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Following the lead of Villalobos and Omar S, Shackleton uses his Fabric entry to mix his own work-- including plenty of new material. | Following the lead of Villalobos and Omar S, Shackleton uses his Fabric entry to mix his own work-- including plenty of new material. | Shackleton: Fabric 55 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14947-fabric-55/ | Fabric 55 | Sam Shackleton approaches dance music cautiously. He does this both personally (shuttering his dubstep-affiliated Skull Disco label, moving to Berlin) and artistically (his intricate, pattering rhythms can take months to program). Fabric 55 is one step further into the dance world, expanding on the stolid gray sonics of 2009's Three EP's for a nightclub/label at the center of the techno community. But Fabric 55-- a studio-reproduced mix of Shackleton's set at the club featuring plenty of new material-- doesn't see Shackleton cast his hat into the ring of prominent DJs so much as affirm his status as an inspired squatter of whatever scene he inhabits.
In his review of the first Skull Disco compilation, Tim Finney said "Shackleton's production can seem like statues... waiting for someone to enliven and animate them." On Fabric 55, Shackleton plays the animator himself, carefully stitching together his own already careful work. Like Fabric DJs Omar S and Ricardo Villalobos before him, Shackleton mixes exclusively his own material. He doesn't necessarily shed new light on his work, but the shorter, more transitory nature of the tracks here releases them-- Shackelton himself enlivens and animates his own productions.
Shackleton all but abandons his Skull Disco tracks, cutting his already tenuous ties to dubstep. Instead he focuses on bizarro earworms ("Negative Thoughts") and still more Middle Eastern vocal samples. Strung together they reveal an alien noir, one whose sound-world is complete enough to divorce you from the feeling of listening to techno. In a home-listening context, it's often easier to file him alongside Coil and your Edward Gorey prints as Michael Mayer or Skream. If Shackleton's rhythms previously served primarily to hollow your mind in order to better contemplate Deep Dark Thoughts (see: "Death Is Not Final", "I Am Animal", etc.), they now highlight his idiosyncrasies, the tilted drum timbres and haunting vocal melodies he seems completely subservient to.
Shackleton's craftsmanship lends his work a resilient delicacy. His idea of a big build-and-release DJ moment appears to be to ratchet the tension up one half-notch and then sneakily ratchet it back down, before anyone gets too excited. The two-part "Man on a String" suite features furious, jazzy hand drums and a tip-toeing synth line in what amounts to an explosion of activity. Shackleton has always been kin to minimal techno producers, but Fabric 55 isn't spare so much as careful and modest.
Fabric 55 is world music in the most literal sense: It is a Londoner living in Berlin composing dance music with African rhythms, reggae melodies, and Far Eastern vocals. Shackleton does this using a computer, and he does it not to educate or out of deep respect for these cultures and traditions; he does it because these are some sounds he's heard and he likes them better than other sounds. I think this augurs well for Shackleton's future, even if Fabric 55 sounds like a weird purgatory between the vitality of his early singles and his next true breakthrough or change-up. This mix lingers and waits; it stirs and then settles again. Rather than a career retrospective or a greatest hits package, Fabric 55 is a thoughtful moment in a singular producer's trajectory. | 2011-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | January 3, 2011 | 7.7 | 851edc3b-a4b8-4866-892e-e5483f5a2b6a | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
After six years, the Swedish singer-songwriter returns with another soothing album of sweet indie-folk murmurs. Spare electronic beats bring a new pulse to his sound, but the voice remains the same. | After six years, the Swedish singer-songwriter returns with another soothing album of sweet indie-folk murmurs. Spare electronic beats bring a new pulse to his sound, but the voice remains the same. | José González: Local Valley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jose-gonzalez-local-valley/ | Local Valley | José González never sounds like he’s in a hurry. He takes his sweet time both in song and in life: The gap between the Swedish songwriter’s third solo album, 2015’s Vestiges & Claws, and fourth, Local Valley, was long enough to encompass the entirety of Trump’s presidency, several Lorde rebrands, and some 13 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard albums. Empires rise and fall; celebrity marriages come and go. Yet the basic elements of González’s sound have been more or less preserved in amber since 2003’s Veneer: sparse arrangements, intricate acoustic fingerpicking, gently philosophical lyrics, and a plaintive voice that’s halfway between a murmur and a croon. Never freaky enough for the freak-folk movement nor chronically chill enough for the Jack Johnson dudes, González carved out his own niche, imbuing his music with a sense of timelessness that’s impervious to trends but also susceptible to a sameness that can be stifling.
Recorded at González’s bucolic home studio near the Swedish coast, Local Valley brings no grand reinventions, but does gently tweak the songwriter’s approach and inject a little rhythmic bounce into his songwriting, making for a livelier, more playful album than Vestiges & Claws. The record opens on a sleepy note, with home-recorded birdsong ornamenting the new-age reveries of “Visions” and guitars rustling like a delicate forest in the hymn-like “Horizons.” None of the first four songs rise above a pleasant murmur. But somewhere around “Head On”—a standout track that’s as close as González gets to a protest song, with stomping handclaps egging on his jabs at “corrupt oligarchs” and “power snatchers”—Local Valley picks up the pace.
An English-speaking songwriter born in Sweden to Argentinian parents, González has always been a cross-cultural talent. In interviews, he has emphasized the fact that Local Valley is his first album to contain songs in each of his three languages. First single “El Invento” combines Spanish lyrics with one of his trademark open tunings, while both “Tjomme” and the album’s sole cover, “En Stund På Jorden,” a song by the Iranian-Swedish pop singer Laleh that he has pared down to its barest essence, are sung in Swedish. Covers are a longtime González tradition, but for an American listener unfamiliar with Laleh, the latter song could easily be mistaken as one of his own.
Yet the album’s most surprising element lies in the uptempo rhythms and electronic pulses that spice up the album’s back half. González spent some time tinkering with a DM1 drum-machine app on his iPad, which livens up the tempos and brings a welcome bounce to mantra-like grooves like “Lasso In.” “Lilla G,” written for González’s young daughter, is a dreamy folktronica reverie buoyed by lovely, soft-focus harmonies and well-deployed whistling. And “Swing” is the biggest departure for the songwriter, owing both to its goofy lyrics (“Swing your belly, baby,” he exhorts over and over) and its prominent reggaetón beat.
González has said the song’s Caribbean style reflects the music he likes to listen to at home. But his foray into beat-making—particularly on “Swing” and “Tjomme”—feels perfunctory at best. He has dabbled in electronic textures before; “Cello Song,” his 2009 Dark Was the Night collaboration with the Books (covering Nick Drake’s song of the same name), was excellent. These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.
Local Valley returns to pastoral quietude in its final moments, with the tranquil “Honey Honey” essentially serving as a duet between González and more chirping birds. It’s a lovely little sendoff, even if the main emotion it provokes is a desire to visit the Swedish countryside. For González, I imagine, it sounds like home.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mute | October 1, 2021 | 6.6 | 852bc481-1a0f-43b6-91e8-048acf368c14 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
null | The tragic irony behind Roger Kynard "Roky" Erickson's vaunted legacy as the father of psychedelic rock is that the very things that make him so important to so many fans and that keep him prominent in so many listeners' memories also ensured him a hard life spent in sanitariums and studios. Granted, for many that hard life is an integral part of his cachet: Arrested in 1969 and charged with possession, Erickson pleaded insanity rather than face jail time, and was committed to Rusk State Hospital. As legend has it, his mind was so devastated by the shock therapies and | 13th Floor Elevators / Roky Erickson: The Psychedelic Sounds of... / I Have Always Been Here Before | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11855-the-psychedelic-sounds-of-i-have-always-been-here-before/ | The Psychedelic Sounds of... / I Have Always Been Here Before | The tragic irony behind Roger Kynard "Roky" Erickson's vaunted legacy as the father of psychedelic rock is that the very things that make him so important to so many fans and that keep him prominent in so many listeners' memories also ensured him a hard life spent in sanitariums and studios. Granted, for many that hard life is an integral part of his cachet: Arrested in 1969 and charged with possession, Erickson pleaded insanity rather than face jail time, and was committed to Rusk State Hospital. As legend has it, his mind was so devastated by the shock therapies and medications that he spent the rest of his life battling serious mental illness that left him easy prey for unscrupulous record promoters (who had him sign away his royalties for numerous reissues) and sabotaged almost every attempt at a comeback.
There are, of course, scores of 1960s cautionary tales, but the music Erickson helped to make and the lifestyle he promoted with the 13th Floor Elevators explicitly advocated drug use as mind expansion, as true spiritual freedom-- a bunk idea he shared with Jim Morrison, although even at his most obtuse, Erickson never descended to the empty-headed blathering and lounge-act crooning that were the hallmarks of the celebrated Lizard King. Erickson's psychedelia was not passive aural wallpapers-- all pretty shapes and colors to listen to while tripping-- but an active force of social, musical, and psychological change. Aside from the infamous album starter "You're Gonna Miss Me", which Erickson wrote for his previous band the Spades before rerecording with the 13th Floor Elevators, The Psychedelic Sounds is awash in narcotic philosophy. And in case you miss it, Tommy Hall explains it all in his original liner notes.
However, what makes The Psychedelic Sounds powerful 40 years later isn't its questionable philosophy but, as the title makes clear, its psychedelic sound. The 13th Floor Elevators were a remarkable band: Erickson's wild-man vocals create an atmosphere where unfettered mayhem reigns. Stacy Sutherland's piercing guitar puts a dark mood on "Roller Coaster" and "Reverberation (Doubt)", while drummer John Ike Walton ties it all together. It's a dynamic that's even more pronounced on the eight live tracks on this UK reissue, which were recorded in San Francisco following the album's release. Their covers of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", the Beatles' "The Word", and even their take on that '60s live staple "Gloria", are anything but placid drugs trips or by-the-numbers re-creation; instead, the songs get the full psychedelic treatment as the Elevators play them like they're handling snakes.
As with any historical legacy, however, Erickson's reputation as the father of psychedelia is largely oversimplified. He was a late addition to the 13th Floor Elevators, which was the brainchild of Tommy Hall. Hall's acid poetry informs every song on The Psychedelic Sounds (aside from "You're Gonna Miss Me", Erickson's lone contribution). And, perhaps most important, it was Hall who plugged in his jug and provided the psychedelic sound that evokes the chemical weightlessness of a trip. It's the wiggedly-wiggedly of a dream sequence, the sound of your hands melting or of a dimensional door squeaking open. That the 13th Floor Elevators could translate that concept into an aural sensation is perhaps the root of their reputation and would have been impossible without Hall.
Erickson, however, undoubtedly was a creative force in the band, as a vocalist on Psychedelic Sounds and also as a songwriter on the follow-up, Easter Everywhere. Selections from those two albums, as well as from subsequent aborted comebacks, are collected on the two-disk I Have Always Been Here: The Roky Erickson Story, which is, unbelievably, the first overview of his long, strange career. Erickson's is a long career to capture on only two disks, but Shout! Factory makes judicious use of the space not only to provide a chronology of Erickson's development over four decades, but also to paint him as a sort of outsider artist rather than as a victim.
Emphasizing Erickson's solo output over his reputation-making Elevators material, the collection includes only a handful of tracks from The Psychedelic Sounds and Easter Everywhere. "Slip Inside This House" is a masterpiece of psychedelic inventiveness, a spacey blues jam that circles back on itself and eats its tail. On "I Had to Tell You" and the heartbreaking same-session outtake "Right Track Now", Erickson foregoes his usual hysterical vocals for a much more direct, reflective approach.
But I Have Always Been Here is more interested in Erickson's less-explored post-Elevators period, roughly from the mid-70s to the present. Whether solo or with the Aliens, he churned out potent and patently weird Texas blues rock similar to Stevie Ray Vaughn or early ZZ Top and often mimicked the vocal hiccups of fellow Texan Buddy Holly. In the 1970s, Erickson became fascinated with science fiction, re-creating B-movies with songs like "Creature With the Atom Brain" and "Stand for the Fire Demon". What makes these songs so kick-ass is that it's the sound of someone going right off the page of the rock script-- like so many B-movie auteurs of the '60s (Ray Dennis Steckler and Hal Warren, ill-fated director of Manos: The Hands of Fate, come to mind), he's doing whatever he wants with no one to tell him that's not how it's done.
As a result, very few of the songs on I Have Always Been Here Before depend for their impact on the listener's knowledge of Erickson's mental health at the time. This is perhaps the singer's true achievement, which this compilation generously spotlights: even when he was suffering, his strange music sounds wholly idiosyncratic and spiritually curious, the sound of a man who won't let the world's ugliness diminish his enjoyment of life or hinder his search for something solid and secure. | 2005-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 10, 2005 | 9.1 | 853a23de-af96-4af4-a6ea-25919a155643 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Adopting a new alias, UK electronic musician Loraine James swaps out jagged beats for ambient textures and sketch-like improvisations mapped to different lines on the thermometer. | Adopting a new alias, UK electronic musician Loraine James swaps out jagged beats for ambient textures and sketch-like improvisations mapped to different lines on the thermometer. | Whatever the Weather: Whatever the Weather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/whatever-the-weather-whatever-the-weather/ | Whatever the Weather | Emerging from the restrictive winter cold into the unpredictability of spring, it can be tempting to read a weather forecast like a horoscope. A brief glance at a row of temperatures and precipitation odds can send your mind running wild, soaring with hope at the suggestion of a sunny weekend day or plunging into despair at the thought of digging out that down jacket yet again. When you’re still emotionally digging your way out of the snow in March and the screen says it’s the bad number outside, your heart stops.
Skim the tracklist of Loraine James’ Whatever the Weather and you might feel a similar reaction. In place of words or phrases, James has used only temperatures as titles. Such precise values might feel alien to ambient’s delicate dreaminess—it’s easy to project a series of highs and lows onto the journey before it’s had a chance to settle around your eardrums. But across these 11 tracks, James savors every opportunity to subvert the forecast, supercharging a balmy “17℃” with frenetic drumming, conjuring up a counterintuitively glacial synthesizer march for a beatless “36℃,” and letting the frigid “0℃” stand in for the record’s most danceable groove.
Such misdirection is hardly surprising for James, a genre-busting musician whose excellent 2021 album Reflection tore holes in the dancefloor large enough for the entire ’90s IDM scene to crawl through. Built from sessions that ran parallel to that album’s blisteringly funky experimentalism, along with lingering ideas unearthed from five-year-old project files, Whatever the Weather lightly tethers itself to ambient’s cool stylings, but the 26-year old also gracefully covers new ground; her experiments with improvisation lend this side project a lively, unpredictable edge. At every temperature, James finds a fresh inflection point, bending into the still-widening array of sonic identities at her disposal and shaking expectations loose.
Standout track “14℃” probes gently into this murky space. James pushes forward with a soulful piano melody, letting you feel the alternating drags and rushes in her playing as she explores its contours; she resists the impulse to explode it entirely, keeping the focus on searching vulnerability as glitched remnants of the keys linger and distort in the surrounding air. A few degrees below, on “10℃,” she turns up the aggression. Building from a single burbling electric-piano run into a whirling flurry of dissonance, James toys with space jazz, accompanying her own jagged reverb trails in a duet that bristles with frantic energy. For a producer whose records have tended toward tightly coordinated assaults on the senses, this looser posture suits her beautifully. Not quite demos but maintaining a similar sketch-like quality, these tracks feel like a rare chance to watch the gears of her mind turn in slow motion, uncovering the right notes in real time.
The skeletal quality of these improvisational stretches helps foreground the handful of moments in which James calls her well-honed instincts for dance rhythms into service. “17℃” comes close to rehashing Reflections’ grimy atmosphere, propelled by fluttering drums that smear against stuttered vocal cuts, but be prepared to wave a long goodbye when James cuts hard into a misty sample: The beats here mostly exist to shuttle you between Whatever the Weather’s ethereal scenes with a dash of low-end grit. The ghostly R&B of “0℃” grinds around clattering drums and a chirping synth hook, content to bump along in reflective bliss, while “4℃”’s submerged breaks never quite come up for air, preferring to lurk beneath a dense soup of fuzzy synths and pitched-up vocals. The dark nightclub ambience never quite dissolves—it’s still bumping through the walls—but here James soundtracks the haven of a chillout room.
In unpacking her guiding influences, James often mentions the impact of math rock and Midwestern emo bands—particularly American Football, who she cites as a direct reference for Whatever the Weather’s vocal performances. While the album is light on 13/8 time signatures, it fully embraces their meditative navel-gazing in spirit and tone on “30℃,” where James’ vocals stretch into a Kinsella-like whine as trickling keys dance around a sprightly beat. Rumbling drums guide you away, but the lingering effect is clarifying and unnerving all at once, like waking from a dream with unexpected tears still drying on your face. Moments of jarring emotional displacement like these stretch across James’ brief but mesmerizing career, but Whatever the Weather dazzles by pulling you towards them with the gentle confidence of an outstretched hand. | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | April 18, 2022 | 7.8 | 853b2595-02b0-49cd-94f4-7246c7d2a4cd | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Long known for his dusty, slow-motion take on UK bass, the London producer makes a surprising turn toward pop on his debut album, without stifling any of his experimental instincts. | Long known for his dusty, slow-motion take on UK bass, the London producer makes a surprising turn toward pop on his debut album, without stifling any of his experimental instincts. | Parris: Soaked in Indigo Moonlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parris-soaked-in-indigo-moonlight/ | Soaked in Indigo Moonlight | Of all the ways that Parris could have described his long-awaited debut LP, it’s unlikely that “This is an album built on Pop” is what anyone expected. In recent years, pop tropes have become commonplace even in electronic music’s most experimental corners, but for a producer who’s spent years building his name with dusty, slow-motion beats and bass-infused hybrids, to cite artists like Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey, and Frank Ocean seemed like a surprise left turn.
