gestures, the great triumph of GAS is that the feelings the project evokes are hard to name. The music of Narkopop can be meditative, but there’s always something unsettling lingering beneath—it’s about shaking something loose rather than easing us into serenity. The arrangements imply “drama,” but it’s all of a nonspecific type, a blurry scene those details are just out of reach. So while a given track might feel ominous or uplifting, it always stops just short of manipulation. The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music’s most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener. | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | April 21, 2017 | 8.8 | b35f2c6d-501d-4607-8d59-6a7dc95c1a22 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On their remarkable third album, the New Orleans band pushes their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their raucous, revolutionary glam punk. | On their remarkable third album, the New Orleans band pushes their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their raucous, revolutionary glam punk. | Special Interest: Endure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/special-interest-endure/ | Endure | In a big enough mosh pit, the world jostles loose. You enter the pit as one person, and you leave as someone else. The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz described this transformation as a portal in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia. “I remember the sexually ambiguous punk clubs of my youth where horny drunk punk boys rehearsed their identities, aggressively dancing with one another and later lurching out, intoxicated, to the parking lot together,” he wrote. “For many of them, the mosh pit was not simply a closet; it was a utopian subcultural rehearsal space.” In the squall of the music, reality starts to split and curl. Through communal, friendly violence, punks build muscle memory of what it’s like to feel unhinged and cared for at the same time. The thrash of bodies clears a channel, however fleeting, into a more survivable life.
Special Interest drill down into that same molten core. Across three ferocious albums, the New Orleans band traces the line where the thirst for a new world meets the rage that torches the old one. Lit up and led by searingly charismatic singer Alli Logout, they call out the stakes of the era as they see them, excoriating gentrifiers, cops, warmongers, and trust-fund art-school kids with keenly tuned sneers. Songs about bracing for revolution brush up against songs about great sex on great drugs. Running on the tireless engine of Ruth Mascelli’s clattering drum machine, they follow in a legacy of queer perturbations from the ’80s and ’90s that include Coil, Frankie Knuckles, and the B-52’s—all of whom, in their own way, worked with the same mix of political dissatisfaction, biting humor, and erotic fantasy. On their third album, Endure, Special Interest push their sound to both its bleakest and its sweetest brinks. Pop, disco, and house all melt into their reliably raucous glam punk, and questions of communal caretaking press against a grief-riddled apocalyptic outlook. This time around, their thorns drip with honey.
Across Endure, Special Interest embellish the cornerstones they established on 2018’s Spiralling and 2020’s The Passion Of with gestures that wouldn’t sound out of place on ’90s radio. The after-dark sounds of house and techno started spilling onto commercial daytime airwaves toward the end of the last millennium, many of them drifting onto the Top 40 from overseas in the pan-flash genre called Eurodance. Logout stretches into certain vocal timbres and minor-key intervals that echo the perfect, ephemeral dance pop of a group like La Bouche, while behind their voice, delicate piano lines fringe the band’s hard-driving foundation. These shifts clear more air around Special Interest’s sound. While certain moments still feel immediate and unignorable, others seem to waft out from a club’s open back door, beckoning passersby to come take a closer look.
The album’s most compelling songs use both strategies in tandem. They invite you to wander in of your own accord, then enclose you inside a fever pitch. On the rollicking dance track “(Herman’s) House,” Special Interest forge an incandescent call to anger out of a surging hook. The song shares its name with a 2012 documentary about the imaginative collaboration between artist Jackie Sumell and activist Herman Wallace, a member of the Black Panther Party who spent 41 years in solitary confinement after serving a life sentence for a murder he denied committing. From his tiny cell, Wallace described his dream house to Sumell, who rendered it via computer graphics and as a tabletop model. In 2013, Wallace finally stepped out of prison, then died of cancer three days later. Sumell made plans to build the house he described to her as a youth community center in New Orleans, but property developers bought the proposed land out from under her.
The story ends bitterly, but Special Interest find solace in the idea of projecting utopia out from hell. “Build it out like Herman’s house,” Logout screams at the chorus over Nathan Cassiani’s jaw-clenched bassline. “We’ll all be Basquiats for five minutes or Hermans for life/So when I say build I mean dream, because that’s all we got promised,” they command in a spoken-word breakdown just before the final refrain. In a recent Quietus interview, Logout illuminated the juxtaposition between the Black queer artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wallace: “It’s two different sides of what being Black in America is. You’re either fully idolized and destroyed, or you’re thrown in a cage.”
Special Interest began writing Endure in the middle of 2020, in the wake of uprisings against police killings that stirred cities around the world. Across the insistent drumbeat spikes of “Concerning Peace,” the band bemoans the whittling down of those revolutionary impulses into a neoliberal mold of nonviolent personal enrichment: “Liberal erasure of militant uprising is a tool of corporate interest and a failure of imagination,” goes a call-out line reminiscent of the interjections on System of a Down’s “Prison Song.” Over Maria Elena’s frothing, sidelong guitar chords, the band’s voices come together for the chant-along chorus, where they collectively quote the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael: “We are not concerned with peace/Peace is not of our concern.” Power disguises its own violence as the natural order of things; to call for violence in retaliation clarifies the terms of a smiling oppressor. “No one will ever rest in peace/When their value is less than property,” Logout seethes, pillorying commentators who expressed more concern over broken store windows than the lives of Black people killed by police.
Endure howls against a capitalist regime that feeds on the neglect and death of sidelined and exploited human beings, both in the U.S. and globally. This system is fragmented enough to work in the shadows; long threads connect military activity in the Middle East and the gas that seeps out of the pump at the 7-Eleven, but they’re obscured enough that whoever’s gripping the handle won’t typically feel them. On “Kurdish Radio,” Special Interest draw an explicit line between oil lurking under the sands of contested territory and the lives lived in American cities. “Is love like Arab oil?/Do we take take take till it’s depleted?” Logout sings. Later in the song, they overlay crude oil with blood staining the streets of New Orleans, as if to suggest that connecting local struggle to a global network makes for a start. At the climax of “Concerning Peace,” Logout calls out the names of metropolises across the world, tethering them together as sites of both historic disinvestment and revolutionary potential.
Amid calls to destroy every kind of cage, Special Interest stay attuned to what might sprout from the ashes. The music video for “Midnight Legend,” a sweetly melodic dance track whose single version features a verse from Mykki Blanco, follows a group of clubgoers through a messy night out. They flip off a handsy bouncer, ingest a few too many drugs, argue with exasperated bartenders, and get kicked out of the bathroom in the middle of a gay threesome. This club houses little of the utopia the dancefloor can sometimes tease; all night, it plays host to low-grade, aggravating conflict. Then the dancers spill out into the morning light. As passersby hustle their way to work, three of the clubgoers sync up for an impromptu dance routine. The people who have just woken up scowl at those who have been up all night. But the dancers look at each other and beam. Their movements reassure each other that they have each other’s backs even if no one else does. Under the new sun, they practice another world inside the cracks of this one.
The album rolls to a close with the slow-burning “LA Blues,” a song that sheds its skin multiple times over the course of its eight minutes. It starts with a handful of neighborhood scenes and a repeated falsetto taunt: “If you don’t like it you can fuck right off/Them boys in blue don’t come around on this block.” In the third verse, Logout’s gaze turns inward. They ruminate on the end of a relationship, approaching a state of tenderness but quickly diverting it with a sarcastic “boo hoo,” then looping back to the bitterly laughing chorus. But as the song rolls on, as the one-two step of the drumbeat and the guitar’s sour roar refuse to slow or pause, Logout dives deeper. The song boils into a dirge; Logout interrogates God in the wake of an immeasurable loss, their voice strained and cracking. As they hold their grief in its fullness, the song changes again, turning anthem-like, and Logout parts the curtains on a formerly hidden outlook. “The end of the world is just a destination/I had to grow to love/Yes and now I know I’m not unworthy of love,” they conclude, their voice warm and open, defenses scattered on the ground. If this world is barrelling toward a cliff, if there’s an unavoidable terminus square in our path, maybe we should try to love like we did at the beginning. | 2022-11-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | November 4, 2022 | 8.8 | b36a81f7-78c7-4d50-b724-24f371a8bfd0 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Though it’s undermined by its inertia and lack of focus, Offset’s solo debut offers glimpses of the rapper as a compelling storyteller and bluesman. | Though it’s undermined by its inertia and lack of focus, Offset’s solo debut offers glimpses of the rapper as a compelling storyteller and bluesman. | Offset: Father of 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/offset-father-of-4/ | Father of 4 | Before Quavo was a huncho, he was a doubter. “How long you think we gonna last?” the Migos member asked a journalist in 2014. The question feels quaint in a world where politicians dab and Beyoncé raps about Pateks and Lamborghinis. But that lasting whiplash, that nagging proximity to life before fame, is the essential Migos experience. Their tagline, “YRN,” is a boast, a thanksgiving, and a punchline all at once: Young, wealthy, and black? In America? Shit, I’d have my doubts too.
Their two blockbuster albums, 2017’s Culture and 2018’s Culture II, downplayed that sense of culture shock by framing the group’s rise as a long-awaited coronation. But for Offset, the jet lag hasn’t worn off. Tinged with paranoia, shame, and anxiety, his debut solo album Father of 4 depicts the murkier side of the group’s ascent. Though it’s ultimately undermined by its inertia and lack of focus, the record offers glimpses of Offset as a compelling storyteller and bluesman.
In public and private, Offset has had the rockiest ride of all the Migos. From his untimely jail bids to his stormy courtship, marriage, and separation from Cardi B, he’s felt the white-hot intensity of the spotlight and the coldness of its absence. This turbulence has come to define his style, the tortured menace to Quavo’s glossy cool and Takeoff’s stoned zen. Rapped in choppy barks, his flexes shine and cast shadows, invoking losses alongside the gains. “I bring that pain and that rough side that some people are scared to go on,” he’s summarized. Dovetailing with his admiration of Cardi, who excels at navigating fame, this newfound confidence has emboldened him to open up.
Father of 4 is, at best, a proof of concept. Offset is so naturally guarded and private that he approaches his life nervously and obliquely. The title track, an apology to his four children by four women, is elusive and compressed. As he mentions his kids by name, he’s so audibly uncomfortable it feels like he’s on death row. He uses Auto-Tune to make his voice wobble and fizzle and ends up somewhere between a yelp and a moan. His apology to his daughter Kalea is so concise it’s vivid. “In the pen when she pushed you out,” he says of her birth. This split-screen storytelling, always emphasizing distance and closeness, allows him to trade linear narrative for a montage. He toggles between images so abruptly that you feel the spaces between them.
That jerkiness is Offset’s default mode. Songs like “Red Room” and “How Did I Get Here” have the unsettling discontinuity of the memory elevator in Inception. The deeper he goes, the more his memories bleed into each other. “How I’m supposed to take it?/Niggas dyin ‘round the same time I had a baby,” Offset raps. When done right, that juxtaposition of success and pain adds ballast to his flexes, as on his Cardi tribute “Don’t Lose Me.” Alluding to Cardi’s storied self-reliance, he recalls his early appreciation of her wrist. “First time I seen the Patek glisten/They did not believe the vision,” he coos with satisfaction. He sounds so dismayed at his loss you get the sense that he too was a nonbeliever.
When Offset isn’t as focused, the record feels directionless. “North Star” shifts from aimless verses about Offset’s life on the north side of Atlanta to a painfully goofy Cee-Lo feature about being the North Star. “Legacy” sounds like a Without Warning outtake and has a distracting amount of filler. “I’m from the jungle, I’m an animal,” Offset raps as if he’s explaining a failed round of charades. The familiarity of many of the rhyme schemes and hooks sinks otherwise interesting verses. Offset tends to build songs line by line, which is great for finding the unique sounds and images that Migos thrives on (“Raindrops/Drop tops”), but not as conducive to the introspection that the record strives for. For every line about passing on money to his kids or fixing his broken family, there’s three that slip into overdone clichés: hopping out the Lamb, chugging lean, flashing the Piguet. Offset takes the stage alone, but he still moves like Migos.
It doesn’t help that the production is static too. While Marquee producers Metro Boomin and Southside provide the bulk of the beats, they feel reined in. Instead of the eerie guitar loops, wild synth fills, and organ arpeggios of their past work, the default here is bass-heavy tracks with muted chords and lone snare strikes. This gives Offset plenty of space to scrawl in his looping verses, but he generally sounds far too comfortable. The Quavo-featuring “On Fleek” is so on-brand it hurts. “Clout” squanders the optics of Cardi and Offset collaborating post-breakup for generic jabs at attention-seekers.
Father of 4 ultimately works as a solo outing because Offset is such a force of nature, but it’s too often cautious where it could be candid, or dull where it should be sharp. Still, the record is a progression for Offset and for Migos. Fueling the group’s trademark excess is a serious distrust of the carceral state and celebrity, a tension that can only intensify as they climb the charts recounting the lives they left behind. When that dissonance is given proper context, their rags to riches tales feel like vibrant portraits more than gilded myths. | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown | February 27, 2019 | 6.9 | b373d61a-7e4b-4807-9589-1572293c0483 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Los Angeles trio steps fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth. | The Los Angeles trio steps fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth. | MUNA: MUNA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muna-muna/ | MUNA | When they were still signed to a major, MUNA felt conflicted. As guitarist and producer Naomi McPherson put it to the New York Times recently, “At RCA, we were like, ‘We’re staying true to ourselves, we’re going to make interesting, indie-pop music, we’re not here to make hits.’” Guitarist Josette Maskin has described the disconnect of working with a label that didn’t always know “exactly what to do” with a queer band making proudly, outwardly queer music. But after RCA dropped the group and Phoebe Bridgers signed them to her Saddest Factory imprint, they’re making not only the most interesting music of their career, but also the most unabashedly pop. On their self-titled third album, MUNA step fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth.
The trio’s trajectory from alt-pop to gleaming songs inspired by 2000s radio pop comes without sacrificing any of their identity. In their new videos, they pay homage to the Y2K queer satire But I’m a Cheerleader, go line-dancing, and wear drag. Lead singer and songwriter Katie Gavin recently told Pitchfork, “There have been moments where it feels like we’re almost doing a drag performance of being pop stars.” In their camp paparazzi chase video for “What I Want,” that’s exactly what they do, donning the skin-tight sequins, side-swept bangs, and tank tops of early-aughts tabloid icons. Yet there’s a distinct lack of irony to the full-hearted pop performance they give on MUNA.
This new era debuted in the form of summer-crush song “Silk Chiffon,” a collaboration with a pink-haired Bridgers whose breezy hook—“Life’s so fun, life’s so fun”—captures a joy so fleeting it can scarcely be believed. Another resplendent single, “Home by Now,” adopts the perennial real-estate tagline to indulge in post-breakup ruminations about what could have been. The hard-hitting, hedonistic “What I Want” is what lead singer Gavin has described as “an adult coming out.” Amid defiant lyrics about downing shots and dancing freely in a gay bar, the song’s explosive desire leaves room to mourn the time you wasted before you knew what you were missing: “I’ve spent way too-too-too many years/Not knowing what/What I wanted…I’m gonna make up for it all at once.”
MUNA shine in this no-holds-barred mode, with boot-stomping percussion and hooks that stick like last night’s glitter. The opening four tracks—with their propulsive beats and repeated lyrical allusions to driving, roller skating, and running—have an irresistible forward motion, culminating in the band’s most ambitious song to date, “Runner’s High.” It wouldn’t sound out of place in a playlist alongside Charli XCX’s Crash or Rina Sawayama’s SAWAYAMA, with its full-throttle drums, strobe-lit choruses, and distant echoes of UK garage nostalgia. Elsewhere, there’s a hyperreal gloss to the unapologetically horny “No Idea” (co-written with Mitski) and a deeply satisfying singalong moment with the backing vocals that fill “Solid.”
It’s not all so full-on. MUNA also indulges in soft-touch country pop—inspired by Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour—and more downbeat, delicate moods, with mixed results. On “Loose Garment,” the album’s strongest ballad, Gavin offers one of the poignant similes that are her calling card: “Used to wear my sadness like a choker, yeah, it had me by the throat/Tonight I feel I’m draped in it, like a loose garment.” She has mastered the technique of turning a single image in her hands so it reflects light from many angles, but the tender country-rock song “Handle Me” lacks a similar level of complexity, and by the time we arrive at the sparse closing track “Shooting Star”—which compares a new crush to a meteor streaking across the sky—the technique begins to feel repetitive. Now that MUNA have nailed this kind of classical pop songcraft, one wonders what they could achieve if they experimented further with structure and form.
That MUNA had to leave a major label before making their most radio-friendly album isn’t necessarily a paradox. Much of the most thrilling recent pop music, like PinkPantheress’ breakthrough TikTok hits, Little Simz’s confessional orchestral rap, or Sawayama’s theatrical pop collages, comes from the margins. MUNA’s celebratory, affirming music benefits from having the space to be true to themselves—space that many artists don’t find under the institutional gaze of a major label. Lyrically and implicitly, MUNA celebrates the freedom to break free of the ways that others see you. “I’m not some kind of minor trope/[...] That’s so derivative,” Gavin sigh-sings on “Kind of Girl.” MUNA no longer feel the need to hold back, nor answer to anyone’s vision but their own. | 2022-06-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Saddest Factory / Dead Oceans | June 28, 2022 | 7.8 | b378238e-2f2c-48c9-8d69-93aa39c6c120 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The songs on This is the Kit's new album, Bashed Out, sound like songwriter Kate Stable's first recordings nearly a decade ago. This time, though, the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds. | The songs on This is the Kit's new album, Bashed Out, sound like songwriter Kate Stable's first recordings nearly a decade ago. This time, though, the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds. | This Is the Kit: Bashed Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20417-this-is-the-kit-bashed-out/ | Bashed Out | This Is the Kit wasn’t the most popular name to appear on Folk Off, the 2006 state-of-freak-folk compilation that pitted US artists (Sufjan Stevens, Animal Collective) against their UK counterparts (Vashti Bunyan, Tunng). At the time Kit captain Kate Stables hadn’t even released a debut single, let alone a full album, but that made her an ideal inclusion: a less established artist who could benefit from proximity to more popular names while demonstrating the depth and breadth of the scene. Built around a deftly picked guitar theme and showcasing her earthy vocals, "2 Wooden Spoons" held its own against Stables’ contemporaries. But nearly a decade later—when folk has fully embedded itself in the indie mainstream such that we’ve dropped the "freak" appendage altogether—the song carries very few of the signifiers that might anchor it to that long-past trend.
Stables wears her eccentricities comfortably, whether she's bending an old word into new shapes or displaying a curious sense of professional timing. Sunday Best, the label that released Folk Off, quickly issued her debut 7'', with a full-length debut, Krulle Bol, released a year later. Wriggle Out the Restless followed in 2010, and the folksy austerity of her music caught the ear of Aaron Dessner, who not only signed her to his Brassland label but secured an opening slot for This Is the Kit when the National played New York in 2011. Four years later, Stables is releasing her third album, Bashed Out, which Dessner inevitably produced. This is Slow Music: patiently and carefully handcrafted, as though the process were just as important as the result, and released on her own whim rather than by industry dictate.
These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds. Dessner works in a minimalist vein, placing a handful of instruments at various levels in the mix but never locking them into place. A barely audible bassline rocks softly against Stables’ plaintive guitar theme on opener "Misunderstanding". "Silver John" blossoms into a swell of synths (courtesy of Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman) and builds to a chorus of odd siren vocal calls. There’s a parallax quality to the music, an immersive sense of depth that makes the songs sound larger with each listen.
Even as he expands her range and emphasizes her idiosyncrasies, Dessner wisely stays out of Stables’ way, and she emerges easily as the dominant force on Bashed Out. Her guitar work is nimble but not fussy, and she conjures a sense of nameless menace on closer "Cold and Got Colder". On "Spores All Settling" her banjo playing is almost pointedly rudimentary, emphasizing the present moment rather than the perfect performance. She’s a complex and compelling personality, spiking her folksy whimsy (there’s a song about the smell of mushrooms) with shots of prickly wisdom. "And so the outside, it bashes us in, bashes us about a bit," she sings on the title track, one of the album’s weightiest moments.
For Stables, creating music—or making art of any kind—means bashing right back at life, matching it blow for blow. Yet, this resilient album is less concerned with enduring immense tribulations than it is with enjoying life’s simple pleasures. Stables’ concerns are microcosmically personal, trading in minute details and small observations that provide immense contentment. "Vitamins" is an ode to fresh greens, while "Nits" describes sheep on a hillside as "happy little fatties." Both songs land just this side of unbearably precious, but Stables doesn’t seem to care how such moments strike the listener. After almost a decade presenting herself as This Is the Kit, she has learned to root her music firmly in her own quirks rather than in the demands of any particular genre or trend. | 2015-04-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Brassland | April 16, 2015 | 7.2 | b37f577e-dc5a-4426-8e55-10db908a986d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Following 2013’s bludgeoning The Things We Think We’re Missing, the Doylestown, P.A. band returns with a cleaner, efficient, and more stylish sound. | Following 2013’s bludgeoning The Things We Think We’re Missing, the Doylestown, P.A. band returns with a cleaner, efficient, and more stylish sound. | Balance and Composure: Light We Made | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22376-light-we-made/ | Light We Made | Balance and Composure’s sophomore album The Things We Think We’re Missing could end up being the quintessential document of the new vanguard of old school alt-rock. In the context of its release year, 2013, this kind of aggressive guitar music actually felt like an alternative to something, and it still does. Its fanbase was too young to be embraced as “indie” (read: college) rock, and it lacked the obvious hit single or image necessary to break satellite radio. It was far too artistically and socially considerate to be aligned with the Warped Tour.
Though alternative rock can no longer claim a nation, bands like B&C thrive in a sizable Twitter, Tumblr, and message board underground, where Nirvana is classic rock, Brand New is modern canon, and Neutral Milk Hotel is still a mandatory rite of passage. It’s easy to figure which bands view this space as a final destination and those who are trying to find a bridge towards the mainstream. If you couldn’t tell where Balance and Composure’s ambitions lie with Light We Made, just know this: they’re labelmates with the 1975 now.
But true to form, their advancement is one that adheres to old school alt-rock ideals. Lead single “Postcard” was a surprisingly demure teaser that nonetheless felt like a big reveal, going against just about every formidable strength Balance and Composure had previously established: the riffs here are clean and hypnotic, where before they would bludgeon you into submission. Jon Simmons’ vocals are cloaked and conversational rather than a charred howl. Compared to “Reflection,” a steamroller that foretold the direction The Things We Think, “Postcard” might as well be a Prius: efficient, stylish, aimed at a more mature consumer.
“Postcard” is virtually unrecognizable as Balance and Composure; it bears more than a passing similarity to Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong.” This being 2016 and not 2001, ambitious, young rock bands aren’t really using Radiohead as their North Star (at least not publicly). But for a lot of listeners, a certain era of Radiohead still represents the zenith of alternative rock. Think the late ’90s, maybe half of Amnesiac: a man-machine interface both tech-savvy and tech-wary, while still maintaining the look, feel, and perspective of their angstier early days.
And so, Light We Made isn’t a total rebuild. Aside from a few drum triggers, synth-bass fuzz, and additions to the pedal board, Balance and Composure could play these songs live with their 2013 setup. Simmons gets occasionally chopped, screwed, and Auto-Tuned, texturing vocals that can often lack a personal watermark. More importantly, they underscore the incremental progress of his matured perspective. Simmons still strains to make even the most worn metaphors for physical desire, but B&C manage to create a number of distinct spaces where social anxiety and self-loathing can be tempered with well-meaning amorousness. “Mediocre Love” and “Is It So Much to Adore?” hypnotically churn with startling rhythms, while “Loam” and “Fame” are more inspired takes on the Cure’s latter-day metallurgy.
