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SeeFu Lilac consists of outtakes and fragments from a never-finished Black Moth Super Rainbow album. It's musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase, but not much else. | SeeFu Lilac consists of outtakes and fragments from a never-finished Black Moth Super Rainbow album. It's musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase, but not much else. | Black Moth Super Rainbow: SeeFu Lilac | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21464-seefu-lilac/ | SeeFu Lilac | For an artist, consistency is a murky indicator of success. What looks like the honing of craft and technique via repetition can easily be confused for homogeneity and a Clive Cussler-esque predictability. You run the risk of being trapped on an artistic treadmill if you don't decide to throw some of your old tricks in the garbage. And it's awfully hard. But in all arts, be it writing, or the making of psychedelic pop music, sometimes you have to kill all your darlings.
Last time we saw Black Moth Super Rainbow it was 2012, and they were riding high off the spoils of Kickstarter booty and an album that was an index for how far they had come. In* Cobra Juicy*, Tom Fec and his merry band of freaks seemed to have finally revealed the intimations of a more mature musical project. Fast forward to November of last year: With no sixth album in sight, Black Moth Super Rainbow decided to unload, in their own words, "neon flavored outtakes from a 6th album that doesn't yet exist." SeeFu Lilac is just that, outtakes and fragments, musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase but not much else.
Clocking in at a scant 19 minutes, SeeFu Lilac is a collection of nine songs which slavishly adhere to the sounds and tropes which made BMSR famous in the first place. The ubiquitous vocoder vocals and the patina of vintage synths are all here, along with the same self-satisfied, isolationist nostalgia, which to some paints BMSR as refreshingly authentic and to others gimmicky cranks who haven't listened to an album made after the year 1993. When the band released a stream of the record on Facebook, they proudly rallied against trendiness or marketability, proclaiming "no glam shots, no press releases, no problem."
The one thing that separates SeeFu Lilac from previous BMSR efforts is the noticeable change in disposition. The record as a whole feels sunnier and the nostalgia is less sinister and somehow saccharine. Gone is the seething pop evil that coated Cobra Juicy. Instead of toeing the line between beautiful and grotesque, in these sketches of songs BMSR is trying to sound more subdued and much prettier. Seefu Lilac's most exciting moments come in small instrumental bursts that are calming and melodic. In the album's title track, a ruminative acoustic guitar is put in conversation with a wall of warm synths, and the result is nicely organic and effortless. It gives a hint of the sound BMSR might want to work with in future records.
They benefit from uncluttering their music and removing the fading drapery of distorted effects and wonky inversions, because it showcases what made BMSR so interesting earlier in the 2000s: vintage gear and earnest analog sentimentalism. But this sentimentalism is the very reason why this record is so uninteresting: It's a love letter to their previous work.
I wonder if Fec should toss the vocoder aside. The same suite of effects used to achieve the throaty and warbled vocals hasn't changed at all since Dandelion Gum. At this point, it wouldn't be unfair to say that it's become a gimmick, especially when deployed to tackle subjects like love or loss. The vocoder flattens and parodies whatever emotions a song might be meditating on. In "Since You've Seen Her," it's hard to take Fec seriously as he sadly croons "make a wish" over and over again.
In a recent interview addressing the album, Fec said that he thought a lot of contemporary music felt "so desperate." He made sure to backtrack and soften this statement, saying that: "Maybe I am kind of a recluse, and maybe..I don't have the greatest perspectives of everything." Fec has painted himself as an outsider for years, and it's not surprising that he finds so much of music just outside his lair unrelatable; you can hear it in the music he makes. It's the product of living in an echo chamber and not paying attention to the changes in both DIY and synth-driven music in the last four years. Fec has admitted to a certain amount of frustration with the sixth proper BMSR album, and the release of SeeFu Lilac is music he "needed to get out of [his] head" because it didn't fit in where he was going artistically. Hopefully Fec and friends have exorcised their nagging demons with SeeFu Lilac, and move forward into something very different. | 2016-02-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rad Cult | February 4, 2016 | 5.5 | 81095b20-01d8-456e-9737-b77f01eec71a | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Despite the Roman numerals and German words in its title, Lamb of God’s seventh album is a satisfactorily settled, gimmick-free record. VII: Sturm und Drang, featuring a guest spot from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, is also the metal stalwarts' most alluring album in years. | Despite the Roman numerals and German words in its title, Lamb of God’s seventh album is a satisfactorily settled, gimmick-free record. VII: Sturm und Drang, featuring a guest spot from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, is also the metal stalwarts' most alluring album in years. | Lamb of God: VII: Sturm und Drang | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20714-vii-sturm-und-drang/ | VII: Sturm und Drang | We do not live in a golden age of major-label heavy metal. Gone are the days when many of the worldwide form’s biggest innovators earned large budgets from still-larger companies or bidding wars occurred for the most brutal new prospect. Though there are exceptions, most modern metal backed by largesse aims so squarely for genre rigidity and predictability that it’s hard to believe it requires humans to make. It’s as though the stuff comes from a factory in some anonymous and once-economically depressed flyover town, conveniently produced in five-band package tours that are almost impossible to distinguish but easy to absorb. Meanwhile, the new metal records that seem destined to matter as masterpieces, like Tribulation’s recent Children of the Night, arrive largely from the indie fringes. After three decades under Rick Rubin’s aegis, even the mighty Slayer have decamped to an indie for the forthcoming Repentless.
During the past decade, Lamb of God have struggled with such a fate. Since signing to Epic Records for their third album, 2004’s Ashes of the Wake, they’ve often seemed a rather regimented metal band. Every two or three years, they would churn out another 10 or so songs, with big grooves and death metal outbursts decorated by lots and lots of guitars. Randy Blythe was a rampaging frontman, the kind who encouraged that you get loud with his tirades. But Lamb of God always teased the edges of their sound, trying to push beyond their meat-and-potatoes metal reputation with each release. It’s as if they felt guilty about their well-heeled position on Epic and tried to use it to gradually inch away from stylistic and financial safety, somehow back toward the fringes. By the time they issued 2012’s Resolution, such distractions had wantonly diluted their strengths, resulting in an abysmal record of mediocre hooks and banal studio gimmicks.
Despite the highfaluting combination of Roman numerals and German words it takes as a title, Lamb of God’s very good seventh album, VII: Sturm und Drang, is a satisfactorily settled record, arguably their first such effort in a decade. Sturm und Drang takes decidedly few chances. Instead, it sticks mostly to up-tempo numbers, countered only by a clean-singing ballad that soon enough heads for the pit and a righteous stomper that eventually sublimates into something like shoegaze with the help of Deftone Chino Moreno. All of these songs are studded with enormous refrains and driven by a sense of urgency that Lamb of God have forsaken in recent years. When Blythe’s distended scream rips across howling amplifiers at the start of "Still Echoes", or when "Delusion Pandemic" snaps right into a belligerent stomp, it’s as if they’ve finally got too much to say to fuck around with being fancy. By not trying to be overly interesting or involved, Lamb of God have made one of their most alluring albums in years.
The newfound energy and efficiency seem to stem, in part, from between-album trauma: In 2012, months after the release of Resolution, Czech police arrested Blythe in a Prague airport. He spent five weeks awaiting trial for a manslaughter charge after he pushed a teenaged fan, who subsequently died, off the stage at a concert there two years earlier. Blythe was acquitted, but the process hung like a cloud around the band. They scrapped plans for shows and talked about taking a long break. Rather than languish, however, Lamb of God reassembled in the studio and got to work on several songs that examined the frontman’s time in prison and his rather hostile feelings at large.
The obvious approach worked: "Still Echoes" explores the Nazi history of Prague’s Pankrác Prison, his anger for the subject animating the song with feeling. The guitars twist and scrape like the anxious hands of a very nervous person. It smartly points to Blythe’s prison time without exploiting it, powerfully suggesting that his stint inside allowed him to think about the rest of the world’s problems just as much as his own. And though the irrepressible "512" is named for the cell where Blythe spent some time, it’s penned from a much broader perspective. He serves not as the prisoner but as the spokesmen for them. "My hands are painted red/ My future is painted black/ I’ve become someone else," he screams in one of the band’s best choruses ever, deflecting much of the blame at a society that creates its own criminals. He lodges similar criticisms during the bracing-and-racing "Footprints", a song about environmental degradation, and the wonderfully thrashing spree "Delusion Pandemic", a madman philippic on Internet culture. As laughable as Blythe’s hook about mockingbirds being fed to wolves may be, it’s an irresistible moment.
As with the other numbers about self-immolating heroes, Nazi assassins, or media distortion, every song on Sturm und Drang feels like an outburst unmitigated by extraneous tinkering or trials. The production is dense, thin, and minimal, the guitars and drums pushed tight to give all these lyrics extra oomph. The fancy features are limited to a talkbox solo here and a Henry Rollins-like spoken-word bit there. Rather than distract from the hooks, they only reinforce them through contrast. No, Sturm und Drang isn’t a landmark of major-label heavy metal, but it is a reminder of just how very good one of its biggest bands can be when they have something to worry about other than trying so hard to be important. | 2015-07-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Epic / Nuclear Blast | July 27, 2015 | 7.8 | 810b82db-05b1-4a04-ab7d-e5a1040a4e34 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
On their fourth record, the succinctly titled IV, BADBADNOTGOOD rein in their jam-band impulses, delivering a velvet-crushed portrait of an effervescent lounge act in the 21st century. | On their fourth record, the succinctly titled IV, BADBADNOTGOOD rein in their jam-band impulses, delivering a velvet-crushed portrait of an effervescent lounge act in the 21st century. | BADBADNOTGOOD: IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22109-iv/ | IV | Five years ago, Canada’s BADBADNOTGOOD, then a trio, uploaded a shaky black-and-white clip of them playing jazz interpolations of Odd Future songs onto YouTube. (Most prominent among them was raucous rendition of “Orange Juice.”) They played the suite for their professors at music school to a chilly reception. Bad grade and all, things turned out well, and they caught the eye of Tyler, the Creator, who became their first supporter, sharing their “Odd Future Sessions” on social media. Just a year later, they uploaded yet another video—Tyler, the Creator running through “Orange Juice” with BBNG as a backing band. The band’s technical prowess and smooth sound cushioned Tyler’s snarl. Their drummer, Alex Sowinski, is clad in a creepy pig mask, and Tyler stalks around the room with a Colt 45 in hand. Filled with whimsical vulgarity and instrumental pyrotechnics, it was visual candy for college-aged boys.
BBNG was essentially on their way to becoming world’s most successful hip-hop jam band. In the last five years, their solo work has focused on a mix of original compositions and covers of famous hip-hop instrumentals. In that way, like the myriad Phish cover bands that flock to our continent’s music schools, chops do not compensate for bad taste. Last year, they produced a record with Ghostface Killah, titled Sour Soul, which more or less served as a breakthrough moment for them. (The band sprinted way past Killah with their mercurial speedball pace.) On their fourth record, the succinctly titled *IV, *they’ve reined in their jam band impulses, delivering a velvet-crushed portrait of an effervescent lounge act in the 21st century.
They’ve now added a fourth member, the multi-instrumentalist Leland Whitty, who’s been a sideman with the band for years, playing guitar and saxophone. In keeping with BBNG’s growing boundaries, they’ve invited features for the first time. In IV, they managed to rope in Future Islands’ Sam Herring, Kaytranada, Colin Stetson, Mick Jenkins, and the Toronto R&B singer Charlotte Day Wilson. And it’s in the features that you can get a real sense of how much more flexible and relaxed BBNG have become as a band.
The best of these is Sam Herring’s contribution, “Time Moves Slow,” where his gravelly voice pairs nicely with the sounds of the Crumar electric organ. It was the first indicator here that BBNG were moving away from their hip-hop roots to a more lounge-y R&B style. This continues in featureless songs like “Chompy’s Paradise,” which includes an incredibly slinky and plasticine sax solo from Whitty. It recalls all the music from The Pink Panther to “Gilligan's Island”—the sunny attitude of mai-tais by the pool, the elegance of donning an exquisitely crisp trench coat. On the ballad “In Your Eyes,” Charlotte Day Wilson strikes a middle-ground between these two dispositions. Her voice generates the murmur of a foggy room draped in cigarette smoke and the clink of martini glasses. But the surrounding instruments around her can air towards the pleasantly goofy, mixing in flute and acoustic guitar, conjuring up images of that infamous scene from *Anchorman. *
In fact, the jazz flute liberally peppered throughout IV offers large swaths of the music a very special brand of cornball poise. “Speaking Gently,” for example, would sound fantastic as theme music for a Vincent Price horror film. “Cashmere” collages together Dave Brubeck-inspired pianos with Bossa Nova percussion, and it’s the best example of slacker grace that these guys have been able to cultivate. It’s something that would be played in the classier sections of Rob Gronkowski's party cruise.
IV teeters between bland and anonymous fare. The new fusion jazz sounds they’ve adopted make their weirder tendencies more muted, or at least commiserate. It’s hard for BBNG to strike the balance between straight-up beauty and a freewheeling spirit. In the title track, for example, Whitty’s frenetic sax work and Matthew Tavares’ hyperactive Rhodes piano mashing can feel claustrophobic and luxuriantly cheesy. And there are true missteps that seem like headscratchers on paper, like the features with Kaytranada or Colin Stetson. The composition with Stetson, “Confessions Pt. II,” is probably the most disappointing song on *IV. *It hones in on the disparity between masterful technique and compositional restraint that BBNG has always struggled to balance. Stetson and Whitty’s dueling saxophones are skillful without a doubt, but this is the also where the band retreats back to their rote jam band noodling.
BBNG can still be frustrating, but IV is a sign of a band hitting its stride. It’s their most jazz-forward album, and it’s filled with some markers of magnificent growth. BBNG move between instruments and sounds effortlessly. And they are distinct but generous enough to make vocal guests feel natural in their particular environment: bro sophistication. | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Innovative Leisure | July 19, 2016 | 7.1 | 810ba1df-7b77-4a29-bf8e-08ac96fbfd64 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Gabriel Garzón-Montano became famous when Drake sampled his voice for “Jungle,” but his debut album stands on its own, heavy on pearly funk and pop, live instrumentation and harmony. | Gabriel Garzón-Montano became famous when Drake sampled his voice for “Jungle,” but his debut album stands on its own, heavy on pearly funk and pop, live instrumentation and harmony. | Gabriel Garzón-Montano: Jardín | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22768-jardin/ | Jardín | Odds are good that you’ve heard Gabriel Garzón-Montano before, whether or not you realize it: it’s a tantalizing, slow-drip sample of his vocals underpinning Drake’s “Jungle,” which appeared on the superstar’s 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Faced with a wave of interrogation after being pressed into Drake’s service, Montano has zigzagged between gratitude—“I think it’s remarkable that the guy who’s been singing everyone’s hooks for the last five years chose me to sing a hook for him”—and an approximation of “enough already:” “I don’t want to be the guy that got sampled on ‘Jungle.’ I don’t want that to give me my value.”
His poised, adamantly musical major-label debut, Jardín, should banish those concerns. Montano settles on an unusual and fertile combination of sounds, knitting together the burnished, languorous acts of the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Association, Todd Rundgren—with lean, hair-trigger grooves. The result is heavy on pearly funk and pop, live instrumentation and harmony. But Montano mostly avoids sounding like a tasteful throwback, pulling off his merger with zippy grace, in the manner of a prime Pharrell production.
Like Pharrell, Montano has an everyman voice that he's adept at rescuing with exquisitely layered arrangements. But this is not immediately apparent on Jardín: early on, Montano seems intent on showcasing his lone voice in multiple settings—a slice of buzzing hip-hop soul, and then a pivot into piano balladry. The record blooms on “The Game,” the fourth track, which is filled with wonderfully multi-tracked iterations of Montano, each intoxicated on melody. Behind the lead vocal, he sings both a descending, calligraphic line and an unfussy alternative that moves with the beamed focus of a weary sigh. Just as these threaten to bottom out, he adds an onomatopoeic two-note interjection that climbs upward, like the small, immensely gratifying plop that rises after you toss a pebble into a pond.
Similarly heaped vocal passages, teeming with good ideas, are everywhere on the second half of Jardín. Montano especially enjoys contrasting blocky, beeline melodies from A to B with more scenic paths, as if to gently chide ruthless, shortest-route-best-route songwriters. (Montano wrote or co-wrote every song here, played almost every lick, and served as his own producer.) "Long Ears" includes held notes that move with the easily identifiable logic of a staircase as well as loopy, horn-like vocal sequences, jumpy collations of lunging jabs and luxurious glides. It's like someone overlaid a men's choir doing simple warm-ups on top of the backing vocals from D’Angelo’s “Send It On.”
That suggests a dangerous level of self-seriousness, but Jardín stays light on its feet, serving up these vocal feasts with nifty, shifting rhythmic beds: odd click-boom combinations, agitated, slap-happy pitter patter, studio-ace, Bee Gees-level punch. On “My Balloon,” Montano even designs something that could catch the ear of an adventurous radio programmer, soldering a thick synth whirl and light drum programming onto a pop-funk lattice. It’s detail-rich, but the curlicues can't hide the hook's brick-through-a-window bid for your attention.
Refreshingly, there are no whiffs of Drake-indebted R&B here, none of the mixture of hard-bitten programming and bathetic singing that permeates the airwaves and continues to entrance many young singers. This divergence is not necessarily surprising—after all, “Jungle” was an outlier even within the confines of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. Montano's presence on the track helped create a resoundingly ambivalent moment on an album otherwise characterized by chest-thumping standoffishness.
Still, Montano's album marks him as part of a current of rising singers pointedly and successfully ignoring the latest wave of hip-hop/R&B hodgepodge. This varied group includes Guordan Banks, who landed a No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult R&B chart in 2016; Yuna, whose album Chapters spawned a pair of radio hits; and KING, who recently earned a Grammy nomination for last year’s We Are KING. Montano has been tactful about his tenuous connection with Drake in interviews, but Jardín represents a soft rebuke to the star—as well as a rich, buffed debut from an adept young artist. | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | January 20, 2017 | 7.4 | 81126fa0-e639-4f21-a7b5-41458cdd6073 | Elias Leight | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elias-leight/ | null |
On the first of two mixtapes to be released before her major label debut, Before I Wake finds the Oakland emcee less relaxed and laidback. It plays out like a reassertion of control. | On the first of two mixtapes to be released before her major label debut, Before I Wake finds the Oakland emcee less relaxed and laidback. It plays out like a reassertion of control. | Kamaiyah: Before I Wake | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamaiyah-before-i-wake/ | Before I Wake | For this first time since she introduced herself on “How Does It Feel,” Kamaiyah is truly frustrated. “Yeah I fucked up this summer/I didn’t put out one damn song, but y’all hoes still ain’t did nothing/I smell my revenge coming,” she raps on “Slide (Bet),” off her new mixtape Before I Wake. Coolness and calmness have been the Oakland emcee’s calling cards, but there’s clearly a lot weighing on her mind lately. Her debut album on Interscope has been held up by sample clearance issues, causing the healthy buzz built by her breezy 2016 mixtape, A Good Night in the Ghetto, to taper off a bit. Before I Wake is the first of two mixtapes that will precede the album as an attempt to regain some momentum. The fame she’s accumulated is wearing on her, and there’s a slight strain in her voice. But despite these tensions, she’s still making things look easy.
A Good Night in the Ghetto was largely celebratory, conveying the fleeting highs of youth and West Coast nightlife as escapism. Sure, there were mentions of absentee parents, untrustworthy jump-offs, lost friends, and city violence, but those things mostly existed on the periphery, distant thoughts tucked in the back of her mind. Before I Wake is less relaxed and laidback, playing out like a reassertion of control—over her music career, her spot in the rap hierarchy, her mental health and wellness, and hell, even her lovers. She’s snappier here, more keen to defend her territory. “Which one of ya’ll gonna stop me? ‘Cause ain’t nobody standing in my way,” she sings on “The Wave,” hinting at her conquest. “Which one of y’all gon’ top me? ‘Cause ain’t nobody fucking with the wave.” When she calls herself “the coldest bitch alive,” she’s putting suitors on notice: “You can bring the world to me/It don’t matter what you provide/Cause the playa in me it ain’t gon’ never be satisfied.”
Satisfaction is something Kamaiyah has been seeking from the beginning, since she openly wondered how it felt to just live. That pursuit has made her weary. For much of Before I Wake, Kamaiyah takes on a sleepy, singsong delivery, less animated than the unflappable half-croon she rapped through on her sunnier A Good Night in the Ghetto cuts. These performances are somewhat less dynamic, but she still provides the sort of candied melodies that become earworms, sinking comfortably into glossy synth beds.
Kamaiyah has been compared to Missy Elliott, as an inventive rap artist with a clear aesthetic vision who also rocks colorful jumpsuits, which is exemplified by the tasteful “Fashion,” a song that feels retro and chic all at once. But she isn’t beholden to any one style or influence, and on Before I Wake, she blends her reference points into something distinctly hers for a project that is cohesive, sleek, lustrous, and super funky. She borrows the mack raps of Oakland legend Too $hort, plush R&B arrangements (TLC, Keith Sweat, S.O.S. Band), and new jack swing rhythms. Her distillation of the ’80s and ’90s never feels like cloning, or worse, nostalgia chasing. Instead, she’s emerged as something completely original—Not Missy 2.0 or TLC redux, but Kamaiyah 1.0, a visionary who respects and reflects her history.
Given the pending sample clearance delays for Don’t Ever Get It Twisted, it’s somewhat ironic that some of samples on Before I Wake seem almost tangentially related to the songs they form. “Playa in Me,” using a stripped down sample of Lil Jon’s “Play No Games,” flips the original’s script. Tha Dogg Pound’s “Some Bomb Azz (Pussy)” gets a rebrand as “Dope Bitch,” as if the woman from the former rejects that song’s premise and tells her story instead. “Leave Em,” a friendly reminder to leave that terrible boyfriend, samples TLC’s “Creep,” a song about female infidelity and sexual freedom. The samples don’t just complement each other; they tell their own stories. Kamaiyah is never overwhelmed by the burden of potentially mishandling any of them, and each moment feels like a restoration, refurbishing classics for a new generation, with new purpose.
If Kamaiyah’s style is about being approachable, about the very normal and mundane ways we distance ourselves from a violent and unfair world, Before I Wake is the first of her releases that keeps listeners at arm’s length. She’s cautious of others, analyzing their motives, and worried about her own sanity on “Me Against Myself,” rapping about how she puts on a “Hennessy smile to hide my tears.” The bassline dribbles beneath her as she lays out her distresses: “You ain’t felt pain like I have felt pain/People in my life just for self-gain/I’m going through the motions/But myself changed.” When she asks, “Who gon’ really love me and be there for me?” on “Therapy,” she’s channeling years of setbacks and letdowns. She’s learning that success doesn’t erase depression. But there’s never the slightest sense that she’ll let these lapses defeat her, or that she won’t overcome them. She’s still here to win. Doubts creep in on Before I Wake, but she just knows she’s due for another good night. | 2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 13, 2017 | 7.7 | 81241d95-a3de-4abe-9e8e-76431ce55fdb | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
An almost wholly unrooted and original dance music, this emerging South African sound marries hyper-quick, cheap electronics with soulful vocals. | An almost wholly unrooted and original dance music, this emerging South African sound marries hyper-quick, cheap electronics with soulful vocals. | Various Artists: Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14532-shangaan-electro-new-wave-dance-music-from-south-africa/ | Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa | Speed in music can be strange. Sometimes songs that are fast, technically speaking, don't sound fast in effect. Maybe they don't move, or don't prove fleet in any way. Whereas sometimes a slow song, with the right lean, can seem to take off, to zoom toward some distant horizon. But however the finer points play out, speed in music can be misleading-- and wondrously disorienting. Case in point is the compilation Shangaan Electro-- pretty much every track on it is ruthlessly, breathlessly, ridiculously fast. Yet the effect of so much speed is to make everything, paradoxically and more than a little psychedelically, slow down.
Opening track "Ngunyuta Dance", by an act called BBC, makes for a good primer. After beginning with a weightless drop of chintzy-sounding keyboard tones and spritzy digital drums, it eventually has like 10 different patterns running through it, each at a manic pace. And something in the ceaselessness of them all makes the rhythm seem to just keep getting faster and faster as it transpires-- until a disembodying sense of overload washes over and starts, kind of magically, to pull everything apart.
There's a lot to pull apart. Shangaan Electro collects 12 extremely dense and startling tracks of contemporary Shangaan dance music from Africa, specifically a few southern parts near Johannesburg and Mozambique. Evidently, the scene grew out of the mind of one man, named Nozinja, who works as a producer and sells music on his own, on DVDs and cassettes that fan out for use at insane dance parties. Footage from these village parties has gotten around via popular YouTube clips full of sick dance moves, which feature lots of heavily torqued wiggling and actions that look like something a man might do after just discovering a leech on his balls. (Another way to describe them, this a choice quote from the liner notes: "When you see them dance you feel like they have got no bones.")
But part of what makes Shangaan Electro so interesting is the way it seems to laugh away the notion of context altogether, or at least rush right past it. Tracks in the Shangaan style tend to run around 180 beats-per-minute, which is very fast, and the seizing effect of that is amplified by a focus on cheap high-end sounds and a near-total absence of bass, which there simply doesn't seem to be room for. Dance music in general is typically weighted and time-stamped by bass. Shangaan electro floats in ethereal space instead, with lots of speed and no friction.
In the most comprehensive terms, Shangaan electro is extremely weird. The sound sources enlisted in the mosaic tracks here range from what sounds like children's-movie traffic noise to solar flares from a plastic sun. There's beautiful human soul in the choral singing in "Nwa Pfundla" by Tshetsha Boys, but there's as much beautiful post-human soul in the highly processed chipmunk vocals of their "Uya Kwihi Ka Rose". And pretty much throughout, there's a startling range of inventiveness with electronic sounds that are constantly clipped, looped, and folded in on themselves-- like in Mancingelani's "Vana Vasesi", which sounds like someone's spotty memory of Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" run at triple speed.
The liner notes, revealing but also helpfully incomplete, describe the previously very isolated Shangaan electro sound as "hyper-local music, all of it still considered traditional." But little here scans as "traditional" once you tumble in and fall under its swirling parts' spell. All the tracks compiled trace back to Nozinja's studio, where they were born between 2006 and 2009. But they've started to thrive in a zone of no context, which is where we are now. None of Shangaan Electro sounds quite like anything else we have at our disposal. Which, come to think of it, places it within a rich tradition indeed. | 2010-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-08-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Honest Jon’s | August 17, 2010 | 8.3 | 8130719a-595d-4cef-a4ea-2f805330207d | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
Thug offers up a nice summertime party record, his most cheerful, undemanding project since his early mixtapes. | Thug offers up a nice summertime party record, his most cheerful, undemanding project since his early mixtapes. | Young Thug / Young Stoner Life: Slime Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-thug-slime-language/ | Slime Language | Nothing kills the excitement around a new rap record like learning it’s actually a label compilation. From Eminem’s grim Shady Records showcases to Lil Wayne’s sadistically Gudda Gudda-heavy We Are Young Money comp and JAY-Z’s forgotten Roc-A-Fella Records Presents: The Roc Files, Vol. 1 (there was never a Vol. 2), rappers have a long tradition of burying second-tier material on promotional efforts created to lift their imprint’s lesser talents. Even Young Thug’s team seemed to telegraph that his new release, Slime Language, should be graded on a curve. Its overcrowded tracklist is heavy on unknowns like Lil Keed, Tracy T, and Nechie, and speckled with verses from guys like Duke, who has never generated any real heat of his own despite wing-manning on Thug tracks for years. That it also features not only Thug’s sisters HiDoraah and Dolly but also his on-again, off-again partner Karlae furthers the impression the project was born of little more than blatant cronyism.
And yet any skepticism goes out the window from the first track, when Thug euphorically cowabungas his way across a tropical breeze of a beat on “Tsunami,” setting a precedent for good vibes that the record consistently lives up to. Label compilation or not, Slime Language is so generous with its star attraction that the distinction barely matters, and Thug digs in with his usual rubber-jawed zeal. He’s the kind of rapper who commits so fully that even a disposable quip like, “I’m not 2 Chainz/I got 40” feels like method acting: It’s a mere two bars, yet he inhabits the aggrieved sense so fully, selling the umbrage in the notion that somebody’s count could be so off.
From the streamlined elegance of Barter 6 to the lunatic modernism of JEFFREY and the horndog strum-and-croon of Beautiful Thugger Girls, Thug’s strongest projects have introduced completely new avenues of expression. In part because of its label obligations, Slime Language isn’t as indelible as any of those records, nor as revelatory, yet it carves out a niche in Thug’s discography: It’s a summertime party record, his most cheerful, undemanding project since the I Came From Nothing mixtapes of his less adventurous early years, before stylistic gambits took hold over simple pleasures.
For their part, Thug’s labelmates largely try their best to mirror his exuberance, and most of them hold their own. Gunna makes his mark on four solid tracks, reaffirming why he’s Thug’s buzziest protege, even though he’s upstaged by non-YSL signee Lil Baby on the crisp standout “Chanel.” The women in Thug’s life all prove they deserve the spotlight on their own merits, too, especially Dolly, whose stern, no-nonsense flow stands in cold contrast to her Animaniac brother. It’s a shame Slime Language doesn’t explore that dynamic; she appears on the one track Thug sits out entirely.
It’s only in Slime Language’s final stretch that the sheer weight of the guest features takes its toll, and by then it barely matters, since the highs have already left a lasting buzz. Among those thrills: Thug racing against drums modeled after a street busker’s plastic tub on the kinetic treat “Gain Clout”; Thug outlining his philosophy that if you’ve paid for it you might as well enjoy it on “Dirty Shoes” (“Came through Bleveland swerving/I just wiped my dick off with the Rolls Royce curtains”); and a hyped-up, hallucinatory beat from newcomer Keyyz on “Audemar.”
And so Slime Language isn’t as disposable as its somewhat muted early reception would make it seem. Young Thug has been on such a hot streak for so long, dependably mining new muses year after year, that listeners can begin to assume that he’ll always continue at this stride, but that’s not a given. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Inspiration dries up and moments end. For now, though, Slime Language captures one of the most boundless rappers of his era operating near his peak. That it has a bill of goods to sell does little to diminish its accomplishments. | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | August 22, 2018 | 7.3 | 81326ad3-bfb7-4007-b551-c33dcc559e49 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Natalie Mering’s majestic fifth record is a dispatch from the center of catastrophe—an idiosyncratic set of love songs and secular hymns with lushly orchestral arrangements. | Natalie Mering’s majestic fifth record is a dispatch from the center of catastrophe—an idiosyncratic set of love songs and secular hymns with lushly orchestral arrangements. | Weyes Blood: *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weyes-blood-and-in-the-darkness-hearts-aglow/ | And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow | “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” starts small: just Natalie Mering’s voice and piano, and a line about feeling alone at a party. Within a verse or so, its scope has widened to encompass something like the human condition itself. Mering’s narrator wonders whether any of her fellow partygoers really know her, whether they can see her for who she truly is. As the arrangement slowly gathers layers of woodwinds and strings, she realizes that her very isolation may hold the key to the connection she seeks. Perhaps everyone feels just as alone and unseen as she does; if so, they can at least be together in their aloneness. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” like the album it opens, isn’t coy about what it’s trying to convey. When Mering reaches the crux of her revelation, she doesn’t dress it up with figurative language: “Mercy is the only cure for being so lonely.”
Mering has said that And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, her fifth album as Weyes Blood, is the second chapter in a trilogy that began with 2019’s spectacular Titanic Rising. In her telling, that album was a foretelling of catastrophe, and its follow-up is a dispatch from the center of it. Titanic Rising, for all its thematic weight, had the snappy exuberance of classic pop; And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is more like a collection of secular hymns. The rhythms are stately and unsyncopated. The arrangements are lushly orchestral. The songs are mostly around six minutes long, proceeding at the unhurried pace of guided meditations. And, perhaps owing to the sense of communion-via-solitude espoused in the first track, the lyrics are concerned with “we” nearly as often as they are with “I”: “We’re all lost,” “We don’t have time anymore to be afraid,” “We are more than our disguises/We are more than just the pain.”
The album is at its best when Mering roots these universal observations in her perspective as an individual, whether via an unusual chord change or a finely textured image, like the lamplit campsite that appears in the chorus of “Grapevine,” or the boardwalk Ferris wheel that provides the setting for “Hearts Aglow.” Those are both love songs: not love in the sense of a benevolent force that binds together all living things, but love in the sense of a burning connection between two people. And though And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow more overtly concerns itself with the former kind of love, it is frank and perceptive about the latter, both its power and its limits.
In “Grapevine,” a fraught romance makes Mering distant from herself, furthering the sort of alienation she seems determined to transcend. In “Hearts Aglow,” a night out with a beloved is enough to stave off the creeping dread of a world in collapse, at least temporarily. “Might be the moon or the cotton candy/Or he might be a man who actually understands me,” she sings over a Phil Spector-ish slow-dance pulse as backing vocalists swirl behind her. But even in her bliss, she submits to uncertainty: “Rising over the tide/Oh hold me tight/But I’m scared I might fall/Just like the water below/You don’t get to know/If your love has all/It’s gonna take.”
Even when Mering is addressing humanity more broadly, her idiosyncrasies as a writer and a performer keep the music personal and alive. There is her extraordinary voice, so poised and precise that small deviations—an unexpected blue note, or a measured break into a slightly higher register—convey depths of feeling that would require much more demonstrative emoting from other singers. And there is her way of letting the shape of a composition flow from its subject matter, rather than relying on established forms to dictate what goes inside them. The album’s most striking song in this regard is “God Turn Me Into a Flower,” which extolls softness and pliability as strengths rather than weaknesses in a way that reminds me both of Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour, whose narrator deals with grief over her father’s death by turning into a leaf, and of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, whose protagonist asserts that “Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life.” The music itself resists rigid structure, with synthesizer arpeggios, choral harmonies, and sampled birdsong all blooming along the arc of Mering’s intuition.
If a lesser artist were to attempt an album like And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, they might come up with pablum. Its central theme—the search for connection among humans in an increasingly fractured world—is extremely pressing, so much so that it’s also sort of obvious. How do you say anything new or interesting about the water that all of us are swimming in every day? Like Sheila Heti, Mering does so by looking inward and outward at once: having faith that their own perspectives, rendered vividly and honestly enough, can reveal truths that extend far beyond themselves. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow may aspire at times to address the whole world, but it begins with one woman alone at a party. | 2022-11-18T00:04:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-18T00:04:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 18, 2022 | 8.4 | 8134aff5-86e9-42d1-b1ae-654b206b70c6 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Spencer Krug's project away from Sunset Rubdown and the on-hiatus Wolf Parade continues to obsess over the properties of specific instruments. | Spencer Krug's project away from Sunset Rubdown and the on-hiatus Wolf Parade continues to obsess over the properties of specific instruments. | Moonface: Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15674-organ-music-not-vibraphone-like-id-hoped/ | Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped | Late last year, Wolf Parade announced that they were going on an "indefinite hiatus." What this actually means-- and whether or not it's a bit premature to talk of their "lifespan"-- is unclear, but fortunately, Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug do not need each other to make good music. Last month Boeckner's electro-punk duo Handsome Furs released Sound Kapital, and it was undoubtedly the most impassioned record they've made yet. The prolific Krug, on the other hand, has been churning out interesting music for years with a variety of different projects, be it the eccentric supergroup Swan Lake or the increasingly ambitious one-time side project Sunset Rubdown. In a moment when many popular independent artists value accessibility, simplicity, and beach-ready blitheness above all else, Krug's continued appeal lies in the fact that he is an anachronism: a songwriter who's trying to squeeze Byzantine grandeur into the unlikely framework of indie rock. His catalogue is dense, charged with anxiety, and-- in a trick he may have picked up from Dan Bejar-- about as self-referential as a late-series episode of "Arrested Development".
Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped, Krug's first post-Wolf Parade LP, feels like ritual music infused with 1980s nostalgia. Like his previous release as Moonface, a 20-minute marimba showcase appropriately subtitled Marimba and Shit-Drums, Organ Music springs from Krug's experiments with a particular instrument. Over *Organ Music'*s five tracks (the shortest of which clocks in at six-and-half minutes), he creates what you might call Nintendo spirituals: songs that evoke his double-manual organ's devotional vibes just as much as they do-- through the use of drum machine beats, loops, and some skittish programming-- that song that plays throughout all the underwater levels in the original Super Mario Bros. These tracks are meditative, hypnotic, and born of Krug's unmistakable infatuation with the organ's brooding drone. I saw him perform the record live, and whenever he stopped singing he looked completely lost in his own reverie. Which, ultimately, is precisely the problem with this record.
Sunset Rubdown's last album, Dragonslayer, found Krug doing something that his critics didn't think he had in him: self-editing. It remains Krug's most impressive work to date because it's as accessible and immediate as it is thematically complex. Sure, there are dragons, muses, and forays into the Icarus Rhyming Dictionary, but there are also pummeling riffs and catchy hooks galore. Perhaps Dragonslayer's greatest and most unexpected triumph, though, was how emotionally relatable it was. It was a personal record about the toll that the worlds inside someone's head takes on his relationships.
Organ Music, on the other hand, is more of an exercise in shadowboxing. Here, the music drones on without creating an inhabitable atmosphere, and most of its melodies are flat and uninviting. Even when Krug explores Organ Music's more interesting lyrical terrain, it often feels like an echo of something he's done better in the past. The opening verse of "Whale Song (Instead of a Kiss)", for example, feels like a retread of Wolf Parade's "Grounds for Divorce", but with less of a blunt impact.
Which isn't to say it's all tedium. The opener "Return to the Violence of the Ocean Floor" is absorbing and showcases a wide array of the titular instrument's moods. And the standout track is "Fast Peter", a charming tale of recreational drug use and long-distance Internet love with a frenetic tempo and a weirdly compelling 8-bit Peer Gynt vibe. These two songs combined are about as long as Marimba and Shit-Drums; they might have made a good EP.
Organ Music's press release has been floating around the Internet for some time now. It was written by Krug himself, and it is magnificently bizarre and fittingly meta. In it, he hints at knowing that this release is more than a little self-indulgent. He tells us the record was twice as long before he cut five tracks; "You're welcome," he adds. He also seems to wink at the inevitability that we will compare it to the high-water marks of his career. "Moonface will probably never sound like Wolf Parade or Sunset Rubdown," he says, and he's not wrong. Organ Music isn't reaching for any brass rings, so it's hard to fault it too hard for not being a highlight of his career when it never tries to be one. And Krug fans who can't get behind this particular side of him shouldn't get too bent out of shape; his back catalogue shows that something completely different could be around the next corner. | 2011-08-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-02T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | August 2, 2011 | 6.1 | 813a4c9a-28b0-4b99-bb94-636c51aa42c5 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer. The songs tear into the feeling of leaving and having been left alone. | Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer. The songs tear into the feeling of leaving and having been left alone. | St. Vincent: Masseduction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-masseduction/ | Masseduction | St. Vincent gets called “the female Bowie.” Not always for her music, which has taken off from steady and skillful to expansive and gripping at exponential speed; not for her tributes and eulogies of the man, nor exactly for her gender-tweaking image. No, among the first hits for “female Bowie” is a British tabloid, sweeping her and model and ex-girlfriend Cara Delevingne into a world of “domestic bliss” and “purple loo outfit[s].” Such is the life of a woman whose artistry has been made into snackable content. But torn-from-the-headlines reductiveness aside, over the past decade there really hasn’t been a better candidate for the new anything-Bowie than Annie Clark.
Masseduction, then, is her Let’s Dance: exploding the comparatively unassuming craft of Marry Me and the comparatively tentative rhythms of her self-titled album into immediate hooks with a roaring largesse. The guitars are background squalls, compressed and oiled up with “Gary Glitter tuning.” Kendrick Lamar beatmaker Sounwave contributes. So does Jack Antonoff—who’s helped turn the stories of Lorde and Taylor Swift into technicolor memoirs—and even Delevingne herself on backing vox. All of which, in 2017, looks an awful lot like a pop album.
There’s a certain path that former cult artists, or at least non-megastars, take when inspiration or finances move their career pop-wards. The album will be meta, pop-about-pop: smart and layered at best, self-conscious or defensive at worst. The rollout will be a multi-platform extravaganza, where fake takes and alternate poppier personalities abound. Masseduction certainly has that. “We wanted pop-level intention,” said creative director Willo Peron, and Clark delivered: listening sessions styled as escape room puzzles, an art campaign in vinyl-bright pink and red, the fetish boots-and-catsuits in the style of (and on the lower half of) artist and album-cover model Carlotta Kohl; gimmicky Instagram interviews scripted by Carrie Brownstein. The interview questions were absurd placeholders standing in for the ubiquitous, rote questions musicians constantly field—the banal (“insert light banter”), the softballs (what would you tell aspiring musicians?) and the exhausting and gendered: what it’s like to play a show in heels? What it’s like being a woman in music? The punchline to this is pure undiluted acid. The acid’s seeped into the music, too; Masseduction isn’t a pop album so much as a deeply, admittedly personal communique with a pop veneer.
“Sugarboy” executes this with aplomb, via the synthy production, slinky vocals, the call-and-response “Boys! Girls!” and the Swiftian line, “Got a crush on tragedy,” but it’s all played at a deliberately-too-manic pace, too fast to strut. Clark addresses her fans through gritted teeth, guttural voice, and alarming bluntness: “I am alone like you,” less a star’s smile than a rictus grin. “Fear the Future” echoes Marry Me’s “The Apocalypse Song” in its love metaphor, “little death” at the time of the big death, except this time, plays it bigger, more cavernous, turning the restraint of “The Apocalypse Song” into Michael Bay’s Armageddon. The percussion cracks like tectonic plates, the guitars like shuddering reverberations. It almost sounds like a Sleigh Bells track, except where they’d be goofy or cutesy, Clark is deadly serious. The catchiest song, with the most rock-star title and most tabloid-baiting content, is “Young Lover”—one about an overdose, but played with complexity. She leaves in the worst thoughts, putting the most yearning love-song lyrics in the place they accomplish the least. It’s no new trick to make one’s poppiest songs one’s saddest, largely because it works: despair as a neon marquee.
Clark has achieved rockstar grandeur, as well as rock stars’ greatest musical vice: unsubtle commentary on the problems of today. Undoubtedly, there are things left to say about Los Angeles, but while Clark describes the city in great turns of phrase like “the mothers milk their young,” the verses are the same story: sun, sleaze, stars. Just by reading the title “Pills,” you’re already at the finish line, having anticipated its nursery-rhyme, advertising-jingle setting after the first few seconds. But it’s not just social commentary—she’s said as much—it’s also a snapshot of a year in a life, medicated into a blur. “Los Ageless” isn’t about the city so much as Clark’s fleeing it. The most LA thing about it may be the cinematic-noir chorus Clark inhabits—“How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds, too?” On the other coast, in “New York,” she inhabits a stage ballad: the beat haunted by a muffled pulse, the kind that could burst awake at any moment but won’t, and the lyrics haunted by the ghosts of old swagger and surety. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,” she says, speaking in the present, talking about the past.
Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one. It’s part industry mundanity—“Slow Disco” sounds nothing like the rest of the album because it was written with and for Joy Williams of the folk-rockers the Civil Wars—but it fits the narrative: a few years unmoored in the land of sex, drugs, and pop. “Savior” is like porno-funk played by an utterly bemused band. Clark recounts the sexual un-imagination of American history as told through sexy Halloween costumes—nurses, teachers, nuns and cops in their respective ill-fitting clothes, in the garb of dominatrices and the guise of the powerful, but the mindset of the alienated. If St. Vincent was Clark’s Lorrie Moore album (“I ripped [Moore] off so much on the last album, I’m surprised she didn’t, like….” she said at a promo event), this is her Mary Gaitskill song, where she echoes her protagonists’ exhaustion at the sexual personalities and dialogue they’re given, all roles and no play.
Compare this to the title track’s hyperspecific and very un-mass figures of seduction. Clark mentions Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, a nihilist and a “punk rock romantic,” prodigal Christians and their “paranoid secretions fallin’ on basement rugs,” recounted gleefully, as if shining a blacklight on them. You won’t see these figures in costumes because their common threads are exploitation—(the punk is passed out on the floor, the nun’s in the torture-pose “stress position,” Lolita is herself)—and sadness. The Boatman’s Call was recorded after parts of Cave’s life collapsed, and sounds it, and Mingus’ liner notes, co-written by his psychologist, exhume its despair: “If I heard his music I'd understand.” You’d understand by hearing the chorus of “Savior,” too: one word, a simple “Please,” drawn out, syllable by syllable, every shade of longing and real connection unspoken but apparent. Even it’s a little fraught—at the end, Clark’s refrain is buried in the mix, hard to say whether it’s intimate or rueful.
This is the sadder core of Masseduction. Everyone, including Clark, has been left or is leaving and looking back at what used to be a connection. The only constant is the void—“back and unblinking,” Clark admits. On “Happy Birthday, Johnny,” the man of 2014’s “Prince Johnny” and 2007’s “Marry Me” is adrift and estranged somewhere; the ballad is both achingly personal, centering on possibly-real dialogue (“Annie, how could you do this to me?”) and painstakingly crafted—maybe, it seems, if she worded it perfectly, it wouldn’t have to be a eulogy. It all ends with a mournful cabaret titled “Smoking Section”—a little like if “Happy Together” were scraped hollower and hollower from the inside. Clark imagines increasingly baroque deaths for herself: not suicidal, exactly, more the feeling that if death were to be suddenly provided, through some freak faultless accident, it’d be fine. “It’s not the end,” Clark sings, one last ragged thread of resilience. The unspoken subtext is that for Clark it still feels like a beginning. | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | October 16, 2017 | 7.6 | 81414066-130d-432e-9044-b384423e7caa | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Brooklyn band skewers our collective relationship with social media—as well as their own—in noisy punk thrashers that are clever, incisive, and frequently very funny. | The Brooklyn band skewers our collective relationship with social media—as well as their own—in noisy punk thrashers that are clever, incisive, and frequently very funny. | Weeping Icon: Weeping Icon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weeping-icon-weeping-icon/ | Weeping Icon | In 1990, experimental filmmaker Jon Moritsugu released My Degeneration, a movie about an all-girl punk band called Fetish who get sponsored by Big Beef and spiral into chaos as a result of their success. Their songs become propaganda for juicy steaks and sausages, and their lead singer falls in love with a severed pig’s head named Livingston. It’s a hilarious parody of rock’n’roll excess, inflated egos, and the now-obsolete sin of “selling out.” The characters that populate Brooklyn punk band Weeping Icon’s self-titled debut are grappling with similar issues, only their patrons are lifestyle brands and their preferred platform is Instagram instead of a stage. On their sturdy first album, Weeping Icon offer a suite of detailed and coarse thrashers that pick apart our relationship with social media and #content in a way that is unpretentious and often quite funny.
In 2017, Weeping Icon released Eyeball Under, an eight-track project stocked with energetic (if sometimes generic) punk cuts that were effective individually but didn’t stitch together as a whole. In contrast, Weeping Icon feels like a complete vision, aided by a studio team of Uniform’s Ben Greenberg and Eaters’ Jonathan Schenke, as well as the precise, discordant interludes that connect each song like barbed wire. These distorted tendrils mimic Weeping Icon’s live performances. “We don’t stop between songs because we want to sustain the energy and for the sets to be immersive,” the band said in a 2017 interview. “We want people to feel very present.” Considering that most of the lyrics on Weeping Icon skewer the amount of time we spend staring into our phones, you might say the desire to be present is one of the album’s unspoken themes.
The instrumental vignettes do command presence. They cast an apocalyptic pall over the record, perpetuating a feeling of unease, but they also allow the full-length tracks to pop. “Be Anti” punches through the sickly, arrhythmic heartbeat of “(you should listen to me),” delivering a snarky sendup of counterculture fit for Portlandia. Singer and guitarist Sara Fantry spews a vague monologue about how fucked up the world is. She’s pissed off, and there is only one way to change things: “I’m gonna spit,” she snarls, before making sure the act was captured on video. “Did you get it?” She asks. “Post it on Instagram… Do you have Snapchat? Oh, Facebook Live, put it on Facebook Live. I’ll do it again.” It’s an abridged version of something we see every day: People staging their lives for an invisible audience.
Throughout, Weeping Icon poke fun at the discrepancies between the lives we live and those we post online. On “Like Envy,” Fantry takes on the persona of an Instagram influencer. “I post every day at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.,” she gushes. “My life is my brand.” By the song’s end, Weeping Icon’s instruments have been kicked into overdrive, Fantry’s buzzsaw guitar shooting off sparks while Sarah Lutkenhaus’ synthesizer howls like a wild dog. Fantry’s character, meanwhile, has completely unraveled. She sounds like she’s crouched over a pile of burning rubble, compulsively listing Instagram filters she can no longer use, because the world has ended.
It would be too easy for Weeping Icon’s critique of the social-media generation to come off as heavy-handed and out of touch—fortunately, they’re just as guilty as the rest of us. “We’ve all taken selfies,” Fantry said in a recent interview. “We’re on social media all the time.” Their participation in the phenomenon and their sense of humor (one of the songs is literally the bandmates laughing uncontrollably) are what save Weeping Icon from sounding like an album made by Abe Simpson, or worse, your dad.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | September 30, 2019 | 7.7 | 8147ece6-6947-4e47-9e58-52d1cb6e8c24 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The full-length debut from Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. | The full-length debut from Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points) is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. | Floating Points: Elaenia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21110-floating-points-elaenia/ | Elaenia | The title track of Sam Shepherd's debut album as Floating Points was inspired by a dream: A migratory bird strays from its flock and is swallowed up by the forest, mimicking the way our atoms are absorbed into the fabric of the universe when we die (or so goes one theory, anyway). We might find ourselves "reincarnated as a SIM card in Singapore, or as a beetle in Scotland," as Shepherd told Pitchfork recently.
He recorded the song "Elaenia" the very next morning, and its improvised, fluid form mirrors the dream's holistic vision. Made with just a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a handful of arcane synthesizers, it bobs between gurgles and limpid, lyric melodies. At more than seven minutes long, it is the second-longest song on the album, and also the most spare— just a handful of chords, some rumble, and a lot of nuance. Like an ocean swell, it is simple on the surface but complex beneath, and the same could be said of Elaenia as a whole.
Though comparatively short—just seven songs totaling some 43 minutes—Elaenia is rich and welcoming, balancing Shepherd's intelligence with intuition. Flitting between strange time signatures and simple pulses, it utilizes mostly analog synthesizers, pairing them with live instrumentation: electric bass, guitar, piano, live drums, and strings. It is as warm and fluid an "electronic" album as you will hear all year, and it has a timeless feel: There's no reason it could not have been written and recorded 10, 20, or even 30 years ago.
For long-time fans of the UK producer, musician, and DJ, Elaenia feels both like a surprise and a logical extension of his previous singles and EPs. Rhythms are played, not looped or sampled; the album skirts the edges of the dancefloor, flitting between ambient miniatures and extended jams falling somewhere between post-rock and jazz fusion. But nothing here feels like a radical departure, which is a testament to Shepherd's gradual process of refinement. He is trained in neuroscience and epigenetics, but it would be just as easy to imagine him as a furniture builder who had spent the past six years working on a single desk. The underlying structure of his work has remained more or less constant for years, but with every recording, it gets a little smoother, a little more perfect, inching a little closer to its ideal form.
Shepherd has cited Talk Talk as an inspiration, and you can hear the influence of albums like Laughing Stock on the porous fabric of Elaenia. It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details. With the exception of the cosmic jazz-leaning "Silhouettes (1,11,111)", you're left less with hummable themes than with small, passing moments: the burnished gleam of a lone Rhodes key hit hard, a faint scrap of radio static, soft notes that cling to each other like burrs.
In keeping with the transfiguration theme, the music seems to have no stable center at all. It moves like clouds in the sky, slowly and imperceptibly shape-shifting, and at any given moment, what's being played matters less than how we arrived at that point. The sense of an unbroken line is paramount, leading to the album's final thrill when it is suddenly yanked up at a 45-degree angle. In five minutes it goes from silence to jet-engine loud. Synthesizers snarl, the string section goes into overdrive, and the drum kit rolls on inexorably, explosion upon explosion. The song, "Peroration Six", is the only one where you feel Shepherd and company really letting loose. It's a revelation and a rush, a full-on "Fuck yeah!" shouted into the coming storm. The last thing we hear sounds almost like a wrong note, and then it's all simply cut short. The silence is deafening; it feels like waking up from a very heavy dream. | 2015-11-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Luaka Bop / Pluto | November 3, 2015 | 8.4 | 814b7a21-d08e-4e36-b272-8b28b80681ba | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
R&B’s weirdest—and most radical—weirdo modernizes his sound on an album that uses Auto-Tune to convey the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the economic desperation of life in Trumpland. | R&B’s weirdest—and most radical—weirdo modernizes his sound on an album that uses Auto-Tune to convey the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the economic desperation of life in Trumpland. | Swamp Dogg: Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swamp-dogg-love-loss-and-auto-tune/ | Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune | If all Swamp Dogg was was weird, would we still care? The man born Jerry Williams Jr. found LSD and Frank Zappa in the late 1960s, and these discoveries prompted his transformation into R&B’s weirdest weirdo. He planted his freak flag on 1970’s ebulliently funky Total Destruction of Your Mind and the following year’s Rat On, with its indelible cover image of the Dogg happily riding a giant rodent. On more than 20 albums in 40 years, however, those eccentricities have led his music in fascinating directions—and they've accentuated rather than obscured his radical ideas about race, politics, and sex. His outrageousness has only intensified his outrage. The anger and despair and heartbreak and loneliness that underscore his songs have helped cement his status as one of pop’s great cult acts. As recently as 2014, he was railing against America’s history of racial oppression and erasure on an album titled The White Man Made Me Do It.
