alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gold Panda's warm and exuberant new album sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way. | Gold Panda's warm and exuberant new album sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way. | Gold Panda: Good Luck and Do Your Best | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21874-good-luck-and-do-your-best/ | Good Luck and Do Your Best | Two years ago Gold Panda made a series of trips across Japan with the photographer Laura Lewis to gather visuals and field recordings for what was supposed to be “a sight and sound documentary,” perhaps not unlike Chris Marker’s quiet and thoughtful film essays. So far the documentary hasn’t been made, but the impressions of the trips during the fall and spring of 2014 led to his first album in three years, Good Luck and Do Your Best. Apparently the moment of inspiration and the album’s title came from a chance interaction with a taxi driver who wished them luck, saying those very words as they exited the cab. He wrote the album in Chelmsford, using Laura's photos, their colors and experiences, as catalysts for the album’s 11 tracks.
It is decidedly brighter, more low-key, and less dance-oriented than his previous outing *Half of Where You Live**. *Instead this newest album seems to fit more into the structure and mood of his debut *Lucky Shiner. *The same spirit of nostalgia, pleasantly handmade feel (which comes from his expert use of MPCs), and wistful joy pervades *Good Luck and Do Your Best. *It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.
The best tracks capture the short-lived exuberance of the photographer's golden hour. When the sun is on the cusp of setting, if you’re lucky, streetscapes will be awash in an exceedingly warm golden light. It makes whatever you photograph seem more buoyant, colorful, and evanescent. The bright drum-pad meditation of “In My Car” and the understated string arrangements in “Time Eater” all speak to this kind of feeling. Gold Panda is at his best making lush and ambulatory compositions, and the relaxed itinerancy of a vacation is most evident in his more minimal sound studies, like “Unthank” and “I Am Real Punk” which rely on just a few elements, like the repetition of plucked strings or a single synth looped.
Those songs in particular reminded me of the producer Suzanne Craft, or the compositions by the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They have same ability to create a grand feeling atmosphere out of minimal ingredients. This album only doesn’t work when it gestures towards faster paces. “Song for a Dead Friend” stands out as a one of the album’s true missteps, a seemingly juke-inspired track that twists an ankle and falls flat.
In terms of samples used, the Japanese inspiration seemed to come mostly from the use of string instruments, but otherwise it’s more muted than the story suggests. Two music videos were released in advance of the album (for “Pink & Green” and “Time Eater”) and the videos try to give an idea of what the documentary might have been. In “Pink & Green” in particular we find Gold Panda and Laura in the midst of the vacation. They walk the streets, gaze at the sights, eat at McDonalds. They take the train and laugh at dinner and sing karaoke, as tourists must feel compelled to do in Japan. There’s a kernel in the visual aesthetic and silent narrative that might not mean to point to Lost in Translation, but it’s hard to avoid. How can you appreciate a vacation in a foreign place, thoughtfully and gracefully? Missteps seem inevitable.
Listening to this album, I wondered if Gold Panda set out to explore some of these thoughts from the pads of an MPC. Does archiving a vacation in sounds or pictures, making art of it, do justice to the essential passing of things? Is nostalgia destructive or generative? At the end of it all, the music escapes the expectations its creators imbue it with. As its title suggests Good Luck and Do Your Best is a modest and heartfelt attempt to celebrate a memory and place that you continue to love even at a distance. | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | City Slang | May 25, 2016 | 7.4 | 83277b2a-72b8-439f-9af9-dcf78e65689f | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Art-rock collective ringleader Daniel Smith transforms his tangled song fragments and inimitable vocal style into a highly contagious, beautifully ramshackle record. | Art-rock collective ringleader Daniel Smith transforms his tangled song fragments and inimitable vocal style into a highly contagious, beautifully ramshackle record. | Danielson Famile: Ships | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2642-ships/ | Ships | One of the great everlasting indie rock adages: "If this band ever got on the radio, they'd be huge." I mean, why couldn't Sonic Youth have been the best selling group of the 1990s? What did My Bloody Valentine record if not great pop songs? Wolf Eyes is a classic singles band! Sad but true: This old wisdom doesn't fly. Though it's harbored its share of forward-thinking songwriters and producers, independent music isn't traditionally thought of as user-friendly. And although its recent ascent in popularity has allowed its most accessible bands brief bouts with commercial success, the culture is still mostly populated by artists whose music is too difficult, challenging, or in some cases, annoying, to appeal to anyone but the smallest minority.
In his decade-long run as the ringleader of art-rock collective the Danielson Famile, Daniel Smith has practically defined the term "cult artist." His records-- most of them highly conceptual paeans to God-- can be exhausting, barraging listeners with surprise twists and turns and tangled song fragments. Smith himself has an inimitable vocal style: a twisted melange of bleating, twinging yelps, whoops, and screeches. Yet Smith's discography has yielded him a small but unflaggingly loyal congregation, drawn to music that, above all else, is uninhibitedly gleeful, celebratory, and rallying-- the kind of inspired communal rejoicing that's highly contagious.
Though I've long admired Smith's idiosyncratic vision, navigating his music's quirks and structural obstacles hasn't always been wholly rewarding. But after two years spent refining his approach in his Clarksboro studio, he's re-emerged with an album that serves as the resolution of his recorded output: the spectacular Ships. Harnessing a work ethic so steadfast its presence is felt throughout the album's entire duration, here Smith distills the best and most unique attributes of his sound, and marries that creative concentrate to a grander, more cinematic sensibility. The result is staggeringly triumphant-- the blustering, ambitious consummation of all he's worked toward.
Initially recruiting likeminded noise-pop explorers Deerhoof as his backing band, Smith's ambitions for the album eventually found him corralling a total of 20 musicians, including all Famile past and present, Anticon alumnus Why?, members of Serena Maneesh and Half-Handed Cloud, and longtime Danielson acolyte Sufjan Stevens. So many mismatched contributors could have turned the album into a chaotic melée of disparate ideas. Instead, the sound only grew greater and more colossal with every added hand-- one more instrument in a superdense wall of beautifully ramshackle orchestration that creaks and groans beneath its own enormous weight.
That weight is Ships' cornerstone. None of Smith's previous records-- and in fact, very few indie releases this year-- have flat-out rocked like this one, with blaring trumpets signaling snares to exact their force beneath sweeping multitracked vocal choruses that simply won't stop crescendoing. On standouts like "Ship the Majestic Suffix" and "Bloodbook on the Half Shell", the music builds to such immense heights, and increases tension so far past the expected breaking point, that the inevitable release is nearly dizzying. But Smith also grasps the inherent malleability of such a sizable ensemble, and though he most often uses it to breathe life into the album's darkly apocalyptic overtures, he also wisely crafts shimmering psychedelic passages that prevent it from becoming too claustrophobic.
Of course, while vastly more accessible and streamlined than Smith's other outings, Ships is, in that same vein, very much a cult record. And like other recent, successful cult records-- the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, and earlier this week, Scott Walker's The Drift-- the elements that make it so refreshing and exciting to some listeners are certain to put off others. Smith's vocals, for instance, are significantly calmer and less abrasive here than ever, but his charismatic chirps and squawks may be an obstacle for even some seasoned fans of yelpy indie rock. And while they offer Smith the opportunity to achieve a number of unusual melodic feats, the unpredictable song structures may initially throw some listeners for a loop.
Still, the fact that it lacks some of the broader appeal of independent music's more orthodox practitioners also allows more room for the kind of weirdness and experimentation that makes Ships such a fascinating listen, and indeed, such a watershed in Smith's development as an artist. It's the kind of album he may spend the rest of his career trying to top-- and in the closing track, charmingly titled "Five Stars and Two Thumbs Up", he seems to recognize it. With wide-eyed bewilderment, amidst the clash and clang of cymbals and triangles, butterfly flutes, manic guitar strums, ascending eight-part harmonies, and surprise key changes, the euphoric message is reiterated: "Thanks, thaaaaaanks, thaaaaaaaaaanks!!!!" | 2006-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-05-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | May 10, 2006 | 9.1 | 832a8ff8-63d8-407e-b184-acc67cdc149a | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
The four-man Bay Area rap crew delivers a breathless, irresistible, and highly defined record that hits your gut and your shoulders at the same time. | The four-man Bay Area rap crew delivers a breathless, irresistible, and highly defined record that hits your gut and your shoulders at the same time. | SOB X RBE: Gangin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sob-x-rbe-gangin/ | Gangin | The four members of SOB x RBE are from Vallejo, California, home to the iconic rapper Mac Dre. And like Mac Dre—both back in the ‘90s and later, at his thizzed-out zenith—SOB x RBE can be, in the bones of their songwriting, contemplative and grim while making music that’s constantly propulsive, punishing, joyous, fun. Dre would rap over the phone from prison about police brutality and about babies born addicted to crack, but he was doing it with a sort of bounce and levity. It was heavy, but it wasn’t.
SOB x RBE’s latest album, Gangin, follows this lineage, an irresistible record full of songs that hit your gut and your shoulders at the same time. The group (the “x” is silent) was formed when friends Yhung T.O. and DaBoii—who cut their teeth by rapping into their phones and putting it over a beat through a Playstation—fused their efforts with fellow teens Slimmy B and Lul G. The “SOB” is for “Strictly Only Brothers,” the “RBE” is “Real Boi Entertainment.” They’ve spent most of the time since that 2015 merger as a minor phenomenon, both in the Bay and online. Just weeks ago, when Interscope rolled out the TDE-helmed soundtrack for Black Panther, one of its highlights was the skull-rattling “Paramedic!” where each SOB x RBE member bounces his voice off of Kendrick Lamar’s.
About the voices: Yhung T.O., the group’s potential breakout star, is slick and melodic; Slimmy B is an abrasive counterpoint, force to T.O.’s finesse. At some point in their formative stages, the members decided to play with the structure and lineup of each song: Instead of shoehorning all four onto every track, they appear in a variety of orders and combinations, both here and on last year’s lean, self-titled mixtape. This has allowed for Lul G to excel in spot duty, and for DaBoii to develop into a magnetic presence, as brash as Slimmy and with just as much bite to his voice.
This fluidity lets Gangin weave in and out of different sonic lanes without feeling perfunctory or out of place. “Anti Social” is as silky as “Can’t” is confrontational, but the progression from one to the other sounds like a good DJ mix as opposed to an A&R-mandated box-check. The quartet’s youth, their relatively short time rapping together, and commitment to each hairpin turn in tone lends their music the feel of experimentation and discovery and in real time.
That’s good, because there’s a certain breathlessness that their style requires. SOB x RBE fit comfortably into Vallejo’s rap lineage, which includes pioneering stylists like Dre and E-40, and peers like Nef the Pharaoh—whose music seems to be in constant conversation with his city’s forefathers. By contrast, SOB x RBE’s music is less lyrically referential to those predecessors, instead looping back to the lush, up-tempo production traditions from Vallejo and Oakland. As vocalists, they draw obvious inspiration from Detroit’s street rap scene (see: Doughboyz Cashout), though that comes across less as imitation and more as the sort of cultural exchange that has long run between Bay rap and rap in the Midwest and South.
The heart of Gangin is a four-song run on the backstretch where each member is allowed his own solo cut. DaBoii’s “Paid In Full” is almost comically no-frills, and reveals him as an acrobatic technician; “The Man Now” casts Lul G as a villain, sneering and Grinch-adjacent; “Y.H.U.N.G” relocates T.O. to an undisclosed Caribbean villa.
The real jewel is “God,” where Slimmy raps uninterrupted for more than two minutes—it’s not exactly in prayer, more like an explanation to some unseen third party about why he might be praying. There are benedictions for piles of money and humble requests for more; there are hopes for healthy sons and mothers. From there, the song shifts its focus outward, and Slimmy lashes out at some of those who have hurt him. There’s his friend who stole from him, and his father (”I love your ass to death, but don’t ever think I owe you”). The whole thing happens at a brisk pace, stuffed with asides like, “Niggas dying every day, who the fuck this shit fun to?” What makes “God” so arresting is how it reveals the ghosts chasing and invisibly shaping Slimmy’s writing—that just below the surface, torturous thoughts like this are always simmering.
All four members of SOB x RBE let shards of this world-weariness cut through, and to the audience, it seems to bind them together: Not only is there a powerful musical chemistry, but these four redeem one another in perpetual motion as they sort through anger and frustration and wild ambition with a three-man safety net beneath them. It helps that they are all outrageously colorful writers who give the music an overwhelming kinetic energy. They breathe deep life into music with young lungs. Gangin is not explicitly a record about platonic love and the irreconcilable tension between youth and mortality, but it’s that, too. | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | SOB X RBE / Empire | February 26, 2018 | 8.3 | 8330c2fb-eca1-48b2-bab1-dd41e849083b | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Paired with drones from strings and struck bowls, the multimedia artist’s vivid readings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead offer the possibility of solace in sound itself. | Paired with drones from strings and struck bowls, the multimedia artist’s vivid readings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead offer the possibility of solace in sound itself. | Laurie Anderson / Tenzin Choegyal / Jesse Paris Smith: Songs From the Bardo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurie-anderson-tenzin-choegyal-jess-songs-from-the-bardo/ | Songs from the Bardo | When his brother-in-law died in a refugee camp in India, Tibetan singer and musician Tenzin Choegyal joined his sister in mourning. Tibetan Buddhists believe that when someone dies, their consciousness wanders through an in-between phase called the bardo for seven weeks before transitioning to a new life. This journey can be disorienting and frightening. To help guide his brother-in-law’s consciousness toward rebirth, Buddhist monks read aloud from The Bardo Thodol, also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, over the course of 49 days. “The ritual performance and recital of The Bardo Thodol by the monks transformed my sister from a devastated person to someone who gained conviction in her life again,” Choegyal writes in the liner notes for Songs From the Bardo. “The whole process was as therapeutic as anything I have ever observed in my life.”
Over the past 15 years, Choegyal has explored the power of The Bardo Thodol in a variety of musical projects. Songs From the Bardo is the latest manifestation and finds Choegyal in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson and composer Jesse Paris Smith. Anderson acts as the guide, reading passages from The Bardo Thodol translated into English by Choegyal. The unknowable expanse of the bardo is invoked by Choegyal and Smith through vibrations summoned from a variety of particularly resonant instruments.
Resonance is the closest that sound gets to touch. Lyrics can describe a caress, but reverberation can move air and bodies in ways that viscerally recall the breath of a loved one on the nape of the neck. Throughout much of Songs From the Bardo, it is the soothing drone tones of Choegyal’s Tibetan singing bowls and Smith’s crystal bowls that hold the space. The album’s songs flow into one another with little regard for beginnings or endings, just as The Bardo Thodol describes the journey of the consciousness through death to the next life. On “Heart Sutra Song – Gone Beyond,” Choegyal’s plucking of the dranyen, a Tibetan stringed instrument, provides a grounding counterpoint to Anderson’s inquisitive violin and guest musician Rubin Kodhel’s brooding cello. Over the strings, Choegyal sings part of the Heart Sutra in Sanskrit; his natural vibrato makes for one of the most stirring moments on the album. Elsewhere, Anderson’s recital is also deeply resonant. Her words often hang in the air for a split second after they leave her mouth. Over Smith’s gently rousing piano on “Lotus Born, No Need to Fear,” Anderson imbues each description, including “a fish rolling in hot sand,” with such emotion that it floods the mind.
“Listen without distraction” is a refrain that Anderson repeats throughout Songs From the Bardo, and one that occasionally made me wonder if the album would have benefitted from using her gift for spoken word more sparingly. The interplay between the three collaborators’ instrumental contributions is so absorbing that maybe it doesn’t always need the narration; the spiritual guidance is apparent in the resonance itself.
That said, dissonance plays as an important role as resonance on the album, especially in its second half. On “Dancing With the Crescent Knife,” Choegyal’s low chant rolls underneath creaking strings that, along with Anderson’s theatrical storytelling, bring to life the most disconcerting phase of the bardo. The spoken word on Songs of the Bardo, it is important to note, draws exclusively from the Chonyid Bardo, the part of The Bardo Thodol that describes the various spirits, including “blood-drinking wrathful deities,” that one’s consciousness encounters in the bardo. “Natural Form of Emptiness” illuminates those spirits further. Choegyal plays the lingbu (a Tibetan bamboo flute) like the guiding call of a bird, as if to say, This way, this way. Then the repeated crash of a gong signals a warning, but Anderson encourages the listener to hold their ground. “Awakened one, when projections appear like this, do not be afraid,” she recites. Then, later, “They only arise out of the spontaneous play of your mind.”
The spontaneous play of your mind. These words hold particular weight at a time when systemic injustice, existential crises, and self-commodification pull the psyche in a thousand different directions at once. Anxiety, stress, depression, and a general sense of paralysis are common complaints of everyday people, and are without fail capitalized on by the very institutions and corporations that purport to support us. Insomnia, a smaller but related complaint and something I’ve experienced recently, can feel like being trapped in an in-between state. I listened to Songs of the Bardo on repeat when my eyes were burning and my head felt clogged, and it helped. The album’s contemplative pace—designed for listening in solitude, not playing in the background—cracked open just enough mental space to provide relief, and for that I am very grateful. While based on a text to help the recently deceased reach rebirth, Songs of the Bardo is very much an album about life; a salve as much as a guide.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Folk/Country | Smithsonian Folkways | September 27, 2019 | 8.4 | 8331e503-63fe-41f5-824f-c7bbb0a6ae22 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
By 1976, Fagen and Becker pushed their music to feel as grotesque as their words. The result is the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood. | By 1976, Fagen and Becker pushed their music to feel as grotesque as their words. The result is the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood. | Steely Dan: The Royal Scam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steely-dan-the-royal-scam/ | The Royal Scam | For decades after their initial discovery in 1868, scholars dismissed the Paleolithic cave paintings of Altamira, located in the north of Spain, as forgeries. The use of cracks and shading to create perspective, and abstract images created out of ghostly impressions of handprints, all seemed too advanced to be the work of prehistoric Homo sapiens. But after similar designs were discovered at nearby sites in France and Cantabria, a French historian published an apologetic paper in 1902 affirming Altamira’s authenticity. In the first half of the century, cave painting blossomed into a major field of scientific study, and in 1976, the caves were fully legitimized, finally, when Steely Dan named the best song on The Royal Scam after them.
The narrator begins by remembering a visit to the Spanish caverns as a child—how the animal figures on its walls and ceilings seemed to come to life when he held a candle up to them. He remembers that he “understood” something after leaving the caves—a latent meaning in the “sad design”—but what was it? “Before the fall/When they wrote it on the wall/When there wasn’t even any Hollywood,” the chorus begins, and the question lingers: Why does it matter that Hollywood, specifically, didn’t exist the Paleolithic era?
“Sentient life in Los Angeles is a distinct rarity,” Walter Becker sneered to journalist Richard Cromelin in a 1976 interview for Sounds. As New York expats working in West Hollywood during an era that they felt out of step with—“Not much of a decade,” Becker said of the 1970s—nothing in the work or public comments of the increasingly reclusive studio team of Becker and Donald Fagen suggested they thought humankind had progressed much since the prehistoric days their protagonist had fantasized about. If anything, perhaps, we’d gone backwards.
Answering fan questions for the BBC in 2000, Becker claimed “Altamira” was about the narrator’s “loss of innocence,” and the rest of The Royal Scam seems to dramatize that descent across a series of more modern case studies. The narrators on the album are the most dissolute bunch Fagen and Becker ever assembled: Kid Charlemagne the washed-up acid guru, the suicidal criminal in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” the kleptomaniac in “Green Earrings,” and the violent cuckold in “Everything You Did,” among others. Recorded somewhat reluctantly at ABC Studios, where the noise reduction system had fried the sound quality of Katy Lied in the previous year, The Royal Scam found Fagen and Becker using their burgeoning studio budget—and the continuing absence of other obligatory collaborators—to create knotty, darkly playful arrangements that animated their dismal fables. The result stands as the bleakest and most narratively vivid album of their career, as well as their most misunderstood.
In interviews at the time, Fagen and Becker expressed their disenchantment with a perceived 1970s monoculture, as if working their hardest to nail in their reputation for being sneering curmudgeons. If today we view the decade as one of the most stylistically variegated time periods in popular music—one in which, after all, a band as weird and iconoclastic as Steely Dan could thrive commercially—Fagen and Becker still seemed to view the industry as one big, vapid dance party. “It’s a lot like the ’50s,” Fagen grumbled to Sounds. “The same music on the radio. I think the Four Seasons, when they started really slamming out this current string of hits, that was the capper.” Still, no matter how they might have felt about “December 1963 (Oh What a Night)” and its ilk, modern dance music still seeped into their arrangements. The sound of the rhythm sections on Scam, as much as anything, firmly places the music in 1976, and far away from the band’s roots in more conventional, upbeat radio-rock and harmonized guitar leads. Becker and Fagen consciously wanted “a more live, rhythmic sound” on the record, as Fagen described it to Melody Maker in 1976, and began recording songs with six or seven different rhythm sections.
Ultimately, Fagen and Becker used veteran session drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie—the namesake of a very particular kind of shuffle beat, purveyor of chattering hi-hat patterns—on all but two tracks. Purdie was a key collaborator during the band’s career, going on to define the groove-based sound of 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho. On Scam, though, “The Fez” was the closest thing to an attempt at disco, and it seemed to be satirizing itself, incorporating an eerie, vaguely Eastern European synth lick, a short aberrant lyric—either an extended metaphor about the importance of condoms or an unambiguous statement of purpose from someone who insists on only having sex while wearing a Shriner’s hat—and moments of jokey complexity that threw the groove. All of this felt fairly remote from “Play That Funky Music,” to say the least.
Although Scam was Steely Dan’s slickest album to date, it was also, in some ways, their ugliest. Its arrangements are a jungle of Rhodes stabs and the most aggressive—and finest—guitar work on a Steely Dan album since 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy. On “Don’t Take Me Alive,” Larry Carlton seems to take up most of the space, snarling, feeding back, advancing the simmering tension at the song’s stakeout (in a 1979 radio interview, Gary Katz said they’d directed the guitarist to play as “nasty and loud as possible.”) In “Sign in Stranger,” Elliott Randall’s erratic guitar breaks jostle for space with Paul Griffin’s bluesy piano—hard-bop comping in double-time. Together, they seem to mimic the crooked vendors vying for customers in the song’s marketplace, which Fagen claimed to have modeled on the “Sin City/Pleasure Planet” trope from some of his favorite sci-fi stories.
Techniques like these illustrate how Fagen and Becker pushed the music on Scam to feel as grotesque as their words—to be vignettes musically as well as lyrically. This tendency toward the theatrical is most apparent in the album’s queasy emulations of reggae and Carribean music. “I think Duke Ellington’s whole exotic jungle trip contributed a lot to our tropicality numbers,” Fagen told Melody Maker in 1976. “It’s an idealized, exotic atmosphere...Showtime, Ricky Riccardo stuff. More I Love Lucy than Bob Marley.” There is the rock-steady backbeat of “Sign in Stranger,” with a closing horn line that sounds like Cuban jazz pouring in from somewhere outside of the song.
On the more extreme side is the white elephant in the room: “Haitian Divorce,” complete with an intermittent Jamaican accent and a talkbox-treated guitar that sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Allegedly inspired by tracking engineer Elliot Scheiner’s attempt to finalize a divorce in a matter of a couple of months through a Central American loophole, it was a cinematic bit of storytelling, and Fagen and Becker framed it explicitly as such: “Now we dolly back/Now we fade to black.” It would be easy to write off as a misguided aberration if it didn’t rank among the record’s musically inspired moments: The song’s central modulation when the backing vocalists enter makes for one of the most satisfying chorus drops they ever recorded. It was also the band’s highest-charting single in the UK to date.
The song is a microcosm of what makes The Royal Scam both singular and frustrating: a combination of sharp songwriting, a resourceful approach to narrative, piss-take musical references, and willfully poor taste. More than on any album they ever released, Fagen and Becker foregrounded their jarring stylistic pivots, tying them directly to their lyrical scenarios; Aja and Gaucho, on the other hand, would create a sleek musical surface that functioned just as well apart from the sordid narratives. The Royal Scam is the Dan album where the music doesn’t allow the listener to escape the mindset of its characters and their stories’ grim implications: real progress is rarely possible, and we are doomed to repeat our worst behaviors over and over again.
Nowhere on The Royal Scam does this feel more apparent than on the title track and closer, a plodding epic about Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City. With little in the way of vocal melody, verbose phrasing inspired by the King James Bible, and a beat that never really seems to kick in, it sounds like a smooth-rock version of what it might have felt like to row a Viking warship. It is based around harsh melodic cells traded back and forth between Fagen’s Rhodes and Carlton’s guitar, with a few solo horn interjections. The motifs feel oddly mechanistic—a process that never gets anywhere. The corruption and abuse that crop up throughout the rest of the album descend on the undeserving populace. “The Caves of Altamira” may be about a loss of idealism, but we never see the fallout; here, Fagen and Becker shove our faces in the characters’ dashed dreams. In the album’s final moment, they perpetuate the scam they fell victim to like a game of telephone, crafting fabricated success stories for their relatives at home: “The old man back home/He reads the letter/How they are paid in gold/Just to babble in the back room/All night and waste their time.” By all indications, the cycle of hope, subjugation, and destruction will begin again. | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ABC | November 20, 2019 | 8.3 | 83326736-6e30-4192-bf3a-93d60141306d | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | |
Twenty-five years after 1989's career-spanning Sound + Vision box set, David Bowie has assembled a new retrospective, Nothing Has Changed, which comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror. This is Bowie as he wants us to encounter him, as a practitioner of fine art whose interests have occasionally, improbably, marvelously intersected with pop of the moment. | Twenty-five years after 1989's career-spanning Sound + Vision box set, David Bowie has assembled a new retrospective, Nothing Has Changed, which comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror. This is Bowie as he wants us to encounter him, as a practitioner of fine art whose interests have occasionally, improbably, marvelously intersected with pop of the moment. | David Bowie: Nothing Has Changed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20004-david-bowie-nothing-has-changed/ | Nothing Has Changed | To pick a few selected works from an artist's career is to construct an argument about that artist. Every curator knows that, and David Bowie is nothing if not a curator. The first great Bowie best-of was 1976's Changesonebowie LP, whose argument was that he was a mamapapa comin' for you, a rocker too strong and too glittery to be pinned down. (The 1981 Changestwobowie LP and the 1990 Changesbowie CD, stabbed in its gut by the dreadful remix "Fame '90", tried to extend that premise.) Bowie's initial attempt at a full-career assessment was the 1989 Sound + Vision box set, revised and updated in 2003. In both forms, it's a bunch of hits and album tracks and rarities clumped together, an impressive show of range whose failure is that it assumes, rather than argues, that he's a rock god and that therefore anything he does is interesting.
Twenty-five years later, coinciding with an actual touring museum exhibition of the apparatus around his music, Bowie has assembled a new retrospective. Nothing Has Changed—a very sly title, as a riposte to Changesonebowie and "Changes", especially since it's also a lyric lifted from his 2002 song "Sunday"—comes in three different versions, each with a cover image of Bowie regarding himself in a mirror. That's a sharp gesture too: he's never been shy about his fascination with his own mercurial self, shedding his skin again and again and then carefully preserving it to wriggle into again later. (This is not the first time he's done the "multiple versions of a greatest-hits set" trick, either: 2002's Best of Bowie had twenty different track lineups, depending on which country you bought it in.)
The weakest of the three versions of Nothing Has Changed is the chronologically sequenced 2xCD version. It's basically just a slight revision of Best of Bowie, compressed to throw in five later songs including the newly recorded oddity "Sue (or In a Season of Crime)". The first disc starts with his commercial breakthrough "Space Oddity" and ends with its sequel/repudiation "Ashes to Ashes", which is a nice bit of symmetry. Mostly, what we get is Bowie as he's understood by oldies radio, although we're seven tracks in before he really starts to toughen up (with "Ziggy Stardust").
But the second half of the 2xCD version covers three times as many years as the first, and suggests that Bowie was a temporarily interesting trend-follower whose fade-out has been slowed by his being repeatedly propped up and dragged into modernity by big-name collaborators: Queen, Pat Metheny, Pet Shop Boys, Trent Reznor, James Murphy. This Bowie's sense of tune eventually abandons him and never returns. After the look back in sorrow of "Absolute Beginners", halfway through the second disc, he's coasting on his rep; it's just one decent comeback attempt after another, with "Sue" at the end as a sort of I-give-up-but-here's-something-new-anyway gesture. That's a reasonable case to make; it also misses most of what's magical about this particular artist.
The 2xLP version of Nothing Has Changed makes a simpler and happier argument, that this is a dude with a lot of big hits and a peculiar arty streak. It's a non-chronological set, mostly songs that you might want to play if you were DJing a party—three out of 20 are the singles from Let's Dance. The sides have something like thematic unity: Bowie the dancefloor-filler and lighter-waver, Ziggy/Aladdin the glam spaceman, David the magisterial vocalist and pop experimentalist (this is where "Sue" lands), and You-Know-Who the introspective eminence grise (concluding with last year's "Where Are We Now?"). You could do worse.
The 3xCD Nothing Has Changed, though, is the jewel among the three variations on the same core material. Its masterstroke is that its 59 tracks appear in reverse chronological order. To end a greatest-hits with "Sue" is to remind listeners that there's a good moment to hit the stop button. To begin it with "Sue"—the longest track on the whole thing—smacks us to attention. This is Bowie as he wants us to encounter him, as a practitioner of fine art whose interests have occasionally, improbably, marvelously intersected with pop of the moment. "Sue", written and recorded with Maria Schneider and her jazz orchestra, announces its intentions from the moment Bowie's actorly baritone warbles in: it's the latest in his line of homages to Scott Walker, the double whose guise is the one role he's never been able to play. (The artistic relationship between Bowie and Walker—so similar, so different—is a complicated topic on its own; the comprehensive Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame includes a pair of brilliant posts about it.)
For at least the rest of its first disc, the 3xCD version reframes latter-day Bowie as an alternate-universe version of Walker, a solemn avant-gardist who keeps trying to rocket out beyond pop and keeps being drawn back into its gravity well. That makes his later work a lot more interesting, it turns out. This is a Bowie who never runs out of fresh ways to gaze back at himself in the mirror. There are three tracks here from his never-released 2001 album Toy: reworked versions of a pair of songs from his youth, and the lovely obscurity "Your Turn to Drive", which is as close as he's ever come to dreampop. And it's hard to miss the science fiction that's never totally left his lyrics when James Murphy's remix of "Love Is Lost" (with its quotation from "Ashes to Ashes") appears next to "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" and "New Killer Star", and just down the hall from Pet Shop Boys' reworking of "Hallo Spaceboy" (which itself incorporates a William S. Burroughs-style cut-up of lines from "Space Oddity").
The edited and remixed versions of Bowie's post-1995 singles that populate the first disc are all distinct improvements on their original versions; you'd be forgiven for wondering if 1999's dismal Hours... was as good as it seems here. Single mixes are the meat of the rest of Nothing Has Changed too, because the metric for inclusion even on the longest version is, more or less, which songs were some kind of hit. (Although it's worth noting that a collection of Bowie's U.S. Top 40 singles would be 10 songs long and end with 1987's "Day-In Day-Out" and "Never Let Me Down", neither of which appear here. We do get "The Man Who Sold the World"—which was never a single and didn't appear on a major Bowie compilation until 1997—and "All the Young Dudes", a hit for Mott the Hoople whose studio recording Bowie didn't even release until the mid-90s.)
Nonetheless, there's some curation going on here. Nothing Has Changed is a version of Bowie's career in which his circa-1990 hard rock quartet Tin Machine never happened (that's just fine, actually). Cultural currency and UK chart success are no guarantee of inclusion: there's no "D.J.", no "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", no "Suffragette City", no "John, I'm Only Dancing", no "Queen Bitch", and don't even ask about "The Laughing Gnome". Undignified moments like the Labyrinth soundtrack and "Real Cool World" have been expunged from this particular record (although somehow "Dancing in the Street" wasn't—the musicless version of that one is preferable.). The "Berlin trilogy" of albums is represented by one quick blast apiece ("Boys Keep Swinging" into "'Heroes'" into "Sound and Vision", shoulder to shoulder in glory). But its swift, forceful backward flow through Bowie's waves of reinvention and discovery is worth more than any kind of completeness would be.
What the 3xCD museum tour of Nothing offers instead is a treat in its final chamber. It keeps on zooming past "Space Oddity" to Bowie's juvenilia, the five years' worth of grasps at the brass ring that preceded Major Tom's rocket to the stars. (David Bowie Is, the actual museum show, also includes his youthful presentiments of what would come later.) Here, again, the reverse chronology works marvelously. "Silly Boy Blue" anticipates the voice we've been hearing all the way from "Sue" on back; "Liza Jane" (the recorded debut of "Davie Jones") and "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" are the work of a teenager learning to play a more complicated version of dress-up. And "Can't Help Thinking About Me", the first single for which he tried on the David Bowie name, becomes a key to the whole exhibition: a beautiful young Narcissus, shedding his identity for the first time, and already looking back on what he's left behind himself. | 2014-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | November 20, 2014 | 8.8 | 83438f47-fd6e-4faf-a990-881fb6a18bf9 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The Chicago-based band sounds more consistent—but also more risk-averse—than ever on a guitar-driven album that’s as peaceful and unchallenging as its title suggests. | The Chicago-based band sounds more consistent—but also more risk-averse—than ever on a guitar-driven album that’s as peaceful and unchallenging as its title suggests. | Clearance: At Your Leisure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clearance-at-your-leisure/ | At Your Leisure | A wave of textural innovation is sweeping the indie guitar realm, as bands vying to get ahead of a pack led by Tame Impala and the War on Drugs stack effects in pursuit of novel sounds. But Clearance are sitting out this race. As far as the Chicago-based band is concerned, no newfangled gimmick can beat two electric guitars backed by a little inspiration and the support of a skilled rhythm section. They proudly stand ‘neath the marquee moon, come alive at animal midnight, and abide by forces at work.
Clearance certainly have the chops for this unadorned yet deceptively difficult style of composition: “Walking Papers,” from their first 7", 2013’s Dixie Motel Two-Step, applied a light touch to cloudy chords. “Total Closeout,” the centerpiece of their 2015 debut LP, Rapid Rewards, was a long, ascendant swirl of riffs whipped up by frontman Mike Bellis and guitarist Kevin Fairbairn, with bassist Greg Obis and drummer Arthur Velez confidently spotting them as they climbed. But on their second proper LP, At Your Leisure, Clearance avoid such epic instrumental journeys to focus on the fundamentals of songwriting: Every track is short, sweet, and complete. It’s their most consistent record to date, if also their most risk-averse.
Lead single “Destination Wedding” opens in sheepish, shuffling fashion, then finds confidence midway through in a series of ringing, sustained notes. Rather than luxuriate in this comfortable arrangement, the band cuts off the song before it can wander into extended-jam-outro territory. “Another Arrow” is the only track that messes around with tempo, playing a game of red-light-green-light with Bellis and Fairbairn’s guitars. The standout “Haven’t You Got the Time?” sparkles with the clarity of a Mediterranean lagoon. Bellis finds his gold note, takes the opportunity to open his throat wider, and enters Liam Gallagher territory with some long “i” sounds that he happily stretches for an extra second.
Like Doug Martsch of Built to Spill, Bellis tends to subjugate his vocals to the guitars, letting the instruments capture each song’s shifts in emotion. He doesn’t raise, push, or twist his voice. Instead, he confines it to a single mood: mild and patient, as if he’s working through complex feelings but has all the time in the world to do so. Bellis’ musings meander and get sidetracked, like reflections in the mind of a zoned-out dreamer, and his metaphors don’t always cohere; the album’s lyrics are so swathed in an ambiguity that they can come off as both impersonal and overly safe. Lines like “Was my invitation lost to your destination wedding?” and “I had a fantastic dream about the coastline” certainly don’t compete with the interplay of the guitars. This lyrical blandness keeps a well-deserved spotlight on the music, but it also limits the payoff of the band’s strongest compositions.
Not that Clearance ever promised to change our lives. At Your Leisure is exactly what its title advertises: a collection of pared-down songs that sound peaceful and welcoming, like a room full of humble yet comfortable furniture. As a testament to the electric guitar’s capacity for communicating when words fail us, the album is persuasive, even if it never crosses over into transcendence. | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | August 3, 2018 | 6.4 | 83452546-f3a7-4884-8f41-732306725922 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On his sixth release, lo-fi techno producer Florian Kupfer creates music as airy and pleasantly rudimentary as a papier-mâché sculpture. | On his sixth release, lo-fi techno producer Florian Kupfer creates music as airy and pleasantly rudimentary as a papier-mâché sculpture. | Florian Kupfer: Unfinished | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22175-unfinished/ | Unfinished | Florian Kupfer was once a choir boy. He was a soprano. For over six years, he practiced Gregorian chorals everyday and was surrounded by the aroma of frankincense. These rituals—mixed with an early introduction to ’90s techno from his mother—formed Kupfer’s anachronistic foundation. His brand of thoroughly low-fidelity techno evolved after meeting Ron Morelli of the label L.I.E.S., also known for his own very murky sounds. Since the release of his 2013 debut, Lifetrax, Kupfer has developed a style that flits between rhythmic industrial soundscapes (not unlike his onetime labelmate, Eric Copeland) and romantic ambient techno with a handmade feel. In his sixth release, Unfinished, he creates music as airy and pleasantly rudimentary as a papier-mâché sculpture.
*Unfinished *runs barely over 25 minutes. Composed of four tracks, it can feel much longer. Sonically speaking, Unfinished is a compromise between two of Kupfer’s best-known songs: the melancholic, R&B-inflected house hit of 2013’s “Feelin” (itself reminiscent of Galcher Lustwerk or DJ Richard) and his sublime 2015 flip of Sade’s “Couldn't Love You More.” In *Unfinished, *he’s more atmospheric than the industrial menace of 2015’s Explora, with its sharply exposed edges. *Unfinished *is, if anything, defined by a meandering and cleverly unfocused pace, allowing Kupfer to explore all the odd angles of a sound.
In the album’s opener, “Elle,” Kupfer showcases this album as strangely and pleasantly nostalgic. The song’s six minutes seem sourced from arcade-era video games, with computer approximations of guitar jangle and uneven drum machines. This continues into “Erika,” like a Huerco S track with its slithering but open progression. It’s the album’s longest track (over eight minutes) and it slinks slowly towards any kind of change, slathering on hissing and unravelling tape loop distortions for almost four minutes. It’s more ambient than anything else, even when it arrives at its modest crescendo—a chopped and screwed vocal sample of Monifah’s “Fairytales.” He adds bursts of bated and sometimes goofy percussion along with synth loops, but somehow these parts act independently of each other. The song is like a conglomerate of rough drafts, or a découpé of misshapen parts artfully put together.
What unites many of the song’s in *Unfinished *is the quality of something still being constructed, or figuring itself out. A sense of cohesion arises from the songs’ handmade and purposefully asymmetrical minimalism. Listening to some of the songs on *Unfinished *made me think of certain Clyfford Still paintings, with their organization of angles and colors that are off-kilter, distorted, but arranged with a sense of overwhelming texture rather than compositional logic. This is most present in “Being Me,” allowing its twinkling synth arpeggios and aggressive kick drums to float in space and crash into each other. *Unfinished *finds Kupfer gathering all the materials from his last three years of music-making to land on electronic music that is mercurial and flexible. Moving from ambient to house to techno to pure noise on a dime, Kupfer’s aesthetic is perfectly imperfect. | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | July 27, 2016 | 7 | 83481f15-f982-4c4b-8885-9045af3adf65 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The prolific saxophonist recorded this stark, searching album at 1:30 a.m. in an underground parking garage; it is both an exploration of negative space and an exorcism of ghosts. | The prolific saxophonist recorded this stark, searching album at 1:30 a.m. in an underground parking garage; it is both an exploration of negative space and an exorcism of ghosts. | Patrick Shiroishi: I was too young to hear silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patrick-shiroishi-i-was-too-young-to-hear-silence/ | I was too young to hear silence | The wellspring of Patrick Shiroishi’s torrential output—last year his name appeared on 32 albums, and there is every indication that he will break that record this year—is a conversation he had with his grandmother. When Shiroishi was young, he asked her about the Japanese internment camp at Tule Lake, California, where the U.S. government incarcerated nearly 30,000 people during World War II and where she met his grandfather. Normally chatty and amiable, she suddenly went stonily silent. Shiroishi has since used his saxophone to excavate his family’s history and grapple with Japanese Americans’ collective trauma. His first solo album was dedicated to his grandmother, others to his parents and his aunt. Shiroishi’s breakout solo effort, 2021’s Hidemi, narrated his grandfather’s life after Tule Lake through beautifully dense, multilayered compositions. Even Shiroishi’s collaborations with others—in his own bands Fuubutsushi, SSWAN, and Oort Smog and in countless duos, trios, and quartets—are modeled after his grandfather’s life: specifically, the sense of community that Patrick Hidemi Shiroishi helped build, as a deacon and small businessman, in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.
I was too young to hear silence is the sparsest of Shiroishi’s releases, but its fragile improvisations also carry the weight of his family’s story. Recorded at 1:30 a.m. in a parking garage under a Japanese restaurant near his hometown of Rosemead, California, Shiroishi’s lone saxophone emanates from underground like the buried past crying out for remembrance. In the massive, empty building, trembling melodic lines are buttressed by long stretches of ambience, and sharp bursts of noise are met by reverberant echoes. Shiroishi cites the work of saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe, whose albums A Brute and Sōingyokusaiseyo are more silence than sound, as an influence on his minimalist approach. But just as important are location-dependent works like Pauline Oliveros’ recordings with the Deep Listening Band in an underground cistern or Akio Suzuki’s “o to da te” project, which maps points of strong echoes across urban areas. This isn’t the first time that Shiroishi has played in this garage—last year’s empty vessels, with Marta Tiesenga, was recorded there during the lockdown—but here he responds to the space as if it were the other half of a duo, an integral part of the unfurling composition.
The album was recorded in one take with a saxophone, glockenspiel, two microphones, and portable recorder. As a document of a live performance, it combines the tension of an improv set with the petty thrill of trespassing. “stand still like a hummingbird” opens with several seconds of silence before short saxophone blasts reveal the garage’s cavernous resonance. Running water, perhaps from a custodian or shopkeeper washing up late at night, can be heard in the background. As Shiroishi’s improv progresses, he develops a language of piercingly high notes, fluttering runs, and breathy puffs of air, all of which cascade through the concrete passages of the garage and return slightly delayed and diminished.
The centerpiece of I was too young to hear silence, the seven-minute “tule lake blues,” is a memorial for his grandparents that transitions from soulful melodies into keening metallic screeches, as if Shiroishi is finally voicing his grandmother’s wordless despair at the mention of the eponymous camp. Two songs after that cathartic moment, some of his loveliest playing appears on on “is it possible to send promises backwards?,” a joyfully acrobatic display that seems to glory in movement itself. Finally, “if only heaven would give me another ten years” closes the album with celebratory lines that arc brightly through the air before resting again in the silence of the Los Angeles night.
Shiroishi’s productivity is due in part to his versatility. Through a multitude of guest appearances, he has found a space for his saxophone in the Armed’s muscular hardcore, Agriculture’s ecstatic black metal, and Quicksails’ fractured electronica, among scores of others. But I was too young to hear silence showcases Shiroishi’s music at its purest. The raw, impromptu output of a player uniquely attuned to his instrument and purpose, it amounts to an exorcism of the generational trauma that informed this searching night underground. | 2023-11-15T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-15T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Experimental | American Dreams | November 15, 2023 | 7.2 | 834e8b66-94cd-4d6a-a7e8-0b03274aae67 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The third album from the Bristol singer-songwriter furnishes complex storytelling in cozy, lived-in atmospheres. | The third album from the Bristol singer-songwriter furnishes complex storytelling in cozy, lived-in atmospheres. | Fenne Lily: Big Picture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fenne-lily-big-picture/ | Big Picture | Fenne Lily wrote her latest album amid a creative slump whose timing is no doubt familiar to many. Her work stalled out during a post-2020 malaise that The New York Times summed up in an unsurprisingly viral piece as “languishing,” a word that suggests an indulgence in the act of doing nothing. Writing about forgettable days runs the risk of being forgettable, but on Big Picture, Lily lets herself surrender to that compromised comfort. Her voice has a warmth and a quaver that can wring pathos from even the most conversational lines, and the production by Brad Cook (Hurray for the Riff Raff, The War on Drugs) furnishes her with warm, lived-in atmospheres. Every track has something to sink into, like the pinging, playful background vocals throughout “Pick,” or the airy, breathy coda of “2+2.”
Most of the bitter, early-Laura-Marling humor of BREACH is gone here; nothing on Big Picture approaches the fuck-off stance of “To Be a Woman Pt. 1,” the pitiless gaze upon male red flags that was “I, Nietzsche,” or the wackiness of “Birthday”’s introductory severed head. Lily seems to be aiming for a more universal, classically sedate writing voice, and sometimes she overreaches and produces songs that sound as labored-over as she says they were. “Dawncolored Horse,” while competent, is a bit too obviously made of set pieces and conceits and a shelf that exists solely to be rhymed with “herself.” “2+2” begins with a faux-casual anecdote about how maybe she’ll look into “some guy called Jesus”—you know, just that dude—though Lily’s baleful vocal does the emotional lifting in the lyrics’ stead, and the song recovers in its lovely second verse.
Lily began writing Big Picture just before she met her then-partner and finished writing its last song just after they’d broken up. But there's no simple narrative to the album, no clean line from beginning to heartbreak. Every song is written from a place of indefinite stasis, of having an epiphany you didn’t want to have and don’t want to act on. “Lights Light Up,” with its disinfectant-bright guitar line and ending-credits pace, is very nearly a love song: Lily sings much of the first few verses, especially asides like “well,” like they’re little adoring looks. Then, without changing her affect, she punctures it with the unspoken, fatal truth that the relationship was held together by, “though we don’t really talk about it often, the fear of this getting old.”
Lily leans on these twists often, but impressively the returns never diminish. On “Half Finished,” she answers a companion’s offhand question with “sometimes I can’t help but picture a whole different life”; immediately the vocals drop away, as icebreaker becomes weepy. The melody of “Superglued” is bleak and deceptively layered: Every time Lily raises her voice or a sudden chord lets some light in, the whole thing just slumps farther down. Like “Lights Light Up,” there’s a love song in there somewhere, too, but not one you’d sing when you were in it. Likewise, the two most obvious breakup songs are also the most hopeful. On “Red Deer Day,” the song Lily wrote last, her vocals move through lines like “For the longest time I’ve imagined I am alone and now it’s real” without dwelling for emphasis or drama. It doesn’t fully register that the track is a breakup song until Lily has already moved on to the reassuring chorus; perhaps all those love songs were her pre-processing it, in her own time. “Map of Japan,” the album’s standout, is about another quietly decaying relationship and deferred realization. Cook and Lily’s arrangement is likewise restrained, except for the periodic interruptions of muscly guitar chords, placed loud in the mix. Each appearance feels a little defiant. They sound like reminders to oneself: Nothing has atrophied. Everything will be there where you left it. | 2023-04-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Dead Oceans | April 21, 2023 | 7 | 8351a5a4-fb8d-4325-9a93-27ef5838b59e | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Ship, Eno's sixth album for Warp, is one of his best solo albums in a while, walking the line between pure ambiance and vocal-driven pop. | The Ship, Eno's sixth album for Warp, is one of his best solo albums in a while, walking the line between pure ambiance and vocal-driven pop. | Brian Eno: The Ship | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21743-the-ship/ | The Ship | There aren't many artists who, with 40-plus years of record-making under their belts, still see each record as a way to challenge their own paradigms with something new and different. For Brian Eno, however, this kind of challenge is core to his identity as a musician. The Ship, Eno’s newest release and his sixth on Warp, somehow manages to feel distinct from all the work he’s done. He describes this divergence as a desire “to make a record of songs that didn’t rely on the normal underpinnings of rhythmic structure and chord progressions but which allowed voices to exist in their own space and time, like events in a landscape.” The Ship is broken into four tracks that more or less flow into one fluid 48-minute suite of music.
On his website Eno describes his inspiration for The Ship as coming from, among other things, a fascination with the sinking of the Titanic and humankind’s balance “between hubris and paranoia.” That Eno should go here now is an interesting way of coming around full circle, because four decades ago he kicked off his non-pop career by issuing The Sinking of the Titanic by his friend and peer Gavin Bryars. That release, which featured not only Bryars but also Michael Nyman and Derek Bailey, was the very first on Eno’s then-new Obscure label in 1975, and served as one more footnote in the annals of Eno’s history in serving as a nexus for the “scenius.” (a term he coined to describe his belief that “it’s not individuals who create things, it’s scenes.”) The Bryars opus is also a double-edged sword as reference points go, because it has claimed ownership on Titanic-related musical storytelling, and it’s also incredibly good.
Thankfully, the comparisons end there. While Bryars’s piece, with its beautiful, looping melody and gentle, nagging insistence, conjures a feeling of an auspicious capital-M Moment whirlpooling slowly downward, Eno’s opening track “The Ship” tells a story not of submerging into sea but of floating listlessly across windless water and forever fog, waves nibbling at the bow and starboard. With a minimalist structure and languid pace, this is not music meant to be experienced or appreciated by those in a hurry, or to be played in the background; it demands your attention in a way that quiet music often doesn’t.
For those willing to stick it out for 21 minutes, “The Ship” unfolds with a kind of majesty that can make one feel like they’re getting their body re-calibrated. Slowly shifting synths establish both gait and mood, before eventually giving way to poem-like vocals by Eno, intoned in a sort of Gregorian chant that only serves to strengthen the feeling that you are being induced into a meditative state. They continue for several minutes before subsiding and the track’s gentle voyage continues, with pitch-shifted voice returning with the refrain “Wave, after wave, after wave.” While not ambient music, the sounds at times resemble moments from Eno’s past, including especially the burbling sounds around 5:50 that recall his work with Bowie on Heroes’ "Neuköln."
From here, The Ship gives way to the album’s second longest composition, “Fickle Sun (i),” clocking in at 18 minutes. Though the pace is a similar speed to “The Ship,” the feel is quite different, with a bass somewhere between “bounce” and “plod” and trebly, rising synths that give the track a menacing oomph. A later section seems to call upon the ’00s work of Fennesz, David Sylvian, and Scott Walker, which are good reference points for this record in general. While “The Ship” is remarkable for sustaining a specific tone for 21 minutes, all the while telling a clear story, “Fickle Sun (i)” is just as impressive, going in more directions musically and challenging the listener’s sense of understanding.
After these two behemoths conclude, the storm clears and we are left with two brief cuts that function more as appendices, both of which are technically parts of “(ii)” and “(iii)” of “Fickle Sun” and each of which present issues for different reasons. “(ii)”, subtitled “The Hour Is Thin,” carries the same emotional tone, but stripped down only to plaintively struck piano notes and with a spoken-word piece by Peter Serafinowicz. While the music itself fits very well here, it would have been preferable to hear Eno’s honeyed baritone instead of Serafinowicz's clinical recitation. And “Fickle Sun (iii)” is a luxurious, jaw-dropping cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free” emerging unexpectedly from the last twinkled notes of “The Hour is Thin.” It’s incongruous to the rest of the record, but is so painfully perfect it can make you nearly let go of everything you’ve just heard to imagine, for a second, that Eno hadn’t stopped making pop music all those years ago.
The Ship is a great, unexpected record. The title track and “Fickle Sun (i)” on their own and as a connected piece of music are marvelous accomplishments, distinctive in Eno’s catalog. And “I’m Set Free” immediately ranks among the most perfect-sounding pop songs Eno has ever had a hand in making. It is a little tough to process the disparity between the minimalist front and the melodic hanging chad of “I’m Set Free” at the end—and the latter is just so damned good that Eno’s pop fans may weep over being denied a full record’s worth of it. But in the end it’s easy to feel grateful that it all exists, and enthusiastic that Eno is an artist who still sees new techniques to learn and new landscapes to paint. | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | April 27, 2016 | 8 | 835ecd84-00f5-4693-87e3-387707ba785a | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Playing remarkably tuneful pop-rock at sludgy tempos, the Flint, Mich. trio Greet Death benefit from isolation. Their debut album is full of bludgeoning tones and diamond-cut production. | Playing remarkably tuneful pop-rock at sludgy tempos, the Flint, Mich. trio Greet Death benefit from isolation. Their debut album is full of bludgeoning tones and diamond-cut production. | Greet Death: Dixieland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greet-death-dixieland/ | Dixieland | Greet Death’s debut album is a useful tool in parsing the difference between originality and innovation. It takes only 30 seconds of the first proper track “Bow” to spot just about every major influence on Dixieland, where the Flint, Mich. trio exist in a bloodline that runs from Failure to Hum to Deftones—bands that once tried to smuggle in sludgier, slower, and stonier forms of rock into alternative radio like joints at Coachella. But innovation, particularly in rock music, isn’t often the invention of something entirely new; it’s more likely a small and extremely significant tweak of an existing product. Most vocalists either mutter or mumble through this kind of music, buried in the mix and rendering any sense of “pop” theoretical or relative. Greet Death are pretty much the exact opposite of that. This is a remarkably tuneful, forthright pop-rock band that just so happens to play six-minute songs at bradycardic tempos.
No matter how loud or feedback-scarred the guitars get on Dixieland, it would never be enough to hide the vocals of Sam Boyhtari. His are a nasal glam-geek variant, something along the lines of Brian Molko or even Dan Bejar. And if the latter seems unfathomable in the context of a band that could either be described as slowcore or doomgaze, Boyhtari’s released another striking album a few weeks ago as War War War that’s virtually Destroyer fanfic. It’s an acquired taste for certain, a splash of sriracha with a bright, almost chemical heat that fundamentally alters everything around it. Though “Bow” and “The Waste” make compelling use of bludgeoning guitar tones and mesmeric repetition, Boyhtari’s sprightly melodies and unorthodox enunciation take this way outside the realm of stoner rock. The compact surge of “Valediction” sounds like Siamese Dream without the solos. This is active listening, abetted by the diamond-cut production of Nick Diener, who’s quickly becoming Michigan’s answer to Will Yip.
Yet, the greatest attribute of Dixieland is that all of the above is still applicable even when Boyhtari isn’t singing. With the exception of the interlude “Again,” guitarist Logan Gaval carries the more versatile and expository Side B. Gaval can get gauzy enough to go with the aqueous flow of “Black Hole Jesus Christ,” though Greet Death’s geographical roots are exposed by the denim-rough grain he takes on “Dragged to Hell” and the monolithic, perpetual crescendo of “Cumbersome,” which clinches it with a Silver Bullet Band blues-bend solo.
As with similarly slow and stoic Midwestern bands Cloakroom and Thunder Dreamer, there’s the sense that the big, coherent sound of Dixieland is a product of isolation, of being able to develop at one’s own pace, play loudly, and remain impervious to trends. It’s all compounded by the sense that newer rock bands of this sort are marooned in 2017—without a scene or narrative or a revamp of MTV2 to give them a signal boost. And the title of Dixieland is daringly loaded at a time when both the downtrodden parts of the Midwest and the South are jointly being held responsible for the inflammation of American discourse, viewed with either detachment or disdain by the media. But Dixieland is a political album only in the sense that personal exchanges are framed as unequal power struggles; the title is actually taken from a flea market in Flint. Greet Death survey their surroundings and see mostly junk, death, and decay. But like its titular inspiration, Dixieland allows the beholder to find their own beauty and meaning in forgotten treasures. | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flesh and Bone | September 2, 2017 | 7.7 | 836593b6-868e-4dd9-a957-1b402f3aaaf1 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Alabama rapper’s debut offers few worthwhile insights into him as a person and ends up stalling on its own ambition. | The Alabama rapper’s debut offers few worthwhile insights into him as a person and ends up stalling on its own ambition. | YBN Nahmir : VISIONLAND | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ybn-nahmir-visionland/ | VISIONLAND | The YBN collective’s origin story is part of internet rap lore: The group first met in the depths of Xbox Live in the early 2010s and would freestyle during Grand Theft Auto V sessions. It was the hi-octane trap of YBN Nahmir’s 2017 single “Rubbin Off the Paint” that initially put Nahmir on the map—the song grew so popular that the then-17-year-old had to be pulled out of school. He and fellow members Almighty Jay and Cordae gained steam the quickest and formed the triforce of power, pushing the group toward a record deal with Atlantic. As their respective profiles grew, the YBN unit splintered, and Nahmir officially declared its death on amicable terms with his brothers last August.
Though he was the collective’s first member to make a national impression, Nahmir never capitalized on it with a solo project. His long-awaited debut album VISIONLAND—named after an amusement park in his home state of Alabama—is an attempt to regain control of his narrative, to reorient himself with his first statement of intent. His drive to take care of his family is admirable, but VISIONLAND offers few other worthwhile insights into Nahmir as a person or as an artist. Four years removed from his breakout single, his music feels as anonymous and inert as a stock player character in a video game.
It’s a shame because the album’s opening song “Still (Family)” is one of Nahmir’s best. On it, he bares all about brushes with death, lost loved ones, and redistributing his gains as his career’s taken off: “New cars and they start up without keys/My cousin graduated, gave her fifty/That’s what real niggas do, so they envy/So I keep a fat forty and it’s crispy,” he says over a wailing vocal sample. The song is plainspoken, clever, and backed by the kind of easygoing beat Nahmir typically avoids. It’s a risk that starts the album on a high note before it plummets.
Bright spots like “Still” are the exception on VISIONLAND, which is generic to its core. Whether it’s shootouts, sex, or money, Nahmir sets up the most hi-octane events in the blandest ways possible, barely switching up his phrasings. Across 20 songs, he gets his dick sucked (“Get It Crackin,” “LAMB TRUCK”), gets high (“Fast Car Music [STAIN]”), and shuns haters (“Wake Up”), wasting several decent beats in the process. Even the mixing and his vocal punch-ins on tracks like “Homework” are uninspired; for a major label album, VISIONLAND often sounds incredibly cheap.
Nearly every guest steals their respective song from under Nahmir, who proves to be out of his depth. G Herbo and DaBoii bring a flavor and urgency otherwise missing from “Politics.” 21 Savage effortlessly drops one-liners (“Opps wants promotion; we put ’em on a poster”) with a bored sigh on the “Opp Stoppa” remix, while Nahmir rhymes “rocket” and “pocket” with ”pocket rocket.” When Nahmir does attempt to switch it up, it makes things worse. “Soul Train” is a slice of retro funk somewhere between Chic and The Free Nationals, complete with Auto-Tuned warbles about love that sound sourced from the gift card section of a pharmacy. Its inclusion here is embarrassing, to say the least.
In a recent GQ interview, Nahmir positioned himself as one of the highest-profile rappers to ever emerge from Alabama. That may be true in sheer numbers, but the majority of VISIONLAND is severely lacking in personality compared to his fellow Alabamians. He’s missing the punchy enthusiasm of Flo Milli, the melodic sharpness of NoCap, or the vivid stoicism of OMB Peezy and brings little else to the table. A few uplifting moments can’t prevent VISIONLAND from stalling on its own ambition.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | April 1, 2021 | 5.3 | 83687531-3869-4ae4-b92b-b1ab2efa2fa9 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Andrew Bird's latest album, which includes a duet with St. Vincent, finds the multi-instrumentalist working more collaboratively with a band than he has in a long time. | Andrew Bird's latest album, which includes a duet with St. Vincent, finds the multi-instrumentalist working more collaboratively with a band than he has in a long time. | Andrew Bird: Break It Yourself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16356-break-it-yourself/ | Break It Yourself | Lyricists write about the world we live in, and most of them choose a layer or two and stick with them. The human, religious, and geopolitical layers are the ones that get the most play in popular music, for obvious reasons. They're immediate to our everyday existence-- we're more likely to think about the role love plays in our day than the role of cell division. Over the course of his career, Andrew Bird has gradually added more layers to his songwriting, very often intertwining the political with the microscopic, the humdrum with the fantastical, the made-up word with the pointed phrase. Pop music is steeped in a certain kind of language-- it's largely informed by a spiritual and emotional understanding of the universe. Rational understandings of the way things work and the hidden worlds behind the world we experience simply haven't established much of a foothold in our emotional vocabulary, but Bird has probably made more strides toward developing this kind of vocabulary than any other prominent songwriter.