Balance and Composure are a far more flexible band than they were on The Things We Think We’re Missing, which had one move: repeatedly slamming the listener into Will Yip’s brickwalled production. Yip is back on board and rightfully so, since he oversaw Title Fight’s Hyperview and Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, two of this scene’s most divisive and relatively daring dives into traditional indie rock from 2015. Neither of those bands could completely transmogrify, but the remnants of their putative DNA made each of them stand out—Title Fight’s take on shoegaze had concision and a searing intensity, whereas Turnover’s hybrid of dream-pop guitars and pointed pop-punk lyricism created a legitimately novel hybrid.
The past and present of Balance and Composure can’t manage the same symbiosis. The arresting, trip-hop reverie of opener “Midnight Zone” quickly gives way to nü-bubble grunge singles that are not particularly compelling. Nowhere is the distance between Balance and Composure’s ambitions and abilities more chasmic than on “For a Walk”; it’s not too often you can use the Spawn soundtrack as a reference point, but that’s pretty much their nu-metal/industrial take on the lyrical thrust of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.”
A few weeks before Light We Made’s release, the band opened up about a series of terrifying van crashes that caused them to put everything on hold for a year and a half. They had remained silent so as to not draw attention to themselves or offer a juicy narrative that had nothing to do with their music. It’s admirable, and it also speaks to a lack of disclosure that pervades Light We Made. As with The Things We Think, it feels like the sound of a curious band still working out how to make music as distinct as its influences; whether lyrically or sonically, they come across as either unknowable or proudly workmanlike. Strangely, as Simmons makes a French exit on “Afterparty,” he sings, “Let your feelings show, it’s easier than you would ever know.” Yet, judging by Light We Made, it’s much harder than he thinks. | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Vagrant | October 5, 2016 | 6.8 | b38910a5-7a99-4fb7-80d2-3132a53570e1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
After the Britpop gestures and electronic touches of her last two albums, the UK singer-songwriter explores a more pared-back mode that highlights her incisive lyrics. | After the Britpop gestures and electronic touches of her last two albums, the UK singer-songwriter explores a more pared-back mode that highlights her incisive lyrics. | Marika Hackman: Big Sigh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marika-hackman-big-sigh/ | Big Sigh | Across her last two albums, Marika Hackman has been wresting herself from the dusky, somber folk songs of her 2015 debut, We Slept at Last. On 2017’s I’m Not Your Man, the British singer-songwriter tweaked her palette with nods to ’90s Britpop and a mischievous punk spirit. Hackman’s third full-length, Any Human Friend, was moodier, but still felt like a pointed departure, swapping softly strummed dirges for an electro-pop-rock hybrid along the lines of London’s Field Music and Hot Chip. But then, it all stopped. In 2020, Hackman developed an acute case of writer’s block; it was so paralyzing that she feared she’d never press another track to vinyl. Her new album, Big Sigh, is the result of slowly piecing songs together over the last few years and finding the confidence to helm production for the first time.
Likening the process to cracking into a block of ice, Hackman chipped away at writing Big Sigh with weary determination. Sometimes, the songs cleaved off easily in glistening hunks—but occasionally, you can hear the labor that went into all that chiseling. Acoustic closer “The Yellow Mile” is effortless and demure, its finespun fingerpicking reminiscent of Hackman’s earliest work. Little more than a mingling of guitar and her delicate register, “The Yellow Mile” is an uncluttered canvas where Hackman’s incisive lyrics glint like blades. Chronicling an unhealthy relationship, she likens her stasis within it to that of a wounded bug. “I left my body in your care,” she sings, teasing a happy ending. The hairpin turn that follows is jarring: “You plucked my wings off and I went slack/I was a beetle on my back.” Hackman has always been adept at spiking sweet melodies with venomous couplets, and “The Yellow Mile” is a lean and prickly fusion of those tendencies.
Slow-burner “Vitamins” is from the same playbook, pairing hushed dynamics with gritty imagery. Here, Hackman meddles with the formula, coating her voice in metallic layers and sending the song out on a warped synth arpeggio. “Mum says I’m a waste of skin/A sack of shit and oxygen,” she sings. An electronic chirp cuts through her placid vocal, sounding almost like a dying heart monitor. There is something extremely vulnerable about Hackman’s plainspoken admissions of feeling worthless, a sentiment that’s somehow sharpened by her detached, steely voice.
Big Sigh is notably less poppy than Hackman’s prior two albums, but the most energetic tracks on the record are also its best. “No Caffeine” and “Slime,” both of which were released as singles last year, merge her sober delivery with sly hooks. “Slime,” a callback to the randy songs on Any Human Friend, is an ode to sticky, unfettered sex. What starts as a moody ’90s alternative ballad cracks open to reveal a tart and chewy guitar-pop core. Opener “No Caffeine” shares more DNA with the dramatic Britpop of I’m Not Your Man, stacking strings atop palm-muted guitar and swelling horns. Hackman penned the lyrics as a litany of “cures” for her crushing anxiety—self-written prescriptions for herbal tea, wine, TV, and sleep. As the power chords surge in the chorus, catharsis sets in.
Hackman’s attempts at alt-rock heft don’t always pay off. The title track is sludgy grunge cosplay, slow-moving and a bit dingy. Rather than contrast her voice with unexpected arrangements or intricately plucked strings, Hackman dulls her edge with a sleepy, Nirvana-esque bass riff, oversized electric guitar strums, and vague lyrics. Big Sigh is at its best when Hackman resists these broad-stroke urges, and carves out more precise imagery—whether with a pen or an ice pick. | 2024-01-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-16T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Chrysalis | January 16, 2024 | 7.2 | b38cada1-3818-4c73-97e3-e5b2831a361a | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On Suede's first post-reunion album, Bernard Butler remains absent, but his replacement, Richard Oakes, has an undeniably reinvigorating effect on frontman Brett Anderson. His lyrics strike the balance between decadence and elegance, and seek meaningful, one-on-one connections. | On Suede's first post-reunion album, Bernard Butler remains absent, but his replacement, Richard Oakes, has an undeniably reinvigorating effect on frontman Brett Anderson. His lyrics strike the balance between decadence and elegance, and seek meaningful, one-on-one connections. | Suede: Bloodsports | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17779-suede-bloodsports/ | Bloodsports | Given the reliability of 20-year nostalgia cycles, the reunion of Suede-- or, here in litigation-crazy America, the London Suede-- was inevitable. A new Suede album, however, was not. Mere months after the Britpop progenitors embarked upon a well-received greatest hits revue in 2011, frontman Brett Anderson had returned to his decade-long practice of releasing small-scale solo albums, while a concurrent, exhaustive reissue of Suede’s back catalogue seemingly confirmed the reunion’s retrospective impetus. And there was, of course, the nagging question of whether a new album was even necessary. After all, Suede were their generation’s Saturday night soundtrack to being young, being lost, and undergoing all the necessary preparations (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs of dubious origin) to ensure you leave behind a most exquisite corpse. What could Suede offer to their faithful now that, well into their sober 40s, they no longer represent any of these things?
For Bloodsports, their plan is not to simply recapture their past, but imagine an alternate course for it. Like their 2011 tour campaign, Bloodsports employs the band’s post-1995 line-up-- i.e., the one without Anderson’s formative songwriting partner-turned-nemesis, Bernard Butler. In the absence of Butler’s authoritative presence, Suede’s albums sometimes veered toward the slight and frivolous, the tension and bravado that fuelled their definitive singles giving way to a certain self-satisfied complacence. But if the relationship between Anderson and Butler’s replacement, Richard Oakes, was decidedly less tumultuous, on Bloodsports, the guitarist’s presence has an undeniably reinvigorating effect on the singer.
Throughout Bloodsports, Suede consistently strikes the balance between decadence and elegance-- a “world wrapped in tinsel,” swathed in “lipstick traces” and “second-hand furs”-- that marked their signature work. But where Anderson once aligned himself with his fellow misfits, on Bloodsports he’s seeking more meaningful, one-on-one connections. Though it climaxes with a bleacher-baiting gang chorus, the Joshua Tree-toppling salvo “Barriers” is, at its core, an intimate, open-hearted address from someone who wants his relationships to be measured in years rather than nights. And it gets Bloodsports off to a terrifically rousing start; the succeeding “Snowblind” and “It Starts and Ends With You” both come loaded with the sort of do-or-die urgency and knockout choruses to earn retroactive placement on 2010’s Best of Suede compilation.
It’s fitting that Suede are staging their comeback the same month as their patron saint, David Bowie (with whom Anderson famously shared an NME cover back in 1993). But where Bowie spends much of The Next Day sardonically addressing his extended absence and his own mortality, Andrerson hurtles himself into Bloodsports with the stern-faced intent of someone who is grateful to have been granted a second chance and determined not to let it go to waste. And if his outsize passion isn’t enough to push every big-tent ballad over the top (like the middling “Sabotage”) or sell you on the odd underwritten chorus (e.g., “Come on and hit me/ With your mystery”), he keeps the frisson flowing well into Bloodsports’ more atmospheric and despairing second act. As the wide-eyed romanticism heard in the album’s opening stretch gives way to a vicious cycle of emotional dependency (“Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away”), betrayal (the eerily desolate “What Are You Not Telling Me?”), and predatory, restraining-order-worthy behaviour (the ominous “Always”), the band respond with their weightiest, most calamitous music since side two of 1994’s darkly epic Dog Man Star.
But if Bloodsports stays faithful to Suede’s signature sound, it represents a refreshing evolution in spirit. This is not the place to go to indulge your student-disco nostalgia; rather than try to swagger back onto the scene and try to out-snort men half their age, Suede shrewdly draw our attention to those youthful indiscretions-- ego, insecurity, obsession-- that we never seem to outgrow. | 2013-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Suede Limited | March 22, 2013 | 7.6 | b38cb31e-9d9d-41b3-b588-7a6d4b70e9da | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Led by charismatic vocalist Alanna Oliver, the Australian rock band draws on vintage references with enthusiasm and pomp, shooting their songs into the stratosphere. | Led by charismatic vocalist Alanna Oliver, the Australian rock band draws on vintage references with enthusiasm and pomp, shooting their songs into the stratosphere. | Romero: Turn It On! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/romero-turn-it-on/ | Turn It On! | Romero’s Alanna Oliver spent her post-collegiate years touring Victoria, Australia, with a Blues Brothers tribute band, covering the likes of Aretha Franklin and Tina Turner, doused in more than a little bit of camp. This part of her origin story is a far cry from the scuzzy Melbourne rock scene that her bandmates—Fergus Sinclair, Justin ‘Murry’ Tawil, and brothers Adam and Dave Johnstone—came up in. But that element of virtuosity is also what makes them stand out in a community where attitude is as important as talent.
The sound of Romero’s debut album, Turn It On, feels like a collection of reference points, from the relentless drive of Royal Headache’s power pop to Thin Lizzy’s squealing solos, or even the vintage production effects of the Strokes, had they been born in Dunedin, New Zealand. But their closest analogue is Sheer Mag: Their crunchy guitar tones sound separated at birth, and they’re both referential, throwback rock bands whose charismatic singers occasionally carry them to moments of transcendence. Good taste makes even the most devout reverence more palatable, and Turn It On! plays to their strengths. There’s a satisfying crackle to Adam Johnstone and Fergus Sinclair’s choice in amplifiers, pickups, and pedals, and engineer Andrew ‘Idge’ Hehir places them in a dueling stereo mix, their loud, lo-fi tones battling across the left and right channels.
It’s hard to understate the rejuvenating effect Oliver had on the rest of the band. Drummer Dave Johnstone and guitarist Adam Johnstone had become disillusioned with Melbourne’s scene and were on their way out when they met her. Their old bands, Chillers and Summer Blood, were both jangly garage rock outfits more representative of what you might hear at the Tote, the Melbourne venue at the heart of an independent rock scene that venerates the punk and power pop of the 1970s and ’80s. These were good bands, but they lacked something that was hard to put a finger on—at least until they met Oliver. She wasn’t just removed from the scene—she was relatively unfamiliar with rock music in general.
That outsider POV is what makes Romero sound fresh despite the vintage palette, an injection of earnest enthusiasm and pomp that shoots these songs into the stratosphere. Oliver’s subject matter is largely drawn from people in her life, like the non-committal ex-boyfriend in “Halfway Out the Door” or her cool auntie in “Neapolitan.” Other lyrics offer a glimpse into how she approaches her performance. “Turn It On” is inspired by a remark about Blondie’s Debbie Harry from a documentary—“She just gets on stage and she turns it on”—and while their voices couldn’t be more different, the effect they have on their bands is similar. Oliver can ooze heartache and attitude with equal aplomb, following a soaring vocal run on “Halfway Out the Door” with a cocky strut on the title track. “Turn It On!” is Romero at its most fun—dialing up the camp and cowbell, leaning into “hoo-hoo” harmonies that fall somewhere between a smile and a sneer.
The album’s climax, “Petals,” packs everything great about the band into four minutes: a monster hook, a blistering solo, and a rollercoaster structure that tests the limits of their dynamic range, from the softest hush to Oliver’s most triumphant wail. Her lyrics are incisive and direct: “Don’t tell me what the fuck to do/You know I can’t live alone with you/‘Cause all my petals falling one by one,” she sings, rejecting a cycle of codependence under which she’s slowly wilting.
Romero’s rise has been rapid, scoring a deal with tastemaking Aussie label Cool Death after just a handful of shows. Their debut LP comes on the heels of just three previous songs—the double A-side ‘Honey”/“Neapolitan” and “Troublemaker”—and a head-turning performance at the final Maggot Fest, a long-running showcase of Australia’s best underground guitar bands. While their ascendance has been expeditious, their chemistry is undeniable. Oliver might be an outsider—a ringer, even—but she’s a natural performer leading a band that knows how to have fun. And on Turn It On!, that’s more than enough. | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cool Death / Feel It | April 11, 2022 | 7.5 | b395819b-987c-48f0-9cfd-26a1578bc070 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Pieced together from four Merriweather Post Pavilion-era sets, this live album reinforces the weirdness of the band’s pop heyday. | Pieced together from four Merriweather Post Pavilion-era sets, this live album reinforces the weirdness of the band’s pop heyday. | Animal Collective: Ballet Slippers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/animal-collective-ballet-slippers/ | Ballet Slippers | A decade since Merriweather Post Pavilion, the qualities that once made Animal Collective singular—their gleeful nitrous-oxide harmonies, their cascading drums, their interlocking hooks—are as familiar as Instagram filters. The success of “Peacebone” and “My Girls” has overshadowed their unruly previous decade to the point where it can be hard to remember just how wild and transgressive Animal Collective were for so long.
Those splendid eccentricities surface again on Ballet Slippers, a 12-song live mix culled from four shows a decade ago and sequenced into a simulacrum of a single concert. They begin with the hiccuping samples and strangled static of Merriweather opener “In the Flowers” and kill the sequences 90 minutes later after the tessellated jumble of Merriweather closer “Brother Sport,” wishing the crowd well. Between these bookends, things get weird, often subtly so. A tambourine and acoustic guitar meet so high in the mix of “Who Could Win a Rabbit” that it sounds like the microphones are being hit by snow chains. A noise collage erupting inside “Bleed” suggests a basement show circa 2003. And “Daily Routine” turns into a slow-motion tug of war between a fetching hook and surrounding chaos.
Throughout, Animal Collective split the difference between fidelity to the songs on Merriweather and nuanced improvisation. A Las Vegas crowd squeals as the kaleidoscopic sequences of “My Girls” rise from primordial goo, a pointed reminder of just how alien but magnetic that inescapable song felt in 2009. They give the hit its space, pushing the interweaving harmonies high above the drums to emphasize the basic humanity of Panda Bear’s early-Obama-years request—just to be a good person with a safe place to raise a family. Freed from studio safeguards, “Lion in a Coma” feels particularly frantic and urgent. Avey Tare’s vocals tunnel through cramped electronics, emphasizing the song’s existential agoraphobia.
At the other extreme, Animal Collective treat “Banshee Beat” like its own world, with an atmosphere of droning guitars that shift like summer winds and synthesizers that slip like sunlight through storm clouds. A month or so after the recordings that shape Ballet Slippers, Animal Collective made history by licensing the first-ever Grateful Dead sample. If that’s always felt like lip service, their extended sweep between “Lablakely Dress” and “Fireworks” provide the bona fides. The skipping drums, the shaky vocals, the woozy electronics: Over 20 minutes, a dozen tiny parts coalesce into a hero’s journey from one of the band’s early abstractions to one of their most radiant anthems. And if the idea of a heroic Animal Collective guitar solo feels absurd, it arrives halfway in, a circuit of trebly notes transmuted into ecstasy by sheer repetition.
Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you. And if you are already on board, Animal Collective’s ability to jam will come as no surprise; these takes will, instead, transport you to a past place and time, previously accessible through bootlegs or YouTube or your memory. But the best of this set serves as an essential reminder of how, on Merriweather Post Pavilion, Animal Collective successfully folded a decade of experimentation into 11 engrossing pop songs that sounded like little else—and then, on the road, let it spill back out for big crowds looking to party to “My Girls.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | November 28, 2019 | 7.4 | b395c3ac-9fe5-4bfd-9635-2683883cb57e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The young Atlanta rapper argues that he’s made it, but his pro forma trap debut suggests that he’s not quite there yet. | The young Atlanta rapper argues that he’s made it, but his pro forma trap debut suggests that he’s not quite there yet. | Rich the Kid: The World Is Yours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rich-the-kid-the-world-is-yours/ | The World Is Yours | The current generation of rappers, particularly those coming out of the trap music bull market that’s housed in Atlanta, typically arrive onto the scene atop viral hits. Rich the Kid, a demonstrable talent with his own imprint (Rich Forever) rode into the mainstream on a wave of critical enthusiasm and industry interest atop “New Freezer.” That it includes the holy grail of features from Kendrick Lamar suggested that, yeah, Rich’s made it, but the album that came with the explosive single rarely shifts out of a default rap scheme.
While the Rich the Kid we meet on The World Is Yours clearly considers himself a big-leaguer, the album is short on the deftness and polish that was promised on “New Freezer.” He ably deploys the standard stop-and-go triplet flow across its 14 tracks, but does so without ever shifting from a self-limiting rap model, leaning heavily on concussive, bass-heavy beats and lyrical contributions from a bounty of veteran and trend-setting artists.
The title track is a comparatively honest introduction, lacking in the “yuhs” and “ayys” that soon begin to overwhelm and distract. “World Is Yours” lays out the devil-may-care posturing and slight bits of humor (“No Biggie but I used to trap in the Coogi”) that listeners should expect for the next 40-plus minutes. The clarity of the leadoff bleeds into the glut of trap motifs that is “New Freezer,” wherein Rich gladly ingratiates himself with the album’s talking points: money, women, cars, and big jewelry.
Rich shows off his lyrical styling, but even that remains far from revelatory. While his voice suffuses the album, it exhibits only a handful of emotional states. For Rich, who has noted that he does not write his bars down, but rather, “I just go in there and—boom,” his enthusiasm doesn’t make up for his lack of styles and flows. His insistence on rapping about “money, hoes, and clothes” as Biggie waxed 23 years ago puts Rich in a position to get consistently outshone by the many co-signs scattered across the album.
This is pointedly clear on “End of Discussion,”a dismissal of perceived haters that is piqued by a curious beeping sound and the noise of a money-counting machine at work. Lil Wayne does the heavy lifting here with a bodied rollout of well-paced, self-referential rhymes: “Pull of fast like a loose cheetah/One diamond ring on two fingers/Cheating on these hoes, call me Tune-cheater.” He sounds as if he were running a clinic on the song; a rap alum at homecoming mingling with the popular freshman. Meanwhile, Rich is somewhat adrift in his unremarkable feints. It makes the notable absence of female voices significant as woman contribute little to the album save as unnamed dalliances, anonymous tricks, and forget-me-nots.
The exception is “Too Gone,” a track with a metronomic xylophone trill produced by the Canadian beatmaker WondaGurl. Khalid levitates the song with his crooning, modest refrain about being too faded to connect with someone who wants your affection. Rich, though, continues to assail his doubters while suggesting just a bit of openness: “Really not used to you calling me/I’m in love with a coupe.” It’s the greatest concession to romance as we’ll get on the LP.
However, Rich appears in peak form on “Dead Friends,” widely regarded to be a Lil Uzi Vert diss track. The album’s finale has Rich channeling Meek Mill in the drill rap cadence familiar from his mixtape days. The caustic clap backs, even if muddled, are best in the chorus: “All them dead friends (dead), you a middleman (what)/You a little man (little, huh)/Your money getting shorter (shorter).” Given some direction, Rich’s best when he’s got a real target in his sights to slight.
In an album that touts a reputable lineup of producers and contributors, it smarts as Rap Caviar bait rather than as a collective trap triumph. Algorithms are the new inroads to platinum after all. Still, braggadocio is a trap rapper’s default setting, and the kid may be rich now, but The World Is Yours wants for all of its wealth-inspired imagery and allusions to amassed clout. | 2018-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Rich Forever | April 9, 2018 | 6.6 | b396dde7-6a99-4141-86ad-297422f85eeb | Frankie Caracciolo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/frankie-caracciolo/ | |
On his eighth album, the singer-songwriter connects his gentle, acerbic soul to his most politically charged, well-stated, and funniest songs. | On his eighth album, the singer-songwriter connects his gentle, acerbic soul to his most politically charged, well-stated, and funniest songs. | Cass McCombs: Mangy Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22256-mangy-love/ | Mangy Love | On the very first song on his very first record, Cass McCombs went to the hospital. There he received some troubling test results and found himself faced with an unanswerable question. “Is it dying that terrifies you,” he sang, in a gentle, boyish sigh that would earn him plenty of comparisons to Elliott Smith, “Or just being dead?” It was a heavy introduction, but, in its plainspoken intensity, it foretold the work to come. As McCombs’ music progressed from murky lo-fi to austere folk-rock, his on-record persona has evolved with it, becoming at once more fleshed-out and more mysterious. He’s in a strange position now of being a veteran songwriter who we’re just getting to know.
On his last record, 2013’s double-album Big Wheel and Others, McCombs tried to show us everything. While it was his most ambitious album—ranging from apocalyptic ballads to sunny, crooner pop, with enough room to include a faithful Thin Lizzy cover—it was also his most unwieldy, an album as road-trip that was exhilarating and exhausting. *Mangy Love *takes the opposite approach, refining a career’s worth of ideas into his most focussed work yet, accomplishing what *Big Wheel *set out to do in about half the time. As expected from McCombs, *Mangy Love *is a uniformly cloudy work, but it’s his most revealing album, his most political, and his funniest yet. Across its twelve songs, McCombs dabbles in his deadpan surrealism, throws in a few well-placed toilet jokes, and even shares some of his Twitter drafts. “Netflix and die,” he scowls late in the album, “Go on and cry.”
While McCombs’ career has been one of slow-building evolution (“Season of the slug/Crawling up the vine,” goes a line on “Medusa’s Outhouse”), Mangy Love’s first half feels something like a crash course through his last fifteen years of songwriting. The set opens with “Bum Bum Bum,” whose soulful, echoing guitars harken back to McCombs’ early work. But the lyrics express confusion and hopelessness in the current flashpoint of police brutality. “How long until this river of blood congeals,” McCombs asks repeatedly, punctuating each stanza with an exhausted “bum bum bum.” It’s one of the most powerful songs McCombs has ever written: a plea for peace, or maybe just to pay attention.
Other tracks follow suit, expanding on McCombs' discography with a wider scope and greater confidence. “Medusa’s Outhouse” floats like a psychedelic smoke ring through Wit’s End’s wine-stained piano ballads, and “Low Flyin’ Bird” hums with a folksy flutter, recalling McCombs’ jammy detour on this year’s Skifflin’*. *These songs highlight McCombs’ keen pop sensibility that informed breakthrough moments like “You Saved My Life” and “County Line,” without forsaking any of his idiosyncrasies. The juxtaposition of the two are made immediately apparent amid the ’90s-Van Morrison jazz-pop of “Laughter Is the Best Medicine.” Guest vocalist Rev. Goat Carson slurs along with McCombs in almost-unison, his timing perfect, so as not to spoil the punchlines. “Sugar and spice,” they sing together, “And everything… weird.”