A native Londoner, Parris has long spoken about club culture and its profound impact on his musical vision. As a child, he was wowed by an uncle who moonlighted as a DJ, along with his massive record collection. Once he was old enough to experience nightlife for himself, Parris dove right in, becoming a regular at foundational dubstep weekly FWD>> when he was only 19. His discography contains releases on vaunted UK labels like The Trilogy Tapes, Hemlock, Idle Hands, and Wisdom Teeth; Soaked in Indigo Moonlight arrives via Can You Feel the Sun, an imprint he’s been running alongside Call Super since 2019. Those reference points might not mean much to mainstream pop fans, but among a certain contingent of dance music’s critical vanguard—think trainsotters who worship Ben UFO and wax poetic about the hardcore continuum—Parris’ resume represents a sort of artistic ideal.
In truth, only the most rigid members of that crowd are likely to be frightened away by Soaked in Indigo Moonlight. The album includes only one blatantly pop turn: first single “Skater’s World.” It’s a bright and bouncy tune that’s more PC Music than Hessle Audio. The off-kilter beat does recall some of UK funky’s more playful moments, but thanks to Eden Samara’s vocals, the sugary song takes on a hyperpop bent, ultimately sounding like vintage Janet Jackson cutting something for the Powerpuff Girls soundtrack. Inspired by a shared love of skateboarding—and the days the two spent running around London with friends and “being hooligans” once lockdown began to lift earlier this year—the track exudes a carefree sense of joy that’s often absent in the heads-down world of UK dance music.
Casting off aesthetic constraints seems to be Soaked in Indigo Moonlight’s core mission. Although the remainder of the album never quite matches the candy-coated energy of “Skater’s World,” Parris does largely steer clear of London’s usual grayscale tones and drab textures, even during more subdued moments. (The only conventionally moody tune is the heavy-lidded “Sleepless Comfort,” whose lush pads and restless skitter are perfect for late-night bouts of existential pondering.) “Movements,” a collaboration with Norwegian/Mexican artist Carmen Villain, is typical of what the album has to offer. Atop a relaxed beat that falls somewhere between house and hip-hop, its airy pads and floaty woodwinds set a mood that’s closer to the flotation tank than the dancefloor, but Parris’ liberal usage of familiar video-game sounds—pretty much everyone recognizes the sound of Mario collecting coins—adds a sense of childlike glee to the proceedings.
If Soaked in Indigo Moonlight was built on pop, that largely manifests in the music’s whimsical nature and Parris’ general refusal to adhere to genre orthodoxy. The wiggly “Contorted Rubber” won’t ever make the Top 40, but its elastic basslines and zipping melodies merrily live up to the song’s title, while the wonky gait of “Laufen in Birkencrocs” evokes images of a sauced birthday clown showing up to a kid’s party with a buzz on. Dubstep and bassweight play a role, but they’re ultimately just two of the colors in Parris’ expansive palette, and once Call Super enters the fray on “Poison Pudding,” the two Brits spend nearly six minutes frantically connecting the dots between ’90s digital dancehall, ravey techno, and the most vibrant strains of IDM. “Crimson Kano” takes a similarly eclectic route, feverishly cycling through assorted drum patterns (and tempos) before collapsing in a heap of satisfied exhaustion.
Like any bout of hyperactivity, Soaked in Indigo Moonlight has a comedown, and the spacious “Frozen Hailstones Underwater” patiently explores a sort of reverb-soaked ambient grime. Even more soothing is LP closer “falling in the waves,” which loops, stretches, and manipulates James K’s vocals into delicate clouds of ethereal bliss. It’s not exactly a pop song, but it is a tender one, and it’s indicative of Parris’ willingness to toss expectations aside and simply follow his own creative impulses, wherever they may lead. The work of artists like Vince Staples, Lil Peep, and Denzel Curry (who were also namechecked in the LP announcement) helped inspire Soaked in Indigo Moonlight, but the album itself—whose title is a reference to the old adage that “only moonlight shows your true reflection”—can only be understood as a window into Parris’ own head (and heart). If taking cues from pop simply means setting pretension aside and doing what you love, perhaps more of Parris’ peers would be wise to follow suit.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Can You Feel the Sun | November 24, 2021 | 7.4 | 8541f307-0c43-47db-9126-f18b1ae7bbdf | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
As his solo career gains momentum, the second-most famous member of Bon Iver spends his latest LP meditating on the simple life. | As his solo career gains momentum, the second-most famous member of Bon Iver spends his latest LP meditating on the simple life. | S. Carey: Hundred Acres | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/s-carey-hundred-acres/ | Hundred Acres | Taylor Swift listens to him. Sufjan Stevens had him play on Carrie & Lowell. The song he co-wrote with country star Dierks Bentley generated Oscar buzz, and Will Arnett commissioned him to write a weeper for the Netflix series “Flaked.” Nearly a decade into his solo career, it seems longtime Bon Iver drummer and backing vocalist Sean Carey is finally edging past Justin Vernon’s very long shadow.
For all they have in common—their shared Wisconsin roots, the pastoral feeling of much of their work—it’s always been lazy to conflate Carey and Vernon’s styles. Where Vernon relishes poetic extravagance, layering his band’s music with numerology and a pine-scented sense of lore, Carey’s appeals to the heart are far less adorned. In his songs, wife and kids are the keys to deepest life, the natural world holds deepest truth, and John Muir was right about everything. His aperture on the world is tight and Whitman-esque. He mellows on hearth and home while his more famous friend chases dragons.
Carey’s latest record, Hundred Acres, is the purest distillation yet of this vision. It’s concerned with “trying to live a simpler life and doing the things you want with the people you love,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This statement squares with the fly-fishing victories Carey shares on Instagram and the sound of Hundred Acres: The tunes are full of big-hearted open chords, sweetly bowed strings, restorative synths, and stories about perseverance, love, and hiding in coves with lovers. The music heaves like foam on lake shores.
This is a shift. On 2014’s intricate Range of Light, Carey’s jazz and percussion training bore abundant fruit, inviting a tension between free-floating beauty and thrilling rhythmic counterpoints. The best parts of that album felt like miniature Jonny Greenwood scores, equally unsettled and blissed. Hundred Acres is often gorgeous, and the songs “True North” and “Meadow Song” rank among Carey’s finest, but the LP’s pared-down palette leaves it with less verve. The change in sound is clearly intentional, and Carey’s choice to evolve is admirable. The problem is one can only hear so many nebulous couplets about rivers and waves over languid instrumentation before this gentle snow turns to mush.
It’s possible that Carey is reaching for a wider audience. Perusing his photos, listening to these tunes, watching him blend seamlessly with someone like Bentley, it’s not difficult to imagine a new future for Carey: Not topping charts, perhaps, but becoming a more marketable Glen Hansard or Damien Rice type. Stripped of production embellishments, Hundred Acres can even echo early Coldplay. That isn’t meant as an insult, but it’s worth considering the implications: One reason many listeners just can’t with Coldplay is that Chris Martin’s lyrics feel too broad to be sincere. Similarly, one begins to sense after a few listens to Hundred Acres that Carey isn’t expressing something deep in his marrow.
We know from songs like “Alpenglow,” from Range of Light, that he’s able to express real emotional grit in his songs. Carey gets there occasionally on this album, as when he restates his marital vows on “True North.” Too often, though, Hundred Acres is content to be pleasant. | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | February 27, 2018 | 6.4 | 85437586-3f71-47dc-a0e1-3ecfc5cee6bd | Ryan Burleson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-burleson/ | |
On his first proper solo album in 30 years, the Spacemen 3 cofounder ruminates on mortality and transcendence over a glowing bed of analog synths. | On his first proper solo album in 30 years, the Spacemen 3 cofounder ruminates on mortality and transcendence over a glowing bed of analog synths. | Sonic Boom: All Things Being Equal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-boom-all-things-being-equal/ | All Things Being Equal | Pete Kember has been playing more or less the same song for almost 40 years. It’s built on blues swagger, but slowed down until it sways. It’s informed both lyrically and melodically by minimalism, insisting on simplicity. And though it throbs like techno, it’s directed at the head, not the feet or anywhere in between. It’s both solipsistic and psychedelic, urging listeners to travel into their own depths and welcome the joy and despair they might find there.
All Things Being Equal is Kember’s first album as Sonic Boom since 1990’s Spectrum, a sort of solo record made with his bandmates in Spacemen 3 as that legendary psych combo broke up. He followed up Spectrum with a new band called Spectrum, before heading into the noise lab with Kevin Shields and others for Experimental Audio Research and branching out through collaborations with Stereolab, Delia Derbyshire, and Beach House. In each case, the personnel was less the focal point than the sound and the equipment making it: vintage ’60s and ’70s analog synthesizers, the odd guitar, and racks and racks of gizmos to oscillate and phase and flange. All Things has all of these—some 11 machines are listed in the liner notes, including two vocoders and a toy called Thumbs Up Music—and they perform Kember’s pop songs but also become them, as veins both determine a leaf’s survival and define its shape.
“Just imagine you’re a tree,” he suggests in the dewy opener, which tells the apparently true story of a boy who believed he cured his own cancer by picturing himself as a storm, able to rain sickness out. “Just imagine that you’re a cloud/Just imagine, don’t say it out loud…just imagine the cloud wasn’t grey.” Hopefully, it’s not so much anti-science as simply pro-healing, however you can get it. In “Just a Little Piece of Me,” Kember transforms into a tree not in life but death. “Bury me beneath a tree/Let its root grow into me,” he sings in the shade of harmonies from longtime collaborator Panda Bear. “Let it grow and then you’ll see/Just a little piece of me.”
Mortality is natural, but not always peaceful. In “Spinning Coins and Wishing on Clovers,” Kember ruminates on his imagined deathbed while noise thrashes around him and electronics twinkle like pangs of regret. “My Echo, My Shadow and Me” might be bleaker. “I am the ocean that you’ll never cross/I am the night where hope is not lost,” Kember intones, his voice bloodied yet disembodied: “I am the journey that you never planned/I am the wave that’ll never see land.”
Mostly, though, Kember is seeing the land, and the beauty pushing through it. “Tawkin Techno” carries on Kraftwerk’s early Schubert-meets-the-Beach-Boys good vibes, but swaps out their industrial kitsch for an ode to the titular plant, better known as the Golden Club. “On a Summer’s Day,” he’s dumbstruck by the view from his window. “I just don’t know what to say,” he sighs, lost among keyboards, chirping and aglow. In the stroboscopic “I Can See Light Bend,” a freakout as hallucinatory as any in catalog defined by them, Kember’s senses overload and fail in a thicket of white noise and faux-Theremin. Or perhaps not fail but succeed. They merge: Seeing is believing. Halfway through its prickly ecstasy, he testifies: “Alter the light source/Build up my life force.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | June 9, 2020 | 7.7 | 854564cc-c424-4ede-b99c-20a4194f4e6c | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The electronic musician and veteran soundtrack composer turns his interpretive abilities to a single episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian Netflix series, to subtle yet compelling effect. | The electronic musician and veteran soundtrack composer turns his interpretive abilities to a single episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian Netflix series, to subtle yet compelling effect. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: Black Mirror: Smithereens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryuichi-sakamoto-black-mirror-smithereens/ | Black Mirror: Smithereens | “Smithereens,” the second episode in the fifth season of “Black Mirror,” opens with a rideshare driver meditating in his car, assisted by an app, outside the towering headquarters of a tech giant. It’s a beautifully concise haiku of our historical moment. Observe as the worker, isolated and at the mercy of opaque algorithmic tweaks, hustles his way through the gig economy, using the same technology that has wreaked havoc on job security to steady his mind. He cannot afford to panic, is in fact desperate to stay in the moment. But how much are these attempts at serenity mere flailings against capitalism and the inescapability of the internet?
That the episode (in fact the whole season) explores such issues with the milquetoast characterizations and shallow twists of an M. Night Shyamalan film is a disappointment to all who thrilled to “Black Mirror”’s pre-Netflix incarnation. But at least it’s got a classy soundtrack. Ryuichi Sakamoto—composer, electro-pop pioneer, buddy to David Bowie, and synthesizer legend—was brought on to score “Smithereens.” His work since the late 1970s has taken him from the top of the charts to the monastic depths of the avant garde, but regardless of context, Sakamoto’s music has consistently exuded a profound empathy. Whether leading Yellow Magic Orchestra’s cheeky pop, collaborating with cranial ambient artists, or, more recently, confronting his own mortality, Sakamoto’s music expresses in a few elegant gestures the haunting richness of life.
“Meditation App” is the first piece on the soundtrack, and, at over five minutes, the only one that truly works as standalone music. Airy and soothing, it floats with a single-minded aspirational splendor. In the episode, the meditation is guided with gentle directions to remain open and non-judgemental to whatever thoughts come up. This profoundly difficult prompt is delivered with a grating, faux-enlightened calm that sidesteps the harrowing depths of the psyche, and “Meditation App” perfectly embodies this flowy, insubstantial bid at inner peace. Its dulcet timbres suggest the immanence of a world without conflict, without pain or paradox, loss or grief. Perhaps we nurse private fantasies of a return to such an Edenic womb, but the music’s effect has a killing-with-kindness quality. Sakamoto plays it straight, never introducing even a drop of skepticism into the mix, and in doing so allows the show to weaponize the language of wellness. “Meditation App” could be looped in the lobby of a high-end spa, and no one would care to ask who composed it. This means Sakamoto did his job.
The rest of Black Mirror: Smithereens is filled with the type of dark, pulsating synthesizers that have found equal favor in techno clubs and modern, edgy thrillers. It isn’t surprising that the mood is one of rising tension, with rhythms that suggest a predator on the hunt (there’s even a piece called “Prey”) and thick, gelatinous drones that suck the air out of the room. Sakamoto effectively conveys a looming state of emergency with the bare minimum. Here a bass riff groans and then spasms to life, there a flicker of white noise recalls a nervous tic. “Closing In” lightly clutters its background with distant sirens, then fades into an uneasy clearing. “Flashback” keeps its sentimentalism at bay, cloaking its melody with dissonance and water-droplet sounds before quietly blooming for a moment of pure ache. Isn’t this how memories work, slowly rising from the depths before coming into sharp, agonizing focus?
These minor details are easy to ignore while caught up in the drama of Black Mirror: Smithereens. Even listening casually at home, they remain steadfastly integrated in a moody, fluid whole. The 44 seconds of “Gun Is Real” hardly register as music, though they are powerful in context. This isn’t a problem, but it does suggest the score for Black Mirror: Smithereens will be loved by two groups only: those with an abiding hunger for all things “Black Mirror” and those with the same hunger for Sakamoto. Soundtracks are difficult to comment on unless they are either exceptional or awful. The best walk a fine line, enhancing each moment of action while not quite stealing the show. Describing Halloween, actor Nancy Loomis said: “The first time I saw the movie, it was a rough cut without the music, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is so forgettable.’ Then I went to a screening when the score was finished, and I was floored by how terrifying the movie was.” While Sakamoto here offers no iconic melodies, the sentiment holds. “Smithereens” may falter as an episode, but it would be dead in the water without his contributions. | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | June 11, 2019 | 6.8 | 85463df9-6b6b-4227-aff3-f09edc19ba0c | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
The Goon Sax are a teenage indie-pop group from Brisbane. The best moments on their debut are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic frontman Louis Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind The Go-Betweens. | The Goon Sax are a teenage indie-pop group from Brisbane. The best moments on their debut are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic frontman Louis Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind The Go-Betweens. | The Goon Sax: Up to Anything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21692-up-to-anything/ | Up to Anything | In American English, saying you're "up for anything" usually means you're open, adventurous, maybe a little indecisive. The Brisbane teen trio the Goon Sax have titled their debut album Up to Anything, which might be the dark flipside of that sentiment: "I'm not feeling up to anything/I'm nothing, nowhere, all over again/I can't walk/I can't walk this sadness out," bellows frontman Louis Forster on the first and title track. In this mind state, you aren't just open, you're rudderless and confused, and will go along with whatever life presents you. It's a place of self-defeating vulnerability that anyone young has experienced, and the Goon Sax have made a jangly pop record that reflects it.
The Goon Sax began in 2013 when Forster and guitarist James Harrison were in high school (they're still of school age, the band averaging 17.) Drummer Riley Jones joined in 2014 after a month of lessons on the instrument. That inexperience is something of a theme within the band, even within their name: a goon sack in Australia is the silver plastic bag of booze within a wine box, something of a symbol of youth—it's inexpensive alcohol. For American ears, imagine it similar to someone naming their band Franzia or 4Loko.
The best moments on Up to Anything are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind the Go-Betweens. "Sometimes Accidentally" could sit closely to "Cattle and Cane," perhaps just with modern, youthful vigor: Harrison takes over (his voice is a sweet alternative to Louis' deep, apathetic tone) and sings, "Sometimes I think about things and sometimes I accidentally think about you." The line echoes Courtney Barnett, and is performed in a similar speak-sing. In "Telephone," the band villainizes the antiquated technological development of talking on the phone, as if it's to blame for a conversation gone awry. In "Target," the shopping center becomes a reflection of the joy they don't feel: "Couldn't work at Target / The only color shirt I wear is blue." "Home Haircuts" depicts the indignity of trying (and failing) to get a rock-star hairstyle, at home or at the local salon: "I show them a picture of Roger McGuinn / Edwyn Collins / John Lennon / David Byrne / It seems I just can't win."
For a band so intimately linked to one of Australia's greatest pop acts, the namedropping is fitting. Their music is entirely '80s in feel, channeling the Pastels at this turn and classic Flying Nun at that—the video for the song "Boyfriend," in which Louis longs for a man to call his own while systematically threatening to make him miserable, was inspired by Top of the Pops, a classic music program everyone in the band is too young to have seen firsthand. This music is a distinctly Australian blend of honesty and unpretentiousness. Like the Go-Betweens, they are as confident in their songcraft as they are uncertain in life. Each song is well-structured and wise beyond its years while the messages are confused, delicate and very, very teenage. This is the sound of growing up smart. | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Chapter Music | March 18, 2016 | 7 | 854d2828-0101-4bee-abc6-856dbb34d264 | Maria Sherman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-sherman/ | null |
Full of vivid detail and imagination, this defining 1968 album from Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood gets its first official reissue. | Full of vivid detail and imagination, this defining 1968 album from Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood gets its first official reissue. | Nancy Sinatra / Lee Hazlewood: Nancy & Lee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nancy-sinatra-lee-hazlewood-nancy-and-lee/ | Nancy & Lee | Nancy & Lee is one of the quintessential artifacts of the 1960s, a document of how counterculture collided with the pop mainstream at the height of the psychedelic era. Neither Nancy Sinatra nor Lee Hazlewood could accurately be characterized as part of the counterculture. As the daughter of Frank Sinatra, Nancy was showbiz royalty, while Hazlewood was a Phoenix-based producer who made his reputation with a series of cinematic instrumentals he recorded with the rumbling guitarist Duane Eddy. Like several other hustlers of his time, Hazlewood had a gift for recognizing and exploiting fads, a talent that found its full fruition in his collaborations with Sinatra.