Break It Yourself, his latest album, opens with a song that jumps right into these kinds of concerns. "Desperation Breeds" wrings more than a little haunt out of the precipitous loss of bee populations, and from there, we're off to the races, winding through ruminations on the way death's promised end point can inject meaning into life's mundane moments ("Near Death Experience Experience"), to "Sifters", whose point that the "moon plays the ocean like a violin" works both metaphorically and literally. Certain themes recur. One is the slipperiness of truth and memory-- "Lazy Projector" throws itself straight into wondering how much of our memory is our own, while "Lusitania", a duet with St. Vincent, transposes the thought to collective memory, capping a verse that touches on events from World War I and the Spanish-American War with the line, "We don't study these wars no more."
Another recurring theme is perhaps more germane to the sound of the album. There are several moments where Bird seems to grapple with his own decision to distance himself from the world on his farm. He's working much more collaboratively with a band on some songs here than he has in a long time. Lead single "Eyeoneye" is a pretty straightforward indie rock track by his standards, though honestly its bashing straightforwardness makes it one of the least captivating songs here. Still, though, when on "Danse Carribe" he sings, "Then one day you'd had it/ Exiled your closest advisors," it sounds like he's talking to himself, even as his band builds around him. The song is one of his best, picking up a completely unexpected Afro-Caribbean groove halfway through, then mixing it with the type of fairly traditional fiddling he hasn't done much of since he went off on his own and rebuilt his tonal vocabulary around his layered violin, whistling, and glockenspiel.
The fact that he has his own sound is essential to making all this work. A lot of people I know find Bird's lyrical flights unpalatable, and many feel the same about the whistling, but for me, it all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it. The world is so much stranger than we commonly assume, and I like that Bird points his lights into the quantum corners to gain a different perspective, and does it while committing to the quirks of his own strange sound. That strange sound becomes positively majestic on "Hole in the Ocean Floor", an eight-minute fever dream that caps the album with just a few words scattered through the soundscape of looped and layered violins. It's a piece of music no one else could have made, on an album no one else could have made. And it's a little like the world-- the longer you live with it, the more the details become apparent and the more you can feel it all working together. | 2012-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Mom+Pop | March 6, 2012 | 7.5 | 8379c0e7-2b81-439d-98f9-9a8d49dbc599 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Self-produced and recorded, Heartworms is the most hermetic LP James Mercer has released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled. | Self-produced and recorded, Heartworms is the most hermetic LP James Mercer has released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled. | The Shins: Heartworms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22985-heartworms/ | Heartworms | Dismantling the old Shins lineup must have been a bittersweet trade-off for James Mercer. On one hand, it freed him from the interpersonal conflicts inherent in running a band like a democracy, which surely was a relief to a songwriter who never prided himself on his people skills. But it also placed a weight on his shoulders. The sole burden of the band’s music and image now falls squarely on Mercer, including formalities that never seemed to come to him as easy to him as the songs did. During the band’s mid-’00s peak, for instance, Mercer often positioned himself toward the side of stage in concert, happily outsourcing traditional frontman duties like joking and bantering to his gregarious sideman Marty Crandall.
We can’t know whether Mercer laid off his bandmates for creative reasons, as he’s judiciously insisted, or if Crandall’s arrest for domestic assault left him no choice. Either way, he no longer has a real band to help him carry the load, and it takes a toll on him. While the Shins’ music hasn’t changed markedly since that purge in 2008, its image has. The press photos tell the whole story. Remember those old pics of colorful indie dudes horsing around? They’ve been replaced by shots of a lone, forlorn middle-aged guy, trying and utterly failing to look like he’s enjoying himself. The songwriters Mercer most looks up to—icons like Morrissey, Ian McCulloch, Lennon and McCartney—were stars born for the stage, but Mercer never shared their comfort with the limelight. In an interview with NME this winter, he relayed these pressures. “It comes at weird moments in life,” he explained. “Like we went for this big meal the other night because the Shins are releasing a new record, and then I realized that it’s just me in the Shins so all those people were there for me.”
That may be why, for his 2012 Shins reboot Port of Morrow, he created a sort of shadow band, inviting guests like Janet Weiss, Joe Plummer, and Eric Johnson to help carry the weight. As if to suggest that the Shins were still a band, Mercer posed in promo photos with his touring lineup. Heartworms, however, is the first album where he fully embraces the reality that he is the Shins. Self-produced and recorded with a smaller cast than its predecessor, it’s the most hermetic LP he’s released since 2001’s Oh, Inverted World, the last album he recorded himself. At times it overtly calls back to that debut. With its psychedelic patter, “Dead Alive” is an almost direct sequel to “One by One All Day,” drawing out that song’s reverb-soaked outro into its own romp, like some kind of self-written fan fiction.
For as openly as Mercer discusses his anxiety (he dedicates Heartworms’s final song, “The Fear,” to it), he still adheres to a disciplined, “never let them see you sweat” approach in the studio. He creates the illusion that songs come to him quickly, as if pulled from thin air, even if the five year gaps between the last few Shins albums argue otherwise. His gift for making fussy arrangements seem effortless remains unparalleled. Heartworms’ chipper title track is all weightless wonder, as free and euphoric as anything on Inverted World. Opener “Name for You,” a sweetly encouraging piece written for his three daughters, plays as if he raced to the studio to record it while it was still fresh in his mind. And the most Chutes Too Narrow-esque number, “Mildenhall,” shares the same live looseness as that album’s country tunes. An unabashedly autobiographical origin story, it details Mercer’s evolution from military brat to indie rocker: A classmate passes him a Jesus and Mary Chain cassette; he starts fiddling with his dad’s guitar; his dad teaches him some simple chords and, yada yada yada, “that’s how we get to where we are now.”
There’s often been a tension, albeit only a mild one, between Mercer’s classicist pop impulses and his more progressive leanings, and some of that creeps in here, too. The nervy, acid-washed “Painting a Hole” plays like something Kevin Barnes might concoct after several sunless days sequestered in a studio—its groove is heavier and nastier than any Danger Mouse has cooked up for him in Broken Bells. “Cherry Hearts” and “Fantasy Island” each call attention to themselves with grimy keyboard tones and deep, almost 808-esque low ends. In the past, Mercer has tripped over these kinds of experiments (“Sea Legs” doesn’t feel any less clumsy today than it did a decade ago), but here he lands them with the confidence of an old pro aware of his limitations.
Like many of the indie bands from his era, including fellow pop true believers the New Pornographers and Death Cab for Cutie—one of the few other acts from the mid-’00s indie boom still on a major label—Mercer has survived by staying the course. He has largely resisted trends or any temptation to drift too far from his established sweet spot. The thrill of discovery may be gone—really, it disappeared with Wincing the Night Away—yet it’s remarkable how little rust he’s showing. And although Heartworms never quite conjures the magic of those first couple Shins albums, it’s further proof that they weren’t a fluke. This guy always did, and still does, know how to write a song that sticks. | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / Aural Apothecary | March 13, 2017 | 7.6 | 837a4476-66a8-48cc-910a-59fad31a57d9 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The St. Louis band’s third album is big, beautiful, and audacious, an artful leap toward creating the new sound of rafter-shaking indie rock. | The St. Louis band’s third album is big, beautiful, and audacious, an artful leap toward creating the new sound of rafter-shaking indie rock. | Foxing: Nearer My God | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foxing-nearer-my-god/ | Nearer My God | Throughout history, “Nearer My God to Thee” have become infamous last words. The traditional Christian hymn retells Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching all the way to heaven, but it’s gotten a reputation for inserting itself into parables of tragic ambition. The Battle of Gettysburg culminated with a disastrous infantry assault by the Confederacy, and its band played the hymn as surviving troops retreated from Pickett's Charge. It's disputed whether the band on the Titanic actually did the same while the ship sank nearly 50 years later, but that’s how the movie tells it. It is also the soundtrack for the “Doomsday Video,” created by Ted Turner so CNN can be the last thing people watch before the world ends.
Foxing knew exactly what they were getting into by interpolating “Nearer My God to Thee” as the title of their third album, which was already tempting fate—there are few things that indie rock artists are less willing to publicly admit than the desire to make a classic album, but this is exactly the challenge producer Chris Walla placed before them and the one they go to every possible length to meet.
The band’s previous albums, The Albatross and Dealer, were bookended by muted introductions and finales, hand-crafted keepsakes meant to be dog-eared and footnoted. Nearer My God is likewise a closed system bound with melodic and lyrical leitmotifs, but designed more like a multimedia extravaganza. About two minutes into the opener “Grand Paradise,” Murphy is “shock-collared at the gates of heaven” when the drums finally come in and it’s a legit drop for light shows they’ll never afford at festivals that have never considered booking them. Nearly an hour later, he cries, “Heaven won’t take me in” on the closing “Lambert,” a “Mr. November”-style victory lap where Murphy could walk into the crowd to be mobbed during the final surge. In between, “Five Cups” anchors Nearer My God with a nine-minute montage for Murphy’s dead friends. They brought in a guy to play bagpipes. There are songs that swap out bass guitars for Volca sequencers, immaculately recorded drums for 8-bit synth triggers, guitars for string samples and Murphy’s clean vocals for mutated and pitch-shifted versions of itself.
There are the aspects to Foxing’s third record that are objectively ambitious. But ambition alone isn’t transformative. It works best in tandem with audacity, something that chafes against the preordained dominance that accompanies the reception of albums from our most celebrated pop artists. Whatever the case, Nearer My God provides the incapacitating rush of watching a broken play develop into a Hail Mary, a half-court buzzer beater, a double steal that actually works—the thrill of its success amplified by palpable risk and an alternate, disastrous outcome that was narrowly avoided.
“Five Cups” could’ve stood accused of being nine minutes just so Foxing can say they did it, spending nearly half its length with Murphy paying intoxicated tribute to lost souls, drifting through backmasked bass, detuned vocals, and aqueous reverb. But Foxing’s free-form ambience is just as well-crafted as a chorus—brass occasionally blares through the mist like a foghorn until a final, regal swell announces its arrival on the mainland. It’s immediately followed by “Heartbeats,” where the friction between their typically knotty, math-rock rhythms and a delirious, disco-diva chorus completely unrecognizable as the work of Foxing creates suspense appropriate for a song where a life literally hangs in the balance. “Gameshark” is intentionally a splatter of organized noise, edging dangerously close enough to KROQ-core just to become its evil clone—something like Hail to the Thief played at 45 RPM or “Feel it Still” in a hall of broken mirrors. It’s also the first time Foxing’s crackling live energy is duplicated on tape.
The daredevil approach of Nearer My God is a rare one that I also got from the Hotelier’s Goodness and The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Harmlessness, albums that likewise came at a similar career points. Perhaps it’s easier for these bands to internalize the condescension often heaped upon their scene and use it as rocket fuel to cross the lacunal distance between themselves and mainstream recognition. Whatever the case, at a moment when even the most promising indie rock bands are shuffling familiar tropes from the ’90s and long-canonized influences, bands like Foxing that derive inspiration from emo, the electronic leaders of early 2000s indie, and alt-pop are adding new cards to the deck by default.
An extension of Murphy’s drugged and bugged-out solo album as Smidley, the electronic production on “Slapstick” is tinted by both codeine highs and cocaine hangovers. Murphy’s vocals conflate emo hysteria and R&B ecstasy on “Won’t Drown,” set to pummeling rhythms that reimagine MewithoutYou and Sung Tongs nonchalantly coexisting on CD racks in 2004. Foxing had already been the most sonically curious band to emerge from the dad-hats-and-capos wave of ’10s emo—both The Albatross and Dealer touched on free-form R&B, contemporary classical, post-rock, and ambient. But they were just that: touches that never felt like a full embrace. The stylistic density of Nearer My God produces its own gravitational pull that slams incompatible parts into intriguing new forms: There’s swirling death-disco that takes Murphy to the edge of a bridge, soaring Bowie-esque anthems about coked-out sexting, a sultry, bass-heavy lurch inspired by playing D&D on ecstasy, and an impossibly sad, glitch-pop ballad scented by “celebrity colognes” called “Trapped in Dillard’s.”
It’s an album of complicated, often elusive views on the illusion of control, an apocalypse that always feels impending but never arrives. But the best evidence of Foxing’s boldness is the thing that makes Nearer My God their most accessible work, their ability to distill the emotional core of each song into an instantly memorable tagline that can draw in new listeners not already predisposed to this brand of emotional brinksmanship: “You think I must not remember/but I do,” “You are not in love/so stop playing along,” “I just want a real love for you,” “I want to drive with my eyes closed,” “Is there anyone who wants me at all?”
The latter comes from the title track, where Murphy confesses that he’d sell his soul to be “America’s pool boy,” opting out of the financially and emotionally demoralizing gig life of indie rock to be rich, dumb, beautiful, and told what to do. But “Nearer My God” doesn’t come off like an endorsement or even a celebration of these desires. It’s more of a commiseration over their enduring appeal in our shittiest moments—“all that stupid old shit, like letters and sodas”—for this year’s struggling creatives. It just so happens to be framed in a fearlessly ascendant synth-rock song that could be used over Super Bowl highlights if it caught the right set of ears.
The band admitted that “Nearer My God” was originally headed to the scrap heap for being too streamlined, too rock until Walla intervened on its behalf. He has a good track record of knowing when modesty no longer is serving a band. It's an extremely immodest song that serves as the emotional core of an extremely immodest album: “I want it all,” Murphy wails on its truest lyric, one that struck so close to home, they nearly left it off the album. This mindset alone sets Nearer My God apart from nearly anything else in its sphere. Plenty of artists put their every fiber of being into a record, but there’s rarely the overt drive to exceed one’s greatness that’s so insistent, it threatens to earn indie rock's most unintentionally revealing slight: try-hard. For most bands, it's an epithet. On Nearer My God, Foxing flaunt it like an Olympic gold medal. | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | August 13, 2018 | 8 | 837f0df5-3fc1-4120-bc38-706df389fd74 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The idiosyncratic singer mixes R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul on her most accessible and fully-formed record, one that still feels like an open mic. | The idiosyncratic singer mixes R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul on her most accessible and fully-formed record, one that still feels like an open mic. | Anna Wise: As If It Were Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-wise-as-if-it-were-forever/ | As If It Were Forever | When you hear the name Anna Wise, you might think first of Kendrick Lamar—but before she sang on his music, Wise was the eccentric half (or one-third, depending on who was in the group) of Sonnymoon, a New York-based alt-soul and bedroom pop outfit. You never knew what you’d get from her: On a song like “The Fear,” she sounded playful, almost cartoonish; on “Things to Come,” she faded to the background, her piercing falsetto reduced to background noise amid clattering bass drums. Sonnymoon made waves in underground music circles, and around 2016, Wise’s light began to shine brighter, magnified by star turns on songs like “Real” and the Grammy Award-winning “These Walls.” Yet Wise kept churning out the same esoteric soul she always had: She released a solo project, 2016’s The Feminine: Act I, a pop-focused set with electro-soul and hip-hop on the fringes, followed less than a year later by The Feminine: Act II. Then, in 2018, Wise and Jon Bap—a noted vocalist/producer and Wise’s significant other—quietly released a collaborative LP called geovariance, an abstract collage of fuzzy vocal loops and tape glitches that foreshadowed Wise’s proper solo debut album.
As If It Were Forever isn’t so wonky, though. Mixing quiet storm R&B, ambient, and acoustic soul, Forever is Wise’s most accessible and fully-formed record, the clearest entry point to her catalog. The peculiar tweaks are still there: “Worm’s Playground” opens with a jumble of loop-pedal vocals, and “Coming Home” is just ambient hums coiled into a quick meditative interlude. The guest features come and go, breezing in and out as Wise’s protagonist holds court. Appearances by rapper Little Simz on the self-loving ode “Abracadabra” and rapper/singer Pink Siifu on the sugary, folk-centric “One of These Changes Is You” give the impression of a collaborative effort between musicians who share a love of cryptic artistry and aren’t defined by arbitrary definitions of hip-hop and soul. Forever is like an open mic in that way: The tracks fade into each other, maintaining a sense of continuity that makes the record feel like a 38-minute suite. It’s a head-in-the-clouds LP where the singer dips between reality and surrealism, exploring the fleeting moments—laughing with friends, relaxing with a lover at home—that she wishes could last an eternity. Forever is about breathing in the good times before they dissolve, and understanding that the only constant in life is change.
Lyrically, the songs on Forever read like jotted-down missives in an old diary, ink bleeding through its yellow pages. “Abracadabra” runs through the should I or shouldn’t I of new love, basking in the glow of romance and the tension of maintaining desire. But like everything else, the adoration fades. On “Vivre d’Amour et d’Eau Fraîche,” a sultry duet with Bap near album’s end, the two lean into each other, their voices melded into one. Where “Abracadabra” ends on a somber note, “Vivre d’Amour” is an after-hours slow burner, applying sex and tenderness in equal measure. “Your skin on my skin,” Bap sings over warped guitar chords and barely-there drums. “Your path met my path, several doors are open and all of them divine.” Forever isn’t entirely sentimental; “Nerve” is a chest-thumping proclamation of independence. “I’m not gonna play the safe side,” she declares over scant marching drums and background studio chatter. “I don’t wanna live a simple life when I’m not a simple woman.” On a record wrestling with self-doubt and faded memories of the past, Wise is taking life as it comes and on her own terms. | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Alpha Pup | October 17, 2019 | 7.5 | 837f9f51-1ea7-4ee7-bb18-1837d9887ec8 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
As Cigarettes After Sex, Greg Gonzalez writes modern love songs set to downbeat dream pop. Much like relationships themselves, the songs on his self-titled debut LP are full of contradictions. | As Cigarettes After Sex, Greg Gonzalez writes modern love songs set to downbeat dream pop. Much like relationships themselves, the songs on his self-titled debut LP are full of contradictions. | Cigarettes After Sex: Cigarettes After Sex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23308-cigarettes-after-sex/ | Cigarettes After Sex | The opening track on Cigarettes After Sex’s self-titled debut album is a slow-as-molasses alt-rock ballad simply titled “K.” It chronicles lead singer Greg Gonzalez’s infatuation with a girl named Kristen, and pinpoints the very moment their relationship shifts from strictly casual to something more substantial. “We had made love earlier that day, with no strings attached/But I could tell that something had changed,” Gonzalez croons in a voice close to a whisper. And while he seems to have cinched the deal with the girl in question, the song ends on an elusive note: “Stay with me/I don’t want you to leave...”
Kristen’s initial is also the death knell of modern romantic communication, the wretched abbreviation for “OK,” the text message equivalent of rejection by indifference. Without a doubt, Cigarettes After Sex is an album of love songs, but it’s tempered with a millennial ennui that gives the songs an extra layer of relevance in 2017. Instead of relying on lovey-dovey, pastoral lyrics to tell stories of budding relationships, each song is set to a backdrop of ultra-downbeat dream pop, its somber moods leaking into fleeting vignettes of sexy iPhone videos and bittersweet hookups. The record plays like a cryptic guidebook to navigating the world of contemporary love affairs, or the slightly depressing diary of some 21st century Don Juan.
Sonically, Cigarettes After Sex is an impressively even-keeled, slowcore collection—so even-keeled that it borders on ambient. It’s easy to write a bunch of slow songs with similar chords, but it’s an altogether different feat to produce, mix, and compile them in a way that their similarities become their strengths, gradually setting an unshakable mood. At first the repetition of certain elements—echoing guitars, soft hi-hats, elastic basslines—seems overbearing. But after multiple listens, Cigarettes After Sex’s less-is-more ethos is clear, and their heady melange of several genres of subdued indie rock begins to make more sense.
The album possesses strong aspects of alt-country in its reverberated, plucked guitars and shuffling snares, immediately bringing to mind groups like Cowboy Junkies and Mojave 3. But then you encounter a track like “Sunsetz,” whose dreamy intro owes a considerable debt to mid-era Cocteau Twins, before dropping almost all instrumentation in its verse to showcase Gonzalez’s boyish vocals. “Sunsetz” is so loose, and with so much space, that it should be boring; instead, it’s electric, the emptiness forcing you to focus on Gonzalez’s stark lyrics and clever composition. “So you open your dress and show me your tits/On the swing set at the old playground,” he sings, not really as a command, but almost as a general observation.
The theme of sexual encounters as fodder for quiet introspection continues throughout Cigarettes After Sex, but it’s delivered in such a nonchalant way that it avoids corniness. “Sweet” opens with the line “Watching the video that you sent me/The one where you’re showering with wet hair dripping,” before turning into a song about longing to touch a loved one’s skin through a screen. A catchy late-album highlight, “Truly”’s chorus goes, “Truly, know that you really don’t need/To be in love to make love to me.”
Much like relationships themselves, these songs are full of contradictions. The objects of Gonzalez’s desire are both achingly close and tantalizingly far, in his phone and in his bed, on his couch and in his head. Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines. | 2017-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Partisan | June 8, 2017 | 7.4 | 83818279-e55e-4dbd-b4f8-00523056a4bd | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
After tiring of the patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny designed a theoretical framework that forced his hands into different positions. February's loud, aggressive Hexadic, his public debut with the system, felt like an attempt to declare its formidable nature. For Hexadic II, he's used the same results of the system to create gentler solo versions of the songs. | After tiring of the patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny designed a theoretical framework that forced his hands into different positions. February's loud, aggressive Hexadic, his public debut with the system, felt like an attempt to declare its formidable nature. For Hexadic II, he's used the same results of the system to create gentler solo versions of the songs. | Six Organs of Admittance: Hexadic II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21189-hexadic-ii/ | Hexadic II | Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some indication of time and tempo, and lyrical rules for the songs themselves.
Though Chasny describes it as a "caveman" appropriation of similar constructs by Anthony Braxton and John Cage, it is involved and elaborate enough to prompt a book, The Hexadic System, published by Drag City this year. And February's Hexadic, his public debut with the system, felt like an attempt to declare its formidable nature. Showcasing the scope of the system felt as important as the songs. Unapologetically loud and aggressive, with more than a whiff of hardline Japanese psych, it was an extreme indoctrination into a new approach. Recorded with a fully loaded quartet, the largely instrumental Hexadic was not for the faint of heart or those accustomed to Chasny’s softer side.
For Hexadic II, though, Chasny used the same results of the system to create new solo versions of the songs. He swapped the electric for the acoustic, added soft murmurs of harmonium and electronics and strings, and sang on almost all of the songs. The output gives the Hexadic System a new patina of accessibility. On the penultimate track "Vile Hell", Chasny jumps between notes at unexpected angles, sounding like Derek Bailey in a windstorm, before he stops playing altogether. He lets a faint, luminous drone linger until it spills over into "Poor Guild", the record’s gorgeous finale. Violinist Jen Gelineau matches the drone’s tone, and Chasny picks his way through it. In a keening falsetto, he offers a series of elliptical, evocative phrases—"tiny excess/ eye maligned/ depict, transfix." It is the most purely pretty moment in Chasny’s enormous catalogue, the sight of an early bloom, opening slowly after an arduous winter.
The nine tracks on Hexadic II follow the same order as their Hexadic counterparts, and careful, comparative listening does reveal analogous aspects. It’s more rewarding, though, to consider the differences, or to take the sets as entirely separate products of the same process. The disparity shows just how far Chasny may be able to take an idea still in its early stages of execution. Where "Wax Chance" was a diabolical, noise-soaked dirge, "Exultation Wave" is an exquisite gallop, with multiple guitar lines and multi-tracked vocals suggesting the density of the earlier work without trying to match it. Likewise, the two-minutes of no-wave roar from "Maximum Hexadic" unfurl here into eight minutes of circular picking and ghastly vocals for "Anyone’s Dawn". Chasny’s playing invokes the same Middle Eastern influences that Sir Richard Bishop has often conjured, while his singing recalls the fragile coo of Richard Youngs. What was shocking is now sublime.
In that way, the Hexadic System feels like a prism for Chasny, able to draw different elements of his influences and approach based on the input and circumstances. The results are novel and approachable, a combination that enables Chasny to transcend the examples of Cage and Braxton, at least in execution. Despite the complexity of the system that produced Hexadic II, the songs and sounds measure up to the setup itself. | 2015-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-19T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | November 19, 2015 | 7.8 | 83927a0a-b736-48fd-a8b8-a851101a4cf4 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Syd Nathan never wanted this record made. The King Records founder had a long history of working with black performers ... | Syd Nathan never wanted this record made. The King Records founder had a long history of working with black performers ... | James Brown: Live at the Apollo [Expanded Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/976-live-at-the-apollo-expanded-edition/ | Live at the Apollo [Expanded Edition] | Syd Nathan never wanted this record made. The King Records founder had a long history of working with black performers, ever since the late 40s when he decided to get into "the race business" after initially only concentrating on "hillbilly accounts." This is a man who had not only started his own independent label, but also bankrolled his own recording studios, pressing plant and distribution network. He was keenly aware of talent, using A&R; reps (who would later be his scapegoats when pressed by the FCC during the payola hearings of the 50s) to snatch up big band singers and bandleaders, in the hopes of transforming them into viable sensations for what would one day be called "crossover" appeal. He tried country, blues, doo-wop and R&B--; he might not have capitalized on every opportunity (most notably letting The Platters go to Mercury in 1953, only to witness them become the most successful vocal group of the decade), but he was certainly willing to try.
Nathan signed Macon, Georgia performer James Brown in 1956 to his King subsidiary, Federal, despite a less than favorable view of the "Please, Please, Please" demo (in short, "That's the worst piece of crap I've heard in my life"). Brown and his band, The Famous Flames, had already toured the South when he was signed for $200 to Federal, but he had yet to convince Nathan and Federal to allow him to record with the band. It wouldn't happen until Brown and the Flames scored a hit called "Mashed Potatoes" under the pseudonym Nat Kendrick & The Swans for another label. After Brown hit regionally with "Please, Please, Please" in 1956 for Federal, Nathan's original appraisal appeared to have been off the mark. That is, until Brown's next nine singles in a row flopped. Badly.
Brown and the Flames finally scored a national hit with their eleventh single for Federal, "Try Me", which granted him further stay on the label. Nathan was rewarded, too, as over the next four years, the band earned its reputation as the best in the biz, performing as The James Brown Revue ("Star Time"), and saddling its frontman with several well-applied titles: "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business," "Mr. Dynamite" and ultimately, "The Godfather of Soul." By 1962, Brown intended to showcase his act with a live album, especially after seeing Ray Charles hit with In Person in 1959. He'd played Harlem's Apollo Theater several times, but when Nathan refused to pay for a live recording on the basis that he wouldn't have a single to promote it, Mr. Dynamite had to take matters into his own hands.
Brown personally funded the recording of his Wednesday night show at The Apollo on October 24th, 1962. He and the Flames had been there all week already, and Brown was counting on the raucous crowds who showed for amateur night to give him the kind of support he knew Nathan couldn't ignore. For his part, Nathan had reluctantly sent one of his people to supervise the recording, but could hardly have expected it to result in this album. It's more than a little strange to think King had originally issued Live at the Apollo with canned applause and screams because not only were the Apollo faithful in full "support" of Brown's revue, that night has gone down in rock and soul history as arguably the finest live performance ever captured on record. Not bad for a guy who'd been one flop away from failure only a few years earlier.
Live at the Apollo was issued in 1963 and became an instant hit. Not only did it satisfy Brown's small legion of diehard fans-- to the tune of being played in its entirety during the evenings on some R&B; radio stations-- for the first time, it brought the undeniably intense celebration of his live show to young audiences throughout the country. This might not have been very important in another era, but just as Live at the Apollo can be seen as a symbolic transformation of R&B; into Soul, for a myriad of events, 1963 marked the dawn of a decade when sharing experiences and points of view across an entire culture meant more than just crossover success. It was the true beginning of the 60s, and Brown's half-hour Wednesday night set figures no less prominently than Dylan bringing protest music to the masses or The Beatles arriving in America the following year as musical signposts for A New Day.
Emcee Fats Gonder's introduction to the show is as fine a setup as a performer could ask for: "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is Star Time. Are you ready for Star Time?!" The Flames give hits upon each Brown hit that Gonder lists, and the eager crowd responds with due enthusiasm (i.e., screams, lots and lots of screams). The band then drops a cutting version of Brown's "The Scratch" to urge the Man onstage. And what do you think Brown should announce as soon as he arrives? Two years before "I Got You", and he lets us have it: "You know, I feel alright!"
The band launches "I'll Go Crazy" with the slash of Les Buie's guitar and the sting of horns. "If you leave me, I'll go crazy," sings the leader, and the audience can already barely stand themselves. Horn punches accentuate the message Brown has taken with him to this day: "You gotta live for yourself, and nobody else." Just as soon as he's delivered the advice, Brown pleas to "Try Me! SCREAM! Try Me!" His trio of background singers, Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett and "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth, echo the sentiments, while the band locks the bluesy shuffle in tighter than the tension on Clay Fillyau's snare head. And again, before you can catch your breath, the band is already into the post-jump intro to "Think". Star Time was a lesson in speed, endurance and shared inspiration: If you gave the band everything you had, they'd return the favor tenfold.
Then, things get really good with a dit-dit-dit-DOOO and the ultra-cool, slow burning blues seduction of "I Don't Mind". With each beat, falling just behind where you expect it to land, Brown and his angelic backing choir deliver a fatal blow to any woman within earshot: "I don't mind, and I know you're gonna miss me." Jesus. Just in case you didn't think he was serious, good luck surviving "Lost Someone", ten minutes of gospel-tinged balladry somehow slower and lower than the preceding number. The Flames horns (led by trumpeter Lewis Hamlin) maintain a faint bond to Count Basie while at the same time handing Brown the razor-sharp precision he demanded. Between each declaration of passion, the horns serve an upturned figure, just enough to hold the audience in their place lest they faint from what must by then have been a steamy auditorium. And can I get a medic to those two girls JB was singing to at the end?
The Flames were masters of pacing, and roll out a six-minute medley of their hits to keep the show rolling, including "Please, Please, Please" (twice!), "You've Got the Power" and "Why Do You Do Me". The audience doesn't miss a beat, of course, and the only thing more powerful than Fillyau's bass drum kicks are their shrieks. And then things get REALLY REALLY good: "All aboard!" "Yeah!" "All aboard!" "Yeah!" "For NIGHT TRAIN!" Brown ends the show with his then latest hit, running down a list of cities in which he was quickly becoming a household name. He even gets his band excited when name checking New York City. "Night Train" is full of complex polyrhythms and demands total precision from the musicians, but you can hardly blame them for getting swept up in this show.
The original Live at the Apollo ended after "Night Train", but the newly expanded and remastered version contains four mono single-edits of songs from the show that Brown issued to tide over fans unable to catch one of his 300 yearly shows. 40 years later, the few remaining folks either unaware or somehow unconvinced of the power of the record have little excuse not to put down the bucks for this budget-priced edition. Beyond its significance in rock and soul history, and for Brown as an artist, this music translates so far beyond barriers of style or taste, it's one of the few albums that could accurately be described as essential. Fats Gonder said it best: "It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time... James Brown & The Famous Flames." Amen. | 2004-03-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-03-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | King | March 30, 2004 | 10 | 8392812f-547a-45d0-8b97-29d8c954c04e | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
Four years after “Feel It All Around” defined chillwave, Paracosm presents Ernest Greene as a man without a movement, someone whose music can no longer be used to project opinions about a larger trend. Produced again by Ben H. Allen, the album's instrumentation sloshes around in lush, warm reverb and palpable bass frequencies. | Four years after “Feel It All Around” defined chillwave, Paracosm presents Ernest Greene as a man without a movement, someone whose music can no longer be used to project opinions about a larger trend. Produced again by Ben H. Allen, the album's instrumentation sloshes around in lush, warm reverb and palpable bass frequencies. | Washed Out: Paracosm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18324-washed-out-paracosm/ | Paracosm | The titles of Washed Out’s breakthrough song and the first single from Paracosm share the two most important words in Ernest Greene’s musical language: feel it. It’s a simple request, as well as the dividing line between those who think of Washed Out as an evocative catalyst of warm nostalgia and those who hear Greene as someone fumbling around for a tune like he's trying to find the snooze button. Four years after “Feel It All Around” defined chillwave, and two since Within and Without stood against the backlash, Paracosm presents Greene as a man without a movement, someone whose music can no longer be used to project opinions about a larger trend. Due to the attrition of his peers and imitators, as well as his own artistic refinement, this sound is all his now. While Paracosm isn’t going out of its way to convert anyone, it’s a modest display of staying power*,* proof that Greene is a niche artist who hasn't yet suffered from redundancy.
Greene’s referred to Paracosm as “daytime psychedelia,” a response to its predecessor’s nocturnal amorousness. Once again working with producer/engineer Ben H. Allen, the album's instrumentation sloshes around in lush, warm reverb and palpable bass frequencies. As such, each song is sensual and immersive, indulgent and often feeling shorter than their average five minute length would suggest. While Paracosm never rocks, it always knocks, as few producers are better than Allen at ensuring indie artists stress the low end. Under his hand, the tactility of Washed Out’s studio albums have stood out in comparison to any drizzly replicas that have followed.
Elsewhere, Paracosm finds Greene doing subtle and effective troubleshooting. Though Within and Without wasn't a huge change for Washed Out's aesthetic, it was understandable why people who enjoyed his earliest work might’ve been turned off: “Feel It All Around” had an organic, homemade ingenuity, but Within blended nearly every known variant of makeout music-- shoegaze, Balearic, trip-hop, chillwave, R&B-- into a silken, sweet whole.
Paracosm possesses more texture, which can be partially attributed to the presence of a live rhythm section. “Entrance” begins with chirping birds, and elsewhere there's snippets of laughter, harps, house parties, bongos, and slight swings of human imperfection in the rhythm section. “It All Feels Right” bumps with light reggae upticks before momentarily collapsing into a sunstroke, while “Great Escape” leans off the beat just enough to generate a little bit of Southern soul.
The range of Paracosm helps Greene present himself as more of a singer/songwriter than a producer, though the former part of that dynamic still lags. His voice is an effective and imperfect apparatus that suggests rather than commands; his enunciation is still slack, as hard consonants and most vowel sounds dissolve into a semipermeable gauze. Maybe it’s for the best, though, since the lyrics of “It All Feels Right” are indicative of how much of Paracosm boils down to “Have a nice day” and not much more. However, Greene is growing in terms of melodic construct, as the chorus of “Don’t Give Up” is the strongest and trickiest he’s ever written. The way he manages the song's nimble rhythm suggests Washed Out’s future depends more on the development of Greene’s internal instruments rather than the external ones.
That said, Paracosm’s diversity leaves its individual songs subject to more scrutiny than they were on its overly cohesive predecessor. “Weightless” is equal parts Cocteau Twins and Calgon, but its soapy texture wants for Elizabeth Fraser’s fierce elocution and command of syllabic nonsense. And whether or not “Great Escape” is an intentional homage to “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, it’s probably in Greene’s best interest not to remind listeners of the difference between his vocals and those of Marvin Gaye.
When Greene misses the mark, it’s a demonstration of his musical limitations as well as a counter to the misconception that Washed Out is unambitious or complacent. It’s not unthinkable for Greene to take notes from M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, another innovator in electro-pop ambience who learned to transcend the mumbly vocals of his early work by gradually embracing the role of a true frontman while working with powerhouse guest vocalists as well. But Paracosm is a document of someone who sounds satisfied with his place in life, and that can understandably drive people nuts. There’s plenty of art responsible for describing and inducing vertiginous highs and lows, and Paracosm is more than happy to soundtrack the satisfying moments that seek you out instead of the other way around, effectively triggering the kind of subtle joys that course through you without warning – manageable contentment, sustainable romance.
Those moods are easy to dismiss when they're captured in a lyric like "Call your friends, I'll call mine/ We'll head out for a long ride/ Sun is coming out now, it all feels right." There's a cognitive dissonance, and maybe some embarrassment, in recognizing that emotional state and hearing it expressed back to you in such naïve, plainspoken language. You can call it a guilty pleasure in action-- or, you can just take this accessible escapism at face value and just, you know, feel it. | 2013-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sub Pop | August 12, 2013 | 7.4 | 8394661e-07f7-4ee7-a56a-204477857328 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Two artists from opposite sides of the ambient spectrum find common cause in a 132-year-old pipe organ. | Two artists from opposite sides of the ambient spectrum find common cause in a 132-year-old pipe organ. | Loscil / Lawrence English: Colours of Air | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loscil-lawrence-english-colours-of-air/ | Colours of Air | Since the late 1990s, Loscil—Vancouver’s Scott Morgan—has amassed a sprawling discography numbering dozens of ambient releases. Brisbane, Australia sound artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is an equally prolific creator of musique concrete that typically falls on the fringes of ambient. On Colours of Air, their first album together, Morgan’s naturalistic nuance coaxes out English’s elusive ethereal side, often glimpsed in passing but rarely explored at length. Across 49 minutes of muted soundscapes peppered with warm energy, the two musicians use manipulated organ tones to patient, meditative ends.
A conversation about the nature of “rich sources” inspired Colours of Air and its verdant palette, which is unlike the jagged, minimalist toolkit that defines much of English’s work. The two recorded material on a 132-year-old pipe organ housed at the Old Museum in English’s hometown and then warped those recordings into these cuts, all named for a different color. “Yellow” commands patience, built around chirruping melodies peeking out from behind vast chords that dominate the mid frequencies. Opener “Cyan” is metallic yet cozy, thanks to airy, filtered leads that ride atop an elongated drone. “Black” is hypnotic and shimmering, less sinister than the darkness that its name implies. While the Colours of Air tracklist evokes a diverse range of hues, all the pieces seem to rest on individual shelves in the same soft-lit, jasmine-scented room.
English’s distorted experimentation is fairly subdued on Colours of Air, which favors the overcast trappings of the classic Loscil sound. But the Australian musician makes his penchant for graininess and intensity felt in intriguingly offbeat ways. Closer “Magenta” is brooding and cinematic, centered on bassy tremolo pulses and a descending lead that wouldn’t sound out of place on a tasteful club banger. “Pink” ebbs and flows, contrasting challenging, silvery swells with balmy moments of serenity.
This isn’t English’s first foray into the pipe organ; he’s toyed with its textures on a few albums. Most recently, on 2021’s Observation of Breath, he used the same instrument heard here to create floor-shaking noise. But more than any other installment in English’s unpredictable body of work, Colours of Air plays like a spiritual companion to his 2018 record Selva Oscura, with William Basinski. Both albums put English’s austere signature to an uncharacteristically harmonious backdrop.
In recent years, the organ has become a tool for modernist soundscaping in the hands of artists like Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi. Loscil and English’s album is in a similar vein, and it reinforces how rewarding it can be to hear centuries-old tones and timbres in new contexts. “That which lies beyond our comprehension—a bird call, an animal whimpering, a mountain whispering as wind licks its edges—this is the stuff that has fuelled our mythologies,” English once said, contemplating the link between sound, perception, and meaning. On Colours of Air, the off-putting noisiness of his formula is cast in the gentle glow of Morgan’s hospitable quietude. The album is lush and oblique—an approachable standout in two daunting catalogs. | 2023-02-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-08T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Kranky | February 8, 2023 | 7.3 | 83997c0d-d9b9-4579-9c03-e5507a72ac40 | Ted Davis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ted-davis/ | |
They may have found fame through Beavis and Butt-Head, but in their early days, White Zombie operated in the same NYC underground as Swans and Sonic Youth. This Numero Group box set tells the story. | They may have found fame through Beavis and Butt-Head, but in their early days, White Zombie operated in the same NYC underground as Swans and Sonic Youth. This Numero Group box set tells the story. | White Zombie: It Came From N.Y.C. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21654-it-came-from-nyc/ | It Came From N.Y.C. | “Shut up, Beavis, you’re ruining it.” That’s Butt-Head telling Beavis to stop interrupting White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ‘65” video. The cartoon duo treated Rob Zombie and Sean Yseult’s band with deep reverence, and ironically enough, the clip is widely credited as the reason for White Zombie’s initial leap to multi-platinum success. It’s easy to see why the band captured the imaginations of millions of Butt-Heads: Their aesthetic was fully realized—horror and grindhouse-nodding videos and lyrics, Zombie’s booming voice skulking at the front (not to mention his dreads and goggles). It was metal that rode grooves and featured tons of samples. The mid-'90s run of White Zombie that produced their final two albums—their final single, appropriately enough, being their Beavis & Butt-Head Do America soundtrack contribution—was easily the most popular.
But by the time they were playing arenas and getting frequent airplay on TV, they’d been making music for a decade, and their earliest work arguably holds up better than the stuff that made them famous. Yes, it's a total surprise that Numero Group are giving an extremely successful rock band fronted by Rob Zombie the box set treatment—an honor usually reserved for forgotten funk and soul gems. But it also makes total sense. It Came From N.Y.C. unearths records both unreleased and out-of-print while exhaustively telling the band's lesser-known origin story. The box comes with rare photos, archival flyers, a complete archive of their shirts, reproductions of Rob Zombie’s illustrated liner notes, and a detailed account of the band’s history from (full disclosure!) Pitchfork contributor Grayson Haver Currin. Interviews with the band, logged in a beautiful hardcover tome, offer crucial context for this music.
In the beginning, they were a band of art school kids living amid New York City crime and filth. Sean Yseult and Rob Cummings were both attending Parsons in 1984. Yseult switched from ballet to photography after she broke her foot, discovering hardcore and picking up instruments in the process. Cummings moved to New York from small town Massachusetts where he’d been dreaming of the city described by the Ramones and Velvet Underground. The two met in a cafeteria. She had blue-black hair; he wore a Misfits motorcycle jacket. They became a couple and were inseparable for years. They kicked around the idea of starting a band together and ultimately named themselves after a 1932 Bela Lugosi-starring horror film.
What’s quickly apparent from the almost three hours of music on It Came From N.Y.C. is that Cummings and Yseult were the creative and aesthetic anchors behind White Zombie. Guitarists never stuck around long in the band’s early incarnations, which means every one of their first records had an entirely different vibe. Ena Kostabi’s solos on their debut 1985 EP Gods on Voodoo Moon, for example, are a little more flashy than seems sonically appropriate for the band’s ominous, minimal, and occasionally trippy noise-punk underpinnings.
There are great moments on that first 7”—the uneasy melodic sway of “Tales From the Scare Crow Man” and point-perfect opening chug of “Gentleman Junkie”—but the songs themselves show more potential than prowess. Cummings’ growling, raspy screams are perfectly suited to his early horror-aping lyrics, but the frontman billing himself as “Rob Straker” hadn’t found his eventual authoritative Rob Zombie howl. Still, the essentials that would remain throughout the band’s tenure are present on their first recordings: hooks led by Yseult’s bass while Straker shouts nihilistic lyrics about holy mountains, demon clowns, Nazis, butchers, and scarecrows.
The band’s sound was pushed forward on their 1986 “Pig Heaven” single—presented in the box as an EP with four more unearthed tracks from the same session. Their new drummer Ivan de Prume, who would stay with White Zombie throughout the 1980s, emboldened their rhythm section tenfold. They sounded stronger and tighter than ever, and Straker’s psychedelic horror lyrics were becoming narratively connected stories. In their new attempts to make songs trippy or disorienting, they didn’t rely on thin effects pedals—they shoved more details into the margins. (Later in their discography, they proved to be adept with a “more is more” approach.)
The record is bookended by the tinny recording of a ragtime piano—a simple device that both emphasizes their power and shows their interest in painting a more elaborate picture beyond just screams and spilled blood. But while new guitarist Tim Jeffs was an excellent player, his blues-heavy riffs felt out of place in White Zombie. The nearly eight-minute blues groove of “Rain Insane” is one of the most significant departures in the band’s discography, and while it’s definitely an impressive Straker-fronted blues rock jam, White Zombie were much better when they veered toward chaos.
It’s important to note that while White Zombie were making records and playing shows, they were operating in the same New York underground as Swans and Sonic Youth. After they dumped Jeffs, they looked for a guitarist with more specific influences—their ad asked for someone who was into the Butthole Surfers, X, and the Birthday Party. They found Tom Guay, who ran in the same circles as Pussy Galore and was clearly more ready to convey dissonance than prowess. On 1987’s Psycho-Head Blowout EP, Straker was becoming a more confident frontman, Yseult’s low-end was becoming beefier and more authoritative, and on songs like “Gun Crazy,” de Prume would bring rapidfire discord. They were becoming more abrasive and unpredictable, Yseult unafraid to dive headlong into sludge while Guay tried on a variety of anxious, frenetic grooves.
Their next record was written, recorded, and released soon after Psycho-Head Blowout. It was hammered out in a practice space that shared walls with people who screamed in the hallways, jumped out windows, and kept pet raccoons. “It was a fucking nuthouse to say the least,” remembers Straker. Those were the conditions behind their debut album—their most bleak and noise-centric outing yet. With no-wave producer Wharton Tiers (Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca), they made their debut album Soul-Crusher, one of the best of their career.
Early on in White Zombie’s recordings, they tried for intimidation, but could never rise above pastiche. With Soul-Crusher, they create a sound that’s fully unsettling, Straker’s multi-tracked voice becoming a one-man cackling, shrieking chorus. There are several moments throughout where saliva seems to be palpably sticking to his lips, making his uncomfortable lyrics borderline unbearable. Guay, again, is essential. Any impressive on-point solos are buried in the mix beneath Yseult’s massive, overpowering sludge. When he’s prominently featured, he’s playing in the wrong key or doing some incredible work with feedback. Several times, de Prume full-on switches time signatures while the band slip in and out of key. The album features spoken-word samples from old horror movies, but by this point the band was its own B-movie soundtrack.
Despite hitting their target squarely, Straker decided to move on. Guay was fired from the band; Straker started crediting himself as Rob Zombie and became enamored with Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. As a result, White Zombie made the abrupt, full transition to metal on Make Them Die Slowly. Everything about the album is more crisp: The lyrics in the liner notes were no longer hand-scrawled with illustrations littering the margins. Guitarist John Ricci, who could rip through galloping riffs and nail precise high-speed solos, was practically the stylistic opposite of Guay. Producer Bill Laswell placed a huge emphasis on Ricci’s guitar and Zombie’s voice while neutering the rhythm section. Yseult’s bass wasn’t the overpowering beast it was on the previous two records, which means White Zombie were deprived of one of their most crucial ingredients. The drums sounded smaller, thin and hollow. The overall effect is especially draining when taken in the box set’s chronological order: the noise dominance of Soul-Crusher followed by the sluggish, monotonous Make Them Die Slowly.
Once again, White Zombie would ditch their guitarist and move on to the next one. Jay Yuenger is the one that stuck—he stayed with the band until they eventually called it quits. Their final record before signing to the majors and moving out to L.A. was 1989’s God of Thunder. On the cover, Zombie holds the severed head of Gene Simmons. The record opens with their cover of the Destroyer classic “God of Thunder,” and White Zombie introduce their version by jacking Kiss' legendary introduction: “You wanted the best? You got the best! Introducing the hottest band in the world!” Their sense of humor and a slam-dunk performance of a Kiss classic bring some much-needed levity to their aesthetic.
In their final stop before “Thunder Kiss ‘65,” God of Thunder shows the band utilizing samples more successfully than ever. (The best one: Between Zombie verses, a blasé voice chimes in to say, “Listen, you fuckers.”) Yuenger’s style in his White Zombie debut offers the midpoint between Ricci’s and Guay’s—he’s impressive, but not overpowering; heavy, but precise. By God of Thunder, they found footing after some thrilling moments in the underground and a couple of creative missteps. But the missteps come with experimentation, and experimentation is mandatory if you want to escape the 1990s as maximalist weirdo rock stars.
Listening back to White Zombie, it's interesting to consider how their music holds up in 2016. Obviously, they're a crucial part of Rob Zombie's horror legacy, introducing the nihilistic hellscape language he would follow in his solo albums and literal horror films. In an era where Michael Gira is making some of the best records of his life while early works by Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch are getting reappraised, White Zombie's early presence as a New York underground institution is, on their first 7", intriguing, and on Soul-Crusher, enthralling. Even their later hits, entrenched in 1990s culture as they were (again, thanks in large part to "Beavis & Butt-Head"), stands the test of time thanks to riffs like the slide guitar of “More Human Than Human.” This music pummels, and better still, it escapes the trap of self-seriousness that so many metal and noise bands seem to fall into. They had a sense of humor, which came through in their use of samples and in Zombie's deranged carnival barker performances. But even more engaging than the music's heft, humor, or chaos is the narrative that forms across It Came From N.Y.C.—one of a band that played by their own rules, bucking genre conventions and cutting ties with bandmates in an effort to continuously move forward. | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | null | June 7, 2016 | 8.1 | 839ab76b-b639-4196-9520-1071aac66dd0 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Crosswiring ’80s-Springsteen valor with contemporaneous synth pop, the second album from Dan Boeckner’s disco power trio channels the crushing fear of imminent collapse. | Crosswiring ’80s-Springsteen valor with contemporaneous synth pop, the second album from Dan Boeckner’s disco power trio channels the crushing fear of imminent collapse. | Operators: Radiant Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/operators-radiant-dawn/ | Radiant Dawn | Everything and nothing about Dan Boeckner’s career has changed in the past 15 years. Though he’s best known as the wiry yin to Spencer Krug’s whimsical yang in Montreal indie-rock institution Wolf Parade, Boeckner’s extracurricular activities have taken him further and further from that band’s blue-collar prog, through the skeletal electro-punk of Handsome Furs and, now, the strobe-lit DIY disco of Operators. And yet when he takes to the mic, he’s still very much the same guy we first met on Wolf Parade’s Apologies to the Queen Mary—the bleary-eyed, raspy-voiced underdog with no love for the modern world. His second album with Operators makes it immediately apparent that, this time, Boeckner’s got far greater stressors on his mind than a boring job.
Radiant Dawn ticks all the boxes for a proper dystopian concept album: an overarching theme, recurring lyrical references, brief instrumental interludes, not to mention an album cover that appears salvaged from Storm Thorgerson’s rough drafts for Dark Side of the Moon. But Radiant Dawn differs from the template in one significant respect: Where most bands use concept albums as an excuse to go over the top, Operators want to get under your skin. On their debut 2014 EP, Operators sounded like they were trying to claim the dancefloor vacated by a then-dormant LCD Soundsystem; much of their 2016 full-length, Blue Wave, could’ve passed for Wolf Parade songs with less Krug and more Korg. Radiant Dawn, by contrast, is defined by motorik minimalism and an austere, foreboding atmosphere that allows the band to stretch out musically while encouraging Boeckner to burrow deeper inward lyrically.
In an interview last year, Boeckner admitted that Operators is essentially a power-trio remount of Handsome Furs, the project he formed in 2006 with Alexei Perry and which terminated in 2012 when their marriage dissolved. While recording Radiant Dawn, Boeckner, fellow synth-tweaker Devojka, and drummer Sam Brown actually performed a handful of one-off shows showcasing Handsome Furs material—partly because its politicized intent resonated through the songs they were writing for the new record. While Boeckner continues to crosswire ’80s-Springsteen valor with contemporaneous synth-pop sounds, Radiant Dawn looks to the Cold War era less for musical inspiration than psychological. To accurately gauge the unsettled state of our world today, Operators transport us back to the last time in modern history when it seemed life on Earth was coming to an end.
Not a moment goes by on Radiant Dawn when Boeckner isn’t feeling crushed by the weight of modern life and the fear of imminent ecological collapse. He opens the record with a lyric that seems to plummet to new depths of despair with each line, like stops on a descending elevator: “Staring down the void/At the bottom of the glass/In a public parking lot/I woke up in the woods.” From there, the album moves on to paralyzing ennui (“It’s impossible to live today”), mental deterioration (“Put poison in your hollow skull and overload until you just can’t feel”), and fuck-it-all nihilism (“I want to watch the flood come and wash it all away”).
But you’d be forgiven for not noticing that Radiant Dawn is one of the bleakest records of the year, because it’s also among the most effervescent. On “I Feel Emotion,” Boeckner isn’t just cataloging his blues, he’s giving himself the heart-pounding aerobics soundtrack that will motivate him to shake them off. And while Neu!-wave anthem “Faithless” may speak of spiritual emptiness, the song steps up to fill the void with an urgent rhythmic pulse and surprisingly psychedelic textural freakery.
At six and a half minutes, “Faithless” is both the longest and most arresting track—and given its early placement, it threatens to overshadow everything that follows. But as the album’s tropical digi-dub interludes become more frequent, they seem less like random sketches and more like necessary narcotizing devices that allow Operators to reveal their vulnerabilities. The album hits its emotional peak with “Come and See,” a slo-mo electro ballad that disintegrates into an oddly moving ambient coda haunted by a corroded sample of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” like a faded Polaroid of a more innocent time. And with the neon-tinted knockout “Strange,” Boeckner crafts a “Dancing on My Own” to call his own, albeit one that celebrates a different kind of perseverance. “The feeling’s gone, gone,” he laments, before revealing the silver lining to Radiant Dawn’s black-cloud forecast: “I’m on the wire/Holding on.” | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Last Gang | May 22, 2019 | 7.7 | 83a29a2a-81f8-467e-8e4d-707b0a2ed32f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Joey Purp is a member of Chance the Rapper’s Savemoney Crew, and iiiDrops is his most well-rounded and definitive effort: He comes off as boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy. | Joey Purp is a member of Chance the Rapper’s Savemoney Crew, and iiiDrops is his most well-rounded and definitive effort: He comes off as boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy. | Joey Purp: iiiDrops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21913-iiidrops/ | iiiDrops | “I done been on both sides of the burner/I done witnessed both sides of the murder/I done seen a nigga killed/And seen a nigga kill a nigga.” This is how Joey Purp opens up his new mixtape, iiiDrops—announcing himself as a street-savvy, thug-fluent, criminal-adjacent observer of society's darker corners. He's more on the sidelines than in the fields, but he's not an outsider looking in, either. An accessory by necessity, he's smart enough to not snitch and careful enough to make his death threats subliminal, yet still aware enough to speak as the conscience from within the belly of the beast, because he personally knows of the tolls paid on the backroads to riches. “You see the world in my daughter's eyes/If you had seen what she had seen, you'd be traumatized,” he raps.
It's tempting to simplify when talking about artists, to shave off their multitudes, flatten, and categorize them. Because he is part of Chicago's Savemoney crew—the loose collective of artists that includes Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and others—Joey comes with a certain set of preconceptions, namely that he be a technically proficient stylist with a progressive artistic bent. He fits that bill, sometimes, but he's a little deeper and more human than that. Boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy, longing for the music industry's spoils while simultaneously disregarding them—his various sides come together on iiiDrops, which is more well-rounded and definitive than his woozy The Purple Tape or his word-centric experimentalism as part of Leather Corduroys.
Where Chance spent Coloring Book showcasing the audacity of his hope for a better tomorrow, Joey is a panoramic and holistic realist when he looks around at the forces and people that support the cycle of violence in his hometown. On “Cornerstore” he rides a horn-powered groove from Thelonious Martin and Donnie Trumpet, dropping off pinpoint observations along the way: He recalls speaking to his brother who may never come home from behind bars, confesses of marijuana dreams of drug kingpin success, notes that “White kids deal with problems that we never knew to bother/Arguing with they dads, we pray we ever knew our fathers,” and watches gentrification from ground zero: “Now up in the corners where killers used to inhabit/They built a row of new condos where they tore down project buildings.” He's joined by Saba (another Savemoney satellite), who matches him observation for observation: “My best friend from when I was 11, posted with the weapon/Actin' like he do not see me step into they section/We used to hoop daily and treat it like a profession/And now I'm walking by him like I'm some type of pedestrian.”
Joey’s songs make no distinction between the personal and political, and see systemic failures through the lenses of individuals without ever quite pointing fingers or succumbing to victimization. “We grow up being neglected by our elected officials,” he raps on “Money & Bitches.” “My nigga, cry me a river, I’ll buy you a tissue/ I don’t wanna hear your complainin’, you pressin’ my issue/All I know is money and bitches.” There’s also little difference between good thoughts and worthy wordplay—every rhyme and idea flows into a next; almost every moment is quotable and represents a greater whole. It’s an astounding feat for someone who tried to lean and swag his way through his first solo project.
In a year that's been dominated by headline releases from marquee artists, iiiDrops has the making of a sleeper hit. The POV is measured and insightful, the rhyming is assured by both technical and narrative metrics, and the music is quietly confident and sharply novel—Knox Fortune and GARREN's funky broken soul on “Photobooth,” OddCouple's triumphant swing on “Morning Sex,” the stripped Neptunes-ish drumplay of “Girls@” and “Say You Do,” updated blaxploitation psychedelia on “Godbody,” a semi-paranoid summer evening pulse to “When I'm Gone.” Some of the numbers sound like they belong of a producer’s showcase, more than a rapper’s coming out party, but Joey rides every beat with an easy intensity that makes his worldview the unifying factor here. He never allows the tracks to become the sole point of focus, and it takes Chance the Rapper—going on about dead batteries as a pick-up line to girls “readin' Ta-Nehisi Coates”—to upstage the star of this show.
Purp is adept at juggling and offering competing meanings, often from within the same song: “When I'm Gone” shuffles between a tale of relationship drama and fights with his boss, while the closer “Escape” is a Drake-like stream of boasting and history and chest-thumping prediction that plays like Purp's “5 A.M. in Chicago.” But he never comes off jumbled or all-over-the-place; he not only sees both sides of murder, but also the bigger picture. On “Morning Sex,” he raps, “Look in the mirror, all I see is the money / I close my eyes, all I see is the money.” He's not immune to capitalism's siren, but he's aware of the opportunity costs. Unfortunately, his gaze does not extend to seeing women in whole; there's nary a girl mentioned who isn't a ho, a nag, or one or the other in the making. That’s a disappointing state of affairs, but there is hope: If you look into his daughter’s eyes, you can see the world. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees his mother’s eyes. He's traumatized, but he’s still looking. | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 3, 2016 | 8.2 | 83a7f5b8-9119-46d5-a335-54917f16b017 | kris ex | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kris-ex/ | null |
The 100% Electronica affiliate channels bits of techo, trance, 2-step, and jungle into contemporary rave hybrids tempered with a hint of vaporwave’s self-awareness. | The 100% Electronica affiliate channels bits of techo, trance, 2-step, and jungle into contemporary rave hybrids tempered with a hint of vaporwave’s self-awareness. | Vitesse X: Us Ephemeral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vitesse-x-us-ephemeral/ | Us Ephemeral | When New York City’s Jordan Stern stopped playing guitar and bass in shoegaze bands and started making techno, she took the name Vitesse X. As an algebraic variable expressed in French, the name might mean unknown speed. On her debut album, though, the velocity is fairly clockable: mid-tempo, with a nice vroom every now and then to prove the music’s horsepower, transportive if not transformational.
Us Ephemeral is worth a spin, though. Vitesse X came up, in part, through the 100% Electronica scene, which spent the pandemic amusing themselves and amassing followings via ravey, post-vaporwave VR concerts on YouTube. Engineered with precision, her output is among the scene’s most accomplished. It’s a bit peppier than Slowdive and Orbital’s early-’90s crystallizations of noise, dub, and Detroit techno. It’s heavier on the breaks than the current high-speed techno of Brooklyn clubs between the Covid waves, where muscles outflank hooks. And it’s engaged, if a bit neutral. Her work lacks some of the personality of that 100% gang, but it also sidesteps their often exhausting blend of TRL, PLUR, and MST3K.
The title track kicks things off with dust clouds of reverb, little scraps of what might be radio transmissions, a big widescreen beat, and Stern’s floaty vocals. A sped-up voice riding shotgun chants, Go go go go go. It’s a winning start to an album that continues down similar paths, passing landmarks of the last 40-odd years of dance music. “Potential Energy” takes in techstep, trance wooshes, and EDM fizz, landing somewhere near the Powerpuff Girls theme. (Which is not a read: I recently witnessed that bubblegum blaster destroy a small club in Brooklyn.) “Activation” is part Kylie/Cathy Dennis’ “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” part the XX/Florence and the Machine’s cover of “You Got the Love,” and even a touch of t.A.T.u.’s “Not Gonna Get Us.” In a cheeky bit of map-reading, she sings, “You keep getting in my head,” making it sound like a nice, if familiar, place to get lost in.