It’s a classic McCombs trick, flipping cliches into his own weird vernacular. It’s also something of a mission statement for the album’s back half. Songs like “Run Sister Run” and “Switch” favor the groove over the hook, giving away their secrets in the first 60 seconds and mostly just riding those vibes before fading around the five-minute mark. While lacking the momentum and immediacy of the album’s first half, these songs showcase the dynamics of McCombs’ band and the impeccably smooth production from Elliott Smith-collaborator Rob Schnapf. Like Ariel Pink’s similarly expansive Pom Pom, *Mangy Love *is comfortable in its experimentation, maintaining a consistent, lived-in atmosphere throughout its separate halves.
Ever resistant to traditional structures, however, McCombs imbues each side of the record with a track that deliberately disrupts the flow. “Rancid Girl,” an outtake-quality oddball placed in the confrontational spot of track two, loops a gnarly, bluesy riff while McCombs berates a 17-year-old (“You’re bad/I mean, you *smell *bad.”) Think of it as a symbolic sister to Neil Young’s “Stupid Girl,” the kind of character experiment that one might have expected McCombs to have outgrown by this point (which is probably exactly why he kept it on the album). On the opposite end of the spectrum is “It,” a late-album stunner that begins like the world’s saddest air conditioner booting up and climaxes with a choir of harmonies behind McCombs’ vocals. The song bursts out the speakers. “All of its life, wandering/All of mine, wondering,” he sings, a simple turn of phrase that reads like a reflection on the work he’s created: an ever-shifting body, with a restless brain behind it. But even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection. | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | August 29, 2016 | 8.1 | b397460a-2b46-4be6-a666-07e26b1d2d66 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
A rare full length from Hyperdub, Ikonika's debut is an exciting extension of post-dubstep styles like wonky, funky, and chiptunes. | A rare full length from Hyperdub, Ikonika's debut is an exciting extension of post-dubstep styles like wonky, funky, and chiptunes. | Ikonika: Contact, Love, Want, Have | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14131-contact-love-want-have/ | Contact, Love, Want, Have | Ikonika's debut full-length is a big deal in the dubstep community for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, it's seen as an exciting extension of the various styles that have been swirling around the genre for the past few years-- specifically wonky and funky. The record also arrives with some cachet: It's only the fifth long player to be released by Hyperdub, still the genre's standard-bearer and the source of some of its most essential music. Ikonika's (real name Sara Abdel-Hamid) record is also one of the first high-profile dubstep full-lengths produced by a woman, and though that's moot with regard to her actual music, it's at least encouraging for what has been a mostly male-dominated scene so far.
Ikonika isn't the most musical or technical producer out there, but she does have a way with melody. In an interview with Pitchfork columnist Martin Clark, she told us, "I don't really know how to play keys. So I just smack them until something nice comes out." Okay, probably not the best defense of one's own work, but it is important to understanding how she differs from other dubstep producers. Instead of the meticulous, heady style that we've come to expect from the genre, Ikonika's approach is more spontaneous and direct, concerned more with impact than process. Her productions aren't as dynamic or complex as others' are, but they're arguably fun in a way that a lot of dubstep-- especially the traditional murky, low-end variety-- is not.
In terms of sound, Ikonika isn't that different from producers Joker, Rustie, and Starkey. Like them, she uses dubstep as a base for a jumble of styles-- in this case the wobble of wonky, the insistent thud of funky, and chiptune videogame sounds. Her pitch-bent synths are usually the focus-- they sit upfront in the mix and are manipulated to match a song's mood. Sometimes the album can feel almost cloyingly upbeat (there's a lot of very ramped-up, tech-y sounds) but there's also a good deal of variety. "R.E.S.O.L." nearly makes you woozy with its heavy, wobbling bass and distorted 8-bit squiggle. Videogames are a running theme, and certain tracks like "They Are Losing the War" really play up this quality. Others, like "Millie" are more slow-moving and syrupy.
Because of these distinct moods, the record works nicely as a full length-- it holds your attention, and the songs never bleed together. For those not expecting progressive dubstep, it's a catchy, immediate pleasure. But others who desire something heavy on craft, depth, and movement might find it insufficient. The record lacks some of those critical elements, but ultimately it's neither a great crossover dubstep-pop LP nor some kind of crude flop. It's a solid record. If nothing else, Ikonika's desire to inject some playfulness into a genre that could use a lot more of it is a good and welcome thing. | 2010-04-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-04-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | April 14, 2010 | 7 | b3975484-9d7f-4f87-8304-18a4396b6e68 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The second album from Texas songwriter Hannah Read—the creative force at the heart of Lomelda—is alternately quiet and erupting, with immediately arresting melodies that long for closeness and wonder. | The second album from Texas songwriter Hannah Read—the creative force at the heart of Lomelda—is alternately quiet and erupting, with immediately arresting melodies that long for closeness and wonder. | Lomelda: Thx | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lomelda-thx/ | Thx | Highways crisscross Lomelda’s second album, and they are not the exciting, adventure-filled ones that star in movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or in books like On the Road. These are lonely highways heavy with the distance between the driver and her destination—or the driver and the people she’s trying to reach both physically and emotionally. Distance saturates Thx, the Texas band’s Double Double Whammy debut, and it makes sense when you look at a map: Hannah Read, the creative force at the center of Lomelda, grew up in Silsbee, Tx., where she still lives with her family, two hours from Houston and four hours from Austin. She’s swaddled in distance, and in her music, she paints those miles of empty highway she has to drive all the time with a profound longing for closeness and wonder.
Take “Interstate Vision,” which opens the album. “Interstates are not what I want,” Read sings, her voice multi-tracked and harmonizing with itself, as though she’s not driving alone across Texas’ flat expanses at night but driving with herself every other time she’s cut through that same strip of road. Then she’s seeing angels burst out of someone else’s headlights; then she’s sitting with “you” in a parking lot, asking, “Can you feel me now?/Do you know me yet?” As in: I am here sitting next to you in the same motionless car, but are we together? Do you see me?
Co-produced with Read’s brother Tommy, who also wrote the song on which the second track “Bam Sha Klam” is based, Thx wanders to the very borders of those questions. Read’s vocal melodies sweep her range, and they’re often overdubbed with harmonies to lend depth and space to her singing. Read also plays guitar and bass throughout the album; other than drums and a handful of string instruments, she’s the only one you hear, meaning she’s Lomelda the way Conor Oberst used to be Bright Eyes—not really an individual behind a pseudonymous solo project, but not really a band, either. The individuation allowed by that arrangement bolsters Read’s songwriting. She knows when to keep quiet, as on the acoustic title track, and when to erupt, as on the closing track “Only World” and at the coda to “Bam Sha Klam.”
That coda is where the album peaks, which is not to say that it’s over by track two. It’s just that you’re in for a long (and lovely) comedown after “Bam Sha Klam”’s triumphant finish. Part of its endurance comes from its setup; Read catches you off guard, singing, “Why are ya laughing?/Listen here/This is serious,” and then, as if all the miles she’s ever driven came pouring out of her voicebox all at once, “It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going from here on out.” It’s a coda to topple codas. File it next to Silver Jews’ “Federal Dust,” with which it shares its highway fetish and semantic simplicity, and Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” with which it shares its battering ram bassline and towering anxiety.
Read addresses one of her songwriting kin by name on the album: Elliott Smith, at the end of “Out There.” In an interview with NPR, she explained that her brother once told her he knew Smith personally, that the late songwriter had taught him how to smoke cigarettes after a show. She always knew Tommy had been lying to her, but she spent years trying to get her head around the fib, to make sense of the idea that someone could insinuate himself into your personal life through his music. “Elliott, what have you done to us?” she asks in one of her endless searching melodies. He’s a ghost at this point and yet no further away from Read and her brother than the time when Tommy told her that story. Smith’s still out there in the dark slipping past the car windows as Read drives; he’s still messing with their heads, crawling around in their sadnesses, putting words to moments that otherwise would have passed like shadows on asphalt.
Thx comes with its share of sadnesses, but they’re not the kind you necessarily notice on first listen. Unlike peers like Julien Baker or Told Slant, Read prioritizes immediately arresting melodies over immediately arresting lyrics. Her words tend toward the casual while her singing gravitates toward the adventurous, and so you might be too caught up with where her notes are going to pay attention to what she’s saying. But by the time her sentences ring clear on the third or fourth listen, Thx already has you in its hooks. | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | September 11, 2017 | 8 | b39a9717-1125-4327-8daf-ae64fa18ee81 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
This 4xCD box draws on electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more, including key early tracks from the Human League, Throbbing Gristle, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. | This 4xCD box draws on electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more, including key early tracks from the Human League, Throbbing Gristle, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. | Various Artists: Close To the Noise Floor - Formative UK Electronica 1975 - 1984 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21653-close-to-the-noise-floor-formative-uk-electronica-1975-1984/ | Close To the Noise Floor - Formative UK Electronica 1975 - 1984 | The evolutionary arc of the synthesizer has a completely different shape from the trajectory of the electric guitar. With a few exceptions, the guitar started out as a crude generator of exciting noise and dance energy—a fundamentally teenage sound. Then it gradually became an ever more subtle expressive implement, with a huge textural range. Synths, in contrast, started out prog: they cost a fortune and were challenging to operate, and this made them the preserve of established performers generally of virtuosic and artistically ambitious bent. Either that, or synthesizers belonged to institutions like universities and were accessible only to composers with equally lofty purposes in mind.
The primitivist phase of the synthesizer came after the sophisticated start. In the late 1970s, cheaper machines like the Wasp became available; they were also compact, portable, and relatively user-friendly compared with their bulky predecessors. This democratization of electronics happened to coincide with rock’s own self-conscious return to juvenile basics in the form of punk. All of a sudden, the synth was competing with the guitar to be the true instrument of do-it-yourself. For many, the synth won that contest handily—you didn’t even need to learn two chords, you could riff out abstract blurts of nasty noise or play one-finger melodies. Furthermore, synths and the rudimentary drum machines that were also newly available encouraged a “non-musical” (at least in rock terms) approach. Rather than jam your way to a song through the intuitive logic of groove and feel, tracks could be built up through addition and subtraction, using a hypnotic but uninflected machine-beat as a grid for the assembly process.
Close To the Noise Floor is a 4xCD survey of the excitingly messy birth of British electronica during the late '70s and early '80s. One of the maps for the set compiler Richard Anderson used is “Wild Planet,” a celebrated three-part feature written by Dave Henderson for the music weekly Sounds. The 1983 article spawned a regular Sounds column dedicated to the cassette underground of tiny labels like Flowmotion and Third Mind. Henderson contributes a short but vivid memoir-style introduction to this box set and also features in his musical guise as a member of Worldbackwards, a group whose ambition was to sound like “Throbbing Gristle on Tamla Motown.”
“Minimal synth” works as a shorthand tag for Close To the Noise Floor’s remit, although the scope of the trawl is actually wider and more disparate than what that term tends to signify, taking in electro-punk, industrial, synthpop, dark ambient, and more. Rather than use generic focus as an organizing principle, the anthology achieves coherence through sticking with a single country—Britain—when it could have easily have swept across the equally active European scene or harvested the scattered but significant American exponents like John Bender and Nervous Gender.
The national focus makes sense historically, in so far as the UK scene was catalyzed by half-a-dozen native outfits who released debut singles within a few months of each other in mid-1978: the Normal, Human League, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Thomas Leer, and Robert Rental. The combined impact of these singles—respectively “T.V.O.D.,” “Being Boiled,” “United,” the Extended Play EP, “Private Plane,” and “Paralysis”—was as galvanizing as Buzzcocks’s “Spiral Scratch” had been for scrappy DIY guitar-groups a year earlier.
Noise Floor’s first disc concentrates on the children of Throbbing Gristle and “Warm Leatherette” (the more influential B-side to The Normal’s “T.V.O.D.”). No spacey ripples or groovy Moogy sensuality here: the synth is used aggressively and obnoxiously. One gem in this vein is Storm Bugs’ “Little Bob Minor," with its ear-itching drones whose texture resembles a comb-and-paper kazoo. Vocals, when they appear, are usually screams or creepy spoken-word soundbites, as with the cut-up voices from a radio interview with prostitutes that appear on We Be Echo’s “Sexuality.”
The stand-out track on the first disc, though, is a bit of an anomaly: Thomas Leer’s “Tight As a Drum,” from his fabulous EP 4 Movements. By 1981, Leer had left behind the gratingly foreboding ambiences of The Bridge, his collaborative album with Robert Rental, and absorbed the mutant disco influence of New York’s ZE label. 4 Movements also sounds like he’s letting back in some of the banished musicality of pre-punk rock, figures like Island Records folk-blues minstrel John Martyn. “Tight As a Drum” swings because although the percussion is electronic, Leer played it by hand on pads; the intricate weave of synth-melodies over the top sounds vaguely Middle Eastern in its ornamented filigree. The song seems to reach your ears through the heat-haze coming off a sun-baked road. A snapshot of a moment of tension so exquisitely taut it’s a kind of ecstasy, “Tight As a Drum” features the briefest of spoken-not-sung lyrics: a depiction of a young man stretching himself, silhouetted against the morning light streaming through a window.
Embracing mainstream ideas of melody and musicality doesn’t work so well on the second disc, which mostly features groups who reach towards pop but don’t get even as close as the Human League did on “Being Boiled” (included here). Performance art duo SchleImer K’s “Broken Vein” suggests Soft Cell sans the soaring voice and heart-swelling tunes; Native Europe’s “The Distance from Köln” is a lo-fi cousin to Berlin’s '80s radio staple “The Metro”; lyrically if not so much sonically, Cultural Amnesia’s 1981 anti-Thatcherism ditty “Materialistic Man” comes over like a dry run for Depeche Mode’s “Everything Counts." The better tunes come from those who actually managed to make it as pop stars. “A New Kind of Man,” an unreleased solo single by ex-Ultravox singer John Foxx, features a vocal that—typical for the emerging synthpop genre—sounds glacial and torrid at the same time, plus lyrics like scraps from an abandoned and torn-up screenplay: “An underwater kind of silence/Humming of electric pylons/Don’t forget me/Fits of static/Another scene began.” Heard in its superior 1980 album version rather than original incarnation, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Almost” sounds like a spindly North-of-England Kraftwerk—graph-paper rhythm, sobbing synth.
Livening up the second disc—otherwise a bit of slog—are specimens from the post-punk mini-genre of parody. The late '70s erupted with cover versions that swapped reverent reinterpretation for willfully goofy travesty—think Flying Lizards’ deadpan take on “Money,“ or the Dickies’s punked-up “Nights in White Satin.” The idea, I think, was to show just how much distance there was now between Old Wave and New Wave—or, if the cover was of a contemporary hit, how far from chart-pop convention you could push the song.
That’s the nature of the game with British Standard Unit’s deconstructive molesting of Rod Stewart’s “D’Ya Think I’m Sexy,” which became a John Peel radio show fave in 1979 with its grotesquely sped-up voices and anti-disco jerkiness. B.S.U. was just one of numerous guises worn by ex-Mott the Hoople keyboard player Morgan Fisher for a covers album project called Hybrid Kids - A Collection of Classic Mutants. “Gerry and the Holograms,” by the group of the same name, isn’t a cover but a lampoon of the emergent synthpop genre itself, wrought by two members of the cult band Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias (whose output consisted almost entirely of parodies such as their punk-mocking Snuff Rock EP). “Gerry and the Holograms” has been identified as the melodic source for New Order’s “Blue Monday,” but to these ears sounds more like The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” covered by BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In a word, awesome.
That pair of whimsies could equally have been squeezed onto the last disc of Close To the Noise Floor, which corrals an array of unclassifiable oddities. Although electronic in feel, more often than not the sounds here are achieved via conventional instruments subjected to heavy treatments. Here the forebears, if any exist, are the Residents and Cabaret Voltaire (who in their early days used effects-processed flute and guitar more than synths). Renaldo and the Loaf’s “Dying Inside” sounds ripe for sampling by Kanye West on Pablo II. Unable to afford synths, the duo used effects pedals to render their instruments and voices as inorganic and alien-sounding as possible. Alien Brains’ “Menial Disorders” has a great backstory (the project started in the physics lab at the group’s high school and mainly deployed a “Loopotron,” a self-cobbled tape-echo machine that used the erase head to alter the sound) which is matched by the sound itself : a cloud of mechanical gnats circling around your head, fizzing zig-zags of hi-hat, corrugated crumples of texture, rhythm like bed springs pinging inside a giant reverberant cistern.
Most of Noise Floor’s contents are shaped by twin prohibitions. First and foremost, the goal was to sound as un-rock’n’roll and un-American as possible (which is why the vocals, when they appear, are usually absurdly English—stiff-backed, groomed-sounding, somehow short-haired). But there was a secondary impulse at work too: to break with the conventions of synth-based music established in the first half of the ’70s by groups like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, who favored long-form compositions (often taking up an entire album side) and an atmosphere of celestial serenity.
Now you might have noticed that I jumped right past this box’s third disc. That’s because in some ways it’s the most intriguing of the four, precisely because it’s full of post-punk DIY that still took its bearings from the pre-punk electronic cosmonauts. Maximal Synth, you could call this stuff: operators like Sea of Wires, MFH, and Mark Shreeve, who, rather than ape “Warm Leatherette” or Cabaret Voltaire’s “Silent Command," parallel the billowing pulse-scapes being made at that same time by Manuel Gottsching on albums like 1978’s Blackouts. This sound—late period kosmische drifting towards New Age or proto-techno—has in recent years enjoyed a measure of renewed currency thanks to Emeralds and their ilk, but generally it’s been written right out of history.
One of the groups included on Disc 3 are actually a totally pre-punk proposition. Zorch took their battery of EMS Synthi As and light show to free festivals all across England, including the very first Stonehenge Festival in 1974. Hearing their “Adrenalin (Return of the Elohim Pt. 1)” made me wish for a time machine so I could experience its spaceship-landing whooshes panning around the megalithic columns and frazzling the minds of the gathered long-hairs. In a similar amorphous vein, Ron Berry’s “Sea of Tranquility” is an elegiac homage to the Moon Landing. But “Triptych” by EG Oblique Graph (Bryn Jones, later better known as Muslimgauze) is less beatific, recalling the sensory-deprivation aesthetic of Conrad Schnitzler: insidiously hissing percussion and color-leached tones, like a wintry after-dark walk through a Berlin pedestrian underpass.
Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor. Time, perhaps, for a box set that does justice to major label synth-rock of the ’70s: figures like Tomita, pre-Chariots of Fire Vangelis, Michael Hoenig, Ralph Lundsten, even Jean Michel-Jarre. Rather than the underground, which enjoys a healthy complement of dedicated curators and salvage operators, it’s the mainstream of that era that is truly lost, that in a strange way seems even more exotic and remote in time. | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Cherry Red | May 3, 2016 | 8.1 | b3a689ca-8393-4e87-acfc-e93cae223322 | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | null |
As Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter inch toward the mainstream, their plaintive and gloomy* Three* feels less like an album and more like postcards from the eye of an emotional hurricane. | As Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter inch toward the mainstream, their plaintive and gloomy* Three* feels less like an album and more like postcards from the eye of an emotional hurricane. | Phantogram: Three | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22471-three/ | Three | You’ve got to hand it to Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter for their work ethic. In the past nine years, they’ve transformed their duo Phantogram from an indie trip-hop venture à la Dead Can Dance to the most monolithic, festival-ready pop project on Republic’s roster. They’ve refined the core sound of Barthel’s powerhouse alto vocals and Carter’s glitchy arrangements to a diamond tip and embraced a blossoming interest in collaboration: from Miley Cyrus to Skrillex to OutKast’s Big Boi (who tapped Phantogram for multiple tracks on his 2012 album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, and later recorded an EP with them under the name Big Grams). With their audience and creative network steadily expanding, the duo is bound for the mainstream–which, of course, means they’ve got to prove themselves all over again.
Phantogram’s latest album, Three, arrives under a pall. This past January, Barthel’s older sister (who was close friends with Carter as well) took her own life, a personal trauma that hovered over the sessions. Granted, the duo has always thrived in the shadows, having relied heavily on stark backbeats and gloomy synths for previous nocturnal anthems like 2009’s “Turn it Off” and 2014’s aptly-titled “Black Out Days.” But expressing such a deep loss through music takes finesse, something that Phantogram accomplish only unevenly on Three.
Between brooding, vulnerable cuts like “Barking Dog” and punchier offerings like “Run Run Blood,” Three often feels less like an album and more like postcards from the eye of an emotional hurricane. This is partly due to the album’s formidable supporting cast: R&B maestros the-Dream and Tricky Stewart and pop strongman Ricky Reed (Meghan Trainor, Jason Derulo) all show up in the credits. And yet, excepting Reed’s clearly visible fingerprints on the trunk-rattling tour-de-force “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore,” it’s hard to sort out these producers’ exact contributions on Three. Phantogram’s vaporous sound is as prevalent as ever, with Barthel’s airy runs and Carter’s turgid samples lending a weightless, fever-dream quality to “Answer” and “You’re Mine.”
However alluring their atmospherics, these mid-tempo cuts (of which Three contains far too many) pale in comparison to the aforementioned single, the album’s greatest draw and Phantogram’s finest song to date. Never before have the duo sounded so animated, self-assured, or synchronized. Barthel effortlessly alternates between half-rapped verses and cooed hooks, with Carter meeting every vocal pivot with a blast of bass (the funky, ad-lib on the second verse is a particularly nice touch), a frigid synth melody, or a distorted guitar riff.
The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good. Consider “Run Run Blood”—an unwieldy bricolage of dub grooves, breakbeats, plaintive guitars, ambient interludes, and ham-fisted lyrics about “falling into a swarm of bees” that give me The Wicker Man flashbacks every time I hear it. Shortly after delivering that howler, Barthel gestures to the big picture, literally: (“It’s bigger than life/It’s bigger than love/It’s bigger than us/Bigger than all”). She never specifies what it is, exactly, but the logical answer would be some kind of morbid sublimity that Phantogram strive for and, alas, fail to detail. | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | October 7, 2016 | 5.8 | b3a71738-44e6-44ff-a9dc-a88066a88652 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
A year and a half after Purity Ring surfaced with the song "Ungirthed", the young Edmonton, Alberta, duo has released a proper debut, a compulsively listenable collection of dubbed-out retro-futuristic indie pop. Shrines is not about range, offering instead subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. | A year and a half after Purity Ring surfaced with the song "Ungirthed", the young Edmonton, Alberta, duo has released a proper debut, a compulsively listenable collection of dubbed-out retro-futuristic indie pop. Shrines is not about range, offering instead subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. | Purity Ring: Shrines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16851-shrines/ | Shrines | In early 2011 a song called "Ungirthed" by a group called Purity Ring started circulating online. There wasn't much information about them out there; they had a member that used to be in something called Gobble Gobble, which momentarily seemed notable. But everything you needed to know was contained in the song itself. It mixed the kind of ghostly pitch-shifted vocals, reminiscent of the Knife and Burial, that had spent the previous year haunting witch house; it had warped, surging, Dilla-derived synth chords that popular online remixers like Star Slinger were on the verge of turning into a cliché. And it had the stuttering start-stop drum machine patterns that highlighted how much the pulse of Southern rap had invaded indie music the last few years. But where these production touches were often held up as ends in themselves, "Ungirthed" was a well-constructed and fully realized pop song, with an infectious vocal hook and a melody that went places. This was novel. It was the kind of tune you took notice of immediately.
Eventually we learned that "Ungirthed" was the work of Megan James (vocals) and Corin Roddick (production), two young musicians from Edmonton, Alberta. Wisely, they didn't rush out an album, but other songs trickled out: "Belispeak" surfaced in the fall and "Obedear" emerged this spring. Along the way, Purity Ring polished up their live show, outfitting the stage with lanterns synchronized to the music, which Roddick triggered via MIDI using drumsticks. They built an audience with very little recorded music to share with it. And now, a year and a half later, they've issued their debut album, Shrines.
