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The cosmically minded group featuring rising jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings dances to the apocalypse and pleads for humanity. | The cosmically minded group featuring rising jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings dances to the apocalypse and pleads for humanity. | The Comet Is Coming: Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-comet-is-coming-trust-in-the-lifeforce-of-the-deep-mystery/ | Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery | For the past two years, London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has traveled the globe as one of jazz music’s top performers, lending his hallmark bluster to like-minded artists Makaya McCraven and Moses Sumney, while crafting the sonic direction for two of his three disparate bands: the Caribbean dance-themed Sons of Kemet, the spiritual jazz-focused Shabaka and the Ancestors, and the cosmic jazz-centered the Comet Is Coming. Through a tireless work ethic, Hutchings has become one of the trendiest musicians in all of jazz, and is the leader of a U.K. jazz scene that boasts such names as Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, and Theon Cross.
Yet if there’s a flashpoint of Hutchings’ ascendance, it’s 2016, when his other band, the Comet Is Coming, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize Album of the Year and Shabaka and the Ancestors released an exquisite album called Wisdom of Elders on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label. From there, his name and likeness started appearing everywhere: Hop on his Instagram and Facebook pages, and you’re likely to see Hutchings blaring his sax on stage through grainy video footage, or posing alongside the likes of Kamasi Washington, who’s become a fan of his work. Though Hutchings has been a driving force in the British underground since the early 2010s—having played with a variety of bands, including the punk-focused Melt Yourself Down, and the kaleidoscopic jazz group Polar Bear—it seems the rest of the world is coming around to his magnetic creative artistry.
Of Hutchings’ groups, the Comet Is Coming reaches farthest, and their new album Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery feels directly influenced by the cosmic electronica of Flying Lotus’ Los Angeles and any of Sun Ra’s eccentric jazz. Co-written by Hutchings on sax, Max Hallett on drums, and Dan Leavers on keys, the Comet creates sci-fi-themed blends of jazz painted in dark shades of crimson. Equally nostalgic and progressive, the band mixes the upbeat bounce of 1990s house music with dismal funk and psych-rock, landing on a sound that feels tethered to disaster, like the soundtrack of a party that will soon dissolve. Across this album and the band’s previous work, there’s a sense of cataclysmic despair, that the world is ending and there’s nothing left to do but dance to the apocalypse. If 2017’s Death to the Planet scored Earth’s demise, Lifeforce details its restoration, just as the flames dwindle and the fumes rise from charred soil.
Lifeforce is an album in the truest sense, with each song blending into the next for continuous listening. Mostly low- to mid-tempo, the band skillfully integrates bleak and radiant tones, leading to an impressive nine-track suite of ambient, spoken-word and grime-infused compositions. Take the bookend tracks, “Because the End Is Really the Beginning” and “The Universe Wakes Up,” as examples: They’re both weightless, unfolding in a haze of foggy synth chords, faint drum fills and sullen saxophone wails, at once eliciting thoughts of impending doom and possible hope. Other songs feel especially festive: “Summon the Fire,” “Super Zodiac” and “Timewave Zero” have quick percussion and soaring synth work, and Hutchings accentuates them with turbulent blasts. The saxophonist’s technique centers on high-powered gusts that slowly unfurl until the track’s apex, where he heightens the energy even further with higher-pitched shrieking.
By the time “Unity” comes around, Hutchings takes the steam out of his horn, letting the notes flutter as Hallett and Leavers take center stage. On an album of gripping intensity, this song is the most optimistic, soft drums and oscillating synths conveying the deepest notions of peace. “Blood of the Past” is the album’s clear centerpiece and its heaviest track. Here, the trio produces a menacing instrumental on which poet Kate Tempest delivers a finger-wagging verse to, well, everything—vanity, capitalism, social disconnection, and nonchalance. She speaks the only words we hear on the album, crystallizing the Comet’s masterful release with blunt force impact. “Imagine a culture that has at its root a more soulful connection to land, and to lovers,” Tempest ponders. “...Unable to listen, we keep speaking … unable to notice ourselves, unable to stop and unwilling to learn.” The Comet’s point becomes clear in that moment: Earth’s demise isn’t due to some fiery blast you’d see in a movie, it’s due to the erosion of common decency, and our allegiance to superficial items that validate our existence. Lifeforce is a plea to stay human, and most of all, humane. | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | UMG | March 18, 2019 | 7.8 | 7f367316-6c28-4230-b183-ea45318a79a8 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
The San Antonio-based rapper rides menacing, three-dimensional beats with steely confidence and creative flows, but he’s most interesting as a storyteller. | The San Antonio-based rapper rides menacing, three-dimensional beats with steely confidence and creative flows, but he’s most interesting as a storyteller. | Mike Dimes: In Dimes We Trust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-dimes-in-dimes-we-trust/ | In Dimes We Trust | Mike Dimes is a hip-hop nomad in multiple senses. Part of a military family, he moved across the southeastern and western United States as a child before settling in his birth state of Texas. Dimes originally dreamed of pursuing a career in basketball, but a latent interest in poetry and an influx of rap influences—everyone from 50 Cent and Tupac to A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$—pushed him toward music. His 2021 debut DLOG, released while in college for business management, put him in the same field as artists like Kenny Mason and Grip: lyrically minded spitters comfortable over just about any kind of beat. DLOG’s sample platter of sounds could be hit-or-miss, but Dimes’ steely confidence and flow switch-ups kept the songs on track.
His latest project In Dimes We Trust is more musically focused, foregrounding the bludgeoning low end and minor-key flourishes of Texas and Tennessee hip-hop. He has an ear for the kind of sounds designed to drive both live crowds and headphone fetishists into fits of nirvana, and his best songs revolve around menacing, three-dimensional beats. The gloomy stomp of producer Zuri’s beat for “Paparazzi” evokes vintage Three 6 Mafia and Key Glock in equal measure, while singles “Home” and “No Trends”—produced by Zuri and cvleb and Treetime and Rxkz, respectively—pit victorious samples against weapons-grade 808s. But Dimes is never overwhelmed, his monotone voice cutting through the clatter at every opportunity. Considering that he’s only 21 and still in college, his presence and technique are remarkably sharp—he blends in with the beat without becoming constrained by it, keeping a breakneck pace on “Religion” and finding pockets you might not expect on “Same Gang.”
There’s a handful of lyrical subjects Dimes is keen on: being a better rapper than you; getting more women than you; generally stunting across this plane of existence in ways you could never imagine. But for all his skill and composure, his imagination is pretty limited in scope. His metaphors and punchlines aren’t quite as clever as this level of posturing demands—“I’m a Christian rocking Christian Dior” from “Luv” is one of several that feel basic—and even the sex boasts occasionally blur together. If it weren’t for the beats, some of the bars on “Jiggalo” and “Backroom” would be interchangeable. It’s a problem fellow subgenre-straddling rappers like IDK frequently encounter: No outright granola bars stand out, and that’s almost worse than if they did.
What is memorable—what balances out the patches of indistinct writing—are Dimes’ delivery and flows. He has a way of finding the melody in the amelodic, of stretching words until they snap like glow sticks. Take the way he chops up the names of all the women he’s seeing halfway through the second verse of “Jiggalo” (“Stephanie, Bethany, I don’t know, something with Effanie”); or the way his hook on “No Trends” careens around the drums and sirens of the beat like an inner tube through a waterslide. The excitement stems from the feel and application of Dimes’ words as much as from their meaning, verses and hooks feeding off the electricity of his vocal arrangements.
That isn’t to say that Dimes’ words carry no weight. He’s much more interesting as a storyteller than as a punchline rapper. Little bits of autobiography—telling off a naysaying teacher at the beginning of “Paparazzi”; the truncated path to success he lays out near the end of closing track “Who Is Mike Dimes?” (“Fourteen, saw a dream, 15, made a scheme/Sixteen, made a team, 21, love the green”)—illuminate his come-up and flesh out his personality. In Dimes We Trust inches audiences closer to a full understanding of his purpose. No songs here approach the bare-all storytelling of DLOG standout “Drive By” or his TikTok smash “My Story,” but his mood and control are fierce and he moves through beats like oil through water. Even when Mike Dimes’ writing blends in with the zeitgeist, his performance will grab your ears and shake your brain for loose change. | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Encore | March 23, 2022 | 6.8 | 7f37a672-ecbb-47a4-acf7-49e571b19b84 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Following up their remarkable LOSE, the Staten Island rockers try to fight grief with dense, hook-filled songs about the intrinsic value of being alive. | Following up their remarkable LOSE, the Staten Island rockers try to fight grief with dense, hook-filled songs about the intrinsic value of being alive. | Cymbals Eat Guitars: Pretty Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22397-cymbals-eat-guitars-pretty-years/ | Pretty Years | Cymbals Eat Guitars’ 2009 debut album Why There Are Mountains arrived at the very tail end of indie-rock’s halcyon days when it was still possible for a new band to earn a fast following just by doing the whole Built to Spill/Modest Mouse/Pixies thing well. That’s not to say they didn’t deserve their success. They were always more than the sum of their influences, considerably craftier and less predictable than most of the era’s ’90s enthusiasts. But as the public’s appetite for meat-and-potatoes indie rock waned, the band found that their fast rise didn’t buy them much loyalty. The group’s prickly yet exhilarating 2011 follow-up Lenses Alien demanded more from listeners than most were willing to give, and although their more immediate, emotional knockout punch of a third record LOSE seemed like a prime candidate for a second breakthrough, its reach didn’t live up to they hype. For all the accolades, as the band bluntly told Spin, “It didn’t sell.”
And so now a band that once stumbled into an audience now finds themselves scraping for one, a cruel reversal of fortunes for a group that’s making the best music of their career. But perhaps timing could work in their favor again. The emo revival has created a home for loud, openhearted guitar rock that skirts conventional notions of “cool,” and although Cymbals Eat Guitars aren’t by any means a complete match for that scene, circumstances have aligned the two. The band spent the two brief years between LOSE and their fourth album Pretty Years on the road with acts like Say Anything, Brand New, and Modern Baseball, so it may not be entirely a coincidence that Pretty Years, while holding true to its own distinctive aesthetic vision, confronts the same vital concerns that have made the best albums from emo’s modern crop resonate so deeply. Like recent works from The Hotelier and Sorority Noise, it’s about nothing less than the intrinsic value of being alive.
Some of those leaders of emo’s fourth wave have gone so far as to cast their music as a kind of support group, recording albums that double as manuals for coping with hardship. Pretty Years stops short of that. Despite the comparatively upbeat outlook of these songs—a shift that’s underscored by the album’s jaunty tempos—words of comfort don’t come naturally to singer Joseph D’Agostino. He spent much of Cymbals Eat Guitars’ grief-sick last album processing the death of a close friend, so even as he looks to better days here, he remains guarded and deeply skeptical of any good fortune. “It's as much of a declaration of love as I’ll ever muster,” he trills on “Close.” He’s trying to channel Robert Smith’s heavenly sigh, but his words don’t soar the way Smith’s do. His rasp imparts even his sweetest sentiments with a crotchety sting. “Can’t believe the shit that we were promised really might exist,” he marvels on “Have a Heart,” but it takes the song’s twinkling, Johnny Marr-esque guitars to confirm that, no, he’s not being sarcastic. He really is in love.
Every Cymbals Eat Guitars album has been dense, but none have covered as much ground as effectively as Pretty Years. With the help of producer John Congleton, who continues his remarkable streak of bringing out the best in nearly every act he works with, the band nods to some of the wilder arrangements of ’80s pop-rock records like Born in the U.S.A., Brothers in Arms, and Head on the Door. Jubilant E Street Band saxophones cut against D’Agostino’s voice on “Wish,” while the pumping “4th of July, Philadelphia (SANDY)” charges forward with the pageantry and sparkle of a lost Sandinista! gem. Pretty Years’ colorful arrangements keep the mood light even when the subject matter is anything but. On “Well,” bright Duran Duran synths soften the blow of D’Agostino’s harrowing confession: “Think I need help/Wanna get well.”
So D’Agostino still has some things to work through, even if he’s come a long way from the days of hyperventilating at the prospect of dirty hypodermic needles hidden in movie theater seat cushions. The terrible thing about anxiety, as anybody who’s ever suffered it can attest, is that there’s no permanent fix for it. It does get better over time, maybe even better than you could have hoped, yet you can never be certain that it isn’t still there, hiding dormant somewhere in your chest, waiting to throw off your heartbeat at the least expected moment. On the closer “Shrine,” D’Agostino confronts it head on, testing his progress by joining the family of his deceased friend for a meal commemorating his birthday. That prospect might have thrown him into fits just an album ago, but here things go about as well as you could hope, given the circumstances. “We laugh and drink and eat,” D’Agostino sings, “but we’re all just wishing you were here.” It’s not quite a happy ending, but it’s a fitting final anecdote for an album that so movingly testifies to the difficulty of appreciating what you have while still reconciling what you’ve lost. | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sinderlyn | September 16, 2016 | 8 | 7f3c95ce-4b1c-4cee-b759-cdaae730c17c | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | 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 Missy Elliott’s debut, a radically empathetic statement of self. | 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 Missy Elliott’s debut, a radically empathetic statement of self. | Missy Elliott: Supa Dupa Fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/missy-elliott-supa-dupa-fly/ | Supa Dupa Fly | In the summer of 1997, following the murders of both 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., hip-hop underwent a transformation. Amid the continued rise of Clinton-era “tough on crime” policies, the unexpected and widespread popularity of gangsta rap from the projects to the suburbs showed no signs of stopping. But the music industry itself felt bogged down by the real-life violence that rap stars spoke of. As a rising star, Missy Elliott was frequently hired by Bad Boy Records to write for some of its hottest stars, and she even ran into Biggie Smalls the night he was killed. But rather than dwell on the tragic murder and roiling violence of rap at the time, Missy sought to capture the feeling of a generation breaking out of societal norms in the name of amusement and pleasure with her debut album, Supa Dupa Fly.
When faced with times of escalation, the Black community often folds within itself to find solutions. With hip-hop, the Black youth that had fought and raged to be heard saw themselves at the helm of what would become a billion-dollar industry. By the late ’90s, rap had shifted from gritty biography to decadent stories about children of the crack era growing up to be millionaires off their own talents and oral history. Those who had been marginalized were now the Black nouveau riche—a movement led in the East by Bad Boy Records. The label’s music focused on a new class of black millionaires who wanted to talk more about what they were looking forward to rather than leaving behind, and Missy was right there in the mix.
Though Missy was mostly writing for R&B stars and was then known as a singer, it seemed inevitable that she would try her hand at rapping. The late ’80s and early ’90s had introduced New Jack Swing: a fusion of hip-hop rhythms, samples, and production techniques with urban contemporary R&B. The success of Teddy Riley, a Virginia native and father of New Jack Swing ushered in the reign of the Neptunes and Timbaland: producer powerhouses who would eventually become titans of the industry by running with new styles of production. By virtue of its geography, Virginia connected the tenacious sounds of the Northeast and the looser style of the South. It was this very storm that brewed up the magic of Missy and her partner in beats, Timbaland.
High school friends who had met in their home state of Virginia, Missy and Timbaland spent the better part of the ’90s writing for almost every major R&B act at the top of the charts, including SWV, Jodeci, and Aaliyah. By the July 15, 1997 release of Supa Dupa Fly Missy was already the head of her own imprint, The GoldMind Inc, which co-released the project. Considering the male dominated landscape of the era, this feat was not only incredibly impressive for a female rapper but an undeniable catalyst for the way the genre would take shape in the new millennium.
Hailing from Portsmouth, Virginia, Melissa Elliott had spent her entire life onstage, even performing for her own dolls at a young age. Getting her start singing in church, she became a regular fixture in talent shows across the city and state. She first linked up with Timbaland while working on material for her all-female quartet, Sista. The group got a break when they caught Jodeci’s DeVanté Swing backstage at a show; he took the group on. Unfortunately, the Sista project was shelved and Swing’s label, Swing Mob, later shuttered, but Missy took it as a lesson to become well-versed in songwriting and production. Timbaland has said that working with Missy was what first introduced him to the idea of melodies and made him think of his beats in song form.
While much of the music of the time was powered by well-known samples, including Bad Boy’s hits such as “Mo Money Mo Problems” (which flipped Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out”) and “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” (based on Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”), Timbaland and Missy preferred not to sample—and if they did, it had to be interesting. Timbaland would speed up vocal samples just to use as them as a bass line. He used breakbeats in a unique way, too, employing them to create pauses and longer stretches of silence. The dead space became its own canvas within the beat where Timbaland could use overlays of beatboxing, clicks, and just about any cool sound, from a baby’s cry to an Egyptian flute. But it was the intuitive songwriting style and unique imprint of Missy’s pen that would make the duo a top-tier act.
By summer 1997, Missy had just finished writing nine tracks for Aaliyah’s One in a Million and made her debut as a rapper with a feature on Gina Thompson’s “The Things You Do.” Supa Dupa Fly was not a project she had long considered making but rather a reaction to the demand for her talent; the record was recorded within two weeks. “I did this album for my fans and not to make money, because I’m already making money with my songs,” she told interviewers around its release. Timbaland produced the entire project, and, together, they delivered a perfectly edited joint résumé.
It is impossible to separate the two throughout any of the 17 tracks. The record even has moments where they sample themselves, bringing back beats they had previously used for other artists: The syrupy guitar loop of SWV’s “Can We”—a song that notably starts with Missy’s soft whispers of being “supa dupa fly”—is interpolated on three separate tracks. It becomes a signature of sorts on an audio collage of Afrofuturism and Black Cool within the pop space.
Throughout the album, Missy follows the algorithm of pop lyrics: short and catchy phrases that boil down raw feelings in real time. However, her concerns were never with the sunny side of love but rather the work and pain that it takes for one to find real affection in this world. Tracks like “Beep Me 911” and “Sock It 2 Me” speak of a need for sex more than true love. “I was looking for affection/So I decided to go/Swing that dick in my direction/I’ll be out of control,” she sings. Missy’s brand of nasty singing was less Anita Baker and more in line with the hypersexualized bars of the likes of Lil’ Kim (who would become one of her best friends) and Foxy Brown.
This talk was especially innovative coming from a curvy, gender-bending woman who often appeared in exaggerated and animated form in her videos. In the iconic visual for “The Rain(Supa Dupa Fly),” Missy appears as a Michelin woman, dancing into the camera while wearing a giant plastic bag suit and biker’s helmet. The costume made her look even bigger than she was but also took away the obviousness that she was not a thin Lolita type. In the same video she wears a straight wig and sits on a hill twirling it in caricature of Lil Bo Peep. “We wanted to make fun of the ways record companies try to make black women look white,” Missy has said. “Fake hair, fake music.”
She was quite aware of how she looked and how the mostly male-audience of rap would receive her but she did not cower away from being the sexual aggressor. Missy rapped and sang about the woman who was self-assured and still sensitive to heartbreak; one that knew what she wanted enough to demand it but was prone to getting hurt. Even better, because of her “lack” of sexual appeal to the market of the time, she was able to skip the highly-sexualized performative nature of her female rap contemporaries. Many of those acts spun objectification into sexual empowerment, and Missy also empowered those who may have been told that their bodies were not attractive and therefore not valuable to consumers. What sells is not real life, and she made it clear that women like her have sex too. She also did not look down on her peers. Her focus was innovation, not morality.
One of the LP’s strongest ballads, “Best Friends,” featuring Aaliyah, tells the story of a woman who wants to protect her pathetic man in spite of what her friends may say. “My best friend say she sick of me cryin’ on the phone/Tellin’ how the men be doggin’ me/My best friend say don’t tell her nothin’ bout me and you/’Cause she ain’t showin’ me no sympathy,” Missy cries before belting out a chorus that declares her defiant commitment to be there for this wayward lover and whatever he may need. These everyday stories of love give her writing style the freedom to be as empathetic as it is explicit. Missy brings the biographical component of rap full circle for women here, not as just a raunchy counterpoint to its misogyny but an entirely new safe space for women to express their sexual liberation in dulcet tones.
Better yet, she was able to make her music contextually specific to its audience. Some of the album’s initial reviews criticized Missy’s writing skills, claiming that the lyrics were lacking in substance and structure. But whereas contemporary pop had been mostly for a white audience, R&B was a decidedly urban (read: Black) art form. 1997’s top love songs were far from sexually explorative: LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” and Backstreet Boys” “As Long as You Love Me” spoke of love as a virtuous happenstance, and heartbreak as a calamity that would stop all motor function. Missy spoke of tortured love at the hands of men that were not quite respectful and most definitely bad for you-- the kind of relationships you needed friends to survive through—and she spoke of it in the language of the hoods she came from. What some wrote off as “lazy” and “uninspired” lyrics were simply in AAVE, speaking directly to the audience from which they came. On “Beep Me 911,” Missy takes on the role of a spurned lover who has had enough of being humiliated but may still hear him out. “Why you played on me, wasn’t I good enough for you/All those other girls you’ve been with can’t do like I do/Gave you all my dough when you needed it all the time/And if you planning on leaving me again then give me a sign.” These were not linear characters with strict moral standards on how they could be treated but real people with flaws who went against what was best in the name of comfort or even orgasm. These were topics that everyone could empathize with, marketed directly to those who informed the context.
Supa Dupa Fly speaks to the way Missy stuck to having fun with the music. She and Timbaland saw a opening to transpose the outlook of this young Black culture class and the very sound it used to define itself. What followed Supa Dupa Fly was many years of the industry attempting to reproduce what Missy and Timbo had created organically and by the time “Get Your Freak On” became an international success in 2001, much of the urban and pop landscape was employing Timbaland’s sound. But no one would ride his beats like Missy. On “They Don’t Wanna Fuck Wit Me,” the pair do back to back, almost freestyle verses, talking shit about their innate ability to crush tracks. Missy notes the things that seem to irritate her detractors, though they can’t stop listening. Over a sparse beat she rhymes, “I come back into my flow/My people just don’t know/They hate the way that I hee/They hate the way that I hee-haw/Cuz I got too much dough/You know my steelo/So what you come here fo’?” She brings back to focus the new money of rap’s Golden Age, which not only bought her a new lifestyle but the space and privilege to enjoy being herself. | 2018-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | EastWest | November 4, 2018 | 9 | 7f3d4d11-6286-4771-9760-14478b49a0db | Judnick Mayard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judnick-mayard/ | |
Guided by Voice’s 24th studio album is a 32-track double-album that contains plenty of tiny details to savor. It is impressively low on filler from Robert Pollard. | Guided by Voice’s 24th studio album is a 32-track double-album that contains plenty of tiny details to savor. It is impressively low on filler from Robert Pollard. | Guided by Voices: August by Cake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23094-august-by-cake/ | August by Cake | For better or worse, Guided by Voices leader Robert Pollard has always staunchly resisted the quality-over-quantity rule. In addition to the band’s proper albums, GBV has now issued five rarities box sets, each containing 100 tracks or more. So even fans will likely shrug knowing that August by Cake, GBV’s 24th studio album, is a 32-track double-album. Pollard also claims that it’s his 100th release overall (knock yourself out if you want to go combing the internet for an exact count).
A good deal of Pollard’s charm stems from his willingness to release unformed sketches of songs that barely develop past the work-in-progress stage. But Pollard’s prolific output can also be read as an obsessive quest to master the art of songwriting. And once you hear his most committed songs, it can be frustrating to return to his shoebox of cassette demos. Take the string-laced 2004 tune “Window of My World.” In under three minutes, Pollard steers the band through folk balladry, orchestral pop, and dreamy, anthemic psychedelic rock—an irresistibly catchy confection of a song that made you wonder why Pollard didn’t push himself more often. Strangely enough, though, August by Cake benefits from Pollard not trying too hard.
Since their 2010 reformation, Guided by Voices have nearly doubled the pace of their output, releasing two and even three albums in the same year. Somewhere along the way, Pollard crossed over from displaying a lack of effort into embodying effortlessness, and in terms of scope and flow, August by Cake coalesces into one of Pollard’s most complete efforts. As always, several of the new tunes consist of one idea repeated in trademark GBV fashion and then abruptly cut short. Sequenced without pauses between songs, the album surprisingly doesn’t become exhausting because, for once, Pollard doesn’t disrupt his own flow.
In fact, more than Pollard or any of his bandmates, it’s the song sequencing that steals the show here. When a bright church organ swoops in to lift the woozy “Generox Gray Ⓡ” out of its downtempo doldrums, your ears immediately perk up—for all of seven seconds, that is, until the song is over. Rather than doom the track to its fate as yet another incomplete song fragment, Pollard gives the brevity of the organ a purpose by segueing directly into the faux-electronic drumbeat of “When We All Hold Hands at the End of the World.”
By the time you get to the premature fade-out on fifth track “We Liken the Sun,” the album’s cadence is established and the entrance of the next song actually feels welcome. From there, there’s no shortage of small-but-significant attributes to pick apart and savor over repeated listens. The harmonies and guitar wash of “Goodbye Note” recall Bob Mould in Sugar, and bassist Mark Shue’s lead vocals on “Absent the Man” are a breath of fresh air. But most noteworthy is the absence of Pollard’s typical filler, shared before it had a chance to blossom.
Like any songwriter steadily plying his craft, Pollard has grown almost imperceptibly understated and even tasteful with his decisions. August by Cake is as much a sum of those choices as it is of songs. After over 30 years in pursuit of the perfect song, Pollard has finally started to recognize the album for everything it can be. | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. | April 11, 2017 | 7.1 | 7f3e71c1-56cc-46ef-87de-ceabba75e8e2 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The second album from the Albany freak-folk group is vivid and dreamlike, revealing a meticulous attention to detail. | The second album from the Albany freak-folk group is vivid and dreamlike, revealing a meticulous attention to detail. | Bruiser and Bicycle: Holy Red Wagon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruiser-and-bicycle-holy-red-wagon/ | Holy Red Wagon | When Bruiser and Bicycle released their 2019 debut, Woods Come Find Me, the Animal Collective comparisons were inevitable. Though unsuspecting and humble in nature, their lo-fi sound tapped into similar vocal hijinks and manic acoustic arrangements as Sung Tongs, prompting a pavlovian response for anyone who ever bookmarked Said the Gramophone on Internet Explorer. Founded by multi-instrumentalists Nick Whittemore and Keegan Graziane, Bruiser and Bicycle spent four years perfecting their follow-up, Holy Red Wagon, and honing their identity away from their freak-folk touchstones. While the comparisons are still easy to draw, the band embarks on its own winding adventures with the help of drummer Joe Taurone. What sounds at first like free-spirited chaos settles into a strange rhythm, like three different heartbeats that just happen to intertwine snugly.
Though Whittemore and Graziane started writing Holy Red Wagon pre-pandemic, the restlessness of 2020 influenced the spirit of the project. The two started individually writing and demoing tracks to show each other—a first for the band—and continuously modified them as time stretched on forever. “I had this need to create as big of a space as possible through music because I was being so compressed in [my studio apartment],” Graziane told Post-Trash. After all that refining, their songs evolved into intricate, tightly crocheted doilies that are dizzying up close but transform into a singular design from afar—hence the median song runtime of seven minutes. On standout “Unknown Orchard,” a retelling of the Garden of Eden through the eyes of a tour guide pointing out the forbidden knowledge dangling within reach, a claustrophobic 5/4 time signature expands into something playful and spacious. Guitars flicker atop a jovial indie-rock hook before segueing into freeform jazz-funk. It’s one of many mid-song change-ups, a staple of their songwriting that reflects a desire to indulge while keeping the overall delivery tidy and light.
Bruiser and Bicycle allotted another lengthy chunk of time for production and mixing, allowing for a similarly meticulous process. Inspired by Dave Fridmann’s production on the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic, they asked producer Scoops Dardaris to emphasize the drums for a loud, saturated tone and a hi-fi sheen on the rest of the instruments. You can hear the effect toward the end of “1000 Engines” when Taurone transitions from a jittery syncopated beat fit for the Dodos into a blown-out crash that swallows the mix whole: drilling the snare, showering the toms in a rain of bullets, and rattling his sticks on the cymbals. This attention to detail is evident through each song: the keyboard straight out of a ’70s horror film that buzzes loudly over the start of “Superdealer,” the squealing synth of a dystopian radio dial in “Lunette Fields Speak,” the searing guitar notes over carnivalesque melodies in “Aerial Shipyards.” Holy Red Wagon overflows with these production tricks that roughen up the texture while smoothing the edges of their moving parts.
As staunch congregants at the altar of multi-tracking, Bruiser and Bicycle build their songs like post-modern skyscrapers, stacking level after level until it all seems precarious. That density can be deceptive; take “Forks of the Jailhouse,” a breezy jangle-pop earworm reminiscent of Real Estate that, in reality, has so many layers that it initially crashed Pro Tools. Their maximalist approach surfaces most obviously in Whittemore and Graziane’s shared vocals, which are key to those Animal Collective comparisons. Whittemore channels his inner Avey Tare with warbled falsettos and giddy enunciation, especially in the wordless harmonies of “Aerial Shipyards” and the descending vocal lines of “1000 Engines.” Closer “We Thought the Sky” picks up where Fall Be Kind’s “What Would I Want? Sky” left off, shooing away the 2009 clouds of bong smoke for a sensation more like heat shimmering above scalding pavement. They go full power-pop on the vocal harmonies, even breaking out the “ba ba ba’s” before a surrealist synth melody wiggles into frame and their yells turn psychedelic: “Give me your arms in the sunlight/We wanna build the sky.” It’s a dreamlike pursuit, but Bruiser and Bicycle make it clear they’re up to the task. | 2023-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | April 18, 2023 | 7.5 | 7f463703-bdee-442c-be27-62ea5781cd59 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
On his debut album, the Toronto artist provides his origin story, and proves just how hard it is to escape from the long shadow of Drake. | On his debut album, the Toronto artist provides his origin story, and proves just how hard it is to escape from the long shadow of Drake. | Tory Lanez: I Told You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22211-i-told-you/ | I Told You | Toronto singer and rapper Tory Lanez has his eyes fixed on mega stardom. “My name is Daystar Peterson. One day I’ma be the biggest artist in the whole world,” he says casually in the opening moments of his debut album, I Told You. But for now, he isn’t even the biggest artist in his own city. Lanez is among a group of Toronto artists trying to escape Drake’s long shadow through emulation. He has been pestering the OVO boss in an attempt to get his attention and by extension, the world’s, and Drake eventually gave him half a bar on the Meek Mill diss “Summer Sixteen” with a dig at the so-called "New Toronto," the class of up-and-comers molded in Drake’s image.
This shot, in a way, legitimized Lanez as a Drake adversary or at least a potential Drake understudy, and Lanez has since produced a platinum single, the Brownstone-sampling “Say It.” In Lanez’s mind, these constitute huge stepping stones in his career, one that started when he was kicked out of his grandmother’s house. I Told You chronicles this journey, relying heavily on skits and an out-of-body Menace II Society-esque narration ploy to tell its story, which basically is a long-winded build to (as its title implies) force-feeding doubters crow, cycling through several iterations of Drake in the process. As a title, I Told You isn’t a far cry from Thank Me Later.
To be clear, Tory Lanez will never be Drake. He doesn’t have the knack for hooks, he isn’t better at writing raps than the Drake brain trust (or at making songs, for that matter), and he has a much tougher time finding the right rapping to singing ratio. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to remake Take Care on his debut. Some songs smolder into other attached songs, like “I Told You / Another One” and “Dirty Money.” Others try to dole out that patented half-sung rapping that has become a Drake staple. And “Loners Blvd” is a straight up “Look What You’ve Done” knockoff in both intent and tone. There are even samples of “We’ll Be Fine” in “4am Flex” and “Friends With Benefits.” Give Lanez credit, though: He has succeeded where several others have failed in playing Drake’s game (politicking in interviews but waging a war of subliminals) and existing in his world and sonic space (c.f. the robbery he pulled on his version of “Controlla” or his play for world audiences with the dancehall-flecked single “Luv.”) In a post-VIEWS universe, it isn’t impossible to imagine a scenario where Lanez cuts the distance between them.
Over the last few years, Tory Lanez has grown into a relatively versatile artist, a better singer than rapper, but decent at both. I Told You is a sonic variety pack compared to his last two mixtapes The New Toronto and Chixtape 3, both of which tried to split his sound cleanly down the middle. His debut is an introduction not only to his story, but to his full skill set. He isn’t a particularly quotable rapper, but he strings together some interesting cadences on “To D.R.E.A.M.,” which, in the narrative flow, functions as his “Backseat Freestyle.” His falsetto slips into the melting guitar licks on “Guns and Roses,” a song that toys with a simple but effective ‘love is war’ metaphor. “Cold Hard Love” is like putting songs from two different Weeknd eras together at the seams, and it’s an intoxicating brew of atmosphere-warping R&B and pop zip.
The longer I Told You runs, though, the more it unravels. It’s an overly ambitious project that attempts to shoot a movie and forgets it’s an album in the process. Sometimes in an effort to pat himself on the back, Lanez reduces songs to plot points in his own myth-making. He could’ve shaved at least 10 minutes off the 76-minute runtime just by cutting the fat. He suffers from Travis Scott Syndrome: the tendency to overdo. Songs don’t always need big second acts or elaborate arrangements. Sometimes, less is more. “Flex,” a song almost entirely made of hooks, is two hooks too long. “4am Flex” could’ve done without the rapped outro. Everything doesn’t need a skit.
Some songs here are hastily penned with only exposition in mind like a pivot moment in the Fox industry drama “Empire.” Others are jammed in completely ignoring the flow of the album, making room where there isn’t any through dialogue or soliloquy. It’s also ironic that an album this long somehow rushes the ending; the climax of his rags-to-riches yarn is fumbled in a frenzy of singles. Tory Lanez is a promising talent who has a long way to go before he can be considered Drake’s peer, but he’s already nailed at least one Drake-ism: the bloated, overwrought album. | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Interscope | August 24, 2016 | 6.3 | 7f508600-73fb-4e69-bc4c-c7f92e005573 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
After freeing himself from the feuds and narrative that dragged him down, Meek Mill’s third studio album is a comeback by any measure, honest and gripping. | After freeing himself from the feuds and narrative that dragged him down, Meek Mill’s third studio album is a comeback by any measure, honest and gripping. | Meek Mill: Wins and Losses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meek-mill-wins-and-losses/ | Wins and Losses | Meek Mill spent much of the last two years trying to understand how a ghostwriting bombshell dropped mid-Twitter rant could backfire so tremendously. Less than 140 characters completely changed his trajectory. When he exposed Drake as a Quentin Miller mouthpiece, he couldn’t have anticipated the blowback—“Charged Up” and “Back to Back”—would send his career spiraling. Long after the matter was closed he was still rapping about it constantly, as if dazed and trying to make sense of what happened. Many deemed the series of Drake disses, which would come to include the “Summer Jam Screen” moment and “Summer Sixteen,” as resounding losses, the type rappers don’t recover from (ask Ja Rule). Earlier this year, the other shoe dropped: Meek and Nicki Minaj unceremoniously split after two years of dating, and the subs went flying in song. Minaj invited Drake to send stray shots at Meek on “No Frauds.” These moments have come to define Meek for many who were only casually invested in the first place. He is continuously addressing these setbacks because no one will let him forget about them.
His third album, Wins and Losses, assesses what it really means to be defeated. In an interview with Atlanta’s Streetz 94.5, he clarified the album’s ambitions: “I just wanted to give people a real perspective of my life, what we call wins and what we call losses. I lost my case, we lost Lil Snupe, Chino lost his brother. Where we come from, that’s a loss. When you talk L’s and W’s, you get an L, that mean you got life in jail. It’s critical. It ain’t what they talking about.” Much like his major label debut, Dreams and Nightmares, his new album juxtaposes rap dreams and hood realities, but draws more deliberate distinctions. He recognizes rapping as salvation from street life, not some gladiatorial clash inside an echo chamber. Meek makes the case there’s more than one way to win, and that being bested in the rap coliseum isn’t nearly as devastating a blow as seeing close friends die. Subliminal shots don’t hit the way real ones do. The album is a comeback by any measure, honest and gripping.
Rap is largely a perception game (as Meek’s MMG boss can attest to), and on Wins and Losses Meek attempts to change his narrative using a different perspective. Here, he isn’t Drake’s also-ran or Nicki Minaj’s ex; he’s the ultimate underdog, a battle-rapping corner boy who came from nothing and gained everything. “I just made like 20 Ms, they say it’s an L (what?)/Niggas prayin’ that I fall and I wish ‘em well,” he raps on “Issues,” making light of his perceived misfortune and those who want to see him fail. The message is even clearer on “1942 Flows”: “I done seen all these niggas try to downplay my dreams/So I’ma give it to ‘em every time I’m on the scene.” Chasing dreams is Meek’s guiding principle. He’s always been about triumph in the face of adversity. He finds solace in knowing he’s achieved all he set out to, and that he wasn’t even supposed to be here.
Aside from trading in his Rolex for a Patek, and Maybachs for Wraiths, Meek settles back into his usual rhythm on Wins and Losses. He wasn’t rapping poorly on his 4/4 EP or his DC4 mixtape, but Drake had taken up so much space in Meek’s consciousness (and ours) that he was dictating many of Meek’s raps and how people chose to listen to them. Across 67 minutes and 17 tracks, Meek gets back to what he does best, diagramming a tumultuous life lived—praying for bricks, prison stints, starting out broke and earning millions, losing a brother and memorializing him in ice. He sees stunting as a salute to the dead. “Rockin’ all this ice, I’m just tryna hide my scars tho/Somethin’ bout that Wraith and them lights, how them stars glow/Give me motivation,” he raps on “These Scars.” Alongside Young Thug on “We Ball,” a sparse thumper driven by Thug accents, he laments lost comrades, vowing to honor them and provide for those still living. “Heavy Heart” indicts betrayers and defiantly challenges naysayers. He’s sharp and adrenalized, even in mourning.
The most moving Meek bars use success as a lens through which to understand misery, reflecting on a distressing past, measuring the distance between fame and struggle, and finding the overlaps. It is a constant balance, as displayed on “Heavy Heart”: “Shit I’d rather work and walk ‘fore I ride luxury with niggas that don't fuck with me/I’m startin’ to hate this fame shit, look what it done to me.” Wins and Losses considers the trappings of celebrity better than any other Meek project. There is never a sense of calm in his raps; he’s always on edge. You get the feeling that recent events have left Meek not knowing who to trust, and his music carries that anxiety.
Some songs are rehashes, like “Connect the Dots,” a Rick Ross collaboration that evokes past team-ups like “So Sophisticated.” And “Ball Player” is just one of a handful of tracks that should’ve gotten the axe; redundancy is an issue on the album, as it is on any Meek album (so much so that twice he addresses listeners critical of his endless Rollie raps). He operates in finite space at polar extremes: agony or exuberance. But Meek does challenge himself, and those who suggest he’s merely a shout rapper, on Wins and Losses: “Fall Thru” slathers on the Auto-Tune for a more chic sound; “Open” packs rapid fire flows into a muted sex jam; “Young Black America” turns a heavy sample of JAY-Z’s “Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)” into a chilling 13th audiobook. When tested to come up with his most insightful work and justify his missteps, he delivers compelling alternate truths. Wins and Losses shows the rap game is much harder to score than one might think. | 2017-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Maybach Music Group / Atlantic | July 27, 2017 | 7.4 | 7f5f42ce-08b2-478d-bea3-f2f361e109d9 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Chicago psych trio’s loops and layers seem to play tricks on time: Long songs fly by quickly, and short pieces feel expansive. | The Chicago psych trio’s loops and layers seem to play tricks on time: Long songs fly by quickly, and short pieces feel expansive. | Bitchin Bajas: Bajascillators | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bitchin-bajas-bajascillators/ | Bajascillators | Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas make languid, slowly developing music, relying on boundless repetition rather than big changes to move forward. But compared to previous full-lengths—like 2014’s 76-minute self-titled album and 2017’s 80-minute Bajas Fresh—Bajascillators is surprisingly compact. On each of the four tracks, Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan start with minimal loops, add concentric layers, and crest into multiphonic bliss. They still stretch and float, utilizing a score of instruments including keyboards, reeds, and woodwinds. But everything here is focused and relatively efficient, making for a sharp distillation of the band’s core strengths. If you could squeeze 47 minutes of music onto a 7", Bajascillators would fit that format well.
Time has always been a malleable concept for Bitchin Bajas. Their open-ended approach lets sounds grow but never stagnate, so the trio can make long songs seem to fly by quickly and short pieces feel expansive. On Bajascillators, each track is roughly the same length—the shortest runs nearly 10 minutes, the longest 14—yet each one facilitates a significantly different temporal perception. Opener “Amorpha” hits the ground running with a mesh of marimba-style loops— aided by Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse software—and sprints toward the finish line. That’s followed by the airy, glacial “Geomancy,” whose sparse tones and deliberately paced chords evoke a film slowed down to the point where you can see the shift between each frame.
When it comes to messing with perception, the most dazzling piece on Bajascillators is “World B. Free.” Named after a legendary basketball player who himself seemed to defy the laws of physics, the piece starts distant and subtle, with a high-pitched drone slowly crawling in from the horizon, as if the track were an extension of “Geomancy.” A few minutes in, a circling synth slips under a clarinet-like melody, and the loops begin to multiply. Soon, innumerable sounds are crossing paths and spawning new patterns, and “World B. Free” clicks into a busy pace. Then it fades again, melting into echoing chimes and dying trails, like the last evidence of a rocket shot into space.
Many of those kinds of sparks and embers on Bajascillators are heard best through headphones. Playing in the background, the album can come off as merely soothing, but get up close and you’ll notice many more patterns and curves than the surface suggests. That effect is clearest on closer “Quakenbrück,” the catchiest cut here. Driven forward by the drumming of guest Rex McMurry, it rapidly grows into motorik space -rock, sounding like classic Bajas as well as the band McMurry shares with Crain and Frye, Cave. If that means this isn’t a big change of pace from the trio’s previous work, that’s no problem. Bitchin Bajas’ music is about keeping on, and Bajasicllators does that as well as anything in their discography. | 2022-09-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-06T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Drag City | September 6, 2022 | 7.6 | 7f620af7-ad5d-4d30-b783-f7b2f5ac73b7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The ninth album from Ben Gibbard and Co. is their strongest album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition for its rare moments of shining, indie-pop songwriting. | The ninth album from Ben Gibbard and Co. is their strongest album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition for its rare moments of shining, indie-pop songwriting. | Death Cab for Cutie: Thank You For Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-cab-for-cutie-thank-you-for-today/ | Thank You For Today | On “Gold Rush,” the first single from Thank You for Today, Ben Gibbard waxes about the many ways his native Seattle has changed over the past two decades, mourning memories of old buildings and intimate moments under street lamps before sighing: “Please don’t change/Stay the same.” The accompanying video follows suit, a dorky-haircut take on the Verve’s iconic “Bittersweet Symphony” visual that features Gibbard getting knocked around by rude passersby during a daytime neighborhood stroll, ending up trapped in a sea of pedestrians glued to their phones. The get-off-my-lawn-ness of it all isn’t fresh territory for Death Cab, a band reputed for cloying sincerity that has nonetheless occasionally showed some teeth regarding the ephemera of modern life. Recall the closing moments of 1998’s Something About Airplanes’ “Amputations,” which samples a speech that features the following excerpt: “In this modern day, we have instant coffee and instant tea—instant disbelief, that’s the reason we will never become anything.”
But while “Amputations” is indicative of Death Cab’s early, beloved Barsuk days—chiming guitars, soft-focus songwriting, Gibbard’s endearingly unadorned vocals—”Gold Rush” is one of a few moments on Thank You for Today that embody the lows of the band’s 2010s output. Constructed around a sample of Yoko Ono’s “Mind Train,” the song feels inert in its steady chug, with watery processing laid atop Gibbard’s vocal take. Thank You for Today marks the first album Death Cab have put to tape since longtime member and in-house producer Chris Walla’s departure, but it’s the second record of theirs helmed by studio vet Rich Costey, whose credits include several Muse albums and Interpol’s divisive major-label move Our Love to Admire. Once again, his production touches lend these 10 songs a competent, anonymous sheen.
While it’s tempting to fully blame Costey’s presence for Thank You for Today’s emptier moments, the fault unmistakably lays with Gibbard and the gang. The album’s faults are a byproduct of Death Cab’s tendency to dip their toes into textures incongruous with Gibbard’s songwriting, which emerged around their 2008 LP Narrow Stairs. While that album found great success in exploring a variety of styles, from Pet Sounds chamber-pop to tricky math-rock breakdowns, its 2011 follow-up, Codes and Keys, went full-bore in ditching guitars for airless atmospherics and brooding song structures, making for the band’s most dismal effort to date—a classification that even Gibbard himself agrees with.
Thank You for Today isn’t as uniformly bland as Codes and Keys—if anything, it’s the strongest Death Cab album of the 2010s, a dubious achievement that nonetheless deserves recognition. But there’s moments that suggest Gibbard and the rest of Death Cab are still struggling through the beige malaise that has cast a pall over their more recent work. “I Dreamt We Spoke Again” suffers from more vocal processing along with drifting tones and a cheaply stolen New Order bassline; the plodding “When We Drive” possesses all the charm of a car commercial, while “You Moved Away” smothers its lyrical musings on time passed and friends left behind—themes that course throughout Thank You For Today’s often-bloodless veins—with pitter-patter percussion and soupy atmospherics.
Closing track “60 & Punk” is possibly one of the most acerbic songs Gibbard’s written since Plans’ infamous “Someday You Will Be Loved,” casting a critical eye on besotted, long-in-the-tooth lifers over echo-laden piano and brushed drums before arriving at a crushing, open-ended question: “Were you happier when you were poor?” Even amid its melancholia, there’s something funny and self-aware about the 42-year-old Gibbard referring to a past-his-prime bandleader as “A superhero growing bored/With no one to save anymore.”
Prior to Thank You for Today, it’s been slim pickings in terms of album highlights in Death Cab’s 2010s oeuvre—so it’s something of a relief that this latest release offers a few of the band’s strongest songs since Narrow Stairs, gossamer indie-pop gems that recall the band’s glory days, if only for a few minutes. “Summer Years” twists and turns with interlocking guitar lines and a sneakily paced drumbeat, while the peppy “Autumn Love” recalls The Photo Album in its verse structure, before hitting the type of effervescent chorus that Atlantic-era Death Cab have occasionally excelled at.
Then there’s “Your Hurricane,” possibly the loveliest Death Cab song in more than a decade, a ballad cloaked in vintage-4AD guitars and an emotive vocal take from Gibbard that can hang with his best work. Scuff up the clean-sounding production and maybe close your eyes, and it sounds classic—a broken-clock reminder that, despite recent missteps, Gibbard’s still capable of these silken moments without sounding totally adrift. Capitulating to nostalgia is often an unwise stylistic choice, but perhaps Death Cab could look back a bit more in the future. The past doesn’t always have to be a hindrance—sometimes it can just be a nice place to rest for a while. | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | August 20, 2018 | 6 | 7f62b3fa-ebae-47b8-8ba4-5748fbb4d4bf | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
The Chicago trio excels in precisely detailed ambient dub with just the right amount of reverence for turn-of-the-millennium avant-garde electronic music. | The Chicago trio excels in precisely detailed ambient dub with just the right amount of reverence for turn-of-the-millennium avant-garde electronic music. | Purelink: Signs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/purelink-signs/ | Signs | Purelink’s debut single might have been a time machine. One track, the B-side’s “Head on a Swivel,” invoked the ’90s drum’n’bass of artists like Photek and Source Direct, in which breakbeats splintered like shards of glass over inky pools of bass. The A-side’s “Maintain the Bliss” was hazier in feel yet even more sharply focused on its contemporaneous reference points. Buoyed by vaporous clouds of synth, with featherweight filters sweeping back and forth over soft explosions of sub-bass, it was reminiscent of a strain of ambient techno perfected a quarter-century ago by acts like Vladislav Delay, Deepchord, and a little-known Glaswegian artist named Pub, whose 2000 dub-techno epic “Summer” drew the blueprint for Purelink’s blissed-out reverie.
Obscure as these reference points may seem, they’re worth noting because they indicate just how specific Purelink’s vision is. All still in their twenties, the Chicago trio’s members—Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka Kindtree), and Akeem Asani (aka Millia)—appear to be connoisseurs of a rarefied strain of Y2K-era experimental techno. But where many acolytes of bygone styles labor under the anxiety of influence, “Maintain the Bliss” felt effortless. It could easily have been a lost classic rescued from a 25-year-old DAT.
The new album Signs keeps its gaze trained on the digital avant-garde of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The glinting contours of the opening “In Circuits” are reminiscent of Jan Jelinek and Oval, while the faintly dubwise rhythms and distant crackle recall Pole. In one sense, they’re right on time. With so many young musicians reanimating the skeletons of shoegaze, nu-metal, ’90s alternative, and jungle, it stands to reason that someone would devote equal attention to these marginal sounds from the same period.
But Signs never feels expressly retro. That might be because there are so few obvious cultural associations to attach to these sounds in the first place—the so-called clicks + cuts movement was always among electronic music’s most faceless sectors, its unshowy practitioners stubbornly hidden behind their laptop screens. But what chiefly saves the record from feeling backward-looking is the sheer loveliness of the results. Ambient and dub techno have always foregrounded sensory pleasure, and Purelink excel in that department. Signs is a virtual steambath of foggy chords, chest-massaging bass, and sumptuous, ultra-vivid textures.
They maintain a uniform mood of gentle repose across the whole 39-minute release. There’s nothing as insistent as a four-to-the-floor beat; where kick drums appear, they land only every so often, offering the merest hint of a pulse. Instead, movement comes from the way that synths and filters swirl, curling like foam along the shoreline. Tracks are largely monochromatic in tone, with the exception of “4k Murmurs,” whose gliding chord progression is the record’s emotional high point. At the same time, Purelink elevate themselves above more overtly functional chillout producers in their uncanny grasp of detail. These tracks tend to sit comfortably in the background; in fact, their lulling rhythms and hushed volume makes them difficult to concentrate on for long. But occasionally, a sound flashes out like a beacon—a crisply tapped ride cymbal, or a brisk tintinnabulation, or an unfamiliar chug cutting crosswise through the mix. Purelink’s hypnotic music is good at putting you under, but it rewards those occasions where you straighten up and snap to attention.
In addition to “4k Murmurs,” the other highlight is the penultimate track, “Untitled.” At first glance, it appears to be the least distinctive of the bunch: just a murky churn of chords flecked with trebly fizz and arrhythmic clanks. Listen deep enough into its matrix of signals, though, and you may imagine that you hear footsteps or creaking brakes. The track’s stillness suggests an abandoned city at night, sounds wafting upward like steam from a subway grate. Metallic chords periodically strike, with no audible rhyme nor reason to their timing; it sounds like a kind of automatic music, as though no humans were involved in its making. Rather than being off-putting, that anonymity is comforting: a snapshot of the digital sublime, a hymn to the beauty of accidents. Purelink’s intentions, whatever they’re trying to do with such classic influences, are immaterial: On Signs, the sounds are moving gracefully through them. | 2023-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Peak Oil | September 29, 2023 | 7.8 | 7f639bab-35c2-428c-ade4-a54b44013d5b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Recorded on the fly with ex-Pixie Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is Eddie Argos' scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom. | Recorded on the fly with ex-Pixie Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is Eddie Argos' scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom. | Art Brut: Art Brut vs. Satan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12902-art-brut-vs-satan/ | Art Brut vs. Satan | Spoiler alert: Art Brut lose. Of course they do. Tramps like former Art Brut tourmates Hold Steady were born to run around wearing baseball jerseys in front of Counting Crows fans (and good for them!). Art Brut were born to lose: How could they ever improve on the clumsy meta-punk rush of their first single, "Formed a Band"? They arrived almost fully formed. They never got to play "Top of the Pops". When they miraculously came up with another 11 songs just about as good-- or, in the case of "Emily Kane", arguably better-- on their brilliant 2005 debut album, Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it only added sting to their inevitable defeat. They were even losers at being losers. I loved them for it.
That's partly why it's so strange now to read reviews that lump Art Brut in with more commercially successful UK bands such as Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. At live shows, lead not-quite-singer Eddie Argos used to change "I can't stand the sound of the Velvet Underground" to "I can't stand the sound of Gang of Four," and I always assumed his targets were obvious (hint: neither the Velvet Underground nor Gang of Four). Full of fist-pumping but self-mocking bar-punk about obsessive fandom and romantic awkwardness, Bang Bang Rock & Roll was the closest our decade has come to The Modern Lovers. Art Brut's true peers are lyrical music geeks like John Darnielle, Jeffrey Lewis, Jens Lekman, Los Campesinos!, the Tough Alliance, and, most recently, Nodzzz. It's not irony; it's self-aware sincerity.