Nancy & Lee is now being commemorated with a deluxe package from Light in the Attic featuring two bonus tracks and a handsome book, marking its first official reissue since its release in 1968. If that seems like a long wait, that’s because Rhino’s 1989 compilation Fairy Tales & Fantasies: The Best of Nancy & Lee has served as a placeholder for Nancy & Lee, containing every one of the album’s songs in order, along with several highlights from 1972's Nancy & Lee Again. Such record company machinations suit Nancy & Lee, as it was a proper LP of its time, collecting previously released singles, covers, and album cuts designed to boost a songwriter’s publishing—in this case, Hazlewood himself.
Nancy & Lee picks up the Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood story at its midpoint. Nancy had been a recording artist on her father’s Reprise label since 1961, putting out single after single of effervescent, sticky-sweet pop that made no impact on the pop charts whatsoever. By 1965, Frank got fed up, so he tapped Hazlewood to kickstart Nancy’s career, which he did with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a sexy strut designed to sound right at home in the go-go clubs cluttering the Sunset Strip.
“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” climbed to No. 1 early in 1966, so Nancy and Lee began churning out rapid sequels to their hit, reaching the Top 10 twice with “How Does That Grab You, Darlin’?” and “Sugar Town.” Somewhere during the course of 1966, the pair began duetting together in the studio. By that point, Hazlewood had several albums to his credit—including a pair of LPs released on Reprise—and had attempted to forge a duet partnership with Suzi Jane Hokom, a vocalist who ultimately decided she didn’t want a part in the spotlight. Nancy Sinatra already was comfortable on the center stage, and furthermore, she had a peculiar alchemy with Hazlewood. A singer so sweet she could seem curiously placid, she contrasted sharply with Hazlewood’s oily baritone, which recalled Johnny Cash retooled as a lounge lizard. Together, the chemistry was palpable: Nancy offered a hopeful tonic to Lee’s booming dread, Hazlewood pulling Sinatra back into the muck and grime whenever she threatened to drift away.
Sinatra and Hazlewood first discovered this dynamic tension on “Summer Wine,” a slice of western melodrama released as a B-side at the end of 1966, just about a year after “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Achieving altitude on the wings of swirling strings, “Summer Wine” contains every splashy studio trick Hazlewood could muster: fathomless echo on the voices, an orchestra of percussion and twang, all accentuated by stabs of brass. It’s as if a CinemaScope film has been funneled into a four-minute 45, a vivid representation of Hollywood in the mid 1960s. Fittingly, their next single roped in their other major influence, the glitz and schmaltz of Nashville. Nancy and Lee’s version of Johnny Cash and June Carter’s recent smash “Jackson” wrapped up country corn in a shiny package, the pair trading knowing jibes as steel guitars and harmonica dance around their shtick.
Hazlewood figured out how to channel his cowboy fascination into high lonesome psychedelia, casting himself as the wandering, wounded stranger to Sinatra’s redemptive angel. In “Sand,” his outlaw character comes upon an innocent woman who offers a warm home—a deliverance over a bed of harpsichords and a maze of backward guitars. “Sand” found a counterpart in “Some Velvet Morning,” where Hazlewood reckons with a heavy hangover and the memory of a departed love. The verses are Lee’s wrecked ruminations, sadly and insistently galloping into the sunset, while Nancy provides an ethereal release on the waltzing chorus.
“Some Velvet Morning,” “Sand,” and “Summer Wine” cut such an indelible impression that they can give the illusion the rest of Nancy & Lee is as trippy as this triptych. While the opening “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” unfolds at a lysergic crawl, most of the album pivots off “Jackson,” with snazzy, country-inflected pop that seems as if it was tailored to play on televised variety shows or perhaps a drive-in movie where the good girl gets seduced by a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Hazlewood’s remaining originals—the dusty, doomed romance of “Sundown, Sundown,” the sprightly “Lady Bird,” and wryly self-deprecating “I’ve Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up to Me)”—fall into the latter category, while the covers are pure Hollywood hokum. Nancy and Lee clown their way through “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman,” elbowing each other in the ribs as they deliver Tom T. Hall’s bon mots, then they wallow in the sticky sentiments of “Storybooky Children” and “My Elusive Dreams,” the latter a No. 1 country hit for David Houston and Tammy Wynette in 1967.
Far from diminishing the impact of Nancy & Lee, these moments of overblown silliness accentuate the genuine, layered weirdness of “Some Velvet Morning” and “Sand,” as they provide a baseline for what Southern Californian pop sounded like at the time. Also, Hazlewood’s vivid, widescreen arrangements on the schmaltizer material are evocative in their own right thanks to his masterly use of the studio. Such artistry isn’t necessarily evident on other Hazlewood-produced Sinatra albums of the period—he helmed nearly all of them from 1965 to 1967—nor is it on the pair of bonus tracks that round out the Light in the Attic reissue: a whispery cover of the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and a go-go version of the Mickey & Sylvia oldie “Love is Strange.” Pleasant enough, they’re slight sketches, clearly relics from the late 1960s; Nancy even utters “sock it to me,” the catchphrase from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, the biggest TV show in the USA in 1968, during “Love is Strange.” Nancy & Lee may be redolent of its era but in its vivid detail and imagination, the album is so thoroughly of its time that it can sound otherworldly. | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | Light in the Attic | June 2, 2022 | 8.8 | 854fa63d-1146-4006-b99a-2ea6832794f4 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
If you'd told me a few weeks back that I'd be lusting after some chick\n\ named Goldfrapp ... | If you'd told me a few weeks back that I'd be lusting after some chick\n\ named Goldfrapp ... | Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3504-felt-mountain/ | Felt Mountain | If you'd told me a few weeks back that I'd be lusting after some chick named Goldfrapp, I'd have told you to pack your bags for an all-expenses-paid trip to my fist. But writing this review, all I can think of is Goldfrapp. Sweet, sweet Goldfrapp. Mmm... Goldfrapp.
Before I get accused of any level of chauvinism here, I feel I should defend myself. I am, after all, only a male variant of the human species. And what sane, sexually functional guy could resist a woman who whispers in a throaty voice, "No time to fuck/ But you like the rush?" Not me! What's more, she's English! English from England! And she hangs out with Orbital! C'mon, now!
Taking cues from apparent influences ranging from Marlena Dietrich to Siouxsie Sioux to Björk, Alison Goldfrapp has constructed an album that's simultaneously smarmy and seductive, yet elegant and graceful. Describing the sound of Felt Mountain comes easy not because it's a simple album, but because the devices used throughout are so ingrained in our musical vernacular.
If Austin Powers had been a film noir flick, its soundtrack would probably sound something like Felt Mountain. The hushed vocals, the crying analog synthesizers, and the sustained seven chords all evoke amazingly strong images of things past. Still, the album manages not to sound dated, kept fresh by occasional journeys into more experimental electronics and Goldfrapp's always-engaging vocals.
Felt Mountain opens with "Lovely Head," a track that juxtaposes a shuffling drum beat and whistling that sounds like it could be 50 years old with futuristic analog beeps. Goldfrapp's voice, with all its warmth and expressiveness, sounds instantly familiar. And it retains this familiarity over the course of the album, excepting a throaty, Siouxsie-esque yelp or two in "Human," and a bizarre passage at the end of "Deer Stop," in which her voice is made to sound eerily childlike. Creepy, especially considering the sexual undertones present.
All this taken into account, Felt Mountain's greatest strength lies in its overall elegance as a record. While certainly not "poppy," it never has a truly weak moment. And while the songs aren't all that different from one another, the flow from track to track makes perfect sense.
To summarize, Felt Mountain is a really swell record, and I am madly in love with Alison Goldfrapp. I'd have her name tattooed on my arm, but... you know. There just isn't room in this world for a man with "Goldfrapp" inscribed in his flesh. Luckily, there's always room in the world for a damned fine record. | 2000-09-19T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2000-09-19T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | September 19, 2000 | 8 | 8558a26a-9ab9-4e1d-be9d-74adf9573789 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
The Cleveland electronic musician has refined his minimalist techno to a frictionless peak. The keyboard patches on his latest are so physical that you can imagine holding them in your hand. | The Cleveland electronic musician has refined his minimalist techno to a frictionless peak. The keyboard patches on his latest are so physical that you can imagine holding them in your hand. | Steve Hauschildt: Strands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22414-strands/ | Strands | You don’t come to one of Steve Hauschildt’s records expecting, or even hoping, to be surprised. The Cleveland electronic musician's consistency is one of his great strengths: His synthesizers ripple like a mountain stream at peak snowmelt, and his frictionless pulses represent only the finest qualities of electricity itself. They feel like dreams of a coal- and hydraulic-free future, when mammoth wind turbines and sparkling solar arrays offer the promise of a guilt-free grid.
That’s not to say Hauschildt’s sounds or techniques are necessarily very original; he makes no attempt to disguise his debt to artists like Klaus Schulze, Edgar Froese, and Manuel Göttsching. But, much as his former band Emeralds did, he has succeeded in taking those influences and spinning them into a fusion that is his alone. Over the course of several albums for Kranky and a handful of CDR and cassette releases, he has channeled those spinning arpeggios into an unmistakable signature.
Throughout his solo career, Hauschildt has signaled his disinterest in strictly repeating himself—thus the Vocoder and new wave experiments of Sequitur, and the occasional detour into ambient techno on Where All Is Fled. But it’s worth bearing in mind that Emeralds’ breakup, whatever its ultimate causes, was presaged by the radical shift in sound they took with their final album, 2012’s Just to Feel Anything. And what keeps many listeners coming back to Hauschildt’s records is precisely the promise that each album will sound practically interchangeable with the one that came before—just, perhaps, marginally better.
On both of those counts, Strands succeeds, yet it also marks a shift in tone: At just eight tracks and 43 minutes long, it is noticeably more restrained. A few songs could have come from any of his earlier albums: “Same River Twice,” whose title goes to the heart of Hauschildt’s approach, unleashes a dizzying moiré of overlapping pulses—eighth notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes, all spinning like pinwheels whose tips are fixed with tinier pinwheels ad infinitum. But five tracks feature no arpeggios at all, which, given Hauschildt’s previous work, is a little like imagining a Four Tet record with no samples, or an Aphex Twin record with no drum machines.
“Transience of Earthly Joys,” in which piano and pipe organ transmute into feedback-ripped synth squalls, has a quiet, blurry calm that's reminiscent of the most ambient moments on Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies. The rich, augmented chords and faintly detuned oscillator voices of “A False Seeming” and the slow, string-like passages of “Time We Have” also recall the The Moon and the Melodies, along with another 4AD album of a similar vintage: Michael Brook and Pieter Nooten’s 1987 album Sleeps With the Fishes, which framed melancholy pop melodies in velvety synthesizers and echoing guitar. In its slowest moments, Hauschildt’s album exudes the same sort of narcotic bliss. At points, it barely resists tipping into the maudlin, but that resistance, that willingness to inch right up to the edge of bathos without falling into it, is part of what makes it so captivating.
It’s a bold move, slowing down like he has here. But by taking the emphasis off of rhythm, he allows us to focus instead on the texture of the sounds themselves. His patches are so physical—rasping, buzzing, peeling off like metal shavings—that you can imagine holding them in your hand. They feel like direct extensions of the silicon in the machines that produced them, like the transfiguration of sand into sound. | 2016-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | November 1, 2016 | 7.6 | 8568c2ac-6e21-488f-a910-9de28f4be227 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Brooklyn-based DIY punk band's new full-length is clever without being cheeky, sincere without being preachy, self-aware but never too in on their own joke. | The Brooklyn-based DIY punk band's new full-length is clever without being cheeky, sincere without being preachy, self-aware but never too in on their own joke. | So So Glos: Blowout | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17953-blowout/ | Blowout | Most rock'n'roll records can be traced back to some specific place and time, but very few provide evidence of their exact origin. "I guess he doesn't have a gun," a tiny voice chirps giddily on what sounds like a cassette player recording. "Do you think he has a gun? Yes! He shot himself! We're listening to Nirvana and, as you know, Kurt Cobain... POW!" The voice belongs to Alex Levine, bassist for New York punk omnivores the So So Glos, kicking off their heart-racingly enjoyable new album Blowout. The snippet was recorded when Levine was seven, at the start of an abrupt and confusing changing of the guard in rock. In the wake of Cobain's suicide, alternative music started looking much different than it had before, as punk got poppier and alt-rock proper got angrier. For twentysomethings making music today, this once maligned schism now feels whole, with likeminded bands like Wavves and the Titus Andronicus subtly paying their dues to the Hollands, Hoppuses, and Armstrongs (Tim and Billie Joe) of their youths. The So So Glos are also a proud result of this divide, where disaffection still lingers but never interferes with having fun.
The So So Glos have zero interest in being sedated. On "Xanax", with its festive sha-la-las, sleigh bells, and cowpunk flourishes, frontman Alex Levine warns that "they just wanna dumb you down like I did." (Rounding the band out are Alex and Ryan's step-brother Zach Staggers on drums and childhood friend Matt Elkin on guitar.) The So So Glos are clever without being cheeky, sincere without being preachy, self-aware but never too in on their own joke. Still, their most endearing trait is a simple one: They make murderously catchy, endorphin-boosting, shout-along guitar music with vigor and zeal, breaking in their Doc Martens with a mid-song skank on the title track and goofing with Strokes-y cool on "Speakeasy". Thanks to their DIY background, the 12 songs on Blowout foster an immediate sense of community, with love and enthusiasm pumping fiercely at the heart of these songs. If you've spent any time over the past few years at NYC venues like Shea Stadium or the Market Hotel (both of which the band helped co-found), there's a good chance you've not only caught a So So Glos set, but felt that same energy.
Blowout isn't trying to break any molds, but distinguishes itself with thoughtful genre cherry-picking and a more inclusive spin on their contemporaries' established efforts. You can find hat-tips to forebears like the Gun Club and the Replacements (and note the Joe Strummer vocal inflections on the bittersweet "Island Ridin'") as well as bands that most pre-pubescent punks would have idolized when the Glos were coming up ("Wrecking Ball" sounds like Rancid all juiced up on the Beastie Boys). But as far as the current landscape is concerned, the So So Glos have a broader focus. Poking fun at American privilege is pretty standard for a band in their sphere ("Son of an American"), but the Glos come off less fussy and indignant than their friends Titus Andronicus (they even do a spot-on TA imitation with "All of the Time"). Parquet Courts feel like spiritual cousins, though SSGs are considerably less stoned and way more caffeinated. Almost every song has some sort of Japandroids-styled oh-oh-oh! chant-along, often more pop-conscious but equally as satisfying.
Full of great hooks, anthemic energy and personality to spare, the Glos are able to etch out their own space thanks to these adventurous songs (the one-two gut-punch of the melancholy-laced "Lost Weekend" and "Xanax" are both easy highlights). "I’ll be a buzz bin fly just living to die," Alex Levine sings on the aptly titled "Everything Revival", "and I don't wanna be the guy to sat whatever, never mind." So the So Glos know where they came from, but have the confidence to continue to do things their own way. Turns out it's been a nearly lifelong way of thinking for the band: Hang around after the record's over for a hidden track called "Let's Rock 'Til We Die", written and performed by the same seven-year olds we met earlier trying to unpack "Come As You Are". The song is loud, it's to the point, and it's charming as all hell. Not a lot has changed. | 2013-05-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Shea Stadium | May 3, 2013 | 7.6 | 856e8612-f504-48b0-a5e6-8020a45c5603 | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
It took more than a decade to follow up In the Reins, but its successor reveals musicians who’ve learned to corral swarms of instruments and styles into a newly complex sound. | It took more than a decade to follow up In the Reins, but its successor reveals musicians who’ve learned to corral swarms of instruments and styles into a newly complex sound. | Calexico / Iron & Wine: Years to Burn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/calexico-iron-and-wine-years-to-burn/ | Years to Burn | When Calexico and Iron & Wine released In the Reins, their first collaboration together, back in 2005, both bands were in a state of flux. Sam Beam had just released the Woman King EP, which added a few new musical twists to his disarmingly intimate acoustic songs, and he was two years away from releasing The Shepherd’s Dog, which would redirect the next decade of his music into ever more elaborate jazz-folk compositions. Meanwhile, Joey Burns and John Convertino were incorporating Latin American styles such as samba and cumbia, not to mention more vocalists and musicians, into an increasingly orchestral and cinematic sound. An indie-rock eon later, it’s easy to forget how new In the Reins sounded at the time, how it represented tentative steps forward by acts who would become tenacious music lifers.
That 2005 mini-album becomes a useful point against which to measure both bands’ growth. If it sometimes felt like a great backing band and a great frontman working in parallel lanes, its successor Years to Burn mixes those roles up to reveal musicians who’ve learned to corral swarms of instruments and styles into a newly complex sound. Nowhere is that more apparent than on “The Bitter Suite,” which is not a Marillion cover but a musical triptych showcasing the various voices in this collaboration. It opens with Calexico trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela singing a Spanish-language overture, based on Beam’s lyrics about “exploring dreams wild enough to pass the time”—one of those Iron & Wine phrases that sounds straightforward but demands some unpacking. Fluidly the song morphs: first into a lowdown desert groove, its rhythms fraying at the edges, and then into a quiet finale, Beam and his deftly picked guitar commenting on what’s come before. The sections complement each other nicely but not too perfectly, creating just enough friction between them to catch a spark. Despite that hacky title, “The Bitter Suite” is certainly the most compositionally ambitious song either entity has released in years.