“Spaces” spatters a chunky frame with buzzy synths and scraps of organ, while Stern’s voice weaves in and out; with a bit more drive, it could charge into Charli XCX or her own tourmates Magdalena Bay territory. Spacier, and more intriguing, are “Rash Devices,” which drips spangled guitar and murmuring sighs across a bed of 2-step, and the smeary “Centrifuge Me,” which offers a hint of the force she might accumulate if she let go of the Télépopmusik tastefulness and let loose. Album highlight “Gated Bloom” unleashes a storm of drum trickery, filters, and fuckery to map out a disorienting stereo field. It may lack the breakbeat-as-breakthrough revelation of Eris Drew, but it’s aiming for stimulation, not revolution, and it surely gets there.
Sometimes, as with the pitched-down vocals and guitar peals of “Therma Maxima,” tracks feel more like tourist traps, obligatory stylistic touchdowns. “Desecrate my mind,” she might sing, but the moment seems dutiful. And closer “Repress Reprise” approaches a crisp weightlessness but gets bogged down in water-feature effects. Vitesse X isn’t there yet, but she’s heading somewhere all her own. Until then, Us Ephemeral is a good trip. | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 100% Electronica | March 31, 2022 | 6.9 | 83a951c6-f05e-4663-a6ad-810f3a30a767 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The Canadian rapper’s latest album finds moments of real depth and humanity. The rest of the time, his verses register as monotonous and tame, his energy dictated by A-list collaborators. | The Canadian rapper’s latest album finds moments of real depth and humanity. The rest of the time, his verses register as monotonous and tame, his energy dictated by A-list collaborators. | Nav: Demons Protected by Angels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nav-demons-protected-by-angels/ | Demons Protected by Angels | Nav has an aptitude for fading into the background. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whose fault that is, like when his guest verse on Travis Scott’s Astroworld was the quietest on the album. But on his most recent projects, 2020’s Emergency Tsunami and Good Intentions, Nav’s meekness—combined with generic, Auto-Tuned crooning and flexes ranging from standard to weirdly specific—made his presence feel more like that of a stock image than a main character. On the new Demons Protected by Angels, he attempts to shift focus away from the beats and features, finally treating the songs like they’re his own. Nav lets extended moments of true self-awareness break through his manicured shell, momentarily deviating from the soulless bars that often fill his albums.
His comfort with the spotlight manifests in funny ways, oscillating between moving personal stories and times when he lets other artists control the tempo. Demons Protected by Angels originally included a track featuring Drake, which Nav removed because his fellow Canadian is “such a big artist” that his presence might “take away from anything else on the album.” That makes sense—but Nav then proceeds to feature Travis Scott, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Baby, and Don Toliver within one four-song stretch. The competing logic of the album’s synthesis and final structure exposes the reality of Nav’s stardom: He doesn’t have the draw to carry an album by himself. You begin to suspect that he realizes this as well.
Ceding too much room to guests undermines Nav’s individuality and causes the star-powered tracks to veer toward the generic. “Lots of water on my neck and I could easily get you wet too,” he raps on “Dead Shot,” resorting to cookie-cutter boasts to keep pace with the cosmic pitter-patter of an instrumental clearly designed with Uzi’s cadence and delivery in mind. Lil Baby blisters through his verse on “Never Sleep,” while Nav drones on about foreign cars and putting molly in Travis Scott-branded alcoholic seltzers, getting swallowed up by the Tay Keith beat. Some tracks with features rise above the mind-numbing fray, like “Interstellar” with Uzi (their matched energy is reminiscent of the stellar Eternal Atake) and “Mismatch” with Babyface Ray, who skates over a frantic Wheezy beat with expert precision. But too often Nav’s contributions register as monotonous and tame, his energy dictated by his collaborators, his words doomed to be forgotten until they’re mined for future Instagram captions.
To his credit, there are real moments when Nav draws listeners closer and surprises them by baring his insecurities and pain without flinching. Sandwiched between A-list collaborations, the solo track “Last of the Mohicans” repurposes the 1992 Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle as a double entendre reference to Nav’s Punjabi heritage and self-described isolation. Supported by little more than a trap drumbeat and wistful background vocals, he sounds remarkably honest on the subject of loss and loneliness, rapping about emotional breakdowns and fears of mortality. “Lost Me,” with its somber Rod Wave–esque piano introduction and Toronto crooner RealestK’s wispy falsetto, is the closest the oft-shallow Nav has come to a true ballad. “In another dimension, I hope I get dementia to get you out my memory,” he raps at the end of the first verse, granting a rare window into what heartbreak feels like for him.
Left to his own devices, Nav sometimes strays back towards raps without substance, coasting on pristine beat selection and Auto-Tune that lull the listener into easy-listening mode. Over the sugary melody and money-counter sound effects of “Loaded,” he attempts to interrogate drug use as a form of escapism, but his abridged verse ensures that you’re more likely to hum along with the electronic keyboard in the background than to remember his accounts of fast living. The saving grace for “Destiny” is the intermittent atmospheric beeping, which forces an intriguing shift in pace and cadence amid Nav’s raps about shooters and Christian Dior floors.
The closing track, “Ball in Peace,” is a dedication to Nav’s late friend Joley Aristhee, who died in February 2022 after falling from a Manhattan rooftop while running from police. It feels like Nav’s enlightened form, the pinnacle of what he could achieve if he decided to rap about things that actually mattered to him. The song is powered solely by his voice, and though the melodies are airy, his words are tinged with pain and regret. “I see you in my dreams, fallin’ away from me/I never met someone as loyal, I’ma just keep shit immaculate for you,” he raps. It’s unfair to expect any artist to reach these depths and share them—but here, Nav does. It’s an extreme example of the emotions that he’s capable of displaying in his music. The challenge is to make these showcases of humanity and meaning the rule, rather than the exception. | 2022-09-15T00:14:56.408-04:00 | 2022-09-15T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XO / Republic | September 15, 2022 | 6.2 | 83b9c985-ee8b-44e2-9ad0-12b0259d5d12 | Matthew Ritchie | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ritchie/ | |
Clunky lyrics and inept political analysis hinder Scott Kannberg’s most enjoyable solo album to date. | Clunky lyrics and inept political analysis hinder Scott Kannberg’s most enjoyable solo album to date. | Spiral Stairs: We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spiral-stairs-we-wanna-be-hyp-no-tized/ | We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized | Scott Kannberg enjoys the kind of indie-rock legacy that can’t be easily undone, but not for lack of trying. We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized is the Pavement co-founder’s third album as Spiral Stairs, or his fifth solo LP overall, counting two sometimes tedious ventures as Preston School of Industry. Though it represents his strongest and most immediately appealing output to date, Hyp-No-Tized eventually succumbs to the central conundrum of Kannberg’s post-Pavement output: On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.
Twangy, sun-bronzed rock is familiar Spiral Stairs territory, explored first on 2009’s The Real Feel and again eight years later on 2017’s Doris and the Daggers. Hyp-No-Tized accelerates the style to a faster clip, generously supplementing its guitar parts with saxophone and trumpet. The occasional forays into psychedelia—on jaunty opener “Hyp-No-Tized,” probably the strongest track of the bunch, and “BTG,” short for “Blame the Government”—feel effective, if not quite revelatory. Kannberg is a more assured and less nasal singer than he once was, an achievement he credits to imitating Van Morrison. But his lyrical abilities continue to lag behind his instrumental talents: At nearly every turn, he’s hampered by clunky phrasing, whether regrettable rhymes of convenience (“You were dressed up as a clown[...]/You just couldn’t hide your frown”) or ideas more eloquently expressed elsewhere (“There’s something bad going down in Denmark”).
Where Doris and the Daggers incorporated more personal reflection, Hyp-No-Tized taps into a timely but vague political theme. The nonspecific approach offers advantages: The United States’ long political nightmare needs no introduction, nor does anyone want to find out what rhymes with “Trump.” The cumulative effect, though, is uninspired. “Swampland” rebukes Washington, D.C. by embracing its most hackneyed metaphor. “Fingerprintz” begins by decrying partisan bickering, but halfway through it meanders into a thicket of instrumentation, never to return to the subject.
The album’s most topical entry, “Borderline,” addresses sensationalized talk of border walls and migrant caravans—issues on which Kannberg, as a Californian now living in Mexico, could offer a perspective. Yet the song operates in trite and indelicate couplets (“They’ll take your bread/And shoot you dead”), dimming the appeal of what would otherwise be solid pseudo-classic rock. As always, it’s near impossible to avoid comparison to former bandmate Stephen Malkmus, whose latter-day career has yielded both more incisive commentary (“Senator,” “Middle America”) and more enjoyable nonsense.
Those determined to listen to the entirety of the greater Pavement-related discography will surely find things to appreciate: the confident strut of the title track, the guitars that lap and corner around Kannberg’s vocals on “Hold On (Til I Figure It Out).” These are exciting moments and help elevate We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized above its predecessors, which is not a high bar to clear. | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nine Mile / Coolin’ by Sound | March 27, 2019 | 6.5 | 83c2e09f-07d6-46a4-afd6-0c365dd250ee | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The new project from Grouper’s Liz Harris contains some of her most beguiling work. Spread across two long, contrasting ambient compositions, her music remains in an enigmatic class of her own. | The new project from Grouper’s Liz Harris contains some of her most beguiling work. Spread across two long, contrasting ambient compositions, her music remains in an enigmatic class of her own. | Nivhek: After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nivhek-after-its-own-death-walking-in-a-spiral-towards-the-house/ | After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house | Liz Harris is just barely audible in her own music. Her voice, when she sings, is usually so low that the words sit just below comprehension, teasing that part of the mind that wants to find meaning in the things it struggles to discern. You are forever just about to comprehend a Grouper song. You don’t.
This uneasy little purgatorial space—between understanding and mystery, between anxious hum and beatific drone—is where Grouper’s music lives. It’s where a lot of us live, and Harris’ ability to speak to this place might explain why her music commands such consistent reverence. Rarely does ambient music, by definition lacking sharp form or borders, generate such a specific clutch of recognizable human feelings; rarely does it feel like one person’s breath in our ear. Harris’ music, as diffuse as it is, feels like traveling around inside of a mind.
Last week, she released a project consisting of two long, exploratory works, each broken into two pieces. Working under the name “Nivhek,” she collaborated with visual artist Marcel Weber on an audiovisual installation, one that corresponded with a residency in Portugal and the Russian Arctic. The work, taken by itself, has some of the serene, harsh quality of the landscape itself. The first piece, “After its own death,” is darker and thicker-sounding than anything on either 2018’s Grid of Points or 2014’s Ruins. It is immediately one of the most potent pieces she’s released in a decade. Over the course of its runtime, it expands and contracts and changes shape a number of times, gathering mass with foreboding blobs of tape and Mellotron and then dissolving into solitary bells and gongs, glimmering into thick silence. The atmosphere is severe, a landscape of vast emptiness that nonetheless throbs with alien, unforgiving life.
The second half of the piece feels downright sepulchral, due in no small part to the sound of heavily slammed doors echoing down hallways behind Harris’ murmured vocals. She places other small, field-recorded noises in the corners of the mix—a man’s faraway voice, some shuffling footsteps. A startling surge of distortion from a malfunctioning effects pedal blurts out of the silence, and it might be the loudest sound ever to appear on a Grouper record. The vibe is wet, sucking mud, freezing toes, a faint mildew smell in the air. The overlay of tape hiss gives it a dismal, gray feel, like a damp chill that has penetrated our clothes.
The second composition, “Walking in a spiral towards the house,” picks up where the ringing bells of the first piece began. A circular little theme on mallet percussion, bells and gongs traces and then doubles itself, wandering around prescribed circles. Lou Harrison, a minimalist composer and West Coast mystic, wrote many pieces for gamelan and gamelan-inspired ensembles throughout his decades-long career, and there are hints of some of his works—the “Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan,” for example—at play in Harris’ haunted “walking in a spiral.” The piece is spare and uncluttered to the point of stasis; listening to it, I felt sometimes as if I were watching a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself. The mood is there, a certain mystery and awe, but it dissipates as the bells chime on and the piece gathers no further momentum and takes no forked paths.
That said, one-half of After its own death/Walking in a spiral is her most beguiling work in years. Making hard distinctions between Grouper records feels a bit like ranking and classifying heavy sighs, but there are skin-prickling passages moments that surge out of her work—minor epiphanies that prick the surface of life, startling and haunting you back into yourself. It is not easy to harness or command, and if we have to wander with Harris through some uncertain patches to chance upon these private revelations, all the better. | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Yellow Electric | February 14, 2019 | 8.3 | 83c2e775-5f4b-4814-892c-1281332d89ee | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Chicago group pairs new recordings of songs from 2011’s RATBOY EP with a collection of early rarities, contrasting cozy nostalgia with hard-rocking instincts. | To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Chicago group pairs new recordings of songs from 2011’s RATBOY EP with a collection of early rarities, contrasting cozy nostalgia with hard-rocking instincts. | Ratboys: Happy Birthday, Ratboy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ratboys-happy-birthday-ratboy/ | Happy Birthday, Ratboy | Ratboys have every reason to be bitter. After nearly a decade of touring, supporting bands like PUP and Soccer Mommy, the Chicago group had cultivated a rock-solid setlist bridging its recordings’ melodic pop with a heavier live sound. Following 2017’s mesmeric GN, songwriting partners Julia Steiner and Dave Sagan rounded out their roster, adding touring bassist Sean Neumann and drummer Marcus Nuccio as full-time members before returning to the studio for their third full-length. When Bernie Sanders shouted them out at an Iowa campaign stop, it became a meme. 2020 should have been their year.
It wasn’t. Printer’s Devil, which would have been a career-defining record in virtually any other timeline, arrived on February 28, 2020. The anthemic “Anj” and “Alien With a Sleep Mask On” never knew a concert hall or festival stage. Ratboys canceled their first headline tour and relegated the album’s nervy guitar pop to acoustic live streams recorded amidst IKEA furnishings. Confined indoors, the quartet was moved to revisit past triumphs, rearranging old demos and concert staples for the new lineup. Happy Birthday, Ratboy, released to coincide with the band’s 10th anniversary, packages new recordings of songs from 2011’s RATBOY EP with a collection of early rarities and one new song, “Go Outside.”
Approached as a companion piece, Happy Birthday, Ratboy is somber and reflective where Printer’s Devil was ebullient and hopeful. But like all of Ratboys’ music, the songs have a glowing warmth even when the guitars roar and Steiner’s vocals border on a piercing shriek. The new RATBOY arrangements are faithful to the midtempo afternoon ambience of the original EP, which Steiner and Sagan recorded as undergrads at Notre Dame. “The Stanza,” which recalls high-school reading lists and nail-biting teenage listlessness, is outfitted with a more punctuated slap-guitar touch, while “Key” swells with a drowsy chorus and woozy synth solo. They also punch up the jangly folk of “Down the River” from the 2011 version.
Steiner describes Ratboys’ sound as “post-country,” which doesn’t quite fit. Their catalog is split between intimate folk pop and louder indie rock, and both strains are approachably earnest in a way that only rarely verges on melodrama. As a lyricist, Steiner finds poignancy in glancing portraits—a little boy playing on train tracks beyond view of his preoccupied father, a dead housecat overstaying its welcome in the kitchen freezer—which together approximate a clear-eyed Americana. When she writes about growing up, her focus drifts to unexamined, interstitial moments, as on “Intense Judgment”: “On the second of July, I stubbed my toe/It was 2010 and my brother was in Mexico.” Her narratives are conscious of guilt, yet redeemed by close embraces. On “Down the River,” her narrator leaves a six-pack of Heineken on a gravestone.
But Steiner and Sagan’s earworm-y melodies have a timeless quality, and Happy Birthday, Ratboy gets really interesting on its back half, where the double-tracked vocals and snarling basslines resemble Veruca Salt and Juliana Hatfield’s mid-’90s work. “Collected” lurches between jagged verses and radiant chorus; the half-time instrumental breakdown features Sagan’s most psychedelic performance in memory. His playing is equally striking on “Cacao to Cacao,” which conjures early Third Eye Blind in its pacing and precise composition.
“Have a Heart” is the record’s most ambitious arrangement, laying violins over guitars for a stirring climax, but Happy Birthday, Ratboy is most rewarding when Ratboys contrast cozy nostalgia with their hard-rocking instincts. To balance the enrapturing melody of “88 Fingers Edward,” the engineering emphasizes Neumann’s rugged bass and Sagan’s growling guitar chords. Steiner’s soft voice lilts in wistful memory: “Follow me back where we were when everything was right/And we were humming and our mouths were dry, we didn’t say it but we liked/When 18 was the age of walking in and doing things you couldn’t do/When you younger, you were dumber, but you’ll be older soon.” Then Steiner pleads, “So give me a nod, and some time to look around,” and the song launches into a two-and-a-half minute instrumental digression, both guitars soaring through a momentous key change. It took them a while to get here, but Ratboys were always sitting on a goldmine.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | April 6, 2021 | 7.2 | 83c8fff3-480e-415e-9922-061900191655 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
With help from Jim O’Rourke and Henry Kaiser, the British guitarist supplies the bittersweet backdrop to Werner Herzog’s 2005 film about humans’ doomed desire to conquer nature. | With help from Jim O’Rourke and Henry Kaiser, the British guitarist supplies the bittersweet backdrop to Werner Herzog’s 2005 film about humans’ doomed desire to conquer nature. | Richard Thompson: Music From Grizzly Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-thompson-music-from-grizzly-man/ | Music From Grizzly Man | The first thing Werner Herzog needed viewers to know about Timothy Treadwell was that he was dead. His Grizzly Man had indeed become at best a vanquished hero, eaten by the very bears he sought to protect, or perhaps even become. Just 31 seconds into Herzog’s 2005 documentary, Treadwell—a failed actor with a blond Prince Valiant bob, who spent 13 seasons documenting grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness—kneels in front of his camera and between two bears, bragging to an imagined audience about how dangerous and important his work is. “(1957–2003),” the screen reads, a tacit taunt that offers up the ending by way of introduction. The specifics of Treadwell’s death, though, always mattered less to Herzog than the fundamental question Treadwell’s life presented: What right do people have to think they can completely return to nature or, worse, conquer it?
In his clenched German accent, that’s the issue Herzog repeatedly confronts for 100 minutes above Treadwell’s wondrous footage of bears in the Alaskan bush. But Grizzly Man’s most understated element—its instrumental music, somehow as dark as it is refulgent—may be as important to the film’s emotional gravity as Herzog’s editorials or Treadwell’s views.
Guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson assembled a modest quintet to improvise alongside an edit for two days, part of a spirited rush to finish Grizzly Man before its Sundance premiere. (The credited “James O’Rourke” is indeed that Jim O’Rourke, then on a collaborative tear but too kind to ask that his name be fixed.) Under the aegis of producer and much wilder guitar hero Henry Kaiser, they embodied Treadwell’s personal volatility, Alaska’s untamed grandeur, and the film’s philosophical quandaries. The music never tells us how to feel about this man who seemed to know how it would all end; it only underlines the moral complexity of Treadwell’s tenuous relationship with his harsh reality.
Thompson and his little band display incredible range; their playing suits the action on screen no matter how dramatic or subtle it becomes. “Bear Fight”—a raging duet between cellist Danielle DeGruttola and bassist Damon Smith—introduces a titanic clash between Sergeant Brown and Mickey, two males in pursuit of “the queen of the grizzly sanctuary.” On the other hand, the spirited acoustic tangle of “Foxes” is all agility and so little power, its frothy ebullience the perfect accompaniment to playful footage of Treadwell’s steadiest forest friends. Presaging the solemn blues Earth would soon make, the title theme is majestic but troubled. Unfurling while Treadwell plays with adorable cubs that get too close and Herzog tell us that the man has “crossed an invisible border line,” it is a sublime wordless thesis, perfect in reductive function.
But a newly remastered edition of Thompson’s score is a pointed reminder of how well these pieces work without the movie, especially in the way they speak to our broadening and deepening conflicts with nature. Much like the film it traces, most of this music lingers in a bittersweet daze, pondering questions of right and wrong, and romance and ridicule, that Thompson knows he can never actually answer.
The minute-long preamble “Tim and the Bears” is as light as a Windham Hill feather, but there’s an undercurrent of accepted doom, too—fitting, since this is what plays in those opening moments, as Herzog offers his introductory silent obituary. Thompson’s stately arrangement of “Glencoe,” a Scottish fiddle lament written to memorialize a 17th-century massacre, is gorgeous and warm, its melody lazily sparkling like late-fall sunshine on a country lake. As Thompson lets his licks linger in the cracks of the restrained rhythm section, however, it’s hard not to feel uneasy, like someone is watching you. Unfathomable beauty and inescapable, irresistible danger—is there a simpler distillation of what drove Treadwell to his death?
Those tracks, though, follow the more familiar model for bittersweet or even emotionally ambivalent music in general—make it pretty and approachable first, then tuck the darkness into seams and corners. Grizzly Man is actually at its most stirring and enduring when it inverts this trope, adding pleasant overtones to music that feels sad or despondent. Thompson and crew nail this effect during a mid-album suite of four pieces, including his only two co-writes with O’Rourke. They mirror the way Herzog seems to see Treadwell and nature itself—skepticism and fearful respect, backed with unwavering wonder.
Notice the way that the eerie prepared piano and quiet metallic clanging of “The Kibosh,” the start of this suite, pair with Thompson’s warm acoustic line, cloaking everything they touch in sinister shadows; then notice the way all those elements slowly settle into conversation, as if warring parties have reached a promising compromise. “Small Racket,” the last of this stretch, waltzes with despair, each electric note extending another new frown. Thompson steadily lets a little more air into the lugubrious riff, harmonizing with it until it seems almost to smile. “Treadwell No More,” one of the most remarkable guitar works in Thompson’s very remarkable career, gathers up the loose threads of a Loren Connors abstraction and winds them into a long, tense, and luxurious blues, like some languid Mississippi raga. Sadness and sweetness are never far apart here.
“Human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth,” John McPhee wrote decades ago in his canonical The Control of Nature, “to take what is not given.” He was talking about the Mississippi River and our endless efforts to manage its course, but he could have been talking about Treadwell—a tragic hero or lovable villain, depending on your vantage, who thought he was strong enough to protect animals that could and finally did kill him and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. The bear was subsequently shot, too. Nature didn’t need Treadwell; he harmed it, however much he loved it.
The real magic of Thompson’s work for Grizzly Man is that it could score a million such movies about humanity’s quests to dominate nature or integrate back into it. In the splendor of these sounds and their ingrained fatalism, you can picture wildfires ripping through mountain towns that perhaps shouldn’t exist, or waters ruining coastal cities we couldn’t save. Do you marvel more at the dam whose intricate engineering controls the river for a spell, or the mighty river when it eventually wins? Do you admire Treadwell’s devotion to the bears, or do you privately relish his fate as a subject’s pre-hibernation meal? Thompson steps back and watches, playing along to a sort of beautiful doom that seems bound to become more routine. | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | May 13, 2022 | 8 | 83cc133c-675a-4a89-bf86-fd88fc866b0d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Swedish melodic death metal innovators crib from a career highlight, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease, on their first reunion album that does justice to their legacy. | The Swedish melodic death metal innovators crib from a career highlight, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease, on their first reunion album that does justice to their legacy. | At the Gates: To Drink From the Night Itself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/at-the-gates-to-drink-from-the-night-itself/ | To Drink From the Night Itself | More than a decade after reuniting, Swedish melodic death metal innovators At the Gates have finally made a record worthy of the excitement their comeback created. Unlike 2014’s disappointing At War With Reality, their new album, To Drink From the Night Itself, marks a delayed reawakening of the band’s melodic sense. At the Gates are still drawing on their own past—that’s just standard procedure for any death metal act that’s been around for a couple of decades. But this time, they’re cribbing from a career highlight, 1994’s Terminal Spirit Disease.
War was essentially a continuation of At the Gates’ Black Album, 1995’s Slaughter of the Soul, whose streamlined version of their sound catapulted the band to popularity. They broke up shortly after its release, but Slaughter lived on in 2000s metalcore, as acts like Killswitch Engage, the Black Dahlia Murder, and Darkest Hour further simplified the record’s sounds. By the time At the Gates reunited in 2007, the long-defunct Swedish group had become one of the most influential metal bands in America. Their subsequent tour was the ultimate “show ‘em how it’s done” affair—but when they finally released War, it read as a played-out rehash of the sound they’d created.
Drink goes deeper with its melodies, eschewing the shortcuts of War and Slaughter. Its title track almost mirrors that of Disease, weaving ’80s twin-guitar melodies into its thrashing rhythms. This interplay is At the Gates’ signature, and it’s far more prominent here than it was on War. The recent adjustment to their sound is, in part, the result of a changing of the guard: God Macabre’s Jonas Stålhammar replaced original guitarist Anders Björler in 2017, and the band’s other guitarist, Martin Larsson, first came on board with Disease.
Melodic death can sometimes border on AOR sappiness, but the melodies on Drink dazzle without becoming overbearing. The final passage of “Palace of Lepers” provides the most beautiful moment on the album, reveling in At the Gates’ most Romantic, Maiden-as-gospel urges. “The Chasm” is Drink’s oddball, a hybrid of the band’s own sound and the D-beat of Disfear, vocalist Tomas Lindberg’s other main group. It’s more direct than Disease, but in a way that doesn’t mimic Slaughter. Thrash and hardcore seem closer to Lindberg’s heart than melodic death metal, and it’s those influences that prevent Drink from sounding saccharine.
Although it’s a vast improvement over War, the album isn’t faultless. It loses steam over the last few tracks; as much of a relief as it is to see the band shake off the legacy of Slaughter, Drink could’ve used a galvanizing single like that record’s “Suicide Nation.” The strings are almost cinematic, and those embellishments come off as a false puff-up compared to Disease’s delicate chamber flourishes. At the Gates still don’t sound quite as confident as they did in their prime.
Death metal may not be the dominant mode of the metal underground (if there’s a drawback to diversity, it’s that there aren’t currently a lot of unifying bands or styles), but it has never been in a better place than the one it’s in now. Even as newer bands reanimate old sounds, great albums are flowing in from elder statesmen like At the Gates. It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview. | 2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Century Media | May 17, 2018 | 7.3 | 83d15896-703e-40e2-b0bf-0a8df9cd90cc | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The Toronto duo Majid Jordan wrote and and co-produced Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home." On their self-titled major label debut, they succeed the most when they embrace that hit song's sunny, pure-pop-for-pop's-sake energy. When they attempt to go darker, or more serious, they tend to fall flat. | The Toronto duo Majid Jordan wrote and and co-produced Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home." On their self-titled major label debut, they succeed the most when they embrace that hit song's sunny, pure-pop-for-pop's-sake energy. When they attempt to go darker, or more serious, they tend to fall flat. | Majid Jordan: Majid Jordan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21506-majid-jordan/ | Majid Jordan | Early success has its perks and its drawbacks. Since the Toronto duo Majid Jordan wrote and and co-produced Drake's "Hold On, We're Going Home," they've seen every new song and video of theirs given the same treatment as if it were new material from the 6 God himself. The co-sign led to a major-label signing and an eager, supportive audience for their self-titled debut album. But it also means that Majid Jordan are immovably situated in Drake's shadow, and their self-titled debut doesn't really serve to extricate them.
Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman (the group's singer and producer, respectively) aren't run-of-the-mill Drake copycats by any means: They're pop enthusiasts, first and foremost. Witness the synth pads on "Hold On, We're Coming Home," which were cheesy and irresistible enough for us to take Drake's desire for "hot love and emotion" seriously. This sense of fun is often missing on their solo material, where they too often experiment with darker, self-consciously deeper sounds that fall flat. 2014's A Place Like This EP begins at breakneck speed before devolving into easily ignorable background music. Majid Jordan, likewise, mixes brisk pop efforts with moody cuts that blur together.
The album begins promisingly with "Learn from Each Other," which is kept afloat by pulsating bass and uptempo drums. Standout single "Something About You," produced with the Weeknd architect Illangelo (and featuring background vocals from Vince Staples' secret weapon Snoh Aalegra), deftly samples Al Maskati's distorted vocals. But for every "Something About You," there seems to be a dud, whether it's "Pacifico," "King City" (2016 OVO muzak at its flimsiest), or "Shake Shake Shake" (a "Maneater" update). "Day and Night" sounds like a Prince castoff.
And so the question remains: Why bother with Majid Jordan? They are occasionally brilliant—"Something About You," "Every Step Every Way," "My Love," "Small Talk," and "Warm" could make for a tremendous EP—and a full-blown pure pop LP would be welcome. Unfortunately, the duo's apparent ambitions to be something more hold it back from reaching serotonin-peaking heights (like Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION). Drake may have propelled Majid Al Maskati and Jordan Ullman to heights they may have otherwise never achieved. His specter, however, keeps them grounded. | 2016-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. / OVO Sound | February 2, 2016 | 6.8 | 83da47c0-48ba-4e93-ad3b-7dd0f60879d6 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
The Leeds-based musician crafts a bittersweet and atmospheric record whose songs find serenity in stillness. | The Leeds-based musician crafts a bittersweet and atmospheric record whose songs find serenity in stillness. | Far Caspian: The Last Remaining Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/far-caspian-the-last-remaining-light/ | The Last Remaining Light | In the final moments of “Own,” a single from Far Caspian’s The Last Remaining Light, an ensemble of guitars, cello, and violin floats like starlings in a murmuration, shapeshifting from ovals to rhombuses before dispersing against the horizon. The song, a tale of fractured friendship and well wishes, doesn’t just preach melancholic acceptance but demonstrates it. Under the Far Caspian moniker, Leeds-based, Ireland-born musician Joel Johnston uses understated indie rock as a vehicle to access distant memories that still gnaw at the heart. The bittersweet atmosphere of The Last Remaining Light coaxes out precarious emotions with ease.
Johnston debuted Far Caspian around 2018 as a way to showcase his production skills on SoundCloud. Following two EPs and a full-length, 2021’s Ways to Get Out, he wanted to make an album guided by intuition and space, with warm, clean guitar tones and soft percussion. Written, performed, recorded, and produced entirely by Johnston, The Last Remaining Light embraces these muted textures and expands them into a fine-tuned, heartfelt sound. Despite upbeat tempos, songs like “Arbitrary Task” and the title track flex detached, almost despondent vocals against sparse hooks and nimble guitarwork. You might shelve The Last Remaining Light alongside beautiful downers like Sparklehorse’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump.
The record maintains its balance even while Johnston is transfixed by acts of falling: in love, into despair, or, in “Pool,” straight into the deep end. At a glance, The Last Remaining Light can seem like a concept album about descent. Instead of focusing on crash landings or the hope that precedes a fall, Far Caspian captures the sensation of weightlessness that occurs between the two: the fleeting out-of-body experiences that grant insight into who you are and how you’re living. On “Pet Architect,” a foray into post-punk lite not dissimilar to Ought, he grapples with his recent Crohn’s diagnosis by learning to appreciate the moments when he’s not actively in pain: “Again I find myself just trying to find out how I’m strong.” After a while, the repeated falling metaphors start to feel like commentary on the monotony of routine, particularly the notion of being forced to follow through on something sure to end poorly.
Far Caspian’s most impactful lyrics are resigned to motionlessness—“I long to be somewhere I could sleep,” “Bury me beside her/Fill me up with the soil”—as if craving the security of stasis. Even in the album’s most tranquil dream-pop stretches, he doesn’t take stillness for granted. This might explain the sadness underpinning his voice. Johnston sings in the same way Mark Linkous did: so close to the microphone that he can whisper like you’re the last two awake at a slumber party, giving commonplace words the allure of secrecy. He has described these quieter passages as a salve for his own OCD, whether in the plucky bass reminiscent of Pinback on “Choice” or the steady kick drum heartbeat of “Cyril.” In Far Caspian’s music, a pause is a welcome opportunity for respite.
For a musician doing everything himself, Johnston’s most impressive skill is how he navigates the soundboard. His production coats the entire album in an overarching softness: Even the most tightly coiled guitar hooks or dissonant piano notes sound as if they are swaddled in a sherpa blanket. Clean, warm instrumentation can be just as moving as a page of heartfelt lyrics, and Far Caspian makes it a point to deliver both. | 2023-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Library | July 31, 2023 | 7.5 | 83db18f1-7d54-4e24-ba43-32a55a9774b4 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Rage rap can be rote and exhausting, but in small doses—like on the Portland rapper’s new pared-down and hypnotic album—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal. | Rage rap can be rote and exhausting, but in small doses—like on the Portland rapper’s new pared-down and hypnotic album—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal. | Yeat: Lyfë | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeat-lyfe/ | Lyfë | Every pop decade has its cult crazes—Beatlemania in the 1960s, Durannies in the ’80s, Bieber Fever, Barbz, Swifties, and more in the late 2000s and 2010s. Strange as it may seem, Yeat is the newest inheritor of that type of fan delirium. Listeners write comments on videos for Yeat’s new project Lyfë saying his music revived their dying grandmothers and that he’s the best thing the human race has produced since the invention of the wheel. When given a chance to FaceTime the rapper, one fan howled Yeat’s lyrics at his face like a worshiper stunned by God’s light. It’s often difficult to tell whether these typically young fans really think he’s the suprëme being or they’re just shitposting. Either way, it’s the perfect half-meme reaction to a man who rose to fame off TikTok hits, a Minions collab, and a slew of mutant vocal methods.
Detractors often say Yeat’s music style—rage—is too uninspired and repetitive: bashing beats and super-shiny melodies engineered to turn concert halls into mosh pits. They’re not completely wrong. Stretches of his last four projects were fatiguing, and the busyness and intensity dull its impact on repeated listens. But in small doses—like on Yeat’s new Lyfë, which has a pared-down tracklist and hypnotic sound—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal, like giant chainsaws ripping through rubber.
Take “Talk,” Lyfë’s only single. Police sirens set a frantic scene, and then a shrieking synth catapults Yeat’s flexes into the sky: “Head #1 up on these charts, we stuck or what?” Mangled background vocals creep like demonic backup singers shadowing Yeat’s steady voice. Barely any other major label rap production in 2022 sounds as unhinged and off-kilter as this. Even some of Yeat’s most popular rage rivals, especially Ken Carson, are like cardboard Flat Stanleys compared to Lyfë’s explosive charisma. “Talk” was produced by BYNX, a member of the Working on Dying collective who cooked up many of the EP’s best beats, including the blisteringly bright “Flawless.” Then there’s “Out the way,” where Yeat wrenches out dino burps and evil Peppa Pig honks over a beat so squiggly it’s like he’s in front of you doing a goofy little dance. The synergy between Yeat and BNYX is what makes Lyfë more than just a scattered vibe-mash. Equally, without BNYX, the production sometimes drops into rage by rote mega-synths, as on “Up off X” and “Come on.”
Behind the hyperkinetic facade of the sound, though, lurk stream-of-consciousness lyrics that often describe a fucked up life that’s more wretched than rageful. “This could be my last song, hoe, it feel like I’m dyin’ on that X,” Yeat cried on the unnerving 2021 track “Let ya know,” one of many allusions to his addictions to Percocet and ecstasy. “Bag after bag after bag I can’t stop, yert after perc after yert I can’t stop,” he groans over the churning guitar and robotic banshee wail synths of “Can’t stop it.” Extreme drug use comes up so often in Yeat’s music it gets to be surreal, like percs and X are recurring characters in a cinematic universe that also includes his cars, his racks, his twizzies.
The best of Lyfë is pure hallucination music, with layers and sublayers of sound drowned in effects. On the Luca Malaspina-produced “Holy 1,” Yeat grumbles and shrieks about killing people, being a star, and trusting no one all in the same choked breath. Vaporous ad-libs and deformed growls careen over the bassline and dissolve into sacred-sounding hums. Descending deeper into the dissonance on “Killin em,” Yeat twists his low-syllable raps into an anthem for those who “come from that dirty… drinking that dirty.” Yet even on the record’s closest thing to a soul-baring song, it’s still the neon murk of the sound that compels your attention the most. Yeat hasn’t yet reached Future’s tortured tension, Young Thug’s artful eccentricity, or Playboi Carti’s squeak-scream wonder—the three vocal acrobats to whom he’s typically compared and accused of ripping off. But there’s also a sense that he’s not really trying to write heart-seizing narratives or leap much farther than his predecessors.
Yeat fans dig his music’s insularity and world-building, made from the many umlauts, alien voices, and Yeat-lish slang he’s popularized. It’s like the rage equivalent of Drain Gang lore, a similarly dense web of meme mythology. For ultra-fans, everything Yeat makes is a “vibe,” a “feeling,” and if you don’t get it then you’re an oldhead. For haters, and there are many, the 22-year-old is a copycat, a Zack Bia-boosted industry tool, and a man who raps like Yoda with a tummy ache. Lyfë doesn’t prove or shred those allegations, but if anything it sounds like Yeat has no concern for the backlash. He’s off on his own lonely planet, gurgling and spewing ad-libs into the cosmic void. | 2022-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Field Trip / Geffen | September 15, 2022 | 7 | 83e3f86c-f3f8-4739-b525-394b6f13298c | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
Free of Diddy's Dirty Money project, the vocalist releases a remarkable EP that eschews traditional R&B, contrasting human sympathies with harsh mechanical sounds. | Free of Diddy's Dirty Money project, the vocalist releases a remarkable EP that eschews traditional R&B, contrasting human sympathies with harsh mechanical sounds. | Dawn Richard: Armor On EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16486-armor-on-ep/ | Armor On EP | The most startling aspect of Diddy and Dirty Money's "Ass on the Floor" was not its liberal use of the militaristic snare loop from Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor", but how that loop was melded so successfully to the tearjerking R&B harmonies of Dirty Money members Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper. I suspect this was the ideological heart of Diddy's Dirty Money project: an insistence that R&B's sonic adventurism and its emotional intensity are in a relationship of mutual necessity, each offering a frame through which the other can be perceived in its best light. Dirty Money is apparently defunct now, but Richard has absorbed, and built on, its aesthetic to the point where she can match or even surpass the heights of 2010's Last Train to Paris, the project's sole album release.
Where Last Train came on like a glittering chorus line of guest stars, electronic costumes, and emotional poses, Dawn's solo work is rigorously private and individual. Last year's mixtape A Tell Tale Heart was modern R&B stripped to its essentials, with almost every song built around muscular rhythm tracks and layers of Dawn's vocals. Dawn's voice often resembles that of a more accomplished Brandy, combining swooping harmonies with a spare central vocal frequently on the verge of choking up. It's as if everything in her music can be divided between the absolutes of the aggressively mechanical and the nakedly, vulnerably human.
Dawn's new release Armor On is billed as an EP, but its 36-minute expanse is longer than many albums and more impactful than most. The collection makes the contrast between the mechanical and the human its central theme, aspiring to steely invincibility as an escape from the frailties of the flesh, with the constant danger of placing one's happiness in the hands of another. Dawn and her producer Druski-- who's responsible for all but one of the tracks here-- frequently turn to dance music in order to express this contrast, but Armor On largely eschews the banging wall-of-sound approach of contemporary dance-pop. Instead, its vision of dance music is one of vast, grandiose structures anchored by persistent repetition, like a vow of survival or fidelity in a rainstorm.
On "Black Lipstick", quicksilver drum'n'bass beats are deployed like landmines, tripped by the twists and turns of this deeply ambivalent song of obsession. I'm guessing that for Dawn the appeal of drum'n'bass is less the accelerated tempo than its facility for layering rhythms to create a sense of ever-deepening complexity and force. This approach matches her vocals, building into complex tapestries of interwoven harmonies, while the songs plummet toward a melodramatic core of regret, of abandon, of anger-- the tenor of the emotions may change, but the intensity is a constant. "Black Lipstick" may be more unexpected, but the by turns sensuous and haunting ballads "Scripture" and "Save Me From U (Remix)" are similarly accomplished and seductive.
Surprisingly, Dawn's distance from the compressed build-up/break-down cycles of commercial dance pop carries over to Armor On's house-influenced tracks. On the devotional "Change", a syncopated kickdrum groove gathers percussive snare rolls around it like fairy floss, until the song's percussive density becomes unbearable (echoing Dawn's romantic absolutism: "If he was religion, I'd be the faith," she declares, sounding like she's watching her lover's execution), while on "Heaven" a seductive tabla-sampling house groove becomes submerged like a fossilized imprint under successive layers of pummeling drums. Even "Faith", the EP's one concession to contemporary R&B mores, is a masterpiece of build, spiraling ever upward toward an anthemic, explosive release.
Dawn's stylistic promiscuity may be Armor On's key talking point, but its most remarkable quality is its essential unity, always returning to her vacillations of defiance and surrender in the face of love's promise and its deceptions. "I feel so artificial when loving you," she accuses a callous, uncaring lover over the rigid robo-groove of "Automatic", then sighs, "I wanna be human…" Her dilemma remains endlessly sympathetic, but it's hard not to hope she remains stuck in this bind when the results are so spectacular. | 2012-04-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-04-13T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Our Dawn / Chartbreaker | April 13, 2012 | 8.2 | 83e8489e-7609-4225-ae1b-df1731f847bf | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
The Norwegian band's second album, produced by Converge's Kurt Ballou and featuring cover art from Baroness' John Baizley, is their first for Warner subsidiary Roadrunner. | The Norwegian band's second album, produced by Converge's Kurt Ballou and featuring cover art from Baroness' John Baizley, is their first for Warner subsidiary Roadrunner. | Kvelertak: Meir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17815-kvelertak-meir/ | Meir | At their best, Kvelertak register as 40-plus years of aggressive-rock history crammed into one filler-free highlight reel. Frontman Erlend Hjelvik screeched exclusively in his native tongue on the Norwegian sextet's self-titled 2010 debut, but the album spoke a universal riff language. Kvelertak's gambit was to smash the barriers subdividing the metal pantheon, so that the nimble six-string grandstanding of Thin Lizzy and cartoonish machismo of AC/DC could mingle with black metal's tortured yowls and headlong blastbeats, and commune with hardcore's bottomless vitriol. Tracks like "Blodtørst" honored Kvelertak's righteous name (it means "chokehold"), besting Andrew W.K. at his crank-it-up-and-chug party-metal quest, while at the same time mustering enough heft and geeky shred to satisfy any fan of Leviathan-era Mastodon. Extreme metal and rock & roll had cohabitated before-- see: early/mid 90s works by Entombed and Carcass, or the punky hedonism of Venom and their modern-day disciples such as Midnight-- but rarely with such sheer ballsy flair.
Kvelertak's second album, aptly titled Meir ("More"), doesn't tweak the basic formula. The band has jumped from Brooklyn indie the End Records to Warner Music Group subsidiary Roadrunner-- a label that was ground zero for early-90s death metal and currently backs Opeth, Slipknot, and Rush-- but otherwise, they've retained key aspects of Kvelertak: stunning production, almost like an extra-beefy Steve Albini job, courtesy of Converge's Kurt Ballou, eerily elegant cover art from Baroness's John Baizley and a wholesale avoidance of English. Meir also echoes the tantalizing inconsistency of its predecessor. As on Kvelertak, the choice tracks here are stunners, songs that deserve to be fast-tracked into the heavy-rock pantheon. While there are no outright duds, the less memorable material can't quite measure up, lending the album a certain almost-there feel. Meir isn't the magnum opus Kvelertak clearly have in them, but there's enough brilliance here to indicate that LP three or four very well might be.
Kvelertak's strongest songs have a way of making the hammiest stunts seem completely sensible. Lead single "Bruane Brenn" ("Burning Bridges") charges into the band's wheelhouse: pummeling uptempo rawk with Hjelvik-- a stylistically limited yet enormously charismatic frontman-- shredding throat over top. First, the band hints coyly at pop, with a nifty melodic vocal hook from guitarist Maciek Ofstad and the subtle addition of Vidar Landa's pounding piano in the second verse. Then, at the 2:45 mark, they suddenly ramp down the tempo and burst into a half minute of pure power-ballad grandstanding. The moment is so shrewdly integrated, it doesn't feel like winky pastiche; it's simply what the song demands.
Other Meir standouts show off Kvelertak's mastery of disparate metal varietals. "Spring Fra Livet" ("Run From Life") effortlessly juggles bluesy, shimmy-friendly verses and tremolo-picked cosmic-black-metal interludes, as drummer Kjetil Gjermundrød trades blastbeats for stadium-rock stomp. The effect is one of giddy inclusiveness, as though these marauding Norsemen were clenching their scowling, corpse-painted countrymates in a boozy bear hug. Awesomeness also abounds in "Trepan" (the title refers to an arcane medical practice involving skull-drilling) with its breathtaking triple-guitar stop-time interlude, and "Evig Vandrar" ("Eternal Wanderer"), which dispenses with style-hopping in favor of handsomely Zepped-out, stomping-giant raunch rock.
Meir slackens in its second half. "Tordenbrak" ("Thunderclap") features what might be the album's single finest riff-- a florid marvel that sounds something like Boston guitar wizard Tom Scholz embellishing on the Steve Miller Band's "Jungle Love"-- but the band employs the motif like a crutch, failing to situate it into any kind of compelling narrative arc over a near-nine-minute running time. Other songs seem arbitrarily eclectic. "Nekrokosmos" juggles so many sections, it scans as the metal equivalent of a Magnetic Poetry blitz, and when the band kicks into an old-school thrash gallop on "Månelyst" ("Moonlight"), the shift registers as a because-we-can move, rather than one born out of real compositional urgency.
Fortunately, Meir rights itself at the end. The final track-- entitled, yes, "Kvelertak"-- is a timeless beer-hoister, like a Back in Black outtake souped up with hardcore-style gang vocals, post-Jailbreak fret dancing and a soulful, bittersweet chorus. Clocking in at 3:50, it's basically perfect, a reminder that epic-scale songs and frantic eclecticism are secondary to the band's central mission. Like so many of their beloved forebears, Kvelertak sound smartest when they're playing it dumb. | 2013-03-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-03-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | March 25, 2013 | 7.2 | 83e91715-7e04-4ce9-8c6b-4b1b8a1273a7 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | null |
The Nashville egg punks’ debut is a short, speedy trip to the world of “Devo-core.” Bring your giant puppets. | The Nashville egg punks’ debut is a short, speedy trip to the world of “Devo-core.” Bring your giant puppets. | Snõõper: Super Snõõper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snooper-super-snooper/ | Super Snõõper | Before Jack White signed them to Third Man, Snõõper staked their claim in Tennessee’s DIY scene as the sound of egg punk in the 2020s: fast riffs, fun antics, and no-fucks-given misfit pride. While Indiana torchbearers the Coneheads and Liquids played hardcore-inspired weirdo punk in a Hardee’s parking lot, Snõõper raided the arts and crafts closet. At live shows, the Nashville five-piece rip through minute-long songs, perform choreography in matching tracksuits, and march bug-eyed papier mâché puppets around the stage as singer Blair Tramel curls a comically large cardboard dumbbell. The goal, as guitarist Connor Cummins put it: “Go as crazy as possible for 30 minutes.” A band with an insatiable desire to shred and a keen eye for bold visual aesthetics? Of course the guy who co-founded the White Stripes couldn’t call dibs fast enough. Snõõper’s debut, Super Snõõper, is a highlight in the world of “Devo-core,” with unpredictable riffs and voltaic singing that strike just the right balance of delightful and detached.
On their first full-length, Snõõper crawl out of the basement show circuit and into the light of a street parade, determined to make people who claim they don’t know how to dance finally bust a move. After intro “Stretching,” a sampler platter that splices together song snippets like you’re scanning radio stations, Snõõper sprint through 13 tracks of squealing guitars and sci-fi sound effects in just over 20 minutes, never allowing a good chorus to overstay its welcome. It’s not that they’re trying to leave you wanting more; they’re just constantly being interrupted by another, even more urgent idea. “Pod,” a zippy post-punk number that intertwines a melodic guitar line with jittery drum-machine cowbell, cuts out in the middle of a guitar solo so the band can barge into “Fitness,” a garage-rock send-up of exercise culture that’s interspersed with the piercing whistle of an irritated coach. In Snõõper’s world, there’s no time for fadeouts.
The puppets and props—enormous Magic 8 Balls, retro phones, arcade consoles—are a requisite part of Snõõper’s identity. For Tramel, these constructions aren’t afterthoughts but a crucial impetus for the band, easing her transition from a vocalist with imposter syndrome to a commanding frontperson. (Though she radiates enviable panache on stage, in daily life Tramel is an elementary school teacher who recently crowd-surfed for the first time and immediately called her mom to tell her about it.) More Frank Sidebottom’s big head than Iron Maiden’s elaborate mascot Eddie, Snõõper’s props are born of restless DIY creativity—a defining trait of the egg punk scene, which tends to prefer physical spaces to digital ones. But even without the aid of a glue gun or upcycled shipping materials, Tramel’s voice is electric. On “Xerox” and “Inventory,” she uses a crackling, lo-fi vocal filter that recalls Guerilla Toss’s Kassie Carlson. Whether delivered in a staccato bark, an abrasive shout, or a playful slur, Tamel’s words land like tiny static shocks. The total effect of Snõõper’s high-velocity songs is like clutching a plasma globe with both hands.
The physicality of Snõõper’s playing adds its own power to these recordings. The chugging guitars on “Unable” may sound straightforward, but Cummins and drummer Cam Sarrett beef them up by contrasting guttural tones with dainty chimes and flashes of total silence. On “Defect,” Happy Haugen takes the lead with a breakneck bassline that verges on blues rock, the notes coming so fast you can feel the blisters forming. Blanketing it all is the gritty texture of the band’s 8-track recorder. It’s hard to translate the kitschy performance-art charm of Snõõper’s stage show on record, but the album’s last and longest song puts on a spectacle to rival it: The five-minute “Running” hypnotizes as it escalates from a post-punk pulse into a bongo-smacking, cymbal-crashing, synth-wailing caterwaul. They say you have to see egg punk live to really get it. But the goofy, revved-up glory of Super Snõõper comes pretty close. | 2023-07-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | July 19, 2023 | 7.3 | 83ec1afd-240a-4e35-9ba5-d7aa13fd1f53 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
As he evolves to match modern conceptions of chillout music, downtempo producer Simon Green lands on a sound that’s pleasant, current, and unoriginal. | As he evolves to match modern conceptions of chillout music, downtempo producer Simon Green lands on a sound that’s pleasant, current, and unoriginal. | Bonobo: Fragments | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonobo-fragments/ | Fragments | Electronic music at the turn of the millennium was in a pretty laid-back place. Following rave culture’s expansion into chillout rooms and IDM’s home-listening rebuttal to house and techno, a wave of quirky European producers emerged with the shared goal of taking electronic lounge music to the next level. Downtempo acts like Zero 7 and Lemon Jelly were products of a dance music scene on the comedown, filling headphones and hi-fi stereo systems with grooves so smooth they practically unfurled onto the living room rug. The best of this crop, like Röyksopp and Air, wove colorful tapestries of samples and synths that felt like a logical convergence of trends in trip-hop, electronica, and turntablism. But even then, many of the genre’s practitioners were laying the groundwork for what we now think of as “lo-fi beats to relax/study to,” creating a post-hip-hop template for wallpaper music as feathery as it is faceless.
Simon Green, aka Bonobo, was never the most visionary producer to come out of this movement, but over time he abandoned his early downtempo style, evolving to match modern conceptions of chillout music and his own rising profile as a live performer. Starting with 2010’s Black Sands, Green gradually pivoted to a more club-centric sound, swapping reference points from Kruder & Dorfmeister to Darkside and DJ Koze. But where the latter artists have regularly spun dance music tropes into euphoric new highs, Green’s MO requires finding a zone just mellow enough to settle into until it’s time for the next track. Even if his tempo has picked up slightly, the overall effect hasn’t. His latest dispatch, Fragments, applies a soft, twinkling sheen over a familiar and unfortunate lack of original ideas.
It’s still a pleasant listen, with a bevy of collaborators who help to break up the album’s languid stream of violin interludes and sedative synth chords. The opening stretch is strongest: “Shadows” builds its central deep house groove into a swirl of hi-def synthesizers and yawning strings, while fellow Ninja Tune signee Jordan Rakei provides the generic, inoffensive club R&B vocals. More groan-worthy is “Rosewood,” which pilfers its central “I won’t leave you” line from Maxwell’s “Lifetime,” reducing an actually romantic song to boilerplate garage-house rehash. Throughout Fragments, Green’s use of samples toes this line between tried-and-true and corny, though he finds moderate success in the anthemic Bulgarian choir he deploys on “Otomo.” It’s more than a little cliché, but when the bass drops, you can practically see the heads bobbing in the summer festival crowd.
From there, Fragments blurs into a syrupy slog. Electro-R&B experiments like “Tides” (featuring Jamila Woods) and “From You” (with Joji) temporarily break up the pacing, but otherwise the album’s drowsy club thump carries on unchangingly, borrowing ideas from past decades of electronic music and presenting them in their most narcotic iterations. “Counterpart” and “Sapien” allude to Jamie xx’s technicolor take on garage with none of his inventiveness; layers of plucked and bowed strings on “Tides” recall the dubious “world music”-tinted electronica of the ’90s and early ’00s. It’s hard to get upset at music that’s ultimately this innocuous, but that doesn’t stop the record from feeling more like an overpriced spa day than a club night.
Fragments certainly feels up to date stylistically, with a mix of hi- and lo-fi sounds that evoke the silvery sheen of an episode of Euphoria, or the lavish productions of Green’s more adventurous labelmates. But Bonobo’s latest work still carries some of the worst traits of his earlier records, leaning so deeply into relaxation that it loses urgency altogether. In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes. It’s fine as something to throw on—but then, so is lo-fi hip-hop radio.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Ninja Tune | January 18, 2022 | 5.4 | 83ef4296-df13-46da-915b-6c83e317b0a8 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Each cut on the obscure British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle's Phantoms of Dreamland presents a strange-yet-charming self-contained little sound world. | Each cut on the obscure British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle's Phantoms of Dreamland presents a strange-yet-charming self-contained little sound world. | Michal Turtle: Phantoms of Dreamland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22182-michal-turtle-phantoms-of-dreamland/ | Phantoms of Dreamland | To call the British-born, Swiss-based musician Michal Turtle “obscure” is an understatement. Active since 1983, Turtle’s been in bands like wearedust, It’s 5 to 12, Monika Miller and Wicked Kitchen Staff, which is to say, music entities that are barely blips on anyone’s radar. If known for anything, it’s a collection of six strange electronic songs Turtle pressed up in 1983 entitled Music from the Living Room and if you weren’t residing near said room, chances were you never heard it.
But time has a funny property in the digital age, where even the most reclusive and obscure sounds can find a strand on the web and ride it back to the surface, which is what Turtle did, thanks to the Music from Memory label. Despite its name, the label specializes in music nearly lost from memory, reviving the fringe folks like Gigi Masin, Leon Lowman, Vito Ricci, and now Turtle. The songs that comprise Music from the Living Room scan as both primitive and deeply forward-thinking, sounding loop and sample-based though all instruments were played live and layered on tape. Truth in advertising, that album was recorded in the living room of Turtle’s parents.
And while Phantoms of Dreamland comes from an eight-minute spoken word track that grows fangs as it proceeds, the title scans as truthful in its own way. Twelve of the fifteen tracks are unreleased, phantasmal things tucked away on tape and left unheard for three decades, things once conjured by Turtle’s musical imagination. No doubt it’s Turtle’s sensibilities as a drummer that help give these tracks their ability to be revived in a DJ-centered era, in that all the squiggles, bell dings, synth dollops and guitar string scrapes are rhythmically organized into—if not grooves per se—than at least into peculiar rhythmic patterns. “Village Voice” might originate from Mr. And Mrs. Turtle’s kitchen, all gong-like lids and glugging water sounds with two voices droning at play, but its underlying pulse gives it coherence.
Glittering flits of electronics and layers of hand drums make “El Teb” sound astral and tribal at once, its hazy fidelity making it fit into a constellation between Sun Ra and outsider house producers. But almost all of the tracks follow their own insular logic, as on the nine-minute “Zoote Pointe.” It begins in a Jon Hassell-like world of woozy ritualistic percussion, rattled chimes, fluttering electronics and a cycling bassline. It nearly flickers out before Turtle suddenly changes gears at seven minutes, adding a clang of go-go bells, guitar pings and what sounds like a squeeze bottle of mustard.
Maybe having a track climax with a wet fart made sense to the man himself back then, before he went on to a career writing jingles for radio and TV. It’s a nearly lost history, but each number here presents a strange yet charming self-contained little sound world. As most musicians forgo live interaction to instead get lost in loops and insular music-making (often in their own bedrooms), Turtle’s squelchy proto-techno composition “Are You Psychic?” seems to become more prescient with each passing year. | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | August 8, 2016 | 7.9 | 83f6eaeb-d566-42d4-b948-a97a68dcfb61 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The trio’s first album in nine years ushers in a patient new era for the band, gracefully shedding the electrifying hunger of its early days to make room for tempered joy. | The trio’s first album in nine years ushers in a patient new era for the band, gracefully shedding the electrifying hunger of its early days to make room for tempered joy. | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Cool It Down | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeah-yeah-yeahs-cool-it-down/ | Cool It Down | If any group could capitalize on indie’s embrace of pop and submission to nostalgia in the last decade, Yeah Yeah Yeahs surely might have reshaped their volatile Technicolor swagger to fit the bill to a tasteful T. But leave it to Karen O and co. to explode out of their hiatus with a cannon blast. Slowing down the drum beat of Show Your Bones opener “Gold Lion” to a mechanized crawl, “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” the lead single from their first new album in nine years, hurls the band into a cinematic fever dream, trading the former song’s folky guitar strums for the cosmic churning of synthesizers. O, joined by experimental pop prince Perfume Genius, stares down the apocalypse with a commanding sermon, defiant but reflective as she comes to grips with leaving a rotting world to her son.
Late in the song, O turns the camera on herself and hands him the mic. “Mama, what have you done?” she laments as the doomsday clock ticks down, striking midnight to the screaming fuzz of a barn-burning Nick Zinner guitar solo and Brian Chase’s thundering drum fills. The trio throws all of its weight behind the song’s futuristic arena rock, charging out of the bomb shelter to bet it all on a last-ditch trick play. The message is simple but effective: if you’re going to stage a comeback at the end of the world, throw the strongest hail mary pass you can—and pray.
Though the return to IMAX-sized synths and floor-filling beats will inevitably recall the vibrant electronic rock fantasia of 2009’s It’s Blitz!, Cool It Down brings its own sentimental dance party to life by painting with a more tightly coordinated color palette. Producer Dave Sitek, who’s contributed to every YYYs album since 2002’s Machine EP, chops down the guitars to usher in pianos, strings, and heavier bass than they’ve ever played with. Cool It Down’s deep grooves usher in a patient new era, gracefully shedding the electrifying hunger of the band’s early days to make room for tempered joy.
Due to either the album’s truncated recording process—a breezy five months for a group used to a long demo process—or simply rose-colored wistfulness, Yeah Yeah Yeahs spend some of Cool It Down’s sharpest moments citing and deconstructing their influences with refreshing candor. It’s jarring how cleanly “Burning” lifts the vocal melody of the Four Seasons’ “Beggin’.” But as the shock wears off, it’s impossible to ignore the sweetness of the track’s earnest charm, the slick inventions of the updated arrangement that swaddle the original’s ’60s stomp in tight disco strings, or the exhilarating wail of O’s soaring vocal.
The trio pushes this approach one step further on “Fleez,” where O immortalizes a night out seeing reunited dance-punk innovators ESG live. She shouts them out by name in the verse, bouncing along as the band burns a scorching path to ecstasy with a hypnotic funk pulse of its own. After the opener, it’s Cool It Down’s most thrilling break with the past—a warped memory that refuses to decay, grooving harder with each distorted recollection. If giving the Scroggins sisters their flowers will keep Yeah Yeah Yeahs this charged up in the studio, so be it.