Good news for people who love losers: Art Brut's third album is on what Kanye might call "some Benjamin Buttons shit." Gone is the slight maturation of their good-- but, sadly, not great-- sophomore album, 2007's It's a Bit Complicated, which tried to win by the attractive-people rules of polished production; the songs were still warm, witty, and alive, but they just didn't have the original's "I've seen her naked-- TWICE!" brashness. Recorded on the fly with fellow Jonathan Richman acolyte Frank Black, Art Brut vs. Satan is a scrappy, romantic, and painfully hilarious return to loserdom. Coldplay will always be more popular. So what? I hate those guys!
Art Brut probably do, too. If they can't topple vague, pasty, barely breathing background rock from the charts, at least they can sing gloriously doomed songs about it. "Cool your warm jets, Brian Eno," Argos jibes on "Slap Dash for No Cash", teasing shiny U2 clones the way he previously skewered vapid post-punk revivalists. Argos champions instead the records where you can hear not only the crack of the singer's voice, or the squeak of the guitarist's fingers, but also (as on a Gorky's Zygotic Mynci B-side, apparently) their parents complaining about the volume-- not because those records are more artistically valid, or more authentic or whatever, but for a more important reason: "Those are the records I like."
Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us. "Demons Out!" shifts the Smiths' "Panic!" from hanging DJs to denying record buyers suffrage, but don't mistake it for a Death Cab for Cutie-like manifesto against U.S. Auto-Tune pop; more accurately, it's an ideal rebuke against the endless Travis Kooks Kaiser Chiefs Razorlight blandness of UK "science museum" rock. So too "The Replacements", which melds the Mats' "Alex Chilton" and the Brut's "My Little Brother" into a clamorous endorsement of used CDs and deluxe reissues. Extending the prior album's trend toward sacrilegious song titles, "Twist and Shout" may not have you accidentally repeating its off-key la-la-las in public, like the song's narrator, but you'll probably know exactly how he feels. Not that Satan gives a damn about songs that communicate aspects of everyday life with clarity and human charm.
Art Brut remain ever the underdog when they're singing about arrested development and girls, too. "DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake" is a cereal-eaters' song as universal as Jerry Seinfeld, with a nicely echoing bridge, while perfectly sloppy public-transportation anthem "The Passenger" rewrites Iggy Pop from the perspective of a guy who can't drive. "Summer Job", with its Vampire Weekend-whooping intro vocal, is the album's only concession to conventional melody, and its summertime-blues-curing slackerdom could hardly be more enjoyably juvenile. Like a bizarro "Rusted Guns of Milan", "What a Rush" fumbles for morning-after Beatles vs. Stones meaning-- and socks. Add to vocab: "Sober...ish?". Slowing down but not going ballad, "Am I Normal?" is a preview of the kind of shy neurotic who might go on to write "Emily Kane".
Art Brut Vs. Satan begins and ends with a hungover Argos trying to remember what he did the night before. Frantically buzzing opener "Alcoholics Unanimous" finds Argos sending apologetic mass texts; he's been concerned about what he's been up to, and with good reason. On epic finale "Mysterious Bruises", which I didn't even notice was seven minutes until I looked it up later, Argos proclaims: "I fought the floor and the floor won." Satan always wins. The beautiful people and their sycophants will always outnumber lovable losers. But this is a record I like. | 2009-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Cooking Vinyl / Downtown | April 21, 2009 | 7.7 | 7f66d60a-037b-44d6-b77b-2844244a51af | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The no-wave inspired Brooklyn punks Pill pair controlled chaos with darkly funny, incisive political commentary. | The no-wave inspired Brooklyn punks Pill pair controlled chaos with darkly funny, incisive political commentary. | Pill: Convenience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22244-convenience/ | Convenience | At the core of Pill’s debut full-length, Convenience, is a statement in the form of a question: “Is this situation based on power?” The query is rhetorical—of course it is—and singer/bassist Veronica Torres has her follow-up locked and loaded, a revolver pointed at the head of the patriarchy. “My body, my queerness, my decision to bring life,” she sings on “My Rights.” “My body my fight, congressman wants to steal all of my rights.”
Already fixtures in the Brooklyn DIY scene, Pill introduced themselves last year with a self-titled EP that dropped via Andrew Savage’s Dull Tools label. (The band has since signed to Mexican Summer.) As with Savage’s band, the post-punk quartet Parquet Courts, Pill are careful students of rock history, but difficult to pigeonhole. Often, Pill is described as a no wave act, a genre that was defined above all by its refusal to be categorized. “I can’t stand it when you hear a band and you know exactly what’s in their record collection,” Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch once said. While one might guess at the bands that have inspired Pill (Neu!, ESG, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney), the four-piece is more than an assortment of influences.
Convenience, takes the themes of their EP and expands on them, tightening their hooks in some places, letting looser arrangements unfurl in others. Torres tends towards a speak-sneer that sometimes verges on spoken word. Her lyrics, steeped in feminism, are immediate and cutting. “Convenience is more modern-day folk or protest music for the conflicted confines that New York City has become,” reads Pill’s Bandcamp description. Anger is vented, lust explored and questions asked, but no panacea offered.
On “Fetish Queen,” Torres presents herself as both a sex object and romantic adversary. “Picture me in your favorite tee,” she sings, indulging High Fidelity rock dude fantasies, before flipping the script: “Love serenade in a hand grenade/Love serenade in a bondage game.” Though Torres’ lyrics are confrontational and sardonic, they’re also clever, sometimes darkly funny. “Body con, body conscious, body consent, body control,” she sings on “Love & Other Liquids,” mixing images of Herve Leger clubwear with a pro-choice call to arms. On “Speaking Up,” a song about a workplace sexual advance, the liner notes include a sad face emoji. “No I won’t get you a coffee :-( I’m your superior!,” they read, placing the exchange firmly, and realistically, in the realm of an office Slack chat. Set to clean guitar and warbling sax, plays like the negative of a Violent Femmes song, with Pill calling out creepiness for what it is.
But Pill is more than a mouthpiece for Torres and, more often than not, she’s locked right in with the other three players. Convenience ranges from post-punk to surf-rock to free-jazz, but no matter the sound, the songs seem rooted in communal improvisation. Benjamin Jaffe, the band’s saxophonist, creates ribbons of noise that oscillate between artful squawks, painterly washes of sound, and technical, free-associative runs. The sax establishes a constant push and pull with Torres, and the lyrics about power dynamics are mirrored in the back-and-forth of the song structures, with Jaffe serving as a de-facto second vocalist. Using Andrew Spaulding and Torres’ tight rhythm section as anchor, Jaffe just as easily becomes a lounge act riding a motorik beat (“Love & Other Liquids”) or a psychedelic punk, whose dissonant wails melt into the chug of Jonathan Campolo’s guitars (“Medicine”). Campolo and Spaulding, it should be said, do triple duty or more—each playing a variety of instruments including a custom-made noise rig.
Because *Convenience *covers so much distance, and does so with such a free-associative spirit, everything doesn’t always hang together; it wouldn’t be as interesting if it did. Unexpected digressions lead to minutes of far-out jamming that derail the album’s momentum (see: “Sex With Santa”). The band is more effective when riding a groove (“Vagabond”) rather than going for broke in psychedelic-freakout mode (“100% Cute”). More often than not, though, Pill’s four members create controlled chaos that combines musical chops rarely seen in punk with incisive social commentary. Other bands have one without the other, but Pill know words are only as powerful as the music behind them. | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | August 16, 2016 | 7.9 | 7f694800-1e4b-474e-bf99-226dd7a91885 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
The Irish post-punk band’s most demanding and musically adventurous album is also its most open-hearted, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender. | The Irish post-punk band’s most demanding and musically adventurous album is also its most open-hearted, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender. | Fontaines D.C.: Skinty Fia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fontaines-dc-skinty-fia/ | Skinty Fia | The year 2019 already feels like the distant past for most of us, but for Fontaines D.C., it really must seem like another lifetime—and that has less to do with the pandemic than their own skyrocketing success in spite of it. Pretty much everything that defined this band three years ago, when they dropped their debut LP, Dogrel, has already changed. Once the scrappy underdogs who ironically declared “I’m gonna be big!”, the Dublin-bred quintet have headlined arena shows for crowds of 10,000 in the UK, appeared on CNN, scored a Grammy nomination (outside the Alternative category ghetto, no less), and crossed “multiple appearances on Jimmy Fallon” off their bucket list. Where they once reanimated familiar post-punk and garage-rock influences with a pugilistic intensity, these days they’re more keen on arranging choral harmonies and crooning squeeze-boxed ballads. Even the band’s essential Irishness—reflected in their site-specific lyrics and baked right into their very name—is now up for debate: With four members currently living in England’s capital, Fontaines D.C. can now be more accurately rebranded as Fontaines LDN.
But while one’s identity can be greatly shaped by their home environment, it’s often hardened by their distance from it. On the band’s third album in four years, Skinty Fia, Fontaines D.C. detail what it’s like to be the boys in a not-so-better land, as Irish expats who may share the same skin tone and speak the same language as England’s dominant culture, but who are instantly singled out the moment their accents are revealed in mixed company. Named for an arcane Irish slur that translates to “damnation of the deer”—which, for Fontaines’ purposes, functions as a vivid metaphor of cultural mutation and degradation—Skinty Fia is a record about living in a place that looks like home but doesn’t feel like it. Fontaines D.C. use that feeling of placelessness to their advantage, seizing the opportunity to reinvent themselves on a track-by-track basis.
On their 2020 release, A Hero’s Death, Fontaines D.C. already sounded eager to check out of the post-punk revival they helped rally, frequently downshifting into moodier and more melodic territory. Skinty Fia further hammers home the point that this band’s true peers aren’t IDLES and Yard Act, but rather bands like Iceage and the Horrors—groups that erected rigid stylistic barriers only to delight in bulldozing them with each subsequent record. Fitting for an album inspired by moving to London and missing Dublin, Skinty Fia finds its spiritual center at the approximate midway point of Manchester, a city whose rich musical history—evolving out of post-punk into indie-pop, rave-rock, and stadium-sized Britpop—provides Fontaines D.C. with a roadmap of paths to explore.
So while the first thing we hear on Skinty Fia is an urgent Joy Division-esque bassline, the song that’s built on top of it—“In ár gCroíthe go deo”—could never be confused for an Unknown Pleasures outtake. Instead, that rhythmic pulse serves as the unsettled foundation for bassist Conor Deegan III and guitarist Conor Curley’s haunted harmonies, which repeat the title—the Irish phrase for “in our hearts forever”—with funereal solemnity before Chatten’s cries into the void and Tom Coll’s jungle-patterned drum beats steer the song toward its stormy conclusion. Tellingly, Fontanies’ first album as Londoners also marks the first time they’ve foregrounded their homeland’s native tongue in song, and it’s not just for ornamental purposes: The titular phrase was at the center of a media controversy in 2020, when the family of a deceased Irish woman who lived in Coventry, UK tried to have it transcribed on her tombstone, only for the Church of England to demand it include an English translation. For a recent transplant like Chatten, that news story provided a crash course in living as an Irishman in England, where cultural identity is something you have to keep fighting for even when you’re dead.
That homesick, fish-out-of-water feeling manifests itself in myriad ways on Skinty Fia: Where the title track channels Chatten’s uneager-to-please outsider attitude into a strobe-lit industrial funk swagger, “Bloomsday” is a wistful farewell to Dublin, rendered as a melancholic gothgaze soliloquy. But in Chatten’s case, living outside his homeland also provides him with a greater clarity and objective distance to properly diagnose its current condition. Though he’s always balanced shamrock-tattooed pride with tough-love critique, he’s never written a song as angry and anguished as “I Love You.” What begins as a misty-eyed ode to his country gives way to a laundry-list screed on why its brightest minds may feel compelled to leave it, as Chatten sounds off on the church scandals, economic instability, and suicide epidemics that have ingrained a sense of hopelessness in Irish youth. When Chatten disrupts the song’s dreamy atmosphere to rail about his island being “run by sharks with children’s bones stuck in their jaws,” it’s like the Stones Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored” being gate-crashed by John Cooper Clarke.
Those drawn to Fontaines for the first-pump fervor of songs like “Big” and “A Hero’s Death” may find Skinty Fia a more forbidding proposition: Tracks like the disintegrated dirge “How Cold Love Is” and the Unhappy Mondays groover “Nabakov” don’t exactly lend themselves to pint-smashing sessions with the lads. But the real triumph of Skinty Fia is that Fontaines D.C.’s most musically adventurous and demanding album to date is also its most open-hearted. While Chatten’s voice remains a blunt instrument, he now wields it more elegantly, striking a perfect balance between tough and tender: On the self-loathing cad anthem “Jackie Down the Line,” he applies a Wembley-ready wail to a Smithsian sway and delivers the sort of capital-c Choon that all but guarantees Fontaines an opening slot on the Oasis reunion tour whenever the Gallaghers finally get their shit together. And on “Roman Holiday,” he paints a beautifully smeared portrait of young Irish lovers making the streets of Londontown their own, haters be damned, tapping into a stream-of-consciousness magic realism that approaches the heady heights of mid-’90s Verve.
But even those moments of grace won’t prepare you for “The Couple Across the Way,” where Fontaines’ exploratory impulses and dogged romantic spirit intersect in a mournful ballad that echoes John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme—albeit performed entirely by Chatten on accordion. Inspired by the singer’s actual Rear Window-esque observations of his neighbors, the song voyeuristically peers into the flat of an argumentative older couple trapped in a perpetual state of verbal warfare, “after 23 years of the same.” In the midst of apologizing to his wife for his latest destructive outburst, the husband makes a comment that’s as poignant as it is devastating: “Across the way moved in a pair with passion in its prime/Maybe they look through to us and hope that’s them in time.” By burrowing into Fontaines D.C.’s particular experiences as strangers in a strange land, Skinty Fia ultimately homes in on the eternal fears—of growing old, bored, bitter, and unloved—that unite us all. | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | April 22, 2022 | 8 | 7f721d94-0fad-4925-9e39-5dd61823a5ea | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Drawn from the same sessions as 2022’s Gold, the UK jazz poet and saxophonist’s new album counters that record’s opulence with a spare, percussive sound. | Drawn from the same sessions as 2022’s Gold, the UK jazz poet and saxophonist’s new album counters that record’s opulence with a spare, percussive sound. | Alabaster DePlume: Come With Fierce Grace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alabaster-deplume-come-with-fierce-grace/ | Come With Fierce Grace | Alabaster DePlume cuts a grand figure: ringed, tattooed, bestowed with a splendiferous stage name that also pokes fun at the idea of stage names. Yet the Mancunian singer-poet-saxophonist’s role in the fertile UK jazz scene is less mad genius than social locus, hosting fertile sessions at London studio and club Total Refreshment Centre in which bright young players can indulge their brightest ideas. His 2022 album Gold: Go Forward In The Courage of Your Love came out of these sessions and situated DePlume’s slithery poetry and tenor saxophone playing within the most opulent strains of ’70s spiritual jazz: Bennie Maupin, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane. Come With Fierce Grace, by contrast, is so spare that it could have been composed in the Stone Age.
Most of the album’s expanse is taken up by percussion: drum thwacks, rimshots, clicked sticks, woodblocks, sleigh bells, chimes. DePlume mostly plays tenor saxophone, and his most sustained burst of spoken-word inspiration comes at the end of “What Can it Take,” riffing on themes from Gold: being “brazen like a baby,” going “forward in the courage of my love.” DePlume’s music encourages an elemental purity of thought, unclouded by the emotional self-censorship that modern social interactions demand. Come With Fierce Grace aspires to a similar ideal in its composition—a raw, brutal immediacy as reflective of an egoless musical ideal as a drum circle, cacerolazo, or grounation. It’s the sort of music people make instinctively, banging on whatever’s handy in pursuit of a common goal, be it communal joy, spiritual ecstasy, or rebellion against the status quo.
The difference is that DePlume has some of the best jazz musicians in the UK behind him. Hotshot drummer Tom Skinner lays down a serpentine groove on “Greek Honey Slick” that moves like a Chinese dragon, or like those guys struggling to carry the giant snake through the meadow on the cover of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Cellist Hannah Miller imparts a sense of maudlin grandeur to “Fall On Flowers” and “Not Even Sobbing.” Vocalists bring light to this cracked and ragged landscape: Momoko Gill riffs thoughtfully on DePlume’s poetry on “Did You Know,” accompanied by a humming, musing choir of herself, while on the wonderful deconstructed jazz ballad “Fall On Flowers,” a circle of voices coos in mournful unison as DePlume’s saxophone flickers like a votive candle.
Many of these tracks seem to start in the middle, likely because they were curated by DePlume from the best parts of endless jams and shoot-the-shit sessions. As monstrous as tracks like “Greek Honey Slick” and “Fall On Flowers” are, they feel less like self-contained compositions than pieces of a larger morass of music only hinted at on Fierce Grace’s 42 minutes. Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here. Surely there were more consonant and ear-pleasing moments from the sessions that produced the albums, but most of those probably ended up on Gold. Fierce Grace is beautiful in the same way as a stick insect.
Every now and then, DePlume and his band will hit on an insistent single-note pattern—it happens on “What Can it Take,” again on “Naked Like Water,” and finally on the spectacular and stately “Broken Again.” It’s an unmistakably modern sound, one that repeats with mechanical repetition and inhuman relentlessness: noise, in other words. Amid this primal, ancient-seeming music, it’s as jarring as a straight line on the surface of an alien planet, and it serves as a reminder of the hyper-stratified post-industrial drudgery to which DePlume’s pursuit of musical and mental liberation is a revolt. The music on Come With Fierce Grace is not designed to be played in restaurants, cafes, cannabis dispensaries, or any other context so casual or vulgar. It might seem at first to be about little more than the joy of its making, but what it argues is how precious that joy really is. | 2023-09-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-11T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | September 11, 2023 | 7.5 | 7f72bafd-3bdb-4766-83bd-d36e4d26dc43 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
A new reissue of Arca’s 25-minute mixtape from 2013 highlights its prophetic, trailblazing qualities. It remains an unfathomably skillful and multi-layered piece of music. | A new reissue of Arca’s 25-minute mixtape from 2013 highlights its prophetic, trailblazing qualities. It remains an unfathomably skillful and multi-layered piece of music. | Arca: &&&&& | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arca-andandandandand/ | &&&&& | It sounds strange to say it now, but when Arca’s &&&&& dropped out of the blue in the summer of 2013, it felt like we’d finally arrived in the future. The 25-minute mixtape sounded like a celebration of speed, of the infinity of musical information that the internet puts at our fingertips, of the wild emotional contrasts of a night spent staring down the barrel of one’s feed. And to top it all off, it played like one continuous track.
Though the Venezuelan producer’s source materials (grime, trap, glitch, dub) derived largely from club culture, &&&&& seemed to take a mischievous pleasure in disrupting the metric grid that dance music was built on—reveling in a sonic rubberiness that her previous two EPs, Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, had hinted at in name. Even the image that accompanied it—a bird-like creature with distended legs and translucent skin, courtesy of artist Jesse Kanda—seemed to suggest the birth of something new, quivering inside an amniotic sack of digital slime.
In truth, &&&&& was probably less the dawn of a novel genre of electronic music than the crystallization of a perspectival shift that had already been in the works for some time—and not just in the foggy rooms of GHE20G0TH1K, the joyfully irreverent LGBTQ and POC-focused dance party where Arca interned as a college student at NYU, though it probably started there. Where the cool kids of the late ’00s had met the rising tide of technology with a retreat to the obsolete sounds and formats of the past (think: the vinyl collector culture driving the global techno scene, the cassette tape fetish of the chillwave generation), a new generation of producers and DJs at the turn of the ’10s—armed with CDJs and sample packs and vape pens—seemed to see a new revolutionary potential.
It wasn’t just that the tools of electronic music production were becoming more widely accessible, or that the internet seemed to be having a democratizing effect on music, catapulting unknown artists to overnight fame; it felt like the old distinctions between high and low, underground and mainstream, club culture and pop culture, were finally on the verge of collapsing once and for all—and rattling the foundations of the culture industry in the process.
Arca had given only one formal interview to date, but what we did know about her seemed to situate her in the cultural crosshairs of that moment: Hood By Air, the avant-garde fashion brand co-founded by GHE20G0TH1K’s Shayne Oliver—and for which Arca would compose the occasional runway soundtrack—was galvanizing the worlds of streetwear and couture with its vision of a gender-fluid, multicultural future. Auteurist experimentalists like Mykki Blanco and FKA twigs, who’d also tapped Arca for her lurching, ballooning sound design, seemed poised to become crossover stars. Just a month before she unveiled &&&&& to the world, Kanye West had dropped the era-defining Yeezus, an album with enough crunchy synth strobes, expressively deformed samples, and blood-curdling screams to sound right at home at a semi-legal warehouse party at peak time. In what critics roundly heralded, somewhat paradoxically, as a sign that underground music had finally entered the big leagues, he’d enlisted Arca’s own services for the production, alongside fellow eclectic beatmakers like Evian Christ and Hudson Mohawke.
Even with so much in flux, it is hard to overstate how novel &&&&& felt when she uploaded it to SoundCloud. Though it was technically “released” by the label Hippos in Tanks, a home for brain-bending sounds that seemed to emblematize this “Wild West” moment in music, it didn’t actually seem to be for sale anywhere; and though Arca was billing it as a digital “mixtape,” a format that derived from hip-hop but that was becoming increasingly popular as a promotional vehicle in SoundCloud producer circles, it didn’t exactly seem to be teasing a more finished work to come (though Arca did self-release a small vinyl run of &&&&& in 2014). Unfolding as one long musical utterance—by turns hyper-caffeinated and mournful, brutal and full of open-eyed wonder—&&&&& was a complete work unto itself, an unfathomably skillful and multi-layered piece of music that is perhaps only possible to describe as the sum of its own contradictions.
Here was music that was at once decidedly challenging and overflowing with hooks. And it was so aggressively synthetic, so plastic in its conception of sound and rhythm, that it somehow evoked the unchained emotionalism of the romantic composers she played as a young piano student (Schumann and Mendelssohn) more than it did actual dance music. Mostly, it felt like the first clear articulation of a feeling that was already in the air, and that arguably continues to drive the musical conversation to this day: In the post-internet world, music didn’t have to be one thing or another. It could be abrasive & melodic & synthetic & organic & prickly & sweet and frankly, whatever felt right in the moment.
At least, that’s one possible explanation for mixtape’s enigmatic title—even though &&&&& always sounded too free-associative to feel like the mere illustration of a concept. Listening to it now, on the occasion of a new reissue and remaster from Berlin record label PAN—one that, for the first time, will make the record available on streaming services in the form of individual tracks—it’s the record’s rolling tides of feeling, its combined technical dexterity and emotional specificity, that stands out. Whether she’s splicing a pitched vocal sample into the aural equivalent of a strut, flooding the room in a cold ocean of synthetic voices, or dropping down the energy with a distended, melodic sigh, this symbiosis of woman and machine feels life-affirming.
Seen from the vantage of 2020, of course, &&&&& feels like it was heralding a bright new future that never came to be; it’s hard to remain optimistic about technology when our politics are descending into Twitter-addled madness and the platforms we might have expected to sustain our creative economies in a time of crisis seem incapable of compensating our artists more than a fraction of a penny per stream.
Over the past seven years, Arca has continued to drill down into the complexities of power, gender, and the economics of the music industry itself, using each successive project to reveal another side of her person, to question why we do things the way we do, to reach out to her people through the pixelated ether. But there’s something a bit melancholy about listening to &&&&& now—the feeling that instead of freeing us from the past, technology has left us stuck in a loop, endlessly refreshing in search of a better world that never arrives, but that we can still dream of in our art. And while &&&&&’s genre-splicing, additive approach to sound arguably continues to set the blueprint for much of youth music today—from the post-club artists and collectives across the world pushing sound into mutant new shapes, to stadium pop—it’s hard to say whether there has been any giant, qualitative leap forward in music ever since.
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. | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Pan | September 21, 2020 | 8.4 | 7f75e070-4bac-4929-b439-64cad9693f91 | Emilie Friedlander | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emilie-friedlander/ | |
After a decade, Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes’ band returns with an album that’s musically rejuvenated but lyrically nearsighted. | After a decade, Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes’ band returns with an album that’s musically rejuvenated but lyrically nearsighted. | Quasi: Breaking the Balls of History | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/quasi-breaking-the-balls-of-history/ | Breaking the Balls of History | When Janet Weiss broke her legs and collarbone in a 2019 car crash, she gained a new appreciation for drumming—not just as an artform, but as a lifeline that could be snipped at any moment. The world was in lockdown by the time her bones healed, so Weiss took refuge in daily jams with Quasi bandmate Sam Coomes. The duo ended up recording the first new Quasi album in a decade. “I can hear in the music how happy I am to be there and to be playing at that level again,” Weiss said in a statement announcing the record. She’s right; the audible joy and relief in her drumming is the most tactile part of Breaking the Balls of History. What the record offers in energy, however, it lacks in efficacy; Quasi’s comeback sounds like a productive songwriting session that never got a round of edits, leaving glaring holes where the creativity and experimental vision of their best work should be.
As ever, Quasi remain true to the art-rock spontaneity and lyrical brashness of mid-’90s Portland, Oregon. There are echoes of fellow local acts past and present: punchy keyboard chords on “Queen of Ears” like the Thermals, a tongue-in-cheek guitar solo on “Nowheresville” like Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, an ascending guitar line on “Inbetweenness” like Menomena. Weiss has never drummed harder on a Quasi record; she crashes through “Riots & Jokes” like it’s the last drum fill of an encore. Coomes plays up the fried dissonance of his Rocksichord at every opportunity, bringing a raw, blues-indebted twang to “Rotten Wrock” and a natural complement to his throat-scratching yell on album highlight “Back in Your Tree.” Compared to 2013’s hiatus-inducing Mole City, the enthusiasm is welcome.
Breaking the Balls of History was born from a desire to live—immediately, vivaciously, free from judgment or pressure—before it’s too late. As Weiss put it, “There’s no investing in the future anymore. The future is now. Do it now if you want to do it.” Quasi introduce that carpe diem sensibility with opener “Long Last Laugh,” a scrappy, heartfelt ode to navigating life that’s peppered with metaphors for defense mechanisms, like a porcupine with nails for quills. But the clever imagery and surrealist refrain of “a last long laugh at the edge of dreams” soon give way to more banal, abstract songs that don’t meet the urgency of their subject matter.
Written during the pandemic, Breaking the Balls of History is heavy with the anxiety and fatigue of racial unrest, political violence, and public mistrust. But when Quasi march onward in peace from those problems while simultaneously shooting backward in annoyance, it’s hard to know which direction they want to go. The lyrics waffle between underwritten observations of hot-button topics and purple prose. In “Doomscrollers,” Coomes sets a scene full of charged imagery: Punisher skulls on pick-up trucks, kids stuck in virtual school, “the anti-vaxxers and the climate deniers.” But then nothing else happens—not to them, about them, or by them. “Here they come now/Thoughts and prayers,” he sings later on “Nowheresville,” gesturing to the politician’s rote response to tragedy without any supporting commentary. If this is a laugh at the edge of a dream, it’s an awkward one—the kind that fills a pregnant silence.
Quasi didn’t come out of 2020 empty-handed. They sound rejuvenated and youthful, but they forget to look beyond the moment that prompted their rebirth. That’s shaping up to be a frequent hangup of pandemic art: for better or for worse, much of the middle class experienced lockdown in a similar way, leaving artists to recount what many listeners know firsthand. You can’t help but wish Quasi illustrated their nonsensical dreams with more color, or rubbed their eyes harder to produce a clearer vision of the realities they condemn. Instead, Breaking the Balls of History has a blurry quality: a jumble of all-too-familiar thoughts that never add up to a breakthrough. | 2023-02-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Sub Pop | February 14, 2023 | 6.3 | 7f78cae2-7a73-4db2-8b84-57611673437d | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Inspired by a documentary about the opioid crisis, the pop singer and songwriter dreams up a fictionalized shoreline town where decadence is fueled by deep-rooted melancholia. | Inspired by a documentary about the opioid crisis, the pop singer and songwriter dreams up a fictionalized shoreline town where decadence is fueled by deep-rooted melancholia. | Allie X: Cape God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/allie-x-cape-god/ | Cape God | The glassine synthpop Allie Hughes crafts as Allie X often serves as a Trojan horse for the eccentric personas she invents. A classically trained singer, Hughes prefers characters and costumes, often donning bug-eyed sunglasses while performing songs that relish or wallow in being the outsider. On 2018’s Super Sunset, she vivisected life in image-obsessed L.A. through different female archetypes, resulting in a deft if interchangeable set that favored effervescent, ’80s-inspired pop. On its spirited follow-up, Cape God, Hughes heads to the East Coast for a more striking emotional reckoning, abandoning past alter egos and inserting herself in the troubles of a gloomy, fictionalized shoreline town.
Cape God was inspired by Heroin: Cape Cod USA, a harrowing 2015 HBO documentary about the effects of the opioid crisis on young people living in the seemingly idyllic Massachusetts vacation destination. The horrors of addiction surface in oblique ways here, but Hughes largely uses the documentary’s subjects as ciphers to reflect on memories of the inner turmoil she experienced growing up between Ontario and northwest Michigan. Cape God’s grim fables play out like a TV drama about debauched teens set to springy Max Martin-style production, setting stories of suburban excess to gothy synthpop and dramatic ballads.
The album’s fatalistic streak is familiar but compelling: Hughes dreams up a place where decadence is fueled by deep-rooted melancholia. She gets blackout drunk over handclaps and heavy synths on “Life of the Party,” where the propulsive backdrop feels at odds with the disturbing details: “Even when I nodded out,” she deadpans, “I was center of the action.” That kind of unflinching look at the abuse and depression borne of suburban ennui is a potent creative source for Hughes and makes for some of her most exciting work. “June Gloom” depicts the cold isolation of depression through fizzy electropop, and the swooning “Susie Save Your Love” zooms in on a main character who’s “too drunk to drive” and pining after a guy who doesn’t reciprocate. “Susie” is an especially bright highlight that features Mitski on vocals, though the two harmonize so closely that her appearance becomes almost anonymous.
When Hughes tries out more rote pop songs, Cape God can get a little dry. “Love Me Wrong” employs an acoustic guitar, a choir, and a sleepy-sounding Troye Sivan to sing about double-edged romance, but the belabored song comes off like an underwritten B-side. The self-effacing “Devil I Know” and “Regulars” are the most anodyne of the bunch, with similar plucked guitar lines and repetitive choruses—and worse, they’re sequenced back to back.
Still, the sad world of Cape God is an alluring one, and Hughes’ vocal range is its unequivocal linchpin. She shoots off staccato spoken word on the ironic “Super Duper Party People,” hopscotches over drums with a featherlight touch on the catchy “Sarah Come Home,” and drops to a smoky lower register on the cinematic “Madame X.” The latter song is where she makes the clearest gesture at the grim, all-consuming power of addiction: “Take my money, my self respect,” she sings over a swell of strings. “You fill me up with your emptiness and it’s the first thing I’ve ever felt.” It’s a despairing note, but it’s also one of Hughes’ starkest—a vivid rendering that establishes Cape God as the strongest concept in her catalog to date. | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Twin Music | February 27, 2020 | 6.8 | 7f78dbd3-1d9b-4621-ad0a-0e9b79ec244b | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On her new album, Alicia Keys inhabits the personae of multiple characters but still doesn't tell us much about herself. | On her new album, Alicia Keys inhabits the personae of multiple characters but still doesn't tell us much about herself. | Alicia Keys: HERE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22582-here/ | HERE | Alicia Keys is a creature of habit when it comes to her music. With “Piano and I,” the first track on her hugely successful debut album Songs in A Minor, she started the tradition of opening her albums with a clearly marked intro. Although the format varied—wordless classical compositions, piano-backed spoken-word pieces, a short poem—these intros generally served two purposes: reminding us of her piano chops and elucidating her state of mind during the recording process. If you study a person’s habits enough, a picture of who they are should start to emerge. Yet HERE, Keys’ sixth studio album, does little to further our understanding of who Keys is.
“The Beginning (Interlude),” HERE’s opener, sets the scene for the album to work as a series of extended metaphors. So when Keys says “I’m the musical to the project fables/I’m the words scratched out on the record label/I’m the wind when the record spins/I’m the dramatic static before the song begins,” you don’t need to take it literally. Instead, by personifying hip-hop, she is performing the first of several shifts in narrative perspective.
It helps to take this into consideration early on, so that it’s not entirely confusing when Keys starts singing from the perspective of a 29-year-old addict on “Illusion of Bliss.” Or on “Kill Your Mama,” where she takes on the role of spokesperson for all of Mother Earth’s wayward children, piling the platitudes onto a simple guitar melody: “Is there any savin’ us/We’ve become so dangerous/Is there any change in us/Even for the sake of love.”
Still, this is an Alicia Keys record, and it wouldn’t be wrong to expect her to devote time to herself. There are only three tracks on which you could safely guess that she is giving any insight into her world. “Work on It” is a look just beneath the surface at a relationship that takes, well, work— but the intrigue is lacking, even with production from the usually unflappable Pharrell Williams. “Girl Can’t Be Herself” is surely the anthem for her makeup-free movement and, by her own admission, a tool for working through some of the insecurities that she tackles in the lyrics. “Blended Family (What You Do For Love)” rolls along as an earnest-but-slightly-awkward song about the dynamic within her home, before getting completely sabotaged by a throwaway verse from guest A$AP Rocky.
HERE is punctuated with interludes that feature recordings of candid discussions between Keys and her friends including, reportedly, Nas. It seems unjust that these brief appearances spark more curiosity about the speakers than the songs that refer directly to the artist with top billing, and the rest of the tracks do little to address this balance—at least from a lyrical standpoint.
To her credit, she flexes some surprising dexterity, moving easily between ballads and more uptempo beats and varying her delivery to occasionally take on a rapper’s cadence, for example on “The Gospel.” She’s probably not about to rebrand herself as a spitter, but the piano melody textured by a stuttering drum pattern works well. The drum programming comes courtesy of Harold Lilly, while songwriting and production duties fell largely to Mark Batson and Swizz Beatz, who left no traces of his signature sound. Along with Keys the four form a production group called The ILLuminaries, and they prove on several occasions how the hivemind approach to beatmaking can pay off.
The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work. While it might not mean much in the age of streaming, there is something particularly confounding about the decision to relegate the most exciting lead single (“In Common”) to a bonus track on the deluxe edition, when the rest of the album didn’t quite follow through on the song’s promise. Alicia Keys has worked hard to build up enough name recognition; she can tick off multiple successes after several years in the game; she has earned the right to throw caution to the wind. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this record was a missed opportunity to do so. | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | November 10, 2016 | 6.5 | 7f7cd517-5aa0-4e71-9889-b12af4543622 | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
The Kills' latest retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives in an attempt to broaden their palette, with mixed results. | The Kills' latest retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives in an attempt to broaden their palette, with mixed results. | The Kills: Blood Pressures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15288-blood-pressures/ | Blood Pressures | There's a cute little joke lurking in the background of Alfonso Cuarón's otherwise bleak dystopian thriller Children of Men. The film is set in the year 2027, and at one point a deejay overheard on a car radio introduces "a blast from the past all the way back to 2003," before spinning the Kills' country-blues serenade "Wait". Even if 2003 was only eight years ago, for the Kills, it might as well be 24, given how far Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have been able to push the limited parameters of their guitar/drum-machine set-up and develop an identity increasingly distinct from their formative junior-Royal-Trux roots.
But even as the Kills have gone from covering Captain Beefheart on their debut 2002 EP, Black Rooster, to teaming up with Spank Rock producer XXXChange for 2008's electro-fied Midnight Boom, Mosshart and Hince have always conveyed a sense of anxiety and nervous energy through their music. And the duo's lusty performances eagerly play up the ambiguity of their platonic partnership. It's a quality that defines them as much as Mosshart's feverish moan, Hince's hand-slashing guitar riffs, and the synthetic beats-- just Google "the Kills + sexual tension." And even though the will-they/won't-they question has been definitively tilted toward the latter, that doesn't mean the Kills can't continue to summon that frisson through roleplay. But on Blood Pressures, there's a creeping sense that their individual preoccupations outside the band-- Mosshart as Jack White's feisty foil in the Dead Weather; Hince as the paparazzi-hounded fiancé of the world's most famous supermodel-- has diffused some of that intensity, as the duo attempts to evolve its dynamic.
Sonically, Blood Pressures retreats from Midnight Boom's dancefloor directives and energized, in-the-pocket pop. The new album feels at once a return to the Kills' beatbox-blues origins as well an attempt to broaden their palette with more sensitive, intimate turns. Notwithstanding the motorik garage-rock of "Heart Is a Beating Drum" and brash, big-beat stomp "Nail in My Coffin", this album will present Hince and Mosshart with fewer opportunities to stare each other down suggestively on stage in predatory, fuck-or-fight fashion. Whether it's the swampy reggae groove of "Satellite", the clock-punching blues-rock prowl "Damned if She Do", or the mid-album tandem of Hince's Lennon-esque reverie "Wild Charms" and Mosshart's slow-simmering answer track "DNA", there's an overarching sense of restraint and resignation that's disappointing in light of how fearless and adrenalized the band sounded on Midnight Boom.
On that album's standout moments (the desperation of "Last Day of Magic", the spiky outbursts of "Tape Song"), you could hear Mosshart really pushing herself to project a more passionate persona from behind the Kills' ultra-cool, cigarette-smoky pose. By contrast, Blood Pressures' would-be emotional centerpiece The Last Goodbye" is a maudlin piano ballad that feels oddly disaffected, with Mosshart singing in an overly poised, uncharacteristically lower register as if trying to channel some aging-diva caricature. A far better barometer of the Kills' maturation is the more understated but infinitely more affecting "Baby Says", a melancholic Mosshart/Hince duet set to a steady backbeat, ideal for filling in the awkward silences on a couples-retreat road trip gone bad. In other words, it's precisely the sort of interstate love song that the golden-oldies DJs of 2027 will be all over. | 2011-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 6, 2011 | 6.4 | 7f8871d0-05d0-4714-9c74-88b82ac2e655 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The promising Seattle composer and songwriter's handmade orchestral pop record features David Byrne, tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso, Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, Wilco's Nels Cline, and Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, among others. | The promising Seattle composer and songwriter's handmade orchestral pop record features David Byrne, tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso, Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, Wilco's Nels Cline, and Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, among others. | Jherek Bischoff: Composed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16838-composed/ | Composed | The Seattle composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff had a dilemma: He wanted to make an orchestral pop record but, like most people, lacked an orchestra. Decidedly unlike most people, however, he remedied this by building one himself. Throwing some rudimentary recording equipment in his backpack, he visited a handful of musician friends in their homes, re-recording them as they played dozens of parts, and then mixed the painstakingly assembled piecemeal results into the majestic 70-piece outfit he could never afford during mixing. Listening to Composed with this task in mind is like imagining someone filling an Olympic-sized pool with an eye dropper: the mind balks, both at the enormity of the undertaking and at the disposition of the person behind it.
Composed had to get made. But you would have gathered this from the album's first six minutes without a shred of context anyway: Opening with a gorgeously sobbing piece of string writing reminiscent of Samuel Barber's "Adagio For Strings" as fanfare, the orchestra slides into a groove, tropical and breezy. And then who should wander into view but David Byrne, in loosened-tie, silver-fox mode, crooning a quizzical love song to the disparate parts of his beloved's face. Not bad for an opening number.
Composed is a succession of these head-turning walk-ons. No sooner has Byrne ambled offstage than Tropicália legend Caetano Veloso has sauntered on, for "The Secret of the Machines", stepping lightly with his reedy voice over an orchestral landscape that veers from Disney rainbows to a moat filled with snapping jaws. Greg Saunier of Deerhoof appears on Composed also, as do Nels Cline, Craig Wedren of Shudder to Think, and many others. It's an ensemble affair. Folk singer Dawn McCarthy drops by to sing a cheery number titled "Insomnia, Death and the Sea". Each artist contributed their own lyrics to Bischoff's compositions, lending the album the feel of a busy, semi-staged opera.
Bischoff arranges the songs around his guests like thick little jungles, symphonic interludes sprouting like overgrowth. On the surface, Composed feels like a successor to records like Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest and St. Vincent's Actor, chamber-pop records that drip with ornament. But it's to Van Dyke Parks, the granddaddy of unclassifiable, absurdly ambitious art-song cycles, that Composed owes the most. Like Parks, Bischoff's music swims around in a deep pool of references: a bassoon pops up, in "Secret of the Machines", quoting the opening of The Rite of Spring, and ragtime, bossa nova, and more flit airily through the arrangements. "Young and Lovely", featuring Zac Pennington of Bischoff's former band Parenthetical Girls, indulges in a broad, slurpy cabaret melody for its chorus that feels like Parks reincarnate.
If Composed doesn't resonate as deeply as it should, this debt might be part of the reason. Bischoff is a hugely talented composer, with sky-high ambitions. He is also still in the process of announcing his voice. Many of the big ideas on Composed still feel borrowed, from Parks and from others, but you can hear Bischoff busily whittling away at their edges so that he can eventually own them. The multiple guest vocalists, meanwhile, keep things lively while also preventing a through-line from developing. Composed is a good album. Someday Bischoff will likely make a great one. | 2012-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Leaf / Brassland | June 13, 2012 | 7.1 | 7f902b32-8928-499a-96f4-784934ca0ee4 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Produced entirely by Navy Blue, the New York rapper’s latest is one of his greatest. A wise and angry Wiki reveals what it’s like to come of age in the city: the way it shapes, hardens, prematurely ages you. | Produced entirely by Navy Blue, the New York rapper’s latest is one of his greatest. A wise and angry Wiki reveals what it’s like to come of age in the city: the way it shapes, hardens, prematurely ages you. | Wiki: Half God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiki-half-god/ | Half God | Kids grow up fast in New York City. Pre-teens ride the trains alone, shuttling between school and the park and home. You learn to spot scammers, junkies, tourists, and cops from a mile away. From the time you learn to speak, you’re exposed to languages from around the world. The streets are more than just a thoroughfare for cars and trucks, they’re a fire hydrant water park, a street cart restaurant, a living room for old men playing dominoes, a nightclub with perreo, nutcrackers, and no cover. A New Yorker can live several lifetimes before they ever turn 18.
Few rappers reflect this spirit quite like Patrick Morales, the 27-year-old Irish and Puerto Rican MC better known as Wiki. His latest album, Half God, is a record about what it’s like to come of age in New York: the way it shapes, hardens, prematurely ages you. Produced in its entirety by Navy Blue—the skateboarder/model turned prolific producer/MC born Sage Elsesser—the record captures the varied tempos of city life in colorful vignettes. A warbling guitar loop soundtracks a contemplative smoke session on “Roof”; the stuttering soul samples on “Can’t Do This Alone” stroll with Wiki and Navy Blue through city streets; hi-hats crunch and snares snap on “The Business,” as Wiki spews vitriol at the gentrifiers changing his home into something unrecognizable.
Gentrification looms like a specter over the entire album. Born on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and living on the Lower East Side, Wiki has watched the city’s grit be slowly washed away, its quirky characters and storefronts pushed out in favor of chain stores and bottomless mimosas. Near his downtown apartment, where Chinatown and the LES meet, abuelitas push grocery carts past old Chinese men smoking cigarettes on stoops, and young Asian kids walk to school to the tune of car stereos blasting Latin music. But interlopers threaten the vibe, and Wiki’s anger permeates much of Half God. Everyone understands New York attracts people from everywhere; Wiki just can’t understand why the most privileged of them are so selfish. On “New Truths,” he rails against college kids unable to empathize with the less fortunate. On “The Business,” he chastises NIMBY transplants: “What I can’t understand and get through to me is/After all the schooling you did, don’t know what community is?”
An old soul at 27, Wiki may have come up as a hard-partying dirtbag, but he’s clearly mellowed out and wised up in the decade since that first Ratking EP. In the years since he went solo, his influences have become more focused, his pen sharpened against anyone disrespecting his idea of hip-hop, or his hometown. On Half God, months of pandemic isolation lead him to even deeper introspection, considering the role that performing has on both his wallet and his mental health, and what kind of legacy he might leave to his hypothetical children. Being cooped up inside drove him a little nuts, but also confirmed the human need to connect. Perhaps the most interesting sign of his maturity is a willingness to be emotionally vulnerable. He long avoided promiscuous boasts in favor of monogamy raps; on “Never Fall Off” he takes it one step further, narrating the joys of a budding courtship with a giddy earnestness not often found on rap records.
His sharp tongue and self-reflection put him in good company among his peers, several of whom appear and feel right at home on Half God. Wiki and Earl Sweatshirt—Elsesser’s childhood friend and frequent collaborator—vibrate at the same frequency on “All I Need.” Wiki’s last solo album, Oofie, already felt spiritually aligned with Earl’s 2019 LP Some Rap Songs, and in their mid-20s, the pair already feel like elder statesmen. Plenty of the beats on Half God feel like they could have appeared on past MIKE releases, which were occasionally peppered with Navy Blue beats. And few humans embody New York more than Queens rapper and durag legend Remy Banks, who brings supreme confidence and gravitas to the Daniel Dumile nod “Gas Face,” which inspires Wiki’s morbid ruminations on how much more popular he might be if he were dead: “Is that the only time you can find me on your mind?/For you to really know I was fly, jeez/Post up old pics on IG/Then sign me/My dead body/Even when dead lotta money to make off me.”
Wiki’s wit and skill as an MC have never been in question, and on Half God, he seems to finally believe it himself. He’s less concerned with flexing his chops than painting pictures and telling stories; he’s wise enough to really know himself and confident enough to reveal it. “Is my fate sealed, is it definite?/Or can I make an appeal/A second attempt/Is it healing me when I feel the medicine?/What’s real and what is relevant?” he raps on “Home.” Free of insecure braggadocio, we’re left with the clearest image of himself. But the most remarkable thing about Half God may just be how well Navy Blue’s beats suit Wiki’s style, tone, and spirit; the hypnotic loops warp and snap back into focus alongside stream-of-consciousness flows, simple but sophisticated.
Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive. From the first track, sirens swirl around piano loops and cymbal crescendos, and street noise weaves in between beats and bars, triggering the senses. You can almost smell the meat on the grill as Wiki’s akhi hooks up his spicy chicken sandwich, or feel the breeze across his rooftop as people march like ants on the street below. New York City has long been a character in rap. But Half God is the story of how that character has shaped our protagonist, a young man immersed and in love with its spirit, holding on loosely to an ever-evolving community in which he sees his own reflection.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Wikset Enterprise | October 5, 2021 | 8.5 | 7f924609-eccf-45f4-9382-9d3cad65556a | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
On her new album, Madonna attempts to take on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, examining her own history and crushing it under her boot heel. | On her new album, Madonna attempts to take on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, examining her own history and crushing it under her boot heel. | Madonna: Rebel Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20293-rebel-heart/ | Rebel Heart | It’s difficult to take Madonna at face value. She is on her third generation of pop iconhood, after all, and her work comes freighted with decades of discussions about sexuality, appropriation, and whether what she is doing is "shocking" or "fake" or "appropriate." In the run-up to Rebel Heart, a series of bad-press flare-ups—myriad Instagram-based controversies, comparing her album leak to rape—suggested that maybe Madonna had slipped from our reality entirely. Yet, the surprise of Rebel Heart, her 13th album, is its groundedness, its centering of the Real Madonna in the mix.
In a way, Rebel Heart fits squarely into a growing canon that also includes Björk’s Vulnicura, Kim Gordon’s new memoir and the autobiography of Slits guitarist Viv Albertine: female artists of a certain age making mature, candid work about divorce, and the rediscovery of the artistic self that follows in the wake of the rupture of their domestic life. Rebel Heart, like Vulnicura, digs in on the vertiginous aftermath (most spectacularly on "Living for Love" and "HeartBreakCity"), and finds steadiness in the pure loves of children, the bedrock of self, and spiritualism. As is traditional Madonna™, her lyrics reach for top-shelf Catholicism, conflating spiritual and sexual salvation in a way that never makes entirely clear whether the supplication is being offered at the foot of Christ or a bedmate.
On the absolution-seeking "Devil Pray", she sings about the futility of escaping pain and recites a garbage head’s shopping list of street drugs that offer brief relief—including, but not limited to, sniffing glue. As she chants "Save my soul/ Devil’s here to fool ya" a bed of throaty, orgasmic samples rises in the mix, a hundred tiny Madonna-voices in coital abyss. It is a strange, tender, comical thing, this Madonna song that cites huffing and invokes the presence of "Lucifer." But ultimately, it’s a boring stadium-throb lite-EDM song about seeking sobriety and/or big-G God. It’s also a Madonna-doing-Madonna cliche, which is too often the downfall of Rebel Heart.
The good news is that most of the time, Madonna-doing-Madonna seems in on the joke. There’s the masterfully campy "Bitch I’m Madonna", and then the 50 Shades of What-the-Actual-Fuck of "S.E.X.", which goes from trad break-you-off/come-inside talk to mentions of "chopsticks," a "dental chair," a "golden shower" and raw meat as erotic objects in a voice that sounds like she’s calling on her Creepy Frog phone while wearing a zipped fetish mask. On "Holy Water" she draws a comparison reminiscent of Lana Del Rey and Pepsi-Cola.
The deep production team on Rebel Heart—Ariel Rechtshaid and Diplo in particular—have previously done work referencing classic '80s Madonna, and seemingly have a good sense of what suits her voice and still-evolving mature-era aesthetic. The soulful diva house of "Living for Love" sounds like it should have been the single off the Mary J. Blige London Sessions album, complete with celestial gospel chorus and piano 8s. It kicks off the album and serves as its thesis—Madonna as triumphant (yet vulnerable) phoenix from the flame, seeking good love and God, raving in the dawn after the darkness. Much of the 14-track domestic commercial version (as well as crushingly long 25-track super deluxe version) mines the same territory.
When she’s not hammering self-help maxims in the breakup zone, she is ordering the pop cosmos around her, much like she’s been doing since approximately 1985. "Bitch I’m Madonna" is a fantastic argument that the Sophie, Nicki Minaj, Diplo & Madonna album should come out, like, tomorrow and save everyone’s summer. It’s corny and glorious, its Nicki verse the most energizing 26 seconds of the album—and it’s also a convincing plea for big-tent EDM to get weird. On the surface it’s essentially the most artful Kesha song anyone’s ever made, but grows progressively more warped and bubblegum until it falls apart amid seizing saw synths. It’s Madonna as cartoon diva, but then it’s piggybacked by the pained ballad flipside: On "Joan of Arc" she opens up, as much as any ultra famous pop performer can in four minutes, about how hard it is to be the public Madonna, followed by paparazzi and dissected by trolls online. "Just hold me while I cry my eyes out," she sings.
It’s a curious cocktail, one that makes it seem like she is actively taking on the mantle of What Madonna Means To Us In 2015. Rebel Heart finds her recoiling and resigning from it, refusing it, fucking with us, examining her own history and playfully crushing it under her boot heel. Yet, while some songs never quite make their point, others drill down on bad ones. The cringe-inducing "Body Shop"—wherein Madonna takes a body-as-a-car metaphor into mortifying territory that makes you wish for an Auto Wrecker: "You can polish the headlights/ You can smooth out the fender." (Bon Scott is probably spinning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken.) With songs like that sandwiched between unabashed bangers and tenderhearted treacle, and constant codeswitching from Madonna the character to Madonna the human being, Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses. As valiantly as the album tries, it’s hard to hit reset on the Madonna we’ve known and loved, after 30 years of campaigning for our hearts and minds. | 2015-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Live Nation | March 13, 2015 | 5.1 | 7f95e0cf-5a73-4ed5-a60f-749463cfa998 | Jessica Hopper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-hopper/ | null |
Gucci Mane and Zaytoven give a quick five-song salute that recaptures a few sparks of their former fire. | Gucci Mane and Zaytoven give a quick five-song salute that recaptures a few sparks of their former fire. | Gucci Mane / Zaytoven: GucTiggy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22340-guctiggy-ep/ | GucTiggy EP | The rapper-producer bond is at the center of rap symbiosis, but it’s a balance that’s difficult to maintain. Gucci Mane and Zaytoven have embodied that balance for over a decade now. It was Zaytoven who convinced Gucci to start rapping in his basement in the early 2000s, and the connection between the two was instantaneous: “Me and Gucci had a chemistry,” he told The Fader for their oral history of the storied street rapper. “Wherever he went or whoever he teamed up with, I was rocking with him.” The pair has been prolific, releasing hundreds of songs and forging modern trap music in their image. In addition to producing EA Sportscenter, which kickstarted Gucci’s strongest stretch in 2008, and appearing on several mixtapes throughout his career, Zaytoven is the only producer credited on all nine of Gucci’s studio albums. It isn’t an exaggeration to say they changed rap, in sound and disposition.