Nothing else on Years to Burn complicates the equation quite so radically, although there are compelling flourishes and fresh twists on familiar tropes. Calexico invest “Father Mountain” with a kind of pop stomp, a performance that reinforces the catchiness of Beam’s hooks. Tracing the lifelong arc of a beleaguered relationship, opener “What Heaven’s Left” ratchets emotional tumult to a dusty country-soul arrangement that culminates in a coda where trumpets dance around each other, offering more hope and reconciliation than the lyrics extend.
These two groups always intended to record a follow-up to In the Reins, and they’ve guested on each other’s subsequent albums. But it took them more than a decade to align their schedules, and Years to Burn might be better for that lifetime in between. Fittingly, it’s a record that’s all about time and how we measure it: against our own memories, against other people, again previous albums. “We only want a life that’s well worth living,” Beam sings on closer “In Your Own Time,” “and sleeping ain’t no kind of life at all.” Such a line might come across as too obvious if it didn’t sound so hard-learned, if the music surrounding it weren’t so imaginative. Comparing the two releases, it’s clear that Calexico and Iron & Wine have found a way over the years to leave a little more mystery in the words and let the music provide more of the clues. | 2019-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Sub Pop | June 17, 2019 | 7.4 | 857f4ef1-c7d6-47f4-8fd0-d954435c98d1 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The final installment of Young Thug's Slime Season trilogy is a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. It also feels like the end of a holding pattern, hopefully leading to Thug's long-rumored official debut. | The final installment of Young Thug's Slime Season trilogy is a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. It also feels like the end of a holding pattern, hopefully leading to Thug's long-rumored official debut. | Young Thug: Slime Season 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21789-slime-season-3/ | Slime Season 3 | Slime Season 3 is the last in a series of hard-drive dumps following a massive security breach that scattered hundreds of Young Thug songs across the Internet. After Lyor Cohen cryptically announced plans to "bury" the mixtape, Thug literally held a funeral procession at SXSW and eulogized it later by saying, "All good things must come to an end. This is the birth of something new…HY!£UN35," alluding to his oft-rumored debut album. The full eulogy suggested what we've known all along: each Slime Season was cobbled together from stray files in the archives, compiled and released in an attempt to thwart the data leak, which has prolonged the introduction of the Next Gen Young Thug, the one, undoubtedly, with something new in store.
That isn't to say that Thug has been anything short of breathtaking during this run, or that he's grown trite. Some of his best songs have been remastered and released in response to the hack. The projects in this series are all good, but they are arranged without purpose and pushed out hastily in large, uneven packages with botched promotions. The final Slime Season is forged in the image of its predecessors, with Thug turning in charismatic performances over pulsating productions from frequent collaborators London on da Track, Mike WiLL Made It, Allen Ritter, Ricky Racks, and Isaac Flame. But it's a lean, 8-track offering without filler that moves rather seamlessly. The beats vibrate, hum, and strobe and Thug navigates them like a bat using sonar. The prime example of this is the opener, "With Them," which he debuted at Kanye West's The Life of Pablo listening party at Madison Square Garden, where the reverb from his tumbling cadences lingers into pockets of empty space.
The Slime Season series has found Young Thug settling into a particular set of vocal tics. He sometimes defers to specific tendencies, like leaning on ad-libs as structural pillars. Inside the darker, more open beats, he packs syllables together like putty then gently pulls at them. This is as close to autopilot as he gets. Luckily, it is nearly impossible for Young Thug to recycle his sound because there are so many different variables at play; he manipulates flows as well as any of his colleagues and his vocabulary of squawks and yips continue to expand even as his quirks grow more familiar. Something like "Memo," with its mesmerizing melodies, might recall other moments from the recent Thug canon. But then there's a song like "Drippin," which is a devastating display of timing and pacing that even turns his voice into a pure percussion instrument, ripping words off in micro-bursts.
The tape plays like a final installment, going out with a bang and saving some of the series' best for last. The posse cut "Slime Shit," which features longtime Thug associates Yak Gotti, Duke, and PeeWee Roscoe, is something of a theme song. On "With Them," he rattles off simple but effective punches through a nasally mumble. Then there's the standout "Digits," which wraps the YOLO philosophy inside a 'get money' cliche, moving at warp speed before settling into a strutting pace. "I been gettin money before the music, fuck Pandora/ I can do this shit when I get bored," he says, casually. It's a fitting gauge of his talent and a peek into his current outlook, and the tape is a fitting end to the Slime Season trilogy. | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | March 30, 2016 | 7.9 | 8588dfed-d365-4891-adc6-64ff9c754217 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The band’s dense and ornate fourth album sacrifices intimacy and warmth in favor of the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music of their career. | The band’s dense and ornate fourth album sacrifices intimacy and warmth in favor of the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music of their career. | The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Illusory Walls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-world-is-a-beautiful-place-and-i-am-no-illusory-walls/ | Illusory Walls | The past few years have been enough to turn the widest-eyed dreamer into a staunchly cynical realist. For The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the next step is salvaging the wreckage and reconstructing it as a brutalist sculpture. The band—whose five members are split between Philadelphia and rural Connecticut—is best known for bringing a hyper-specific authenticity and uplifting collectivism to the wistful guitar plucks and squeaky singing of the early 2010s emo revival. Their fourth album, Illusory Walls, sounds like a grim reincarnation of the band they once were. Written and recorded remotely during the pandemic, it is the band’s first album to prominently employ an outside co-producer (Greg Thomas), and the first to feature just one main guitarist (down from three). It is the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music in their discography, albeit at the cost of their unique intimacy and warmth.
If 2017’s Always Foreign smartly retrofitted TWIABP’s sprawling indie rock with clear-eyed vocals and concise song structures, Illusory Walls redraws the blueprints again. Think of songs like Always Foreign’s contemptuous “Fuzz Minor,” or the atmospheric churn of “We Need More Skulls” from 2015’s Harmlessness, now with dropped tuning, ornate production, lots more riffing, and a bigger axe to grind. Illusory Walls fumes with resentment for the ruthless greed and self-interest fueling societal collapse, even as it hunts for moments of beauty in the destruction. Thematically, the record is among the band’s most irrefutable and effective. At the tail end of 20-minute closer “Fewer Afraid,” guest vocalist Sarah Cowell sums up the album’s driving forces: “I think the world’s fucked up and brutal. Senseless violence with no guiding light. I can’t live like this, but I’m not ready to die.” It’s dirty, dark, angry, conflicted, anxious, mournful, and still somehow resilient.
The conflict is between old habits and new ideas. Even with a band roster in the double digits, past TWIABP albums never felt at odds with themselves; their clarity came from simple arrangements that left the music’s emotional message unmuddied. On Illusory Walls, simplicity is in short supply. The soft guitar and synth notes that begin opener “Afraid to Die” would’ve felt at home on previous albums, but they soon explode into an early climax of multi-tracked riffs, anthemic strings, punchy drums, and David Bello’s charming but limited voice. “Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance” is so busy and over-complicated that the emotional presence of the vocals has no choice but to take a back seat. It robs the song’s conclusion—where Bello sings out casket dimensions over growling guitars—of any weight.
Illusory Walls sets itself apart in the TWIABP catalog through its focus on intricate guitar work—the difference between a guitar album and a guitarist’s album. Chris Teti, TWIABP’s producer and current sole guitarist, has spoken at length about the influence of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, as well as highly technical post-hardcore bands like Cave In and Glassjaw. The references bear out in the music. Whether it’s the brooding palm-muted chugs in “Your Brain Is a Rubbermaid” or the interwoven leads in “Trouble,” Teti’s deft playing often takes center stage. But when the riffs step back to share the spotlight, they become a more potent tool. “We Saw Birds Through the Hole in the Ceiling” takes its time to ratchet up the tension, giving Bello space to wade around in the melody. When the song hits its peak, the screaming background vocals and fiery guitar tones feel earned.
Thankfully, there are breaks in the angst. A pair of interludes, “Blank // Drone” and “Blank // Worker,” provide necessary breathing room and the album’s clear emotional core. Guitars lilt and quiver in a cyclical melody as Bello softly voices some of the album’s most evocative lyrics: “Ohio river stomachache, pray DuPont, our water is safe/If we don’t die out here on the grass, we might one day be middle class.” They’re as much a lament for a fading American Dream as a lullaby for the working class, and go a long way in showing how the band’s simplest images paint the most richly detailed portraits of everyday life.
Yet the indulgence that colors so much of Illusory Walls is also responsible for its two best songs. “Infinite Josh” and “Fewer Afraid” feel like TWIABP catalog classics, intensely personal and universally resonant in their post-rock grandeur. Complete with intimate, conversational lyrics and a vocal melody readymade for audience singalongs, the penultimate, 15-minute “Infinite Josh” shows the band at the height of its powers. It strikes the same impossible balance as “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity, luxuriating in the long, slow build of repetition while delivering hook after indelible hook. “But everyone says, ‘You can’t go home again,’” goes the refrain, even as it feels like that’s exactly what the band is doing.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the vocalist featured on “Fewer Afraid.” She is Sarah Cowell, not Katie Dvorak.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | October 13, 2021 | 6.8 | 8599ae89-a6d7-4af6-83d6-475353cc259b | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated. Their latest is light on bangers and more focused on texture. | At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated. Their latest is light on bangers and more focused on texture. | Simian Mobile Disco: Whorl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19656-simian-mobile-disco-whorl/ | Whorl | James Ford and Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco have spent the last decade cresting waves and skirting irrelevance to arrive at where they are today. After splintering from rock quartet Simian in 2005, Ford and Shaw turned toward the type of high-energy, melodically palatable electro that came to be known for a mercifully brief spell as “blog-house,” releasing one of the genre’s most colorful and striking full-lengths in the form of the 2007 debut Attack Decay Sustain Release.
The title of SMD’s 2009 follow-up, Temporary Pleasure, suggested the London duo’s dance-pop might be getting stale, so the following year saw them take a successful left turn into hard techno territory, launching the Delicatessen label and releasing an enjoyable batch of roilers in the form of that year’s singles collection Delicacies. At this point, SMD aren’t exactly underrated—their 2012 LP Unpatterns was a just-okay collision of their techno and electro tendencies—but their longevity has perhaps gone underappreciated, as recent collaborations with techno heavy-hitters like Irish duo Bicep and German veteran Roman Flügel have spoken to the duo’s adventurousness and steady sense of industry.
SMD's new album Whorl plays like an expected follow-up to the pleasantly forgettable Unpatterns rather than a confirmation of SMD’s still-revered live show. Much of the 64-minute set emphasizes texture over dynamics, content to exist as background music. This, in and of itself, is not the worst thing that could happen: Ford and Shaw are experts at the nuts and bolts of sound—the former is also an in-demand studio producer and songwriter—so the drifting ambience and analog burbles of Whorl are, like ice sculptures, glimmering in their plainness. The swirling, beatless one-two kiss of “Redshift” and “Dandelion Spheres” take on pleasing, meditative shapes, but the downtempo fare presented elsewhere—the frizzy, disjointed atmospherics of “Z Space”, “Nazard”’s questionable flirtations with chillout—simply dissipates upon contact.
As ever, SMD are most engaging when creating body-moving, uptempo fare: “Calyx” percolates and whines to a pleasing climax, with piping tones dancing on its surface, while “Tangents” builds to an anthemic swirl of synth lines anchored by a steady, hissing 4/4. Most notably, “Jam Side Up” rides a cascading melody for nearly six minutes, building and breaking a beat around it with a sense of patience that makes for an impressive mid-tune peak. These three tracks are clustered in the middle section of Whorl, possibly to mimic the structural build of a live performance, but the shiftless sounds that come before are more likely to trigger a click on "pause" rather than create anticipation for what’s to follow.
Just last year, SMD released Live, an untouchable document of their onstage capabilities that stands as their most pleasurable recorded statement. On Live they distilled their two primary modes—their harder, abstract side and their more explicitly pop-leaning past—into something cohesive and enjoyable, but the set also highlighted the duo’s Achilles heel: they’re more of a singles outfit (as many dance acts are) and when they’re constrained to the album format, tedium creeps in. That’s been the case since Temporary Pleasure, and it’s the case for Whorl, too, a record that finds SMD operating at half-speed when the accelerator is pedal is close within their reach. | 2014-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anti- | September 12, 2014 | 6.5 | 859f0e12-3e13-4bbb-b047-43bb9372b9be | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The hardcore quartet’s 13-minute debut skewers abuses of power, unchecked male privilege, and capitalist complacency at tornado speed. | The hardcore quartet’s 13-minute debut skewers abuses of power, unchecked male privilege, and capitalist complacency at tornado speed. | Soakie: Soakie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soakie-soakie/ | Soakie | Soakie make breakneck rippers. The hardcore quartet, with members stretched between Australia and New York City, confront abuses of power, unchecked male privilege, and capitalist complacency at tornado speed. The band formed in 2018 when drummer Austin and vocalist Summer befriended guitarist Chumz and bassist Nellie in Melbourne. With visas dangerously close to expiration, the band held their first practice, played their first show, and recorded a demo all under two weeks. Subsequent songs were played hard and loud, with an urgency that suggested that the ground beneath the band was being swallowed by lava. Two years later, Soakie’s searing self-titled debut maintains that anarchic defiance.
Opener “Nuke the Frats” is a blast of thick reverb, shredding, and unrestrained spite. Summer, whose caustic, deep-fried snarl evokes punk greats like Vi Subversa and Kathleen Hanna at her most feral, uses her voice as a tool to mimic and ridicule convention. On the fiery “Or You Or You,” she snaps from childish innocence to a gnarly, face-melting howl while breathlessly yelping a curt dismissal: “I don’t want to talk to you!” “Power Tool” is as jagged and incisive as a chainsaw. Built off a gloriously sneering chorus—“Football, red meat, power tools!”—it is a compelling demand to open up this fucking pit.
A good chunk of these tracks are sharpened and beefed-up versions of songs that first appeared on the 2018 demo. Though the band continues to skewer and satirize the mainstream, Soakie’s new screeds signal an increasingly nuanced writing approach with an explicitly political focus. “Ditch the Rich” is a rallying cry that demands “all the rich get in a ditch,” while quietly pointing out the dismal reality of wealth inequality: “I don’t see any dream, all I see is Mickey D’s.” “I’m sick of fascist politics,” Summer screams on closer “Don’t Talk Back” over her bandmates’ thrashing. “What’s Your Gender” questions the value of binaries and social conventions atop a wall of crashing cymbals and dense riffing. While it ends on a doggedly resilient note (“I am happy, love myself/And you can all just go to hell”), the song emphasizes that this hopefulness is a hard-won in a world hellbent on self-destruction.
Soakie’s greatest moment laments a headache as old as time: “There are too many fucking boys on stage!” “Boys on Stage,” a furious indictment of gender inequality in music scenes large and small, is a crucial anthem on a sadly evergreen topic. Summer mocks badges of masculinity and scene cred like emo lyrics and studded leather jackets with oozing sarcasm: “I see you man, you’re real hardcore!” she cheers, eyes rolling out of her head.
“Boys on Stage” concludes with an exuberant declaration: “It’s not just only boys!/There’s girls here now!” It’s a vision of inclusion, a symbol of why listening to Soakie feels so exhilarating. Frustration and anger can leave you listless; these seven songs transform the feeling into pogoing, throat-ripping liberation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | La Vida Es Un Mus | February 22, 2020 | 8 | 85a72080-f202-4856-a68a-66b94bce90aa | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Chelsea Faith Dolan perished in Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire in 2016; this EP of left-field dance music made with her 100% Silk labelmate Maria Minerva is a moving testament to her talents and legacy. | Chelsea Faith Dolan perished in Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire in 2016; this EP of left-field dance music made with her 100% Silk labelmate Maria Minerva is a moving testament to her talents and legacy. | Cherushii / Maria Minerva: Cherushii & Maria Minerva | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cherushii-maria-minerva-cherushii-and-maria-minerva/ | Cherushii & Maria Minerva | In 2013, the Estonian songwriter and producer Maria Minerva (née Juur) toured the U.S. with Chelsea Faith Dolan, aka Cherushii. Both were signed to DIY dance imprint 100% Silk; label co-founder Britt Brown had set them up on a cross-country “blind date” of sorts, knowing that Dolan had a car and suspecting that the two might get along. Sure enough, the experience of spending hours together on the road between San Diego and Chicago, sleeping on air mattresses in strangers’ homes and reveling in each other’s dazzling live performances, night after sparsely attended night, brought them closer together.
But their artistic partnership was barely realized before Cherushii perished in the 2016 Ghost Ship fire, a three-alarm blaze that ripped through an Oakland warehouse and claimed 36 lives. Following her friend’s death, Minerva became a steward of her legacy, taking responsibility for posting on her Facebook page (along with Dolan’s sister and audiovisual artist David Last) and penning a thoughtful tribute that doubled as an introduction to Cherushii’s life and music. She also shepherded to completion six tracks that the two of them recorded and mixed with help from West Coast audio wizards Last, Adam Gunther, and Brian Foote, another 100% Silk labelmate.
Long after the initial rush of fundraisers and compilations to commemorate the dead and rebuild the community, the tragedy’s ache still lingers. “When the madness dissipates and you’re just left with the sad reality of what happened,” Minerva said in a recent interview. Cherushii & Maria Minerva is a testament to Dolan’s vibrant spirit and formidable talent, providing a glimpse of sunlight—and what would likely have been a fruitful collaborative relationship—through the residual smog of grief and loss. Most of the lyrics seem to be directed towards a male partner (perhaps the previous owner of the “Boyfriend Shirt” in one of the tracks) but post-Ghost Ship it’s not a huge stretch to read subtler, heavier meanings into some of them. Album centerpiece “This Must Be the Place” drifts along in a state of Friday-night ennui before the eerily prescient line “Greater than the fear of unexpected violence is the fear of everlasting silence” lands like a punch to the gut.