Karen O’s genius at transforming the smallest of phrases into endlessly sparkling hooks is no secret: Look no further than the eternal (and Beyoncé-interpolated) chorus of “Maps,” or the way she granulates “taking off” into a percussive sugar rush on Show Your Bones standout “Cheated Hearts.” But every now and then, her reliable lyrical workhorse hits a brick wall—it doesn’t take scarfing down the stomach-churning choruses of “Mosquito” or “Buried Alive” to realize that simple repetition can’t salvage an undercooked idea, much less imbue it with transcendence. Thankfully, Cool It Down doesn’t quite stoop to those lows, but two of its tracks struggle in vain to lift off—a real nuisance on an album with only eight songs. “Different Today” stretches the phrase to its breaking point, its shimmering synthesizers and finely tuned beat working overtime to give O’s empty optimism a narrative arc. There’s deeper heartbreak to be found on “Lovebomb,” in which vague desires for “time” and “light” flounder in an unconvincing dream-pop wash of texture. What could have been a neat genre experiment only serves to kill the momentum of the opening track’s crushing bravado.
In step with her band’s 11th-hour return, O vaults into Cool It Down’s closing moments with a daring lyrical evolution. Taking advice from fan-turned-influence Michelle Zauner, she tries her hand at poetry, recounting (or at least masterfully fabricating) an impossibly sweet memory of gazing at the ocean with her son: “I watched my favorite show tonight/The dance the light does/On the sea’s ever shifting surface.” As a twinkling synth arpeggio circles overhead, she asks him what the sun looks like. “‘Mars,’ he said/With a glint in his eye,” she recalls, repeating the line—just once—to encase its warmth in amber. In every expansive leap, Yeah Yeah Yeahs reaffirm their magnetic devotion to unearthing vulnerability. It's the magic key to their evergreen formula of amplified tenderness, and hearing them unlock a new passageway is a compelling reward all its own. | 2022-09-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-29T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | September 29, 2022 | 7.4 | 83fdf95a-fd25-4af8-8d91-84a440ac86f9 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
The first duo record from the longtime Sea and Cake bandmates exemplifies the ramshackle, improvisatory spirit that’s at the heart of modular synthesis. | The first duo record from the longtime Sea and Cake bandmates exemplifies the ramshackle, improvisatory spirit that’s at the heart of modular synthesis. | Sam Prekop / John McEntire: Sons Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-prekop-john-mcentire-sons-of/ | Sons Of | The Sea and Cake have always radiated an unusual mixture of ease and control. Their balmy chords and sighing vocals may be redolent of lazy Mediterranean afternoons—Campari on ice, old-money sailboats—yet their rhythms remain impeccably unwrinkled. In contrast, Sam Prekop’s solo electronic work has always been playful, restless, maybe even a little bit reckless. Locked away in his home studio, the Chicago musician approaches his modular synthesizers like a genially rumpled Hollywood scientist, lab coat stained with strangely colored chemicals. Haywire arpeggios twitch and jerk; splotchy sounds undulate like cartoon amoebas. Infused with a guileless and inquisitive spirit, Prekop’s music is experimental in the most literal sense: What happens when I push this button?
Sons Of is the first duo record from Prekop and his longtime Sea and Cake bandmate John McEntire, a producer and percussionist who, between his time in Chicago groups like Tortoise and his work behind the boards for Stereolab and Teenage Fanclub, has put his stamp on decades of indie and post-rock. But the project is a long time coming: A dozen years ago, Prekop told an interviewer that the two men had recently been “very close to collaborating on an ‘old-fashioned’ sequencer record”; then Prekop’s twins were born, and his free time evaporated. The idea, though, did not. In 2019, they played a handful of shows together, recording as they went, and when the pandemic hit, they retreated to their respective studios and began emailing ideas back and forth. Compiling the fruits of those long-distance collaborations with material recorded live in 2019 and 2021, Sons Of represents a natural extension of Prekop’s solo electronic work, full of baubly tones, chirping accents, and supersaturated colors.
But there are crucial differences, too. The first becomes apparent just a little over a minute into the opening “A Ghost at Noon,” as a gargantuan kick drum comes pile-driving its way through elysian fields of synths. The rhythmic dimension of Prekop’s music has never been so prominent: He began toying with drum machines on 2020’s Comma, but every track on Sons Of is anchored by the steady thump of fat, declarative kick drums and crisp electronic hi-hats. Prekop has previously called his beat programming “rudimentary,” and despite McEntire’s prowess as a drummer, the duo doesn’t seem much interested in subtlety here; the album’s beats are proudly, almost defiantly simplistic. Pitched anywhere between a leisurely 118 bpm and a dubbed-out slow-motion crawl, the drums serve mainly an architectural function, like trellises to support the growth of their vine-like sequences. But that simplicity has a charm of its own: a mix of insistence and innocence that’s reminiscent of the very earliest house music.
Compared with Comma’s relatively compact statements, the four tracks on Sons Of positively sprawl. The shortest, “A Ghost at Noon,” is nearly eight minutes long; the longest nearly 24. The expanded real estate gives the duo ample room to dig into repetition’s hypnotic effects. You can hear echoes of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 in their endlessly unspooling arpeggios and patient filter tweaks, but unlike the German composer’s scale model of infinity, Sons Of’s tracks are never content to remain in place for long. They’re not as mutable as either of Prekop’s recent albums for Longform Editions, which meandered across endlessly morphing landscapes for 20-plus minutes at a time. But fresh sounds are constantly coming and going. In “Crossing at the Shallow,” a new set of chords draped over an unchanging ostinato bassline lends a new harmonic dimension, turning a club track into something more like an actual song. And in “Ascending by Night,” when a unison melody line suddenly blossoms into triads, it’s unexpectedly affecting—a reminder of how powerful even the simplest harmony can be.
That expressive dimension is Sons Of’s greatest strength. Even as the music expands in length, it feels more immediately emotionally satisfying than any of Prekop’s previous electronic music. As his experiments have gotten riskier, the music has gotten sweeter. Every track is awash in sumptuous, eminently hummable melodies; the album swells with a newfound sense of joy. That’s particularly true of “A Yellow Robe,” the album’s longest track and clear highlight. Begun as a live improvisation in Chicago and then polished up in the studio, it’s a 24-minute dreamscape of percolating arpeggios and graceful melodic lines. For a time, its layers of soft, staccato tones suggest an ensemble of mallet instruments like marimba and xylophone; the groove moves with a syncopated shimmy, the rhythm’s particulars in permanent flux. (The beat on this one, at least, is anything but rudimentary.) But halfway through, things shift: New drums enter the frame, slipping like marbles around the electronically quantized pulse, and lush pads billow like clouds. Every few bars, there’s a new sound clamoring for your attention; the chords gradually become more enveloping, radiant, even sentimental. The drifting harmonies echo the Sea and Cake at their balmiest and most bucolic, where even the slightest effort melts beneath the glow of the endless summer; the tumbling groove exemplifies the ramshackle, improvisatory spirit that’s at the heart of modular synthesis. The combination of the two is delightful. | 2022-07-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-25T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Thrill Jockey | July 25, 2022 | 8.3 | 840194cf-df97-4adf-aac5-b15ae22c201e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Using sparse language and baroque instrumentation, the London artist explores captivity and control over this spectral three song EP. | Using sparse language and baroque instrumentation, the London artist explores captivity and control over this spectral three song EP. | Martha Skye Murphy: Concrete | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/martha-skye-murphy-concrete/ | Concrete | There are ghosts swimming in the margins of Martha Skye Murphy’s songs. Not memories of the dead, per se, but pale impressions of death, conflict, and captivity. The London-based artist never explicitly announces these themes on her new EP, Concrete, but they exist as apparitions—suspended in the space between lyrics, or billowing from Murphy’s layered and processed soprano. With additional production from FKA twigs collaborator Ethan P. Flynn, Murphy’s new record is a quiet eruption of baroque art-pop, evoking the legacy of Kate Bush and Julee Cruise. Concrete stretches and sprawls over a surprisingly expansive twelve minutes, sinking into a liminal space between dreaming and waking.
The three songs on Concrete flourish from their minimal verbal detail. Murphy selects her words very carefully; she is intrigued by what blooms in the space between words. Murphy understands the techniques behind effective poetry: that negative space and diction can often shape an image more cleanly than clunky exposition. On the spectral “Stuck,” Murphy points to the clouds: “Look there, there’s an airplane,” she sings, her voice small and skyward. “I wanna know where it’s going.” By her next breath, the plane has crashed (possibly into the ocean) but we aren’t privy to the details. Murphy only gives us a glimpse of the aftermath, scored by organ pulses and rippling flute: “And when they find the black box/I’ll be there with it/Sinking and kicking as I go.” The tragedy is implied in the space Murphy leaves for us.
On the creeping “Found Out,” Murphy alludes to feeling sinister delight in a power struggle. Whether the conflict is external or symbolic is never stated outright, but she suggests a shift in sexual control. “I’m saying no now/I’m saying slow down/Curtsy before you bow,” Murphy sings over lean classical guitar. “Draw me in/I’ll push you out/Spit into your mouth.” The song gets grimier as it unfurls; an electronic croak rolls in as the word “bow” leaves Murphy’s lips, and the clavinet keys sound drunken and sickly. Murphy’s voice is inherently sweet, but there is something creaking and demonic in its corners. She layers it like swaths of fabric, some coarse and tattered at the edges, others sheer and weightless. Her piercing whistle register—a technique often flaunted by pop divas—becomes something far more menacing.
Murphy pays close attention to dynamics and texture throughout the record. The tonal pivot on “Found Out” is measured, sneaking in on its tip-toes. On the title track however, it comes in one violent blow. Murphy wrote “Concrete” from the perspective of a captor “to their beloved hostage.” The song, which features New York duo LEYA and bass from Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, is a lullaby for confinement. Murphy spends three minutes as a kidnapper and architect, whispering plans for her grand structure. “I want to build a building around me/I’m gonna make it out of concrete/Around us,” she sings, strings surging behind her. “It’s gonna be three stories high/It’s gonna be wide/It’s gonna be right.”
Nothing overt about the song, with its twinkling harp and parlor piano, suggests imminent danger. The repetition of the words “in concrete,” over a dozen times before the song’s end, is the only hint at imprisonment. Each time the words are sung, it’s like another layer of cement is poured onto the structure, leading to a sublime crescendo. Murphy’s multi-tracked vocals are scattered across the song like shafts of light, and strings and synthesizers keen like whale song. Much like sirens led sailors to the rocks in Greek mythology, Murphy’s voice lures you to the abrupt crash at the end of “Concrete”: a harsh collision of metal and pavement. It is only there, in the space of the song’s final seconds, that we understand we’ve been trapped all along.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Practise Music | December 9, 2021 | 7.9 | 8402a633-052d-47e6-9d10-6035aa554fbe | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
One of the hardest-working singers in indie-pop returns to his main band for their first full-length since 2014’s breakthrough Torch Song. | One of the hardest-working singers in indie-pop returns to his main band for their first full-length since 2014’s breakthrough Torch Song. | Radiator Hospital: Play the Songs You Like | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/radiator-hospital-play-the-songs-you-like/ | Play the Songs You Like | Sam Cook-Parrott has quietly built up a bit of reputation in recent years among people who like their scrappy underdog pop-punk with a tender heart on its sleeve. Torch Song, the breakthrough album that his Philly band, Radiator Hospital, released in 2014, featured a highly endearing breakup song, “Cut Your Bangs,” amid guest appearances by Katie and Allison Crutchfield. Since then, Radiator Hospital have cut a split EP with likeminded British DIY-pop group Martha, while Cook-Parrott has lent his bed-headed backing vocals to sweetly shambolic tunes by Fred Thomas, Allison Crutchfield, and, perhaps most visibly, Japanese Breakfast. He also released a self-titled album as one-half of duo the Afterglows. The stage would seem to be set for Cook-Parrott to translate this cachet among indie-pop peers to a wider audience.
Play the Songs You Like, the first full-length Radiator Hospital LP since Torch Song, once again teams Cook-Parrott with fellow guitarist-vocalist Cynthia Schemmer, drummer Jeff Bolt, and bass player Jon Rybicki. Like its predecessor, it’s packed with short, energetic songs that tend toward bashful yearning. Cook-Parrott’s slurry squeak of a voice, which many first heard on Waxahatchee’s 2013 album Cerulean Salt, remains a distinctive instrument, and there’s a spirited sincerity to these songs that should keep the already-converted bouncing around mistily in ramshackle venues. But the group’s highest-profile release to date feels strangely like a missed opportunity.
Although Play the Songs You Like is 16 tracks long, they tend to blur together. That’s true of the fast songs, such as the snare-snapping “Out of Mind,” where Cook-Parrott slurs about waking up “with your picture in my mind,” or the bristling “Lonely Road,” which finds him out there “talking to myself.” But it’s also true of the more midtempo, Byrds-descended tunes, like the dreamily resigned “Nothing Nice,” with its closed-down comic book shop, or “Cheap Day,” a ringing reminiscence on an image in an old magazine. The sharp songwriting voice behind Torch Song—the one that put the kick into “You say you’ll cut your bangs/I’m calling your bluff,” on that album’s kiss-off standout—feels less present here. Maybe those bangs got cut after all. There are a few welcome changeups—the patient space-out “Also Ran,” the winsome Schemmer showcase “Half Empty,” the mumbly acoustic ballad “Heart of Darkness”—but they come across as just that, changeups from a formula that’s not quite working.
Some of Radiator Hospital’s best work in the past has made reference to the ways that music intertwines with memory, going back to “Our Song” and “Down Again” from 2013’s partly self-recorded Something Wild. But here the meta-songwriting seems a tad counterproductive. In one consecutive three-song stretch, we get “Pastoral Radio Hit,” which has a buoyant Shins-like chorus melody; “Old Refrain,” which is enjoyably rambunctious; and “The Songs You Like,” which waxes nostalgic for those nights when a particular piece of music sounded best. None are much more memorable than their placeholder-like titles. (When the Chills called a song “Heavenly Pop Hit,” at least it was actually heavenly pop, dangit.) A few tracks later, “The People at the Show” rips into someone who’s “talking… damn near screaming.” Like much of the rest of this album, that line comes across as well-intentioned and decent, but ultimately uninspiring. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to quiet the loudmouth in the back of the bar.
Sadly, that remains the case even when Radiator Hospital play a song that some indie-pop diehards may already like. The penultimate track, “Sycamore,” is a fine cover of a song by Martha, whose Blisters in the Pit of My Heart was one of last year’s underappreciated gems. It’s a nice gesture of friendship, but the 2013 original managed to convey its jittery internal conflicts more distinctively, without sounding so much like yet another 1990s indie-rock pastiche.
“In between the notes of your favorite song/You try and figure where it went wrong/But it went wrong long ago in many different ways,” Cook-Parrott sings at the start of “Dance Number,” Play the Songs You Like’s bouncy lead single. Sometimes it’s less a question of going wrong than not quite finding the spark that makes something go right. In the same song, he adds, “I find meaning in this life when I wake up every day/But I’m feeling sick and tired in new and frightening ways.” Finally, it’s a memorable line—but what meaning he’s found, and how those ways are similar to or different from the ways we’re all feeling sick and tired, is left for another song. | 2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Salinas | October 27, 2017 | 6 | 840b7aba-6817-4be1-a297-7f763ea7bc38 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Toronto post-rock band's latest contains four lengthy tracks that add new dimensions and sharper textures to their sound. | Toronto post-rock band's latest contains four lengthy tracks that add new dimensions and sharper textures to their sound. | Do Make Say Think: Other Truths | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13595-other-truths/ | Other Truths | When instrumental rock bands get tapped for soundtracks, it can be kind of a gut-check that tests how a wider audience may view their music. Sigur Rós' folkloric melodrama and emotive language made sense as a backdrop for Vanilla Sky, itself a sort of sci-fi fairytale about misplaced and unrequited love starring someone prone to over-excitement. The charged music of Explosions in the Sky fit the open expanses and crushing blows of Friday Night Lights' take on Texas high school football culture (hell, guitarist Munaf Rayani sometimes bends over his instrument like a lineman crouching down into a three-point stance). So it seemed odd that a track by Canadians Do Make Say Think was chosen for the oil industry drama Syriana. Not to say the Toronto post-rock band doesn't make the kind of mesmerizing music suitable for a film score (or that the more tense, overtly politicized music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor might have been a better fit). But DMST can sound so pastoral-- the music was literally recorded in a barn, in some cases-- it may seem to lack the bite for a blood-for-oil flick.
While Do Make Say Think can project a gentle, laid-back vibe-- member Charles Spearin did just finish The Happiness Project-- they're far from spinning their wheels and rehashing post-rock clichés. Other Truths doesn't roughen up the band's jazz-steeped aesthetic. But it does add more dimensions and sharp textures to their songwriting, which continues to get tighter yet wider in scope. Spread across a suite of four lengthy tracks and titled with the same string of verbs as the band's name, the album isn't about momentum as much as it is about transitions. Opener "Do" starts with crisp, intertwined guitar lines playing off one another. As the track morphs and unfurls-- cue the slow-build and crescendo-- the themes reappear more charged, parrying with horns and descending into static. "Make" quietly delays the payoff, slowly ratcheting things up and marching toward a climax with a floor of tense bass, echoing chants, and sinewy, stretched string notes. When a warm motif of horns and fuzzed guitars begins to cut through the dread, the song's color noticeably shifts. "Say" strikes a grandiose yet road-weary tone, as a lonely slide guitar melody gets echoed and expanded by trumpets and churning drums, while "Think" may be its companion and comedown, a slow trail set forth by a quivering, reverb-laden guitar line.
Compared to the group's first few albums, filled with echoing melodies reflective of cavernous recording spaces, Other Truths shows Do Make Say Think more adept at sketching out and imagining their own widescreen landscapes. The interplay here is more complex than You, You're a History in Rust, showcasing restraint and more subtle shifts. Calling instrumental rock "soundtrack music" might be stating the obvious. But when it manages to sound as composed and calculated as Other Truths, it isn't meant as a slight. | 2009-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Constellation | October 23, 2009 | 7.2 | 840d88fd-a0d3-41ba-aaf2-8283e7975499 | Patrick Sisson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-sisson/ | null |
The German producer’s smooth dance-pop is meant to be played under bright festival lights—and it’s never sounded less convincing. | The German producer’s smooth dance-pop is meant to be played under bright festival lights—and it’s never sounded less convincing. | Roosevelt: Polydans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roosevelt-polydans/ | Polydans | Dance music can only suspend your belief for so long these days. COVID has lapped us, and what used to be baked-in elements of our musical experience aren’t around anymore—the sparks of connection that fly at a club set, the momentum that builds during a live show. We need to grieve those serendipitous nights out, the ones that felt as if they simply sprung from a passing lusty synth line like Roosevelt’s 2015 song “Night Moves,” and we haven’t had the chance. But it’s 2021, and on Roosevelt’s latest album Polydans, Marius Lauber is still offering the illusion of open space and carefree thoughts.
Lauber started out as a DJ in Cologne at 19, jumping from band to band until he started making music as Roosevelt. Where some electronic pop acts might swaddle a song in gauze, Lauber’s music evokes an earnest sweetness, forming crisp melodies around his smooth vocals. The snappy, cooled-off attitude of songs like 2013’s “Elliot” landed him on international festival stages, a lifestyle that manifested on 2019’s glossy Young Romance.
Polydans floats between glorifying the past and dreaming of a future that might not come. On “Feels Right,” Lauber sings of running into the dusk, pretending “it ain’t that hard to carry on.” The bouncing hook on “Forget” is sweet enough to dream along with your headphones. It’s almost hard to believe an album this syrupy came from within the same four walls of isolation as the rest of us. The mysterious depth that shadowed Roosevelt’s earlier work feels sugarcoated.
What to do with the deep-fried Myspace-era nostalgia and “world keeps turning” platitudes of a song like “Lovers”? It’s hard to remember a time where this would’ve hit the spot. Roosevelt’s flavor of dance-pop is meant to be played under bright festival lights, and a wide, empty transition track like “Montjuic” would be perfect for the encore—but on record, it’s just not the same.
Polydans closes with a hint of the moody, steamy dance music Roosevelt was born to make. The wistful groove of “Sign” reveals a glimmer of the grief and loss beneath the saccharine sheen: “Come back and give me a sign of your love.” Still, it’s not enough to contain your skepticism after the music stops.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | City Slang / Greco-Roman | March 3, 2021 | 6.4 | 840d96ba-a9f5-468a-9c8e-7173512dbe16 | Bailey Constas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bailey-constas/ | |
On her sophomore album, the country singer name-checks Minor Threat and Against Me! while drawing inspiration from classic Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. | On her sophomore album, the country singer name-checks Minor Threat and Against Me! while drawing inspiration from classic Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. | Esther Rose: You Made It This Far | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esther-rose-you-made-it-this-far/ | You Made It This Far | A few songs into her sophomore album You Made It This Far, country singer Esther Rose flashes back to her high school days in Columbiaville, Michigan. In her memory, she hears her mother’s coffee machine, wakes her sister, and scrapes the ice off the car. When they finally get out the door, she proudly lists the artists on the mixtape soundtracking the drive: “Against Me!, Julie Ruin, Minor Threat,” Rose sings. “I light up my last cigarette.” You can picture the scene—the angsty teens, the snowy road, the humdrum day ahead. All the while, a lazy pedal steel yawns and a shuffling beat pushes them forward, in no particular hurry.
The listless young characters in “Five Minute Drive” aren’t far from the ones Rose sings about on the rest of the album, emotionally speaking. But a lot has changed. For one thing, much of the present-tense action takes place in New Orleans, the city Rose has called home for the last 10 years. She addresses it most directly in “Lower 9 Valentine,” a simple love song named after the working-class neighborhood where she recorded the album with her small band. You get the sense that Rose’s setting is as important to her as the company she keeps: “Every day’s a holiday when we’re walking on the levee,” she sings. With a hopeful pull in her voice, she makes you want to join in on the celebration.
As a writer, Rose draws inspiration from the classic country songbook, artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Her preferred delivery is a sing-songy cadence that can package punchlines and hard truths with a cozy, cosmic wink. She’s also noted the influence of traditional blues music—as much the songwriting as the recordings themselves, with their crackle and sonic imperfections. In subtler ways than her 2017 debut This Time Last Night—a stark, stirring album recorded directly to two-track tape—this music incorporates the atmosphere around her. Peaceful, with ample room to breathe, these are songs that could change with each performance, on any night, in different weather.
You can also hear the influence of those old punk mixtapes from high school. For as traditional as her songs come across, you wouldn’t mistake them for throwbacks, and her lyrics can hit with an urgency embedded in the mind of anyone who’s shouted back lyrics in a sweaty, crowded basement at a formative age. (“I hope you change your mind,” goes a particularly cathartic chorus, “Oooh/Try!”). She’s often accompanied by lap steel and fiddle—two instruments that closely approximate the twang of her voice—and the arrangements fill the blanks between her words. In the exquisite “Only Loving You,” her band switches abruptly between its moody refrain and upbeat chorus. It’s an aural jump-cut that makes the music feel darker than her lovesick words would suggest.
Rose focuses her songwriting on self-discovery and how the passing of time shifts her understanding of people. In “Always Changing,” she notices a couple kissing in the park and wonders what their lives are like once they get back home and it’s just the two of them. She puts her own relationships under the microscope in “Sex and Magic,” noting the similarities between the performances in the title, how cheap and fake and desperate each can seem once it turns into routine. The sloppy pedal steel solo adds a kind of slapstick comedy, but Rose’s writing is earnest and direct; when she holds eye contact, it’s like there’s no one else in the room.
The album’s best song is also its sparest. The solo acoustic “Don’t Blame It on the Moon” was written just before the album was finished, and it’s the closest Rose has come to writing her own standard. Outside a bar in the late hours of the night, she lets us in on a series of climactic exchanges between two people in love, at the end of their ropes. Each verse is more hopeless than the last, and both parties sound exhausted and hardened to their own bad habits. “Don’t blame it on the moon/It’ll all be over soon,” Rose sings softly, then ends the song on a resounding major chord. Because soon the sun will be up, and it will be time to get moving again. | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Father/Daughter | August 22, 2019 | 7.5 | 84109ecf-f7d2-4b7b-a5bf-a98ab4dc67b7 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On a companion EP to last year’s Information, the New York house producer continues to experiment with new styles, but the prevailing mood is one of late-night weariness. | On a companion EP to last year’s Information, the New York house producer continues to experiment with new styles, but the prevailing mood is one of late-night weariness. | Galcher Lustwerk: Proof | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galcher-lustwerk-proof/ | Proof | A Cleveland native who’s been based in New York for more than a decade, Galcher Lustwerk first appeared in 2013 with the now classic 100% Galcher mixtape. Since then, he’s quietly amassed an extensive catalog while working under a variety of names (including Road Hog and 420, and as one half of the duo Studio OST), cooly connecting the dots between smoky R&B, fantastical strains of hip-hop, and the kind of smoothly melodic deep house that Midwestern legends like Larry Heard first cooked up in the late 1980s.
Although Lustwerk has tinkered with his aesthetic over the years, 2019’s Information, his third full-length under the alias and first for Ghostly International, documented a subtle, albeit significant expansion of his repertoire. Intermittently abandoning the dancefloor altogether, the low-key LP folded in meditative bits of jazz and ambient while exploring feelings of late-night weariness. That process continues on the Proof EP, a quality companion piece that’s similarly steeped in a sense of exhaustion, even when a bumping beat is present.
“Proof” is something for the DJs, its low-slung house groove fleshed out with gleaming pads, tiny flecks of piano, and moody vocal clips. As always, Lustwerk is almost impossibly cool on the mic, even as he swaps his usual narrative approach for a melange of stream-of-consciousness ad libs. He’s back to storytelling on the sultry, sax-laden “I Had to Slow It Down,” in which he luxuriates inside an updated New Romantic template, his voice bleary and gravelly. The confident “Graham” exaggerates his vocal affect even further, dispensing with drums entirely and ultimately sounding like a woozy excerpt from a Southern rap mixtape. These creative departures are some of Proof’s strongest offerings, but those looking for something with a vintage Galcher feel might be satisfied by the lush keys and gently clicking rhythm of digital-only cut “Leave,” along with Lustwerk’s new version of “Another Story,” a repurposed track from Information that he’s reinforced with a sturdier beat; to the latter he also brings an extra shot of bravado that makes lines like “I’m in New York and I’m Black (Black)/I can make beats, I can rap (rap)” sound especially potent.
Although those lyrics were penned long ago, they take on added significance right now, as dance music publicly wrestles with structural racism and Black erasure. There’s been a renewed call not just to reassert the music’s Black roots, but also to examine and dismantle the many ways that the industry and the culture around it continue to place Black artists at a disadvantage. Lustwerk—who’s never previously been particularly vocal on social media—has been right in the thick of the dialogue, most notably when he recently tweeted a long list (which he’s since deleted) of microaggressions, indignities, and racist situations he has encountered as a touring DJ. Blackness has always been a part of his work—the title of the first Road Hog LP, 2014’s D.W.B., is short for “driving while Black,” a phrase used to describe the racial profiling of Black motorists—and while the critical discourse around his music has largely avoided the topic of race, Lustwerk seems determined to push the conversation forward.
On Proof, that conversation is loudest on “Speed,” a track off Information that’s been remixed for the EP by red-hot NYC outfit AceMoMA (aka AceMo and MoMA Ready). The song’s slippery hardware rhythms and infectious energy will undoubtedly ring familiar to anyone who’s been following the pair’s HAUS of ALTR label, which has specifically sought to showcase talented Black producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Enlisting AceMoMA is a way of co-signing their efforts—and strengthening solidarity among Black and brown artists who are no longer content to wait for recognition from entrenched (and usually white) industry institutions. As exhausted as Lustwerk sounds on Proof, he’s clearly got the energy to demand better of dance music, both for himself and all who follow in his wake.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | July 10, 2020 | 7.4 | 84110827-d2eb-4ec8-ba6e-cdda91d8bc71 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the quintessential release from the Detroit producer, a 2000 mix of house and techno that forms a capacious document of the sounds of his city. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the quintessential release from the Detroit producer, a 2000 mix of house and techno that forms a capacious document of the sounds of his city. | Moodymann: Forevernevermore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moodymann-forevernevermore/ | Forevernevermore | Kenny Dixon Jr. started his career modestly; to hear him tell it, he made his first ever single as Moodymann at a Guitar Center. “I went in… quietly testing out something, so they thought,” he revealed in a sprawling 2010 interview at London’s Red Bull Music Academy. “I had my cassette and I was in there making a track. I spent about an hour on it and put that motherfucker out about six months later.” As the somewhat theatrical interview progressed, and he slowly talked about how he was going to give the audience the whole truth, a woman stood behind him and combed his hair.
Though some of his declarations seemed like jokes, his sense of what he provided as a DJ was completely honest: “I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world. But what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables. Whenever I’m playing up there at a particular moment, I might be at home in Detroit at my motherfucking Impala playing the same mad shit.” Running through these anecdotes and mission statements is the sense that the quotidian can be a portal to the majestic–the beginning of a legendary musician’s career can be where teenagers test out riffs on electric guitars, and the most transcendent night of music you will ever hear can be streaming out of some dude’s Chevy.
Released in 2000, Forevernevermore feels like Moodymann’s attempt to put the listener in the backseat of that Impala. The album is made up of a series of tracks that he had put out on white labels—unmarked vinyl releases that DJs make to promote their music—in the preceding years that were edited and expanded to form a capacious document of the interior and exterior sounds of his home city. For Moodymann, there’s no place like Detroit and its music, where growing up the radio stations were unsegregated; “Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas,” he joked to RBMA. To a certain extent, this was also what Kraftwerk were going for: In an interview for Dan Sicko’s book Techno Rebels, a history of Detroit techno, Kraftwerk percussionist Karl Bartos said soul music, Motown, and James Brown were some of the group’s core influences. Later in the book, Sicko argues that “even the most ‘hard core’ and militant-sounding techno groups”—like Detroit’s defiantly anti-corporate and pro-Black Underground Resistance techno collective—had “lofty ideals at heart—scenarios where race is no longer an issue.”
Before releasing Forevernevermore, Moodymann had approached race through direct statements on his EP covers and subtle references in his music. His 1996 EP, Don’t Be Misled, took its name from the Super Fly soundtrack sample on the first track, wherein Curtis Mayfield sings in anger and pain about Black people’s inability to protect each other, while exhorting the listener to think of the fate of the titular Fred, a drug dealer who gets dispatched in the film. “The City: A place where most suburban kids think they’re from. Detroit: A place where neggahs roam, neggahs like me... don’t be misled!” the EP’s cover stated. This salvo at middle-class tourists who either toured Detroit or watched it from afar on television screens expressed a visceral disdain towards these people, while simultaneously embracing the freedom of civic neglect.
More damning was the cover of his 1997 Amerika EP: “It’s been proven in history no matter what I do or what I become I’ll always be J.A.N. in this country–AMERIKA (This planet’s greatest thief) SIGNED Just Anotha Nigga.” Amerika contained two interpretations of a Gil Scott-Heron track where he traces the lineage of the blues to the United States, because the blues can only exist in a country that makes itself and the world so wretched. In both cases, the music was never as angry as the statements themselves; Moodymann simply said what he thought needed to be said.
Forevernevermore splits the difference between hinting at past oppression and urging for a different future through its enveloping sound, taking in everything from stadium rock to gospel. You can detect the influence of Underground Resistance and Kraftwerk on “The Setup,” a slice of fairly menacing techno. Its gnawing pads devour the space of the song, leaving room only for paralyzing metronomic percussion. “The Setup” is interrupted with a snipped bit of dialogue—a pronounced threat from the blaxploitation film, The Mack. The transition feels like talking to an overexcited friend who tells you that they need to pause the song they just began because they have another cool thing to let you in on. This and the following song, “[Logo],” form the techno section of the album. “[Logo]” is ambient washes of synth and glitchy notes played quick, all surrounded by unrelenting drumming. It’s the aquatic type of techno that the Detroit duo Drexciya was known for, but this isn’t the music of the future; towards the end of the track, Moodymann integrates Curtis Mayfield samples and the sound of children screaming, positioning the work in the current day.
The throughline of Forevernevermore is about making do with what one has in the present moment. While Moodymann has said his upbringing was mainly around Black people, whites would appear from time to time, and their presence generally meant that something was going to go wrong: “I’m not saying everybody in Detroit is racist or nothing like that, but the only time I saw white folks, you come to cut my gas off, you come and take my father to jail,” he said in the RBMA interview. It was a quotidian formulation: white proximity would lead to Black subjection. The grim fact of this history is made clear from the opener, “Meanwhile Back at Home.” The track is a floor-filler that gets its African drums from Quincy Jones’ soundtrack to Roots—in particular, the theme played when the Africans who will soon be sold into slavery are first seen in their bucolic village. Yet this song flows into the fluttering “Wednesday Night People,” which functions as a rejection of the negativity associated with meditating on the past. The track is a weightless house groove that has the words “I keep on” as a mantra, which repeat the whole time through. It’s fairly short, but its elements—a slowed down moan, a drooping bass, the slight singing of birds—are bright and expressive enough to comprise a heavenly infinity.
This pragmatic hope is what gives the album its particular presence. Moodymann has bluntly stated that Detroit is a city where the options can seem limited, yet his stated philosophy has prioritized self-reliance as a response to structural circumstances: “I don’t care if you are out here selling dope, do it well,” he told British DJ Gilles Peterson in a 2007 interview. “I don’t care if you are out here selling pussy, fuck it well. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” These lessons came to Moodymann through the Black church, and the power of the music of the Black church is foundational to Forevernevermore’s magnum opus, “The Thief That Stole My Sad Days (Ya Blessin Me).” Built around a fiery sermon focused on slavery (the preacher screams about “400 years” of bondage) and a simply undeniable piano loop, the song is house at its most spiritual. Throughout, the musician Debbie Welch sings to a God that makes everything OK. Her vocals are hypnotic and plaintive all at once, earning every single iota of emotion she strains out of her hums and screams. After she illustrates how she has been helped by Jesus, a house beat comes in, propelling her up as she exalts him: “You pick me up/And ya rocking me.” Improvised organ played by Moodymann’s collaborator Amp Fiddler moves all of this closer to a celestial level, making Welch sail upwards. What else can follow this but praise?
On “Tribute,” Moodymann pays homage to Marvin Gaye by cutting together different bits and slices of the soul singer’s tracks, presenting them with ethereal pads and thumping, ecstatic percussion. “Tribute” gets at two pillars of Moodymann’s universe: family and music. Its entire premise is based on witnessing the departure of a great musician, and realizing that there’s not much one can do but listen to the records they left behind. The track originally appeared on 1994’s The Day We Lost the Soul EP, where it was titled “Tribute! (To the Soul We Lost),” and followed an eponymous introductory track made up of radio clips from the day Gaye died. According to Moodymann, even getting these clips was a family endeavor; when Gaye died, he and his aunt recorded the entire day’s worth of tributes on Detroit radio. It was mourning through conservation.
The 1994 version was constructed around a sample of “What’s Going On.” It’s more of an edit than anything else, consisting of Gaye’s instrumentation (altered to sound as spacey as ESG) and vocals. The sample lies just under the mix, swathed in glowing chords and shakers. The album version is slightly different—it’s shorter, ending with a recording of what could only be a family get-together. After what sounds like a relative playing on the piano fades out, you hear a child sing a song that they came up with themselves. You hear his community’s presence, one that keeps Forevernevermore from sounding like an ethereal collage, close to something like the KLF’s ambient pastoral masterpiece Chill Out. Though comfortable in abstraction, he never stays there, deeply connecting his work to Motown soul, disco, jazz, and gospel.
For Moodymann these records aren’t just music—they’re guideposts, signals that can’t be ignored. There’s a video of Moodymann playing the first Movement Festival in Detroit, where he begins by playing Gil Scott-Heron’s “We Almost Lost Detroit,” rewinds it, reminds the crowd where he’s from (“Everybody up here driving through Detroit. I drive in it, you understand? Every day”), and then plays the record again, letting Gil Scott-Heron’s rasp tell the rest of the story. He seems completely comfortable here, happy to let the music play, singing along to the chorus from time to time. The song, of course, is about the threat of nuclear annihilation, about the threat of extinction, about the threat of purposeful extinction. But this doesn’t frighten Moodyman: “If it wasn’t for Detroit, I wouldn’t be the motherfucker I am today. So I’m not leaving my baby. I’m going to stick with it,” he said in the RBMA interview. “If that motherfucker fall down to the ground, well, y’all pray for me because I’ma fall with that motherfucker, you understand?”
Moodymann’s pride in his local scene comes from a time before globalization and from a place that was robbed by it. But this theft and isolation are what makes the city itself so special. Somehow a musical utopia arose out of decades of gradual deindustrialization, and this only came about with the perseverance of those who stayed. Moodymann occupies his own distinct place in Detroit. Where other DJs like Theo Parrish release music that sounds raw, Moodymann will release music that feels like a work in progress; the same record might sound different depending on what country it was purchased in. These calculated errors form the mystique that surrounds him, and they also speak to a DIY sense of entrepreneurship. If people are interested in buying something that’s real, then they need to take the good with the bad; nothing can be left out, including mistakes.
The rattling immediacy of Forevernevermore comes from its rejection of any totalizing reading. The three-part title track is a case in point: Concluding the album, it begins with six minutes of a turned-up disco groove, floating in and out of the mix are snatches of crowd noise, a horn solo, and dialogue. The effects are very similar to the party sounds that open and close “What’s Going On.” Yet unlike the samples found there, which served as an elegiac counterpoint to Gaye’s expression of political turmoil, they function as joyful noise–very pleasant shit to hear along with the Brazilian pianist and disco producer Eumir Deodato’s “Whistle Bump.” The next part is abstract industrial with Moodymann mumbling to himself, entertaining himself by repeating phrases that jokingly hint at irritation with the way he’s perceived by others (“Niggas be talking all that shit about me/Why you always going overseas?/Why you always driving around the D?”).
Finally, the song moves to a conclusion with the glimmering techno we only got a glimpse of earlier. Yet the pounding drums and buzzing notes that make up this interlude disappear almost as soon as they accumulate, leaving us with the reverbed voice of a child telling us the record’s over. It feels like just some guy fucking around in his living room, playing snatches of different records, wondering what he’s going to do before his kid comes home. Ignoring the fact that this is his stated purpose, this is really what he knows how to provide, and what he perfects on Forevernevermore. Every irritation, every joy, every mistake, and every combo that just somehow worked comes together to form a piece that feels seamless.
That’s the wonderful illusion of Forevernevermore—it asks the questions Gil Scott-Heron asked, only to rumble your speakers; it makes Chic sound even better, and then it hits you with the gospel. It’s a compendium of Black thought, doubling as one dude’s very long stand-up routine. At the end of the RBMA interview, Moodymann was asked what the most rewarding place he’d ever been was. His response? “Man, the east side of Detroit is incredible. I hit it every weekend, you’ve gotta go. Southwest is all cool, we got our Spaniards down there they be teaching me all kind of shit. West side is my roam, that is some bad motherfucker, we got some kings over there.” This record shows he was speaking the truth. | 2022-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Peacefrog | May 8, 2022 | 9.2 | 84157b12-4062-4fe9-b79b-7b0f3da3b55a | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
With patient songwriting and gentle arrangements, the Icelandic art-pop musician portrays seismic emotional transformations through resounding moments of stillness. | With patient songwriting and gentle arrangements, the Icelandic art-pop musician portrays seismic emotional transformations through resounding moments of stillness. | JFDR: Museum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jfdr-museum/ | Museum | Jófríður Ákadóttir was at odds with herself. “I can't tell my feelings apart,” she sings in “Life Man,” a standout from Museum, her third album as JFDR. “Even when I reason with myself/I’m no closer.” All the while, she keeps moving: “Get up brush your hair and start the day at midday/In the meantime.” Fittingly, the song’s title comes from an unsatisfying interaction with a therapist, in which Ákadóttir unspooled some existential crisis and was greeted with raised eyebrows and a simple shrug of “Life, man.”
Jocular as the reference might be, Ákadóttir’s therapist’s words help contextualize Museum. Right when lockdown was starting in March of 2020, Ákadóttir released New Dreams, an album that marked a fuller realization of her sound and boasted some of her most striking songwriting. Having holed up in Australia with her bandmate and soon-to-be-husband Joshua Wilkinson, Ákadóttir went through the sort of listless identity spiral many artists experienced during the pandemic. After performing in various projects since her teenage years and having already released over 10 full-lengths, she questioned her future in music until Wilkinson encouraged her to revisit some demos. Soon, Ákadóttir started collecting new fragments and lost scraps and eventually booked a recording session in New York with longtime collaborator Shahzad Ismaily.
Museum continues the refinements of New Dreams. As always, many of her songs are strikingly pretty. Across the album, Ákadóttir and her collaborators craft patient art-pop atmospheres above rippling piano and acoustic guitar; many songs are accentuated by the metallic tones of the langspil, an Icelandic string instrument. On singles “The Orchid” and “Spectator,” Ákadóttir drifts on aqueous synths and flickering orchestration to powerful denouements. Discussing the title Museum, Ákadóttir likened these songs to sculptures, pieces chiseled out of recent memory. With her incantatory melodic sensibility, they could just as well be conjurings, wading through the debris of life before arriving at gentle catharses.
Images of nature abound on Museum. In “Air Unfolding” the air in question is a tangible gulf between two people anxious about where they stand, while relationships bloom in “Underneath the Sun” and contort in “Sideways Moon.” She renders human flaws and foibles as something elemental. Under JFDR, Ákadóttir hasn’t shied away from the tradition of Icelandic art that captures the surreal, severe nature of her country’s landscape, and there is often something hushed and naturalistic to her music. Her voice is an expressive whisper carried not on storm gusts or carved from towering glaciers, but instead weaving in and out of more wandering winds and waters.
JFDR’s music is not necessarily minimal, but it is restrained—sometimes to a fault. It’s easy to fall for the slowly unfolding beauty in her songs, and every now and then she comes around with something more propulsive, like “Life Man” or New Dreams’ “Taking a Part of Me,” that more directly depicts the forward motion she seeks in her lyrics. That is not where JFDR is yet; Museum is by design a document of stasis. She makes intimate portraits cataloging seismic emotional transformations, but occurring in single, resounding moments of stillness. Museum feels like a transitional statement—a small but powerful reflection on an era when everyone and everything ground to a halt. But at their best, these songs also offer hints of how Ákadóttir might start moving again. | 2023-05-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Houndstooth | May 4, 2023 | 7.3 | 8419f62b-2a55-4ca3-8ee3-8315cc8bdd8e | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
With the help of some producers du jour, the Irish singer-songwriter expertly blends his deep love for acoustic soundscapes and hip-hop on his fully realized third record. | With the help of some producers du jour, the Irish singer-songwriter expertly blends his deep love for acoustic soundscapes and hip-hop on his fully realized third record. | James Vincent McMorrow: We Move | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22330-we-move/ | We Move | Until recently, Irish folk singer and songwriter James Vincent McMorrow only existed in wisps. His delicate falsetto would vanish quickly back into the silence of his sparse arrangements and his ideas were veiled and occasionally incomprehensible, blurred as lyric fragments and extended metaphors. His sophomore album, Post Tropical, was atmospheric in theme and tenor, relying primarily on mood and melody to produce sensations. The beauty was in his exquisite style and sound that buoyed arcane stanzas like, “Someone is ringing a bell/It chimes through this shimmering shell/That once was my vision of birth/But now it’s my vessel and curse.” But McMorrow has hinted at a desire to be bolder and to fully realize his love of hip-hop and electronic music in song. Post Tropical implied these connections existed, but it couldn’t fashion them into a working framework that made meaningful use of the components.
The first single from his new album We Move, called “Rising Water,” signaled a complete transformation was in store. The song reimagined McMorrow’s standard indie folk as a pop R&B jam. He kicked up the tempo with heavier drums, creating layers of sound out of electro synths and pulsating bass. It distanced McMorrow from his previously cryptic writing style—which he has charitably called “esoteric”—presenting text that’s easier to follow. His voice was even reintroduced on the track as a powerful and vibrant instrument. But more than anything else, the song seemed to find his perfect balance.
“Rising Water” was produced by OVO hitmaker Nineteen85 (the mastermind behind three of Drake’s biggest successes—“Hold On, We’re Going Home,” “Hotline Bling,” and “One Dance”—and one-half of the R&B duo dvsn), who McMorrow met on tour in 2015 and worked closely with for We Move. Nineteen85 brings clarity and sharpness to McMorrow’s work, just as he does Drake’s, by only using the bits that are functional and necessary. Operating alongside OVO’s secret weapon, Frank Dukes (another Toronto beat-maker who has worked with Drake, Travis Scott, Kanye West, Rihanna, and Kendrick Lamar), and Two Inch Punch (who has written and produced songs for Jessie Ware, Sam Smith, and Tory Lanez), have also added more depth and resonance. McMorrow’s music was once picturesque but idle, a prisoner of its own tranquility. His songs were to be admired, but never fully understood, and they didn’t do enough with melody to overcome a static nature and convey more than just “vibes.”
The songs on We Move subvert this established pattern. The ideas are articulated much more distinctly than on past recordings, bringing added significance to the gorgeous compositions. McMorrow still communicates most of his feelings through high-pitched coos, but the notes carry more weight and they linger into richer backdrops, like on “Killer Whales” and “Surreal.” The verses are stated plainly and the syllables are more than just conductors for sound. He still leaves some of the mystery, divorcing many narratives from any context, but the writing is much more striking now. “Last Story” is the best song he’s ever written, an epic drama about revisiting old romance that melds the strengths of his two writing styles, remaining ambiguous without feigning intimacy.
There are songs about heartbreak and loss; about trying to make it work and moving on; about the many ways lovers can destroy each other, and about personal growth. It isn’t just about conveying a feeling anymore; it’s about examining them. Some songs ruminate on relationships, past and present. Others compile shared experience. He asks rhetorical questions of anyone in earshot: “Are you hopeless like me?” and “Have you come here to save me?” and “Who battled here for you to live?” People saving each other is an ongoing theme, and We Move is fascinated by the impact we make. Every now and then, he’ll say something truly devastating like “I’m afraid to die without leaving a mark.” This album, perhaps, is the greatest reflection of that.
We Move is the album McMorrow has always dreamed of making—the one he tried to make with Post Tropical: an elegant, hip hop-indebted record with a folk nucleus that still hangs on every utterance, that advances on his tasteful croons. (McMorrow, a noted fan of rap, has always wanted to transmit that spirit in his tunes but lacked the direction; earlier this year, he said the original version of Early in the Morning had all electronic drums that were created on a Korg Triton—a favorite tool of rap producers like the Neptunes—before he panicked and changed it.) The songs on We Move marry his acoustic ideas with hip-hop/R&B sentiment and programming, blending the two into something new and fluid. On “Get Low,” the deep guitar licks settle into a thumping bass line. The chorus of “Ohs” on “Evil” slips into a skipping rhythm of hi-hats and washed-out synths. At every turn, the music is fuller, less caught in suspension. “Is it better to live your life in shallow water or is failure drowning in the deep end?” McMorrow asks on “Lost Angles.” In his case, leaving the safe alternative proved to be the right choice. | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Folk/Country | Caroline | September 9, 2016 | 7.3 | 841b3b27-27ab-4986-ac5e-604e153cbd6f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Daniel Lopatin’s latest doesn't swerve in a new direction but instead serves as an overlook for his career, highlighting his skill at splicing the old and the new in continually fascinating ways. | Daniel Lopatin’s latest doesn't swerve in a new direction but instead serves as an overlook for his career, highlighting his skill at splicing the old and the new in continually fascinating ways. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Magic Oneohtrix Point Never | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-magic-oneohtrix-point-never/ | Magic Oneohtrix Point Never | Like any handover of power, a radio-station format change—from country to classic rock, say, or Top 40 to oldies—follows a loose script. A farewell from the outgoing station manager, a second or two of dead air, and then the benediction from the victorious new regime. No wax seals memorialize these fleeting events; no toppled statues litter the ground. But they are charged moments nonetheless, admissions of failure and also statements of continuity: The king is dead, long live the king.
Brief snippets of such format flips are threaded throughout Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin’s first album since his Uncut Gems soundtrack. Gathered from an online archive, they’ve been manipulated and sequenced to sound like a kind of cartoonish Greek chorus. These “eulogies,” as he has called them—for outmoded styles, written-off market segments, abandoned listeners—are nonetheless, in the manner of commercial radio, relentlessly upbeat; they seem to proclaim that American lives are nothing but second acts, perpetually being erased and reset. “Somehow the music we grew up listening to doesn’t relate to our adult reality and our new dreams,” says a disk jockey in one of a handful of format-flip interludes, surrounded by murky, atonal flourishes. His garbled voice rises in pitch as easy-listening piano blossoms in the background. “The main question to mind is, Have you changed? And the answer is, uh, yes.”
At this stage in his career, “I’ve changed” would not be a terribly revelatory statement from Oneohtrix Point Never. In recent years, Lopatin has become a skilled choreographer of wrongfooting listeners’ expectations, trading the vaporous textures of his early work for the overdriven “hypergrunge” of Garden of Delete and then the almost incomprehensible world building and dizzyingly recombinant styles of Age Of. It’s tempting to look for an autobiographical subtext in Magic Oneohtrix Point Never; recall that Lopatin took his moniker from Boston’s Magic 106.7, which provided the gauzy soft-rock backdrop of his youth. But Magic, which was created largely during the pandemic, is not so much a format change in Lopatin’s discography as an inflection point or perhaps simply an overlook: an opportunity to take stock of where he’s been and where he might go next.
In sound and feel, Magic frequently dwells on familiar sounds and tropes, many of which return to Replica and R Plus Seven. The album is thick with sounds that blur the line between the fake and the real, like plucked and bowed strings, reed, harpsichord, hammered dulcimer, and marimba. Whether sampled, synthesized, or acoustic, they are rich with implicit physicality, evocative of stretching and striking; processed voices are carved into curved, glistening shapes, uncanny as ice sculptures. It’s a ridiculously opulent palette. The thrumming strings of “Long Road Home,” a sort of Mike Oldfield-esque ballad featuring a largely unrecognizable Caroline Polachek, could easily be repurposed for an Audi commercial, while the slicing bows and THX-grade sound effects of “Shifting” evoke big-budget Hollywood blockbusters.
“Every song is an opportunity to freak somebody out,” Lopatin has said; the most audacious thing about Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is probably a co-executive producer credit for Abel Tesfaye, aka notorious R&B rapscallion the Weeknd, who reached out to Lopatin after hearing his score for Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2017 film Good Time. After both worked on the Safdies’ Uncut Gems, Lopatin ended up working on a few tracks for the Weeknd’s After Hours. Tesfaye appears only once here—on “No Nightmares,” an ’80s-inspired power ballad reminiscent of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”—but Lopatin credits Tesfaye’s feedback in helping to shape the album. (“I needed someone to give me perspective on what I was doing as a music fan because he’s got unbelievable taste,” Lopatin told The Guardian. “He was like: ‘Burn it down! This is an OPN record!’ I was like: ‘Oh yeah, I forgot!’ He was really in my corner as a friend.”) Still, Tesfaye’s fingerprints are not obvious; even on “No Nightmares,” which also features Polachek, his customary falsetto is vocodered beyond recognition, and the lyrics are free of his signature tales of sex, drugs, and self-loathing.
One of a handful of pop-adjacent songs on Magic, “No Nightmares” is probably the album’s nadir. It could be that the world simply doesn’t need another “Take My Breath Away,” no matter how ambiguously tongue in cheek; it could be that Lopatin’s principal talent is not in writing pop songs. The really moving parts of Magic happen in its more abstracted tracks, which fortunately comprise the bulk of the album. Following Lopatin’s movements can feel like watching a tornado tear through a fabric mill, ribbons of color spilling out in every direction. In “Bow Ecco,” shoals of harpsichord swirl around plangent woodwinds, directionless yet somehow compelling; “The Whether Channel” (surely one of his best titles yet) arrays sweetly blippy synths over cascading dulcimer and dissonant drones in a way that makes chaos feel somehow lyrical.
Lopatin has a remarkable talent for giving shape and movement to an indistinct mass of sonic matter, setting it in motion like a baton-wielding maestro conducting a murmuration of starlings. “Tales From the Trash Stratum” is as beautiful and incomprehensible a piece of music as Lopatin has written. Out of a fog of radio-dial swirl emerge first a blast of noise and then delicate mallet percussion; it soon sounds like Oval taking his Sharpie to a Steve Reich CD against a backdrop of synthetic birdsong, running water, Ren Faire flutes, spaceship whirr, and what might be the startup chime of a vintage Mac hybridized with Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies. Except you barely notice any of these things as discrete sounds; taken together, it all simply sounds like Oneohtrix Point Never.
What is so moving about these radically abstracted pieces is their instability and their impermanence; they are always in the process of becoming or disintegrating, and the listener accustomed to OPN’s way of working soon comes to understand that no moment of beauty will last for long; that even the most gorgeous passage will soon crumble to noise—or, worse, become something tacky and distasteful, a song you can’t change the radio dial fast enough to turn off. In this sense, there’s something poignant even in the album’s ugliest bits.
Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy. He told GQ, “I put all of these dead air moments throughout the record—eulogies—to make them say something that felt personal to me as far as my own career, as well as what was happening to the country.” Seen in that light, his sample flips are signs not just of impermanence but also division, of a body politic cleaved in two. It’s a disheartening thought. Toward the end of the album, a disk jockey chirps, “There’ll only be a memory of the music you heard over the years, but the country will not die—it exists at a new home, and I’m sure that home’ll give it the space to grow.” Another announcer’s voice is spliced in: “This has been—this. And this dream is the sound. And this dream will self-destruct in 3… 2…” Drowned out by churning loops of tone, he never gets to finish his sentence. Like other albums created during the pandemic, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never is steeped in the loneliness and disorientation of the present moment. What sets it apart is Lopatin’s willingness to face—with tenderness but little sentimentality—the uncertainty of what might await us on the other side.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | October 30, 2020 | 7.7 | 842269e1-ddff-4d5a-81c8-e4508a13a3b2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Mike Skinner says goodbye to his Streets project with an attempted return to the sound of his landmark 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material. | Mike Skinner says goodbye to his Streets project with an attempted return to the sound of his landmark 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material. | The Streets: Computers and Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15099-computers-and-blues/ | Computers and Blues | Back in the early 00s, Mike Skinner and James Murphy both seemed like transformative figures: two charismatic producer/talkers with rhythm, intelligence, senses of humor, and senses of gravitas. Both were innovators who existed at once inside and outside a pair of emerging genres (grime and dance-punk, respectively), and both focused so fully on their own tiny corners of existence that they made those experiences tangible to people who only had the slightest idea what they were talking about. Now, a decade later, both are preparing to say goodbye to their signature projects.
Skinner's landmark debut, Original Pirate Material, hit just months before LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" single, but the follow-up, A Grand Don't Come for Free, arguably holds up better today. A staggering conceptual LP, the record was a grounded and powerful piece of linear storytelling that found Skinner in a more challenging and ambitious mode. But in that album's wake, Skinner adapated a much less relatable and charismatic persona, releasing a pair of disappointing LPs that squashed his accumulated goodwill. The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living was a near-fatal cocaine-and-tabloids tantrum, an attempt to shed light on celeb-culture shallowness that simply wound up indulging in it. And Everything Is Borrowed was even stranger, an amber-hued pastorale that made no sense at all. Now, convinced he's got nothing left to say, Skinner gives us Computers and Blues.
A collection of lesser beats and hooks that somewhat returns to Original Pirate Material's sonics, Computers and Blues sadly trades that record's wonderful sense of place for a foggy vagueness that leaves Skinner's insights mostly impenetrable. And yet, after the last two albums, it feels something like a return to form, actually coming closer to the particular weird spark of Skinner's debut than anything he's released since. Even the image of the apartment building on the cover echoes the lonely tenement on his first album. And as a series of disconnected sketches with cheap bedroom beats, Computers and Blues is not without its charm.
But where Original Pirate Material empathetically chronicled the lives of its scabby potheads, Computers and Blues mostly concerns their weed-hazed days-- including, on "Outside Inside", the frustrating inability to get off the couch. Even as Skinner toys with some truly dumb lyrical conceits, it's a joy to hear him push language around: "The fossiled remains of lots of ancient ways are buried or lost in every one of my mates' brains." And there's also the genuinely moving "A Blip on a Screen", a vulnerable and wonderstruck song about seeing your kid on an ultrasound screen for the first time.
Musically, too, this is still recognizably the work of the kid who once mined rap and garage for everything he could use and threw the rest away. The beats are all endearingly awkward and homemade-- drums and horns and Bollywood samples tripping all over each other rather than combining into any sort of steamroller. A few tracks bring a nice garge-disco glide, an encouraging sign that Skinner could go on to be quite good at actual dance music. The hooks may be uniformly awful, but at least he's trying.
Still, nothing on Computers and Blues rivals even the weakest moments of Skinner's first two albums, and it comes out at the same time of something much more encouraging: a mixtape called Cyberspace and Reds, which Skinner claims is all music he's made since he finished this album. Cyberspace and Reds dips deeper into British rap than Skinner has ever allowed himself to go, with old grime comrades like Wiley and Kano and Jammer stopping by to talk shit. It's fun, for a change of pace, and it offers no indication that Skinner's trying to make an important piece of work. If he can lighten up enough to make something like that, there could be hope for him yet. | 2011-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / 679 | February 28, 2011 | 5.3 | 842a8b5b-0993-451f-aee0-5d8744332dfb | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | 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 explore Built to Spill’s winding, monumental 1997 album Perfect From Now On. | 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 explore Built to Spill’s winding, monumental 1997 album Perfect From Now On. | Built to Spill: Perfect From Now On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/built-to-spill-perfect-from-now-on/ | Perfect From Now On | There’s a mustiness to the term “classic rock” that makes it seem like a slur. It’s the air of overfamiliarity, of overstayed welcome, of predictability, of canon that we had no say in being forced upon us. This, at least in part, is what made even the embarrassing aftereffects of the culture and business of rock music in the ’90s so thrilling—that feeling of storming the gates even if no one was quite sure what to do once inside.
But there’s also something aspirational about being labeled “classic rock”—about wanting to make something that could both iconically represent a specific time and become unstuck from it. This feels like the way to think about Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On, which began its life being compared to avatars of the former but gets to spend eternity as an exemplar of the latter.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Love the second album Doug Martsch had made with a revolving cast of bandmates under the name Built to Spill, was of its time. Released in 1994, it’s an unassuming, lovely slab of lo-fi fuzz-pop about growing up, and not growing up, in Idaho, with picaresque lyrics about playing seven-up with grade-school crushes, driving nowhere in particular, loneliness, and the childlike wonder of staring up at the stars. Then he followed it up with an album-length response from the galaxy’s point of view.
In 1997, at the peak of the underground’s widespread gentrification, there wasn’t an album that blended outsize ambition with characteristically indie aw-shucks modesty like Perfect From Now On—a sprawling, seeds-in-the-gatefold opus happily bankrolled and distributed by one of the biggest media conglomerates on earth. Two years after its release, Doug Martsch described the album to the AV Club as “kind of big and epic, but also kind of crappy and personal,” which is about as clear a distillation of the music industry’s post-grunge boom years’ identity crisis ever stated. If the mid-’90s meant mastering the fine art of trying to do big things while seeming small, Perfect From Now On may be its defining artifact.
It is positively quaint, now, to think back on the melodrama of indie bands signing to major labels and the degree to which this drove the central narrative for an entire era of music. One of the most important and fruitful periods in contemporary pop cultural history was dominated by the question of whether or not to take corporate money to make art. This period’s most important artists were often defined by their abilities to resist; their subsequent work was seen through the filter of how that decision changed them, of what was sacrificed in the name of expanding an audience, of whether something means more if it’s consumed less.