But time changes everything, and the two aren’t the tag-team they once were. They’ve both strayed from their storied partnership in recent years, in part because of Gucci’s prison stint, but also just due to outright growth and progression. Zaytoven produced the middle work in Future’s rehabilitating mixtape trilogy, Beast Mode, along with hits like Migos’ breakout single “Versace,” and Gucci has worked with a host of producers including Mike WiLL Made-It and Metro Boomin, two guys heavily indebted to his influence who have gone on to shape the current rap landscape. Gucci and Zaytoven always existed outside of each other, but these days they’re no longer defined by it. Their latest joint EP, GucTiggy, is a salute to the decade-plus they’ve spent redefining rap and a testament to their fellowship. Gucci puts it plainly on “GucTiggy Vol. 3:” “Zay, that's my vato, yeah, yeah, that's my Preemo.”
Likely recorded in the six days of sessions that created Everybody Looking, which was primarily produced by Zaytoven and Mike WiLL, GucTiggy is just as rushed as the album and even less polished. But this project isn’t meant to be some great, standalone work, an Everybody Looking companion piece, or even as an informal introduction to the upcoming Woptober project. It’s simply a token of a longstanding, working friendship. The production value is somewhat fitting, almost reminiscent of those early mixtapes that made them staples on the underground and Datpiff circuits. These songs are trinkets, collectibles for longtime fans and disposable Gucci-Zay ephemera for their rap scrapbook. If Everybody Looking was Gucci Mane and Zaytoven rediscovering their rhythm, this is their opportunity to smell the roses.
Still, Gucci is shaking the prison rust off with every flow, working his way back into rapping shape, and even when he isn’t at his full power he’s a formidable presence. On “GucTiggy Vol. 2 (Woptober),” he chugs along steadily, letting his momentum build line by line. By “GucTiggy Vol. 4,” he’s capturing glints of past glory with gems like “I’m so Marilyn Manson, I’m so heinously handsome/I’m more dangerous than famous, I’ll take your grandson for ransom.” Zaytoven is about as dependable as they come, and he lines heavy 808 bass with prickly synths and accenting keys. Things are starting to come together, and on GucTiggy they build back a bit more of the chemistry lost to time served with each breath and keystroke. “I ain’t got not partners, I’m my own partner,” Gucci raps in the opening bar of “GucTiggy Vol. 1,” undoubtedly a swipe at a former comrade like Waka Flocka Flame. But such a bar overlooks his man behind the boards. | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 29, 2016 | 6.5 | 7f98e8da-fbbf-4abe-83e1-33fe2d3f2020 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
All cognac and white linen, the Virginia R&B musician’s debut album is steeped in quiet storm and beefed up with crisp drums and booming production: a sophisticated, seductive mix. | All cognac and white linen, the Virginia R&B musician’s debut album is steeped in quiet storm and beefed up with crisp drums and booming production: a sophisticated, seductive mix. | Masego: Lady Lady | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/masego-lady-lady/ | Lady Lady | It doesn’t take long to reach the heart of Masego’s debut full-length album, Lady Lady. It’s a meditation on women, strong women: those loved and lost, some who’ve taught him hard lessons along the way, others who haven’t entered his life yet. Through real and imagined narratives, the singer navigates the nuances of black romance, celebrating the bliss and uncertainty it brings. He honors the southern charm of women from his native Newport News, Virginia, the sexiness of a late-night dance on the beach. He’s also a young man who wants to parlay for a little bit. “Wanna use my fame and lay wit a model,” he quips on “Lavish Lullaby,” one of various standouts from the new album.
Lady Lady soundtracks the evening, when the sun shifts along the horizon and the air begins to cool. All cognac and white linen, it’s the record you play just after the storm, as the steam billows from the concrete and the nightlife is beginning to pick up. The album also delves into the dichotomy of Masego himself: the good dude, the bleeding-heart romantic, the burgeoning talent wrestling with his own ego. His music is sophisticated, steeped in 1980s quiet-storm R&B with hints of smooth jazz along the fringes. He calls it “trap house jazz,” a retro-futuristic mix of booming bass drums and staggered rap cadences made for open-air festivals and adult-contemporary radio. Masego is an old soul who, at the age of 25, can evoke the sweet tenderness of Stevie Wonder and the gritty shit talk of Anderson .Paak. He caters to both crowds, crafting a sound that pulls in black music’s past and present in equal measure.
Long before this album, Masego released an assortment of tracks and EPs on Bandcamp that included everything from repurposed Stevie songs to tropically themed bounce beats dedicated to his roots in Kingston, Jamaica. Though the song quality varied from track to track, one could hear Masego inching toward the fleshed-out arrangements he creates now. It showcased his ambition: Masego handled almost everything himself—singing, producing, and arranging each tune. He taught himself how to play piano, saxophone, drums, bass, and guitar in high school, then started posting his original work on SoundCloud.
There was no grand breakthrough moment for Masego; the notoriety he’s achieved to this point is the result of steady gains made over the past five years. But if he did get a major assist, it was around 2016, when the renowned producer DJ Jazzy Jeff cosigned Masego and started working with him. He later released a well-received compilation of demos called Loose Thoughts, which—despite all the music he’d dropped—was dubbed a proper introduction to Masego’s full creative range.
Featuring vocalists SiR and Tiffany Gouché, producer Sounwave, and singer/composer French Kiwi Juice (aka FKJ), Lady Lady offers a wide-ranging glimpse into Masego’s different interactions with the stronger sex. On “I Had a Vision,” he lauds their strength and independence, then on “Black Love,” a gorgeous ballad near album’s end, Masego envisions his wedding day, singing to his potential bride on the altar. The writing is poetic, evoking a head-in-the-clouds motif that recalls Stevie classics like “Knocks Me Off My Feet” and “With Each Beat of My Heart.” To that end, though, Masego skews too close to his influences in certain spots, and on interlude “24 Hr. Relationship,” he lifts a scene from The Love Below half of OutKast’s 2003 double disc, recreating it almost line for line here. On an album meant to establish Masego as a standalone entity, its inclusion feels like a misstep, though it doesn’t diminish the record’s overall flow. In the end, Lady Lady is a grand coming-of-age record that displays the playful and reflective halves of Masego, illuminating his versatile nature with the promise of more to come. | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | EQT | September 11, 2018 | 7.3 | 7fa18b49-7c97-4fc2-aa7a-25208536b1cb | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
The pop singer hits a soft reset on her second album, which isn’t a revelation, but it has the tinge of a project made with love and devotion. | The pop singer hits a soft reset on her second album, which isn’t a revelation, but it has the tinge of a project made with love and devotion. | Alessia Cara: The Pains of Growing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alessia-cara-the-pains-of-growing/ | The Pains of Growing | Alessia Cara was nearly drowned by a record contract. She would have had good company down there: The music industry is a watery grave for people in her position—one hot song, a firestorm of interest, and zero leverage. After her cool-eyed hit “Here,” she disappeared almost entirely into Def Jam, like a dollar into a wind tunnel. She put out EPs with prefab songs that sounded intended for Bebe Rexha or Taylor Swift or anyone who agreed to record them. Her name and voice appeared on them, but nothing else did. It looked like “Alessia Cara,” as a fresh voice in pop music, had been thoroughly strip-mined.
She has not escaped Def Jam, but she must have convinced them to leave her alone at some point. Maybe it was her appearance on Logic’s massive hit “1-800-273-8255” that convinced them to let her breathe, or maybe it was Disney’s Moana, but her second album, The Pains of Growing, is full of pop songs that feel grounded in a perspective. The person on The Pains Of Growing isn’t the moody teenager of 2015’s “Here,” but it is, recognizably, a person, one with specific aches, lusts, and irritations. The album isn’t a revelation but it has the tinge of a project made with love and devotion, a feeling that had more or less evaporated from Cara’s music.
The production picks sounds from off the big pop song sale rack—the neat little boom and click of the drums on the single, “Not Today” comes marked down courtesy of Lorde’s “Royals,” and the clipped guitars remind you that you streamed the Haim album recently. Cara’s vocals, sleepy and warm, gaze up at an Amy Winehouse poster. But the song cocks a wry eyebrow right at you. Cara’s lyrics step through a well-worn set up (”Someday I’ll forget the day he left/But surely not today”), funny and still singular enough for her to work in a line as weird as “I’ll be acquainted with my jollities,” which sounds like it comes from the forgotten third verse of some old Christmas carol.
Another highlight, “Trust My Lonely” approaches heartbreak from the opposite side.The titular hook—the song has two, each memorable enough for its own song—is, “Don’t you know that you’re no good for me?/I gotta trust my lonely.” “I gotta trust my lonely”—the phrasing is a little maddening in a good way—part marketing slogan, part trending topic, somehow still winsome.
A few songs here feel like homework assignments done en route to arrive at a better song: “All We Know” opens with the sound of a guitar line so brazenly lifted from the xx that you could be forgiven for checking your phone to see what album is playing. The would-be anthem “7 Days” takes a game stab at media criticism, but if you don’t trip over the lyric “Oh, Mr. man upstairs,” you probably won’t make it past “Oh, the land of poor taste/The spectacle of cut and paste.” These songs are stumbles, though, not faceplants, and they mostly ring hollow because Cara herself doesn’t sound as invested in them.
She is at her most winning when she sounds like she is having fun: On “Nintendo Games,” she compares a difficult relationship to…well, Nintendo games, with this hilarious complaint: “This is taking longer than ‘Zelda.’” Then, she tells the guy she’d rather be playing “Mario Kart.” On “Wherever I Live,” she offers a dispatch from a series of shit hotels, places where she hears reruns of “Friends” playing through the wall and imagines a knocking at her door: “I’m going crazy, and this toilet’s rusted/Food came but I don’t trust it.” The song is just her voice and a guitar, the simplest music she’s made yet, and it is so endearing it tugs at your shirt sleeve to get you to love it. “Girl Next Door” has the same arrangement, and has a similar freshness. “I rock my soul on both sleeves of my t-shirt,” she declares on the hook—a little hokey, maybe, but honest and refreshing. It’s the first moment she has sounded truly free since she first got our attention. | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | December 7, 2018 | 6.8 | 7fa53939-92ae-44b6-8da2-6dd883c85c16 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
This live album is an intense, electric, and sometimes uncanny exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs on stage. | This live album is an intense, electric, and sometimes uncanny exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs on stage. | King Krule: You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-krule-you-heat-me-up-you-cool-me-down/ | You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down | Pieced together from the three shows King Krule managed to play in 2020 before COVID rolled in—a couple in Paris, including one for Jehnny Beth’s Echoes program, and one in Amsterdam—You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down is a live album that hints at what could have been. Featuring performances in support of last year’s Man Alive!, the set offers an exhibition of Archy Marshall’s ability to reimagine his songs in a live setting. It also captures the unique transfer of energy between performer and audience that can only happen with a stage and a sticky floor.
This isn’t Marshall’s first live album—that was Live on the Moon, in 2018—but it is the only one he’s released after being forced to cancel an intercontinental tour, so it’s safe to say that it’s carrying a little extra weight. The setlist offers a fairly even spread of tracks from Man Alive! and 2017’s excellent The OOZ, along with a handful of crowd pleasers from his 2013 debut 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, making for something of a greatest-hits trawl. On stage, these songs take on a new exuberance and intensity. The sludgy guitars of “Stoned Again” and the unhinged sax on “Comet Face” pack a kick that’s absent on the studio recordings; the bass is puffed up throughout, offering thick, grippy hooks for Marshall’s drawled vocals to hang off.
The performances are intense and electric: Slouched verses set up a dizzying slingshot effect for the moments, as on “Alone, Omen 3” or “Rock Bottom,” when Marshall opts to soar into a chorus. Frenzied interplay with his regular five-piece touring band—featuring sax, keys, bass, guitar, and drums—opens dynamic space for Marshall’s psychedelic songwriting, defined by its twisted structures and occasional apoplectic outbursts. “Half Man Half Shark” elides its indie-disco strictures with an added dose of aggression, and comes out better for it. “Alone, Omen 3” rends its pop chops in favor of funky delay pedals and UFO synth effects; it’s brilliantly, magnetically delirious.
Crowd noises are wheeled in at odd intervals, often to provide an illusion of continuity between the stitched recordings. The feeling is uncanny, a reminder that it’s still a bit weird to hear music being played live and loud at the moment. There’s polite applause for the most part—and one excitable guy shouting out “How you doing, Archy?” after “Stoned Again”—until the closing performance of “Easy Easy.” All of a sudden, you’re thrown into the throng, ensconced in the familiar buzz of anticipation and friendly boos when Marshall announces, so nonchalantly you could miss it, that this is the last song. Here, the adoring mass is conjured perfectly, singing back the bridge as it builds, before being drowned out—despite their loudest efforts—by the wall of guitars and grit-strained vocals.
It’s a moment tinged with the familiar, sinking realization that the show is nearly over and the comedown is about to begin. What’s a live album for, if not to stir exactly this fervent mix of feelings? And, of course, to provide the option of pressing play and repeating the experience all over again.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 13, 2021 | 7.4 | 7fa61dd6-a09a-42ee-aaf7-99a942c0475f | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Portland duo Golden Retriever have created their own musical language using bass clarinet and a modular synth rig. Rotations expands their sound, adding 10 classical musicians to the mix. | The Portland duo Golden Retriever have created their own musical language using bass clarinet and a modular synth rig. Rotations expands their sound, adding 10 classical musicians to the mix. | Golden Retriever: Rotations | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/golden-retriever-rotations/ | Rotations | For nearly 10 years, the Portland, Ore. duo Golden Retriever has maintained a rigid approach to experimental composition. Jonathan Sielaff’s bass clarinet and Matt Carlson’s modular synth rig comprise just about the entirety of their sound, along with some basic effects and computer editing used to enhance each improvisational performance. By developing their music within the limitations of a self-imposed binary system, Golden Retriever has created their own language and made it readily translatable to an array of motifs. But for the majority of the group’s career, they’ve preferred ambiguity and their own instincts over any clearly defined structure.
The 2014 album Seer used this peculiar vocabulary for Golden Retriever’s most coherent yet varied music yet. Encompassing free jazz, kosmische, early ambient, new age, and musique concrète, the record expressed a remarkable range of ideas with an unusual sense of clarity. Continuing this gradual evolution, Rotations rips a handful of pages out of the Golden Retriever rule book. The duo’s third record for Thrill Jockey expands on every aspect of their sound, most notably by adding 10 classical musicians to their ranks. After receiving a grant from Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council to write and perform new work locally, Carlson and Sielaff methodically carved out their unique take on chamber music. The process found them blending their time-tested practice of sparse improvisation with more traditional notation and arrangement, subsequently performing the pieces live with an ensemble in October 2015. Almost two years later, the recordings of those commissioned works stand among Golden Retriever’s best and most accessible music.
Despite the influx of instrumentation, minimalism remains a key tenet of Rotations, as does freeform structure and a tendency for the avant-garde. In fact, the accompanying musicians—including the Mousai Remix String Quartet and players on piano, woodwinds, percussion, pipe organ, and French horn—sometimes simply fill out the peripheries around Carlson’s electronics and Sielaff’s treated clarinet. The quiet subtleties and complex layering of the augmented arrangements can create a hallucinatory effect. On the more elaborate songs, such as “Pelagic Tremor” and “Tessellation,” the tonal identities of, say, a sustained flute note, a sine wave, and an organ’s drone become blurred, if not utterly indistinguishable. “Thirty-Six Stratagems” brings chaos and dissonance to the fore, with its only easily identifiable sound as the tumbling, knotty percussion. Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever.
Rotations is also richly emotional. From the reflective piano figures that drive “A Kind of Leaving” to the trembling resonance of “Thread of Light,” feelings akin to the pianist Harold Budd’s glowing minimalism emerge. Elsewhere, the influence of experimental composers Éliane Radigue and Laurie Spiegel can be felt in the thoughtful, unfurling intricacies. Nestled between beauty, sadness, confusion, and grace, these six pieces share a common ground and grow from it, which is integral to how Rotations makes such an impression. Whether it’s with the modern classical closer “Sunsight,” perhaps the album’s most consonant and traditional music, or the meditative tone poem “Tessellation,” Golden Retriever communicate a shared humanity above their personal skill, innovation, or ambition. And it only betters the music when they do so with a vocabulary meant for everyone to understand. | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | July 28, 2017 | 8 | 7facec80-1fc3-42af-8e84-b04b58a421de | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini has been a member of Nine Inch Nails since the late 2000s and is also part of the small-world subculture of analog and modular synths. His second album for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient’s Dominick Fernow, is organic and propulsive, eerie and claustrophobic. | Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini has been a member of Nine Inch Nails since the late 2000s and is also part of the small-world subculture of analog and modular synths. His second album for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient’s Dominick Fernow, is organic and propulsive, eerie and claustrophobic. | Alessandro Cortini: Risveglio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20802-risveglio/ | Risveglio | If you dabble in the small-world subculture of analog and modular synths, Alessandro Cortini is difficult to avoid. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist posts on the message boards, appears in the documentaries, and turns up at conventions repping for popular modular designers like Make Noise and Verbos. A member of Nine Inch Nails since the late 2000s, he’s earned a certain amount of mainstream alt-rock visibility, but there’s a substantial portion of his audience that likely found out about him by watching YouTube videos in which he monkeys around electronic unobtanium like the Buchla 700. He’s a gearhead’s musician.
His solo synthesizer records only reinforce that role. Cortini has a knack for making esoteric instruments like modular synthesizers seem cool and approachable. If you’re coming to electronic music via post-rock or even from film soundtracks, Cortini's music is easy to connect with. His compositions are spare and repetitive, but also melodic—employing warbly cyclical melodies that sometimes recall John Carpenter’s early '80s film scores or the work of Boards of Canada. Though he's often in proximity to instruments that epitomize electronic music's squealing id, Cortini's solo music is pretty dialed in.
Risveglio is Cortini’s second full-length for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient’s Dominick Fernow. Like its predecessor, Sonno, the album was composed while on tour using a portable studio setup. On that album Cortini used only one instrument, the Roland MC-202—a monophonic synthesizer/sequencer. Here, he expands the palate, adding a second element, the Roland TB-303. Both of these synths were heavily used in dance music during the '80s and '90s, particularly the TB-303, which provided the unmistakable squelchy bass sound that defined acid house. However, you will hardly recognize either of them on Risveglio.
In these songs, Cortini sets up static patterns that are gradually tweaked and mutated, using effect pedals (delay, reverb) to create a sense of development. The constant motion and shifting textures of sequenced synthesizer music (think Manuel Gottsching's "E2-E4") often make it feel fluid and watery. This is not exactly the case with Risveglio. It’s organic and propulsive, but the sound is eerie and claustrophobic rather than shimmery and ebullient. Cortini may have recorded it in a hotel room, but "Lotta" sounds like it was put to tape in an underground bunker.
In a genre where compositions are frequently driven by density and accumulation (both in terms of sound and of hardware), Cortini’s music is notable for its economy. Because of the instruments involved, no song can involve more than two active melodies at one time. Complex chords and harmony are not possible. These limitations make the music easily identifiable and distinctive. And despite the noise and murk, it's easy to listen to—once you're a minute into one of Risveglio's songs, you pretty much know what it is and where it's going. It's music that is alien and strange, but also familiar. | 2015-07-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hospital | July 29, 2015 | 7.2 | 7faf12ed-4472-45de-bc3d-0e8af4876b5f | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The proudly campy hyperpop singer’s debut is vibrant and ridiculous, for better or worse. | The proudly campy hyperpop singer’s debut is vibrant and ridiculous, for better or worse. | Slayyyter: Troubled Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slayyyter-troubled-paradise/ | Troubled Paradise | In the world of 24-year-old glitch-pop artist Slayyyter, the Juicy Couture lockets sway to the booming bass, celebrities from 2004 are ancient deities, and when you sing along, you should sound like Britney. In 2018, between shifts as a salon receptionist, the Missouri native began posting tracks on SoundCloud with help from Ayesha Erotica, a prolific hyperpop producer who scrubbed her work from the internet in 2018. Their music was half-joking and brashly sexual, stuffing lyrics about white Jeeps, kissing strangers, and feeling “daddy as fuck” between burping bass and synth flourishes sharp enough to pop a White Claw. Slayyyter’s SoundCloud singles coalesced into the self-released 2019 mixtape Slayyyter, a deep-fried pop delicacy that landed her on Charli XCX’s tour. She seemed poised for a breakthrough—but when offensive old tweets resurfaced in early 2020, fans weren’t so sure she deserved it.
Troubled Paradise, Slayyyter’s full-length debut, seeks to recapture some of that flagging momentum. The album is vibrant and ridiculous, its lyrics silly and captivating (“All these vegan bitches want beef!”), but even at its most high-fructose and helium-inflated, the music can’t conceal its own shallowness. Still, it tries hard, sometimes scrounging up flashes of gold. The title track is Slayyyter’s shot at soaring, heart-pounding electropop, and although its four-minute length feels gratuitous, the bittersweet lovesickness is locked in. “Throatzillaaa” is a sultry blowjob anthem (hear me out); Slayyyter sounds completely serious as she declares in bubble-bath Auto-Tune, “Baby, let me swallow them kids.” Funny, hooky, and over-the-top sex-positive, it’s a prime example of her ability to deliver tackiness with endearing nonchalance.
Slayyyter was an early adopter of the internet’s current preoccupation with 2000s-era bimbos and relishes in that kind of camp. She treats pop-culture excess with the reverence of a historian, mentioning Nickelodeon’s Timmy Turner in the same line where she talks about doing coke. Far from the detached femmebot you might imagine singing these songs, Slayyyter’s face and body are constantly present: slithering out of a hellishly pink tanning bed on her mixtape cover, or moaning against the greenscreen in the orange desert of her “Cowboys” video. Her tabloid-ready outfits and hyper-saturated music videos are impossible to separate from her music—they all inform each other.
But that audacious image and sound haven’t advanced any further than where she left them on Slayyyter. Songs like the unpleasantly frizzy “Over This!” and the monotonous “Dog House,” an uninspired copycat of Azealia Banks’ “212,” sound like they could have been B-sides from the earlier tape. Slayyyter doesn’t lean into her persona the way Lana Del Rey does, or shift it into something multidimensional and theatric like Dorian Electra, either. It’s just kind of... there.
When she first debuted on SoundCloud, “hyperpop” hadn’t yet become a genre movement. Slayyyter channeled the most maligned hot girls of 2008 with grimy glitz and neon glare, her own attempt to mold the gushy, processed sound of PC Music back towards something resembling the mainstream. It’s an artistic trajectory shared with artists like Bladee, Poppy, and Kim Petras, but Slayyyter—unfiltered, unpolished, and proudly, performatively trashy—was different enough to distinguish herself from other hyperpop disciples with Hot 100 aspirations. Perhaps they were afraid to be truly crude, to whip out the velour track pants and soak them at the wet T-shirt contest. Slayyyter knew how to turn grossness into glamour, or at the very least, into the best song for crushing blue raspberry vodka shots with six of your closest The Real World fans.
More recently, as pop culture reevaluates its relationship to the Courtney Stoddens and Megan Foxes of the world, Slayyyter’s teeny bikinis and hair flips aren’t quite enough to make her appear more interesting than other Y2K-loving hyperpop acts. Projects like Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now draw on hyperpop’s capacity for emotional depth and play, using the genre’s characteristic lack of restraint as a vehicle to explore personal truths. Slayyyter has trouble getting there; her jabs at vulnerability never make it past stiff cliché (“I don’t want to think/Pour another drink”). Her star quality has supernova potential if she just allowed herself to dig deeper—bimbos have brains, too.
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. | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fader Label | June 14, 2021 | 6 | 7fafcd2d-1860-4bd8-afd5-a68a0c951f2b | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
On an 81-minute double album, the EGOT singer-songwriter enlists an impressive roster of guests to help bring more fun—and funk—to his music than he has in years. | On an 81-minute double album, the EGOT singer-songwriter enlists an impressive roster of guests to help bring more fun—and funk—to his music than he has in years. | John Legend: Legend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-legend-legend/ | Legend | These days, John Legend’s reputation lies as much in network television as it does in music, but his status as a ubiquitous, EGOTing, family-friendly singer of inspirational R&B tunes isn’t entirely fair to the range of his discography. On his 2004 debut Get Lifted, a boisterous proof-of-concept for Kanye West’s G.O.O.D Music label, the former choir director and pianist gave equal space to tender ballads and odes to philandering, painting himself as a neo-soul casanova who could make infidelity sound downright spiritual. Over time, Legend’s more earnest archetype won out; his deeply personal single “Ordinary People,” inspired by his parents marrying and divorcing twice, became a commercial and critical success. Later, he landed a spot on wedding playlists for eternity with “All of Me,” thus completing his transformation into a representative for domestic bliss.
His latest album, Legend, is not a complete 180 back to the playboy territory he once dabbled in, even if his shirtless pose on the cover may suggest so. But it does bring more fun and funk into Legend’s music than he has during the past decade. Part of that lightness can be attributed to the album’s length: At 81 minutes and 24 songs, this is a proper double LP, and the added space gives Legend the opportunity to stretch his limbs and tap into more playful modes he may have usually cast off in favor of his doting family-man image. This, of course, can lead to some repetition—if one horny track called “Waterslide” wasn’t enough for you, there’s another called “Splash”—but the whole thing flies by with such carefree ease that it never feels overstuffed.
Legend’s previous album, 2020’s Bigger Love, made some misguided attempts at bringing pop energy to his schtick. Legend, executive produced with Ryan Tedder, settles on a pop-funk sound better suited to his sensibilities: timeless, genial, and a pleasant contrast from his usual tear-jerkers. Suave tracks like “Guy Like Me” and “Strawberry Blush”—the latter recorded with Anderson .Paak collaborators Free Nationals —would fit right at home at a birthday party or barbecue alongside recent material from Beyoncé and Silk Sonic. And just like .Paak and Bruno Mars’ collaboration, Legend instinctively understands the potential in hamming it up with retro style. “You” could be a direct descendant of Roger Troutman’s 1987 electro love song “I Want to Be Your Man,” talkbox and all. Seeing this side to Legend isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s refreshing to hear him loosen up his tightly controlled persona with these songs, especially when he ascends to roller-rink glory on lead single “All She Wanna Do” (appearing twice here, with and without Saweetie).
The impressive roster of collaborators—Rapsody, Rick Ross, Amber Mark, Jhene Aiko, Ty Dolla $ign—helps push Legend out of his comfort zone, particularly in his vocals. In the gospel-influenced slow jam “Love,” with Jazmine Sullivan, both singers soar over bare-bones cymbals and a venerable horn section, paying homage to Legend’s church roots. On opener “Rounds,” Legend complements Ross’ luxury raps (“Pickin' rose pedals in Anisa, France/Pink peacocks roamin' at the mansion”) with a buttery-smooth drawl, punctuated by the occasional Prince-like yelp.
Although a talented songwriter, Legend is not a memorable lyricist, and he can falter when attempting to write a catchy pop hook. (“She’s sooooo dope/Wanna be her dope fiend/She shows me what dope means,” he spells out on “Dope.”) The second half of the album returns largely to devotional anthems, and while there are some interesting production choices here and there, like the reggae beat on “I Want You to Know,” hearing them all bundled together feels like an admission that, even while dipping his toes into other moods and genres, Legend feels obligated to keep returning to the same sound that propelled his biggest hits. It’s a reminder that, no matter the window dressing, he always gravitates towards his foremost appeal: a simplicity that can easily translate into universalism. | 2022-09-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-14T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | September 14, 2022 | 6.7 | 7fb2e6dd-796e-4023-a23e-b9fca43da640 | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
Featuring contributions from Lemmy, a pair of Hot 100 hits, and a newly vulnerable outlook, this peak from the rock star’s solo career gets a 30th anniversary reissue. | Featuring contributions from Lemmy, a pair of Hot 100 hits, and a newly vulnerable outlook, this peak from the rock star’s solo career gets a 30th anniversary reissue. | Ozzy Osbourne: No More Tears | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ozzy-osbourne-no-more-tears/ | No More Tears | When Ozzy Osbourne started recording No More Tears, he had just completed a court-ordered stint in rehab, the result of a grim night in 1989 where he blacked out and assaulted his wife and manager, Sharon. She later dropped the charges against him, but this was clearly rock bottom, and for the first time in his substance-addled life, the 41-year-old singer committed to recovery. No More Tears was the first album he made sober. (He now admits that while he was off booze, he was still abusing prescription pills.) It was also a chance to prove his relevancy at a time when his tabloid persona was overshadowing his musical output. On a new deluxe edition released in celebration of its 30th anniversary, No More Tears still sounds like Osbourne’s high water mark as a solo artist.
The reckoning in Osbourne’s personal life shows up all over the music. A decade removed from the wildness of Blizzard of Ozz, he sounds like a man who very much wants to keep his crazy train from going off the rails. “I can’t take this alone/Don’t leave me on my own tonight,” he pleads on “S.I.N.,” the desperation straining his voice. The shambling “A.V.H.” has the pangs of withdrawal, while the power ballad “Time After Time” considers a splintered long-term relationship that sounds a lot like his own. On the stunning closing track, “Road to Nowhere,” Osbourne eulogizes his former self with humility and gravitas: “I was looking back on my life/And all the things I’ve done to me/I’m still looking for the answers/I’m still searching for the key.” For the first time in his career, the famously reckless singer sounds like he understands the consequences to his actions.
Of course, No More Tears is still an Ozzy Osbourne album, and it’s a brilliant one for how well it balances its lesson-learning and vulnerability with thrilling bravado. Unlike his 1970s albums with Black Sabbath, an immortal run that was burdened with nothing less than the invention of heavy metal, Osbourne’s solo work has always been a place where he could be a pop singer. No More Tears yielded a pair of Hot 100 hits in the epic, orchestral title track and the lighters-aloft tearjerker, “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Osbourne sells that song’s sweetly simple sentiment—he’s got a mama, and he’s coming home to her—with a depth of feeling that only the greatest pop balladeers can hit.
A hallmark of Osbourne’s solo work is the presence of a virtuosic guitarist beside him. Randy Rhoads, with his electrifying playing on Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, was a co-star and true equal, and after Rhoads’ death in a plane crash in 1982, Osbourne made a point of keeping a shredder in his employ. Zakk Wylde first stepped in for 1988’s No Rest for the Wicked, and on No More Tears, he joined the pantheon of great rock sidemen. Wylde can shred with the best of them, but his earthier, blues-rooted style helped define the sound of the albums he worked on with Osbourne. Without his twangy licks, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” would fall flat, and his contributions as a songwriter helped make No More Tears the most consistent solo record of Osbourne’s solo career.
The late Lemmy Kilmister was also a crucial contributor to No More Tears. The Motörhead frontman co-wrote four of its best songs: “I Don’t Want to Change the World,” “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” “Desire,” and “Hellraiser.” Apart from “Hellraiser,” which Motörhead also recorded for March ör Die, these were songs that Lemmy couldn’t get away with at his main gig, whose whiskey-soaked rumble didn’t exactly lend itself to soaring pop hooks and tender acoustic balladry. Motörhead is both celebrated and criticized for their adherence to a single primordial style, but Lemmy’s work on No More Tears proves that he was a canny, versatile songwriter who had the good sense to play to his strengths.
The demos and bonus tracks on this new edition aren’t especially enlightening, but the live material, taken from a pair of shows in 1992, is essential. That ’92 run was cheekily dubbed No More Tours, as a burned-out Osbourne stared down another endless cycle of performances and decided he didn’t have it in him anymore. “I’d been on the road for 25 years, pretty much,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, I Am Ozzy. “I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour. I mean, I’d buy all these houses, and I’d never fucking live in them.” Of course, he un-retired just a few years later, but you can hear in these recordings the deep gratitude he felt toward his fans on what he thinks will be his last time singing to them. On nearly every song, Osbourne ad-libs an “I love you!” between verses. He sounds like a man who understands how precious it is to get a second chance.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Legacy | September 23, 2021 | 8.1 | 7fb80563-e3f9-4cb3-a1c7-be0f8315697b | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
On their sophomore album, the London trio animate songs about the complexity of memory and the promise of dreams with playful production choices and moments of bedlam. | On their sophomore album, the London trio animate songs about the complexity of memory and the promise of dreams with playful production choices and moments of bedlam. | Kero Kero Bonito: Time ‘n’ Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kero-kero-bonito-time-n-place/ | Time ‘n’ Place | You may think time travel is only the stuff of sci-fi novels and films starring Jake Gyllenhaal, but the human brain has its own way of manipulating time. Episodic memory allows us to recall the setting of a memory, the contextual shell for that moment in life. The brain can resurrect a past that has seemingly seeped its way into the walls of spaces like an old school or bedroom. A bricks-and-mortar embodiment of a person’s youth, a childhood home can be an episodic jackpot. Last year, Kero Kero Bonito singer Sarah Midori Perry learned this the hard way when her suburban home on Japan’s Hokkaido island was demolished. That personal casualty ripples through her London trio’s sophomore album, Time ‘n’ Place, where memorial phantoms flow through a mix of upbeat rhythms and opalescent synths. “It’s funny how physical us humans are,” Perry coyly sings.
Kero Kero Bonito broke out in 2016 with Bonito Generation, an album of synthpop so effervescent it felt like the sonic embodiment of watermelon Pop Rocks. The members have since recast themselves with typical band roles—guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, augmenting their sequencers and synthesizers. Time ‘n’ Place is much more turbulent than its predecessor, even if it’s more conceptually grounded. “Only Acting,” for instance, leads with a drum pad beat and synths that writhe like Silly String. What begins as spunky dance-pop soon bursts into distortion-heavy rock, reflecting the performance anxiety of Perry’s lyrics. “I thought I was only acting/But I felt exactly like it was all for real,” she chimes. The song deteriorates into laser beam synths and jagged guitar squeals, Perry roaring as though possessed. Everything returns to chipper normalcy for one verse, before the song skips again and again like a scuffed CD.
The most exciting moments on Time ‘n’ Place come when the production takes these sorts of left turns, when the recordings fizzle or crack with distortion as though an alternate reality were coming into focus. KKB disrupt songs with surprising video game melodies and distortion bombs wired with manipulated vocals. Closer “Rest Stop” ends with Perry’s voice wrapped in uneasy static, ominous groans and machine gun sounds skittering in the distance. “When we walk among the clouds/Hold your neighbor close/As the trumpets echo ’round/You don’t want to be—,” she sings, cut off before she can divulge her conclusion. The secret haunts the album’s end; maybe there wasn’t enough time, or maybe her own memory is starting to waste away.
Kero Kero Bonito bounce between bouts of chaos and the absolute cheeriness of pure pop, a sensation that suggests they are tinkering with those wild old memories, trying to reconcile them with reality. When they aren’t looking for escape on tracks like “Outside” and “Flyway,” KKB transform their current world, whether perceiving a garbage dump as a sacred communal watering hole (“Dump”) or exploring the lucid dream world where your surroundings bend to your will (“Make Believe”). These songs reach for the braid of hope that you can make your own reality.
The conceptual infrastructure of Time ‘n’ Place is often captivating. But more often than not, the songs don’t hold up their end of the bargain, with structures that do little to emphasize the smarts of the ideas themselves. The content is memorable, but the melodies aren’t. Still, stronger and more diverse than their debut, Time ‘n’ Place aspirationally conjures a world that won’t be so easy to detest, one where magic and memory intertwine. | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polyvinyl | October 16, 2018 | 6.5 | 7fb95634-66d5-4bbe-bb5f-d6bbbc2306c3 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
UK producer Mark Pritchard's Under the Sun is deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic. Key vocal features from Thom Yorke, Linda Perhacs, Bibio, and others give the album its sense of movement. | UK producer Mark Pritchard's Under the Sun is deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic. Key vocal features from Thom Yorke, Linda Perhacs, Bibio, and others give the album its sense of movement. | Mark Pritchard: Under the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21785-under-the-sun/ | Under the Sun | When Mark Pritchard first released "?," that question mark made perfect sense. It was 2009, and the track—six somber minutes of gelatinous, pitch-black drones and a doleful, harpsichord-like synth melody—didn't sound like anything else he had ever done. And that's saying something, because Pritchard has done a lot: Between his time in iconic early-'90s groups like Global Communication, Jedi Knights, and Reload, plus an array of solo aliases including Harmonic 313 and Troubleman, the UK producer made ambient, electro, house, acid, instrumental hip-hop, and broken beat, among other styles and hybrids. Not long after "?" appeared as the A-side of a 10" single (the B-side cut, "The Hologram," sounded more like a lost Mo Wax instrumental from the mid '90s), he embarked upon his career's wildly prolific second act, making dancehall, grime, footwork, trap, ragga-jungle, and throwback rave tunes in the duo Africa Hitech and under his own name. Throughout it all, "?" felt like an outlier among outliers; in an oeuvre full of left turns, it was the only one that didn't seemed to have steered him full circle.
Seven years later, that stray puzzle piece falls into place as the opening track on Under the Sun. "?" has always had a liminal feel to it—a number of DJs, including the Gaslamp Killer, Manuel Tur, and Oneman, have used it to open mixtapes, and a few more have closed out their mixes with it—and here it also plays a scene-setting role, establishing the base notes of one of the most curious and idiosyncratic records in Pritchard's catalog. For the most part devoid of drums, Under the Sun is loosely ambient in feel, but it's a world away from the lushly psychedelic chillout-room tropes of Global Communication. Many of its tracks feel like soundtrack cues, and its blippy analog palette often suggests the influence of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There are nods to Boards of Canada, particularly in the vocoded recitation of colors in "Hi Red," the shortest of a number of sketch-like, interstitial cuts. But the album's most unusual aspect, and its unifying thread, are the thin, quavering synthesizer patches suggestive of flute and clarinet and recorder, which, playing quiet, contrapuntal melodies, imbue the album with an almost medieval air.
Against this atmospheric backdrop, a few key vocal features help give the album its shape and sense of movement. The first, immediately following the ambient intro of "?," is the Bibio-sung "Give It Your Choir," which pairs chiming synth parts with richly colored vocal harmonies that whirl like the beads in a kaleidoscope. For much of the warm, woozy "Beautiful People," Thom Yorke's voice is processed nearly beyond recognition, and even when the effects are stripped away, it sounds like he's singing through clenched teeth, his words reduced to something like pure tone. But the odd phrases that sneak through ("Angels stroke your head," "I can't go back") reinforce the song's dream-like logic, forever on the verge of pulling into focus. "The Blinds Cage" also bobs on the surface of consciousness, as Anti-Pop Consortium's Beans narrates a stream-of-consciousness report from the border between life and death over a blippy backdrop of electronic abstractions.
In the album's centerpiece, "You Wash My Soul," the folksinger Linda Perhacs is accompanied by delicately plucked acoustic guitar as she sings mournfully of elemental forces and spiritual connections. At once chilly and pastoral, it's evocative of a strain of gothic folk that stretches back through Jarboe, Current 93, and Nick Drake; it's the polar opposite of "Infrared," a nervous synth'n'roll number that's reminiscent of Suicide. On paper, the two songs might not seem to have much to do with each other, but part of the beauty of the album is how it pulls such contrasting moods together into a coherent whole.
Deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic, Under the Sun is an easy album to disappear into. Alternating short sketches with long, immersive tracks like the sumptuously droning "EMS," and balancing emotional vocal tracks with more abstracted moodpieces, it never feels scattered; instead, each piece leads into the next, like the segments of a maze. I put it on for an hour-long perambulation through the city and found myself cozily cocooned in its folds. I was surprised, when I finally took my headphones off, to be confronted with the lively din of an outdoor café I had been idly watching for 15 minutes; it felt as though I had been zapped back to the heart of the city, transported from a faraway place that was green and warm and ancient. The only question was how music so simple, and almost naïve, had done such a thorough job of erasing the traces of the modern world around me. | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 13, 2016 | 7.6 | 7fc1d2ab-d360-4f58-94ba-45394d0f55e0 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
This collection-- the first of two Sally Shapiro remix sets this year-- is an accomplished, occasionally revelatory recasting of Disco Romance's synth-pop by some of contemporary electronic music's most capable hands, including Junior Boys, Lindstrøm, and the Juan MacLean. | This collection-- the first of two Sally Shapiro remix sets this year-- is an accomplished, occasionally revelatory recasting of Disco Romance's synth-pop by some of contemporary electronic music's most capable hands, including Junior Boys, Lindstrøm, and the Juan MacLean. | Sally Shapiro: Remix Romance Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11409-remix-romance-vol-1/ | Remix Romance Vol. 1 | When Sweden's Sally Shapiro introduced herself in 2006 with near-perfect single "I'll Be By Your Side", she had no other discography, posed for no photographs except those taken by people she already knew, and gave no interviews. We knew her only by her bashful vocals and producer Johan Agebjörn's vintage Italo-disco production. Listeners could fill in the gaps of persona for themselves, unmediated by stylists, publicists, or the crumbling corporate edifices that have only lately wised up enough to start buying out your blogosphere. Like most great pop music, the song was able to make huge numbers of people each feel like it was just for us.
As great as Shapiro's full-length debut Disco Romance turned out to be, both in its original 2006 form and last year's souped-up U.S. release, I'll admit I was leery about the prospect of a remix album. Would Remix Romance Vol. 1, like so many remix compilations before it, be little more than an attempt to strike while the fire was hot? To cash in on Shapiro's recent internet renown without the hassle of bulking up her slim song catalog? I worried the idea would stretch way too thin the songs of an artist whose appeal lies at least partly in shy understatement.
Sometimes I think too much about things. Remix Romance Vol. 1 is an accomplished, occasionally revelatory recasting of Disco Romance's synth-pop by some of contemporary electronic music's most capable hands. The fragile melodies and melancholic lyrics of the original songs mostly survive the remixing process, but here they're dressed up in shiny disco (Toronto duo the Cansecos' "Hold Me So Tight", with its funky Gloria Gaynor bass lines), pulsating techno (Hamburg producer Tensnake's grand, Booka Shade-esque "I'll Be By Your Side"), or even quirky keytar-and-cowbell electro-pop (Toronto duo Woodhands' "Anorak Christmas"). The famously reticent Shapiro has finally come into the open in recent months, conducting a few interviews and appearing in public for a string of recent DJ gigs; Remix Romance is the sound of her coming-out party.
Even the most dramatically altered remixes here still keep enough of the source material's lonesome charm, just changing the scope from pop's concise three-minute single to dance music's vast 12"-ready sprawl. An 11-minute "Time to Let Go" by Norway's Lindstrøm holds up after hours of listening, transforming the title phrase to dancefloor mantra while fluid guitars, synths, and house beats percolate gradually into a cosmic disco epic; Shapiro could be reading the phone book as she whispers in French, but it still wouldn't diminish the hypnotic effect. DFA's the Juan MacLean gets a co-writing credit for his "I Know You're My Love", which combines shimmering, angelic choruses with the analogue synth arpeggios of the classic Italo that appeared on the influential Mixed Up in the Hague compilation. And the ever-dependable Canadians of Junior Boys transform U.S. Disco Romance bonus cut "Jackie Jackie (Spend This Winter With Me)" into pensive, shadowy "Jackie Junior", with squiggly horn and synth fragments playing out atop a rubbery sawtooth bass line.
Remix Romance Vol. 1 isn't always as breathtaking as those three tracks, but it's constantly uncovering new sides to Shapiro's songs. I've criticized Toronto instrumental rockers Holy Fuck's remix of Radiohead's "Nude" for adding little but drums and smeary textures to the original, but they flesh out "Find My Soul" with some metallic squeals and R.E.M.-esque minor-key acoustic guitar jangle, and their live drumming brings Shapiro from some fantasy 1980s European disco to the present day's beer-smelling but very real rock clubs. Norway's Skatebård nearly beats Agebjörn at his own game with the vocoders, snow-frosted synths, and whimsical whistles of "He Keeps Me Alive"; Sweden's Between Interval re-imagines rain-drenched "Sleep in My Arms" as a serene, ambient space walk. Sure, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but Remix Romance Vol. 1 reaffirms that Shapiro's music is the type you can live with day in and day out. You know, a lasting romance. | 2008-04-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Paper Bag | April 15, 2008 | 7.6 | 7fc78e0e-5678-4297-9004-57212e58f7f1 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Brisbane guitar-pop trio infuses conversational vocals with deep emotional resonance on a sophomore album that spotlights the refreshing contributions of drummer Riley Jones. | The Brisbane guitar-pop trio infuses conversational vocals with deep emotional resonance on a sophomore album that spotlights the refreshing contributions of drummer Riley Jones. | The Goon Sax: We’re Not Talking | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-goon-sax-were-not-talking/ | We’re Not Talking | Speak-singing is the enemy of strict choirmasters and the refuge of wannabe frontpersons too nervous to sing for real. Formally known as sprechgesang, a German word coined in the 1900s to describe the expressionist vocal technique used in operas, speak-singing has since shown up in practically every genre of popular music. And no matter how often it’s used, whether by Jonathan Richman or Courtney Barnett, it retains its imperfect charm, allowing each artist’s unique inflections to warp the notes that carry their words. Brisbane guitar-pop trio the Goon Sax have figured out how to maintain that looseness while injecting emotion into a technique that can flatten feelings. Their sophomore album, We’re Not Talking, feels refreshingly candid because of it.
In the two years since the Goon Sax released their debut album, Up to Anything, all three members—guitarist Louis Forster, guitarist James Harrison, and drummer Riley Jones—graduated from high school. Now, at 19, they’ve entered an era of maturation, in which reason and experience start to overtake inquisitiveness and wonder but can’t altogether supplant them. We’re Not Talking rides those lingering waves of adolescence. While the Goon Sax used to write hyper-specific vignettes, their new songs sound a little more vague and feel a little more relatable, whether they’re about bottling up emotions in a movie theater or losing a loved one’s number on your phone. There to enrich the stories are instruments like castanets, strings, and horns—all new to the band and each used sparingly, to emphasize the moods behind their words.
The vocals on these songs have the effect of a good story being told for the first time, all kinetic energy and disjointed phrasing. The fact that all three members share vocal duties reinforces that conversational element. On the piano ballad “Now You Pretend,” a deep sense of longing lines the edge of Harrison’s mellow baritone. Throughout We’re Not Talking, the band’s complex inflections give their words an air of ambiguity. In “Love Lost,” multi-tracked vocals radiate passion despite the flat vocal tones, making for a spirited trudge that matches the song’s story about wallowing in romantic isolation. Listening to the Goon Sax, you get the sense that they’re reliving real, vital moments that their hearts are still tied to. Harrison’s muddled enunciation suggests that he’s working his way through the emotions he’s describing, and you can’t help but feel it, too.
Jones’ voice, as both a singer and a songwriter, surfaces for the first time on this album. Her contributions seem to have been crucial to the band’s evolution, increasing the complexity of their harmonies, but also adding a female perspective that complements Forster’s and Harrison’s narratives. She adds levity to songs that would otherwise plod, like “Losing Myself,” which is weighed down by chunky guitar riffs until her glossy voice skates in on the chorus, and “We Can’t Win,” whose metronomic rigidity finally starts to give way when her melodies kick in. When she takes lead vocals on “Strange Light,” the album’s most gutting track, her frail voice heightens its themes of paralyzing fear and lack of direction.
Bolstered by Jones’ increased visibility and a newly varied instrumental palette, We’re Not Talking stands as proof that speak-singing still has some life left in it for a new generation of indie rockers. And the band seems to understand that: The most stirring example of their novel formula—emotional depth + conversational delivery—kicks off the album on “Make Time 4 Love.” As trumpets cascade and vocal harmonies warm up, Forster issues a series of exhausted ruminations that belie the band members’ young age: “I give in/I won’t outrun the train/And I can’t understand/Why you’re still trying.” The Goon Sax have already learned how to roll with life’s punches—and that new state of mind has certainly given them plenty to discuss. | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita | September 18, 2018 | 7.2 | 7fcaba25-6a1b-4f1d-aa09-96bb40c8182f | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Trent Reznor returns with yet another digital record; The Slip is a free download that, unlike the sprawling loss-leader Ghosts I-IV, consists of fully realized songs. Pretty good ones, too. | Trent Reznor returns with yet another digital record; The Slip is a free download that, unlike the sprawling loss-leader Ghosts I-IV, consists of fully realized songs. Pretty good ones, too. | Nine Inch Nails: The Slip | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11503-the-slip/ | The Slip | Remember how frustrating it was when Nine Inch Nails would make us wait four to six years between albums? That trend, it appears, has entered the rearview mirror stage, along with the label messes and rehab stints that helped cause those interminable gaps. Consider the new math after The Slip hit hard drives as a free download last Monday: over the last three years, Trent Reznor's released as many full-length records of new material (four) as he did during the first decade of his recorded existence. Since Pretty Hate Machine, the concept behind Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails has been blunt and straightforward: dystopian techno-metal forged from the fusion of man and machine. But since last year's Year Zero, which came bundled with an alternate-reality video game and high-concept pre-release marketing schedule, and including Ghosts I-IV, which mimicked Radiohead's lossy-leader gimmick, Reznor has slowly emerged as a new sort of cyborg: an artist wholly immersed in the newest digital trends for the distribution and promotion of his music. Like a more magnanimous Radiohead, Reznor's called into question the major-label reserve clause for established, profitable musicians by not just coming up with a new way to monetize music, but just giving it away for free, no strings attached. Instead of "tip-jar," it's "this one's on me."
Unlike its most immediate predecessors, The Slip comes packaged with a crucial difference: the music itself is more satisfying than the sui generis marketing scheme. Reznor's unique capacity to commingle raging industrial bangers with ballads and ambient instrumental passages appears in its best form since The Downward Spiral, and here gains much of the focus and restraint that many remember used to be his calling card. At just under 44 minutes, The Slip is Reznor's shortest full-length since Machine, and it indexes many of his most appealing qualities as a songwriter and album sequencer. His former label Interscope still retains the rights to issue a Nine Inch Nails greatest-hits set, but The Slip plays like Reznor's own minor retrospective, fleshed out with plenty of present-day ruminations.
First single "Discipline" eschews a typically monstrous chorus for an airtight industrial disco grind ventilated by an airy piano and falsetto cooing. It's another solid pop song about constraint from the guy who, following Prince, brought kinky sex odes to strip-mall bars. This sort of control is of a different stripe than in the past, though: When Reznor asks, "Is my viciousness losing ground?", it comes from a long-established and now label-free artist trying to reflexively reassert his position in the pop landscape, on his own terms. One of the pitfalls of perfectionism and digital production is endless tinkering and shapeless experimentation, and "Discipline" evinces Reznor's desire for some sort of framework, lest he get too comfortable cranking out 4-LP instrumental opuses from here on out. In relative terms, "I need your discipline/ I need your help" is sure a long way from the nearly 20-year-old "Head Like a Hole" refrain "I'd rather die/ Than give you control".
Studio hermeticism is still isolation, though, and "Discipline" gives way to "Echoplex", in which Reznor's attention is taken by the sound of his voice reverberating throughout the studio. After a quick swipe at those who've insisted he's passed his sell-by date: "I'm safe in here/ Irrelevant/ Just like they said," he casts his tomb as a seductive, slow-torture chamber, cooing: "My voice just echoes off these walls." "1,000,000"-- with any luck, the album's second single-- reappropriates the "Hurt" lyric "a million miles away" from the context of heroin addiction isolation to a more recent sort of reality-remove, occasioned by a period of declining fortunes for major labels. This sort of self-referentiality seems designed to clarify that Reznor has moved from a self-destructive form of addiction to another, hopefully more productive one.