Now, he’s modernized his sound with an album called Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune. Rather than adopt the austerity of the soul revival, Swamp Dogg embraces this technology as something fresh and new, another tool he can use to get his point across and sound fabulous doing it. Producer Ryan Olson lends a hand, drawing more on his all-star ensemble Gayngs’ wiseacre R&B than on his band Poliça’s moody indie rock. Justin Vernon shows up with his Messina, a recently invented instrument that allows the singer to harmonize with himself in real time. There’s a string section. Someone named Viagra plays shakers. And everything is bathed in that sudsy wash of pitch correction.
The experiment succeeds because Swamp Dogg delivers on all three aspects of his album title: the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the way Auto-Tune can be used to magnify those feelings. “I’ll Pretend” is a fairly straightforward soul number, with Swamp Dogg sing-speaking sentiments that are all the more affecting for being so mundane: “I’ll pretend you’ve gone on vacation, and you’ll be back in a week or maybe two.” The music is dank and slippery, with Texas blues legend Guitar Shorty noodling somewhere off in the distance, and the Auto-Tuned self-harmonies sound like the fevered inner monologue of a man so lonely he has to invent voices in his head just to have a little company.
The album works best when the technology evokes abject isolation. A cover of “Answer Me, My Love,” made famous by Nat King Cole in the ’50s, chops and screws an orchestra to punctuate Swamp Dogg’s appeal to a lost love, while a song actually titled “Lonely” warps a tight R&B combo of piano and sax as though it’s a bleary memory from the early ’60s. “You can make your mouth say you love me, but it don’t have to mean a thing,” Swamp Dogg declares on “$$$ Huntin’,” a song about unemployment. The words are slathered in Auto-Tune, but that only heightens the painful resonance of this Trumpland blues about hard times in America, a track both boisterous in its boasts and angry at how a bad economy forces you to prioritize money over love. “This is not a joke,” he testifies.
Despite the complexity and insight it offers in its lyrics, the jumbled rhythms on “$$$ Huntin’” trip up any groove the song might otherwise achieve. Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune often loses its footing at moments like this, when the tempo picks up. “I’m Coming With Lovin’ on My Mind” will remind you that chillwave was spectacularly unfunky, and there’s nothing sexy about “Sex With Your Ex.” All that technology just gets in the way of what should’ve been a satin-sheeted slow jam, turning Swamp Dogg’s argument—that fucking is a legitimate and meaningful way of connecting with another human being—into a banal punchline.
The album concludes with what may be its most divisive track, a cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” The tune is older than 76-year-old Swamp Dogg himself, but in this version, the music sounds like a perverted Disney soundtrack, all shimmering starbursts, discordant strings, and gritty bass throbs. Yet Swamp Dogg sings it like it’s a stone R&B classic, rather than the stale standard presented on so many blah American Songbook albums. Carmichael recorded the song in 1927, when he was in his late 20s; here, it’s recast as a heavy-hearted, late-in-life reverie, the testimony of a man left only with memories. “Love is now the stardust of yesterday, the music of the years gone by,” Swamp Dogg sings. It’s an intriguing closing sentiment for an artist who has rarely sounded so rooted in the here and now. | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Joyful Noise | September 10, 2018 | 7.3 | 8157f93d-50b7-4756-bcde-8a0110d8426e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Danny Brown collective’s new album is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl. | The Danny Brown collective’s new album is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl. | Bruiser Brigade: TV62 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruiser-brigade-tv62/ | TV62 | Detroit’s Bruiser Brigade collective, led by Danny Brown, got their name from a hidden team power-up in a video game. In the 2004 title X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, you create a four-person unit from a wide selection of characters to defeat the titular villain. The name of one of those teams—composed of mutants Wolverine, Rogue, Colossus, and Juggernaut—appealed to Brown and a handful of members, and it eventually stuck. Bruiser Brigade has since proven to be an apt name for the collective, especially in a world where Brown regularly leaks songs via the game-oriented streaming service Twitch. Their music is confrontational and challenging, obliterating the line between hard-bitten street raps and hazy abstraction until they all become points on the same Cerebro map.
TV62, the group’s latest compilation and the first to be released through the recently founded Bruiser Brigade Records, funnels this formula through the group’s first stab at a loose concept project. A fuzzy ad for WGPR-TV—a Detroit TV station that was also the first Black-owned television station in the United States—opens the album before Danny and a handful of Bruiser Brigade members are heard telling jokes and laughing in the background. The songs don’t have a narrative throughline, but the intent is clear: the Bruisers are as Detroit as Rockports and Cartiers, and they’re here to rap through any wall you put in front of them. There are a few surprises and left turns, but TV62 is a solid extension of their brand of gully Detroit music delivered with a crooked snarl.
Across the project, each member firmly establishes their purpose within the squad. J.U.S. and Fat Ray are the hard-nosed soldiers giving clear-eyed status reports. Newcomer Bruiser Wolf uses a disarming amount of punchlines to portray the drug game in vivid, cartoonish detail. ZelooperZ’s voice shapeshifts from bar to bar, keeping his songs unpredictable yet shackled to the ground. Producers Black Noi$e, SKYWLKR, Raphy, and J.U.S., among others, provide a diverse palette of boom-bap, mid-tempo dusty loops, and even a variation on the Detroit street rap someone like Babyface Ray would float on. All roads lead back to Danny, who’s the glue binding these seemingly disparate elements together.
That’s a staggering amount of voices and personalities crammed into 16 tracks, but it never become chaotic or overbearing. The baton is passed frequently enough to give the project a brisk pace. Eagle-eyed fans will notice that Dopehead and Kash The Kushman—two Bruiser Brigade members featured prominently on 2018’s Reign Supreme—are absent from TV62. Old and new members alike pick up the slack, elevating the project to more than just a pile of loosies cobbled together. ZelooperZ uses both ends of his vocal register to churn the maximum amount of personality out of his one song and one guest verse. Bruiser Wolf, J.U.S., and Fat Ray, meanwhile, each appear on four songs as either a headliner or guest. (All three have released full-length projects through the label within the last five months.)
The affect and wordplay that Bruiser Wolf sharpened on his stellar label debut, Dope Game Stupid, contrasts nicely with the weirder flourishes of Black Noi$e and Gulley’s production. Fat Ray, the group’s most traditional rapper, matches the shuffle of a downtempo beat on the standout “Superhero,” where he talks about cracking heads like Pepsi cans and says he has more bars than Maryland rapper Xanman. J.U.S.’s storytelling continues to impress, too—he compares life to a video game on the self-produced “Story Mode”; and on “Friends or Foe,” he stuffs several vignettes into roughly a minute over producer dream beach’s chirping synths. Though nearly every featured artist has at least one song that could go, the concise runtimes keep the action moving.
Naturally, Danny Brown’s songs connect all corners of TV62. He’s larger than life like Bruiser Wolf, isn’t afraid to modulate his voice like ZelooperZ, has the anecdotal eye of J.U.S., and the stoic “don’t cross me” nature of Fat Ray. He adopts styles and powers with the ease of the X-Man Rogue, attacking different beats with varying skill sets. His voice skips across the production on “Dylon” and “Welfare,” stretching to the elastic heights of Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the latter. Brown’s four tracks embrace the whiplash in tone, from manic to somber, that fueled early work like XXX and Old; but because they’re so spread out, it’s even more surprising to hear him squawking like a character from Chowder about trapping on Greyhound buses immediately after J.U.S.’s straight-faced listing of goals on “Icewood Type Beat.”
Falling in line with the album’s intro and interspersed skits of laughter, TV62 approximates the casual chaos of late-night channel surfing. Bruiser Brigade’s chemistry and skill propel the project beyond the sum of its parts, though, standing as the closest thing to a statement the group has ever released. “Everybody want us all to win. Everybody working toward the same efforts,” Bruiser Wolf recently told Dad Bod Rap Pod of the group’s endgame. The only way they intend to get to the next level is together.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bruiser Brigade | May 20, 2021 | 7 | 81591f49-e60b-4817-822d-8c4d7da1c439 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Availing himself of his formidable array of modular-synthesizer components, the Depeche Mode songwriter indulges his darkest instincts. | Availing himself of his formidable array of modular-synthesizer components, the Depeche Mode songwriter indulges his darkest instincts. | Martin Gore: The Third Chimpanzee EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martin-gore-the-third-chimpanzee-ep/ | The Third Chimpanzee EP | Since 1989, in and around writing the bulk of the songs recorded by Depeche Mode, Martin Gore has been slowly building a solo discography. It’s a humble side hustle comprising cover versions or, as on MG, modular-synth instrumentals, some of which originated as demos for his band’s 2013 album Delta Machine. But with Gore having no one to please but himself, he’s free to make weirder and more dynamic sounds than he would dare with the day job.
The Third Chimpanzee is his darkest—and strongest—solo work yet. The five instrumentals, all of them named after different primates, have the overdriven sting of vintage industrial, with bone-shuddering bass and the nastiest synth eruptions that he has elicited since Depeche Mode’s 1997 album Ultra. The mood is feral and erotic yet curiously comfortable, as if Gore discovered his old bondage gear in the back of a closet and found that it still fits.
Gore establishes a seamy atmosphere in the EP’s first seconds. Opening track “Howler” kicks off with a shredded bass pulse and metallic groans that gradually mesh with assorted blips to build a lumbering rhythm. By the time the main melody’s blurry, four-note shuffle kicks in, it feels like a gratifying release.
Other tracks are even more agitated. “Mandrill” stomps with an ugly sensuality evocative of former Depeche Mode tourmates Nitzer Ebb, while “Capuchin” slowly rolls with a John Carpenter-like tension. The best is “Vervet,” eight and a half minutes that glisten and creak like skintight latex. Various glassy melodies and countermelodies wind around a 4/4 thump, growing in size and intensity as the song rumbles steadily ahead.
What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete. The way “Vervet” continues to build suggests an even more explosive track to follow. Instead, Gore circles back to the beginning, reprising two minutes of “Howler”’s melody and then ending the EP there. Maybe these five tracks were all that he had in him this time around; perhaps he’s got more music ready but is parceling it out in small doses. Whatever the case, on The Third Chimpanzee Gore sounds refreshingly inspired.
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. | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | February 1, 2021 | 7.3 | 815eae04-63bd-463a-b754-51f287d16e57 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
Still a child during grime’s original heyday, the Edinburgh producer approaches the genre with a collagist’s appreciation for layering, juxtaposition, and hyper-referentiality. | Still a child during grime’s original heyday, the Edinburgh producer approaches the genre with a collagist’s appreciation for layering, juxtaposition, and hyper-referentiality. | Proc Fiskal : Insula | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/proc-fiskal-insula/ | Insula | Joe Powers grew up 300 miles and 10 years away from the epicenter of grime. The Edinburgh producer would have been more interested in plastic blocks than tower blocks back when Deja Vu FM was transmitting from the rooftops of East London. But his debut album as Proc Fiskal is one of the most original records to emerge from the genre’s current burst of afterlife, possessing an outsider spirit all its own.
As you might expect from a musician born in the late 1990s, Powers’ introduction to grime came not through pirate radio but the flattened digital vistas of YouTube, where he discovered vintage tunes by first-wavers like Wiley and Danny Weed. Grime itself is always somewhat distant in Powers’ universe—always mediated, altered by the passage of time, or seen through a screen. Insula is a dense thicket, like an ocean gyre that’s churned a ton of colorful flotsam into an ad hoc territory of its own, isolated from its original destination. Over its 16 tracks you can make out the eski clicks and plinking 8-bit melodies of classic grime; gooey synth tones lifted from ambient music; cut-up drums reaching IDM levels of anal-retentive orderliness; and random bursts of conversation captured on Powers’ phone. “If ma dad knew what was going on he’d fucken’ eat your eyes,” squeaks an adversary on “Achiltibuie,” one of several interludes that create intimate B-roll footage for his emotional narrative.
These voices, often captured unawares, lend Insula an intimacy that’s often been missing from recent instrumental grime, much of which is tooled up for the dancefloor. Powers can do rugged instrumentals too—his first EP for Hyperdub, 2017’s The Highland Mob, was a more clinical interpretation of classic 8-bar riddims, while the recent Hello Boss EP took a detour through jungle and dub. But, as its title suggests, Insula is more introspective, a scrapbook of false memories and eavesdropped emotions.
Vintage grime is broken and rebuilt to provide the album’s basic skeleton; most of the melodies are powered by sounds from old computer software and video games like “Paper Mario” and “Pikmin,” along with an arsenal of classic grime sources like the Korg Triton and the Plugsound VST. The air is thick and alive, packed with clicks, squeaks, and whirrs, as on the 8-bit sugar-rush of “Scotch Precog” and the melancholy chimes of “Future Headache”; on these tunes, the effect is strangely akin to the hyperactive collage beats of early Four Tet and Manitoba. The nod to the past is more explicit on “A Like Ye,” a Scottish spin on Dizzee Rascal’s genre-defining “I Luv U”; elsewhere, standouts “Apple Juice” and “Dish Washing” expand the concept of eski clicks to include birdsong, helium voices, and the simple sound of breathing.
Powers has said that these songs are about “girls, depression, positivity, being unemployed, being employed [and] hating it,” among other quotidian concerns; his phone addiction also features, with social-media notification sounds providing hormonal spikes at random. On “Dopamine” he addresses his addiction through a frantic beat and twinkling keys which have a distinctly “Eastern” feel—a tribute to the historical meta-genre of sinogrime, coined by Hyperdub label boss Kode9 to describe a seam of grime tunes with vaguely Chinese-influenced melodies.
Those pretty keys appear throughout Insula in a style that also nods to the tranquil beauty of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano melodies. The Japanese composer has been a key influence on the current generation of grime artists, including Mr. Mitch and Yamaneko—the former taking grime into the zone of minimalist R&B and pop, the latter making connections with ambient and video-game music. Their introspective deconstructions of grime machismo are obvious forebears to Insula, but Powers has forged a sound of his own, too: scattershot and emotional, attention deficient and frantically detailed. As its filigree twists expand into every available space, Insula suggests there are still acres left to explore in this increasingly virtual territory. | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | June 11, 2018 | 7.9 | 81621e9c-9aca-487a-89c4-7e07516fa633 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Ryan Pollie's self-titled debut as Los Angeles Police Department is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope, recalling the sleepy melancholia of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House in its halo-effect ambience. | Ryan Pollie's self-titled debut as Los Angeles Police Department is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope, recalling the sleepy melancholia of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House in its halo-effect ambience. | Los Angeles Police Department: Los Angeles Police Department | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19747-los-angeles-police-department-los-angeles-police-department/ | Los Angeles Police Department | Los Angeles Police Department is a blank sign of a name, a Walmart smiley face, and Ryan Pollie, the 25-year-old who records under it, doesn't provide any hints as to how to read it—there is no detectable whiff of irony in his gorgeous, sleepy songs. If anything, he seems to be hiding behind the moniker, recalling the brief moment, three or four years ago, when indie bands stumbled upon a brief obsession with un-googleable names (Girls, Tennis, Real Estate)—that, or he just finds the name hilarious.
Pollie grew up in Philadelphia but now lives and records in Los Angeles, and his music has the sort of dreamy air that would entertain these sorts of idle fancies. His self-titled debut is a pleasingly rumpled yawn of California pop, ambitious in arrangement and melody and narrow in scope. Most of the richly arranged and spacious songs focus on the ache of being alone or the satisfaction of it. "I let her go and that was wrong," he sings on "She Came Through (Again)", the song title rounding out the story and letting you know that someone important to him is giving him second (or third) chances. "It's happening again, I can be so selfish/ But you're the only one I can be myself with," goes the chorus to "The Only One".
Pollie sings these pretty choruses about alone time in a quiet voice resembling Ira Kaplan's, the kind of plainspoken whisper often associated with public radio announcers. He strums casually, sometimes messily, on an acoustic or a lightly distorted electric, lending the songs on LAPD the sort of just-sitting-around energy that conjured the phrase "bedroom pop" into existence. You can practically shut your eyes and see the chord snaking messily around the bed sheets while he sings from a notebook.
But beneath its rumpled surface, Los Angeles Police Department isn't casual or tossed-off, as Pollie has layered all sorts of detail into his songs, which give away obsessions with painstaking craft. He's an off-handedly excellent musician who seems to be just messing around, even when he's racking up triple word scores. The drafty-ceiling melancholy and watercolor sound of Grizzly Bear's Yellow House is all over LAPD, and the way the song structures braid together like the wicker in an Amish rocking chair would probably impress Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen. "Go Down" is broken down into globular little sections, one of them a toy-marching-band fugue, that tells us Pollie has done some intense Smile studying. On "August 31", where Pollie admits he's "getting tired of my friends," he layers himself into a stacked choir and harmonizes with himself gloriously.
LAPD is less than half an hour's worth of music—it slots neatly into a morning walk, and because it's murmured and low-key, it's easy music to make friends with without over-scrutinizing. It's a first-cup-of-coffee album, the cotton-wispy music played when people are still peeling back filters of consciousness and gathering the wherewithal to join the world again. Gloriously arranged with a late-summer-light country rock haze, LAPD is big shady tree we can sit beneath, shielding us from the real world the same way Pollie's curiously anonymous band name does for him. | 2014-09-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-09-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Forged Artifacts / ChillMegaChill | September 18, 2014 | 7.5 | 816a04aa-5161-46a3-a981-67d7b08d14d5 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Mark E. Smith’s meaty, swollen approach to garage rock may bristle fans of his early work, but the album’s little touches and turns makes this more than an average release for a legacy band. | Mark E. Smith’s meaty, swollen approach to garage rock may bristle fans of his early work, but the album’s little touches and turns makes this more than an average release for a legacy band. | The Fall: New Facts Emerge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-fall-new-facts-emerge/ | New Facts Emerge | The Fall is a band that exists without precedent. For 40 years, they have remained the chief creative output for the mercurial and often combative vocalist/songwriter Mark E. Smith, and in that time, the Fall have fulfilled the promise of the post-punk movement that they emerged from. The project continues to move forward with an almost cavalier disregard for their past accomplishments. A look at recent setlists from the band’s live performances show that, in spite of a rich and varied discography, the oldest original material that Smith and the current incarnation of the Fall will deign to play are songs from their 2007 album Reformation Post TLC.
With the band’s contemporaries like Peter Hook and the Buzzcocks content to while away their careers reliving former glories, the Fall’s indifference to the sound that made them known is almost admirable. But it does put the band’s recent material—like their new album, New Facts Emerge—at something of a disadvantage, because anyone discovering the Fall through this or other recent releases might rightfully wonder what all the fuss is about.
That’s, in part, because Smith’s current bandmates—the solid trio of guitarist Peter Greenway, bassist Dave Spurr, and drummer Keiron Melling, one of the Fall’s longest tenured lineups at 10 years and counting—haven’t made a concerted effort to revert back to a classic Fall sound. Theirs is a meaty, swollen approach to garage rock that leaves ample room for diversions into exploratory psych and shredded rockabilly, and these moments turn out to be the best on Emerge. On “Couple Vs Jobless Mid 30’s,” the band cycles through an array of moods, from a slow ooze to a stiff-legged shuffle to a slinky surf number. On the album closer, “Nine Out of Ten,” Greenway plays a hypnotic, overdriven guitar pattern alone for almost five-and-a-half minutes.
Another potential sticking point for any Fall fan, new or longtime, is the current state of Mark E. Smith’s voice. Long gone is the untrained yet undeniably charming timbre that barked, squealed, and crooned through his band’s most prominent work; it’s been replaced by a bilious and phlegmy growl struck by age (he turned 60 in March) and many, many cigarettes. It’s not an easy sound to get used to, but on much of the Fall’s recent music, it’s clear that Smith is aware of how he sounds. He seems to take pleasure in drawing out the syllables in a word like “folderol” (“Fol De Rol”) because it sounds especially menacing when he does it—and on the same tune, he gives the phrase “homo sapien electric” the same chilling effect by raising the volume and letting the moisture in his throat rattle away. However, he does settle down as the mood strikes him: As his band rat-a-tats behind him on “Groundsboy” and “Gibbus Gibson,” he sounds vaguely sweet, like a liquored-up uncle trying to sing a ballad at the karaoke bar, holding out notes and words to their breaking point.
What truth remains in John Peel’s oft-repeated comment about his favorite band (“They are always different; they are always the same”) is Smith’s love of sound. Not just the noise that a great rock group can make, but the possibilities available in the recording process. As co-producer of Emerge (with Melling), he gets especially playful, sending the last few seconds of “Victoria Train Station Massacre” into reverse and muffling the entirety of “O! ZZTRRK Man” with his voice stuck in the recesses of the song. It’s those little touches and turns, and Smith’s larger unpredictability, that keep this album from becoming another average entry into the catalog of a respected legacy act. | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cherry Red | July 29, 2017 | 6.8 | 81712602-6b4f-4d3f-93b1-4674bdb17998 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | null |
Two years after their collaborative debut Step Brothers, Southern rappers Starlito and Don Trip present the for-retail sequel, a release that reveals two of the most honest writers in rap working together at maximum comfort and confidence. | Two years after their collaborative debut Step Brothers, Southern rappers Starlito and Don Trip present the for-retail sequel, a release that reveals two of the most honest writers in rap working together at maximum comfort and confidence. | Don Trip / Starlito: Step Brothers 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18803-don-trip-starlito-step-brothers-2/ | Step Brothers 2 | The first sound on Step Brothers 2 is Starlito arguing good-naturedly with Don Trip over which one of them should go first. (The track is song is called "Paper Rock, Scissors," suggesting how they settled the issue.) The two rappers—Starlito from Nashville, Don Trip from Memphis—enjoy a bond unusual among solo artists and particularly unique among rappers. (I recommend reading some interviews with the two of them if you need to feel good today.) The two met in 2010, when they were both were fairly recent castoffs from major labels; Don Trip had a cup of coffee on Interscope, while Starlito submitted his talents to the ruthless Cash Money grinder for years. Both of them were in the throes of building the kind of midlevel regional careers that ensures you'll always have fans but might never have money. They clicked.
The mixtape they made, 2011's Step Brothers, took its title from the then-three-year-old Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly vehicle. "[I was drawn to] the concept of the camaraderie between two strangers that were so quirky in their own regard that they wouldn't gel with anyone else," Starlito told The Fader. It was the most popular thing either of them had ever released; fair or not, they learned the world paid more attention to them together than to either of them alone.
Other rappers might have rushed out a sequel within six months, to strike while the iron is hot. But Lito and Trip are shrewd and deliberate, which means that Step Brothers 2 is out now, two years later, and unlike its predecessor, it's available for retail. They spent money on beats from Drumma Boy, Sonny Digital, and other in-demand producers, and honed their songs and concepts. What you don't get this time around: the bottled-lightning sound of two rappers falling in love with each other's ideas in real time. What you do get: Two of the most honest writers in rap working together at maximum comfort and confidence.
As with the first Step Brothers, Lito and Trip largely don't bother with hooks. "No chorus but it's goin' on like four minutes," Starlito says wryly on "Paper, Rock Scissors," and many of these songs just go on and on, in the best and most exciting sense, both rappers dreaming up vivid phrasing and rapping for audiences of one. "My ink pen drip icicles," Don Trip says on "Paper, Rock, Scissors". "Servin, servin like we never heard of cops/ Prefer to handle my business personally -you want this work or not?" raps Starlito on "28th Song". They elbow out the beats, blotting out the empty spaces, rap for 32 bars or more; they have too much to say, and it's exhilarating.
For the friendly-competition purposes of Step Brothers 3, I'll observe that Lito gets Trip on this one, just barely. Trip makes his way from point A to B by stringing sometimes-dumb puns together, as in "Life is sweet, but still sucks, like a Sno Cone" ("4x4 Relay"), while Lito raps in gorgeously accumulating run-on sentences, dotted with musical phrasings and internal rhymes. Following along with the long "O" sounds in a stretch of rhyme like "On the low I been unfocused, I'm just hoping no one notices/ Trying to play my cards right, but things got wild as the Joker is/ The things I love I kill for, call my bluff with no poker chips/ got this chip on my shoulder which/ Brings me to this lick I'm about to hit" (from "Caesar and Brutus") points you toward the subtlety of Lito's writing, which never halts the force of his rapping.
Starlito has had a quietly triumphant year; Step Brothers 2 is his third stellar full-length of 2013. His musing, wry style has gathered resonance as he's developed as an artist, and this year, every off-the-cuff thought he shared cut to the bone. On Funerals & Court Dates from last winter, he talked ruefully about not finishing college, simply because "shit's expensive." On Cold Turkey from this summer, he told us to call our grandmother to "see how her day went. "This advice come with experience, you ain't gotta take it," he shrugged.
It's this unforced honesty he shares with Don Trip, whose biggest song, "Letter To My Son", was a powerful lament about struggling to visit his child that lingered over details like court-appointed visitation rights. His adlib is a high-pitched, braying cackle, the sound of someone's soused uncle laughing at his own off-color joke; he's a good foil for the subdued Starlito, who can get lost in his own mind occasionally. Step Brothers 2 was financed by the tour that the two rappers booked themselves, without a team of promoters. Hopefully, it will inch the career of both rappers a little further up the ladder.They deserve a dedicated cult fanbase in every major American city. | 2013-12-09T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2013-12-09T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 9, 2013 | 7.7 | 817b1955-532c-460e-a615-67c6dcc90e31 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Spacemen 3’s newly reissued drone album—recorded in 1988 in the lobby of a movie theater—marked the start of the curious rise of one of the UK’s most influential indie rock bands. | Spacemen 3’s newly reissued drone album—recorded in 1988 in the lobby of a movie theater—marked the start of the curious rise of one of the UK’s most influential indie rock bands. | Spacemen 3: Dreamweapon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spacemen-3-dreamweapon/ | Dreamweapon | On August 19, 1988, Spacemen 3 traveled down from their homes in Rugby—a manufacturing town 80 miles northwest of London—to play a show at the Watermans Arts Centre in the West London suburb of Brentford. It wasn’t even a show, really: The group was to play in the venue’s lobby, while patrons lined up to get into that evening’s screening of art-house auteur Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Only 15 or so fans actually watched them play.
At that point, Spacemen 3 were so peripheral to British independent music that they were barely a curio. Without the support of the weekly music papers, the band was purely the preserve of psychedelic heads. No one had it in mind that they might one day rival the Smiths as one of the most profoundly influential British bands of their era.
The performance at Watermans Arts Centre was billed as “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music,” despite the complete absence of sitars. It consisted of Peter Kember (aka Sonic Boom) playing a single E chord, while guitarists Jason Pierce and Steve Evans picked notes around him, and Will Carruthers anchored everything on bass. That was the plan, at least; in practice, Carruthers forgot to turn on his amp. As he put it in his terrific memoir, Playing the Bass With Three Left Hands: “A monkey could have done what I had just done. A non-existent monkey could have done it.”
The 45-minute performance was recorded and served as the main attraction of Spacemen 3’s 1990 album, Dreamweapon. Superior Viaduct’s new edition, with “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” augmented by three more drone pieces, is testimony to the live document’s continued allure, despite its oddly comical nature (around the 16-minute mark, you hear a voice in the background over a PA: “Ladies and gentlemen, the cinema is now open and you can take your seats for this evening’s showing of Wings of Desire.”).
“An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” is one of the most extreme pieces of music to find a fairly large audience. It’s not that it is confrontational, or difficult. It is just so completely unyielding. It offers no concessions to listeners, demanding they embrace the drone, or leave. Despite the lo-fidelity and the background noise— along with the PA announcements, there is clattering tableware, chatter, and a crying baby—it is beautiful, in the same way, that watching clouds rolling across the sky is beautiful. It offers no navigation points, no waystations. It is absolutely captivating because it refuses to expand. “An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music” would have the same impact at 10 minutes, or 20, or 30. It lasts 45 minutes only because that’s how long Spacemen 3 had been hired to play.
The three other pieces on this new Dreamweapon reissue are variations on a theme: “Ecstasy Live Intro Theme” takes a single synth bass note, with a high, piercing, dentist’s drill tone sliding around the scale at the top end of the keyboard. Does it build and subside in volume? It’s genuinely hard to tell, yet there are places when, for no apparent reason, it suddenly feels startlingly more intense, anxious, and claustrophobic. It is, at times, verging on terrifying in its physicality. “Ecstasy in Slow Motion” is more of the same, but less intense. (Both are close cousins of “Ecstasy Symphony,” from the band’s 1987 album The Perfect Prescription.) The concluding “Spacemen Jam” is the filler here: 15 minutes of guitar doodles that are precisely as interesting as you would expect from a couple of young men messing about on their guitars with a tape recorder running.
Had the voiceless drone been the sole interest of Spacemen 3, then it’s likely that Dreamweapon would never have seen the light of day. But in November 1988, Spacemen 3 released the more traditional psych-rock explosion of “Revolution,” the song that changed everything for them. “Revolution” became UK indie’s ubiquitous theme of autumn 1988, hailed by the critics, and featured on television. The album Playing With Fire, released in February 1989, confirmed their new status. Suddenly all the mythology Spacemen 3 had built up for themselves—typified by their slogan, “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”—stopped being the self-aggrandizement of unknown provincials and became mission statements of a major band. They spent most of 1989 slowly unravelling, finally officially disbanding in 1991 after the release of Recurring, their fourth and final studio album. Their whirlwind trajectory only contributed to the mystique, prompting an array of live albums and unofficial and semi-official releases that started in 1990.
More than any of their contemporaries, Spacemen 3’s legacy depends on that elusiveness, the sense of them as voyagers through a psychedelic netherworld. They were a band who promised to open doors, and who did so for scores of bands who followed—John Dwyer’s Thee Oh Sees and the whole of the San Francisco psych scene, the Warlocks, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the Black Angels, through to the War on Drugs and pretty much anyone else with a taste for hallucinogens and the drone. What Dreamweapon reveals is how quotidian the origins of that mythology were: four blokes earning a few quid playing for people who weren’t even listening. As the silent bassist Carruthers wrote of the performance: “To this day, I’m not sure if it was art or not.” | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Superior Viaduct | March 3, 2018 | 6.6 | 8182897b-c7c0-4ee9-8d5c-9923267a5da2 | Michael Hann | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hann/ | |
If you were trying to explain IDM to someone who had heard neither the term nor the music categorized as ... | If you were trying to explain IDM to someone who had heard neither the term nor the music categorized as ... | Plaid: Spokes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6337-spokes/ | Spokes | If you were trying to explain IDM to someone who had heard neither the term nor the music categorized as such (i.e. 99% of the populace), you could do worse than to put on a Plaid record. With a history stretching back to the formative days of post-techno, including a contribution Warp Records' seminal Artificial Intelligence compilation (the duo was then working with Ken Downie as Black Dog Productions, but their track was released under the name I.A.O.), Plaid strikes me as the prototypical IDM act. Aphex Twin and Autechre, both of whom were also featured on AI, have developed too unpredictably; their records can go anywhere. Plaid, on the other hand, continue to refine and develop their early sound.
But back to the hapless no-IDM-knowin' subject of our experiment: What would he call Plaid if we were to throw on a record? My guess is "techno." "Techno" is in its widespread usage among casual music fans is a catchall term for any danceable electronic music. Depeche Mode were called techno when I was in college, back before anyone had heard of Derrick May, and when Eminem dismissed Moby because "nobody listens to techno" only serious music heads questioned the accuracy of his label. That someone without an interest in electronic music subgenres (which, again, is almost everybody) might describe Plaid as such is ironic because, in fact, they are much closer to the ideal of sleek Detroit techno of the Belleville Three than most of their Warp roster brethren. Unlike Aphex or Ae, Plaid have never been particularly interested in texture in the micro sense; they're quite content to let their synths sound the way "futuristic" synths sounded in the late 80s and early 90s. Plaid has always been more about the rhythmic and arrangement possibilities of digital music, which puts them closer to where the music started.
In the past Plaid sprinkled their sober post-techno with playful experiments and excursions into the rhythms and sonic signifiers of cultures not usually associated with their kind of music (Latin America, the Far East); with Spokes, Plaid offers their most focused vision yet. A consistent mood is carried through most of these ten tracks, and it can be characterized with words familiar to people who listen to a lot of IDM: reflective and mysterious, with an occasional tension verging on paranoia. Beats are everywhere, but they're never danceable nor do they seem to be the focus of any specific track. Instead, percussion here mostly serves the traditional function of marking time while the swirl of synths builds and develops.
The interplay of the sounds on Spokes is occasionally striking. The rapid, overlapping sequences of "Crumax Rins" lock together to form a constantly shifting tapestry of sound, the sonic equivalent to a vibrating field of colors that transforms completely every time you blink. The acid arpeggios that mark the lead-in to "Upona" have a similar effect, introducing the world of the track as a place of speed and random twitches, where the vibrations just beneath the surface of awareness are disorienting. The opening bass throbs of "Marry" suggest a celestial scene-- some sort of deep space docking station, perhaps. But then the peppy (if malnourished) drums kick in, and the focus turns to the swirl of synths that lag behind the beat and coagulate into a bland but pretty melody that, unfortunately, doesn't seem a galaxy away from Mannheim Steamroller.
Indeed, there are some dull moments on Spokes, but plucking tracks from the record and turning them around under the magnifying glass probably misses what Plaid intended (this one seems meant to be listened to in succession). For my money, the highlights on the album come during the tracks that depart from the album's script. "Get What You Gave" has pads that sound like an electronic steel drum carrying the melody, and that combined with the polyrhythmic stop/start beat evoke a light, airy Latin feel. And then "B Born Droid" is like a cyborg waltz, with a patient, shuffling gait and a minor key synth lead. These standouts are open and full of possibility amid tracks that seem content to work within narrowly defined parameters established years ago. Plaid do both very well, mind you, but I find myself wishing the ratios were reversed. | 2003-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 14, 2003 | 6.2 | 81873bd5-304d-4809-beac-3ba7756f94ad | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The Faint released their debut album Sine Sierra nearly twenty years ago, and if that makes you feel old, imagine how they must’ve felt when they went on hiatus following 2008’s Fasciination. Their first album since reuniting, Doom Abuse, isn’t so much an argument for the Faint’s continued relevancy as it is for the potency of their real-time nostalgia. | The Faint released their debut album Sine Sierra nearly twenty years ago, and if that makes you feel old, imagine how they must’ve felt when they went on hiatus following 2008’s Fasciination. Their first album since reuniting, Doom Abuse, isn’t so much an argument for the Faint’s continued relevancy as it is for the potency of their real-time nostalgia. | The Faint: Doom Abuse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19186-the-faint-doom-abuse/ | Doom Abuse | When the Faint released their debut album Sine Sierra, Conor Oberst was a band member and they were known as Norman Bailer. That was nearly twenty years ago, and if that makes you feel old, imagine how the Faint must’ve felt when they went on hiatus following 2008’s Fasciination. For sullen teens who thought Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine were for jocks, the Faint's angsty, political electro-punk could've seemed like the most exciting shit imaginable, and by the time they reunited to play festivals in 2012, everyone was free to admit “Agenda Suicide” kinda kicked ass. A new album wasn’t part of the deal, but if we’re going to get one anyway, at least the title of Doom Abuse shows their heads are in the right place. They’re not here for new recruits.
Of course, that means the Faint still have to make Faint-like music, and they can’t claim any new insight to our political and socioeconomic problems. Regardless if Todd Fink has opinions on the NSA and the Crimea, as far as he’s concerned, 2014 might as well be 2004—or 1994, or 1984. During the anti-everything recitation of “Animal Needs”, Fink nasally intones, “We don’t need soap/ We don’t need straws/ We don’t need software to tell us we’re lost.” He also tells us we don’t need toilets, so...shots fired, American Standard?
The level of discourse on Doom Abuse will hit the spot for people who still think Desaparecidos’ political views are a little too nuanced. Who knows if Fink even believes half the shit he says, but his functional nihilism is an accessory not all that different than pleather pants or Commie-chic album covers: disaffection is sexy, so whether you’re batting your guyliner or rolling your eyes, it’s all part of the same outfit. As he sings at one point, “Evil voices lie when they say you’re in love!”, proving that even coupling is inextricable from shadow-government involvement.
To the Faint’s eternal credit, their sacrifice of any modicum of "cool" means the songs on Doom Abuse more fun-silly than flat-out dumb. It’s even more Faint-like than the exceedingly sui generis Fasciination, so at the least they can be forgiven for giving the people what they want. Even if they’re subject to fairly brazen ripoffs__—__there’s at least twenty different Cure riffs that are similar to the one that drives “Mental Radio”, and the XTRMNTR JR industrial agit-prop of “Animal Needs” is pretty much a verbatim copy of Primal Scream's “Swastika Eyes.”
Doom Abuse is most enjoyable when its superficial slapstick is at its most pronounced, which is most of the time__—__it’s uptempo, it’s unashamedly hooky, Fink shouts a lot, and it’s over before you can take the time to pick apart study hall manifestos like “Unseen Hand” or “Dress Code”, a 100-second shoutdown against, uh, dress codes. Doom Abuse isn’t so much an argument for the Faint’s continued relevancy as it is for the potency of their real-time nostalgia. | 2014-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | SQE | April 4, 2014 | 6.1 | 818a4792-0c4d-4eff-865f-16dceab81ec5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Australian producer Jordon Alexander threads rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations into a debut that purports to pay tribute to dance music history but has remarkably little to say. | Australian producer Jordon Alexander threads rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations into a debut that purports to pay tribute to dance music history but has remarkably little to say. | Mall Grab: What I Breathe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mall-grab-what-i-breathe/ | What I Breathe | For an artist who came up under the dewy umbrella of lo-fi house, Australia’s Mall Grab has never been a particularly subtle producer. His early tracks were rudimentary affairs marked by blocky keys and classic Roland drum sounds squished through soupy tape-compression effects. He looked to memes for song titles; for hooks, he relied on pitched-down vocals that nodded to chopped and screwed hip-hop. One big early single, 2015’s “Guap,” invoked the dusty hip-house that Galcher Lustwerk had already been making for a couple of years.
As clubland trends have evolved, Mall Grab—aka 28-year-old Newcastle native Jordon Alexander—has moved beyond the lo-fi house template, but the haze in his music hasn’t cleared so much as congealed into a thick, oppressive murk. He’s beefed up his sound, becoming a reliable purveyor of big-room club fodder. Full of super-sized kick drums and relentless hi-hats, his drum programming packs a wallop; so do his synths, which flash back to the rave stabs of yore. His vocal samples aren’t much more nuanced. Part of a long tradition of songs sampling musicians talking about music, “Sheer Fuck-Offness” layers in an interview of a Newcastle DJ describing “the sheer fuck-offness” of a record; “Blood Flood” loops a muttered “Blood floods your eye” over apocalyptic synths and pile-driving drums.
At the same time, under his own name, Alexander has been quietly releasing music that’s less club-focused, more melancholy, and more stylistically diverse: atmospheric electro, beatless IDM, and even sad-sack bedroom pop halfway between shoegaze and Sebadoh. On What I Breathe, his debut album as Mall Grab, he brings the various sides of his musical identity together: bangers and ballads, atmospheric pads and hammering kicks, rabble-rousing rave and late-night ruminations.
He lays out his range in the first few tracks. The opening “Hand in Hand Through Wonderland” is twinkling electro, buoyant pads bristling with pitter-pat hi-hats. “I Can Remember It So Vividly” is a rollicking, 140 bpm floor-filler with a rubbery bassline and an insistent groove. And “Love Reigns” is a big, ebullient, ’90s-indebted piano-house anthem designed to elicit giddy smiles and molly-water tears at summer festivals. The first big curveball appears four tracks in, on “Understand,” where Turnstile’s Brendan Yates lends his sandpapery bark to a moody electro track that aims for pathos but ends up sounding more like Basement Jaxx’s “Where’s Your Head At” with all the fun sucked out.
Here and across the album, Alexander’s synths are the most compelling aspect of his music, telegraphing outsized emotions with a silvery flick of the waveform. But his drums come up wanting; too often, his programming feels formulaic, a way of filling in the empty space in the mix. In “Patience,” the steady hi-hats steamroll all the subtlety out of Nia Archives’ trip-hop-like vocals. In the hardstyle-influenced “Metaphysical,” flayed hi-hats and Amen breaks compete for attention with overblown bass and a shouted vocal sample that’s looped ad nauseum, as so many of his vocal samples are. Rather than compellingly heavy, it just feels leaden.
Alexander has described What I Breathe as a love letter to the dance-music legacy of London, where he’s lived for the past seven years. But beyond a handful of jungle breaks and a joint feature by grime MCs D Double E and Novelist, nothing here feels intrinsic to UK club history. Genuflecting to what Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” is practically de rigueur in certain corners of UK-inspired dance music these days; What I Breathe doesn’t say anything new about the tradition that runs from the UK’s discovery of acid house through breakbeat hardcore, jungle, dubstep, and grime. Alexander simply gathers these sounds around him, badges of fealty to his adopted hometown.
There’s one more featured vocalist on the album: Alexander himself. He brings a mewling falsetto to “Without the Sun,” a bittersweet UK bass/house hybrid that vaguely resembles Larry Heard and Mr. White’s “The Sun Can’t Compare”; fusing the atmospheres of the Cure’s Wish with brittle grime production, the closing “Lost in Harajuku” is more unexpected, but Alexander’s understated monotone sounds reluctant to take the spotlight, and while the lyrics are hard to make out, the glimmer of Lost in Translation-like disorientation that sneaks through fails to elicit much sympathy. Taking a feature on his own album comes off as a kind of rhetorical trick, a suggestion that this, at least, is a glimpse of Jordon Alexander at his most personal. The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences. | 2022-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Looking for Trouble | August 6, 2022 | 5.8 | 8191b6b6-8a2a-4207-874e-fd4e84500bb5 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The first in a trio of new mini-albums from Belle and Sebastian finds the Glaswegian indie-pop greats speaking to our times. At its best, it grows into a divine six-minute prog-disco suite. | The first in a trio of new mini-albums from Belle and Sebastian finds the Glaswegian indie-pop greats speaking to our times. At its best, it grows into a divine six-minute prog-disco suite. | Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/how-to-solve-our-human-problems-pt-1/ | How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 1 | This past summer at Montreal’s Osheaga Festival, I watched a 40-foot-tall Stuart Murdoch merrily play bongos on a Jumbotron—which is a collection of words that, 20 years ago, would’ve been impossible to string together, like trying to connect magnets with the same polarity. Back then, the prospect of the notoriously secretive Belle and Sebastian even performing live—let alone enthusiastically in front of thousands of people tossing around oversized corporate-branded beach balls—seemed to be as much of a soft-focus fantasy as the misty-eyed daydreams cataloged in their achingly intimate songs. But not only did Belle and Sebastian gradually blossom into one of the most generous and gregarious acts on the festival circuit, their records have become increasingly engineered to ensure the party rages on. By 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, the band had strayed far enough from their bedsit-indie roots that they could title a single about dancefloor seduction “The Party Line” and—thanks to its synth-glossed, four-on-the-floor beat—have it work as a double entendre.
But where Belle and Sebastian have ultimately decided it’s less fun to be the new Smiths than the old Chic, they’re at least revisiting some of their early battle-plans. Between now and February, the band will release three mini-albums under the banner of How to Solve Our Human Problems, a strategy that hearkens back to the trifecta of stellar EPs they released over the course of 1997. According to Murdoch, it’s a way for the band to bust out of the typical album/tour/repeat cycle—not to mention a savvy ploy for a veteran act to linger in our newsfeeds at a time when even the most hyped new albums seem to drop out of the conversation in mere weeks. (As he recently lamented to Stereogum, “I think these days when an LP comes out, it’s kind of disappointing. Nothing seems to happen.”) Rather than hunker down in some expensive studio with a producer and crank out an album on deadline, the band worked casually on their own clock in their native Glasgow, enlisting outside help only when the mood struck. As they did with those ’97 releases, they selected three flagship singles from their cache of recordings and built discrete EPs around each.
On the first volume of How to Solve Our Human Problems, the selected showroom model is “We Were Beautiful,” a song that inherits Peacetime’s bright synth sheen, but feels infected by the anxiety and malaise that has overcome the world since that album’s release. The skittering breakbeat immediately sets a more tense tone, as Murdoch veers from general expressions of depression (“I was black as I could be”) to the very specific feeling of inadequacy that afflicts you when walking through a gentrifying neighborhood full of fashionable people. (“We were in the urban scene, where they grind the coffee bean, where the women are oblique/And the boys are paper thin, ragged beards upon their chin, we were on the outside looking in.”) But a buoyant brass fanfare can’t quite elevate an undercooked, repetitious chorus that prevents the song from joining the pantheon of B&S best singles.
And that’s okay—because you’ll still be buzzing from the preceding track, which ranks among the greatest songs the band has produced this millennium. A rare Stevie Jackson/Murdoch duet, “Sweet Dew Lee” sees the band more subtly absorb the influence of ’70s dance music in a divine six-minute prog-disco suite that bounces laser-beamed synths off its glitter-ball grooves. Its lustrous aura obscures an increasingly tense tug-of-war between Jackson’s starry-eyed romantic idealist and Murdoch’s bitter-truth realist, who cautions, “Reconcile yourself to knowing/That glamour fades as time moves on.” It’s a line that Murdoch could very well be singing to himself, given that Belle and Sebastian’s days as indie rock’s most mysterious and feverishly analyzed band are far in the rearview and they’re now lodged firmly in their steady-as-she-goes middle-age phase.
But if Sarah Martin’s country-soul serenade “Fickle Season” is precisely the sort of breather ballad we’ve come to expect in the No. 3 slot on a given Belle and Sebastian record, “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” shows they’re still masters of sly subversion, as they twist a breezy, Eno-esque motorik-pop tune into the world’s peppiest protest song. What begins as a typically Murdochian portrait of a disillusioned, lovelorn young woman gradually zooms out to reveal the omnipresent geopolitical strife weighing on her psyche: “They’ll take profits over the people/They won’t make the country great again/Just as long as it’s white and wealthy/Fear the immigrant workforce!/Fear the kids raised on the internet!” Belle and Sebastian’s music always quietly railed against the bastards—the ex-lovers, the priests, the schoolyard bullies—that keep us down. These days, the bastards are bigger and more powerful, and so Belle and Sebastian project their voices all the more vigorously.
But if “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” sees the band successfully apply its insular lyrical perspective to current affairs, the EP’s closing track betrays the pitfalls of their carefree, hermetic recording process. The textbook definition of a meandering B-side jam, “Everything Is Now,” almost shares a title with Arcade Fire’s recent album/single, but it’s actually more like this EP’s “Infinite Content”—i.e., an elaborate set-up to a simple, dispiriting pun. Over a hippy-dippy, slow-clapped ’68-Beatles groove, and no small amount of organ noodling, the band repeatedly chant in unison, “everything is now/everything is different, now” before undercutting the celebratory mood by switching that last part to “everything’s indifferent, now.” It’s an alternately cheeky and weary riposte from a band that still obviously cherishes an intimate connection with their fans (to the point of featuring them on the new EPs’ cover photos), but is all too aware of how tenuous those connections can be in the age of perpetual distraction.
Twenty years ago, the release of a new Belle and Sebastian EP would send stateside fans rushing to their local record store and hounding the clerks to order an import copy; failing that, they’d have to hassle a relative in the UK to drop a copy in the post. Now, they can just drag and drop it into a Spotify folder along with the other 50 records they’ve dragged and dropped this week. Accordingly, How to Solve Our Human Problems, Part 1 is the sound of a band deploying its full arsenal of bells and whistles to seize your attention, even when the songs themselves aren’t always strong enough to retain the grip. | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | December 8, 2017 | 6.9 | 819681bf-0364-4325-ba3f-dd74a9ccb621 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Turning the gestures and feeling of classic rock into a statement on our modern malaise, this Omaha guitarist balances the tightness of a new band with the the rage of the day. | Turning the gestures and feeling of classic rock into a statement on our modern malaise, this Omaha guitarist balances the tightness of a new band with the the rage of the day. | David Nance Group: Peaced and Slightly Pulverized | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-nance-group-peaced-and-slightly-pulverized/ | Peaced and Slightly Pulverized | David Nance makes music as if he were a member of an endangered species. The Omaha guitarist clings to the most well-worn FM-radio tropes—extended jams, grungy riffs, heroic choruses—like someone grabbing their most precious belongings from their burning house. He draws on those comforting sounds of the past to make profoundly uncomfortable music for the now. This freak-flag-waving allegiance to dinosaur-rock traditions matches his outlook on life and our grim prospects for survival on a planet that resembles a figurative and literal dumpster fire. For Nance, a face-melting guitar solo isn’t just a showcase of virtuosity; it’s a form of therapy, the only means to let out his anger and anxiety without getting himself arrested or committed.
Following a handful of wiggy lo-fi releases and classic-album reinterpretations under his own name, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized is Nance’s first release as the David Nance Group—a sophisticating rebrand that not only signals tighter songcraft and more muscular production but also the last-gang-in-town ardor of these performances. (And hey, if rock is the new jazz—a once-revolutionary sound slowly fossilizing into a nostalgic niche concern—why not get yourself a classy bandstand moniker?) The album was recorded by guitarist/keyboardist Jim Schroeder in his basement, but Nance’s newly anointed four-piece rips and wails through these seven tracks like they’re headlining the Fillmore.
For all its vivid evocations of rock’s bygone glory days, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized is undeniably a product of the tense present. “Poison,” the album’s valorous opener, realizes a flannel-clad fantasy of 1980s Springsteen fronting 1970s Crazy Horse. But its lyrics (“Spent the time/Took a dive/Landed nowhere fast”) are imbued with a very 2018 sense of chronic disappointment and helplessness. The epic “Amethyst” is an even more flagrant act of “Cortez”-killing, but it churns and rages in ways that even Neil Young never broached. As Nance and Schroeder get lost in a tangle of sad-eyed psychedelic leads and atonal screech, the song becomes the musical manifestation of a panic attack. Even when the group settles into the nocturnal Creedence voodoo of “110 Blues,” there’s a queasy quality to Nance’s voice, his words drifting past you like freeway billboards you can’t quite read.
Peaced and Slightly Pulverized still bears the jittery after-shocks of Nance’s more frazzled work. “Ham Sandwich” is a manic blast of garage-skronk that rails against income inequality with lunchmeat metaphors and guitars that squeal like ghost-controlled theremins. And while Nance’s oblique critique of organized religion and capitalism rolls in on a cool groove during “Prophet’s Profit,” it soon roils and boils into a volcanic sax-ocalypse.
But the album also teases out a new tenderness and grace, particularly during the riveting emotional centerpiece, “In Her Kingdom.” The seven-minute track functions as a corollary to Nance’s “River With No Color,” his seething indictment of human overconsumption and trash-filled waterways. “In Her Kingdom” is, likewise, set amid a garbage-strewn scene, though here it’s less a damning symbol of gluttony than a stark mark of poverty. Atop a hazy drift that sounds like Pavement trying to jam on the Doors’ “The End,” Nance paints an affectionate, sympathetic portrait of a woman living in a dilapidated house filled with “cigarette butts and McDonald’s cups.” He marvels at her resilience, resourcefulness, and apparent peace with having nothing in a world where we’re conditioned to crave more, more, more. “In her kingdom of shit!” Nance repeatedly cries as the song peaks, conveying a sense of awe that verges on jealousy. In constructing its own universe from the wood-paneled detritus of classic rock, Peaced and Slightly Pulverized outfits Nance with a cozy kingdom of shit to call his own. | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | October 12, 2018 | 7.7 | 81b0b506-149b-4b49-84e8-270153e44005 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Over the course of the three songs on Montreal noise rock trio No Joy's new EP Pastel and Pass Out, they extend the accessibility of this year's Wait to Pleasure into a surprising playfulness with structure, brevity, and dynamism. | Over the course of the three songs on Montreal noise rock trio No Joy's new EP Pastel and Pass Out, they extend the accessibility of this year's Wait to Pleasure into a surprising playfulness with structure, brevity, and dynamism. | No Joy: Pastel and Pass Out EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18707-no-joy-pastel-and-pass-out-ep/ | Pastel and Pass Out EP | With their strong second full-length Wait to Pleasure, Montreal trio No Joy transcended the faithful shoegaze revivalism of their 2010 debut Ghost Blonde and follow-up EP Negaverse by yanking melodies out of their thick, fuzzy guitar stew and operating with previously unforeseen refinement and clarity. Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd pushed their vocals to the front of their compositions, turning amorphous layers of sound into reasonably intelligible, catchy hooks; on standouts like "Hare Tarot Lies" and "Wrack Attack", their silvery, melodic guitar lines scrubbed away sludge, leaving behind straightforward dream-pop songs. The band's new EP, Pastel and Pass Out, is meant to coincide with an upcoming trek through Europe, and over the course of its three songs No Joy extends the new accessibility of Wait to Pleasure into a surprising spryness with structure, brevity, and dynamism.