When Built to Spill signed to Warner Bros., it didn’t feel shocking, nor was the decision in opposition to the band’s carefully cultivated outsider image; they didn’t have one. Martsch had a young son to take care of, there’s nothing wrong with practicality. There was little hand-wringing as to whether “Car” would start soundtracking Volkswagen commercials or whether Martsch would abandon the fierce principles he’d shaped over a few years of lo-fi scrappiness to score a gig at the Peach Pit. But: If the label wanted to give him more money than he’d ever needed to make an album, he was going to use more money than he’d ever needed to make an album.
While the songs on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love were straightforward and concise, the new ones were expansive and twisty, layers of guitars doing things that often didn’t sound like things guitars do. They had all the markings of dramatically increased scope, even if that was a goal their creator wasn’t necessarily interested in telegraphing.
What this all amounted to was a guarantee that some mathematically measurable number of people were actually going to hear this music and judge it on its merits, stripped from the comfort of indie-clique shorthand. “It was definitely the first time I thought there was going to be an audience for my music,” Martsch told Magnet. “This was the first time I was like, ‘Whoa, people are actually going to listen to this, and it’s going to be reviewed.’ Up until then, everything was kind of like free and fun.”
One explanation for Perfect From Now On’s enduring appeal is the fact that it was made three different times. Produced again by Phil Ek, making his own major-label debut at 24, the first sessions felt lackluster, so Martsch scrapped them. They started over with Martsch’s high school bandmate Brett Nelson on bass and the Spinanes’ Scott Plouf on drums, where they’d remain for 17 years. Confusingly, Brett Netson of Boise’s Caustic Resin, played guitar. Those tapes were ruined after being left in Ek’s pickup truck. So the third time—with that much more preparation and rehearsal—was the charm, but at the expense of Martsch’s patience. When it came time to tour behind the album, Martsch could barely bring himself to play any of the songs that were on it.
The meticulousness, whatever it took to get there, shows. The album consists of eight songs in 54 minutes, although that’s a little deceiving—“Stop the Show” has no fewer than four different songs packed into its six and a half minutes. The shortest is “Made Up Dreams” at a svelte 4:52, and the climax, “Untrustable / Part 2 (About Someone Else)”—there is no Part 1—is just shy of nine minutes. Big songs about big moods.
“Randy Described Eternity” begins the album with a metal sphere 10 times the size of Jupiter that floats a few yards past the earth every thousand years and a dude named Randy, but this is as close as the album comes 2112’s orbit. Nothing is a difficult listen or a test; even the most intricate songs feel like long brisk walks rather than math problems. There are guitar solos—are there are ever guitar solos—but they don’t feel wanky, they don’t feel like self-indulgent refutations of punk’s economy, they just feel like a guy who knows how to play guitar real good.
“Velvet Waltz” is as advertised, “Kicked It in the Sun” is rainy-day indoor space-rock. It’s a concept album about not really having any idea what’s going on. The album’s most memorable lyric is the refrain of “Untrustable”: “God is whoever you’re performing for.” It’s a marvel of a rallying cry about art and intimacy the myth of indie-rock ambivalence and defining for yourself what success means and Martsch sings it like a shrug.
Martsch himself resisted the low-hanging comparison to FM staples like Neil Young (although his trademark adenoidal vocals and this 21-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer” probably didn’t help). He saw his nascent guitar heroism and gravitation towards more complex arrangements as owing to contemporaries like Butthole Surfers and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Dinosaur Jr. It was classic rock for kids who didn’t know whether it was cool to like classic rock but would never admit to being self-conscious enough to question whether it was cool to like classic rock.
The total lack of mythology or image surrounding the band has become Perfect From Now On’s greatest asset. The music is just the music, there’s no baggage that’s accrued with time that changes its perception, nobody disappointed anybody or died or joined the Smashing Pumpkins. Your enjoyment suffers not one bit from not knowing what Doug Martsch looks like. The record doesn’t sound like 1997 or 1967; it and exists to get lost in, to make you want to carve out some time to get lost. There are new things to find in every listen, which isn’t that different from the impulse to sync up The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz, just to see.
Perfect From Now On didn’t mark some dramatic fulcrum in the band’s trajectory—the album sold well enough to begin a relationship with Warner Bros. that, remarkably, only wound down last year. Its follow-up, 1999’s Keep It Like a Secret, was a return to more compact songwriting and subsequent albums have generally followed suit, to surprisingly little diminishing returns. But none of them feel as of a piece as Perfect. Martsch, Plouf, and Nelson played the album in its entirety for shows in 2008; it feels right to think of this as a 10th-anniversary celebration that they spaced on and wound up getting to a year late.
Nor was it even 1997’s most dramatic example of a band leveling up and delivering a career-redefining existential masterpiece; OK Computer could be Perfect From Now On’s evil twin (or maybe Perfect is OK’s stoner cousin). Martsch seems fine with not having any answers and revels in the comfort of being lost. In “Velvet Waltz,” a song about a “world that’s not so bad,” he sings, “You better just enjoy the luxury of sympathy if that’s a luxury you have,” and it’s the best advice no one ever gave to Thom Yorke. Both albums hit similar nerves about the significance of cohesive album-length Big Statements, whether that was a conscious throwback or just a reminder that the present wasn’t such a convulsive change after all.
On a recent Thursday night in Brooklyn, Built to Spill—now comprised of Martsch, Steve Gere on drums, and Jason Albertini on bass, the same lineup BTS has had since 2015’s Untethered Moon—played to about 250 people between stops on a co-headlining tour with Afghan Whigs. Martsch seemed to only have brought one guitar with him, so changing a broken string or between-song tuning became exercises in long, stubborn, almost performatively awkward silences. The instinct to say something seemed so obvious that to just not somehow felt like a political decision, a meta-commentary on what it means to lead a band and manage the dynamic between performer and whoever you’re performing for. On this night, God looked like a bunch of folks wearing winter coats indoors and stifling the urge to shout requests while making fleeting “You think this is a little weird, too, right?” eye contact with one another. And our subject, our disciple, was an unbothered guy who may have packed too light for a long trip. | 2018-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | April 29, 2018 | 9.2 | 842af379-809b-4331-8083-3ddabb0ffb3a | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
Kode9’s Hyperdub label celebrates its 15th anniversary by moving confidently beyond the London club music’s conventions. | Kode9’s Hyperdub label celebrates its 15th anniversary by moving confidently beyond the London club music’s conventions. | Various Artists: HyperSwim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-hyperswim/ | Hyperswim | The journey from Hyperdub’s 10th to its 15th birthday has proved as exciting and change-ridden as the equivalent passage into human adolescence. It’s not that the London label has abandoned its childhood friends—longtime pals Burial, Cooly G, Ikonika, and DJ Taye are all here to blow out the candles on this anniversary compilation—but they mingle with new acquaintances, who bring international poise to the party.
Hyperdub always was a globally-minded label, providing one of the first homes for footwork outside of Chicago and taking an early interest in South African electronics. But as recently as 2014, the label still felt like a reflection of the London underground; the four compilations released to mark its first decade gravitated around the sprawling UK bass continuum, from grime to funky, garage to dubstep, gilded by touches of R&B, footwork, and techno.
HyperSwim, released in collaboration with anarchic cartoon network Adult Swim, is an altogether more cosmopolitan beast, held together more by the spirit of innovation than local circumstance. London is represented by the likes of Burial, Dean Blunt, and Cooly G, but they rub shoulders with artists from Cape Town (Angel-Ho), Angola (Nazar), Turin (Mana) and Philadelphia (Mhysa). As well as this geographical drift, HyperSwim captures Hyperdub’s growing agnosticism to genre. Even the most eagerly informed listener would struggle to say exactly what kind of music this album contains, with Hyperdub tapping into a global electronic underground for whom genre is little more than a SoundCloud tag.
That might sound like a recipe for chaos, but HyperSwim works these diverse sounds into recognisable strands of shape and feel, allowing the listener to drift from the sweetly naive, deconstructed pop of Mhysa’s “Games”—whose un-AutoTuned vocal and rambling feel remind me of Sarah Records’ hair-clip indie—to Fatima Al Qadiri’s deliriously dystopian “Filth” without feeling any jarring changes.
Broadly speaking, the album starts sparse and melodic, accelerates through the biting rhythms of New Jersey club, then closes with thunderous four-to-the-floor drums. But nothing is quite as it seems on this devious beat excursion. DJ Taye may be a member of legendary footwork crew Teklife, but his “Inferno” owes as much to Three 6 Mafia’s proto-trap as it does to DJ Rashad; Doon Kanda appears to have sucked all the life out of a Ricardo Villalobos production to create the nightmarish haunted house of “Perfume”; and Mana’s contribution, “Climbing the Walls,” sounds simultaneously fast and slow, a spectral guitar sample coming up against racing hi-hats.
For all HyperSwim’s futuristic feel, the standout tracks largely come from the label’s established artists. Burial’s “Old Tape” is a wonky masterpiece that combines the familiar crackle and murk with an unexpected ’80s pop touch reminiscent of Inner City, Jan Hammer, and Enya; label founder Kode9’s marvellous “Cell3” sounds like orchestral grime being slowly sucked through a supermassive black hole; and Laurel Halo’s “Crush” is a bizarrely funky mixture of broken beats, bleeps, and the roar of the hopeless void. But as with most compelling compilations, HyperSwim’s success doesn’t come down to individual tracks. Instead, its brilliance lies in its cohesion and disparity: the way it teases a logical narrative out of decentralized musical moods without sacrificing artistic individuality. | 2019-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Hyperdub / Adult Swim | December 4, 2019 | 7.8 | 842bc0a8-99bc-4844-9c17-679364544628 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Newly reissued on vinyl, the most experimental album from the Charlottesville jam institution explores the uneasy zone between celebratory anthems and grim lamentations. | Newly reissued on vinyl, the most experimental album from the Charlottesville jam institution explores the uneasy zone between celebratory anthems and grim lamentations. | Dave Matthews Band: Before These Crowded Streets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-matthews-band-before-these-crowded-streets/ | Before These Crowded Streets | In the summer of 1997, the Dave Matthews Band reigned as unlikely alt-rock superstars. The group’s major label debut, 1994’s Under the Table and Dreaming, elevated them from heroes of Virginia’s progressive roots scene to mainstream success, and 1996’s Crash made an even bigger splash, propelled by the ubiquitous hit single “Crash Into Me” and a resultant Grammy win. As was their style, DMB had dedicated most of the years between to touring, jamming ebulliently to crowds of adoring fans who were, as comedian and podcaster Marc Maron would eventually put it, only truly comfortable while “jigging around in an arena with other like-minded people.”
That DMB was difficult to classify hadn’t barred them from hitmaker status, but the spotlight left Matthews feeling restless. “Maybe you couldn’t call them pop and you couldn’t call them jazz and you certainly couldn’t call them rock,” producer Steve Lillywhite told Relix in 2018. “What were they?” With 1998’s Before These Crowded Streets, Dave and co. asserted that whatever you thought they were, they were something different. Newly remastered and reissued on vinyl to commemorate its 25th anniversary (puzzlingly sans bonus material, given the ponderance of archival tape), the record represents DMB at its most nakedly ambitious. The core of the band’s sound remained intact: maximalist rhythms from drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lessard undergirding Matthews’ buoyant odes to abandon, while the melodic runs of saxophone/flutist LeRoi Moore and sawing fiddle of Boyd Tinsley offer counterpoints. These songs, however, explode the template with gothic romance, horror, and yes, a few goofy odes to bliss.
As work began on the record, DMB were tasked with contributing a recording to Wes Craven’s meta-horror sequel Scream 2. Though the band owed its stardom to peppy, worldbeat and jazz-inflected acoustic rock, one entry from Matthews’ songbook made immediate sense for inclusion: “Halloween,” an uncharacteristically aggressive number about a jilted lover that originally appeared on the group’s 1994 pre-major label EP Recently. They got to work on an update, shaping the queasy, see-sawing composition into something more sinister. Matthews’ voice usually sounded friendly and jovial. Now he was howling, dripping menace and bile, part Tom Waits with a side of Vincent Price. The band began wondering if perhaps the song was too interesting to give away, so they reversed course, submitting “Help Myself,” an old reworked tune, instead.
“Halloween” is a testament to the darkness that lingered in the corners of the breezy music of the Dave Matthews Band from the very beginning. With Crowded Streets, that darkness moved to the fore, unavoidable even among supremely horny songs like “Stay (Wasting Time),” the knotty funk of “Rapunzel,” and the sleek and devotional “Crush,” where Lessard’s Mingus-inspired bassline and blocky jazz chords impart an air of smoky sophistication. “No need to bear the weight of your worries/Let them all fall away,” Matthews sings at the start of the record; then he and his collaborators spend the next hour documenting all manner of anxiety.
Though the DMB lineup was already vast, a wide cast of guests joined to fill all available space. Alongside jam band fellow traveler Béla Fleck on banjo, Alanis Morissette on backing vocals, and the Kronos Quartet, returning contributors included Chapman Stick player Greg Howard, pianist Butch Taylor, trumpeter John D’earth, and crucially, guitarist Tim Reynolds, whose frenetic guitar work nudges toward prog. Though Reynolds was essentially the band’s lead guitarist on their first two albums, Lillywhite had largely directed him away from the electric guitar. Now, he had more creative license: electric was the default, playing in the right speaker against Matthews’ acoustic in the left.
Lillywhite may have suggested DMB as a “non-rock” act, but the album’s unlikely first single, “Don’t Drink the Water,” embraces their rock bonafides. Like Pearl Jam’s “Given to Fly,” the song is an overt homage to Led Zeppelin. With Beauford and Lessard locked into a Bonham and John Paul Jones-inspired churn, Matthews explores the subject of colonialism based on his childhood in apartheid-era Johannesburg: “What’s this you say? You feel a right to remain? Then stay and I will bury you,” Matthews sings. The song drew on his South African roots but it also addresses the forced expulsion of Indigenous people in the United States. “Your land is gone and given to me,” Matthews sings, before Morissette joins him for a wailing conclusion, their entangled voices suggesting the cries of the damned far more than friendly whoops from the crowd at Red Rocks.
Matthews makes ample space for songs that subvert the grim qualities of the epics. On “Crush,” he evokes the specter of Marvin Gaye, sounding more than a little like Sting, and backed by Beauford’s dynamic harmonies. The song’s title was inspired by an in-joke about “Crash Into Me,” but it’s also a kind of reaction to the former song, maturing from youthful voyeurism into something more gentlemanly and charming. Speaking with GQ’s Alex Pappademas, Matthews said that unlike “Crash Into Me,” “Crush” communicates his devotional intent: “[W]hen I hear it now, I don’t go, Jeez, pal. Pull your pants up.” Following a fiery solo by Tinsley, the song settles into a luxurious jam that could extend indefinitely.
Twenty five years later, Before These Crowded Streets remains DMB’s most experimental album, a crossroads in the band’s history. Their followup, 2001’s Everyday, would pull back on the eclecticism in favor of pop cohesion. Not that overt darkness and challenging structures stopped Streets from debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, displacing the Titanic soundtrack. Certainly, it represented Matthews’ desire to dispense with the perception he was a mere “chugalug mirth-meister,” as David Browne put it in his 1998 Entertainment Weekly review, but it also showcased his desire to step forward and embrace his paradoxical multitudes.
The record’s penultimate song, the tragicomic “Pig,” synthesizes Matthews’ viewpoint. As Moore and Tinsley play woozy, elegant arcs with the easy feel that characterized the band’s earliest singles, Matthews adopts a gentler perspective: We have right now, and that’s enough. Like so many of the songs on Crowded Streets, this one concerns blood, but now it represents a life force, “alive deep and sweet within.” Here, Matthews carves out a peaceful space between the impermanence of life and the certainty of death. “From the dark side we can see a glow of something bright,” he sings, suggesting an interdependence between what we love and what we fear, the space between who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. Stumbling into unlit territory, the Dave Matthews Band found something gleaming deep in the shadows. | 2023-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-11-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy | November 4, 2023 | 7.6 | 84379b51-8f44-4657-a8c4-9f383ea67ae0 | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
The Antlers’ first full-length in three years confirms that they are operating in their own zone. It doubles down on their last record's somnambulant moodiness and increases the focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release. | The Antlers’ first full-length in three years confirms that they are operating in their own zone. It doubles down on their last record's somnambulant moodiness and increases the focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release. | The Antlers: Familiars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19453-the-antlers-familiars/ | Familiars | The Antlers have grown up in their own way: slowly. The project’s first full-band effort, 2009’s Hospice, followed two collections of roughshod solo material from lead vocalist Peter Silberman, records that sounded as if he were fumbling in the dark; Hospice, then, was light making its way into the room, a collection of indie rock that drew from the sounds you’re likely to find on an iPod owned by someone in their mid-20s—sparkling chamber-pop, angsty, emotive vocal surges, gaping shoegaze guitars. Two years later, they returned with Burst Apart, a transitional effort that found the Antlers getting weirder, incorporating the kind of saucer-eyed ambience familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Sigur Rós in a smoke-filled dorm room.
If Burst Apart was the sound of the Antlers dipping their toes into unfamiliar waters, on the following year’s mini-LP Undersea they took the plunge: notions of immediacy and concision were discarded, replaced by a slow-handed approach to space rock that valued detail over the type of explicit melodicism showcased in their earlier work. In opposition to the music that was being put forth, the shift on Undersea was startling, bold, and more than a little brave. By industry standards, the Antlers were growing—Undersea was their first release for Anti-, a significant step up in visibility from their previous label, NYC-based farm-team indie Frenchkiss—but as the lights were increasingly trained on them, the band managed to find their own darkened corner in the musical landscape. Hospice could sound like the work of a band that was very good at sounding like other bands; Undersea was the point at which the Antlers found themselves. Familiars, the Antlers’ first full-length in three years, confirms that they are operating in their own zone. They’ve doubled down on Undersea’s somnambulant moodiness and increased focus on atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release.
As with every Antlers record since Hospice, Familiars was self-produced, and the group’s collective ear for texture continues to take hold as its own expressive instrument. As ever, drama is in no short supply either. Silberman’s lyrical predilections, in particular, have long possessed an emotional scope that speaks to the honest naiveté associated with stumbling through your young adulthood: Hospice essentially compared love and loss to a children’s cancer ward, Burst Apart was all house fires and metaphors for sexual frustration, and Undersea explored the age-old concept of water-as-emotional metaphor. In an interview with Pitchfork, Silberman name-checked filmmaker Gaspar Nóe’s trippy opus Enter the Void, a movie that treats death as an orgasmic act of self-exploration, as one of a few inspirations for Familiars’ funeral-pyre slow-burn. “There are different ways to look at death,” he said, “and they don’t have to be depressing at all.”
In that same interview, Silberman claimed that the Antlers are frequently pegged as a “sad band,” and while no one will mistake the breathy ruminations of Familiars as “happy music,” the record’s instrumentation has a transcendent brightness, not unlike what you might see when closing your eyes after staring into the sun for too long. The spacious lope of “Intruders” is made up of muted guitar stabs and molasses-slow drum work, surrounded by heavy swirls of space and dotted with the occasional horn and keyboard flourish; “Surrender” rests itself on a gently descending guitar figure that, at the six-minute song’s midpoint, reaches upwards to impossible heights before dissolving in pedal-abused piano and horns soaked in warmth.
Whether they’re reaching above their heads or to the deepest depths, on Familiars the Antlers are even more concerned with catharsis, resulting in a string of patient, beatific crescendos. (The word “patient” is, at this stage of the Antlers’ career, operative: only two of Familiars’ 10 songs finish before reaching the five-minute mark.) The elegiac “Director” spends its first two minutes and change moving at the pace of a burning stick of incense, as Michael Lerner’s brushed cymbals create a suitable bed for drowsy guitar; then, the weight shifts in the form of rolling drums and just enough six-string fuzz, evoking the type of soft psychedelia that Spiritualized have occasionally turned to. Opener “Palace” is essentially five-and-a-half minutes of declarative melody that comes on strong and stays there before vanishing completely, while “Revisited” is the record’s torch song—but one without resolution, as Silberman repeatedly switches between anguished vocals and receding into the background, breaking into a elliptical guitar solo near the song’s end that floats above the fizzy electronics.
As a vocalist, Silberman’s never shied away from theatricality; on Hospice’s “Sylvia”, he seethed and cried to match that song’s bursting guitar burn of a chorus, and every successive release has seen him expanding his register to match the music’s at-times skyscraping qualities. On Familiars, Silberman cements himself as one of indie rock’s most compelling and distinctive singers. He’s capable of projecting a wide, complex range of emotions—angry and defeated on “Hotel”, cautiously hopeful on “Intruders”. On the straightforward saunter of “Parade”, he takes on the ruminative prognostication of someone looking at a yearbook and wondering if the future and past possess any connection at all.
Lyrically, Silberman’s very much in his therapist’s-couch lane on Familiars, with a few subtle shifts in his mindset that you’d expect anyone currently reaching the end of their late 20s to undergo. “Maybe when I’m older,” he optimistically states in the beginning of “Intruders”, “I’ll be clearer/ More attuned and understanding.” On “Refuge”, he morbidly turns his gaze to what life’s endgame means—”When you lift me out of me/ Will I know when I’ve changed?”—but despite that and other brief meditations on death-as-release, Familiars’ thematic focus is a bit more scattered than Silberman name-checking The Tibetan Book of the Dead would have you believe. This time around, the theme he returns to most is identity—who we see when we look in the mirror, what happens when we don’t recognize who’s staring back—and on “Intruders”’ emotional peak, he confronts the terrifying possibility of encountering a dopplegänger with what sounds like murderous intentions: “When my double scales the wall/ I’ll know exactly where he’s landing/ And I’ll surprise him.”
Indeed, even as Silberman’s stuck with his most literary affectations—full-sentence lyrical statements, a heavy reliance on symbolism—he and the Antlers have loosened in terms of pretense over the last five years, taking on more self-absorbed concerns as their music has grown more insular and drowsy. The 28-year-old Silberman was barely of drinking age when he released music under the Antlers guise in earnest, and in the eight years since he and his band have aged publicly, charting their own distinct course while making music about the small-scale challenges faced when you feel truly lost in the world. Against all odds, they’ve become one of the most interesting indie rock bands working, and the stately beauty of Familiars is the latest satisfying effort from a band that continues to reward those listeners who give them the attention their elegant, secretly weird music deserves. | 2014-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Anti- | June 18, 2014 | 7.8 | 843a1ed7-fa73-410a-8cef-ab527452c60a | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Wild Nothing's new EP is his most synth-heavy outing yet. It has the same relationship to its full-length predecessor as the Golden Haze EP did his debut: it’s noticeably bolder, sounds more expensive and crafted with live performance in mind. | Wild Nothing's new EP is his most synth-heavy outing yet. It has the same relationship to its full-length predecessor as the Golden Haze EP did his debut: it’s noticeably bolder, sounds more expensive and crafted with live performance in mind. | Wild Nothing: Empty Estate EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18106-wild-nothing-empty-estate-ep/ | Empty Estate EP | Wild Nothing’s two full-lengths have made it clear which artists Jack Tatum models his sound after. Judging from his EPs, he also hopes to emulate their careers. As with his much-cited indie and dream-pop influences-- Belle and Sebastian, My Bloody Valentine, to name a couple-- Tatum tailors his ambitions to the format. With an EP's expectations and stakes lowered, he builds on the previous full-length and takes some artistic risks to push his sound forward. His second EP, Empty Estate, has the same relationship to its full-length predecessor as the Golden Haze EP did his debut: it’s noticeably bolder, sounds more expensive and crafted with live performance in mind. But it’s also the first time Tatum’s music hasn't improved on what came before.
On Gemini and Golden Haze, Tatum's strengths lay in writing modest indie rock songs that stuck, as he found an exact point where familiarity didn’t cross over to derivation. Unlike most current bands in the dream-pop/shoegaze nebula, you sense that Tatum starts with melody and adds atmosphere as opposed to the other way around. With Nocturne, you could hear a concerted effort to be a little more immodest and little less indie on “The Blue Dress” and specifically “Paradise”. These songs weren’t dance music per se, but they had rhythms and fleshier arrangements that Tatum built knowing he’d have a full band at his disposal. Empty Estate continues this push towards extroversion. Where Wild Nothing songs were once centered firmly on guitar with synths filling out the margins, Empty Estate inverts the ratio, leaning toward glittery electro-pop.
Empty Estate tries to guide Wild Nothing towards a more physically charged sound, and it’s not always an easy transition. Tatum still has the same wispy vocals, and the Byrne/Bowie talk/sing approach on the verses of “A Dancing Shell” are as jarring as the typically moony chorus is soothing. Tatum will be the first to admit he doesn’t put too much stock in his lyrics and his chosen genres can tolerate plenty of nonsense. But it's a little hard to take when Tatum’s stonefaced sincerity doesn’t break on a line like, “I’ll be your monkey/ Every night/ If it makes you love me.”
There’s a chance Tatum could make a full adjustment by Wild Nothing’s third album-- he still hasn’t written a bum song. After Empty Estate, what he has done is composed a couple of bum instrumentals. You can’t just toss out “On Guyot” and “Hachiko” if you value Empty Estate as a full experience; credit where it’s due, the entire thing is carefully sequenced to play as a continuous, single serving. But Tatum’s arranging skills lag far behind his songwriting and the instrumentals lack any sort of textural contrast or field of depth. Still, the EP as a whole suggests that, regardless of the outcome, a gradually evolving songwriter like Tatum benefits from not waiting two years between releases. | 2013-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union / Captured Tracks | May 14, 2013 | 6.6 | 843cd364-f6af-4591-baa1-ed6db17e29fb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Air's wonderful debut is, perhaps oddly, re-packaged as a 10th-anniversary set with a disc of B-sides and Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing. | Air's wonderful debut is, perhaps oddly, re-packaged as a 10th-anniversary set with a disc of B-sides and Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing. | Air: Moon Safari - 10th Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11442-moon-safari-10th-anniversary-edition/ | Moon Safari - 10th Anniversary Edition | We all know what horrors illegal downloading has wrought on new releases; one side effect of that erosion involves labels attempting to recoup those losses by re-animating their back catalogues, Mary Shelley style. Before the big swoon, it was tough to justify a reissue without a remaster, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and so lately, we've seen an increasing spate of albums re-released for no other reason than a round-number anniversary. In the cases of your Thrillers and your Pet Sounds, that's a justifiable enough benchmark-- in a way, those reissues provide the platform to talk about us and how much we've changed as much as the music. Something like the new deluxe edition of Air's Moon Safari, though, is a slightly trickier proposition.
For starters: There's the niggling question of whether Air's debut, superb as it is, really merits canonical treatment. As a collection of songs, it's endured well enough over time; after a decade, it still holds up fine. But so have a ton of other similarly acclaimed and successful records from 1998, and it doesn't seem remotely appropriate to roll out the red carpet for those either. As far as modern connect points go, there's nothing really happening musically at the moment that makes Moon Safari suddenly worthy of re-examination. If anything, with its dainty sonics and polite arpeggios, a lot of this record runs counter to the discofied and Balearic dance that's currently in fashion. Even Air would quickly abandon the cultivated library music aesthetic that characterized this record in favor of spindlier, more complicated, more sinister material. So yeah: As a snapshot of a place in time, you could do a lot worse than Moon Safari. But as something to be canonized in a three-disc set? The physics are lost on me. What, aside from the poetry of the number 10, is the exact reason to celebrate it now?
Granted, it probably wasn't Air's idea to do this, and it's certainly not their fault that Moon Safari's legacy ultimately yielded a long list of bands along the lines of Lemon Jelly, Zero 7, Morcheeba, and Thievery Corporation, so perhaps it's fairer just to concentrate on what this reissue offers rather than the reason for it. The answer there, unfortunately, is: mixed returns. Although a robust collection featuring the original album, a disc of bonuses and B-sides, and a DVD featuring Mike Mills' 1999 tourfilm Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing, this reissue doesn't offer nearly enough in the way of substantive bonus material to warrant its existence, nor does it even select the right material from that era to re-package.
The bonus disc is the biggest indicator of the lack of quality control or thoughtfulness on hand: instead of material from the duo's excellent surrounding EPs, Le Soleil Est Près De Moi and the singles compilation Premiers Symptômes (a lot of which could actually benefit from having a light shone on it), we get five live tracks-- including a horrible, thrashy version of "Kelly Watch the Stars"-- which expose Air's live approach early on as light on musicianship and heavy on grating affectation and kitsch. Of the remaining demos and remixes, only the two-minute long, string-heavy take on "Remember" (itself a resurrected B-side) and a sparse demo of "You Make It Easy" (from when it was an instrumental called "Bossa 96") are remotely illuminating. Everything else just feels incidental and reheated.
Provided you like your filmmaking mannered and slightly cutesy, Mills' documentary remains a worthwhile curiosity, but even still, I can't imagine that anyone who'd be willing to shell out the money for a Moon Safari 10th Anniversary Edition wouldn't be acquainted with it already. Aside from that, you're basically paying for the packaging; in this case, that means a DVD-sized hardcover package with a nice, if slightly unnecessary, lyrics book attached. As a case for Moon Safari as a classic record, it falls a little short. But as a nice keepsake of a lovely record, it could be worse. I guess in the end it's really just a matter of whether you're fanatical enough about this album to buy it again. Virgin's either betting (or hoping) that enough of you are. | 2008-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks / Virgin | April 24, 2008 | 5.6 | 843edcbd-abc6-427f-9be9-a2c85fcab855 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
null | When I first heard Swedish psych outfit Dungen via the 2004 international breakthrough album *Ta Det Lugnt*, Gustav Ejstes' lyrics could've been as dopey as Neil Diamond's "Porcupine Pie" for all I knew. Turns out they weren't, really, but for someone who doesn't comprehend Swedish that's simply a safety net. The important thing was Ejstes' voice-- a rich, multitracked sharp/sweet melodic hum which could be non-contradictorily described as a "beautiful whine." Nobody else in rock sounds like him, and since he's clearly aware of the multilingual nature of his audience-- especially as a musician with an international rolodex of influences | Dungen: 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12231-4/ | 4 | When I first heard Swedish psych outfit Dungen via the 2004 international breakthrough album Ta Det Lugnt, Gustav Ejstes' lyrics could've been as dopey as Neil Diamond's "Porcupine Pie" for all I knew. Turns out they weren't, really, but for someone who doesn't comprehend Swedish that's simply a safety net. The important thing was Ejstes' voice-- a rich, multitracked sharp/sweet melodic hum which could be non-contradictorily described as a "beautiful whine." Nobody else in rock sounds like him, and since he's clearly aware of the multilingual nature of his audience-- especially as a musician with an international rolodex of influences and interests himself-- he puts a strong focus on the purely musical aspect of his voice. Understand Swedish, and you get the full meaning; if you don't, you still get caught up in the striking way he draws out all those unfamiliar syllables.
Yet that voice had become familiar by 2007's Tio Bitar-- enough that it was easier to catch your breath and cast a slightly more jaded ear towards the formula churning away: bucolic Scandinavian folk, fuzzed-out psych, a bit of bop-jazz elasticity, lots of Keith Moon-ish drum fills, and ringing piano chords. Even then, going from sounding revelatory to sounding reliable isn't exactly falling off, and the music still made it hard to believe that it was put together largely by Ejstes alone in a multi-instrumentalist, producer-assembled capacity informed as much by Pete Rock as Pete Townshend.
4 follows Tio Bitar, and while it's clear Ejstes has grown comfortable without getting complacent, he's managed to shake things up for the better this time around. Most notably, there's been a subtle shift to the group's dynamic-- and it is a group this time around. As much as Ejstes' one-man operation's been played up, there's a greater role for other musicians on 4, as Gustav opts to focus primarily on vocals and piano; Reine Fiske reprises his Tio Bitar role providing most of the lead guitar spark, Johan Holmegard takes over behind the drum kit, and touring-band member Mattias Gustavsson holds bass duties. 4 shows this permutation of Dungen to maintain the kind of tautness previous albums have thrived on, the end result of a touring unit assembled and honed to ideally recreate the careful constructions of a stylistically restless auteur in a live setting.
The resulting lineup has come up with a tighter, more focused, and more compact record than Tio Bitar (10 songs, 38 minutes, no songs over five minutes) that still finds a way to touch on all of Dungen's sonic tendencies in lively, unpredictable fashion. Moments of mournfully wailing acid-rock beauty (the violin-tinged opener "Sätt Att Se") give way to gentler strains of classically influenced pop ("Målerås Finest"). The loose-fingered, high-speed freakout of "Samtidigt 1" is joined in progress right after the fluttering pastoralism of "Det Tar Tid"; its partner "Samtidigt 2"-- culled from the same full-band jam session-- soars into some kind of Deadhead exosphere only to dissipate into the soft piano/chime/flute melodies of "Bandhagen" (and its not-so-soft drumbeat-- like every other Dungen record, 4 is a percussive monster). And sometimes the contrasts build over the course of a single song, like when the jaunty Zombies/Kinks march-beat of "Finns Det Någon Möjlighet" eventually shifts from lighthearted, piano-driven frolic to a feedback-drenched trudge through creeping dread.
And since the music has a renewed surprise to it, that voice does, too. Even though 4 has a greater emphasis on instrumental compositions that don't suffer much from the absence of Ejstes' vocals, it's a bit of a disappointment that they only show up in half the songs. Especially considering that they're a fine melodic accompaniment to just about anything the musicians are capable of-- crooning Byrds-inflected self-harmonies over the minimalist Motown groove of "Ingenting År Sig Likt", for instance, or keening through the Turkish-influenced stomp of "Mina Damer Och Fasaner". But even if that voice's an incredible instrument, it's just one piece of what's become an intricate structure. | 2008-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-09-29T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Subliminal Sounds | September 29, 2008 | 7.8 | 844011bd-62ed-4e96-ae7c-4d1728fe4b9f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | 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 a crucial jazz record from 1961, led by a lyrical trumpeter and composer who captured the many overlapping currents of the genre. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a crucial jazz record from 1961, led by a lyrical trumpeter and composer who captured the many overlapping currents of the genre. | Booker Little: Out Front | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/booker-little-out-front/ | Out Front | At the dawn of the ’60s, jazz was in the midst of a growth spurt that doubled as a culture war. Ever since Ornette Coleman’s 1959 debut at New York’s Five Spot—a gig that’s often viewed as the official unveiling of free jazz—critics and artists had been fretting over the future of the genre like parents of a wayward teen. Much like when bebop swept the scene in the mid-’40s, the prevailing sentiment was that you had to pick a side. Were you a defender of the jazz faith, or a champion of its latest modernist turn?
At least one thoughtful young musician, trumpeter Booker Little, wasn’t buying the binary. As he put it in a 1961 interview, if jazz were mapped on a political spectrum, he’d fall somewhere in the center. “My background has been conventional,” the conservatory-trained 23-year-old told the writer Robert Levin, “and maybe because of that I haven’t become a leftist, though my ideas and tastes now might run left to a certain degree.” He went on to defend Coleman (“…I think I understand clearly what he’s doing, and it’s good”) before touching on one of his core aesthetic tenets. For Little, dissecting an artist’s methods without considering the feelings that informed them made no sense. “I can’t think in terms of wrong notes,” he said. “Because if you insist that this note or that note is wrong, I think you’re thinking completely conventionally—technically—and forgetting about emotion.”
These beliefs were crystallizing at a critical time for the trumpeter. Tragically, he wouldn’t live to see 24—in October 1961, he died from uremia, essentially blood poisoning due to kidney failure. But before his death, he would back up his statements with an album that made the post-Ornette jazz wars seem petty and myopic. Out Front, his third LP as a leader, recorded in two sessions in the spring of ’61, didn’t feel remotely like free jazz. But it crackled with a Coleman-esque charge thanks to the saxophone work of Eric Dolphy, who in 1960 had recorded alongside Ornette on the album that would become the flagship of that movement, and would soon take part in John Coltrane’s most adventurous work to date. Nor did it fit in with the hard-bop sound that defined the jazz mainstream at the time, where fellow rising trumpet stars Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan (both born, like Little, in 1938) each found a comfortable home. Yet at moments it swung as hard as a typical contemporary Blue Note recording.
It didn’t exemplify any other trending jazz topics of the time, either: spacious modal jazz à la Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue; the classical-fusion movement known as Third Stream; Dave Brubeck’s rhythmic experimentation as heard on Time Out. But Out Front’s sound—marked by elaborate arrangements featuring piquant harmonies and ever-shifting time signatures, occasionally broken up by moments of startling minimalism—felt just as fresh as any of those developments.
Out Front was simply Booker Little music. And if the goal was to bring a composer’s touch to jazz while keeping emotional expression at the forefront, few statements in the genre—and even fewer outside the catalogs of, say, Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus, both of whom the trumpeter cited as key inspirations—can rival it. (Candid, the label that originally released Out Front, will reissue it in a remastered vinyl edition later this month.) What Ellington realized with a big band or Mingus a midsize ensemble, Little achieved with a sextet. “Moods in Free Time,” maybe Out Front’s quintessential track, shows just how much he could accomplish in that format, summing up the Booker Little soundworld in just under six minutes. It starts out feeling orchestral, with Little leading his band—including Dolphy; Max Roach, the pioneering bebop drummer and Little’s first major employer; trombonist Julian Priester; pianist Don Friedman; and, on this track, future bass legend Ron Carter—through a tightly plotted overture. The horns trace distinct but interlocking paths through a complex multi-part theme that cycles through various rhythms—including a prominent section in 5/4, a favorite meter of Little’s that shows up all over Out Front. As crisp and driving as the arrangement sounds, the harmonies have a slightly sour, mournful quality, reflecting Little’s love of the tastefully outré. (“In my own work I’m particularly interested in the possibilities of dissonance,” he told Levin. “The more dissonance, the bigger the sound.”)
In a typical jazz tune of the time, following this “head,” you’d expect a series of solos on the same form. But right around the one-minute mark, the piece downshifts into a dirge, with the horns sobbing out a painfully slow background pulse as Little improvises aptly yearning lines, maintaining his trademark tone—rounded and gorgeously pillowy—even as he cranes for piercing high notes. Roach, a master of vigorous swing, sets aside a timekeeping role entirely and draws on his classical percussion background to conjure eerie whooshing-wind sounds from a set of timpani drums. When Dolphy enters on alto sax, the vibe changes from somber to downright harrowing. Ushered in by dramatic mallet strikes from Roach, he plays a shuddering, eruptive phrase, setting up what feels less like a jazz solo than some kind of sonic Butoh, where long, jagged swoops and wobbling squawks collide with bluesy punctuations. Once Dolphy finishes, Roach switches back to the kit for a brief, sharply etched solo that reestablishes the feel of the intro, and the band comes in for a reprise of the initial theme. Taken as a whole, “Moods” is bizarre yet breathtaking—a through-composed musical manifesto that perfectly balances compositional intrigue with an outpouring of visceral feeling.
How is it that Little had already staked out such rich aesthetic terrain at such a young age? His early background offers some clues. Little’s mother and father both played music in church; his sister, Vera, sang opera and enjoyed a long, distinguished career in Europe. In 1959, she sang Bach at the Vatican, becoming the first-ever Black singer to perform for a pope. Little started playing trumpet while attending Memphis’ Manassas High, where he formed close bonds with future jazz greats like pianist Harold Mabern and saxophonist George Coleman. In his autobiography, Miles Davis made reference to “the great young trumpet player Booker Little,” and wrote of this Manassas cohort, “I wonder what they were doing down there when all them guys came through that one school?”
Little went on to study composition, theory, and orchestration at the Chicago Conservatory. While there, he met rising saxophone star Sonny Rollins, who stressed to Little the importance of finding one’s own sound, and also facilitated his first high-profile gig by introducing him to Roach. In 1958, the drummer—who’d previously worked with another young trumpet star, Clifford Brown, before Brown’s death in a 1956 car accident—hired Little for his working band, which also included the trumpeter’s old Memphis pal George Coleman. Little quickly established himself as a star soloist with Roach, but his writing made an equally strong impression. On pieces like “Larry-Larue” and “Gandolfo’s Bounce,” Little compositions that showed up on Roach’s albums during his tenure in his band, you can already hear him using a jazz quintet with three horns as a mini orchestra. Little’s own debut album, 1958’s Booker Little 4 and Max Roach, featured just two horns—his trumpet and George Coleman’s tenor—but achieved a similar effect.
The next couple years were a flurry of activity for Little. He made a powerful and assured quartet album under his own name; recorded more sessions with Roach, including the groundbreaking civil-rights-movement–inspired We Insist! and an all-star date held in protest of the Newport Jazz Festival, which featured a brilliant Little original; and tracked his first date with Eric Dolphy. Things ramped up majorly in 1961: In February, he re-teamed with Roach, We Insist! producer Nat Hentoff and the Candid label on singer Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead. The album features two pieces arranged by Little, including “In the Red,” a chilling evocation of, as he puts it to Hentoff in the liner notes, “that awful suspense you’re always in when you’re broke.” With its crawling tempo and tense harmonies, it plays like a prelude to Out Front—the clearest statement yet of Little’s expressionistic vision.
But Out Front, recorded in March and April of ’61 and also produced by Hentoff, was where everything clicked into place—the first album-length immersion into the trumpeter-composer’s heart and mind. In line with "Moods in Free Time," the full LP has an uncommon gravitas. On “Strength and Sanity,” one of several downtempo pieces on the album, Don Friedman’s romantic piano intro and Roach’s whispery brushed cymbals set the table for a classic jazz ballad, but the composition refuses to settle down. After two minutes of gently unspooling melody, the rhythm section drops out and the horns play a kind of wounded fanfare, where Dolphy’s alto and Priester’s trombone frame Little’s trumpet in deep ochre tones. Little goes on to play a lovely extended solo with soaring peaks, but the heaviness of the arrangement—its sense of being suspended in a persistent existential ache—never subsides.
“Man of Words,” dedicated to Hentoff and paying tribute to his profession, is another pensive masterpiece. Played without drums and featuring Ron Carter on bowed bass and Dolphy on bass clarinet, it employs an incredibly simple arrangement to awesomely intense effect. The entire piece, just short of five minutes, consists of a droning, descending melody, repeated over and over, with roomy pauses in between. Little is the only soloist, and his phrases are both precision-sculpted and filled with pathos. He builds steadily from slow arcs and pirouettes to an arresting climax: Right around the 3:40 mark, he plays three pulsing, almost gasping high notes. The last one, which rings out while the rest of the band is silent, feels like some kind of sonar ping into the abyss.
There’s also optimism on the record, as on hard-swinging opener “We Speak,” where Little’s bold, proudly ornate writing feels more anthemic than reflective, and “Quiet Please,” which repeatedly zig-zags between slow and fast, portraying the struggle of a parent trying to keep a rambunctious child quiet. (“He’ll obey for a few moments, but he’s quickly active and roaring again,” Little, already a young father by then, told Hentoff in the liner notes.) The accelerating structure of the piece inspires thrilling quicksilver alto runs from Dolphy.
Out Front possesses a rare kind of self-assurance, a staunch commitment to an unusual vision that demands full engagement from both the players and the listener. Around the time Little recorded these pieces, as Coleman, Dolphy, and others were spearheading the emerging jazz avant-garde, his peers Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard were releasing albums packed with catchy, swinging tunes that presented them as star soloist-bandleaders. Out Front features plenty of virtuosic playing, but its fireworks are secondary to its shifting moods and sonic curveballs. The album feels more like a suite tailored for a concert hall than a set that would translate well to a nightclub.
But Little wasn’t having any second thoughts; he knew he’d found his direction, and that Out Front was a breakthrough. “I don’t think there’s very much of my work prior to these Candid albums that expresses how I feel now about what I want to do,” he told Levin after recording the LP. He had lots of ideas about upcoming projects, including a possible multimedia work involving visual art and an album that featured tenor-sax giant Coleman Hawkins in what Little termed “a modern setting.”
Meanwhile, right after the album’s second session, he got back to work. In May and June of 1961, he recorded with John Coltrane on what would become Africa/Brass, the first album of the saxophonist’s legendary Impulse! Records run. In July, he and Dolphy spent two weeks co-leading a band at East Village club the Five Spot; one full night was recorded, yielding an electrifying pair of live albums. In August he made his last recordings with Max Roach, which would end up on the drummer’s Percussion Bitter Sweet, an album filled with rich arrangements that seem to point back to the orchestral feel of Out Front. And either that month or in September—the precise date is fuzzy—he made one final album under his own name: Booker Little and Friend, later reissued as Victory and Sorrow, the title of the opening piece.
That fall, apparently just days before his death, Booker Little visited the office of Down Beat magazine and gave an interview. Only one quote was ever published, but that brief statement was enough to capture how much determination he still had in him, and how certain he was about his creative direction—that unique weave of improvisational pathos and compositional sophistication that came to full flower on his recordings that year. “Writing is a special thing with me,” he said. “I want to play, but I am very interested in writing because I hear so many things for others. I’ll develop, I need to, and I’ll do it in my own way. I’ll always be me in the important part that’s me. The other part, the part people buy, that’s different. I’ll still always be me, even there. You can’t sacrifice integrity and still be you.“
In his liner notes to Out Front, Nat Hentoff pointed out a slight paradox in the album’s title. “In Out Front, Booker Little is actually not at all ‘far out’ in the usual sense of that term,” he wrote. “He is, on the contrary, a strongly self-disciplined creator of forms that follow his own inner feelings.” It’s a smart read: As both his music and his words show, Little wasn’t necessarily aiming to revolutionize jazz in the way that Ornette Coleman already had or John Coltrane soon would. Maybe for that reason, coupled with the fact of his untimely death, Little’s influence has been limited—though in the six decades since his death, other trumpet luminaries have made a point of keeping his legacy alive. Freddie Hubbard included a lovely ballad dedicated to his peer and friend on Hub-Tones, recorded almost exactly a year after Little’s passing; Dave Douglas, Kenny Wheeler, and Nicholas Payton each composed tributes to Little in the ’90s and early 2000s; and in 2017, new-school star Jaimie Branch singled out Little as “by far my favorite trumpet player.”
Booker Little wasn’t a rule-conscious conservative, nor an iconoclastic “leftist,” but some artful weave of the two, intent on using music to explore his own distinct blend of beauty and anguish, victory and sorrow. Thankfully, before he left us, he found the courage to look beyond all the furor over right and wrong notes, zeroing in instead on the ones that simply felt the most true. | 2022-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Candid | August 7, 2022 | 9.3 | 844f312a-4e46-480a-a4f2-316b343a8e13 | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | |
Drawing from footwork, jungle, acid, and more, the UK producer lets his breakneck tempos lead him to some of his funkiest, most kinetic—and oddly beautiful—work to date. | Drawing from footwork, jungle, acid, and more, the UK producer lets his breakneck tempos lead him to some of his funkiest, most kinetic—and oddly beautiful—work to date. | Itoa: Oh No EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/itoa-oh-no-ep/ | Oh No EP | Between hyperpop’s entry into the mainstream, Gen Z’s embrace of drum’n’bass, and the international success of regional genres like footwork and singeli, warp-speed electronic music is everywhere, leading the charge as popular music, broadly speaking, picks up the pace. In his work as Itoa, the British producer Alex Godoy has staked his claim in dance music’s fast lane, regularly clocking 160-plus BPMs without ever stalling out on straightforward genre imitation. His music draws deeply and liberally from rapid-fire strains of house and techno—classic acid, footwork, bassline, and jungle—which he manipulates into wildly danceable assemblages. At its best, an Itoa song is packed with intricately moving parts that, taken altogether, coalesce into a sound that’s rubbery and relentless. On his latest EP, Oh No, Godoy presents some of his most kinetic, funky, and oddly beautiful work to date, refining his sound while also unlocking promising new skills.
Opener “Wet Brain” kicks things off on a slightly anxious note, building from a timid hi-hat and woodblock rattle before escalating into a footwork-fueled trance banger, complete with chirping synths and choppy vocal science. What’s most remarkable is how seamlessly Godoy segues from pounding dance music into unexpected pockets of beatless ambience and back again. His talent for wrongfooting the listener with both beauty and brutality extends to “Girlboss Microplastix,” which lurches forward with a broken drum break before the floor falls out and lands in a pocket of ominous calm, a respite before the violence of the drums resumes with a vengeance.
Godoy’s color palette brightens considerably toward the middle of the EP, at which point things get wildly fun. The title track, a collaboration with Japanese performer なかむらみなみ (Nakamura Minami), pits her staccato, shit-talking flow against an alternately throbbing and squelchy bassline that wouldn’t be out of place on a SOPHIE record. Unlike other vocalists who perform over footwork—like Jessy Lanza, who floats dreamily above the mix, or DJ Taye, who races at light speed against the clock—the rapper’s hop-scotching vocals fasten perfectly into the beat’s pocket, her every syllable building out the song’s kinetic rhythm and unlocking the latent mischief and swagger of Itoa’s production.
But the euphoric highpoint is the massive “Catch Eyes,” which weaves a grinding TB-303 bassline into a quick-stepping syncopated rhythm; then, just as everything’s running smoothly, Godoy detonates the song’s groove with an explosion of racing pinwheel synths and babbling, fragmented vocals. For an artist so skilled at producing utilitarian, floor-filling dance music, Godoy clearly delights in proving just how far he can tilt a track off its axis without ever losing the flow.
The momentum that Itoa achieves and sustains throughout the EP is remarkable—and close listening reveals just how energizing and effortless even the most meticulous elements of his production can be. Despite the relentless tempos and complex detailing, Oh No never feels exhausting or top-heavy. Its power derives from the collision of two opposing forces: the density of Godoy’s ideas and the dynamism of his light touch. | 2023-01-18T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-18T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Exit | January 18, 2023 | 7.4 | 8450e0f2-f7b5-48a5-a925-cb072acb6756 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Serving up his customary collage of UK garage rhythms, forlorn vocals, sugary trance synths, and copious vinyl hiss, Burial is at his most emo on a new split EP. | Serving up his customary collage of UK garage rhythms, forlorn vocals, sugary trance synths, and copious vinyl hiss, Burial is at his most emo on a new split EP. | Burial / Blackdown: Shock Power of Love EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burial-blackdown-shock-power-of-love-ep/ | Shock Power of Love EP | For the first eight years of his recording career, you knew where you were with Burial, and it felt like a predictably desolate place to be. This—as the actually pretty accurate cliché went—was music for London night buses and soggy spliffs, music that buried its emotion under layers of needle hiss, with song titles like “U Hurt Me” and “Broken Home” as evidence of the sensitive soul hidden in the gloom. This perception shifted with 2013’s stunning Rival Dealer EP, which was shot through with dialogue about love and the power of self-acceptance. Stepping out from behind the curtain, Burial shared a message with the BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs in which he called the EP’s songs “anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves,” a shockingly unambiguous message from a producer who had always come swathed in mystery.
Shock Power of Love, a joint release with London producer (and former Pitchfork contributor) Blackdown, continues in this emotionally explicit line. Standout track “Dark Gethsemane” is a showcase for Burial the softie, a song that radiates emotional sincerity with a side order of wonder. The opening five minutes are fairly standard Burial, with a mangled yet still elegant vocal floating over a lurching UK garage beat and pointillist synth riff. The second half of the song, however, makes a radical about-face, as the UKG propulsion of the first five minutes dissolves into a kind of ambient gospel. A sonorous vocal sample tells us, “We must shock this nation/With the power of love,” over a submerged “Billie Jean” beat, handclaps, and gorgeously nebulous orchestral chords that bring to mind “Touch,” the lovelorn tearjerker that soundtracked Daft Punk’s farewell video. Consciously or not, “Dark Gethsemane”’s closing section feels like a grab for the French duo’s crown as kings of heart-tremblingly sincere electronic music.
Burial releases inevitably provoke furious online debate, and—sure enough—early reactions have been decidedly mixed, with some commentators convinced that the revered London artist has lost his touch. But it’s easy to imagine that Burial has entirely stopped giving a toss what other people think (if he ever did at all), given his other contribution to the split EP. “Space Cadet” rides a featherweight pop-trance beat, bouncing bass pulse, and the kind of circular synth riff you might find in a well-intentioned children’s cartoon, its sugary rush only partly offset by Burial’s habitual palette of vinyl crackle and soused vocal samples. The song has some beautiful moments—notably the choral rush of “Take me higher,” about halfway in—but the overall feel is too meager to really convince. The song ends with two minutes of rinky-dink dance pop that could have come straight from a second-generation Mario Bros. game.
The flimsiness of “Space Cadet” makes it an oddity in the Burial catalogue, a weakling shadow to the emotional outpouring of “Dark Gethsemane.” But at least you can see the sentimental throughline connecting the two tracks. The relationship of these songs to Blackdown’s two productions on the EP—“This Journey VIP,” a brooding take on a song originally released on Dusk and Blackdown’s 2020 album RollageLive vol 1: Nightfall, and Blackdown’s twinkling remix of Heatmap’s “Arklight”—is far less obvious.
Blackdown and Burial clearly have history—Burial remixed Blackdown’s “Crackle Blues” in 2006 and released “Temple Sleeper” on Blackdown’s Keysound label in 2015—and Blackdown’s bassy post-dubstep productions come from roughly the same place as Burial’s own work. But there’s little on these two tracks—beyond, perhaps, the enigmatic presence of muted vocal samples, which you could imagine Burial making far better use of—that suggests they simply had to be on this release. Blackdown’s two tracks are enjoyable; Burial’s, even when they stumble, are remarkable, a tribute to his expansive artistic vision over Blackdown’s rather more workaday productions.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Keysound | May 12, 2021 | 7.2 | 8463b485-8770-48bb-9d3d-d0764c78f0a3 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper showcases her newly refined confidence, taking a step toward the pop powerhouse she's capable of becoming. | The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper showcases her newly refined confidence, taking a step toward the pop powerhouse she's capable of becoming. | Ashnikko: Demidevil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashnikko-demidevil/ | Demidevil | The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper Ashnikko commands fantasy and chaos with ease. She dresses as an eyeball-studded character for a performance of TikTok hit “Daisy” with just as much nonchalance as she posts photos of empty dildo containers stuffed with beans on Instagram. But Ashnikko’s unselfconscious brazenness is a newer phenomenon in her young career. Her earlier releases, while still defiant and bawdy, felt constrained by uncertain line delivery and sometimes-clunky production. She told Vulture that listening to her first EP Sass Pancakes made her want to cry, saying that only recently has she started to feel “like a songwriter.” Ashnikko’s latest mixtape, Demidevil, is a showcase for her newly refined confidence, a step towards the pop powerhouse she’s capable of becoming.
Like a lot of her fellow weird pop girls (think Princess Nokia and Slayyyter, with the former featured on this album), Ashnikko enthusiastically embraces the hallmarks of 2000s radio. You can hear it in the keyboard melody in “Slumber Party,” which honks with horny Pussycat Dolls insistence, or the track “L8r Boi,” which is a staunchly anti-skater boy rewrite of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi.”
But Demidevil is by no means limited to ’00s inspiration. “Toxic” and “Daisy” both dabble in bratty trap, while the Grimes-featuring “Cry” toys with nu-metal. Some genre experiments are less successful: “L8r Boi” is boringly faithful to its source material while the theatrical “Clitoris! The Musical” is as unsatisfyingly repetitive as the song’s clueless sexual antagonist. The lyrics on these experimental tracks are noticeably less artful, too. At one point on “Clitoris!” Ashnikko wonders “Why is my orgasm censored on the TV /While cis boys get to ejaculate freely?” A valid question, but it becomes less serious in the context of a jokey theater spoof.
Something that is thankfully consistent through all of Demidevil is Ashnikko’s humor and subversive personality. She tells untrustworthy boys “you can keep the image of my butt as a souvenir,” and admires someone else’s girlfriend for her “hentai boobies,” already having given her “cunnilingus on the couch.” In a world where “WAP” brought a tragic amount of men to the realization that they’re bad at sex, Ashnikko’s shameless odes to boobs, butts, and pussy, which she declares to be her religion on “Drunk With My Friends,” help challenge the expectations for what women can and can’t talk about. For most of music history, women pop stars have been expected to be perfect encapsulations of heterosexual sex, sultry when asked to be and angelic when not. Weird girl artists like Ashnikko crush that perfection under lucite heels, covered in your boyfriend’s blood.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner | January 21, 2021 | 6.9 | 8464b5cb-cd5f-4672-9011-b1041e41cb39 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
With a voice that evokes Nina Simone’s, the 24-year-old Atlanta soul singer uses her debut album to explore post-breakup intimacies of pain and desire. | With a voice that evokes Nina Simone’s, the 24-year-old Atlanta soul singer uses her debut album to explore post-breakup intimacies of pain and desire. | Baby Rose: To Myself | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baby-rose-to-myself/ | To Myself | Since the days of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, rejecting domesticity has been part of the blues lady agenda. In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis wrote that leading blueswomen “challenged the notion that women’s ‘place’ was in the domestic sphere” by making very few allusions to marriage, domesticity, or motherhood. Instead, counter to social expectations for women then and even now, they presented themselves as independent.
Atlanta soul singer Baby Rose, whose cavernous voice evokes that of Nina Simone, references domesticity just once on her debut album, To Myself. The mention arrives early on opening track “Sold Out,” when she sings of a past lover with whom she’d considered settling down. “When we was together/I was like spouse/Right beside you/Playing house,” she sings in a velvety, bittersweet contralto, recalling the relationship before it turned “upside down.” Unlike her foremothers, Baby Rose doesn’t hesitate to admit that she once bought into the domestic fantasy. But throughout To Myself, her voice bears the emotional weight and range of the blues, exploring post-breakup intimacies of pain and desire as she works to shatter the glowing facade of her previous life.
For much of the album, Baby Rose wrestles with her polarized feelings towards her ex. On the yearning ballad “Borderline,” she dramatizes her indecisiveness about whether to go back to her man or leave him for good. Though it’s a well-worn metaphor, already used by Madonna and the Black Eyed Peas, Rose’s masterful and commanding voice paints shades of nuance, pooling and pouring out her vowels like thick molasses. Other songs encode more subtle emotional tensions: The Daniel Caesar-esque “Mortal,” which compares her ex-lover’s magnetism to a strong undertow, squares up against the vengeful blues ballad “Ragrets,” where Rose’s brooding mind can only remember him as an evil heartbreaker full of “poison.”
To Myself’s richness lies in how the intricate, multi-layered production accentuates her warm and expressive voice. The hook of “Pressure” is five words long (“Pressure/Keeps holding me back”), but like Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, Baby Rose can extrapolate mournful meaning from just a few syllables, her voice hesitant and stumbling as she reaches the end of the phrase. A fidgety electric guitar and a drum backbeat that seems to stop and reverse every couple of bars only contribute to the feeling of uncertainty.
On the album’s centerpiece “All to Myself,” Rose is paired with just sparse piano and organ as she recalls the feeling of being alone at 3 a.m., debating whether to drunkenly call her ex. To record the song, she downed mimosas and tequila in the studio, a method-acting approach that results in a moving and raw performance suffused with moans and labored breaths. Even small noises, like her whine at the end of the word “complicated,” become little universes of desperation and sorrow.
“I had all bets in being a housewife with this guy and not even thinking about music as my first go to, even though I knew this was my purpose,” Rose told Pigeons & Planes, hinting at how the expectations of domesticity can sidetrack women’s careers. The conflict at the heart of To Myself is not just about one choosing to leave one person, but about making the decision to change your trajectory, to rewrite part of your identity. Like the blueswomen before her, Baby Rose forges her own path. | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Human Re Sources | August 29, 2019 | 7.5 | 8466667a-7fe9-415e-bb73-46f5c5610b06 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
San Fran baroque-pop group takes a nice step forward on its sophomore album, thanks in part to pristine production from Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor. | San Fran baroque-pop group takes a nice step forward on its sophomore album, thanks in part to pristine production from Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor. | The Morning Benders: Big Echo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13965-big-echo/ | Big Echo | Album titles can often sum up the albums themselves. Case in point: the Morning Benders' 2008 debut, Talking Through Tin Cans, a collection of boilerplate indie rock that borrowed more than a bit from the Shins' jangle pop. Despite a few bright spots, the record branded the San Franciscan outfit with a second-tier reputation. Add that to the fact that the Shins aren't groundbreakers themselves, and Talking Through Tin Cans begins to sound as limited as the rudimentary children's activity suggested in its title.