While I doubt The Slip recording process resembled this (although that would be awesome), the liner notes do hint toward a possible shift in method. Session drummer Josh Freese is accompanied by longtime associate Robin Finck (back after a profoundly unproductive period as Slash's replacement in Guns 'n Roses), and keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, and all are listed in the credits as co-performers. I have no idea how much trap-work Freese does on the album itself, but the mixture of live and machined drumming is The Slip's most appealing sonic quality. It's not a totally new thing, of course-- Dave Grohl played on much of With Teeth-- but here, Reznor strives specifically for, and occasionally hits, the sort of room-mic'd aura that made a song like "March of the Pigs" such a visceral experience. The riff-metal on "Discipline", "1,000,000", "Head Down", and "Demon Seed" can't compete with the best of the 1989-94 era, but it's clear that Reznor's assessing the best of his peak period through the filter of his post-Fragile activity, and producing some solid songs in the process.
The hard-hitting first half of The Slip gives way to a second marked by a more patient form of rumination, beginning with the plangent "Lights in the Sky", on which Reznor unearths the decaying piano from the Tate Mansion for a song that, like Radiohead's "Weird Fishes", finds macabre, romantic pleasure in drowning. "Lights" seamlessly blends into the seven-and-a-half minute ambient piece "Corona Radiata", which ascends to a noise-filled post-rock crescendo before abruptly cutting to the evocatively-titled "The Four of Us Are Dying". Reznor's fondness for instrumental passages on his albums goes back to Broken, but this 12-minute stretch, more than a quarter of The Slip's runtime and the obvious product of post-Ghost compositional confidence, is the only lag in the album's overall flow. It's much easier to listen to these pieces in the context of a traditional Nine Inch Nails album, to be sure, but the pulsing rhythm of "Dying" is nonetheless welcome after "Corona", a lengthy indulgence not quite earned.
The title of "Dying" is a nerdy reference from Reznor to this Twilight Zone" episode, in which Archie Hammer, a low-life mug, possesses the ability to change his face at will and assume the personalities of the recently deceased. The title is its own spoiler, really, but the episode is more than just an ending; it's a 24-minute meditation on the public performance of identity, and the frightening ramifications that can happen when none of them have any bearing in reality. It's the sort of lesson that Reznor seems to be learning publicly, and occasionally painfully. The Slip, then, allows him to do just that: shift between and reflect upon his various artistic and personal personae, without fear of reprisal. Instead of a symbolic death, The Slip feels much more like a possible rebirth. | 2008-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-05-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | May 13, 2008 | 7.5 | 7fcf33e1-9c82-4ffb-8f5f-5a7bcefc6462 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The Social Experiment members reintroduce themselves as earnest singer-songwriters, but their post-genre mashup production produces more vibes than actual songs. | The Social Experiment members reintroduce themselves as earnest singer-songwriters, but their post-genre mashup production produces more vibes than actual songs. | Intellexual: Intellexual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nico-segal-nate-fox-intellexual/ | Intellexual | It’s hard to pinpoint where Nico Segal and Nate Fox went wrong with Intellexual, but it certainly didn’t stop at the name. Producers and instrumentalists by trade, the pair have made an album that sounds like misting truffle oil on plain pasta and serving it with a chef’s kiss. To listen to Intellexual—their official debut after years of behind-the-scenes collaborations—is to poke at something hollow, and the duo’s recent press run confirms the bullshit: “For Intellexual it wasn’t just about a song being good, it was more so, What is intellexual about it?” Segal told Billboard. “How do I make it intellexual? How does this song get executed in an intellexual way?” Later in the same interview, he declares that the song he’s “most proud of” is the one called “Overthinking.”
Segal (formerly known as Donnie Trumpet) and Fox have built a pedigree through their close work with Chance the Rapper on Coloring Book and as members of the Social Experiment. You can hear moments on Intellexual where they’ve lifted their own fingerprints from those sessions and smudged them onto a blank slate. Their production is elaborate, but the songs are vapid. And though Intellexual is framed as an earnest singer-songwriter record, these are not so much songs as vibes.
Across a dozen tracks, Segal and Fox corral a group of semi-familiar vocalists like Knox Fortune, Vic Mensa, and Raury. But instead of training a spotlight on their stars, they overdirect them with ham-fisted production. “Roxstar” takes a half-baked Knox Fortune song and obscures his personality, leaving no meat on the bones but plenty of garnish. Segal’s trumpet swells up in a triumphant flutter, background vocalists riff endlessly, everything except the piano drops out, something twinkles, nothing happens. “Times have changed/I think it’s strange/We’d stay the same,” Fortune sings. The chorus delivers another clunker in his pretty falsetto: “The things that make us right/Sometimes make us wrong.”
“Like I Feel,” a direct echo of Segal and Fox’s gorgeous Social Experiment vamp “Pass the Vibes,” from Surf, is even more of a shell of a song. Surf was dense and soulful, and there, “Pass the Vibes” felt like an exhale. “Like I Feel” has no purpose and nothing to tether it down, just a pretty moment and a repeated phrase: “When you feel like I feel, you feel good.” The calculated new-age samba of “Boca” sets lower stakes and fares better, even if it amounts to intricate background music, easy listening with extra flavor.
There are bigger and more obvious missteps on Intellexual—Vic Mensa makes an ineffectual appearance, Segal and Fox croon corny and nonsensical lyrics at every turn—but it’s the post-genre mashup production that sinks the ship. At best Intellexual is quaint; at worst it’s unsubtle and full of itself. It’s the sound of two talented musicians stumbling over their own chops, doing too much and too little in the same motion. | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fantasy | April 20, 2019 | 4.3 | 7fdc26ad-7898-4461-bdb4-bb0a5b6980d2 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The British singer and beatmaker’s largely self-produced debut album is a pleasant, frictionless listen that benefits from his obvious chops but is held back by his risk-averse tendencies. | The British singer and beatmaker’s largely self-produced debut album is a pleasant, frictionless listen that benefits from his obvious chops but is held back by his risk-averse tendencies. | Tom Misch: Geography | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-misch-geography/ | Geography | You might be slow to warm to Tom Misch. You might look at his pretty, symmetrical face and listen to his pretty, sweet voice and think to yourself: Haven’t we seen this before? Do we really need another blue-eyed prince of soul? After all, Misch may sing Dilla’s praises now, but in five years, when Brexit finally goes through, there’s no telling how he’ll have changed. Maybe he’ll pull a “Man of the Derbyshire Woods”-type routine, adopt a rural accent, and take up fox hunting.
But Misch, who’s been releasing music through SoundCloud since 2011, is no British Timberlake (and he’s from South London, not Derbyshire). If you need an American analogue, think Mayer Hawthorne: Misch is another shy, beat-loving polymath raised in the temple of Dilla and Madlib who sidestepped to R&B once he realized that people enjoyed hearing his voice. (No falsetto though.) His debut album, Geography, the vast majority of which he produced himself, also carries echoes of Craig David and Jamie Woon. With its mild, coffee-house buzz and flat musical minimalism, the record is mostly in the tradition of contemporary British R&B, though a handful of instrumental tracks speak to the singer’s origin story as a lo-fi SoundCloud producer.
At their best, Hawthorne and David are strong songwriters, and Misch, who started singing over the past several years, is still working to acquire that skill. But the first proper song on Geography, “Lost in Paris,” is a gem that showcases the best of what he can do. It’s a simple song about the end of a relationship, but it refreshes itself constantly, with Misch bringing in a new element every eight bars or so. The final addition is a verse from the rapper GoldLink, who has been ubiquitous lately yet still hasn’t worn out his welcome. His comfort with Misch (the two have worked together previously) allows him to treat his verse as a punctuation mark, and it turns the song into an outright jam. It wouldn’t be surprising if “Lost in Paris” were to become the modest hit that introduces Misch to American ears.
That introduction will likely be frictionless, given the dreamy appeal of Misch’s voice (and looks) and the almost total lack of frisson in his music. Geography has little interest in sex, and he is finicky about other types of relationships as well. (The ballad “Man Like You” seems to hint at greater depth, but it’s a Patrick Watson cover.) It’s an overridingly pleasant listen, but that pleasantness is too often maintained by featureless production and other manifestations of Misch’s risk-averse instincts.
“Movie,” a ballad that opens with his sister Polly performing a classic film-inspired monologue, is a good example. It filters a past romance through the vocabulary of communications technology, with verses that recall love letters and texts and a chorus about vintage movies. (Oh and if you’re tempted to bring up “Lost in Paris,” which does seem romantically inclined, be warned: The relationship it explores is one between Misch and a lost hard drive.) Meanwhile Misch’s music, which is informed by the increasingly conservative online beat scene as well as his classical upbringing and jazz education, is often unadventurous, though his chops are obvious. His funkless, tediously faithful instrumental cover of “Isn’t She Lovely” spells the issue out clearly without using any words at all.
Misch shares some of the Luddite qualities that made backpackers of the last decade such a bore, but he doesn’t necessarily come off as boring—just timid, and there’s plenty of room for him to grow. In an interview last year, he said that his chief influences were John Mayer and Robert Glasper, and while the Mayer name-drop may be a worrisome sign to some, both of those artists had modest, crowd-pleasing debut albums before they became more technically adventurous. And like Misch himself, Geography is not as easy to write off as it initially appears. Songs including “Lost in Paris,” “Cos I Love You,” and the sparkling “Disco Yes” are stickier than you’d expect, and Misch’s expertise with jazz guitar offsets his modest arrangements. He said while making the album that he felt “like I’m still at the stage where I have to kind of prove before I can just make what I really want to make.” But if the best songs here are indicators of the kind of fun, bubbly music he really wants to make, he could do with less proving and more letting letting loose. | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Beyond The Groove | April 11, 2018 | 6.5 | 7fdcb38e-dda9-4224-9b13-dfff7b5465e1 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On his debut solo album, the Oakland experimental musician utilizes custom-built software systems that allow him to navigate around disability, with electrifying results. | On his debut solo album, the Oakland experimental musician utilizes custom-built software systems that allow him to navigate around disability, with electrifying results. | Dax Pierson: Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dax-pierson-nerve-bumps-a-queer-divine-dissatisfaction/ | Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction) | Difference isn’t definition, but it can be context. So here’s a bit of what sets the new album from Oakland’s revered Dax Pierson apart: While sounding in no way retro, it nods to the techno/jazz/experimental fusion released in the 1990s by labels like Planet Mu and Submerge. Nerve Bumps’ nine tracks include one that lasts barely a minute and another that’s nearly 12, and both are fully formed at the length they should be. The album’s acidic squiggles, soft yet sharped-edged pads, and bouncy rhythms are familiar—but they combine in unusual ways.
Stylistically, the music is free of obvious biographical clues. But the personal can be contextual, too. Dax Pierson spent the early 2000s as a keyboard virtuoso in Anticon heroes Subtle and post-whatever Themselves/the Notwist side project 13&God, and then the confounding Can-related project Malcolm Mooney and the Tenth Planet. Pierson was one of the few Black and queer people in those various spaces. In 2005, he was touring with Subtle when their van hit some ice and flipped over; his seatbelt malfunctioned. He was partially paralyzed from foot to fingertip. He spent a decade recovering. In 2019, he released Live in Oakland, which makes music from the concrete circumstances of his disability. Condescending doctors appear as vocalists while his wheelchair makes the beat.
Nerve Bumps, released through San Francisco’s vital Dark Entries Records and the Ratskin Records collective, Oakland’s hub for “decolonial experimental music,” pushes things further. As Pierson recovered, technology progressed. The iPad arrived, and he devised a rig of them and apps to manifest what many producers twiddling the knobs of their Euroracks rarely manage. The organ tones and fuzzy envelopes of “For 2_24” vibrate at frequencies closer to Op Art than ambient. Opener “Adhesion” gets things moving in Detroit-inflected 7/8 techno pushing through ominous arpeggios, upended by interludes of footwork and orchestral stabs. It jumps suddenly into “For the Angels,” a kind of Bardo that shimmers and shakes, crystallizing into a funk that, in turn, cuts with little warning into the vocal workout of “Snap.” That brief snarl of Pierson’s whispers and vows signals a flow with a mind of its own.
There are referents: “Keflex,” named for an antibiotic, tangles what sound like guitars tangling around what sound like Linn drums, for a healthy reminder that Prince was a Cocteau Twins fan. It also grinds as heavy as anything unearthed by, say, Long Island Electrical Systems. The coldwave of “Catch” warms itself by the fire of blown-out snares that occasionally shoot off sparks of trap-ish hi-hats. “I Slay the Pain” is aptly named: Percussion at the top end pays tribute to that finger-snap sound that’s still the queen of gay house, with a deeper-than-deep bass and healing piano chords. “NOTHING FKS U HRDR THN TM” closes up with six minutes of interstellar travel into a clearing Angelo Badalamenti might recognize, and so might Lee “Scratch” Perry, and so might KMRU—a circle of Black techno and jazz and dub traditions made new.
For the album’s name, Pierson borrowed a quote from choreographer Martha Graham, whose work did its own kind of refashioning and reconceptualizing of what the body could do. “No artist is pleased,” she once said. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” Pierson has marched past other producers who’ve disappeared up their own DAWs. His work is divinely queer, from its sound to the cover surrounding it, a painting by his partner Chuck Nanney. He makes body music for different kinds of bodies. When the clubs reopen, they should all be welcomed.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Ratskin / Dark Entries | February 23, 2021 | 7.7 | 7fdfff3c-89f4-4c96-9d17-34e282f1af2b | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On their first album in four years, Goldfrapp synthesize all their many sounds and modes to get at the core of their musical identity. They find a beautiful, poppy, platonic ideal. | On their first album in four years, Goldfrapp synthesize all their many sounds and modes to get at the core of their musical identity. They find a beautiful, poppy, platonic ideal. | Goldfrapp: Silver Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23050-silver-eye/ | Silver Eye | It takes Alison Goldfrapp more than a full verse into Silver Eye’s leadoff track “Anymore” before she utters a single word with more than one syllable: “You’re what I want. You’re what I need. Give me your love. Make me a freak.” Reductive? Considering her and collaborator Will Gregory—whose past lyrics would gussy up their earthy emotions and desires in hazy surrealism like, “Wolf lady sucks my brain” and, “Now take me dancing at the disco where you buy your Winnebago”—you might be tempted to think so. Prior to “Anymore,” Goldfrapp hid their most verbally explicit expression of lust (“Put your dirty angel face between my legs and knicker lace”) in an elaborate fantasy about a tryst with a traveling carny titled, appropriately enough, “Twist.”
But the direct approach suits this new album, the group’s first since 2013’s Tales of Us. Ever since the pair swapped the John Barry ambience of their debut album Felt Mountain for the electro-glam of its successor Black Cherry, they’ve staked their identity on being able to assume new identities at will. Wanna double down on that sexy “Spirit in the Sky” shimmer? There’s Supernature. Wanna go pastoral? Check out Seventh Tree. Wanna trade Gary Numan and Marc Bolan for the Pointer Sisters and circa-“Jump” Van Halen? Head for Head First. By contrast, Silver Eye is a synthesis—a combination of all the things the group has done well. “Become the one you know you are,” commands a key track, and they’re teaching by example. Who needs many syllables to express something so fundamental?
Glimpses of past glories are more evident in some songs than others. “Anymore” and its immediate follow-up “Systemagic” return to the synthesizer strut of their electroclash-era albums Black Cherry and Supernature, while “Everything Is Never Enough” shares the bright-eyed poptimism of Head First. But these new songs avoid the genre-pastiche of their counterparts. Silver Eye’s tracks have a sincere, blunt-force feeling that’s new and closer to the actual core of their musical identity. It’s like Kiss taking off the make-up, but, you know, good.
Silver Eye’s more esoteric numbers are even more impressive. “Illuminating his eyes and fur/Ohhhhh….magnificent,” Goldfrapp sighs on “Tigerman,” a come-on to the title character in which attraction to a new lover is treated like a discovery every bit as transformative as making contact with a whole new lifeform. The pulsing jam “Become the One” uses vocal pitch-shifting to make its message of self-realization sound beamed in from an external alien intelligence. (Sometimes, that’s what self-realization requires.) And a trio of ballads—“Zodiac Black,” the song on which producer Haxan Cloak’s haunted atmosphere is most apparent; “Moon in Your Mouth,” a record of absolutely desperate romanticism; and “Ocean,” lead single, album closer, and cri de coeur—combine nature imagery and big, echoey washes of sound to create a sense of space as enveloping, absorbing, and suffocating as anything on the band’s three “quiet” albums. If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine—it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed. | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | March 30, 2017 | 7.4 | 7fe19337-48e7-4f9b-87f4-d6fdf31a69c9 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | null |
Griselda’s newest signee alternatingly embraces and cuts against the Buffalo collective’s throwback Mafioso rap. | Griselda’s newest signee alternatingly embraces and cuts against the Buffalo collective’s throwback Mafioso rap. | Armani Caesar: The Liz Tape | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armani-caesar-the-liz-tape/ | The Liz Tape | Following a long hot streak that cemented the label’s hallowed standing in the most traditionally minded corners of hip-hop fandom, Griselda has entered the thorniest phase for any rap imprint: expansion. Hitherto a tight circle of brothers Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn and cousin Benny the Butcher, this summer the Buffalo, New York collective branched out with releases from Detroit signee Boldy James and Benny’s Black Soprano Family crew, neither of which threatened their reputation for quality control. Now comes the Griselda debut from Armani Caesar, the label’s self-billed “First Lady,” whose album The Liz Tape alternatingly embraces and cuts against Griselda’s throwback Mafioso rap with gusto.
Armani may not share the blood ties of Griselda’s founding trio, but her biography overlaps. She’s from Buffalo, and she was discovered by Griselda’s late producer DJ Shay, who signed her in 2009, so like Conway and company, she logged plenty of time in obscurity before finding her break. And since she’s on Griselda, it goes without saying that she’s got bars. “Hundred grand flow, chillin’ in the Lambo/Eight bands for the bag, two more on the sandals,” she spits on “Gucci Casket,” with a precision that recalls early Nicki Minaj, without the cartoonish embellishments that eventually turned Minaj’s pressure-cooker flow into shtick.
The Liz Tape spends its opening stretch proving just how well Armani belongs on the label, casting her crime tales against bruising loops and terse, Mobb Deep pianos—“Countdown” even throws in a Redman sample, old-head catnip in its most concentrated form. It also gives her plenty of chances to spar with Conway, Westside, and Benny, and she has a natural rapport with each of them. She’s the Sharon Stone in Casino to the label’s assorted De Niros and Pescis, the new arrival who fits in so naturally you could be convinced she was always part of the ensemble.
And yet, unlike her new labelmates, Armani isn’t a born outsider. As hard as The Liz Tape works to cast her as the Foxy Brown/Lil’ Kim of their crew, the lone woman who punches as hard as her male cohorts, her flows are too flashy and contemporary to be boxed in by Griselda’s East Coast classicism. Her wanderlust sets in on the record’s second half, where she begins to sound less like a Griselda lifer than a talented ringer who saw an opportunity. There’s a sense that, left to her own devices, she’d rather play in 21 Savage and Megan Thee Stallion’s sandbox than Roc Marciano’s, especially on “Yum Yum,” the first ever straight-up strip-club track on a Griselda release.
The Liz Tape stacks its best songs back to back, and they show off her dueling sides. The DJ Premier-produced “Simply Done” is a golden-age fever dream, a frenzy of hard bars, kinetic loops, samples, and scratches—it’s thrilling, in that perfectly predictable way that every first new DJ Premier track you’ve heard in a while is thrilling. “Drill a RaMa,” on the other hand, disposes with ’93-era New York in favor of Atlanta circa now, with Armani and Benny firing off twisty triplet flows and clearly relishing the breather from Griselda’s usual boom-bap.
It’s a rare rapper who’s equally equipped to crush both tracks. By now, Griselda is so established as a trio that some fans may be inclined to write off a newcomer like Armani as a second-tier member. But it’s her willingness to shake things up that makes her such a valuable addition to a crew that, despite its impressive track record, can sometimes be blinded by its reverence for rap’s past. A little modernity looks good on them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | September 23, 2020 | 7.2 | 7fe5ce68-c01f-4297-9eef-3a43f2f49537 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
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 a historic collaboration that braided three unique histories of American music into a timeless whole. | 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 a historic collaboration that braided three unique histories of American music into a timeless whole. | Dolly Parton / Linda Ronstadt / Emmylou Harris: Trio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dolly-parton-emmylou-harris-linda-ronstadt-trio/ | Trio | More than once, Linda Ronstadt has recounted the blunt welcome she received when she left her sleepy hometown of Tucson, Arizona for Los Angeles in 1964. “Honey, in this town, there are four sexes: women, men, homosexuals, and girl singers,” Judy Henske, a singer-songwriter and an employee at a folkie coffee shop, reportedly advised the new arrival. It would be Ronstadt’s introduction to the rest of her life.
To be a girl singer, as indicated by rock’n’roll memoirs by men and women alike, was often to be shunted aside and leered at, pitted against one’s peers, at the mercy of the guys in charge. Even Ronstadt felt the hot flush of competition when she first saw Emmylou Harris performing at Los Angeles’ Troubadour in the early 1970s. But Ronstadt realized that she could be jealous, or she could make a friend. When the pair finally met in 1973—while on tour with Gram Parsons and Neil Young, respectively—a lifetime friendship sparked from their shared love for another girl singer: Dolly Parton.
It would take another 14 years for Harris, Ronstadt, and Parton to release Trio, their first full-length album together. Their mutual admiration had blossomed when Ronstadt and Harris crossed paths with Parton in Nashville in the early 1970s, and they’d started singing together occasionally in the back half of the decade. Plans for a proper LP, however, got tangled in the contractual obligations of their escalating stardom and ever-expanding professional lives. Making Trio allowed each of them a long-overdue opportunity to assume a new identity in an industry that had long tried to pigeonhole them.
Trio opens with “The Pain of Loving You,” a song that Parton co-wrote with country singer and television presenter Porter Wagoner. Wagoner’s hit TV show had provided the charismatic young Parton with an early break in 1967, and though she’d only signed a five-year contract, she stayed on for seven. As a gracious parting gesture, she wrote “I Will Always Love You” and dedicated it to him. In 1979, Wagoner returned the favor with a $3 million breach of contract suit, claiming that his tutelage entitled him to a cut of Parton’s solo earnings. The dramatic falling-out between an established country star and his one-time protégée was big news—big enough that it was picked up in Billboard and on the United Press newswire. Harris and Ronstadt would have been aware of it all, even in their Los Angeles singer-songwriter enclave.
Meanwhile, their own career trials had only strengthened their bond. For decades, Ronstadt kept the yellow rose that Harris presented to her after an exceptionally nasty encounter with one of Neil Young’s bandmates in 1973; a few months later, she invited Harris out for an extended convalescence in California as she grieved the death of her former singing partner, Gram Parsons. Through difficult tours and indiscriminate egos, the friends extended comfort to one another. They, too, had butted up against powerful men in their industry who sought to fuck them one way or another.
“The Pain of Loving You” becomes a place where the women can relieve themselves of that burden, dissolving their individual identities along with their aches. “You just can’t stand to see me happy/Seems you hurt me all you can,” sings Harris, who’d spent much of Trio’s recording tangled in a private custody battle and found support with her singing partners. The pace of the song is gently upbeat, riding on a loose mandolin chop and a light rhythm section. In the chorus, the three come together, cresting a high that sounds almost flustered (“Never knowing what to do”) before slipping back down into a resigned sigh (“Oh, the pain of loving you”).
Trio radiates a sister-bestie energy, aided cosmically by three women who were born within 18 months of one another. Ronstadt once compared singing with Harris and Parton to trying on their voices, like “getting to wear the dress or the face or the figure of the prettiest girl on the block.” The three boasted serious vocal talent: Ronstadt landing blows with her bold and forthright soprano, Harris weaving with the strength and flexibility of willow branches, and Parton floating like a butterfly with her bright warble. Their braided voices had a special quality right away. “The sound that we made together surprised and astonished the three of us,” Harris recalled of their first time singing together, at her house in Los Angeles in 1975.
That sound shines brightest when the women maximize the spine-tingling charge of close bluegrass harmonies. George Lucas, who was dating Ronstadt at the time and directed the video for “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” offered a surprisingly astute assessment of his former beau and her friends: “It’s not just the voices. It’s the cultures behind the voices that blend, and their struggles.” Appalachian poverty, Arizona ranch life, rural restlessness, countercultural sea change, grown-woman heartbreak, and personal triumph all shade the emotional backdrops of Trio.
The fluid vocal harmonies belie the years it took to finally record them. In 1979, the women began working with Harris’ then-husband, producer Brian Ahern, on a pop-leaning record, but didn’t like the results and shelved it. The next several years seemed to evaporate in other commitments—tours, albums, films, and family life. The three nonetheless found ways to connect, recording one another’s songs and appearing in different combinations for duets. They palled around on a 1977 episode of Parton’s variety TV show, Dolly, performing the folk ballad “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” which they’d first sung back at Harris’ house. Parton opened the episode with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” a tune Ronstadt had recorded for two different solo records, her 1969 debut Hand Sown ... Home Grown and 1973’s Don’t Cry Now.
Though “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” didn’t make it to Trio, it was typical of the country-rock crossover that Harris and Ronstadt were pursuing on the West Coast. Harris had shifted from her role as duet partner to become a bandleader, strumming originals alongside songs by the Beatles, Merle Haggard, and the Louvin Brothers. Ronstadt’s own setlist grab bag overlapped Harris’ with selections from Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, plus Los Angeles contemporaries like Jackson Browne and her former bandmates in the Eagles. Harris made a live staple out of Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” recording it for 1975’s Pieces of the Sky, while Ronstadt cut “I Will Always Love You” for Prisoner in Disguise the same year.
In Parton, they spotted a talented peer, a kindred spirit, and a potential ally. They saw the generous, self-effacing humor, high-femme indulgence, and butterfly-knife business acumen that Parton would eventually parlay to become a full-blown cultural icon. Her effervescent disposition was a thrill to the more introverted Californians, whom she likewise recognized as devotees of a musical lineage that endured hard times with grit and grace. Country music was an integral part of the singers’ DNA, and each woman had developed a different relationship with the genre. The Tennessee-reared Parton had the closest bond by way of geographic proximity. In Tucson, the social traditions of Ronstadt’s music-loving family and dispatches from border-town radio stations kept young Linda up to her ears in song. Harris, meanwhile, had turned her attention to the 1960s folk revival as a teenager, following a childhood shaped by her Marine Corps father’s multiple relocations.
The singers’ nostalgia for the music of an earlier time shines through the album’s final two songs. Though both originated in the South more than a century ago, the sorrowful ballad “Rosewood Casket” bears a dulcimer sparkle, while the gospel-rooted “Farther Along” leans into its hymnal history. Trio shifts into the 20th century on the forlorn “Hobo’s Meditation,” a 1932 song by early country star Jimmie Rodgers, and the mawkish 1958 pop number “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” The tuberculosis-stricken Rodgers lived hard and died young at the dawn of commercial radio, and “Hobo’s Meditation” empathizes with the down-and-out drifter who wonders if the afterlife will improve on his earthly lot. Even Ronstadt, however, can’t keep the first-person descriptions of boxcars, cops, and brakemen from sounding almost like a caricature to modern ears. “Making Plans,” which dates to 1963, has aged better, drawing out the song’s waltzing, honky-tonk heart.
The Grand High Trio bestowed a de facto blessing on their selections, creating a mini repertoire of classics that resonated with these giants of their field. The songs abetting Trio’s nostalgia cuts become valuable endorsements of other girl singers (and songwriters) whose talents had not earned them the same celebrity. The women borrowed “My Dear Companion” from the Kentucky dulcimer player Jean Ritchie, whose expertise in folksong, Appalachian life, and her charming, many-stringed instrument had trickled down to Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez. “I’ve Had Enough” came from Kate McGarrigle, who, with her sister Anna, wrote songs that would be sung by both Ronstadt and Harris throughout their careers. (On Prisoner in Disguise, Ronstadt’s take on Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” follows “You Tell Me That I’m Falling Down,” an Anna McGarrigle co-write).
Parton’s original “Wildflowers” is Trio’s lustrous centerpiece, carried on shimmery swipes of autoharp and bass that plods along like a friendly neighborhood dog. Parton takes a more prominent lead here, delivering the refrain—“Wildflowers don’t care where they grow”—as warm supporting vocals from Harris and Ronstadt supply the same variegated beauty. The women trade off vocal leads throughout Trio, but the tunes feel shared more than divvied up. Though Parton typically wrote more of her own material than Ronstadt or Harris did, the group’s pluralistic approach to curation and performance gives Trio a sense of camaraderie and collaboration.
Across the album, acoustic guitars, fiddles, and strings breathe unencumbered, a credit to the uniquely attentive ear of engineer and producer George Massenburg. By the time Massenburg signed onto Trio, he’d worked with Ronstadt, Little Feat, Randy Newman, and Earth, Wind & Fire; prior to that, he’d developed groundbreaking technology for audio equalization. His technical affinities were a strong match for an ensemble of singers who wanted to capture their full, glorious union and the nuances of their individual voices in a clear mix. The session band included longtime studio collaborators Russ Kunkel and David Lindley, guest spots from Ry Cooder and Little Feat's Bill Payne, and picked up bluegrass cred from guitarist John Starling and fiddler Mark O'Connor.
Working from this stable foundation, the women found the recording process easier, and the fruits of their labor sweeter. “The only big disagreements would be, ‘Are we going to use autoharp or dulcimer on this song?’” Harris told one interviewer with a smile. Parton fondly recalled Ronstadt’s perfectionist approach to vocal takes as “a pain in the ass sometimes,” though it strengthened her own singing. All three singers’ vocal talents had ripened by the time they were making Trio, and Ronstadt in particular was at a new personal best. She credited her enhanced powers to the technical demands of her recent stint on Broadway, where she’d starred in The Pirates of Penzance. Though Ronstadt takes a melancholy lead on “Hobo’s Meditation,” she belts a stunner with “Telling Me Lies.” Songwriter Betsy Cook penned it with Linda Thompson, who was divorced and operating free of the “Richard-and-” prefix of her songwriter ex-husband when she first released it on her solo debut in 1985. The arrangement—electrified keys, a little jazz guitar sting at the end—stands apart from the album’s country focus, but that didn’t stop the song from picking up a Grammy nomination for Best Country Song in 1988. It’s a buried treasure in Ronstadt’s vast catalog.
At times, Trio flags with its numerous slower ballads. Rolling Stone concluded its review by suggesting that the album must’ve been more fun to make than to hear, which occasionally rings true. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” is a light, sleepy number that breezes past in a sigh (and to know the song’s author, Phil Spector, is perhaps just as likely to despise him). Massenburg, the album’s producer, recalled that Nashville “loathed” the record. “I don’t think anybody liked the idea of three women singers. I don’t think anybody liked the idea of us not being in a niche,” Ronstadt reflected in a 2016 BBC documentary. “It wasn’t rock’n’roll, it wasn’t country, it wasn’t this, it wasn’t that. It was old-timey music.” In the same documentary, a former Warner Brothers executive noted that the record’s traditionalism was a poor fit for the commercial pop trends then bleeding into country radio. Regardless, Trio found its audience in the women’s overlapping musical circles, selling more than a million copies within five months of release. It’s not quite a historic compendium of essentials, but it certainly wasn’t the lead balloon that the country music machine had predicted.
It would take another dozen years to make a companion volume, Trio II, which arrived in 1999. Plans for a third were suspended permanently in 2013, when Ronstadt retired from singing after being diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder. The public face of the women’s lasting friendship remains an endearing sight to behold, as when Ronstadt made a rare public appearance to co-present with Harris at a 2019 MusiCares gala honoring Parton. The woman of the hour pulled Ronstadt into a tight, full-body squeeze, eliciting a spontaneous laugh. Good friends can be hard to find, but heartache, harmonies, and country songs make enduring adhesives. Trio is a testament to the invisible bonds that hold fast through personal, professional, and artistic growth: a love letter to the wildflowers who find one another, growing free and strong wherever they might go. | 2023-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Warner Bros. | July 9, 2023 | 7.8 | 7fee3c42-b068-4806-8705-cf6ca095815c | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
BlocBoy JB has a habit of starting or promoting things that become more popular than he is. This seven-song mixtape is his attempt to combat that. | BlocBoy JB has a habit of starting or promoting things that become more popular than he is. This seven-song mixtape is his attempt to combat that. | BlocBoy JB : Don’t Think That | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blocboy-jb-dont-think-that/ | Don’t Think That | Memphis rapper BlocBoy JB’s most important contribution to pop culture may never earn him the credit he deserves. He created the now-viral “Shoot” dance for a song of the same name. Fortnite ripped it off, Usain Bolt performed it as a celebration during his soccer debut, and it appeared at the World Cup this summer. A microcosm of the ways rap culture dominates culture at large without concomitant representation for the people who create it, “Shoot” will likely leave BlocBoy JB behind as its originator. BlocBoy’s year-capping, seven-track mixtape, Don’t Think That, feels like an overture made with relevance in mind, an effort to stay seen amid a fast-moving attention economy. Its songs are good but mostly inessential.
Don’t Think That isn’t as strong as Simi, JB’s Drake-cosigned May breakout stacked with vivid off-brand quips and threats so bizarre they seemed only half-serious. He was respected in the hood like a preacher wearing Gucci and Louis sneakers, and you were dancing with the devil while he danced with Cinderellas. Bars about guns seemed almost whimsical; the songs themselves, fun. But these new tracks don’t press zonked-out shoot-’em-ups into minor-key thumpers. This is due, in part, to fewer Tay Keith beats. No beatmaker had a better year than he did, from “Look Alive” to “Nonstop,” but he produced only two songs on this tape, “Club Rock” and “Bacc Street Boys.” BlocBoy sounds best scooting through them, his voice sloping perfectly into their gaps. JB and Keith share an undeniable chemistry, one not even Drake could replicate in several attempts. His absence here changes the tenor of the entire tape. Beats from Babyxwater, DMacTooBangin, and Kyle Resto box BlocBoy into the sounds of the rap moment—spaced-out trap and Auto-Tune—and his songs lose their signature.
The hooks aren’t as catchy here, either, and the verses aren’t as snappy as those of Simi. Like many of those songs, these only have one verse, too. But Simi’s verses were more purposeful and conscious of their economy, creating a 48-minute jaunt with a nice arc. In this 15-minute run, though, getting eight or 16 bars a pop means getting short-changed, especially with JB’s tottering rap style. The writing is less imaginative, plucking the lowest-hanging fruit for punchlines. He even recycles one such line—about “pulling cards like Yu-Gi-Oh”—from Simi. For a stopgap release, Don’t Think That is serviceable, producing at least one daring maneuver in “Crip Lit,” a left-field half-ballad that slathers Auto-Tuned croons onto guitar licks. But nothing about these songs indicates even lateral movement, much less progress.
Still, BlocBoy can quickly seize momentum. Even when the songs are inert, his fitful performances suggest forward motion. “Rich Hoes” sounds like the scooped-out guts of G-Eazy’s “No Limit,” but BlocBoy salvages it with flows that fold where they shouldn’t. He jerks them out of pocket and then thrusts them abruptly back on beat. His greatest strength is that his raps are almost casually slapstick in performance and execution. And his sense for swing is almost as pointed as his comedic timing. He likes to drag out rhyme schemes, changing up the pace to throw you off. Stretching a scheme like this is an underrated skill that requires patience and finesse, like lining up dominos in an array. It’s one that BlocBoy regularly deploys.
JB is at his best when he uses these lurching flows to construct lasting images. During one sequence of “Club Rock,” he spends $20,000 on soap while reminiscing about taking his gun to school and wearing matching Dickies. But he gets even better on “Bloc”: “Shots in your stomach, bitch, how you gon’ eat?/I’m gettin’ head while I’m brushin’ my teeth/Walk in this bitch like my name Mr. T,” he raps, sketching out a caricature. Such moments drive his songs, but there just aren’t nearly enough of them on Don’t Think That. This is BlocBoy JB’s attempt to stay as current as the things he helped make popular but are now more popular than he is—the “Shoot” dance and Tay Keith’s production, namely. In so doing, he only widens those gaps. | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bloc Nation | November 10, 2018 | 6.2 | 7ff5ce77-f43f-4ffd-b03d-da5c372863d3 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The Baltimore rapper switches between singing, rapping, mumbling until there's almost no difference between the words and the beats. | The Baltimore rapper switches between singing, rapping, mumbling until there's almost no difference between the words and the beats. | Ghostie: Poltergeist Slim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-poltergeist-slim/ | Poltergeist Slim | When I heard the name Poltergeist Slim, I knew it could only belong to one of two types of people: a long-dead cowboy, cursed to ride the range for eternity, or a SoundCloud rapper. In this instance, it references the latter—it’s the evocatively titled new album from Baltimore rapper Ghostie—but it’s easy to imagine some long-lost piece of wax under the same name, recorded by a one-eyed and illiterate ranch hand, forgotten until some lucky soul rescued it from the bottom of a bargain bin and reissued it on 180-gram vinyl.
True to his name, there’s not much information out there about Ghostie beyond his affiliation with the collective Antiworld and the prolific catalog he’s amassed over the past several years. One thing is clear from his SoundCloud—Ghostie is a worker, regularly posting beats available for purchase or lease via the Cash App. With the exception of “Crash,” co-produced by BioQuery, and “Depressed Today,” co-produced by Koobideh, the entirety of Poltergeist Slim is self-produced.
Like any skilled producer-rapper, from Kanye West to DJ Paul, Ghostie seems keenly aware of his strengths and weaknesses as a vocalist, treating his own voice as just another shade in the palette rather than the centerpiece. When he’s rapping, Ghostie’s voice is full-bodied and deep-throated, reminiscent of fellow Internet-bred rappers like Denzel Curry or Night Lovell. When Ghostie sings, as he often does, he comes across much softer, with a monotone edge that betrays Kid Cudi’s influence. For better and worse, Ghostie’s voice bleeds into the instrumentals and eventually blends into his surroundings. His flow is consistent but fluid, sometimes aggressive, always expressive.
What keeps Poltergeist Slim fresh are Ghostie’s fickle stylistic allegiances. Ghostie switches modes frequently, sometimes in the space of a single song. “Pay For It All” opens with abstract wailing until a crunchy and compressed drum 'n' bass beat drops and Ghostie’s flow kicks into high gear. “Allyall” opens with an acoustic loop that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Baths album, but it’s soon joined by a funky bassline that transforms the track into the tape’s most laid-back jam. Ghostie’s beats are as diverse as his collection of flows: there’s a little bit of chiptune on “Fever,” and the beat to “Sorri in Somali” is built out of the infamous bed-squeak sound effect, invented by Lil Jon and perfected by Baltimore club. Sandwiched in-between the more turned-up tracks are a number of vocal-driven ballads, like “Depressed Today,” which more explicitly convey the melancholy that lurks underneath the tape.
At 20 tracks, Poltergeist Slim can start to feel sprawling and unfocused, but it’s the kind of project that wouldn’t actually benefit from cutting down. The album’s most interesting attributes are at the edges, in the kind of castaway tracks that are clearly the result of fucking around. The best example of this is “Fuck Words,” which fully delivers on the promise of “post-verbal rap” that many critics identified with the rise of Young Thug and the fear contained in the pejorative “mumble rap.” Rap has toed this line for years, and Ghostie is the first I’ve heard that’s brave enough to cross it. This is actual mumble rap—there are literally no words in the entire song, with the exception of the hook “Fuck words.” His chops as a producer and a rapper are formidable enough that it doesn’t come across as just a joke.
Rap fans often queue up along a dividing line: Do you care more about bars, or do you care more about beats? For someone like Ghostie, there’s little difference between the two, just as there’s increasingly less space between country and rap: every sound has its own unique resonance and capacity for expression. The latest generation of rappers are trying to find new ways to express their sadness, and they’re looking for ways beyond language and its failures to do it. “Fuck words” isn’t just a gag or a gimmick—it’s a creed. | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lost Appeal | May 8, 2019 | 7.2 | 7ff9da72-d452-4214-88be-44c980db7ad1 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Beyoncé follows other, uh, great ideas like Garth Brooks's proto-emo character Chris Gaines and T.I. vs. T.I.P with a split-personality 2xCD record. | Beyoncé follows other, uh, great ideas like Garth Brooks's proto-emo character Chris Gaines and T.I. vs. T.I.P with a split-personality 2xCD record. | Beyoncé: I Am... Sasha Fierce | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12462-i-am-sasha-fierce/ | I Am... Sasha Fierce | Though she's only 27, Beyoncé goes out of her way to be an old-fashioned celebrity, the type offended by Pete Wentz blogging about Oscar the Grouch or Britney Spears Twittering her life away. "I feel that, especially now with the Internet and paparazzi and camera phones, it's so difficult to maintain mystery," she said earlier this year. "It's almost impossible to have superstars now, because people will never get enough." And, in our TMZ-addled world, her reluctance to entertain most questions about her personal life is both refreshing and a bit stubborn. She's a megawatt anachronism in sky-high heels and a frozen smile. So, without much outside interference, Beyoncé's fan-artist connection relies almost wholly on her music-- the only place to find the "real" Beyoncé is on her albums. With that direct relationship in mind comes I Am... Sasha Fierce, a supposed window into the soul of Beyoncé as well as her hair-flipping sexpot alter ego who happens to be blessed with the ultimate "Project Runway" moniker.
The "split-personality" gimmick is now a tired and, more often than not, hapless pop theme (see: Garth Brooks's proto-emo character Chris Gaines, T.I. vs. T.I.P, the street vs. boardroom dynamic of hubby Jay-Z's Kingdom Come). Sasha Fierce will not disturb that unfortunate trend. Unlike 2006's underrated funk-fest B'Day, which held together remarkably well as an LP and saw Beyoncé ditching sap for sass, this record isn't supposed to coalesce. Speaking once again to her penchant for the outdated and obsolete, it's a 2xCD affair also available in a deluxe edition with five additional tracks. (Didn't anyone tell her about Christina Aguilera's recent diva-fied double disc disappointment Back to Basics ... and that you're supposed to put the deluxe edition out six to eight months after the regular edition?) Sasha Fierce puts Beyoncé back into the "singles artist" column-- only the blindly devout would consider slogging through the deluxe edition multiple times; only the foolishly puritanical would deny the occasional high-gloss super hits.
Nobody wins the Beyoncé vs. Sasha battle-- often, the listener loses. On the Beyoncé side, while tracks like the effective (and affecting) gender-bender "If I Were a Boy" and the stunning love-as-god power ballad "Halo" (courtesy of "Bleeding Love" scribe Ryan Tedder) find the singer both strident and exposed, there's lots of wispy nonsense seemingly dug out of Celine Dion's scrap pile. Her twist on "Ave Maria" is vocally impeccable, but it reads more like recital fodder rather than a true confessional. Flip to Sasha, which is more listenable overall, but also more pandering. There's the one that sounds like past Beyoncé hits ("Single Ladies [Put a Ring on It]"), the one that sounds like "A Milli" ("Diva"), and the one that sounds like Rihanna ("Sweet Dreams"). For someone famous for effortlessly sparking trends, there are a surprising amount of opportunistic retreads here.
Beyoncé is a capital-S Star, and one glimpse of her onstage makes it clear why she's earned her right to operate above the fray. But an album isn't a concert, and there are simply not enough Sasha Fierce songs worthy of her or our time. (The hopelessly benign "Smash Into You" will provide a prime bathroom break moment on her next world tour, though.) While this LP is more painstaking than B'Day, the extra effort dulls any emotional wallop; B'Day, in all its hectic glory, offered a much more vivid peek into the elusive mind of Beyoncé than Sasha Fierce, which often reads more like projection than reality. Considering the wealth of characters this multi-talent is currently amassing between movies and alter egos, the notion of Beyoncé is more splintered now than ever. Sasha Fierce doesn't help her put the pieces back together. | 2008-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-21T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Columbia | November 21, 2008 | 5.7 | 7ffd6610-d2c7-4b37-b734-9cf6f2fd44dc | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The British singer-songwriter’s harrowing, physical folk music forces you to confront an awful and awesome kind of beauty. | The British singer-songwriter’s harrowing, physical folk music forces you to confront an awful and awesome kind of beauty. | Keeley Forsyth: The Hollow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/keeley-forsyth-the-hollow/ | The Hollow | When Keeley Forsyth sings, you become acutely aware of the body emitting her voice. Not what it looks like, necessarily—not its age or shape or gender or skin color—but its raw physicality, its fundament of bones and sinew. She sings with her whole chest: diaphragm tightening, air filling the lungs, muscles twisting up the length of her throat, unleashing a presence that drips with the blood of the flesh that produced it. Some singers try to make their art sound effortless; Forsyth emphasizes the physical strain.
Perhaps this sound was born of desperation. In 2017, Forsyth, who has been acting professionally since she was a teenager—mostly on British television, though she also has recent credits in Guardians of the Galaxy and Poor Things—suffered a psychological and physical breakdown that left her tongue paralyzed for a month. The desperation of that experience was palpable on her 2020 debut, Debris, an album of haunted minimalist folk that she released at the age of 40. Limbs, which followed in 2022, was more conventionally beautiful. But on The Hollow, her third album, she puts her gale-force vibrato in the service of her most intense music yet.
“I’ve always enjoyed making people feel a bit uncomfortable with the sounds and music I make,” Forsyth once told The Quietus; here, it sometimes feels as if she wants to terrify. The album begins with stately restraint; over slow-moving organ tones, her voice mournful and controlled, she sketches an agonizing search for meaning intercut with a single jarring image of physical desolation, “Veins like dry stalks/That can never bring water.” The title track, which follows, begins with liturgical grace, but her voice—digitally layered, quavering severely—assumes the sound of a sob lodged in the throat, her words at first nearly unintelligible. A dirgelike mantra (“There is no help here/Not for me”) gives way to a startling cry—“Shake my life/Out of my mouth”—delivered with larynx-rending force.
Forsyth and her producer, Ross Downes, continue to channel the same influences that informed her previous music, principally Scott Walker’s Tilt and Meredith Monk, along with the spiritual yearning of Arvo Pärt and the cerebral goth of This Mortal Coil. Even when she raises the hairs on the back of your neck, she evokes an awesome, awful beauty. On “Eve,” she offers a tender tribute to her grandmother, who raised her: “Nothing can/Tear us apart/Let the body lay down/And die.” (On The Hollow, even the songs in a major key are about death.) On “Turning,” she is borne aloft, chanting and bellowing on the surging floodwaters of Colin Stetson’s arpeggiated saxophone; it’s a romantic landscape painting rendered in sound.
Forsyth’s lyrics have never been sharper, or stranger. “Slush” is an onomatopoeic poem about children playing in snow that assumes the doomy menace of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. In “A Shift,” she layers two songs in parallel: One is a spoken-word text about an actor donning their costume, the other a wailing rendition of “We Are Women, We Are Strong,” an anthem from the miners’ strikes of the early 1980s, a provocative fusion of class solidarity, feminism, and creative labor. On “In the Corner,” some of her more oblique constructions—“storm fallen days” and “an infinite glass secretion”—remind me, faintly, of ML Buch’s surreal menagerie of “flesh on air” and “flames shards goo,” but shot through with horror instead of twee.
The album takes its title from a mineshaft that Forsyth stumbled upon while wandering the countryside near her home, and much of the record feels charged with the sort of uncanny power that holes in the ground can hold over the imagination. In her most striking lyrics, Forsyth maps an eerie intersection of landscape, spirit, and the human body—“crossroads of flesh,” as she puts it in “In the Corner.” Branches grow through her sleeping body; dust wakes within her, a specter of death brought to life. The lyrics abound with roads and bridges, brown fields, clouds scraping at the land: scenes straight out of Breugel, terrifying images of what we might call the Old Wyrd Europe, where nature and fate are intertwined.
Most of her songs are mercifully short, many under three minutes long, as though Forsyth was aware that music of such intensity could easily overwhelm. The gentlest song is one of the shortest: “Creature,” which closes the record. Over spare, searching piano from her frequent collaborator Matthew Bourne, she sings, “There is no help here/Not for me,” reprising a line from “The Hollow.” But rather than desperate or harried, she sounds at peace. If the hollow is a destabilizing rupture, it is also a sanctuary—and a vessel, a source of strength; a resonant chamber, empty until sound spills forth. | 2024-05-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-16T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 130701 / FatCat | May 16, 2024 | 7.7 | 7fff75eb-db0e-45f1-a08e-a49d7b772d2d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Brooklyn band’s second album offers a reverent spin on the alt and indie-rock canon. Their songwriting has grown tighter since their debut, but their music is unlikely to inspire strong emotions. | The Brooklyn band’s second album offers a reverent spin on the alt and indie-rock canon. Their songwriting has grown tighter since their debut, but their music is unlikely to inspire strong emotions. | Sunflower Bean: Twentytwo in Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunflower-bean-twentytwo-in-blue/ | Twentytwo in Blue | When I think of Sunflower Bean’s Twentytwo in Blue, the first thing that comes to mind is “lovable.” And I swear to you that was before I read frontwoman Julia Cumming making the following statement in a press release for her band’s sophomore album: “I think one word that always comes to mind when I think about this record is lovable.” True, organic endearment could be just as important for an aspiring rock band in 2018 as a crossover hit or a crucial sync placement. Probably more realistic too, and Sunflower Bean are a proper charm offensive: They’re young, but come off as experienced beyond their years. They’re stylish, but not styled. They’re clearly a rock band, but they’re also kinda chill and never sound like they’re here to do either to an extreme. They’re a coed trio outraged in the “Can you believe this shit?” default of the current moment; in a recent Billboard interview, Twentytwo in Blue was credited with the foresight to anticipate #MeToo, the Stoneman Douglas High School protests, and Black Lives Matter. If you could focus-group the platonic ideal for "lovable rock music for 2018" into existence, it would sound and look a lot like Twentytwo in Blue.
This is about the same place they ended up on their delightfully ragged debut, Human Ceremony; sure, it was a low-stakes rummaging through the alt and indie-rock canon, but its appeal rested in watching it performed with such reckless glee. Twentytwo in Blue is no less reverent; smartly compartmentalized into upbeat pop-rock shuffles, silvery ballads, a waltz-time showstopper, and the late-album filler with Nick Kivlen on lead vocals, they’re never more than two degrees removed from Fleetwood Mac, our generation’s classic-rock common denominator. Sunflower Bean are just much more efficient these days, like they’ve spent the past two years studying underlying song structure rather than pure sound. All 11 tracks are streamlined, sleek, and ensure the chorus hits when expected, as expected. There’s no filler, just songs that at least leave a strong first impression, even if they end up being the only one it leaves.
It all bodes well for Sunflower Bean’s prospects. They’ve carefully honed a resume for festivals that prefer to book rock bands that don’t actually rawk, which are really most of them. This professionalism doesn’t cut against Sunflower Bean’s aims to create a lovable album, but it definitely undermines making one specifically about the experience of being 22—“independent,” but also “busted and used” as the quasi-title track puts it, a variant of Taylor Swift describing the same age as “miserable and magical.” All members of Sunflower Bean are actually 22 and rather than exploring those extremes, Cumming and Kivlen play the most lovable role of all: the level-headed friend who’ll hear you out with no judgment.
On “Twentytwo,” Cumming exhibits superhuman empathy, a voice of feminist allegiance who understands the draw of toxic masculinity even while condemning it. Meanwhile, “I Was a Fool” and “Puppet Strings” are breakup songs with enough distance from their blast radius not to be poisoned anymore. But when “Burn It,” “Crisis Fest,” and “Human For” vow to burn your hometown to cinders, take the patriarchy with it, and establish “the drum” as the universal religion, they just sound like 7 p.m. at Coachella instead. It’s the result of what someone might hear if they were equidistant from concurrent Haim and White Reaper sets. It’s a perfect union if anyone finds the former too glossy and the other too gritty, but in occupying this middle ground, nothing here would qualify as potentially divisive protest music. In fact, there’s nothing divisive about Twentytwo in Blue at all, which means Cumming and I were just slightly off the mark—without the ability to inspire any strong emotion one way or the other, it has to settle for “likable.” | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | March 26, 2018 | 6.4 | 800b8601-b7e4-41be-b007-c755a1a29eba | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Mega Bog is the malleable rock band masterminded by multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy. Happy Together flits through a sound that is familiar and far-out, transforming the mundane into jazzy wonderlands. | Mega Bog is the malleable rock band masterminded by multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy. Happy Together flits through a sound that is familiar and far-out, transforming the mundane into jazzy wonderlands. | Mega Bog: Happy Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22843-mega-bog-happy-together/ | Happy Together | Mega Bog is the Seattle- and Brooklyn-based band of Erin Birgy and her merry crew of players. Together, they have the power to transform the mundane into jazzy wonderlands. The group’s second album, Happy Together, bubbles and abstractly teems without ever feeling excessive. Birgy flits through a sound that is both familiar and far-out. Mega Bog often summon the spirit of David Bowie with enigmatic lyrics and twinges of glam concretely based in guitar music. It’s freaky in the best way.