The EP’s robust basslines and glittering melodies are good foils for Minerva’s vocal stylings, a cross between Blossom Dearie, Brigitte Bardot, and the Estonian pop singers she grew up listening to. Despite the mournful connotations of the title, “A Day Without You” sets a bright tone as Cherushii buoys Minerva’s featherweight (and at times ever so slightly off-key) croon with cowbells, bongos, and a brisk beat. A strong showing from both musicians, “Out by Myself” is a strobing peak-time ode to hitting the club alone. Cherushii & Maria Minerva also repurposes a couple of tracks from previous Cherushii releases that fit in easily with their more recent counterparts: “Thin Line” is a Balearic-tinged highlight from 2015’s ambient dreamscape Memory of Water, while “Nobody’s Fool (Vocal Version)” originally appeared as an instrumental on a three-tracker of the same name, also in 2015. Each artist consistently brought out the best in the other over the years, and the process of listening to these tracks leaves behind a sense of longing for the full-length Minerva has said they were planning to work on next.
Foote’s haunting edit of “A Day Without You,” under his Leech alias, closes Cherushii & Maria Minerva on a sobering note: the comedown for a party that never should have ended the way that it did. Like most dubs, the track is built around absence, and Cherushii’s departure from this world can be felt the strongest here. It’s a reminder that she will be remembered not just by the music she made, but by the impressions she left on everyone around her. | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | 100% Silk | February 19, 2019 | 7.7 | 85ad5d07-c01d-41f1-b87e-f8e93655c6b9 | Harley Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harley-brown/ | |
For a band that built its name on ripping up the rule book, what do Public Image Ltd. sound like 20 years since their last album, and over 30 since their first? | For a band that built its name on ripping up the rule book, what do Public Image Ltd. sound like 20 years since their last album, and over 30 since their first? | Public Image Ltd: This Is PiL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16668-this-is-pil/ | This Is PiL | It's almost as if history is repeating itself: a royal jubilee, a limply received Sex Pistols reunion, and now John Lydon has gone and reunited his post-Pistols band Public Image Ltd. PiL (as they're now known in abbreviated form) are best known for pioneering the post-punk sound with their meandering, dub-influenced music that seemed to creak and creep rather than bang out conventional riff-rock; but for all their supposed influence, how many classic albums of theirs could you name? I'd wager three: First Issue, Metal Box, and The Flowers of Romance, but only Metal Box is an airtight case for canonization. Following that strong three-album run, the band embarked on a turbulent course marked by slipshod albums and regrettable production choices, epitomizing themselves as a sort of tragic case of potential gone unfulfilled. But for a band that built its name on ripping up the rule book, what do Public Image Ltd. sound like 20 years since their last album, and over 30 since their first?
It's hard to decide if This Is PiL is a surprise or merely par for the course. Surprising, because it's not terrible-- it's arguably the band's best effort since 1984's maligned but salvageable This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get, and is slightly marred by similar issues of production and questionable songwriting. Which makes it exactly what we should have expected, right? Mixed in with the self-conscious imageering, down to the album title and opening track, which determinedly declares "This! Is! PiL!" over sluggish backing, it's also hard to tell whether or not they're taking the piss-- as on 1985's marketing send-up Album-- or if Lydon is ill-advisedly trying to re-establish himself. Either way, once that intro is out of the way, his band suddenly sounds hungry, alive, and passionate.
There's a lot of fury on This Is PiL, though some of it rings hollow; "The Room I Am In" takes ham-fisted potshots at UK council housing but comes off confused and rambling, with one of Lydon's more ridiculous vocal performances. Meanwhile, the venom on "Fool" seems general and misdirected, and "It Said That" is an incomprehensible mess. All that aside, the album's opening run is enough to remind you what you might have loved about the band in the past. "One Drop" and "Deeper Water" both feature sterling performances from Lydon, and it's eerie how his voice appears to have escaped the ravages of time. He's as shrill and as powerfully bleating as ever. His lyrics are still nothing to write home about, but they sound formidable all the same delivered in that familiar, angry froth of saliva and bile, all harsh stutters and long, drawn-out notes.
After that clunky start, the rest of the band sounds impressively together given that Lydon is the only founding member present, knocking out Joy Division-dark fretwork on "Deeper Water" and taut, squiggly funk on "Human". Part of that rigorousness comes with the no-frills production, which leaves the band in a clean antiseptic room, trading personality or idiosyncrasy for pure functionality. There's no Jah Wobble here, nor even a Keith Levene-- the band works as a faceless vehicle for the songs, so when the writing falters, the whole thing collapses (the annoying "Lollipop Opera"). Otherwise it's the sound of a particularly competent rock band with a deranged singer, replacing the strung-out, mentally damaged echo chambers of yore with mechanical grooves.
This Is PiL's final two songs hint at the experimental dubby glory of the band's heyday, particularly the nine-minute closer "Out of the Woods", which approximates' Metal Box's uneasy stagger for the only truly menacing, challenging moment on This Is PiL. It's an album that doesn't add anything to a cult legend band's legacy, but it does the unexpected duty of salvaging that legacy, showing a savvy mastermind in John Lydon, who's apparently capable of at least mimicking old glories. It would have been a shame if the band's swan song was left as That What Is Not, released 20 years ago now. This Is PiL isn't a magical solution per se, but for now, it'll do-- a reminder of the band's former genius and a treat for longtime fans who should appreciate at least half the album as solid PiL work. Historical importance aside, they're a band built on unreliability and inconsistency, and This Is PiL maintains that reputation. | 2012-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-05-30T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | PiL Official | May 30, 2012 | 6.3 | 85b77583-e8fa-4ec8-8749-ff9c8de00f62 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
With their entry in the long-running mix series Late Night Tales, the Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD offer an eclectic, uncompromising, and delightful “soundtrack for reflection and meditation.” | With their entry in the long-running mix series Late Night Tales, the Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD offer an eclectic, uncompromising, and delightful “soundtrack for reflection and meditation.” | BADBADNOTGOOD: Late Night Tales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/badbadnotgood-late-night-tales/ | Late Night Tales | Since 2001, the Late Night Tales mix series has been producing turn-down compilations for night owls. Artists from across the spectrum are commissioned to create their ultimate after hours listening experience, and they’re given license to decide just what that means for themselves. There are as many ways to spend a night as there are to soundtrack one, and each host is tasked with bringing the sound of nighttime to life. Jamiroquai, Four Tet, the Flaming Lips, Arctic Monkeys, MGMT, Röyksopp, and Nils Frahm are just a handful of the artists who have assembled these mixes.
In an era of playlists, where any novice with a Spotify account can curate their own mix (or have algorithms and “experts” curate one for them), there’s reason to wonder if mixes like Late Night Tales are still necessary, and how long they’ll survive. But there’s a reason Late Night Tales has managed to hold out this long: The care with which its subjects assemble their selections, along with the rarities and exclusives they share. The mixes have often included covers by the hosts and original spoken word pieces. Ólafur Arnalds turned Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” into a sleepy, sad-eyed plea. Groove Armada interpreted “Fly Me to the Moon” by warping the Sinatra standard into a deconstructed transmission from outer space. Benedict Cumberbatch told a literal late night tale across two installments in the series. A mix is only limited by the curator’s imagination, and the hosts are music-obsessives, auteurs, and visionaries. In turn, Late Night Tales presents resourceful artists with an opportunity to really say something about themselves.
Canadian band BADBADNOTGOOD are quite resourceful—they got their break transposing rap songs by Gucci Mane and Odd Future into jazz—so it makes sense that their Late Night Tales entry is eclectic and uncompromising, yet delightful. They selected songs for their mix based on the music they've interacted with while touring the globe, whether introduced to them by collectors on the road or made by one of their friends. They’ve called the mix a “soundtrack for reflection and meditation,” designed to soothe and stimulate.
Most entries into the Late Night Tales series are geared for an evening come-down or as a guide through a sleepless dawn, a lullaby cutting into the silence of night. But the idea here is that there are many directions a late night can take someone—out somewhere to share quality time with close friends, crammed into a cabin on a red-eye, into the warm and familiar embrace of a lover, deep into the recesses of one’s own mind—and BBNG are simply looking to facilitate the process (a mix for “a quiet night by yourself or with friends,” as they put it). Their mix is intimate and pacifying; their tranquil cover of Andy Shauf’s “To You” feels like a personal dedication.
BBNG’s Late Night Tales certainly unwinds as it goes on, getting more and more hushed with each passing moment, but it never settles into any single sonic space, constantly shifting and advancing. The mix’s middle section, which blends disco, bassy funk, and contemporary R&B, builds leisurely to the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” and Donnie & Joe Emerson’s softly cooing “Baby.” Songs across genres and generations all find their place, contributing to the whole. Young Canadian R&B crooners River Tiber and Charlotte Day Wilson fit in snugly with the American R&B old guard, Grady Tate and Esther Phillips. This is a mix filled with treasures that never loses sight of its primary objective: to enable a low-key vibe.
Mixes are about music discovery; since the days of cassette tapes, people have carefully crafted comps for friends and sweethearts hoping to share new sounds, often sending profound and personal messages with their choices. On some level, BBNG understand that layer of connectivity with this audience. Their Late Night Tales entry is packed with little surprises and new discoveries, relics of American soul and obscure funk and jazz artifacts from France and Cameroon. The mix slowly unwraps oddity after oddity: Ghanaian disco, groovy, keyboard-driven Ethiopian electronica, a feathery Estonian take on Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin Love,” Erasmo Carlos’ música popular brasileira. These are gems you might not find anywhere, much less together. The sincerity can be felt in each pick; BADBADNOTGOOD introduce the sounds and musicians that have brought them solace with hopes that listeners might find the same comfort and inspiration that they have. | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Night Time Stories Ltd. | August 5, 2017 | 7.6 | 85bc7b23-7b24-4479-bf92-63050f2be30a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Following his release from jail, the Michigan rapper expands the aperture of his street tales with cinematic storytelling and post-prison clarity. | Following his release from jail, the Michigan rapper expands the aperture of his street tales with cinematic storytelling and post-prison clarity. | Peezy: Only Built 4 Diamond Links | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peezy-only-built-4-diamond-links/ | Only Built 4 Diamond Links | Michigan rapper Peezy first caught ears as a solo artist in 2014 with Mud Muzik, the first in a series of lean-inspired albums showcasing his villainous wit and natural gift for storytelling. But in 2019, that momentum was halted when he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on racketeering charges. Since his release in February 2021, Peezy’s life has looked different; he says he’s given up opiates and crime in lieu of running his own independent label, #Boyz Entertainment. His latest offering, the 21-song ONLY BUILT 4 DIAMOND LINKS, shows a veteran artist doubling down on the persona he’s cultivated since his early days, expanding the aperture of his street tales with post-prison clarity.
On “Hustler Vs. Scammer,” Peezy fondly remembers what it was like to be 17 with his own trap house, making fast money and having casual sex, as he recalls minute details like the precise amounts of cocaine he used to buy or the brand of soda he mixed with codeine cough syrup to avoid withdrawls. But treachery was never far. “Bro stabbed me in the back, felt like it was Jason/I’ve endured so much pain, I can hardly take it,” Peezy says over gloomy, piano-driven production that builds in intensity with his rapping. Even while telling war stories, he stays grounded, reminding the listener that he’s happily married now and no longer living in squalor. That song’s title comments on the widening gap between the Detroit where Peezy spent 11 years building a music career and the more recent wave of Michigan scam rappers like BabyTron and Teejayx6. Peezy wisely avoids trend-chasing adaptation by doubling down on the rambling flow that’s more stylistically similar to current L.A. street rap like BlueBucksClan or Ralfy the Plug.
Peezy’s storytelling has only grown more cinematic since transitioning into a full-time rapper and label boss. There’s a newfound sentimentality to his perspective that reflects his understanding of how precarious this new life is. The soulful “Married to Da Game” and the boastful “Murder 4 Hire” are straight bars, with Peezy doling out life advice like a boss who’s annoyed about having to explain how things work again. The effortless cool of “Cruise” and the darkly humorous “Don’t Call Me Twin” reflect the irreverent fun of Rio Da Yung OG and RMC Mike, who Peezy once mentored; while the two rising artists from neighboring Flint, Michigan don’t appear on the album, their influence can be found in Peezy’s deadpan taunts and quick-witted humor. No song better distills Peezy's new outlook than the Mozzy-assisted “Can’t Explain,” where Peezy raps, “It don’t make no sense to have them M’s and still be in the trap/It don’t make sense to make it out and keep on coming back.” The beat is softer and more melodic than we’re used to hearing from Peezy, reflecting a slight dissolution of the no-frills, cutthroat attitude of earlier records.
While Peezy’s past few solo records have felt more like mixtapes, DIAMOND LINKS somewhat clumsily takes album form through varied production clearly aimed at pleasing more than just fans of piano-heavy, regional Detroit rap. On “Shopping Spree,” Peezy joins the wave of rappers remaking 2000s hits, hopping on a flip of Twista’s X-rated 2009 song “Wetter.” In the past, Peezy’s crude sexual innuendos functioned as absurdist humor, but here, lyrics like “I want some head/I’m trying to bust all in your new braces” feel tactless in the context of a love song. Similarly, “Wedding Ring” is ostensibly about a marriage proposal, but Peezy instead spends half the song lamenting what he doesn’t want in a partner in generic Auto-Tune.
These are small gripes when a majority of DIAMOND LINKS evokes the formless fun of past Peezy albums like No Hooks and No Hooks II. But now there’s also a seriousness that grapples with his urge to revert back to old habits, even while the stakes of staying legitimate have never been higher. Toward the end of “Interlude,” Peezy bemoans having “one foot in, one foot out.” His voice is chopped and screwed; the effect is dissociative, underlining the nervousness and paranoia of someone only halfway removed from the streets. ONLY BUILT proves that Peezy doesn’t need to keep risking his life to make compelling music. | 2022-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | #Boyz Entertainment LLC / Empire | August 19, 2022 | 7.1 | 85c739f6-b0ad-4cd7-a24f-1c40d5648a98 | Donald Morrison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/donald-morrison / | |
In his work as Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny refuses to stay in one place for long, darting between folk, rock, psych, and noise from album to album and song to song. His new record Hexadic is his first that sounds unsettling. | In his work as Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny refuses to stay in one place for long, darting between folk, rock, psych, and noise from album to album and song to song. His new record Hexadic is his first that sounds unsettling. | Six Organs of Admittance: Hexadic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20074-hexadic/ | Hexadic | Ben Chasny has always been an unsettled artist. In his work as Six Organs of Admittance, he refuses to stay in one place for long, darting between folk, rock, psych, and noise from album to album and song to song. But Hexadic is his first record that actually sounds unsettling. His guitar playing is desperate and cutting—a fiery, jagged rip that recalls Japanese air-piercers like Keiji Haino and KK Null. On the more hectic tracks, Chasny and his band approach the aggressive howl of drowned-in-the-red acts like Sightings and Harry Pussy. But even when they swing slower and sparser, the music remains harrowing, more bent on disturbing than soothing.
The constantly-disruptive feel of Hexadic makes it perhaps the most consistent Six Organs albums to date. There’s a real sense of aesthetic purpose here; though none of Chasny’s work has ever sounded non-commital, his dedication to one guitar approach creates thorough cohesion, gluing all nine tracks together under one communal vibe. That effect was likely enhanced by Chasny’s self-devised songwriting system, one that even inspired him to create his own set of Six Organs playing cards. But this method seems more about creating a frame of mind than hewing to specific rules, as the resulting music sounds ready and willing to go anywhere.
That openness allows Chasny and his colleagues—including his Comets on Fire bandmate Noel Von Harmonson on drums—to play patiently and thoughtfully. Even when they’re smashing into a crescendo, it feels like a natural, well-worn state rather than a rushed attempt to force frenzy. In a way they come off like an athlete who’s so calm under pressure her heartbeat hardly varies whether she’s winning easily or taken down to the wire. So even though Hexadic bears an ominous, sometimes even disorienting tone, there’s a placidity to the proceedings that keeps the music more welcoming than confrontational. It reminds me of how Neil Young’s noisiest songs sway rather than crash, more reflective than assaultive, despite all the sonic debris.
In Hexadic’s best songs, the reflective and the assaultive are two sides of a coin. The heavy march of "Hollow River" is both turgid in Chasny’s dense distortion and spacious in its elongated beat. "Guild" creates a similar atmosphere before retreating subtly into dry, open spaces, while "Future Verbs" is almost all open spaces, like a spaghetti Western theme stretched into suspense-movie tension. Other tunes are more blunt, terrorizing attacks—take the pummeling grind of "Sphere Path Code C" or the aptly-titled "Maximum Hexadic"—yet still somehow feel measured, perhaps just by association.
Whether those destructive sides of Hexadic will appeal to anyone not already initiated into the Six Organs circle is hard to guess. You could even imagine some fans of Chasny’s folkier side balking at the relentlessness of his dark-lensed vision here. But such concerns seem beside the point; if Chasny was worried about maintaining or growing an audience, he wouldn’t have made so many unpredictable choices and opposing moves while crafting one of the most unique discographies of the past 15 years. And besides, you might not have guessed Hexadic would sound like this, but you won’t be surprised that it sounds this good. | 2015-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Drag City | February 10, 2015 | 7.6 | 85d76906-05ed-4c1a-854a-4857414896d7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On her self-produced seventh solo LP, Neko Case brings on a bunch of collaborators for a dense album that searches for connection amid human cruelty and chaos. | On her self-produced seventh solo LP, Neko Case brings on a bunch of collaborators for a dense album that searches for connection amid human cruelty and chaos. | Neko Case: Hell-On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neko-case-hell-on/ | Hell-On | For all of Neko Case’s masterfully delivered tales of killer animals and sentient weather patterns, her decades of work have revealed an increasingly human worldview where mercy is shown only to those who deserve it. She sings of bloodshed and mystery and revenge, but in her albums there are also pleas for basic compassion that are intimate and deeply felt. “I’m a man,” she sang in a definitive lyric from her strikingly personal album from 2013, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight. “It’s what kind of animal I am.”