Since those early singles all mined such similar sounds, it was an open question how Purity Ring might mix things up over the course of an 11-song, 38-minute full-length. But Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point. "Ungirthed" is how you see it head on; "Fineshrine" is what it looks like from a low angle, with a bit of shadow from the overhang providing an extra touch of darkness; "Crawlersout", with its sharper percussive edges and extra portion of ghosted vocals, is the view from 90 degrees to the left; and then "Grandloves", with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won't stop talking on his cell. "Grandloves" is the one moment in which Purity Ring seem common, but that's one truly weak song out of 11. Not a bad ratio for a new band. And the consistent quality makes it easy to forgive the feeling that occasionally creeps in the first few times you hear the album straight through: "Didn't I just hear this one a couple of minutes ago?"
A quality that further elevates Shrines is the lyrics, and that's something that could be easily missed, since James' vocals are often heavily processed. They, too, offer variations on a theme. "Sea water's flowing from the middle of my thighs," are the first words we here on the opening track, "Crawlersout", and the focus on the body never lets up. From "Dig holes in me with wooden carved trowels," on "Grandloves" to "The crawling animals will seek all things warm all things moist, I will relentlessly shame myself," on "Saltkin", the words are impressionistic but always come back to sweat, skin, and bones. Fluids ooze in sympathy with the chords; hearts are given away by being ripped from ribcages. The lyrics are vivid and striking, even if it takes some work to parse them out. And the contrast between their bloody earthiness and music born of 1s and 0s gives the record an appealing push/pull and provides the album with some additional staying power. These songs, so instantly catchy, have more to offer over time.
The band that Purity Ring most reminds me of is High Places. The dubbed-out retro-futuristic approach to sound, the male/female duo, the connection to the earlier iterations of indie pop, the experiments with live spectacle. And High Places also emerged more or less fully formed, with the singles and EPs collected on 03/07 - 09/07 pulling together au courant influences into something that felt personal and new. But ever since, High Places have had some difficulty figuring out where to go next. Once you own a sound and make it your own, it's not always easy to leave it behind. We'll see how that plays out with Purity Ring. For now, the compulsively listenable Shrines stands quite well on its own. Most bands never manage a statement this forceful. | 2012-07-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 4AD | July 24, 2012 | 8.4 | b3b3af94-c8ae-4a1f-bbd8-dd813466c7ce | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Somewhere in England, or maybe Iceland, Graham Coxon is crying. Blur recently\n\ announced that their hiatus will continue through ... | Somewhere in England, or maybe Iceland, Graham Coxon is crying. Blur recently\n\ announced that their hiatus will continue through ... | Gorillaz: Gorillaz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3524-gorillaz/ | Gorillaz | Somewhere in England, or maybe Iceland, Graham Coxon is crying. Blur recently announced that their hiatus will continue through the year's end, due to Damon Albarn's collaboration with Norman Cook. To make matter worse, another Albarn side project, Gorillaz, has already hit stores on both sides of the Atlantic. The novelty group finds Albarn assuming the role of 2-D, the animated lead singer of a pack of four misfits, whose likeness was envisioned by Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett. The Automator-produced "act" is a smarmy, promotional gimmick. And it's the best Blur offshoot released to date.
As soon as the record begins, the cartoon façade fades. Even people who only know Blur as "that band who did 'Woo-Hoo'" will immediately detect Albarn's ever-so-Brit pipes. Early reports suggested that Albarn contributed to only a few songs, but he could rightfully be called the band's frontman; his croon can be heard on all but 4 of the album's 16 tracks. Dan "The Automator" Nakamura is similarly recognizable. There's no band (animated or otherwise) making this music; it's the Automator throwing down beats, manipulating samples, and letting Kid Koala's scratches interrupt his flow. And that, friends, is why Gorillaz is a conceptual failure.
But maybe this is for the best. Nakamura's refreshing production doesn't rely on today's hip-hop skitters and squiggles for its futurism. No, what we've got here is the same brooding backpacker hip-hop that elevated the similar Deltron 3030 LP to unforeseen heights. As a result, this record reveals itself as far less disposable than its cartoon cover art suggests.
Gorillaz's best tracks exploit the unlikely, but successful dynamic between Albarn and Nakamura. On "Man Research (Clapper)", Damon wails hysterically over Dan's relentless, echoing thump. "New Genious (Brother)" is gloomy trip-hop with orchestral flourishes that wrap around the flux of Albarn's falsetto. On "Clint Eastwood", Del tha Funkee Homosapien handles the song's verses, allowing Damon a small cameo in the looped chorus. And curiously, I can think of few other samples that would compliment Del's urgent delivery as effectively as Albarn's laconic vocal haze.
The album's foray into dub-lite, "Slow Country", is Gorillaz's charming peak. A light, Latin-tinged piano playfully slides over a sunny groove while Albarn exhibits "Tender"-like plaintiveness with lines like, "I can't stand your loneliness." Despite the fact that this track is unfamiliar territory for both Nakamura and Albarn, their charismatic playfulness makes for undeniable fun.
The small-scale experimentation, though, falls flat on the record's few rock tracks. The appropriately titled "Re-Hash" is such a generic marriage of acoustic pop and stock hip-hop beats that, were Albarn to come in chanting, "Come, m'lady, come, come m'lady," it would hardly strike as surprising. The Wire reject, "Punk", suffers from an asinine formula (play a sloppy riff, clap three times, add cockney vocals, repeat) that makes each of the track's 90 seconds harrowing.
That Gorillaz's closing number-- Ed Case's two-step-meets-raga remix of "Clint Eastwood"-- doesn't feel out of place could be taken as testament to how successfully eclectic the album is. But in actuality, it's a sign of the record's short-lasting, faddish appeal. Gorillaz is the definitive side-project: Even at its best, it's never more than a divergent one-off stint. Albarn may occasionally succeed on non-Blur outings, but as with Coxon and Alex James' solo affairs, they only further prove that Blur is equal to much more than the sum of its parts.
Keep ya head up, Graham. | 2001-05-31T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2001-05-31T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin | May 31, 2001 | 7 | b3b3bdd0-4c5f-4dc7-b200-89ac52aef8f0 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | null |
The Dilated Peoples MC’s third solo album shows his continued faith in the eternal truths of boom-bap rap music. | The Dilated Peoples MC’s third solo album shows his continued faith in the eternal truths of boom-bap rap music. | Evidence: Weather or Not | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/evidence-weather-or-not/ | Weather or Not | It’s been 11 years since Evidence’s solo debut, The Weatherman LP. The planet has continued warming, continents have drifted a little further apart and the universe has expanded; all the while, the Dilated Peoples rapper has kept forging the same knuckle-duster boom-bap music that’s been his trademark since day one. That’s no bad thing. Evidence is like a soccer player who finds space not by running, but by staying still while everyone around him runs. And as his latest solo LP shows, the raw, twisted style he’s always favored still feels fresh in 2018.
While the tracklist features production from several old-school-minded luminaries, among the most impressive songs on Weather or Not are a handful of collaborations with Evidence’s lifelong friend the Alchemist. Alc’s hard-angled instrumentals have acted as a potent backdrop for many gritty East Coast spitters over the years—Action Bronson, 50 Cent, and the sadly departed Prodigy among them—but he’s always had a special thing going with Evidence, from the signature songs he produced for Dilated Peoples starting in the late 1990s to Lord Steppington, the full-length LP that the pair released in 2014 under the name Step Brothers. Here, the two early-40s Los Angeles veterans continue to draw strength from the time-honored sounds of the Five Boroughs.
“I write to Alchemist ’cause others don’t inspire me,” Evidence says on “Throw It All Away,” a bitter ode to blowing money fast when you’ve not got many dollars to your name. The track’s unrushed, no-nonsense drums and chopped-up, echoing sample are easy pickings for the rapper’s bruising flow as he spits blunt one-liners on the “long, winding road” of his career with the thoughtful deliberation of an elder statesman. While that track is a fine exhibit of classic Alchemist orchestration, the producer also serves up the biggest oddity of the set in “Powder Cocaine.” With a post-punk-style hook courtesy of singer Catero, acidic guitar lines that wander in and out of the mix, and a vocal harmony loop that could have been salvaged from one of the Beatles’ magical mystery tours, it’s the clearest iteration of the album’s surly psychedelica. His flow as forceful as ever, Evidence strides confidently through the candy-colored landscape.
Elsewhere, subway-cold beats play well next to laid-back Cali grooves. The thick, nasty bassline that Nottz provides for “Jim Dean” recalls turn-of-the-century Dr. Dre; “To Make a Long Story Longer,” featuring an excellent assist from the low-toned Jonwayne, is built around a dusty jazz sample that could have scored a evening sipping Manhattans in 1950s Midtown. Amid the swirling analog keys of “10,000 Hours,” Brooklyn’s own DJ Premier cuts in snippets of Snoop and Dre’s iconic “Nuthin’ But a ’G’ Thang” verses, their voices scratched in like spirits from L.A. rap history.
Evidence is fully at home in this odyssey through time and space. He’s a bottomless lyricist, more interested in jabbing away with stiff punchlines than building narratives. “I take my chance and live between the checks of advances,” he raps on the title track, nodding to the economic struggles of a hip-hop lifer. “Love your fans and like your label/And I ain’t making shit for neither, lay that on the table.” Two decades after arriving on the scene with Dilated Peoples, Evidence remains blessedly devoted to the unflashy ideals that made him an underground hero. | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | January 27, 2018 | 7 | b3b82c1e-6fd4-4c4a-bab7-e753a1b29011 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys is nothing less than a tour of Southern bigotry and pride in the 20th century. It remains as shocking, pristine, and regrettably relevant as the day it was released. | Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys is nothing less than a tour of Southern bigotry and pride in the 20th century. It remains as shocking, pristine, and regrettably relevant as the day it was released. | Randy Newman: Good Old Boys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22308-good-old-boys/ | Good Old Boys | Since his teenage days marketing demos to pop singers, Randy Newman has fancied himself a shirt-sleeves-rolled-up piano man in the classic mold more than a rock musician—a Laurel Canyon-era Hoagy Carmichael or Harold Arlen, if they wrote about young women being run over by beach cleaning trucks or lonely men with hat fetishes. Guitar leads and crisp grooves crop up across all of Newman’s studio albums, but live, he defaults to performing alone, interspersing his intimate, charmingly imperfect sets with self-deprecating banter and sarcastic qualifications.
His sense of humor, even outside of his caustically funny songs, can be polarizing. For one critic—Greil Marcus—a February ’75 Newman show proved toxic, threatening to overturn his reverent opinion of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter. With his stage banter and rave-up delivery, Marcus felt that Newman was lampooning the morally compromised but disenfranchised characters who populated his album of the previous year, Good Old Boys, which was written largely from the perspective of a bigoted Southern steel worker. “He made it clear that the song [“A Wedding in Cherokee County”] was a joke, that the people were jokes, that their predicament was something those smart enough to buy tickets to his concert could take as a sideshow staged for their personal amusement,” Marcus wrote in The Village Voice, excoriating the tittering, cocktail-sipping Manhattan crowd.
If Good Old Boys came out today, the nature of the criticism would, doubtless, be quite the opposite. Newman, who spent his childhood in New Orleans, would not have passed sufficient judgment on his racist, abusive subjects. He’d be criticized for assuming their detestable vocabulary, and for even dreaming up such a project in the first place. Any discussion of the album begins and probably ends with the fact that on its opening track, Newman — speaking as the steel worker, whom he named “Johnny Cutler” on early drafts for the album — says the “n”-word eight times, not including one use of “Negro.” Cutler is a gaping all-American nightmare in the vein of Mark Twain’s Pap. In the song, he seethes while watching Lester Maddox—the Klan-backed, segregationist governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971 — be jeered offstage on “The Dick Cavett Show” (by “some smart-ass New York Jew,” Newman sneers).
“Rednecks” was a few steps, or a parkour leap, beyond any grotesque character study Newman had previously attempted, even 12 Songs’ masterclass in voyeuristic white privilege “Yellow Man” (“Eating rice all day/While the children play/You see he believe in a family/Just like you and me”) and “Sail Away,” his slave-trader salesman pitch to a group of Africans (“Climb aboard, little wog/Sail away with me”). Cutler is so content to wear his ignorance like a badge of honor in “Rednecks” that it’s easy to mistake some lines for Newman’s own voice nervously interceding to denounce him. The surging, C&W-tinged chorus of “We’re rednecks, rednecks/We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” functions as both Greek-chorus commentary on the action and Cutler’s motto. (It’s harmonized immaculately by—yes—the Eagles, who would conveniently drop out before “and we’re keeping the n*ggers down.”)
To make things even thornier, Newman folds bits of salient criticism about the hypocrisy of holier-than-thou Northern white liberals—in denial about the institutionalized segregation of their own communities—into Cutler’s objectionable voice. “Now your Northern n*gger’s a Negro/You see he’s got his dignity,” Cutler sneers facetiously, before leading a whirlwind tour through the implicitly ghettoized North (“He’s free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City/He’s free to be put in a cage on the South Side of Chicago, and the West Side”) with revival-meeting-like gusto that forces him off the beat entirely. The orchestra, in turn, seizes up and derails beneath him before thudding to a sudden halt. It’s the first indication that this album is no simple character study, but a composite survey of the roots and institutionalization of Southern bigotry in the 20th century—in other words, the diciest and most formidable project Randy Newman had (and has) ever attempted.
Newman sells his pivots and double-meanings skillfully in “Rednecks,” the album’s microcosm, through both his character building and deceptively intricate music—peppered with gestures that could have been pulled from ragtime standards, brass-band chorales, and the mid-19th-century popular songs of Stephen Foster. Like most of Good Old Boys, the song was scored for piano, full orchestra (largely arranged and entirely conducted by Newman), and rock rhythm section (expert bass and drums from L.A. studio masters like Jim Keltner and Willie Weeks, inspired by Muscle Shoals productions).
Today, “Rednecks” might seem like a relic, or baiting, self-satisfied armchair-liberal-ism at cross-purposes with itself. What constructive function does this kind of “humor” serve? By any stretch of the imagination, does Newman have the right to invoke this language? It’s an open question, but Hilton Als’ measured defense of Flannery O’Connor’s non-biographical, darkly humorous, “n”-word-studded Southern fiction comes to mind, especially his praise of the Georgia-born author’s rare ability “to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order.” This, too, is Newman’s subject and methodology. His characters’ vocabulary pulls back the curtain on their self-hatred, so he doesn’t have to butt in and do it for them (O’Connor called this “mind[ing] your own bisnis”). He illuminates their fear of becoming marginal, their search for fundamental truth in all the wrong places, and the dead-end rituals of behavior and thought that anchor their communities. Newman’s narrators are the ones in his crosshairs; their unworthy targets are never dragged down with them—never roped into the songs’ action to ossify into caricatures and become punchlines. Lost in their demented reveries, and powerless to tell their imagined nemeses’ stories for them, Newman’s basket of deplorables are left to fall on their swords all by themselves. Jeff Chang deemed Newman’s approach, in defense of “Korean Parents” —another incendiary Newman song from 2008 —“the best kind of race humor… found by wedging open the wound long enough to stare at, and then sharing the joke in that. Of course, the trick is that you need to be the one who's bleeding.”
Newman felt that he needed to write “Birmingham” and “Marie,” to “explain ‘Rednecks’ better.” From there, Cutler became the necessary protagonist of his new album, which was to be called “Johnny Cutler’s Birthday.” “Birmingham” introduces Cutler’s family and home life with humorous banality; the darkness is left unspoken but you can feel it looming behind its jaunty string figures and horn oompahs. “Marie,” an emotional release for both Cutler and the listener, is a desperate paean by a blacked-out Cutler to his wife (for whom Newman also wrote a scrapped solo song and a duet), with a luxuriant string arrangement—an emotional release for both Cutler and the listener. There is something approaching honest self-reflection (“Guilty”), and then Cutler’s ultimate cop-out—a return to his escapist after-work routine (“Rollin’”). Across these songs, Newman expertly scales the depressive plateaus of the low-functioning alcoholic—the gentle, bluesy sensibility of the music feels appropriate, and makes for savage musical irony when the overlying scenes get dismal enough (they always do).
Newman also wrote interstitial songs for* Good Old Boys*—originally imagined as diegetic entertainment at Cutler’s 30th birthday party—which relayed tall tales, jokes, and fudged biographies of Cutler’s heroes. While sketching these, Newman would grow obsessed with the political career of Huey Long, the noted Great-Depression-era Louisiana governor, party-busting senator, short-lived presidential candidate, and megalomaniac. His research into the contradictory Long—part pseudo-socialist, part vindictive bigot—would force his pen away from Cutler, toward a broader-stroke compendium of Southern snapshots and lore.
“Louisiana 1927,” the first Long song and an apt musical sequel to “Sail Away,” examines the Great Mississippi Flood and the federal government’s mishandling of it, which stirred up class resentment, around which Long would build his candidacy for governor in the following year. “Every Man a King” is a barroom cover of an actual Long campaign song, espousing the rhetoric of his proposed (and completely untenable) “Share Our Wealth” program. Long promised to cap income and redistribute funds to make every American “a millionaire”—or at least, every bit as good as the highfalutin' ones calling the shots in Washington.
Long’s big production number, though—and arguably the album’s greatest musical triumph — is “Kingfish,” the best campaign speech in pop music history (though it’s unclear if it has any competition). It’s all glitzy, triumphant showmanship in the verse; even if we don’t know the history, we can sense the visceral allure (“Who took the Standard Oil men and whooped their ass?/Just like he’d promised he’d do?”) Discordant strings circle like buzzards in the would-be inspirational chorus (“Kingfish/Friend of the working man”), implying the proud, vengeful man hiding behind the catchphrases; here, the album’s resonances with America’s current political imbroglio become impossible to ignore. “Kingfish” is the Donald’s “I’ll fix it” platform stretched across three minutes of music. Long promises to make Louisiana great again by fashioning its government in his own convex self-image: that of the self-made man who is not afraid to speak truth to power, or rather, exalt xenophobia to a moral imperative and deride the proverbial Northern fatcats he was no better than. Long was often drunk during his fiery live appearances, and the spasmodic rhythms of the song mirror that live-wire energy: “I’m a cracker, you are too/Don’t I take good care of you?”
Good Old Boys creates a rich sense of time and place, contrasting interior and exterior settings, and his characters’ public and private selves, cinematically. “Marie” is a wee-hours argument in the kitchen; “Kingfish” is cavernous, roaring, the sound of an unruly political rally; “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” on the other hand, is intimate parlor music. The opening riff sounds like a turn-of-the-century pop song, played off some weathered, forgotten sheaf of sheet music found in the piano bench. But then, an ornery new character begins to describe the pitfalls of living with his mute fiancée in the backwoods of Alabama; in the waning moments of the song, he bemoans, in lofty euphemisms, his erectile dysfunction (“But though I try with all my might/She will laugh at my Mighty Sword”). A classic American tale, really.
Despite, or more likely, because of moments like this, Good Old Boys would be Newman’s first remotely successful release as a solo artist, providing some nagging perspective on the charts just as loud-and-proud Southern rock acts like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, and the Marshall Tucker Band were rising in popularity. The album was heralded by positive reviews and promotional literature that spread word of its controversial material, as well as an ambitious tour, including some dates with 80-plus-piece orchestras. It didn’t hurt that it was overstuffed with great pop melodies; its listenability seduced listeners into examining and reexamining its troubling themes. It became Newman’s first to clear the top 40—or even crack the double digits—on the album charts.
It also marked the moment at which Newman’s career turned a lonely new corner. These were not, like songs on his previous albums, ones that could be easily plucked from their context and marketed to other singers. Bonnie Raitt’s pre-existing, less skeletal version of “Guilty” would be a rare exception. There had been plenty of unlikely Newman interpreters (in one of the most head-scratching examples of master-imitating-disciple, Ray Charles covered “Sail Away”), but the image of a contemporary pop vocalist—Tom Jones or Donny Osmond, perhaps—delivering “Papa was a midget/Mama was a whore/Granddad was a newsboy till he was 84” was tough to conjure.
From that point forward, Newman would begin to become an island unto himself. He charted a couple of widely misunderstood, if brilliant, hits, before putting the better part of his energy toward film scoring. In 1977, “Short People”—absurdist, rock-ified, nursery-rhyme catchy — would go to No. 2 for mostly the wrong reasons; the uproar surrounding the song (another rumination on prejudice) would result in record-burning parties and Newman’s face on dartboard targets, and prompt him to give the audience a raspberry when he performed it on “SNL.” “I Love L.A.” would be played at Clippers games and receive heavy circulation on early music television; Maroon 5 would cover it with pride and the Kardashians would rewrite it, all despite the defining line “Look at that mountain, look at those trees/Look at that bum over there, man, he’s down on his knees!” Both were regarded as novelty songs—as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” now Newman’s biggest claim to fame, ultimately would be—and so Newman became, to non-acolytes, a novelty act.
Perhaps, in another universe, he might have remained more at the center of the pop songwriting world, whether or not he was singing on the records (his voice had always been a hard one to sell). But his compulsions forced him elsewhere. “I like to know what makes people tick, what their mothers and father were,” Newman told journalist Paul Zollo. “Why they talk the way they do, using this sort of word or that sort of word. What it all means.” Randy Newman, in that search for meaning, became the king of the unreliable narrator in American popular music, and one of rock’s greatest lyricists full-stop. But part of earning the distinction involved venturing into dark corners, and inhabiting them for a while; in his Good Old Boys review for Rolling Stone, Stephen Davis would use this logic to diagnose Newman as deeply “troubled.” It was a dirty job, and certainly, no one had to do it. It was usually thankless and almost always alienating. But it also yielded one of the best singer-songwriter albums of the 1970s, which remains as shocking, pristine, and regrettably relevant as the day it was released. | 2016-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Reprise | October 16, 2016 | 9.3 | b3c52dd6-ea08-46bd-9886-b36e9df4ccc7 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the album that made Rod Stewart a star, a rollicking and surprisingly grounded document of early ’70s folk-rock. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the album that made Rod Stewart a star, a rollicking and surprisingly grounded document of early ’70s folk-rock. | Rod Stewart: Every Picture Tells a Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rod-stewart-every-picture-tells-a-story/ | Every Picture Tells a Story | 1. “I sincerely thought I was so complete”
In 1971, at 26, Rod Stewart thought he was an old man. He’d been working as a musician since his late teens. In the preceding three and a half years, he sang on six albums alone and he hadn’t attained the success he craved. As Stewart mentions in Rod, his 2012 autobiography, no one intended for rock’n’roll to be a career; Paul McCartney said he’d give up music if he hadn’t hit big by 20. All around Stewart, his peers—the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—had become global icons. And 27 literally felt like death, because in the previous 18 months, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin had died at that age.
By almost anyone else’s standards, Stewart was doing very well. He had a solo record deal while singing for the Faces, the most hyped band in the UK. He owned a home in London and a brand-new Marcos GT two-seater. The unabating bacchanal of the rock’n’roll lifestyle suited his appetites. It wasn’t sufficient. He wanted to be a star.
Every Picture Tells a Story, Stewart’s third solo album, made him one. It’s the LP that launched him into a rarefied stratosphere of celebrity, the kind accompanied by wild rumors that sound like they were spread by the Marquis de Sade. But the opening six-minute title track doesn’t convey confidence, purpose, or craft—at least at first. Emphatic strums of G chords spangle up and down, in, through, and out the rich, hollow wood of a 12-string acoustic guitar. The winding melody lasts for a dozen seconds; the pluck of a string hangs there for a few more. Then the drums crash and a bold rasp shouts forth: “Spent some time feelin’ inferior, standin’ in front of my mirror.” Stewart sings the line declaratively, setting the scene and framing the perspective of an insecure young man. “Combed my hair in a thousand ways,” he continues, “but I came out looking just the same.”