Happy Together begins with a dizzying sensation comparable to tumbling down a rabbit hole. The uneasy spirals of “Black Rose” evoke a soupy free fall into a new reality; the lyrics are equally spooky. The supernatural “Blackout” is paradoxically sunny—still a tough nut to crack, but it’s considerably more inviting. “My heads in a bed of improbable palm trees on an ugly, cold Chicago night,” Birgy murmurs, the words dripping like honey.
Above all, Mega Bog’s sound is malleable. Birgy’s vocal character fluctuates from an operatic soprano to a wispy sage to a windswept Gold Dust Woman. The band itself is flexible, with members fading in and out while also working on their own projects. Performers on Happy Together include the multi-instrumentalists Zach Burba and Will Murdoch of iji (which Birgy has played in), Hand Habits guitar virtuoso Meg Duffy (seen recently on tour with Kevin Morby’s band), and Big Thief’s James Krivchenia (who also mixed and mastered the record), among others. “It’s hyper-sexual, Aquarian music,” Birgy once said, but rather than collapsing into some sort of Hair style free-love fest, Mega Bog’s shape-shifting is carefully constructed.
Take “Diznee,” a swirling saxophone showcase that bobs along madly while spouting tongue-teasing lyrics like “Soda fountain on the fritz/In the ritzy/Underground Billy Goat bar.” The track is an absolute circus, always threatening to spin off its axis, if such a center even exists. The zippy dream that concludes “Diznee” flings Happy Together into a surrealism that is both sinister (“London”) and mystical (“She’s History”), but like a disco ball, it always encourages dancing through the darkness.
This feels particularly pertinent on the haunted, interstellar “192014.” “So when it’s your turn to start working towards the light/And how do you plan on giving me back any of my precious time?,” Birgy asks over spasming saxophones. Speaking of horns, “Diznee,” “192014,” and the sprawling “Worst Way” all celebrate the honking saxophone. Whether yelping, screeching, or beeping in joy, Mega Bog’s use of the sax adds a wonderfully freewheeling detail to an already complex mosaic.
Then there’s “Fwee,” a Happy Together standout that meditates on inner peace following a period of trauma. “How could I have known,” Birgy asks carefully, each word melting like a pad of butter, “There’s a person out there who means me no harm.” As Birgy walks through her own realizations, “Fwee” twists and turns alongside her, weaving spindly guitar through husky ’70s harmonies, before finally dissolving into psychedelic chaos at the climax of its lyrical consciousness. “Fwee” is an outlier on Happy Together, in that it is the most temporal. Its concerns are bodily as much as they are mental. Whether Happy Together is boogieing through a lively cacophony or laying low, Mega Bog never lose sight of the end goal: exploring purity and joy that take a variety of forms but never evaporate. | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nicey | February 6, 2017 | 7.4 | 800c07f2-153f-4f22-9f5a-029c552aef29 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Dreamcar is a new supergroup featuring three-quarters of No Doubt with AFI frontman Davey Havok. This eponymous debut is a testament to the new wave crushes of their youth. | Dreamcar is a new supergroup featuring three-quarters of No Doubt with AFI frontman Davey Havok. This eponymous debut is a testament to the new wave crushes of their youth. | Dreamcar: Dreamcar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23293-dreamcar/ | Dreamcar | Most supergroups are predicated on a paradox: old masters trumpeting a sonic restart with the knowledge that, at least musically speaking, shedding the baggage of the past is but a pipe dream. A supergroup’s members can pray for rebirth all they like, but nostalgia inevitably creeps in. Dreamcar, a new band comprising AFI frontman Davey Havok and everyone in No Doubt not named Gwen Stefani (guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young), don’t fall into that trap. On their eponymous debut, the quartet takes an alternate route down memory lane.
Speaking with Billboard earlier this year, Havok framed the album as an adolescent time capsule of sorts, one that “immediately... evoked moments of [his] musical upbringing.” “That new romantic period was something I was very enamored of when I was very young,” Havok said. The latter portions of AFI and No Doubt’s discographies could be seen as a testament to Dreamcar’s new wave crushes (as could Havok’s synth side project Blaqk Audio). The former band went full-on Cure over a decade ago with their breakthrough album Decemberunderground; the latter group’s long-awaited return, 2012’s Push and Shove, often resembled a Duran Duran covers album, with Stefani filling in for Simon Le Bon.
Dreamcar, then, represents the inevitable offspring of this love affair—a spitting image of its parents’ influences, as opposed to the parents themselves. In other words, what we have here is neither Tragic Kingdom slicked with eyeliner, nor Sing the Sorrow spruced up with ska, but a bunch of erstwhile punks nodding to the greats like bobbleheads, while Havok wails his heart out. Following an eternity of plucking off paint-by-numbers pop-rock basslines, Kanal is back on the offensive, channeling Peter Hook through textured, punchy progressions on “Kill For Candy” and “All of the Dead Girls.” Dumont’s antsy riffs—which typically flit around the mix just out of reach, flickering like dying neon—are the clear product of years of Andy Taylor worship. They’re anchored by Young’s disciplined work behind the kit, a far cry from his No Doubt days, which showcased a more pugnacious spirit.
Were it not for this fortified mid-tempo framework, Havok’s incessant whinging on Dreamcar (directed at exes, paramours, and other cheery folk) may very well have torpedoed the quartet’s maiden voyage. That alt-rock’s designated theatre kid would take an even more zealous approach to new romantic songcraft on a new-wave-revival exercise comes as no surprise, of course. And Havok’s brooding occasionally blossoms spectacularly, like on “Born To Lie”, an open-eyed kiss-off with harmonies that arch and intersect unexpectedly.
All too often, though, he simpers like he’s trying to open his heart and study SAT vocabulary at the same time. “Did you see that candy girl selling pretty dreams?” he ponders midway though “On the Charts,” “A rainbow smile to tame the storm/In haute couture pristine?” Even the songs that take a more comedic approach—such as “All of the Dead Girls,” a vaudevillian ode to goths, and maybe necrophilia—threaten to collapse under the weight of lines like “Whatever their tone, beyond moribund/Bathing in bleach and Rose 31.” And yet, ironically, the lyrical setbacks also help emphasize Dreamcar’s greatest strength: It’s a simple labor of love, as opposed to a grandiose spectacle, and in doing so, it sidesteps the usual supergroup cesspool. | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | PLOF | May 25, 2017 | 5.8 | 8018ee14-dc6c-4533-a3a0-57ee86119e83 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | 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 infamous 1974 album Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon, the moment a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure. | 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 infamous 1974 album Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon, the moment a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure. | Harry Nilsson: Pussy Cats | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-nilsson-pussy-cats/ | Pussy Cats | If people know of Pussy Cats, they know at least two things: That Harry Nilsson shouted his voice so hoarse that blood hit the microphone, effectively destroying his golden, three-and-a-half octave range forever. And that it was produced by John Lennon during his so-called “Lost Weekend,” the 18-month stretch from 1973 to 1975 in which Lennon and Yoko Ono briefly separated and he disappeared into drugs and drink.
To listen to Pussy Cats, it’s long been assumed, is to get a peek into the broader Lost Weekend of the early ’70s—how it felt, how it sounded. This was the blowsy era, immediately post-Beatles, when rock stars could get away with recruiting four or five of the usual suspects (here, it was Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, and session guys like Jim Keltner and Klaus Voormann), bang out a few Bob Dylan covers, and call it an album. It was an era when all the hippie icons were lousing around the Playboy Mansion, when the euphoria of the late ’60s had petered out but all the main players were still onstage. This was the time in which Lennon allegedly punched a waitress while being ejected from a Smothers Brothers gig, his famous spectacles tossed aside in the scuffle.
Reading about this era is funny until it’s depressing. Hearing Lennon talk about the beach house where he, Nilsson, Ringo, and others partied until they were sick every night instead of making Pussy Cats is deflating, as is Lennon’s revelation that “One day I realize, Jesus, I’m the producer, one day they’re going to be asking me where the tapes are.” Stories like these, lapped up by periodicals and repeated in interviews, defined and calcified what “rock star excess” looked like, and Nilsson was there for nearly all of it.
If any one person could embody the notion of late-’60s rock stars going to seed, that person would undoubtedly be Harry Nilsson—one of the most talented songwriters of his generation, feted by all four Beatles, bedecked with Grammys, scoring hits while seemingly not even trying, squandering studio budgets and burning bridges while carousing with anyone who would join him. Nilsson was present for the only known post-Beatles reunion of Lennon and Paul McCartney—Stevie Wonder was also there. Mythical, and yet the result was atrocious. The name of the bootleg (“A Toot and a Snore in ’74”) came from cocaine, and it sounds that way. Wherever a famous ’60s icon was debasing themselves, Nilsson was there, supplying the drinks and collecting the stories.
In 1974, the golden aura from 1971’s triumphant Nilsson Schmilsson had dimmed, but not yet faded away—he was known as a troubled, troublesome guy, but generally worth the effort, a risky investment that could still pay dividends. Pussy Cats is considered the moment he leaped over the brink, a sort of album-length Leaving Las Vegas in which a would-be titan consigned himself to a tragic cult figure. For many Nilsson fans, it is too painful and disheartening to listen to.
But this strange and seemingly radioactive album has persisted in the cultural imagination as more than just a cautionary tale. Nilsson himself denigrated the original material he brought to the Pussy Cats sessions—“Most of those songs will be originals, even though I don’t like my songs very much right now,” he told NME in 1973. “Still, we’ll do them anyway because I haven’t got anything else to record.” He was a little too hard on his own work, because there are at least three classic Nilsson songs to be found on Pussy Cats: “Don’t Forget Me,” “All My Life,” and “Old Forgotten Soldier.” “Don’t Forget Me,” in particular, is one of those moonlit reveries that Nilsson picked like bits of food from his scraggly beard; it’s a wry, pickled, devastatingly sad song that many artists have reached for in the ensuing decades, from Macy Gray to Neko Case to Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold to Marianne Faithfull to Joe Cocker. It’s part of the American songbook now, and it slunk into the world on the flea-bitten back of Pussy Cats.
The most infamous song on the album is the first one—a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross.” In popular Nilsson lore, this was the song, the one that did it, the moment when Nilsson, aware that he was developing a node on his throat, simply screamed through it. It’s accumulated a reputation as a sort of aural suicide note, an act of self-immolation—but it’s also a tremendously powerful performance, and one of the most indelible tracks Lennon ever worked on as a producer.
The arrangement for “Many Rivers to Cross” is so slow that the song seems on the verge of simply stalling out, the drummer wandering away or the guitarist setting down his instrument to get a glass of water. It’s unnervingly slow, and heard today, it reminds me faintly of the codeine-glazed gravitational pull of screw music. At the time, it recalled the hymn-like feel of Lennon’s recent solo work, particularly Mind Games, released the previous year. Apart from the tabloid exploits and benders, this was also a particularly introspective moment in Lennon’s life, one in which he reconnected with his son Julian, reconciled with the other Beatles, and formally dissolved the group. He might have been flailing, but he was also searching. In his music at the time, it sometimes seemed like he was slowing down his songs until he could unearth the secret message his subconscious had buried there.
This was the same stately pace of “Many Rivers to Cross,” and Nilsson’s vocal take is so evocative of Lennon that Nilsson-heads still bicker over whether and where Lennon is singing backup. But Nilsson wasn’t channeling the bright, boyish tenor of “Strawberry Fields Forever” or “A Hard Day’s Night.” This was therapy Lennon, primal-scream Lennon, the one you can watch cowing an audience into frightened silence performing “Mother” and screaming all the way inside himself. On “Many Rivers,” Nilsson puts himself inside the space, and in his guttural screams, you can hear, among other things, the sound of one man trying to inhabit the voice and cultural footprint of his idol.
The relationship between Nilsson and Lennon is one of the many sad subtexts of Pussy Cats—it was Lennon who uttered the famous “Nilsson is my favorite group” line in a 1968 press conference, and Nilsson waited years for the opportunity to work with him. Where some chalk up Nilsson’s hemorrhaging vocal cords on Pussy Cats—and his failure to halt the sessions and deal with this problem—to self-destructiveness, Nilsson confessed to something more tender and timid: “I was afraid that if he stopped it, we wouldn’t do it again, we wouldn’t finish it. So I just said nothing.” Viewed this way, his screaming isn’t an act of self-destruction; he is giving everything he has to impress his hero.
Lennon, for his part, had just walked away from a warlike session with Phil Spector trying to record his oldies album Rock ’N’ Roll—pistols were pulled, and things had gotten dicey and unstable in the particular way of Spector recording sessions. It was in the midst of this hellish scene that Lennon announced his intention to walk away and produce Nilsson. The sound that Lennon sought on “Many Rivers” was oddly similar to Spector’s Wall of Sound, but through Lennon’s ear, the Wall of Sound was crumbling—the drum hits felt like debris hitting the floor.
Their cover of the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me” carries the same solemnity. Reverb and echo soak into every crack, making the song feel inescapable, pressing down like a heavy blanket or ambient anxiety. The pace was, again, glacial; the mood, again, devotional. Nilsson’s voice may have been disappearing as the tape rolled, but his tenderness wasn’t—he leans into every note, drawing it out as if the session’s end would take all life’s happiness with it. When you’re at last call, every song feels like a hymn.
It’s impossible to discuss Pussy Cats without circling around the ruination of those vocal cords. Whatever others hear in these performances—poignance, pathos, or even evidence of a certain personal failing—I hear a peculiar bravery. Yes, Nilsson was in the process of losing his most prized possession, but he did nothing to hide or disguise the wreckage. His voice, in all its degradation, is as closely mic’d as it was on A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, his album of songbook standards from just a year earlier when his voice was in its prime. His vocals on “Old Forgotten Soldier” are hollowed-out, whispery, and you can hear air whistle out of his throat without producing so much as a squeak. But Nilsson leans forward, steps into the light. He lets you see and hear all of him. He was a studio musician, after all, so petrified of performing that he gave no concerts. Whatever secrets he divulged about his soul he left on tape.
The low points on Pussy Cats are harder to dignify. Nilsson’s cover of Johnny Thunder’s “Loop De Loop” is about as appealing as a smoker’s cough, transparently awful and without purpose. It reminds me of an A-student filling in one straight column of bubbles on a test and turning it in with a shit-eating grin. The “Rock Around the Clock” cover is another embarrassment, an all-star band featuring Ringo Starr and Keith Moon unable to keep it together and reverting to middle-school levels of competency. It’s the sort of misfire that has earned Pussy Cats its lamentable reputation, and the reason it can never entirely transcend it.
But everything that makes it seem lamentable is also the source of its power. The cover of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” conversely, is loud and clattering. You can picture the blood draining from the face of the label exec listening to it on playback, calculating royalty payments and revenue loss, just as you can imagine Lennon and Nilsson sniggering to each other over the mixing board. But there is also a deranged urgency to the playing; it catches an edge. Listen to the drums; that’s Ringo Starr playing alongside Jim Keltner. Has Ringo Starr ever drummed so hard? Whatever was driving him—creative urgency, cocaine, a simple panicked desire to not lose the beat—the result is a moment of delirium captured at the back of the song. It’s good chaos, a productive mess.
After Pussy Cats, Nilsson’s life and career slid into denouement. He was finished as a recording artist by 1980 and entered a quieter phase of life, marked by relative sobriety and stability. He made music for movies and more or less disappeared from the public until his death in 1994. In some ways, Pussy Cats was the final statement from Nilsson when he was still in the thick of it, still the amiable-genius drinking buddy of every rock star. Picture-book drunkards like Nilsson live their lives in cheerful, elegant gestures of failure and small, pained declarations of success. Pussy Cats contained a little of both.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA Victor | August 30, 2020 | 7.8 | 801abd62-4346-496f-ae79-214243650c9f | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Brian Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes. It suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard. | Brian Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes. It suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard. | Brian Eno: Lux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17303-lux/ | Lux | In 1985, Brian Eno released a CD called Thursday Afternoon. The hourlong work was the soundtrack to a video piece, a project notable for two uses of technology. One, the video was meant to be viewed on a television placed on its side (there's a YouTube rip out there that requires you to rotate your laptop). And with its 61-minute runtime, Thursday Afternoon was promoted as the first piece to be created specifically for compact disc. Before the arrival of the CD a couple of years before, works of such duration had to be spread across sides. And since Thursday Afternoon was an immersive ambient piece in the classic Eno mold, the idea that you could absorb it uninterrupted in one hour-long session was important.
Thursday Afternoon seemed to drift in place; it was music that seemed not so much "played" as "allowed to exist." Its structure brought to mind wind chimes, as a handful of individually pleasing elements-- a few notes of piano, some light synth treatments-- knocked around the space arbitrarily but seemed to benefit from the lack of order. Eno's first true ambient work, Discreet Music, from 1975, was his first example of the form; there, he generated a handful of electronic synth tones and allowed them to cycle through chance patterns (the title track from that album also pushed the limits of technology, with over 30 minutes of audio on a single LP side). And now, Eno's new solo album, first created for an art installation, is another. Lux consists of four tracks spread across 75 minutes, but you don't really know where one ends and another begins and it doesn't matter. Like those earlier works, a small number of sounds that complement each other are set loose in a space and allowed to move around in different configurations, with subtle patterns sometimes emerging from the randomness. The most prominent of these sounds is single piano notes played quietly, which further connects the work to Thursday Afternoon in the Eno lineage. But where the 1985 album felt submerged and ghostly, Lux is clear and bright, with the crisp higher harmonics allowed to come through.
The other Eno work that comes to mind with Lux isn't a CD, but yet another boundary-pushing use of technology, and that's his iPhone app Bloom. The basic elements of light, thin drone mixed with piano notes that strike, decay, and play against other notes is also the central idea of Bloom. The danger with a program like Bloom, where Eno creates a generative system that allows the listener to make his or her own ambient pieces, is that it raises the question: What purpose does the artist himself serve at that point? He's possibly invented himself out of existence. But if Lux does nothing else, it suggests that there's a reason Eno's name has become synonymous with "ambient" and why his thoughts on the music remain the gold standard.
Thursday Afternoon was assembled to accompany a "visual painting" and Eno studied art, and it's best to think of his music using the language of design-- the colors used, their proportions, how they are laid out and balanced in the space. Eno is brilliant at getting things just so. So Lux has a mix of space and sound that feels right; no one element dominates or becomes grating over the course of 75 minutes, even though all repeat over and over. Piano notes linger, there are light plucks on what could be a harp, and everything is bathed in Deep Listening-levels of reverb. While it accomplishes Eno's long-stated goal of changing the mood and feel of a room, "tinting" the atmosphere, it refuses to enforce any feeling in particular.
It's easy to forget that Eno's ambient work doesn't always fit his strict definition. Music for Films sounds like it-- it's very suggestive of particular feeling-- and the brilliant Ambient 4: On Land conjures an entire landscape, one filled with swamps and strange creatures. But Lux is squarely in the tradition of music that can be ignored but holds up (sometimes just barely) to closer scrutiny. It turns any living room into an art installation where interesting things may or may not happen, and its lack of direction and specificity is in its own way brave. Sometimes it's hard to not say anything; Brian Eno is doing just that, once again, and beautifully. | 2012-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 6, 2012 | 8 | 8028c128-388f-4864-bfa2-d170ba301be6 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Three members of the Most Serene Republic reach into the vaults to dust off their teenage, pre-Arts & Crafts recordings. | Three members of the Most Serene Republic reach into the vaults to dust off their teenage, pre-Arts & Crafts recordings. | The Most Serene Republic: Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15479-pre-serene-thee-oneironauts/ | Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts | "The smartest thing a record label can do is sign a bunch of kids at 19, and then trick them into documenting their lives for the next six to 10 years." So mused Ryan Lenssen, a founding member of the Most Serene Republic, upon the release of the band's most accomplished record, 2009's ...And The Ever Expanding Universe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lenssen was 19 when the Most Serene Republic began releasing their take on baroque, kitchen-sink pop, in the process becoming the became the first non-Broken Social Scene-related project to sign to Arts & Crafts. Now they dig back into their vault to remaster and release eight tracks from Thee Oneironauts, a band that Lenssen and two other members of the Republic played in when they were 18. The resulting collection, Pre Serene: Thee Oneironauts, is as gawky as a middle school yearbook photo: It sounds like it was made by teenagers who play immoderate amounts of Zelda, like to write songs about 1980s movies that they think are really awesome, and do not yet feel the artistic need to disguise or complicate either of those artistic impulses. O sweet, guileless youth.
Thee Oneironauts shows that even at an age when most would-be musicians are fiddling with distortion pedals and refining their teen angst, current Republic members Lenssen, Adrian Jewett, and Nick Greaves (along with non-Republic-an Emily Hunt) were always in the business of bleeding heart earnestness and ornate compositions. Unfortunately, Thee Oneironauts were unable to unite either of those things in intriguing ways, and this collection of their recordings comes off as skittish, cluttered, and excessively maudlin. "Today Is the Day" sounds like the work of a young band equally enamored with the Postal Service and the fact that synths can sometimes sound like rocket ships, while the tone and lyrics of the unreasonably long "St. Germain" aim for romantic but miss the mark. We now know that these guys would later develop into better songwriters, but this record doesn't offer much evidence in support.
Still, Thee Oneironauts' most cringeworthy moment, "Zoltar Speaks" (yes, it's a song told from the point of view of Tom Hanks' character in Big) serves as a pithy thematic summary: This is a document of the anxieties of growing up. It's full of the sort of details and feelings that few of us sensible grown-ups would commit to tape (the lyrics to "The Breath" sound like facts that the band members memorized for their high school history class: "1896: the first movie shown/ 1912: the Titanic went down"), and there's a certain charm to a document like that. But this one is something that only very loyal fans of the band will be able to appreciate; the rest will probably be left wondering why they took these recordings out of the vault in the first place. | 2011-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Home of the Rebels | June 2, 2011 | 4.9 | 802c2a02-85b2-451b-a24f-b25a02c329a9 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Nathan Williams treats his Ghost Ramp label's inaugural release, an EP featuring guest spots from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino and Fucked Up's Damian Abraham, like a 24-year old's first apartment: Maybe you'd only want to spend 15 minutes in this ramshackle mess, but hey, he's enjoying his freedom. | Nathan Williams treats his Ghost Ramp label's inaugural release, an EP featuring guest spots from Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino and Fucked Up's Damian Abraham, like a 24-year old's first apartment: Maybe you'd only want to spend 15 minutes in this ramshackle mess, but hey, he's enjoying his freedom. | Wavves: Life Sux EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15827-life-sux-ep/ | Life Sux EP | King of the Beach was a quantum leap for Wavves, but not so much for Nathan Williams. In the context of the monochrome, fuck-all noise of Wavvves, it was easier to stomach an attitude that hovered somewhere between high, hungover, and hateful. What pissed off a lot of people was the way he could broaden his sonic palette and galvanize his songwriting without even the slightest attitude adjustment: The world would have to start taking him seriously, and it was abundantly clear he had no plans to return the favor. So do you think the tsk-tsking of some critics or Marnie Stern is gonna stop him? In case you missed the point of King of the Beach's opening salvo, here's Williams on "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl": "You're still never gonna stop me." As such, his follow-up EP is titled Life Sux, it features some of his more famous friends cheering him on, and Williams treats the inaugural release on his Ghost Ramp label like a 24-year old's first apartment: Maybe you'd only want to spend 15 minutes tops in this ramshackle mess, but hey, he's enjoying his freedom.
At the very least, you know where you stand with Wavves: If you're not referenced by name or actually appear on Life Sux, there's a good shot you're a target of Williams' limitless disdain. So then, "Bug": He's cool with Dinosaur Jr., whether he's paying homage with some of his mostly instantly catchy fuzz guitar leads, or just pissing in the wind about the futility of relying on other people. Meanwhile, "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl" follows in the grand tradition of Local H's "Eddie Vedder" (if not "I Had Mark Arm") in terms of grunge fan fiction fueled by overblown ego and non-existent self-esteem. He switches "meet" with "be" during the brainwash of a chorus, which brings out this strange humanizing quality even though the premise doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense: Whose life ambition is it to meet or even be Dave Grohl when he's quite possibly the squarest dude that qualifies as an actual rock star? Is it because "Krist Novoselic" has too many syllables and doesn't rhyme with anything?
Unfortunately, when his tributes to the Buzz Bin become less overt but no less pervasive, Side B of Life Sux, well, kinda sux: The title of "Poor Lenore" is the first time Williams has implied he's ever picked up a book in his life, but the turgid, 3rd-gen grunge suggests he found that Poe anthology right next to a used copy of Frogstomp. And though "Destroy" is a well-intentioned collaboration in the name of break-shit punk, once Pink Eyes' vocals give Williams the bum's rush, it ceases to have the ability to be heard as anything other than a lo-fi Fucked Up track. If you ever wondered if those dozens of guitar overdubs were really necessary on David Comes to Life, "Destroy" emphatically answers in the affirmative.
Despite its reduced scope, Life Sux is actually pretty versatile depending on where you stand with Wavves-- take it as further confirmation of his permanent immaturity, or a sign that rattling off rudimentary but undeniably hooky punk-pop comes fairly easy to him. Still, with an LP supposedly on its way by the end of the year, you don't have to wonder quite yet if using the brat factor as something of a crutch means that he already reached his ceiling and King of the Beach is the record he was put on this earth to make: one that Weezer couldn't make after they'd discovered branding, Blink-182 couldn't after they thought owning Cure albums meant they had to be taken seriously as artistes, and Green Day couldn't after Billie Joe picked up a copy of No Logo.
Unsurprisingly, the track that gets him out of the artistic cul-de-sac is by far the best thing here: Crazy for You and King of the Beach coyly flirted with addressing the real-life relationship of its creators, and Williams' collaboration with Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino on "Nodding Off" doesn't get much into detail either. Still, it threatens to make even the most jaded Hipster Runoff devotee actually root for them: think Best Coast with more power, Wavves with more pop, or just a more reckless, less cerebral New Pornographers. Of course, even if the heart of Life Sux is a gooey escape fantasy featuring his girlfriend, if he still wants to describe the EP as something you'll probably like "if you hate yourself and other people"... well, you're never gonna stop him. | 2011-09-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ghost Ramp | September 19, 2011 | 6.7 | 8033776e-56e2-41fb-bf08-f88a997021bb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their first album in five years, Nick Thorburn’s ever-evolving band takes a pop-friendly turn. With neon synths and disco grooves, these songs are Top 40 at heart. | On their first album in five years, Nick Thorburn’s ever-evolving band takes a pop-friendly turn. With neon synths and disco grooves, these songs are Top 40 at heart. | Islands: Islomania | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/islands-islomania/ | Islomania | How do you follow the Unicorns? Nick Thorburn has offered a lot of answers over the years. Since that group’s breakup in 2004, Thorburn has filled his time juggling side bands and solo projects. In between, he has scored a film, dabbled in rap, authored a graphic novel, directed and toured with Michael Cera, and composed the theme for Serial. By far his most prolific creative outlet, however, has been Islands, an ever-evolving band that released seven albums in the span of a decade, all of them good and one of them, their 2006 debut Return to the Sea, a pillar album of indie rock’s big-tent era. For a musician who never became a household name, that’s a hell of a CV.
Despite these accomplishments, there’s no denying his discography is front-loaded. Even his best records with Islands never resonated on anywhere near the scale of 2003’s Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?, which has lost none of its sugar-rush intensity or cult appeal. This may be part of the reason why, without ceremony, Thorburn retired Islands in 2016. He never formally announced his decision, but as he later told Stereogum, “I had nothing left to give and nothing left to say.” Retroactively learning that Islands broke up is a surprise. Learning that the breakup did not stick, however, is not. Musicians who record as voraciously as Thorburn seldom quit for good.
The comeback album Islomania is the group’s first in five years, and like most Islands albums before it, this one is a departure. Ratatat’s Mike Stroud lends some guitar and John Congleton, known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen, mixed the record. These collaborators might suggest something prickly or texturally askew, yet Islomania is anything but. From its disco grooves to its neon synths, this the band’s most pop-forward album yet, with few of the detours and little of the digressive oddness that have animated Thorburn’s defining records.
As a general rule, when a band writes a song about dancing, as Islands do here with the beach jam “(We Like To) Do It With the Lights On,” they’re making a bid for a larger audience. And sure enough, most of Islomania is optimized for mass appeal. The digitized disco tribute “A Passionate Age” is the closest Thorburn has ever come to Daft Punk; the synth-slapped funk of “Closed Captioning” could easily be reworked into a Maroon 5 or Bleachers track. Though it’s mellowed over the years, Thorburn’s voice retains some of its boyish, indie charm, and a few of the arrangements are dressed with blaring saxophones that hint at art-rock. But the songs themselves are Top 40 at heart—featherlight and direct, more interested in pleasing than in challenging.
Perhaps this radio-friendly makeover is Thorburn’s way of joining the ranks he’s inspired. The Unicorns’ impish spirit has reverberated, however indirectly, through alternative airwaves by way of bands like MGMT and Foster The People and their many interchangeable offshoots. Comb through Spotify’s “Indie Alternative Synth Pop” playlist and you’ll hear dozens of bands indebted to Unicorns’ brand of liberating quirk. If others are profiting from commercialized versions of that sound, why shouldn’t Thorburn, too?
Thankfully, Thorburn sings with such sweetness and sincerity that Islomania never feels like a cash grab. On “Never Let You Down” and “Marble,” you can hear in his voice a bit of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, and in the music that band’s desire to draw vast, hugging crowds at festival stages. These songs are genuine and open-armed, and there’s always room for music like that. But what’s sorely missing is the fuck-around energy that made even Islands’ later work so exciting; even just a few left-field twists could have gone a long way toward breaking up this very conventional set. Thorburn’s best albums sound like nobody else could have made them. A lot of acts have already made ones like Islomania.
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. | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Royal Mountain | June 16, 2021 | 6.7 | 8033dca0-1701-4f5a-9d00-f8ab8309c669 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On the fourth installment of his Dreamchasers mixtape series, Meek struggles to figure out exactly where he belongs, caught between his old life and his new one, between superstar and street rapper. | On the fourth installment of his Dreamchasers mixtape series, Meek struggles to figure out exactly where he belongs, caught between his old life and his new one, between superstar and street rapper. | Meek Mill: DC4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22575-dc4/ | DC4 | Since his last major-label release, 2015’s Dreams Worth More Than Money, Meek Mill has been anything but silent. He put out a two-part EP (4/4), and fired up an assortment of beefs with Drake, the Game, Joe Budden, and 50 Cent. The largest course, of course, was with Drake, a Mean Girls meme-war that left Meek’s credibility so pummeled that fast-food chains felt safe enough to roast him. Even his MMG Boss Rick Ross distanced himself from his once proud protege (“I never took an L back when Meek fell…”). If nothing else, his next LP would be his best chance to define the next chapter in his story.
But that LP, DC4, inspires more questions than answers. It’s ostensibly a mixtape, but it’s for sale on iTunes, suggesting the samples were cleared. Conceptually, it’s the fourth in his Dreamchasers series, a concept that defines both his side ventures and his identity. Meek’s struggle is quintessentially American. With the deck stacked against him from day one, his American Dream was laser-focused on climbing out of the South Philadelphia ghetto that claimed his father’s life. His Philly heroes in the State Property crew rapped as tough as they looked, and his hip-hop education played out on street corners.
He brings that energy to every one of his songs, and DC4 is no different. Taking a cue from Nas & Puffy, he starts off with nothing less dramatic than the “O Fortuna”-sampling “On the Regular,” produced by Lex Luger protege MP808. The opening bars serve as a prologue for the rest of the record, listing the things he will rap about: selling dope, going to court, wearing jewelry, drinking alcohol, having sex, smoking high-quality marijuana. Or as he puts it, “Stickin’ to the basics.”
And if there’s a knock on Meek, it’s just that—he’s basic. Struggle rappers are constantly underestimated, dropping countless releases, scrapping for every ounce of recognition they can get. After more than a dozen releases, Meek Mill is really just a struggle rapper that made it. If he started from the bottom, now that he’s here, what else does he have to say?
Not much, it turns out. Meek’s beat selection has always been impressive, especially considering his prolific output. And DC4 may have benefitted further from the relatively delayed release; The track list is loaded from top to bottom with bangers from young producers such as Sound M.O.B. (“Litty”) and the 808 Mafia. The features are a good indication of the sound he’s adopted, with guest appearances from Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug, 21 Savage, and Migos’ Quavo. He takes a welcome left turn with the blues-guitar driven “Blue Notes,” built off a Snowy White sample, and puts on up-and-coming R&B crooner Guordan Banks with the Pusha T-featuring “Two Wrongs.”
But when it comes to his rhymes, there’s little variety in his style. No matter the tone or mood of the beat he’s rhyming over, his rhymes are yelled rather than rapped. He’s 2016’s version of Bad Boy’s “Madd Rapper”—mad cuz he’s not getting enough “Shine,” mad cuz he didn’t get a tweet from the game’s biggest star. His energy at shows, honed from years of street-corner battles, is infectious. But on record, with his volume always cranked to 10, it really only works in small doses. And while he’s capable of detail-rich narratives, he never manages to focus on any one thought long enough to say anything of substance. Even the serial story of “Tony Story 3” is mired in hoary gangsta tropes.
On DC4, Meek Mill is caught between his old life and his new one. His history with actual “gangsta shit” may have boosted his credibility—and profile—but now, it seems to be holding him back. He’s still prone to the occasional exhibition of garden-variety homophobia, but at least since he’s been in a relationship with Nicki Minaj, there’s been a noticeable reduction in misogyny. He almost certainly would love to graduate from his tough-guy street persona, but it’s as if he feels his core audience won’t let him. “You can't be hard all the time, man,” he told Billboard in an interview last year. “There's both sides to everything. What's wrong with it? Jay Z was a street rapper and he had a girlfriend.”
He’s clearly thinking about how these pieces of his life fit into the larger struggle, but DC4 merely hints at powerful, ugly truths. The album’s cover is a collage of court documents (including his plea agreement) and a mug shot of an 18-year-old Meek, his face bandaged and eye swollen after a beat down from black cops. But he went harder on Funkmaster Flex’s Hot 97 show than he does on record, eloquently questioning the morality of the prison system and Flint’s poisoned water. Time will tell if Meek’s legacy outlasts the embarrassing Drake episode, as the only questions DC4 has answered are related to how he’d like his famous friends to promote his new record. But as an MC, Meek’s considerable potential remains untapped. | 2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Maybach | November 2, 2016 | 6.9 | 80401ef2-0f9f-44d2-8aff-55a3a09d13cc | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
The former Verve frontman returns after a hiatus with another Richard Ashcroft solo album, with all the ostentatious orchestration, bumper-sticker mantras, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail. | The former Verve frontman returns after a hiatus with another Richard Ashcroft solo album, with all the ostentatious orchestration, bumper-sticker mantras, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail. | Richard Ashcroft: These People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21894-these-people/ | These People | It’s been a busy month for ’90s Brit-rock icons on the comeback trail—Radiohead, Super Furry Animals, and even the Stone Roses have all recently resurfaced after prolonged periods of inactivity. But of them all, Richard Ashcroft arguably has the longest climb back up the mountain, even when you take the Roses’ DOA “All for One” single into account—after soaring to the top of the pops in 1997 with the Verve’s platinum-plated opus Urban Hymns, his stock has tumbled down unceremoniously through a series of increasingly soppy solo albums released over the course of the '00s.
Like many rock ‘n’ rollers saddled with wild-child reputations, Ashcroft has been accused of going soft in his middle age. The truth is, Ashcroft was flashing his sensitive side way back when the Verve was doing pretty acoustic versions of “Make It Till Monday” on the promo circuit for their 1993 debut, A Storm in Heaven. However, his solo work has too often highlighted the big difference tenderness and mush, blowing out the resolution of simplistic songs like someone trying to project an iPhone home movie onto an IMAX screen.
In a way, the appearance of the first Richard Ashcroft album in six years is more unlikely than the Roses’ return after 21. After all, in this current gig economy, it’s expected that our favorite groups will reunite for the plum festival guarantees, no matter how acrimonious the initial split. And, having already played the Verve comeback card in 2008, followed by an aborted attempt at rebranding, it seemed like Mad Richard was content to just carry on as Dad Richard. But if the emergence of These People is something of a surprise, its contents are anything but. (Well, other than the fact it took a preaching populist like Ashcroft this long to title a song “Hold On”). The extended layoff has only further entrenched Richard Ashcroft’s desire to make Richard Ashcroft albums, with all the ostentatious orchestration, resurrection rhetoric, bumper-sticker mantras, clunky metaphors, and cursory electro-dabbling those entail.
In hindsight, the early Verve were essentially the missing link between Spiritualized and Oasis, but with Urban Hymns, they anticipated the post-Britpop soft-rock that Coldplay would use to fill stadiums. And though Ashcroft is loathe to own that legacy, he and Chris Martin ultimately share similar goals—namely, to retrofit classic, Glastonbury-sized balladry to contemporary Top 40 standards, and sell it to the masses with life-affirming, one-size-fits all-lyrics. Ashcroft still possesses one of rock’s great voices, his singular balance of grit and gravitas undisturbed by the passage of time. But unlike Martin, there’s an inherent weariness to Ashcroft’s singing that meshes awkwardly with his forays into upbeat dance-pop.
The most thrilling moments in Ashcroft’s discography have come when it sounds like he’s getting lost inside his own music, with the surging sonics and multi-tracked vocals pushing him toward rapture. But here, he’s merely singing about going “Out of My Body” over pro-forma disco-house presets rather than actually doing it. That fish-out-of-water feeling only amplifies his lazier lyrics, whether he’s dropping musty Watergate metaphors on that track, or deploying tired heroine-as-heroin cliches about a woman who goes “straight for my veins” on the arms-aloft anthem “This Is How It Feels.”
These People supposedly addresses socio-political hot topics like Syria’s refugee crisis and government surveillance, but those inspirations yield precious little insight—as per his solo m.o., Ashcroft transforms real-life tumult into nondescript, placeholder lyrics. And while “Everybody Needs Somebody to Hurt” and “Hold On” respectively recycle the “life’s a bitch” sentiments of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” atop neon-flickered electro-pop and sunrise-rave sonics, their pat advice (e.g., “So hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on/You know there ain’t a lot time, but I know that we can make it!”) doesn’t exactly instill you with the fuck-it-all swagger that prompts one to plow into grannies on your morning stroll.
Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs. His reunion with the Verve’s go-to string arranger Wil Malone pays immediate dividends on “They Don’t Own Me,” which plays like a sequel to “Lucky Man,” albeit with the sense of fire-wielding wonderment replaced by hardened resilience. Even better is the atmospheric, dead-of-night rumination “Picture of You,” which mines a haunted melancholy that Ashcroft hasn’t really tapped since “Sonnet” and “The Drugs Don’t Work,” while “Black Lines” yields his most rousing performance in ages. Sure, it doesn’t tell you anything we haven’t heard before: “It’s real life/Sometimes it gets so hard.” But more than just remind us once again about the inevitability of debt and death, the song’s ascendant, string-swept chorus shows Ashcroft still has the ability to make us momentarily forget about it. | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cooking Vinyl | May 21, 2016 | 5.1 | 80403c39-6885-41ac-b1db-9129f184b003 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
A companion piece to last year’s sparkling Silver Ladders, the harpist’s latest dip into her archives assembles improvised sessions into intricately layered songs with a powerful emotional pull. | A companion piece to last year’s sparkling Silver Ladders, the harpist’s latest dip into her archives assembles improvised sessions into intricately layered songs with a powerful emotional pull. | Mary Lattimore: Collected Pieces II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-lattimore-collected-pieces-ii/ | Collected Pieces II | The joy and burden of remembrance live in Mary Lattimore’s looping, layered harp music. The Los Angeles-based musician often ties her wafting music to particular places and memories, giving voice to fleeting moments. Collected Pieces II, which brings together nine tracks from Lattimore’s archive of recently recorded music, balances the softest plucks with the most powerful strums to delicately illuminate what feels like the full complexity of being.
Collected Pieces II, which follows 2020’s sparkling Silver Ladders, builds on its predecessor, even featuring a home recording of a Silver Ladders track titled “Pine Trees.” Lattimore has done something like this before; her tranquil 2017 anthology Collected Pieces served as a companion to her acclaimed 2016 album At the Dam. Her music is often assembled from long improvisational sessions that she splices into textural portraits, and these archival records present distantly related material that didn’t make it onto her full-length albums, offering another glimpse into her musical world and the memories she’s chosen to soundtrack. Some of the stories she weaves on Collected Pieces II are rooted in specific events, like “Mary You Were Wrong,” which chronicles a broken heart. Others, like “We Wave From Our Boats,” which was born out of musing on lockdown, use narrative as a jumping off point for abstract melodies that illuminate a feeling of uncertainty.
Collected Pieces II’s greatest strength lies in its nuances. The most successful tracks balance lightness and darkness, letting both unfold through intricate details. “Sleeping Deer” uses contrasting layers to showcase depth, placing a rhythmic melody on top of punchy chords and distant echoes. As in much of Lattimore’s music, the song’s melodies expand through repetition, but this time, a gravelly bass swallows a graceful melody, forming a cavernous and ominous vibration. On “Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” repetition takes the center stage, too, looping echoing phrases to nostalgic effect. It’s in this meticulous structuring that Collected Pieces II finds its footing.
Despite the overarching air of patterning, Collected Pieces II highlights the varying complexity of Lattimore’s music. The album’s longest piece, “Be My Four Eyes,” shifts between moods with ease instead of stacking melodies on top of each other. At times it’s colored by heart-wrenching wistfulness, other times sparkling airiness. Every moment is driven by a celestial stream of melodies that repeat so many times they begin to collide into each other, forming one glimmering mass. But when Lattimore forgoes these depths, the music starts to feel flat. The album’s weakest moments come when the music leans toward pure brightness, like on “Princess Nicotine,” which is made of high-pitched plucks that merely tread water. It’s one of the least compelling tracks, trading looping melodies and crisp texture for a twinkle that feels stuck in place.
But when Lattimore finds what’s hidden behind filmy plucks and gauzy melodies, her music shines. “There’s a special kind of vibe when you’re at a seaside town in the winter, a serenity and kind of gloominess,” Lattimore told The Quietus in 2020. That’s the feeling Collected Pieces II recalls so well—the feeling of staring out into the mist, at peace but eerily still. Collected Pieces II comes to life when murkiness collides with radiance. And in the moments when everything clouds over, there’s still some hope left to grasp.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ghostly International | November 1, 2021 | 7.3 | 804094b5-6bce-44c4-b8ef-710cbde4d421 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche has been successful as both a composer and a performer in the modern classical scene. His album with the elite contemporary classical group So Percussion seems inevitable, in the best possible way. | Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche has been successful as both a composer and a performer in the modern classical scene. His album with the elite contemporary classical group So Percussion seems inevitable, in the best possible way. | Glenn Kotche / Sō Percussion: Drumkit Quartets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21570-drumkit-quartets/ | Drumkit Quartets | Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche has added some impressive entries to his new-classical resume in recent years. With his 2014 full-length debut as a composer, Adventureland, he displayed a facility for rich, percussive-driven works—and also a skill for writing multi-movement pieces that included parts for string instruments and electronics. He’s been equally successful as a performer in this field (as a powerhouse 2015 recording of John Luther Adams’s Ilimaq demonstrated). In light of this, a collaboration between Kotche and the elite contemporary classical group So Percussion seems inevitable, in the best possible way.
At crucial points, the pieces that make up Drumkit Quartets can fail to sound as purposeful as those on Adventureland. The album’s opening and closing tracks give a sense of this indecisive quality, with Kotche’s "Drumkit Quartet #51" receiving two different presentations. The first version is subtitled "Tokyo, Brisbane & Berlin" (indicating cities where Kotche worked on the piece, or else where he made field recordings). Here, competing rhythms for marimbas cycle through the composition amiably, without creating much tension. Kotche’s collage of pre-recorded noises is frequently spare to a point of seeming aimless. A brief haiku by Kotche (voiced by Yuka Honda) has its say in the final third, and the strongest feeling it imparts is a quizzical one.
Texture-obsessed writing isn’t objectionable on its own, but 10 minutes of it is a lot of time for a 51-minute set—especially when the closing "Chicago Realization" of the very same composition generates much more excitement. In this version, Kotche’s denser background recording highlights the subtle turns of the marimba writing and preserves the delicacy Kotche is obviously aiming for.
Presenting different "realizations" of the same piece can make sense when John Cage-style "chance operations" are part of the mix. But these versions just shift around the arrangement of pre-recorded parts, suggesting compositional diffidence. In his liner notes, Kotche makes reference to these pieces being conceived during a period in which he was "touring extensively" with Wilco. He also admits that finishing another of the longest tracks here, "Drumkit Quartet #50," was "challenging." The labor is audible.
Still, sketchbook albums from skilled artists can have their moments. Kotche’s miniatures fare quite well. Two propulsive items—"Drumkit Quartet #1" and "Drumkit Quartet #54"—are full of ingenuity as well as power. The brief, three-movement "Drumkit Quartet #3" moves from dry cymbal work to more resonant pitched percussion with a serene focus. Together with "Drumkit Quartet #51 (Chicago Realization)," there’s enough intriguing work here to make Drumkit Quartets worth investigating. Hopefully Kotche will reconnect with the players of So Percussion again at some point in the future, when he has something more clearly fashioned in mind. | 2016-02-26T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-26T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | February 26, 2016 | 6.6 | 8043847f-1b0a-413e-ae6d-45151a85fc35 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The return of Dinosaur Jr. as a trio forced the singer to find a new avenue for his softer side and acoustic explorations. His third album in that series arrives at perfectly refined folk-rock. | The return of Dinosaur Jr. as a trio forced the singer to find a new avenue for his softer side and acoustic explorations. His third album in that series arrives at perfectly refined folk-rock. | J Mascis: Elastic Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-mascis-elastic-days/ | Elastic Days | Dinosaur Jr. didn’t reunite so much as reset. Since the mid-2000s, J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph have essentially picked up where they left off after 1988’s college-radio touchstone Bug, reasserting themselves as indie rock’s most ferocious and slackadasically tuneful power trio. But their reconciliation erected a wall around the more exploratory path that Dinosaur Jr. had taken during the 1990s, after Barlow’s acrimonious departure allowed Mascis to seize full creative control of the band (and all the mellotrons and timpanis that went with it). In that time, Dinosaur Jr. had effectively become a solo vehicle for Mascis, who handled the production and most of the instrumentation. But with the original lineup back in action—and more prolific than ever—Mascis has respected the fact that the musical alchemy he shares with Barlow and Murph is its own special thing. He has directed his more sophisticated songcraft into a parallel series of solo albums, favoring low-key acoustic arrangements that allow him to both simmer down and branch out.
Mascis’ third such album, Elastic Days, reunites much of the supporting cast he corralled for 2014’s Tied to a Star, including pianist Ken Maiuri, former Black Heart Procession singer and guitarist Pall Jenkins, and Miracle Legion leader Mark Mulcahy. Their reappearance suggests that, for Mascis, these solo albums aren’t an unplugged antidote to Dinosaur Jr. but instead the manifestation of an equally considered alternate vision. It’s taken some fine-tuning to get there: 2011’s Several Shades of Why was achingly intimate, while the more lively Tied to a Star was liable to drift into hacky-sack psych. With Elastic Days, he’s arrived at the sort of refined folk-rock that the ’90s iteration of Dinosaur Jr. probably would’ve made had it continued veering toward the middle of the road.
For the generation of Dinosaur Jr. fans who discovered the band by seeing the video for “Get Me” on “120 Minutes” in the early ’90s, Elastic Days will feel like a homecoming. As that song proved, Mascis’ perpetually pained moan was always begging for some healing harmonies. On Elastic Days’ beautifully breezy opener “See You at the Movies,” Jenkins fills the role Tiffany Anders did 25 years ago, his plaintive backing vocals wrapping around Mascis’ wounded croon like a wool toque. Jenkins is one of many guest singers called on to nurse Mascis’ bruises: “I Went Dust” is a lovely duet with Zoë Randell of Aussie indie-folk duo Luluc, where a lick straight out of Jimmy Page’s acoustic playbook punctuates each crestfallen line. During the gently galloping country-rocker “Picking Out the Seeds,” Mascis’ underrated falsetto gets a boost from Devadas, the Brooklyn composer who’s previously joined Mascis for occasional forays into Hindu spirituals.
But as with any Mascis release, one voice resounds louder than all: his guitar solos. Naturally, his playing here is more tempered and soothing than the typical Dinosaur Jr. face-melter. But the function of his guitar solos remains less decorative than demonstrative. Almost every single song J Mascis has written over the past 30-plus years sounds like an excerpt from the same intensely personal, painfully awkward exchange, where the averted gazes and shrugged shoulders say more than the limited words. The solos on Elastic Days play the role of emotional interpreter, giving Mascis’ notoriously vague lyrics a more acute, deeply felt sense of ache and distress.
As such, pretty much every song here is a build-up to the moment when Mascis inevitably lets loose. The tunes don’t all sound the same; there’s a canyon between the campfire serenity of the winsome title track and the freewheeling “Sometimes,” where an accelerated back half practically turns it into a folk-rock “Feel the Pain.” But Elastic Days is the sort of record where the album sequence feels immaterial, where there’s no discernible dramatic arc. Each track functions as its own ecosystem, undergoing the same cycle of welling up and gushing out to achieve the right balance of musical clarity and emotional confusion. As Mascis sings on “See You at the Movies,” “Finding you is easy/Finding me is hard.” On Elastic Days, he’s somehow as accessible but elusive as ever. | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 12, 2018 | 7.3 | 804635c0-c0f7-404b-95b8-19b0bd34399c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
"Every day I wake up and it's Sunday," Fran Healy exhales to begin The Man Who. This lazy day ... | "Every day I wake up and it's Sunday," Fran Healy exhales to begin The Man Who. This lazy day ... | Travis: The Man Who | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8143-the-man-who/ | The Man Who | "Every day I wake up and it's Sunday," Fran Healy exhales to begin The Man Who. This lazy day mood stretches throughout Travis' sophomore release. The tunes stay in their sweats and don't get around to showering until 5:45pm-- fifteen minutes before the pizza arrives. The tunes flip through football and golf. Healy sounds like he's spilling his soul to an empty cabin after 13 hours of sleep. Check out a daily planner, though-- Sunday has the least amount of space. This is the least productive day, yet most anticipated. Travis fulfills the musical equivalent of this basic human need for the occasionally mundane. While by no means groundbreaking, The Man Who massages with sincerity and crisp precision.
The production is cool and spacious thanks to Nigel Godrich (of OK Computer fame), and his breath can be seen slowly puffing throughout. Icicle pickings chime over jangling acoustic ballads. Elegent and deceptively simple, like unfinished furniture, the ten songs never rise to a scream, yet the trembling ambience is nonetheless smothering. Your ears will shift focus through translucent layers of sound. Godrich truly is blessed. Fran Healy sounds remarkably like a stable Thom Yorke, and songs like "The Fear" point directly to this influence, but with a more folky, tender approach. Some of his notes will make your cheeks tingle. And eminating from his lungs, the repetition of "Turn" brings goosebumps.
Travis' debut shamelessly prayed to power rock like a British Weezer, and there are still echos of that boyish glee here. Along with Weezer, Travis keep the flame of the righteous guitar solo lit while uninspired, obvious guitarists continue the Tom Pettification of this lost art and continue to piss on it. The ability to imbue solos with any sort of soul and intensity should be cherished.
On The Man Who, power comes from restraint and space. There are enough subtle flourishes buried beneath the pillowy snow to reward repeated listens-- the chimes and ominous keyboard under "As You Are," the wind in "Slide Show," and the sitar strums on the dramatic chorus to "The Last Laugh of the Laughter." The hidden track even rewards those who need to rock with bellowing choruses, gong guitars, and unnerving cymbal ticks.