The EP's playfulness begins with its title. Pastel and Pass Out is the perfect tagline for No Joy c. 2013: they're a band equally comfortable with soft-hued palettes and brutal knockout blows, like Mike Tyson waking up early on a dewy April morning to paint with watercolors. Lead single "Last Boss" conveys this message with impressive efficiency, as it moves from a simple marriage of melody and motorik chug into slugging, squealing riffs into a final, meditative section in just over three minutes. The band makes thoughtful use of volume and space to chop the song into these three discrete parts, and in doing so they amplify the size of the difference between said parts; we hear guitars massing like dark clouds on the horizon towards the end of the song's first minute, and in the next second we're thrown into the eye of the storm.
The other two songs on Pastel and Pass Out take the two faces of "Last Boss" and blow them up into distinct tracks in their own right. "Starchild is Dead" subjugates a rather pretty guitar lead with incredibly dense, crunchy waves of noise, the kind that compel listeners to zip over to cleaner songs just to make sure their headphones aren't broken. The arrangement's weight, and the appeal of the plumes of the melody that finally rise from the arrangement, are reminiscent of the chewiest work done by No Joy's shoegaze ancestors; when a single note escapes and starts roaring and squealing above the din, there's almost something classical about it.
Meanwhile, EP closer "Second Spine" benefits from thoughtful sequencing and the band's understanding of rhythm and momentum. Coming on the heels of two ferocious performances, the band establishes tension with little more than slight upticks in rhythmic intensity, channeled through drum and bass volume. When the chorus comes and goes without a crushing wall of guitar sound, it becomes clear the listener has been subject to an artful feint, one that elevates a simply pretty song into an interesting one.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Pastel and Pass Out is its economy: it takes No Joy less than twelve minutes to refine and expand on the musical ideas they first presented on Wait to Pleasure earlier this year. With two sets of full-length albums and accompanying EP extensions, the band has established a dependable pattern of step-wise growth; Pastel and Pass Out is a small but strong release that should tide fans over until No Joy's next major statement. | 2013-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | November 12, 2013 | 7.6 | 81b1aa57-85a1-4348-ad04-2ed88a1dd9d5 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements—see his 2012 recording Red Book, which drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes. The Emissary is in comparison an album of quiet miniatures, with tracks built on pulse and echo. | Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements—see his 2012 recording Red Book, which drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes. The Emissary is in comparison an album of quiet miniatures, with tracks built on pulse and echo. | Jens-Uwe Beyer: The Emissary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21015-the-emissary/ | The Emissary | Cologne's Jens-Uwe Beyer has a thing for big statements: His 2012 recording Red Book drew out a single, unbroken techno groove to nearly 80 minutes—a metaphorical "journey by DJ" that could, in fact, accompany a moderately lengthy journey, or at the least one hell of a commute. But he's equally a fan of far more modest statements. Since 2005, his annual contributions to Kompakt's Pop Ambient series have typically taken the form of bite-sized reflections on a single mood, texture, or tone. Now, on The Emissary, he strikes a balance between these approaches. It is an invitation for the listener to travel but as travelogues go, The Emissary features no panoramic views, no grand vistas, no monuments, no scenes of splendor. It's more of a soothing blur flashing past, as seen from a comfortable seat aboard the bullet train.
There are two principal modes at work across the album's nine tracks: pulse and echo. "It Started on Wednesday" uses both at once, and it's serene to the point of detachment, in which patient bass notes dissolve into reverb trails so thick you could smear them with a putty knife. In "Moonshine Tangerine", quarter-note taps are fed through filters and delay, gradually building up into interlocking shapes with a debt to Robert Hood's brand of ultra-minimal techno, but drum-free and dew-bubbled. "The Life Of" also brings to mind techno rendered in water droplets.
The pulse-oriented productions aren't always so regular, however. The opening "St. Pop" is comprised of short, monophonic synthesizer bursts, first fast then slow then fast again; they suggest neurons firing in some post-cryogenic scenario, and they feel both melancholy and slightly numb. In "Hands", a three-note piano figure reminiscent of new age pianist George Winston runs in unsteady cycles, its shifting accents conveying a simultaneous sense of stillness and movement. The same goes for "Water Dancer", a duet for looped guitar and sloshing waves that evokes Grouper's method of traveling without moving. The remainder of the album is more placid—"About Turn" hangs glowing in the air like a fog that veils the sun, while "Trip the Light Fantastic" slows a sense of ecstatic wonder to a deathbed crawl with a minute-long fadeout.
These tracks aren't terribly sophisticated; as per Kompakt's Pop Ambient dictate, the album is content to take a pretty simple idea—ambient music as comfort food—and stretch it as far as it can. But there are also promising signs that Beyer isn't quite content to leave things there. As "Moonshine Tangerine" fades out, a scrappy guitar figure, run through tremolo, pops up from out of nowhere, and the same thing happens at the end of "The Emissary", this time with a tentative little piano prelude that runs for nine-and-a-half bars and then breaks off, silenced by a sigh in the background. These codas feel like riddles, hints of wormholes to other worlds that lie just out of reach of the album's sheltering ambient cocoon. They're reminders, maybe, that every journey is also the story of a journey not taken—teasing snapshots of the world beyond the train's windows as it comes fleetingly to rest. | 2015-09-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | September 17, 2015 | 6.8 | 81b51267-d41b-4924-a04e-15fb1a478db3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The expertly sequenced and always vibrant debut from the Puerto Rican rapper collects every fascinating side of Bad Bunny into one singular statement. | The expertly sequenced and always vibrant debut from the Puerto Rican rapper collects every fascinating side of Bad Bunny into one singular statement. | Bad Bunny: X 100pre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-x-100pre/ | X 100pre | In the first three years of his nascent career, Bad Bunny put out enough singles and did enough guest features to fill out several albums. As an audition for pop superstardom, it’s been impressive. He can adapt to seemingly any style—trap, R&B, reggaeton, bachata, dembow—with a heavy, nasal croon perpetually drenched in Auto-Tune. He became a huge star in 2018, circumventing terrestrial radio and government censorship to become the third-most streamed artist in the world on YouTube. Why does Bad Bunny even need to release an album?
In some ways, X 100pre (a stylization of “por siempre” or “forever”) presents a new Bad Bunny, a bellwether for the new stars of urbano. Like his contemporaries J Balvin and Daddy Yankee, he’s refused to pick a lane or to repress parts of himself that might seem antithetical to an urbano audience historically resistant to deviations from traditional masculinity. He bucks gender norms (wearing cutoff shorts and nail polish) and uses his massive platform to decry domestic violence. With X 100pre, we’re finally able to see all of these sides of Bad Bunny in a singular statement.
Free of bloated posse cuts and seven-minute remixes, X 100pre’s guests are expertly calculated. There’s an absolutely filthy low-slung trap beat from global gentrifier Diplo (“200MPH”), a hook in Spanish from Drake (“Mia”), a hookah-bar anthem with Dominican dembow don El Alfa (“La Romana”), and even a secret cameo from Latin music’s ultimate crossover artist, Ricky Martin (“Caro”). He’s also parted ways with DJ Luian and Hear This Music, who were instrumental in helping him bridge the gap between the reggaeton OGs and the new-school Latin trap artists. DJ Luian may have helped catapult Bad Bunny from the SoundCloud underground to the YouTube mainstream, but he also prevented him from making an album. Upon X100pre’s release, he told Beats 1 he “never had the support” to do an LP. It’s a little crazy to think that, even as we witnessed Bad Bunny’s incredible pre-album run, we were watching an artist who felt like he was being held back.
It’s clear, however, the thrill that comes when he’s left to his own devices. X 100pre reveals an artist both proud of and unafraid to tell the truth about where he comes from. On “Estamos Bien,” he brags about driving his Benz through the potholes in Puerto Rico’s poorly maintained roadways, then takes a nostalgia trip for the perreos of yesteryear on “Cuando Perriabas,” which recalls a “party de marquesinas” that should sound familiar to any boricuas from the island.
And even if his reference to the famous missing persons case of Rolandito Salas Jusino (“RLNDT”) feels a bit self-absorbed—“Y no sé si me raptaron o estoy perdido,” he sings, or, “I don’t know if they kidnapped me or if I’m lost”—those feelings of loss and hopelessness are still likely to resonate with anyone who remembers seeing posters with the young boy’s plastered all over the island. He even dabbles in the political: When he questions the logic of closing schools while new trap houses proliferate on “Ser Bichote,” he’s talking directly to La Junta de Control Fiscal.
Most of X 100pre was produced by reggaeton veteran Marcos “Tainy” Masís and Roberto Rosado and from a production standpoint, it’s nearly flawless—the lone misstep being the ill-advised foray into pop-punk “Tenemos Que Hablar,” which features a stiffly programmed guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted from the Kidz Bop studio session for “Since U Been Gone.” But X 100pre’s high points are numerous, like the two-part, beat-switching jam “La Romana” that expertly marries three genres birthed by Dominicans—bachata, dembow, and Latin trap; or the trap banger/ballad “Caro,” which is at once the hardest and softest track on the record.
Bad Bunny’s perspective is decidedly Puerto Rican, but he’s always drawn musical influence from across the diaspora, from Juan Gabriel’s Mexican boleros and Héctor Lavoe’s salsa to the Colombian (J Balvin) and Puerto Rican (Daddy Yankee) reggaetoneros and trap stars (Ozuna) he’s been collaborating with. And while much has been made of his similarities to Drake’s sad-famous rich-boy aesthetic, it only takes a few seconds of their duet “Mia” to see that the influence flows both ways. The synthesis of this Pan-Latino perspective is difficult to express in any language, yet X 100pre’s masterful sequencing somehow manages to weave a diverse arrangement of styles into a coherent statement, one that represents one of the most honest depictions of urbano music. Because while Latinidad might consist of a collection of distinct and vibrant cultures, they’re in constant conversation—from América Central to del Sur, from the Caribbean to the barrios in the states. X 100pre is what that conversation sounds like. | 2019-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | January 3, 2019 | 8.2 | 81b87cd5-a7cf-4b18-9005-3e59c753c075 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has worked with artists as diverse as A$AP Rocky and Show Me the Body. On Holy Wind, he leaves the city behind for an otherworldly record with ecological themes. | The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has worked with artists as diverse as A$AP Rocky and Show Me the Body. On Holy Wind, he leaves the city behind for an otherworldly record with ecological themes. | DADRAS: Holy Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dadras-holy-wind/ | Holy Wind | The Queens-based producer Alex Dadras has cast a wide net. Working across New York’s rap and experimental scenes, he’s collaborated with everyone from A$AP Rocky to Eartheater to Show Me the Body. In the process, Dadras has developed a unique and versatile sound of the sort that can only be incubated in a place like New York City, blending house, hip-hop, and dancehall with a wide palette of samples. But his new album Holy Wind seems to unfold in a place far from the steel-and-concrete landscape that’s shaped his career.
There’s a clear ecological theme running through the album, from the song titles to its all-encompassing ambience. The elusive effects and samples Dadras uses sound like they could be field recordings or purely digital creations: flutes mix with high-pitched chirps, and kick drums blend with the creaking of trees. His compositional approach resembles an evolutionary process— on tracks like “Bird Strike” and “Eucalyptus,” he takes the sound of wildlife and organizes it into the rhythms of human life.
Holy Wind isn’t strictly a dance record. The percussion is varied, and when Dadras slows down the tempo, his compositions mutate into darker and more haunting territory. The brightness of the album’s first half recedes into the foliage as you descend further into it; “Jungle Sweat” is a torrent of drones, rumbles, and wails over an almost-military drumline.
The natural and the digital come together on tracks like “Labyrinth,” blending 808 cowbells and inscrutable vocal fragments. Electronic bleeps and bloops dissolve into the hum of nature. On “Pyrrhic,” a lower BPM, dancehall-like beat is paired with a clipped and compressed vocal sample, as cascading synthesizers roll in like the tide. “Sloth” and “Bird Strike” are experimental and strange, but sound much closer to hip-hop beats, evidence of Dadras’ fluidity and flexibility.
There are occasionally clearer samples of the human voice — a segment of John Lurie’s surreal and underrated travel program Fishing With John on “Fishing,” a snatch of a Charlie Brown special on “Bottle Princess,” what sounds like a nature documentary on “For the Frogs.” But mostly Holy Wind is guided less by a human touch and more the world around it. Pulling from our recollections and imaginations of nature, Dadras is able to conjure a vivid environment that’s palpable and felt even inside city limits.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | UNO | September 1, 2020 | 7.3 | 81ba31de-09dd-483e-9c18-7d26d72e3086 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Magic Circle's members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, but they make traditional metal with a deceptively useful spunk. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses. | Magic Circle's members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, but they make traditional metal with a deceptively useful spunk. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses. | Magic Circle: Journey Blind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21263-journey-blind/ | Journey Blind | There's little better than the mixture of punk speed and metal riffs. Punk tempo supplies the adrenaline injection that metal's compositional superiority clearly needs. Massachusetts' Magic Circle are a variation on this principle: its members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, such as Mind Eraser, the Rival Mob, Innumerable Forms, and Doomriders, and they make traditional metal with a deceptively youthful spunk. Even as most of its members were known figures in their home state, Magic Circle's debut still came out of nowhere in a sense: who knew they were capable of this? Their second record, Journey Blind, doesn't have the mystique of the first, but it makes up by being more assertive.
With its faster rhythms paying homage to that nook when NWOBHM was picking up but thrash hadn't quite emerged, the lead-off title track shows the influence of Stone Dagger, which features bassist Justin DeTore, vocalist Brendan Radigan, and guitarist Chris Corry, bleeding into Magic Circle. Don't get fooled by the Mellotron intro and think this will be a prog effort. Corry, along with Dan Ducas, turn every melody and lead into a hesher motivational speech. "The Damned Man" takes the majesty of the title track and gives it a more proto-thrash, biker-like thrust. Radigan is the ideal vocalist for this material, going in for maximum horn-raising wailing while maintaining a tough edge in most of the verses.
Another spirit that Magic Circle absorb, albeit not as obvious, is that of early Pentagram. Radigan's vocal range is greater than that of Bobby Liebling's, but he is able to convey darkness with a light of hope shining through, like Liebling before he descended into the path that's been covered to death elsewhere already. "Ghost of the Southern Front" is where the Pentagram influence really emerges, with Corry and Ducas adding a macabre boogie to their riffing. Their ending solos have that purgatorial feeling of Pentagram's "Death Row", perfect for looping. Closer "Antedivullan" begins with a softer passage not unlike Black Sabbath's "After Forever", and when they rage into their standard battle charge, the song's placements gives it a do-or-die urgency. Much like Metallica's "Damage Inc.", it's a choice anthem for going down swinging.
Magic Circle belong to a special group of new traditionalist bands alongside High Spirits, Crypt Sermon, Ranger, Iron Age, and (on the more progressive, much weirder end) VHÖL. All of these bands wear their influences on their battle jackets while bringing a real hunger to the table. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses. Hardcore kids can do something with more complicated structures too, and can draw the same sense of purpose that metal has been excellent in instilling for decades. | 2015-12-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-03T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | December 3, 2015 | 7.6 | 81bc08d2-ff25-48bc-b0b8-7e579793ec0e | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Dipset capo wins not by breaking new ground but by alternating between trying existing trends and throwing back to the sounds of his past. | The Dipset capo wins not by breaking new ground but by alternating between trying existing trends and throwing back to the sounds of his past. | Jim Jones: Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-jones-gangsta-grillz-we-set-the-trends/ | Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends | Since the last Dipset album flopped in 2018, no member has been more culturally visible than Jim Jones. Every day, he tends to his online following (fun fact: Jones has 10 times more Twitter followers than one Cameron Giles). In the past two years, Jones has opened a virtual music studio and sought the role of hip-hop tech tycoon by launching his own cryptocurrency. He’s maintained a respectable recording schedule, too, including his solo project El Capo and a full-length collaboration with producer Harry Fraud. Gangsta Grillz: We Set the Trends spans 79 minutes and features an army of rappers, with Jones assuming the role of a veteran, inviting disciples to show him what they’ve got.
To be fair, the title won’t get past many fact-checkers. Jones hasn’t been part of any musical trendsetting since the Diplomats turned Harlem into their own slick-talking, flashy paradise some 20-plus years ago. As for DJ Drama, his approach hasn’t changed much since he was personally selling mixtapes for five dollars a pop. Drama is entitled to enjoy the attention bump he got from Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, but the addition of those legendary adlibs was an exercise in nostalgia. So don’t expect the cultural fabric to be altered by this project. In fact, Jones wins not by breaking new ground but by alternating between trying existing trends and throwing back to the sounds of his past.
Like the best Gangsta Grillz tapes, there’s no overarching theme, just Jones behind a minigun, firing off 200 ideas a minute, hoping more hit the target than not. Of course, going with youth comes with the risk that you’ll become the rapping personification of a “How you doing fellow kids?” gif. There’s “Crunk Muzik,” which appropriates lyrics from an old Dipset song of the same name that more legitimately qualified as crunk music. Fivio Foreign is a solid recruit to lead off a Brooklyn drill standard, but Jones lacks surefootedness over the murky beat, simplifying his cadences down to an underwhelming bare-bones flow: “Bang bang, bang bang/Hooligan, gang gang.” Much better is “Militant,” which combines drill’s thumping 808s and shadowy basslines with a sample of reggae classic “World a Music” as Jones and rising New York co-stars Connie Diiamond and Rah Swish interweave their bars fluidly. The most disappointing collaboration is with the Migos on the title track. Jones’ verse is alright, but the song is built around a generic tooting keyboard riff that should sound triumphant but instead drags the record into the mud.
Not surprisingly, most of the best stuff on the album throws back to the 2000s. “That Gangsta Grillz feels like it’s ’06. That’s what it’s supposed to sound like,” Drama shouts on “Ven Aquí,” its Middle Eastern flavors evoking classic Neptunes and Timbaland productions. “Record Me Baby” essentially resurrects the Neptunes’ P. Diddy and Lenny Kravitz collaboration “Show Me Your Soul.” And if the stripped-down funk of the excellent “Shots” doesn’t signal its influences strongly enough, it even includes Pharrell’s trademark four-count intro. With its tightly wound sample and snare drums, “Different Ways” is the closest thing to a Dipset tune the tape has to offer and draws attention to the fact that despite a sea of guests, the presence of Cam’ron and Juelz Santana would have been the icing on this decadent cake.
And what of Dipset’s third-best rapper? Jones has never been a particularly singular performer, but when he keeps his flow at a comfortable level, he retains that swaggering confidence that made him such a fine foil to Cam and Juelz. He’s reliable with his concepts, too: you get shameless boasting, sleazy narratives, uptown recollections, and bizarre humor. “Fit Lit (Betty White)” pays tribute to the beloved icon in the best way Jones knows how: by claiming he went out on the day she died and bought a Porsche in her honor.
A three-song run over the tape’s second half provides a gripping dichotomy. “Batman” and “Vamps” use fantastical imagery: Jones springing from a dungeon like he’s been “looking for Bane” to sell crack by the g-pack; men turned to monsters in prison cells, unleashed to skulk late-night New York streets. Balancing the unreal feel of those songs is the nostalgic “Barz.” Jones and Dave East pass the mic back and forth, recalling “days in the hood” listening to the Purple Tape, watching Family Matters, and hating that they needed food stamps. The combination of Jones attempting to tap into the zeitgeist and reveling in his veteran status can make for some messy moments, but the fusion of past and present never feels contrived. He comes across not like a guy chasing relevancy but a hip-hop polymath with a curiosity for new forms. The result is wildly entertaining.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Empire | January 26, 2022 | 7 | 81c5e5aa-a8f5-4ab1-9f2e-78d21e3cd92f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
On their collaborative EP, the UK electronic duo provides a lush and polished bed of sound for Iggy Pop to grouse about the state of the world. | On their collaborative EP, the UK electronic duo provides a lush and polished bed of sound for Iggy Pop to grouse about the state of the world. | Underworld / Iggy Pop: Teatime Dub Encounters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/underworld-iggy-pop-teatime-dub-encounters-ep/ | Teatime Dub Encounters EP | Iggy’s got a few complaints: The world’s changing, nothing’s fun anymore, he hardly has any friends and the ones he does have are a pain, the music industry is a drag, his reputation isn’t what it used to be. Oh, and you can’t smoke on flights. On an EP filled with these kinds of lamentations, one couplet neatly epitomizes his gripe: “It’s getting harder to be free/It’s getting so much harder to be me.” The first line might be on the money, but the second reduces his message to one of solipsistic whining.
Pop belongs to a tiny club—alongside Keith Richards, George Clinton, and perhaps no one else—of the hard-living, perma-cool rock-icon survivor whose lives are marked by a steel imperviousness to consequences. Pop’s work writhed and spasmed to historic effect while he remained, apparently, unbreakable. As the frontman of the Stooges, he set the high-water mark for punk intensity. As a solo artist, he narrated the tumultuous dreamlife of a junkie street urchin who was also a star. Now, teamed up with UK electronic duo Underworld on Teatime Dub Encounters, he sounds like something else entirely: a resentful baby boomer grumbling about the state of the world.
The collaboration came about via a bit of sabotage in 2017: With the release of Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting looming, Underworld began to envision their own sequel. After all, their anthem “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” highlighted the iconic soundtrack to the original film (the start of the disc was Iggy’s 1977 groover “Lust for Life”). A plan was hatched to get Pop to a meeting at a hotel and surprise him, upon arrival, with a fully functioning studio and a batch of tracks ready for vocal overdubs. The fruits of this impromptu session sound exactly as you might expect. Underworld’s compositions are lush and polished, while Iggy’s ad-libs tend to spin their wheels, at times pausing and sputtering while he searches for the next word or phrase.
The pairing itself is a canny one. Iggy’s always had a pop edge that balanced out his feral persona, and Underworld frequently added doses of weirdness to their crossover electronica. In the Venn diagram of the two groups, there’s an overlap that’s worth exploring and might even bear fruit. So it’s unfortunate that Iggy, now 71, is in such a half-baked and aggravating form. His voice has the leathery gravitas to pull off more reflective moods while still being elastic enough to go for a full frontal attack.
But he needs better lyrics than these. On “Bells & Circles,” he bemoans an uptightness encroaching on his daily life.
If I had wings I wouldn’t do anything beautiful or transcendent
No! I’d get my finger into everything I wanted
I’d do all the beautiful things
Those things you can’t do
Because nobody wants you to be able to do the things that make you feel good
The man dated Nico, made it out the other side of a heroin addiction, collaborated with Bowie, helped to invent modern rock, and hasn’t worked a day job since the ’60s—who exactly is victimizing him? The revealing double use of “beautiful” suggests a worldview hopelessly skewed by entitlement. Later he bemoans a character named Johnny for getting a mortgage, thereby killing his inner child. At a time when the middle class is reaching its nadir and basic services like health care and education are cripplingly unaffordable for many Americans, stale critiques of a dated bourgeoisie are callously out of touch.
Die-hard followers of both artists may find something to love here, in the same way Star Wars fans devour hastily written, officially branded novels set in the same universe. Aging rockers might get a jolt of smug satisfaction from Iggy’s rants, but few will be genuinely thrilled. If Iggy were to dissect his pride more surgically, he could harness some genuinely moving work. But on Teatime, his reflections lack rigor and drift quickly into petty grievances.
Closer “Get Your Shirt” poses as advice to a younger generation of musicians on the perils of the music business. But it’s just a matter of time before the real thesis comes: “Wait for the music of the spheres/To move the stars/Into the right position/To reclaim my fortune/I want my shirt back!” Artists as varied as LCD Soundsystem and Drake have made riveting art exploring vanity and its pitfalls, and in the process gotten more than a few shirts. Will Iggy take us into his dark heart of vulnerability with the next line, reminding us why we should care about his fate? “Not a hair shirt!” he whines. “A fun fair shirt!” This type of flourish used to represent Pop ’s primal id, the one he spent his career turning into blistering art. But, as Freud said, “Where id is, there shall ego be,” and it takes a lot of ego to make a record as dull and demanding as Teatime. | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Caroline International | July 31, 2018 | 4.7 | 81c813b2-9cfb-4f57-a629-e6130427f57e | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Refining the sound of last year’s sprawling Spirit Counsel into more focused riffs and songs, By the Fire suggests a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental instincts and his desire to rock. | Refining the sound of last year’s sprawling Spirit Counsel into more focused riffs and songs, By the Fire suggests a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental instincts and his desire to rock. | Thurston Moore: By the Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thurston-moore-by-the-fire/ | By the Fire | In the nine years since Sonic Youth played their final show, the members’ solo projects have taken various elements of the band’s sound and run with them. Whether with her noise duo Body/Head or the stylized future-punk of last year’s No Home Record, Kim Gordon has eagerly played the experimental jet-setter, while Lee Ranaldo has embraced his standing as Sonic Youth’s resident beatnik on his wistfully melodic and psychedelic solo outings. But for those fans who just want the jams to run free forevermore, we have an impressive string of albums from Thurston Moore that essentially amount to Sonic Youth on steroids, reimagining the group as the sort of fearsome, festival-rockin’ workhorse that could theoretically lay waste to crowds at both Bonnaroo and Unsound with equal aplomb.
Moore’s new record, By the Fire, features the same core engine (guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe) that powered his previous rock-oriented releases, 2014’s The Best Day and 2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness. It also brings back two contributors (Negativland electronics expert Jon Leidecker and drummer Jem Doulton) that helped produce the mammoth, 63-minute “Alice Moki Jayne” movement from last year’s 3xLP collection of improvised instrumentals, Spirit Counsel. But where Moore typically files his avant-garde excursions outside his official discography, By the Fire mirrors the typography and spartan cover design of Spirit Counsel, suggesting a renewed dialogue between Moore’s experimental and accessible sides. The relationship between the two releases is analogous to that of Sonic Youth’s 1998 epic A Thousand Leaves and the concurrent series of free-form EPs they released on their SYR imprint, elements of which were refined into proper songs on the former. (In fact, By the Fire’s opener, “Hashish,” is essentially a more sinewy revamp of A Thousand Leaves’ “Sunday.”) While By the Fire doesn’t explicitly reference Spirit Counsel in the same way, it provides a more concise distillation of the same methodology—i.e., using apocalyptic noise to achieve an ecstatic peace, while reminding us that the punks and the hippies were always on the same side.
Of course, in this case, “concise” is a relative term—By the Fire still runs as long as most feature films, hovering just below the 90-minute mark. But it’s a record that justifies and even demands the extra space to explore; Moore and co. take their sweet time to sculpt squalls into riffs and lure extended meditations into melodic focus, like a roving crosshair that finally locks on its target. Moore’s first verse on “Siren” doesn’t surface until we’re three-quarters of the way into its 12-minute runtime, but the song’s gorgeous circular guitar pattern, which imagines Television transplanted from the East Village to the West Coast, makes it easy to sit back and savor the journey. “Locomotives” is even longer—and a much more forbidding prospect, with its extended death-cult procession of dissonance—but it too blossoms into something wondrous. “We are here, we come in peace,” Moore gushes as the song hits its strut, confirming that noise isn’t a mere aesthetic device on By the Fire but a narrative one too, representing the dark forces in the world that can be extinguished by the radiance of positive energy.
Like its song-focused predecessors, By the Fire once again features lyrical contributions credited to Radieux Radio, a mysterious London-based poet whose online presence just so happens to be limited to name-drops in Moore-related press. But whether Radieux Radio is an actual muse or elaborate ruse (or both), their partnership has invested Moore’s work with a more passionate perspective that gives his shape-shifting songs a clear ideological throughline. Where Moore spent his preceding records drifting between the personal and the spiritual, By the Fire is more firmly rooted in the political, though not in an obvious, “Yeah the president sucks/He’s a war-pig fuck,” kinda way. Rather, its songs suggest that peace is not passivity, and love is not sentimentality—they’re powerful yet perpetually under-siege forces that must be defended at all times, especially now.
Moore and his group bring heavy artillery to the battlefield. Though he has made plenty of psychedelic music, “Cantaloupe” is the closest he’s ever gotten to the sludge of pure stoner rock, as he rewrites the Book of Genesis into a call to arms for electric warriors everywhere: “On the second day/We drew streaks/Of lightning on your Tele.” Where Moore and Sedwards’ lacerating squall provides the frontline offensive on “Breath,” the rhythm section drives the armada forward with motorik propulsion, with Googe keeping her bass set to “You Made Me Realise” levels of griminess. Even when Moore strips back to just guitar and bass on “Calligraphy,” the album’s energy level doesn’t waver; his tense, tactile strums judder with Velvets-esque verve.
By the Fire is evenly divided between double-digit excursions and more compact rock songs, but its emotional climax, “They Believe in Love (When They Look at You)” hovers somewhere in the middle, rendering the eternal struggle between good and evil as a seven-minute cage match. As Moore writes in the liners, it’s “obviously a love song,” but one that announces itself with a menacing backbeat, needling guitar pricks, and nauseating ray-gun squeals. Dressing up its terms of endearment in ominous clamor, the song evokes the classic Sonic Youth chiller “I Love Her All the Time,” updating its “she’s on my side” refrain for more perilous times: “Where do we go after long goodbyes/Heart torn up when we’re not side by side.” Rather than surrender to doom, Moore keeps fighting for the light, transforming the track into a love song for love itself: “It's a profound wonder,” he sings, “a revolution, a truth!” At a time when the politics of hate sometimes feel like they are pushing the world to its breaking point, By the Fire posits that love constitutes its own act of radicalism.
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. | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Daydream Library Series | September 29, 2020 | 7.8 | 81d106d1-ef72-43e8-be25-4c27aaf10adf | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The composer’s electronic music dates back to the 1950s yet still sounds radical today. This five-disc box set illustrates the spirit of possibility animating even his most forbidding pieces. | The composer’s electronic music dates back to the 1950s yet still sounds radical today. This five-disc box set illustrates the spirit of possibility animating even his most forbidding pieces. | Iannis Xenakis: Electroacoustic Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iannis-xenakis-electroacoustic-works/ | Electroacoustic Works | As a composer, Iannis Xenakis had a fraught relationship with emotion. Blame childhood trauma: His mother died when he was five, and the memories tied up with the Romani folk songs he heard as a boy were too much to bear. As an adult he would burst into tears upon hearing sentimental melodies, then begrudge his own response: “Music shouldn’t be listened to in this way,” he would admonish himself. He viewed such mawkish reactions as a response to “subjective coloring”: the frames of reference that alter music’s effect on each person, be it their cultural upbringing or the century in which they lived. He wanted timelessness, universality. “Something that remains in the past,” he once declared, “is dead.”
For the late Greek-French artist, the beauty he sought in art couldn’t be attained via religion, emotion, nor tradition. His path to understanding this was arduous. After his mother’s death, he was sent to boarding school on the Greek island Spetses. He was miserable, bullied by classmates and considered stupid, so in his loneliness he turned to books, learning about astronomy. At 16 he moved to Athens for bigger dreams, eager to attend the Polytechnic School. He loved math and physics so prepared for the entrance exam, but also studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration under the composer Aristotle Koundourov; these ostensibly disparate fields were always of simultaneous interest. Xenakis’ innovative compositions, ranging from chamber works to computer music, would be based on game theory, apply stochastic processes, and look to inspiration from concepts such as the kinetic molecular theory.
The day Xenakis learned of his passing test result, the university closed: Italian forces had invaded the country, prompting him to join the Greek Resistance in 1941 and then the Communist Party. While he obtained a civil engineering degree in 1947, he could no longer stay in Greece—his country’s government was sending Communists to concentration camps. The ideals Xenakis fought for had been, in his words, “senselessly, hopelessly defeated.” He relocated to France, but doing so became a tremendous source of guilt—some of his friends who stayed behind were imprisoned, and others died—and felt an excruciating need to do something important with his life. He could never be content with heartstring-tugging ditties; at the very least, his music needed to capture the entire sweep of the cosmos.
Listening to the five-disc box set Electroacoustic Works, it’s clear that Xenakis succeeded. These 13 compositions date from between 1957 and 1994 but could easily shock audiences today—their sonorities are strange for the unacquainted and immensely energized compared to similar works today. (There are discrepancies in the dating of Xenakis’ pieces; Bandcamp and the compilation’s liner notes offer competing years. The dates in this review come from Conversations with Iannis Xenakis, by Bálint András Varga.) Xenakis wasn’t interested in mere provocation, though; he wanted a listener to “los[e] his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.” In other words: ekstasis. Take Orient-Occident (1960), a two-channel tape-music piece that soundtracked Enrico Fulchignoni’s short film of the same name. As sonic accompaniment, the work is diluted by the images and voiceover, but heard alone, its intensity is palpable. Fulchignoni’s project compared art from different countries and centuries; Xenakis’ piece makes more elusive connections. There are meditative drones and bowed strings, animal roars and percussive bursts, all manipulated in nuanced fashion. Despite its straightforward structure, Orient-Occident uses juxtapositions to help these sounds transcend specific cultures and eras; every noise extends beyond easy representation, and invites listeners to dig deeper.
In France, Xenakis found a job at Le Corbusier’s architecture studio, working his way from computation to advising to design. All his free time, though, was devoted to music. His first masterpiece came with Metastasis (1953-1954), an orchestral work for 61 players. Though not included on Electroacoustic Works, for obvious reasons, it’s a crucial inflection point in Xenakis’ career, as it inspired his contributions to the Philips Pavilion; Xenakis saw a relationship between the composition’s striking glissandi and the building’s hyperbolic-paraboloid shells. Xenakis had been motivated; he found a way to bridge art and science at an impressively large scale. Now, he had the experience and vision to pursue what he called polytopes—site-specific multimedia works that utilized light, sound, and architecture.
One such example took place in the ruins of Mycenae, a Bronze Age acropolis. Mycenae Alpha (1978), the audio component for the presentation, has the ferocity of a power saw piercing your skull, though it occasionally rests on silence and simpler tones. Its most breathtaking moment is subtle: After six minutes of whirlwinding noise, electronic blips arrive and nearly vaporize, their ascending melody dragging you into the ether. The audio was the first of his completely digital pieces, produced by a computer music system he devised called Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC). It requires an electromagnetic ballpoint pen for drawing compositions onto a tablet, the shapes then translated into digital waveforms. In the score, those escalating notes look like a plain curved line; the conversion from graphic notation to sound is an uncanny marvel.
Regarding his orchestral work, Xenakis described brass and string sections as being “controlled like clouds” or herded like animals, and UPIC was another way for Xenakis to take command of his materials. This was, after all, the same person who stated, “This is my definition of an artist, or of a man: to control.” With lights and ritualistic performances, his Mycenae polytope featured reenactments of Greek mythology. Xenakis had felt he was born two millennia too late, but he knew that music and the natural sciences—for him, the links between past and present—were worthy of lifelong devotion. As such, this installation served as a meditation on his own understanding of Greece. Xenakis hadn’t been back to the country in decades, so here was a recollection of his experiences there: constant unrest and catastrophic violence.
The war’s most consequential impact on Xenakis happened in 1945: The shell of a British M4 Sherman tank left his left eye blinded, his cheekbone destroyed, and his hearing irreparably damaged. “I don’t live in reality,” he explained years later. “Because of my weakened senses I can’t immediately grasp the surrounding world.” One can imagine his larger works as being self-created worlds unto themselves, the kind that could transport Xenakis into a zone of heightened perception. Persepolis (1971) is a 55-minute, 8-track tape-music piece that was part of a massive polytope involving laser beams, 59 loudspeakers, and groups of children carrying torches. The music is incredibly dense: There are clarinets and timpani rolls, ceramic windchimes and string harmonics. It’s monolithic and inescapable, channeling the apocalyptic terror of a locust swarm—even the composition’s initial moments sound like petrified screeching. One can acclimate to the noise, but its rapturous churn maintains an atmosphere of forlorn dread, like trudging aimlessly through a dust storm.
Xenakis followed Persepolis with a polytope in Paris, a city where many young people considered him a lodestar. Restive French students had previously invoked his name in demonstrations, declaring “Xenakis not Gounod”—a reference to Charles Gounod, a 19th century French composer whose influential works, such as his Faust and Roméo et Juliette operas, they deemed hopelessly fusty. Xenakis’ concerts would sell out and zealous fans would defy security guards to witness his radical art, one they felt channeled a welcome freedom from tradition and nationalism; to them, his work telegraphed crises ensnaring the entire world. Polytope de Cluny (1972), more sparse than Persepolis but equally as charged, was housed in the historical thermal baths of its namesake. Xenakis used lasers and flashbulbs, but also 400 mirrors whose changing orientations could allow for evocative interplay between the densities of each aural and visual element. The 8-track tape contained seven tracks with music and one with 43,200,000 binary commands to control his different tools. Just as lasers, largely associated with weaponry at the time, held new meaning and form in this polytope and ancient site, Cluny’s abrasive strings and whimsical mbira felt strangely alien.
The most awe-inspiring composition on Electroacoustic Works is La Légende d’Eer (1977), a 46-minute epic whose title draws from Plato’s Republic. It begins with an alternation of high-pitched tones and silence, the former dotting the piece in a delightfully speckled array. As it progresses, it offers a suggestion of the universe being birthed, with electronics circling the listener and expanding outwards. Much credit should be given to sound engineer Martin Wurmnest and mastering engineer Rashad Becker, whose work across the box set, and especially on this track, captures crucial dynamic range surpassing that of older editions—one senses real gravitational pull here. There are incredible bursts of noise and bubbles of synthesized murk, and the atmosphere Xenakis conjures is glorious. Xenakis, who “found God” at 13 but was a staunch atheist later on, once said that art could “lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.” If there’s any track in his oeuvre that’ll convert non-believers, it’s La Légende d’Eer.
It’s humbling to hear Electroacoustic Music because Xenakis’ music is never about simple novelty; these pieces instill hope in unimagined possibility. Such arresting inventiveness is there in his earliest tape-music experiments: Diamorphoses (1957) crafts haunted soundscapes out of trains, a jet engine, and an earthquake, whereas Concret PH (1958) transforms smoldering charcoal into playful, metallic plinks. Even his later electroacoustic pieces show no signs of complacency: The UPIC composition Voyage absolu des Unari vers Andromède (1989) has one passage that sounds like hazy, crackled techno, while Gendy 3 (1991) and S.709 (1994) are the strikingly different products of dynamic stochastic synthesis. Whatever Xenakis was attempting, it was out of insatiable desire for the next step, the highest possible height. When asked if he felt closeness to his past art, he responded, “I try to avoid any strong emotional ties with older works because I need to concentrate all my energies on the one being written.” He added, “Otherwise I’d be imitating myself.” Xenakis didn’t allow himself to be stuck in the past—neither his artistic triumphs nor his many tragedies. That’s why, even decades after his death, his music lives on. | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Karlrecords | February 9, 2022 | 9.2 | 81d2e05a-d29d-4e7f-9d0a-a43a63d9d788 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Numero Group’s latest installment in the Eccentric Soul series paints a vivid portrait of the Norfolk sound and its unsung influence. | The Numero Group’s latest installment in the Eccentric Soul series paints a vivid portrait of the Norfolk sound and its unsung influence. | Various Artists: Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-eccentric-soul-the-shiptown-label/ | The Shiptown Label | For a brief moment in the mid-20th century, Norfolk, Virginia was the center of a musical universe led by Noah Biggs. The freewheeling wanderer originally came to the city at the height of the Great Depression in search of a job in the shipping industry, and eventually found work as a longshoreman with one of the area’s thriving shipyards. With a passion for gambling that fueled his interest in entrepreneurship, Biggs placed his bets on the record industry, incidentally starting one of the few great labels to ever emerge from the area. Shiptown Records was Norfolk’s answer to Motown, a commercial outlet for the loose network of soul and R&B musicians who made a living performing in the area’s nightclubs. A new compilation from the Numero Group, Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label, offers a window into the imprint and into the era’s strange and exciting landscape, showcasing its importance without overspeaking on the music’s behalf.
Shiptown established an image and brand identity for the “Norfolk Sound,” a regional style of soul music that supposedly inspired the Beatles and found new life as part of England’s “Northern Soul” movement. The label also benefited from the steady influx of people (and capital) moving through the city during the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to its booming shipyards and navy base. Frank Guida, a local record executive who owned the shop and studio where much of the “Norfolk Sound” was first recorded, helped build out the infrastructure of the scene through a successful suite of labels and artists, like vocalist Gary “U.S.” Bonds, who released a handful of singles that spent multiple weeks on the Billboard charts. There was also a certain continuity between the sounds of coastal Virginia and other Black diasporas abroad, as acts like Jimmy Soul borrowed ideas from the calypso records coming to Norfolk from the Caribbean. Meanwhile, the saxophonist Gene Barge’s style seemed to channel the influence of the big band ensembles present throughout his time in the U.S. military, providing backing instrumentation for an entire roster of musicians beyond Shiptown, on labels including Chess and Stax Records. Eccentric Soul: The Shiptown Label brings these influences together, connecting the spirit of the region with the broader sounds of the 1960s.
Ida Sands, a vocalist and member of the Soul Duo and the Idets, became one of Shiptown’s biggest stars. Her solo track “Start All Over Again” appears about halfway through this compilation, reverberating like a triumphant firecracker explosion from the golden age of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. With brash horns, thick guitars, and a fuzzy, lo-fi warmth, the 1969 single feels like a clear standout, the kind of perfect pop single that crate-diggers spend their entire lives looking for—even as it’s conspicuously buried by the album’s sequencing.
Sands eventually married founder Noah Biggs, pushing her group the Idets closer to the label. Her bandmate Barbara Stant would become another breakout star for Shiptown, as well as its most prolific recording artist. With their support, Stant released a variety of singles, including “Baby I Love You/I'm Going to Outfit You Baby,” “My Mind Holds onto Yesterday,” and “Unsatisfied Woman,” all of which appear on this compilation. The latter is a sparse, downtempo standout with all of the pain and heartbreak of an Etta James song. Over soft guitar tones, Wurlitzer chords, and steady drums, Stant sings about the humiliation and debasement of investing time and energy in a relationship that’s fated to fall apart. It’s an agonizing entry into a catalog of inarguably sublime breakup songs, one that transcends regional and temporal boundaries to tap into something timeless.
The entire album is filled with similar moments of transcendence, where passion, grief, and joy become more than the sum of their circumstances. With its warm, slightly detuned horns, Wilson Williams’ “I Got a Lot to be Thankful For” is glorious and sure to be sampled by rappers for years to come. For all the incredible blogs, websites, documentaries, and local archives dedicated to preserving the depth of this historical period, nothing compares to musical moments like these.
To listen to the compilation is to bear witness to just how circumstantial the canonical histories of Motown, Stax, Chess, and other mid-century soul labels really are, despite the obvious quality of their catalogs. Shiptown will never be Motown, but it feels equally representative of that particular time and environment in pop music and Virginia, in part because it echoes Motown’s orientation to the political and economic climate of the 1960s. By welcoming listeners into the formation of a minor history—with all of its theaters, streets, neighborhoods, and diasporic influence—Numero gives us something more than the immediate satisfaction of even the best recorded music. It provides a snapshot of unfinished, imprecise histories for an audience eager to participate in the archival process. | 2022-08-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-17T00:02:00.000-04:00 | null | Numero Group | August 17, 2022 | 8 | 81d5fb78-ab5c-435e-ac22-e3e44b5c52a0 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
A mosaic of rhythmic snippets and melodic scribbles, most averaging a minute or less, this LP is in the tradition of the single-artist album as DJ set. | A mosaic of rhythmic snippets and melodic scribbles, most averaging a minute or less, this LP is in the tradition of the single-artist album as DJ set. | Prefuse 73: Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12961-everything-she-touched-turned-ampexian/ | Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian | Guillermo Scott Herren has become a model of 21st-century post-techno productivity, if not necessarily consistency. Qualitatively, that is; there are certainly audible links between and within each of Herren's not-quite-disparate endeavors. Despite being most identified with genres known for their rhythmic punch (hip-hop) and textural layering (glitch electronica), the Prefuse 73 discography is united by Herren's skill with melody, the warm glue binding his often ultra-fractured rhythm and noise together. It's the comforting low-end hum of fusion-era organs, or the bright synth line guiding listeners through his gloriously disorienting vocal and percussion edits.
And no Prefuse album has ever felt so thoroughly edited than the new Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian. An hour-ish mosaic of rhythmic snippets and melodic scribbles, most averaging a minute or less, Ampexian is in the tradition of the single-artist album as delirious self-constructed DJ set, many tracks combined into one flowing composition to discourage shuffle function tomfoolery. Even Prefuse's 2001 debut, the indelible Vocal Studies and Uprock Narratives, featured more sketches than songs, but Ampexian is built from stacked fragments of boom-bap and digital ambiance that would bounce right past your half-conscious ear when removed from their context, rather than two-minute interludes slid between traditional three- or four-minute grooves.
So, sure, you could sieve the nerve-jangling music-box miniature "No Lights Still Rock" for some personal playlist, but it's designed (presumably) to follow "Simple Loop Choir", an ultra-chill moment in love. Does this tapestry aesthetic pay off? Yes and no. "No Lights Still Rock", annoying in that overly antic way common to several generations of Warp Records artists, is a bomb dropped to disrupt the listener's reverie, but it comes off as an irritating intrusion rather than a mood-altering segue. That's obviously a problem when the goal is end-to-end enjoyment, with your fingers a comfortable distance from the skip button.
Unless you're making outright background music-- and Ampexian is too restless for that designation-- lack of flow is a cardinal sin when constructing an album that asks to be played first minute to last, especially in an era of endless easy distractions. And perhaps non-fans used to mixing and matching MP3s will suffer Herren's occasional sequencing missteps for the moments when that aforementioned melodic instinct makes him shoot for swoon-worthiness over laptop shock-and-awe. It's hard to imagine any Prefuse project fully abandoning agitation, the thrill of Herren's digital slicing and dicing. But the highlights of Ampexian suggest that if he did want to use the moniker for easier listening, the results would genuinely beguile, rather than demand your full attention and hope for the best. | 2009-04-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 27, 2009 | 6.5 | 81d6756b-6195-4fb7-a8ca-14b927a6ae22 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and the story of its creation sounds like a "Portlandia" synopsis. Guests include three-fourths of Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus. | Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and the story of its creation sounds like a "Portlandia" synopsis. Guests include three-fourths of Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus. | Anand Wilder: Break Line the Musical | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19644-anand-wilder-break-line-the-musical/ | Break Line the Musical | Over the last five years, a group of Brooklyn musicians got together and recorded songs from a planned musical about a doomed interracial romance in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, drawing inspiration from an old folk song taught to children in Quaker schools in the 1950s. No, that’s not a summary of a special East Coast episode of “Portlandia”—this actually happened. Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and pianist Maxwell Kardon, and work on the project began a decade ago when they were fiddling around with a guitar and a banjo on a front porch in Philadelphia. They spent the next five years sporadically working on the songs and began putting them to tape in 2008; around that time, details of the project emerged, including the potential involvement of a gospel choir and plans to bring the production to the stage. The latter hasn’t happened yet, and if the liner notes for this recording are to be believed, the former never happened at all; regardless, Wilder and Kardon’s sense of ambition is inherent.
Considering Wilder’s main gig, the mere existence of Break Line makes some sense. Yeasayer’s buzz-generating 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals leaned hard on proggy mysticism, while the melted pop structures of Odd Blood from 2010 and Fragrant World from 2012 exuded a try-anything-once sense of adventurousness. While Fragrant World was a dismaying, grayed mix of muddy electronics and moody vocals that smacked of a band getting lost in their own heads, the initially divisive Odd Blood has aged better, its high points an intriguing realization of the psychedelic-pop promise some of their peers once held. Even at their lowest, Yeasayer have never sounded “normal,” and it’s that relative weirdness that has, for the time being, drawn the curious towards the band and their associated projects.
In a recent interview with The T Magazine, Wilder claims the pair looked to Celine Dion and music from the ‘70s for creative inspiration for this project. But despite those claims and his own pedigree as a moderately odd songwriter, the most surprising thing about Break Line is how ordinary the project sounds. These 11 songs are almost disarmingly straightforward and simplistic, adhering to the platitudes and rigid structures of a high school musical. From the harmonica that kicks off “Coal Into Diamonds”, featuring vocals from Aku Orraca-Tetteh of synth-proggers Dragons of Zynth, it’s apparent that Wilder and Kardon weren’t interested in taking risks. But even after discarding any expectations brought to the table while approaching the project, Break Line is as an exceptionally dull collection of songs, with flickers of hammy theatricality weighed down by leaden arrangements that sound boring even by the standards set by modern self-important faux-indie music.
Heard as an album, the mid-tempo bombast and insufferable balladry of Break Line coalesces into flavorless mush, so maybe it’s better to approach it as a musical with a cohesive narrative. But it's no better on that level. Beyond the details already provided in the lead-up to the album’s release, few lyrics suggest a narrative—Suckers’ Quinn Walker plaintively singing about blowing up coal mines over the folksy shuffle of “They’re Stealing Our Coal”, the ruminations on strikebreaking and lynching uttered by that same band’s Austin Fisher over the colorless plod of “Better to Die”. But even with a lyric sheet on hand, it’s impossible to understand what, exactly, Break Line is about.
Whatever sense of story exists comes from the rotating cast of vocalists: In addition to Walker, Fisher, Kardon, and Wilder, there’s Yeasayer co-lead singer Chris Keating, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus, among others. (MGMT's James Richardson and Delicate Steve contribute instrumentally, but you can’t hear either in the music’s beige Americana.) With the exception of Wilder, who is painfully awkward on “Wedding Day”, none of these vocalists embarrass themselves. Honus Honus, in particular, has never sounded more at home than he does barking about “bombs in the mineshaft” over the coffee-shop blues of “It Doesn’t Seem Right”, a pairing so hilariously on-the-nose it scans as unintentional comedy.
The most notable contributors to Break Line are Yeasayer themselves. Three-quarters of the band’s current lineup pitches in, along with former member Jason Trammell. And while it’d be unfair to think of this record as the proper follow-up to Fragrant World, Wilder’s recent claims that the band will be taking a more organic approach to their next album is, in the face of this collection’s plain-faced blahs, disheartening. For now, though, Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one. | 2014-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-07-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Secretly Canadian | July 17, 2014 | 3.8 | 81decf9f-0fcb-4a51-9bf6-791a0abe7f86 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Recorded in Memphis before lockdown, the Mountain Goats’ second album of 2020 is lush and loose, full of stories about personal fulfillment, in whatever form it takes. | Recorded in Memphis before lockdown, the Mountain Goats’ second album of 2020 is lush and loose, full of stories about personal fulfillment, in whatever form it takes. | The Mountain Goats: Getting Into Knives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-mountain-goats-getting-into-knives/ | Getting Into Knives | The Mountain Goats used to be an acquired taste. Even by the standards of turn-of-the-century indie rock, they were too esoteric for most, the vocals too sharp, the emotions too raw. But that edge has dulled naturally over the years, as songwriter John Darnielle retired his old boombox for a full band. It was a surprise, then, when Darnielle made a return to his home-recording roots earlier this year with his quarantine album Songs for Pierre Chuvin. Yet where that record captured The Mountain Goats as they’ll always exist in the popular imagination—an unadorned songwriter baring his soul—the second Mountain Goats album of 2020, Getting Into Knives, documents them as they really are: a tasteful ensemble that plays with the kind of easy grace that can only come from years of seasoning on the road.
As they’ve dialed down their eccentricities, their sound has grown more approachable. Darnielle, a musician once indifferent to the notion of fidelity, has gradually become a master of it, and even his frayed vocals have been smoothed out. He’s still got a voice like Miracle Whip, with a tang that’s always going to turn some people off, but he’s learned how to sub it into just about any recipe. And over the last several years in particular, he’s relished the freedom that’s given him to branch out.
Getting Into Knives is the full-on Memphis record the group’s increasingly lavish albums have been foreshadowing for some time now. Recorded just weeks before March’s lockdown at Memphis’s Sam Phillips Recording, an old Elvis hangout that’s hosted Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, it’s the band’s loosest LP by some distance. Opener “Corsican Mastiff Stride” nods to the studio’s heritage with a rockabilly jaunt, full of brushed drums and shimmying guitars, while bluesy horns punch up “Get Famous.” Session players deftly color every track, most notably Hi Records organist Charles Hodges, so instrumental to Al Green’s heyday records, whose swooping Hammond organ tops “Tidal Wave” and “Harbor Me” like pats of melting butter.
Unlike previous Mountain Goats albums about underground wrestlers, aging goths or fantasy worlds, Knives doesn’t have a high concept, but it’s loosely bound by Darnielle’s stories about the pursuit of personal fulfillment, whatever form it may take. On “Corsican Mastiff Stride,” it’s an adventure-seeker courting death at sea, comforted by the companionship of his loyal dog. On the rocker “Rat Queen,” it's the image of vermin scoring big in a fast-food dumpster. And on “Picture of My Dress,” a story spun from a tweet by poet Maggie Smith, it's a liberated bride basking in the open road. In typical Darnielleian detail, she pauses in a truck-stop Burger King bathroom to take notice of an Aerosmith song (“Mr. Steven Tyler is on the overhead speakers/He doesn’t want to miss a thing.”)
Even Getting Into Knives’ title track, while ostensibly a revenge story, is framed as an account of someone discovering a new hobby. “I sought wisdom from the sages,” Darnielle sings, “Consulted with master tacticians/Met up with some guys who wouldn’t tell me their last names/They specialized in non-conventional munitions.” As a songwriter, Darnielle’s key rule is never to judge, only to sympathize.