The musicians—Ron Wood on bass, electric, and acoustic 12-string guitar; fellow Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan on organ; pianist Pete Sears; and drummer Mick Waller—seem as if they’re learning the song while they’re playing it. Nothing is in lockstep. Stewart foregrounds the acoustic guitar so that it punches through the speaker. “Every Picture Tells a Story” is in 4/4 time, but Waller bashes off-beat during the moments Stewart isn’t singing, a disorienting force that mirrors the inexperience and uncertainty of the narrator.
Our “hero” is a working-class lad whose father urges him to see the world. In three verses he sets off for Paris, Rome, and the “Peking ferry.” He gets arrested as a passerby at a protest in the first city, ends up a stinking vagabond in the second, and on his third sojourn has a magical night with a mysterious woman (more on that later).
It’s also fair to surmise that the narrator is Stewart. In the final verse, he presumably returns home while contemplating his adventures. In the first half, Stewart looks to the past, bemoaning his childishness and the women who spurned him. But in the second, he summarizes his state of mind, adopting a stance that will guide his future:
I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley, or Keats
'Cause it's all been said before
Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off
You didn't have to come here anyway
Rod Stewart has arrived. He’s no wordsmith, but he’s fluent in common sense and good cheer. He’s in love with tradition, but not reliant on it. He’s an imp and a carouser unruffled by judgment and self-pity, a sentimentalist suspicious of nostalgia. And there’s something funny about a singer-songwriter reflecting on the travails of his life, as if he’s viewing it all from the vantage point of a wizened elder, when he’s only 26 years old.
The band seems to eventually figure out the song. They merge into a steady rhythm while Maggie Bell and Stewart sing the refrain, a smirking rhetorical question, soon accompanied by a chorus of others: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
2. “Hard times are only the other side of good times”
It’s 1968 and Rod Stewart is 23 years old. As a teenager he was a talented soccer player who dropped out of school to go pro, but wasn’t quite talented enough to make the cut. He sought something more lucrative, so he opted for a career as a musician.
Even though he looked like, as Lester Bangs eloquently put it, “a horse with a rooster’s ratcombed haystack,” people in the UK music biz kept trying to make Stewart a success, to no avail. Between 1964 and 1967 Stewart was a member of, in order, Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, Long John Baldry and the All Stars, Steampacket, and Shotgun Express with Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green, the last of which Stewart writes, “I don’t have especially happy memories of those months—and incredibly, there were at least eight of them.”
In all of these setups, Stewart was singing blues and R&B covers, just like he was in his fledgling solo career. His first single was for Decca, a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl,” and the label secured a performance on ITV’s musical variety show Ready Steady Go! It was awkward and unremarkable, so he headed to a pub in Soho to drink away his shame where a man approached him, sharing a striking physical and sartorial resemblance. They got sloshed and laughed about Stewart’s appearance on Ready Steady Go!, and thus began his lifelong friendship with Ron Wood, his most esteemed collaborator.
Flailing between projects, Stewart did have a minor brush with fame as the subject of a TV documentary about the mid-’60s mod scene, whereby he earned the title of “Rod the Mod.” Because he had public recognition and experience singing blues, he was a natural choice to become the frontman of a new group formed by Jeff Beck, one of the UK’s most famous guitarists, who’d recently been kicked out of the Yardbirds. Stewart persuaded Beck to hire Wood on bass and the first incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group was born. Credited to Beck only, their first album, Truth, came out in 1968.
Beck was a legendary guitarist in both the UK and U.S., so Truth reached No. 15 on the Billboard albums chart more or less automatically, and thanks to a successful stateside tour Stewart gained his first exposure to American audiences. Today, Truth is regarded as a progenitor of the supergroup stadium rock of the ’70s, where the length of solos and the heaviness of riffs and rhythms parallel the imperiousness and arrogance of the band. But crucially for Stewart, the album showcased his first songwriting efforts (alongside Beck) and provided a template for his earliest solo LPs: A few originals surrounded by covers.
Every Picture Tells a Story sticks to this formula—of its eight tracks, only three are originals. Stewart’s talent for interpretation is evident on “Seems Like a Long Time,” first written by Theodore Anderson for the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, whose construction leans on vocal harmonies and wah-wah guitar for a soft-rock, AM radio effect. Stewart slows the tempo to a crawl and transforms it into the bleary gospel song it always should have been.
“Seems Like a Long Time” is representative of something true of all Stewart’s output in the early ’70s—it sounds a lot like the Rolling Stones. And the equivalence is understandable, since no other outfit was compared to or pitted against the Stones more often than Stewart’s next band, the Faces.
3. “While I’m here I’ll have me a real good time”
In October of 1970, the Faces performed to an adoring audience of 3,500 people at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. As he wrote in his 1981 prankster quasi-fictional pop bio, Rod Stewart, Lester Bangs was at this show, which he praises as “a party.” At the end, the members wrapped their arms around each other and Stewart yelled into the microphone: “If you ask for one encore, you’re gonna have to take at least five!”
The Jeff Beck Group with Stewart and Wood lasted only 18 months, and once guitarist and lead songwriter Steve Marriott left the Small Faces, the band quickly pulled in Wood as a replacement. Stewart would sit upstairs in the rehearsal space listening to his friend’s new group, wondering when they would plead with him to join. For a while, the Small Faces weren’t interested, out of fear that a lead singer would overshadow them. But after a few jams with Stewart, everyone assented that his brambly crooning fit perfectly with their ramshackle approach.
The ’60s were over, and out of its ashes emerged indulgence, whether through the symphonic overtures of progressive rock, the narcissism of the singer-songwriter movement, or the lordly debauchery of hard rock. In each scenario, the connection between the artist and the fans grew distant.
The Faces were the earthbound corrective. Their live show had no pomp and circumstance, just five guys whose palpable joy exceeded everything but their bar tab. Night to night, the band were a sloppy mess, but if they weren’t overserved, they could turn an arena show into a packed basement. No group in the early ’70s was as endearing as the Faces, because the only approximation of the warmth they exuded is the sensation you get when you’re having a ball with your best friends.
From the time they coalesced in late 1969 until mid-1971, the band had put out four Faces or Faces-adjacent albums (two attributed to the group and two to Stewart). Because he’d inked a solo deal with Mercury separate from the Faces’ with Warners, Stewart always had a new release on shelves, meaning more income and more incentive to go out and promote it. In 1970 the band toured the US three times, building a following from word-of-mouth exaltations of their cheerfully unruly concerts. Stewart’s cover of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” is the one song on Every Picture Tells a Story that could be considered a throwaway, but it’s the closest the album verges on the insouciant abandon of the Faces, a rambunctious barroom rave-up.
4. “I can’t hear the echo of my footsteps”
Rod Stewart isn’t commonly associated with Bob Dylan, and that’s probably because Rod Stewart is like if Bob Dylan had decided to become a Vegas lounge singer. When Stewart was 17, he listened to Dylan’s self-titled debut and later described it as a “life-changing, direction-altering experience.” He heard America, “vastness and openness,” not just a horizon wider than what he could see in the UK, but a new horizon entirely.
Stewart doesn’t espouse any of American folk music’s political roots, to put it charitably, nor its humility. Yet there’s no question he favors some of its key attributes, in particular interpretation, history, and yearning. In between “That’s All Right” and Stewart’s take on Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time,” there’s a two-minute interlude where he sings “Amazing Grace,” backed by Sam Mitchell on a slide guitar. This inclusion bridges two tonally different songs, but it also signals Stewart’s unyielding love of Americana—all of Stewart’s covers on Every Picture Tells a Story are of American songwriters.
Part of the magic of Every Picture Tells a Story is its blend of British and American sensibilities. American folk music is often spartan in its presentation, whereas British folk, even predating psychedelia, is filled with filigree and ornamentation. Stewart’s version of “Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time” sounds less like a love letter to America than the vision of a British person who loves America. Wood’s pedal steel and Dick Powell’s violin don’t transport you to dusty highways or Midwest farmland, but to bogs and marshes and rolling verdant hills, into old inns where villagers drink mead and across vast estates where sheep roam.
The front of Every Picture Tells a Story is designed in the style of an early-20th-century art deco sheet music cover, and the back displays fictional sheet music covers with the song titles overlaid on them. Stewart has never articulated an overarching theme to Every Picture Tells a Story, but the artwork, paired with the mood and the musical arrangements, emanates the amber and auburn hues of an autumnal past. Yet the music isn’t pastiche or kitsch—it somehow exists throughout time, from the agrarian roots of the ancient past to the immediacy of the unceasing present.
5. “I’m as blind as a fool can be”
Picture this: It’s 1962 in London and a 16-year-old boy encounters a fortysomething woman whom he recognizes as a local prostitute. He seduces her with his blissful naivete and they have a night of clumsy yet affectionate sex—his first time. They carry on a brief romance, but their age gap is too extreme, so they part, but he remembers her always as he ventures into adulthood.
If this reads as the pitch deck for Hollywood schlock, it’s because this yarn, the story told in the lyrics of “Maggie May,” is one of the most repeated chestnuts in rock lore. That it’s actually about how Stewart lost his virginity is pure mythmaking—the event in question happened very unspectacularly at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival when he was 16. And as Tom Ewing points out, the core genius of “Maggie May” is not whether it’s true; at heart it’s a story about the genesis of “Rod Stewart” the persona.
It’s hard to ignore the song’s misogyny. Stewart complains about being used in “Maggie May,” but he uses a woman from his real life for creative expression without consulting her. He insults her (“The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age”) and recounts their tryst without granting her any agency. And this isn’t even the worst display of sexism on Every Picture Tells a Story, nor the most offensive moment—the fourth verse of the title track, when Stewart rides the Peking ferry, is a hideous and dated representation of Orientalism.
No amount of devil-may-care dismissiveness can excuse any of this—Bangs was so tortured about his enjoyment of “Maggie May,” he composed a 23-page short story centering Maggie and humanizing Stewart. But I’d argue that one reason people don’t cringe when they listen to either song is Stewart’s honesty and vulnerability. Within the severe Madonna-whore complex in “Maggie May,” Stewart expresses genuine affection for Maggie, his bitterness borne from self-loathing, offset by the elation of having known her. Whereas someone like Mick Jagger snarls about women with venom and spite, Stewart valorizes Maggie and renders her iconic.
Purely as music, “Maggie May” is stunning. Martin Quittenton, a proficient acoustic guitarist, crafted the central melody, which earned him a co-songwriting credit. There’s McLagan’s organ playing, which coats the song in a shimmering haze, accented by daubs of Sears’ celeste chords. And the whole song is a showcase of Wood’s musicianship, from the slyly busy basslines to the dancing coins of his 12-string to his wooly electric guitar solo. Stewart has often expressed surprise that “Maggie May” became such a huge hit since it has no chorus. Except it has a chorus: Ray Jackson’s soaring, hummable mandolin solo at 4:26. It clearly made no impression on Stewart, who cited Jackson as “the mandolin player in Lindisfarne” in the liner notes.
Looking back, the success of “Maggie May” is unsurprising, since it incorporates so much of what was popular in 1971. Like a lot of prog and AOR heavy rock, it has two memorable solos, one of which is from an instrument that doesn’t typically appear in a rock context. As with so much singer-songwriter music, it’s a personal story featuring a character who’s somewhat of a mystery. Most importantly, it’s a true fusion of folk and rock, acoustic instruments played with the energy of rock while retaining the warmth and coziness of folk music.
“Maggie May” reached No. 1 in both the U.S. and UK for five weeks, and its trajectory was so powerful that it propelled Every Picture Tells a Story into the top spot on both country’s album charts, simultaneously, for four consecutive weeks. To this day, Stewart is the only artist to have accomplished this. He’d finally done it. He was a star.
6. “Don’t have much, but what I got is yours”
There’s a story within the lyrics of “Mandolin Wind,” Stewart’s greatest song by a distance, but it’s secondary to the music’s emotional intensity. Quittenton and Wood provide dual acoustic guitar parts, and the latter also adds gorgeous flitters of pedal and slide guitar. The playing conjures a pastoral setting, a window-down drive through rangeless fields of wheat and corn canopied by cerulean sky.
A man and a woman live together in love, but something ominous befalls them. “When the rain came I thought you’d leave/‘Cause I knew how much you loved the sun,” Stewart sings, implying that what’s afflicted them isn’t bad weather but illness. They endure “the coldest winter in almost 14 years,” and the man realizes that someone who’d stand by him and tend to him in sickness is surely the love of his life. In the last verse, the man might be at death’s door:
I recall the night we knelt and prayed
Noticing your face was thin and pale
I found it hard to hide my tears
I felt ashamed, I felt I'd let you down
No mandolin wind couldn’t change a thing
Stewart has never said what a “mandolin wind” is—within the context of the song the explanation seems to be a euphemism for death. But remarkable things happen in the bookends of this verse to signify something more intricate. Beforehand, Jackson chimes in with a symphonic mandolin solo, simulating the characters’ profound love for each other; afterwards, “Mandolin Wind” becomes an exhausted dash, the man’s epiphanic acceptance that the love he lived through made his life worthwhile (“I love ya, yes indeed I love ya!” Stewart hoarsely bellows). I’d say “mandolin wind” isn’t the moment of death, it’s the constant awareness of life’s impermanence, maximizing your time so that it’s perpetually meaningful.
This is my wife’s favorite song, though she hears it with the roles reversed. In her view, a woman moves in with her beloved during a harsh winter she’s unaccustomed to, grows pneumatic, and dies. When Stewart sings “I felt I’d let you down,” it’s because she moved for him and it killed her. I can see it both ways, because the story can be about anyone. At heart, “Mandolin Wind” is an evocation of the fulfillment of having loved beyond lust and pleasure, into a space where a person is more important than your own self. It doesn’t matter which person inhabits which role.
There’s an apocryphal rumor, probably started by Faces bassist and singer-songwriter Ronnie Lane, that Lane is the song’s true author and Stewart nicked it from him. It’s natural to assume this, since Lane is recognized for his poignant, good-natured touch and Stewart, well, isn’t. But because of its juxtaposition with “Maggie May,” that seems unlikely. Ewing wrote that “Maggie May” demands an answer record. “Mandolin Wind” is the answer record. “Maggie May” is about a self-involved teenager whose idea of love is his own sexual gratification; “Mandolin Wind” is about actual, reciprocal, deep love.
7. “I fooled myself as long as I can”
On the cover of his 1978 album, Blondes Have More Fun, Rod Stewart appeared with his hand on the buttcheek of a woman wearing a tiger-print spandex bodysuit. This is the “Rod Stewart” of the public imagination, the “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod Stewart, a rascal and a bozo. It’s hard to believe the architect of the ineffably beautiful “Mandolin Wind” is the same person who devotes entire chapters in his autobiography to his cars and his hair. But through all the sleaze and cheesy cover songs and crass commercial gestures, Stewart’s never been guilty of taking himself too seriously. The joke’s always on him.
Such lightheartedness is a grotesque evolution of the camaraderie of the Faces. The band dominated 1971, riding high off the wave of adulation for Every Picture Tells a Story and two other albums. A Nod Is as Good as a Wink…to a Blind Horse, released a mere six months after Every Picture Tells a Story, is their zenith, a raucous 36 minutes where every member is in sync and out of their minds.
The Faces back Stewart on only one track on Every Picture Tells a Story, an extended workout of the Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” which teases the interlocking, energetic, and raggedy blues-rock they’d turn out on A Nod. It’s a phenomenal cover, enhanced by its placement on an otherwise melancholic and reflective second side. David Ruffin loved the Faces’ version so much, he joined them onstage to sing it with them at Cobo Arena in Detroit in December of 1971.
But you could also say that the song selection, about one person’s premonition of a romantic partnership falling apart, is a subconscious flash point coming after the triumph of “Maggie May” and “Mandolin Wind.” The other Faces were always worried that Stewart would one day supersede them, which is exactly what happened. On subsequent tours they’d frequently see “Rod Stewart and the Faces” on the marquee.
The band’s lifespan was brilliant, transient, formative, and unhygienic—like going to college. With an ever-expanding ego, Stewart trashed 1973’s excellent Ooh La La in a Melody Maker interview, and Lane, who’d lead the sessions and wrote half the songs, exited three months later. In 1975, the Rolling Stones made Wood an offer he couldn’t refuse: Spend the rest of your life cheering up Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for eye-popping amounts of money. His departure was the death knell, and the Faces were no more.
8. “I’d find a way just to leave the past behind”
The obvious reading of Every Picture Tells a Story isn’t necessarily the wrong one: A photograph, or a song, is more than a fragment of time. It’s a world. But another way of understanding Every Picture Tells a Story is that a person isn’t defined by one moment—they’re a confluence of incidents both mundane and acute that form personality. Rod Stewart isn’t primarily an ambitious singer, a teenage folkie, a horndog, a romantic, a poet, or a clown. He’s all of those things. What’s universal is every individual knows they’re more than a caricature and wants everyone else to know it too.
The contradictions and double meanings of Every Picture Tells a Story underlie Stewart’s cover of Tim Hardin’s “(Find a) Reason to Believe,” a perfect closer. Stewart and Wood arrange it as a hybrid of gospel and British folk, which makes it feel like an old English ballad. The refrain, “Still I look to find a reason to believe,” imparts perseverance in the face of life’s obstacles. In reality, the song is about someone who self-destructively keeps returning to a bad relationship. Stewart sings it sympathetically, as if to say that you shouldn’t judge someone by their weaknesses, you should focus on the strength they exhibit trying to overcome them.
At 2:40 the song drops out and you expect the album to be over. But Stewart, forever the showman, takes a few beats, then starts singing a capella. Seconds later, the band plays along for one more minute, as if they’re closing out a concert. The wings of the curtain crumple to the floor and the house lights come up. The singer-scamp forges ahead into the decadence he desired. Trailing him immortally, the staccato rippling of snickers and applause. | 2023-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mercury | December 10, 2023 | 9.4 | b3c72960-27c5-4c64-94fd-762b1f75a420 | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | |
The R&B star’s latest ode to the power of love bursts with positive energy, but there’s an emptiness beneath. | The R&B star’s latest ode to the power of love bursts with positive energy, but there’s an emptiness beneath. | John Legend: Bigger Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-legend-bigger-love/ | Bigger Love | It’s a pretty good time to be John Legend. Since his last album, he scored the Emmy to secure his EGOT, had a second child with model Chrissy Teigen, was awarded an honorary doctorate at Berklee College of Music, and was named Sexiest Man Alive. The album he recorded amid all the success, Bigger Love, is correspondingly upbeat and joyous. He describes it as “vintage sounds with a modern sensibility,” in keeping with a longstanding personal mandate, using love songs as a bridge between the old and new. With this incredibly on-the-nose title, he reminds us both of his devotion to his muse and his limitations: Love might be fathomless, but Legend’s appreciation of it is pretty shallow.
Legend believes in the power of love the way some believe in Christmas spirit—as a transmissible, irresistible force that extinguishes all negativity. Fittingly, the album reunites him with producer Raphael Saadiq, who was behind his 2018 Christmas album. Legend is pegging his new album, which was recorded primarily in 2019, as a sort of balm for the times. “A lot was going on, but I still felt like people need some uplifting music,” he told Oprah Magazine. “Hopefully it can help them get through what’s been a tough spring, and hopefully this music will help them have a better summer.” Bigger Love is rife with this feel-good energy, buoyed by his stately voice and easygoing charm, but beneath its positive exterior is an emptiness that’s hard to ignore.
His last album, 2016’s Blake Mills-produced Darkness and Light, had a personality and intimacy that eluded him on previous albums. He was inhabiting songs as a person and not just a dutiful soul man treating the piano bench like a cubicle. They never quite conjured a “What’s Going On,” as they hoped, but Mills brought character to his music. The everymanisms of Love in the Future were replaced with personal reflections, confessions of a “FaceTime abuser,” and the politically minded expressiveness of a man clinging to hope in a darkening world; Legend’s songs were suddenly richer and more textured.
Bigger Love reverts to a vacant pantomime and a less robust R&B palette courtesy of producers like Oak, Ryan Tedder, and Ricky Reed. His 2019 protest song, “Preach,” is curiously absent here; so, too, is the effortless tonal blend of the album’s predecessor. This marriage of vintage and modern goes awry, as Bigger Love opens with a trap take on doo-wop and closes with a Mr. Hudson ballad. Following the lead of his Oscar partner Common, Bigger Love is risk-averse and platitudinous. There’s a derivative YOLO song called “One Life” and the hook couldn’t be more uninspired: “We’ve got one life/I won’t waste it, one life/I’m gon’ taste the joy in every minute/Beginning’ ‘til the finish,” he sings. Not even Anderson .Paak’s smooth funk can save it. If the album’s tacky acoustic lead single, “Conversations in the Dark,” sounds like a not-so-subtle sync for a tear-jerker network drama, that’s because it pretty much is.
No song here is transcendent enough to join “All of Me” in wedding-first-dance canon, nor is there a moment as touching and emotionally honest as “Right By You (for Luna),” the song he wrote for his newborn daughter on Darkness and Light, where he wonders aloud how she’ll receive and be received by the world, the quiver in his tone carrying a father’s anxiety. “Actions” fails to live up to its brazen “The Edge” sample, so clearly repurposed to call to mind Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” that its appeal is lost to sense memory, and the song’s core directive (“actions speak louder than love songs”) goes largely unheeded.
Even working within the confines of his safe space, though, John Legend can remind you why Kanye built a label around him, and Bigger Love is sustained by such moments. He works well in collaboration with bluesman Gary Clark Jr. (“Wild”), psychedelic R&B singer Jhené Aiko (“U Move, I Move”), rap technician Rapsody (“Remember Us”), and reggae artist Koffee (“Don’t Walk Away”) on tracks that stretch his songcraft in different directions—anthemic pop rock, alt-R&B, neo soul, and dancehall lite. The attempts are bold by his standards, and he slots into each one confidently. “Favorite Place” is the kind of sexy-time jam befitting a new dad. He plays to his strengths on “Slow Cooker,” a quirky little song that likens brimming sensuality to the simmer of a crock-pot, letting the resonance of his timbre give shape to his phrases. On the understated “Focused,” the confusion produced by a noisy outside world falls away when under his wife’s thrall. Plain and folksy, it has the characteristics of a Bill Withers song: The simplicity of the lyrics mirrors how uncomplicated things are in her company. Suddenly, the uplifting power he’s been preaching about is in full effect. | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | June 24, 2020 | 6.4 | b3c821b1-4903-488e-b47f-2027289a34fd | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The 1984 film The Terminator's vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence was backed up by a Brad Fiedel score that not just dramatized but echoed that sense of a machine army in the ascendant. This remastered reissue is lavishly presented across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl. | The 1984 film The Terminator's vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence was backed up by a Brad Fiedel score that not just dramatized but echoed that sense of a machine army in the ascendant. This remastered reissue is lavishly presented across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl. | Brad Fiedel: The Terminator OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21652-the-terminator-ost/ | The Terminator OST | Synthesizer music was hardly a new phenomenon in 1984, the year of The Terminator’s release, but the movie theater proved a remarkably successful means of injecting experimental electronic sounds direct into the mainstream consciousness. Not that anyone out there expected The Terminator to find such a broad audience. Made for a lean $6.4 million by James Cameron, then a rookie screenwriter and special effects designer with just one directorial credit—1981’s best-forgotten Piranha II: The Spawning—to his name, even the film’s star, Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially cool to it. “Some shit movie I’m doing, take a couple of weeks,” he explained while on the set of Conan The Barbarian. But The Terminator made Schwarzenegger a star and set the tenor for the next decade of sci-fi cinema, its vision of humanity crushed by a malign artificial intelligence backed up by a score that not just dramatized but echoed the sense of a machine army in the ascendant.