The title to the Benders' sophomore effort and Rough Trade debut, Big Echo, appropriately evokes their sonic shift in the past two years. The album is a homecoming of sorts, as it finds the Morning Benders correcting their PacNW indie pop identity crisis in favor of a more coastal, kaleidoscopic California haze. It also finds them embracing the cavernous experimental rock sound of Grizzly Bear, whose Chris Taylor shares a co-production credit with Benders singer/guitarist Christopher Chu.
Big Echo kicks off with "Excuses", a sunny, lilting little ditty that carries simultaneous debts to 1950s pop balladry and Sgt. Pepper's-inspired orchestral mania. The song is an easygoing and excellent introduction to the Benders' stylistic changes, and its charming melody serves as an adequate explanation as to how these guys got so many San Franciscan music notables into one room to perform the tune for videographers Yours Truly.
The trio that follow "Excuses" round out Big Echo's more accessible front-end and come closest to the Benders' previous, less complicated sound. Even then, the band finds ways to add touches of weirdness to each track. "Promises" may be just another song about an uncertain relationship, but the song's big-beat thump and tangled voices add something sticky to the bittersweet presentation. The simple shuffle of "Wet Cement" is augmented by scale-sliding background vocals, while the economical "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)" features glockenspiel to accentuate its ramshackle charm.
Big Echo's second half is slightly slower and swampier than its first; it's also where the band's newfound Grizzly Bear influence comes through clearest, from the jagged guitars that crack open "Hand Me Downs" to the breathy, multi-part swooning of "Pleasure Sighs" and "Stitches". Taylor's studio presence is all over Big Echo, from the warped music-hall strings of "Excuses" to the hymn-like, soft-focus vocals on album closer "Sleeping In". This cavernous production gives Big Echo another titular double-meaning, lending gravitas and providing guitarists Christopher and Jonathan Chu room to stretch amidst the wooly arrangements.
Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love. Many bands spend entire careers trying (and failing) to even nail down the one thing they're good at. The Morning Benders have already found a handful. Here's hoping they continue down the path illustrated on Big Echo's gorgeous oil-painted album cover: into the unsure seas, and away from the relative safety of stable terrain. | 2010-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | March 17, 2010 | 8.2 | 84693f3a-3f78-4bc4-bebe-0e1e3014708b | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The eclectic comp from the Rome-based collective Crudo Volta is a solid primer for those new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic. | The eclectic comp from the Rome-based collective Crudo Volta is a solid primer for those new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic. | Various Artists: Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes From the Spirit of Young Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-taxi-sampler-01-rhythms-and-vibes-from-the-spirit-of-young-africa/ | Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes From the Spirit of Young Africa | When in Rome, the young visual collective Crudo Volta dreams of Lagos, Cotonou, and Maputo. The name Crudo Volta translates from the Italian as “a time for rawness”—something jagged and pure. Its members make high-energy, high-gloss documentary films that bridge Africa and the African diaspora. But despite its flagship medium, Crudo Volta is, at its core, all about sound.
In 2016, the group made Woza Taxi, a short movie about gqom, a nocturnal house genre birthed in Durban, South Africa. Next came Yenkyi Taxi, which followed Brendan “Hagan” Opoku-Ware, a London-based producer, through Accra, Ghana, where his family is originally from. And earlier this year, Crudo Volta debuted “Taxi Waves,” an Italian streaming series on youth music scenes in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Now, the collective has spun off a record label that draws on its sonic archive and transnational ties.
That label, Python Syndicate, is a two-man joint, run by Mike Calandra Achode, a Beninese-Italian graphic designer and founding member of Crudo Volta, and Nan Kolè, a DJ and gqom evangelist. Their first release is Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes from the Spirit of Young Africa, a two-LP set featuring “the sonic and cultural landscape” of the continent’s contemporary underground, replete with a 26-page photo booklet.
The album is a musical skinny dip into a warm lagoon—which is to say, no previous experience with African club music necessary. Achode and Kolè have chosen a mix of previously unreleased tracks and tunes familiar to Afrophilic cosmopolitan DJs—by artists including Young John, Hagan, Gafacci, Sess the Problem, Ellputo, and TLC FAM. Many of the songs are fun and danceable; others hit a hypnotic groove and get stuck, looping into boredom.
Every few tracks on the LP version, there’s also a short “skit”—an interview with a music-maker—reminiscent of both ethnographic field recordings and the palate-cleansing entr’actes on rap and R&B albums. In one, Ghanaian producer Gafacci recalls his father telling him, “Hey, you have to have African elements in your songs.” (This interview appears in Yenkyi Taxi.) Another skit proceeds in an unidentified language, conveying an impression of unmediated foreignness. In their signaling of authenticity, these snippets can feel heavy-handed, but it’s nice to put a lilting voice and laugh to a name.
The strongest tracks on Taxi Sampler 01 come from two better-known artists, Rvdical the Kid and Ethiopian Records. In “Tigist,” the Addis Ababa-born Ethiopian Records opens with dueling synth swirls and a heaving drone, then builds with organic complements: palmed drums and a reedy flute. Rvdical the Kid, a DJ and producer who splits his time between the U.S. and West Africa, blends soul and funk vocals, call-and-response shouts, and an insistent, trap-like bass in “Yama Kegule” and “Free Spirit.” Both artists work up a density in their tunes, as though they’ve swaddled the underlying beat, then peeled and unpeeled the layers, to the listener’s surprise. All this adding and subtracting moves their music along, toward peaks and troughs and suspenseful transitions. Other, lesser tunes on the album are static by comparison, building only in terms of decibels, not emotion.
It might be said that electronic music should move with the imagined velocity, mystery, and danger of a taxi, the preferred motif of Crudo Volta and Python Syndicate. On countless productions of World Music 2.0—the term for post-colonial, post-ethnographic global sounds—the taxi has symbolized movement through unfamiliar territory. For listeners new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic, that’s what Taxi Sampler 01 does best. | 2019-06-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Python Syndicate | June 29, 2019 | 7.1 | 847106aa-8349-456b-939f-0fc09ba0a598 | E. Tammy Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/e.-tammy kim/ | |
The young Chicago producer Nick Zanca records home-schooled electronic music as Mister Lies. His buzzed-about debut full-length is an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures. | The young Chicago producer Nick Zanca records home-schooled electronic music as Mister Lies. His buzzed-about debut full-length is an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures. | Mister Lies: Mowgli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17640-mister-lies-mowgli/ | Mowgli | At a glance, there doesn't appear to be anything terribly original about Chicago's Mister Lies. Surfacing in 2012, the project followed just about every unwritten rule in the up-and-coming, home-schooled electronic producer playbook. The Hidden Neighbors EP-- a seductive, downtempo affair informed by strains of subterranean, laptop-engineered music from the UK-- was released under a cloak of anonymity. After revealing himself as Columbia College student Nick Zanca, a 7" and an "ambient gospel" collaborative EP with fellow Chicagoan Different Sleep followed, though neither proved quite as compelling as his initial effort. And finally, last summer, Zanca holed himself up in a lakeside cabin in Vermont to record his first proper full-length, Mowgli. But despite the buzzworthy pretenses surrounding his debut, Mowgli feels refreshingly untethered to anything other than Zanca's own impulsive yet careful direction. Instead of becoming encumbered by its heavy reliance on mood and atmosphere, Mowgli's patient nature makes room for some serpentine-like twists turns that often bear rich and strange fruits. Though the footing may not always be so sure, it's a record worth paying attention to thanks to it's reluctance to walk a too-familiar plank.
"My music has to do with imaginary things," Zanca told Pitchfork back in May, and while Mowgli most certainly has a well-mapped root structure (he name-checked Portishead, Burial, and "1990s trip-hop" in the same interview), it's so curious and elusive, you feel as if an Inception-style plundering of his daydreaming would be the only real way to unpack it, however subtle and simple its defining components might seem. Still, Zanca is most likely a lucid dreamer, as his knack for creating standalone sounds-- the almost uncomfortably sharp handclaps on opener "Ashore", percussive elements that sound as if they were secretly recorded in a decaying old apartment building on "Dionysian"-- makes the album feel very much of this earth. But despite not being quite impervious to gravity, Mowgli's ultimately an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures. A good number of these songs are landlocked by similar swaths of beatific fog, as familiar shapes remain a bit too blurred to really make out. But as Zanca lifts his various veils, these songs reveal themselves in unsettling, warm, or chaotic ways that feel shy, sexy, and more than a little scary, sometimes all at once. Though few records can really claim it as an asset, Mowgli invites return listens because it's so difficult to put your finger on.
Zanca's neatest trick on Mowgli is being able to emulsify opposing sounds in interesting ways, evoking a wide stretch of emotions over seemingly tiny soundscapes. Often times, it sounds like it's stuck between two different rooms, as the noise from either collides in ways that almost nauseate at first, but become harmoniously fractured as they slowly sync. "Ashore" feels like the work of a trendy, tweezer-wielding chef, plating various components just so until a huge wave of cotton-candy wrapped synth blows everything off the table. "Align" manages to juggle Four Tet-like euphoria, a burly, wormy synth line and ghostly wails and still make sense of it all. "Dionysian" is both joyful and hellish, a headrush of a track that culminates in a cacophonous rage, blowing hot all the while. But not all of Zanca's creations are so cleverly caustic-- "Ludlow", named for the Vermont town where Mowgli was born, is funky, sultry, and comfort food-y in ways that make it fully apparent why Zanca chose to record there.
For someone not yet old enough to legally drink, Zanca is ahead of the game in a lot of respects, but it doesn't mean he's impervious to the same trappings that present themselves to every young musician, especially ones who make music as insular as Mister Lies does. Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all, like "Canaan", which features a poem that came straight from freshman AP English class, or the jittery "Lupine", darting around like a sloppy game of racquetball. Over the course of a year, Zanca has proved himself to be a musician than can produce songs that are interesting and songs that are actually just plain great, and in working to find that balance on Mowgli, we can see that while it's engaging to watch him try and synthesize these two halves of his personality, it also means that Mister Lies is a project that's still in need of fine tuning. There's little question that Zanca knows where he wants to go, it's now just a question of figuring out how he wants to get there. | 2013-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-03-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Lefse | March 7, 2013 | 6.6 | 84726a2b-e9e9-423b-9b73-e667a6be6909 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
The Memphis garage punk band Nots' debut album, We Are Nots, offers an aggressive blend of echoing guitars, powerful drums, synthesizers, and gang vocals. They're a united front, belligerent and dizzying in their approach. | The Memphis garage punk band Nots' debut album, We Are Nots, offers an aggressive blend of echoing guitars, powerful drums, synthesizers, and gang vocals. They're a united front, belligerent and dizzying in their approach. | Nots: We Are Nots | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19966-nots-we-are-nots/ | We Are Nots | For each song on Nots’ debut album, there’s a word or phrase that makes itself prominent, forcefully. Most of these are ripped from the song’s titles: "insect eyes," "decadence," "reactor," "strange rage," "static," "psychic talk show." They’re used as bludgeons, shouted by multiple voices, often lobbed with disdain or disgust. Obviously, there’s a lot of punk rock utility in catchy, abrasive, oft-repeated two-word hooks—when several people shout "black mold" in unison, you pay attention. With these kinds of choruses, they come out of the gate with undeniable power, but Nots aren’t merely offering a surface-level veneer of "creepy" or "strange." Natalie Hoffmann, Charlotte Watson, Madison Farmer, and Alexandra Eastburn are, at times, incredibly bleak. They’re letting you know that they’ve lived through some shit.
Here are some of their points of reference: a person stumbling in the dark while consumed by rage, joyless posturing, blank smiles, blood on the lawn, decay—the names, faces, stories, details, and circumstances behind their songs are unclear, veiled behind minimal poetry and symbolism. That's why every song encourages a few deep listens with the lyrics sheet in hand—there are so many subtle turns in their words, and when you look closely at their stark phrasings, it's clear they communicate quite a bit.
Regardless of where it's coming from, We Are Nots is fueled by its deep well of anger and frustration. Listen to how they yell; they're sick of being complacent, of watching people walk around with an unwarranted smug ease. Nots don't have time for that, and their brand of "weird punk," as Hoffmann summarized it during a Memphis morning TV segment, lends an ominous attack which reflects that tone. Every member of the band plays a role in adding heft and urgency to complement the lyrics. There's Farmer's persistently ominous bass, Hoffmann's swirling and echoing hellscape guitars, Watson's unrelenting bash, and perhaps the most imperative weapon in Nots' arsenal, Eastburn's ever-present synthesizer. So often, synths in punk music are an afterthought with a definitively tertiary spot behind the guitars. Here, it plays a prominent role in forming each track's overall tone.
Eastburn's presence also gives the band more freedom to go long. The Memphis band’s debut 7” arrived late last year—four muffled, lo-fi tracks that were vicious and raucous. Under their initial lineup (Hoffmann, Watson, and Laurel Ferdon), they delivered great songs. Still, they felt definitively like 7” songs—succinct, loud, and powerful, but too primitive and punchy to carry an entire album. Like so many other bands in the garage punk sphere just putting out their first single, it was unclear whether or not they could transition naturally into an "album band." They did, though—We Are Nots succeeds because Nots have evolved. With Watson moving behind the drums, they’ve got a stronger backbone. Eastburn’s synthesizers expand the band's scope, making their songs feel more fully realized and giving the band more freedom to go long. On “Reactor”, for example, Hoffmann takes her time with a few well-placed guitar stabs; she wouldn’t be able to do that without the band’s newfound synth sprawl.
The biggest obstacle they face with their first long-player is that We Are Nots is clearly set in its ways. The synthesizers, the gang vocals, their approach to choruses—it's all reasonably similar across these 27 minutes. Even Hoffmann’s vocal style, thrillingly furious in its from-the-gut delivery, doesn’t vary too much. But the structures, stories, and overall tones differ enough from song to song that this never feels like a monotone slog. They've created a surefooted, aesthetic defining opening statement.
"Don’t act like you and I would get along," sings Hoffmann on the 48-second track "Get Along" shortly before she’s joined by several voices feverishly yawping "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" over and over again. Hoffmann might be alone in pointing the finger accusingly during the verse, but she's quickly backed by her bandmates. They're a united front, belligerent and dizzying in their approach. It's aggressive, and it sounds like fun. | 2014-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-11-20T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Goner | November 20, 2014 | 7.8 | 8473be7f-b6f0-4d42-96ad-f42ea979d2ec | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
On 1995's Different Class, Pulp and Jarvis Cocker were arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk, and they became pop in its most democratically widespread sense. | On 1995's Different Class, Pulp and Jarvis Cocker were arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk, and they became pop in its most democratically widespread sense. | Pulp: Different Class | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22054-different-class/ | Different Class | The first time I heard Pulp’s “Common People” was at my brother’s wedding reception in the tiny English town of Tring. I had moved to America in the early ’90s and completely missed the Britpop anthem’s rise to #2 in the UK charts in June 1995. Since then, I’ve never been able to separate the sound of “Common People” from the memory tableau of those wedding revelers—all ages and levels of dancing ability, varying states of intoxication—flailing wildly as the song’s tempo accelerated from a canter to a gallop.
A wedding reception is exactly the kind of commonplace occasion or location—see also office parties, school discos, pub nights, and the sort of unhip nightclubs found in the center of provincial towns across Britain—that Pulp aimed to infiltrate in 1995. Jarvis Cocker and his group wanted to become pop in its most democratically widespread, accessible-to-all sense. Different Class and the four UK hit singles spawned off the album achieved that ambition mightily.
Amazingly Pulp had existed for seventeen years before their 1995 breakthrough, and for most of that time they'd barely qualified as a cult band. Across the ’80s, they’d released a string of oddball, mildly intriguing albums via little labels like Red Rhino, Fire, and Gift. In 1991, the gawky aspiring grandeur of “My Legendary Girlfriend” won them some fans. After a decade-plus scrabbling along in indie-land, Pulp finally got picked up by a major label, Island, who in ’93 released an anthology of their recent Gift singles titled Intro and then, two years later, the group’s proper big-league debut His ‘ N’ Hers. “Do You Remember the First Time?” glancingly brushed the UK Top 40; The Sisters EP fared slightly better, denting the charts thanks to its bouncy, bittersweet lead tune “Babies.” But Pulp were still barely hanging on to pop.
A sense of urgency—“this could be our last chance”—must surely have possessed Pulp as ’94 turned into ’95 and work started on the album that would become Different Class. Seventeen years after Cocker formed Pulp in post-punk Sheffield while still a schoolboy, the singer and his group rose to the make-or-break moment. Cocker wrote eight of the album’s 12 songs in a 48-hour burst of inspiration. Among them was “Common People,” which instantly stood out as a potential anthem.
The genius of “Common People” is the way its fist-punch chorus and frantic surge rouses unity and release even as its socially acerbic lyric speaks of division and tension. Jaunty and whimsical in tone at the start, “Common People” seems initially to be just a wry true-life anecdote: posh girl recruits fellow art student from a humble background (Jarvis) as a guide to how the other half lives. But as the pace quickens, the song escalates into an accusatory tirade, fueled by Cocker’s stinging awareness of how stacked social odds determine life outcomes. The slumming St Martin’s College sculpture student adopts the lifestyle of the less well-off. But not only will she “never get it right,” she’ll never really know the desperation that drives the live-for-now rapacity of working-class pleasure-taking: All it would take is one phone call to her father and she’ll be restored to her wealthy background. “You’ll never understand,” rails Cocker, “how it feels to live your life/With no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go/You are amazed that they exist/And they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why.”
Different Class identifies its primary subject in its title: The social antagonisms that rankle as raw in Britain today as they did 20 years ago. Class division and regional antipathy contributed as much to the upset of Brexit—in which Pulp’s traditionally left-wing hometown Sheffield, in the formerly industrial North, surprisingly voted to leave the European Union—as xenophobia and nativism did.
In addition to pouring salt on the perennial wounds of class that mark anybody who grows up British, “Common People” had further resonance in ’95 as a skirmish in the battle of Britpop. The rivalry between Oasis and Blur was structured in terms of class and region: Northern lads celebrated as the genuine working-class article contrasted with Southerners seen as the bourgeois unreal-thing by their detractors. Damon Albarn’s Mockney-accented character studies on *Parklife—*which Cocker described as “slumming”—were a spur for the writing of “Common People.”
Pulp pointed to a third path that cut across the Oasis-vs-Blur binary. Cocker and other members of the group such as Steve Mackey and Russell Senior represented a different tradition of British proletarian pop than the Gallagher brothers: stolidly working class in background, solidly socialist in their ingrained allegiances (Senior, for instance, had picketed during the 1984 Miner’s Strike), yet arty and intellectual, in an autodidact or art school-influenced way, at odds with that background.
Those tensions—loyalty to origins versus the desire to escape their self-limiting horizons—fed into “Mis-Shapes,” the opening track on Different Class. It attempts to repeat the populist power of “Common People” but is less successful simply because it speaks for a smaller fraction of the populace. Cocker sings as spokesman for those who “learnt too much at school” and “now can’t help see” too clearly, right through the lies that every segment of society tells itself. The title “Mis-Shapes” comes from an old-fashioned word for a broken product—often a foodstuff, like a cookie—that is rejected for damage or defects, and sometimes sold at a cheaper price. “You could end up with a smack in the mouth, just for standing out,” Cocker sings, the memories still vivid of being persecuted as a weakling weirdo.
The liner notes of the CD booklet pick up this theme: “Please understand. We don’t want no trouble. We just want the right to be different. That’s all.” The tone of “Mis-Shapes,” though, is not plaintive and pleading but strident and defiant, ascending through superiority complex (“We'll use the one thing we've got more of, that's our minds”) to a triumphant fantasy of vindication and victory: “Brothers, sisters, can't you see?/The future's owned by you and me...They think they've got us beat/But revenge is going to be so sweet.”
Cocker’s ambivalence about the masses also informs “Sorted For E’s & Wizz,” which—with “Mis-Shapes” as its double A-side—became Pulp’s second UK No. 2 hit of 1995. A wistful flashback to the illegal outdoor raves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, “Sorted” sees Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?” he muses disconsolately, “or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the Ecstasy wears off and dawn peeks grimly over the horizon, Cocker finds the sensations of unity and bonhomie to have been ersatz and ephemeral: not one of the ultra-friendly strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. Still, he can’t quite shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were magically dissolved for a few hours. In the CD single booklet, a four-word statement of perfect ambiguity spells out his sense of rave’s fugitive promise: “IT DIDN'T MEAN NOTHING.”
Class is far from the only theme bubbling away in this album, though. At least half the songs continue the love ‘n’ sex preoccupations of His ‘N’ Hers, tinged sometimes with the yearning nostalgia of earlier songs like “Babies.” The treatment on Different Class ranges from saucy (“Underwear”) to seedy (“Pencil Skirt,” the hoarsely panting confessional of a creepy lech who preys on his friend’s fiancé) to the sombre (“Live Bed Show” imagines the desolation of a bed that is not seeing any amorous action). “Something’s Changed,” conversely, is a straightforwardly romantic and gorgeously touching song about the unknown and unknowable turning points in anyone’s life: those trivial-on-the-surface decisions (to go out or stay in tonight, this pub or that club) that led to meetings and sometimes momentous transformations. Falling somewhere in between sublime and sordid, the epic “F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E” exalts romance as a messy interruption in business-as-usual: “it’s not convenient...it doesn’t fit my plans,” gasps Cocker, hilariously characterizing Desire as “like some small animal that only comes out at night.”
Sex and class converge in “I Spy”—a grandiose fantasy of Cocker as social saboteur whose covert (to the point of being unnoticed, perhaps existing only in his own head) campaign against the ruling classes involves literally sleeping with the enemy. “It’s not a case of woman v. man/It’s more a case of haves against haven’ts,” he offers, by way of explanation for one of his recent raids (“I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past 16 weeks... Drinking your brandy/Messing up the bed that you chose together”). Looking back at Different Class many years later, Cocker recalled that in those days he thought “I was actually working undercover, trying to observe the world, taking notes for future reference, secretly subverting society.”
“I Spy” is probably the only song on Different Class that requires annotation, and even then, only barely. Crucial to Cocker’s democratic approach is that his lyrics are smart but accessible: He doesn’t go in for flowery or fussy wordplay, for poetically encrypted opacities posing as mystical depths. He belongs to that school of pop writing—which I find superior, by and large—where you say what you have to say as clearly and directly as possible. Not the lineage of Dylan/Costello/Stipe, in other words, but the tradition of Ray Davies, Ian Dury, the young Morrissey (as opposed to the willfully oblique later Morrissey).
Cocker’s songs on Different Class are such a rich text that you can go quite a long way into a review of the album before realizing you’ve barely mentioned how it sounds. Pulp aren’t an obviously innovative band, but on Different Class they almost never lapse into the overt retro-stylings of so many of their Britpop peers: Blur’s Kinks and new wave homages, Oasis’ flagrant Beatles-isms, Elastica’s Wire and Stranglers recycling. On Pulp’s ’90s records, there are usually a couple of examples of full-blown pastiche per album, like the Moroder-esque Eurodisco of “She’s a Lady” on His ‘N’ Hers. Here, “Disco 2000” bears an uncomfortable chorus resemblance to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” while “Live Bed Show” and “I Spy” hint at the Scott Walker admiration and aspiration that would blossom with We Love Life, which the venerable avant-balladeer produced.
Mostly though, it’s an original and ’90s-contemporary sound that Pulp work up on Different Class, characterized by a sort of shabby sumptuousness, a meagre maximalism. “Common People,” for instance, used all 48 studio tracks available, working in odd cheapo synth textures like the Stylophone and a last-minute overlay of acoustic guitar that, according to producer Chris Thomas, was “compressing so much, it just sunk it into the track.... glued the whole thing together. That was the whip on the horse that made it go.”
I started this review with my brother’s wedding reception and, strangely, only later remembered that Different Class’ front cover is a wedding photo. A real-life wedding too: at the request of a Pulp associate who knew the bride and groom, the happy couple and their families agreed to pose for some extra shots with life-size, black-and-white cut-out figures of the band members inveigled into the midst of the full-color scene__.__ That seems like an apt symbol of what Pulp were doing with Different Class and its hit singles: Arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk.
Cocker, operating solo, repeated this feat in a more surrealist prankster way the following year at the Brit Awards ceremony: he vaulted into the midst of a Michael Jackson performance, waggling his bony arse subversively and alarming some of the small children dancing onstage with his goofy moves. But in this instance Cocker represented not the freaks of the world but the regular people: it was an impulsive gesture intended to deflate the fantasy bubble-world of deluded superstars. “My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson saw himself as some Christ-like figure with the power of healing,” Cocker recalled years later. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on by boredom and frustration. When someone appears onstage and wants to be Jesus, I think it’s a bit off.... I’ve always thought that when you get into a position of privilege, you should abuse it rather than toady along with what’s going on.”
After Different Class, Pulp made great—or partially great—records like 1998’s This Is Hardcore and We Love Life, the group’s 2001 swansong. But songs like “Weeds II” and “Wickerman”— inventive and majestic as they are—have, I’d wager, rarely ignited a wedding celebration or been repeat-played on a pub jukebox. Never again would Pulp command pop’s center stage—be common property—like they did in 1995. | 2016-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | July 3, 2016 | 9.3 | 8474ac84-1c2a-40ea-b8f0-585b6dcde665 | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | null |
After a decade of record label turmoil, the pop singer JoJo—of “Leave (Get Out)” fame—returns with a sincere third album, featuring guest spots from Alessia Cara, Wiz Khalifa, and Remy Ma. | After a decade of record label turmoil, the pop singer JoJo—of “Leave (Get Out)” fame—returns with a sincere third album, featuring guest spots from Alessia Cara, Wiz Khalifa, and Remy Ma. | JoJo: Mad Love. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22545-mad-love/ | Mad Love. | At 25, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque is already something of a veteran. In 2004, she became the youngest artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop songs chart with “Leave (Get Out),” released when she was just 13. Its girl power ethos and catchy hook delivered by a precocious teen star aligned into a perfect pop moment. “Leave (Get Out)” was an emblem of the TRL era—and, ostensibly, the launchpad from which JoJo’s career would blast into the stratosphere.
Some of this momentum carried over to her sophomore effort, The High Road, in 2006, featuring the excellent young love anthem “Too Little Too Late.” Then, in a turn of events that even the most experienced musician would dread, a legal dispute with her label halted any of her commercial ambitions. The battle essentially held her career hostage for the better part of 10 years. Now that the smoke has cleared, JoJo’s back with a new label in her corner, a decade of gritty industry experience behind her, and her third full-length album*.*
Mad Love. provides some indication of the path JoJo might have taken if her career had rolled along uninterrupted. The EDM-leaning beats favored by today’s biggest pop stars, her contemporaries in terms of age if not necessarily longevity, are prevalent. The low, pulsating synths of bonus track “Good Thing.” build up to a drop on the chorus, and lead singles “Fuck Apologies.” and “F.A.B.” are obvious ploys for radio rotation. The former comes complete with a tame Wiz Khalifa verse, while the latter boasts an always welcome contribution from Remy Ma.
From a different artist, these songs might sound like pre-packaged attempts to jump on the same bandwagon that she decries in “F.A.B.” In JoJo’s case, they play out as sincere progressions, bolstered by her vocal talent and honest approach to storytelling (she has songwriting credits on every track). There’s enough compelling singing across Mad Love. to hold interest, even if your tolerance for dance-pop wears thin.
Rhythmically, JoJo is arguably following on a trend that she helped put in motion: she was working with Nordic hitmakers well before Stargate’s run of chart smashes. Lyrically, she is also exploring more mature themes. There are songs about sex and love to be sure (“Reckless.,” “Like This.”), but also joy and angst. On bonus “Clovers.,” she chronicles her struggles with depression: “No matter what the doctors offered me/Couldn’t shake that dark cloud off of me.” The song gives her fans, especially the ones who shed adolescence alongside her, the language to describe the fraught transition into adulthood. Perhaps the unintended advantage of being sidelined by her label was the chance it gave JoJo to bypass the common, shock-based pop starlet rebrand in favor of simply living to tell her tales on her own terms.
JoJo’s original deal was with the now defunct Blackground Records, helmed by uncle of the late Aaliyah, Barry Hankerson. The association undoubtedly, if unconsciously, pushed her sound towards R&B. It also resulted in some of her debut album’s best non-single cuts. Twelve years later, Mad Love. only reinforces the idea that JoJo could thrive in the R&B sphere; “Edibles.” is proof. As she sings, “I bring all the realness to the surface/Does a woman like that make you nervous?” over distorted synths to her are-we-aren’t-we companion, you can’t help but wish that every other track sounded something like it. The electro-pop of Mad Love. could stand to make way to a few more slow jams, which highlight her impressive range and its raspy magic—outdone only slightly by Alessia Cara on “I Can Only.,” another standout.
While JoJo sounds great on big ballads and floor-filling tracks alike, Mad Love. lacks a cohesive sound. The abrupt genre shifts are jarring at turns, but paradoxically it’s this malleability that should be key to JoJo’s continued success. Ultimately, though, Mad Love. sounds like an album that JoJo needed to make, and one that her fans were waiting for—the fans that grew up with her, went through big life changes beside her, devoured EPs and mixtapes she made despite record label obstruction, and took her back to No. 1, according to a more modern metric (the iTunes chart). On “Music.,” when she sings “every night I bet my life on you,” it’s encouraging to see that after all this time, the risk paid off. | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | October 27, 2016 | 7 | 847e4f24-b492-44dd-914f-c4c54dee2818 | Vanessa Okoth-Obbo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa- okoth-obbo/ | null |
Jamie Stewart duets with more than a dozen indie, punk, and experimental music colleagues, and what results is a surprisingly sweet meditation on friendship, with nary a try-hard shock to be found. | Jamie Stewart duets with more than a dozen indie, punk, and experimental music colleagues, and what results is a surprisingly sweet meditation on friendship, with nary a try-hard shock to be found. | Xiu Xiu: OH NO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xiu-xiu-oh-no/ | OH NO | It’s difficult to be a Xiu Xiu fan, mostly because it means you have to listen to so much Xiu Xiu music. Sharon Van Etten seems to acknowledge this at the beginning of OH NO, when she asks Jamie Stewart: “What were you doing there, so un-anxious to be liked?” That’s the question regarding a glorious, terrible, improbable body of work that has shades of The Velvet Underground, Suicide, and Einstürzende Neubauten but really sounds only like itself.
Though Xiu Xiu is now a duo with Angela Seo, Stewart is the lifetime member. He’s spent the last 20 years blazing an illegible path, musically and morally, between queer politics and shock-jock shtick, radical vulnerability and repugnant cruelty, good faith and bad taste. The music varies wildly in style—from punky folk and dreamy pop to experimental electronics and harsh noise, all teeming with global instruments—and quality, from the heart-filled zenith of “I Luv the Valley, OH!” to the heartless nadir of “I Luv Abortion.” For every song you’d defend with your last breath, there’s another you couldn’t defend with your first. Most perverse is when they blend into the likes of “Ale,” a gorgeous tune about telling an overweight woman playing GameCube to shut up.
It wasn’t always this way. The urge to disturb has been part of Xiu Xiu since the beginning, but there’s something elemental and pure about those early releases, which calibrated their shocks with tenderness and grace, brilliantly modulating danger and desire in mini-masterpieces like “Fabulous Muscles.” Such moments are scattered across Xiu Xiu’s later days, but the signal-to-noise ratio decidedly shifted. Shock art has to shock itself, and gradually it grows numb. The music got sprawlier, louder, more hectoring; the targets of Stewart’s disgust grew increasingly outlandish; there were chiptune experiments and free-jazz Nina Simone covers; the lyrics developed a worrisome onomatopoeia habit. At last check, Stewart was up to his old tricks on the bombastic Girl With Basket of Fruit, the title track of which contains lines like “A flock of erect dicks on bat wings pee-pees into her sleeping face.”
This is why a record as modest as OH NO, on which Stewart duets with more than a dozen indie, punk, and experimental music friends, feels disproportionately appealing. One hesitates to say he’s “grown up,” both because it’s a condescending cliché and because he’ll probably come back with an album called I Luv COVID or something. But OH NO, which is reportedly about a personal betrayal, comes out as a pretty sweet meditation on friendship, with nary a try-hard shock to be found. The collaborations clear the clotted atmosphere and perhaps have a tempering effect. You probably don’t get Sharon Van Etten in the studio by asking her to sing about clubbing baby seals over a bunch of crashing sounds.
Still, OH NO sounds more like a regular Xiu Xiu album than its track list would suggest. Apparently, singing with Stewart makes you sing like Stewart—that is to say in a kind of sinister mumble, stretching out melodies so they creep more than they stick. But given space to breathe, Stewart’s gifts as a vocal performer and sound arranger result in elegant, habitable art-pop, more along the lines of latter-day These New Puritans than GG Allin.
The darkest moments here tend to be closer to comical than harrowing. On the ambient pop charmer “I Cannot Resist,” featuring Deb Demure, the sound of a head rolling down stairs is given as “bing bong bonk-o bung.” The Greg Saunier collab, “Goodbye for Good,” is about how plants want to kill us, and features Newsom-like lists of whimsical animal names. Angus Andrew from Liars shows up to rant about Flaming Hot Cheetos and Fuego Takis on an unabashedly silly ESG pastiche called “Rumpus Room.”
More affecting is the melancholy and remorse that floats through songs with Circuit Des Yeux, Susanne Sachsse, Twin Shadow, Liz Harris of Grouper, and Chelsea Wolfe, who appears for an emphatic cover of The Cure’s “One Hundred Years.” As signs of Xiu Xiu mellowing go, could you ask for more than duets with Owen Pallett and Jonathan Meiburg from Shearwater? By not trying to shock us, Stewart actually surprises us, and OH NO makes it easier to be a Xiu Xiu fan than it’s been in years.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Polyvinyl | March 29, 2021 | 7 | 848b0608-cd82-44d6-9eb1-08e4492d8f2d | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
Armed with breakbeats, gnarled riffs, and her most uplifting songwriting yet, the Black Dresses musician maps an arduous path toward love and security. | Armed with breakbeats, gnarled riffs, and her most uplifting songwriting yet, the Black Dresses musician maps an arduous path toward love and security. | Ada Rook : Rookie’s Bustle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ada-rook-rookies-bustle/ | Rookie’s Bustle | As one half of the noise-pop duo Black Dresses, Ada Rook makes radioactive sleepover music that explores the fear, anger, and trauma spawned by a hostile world. On solo records like 2016’s Void Fantasy and 2020’s 2,020 Knives, she crafted industrial nightmares and dissociative electro-lullabies with the bite of a brutal winter night, leaning into similarly dark themes. As of late, Rook’s perspective has grown more optimistic, a change you can see even in her song titles. Where she once gave her tracks names like “Tortured Bitch” and “Dream of the Weeks When the Void Held Me and All I Could Hear was the Howling of Wind,” she now offers a more hopeful reassurance: “Ur Gonna Live.”
Culled from unreleased cuts dating back to 2019, Rookie’s Bustle is her leanest and most uplifting release. The EP’s namesake is the Japanese point-and-click adventure game Cookie’s Bustle, about a young girl who believes she’s a teddy bear and confronts challenges ranging from terrorist threats to the eradication of humanity by aliens. (Rook is also a game developer.) Rookie’s Bustle maps a similarly arduous path toward trust and comfort. Opener “920London” lays out its arc in miniature, with a concept loosely inspired by a graphic novel about goth lovers nearing the apocalypse. Jangly guitar chords spread like rays of sunlight, only to be interrupted by a gnarled riff and anguished screams. Rook sings of “clouds in my head starting to break,” but her bleak imagery—car crashes, bad dreams, bloodshot eyes—creates a cataclysmic mood. At the last moment, the desolate noise fades and Rook cries out, “And you’re still here!” It sounds like a sigh of relief.
The skies are still dreary on the robo-thrasher “Ur Gonna Live,” but at least she’s not alone: “Everytime I look at you/I feel like I’ve become somebody new,” Rook sings. The pop-punk highlight “Curse (for Devi)” is an even more touching ode to companionship, with Rook pouring her heart out to her Black Dresses bandmate Devi McCallion. “You make me feel like I’m not sick,” she whispers with a tender ache, “like nothing ever happened to me.” The sweetness and confidence of these seven tracks lend the EP a unique position within Rook’s discography. By the time we get to happy hardcore closer “A Future,” peace seems finally within reach.
The upbeat arc of the lyrics parallels the increasing buoyancy of Rook’s sonic palette. Much of her prior work sounded like a rave inside a cement mixer; Rookie’s Bustle, by comparison, is closer to a metalcore riff on the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack. Where she once wielded clanging metallic percussion and bursts of harsh noise, she now deploys breakbeats that showcase her gift for peppy, danceable pop production. Her snarling screams now resolve into satisfying melodic hooks, as on the scratchy crunkcore of “STARLIGHT ZONE.” Even when that old, familiar darkness creeps into her music, the glimmer still remains, brighter than ever. | 2023-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Metal | self-released | March 31, 2023 | 7.1 | 848e98ca-73f5-451d-aaca-c1b07e138ef7 | Natalie Marlin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/natalie-marlin/ | |
Following last year's fantastic Asa Breed, Michigan-based DJ/producer Matthew Dear issues this mix of minimal techno and deep house on Berlin's famed Get Physical label. | Following last year's fantastic Asa Breed, Michigan-based DJ/producer Matthew Dear issues this mix of minimal techno and deep house on Berlin's famed Get Physical label. | Matthew Dear: Body Language Vol. 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12422-body-language-vol-7/ | Body Language Vol. 7 | To make a massive oversimplification, minimal techno in 2007 was all about Luciano's live DJ sets. The head of German label Cadenza may not have initiated the genre's trend away from minimalism and back towards deep house classicism, but he made it exciting. In the process, he practically trademarked many of the year's key tracks. Luciano switched easily from brain-frying hypnotism to body-moving funk, blurring distinctions between the two. Unfortunately, his official 2008 DJ mix, Fabric41, veers too much toward the former, restricting access to the "ultimate Luciano live experience" to those who download bootlegged live sets.
As if on cue, Michigan-based DJ/producer Matthew Dear steps up to the plate with Body Language Vol. 7, a mix for Berlin's Get Physical label that apes the Chilean DJ's minimal European techno and deep U.S. house-- a circuitous route sure to annoy purists of all stripes. Dear's the right kind of artist to jump on this trend: From the quirky micro-pop records he releases under his own name to the coldly monolithic bangers he concocts under his Audion alias, he has a knack for taking other people's blueprints to their logical conclusions.
Dear fares best when pushing to the extremes of the styles he spins here. In the minimal camp, Kalabrese's "Cityblues" is a murky cabaret number with its insistent bass pulse, Chic guitar, and erratic, live-sounding percussion, is as compelling as any of the house-noir that Kompakt's Matias Aguayo has made of late; Radio Slave's remix of Mlle Caro and Franck Garcia's "Dead Souls" counterposes eerie, fragile vocals with longform groove; DJ Koze's "Zou Zou" is the most imaginative adoption of world music this side of trumpeter Jon Hassell or Chilean minimal house producer Ricardo Villalobos. At the other end, the casual, celebratory vibe of Kid Sublime's delightfully glittery disco revival "Basement Works Vol. 1" evokes the best impromptu house party ever. And the set closes with Lorenzo's already classic 2001 anthem "Get Deep", its seductive bass punctuated with thick handclaps and yearning male vocals.
Sometimes, though, the middle ground is also the highest ground: The set's best track is Seth Troxler and Patrick Russell's "Doctor of Romance", an endlessly involving groove concealing gently writhing layers of percussion and an army of murmured vocals, sighs, and grunts. The tribal workout of Basti Grub's "Baaa Niii" is nearly as strong, with its surround sound rhythms and slurred spoken-word vocals. An entire album of tracks like these would be irresistible rather than simply great.
That Dear falls slightly short of this is less a measure of his own successes and shortcomings than those of the 2008 minimal scene. The triumph of deep house, which has replaced minimal as today's archetypal sound, has reinvigorated dance music values such as restraint, subtlety, and that most meaningless of words, "deepness." Minimal, on the other hand, placed a classicist-baiting emphasis on novelty, diversity, and melodrama. Lately, minimalism has departed from such values and lurched towards sameness, becoming a drab cliché. This year's ascendancy of rigorously reductive (but not minimal) deep house turns that pursuit of sameness into the norm, as producers craft undemonstrative, compulsive grooves.
Subtlety and restraint can be great things in dance music, and many of the best dance tracks of the year are those that get this "undemonstrative, compulsive" mix just right; the trouble is that distinguishing between the scintillating and the boring becomes a challenge when these traits dominate. There are few truly awful records, yet far too many just-decent ones, and navigating the tiny stylistic space between them is increasingly difficult. In such conditions, Dear gets it right more often than most-- a good two-thirds of Body Language Vol. 7 is genuinely compelling-- but I can't shake the feeling he won this round by a throw of the dice. | 2008-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-11-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Get Physical | November 14, 2008 | 7 | 848ee516-087a-403e-985f-3d476b530485 | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
Backed by industrial noise, drum machines, and synths, the Philadelphia-based songwriter rages at systems of oppression on a bleak, troubling record of nearly unrelenting hostility. | Backed by industrial noise, drum machines, and synths, the Philadelphia-based songwriter rages at systems of oppression on a bleak, troubling record of nearly unrelenting hostility. | Shamir: Heterosexuality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shamir-heterosexuality/ | Heterosexuality | Heterosexuality is the latest installment in Shamir’s spiky “anti-career.” After his glossy debut, Ratchet, the Las Vegas-born, Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter has issued a cavalcade of self-released, lo-fi experiments: at times brilliant, at times bizarre, but never bland. Recent records drew on hip-hop and country, but Heterosexuality nods to icons of rage like Nine Inch Nails with lyrics that capture the heavy burden of being a visibly trans person in North America.
Produced by Hollow Comet, a member of the Philadelphia indie rock band Strange Ranger, this is a record of nearly unrelenting hostility. Over industrial noise, horror-movie synths, and grating drum machines, Shamir uses his singular, stunning voice to vent at the systems oppressing him, the spectators gawking at him, and the so-called friends who’ve failed him. “I’ll keep my foot on your neck,” he growls on the gritty “Abomination,” and you don’t doubt for a second that he means it. A few moments later, in the funniest line on the album, he declares himself a “thick tankie bitch” with “a custom guillotine.” His message is clear: Join or die. Or, as he sings in “Gay Agenda,” “Free your mind, come outside/Pledge allegiance to the gay agenda.” In moments like these, Heterosexuality stands as a powerful alternative to the zero-calorie pride anthems that pepper the pop charts every June.
Elsewhere, Shamir directs his anger not at the outside world but toward himself. The 27-year-old artist has been open about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and many of his albums—particularly 2018’s Resolution, a meditation on racist violence—explore his experiences navigating traumatic circumstances. He has welcomed fans into his sadness, giving young queer people of color a rare space to unburden themselves in safety.
But he offers little comfort on Heterosexuality, working in a lineage of industrial music about self-harm and suicide. Some lyrics, like the chorus of “Gay Agenda,” are sung with tongue pressed firmly to cheek: “Pray as much as you can, there’s no hope for me/I will see you in hell/I will be bringing the heat.” Others are more troubling, with lyrics that allude to cutting, hanging, and drowning. “Cisgender” opens in defeat, with Shamir singing, “You wanna kill me? Well, here’s your chance!/I can barely get around now as it fucking stands.” Later in the song, when he flies toward the highest register of his voice to belt, “I’m not gonna pass for you,” his sense of defiance sounds like that of Dido on the pyre. “I’m not sure there’s a life I can lead,” he confesses on “Gay Agenda,” his remarkable voice sounding muddier, lower, less clear, before vowing on “Reproductive” to “make sure the evil ends here with me.”
To be clear, Shamir doesn’t owe anyone optimism. There must be room in queer songwriting for a broader spectrum of emotion than pride alone. That said, a sort of hopelessness flows through Heterosexuality. “Serotonin comes and goes in tiny waves,” he sings on the closing track, “Nuclear.” “But these days, it’s stalled, and I kinda like it that way.” Shamir is singing from a position of surrender, suggesting that coping with depression means ceding to it. It can make for a gutting listen.
While preparing to write this review, I’d gone for long walks through my city, headphones in. I listened to Shamir’s entire body of work, thrilling as he departed from the mainstream to hone a distinct, abrasive point of view. On one of these walks, a man twice my size flew into my periphery. He punched me. He called me a dyke.
For days afterward, I sat in my apartment and struggled to make sense of what had happened to me in broad daylight, on the street where I live, surrounded by neighbors who didn’t stop to help. Listening to Heterosexuality, I often felt as though Shamir and I were standing in the same dark place together, asking one another: Why go on? I don’t fault Shamir for asking the question. But I want us to go on, anyway, and, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Boyer, clamber out of that which resembles the grave but isn’t. Shamir finds plenty of worthy targets for his rage in Heterosexuality. Burial is their job, not ours.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-TALK (8255) | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-15T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AntiFragile Music | February 15, 2022 | 6.5 | 849160c2-079c-4a12-89d2-8cc24ad1ee7e | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Although Dodie Clark came to fame for her chatty and intimate viral videos, she proves the exception to the rule about internet stars making terrible music. Her debut studio album spotlights the sparse and self-conscious folk-pop she’s been making for nearly a decade. | Although Dodie Clark came to fame for her chatty and intimate viral videos, she proves the exception to the rule about internet stars making terrible music. Her debut studio album spotlights the sparse and self-conscious folk-pop she’s been making for nearly a decade. | dodie: Build a Problem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dodie-build-a-problem/ | Build a Problem | From Logan Paul’s Santa Claus diss track to the whoah-inducing pop of TikTok’s Addison Rae, many viral internet stars have tried to maximize their influence by creating music. This usually leads to a lot of meme trap and middling R&B, but every now and again, there’s an exception—like 25-year-old Dodie Clark, who has been uploading videos to her YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers since 2011. Her debut studio album Build A Problem is an official unveiling of the sparse and self-conscious folk pop she has been posting online for nearly a decade, a career milestone for an artist who has, for the most part, been relegated to YouTube.
Although her first YouTube video is an original song called “Rain,” Clark gained subscribers not solely because of music, but because she made videos about jellybeans and bisexuality, candidly discussing her mental health while boiling pasta drunk in her kitchen. For a lot of young, struggling fans, including 19-year-old me, her videos were the ultimate salve, with their glowy, bluish lighting and Clark’s intimate mode of address. Although these videos have been unlisted and moved to a second channel, presumably in an effort to make Clark appear more serious as an artist, the vulnerability in them shines through on Build A Problem.
The music on this album is nothing if not twee, prioritizing lush vocal harmonies and shy, plucky acoustic guitar. Despite the soothing tones, Clark often finds herself swallowed by misery and bitter self-effacement in the lyrics. On “Cool Girl,” Clark wonders “How much of a tongue can I bite/until we notice blood.” On “Sorry,” Clark’ identifies herself as a monster in a small voice over stormy violins. Her emphasis on harmony, billowy vibrato, and the dutiful acoustic strumming often recalls early Ingrid Michaelson or A Fine Frenzy. Sometimes Clark departs from this candied, folk-pop sound and ventures into something closer to contemporary musical theater, coupling production melodrama with straight-shooting melodies, like on the pleasurably tense and self-serious “Before the Line.”
But some of Clark’s genre experiments are less successful. Instrumental transition tracks “?” and “.”, both feel uninformative and ungrounded. They’re the instrumental equivalents to Clark’s occasional lyrical problem, where she obscures her meaning so much that you start wondering what she’s talking about. On “Boys Like You,” Clark tells us “there’s a name for boys like you” without ever really elaborating. The political ache of “Guiltless'' turns up hollow when the most incisive lyric in it is an opaque reference to how “a dark politician will end up alone.”
But Clark isn’t totally averse to being explicit, especially when the subject is Clark herself. She tells us plainly that she hates herself, ruefully revisits drinking until 5AM to justify desperate hook ups, and admits that, at “24, I still count everyone I kiss.” These clear, specific songs carry the same appeal of Clark’s tender and intimate old vlogs. They’re not too complicated, and the experiences they describe aren’t terribly unique, but they’re presented with the kind of surprising honesty you usually feel when reading through drunken Notes app confessions. They lay out insecurity in detail without scrutinizing or justifying it, making you want to lay yourself bare, too. Sometimes, you don’t want to think too hard. You want to put on a big sweater and complain. You want to listen to something soft and sad, look out the window and remember how embarrassing you have been. Clark knows that feeling well—her music is made for it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | doddleoddle | May 7, 2021 | 6.6 | 849198bf-9cd2-4e09-baf9-b2ba5993b946 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Jim O’Rourke’s 1997 album Bad Timing turns his obsessions with Americana into a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism. | Jim O’Rourke’s 1997 album Bad Timing turns his obsessions with Americana into a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism. | Jim O’Rourke: Bad Timing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22870-bad-timing/ | Bad Timing | In the early 1990s, years before he joined Sonic Youth or partnered with Wilco or tried his hand at singing, Jim O’Rourke was a kind of prodigy in the experimental music underground. He recorded albums in his early twenties for labels like Sound of Pig, Amsterdam’s Staalplaat, and John Zorn’s Tzadik. He made music with whatever was at hand and was proficient on many instruments, and he often performed in the context of free improvisation. But O’Rourke’s first instrument was guitar, and one of his deepest musical loves was the art of arrangement—the precise placement of this note in this pocket of space, the choice of this instrument for that note. The two obsessions met in glorious fashion on his 1997 album Bad Timing.
In the 21st century, we take music built around steel-string guitar for granted. New practitioners have emerged (William Tyler, James Blackshaw, Ben Chasny), a latter-day legend has come and gone (Jack Rose, R.I.P.), and an endless series of reissues of albums by major figures stream by (hello, Bert Jansch). But 20 years ago, the notion of solo acoustic guitar as a medium for expression of album-length ideas was only just emerging from hibernation. Some of its resurgence during that period could be traced to the work of critic Byron Coley, who had written an article in SPIN in 1994, in which he’d tracked down the then-obscure John Fahey in Oregon. Fahey had barely recorded in the few years previous, and was living off the grid and on the edge of poverty, occasionally sleeping in homeless shelters. That SPIN piece, along with the Rhino compilation Return of the Repressed, which put his out-of-print music back in stores, cemented the guitarist’s status as an icon of American music. Neither he, nor his instrument, have left the conversation since.
In North America, the acoustic guitar is often associated with “folk” music of a certain mood; from 1970s singer-songwriters to the ’80s emergence of new age and then onto the rise of “unplugged” music in the ’90s, the acoustic became associated with relaxation, intimacy, quiet contemplation—a sound ostensibly more closely connected to the natural world than its electric counterpart. But Fahey’s vision for acoustic guitar was something else entirely. He was among the first to fully grasp that the instrument had uniquely expressive qualities, that its possibilities as a device for melody, harmony, and rhythm were untapped, and alternate tunings gave it further flexibility other instruments couldn’t match. In Fahey’s hands, the guitar became an orchestra in miniature, and long, multi-part pieces with the thunderous sweep of a symphony could sit alongside rustic evocations of the past. Fahey’s guitar became a tool for collapsing time and space, able to incorporate the grand sweep of music history in a flurry of strummed chords, fingerpicked melodies, and raga-like repeating rhythms.
Fahey’s mid-’90s resurgence served as a backdrop for Bad Timing, and the connection colored how it was received at the time. The Fahey connect was further underscored by O’Rourke’s earlier work in Gastr del Sol, his post-rock duo with David Grubbs (they covered Fahey on their 1996 album Upgrade & Afterlife.) But while Bad Timing has deep spiritual connections to Fahey’s work, the actual music comes from a very different place. You could almost think of Bad Timing as as a record that’s trying to be a Fahey album but keeps getting derailed and ends up going somewhere even more interesting. It was originally written to be a solo guitar record, and O’Rourke has performed versions of the pieces in that setting, but as he worked on the music, he decided he wanted to take it into another direction, one that would incorporate his obsession with carefully arranged sound.
Expanding Bad Timing allowed O’Rourke to paint on a much larger canvas. “For me both Happy Days and Bad Timing were about my myths,” O'Rourke explained to writer Mike McGonigal in a 1997 interview in the zine Music. “A big part of my head is Americana. But the Americana I know comes from listening to Van Dyke Parks, John Fahey, and Charles Ives. That doesn’t exist, and I have to face the fact that it doesn't exist. I have to address that it’s nothing but a construct.” O’Rourke has always wrestled with the “Why?” part of record-making. He’s an avid and thoughtful listener and has absorbed a mountain of music, so with each project, he considers exactly why he should be adding to the pile. Bad Timing may be an homage to some of his heroes, but he takes their collective influence and bends it into a peculiar shape, a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism. It’s a fantasy that is aware of itself as fantasy, a self-conscious evocation of an individual artist’s obsessions that also functions as a neat historical snapshot.
Parks’ lush arrangements and his gentle irony; Fahey’s vast scope; Ives’ clash of folk simplicity and avant-garde dissonance—these elements are all over Bad Timing, and minimalism is the final piece of the puzzle. Though it draws heavily from the music of other cultures, particularly India, minimalism as a compositional technique is closely identified with American icons, in particular the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. Glass, Reich, and Riley are best known for repetition—they build meaning through gradually shifting clusters of sound. Young’s music has alternated between repetition and carefully tuned and deeply physical drone. Two other composers, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad, both of whom O’Rourke work with, further extended Young’s drone conceptions. For this group, held tones become a form of change; from moment to moment in a drone piece, you expect shifts and development to happen, and when they don’t, you’re constantly re-discovering where you are in the now.
Bad Timing has this mercurial quality. It flows beautifully and is easy for a newcomer to enjoy, but it’s also a series of head-fakes, regular juxtapositions that jar the music off course as it moves from one mode to the next. The opening “There’s Hell in Hello But More in Goodbye” starts off almost as a carbon-copy of Fahey in his most whimsical mode, with a sunny finger-picked melody that one could imagine a turn-of-the-century farmer whistling as he strolled across a field. But after a few bars, it drops into a single repeating pattern played on just a small handful of notes, like a needle slipping into a skipping groove, and it stays there, as a lone chord is examined, poked at, and wrung dry. Other subtle instruments fold in—organ, piano—and as “Hello” unfurls it becomes a pure drone piece, quieter and prettier but not so far from the Niblock-inspired hurdy-gurdy blast that defined O’Rourke’s previous album, Happy Days. What started as “folk” ends as a kind of raga meditation.
This kind of shell game happens throughout Bad Timing, as the individual pieces convince you they’re one thing while they’re in the process of becoming something else. “94 the Long Way” opens with a tentative, lurching fingerpicked section, hinting at possible songs behind it, but not quite committing, until finally a pattern emerges that mixes a lurching bass-string loop, repetition in the middle register, and a simple descending three-note melody that becomes the center around which the rest of the track orbits. It at first sounds too simple, like it’s barely even a melody, but O’Rourke adds cheery keyboards, gorgeous pedal steel guitar, and trombone, and it starts to feel like a John Philip Sousa march—you think of fireworks and parades and kazoos and guys in funny hats and rolling expanses of land stretching to the horizon.
The construction of the piece is impressive as new instruments are added every few bars and they all lock into place. But there’s also something joyously silly about it all, a cartoon of civic engagement. The bumptious cheeriness evokes children performing an exaggerated “whistle while you work” march, pounding forward in service of some high-minded collective ideal. The hint of camp extends further. I’ve always taken the “94” in the title to be a reference to I-94, the interstate highway that runs through Chicago. If you’re in the Midwest and you want to take a road trip, you’re almost certainly going to find yourself in I-94 at some point. O’Rourke’s song can be heard as an ode to the freeway, his acoustic Americana version of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”—indeed, the structure of the two songs is similar, and the snaking pedal steel is evocative of the gliding guitar in the Kraftwerk tune. It’s a soundtrack for looking out the window as you roll through the farmland of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
“Americana” is an inexhaustible descriptor entirely dependent on perspective. American music, after all, is by its nature fractured, a bottomless well of influences that zig-zag around the country and then around the world. Hyper-local folk forms are “discovered” and stolen from and then sold back in a gnarled form by professionals from far away. Aaron Copland, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man,” was a gay, cosmopolitan Jew with communist sympathies, and he created work steeped in American myths, dreaming up places where he might not be entirely comfortable (or welcome) if he were to actually visit them. O’Rourke’s musical fantasy is steeped in the past but also feels ripe with the possibility of the present moment; it’s of history but it sits outside of it.
The second side of Bad Timing is essentially a single 20-minute piece split into two sections that grows steadily stranger while playing with ideas of nostalgia and memory. O’Rourke presents ancient notions of “American music” and then toys with them. The title track opens with another playful folk guitar figure before losing itself in haze of keyboard melody. For minutes on end, the song seesaws between two slowly plucked chords as hints of accordion nudge the tune along. You keep listening for changes, and you think you might hear something shifting, but you’re also happy to get lost in the repetition, the simple twinkling beauty and building tension of the arrangement.
And then it explodes: a huge distorted power chord launches us into “Happy Trails,” the final piece. Suddenly we’re in the middle of a psychedelic rock record, and it’s like a light switch thrown on, or explosive laughter that sucks the discomfort out of a room. After the lengthy fallout from that blast, there’s another extended fingerpicked acoustic passage, and then the song is overwhelmed with a crashing marching band fanfare (a possible nod to Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4, where a brooding string passage is interrupted by blasts of horns that sound borrowed from another piece). Adding further contrast, pedal steel guitarist Ken Champion, whose impossibly beautiful swells of sound add so much poignancy to “94 the Long Way,” returns with a downright loopy solo fit for the Country Bear Jamboree. Then the song sunsets in a golden-purple haze of muted horns, returning to uncanny beauty one final time.
This seesaw between mischievous subversion and slack-jawed beauty is the key to O’Rourke’s best music. His sense of humor is both generous and slightly dark; there’s irony in his touch, but it’s not a negating one. It’s more about being open to hearing every possibility in a given piece of music. In a 2001 interview O’Rourke was asked if Bad Timing had an element of parody. “Not a parody at all, or infatuation, it’s more like trying to reconcile what is imagined, learned, real, and imaginary.” And then he added, “Is it really that impossible to believe that something can be funny and sincere at the same time?”
Bad Timing, and O’Rourke’s solo career that followed, is a convincing argument for creation in the face of self-consciousness. The “Why?” of music-making is under-explored. Does your individual record need to exist? For O’Rourke, and especially for his solo albums on Drag City, he justifies their release by lavishing care on every detail, and embracing the music of the past in all its complexity. O’Rourke has always been very careful about how his music is packaged and presented. He only allowed it to be released digitally in the last couple of years, and the downloads on Drag City’s newly created Bandcamp pages urge the listener to “please download the best possible quality.” He’s fighting against his music being reduced, whether that means shrinking the artwork, compressing the digital files, or removing individual tracks from the context of the whole. He’s asking for a lot from the listener, but giving even more in return. Bad Timing was where so many of these ideas came together for the first time, a glorious imaginary world that becomes real every time it plays. | 2017-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | February 12, 2017 | 9.1 | 84925fc7-a65b-4a45-af47-9a0be336bff9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Prins Thomas' Paradise Goulash is a real-time, hand-mixed DJ set, and it spans 57 songs and hours of music. It's the kind of mix you might plan a dinner party around, but beware—somewhere in the middle stretch, there will be dancing on tables, and it will probably be barefoot. | Prins Thomas' Paradise Goulash is a real-time, hand-mixed DJ set, and it spans 57 songs and hours of music. It's the kind of mix you might plan a dinner party around, but beware—somewhere in the middle stretch, there will be dancing on tables, and it will probably be barefoot. | Prins Thomas: Paradise Goulash | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21088-paradise-goulash/ | Paradise Goulash | Prins Thomas' Paradise Goulash is seamless like a DJ set and wildly idiosyncratic like an independent radio broadcast. Spanning three CDs totaling nearly four hours' worth of music, it represents a colossal amount of effort: I don't even want to think about the licensing headaches involved in putting it together, what with its 57 songs, many of them out of print, including one dating all the way back to 1968. Unlike many commercially available mix CDs, it's clear from the intermittent tempo-nudges and occasional stretches of near-chaos that this one was mixed by hand—with all the risks, and all the added hours' worth of flubbed takes, that mixing in real time and without recourse to the sync button entails.