That title track caps offs a mellow, low-key final stretch that closes the record not with a bang but a contented sigh. Darnielle’s best songs stick like parables, leaving behind lasting images both poetic and mundane. Most of these songs don’t quite land like that; for all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.
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. | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 29, 2020 | 7.7 | 81df9d2d-4006-48e5-bfcb-42bd5e72dc47 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
With unexpected musical contrasts that evoke a constant sense of uncertainty, composer Jung Jae-il’s score hints at what lies beneath the characters’ superficial appearances. | With unexpected musical contrasts that evoke a constant sense of uncertainty, composer Jung Jae-il’s score hints at what lies beneath the characters’ superficial appearances. | Jung Jae-il: Parasite: Original Motion Picture Score | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jung-jae-il-parasite-original-motion-picture-score/ | Parasite: Original Motion Picture Score | Sunlight streaks into a low beige room, where rumpled socks hang from the ceiling as Kim Ki-woo learns that his family’s free WiFi hookup has been locked with a password. Bouncy pianos and bells lend a playful air to the discovery. This is our first taste of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a stark, genre-blending satirical film that paints a harrowing picture of class divide through the impoverished Kim family’s attempt to infiltrate a wealthy household. Composer Jung Jae-il’s score strikes a delicate balance between gentleness and severity, creating unexpected musical contrasts that evoke a constant sense of uncertainty.
Jung previously scored Bong’s 2017 drama Okja, providing a bustling backdrop to the story of a girl’s quest to save her beloved companion animal from the clutches of a greedy corporation. Both films spotlight the inequities of capitalism, but with the Parasite soundtrack, Jung emphasizes disparate styles. As the film’s chaotic trajectory gets underway, the sense of hope from “Opening” soon dwindles. Juxtaposing exultant orchestral passages with gloomy piano ballads and rich melodies with spine-tingling violin glissandi, Jung uses sinister sounds to hint at what lies beneath the characters’ superficial appearances. As the score proceeds from lighthearted early pieces like “Mr. Yoon and Park” to the horror-movie pandemonium of “The Hellgate,” sly humor gives way to discord.
The early stretches of the score feel too sparse without their accompanying visuals, more texture than melody. “Conciliation I” lacks forward motion; the heavy pizzicato of “Plum Juice” serves little dramatic purpose on its own. But with “The Belt of Faith,” a lavish suite that alternates between grand orchestral statements and solos, the score finds its voice. A baroque-sounding theme recalls Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, building towards a melodramatic climax. Immediately the score shifts to a moody piano ballad, “Moon Gwang Left,” sinking back into a darker reality.
Contrasting styles inch into closer proximity as catastrophe looms. “The Frontal Lobe of Ki Taek” first appears placid, but its ominous blend of piano and strings shivers with nervous energy. “It Is Sunday Morning” presents a nostalgic vocal melody with a powerful sense of irony, until strings enter with alarming dissonance. With “Blood and Sword,” the music at last succumbs to fear. A pained cello melody echoes over a drone, while strings accompany with searing tone clusters reminiscent of Penderecki and prickling col legno as the Kim family meets tragedy.
As the credits roll, we get one final glimpse into the daily life of Ki-woo. On “Soju One Glass,” actor Choi Woo-shik sings lyrics—written by Bong—that describe his character’s daily struggle. Cheery acoustic strums and an arena-ready electric guitar solo lighten the mood as he describes his unfortunate circumstances. It could be considered a musical mismatch—but it’s merely one final reminder of the way relentless positivity has a tendency of giving way to blunt reality. Like the plot of Bong’s film, the twists and turns of Jung’s score turn out to be circular path back to an uncannily familiar place.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 5, 2020 | 7.6 | 81e789cb-c3e4-40fb-bd91-0c8332066c5a | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren is a devoted student of NYC '90s rap, and on his latest, he pitches himself as a veteran crime boss too deep in the game to change his ways. | Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren is a devoted student of NYC '90s rap, and on his latest, he pitches himself as a veteran crime boss too deep in the game to change his ways. | Meyhem Lauren: Piatto D'Oro | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21855-piatto-doro/ | Piatto D'Oro | New York’s golden-age gods loom over many of the city’s current crop of emcees—from Joey Bada$$’s dusty boom-bap, to Ka’s bitter-cold drug slinging narratives–but Meyhem Lauren is among the most fiercely dedicated students. Operating in an outline sketched out by Martin Scorsese and Reasonable Doubt, the Queens heavyweight pitches himself as a veteran crime boss too deep in the game to change his ways, too flush from the life to take a step back.
Sticking to this trusted methodology, Lauren has struggled to separate himself from the pack. The wheezy-voiced rapper often deploys a steady-paced flow that rumbles into view like a packed SUV, his style landing somewhere between NYC legends Raekwon and Big Pun, without the former’s eye for detail or latter’s technical complexity. When Meyhem overexerts himself, he sounds like the air can’t back into his lungs fast enough; in his best moments, his gruff vocals hit hard and effectively. He’ll rap blood-soaked confessions with the eerie calm of a guy who isn’t kidding, and his sex stories are cooed like he’s still dragging on that first post-coital cigarette.
His latest offering Piatto D’oro is derivative as hell, but it’s still fun to throw on. The sturdy, familiar beats and the no-nonsense hooks—like on the sidewalk-smashing "Deep Cover" homage "Badmon Ting" and shimmering street anthem "Elevation"—mostly stick. It’s old school gangster rap appropriation for those who can’t get enough of the familiar stuff.
"Money in My Pocket" lays out Meyhem’s manifesto: "Lunch at Don Pepe’s, life in rap essays/Top grain leather, we tryna enjoy decades." Like his frequent collaborator Action Bronson, Meyhem raps about food a whole lot, bragging about eating crab meat "right out the shell" on the soul sample-swaddled "Garlic and Oil" and his 4am steam fish take-out runs on the tough drums of "Vintage." In Mey’s world, the quality on your cuisine is the ultimate status barometer.
Though there’s surface-level value to the set, *Piatto D’oro *too often wilts under close inspection. Meyhem might take us on a slow drive around his neighborhood, but we never get close enough to the drama. The violent imagery and drug-dealing narratives lack rich specifics, a moralistic center or any sense of a beating heart behind the poker-faced protagonist’s bluster. It’s a widescreen crime flick with a seven-page script.
Take the Large Professor-produced "Not Guilty." The minimalist beat leaves plenty of space, and would have been a good opportunity for Lauren to delve into his outlaw origin story. Instead, we get more stock similes: "Breitling on my wrist since I’m 21/Became a man, bought a watch and a gun," he spits, passing up chances to dig any deeper. "Bonus Round" keeps the retro charm ringing, but with a Sega Genesis-jacked sound. Roc Marciano, Action Bronson and Big Body Bes guest as the lean 16-bit pyrotechnics swarm around the squad’s voices. Here, Bronson does with a bar than most rappers need whole verses to lay out: "Daddy didn’t believe I was an earner/‘Till I showed up in the Lamb with the safari window," he raps, connecting the past with the present, and family with his hoodlum life, in just a couple of lines. It’s a reminder that most of Piatto D’oro is all gusto with little underneath. | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | May 9, 2016 | 6.6 | 81edda07-6088-4e73-a930-6e671868cc49 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The veteran singer-songwriter made his name penning songs for other people. The classic rock and adult contemporary of his first album of original material in 18 years sound slick yet curiously anonymous. | The veteran singer-songwriter made his name penning songs for other people. The classic rock and adult contemporary of his first album of original material in 18 years sound slick yet curiously anonymous. | Albert Hammond: Body of Work | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/albert-hammond-body-of-work/ | Body of Work | “Certain things get clearer/In the rearview mirror,” sings Albert Hammond on “Looking Back,” a song deep into Body of Work, the first album of original material the veteran singer-songwriter has released in 18 years. A hitmaker who ceded the spotlight to his songs, Hammond built a catalog that could sustain a career without a need for new tunes. Save perhaps for “It Never Rains in Southern California,” a satiny smash from 1972 that was his only single to enter the Billboard Top Ten, all of Hammond’s tunes are best known as renditions by other artists. The Hollies turned “The Air That I Breathe” into a soft-rock perennial, Leo Sayer brought the ballad “When I Need” You” to the top of the charts in both the UK and U.S., and Whitney Houston chose “One Moment in Time” as her contribution to the 1988 Summer Olympics. The key title in Hammond’s catalog is “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” a collaboration with lyricist Hal David that became a global blockbuster when covered by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson in 1984. With one foot planted firmly in American corn and the other in cloying Continental sophistication, Iglesias and Nelson revealed Hammond’s grasp of the international language of schmaltz: His heightened sentimentality knows no borders.
Hammond is deliberately looking outward on Body of Work. He recorded the album in Nashville and Berlin, then reunited with his old songwriting partner John Bettis—who co-wrote “One Moment in Time” with him—to help him finish a surplus of ideas he developed during a particularly tumultuous time in his life. In the years leading up to the album, Hammond divorced his wife and struggled with vocal atrophy brought on by an immune disease. He responds to those trials by confronting the clamor of the modern world—albeit through the prism of a showbiz lifer who feels at home surrounded by high-end recording gear.
Relaxing into the comfort of studio craft, Hammond dabbles in a variety of styles, striking a note of insistent defiance with the arena rock of “Don’t Bother Me Babe” and relying upon his adult-contemporary skills for “Somebody’s Child”; he counters those unabashedly commercial plays with such gentle love tunes as “Bella Blue” and “Young Llewelyn,” whose narrative balladeering hearkens back to Hammond’s folk roots. An able, old-school professionalism flattens these shifts in tone and direction, helping the album glide unperturbed from one song to another. What cuts through the gloss are lyrical barbs, with Hammond taking potshots at “social addiction” and “Chinese phones” in full Boomer-yells-at-cloud mode; the cynicism of “The American Flag,” with its swipes at “the money brokers” and “the media… just propaganda clowns,” is more Roger Waters than Woody Guthrie.
Despite these occasionally acid undertones, Body of Work veers towards hopefulness, conveying a sunny disposition in its unrepentant slickness and offering a couple of welcome detours from its deliberately classy soft rock. “Like They Do Across the River” bops to a reconstituted Bo Diddley beat; the Beatlesque bounce of “Gonna Be Alright” is punctuated by an exhortation to “Fuck all night/Fuck all day”; “Looking Back” is incongruously draped in neon vaporwave trappings; and the acoustic blues of “Goodbye LA” ends the proceedings on an unexpectedly ramshackle note, warmer and looser than its predecessors. These lighthearted departures give Body of Work a needed pulse and also reveal the sense of anonymity inherent in Hammond’s universality; instead of sounding at home everywhere, it’s curiously rootless. | 2024-03-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | earMUSIC | March 6, 2024 | 5 | 81f100e3-352d-47e0-b6f4-45158580ac04 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Drake’s new project is a mixtape of glossy “demos” from the recent past. It showcases his precise delivery, sticky flows, and arena-sized hooks, but comes with a fair amount of well-tread material. | Drake’s new project is a mixtape of glossy “demos” from the recent past. It showcases his precise delivery, sticky flows, and arena-sized hooks, but comes with a fair amount of well-tread material. | Drake: Dark Lane Demo Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-dark-lane-demo-tapes/ | Dark Lane Demo Tapes | Drake’s house is a gleaming monstrosity. Inside the 50,000 square-foot Toronto mansion called the Embassy, the rapper girdles himself with spikey chandeliers, slabs of Spanish marble, and sumptuous-looking fabrics. In one room, a shiny golden art piece constructed out of semi-precious stones occupies an entire wall. In another, beneath a microphone and requisite pop filter, there is a daybed upholstered in technicolor Jean Paul Gaultier and Louis Vuitton textiles. Dark Lane Demo Tapes, the 14-track mixtape Drake has released ahead of a proper studio album he says is coming this summer, shares the house’s gilded finish. As he toggles between a decade and several cities’ worth of rap styles, there is a consistent sheen, as though the project was furbished in the same workshop as one of his coffee tables.
Though Drake has spent much of his career predicting and synthesizing trends in rap and pop, Dark Lane Demo Tapes proposes not a new sound but a new format, formalizing recent snippets, one-offs, and collaborations onto streaming services. He experimented with the mixtape as album on 2009’s So Far Gone, the album as mixtape on 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, and the LP as playlist on 2017’s More Life. Last August, he dropped Care Package, a collection of songs he’d casually released or teased over the years. Billing these tracks as demos may offer the slight advantage of lowered expectations, a kind of ad-hoc market test. But it’s also a clever rejoinder to the current internet economy, in which artists like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert have had their momentum derailed by endless leaks. The concept of the compilation may ultimately wind up being more useful in their hands than in Drake’s.
Contributions from a broad range of producers—including Southside, Cardo, MexikoDro, and Axl, each representing their own little corner of hip-hop—allow Drake to travel. Earlier in his career, he likely would have tried on new subgenres like “SoundCloud rap” and transcontinental drill closer to their emergence. And yet the lag isn’t much of a hindrance. On “Pain 1993,” a Pi’erre Bourne-produced song that leaked earlier this year, Drake sounds comfortable softening his consonants alongside SoundCloud emissary Carti, even as the style is past its peak. On “Demons,” he matches the energy of Fivio Foreign and Sosa Geek, a pair of Brooklyn rappers who have been at the forefront of the borough’s drill subgenre; both sound genuinely thrilled to have earned his recognition. The single “War,” released this winter in support of longtime manager Oliver El-Khatib’s partnership with a high-end incense brand, is a spot-on UK drill track. It’s one of Drake’s most effective songs in a while, harnessing the genre’s menacing energy, barbs delivered convincingly.
Demo Tapes contains moments of precise delivery, sticky flows, and hooks primed to be enjoyed in the context of an arena show, but there’s a fair amount of well-tread material, too. Drake begins the album with his tradition of pointed bars, includes a pair of slow burners with R&B vocals from Giveon and Chris Brown, and links up with Future and Young Thug for a solid, if entirely familiar song that has the tectonic bounce and clever flexing Atlanta rap has perfected. He follows that thread on the private jet anthem “Landed,” luxuriating over a spinning beat by Cardo and Dez Wright. Still, Drake remains more interlocutor than interloper. It helps that, unlike many of his peers in the top tier of the music industry, he has maintained an unwavering focus on music: “They too worried bout selling out shoes/I don’t give a fuck about jeans and crep/Or going to Milan or going to the Met/I just wanna make these songs for the set,” he rapped in a Link Up TV freestyle, in a verse ostensibly aimed at Kanye. Dark Lane is similarly a promise, or threat maybe, that he has the confidence to release music at a clip rivaled by few others at his level; as he points out on “When to Say When,” “He’s exceeded 500 weeks on the Billboard charts.” He’s a one-man monopoly, controlling both the supply and demand of his own work.
But for all of Drake’s strengths, he has not evolved past the tensions that have defined this half of his career—the sulky revenge fantasies of a petulant man-child who is capable of loyalty to men but treats all women with suspicion. He remains in a suspended state of something resembling teenage boyhood, in which he is constantly aggrieved, but never accountable. As ever, Drake finds new ways of expressing escalating amounts of pettiness: Instead of snow tires and designer purses, the women he dates now want butt lifts and Lasik eye surgery. Instead of tracking their mileage on his Bugatti, he sends a friend to take back a gifted car. One song, “Desires,” features the unhinged regret that he didn’t isolate a woman he was dating so as to avoid losing her: “I should’ve put you somewhere where no one could find you/Mansion out in the sticks with nothing around you.”
Drake lives in symbiosis with Kardashian-style celebrity culture, using veiled lyrics and social media posts to carefully extend or withdraw access to his narrative. Incidentally, one of the most evocative things he has written recently is the caption to an Instagram post he made celebrating his son’s birthday and sharing photos of him with the public for the first time. “It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past or what is happening around us now, you can always make the choice to break free of the wheel of suffering and panic and open up to your own light,” he wrote. The venue was appropriate for an artist whose success was formed in part on his ability to fill songs with pithy captions. But the message was a rarer thing: earnest, tenderhearted, with the focused sobriety of someone who has been meditating or studying Eckhart Tolle. Unfortunately, very little of that sentiment has made its way into his music, which remains guarded and skin-deep, even as it grows, like his houses, bigger and more expensive. | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | May 5, 2020 | 6.8 | 81f27759-c5da-4e8f-9532-8fcf02d6d7f6 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Baltimore's Co La belongs to a shrinking group of composers for whom sampling remains a singular muse. His new album aims to explore the banging, echoing sounds of the club, and all of No No's sounds are recognizable, or at least conceivable. Increasingly, those sounds are drums, or things that sound mostly like drums. | Baltimore's Co La belongs to a shrinking group of composers for whom sampling remains a singular muse. His new album aims to explore the banging, echoing sounds of the club, and all of No No's sounds are recognizable, or at least conceivable. Increasingly, those sounds are drums, or things that sound mostly like drums. | Co La: No No | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21078-no-no/ | No No | Sampling isn't a lost art form just yet, but it's fair to call it a diminished one. This has happened even as the sample itself remains a staple of modern music production: how Young Chop has access to an orchestra, how every bedroom producer from Los Angeles to Berlin owns an 808. Those sounds are meticulously recorded and integrated into popular software. Sampling itself—the act of sourcing, manipulating, and arranging previously recorded sound—is more esoteric; certainly there are fewer producers rewriting the history of jazz and funk (DJ Premier, the Bomb Squad) or expanding the cosmic vistas of the dance floor (the KLF, the Orb). The practice remains more common in dance music, but it's still notable when someone returns to the old methods, and licensing concerns crowd many out. Instead, sampling has followed a path opposite that of most musical trends: from the unobtainable feel of early studio instruments to widespread pop deployment to the obscure and niche.
Baltimore's Co La belongs to a shrinking group of composers—Flying Lotus and Bibio among them—for whom sampling remains a singular muse. His last album, Moody Coup, was a genteel patter that stitched together everything from ASMR-like frivolity to reggae toasting. His third-ish album (he's had several cassette and low-run releases) and second for Software, No No, arrives with a harsher mandate, aiming to explore the banging, echoing sounds of the club. This makes for a louder, tenser listen, even as Co La's methods remain largely unchanged: all of No No's sounds are recognizable, or at least conceivable. There's nothing truly alien here, and you'd always feel comfortable at least guessing at a sound's source.
Increasingly, those sources are drums, or things that sound mostly like drums. There's a lot of diffuse banging on No No—only rarely does a deep kick-like sound arrive on time—and it sounds like Co La is one of a growing pool of producers inspired by the rhythmic daring of artists like Pearson Sound and Jam City. This manifests itself in tracks such as "Crank", which rises from a clutch of voices into a surprising, hands-in-the-air throb, and "Gush", which revels in a suspended state before perforating the bubble with rapid bursts of percussion.
Of course, No No isn't dance music; Co La seems unwilling to commit to that level of structure. So while you could see a deft turntable hand or a devout remixer turning this club-ready, there are lots of potent moments ("No No") and transfixing loops ("Barricade"'s pitched dollops) that are abandoned too quickly. Elsewhere, as on opener "Squeeze", the percussive elements feel placed at random, and the track, untethered, scatters away. I miss the gentleness of Moody Coup, and when the latter half of "Tragedy" opens up with a laughing voice and a rich piano lament I realize how stern and abrasive much of No No sounds.
That's probably intentional, given the playfulness that's baked into Co La's methods and sound sources. This is avant-garde music at its core, and the precision with which these sources are treated and deployed means Co La probably has more in common with, say, Steve Reich than with DJ Premier. No No asks a lot of listeners, that we unpack all of these fun inferences even as we're being assaulted by the 143 different sounds Co La casted into the vestige of a snare drum. No No, on balance, is worth the effort. | 2015-10-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Software | October 6, 2015 | 6.8 | 81fe04c6-07c0-4a78-97ee-f9fae9b73674 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
After a protracted battle with Stormzy and a scrapped crossover album, the grime veteran regroups and offers what he calls his final album. | After a protracted battle with Stormzy and a scrapped crossover album, the grime veteran regroups and offers what he calls his final album. | Wiley: The Godfather 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiley-the-godfather-3/ | The Godfather 3 | When Wiley started picking fights at the end of 2019, most grime fans assumed it was the scene’s old hand turning to a tried-and-true promo playbook: call out another MC on the radio, trade a few diss tracks, piggyback off each other’s rep, create a buzz, then drop a new album. Having rattled through a 15-minute BBC radio interview—calling Drake a “pagan” and Ed Sheeran a “culture vulture”—Wiley followed up with a bunch of tweets and war dubs aimed squarely at Stormzy, who was preparing for an extensive world tour off the back of a second number one album in a row. It worked, of course. The two sent shots at each other. Wiley met with A-list boxing promoter Eddie Hearn about promoting a live clash between him and Stormzy at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena. Broadsheets filled pages awkwardly explaining the dispute, while fans debated online as to who was coming out on top—and whether there was anything more to the beef than Wiley stirring the pot to his own end.
But then no album appeared. According to people on Wiley’s side of the argument, label wrangling behind the scenes meant Wiley had to wait out his term’s expiry date before he could release the record on his own. But while his beef with Stormzy tailed off, Wiley was driving around London linking up with MCs to lay down verses. To what end, they couldn’t be sure—when Godfather III finally dropped last week, a number of MCs tweeted out that they didn’t realize they were going to feature on the finished album—but for Wiley this was an exercise in taking grime back to its roots or, in his words, “back to the village.”
All of a sudden, the beef started making sense. His real umbrage is not so much with Stormzy’s success or the perceived lack of homage paid to grime’s originators, but the way in which he believes control has been wrested from artists by the suits—or, in the case of Sheeran’s “Take Me Back To London” remix, by a dorky singer-songwriter. It’s hard not to view Godfather III as a direct response to all of this. The album’s first half is stacked with songs directly addressing the issue. “Protect The Empire” packs a blunt-force chorus of “We built this up, that’s why we must protect it.” On “The Game,” he can’t resist taking another jab at his former protégé and fellow grime innovator, Dizzee Rascal, for starring in ads for Ladbrokes (a gambling chain accused of targeting deprived urban areas and leeching off the UK’s most vulnerable) instead of putting his efforts into pulling the scene up with him.
Wiley has flirted with major labels throughout his career, and he’s left pretty much all of them with a bridge blazing behind him. Last year, a star-studded dancehall album called Full Circle featuring Future, Tory Lanez, and Nicki Minaj, among others, was ground into nothingness by rights disputes. A commercial shoo-in that would surely have been Wiley’s retirement fund following the massive success of 2019’s “Boasty,” the record was canned as egos and bureaucracy prevailed over the music. Godfather III, which packs close to 30 featured artists over its 22 tracks, shows Wiley holding up a mirror to the industry’s bureaucracy.
In place of familiar faces from the Billboard Hot 100, he invites grime MCs from all eras of the sound to bar alongside him. Veterans like D Double E, Flirta D, and Scratchy bump up against newer names like Jammz, Jon E Clayface, Big Zuu, and Capo Lee. Some, like K9 and Manga, straddle both epochs, while others have just a handful of credits to their name. Two tracks—“West London” and “South London”—are dedicated to showcasing talent from small pockets of the city. The beats derive from the years of dubplates and car-trunk distribution up to streaming hits too: On “Alla Dem” he raps over a Scratcha DVA instrumental that dates back as far as 2007; Zdot’s beat for “Da Vibez Is Back” hooks on a sample of one of Kanye’s infamous 2016 rants; while “South London” is produced by Mazza—one of the beatmakers behind Big Shaq’s viral UK drill track “Man’s Not Hot.”
At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago. This plays out to literal effect on “Eskimo Dance.” Named after the series of raves Wiley started in 2002, the track shows 11 different MCs passing the mic to spit their most explosive bars in an eight-bar rally as classic instrumentals from the sound’s first golden age slide into one another. (In a neat historical nod, the first three instrumentals on the song are the same three instrumentals that opened the very first Eskimo Dance.) When things do slow down and Wiley centers his own voice—see “Free Spirit” or reflective closer “Press Record”—the pause is welcome: Not only for the insights and insecurities revealed (“We’ve done things in music we didn't know we could/The crowd’s gone overground but we all came from the hood /I don’t know where I'm going but where I’m going is good” on “Free Spirit”) but for his idiosyncratic ability to drop punchlines like “I never liked Marmite on toast, and no no I never liked porridge” amidst the profundity.
This month, Wiley told The Guardian that Godfather III will be his last album. Needless to say he hasn’t mentioned any retirement plans. Maybe this was just another leaf from that well-worn promo playbook? But if Godfather III is to be his swan song, then fans could hardly hope for a better send-off: it’s about as pure an encapsulation of grime’s past, present, and future as the album format allows. | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 16, 2020 | 7.2 | 8204d853-a295-4c40-8bb5-b6c6416c8fd7 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
A revelation hidden in plain sight, this Memphis rapper’s latest project is more proof that he’s headed for bigger things. | A revelation hidden in plain sight, this Memphis rapper’s latest project is more proof that he’s headed for bigger things. | Moneybagg Yo: 2 Heartless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moneybagg-yo-2-heartless/ | 2 Heartless | Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo’s voice falls somewhere between the monotone largesse of his mentor, Yo Gotti, and the watery warble of Kevin Gates. It’s a voice that, at first listen, is unremarkable, but, after a few songs, reveals its humor and dexterity like a magic trick. Like his voice, Moneybagg himself is a revelation hiding in plain sight. Largely unknown to mainstream rap audiences but a full-blown celebrity in his hometown and, increasingly, beyond, he’s finally starting to see the payoff to his patient and calculated approach to regional rap stardom. The street album Federal 3x, the highlight of his highly productive 2017, debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 last summer, outselling SZA, Ed Sheeran, and Bruno Mars that week. A polished collection of outsized brags and ominous trap instrumentals that lacked a clear single or a notable guest appearance outside frequent collaborator YoungBoy Never Broke Again, that album provided the strongest argument yet that Moneybagg is headed toward a broader breakthrough.
2 Heartless, Moneybagg’s first project of 2018, builds on his momentum. At a bloated 18 tracks, it lacks the efficiency of Federal 3x, or the bounce of Moneybagg’s 2016 collaborative tape with Yo Gotti, 2 Federal. But the new album, which features Quavo, Gotti, BlocBoy JB, and Lil Baby, succeeds as a fruitful exercise in sticking to what works. This isn’t to say that Moneybagg’s execution is simplistic. Instead, he’s a self-sufficient enterprise of one, capable of conveying on his own what many rappers struggle to do with help. It’s sometimes hard to identify the highlights of a Moneybagg project, but that’s the point: Whether threatening his enemies or mourning lost love, his songs purposefully blend into one another, making his albums best consumed in a single sitting. In an age of relentless single-chasing in rap music, Moneybagg Yo’s low-concept, consistent work ethic is refreshing.
Moneybagg, a 26-year-old father of seven, is a master of colorful wordplay. Each song is a treasure trove of quotables: “Fire up the Backwood, it smell like a skunk dead,” he snarls on “Back Then,” “I been gettin’ to it, a hundred thou trap cash/Pockets lookin’ like bunk beds.” On the Tay Keith-produced standout “Super Fake,” he takes a similar thought a step further: “Chandeliers on both my ears, my earrings look like two lamps,” he starts, before continuing in the same breath, “This might not mean nothin’ to you, but I used to get food stamps.” Moneybagg wields vulnerability the same way he does his boasting, with an offhanded speed that nonetheless provides a deeper look into his psyche. His reliance on rhetorical questions and conversational ad-libs—“Remember Mario from eleventh grade?/(Remember me from Mitchell?)” he asks on “Super Fake”—can make it sound like he’s talking to himself, or confiding in a close friend.
Really, though, he’s more of a lone wolf. “Earn my trust, keep all my secrets,” he whispers in the fading moments of 2 Heartless, rewarding us for making it to the end of yet another project. But unlike most musicians on the come-up, Moneybagg genuinely doesn’t seem to care if you listen. He’s so brazenly secure in his sound, so convinced of his impending success, that you’re left feeling like you have to win him over, and not the other way around. | 2018-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | N-Less | February 23, 2018 | 7.2 | 8205d39d-2909-4630-a666-5bea312c306b | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
This big box set marks the first posthumous release from the Petty estate and finds new meaning both through songs we thought we knew and necessary obscurities. | This big box set marks the first posthumous release from the Petty estate and finds new meaning both through songs we thought we knew and necessary obscurities. | Tom Petty: An American Treasure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-an-american-treasure/ | An American Treasure | Tom Petty’s music has been obsessively compiled, assessed, and summarized. If you want the full story, there’s Peter Bogdanovich’s four-hour documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream. If you’re interested in a grittier account, try Warren Zanes’ epic biography, Petty. Here for the music? In 1995, Petty mined his vaults with Playback, a comprehensive collection filled with singles, deep cuts, and outtakes. That set arrived just two years after his 12-times platinum Greatest Hits, expanded in 2000 for the immersive Anthology: Through the Years. And befitting a bandleader who many would argue lit up the stage more naturally than the studio, there’s 2009’s four-disc Live Anthology, collecting highlights from three decades on the road.
Petty’s legacy has been sustained through such retrospectives, arguably more than any other artist of the classic rock era. His output was so consistent for so long that no single studio record could accurately frame the breadth and depth of his catalog. Following his death last fall, it was both telling and touching to hear famous fans covering songs from across his career, whether it was the National dusting off a late-career weeper, Phoebe Bridgers meditating on a 1987 deep cut, Bob Dylan putting his spin on a singalong strummer, or Miley Cyrus closing her eyes and belting out a wistful lullaby. While compilations can feel like cash grabs or contractual obligations, Petty’s music invites this type of listening. His songs form their own universe, primed for diving in and finding your own little corner.
So An American Treasure—a new career-spanning collection and the first posthumous release from the Petty estate—is not without precedent, making its ability to say something new even more impressive. No Tom Petty collection has ever felt so thoughtful or complete. With a tracklist selected by those closest to him—his wife, Dana; daughter, Adria; two Heartbreakers bandmates, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench; and his studio collaborator Ryan Ulyate—it’s the rare career survey that makes you reconsider the work it collects. It is filled with love, vulnerable in a way it might not have been had Petty himself overseen it.
Consider the inclusion of an alternate version of “Rebels,” a song with a troubled history. In the mid-1980s, Petty and his Heartbreakers toiled over the Southern Accents opener, culminating in Petty breaking his left hand after punching a wall in frustration. He felt that the studio rendition didn’t hold up to his original demo, and the Heartbreakers were losing valuable studio time worrying with it. Listening again, the problem seems obvious: Like a lot of Petty standards, “Rebels” is both anthem and elegy—the tale of a down-and-out Southerner confronting his limitations, dwelling in pain that was once pride. With a triumphant horn section and a “hey hey hey” refrain, the music works directly against the lyrics. On any given listen, you might hear one side winning over the other. It’s a fascinating battle for a listener but a frustrating one for an author trying to document a definitive take. With a slightly altered mix and more dynamic horns, this version feels more decisive.
The context helps, too. Petty’s growth as a songwriter is the focus of An American Treasure, which shades in the spaces between his radio staples and leaves room for his growing pains and left turns. There’s no “Free Fallin’” or “American Girl,” but four selections from 2002’s oft-derided The Last DJ make the cut. That album’s poor reputation is based in part on its bitter reflections on a changing music industry, but these highlights focus on the wild romance that brought Petty to the business in the first place. The gorgeous “Like a Diamond,” the swooning road song “You and Me,” and the sprawling “Have Love Will Travel” are all solid additions to his catalog of love songs. They shine brighter here, their happy endings left in place.
For the most part, Petty albums are focused and concise, sometimes to a fault. His compilations make room for all the detours he could have taken. As usual, the selected outtakes are as polished and enduring as the album cuts. “I Don’t Belong,” recorded for 1999’s dark Echo, merges post-grunge angst with power-pop sweetness. It presages Americana-based indie by the likes of Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes that would help carry Petty’s influence into the next decade. More famous outtakes like “Keeping Me Alive” and “Surrender” (which previously appeared on Playback and Anthology, respectively) now seem as immortal as any of his hits, despite never making it onto a proper album.
Many of Petty’s best-loved songs find new resonance here. Stripped-back takes of “I Won’t Back Down,” “Insider,” and “Even the Losers” unveil the multiple perspectives locked within Petty’s most familiar tunes. He was not an autobiographical songwriter, but his character-based writing, so free of pretense, feels revealing. “Two Gunslingers,” an allegory that offers as much wisdom about senseless violence as it does a toxic relationship or a bad record deal, appears in a live acoustic rendition that is more baldly emotional than its studio counterpart. It is a showcase for the tenderness that allowed him to find success even as he mellowed out. “You’re a good man to ride the river with,” Johnny Cash once wrote to Petty, aptly capturing the comforting presence that shined through all his greatest songs. Working mostly chronologically, this set flows so that you feel you’re riding alongside him.
Both the condensed and deluxe editions of An American Treasure stretch from Petty’s early tracks with the Heartbreakers to his late work with Mudcrutch, the hometown band he reunited in 2007 and with whom he’d release his final music. “This town broke my heart/Then just carried on like nothing happened at all,” he sings in the closer, “Hungry No More.” It’s easy to imagine this being the fear that drove so much of his music: our stories and memories forgotten, leaving the world with us. There’s a distinct desire in Petty’s work to make an immortal connection, whether that means getting back in touch with his old Gainesville pals or writing hits that would echo in stadiums around the world. An American Treasure doesn’t prioritize one more than the other, because Petty never saw a distinction. | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | October 5, 2018 | 8.3 | 8205e646-a32b-446a-861d-58e150ff2c7a | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Garage-pop band from the fertile San Francisco scene works with producer Tim Green on its strongest material to date. | Garage-pop band from the fertile San Francisco scene works with producer Tim Green on its strongest material to date. | The Fresh & Onlys: Play It Strange | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14736-play-it-strange/ | Play It Strange | Over the past few years, San Francisco has given rise to a new scene of garage-pop bands pushing the frustrated proto-punk sounds of the 1960s in different directions. Girls are indie-pop classicists who hit heartbreak even when they don't reach for it. Thee Oh Sees take the scrapiest, ugliest sounds on the Nuggets compilations and run with them. Sonny & the Sunsets play cartoonish games with the skewed innocence they hear in oldies-radio fare. And then there are the Fresh & Onlys, who seem in love with the era when garage-rock thud and folk-rock jangle first fell for each other. The guys in the band aren't revivalists, exactly, but they are pastiche artists. And in their florid, carefully orchestrated chug, we hear bits of any number of historical pop moments: starry-eyed Buddy Holly pep, Byrdsian guitar sprawl, willfully silly Donovan Mellotron idealism, scraggly Sebadoh sighs, bored Dandy Warhols stoner glamor.
Since forming a few years ago, the band has kept up a steady stream of 7" and cassette releases, and Play It Strange is their third LP in as many years. But this one finds them starting to pull all those ideas into something a little more focused, something easier to digest. For the first time, they've left the confines of their home studio, and now they're working with an actual producer-- former Fucking Champs guy Tim Green, who might not exactly be Daniel Lanois, but he's still a big step for this band. Their smart little melodic flourishes have always been there, but now you don't have to strain your ear to hear them.
Even at their most straightforward, the Fresh & Onlys still find plenty of room to play around in the margins of their songs. "I'm All Shook Up" is a relative rave-up, but organs blurt and bass murmurs deep in the mix, adding melodic accents to the pounding. "Who Needs a Man" is a swampy rush that ends before you know it, but the ghostly shades of surf-guitar exotica keep things restless. And then there's "Tropical Island Suite", this band's shot at eight-minute "Hellhole Ratrace" grandeur. A straight-ahead, simplistic bash dissolves into muffled feedbacky noise halfway through, then returns as a slower, strummier lope. It's as if the band couldn't decide which way to play the song, so they just went with both ideas.
Singer Tim Cohen has a flat, affectless voice, nowhere near as expressive as peers like Christopher Owens or even Sonny Smith. But that baritone works nicely in the middle of the mix, and it's fun to hear him sounding bored of being a player on "I'm a Thief" or trying to escape information-age overload on "Waterfall". My favorite line comes on "Be My Hooker": "I can hear the open sea calling me, but I don't know, I don't know"-- wanderlust and indecision rendered in one quick, direct stroke. He keeps things concise, and the whole album finishes up business well before the 40-minute mark. May this band continue to crank out inventive little nuggets like this long into the future. | 2010-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | October 18, 2010 | 8 | 820ba81a-b1a1-4ee6-a4c5-5df8499e5735 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The New York duo’s second album is tasteful to a fault, joining gentle electronics with polite indie rock and vaguely wistful lyrics. Despite the title, it’s a record that avoids discord at all cost. | The New York duo’s second album is tasteful to a fault, joining gentle electronics with polite indie rock and vaguely wistful lyrics. Despite the title, it’s a record that avoids discord at all cost. | Bob Moses: Battle Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-moses-battle-lines/ | Battle Lines | The band Bob Moses sounds remarkably like Coldplay on Battle Lines, from the soaring vocal melodies to the stately piano chords to the overall air of slightly apologetic celebration. Most of all, though, Bob Moses sound like Coldplay because singer Tom Howie sounds like Chris Martin. The resemblance is there in Howie’s hushed vocal tone, his tendency to reach for the falsetto and only just arrive, and the way he stretches out his words like a politely howling coyote, so that “insanity” becomes “insanity-y-y,” the last syllable tugged along by vast slabs of singalong phrasing.
Coldplay’s role as perpetual media whipping boy might make the comparison sound like an insult, but it’s not meant to be. Especially on their first two albums, Coldplay had a fantastic gift for melody that soundtracked more autumnal breakups than many people these days might care to admit, and Bob Moses share some of this melodic nous. At their best, the Vancouver band’s tunes are like seeds in the desert: imperishable hooks that lie dormant for months only to flower at the first sign of heartbreak. Album opener “Heaven Only Knows” has the same boisterous stadium melancholy that Chris Martin and co. might use to slay a boggy Glastonbury Festival, while “Listen to Me” is a wonderful earworm mix of fragility and defiance.
The problem lies in what Bob Moses do—or rather don’t do—with these melodies. For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock. The typical Battle Lines song starts with solemn piano chords and a mournful vocal refrain; a beat starts up, earnestly marking time; then guitar and synth join wearily in, a pattern so unbelievably muted it makes you wonder if electronic music could really have originated in the delirium of disco or was instead soldered together in a suburban laboratory with the express goal of putting drummers out of business. There are minor exceptions to this rule: “Listen to Me” introduces a weighty bass pulse, giving Battle Lines its first suggestion of grit eight tracks in, while “Don’t Hold Back” recalls the schaffel beat of the band’s Grammy-nominated hit “Tearing Me Up.” But these are isolated islands of change in a warm sea of drift.
Allied to this are lyrics so deeply ambiguous they make choose-your-own-adventure books seem dangerously decisive. “Sacrifice/Don’t think twice/Wear your faith as your only disguise/It’s justified, don’t ask why/’Cause heaven only knows,” runs the second verse of “Heaven Only Knows,” clearing up precisely nothing about what it is, exactly, that heaven only knows and why we should care.
What makes this drabness all the more galling is that Bob Moses should, on the face of it, be a pretty fascinating band. Jimmy Vallance, the other half of the duo, started his career making trance and progressive house, and Bob Moses are one of few acts to have played EDM wonderland EDC, the earthier Bonnaroo, and London underground clubbing institution Fabric. You can hear the subtle influence of trance on tracks like “Back Down,” where the slightest suggestion of fluoro folly in the interplay between synth and voice briefly raises hopes that the duo might leave the leaden comfort of beige for rampant electronic abandon. After all, even Coldplay went EDM on hands-in-the-air Avicii collaboration "A Sky Full of Stars.” But these hopes are soon dashed as Bob Moses chug back down through the gears, leaving their second album feeling less like Battle Lines drawn and more like the carefully negotiated de-escalation of a crisis—a situation that is great for international diplomacy but unlikely to set the heart on fire. | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | September 18, 2018 | 5.6 | 820e90ee-5fd2-400f-ac90-ab9829e349f8 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The electronic artist Arca's latest unclassifiable release is darker than his stunning 2015 LP Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting. | The electronic artist Arca's latest unclassifiable release is darker than his stunning 2015 LP Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting. | Arca: Entrañas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22093-entranas/ | Entrañas | Arca does not take many categories for granted. Alejandro Ghersi’s fondness for what he calls “in-between states” extends to gender, genre, emotion, and form itself. Mutability and ambivalence guide the sound of his music, the contours of which variously suggest globular, blown-glass shapes and the jagged shards of smashed windows, and his fondness for slipping between the cracks of well-worn molds even extends to his choice of musical formats. One of his very first releases, Baron Foyel, for DIS Magazine, was a mixtape consisting of all original productions, most of which never turned up anywhere else in his discography. In 2013, he followed the “official” records Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 with the free download &&&&&, an unbroken 25 minutes of music containing 14 different segments within its undulating folds. He did something similar with last year's Sheep, the soundtrack to a Hood By Air runway show at the Pitti Uomo menswear trade fair in Florence, Italy, which took the form of a 17-minute piece broken into 11 seamlessly interwoven parts. What do you call in-between items like these, which are neither albums, nor EPs, nor mixtapes, exactly? Given the way these recordings are simply flung into the cloud, like doves being loosed from cupped hands, perhaps the simplest term—“release”—is also the most accurate.
Entrañas follows in the vein of &&&&& and Sheep. It is 25 minutes long, and, for the moment, it exists only as a single audio file distributed via SoundCloud and Mediafire. According to the tracklisting, its switchbacking course consists of 14 individual segments. But good luck trying to figure out where “Culebra” ends and “Vicar” begins, say, or even which songs are collaborations with Mica Levi, Massacooramaan, and Total Freedom. As always, the method behind Arca’s morass is about as clear as snorkeling through motor oil.
But anyone who has spent any time listening to Arca will immediately recognize Entrañas as his work. All the hallmarks are here: abrasive percussive blasts, metal-shop whine, the screech of subway brakes, the whine of jet engines overheating. Anthropomorphic and animalistic sounds abound—mewling cats, mooing cows, anguished screams, the grunts and groans of orgasm. There are plangent synthesizers, too, and brittle harpsichord and noxious strings, bitter and dissonant. He stretches his sounds this way and that, backwards and forwards: distending, slowing, twisting, and mangling into a gummy ball of melted spacetime. Shuddering club beats collapse into white noise, never to be heard again; melodies flare up and fall silent just as abruptly. The whole thing crumples like a set of body armor being wadded up in the fist of an angry god. It is darker than Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting. One of the ironies of the form is that it makes you listen more closely than you might to a full album. It’s short enough that you can focus all your attention on it, and with no gaps between songs, it affords little possibility to escape. It’s often damn-near claustrophobic.
Soaking up all manner of references, this might be the most porous that Arca’s work has ever been. In “Baby Doll,” he brandishes a sample of Cocteau Twins’ 1984 song “Beatrix” like a lit torch, and, intentionally or no, he recreates the eviscerating kick drums of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin.” Further on, there’s a brief moment of gravelly crunch and cock-rock swagger that sounds a lot like Oneohtrix Point Never’s invented genre of hyper-grunge. And in a pointed comment on repressive sexual mores, he samples Charlotte Gainsbourg’s speech from the 1993 film The Cement Garden: “For a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly, you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you—what it feels like for a girl?” Sounding seductive, innocent, and furious all at once, the monologue goes to the heart of the contradictions that animate Arca’s music.
Entrañas’ title translates as “entrails”—a metaphor in keeping with Arca and his close collaborator Jesse Kanda’s shared interest in anatomy, disgust, and the idea of turning bodies inside out—and the image suits the music’s undulating form, which twists and turns in sticky knots. The set builds to a sour, soggy lament, “Sin Rumbo,” that sounds like Ghersi’s take on a torch song for a David Lynch film, something like Rebekah del Rio’s “Llorando.” It’s an unexpected way to close the set—elegant but also strangely listless, with a refrain that translates as “Aimlessly/I walk aimlessly.” The whole thing ends in a cavalcade of fireworks, yet it would be hard to call it celebratory, exactly; the mood throughout pulses, rather, with the hot blood of a cornered animal, though you can detect a certain sense of exhilaration beneath the cold sweat and shrapnel. It is, in other words, the quintessential Arca recording, commingling pleasure and terror and beauty and ugliness in the most thrilling ways possible. Sinking its claws deep into you, it affords the sweetest kind of release. | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | July 13, 2016 | 8.1 | 8212896c-a352-4569-9328-0b23b31bbf9d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes provided the score to the debut film from director Gia Coppola, and he also appears on the film's original soundtrack alongside Tonsstartssbandht, Rooney lead singer Robert Schwartzman, and Jason Schwartzman's Coconut Records project. | Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes provided the score to the debut film from director Gia Coppola, and he also appears on the film's original soundtrack alongside Tonsstartssbandht, Rooney lead singer Robert Schwartzman, and Jason Schwartzman's Coconut Records project. | Devonté Hynes: Palo Alto: Original Motion Picture Score / Palo Alto: Music from the Motion Picture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19473-devonte-hynes-palo-alto-score/ | Palo Alto: Original Motion Picture Score / Palo Alto: Music from the Motion Picture | The biggest problem with the film Palo Alto: too much James Franco. In some ways, this was unavoidable—after all, it is a movie based on his collection of short stories, and out of all the unredeemable characters who aren't human beings so much as a bundle of oversold affectations, his manipulative, lecherous high school teacher “Mr. B” is the least redeemable. Consequently, the film suffers both from dilettantism and taking itself way too seriously, an immiscible mixture of Kids-style scared-straight sex romp and the beatific teen dream of T**he Virgin Suicides (helmed by director Gia Coppola’s aunt, Sofia).
But it'd be unfair to expect Blood Orange mastermind Dev Hynes' score to Palo Alto to replicate last year's Cupid Deluxe; the latter was Hynes’ portrayal of outcasts in a pop setting, the inverse of Palo Alto’s gauzily-shot coterie of mopey high school A-listers. I went into my viewing experience of Palo Alto having no idea Hynes was responsible for the score, which is barely noticable throughout the film. This means he did his job of being both hip and unobtrusive; the title track and “April’s Daydream” are the few vocal pieces that are at least reminders of the limber, lithe funk that got him here in the first place. Otherwise, the near entirety of the score does away with his requisite Hynes-ness and gives you about what you’d expect from an indie artist working on a well-financed indie film: minute-long asides consisting of the occasional well of strings, mallet percussion, and slow-moving synthesizer pads, almost none of it set to a beat.
The score is nice enough, if not necessarily evocative or distinct—the titles helpfully point out where each snippet appeared in the film, though it’s indicative of the score’s mundane cohesion that “Run to Graveyard”, “Skateboard Garage”, and “Teddy in the Library” somehow all sound pretty much the same. It leads to the same question asked of M83's Anthony Gonzalez upon his completion of the Oblivion soundtrack—why would you ask him to do this if it’s not going bear the artist’s signature? There’s an easy answer to that: as a means of branding, Palo Alto works splendidly, its musical component coming from someone who’s currently a hot item. Palo Alto may only be useful as background music, but as long as Hynes’ star continues to rise, it's hard not to see him potentially getting more work in this vein.
Pop music does plays a crucial role in establishing the film's narrative flow, as its most memorable scenes usually involved two people sitting uncomfortably close on a couch, accompanied by the overlay of a recognizable “indie” song. The most noteworthy example is when Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” makes it clear a house party has officially been upgraded to a raging kegger. It is not on the soundtrack, but Blood Orange’s “You’re Not Good Enough” and Mac DeMarco’s “Ode to Viceroy” are; they're two songs which already feel like standards, the latter in particular conveying the mix of easy, boyish charm and underlying seediness that the film's male characters are entirely unable to exude.
Instead, we’re given reminders of what protagonists Fred and Teddy are actually like in the movie. Nat Wolff’s Fred is presented as a magnetic misanthrope and comes across as a superhumanly annoying, sociopathic asshole who can only express his supposed complexities in the most comically blatant way; his meta-goof “Rock Star (Movie Version)” finds him banging on a piano in the middle of a party, which is supposed to indicate his ability to be charming before he gets too many drinks in him. Meanwhile, Jack Kilmer’s Teddy is demonstrated as a soulful, artistic type caught up in incapacitating teen angst and peer pressure; while his estranged love interest (Emma Roberts’ April) has a good sulk in her bedroom, "T.M." is supposed to reveal Teddy's inner Cobain, and instead comes across like a poorly played instrumental from the first 3 Doors Down album.
Jack Kilmer is Val’s son, and portions of Palo Alto were filmed at his house in Southern California, which is indicative of the film's clumsy grasp on reality; if Palo Alto wasn’t the name of the movie, you’d have no idea where it actually took place, (save for the California license plates). This is troubling, since the Silicon Valley focal point and home of Stanford University and isn’t exactly Anytown U.S.A.; the soundtrack even suggests that Palo Alto is in Orange County, given the presence of contributions from Jason Schwartzman’s post-Phantom Planet concern Coconut Records, as well as Rooney lead singer Robert Schwartzman.
Palo Alto is as much an audition for Robert Schwartzman as it is for Dev Hynes; he’s given four tracks, half of which show a facility for rehashing interstitials from Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Otherwise, you get a couple of lo-fi electro-alt songs, and as far as lo-fi, electro-alt side projects featured in grim high school movies go, Robert Schwartzman's contributions don't exactly resemble the Folk Implosion: “So Bad” samples Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat”, i.e., the one from “99 Problems” and “Fix Up, Look Sharp”, meaning it was already getting played out when Rooney was still sh-sh-shakin.
Otherwise, Palo Alto is most notable for its clear outliers: “Champagne Coast”, the highlight from Blood Orange’s largely forgotten 2011 debut Coastal Grooves, and Tonsstartssbandht’s maddeningly catchy proto-witch house earworm “5FT7”. There’s also a century-old Italian aria from Senza Mamma, a melodramatic musical play written by Francesco Pennino and included in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II. Pennino is Coppola’s maternal grandfather, and the lead singer of Rooney also used to go by Robert Coppola Schwartzman, just two indicators of the enterprise of smug, well-connected, celebrity indulgence that is Palo Alto. | 2014-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | June 18, 2014 | 5.5 | 82197deb-7c99-49ef-95c6-0d0f7982b7ac | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Berlin-based musician reworks audio from vintage pornography into unrecognizable forms, queering the lineage of ambient music and subverting stereotypical representations of gay sex. | The Berlin-based musician reworks audio from vintage pornography into unrecognizable forms, queering the lineage of ambient music and subverting stereotypical representations of gay sex. | Jake Muir: Bathhouse Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jake-muir-bathhouse-blues/ | Bathhouse Blues | Gay cruising is 90 percent patience. In bathhouses, clubs, parks, lavatories, and subway tunnels, the promiscuous loiter longer than they fuck. People swarm when activity breaks out; sometimes erotic energy spreads through these tenebrous spaces. But after a few minutes, everyone wanders around or waits, posting up against the walls while they stare at each other with an obscure mixture of indifference and excitement.
The music of this ritual, heartbeat kick drums and climactic synths, is commonly associated with copulation, not minutes or hours of longing and boredom. Jake Muir captures the latter, slower reality by removing electronic music’s thumping pulse altogether. An ambient artist and field recorder, Muir grew up in Los Angeles and established his music practice in Seattle, and the sounds of water and nature that predominate in his work feel inspired by the Pacific coast and its lush, pleasant environs. Since he moved to frigid Berlin—surely a world capital of public sex—human life began to leave footprints in his glacially shifting soundscapes. His 2020 album the hum of your veiled voice delved into a night-lit queer demimonde, albeit one in which everything lascivious happens off camera. The LP animates the contemplation, shared silences, and quiet walks from DJ set to backroom bar that punctuate wee hours out on the town.
Muir’s new album, Bathhouse Blues, incorporates highly processed audio clips from vintage gay pornography. This raw material offers tremendous potential for sexual explicitness. Yet Bathhouse Blues is powerful because it immerses us further in yearning and ennui, not consummation. Voices appear like the ghosts of past hookup scene habitués—a sinister image considering the title of the first track, “Cruisin’ 87,” which takes up a whole vinyl side and evokes AIDS’ deadliest years. These voices feel overheard, reverberating from across a room. Muir disfigures his audio enough that it sounds at once empty and existential, like lurking in a gay club’s maze just before sunrise, hoping for some ideal partner to round the corner.
The introspective public-sex enthusiast is an underexposed cultural archetype, and Muir draws us with a librarian’s soft touch into queer history, showing how pensive figures have always flitted along the crowd’s fringes. His project focuses on a particular period, the 1970s and ’80s, in which gay directors were largely barred from telling stories about their sexual orientation in both mainstream and arthouse fare, and used the funding of the adult movie industry to bankroll cinema that was both titillating and moving, even profound. A number of the era’s gay skin flicks are considered classics today, including Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Passing Strangers (1974), much of the corpus of Wakefield Poole, and Dietrich de Velsa and Frantz Salieri’s Equation to an Unknown (1980). Others have achieved cult status among porn enthusiasts, or have yet to be uncovered in the VHS bins of the past.