This freshly remastered reissue of Brad Fiedel’s Terminator score comes as part of the Milan Records’ Nicolas Winding Refn Presents series, and is lavishly presented, its 69 minutes of music spread across two slabs of 180g red-and-blue spattered vinyl and housed in reflective UV wrap. Such quality production values mean that it’s easy to forget scores like this were often ad hoc, the result of budgetary expediency and on-the-fly invention. Neither a celebrated soundtrack maestro or analogue synthesizer guru, Fiedel’s CV was about as square as it gets: he began his career signed to Paul Simon’s music publishing company and spent six months playing live keyboards for the soft rock duo Hall and Oates before making the leap into TV scoring. The Terminator was his first feature film, and after an intermittent film career that culminated with Cameron’s 1994 blockbuster True Lies, he retreated from Hollywood to pursue his real love, musicals. In an interview recorded for Japanese TV, now available to view on YouTube, you get a glimpse of Fiedel’s sensibility: sat at an electric piano, he tinkles away at The Terminator’s main theme as if auditioning for some Broadway revue.
Still, if the soundtrack still feels special, perhaps it’s because of this unlikely collision: an intermingling of theatric sensibility and emergent technology. The tools Fiedel used were cutting-edge for the period—a Prophet 10, an Oberheim, a drum machine and a sequencer—but still primitive in their workings. This was, just, a pre-MIDI age, so he would synch up his instruments by hand, and you can hear the occasional sense of slip and slide. The film’s majestically dark “Main Title” is a perfect mix of haunting melody and remorseless, mechanical rhythm, the latter in part the result of human error. While looping his Prophet 10, Fiedel missed the complete measure by a split second, but liking the result, kept it. Seth Stevenson’s 2014 article for Slate pins it to the unusual time signature of 13/16, which lends the track an eerie, unheimlich quality: the heartbeat of a machine.
The Terminator was a pulp film with depth, one that critics have gone lengths to decode. In 1995’s Projecting The Shadow: The Cyborg Hero In American Film, Janice H Rushing and Thomas S Frentz read it as a sort of Christian parable, writing that “John Conner, a modern day J.C. born of an ‘ordinary’ mother, is the warrior-king who is prophesied to reconstitute the world, to avert the apocalypse through a fight with a cyborgian devil.” Whether Fiedel recognized it or not, his music echoes something of this eschatological struggle: the implacable rhythms and cold choral swells of “Terminator Arrival – Reese Chased – Sarah on Motorbike” gesture to both the ruthless march of an automated future and the cold solemnity of the Catholic mass.
Elsewhere, Fiedel weaves around to capture the film’s sense of cat-and-mouse pursuit, shifting beats between simmering tension, lurching pursuit, and brief but precious glimpses of redemption. There are moments when the limited sound palette dates it—see the gurgling, acidic arpeggios of “Matt & Ginger Killed – Sarah Calls Detectives” and “Tunnel Chase.” Elsewhere, though, it feels eerily timeless: the dark ambient investigations of “Arm & Eye Surgery”; or “Reese Dreams Of Future War,” which with its racing synth progressions, harsh stabs and rumbling martial percussion might have slotted seamlessly onto Prurient’s Frozen Niagra Falls.
Perhaps the root of Fiedel’s success here, though, is the way his score holds close to the main theme’s central melodic and rhythmic motifs, remaking and remolding them to keep a sense of narrative continuity even as he shifts around sound and tone. From the metallic march of “‘I’ll Be Back' – Police Station & Escape” to the yearning piano of “Love Scene,” a firm backbone runs throughout, and when the end credits ushers in a cold dawn, Fiedel holds back on fireworks or tidy emotional resolution. As Sarah Connor loads up the Land Rover and disappears into the desert here is no salvation here; just a cold dread for what is to come. | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Milan | March 29, 2016 | 8.5 | b3cb4654-bc08-4a69-9866-878fd33fefa3 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
The allure of isolation defines Damon Albarn’s latest project. With only a few guests on the album, he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion. | The allure of isolation defines Damon Albarn’s latest project. With only a few guests on the album, he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion. | Gorillaz: The Now Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gorillaz-the-now-now/ | The Now Now | At 50, Damon Albarn is still writing songs for the world’s most popular cartoon band because he believes in the romantic idea that an international charting group can change the world. Cartoons appeal to young people, which makes illustrator and co-founder Jamie Hewlett’s multicultural avatars—2-D, Russel, Noodle, the “imprisoned” Murdoc, and stand-in bassist Ace—a Trojan horse for the kind of politics that people prefer not to hear from millionaires. The records range from eco-centric protests to dystopian party playlists, all full of Albarn’s auteur charm and a faint scent of calculation, as if they’d been executive-produced by a bohemian pop-cultural think tank.
It’s hard to resent someone as melodically adept as Albarn, or so obviously in love with their work. On The Now Now—Gorillaz’s second album in two years, and Albarn’s fourth in five—he writes simple, mostly upbeat songs with words of exhaustion. Adrift from the group’s grand concepts, this is their least ambitious and most plainly enjoyable music in years: written on tour, hashed out by Albarn and Hewlett at their studios, and recorded in the space of a month. It is, in the band’s telling, a solo album by Albarn’s character 2-D. It sounds, to the less imaginative, like an outlet for the daydream funk, playful psych-pop, and upscale disco that presumably soundtrack Albarn’s rare days off.
When Gorillaz records do grate, it’s usually thanks to a kind of sarcastic opulence, as if they’d been dictated by a man in a poolside recliner who won’t put down his iPad. Even when they’re on form, there’s something not quite right about their version of pop. The album opens with “Humility,” which sounds like an A.I.-generated summer bop: basslines bounce, synths rush, and George Benson riffs frolic like dragonflies. Everything is in its right place, yet the tune, as well as plenty here like it, conjures the ennui that descends when you finally arrive at the beach and wonder, Is this it? It is. The Now Now is programmed fun, the affable kind that never threatens to whisk you away, but its wrongness is oddly compelling and part of Gorillaz’s world-building dexterity.
The Now Now succeeds partly because of its scarce guest list (Snoop Dogg and Jamie Principle, on “Hollywood,” are the only vocal features), relative to last year’s overstuffed Humanz. The allure of isolation defines the record—Albarn wrote it in penthouse hotel rooms—and the motif fits his themes of modern politics and technology. “Calling the world from isolation,” the album begins, a mantra that shape-shifts to allude to Brexit, gun laws, and other political specters. It’s handy that these themes are, with Albarn’s light touch, mostly interchangeable, because they later become entangled with the subplot of a sabotaged relationship. “Baby I just survived, I got drunk, I’m sorry, am I losing you,” he groans on “Fire Flies,” a come-back plea that might as well be Britain sending a rueful late-night text to the EU. After endless observational laments, it’s a welcome personal flourish, albeit undermined by plodding space-funk that’s barely more convincing than its penitent narrator.
Given his penchant for the music of Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s fascinating that Albarn remains such a sucker for generic pop-house and boom-bap beats. Gorillaz may be the only band in the world that could be improved by Diplo: Their rhythmic homogeneity—along with the space-station filters on Albarn’s already glum vocals—sometimes keeps these otherwise masterful pop confections grounded. Often the best songs are, accordingly, the folksiest, like “Souk Eye” and “One Percent,” fingerpicked acoustic numbers embellished by android whirrs and longing synths. They might have populated a follow-up to Everyday Robots, Albarn’s 2014 solo LP, were it not for their fairytale twinkle—the sense that everything is at once awful and full of magic, a quality that animates all of Gorillaz’s most apocalyptically pretty work.
Albarn had a shot at rehabilitating his languid balladry on Everyday Robots, his first latter-career album to let his melancholy just exist without ornamentation. The cartoon band can catch you off guard like that, in a summer pop playlist or a branch of Urban Outfitters, which makes the project, in a strange way, a more suitable solo concern than Albarn’s proper solo work. He’s his own institution now, neither a dilettante nor a polymath, comparable to none, still with a schoolboy eye for the absurd and an interest in almost everything. It might be too humble for its own good, but The Now Now is the rare commercial sojourn that feels like a product of real fascination. | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Parlophone | June 29, 2018 | 6.8 | b3d9e0fc-5d83-4f46-bef2-970b836e711a | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
null | null | My Morning Jacket: Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh / Chapter 2: Learning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11780-chapter-1-the-sandworm-cometh-chapter-2-learning/ | Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh / Chapter 2: Learning | If you're a My Morning Jacket fan, you likely know that the band have lots of unreleased material, old tapes, and reel-to-reels scattered around the silo propped against rusting farm equipment and crusted with the hardened wax of a thousand candles. And you probably figured out that unreleased material sounded rough and raw, all those songs saturated in reverb and tape hiss. And you knew scattered among that scattered archive-- long stepped over, or used as coasters for countless beers, or as ashtrays, or piled 10 high for footprops-- there were bound to be a few gems. You were, more or less, right all along, as these two mini-biographies from the band's original label, Darla Records, attest; both are subtitled "early recordings, b-sides, covers, y mas" (that's if I'm reading the scribbles along the spines correctly), which is an adequate product description, albeit one that omits a few live versions, several alternate takes, some half-assed doodles, tape experiments, and distractions on a bored Sunday afternoon.
Most of these songs, as you could probably guess, feature just Jim James, the voice of My Morning Jacket, either strumming a guitar or playing rudimentary drum rhythms. He ostensibly compiled these tracks for Darla and divided them onto two separate disks. The first, Chapter 1: The Sandworm Cometh, almost has the easy flow of a proper album, beginning with the relatively polished "Weeks Go By Like Days", a full-band track from the Darla 100 comp and ending with a faithful cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which is particularly affecting here because James sounds like he's singing from the void of outer space.
In between those two stellar tracks are alternate takes of "They Ran" and "Evelyn Is Not Real", which would end up My Morning Jacket's debut, The Tennessee Fire, with better arrangements; strong rarities like "I Just Wanted to Be Your Friend"; some strange, short doodles ("What Will I Do?" and "Isobella With the White Umbrella"); a fuzzed-out version of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"; and, best of all, a ragged rendition of Santo & Johnny's "Sleepwalk" that leads into a live, slowed-down version of the Tennessee Fire track "Olde Sept. Blues". Surprisingly, the collection holds together remarkably well as you glimpse the band's creative process through its discarded recordings.
Chapter 2: Learning is even more scattershot, both in its songs and in its tracklist. That subtitle is very likely a disclaimer, a tongue-in-cheek caveat to fans who might otherwise expect too much. The demo versions of album tracks like "Just One Thing" and "Death Is the Easy Way" anchor this volume, but other tracks uproot it. The three frontloaded covers are straightforward, but unlike "Rocket Man", they're also unimaginative and almost unlistenable. James peppers the band's straightlaced reading of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" with sound clips from Top Gun, which apparently passes for clever. That song is followed by an even greater disaster, an almost note-for-note cover of "West End Girls", on which James mimics Neil Tennant's half-spoken delivery without displaying the slightest awareness of the Pet Shop Boys' devastating decadence.
But covers are half-serious undertakings anyway, especially on a hodgepodge compilation like this, and besides, James' rendition of "Dream a Little Dream" is almost charming-- that is, until he starts puppy-whimpering at the end. Similarly, the full-band version of Hank Williams' "Why Don't You Love Me" is a hoot until the drum solo coda, which in the liner notes James calls "Hot!" but which might be better described as "Incredibly annoying!" This percussive sound spoils "Nothing 2 Me" as well, burying a signature My Morning Jacket melody under six feet of reverby drums. This sort of self-sabotage can often sound fascinating if it serves a larger purpose, but here it sounds self-indulgent, juvenile, and-- quite frankly-- openly hostile, as if James is daring you to keep listening. Granted, he gives you good reason to endure all the shrill noise with songs like the live version of "Bermuda Highway" and "I Will Be There When You Die/Sunrides and the Girls Scream", but that only seems to make the lesser songs all the more grating.
At their worst-- which is much of Learning-- these two hodgepodge volumes will interest only the die-hardest of fans, those who probably already own the Darla comps and the European-only EPs. But at their best-- which is most of The Sandworm Cometh-- they offer a compelling if not altogether listenable chronicle of a band with an already prickly creativity and only a nascent idea of what works and what doesn't. Taken together, they're about what you might expect from My Morning Jacket's early stuff, give or take. | 2004-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | December 15, 2004 | 6.9 | b3db40a4-c818-4620-8a05-fe18d18cd468 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On their second proper album, the already-bizarre Quebec experimentalists splice and reformulate their DNA to become even more aggressively strange. | On their second proper album, the already-bizarre Quebec experimentalists splice and reformulate their DNA to become even more aggressively strange. | FET.NAT: Le Mal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fetnat-le-mal/ | Le Mal | Exercise exposes the body as a machine, locking limbs into controlled motions without the conscious direction of the mind. Fitting for an album with a treadmill on the cover, on Le Mal, the bilingual psycho-jazz punk-funk quartet FET.NAT likewise give themselves over to mechanistic processes. They’ve essentially made two records from the same material: Le Mal’s first side features five songs performed by the band, while its back half is dedicated to MIDI reinterpretations—or degradations—of four of them. The structure brings to mind Neu!’s notorious second album, where, having blown their recording budget, the kosmische-rock pioneers padded side two with sped-up and slowed-down versions of songs from an earlier single. But Le Mal’s MIDI manipulations never feel like a ploy to fill the tracklist, nor even companion remixes. Rather, they find this already bizarre band splicing and reformulating their DNA to become even more aggressively strange.
FET.NAT hail from the small city of Hull, located across the river and the Ontario border from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. Fittingly, they’re a band that straddle musical and cultural divides: Atop the group’s spasmodic rhythms, lead singer and lyricist JFNO delivers his fragmented sing-speak in a hybrid franglais dialect. Hull’s greatest claim to fame, though, is that it’s a party town, a late-night destination for 18-year-old Ottawans eager to take advantage of Quebec’s lower legal drinking age. FET.NAT’s music is hardly the stuff of college-pub playlists, but for all their jarring sonic intrusions and tripped-up time signatures, they know how to entertain. If you can’t exactly dance to their music, you can certainly convulse enthusiastically.
Where FET.NAT’s earlier releases were built upon a bedrock of Beefheartian skronk, Le Mal ventures further down the polyrhythmic path of their 2017’s Gaoler EP, cross-wiring the cowbell-clanking, dub-funked faction of ’80s post-punk (Konk, Pigbag, 23 Skidoo) with the glitchy, skittering cadences of ’90s IDM. At times, like on the warped and distended “Des Fois,” JNFO’s mutating slow-motion delivery, Pierre-Luc Clément’s slap-bass spikes, Olivier Fairfield’s stuttering beats, and Linsey Wellman’s saxophone farts all seem to pull the song in different directions. But the resilient rubbery groove of “Tapis” is a testament to FET.NAT’s ability to maintain forward momentum even as Wellman’s sax squiggles upset their equilibrium. And on “Patio Monday,” a relentlessly hiccuping rhythm gives way to the simplest of pleasures—a giddy playground chant that conjures the image of schoolchildren playing double dutch on the floor of the Mudd Club.
Once FET.NAT start feeding their music through the MIDI filter, any concessions to accessibility swiftly break down. Where “Tapis” found JNFO’s suggestively whispered verses hovering unobtrusively below the groove, on “Tapis d’Orient,” they’re ominously foregrounded in the mix, while Seinfeld-worthy slap-bass tries to ward off a creeping influx of sci-fi synth oscillations. The greatest disfiguration is reserved for “Your World Is My Mystery Gift,” FET.NAT’s contorted freakazoid of a love song. In its original form, it’s the sort of electro-shocked serenade that might’ve sounded at home on the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. In its side two sequel, the song becomes a mutant slow jam, melting in a vat of ambient acid and disintegrated chipmunk-soul squeals. If the body is a machine, this one is prone to sudden decelerations and short circuits. | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Boiled Records | March 26, 2019 | 7.3 | b3dc7018-5e43-44fb-a73f-e15fe752162a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Mark Fell enlists Portugal’s Drumming Grupo de Percussão to perform captivating computer-generated rhythms on the sixxen, a little-known invention of Iannis Xenakis. | Mark Fell enlists Portugal’s Drumming Grupo de Percussão to perform captivating computer-generated rhythms on the sixxen, a little-known invention of Iannis Xenakis. | Mark Fell: Intra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-fell-intra/ | Intra | The story behind the English musician Mark Fell’s Intra, which marks the first entirely acoustic major release of his 20-year career, starts about four decades ago. It goes back to the moment that the influential Greek composer Iannis Xenakis decided that his 1978 percussion work “Pléïades” required the invention of a new metallic instrument, which he called the sixxen. In his score for the piece, Xenakis specified that each of the six required sixxens should feature 19 irregularly distributed microtonal pitches, utilizing frequencies separated by smaller intervals than the standard Western semitone. Additionally, none of the sixxens was supposed to be in “unison” with the others. Somewhat comically, it has been said that Xenakis objected to every version of the instrument built during his lifetime; he admittedly could have been a lot clearer about what exactly he was looking for. The idea of the sixxen appears to be as dissonant as the instrument itself.
Written expressly for the sixxen, Intra—an album of meditative pieces for metallophone—is a far cry from the elastic, hi-def electronic music with which Fell is most closely associated. Performed by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo de Percussão, Intra is a measured, oneiric, and glistening set of eight instrumental pieces inspired by South Indian carnatic music systems. Despite the shift in instrumentation, the album’s subtitle—Computer Generated Rhythm for Microtonal Metallophones—ties directly back into Fell’s longstanding practice of working with limited technological systems to facilitate creativity. It also provides some insight as to why these entrancing pieces feel so strange.
The musicians performing Intra were not provided with a musical score. Instead of “composing” in the traditional sense, Fell used computer software to design systems that generated a series of electronic sound patterns. During the Intra recording sessions, the musicians of Drumming Grupo de Percussão were fed these patterns via headphones and instructed to follow them with their instruments in real time as accurately as possible. One can only wonder what Fell’s original electronic patterns were like, and how they might sound when interpreted through an instrument less tricky than the sixxen. The artist initially began using this non-standard approach to composition with his Focal Music series for solo violin, piano, and other instruments; some of these were released in highly limited edition by the Tapeworm, a British cassette label, last year.
Intra’s architecture of sound is spindly, lustrous, and bending. In many ways, these contemplative tracks do sound like algorithms or slowly unwinding algebra problems. Each piece is based on a repeating central motif that slowly morphs, and the results are as serene as they are eerie. “INTRA-8” sounds like the good version of getting caught in a spiderweb, while “INTRA-7” could be the product of an impromptu jam session involving kitchenware found on a campsite. Contrastingly, “INTRA-3” and “INTRA-9” are delightfully spacious, using slowness to rev up a sense of mesmerizing clarity and painterly depth.
It is in the procedural dimension of Intra’s shifting patterns that one can hear resonances with carnatic music, which Fell has praised for the variety and complexity of patterns its rhythmic structures are capable of generating. The album also strongly conveys the visceral sense of a computer modulating sound and executing code without prejudice. But if Fell’s processes suggest a hands-off approach to emotion, the sensitivity and expressivity of Drumming Grupo de Percussão’s playing is awe-inspiring. There is a whole world of textures in these tracks, from feathery to guttural and lots more in between. In the process the sixxen comes alive as a genuinely captivating instrument in its own right. Perhaps even Xenakis would have approved. | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Boomkat Editions | July 2, 2018 | 7.4 | b3dd7be0-ede5-48b2-b2dd-fa0c184c2488 | Alexander Iadarola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/ | |
Following the dissolution of the group’s lineup, founding member John Rossiter plays alone for the first time, working up an intimate set of songs using just mic, laptop, and field recordings. | Following the dissolution of the group’s lineup, founding member John Rossiter plays alone for the first time, working up an intimate set of songs using just mic, laptop, and field recordings. | Young Jesus: Shepherd Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-jesus-shepherd-head/ | Shepherd Head | Over the course of six ambitious records, Young Jesus have cemented their place as one of the most thoughtful acts in avant-emo. Led by founding member John Rossiter, the Los Angeles group gradually became known for its esoteric maximalism, dropping 20-minute musical epics and incorporating instruments like flutes and saxophones into their arrangements. They emphasized their brainy side on their last full-length, 2020’s sprawling Welcome to Conceptual Beach, where a hypothetical shoreline evoked the intersection of knowing and unknowing. In contrast, Young Jesus’ latest album, Shepherd Head, strips things down to basics. This time working mostly solo, Rossiter enlists just a few peers to help flesh out eight swirling yet withdrawn tracks.
After touring burnout took its toll on Young Jesus’ lineup, Shepherd Head marks the first time that Rossiter has made music alone since he founded the project. He took his time working up these songs on his laptop, using just Garageband and a Shure SM57 microphone—a stark contrast to the months of workshopping and week-long recording sessions that shaped Young Jesus’ prior endeavors. While it’s as ambitious as the records that came before it, Shepherd Head is unusually restrained. Shying away from extravagance, Rossiter’s lyrics explore themes like solitude, the death of a close friend, and the dissolution of his band. Even though he occasionally masks his writing in vague poeticism, he still sounds more vulnerable than ever before.
The majority of the cuts on Shepherd Head exude a deep sense of introversion, but a few collaborators make their impact subtly felt. The subdued lead single “Ocean” features songwriter Sarah Beth Tomberlin, whose poppier sensibilities compliment Rossiter’s experimental edge well. The duo’s languid harmonies rest atop a delicate synth bassline and warbled vocal samples on the song’s chorus, making for one of the record’s most captivating moments. Tomberlin appears again, this time using her ad-libs to support a speaking role from poet Jamie Renee Williams, on the comparatively boisterous song “Gold Line Awe,” which sounds like Young Jesus’ wonky attempt at a big-tent house banger. “Believer” features another surprising guest: Los Angeles electronic up-and-comer Arswain, whose signature is audible in the song’s golden layers of ambient synths and voices.
Shepherd Head favors a palette of synths and piano whose warmth is accented by the use of found sounds and field recordings. Closer “A Lake” is supported by earthy clicks and pops, as well as a recurring sample of a disembodied voice that calls to mind folktronica’s heyday. “Satsuma” pushes Young Jesus’ sound to uncharacteristically futuristic places, morphing from a spoken-word intro into soaring IDM. And the title track offsets oblique lyrics with carnivalesque woodwinds and orchestral cymbal crashes. “It’s all for heaven, love/And all I offer/I will move towards my fear,” Rossiter sings in the song’s bright, waltzing first verse, before the song culminates in a wonderfully bizarre, wordless climax.
The album is pulled in two directions at once. Some songs play like a more intimate take on the tried and true Young Jesus formula. At other times—like on the dancey track “Johno”—the electronic experimentation makes this sound like an entirely different project than the one that put out Home back in 2012. But Shepherd Head thrives when it leans into the elements that make it so notably different from the albums that came before it. “I’ve run away from disagreements and/Abandoned older friends,” Rossiter sings on the opening “Rose Eater,” which tells the story of the full band’s split. Born from adaptation and self-realization, Shepherd Head captures Rossiter’s output as Young Jesus at its most personal. | 2022-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | September 22, 2022 | 7.4 | b3df21fe-f0c9-4fe3-9e55-6350c716be92 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
Typically a clearinghouse for Pharrell's bad ideas, an N.E.R.D. record again serves as a parade of deliriously off impulses. | Typically a clearinghouse for Pharrell's bad ideas, an N.E.R.D. record again serves as a parade of deliriously off impulses. | N.E.R.D.: Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14825-nothing/ | Nothing | Even among pop stars, a demographic made up entirely of magical thinkers, Pharrell Williams' all-encompassing belief in himself is remarkable. It's hard to imagine that he's ever had what he considered to be a bad idea. On the one hand, this sublime self-confidence is sort of awe-inspiring, and exactly the sort of attitude we demand from our pop stars. On the other hand, Pharrell has had an awful lot of wretched ideas.
Ever since 2001, his rock-band side project N.E.R.D. has been a reliable repository for all of the worst ones. Back when he and Chad Hugo were still dominating hip-hop radio, N.E.R.D. albums served a useful purpose: they brought the super-producers, endearingly, to earth. For every indestructible "What Happened to That Boy" or "Superthug", there was an "Everyone Nose" or a "She Wants to Move"-- something goofy and dubiously conceived where their reach wildly exceeded their grasp. N.E.R.D. albums may never have made for essential listening, but they spoke to an important part of the Neptunes storyline, fleshing out Hugo and Williams' image as likable, overly enthusiastic dorks.