But despite all this, Paradise Goulash never feels like work; it is an invitation to sit back and let Thomas do the driving, and it covers a lot of ground. The first mix begins with lyrical Norwegian jazz and the third mix concludes with Kurt Vile's "Baby's Arms"; along the way, we're treated to Spanish guitar, Balearic ambient, '70s Europop, French/African electronic music, dub techno, acid, deep house, Detroit techno, Swedish space rock, Italian synth pop, and a conceptual artist's cover of Arthur Russell's "This Is How We Walk on the Moon". It's the kind of mix you might plan a dinner party around, but beware—somewhere in the middle stretch, there will be dancing on tables, and it will probably be barefoot.
Thomas is known for his eclecticism, so the range isn't surprising. What is surprising is how seamlessly it flows. Even his oddest selections seem designed to seduce, and whether he's riding the mix hard—one Ricardo Villalobos track weaves in and out for nearly 20 minutes—or simply playing out songs in full, his sleight-of-hand skills are such that you never really notice the changes.
Disc one begins with jazz, detours through groovy funk rock, and then stretches out to explore all manner of sounds you might have heard Ibiza's DJ Alfredo spinning in the early '90s. A five- or six-song stretch of chilly drum machines, slow-motion acid, and world-music accents that climaxes in A Split - Second's chugging New Beat is particularly inspired; it seems to open up a kind of wormhole in time and space, collapsing multiple places and eras into a single idea. As for the tranquil denouement, Kurt Vile and that Arthur Russell cover may be notable talking points, but the most remarkable find here might be Il Guardiano del Faro's "Ma Ci Pensi, Io E Te", an Italian easy-listening song from 1980 that sounds like John Carpenter at the Ice Capades.
Those are a few of the highlights, anyway; every listener will doubtless pick up on different moments. The sheer volume of material, combined with Thomas' knack for teasing out a given tonal or rhythmic idea across long stretches begins to lend repeated listens a kind of hallucinatory air. Where am I? Didn't I just hear this? Does this stairway lead up or down? It's rare that a mix so accurately replicates the sense of disorientation that you get from a marathon stretch of clubbing, but on Paradise Goulash, the windows are blacked out, you can't find your friends, who knows what time (or day) it is, and you wouldn't have it any other way. | 2015-10-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Eskimo | October 13, 2015 | 8 | 84941fbe-fc4b-4636-a833-a6d2cb597a3f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
On his second record for Mac DeMarco’s label, the Australian singer-songwriter settles into an effortlessly smooth sound perfectly suited for date-night soundtracks. | On his second record for Mac DeMarco’s label, the Australian singer-songwriter settles into an effortlessly smooth sound perfectly suited for date-night soundtracks. | Tex Crick: Sweet Dreamin’ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tex-crick-sweet-dreamin/ | Sweet Dreamin’ | Tex Crick has a rare ability to sound wistful without any sense of pain or longing. On Sweet Dreamin’, the Australian songwriter’s second LP for Mac DeMarco’s record label, his languid vocals take on a more prominent role as he croons over pop-piano melodies and humming analog synths lines that meet him like a warm embrace. Even with his newfound bravado, he is never looking to steal the spotlight with his voice or his perspective. This is peak park-hang music, genial and accomplished without trying to get complicated.
Having played with Kirin J Callinan, Connan Mockasin, Weyes Blood, and Iggy Pop, Crick is no stranger to the ensemble approach. On Sweet Dreamin’, however, he recorded nearly every instrument by himself at his home base in Tokyo. (His sole collaborator is Miles Myjavec, who recorded the drum parts remotely from Australia.) Even as his own backing band, Crick conjures up a loose, lingering jam-session sound that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Songs are mostly under four minutes, and the fleeting moments of indulgence, like the ragtime interlude “Alley Cat” and contemplative “Drifting Off Again,” only add to the album’s casual atmosphere.
Crick’s vocal delivery, hushed yet emotive, resembles the showmanship of Boz Scaggs at a more intimate scale. He’ll have fun within the mumbled scats on “Mulberry Wine,” rhyming “take it to go” with “Picasso,” but every declaration of love sounds effortless, with nary a vocal strain. “I’ll be waiting for ya/You bring my dreams to life,” he sings to a faraway sweetheart on “All I’m Dreaming Of.” Even when his narratives imply star-crossed romance, Crick sounds more like he’s looking forward to a nice vacation. His sentiments aren’t especially original, but he imbues them with enough charm to make the optimism believable.
Though Crick’s piano is at the center of most of the album’s arrangements, the most interesting flourishes come from other instruments. It’s a small joy to hear the spurts of cowbell mixed into opener “Easy Keepers,” followed by the slinky bassline and rollicking synths of “Silly Little Things.” The richest tapestry materializes on “Barefoot Blues,” the closest Sweet Dreamin’ gets to a climax. Over a guitar lick inspired by Hawaiian lap steel music, Crick recalls a vivid affair that culminated in a serenade at a tiki bar. Appropriately, the most realized, romantic scene on the album is a memory of a live performance: “Oh, what a beautiful sound/It was heaven with two feet.”
“Barefoot Blues” also stands out for its sense of place. Absent from Sweet Dreamin’ are the ambient urban sounds that added a touch of realism to Crick’s previous album, 2021’s Live in…New York City. While the music does evoke a cozy home studio—you can practically feel the carpet under your feet—the more anonymous setting can make the album feel a little shapeless. This won’t necessarily be a detriment: No matter where you are in the world, Sweet Dreamin’ sounds perfectly content to be a tasteful, unassuming date-night backdrop. | 2023-10-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mac’s Record Label | October 19, 2023 | 6.8 | 84a06938-a2c6-4ff7-b274-2c41145e7a05 | Claire Shaffer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-shaffer/ | |
The Ontario band arrive full-formed on a musically polished, emotionally ragged mini-album that testifies to the enduring potency of emo and pop-punk symbiosis. | The Ontario band arrive full-formed on a musically polished, emotionally ragged mini-album that testifies to the enduring potency of emo and pop-punk symbiosis. | Arm’s Length: Everything Nice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arms-length-everything-nice-ep/ | Everything Nice EP | Slide a burned CD-R of Everything Nice to a brainfogged A&R rep at DreamWorks or Vagrant, and they might be convinced they signed Arm’s Length to a development deal during those fertile days of the early 2000s when pop-punk and emo solidified themselves in alt-rock rotations. The two charmingly cash-strapped videos for “Garamond” and “No Sleep” give up the game: Everything Nice is a self-released EP made by post-adolescent, suburban Canadians born between 2000-2002. In many circumstances, the dissonance between this band’s unassuming presentation and their shockingly polished collection of could-be anthems would raise suspicion. But who would try to sound like this in 2021 if they were angling to bypass a few rungs on the ladder of success?
Yet Arm’s Length are apparently right where they need to be: “Garamond” owes its buzz to emo TikTok, a platform that thrives on an encyclopedic knowledge of genre tropes and a willingness to poke fun at them. The song itself is a testament to the enduring potency of the symbiosis between emo and pop-punk, the former’s chiming, wistful guitar interplay and poetic pretensions expanding the scope of a genre whose perspective is often limited to the insides of teenage bedrooms and gym lockers. On Everything Nice, pop-punk lends propulsion and melodic immediacy, shaping the band’s more unruly impulses into something accessible. When Allen Steinberg and Jeremy Whyte hit those airtight harmonies on the swaying chorus, you know what it is: a soundtrack for wistfully scrolling through old texts and secretly wishing the whole world could just get a glimpse of how you feel.
Arm’s Length’s updates for the 2020s are minor but crucial—a couple of tricky breakdowns sourced from the New Wave of Post-Hardcore and lyrics that deal primarily in identity, familial strife, and therapeutic frameworks, leaving the romantic turmoil understated but implied. What they lack in innovation, Arm’s Length more than make up in enthusiasm, treating their formative influences with evangelical reverence. The parts during the verse where a muttered vocal gets doubled one octave higher? The off-mic yelling and low-pass filtered drums? The way the second verse shifts into double time, hitting a giddy and not entirely graceful key change at the end of “Eve (Household Name)”? They’ve studied the masters and learned that hooks can arrive other places besides the chorus, that if the drums cut out during a particularly quotable lyric, all you have to do is imagine the DJ at Emo Nite thrusting the mic towards the crowd.
Perhaps it’s the dwindling of resources or attention spans, but like many of 2021’s standout emo and hardcore releases to date, Everything Nice is here for an emotionally turbulent time but not a long time. Even if it’s technically an EP, each of its six tracks works towards establishing the structure of a genre classic: There’s the introductory track that acknowledges its role as such (“Theme Song”), the one that slows things down just a bit with guitar harmonics and mallet percussion (“Gallows Humour”), the hardcore outlier (“Safer Skin”), the one named after a woman, and the one with the parenthetical, and those last two are are actually the same one. They also pull the time-tested trick of putting the big power ballad with acoustic guitars at the sixth spot—only here, it’s also the closer.
You almost wish they’d thrown in a few filler tracks just to give Everything Nice the assumed heft of an album. Arm’s Length aren’t trying to deny their anachronisms and attachment to the CD era; the cinematic breakup of “Garamond” is captured on VHS tape and “Gallows Humour” ends with the sound of vinyl crackle that you only hear on non-vinyl recordings. The nostalgia is real and if you were alive in 2002, Everything Nice will take you there. Yet when I hear Everything Nice, I’m liable to think of 2022—a time when college freshmen might again safely pine in their dorm rooms, when friends will commiserate over beers before packing into a sweaty basement to yell the chorus of “No Sleep.” The future of Arm’s Length is bright regardless.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | March 15, 2021 | 7.5 | 84a840cc-862a-4ac2-9957-bf85fc8b75c2 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Long-lost soundtrack recordings by the saxophonist’s powerhouse quartet, made shortly after 1964’s Crescent sessions, capture the band at the peak of its cohesion. | Long-lost soundtrack recordings by the saxophonist’s powerhouse quartet, made shortly after 1964’s Crescent sessions, capture the band at the peak of its cohesion. | John Coltrane: Blue World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-coltrane-blue-world/ | Blue World | Sometimes a thing can be hidden without really hiding. Blue World, a previously unissued cache of studio recordings by the classic John Coltrane Quartet, comes to us in this vein: For the last 55 years, a clue to its existence could clearly be heard in the soundtrack to a well-regarded French-Canadian film, which interpolated portions of three separate tracks. But only in recent years have jazz scholars connected the dots, leading to what we have here: a 37-minute album (of sorts) by one of the most compelling bands in jazz history, at an unmistakable apex of cohesion.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because of the afterglow of Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, which Impulse! released, to critical acclaim and commercial triumph just last year. The precedent of that album, and what you could call its market validation, surely had something to do with the way that Coltrane’s estate and former label have rolled out this one. But it would be foolish to shrug off Blue World as yet more product off the archival assembly line. For any admirer of Coltrane, a saxophonist-composer-bandleader who embodied so much in the 1960s—deep mystery, spiritual fervor, hurtling momentum, searching humility—it’s a windfall worth greeting with fresh astonishment, before considering a handful of questions.
So, in that spirit: Blue World offers a glimpse of the John Coltrane Quartet in a state of relaxed assurance, during the same span of time that would yield two landmarks, Crescent and A Love Supreme. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios on June 24, 1964, it’s a small assortment of songs from earlier in Coltrane’s career, refashioned by the evolving language of the band. And to a man—Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—these musicians seem almost to luxuriate in the dark modal hum and polyrhythmic pull that had already become their trademark. They sound unburdened, as if they have no agenda to advance, and nothing to prove.
Which stands in stark contrast to director Gilles Groulx, at whose behest this music was made. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Groulx was working on his first feature, Le chat dans le sac (The Cat in the Bag)—a metaphorically charged portrait of a young couple’s unraveling, informed both by the French new wave and Québec’s emerging separatist movement—when he had the idea to approach Coltrane for a soundtrack. Coltrane agreed, but because the project fell outside the purview of his record contract, he left the date off the usual session logs. Groulx took the master tapes back to Montréal, where they were eventually stored in a vault of the National Film Board.
Le chat dans le sac, an early touchstone for Québec cinema, uses only 10 minutes of Coltrane’s music—but in prominent places, with an obvious touch of pride. Barbara Ulrich, one of the film’s two stars (and Groulx’s romantic partner for a time), recalls in the Blue World liner notes that he had specific song requests for Coltrane. Drawn from albums in his personal collection, they represented objects in the saxophonist’s rearview. Coltrane wasn’t in the habit of revisiting previously recorded songs in the studio, but in this case, he and the band obliged.
“Naima,” Coltrane’s tenderest ballad, first appeared on Giant Steps, the 1960 album that signaled his break from Miles Davis, and the beginning of a relationship with Atlantic Records. The song remained in Coltrane’s active repertory—you’ll find it, twice, on The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings—but its quietly smoldering treatment here is notable. Les chat opens with the full first take. (A second take is no less persuasive but a touch less vulnerable.)
“Traneing In” is from an even earlier vintage: the album titled John Coltrane With the Red Garland Trio, recorded in 1957 and released, on Prestige, the following year. The version on Blue World begins with a nearly three-minute bass solo—a master class in low-end theory by Garrison, but not the sort of gesture that would have naturally suited an album track at the time. Coltrane must have embraced the idea that Groulx would pull choice excerpts from the session, taking it as a license to stretch. (The looseness in his own solo recalls a boxer’s warmup routine.)
Groulx must have also admired the 1961 Atlantic album Coltrane Jazz, because Blue World includes two reimagined pieces from its tracklist, “Like Sonny” and “Village Blues.” The former, so named because Coltrane based its melody on a phrase he associated with Sonny Rollins, appears here in one brief and noncommittal take; Coltrane’s intonation and attack are shaky, and it would seem that he decided to set this tune aside. Honestly, it’s not a keeper.
“Village Blues,” on the other hand, sounds marvelous in all three versions on Blue World. Take 2, which appears in the film, is the right selection. (The first take feels less focused rhythmically; the third maintains a lower simmer.) But these musicians could do no wrong playing the blues in this period, and the loping incantation of “Village Blues” is a near-perfect vehicle for them.
Speaking of which, the title track of Blue World appears in two excerpts toward the end of Groulx’s film. This too is a callback: The song is a barely disguised rewrite of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Out of This World,” which had been the opening track of the 1962 album Coltrane. Its new title is almost certainly a ploy to evade copyright and licensing obligations, given that Coltrane employs such a similar arrangement as he did before. Still, the execution reflects a band with heavier traction, a stronger sense of itself. And there are moments in Coltrane’s solo when he cycles a motif through several tonal centers, testing an idea he’d soon push to center stage on A Love Supreme.
The comparison that puts Blue World in clearer context, though, is Crescent, the title track of which had been recorded in the same room three weeks earlier. Ben Ratliff, one of Coltrane’s biographers, has observed: “Crescent does not contain the most impressive solos by any member of the John Coltrane Quartet; but in a span of six years with more cornerstone statements than most bands have listenable albums, it occupies the greatest part of that group’s center.”
This is correct. And to extend the thought, Blue World falls just off-center—not a major addition to the Coltrane canon, but certainly an addition to a major part of it. There’s no serious argument to be made for its integrity as a proper album; there’s too much redundancy for that, and no way of knowing what Coltrane would have wanted. But the strongest moments on this offhanded, unintended artifact are remarkable even by the standards of this band at this juncture, and the historical record will reflect that. Finally, the cat’s out of the bag. | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | September 30, 2019 | 8.4 | 84ab8334-2b6e-4feb-a51b-144d904a0ef3 | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
The product of lockdown recording and late-night walks through London, the Bloc Party frontman’s fifth solo album is as low-key and eccentric as he’s ever sounded. | The product of lockdown recording and late-night walks through London, the Bloc Party frontman’s fifth solo album is as low-key and eccentric as he’s ever sounded. | Kele: The Waves Pt. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kele-the-waves-pt-1/ | The Waves Pt. 1 | In 1984, London’s Bronski Beat rejected the industry’s ideas about which in-your-face marketing tactics could be applied to a trio of working-class gay men. Instead, they crafted “Smalltown Boy,” a kitchen-sink drama about a bullied outsider who flees home but never gives up his dignity. Kele Okereke’s serene cover of the synth-pop classic suits him impeccably. Tucked away toward the end of the longtime Bloc Party frontman’s fifth solo album, The Waves, Pt. I, it certainly isn’t the first beatless reimagination of a dancefloor favorite, “Smalltown Boy” included. But from a Black, gay artist whose intersecting identities were once either high-mindedly downplayed or frustratingly over-emphasized (“From 2004 to 2006, in every interview I was asked what it felt like to be a black musician making indie music,” he has said), this tender rendition feels personal. It’s also exquisite and unexpectedly raw, all aching falsetto and reverberating guitar textures.
Perhaps the pandemic-era timing was just right. Although Kele’s willingness to go for grand gestures has always endeared him, over the years that ambitious approach has seemed to yield diminishing returns. The Waves, Pt. I stands apart, the product of lockdown recording and late-night walks through London as the stay-at-home father of two passed time posting guitar covers on Instagram. Half lyric-based and half instrumental, built out of only guitar, piano, and voice, it’s as low-key and eccentric as Kele has ever sounded.
On its own introspective terms, The Waves, Pt. I is audacious, even poetic—a quiet room to the blaring clubs of Kele’s early electro-pop solo albums. Informed by Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Glenn Branca, the instrumentals are thoughtful showcases for the fluid guitar playing Kele more typically reserves for Bloc Party albums. For the first time, that guitar is heavily treated through loops and his home collection of effects pedals, evidenced in the crystal lattices and churning undercurrents of opener “Message From the Spirit World.” Next to “Smalltown Boy,” the song-based originals are more like sketches, often blending spoken word with Kele’s plaintive moan to create a sense of solitary ambience. As the world struggles to move past the last year and a half, Kele’s reflections on relationship drama, headline fatigue, and sleeping aids feel refreshingly true-to-life.
The racial justice themes of 2019’s cluttered 2042 are more restrained here, but Kele’s rage and sadness are all the more eloquent without overt sloganeering, and even without words. “The Patriots,” a brief but potent instrumental, builds layers of guitars into gnashing convulsions that unmistakably communicate this second-generation immigrant’s dread about right-wing nationalism on the march. More often, though, the instrumental-leaning tracks offer solace from the turbulent world outside Kele’s home and headphones. “The Heart of the Wave,” his starting point for making the record, is a meditative tangle that recalls Vini Reilly’s loveliest work as the Durutti Column. “Intention” combines the sort of mindful field-recording exercise you might expect from Cassandra Jenkins and the dystopian new age calm of Oneohtrix Point Never.
Even the “proper” songs are idiosyncratic mood pieces. The half-spoken “They Didn’t See It Coming” is like a travelogue set in London during the turbulence that followed the murder of George Floyd; Kele observes broken storefronts and wild foxes as cooly as Jonathan Richman might talk about Kenmore Square. “Nineveh,” a piano-based breakup anthem that is among the album’s highlights (“You said, ‘Boys like me don’t just grow on trees’/But lately I’ve been thinking all about the evergreens,” Kele croons sweetly), gives about half its runtime to expressive guitar pyrotechnics reminiscent of a ’70s Brian Eno production. A bouncy springtime guitar on “How to Beat a Lie Detector” belies a crushing tale of grown-up romantic problems: “Just promise not to ask, it’s best that you don’t know,” he implores.
The Waves, Pt. 1’s warts-and-all looseness isn’t without the requisite warts. There are lyrical clunkers—“A deal is a deal/To take it back is to steal,” Kele intones on another melancholy reverie, “From a Place of Love”—and the instrumentals can seem slight (are the spiky arpeggios of “Dragoness” a little too ephemeral?). When Kele’s familiar voice leaps all over the limits of its range, songs like “The One Who Held You Up” take on a stagey quality. But overall, The Waves, Pt. 1 is a mid-career detour worth indulging. The left-of-center UK rock veteran sounds better here than he has at least since the best songs on 2017’s folksy Fatherland, his previous no-frills record. But this time Kele also sounds free. As he calls out at the end of the airy, vulnerable bonus track, “Cradle You,” “It’s time to rise.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | KOLA / !K7 | June 2, 2021 | 7.3 | 84b9e4a2-1bc8-4646-bb6a-43b651c8fc18 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Action Bronson's major-label debut Mr. Wonderful feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. | Action Bronson's major-label debut Mr. Wonderful feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. | Action Bronson: Mr. Wonderful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20404-mr-wonderful/ | Mr. Wonderful | In rap music, the album has become a hurdle. You can count on one hand the rappers who can accomplish the following two feats: getting a label to release an album, and having that album be good enough that fans aren’t imagining the ways in which it could have been more like the artist’s previous—usually more unfettered and pure—work. In the increasingly fraught journey from underground to mainstream, no time is more uncertain than when mixtapes and EPs must finally become an album. You get one or maybe two shots to prove your staying—and earning—power before your resources get shifted to the next dude with a few radio hits or a small but growing fanbase. It is a grim and unfair reality, and on his major label debut album Mr. Wonderful, Queens jester Action Bronson more or less flips his middle finger at it—an admirable response, though ultimately unsuccessful.
Consider that the first time we hear Bronson’s voice, he is singing in an exaggerated off-key warble. The song falls apart twice, with Bronson cursing that he can't get his vocals right. The moment feels like a rejection of the idea that a major-label debut needs to be a no-nonsense statement to be remembered for decades. In theory, this approach would be refreshing, and if any rapper could let the attendant album pressure roll right off his back, it’s Bronson, who inhabits a character whose reality bares little resemblance to his—or our—own. Yet those atonal vocals end up feeling like a warning sign that Bronson is not going to upend the way rappers make their debut albums. Instead, it turns out, he’s just going to derail his own.
Those nagging vocals—the kind of singing you do to momentarily piss off your significant other—not only embody the spirit of the album, but they conveniently highlight exactly when and where Mr. Wonderful falls apart. After an opening handful of tracks that sound reliably like Action Bronson songs—with a few noticeably ritzy, retro-soul productions—the album shifts into a suite introduced by "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)", a sketch in which an older man sings to Bronson about a lost love who disappeared from the streets.
What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album, with Bronson continuing the story of a runaway girl who has left the protagonist brokenhearted. On "City Boy Blues", Bronson fashions himself as a bluesman, singing and mumbling over a jazz-bar instrumental. Next is "A Light in the Addict", a maudlin and forgettable song made with longtime collaborator Party Supplies that features an unnecessary multiple-minute piano outro. It’s all wrapped up by "Baby Blue", in which Bronson kisses the woman off with those same whining vocals, over a Mark Ronson production that could have fit on an Amy Winehouse album.
This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither. When Chance the Rapper shows up at the end of "Baby Blue" with a verse of playfully inconsequential insults—"I hope every soda you drink already shaken up," "I hope the zipper on your jacket get stuck"—before admitting he hopes his heartbreaker is still happy, he pulls off in half a minute what Bronson couldn’t in fifteen: using an imagined story to reveal humanity through humor.
Bronson, it should be noted, has hit that note before. "THUG LOVE STORY 2017 THE MUSICAL (Interlude)" is a callback to "Thug Love Story 2012", a standout from his still-excellent mixtape Blue Chips. That song was connected to the multi-character track "Hookers at the Point", inspired by the HBO documentary of the same name, in which Bronson rapped in different voices from the points of view of a pimp, prostitute and john, in the process showing that he could consider and illuminate the world outside of his own head. Those two songs felt almost effortless in their construction, while the suite inside Mr. Wonderful feels at once belabored and half-assed.
From there, the album closes with a whimper. Party Supplies, Bronson’s most reliable partner, is brought back again on "Only in America", a track with a classic-rock guitar riff that feels like an inadequate sequel to the duo’s fantastic jukebox rap trifle "Contemporary Man". A few tracks later, there is a live recording of a meandering new song called "The Passage"—if you can figure out the purpose of its inclusion you will have gotten further than me.
Amidst all this are a few tracks—"Terry", "Actin Crazy", "Galactic Love"—featuring Bronson spitting fantastical bullshit over laidback beats. This is where he is at his most natural, approachable, and likeable, dotting his world-traveling fantasies with the names of gourmet foods. Instead of slicing at convention, Bronson accepts it—bringing himself back to square one, which Mr. Wonderful argues, was a pretty fine place after all. | 2015-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Vice | March 25, 2015 | 6.3 | 84bb8cc8-4e29-4710-aafd-6f04604bd07b | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The divisive Vampire Weekend return with LP number two, and Contra finds them embracing their eccentricities without shame or apology. | The divisive Vampire Weekend return with LP number two, and Contra finds them embracing their eccentricities without shame or apology. | Vampire Weekend: Contra | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13807-contra/ | Contra | Vampire Weekend’s second album starts with “Horchata,” ostensibly a punching bag for people who didn’t like their first one. Singer Ezra Koenig rhymes “horchata” with “balaclava,” while keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij arranges the song around the polite plinks of marimbas. It’s a sweatless calypso, buttoned-up and breezy. So, of course, haters will still find plenty to hate about Contra, and they’ll hate it with vigor. Meanwhile, Vampire Weekend sound like they’ve fallen in love with what they started and are hugging it tight without shame or apology.
Considering the ferocious objections to Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut, “Horchata,” and the rest of Contra, is brave music. It’s like they’ve spent the past two years building a bionic version of the band—not only brighter and tighter, but weirder. The group nurtures its eccentricities and the result is a record full of them: Ezra’s stretchy, dynamic voice; Rostam’s fussy but colorful arrangements, packed with lots of orchestral confetti; and a sound that spans an increasingly multicultural array of genres, from American synth-pop to reggae, ska, calypso and Afropop. By comparison, Vampire Weekend sounds monochromatic and restrained.
In terms of vanguard indie bands, this makes them more digestible than Dirty Projectors but also more exciting than the relentlessly sophisticated Grizzly Bear. But Vampire Weekend also outsold both those bands. Their music was optioned for major-motion-picture soundtracks. They played Letterman, and Letterman didn’t passively mock them. Ezra Koenig sang with Fucked Up. Later, they were in Vogue. They’re a cross-cultural, cross-generational new indie band. Contra’s most sellable song, “Giving Up the Gun,” is more polished than Vampire Weekend’s, but its many stranger ones are more imaginative than anything on their debut. Considering Contra is only their second album, they’re in an enviable position: semi-popular and sincerely idiosyncratic.
Contra works because of its juxtapositions—of natural sounds to processed ones; of manners to tantrums; of party rhythms to deadpan poetry; of Black music to white music. “Diplomat’s Son” samples M.I.A. and features an 8-bit interpolation of Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” amidst characters getting stoned and falling asleep in unfamiliar houses. Almost every song on the album is this rich and this delirious. And for listeners with an aversion to richness or delirium, the band still plays sweet melodies with a light touch.
Vampire Weekend’s willingness to take cues from a variety of styles makes them thoughtful musicians, but it’s the styles they draw from that makes them contemporary. Ezra Koenig once said that his clean guitar tone was a reaction to being force-fed grunge as a preteen, but he was also entering puberty when No Doubt was entering the charts, and when ska—a sound that originated in Jamaica and became working-class British music in the ’80s—became a renewed phenomenon at teen centers across the New York metro area. Rostam Batmanglij’s side project, Discovery, was an R&B album made on synths and sequencers—which, by 2009, was another synonym for “indie rock.” Adopting what they adopt and rejecting what they reject might make Vampire Weekend look like pretenders, but they’re not—they’re reactionaries.
Then again, these contradictions, passions, and superficialities are what the band seems to be thinking about—and what Koenig has gotten sharper about writing into his lyrics. These lines don’t scan as being about privilege or money, but about people struggling with their social status, something that everyone—college-educated or not, rich or poor, people who hate Vampire Weekend and people who don’t—does at some point. (Though, as Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef pointed out in 2008, the band’s detractors probably wouldn’t be nearly as hung up on Ezra’s lyrics if the people in Vampire Weekend’s songs—or the people in Vampire Weekend—seemed poor.)
Ezra isn’t writing about college or Northeastern geography anymore (terrific), but the loud nouns are still there. Take “California English”: “Sweet carob rice cakes, you don’t care how the sweets taste/Fake Philly cheesesteak but you use real toothpaste/’Cause if that Tom’s don’t work, if it just makes you worse/Would you still lose all of your faith in the good Earth?” In other words, what if all the products and symbols that gave your life meaning—and status—fell away? What if you replaced the organic toothpaste with Colgate? (Which still “says something” about you, namely “I don’t have the time, inclination, or money to give a shit about toothpaste.”) Would life still look as rosy? Or, roughly, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”
These aren’t ad-copy platitudes about the irrelevance of image—if image didn’t exist, he’d have less to write about. His point is simple: Image is important, but don’t think yours is better than anyone else’s, especially if it’s constructed by things you buy. If Koenig has pity, it’s for people who don’t accept who they are off the runway, like the guy in “Taxi Cab”: “When the taxi door was open wide, I pretended I was horrified, by the uniform and gloves outside of the courtyard gate”—the key word being “pretended.” For a band as superficially calculating and antiseptic as Vampire Weekend, the message is a challenge to accept that these guys—these very polite young East Coasters who grew up with ska, punk, and African pop—are exactly who they say they are.
The album ends with “Diplomat’s Son” and “I Think Ur a Contra,” its two most musically scattered and lyrically opaque songs. “Diplomat's Son”—of the aforementioned M.I.A. sample and reggae breakdown—is six minutes long; “Contra” fades to the sound of hand drums and acoustic guitars. On an album marked by ambitious, knotty lyrics, Koenig ends with the lines, “Never pick sides, never choose between two, but I just wanted you, I just wanted you.” Commitment. Surprising, but it looks beautiful on them. | 2010-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | XL | January 11, 2010 | 8.6 | 84bd7160-3f74-42f2-ba28-0987bcf9a012 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | |
Balancing refined minimalism with raw takes, the Boston lo-fi songwriter’s latest project is a poetic and intensely personal rumination on selfishness, self-loathing, and self-forgiveness. | Balancing refined minimalism with raw takes, the Boston lo-fi songwriter’s latest project is a poetic and intensely personal rumination on selfishness, self-loathing, and self-forgiveness. | Bad History Month: Old Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-history-month-old-blues/ | Old Blues | Most people don’t know Sean Sprecher’s name—not even his fans. The Boston-based lo-fi singer-songwriter uses fleeting pseudonyms like Sean Bean or Jeff Meff to mask his solo project Bad History Month, itself a twist on Fat History Month, his avant-folk duo. Yet his influence in the New England scene speaks for itself. Bad History Month is the one-man show that snuffs out chatter during a five-band bill. Artists like Sadie Dupuis and Krill offer eager endorsements of his music. Fans recount his lyrics like they’re quoting cult-classic TV characters, be it a sweet-toothed romantic or a guilt-ridden cowboy. His spiraling drum-and-guitar epics wring poetry from psychological breakdowns. But it’s only now, on Old Blues, his seventeenth release and the second full-length Bad History Month album, that Sprecher has revealed his real name. He’s also resigned as his own worst critic to try something new: attempting to forgive himself.
Old Blues began as a concept album about the childhood immaturities we carry into adulthood: selfishness, grudges, confusion that manifests as disapproval. Across seven songs, Bad History Month analyzes previous poor judgements to imagine healthier ones. “Low Hanging Fruit” struggles to fathom others’ lived experiences as being equally real as one’s own. “Childlike Sense of Hatred” uses war (particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict) as a metaphor to explore how anger and lack of empathy fuel arguments. It’s easy to misread Bad History Month songs as misanthropic, but Sprecher knows where and when to come up for air. As he chronicles the evolution of his personal philosophy on “Want Not,” the 15-minute closer that confronts body acceptance and capitalism-induced shame, it’s clear some wounds remain open. But if Bad History Month songs are a way of holding humanity accountable, then Old Blues is Sprecher finding motivation to follow through in his own life. “Why are people terrible?” has become, “How can we fix ourselves?” Perhaps that’s why he finally felt comfortable crediting himself.
Bad History Month’s self-reckoning succeeds because of its musical interplay. “The Road to Good Intentions” matches ruminations on life’s warped chronology with yawning keyboard ambience, a finger-plucked heartbeat, and an unstable tempo that suggest the soundtrack to a time-lapse video. “Childlike Sense of Hatred” flips moods with its lyrics: hesitant, acoustic guitar for hope; blown-out distortion for rage. Recorded with Fat History Month drummer Mark Fede and Dimples member Greg Hartunian, Old Blues is a careful balance of refined minimalism and raw takes, like Jim O’Rourke improvising with the Microphones while journaling.
Old Blues introduces Sprecher as a grounded poet, turning his usual Bad History Month quips into curt yet detailed sentiments. Each song stems from Sprecher’s low-stakes pursuit of his own aspirations, in hopes that maybe he’s not alone in them. In opener “Waste Not,” he’s a whale “beached on the shore of a backward glance,” reminiscing about being a beach ball. Soon after, he recalls he’s neither, singing, “I’d better get to work on learning to improve/And move, and make use of my new limbs.” In these moments, it’s hard not to compare him to Silver Jews’ David Berman. “Everyone looks ugly when they’re close enough to kiss,” Sprecher sings on “A Survey of Cosmic Repulsion,” a song that began as revenge against a neighbor blasting Grateful Dead records but ends up as a rosy reflection on shared love: “Luckily for me, I’m into ugliness.” Old Blues isn’t a pity party for lingering blind spots; it’s a public call to mend them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | May 7, 2020 | 7.3 | 84ca9d04-9a19-416b-b4ed-a6c4c3366ca8 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
For all its detours toward sadness and alienation, death is the real story on Bob Dylan's latest album, very much a record about The End. He's learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, that sometimes it just comes. | For all its detours toward sadness and alienation, death is the real story on Bob Dylan's latest album, very much a record about The End. He's learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, that sometimes it just comes. | Bob Dylan: Tempest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17139-the-tempest/ | Tempest | It seems redundant to apply more adjectives to Bob Dylan's singing voice-- easily the most infamous rasp in American music, a cultivated tangle of disdain and nicotine and bad love-- but it remains the defining characteristic of his work, as essential to his legacy as vowels or the acoustic guitar. Dylan's long-lauded backing band, which has helped define much of his later work, may crank out a first-rate iteration of honky-tonk bar-rock, but it's primarily a canvas. His voice is so unique (even when it's approximating other voices) that I crave it the same way I might crave, say, an apple: It's a thing unlike any other thing, a whole food, a singular expression.
Still, on Tempest, his latest album, Bob Dylan mostly sounds insane. That volatility can yield tremendous rewards-- on the ferocious "Pay in Blood", it clarifies his nihilism, his cruelty-- but it can also be distractingly unruly, inching toward self-mockery, all wild undulation and hairball-retch. Which would be okay-- embraced, even!-- if the rest of Tempest didn't feel so rote. Here it is, again: the gargle, the zinger, the rollicking blues riff. The formula that made Time Out of Mind through Modern Times such a thrilling stretch feels exhausted now, and Dylan relies on his own gruffness as a substitute for real intent; he knows he doesn't have to work very hard to sound present, and so he doesn't, and so he isn't.
Lyrically, he's sharpest when eulogizing mangled relationships ("One time, for one brief day, I was the man for you," he seethes on "Long and Wasted Years"), and the best cuts here are the ones that directly address lingering heartache. On "Soon After Midnight", he speaks to an absent lover: "It's now or never, more than ever/ When I met you, I didn't think you would do/ It's soon after midnight, and I don't want nobody but you," he sings. It's a classic Blood on the Tracks-era barb, vitriol mixed with real longing-- rage and love, rage at love. Likewise, on "Narrow Way", he admits inferiority ("I can't work up to you/ You'll surely have to work down to me someday"), then accuses his girl of certain cruelties ("You broke my heart/ I was your friend 'til now... You got too many lovers").
At just under 14 minutes, the album's epic title track is also its longest (worth noting: It outruns "Desolation Row" (11:20) and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (11:22), but not "Highlands" (16:31), Time Out of Mind's sprawling closer), a sober and meandering meditation on the sinking of the Titanic. In the pantheon of grand, gory tragedies, the dismembering of the Titanic via iceberg is a catastrophic entry, sure, but its legend still trumps its carnage, making it worth wondering why Bob Dylan, in particular, would suddenly revisit it a solid century on. In her essay "7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38", Joan Didion, writing both of the Titanic and of Howard Hughes, hints at the inescapable glee of schadenfreude, how we (quietly) relish the beautiful becoming the damned: "Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted," she writes. "How the mighty are fallen."
"Tempest" is based at least in part on "The Titanic" (or "When That Great Ship Went Down"), an old folk song that likely originated around 1915 in Hackleburg, Alabama, and has since been recorded by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and others. In his notes for the 1997 reissue of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Folkways archivist Jeff Place notes that some African-Americans viewed the Titanic's dissolution as a kind of "divine retribution," given that blacks were resolutely banished from the ship (indeed, the version recorded by William and Versey Smith for the Anthology is conspicuously spirited). Here, though, Dylan is earnest, nearly deferential. It's not schadenfreude, or retribution, or even a social commentary; it's a long, sad, straightforward narrative, complete with a "little crippled child," self-sacrifice, hearts at peace, and a final glug of brandy as the ship slips under. "There is no understanding... the judgment of God's hand," Dylan announces, and I suppose that's as reasonable an explanation as any, although it's also a disappointingly pedestrian conclusion from an artist as acerbic (and populist) as Bob Dylan.
And so it's revealed that death-- mass death, helpless death, inevitable death-- is the real story here, and Tempest, for all its detours toward sadness and alienation, is very much a record about The End. Whom we loved, who failed us, and what it all means in the face of our own inevitable demise. Dylan's long been enamored with Appalachian murder ballads-- those gruesome, Celtic-born parables designed to dissuade potential sinners from indulging their darker whims-- but he's finally learned, at 71, that death doesn't necessarily come with a lesson, sometimes it just comes. Tempest's moving closing track, "Roll on John", a remembrance of John Lennon, suffers from a few flaccid clichés ("You burned so bright!"), but at least Dylan finally sounds engaged, his garbled vocals heavy with sorrow and helplessness. In that sense, it's a fitting coda for an album bogged down with resignation. | 2012-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 13, 2012 | 6.8 | 84cc56a0-47d7-4c40-8df7-0f7fd97d687a | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
This mixtape, released after Durk’s departure from Def Jam, is a minor but effective dispatch from one of Chicago’s most compelling narrators. | This mixtape, released after Durk’s departure from Def Jam, is a minor but effective dispatch from one of Chicago’s most compelling narrators. | Lil Durk: Just Cause Y’all Waited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-durk-just-cause-yall-waited/ | Just Cause Y’all Waited | Lil Durk writes about Chicago the way Joan Didion once captured California. In a generation of drill rappers who detail life in his hometown with righteous anger, brutal narratives, and on-the-ground perspective, Durk has distinguished himself with wicked specificity and cutting turns of phrase. His style utilizes elements of memoir, journalism, and fiction to capture life in what he describes as “the trenches.” Like Didion’s, Durk’s words are a lens into a deeply American brand of chaos.
The surprise release of Just Cause Ya’ll Waited comes with the news that Durk has split with Def Jam after a five-year stint. That’s okay—he never looked particularly comfortable in major-label rap star threads, anyway. Pitched as something to tide fans over before his next marquee mixtape, Signed to the Streets 3, it’s a low-stakes affair, but Durk wins by accentuating the strengths that have set him apart from his contemporaries. This is party music that might make you weep. Durk looks backwards to his childhood, to family, and to fallen comrades. He’s a 25-year-old with more burdens than someone his age should be saddled with.
Durk’s songs rarely sketch out fully functioning narratives. Instead, his writing is loaded with rich flourishes and sobering details. On the chorus of “Public Housing” alone, he drops $50k on new clothes, calls out to Allah for guidance, and connects his come-up to past hardships (“I came from public houses to a mansion/I lost my family I was feelin’ stranded”). It’s a song about one of hip-hop’s great absolutes: staying loyal to your roots while pursuing the almighty dollar. Similarly, “Granny Crib” flickers with diamond-sharp detail as Durk gives thanks for his success while remembering childhood nights spent sleeping among cockroaches and days packing pistols to stop him from “being bullied.”
If Durk sounds reflective, it may be because mortality is on his mind. “Crossroads” offers a penetrating analysis of grief. With its caressed piano chords, the song draws instant parallels with 2pac’s “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” T.I.’s “Live in the Sky,” and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s own “Crossroads,” but Durk brings his own deft perspective, saying “I don’t wanna be lonely” in the face of constant loss. Elsewhere, “Instigator” references suicide as he admits, “I feel that pain I thought I’d never feel.” The song ends with Durk trading in his gold Rolexes and trying to get a day job driving a bulldozer.
The backdrop to these musings is a set of beats that lean on rattling hi-hats, shadowy synths, and simple key riffs that the rapper sounds comfortable on, allowing him to test the limits of his voice. Though most of Durk’s delivery comes in a bled-dry, Auto-Tuned style, “Just Flow” is a reminder that he can rap with real fury too. Closing track “My Bruddas,” meanwhile, sounds like a potential single, as Durk’s synthetic voice carries a doomed sense of melody that errs towards Future’s modish sound.
If you’re looking for the mixtape’s weak spot, you’ll find it at its soft center. “Breather,” which features Ty Dolla $ign and PARTYNEXTDOOR, and “Home Body” are sleazy sex jams that are totally fine on the ear; just one would have sufficed. It’s the only wasted motion on Just Cause Ya’ll Waited, which will likely go down as a minor release in Durk’s canon. Even so, this mixtape is a reminder that he’s one of his city’s most compelling correspondents. | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Only the Family | April 5, 2018 | 7.3 | 84dded8d-4727-459b-8f09-6643d1e06740 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
null | null | Spoon: Girls Can Tell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7429-girls-can-tell/ | Girls Can Tell | Over the past week I've scrapped several quasi-amusing, only-tangentially-related-to-the-topic-at-hand anecdotes that would have served as some sort of introduction to this review. Among them: a tedious explanation about how what I'm learning in grad school about connectionism and neural networking somehow applies to Spoon's songwriting methodology (hint: it really doesn't); a comparison of Spoon to the ugly metallic monstrosities that pass for public sculpture these days; and a tired parody of VH1's "Behind the Music" ("Spoon: They had it all. And then it all came crashing down! But now they're back! Etc."). I ran out of clever metaphors to describe Spoon's music a while ago. In fact, I don't think I've ever really captured in writing what it is about Spoon that I like so much. Their music just seems to possess this attitude that's both fresh and rooted in the origins of rock 'n' roll, an anger that's at once stylish and direct, a compassionate ache that's as oblique as it is palpable. And Girls Can Tell wraps all that is great about Spoon up in a shiny new package.
It's been nearly three years since Spoon's last album, A Series of Sneaks, rocked heads and broke hearts, and even though the band was without a label for most of that time, they forged ahead with the writing and recording of Girls Can Tell anyway. They had more than enough time to get the album sounding just right, and it definitely shows in the finished product. But an open-ended recording schedule has its advantages and disadvantages: Girls Can Tell is more mature and accomplished, but at the expense of the spark of spontaneity.
Fans of Spoon's mannered sloppiness will most likely be taken aback at their new sound, one which is significantly spookier and cleaner-sounding, with more conventionally structured songs. It may be worth noting that John Croslin, who's produced most of Spoon's output to date and may be responsible for the more off-kilter ideas on previous albums, is barely present on this album. Where A Series of Sneaks was a giddy grab bag of intentional loose ends, Girls Can Tell ties those loose ends up, perhaps a bit too neatly. The irony, of course, is that this album sounds much more like a major-label release than Sneaks.
But the "maturing" of Spoon should by no means be a point of contention. No, they no longer sound like the Pixies, Gang of Four or Wire; instead, they sound like Spoon now. And initially, Girls Can Tell sort of feels like a recap of Spoon's brightest spots within their oeuvre, recast in a new light. "Believing is Art" uses the insistent eighth-note rhythm of "30 Gallon Tank"; "Lines in the Suit" recalls the stark living-room production of the "Agony of Laffitte" single; "Fitted Shirt" starts where the one-note riff of "Mountain to Sound" left off; "Anything You Want" hums with the easy melodic brilliance of "I Could See the Dude," or "Metal Detektor," or "Plastic Mylar." The one new addition to their sound is a foggy-midnight moodiness enhanced by mellotron, vibraphone and viola on tracks like "Everything Hits at Once" and "Chicago at Night"; still, this shift in sound was presaged by "Change My Life" off the recent Love Ways EP.
But any perceived straddling of the line between self-cannibalization and self-reference is rendered moot on subsequent listens; these songs not only stand strong on their own, but also complement each other in unexpected ways. The eerie tones floating throughout "Everything Hits at Once" drift into "Believing is Art," where martial rhythms, Britt Daniel's breathless stuttering, and even the jarring fuzz riffs that tear apart the chorus do nothing but build tension until it fades into nothingness. The tension is finally broken with the ringing chords that open "Me and the Bean."
"Lines in the Suit" offers the first solid indication of development within Daniel's lyrics; whereas they were once resolutely abstract and liberally peppered with odd turns of phrase, here, they point toward concrete emotions and situations. Written during the fallout from being dumped from their former label, it's the sound of Britt sitting on his couch, strumming his guitar, staring out the window and wondering, "How come I feel so washed up/ At such a tender age now?"
Daniel may regret some of the decisions he's made in life, but so does everyone else; eventually, he comes around to remembering that while being a rock musician may still be a job, it's still better than real work. Better that than the human resource clerk on her lunch break who says, "It could have been good by now/ It could have been more than a wage." "Fitted Shirt," the most recognizably Spoon-like song on the album, concerns itself with a considerably lighter subject; namely, how Britt wishes that shirts didn't always come in one-size-fits-all proportions.
Of course, there are also songs on Girls Can Tell that are just about, well, girls. And hanging out. And telling off record labels. On the heartbreakingly pretty "Anything You Want," Britt pines for the girl that he knows full well won't work out anyway; on "Take a Walk," he lashes out with a snarling, swaggering blues riff as he spits, "Now that song's been sung/ It's just the cost of what's been done/ The cost of talking a walk with you." "1020 AM" returns to the mooning about, with elegant acoustic guitar and flutelike organ imparting an almost chamber-music-like aura. "Take the Fifth" has nothing better to do than to strut down the strip on a Saturday night, handclaps and tambourine included.
Girls Can Tell slithers to a rather downbeat conclusion with "This Book is a Movie," a rather incidental instrumental number that wants to build tension as effectively as "Believing is Art," but doesn't quite get there; and "Chicago at Night," where the desolate guitar twang seems to dissolve into a cloud of smoke. It's an ending that seems to echo the uncertainty of Spoon's existence over the last few years, as if the continuation of the band is still somehow in question. While Spoon definitely shows signs of life on this album, it's also clear that their more negative experiences have changed them irrevocably. It's not necessarily a qualitatively good or bad change, it's just change.
Digging deeper into Girls Can Tell, I get the feeling that Spoon is trying to reconcile their distinctive tics with deeper traditions of rock. They've always seemed like an indie rock band with a rock 'n' roll soul, and here, they're trying to lose some of their outward quirkiness and just be a rock band. But they'll never sound like just another rock band; some of their peculiarities are so engrained in their sound that they stick out even more here: the deceptively simple-sounding drum patterns, the combinations of succinct riffs that somehow miraculously fit together just so, and of course, Britt Daniel's voice, which if were up to me would be ranked as one of the classic voices in rock. It's a great thing, hearing a band grow up without losing sight of what made them so vital in the first place; and seeing as how Girls Can Tell might not have ever seen the light of day, it makes it even better. It's worth cherishing. | 2001-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 20, 2001 | 8 | 84e4aa07-607b-46ed-8920-b92398714b48 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Braid's first album in 16 years is suprisingly strong. This is precisely the kind of album you’d expect out of Braid if they kept going after Frame & Canvas and learned how to adjust with age. | Braid's first album in 16 years is suprisingly strong. This is precisely the kind of album you’d expect out of Braid if they kept going after Frame & Canvas and learned how to adjust with age. | Braid: No Coast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19502-braid-no-coast/ | No Coast | The first Braid album in 16 years ends with a song called “This Is Not a Revolution” and man...it’s hard to resist tweaking its title to comment on its surrounding circumstances, i.e., “this is not a revival.” Or, in the case of Braid themselves, “this is not a reunion.” It’s been called one for understandable reasons. So many of their peers have gotten the band back together recently and the excitement of seeing American Football or Mineral for the first time since the late 1990s might lead you to overlook Braid having played Fun Fun Fun Fest in 2012 or a couple of gigs in 2004. Or maybe it’s just that their 2011 EP Closer to Closed is better off being forgotten. It was a Braid release in name alone—one cover and three nondescript, tentative Braid originals made less because they wanted or needed to, but because they could. The one lyric I remember was fitting: “I want a do over.” Consider No Coast a promise kept.
No Coast doesn't pick up where Frame & Canvas left off. It doesn't sound like a band in their mid-20s, though you could hear the antsy, arms-akimbo “Put Some Wings on That Kid” and “Lux” as an effort by Braid to show they’re still capable of playing songs from their under-appreciated second album The Age of Octeen. Rather, this is precisely the kind of album you’d expect out of Braid if they kept going after Frame & Canvas and learned how to adjust with age. Unlike Closer to Closed, No Coast retains an identifiable Braid-ness, the knotty musicianship that subsequent offshoot Hey Mercedes untangled and straightened—the sudden stops and cuts, vocals in friendly competition, an active, inventive rhythm section that never calls attention to its trickery. Singer Bob Nanna was hoping people would consider Braid as a forerunner and a peer of You Blew It! and A Great Big Pile of Leaves, and you can definitely hear where their new label-mates got some of their moves.
But the new guys operate at full speed; Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots. “Bang” and the title track showcase Braid’s rhythmic double clutches, their pivots after sudden silence in more methodical, midtempo ways, patiently working towards conventionally pleasing codas. Other times, Braid just goes straight for the big, alt-rock chorus, as “East End Hollows” and “Damages!” show Chris Broach channeling his agitation into legitimate, singalong (not shout-along) hooks. His vocals have developed a high, Mark Hoppus nasality, which has the occasionally unfortunate effect of stressing some of No Coast’s too-cute lyrical puns. But it plays wells with the more measured and mature Nanna. While they maintain the exuberance of having too much to say at the same time, the two vocalists are less likely to topple over each other; check the one-man give-and-go on “Many Enemies”, or the pick-and-roll performed during the bridge of “East End Hollows”. In fact, on a song-by-song basis, No Coast is actually more consistent than Frame & Canvas, though it wants for something as scene-defining as “The New Nathan Detroits”.
But maybe they’re in a position define an entire new “scene”, or at least a demographic. With the exception of Lifetime’s 2007 self-titled return, I’m not sure if there’s much precedent for artists from this world making such a strong statement in their late-30s as the same band. And so No Coast is an inspired record for a very tangible reason that goes beyond associating with an in-demand producer (Will Yip) and a hip new label: Braid have taken stock of their own lives as unintentional elder statesmen and treat it as worthwhile subject matter.
“Light Crisis” begins with an old recording from Nanna’s grandfather, while “Put Some Wings on That Kid” obliquely references the adoptee’s recent discovery of his birth parents. But such direct, autobiographical details are less frequent that the generational resonance found in the title track’s opening line: “No coast/ Is how I feel the most/ In the middle, a little invisible, the ghost.” The title of No Coast was intended as positive reinforcement for the band, and it’s also indicative of a spiritual displacement, of being overlooked and at the same time, not quite sure if you're confident enough to be looked at. Two of the first three songs contain the line, “This is the life,” most notably in “No Coast”: “This is the life we chose”. That life being one that hasn’t gotten Nanna or Broach much separation from the scene and people who might refer to Braid as “legendary” or Frame & Canvas as a “classic”; they probably get recognized in bars, have some nice email exchanges and the occasional shout out from an up-and-coming band. But these aren’t the sort of things that would satisfy the nagging parent in “The New Nathan Detroits,” the one asking them if all of this will ever compare to a house, kids, and everything else that seemed for the taking for a band of Braid’s ilk right before emo's commercial breakthrough.
Nanna spends a lot of time in that "middle" he speaks of, not quite domesticated, but not young and untamed either; when he calls himself a "runaway train" on "Bang", it sounds like an admission of being set in one's ways rather than out of control. No Coast is very, very Chicago in both sound and spirit (specific streets are name-dropped on “Light Crisis”), though in Nanna and Broach’s lyrics, you’d think it was the world’s biggest college town and any given day can be a class reunion that allows you to feel the same twinge of warm nostalgia and cold reality of time moving forwards. “East End Hollows” initially sounds laudatory, Broach dreaming of “drunk lust and punk love” and reveling in a DIY spirit where “happiness is in the doing, in the making.” The catchiest song on No Coast is the most conflicted as well, as Broach notes the false sense that happiness is also tied up in the gossip of “who knows who and what happened” and bars where diehards balance “Another drink/ Another lifetime of regret.” The chorus “You take these dreams and throw them out the window” can sound like a command rather than a lament, of Broach try to live the ideals of “no coast” surrounded by people who aren’t doing shit besides resting on their laurels.
But there’s no bitterness in No Coast, just perspective and empathy for those who actively seek to follow in their path. Nanna understands the inherent, nostalgic pull of listening to Braid in the first place and his lyrics often follow suit; he’s wishing for his bucket of old tricks in “Damages!” and grapples with young love transitioning into suburban comfort on “Pre-Evergreen". Meanwhile Broach laments faded friendship on “Many Enemies” and marvels at the blind energy of youth of “Doing Yourself In”. Or at least that’s what I hear; Nanna and Broach are more careful about choosing their words as well and while No Coast is always emotive, it’s open-ended and serves to point out that for many, the “emo” established by Braid and their ilk and sought after by their fans constitutes a set of musical values as defined and worthwhile as “post-punk” or “house”. Nanna expressed that he wanted No Coast to be “exciting and vital for people that aren’t in their late 30s,” and those who’ll check it out simply because it’s on Topshelf won't be let down. But if you're a Frame & Canvas lifer who's made a home and put the kids in their beds, No Coast lets you know the great mistakes to make and chances to take are still out there. | 2014-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | July 8, 2014 | 7.7 | 84e6dd28-2ab6-4b70-bf18-37eb80e3a518 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Like Celtic Frost before them, Black Anvil find ways to summon profound darkness without tapping into black-metal clichés. Their latest ebbs and flows with effortless grace. | Like Celtic Frost before them, Black Anvil find ways to summon profound darkness without tapping into black-metal clichés. Their latest ebbs and flows with effortless grace. | Black Anvil: As Was | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22716-as-was/ | As Was | When Black Anvil covered the obscure KISS ballad “Under the Rose” as a deluxe bonus track for their last album, 2014’s Hail Death, it drove home the point that no influence was off limits. Choosing that song—which hails from the one album where the otherwise hedonistic KISS tried their hand at a weighty concept—effectively worked as a declaration of Black Anvil’s contrarian streak. Moreover, rather than give “Under the Rose” a predictably harsh makeover, Black Anvil more or less opted to preserve its original form, which alternates between delicate acoustic guitar-driven verses and a chorus that weds chunky hard-rock guitar with moody grandeur.
On paper, it was a splashy move. But the truth is that the KISS cover fits right in with the rest of Hail Death, which captures the New York black metal outfit taking risks right from the opening note. At that stage, after two albums of full-on heaviness, Black Anvil were starting to infuse their blackened thrash with influences that, by comparison, fall close to pedestrian ’80s hair metal. Somehow, though, they made all the elements on Hail Death fit together—which isn’t quite as surprising when you consider that, as New York hardcore veterans, Black Anvil hold Twisted Sister in the same esteem as Bad Brains and the Cro-Mags.
On their new album As Was, Black Anvil remain as willing as ever to stretch, but it takes more patience to see their range this time. The eight-minute opening number “On Forgotten Ways” contains plenty of twists and turns, but other than some melodic vocals, it doesn't introduce any new expressions to the band's palette. When you compare those clean vocals to similar phrasing by say, Charlie Looker of Psalm Zero, Black Anvil sound like they’re running with a pack rather than striking out on their own. And when frontman/bassist Paul Delaney screeches, he hits so close to Carcass frontman Jeff Walker you have to wonder if Delaney is doing an homage.
It isn’t until the third and title track that the album suddenly opens up. Where many black metal acts overplay their hand when it comes to mood, resulting in exaggerated, even comical, attempts at drama, Black Anvil make a genuine appeal to the emotions as the title track ebbs and flows, its heavy buildups placed ever-so-carefully in relation to serene sections where acoustic guitars function as so much more than just unplugged electrics. Songs like this usually expose bands as trying too hard, but “As Was” unfolds with effortless grace.
Going even further on “Nothing,” Black Anvil follow a smoky keyboard section worthy of Yes artist Roger Dean with a highway-bound rook groove reminiscent of shredding icon Joe Satriani’s “Summer Song.” The band even channels its inner David Lynch with the eerie twang that introduces “Two Keys: Here’s the Lock.” Such moves might carry a whiff of ironic perversion if they didn't blend in so well.
Like Celtic Frost before them, Black Anvil conjure a profound darkness that isn't necessarily rooted in hatefulness or negativity. It’s been a long, long time since Satan became for black metal what cars and sex are to rock’n’roll, and Black Anvil don't even directly refer to the devil on As Was. Instead, they repeatedly address the presence of vaguely supernatural entities they refer to only as “he” and “she”—“She speaks to me/I can hear her faintly/She whispers, she screams/a name unspoken” Delaney sings on “May Her Wrath Be Just.”
“On Forgotten Ways” refers to a “beast” that “writhes in agony/Beside me, within me/A part of me.” The lyrics never have to get overly specific to make it clear that Black Anvil are channeling real-life struggles. In that way, As Was aims far beyond the sophomoric black-metal fare that uses Satan as a way of saying “fuck you” to world. And while the interpretation is left to the listener, Black Anvil manage to be thoroughly convincing with As Was, an album whose lyrical opacity strengthens the versatility of the music, and vice-versa. | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | January 11, 2017 | 7.5 | 84e7eaf1-074a-4144-a1a0-bc86331c5bae | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | 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 Photek’s 1997 debut, a breathtaking, transcendent drum’n’bass album that changed the language and landscape of the genre. | 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 Photek’s 1997 debut, a breathtaking, transcendent drum’n’bass album that changed the language and landscape of the genre. | Photek: Modus Operandi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/photek-modus-operandi/ | Modus Operandi | The kid had been standing in the corner of the record store for a good while, soaking up the sound of the jungle 12"s spinning on the shop’s turntables, when he approached the counter with a puzzled observation. “I’ve been listening for half an hour,” he said to the shopkeeper, “and every tune’s got the same drums.”
It would have been easy to scoff at the comment, to write it off as the uninformed perspective of a newbie—it was, after all, the early 1990s—or the opinion of a cloth-eared contrarian. How many times have electronic music fans heard a similar gripe? It all sounds alike. Every song has the same beat. I’ve been listening to this DJ for half an hour and I don’t think he’s changed the record once.
Put yourself in the clerk’s shoes and you might imagine responding with a heavy sigh, If you’re looking for an Oasis record, HMV is across the street. Or maybe, more charitably: Mate, that’s the way jungle is supposed to sound. Here’s a Reinforced comp and a rave flyer—come talk to me next week.
But recalling the exchange a few years later, the man behind the counter that day—Rupert Parkes, better known as the celebrated drum’n’bass savant Photek—had a different reaction. “I couldn’t really argue with that, it was true!” he told Muzik magazine in 1996. “Everyone uses the same breaks. It’s very rare to find a new break which is really worth using. They’re drying up. It’s like oil, it’s not going to go on forever, so you’ve got to look for alternative sources.”