Five years later, Case returns with Hell-On, her most collaborative release to date, featuring pop producer Björn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn and John), gruff-voiced alt-rock veterans Mark Lanegan and Eric Bachmann, and bandmates from the New Pornographers and case/lang/veirs (k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs). The added company is felt throughout: No other album in her catalog is so musically rich and orchestrated. Its eclectic nature sometimes takes the spotlight from Case’s inimitable alto—usually the central force of her records—but it also highlights the unmistakable identity of her writing. As the scenery shifts, Case spends these songs siphoning wisdom from horror and searching for connection amid human cruelty and chaos. “Be careful of the natural world,” she cautions in the opening title track. You’d be wise to take her advice.
If there’s a theme running through the record’s dense, disparate tracks, it’s confronting primal fears head-on. In a deceptively upbeat song called “My Uncle’s Navy,” she includes a trigger warning: “If you’re tender-hearted, you should stop the tape.” Then, she recounts an early trauma about a relative mutilating animals to scare young girls. Case revisits the scene from various angles, questioning the adults who could have stopped him and analyzing the way sadism evolves when left unchecked. “Bullies are not born, they are pressed into a form,” she reflects. What remains so disturbing to her isn’t the violence so much as the way it can be imposed upon us, without consent or explanation, at a formative age.
Hell-On doesn’t carry the autobiographical precision of The Worse Things Get. Its songs are knottier and more elliptical. While more uptempo tracks like the righteous “Last Lion of Albion” and the loping dust storm of “Dirty Diamond” lack the effortless drive of her old power-pop numbers, they make up for it in texture. Hell-On’s many moving parts invoke a wide palette of fragmented follow-up albums: the arrangements on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk that sounded like three different bands playing (and breaking up) at once; the moments on Destroyer’s Poison Season that seemed pieced together from shattered remains of pop standards. Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.
Case’s gift as a songwriter has long been her ability to burrow small moments into your consciousness: She finds resonance in simple, ambiguous phrases—“I’m free to covet all I please,” “You never held it at the right angle”—where other artists build hooks out of their most universal insights. Here, these mystifying lines come packed together more tightly in songs that rarely cover the same ground twice. At some point during the nautical waltz of “Winnie,” Beth Ditto comes center stage to sing the most triumphant chorus to ever appear on a Neko Case record—the aural equivalent of a celebratory group hug after a decathlon. “We were warriors,” she belts with just the right amount of ceremony. But that melody never recurs, and by the end of the song, Case is back alone at the microphone singing in a quiet, mournful coo. Stories are more exciting, she discovers, when every part is not treated like its climax.
During the recording of Hell-On, Case endured a series of calamities. First, her house burned down. (Thankfully, no one—including the myriad animals she cares for—was injured.) Next, a journalist included her name and address in a news report about the fire: a terrifying prospect, considering Case was dealing with a stalker at the time. These events are never addressed directly in the lyrics, but the ongoing struggle darkens the record. Feelings of fear and exhaustion seep through nearly every song. On a previous album, the karmic apocalypse in “Bad Luck,” with its punchline, “So I died and went to work,” might be a moment of levity. Here, it sprawls uneasily and cycles through peppy, crowded verses that start to feel like a compulsion. In other tracks, she gives the microphone over entirely to her accompanists, retreating momentarily in their presence. “You are beautiful and you are alone,” went a borrowed mantra on her last album. Hell-On takes the opposite angle: As ugly as things get, at least we have each other.
With this outlook, Case is empowered. In the dazzling ballad “Halls of Sarah,” she sings, “Our poets do an odious business loving womankind/As lions love Christians.” Through these songs, she attempts to correct the poets, scavenging for what she refers to as “the warmth of your species,” some common kindness uniting us. While writing this record, Case took inspiration from Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, a thoroughly researched book that offers proof of a long-ignored civilization. Hell-On, with its embattled stories and restless spirit, comforts by offering a similar affirmation: The myth is all the more beautiful and strange if it’s real. | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | June 5, 2018 | 7.7 | 85d77325-8c99-44a7-81ee-7415e89fe4da | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Mexican American electro-pop artist’s debut EP, produced with Panda Bear collaborator Rusty Santos, is a restless patchwork of genre-smashing sounds. | The Mexican American electro-pop artist’s debut EP, produced with Panda Bear collaborator Rusty Santos, is a restless patchwork of genre-smashing sounds. | Jackie Mendoza: LuvHz EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jackie-mendoza-luvhz-ep/ | LuvHz | Jackie Mendoza has packed a lot of life into 26 years. She’s been a resident of Mexico, California, and New York. She’s created two minor pop hits with “Islands” and “La Luz.” And now, with the release of her debut EP LuvHz, she’s worked with one of avant-indie’s oddest producers, Rusty Santos (who worked on Panda Bear’s latest, Buoys). That collective experience could have fed into a pop project defined by a strong sensibility and pointed perspective on the world. Instead, LuvHz is aimless.
That aimlessness may be the result of Mendoza’s effort to make music more distinct than those aforementioned hits, which in hindsight seem calculated to take advantage of the market’s hunger for bilingual, dancehall-adjacent pop. The EP’s opening track, “Mucho Más,” signals an intentional shift. It begins with the glitchy sounds of crickets and a hazy summer night as Mendoza chants the EP’s only earworm, “Mucho más, más allá.” Eventually, a swollen reggaetón beat thuds into the forefront and Mendoza rides it out until it dissolves along with her voice, a harbinger of what’s to come.
It’s thrilling to hear a Latinx artist manipulating the sounds of reggaetón into something less conventional, but nothing so clever is found elsewhere on the EP. Like much of LuvHz, “Mucho Más” is a vibe, not a bop. Co-produced by Mendoza and Santos, LuvHz’s anti-pop is in its own abrasive way quintessentially 2019: a restless patchwork of genre-smashing sounds, all layered atop one another and then smothered in clouds of reverb. The signature here is not mutated beats but Santos’ beloved underwater percussion, and no track conveys drowning more than “Seahorse.” It’s a dirge of a song, floating along on samples of babbling water and Mendoza’s pleading vocals but never managing to go anywhere.
Brevity hinders almost all of the songs on LuvHz. Mendoza is great at building tension in her work, but the tension barely breaks; when it does, the relief is too fleeting to enjoy. Even the EP’s best song, “Loco Flow,” isn’t given the space to establish its titular flow. It’s a beautiful collage of gurgling harps cut through by a satisfyingly sharp My Bloody Valentine guitar line, and it features Mendoza’s most biting lyrics. Taking aim at the status quo and the complacency of her peers, she sings, “Not enough going against the grain, they’re launching missiles at crossed purposes again/Crossing the same paths, denting the same ground.”
LuvHz is, if nothing else, an argument against complacency. Mendoza’s tenacious versatility is her most interesting strength, but this scattered six-track EP makes clear that it’s also her biggest weakness. Is she trying to make Grimes-esque nü-metal revival, as on the exhilarating “Puppet Angels,” or is she aiming for a singer-songwriter take on the complications of internet romance and obsession (“Your Attention”)? Is she trying to make artful pop, or just art? Does it have to be one or the other?
There’s no need to pin down an artist with such evident curiosity. But Mendoza’s songs are frustratingly caught in-between, unable to commit to loud or quiet, personal or political, while trying to be all of the above. Her résumé and talent—her bright voice resonates throughout, cutting through the production sludge—prove that Mendoza is capable of making whatever music she wants to make. Judging by LuvHz, though, it’s not clear she knows what kind of music that is. | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | May 1, 2019 | 6.7 | 85e9456f-c63d-4ccf-be6d-89bf846c0467 | Shane Barnes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shane-barnes/ | |
The South Florida rapper sounds like a hip-hop Hades on a menacing, underworldly mixtape leavened by cracked psychedelia, surreal humor, and straight-up weirdness. | The South Florida rapper sounds like a hip-hop Hades on a menacing, underworldly mixtape leavened by cracked psychedelia, surreal humor, and straight-up weirdness. | Ski Mask the Slump God: Beware the Book of Eli | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ski-mask-the-slump-god-beware-the-book-of-eli/ | Beware the Book of Eli | On “Lost Souls,” from his new mixtape, Beware the Book of Eli, the South Florida rapper Ski Mask the Slump God draws from the sinister side of Greek mythology. “I’mma drown a nigga in a river of lost souls,” he spits over the track’s foreboding beat, threatening to extinguish his enemies in the fabled tributary of the afterlife. Call Ski Mask the hip-hop Hades—king of the underworld and the dead, god of wealth, making songs that could soundtrack the valley of directionless spirits. This is murderous, netherworld music that you can throw up your jewels and smoke a blunt to.
Beware the Book of Eli is the finest showcase so far for Ski Mask’s significant strengths. Of the 13 songs here on the leaked version (an official version, with only ten songs, was later released), only one, “The Bees Knees,” reaches the three-minute mark. This might suggest a scattershot approach, but it’s the lack of wasted motions that make the tape such a savage trip into cracked psychedelia, surreal humor, and straight-up weirdness. There’s desolation in its DNA, yet Ski Mask—an MC who in his best Raoul Duke bucket hat traverses the twisted universe ruled by God Emperor MF DOOM—dilutes that darkness with stoner absurdity. On “Ski Meets World,” he references “Bob the Builder” and Froot Loops mascot Toucan Sam, then vividly describes a sex act, veering in and out of a wacky voice that could’ve come straight out of an Adult Swim cartoon. On a track with the lurid title “Bukakke,” he envisions himself as a vampire who’s invincible to the sun’s rays. Each image is shrouded in the purple haze of weed smoke.
Ski Mask’s consistently off-kilter rap style adds to the tape’s malevolent vibe. His flow is like a butterfly sword, swooping in from a dozen directions at once and slicing from seemingly impossible angles. The frequency with which he changes up his voice might be dizzying or tiresome from a lesser rapper, but Ski Mask never loses control of his gravelly larynx. There are occasional shades of Migos’ rapid-fire couplets on Beware the Book of Eli, underlined by how easily Ski Mask’s style meshes with Offset’s on “With Vengeance.” He negotiates the skyscraper-sized bassline of “Dapper Dan” by speeding up his flow. On the warbling “Suicide Season,” his voice is melodic but bugged out, as though he’s the last conscious person at the party as the sun comes up and the smoke starts to clear.
Key to Ski Mask’s artistry is his identity as a student of hip-hop history. He repurposed Missy Elliott’s “She’s a Bitch” in last year’s “Catch Me Outside,” a number that united 1990s rap with modern street sounds. On the new tape, “Worldwide” boasts the kind of explosive beat Missy could easily have turned into an MTV smash two decades ago, underpinned by fizzing electro production that recalls early rap classics such as Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock.” Meanwhile, the cold production on “Throwaway” would easily fit into the 36 Chambers.
Despite most tracks’ brevity, Ski Mask finds room to toss in some choruses. The catchy hooks of songs like “Throwaway” reveal another facet of his artistry and imbue the release with enough good vibes to soundtrack a nighttime drive in a car packed with friends. But even when the music is at its liveliest, the mixtape feels cracked and decayed like a cassette left behind by a lost civilization. A brutal odyssey that nonetheless provides plenty of kicks, Beware the Book of Eli stands as a new monument on the off-mainstream rap landscape. | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | May 12, 2018 | 7.9 | 85fdc850-8d24-4e62-92ef-e4d7c9823859 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
After a string of promising mixtapes, rapper J. Cole was signed by Jay-Z and now returns with his major-label debut. Jay guests here and inadvertently highlights exactly where Cole comes up short. | After a string of promising mixtapes, rapper J. Cole was signed by Jay-Z and now returns with his major-label debut. Jay guests here and inadvertently highlights exactly where Cole comes up short. | J. Cole: Cole World: The Sideline Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15879-j-cole-cole-world-the-sideline-story/ | Cole World: The Sideline Story | J. Cole is the kind of rapper who worries aloud, and frequently, if he's getting too deep for his own songs. A St. John's University magna cum laude graduate raised in poverty by a single mother, Cole distinguished himself in his early career as much through effort as talent. Over a string of fiercely earnest, frequently impressive mixtapes, he rapped in writerly thickets in which the semicolons and embedded clauses were audible, and he produced all his own tracks. He became a leading light of the conscious-rap crowd, who, always eager for a viable mainstream entrant in rap's ongoing culture wars, fervently embraced him. And then, perhaps inevitably, Jay-Z swooped down and signed him.
The resulting major-label debut, Cole World: The Sideline Story, which finally saw release this week, is shaping up to be an actual Big Moment for Cole: Despite a tepid radio presence, it is projected to sell nearly 250,000 copies. Those are startling first-week numbers for a new rapper these days, and they assure that J. Cole will get at least a partial promenade through the spotlight. People appear to care deeply about this guy. But it's difficult to imagine why from the evidence of this studiously bland and compromise-riddled record, which seems to be searching for the meeting point of every conceivable middle.
About half the album bears Cole's production signature: a glimmering update on 1990s jazz-rap, spiked with live-sounding boom-bap drums. As a rap aesthetic, it's about as rigidly conservative as they come. But Cole is admirably committed to it, and he fleshes it out with surprising musical detail-- backup vocals, comping jazz guitars, lots and lots of grand piano. The songs that stick to this template feel warm, pleasant, and Cole-ish. The rest of Cole World is a 2011-era pop-rap project with a varying success rate: the madcap, syncopated single "Can't Get Enough" feels like a lost transmission from 2002-era rap radio, and it succeeds only insofar as it compels you to imagine how much better an '03-era T.I., or even N.O.R.E., would have finessed the beat than does Cole, who deflates the track's bounce.
It doesn't help that Cole brings the least-flavorful bars of his career to his debut, aiming, most likely, for something more universal than his diaristic mixtapes. The few glints we get of his personal life are intriguing: "Lost Ones" is a slippery and well-conceived, two-sided argument between Cole and his baby mother over whether they will keep the child. "Breakdown" affectingly recounts his late-in-life reunion with his father. But otherwise he seems to be playing by implied, major-label debut rules: keep it simple, slow it down, don't lose anyone. The result is like glutinous paste that results from mashing together Drake, Kanye, and Big K.R.I.T. and straining out what makes them interesting.
Jay himself, the benefactor figure, pops up twice, and both times his presence subtly undermines the marquee star. On his guest verse for "Mr. Nice Watch," he flexes his double -time flow and coolly blows Cole out of the water. He's heard again on the intro to "Rise and Shine," musing in a sampled snippet from his 2000 concert film Backstage on his ideal signee: rapping over his breakfast cereal, gunning for Jay's own spot. "I'mma find him, though, and sign him; I don't want no problems," he says and there is a startlingly predatory ring to his laugh. J. Cole certainly posed no threat to Jay-Z's crown; he's too humble and lacks charisma. But maybe the next up-and-coming rapper to successfully forge and remain in his own lane is the one who refuses Jay's help. | 2011-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia / Roc Nation | September 30, 2011 | 6.1 | 8605dac6-aba5-44f5-9134-4d77e872edd3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Far from the knotty time signatures and intricate textures of their later work, Stereolab’s debut album captures a shoegaze-besotted indie-pop band figuring out exactly who it wants to be. | Far from the knotty time signatures and intricate textures of their later work, Stereolab’s debut album captures a shoegaze-besotted indie-pop band figuring out exactly who it wants to be. | Stereolab: Peng! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stereolab-peng/ | Peng! | Stereolab could never have imagined how experimental, or influential, they would become. When Lætitia Sadier joined her then-boyfriend Tim Gane in his British jangle-pop band McCarthy, the two melted insoluble genres, like 1950s jazz and 1970s krautrock, into a singular style. In McCarthy’s wake, they formed Stereolab—the name taken from a Vanguard Records sub-label—with Sadier on synthesizer and lead vocals, alternating between French and English; Gane on guitar, organ, and synth; Martin Kean on bass; Joe Dilworth on drums. A year later, Stereolab released two 10" EPs and a 7"—Super 45, Super-Electric, and Stunning Debut Album—primarily on Duophonic, a boutique label they co-created with their manager. In 1992, after attention-grabbing Peel Sessions and in-store performances at Rough Trade, Stereolab released their debut full-length, Peng!, through Too Pure, an independent London label that was about to get its own big break the same year with PJ Harvey’s Dry.
Peng! is a blueprint of what Stereolab would become: a band experimenting with 1960s pop harmonies, teethy guitars, and the borderless world of analog electronics. It’s an incomplete picture of the band—two key members, singer-guitarist Mary Hansen and drummer Andy Ramsay, had yet to join—but it has an immediate magic to it, like being there in the studio beside them before their career kicks off. It’s also the closest Stereolab come to being an indie-rock band. Their songwriting chops are there, but they haven’t yet discovered all the instruments and techniques that could, and would, eventually make their music so dazzling. It’s a guessing game of empty spaces as the Groop lay the foundation for what would come.
With an eerie synth fade-in, Sadier beings her monotone singing. When the song, “Super Falling Star,” reaches its chorus, twinkling guitar cushions the two parts, establishing a moody, dreamlike first impression fit for a sci-fi film. Stereolab introduce their futuristic sound only to follow it with a string of more traditional indie-rock songs: “Orgiastic,” “Peng! 33,” and later “The Seeming and the Meaning.” All three chase a driving tempo with strummed guitar and peppy one-woman vocals. The songs are charming, straightforward, and just lo-fi enough to feel like gems waiting to be polished. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that Iron & Wine covered “Peng! 33.”)
Over this indie-rock foundation stretches an unexpected shoegaze veneer. Fuzzy guitars take priority over sharp electronics, giving listeners a chance to imagine who Stereolab could have been if they followed in the footsteps of My Bloody Valentine or Swirlies. “Enivrez-vous” opens with an anthemic drum roll and buzzing guitar reverb. From afar, Sadier reads a Charles Baudelaire poem about getting drunk, creating a blurry airport-announcement effect. A similar blanket of warm guitar drives closer “Surrealchemist,” while field recordings and a thundering Farfisa organ storm its sprawling ending. Shoegaze’s blend of hooks and noise feeds directly into the group’s evolution as a self-described “high-concept pop group.”