Muir pulls from a wide assortment of videos, but about half of his samples are from two surreal, ambitious works by Michael Zen, Falconhead (1976) and Falconhead Part II: The Maneaters (1984). These movies fetishize leather, rubber, and a mysterious central figure who wears a gigantic falcon mask, yet they lavish as much attention on radiant lighting schemes and pitch-perfect musical cues as they do on bodies; the result is dreamy and languorous, not unlike Muir’s compositions. The soundtracks of both films are astonishingly deep, framing gay sex with a pioneering meld of jazz fusion, classical, electronic, and new age: Herbie Hancock, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Iannis Xenakis, Bela Bartók, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra all make appearances. Such an eclectic blend anticipates the broad and stylistically agnostic ambient genre that flourishes today.
We sense that Muir is trying to place himself as a heady, technically brilliant sound artist in a queer lineage, while looking back at a time when gay males were pigeonholed as cold, superficial lovers of robotic music—how detractors described disco. Gay men, according to this homophobic logic, were always sniffing drugs and having thoughtless sex. Yet the porn actors who Muir samples are having thoughtful sex: “C’mon, I’m tired of this bar,” one says at the end of “Cruisin’ 87,” after a 20-minute drift from a fleeting, optimistic overture through the damp echoes of Muir’s stacked samples, “Let’s go to my place.”
Muir culled this album from a mix he assembled for the San Francisco label Honey Soundsystem and a sequel he put together a couple of years later. Those sets were full of clarity, knitting together occasionally audible coitus with cuts by more contemporary producers. But everything on Bathhouse Blues comes from vintage porn—the music, too. Muir layers, screws down, and loops internet rips of VHS tapes and studio recordings of his soundtrack selections until they're all but unrecognizable.
The result can feel like a dub of his two original mixes, but instead of twisting the bass knobs, Muir mucks up the atmosphere. He muddles Tangerine Dream and Vangelis into somber ambience. The disc’s B-side, “Pipe Dream,” rumbles and whooshes while crickets chirp in the background. Close listening reveals a few grunts at the song’s end, perhaps from a sex scene, but these connective utterances are buried and denatured. Bathhouse Blues has already hypnotized us with an exploration of how lust can be solitary, even in a place full of people.
Muir constructed his teeming 2018 collection Lady’s Mantle from samples of surf rock records. The subject was clear: his birthplace of L.A. and its coastal mythos. But as every Angeleno knows, the beach’s flipside is the valley, and the valley is the cradle of America’s porn industry. Bathhouse Blues slyly tells us a new tale about Muir’s hometown, like a hookup who can’t help but divulge flashes of his life story. We see our own sense of caution reflected in his air of circumspection; when he offers up an intimate fact about himself, we trust his honest intentions. Muir understands a world in which men draw you in close but keep you at arm’s length emotionally. Bathhouse Blues seems to mimic this ambivalent behavior—and then we find the warmth beneath its layers. | 2024-01-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-29T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | sferic | January 29, 2024 | 8 | 821ca95b-80b4-46d8-ad37-be6b0a8dc4c0 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The long-running Oregon doom metal trio opens its third act with a sensuous, aggressive, and jubilant album inspired by singer-guitarist Mike Scheidt's recent brush with death. | The long-running Oregon doom metal trio opens its third act with a sensuous, aggressive, and jubilant album inspired by singer-guitarist Mike Scheidt's recent brush with death. | YOB: Our Raw Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yob-our-raw-heart/ | Our Raw Heart | Mike Scheidt, the vocalist and guitar player for Oregon doom metal trio YOB, was hospitalized with diverticulitis early last year. In a recent Decibel cover story, he made the ailment sound pretty metal, likening it to a Chestburster wallowing inside him. But the experience—which nearly killed him—left Scheidt so changed that he wasn’t sure, at first, if the band would continue.
YOB’s eighth record, Our Raw Heart, was born out of Scheidt’s health scare—and, given the circumstances, the fact that it even sounds like a YOB record is a triumph. While 2011’s Atma was all aggression and 2014’s Clearing the Path to Ascend delved into their psychedelic side, Heart unites those two sounds in service of a new theme. The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.
Despite everything Scheidt has been through, YOB never come off as angry on Heart; the rage in these songs is actually an affirmation of life and emotion. “The Screen” takes the mystic pummel of death-doom act Cathedral’s Forest of Equilibrium—one of Scheidt’s biggest influences—and translates that downward crush into something more uplifting. YOB are still adept at playing slowly to bend time: Scheidt’s guitar chug fragments into an arsenal of time bombs, each one cycling from countdown to detonation. “In Reverie” constantly builds momentum and knocks it down again, but this isn’t an abusive back-and-forth so much as the sonic version of proper pit etiquette. Intimidating as it can sound, YOB’s music is some of the most inviting in contemporary metal. Scheidt can make the most grinding riff feel soothing, like a vision quest that comforts and imbues purpose even as it tests the listener.
Clocking in at over 16 minutes, “Beauty in Falling Leaves” is Heart’s centerpiece, melding all the heft and tenderness that define YOB into one sermon. The track places Scheidt on a path of elevation and love, spilling ferocious goodwill with flangers and Sabbath on max. It makes sense that the album is called Our Raw Heart: The band is bringing the audience into their world, laying its soul bare, and refusing to let metal purity get in the way of total communion. Recounting his experience with diverticulitis, Scheidt described himself as both “a sensitive, effeminate man” and “an old-world macho moron, especially when it comes to outwardly showing physical pain.” Self-deprecation aside, that’s an apt description of this song: YOB wield unbridled metal muscle and disarming openness as if they were an obvious combination.
Bliss overflows into the following track, “Original Face,” a doom song spiked with crossover verve. This fusion isn’t unusual for Scheidt, who started out in punk bands and has revisited those roots singing in the punk-influenced metal supergroup VHÖL, yet those styles have never sounded so integrated before. Situated between “Beauty in Falling Leaves” and the title track, which closes out the album on a serene, psychedelic journey to nowhere, “Original Face” doesn’t feel abrupt amid their epic slowness. Metal is endlessly segmented, but YOB understand it as an ever-mutating, cross-pollinating form. With Scheidt back on his feet, they’re free to go wherever.
Scheidt had to reconsider his approach to vocals following his diverticulitis surgery: “I couldn’t bear down on my diaphragm too hard or else I could herniate my incisions, so I started sending air to these different places in my body,” he told Decibel. Like the music of Heart, his voice is familiar, yet fundamentally changed. The Super-Ozzy wail that carried him through Atma is still intact on “Ablaze,” but his vocal is noticeably quieter and rawer on “Beauty in Falling Leaves.” This is not the sound of a man weakened—it’s the sound of a man who wrestled with his mortality and now feels more alive than ever.
This is not the first time upheaval has led to renewal for YOB; Heart is, in fact, the beginning of their third act. Scheidt dissolved the band in 2006, then reformed it following the collapse of another band, Middian, due to legal issues two years later. That period yielded some of YOB’s best work, starting with 2009’s The Great Cessation and continuing with Atma and Ascend. At the darkest point of this latest cataclysm, Scheidt did not almost die for metal; he’d surely reject a narrative that cartoonishly macho. Instead, metal helped him preserve and, later, process life. Our Raw Heart is about how much more he has to give—to YOB, to the world, and to himself. | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | June 8, 2018 | 8 | 821e60cd-a154-4b48-8ff6-7dabdea5a48c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
After working for a decade as the Preston School of Industry, Pavement founder Scott Kannberg releases his first album as Spiral Stairs. | After working for a decade as the Preston School of Industry, Pavement founder Scott Kannberg releases his first album as Spiral Stairs. | Spiral Stairs: The Real Feel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13547-the-real-feel/ | The Real Feel | It's not mandatory for great bands to balance a dominant vocal personality with a foil, but it makes sense that it happens so often. A good No. 2 doesn't need to be less interesting than the star-- Flavor Flav is surely a more magnetic figure than Chuck D, for example-- but at best, they establish a necessary contrast that casts the lead in sharper relief. The star shines brighter, the subtext runs deeper, and the emotional range gets broader. In indie rock terms, think of how Kim Deal's easy-going stoner femininity emphasizes Black Francis' tightly-wound nerd masculinity, or the way Lee Renaldo's hipster everyman style offsets the larger-than-life personae of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.
Pavement may not have had a vocal dynamic as profound as Public Enemy, the Pixies, or Sonic Youth, but Stephen Malkmus had his appropriate foil in the form of Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg. Spiral was no less shambling and inscrutable, but he was very good at playing the self-effacing underdog to Malkmus' nonchalant indie alpha male. It would be an error to label his songs as more "sincere"-- he was consistently a far more cryptic and opaque lyricist than SM-- but he was capable of projecting a nervous vulnerability that destabilized the freakishly self-assured vibe of Pavement's first four albums in a way that was positive and necessary. Even if Spiral Stairs was not crucial to either Pavement's appeal or Malkmus' success, his presence offered a subtle balance and contrast, and yielded at least a few classics: "Kennel District" from Wowee Zowee; "Date With Ikea" from Brighten the Corners.
In the time since Pavement's dissolution in 1999, Kannberg has stepped into the role of the frontman with mixed results. Despite the nod to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass in its title, his debut as the leader of the Preston School of Industry did not reveal him to be an extraordinary songwriter obscured by the flash of his former partner, but rather just a serviceable author of amiable but not especially interesting indie rock. He pushed himself further by embracing alt-country on the follow-up, Monsoon, but the record was a tuneless, dreary mess, and it is undoubtedly the worst release ever to be associated with anyone having to do with Pavement. The central problem with the Preston School of Industry albums is that the very things that made Kannberg an effective foil for Malkmus also made him exhausting and dull as the focal point of a band. Whereas he was once the Milhouse Van Houten to Malkmus' Bart Simpson, he had devolved into being an incoherent indie equivalent of Milhouse's dad mewling "Can I Borrow a Feeling?"
After a five-year hiatus from recording, Kannberg has dissolved the Preston School of Industry, or perhaps more accurately, rebranded the project as Spiral Stairs. This is a sensible decision. Preston School of Industry was a terrible name for a band, and Spiral Stairs was always one of the better stage names in alt-rock. The reversion to the Stairs moniker could be taken as a signal that Kannberg has returned to form, but anyone expecting anything along the lines of his Pavement tunes will be let down by the contents of The Real Feel, his first record under the name.
Kannberg's new music mostly takes its cues from Neil Young and mid-period Bob Dylan, and to a certain extent, the ragged yet expansive sound suits his strengths as a guitarist and his weaknesses as an often aggravatingly nasal vocalist. "True Love", the album opener, is confident and sharp despite feeling more than a bit generic, and tracks like "Maltese T" and "Cold Change" are minor works, yet successful on their own terms. Even the weakest cuts on The Real Feel are at least passable genre exercises, but at a point it becomes difficult to tell whether they are actually good faux-Neil Young songs, or if these tunes would have any appeal at all to listeners who were not hardcore Pavement fans with an unusually large amount of goodwill for the band's less famous founding member.
Though he is still prone to writing nonsense lyrics nearly devoid of resonance, Kannberg has opened up significantly as a lyricist, though his most emotional and unguarded moments on "Call the Ceasefire" and "Blood Money" are mostly quite banal. Unlike many of his previous works, he seems far more interested in revealing himself and connecting with an audience, but even though his voice has grown stronger, he still sings everything as if he can't stand to make eye contact with you. The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases. His style may shift, but Kannberg remains an unambitious songwriter and underwhelming frontman. It could just be that he's the type of person who best thrives as a second banana. Then again, maybe all he needs is a foil of his own. | 2009-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | October 20, 2009 | 5.2 | 821fa1b2-c1af-4f2b-bf03-c21a25e4efc5 | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Diplo and Switch supplement their 2009 dancehall record with this EP, a summertime's worth of originals and reinterpretations. Thom Yorke and M.I.A. appear. | Diplo and Switch supplement their 2009 dancehall record with this EP, a summertime's worth of originals and reinterpretations. Thom Yorke and M.I.A. appear. | Major Lazer: Lazers Never Die EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14462-lazers-never-die-ep/ | Lazers Never Die EP | If there's one complaint you can lobby against Lazers Never Die-- the new EP from Diplo and Switch's global party project Major Lazer-- is that we're only now getting our hands on it, a month or so into summer. A minor qualm, but it's a shame to think about how many Fourth of July barbecues could've benefitted from this batch of originals and reinterpretations from the duo's hybridized dancehall debut, Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do. To paraphrase Scott Plagenhoef's review of that album last year, this is clearly music that works best in the heat, but it still has the dexterity to stick around once the flip-flops have been tucked away. On this concise and surprisingly fresh sounding EP, Major Lazer retain the sweat-soaked club feel that's curried them so much favor but also appeals to their perennial accessibility.
It's no secret that Major Lazer have racked up some serious frequent flyer miles this year. And in between the daggering instructional videos and recording at the legendary Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica (where much of Lazers Never Die was created), it's surprising to find that these guys have had the time to get any kind of work done at all. Last month, they released a remix record with La Roux, a somewhat mismatched pairing but one that proved fruitful and thoughtful. And even if the brunt of the work here has been shouldered by the remixes of tracks found on Guns Don't Kill People, you can tell that the EP is no toss-off.
Among the new songs is the mp3 blog favorite "Sound of Siren", which features Lazer's most familiar affiliate, M.I.A., and Jamaica's Busy Signal. With its rigid snare-snappings and militant, sing-songy hook, it's a clever entry point given the Major Lazer mythology. Dancehall heavy-hitter Busy Signal swoops in and does his thing effortlessly, snarling and flailing all over the otherwise uncluttered, straightforward lurch. Somewhat overlooked when it wound up online at the beginning of this year, it's nice to see "Siren" getting its proper shine here, with both M.I.A. and Busy making their stop snitchin' talk convincing. Better still is the Collie Buddz- and Lindi Ortega-assisted "Good Enough", a pretty down-the-line island-riddim affair that employs great melody and some aqueous synth accents that help lodge this one right into your brain. Ortega-- an under-the-radar Canadian singer-songwriter-- somehow walks away with it, deliciously channeling a rocksteady-pumped Gwen Stefani.
But the remixes feel equally vital to the EP, because after all, the great appeal of Major Lazer is watching these dancehall concoctions transform, as elements of dub and hip-hop and reggae are also smashed into one freaky, juiced up mutant (kinda like the fictional Major Lazer himself). Buraka Som Sistema do a house-y two-step all over "Bruk Out", giving it the extra 10% of oomph that Einstein's gleefully whacked-out feature always deserved. And even if the K.L.A.M. remix of "Can't Stop Now" doesn't break much new ground, guest rapper Miss Banks brings enough clever, dirty sass that it's hard to pass up. Even the big name-drop moment doesn't disappoint: Thom Yorke laces "Jump Up" with queasy, slow-burn dubstep moves, providing an unexpected amount of movement with some simple, sandpapery claps. And it might go without saying, but everyone gets a bonus points for knowing to leave "Keep It Goin' Louder" well enough alone. | 2010-07-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Global / Pop/R&B | Mad Decent | July 21, 2010 | 7.8 | 8221c318-5ada-418f-9041-5a442f885d47 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
After singing with Solange, Drake, Kanye, and Frank, Sampha releases his debut LP. It’s a remarkable, meditative work, as he processes grief and navigates self-discovery. | After singing with Solange, Drake, Kanye, and Frank, Sampha releases his debut LP. It’s a remarkable, meditative work, as he processes grief and navigates self-discovery. | Sampha: Process | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22831-process/ | Process | When Sampha Sisay was three years old, his father brought a piano into the family’s Morden, England home. It wasn’t a grand gesture—just a way to get his sons away from the TV. Yet for Sampha, the youngest of five siblings, the instrument became a vessel for his personal growth. It helped enlighten the young boy, offering solace and purpose, commencing a spiritual journey that he’s still navigating. In Sampha’s world, the piano is one of the few things that’s always been there. It’s never gotten sick or faded away from disease. “You would show me I had something some people call a soul,” he sings on “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” a gorgeous ballad and one of many standouts from Process, Sampha’s remarkable debut album.
The song—much like the LP—comes from a deeply meditative place, reflecting the innermost thoughts of a man still coping with heavy loss. His father, Joe, passed away from lung cancer in 1998. His mother, Binty Sisay, died of cancer in September 2015. Throughout the spare electro-soul of Process, you feel his mom’s spirit in the stillness, pushing her son in his quest for understanding. Sampha’s endured his own health struggles as well. He once discovered a lump in his throat while on tour; despite an endoscopy, doctors couldn’t determine a cause. It became a catalyst for the singer to assess his own mortality here. “Sleeping with my worries,” goes the opener “Plastic 100ºC,” “I didn’t really know what that lump was.”
Sampha’s career dates back to 2010 and the release of Sundanza, his first EP. In 2011, Sampha was featured heavily on producer SBTRKT’s debut album; his second EP, Dual, followed in 2013. Sampha played the background from there, turning up on tracks with Drake (“Too Much,” “The Motion”), Kanye West (“Saint Pablo”), Frank Ocean (“Alabama”), and Solange (“Don’t Touch My Hair”). His presence was strong, even if his voice—a gentle, shimmering falsetto—added light touches to the scenery. Despite its delicate texture, Sampha’s inflection hovers perfectly above the music, cracking at certain pitches to convey grief.
In a way, Process feels like a concept album on which Sampha rediscovers himself. The musician’s mother was diagnosed with cancer the same year Sundaza came out, and as her primary caregiver, he naturally focused his attention on her well-being. Now, he’s attempting to reconnect with his core while coping with despair. In the past, he’d mix his voice to fit within the instrumental; on Process, he makes it the focal point. Co-produced with Rodaidh McDonald, *Process *brings to mind James Blake while nodding to mainstream hip-hop. On “Under,” in particular, Sampha utilizes a sleek trap beat.
Even the album’s most upbeat tracks are shaded with tension. “You’ve been with me since the cradle,” Sampha recalls on “Kora Sings,” presumably referring to his mom. “You’ve been with me, you’re my angel, please don’t you disappear.” With “Blood on Me,” the album’s second single, the vocalist sings through heavy breaths, seemingly haunted by his own insecurities. It addresses the fear of moving forward after personal trauma, and for a quiet soul like Sampha, it also speaks to the panic of navigating the world by himself. “I’m on this road now,” he exclaims. “I’m so alone now/Swerving out of control now.”
On album closer “What Shouldn’t I Be?,” you feel Sampha’s air of prolonged detachment. It catches the singer at his most vulnerable, trying to remember the sketches of his childhood. Close your eyes, and you can almost see Sampha’s family—happy, affectionate, and together. “I should visit my brother,” he ponders, “but I haven’t been there in months.” His self-imposed isolation doesn’t outweigh the song’s overall premise: “You can always come home.” | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Young Turks | February 3, 2017 | 8.6 | 822d539a-3150-4168-aefe-3efb9af240a7 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
A remastered double-LP compilation of the D.C. art-punks’ early 2000s material showcases their atmospheric, Wurtlitzer-haloed approach to indie rock. | A remastered double-LP compilation of the D.C. art-punks’ early 2000s material showcases their atmospheric, Wurtlitzer-haloed approach to indie rock. | Beauty Pill: Blue Period | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beauty-pill-blue-period/ | Blue Period | Last summer, Chad Clark got a third heart. The electric one he’d received in 2008, after a viral infection, had been recalled, and this time doctors were able to secure an organ transplant. Severely immunocompromised, Clark hasn’t performed live much in recent years, but on those rare occasions, his lineup-shifting project, Beauty Pill, has shared stages with avant-garde icons from Laurie Anderson to Arto Lindsay. Open and humble on social media and in interviews, Clark has aged gracefully and miraculously into a role as an art-punk elder. “I’m not a rock star,” he recently told Washington City Paper. “But I don’t really feel like the world has mistreated me the way I felt when I was younger.”
At the turn of the millennium, Clark’s path might have seemed very different. The former frontman for Smart Went Crazy, a bleak and brainy, Washington, D.C.-based post-hardcore band, he was also a studio whiz who’d worked on local indie-rock heroes the Dismemberment Plan’s breakthrough album, Emergency & I. Beauty Pill bowed in October 2001 with a promising debut EP, The Cigarette Girl From the Future, that embraced psych-pop lushness. Then, a couple of years before Clark’s heart problems started, came the tumultuous era documented on Beauty Pill’s new archival release, Blue Period.
The double-LP compilation acts as a deluxe reissue of Beauty Pill’s ambitious but mostly overlooked debut album, 2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle, followed in the track listing by the rougher-hewn 2003 EP, You Are Right to Be Afraid. Both are newly remastered, giving the old recordings fresh heft, and making their first appearance on vinyl. Rounding out the set is a side’s worth of previously unreleased material. While not quite a trove of lost classics, Blue Period swells with intelligence and musical inquisitiveness. It’s a snapshot of a fertile moment, and a signpost for the restless avant-rock perfectionist that Clark has survived to become.
In the early 2000s, plenty of bands were blurring post-hardcore, emo, and indie rock toward unknown vistas, and The Unsustainable Lifestyle would sit comfortably in a Case Logic with contemporaneous releases from Jets to Brazil, the Promise Ring, Rainer Maria, Pretty Girls Make Graves, or even Death Cab for Cutie. The band takes an atmospheric, Wurtlitzer-haloed approach to indie rock, with vocal duties shared between Clark and two former members, Rachel Burke and Jean Cook. Clark’s nuanced and meticulous production stands out: Notice how the throbbing drums pan from left to right on ethereal opener “Goodnight for Real,” or the blissful tremolo guitar of Burke-led “Such Large Portions!”
On Smart Went Crazy’s swan song, 1997’s Con Art, Clark sang about a reckless driver who, we soon learn, has his dead wife’s body in the trunk. As lovely as the textured productions can be, such unwieldy lyrical conceits also limit The Unsustainable Lifestyle. “The Mule on the Plane” is a noise-rock drug-courier narrative that sounds like a surf-ier Sonic Youth after watching the 2000 film Traffic; “Quote Devout Unquote” muses on dog spit, Santa Claus, and courtroom jargon before reaching its skyscraping art-rock climax. As with Con Art’s “Good Day,” the biggest conceptual swing from The Unsustainable Lifestyle is an exploration of race and hip-hop led by Clark, who is Black. “Won’t You Be Mine” flips a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood sample to ask “Are you my nigga?,” making a pointed critique of mainstream rap’s materialism that went unexamined by white critics 20 years ago. Today, Clark shares a mutual appreciation with Bartees Strange, a successor who’s repeatedly cited Clark as an inspiration for genre-roving Black artists in the D.C. scene.
The rest of Blue Period is a similarly of-its-time assortment of sonic kicks and lyrical clunkers. From the You Are Right to Be Afraid EP, the winding guitar and lilting falsetto of “Copyists” show Clark moving appealingly toward Stephen Malkmus territory, while the title track brings a Hüsker Dü-like rock frenzy that’s bracing regardless of your investment in the D.C. hardcore aesthetic. Of the previously unreleased material, a deconstructed take on Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah workout “I Don’t Live Today” is pleasant enough, but “Fugue State Companion” is a circa-2004 indie rock song based on an extended metaphor about The Empire Strikes Back.
Happily, Clark is still active and, scary hospital visits aside, apparently thriving. Beauty Pill’s most recent full-length, 2015’s kaleidoscopic Describes Things As They Are, was the band’s first since The Unsustainable Lifestyle. Two equally distinguished EPs, 2020’s Please Advise and 2021’s Instant Night, also make fine entry points to Clark’s catalog. Beauty Pill’s fate in the mid-2000s was all too nearly a tragedy, but they’re still here to be discovered. “There’s only so much oxygen/Left in the room,” Clark insists on “Goodnight for Real,” but the song’s focus on bands and scene politics seems small and parochial today: There’s air to go around. Here’s to second chances—and third hearts. | 2023-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ernest Jenning | February 1, 2023 | 7.4 | 82312cc9-defb-4b86-ba2a-31609a52da5a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
A 4xLP box set pays tribute to the influential Athens band, who in the early ’80s pioneered a stripped-down post-punk sound that was raw, minimalist, brainy, and danceable. | A 4xLP box set pays tribute to the influential Athens band, who in the early ’80s pioneered a stripped-down post-punk sound that was raw, minimalist, brainy, and danceable. | Pylon: Pylon Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pylon-pylon-box/ | Pylon: Pylon Box | Pylon didn’t really want to be a rock band. When art-school classmates Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley started banging on cheap instruments in their Athens, Georgia, apartment in the late 1970s, they were more into performance art than music. “We are not musicians, we do not like to ‘jam’ or even practice,” Lachowski wrote to his art professor at the University of Georgia. “We only want to perform—we only care about the product, not the process.” Adding fellow UGA alum Vanessa Briscoe Hay on vocals and drummer Curtis Crowe (their landlord and neighbor, who heard their noise from a floor above), they called themselves Pylon and stuck to their art attack. They had one explicit goal: play a single show in New York, get written up in New York Rocker, and then immediately break up.
The first two goals were achieved so quickly that Pylon delayed the final one. But they only lasted five years, releasing just a handful of singles and two albums before dissolving. Pylon Box, a new 4xLP collection of those recordings and previously unreleased material, shows that their influence has survived much longer. In an accompanying book, musicians from all over testify to the example they set, while a biographical essay by Pitchfork contributor Stephen Deusner details the local remifications of their legacy. Though the B-52’s put Athens on the map (their success in NYC made Pylon want to play there), it was Pylon who built the town’s music community, through parties, concerts, and their own still-surviving show space, the 40 Watt. “If the B-52’s proved that good, original, compelling music could be made in Athens,” writes Deusner, “then Pylon proved that the town could sustain a scene.”
That wouldn’t have happened if Pylon’s music wasn’t so original. “We’d never learned how to play music,” said Crowe. “That was the secret to whatever success we had—the fact that we never had any idea what we were not supposed to do.” Bewley developed his own guitar language by starting with an alternate tuning, simply because he didn’t know any standard ones. He and Lachowski took turns playing repetitive grooves and unfettered improvisations; as Grace Elizabeth Hale points out in her recent history of Athens, Cool Town, this “gave birth to a remarkable independence between the bass and the guitar parts.” That became a chemical reaction once Crowe added nimble drumming and Briscoe Hay provided yelps, growls, and chants, taking her cues from Yoko Ono and Patti Smith. It all added up to something raw but sharp, minimal but unrestrained, brainy but swinging—a sound that was hard to predict but easy to dance to.
Their sound gelled with lightning speed. In the summer of 1979, just months after they began, Pylon got their dreamed-of New York gig—opening for Gang of Four—and a rave in Interview magazine from tastemaker Glenn O’Brien. That fall, they made their first recordings in Lachowski and Bewley’s apartment, taped by local record-store owner Chris Razz. As heard in Pylon Box, on an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease. Take “Functionality,” a marvel of clipped angles, racing rhythm, and Briscoe Hay’s sneaky voice darting through criss-crossing lines. As the band whips up an evolving, syncopated loop, it seems they could giddily grind out variations on this jerky groove forever.
Razz Tape also includes the first recorded versions of two iconic Pylon songs: the rushing “Cool,” marked by an urgent Briscoe Hay slogan (“Everything is cool!”), and the contorted howler “Dub.” In his review of their NYC show, O’Brien guessed that “these kids eat dub for breakfast.” In reality, the quartet had never even heard of dub, but they were happy to use O’Brien’s claim as material. “I don't know what you're talking about,” snarls Briscoe Hay before chanting, “We eat dub for breakfast!” This kind of pop-art repurposing typified Pylon’s aesthetics, which were more down to earth than ivory towered. Some of the members had jobs at a local factory, where ubiquitous safety cones inspired their band name and a pragmatic work atmosphere spurred their straightforward approach. They called their music “feasible rock,” espoused ideas like “form follows function,” and favored one-word song titles and taut lyrics. Sometimes they took this brutalist minimalism to extremes: One early flyer showed just a picture of the band and the letters “FRI,” barely enough information to indicate their next show was happening on Friday.
As Pylon played, wrote, and recorded more, their functional minimalism persisted, keeping their music both accessible and exciting. In many songs, you can hear the building blocks come together as they play, while more complex tunes eventually reveal their sturdy structures with subsequent listens. Pylon’s first full-length album, Gyrate, was recorded in 1980 in three days, and the mix of elementary hooks and dizzying figures remains exhilarating. The third track, “Precaution,” has a clean punk beat but Bewley’s spiraling guitar line immediately turns hectic. The instrumental “Weather Radio” boasts a clucking swing, quickly rushes into a rave-up chorus, then settles back into a mesmerizing stomp.
Recorded in a professional studio, Gyrate doesn’t sound primitive, but it sticks pretty closely to what you might hear at a sweaty, dance-filled Pylon show. Three years later, after a few singles—compiled here on an LP called Extra—Pylon sought to use the studio more like a tool, and they ventured to North Carolina to record with Mitch Easter, who had recently produced Chronic Town, the debut EP by Athens comrades R.E.M. On the resulting second album, Chomp, the songs sparkle a bit more as the band mold their shapes to wider sonic dimensions. This helps their energy shine even brighter, from the ESG-style punk/funk of “Yo-Yo” to the shimmering guitars of “No Clocks” to the gothic jangle of “Crazy” (later covered by R.E.M. on their outtakes collection Dead Letter Office).
Not long after Chomp came out in 1983, Pylon were offered gigs with an up-and-coming band called U2. Dreading the drudgery of a long tour, they broke up instead. “I never planned on being a musician,” said Briscoe Hay in the 1987 documentary Athens GA Inside/Out, “so it’s not like any big loss in my life that I’m not in a band anymore.” A few short reunions came later; Bewley passed away in 2009. But Pylon’s legacy survives, through musician namechecks, archival releases (their final 1983 show came out a few years ago as Pylon Live), and Briscoe Hay’s semi-tribute act Pylon Reenactment Society. Their lasting influence comes from a simple idea: Anyone can make music—and maybe, in passing, start a scene, or even become a legend. “You don’t need training or authority or legitimacy,” Lachowski said. “Just figure it out.”
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | New West | November 10, 2020 | 8.5 | 82346902-f441-4d79-96ba-6f581a155ecd | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The brothers’ ninth studio album marks their second comeback; there are glimmers of their crowd-pleasing, mind-expanding rave heyday, but too often the material lacks a sense of purpose. | The brothers’ ninth studio album marks their second comeback; there are glimmers of their crowd-pleasing, mind-expanding rave heyday, but too often the material lacks a sense of purpose. | Orbital: Monsters Exist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orbital-monsters-exist/ | Monsters Exist | Take a second to reflect on how remarkable Orbital’s initial run was. Since the British duo of Phil and Paul Hartnoll first put the eternal “Chime” to tape using their father’s cassette deck in 1988, the brothers spent the 1990s establishing themselves as one of the rave era’s most masterful dance teams, casually crafting side-long moments of bliss while pushing their sound forward in subtle, complex ways. They survived the commercialization of rave, released a series of strong albums within a genre that’s never had much use for the format, and, despite their involvement in electronica-era zeitgeist moments like the soundtrack to 1997’s Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, managed to make it through the decade without too many embarrassing decisions to their name. Suffice to say, Norman Cook could never.
Their decision to say goodbye, in the early years of the new millennium, was impressive at the time—a rarity among dance artists, who often continue on well past their creative prime for the sake of the always bountiful dance-festival dollar—and 2004’s swan song The Blue Album was as glimmering a final gesture as any. Of course, nothing is “final” these days, and Orbital eventually reunited for a spate of live shows from 2008 on; the reunion album that followed, 2012’s Wonky, was a high-risk return that nonetheless found the Hartnolls evoking their glory days more often than not. Close your eyes while listening to that album’s “Stringy Acid,” and it sounds no different from the heady, trance-inducing glories that made up their initial run.
Two years after Wonky, Orbital decided—again—that their rave days were over, making it the second time in their career that the duo would be going out on a relative high note. This latest declaration of finality was even less definitive than the one previous; last year, the Hartnolls started playing live again, and now we have Monsters Exist, their ninth studio album over a nearly 30-year career. The title and overall thematic bent of the album is decidedly political, because what isn’t these days; in the accompanying press bio, Phil states that the titular bogeymen “can mean anything from bankers and The Man or your own demons and fears,” while the album’s closing track, “There Will Come a Time,” features a lecture of sorts courtesy of English physicist Brian Cox.
Luckily, you don’t need to be aware of these resistance-rave talking points to enjoy Monsters Exist’s highlights. There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak—and, honestly, even the best of these nine songs falter next to Wonky’s highs—but there’s just enough pleasure to be gained on Monsters Exist to justify the album as a worthwhile endeavor. “Hoo Hoo Ha Ha” and “P.H.U.K” are indicative of the Orbital sound its fans have come to love, the former arriving at a winding horn line and the latter making capable hay out of a punchy bassline and futuristic synths; “Tiny Foldable Cities” weebles and wobbles with a mid-tempo gait to resemble Orbital’s take on Daft Punk’s “Something About Us,” while “Vision OnE” takes a few pleasurable melodic twists and turns, showcasing Orbital’s still-potent talent for crafting patient and expansive rave music.
Elsewhere, the album occasionally dips into moodier, soundtrack-like stasis, recalling the darkly colored cuts on their creative low point, 2001’s Tool-sampling The Altogether. These unfortunate callbacks to gloomier days aren’t the only instance of Orbital getting explicitly nostalgic on Monsters Exist, intentional or otherwise; the album’s strange, vaguely shroom-y artwork was designed by John Greenwood, who also crafted the images that adorned 1994’s Snivilisation and its follow-up, 1996’s In Sides. All these evocations of the past only trigger questions about Orbital’s future, having broken up twice in the 15 years only to stage two consecutive comebacks that were, respectively, impressive and not totally embarrassing. They’ve already had the chance to leave it all on the mat twice, and doing so for a third time following what is arguably the weakest of their post-reunion albums would be less than ideal. The final track on Wonky was titled “Where Is It Going?,” and by the time Monsters Exist draws to a dull, didactic close, you might find yourself asking the same thing about Orbital themselves. | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ACP | September 17, 2018 | 6 | 82348392-5356-46a9-934a-5d3578ee08b2 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Two celebrated jazz pianists bring contrasting, complementary approaches to a set of improvised pieces that pay tribute to Cecil Taylor, Geri Allen, and other titans of the instrument. | Two celebrated jazz pianists bring contrasting, complementary approaches to a set of improvised pieces that pay tribute to Cecil Taylor, Geri Allen, and other titans of the instrument. | Vijay Iyer / Craig Taborn: The Transitory Poems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vijay-iyer-craig-taborn-the-transitory-poems/ | The Transitory Poems | The jazz pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn have a lot in common, at least on the surface. They’re in their late 40s. They’ve played with many of the same people, including Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, and Wadada Leo Smith. In the past decade or so, they’ve each released piano trio albums that have helped reinvigorate the tradition. They both operate in what might be described as the avant-garde. But they’re also different musicians. Iyer is mathematical at the keyboard, with a precise, percussive touch, while Taborn, who is more of a figurative thinker, gets by on suggestion and metaphor. His sound is ruminative and spacious.
The qualities that set them apart aren’t in opposition on their first, aptly titled album together, The Transitory Poems, an improvised duo recording that documents a live performance from last March at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Their styles mesh so well that it can be difficult to distinguish one set of hands from the other, as though a four-armed being had taken a seat at the piano and decided to play for an hour and a quarter.
Of the eight tracks, half are homages. Three are dedicated, respectively, to the pianists Muhal Richard Abrams, Geri Allen, and Cecil Taylor, all of whom died within the past couple of years. (The record takes its name from a typically philosophical Taylor quotation.) These tracks are appropriately elegiac. “Luminous Brew,” the Taylor tribute, rumbles mournfully like a quiet storm, while “Clear Monolith,” which is dedicated to Abrams, ends with a series of lush, tender chords that emanate peacefully into the concert hall.
But the album isn’t a serene listening experience by any measure—and that’s for the best. This is raw, gestural stuff. Though there are some ponderous moments in which Iyer and Taborn appear to be feeling each other out in the moment, pecking out tentative lines here and there, the pianists always maintain a sense of forward motion, even if it occasionally seems spasmic, like a cell mutating under a microscope. The most engaging tracks are those that have a sense of narrative, such as “Kairòs,” which builds to a forceful climax in which a dissonant, high-register chord is pounded out repeatedly. It sounds kind of like Jerry Lee Lewis, if he’d been schooled by Arnold Schoenberg.
The other homage on the album is “Sensorium,” clocking in at about four minutes, the shortest track by far. It’s a nod to the visual artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018 and claimed to have been influenced by John Coltrane. The tune, an abstract portrait of an abstract painter, is full of slithering, contrapuntal passages that bring to mind Whitten’s collage-like approach, in which he layered dried pieces of acrylic paint onto a canvas to create a kind of rough mosaic.
In a way, all of the songs on The Transitory Poems are mosaics of a sort. Iyer and Taborn layer their ideas methodically, dexterously building and expanding on different chords and phrases. The album opener, “Life Line (Seven Tensions),” is the best example of this textured approach, featuring a series of tortuous solos over stop-and-start chordal patterns. Incidentally or not, the track sounds a bit like “Turkish Mambo,” a tune by the great pianist Lennie Tristano, who overdubbed his lines to create a sense of mesmerizing density.
And while this performance would probably have been best experienced live—what jazz isn’t?—it’s still mesmerizing to hear these two gifted pianists improvising together, in real time, to create a fresh and singular new sound. Although Taborn released a fine piano duo album, Octopus, with Kris Davis last year, the two-piano tradition in jazz has a relatively scant recorded history. There have, of course, been memorable contributions—Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor, Jaki Byard and Tommy Flanagan, Marian McPartland and any number of important players. But the Iyer-Taborn mind meld sets a high standard for future entries in the canon. | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | ECM | March 14, 2019 | 7.5 | 823a818c-7e79-4613-90c9-cf42850910b6 | Matthew Kassel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-kassel/ | |
At once familiar and disorienting, the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s new album challenges any fixed ideas of what “guitar music” can be. | At once familiar and disorienting, the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s new album challenges any fixed ideas of what “guitar music” can be. | Jules Reidy: Trances | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jules-reidy-trances/ | Trances | Jules Reidy’s music feels like a private language. Its carefully voiced chords and patiently arranged forms imply an underlying structure, a kind of musical grammar. Its fingerpicking suggests a common lineage with the American primitive guitar tradition of John Fahey, as if both were branches of the same tree. Yet something about Reidy’s music remains untranslatable. Its richly unconventional tunings, according to the system known as just intonation, slip the bounds of ordinary 12-tone intervals. Its nagging repetition thwarts standard melodic forms. And the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s Auto-Tuned vocals, submerged low in the mix, are all but indecipherable. Their work is too rigorously structured to be called “abstract”; even at its most cryptic, it’s clearly expressing something. But what? You grasp for names that might fit Reidy’s elusive emotional register, searching in vain for an affective Rosetta Stone. The music feels both warmly familiar and uncomfortably alien; therein lies its power.
Over time, their music has steadily expanded, growing outward from a busy amalgam of strumming and picking. It took on new textures, elements, and forms, challenging what “guitar music” could be. Auto-Tune came to the fore; their playing sprawled across side-long suites. On last year’s World in World, they explored shorter, more sketch-like pieces that placed the focus back on their guitar playing. But on their new album Trances, they reverse course, distilling all their ideas into their most potent composition yet. As a single piece of music divided into two parts on vinyl and Bandcamp (despite the 12 track markers noted on Spotify and Apple Music), there is only a single break in the music, halfway through the album’s 44-minute run. It is immersive and overwhelming, a bewitching synthesis of folk and ambient drone that is both beautiful and unsettling.
Trances opens with a tentative strum—four notes in quick succession, bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back—wreathed in a broad, shimmering haze. New chords periodically blossom across the stereo field, branching outward like frost crystals filmed in stop motion. Their harmonies are not dissonant, exactly; “dissonance” implies an unwanted clash of sounds, whereas these are sleek and glassy and weirdly pleasing to the ear. But they are unusual in the extreme, and in that peculiarity opens up a vast expanse of possibility. Just as the theory of dark matter posits a hitherto unknown something lurking in plain sight, Reidy’s nitid tone clusters indicate hidden dimensions layered in between everyday, shopworn harmonies. Rushing white noise, like the roar of surf, occasionally surges underneath, suggesting a fantastical landscape bathed in palladous light.
“I like the idea of creating the feeling of moving without being told exactly where you need to go,” Reidy once said. True to that impulse, their music treats directionlessness as a form of freedom. Trances is rarely at rest: It glides ceaselessly forward, changing shape all the while. Reidy’s Auto-Tuned voice beams in from afar, offering a sticky-sweet counterpoint to their prickly fretwork; they chop blinding electric feedback into rhythmic bursts; bell tones suggest softly tinkling wind chimes. The music’s enduring drone folds countless minuscule variations into a plateau extending in all directions; I’m reminded of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes, with their infinity of silver and shadow. The effect is hypnotic and genuinely trance-inducing.
It’s a great moment for adventurous guitar music, with no shortage of artists reimagining the tradition in new ways—like Bill Orcutt, Raphael Rogiński, and Daniel Bachman, to name just three diverse players who put out strong and surprising albums this year. Reidy has been part of this group for at least half a decade, and with Trances, they reassert their position as one of their instrument’s most restlessly inventive interpreters. Within every one of their uncanny chords lies a secret universe where the usual laws do not apply. | 2023-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | December 13, 2023 | 7.8 | 823c19ed-5665-4afb-9eac-f167f01f3387 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The new album from multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson (Tame Impala, POND) is his most ambitious to date, imbuing his mad-scientist home-recording project with some fleeting glimpses into his life beyond the console. | The new album from multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson (Tame Impala, POND) is his most ambitious to date, imbuing his mad-scientist home-recording project with some fleeting glimpses into his life beyond the console. | GUM: Out in the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gum-out-in-the-world/ | Out in the World | Jay Watson was supposed to spend his summer touring arenas and amphitheaters with Tame Impala, resuming his role as Kevin Parker’s multi-instrumentalist sidekick that he’s held down for over a decade. Meanwhile, the fifth album from his solo outlet, GUM, arrived on the same day last week that Tame Impala would’ve wrapped up a string of North American dates at the Amway Center in Orlando, a circumstance that epitomizes the stark contrast between Watson’s high-profile touring gig and his passion project. Now that the promotional juggernaut for The Slow Rush has stalled and much of the world has become acquainted with the self-isolating lifestyle of a home-recording hermit, the conditions are ripe to better appreciate GUM on its own peculiar terms—and fortuitously, Watson has stepped up with his most ambitious GUM album to date.
While both groups function as one-man bands in the studio and share a fondness for synthetic psychedelia, their results couldn’t feel more different. If Tame Impala makes Parker’s solitary operation sound like stadium rock, GUM exudes a claustrophobic, mad-scientist energy that lends even the most grandiose gestures a DIY charm. This time around, he offers some fleeting glimpses into his life behind the recording console. Written after a brief six-month stint living in the Golden State, the opening “Weightless in L.A.” is a Syd Barrett-like serenade carried away on a parade of drum machines, yacht-rock sax, and digital noise, rendering the song less an ode to California dreaming than an attempt to shatter the idyllic facade. And while the title track may not be about explicitly about Los Angeles, the music suggests a blend of Laurel Canyon bliss and Ariel Pink paranoia, perhaps inspired by Watson’s recent entry into fatherhood—surely, every new parent can relate to the anxiety of a line like “It’s morning again/I’m sensing a trend/I don’t know how it takes so long to get to sunset.”
By Watson’s own admission, GUM records are more a catalog of moods than a collection of profound statements, and he’s become more adept at adding just the right details to expedite that immersion. Sampled strings add a sinister edge to the street-funk strut of “Airwalkin,’” while the heavenly chorus hook on the wistful “Many Tears to Cry” suggests Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” given a Moon Safari makeover. Though Out in the World is rooted in the same self-deprecating, existential introspection as 2018’s The Underdog, Watson has discovered more colorful ways to express it: “So I go low to low,” he sings on “Low to Low,” as the track’s seductive bossa-nova beat scales from high to high. And with the closing “You Make Your Own Luck,” Watson effectively distills GUM’s whole essence into a two-part mini-suite: one half nocturnal cosmic ballad, one half sunrise-summoning soul-jazz groove, the song reaffirms Watson’s ongoing mission to find the elation in isolation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Spinning Top | June 17, 2020 | 7.5 | 824e9889-bc75-4d4c-beb0-35a573ac50a5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
A member of Trouble Books, Aqueduct Ensemble, and Lemon Quartet, Akron’s Keith Freund combines found sounds, acoustic instruments, and wonky electronics into evocative ambient miniatures. | A member of Trouble Books, Aqueduct Ensemble, and Lemon Quartet, Akron’s Keith Freund combines found sounds, acoustic instruments, and wonky electronics into evocative ambient miniatures. | K. Freund: Hunter on the Wing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/k-freund-hunter-on-the-wing/ | Hunter on the Wing | For Keith Freund, even the most cerebral compositions sound humble, heartfelt, and homemade. As part of the Ohio indie-pop duo Trouble Books, Freund paired stories of domestic life (with his bandmate and partner Linda Lejsovka) with clean tones, muffled field recordings, and warbling electronics that felt delightfully subversive against the backdrop of the early-2010s twee explosion. As bands like A Sunny Day in Glasgow and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart found massive acclaim recreating underappreciated sounds from the past, Trouble Books took a sharp left turn, combining noise music, ambient experiments, and musique concrète with charming lyrics about stray cats, washing dishes, and houseplants. Just as Microphones songwriter Phil Eleverum started his career using unorthodox studio techniques to convey his love for the recording process, Freund and Lejsovka took comfort in wide-eyed eccentricity, building a sprawling universe out of their native Akron, Ohio—both with Trouble Books and as part of the regional community of acts like Talons’, G.S. Schray, and others on Freund and Lejsovka’s label Bark and Hiss Records.
In recent years, Freund has expanded his focus to explore other styles and genres with a growing number of projects: the self-professed “DIY shitty classical” of Lejsovka + Freund, the moody, ECM-adjacent jazz of Aqueduct Ensemble, and the smoldering solitude of Lemon Quartet, always finding the same warmth and delight as in his time with Trouble Books. On his second solo album (following 2011’s Constant Comments), Freund continues to explore new terrain within noise, jazz, and musique concrète, with an enthusiasm for the soundscapes of the American Midwest that feels wholly his own.
Billed as a collection of nine “sound objects” in the rich tradition of electroacoustic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, the album combines tape loops, field recordings, and instrumental improvisation into a brisk assemblage of gently moving parts. “Aire 3” opens with a shuffle of incidental noise as a fluttering synth enters and the piece builds around sparse notes from a cello and upright piano. Though ostensibly in the same key, each part feels conspicuously designed to act independently; amateurish keyboard flourishes sound more like ringtones than jazz or classical music. Other pieces like “Nothing, I’m Just Listening to the Moon” and “Hunter on the Wing” orbit around small bits of looped tape, as melody and harmony slowly emerge from the background. The former track calls to mind the somber, cinematic compositions of Bing & Ruth and Harold Budd, while the latter leans more heavily on collected audio snippets and saxophone overdubs to flesh out an otherwise minimal track.
While Freund is certainly a capable performer, it’s his ear for arrangement and astute use of found sounds that really shines through. From his early days with Trouble Books, when crackling recordings of wind chimes complemented Rhodes chords, synth arpeggios, and introspective lyrics, Freund has routinely asked the question: What would the experimental music of Emeralds, Black Dice, and early Oneohtrix Point Never sound like if imbued with the self-reflection of the Microphones? In his departure from narrative songwriting, Freund has captured a similar intimacy in delicate sound collages. Tracks like “Aire 2” and “Wet Flag” derive their warmth from projector reels, thunderstorm recordings, and circuit-bent electronics.
The album isn’t completely instrumental. Two compositions include short spoken-word poems that find beauty in the Midwestern landscape. “Glimmering runnel over frost-wedged shale/Pulls a pop can tumbling,” Lejsovka intones on “Therm 2.” While her deadpan delivery calls to mind the dystopian satire of Holly Herndon’s “Locker Leak,” the poem offers something altogether separate from social critique. By contrast, it’s striking in the way it uses a small piece of Midwestern vernacular to new percussive ends, punctuating a natural scene with a strange regional inflection. On “Therm 5,” Lejsovka recites, “Hunter on the wing, walker at the key/I could’ve seen a stone dissolve in the wind and disappear, and it would not have surprised me.” Paired with steadily pulsing keyboards and swelling string loops that fall in and out of sync, the words feel like a defense of the subtle charms of small-town living, with a wide-eyed naturalism—or perhaps a magical realism—in place of provincial sloganeering.
For all of its romantic, secluded imagery, Hunter on the Wing feels broadly in tune with a recent impulse in ambient music that aims to capture the uncanny, sublime feeling of living through a moment of immense socio-cultural upheaval. Roughly two years since the COVID-19 pandemic first shut down restaurants, live music, and urban noise generally, our global acoustic ecology feels vastly different than in the days before the crisis. Armed with a Zoom H5 microphone or the iPhone’s default Voice Memos app, artists like claire rousay, Eli Keszler, M. Sage, and Andrew C.S. have used electroacoustic composition to address themes of politics, ecology, technological intimacy, and pandemic life in their work, enlivened by the changing soundscapes around them. Where artists like rousay and Sage may have once been drawn to the novelty of a digitally mediated, yet phenomenological trend like ASMR, these ideas have ultimately inspired a greater return to the world, one in which frog croaks and bird songs can feel as astonishing as the wonky synthesizers slathered throughout Freund’s work. These are strange times for ambient music, and Hunter on the Wing offers just about the furthest thing from a didactic explanation. But when Freund and his collaborators deliver yet another moment of bliss from a well-placed sample, it’s hard not to feel slightly more at ease. | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Last Resort | March 9, 2022 | 7.7 | 825c9fac-7a68-4f41-b544-db71d227b116 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
With an elliptical and bewitching new album, Taja Cheek turns her expansive, introspective compositions toward surreal humor and playfulness. | With an elliptical and bewitching new album, Taja Cheek turns her expansive, introspective compositions toward surreal humor and playfulness. | L’Rain: I Killed Your Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lrain-i-killed-your-dog/ | I Killed Your Dog | On the title track of her third album as L’Rain, Taja Cheek chants, “I killed your dog.” The repetition of the four words sounds dissociative at first; as Cheek croons through a scrim of vocal processing, a tinge of regret seems to enter her voice. But her unsettling lyrics and eerily overdubbed vocals hint at a stranger picture. “I felt the blood drip from my teeth,” Cheek’s narrator says. “I felt the waves hitting my face.” Eventually, Cheek twists the proverbial knife: “It made me happy,” the killer confesses, the disclosure followed by sinister laughs that float through an abyss of languid synths and sax. And she’s not done yet. In the closing seconds, Cheek gets surreal, singing “I am your dog.”
This is the theatrical, elliptical, and bewitching mood of I Killed Your Dog, which revamps L’Rain’s typically introspective music into baroque dreamscapes. After exploring the peculiar weight of grief and the weary labor of self-improvement on her first two albums, the singer and multi-instrumentalist turns her attention to another kind of interiority: passion. The intense emotion adds flair and drama to her layered songs, centering the playfulness once pushed to the margins of her music. Only one fictional pet gets snuffed, but the whole album is bolder and brasher than previous L’Rain records, every harmony, loop, and skit engorged with verve. Cheek has figured out how to maintain her slippery, impressionistic style while also letting it be known she’s got that dog in her.
Cheek and her cadre of session musicians establish the album’s beguiling mode early. “Our Funeral” head-fakes as a torch song, floating Cheek’s rich lower register over plaintive keys and flickering synths. But Cheek’s lament to a doomed relationship is curiously eager. “End of days/Are you ready?” she repeats as if calling forth a vengeful god, a cauldron of snaps, melodies, and drums burbling beneath her. This breakup doesn’t just feel like the end of the world; it beckons it. Single “Pet Rock” is outwardly flip, offering wry metacommentary on the erasure of Black people in rock over nimble, Strokes-style guitar melodies. “You know/I’m invisible/Cut the bullshit/And make me into/Something else,” Cheek sings. The fact that she’s the guitarist heightens the irony.
Humor, explicit and subtle, functions as the album’s Rosetta Stone. In the brief skit “What’s That Song?,” someone asks for help figuring a jazz song. “I know it sounds like all of them,” they say after crudely mimicking the melody. Seconds later, a full band blips in to actually play the song, their rich tones snapping the imitation to life and underscoring the condescension of the question. The bit, reminiscent of Adult Swim commercial bumps, is extremely funny—especially if you’ve ever been the goof mangling a half-remembered tune. Cheek has said she set out to make the “exact opposite” of experimental music that is heady and untouchable, and the immediacy of comedy suits that mission.
The record isn’t all arch jokes and inanimate pets. Cheek is foremost a collagist who can wrest surprising textures and overtones from sounds found and played, and these songs boast her most pleasing arrangements. The oddly timed claps and staggered vocal loops of “Sometimes” evoke the unpolished warmth of church hymns. “5 to 8 Hours (WWwaG),” a highlight, whips an already lively folk tune into a whirl of hums, ticking percussion, and guitar and trumpet melodies that ripples over a lengthy spoken-word verse. The words are barely legible over the maelstrom, but Cheek’s confidence seeps through. “I want to try to fill myself with the things I’ve lost, the things I wanted, the things I love,” she says, yearning for satiation.