So the fact that Nothing, their fourth album, is a parade of deliriously bad ideas-- terrible ones realized with fervent conviction, half-promising ones botched by disastrous execution-- shouldn't even really be held against it. That's sort of a N.E.R.D. album's reason for existing. The reason that listening to Nothing is so profoundly depressing, however, is because the first half of the above equation-- the part where the Neptunes are still cranking out lethal, indelible radio hits-- has more or less evaporated. Without that crucial ballast, both sides of the Neptunes story swing irretrievably into orbit. The worst moments on Nothing-- "Life as a Fish", for instance, which recycles the chord changes to In Search of...'s "Bobby James" and uses them to soundtrack Pharrell's preposterously dramatic retelling of God creating Earth; or the Jethro Tull smooth-jazz beat switchup of "I've Seen the Light / (Interlude) Inside of Clouds"-- are the sounds of an artistic compass spinning wildly.
True to form, Pharrell never sounds in the least discouraged steering his way through this wreckage. Whether he's assaying a timid version of Jim Morrison on "Help Me" or pillow-talk whispering his way through the mortifyingly stupid, Daft Punk-produced "Hypnotize U", he remains utterly convinced of his capabilities as a frontman. The songs that do work-- the double-time clavinet-and-bongos funk workout of "Party People", or the tense, minimal thump of the Deluxe Edition's "Sacred Temple" and "Nothing on You"-- hark back to what Neptunes tracks sounded like in 2004, when Pharrell and Chad still had a firm grasp on the rewards of tension and empty space. There isn't a lot left on Nothing, apart from these faint reminders, to indicate that these two guys were the same pair who once revolutionized the sound of hip-hop. | 2010-11-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-11-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Star Trak | November 5, 2010 | 4.1 | b3dfffc4-6e46-4943-b2c8-2c8101211eb1 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh, an era-defining event and live album that set the template for the large-scale benefit concert as we know it today. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit 1971’s Concert for Bangladesh, an era-defining event and live album that set the template for the large-scale benefit concert as we know it today. | George Harrison / Ravi Shankar: The Concert for Bangladesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-harrison-ravi-shankar-the-concert-for-bangladesh/ | The Concert for Bangladesh | In the spring of 1965, the Beatles were roped into filming a movie in support of their upcoming album Help! To say its slapstick comic plot has not aged well would be an understatement: a fan gives Ringo Starr a ring belonging to a group of “oriental mystics,” as the DVD box puts it; wacky antics ensue. The band, perpetually stoned out of their minds, did not particularly enjoy making the movie, but for one member, it was transformative in its way. George Harrison was the group’s youngest member, a diligent guitarist who was all knees, elbows, and biting humor. He was deemed the “quiet” Beatle, but a better label might be “the searcher.” While filming a scene set at an Indian restaurant, Harrison began toying around with a sitar belonging to some hired background performers. Fascinated, he purchased his own, and brought it to the studio for Rubber Soul, their next album, to accompany John Lennon’s infidelity lullaby “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).”
Harrison and the Beatles were not the first Western musicians to find inspiration in Indian classical music—John Coltrane and Philip Glass both studied the tala, its metric cycle; Glass’ fellow minimalist composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young experimented with drones; rock bands like the Yardbirds, the Kinks, and the Byrds used their guitars to emulate the sitar’s distinctive tone. But Beatlemania ensured that anything a member dabbled in became a cultural phenomenon. “Norweigan Wood” helped kick off the popularity of so-called “raga rock,” a brief fad for Western pop that gestured vaguely at Indian musical and spiritual concepts; a raga is the melodic framework of Indian classical music. As critic Sandy Pearlman wrote of raga rock in a 1966 issue of Crawdaddy, “If used only in the interest of exoticism, it can quickly become shopworn and ‘ordinary’ and not particularly justifiable.” Pearlman pointed to “Norwegian Wood” as an example: Since the sitar simply echoes Lennon’s guitar melody, its presence conveys gimmicky Orientalism and not much else.
Roughly in tandem with these developments in British and American rock, master sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar experienced his own surge of Western popularity. In the 1940s and ’50s, he had established himself as one of India’s most celebrated musicians, composing for ballets and films, working as the music director of All India Radio, and founding its National Orchestra, Vadya Vrinda. He began touring internationally and releasing recordings with Columbia, EMI, and World Pacific, and by the late ’60s had gained a large following abroad. As a romantic vision of India captured the Western imagination, he floated between superstardom in both the classical and countercultural spheres, performing at both Lincoln Center and Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He was also unimpressed with “Norwegian Wood,” telling a reporter, “If George Harrison wants to play the sitar, why does he not learn it properly?”
Soon enough, the pair met and discovered they were kindred spirits. Shankar began instructing Harrison on melodic structure and playing technique, as well as the underlying spiritual discipline. As Harrison’s interest grew more sincere and less LSD-laced, he became so preoccupied with the sitar that he essentially abandoned the guitar for a period. Suffocated by fame and lost within the power dynamic of the Beatles, Harrison found new meaning in Indian music and philosophy. Times changed—the ’60s ended, the Beatles broke up, Western mainstream interest in Indian music subsided—but Harrison remained. His friendship with Shankar would prove to be one of music’s richest.
In the summer of 1971, the pair were in Los Angeles finishing the soundtrack of Raga, a documentary about Shankar’s life that Harrison and Apple, the Beatles’ multimedia conglomerate, were helping finance and distribute. But Shankar’s mind was elsewhere.
The Indian subcontinent had been divided into two independent nations in 1947 after decades of British colonialism. Each of them housed a religious majority: Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The partition triggered a massive, horrifically violent wave of migration; the division of Pakistan into two non-contiguous territories, one on each side of India, was especially precarious. Although East Pakistan had a slightly larger population, the government was based in West Pakistan, over a thousand miles away, resulting in many political, cultural, and economic disparities. In March 1971, East Pakistan declared independence, adopting the name Bangladesh, and West Pakistan responded with a brutal attempt to quell the movement for autonomy. Over the next nine months, between 300,000 and 3 million Bangladeshi people were killed in a military and militia campaign that has since been recognized as a genocide. Millions of refugees poured into India, straining an already exhausted system.
As a Bengali himself, Shankar wanted to plan a benefit concert to raise awareness and funds for the refugees. He hoped that one of his famous friends, perhaps Harrison or actor Peter Sellers, might be willing to introduce the show and help bring in a little money—maybe $25,000 if they were lucky. When Shankar told Harrison about the unfolding humanitarian crisis, the guitarist immediately volunteered his services. With a surge of Beatles-learnt self-confidence, Harrison suggested that they raise the stakes and release an accompanying film and album. “Straightaway I thought of the John Lennon aspect of it, which was: film it, and make a record of it, and, you know, let’s make a million dollars,” he later said.
Things moved quickly from there. Harrison spent the following weeks planning the concert and enlisting friends to perform. After he consulted with an astrologer—as one does—it was decided that the Concert for Bangladesh would take place on August 1 at Madison Square Garden. There would be two shows, an afternoon set and an evening set, both of which were recorded for the album and film. Tickets were all $10 or less and sold out in a few hours.
At the top of each performance, Harrison emerged to address the audience. With Shankar, he implored them to listen to the performance of Indian music that opened the show with concentration and respect. “Through our music, we would like you to feel the agony and also the pain and lot of sad happenings in Bangladesh and also the refugees who have come to India,” Shankar explained. Their instructions were prescient: After the musicians—Shankar on sitar, Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, Kamala Chakravarty on tambura, and Alla Rakha on tabla—tuned their instruments, the audience burst into applause. “Thank you, if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more,” Shankar dryly remarked.
With that, Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan launch into “Bangla Dhun,” an emotional instrumental piece that draws on Bengali folk melodies. The duo’s rapport is instinctive and familial, having played together since they were young adults; Khan was both Shankar’s brother-in-law and the son of his guru. The two maestros begin the piece with a brief alap, an improvisational, contemplative exploration of the raga’s melodic possibilities. Chakravarty’s tambura drone and Rakha’s tabla join as the players transition into a medium-tempo gat, the more structured portion of the composition. About halfway through, as the pace increases to a breakneck drut laya, Shankar and Khan’s playing is so heated it seems to erupt into fireworks.
Up next was Harrison, who was admittedly nervous to lead the show. “Personally, I prefer to be a part of a band, but...it was just something that we had to do in order to get the money and we had to do it quick so I had to put myself out there and hope I’d get a few friends to come and support me,” he said at a July 27 press conference. When the lights came back on, it was clear how modest he was being: He had recruited a 24-piece band that included Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann, the Apple band Badfinger, a horn section, a seven-piece soul choir, and more. All agreed to perform without a fee.
As the concert’s organizer and main attraction, Harrison was faced with a decision: fade respectfully into the background, or own the spotlight and put on a good show. From the opening riff of “Wah-Wah,” Harrison’s fiery declaration that he was done being creatively stifled by his former bandmates, it’s clear that he chose the latter. Looking like a sharp-dressed wizard in a white two-piece suit with the Om symbol embroidered on the lapel, Harrison exudes a radiant maturity; it’s staggering to remember that he was only 28 years old.
The Concert for Bangladesh also marked the first time that Harrison performed songs from All Things Must Pass, his triple-album opus from the year prior. Though it was easy to poke fun at Harrison’s spiritual transformation and embrace of Indian philosophy, his earnest belief is undeniable here. During “My Sweet Lord” and “Awaiting on You All,” two of All Things Must Pass’ most overtly religious songs, you can hear his yearning for connection with a higher power reach the rafters of MSG. Both songs espouse the belief of Harrison’s beloved Hare Krishnas, that through “chanting the names of the lord...you’ll be free,” and the gospel choir and Preston’s high-voltage organ playing heighten their joyousness. Harrison’s Beatles hits are unleashed from their studio restraints, expanding into their fullest forms. The acoustic “Here Comes the Sun” is as comforting as a warm soak. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” sounds like Harrison and Clapton—his dear friend and romantic rival, who was deep in the throes of heroin addiction— exorcising their demons in real time. “Something” is bursting at the seams with passion—for another human, a divine being, or for the all-consuming feeling of devotion itself.
Following Harrison’s desire to avoid the center of attention, the concert was arranged like a revue, with performances from the star intermixed with showcases from the backing players. Preston’s rendition of his gospel-rock song “That’s the Way God Planned It” is particularly electrifying, and culminates with the keyboardist leaping to his feet and running to the front of the stage to boogie in exaltation.
Aside from whether or not Clapton would make it through the night, the concert’s other big question mark involved one Robert Zimmerman. After his mythic motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan retreated from his platform as the conscience of a generation, performing live only rarely. “Right up till he came on the stage, I didn’t know if he was going to come,” Harrison later said. His song selection was also surprising. Maybe he was moved by the occasion, or maybe he wanted to do something special on behalf of his pal Harrison, but instead of playing cuts from recent albums like New Morning, he played long-dormant folk classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” There’s not a hint of cynicism or ennui in his nasally voice as he sings of forgotten souls and conjures visions of wastelands; it’s the raw intensity of a poet crystallized in amber. In a few years, Dylan would step back into the spotlight and onto the hamster wheel of constant transformation, but the man caught on tape here is luminous in his stillness.
The concert closed with a performance of Harrison’s recent charity single “Bangla Desh,” often regarded as the first of its kind. Harrison begins by offering some narrative context: “My friend came to me with sadness in his eye/He told me that he wanted help before his country dies...Now I’m asking all of you to help us save some lives.” Then, with the full emotional weight of his backing band—and, in the film, a jarring montage of starving children—behind him, Harrison starts hollering the one word that he hopes his audience takes away from the performance: “Bangla DESH!” Concise, direct, and with a killer saxophone solo, “Bangla Desh” makes a convincing argument: Yes, the ’60s were done. The Manson murders terrified a nation, Altamont crashed and burned, Joplin and Hendrix were dead, and the Vietnam War raged on. Fear and doubt had poisoned the well of idealism. But right here, right now, Harrison suggests, you can honor some of the decade’s lost promises by lending a hand to help a fellow man.
The Concert for Bangladesh was a clear and immediate success. Ticket sales raised around $243,000 for UNICEF, nearly ten times Shankar’s initial expectation. Overnight, the name Bangladesh and its people’s plight became known to the world, which was the sitarist and organizer’s priority. But the celebratory bubble burst quickly. The album was beset by delays and issues with taxes and performance rights; proceeds from its sale were held by the IRS for years. “It was uncharted territory, the scale of it,” Apple employee Jonathan Clyde told The Guardian years later. “The money did eventually reach Bangladesh, although perhaps not in time to help the refugees at that point.” The general public was unconcerned with these issues, however, and The Concert for Bangladesh topped the charts and won a Grammy for Album of the Year.
The Concert for Bangladesh’s successes—its camaraderie, humility, and triumphant money-raising—established the framework for large-scale benefit concerts as we know them today. Fundraising magnate Bob Geldof reportedly reached out to Harrison for advice when planning 1985’s multi-continental Live Aid event. (Harrison’s advice: “Do your homework.”) With star-studded lineups that ensure broad news coverage, benefit concerts continue to be an effective (and popular) way for celebrities to raise money and awareness for a cause. At the same time, it’s easy to feel cynical about these occasions: A pop star gets to play philanthropist for a day before returning to their life of privilege. Conceptually and practically, the “benefit concert” is a short-term commitment to long-term, complex problems; and when it comes to raising money for international crises, there’s usually a whiff of white Western saviorism in the mix. And as the Concert for Bangladesh revealed, getting donations to the people who need them is not as simple as it may seem.
Still, the Concert for Bangladesh was a musical triumph and a momentous collaborative effort. In 1972, alongside Allen Klein—the late-era Beatles manager who was partially responsible for the concert’s financial disarray—Shankar and Harrison were awarded UNICEF’s “Child Is the Father of Man” award for their fundraising efforts. Shankar, initially so skeptical of “Norwegian Wood,” had come to view his collaborator as family. Harrison, he later said, was “my student, my brother, my son, all combined.” If Harrison’s earliest interest in Indian music had involved some trendy fetishism, The Concert for Bangladesh demonstrated that his commitment—to the music and the people themselves—had blossomed into something deep and profound.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Apple | November 29, 2020 | 9 | b3e36f96-535a-4a72-8722-59e755f06ae9 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On a new four-disc reissue of George Michael’s mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected LP from 1990, the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise. | On a new four-disc reissue of George Michael’s mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected LP from 1990, the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise. | George Michael: Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-michael-listen-without-prejudice-vol-1/ | Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 | When George Michael released a mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected album in 1990, in the season of Nelson and Wilson Phillips, many critics responded as if Jordan Knight of New Kids on the Block had announced a run for president. “If Listen Without Prejudice starts a trend among Michael’s pop generation to move beyond image to integrity,” James Hunter lauded in Rolling Stone, “it could make ‘rock and roll TV’ sound more consistently and convincingly like music.” Robert Christgau wasn’t fooled: “Whatever the sleazy details, his announced decision to hold off on the dance music till next time half-proves he doesn't know as much about stardom as he thinks, and the ruminations with which he proclaims his seriousness finish the job.”
For Michael, as ever, announcements traveled subtlest as music. At the time, his most recent hit was “Heaven Help Me,” sung and co-written by his bassist Deon Estus. It sailed into the top five in the spring of 1989, less than six months after “Kissing a Fool,” the last single from Michael’s blockbuster Faith. A featherlight stab at sophisti-pop (trumpet solos, plucked guitar), “Heaven Help Me” served as testament to Michael’s multi-format ambition and do-no-wrong commercial instincts.
That “Heaven Help Me” and “Kissing a Fool” did well no doubt reassured the hyperventilating Columbia record execs when, 18 months after the Estus single, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 came out in September 1990, preceded by its lilting acoustic single “Praying for Time.” The latter topped the chart for a week without fuss, notwithstanding a despairing vocal drenched in echo, reminiscent of Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon, and a lyric that heaped scorn on the rich who “declare themselves poor” while the rest of us hang on to hope “when there is no hope to speak of.” Fans, disappointed by Michael’s folly, clung to the “Vol. 1” part of the album’s title. At the time, unconfirmed rumors suggested Michael had canned an album’s worth of dance material. A legal battle between Sony and Michael then followed, worthy of Bleak House. It killed the pop singer’s American career momentum.
Thanks to a four-disc reissue complete with remixes, documentary footage, and Michael’s 1996 “Unplugged” episode, audiences can hear what Sony had wanted in the Listen Without Prejudice project: a collection of variegated hues in which the pleasures of the flesh co-exist with a deepening spiritual malaise. Where once fans had to buy used copies of 1992’s Red Hot + Dance for “Do You Really Want to Know” and “Happy,” now they can appreciate how proximity to Michael’s covers of Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and the Pips underscores the rhythmic finesse of even the quietest material. George Michael, in other words, fucked up: at a time when Faith granted him supernatural powers, he should’ve released a double album of ballads and dance material. Overreaching? Critics might have said so. But to accumulate power, one has to use it.
In its way, Michael’s insistence on releasing the “Praying for Time” single was as brave as Fleetwood Mac’s sending “Tusk” to radio in the fall of 1979. Yet it fell off the chart as swiftly as it ascended. And now it was Columbia’s turn to realize there was no hope to speak of regarding the fate of its rather defensively-titled parent album, which, ominously, had stopped at #2 behind MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ’Em, an album that dominated its year as Faith had in 1988. In search of another “Faith” or “I Want Your Sex,” the label issued “Freedom!,” a house-inflected dance number in which Michael, again in high dudgeon but chipper about it, declared war on MTV and the system that forced him to look devastating in a leather jacket and stubble. Not giving a damn, MTV played the hell out of the video anyway—how could they not? The concept was novel: the besieged superstar out of sight, in his place a menagerie of supermodels. Disgusted with ubiquity, tired of his face, George Michael wanted to vanish.
But Michael couldn’t vanish: his voice wouldn’t let him. Pathos came as easily to him as melody to Paul McCartney. He loves because, despite the closet, he loved himself. Using the “Funky Drummer” loop, a Procol Harum-indebted organ, and an allusion to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (Jagger-Richards get songwriting credit), the third single “Waiting for That Day” taunts a fool who thinks he’s going to survive this new decade clinging to the stupid mistakes he’s made. The fool, it’s clear, is George Michael. Speaking of McCartney, British single “Heal the Pain” matches him in suppleness but exceeds him in sympathy, earnestness; instead of playing the douche whose shoulder to cry on is actually a penis in his hand, Michael sounds jazzed about being placed in this position—whenever you want him, wherever you will be, he can heal the pain. Michael’s sudden vocal ascensions at the end of each chorus lyric are a producer’s dream of an arrangement. XTC would have killed for the programmed bongos.
In the era of CeCe Peniston and Crystal Waters crossovers, the dance material on the bonus disc would’ve fit as snugly on the charts as a pair of Gap jeans. “Do You Really Want to Know” betrays his interest in Lime. “Happy” has faint hip-hop scratches, more muted trumpet, and a return to the falsetto harmonies of “I Want Your Sex.” The ebullient “Too Funky,” a top ten in the summer of 1992, boasts breathy come-ons over a Latin keyboard line and Michael, forgetting his rancor against the rich who declare themselves poor, getting the hots for a beauty of indeterminate gender drinking cheap red wine. The video was another supermodel revue, only this time Michael deigned to make an appearance—he played the director glowering, as if at gunpoint.
But the divisive stuff rests on the original album. To love Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go,” a marriage of gospel and cocktail lounge melancholy with a sardonic vocal, takes patience. In Michael’s hands, it becomes the cry of a reprobate immersing himself in the waters of his influences. The seven-minute “Cowboys and Angels,” the product of a fascination with Stan Getz later explored at length on 1996’s Older, buries a lovely post-chorus within its Michael-played bass amble; it gives up none of its secrets. When Poppy Bush asked for congressional authorization to kick Iraq out of Kuwait in January 1991, he turned the pan flute-graced anti-war cri de coeur “Mother’s Pride” into a minor hit. The power of his falsetto unsheathed gives “he’s a soldier waiting for a war” a fathomless sorrow.
God’s children. Choirs. A track called “Soul Free.” On “The South Bank Show” episode included, Michael sings “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.” He understood black music as the product of a familiarity with death leavened by the banalities of earth: love, sex, comfort. Something was happening that autumn to gay artists closeted from their fans. In October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe released Behaviour, the quietest album of the Pet Shop Boys’ career. The unceasing piling up of bodies killed by HIV had made, for the moment, the bacchanal into a gauche if not repulsive gesture of sentimentality.
For those of us too young for the plague years—who can imagine, at least, a life lived instead of convulsing in agony on a hospital bed—chastising Michael for leaning on elegies and ballads in 1990 strikes me as glib. In its original form, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol.1 was the follow-up that Faith demanded; in this new incarnation, it’s a miscellany unruffled by notions of coherence, an attempt to make art out of George Michael’s quarrels with himself. Never again would these quarrels work to such bounteous ends. | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | October 26, 2017 | 8.8 | b3eca929-bfb3-48be-b63d-f1fb9043223c | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
On the 23rd album to bear the Guided By Voices name, the ageless and indefatigable Robert Pollard wrote every track and played every instrument himself. | On the 23rd album to bear the Guided By Voices name, the ageless and indefatigable Robert Pollard wrote every track and played every instrument himself. | Guided by Voices: Please Be Honest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21808-please-be-honest/ | Please Be Honest | As reunions go, the second coming of Guided by Voices was a remarkably generous affair. Between 2010 and 2014, the band’s beloved "classic" lineup from the early '90s—the guys responsible for GBV’s best records (Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, etc.)—returned to release six records, including three in 2012 alone, and play for thousands of enthralled faithful. The albums were only intermittently successful, but it was still a thrill to see Robert Pollard—the band’s ageless, indefatigable leader, its one constant across decades of lineup changes—scissor-kick his way across the country, a bottle of Jose Cuervo tucked under his arm, while his old buddies wailed away behind him.
Now Guided by Voices are back again—or at least the name is. You see, for Please Be Honest (GBV’s 23rd LP), Bob Pollard wrote every track and played every instrument himself. There is no Tobin Sprout, Pollard’s songwriting partner from the classic lineup; no Doug Gillard, Pollard’s guitar-shredding sidekick from the TVT and Matador years; not even Todd Tobias, Pollard’s near constant companion on his endless side projects and solo records. This time the Fading Captain rides alone.
And the results are a decidedly mixed bag. With its slapdash, lo-fi production and jarring transitions from ballad to rocker to quirky one-off, *Please Be Honest is a close sonic relative of GBV’s post-2010 discography, Let’s Go Eat the Factory *in particular. But this new Pollard-only GBV has less of the easygoing melodicism and sense of goofy fun that kept those records fresh, even at their most awkward moments.
Of course, this being Guided by Voices, there are still gems to be found. The stately opener "My Zodiac Companion" features one of the more anthemic Pollard choruses in recent memory. The breezy drum-machine jangle of "Kid on a Ladder" could fit on *Alien Lanes, *nestled somewhere between "Game of Pricks" and "My Valuable Hunting Knife." The title track serves up the record’s finest melody, sung in Pollard’s bittersweet higher register over nerve-damaged electric guitar. Refreshingly, the song touches on a real-world subject (Pollard’s attempt to get someone to level with him) rather than the usual carnival of GBV absurdities—the "cucumber guns," "shriveled artichokes," and "glittering parliaments"—that populate the rest of the album.
Despite its myriad eccentricities, aural and otherwise, GBV is at its core a power-pop band. But great hooks are frustratingly scarce on Please Be Honest, particularly on grinding, midtempo dirges like "The Grasshopper Eaters," "The Quickers Arrive," and "Nightmare Jamboree." One really misses Sprout’s songwriting—his emotional candor and vivid harmonies would have helped to brighten what is often a dark, brittle record. And while musicianship is never the point with GBV, many of these tunes, like the lurching, proggy "Hotel X (Big Soap)," would have benefited from a bit more finesse. Too many of the drum and guitar tracks sound like they’re being played with a hammer.