For a band that would eventually define itself as the cross-section of analog indie rock and experimental ’60s pop, Stereolab were, for a long period, tied to rigid beats and tight-knit motorik. On Peng!, they diverge from that metronomic timing to embrace flashes of imperfection. Gane breaks out a metallic, quickly strummed guitar solo on “You Little Shits” that misses several notes in its hurried movement. With the jazzy pop of “Perversion,” a Moog solo slowly wanders off beat, humming its way down its own path. In true Stereolab fashion, these moments just make their technological world sound more human. Stereolab claimed never to play live in the studio, yet Peng!’s strongest moments evoke jam sessions, whether it’s the slapdash blues rhythm on “Mellotron” or the manic guitar solo turned group noise session of “Stomach Worm.”
The band had yet to discover the knack for sequencing that would make later albums feel like such cohesive statements. The mood shifts abruptly and frequently, forgoing segues or fadeouts. The gentle hypnosis of synth lullaby “K-stars” is awkwardly sandwiched between the record’s eponymous pop hit and a similarly exultant rock number. These jumps in mood and tone are ironic, given how often the band was criticized for its “one-note” sound. And while with Peng! they began sinking their teeth into the staples of their songwriting—minimalism and repetition—the album’s tendency to move in fits and starts undercuts the power those techniques would assume on later albums.
Two years after its release, the band would release two studio albums, a mini-album, an anthology, four EPs, six 7" singles, and six splits with bands like Unrest and Nurse With Wound. Vinyl obsessives, Stereolab refused to let songs to go to waste. “From the very beginning of Stereolab, the idea has been to release as many records as possible,” Gane once said. “I want it to be hit and run.” Peng! was a floodgate bursting open, revealing a range of subgenres and influences—organ-driven krautrock, low-key lounge pop, cinematic noise—they could build upon moving forward.
Despite this spirit of limitless creativity, Stereolab didn’t feel comfortable promoting themselves unless asked. In early interviews, Sadier and Gane shuffle around as though unsure how to control the narrative of the band on camera. But on paper, they confidently toyed with expectations, choosing a 1969 Swiss political cartoon for their record sleeves and provocative song titles. Stereolab were still figuring out who and what they wanted to be. Peng! was a trial run for a decade of subverting expectations. They didn’t need promotion, their work said it all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Too Pure | July 18, 2019 | 7.5 | 8606f4c5-7174-4286-9f48-4f0ea6efd752 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
UK cult band Clinic continue to make dependably good music, here continuing their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia. | UK cult band Clinic continue to make dependably good music, here continuing their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia. | Clinic: Bubblegum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14691-bubblegum/ | Bubblegum | The last time we reviewed a new Clinic album, Nate Patrin suggested that you wouldn't get much more of a sense of the band's evolution by listening to their albums in chronological order than by putting their tracks in alphabetical order. I disagree. While it is true that Clinic have always sounded more or less the same, they have made a point of introducing new textures and affects with each new record. The group changes in gradual, largely superficial ways that may not be entirely perceptible unless you've been paying close attention all along. Take, for example, the way they have embraced the aesthetics of late-1960s psychedelia. Those elements are hardly present on their debut, Internal Wrangler, but have become central to their style since 2006's Visitations.
Bubblegum, the band's sixth proper album, goes a few steps further in their ongoing exploration of vintage psychedelia. "I'm Aware", the opening track and lead single, signals a substantial change in approach, if not a drastic stylistic departure. The track begins with gently strummed acoustic guitar, and progresses to include lush strings, mellow coos, and an unusually clear and direct vocal performance by singer Ade Blackburn. Still, despite all these un-Clinic creative decisions, it still sounds exactly like the Clinic we've known for years. The melodies, the cadences, the rhythms, that distinct and vaguely creepy voice-- if you've heard a Clinic album, any Clinic album, you have heard this before. Though the group has consistently modified its approach to arranging its material, their songwriting has barely budged since 2002's Walking With Thee.
This doesn't mean they haven't written a great deal of excellent songs. Bubblegum, like the five albums and slew of singles that came before it, delivers several strong tunes. Blackburn and his bandmates have a way of getting the most out of the limited parameters they have set for themselves. The mellow, acoustic psychedelia and relatively hi-fi production values of Bubblegum lends its tracks a touch of novelty [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| , but the songs that work best succeed on the same terms as anything else they've done over the past decade. Clinic are always going to excel when they go for hypnotic, swooning ballads like "Baby" and menacing garage rockers like "Orangutan", but they stumble a bit when they wander slightly beyond their comfort zone. The record's second half has too many soft, drifting acoustic numbers with pleasing textures but forgettable melodies. These slight missteps aren't enough to derail the album or distract from its high points, but they certainly drag on the momentum. The most exciting cuts revel in their newfound lushness. "I'm Aware" and "Milk & Honey" are sweet and airy; the title track sounds as though it is being presented in full saturated color in comparison to the stark black and white tonality implied by the band's earliest work.
Clinic are a tricky band to judge, if just because their consistency can seem so much like artistic stagnancy. They've never made a bad album; they always deliver at least a few undeniable gems per record. Nevertheless, as much as Bubblegum evidences a lot of thought and effort on the part of the band, it still has the sound of musicians going through the motions and sticking too close to their formulae. Their craft is impeccable, and they still sound like no one else despite lifting from all sorts of obvious and obscure source influences, but there isn't enough spark to this material. It may be time for Clinic to begin experimenting with song forms rather than textures. At this point, a song that sounded like "classic" Clinic but had surprising melodic and rhythmic twists and turns would be much more exciting than the familiar Clinic moves dolled up in fancy clothing. | 2010-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | October 1, 2010 | 6.7 | 860f0ef4-d886-4c39-9d4a-287feb4a56ad | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
The Berlin-based American deep house producer follows a string of well received 12"s with his full-length debut. | The Berlin-based American deep house producer follows a string of well received 12"s with his full-length debut. | John Roberts: Glass Eights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14861-glass-eights/ | Glass Eights | John Roberts isn't mysterious so much as inconspicuous. The Berlin-based, Ohio-born producer would be the great young hope of any scene that didn't chew through great young hopes like goldfish crackers. So instead, after four 12"'s and on the heels of his first full-length album, he's the kid with the no-name name who's really good at deep house.
"Good at deep house" and not "techno wunderkind" because, well, Roberts' skills often seem less like those of a musician than those of an athlete-- a disciplined participant playing a varying but finite game. What was notable about Roberts' early 12"'s was not their singularity or adherence to a breaking style, but their studied execution. Roberts wasn't just dropping house music layups like piano chords and dubby textures; he was performing all manner of subtle and difficult moves, like budding noir atmosphere, pitch-shifted vocals-as-percussion, tension-massing tweaks. Roberts' productions are spellbindingly clear, crystal in their intent and focus.
There is something, then, almost inevitable about Glass Eights, Roberts' debut album for his Dial records. It opens with a shattered piano note and a pattering drum; one minute later, when a tiny vocal sample and electric keyboards drop "Lesser" into a well-paced groove, Roberts provides that rare moment in which both bobbing your head and shrugging your shoulders are appropriate reactions. Simultaneously: "This is excellent," and, "We knew he could do this." Roberts chose to emphasize his compositional skills on Glass Eights. Pianos, violins, and lithe beats rule the tracks, which never seem to stir with overeager rhythms or combust into white noise. There are times when the whole can seem less than the sum of its parts. "Porcelain" features bright, ordered drum patterns, a funny little modular synth melody, and an out-of-nowhere steel drum interlude; the total is passable techno. Six minutes of it.
Still, there are only a handful of producers capable of Glass Eights. Sometimes Roberts seems like he's trying to stimulate his tracks solely via the overtones of his chords; call it harmonic house. On cuts like "Pruned" and "Ever or Not" he searches for the midway point between Carl Craig and Philip Glass, the variety provided by listening to determine on which side he errs. Elsewhere he delights in dispensing with one of deep house's go-to signifers-- "warm"-- and sends his tracks out to shiver until they seem austere ("Interlude [Telephone]" and "Navy Blue").
Dance music enthusiasts are really good at asking one question ("Can [hot artist X] possibly keep this up?!") but predictably poor at asking another: "What will it mean if he does?" Glass Eights shyly defers by focusing on a slightly more musically nuanced type of electronic music than Roberts' previous work. It is impossible to call a failure and equally difficult to pinpoint its vigor. | 2010-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dial | November 19, 2010 | 7.2 | 860f5ef2-8e48-4a42-877d-728999681d7c | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
L.A. space-rock hopefuls Autolux sign to the Coen Brothers' DMZ label and enlist producer T-Bone Burnett to ground their galactic ambitions. | L.A. space-rock hopefuls Autolux sign to the Coen Brothers' DMZ label and enlist producer T-Bone Burnett to ground their galactic ambitions. | Autolux: Future Perfect | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/459-future-perfect/ | Future Perfect | Los Angeles, as we all know and love it, is a fucking cesspool. It's seething with pretty little coke-fed nihilists with shards of hair and vintage fabrics jutting from their dancing skeletons. Skid row after parties are 10 times more populated than the actual shows, and the hordes toast caffeinated vodkas to a vacuous neo-dancepunk set by a B-list celebrity DJ. It's enough to make one want to get the hell out of town, but of course it's difficult to even afford a full tank of gas these days. So instead hitch a ride with fellow Angelenos, Autolux, on their debut Future Perfect. Their optimism is reassuring.
In the first 10 seconds of album opener "Turnstile Blues", Carla Azar shames most every beatmaker with her ridiculous Leibezeit-cum-Bonham percussion. Azar's sturdy and creative drumming provides the thrust of Greg Edwards' heavily reverbed and distorted riffs. Meanwhile, Eugene Goreshter sings whispery lullabies of escape and alienation, and his rumbling bass rattles the brain. "So what/ It's alright," he sighs, "They're waiting for you to go."
It's not until "Sugarless"-- 15 minutes into Future Perfect-- that Autolux veer slightly and strangely away from relentless noise-pop. Like a super-cute HAL9000, Azar's soothing monotone says she's "over it." Over what? All of a sudden, Goreshter starts "whoo-hoo"-ing and we realize we're hurtling toward infinity with a bunch of goddamn lunatics. The middle passage seesaws between swaggering glam and ethereal anxiety. "Capital Kind Of Strain" is the ship out of fuel, tumbling aimlessly through the void; "Asleep at the Trigger" shuts down the boosters altogether.
Surprisingly, the record's production is handled by T-Bone Burnett, soundtrack producer of the Coen Brothers' rustic comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Burnett's laissez-faire style somehow matches as well with Autolux's intense dynamic as it does with Appalachian folk songs. He allows the musicians to speak for themselves-- the only evidence of his existence being the sound of his grumpy ass bumping around the studio in between a few songs.
The obvious talking points here are Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine, but the history of the Autolux's band members cannot be overlooked. All three survived late-90s "alternative rock", most notably Edwards, who was a member of Failure. That band's Fantastic Planet-- along with the twin moons of Cobain and Corgan-- orbits off in the distance on much of Future Perfect.
That said, the album sounds like the work of a band that has been in suspended animation for the past five years, hidden away from the torrent of the new wave revival and the reutn of disco as a viable rock touchstone. Azar, Edwards, and Goreshter now emerge from their slumber, preserved and prepared, ready to scorch the earth with their afterburn. | 2004-11-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-11-29T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | DMZ | November 29, 2004 | 8.3 | 8612f1ea-01de-40a2-b334-0c66db715654 | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
A new instrumental project from Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor and Cameron Ralston drifts between moments of tranquility and cosmic dissonance. | A new instrumental project from Hiss Golden Messenger’s M.C. Taylor and Cameron Ralston drifts between moments of tranquility and cosmic dissonance. | Revelators Sound System: Revelators | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/revelators-sound-system-revelators/ | Revelators | M.C. Taylor doesn’t shy away from the big questions. As the bandleader of the soul-tinged Americana group Hiss Golden Messenger, he’s spent the past decade ruminating on existential mysteries with increasingly open-ended, inconclusive results. As he put it on 2021’s Quietly Blowing It, “When it all feels strange, do the words have no meaning?” Revelators Sound System, his new instrumental project with producer/bassist Cameron Ralston, searches for clarity where language falls short.
Their debut LP, Revelators, uses the hypnotic modal grooves of early 1970s jazz—particularly Pharoah Sanders’ meditative atmosphere and Miles Davis’ multilayered funk fusion—as a point of reference for its four lengthy jams. Opening track “Grieving” pulls specifically from Davis’ work, laying down a frenetic bassline as a springboard for a battalion of woodwinds. Saxophone riffs spiral in all directions as melodic phrases materialize and quickly taper, dissolving into the whole. While it may structurally resemble the spliced electric-jazz of Live-Evil and On the Corner, the timbre is more aligned with the dreamy post-minimalism of the band’s 37d03d labelmates like Big Red Machine and James McAlister. Cloaked in reverb and atmospheric keys, it doesn’t quite bite, but it does gnaw.
Even in his new role as free-jazz bandleader, Taylor’s work is strongest when left unresolved. The hushed minor chords and rambling melodies that characterize his folk material carry over into Revelators in charming ways. Intro track “Grieving,” which Ralston described as being “about what it feels like to be American today,” is gripping in its opening half, contorting as if trying to determine the ideal sitting position in an uncomfortable chair. Six minutes in, the band drifts into a drumless, keyboard-driven lull that sets a tone for the rest of the album. The ambience is soothing, spiced with heaving sax and bluesy piano, but it interrupts the improvisational flow, fading into the next track before they’ve had the chance to fully explore its potential.
The two tracks comprising Revelators’ middle section venture deeper into ambient-jazz territory. “Collected Water” is sumptuous yet stagnant, with JC Kuhl’s wailing saxophone swirling in a pool of delayed keys and heavily affected guitar. “Bury the Bell” is a more interesting variation on the sound. Backed by a string section, Stuart Bogie’s clarinet investigates its alien surroundings, leaving swaths of warmth against the eerie orchestral haze. These songs form a quiet retreat from the tumultuous introduction, letting the band process its dense web of rhythm. If “Grieving” conjures the sustained bleakness of its political climate, the following tracks are a prescribed dose of optimism.
In a 2021 interview with Holler, Taylor discussed his inclination toward “leaving space for hope, or leaving space for the possibility of hopefulness, which is kind of different than protest music.” That sense of space plays a crucial role in determining which moments pack the greatest emotional punch. The cascading keys in “Collected Water” make it occasionally feel like wallpaper music, imposing tranquility instead of offering a path to find it for ourselves. Closer “George the Revelator” revisits the opening track’s dubby krautrock percussion, albeit in a more subdued form. The string section takes the lead, swelling with Morricone-esque flourishes as JT Bates’ snare fills echo and roll. It’s Revelators Sound System’s most confident and conclusive performance, offering a tidy ending to a complicated record. Even as they smooth out the cosmic dissonance that makes this project’s most memorable moments feel greater than the sum of their influences, you can sense Taylor veering closer than ever to the transcendence he’s been seeking. | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 37d03d | June 17, 2022 | 7 | 8613a5b2-9aeb-41ee-94cc-98bda3d6bdfd | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The first-ever proper side project from a Metallica member indulges the guitarist’s cinematic aspirations over sweeping compositions that could accompany zombie westerns or apocalyptic sci-fi. | The first-ever proper side project from a Metallica member indulges the guitarist’s cinematic aspirations over sweeping compositions that could accompany zombie westerns or apocalyptic sci-fi. | Kirk Hammett: Portals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kirk-hammett-portals/ | Portals | “When someone does a side project, it takes away from the strength of Metallica,” frontman James Hetfield once told Playboy. But a lot has changed since the fractious days that birthed 2003’s St. Anger and Some Kind of Monster, one of the most revealing and intimate rock documentaries ever made about a band that seemingly hates each other. Back then, Metallica found itself at a crossroads, struggling with interband tension, sitting through therapy sessions, and even forbidding guitarist Kirk Hammett from playing any of his famously virtuosic solos on their new records. Nowadays, however, Metallica is in the comfortable role of elder statesmen, content to repeat past glories and indulge sprawling mixtape projects, like 2021’s The Metallica Blacklist, an overstuffed tribute to their 1991 breakthrough album that grouped disparate artists like Moses Sumney, Miley Cyrus, and Kamasi Washington.
Portals, Hammett’s debut solo outing and the first-ever proper side project from any member of the long-running thrash band, arrived on Record Store Day with not only the blessing of his bandmates, but via the band’s own Blackened label. Recorded over the course of five years in multiple locations, the four-song instrumental EP reveals Hammett’s aspirations to be a film composer, layering crescendoing horns, flamenco interludes, swelling strings—and, naturally, oversized riffs and unhinged shredding—into compositions that could accompany zombie westerns, gothic giallo thrillers, or apocalyptic sci-fi. Occasionally his cinematic references are explicit—“The Incantation” opens with a theme that reads as pure John Williams, and “High Plains Drifter” shares its title with a 1973 Clint Eastwood western—but Hammett suggests an “audio-cinematic” approach that isn’t tied to any specific narrative, clearing space for his imagination to wander.
While some of these songs began as background music for a Hammett’s It’s Alive exhibition, a touring showcase of memorabilia from his horror and sci-fi collection, he often eschews ambiance and scene setting in favor of fully present rock outs. It doesn’t matter that the territory is more Thin Lizzy than Hans Zimmer; it’s a thrill to hear Hammett playing so unabashed. It conjures a sense of “larger than life” awe, the audio equivalent of the expression on Hammett’s face while gazing at his 13-foot King Kong poster over on the Columbia Museum of Art’s YouTube channel. Opener “The Maiden and the Monster'' fades in with John Carpenter-esque synth swells and tape reversed guitar before settling into “Call of Ktulu”-style fingerpicking. Drums enter in the second half, and by the time the epic reaches its conclusion, it feels like a Load-era Bond theme with Hammett’s Santana-style squeals soaring over a chugging fanfare. The Incantation” follows a similar narrative journey, its intro evoking the magical whimsy of Hogwarts before giving way to a psychedelic sitar break and cascading riffs that feel equally indebted to Danny Elfman and the proggy chug of Mastodon.