British bands tend to leave a bad aftertaste with American audiences with their cognizant conceit. If anything, the raw humility of Travis is refreshing. Figures that this has still only seen release in the UK, while Gay Dad is being dumped on us from bombers. | 2000-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Independiente | April 4, 2000 | 7.8 | 804833f2-7fae-4068-aaac-c0f3c4527deb | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
This collaboration between Connan Mockasin and Sam Dust, formerly of dance-punk Brits Late of the Pier, strikes a discomfiting balance between queasy and cute. | This collaboration between Connan Mockasin and Sam Dust, formerly of dance-punk Brits Late of the Pier, strikes a discomfiting balance between queasy and cute. | Soft Hair: Soft Hair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22464-soft-hair/ | Soft Hair | In a few short years, New Zealander Connan Mockasin has proven himself game for all manner of chameleonic collaboration. With just a few days in Marfa, Texas, he cooked up a little something with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, wrote for and served as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s backing band, and apparently played around with Vince Staples and James Blake on a not-released project. But most tantalizing was a long alluded-to collaboration with Sam Dust, formerly of the British dance-punk Late of the Pier. For all of the rapidity of those other connections, Mockasin and Dust first began smushing together their weird Play-Doh pop songs back in 2009. Meaning that well before Mockasin proclaimed Forever Dolphin Love and busted out a FreekiLeaks slow jam and Dust’s band imploded, Soft Hair was slowly growing.
Hinted at seven years ago and many mixing delays later, Soft Hair finally appears. And for those tantalized/ perplexed at the thought at Mockasin’s creepy castrato set against the heavier, tweaked beats that Dust made as LA Priest will instead find him hewing much closer to the former’s sound. The soggy pretzel logic of Pod-era Ween informs songs like opener “Relaxed Lizard,” most pointedly with that band’s obsession with early Prince. It’s a good fit for Mockasin’s squeaky voice—which can twirl up to “Camille”-like heights without having to speed up the tape—but also for Dust, who can dip into Prince’s vibrato with conviction. “Lizard” almost passes as a helium-voiced sexy little number, until the come-on of “I’d love to fuck you” has to share space with the admission “when you find she’s seventeen” deflates the balloon completely.
The waterlogged skank of “Jealous Lies” is a drunken ditty that replicates the kind of lo-fi weirdness that everyone from Paul McCartney to Aphex Twin has doodled in their home studios. The slow rise and fall of distant ocean waves and flanged-out guitar lines keeps “Lying Has to Stop” from being any kind of conventional beach track. It’s slow bubble could be seductive, except for Connan’s discomfiting come-on “I like to watch you run/But I’ll never touch your bum.” Dust’s dramatic over-emoting on “In Love” sticks out, but it’s the croaked chorus of “in love with the Japanese girls/in love with the Chinese girls” that turns the song irredeemably creepy.
Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute. “Goood Sign” is strange and charming in equal measure, Arthur Russell mumblecore on downers, set atop a slo-mo ’80s Italo horror synth soundtrack. The drum machine may be set to ‘somnambulant’ on “Alive Without Medicine,” but it makes for a lazy groove that syncs well with Super Mario water world bloops. Dust finds a rubber boot beat midway through, only to have Mockasin’s voice break the spell and have the track resolutely meander off course. “l.i.v.” is a mild, languid closer, but it’s not hard to think that after seven years spent cooking, Soft Hair’s results come out half-baked. | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Weird World | November 8, 2016 | 6.8 | 804eaae0-49e7-4537-a8f2-492287d9097a | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The gorgeous and hypnotic second Lightning Bug album focuses more than ever on songwriter Audrey Kang's hushed voice and simple, soulful lyrics. | The gorgeous and hypnotic second Lightning Bug album focuses more than ever on songwriter Audrey Kang's hushed voice and simple, soulful lyrics. | Lightning Bug: October Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lightning-bug-october-song/ | October Song | It was nearly five years ago when an unknown band named Lightning Bug uploaded their first recordings to SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The New York-based trio had yet to play a show by the time their debut album, Floaters, was released to an audience of friends, family, and a keen-eared blogger or two. Yet that 10-song LP belied a rare confidence and versatility. The music was a pastel tapestry woven from the threads of Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine, Camera Obscura, and plenty of early ’00s indie rock, stitched into a unique pattern. Floaters gradually accumulated new listeners and eventually found a spot on NME's list of the best debut albums of the year.
Then, once again, Lightning Bug went away. In the middle of 2016, singer and primary songwriter Audrey Kang had to remind her fans she didn’t abandon them. “We are still here,” she wrote on Facebook, “just keeping quite still and quiet at the moment.” A modest four-song record called the torment of love arrived nine months later with no fanfare. Named after a French Caribbean pastry sold by widows, the 2017 EP was markedly intimate and somber, as if meant to share an honest glimpse of how Lightning Bug had been growing slowly in secret.
More than two years later, that period of personal discovery culminates in October Song. The second Lightning Bug album focuses more than ever on Kang’s hushed voice and simple, soulful lyrics. Her longtime collaborators, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland and producer Logan Miley, are no less vital, but now they serve to support Kang's vision. “I’m carrying a song to sing but I do not know when,” she begins on “(intro),” as applause and crowd noise nearly drown her out. Her voice never rises above a murmur, but when she sighs “A secret thrill, I know I will, and spring will come again,” her stillness draws you in.
That small, unassuming space—where whispers ring out like bell chimes, guitar distortion feels like a downy blanket, and emotions swell but never burst—is where October Song thrives. In the middle of the bobbing drums and tape-warbled guitar of “The Lotus Eaters,” Kang sings as if she’s the only one listening: “Will my own past forget me?” The lyrics are among the shortest on the album, but they feel like a detonation. Kang ends her stanza in defeat: “Sometimes I think nothing changes,” she sings, and the music explodes around her in a whorl of glittering synth, rich choral harmonies, ringing chimes, and crystalline guitar.
October Song is bisected by a beatless, textural piece called “The Root,” which owes as much to Tim Hecker as it does Grizzly Bear and Grouper. At its rumbling center, Kang emerges with an angelic falsetto only to fade back into the ether. It’s utterly immersive, from its sound design to its melody. On “I Looked Too Long,” they tip their hat to Ennio Morricone, an unexpected turn that functions as a palate cleanser for the wistful balladry of “September Song,” which show how quietly multifaceted and adept Kang is as a songwriter.
Just before the release of Floaters in 2015, Kang told the music blog yvynl about Lightning Bug’s early days. “At first, it was a very private project and working together felt like being in a secret club,” she wrote. “We had this loosely enforced rule that while we were working, there always had to be one person napping. It was pretty magical.” October Song never surrenders the sense of cozy grandeur that made Floaters so magnetic, even as it zooms in further and reveals more of the person behind it. | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Marbled Arm | September 16, 2019 | 8 | 804ef9ad-6332-4694-87fb-3fc1b24d8da4 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
Equally suited for headphones or the cookout, this is the UK multi-instrumentalist’s most expansive record yet, reaching beyond broken beat to incorporate boogie, disco, boom bap, jazz, and more. | Equally suited for headphones or the cookout, this is the UK multi-instrumentalist’s most expansive record yet, reaching beyond broken beat to incorporate boogie, disco, boom bap, jazz, and more. | Kaidi Tatham: *Don’t Rush the Process * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaidi-tatham-dont-rush-the-process/ | Don’t Rush the Process | The title could double as a maxim for Kaidi Tatham’s career: Don’t Rush the Process—an encapsulation of the producer and multi-instrumentalist’s decades-long immersion in his singular proclivities. Since the mid 1990s, Tatham has been one of the central pioneers of broken beat, a style of stripped-down and bugged-out beat music forged in the furnace of the West London underground that emphasizes syncopated drumbeats and heavy basslines. He’s a former member of production collective Bugz in the Attic, and his session and remix catalog includes Slum Village, Mulatu Astatke, Marcos Valle, and Henry Wu cuts. But Tatham’s solo career has increased in velocity since he found a home on First Word Records, a company that believed in him enough to reissue 2008’s In Search of Hope—his debut solo record under his own name—a couple of years ago while also overseeing a growing series of LPs where he extends the borders of his sound.
Don’t Rush the Process is Tatham’s most expansive record yet, reaching far beyond his broken-beat origin story to incorporate boogie, disco, boom bap, bossa nova, and shades of Thundercat. There are dreamy harps, Jon Brion-sized strings, choir samples. Tatham’s omnivorous music places him alongside British contemporaries like Kamaal Williams, Joe Armon-Jones, and Tenderlonious. But by underpinning the arrangements with neat, programmed drum loops—as well as keeping the project moving with beat-tape brevity—Tatham’s productions still feel more insular than lush. Don’t Rush the Process is a headphones album that you can still throw on at the cookout. It’s instrumental music with melodies that will stay put in your temporal lobe for days. Tatham showcases his versatility with cohesion and focus.
So you get a song like “We Chillin’ Out”: With its repetitive piano progression, upbeat horn riffs, and cosmic keys, it’s an Earth, Wind & Fire-esque slice of 1970s disco. The sweet ba-ba-ba vocal harmonies of “Knocknee Donkey” invoke Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. The title track is built out of the kind of squelchy synths and bass that could give a lowrider its bounce as it cruises L.A.’s boulevards. (The palm tree in the background on the sleeve sure isn’t depicting Tatham’s hometown of Redditch, just south of Birmingham.)
Amid the more skittish beat cuts—like the grubby, Dilla-worshiping “Funky Fool”—Tatham indulges his taste for jazz. On “Any Flavour,” his brisk piano play is matched with a prominent bassline and hand drums that give it a little Latin swing. He tinkles the keys over ethereal samples on “Runnin’ Tru.” In fact, there was room here for more soloing—there’s nothing quite as fervent as his playing over, say, the second half of 2016 number “The Shadow Ain’t Going Nowhere.” But pull the viewfinder back to a wider angle and witness a prolific veteran currently dedicated to moving away from broken beat—or any other easy genre signifier—with flair and focus. More than two and a half decades deep, Tatham is in a new groove, and it’s anyone’s guess where it may carry him. | 2022-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | First Word | August 5, 2022 | 7 | 8050098f-bd5b-49d0-9c45-404fe5f73859 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Glenn Danzig’s first eponymous album was a thunderous, Rick Rubin-produced progression of his moody, Evil Elvis sound. It’s the pinnacle of goth populism. | Glenn Danzig’s first eponymous album was a thunderous, Rick Rubin-produced progression of his moody, Evil Elvis sound. It’s the pinnacle of goth populism. | Danzig: Danzig | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/danzig-danzig/ | Danzig | Who the fuck is that guy with the ZZ Top beard, Glenn Danzig pondered, and what’s he doing going crazy backstage at MY show? It was a sweltering night in July of 1986 in lower Manhattan, and Danzig had just stormed the stage of the Ritz with his beloved goth rock band Samhain. (The show was part of industry conference New Music Seminar.) You’d think the pasty-faced prince of darkness would be in higher spirits, happy to soak up all of Samhain’s hard-won praises, just as he’d done with earsplitting horror-punk progenitors Misfits earlier in the decade. Instead, lurking backstage just three years after launching his supposedly definitive project, the erstwhile horror punk found himself feeling restless and insatiable.
That’s when Danzig got around to talking with the mysterious beardo he spotted backstage earlier in the night. This much-hyped rap producer and label owner was one Rick Rubin. He’d come to the Ritz in search of talent for his Def American label; at the previous year’s conference, he’d discovered his inaugural signees, Slayer. He saw immense potential in Danzig and offered to sign him—provided the frontman cleaned house. “I don’t want any of these old guys,” Danzig recalls Rubin telling him. To Rubin’s ears, “[bassist] Eerie [Von Danzig] can’t play; the drummer can’t play.” His interests were pointed: “I never liked the Misfits,” he said. “All I want to do is sign you.”
Remarkably, Rubin’s backhanded compliments resonated. Danzig was up for pressing the reset button on Samhain—but only if bassist Eerie remained, and only if Rubin could convince drummer Chuck Biscuits (D.O.A., Black Flag) to sit behind the kit. The producer honored both requests, but insisted Danzig fire guitarist Pete “Damien” Marshall; John Christ eventually took his place. In 1988, Samhain 2.0 staged their triumphant return under a new name—the frontman’s own, so as to avoid royalty lawsuits—and released a self-titled album. Danzig is a thunderous debut that sharpened and streamlined the preceding project’s moody, blues-rock aesthetic without dialing back the darkness. Consider it the pinnacle of goth populism.
Danzig’s strength stems from his devilish voice: a deep, coarse, serpentine croon that fills the space from the bottom up, like a deluge of poisoned honey. Rubin rightly establishes the frontman’s vocals as Danzig’s true north, alongside pared-down arrangements that treat guitar riffs like samples. It makes Danzig’s primal energy all the more fearsome by contrast. Consider the wailing lick Christ doles out on the chorus to “Soul on Fire,” just after Danzig vows revenge on a cold-hearted “devil girl”—it’s not so much a performance as it is an aural exclamation point, a clever instrumental extension of the frontman’s not-so-subtle gravitas.
For the most part, Danzig functions as a monument—or rather, a haunted monolith—to raw power. Most of its grandiosity stems from the bandleader’s idealistic pivot away from Misfits’ acrid pulp fiction: his emergent lyrical obsession with Teutonic literature and the Bible, rather than the pillars of low-brow Americana such as comic books and monster movies. The Old Testament-inspired opener “Twist of Cain” lays bare the blueprint for Danzig as a whole: sultry blues licks, ostentatiously violent imagery, wry innuendos, and of course, that Evil Elvis swagger, all sneered syllables and swooping phrases.
When he’s not singing about ancient acts of fratricide or heartbreaking she-devils, Danzig conjures apocalyptic sex scenes. Much like Jim Morrison before him, he assumes the role of a corrupted avatar for the debauched fantasies woven into humanity’s DNA. Importantly, he maintains a level playing field between genders, exploring the power dynamics of coitus from the perspective of the dominant as well as the submissive. For every sadistic alpha-male control fantasy—“And I will worm inside your skull/Make you beg to be my whore,” crows Danzig on “Possession”—there’s a moment of emasculation. “She will make you scream/She’s death,” he sings on “She Rides,” trembling in awe before his lover. By forgoing the boneheaded locker-room-talk endemic to the hard rock world in favor of dynamic fluidity, Danzig doesn’t just challenge the canon—it transcends it.
“Mother,” the album’s centerpiece, and the biggest hit of Danzig’s career, is a soundtrack for the battle of the ages. It is a war waged not between God and Satan, but between rock’n’roll and Tipper Gore—the silent majority’s messiah, who sought to shield America’s youth from explicit music in the late ’80s, lest Prince, 2 Live Crew, and Twisted Sister drive Generation X to degeneracy. Danzig wrote the five-chord anthem as a rhetorical challenge to Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center, the committee who gave us the Parental Advisory sticker. “Al Gore wanted to tell people what they could listen to and what they couldn’t,” the musician later said of the organization, whom he went on to label as fascist, in 2013.
What better way to lure these people to the dark side than with a siren song inviting mom and dad to the party for an evening of bleeding and headbanging—and informing them, proudly and lustfully, that you’ll be taking their daughter on a nocturnal, presumably X-rated sojourn to your world? (Ironically, despite its lack of four-letter words, PMRC eventually slapped a sticker on Danzig anyway.) You can’t convert them all, but you can scare them shitless, and have fun doing it.
Nearly 30 years after its release, Danzig—the man, the band, the album—has become synonymous not only with “Mother,” but with heavy metal itself. That the jokes of a pair of dorky, animated heshers (“Beavis and Butthead”) were later key catalysts in Danzig’s ascent to icondom hardly scans as a coincidence. After all, though his legendary yowl gives his portraits their distinctive, shadowy form, it’s Danzig’s character—the transgressive machismo, the sullen hip-swinging, the overwhelming vampiric energy—that keeps us coming back for more. Danzig, then, is less an album than a countercultural idea. It is the sonic conduit by which we feeble mortals may commune with a resurrected, vengeful rock god and walk away with ears ringing, enlightened. | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Def American | October 31, 2017 | 8.5 | 80568a25-fa7a-43f8-9327-5d63b55d2b7f | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
The New York singer-songwriter's debut is catchy and well-produced, but she rejects the ice-cream gloss and ambiguity of many other contemporary pop artists. | The New York singer-songwriter's debut is catchy and well-produced, but she rejects the ice-cream gloss and ambiguity of many other contemporary pop artists. | Alex Winston: King Con | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16354-alex-winston-king-con/ | King Con | In a pop landscape filled with cartoonish characters and alter-egos, the first refreshing thing about New Yorker Alex Winston is her name. Confidence in her own skin is something Winston revels in and turns into her most powerful weapon on her debut record, King Con. Her songs are undeniably poppy and well-produced but reject the ice-cream gloss or ambiguity of many other contemporary pop artists. Instead there's a homespun feel here, and the layered production is stuffed with detail and component parts. It's an approach that makes the songs feel driven on piston power rather than Pro Tools.
Her voice is full of quirks, too, and more often than not she sounds closer to more alternative singers such as Kate Bush, Joanna Newsom, or even Karen O. Transplanting imperfect, personality-rich influences like this to a set of powerful pop songs is an interesting move and one that mostly pays off on King Con.
The sound that opens "Velvet Elvis" is a worn, gently warping vinyl stuck in a groove. This nostalgia wash acts as the bedrock for the busier elements that join the scuffle before bursting into a typically big chorus. Winston's narratives here and elsewhere feel just out of reach; they're fantastical but never come across as forced. That's thanks in part to the infectious feeling of excitement she gives off in each her performances. There's no hint of irony on King Con. There is a lot of heart, though, and there's something to be said for that in a realm of music where it's easy to feel manipulated. (That's not to say Winston doesn't pull some strings of her own. The togetherness in songs like "Medicine" and "Host" echoes the "us-versus-them" anthemic sway of a band like Arcade Fire.)
Despite being over a year old, "Locomotive" still feels like a highlight amongst this set, and the song hasn't changed a lot since we wrote about it last February. The edges have been heated up a little, and if anything Winston sounds even looser and more idiosyncratic. The song's feverish momentum is both a high point and vital characteristic of King Con, where each victory feels hard won.
The downside to the relentless energy is that the record can get tiring, particularly after the impressive, but front-loaded first half. "Benny" is the only restrained moment here; even that feels too brief and comes too late. A large part of King Con's charm is its confidence in direction, but toward the end, the sheer weight of similarly paced songs ends up dragging it down. For the most part, though, King Con's an enjoyable collection, one that presents Winston as an artist with a strong enough personality to overcome that dip and to stand out in a scene where it can be hard to make an impression. | 2012-03-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-03-07T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | V2 / Cooperative | March 7, 2012 | 7.4 | 805ad965-48dc-4da3-a326-273590e08373 | Hari Ashurst | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/ | null |
If Le1f's career has thus far been about breaking glass ceilings as a queer black rapper, then Riot Boi shows us a trailblazer sitting down atop these cracked shards of glass, reckoning with what it means to have come first. | If Le1f's career has thus far been about breaking glass ceilings as a queer black rapper, then Riot Boi shows us a trailblazer sitting down atop these cracked shards of glass, reckoning with what it means to have come first. | Le1f: Riot Boi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21109-riot-boi/ | Riot Boi | Queer rap is this era's Riot Grrrl—a "genre" as much as a cultural movement of previously muted voices—and while Hole translated Riot Grrrl into noise within the grasp of Entertainment Weekly's attention, queer rap still awaits its pop culture avatar. Le1f has long seemed poised to cross-over into the mainstream, and he could still become that pop burglar—but not with his debut album Riot Boi. Although lead single "Koi" may sound like a strategic aim at a buzzworthy radio single comparable to the FM accessibility of Le1f's breakthrough track "Wut," Riot Boi is most immediately an album about not being seen. "I'm wonder like Stevie, like Stevie you won't see me," he raps on standout "Swirl." If Le1f's career has thus far been about breaking glass ceilings as a queer black rapper, then Riot Boi shows us a trailblazer sitting down among these cracked shards of glass, reckoning with what it means to have come first.
Riot Boi's early cuts capitalize on production polish that moves beyond the underground grittiness of Le1f's first mixtape Dark York and the simpler sound of his Hey EP. Opener "Hi" succeeds from pure hype, the constant background greetings of a robofemme "Hi!" reminding us that this is a long-anticipated debut—while concluding lines "I'm feelin' like such a new being" promise a newly matured artist. On "Rage", Le1f offers the promise "It's lit/ Now, let's rage", but what follows is less "rage" than swagger-laced annoyance, as on "Grace, Alek or Naomi," where Le1f spits "I'm the faggot they stan or they don't understand it/ I run with the posse and I band with the bandits." This sass saturates "Swirl," which enlists Junglepussy and House of LaDosha to assert the black partner as the erotic powerbroker in interracial trysts—reversing the white gaze. On the track, Le1f reclaims black exoticism with lines like "I'm a dark-skin nigga on TV." Riot Boi thus begins with Le1f navigating his own breakthrough, his point of view oddly retrospective for a debut album—evidencing the new hype economy of the internet, where a star can be made before ever being born.
Le1f's self-reckoning also involves returning to familiar sounds that unfortunately feel like regression rather than mastery. Album midpoint "Koi," alongside "Umami / Water," only recall how much better this kind of aqua shtick worked for Azealia Banks' Fantasea or even for Le1f's own 2012 tracks "Bubbles" and "My Ooozy." "Water" is built on a melodic riff of what sounds like an electric guitar wet-dreaming of a sitar, Le1f's East-Fucks-West aesthetic at its best. It's the album's most compelling sound, but nevertheless its water witch-hop aesthetic (shared with "Koi") diverts the innovative ideas from Riot Boi's early highlights.
Riot Boi delivers what its title promises--a transgression of pop cultural limitations—most clearly in the final three tracks, socially-conscious slow jams with far more overt political messages than Le1f's usual banger-obscured radicalism. This makes for the cringe-worthy "Tell," an admonition to down-low closet cases to come out, but Le1f's political lucidity also allows for the stunning "Taxi." The song speaks about sexual economies of racialized desire but doubles as a commentary on the way mainstream audiences "pass" Le1f "like taxis do." But, he sings, "I don't care, whatever, it's cool/ Roll the window up on 'em"—making it clear that, whatever crossover potential the album falls short of, Le1f is more than content to remain a riot boi. | 2015-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-12T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | XL / Terrible | November 12, 2015 | 7.5 | 805c080e-2ee7-4ae9-b85a-b5f9ddeadd30 | Andy Emitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-emitt/ | null |
Member of Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls abandons the lo-fi M.O. of those groups for a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album. | Member of Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls abandons the lo-fi M.O. of those groups for a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album. | Frankie Rose and the Outs: Frankie Rose and the Outs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14634-frankie-rose-and-the-outs/ | Frankie Rose and the Outs | Frankie Rose is a Brooklyn bartender best known for her drum/vocal/guitar work with fuzzed-out retro acts like Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls. As she bounced from one project to the next (in some cases before she was even considered a proper member), the distinctive threads that joined these bands-- garage-rock ethos, dour jangle pop, 60s girl-group harmonies, questionable sonic fidelity-- suggested Rose had a clearly defined musical M.O. But with her fourth project in almost as many years, Rose is taking on a different approach: She seems intent on creating a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album-- a novel concept among the dozens of her lo-fi peers looking to similar sounds for inspiration.
While Frankie Rose and the Outs lacks some of the charge of her former projects, her restraint feels as brash and satisfying. The key is subtlety and refinement: The guitars here do none of the heavy lifting, often left to only punctuate or reinforce the cascading vocal harmonies and rolling bass that anchor these songs. "Memo"'s sharp, lightly reverbed notes are whisked away by charging drums and voices; the buzzy flat tone in the background of "That's What People Told Me" exists only to offset the song's cautious, lilting shake before shaping itself into a spy-movie riff.
At times woefully angelic (like on the sublime cover of Arthur Russell's "You Can Make Me Feel Bad") or richly layered (the soaring "Little Brown Haired Girls"), Rose's harmonies nail down the technical aspect of what made these girl groups so appealing. For a record this simple and, even at its punchiest, seductively serene, it might seem far-fetched to compliment it for being daring. But considering its own orbit-- and her eschewing lo-fi recording techniques-- Rose cuts right to the chase, making lean, elegant music that practically glows in the face of exceptional fuss. | 2010-09-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-09-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | September 21, 2010 | 7.4 | 805c5fae-84f0-404c-8262-5450df6f7d1a | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
Self Restraint, the latest album from rapper Gods Wisdom of the New England-based Dark World collective, arrives feeling strangely dated, as if it’s an artifact from 2011 or 2012. | Self Restraint, the latest album from rapper Gods Wisdom of the New England-based Dark World collective, arrives feeling strangely dated, as if it’s an artifact from 2011 or 2012. | Gods Wisdom: Self Restraint | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22507-self-restraint/ | Self Restraint | I don’t know if technology has accelerated the process of nostalgia, but we’re only six years removed from the blip the words “witch house” created on the music scene, and even fewer than that from when art-damaged kids creating abrasive rap seemed novel. Self Restraint, the latest album from the Northampton, Mass. rapper Gods Wisdom of the New England-based Dark World collective arrives feeling strangely dated, as if it’s an artifact from 2011 or 2012. The tropes are there, from “666” in Gods Wisdom Bandcamp URL, Tumblr-inspired “wtf” samples (like a snippet of “The Simpsons” here or old news footage there) to the music videos made to look as if they’re shot on VHS; the obsession with the most obvious staples of rap is there, too, from booming low-end to hyperbolic boasts (“in high school I had sex with my teacher” from “2 Lives” is a galling moment, because it’s unclear if this is supposed to be funny or obtuse—it doesn’t work either way), and it’s all done in a manner that suggests this stuff is blazingly au courant. (Noted cool person Kim Gordon, for instance, put Gods Wisdom in her Top Ten of 2015 for Artforum).
Some of the songs work on a goofy, outré level—in spite of its many forehead slapping punchlines, “2 Lives” (which is two years old by the way) rides a triumphant trap beat that Gods Wisdom slathers his voice over with a hook from fiery singer/songwriter Mal Devisa, and it’s a discomfiting piece of music, something that escaped Western Massachusetts and ended up sounding almost fresh, perhaps because instead of winking and telegraphing all of its weirdness, it just kind of exists. Before that, “Respect Women” works a brooding, minimal beat like a good Lil Yachty song does, and Gods Wisdom manages a few memorable lines: “So heavy metal/sexuality of the devil/I’m going out like James Dean/but so much colder.”
Self Restraint bottoms out when Gods Wisdom attempts to create a ruckus, though—instead finding some catharsis in the noise, like avant-rapper B L A C K I E does, it’s just an endurance test—there’s no greater meaning behind the mess. His attempts at “going weird” like the “Peter Piper”-reminiscent bells on the lethargic “Leather Wings” don’t have enough oomph behind them to help Gods Wisdom access the confidence held by similar artists like Juiceboxxx or Baltimore’s Schwarz. It feels hollow, a bunch of signposts (classic samples, smooth jazz sax, vague vaporwave vibe) that don’t point anywhere. (It’s maybe worth noting at this point though that another Gods Wisdom track, “Beep Beep,” is a deliriously silly earworm that is better than anything on Self Restraint.)
And unfortunately, while his sleepwalking-Folk Implosion-meets-Lil Uzi Vert delivery has intermittent charm, it overwhelms the record and for the most part a lot of Self Restraint sounds like Salem Part 2, but updated to a more current operating system. Instead of chopped and screwed rap, the record takes some cues from drill and even Waka Flocka Flame, two inspirations that also stopped being novel in 2012. The opening title track and “Paranoia” are basically Salem songs, noise dripped into rap rhythms with blasé vocals on top—a pointedly unpleasant listening experience. There’s even a micro-staple of witch house—the left-field cover—on Self Restraint, “On the Beach” (yes, Neil Young), which exists outside the parameters of good and bad. It’s a Rorschach test. Did you find something cool/rebellious/interesting in the ugly, casual nihilism of witch house? Then you should like this. If you thought it was all hollow “but that was the point,” you might like this. If you’d rather listen to literally anything else, keep moving. | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | October 21, 2016 | 4.9 | 805f00a9-b903-4aac-a505-152e68a21bc3 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky, the Australian singer and producer makes inky dream pop that’s as heavy and welcoming as a weighted blanket. | Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky, the Australian singer and producer makes inky dream pop that’s as heavy and welcoming as a weighted blanket. | Penelope Trappes : Penelope Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/penelope-trappes-penelope-two/ | Penelope Two | Penelope Two is a monochrome mood board, a one-note tone poem, a mirror’s matte-black back. The work of Australian musician Penelope Trappes derives its power from its profound focus, the single-minded pursuit of a highly specific vibe. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness, it becomes velvety and enveloping: an expanse of sustained pianos, sub-bass rumble, and faint guitar, all drenched in reverb but topped with her cool, clarion voice. You can make out some of her words, but she sometimes doesn’t sing them at all, as though language would stand in the way of her otherworldly visions.
Trappes pursued an almost identical approach on her solo debut, last year’s Penelope One: the same instruments, same echo, same aching melodies, all hanging like breath in a beam of winter sunlight. Penelope One’s 11 songs already fit together like puzzle pieces; spanning 10 songs in a fleeting 33 minutes, Penelope Two is more cohesive. Field recordings—muted traffic, faraway playground din, the faintest suggestion of distant rainfall—blur the boundaries of each track, so that melodies seem to take shape like hooded figures emerging from shadows.
Her reference points are familiar ones, and she doesn’t try to obscure them. The piano chord that launches the album is a dead ringer for the watery tone of Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins’ 1986 collaboration, The Moon and the Melodies. The ethereal influence of the Cocteaus’ 4AD labelmates This Mortal Coil looms just as large over Trappes’ penumbral soundscapes and pervasive melancholy. Her molasses-drip tempos and close harmonies recall Low at their loneliest. On “Maeve,” her airy sigh and tungsten-bright guitar sound like Mazzy Star or Julee Cruise: a roadhouse slow dance as glimpsed in a hall of mirrors, or in a dream within a dream.
For the most part, her tracks do the bare minimum to qualify as “songs.” The opening “Silence” is just three minutes of held keyboard and deep-in-a-well humming, so static it feels as much like a snapshot as a piece of music. On “Connector,” her voice scatters over chasms that open between drumbeats as the guitar drips like icicles. Her mantra-like lyrics are as skeletal as her melodies, only deepening the music’s mystery. On the haunting “Carry Me,” she sings, “A tiny glory hidden in the palm,” her voice closing around the syllables as though unwilling to let go of some secret. And on “Farewell,” you can practically hear her shivering as she sings, “Cold, I’m cold as snow,” her voice small and dry against a backdrop of rustle and drone, like an iPhone voice memo recorded in a cathedral’s catacombs.
With the right reverb setting, virtually anyone can make a reasonable facsimile of doom. What Trappes is doing is more nuanced, difficult, and interesting. On “Kismet,” an almost shockingly pretty piano flourish joins the sounds of heavy wind, roosting birds, and ominous synthesizers—it’s like a daisy being pinned to a black mourning cloak. Creating such captivating environments with so few elements requires not only a strong command of production tricks but also of melody, harmony, and vocal control. Trappe wields her voice with the discipline of a calligrapher.
If the album stumbles at all, it’s in the final third, where a succession of largely ambient tracks leaves Trappes at the risk of disappearing into the murk. It’s not a deal-breaker; the closing “Nite Hive” is as heavy and as welcoming as a weighted blanket. But once the fog has lifted, few details about these atmospheric pieces linger. If Trappes can find a way to consistently marry her exquisite mood-pieces to songwriting as moving as that of Penelope Two’s highest points, then nighttime, winter, and even darkness itself are hers for the taking. | 2018-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Houndstooth | December 18, 2018 | 7.5 | 8061682d-f9a0-4e86-9911-874fb30492b1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Detroit punk trio’s first proper full-length is a blast, but its abstract, evocative lyrics make it a welcome subversion of the punk formula. | The Detroit punk trio’s first proper full-length is a blast, but its abstract, evocative lyrics make it a welcome subversion of the punk formula. | The Stools: R U Saved? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-stools-r-u-saved/ | R U Saved? | If you listen to enough contemporary, small-label punk music, it becomes very easy to identify the points of intrigue. There’s the structural simplicity. The ragged ferocity. The extreme speed and decibel levels. Nuanced and unusual lyrics, however, aren’t always at the top of that list. For better or worse, punk lyrics are often part of a self-perpetuating mythology that goes something like this: “Being punk/Oi oi oi/No one can stop us from being punk.” Hearing Detroit trio the Stools for the first time, you might think that they emerged from the very same school of punk proselytizers. But on closer inspection, their debut album R U Saved? is more sophisticated than the average manifesto. Instead, it’s crammed with hypnotic, abstract gutter poems, shouted over scrappy drums and motor-revving guitars.
The Stools formed after singer and guitarist Will Lorenz called his buddy, drummer Charles Stahl, in the frenzy of a manic episode. “We have to start a band tonight,” Lorenz told Stahl. “We have no choice.” Stahl hadn’t actually played drums before, but the two men began recording that very evening, tracking to tape on a boombox in a dingy wine cellar.
The same urgency that propelled the Stools to record the very second it occurred to them bubbles up and erupts throughout R U Saved?, their first proper full-length. The group thrashes through each of the 12 tracks, whipping themselves into a concise but electrified frenzy. Hard rock ripper “Cut Me Off” is composed of only 14 distinct words, which Lorenz barks like Stiv Bators doing chest presses with a dislodged V8 engine. The Stools love brevity, and when Lorenz splinters his vocal chords to scream “You set yourself on fire!” in the chorus, it becomes clear why some of these songs are so short. The energy the Stools expel is like squirting lighter fluid onto a campfire: The flame is high and hot, burning through the fuel in a quick flash.
R U Saved? deals in muscular, blues-bent rock riffs, dialed up to the speed of ’80s hardcore. Lorenz’s lyrics are bizarre and impressionistic, stoking the imagination with a few specific visuals. On the raucous opener “Stare Scared,” he spools out surreal lines over grimy power chords: “Bunk beds glowing gold/Like chains of pearls…Thumb burned by lamplight.” “Into the Street,” a street punk bruiser bred with ZZ Top guitar, is born of a similar disorienting, dreamlike logic. “Torpedo doors/Old cans of peas/Like little prayer cards/In the blank white heat,” Lorenz shouts.
For all his abstraction, Lorenz can also be an extremely efficient lyricist, building entire scenes with a few well-placed words. On “Pickin’ Out Glass,” the narrator collects shards “from the sidewalk cracks,” noting nearby firemen standing at attention. With two simple images, we can hear windows exploding and whiff the smoke drifting over the ruins. On “Bad Eye Bob,” a song churning to the speed of a circle pit, Lorenz introduces an oddball specter lurking around the historic Coronado apartment building in Midtown Detroit. The titular Bad Eye Bob, who stuffs his cigarettes with M-80 explosives and makes “home videos in a bathroom stall,” is either a hazardous prankster or a street art savant. The answer is never spelled out, but Bob’s seedy kingdom is strangely inviting.
R U Saved?’s best song is the romping “Buick Boogie,” which is sung by bassist Krystian Quint and rides on rockabilly guitar and bass licks dirtied up with distortion. Quint cosplays a slick, suited gangster with “drive by style.” But for all his peacocking, our tough guy chickens out when it comes to busting an actual cap: “Got my finger on the trigger baby/But you know I’m afraid to shoot/Gonna hop in my Buick/Boogie back to you,” Quint sings over Stahl’s thundering drum beat. His confession might be a jab at traditional masculinity, or a metaphor for adultery stalled by erectile dysfunction. It could simply be an excuse to scream the words “Buick” and “boogie” in quick succession. Regardless of your take, R U Saved? is teeming with abnormal imagery and creative language—a welcome subversion of the punk formula.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that “Buick Boogie” is sung by Will Lorenz. It is sung by bassist Krystian Quint. | 2023-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Feel It | June 6, 2023 | 7.2 | 80732777-f766-4dff-bbc7-ec79c538c1c6 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Behold sounds like a continuation of the abstract and free-form ideas that Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. What most separates the two records is the new album's strong sense of groove. | Behold sounds like a continuation of the abstract and free-form ideas that Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. What most separates the two records is the new album's strong sense of groove. | Oren Ambarchi / Jim O’Rourke: Behold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20278-behold/ | Behold | Oren Ambarchi is usually described as a guitarist but before 1998's Stacte, his solo debut, he was a drummer. And if early records like Suspension or Reconnaissance, with Martin Ng, tended to fixate on liquid oscillations and eyedropper drones, recent releases are putting his rhythmic sensibility front and center. Ambarchi's 2012 album Sagittarian Domain was propelled by an elliptical funk groove that moved between krautrock and post-punk. "Knots", from 2012's Audience of One, is largely a showcase for a scorching ride-cymbal fugue played by Joe Talia, and the recently released Live Knots, featuring Tokyo and Krakow performances of the piece, is even more intensely percussive, with Talia's drumming fighting to bring order to Ambarchi's torrential feedback. And now Behold, Ambarchi's new collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, picks up the rhythmic thread of the Australian musician's recent work and finds him back behind the drums.
At first, Behold sounds like a continuation of the ideas that Ambarchi and O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. Like its predecessor, Behold is a single piece of music separated into two side-long sections. Within its 42-minute expanse, it combines multiple methods and approaches—real-time jams, electro-acoustic collage, synthesizers and guitar feedback, ambient dub and free improv—into a shape that's at once sprawling and streamlined.
It's really anyone's guess who is doing what. At the core of the music, there's a battle between brushed metal and scratchy percussive sounds, on the one hand, and luminous tonal elements on the other. The music is aglow with streaks of feedback, molten oscillators, rubbed wineglass rims, and even the occasional struck or held note. With music this abstracted, this gradual, small gestures count for a lot, so that a single pair of bass notes, played several measures apart, come to seem like a major theme. And while there are no melodies, per se, the way filament-like phrases flare up in the murk is nevertheless lyrical. Somewhere in the mix, there's what sounds like an organ, and that Hammond-like flutter imbues the album with lively, trembling movements, even when the music is comparatively still. There are drones like the buzz of airplanes high overhead and a forest's canopy worth of synthetic birdcalls. Beneath the crystal-faceted edges of the sound, the blur runs deep and dense.
What most separates Behold from Indeed is the new album's strong sense of groove, with Ambarchi carving deep patterns with ride cymbals and hi-hats and ultra-low, chest-caving kick drums. It feels like motorik distilled to its very essence, an IV drip of pure rhythm. Like everything else on the album, the drums come and go. For most of "Behold A", there's nothing more than a hint of cymbal tapped out in rolling, quarter-note pulses; for long stretches, there's not even that. Like an underground stream returning to the surface, the rippling metal pulse returns midway through "Behold B" and gradually gathers strength, rising in concert with squalls of guitar feedback and contrapuntal piano. After a long, slow climb, it's a quick climax; the beat dies, and the remaining sounds go sailing out into the abyss, like water over a cliff. But it's the rhythm that stays with you, long after silence has settled in.
Behold is the kind of music where, depending upon the angle from which you approach it, you may perceive its overall effects in radically different ways. The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention. | 2015-03-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-03-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | March 9, 2015 | 7.6 | 8075b38f-09c7-4ec4-9d40-c9632c36c0b2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On her first official LP as Fire-Toolz, Chicago producer Angel Marcloid uses vaporwave’s expansive palette to explore the identities that the internet enables users to absorb, process, and redistribute. | On her first official LP as Fire-Toolz, Chicago producer Angel Marcloid uses vaporwave’s expansive palette to explore the identities that the internet enables users to absorb, process, and redistribute. | Fire-Toolz: Skinless X-1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fire-toolz-skinless-x-1/ | Skinless X-1 | Nothing is off limits to Angel Marcloid. In the experimental electronic music she makes as Fire-Toolz, the prolific Chicago producer scavenges voraciously from a dizzying array of sources: Proggy electric guitar solos bristle against Windows notification sounds; electronic-blast beats underscore muzak bass; black metal screams crash into samples from guided meditations.
The idea that every sound is on the table has proven a key tenet of internet-native genres like vaporwave, whose tactics Marcloid uses often but not exclusively. If vaporwave liquefies discrete source materials into a soothing, uniform goo, Marcloid’s work preserves the rough edges of its components, like scrap metal suspended in Jell-O. On Skinless X-1, she’s less interested in the glazed-over numbness that results from staring too long into the web than she is in excavating the particulate, contradictory identities that the internet enables its users to absorb, process, and redistribute.
Earlier Fire-Toolz releases, like 2017’s Drip Mental and Interbeing, stoked a keen sense of restlessness. The project veered from the staid ambient meditations and noisy experiments Marcloid has cultivated under a variety of other monikers in the past decade (her Bandcamp discography dates back to 2006). Instead of ruminating on a single theme, Fire-Toolz accentuates the contrasts between often clashing forms of sound, a strategy Oneohtrix Point Never also employed on his last two albums. But Skinless X-1, Marcloid’s fourth Fire-Toolz release, finds the project locking into new grooves. Rather than highlight how easily attention can scatter, it congeals attention, testing just how many disparate elements the ear can hold together in a single moment.
Many of the various genres Marcloid draws upon here have similar goals in mind. Black metal, trance, and new age music all seek to free the body from its usual routines of labor and leisure; they pursue sensory extremes in order to end psychological ruts and allow catharsis. Though Skinless X-1 jumps rapidly from one musical configuration to another, that dynamism rarely comes at the expense of momentum or depth. Songs like “Elysian Fields” turns what sounds like video game music into settings for white-hot guitar riffs, bolstering both elements with unsteady yet propulsive beats. On the standout track “Lethe,” Marcloid trades her black metal screams for choked, distorted vocalizations that sound as though they could be floating over a faulty phone line—and yet this scrambled voice beckons more deeply and more seriously than the flat-out howls on “✓
iNTERBEiNG.” The harder it is to hear Marcloid, the more inviting it feels to lean in and try to make her out amid the noise.
This decade has been a fertile time for musicians discovering what online spaces sound like—what the digital images and virtual realities of the present and past have done to attention, connection, and consciousness. Fire-Toolz calls back to an earlier era of the web, when the computer spoke every time you received an email and instant messaging services fostered a new sense of simultaneity among faraway strangers. Rather than suggest that this period marked the beginning of an epoch of detachment, Marcloid remembers the vintage internet as host to emotional intensities. Skinless X-1’s “In the Computer Room @ Dusk ☕” stirs together acoustic guitar, ambient drone, and slow percussive pulses, calling up the image of a young person on an old PC at the end of the ’90s, realizing they've accidentally spent all day online.
A nostalgic fondness percolates through the music, as if Marcloid were reminiscing about a time before online personas were tied to birth names, before the threat of doxxing loomed. Back then, you were whatever you said you were. You could play-act various identities, bond intensely with other play-actors. If you waded in deep enough, you might even have found something true about yourself. | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | August 27, 2018 | 7.1 | 80781559-9673-4c6c-ab06-3b9241b830a9 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Despite its name, Alone for the First Time features a number of collaborators. And for the first time, it features Hemsworth working largely with original, lyrical songs. | Despite its name, Alone for the First Time features a number of collaborators. And for the first time, it features Hemsworth working largely with original, lyrical songs. | Ryan Hemsworth: Alone for the First Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19952-ryan-hemsworth-alone-for-the-first-time/ | Alone for the First Time | Ryan Hemsworth has mastered the social web. You can see it in his tweets, which knowingly combine the sad teenager aesthetic with that of the semi-ironic, in-crowd broducer. You can see it in his Secret Songs record club, through which he's cultivated a community of bedroom producers in his likeness and given them access to a large audience. And you can see it on the guest list for his new album, Alone for the First Time, which, despite its name, features contributions from popular Soundcloud artists and Secret Songs amateurs alike. But even if it’s not literal, the title does justice to the major artistic step that this album represents. For better and for worse, this is the Halifax producer’s boldest aesthetic statement to date, and taking that kind of risk must feel something like striking out on your own for the first time.
Hemsworth started his career playing two distinct roles. He produced songs for minor, buzzing Southern rappers riding the cloud-rap wave and remixed the pop songs of the moment, tricking them out with candy-colored synths and creaky drum machines. He was already about as collaborative as it’s possible to be: most of his work either featured someone else rapping or was a rework of a song that had been created by someone else entirely. But even his original tracks felt like the work of a producer who wasn’t yet sure what kind of music he wanted to make, someone who was following cues from other artists. The Last Words EP from 2012 was catchy but scattered, and last year’s Guilt Trips, as refined as it was, showed a reluctance to commit to any one style. (The exception to these projects was last year’s Still Awake EP, the most direct precursor to Alone for the First Time.)
Hemsworth was one of the early, post-Girl Talk producers who reveled in the dissolution of genre, and he dabbled in bedroom electronic, candied R&B and Southern hip-hop without pledging allegiance to any of them. It was only when he fully embraced a fourth influence, the 8-bit soundtracks to handheld video games of the '80s and '90s, that he began to focus on refining a specific sound, one that combined his pop instincts with the miniaturized melodies of that format.
He’s been drilling down towards the essence of that sound for more than a year now. And the core he’s reached on the new album reveals a singer-songwriter bedroom pop by way of Final Fantasy. It’s unmistakably a winter album, and would be recognizable as such even were its first single not titled "Snow in Newark"; the album fairly bleeds nostalgia and comfort—listening to it feels like being swaddled with blankets and pillows. And for the first time, it features Hemsworth working largely with original, lyrical songs, a jarring development for fans who originally came to him for his remixes or production.
Hemsworth has made sport out of feeling vulnerable—his twitter is replete with references to him needing to snuggle—and his lyrics are generally in that mold. When they’re simple, as on "Walk Me Home", they can feel tender and lovely. The song’s refrain of "Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone, there’s no room for me left in your heart," is genuinely heartbreaking, syncing nicely with an upswing of strings and what sounds like a live version of the drum machines he favors. But occasionally, his songs can feel like transmissions of his twitter feed that have been scrubbed of all humor or irony. "Snow in Newark" is the best example of this phenomenon: the first verse is one of the album's wordiest, but Hemsworth doesn’t use it to communicate details and the song ends up sounding both vague and precious, reminiscent of a lesser Jack Johnson track.
Songs like these will garner Hemsworth new fans, but it’s jarring to hear someone with such a refined sense of structure still struggling with songwriting. It can be a relief then to reach a track on which a truly talented vocalist makes up for Hemsworth's lyrical shortcomings. "Surrounded", which features the voice of the wonderful Angelino songstress Kotomi, is one of the most powerful tracks on the album, and it feels like a natural extension of the R&B remixes that Hemsworth came up on. The singer’s voice breathes life into the lyrics like a good actor into a bad role—the preciousness of the words is swallowed by the power of her emotion and the frantic production that surrounds her voice echoes the track’s message.
Tracks like "Surrounded" hint that the problem with Hemsworth’s songs is not necessarily the lyrics but rather his lack of confidence when it comes to doing those simple words justice. But the contrast between the amateurism of his songs is all the more jarring because he’s become such a sure-handed producer. Instrumental tracks like "Blemish" and "Hurt Me" are quintessential Hemsworth productions, springy, bubbly tracks that sound like they were produced for a Pallet Town after party. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy to each that’s balanced nicely by the chirpy synths and springy drums that have long been the producer’s forte.
You have to hand it to Hemsworth for refusing to make the same song over and over again. He’s learning from the artists he’s meeting online, going farther afield than ever before (the album features artists from all over the globe), and growing more comfortable in his role as someone who can create pop, not merely tweak existing songs. Alone for the First Time is the furthest he's pushed himself, and the growing pains on the album can be chalked up to the strain of trying new things, a kind of adolescent awkwardness that shows signs of maturing into something sophisticated and unique. | 2014-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Last Gang / Secret Songs | November 5, 2014 | 6 | 807a4ec1-106e-472f-9481-b54d6127dc46 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter belongs to a contemporary lineage of classic-rock devotees; his melodic gifts make this double album, recorded in Memphis, exceptionally warm and inviting. | The Brooklyn singer-songwriter belongs to a contemporary lineage of classic-rock devotees; his melodic gifts make this double album, recorded in Memphis, exceptionally warm and inviting. | Cut Worms : Nobody Lives Here Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cut-worms-nobody-lives-here-anymore/ | Nobody Lives Here Anymore | The world that Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Max Clarke builds as Cut Worms is a comforting and familiar one. His nasal, pure-hearted tenor evokes Buddy Holly as surely as a pair of black frame glasses pushed up the bridge of the nose, and the alpine chill, cavernous reverb, and placid stillness of his folk rock instantly recall solo George Harrison. Clarke belongs to a specific lineage of classic-rock devotees—Cass McCombs, Kevin Morby, Whitney—and his records are full of nice, homey, furniture-store qualities: lived-in, grainy, hand-crafted. His music smells like yellowing record sleeves and pleasantly mildewed cellars; you can hear the warmth and spaciousness of the studio he’s strumming his guitar in.
Records that sound like this are nearly impossible to dislike, and there is never any shortage of them. There’s always a pocket of singer-songwriters evoking some combination of these 1970s singer-songwriter influences, from the aforementioned George Harrison to Neil Young to Harry Nilsson. Practitioners are usually bearded and, generally speaking, male, and there is a high rate of turnover. Nonetheless, Clarke stands pretty tall in this field. His new record, Nobody Lives Here Anymore, is a double album, that ultimate symbol of classic-rock ambition, and Clarke traveled to fabled territory—Memphis, Tennessee—to record it.
You can certainly trek hundreds of miles and record a middling album, but Clarke did not, and his pilgrimage feels like a larger gesture of commitment that contains dozens of smaller similar ones inside it. When you’re trying to sink into an era, your success rate depends largely on your attention to important details, and Clarke’s is impeccable, perhaps attributable in part to his day job as an illustrator. Every element of these songs, whether it’s the perfectly tuned clip-clop of drum sticks and bass evoking Sun Records on “The Heat Is On,” or the early-Beatles backup vocals on “Always on My Mind,” wanders onstage with immaculate timing.
Records this handsomely appointed and inviting ask you to settle in. But inside this pleasant atmosphere, and among all these well-worn signifiers, Clarke has passion and vision to burn, and over the course of 17 songs, he seems to hold nothing back. Nobody Lives Here Anymore is an exceptional document of a songwriter and performer allowing all of their instincts and impulses to line up neatly with each other. It’s hard to imagine Clarke making a better or more complete record than this one: The longer it goes on, the richer and deeper it feels, and the more resonant and real Clarke’s imagined world becomes.
His strongest point is his ear for melodies. They spill out of him like loose change from turned-out pockets. Some of his songs have two or three of them that feel like whole songs themselves. “All the Roads” is a good example. The verse, which Clarke sings in an appealingly low, silky register over acoustic guitar, feels sinuous enough to hold a three-minute song. But he has a lot more to give us: There are two pre-choruses, each of them soulful enough to serve as real ones, and then a doo-wop-shoo-wop actual chorus that tops the whole thing like caramel drizzle. This easy generosity keeps the album from ever feeling slack or overstuffed, despite its runtime occupying an intimidating slab of your afternoon.
It’s a testament to the strength of Clarke’s compositional gifts and his command of mood that even 14 or 15 tracks in, in an album pitched at a consistent campfire glow and midtempo stroll, songs like “The Golden Sky” sound just as fresh as the record’s first notes. Clarke has Cass McCombs’ haunted way with Americana signifiers; in his hands, even a sound as recognizable as a pedal-steel guitar feels dreamlike. His songwriting gift is unforced, probably the greatest compliment you can give to a record like this, which measures its success by how long you want to spend with it without focusing on it too closely.
Clarke’s lyrics trade in homilies, and while there are notes of trouble in them that vaguely suggest young people surveying the world in 2020—“Oh my love, what more can we do?/I feel so helpless, don’t you/This whole place began to self-destruct/Long before we ever showed up”—they are couched in phrasing that could just have easily come from a Neil Young record in the ’70s. “Every once in a while, everything comes together/Every once in a while, everything comes out right,” he croons just one song later. On the chorus to “Veteran’s Day,” which could have come from Living in the Material World, Clarke hits the upper reaches of his register, telling us “You don’t know/What this life can do to a fool like me.” A simple sentiment—the simplest—but as Clarke delivers it, it feels as profound, and as resistant to analysis, as a sunset.
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. | 2020-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | October 16, 2020 | 7.8 | 807c4ecf-b981-4268-a2e5-572cd0e60f63 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Featuring guest spots from Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. | Featuring guest spots from Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. | El-P: Cancer for Cure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16641-cancer-for-cure/ | Cancer for Cure | Even the best relationships acquire baggage. Circa 1999, Def Jux forged a fiefdom from the ashes of vinyl champs Fondle 'Em and the soon-to-be-ruined promise of Rawkus. "Independent as fuck" was the mantra, and for those wondering why MF Doom and the Roots couldn't get airplay, it may well have been a war cry.