That appetite for fullness underlies the record’s restless motion. The prominent seams of instrumentation that course through these songs accent Cheek’s uppercase emotions, which span from resentment (“I Hate My Best Friends”) to loneliness (“New Year’s UnResolution”) to wonder (“Oh Wow, a Bird!”). The arrangements and mixing foreground the abundance of sounds being produced and manipulated, the emphasis underscoring both Cheek’s many collaborators and her multiplicity. Where past L’Rain music channeled the woozy fog of memory and the daunting haziness of the future, these songs take place in the chaos of real time.
“Uncertainty Principle,” which deftly shifts from noise rock to angelic R&B, distills the record’s ethos and Cheek’s M.O. “You’re convinced that in the dark there will be nothing/But for me, a little nothing’s got some something,” she sings. She’s a tinkerer enchanted by the musical potential of every little experience and sound, a passion manifest in I Killed Your Dog. It is an odd koan of a record: stuffed to the gills with rhythms and images and feelings, yet loose and dreamlike; replete with despair and loneliness, yet hopeful and communal. Cheek presents herself and experimental music as prisms through which anything—Brandy-like harmonies, silly commercials, and homicidal urges—can flow. Darkness, in her skillful and curious hands, is possibility. | 2023-10-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mexican Summer | October 12, 2023 | 8.7 | 825f073e-2a3e-47ca-8fdd-5bd13ba4f2f6 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Ambitious post-rock band further embraces strings by teaming with Wordless Music Orchestra on this live album. | Ambitious post-rock band further embraces strings by teaming with Wordless Music Orchestra on this live album. | Mono: Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14272-holy-ground-nyc-live-with-the-wordless-music-orchestra/ | Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra | Having established themselves as one of the most distinctive-- and difficult to categorize-- bands of the 21st century, post-rock group Mono have more or less been following their own muse for a number of years. On Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra, it takes them away from their usual home-away-from-home of Chicago (and the ministrations of their favorite producer, Steve Albini), and to New York for a lengthy and elaborately constructed live performance with the redundantly named Wordless Music Orchestra. This time out, the job of recording falls to Matt Bayles, who brings to his duties here the same meticulous determination to give every sound its own space, the way he did on Oceanic and Celestial for the late, lamented Isis. The album sounds fantastic, filling up all the room it's given; even the crowd noise comes through with a bright clarity that matches the emotional resonance of Mono's work.
The music itself-- mostly drawn from last year's Hymn to the Immortal Wind-- very much follows the stream Mono have been navigating since their inception. As early as 2001, they were incorporating strings into their sound, and their previous two albums featured, respectively, a string quartet and a chamber orchestra, so working with a full-fledged, complete orchestral arrangement must have seemed like a natural progression. The arrangements, mostly done by Wordless Music Orchestra conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and Mono guitarist Takaakira Goto, are written to take full advantage of the new range of instruments at the group's disposal. The treatment of the songs never seems tacked on, and Mono never makes the mistake of wasting orchestral resources on tacky string stings and other cheap flourishes.
Yet while Mono avoid the pomposity that often goes along with orchestral collaborations, Holy Ground is most effective when the arrangements are written to take full advantage of both the depth of the orchestra and the power of the rock band they surround. The first two tracks illustrate how good the pairing can be, as does the electrifying treatment of "Halcyon (Beautiful Days)"; all three maximize the potential of the concept by bringing Goto and Yoda's guitars and especially Yasunori Takada's increasingly underutilized drums to the fore and letting the orchestra support them. On other tracks, though, the cart is put so fully before the horse that it's difficult to distinguish what's happening from a manipulative film score. Mono have always been susceptible to overwrought emotion, but by bringing in so many instruments that are inextricably linked in our cultural receptors to specific feelings and moods, they risk becoming an unusually refined melancholy-moods outfit.
Holy Ground is also an extremely intense listening experience; at its end, the listener is, by design, emotionally drained. It's hard to imagine listening to it more than once in anything like a casual way. It comes with a DVD of the original live performance which is much more effective, since it conveys the entire work with the singular experiential power it was intended to have. They may shed some listeners as they define themselves down to an ever-purer expression, but there's no question that Mono is doing exactly what they want to do at this point in their career. | 2010-05-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-05-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | May 25, 2010 | 7.1 | 826a0a8e-dc62-4aa0-927d-496fac775c98 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
With a setlist structured like a party, this new concert film and live album from a charity gig at Madison Square Garden showcase Bruce and the band at full roar. | With a setlist structured like a party, this new concert film and live album from a charity gig at Madison Square Garden showcase Bruce and the band at full roar. | Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-band-the-legendary-1979-no-nukes-concerts/ | The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts | The word “legendary” might seem too weighty for a performance given at a charity gig that was quintessentially of its time. Unlike the Concert for Bangladesh or Live Aid, the No Nukes benefit concerts didn’t leave a lasting cultural footprint—yet the two Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band shows at Madison Square Garden, now consolidated on a new concert film and live album, The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, do flesh out a pivotal moment in Springsteen’s rise to superstardom, providing the first professionally recorded and filmed glimpse of the E Street Band at full roar. The performance also represents the first time Springsteen dipped his toe into political activism, an element that would eventually become a signature part of his public persona.
Springsteen wasn’t one of the founders of Musicians United for Safe Energy, the organization that launched the No Nukes concerts in the fall of 1979. Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall (a member of the soft-rock outfit Orleans, best known for their 1976 hit “Still the One,” who would later be elected to the House of Representatives) formed MUSE in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a disaster that had consumed headlines that spring. The Three Mile Island tragedy inspired Springsteen’s “Roulette,” a cathartic shot of dread that was the first song cut during the sessions for his 1980 album The River but lay dormant until it was released as a B-side in 1988.
Springsteen wrote “Roulette” in the first person, concentrating on the human toll of the nuclear power plant meltdown instead of its politics and, in effect, that’s how he approached the No Nukes concerts, too. He avoided the spotlight in the promotional events leading up to the September shows, and he didn’t do much in the way of actual activism during his association with MUSE. He attended the photo shoot that resulted in a 1979 Rolling Stone cover touting the concerts, but he didn’t attend the accompanying press conference or issue a statement about nuclear energy. He simply joined the bill, consented to be filmed and recorded for the subsequent benefit album and documentary, and that was more than enough: The tickets to his two headlining shows sold out in an hour.
Those swift sales show how Springsteen was already a beloved figure in the New York area, and The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts teems with the exhilaration of the mutual adoration of artist and audience. The E Street Band seem as thrilled to play the gig as the crowd is to see it: They’d spent the better part of the year cooped up in the studio sweating over an album called The Ties That Bind, and in September 1979, its completion seemed imminent, though Springsteen later pulled it in favor of the eventual double album The River. The studio fog lifted as they finally hit the stage on September 21, 1979, just before Springsteen’s 30 birthday.
Bruce alludes to his advancing age during the No Nukes shows, saying that he “can't go on like this, I’m 30 years old! My heart’s about to go on me!” And yet he appears impossibly youthful and muscular as he leads the E Street Band through a marathon taken at the speed of a sprint. As seen in the film, Springsteen is restless—jumping, dancing, and prowling—and his passion translates on record. It helps that the setlist is structured as a party, opening with an intense blast of Darkness on the Edge of Town material before the stark ballad “The River” receives its stage debut. The concert’s quietest moment, “The River” drew upon the story of his sister’s teenage pregnancy and pointed toward a deepening sense of songwriting craft, one he’d develop further on the haunted, folky Nebraska. Here, it’s accompanied by another new tune called “Sherry Darling,” a boisterous, funny rocker which sends frat-party rhythms down to the Jersey Shore. “Sherry Darling” leads a steady escalation in energy and vigor, paved by a pair of Born to Run songs about escape (“Thunder Road,” “Jungleland”) and followed by a joyous “Rosalita” and a rapturous “Born to Run.”
From there, Springsteen finds deliverance in a set of rock’n’roll oldies, inviting Jackson Browne and Tom Petty for a version of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs’ “Stay”—a song Browne rewrote into a medley with “The Load Out” on Running on Empty. The E Street Band then crash into a breathless 25-minute run through “Detroit Medley,” Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three,” and Buddy Holly’s “Rave On!” Propelled by Max Weinberg’s hard swing, they take the time to showcase Clarence Clemons’ R&B sax and the careening keys of Danny Federici and Roy Bittan, elements that evoke memories of golden oldies but are transformed by the group’s intensity. Springsteen would refine this aesthetic on The River, leading to his first smash hit with “Hungry Heart,” but The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts offers an uncut dose of pure rock’n’roll. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band were by then amassing a deep catalog, but they remained connected with their audience through the common vernacular of old hits. Those familiar choruses and hooks are warhorses, but the E Street Band uses them as a vehicle for transcendence. Years of similar performances haven’t diminished the power of this one: It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.
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. | 2021-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 20, 2021 | 9 | 826d02b7-0748-4a7b-8a8e-1a2b09da841b | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The composer and cellist’s score for Charlotte Wells’ film is full of suggestion and shadows, wringing emotion from the lightest touches. | The composer and cellist’s score for Charlotte Wells’ film is full of suggestion and shadows, wringing emotion from the lightest touches. | Oliver Coates: Aftersun (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-coates-aftersun-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Aftersun (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | In filmmaker Charlotte Wells’ feature debut Aftersun, memory is elusive. In the “emotionally autobiographical” drama, a woman named Sophie (played as a child by Frankie Corio and as an adult by Celia Rowlson-Hall) remembers a vacation she took to Turkey with her father Calum (Paul Mescal) when she was a kid. Through gauzy flashbacks—and even gauzier camcorder home movies—the film paints a poignant and idyllic picture of the vacation. Even through the warm nostalgia, Sophie seems to grapple with feelings of grief, as she reconciles her positive memories with her father’s emotional turmoil. It’s a moving depiction of how the people we love can remain inaccessible to us—all we know about them is what they let us know.
Wells assembles these vignettes into a film that feels heavy, dreamy, and touching, feelings magnified by composer and cellist Oliver Coates’ score. Drawing on a love of the minimal yet phenomenological work of Éliane Radigue—whose compositions Wells used as a temporary score while the film was in progress, per an interview with CRACK—Coates made slow, still tracks that nevertheless feel suffused with meaning and experience. Through elliptical string arrangements, tranquil synth pads, and hallucinatory found sounds, the Aftersun score communicates a sense of wistfulness and yearning amid the otherworldly sounds.
In a statement accompanying the score, Coates writes that he sought music that could reflect “the vivid glow of memory”—a thought process illustrated by “One Without,” a key cue used in the film’s final scene and credits. Built around a repeating string figure, overlapping with shimmering reverb trails and little else, it’s spare but flickers with warmth and light. Echoing and repeating for a little over four minutes, it feels like a meditation on constancy and loss, highlighting what stays the same and what subtly changes as memories flit through your head, again and again.
Coates is known for his playfully abstract approach to electronic composition—even indulging a love for jittery Aphexian dance tracks on 2018’s Shelley’s on Zenn-La—but his work for Aftersun is decidedly more minimal. Some tracks are formally complex, while others, like “Tai Chi,” are constructed around simple string drones. Still, he wrings a lot of emotion and texture out of the lightest touches. This depth is due in part to some technological treatment. Coates credits sound designer Johan Nilsson for “tricking” the algorithm of an audio software into “extracting percussion or bass or vocals where there is none.” Even the simplest tracks feel haunted—shimmering with unexpected life in a way that feels reminiscent of the wriggling ambient pieces collected on PAN’s influential Mono No Aware compilation. As a result, these pieces carry emotional weight even outside of the context of the film: It’s ambient music full of suggestions and shadows, allowing curious listeners to approach it and fill in the gaps with meditations of their own. | 2023-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-19T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Lakeshore / Invada | January 19, 2023 | 7.6 | 82786d03-f1f0-4bee-a6b7-fac1cae1c35f | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
On his second solo LP, the Detroit MC Chris Orrick, aka Red Pill, raps about alcoholism and depression. Instinctive Drowning is largely devoted to the persistence of a tormented mind. | On his second solo LP, the Detroit MC Chris Orrick, aka Red Pill, raps about alcoholism and depression. Instinctive Drowning is largely devoted to the persistence of a tormented mind. | Red Pill: Instinctive Drowning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22280-instinctive-drowning/ | Instinctive Drowning | Red Pill has studied his depression. He knows how it works and where it comes from, but the 28-year old Michigan rapper rarely seems to crawl towards relief. Pill, whose real name is Chris Orrick, has frequently come off as an endearing and relatable deadbeat in his raps, but his second solo album inches away from light-hearted self-deprecation in favor of darker introspection.
On Instinctive Drowning,* *the Detroit MC raps about his hand-me-down alcoholism and depression, contextualizing his illnesses as both personal and genetic. Caught in his own mind, the Mello Music Group artist—who is also one-third of the proudly blue-collar underground hip-hop group Ugly Heroes—is a fervent over-analyzer. This tendency sometimes spins his raps into histrionic narration. “I’ve been heartsick/So consider this catharsis,” he sputters triumphantly on the album’s first track, a clumsily obvious recap for such a patently emotional song. This awkward self-referencing falls flat at times, but Red Pill is sincere and his pain never feels like a put-on.
Noticeably, *Instinctive Drowning *carries some of the best and most tailored production that Orrick has enjoyed yet as a solo rapper, driven by a single-producer approach. In this case, San Diego producer/rapper Ill Poetic has upgraded Pill’s previous stable of jazzy boom-bap for a more eclectic and ambitiously moody palette. While some tracks stick to Red Pill’s initial wheelhouse of snappy drums, Ill Poetic is also as apt to construct a new groove as he is to rotely loop up an old one. “Jeffrey Star” freewheels loosely with a Sun Ra-inspired gait to start; “When the Devil Knocks” sounds like boom-bap-inspired crime funk. Many of the songs meander into musical bridges and soulful change-ups, but sometimes the effect is squandered. On “Four Part Cure,” the distorted guitar-driven switch-up sounds forced into place instead of urgently called for.
This new album also contains Red Pill’s strongest rapping to date. The painfully clever album name is crystallized when Orrick recounts his mother’s early death in gripping detail on the title track. “Just shy of the age when her liver failed/Most of my money been spent on liquor sales,” he raps, reluctantly lining himself up for the same fate. Red Pill is almost never upbeat, but there’s a charm to his soul-searching.
As a lyricist Red Pill isn’t flashy as much as casually confident. But sometimes Orrick’s delivery hobbles awkwardly. His hooks are often chanted monotonously in a rarely intoned but variously syncopated flow, an artifact of his general reluctance toward singing. Here and there it works, but an album full of these choruses gums up the momentum. Elsewhere, Pill collapses into a weirdly contrived voice on “Club Privilege,” his almost tongue-in-cheek stab at a self-assured party track that doesn’t quite hit the mark as a lucid P.S.A. about white privilege. (And yet the self-awareness is productive if not clunky.)
Along with the title track, the best songs on *Instinctive Drowning *are sandwiched in the middle. “Fuck Your Ambition” carries the record’s lone listed feature in the form of a charged-up P.O.S. verse. Both Orrick and Ill Poetic make the Minneapolis punk MC sound at home: the producer provides an ambient beat with tweaking, mechanical drum programming, while Red Pill borrows some of P.O.S.’ shouty, disjointed cadence. On “Gin & Tonic,” one of album’s lead singles and one of the artist’s best songs to date, Orrick shares a wistfully cautious optimism about his relationship, drinking, and pervasive sadness. It’s a telling highlight. The rapper both wallows in and stirs from his depression throughout Instinctive Drowning, which is an album largely devoted to the inevitability and persistence of a tormented mind. Red Pill never seems to find solace as much as endurance. | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | August 26, 2016 | 6.5 | 827a58f5-3df6-4fae-883a-a2410a90a9cf | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Azniv Korkejian’s folk music boasts a surreal calm and a lived-in glow that masks turmoil just outside the frame. | Azniv Korkejian’s folk music boasts a surreal calm and a lived-in glow that masks turmoil just outside the frame. | Bedouine: Bird Songs of a Killjoy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bedouine-bird-songs-of-a-killjoy/ | Bird Songs of a Killjoy | The folk music Azniv Korkejian makes as Bedouine has a beckoning quality, a distance that masks the emotion brewing just beneath the surface. Her lyrics are circular and understated; on her second album, Birdsongs of a Killjoy, it often takes a few listens for the wistfulness of lines like, “I love you/You love how much I love you” to sink in. Her music is largely free from temporality—it could have just as easily been made in the 1970s as today.
Like the surreal calm under a bridge during a rainstorm, the album’s quiet sadness feels surrounded by turmoil unfolding just outside the frame. Much of that anguish comes from unrequited love. On Birdsongs of a Killjoy, birds symbolize restless lovers that Korkejian is afraid of holding back. “Am I to you some sort of chain/Are you a bird, am I your cage?” she asks on “One More Time.” On “Bird Gone Wild,” she imagines herself “beating ’round a cage like a/Bird gone wild.” Though there is captivating beauty in a bird’s song, the bird can never truly belong to you.
Korkejian has grown in leaps since her debut. Her lyrics are subtler and more shaded; the guitar, strings, and horn are more plentiful and detailed. Finger-picked guitars and strings swirl around her rich voice, which is weathered and warm as the back of your grandmother’s hand. On paper, there’s nothing novel about the lyrics “One more time, honey/One more time/I’m gonna set you free,” but on “One More Time,” she croons with such hushed mourning that she sends them skyward. Over the sparse guitar of “Sunshine Sometimes,” she fills the word “wildflower” with a drowsy, lived-in glow.
Vivid images dot her lyrics: “Drag my finger ’round the rim/Drag around a phantom limb/When you’re gone,” she murmurs on “When You’re Gone.” Other lines, like “I kept the bottle we drank from together/I don’t know, is that insane?” (from “Bird”) achieve a certain group-chat candor. But the lyrics occasionally verge on maxims, and the space between gems can feel like filler. It’s not always evocative to describe someone as “wild as a storm,” or to compare loneliness to being on an island. When Korkejian alludes to the thrilling unpredictability and turbulence of nature without any comparable rush or sense of awe in the music, those grandiose references feel unearned. At times, it feels like Korkejian is holding back, and the album could benefit from a few more moments as raw as “Bird.” As it is, Bird Songs makes for lovely twilight listening, the kind of reflective and soothing album you play when nestled into a blanket on a porch with the people you love.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Spacebomb | July 5, 2019 | 8 | 827c34d3-33cf-48b2-a748-402840b757b9 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
A new EP of songs originally recorded for 2011’s Hello Sadness illustrate just how well the band’s simultaneously twee- and emo-adjacent indie rock holds up. | A new EP of songs originally recorded for 2011’s Hello Sadness illustrate just how well the band’s simultaneously twee- and emo-adjacent indie rock holds up. | Los Campesinos!: Whole Damn Body EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-campesinos-whole-damn-body-ep/ | Whole Damn Body EP | The title of the fourth album by Los Campesinos! was so cloyingly on-the-nose that you had to assume the irony was intentional. Hello Sadness, released in 2011, was pegged as the Welsh band’s “darkest album yet,” trading in their whimsical noise-pop for sweeping rock with heavier themes to match. But Los Campesinos! went into the album sessions with a mission: make a concise, focused record to follow up 2010’s admittedly overstuffed Romance Is Boring. Now, seven tracks that didn’t make the cut get their first official release as Whole Damn Body, an EP timed to coincide with Hello Sadness’ 10th anniversary. Filled with the band’s sticky hooks and guttural vocals, this collection of “new” old music is less a throwback than it is proof of consistency—and of the way the band’s simultaneously twee- and emo-adjacent indie rock alienated them from trends even as it cemented their oft-overlooked legacy.
Most of the songs on Whole Damn Body deal with lovelorn woes, a theme in line with the Hello Sadness origin story: Vocalist/lyricist Gareth Campesinos! had left a long-term relationship just before taking off to Spain for album writing sessions (he once likened the record’s subject matter to that of Take Care). As with all good things Los Campesinos!, Whole Damn Body doesn’t hesitate to get hyper-specific: “You asked if you could see me before I went to Spain,” Gareth sings in “Tiptoe Through the True Bits.”
Lyrically, Whole Damn Body is classic LC!: drunken gags, salty insults, and soccer references. “Allez Les Blues” flips the French team slogan into a sneer about the other type of blues: “We’re singing, ‘Allez les blues’/’Cause they hold me closer than you would ever do.” Perhaps one of the band’s angriest songs, “Dumb Luck” explores a stage of post-breakup grief hardly heard on Hello Sadness: “When the Third World War comes, it will not be fought on race,” Gareth taunts an ex. “We will line up here in two rows: betrayers versus betrayed.” The whip-smart wordplay of “She Crows” tracks his own ascent to minor indie fame, sizing up the relative prestige of “writing sleeper hits for all these weeping dipshits” and being adored by “finger-sucking, singer-fucking girls”—after all, who in this industry decides what success really is?
Even as their sound shifted from scrappy indie pop towards a more polished aesthetic, Los Campesinos! prioritized songwriting quality over fads or marketability. The band’s catalog has aged remarkably well over the years; even the decade-old tracks on Whole Damn Body feel fresh. The EP’s highlights, like the rollicking drums of “She Crows (Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #4)” or the group vocals on “Dumb Luck,” feel just as likely to rile up a midsized crowd in 2021 as in 2011. The uncharacteristically mellow “Four Seasons” is weak by comparison, but on the whole, this collection of leftovers is remarkably appetizing.
Until now, all but one of the Whole Damn Body tracks were available only through Heat Rash, the 7"-and-zine subscription series the band ran around the time of Hello Sadness’ release. Ten years later, the choice feels right in line with the Los Campesinos! ethos: Never quite on time and never too concerned with making it big, they proudly owed their success to the community that backed them. Whole Damn Body tracks what we knew about Los Campesinos! all along: Authenticity goes a long way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | May 26, 2021 | 7.3 | 827ffa3b-81f2-4d48-b2c2-8b062a34395c | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
I actually frightened friends of mine when I declared that I was looking forward to the new Red Hot Chili ... | I actually frightened friends of mine when I declared that I was looking forward to the new Red Hot Chili ... | Red Hot Chili Peppers: Californication | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6709-californication/ | Californication | I actually frightened friends of mine when I declared that I was looking forward to the new Red Hot Chili Peppers record. Dan simply replied sardonically, "Dooooode." BloodSugarSexMagik was the first CD I ever purchased. Listening to a CD on headphones after a decade of cassettes was revelatory. Faint, echoing harmonies, popping bass, and crisp, finger- lickin' guitar swirled in my ears. (In retrospect, I guess technology had a lot to do with my infatuation with the album.) Now, Californication sees the same players (John Frusciante and Rick Rubin included) from the that album return. As expected, it's considerably better than the bone- stupid One Hot Minute, but not quite as funky- assed as their acclaimed 1991 effort.
But wait. Before we go any further, let's talk about Dave Navarro. Dave Navarro was a horrible fit for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Thankfully, he's off in some private velvet- paneled studio pouring hot wax on his nipples and applying mascara. Look up "wannabe rockstar" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of Dave Navarro's pierced nipples and school- of- Depeche Mode black nail polish. So, weighing in at a stunning 85 pounds, the band's former guitarist John Frusciante and his quavering, pasty, skeletal body rejoined for the Californication sessions.
In his off time from the Chili Peppers, John Frusciante recorded a couple of drug- induced solo mishaps and had a best- selling Italian novel named after him. The man brings a rucksack of real emotions with his guitar. I'll also wager my credibility that he's the best big- time American rock guitarist going right now. His fingers can effortlessly switch from the pickin' funk of "I Like Dirt" to the sculpted feedback of "Emit Remmus" to the tender, lovely (yes, really, a tender, lovely Chili Peppers track) "Porcelain" to the clever, stadium- sized solos throughout. But best of all, he makes you forget about that crazy monkey on bass.
Eh, but let's face it, the biggest obstacle in your enjoyment of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album is horny crooner, Anthony Kiedis. If you can stomach lines like "Go-rilla cunt-illa/ Sammy D and Salmonella," "Up to my ass in alligators/ Let's get it on with the alligator haters," and "To fingerpaint is not a sin/ I put my middle finger in," you're good to go. If those lines make you wince like Pitchfork Editor Ryan Schreiber, keep in mind that I pulled those from only two of fifteen songs.
In a way, you have to be familiar with California to appreciate Kiedis' lyrics. I mean, Los Angeles is shallow, sunny, fun, and tragic. So, in this age of unfathomably horrible choruses like, "I did it all for the nookie/ The nookie/ So you can take your cookie...," "Because you did my homies," and "Bawitdaba" (a five- spot to anyone who can explain that one), we can cut the Chili Peppers some slack. Plus, the sincere, hook- laden, mellow jams of "Scar Tissue," "Otherside," and "Road Trippin'" more than make up for whatever knuckle- dragging Kiedis executes. That the Chili Peppers even gave us a single you can actually tolerate on the radio should be heralded.
Longevity in rock music is about as rare as hip-hop spellcheckers these days. The idea of albums has given way to the force- feeding of singles. Teens reposter their walls with the face- of- the- moment more frequently than undercover advertisers placard boarded- up fences and buildings in New York. Basicially, the Chili Peppers are the closest thing we have to a Led Zepplin today. If you want quality, commercial, Jeep- stereo, headphone, stadium- filling, champion Rock that you can get behind, where else are you going to turn? Not to Eminem, you ain't. | 1999-06-08T01:00:07.000-04:00 | 1999-06-08T01:00:07.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 8, 1999 | 6.8 | 82889c8e-b043-40b8-a867-98af920fbe30 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | 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 Lou Reed’s 1982 solo album, a strangely alluring comeback that made good on the promise of a lasting rock’n’roll icon. | 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 Lou Reed’s 1982 solo album, a strangely alluring comeback that made good on the promise of a lasting rock’n’roll icon. | Lou Reed: The Blue Mask | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lou-reed-the-blue-mask/ | The Blue Mask | The three-minute guitar duet that kicks off 1974’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is kind of satanic when you know what’s coming: “Sweet Jane,” one of the most beautiful and important songs of all time, written by Lou Reed for the Velvet Underground, a beautiful and important band that felt like the last piece of the puzzle to teenage rock fans who discovered them during their renaissance in the early nineties. “Sweet Jane” is the song that liberated a generation from classic rock radio. It proved that you could write something durable without resorting to the exhausting riff-mongering of Foreigner or the idiot machismo of AC/DC. To hear this landmark of art rock used as a prog noodle pot by Reed’s touring band is a profoundly disorienting experience, but the whole album is like that. They do “Heroin” as the kind of uptempo funk that would later be used to get guests on and off of late-night TV. It all sounds very not Lou Reed, but by 1973 the question of what Lou Reed was had become unsettled.
Fans who encountered Reed’s body of work in retrospect may be surprised to learn that Rock ’n’ Roll Animal was his first gold album. I urge you to listen to it—if only to understand what might have happened if he had been born an Allman Brother—at some point before you put on The Blue Mask, an album Reed would release almost a decade later, in 1982, after a series of semi-public crises including but not limited to: moving in with his parents, brakes-off methamphetamine abuse, the slow and occasionally violent end of his relationship with Rachel Humphreys, and asking David Bowie to produce his record seconds before drunkenly assaulting him.
This period of personal disintegration coincided with a six-album run of legendarily confusing studio albums. My favorite is probably Street Hassle, which peaked at No. 89 on the Billboard charts. It contains the masterpiece title track but also the charitably-interpretable-as-satire “I Wanna Be Black,” a song that rhymes “have natural rhythm” with “shoot twenty feet of jism.” All Reed’s post-Rock ’n’ Roll Animal albums feel this way: for every good song, there are three that make you think he wrote the good one by accident, or that he is somehow mad at you for continuing to like him. The peak of this seeming hostility was Metal Machine Music, which Chuck Klosterman cited to illustrate his concept of the “advanced irritant,” an artist who has produced works of genius and then backslides to music that is simply bad. Still, I would rather listen to Metal Machine Music than Growing Up in Public, whose lyrics are disfigured by therapy-speak and whose instrumental arrangements sound alarmingly like Billy Joel.
All this is to say that shortly before he turned 40, Reed had established himself as one of the saddest burnouts of all time. In the absence of artistic and commercial success, his mercurial persona and self-destructive habits made him look less like a rock star and more like an ordinary asshole: someone who had gotten what a generation of musicians dreamed of and traded it for what millions of dumb, violent addicts couldn’t escape.
And then he dropped The Blue Mask. It sounded different from anything he had done before but was unmistakably him—the quote-unquote real Lou Reed everyone recognized but no one could duplicate, a sound that was at once new and a return to form. The first time I heard it, I assumed The Blue Mask was ironic; the second time, I began to suspect that it was the least ironic album of all time. It is strange, specific, and painfully honest, ugly in places and beautiful in others: in other words, a redemption story. Whatever Reed had lost over that last decade, artistically, he got it back.
What changed? For one thing, he dramatically reduced his consumption of drugs and alcohol, although as with many addicts who get clean under their own supervision, how close he got to zero BAC is not clear. He also married Sylvia Morales, a younger painter and poet whom he met at CBGB in 1977. Mostly leaving New York City—Reed kept his rent-stabilized apartment in the Village—the two lived together in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a house in the woods near a lake.
The first track of The Blue Mask, “My House,” is, at least on a literal level, about Reed’s belief that this home in Blairstown is not only “very beautiful at night” but also haunted by the spirit of his former college professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz. This idea is astonishingly self-centered, which is how you know Reed was getting sober. Taking stock, he sings that he’s got “a lucky life/My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife/And to top it all off, a spirit of pure poetry/Is living in this stone and wood house with me.” One can only imagine how thrilled Schwartz would be knowing that he was remembered as a figure of comparable importance to Reed’s motorcycle. But as with almost every track on this album, the real subject of “My House” is not the house or its appurtenances; it is Reed’s ongoing struggle to live productively amid the furnishings of his own mind.
These furnishings are old but unfamiliar, as though Reed had awakened from a blackout and was looking at them for the first time—which, in many respects, he was. The alternately healthful and agonizing experience of seeing himself clearly is the central theme of The Blue Mask, and it is reflected in the alternately beautiful and grotesque sound of the instrumentation. These arrangements are even more expressive than the words, if only because they convey feeling unconstrained by meaning or circumstance and therefore parallel Reed’s dislocating new sobriety. The singular sound of The Blue Mask provides a counterpoint to Reed’s lyrics, nudging them over the line from kind of dumb to definitely dumb and therefore great.
Two members of Reed’s new band seem to have been responsible for this sound. The first is Robert Quine, a former guitarist for the Voidoids and documented Lou Reed superfan who bootlegged a series of Velvet Underground shows in 1969, when he was trying and failing to pass the California bar. Quine’s guitar is on the left side of the stereo mix. On the right is Reed himself, whose return to playing guitar was reportedly a condition of Quine’s appearance. Together they developed a loose but steady sound that is atmospheric on tracks like “Women” but sharp and vital on the rockers—a sound reminiscent of Sticky Fingers-era Rolling Stones but slower, the honky tonk before it opens, while it still belongs to the staff.
The second new player behind this sound was bassist Fernando Saunders, a 25-year-old hired gun whose work on The Blue Mask can be heard, in echoes, on many of the bass sounds in subsequent 1980s pop-rock albums. Playing at the front of the mix with sharp attack and the treble turned all the way up, Saunders makes the bass a midrange instrument, dropping fills from the top of the neck into the pauses in conversation between Reed’s vocals and the guitars. These bass fills are such an organizing feature of The Blue Mask that you can kind of guess when one is coming, e.g. “Seven days make a week [boing]/On two of them I sleep.” In addition to evoking the first step of a 12-step program, this moment from “Underneath the Bottle” suggests that punctuation from Saunders was what Reed’s writing needed all along.
The other element of The Blue Mask that you can’t get out of your head, once you know its context, is how raw it all is—like a dental procedure put off too long. If “Underneath the Bottle” is the honest version of the cynical “The Power of Positive Drinking” that Reed recorded two years earlier, the title track and “Waves of Fear” are the price he paid for lying. “The Blue Mask” is a noise jam about S&M, kind of like “Venus in Furs” from The Velvet Underground & Nico, but in a way that does not make kinky sex sound at all hip or fun. “Cut the stallion at his mount/And stuff it in his mouth!” Reed shouts before the whole thing collapses into a disorganized guitar solo. It is kink as pathology rather than transgression, a too-clear reflection of insecurities and half-repressed failures that ends in humiliation instead of a downtown leather scene.
“Waves of Fear” is about the psychological experience of withdrawal, the often ignored but undeniable place where your body rubs up against your mind. It is not in free time, and neither is it simply a jam; it has its own rhythm and structural logic, but that logic is awful in the biblical sense of the word. “Waves of fear/Squat on the floor/Looking for some pill/The liquor is gone/Blood drips from my nose/I can barely breathe/Waves of fear/I’m too scared to leave,” Reed sings with terrible specificity. Here, at age 39, is his penitence for two decades of songs about how drugs are cool. Here is the process of getting clean not as relief but as de-anesthetized surgery. Here, in other words, is the particularly ugly and beautiful experience of continuing to become Lou Reed.
Not every track on the album reaches that level of fusion between form and content; some are simply failed experiments or regressions to post-Animal pandering. “Average Guy” is what I can only describe as some Joe Walsh shit: a snotty novelty song about how Reed is perfectly ordinary, ha ha. “The Day John Kennedy Died,” while more winsome in tone and seeming intent, ends on the line, “I dreamed that I could somehow comprehend that someone shot him in the face.” This historical inaccuracy brings to mind John Cale’s remark, in his autobiography, that Reed could be extremely funny without knowing when he was doing it. In the context of Reed’s lifelong willingness to embarrass himself twice to produce something beautiful once, though, it is these wabi-sabi elements that perfect the album.
There is a video of the version of “The Blue Mask” that Reed and his band performed live in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2000, in which the essentially two-note bass riff of the original has become a mastering pattern for the entire rhythm section—mostly D and then mostly G played over and over, tighter and seemingly harder each time, the cymbals just behind the beat. Reed is 58 years old. His face has settled into the William H. Macy grimace he would wear in the 21st century. When he begins to sing, he does so almost perfunctorily, in contrast to the driving energy of the arrangement, as though he had been mumbling these words to himself in elevators and on subway platforms for the last two decades. When I watch this video I think about how, at any moment, you can do or say or conceive something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. It might even be something good.
The Blue Mask is good. After I heard it for the first time, I could not stop thinking about it for months. During that initial infatuation, I recommended it to several people, but since then I have become careful not to, because most of them turned out not to like it. I have come to think of that as part of the appeal. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, we didn’t need Lou Reed to write songs that everybody liked; we left that to the Beatles. What we needed from Reed was that singular thing only he could render, with the conviction that no experience was so terrible it could not be redeemed as art, and if that thing that made it possible went away for a while, it would come back to you. And so it did. | 2024-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | April 28, 2024 | 9.2 | 8288b3ca-d91d-41cf-8189-06f10f8584e6 | Dan Brooks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dan-brooks/ | |
The stunning, open-hearted new album from indie rock singer-songwriter Hannah Read renders personal crises with a deft and delicate touch. | The stunning, open-hearted new album from indie rock singer-songwriter Hannah Read renders personal crises with a deft and delicate touch. | Lomelda: Hannah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lomelda-hannah/ | Hannah | Just over halfway through Hannah, the stunning, open-hearted new album from Lomelda, there’s a crucial moment of affirmation. Nothing is working—singer-songwriter Hannah Read’s body refuses to cooperate; her hands aren’t opening, her limbs are weakening. A security guard finds her splayed out on all fours. Singing about the moment over somber piano, Read’s voice cracks: “She asked me what’s your name/Are you ok?” The magic of Lomelda’s music is in that exchange, an infusion of strength and care from one person to another, no matter how small or ordinary. It has anchored Read’s songwriting from the beginning, and it is threaded throughout Hannah, which is warm and enveloping, like a hug.
More than ever, Read’s writing grapples with identity—how we see ourselves, how we’re seen—and the songs on Hannah render personal crises with a deft and delicate touch. “So confused who I have been, who I haven’t” sings Read on “Reach,” before looking outward: “How’d you know?” She’s never alone, even at her most desperately isolated; friends are always orbiting, in person and in memory, and they always seem to know best. The wistful and meticulous “Hannah Happiest” reflects a similar uncertainty. “Asked you if you knew/Who/I was,” Read admits. “You said Hannah.”
These aren’t just casual observations. The album oscillates between emotional registers, balancing profound quiet with strummy, emphatic pleas about how we might better comport ourselves in the world; there’s a sense that even at their most gentle, these songs are transmitting something deeply earnest and hard-won. This is as true of Read’s lyrics as of her arrangements, which are newly rich and rewarding. The noisy riffs of “Wonder” channel Alex G at his scrappiest, while “It’s Infinite” conjures a meditative sensibility with plush, finger-picked guitar. “Give it your all,” Read sings on the former track, nearly hollering, as if willing herself to take her own advice. On the latter, wrangling the family dog becomes a poignant metaphor for Read’s own dream-chasing. Though they’re stylistically distinct, the songs share a commitment to perseverance as a guiding ethos; they’re about resolving to press on, in spite of it all. Together, they suggest that the work of self-discovery is bound up in connection.
It makes sense, then, that the saddest moments on Hannah have to do with disconnection, and the breakdown of communication—half-heard conversations (“Hannah Happiest”), a reckoning with a painful memory (“Polyurethane”), the drop to all fours (“Stranger Sat By Me”). “Hannah Sun” is quintessential late-summer music, a travelogue steeped in regret: “Glad you held her/Glad you held him/Glad you held me, too/Though I didn’t know how to/Be closer to you.” She wavers before building herself back up, but she gets there: “Shadowed by a blue/Am I shining? / I am trying to shine.” It’s an image that captures how feelings can intensify even as they lose shape, leaving a lingering ”blue” in place of something more specific; even in sadness, Read finds a glow.
Read’s music has come to be associated with Silsbee, Texas, where she grew up, and Hannah was recorded in the studio her brother built there. But she’s been based in Los Angeles for the past few years (she cites the sunshine as a major factor in her decision to relocate), and it’s lent the music a more universal feel. The long drives of 2017’s Thx are less prominent here, but Read is still engaged in a kind of mapmaking, charting more explicitly psychological territory. The result is a cosmic “I’ve got you,” a link between worlds, bridging the individual and the communal. By the end, you’ll start to wonder about that distinction—where the boundary lies, or whether it’s there at all.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | September 8, 2020 | 8.3 | 828a0918-eb39-4a98-8b10-ebb1192387a6 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
In the much-missed Monotonix, guitarist Yonatan Gat was the anchor, but his music since is clearly the product of a frenzied, restless spirit. Here, Gat and company touch on everything from bossa nova to soukous, Tortoise-style jazz-rock to the head-swimming spazz-outs of Ponytail. | In the much-missed Monotonix, guitarist Yonatan Gat was the anchor, but his music since is clearly the product of a frenzied, restless spirit. Here, Gat and company touch on everything from bossa nova to soukous, Tortoise-style jazz-rock to the head-swimming spazz-outs of Ponytail. | Yonatan Gat: Director | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20372-director/ | Director | In the much-missed Monotonix, guitarist Yonatan Gat was the anchor, the guy gamely riffing away while his bandmates hoisted themselves aloft in garbage pails or stuffed microphones into their pants. But being the straight man in a band like Monotonix still makes you the wildest guy in most any other room, and Gat's post-Monotonix music is clearly the product of a frenzied, restless spirit. Director, the second record from Gat's eponymous trio, was recorded over three marathon 12-hour sessions with engineer Chris Woodhouse, best known for his work with one-take wonders Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall. A series of freewheeling jams were eventually whittled down to a lean 29 minutes and change, then mingled with field recordings the well-traveled Gat collected over the years. The results are all over the place in every sense of the phrase, a frequently dazzling display of the trio's impressively far-flung influences.
To listen to Director is to feel yourself barreling forward; riffs don't so much unfurl as fly by and songs seem to vanish almost as soon as they appear. Director's constant motion makes it a particularly tough record to pin down for more than a few seconds at a time; in less than half an hour, Gat and company touch on everything from bossa nova to soukous, Tortoise-style jazz-rock to the head-swimming spazz-outs of Ponytail. Director is conversant not just in many styles, but many languages; centerpiece "North to South", for instance, features lyrics in Hebrew, Portuguese, and English. The Israeli-born Gat and Gal Lazer and the Brazilian Sergio Sayeg bring a remarkably vast number of styles to the table here, gleefully recombining them as they go. And you need not know how to suss out a Phyrgian scale or tell your son from your samba to dig into Director; this is a world party, respectful of tradition but unafraid to throw everything in a blender and gulp.
Gat has technical prowess to spare, but he's less concerned about getting things exactly right; there's a seat-of-their-pants feel to the whole of Director, the occasional near-flub a product of their refusal to slow down for any length of time. While Sayeg stays deep in the pocket, Lazer's drums—with cues from Gene Krupa, John Bonham and Tony Allen—and Gat's guitar either tussle like dogs and crackle like flint. Vocals, used sparingly, are often sunk low in the mix. This, combined with Gat's conversational field recordings, gives Director the feel of driving past a bustling street scene with the windows down; you can feel the radiance in the air, even if you're moving just a little too quickly to quite put your finger on it. Despite its sitcom-length runtime, Director manages to feel maybe 10 minutes shorter, so rarely does it pause to fully soak in the scenery.
For all its energy, Director ends not with a bang, but with a floorward collapse. The brief, diffuse "Underwater Prelude" seems designed to provide a respite from the calamity that precedes it, but it only ends up sapping the built-up momentum. The skronky "L'Atlantis" sounds like the intro to a Sonic Youth song that never fully gets itself off the ground. And closer "Tanto Que Nem Tem", with a lovely, mournful vocal turn from Sayeg, is punctuated by bursts of noise that distract where they're meant to disorient. Still, the wildness of the ride Director takes you on more than makes up for this rocky landing. | 2015-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | April 2, 2015 | 7 | 82974e9c-9a86-4210-9cde-7080b3c15760 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Setting aside the retro R&B vamping of his group the Night Sweats, the Denver singer-songwriter returns to the sad-sack folk of his roots. | Setting aside the retro R&B vamping of his group the Night Sweats, the Denver singer-songwriter returns to the sad-sack folk of his roots. | Nathaniel Rateliff: And It’s Still Alright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nathaniel-rateliff-and-its-still-alright/ | And It’s Still Alright | It’s a tale as old as time: When a singer-songwriter wants to plumb the depths of his soul, he needs to step away from his main gig so he can get down to what’s real. Nathaniel Rateliff adheres to this weathered cliche with And It’s Still Alright, his first album without the Night Sweats since 2015 but not his first solo album, not by a long shot. The Night Sweats was his last-gasp attempt at the big time, a neo-soul combo that helped reposition the Denver troubadour as a soul man—a transition aided by producer Richard Swift, who became a friend and a trusted collaborator.
Swift died unexpectedly in 2018, the same year Rateliff divorced his wife after a “tumultuous” relationship. The twin losses inspired the singer/songwriter to record the melancholy, meditative And It’s Still Alright, an album designed to be everything a Night Sweats record is not: intimate, confessional, bittersweet. Rateliff cut the album in part to fulfill a promise to Swift, who told the songwriter, “Keep pushing for those Harry Nilsson tunes, man”—to which Rateliff responded, “Well, we’ll see how Nilsson I can get.”
The answer is, not very Nilsson at all, not even when Rateliff takes pains to stage his own Pandemonium Shadow Show—laboring to replicate the iconic songwriter’s whimsical melodies on “All or Nothing,” or giving “Expecting to Lose” a swaying sing-song bridge. In any case, evoking the ghost of Harry Nilsson is a particularly odd move from Rateliff, since Nilsson—one of pop’s great eccentrics, who recently received a boost when his “Gotta Get Up” was featured in Natasha Lyonne’s Netflix series Russian Doll— was never exactly a paragon of sincerity. Even at his quietest moments, Nilsson favored a bit of the old razzle-dazzle: His celebrated 1970 LP Nilsson Sings Newman doubles as an interpretive masterstroke and a display of studio wizardry, where he proved his vocal virtuosity by overdubbing every harmony part. If Rateliff is anything, it’s doggedly earnest. Whether he’s grinding out old-school soul with the Night Sweats or flying solo, he’s obsessed with the idea of authenticity: the idea that a song isn’t a song unless it can be convincingly played alone on an acoustic guitar.
Ultimately, this old folkie notion of purity triumphs over Rateliff’s composerly aspirations. The lion’s share of And It’s Still Alright backslides to the gormless balladeering of his decade-old Rounder debut, In Memory of Loss—a record made when he was under the spell of M. Ward, peddling himself as “bi-curious, redneck indie-folk” and touring with Bon Iver. Set aside the Nilsson pastiche and a lingering echo of the Lumineers—most prominent on “Mavis,” which he stresses is not named after Mavis Staples, even though that’s the first Mavis that would come to most listeners’ minds—and Alright can seem like a collection of artifacts excavated from Rateliff’s early years. He strums and he mumbles, twisting in his melancholy without bothering to shape his mood into melodies. If he’s baring his soul, his revelations are buried within his slurred, mangled phrasing, a delivery that repels the close listen it’s intended to invite.
That mush mouth is supposed to be the opposite of the retro R&B bluster that Rateliff hauls out for the Night Sweats, but the two extremes are really just different expressions of the same affectation. Rateliff bends his vocal attack to suit his chosen musical style. With the Night Sweats, he’s elevated with grit and muscle, but strumming solo on And’s Still Alright, he gets bogged down in a melancholy murk.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Stax | February 15, 2020 | 5 | 8297a7c7-a5c6-4462-9b66-278c0de98b6a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk’s third album is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition. They’ve become more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them. | Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk’s third album is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition. They’ve become more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them. | Naomi Punk: Yellow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naomi-punk-yellow/ | Yellow | The third album from Olympia punk trio Naomi Punk, Yellow, opens with a sequence of three instrumental tracks that wander and then stop cold, like dropped thoughts. With them, Yellow wastes no time weeding out listeners hoping for another quick fix of grungy rock. In every other regard, though, Yellow wastes quite a bit of time. Years in the making, it is a 75-minute, 25-track study in repetition that doesn’t readily let the listener in on whatever conclusions it draws.
Naomi Punk had hinted they might have a record like this in them. The 2014 Television Man LP periodically broke from the shiv-like rock of their debut for lengthy, arty explorations. But where Television Man was still a rock album at its core, Yellow’s driving impulse is experimentation. In the spirit of Wire, they’ve grown more interested in deconstructing their songs than writing them. And, as if in homage to that group, guitarist Travis Coster’s voice takes on shades of both Colin Newman’s punk sneer and Graham Lewis’ dehumanized croon. One of Naomi Punk’s cooler tricks is nailing the way that Lewis’ more robotic lead turns always sounded like they were being played back from a computer running out of RAM.
There are a couple of spirited 1980s nods along the way. With its synthesized bass, one of the only hints of bass on the whole album, “My Shadow” nails the whole Karate Kid-era video arcade aesthetic, while for two minutes “Matroska” conjures the barren, synthesized rumble of the Cure’s Faith. But those sonic switch-ups are few and far between. Most of the album’s main event songs, the ones that aren’t scrapped together from found sounds or studio racket, follow the same general template of crooked guitar chords, strummed so repeatedly that your own hand can’t help but vicariously cramp up, while drums thud and indeterminate noises creak and bubble around them.
It’s a template as rigid as Andy Warhol’s soup can screenprints, and like those works, Yellow’s songs keep coming long after the point has been made. Instead of paying off with new twists or revelations, the album only grows more cemented in its ways as it enters its increasingly redundant final stretch. The 11-minute gauntlet of “Yellow Cone Hat,” “Carniceria,” and “Motorcade” plays out as three very minor variations of the same mechanical riff, none of them any more eventful or memorable than the others. All that repetition makes for an album that’s as monochromatic as its title.
The central challenge of art punk is how to experiment without completely sacrificing the thrill of a sound that’s typically been synonymous with speed and brevity. Naomi Punk aren’t interested in solving that problem, though. Their concerns are largely conceptual. Between its purposefully narrow sonic template, recirculated motifs, and disjointed lyrics about art and actualization, Yellow presents itself as an intricate puzzle box, one that probably reveals even more facets on vinyl, where its songs are spread out across four sides, creating new patterns to ponder. Naomi Punk have clearly put a lot of thought into constructing it. Now if only it were more interesting to engage with. | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 9, 2017 | 5.6 | 829874a3-76ac-416f-9c04-b471e346cbfc | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Latest from this eccentric sing-songwriter on Michael Gira's Young God label can be wondrous and wildly inventive as well as self-indulgent. | Latest from this eccentric sing-songwriter on Michael Gira's Young God label can be wondrous and wildly inventive as well as self-indulgent. | Larkin Grimm: Parplar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12580-parplar/ | Parplar | Over the course of several self-released albums, Larkin Grimm has carved a niche for herself among the freak-folk contingent-- as an actual freak. In most cases, that's an ill-fitting, derisive label for today's folk revivalists. But Grimm, who was born in a Memphis commune, looks like a Dolce & Gabbana model, writes lyrics so raw they'd make Peaches blush, and cultivates a pagan earth mother/witch persona, would be unlikely to argue with it. As much as her public self and acoustic guitar-based music reveal genuine eccentricity (would Michael Gira have signed her to his Young God label otherwise?), Grimm is Yale-educated, well-traveled and no feral naïf. Indeed, her reworking of folk traditions and the roles women play in them share core concerns and strategies with early academic feminists and the deconstructive fiction of Angela Carter, who famously re-injected blood/sugar/sex/magic into the fairy tales of those other, Victorian, Grimms. As with Carter's fiction, Grimm's music, particularly in her latest, Parplar, can be wondrous and wildly inventive, as well as self-indulgent and, well, kinda icky.
Parplar's lead track, "They Were Wrong", is one of those thrilling numbers, a spooky portrait of loss and mental disintegration in which Grimm's voice develops a subtle shake through its stark four-minute run. "Anger in Your Liver", one of the short tracks clustered in the album's second half, is another simple composition with an aching vocal performance reminiscent of more mainstream Americana singers like Alison Kraus or Gillian Welch. Among the more eclectically arranged songs, the title track is a charming dish of bitterness served on a plate of whimsy-- Grimm's own tenacious "damn the man" lyrics serenaded by Ganges-river horns, slide whistles, and bubbly synthesizer patterns, and queasy, pitch-shifting. "How to Catch a Lizard" is weird (in large part due to Grimm's eerie double-tracked vocals), but effective. She can interpret folk standards just fine, too-- in the case of "Fall on Your Knees", as a twangy, Cajun barn dance.
But the album makes just as many awkward, even confounding, moves, and Grimm frontloads it with her creepiest cuts. "Ride That Cyclone", with its retro Western stylings and eye-rolling double entendres, is as catchy-- and gimmicky-- as a carnival tune. "Blond and Golden Johns" poses as some kind of feminist re-appropriation of the old whore archetype and is stained by bon mots like "I've been penetrated/ So I'm welcome everywhere I go", a line one-upped only by "Dominican Rum"'s "The microscopic spoiled eggs inside my uterus/ Are sparkling and bursting with the greenest yellow pus." Elsewhere, Grimm tosses off several "Huh?" remarks about acid rain and bus exhaust-- proving, if nothing else, that her somewhat anachronistic rhetoric isn't limited to sexual politics.
Sure, there's something to be said for risk-taking. Most folkies stick with the milk-safe, hoping to get by on the sweetness of their sounds, while Grimm serves sour with courageous gusto and humor. And Parplar is a beautiful, exciting-sounding record (coproduced by Grimm and Gira), exploding with banjo, fiddle, trumpet, accordion, dulcimer, and glockenspiel, among a score of other instruments. In fact, considering much of its lyrical content, it would be far better as an instrumental album. | 2009-02-02T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2009-02-02T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Young God | February 2, 2009 | 5.2 | 82a2061a-d519-40f1-82fd-dc42559aeb9a | Amy Granzin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amy-granzin/ | null |
Here's a record by a hip-hop emcee who spends half the album hunched over a guitar, daring to slum ... | Here's a record by a hip-hop emcee who spends half the album hunched over a guitar, daring to slum ... | WHY?: Oaklandazulasylum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8670-oaklandazulasylum/ | Oaklandazulasylum | Here's a record by a hip-hop emcee who spends half the album hunched over a guitar, daring to slum it as a bedroom songwriter. As a member of Anticon-- the hip-hop collective that bleeds at will into other genres-- it's no surprise for Why? (born Jonathan Wolf) to mix in live instruments or write straight-up songs; he already matched guitar with beats on Miss Ohio's Nameless, and you could call his half of Split EP a kind of song cycle.
And yet every time I throw on Oaklandazulasylum it still sounds like the damnedest thing: surprising, confusing, and so wrong it's right. Ever since Why?, Odd Nosdam and Doseone cut their cLOUDDEAD full-length-- still their biggest claim to fame outside the hip-hop world-- they've been under the gun to cut records that are not only as fucked up as their breakthrough, but as fully-realized, albums where the artists drown you in their desparately individual voices, instead of just passing by in a flash of cleverness. For Why?, Oaklandazulasylum is the first disc since cLOUDDEAD that pulls it off.
Producers Odd Nosdam and Jel make guest appearances, but for most of the disc it's Why? who chops up song structure and shuffles arrangements from track to track, fine-tuning the music from every angle. And from the first song it sounds rich and original, with the guitar, simple percussion and blatting horns that start "Ferris Wheel" before it segues to beats and blippy electronics. Why? straddles both camps with total ease. The closest comparison I can make is to The Books' Thought for Food and its similarly organic (and gorgeously captured) mix of sample-based and acoustic music. Plenty of songwriters back their strumming with drum machines, but Why?'s not diddling with digital perfection: these are heavy, multi-layered beats, some lo-fi and crunchy and others high, bright and almost piercing.