Ultimately, however, the biggest problem with *Please Be Honest *is existential: The fact that it’s a Guided by Voices record at all seems entirely arbitrary. It could just as easily have been a Pollard solo album or a new record from Teenage Guitar (Bob’s other solo project) or the debut album from some other dreamed-up band (like, say, Kitchen Winners, Jet Logic, or the Easy Cyclists). Pollard seems simply to have finished a new batch of songs and decided they sounded like a Guided by Voices record—a strikingly anti-climatic backstory for the return of such a legendary act. Without a solid band identity and the sense of mission it provides, this new GBV comes off like little more than a side project, like just another star in the greater constellation of Bob (and not even the brightest one, considering the quality of Pollard’s recent Ricked Wicky records with guitarist Nick Mitchell). Please Be Honest certainly has its charms. But for the first time in Pollard’s career, Guided by Voices isn’t the main event—which, for the band’s legions of fans, is surely a loss. | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rockathon | April 21, 2016 | 5.9 | b3ecf178-6f74-45db-84ec-a0e9cef9aa5c | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
On a split LP, the German computer musician and South Korean cellist apply unusual methods to their respective instruments, approaching the synthesis of digital and acoustic from opposite sides. | On a split LP, the German computer musician and South Korean cellist apply unusual methods to their respective instruments, approaching the synthesis of digital and acoustic from opposite sides. | Hecker / Okkyung Lee: Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hecker-okkyung-lee-statistique-synthetique-teum-the-silvery-slit/ | Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit) | Okkyung Lee and Florian Hecker (aka Hecker) both find freedom in limitation, channeling the infinite possibility inherent in cello and code, respectively. Their methods sometimes verge on hermetic; some of their weaker work sounds more like a demonstration of every sound that can be squeezed from their instrument than a robust composition. On Statistique Synthétique / Teum (the Silvery Slit)—a split album co-released by computer-music heavyweights INA GRM and Editions Mego—both artists attempt to transcend the limits of their approaches by synthesizing their habitual palette with fresh sounds and techniques.
Hecker’s “Statistique Synthétique” leans toward the acoustic: His piece is composed from resynthesized field recordings collected from Croatia, Massachusetts, and other locations. This earthly foundation grounds the music’s strongest moments, where his elemental swarm of electronics mimics cricket chirps, a gushing river, and the warped strum of a zither. Though the work is unmistakably digital, Hecker’s use of field recordings grants it a natural narrative: Sounds flow from one location to the next, and the composition becomes a tapestry of landscapes, a churning, synthetic road trip.
The field recordings give “Statistique Synthétique” a coherent compositional thrust, but Hecker’s use of resynthesis essentially obliterates his source material, reducing the piece to an airtight slab of computerized noise marked by tired tropes—rising sine-tone glissandi, comical burps and gurgles, and dull, clunking thuds and thwacks—that sound well-worn rather than alien. In the final seconds, a raw field recording creeps in: We hear chatter, a car horn, a jackhammer. It’s a moment of much-needed vitality, but the music immediately cuts to black, and the world beyond the computer simply vanishes.
On Lee’s “Teum (the Silvery Slit),” a heavy-handed stereo effect—likely stemming from her use of INA GRM’s Acousmonium—smears her cello across the soundstage, casting a mysterious pseudo-digital spell over the cascading torrent. Though the sound of her instrument is instantly recognizable, in the composition’s strongest moments it becomes denatured, stripped of its natural qualities and reduced to sonic putty. Here, stretches of desert—creaks and scrapes of wood, ratcheting percussive blasts—give way to teeming waves of suspended screeches and plucks; her astoundingly flexible playing in turn recalls the icy chiming of Horațiu Rădulescu’s “Clepsydra” and the shadowy, tectonic crawl of Iancu Dumitrescu’s “Medium III.”
But Lee begins to run out of ideas in the second half. The music’s taut internal logic disintegrates as a steady droning note emerges, and Lee begins cycling through her bristling armory of extended techniques, breaking the pseudo-digital spell and regrounding her sound in the familiar realm of solo free improvisation. Here, Lee’s use of the Acousmonium becomes a novelty rather than a necessity. She summons multiple cellos, multiple Lees, but the sense of scale is lost; at its weakest, it sounds less like a truly unified composition than a simple copy-and-paste job.
Lee and Hecker have established themselves as pioneers in their respective fields through a relentless commitment to experimentation, but the singular nature of their music is double-edged. As they exhaustively mine the depths of their instruments, they risk succumbing to tunnel vision. This is why their strongest work involves active collaboration that allows them to recontextualize their approaches and overcome their inherent limitations. Though they are discrete compositions, “Statistique Synthétique” and “Teum (the Silvery Slit)” sound like complementary parts of a whole, each embodying what the other is missing: They lean enticingly toward one another in sonics and construction, and in their strongest moments seem poised to produce a genuine rupture. They never quite make it there.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Portraits GRM | March 26, 2021 | 6.3 | b3f15374-1a17-49b5-959e-c64dcf2557f9 | Sunik Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sunik-kim/ | |
The New York live disco ensemble's self-titled debut is not just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism, it's a great pop record, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's. | The New York live disco ensemble's self-titled debut is not just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism, it's a great pop record, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's. | Escort: Escort | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16165-escort/ | Escort | The studio must be an oasis for Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, the leaders of Escort, New York's premier live disco ensemble. Do you have any idea how hard it is to play this stuff in a club without coming off like rank amateurs or soulless professionals? You have to be tighter-than-tight to replicate those metronomic rhythms, while also being loose enough to play through any in-the-moment human glitches. You can't wrong-foot dancers, but you also can't be so precision-tooled that you lose the sense of abandon that's essential to any good party. You're not competing with a drum machine, which is tough enough to do. You're competing with Nile Rodgers' Chic, a much more forbidding proposition.
In the safety of a recording booth, a band like Escort is allowed to flub multiple takes, correct any mistakes, and experiment without worrying about bringing the party down from its boil. They can tinker with their lush arrangements until they fit with the jigsaw-precision that was required of disco bands in the genre's pre-computer heyday. Escort is the result of all that fieriness and fine-tuning, the band's debut album after a drawn-out series of singles, teasing fans for more than half a decade. On the evidence, Balis and Cho are two producers who've listened long and hard to the history of their favorite genre, and who care about getting both the little details and the overall Broadway-meets-boogie vibe just right. They manage to replicate every Off the Wall horn blast and Patrick Cowley synth bubble with loving music geek precision.
But Escort isn't just the pinnacle of 21st-century disco fetishism. (Though it would be a singular achievement even if it were.) It's a great pop album, even if it's working off 1979's pop template rather than 2011's. Balis and Cho aren't quite up to Chic's level, obviously, as songwriters or players. But they've set themselves a similar task, out to prove that refinement and abandon aren't mutually exclusive. Like disco the first time around, Escort aims directly for the brain's pleasure centers, particularly the one marked "bubblefunk," but there's also an intensity and attention to sound design that comes from being both an in-the-moment live unit and studio rat tinkerers. All this astounding detail work is there to add extra thrills to songs that are instantly accessible, immediately charming. Rather than 12"-friendly extended disco remixes, these cuts are shaved down to the essentials. And the grooves would be strong enough with half the bells and whistles.
Escort just want you to have a damned good time, even if you don't know Walter Gibbons from KC and the Sunshine Band. And they're willing to risk all sorts of cheesiness to get you there. So it's no accident that "A Sailboat in the Moonlight" seamlessly switches halfway thorough, from hammy musical theater to lascivious funk. The "mutant disco" scene and the pre-crossover Loft underground cuts may be the pieces of the disco pie most palatable to indie-reared ears. But Escort remind revisionist critics that disco also had roots in supper-club schmaltz, showbizzy soul, and Las Vegas pomp. If there's a guiding spirit here, it's not benevolent weirdo Arthur Russell but master entertainer August Darnell at his most eager to please. The rhythm track on "All Through the Night" has the kind of crisp minimalism you find on the best DFA singles. But the rapid-fire R&B sassiness of the vocal takes us straight to the roller rink on teen night. Sure, it wouldn't play at a roller rink now, competing with the brutalism of 2011's pop-dance producers, but Balis and Cho's hearts are in the right populist place.
Escort take obvious pains that this update on one of pop's most opulently orchestrated of genres can stand, sonically, alongside the classics. Those strings! Even if they had the money, modern major labels still wouldn't lavish that much attention on recording a string section. And if that old-school analog lushness is computer fakery, then I'm doubly impressed. But given Escort's rep for throwing down live, I doubt it. It's easy enough to press a button and unleash a sampled swirl of strings or a blast of brass. It's something else entirely to be orchestrating violinists and trumpet players through a seven-minute monster groove. That kind of commitment is one reason Escort have ascended to the top ranks of neo-disco acts, swinging their way through the demands of disco with the consummate skill of the kind of crack big bands that were everywhere in the late 1970s. | 2012-01-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-01-11T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Escort | January 11, 2012 | 7.7 | b3f94bb5-a946-40f8-b63c-d66150a7b69c | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The New York-based musician explores the nature of longing in a set of pieces that merge modular synthesis with Hindustani classical music. | The New York-based musician explores the nature of longing in a set of pieces that merge modular synthesis with Hindustani classical music. | Arushi Jain: Delight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arushi-jain-delight/ | Delight | What does yearning sound like? A composer versed in Hindustani classical music might reach for Raga Bageshri, a melodic framework meant to stir longing for reunion with one’s lover. Bageshri dictates the melody of a slew of romantic film soundtracks, including “Aaja Re Pardesi,” theme to the mystical meet-cute amid the misty pines of northern India that opens the 1958 film Madhumati. Just like that film’s protagonist, electronic musician and vocalist Arushi Jain turned to Bageshri in a landscape filled with wildlife, using the raga to compose the nine tracks on her latest record in a makeshift studio on the shores of Long Island. What Jain yearns for on this record, however, is not a lover but an emotion. On Delight, Jain grasps for a joy that lies tantalizingly out of reach, bringing melodies informed by Raga Bageshri into dazzling contact with modular synthesis and digital manipulation.
That’s no easy task, given the baggage of a genre whose history is centuries old. Attempts to mix Hindustani classical and electronic music date back to at least the late 1960s, as documented by an archival compilation and accompanying book assembled by Emptyset’s Paul Purgas and released last year. Indian musicologist Gita Sarabhai founded India’s first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, in 1969 and experimented with marshaling the Moog to perform Hindustani scales. But Sarabhai was a purist, seeing in Western harmony a dangerous, alien influence on the traditions she was working to preserve in a state freshly liberated from colonial rule. Jain remains open to the possibilities of hybridity and cross-pollination, crafting her own sound in the space opened up by diaspora. Now, working with instrumentalists for the first time, she folds a bit of New York into her cascading, hybrid melodies.
These compositions represent Jain at her most vibrant, coaxing a cornucopia of sounds out of a single raga. Effervescent samples from classical guitarist Ria Modak punctuate a sea of eddying electronics on “Still Dreaming”; MIZU’s aching cello line on “Exquisite Portraiture” morphs in and out of a midnight hum; flutist Annie Wu has a bright, reverb-soaked duet with Jain’s synth work over an understated, evolving rhythm on “Imagine an Orchestra.” Jain’s pointillistic sound-design techniques also add to the pleasure of Delight. An aquatic feel permeates “Our Touching Tongues,” where Payton MacDonald’s glittering marimba flows forward and in reverse. And Jain breaks her voice into grains of sound in “Infinite Delight,” creating microscopic textures even as she bends between microtones. If Under the Lilac Sky was drenched in sunset hues, Delight emanates iridescence through a diversity of electronic and acoustic textures.
Bageshri is meant to be played at midnight; fittingly, Jain ventures into drum programming redolent of the heady minimal techno that permeates Brooklyn’s nightclub scene. “Imagine an Orchestra” and “Play in the Void” incorporate bass drums that pulse forth like a heartbeat. The first track is more relaxed and the second runs at a more anxious, anticipatory clip, as if the joy so desired were just within reach. By the time Jain divulges that desire in English—“I feel irresistibly drawn to your beauty,” she sings on closer “You Are Irresistible”—the album reaches a heavenly peak, and her pitch-bent vocals flit gracefully above four-on-the-floor kicks. It’s trance music of a different kind, a euphoria whose arrival is foreshadowed by record’s teasing Bageshri melodies. Descending like the rays of light that stream into the club as the morning sun rises, delight finally replaces yearning as the music fades into the ether. | 2024-04-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Leaving | April 8, 2024 | 7.7 | b3fa1804-6a7d-4fbc-8dce-9a01665bc9c3 | James Gui | https://pitchfork.com/staff/james-gui/ | |
Sam Beam's new Iron & Wine rarities compilation recalls a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners, and when it seemed he could take his indie folk sound in any direction imaginable. | Sam Beam's new Iron & Wine rarities compilation recalls a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners, and when it seemed he could take his indie folk sound in any direction imaginable. | Iron & Wine: Archive Series Volume No. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20199-archive-series-volume-no-1/ | Archive Series Volume No. 1 | In retrospect, there was no way that Sam Beam—or anyone else, for that matter—could keep singing such quiet, devastating songs. Recorded in his living room while he worked a day job teaching cinema in Florida, his early Iron & Wine material examined harsh truths about the precarious nature of marriage and family: Every child grows up and leaves home, every friendship is eventually defined by distance and difference, every marriage ends in death and loneliness. "One of us will die inside these arms," he sang on "Naked As We Came", off 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days. "One will spread our ashes ‘round the yard." It wasn’t always easy to hear that kind of clear-eyed sentiment, so it couldn’t have been easy to deliver it night after night after night.
Beam’s first forays away from that kind of minimalist folk and its treacherous intimacy were promising, with the Woman King EP and his mini-album with Calexico leading right up to The Shepherd’s Dog in 2007, still a career high. If subsequent albums have sounded less inventive and immediate, the reason wasn’t so much the widescreen arrangements, the experiments with psychedelic jazz and free rock, or even the full band Beam took into the studio and out on the road. Instead, it was a new tack in songwriting, which found him experimenting with fleeting impressionism over concrete details. Each new record put more and more space between Beam and the listener; his songs began to sound affected and oddly distant, as though he were filming a movie whose action took place entirely in the middle distance.
Coming at the end of that ho-hum run of albums, this new rarities catch-all Archive Series Volume No. 1 arrives like a breath of fresh air. Beam is currently between labels, with a few rumored collaborative projects (a duets record with Jesca Hoop, a covers album with Ben Bridwell) overshadowing any talk of his next studio album. While it certainly doesn’t constitute a do-over, it does gently recall a time when he was just beginning to form a strong connection with his listeners and when he could take that indie folk sound in any direction imaginable. Tucked under the bed or squirreled away in the guest bedroom closet, these songs become a point from which to measure his decade-long career, to see how far he has come since he made those first home recordings.
It’s bracing to hear him in this familiar setting once again, to hear the roomy ambience of opener "Slow Black River", a song strong enough to hold its own against anything on The Creek Drank the Cradle. But it’s also a good reminder of just how intricate his minimalist folk arrangements could be. Most of these songs feature just voice and guitar, yet there is a lot going on. There’s a physicality to Beam’s guitar playing, which makes even the slower tunes sound both urgent and casual. The lo-fi production erases any sense of depth in the production, which might be a problem for many artists but here it means that every instrument and every sound is on the same plane—a small wall of sound.
Beam’s strums can be percussive and quietly emphatic, highlighting the breeziness of the melody on "The Wind Is Low" and evoking a sinister force driving "Minor Piano Keys". When he adds instruments—a bass on "Judgement" [sic] or the slide guitar on "Loretta" or what sounds like a mandolin on "Wade Across the Water"—it’s restrained and specific, like a soundtrack composer insinuating emotions onscreen. On the lo-fi "Quarters in a Pocket" a rambunctious banjo conjures a contentment tinged with sadness: "Time spent with you feels like charcoal sketches for a painting that you won’t let me see," he sings over the spiky picking and plucking. "But I’ve come to find that comfort comes like quarters in a pocket, discovered accidentally."
Much like 2009’s Around the Well, the 2xCD retrospective that acted as an epilogue to his Sub Pop tenure and provides a template for Volume No. 1, the songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts. That may be due to the absence of the kind of overarching idea that animates his studio albums, or with the fact that at 16 tracks Volume No. 1 is simply too generous. That’s the nature of any kind of vault-clearing compilation: Instead of a simple snapshot of a period in his career, Beam has created something more like a charcoal sketch. Hopefully, more volumes will soon follow. | 2015-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Black Cricket | February 24, 2015 | 7.2 | b3fbdf93-0c18-420e-ac30-1988cd855d5b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The dignified prog and pop star returns from another long layoff with a covers LP featuring takes on Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and Magnetic Fields. | The dignified prog and pop star returns from another long layoff with a covers LP featuring takes on Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and Magnetic Fields. | Peter Gabriel: Scratch My Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13935-scratch-my-back/ | Scratch My Back | What's he doing here? That was the first question that came to mind when a cover of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" showed up on blogs in 2008, featuring Peter Gabriel's familiar voice singing lead over Hot Chip's backing: "Feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too," goes the oft-quoted refrain, to which Gabriel added, "And it feels so unnatural/ To sing your own name."
It was surprising because Gabriel seemed like the kind of artist who would remain blissfully ignorant of the changes that have befallen the music business in the years since he released his last album, Up, in 2002. Somewhere between the time of the smash So in 1986 and the launch of the Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, Gabriel seemed to transcend the pop machine. He'd undertake offbeat projects (scoring films like The Last Temptation of Christ, making an early stab at interactive art with the EVE CD-ROM), release an album or two when he felt like it, mount the occasional tour, and appear on the odd film or TV soundtrack. But with his graying hair, air of intelligent dignity, and avoidance of celebrity trappings, he was the rare pop star who didn't seem to mind losing relevance or growing old. The last place you expected this guy to show up was singing lead on a blog-bait Vampire Weekend cover.
If nothing else, that Hot Chip cameo mitigated the shock that otherwise came with news that Gabriel's next full-length, Scratch My Back, would be a covers record, featuring songs by Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and the Magnetic Fields, along with work by Gabriel contemporaries like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Paul Simon. From the outset, it sounded like an idea dreamed up by a management team, a way to introduce Gabriel to the coveted New Generation of Listeners. But a recent interview on The Quietus, where Gabriel ran down the song selections and explained how he was introduced to each, revealed the project's organic roots.
The Scratch My Back songs are either lushly orchestrated by the Durutti Column's John Metcalfe or feature just solo piano; all are arranged in a sweeping cinematic style that steers clear of the Hot Chip collab's playfulness and humor. There's a fleeting "Hey, neat" factor in hearing Gabriel use his legendary "I'm bathing in red rain" / "I'm shooting into the light" upper register on lyrics by Justin Vernon and Elbow's Guy Garvey. And there's no question that the years have been kind to Gabriel's vocal instrument: he sounds ready to launch into a full-throated chorus of "San Jacinto" at any moment. But once the initial novelty wears off, we're left with some ponderous, dull, and ultimately pointless versions of songs that sound much better elsewhere.
Every song on Scratch My Back, regardless of its original tone or meaning, is flattened out and turned into this one melodramatic and depressing thing, often with Gabriel whispering half the words to go with the ultra-slow tempos. This uniformity of mood highlights the most puzzling aspect of the record: Gabriel's clunky phrasing. Throughout, he seems to be singing words without necessarily understanding what they mean. If you close your eyes you can almost see him reading them off paper. "You know me, I like to dream a lot/ Of what there is and what there's not," he sings in Lou Reed's "The Power of the Heart". Heard with Gabriel's stiff delivery, the humble declaration is entirely unconvincing. His take on David Bowie's "Heroes", glacially slow and building to a single climax, affirms, like many failed takes before it, that the original is about 70% brilliant record and 30% brilliant song. On Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble", the New York Knicks fan's line about a "turn-around jump shot" sounds exceedingly silly inside of a heavy, life-or-death funeral ballad.
All of which is to say that this album sounds earnest, professional, and ultimately very awkward. When the orchestra reaches yet another world-shattering crescendo on Arcade Fire's "My Body Is a Cage" (one more fine record that sounds melodically feeble in this setting), things almost start to drift into the campy territory of William Shatner's The Transformed Man. This album is called Scratch Your Back because all of the songwriters here will eventually return the favor and cover a song of Gabriel's, to be collected on a sequel. Here's hoping they have better luck. As for this collection, Feels So Unnatural wouldn't have been a bad title, either. | 2010-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Virgin / Real World | February 16, 2010 | 4.5 | b3ff17e2-b83d-4e2f-bc05-9ff4080f4c67 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Sir Richard Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism. On his new Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, Bishop explores the Andulsian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across Morocco's borders. | Sir Richard Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism. On his new Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, Bishop explores the Andulsian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across Morocco's borders. | Sir Richard Bishop: Tangier Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20123-tangier-sessions/ | Tangier Sessions | In the 1920s, a reactionary trend began to take hold in classical music. Composers began to imitate and quote styles from centuries past: particularly, the music of Baroque and Classical masters like Bach and Mozart. Simplicity and symmetry became the order of the day, instead of density and sharp dissonance (hallmarks of the prevailing avant-garde). "Neoclassical" is a fitting descriptor to use when comparing the bulk of Sir Richard Bishop’s solo recordings to the far-flung experiments of the Sun City Girls, his disbanded, performance art-inclined avant-rock trio. As the Girls did, Bishop mixes and matches pan-continental musical styles (from East Asian traditional music to gypsy jazz), but he does so less abrasively: with simple tools (a guitar or two) and little theatricality. As in the most compelling neoclassical compositions, Bishop’s music is driven by clever stylistic juxtapositions and attractive melodicism.
Tangier Sessions, Bishop’s latest album of solo guitar music, was recorded in just a week during a short visit to the Moroccan city. Like much of his output both alone and with the Girls, it’s largely improvised. Bishop circles around and tries out instantiations of a melodic phrase before committing to one, seemingly debating where to move in real time. A particularly clear example of this phenomenon is the speed-ramping "International Zone", which grows in rhythmic complexity and tempo as the guitarist hones in on a central, raga-like melodic pattern.
Stylistically, the album evokes Morocco as a hub of cultural exchange. Bishop often explores the Andalusian flamenco guitar style, infusing it with gestures from across the country’s other borders. In the seductive, cyclical crocheting of "Mirage", there’s traces of the Mali-centered "desert blues," a style sometimes considered to have inspired the American blues, but which now, in contemporary practice, re-emulates it. Elsewhere, Bishop’s haunting melodies recall the sound of the oud, a popular lute-like instrument in North Africa, as well as in the Middle East and Greece.
This image of Moroccan culture as manifold and mysterious is a prevalent one in literature and film, usually contributing to an atmosphere of intrigue or seediness (see Casablanca, Naked Lunch or Jim Jarmusch’s recent Only Lovers Left Alive). Bishop playfully evokes some of the Hollywood Morocco on Tangier Sessions. There is the flamenco chugging of the appropriately titled "Safe House", which comes across like Bishop scoring a farcical chase scene in a spy film. The energetic piece not only breaks up the otherwise meditative album nicely, but seems to acknowledge the music’s inherent cultural tourism, or the way this part of the world has historically captured the Western imagination.
The Sun City Girls’ tendency toward exoticism is hard to avoid; indeed, when doing something like shrieking in faux-Far Eastern gibberish, they push it in their listeners’ faces. Does Bishop’s more polite collage-artistry, too, condescend to and totemize its source material? To some extent (so, often, does the music of John Fahey, Claude Debussy and The Nutcracker), but Bishop’s irreverence doesn’t overshadow the beauty and gentle, sometimes breathtaking intricacy of this music. He’s spent decades getting musical vocabularies from all over the world under his fingers, and even when his improvisations begin to meander, what he creates from his well of options is remarkable and wholly his own. | 2015-02-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-02-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | February 13, 2015 | 7.5 | b406c1fe-b5a6-4072-9d4f-6fb7e436be0e | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
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