Until Russell Simmons took a temporary sabbatical from model mongering to threaten a trademark-infringement lawsuit, even Def Jux's name riffed on (Darth) Def Jam, the rap overlord at its greased-up and growling Ruff Ryders, Jigga, and Ja Rule apex. But back when the "Underground" was tagged in capital letters, the promise of an alternate subterranean grid seemed infinite. Fat Beats did booming business. Hip-hop culture mags cropped up to survey the soundbombing. Clinton was President. Gas was $1 per gallon. A Bellevue-certified eccentric like Kool Keith could get Doctor Octagon dough from Dreamworks to squander in and around the West Hollywood IHOP.
During that last spring of the 20th Century, Rawkus Records released Soundbombing II-- an Underground Now That's What I Call Music*!*-- that banged incessantly in dorm rooms across America and England. It marked the first and only time Eminem and El-P shared space on wax. Yet it didn't feel that weird at the time. People still used the phrase "on wax" and Shady had only recently signed to Interscope. To balance his quality time with Dr. Dre, Marshall Mathers also worked with people like Thirstin Howl III and Outsidaz. As the demented fan from "Stan" said: "I like that shit you did with Rawkus too, that shit was phat." Not only did people still use the word "phat," they opted to build clothing lines around it.
You can trace the genesis of El-P's solo career back to Soundbombing II's "Patriotism". A five-minute fulguration to American culture and the military-industrial complex, it was credited to Company Flow, but his one-time rhyme partner Bigg Jus sat on the sidelines. The next year, the group released its final single, "DPA". It was the second release on the fledgling Def Jux and doubled as a mission statement. This is "heart of darkness," El-P fulminated and as if to prove his point, George W. Bush "won" the Electoral College several months later. He may have been referencing Joseph Conrad, but the Brooklyn bomber soon received a bête noire worthy of Richard Nixon and Raoul Duke. The new imprint existed to chronicle the fear and loathing. And by 2007's I'll Sleep When You're Dead, he confessed to "a gonzomatic fear turning [him] Hunter S. Thompson."
At least that was the image that took root. The reality was more and less sophisticated. Bizarro attempts to break the mold with funk-fusionists Chin Chin and the original Lonely Island, Party Fun Action Committee, rarely received the attention they deserved. Nor did the mutant howls of Camu Tao, whose genre-clobbering experimentation influenced Kid Cudi, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and Danny Brown. Luck didn't lend itself to the Def Jux enterprise. Rjd2 could have re-made Deadringer a half-dozen times, and both label and artist could have reaped that soccer mom Moby licensing money. Instead, he ditched turntables for the microphone, signed to XL, and offered prayers to the mustache of John Oates. Meanwhile, meal tickets Cannibal Ox couldn't get it together for a sophomore album and were last seen wandering lost around the Gardens of Asgard.
That's a lot to deal with for any label head, let alone one tasked to redesign the Delorean every five years. It's hard enough to rap and make beats professionally, never mind having to worry about C-Rayz Walz wanting help with his 401(k). Factor in the ravages of online piracy and the tragic death of Camu Tao, and bombing the system seemed like the only obvious option. Yet what might've been most damning was that Def Jux became imprisoned by ideals that belonged to a different era. Even if most of their artists had long outgrown the "Us vs. Them" mentality, outside perception didn't always chart the progression.
By now, Eminem was making 12-step anthems for trailer trash. Soundbombing II star Common was allowed to wear angora and cinematically woo Queen Latifah with his low-post moves. But El-P and by proxy Definitive Jux were stereotyped with opinions like the one A$AP Worldwide co-founder Yams offered earlier this year: Company Flow fans don't buy A$AP Rocky records. Maybe that was true 10 years ago (if A$AP Rocky been out of Junior High), but the truth had become closer to El-P's response: I'm in Company Flow and I listen to A$AP. It was the rap equivalent of the Battle of New Orleans. The cease-fire had been signed, but there was one last conflict before putting the era to sleep.
With the exception of the Jay-Z/Kanye/Young Money/Rozay axis, the rap game has largely flattened out (or bottomed out, depending on your angle). A guy like Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire can get a deal from Universal after releasing a free mixtape over old Necro and El-P beats. Waka Flocka fronts this month's XXL, but Killer Mike and El-P get second billing alongside Chief Keef, Curren$y, and Slaughterhouse. 2Chainz is playing Rock the Bells. Things are more similar than they've seemed in a long time.
Cancer 4 Cure is both reinvention and inversion. El-P's first album since putting Def Jux on hiatus in early 2010 marks a break from the old order and another call to arms. Whereas Fantastic Damage served as a Def Jux coming out party and I'll Sleep When You're Dead synthesized the sweaty jitters of the mid-Dubya daze, Cancer 4 Cure consciously creates its own iron galaxy. None of the Def Jukies appear, save for Despot. In their stead are eXquire, Danny Brown, and a snarling Killer Mike, whose El-P produced R.A.P. Music is already the front-runner for rap album of the year. Any one of their guest spots could be a hip-hop quotable, if we still lived at a time when people cared about the Hip Hop Quotable. But my vote goes to Danny Brown, self-described as "Ric Flair/ With thick hair/ Yelling out 'woo'/ Getting head in the director's chair."
Cancer 4 Cure's closest analogue may be Portishead's Third: the textures and tones are distinctly different from past releases, but it's unimaginable that it could be made by anyone else. El-P has described the record as fight music abstracted. To be more specific, it's fight or flight music. Primal response mechanism rap. And like any good storyteller, his narratives are rooted in conflict. On "Tougher Colder Killer", El-P inhabits the mindset of a soldier haunted by post-traumatic stress, who made "his enemy dig his own grave at the point of a gun." "For My Upstairs Neighbor" finds the protagonist getting grilled by cops about a domestic violence situation in his apartment building. He tells "Columbo" nothing, but later confronts the abuse victim in the stairwell and whispers to her, "do the thing you have to and I swear I'll tell them nothing." Meanwhile, "Works Every Time" is a drug dealer dialectic between the urge to self-medicate and the consequences of the obliteration.
The closest thing the record has to a love song is "The Jig Is Up", where the hook uses the words of Groucho Marx to describe a relationship: "I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have me." Even "Sign Here", a song grappling with sexual power issues uses an interrogation room as a metaphorical backdrop. You don't need me tell you that it's heavy. It's a record from El-P, a man who could make Pollyanna see poltergeists. But to balance out the hangman's tension, there's "Drones over BKLYN" and "The Full Retard", two clavicle-cracking rants reminiscent of the old El-P, with rhymes "short and fat like Joe Pesci" that would "slap you out of your fucking shit."
The beats. The synths sound like they've been stolen from a bargain bin on Alpha Centauri, stocked with futuristic workout anthems for robot soldiers. Listening to it in daylight hours can make you feel allergic to sunlight. Most rumble at 130 to 140 BPM and feel uniquely congruent with and ahead of the times. After all, the producers at L.A.'s Low End Theory and the early London dubstep architects all owe a small but significant debt to El's experiments with negative space and bone-chipping bass.
What grounds the record is a scarcely subliminated obsession with death. Dedicated to Camu Tao, whose demise directly preceded its creation, the characters are forever warring with some imminent end, whether creative, romantic, or literal. It's rare when re-inventions seem so deliberate but unselfconscious. And through the struggle it gains a certain scarred freedom. It's simultaneously able to stand alone but alongside that trademark blend of sneering New York City skepticism. It sheds the bullshit of the past and is stained with the weary residue of an incalculable number of cigarettes, weed deliveries, bodega runs, and blind turns. It's the best kind of tribute El-P could make: a record that you can pump like they do in the future. | 2012-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fat Possum | May 21, 2012 | 8.5 | 807d9e28-d16d-42e0-8c05-acfec0f1b59b | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
At turns explosive and intimate, the three-hour-plus show performed at a small club in West Hollywood is a legendary document of how Bruce and the E Street Band could transform their songs on stage. | At turns explosive and intimate, the three-hour-plus show performed at a small club in West Hollywood is a legendary document of how Bruce and the E Street Band could transform their songs on stage. | Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Roxy July 7, 1978 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-the-roxy-july-7-1978/ | The Roxy July 7, 1978 | Just over an hour into his marathon show at West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre in the summer of 1978, Bruce Springsteen offers a confession: He doesn’t know how to fix a broken-down car. While this information might seem irrelevant to the night’s proceedings, it’s an important breakthrough in the action-packed group therapy session that is an E Street Band concert. After all, the man on stage—sprightly and clean-shaven, not yet 30, seemingly fueled entirely by adrenaline—had written nearly half his songbook about cars: building and tearing them apart, driving till dawn and finding redemption underneath their hoods. (He was also dressing a little like a car mechanic around this time.) “But I think I understand,” he continues, “the spiritual and religious significance of the 396.” The crowd at the 500-capacity theater roars and Springsteen introduces “Racing in the Street,” a highlight from Darkness on the Edge of Town, released just a month earlier. On the record, it’s the bleakest thing he’s ever recorded; tonight, it becomes something else.
The latest in Springsteen’s ongoing Live Archive Series marks the first official release of this concert in its entirety. In the canon of historically significant Springsteen shows, the Roxy ’78 stands high above the others—above similarly beloved, equally inspired sets that year in Passaic, New Jersey or Houston, Texas. You don’t have to be a fanatic to find your footing. Here is a band in the midst of a runner’s high, bold and electric and ready to face the world. The show was broadcast live, in full, on Los Angeles’ KMET FM, giving West Coast listeners a chance to experience the Jersey legend’s magic in real time. With its three-hour-plus length and uncontainable spirit, it became an instant favorite among the tape-trading community. There was also an issue of scarcity, with a large portion of tickets relegated to radio station contests that barred fans from getting into the already-too-small venue. (Springsteen begins the show by apologizing, earnestly and shakily, to everyone who couldn’t get tickets, an important reminder that such controversies did not begin on Broadway.)
This night’s performance of “Racing in the Street” is a crucial document of how these musicians transform on stage. In 1978, the E Street Band doesn’t jam: None of the members are virtuosos, so their superpower is instead in their focus—seven people stretching songs into their most imposing, unrelenting forms. Saxophonist Clarence Clemons is often singled out as the primary foil for Springsteen’s songwriting during his peak era, but these performances remind you just how irreplaceable each band member had become. At this concert in particular, pianist Roy Bittan, who adds unearthly gravitas to songs like “Prove It All Night,” “Backstreets,” and the world premiere of “Point Blank,” is a revelation. As “Racing in the Street” draws to a close, he lends the song a spectral elegance while Clemons’ sax stutters for percussive effect and the whole band lifts effortlessly like a small plane taking flight. The effect causes one audience member to shout plainly, in the song’s final moments, “E. STREET. BAND.” It’s all that needs to be said.
This is the type of show that converts the uninitiated, with definitive performances of some of Springsteen’s most immortal songs. Near the start, the band tears into my favorite performance of “Badlands,” one that runs proudly above tempo and ripples with defiant energy. Other songs forecast the darker shades his music would embrace. An ominous thunderclap of electric guitar introduces a pulverizing “Adam Raised a Cain.” The then-unreleased “Independence Day” is given a sparse piano rendition that furthers “Adam”’s father-son airing of grievances—a story that Springsteen was now just starting to see clearly—and offsets the ecstatic glee of oldies covers like “Twist and Shout” and “Rave On.”
The show can also be heard as an accidental bildungsroman, summarizing the first half-decade of Springsteen’s career. If Darkness, his final release of the ’70s, was an achievement of solitude and refinement, then its tour was an extended celebration, establishing his reputation for performances that were at turns explosive and intimate. A stunning take on “Growin’ Up” embodies that dichotomy. The audience, who had been alternately howling and singing along and shouting requests, falls silent during the on-stage monologue that serves as its emotional core: a quaint tale of his childhood as he draws a line in the sand between his parents’ dreams and his own expectations. “What they didn’t understand,” Springsteen explains about his parents, “Was that I wanted everything.” Then he cues in the band, who give him precisely that. | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | July 18, 2018 | 8.8 | 808001e6-85f0-4b75-94cf-a1891be6fbb9 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
This 4-disc box set, curated by legendary Beat Generation composer and writer Paul Bowles, offers an eye-opening and immersive introduction to Moroccan music. | This 4-disc box set, curated by legendary Beat Generation composer and writer Paul Bowles, offers an eye-opening and immersive introduction to Moroccan music. | Various Artists: Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21708-music-of-morocco-recorded-by-paul-bowles-1959/ | Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles, 1959 | By now, the stories of Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles and other Beat-generation figures traveling to Morocco in the late '50s/early '60s aren't exactly lacking in mystique. In his introduction to the liner notes for this 4-disc box, former Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo references a widely circulated group photo of Bowles along with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and others taken on the patio of the Villa Muniria hotel in Tangier. Of course, the North African desert would become almost synonymous with Bowles' storied career. But for him, Morocco was also the place he would call home for the rest of his life.
Long considered a 20th-century literary giant, Bowles actually pursued a career in composition prior to (and even after) the success of *The Sheltering Sky, *which was his first novel. Bowles, in fact, visited Morocco for the first time in 1931 on a trip with Aaron Copland, under whom he was studying composition at the time. And though he changed lanes professionally, Bowles continued to nurture a profound interest in music, which is made abundantly clear by this set. Of course, the author occupies a central role here, having recorded all four discs himself over a six-month period in 1959 during which he criss-crossed Morocco, but thankfully he keeps his focus trained strictly on the music and the cultural currents from which it emerged.
"For years, I composed music," Bowles can be heard saying at the beginning of the 1993 documentary* Un Américain à Tanger*. "Then, suddenly, I decided to write books instead... There’s nothing to say about either the music or the books. I hate talking about myself. I’ve got nothing to say." In another documentary, 1998’s Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, the author says, "There was no violence in my life ever—maybe that’s why I gave up writing music."
Maybe so, but on Music of Morocco he has plenty to say. True to his word, though, he says almost nothing about himself. Though his voluminous notes, reprinted here from his own journal, do at times provide first-person accounts of his travels, they do so only to serve a better understanding of what you’re hearing. In fact, "understanding" might be an understatement. The thoroughness of Bowles’ ethnomusicological narration (not to mention the way project producer Philip D. Schuyler organizes and adds to that narration) more or less gives listeners a crash course in the social, historical, and musical basis for four-and-a-half-hours’ worth of music.
Originally released in 1972 as a (now long-out-of-print) 2-record set, this new presentation more than doubles the total runtime, restoring each individual performance to its original length—a crucial difference considering that several of these pieces stretch to 10-15 minutes or more. Bowles separated the music into two major categories: the music of North Africa’s Berber people on one LP and Arab- and Sub-Saharan-influenced music on another. Schuyler, an ethnomusicologist on faculty at the University of Washington, explains that Bowles regarded Berber music and culture as reflective of the "real" Morocco and thought of the Arabic influence as an invasive "contagion."
Schuyler’s new track sequence remains faithful to Bowles’ delineation between those two musical strains, but he does point out that the Arab influence had been steeping in Morocco for a thousand years by the time Bowles arrived. (Schuyler got to consult with Bowles on the project before the author’s death in 1999.) And while it’s certainly not necessary to approach the liner notes as a textbook in order to enjoy the music, the uninitiated will undoubtedly have trouble distinguishing between sounds that Bowles had learned to tell apart. On the other hand, the running order at first comes across as disparate and somewhat disconnected—as if playback had been a secondary consideration.
But the musical variety proves to be an asset in the long run. You may not initially be able place the various rhythmic and harmonic modes that bob and weave in what at first seems like one giant pool of music. But the more you listen, the more you can discern how the various motifs inter-relate and complement one another. After a while, as you get acclimated and your hearing comes into better focus, the entire 4xCD swath starts to play less like a haphazard gumbo of sounds and more like a series of carefully laid-out fabrics.
Regardless, it requires zero background info to be struck right away by three key aspects: repetition, cadence, and the fluidity of North African melodic scales. Bowles and Schuyler expound at great length on all the above, but suffice it to say that much of this music induces a powerful hypnotic effect. In the 1970 documentary Paul Bowles in Morocco, the author recalls how he once saw a man walk into a Moroccan café where a group of musicians were playing. As the man grew more entranced by the music, he started to slash his own arms and legs with a knife—in rhythm as the musicians kept playing. While that’s certainly on the extreme end, it’s a good illustration of how transportive this music can be—not unlike the way American gospel or Haitian ceremonial music can move people into altered states.
Of course, Music of Morocco offers a deeply satisfying experience even if you don’t get that carried away. For some perspective: Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix significantly enriched their work when they trained their sights on North Africa, but their exposure was limited. When Bowles put his Alan Lomax hat on and made these tapes, he had lived in the country for well over a decade. Unfamiliar listeners will no doubt find the flow of this music alien, its meter unfolding in seemingly lopsided patterns the way separate sets of wooden chimes clatter randomly as the wind strikes them. But the form in that clatter becomes evident over time. Moreover, Bowles’ attention to detail shows that he didn’t just regard this stuff as brightly-colored wallpaper or background scenery, but as the living, breathing pulse of the place he chose to call home. When approaching this box, it pays to ditch your notions of how glamorous it was for emotionally desiccated, self-destructive figures like William Burroughs and late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones to feed their habits in an "exotic" locale, the allure of the North African desert a mere backdrop in the arc of their crash-and-burn stories. Unlike his peers, Paul Bowles wasn’t content to just disappear into a cloud of hash smoke.
And so it makes sense that Music of Morocco is such an eye-opening, immersive document, the kind we’d expect from someone who’s spent time in a country getting to know its way of life but who could still make observations (or simply observe) as a guest. And if you’re a fan of Bowles’ novels, don’t expect the indulgent prose that’s all too typical of writers who can’t help but phrase everything as if they were reading aloud in front of an audience. Thankfully, as Schuyler explains, Bowles—a college dropout—didn’t identify as an academic, so he doesn’t come off as pedantic either. (One of the CD sleeves describes his writing as "spare, precise, and carefully assembled.") Because he didn’t lay it on thick in his journal, and because Schuyler refrains from fawning, the faux-leather, 120-page book that comes with this box actually works as standalone reading material that you'd want to keep at your bedside table or pack in your travel bag.
For a record label that’s built its reputation in large part on top-notch presentation standards, Dust-To-Digital, along with Rounder Records’ Bill Nowlin, have outdone themselves this time with a breathtaking package and sleek art direction courtesy of Barbara Bersche. If either you’ve lost sight of or continue to lament the disappearance of the physical object in recorded music, you couldn’t dream of a better reminder than this set. Words just don’t do justice to how it feels holding Music of Morocco in your hands, or to its stately elegance sitting on your shelf. And if you’re looking for an entry point into the soul of a people via its music, you simply can’t do better than Music of Morocco. Consider it essential regardless of your musical tastes or background. | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Dust-to-Digital | April 20, 2016 | 8.9 | 80820ed3-ad46-4476-b5da-79f467b6da44 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
George Lewis Jr. of Twin Shadow has always made music that felt rooted in '80s pop radio, a moment when thundering drum machines and vocal overdubs stormed the Earth. Here he's trying for something even more grand, but the trouble with big leaps is that they can come with precipitous drop-offs. | George Lewis Jr. of Twin Shadow has always made music that felt rooted in '80s pop radio, a moment when thundering drum machines and vocal overdubs stormed the Earth. Here he's trying for something even more grand, but the trouble with big leaps is that they can come with precipitous drop-offs. | Twin Shadow: Eclipse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20321-eclipse/ | Eclipse | In 2010, George Lewis, Jr. released Forget, a small and evocative synth-pop record dotted with sense-memory details: "Here’s all I know/ Your checkered room and your velvet bow/ Your Elvis song in my ear," he crooned. The record was a success, but Lewis seemed impatient with the smaller-scale stardom it brought, and made his hunger for bigger stages plain in interviews. On his 2012 follow-up Confess, he upped the stakes, projecting in a booming, testosterone-rich voice over massive pop-rock tracks. It was a self-consciously spectacular pop record, and it solidified Lewis as someone eager to make Big Statements.
It’s easy to root for artists with this drive—the bedroom-to-stadium leap, when it goes right, is thrilling to witness, and major statements (and artists’ desires to make them) are a large part of what makes following music so worthwhile in the first place. The trouble with big leaps is that they can come with precipitous drop-offs, and on Eclipse Lewis plummets, hard, into a valley of deep ridiculousness.
Lewis’s influences have always felt rooted in '80s pop radio, when thundering drum machines and vocal overdubs stormed the Earth. On Eclipse, the sound edges into the twilight of '88, a moment when power ballads like Chicago’s "Look Away" ruled the airwaves. The dewy piano of "Alone", coupled with Lewis’s echo-drenched vocal, summon unwelcome memories of Richard Marx’s "Right Here Waiting". As he did with Confess, Lewis produces, and on Eclipse he pushes everything so far to the brink that it all tips over. The album sounds like the work of Ron Nevison, whose late-'80s work for Damn Yankees and Jefferson Starship set a new standard for what it meant to sound "overblown."
On Confess, Lewis gave us an outsized performance of masculinity that felt slippery, or at least self-aware, and a lot of that complexity lived in the dynamics. The choruses were massive, but the verses were taut and punchy, and the two worked in tandem. On Eclipse, that nuance is mostly erased, as is nearly any dynamic marking south of ffffffff. Most of the album is delivered in a triumphal shout. The chorus of "To the Top" punches the top of the mix so hard that there is almost nothing left to feel except stunned, and it carries a dangerous whiff of Dirk Diggler performing "You’ve Got the Touch".
Lewis dials back the volume once or twice on Eclipse, and each time it’s a welcome reprieve. "Old Love/New Love" is a legitimately sexy, fluid dance-pop song, marked out with a side-chained four-to-the-floor pulse and house pianos. The big, blocky synths of "When the Lights Turn Out" are slightly reminiscent of '80s Jam & Lewis, and Lewis’s voice is light and pretty above them. It might have a slight whiff of aerobicizing to it, but it’s sincere, and it’s possible, if you squint, to imagine it playing alongside One Direction (a huge compliment, in this case).
Playing next to One Direction is Lewis’s goal, and he is admirably focused and direct about it. "I hate when people that are definitely in the indie world posture themselves as pop stars when they lack the ambition, practice, and craft of someone who is at the top of their game in pop," he told Pitchfork in January. His disdain is rooted in a competitive impulse to swim with the big fish—he has also submitted material for Chris Brown and Eminem—and Eclipse, which is also his first album on Warner Bros., is his bid to join them. But the music feels wedged between weight classes—too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop. Say this for Eclipse: It doesn’t miss by half measures. | 2015-03-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | March 20, 2015 | 4.9 | 8083aa06-14be-439f-9138-b59d5fd4c1d2 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
In the 37-minute piece that comprises his first solo album since 2005, the Mountains multi-instrumentalist ditches the distractions of the attention economy to luxuriate in a stream of consciousness. | In the 37-minute piece that comprises his first solo album since 2005, the Mountains multi-instrumentalist ditches the distractions of the attention economy to luxuriate in a stream of consciousness. | Brendon Anderegg: June | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brendon-anderegg-june/ | June | Deep listening, extended listening, immersive listening—these are not novel concepts, but they do seem increasingly radical, and perhaps even endangered. Every year, the apparently irreversible march of technology chips away at our ability to focus, one crumbling nanosecond at a time. The attention economy turns concentration transactional, substituting red-dot rewards for the fluid pleasures of the stream of consciousness. Songs get shorter. Hooks sharpen. Images simplify, optimized for thumbnail view.
That’s not to say that great art is impossible in a distracted age. The young rapper-producer Tierra Whack recently proved that some ideas are so potent, they don’t need much runway. Her debut album found new dimensions in pop by breaking it open and letting the pieces tumble out like the insides of a kaleidoscope to reveal 15 perfectly proportioned baubles, each exactly one minute long. But to fashion music after the long tidal arc instead of the hiccup of the wired dopamine drip is to defend a different sort of value system. It is to decouple attention from economy, to insist that there need not always be a payoff.
Brendon Anderegg’s music has long been keyed to subtlety. In the early 2000s, recording solo under just his surname, he harnessed field recordings, tape loops, and electronics into crackling, rustling configurations not much more forceful than the scrape of a turned page. His duo Mountains, with Koen Holtkamp, channeled acoustic instruments into blissfully shimmering soundscapes imbued with the scent of the American heartland—a homegrown riposte to European cosmic music (he also occasionally mixes and engineers videos for Pitchfork’s video team).
June is Anderegg’s first major solo release in well over a decade. A single, 37-minute piece, it represents the most focused, minimalist music of his career. The first thing you notice is the suppleness of the sound: a lone synthesizer, twitching and bending at the edges, like a scrap of paper as it burns. That thin, twisting filament of tone is soon joined by a fluttering chord. There are no audible attacks, no traces of a key being pressed; sounds slink into earshot like Spanish dancers rippling across a diver’s peripheral vision. These are the elements that carry the listener through the next half-hour, shifting and morphing. Occasionally they drift down to a bassy near-silence; in the climactic final third of the piece, they build themselves back up into buzzing thickets of chords overlaid with aquatic gurgles, a spray of pulse and overtones reminiscent of Emeralds’ What Happened.
The music’s meandering flow resists interpretation; even its constituent parts—is that a synthesizer patch or a glassy scrap of feedback?—can defy identification. There is a lyrical quality to the melody, such as it is, an unmistakably expressive dimension to the way it twists and turns. Still, it is possible to imagine this as a composition with no guiding hand behind it—that Anderegg simply set the knobs on his boxes just so, flipped a switch, and walked away while the tape was running.
This ambiguity is the album’s defining quality. The pulses are quick, but the pacing is slow. There is little distinction between background and foreground. It’s impossible to say what is intentional and what is incidental. Is this “ambient music”? Yes and no; it is, above all, a music of in-betweenness. And in an increasingly binary world, that very slipperiness counts for quite a lot. June is equally suited for focused listening and gentle background hum, and it is entirely possible, over the course of its run, to toggle back and forth between the two states. That ability to cut a third way between attention and distraction is precisely what makes June feel so freeing. | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | June 22, 2018 | 7.4 | 808b5e79-c955-4fc2-8464-51c5c9bb2844 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Where his 1975 album Neighborhoods was rooted in the sounds of community, these previously unreleased archival recordings capture the Oregon wilderness in synths, zither, and field recordings. | Where his 1975 album Neighborhoods was rooted in the sounds of community, these previously unreleased archival recordings capture the Oregon wilderness in synths, zither, and field recordings. | Ernest Hood: Back to the Woodlands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ernest-hood-back-to-the-woodlands/ | Ernest Hood: Back to the Woodlands | In an endless sea of reissues from the world of early ambient music, Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods remains a beacon of light shining through the fog. Layered with field recordings of children running and playing, the 1975 curio has a warm, friendly air; where other electronic music of the era often sought transcendence in the stars or on the spiritual plane, Ernest Hood found it at the candy shop down the street. Confined to a wheelchair after being stricken with polio in his late twenties, Hood turned to sound as his connection to the world, mixing stray recordings from around his home in Portland with lush zither and synthesizer compositions, creating a woozy and nostalgic ode to community in the process. Much as Brian Wilson imagined Smile as a “teenage symphony to God,” Neighborhoods found a flicker of the divine in the buzz of a bustling playground.
Unlike Neighborhoods, which had been known to collectors for years prior to its 2019 reissue, Back to the Woodlands gathers unheard material. Recorded between 1972 and 1982 in what the notes identify only as “Western Oregon,” the music on Back to the Woodlands is clearly cut from the same cloth, but the pigmentation is different: Gone are the snatched bits of idle conversation that gave Neighborhoods its surreal sense of small-town charm. The synthesizers have yielded to a more acoustic palette that summons the tranquility of Oregon’s majestic wilds. It may not reach quite the same level of eccentric whimsy as its predecessor, but its soft patchwork of sounds also means it’s the easier listen of the two.
The Oregon Coast is home to some of the most stunning landscapes in the United States, and Hood captures its mystery with his fairy-tale zithers and babbling brook field recordings. On “Dusk,” his synthesizers hang in the air like the fog rolling into Astoria, tense blocks of notes floating in a strangely eerie calm. “Into the Groves” spills over with all the radiance of a mossy waterfall, as Hood plays dizzying arpeggios that slowly dissolve into shimmering sweeps across the strings. The real delights are when Hood taps directly into the feeling of being a young child wandering through the forest. In “Pleasant, This Garden,” he tiptoes along a plucked pattern reminiscent of a slowed-down Django Reinhardt swing—one of his original musical obsessions. “Bedroom of the Absent Child,” meanwhile, sways upon golden fingerpicked chords, its gentle melody winding up and down like a music box, each tinny note just barely tumbling out one at a time.
There’s a samey tone to some of the stretches throughout Back to the Woodlands, making the moments where Hood breaks from his swooning ambience to venture into playful new territory feel all the more vital. With its jazzy flutes, “The Jantzen Rag (Raccoons)” has all the mischievous innocence of a Vince Guaraldi waltz, while the hammering synth notes of “Fragrant Duff” spring forth like butterflies flapping their wings over a field of flowers. But even in its tamer segments, Back to the Woodlands offers a rich new perspective on Hood’s wondrous world. Where Neighborhoods elicited the reassuring feeling of living in a community where everyone knows your name, Back to the Woodlands accesses a more primitive, elemental sense of magic. | 2022-12-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Freedom to Spend | December 5, 2022 | 7.2 | 808c6ad0-061a-4104-9e3f-9b70f02e0419 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Chad Ubovich is already a proven guitar hero, having played in Fuzz and with Mikal Cronin. His second Meatbodies album is a mellower, full-band effort with more psychedelic textures than before. | Chad Ubovich is already a proven guitar hero, having played in Fuzz and with Mikal Cronin. His second Meatbodies album is a mellower, full-band effort with more psychedelic textures than before. | Meatbodies: Alice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22862-alice/ | Alice | As California garage rock was recently enjoying a hot streak of sorts, Meatbodies emerged with a 2014 debut that asserted them as wreckers to be reckoned with. Songs like “Disorder,” with its fast, beefy, infectious hook, could hang with Ty Segall’s most rabid material. (It helps, of course, that Segall himself played bass and drums on that track.) It was an album with layers—one where earworm hooks and massive guitar solos wove together with gradual, acoustic psychedelia. Frontman and Meatbodies mastermind Chad Ubovich was already a proven guitar hero from his tenure in Fuzz and Mikal Cronin’s live band. With Meatbodies, he showed that he was an artist who could craft a strong rock album all on his own.
On Alice, Meatbodies test the limits of their capabilities by wading into murkier waters: they made a concept album. The overarching story isn’t exactly spelled out, but the album is filled with strange characters and over-the-top symbolism. Alice, from the title track, leaves men bloody and foaming on the ground. “Disciples” is sung from the perspective of a king who declares himself “the idol,” relishes the fealty of his apostles, and demands his subjects keep their feelings to themselves. Sisyphus, Bethlehem, martyrs, rolling stones, bombs, burning oceans, and translucent flesh are all ingredients in Alice’s narrative slurry. Near Biblical images of torture come before concerns about whether or not to check your texts first thing in the morning. There’s likely some allegory in there, but in the chaos, it’s difficult to parse what exactly they’re going for.
It’s fine, though, since the lyrical fire and brimstone is a natural fit for Meatbodies’ well-honed thrash. That said, the band behind Alice is a different beast than the one on Meatbodies. The debut album’s massive sound fell largely on the shoulders of Ubovich, who played most of the instruments himself (with an assist from Segall). Alice is a proper full-band effort. While Ubovich still plays multiple instruments, and his guitar solos take a good share of the spotlight (especially the monster that opens “Disciples”), drummer Erik Jimenez keeps things frantic. Bassist Kevin Boog is responsible for the band’s monolithic low end this time. The biggest wrinkle in the band’s makeup comes with the addition of Patrick Nolan (of Walter), who trades lead vocal duties with Ubovich throughout. More voices means more variety, and the full band pack even more psychedelic textural experimentation than before.
While there are a few livewire moments that recall Meatbodies’ most exciting work—the triumphant riff from “Touchless,” for example—Alice doesn’t exactly come out swinging. It’s a more sedate record; mellow grooves and acoustic strumming make up its core infrastructure. On “Kings,” big, fuzzy guitar solos are largely just dressing—they sit alongside the synths, adding atmosphere instead of maintaining focus. “Gyre” is caked in fuzz and leads with a high drama guitar solo, but the song’s seven-minute runtime drags as the melody and instruments thin out. Several songs go on for a little too long, and the added guitar fireworks rarely overcome the repetitive, less interesting melodies. There’s not a standout hook that’s as immediate or exciting as 2014 tracks like “Him,” “Mountain,” or “Disorder.” That’s ultimately the trouble with Meatbodies’ concept record ambitions. A muddled narrative isn’t a big deal, but with Alice, Meatbodies have snuffed out a little too much of their old fire. | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | February 17, 2017 | 6.3 | 80925cfd-bb1a-43a1-b465-8d44b8c1d20b | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Kurt Wagner and co.'s masterful 11th album is one of the best to emerge from their strange, modest universe. | Kurt Wagner and co.'s masterful 11th album is one of the best to emerge from their strange, modest universe. | Lambchop: Mr. M | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16221-lambchop-mr-m/ | Mr. M | For the first 20 seconds of Mr. M, all the listener will hear is the sound of a string section, gliding, pretty, and warm, like something from an old Disney movie. The strings are followed by brushed, rolling snare drums. Soon, Kurt Wagner, the band's singer, stumbles into the mix. "Don't know what the fuck they talk about," he sings. His voice sounds beery and disoriented. It seems possible that he's in the wrong room.
Coming from some singers, the line might sound like a challenge, but coming from Wagner, it's a simple admission. Lambchop is a band that has spent the past 20 years in Nashville building its own idiosyncratic universe. For better and worse, the current state of music, its trends and its innovations, pass them by completely. Even during the days when alt-country seemed like a viable art form, Wagner's ornery sense of humor-- the kind that drives you to cap your album with a 40-second-long song called "I Sucked My Boss' Dick"-- made them seem totally out-of-step with their supposed contemporaries. In a lot of ways, Lambchop is a band that seems committed to its own irrelevance.
Irrelevance, though, isn't a burden for Lambchop as much as it is a jumping off point for what makes them them. "I see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors," goes one line on 2006's Damaged-- "I'm sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors." If you aren't sure who Jim Nabors is and you're still reading our reviews about I-rock saviors, you've unknowingly participated in Wagner's self-definition: He hears the conversation going on but damn if he'll take part in it.
Nothing on Mr. M is designed to pop, not in the conventional sense of the word. To describe the band's current style is to invoke genres with an almost negative cultural cachet: lounge, 1970s country, Burt Bacharach-- styles so fixated on sounding high-class that they run the risk of feeling trashy. On paper, Lambchop is a band that would appeal primarily to grandparents and drunks.
Wagner's voice is a low, wounded-sounding instrument whose character has only deepened with time (though Wagner, in his self-effacing Wagnerian way, has attributed it to cigarettes). At root, he's a crooner, but his croon sounds alternately fragile and gruff-- the elderly neighbor who returns your lost dog one day and commands you to step off his azaleas the next, spittle hanging from his lip.
His lyrics are a mix of minor, concrete observations and poetic flights. "We have crawled among the elements, taking pictures of our phones" is one. "Sleep makes you possible" is another. His writing has the power to transform the everyday into a mystery, but his voice-- and the music behind it-- attempts to transform the mystery into something unplugged and emotionally direct-- to make "The wine tasted like sunshine in a basement" sound a little bit like "I love you."
If Lambchop's music bears some essential ambition, it's to marry ambivalence and sentimentality. My favorite turn on Mr. M is on "Buttons", a portrait of a small-town loser by a narrator who seems to neither love nor hate the man he sings about. "Been better times for those that are in trouble," Wagner sings, "and maybe there'll be better times for you. The weight you've gained has made your head a bubble, and your button eyes are brown and not her-- black and blue."
On the last words-- "black and blue"-- Wagner's voice warps into an almost grotesque croon, like he's either about to giggle or weep over the string section, and yet the image in my head is of a pudgy, small-town loser and the woman who he may or may not have beaten with his own sad fists. What we are supposed to do with these mixed emotional cues, I have no idea. It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.
Apprehending Mr. M does not take a genius, nor does it take an English degree, nor does it take 180-gram vinyl and an $800 Scandanavian turntable with counterweights made out of rare geodes. What it does take, I think, is patience. I like tarted-up, throat-grabbing music as much as the next frantically inattentive twentysomething. I also find a deep satisfaction in Lambchop's subtlety, which never makes the mistake of thinking that being high-minded or instructive will get us over to their weird team. Nobody, not even the most depraved among us, needs to be slapped on the wrist in order to see beauty. And still, despite Wagner's protests that he doesn't know what the fuck they talk about, Mr. M sounds aware of itself as an argument-- an argument for the kind of patience the music on it demands.
And so we return to this idea of Lambchop's irrelevance. For the purpose of barroom reductions, Mr. M sounds like a bunch of guys tapping delicately on acoustic instruments from deep within a mausoleum, or the sound of wind blowing gently through the pages of an open book resting on a front-porch rocking chair. But how rare is it that a band asks you to listen to so little, and how much rarer is it that they make it sound like so much? | 2012-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge / City Slang | February 22, 2012 | 8.3 | 8092eb2b-83c8-4182-856c-f0c3583a3355 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The auspicious debut from the Chicago indie rock trio has the spontaneous feel of close friends bonding before the universe has a chance to pry them apart. | The auspicious debut from the Chicago indie rock trio has the spontaneous feel of close friends bonding before the universe has a chance to pry them apart. | Moontype: Bodies of Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moontype-bodies-of-water/ | Bodies of Water | When a close friend moves out of town, it can feel like a great song cutting off. Maybe you didn’t even realize you were being carried by the current of a friendship until its waves suddenly went flat when they left. Zoom could launch free hologram-conferencing; Apple could implant iMessage into our corneas; it wouldn’t make a difference. Life isn’t as good when they don’t live within 45 minutes.
“Ferry,” the centerpiece of the auspicious debut album from the Chicago indie rock trio Moontype, is a slow and sweeping song about this feeling. “I miss you before you’re gone,” murmurs singer and bassist Margaret McCarthy, before opening up into a chorus so full of yearning that the rest of the album seems to orbit around it. Throughout the album, McCarthy sounds like she’s haunted by those she can’t reach out and touch, by friendships unraveled by distance. She sings about friends who take incessant pictures of each other on “About You,” and who watch each other’s hands maneuver a venue’s mixing console together on “3 Weeks.” These moments comprise a compositionally busy but conceptually tight guitar album that’s less about what it means to be there for someone than what it means to actually, physically be there.
McCarthy, guitarist Ben Cruz, and drummer Emerson Hunton knew each other as classmates in their small midwest college music program, but only joined forces after reconnecting in their current city. Bodies of Water has the spontaneous feel of close friends bonding before the universe has a chance to pry them apart. But this theme only emerges with time. What you notice at first is Cruz’s aptitude for acrobatic jazz licks and steady rock melodies. Propelled by his skill, Moontype push in all different directions. At least four of these 12 songs dive into difficult time signatures as McCarthy, Cruz, and Hunton take turns leading an advanced game of Mirror Me, the others matching their wild gestures and pivots with ease. Cruz butts into the last 30 seconds of “Alpha” and “Stuck on You” with solos that take the songs on haphazard piggyback rides; the “Alpha” solo almost perfectly mimics hysterical giggling.
So when they pull back into solid 4/4, it’s remarkable how natural it sounds, as if to imply they could crank out whole albums of strong pop songs if they wanted. On the Ex Hex-esque “About You,” Cruz and Emerson coordinate a whiplash switch from tip-toeing staccato eighth notes to ringing chords and cymbals, like they’re flex-and-busting out of straitjackets. “3 Weeks” dials the volume all the way down for an acoustic moment, where McCarthy sings clearly and specifically about complicated platonic love, emulating Jens Lekman out of nowhere. After flaunting math-rock chops impressive enough to build a whole identity around, they abandon it for a folk song that you might hear on mainstream radio. It’s risky to stretch this far, but Moontype sound honest and unforced in both modes.
McCarthy’s lyrics paint in soft strokes, establishing the stakes without insisting on the details, while the band colors in the rest of the picture. On “Your Mom,” Cruz plays in dreary grayscale, alternating between light-raindrop notes on the verses and thunderous chords on the chorus, while McCarthy narrates the scene of a friend in shambles. A supportive but unwilling witness, she never spells it out, but you get a few ideas of what might have happened, and none are pretty: “Your mom is here for the day/And she’ll make sure that you’re OK/And hold you like she did before,” she sings. Cruz’s range and McCarthy’s economy are impressive, but the song’s emotional honesty comes from a place deeper than skill. The album radiates with appreciation for the simple but irreplaceable power of a friend in the room—whether that’s a present reality or a distant memory.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Born Yesterday | April 5, 2021 | 7.6 | 8095a65c-8ac6-4745-b19f-5fa79cfadcbb | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
After fusing J-Pop and heavy metal to great fanfare, the duo recruit international guests to expand their sound into even more unlikely hybrids. | After fusing J-Pop and heavy metal to great fanfare, the duo recruit international guests to expand their sound into even more unlikely hybrids. | Babymetal: Metal Galaxy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babymetal-metal-galaxy/ | Metal Galaxy | On their unruly 2014 debut, the Japanese pop-metal outfit Babymetal pinballed from blastbeat belligerence to chiptune clap-alongs, adding a trap interlude for extra cultural currency. Two years later, they fortified the follow-up, Metal Resistance, with power ballads and alt-rock anthems. Their indiscriminate approach to approachability worked: Babymetal count Robs Zombie and Halford as fans, and their brutally cute ode to chocolate ranks as one of this decade’s essential viral oddities. On the day they released their third record, Metal Galaxy, they headlined The Forum.
Metal Galaxy is a loose concept album about being dispatched to a distant part of the universe. “We are on an odyssey to the Metal Galaxy/Please fasten your neck brace,” they greet us over a Sleigh Bells-sized, guitar-and-sequencer stomp. But then, that thread mostly disappears, and the real conceit emerges: After touring the world, Babymetal recruit a half-dozen international collaborators to widen their musical net even further. There is a guest verse from Thai rapper F.Hero on “Pa Pa Ya!!” and faceless growling from Canadian grunter Alissa White-Gluz on “Distortion,” which sounds like a Hot Topic-commissioned cover of Taylor Swift. Without the help of guests, Babymetal nod to Bollywood and the Miami Sound Machine. It is an exultant, near-absolute mess.
Now a duo after the mysterious departure of Yuimetal last year, Babymetal are still at their best when they hover around their initial idea—harnessing the energy of metal and J-Pop into high-flying hybrids. Metal Galaxy’s closing stretch of songs do just that; the arcing “Kagerou” boasts one of their most undeniable choruses, and you can visualize the epic sweep of stage lights and lighter-wielding throngs on “Shine.” Babymetal have rarely sounded as natural or convincing as they do in these moments.
Otherwise, Metal Galaxy teems with embarrassing gimmickry. At the start of “Night Night Burn!,” keyboards mimic mariachi trumpets and the vocalists duet with cumbia drums, shouting “Hola! Ma, Mamma Mia!” like they’ve just emerged from a Gloria Estefan nightmare. During “Shanti Shanti Shanti,” they intone in Sanskrit over tamboura drones and sitar samples, offering a cringey Bollywood approximation.
At least those songs are listenable. “Oh! MAJINAI,” an abomination with Joakim Brodén, the lead singer from power metal cosplayers Sabaton, suggests the Dropkick Murphys playing mean at Halloween. “Let’s make a wish!” they yell together in pirate patois. OK, then: Here’s hoping this never happens again.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Cooking Vinyl / earMUSIC | October 16, 2019 | 4.7 | 80a0e843-2fbe-435f-bc38-54a0485201d9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The debut album from the Young Thug protégé is an exhilarating opening salvo by an artist who only occasionally seems in full control of his considerable talent—which is half the fun. | The debut album from the Young Thug protégé is an exhilarating opening salvo by an artist who only occasionally seems in full control of his considerable talent—which is half the fun. | Yung Kayo: DFTK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-kayo-down-for-the-kount/ | DFTK | So few things of interest happen in the text of Yung Kayo’s music that it must be by design. References to fashion labels (constant) and guns (occasional) seldom create any narrative tension, and are instead mere mise-en-scène for songs that reach for what is communicable only through sound design or pure performance. In fact, for someone so nominally obsessed with the things he can buy and wear, the physical world can seem like an impediment to Kayo. Take the way he raps on “no sense,” one of the many dreamlike songs from his debut album, DFTK: “I had to look at my neck/The chain is so heavy it's holding me down,” as if this VVS anchor is the only thing to stop him from simply floating away.
Still a teenager, Kayo (as in K.O., as in “knockout”) recently moved to Los Angeles from his native Washington, D.C., where his father was a go-go DJ. He began rapping around 10 years old when an older brother purchased a microphone; by 15, he was releasing singles and walking in runway shows. But where a decade ago this sort of high-low tension—Kayo’s Vogue appearances and Yak Gotti collaborations standing in for A$AP Rocky’s Rick Owens and Lord Infamous obsessions—led to frenzied press campaigns and breathtaking record deals, Kayo has spent the last few years refining his array of vocal styles and taste in production largely out of view of the adult world and the industries it controls.
His first creative breakthrough came in 2019, on a song called “Glitch.” Produced by Warpstr—who would become a reliable collaborator, and who handles virtually all of DFTK—that song sounds somehow both busy and stripped to the bone, using ad-libs used as architecture in a way that makes “Glitch” seem to breathe on its own. It intrigued Young Thug, who flew Kayo to L.A. and recorded with him for several weeks, eventually signing the young rapper to his YSL imprint. From “Glitch,” Kayo evidently went searching for a style of contemporary rap he couldn’t master, flitting between white-hot growls, round-edged crooning, and exultant singing.
DFTK is not a comprehensive survey of everything Kayo can do as a vocalist. It smartly excises the flatter, more predictable modes he occasionally lapsed into on his earlier EPs, instead finding him at his most concentratedly chaotic, a steady dose of ungovernable energy. Like “Glitch” and his better work from the intervening years, it sounds like a computer booting up from deep in hell; it has as much in common with PC Music as with Swamp Izzo tapes. (Its most arresting guest spot comes not from the buzzing Portland rapper Yeat, but the experimental producer and vocalist Eartheater, who wails halfway through “hear you.”) It’s an exhilarating opening salvo by an artist who only occasionally seems in full control of his considerable talent, an impression that makes the already jittery DFTK all the more unpredictable.
While his writing only rarely carries thoughts to anything like their natural conclusions, Kayo’s phraseology is slyly engaging. As with the chain that keeps him tied to Earth, the banality of certain stock expressions sometimes underlines just how badly he wants to reach some higher, more emotionally honest plane. See one of the album’s best songs, the desperate “believer,” where the couplet “We was supposed to link up/It was supposed to be us” hinges on how insufficient “link up” is for communicating the connection he feels—or seeks—with someone else. On “crystal clear,” he warns that his shooters will “kill for the blue bills,” a description of hundred-dollar notes so odd it’s like he’s only seen them only once or twice. (That song also has one of the album’s only funny moments: “Your homeboy, he run out of Oxys/Me and my bitch, we keep doing the opposite,” an utterly bizarre, yet deeply effective structure for a boast.)
But DFTK is best experienced as a fugue, where one gut feeling dissolves into another the way a robbery on “over” is forgotten nearly as soon as it’s mentioned. Kayo’s music is a study in impulse, and occasionally in excess: opener “down (one kount)” seems as if it might teeter into preening pop-punk revival, but lands closer to his mentor’s best experiments in digital pop. At a time when teenaged songwriters are being praised for their emotional acuity, this—an album that opens and closes with the artist comparing himself to the Joker—is perhaps the most interesting artifact, a reminder of the depth that can be found in what we cannot strictly say. | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life | February 9, 2022 | 8.2 | 80a8cc9c-527e-4520-bc3d-148413b02689 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The Chicago producer’s 2013 album Legacy affirmed his place in footwork’s vanguard. On a new collection of archival work, his loop-heavy tracks sound as raw, dizzying, and psychedelic as ever. | The Chicago producer’s 2013 album Legacy affirmed his place in footwork’s vanguard. On a new collection of archival work, his loop-heavy tracks sound as raw, dizzying, and psychedelic as ever. | RP Boo: Legacy Volume 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rp-boo-legacy-volume-2/ | Legacy Volume 2 | It’s a bold move to title your first album Legacy, but by 2013 Kavain Space had earned the right. The Chicago producer, better known as RP Boo, was already legendary in his hometown, having spent the mid ’90s DJing for the House-O-Matics dance crew at parties across the South Side. In 1997, he released “Baby Come On,” which many view as the origin point of the frenetic footwork style. The track features syncopated drums churning around 160 bpm, the preferred tempo of footwork producers, and an Ol’ Dirty Bastard sample chopped and looped ad infinitum. Boo released the mixtape Dude Off 59th Street in 2007 and contributed two tracks to Planet Mu’s essential 2010 collection Bangs & Works Vol.1 (A Chicago Footwork Compilation). Legacy, though an archival release, was a complete statement of purpose, a crucial document of his madcap ability to sculpt snarky vocal taunts, jagged chunks of pop hits, and skittering drums into otherworldly club cuts.
A decade later, RP Boo offers us Legacy Vol. 2, a sequel equally worthy of the title. Vol. 2 returns to the beginning of the millennium, collecting pieces recorded between 2002 and 2007 (both “Eraser” and “Total Darkness” appear on Bangs & Works). Though he would later begin composing in Ableton, Boo made all of his early work with the minimalist arsenal of an Akai MPC and a Roland R-70 drum machine, and he leaves the songs’ seams visible, which can feel jarring at first. Some loops lope haphazardly, ending with the staccato click of a digital artifact; it often sounds like Boo is triggering samples in real time. He deliberately sets clashing sounds against each other, like the horror-movie drone and “Live and Let Die” vocal sample of opener “Eraser,” and adjusting to the lurching, hyperactive rhythms can take some patience. Though the music sprang from Chicago house, footwork deliberately deconstructs that genre’s quantized, four-on-the-floor grid—the guiding pulse just isn’t there in most cases.
But that slipperiness is what makes RP Boo’s music—and footwork in general—so spellbinding. Taken out of the context of the dance battles Boo would DJ, the odd time signatures and unpredictable bass drops meant to confuse and challenge dancers wash into a mind-bending blur. “Heavy Heat,” which samples the theme from the 1964 film Mothra vs. Godzilla, crushes the horn melody into a quick succession of fluttering stabs. Boo underpins the frantic sample with sub-bass triplets, an off-time kick, and stuttering snares. It’s completely intense, but after a while, the relentless repetition takes on a woozy, psychedelic quality.
Boo’s production is just as disorienting when slowed down. On the mid-tempo ballad “B.O.T.O.,” elements slowly merge into each other like beads of mercury. A lopsided sample from Diddy’s “All About the Benjamins” initially sounds as if a drunk partygoer keeps bumping into the turntable, but Boo fills the extra spaces with claps and hi-hats. Once a gorgeous sitar sample comes in, “B.O.T.O.” coalesces into a dreamy groove; it’s impossible to remember the song’s off-kilter beginnings.
Though RP Boo pioneered footwork, many producers have followed his lead and expanded the genre. The late DJ Rashad’s classic Double Cup presents footwork as the soundtrack to neon-lit hedonism; Jlin’s compositions on Dark Energy vibrate with palpable ferocity and anger; Jana Rush’s Pariah sends footwork rhythms through a warped Venetian Snares lens. The tendrils of RP Boo’s innovations also reach beyond the dancefloor. Chicago drill’s cavernous bass and ricocheting percussion bear markings of Boo’s experiments. The insistent, anxious handclaps in much contemporary Milwaukee rap echo RP Boo tracks like “Azzoutof Control.” His impact continues to reverberate past the limits of his hometown and genre—RP Boo’s groundbreaking legacy, though still being written, is unimpeachable. | 2023-05-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | May 17, 2023 | 8 | 80b66a6f-5041-44e9-bed3-773ca5dfe14c | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
Alec Ounsworth’s latest album is a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place. | Alec Ounsworth’s latest album is a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place. | Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: New Fragility | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clap-your-hands-say-yeah-new-fragility/ | New Fragility | Alec Ounsworth admits to having written only one political Clap Your Hands Say Yeah song in the band’s previous 15 years of existence—though, to be fair, it’s one of his most popular, 2005’s “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood.” Ounsworth has never been a particularly candid lyricist either, his intentions usually assumed through his staunch commitment to independence and occasional antagonistic streak. These qualities once epitomized an indie-rock era of peak preciousness and pacifism, and taking this same approach on CYHSY’s first album since 2017’s The Tourist wouldn’t just be dated, it’s basically inconceivable; artists, or really any empathetic being, are expected to be engaged, enraged, and open to expressing exactly how that feels. Ounsworth is no longer living in the abstract on New Fragility, the first CYHSY album in dialog with the outside world—and it’s a world of divorce, substance abuse, callous indifference to murder, and also bittersweet nostalgia for that bygone indie-rock era that gave him a platform in the first place.