On that note, there is a very slight downer, which is that Why?'s vocals may be hard for some to take, a nasal drawl that hits somewhere between Soul Coughing's M. Doughty and They Might Be Giants' John Linnell. I'm not a big fan of Doughty or Linnell myself; fortunately, Why?'s tone isn't nearly as extreme (and certainly not as quirky) as either, and was never enough to distract me from his most impressive performances, or this record's remarkable uniqueness.
Why? switches from rhythmic delivery to naked singing, sometimes on a dime. The slight nasal quality of his voice sounds so awkward that he can't help but play it up-- "Dream on Costelyou" sounds so unmelodic you can't even believe they let this guy sing-- but witness the brilliantly jerked-out delivery on "Early Whitney", where he treats the syllables like a set of steps to jog over. The almost grotesque, overdubbed harmonies at the end of "Weak Moon" sound so warped that they bend your eardrum, but they're perfectly on pitch, and when he turns to a genuinely tuneful voice later on, it doesn't come as a total surprise.
On technical terms this may be Why?'s best-realized recording, not to mention the most startling album Anticon has dropped this year. But the biggest surprise is how engaging it is-- and how much more you connect with Why? after hearing it. All of the cut-up collages and lo-fi tapes in his prior work were incredibly scattershot, full of distractions that kept his ideas from sticking around. I can think of more classic Why? lines than full Why? songs, let alone albums. But this record fleshes out the seemingly non-sequitor lyrics, and makes them resonate.
I've ribbed the Anticon artists for their habitual memoir-writing, which, coupled with their surreal left turns can become a non-stop emotional reveal-and-feint. This time, instead of just dropping clever lines about his dad, he writes "Afterschool America", a song so tuneful and lyrically rich it's difficult to imagine how he fit in everything in a minute and a half. Why?'s geeky personality becomes human, and when he states, "I'm not myself without my Challenger commemorative button on my brown down vest," I can picture the dorky kid who would obsess about a piece of clothing-- hell, I was that dork, too. When he spits out lines like, "Kissing me is a waste of your saliva," I can empathize with him for the first time ever.
The last few songs grow murky, and don't introduce much that we haven't already heard, and the second side definitely lacks the locked-together flow of the first, but Oaklandazulasylum succeeds where it counts. It's as major a step as you'd expect-- really, as you'd demand-- from someone like Why?, not only for its sheer inventiveness, but the continuity that turns these lyrical snapshots into moving portraits, of urban neighborhoods, half-understood women, and most of all, Why? himself, as a kid, a misfit, and an artist. | 2003-07-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-07-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Rock | Anticon | July 3, 2003 | 8.1 | 82b1ec87-a6a3-468d-a73e-bed142f5e7ec | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
On her subdued debut album, the Tallahassee singer-songwriter constructs an eerie, beguiling world imbued with a supernatural charge. | On her subdued debut album, the Tallahassee singer-songwriter constructs an eerie, beguiling world imbued with a supernatural charge. | Sarah Morrison: Attachment Figure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-morrison-attachment-figure/ | Attachment Figure | When the physical world is stifling, the internet beckons. It’s a sinister trap, one Sarah Morrison knows all too well. On “This Sorry Day,” the second track off the Tallahassee singer-songwriter’s subdued debut album, Attachment Figure, she soundtracks a draining day online with—what else?—smooth jazz. “While you were out I caved to my kitty instinct/Turned my computer on,” she sings with tired resignation over a dampened piano. Soon, her boredom shifts to the kinds of manic thoughts that follow spending hours viewing people through a screen: “Makes me want to laugh at me/Makes me want to look at me/Makes me want to touch me,” she chants, her whispered soprano turned dark and dissonant. But then, without warning, a velvet cyclone of a sax solo lifts the song aloft and carries it through its raging climax.
Morrison has built an eerie, beguiling world in Attachment Figure, one where Southern fields, soft embraces, and bridal statues carry an air of unease, earthly treasures partly situated in an otherworldly plane. Album opener “Via Negativa” hints at this over sparse, dissonant chords, instructing us to recognize the divine through negation. “Could I get closer by knowing what love is not?” Morrison wonders quietly, before the track resolves its choral dissonance into major chords of religious bliss. On the indie-pop graveyard romp “Gray Apples,” the blurring divide between life and death becomes clearer as she walks with a light step among the graves of strangers, bounding synths tagging her spiritual questions: “What’s there to learn from those who’ve known the end?”
Whether singing a tricky lyric in patient time or turning out fluttering melismatic phrases, Morrison’s wispy, warbling voice remains soft and bare, even in the album’s heated moments, of which there are a welcome few. Through the repetitive pounding keys on album highlight “To Kill a Buzzard,” she shudders in anger at the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in 2020 in South Georgia, a few hundred miles away from her home. The song’s frenetic pace slows into a taunting country bridge: “Do you sleep better little gunner/Like with a fake dreamcatcher above your headboard?” she sneers, the ironic twang of a pedal steel echoing her disgust. On “Mango,” Morrison similarly dips into disturbed affect after receiving a hateful message wishing her childless for one thousand years. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she chirps, adding that the letter has only emboldened an act of imagined revenge, “conceiving made-up children to replace and defeat you with such sweet revelating gladness,” her quivering hush giving way to cathartic shouts and clattering, disturbed guitar licks.
I wish Morrison leaned more into her capacity to spark these dark emotions, particularly after looking at the album’s credits; her producing partners, Ross Brand and Clayton Rychlik, played with her in Christina Schneider’s quirky synth-pop project Locate S,1, which Morrison has cited as an inspiration for her jazzier song structures. Likewise, while much of the album came from her interest in horror films and their corresponding soundtracks, some songs don’t fully pull off their intended haunting effect. The elegiac title track sounds more tired than fear-invoking and lacks a sense of urgency, padded with synths that fail to take off near the song’s end.
But not every contact with the dead needs to be terrifying, and Morrison excels at threading the ethereal plane with patient curiosity. On “La Pascualita,” she sings from the perspective of a Mexican folk legend, a shop mannequin so lifelike that some believe her to be an embalmed corpse. Speaking as the 90-year-old mummified woman, she implores her onlookers to recognize that beauty has a life cycle, just as all living things do: “People say if it dies then it wasn’t beautiful in the first place/But I was, oh, it was/Oh, I was,” she murmurs, sparsely backed by a carefully treading bassline. At the song’s end, Morrison’s voice glides and bends into quiet, spectred yelps. Summoning ghosts comes easiest to her at this moment, after having made contact with a tangible reality. | 2023-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ramp Local | October 19, 2023 | 7.3 | 82b55a50-c5b3-4ee7-bd00-609994fb7b9d | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s debut album is an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state of a 26-year-old immigrant in America. | The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s debut album is an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state of a 26-year-old immigrant in America. | Loyal Lobos: Everlasting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loyal-lobos-everlasting/ | Everlasting | Andrea Silva used to sing at funerals. Something about that bittersweet spectacle—as both a celebration of life and a gathering of grief—has never quite left her music. But that was years ago, when Silva was still a child growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, long before she moved to Los Angeles to escape the slut-shaming she endured in high school. Now, she makes music under the alias Loyal Lobos. She’s traded funeral hymns for synth-pop arrangements. And she’s found a way to marry the tough blow of a life left behind with the freedom that starting over allows.
On Everlasting, this freedom isn’t wasted. Silva refuses to fit into the sometimes narrow mold of singer-songwriters in the U.S., where a handful of women dominate a scene Silva once called, aptly, “very American and very white.” She tinkered with their sparse folk-rock on her 2018 EP The Fall before abandoning the limits of that genre for something else entirely: an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state that comes with being a 26-year-old immigrant in America. Everlasting slips into this uncertain space and manages to thrive not in spite of it, but because of it.
Doing so meant letting go of some of Americana’s starry-eyed trappings. Some can still be heard on the album’s first single, “Criminals,” which balances the sad nostalgia of a time before meeting your platonic half with the addictive promise of their newfound love. When Silva’s voice swarms to the heavens, singing, “I’d kill for you,” it invokes a teenaged lust to evade the world’s rules together, her fingerpicked riff scoring the getaway. But on the rest of Everlasting, it sounds like Silva’s done running away from reality. Nearly a year after the longing “Criminals” was released, she’s leaning into herself more and opting for fun as an antidote to trauma. It’s a new kind of safeguard, heard in the whimsy of the album’s percussive pop elements—a surprise that only begins to make sense upon hearing that Silva landed Shawn Mendes’ hitmaker, Teddy Geiger, as her executive producer.
Traces of Silva’s upbringing in Colombia often illuminate these playful moments. Grand telenovela soundtracks, the dreamy haze of the countryside, and the machista culture that drove her away in the first place are all hinted at in experiments in shoegaze and reggaeton-reminiscent rhythms. It takes frisky songs like “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad)” and the Auto-Tuned “Papel” to break up the haze of Silva’s double-tracked vocals—a sonic shift that also seems to give way to more pointed language in her mother tongue. On “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad),” Silva reminds the guys that she’s a “perra, pero el alma baby/Entera,” or a slut whose soul is whole. This makes the lawless, cinematic slant of 2019’s “Criminals” feel schmaltzy in comparison.
That isn’t to say that the simpler balladry on Everlasting is without substance. When Silva quips on the record’s title track, “The stars are now aligned/L.A. people seem to care/Never got to see them/City lights over shine outer space,” you get a sense of a place back home where people can actually see the stars instead of just imagining them.
Yet this nimble songwriting is sometimes obscured—and not only purposefully, like it is by the sizzling feedback on “Whatever It Is” or the taffeta reverb of “You Were Bored.” Silva’s words have a tendency to coast loosely into each other, blurring entire sentences into one breathless slip. Hers is nothing like the crisp deadpan we get from L.A.’s Phoebe Bridgers, who Silva often gets compared to. That difference isn’t without its redeeming qualities, however. There is something powerful in this remnant of where she came from—an insular delivery in which the Spanish-language lilt of her motherland always makes itself known.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | August 8, 2020 | 6.7 | 82b97421-46d9-4e28-aece-04ce0abd2d7a | Jenzia Burgos | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenzia-burgos/ | |
Waxwork Records goes all out with its deluxe vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone’s minimal score to John Carpenter’s The Thing—a 1982 box-office stiff that has only this century become a horror classic. | Waxwork Records goes all out with its deluxe vinyl reissue of Ennio Morricone’s minimal score to John Carpenter’s The Thing—a 1982 box-office stiff that has only this century become a horror classic. | John Carpenter / Ennio Morricone: The Thing OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22931-john-carpenter-ennio-morricone-the-thing-ost/ | The Thing OST | “The quintessential moron movie of the ’80s… too phony looking to be disgusting.” “About as impersonal as a movie can be.” “A great barf-bag movie.” “It qualifies only as instant junk.” Such was the critical consensus surrounding John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, about a shape-shifting alien coated in “creamed corn, Jell-O, mayonnaise, microwaved bubblegum, and five-gallon pails of K-Y Jelly.” Opening the same weekend the world met a more benevolent beer-gut alien in E.T., The Thing was a box-office stiff at the time. Only in this century has pop culture thawed to its Antarctic plot. The Thing is now perceived as a classic of the paranoid Reagan era, and since bombing in theaters, the movie has led to a comic book, amusement park ride, action figures, prequel, video game, and Hugo-nominated short story.
After years of operating on shoestring horror movie budgets, The Thing gave Carpenter approximately $15 million for its gory effects and blustery locations. It also meant that—for the first time in a feature—Carpenter didn’t need to whip up his own score at the last minute. Unable to handle composing duties in addition to everything else The Thing required, Carpenter outsourced the music to the Maestro, Ennio Morricone.
Following decades of success in Europe and his iconic scores for spaghetti westerns, Morricone was only just making inroads into Hollywood. Despite having hundreds of credits to his name, Morricone’s scores remain instantly recognizable, be they the yips of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the stinging surf guitars of Danger Diabolik, or the romantic orchestral swells of The Mission. Watching the film when it screened at BAM a few years ago, it was startling when Morricone’s name emerged on the credits for The Thing—so minimal, restrained, and atmospheric is his score.
Waxwork goes all out with this deluxe vinyl reissue of The Thing, an exquisite package, right down to a breakaway “ice” slipcase. But those hoping to hear the telltale bum-bum that thuds throughout the film and chills the blood might be perplexed at first—those were instances where Carpenter and his frequent collaborator Alan Howarth added extra cues, and don’t emerge until late in the soundtrack. Instead, this reissue opens with Morricone’s “Humanity (Part 1),” a gossamer motif on violin and harp that appears nearly 20 minutes in, which then edges into a more foreboding low-end. It’s a stark piece, one as compositionally cold as the Antarctic landscape itself.
Revisit the film, and it’s the extra patina of electronics that remains most foreboding—the slow drones that make the skin prickle. (Cue the Thing’s arachnid emergence in the dog kennel and tossing a flare onto the tentacular Bennings, for instance.) At times, though, Morricone’s themes sound like the alien himself attempting to recreate Carpenter’s iconic analog synths. The relatively unmemorable “Shape,” with its bowed cello and brass, doesn’t bring to mind a particular scene from the film—nor does the frantic pizzicato of “Contamination.” And the bombastic lurches of “Bestiality” feel too pompous in the context of the minimalist film. Given that Morricone composed suites while only looking at an early rough cut of the film, it makes sense that his cues (some of which went unused) seem out of sync with the film’s frigid aesthetic. Separated from Carpenter’s Antarctic imagery, Morricone’s cues sound unfamiliar; one would be hard-pressed to recall their corresponding sequences.
Midway through, Morricone’s themes strike a balance between acoustic, human sounds and cold electronics. The strings of “Solitude” oscillate between anxious and vertiginous. Keys twinkle like melting icicles on the electronic-tinged “Eternity,” soon joined by a church organ line that seems to be perpetually in descent, ratcheting up the tension and creating a sense of the inevitable. A meandering synth piece, “Sterilization,” shows Morricone not altogether comfortable mixing these two distinct palettes together.
Only on “Humanity (Part 2)” do those forlorn electronic throbs emerge, paired with a desolate theme across woodwinds. It’s on this motif that the film’s frost-tipped dread is most closely felt—so it’s a shame that, after four minutes, it suddenly lurches back into an overstated organ theme. In emphasizing the seething electronics and excising all but crucial bits of Morricone’s original score, Carpenter proved that his vision for the film remained intact. History has bore that out and, unlike this original soundtrack, such barf bag junk has now attained its rightful place as a frightful horror classic. | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Waxwork | March 10, 2017 | 7.2 | 82bc036d-585c-4e47-ab70-80ab8ba96714 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Rapsody’s third record is a triumph. The North Carolina MC unlocks her full skillset and brings her creativity and ingenuity to the fore. | Rapsody’s third record is a triumph. The North Carolina MC unlocks her full skillset and brings her creativity and ingenuity to the fore. | Rapsody: Eve | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rapsody-eve/ | Eve | It was Nina Simone who said that “there’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.” North Carolina MC and budding star Rapsody has taken that lesson to heart. Her astounding third album, Eve, is a “love letter to all black women,” with 16 songs named specifically for her heroes, from Simone and Oprah Winfrey to Sojourner Truth and Afeni Shakur. As Rapsody asserts her black womanhood and places it within a broader historical context, she unlocks her full skillset and brings her creativity and ingenuity to the fore. This is the record where her top-tier status becomes undeniable.
Rapsody crashed through rap’s glass ceiling when her second album, 2017’s Laila’s Wisdom, was nominated for Best Rap Album at the Grammys. She lost to her friend Kendrick Lamar, but she helped kick open a door that had been closed to women since 1997. (Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy won the following year.) The case could be made that Laila, Rapsody’s grandmother, was simply the first woman in the rapper’s exhibition of strong women role models, one that also hinges on Ms. Lauryn Hill. “I didn’t know who Nina Simone was until I got into Lauryn Hill,” she told NPR. “In that sense, there would be no Lauryn Hill without Nina Simone, and without Lauryn there would be no me.” Rapsody carefully traces this heritage while making a clear-cut case for her place in it.
From Beyoncé’s Homecoming, which couched its ideas in conversation with Nina Simone, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison, to Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY!, which honored forebears like Betty Davis, Zora Neal Hurston, Nikki Giovanni, Eartha Kitt, and Octavia Butler, to recent exhibitions like “Black Women: Power and Grace” and “Posing Modernity,” which consider the erasure of black women from art canon, it’s clear there is an uprising occurring: Black women have been demanding ownership of their outsized impact on culture. When holding these works on top of each other you can see the overlaps; a formative syllabus comes into shape. Eve name-checks Simone and Angelou in its tracklist. A song for Eartha Kitt simply didn’t make the cut. It expands the model to include athletes Serena Williams and Ibtihaj Muhammad, Michelle Obama and civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams, models Tyra and Iman. Spoken-word homages from poet Reyna Biddy pull these icons into orbit around Rapsody, as she delivers the loosest, most captivating performances of her career.
Across Eve, she sounds more relaxed, surer of herself. On songs like “Whoopi” and “Iman,” she loosens her flow without losing her sharpness. A self-professed rapper’s rapper, Rapsody has been taut and inflexible in the past, almost as if having to force her immense talent to overcome a deck stacked against her. It sounds like she’s in a home-run trot on Eve. “Y’all banked on the wrong ones, wasted your energy/Lost more interest, got me laughin’ at my enemies/Every door you close, every back you turn/Can’t keep me away from the life I earned,” she snaps on “Cleo.” She sounds unstoppable and liberated, like no one can deny her what’s hers anymore.
Rapsody wields the namesakes on Eve not as reference materials but as stepping off points for considerations on colorist beauty standards, black capitalism, activism, and drive. She raps about being counted out, singled out, and fed up. “This ain’t E.T. news, I done went sci-fi/I’m closer to God, I done went sky high/Been alienated so much that I must be fly,” she gloats on “Aaliyah.” She’s locked in, he wordplay as clever as ever, but she also doesn’t feel beholden to past versions of herself. The updated model is multifaceted with catchier hooks, nimbler rhyme schemes, and a willingness to ad-lib.
They say you can’t teach an old super-producer new tricks, that a sample head will always remain stuck in the dusty soul loops he conjures, but 9th Wonder evolves with Rapsody here, perhaps out of necessity, as her raps continue to expand in force and scope. Alongside Eric G, Nottz, and Khrysis, the other in-house producers at his label, Wonder assists her in reaching new places. There is nothing faded about these beats, which are modern, rich in tone and texture. As an Uncle Luke sample ushers Rapsody forward on “Serena,” she uncorks syncopated cadences and brings out the work ethic she speaks of. “Nina” reclaims “Strange Fruit” from Kanye and “Afeni” channels Tupac’s “Keep Your Head Up,” as if unifying the Shakur family in its admiration of black women’s strength. Throughout the hour, Rapsody is striking this perfect balance between paying tribute and spreading her wings.
She is as comfortable trading bars with Leikeli47 on “Oprah” as she is Queen Latifah on “Hatshepsut,” both of whom make formidable sparring partners. But the message is one of inclusivity, of banding together to receive the respect that is long overdue. And it isn’t just about being acknowledged; it’s about taking a rightful place in the hierarchy. For Rapsody, specifically, that means being as respected as her male peers often spoken of as successors. She proves to be as much an inheritor of the Roc Nation legacy as J. Cole on “Sojourner,” as much of a student of Shakur doctrine as Kendrick on “Afeni.” As Rapsody salutes the heroes that are and were on Eve, her own reputation grows. | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | August 27, 2019 | 8 | 82c2850c-3a88-4e80-aafb-1cf34af33e1d | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
This contemporary classical pianist’s music proves more unsettling the more you disturb its placid surface. | This contemporary classical pianist’s music proves more unsettling the more you disturb its placid surface. | Robert Haigh: Black Sarabande | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-haigh-black-sarabande/ | Black Sarabande | Depending on what release you discovered first, you might have believed there were two different Robert Haighs operating in the UK during the 1980s and ’90s. There was the pianist and composer who worked with Nurse With Wound and released elegant modern classical albums like 1987’s Valentine Out of Season. But what to make of the Robert Haigh behind the neck-whipping jungle breakbeats of the Omni Trio, a force throughout the drum ’n’ bass era in the UK? As that project drew to a close in the early 2000s, the more contemplative side of Haigh reemerged with a string of contemporary classical albums. They made for a perfect fit for New York’s Unseen Worlds label; his 2017 album Creatures of the Deep slotted well alongside pianists new and old, ranging from “Blue” Gene Tyranny to Lubomyr Melnyk to Leo Svirsky.
Haigh’s Black Sarabande explores terrain similar to Deep, mixing gorgeous piano melodies with a patina of electronics. But where that previous album evoked the properties of water, Sarabande feels grounded. It draws on Haigh’s childhood memories of UK coal country and the hardscrabble “pit village” of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire where he was raised. There’s a heavy atmosphere to these 11 tracks, never wholly enveloped in blackness but always threatened to tip over into it.
The opening title track is hushed, provoking comparisons to Harold Budd or Erik Satie. Yet as Haigh’s struck keys hover in space, they turn slightly discordant, like a chill settling into the skin. “Stranger on the Lake” strikes a balance between piano and electronics to luminous effect, its melody shadowed by ghostly overtones. Midway through, the ambient haze swells, and when it finally recedes, the piece is suffused with harp plucks and electronics, making you feel like you’ve left one piece behind and emerged in another one entirely.
Black Sarabande’s calm surface proves illusory the more listens you give it. Struck piano wires startle the surface of the otherwise-placid “Wire Horses”; a gush of strings arrives and just as quickly disappears into the woozy, fluttering ambience of “Painted Serpent.” There are moments when Haigh’s playing verges on silence, so that if you’re listening on earbuds, you might hear your own footsteps through the snow more loudly than the music. The gorgeous and brief “Air Madeleine” sounds as if you’re walking around a frozen pond in the countryside and seated next to Haigh on the creaky piano bench all at once, as imaginary a landscape (and interior) as anything Brian Eno could have conceived.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds | January 27, 2020 | 7.6 | 82c4f6e4-997e-421c-93b3-ffdeaa41dac8 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Brooklyn producer’s debut album is filled with immersive, inventive reimaginings of dance music, flickering between ecstasy and decay. | The Brooklyn producer’s debut album is filled with immersive, inventive reimaginings of dance music, flickering between ecstasy and decay. | M Wagner: We Could Stay | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-wagner-we-could-stay/ | We Could Stay | The music that opens M Wagner’s We Could Stay doesn’t fade-up as much as it lumbers into view. It carries a crackling sense of inevitability, as if you’re watching a shelf cloud advance on a city skyline. Suddenly, it’s upon you: An enormous four-chord vamp mangled by distortion and haunted vocal echoes, the song’s shimmering chimes playing around the edges. There’s a seductive elegance to the track’s destruction, like spending your final moments caught in a tornado, marveling at its power. In its last quarter, the noisy layers of “Release Yrself” fall away, leaving the softly glowing embers of a lullaby-like melody. Right when it feels light enough to drift off on the breeze, Wagner brings in a startling, stabbing trance synth, caking it with the blistering overdrive of a tape deck eating itself.
We Could Stay, the Brooklyn electronic musician’s staggering debut, artfully oscillates between moments of hypnotic bliss and jarring violence. Wagner keeps his programmed percussion as uncomplicated as possible, stripping house, garage, and techno down to the studs. His work isn’t at all minimal, though; the utilitarian grooves leave plenty of space, which Wagner fills with interlocking loops, infinitely repeating micro samples, and droning synths that shudder and spiral when agitated. There are shades of GAS and the Field here—Wagner’s an avid fan of ambient techno pioneers like Wolfgang Voigt and Biosphere—but rather than stretching towards an ever-distant horizon, his work operates in a much tighter radius. Some of the dreamier textures he employs could be traced back to Silver Liz, the psych-pop band he founded with his wife Carrie in 2016—he even samples Carrie’s vocals from Silver Liz’s “Terrapin” on We Could Stay’s title track. And despite economical run times, each track is a full journey, Wagner gleefully bending dance music tropes into unpredictable shapes. Inspect his wall of sound a little closer, and you’ll discover the thunderous roar cleverly hiding a pop sensibility.
One of the key aspects of Wagner’s compositional style is the gradual, almost imperceptible introduction of new elements. He often brings in a sample or instrument through a slow fade, so that by the time it’s prominent in the mix, you’ve forgotten what the song sounded like without it. “Marcy Av” starts with a solitary bass drum, and slowly evolves into a simple, swinging UK garage pattern—more DJ transition tool than album cut. As it shuffles along, a sine wave sequence flickers to life, metallic glitches form a melody, and a splashy breakbeat emerges—all funneling into the final detuned, richly harmonic chord.
The ghostly vocal samples on “Never Gone” bubble up so gently, it’s hard to tell if they’re actually there or if your brain’s working to make sense of the song’s cacophonous, shoegazing frequencies. Halfway through “Rome Generator,” you’ll suddenly become aware of the syncopated kicks, but rewind a little, and you’ll discover they’d initially appeared a full minute before, buried beneath a strobing keyboard. Throughout We Could Stay, Wagner pairs these subtle transitions with more traditional, gridlike techno structures, maintaining an alluring dichotomy between the celestial and the grounded. The record loses itself a little near the end, coming down from the neon-streaked jungle climax of “Thanks for Listening” with two ambient pieces that, while gorgeous, tread somewhat similar ground. But for the better part of its 41-minute runtime, We Could Stay is breathlessly thrilling—bruised, beautiful, and completely engulfing. | 2024-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Extremely Pure | May 24, 2024 | 7.6 | 82d0bce8-ce65-4b59-8875-6b704a2ced59 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The New York experimental musician takes his own stutter as the starting point for an album that is both a theoretical investigation of speech dysfluency and a piece of resistance art. | The New York experimental musician takes his own stutter as the starting point for an album that is both a theoretical investigation of speech dysfluency and a piece of resistance art. | JJJJJerome Ellis: The Clearing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jjjjjerome-ellis-the-clearing/ | The Clearing | JJJJJerome Ellis says, “For me, the stutter is a wild animal, and it is my ongoing practice to follow it where it wants to go.” The multi-instrumentalist, writer, and composer frequently lists “stutterer” among his disciplines, referring to his glottal block, an involuntary speech dysfluency that manifests in pauses while talking or reading. For Ellis, his stutter is simply a facet of his person—it only becomes an issue when faced with others’ expectations. But rather than try to suppress it, Ellis makes ample space for dysfluency in his life. He stylizes his first name as “JJJJJerome” because it’s the word he blocks on most often, and on The Clearing he brings speech directly into his art so that the stutter might make itself at home.
“I speak with a stutter, I am Black, and I am a musician,” Ellis begins on “Jede Krankheit ist ein musikalisches Problem,” laying out three intersecting elements of his identity. The Clearing began as an essay Ellis wrote for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies titled The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness and time. While writing about the use of Black music as a means of resistance against hegemonically white notions of time and fluency, he became curious about pairing the piece with an audible component. Against a backdrop of hip-hop, house, ambient, and jazz-inspired sounds—all musical forms with a strong Black identity—Ellis experimented with reading his words and sharing his experiences, taking full advantage of the aural medium. Any instance of a stutter became part of the work. “My thesis is that Blackness, dysfluency, and music are forces that open time,” he says in the opening “Loops of Retreat,” and the way the strings swell beneath his long pause between “Blackness” and “dysfluency” do just that, cracking open conventional notions of linearity. The Clearing is both a theoretical investigation and a piece of resistance art in itself, pushing back against societal expectations of performative fluency.
Ellis recorded himself speaking in a variety of situations to show how his glottal block can vary. He’s more likely to stutter while reading in silence and less likely when reading over music, due to a phenomenon known as masked auditory feedback, so passages of the essay are recited both ways. On a pair of tracks called “The Bookseller,” he records two calls he makes to Barnes & Noble. The first time, the words get stuck in his throat before getting out the title of the book he’s looking for, and the employee assumes the call has been dropped. They hang up. The second time, he prefaces the conversation by warning the clerk about his stutter, and he’s given the time to speak at his own pace. Later, on “Milta,” Ellis has a candid phone conversation with his mentor—someone that already knows about his stutter—and reads back to her a letter that she wrote to him. He still stammers, but sounds relaxed and unrushed, comfortable knowing he’s free of any expectation to speak quickly or smoothly.
Because of the unpredictable nature of his stutter, Ellis doesn’t consider The Clearing a finished work, simply one possibility among many. The likelihood of stuttering on different words lends the piece an infinitely indeterminate quality. During a live performance celebrating the album’s release, Ellis underscored that idea by reading a list of acknowledgements in the middle of the set. In a Q&A following the show he stressed that it was a deliberate choice to make that part of an ever-evolving composition, explaining that he stutters “more fully and more frequently when saying names, because there are no synonyms for names.” In other words, he can’t fall back on the ability to substitute a word he anticipates tripping up on.
There aren’t many representations of Black people that stutter in popular media. Ellis’ decision to end the album with “Punch Line,” presenting a joke by the late comedian Bernie Mac about his nephew with a stutter, is acknowledgement of a rare example of dysfluency being discussed in Black culture—but also an expression of the conflicting feelings it brings. The joke is not a flattering portrayal of stuttering. “I feel anger, I feel sadness, I feel ‘I don’t care,’” Ellis muses, while acknowledging his reverence for the comedy legend and admitting that he can’t help finding the joke a little funny. But The Clearing is an opportunity to amend the record and put something empowering out into the world. “As in all my work,” he says, “in this project I’m seeking healing.”
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. | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-30T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | NNA Tapes | November 30, 2021 | 8 | 82d6a4af-52d2-4557-90ec-a9634214aa59 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
This groundbreaking and newly-reissued 1972 album is an excellent introduction to Mulatu Astatke, the inventor and sole exemplar of Ethio-jazz. | This groundbreaking and newly-reissued 1972 album is an excellent introduction to Mulatu Astatke, the inventor and sole exemplar of Ethio-jazz. | Mulatu Astatke: Mulatu Of Ethiopia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23241-mulatu-of-ethiopia/ | Mulatu Of Ethiopia | Just about a decade ago, amid the faded 1960s grandeur of Addis Ababa’s Ghion Hotel—Mulatu Astatke’s favorite spot for coffee—the man himself leaned over and asked, “What exactly is the Red Bull Music Academy?” This was after a wide-ranging interview about his career as composer and musician, traveling from the UK to the U.S. to Ethiopia and in between. Mulatu had been tapped to give a lecture in Canada, but he didn’t understand exactly why he was being asked to talk about his music—the bulk of which was recorded between 1966 and 1974—for a bunch of young people.
Originally released in 1972 and newly-reissued, the groundbreaking Mulatu of Ethiopia easily answers that question in under 30 minutes of adventurous, head-nod-inducing music that still sounds new today. These seven melodic tracks take the listener down moody rhythmic paths, all the while accompanied by organ, flute, horns, and Mulatu’s trademark vibraphone.
Born in western Ethiopia, Mulatu planned to study engineering. But upon moving to Wales, and later London, his field changed to music. He became the first student from Africa at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, focusing on percussion as well as vibraphone. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Mulatu recorded on trips to New York, working with a range of session musicians, many schooled in Latin rhythms; playing alongside Cubans and Venezuelans, he observed their experimentation. It sparked his desire to invent his own style, which he called “Ethio-jazz.” “I used the Ethiopian structures to create melodies, but instead of using cultural instruments, I used western instruments like the piano and the contrabass,” he once said. “I somehow created ways to use the Ethiopian modes, being very careful not to lose the feeling.”
Mulatu’s style—he really is the originator and sole exemplar of “Ethio-jazz”—is unmistakable. First, unlike most Ethiopian music of various traditional and contemporary genres, Mulatu doesn’t use vocals. He’s unique in his instrumentality, and his mix of styles was crucial. There is a clear ’70s funk influence at play—with the wah wah on “Munaye,” the driving tempo paired with rolling saxophone on “Chifara,” the floating flute on “Mascaram Setaba.” Afro-Cuban rhythms also appear on “Mulatu” and “Kasalefkut-Hulu.” And those familiar with the Ethiopian washint (flute) will recognize the different wind sounds on “Kulumanqueleshi.” It all joins the melancholic minor rhythm and handclaps, which are reminiscent of traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church music. The melodies, too, use the five-note-scale pentatonic mode common to Ethiopian music.
Though crate diggers developed an enthusiasm for Mulatu’s music in the early 1990s, wider acclaim occurred initially in Europe through the 1998 release of the fourth in the Francis Falceto-curated Éthiopiques series, entitled Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969–1974. A number of tracks from the compilation were then used in the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers (those paying attention will identify that the cinematic “Mascaram Setaba” appeared first on this record). But Mulatu of Ethiopia showcases perhaps the widest range of Mulatu’s talents—including jazz, funk, and what sounds like atmospheric soundtracking—and acts as an excellent initial entry into his catalog.
What is perhaps most significant about this reissue—and for this one needs to purchase the 3xLP set—is how it illustrates the process that went into the creation of Mulatu of Ethiopia. The CD and LP versions include the original stereo release and the pre-mix mono master, but the 3xLP gatefold set adds a whole other LP dedicated to the outtakes of four songs: three of “Mascaram Setaba,” three of “Kulunmanqueleshi,” two of “Kasalefkut-Hulu,” and an extra “Munaye.” These glimpses into the studio provide insight into the explorations that led to the final versions. Some outtakes place the wind instruments out front, others focus on the percussion. These are looser attempts that play with motifs and melodies.
Mulatu, however, is audibly the bandleader. Before laying out the rhythm and counting the band in on “Mascaram Setaba,” you can hear him arguing with the musicians: “No, no, no,” he says, telling the bassist exactly what he wants to hear. After a minute or so, he stops the music again: “Watch me for the chords, ok?,” he instructs. From this three minutes of tape, it’s quite clear that Mulatu knew exactly what he wanted in order to fulfill his concept of Ethio-jazz.
Since Mulatu’s 2007 lecture in Toronto, more and more people have become acquainted with the funky, atmospheric stylings of his Ethio-jazz. This has spurred Mulatu’s recent work, born of connections with London’s Heliocentrics and Boston’s Either/Orchestra. There has also between a rash of recordings sampling Mulatu, and for good reason. Nas, Damian Marley, K’naan, the Gaslamp Killer, Four Tet: all have added in bits and pieces of Mulatu’s music. If there’s one way to invigorate a style, it’s by drawing from the unique cadences of Mulatu Astatke’s inventive sounds, showcased on this 45-year-old classic. | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B / Global | Strut | May 26, 2017 | 8.7 | 82d74932-ccb8-42bf-8931-be8049d7ed23 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
On the follow up to her debut EP, Laurel Halo ditches conventional melody for dark, propulsive rhythms and lets her beats run wild. | On the follow up to her debut EP, Laurel Halo ditches conventional melody for dark, propulsive rhythms and lets her beats run wild. | Laurel Halo: Hour Logic EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15568-hour-logic-ep/ | Hour Logic EP | Last spring, Brooklyn electronic artist Laurel Halo's King Felix gained significant notice among fans of murky electronic pop. The EP secured official release by the end of the year through Hippos in Tanks, and the increased attention Halo was drawing made sense. King Felix prominently featured Halo's expansive vocal range (also exercised on Ford & Lopatin's Games-era cut "Strawberry Skies") doing curly-cues and loop-de-loops above beds of tickled, arpeggiated synths; the results recalled Dirty Projectors' disjointed acrobatics as much as the cosmic analog odysseys of Brooklyn pal Daniel Lopatin's Oneohtrix Point Never. As the electrifying cover art of the Hippos in Tanks re-release suggested, the music possessed a strange, swarming quality, originating at a central point and covering everything in its path.
King Felix sounded like a blueprint for something larger and more sweeping, a hint at greater potential not quite realized. But on Halo's latest EP, Hour Logic, she takes a sharp left turn, largely ditching anything that resembles conventional melody for dark, propulsive rhythms where her beats run wild. As heard here, Halo's version of dance music comes over as sterile and inert-- the beats are there, but they never coalesce into anything in particular. When they're not static (as they are on the constant drip of "Aquifer") they wind up lost in the clutter. She moves through some intriguing ideas-- the acid squiggles that surface near the end of the title track, "Speed of Rain"'s dewy beat-broken opening-- but there's a lack of momentum and the tedium disrupts Hour Logic's flow.
For all its relative experimentation, the EP's most impressive moment takes place during "Constant Index", which finds Halo's distant cries submerged in synth washes and long stretches of delay. It's no coincidence that Halo is at her best when returning to-- and refining-- the ideas presented on King Felix. So Hour Logic ultimately seems like an intermittently interesting misstep, a bold experiment that doesn't quite come off. | 2011-06-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-06-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hippos in Tanks | June 27, 2011 | 5.8 | 82d755ae-acfa-4f17-b5f8-34bc56befbaa | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
In a monumental one-two punch, Metallica set the blueprint for thrash metal and then gave the genre its worldview with its first two records—reissued in deluxe sets that feature alternate mixes, demos, and live shows. | In a monumental one-two punch, Metallica set the blueprint for thrash metal and then gave the genre its worldview with its first two records—reissued in deluxe sets that feature alternate mixes, demos, and live shows. | Metallica: Kill 'Em All/Ride the Lightning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21755-kill-em-allride-the-lightning/ | Kill 'Em All/Ride the Lightning | Without belaboring the point, some albums change the course of music so profoundly that it's hard to imagine what the world was like before their arrival. Metallica's 1983 debut Kill 'Em All more or less singlehandedly launched thrash metal and established the template for every other speed- or extremity-oriented metal band on earth that's been active since. You can split hairs about the key role played by fellow ground-floor pioneers Slayer and Exodus, and point out that Anthrax and Voivod had also already formed by the time Kill 'Em All was released. You could even argue that other bands were bound to reach the same threshold of tempo and attack because the early-'80s metal underground was collectively headed in the same direction anyway—i.e: getting faster and heavier and building on the work of Motörhead, Venom, Mercyful Fate, and others.
But the fact is, several key participants in thrash metal's first wave freely admit that Kill 'Em All gave them a framework for the sound they had all been searching for. In other words, once Metallica stepped up the pace, everyone else followed suit. Listening back through modern ears, it's almost like revisiting those first three Ramones records—you know this music shaped the world you live in, but since so many artists have added extra levels of intensity since then, there's no way to re-create the sensation of how revolutionary the music was during its time. Today, the sequencing sounds a little more abrupt, and a surprising share of the riffs fall closer to traditional Maiden/Priest-level heavy than outright thrash. But of course, there are moments—the crunching chugga-chugga riffs that propel songs like "Whiplash," "Metal Militia," for instance—where Metallica's sense of purpose crystallized, and it's easy to see why the band became known as such a genre-defining force right out of the gate.
That said, the question here is whether there's any justification for re-releasing a title that, for metalheads, is as much a "required listening" staple as Led Zeppelin's first album is for fans of classic rock. It's not like the original pressing of Kill 'Em All suffered from a muddy mix or anything—dated, maybe, but not anything that could be significantly improved upon via remastering. So if you already own this music, don't expect an improvement in sound quality. And if you don't own it, you may be asking yourself: do I need to pay top dollar to get the album plus several hours' worth of previously unreleased extras? For neophytes and—unfortunately, even for dedicated fans—the answer is: probably not. At first, all the extras look tempting—several complete live shows, demos and rough mixes, the "Jump in the Fire" and "Whiplash" singles (both of which come with the same two live b-sides, which was unnecessary), and an hour-plus long interview with drummer and lead mouthpiece Lars Ulrich. If the infamous band biopic Some Kind of Monster makes you cringe at the thought of spending upwards of an hour with Ulrich talking in your ear, his Q&A actually sheds a good deal of light on the early days of the band.
And, though the rough mixes vary in quality, the more fully-developed songs provide a startling new perspective on the material. Classics like "Motorbreath" and "Hit the Lights" actually sound fuller, meatier, and more vital. In this more organic form, the music breathes more. Apparently, the conventional wisdom of the time dictated that this sound was too crude for public consumption. But today, bands put a lot of effort into getting this kind of loose, raw sound on purpose. Now, we finally get to see that perhaps the final Kill 'Em All mix that the public got was too constricted, which makes sense given this music demanded a new approach to production values that hadn't been invented yet. But the new mastering job doesn't serve the main mix especially well. If anything, it only exposes the clenched and unnatural quality of the reverb that's applied to pretty much every instrument. Any time a vocal or snare hit rings out (like when frontman James Hetfield screams "PESTILENCE" on "The Four Horsemen"), the echo tail abruptly closes shut. If you were used to listening to this album on a shitty cassette or in a car or a noisy work environment, you probably never noticed. Here, the clunky gated reverb becomes the music's most noticeable feature.
As for the live material, it would be charitable to call it "bootleg quality." Not to mention that multiple rounds of pretty much the same songs get old pretty quick. The one thing that fans might hone in on is the historical value of early performances of material from the band's next album, 1984's Ride the Lightning. A January '84 performance of "Fight Fire with Fire" even includes a few bars of the song's delicate, classical guitar/Randy Rhoads-influenced intro played for real. (Later live shows featured the de-rigueur prerecorded version.) It must've been exciting to be in the room—as the band played on gear loaned by Anthrax after a Boston robbery, Hetfield explains with good humor to the crowd—but listening back is more an act of archaeology than enjoyment. Sure, it's funny and you can practically picture the acne when Hetfield shouts "Come on, I want you to scream louder than the fuckin' PA!" to the crowd. But unfortunately, it's difficult to discern the rhythm-guitar interplay between Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett. For a more useful document of the band's original two-guitar dynamic, you're better off going to the seminal demo No Life 'Til Leather, which features fellow thrash architect/future Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine. (Hammett only played leads on Metallica's first five albums.)
The thuggish lyrics on Kill 'Em All updated Motörhead's roaming-pirate vibe for a younger generation of brash American kids, as reflected in lines like "The show is through, the metal's gone / It's time to hit the road / Another town, another gig / Again we will explode" from the headbanging anthem "Whiplash." Fueled by hatred for L.A. hair metal and a pop mainstream that the band never could have dreamed would embrace it eight years later, Kill 'Em All raised a middle finger in the air while sounding a trumpet of unity for metalheads everywhere with its us-against-the-world mentality. Now, of course, its youthful persecution complex seems silly and sophomoric.
But in fact, that attitude seemed silly even by 1984, when Metallica released Ride the Lightning and pretty much left its youthful naivete behind for good. Yes, Hammett and late bassist Cliff Burton's fascination with comic books and Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy rears its head on "The Call of Ktulu," but on Ride the Lightning the band no longer comes across like a street gang but like a group of frightened young men using their hellacious sound as a shield against life's unsettling realities.
Ride the Lightning addresses capital punishment, death, suicide, and nuclear annihilation—basically, the array of concerns that would become metal's standard lexicon. Musically, the album represents the moment where thrash intersected with prog, thus raising the bar on technicality, structure, chops, and ambition. Its combination of broadened perspective and elevated musicianship arguably mark it as the point where metal as a whole graduated from goofy adolescent expression to an artform that could speak to thinking adults and nourish listeners long after they grew out of its primary demographic age group. In short, Ride the Lightning is the moment where metal developed a worldview. After Ride the Lightning, thrash turned into an arms race of ever-increasing technical proficiency.
Again, though, did an album of such iconic stature that has gone multiplatinum even warrant a deluxe repackaging? This new expanded edition out-does the Kill 'Em All reissue with more live shows (including a 1985 Castle Donington appearance), the whole album's worth of demos and rough mixes and even more audio interviews, this time featuring Burton and Hammett. Again, though, the quality of the live recordings is spotty at best. The band trainwrecks right from note one, for example, on a March '85 rendition of "Fight Fire with Fire." There's a fine line between warts-and-all charm and embarrassing fiasco that should stay in the vault, and this collection all too often leans more toward the latter. Even in cases where Metallica's formidable live chops come across, the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired. You have to think that if better-quality recordings existed from this time period, the band would have gotten its hands on them and released those instead.
There's no denying the incalculable impact of either of these albums, and it certainly doesn't hurt to have an excuse to pull them off the shelf again. And sure, obsessive completist/collector types will find a lot to sink their teeth into here. But for pretty much anyone else, other than the demos and rough mixes, these sets offer quantity over quality. Not to mention that it's irritating and confusing to navigate the difference in content between the vinyl, cd, and ultra-deluxe sets. Even the fairly dedicated fans who'd enjoy tracing Metallica's development as a live act during these two key stages will likely be disappointed here and are advised to steer clear and try YouTube instead. | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | null | April 13, 2016 | 10 | 82d9e6ae-1343-459d-9866-d850191df56a | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On their second album, the Doylestown, Penn., quintet Balance & Composure have made an unapologetically old-school alt-rock record of jet-engine guitars, impotent rage, and searing, soaring vocals-- it isn’t about teen angst, it just sounds like it. | On their second album, the Doylestown, Penn., quintet Balance & Composure have made an unapologetically old-school alt-rock record of jet-engine guitars, impotent rage, and searing, soaring vocals-- it isn’t about teen angst, it just sounds like it. | Balance and Composure: The Things We Think We're Missing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18388-balance-and-composure-the-things-we-think-are-missing/ | The Things We Think We're Missing | If you’ve resolved every resentment you’ve carried from high school, are in a conflict-free relationship with your significant other, and have not taken a minute in the past few months trying to figure out in literal terms what the fuck is wrong with you people*?*, then by all means, carry on. There’s nothing to see here. Since most of you stuck around, let’s consider Balance & Composure’s second LP The Things We Think We’re Missing. The Doylestown, Penn., quintet have made an unapologetically old-school alt-rock album of jet-engine guitars, impotent rat-in-a-cage rage, and searing, soaring vocals-- it isn’t about teen angst, it just sounds like it. As such, this record looks to fill a void for people seeking popular rock music more stylish and emotive than, say, Avenged Sevenfold, but aren’t really in a position to opt out into counterculture. In other words, it’s “alternative rock” in exact terms and nothing about this will make you feel cool or more connected to the zeitgeist. It’s even better if you don’t care about that shit at all, so the only question is, are Balance & Composure good at what they do?
On lead single “Reflection”, the answer is tacitly an emphatic fuck yeah, though I don’t sense that emphatic positivity is something it would cop to. But as a genre piece, it’s damn near perfect. Upon hearing it, a colleague of mine with more refined tastes said, “I’ve never felt that way in my entire life.” It’s a testament to “Reflection” when that way can be identified so quickly. There’s no conflict here, just pubescent confusion of encountering growth and emotions you don’t have the ability to process. A gorgeous lead riff from Andrew Slaymaker (real name, no gimmicks) introduces “Reflection” and is bodyslammed into altered shapes by two pounding chords. Meanwhile, Jon Simmons’ despondent vocals are softened with slightly flat harmonies-- he can’t decide whether to be feared or to be loved or whether he’s just in fear of being loved. A drum roll leads to what sounds like what should be a chorus of epic emotional venting, yet the band effectively renders the straightjacket of one’s self by thrashing in place. As far as the lyrics go, they’re filled with self-loathing, envy, judgment, anger, fear, pretty much everything that registers as a character defect to an adult. And yet “Reflection” reminds you of how those qualities can feel like survival skills at an age when every social setting feels like a warzone.
It’s a powerful formula and one B&C wisely try to replicate throughout The Things We Think We’re Missing. There’s a strange quirk where it sounds like the band is trying out new guises in two-song chunks: during the opening duo of “Parachutes” and “Lost Your Name”, B&C are a plutonium-powered emo band relying more on force than finesse, on slowly cresting melodies and sustained vocal howls rather than sharp hooks. They’re inversions of Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Circles”, forgoing grunge dynamics entirely by lunging out of your speakers and using the chorus as respite before another tidal push. They provide an easy segue into the more traditionally structured, car-friendly hooks of “Back of Your Head” and “Tiny Raindrop” and as Things progresses, B&C have subtly involved into a band that learned enough from their heroes to troubleshoot some of their mistakes. “When I Come Undone” asks what if the Cure’s Ross Robinson-produced album wasn’t some kind of forced primal scream therapy? What if Billy Corgan realized that he could rock a trenchcoat, pancake makeup, and a Stratocaster at the same time during his goth phase? Enjoy “I’m Swimming” and forget Silversun Pickups ever existed.
That said, The Things We Think We’re Missing is overwhelming four minutes at a time, galvanizing in 10 minute spans, and utterly exhausting taken as a whole. There are cracks in the brick wall of radio-adjusted compression-- hints of acoustic jangle peek through the stormy romanticism of “Tiny Raindrop”, “Ella” and “Cut Me Open” incorporate reverberating drone, and while the acoustic solo performance of “Dirty Head” works against just about every single strength of B&C, it’s probably what they meant when acknowledging the influence of Neutral Milk Hotel. Problem is they’re all mastered at the same extremely loud volume, negating the idea that Things is a record meant to be listened to sequentially rather than strip-mined for singles.
Simmons encounters similar issues with flexibility and nuance as a vocalist. When he’s going full blast, his tone articulates more than his actual words and standard issue angst (“I need a spark to light this house so dark and deep”) detonates into nuclear catharsis. When he tones down his delivery, a bratty, nasal edge puts an unfortunate spotlight on lyrics that draw from the usual sources for sensitive dude poetry-- Morrissey’s auto eroticism (the night drive fantasies of “When I Come Undone” and “Tiny Raindrop”), Microsoft Word thesaurus (“I need you on my garments/ come at me horrid eyes that seep into my system”) and Robert Smith’s playful surrealism, only without the playful part. The most wincing lyric here (“I’m the spider in your room/ and I got eight eyes all on you”) is taken from a song whose title projects the emotional tenor of the entire record: “Notice Me”.
It’s understandable, since B&C are in a position where they do have to beg for recognition. The Things We Think We’re Missing is a strong alt-rock album when such a thing is about the least fashionable thing imaginable, and its practitioners and fans are largely ignored-- their sonic ideals about punk and indie are sourced from Nirvana, but at a time when the platinum polish of Nevermind has become weirdly undervalued compared to the more ethically admirable In Utero. It carries on the tradition of alt-rock records that were crucial entry points for young listeners while being scoffed at by their older siblings: Siamese Dream, the Cure albums that got MTV airplay, Foo Fighters’ The Colour & The Shape. Not to mention their modern analogues, Deftones’ White Pony, Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside of Me, Thursday’s A City By The Light Divided, artful and ambitious heavy pop-rock albums that respectively transcended three genres that triangulate B&C’s coordinates (nu-metal, pop-punk, emo and/or screamo) and were still treated with hostility if not ignored entirely by ostensibly open-minded indie rock fans based on prior reputation. B&C aren’t at that level, but considering the leap they’ve made from their pedestrian debut Separation, The Things We Think We’re Missing serves notice that we shouldn't be surprised if they get there. | 2013-09-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | No Sleep | September 13, 2013 | 6.6 | 82dc1a80-6537-4931-a7e5-031cefa8c8b9 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Scottish band's fourth album avoids the escapist tendencies of their previous records to confront social and emotional turmoil with startling bite. And production from Leo Abrahams, a longtime Brian Eno collaborator, breaks through the sluggishness that had marked their recent releases. | The Scottish band's fourth album avoids the escapist tendencies of their previous records to confront social and emotional turmoil with startling bite. And production from Leo Abrahams, a longtime Brian Eno collaborator, breaks through the sluggishness that had marked their recent releases. | Frightened Rabbit: Pedestrian Verse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17574-pedestrian-verse/ | Pedestrian Verse | Growing up in Selkirk, Scotland, Scott Hutchison was a shy boy. Left in a room with other kids, he would go quiet, and for this, the story goes, his mother called him "her frightened rabbit." Years later, less shy, he began to write songs and sing them live, then along the way he added friends to the act-- two guitarists, a bassist, his brother on the drums-- and with them made albums on which he howled and drank and fucked and fought, every chord seeming to push the memory of his skittish namesake further and further away.
Yet the shy little boy remains. If a single thread can be spun from Frightened Rabbit's first three albums, it's Hutchison's chronic tendency toward escape: into and out of relationships and the past, down through the bottom of uncountable whiskey glasses. "Let's call me a Baptist, call this a drowning of the past/ She's there at the shoreline, throwing stones at my back," he sang on "Swim Until You Can't See Land", an easy favorite from 2010's The Winter of Mixed Drinks, the band jangling along behind as he disappears into the sea-- in search of rebirth, perhaps, or at least a change of scenery.
But Pedestrian Verse, Frightened Rabbit's fourth album, finds Hutchison and his crew in different waters. Opening track "Acts of Man" immediately disarms. "I'm that dickhead in the kitchen, giving wine to your best girl's glass," Hutchison breathes in a nasal falsetto over a gentle piano; the song seems poised to continue as some porcelain lament, but then begins its slow zoom out, from the kitchen to the street to the bar down the way, the percolating guitar and heartbeat drums rolling out as Hutchison notes the bar fights, the date rapes, the coward's festering pride. "Man, he breeds although he shouldn't/ Breeding just because he comes/ Acts the father for a minute/ Until the worst instincts return," he seethes. "I am just like all the rest of them," Hutchison sings, and he offers no apology, begs no forgiveness, slings no blame. This is a considerable step forward for the dude who once sang of a mangled breakup, "My clothes won't let me close the door/ 'Cause my trousers seem to love your floor."