Parkes certainly seemed like someone who had discovered a game-changing new power supply. He had a critically acclaimed EP, The Hidden Camera, under his belt, along with a freshly signed five-album deal with Virgin that would soon take the 24-year-old producer from St Albans, 20 miles northwest of London, to a seat behind the wheels of a series of sports cars (Lotus Elan, Ferrari 348, Porsche Carrera S) in quick succession. If the ubiquitous breakbeats then clogging up record bins were the equivalent of fossil fuels—archaic, polluting, the stuff of dead dinosaurs—Photek’s 1997 debut LP, Modus Operandi, would appear to be powered by something more like cold fusion: a breathtaking, mind-bending rhythmic force that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
Jungle had reached peak breakbeat remarkably fast. The genre had only been around for a couple of years, the latest step in a rapid-fire evolution that had begun with the arrival of American house and techno upon the UK’s shores in the mid-to-late 1980s. When rave culture took off, British dance music was a hodgepodge of inputs: Black American house and techno; vintage soul, disco, and rare groove; Belgian and Italian house; Jamaican dub and reggae; and—crucially—hip-hop, both American originals and Brit imitations.
Working with rudimentary samplers and Atari computers, UK producers molded cut-up loops of funk records like the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” and Lyn Collins and James Brown’s “Think (About It)” into the backbone of British dance music. The acid-house derivative called hardcore was a form of collage, essentially, cutting up choice bits from other sources—hip-hop records, house anthems, children’s television shows—and Frankensteining them into ragtag beasts held together by looped breakbeats. In the first few years of the ’90s, as hardcore’s riotous, anything-goes energy gradually channeled into the controlled rush of the sound known as jungle, a select few breaks got used over and over, becoming part of the genre’s lingua franca.
The limited pool of breakbeats was part of what made jungle so dynamic: Producers were forced to make do with what they had. Working against the limitations of the era’s primitive digital technology, they found novel ways of slicing and dicing up the drums. Stuttering, repeating, reversing. Kinking up the syncopation, adding filters or reverb to individual hits. Combining different breaks so that drummers in different rooms and different years were suddenly jamming together. Breakbeat science cut across the temporal and spatial planes, no more so than when Goldie’s Rufige Cru pioneered the concept of time-stretching—that is, changing the pitch of a sample without changing its tempo, or vice versa—on the 1992 single “Terminator.” The title was a reference to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about an assassin sent from the future—the perfect conceit for a song that split open the rules of space-time with the express purpose of laying wreckage to the dancefloor.
Jungle’s early years gave way to an arms race in audio technology and studio know-how; producers vied to outdo one another as they concocted progressively more elaborate iterations of the same hoary breaks. By the middle of the ’90s, the genre was splitting in different directions. A group of artists with roots in Jamaican soundsystem culture invented ragga jungle. Another faction coalesced around the rugged aggression of the “Amen” break, with its battered and bloodied snares. (In Ben Marcus and Carl Loben’s 2021 history Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum & Bass, the techstep producer Optical called 1995 “an Amen-chopping nightmare—everywhere you went, there were ten thousand Amen snares.”) Still another crew, led by the bespectacled LTJ Bukem, was moving in a mellower direction, pairing smooth, rolling rhythms with jazzy keys and new-age imagery. Goldie, one of the scene’s leading figures, was aiming outward: The eponymous opening track of his 1995 debut, Timeless, was a 21-minute suite that encompassed all the grandiose sprawl of progressive rock—part rave epic, part planetarium laser show.
Photek didn’t fall into any of these camps, even if he had allegiances across many of them. In 1997, Parkes told Muzik, “When jungle split, I was standing in the middle, so I stayed where I was.” In fact, he turned inward, directing his attention not to the broad sweep of the cosmos but the molecular makeup of his percussion, every beat a scale model of whirling subatomic particles.
Before he was an atom-smashing breakbeat physicist, Rupert Parkes was just another teenager raving in darkened warehouses. He had grown up on a mix of hip-hop, soul, funk, and reggae. But around 1989, as he listened to late-night broadcasts emanating from nearby pirate transmitters, he began hearing bits and pieces of his favorite music jumbled together into rough-hewn, hyperkinetic new forms. Gradually, the common denominator of these unruly hybrids came into focus: the breakbeat.
Parkes’ first raves—London’s Telepathy, in the industrial hinterlands of Marshgate Lane, where he witnessed Jumpin’ Jack Frost dropping blistering acid house and hardcore, and then Labyrinth in Dalston Lane—were trials by fluid: So much sweat dripped from the warehouse ceilings, he thought someone had spit on him. But the experience was addictive. After moving to the town of Ipswich, 85 miles northeast of London, in 1992, he poured his savings into a Roland W-30 sampling keyboard and spent the next six months deciphering its secrets. When he wasn’t squinting into the machine’s minuscule LED screen and saving samples onto floppy disks, he was hanging around Ipswich’s Essential Selection, a record shop whose owner, Rob Solomon, had begun banging out his own breakbeat hardcore records under the alias Origination.
Soon, Parkes was collaborating with Solomon on tracks like 1992’s “Sensation,” a slinky hardcore roller that balanced breathless snare chops, sped-up rave stabs, and ragga taunts of “Rude bwoy!” with unusually contemplative Rhodes keys. The music was evolving practically on a week-to-week basis in those days, and Parkes right along with it. Origination’s 1993 single “Make Ya Wanna Do Right” offset layered breakbeats with the dreamy synth pads that would become a hallmark of ambient jungle; “Out of This World,” which rounded out the B-side of the same record, poked into the shadows of what some were calling “darkside,” driven by dizzyingly cut-up snares and cloaked in an eerie metallic sheen.
Over the next few years, Parkes was wildly prolific, turning out scores of tracks under aliases like Studio Pressure, Synthetics, Code of Practice, Aquarius, the Truper, the Sentinel, Phaze 1, and Photek. It didn’t take long for Parkes’ signature to codify itself in the undulating layers and beckoning atmospheres of tunes like 1995’s “Drift to the Centre,” released as Aquarius. Utilizing a pile-driving “Amen” break and some dramatic gongs, it borrowed its watery keys from a recent 12" on downbeat trailblazers Mo Wax, its whispered vocal hook from a vintage Timothy Leary record, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Baby, baby” from a Quincy Jones-produced electro-funk track from the ’80s—a mixture of genres and eras that underscored Parkes’ resourcefulness and vision as a sampler.
Although Parkes was as influenced by techno as he was jungle—in a 1995 Muzik feature, he namechecks Berlin dub-techno pioneers Basic Channel and IDM stalwarts the Black Dog—he didn’t have access to techno’s synthesizers. Instead, he made resourceful use of his sampler, grabbing choice bits from his favorite records and using envelopes and filters to sculpt them into an approximation of the textures he was looking for. “I just thought, If I get this saw string and EQ it the right way, and put a reverb on it, then it’s going to sound like that sound on a Carl Craig record,” he told Renegade Snares’ authors. “There was a much easier way: just buy that keyboard and you’ll be able to replicate that very easily. But none of that occurred to me, because I had no formal intro to making electronic music.”
By 1995, the self-taught producer was nearing the peak of his powers. That year, Photek—which was fast becoming his principal alias—released a string of now legendary 12"s: “Seven Samurai”/“Complex” and “U.F.O.”/“Rings Around Saturn,” for his own Photek label; the Natural Born Killa EP, for scene kingpin Goldie’s Metalheadz; and, finally, “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu (Two Swords Technique),” his debut for Science, a new electronic sub-label of Virgin.
Without losing an iota of soundsystem punch, Photek’s tracks were beginning to feel like movies in miniature. As a sound designer, Parkes experimented with Foley-like effects: water droplets, birdsong, atmospheres coaxed from brushed metal and rubbed glass. He could be wildly inventive: A martial arts fan, he mimicked the sound of a throwing star by whipping a bicycle chain above his head. For “Rings Around Saturn,” he recorded the sound of rainfall and wind chimes outside his house. For another track, he rubbed the record he wanted to sample on the carpet in order to build up a crackling electrostatic charge. He told The Wire, “I’m into that old, dirty sound. My album will probably come out on a CD and sound like a 78 record.” (Somewhere, a young Burial was taking notes.)
As Photek’s work became more complex, it opened up new expressive realms—like the inky, destabilizing minimalism of “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu,” where the snare never seems to fall in the same place twice, or “U.F.O.,” built around audio of a notorious flying-saucer incident, where his dancing drums imitate the momentum-defying movements of extraterrestrial propulsion. On his debut album, he reached the apotheosis of his powers by stripping down his drums as never before.
Recorded back in St Albans, where he’d grown up, and released in 1997, Modus Operandi originally bore the working title Reverse Kids—a nod, perhaps, to Parkes’ fondness for switching up the direction of his beats, flipping them back and forth so often that time seemed to stand still even as it kept hurtling forward. But the name Modus Operandi was even more apropos. It came from Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: When a sergeant asks Al Pacino’s character, a sorrowful cop with no illusions about his opponents, what the criminals’ M.O. is, Pacino shoots back in his trademark rasp, “Their M.O. is that they’re good.”
The bone-dry assessment epitomized Parkes’ desire to prove his mettle in an intensely competitive scene. That’s exactly what Modus Operandi is: a shot across the bow—a demonstration of Parkes’ virtuoso skill, as well as his determination to take drum’n’bass, as the more intricate iterations of the sound had increasingly come to be known, into unexplored territory. If Goldie’s Timeless, as many have noted over the years, was the drum’n’bass equivalent of Pink Floyd’s space-rock epic, Modus Operandi might as well have been an actual trip to the dark side of the moon, a voyage into the airless, lightless unknown.
Across 10 interrelated tracks that play out like movements of a suite, Modus Operandi plunges into a netherworld of skulking beats, viscous synths, and violent foreboding. It’s awash in seasick frequencies and bathed in the sounds of metal—scraping claws, clattering shell casings, glinting steel slicing through the penumbra. Neither strictly a club record nor, by any means, a chillout soundtrack, it suggests a mortal face-off between rhythm and atmosphere, each locked in the other’s death grip.
In a milieu that prized dexterity, audacity, and speed, the album’s opening track, “The Hidden Camera,” is a head-fake. After a sequence of Rhodes keys that sounds almost like a jazz player’s interpretation of church bells, the beat finally drops, but the song can’t really be called drum’n’bass. There’s no trace of any canonical breakbeat in the shuffling snares and cottony flams, and the herky-jerky cadence has little in common with the way jungle and drum’n’bass typically move. Most importantly, the tempo is slow—a pensive 126 beats per minute, compared to the 160-170 range that had become standard for the genre.
The world was awash in chilled grooves in 1997, but “The Hidden Camera” is hardly your typical downtempo. It bobs with a coiled intensity that telegraphs dangerous instability. The kick drum hits just before the downbeat, the snares dance around the backbeat, and all the drums in between are either rushing the beat, as though making up for lost time, or lagging behind. Unidentifiable noises, suggesting anguished dolphins, and grim sound effects, like a handgun being cocked, stoke the anxious mood. Yet for all this, the vibe is relaxed, thanks to a spare, noirish standup bassline and synth pads that swirl like the northern lights. The drum pattern plays out in two-bar phrases, but the keys and pads are drawn out in longer arcs that overlap at uneven intervals. Those overlapping phrases mean that your attention is always following the music in parallel yet contrasting paths—a hallmark of Photek’s looping sleight-of-hand.
If “Hidden Camera” initially suggested that perhaps Photek had gone soft, the album’s second track, “Smoke Rings,” proved exactly the opposite. Where the tempo of “The Hidden Camera” is hard to parse, the 170-bpm breaks in “Smoke Rings” roll out with determined force: The snares and kicks still flit around the edges of the beat, but enough of them hit their marks that the rhythm strides ahead in a practically headbanging 4/4. The atmosphere, meanwhile, intensifies the shadowy moods that Parkes had been painting in tracks like “Seven Samurai”—dark swirls of pewter and purple wafting like the smoke rings of the title.
Parkes indulges his own yen for concept-album sprawl with the next two tracks, “Minotaur” and “Aleph 1,” which are connected by an amorphous, noxious-sounding white-noise fizz, a sound that makes me think of a ghost melting through walls, or a spaceship slipping through the rings of Saturn. (In fact, he told Future Music in 2011, it was the loading-screen noise from the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit home computer from the 1980s that he’d learned to program as a boy.) Taken together, and following “Smoke Rings,” the two tracks demonstrate Parkes’ ability to put similar-sounding drums to radically different ends, eking from each break a distinct sense of movement—an unrepeatable, irreducible feeling of glide and velocity.
Just as the ZX Spectrum sound effects connect “Minotaur” and “Aleph 1,” a handful of sounds—reversed cymbals, plangent synth pads—connect “Aleph 1” to “124,” rounding out the idea of the album’s A-side as a unified movement. “124,” titled for its BPM tag, is slow and woozy. “I felt it was a big deal to do a song at a different tempo,” Parkes said. “Everything was that militant at that time. It was like if you used the wrong bassline, you were rubbish. And you’d have to work for like a year to get your credibility back.” Like the similarly paced “The Hidden Camera,” “124” maintains a conversation with the downbeat sounds developing on Mo Wax at the time. (In fact, Parkes almost signed to the label.) But unlike the cool jazz influences of “The Hidden Camera,” “124” is a skeletal hybrid of electro’s punchy 808s and jungle’s knotted switch-ups—as severe, in its terse claps and shadowboxing kicks, as Photek’s most breakneck roller. Later, on the B-side, he pulls the tempo even lower: The title track is a 100 BPM jazz-funk opus for standup bass, crystalline rimshots, and even an entirely unexpected foray into salsa piano—deployed, as per Photek’s wont, in such a way that what feels like the downbeat of the phrase falls on the upbeat, accentuating the song’s already gravity-defying air.
The B-side plays out much like the A-side, darting and weaving between contrasting styles while sticking to a carefully reduced palette. Fast and snapping, “Axiom” turns an incidental squiggle of wah-wah guitar into the main character of a vignette that’s mischievous, cocky, and more than a little evil; the merciless, unrelenting “Trans 7” echoes the brutally reduced snare workouts that were coming into vogue in the subgenre known as techstep, though the way Parkes switches up the accents, seeming to turn the beat inside out with every Moebius-strip phrase, is classic Photek. (“Trans 7” is also cloaked in evocative vinyl hiss, but this time it wasn’t exactly on purpose; at the last minute, during the album mastering, he decided to swap the song in for “Ni – Ten – Ichi – Ryu,” and since he didn’t have the DAT on him, they mastered directly from his well-worn dubplate.)
Parkes was still using some conventional breakbeats when he recorded Modus Operandi, but he was also crafting his own, programming his rhythms out of “single-shot” drum samples—kicks, snares, shakers, hi-hats, and so on. He even hired session drummers to play individual drums at different velocities, building his own sample library out of their performances; he did the same with bassists. It was all part of his desire to get out ahead of the pack. “I’m planning to never use any breaks that have been used by anyone else,” he’d told The Wire in 1996. “Just make breaks from scratch, use them on a track and never touch them again.”
With “KJZ” he dips back into the bins, yet it’s his tour de force of drum programming: Cobbled together out of a DAT’s worth of crate-dug drum sounds that techno-jazz producer Kirk Degiorgio had passed him, it collages phrases by Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Courtney Pine’s drummer Mark Mondesir, and others into a no-holds-barred display of rhythmic prowess—a veritable cascade of jazz drumming chopped into tiny pieces, spread across the stereo field, and backlit by rosy synths and acoustic bass, like a kaleidoscope of tiny, jagged crystals. As though acknowledging that he’d said all he could on the drums, album closer “The Fifth Column” is the record’s most minimalistic track, just diamond-hard snares galloping against velvety blackness, tracing corkscrewing paths through the suffocating emptiness.
Modus Operandi made Parkes one of drum’n’bass’s most celebrated producers, a visionary on par with ambitious creators like Goldie and Roni Size. He was tapped to remix Dr. Octagon, Everything But the Girl, Björk, even David Bowie. In 2000, as though determined not to be confined by the strictures of drum’n’bass, he switched direction with Solaris, branching out into techno and house. But he never finished that five-album deal; he eventually bought himself out of his contract, and though he has spent more than two decades scoring films in Hollywood and remains intermittently active in dance music—a series of dubstep-influenced productions in the early 2010s, a DJ-Kicks mix in 2012—he’s never come close to matching the singularity of Modus Operandi.
That’s understandable; the album is one of those right-time, right-place, right-person affairs where a musician testing the limits of their talents happens to coincide with a genre primed for a quantum leap. Parkes showed that drum’n’bass, as an idea, could transcend the narrow vocabulary of its best-known breaks. His M.O. was that he was good. And on this album, dropped at a moment of maximum flux in his chosen medium, he was unstoppable. | 2024-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Virgin | March 31, 2024 | 8.8 | 84ec1015-83fd-4bd0-87a1-c35b0e2b364f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
New Zealand's Salad Boys are precisely what you'd expect from the land of Flying Nun—a jangly, cerebral, experimental pop group, a bit shambly, with understated vocals buried in the mix and the bright guitar work pushed to the front. | New Zealand's Salad Boys are precisely what you'd expect from the land of Flying Nun—a jangly, cerebral, experimental pop group, a bit shambly, with understated vocals buried in the mix and the bright guitar work pushed to the front. | Salad Boys: Metalmania | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20877-metalmania/ | Metalmania | Christchurch, New Zealand's Salad Boys are precisely what you'd expect from the land of Flying Nun and Xpressway: a jangly, cerebral, experimental pop group, a bit shambly, with understated vocals buried in the mix and the bright guitar work pushed to the front. They’ve performed as David Kilgour of the Clean’s backing band, and they instantly and seamlessly fit into the legacy Kilgour helped establish; their debut album, Metalmania, feels less like an homage to New Zealand’s 1980s underground and more like a lost release from that time period ready to be unearthed by the record collectors of the future.
When Metalmania is good, it's nearly transcendent, as much as a pop album can be. The melodic kick in the last minute of opener "Here's No Use" is as bracing as sunlight slanting through dust-motes on a beautiful day, and "Dream Date", the album's first single, is driving, energetic, and charming. Later single "No Taste Bomber" is perfectly noisy, just so slightly psychedelic, one of those songs it’s impossible not to nod your head to on first listen (and it only gets further under one’s skin the more one listens). "I’m a Mountain" is crafted so tautly that the chanted lyric "I won’t let you fuck it up" takes on new dimensions with each repetition. "Hit Her and Run" takes a while to build: though it feels like initially it might grow into a Byrds-like California country song, it turns on its heel into a thick wall of distortion.
What Metalmania is slightly short on is the underlying grit present in much of the work of Salad Boys' forebears, one of the elements that kept even the poppiest of the Flying Nun bands (the Bats, the Chills, Able Tasmans) from sounding too cloying. Existential sadness haunts so much of New Zealand’s indie pop but there are three or four tracks on Metalmania that feel like dreamy filler, tracks so airy that they never quite make the emotional impact they could or should. There isn’t quite enough dissonance to them, not enough low end, not enough movement, not enough curiosity. Having similar tempos and chord structures, these filler songs bleed into one another; their grounding is too stable, too comfortable.
Since the memorable tracks on Metalmania are so good, the tracks that don’t quite rise to the occasion feel all the more frustrating. Yes, this is a debut album for a relatively young band (they’ve been around less than three years), and to hold Salad Boys to such a standard might feel a little unfair, but they’ve proven themselves capable of holding their own with the best indie pop their country has to offer. The fact that they’ve set the bar so high for themselves is, in the end, a testament to how exquisite their songwriting at its best can be. | 2015-09-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Trouble in Mind | September 3, 2015 | 6.8 | 84ec659a-6f06-403d-9d05-daf622a2b701 | JJ Skolnik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jj-skolnik/ | null |
On his chic, adventurous, hybrid-pop debut, Benjamin Lyman is a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a voice fit for the mainstream yet made for the arthouse | On his chic, adventurous, hybrid-pop debut, Benjamin Lyman is a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a voice fit for the mainstream yet made for the arthouse | 1010Benja: Ten Total | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1010benja-ten-total/ | Ten Total | The first sound you hear on Benjamin Lyman’s debut album as 1010Benja, Ten Total, is either a throat clearing or a deadpan laugh, an announcement or a provocation. A symphony of programmed horns and strings comes in and Benja begins barking and cooing, sheeshing and coughing, shouting ad-libs—“Hey, man! Hey!”—and unleashing a string of effortless vocal runs. A gunshot pops; an engine revs. Then sirens and bit-crushed battlefield FX swallow the song, leaving nothing but shrapnel. Playful, strange, and surprisingly moving, it’s the perfect introduction to Benja’s oddball brilliance: a world-weary optimist and DIY maximalist with a sinewy, astonishing voice meant for the mainstream yet made for the arthouse.
Ten Total delivers on years of anticipation and promise for a transcendent talent who’s remained mostly anonymous since the start of his career. When Pitchfork called the Kansas City singer and producer “one of 2018’s most promising artists,” he’d only put out three songs. His first EP, Two Houses, released on the heels of this acclaim, suggested a burgeoning star on the cusp of his best work. But as quickly as Benja appeared, he vanished. He’s dropped a few singles in recent years, but the initial hype, faintly redolent of House of Balloons-era the Weeknd and Nostalgia, Ultra-era Frank Ocean, has all but dissipated. It’s easy to conclude that the 34-year-old Benja missed his moment.
If Ten Total proves anything, it’s that Benja’s just fine occupying his own self-defined stratosphere. Though his sound has plenty of precedents—his voice a supercharged hybrid of Jeremih and Justin Timberlake, his rangy production pulling from ’90s Björk and early 2010s Kanye—it’s unmistakably his, unique in its agglomeration. One moment he’s rapping with kinetic ease over a slippery Acid Rap-type beat (“Peacekeeper”), the next he’s belting a glamorous hook over horns and strings and clattering cymbals (“H2HAVEYOU”). Ten Total glides between neo-soul, alt-R&B, drill, gospel, trap, and radio-ready pop while Benja obliquely circles a set of core themes: love and redemption, gratitude and faith, loss and deliverance.
His voice, pliable and precise, allows him to flit effortlessly between moods and styles. “Peacekeeper” and “Penta,” for instance, are skeletal freestyles whose nonchalance gives them a curious gravitas. In the former, he balances humor with wisdom, dashing off lines about “trusting hoes,” watching Star Trek, and reading Alan Moore before triumphantly spitting, “I had to go get it, I couldn’t fold/I had to get up, I couldn’t be told.” On “Penta” he repeats a bar about feeling stupid before groaning, scatting, and making a noise that can only be described as a chortle. It’s invigorating, and funny, to hear Benja stretch his voice to its weirdest depths, à la Playboi Carti or Tom Waits. When the album’s more robust songs materialize, like the warm electro-R&B strutter “Twin” or the searing ballad “Waterworks,” the breadth of his talent reveals itself. Benja could make a cleaner, more straightforward pop or R&B album—he certainly has the voice for it. Instead he dabbles with different forms and flows, playing with bright hues and gummy textures to create his own twisted sense of cohesion.
But when Benja uncorks his voice and goes full pop star, like on “Waterworks” or the show-stopping “I Can,” you sort of wonder why he doesn’t do it all the time. The latter is a passionate, genuinely moving guitar-pop ballad about the fallibility of commitment, about learning to love someone even when it’s hard. Though his writing isn’t exactly revelatory, Benja’s the type of vocalist who really makes you feel what he’s singing; he emotes at such a high frequency that his lyrics function less as literal directions to meaning and more like artfully constructed cairns, reminders that wherever you are is right where you need to be.
Because the moment you begin asking those big questions—what does this song mean? What is this album about?—Benja’s once again huffing and hmphing and hooing and haaing, which he does for over a minute after “I Can’s” guitar solo. He seems to be channeling something words can’t always capture: wonderment, maybe, or provenance. “I need voodoo in my life,” he chants on the album’s closer, perhaps his most direct statement of purpose. Keep the hype and bright lights, he seems to be saying. Just give me room to sing. | 2024-03-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Three Six Zero | March 28, 2024 | 8.6 | 84effe69-c2fa-431d-b16c-ec5c919a9aa9 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Instead of a blistering indictment, the Seattle bubblegum rock quartet Tacocat's NVM throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics—the male gaze, menstruation, seasonal affective disorder—that might otherwise induce rage blackouts. | Instead of a blistering indictment, the Seattle bubblegum rock quartet Tacocat's NVM throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics—the male gaze, menstruation, seasonal affective disorder—that might otherwise induce rage blackouts. | Tacocat: NVM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19049-tacocat-nvm/ | NVM | Is misandry a growing threat to our society? Catcalling women on the street: a socially acceptable form of flattery? Do you have an allergy to certain delicious herbal tea blends? If you said yes to any of these questions, the members of Tacocat are not your friends, but you might end up liking them anyway. Though they've been around since 2007, the Seattle quartet are relatively new to a wider audience. Over the past few months, they've been expanding upon their longtime underground reputation as a gutsy bubblegum surf-rock outfit bolstered by an adorable meme, some goofy Y2K nostalgia, and—above all—an unparalleled feminist wit that's hard to hate, even if you're the target.
It's born of practice: Tacocat's Hardly Art debut, the ironically sunshiny NVM, is hardly their first foray into the satire game. Back in 2012, vocalist Emily Nokes and bassist Bree McKenna were the pair of masterminds behind "Men Who Rock," the now-legendary cover feature of local Seattle weekly The Stranger that brilliantly skewered the music media's objectification of female musicians. Two years later, NVM—an abbreviation for "nevermind" coined by the post-Nirvana AOL generation—has become an extension of that tradition, turning just the right cheerful screws on haters from all corners of their hegemonic hellscape.
Whether it's the male gaze ("Hey Girl") or menstruation ("Crimson Wave"), seasonal affective disorder ("Bridge to Hawaii") or becoming a woman ("Psychedelic Quinceañera"), or even just hometowns that have a collective aneurysm every time it snows ("Snow Day")—no vexation is safe from the sprightly melodies of Tacocat. "In my experience, making jokes about that kind of stupid stuff has made people check themselves more than when people yell at them about it," Nokes said in a recent interview. So instead of a blistering indictment, she and her friends made an album that throws a double-handful of confetti in the face of topics that might otherwise induce rage blackouts, a light-hearted reminder that sometimes the best way to defeat an enemy is to make them sheepishly laugh.
Like many of their compatriots, Tacocat draw as heavily on 60s surf rock and girl-group radio hits as they do on 90s and 00s MTV alt-rock rotation ("Quinceañera" is bolstered by horns worthy only of Cake), but where peers have settled for simple, fest-ready party rock, Tacocat use those influences to complement a musical comedy that's effortless and immediately justifies its existence: I didn't realize I needed a song about hating my bus line with an all-consuming passion, yet "FU #8" delivers like a Sky Mall patent direct from heaven. Almost every track, save the disappointing-only-by-comparison "Alien Girl" and opener "You Never Came Back", serves a highly specific, completely unromantic purpose, especially in the lives of women: they're simple theme songs, #realtalk jingles to tuck away in the personal artillery that gets you through a particularly dumb day.
And though it seems downright insane when paired with the actual sounds contained on the album, most of NVM, despite its humor, is still sincerely concerned with the bullshit inherent in power structures, as much as a Bikini Kill or a Sleater-Kinney or even a White Lung. It lacks the sonic weight that so easily matches those feminist frustrations, but it would be foolish to want such things of a band like Tacocat, because there are so few places in which to find sentiments like these in such a refreshingly sunny musical context. The only anchor the album really needs is the certainty that one day your world will treat you like utter garbage, and only the sarcastic irreverence of Tacocat can lift you out of your vortex of suckitude. Cheeky but not bratty, NVM leaves a statement behind without preaching or scolding (save perhaps on "This Is Anarchy," a satirical, natural mate to millennial eye-rollers like Bent Shapes' "Brat Poison"). It's simple and approachable, but its wit gives it longevity—at least, until a song about "communists in the summer house" is passé. | 2014-02-25T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2014-02-25T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | February 25, 2014 | 7.4 | 850a54f9-8379-4d47-bcd0-416ed4466201 | Devon Maloney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/devon-maloney/ | null |
The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. You can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing. | The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. You can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing. | The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21317-the-complete-matrix-tapes/ | The Complete Matrix Tapes | The Velvet Underground were pioneers with blazing heads, Jesus' sons and daughter, the progenitors of seemingly everything that came after them. Assessing the four studio albums they released between 1967 and 1970 on the Pitchfork scale is like measuring a yardstick. They were also a perpetually struggling touring rock group like any other, playing extended engagements at large and small clubs all over the East and West Coasts, often two shows a night, to an audience of people who mostly just wanted to dance. The Complete Matrix Tapes is a document of that side of the band: Supposedly, it's a collection of the 42 songs the band played in two nights at a 100-capacity San Francisco club, The Matrix, some of which formed the bulk of 1969: The Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed 40 years ago.
The conventional wisdom is that the Velvet Underground were at their best on stage, and the high points of The Complete Matrix Tapes bear that out. The peculiarly thin sonics of Matrix owner Peter Abram's recordings don't do Maureen Tucker's caveman drumming any favors, but they make a serious case for Sterling Morrison as God-Emperor of Rhythm Guitarists. The first disc's magnificent "What Goes On", with Morrison and Lou Reed's guitars chattering together at breathless speed while Doug Yule hammers at an organ, is the wellspring for, among other things, the Wedding Present's entire catalogue; "Ocean" is the seed and the soil for both Low and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The version of the throwaway two-line rocker "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together" on disc two is utterly thrilling, and the hushed, droning "Heroin" later in that set is a solid 20 years ahead of its time. Both "White Light/White Heat" and "I'm Set Free" are much more dramatic and vivid here than in their studio incarnations.
That said, some of the Matrix box's extended vamps get draggy, and there's a lot of song duplication here: four versions apiece of "Some Kinda Love", "Heroin", and "We're Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together", three apiece of "There She Goes Again" and "I'm Waiting for the Man", two apiece of seven others. But The Complete Matrix Tapes is useful as a way to hear how the Velvets constantly reworked their repertoire. Yule later said of Reed that "there were times when he would invent or put together songs on the fly in a performance, and he'd just turn around and say, 'Follow me'". The bizarre take on "I'm Waiting for the Man" that opens the box is slowed down to a crawling blues, extended to 13 minutes with some seemingly extemporaneous new verses; "Lisa Says", which the group had recorded in a studio just a month earlier, has almost totally rewritten lyrics and an entirely new bridge. Their most protean song, "Sister Ray", turns up in a relatively relaxed, noodly 37-minute performance that's far from its face-melting White Light/White Heat incarnation.
This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top. Elliott Murphy's liner notes for *1969—*written in 1972, when the Velvet Underground were still a commercial nonentity with an enthusiastic but tiny cult—imagined a kid a hundred years later, in a "classical rock'n'roll class," listening to the Velvets and wondering what to make of them. We're close to halfway there now, and their place in the canon is secure, but we still haven't entirely figured them out. | 2015-12-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-08T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope / Polydor | December 8, 2015 | 8.5 | 850eb2a7-a391-4bc4-9cc6-3164444a9961 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Explosions in the Sky's sixth album, their best since 2003's The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, is a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. | Explosions in the Sky's sixth album, their best since 2003's The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, is a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. | Explosions in the Sky: The Wilderness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21686-the-wilderness/ | The Wilderness | Explosions in the Sky are the kind of band that you think about in terms of scale. There is the sheer size of their songs, but also of the group: They've sold out Radio City Music Hall and play larger concert halls (which is surprising for a rock band without a vocalist); they famously soundtracked "Friday Night Lights," a number of motion pictures, and their songs shows up on dozens of television shows. But their sixth album, The Wilderness, the first non-soundtrack collection since 2011's Take Care, Take Care, Take Care, feels remarkably small. Shifting inward and turning their gaze toward minutiae, the group still manages to create something that resonates in as grand a way, just via different means, and it's their best since 2003's The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place.
Like Cold Dead Place, The Wilderness gives you a sense of a landscape, but instead of a march towards a vast horizon, it feels like burrowing in to escape the cold. Those signature crescendos and climaxes are present, but just as often you find yourself contemplating near-silent electronic details or wisps of sound. On first listen The Wilderness sounds almost like a whisper; as you do dig in, the details grow and resonate. It's like taking a pause on a hike and realizing just how many sounds there are in what seemed like silence. The Austin band has been around since 1999, and you get the sense that they're searching for new paths to achieve their original goals.
For the most part, the songs feel segmented and self-contained, standalone compositions instead of pieces of an overall fabric. They return time again to distorted drums that sometimes feel like echoes in a cave, other times like a crumbling landslide, while the guitars are generally crystalline and precise, sometimes taking on the texture of strings. It resembles Inventions, guitarist Mark T. Smith's more electronic side project with Eluvium, blended with Explosions' usual dramatics.
"Disintegration Anxiety," which opens with chopped sounds, is the album's big anthem, and they take their time getting there; it's the fifth song out of nine. It's fitting that the title evokes the title of the Cure's landmark 1989 record—there's a similar sense of longing and a beautiful darkness at work here, too. You find the same atmosphere on "Losing the Light" as well—the quietest, most subterranean song on the album, it almost resembles a classical work or something by Tim Hecker, and it feels like spelunking in the dark and coming upon cluster of diamonds that help light your way.
The music is rarely "driving" in the usual sense of the group—it's meditative and okay with staying in one place. "The Ecstatics," for instance, has clicking, slow-motion electronic drums and the same bright, clean guitar as a number of the tracks, and moves in an aqueous slow motion with cold electronics that sound like fizzing water. There are upbeat moments, like "Tangle Formations," or "Infinite Orbit," which at first feels amorphous and ambient before suddenly catching fire. When it does finally open up, the effect is stunning.
Because the group has done so much soundtracking, it's difficult when listening to The Wilderness not to think of images that could go with these songs. Instead of making music for dramatic moments in football games, we're getting sunsets you'll remember a decade later, stumbling first kisses, half-heard car alarms during a comforting dream, that horribly unreal and frozen moment when you first hear a friend has died, walks alone at dusk, laying on your back and watching the constellations with the person you want to grow old with, the calm of seeing a loved one sleep. These songs feel personal. They tug at important moments. It's a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. Of all their records, it's ultimately the one that sounds the most like the image their band name evokes. But you're watching from a distance, and paying more attention to the person next to you than those colors smearing against the clouds overhead. | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | March 28, 2016 | 8 | 85142fda-3220-462d-9d20-dd7daff1c9c9 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Subtitled ”60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s,” this collection makes a fine argument for glam as punk-before-punk and speaks to the herd mentality of rock‘s heyday. | Subtitled ”60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s,” this collection makes a fine argument for glam as punk-before-punk and speaks to the herd mentality of rock‘s heyday. | Various Artists: All the Young Droogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-all-the-young-droogs/ | All the Young Droogs | The title of this glam rock box set is a cute twist on “All the Young Dudes,” the hit 1972 song Bowie gifted to Mott the Hoople. People, then and since, took it as an anthem for rock’s third generation—the kids who were babies when rock’n’roll first arrived, missed out on most of the ’60s, but craved a sound of their own in the ’70s. The Bowie/Mott/Roxy Music side of glam—literate and musically sophisticated—is not really what this collection is about, though. “Droog” is the true clue, a slang term for a teenage thug from A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of the Anthony Burgess novel. Scandalous upon its 1971 release, the film was blamed for a spate of copycat “ultraviolence” and chimed with existing UK anxieties about feral youth and rising crime: soccer hooliganism, skinhead “bovver boys” in steel-capped Doc Martens brutalizing hippies and immigrants, subcultural tribes warring on the streets.
All the Young Droogs: 60 Juvenile Delinquent Wrecks, Rock’N’Glam (And a Flavour of Bubblegum) From the ’70s largely celebrates the music that sublimated and safely vented the disorderly impulses of working-class kids in the not-so-Great Britain of the early ’70s. It’s packed with the coarse, rowdy rock whose shout-along choruses and stomp-along drums shook concert halls from foundations to rafters. Compiler Phil King’s focus, though, is not the huge-selling glitter bands like Slade or the Sweet, but the nearly-made-its and the never-stood-a-chancers: “Junkshop glam,” as collectors and dealers call this stuff, a term that exudes the musty aroma of digging through cardboard boxes of dirt-cheap singles.
Glam as punk-before-punk is an argument convincingly made on the first disc of Droogs, titled “Rock Off!” Ray Owen’s Moon’s “Hey Sweety” launches things with a stinging attack and pummeling power just a notch behind the Stooges, although the oddly phrased title-chorus diminishes the menace slightly. Most Droogs inclusions are fairly frivolous affairs lyrically—anthems of lust, celebrations of rocking out—but Third World War anticipate punk themes with the proletarian plaint and Strummer-like sandpaper vocals of “Working Class Man.” Hustler forge a link between the Faces and Cockney Rejects with “Get Outta My ’Ouse,” which is like Magic’s “Rude” recast as pub boogie: the hilarious lament of a longhair hassled by his girl’s disapproving Dad. In Supernaut’s “I Like It Both Ways,” the bisexual protagonist is confused by stereophonic propositions from a girl in the left speaker and a boy in the right. Other highlights include the chrome-glistening grind of James Hogg’s “Lovely Lady Rock” and the grating lurch of Ning’s “Machine,” akin to being run over by a bulldozer driven by a caveman.
Things stay stompy and simplistic on the second disc, titled “Tubthumpers & Hellraisers,” but with a slight shift towards pop. On Harpo’s “My Teenage Queen,” a lithe, corkscrewing melody contrasts with a relentless beat, which is interrupted by an unexpected outbreak of hand-percussion like a belly-dancer abruptly jumping onstage to join the band. Frenzy’s “Poser” sneers sweetly and Simon Turner’s “Sex Appeal” is a delicious bounce of bubblegum. Compared with the ferocious first disc, though, this radio-friendly fare often feels flimsier, stirring those doubts familiar with similar archival enterprises: Is this really lost treasure? Or is it deservedly obscure?
Shrewdly, on the final disc “Elegance & Decadence,” King switches gears and zooms in on what some call “high glam”: the Bowie-besotted, Bryan Ferry-infatuated side of the genre, which appealed to older teenagers and middle-class students with its thoughtful lyrics, witty cultural references, and the exquisite styling of the clothes and record packaging. The backings favored by performers like John Howard, Paul St John, and Alastair Riddell are svelte and lissome, shunning the beefy power-chords and leaden kick drums in favor of strummed acoustic guitar and swaying rhythms. The vocal presence on these songs is likewise willowy and androgynous: sometimes an unearthly soar above the mundane, other times highly-strung and histrionic.
The most fetching specimens here in this post-Hunky Dory mode are Steve Elgin’s “Don’t Leave Your Lover Lying Around (Dear),” with its saucy asides about how “trade is looking good,” and Brian Wells’ archly enunciated “Paper Party.” Themes of fame and fantasy abound, with many owing a sizable debt to Bowie. “Criminal World,” by the debonair Metro—who described their style as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”—would be later covered by Bowie himself on 1983’s Let’s Dance, a well-deserved compliment. Even more genteel-sounding is “New York City Pretty,” which could be an outtake from Rocky Horror Picture Show, so closely does Clive Kennedy mirror Tim Curry’s phrasing.
Like other retroactively invented genres such as freakbeat, part of the appeal of junkshop glam is its generic-ness: the closeness with which artists conform to the rules of rock at that precise moment. In many cases, these performers were opportunists: a year or two earlier, they’d been prog or bluesy-rock artists. Some would later adopt New Wave mannerisms, swapping escapism and decadence for lyrics about unemployment and urban deprivation. Droogs does contain an example of glam juvenilia from a future prime-mover of punk: “Showbiz Kid” by Sleaze, the early band of TV Smith of the Adverts.
Although this kind of aesthetic flexibility seems suspect and unprincipled, it reveals a couple of things about rock. First, it points to a sameness persisting underneath all the style changes. From today’s remote vantage point, the differences—once so significant and divisive—between ’60s beat groups, bluesy boogie, heavy metal, glam, pub rock, and punk start to fade and a continuum of hard rock emerges. The dominant sound on Droogs is situated somewhere between the Pretty Things, Ten Years After, the Groundhogs, on one side, and the Count Bishops, Sham 69, Motörhead, on the other. I’ve picked British names but you could just as easily throw Steppenwolf, Grand Funk Railroad, and Black Flag in there, or for that matter, AC/DC.
The other thing that Droogs shows is that originality is both uncommon and overrated. Herd mentality, which is to say the willingness of the horde of proficient but not necessarily creative performers to be influenced by the rare innovators in their midst, is what actually changes the sound of the radio. It’s the arrival of the copyists that definitively establishes a new set of musical characteristics, performance gestures, and lyrical fixtures, as the defining sound of an era. Send in the clones, then, because sometimes you can’t get enough of a good thing. | 2019-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Cherry Red | January 29, 2019 | 7.4 | 8518aaab-1ca0-4abf-9093-f625e436a14b | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | |
This sumptuously packaged, limited-edition box set contains the complete works of the UK post-punk band, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members dissect their discography. | This sumptuously packaged, limited-edition box set contains the complete works of the UK post-punk band, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members dissect their discography. | This Heat: Out of Cold Storage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9158-out-of-cold-storage/ | Out of Cold Storage | This Heat were born in the years immediately preceding punk rock. Severe young men Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward were making things go pish-ding-whoosh on London’s free-improvising circuit and had links to the waning days of Canterbury’s whimsical and conceptual prog rock scene. So though punk riled them up-- as it riled up many under-30s lurking in the corners of London in the summer of 1976-- it’s unsurprising that what they produced in response sounds little like the Clash. They hooked up with “non-musician” Gareth Williams and took up in an abandoned meat locker dubbed Cold Storage. Like Can in their castle or Faust in their farmhouse, This Heat recorded endlessly at Cold Storage, editing the results down into (semi-) coherent chunks.
What This Heat produced there is a remarkable body of work, even in the context of creative abundance that was British post-punk. Hayward sang in a keening voice with audible debts to Robert Wyatt, but without the former Soft Machine leader's warmth and sentimentality. This Heat’s astringent combination of tape loops, coruscating sheet metal guitar, Krautrock-inspired groove, improvised noise, and Reagan/Thatcher-era political despair felt frigid to the touch. Listening today you can almost hear Cold Storage’s rusted pipes and crackled, mottled porcelain as captured in this new box set’s black-and-white photographs.
Out of Cold Storage contains the complete works of This Heat, along with a disc of live recordings and an informative booklet where the surviving members (Williams passed away in 2001) dissect their discography. It’s a sumptuously packaged, limited-edition, mail-order release, and since most of the material has long been available only as bootlegs or on mp3, the sound quality of these remasters is an obvious improvement.
Here are some much-hated rock critic words that are impossible to avoid when talking about This Heat: angular, spiky, jagged, shards, atonal. The brittle, scrabbling, squawking, scraping qualities of This Heat’s music come partially out of the band’s background in free improvisation. At the same time, the reversed voices and tea kettle ambience of a track like Deceit’s “Shrinkwrap” find kin in the rusty, industrial Ohio dada of Pere Ubu tracks like “The Book is on the Table”-- crude sound art with the implied violence of rock music.
And This Heat did rock. They were rarely funky, and Cold Storage feels as far from the Mississippi delta as Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. But “SPRQ” is as triumphant a rock song as any post-punk band ever wrote-- just two awkward chords ringing out stadium-sized. And live-- evidenced on the slightly murky sounding Live 80/81 but especially on Made Available, the disc of sessions they recorded for John Peel’s radio show-- they were a snarling, metallic machine.
Recorded from 1976 to 1978 and released the following year, This Heat is the sound of three avant-gardeners getting to grips with the mud and clay of rock. The album opens and closes with radio interference; Williams’ organ sounds like he’s playing it with his elbows. Much of it eschews songform entirely, drifting freely and unmoored. When it doesn’t-- as on “Not Waving”-- Hayward’s voice emerges from the mist of organs on like headlamps in fog with only a tidal clang to anchor the music. But then there’s a track like “Horizontal Hold”, thrashing like a prog rock power trio of cavemen.
“24 Track Loop” feeds a chunk of Hayward’s drumming into a harmonizer and what it spits out sounds, as many have pointed out, strangely like the pitchshifted drums of jungle nearly two decades later. It also sounds more than a bit like Miles Davis’ On the Corner. Indeed, the whole album twitches with the same urban dread as OTC, a creeping turn-of-the-decade horror-- the Cold War on the brink of nuclear meltdown, economic breakdown, conservatism (or outright fascism) on the rise, consumer complacency-- that found its most harrowing expression in This Heat’s second album.
Twenty-five years after its release Deceit feels more relevant than ever-- and not just because our national policy makers are currently playing chicken with Iran and its nuclear capabilities. More of a song suite than its predecessor, the album opens with “Sleep”, a nursery rhyme set to undulating reversed tape loops that envisions a society “cocooned in a routine of food” and hypnotized by television. “Cenotaph” twists a Civil War era standard, lamenting that “a kiss won’t mean goodbye/ When Johnny comes marching home.” When I first heard the album, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the song felt almost unbearably poignant. Now that more than 2,500 American soldiers and uncountable Middle Easterners have died in the current Iraq war, it has only grown sadder.
This Heat’s most expressly political record, Deceit contains references to Triumph of the Will, conflates Nazi rallies with the Roman Empire, and includes a song where the lyrics are simply a recitation of the American Declaration of Independence. It is a bleak, black record, and unlike other efforts of the time by PiL or Joy Division, there’s little redemption to be found in the run out grooves, very little light at the end of the tunnel. Its final track is called “Hi Baku Shyo”; its subtitle is “Suffer Bomb Disease”. And while we’re not dancing on the post-nuclear cinder just yet, one can’t help but feel that Deceit was re-released at precisely the right time.
Health and Efficiency is This Heat’s masterpiece. The title track is, in a complete turn of events for these doommongers, a hymn to the restorative powers of sunshine, and their most traditionally rocking song, at least until it veers off into an extended instrumental slalom with some of Hayward’s most intricate (and violent) drumming. “It seemed to be a quite radical idea to be healthy, happy, acknowledging the sun,” Hayward says in the liner notes. “We’ve all got the same bodies; it’s international.” The B-side, “Graphic/Varispeed”, is an extended experiment in tape loops and studio manipulation, as you might have guessed from the title.
The title track of Repeat is an extended take on the sound of “24 Track Loop”, re-edited in 1992. It’s 20 minutes of rhythm, a cycle of drums, handclaps, buzzing drones, and sharp jumpcuts that may be the band’s most Can and Miles-like moment. “Metal” is 23 minutes of murky metallic percussion, like a field recording of a drunken Asian drum troupe or a blacksmith’s shop, and “Graphic/Varispeed” makes a return appearance. Anyone who hears it will probably toss that new Liars album. There’s also Made Available, the aforementioned Peel Sessions disc, which contains versions of This Heat-era tracks that best their album versions. Live 80/81 is the most inessential disc here, like most live recordings for fans only.
A few months ago, I griped in a Pitchfork review of A Certain Ratio that the renewed interest in post-punk had sent labels scraping the barrel for “lost masterpieces.” I’d be fibbing, to say nothing of backsliding, if I claimed that the average listener needs every disc in Welcome to Cold Storage at the low, low asking price of nearly 100 of your hard-earned dollars. (This Heat is currently available as a standalone disc, with the others apparently to follow.) But anyone with the slightest interest in post-punk should shelve those plans to invest in the Konk reissue or the Definitive Medium Medium, fork over the seemingly high asking price, and wait the interminable length for ReR to mail it to you. | 2006-06-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | ReR | June 27, 2006 | 9 | 851deede-5c9c-46ef-a1ea-eff66169210e | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The disco-funk duo’s grown and sexy album sounds like a glossy recreation of an established style—minus some of the idiosyncrasy and fun. | The disco-funk duo’s grown and sexy album sounds like a glossy recreation of an established style—minus some of the idiosyncrasy and fun. | Chromeo: Adult Contemporary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chromeo-adult-contemporary/ | Adult Contemporary | Late-stage capitalism has many downsides, but hearing about them from Chromeo is a new one. On Adult Contemporary, billed as a grown-up survey of “what it means to be funky in your 30s and 40s,” David “Dave 1” Macklovitch and Patrick “P-Thugg” Gemayel offer mea culpas for situationship snafus, pine for the ex who could change their ways, and, on the Italo-inspired disco of “BTS,” lament the libido-sapping ills of burnout culture. “I need to confess,” Dave 1 concludes, “Sometimes rest can be better than sex.” He’s got a point, but coming from bloghouse’s class clowns it’s kind of a bummer.
On their albums Fancy Footwork and White Women, the Montreal disco-funk duo split the difference between roguish dirtbaggery and suited-and-booted sophistication. If their schtick ever felt overdone, then the duo were rolling their eyes harder. “Guys are all schmucks,” Dave 1 once said. “It would be funnier to embrace it.” Mixed by the New York DJ and Jessy Lanza collaborator Morgan Geist, the new album aims to correct the big-budget bloat and ill-fitting features of 2018’s Head Over Heels, and features La Roux as its sole guest. While a few songs here could be Chromeo canon, Adult Contemporary too often feels like a glossy recreation of their earlier sound that’s missing the idiosyncrasy and baked-in humor.
The album is at its best when the new outlook prompts a change-up of Chromeo’s sound. The yacht rock-inspired “Friendsnlovers” is a wistful sigh that you can imagine soundtracking the bittersweet ending of a Netflix romcom, and “Words With You” is a deadpan boogie through ’80s disco-rock punctuated with a rubbery bass groove and celebratory horns. But at other times, the album sags under an overly liberal lacquering. The introspective ballad “A Cut Above” dissolves into its pillowy synth pads, and the pensive “Waiting for a Star to Fall” soundalike “Lonesome Nights” simply makes you want to revisit Mylo’s (better) flip of it.
As much as the duo idolizes Bootsy Collins et al., Adult Contemporary feels like a well-made 2010s pastiche of disco-funk destined for a sponsored dance tent. (It’s as if the future-funk experiments of Thundercat and Steve Lacy—not to mention the pandemic-era disco explosion in pop—never happened.) The wry “Personal Effects” could be the title for a comedy of manners Noël Coward never wrote, but its retro flavor extends to its central figure of the “leave something behind” girl who sneakily “forgets” her phone charger at the narrator’s place. “Coda” feels like it primarily exists to showcase a punchline about “coda” sounding like “codependent,” trading in the lusty seductions of Chromeo’s funk forebearers for a buzzword cribbed from TikTok. Despite flashes of Adult Contemporary’s described maturity, the album generally prioritizes living large to the extent that, on the hi-NRG referencing “Ballad of the Insomniacs,” a maudlin insomniac wonders, “Where’s the party at?”
But Jagged Edge they are not. Over 52 minutes, Chromeo’s exhortations to vibe begin to feel as repetitive as their album art, which this time features the suited duo alongside a woman whose clothes have fallen off. (They’re not Roxy Music either.) As with Solange’s divine cameo on White Women, the highlight of Adult Contemporary comes when a guest takes center stage. La Roux’s appearance on “Replacements” feels like a parting of velvet curtains, as if everything before were a warm-up. “Tried so hard to get you out of my head,” she sings, before a sly, very funny plot twist. “Oh, I wish you had a sister instead.” In 30 seconds, she nails the precise balance of pathos, warmth, and humor that Chromeo spend the record chasing. | 2024-02-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-21T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | BMG | February 21, 2024 | 6.3 | 851e6963-e41a-4bec-bf79-1beba761487c | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a lost downtempo classic from 1993, a dreamy, fascinating chimera of styles and moods produced by the legendary Andrew Weatherall. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a lost downtempo classic from 1993, a dreamy, fascinating chimera of styles and moods produced by the legendary Andrew Weatherall. | One Dove: Morning Dove White | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/one-dove-morning-dove-white/ | Morning Dove White | The press, in the early ’90s, used a lot of conflicting, if creative, words to describe the music of One Dove. The Scottish band’s 1993 debut album, produced by the DJ and musician Andrew Weatherall, delighted many, disappointed some, and confounded others. Project X magazine, an American publication catering to ravers (which included infamous party monster Michael Alig on staff), put the band’s singer Dot Allison on the cover in a scuba diving suit and declared them to make “some of the most emotion-filled electronic music since the techno-revolution began.” The New York Times called their album “a juxtaposition of eerie, languorous electronics, bleary borderline dance music and quietly torchy pop songs.” The NME, though loquacious, was not convinced. They appreciated that while the band had a “vision of blasting mainstream pop sky high with clubland’s mighty beats and sun-drenched vibes,” ultimately Morning Dove White was “likely to lull you into a light coma.”
Were One Dove here to humanize the mechanical sound of acid house then taking over clubs? Or were their dreamy guitar solos meant to help future-proof the suddenly staid sound of British rock? Was singer Dot Allison a star or a snooze? Was everybody even listening to the same band? To that last point, based on the extensive amount of remixes they released, as well as early album leaks with alternate mixes, it’s possible that, no, they were not.
Regardless, in the 31 years since their sole LP Morning Dove White was released, not too many people have listened to any version of the album. It has been out of print for nearly 25 years, and, until recently, not on streaming services. To add insult to injury, the version available on streaming services now mistakenly repeats track six, “My Friend,” as track seven, “Transient Truth.” “Listen now,” sings Allison on that song, which, if you don’t have a physical copy, you’ll have to head to YouTube to hear, “If you take my words as promises, well then you can keep them.” At least they never felt like they owed anyone anything.
Undoubtedly some of the hype surrounding the album isn’t even of their own making: The band had persuaded Weatherall—renowned for his sledgehammering of genre barriers—to produce their debut. This was immediately after he’d worked with Primal Scream on their groundbreaking album, Screamadelica, which was released to great fanfare during the recording of Morning Dove White. That album’s massive swell, its groundbreaking blend of ecstatic rock guitar work and buoyant house music drum work, became Weatherall’s signature sound. He’d bring some of that in a more subdued form to Morning Dove White. That’s undeniable. Whether he also brought unmeetable expectations is up for debate.
Morning Dove White begins with “Fallen,” their breakout single. Legend has it, when One Dove—the trio of Allison, guitarist Jim McKinven, and keyboardist Ian Carmichel—was pursuing Weatherall, they met him at one of his DJ sets in Italy. They slipped him a copy of the “Fallen” single, which Weatherall played on the spot to warm reception. The next day, he played them Screamadelica demos on the beach before agreeing to collaborate. Fact or fantasy, a Mediterranean origin story is befitting. It often sounds like the music’s been bleached by the sun.
Weatherall has a cosmic sleight of hand that takes a song’s naked bombast and cools it with a lithe touch. He doesn’t reduce its power, just softens its edges. When Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie quietly coos that he’s “higher than the sun,” it has a churchlike echo that feels like a bad boy’s manipulation of holiness. On a more practical level, Weatherall really likes drums you play with your hands—congas, bongos, djembes. Both Screamadelica and Morning Dove White are dripping in Weatherallisms. But those expecting a repeat of Screamadelica misread the direction of his creativity. It moves in all directions at once, not linearly. If he made One Dove sound more like anyone, it’s themselves.
“Fallen” was written without Weatherall, though he did rework it for the album. But hearing the original (at least, one of the original of the three pre-Weatherall mixes) proves they didn’t need him to craft an ebullient slice of weirdness on their own. Playing the two versions, pre-Weatherall and post, back to back, you hear some subtle tweaks, but it’s more like Weatherall took the track and recommended cleansing it with incense. It’s still the same song, only tender. The original version included a spoken intro making clear the lyrical reference to “angel from this dream I have” is a nod to The Catcher in the Rye. On the version that opens the album, it’s been cut, as though he encouraged them to keep their cards just a little closer to their chest. A little mystery never hurt anyone.
To that point, the primary vocals on the song are whispers. Allison mostly doesn’t sing, and when she does, it’s buried in reverb. She talks hushedly about secrets. You can hear a tinge of her Scottish accent. “Don’t know why I’m telling you any of this,” she says as the song begins. It’s like she’s pulling you close for a tête-à-tête: listen up, this is important. “One thing is, don’t ever tell anyone I told you this.” Is she talking about One Dove itself? After a couple decades in relative obscurity, it feels like it.
Like most of the songs on Morning Dove White, “Fallen” is a dance track from a rock band, not the other way around. Never the other way around. You can always sense their roots in regular old guitar music as part of a song’s structure—there’s often a hint of reggae in the guitars and drums—but it’s not what thrills about a track. That’s in the discovery of everything else they can do to accent it. Listening to the album could be a portal to rave culture, soul, dub, trip-hop, even the radio pop of the era. The music vibrates with so much excitement that you get the feeling, for the members of the band, still so young, making Morning Dove White was as much about discovery as it was about declaration. “We each bring a lot of ingredients,” Allison told Spin in 1993, “but together we bake a new cake.”
With so much going on, it’s a miracle the album never manages to trip over its own feet. The songs, long and sprawling, move in and out of genres with little regard for consistency. But they all congeal. Track two, “White Love - Guitar Paradise Mix” opens with a lurching guitar solo, a minute and 45 seconds of something that sounds lifted from Metal Machine Music. Then hip-hop drums break out and trippy keys turn the whole thing into Deee-Lite worship. Track three, “Breakdown - Cellophane Boat Mix” (what is a cellophane boat?), opens with more hip-hop drums accented by a lovely piano run. Dubby bass enters, then the sound of a record scratching before the whole thing turns on a dime at what sounds like the ding of the oven announcing it’s been preheated. Allison saunters in gently. “Breakdown and cry,” she croons over the returned piano chords and the whoosh of an egg shaker. The chorus ends and the oven dings once again. Then a man intones what sounds like a Laurence Fishburne line in The Matrix, a movie still several years in the future. “Against the black-blue sky, the shadow of the dove. The gentle wind’s diversion. An open mind’s excursion.” Allison finishes things up with a breakup lament and a shout-out to the moon. “Sirens” makes room for two solos, one on a bluesy organ solo and the other on an accordion. It wraps things up with a twangy guitar strut. What even is this music?
Allison has referenced the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as a touchstone for Morning Dove White; McKinven the music of dub originator King Tubby. Those are two vastly different source materials, though what they share is a love of resonance and reverb, creation of a vastness as funneled through the mixing board. Weatherall is a producer in the lineage of Brian Wilson and King Tubby, futzing around with the knobs so that a song swoops and whorls. The Beach Boys deployed this experimentation in small doses, accent pieces in their perfect pop songs, whereas King Tubby and Weatherall built songs around the echoes themselves. Neither met a song they couldn’t extend. Single-digit running time? Amateur hour. Weatherall could always squeeze more out of any tune.
Most of the songs on Morning Dove White are 10 minutes or above—plenty of room for them to not only delight but to mesmerize. “My Friend,” the closest the band gets to actually making a techno track, rides along at a mid-pace, bolstered by gauzy vocals from Allison, a snare roll echoed to infinity. Everything builds and builds, while you breathlessly await an explosion. It never comes. “There Goes the Cure” wafts out the gates at a leisurely clip, with Allison’s voice doubled, maybe tripled, with a small choir behind her. She even literally sings about echo while being echoed: “Losing a shadow/Losing another soul/So many echoes/And oh/No more.” The congenial piano riff repeats while the sound of digital crickets breaks, briefly, into the sound of screams. A string section builds, fades. “He’s gone,” Allison repeats for several minutes. Again, no explosion. Climax was never the point.
I’ve been trying to figure out why Morning Dove White disappeared from public view for so long. The band recorded some of a second album, but broke up before it was finished; those songs were never released. Surely a continued lack of presence did not help keep up their profile, but they did tour behind Morning Dove White and, after the band’s breakup, Allison released several solo albums. One in ten people I ask about the band gush about how much they love them and how unfairly ignored they have been. The other nine don’t know who I’m talking about. Was it the sepia-toned album cover, a dour brown so unbefitting of such a bright piece of music? Was Weatherall’s presence, ostensibly so crucial, actually an albatross around their necks, a high-profile co-conspirator whose adjacent work eclipsed their one moment, dooming them to never have another? Or did One Dove, so eager to work with disparate sonics, aim for the future and miss?
There’s some weight to that argument, as, with the ease of technological collage, so much of music continues to ignore genre in favor of cannibalization. But as I report live from the future, I can confidently say Morning Dove White is not the sound of our modern dystopia. Even with its lyrical hints of tough breakups and pining sadness, it’s simply too sweet a record for our sour times. It’s fresh, alive, searching. Eternal qualities. Morning Dove White isn’t a record of any certain time; it’s a classic. | 2024-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | FFRR | May 26, 2024 | 8.7 | 851e70be-4c57-4866-9867-c5f191a45984 | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.