Of course, your Facebook feed since 2016 tells you how this might go: being newly emboldened to say something about the accelerated decline of America doesn’t equate to having something new or profound to add. “Thousand Oaks” is an impassioned and righteous response to “an American massacre in Southern California,” inspired by the mass shooting at Borderline Bar and Grille that left 12 dead and 16 more injured. But like nearly all impassioned and righteous songs written in response to mass shootings, “Thousand Oaks” makes a sarcastic invocation of “thoughts and prayers” that feels as limp and cliché as the real thing, if exponentially less pernicious. Yet with stories like the ones in “Thousand Oaks,” Ounsworth’s point about how quickly mass casualties are forgotten only becomes more poignant.
He’s more compelling when taking an oblique approach in his politics. On “Hesitating Nation,” Ounsworth’s nervy delivery captures a kind of exhaustion that will feel familiar to just about anyone alive today. “All of god’s children are useless to me now,” Ounsworth moans midway through, merging his newfound idealistic zeal with the breathless urgency of CHYSY’s beloved debut.
New Fragility finds many other ways to impart Ounsworth’s contrarianism. Its title is taken from an essay by Twitter’s newfound bête noire David Foster Wallace. For the most part, New Fragility fixates on specific and footnoted memories of a devastating relationship, the kind of personal crises that refused to be put on hold no matter the threat of extinction-level events. The most striking lyrics are shot through with a startling bitterness at an ex’s expense: “You made a scene there at the festival/A European spectacle,” “I miss that lazy comedy of pulling you off the lawn.” But Ounsworth’s autonomy also results in “Went Looking For Trouble” getting completely derailed by the line, “the rain is falling and chases us like a rapist,” which is hardly a strong enough simile to justify itself.
On the whole, Ounsworth’s candor gives New Fragility a necessary charge as he leans into balladry. His voice is a natural fit for the theater: piercing, dramatic, and capable of far more emotional modulation than would’ve been expected in 2005. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah has forever been a DIY indie rock band, but the bravura vocal runs and ornate arrangements of “Went Looking For Trouble,” “Mirror Song,” and “Innocent Weight” prove Ounsworth’s visions go far beyond that. But he loses sight of the memorable melodic structures that propped up his most rickety arrangements. The no-fi closer “If I Were More Like Jesus” could be seen as a callback to the divisive intros of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Some Loud Thunder. But while those albums included the experiments right at the beginning when the listener’s patience and goodwill were at their peak; “If I Were Jesus” arrives after No Fragility’s longest stretch of tedium.
Ounsworth actually does bring the whole project full circle on “CYHSY, 2005,” a song diehards have probably been waiting for since the debut. Not because it’s a real reversion to that album in any meaningful way. But after years of trying to put his band’s unfathomable rise to blog-rock royalty behind him, Ounsworth boldly takes us there, doing away with the legend and printing the mundane—there’s no mention of David Bowie or David Byrne or the National, just emotional breakdowns in a Maine phone booth, dreary drives from Little Rock to Memphis to Texas. “All I wanted to do was stay home/But who am I to question fate/There I go again setting up the next stage,” Ounsworth sings, capturing the mixed emotions of a guy given the Golden Ticket, living the dream, and quickly realizing it was someone else’s.
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. | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | CYHSY | February 17, 2021 | 6.4 | 80bc70ed-6ea9-41cf-8d71-1738258dbf6a | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The 23-year old singer-songwriter Winston Yellen, blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism, recorded Night Beds' debut in a Nashville house once owned by Johnny Cash. It's a sad, beautiful collection showcasing a young talent loved and lost beyond his years. | The 23-year old singer-songwriter Winston Yellen, blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism, recorded Night Beds' debut in a Nashville house once owned by Johnny Cash. It's a sad, beautiful collection showcasing a young talent loved and lost beyond his years. | Night Beds: Country Sleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17656-country-sleep/ | Country Sleep | "Well, you wonder why I always dress in black." "I wear black on the outside, 'cause black is how I feel on the inside." Six of one, half dozen of the other, right? And yet, what do we have to show for the past three decades of trying to find common ground between the barroom and the bedsit? Ryan Adams' Love Is Hell? Pernice Brothers? Hell, don't sleep on a couple joints from the first Pete Yorn album. But is that gonna cut it? Whether you think it's more promising from an artistic or a commercial standpoint, Night Beds' Country Sleep shows you just how wide open this lane really is. Upon first listen, you're struck with the thought of "Wow, this could be really popular." Because for a lot of people, nothing cuts through the noise like a 23-year old singer-songwriter who wants to tell you over either acoustic guitars or weepy, reverbed ones how he drank, loved and lost beyond his years. Winston Yellen, essentially the creative body of Night Beds, does both. And in a lot of ways, Country Sleep delivers while still making you feel like it's playing on your vulnerability, the Pavlovian response to this stuff: It wants you to feel your own pain as much as it allows you to feel Yellen's.
That said, Yellen is kind of the real deal. His past couple of years have been itinerant, dropping out college, having been relieved of both jobs and girlfriends, traveling across the country and eventually writing Country Sleep in a Nashville house once owned by none other than Johnny Cash himself. Dude had to take out some loans to get it done, but I swear, labels should be giving out scholarships for this sort of thing if you've got a voice like Yellen's. The guy is blessed with jump-out-of-the-gym vocal athleticism and throughout Country Sleep, it's unclear whether he's a showoff or if he's still trying to figure out how to corral it. Though there’s a fair share of C&W formalism and cask-aged drawl, Yellen's more of a Buckley or even a Banhart in terms of his ability to work without strcuture. A diva, in other words. That much is clear from a cappella opener "Faithful Heights", which ascends from a maudlin moan to a holler by its end. On the opposite side, there's "Even If We Try", audio lemon meringue that's little more than a couple of fluffy chords and Yellen's tart falsetto in waltz time before shifting to a fiddle-led reverie.
It's all very disarming and Country Sleep talks a good game and looks the part like the beautiful, new stranger in town. And it all comes down to whether or not you want to ask it the tough questions. "Ramona" is an instantly ingratiating piece of twang-free alt-country, rollicking acoustic strums, gliding lead riffs on guitar rather than pedal steel and a good ol' "fuck" thrown in to seal the alt- deal. But as you listen to him describe this girl, stunted by religion and a vague social anxiety, flawed in all the right ways and salvageable through Yellen, you start to get Manti Te'o on the brain and wonder, has he actually met someone like Ramona? Or is she just a construct that makes for a narrative that's easy to grasp? In fact, is the guy singing this song real? I dunno, but judging from that billowy coda, she sure is pretty.
So yeah, even if it's steeped in genres whose appeal often rests on the authenticity of one's sadness, it's beautiful enough for you to feel guilty about refusing to totally suspend your disbelief. The guy might strive to present himself as a Heartbreaker, but he's much better playing the softie. While "Lost Springs" and "Was I For You?" are certainly breakup balm, it's the over-the-counter stuff. He repeats "I don't wanna feel this," towards the end of the former, though my guess is that you actually do want to feel this. It's a kind of lovesickness that feels manageable, even somewhat attractive. And hell, you're probably already inspired to make your next crush playlist, which will include tracks from Country Sleep. A propulsive, be-quiet-and-drive song at its core, the hushed "22" drops the top to let in the sound of crickets and sparkling strings. Likewise, after an untethered falsetto introduces "Wanted You In August", everything stops for Yellen to intone "I want you" and the stars go blue, evoking the humidity and romantic allure of southern, summer nights-- the double meaning of the word "pine" practically invented Yellen's lyrical style.
But while he plays the part of a guy born into an abundance of inherited sadness, how much of it is his own? It's a question that keeps arising from a musical and a lyrical standpoint. Point blank, if you locked Ryan Adams in a room for an hour with an acoustic guitar and demanded he write five songs, one of them would probably be 97% like "Cherry Blossoms". The five-minute closer "TENN" suggests it's the most autobiographical song on Country Sleep, but it's one where you need to retrofit his bio so that its epigram-- "sorrow stole my youth/ what's left I'll give to you"-- hits the way it should. For the time being, Yellen nails letting the sound and emotional tenor of Country Sleep give us the gist: we were supposed to rise above, but we sink into the ocean, he's waiting to derail, he loves the feeling when he goes out, dancing with the women at the bar. Yellen might not have too much to say about his Nashville city nights that we haven't heard before, but Country Sleep works as a personal work about the shared experience of…how'd that song go? You were young and man, you were sad. | 2013-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | February 6, 2013 | 7.7 | 80bdf6a1-4bda-4235-96c9-6e6ca95bce86 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Moscow electronic musician and vocalist’s third album treats the haphazard textures of everyday life with a refreshingly playful sensibility. | The Moscow electronic musician and vocalist’s third album treats the haphazard textures of everyday life with a refreshingly playful sensibility. | Kedr Livanskiy: Liminal Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kedr-livanskiy-liminal-soul/ | Liminal Soul | Fun is a central tenet of Yana Kedrina’s music. Liminal Soul, the Moscow-based producer and vocalist’s third album as Kedr Livanskiy, is defined by a wide-eyed, magnanimous playfulness, an openness to quirk that doesn’t inhibit the seriousness of her message. Listen to the way the chirp of birdsong seems to jumpstart a clattering footwork beat on “Celestial Ether,” or the way that, seconds after the album’s final synth aria seems to have drawn to a close on “Storm Dancer,” it returns for one more bar, a tiny, winking encore. These are vignettes that, like a viral video of a puppy riding a duck, feel unprompted and unaffected, born from a less cynical place than most things of this world. In Kedrina’s music, as in life, moments of spontaneous joy blossom with the randomness and beauty of wildflowers from pavement.
Kedrina has been finding ways to suffuse experimental electronic music with the pleasantly haphazard textures of human life since her earliest records. Even the most meticulous producer can’t predict how their tracks will be heard in real life—how environments and substances might make a song sound entirely different from one person to the next—and Kedrina’s music reflects that uncertainty: one of the most disarming moments on her January Sun EP is when “Winds of May” slips into a higher pitch and back, like a tape changing speed; the reverb-heavy vocals on 2019’s Your Need constantly flicker in volume and tone, drifting as if carried on the wind from an entirely different song.
On Liminal Soul, Kedrina’s sleight-of-hand spatial tricks have become even more deft. A burbling synth line buried deep in “Teardrop” feels nestled in the song’s periphery; the first time I noticed it, I thought it was coming from an entirely different audio source. Many of these songs sound as if composed from elements of the world around you, an effect heightened by the fact of Kedrina’s voice, which echoes as if she’s calling to you from some far-off point in a sparse wood.
There’s an exception to Liminal Soul’s enveloping sound, and that’s “Boy,” the album’s only English-language song, and Kedrina’s first song written entirely in that language. Over a plush 2000s pop breakbeat and an arpeggiated synth line gently affected to sound like an acoustic guitar, Kedrina sings some of her most straightforwardly romantic lyrics: “I’m not lying to you boy/I don’t know why but/I can’t be with you boy.” In contrast to her default lyrical style, which focuses on nature and is laden with symbolism, “Boy” is almost comically vague. But that might be the point: Much of Liminal Soul feels designed to chart out the atmosphere of a natural landscape, and “Boy” plays like a pop song intruding on that vista, the hikers next to you blasting English-language pop from a UE Boom. Of course, Kedrina gets to have it both ways—“Boy” still succeeds as a pop ballad, the balletic grace of Kedrina’s voice lending the song appropriate pathos.
The irregularities of Kedrina’s music have, in the past, made it hard to clearly identify her contemporaries. Not so on Liminal Soul: Centering on communion with nature, this album feels of a piece with recent electronic records that embrace the embodied, humanizing potential of dance music. Like Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song and Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene, Liminal Soul uses elliptical structures, fragmented vocals, and airy, naturalistic tones to implore listeners to reacquaint themselves with the beauty and healing power of the natural world. It’s slightly less enamored with the textures of rave and techno than past Kedr Livanskiy records, and that’s a good thing: Kedrina allows moments of stillness, like the dubby final 40 seconds of “My Invisible” or the limpid choral parts that introduce “Teardrop,” to provide much-needed breathing space amid the wash of breakbeats and acidic synth lines. There’s new room here for Kedrina’s vocals—a necessary feature, considering how instructive they often feel. “Look at the sky, look at the sky, look at the sky,” she chants on “Stars Light Up,” as if leading a guided meditation. On “Night,” she flees the staid city, finding cleansing power (“The wind is my friend/Forgives everything”) in the countryside. Every kind of natural landscape seems to converge on “Teardrop”; Kedrina places you in the center of it all, singing in Russian:
There are comets and stars below
There’s water and a stone island above
Behind is a desert, a hundred kilometers
There are only lands of eternal snow ahead
The copper compass will guide you
And by the warming breath flowers will blossom in scarlet
The flowers of April cover white snow
Kedrina’s focus on the restorative properties of nature, along with the record’s pleasingly glacial, occasionally trance-y palette, feels redolent of, amazingly, ’90s new-age compilation Pure Moods. Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world, presenting “a proposal to make life easier, more fantastic, purer,” as Mina Tavakoli wrote of Pure Moods last year. The difference is that Kedrina’s album is semi-didactic, not just palliative. In the world of Liminal Soul, that purer life is possible, as long as you’re willing to gaze at the stars and feel the embrace of the wind, to ease into the lushness of breakbeats and birdsongs. It’s not that deep, Kedrina seems to say—just have fun with it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2MR | October 4, 2021 | 7.5 | 80bfef85-1c68-4f19-837c-d5a2a7046e13 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The singer and composer Diggs Duke channels '90s hip hop and soul greats with his light, mulifaceted sound. Civil Circus feels remarkably spacious for its 26 minutes, and it has a yearning, almost gospel touch. This is music about being honest and vulnerable. | The singer and composer Diggs Duke channels '90s hip hop and soul greats with his light, mulifaceted sound. Civil Circus feels remarkably spacious for its 26 minutes, and it has a yearning, almost gospel touch. This is music about being honest and vulnerable. | Diggs Duke: Civil Circus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20996-civil-circus/ | Civil Circus | Across several albums and EPs, the singer and composer Diggs Duke has channeled the greats of '90s hip-hop and soul, with a multifaceted sound touching lightly on D’Angelo and A Tribe Called Quest. In 2012, he caught the attention of British DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson, who included the musician’s "Nine Winning Wives" on Brownswood Bubblers Nine and signed Duke to his Brownswood imprint in 2013. Duke released long player Offering for Anxious on the label that year, and made what I thought was a nice splash on 2014’s The Upper Hand & Other Grand Illusions, a quick EP that dissected the power struggles in romantic relationships.
On Civil Circus, Duke reverts to the soulful sound he employed on Anxious, yet the vibe here is firmly rooted in jazz. Album opener "Busker", with its mix of saxophones and live drums, works well in intimate spaces and carries a strong hip-hop knock. While some of the tracks are traditional in scope, others have an alternative slant that fit alongside artists like Thundercat and Flying Lotus, both of whom put esoteric spins on funk, EDM, and rap.
Civil Circus is full of shape-shifting compositions that make the album feel longer than its 26-minute runtime in a good way. The music feels remarkably spacious, and Duke’s songwriting is equally abstract and observational: Civil Circus conveys Duke’s innermost thoughts, no matter how vast or disconnected they might be. There’s a voyeuristic aspect to the album, and Civil Circus feels like a deep chat with a close friend. It’s almost gospel-like, and "Compensation"—a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar—hits the theme head-on: "God, in his great compassion/ Gave me the gift of song." "Stoplight Lessons" speaks to the newness of life and uncertainty of growing older. "Old enough to crawl," Duke hums atop an acoustic guitar, "but speech evades your grasp."
The album's structure gives way to a loose instrumental procession toward the end: "Street Preacher" and "Bumper to Bumper" stamp the LP’s panoramic view; "Damn Near Home", with its light horns and scenic moans, sets the scene for album closer "We Don’t Need Love", which chides superficiality. It’s a fitting end for the album and the impressive career Diggs has built so far. Civil Circus is about being honest and vulnerable. It's about looking up to observe the small things that make life so fruitful, and taking the time to appreciate what's normally taken for granted. | 2015-12-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2015-12-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | null | Following Is Leading | December 3, 2015 | 7.4 | 80cdf3ae-207d-4b6e-acd7-94b6766d7c78 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay returns with his house-oriented Luomo alias. This time out, the focus is less on songs than groove and his typically intricate, hypnotic arrangements. | Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay returns with his house-oriented Luomo alias. This time out, the focus is less on songs than groove and his typically intricate, hypnotic arrangements. | Luomo: Plus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15883-plus/ | Plus | First you notice what's missing: gone are the gently echoing dubscapes, the shivering multi-tracked female vocals, the heartsore melodies, the insectile arrangements, the billowing evocations of desire. Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti's Luomo is nominally his "house" project (as distinct from excursions into stripped-back dub-techno or fractured ambience) but to date it has consistently flirted with an idea of house-- as feminine, gentle, lovelorn, ostentatiously emotive-- quite distinct from the often quite blunt realities of the genre. Plus, then, is Ripatti's first album of house qua house: specifically the cooler, big-room sound of tech-house circa 2006, equal parts Michael Mayer and Carl Craig.
If Luomo's previous work often could feel like the sound of the "body speaking" (to steal the title of one of his best tracks), the colder and harder surfaces of Plus are positioned between the body and the dancefloor, less the sound of movement than the sounds that make you move. Song takes a backseat to groove: while most of the tracks here feature gentle "Computer Love"-style male vocals (courtesy of the Chicago Boys), they are less the music's emotional center than a framework around which Ripatti can weave his typically intricate, hypnotic arrangements. Only on the fragile, trebly new wave of "Form in Void" and the seductive schaffel of "Immaculate Motive" does Ripatti gesture toward the glittering disco-pop of his prior work.
This feels like a deliberate aesthetic shift. Previously, many of Luomo's finest tracks featured late-blooming hooks that would carry the tune's second half in euphoric or melancholy new directions. By contrast, the best moments on Plus tend to turn inward, homing in on the beat until its urgency is almost too close to your ears. The effect can be like sitting in the front row at the cinema, the peripheral details of melodic color and vocals overwhelmed by the abstract throb of the hyper-percussive, multi-tiered groove. In particular, the massive climaxes of "How You Look" and especially "Make My Day" (by some distance the album's finest moment) feel designed to burn out your senses with an overload of physical intensity.
These tracks stand and fall on their own robust physicality: "Happy Strong" features an inane vocal hook and almost no melody to speak of, but its immense, banging groove (all slamming snares and delectable hand-clap counter-rhythms) makes it an album highlight. Only on "Good Stuff" does Ripatti's new aesthetic veer off course entirely, spending nine minutes trying but failing to achieve lift-off through chattering Chicago-house revivalism. Here, the groove isn't compelling enough to distract from the perfunctory song it props up.
If Plus ultimately is only the fourth-best Luomo album (after 2008's Convivial and certainly Ripatti's peerless first two albums under the moniker), it's because maintaining that level of intensity across entire tracks, let alone a whole album, is near impossible, while the moments in between the peaks no longer can coast on the singularity of the producer's sound. The less-exciting stretches on previous albums at least might have boasted a bruised-sounding bassline or delicately mutated vocal harmonies to establish a sense of unity with the climaxes. On Plus, the periods in between the climaxes can slip more easily into the category of fine-- but rather less-distinct-- German-sounding tech-house.
The importance of this criticism depends on how invested you are in house as dancefloor music first and foremost: Ripatti's music demands to be judged purely on the terms of the genre it inhabits, and the way that genre interacts with the bodies of dancers. If you come looking for house with an obvious point of difference, this decision seems puzzling, but if you're prepared to forget the name "Luomo" and simply lose yourself in the groove, then Plus is as involving and engaging as any dance music you'll hear this year. | 2011-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Moodmusic | October 4, 2011 | 7.8 | 80d0dd1e-633a-4175-8813-a221ce789b22 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
Both playful and spare, the second solo LP from the Red River Dialect songwriter and ordained Buddhist chaplain finds warmth and comfort in scenes of decay. | Both playful and spare, the second solo LP from the Red River Dialect songwriter and ordained Buddhist chaplain finds warmth and comfort in scenes of decay. | David John Morris: Wyld Love Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-john-morris-wyld-love-songs/ | Wyld Love Songs | In his work with Red River Dialect and on his solo records, David John Morris—the British singer-songwriter and ordained Buddhist chaplain—has written about journeys both sacred and profane. In songs that ride the line between meditative folk and intricate post-rock, Morris writes about an ongoing search for community with romantic partners, bandmates, and co-religionists, like the monks who inspired his 2021 solo debut, Monastic Love Songs. It was a collection of open, simple songs, heavy on atmosphere, sung with the confidence of a man rediscovering his calling after spending a year in a Nova Scotian monastery. But when Morris came back to London in its wake, he had little money, few possessions, and nowhere to stay. So he took a room in what is known as a guardianship: a condemned building (in this case, a North London nursing home) rented out for cheap, to dissuade squatters and fill space until the building is torn down. Morris only intended to stay until he could put together the rent for his own apartment, and in January 2020, he began to record demos for a follow-up, with the plan of fleshing them out in a studio.
Like most stories around this time, Morris’ plans were massively disrupted, and during the subsequent lockdowns, he hunkered down in the guardianship and kept writing. The temporary home became a newfound community, and the demos became Morris’ second solo record, Wyld Love Songs. Written with only an acoustic guitar and a drum machine, the resulting album is both spare and playful, each song built around Morris’ high tenor and delicate fingerpicking. For the first time he also embraces unexpected electronic textures: Squelchy synths drive the queasy sway of first single “Pebble,” while “Karaoke” achieves a kind of lo-fi jangle pop, its buzzing arpeggios and insistent drum machine pulsing around the story of a late night karaoke party. The muted electronic backbeat on “TT’s Surf School,” meanwhile, carries the song from soaring folk with a kind of digital intimacy, restrained and beautiful as a vintage Magnetic Fields tune. If prior records sought to evoke live-band interplay, the effect here is more artificial and homey. These are folk songs that find warmth and comfort in decay and decline, like a faded brick wall covered with a handmade quilt.
Wyld is full of little stories from life in and around the guardianship: ping pong games, movie screenings, and the little rituals that arise at the start of a courtship. For Morris, these details take on a gleeful mundanity, expanding into thoughts of impermanence and the interconnection of all life. “Black Kite” creates a strange analogy between his own overwhelming emotions and the plight of the first monkeys to cross the ocean between Africa and South America: “Winds and currents carry me,” he marvels, “to a land beyond belief.”
This approach peaks during the loping “Ballad of Ross Wyld.” The song begins with Morris imagining his dream home, with pink walls, a long veranda, and a garden with a cherry tree. Over the following eight minutes, his thoughts turn to lockdown parties, deaths that haunt the building, and, eventually, a screening of the 1991 Robin Williams movie Hook. As Morris acknowledges, he is working to free himself from “a songwriting mode that feels tired and old”—to move on with his artistry and his life. Toward the end, Morris describes taking a break from writing to have a coffee in the guardianship’s garden, where he looks up and notices, for the first time, a cherry tree, triggering the realization that he is at home and the answers are right before him, even if they, too, “will disappear/like all the things.…I’m looking for.” In a press release, Morris notes that Wyld Guardianship has been torn down since his time there and its community has dispersed. All things may be transient, these songs suggest, but music can stick around. | 2022-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | self-released | October 28, 2022 | 7 | 80d7feaa-07e6-4df9-8363-060a50514e9c | Robert Rubsam | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-rubsam/ | |
Giveon’s debut album seeks to scale the highs and lows of love and heartbreak, but more often sounds like he’s cruising on autopilot in the center lane. | Giveon’s debut album seeks to scale the highs and lows of love and heartbreak, but more often sounds like he’s cruising on autopilot in the center lane. | Giveon: Give or Take | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/giveon-give-or-take/ | Give or Take | Giveon’s warm ballads sound like he’s trying to find a happy medium between the loverboy appeal of Brian McKnight and the sultry stylings of D’Angelo. His honeyed baritone is among the most distinctive in contemporary R&B, with a quality that makes his lulled chorus on Drake’s “Chicago Freestyle” the most exciting part of the track. But more often his nasally, aloof rumbles lack the soul and technical skill to make it consistently fragrant. Whereas the dynamic vibrato that lit up Giveon’s stellar 2020 debut EP Take Time made his tales about falling in love too quickly more endearing, its follow-up, When It’s All Said and Done, reeks of lazy vocals that distract from what he’s singing about.
Still, Giveon tries to match the vocal flair of his forebears. His 2020 cover of D’Angelo’s consummate “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” is a respectable attempt that dilutes the strengths of the original: the improvisation, the call-and-response, the piercing vocal delivery, the way D’Angelo’s shout at the end of the song can be mistaken for a praise break after a divine spirit fills the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. Giveon’s version, by contrast, has all the spiritual vigor of a partner who sends you a lengthy good morning text every day; it’s just not that stimulating. The Long Beach crooner’s full-length debut, Give or Take, faces a similar problem: As his expansive ballads seek to scale the highs and lows of love and heartbreak, Giveon more often sounds like he’s cruising on autopilot in the center lane.
Ahead of the album’s release, Giveon cautioned fans to keep a box of tissues nearby. This is not necessary. Across 15 gloomy tracks, he paints a very familiar story of a hopeless romantic who’s searching to understand their flaws and solve their relationship woes in the throes of newfound fame. There’s no shortage of this narrative in contemporary R&B: In the soft, intricate runs of rum.gold’s debut Thicker Than Water and the old-school shimmer of Lucky Daye’s Grammy-nominated Painted, the challenge of being a self-aware lover is illuminated with a lush variety of soul-baring vocal arrangements that would make love’s most dedicated critics become open to understanding the possibilities of healthy romance. But Giveon’s narrative doesn’t land.
Take “dec 11th,” where Giveon laments a missed connection with a fan who caught his eye in Houston. The single is backed by an alluring acoustic guitar that doesn’t pair with his unvarying baritone delivery and instead makes the song sound more clinical, which conflicts with its charming lyrics. His limited range overwhelms the meaning of what he’s saying. The dull, drawn-out two-syllable patterns on “Tryna Be” make Giveon sound like he was dragged out of bed to the recording studio when he’d rather go back to sleep. When the sensual flair of “Make You Mine” calls for dreamy melodies, Giveon defaults to stoicism. Falling head-over-heels in love is enough to make anyone want to sing, but it takes skill to use your voice in a way that makes one actually believe you—think Jodeci on “My Heart Belongs to You” or Brian McKnight on “One Last Cry.” “For Tonight,” Give or Take’s lead single, is the lone song where Giveon really sounds like he’s ready to go there.
The album’s most convincing moments arrive when he stops acting like a passive bystander and addresses his relationship drama head-on. Giveon knows his tendency to fall in love so quickly can get the best of him. On “july 16th,” he admits that he needs to alter his too-eager approach to a new connection (“It’s only been 14 days/And I already adore the way you are to me/I wanna ignore and take it slow/’Cause I know where this can go”). On Boi-1da-produced “Scarred,” Giveon acknowledges how the heartbreak he’s endured in the past has led him to bitterness in the present: “My last love was cold/So now I gotta be the coldest.” It’s an honest refrain from his sappy love songs and explores the source of his toxic traits.
But lyrical vulnerability isn’t enough to lift the dreary cloud of Giveon’s static vocal performance that hangs over the album like a TV show that should’ve ended three seasons ago. The dull midtempo rhythms and runny guitar lines are equally uninteresting. Give or Take is stacked with songs that add minimal variation in cadence and tone that make his honest musings on love sound unconvincing. The Giveon of Take Time experimented with melody and challenged himself vocally; Give or Take stunts that growth in favor of secluding himself in his comfort zone. | 2022-07-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Not So Fast / Epic | July 5, 2022 | 6 | 80d89500-f3c4-40a6-a5d7-9af448dd1a99 | DeAsia Paige | https://pitchfork.com/staff/deasia-paige/ | |
On his melodious debut album, the pop-rap icon flaunts his verve and star power, all while a sense of isolation lives at the music’s brighter edges. | On his melodious debut album, the pop-rap icon flaunts his verve and star power, all while a sense of isolation lives at the music’s brighter edges. | Lil Nas X: Montero | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-nas-x-montero/ | Montero | At the start, Lil Nas X courted controversy by accident. The Atlanta native seized the world’s attention in 2019 with the country-rap juggernaut “Old Town Road,” which country zealots tried to exile from the charts. Nas’ success (and the several, increasingly bizarre remixes) made the complaints moot: After 19 stunning weeks, it took Billie Eilish, another burgeoning pop phenom, to finally dethrone him, and Nas’ song remains Billboard’s longest-running No. 1. He put out a stopgap EP that didn’t move the needle for him as an artist or a viral celebrity, and found himself in an awkward spot: Country and rap devotees both had him marked as a gimmick.
The whiplash between public attacks and chart-topping success took its toll, especially after Nas came out while “Old Town Road” was still No. 1. Now he was a Black queer man deciding to fully express himself through his music, which made him an easy target for bigots who only knew him through his kid-friendly first single (“i am not gonna spend my entire career trying to cater to your children,” he succinctly replied. “that is your job.”). Having just exposed the racialized gatekeeping on Billboard’s charts, now he was airing out everyone’s homophobic laundry, too.
On his debut album, MONTERO, the country’s most popular gay pop-rap star is quick to let you into this roiling headspace. Nas maneuvers through different genres in an attempt to unload some of his heavier baggage: A fractured family life and lingering self-doubt from spending most of his years in the closet weigh on the 22-year-old’s mind. He wants you to know he’s been smoking himself to sleep. Even when he’s singing to the rafters, he’s sad as hell.
It’s a jarring perspective to take for one of the most hyped debuts of the year. The rollout for MONTERO was a lesson in irreverent marketing made entirely on Nas’ terms, this time with the controversy courted by design: giving Satan a lapdance in a big-budget music video for the title track that ignited delight from queer fans and fury from conservatives; making out with a male backup dancer during a performance at the BET Awards that stoked more of the same from those crowds for obvious reasons; then, finally, a telegenic spread in People magazine announcing his “pregnancy” with the album that—well, you get it.
All of the tongue-in-cheek promo leads us to MONTERO, titled after the artist’s given name, Montero Lamar Hill. Over polished production largely handled by regular collaborators Take a Daytrip, Lil Nas X flaunts his verve and star power alongside some of the biggest names in pop, all while that sense of isolation lives at the music’s brighter edges. For an artist capable of gleefully reducing online trolls to dust with a single tweet, his anguish is revealing though not altogether surprising. Lil Nas X has discussed his struggles living in the public eye before. “The idea of ‘He’s a cool gay person; he’s an acceptable gay person,’ I used to see things like that as a compliment, but it’s not,” he told Variety. “I wanted to be even more authentic in my music and let people into my life.” MONTERO pries open that door through angsty pop-punk, introspective guitar ballads, and brash pop-rap, making for a mostly filler-free, engaging album that doesn’t seem to reveal the true soul of Lil Nas X, but certainly comes close.
MONTERO’s first half is the victory lap, loud with pep-rally pop built on blaring horns, 808s, and boasts. Even more than the Kanye-co-produced “Industry Baby,” the vivid “Dead Right Now” evokes West’s widescreen vision, as Nas offers up an origin story with a hard-nosed chorus: “You know, you never used to call/Keep it that way now/I’ll treat you like you dead right now.” The enthusiasm starts to grate by “That’s What I Want,” a yearning pop-rock song and clear successor to “Hey Ya!” with a similar call-and-response hook that instantly and regrettably brings T-shirt launchers to mind.
Yet Lil Nas X’s lyrical confidence is a noticeable and welcome upgrade from 2019’s halfhearted 7 EP. On “Scoop,” featuring Doja Cat, he snarls come-ons that honor his former life as a card-carrying Barb: “I ain’t talkin’ guns when I ask where your dick at.” When so many mainstream pop stars still rely on euphemisms for gay sex, it’s a joy to hear Nas openly embrace it. The brisk title track remains one of his best, with flamenco-tinged guitar loops and throbbing bass as the bedrock for Nas’ frank exploration of gay desire. “I want that jet lag from fuckin’ and flyin’,” he demands, adding a dash of menace to his charm. “Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m ridin’.”
The album’s more contemplative moments shift his point of view into a darker, death-driven focus. The brooding pop-punk highlight “Lost in the Citadel,” focusing on a toxic relationship he can’t help but return to, bridges the gap between the all-out pop songs and the guitar-focused second half. He tackles growing up in a broken home on the deceptively upbeat “Tales of Dominica” before things get bleak on “Void,” when he hits a low point over grungy, strummed guitar. “I’d rather die than to live with these feelings,” he confesses, “Stuck in this world where there’s so much to prove.” The pressure those expectations have on Nas can make MONTERO feel a little confined, but in his vulnerable performance and lyrics, it allows you to become more invested in Nas the person rather than the celebrity.
That approach—and the album’s brisk sequencing—also makes the more sentimental songs go down easier. “One of Me,” in which he gives voice to his bloodthirsty inner critic (“Even if your album OK, it’s flopping, that’s a promise,” he growls), keeps things light with a gentle beat and Elton John’s subtle piano, a moment that feels like a brief passing of the torch from another gay icon who’s no stranger to controversy. “Sun Goes Down,” a letter of support to Nas’ high school self (and, by proxy, the thousands upon thousands of queer kids who will listen to this album), is also an affecting ballad by the time it shows up toward the end. “I know that you want to cry,” he sings over 2000s-nodding, percussive acoustic guitar, “But there’s much more to life than dying.”
The hopeful ending is in line with Nas’ vision—this is the same guy who made a supercut of his videos in the garish style of Marvel movies, after all. Yet even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump. His music is still radio-primed to work well beside Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-punk or Doja’s earworm rap, but he’s using both his music and celebrity to carve out a unique space explicitly for queer people who feel as alone as he did growing up and emphatically insisting on a better future. With MONTERO, he’s already building it for them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | September 20, 2021 | 7.1 | 80df1600-5c0f-41c0-838b-ecae0429a835 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
This Oregon-based, politically informed punk band return with their grandest, loudest, and most electrifying record to date. | This Oregon-based, politically informed punk band return with their grandest, loudest, and most electrifying record to date. | The Thermals: The Body, The Blood, The Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9328-the-body-the-blood-the-machine/ | The Body, The Blood, The Machine | Portland, Oregon natives the Thermals have been hovering on the periphery since their 2003 debut, delivering solid records to undersized acclaim. The band's third album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, conjures an America piloted by some sort of Christian-fascist regime ("They'll pound you with the love of Jesus...They'll own your days/ They're only God's babies/ They follow, they know"), and traces the frantic, fiery flight of an ex-pat and his girl ("I can see she's afraid/ That's why we're escaping/ So we won't have to die, we won't have to deny/ Our dirty God, our dirty bodies"). The Body's story is just vague and gruesome enough to be weirdly terrifying, totally Orwellian, and grander, louder, and more electrifying than anything the Thermals have spit out before.
Original drummer Jordan Hudson ditched the band in 2005, meaning that during the recording of this album guitarist/vocalist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Foster were twitching for three, bouncing around from instrument to instrument, filling in the gaps, injecting percussion, keyboards, organs, bass, and plenty of guitar into their lo-fi basement punk. Produced by Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, The Body is appropriately reminiscent of the Thermals' previous two full-lengths, but far more ambitious in narrative and sound-- the production is cleaner, Harris' vocals are less prickly and more impassioned, and every slammed chord soars. Both in theory and execution, The Body, The Blood, The Machine hits like a less playful, less suburban American Idiot, its apocalyptic, heavily religious iconography conveniently layered over pounding, Ramones-style pop-punk.
The Body*'s unrelenting lyrical gravity is also its single biggest strength-- this isn't the first time the Thermals have gotten political (on 2004's Fuckin' A, Harris bleakly instructed us to "Pray for a new state/ Pray for assassination"), but, from the opening organ chord of "Here's Your Future", it's clear that this is the band at its most somber-- when Harris seethes "So here's your future!" a few beats after inciting "the new master race," it's impossible not to feel like you should transfer all the energy you'd usually waste pogo-ing around your living room into scrawling letters to elected officials. "Returning to the Fold" employs a classic post-grunge melody, Harris' big, punchy wails poking through his guitar-web like it's 1994 and you're watching "120 Minutes" in your parents' basement. "St. Rosa and the Swallows" is a thorny ode to escape ("Passing the corners, we kissed in the rain/ Passing the old rusted warning signs/ What did they say?/ I think they said run!"), while closing cut "I Hold the Sound" is spare and weirdly engrossing, the closest the band comes to recreating the impossible catchiness of "No Culture Icons", before bowing out in a haze of feedback.
Foster's drums and Harris' weird vocal syntax (which contains echoes of the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle) are nicely propulsive, and The Body, The Blood, The Machine cuts off before it runs the risk of getting too repetitive. But the results of its 38 minutes are still chilling. Harris' imagined landscape is severe and grisly, leaving us all to sprint for cover, curling under desks, hands over heads, fingers crossed: These tracks land like bombs. | 2006-08-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 22, 2006 | 8.5 | 80e108fc-b692-4c42-8edd-d1ff9096c855 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The Calgary dancer and singer’s second album strikes a tough pose but offers mostly forgettable trap-pop ballads. | The Calgary dancer and singer’s second album strikes a tough pose but offers mostly forgettable trap-pop ballads. | Tate McRae: THINK LATER | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tate-mcrae-think-later/ | THINK LATER | When Tate McRae punctuated her debut with blunt ruminations on teenage love and coming of age, the dance competitor turned pop singer was heralded as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. For her second album, THINK LATER, McRae toughens up that first impression by becoming a Canadian Sporty Spice, trading neon sweatshirts for hockey gear. It’s a classic formula: Good girl goes man-eating badass, and she’s ready to make that jerk regret losing her. Too bad she’s still hung up on him—and THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.
To showcase a “feistier” version of herself, McRae assembled a roster of prominent pop writers and producers, including OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, SZA’s SOS collaborator Rob Bisel, and Ariana Grande associate ILYA. They land on a style that’s undeniably indebted to Bangerz and the 2010s obsession with trap-pop, updated to iterate on SZA’s love-hate yearning and the Weeknd’s atmospheric alt-R&B. On “run for the hills,” McRae explores the lure of an unhealthy relationship under a looming cloud of synth that’s pierced by single words in her head voice, like Grande rapping “gimme the loot!” on “7 rings.”
Most of the album is similarly concerned with presenting McRae as the give-no-fucks bad girl. “It’s not a good night if you don’t take it too far,” she winks on the arena-stomping title track (which sounds a little like M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” itself). The Timbaland-inspired “greedy,” one of the first and best songs on the record, is McRae at her most empowered and exciting. At other times, the pettiness is just tiring. “we’re not alike” is a pop punk-lite temper tantrum about a friend who breaks girl code; it’s as if McRae attempted to emulate Eilish’s “Copycat” without the bite.
Throughout THINK LATER, McRae’s narrator yearns for the kind of toxic romance that makes Harley Quinn and the Joker look restrained. “You’re the only one who can boil my blood/And make that shit cut,” she warbles on the clunky, mid-tempo “messier,” which sounds like a good reason to finally dump him. Then she goes starry-eyed: “’Cause you know that I’m always yours/I’m so in love.” Where SZA might plot a murder, McRae threatens to make a scene at dinner. The cycle is vicious but worse, it’s dull. Has Tate McRae ever considered protecting her peace?
There’s another school of thought that likens McRae to Britney Spears, recognizing a dancer’s magnetism and competitive edge. McRae’s inability to produce equally compelling music leaves her in a bind. The more comparisons she earns, the more THINK LATER feels anonymous: stuck romanticizing the negative in an attempt to prove her seriousness as a singer. Her music is strongest when she tosses the ballads in the bin. When she rode into the impeccably choreographed “greedy” video on a Zamboni, she looked like a budding star, and when she sings about a random guy who asks if she’s aware of her powers, her response is perfectly dry: “I said, ‘Lemme check.’” Sucks that the rest of THINK LATER can’t muster the same easy confidence. | 2023-12-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-15T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | December 15, 2023 | 5.9 | 80e2edec-5b02-4157-8801-5ab7623a04e8 | Jaeden Pinder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jaeden-pinder/ | |
The Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman returns with a more rough-edged and driving record that features two guest-spots from Beck. | The Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman returns with a more rough-edged and driving record that features two guest-spots from Beck. | TOBACCO: Maniac Meat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14260-maniac-meat/ | Maniac Meat | The longer some formerly hi-tech sound has lingered, the easier it is for some current musician to warp it into a purpose completely at odds with its original ultra-modern innovation. Last generation's gleaming chrome-and-plastic tomorrow gets fed through a chemical bath by some junkshop customer with a home recording studio, and it comes out the other end as a shambling wreck of digital decay, Frankenstein-stitched into discolored reveries or blown-out squalls.
Black Moth Super Rainbow frontman Tom Fec has been on both the mellow and the noisy sides of that mutation process. And where BMSR's last CD release, Eating Us, was a loud but frequently pretty collection of woozily psychedelic prog-pop, Tobacco's second solo album Maniac Meat is all fuzz and snarl, tar-pit bass and rusty-hinged drum machines smashed into corroded analog synths that sound like they were found in a backwoods scrapyard. Think of Boards of Canada's bucolic science-filmstrip wispiness run through a grease-caked doom metal/funk filter, or El-P's noisier productions with the dread and horror replaced by giddy bewilderment. I don't namedrop lightly-- it's actually a familiar, comfortable ride if you keep previous experiences with Geogaddi or Fantastic Damage at the forefront of your head while listening to this.
That's more of a case of kinship than replication. Tobacco shares those artists' samples-and-synths methodology towards similar hip-hop-skewing ends, but he tends to keep a finer balance toward both sides of his "ugly beauty" approach. Tobacco's inhuman, vaguely menacing but mysteriously cheerful filtered voice has a lot to do with that. It's the source of much of the album's decayed-future personality, drawing ambiguous threats, damaged come-ons, and grotesque accusations through unsettlingly fragile vocoder whispers: "Lick the witch/ Make a friend tonight"; "You got sick from a lolly lolly lollipop/ You feel free when you're killing me". It's not the only voice, of course: a pair of Beck cameos on "Fresh Hex" and "Grape Aerosmith" feature the same postmodern lyrical ambiguity that made him famous, and evoke the mutant electro of his circa-Midnite Vultures B-sides. But Fec's tone of subtly unhinged, deceptively naïf-like menace-- or deceptively menacing giddiness, depending on what you've just fed into your system-- runs the show.
That goes double for the motley collection of jury-rigged electronic debris he funnels his music through. Synthetic and live drums alike are both amplified to the point of borderline physical discomfort, basslines melt into riffs that growl like oversized predators, and the treble end is dominated by distorted analog buzzes that sound more like Nintendo superbikes than any kind of easily-graspable hook. But then a bright keyboard melody will jump out-- a Cars-like siren wailing over the hopped-up punk racket of "Constellation Dirtbike Head"; a glimmering electric chime piercing the machine-shop boom-bap of "Motorlicker"; soul pianos and fluttering synths that make "Six Royal Vipers" sound like the Tron version of Willie Mitchell's Hi Records sound-- and the ghosts of prog rock, g-funk and new wave past manifest into a recollection of how audacious those old sounds used to be in the first place. It doesn't take a lot to make old technology sound damaged and creepy. But taking the next step and making that creepiness sound appealing is what makes Maniac Meat the feel-weird hit of the summer. | 2010-05-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-05-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anticon | May 25, 2010 | 7.6 | 80e302ca-6517-4ad3-8d51-7376796f2eef | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Austin-based rock heroes And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead follow the glorious noise and epic urgency of Source Tags & Codes with this sadly pompous, overreaching monstrosity. | Austin-based rock heroes And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead follow the glorious noise and epic urgency of Source Tags & Codes with this sadly pompous, overreaching monstrosity. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Worlds Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/182-worlds-apart/ | Worlds Apart | Did Source Tags & Codes deserve a 10.0? That's not for me to say, but Matt LeMay rightfully counted it as one of indie rock's truly epic albums. By now, "epic" has grown stretch marks-- the term is thrown around whenever tracks buy into a concept, or break up into movements, or simply push past four minutes. Really, to be epic is to have a grand purpose, a destiny, and to fulfill it-- not out of desire, but out of necessity.
But necessity means struggle, and when I listen to "Another Morning Stoner" or "Baudelaire", I hear a band fighting to keep pace with its own colossal compositions. I hear a rhythm section buffeted by uncompromising tempos. I hear a gun held up to the head of Conrad Keely-- maybe the world's most terrible singer-- and a masked man telling him to sing pretty or die. It's not the band or the songs, but the curious life-or-death stakes by which the band played the songs that deserves the rating the album was awarded.
Understandably, Austin's Trail of Dead didn't have a fucking clue what to do for a follow-up. On 2003's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP, they tried reprising ST&C; ("All St. Day"), reverted to their early days as a Sonic Youth cover band ("Mach Schau"), and even turned in a poor man's "Iris" ("Counting Off the Days"). No band wants to hear it can't top itself-- an implication that shadowed every perfect rating ST&C; received critically-- and Trail of Dead seemed anxious to abandon their defining opus, which was already beginning to dwarf the band itself in importance.
Worlds Apart is an aspiration, an apology, the sound of confusion. The Interscope tag continues to be Trail of Dead's biggest asset and affliction: The label allows them the freedom to distance themselves from their past achievements, and access to Jimmy Iovine's in-house PR machine, which can win the interest of major media conglomerates, commercial radio and MTV; but the band aims too high as a result, apparently convinced that they have the power to change pop culture from the inside, to engage the public with seemingly radio-safe rock stylings that actually conceal one deceitful, potentially winning twist. Unfortunately, for Worlds Apart, that twist is once-off gimmickry: hamfisted "subversive" lyrics, pointless pastiche, and outrageous self-parody.
Count first single "Worlds Apart" among the thousands of boring three-minute commercial rock songs that-- get this-- criticize commercial rock. The lyric "Look at these cunts on MTV with cars and cribs and shit/ Is that what being a celebrity means?" is this palm-muted, mall-punk schmaltz-waltz's only surprise, passable on first listen and grating thereafter. It doesn't get laughable until the cursing kicks in-- essential to the band's "points"-- and keeps the song off radio.
In several website manifestos (since removed), Keely complained that music lovers consume songs without actually listening to them. He claimed we reduce albums to genre, and artists to their influences, uninterested in finding a song's meaning and unwilling to appreciate their unique human nuances. One such manifesto came packaged with promo copies of Worlds Apart, in fact, as if Keely could convince us to ignore the fact that "The Summer of '91" sounds like the Counting Crows, "Let It Drive" sounds like the Gin Blossoms, "The Rest Will Follow" sounds like Bright Eyes, "All White" sounds like Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, and the verse melody of "Caterwaul" is the band's most soluble MBV-meets-Sonic Youth rip yet. Much of Worlds Apart plays like a boring mid-90s alt-rock radio mixtape-- so why sit through this shit just to get the band's "jokes"?
Here's the worst joke: Trail of Dead spend so much time being "Worlds Apart" from themselves and the pop culture they engage to overthrow that they only manage one good song. The album's least self-conscious cut, "Will You Smile Again", charges out with a mammoth 5/4 riff, loud and snarling and far more theatrical than the cartoonish "Ode to Isis". Keely sings poorly on "Will You Smile Again" as he does throughout Worlds Apart, but here he turns his biggest challenge into a compelling performance, letting the notes explode into untoned gutturals when they outstretch his range. The seven-minute song's not life-or-death stakes-- it's something bigger, something more confident, but for now a fleeting fancy. Seconds into the title track that follows, Trail of Dead follow a sample of children yelling "YAY!" with Keely sniping, "HEY, FUCK YOU MAN"-- which, of course, makes the kids laugh. This easy switch-up-- kitschy but not considered, cunning but never heartfelt-- is the album's epitaph. | 2005-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2005-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | January 24, 2005 | 4 | 80ee7a3f-ed06-4bfc-a47a-44c0a6fa3061 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
The Swedish folk duo’s fourth album is a showcase for their sweet harmonies, with some bold stylistic departures. | The Swedish folk duo’s fourth album is a showcase for their sweet harmonies, with some bold stylistic departures. | First Aid Kit: Ruins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/first-aid-kit-ruins/ | Ruins | As far back as their 2010 debut album, The Big Black and Blue, First Aid Kit distinguished themselves not only with their singing voices but with their shared songwriting voice. Klara and Johanna Söderberg emerged from YouTube, where they were discovered singing Fleet Foxes songs, and quickly revealed a handy facility for penning folk and country tunes that sounded old in their sounds but new in their sentiments. As teenagers, the sisters had absorbed generations of influences, and now that they’re both in their twenties, they’ve sharpened that sensibility with each new album. “Emmylou,” from 2012’s The Lion’s Roar—a starry-eyed rumination on the lure of Gram, Johnny, and the women who sang with them—is particularly emblematic of their philosophy. Persuasive even in its overly romanticized glow, it’s a country song about why they love country songs.
Ruins, their fourth album, continues that twangy trajectory with songs like the elegant honky-tonk number “Postcard” and “Distant Star,” which shows off rougher-hewn harmonies. Both add new twists to the duo’s sound, refining rather than redefining First Aid Kit. Elsewhere, the Söderberg sisters push further. “Hem of Her Dress” is a dramatic departure—a mash note to Neutral Milk Hotel complete with caterwauled vocals and quavering brass. It might come across live, with a crowd singing along, but on record it can’t escape the shadow of its obvious influence. “Fireworks,” on the other hand, is a genuinely affecting torch song, grounded in early rock and old soul rhythms. The guitar arpeggios sound like Buddy Holly, the rhythm section like “Earth Angel,” and the sisters sing with a new fortitude and clarity. (The video, meanwhile, foregoes their usual Laurel Canyon caftans for ’80s prom dresses and some great big hair.)
After working in Omaha with Mike Mogis on The Lion’s Roar and 2014’s Stay Gold, the Söderbergs ventured further west to Portland, Oregon, to record with producer Tucker Martine (Decemberists, case/lang/veirs). Their aesthetics ought to be an ideal marriage: Martine is known for bringing a shimmery sound to contemporary Americana without rendering it slick or reverent. He helps them move fluidly between styles and sounds, even corralling a loose group of backing musicians that includes McKenzie Smith of Midlake and Peter Buck (perhaps returning the favor after First Aid Kit recorded a sharp cover of R.E.M.’s “Walk Unafraid” for the 2014 film Wild). In doing so, however, Martine buffs away some of their eccentricities. Songs like “To Live a Life” and the title track skate by with no real spark and no real demand on your attention.
That’s due as much to the singers as to the producer. Musically adventurous as they are, Klara and Johanna can rely too much on platitude and convention when it comes to lyrics. “It’s a Shame” picks over the bones of a dead relationship, but realizes there’s “no point in wasting sorrow on things that won’t be here tomorrow.” First Aid Kit have always had a fatalist streak, which adds gravity to most songs—they like to point out the dark cloud attached to every silver lining. That makes “Nothing Has to Be True” a beautifully open-ended closer, but it also makes the coda of opener “Rebel Heart” feel a bit heavy-handed. “Nothing matters,” they sing bitterly, “all is futile.” That statement is so blunt, so general that it almost sounds like self-parody: a minor crisis rendered melodramatically.
But only almost. That qualifier is appropriate because it’s Klara and Johanna singing those lines. Their voices complement each other so naturally and so gracefully that it’s easy to forget how much craft there is in these songs, and how much ingenuity they put into their vocals: the way each sings wordlessly on “Fireworks” to reinforce the melancholy of the other’s lead vocals, the way they both roughen up their voices on “Distant Star,” the way they stretch out vowels like taffy on “It’s a Shame.” Theirs are active harmonies—not merely decorative, but always doing something intriguing, pointing to the breadth of styles on the album. The most impressive thing about Ruins is how they make every style under their vintage-store belts feel like an extension of the same history, the same creative urge, their same tastes. | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Columbia | January 19, 2018 | 6.4 | 80fcaef8-6804-41dc-a058-df0e56323f64 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ |
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