Some sort of heartbreak skulks in the background here, too, though it's balanced with hints towards a similar split with religion. In "Late March, Death March", Hutchison is on the outs with both God and a girl; it's clear he's already given up on one, and the other's not faring much better. Assuming personal responsibility isn't exactly the stuff rock 'n roll fantasies are made of, but it sure as hell makes for better living-- and, in the right hands, better songs. As a lyricist, Hutchison's strength is increasingly proving to be lucid assessments of social and emotional turmoil; he can't push away the darkness completely, but he can feel around in every nook and cranny to get a full topography of the shadows.
More readily apparent than this new emotional maturity is how Frightened Rabbit has really shined up as a band. Earlier records had a certain cozy, shambolic feel: acoustic and electric guitars pushed along by dusty organ moans and piano lines that sounded plunked out in a dimly-lit barroom. It was charming, and occasionally bracing, but by 2012's State Hospital EP, the band's second release for Atlantic, they seemed bored by it all. Here, producer Leo Abrahams, a longtime Brian Eno collaborator, has come in and jumpstarted things. The quietly fierce drumwork of Grant Hutchison now forms the backbone around which guitars needle and prod; unexpected textures are layered deep into the tracks, with horns and string swells rippling against gauzy curtains of distortion. The chorus dynamics err on the side of restraint, avoiding Arcade Fire's apocalyptic urgency or Mumford and Sons' tweedy bombast. As always, Hutchison's rhotic howl is a pleasure all its own, but here he especially seems to knead and pull at his vowels.
The precise ecstasy of the production buoys the record through its few sluggish patches. There are the kernels of at least three great songs buried in the wonky diptych of "Housing (In)" and "Housing (Out)", and "Nitrous Gas" loses some lovely moments amidst a muddly anaesthetic metaphor; Hutchison's songwriting is best at its most emotionally specific. Frightened Rabbit isn't a perfect band-- and nobody knows this better than the lead singer. Of all the harsh truths he reminds himself of in Pedestrian Verse, the most endearing comes on the closing track, "Oil Slick", where he retraces his steps back to The Winter of Mixed Drinks just to gawk at his own maudlin tendencies. "Took to the ocean, in a boat this time," he sings over a rubbery electric guitar lope, a little smile in his voice. "Only an idiot would swim through the shit I write." | 2013-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Canvasback / Atlantic | February 7, 2013 | 7.6 | 82eb6b7f-2d1e-4ee9-ad3b-2ac92b33fbde | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
The full-length debut from the New York folk-rock duo addresses the nonlinear nature of healing with a gentle and deliberate touch. | The full-length debut from the New York folk-rock duo addresses the nonlinear nature of healing with a gentle and deliberate touch. | Babehoven: Light Moving Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babehoven-light-moving-time/ | Light Moving Time | In the fog of emotional turbulence, Babehoven’s Maya Bon holds onto everyday reminders that time moves on. Bon and her collaborator Ryan Albert explored the theme of healing earlier this year on Sunk, an EP that offered an insulated glimpse into grief and acceptance, narrated through suspended, patient songwriting. Their full-length debut, Light Moving Time, expands on Sunk’s musical and thematic foundations, addressing the often illogical and nonlinear nature of healing with a gentle and deliberate touch.
Blending folk and indie rock with the occasional glaze of shoegaze guitars, Babehoven ornament tender, consonant acoustics with subtle dissonance. Take “Do It Fast,” a track that touches on feelings of hopelessness. A free-moving, horn-like synth emerges in the background, accompanied at one point by what sounds like a taser sweeping the stereo range, and distortion overtakes Bon’s vocals as she sings about how she’s “been thinking about how a hurricane was named after you.” These cautiously unsettling features make it impossible to feel entirely comfortable while listening to Light Moving Time.
Even tracks that point toward hope like “I’m on Your Team” are lined with blue. The song begins with Bon’s vocals doubled by the guitar line, a moment of musical solidarity that embodies the concept of being alone but not lonely (or perhaps hiding it well). “Choosing pain when it’s clean/Learning how to be angry but not be mean,” she sings against a persistent guitar chug, suggesting a sense of personal responsibility that comes with time. Though Bon’s lyrics champion support systems and search for “a way out,” her wistful tone gives the song a melancholic air. The conflicted emotions reflect how trauma rarely disappears but continues to inform our lives in subtle ways; on time-halting closer “Often,” Bon speaks to it directly as a physical presence in the backseat of her car.
The pain of redefining our relationships to others threads through the record, like in uptempo standout “Stand It.” It’s a head-bobbing meditation on choosing distance from a loved one when it’s in your best interest: “I’d rather stand outside in the cold/Than walk the way back to my home,” Bon sings. “I love you, but I hate you anyway.” The following track, “Circles,” is its haunted afterimage, illustrating how walking away is easier said than done. Against processed vocals and reverb-heavy production that sounds like trying to stargaze at dusk, Bon sings, “I might be on my knees by sunrise/Begging for some way to stand.” Searching for a place to land, the single syllable of “I” wanders and winds like a pastoral flute.
Light Moving Time is especially evocative at its most expansive. On the highlight “Pockets,” Bon enhances lyrics like “You’re hoping that if there is a God/That they don’t search your pockets at heaven’s gate/And find the vices that drove us apart” with short melismas and sky-reaching notes. Her vocal range has chill-prompting potential, but more often it tends to stay within a certain radius. There are moments where the album’s circular melodies and chugging guitars feel too repetitive, like on “Break the Ice” and “June Phoenix” (which includes a rare wink at the audience: “I am trying to write something funny to get a good rating this time”). Light Moving Time could afford to lean more into dissonance. While the music can feel safe and overly reserved, Bon’s adventurous lyricism is what makes the record so lovely: at once diaristic and philosophical, disarming and inviting, introspective and far-reaching. | 2022-11-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | November 1, 2022 | 7.4 | 82f18454-5991-4a5b-b782-5e0340d55e25 | Jane Bua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jane-bua/ | |
Frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator Anna Wise's The Feminine: Act I boldly presents the plight of the everyday woman. If it's corny at times, it's clever at others. Those triumphs make it worthwhile. | Frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator Anna Wise's The Feminine: Act I boldly presents the plight of the everyday woman. If it's corny at times, it's clever at others. Those triumphs make it worthwhile. | Anna Wise: The Feminine: Act I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21850-the-feminine-act-i/ | The Feminine: Act I | Many knew Anna Wise as one-half of the duo Sonnymoon, as the siren who provides the Yin to Dane Orr's Yang. However, her celebrity kicked up a notch once she became Kendrick Lamar's go-to vocalist, lending her ethereal vibes to his projects Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City, To Pimp a Butterfly, and untitled unmastered. If Anna Wise had any perfect moment to step forward to her podium, then that time is certainly now.
She arrives armed with a message that many if not most have trouble effectively communicating. In 2014 a video circulated of a woman walking the streets of New York City amidst a diverse array of male cat calls. The video introduced a dichotomy that manifested itself in every Facebook comment section. Half of the viewers were offended (though many women were also unsurprised) and the other half rolled their eyes. The mixed reaction to that very video is exactly what Wise is speaking to on her EP. The project opens with a snippet of a dissertation on the feminine, and its need to be understood clearly. It pours into the delicate "Precious Possession," which at first listen channels all the romantic vibes of early Erykah Badu, but placed within the context of the project could arguably be completely sardonic. "I wanna be your princess," Wise gently coos. "Will you call me your girlfriend?" That's not to say women should exist as stoic figures shrugging at the sight of flowers; she's simply displaying the layers of the feminine psyche, which at times can be self-minimizing in the presence of love.
An interlude "How Would You Call a Dog?" reflects on the dual catcalling of both types of "bitches," as Wise snatches the derogations for "BitchSlut," a laundry list of absurd ways women are called both terms. It's empowering, but this topic has been talked into mastication. Still, when Wise cites reasons for being a "bitchslut," including "Cause your hair's long/ Cause you shaved it off," there's a tongue-in-cheek air of brilliance. "Decrease My Waist, Increase My Wage" is laid out similarly to a song by a group like the Coup, where the important lyrics are woven so tightly into a basic-sounding song that the stop-and-listen effect solicits an inevitable "Oh shit."
Any reference to women on anything is oftentimes an abrasive subject to broach, especially at a time when many are just learning to embrace the word "feminist." What Anna Wise attempts with The Feminine: Act I is to serve this realness with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. While it's still a jagged little pill to swallow—and the proof is in the EP's parts that traipse into cornier territory—Wise does present a degree of transparency that many attempt but wind up losing half their audience in the process. This isn't simply a project to make women nod and smirk; it's a work to hand over to men who assume every aspect of a woman's life is a gift with no curses. | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | May 2, 2016 | 6.9 | 82f25add-0730-4ab7-b766-411f82b44e9a | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
The hybrid jazz drummer and producer’s latest album uses his familiar post-production techniques but feels more deftly orchestrated and rhythmically complex. | The hybrid jazz drummer and producer’s latest album uses his familiar post-production techniques but feels more deftly orchestrated and rhythmically complex. | Makaya McCraven: In These Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makaya-mccraven-in-these-times/ | In These Times | In These Times opens with a rhythmic ostinato, a smattering of applause, and a quote from Harry Belafonte. It’s a sample of a radio interview that the folk singer and scholar gave with Studs Terkel, in which he discusses his interpretation of the John Henry story. In Belafonte’s view, the legendary rail tunnel worker was not necessarily against the steam drill that overseers wanted to bring in to finish the job of digging the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Railroad, or the human progress it represented. He only wanted to preserve the dignity of those who had given their lives to the tunnel. “I ain’t really opposed to the machine, I just feel that the machine can’t take the place of the soul and the sweat for the many men who died to help build this tunnel,” Belafonte says, speaking in Henry’s voice. “And we got to finish it, and it just ain’t no two ways about it.”
It’s easy to understand the resonance of this quote for Makaya McCraven, a drummer and composer who has spent his career thus far working by hand and by machine, fusing live-in-the-room jazz improvisation with the electronic manipulations of hip-hop. On albums like 2015’s In the Moment and 2018’s Universal Beings, that meant recording open-ended concerts and then taking a digital scalpel to the tapes of his ensembles’ performances: cutting, looping, rearranging, and occasionally overdubbing new parts; sculpting melodic themes out of stray bits of improvisation and whittling down rhythms to their hypnotic essences. In a series of remarkable performances after the release of Universal Beings, McCraven and his band recreated the album for the stage, playing meticulous arrangements of the bandleader’s hybrid creations and elaborating upon them with even more improv, as if he’d charted them out that way in the first place. The music had started fairly recognizably as jazz, then assumed a mutant electronic form, then came out the other side as jazz again.
In These Times, McCraven’s latest album, reminds me at times of the Universal Beings live show. (Putting numbers to his discography is difficult: not unlike a rapper’s, it is filled with mixtapes, collaborations, and expanded editions that can be just as vital as his “official” albums.) Though it uses some of the same compositional techniques as previous records, it is clearly the product of more deliberate work done in advance of the musicians picking up their instruments. For the first time, it sounds mostly like they are reading notation from a score. And yet it retains the unmistakable rhythmic imprint of hip-hop. McCraven favors meters that are just a sliver of a beat shorter or longer than you’d expect, which gives the effect of a looping sample that has been cut at slightly the wrong length. Like the Universal Beings live players—many of whom appear on In These Times—the musicians are imitating the sound of a chopped-up recording, playing with extreme precision that masquerades as a certain cobbled-together sloppiness. It often recalls J Dilla, who, in declining to quantize his beats to the rigid rhythmic grid that governed other producers’ work, brought new human unpredictability to the instrumental sound of ’90s and 2000s rap.
On the album-opening title track, McCraven deftly switches between emphasizing the asymmetrical jaggedness of the meter and downplaying it. At first, the band is shredding through obviously technical and difficult material; then, at the drop of a hat, they are practically playing a waltz—albeit one with a little limp in its step. The pulse hasn’t changed, but the feel of the music is on a different planet.
If that makes In These Times sound dry and academic, it isn’t. The title track is anchored in its first half by a wistful theme for string quartet and in its second by a breathtaking solo from alto saxophonist Greg Ward, neither of which requires any knowledge of arcane time signatures to get its hooks in you. Whereas most difficult music is imposing at first, and requires repeated listening to reveal its pleasures, In These Times works in the opposite fashion. It is groovy, tuneful, and approachable; only after careful study might you apprehend the music’s astounding intricacy, if you care to discover it at all. I came to deeper engagement with the album after listening closely to the rhythms, but I can imagine someone else delighting primarily in its lushly arranged melodies. You could play it at a dinner party without raising an eyebrow.
The best moments of In These Times come when an outburst of individual spontaneity is allowed to briefly rupture the album’s luxuriant surfaces and highly ordered inner workings: Ward’s sax solo on the title track; McCraven’s own quietly thunderous drumming on “This Place That Place”; a showcase for Matt Gold on “The Knew Untitled,” one of the most exhilarating guitar solos of recent memory, in any genre. McCraven’s previous albums were nearly all spontaneity. Even after his meticulous reorganization of the source material, there was no telling, on first listen, where a particular track might go. In These Times is more elegant, and more ambitious. Its rhythmic experiments represent a genuinely new development in the fertile interzone between hip-hop and jazz. But the album suffers slightly from its own sophistication. I found myself wishing to hear something that would raise an eyebrow at a dinner party: something like “Atlantic Black” a feverish group improvisation from Universal Beings—the sound of a band in unknown territory, in danger of collapsing with one false move.
You can read the title of In These Times in a few ways: as a gesture at the uncertainty of our era, an acknowledgement of the music’s resolutely contemporary nature, or a sly joke about its dizzying array of time signatures. Deliberately or not, it also reads like metacommentary on the broadening of McCraven’s music since In the Moment, the album that gave many listeners their first exposure to his blend of composition and improv. In 2015, he was capturing moments; in 2022, he is speaking to the times.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misattributed the guitar player on “The Knew Untitled.” | 2022-09-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-27T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem / Nonesuch / XL | September 27, 2022 | 8 | 82f38dbe-4ef1-48ef-ad65-d7a8d262c6e3 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Beyoncé-approved sister act are fearless on their debut album, reshaping pop and R&B in their own images until even the highest-profile co-signs seem beside the point. | The Beyoncé-approved sister act are fearless on their debut album, reshaping pop and R&B in their own images until even the highest-profile co-signs seem beside the point. | Chloe x Halle: The Kids Are Alright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chloe-x-halle-the-kids-are-alright/ | The Kids Are Alright | The description on Chloe x Halle’s YouTube channel still reads “just two girls who love making music in our living room.” Perhaps it stands as a monument to their humble beginnings, or maybe it’s as true today as it was 12 years ago, when they launched the page. Of late, though, that description feels far too modest to explain the talent and ambition heard on their debut album The Kids Are Alright.
The Bailey sisters, who grew up in Atlanta, started out covering an array of pop songs on YouTube at ages 13 and 11, respectively. The sheer power of their voices was undeniable, so much so that their 2013 cover of Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts” landed on the pop star’s radar. She signed them to her Parkwood imprint in 2015 and took them on the road as an opening act on her Formation tour, providing them with a ready-made audience, which Chloe x Halle have expanded by landing a co-starring role as twins on the “Black-ish” spinoff “Grown-ish.” But despite having one of the biggest artists in the world in their corner, Chloe x Halle aren’t banking on success by association. Their musical style is fearless, reshaping pop and R&B in their own images until even the highest-profile co-signs seem beside the point.
As soon as the album begins, they give us a taste of their intricate vocal arrangements. “Hello Friend,” the opening track, is a crash course in tonality and harmony done the Chloe x Halle way. Without a single stray note, they fill the space with layers upon layers of their angelic voices, soul and joy radiating everywhere. They follow that with the title track, an ode to the youth that is equal parts encouragement and a statement to adults that the future rests in good hands. It’s an especially prescient statement as society continues to bear witness to youth-led movements against gun violence and other socio-political ills—and a reminder of the importance of just letting kids be kids. “If I’m in the mood, I’ll get as ratchet as I wanna/Turn around and show you I can bless you with some culture,” they sing, making their case with even more ornate harmonies powered by tribal percussion and a chorus of themselves.
Their inventiveness is further amplified by the fact that Chloe x Halle write and arrange all of their songs; Chloe is the masterful producer on all but three here. Throughout the album, they excel when they push their artistry to its limits. “Down” highlights Halle’s operatic range while “Galaxy” is as otherworldly as its title. By the time the gorgeous ballad “Cool People” or the anthemic acrobatics of “Baby on a Plane” roll around, they might as well just be showing off. They shine, too, on a pure songwriting level. Chloe x Halle are a total package: There are sitcom themes (the lighthearted “Grown,” from “Grown-ish”) and soundtrack music (“Warrior,” from Ava Duvernay’s A Wrinkle in Time) fitting into a consistent whole with the rest of the album. “Hi Lo” is the album’s banger, with deep bass and racing hi-hats courtesy of Chloe and co-producer Pluss, who also worked on Beyoncé’s “Formation” and Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” alongside Mike WiLL Made-It. “You can try to point out all my flaws, that’s okay ’cause I still love them all,” they sing before GoldLink offers a suave verse of affirmations.
Chloe x Halle’s music exists in its own right, and speaks to and for a generation nearly two decades their mentor’s junior: Chloe is 19, while Halle turns 18 this week. The Kids Are Alright feels like a coming-of-age moment for the sisters, conveying the experience of having to figure out this music thing while still figuring out life. There are songs about self-discovery and lessons learned the hard way, but there's also a childlike innocence and sense of virtue blanketing the album. Chloe x Halle are a burst of optimism in a world of cynics.
Toward the end of the album, there’s a slow-burning meditation called “If God Spoke” whose tone gets to what’s so special about The Kids Are Alright. There is divinity in the way these ladies are unafraid to be hopeful and comfortable as themselves, and in the way they project that gift outward. The vocal layers make two women sound like an entire choir, as their voices wind around each other to unlock small pieces of heaven. Listening to their debut, it’s easy to believe that if God spoke, she would sound like Chloe x Halle. | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia | March 27, 2018 | 7.6 | 82f4497c-491c-462f-8d0f-1bee822175d9 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Thirty-five years after African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground, Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. The first four albums, now reissued by Sherwood on his On-U Sound imprint, increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead. | Thirty-five years after African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground, Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. The first four albums, now reissued by Sherwood on his On-U Sound imprint, increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead. | African Head Charge: My Life in a Hole in the Ground/Environmental Studies/Drastic Season/Off the Beaten Track | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21437-my-life-in-a-hole-in-the-groundenvironmental-studiesdrastic-seasonoff-the-beaten-track/ | My Life in a Hole in the Ground/Environmental Studies/Drastic Season/Off the Beaten Track | There's a telling line to be found on the back cover of African Head Charge's debut album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground: "Another 1991 On-U Sound Creation." That's all well and fine, except the album was made in 1981. It's a playful admission that what African Head Charge was doing to dub, post-punk, Afrobeat, industrial, and world music might make more sense 10 years down the road.
It's now 35 years later and Adrian Sherwood's deconstruction of the music of Africa, Jamaica, and Great Britain might have finally found its proper decade and century. With pop stars like M.I.A. grabbing at Brazilian baile funk; dubstep practitioners like Mala and Pinch favoring tracks that sound like pulled taffy; and the spare electronic contortions of Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Fade to Mind crew, Sherwood’s tracks are more relevant than ever. Last year, his On-U Sound imprint revived itself and began reissuing a wealth of material, from a survey of Sherwood's decades of dub-punk productions to the dizzying Trevor Jackson-curated Science Fiction Dancehall Classics comp. The music could have dated from 2015, no problem.
Now comes the reissuing of the first four albums of his most heady and vital project, AHC. Taking issue with (or maybe just the piss out of) Eno-Byrne's fake ethnography My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Sherwood created a studio entity along the lines of Eno’s oft-used quote for a "vision of a psychedelic Africa." In much the same manner that Fela's greatest bands had Tony Allen set as the heart, AHC's pulse comes from African percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, Sherwood’s co-conspirator throughout AHC. And titling their debut album My Life in a Hole in the Ground was no euphemism, as Berry Street Studios, the space that Sherwood utilized for his early work, was below street level.
Sherwood's work in UK punk and Jamaican expat dub is crucial to understanding post-punk of that era (around this same time, he produced the Fall and many others), and he was at his finest in African Head Charge. The first album is by far the most experimental of the bunch. Take "Elastic Dance," the opening track on My Life in a Hole in the Ground. A jaw harp twangs and flanges, a sinewave wheezes up and down, a skittering and skeletal drum and bass pattern emerge. And then all of it gets bandied about the stereo field by Sherwood. Always stretching his components to the breaking point and finding rubbery new spaces between these elements, Sherwood used dub techniques to explore the outer regions of punk, reggae, Indian classical, belly dancer motifs, and more.
And once you're this far beyond a certain genre's gravitational pull, Sherwood realized that these disparate forms could be melted back together into fucked-up shapes. Years later, "Far Away Chant," featuring the vocals of thunder-throated Prince Far I, even appeared during a violent moment in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The emphasis on negative space is such that when Ground standout track "Stebeni’s Theme" recently came on my ear buds during rush hour, the introduction of two percussionists on the train blended into that rubbery beat no problem.
Environmental Studies appeared the next year and was also recorded underground, yielding a similarly claustrophobic, dank feel. More so than the first album, Studies scans as the nexus between free improvisation and dub reggae, less interested in melodic fragments and more about exploring the dark space between the two musical forms. The rotating assemblage of players included Jamaican session players like saxophonist "Deadly" Headley Bennett and drummer Style Scott, who was part of the riddim team that backed everyone from Gregory Isaacs to Black Uhuru, but it also made room for members of the Pop Group and Rip Rig + Panic, as well as UK free improviser Steve Beresford. "Beriberi" showcases a swinging horn line that’s as close to ska as the virtual group ever got while "Crocodile Hand Luggage" pits Bonjo’s nyabinghi drums against the sounds of running water and animal cries.
By the time of Drastic Season, their third album in as many years, Sherwood, Bonjo, and cohorts had moved above ground, setting up at Southern Studios and exploring the digital hardware the studio provided. By then, Sherwood had moved beyond the dub template and began to mince the sounds into ever-smaller pieces. The croak of an actual fish becomes the central element of "I Want Water," as Sherwood drowns it in all sorts of severe, whiplashing effects. Even the smallest of musical gestures, such as the short bass figures and drum taps of "African Hedge Hog," get amplified until they become labyrinths. At times, the tracks scan more as experiments.
Off the Beaten Track struck the perfect balance between the mad professorial experiments of Sherwood and the crack live band that had Bonjo at the helm, but it also marked the end of the group for the next five years. The dub explorations hewed closer to the rhythms now, a sound that would soon be called "ethno-beat" and "tribal." Didgeridoos and gypsy violins get turned into gnarly buzzes, African chants turn into incants, Prince Far I’s chopped declamation mixes into Bonjo’s big beat drums, and the barking dog of "Some Bizarre" is the most psychedelic canine until that ‘shroom-chewing coyote.
Without as many heavy FX at Sherwood’s mixing desk (but an uptick of Fairlight and Synclavier noises), the grooves come to the surface. Here’s the clearest correlation from here to the early-'90s post-rock of Tortoise and HiM, the spacy throbs perpetuated by the Orb, and the illbient wooziness of WordSound’s roster. "Language becomes an instrument of reasoning in the true sense of the word," goes the chorus of "Language & Mentality," voiced by none other than Albert Einstein. While dealing with sounds over words, Sherwood’s work across these early African Head Charge albums nevertheless increased the vernacular of adventurous producers in the decades ahead, sounding all the more resonant in the 21st century. | 2016-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | February 1, 2016 | 8.2 | 82fb31d0-a252-4d5e-abad-86ab686aacd5 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Team Sleep was the first side project from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, and featured contributions from Mary Timony and Zach Hill. Ten years after the project's only album, the group has gathered to perform an intimate collection of album tracks and unreleased material recorded in front of a small live audience. | Team Sleep was the first side project from the Deftones' Chino Moreno, and featured contributions from Mary Timony and Zach Hill. Ten years after the project's only album, the group has gathered to perform an intimate collection of album tracks and unreleased material recorded in front of a small live audience. | Team Sleep: Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20907-woodstock-sessions-vol-4/ | Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4 | Team Sleep was Chino Moreno's first major side project, and the ones that came after were almost exactly like it—well-intentioned, admirably executed, and intermittently interesting amplifications of a trace element in Deftones' music. But upon the celebration of Team Sleep's 10th anniversary this past May, the band's only record, released in 2005 on a now-defunct major label, has taken on a Wet Hot American Summer-style, retroactive "wow" factor, both for its mere existence and the subsequent accomplishments of its already impressive cast. It now serves as the common link between Rufus Wainwright, Pinback, Ex Hex, Death Grips, Hole, and Faith No More (Melissa Auf der Maur and Mike Patton's contributions never made the final cut). That alone justifies revisiting Team Sleep, which is the ostensible purpose of Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4. An intimate collection of album tracks and unreleased material recorded in front of a small live audience, the result is much more cohesive record than Team Sleep. It is also a less compelling one.
Mary Timony, Rob Crow, and producer Greg Wells (responsible for the Wainwright and, um, Mika connection) did not make it to upstate New York. It's just as well. Team Sleep was slapdash by default—it was nearly 10 years in the making and reconfigured after its planned 2003 release was scuttled by a leak. Downsizing the personnel rips out much of the inert stuffing that padded out Team Sleep's nearly hourlong runtime—Timony's solo cut ("Tomb of Liegia") was proof enough that any vocalist can sound fairly anonymous doing Sneaker Pimps-style deadpan trip-hop, while the explosive anti-chemistry on "King Diamond" showed how much Moreno can embarrass himself without actually rapping. And while Zach Hill's participation technically qualifies Team Sleep as a retroactive Deftones/Death Grips supergroup, his metallic, skittering breakbeats mostly worked against Moreno rather than with him—the Deftones songs after which Team Sleep was modeled ("Teenager", "Lucky You") tended to be muted, free of distorted guitars and all the better for it.
Hill has been replaced by Gil Sharone—a former member of the Dillinger Escape Plan who already has experience replacing a percussive maniac in a high-profile, alt-rock side project due to his time in +44. He ably recreates Hill's parts, but the wise selection of Team Sleep cuts ensure this is meant to be a more traditional rock record. Prior highlights "(Ever) Foreign Flag" and "Princeton Review" unlock themselves from a machinistic grid and take on an airy, major-key expansiveness that Moreno never quite achieved with Palms, even if they were focused on doing just that. Likewise, "Blvd. Nights" is angular, angry, and alive, while "Live From the Stage" stretches out to become the massive show closer it never had the chance to be.
While the Mo' Wax-worship on Team Sleep can be now seen as both its definitive feature and inherent flaw, the same could be said of Moreno's vocals on Woodstock Session**s. No matter the context, as long as Moreno is singing, you will be forced to compare it to Deftones. Dude can't help it—he's one of the most immediately identifiable stylists in mainstream rock from the past two decades, his vaporous, wavering melodies nearly impossible to trace and usually conveying a highly identifiable mix of sensuality and menace. This is even more true of Team Sleep than it was in ††† and Palms, so even the best work here ends up sounding like a weakened version of "Tempest" that wouldn't be capable of soundtracking Furious 7.
Such is the nature of Moreno's non-Deftones work: Moreno's outside projects do one thing, whereas Deftones are successful synthesists, playing up dynamic contrasts that come off as innovations. Woodstock Sessions is the third Moreno-fronted record to be released since Koi No Yokan, and it's the first where a new Deftones album is within view—though the when is unclear, they had promised a September due date back in March, and they officially finished recording about a month ago. As such, it's hard to feel disappointed in Woodstock Sessions or view it as a distraction. It just confirms what we keep finding out about Moreno's music outside of his main gig—it sounds either too much like Deftones or not enough unlike them. | 2015-08-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | self-released | August 10, 2015 | 6 | 8303333d-95b0-464c-939b-e3c0e3183731 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Hold Steady frontman's second solo album is a character-driven record that's a few shades darker than his last solo outing. It's also driven by acoustic guitar, which puts even more focus on Finn's words. | The Hold Steady frontman's second solo album is a character-driven record that's a few shades darker than his last solo outing. It's also driven by acoustic guitar, which puts even more focus on Finn's words. | Craig Finn: Faith in the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20993-faith-in-the-future/ | Faith in the Future | Through his work first with Lifter Puller, then with the Hold Steady, and later as a solo artist, Craig Finn has created a universe as big as America, a stage that stretches from Minneapolis to Ybor City, from the bars of Chicago to behind bars in Memphis. It’s a world populated by hoodrats and club kids, by dealers and party girls, by guys who look like André Cymone and women named Robbie Robertson ("but people call me Robo"), by the financially desperate and the spiritually confused. Each new song and each new album expands that universe significantly, implicitly or explicitly adding new chapters to ongoing stories as Finn hangs out off to the side, narrating from the periphery of the scene.
It can be forbidding to pick up these narrative strands at this late date, but at his best Finn’s songs swallow you up in that word entirely. His lyrics continually provoke a spark of recognition, as he invites you to connect the dots between a new song and an old one. Listening to "Sarah, Calling from a Hotel", from his new solo album, is a bit like eavesdropping on a friend who has landed on rough times. "Hadn’t seen her since the races at the ending of last summer," Finn sings over a sparse coffeehouse strum. "We watched the horses run up on each other/ She looked pretty." Is this the unnamed subject of "Chips Ahoy!", from the Hold Steady’s 2006 breakthrough Boys and Girls in America, the clairvoyant who "can tell which horse is gonna finish in first"?
If so, the tone of chapter is much darker and more dire than migraines and emotional detachment. Faith in the Future is a character-driven record, even if it doesn’t restore Finn to the heights of his mid-2000s heyday. It’s full of prominent proper names: Sarah and Maggie, Christine and Sandra. St. Peter even shows up, because this is a Craig Finn album. The names are mundane, not exotic. You probably don’t know anyone named Charlemagne, but you’re likely Facebook friends with a Christine. There’s not a single hoodrat on Faith, but there are plenty of people caught between the youthful indiscretions of the past and the adult consequences of the present.
That pretty much describes Finn these days. Even during the disastrous Bennigan’s gig in "Roman Guitars", he comes across as more grown up, imbuing his narrators/stand-ins with a maturity that pushes them even further into the margins—the fate of all thirty- and fortysomethings. He’s no longer talking to the kids, and he’s not coming up the stairs or coming from the streets. Instead, he has entered what you might call the Peter Wolf phase of his career, when the old band has sputtered out and the frontman tries to re-establish himself as a serious songwriter. And if you don’t know who Peter Wolf is, well, then you’ll realize there is a certain unglamorous anonymity that comes with respectability.
The catch, of course, is that the Hold Steady and the J. Geils Band were great groups—exciting and clever and bold and even fun as they wallowed in rock’s less reputable urges. Downplaying riffs in favor of texture, Faith in the Future plays it much safer, which means there’s more emphasis on the words than on Finn’s delivery of them. Finn’s solo debut, 2012’s Clear Heart Full Eyes, attempted to match his songs to amiably twangy arrangements, which in retrospect was an intriguing experiment, but there’s no comparable strategy in place for enlivening these songs. There’s a lot of bland acoustic strumming, as though the austerity of the arrangement were meant to reinforce the slice-of-life songwriting, but anyone who has ever skipped "Citrus" or bristled over Live at Fingerprints knows that acoustic isn’t Finn’s best setting. He doesn’t always have to have a rousing bar band behind him, but he does need something that will lend his lyrics more immediacy and higher stakes.
The best songs succeed despite the music, not because of it. "St. Peter Upside Down" may be the most compelling song of his solo career, a sharp juxtaposition between romantic regret and religious sacrifice that somehow grows more burdened, more beat down with every iteration of its chorus. Finn has, of course, plumbed similar territory in the past, but instead of redundant, it plays like the culmination of his obsession with Catholicism, as though he’s adding an epilogue to his previous spiritual inquiries. As it proceeds, Faith in the Future becomes more and more a benediction for the scene, a goodbye to all that. The perfectly titled "I Was Doing Fine (Then a Few People Died)" sounds impossibly world-weary, as Finn gets drunk with an old friend (possibly, hopefully even Sarah herself). "She said some nights I wonder if anything means anything," and the only consolation he can offer is, "I never said I was Jesus." | 2015-09-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-09-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | September 8, 2015 | 6.3 | 830a0d88-d95b-424e-b791-36c49b3ab51b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
It's not very exciting behind the scenes at Pitchfork. Writers wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up don ... | It's not very exciting behind the scenes at Pitchfork. Writers wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up don ... | Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5358-the-moon-antarctica/ | The Moon & Antarctica | It's not very exciting behind the scenes at Pitchfork. Writers wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up don't hustle around a maze of cubicles while Ryan chews out rookies in his office. We have converted no lofts into spacious playpens loaded with iMacs and Nerf hoops. No interns yet. (Unless Ryan's holding back on me.) Mostly we sit around discussing music. And this isn't even done in the photogenic setting of a stoop or a coffeeshop. We talk about music constantly on the Internet, which, admittedly, is geeky. Plus, we're not even trying to sell anything on the Internet, further compounding our stubbornness. (Some lady beat us to the punch with our farming equipment site at Pitchfork.com, but we're still looking into eRakes.com.)
Yet every so often-- whether due to astronomical occurrences, economic fluctuations, or inherent quality cycles (which have all actually been debated at one point)-- an album comes along that inhibits our serotonin uptake, cleans our ears, palpitates our hearts, ignites our passion, and justifies our existence. I've argued that this occurs approximately every three years, due to slight financial recessions. It's that time again. At this point, I think the world agrees on OK Computer as the last major event in album rock. For at least a few months, the world can stop waiting for Radiohead's next album, and start wondering how in the hell Modest Mouse will ever top the monumental, ground-breaking, hypnotic, sublime The Moon & Antarctica.
Somebody just snickered. Modest Mouse generate a divide between the venerating and violent like few other bands. The latter of which currently questions my ascertations. Wipe the slate clean. You officially have not heard Modest Mouse until you have heard their major label debut. The growth, bravery, and confidence are staggering for a trio that most recently hammered through a song about "doin' the cockroach." Producer Brian Deck of Red Red Meat conjures the supernatural. Layers upon layers of treated and raw sounds blend into a thick headtrip. Piano, cello, sleighbells, keyboards, chimes, and more can be excavated from the mix. Singing guitarist Isaac Brock constantly obsesses over the afterlife, and with Deck's help he's found it, far out in space and inside his clouded, scattered brain.
"3rd Planet" opens the record innocently enough. Isaac plucks a lovely fluttering acoustic bed before he admits, "Everything that keeps us together is falling apart," tersely summing the human condition and the theme of the record in ten seconds. Suddenly, echoing, truck-sized drums stomp over the ebow-dripping chorus as Brock repeatedly pronounces under a sheet of reverb, "The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth/ If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were." Those failing to find the brilliance inherent in Modest Mouse at this point, please check in your Xanax at the window and an agent will escort you to the Target music department.
By the time track two, "Gravity Rides Everything," begins with backwards drums, strums, and plucks, it's quite evident Mouse Mouse have traveled well beyond their past. The song's percussion relies on jacked drumstick claps and electro-bongos as no less than five guitar tracks float on aching melodies. Deck's hands keep the affair shimmering and clear, in what will undoubtedly vault him into the echelon of Fridmanns and Godriches. Laser guitar lines and Brock's wrath blare over violins and undulating bass on the massive "Dark Center of the Universe." Structurally, it's still classic Modest Mouse up to this point, excepting the volume of warped effects.
"Perfect Disguise" quietly kicks off the otherworldly passage of Moon. A chorus sighs "Broke my back" over delicate pickings, sleepy kickdrums, accentuating banjo, and oddball guitar pings. Looping tones usher a nasty bassline and disco rhythms as "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" ceremoniously kicks listener ass. Sinister vocal doubletracking bursts into crackled shouting. Those familiar with Modest Mouse's live show will instantly recognize this as a trademark moment for Brock screaming into his guitar pickups. This heavy march, driven by Jeremiah Green's hissing breaks, sounds wholly unique and creepy.
"A Different City" sits like the obvious single. Flanged riffs pump Pixies-ish glee in Modest Mouse's tightest punch to date. After this brief foray into crunching pop, "The Cold Part" stretches out to infinity. Chiming guitar, strings, over-dubbed echoes, deteriorating machines, and thumping drums fill a dark, beautiful void as a ghostly Brock laments, "So long to this cold, cold part of the world." Any of Brock's prose is instantly quotable. "Alone Down There" announces, "Hello, how do you do?/ My name is you," uncomfortably close to the inner ear. As the song crescendos with building, buzzing guitar, Modest Mouse distills Built to Spill's essence in two minutes. "I don't want to you to be alone down there," Brock pleads. Angelic harmonies grant him his wish.
The epic "The Stars are Projectors" furthers the future of rock in grand gestures. Shifting between acoustic interludes and searing guitar over pounding drums, lyrics postulate the Descartian notion that our world is merely an elaborate dreamscape. Pretty sharp for Northwestern punks. The pace soon accelerates as the song swirls into a sonic twister. Through studio trickery, warbling drums sound as if winds howl outside, prying the roof from above to snatch you into a maw of shrill violins and sheer feedback.
A stripped death ballad peppered with accordion provides perfect comedown on "Wild Packs of Family Dogs." Thus begins the third movement of the record. "Paper Thin Walls" pops along in blue-collar fashion on cowbells and and woodblocks like fIREHOSE, while still injecting the haunted flourishes of the album. If Nirvana played folk with Massive Attack it might end up a bit like "I Came as a Rat." Standard power chords melt into astral tape manipulation. The calm, beautiful respite before the closing snarl comes in "Lives." "It's hard to remember you live before you die," Brock sings over weeping strings. "My hell comes from inside," he reminds. Back comes the resigned aggression. "Life Like Weeds" jangles and bows with still more poignancy. Most grand, expansive, experimental albums of this sort are expected to end with a quiet snuff. Modest Mouse explode into the noisiest, fastest piece to close the record. "What People are Made Of" cuts abruptly on fuzzed bass, clashing cymbals, and attacking guitars-- an ideal ending for a record centered on death and the inability to understand.
So I've just taken you through the entire album. As a fan, I know this sort detail is expected of hallmark albums. In anticipation of the next masterpiece, we all soak up as much info as we can get. Getting geeked up is part of the drama. For the first time, Modest Mouse craft an album, not a collection of songs. That they manage to go beyond any other rock band out there is staggering. The sequencing weaves a dramatic ebb and flow of emotion. Every song is packed with fantastic sounds that reach out for space and salvation. The band is now precise and broad. Eric Judy's fluid bass quietly escorts the ear subconsciously through the appropriate moods. Green's drumming is playful and inventive. There is no way Modest Mouse will ever pull this off live. The space, equipment, and personnel needed seems limitless. Yet this scale rockets the album instantly into Vahalla.
An intoxicating mix of uncertainty and confidence, The Moon & Antarctica constructs hallow approximations of heaven, hell, and deep space-- most of which exist vividly in Isaac Brock's questioning mind. OK Computer must be mentioned, for Modest Mouse just got invited to the same club. They can chat existentially in the sauna. But unlike's Radiohead's unease at technology and quickening society, Modest Mouse grapple with the general conjectures of humankind. The title aptly entails the whole of the album. Sometimes the most spooky, alien places are not too far off. Similarly, our immediate surroundings and internal environment feel even more otherworldly. Modest Mouse seek salvation in God, death, and relationships. Fortunately, the rest of us can sometimes find it in records. | 2000-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | June 13, 2000 | 9.8 | 8312e778-c863-4d30-b220-247a3b07c8eb | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
On a new mini-album, the K-pop group known for bold summer hits returns with refined, verdant dance-pop better suited for springtime. | On a new mini-album, the K-pop group known for bold summer hits returns with refined, verdant dance-pop better suited for springtime. | Red Velvet: The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/red-velvet-feel-my-rhythm/ | The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm | For the first half of their career, Red Velvet gave equal attention to both halves of their name: “Red” for eye-catching pop confidence, “velvet” for classy restraint. Titles of their past releases, The Red and Perfect Velvet, were prosaically clear about which side the music played for, but since the explicit blend of the two on 2018’s The Perfect Red Velvet, the genre-bending girl group have merged their dueling components with increasing abandon. On their latest mini-album, The ReVe Festival 2022 - Feel My Rhythm, released just a fortnight before the eerie glimmer of Japanese full-length Bloom, Red Velvet return with a verdant dance-pop sound. Clothed in Pre-Raphaelite finery in the era’s artwork and videos, the queens of bold summer hits deliberately make their comeback with a refined springtime landscape in tow.
Feel My Rhythm is colored in blooming detail: A promenade from purple and green to yellow and blue in the swooning “Rainbow Halo,” the tranquility of fluttering “petals” in “In My Dreams,” billowing “confetti” across the hook of “Feel My Rhythm.” Bold and stylish, “Feel My Rhythm” is one of Red Velvet’s finest title tracks. Reminiscent of the elegant darkness of their 2019 hit “Psycho,” “Feel My Rhythm” is based on a wistful sample of Bach’s “Air on the G String” layered with a clangorous EDM trap beat. But the song’s frisson isn’t based on the shallow spectacle of the two genres’ contrast. Instead, “Feel My Rhythm”’s contradictions serve to elevate the harmony, playing as smooth and lush as the similar pop concept on the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” Irene’s blunt opening line—“We’re blowing up this fancy ball”—verbally protests while sonically agreeing, and Yeri’s spoken delivery of “Grab me in your motion/G-give me another direction” stutters in time with the detonating rhythm behind her. She sounds unharmonious but skillfully sidesteps discordance.
The sauntering “BAMBOLEO” plays at a five-pronged intersection of nations—its title likely derives from a Spanish-language song by a French band, its K-pop melody ornamented with Japanese city pop stylings, its hook declared romantically in English. But it primly avoids chaos, sounding as evenly dreamy as a Tokyo-tinged cut off of K-pop contemporary YUKIKA’s 2021 EP Timeabout. Only “Good, Bad, Ugly” feels underwhelming in the context of the mini, tepidly and unmemorably strolling through well-trod R&B. Similarly, “Beg for Me” declares itself sensually commanding but is fairly chaste in execution. The chanted invocation of “Dance for me, work for me, beg for me, die for me” and murmured request of “bring out your freak” are amusingly sterile—only Wendy and Joy’s rap glimmers with any real sultriness, delivered with a dark smirk and whispered haste. But the luxurious, balmy closer “In My Dreams” brings a more complex conclusion. Despite all the ornate bravado and glamor across Feel My Rhythm, the ballad centers on a surprisingly tender admission of rejection: “In my dreams, you love me back”.
In the video for “Feel My Rhythm,” the members of Red Velvet drape themselves in the visual beauty of Western classics—Seulgi seated in striking Stygian stylings, Joy raptly posed as John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia,” Irene arcing across the frame in a diaphanous recreation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famous swing. But it’s the less conspicuous Bosch references that ring truest. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” isn’t as immediately Instagrammable as Monet’s lilies, but its phantasmagorical presence—the triptych’s surreal details strewn across a landscape of monstrous set pieces—feels like an appropriate metaphor for Red Velvet’s mythical stature in the modern landscape of K-pop. Despite stumbling on last year’s Queendom, Feel My Rhythm stirs awake from complacency and reinstates the group’s regality without compromising their principles. Resolutely elegant and vocal amid a flashy, Blackpink-influenced fourth generation of girl groups, Red Velvet shrug off trends and embrace their signature idiosyncrasy. | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | SM Entertainment | April 4, 2022 | 7.4 | 8316db90-5598-41d2-8f7e-519da6de1e1d | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
On her debut record, Santogold enlists an all-star team of producers for this inconsistent (if occasionally stunning) blend of dub, new wave, and hip-hop. | On her debut record, Santogold enlists an all-star team of producers for this inconsistent (if occasionally stunning) blend of dub, new wave, and hip-hop. | Santogold: Santogold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11483-santogold/ | Santogold | Santi White used to work in A&R, which gives her put-downs on debut single "Creator" a professional air: "Sit tight I know what you are/ Mad bright but you ain't no star." As Santogold, White is putting her knowledge of star quality into practical effect. At its best, her album's cross-genre confidence is dazzling, combining dub, new wave, and hip-hop to create some of the year's freshest pop. At its worst, it feels annoyingly overthought.
The central questions of Santogold's first single, "Creator" (who's real and who's fake?), seem to nag at her, but its stunning follow-up, "L.E.S. Artistes", returns to the topic of creativity, hype, and integrity, with the singer sinking her teeth into Lower East Side poseurs and wannabes. White's also walking a line herself: She's a professional songwriter, and talked to the BBC earlier this year about writing for Ashlee Simpson. "It's like two different hats that I have to wear. It's like the difference between writing fiction and writing ad copy. It's like a formula versus your art."
That's fair enough. It's not unlike the age-old compromise of film directors-- a movie for the studio, and a movie for me. The problem is that when you compartmentalize formula and art, you risk creating a formula for your art, defining it by what it isn't rather than what it is. Santogold's second half seems to fall into this trap, with a series of tepid dub-influenced tracks that kick her obvious pop gifts-- melody, hooks, and bounce-- to the curb. On "Anne", the usually fiery White sounds muted and apathetic; "Starstruck" is a patience-eroding mess of keyboard fuzz; and the grating "Unstoppable" feels like being lectured by a parrot.
"Unstoppable" is also the track which sounds closest to White's friend and collaborator M.I.A. Hers is the name you'll think of first when you hear Santogold: They share co-producers Diplo and Switch, as well as a taste for bass and a forthright vocal style. The more you listen, though, the shallower the resemblance seems: Santi White can do M.I.A.'s tongue-swallowing bark if she wants to, but she's just as comfortable with the gentler registers her melodies require. And while M.I.A. uses global club music to project a future pop blueprint, Santogold explores how they integrate with renegade music of the past.
For much of Santogold, White is channeling and recombining a series of indie icons: Debbie Harry, Kim Deal, Ari Up, Joe Strummer, and Karen O. On "My Superman" she captures the imperious swoop of Siouxsie Sioux and drapes it over the kind of stern electro Goldfrapp used to make. "I'm a Lady" marries ska-pop verses to a strutting Elastica chorus. "Lights Out" finds a fascinating middle ground between the Pixies and the Go-Go's.
This could turn the record into a spot-the-reference game, but White glues it together first with the backing harmonies she uses to sweeten most tracks, and second with her love of space and echo. The early 1980s fascinate her, and I'd guess a big part of why has to do with the era's cross-breeding of rock, punk, and reggae. A trio of songs-- "You'll Find a Way", "Shove It", and "Say Aha"-- evoke that moment when rock's aggression met reggae's drive and depth, and it makes for Santogold's most thrilling sequence. "Say Aha" in particular is perfect new wave bubblegum-- 2 Tone keyboards, phaser effects, a stomp-ready chorus, and a surf guitar solo to finish. As if to ward off accusations of revivalism, it leads into "Creator", a grimy arcade funk jam that's Santogold's heaviest and most successful electronic move.
"Creator" has already soundtracked more than one commercial, and if "L.E.S. Artistes", Santogold's best song, gets similar exposure it could be inescapable. It already sounds huge, with its soaring chorus that should resonate with anyone facing change: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up." In Santi White's case "it" is stardom, and "L.E.S. Artistes" might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The irony of this song about compromise is that, like the other great tracks on Santogold, it shows exactly why she's in demand with Ashlee or Lily Allen: She's a consummate pop songwriter. Santogold might try to separate formula and art, but her album catches fire when she blasts that distinction into irrelevance. | 2008-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-05-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Downtown / Lizard King | May 7, 2008 | 7.1 | 831f3fc1-88e5-4056-b755-5af5efceb7ef | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
The most mysterious group in hardcore pull back the curtain to reveal: a rock band. If their new album sounds like something you’d hear on alt radio, that’s the point. | The most mysterious group in hardcore pull back the curtain to reveal: a rock band. If their new album sounds like something you’d hear on alt radio, that’s the point. | The Armed: Perfect Saviors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-armed-perfect-saviors/ | Perfect Saviors | Oh, the irony of transforming into action figures only to get scooped by Barbie. For all the promotional and physical muscle the Armed have flexed during the rollout of their own summer blockbuster, none of the pull quotes—“a chocolate cake full of broken glass,” “the real story is more confusing than any lie”—has the snap of Greta Gerwig boasting of Barbie that “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” On Perfect Saviors, the Armed are no longer a collective or a project, but a big ol’ rock band with superproducers, magazine covers, clean choruses, and slick videos, all in the service of meta-arena rock that critiques the concept of rock stardom itself. Artists call this sort of conflict “juxtaposition,” diehards might call it compromise. The Armed appear to see it like Gerwig does, that the only way that mass entertainment can reconcile art and commerce is to make the latter finance its own roast.
In that sense, Perfect Saviors finishes the job started by 2021’s ULTRAPOP, a thrilling album that mostly operated in the theoretical realm. “Pop” referred less to melody or cult of personality than a general ideal of instant gratification and the many hours that go into the science of eye and ear candy. “All futures, destruction!” was a good hook; so was having a bodybuilder named Clark Huge hulking over a bank of synthesizers, or singer Cara Drolshagen in triplicate wearing Juggalo makeup. The Armed bypassed the personal disclosure and parasocial identification now expected of superhero films and pop stars to satisfy an eternal tenet of entertainment: Normal people want to watch extraordinary people do cool shit that they couldn’t possibly do themselves.
The Armed’s new album requires less conceptual heavy lifting. There is no prerequisite knowledge of Guy Debord or Andy Kaufman, of the fake “Dan Greene” or the real Dan Greene, or of Frank Turner this time around. The Armed’s unified theory is that everything is wrestling and ball is life. Scene-chewing opener “Sport of Measure” presents the objective side of this philosophy, alluding to basketball, capitalism, or the technical metal and hardcore that defined the Armed’s past work: gamified pursuits where the winner is bigger, better, faster, and just more than the other guy. Lead single “Sport of Form” is an intricate mini-suite that ropes in Julien Baker and Iggy Pop to represent subjective competitions like figure skating and gymnastics and art, the pursuits your coworker with the Barstool shirt doesn’t think are real because they’re judged and probably rigged. In between are things like boxing and the stylized, shockingly straightforward live performance video for the GNC-glam stomper “Everything’s Glitter”: Victory can be achieved by knockout or just looking really damn good.
And so Perfect Saviors dares to be conventionally attractive—the first time where the Armed’s actual songwriting isn’t meant to be judged on a curve, relative to other metal or hardcore bands. The first seconds bring Tony Wolski’s denimed drawl out to the front, exposing the florid turns of phrase that got buried in static on ULTRAPOP: “Take my fill of these ambrosia nights,” “I’m drama in these khaki towns.” If “Everything’s Glitter” and “Liar 2” are comparable to something currently playing on California’s alt-rock mainstay KROQ, that’s the whole point. What do you think they brought in Alan Moulder and Justin Meldal-Johnsen and former members of Zwan and Red Hot Chili Peppers and half of Jane’s Addiction for?
Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard. Think of a yoked Strokes, or Queens of the Stone Age if “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” replaced its lyrics with the ingredients in Premier Protein. Yet compared to the concept of rock that the Armed once crafted in their own image, it feels vaguely unsatisfying. Unlike the full integration of melody and melee on “All Futures” and “An Iteration,” the Armed-ness here can feel grafted on like producer tags; a blast beat where a drum fill might suffice, a surge of power electronics rather than synth swells. Perhaps this is where the concept of ULTRAPOP meets critique on Perfect Saviors: With enough effort, anyone could achieve a radio-rock banger just like they can get rock-hard abs.
The Armed reference “An Iteration” numerous times throughout Perfect Saviors, establishing continuity within the franchise and unwittingly drawing out its fundamental flaw: While a vivid, imaginative way of doing the arena rock thing, their means of subverting it feels like a repetition of established talking points. You know the syllabus by now: the allure of false idols, the hollowness of fame, the numbness of information overload, the unreliability of the news, “pretend kings with plastic lives in big clone houses,” “this ain’t the same fucking thing you’ve been sold before.” Mind-blowing stuff if first encountered as a teen via Nothing’s Shocking, or Zoo TV, or “The Dope Show,” less so when once-indie artists like Arcade Fire and St. Vincent occupied the same meta-arena rock platforms decades later. Still, the lack of novelty in the Armed’s message doesn’t make it any less true.
When the Armed veer off message during the second half of Perfect Saviors, they’re reborn as a band who promised limitless possibilities, especially applying their physicality to more limber forms of music: Madchester melon-twisters (“Burned Mind”), angular dance-punk (“Liar 2”), and jazz-fusion (“Perfect Grieving”). The redemption of Perfect Saviors is less a matter of muscle or metal than it is mischief and misdirection, none more jarring than the quietest song they’ve ever made. “In Heaven” does the acoustic ballad thing and doesn’t attempt to be the Armed’s answer to “I’m Just Ken.” The Julien Baker harmonies, a possible Smashing Pumpkins reference, and a saxophone solo are all presented earnestly, as is the single most vulnerable lyric Wolski’s ever sang: “My new body waits for me in heaven.” Not exactly “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” but still an admission that these He-Man are human after all. | 2023-08-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sargent House | August 25, 2023 | 7.8 | 83200ba8-78ac-44b7-aa15-5c82a67e4615 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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