With its skittering strings, arch vibe, and harmonized guitars that sound like they could have appeared on Ride the Lightning, “The Jinn” is a blast, a slab of heroic, triumphant metal that soars with or without an imaginary movie marathon playing in your skull. As a lead guitarist, Hammett is often called to bring a sense of abandon to Metallica’s martial grooves. On Portals, he lets loose, allowing for a kind of unfussy bravado that doesn’t always make its way onto Metallica albums, where drummer Lars Ulrich tends to micro-mangages Hammett’s solos. “High Plains Drifter” taps into a Morricone mood similar to Black Album cut “The Unforgiven.” With delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar and twangy electrics that nod to the song’s early life as a flamenco composition, it’s the shortest track on the album and one that demands immediate replay.
A film composer’s job is to enhance what’s on screen, stirring emotion and sustaining tension. Without any on-screen action to guide it, Portals rarely functions like traditional soundtrack music, but the concept winds up feeling beside the point. Often viewed as the soft spoken counterpoint to Ulrich and Hetfield, Hammett relishes this star turn, and his sense of freedom in exploring beyond the confines of Metallica is palpable. (Along with bassist Robert Trullijo, he’s also been playing in an R&B/classic rock project called the Wedding Band.) These instrumentals smartly devote plenty of real estate to Hammett’s familiar metalhead strengths, but they also reveal compositional breadth and dramatic flair. Stepping away from the colossus of Metallica, Hammett revels in being his own singular kind of monster.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Blackened | April 27, 2022 | 7.3 | 861973dc-c58b-43d9-b294-2b9ba46fc8cb | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
Olivia Gibb’s messy, experimental garage rock sounds unhinged and strangely human on Warm Bodies’ debut. Come for the unnerving body horror, stay for the fiery guitar solos. | Olivia Gibb’s messy, experimental garage rock sounds unhinged and strangely human on Warm Bodies’ debut. Come for the unnerving body horror, stay for the fiery guitar solos. | Warm Bodies: Warm Bodies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/warm-bodies-warm-bodies/ | Warm Bodies | While some wonder who’s going to make rock’n’roll wild again, Warm Bodies’ Olivia Gibb is barking like a dog out here. The Kansas City, Missouri artist is effortlessly wild. When she sings, she jumps in and out of cartoonish shrieks. Her bug-eyed and immensely expressive live performances would make John Waters proud. If you visit her website, you can buy some ceramic clown nightmares. Punk’s underground has always been flush with fringe characters—Warm Bodies share a label with noxious weirdos Lumpy and the Dumpers, for example—but Gibb stands out from the heap. On Warm Bodies’ messy and muscular debut album, you can find her screaming about her eyes which have fallen out of their sockets.
“My Face Fell Off” is a minute-long blast of surrealist speed punk, so while Gibb screams for help in locating her face, her bandmates come in frenzied. Drummer Gabe Coppage crashes forward at a turbulent clip while Ian Teeple keeps pace, rattling out power chords and guitar solos. This exact sort of noisy punk maelstrom has been the band’s calling card for a couple years now. The song originally appeared on Warm Bodies’ 2016 demo, and while the two versions are similar, you can hear just how much they’ve leveled up. On Warm Bodies, they’re faster, the recording quality is less scuzzy, and most pressingly, Gibb sounds far more unhinged than she did on her relatively more reserved early recordings.
Take “Something Weird Is Eating Me,” a song that addresses the more uncomfortable truths of the human body. After alluding broadly to a “mess” under her clothes, she gets extremely specific: “A burning lump full of yellow gunk/And I’m itchy itchy itchy itchy,” her voice oozing the discomfort that the song’s lyrics so directly imply. Later, when Gibb shouts about her sexual encounter with real-life plane hijacker D.B. Cooper, Teeple sets the stage with a clattering, rapid-fire hook. This is the band’s secret formula: Gibb whips up fever dreams with her singular voice and Teeple grounds everything with earworms and sick guitar solos.
Across its 20 minutes, Warm Bodies isn’t strictly a wall-to-wall shredfest. It’s an album bookended by electronics, opening with the tense swell of warped synths and finishing with the pulse of crackling, ethereal noise. Then there’s “Stinky dUMBOMix,” a song that’s all synthesizers, drum machines, whistles, and handclaps. It’s only a minute long, but it’s a crucial moment that places the music beyond garage punk and into the context of low-key experimentation.
With that handful of left-field sonic tics, Warm Bodies lean fully into the psychedelia that powers Gibb’s lyrics: melted faces, gnarly rashes, dog cosplay, and fucking a never-been-caught skydiving thief. Chaos is an intrinsic part of their DNA, which means more relatable, day-to-day subjects adopt a funhouse-mirror approach. “Psychic Connection” is a love song that’s both surreal and knowable—Gibb breaks down the unspoken “mind control” shorthand you have with the person you love. Then there’s “I Need a Doctor,” where Teeple’s woozy guitar and the call-and-response of “I need a doctor! (She needs a doctor!)” invoke sick-day queasiness. On an album of hysterical vocals and high-speed guitar work, Warm Bodies is riveting because of how human it is—its joy, rage, infatuations, and yes, literal boils. | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lumpy / Erste Theke Tontraeger | April 3, 2018 | 7.7 | 8620455b-000c-4c5e-a5dc-dc18842a878d | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | |
On its second album, the Portland quartet conjures a sense of ambient horror with shapeshifting, high-velocity death metal. | On its second album, the Portland quartet conjures a sense of ambient horror with shapeshifting, high-velocity death metal. | Ænigmatum: Deconsecrate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aenigmatum-deconsecrate/ | Deconsecrate | Horizons aren’t what they used to be. Now that we’re surrounded at all times by horror—political, biological, climatological—the idea of something awful lurking in the distance, threatening to put an end to life as we know it, is frankly a little banal. When creeping death becomes everyday reality, it can feel like just another distraction. On Deconsecrate, the second album from Portland death-metal quartet Ænigmatum, that ambient horror slowly begins to take over, clouding the band’s joyful mutations as they careen along the borders of black, death, speed, tech, melodic—basically any high-velocity form of metal.
The gyroscope keeping this wildly spinning machine together is bassist Brian Rush, whose fretless runs fill these songs with a melodic light that, when coupled with hyper-melodic tom fills from drummer Pierce Williams, decants what would otherwise be very claustrophobic music, making it feel spacious and hungry with possibility. His contributions are key to the album’s constant shapeshifting, signaling changes in texture and rhythm that the rest of the band gamely follows.
“Forged in Bedlam” opens the album in a slushy hail of guitars, but within 30 seconds, the bass has re-routed the band into a subdued thunderstorm. With a roar from vocalist and guitarist Kelly McLaughlin, the group heads back into the fray with a relentless grindcore beat, only to be seduced once again as the bass snakes and curves its way around the mix. A similar dynamic plays out in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” whose harsh noise intro is filleted by a groove onto which the rest of the band grafts themselves, with Rush’s bass line forming the spine of the re-skinned song. Like Death’s Steve Di Giorgio or Damon Good of Ænigmatum’s 20 Buck Spin labelmates VoidCeremony, Rush’s bass lines work like blushes of pink that underlight a Renaissance cloud, their virtuosity and articulation complementing the music with strange, heartfelt melancholy.
Guitarists McLaughlin and Eli Lundgren frequently stick together, twinning their leads and riffing in tandem. They occasionally break apart for dramatic effect, as in “Larker, Sanguine Phantom,” where they stagger their riffs alongside Rush’s bass in a way that makes them feel like a phalanx armed and ready for the approach. The duo flash coppery sheets of noise across “Disenthralled,” transitioning into a trad-metal duel and raking the song into a peg-legged rhythm pattern that passes through multiple forms. Like a jazz combo holding the one across the changes, they manage to imply the groove even once they’ve stopped playing it. Their constant fluidity turns the album’s thousand little crags into one long, humming vibration, the sound of a truck’s tires speeding over a gravel road.
As Deconsecrate plays out, Ænigmatum introduce subtle changes in the frequency, and the gloom eventually catches up with them. The back half of the album still rages, but the guitars occasionally slow to a prolonged burn. Even when they sprint, it feels like a requiem played at warp speed, and the thrashing and moaning that come off as swashbuckling in the first half of the record begin to feel like a form of pleading. Like the disgraced monarch in Jean-Paul Laurens’ painting The Excommunication of Robert the Pious, they are still in power, but they are stripped of their spirit. It’s a portrait of triumph in reverse.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | August 31, 2021 | 7.3 | 8621023d-c133-42bd-b9b1-ef8cf4d34639 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Denver’s Khemmis traffic in longform doom metal, letting their anger spread gradually rather than unleashing it all in one torrent. | Denver’s Khemmis traffic in longform doom metal, letting their anger spread gradually rather than unleashing it all in one torrent. | Khemmis: Hunted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22557-hunted/ | Hunted | Denver’s Khemmis traffic in longform doom metal, letting their anger spread gradually rather than unleashing it all in one torrent. It’s an unlikely sound to gain wider attention, as it’s resistant to translation and often encourages the depression that’s consistent with its tempos. Where many of their peers double down on Master of Reality worship or tread into more psychedelic or progressive waters (as is the case with Pallbearer, their main contemporary), they elongate the time-worn dual guitar harmonies of Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest, working within a more traditional metal context. Hunted, their second record, sees them making strides in finding their sound, with leads as poignant as their accompanying vocal work.
When your band’s vibe derives mainly from the melody, those leads better be solid, and Khemmis’ core, guitarists and vocalists Phil Pendergast and Ben Hutcherson, make the sorrow in their songs downright joyful. Opener “Above the Water” establishes this rule quickly, with jubilant leads that rival Iron Maiden’s sprightly guitar work. They’re not bogged down by Hunted’s overarching gloom; rather, they justify the songs’ weight, serving as a gliding bridge between lumbering cliffs. The ending of “Candlelight” shows how Pendergast and Hutcherson can be tricksters too, by bending what would be a showstopping riff and burying it in the murk. “Beyond the Door” even features a ZZ Top-esque boogie where they sound like Billy Gibbons wandering through a wasteland, the shuffle acting as a last-ditch flare for any sign of life. (Get a Texan in your band—drummer Zach Coleman, who’s also played in cult black metal duos Vasaeleth and Dagon—and that influence is bound to rub off somehow.)
Pendergast’s somber war cry carries the music as much as his own guitar work. His pealing tone suggests mightiness, but what shines through is what a toll such power can take. “Three Gates” plays around with how death metal and doom influences combat each other. “Gates” is also a nod to the Peaceville Three—Anathema, My Dying Bride, and Paradise Lost—whose earlier works fused death metal vocals, doom pacing, and a bleak outlook. Khemmis have stripped the cobwebs off those bands’ more Gothic moments and revealed the rock’n’roll heart lurking beneath, and “Gates” is a prime example of how their lack of varnish works in their favor. | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | October 31, 2016 | 7.6 | 8627a13e-1aec-4066-83a5-6684311fea4e | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Häxan is the first instrumental effort by the psych-rock band Dungen, a scoring of the 1926 animation classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed. | Häxan is the first instrumental effort by the psych-rock band Dungen, a scoring of the 1926 animation classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed. | Dungen: Häxan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22658-haxan/ | Häxan | Though firmly rooted in ’70s progressive and psychedelic rock, Dungen has never felt like a tribute act, throwback or genre exercise. By offering up honest-to-god great songs with memorable vocals leads, fluid performances, killer arrangements and an unflinching love of the flute, they nail the vibe of their beloved era while always sounding like themselves. On Häxan, the group presents a recent scoring of the 1926 animation classic The Adventures of Prince Achmed, replacing the original’s crackling symphonic score with fourteen interludes, rave-ups and mini-suites that nod knowingly to the past while remaining fresh.
Like most soundtracks, Häxan comes alive in context. Though marketed as a stand-alone album, it reads more as a deep psych mood board than a truly independent work. There’s an abundance of production details to get lost in, and the band sounds as vital as ever—dynamic, tight and assured. The fuzzy guitar and scraped piano strings on the title track give the feel of a genuine Morricone relic, and the gorgeous organ on “Kalifen” nods overtly to “A Whiter Shade of Pale” without feeling cheap. Recorded to and edited on tape, there’s an exquisite warmth to the entire album, with plenty of chunky, vibrant textures. Tiny details, like the trail of a spring reverb or a strikingly loud shaker panned way off in the stereo field give a sense of raw physicality, of players reacting to one another in a room.
One of the best moments comes early on, in “Wak-Wak’s Portar.” Sounding like a live bootleg from 1976, the group blurs into a monolithic, phased out wall of sound… except for the flute. Loud and in charge, it cuts across the whole mix, demanding to be heard. It’s an awesome, and funny, minute and a half, which suddenly gives way to some distant elevator music. Dungen are clearly enjoying themselves.
Once the album is finished, however, the songs stay with you less than these details. To start, at 40 minutes it’s barely more than half the length of Adventures, which means you can’t toss it on alongside the film and have a seamless experience start-to-finish. Nonetheless, letting the two play simultaneously does have its rewards. Album opener “Peri Banu Vid Sjön” initially sounded like a bland bit of coffee shop fodder. But next to the opening credits, it bloomed, teasing out a melancholy ache behind the tale of adventure about to unfold.
At times, there were moments of startling synchronicity. More importantly, the moods simply matched up often. Dungen’s rollicking, questing rhythm section and flight-of-fancy solos sync up well with the flying horses, shapeshifting spell casters and voyages to faraway lands, and the more eerie, spaced out passages worked great in tenser scenes. Still, an edit that we could match to the film would have been a more-than-welcome addition. As it is, Häxan occupies an odd slot in Dungen’s hard hitting and respectably consistent discography: a labor of love that is less than essential, rewarding but not attention grabbing, remarkably ambitious and yet strangely ephemeral. | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | December 3, 2016 | 6.9 | 8628ac8c-3a54-4989-80d1-6c2e69bfa3ee | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
Lil Baby and Gunna are one of the best new rap duos and their latest project develops a chemistry and brotherhood few others can lay claim to. | Lil Baby and Gunna are one of the best new rap duos and their latest project develops a chemistry and brotherhood few others can lay claim to. | Lil Baby / Gunna: Drip Harder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-baby-gunna-drip-harder/ | Drip Harder | Drip Harder is the more opulent and flashier spiritual successor to Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan’s classic 2014 Atlanta mixtape, Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1. The influence of the two pumps through the veins of Lil Baby and Gunna, just as it does any rapper who debuted in the city after 2014. The similarities between the two mixtapes are glaring as it’s a duo of Atlanta-bred melody-driven rappers that spit so damn well with each other, aware that if they go hard enough this is their shot at superstardom. But where Lil Baby and Gunna separate themselves is a chemistry and brotherhood that few rap duos can lay claim to.
The chemistry of Lil Baby and Gunna breeds competition as the mixtape becomes a showcase of two rappers at the top of their game attempting to out-flex the other: If Gunna just copped a new coat, Lil Baby got a superior one that cost $6,500, and if Lil Baby has a VLONE hoodie, Gunna has the same one but in every color. They revealed their world of drip earlier this year when “Sold Out Dates” set the blueprint for Lil Baby and Gunna’s rapping style: a string-sampling instrumental from ATL mainstay Turbo, melodic Gunna hymns dedicated to his designer, and the gruffer bars of Lil Baby still acclimating to this life of showboating. This alchemy shapes Drip Harder into the rare major label collaborative mixtape that’s not on cruise control.
From the beginning, Lil Baby and Gunna are all-in, recruiting high-profile guests like Lil Durk and Nav to follow their lead on a track definitely titled in a 2018 hip-hop name-generator, “Off White VLONE.” Gunna ushers everyone into the piano-laden world where not much matters other than if your belt buckle matches your Balenciaga runners. The duo calls on Drake to go in over the Tay Keith drums he loves so much on “Never Recover” and, although Drake’s borrowed flow can’t keep up with Lil Baby and Gunna, none of their guests can, except for Young Thug. As their idol pops in on “My Jeans,” sliding in a chorus between their two short verses and it’s like a dad taking his two sons to the basketball court to play one-on-one.
Drip Harder thrives when Lil Baby and Gunna are alone, in their element, battling while also making sure to fill their quota of VLONE product placement (for instance, VLONE rims?). On “Drip Too Hard,” Lil Baby finds his melodic sweet spot on the hook only for Gunna to attempt to upstage him with smooth vocals that manage to keep his rapid delivery intact, all while tossing in a few boasts that are probably lies, but those are the best ones (“TSA harass me, so I took a private plane”). Their chemistry takes center stage on “Belly,” as Gunna passes his flow onto Baby who at this point is so confident he even celebrates his scent (“Spend thousands on fragrance she fuckin’ my odor”).
The shortcomings come to light every time Baby and Gunna separate. When Turbo doesn’t have both Baby and Gunna flowing their asses off, his monotonous drums patterns grow tiresome. A few of his beats blend into one another, and he’s just not versatile enough to carry a project on his back. And even the bouncy Gunna solo track “Style Stealer” features Gunna comically unaware that dressing like Willy Wonka is not a flex (“Flawless choker round my throat/Icy cane like Willy Wonka”).
Lil Baby and Gunna’s chemistry is a refreshing splash in an Atlanta hip-hop scene that has felt stagnant. It’s the duo establishing themselves, knowing they have some limitations, but capitalizing on what they do well. And even if they break up over some pettiness like Rich Gang, Drip Harder will be remembered as a moment that let hip-hop know it had two new superstars draped in “designer to the floor,” which, as Gunna said, “I can barely spell.” | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Young Stoner Life / Capitol / Motown | October 11, 2018 | 7.6 | 8629380e-1bf7-4b51-a763-40aacbb6f04f | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
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 1979 debut from the rambunctious and politically charged UK group the Specials, a marquee document of the ska revival. | 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 1979 debut from the rambunctious and politically charged UK group the Specials, a marquee document of the ska revival. | The Specials: The Specials | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-specials-the-specials/ | The Specials | On November 14, 1940, Germany’s months-long air raid better known as the Coventry Blitz reached a brutal climax, razing over 4,000 homes and killing hundreds in the English city. The Luftwaffe struck overnight, using the light of the full moon to sight their targets and cripple the industrial stronghold. Within hours, one-third of Coventry’s factories were leveled. Great chunks of the Daimler plant, birthplace of the first British car, were reduced to heaps of brick and dust. The once-sturdy town, the automotive hub of the West Midlands, was scattered about in smoking piles by morning. The German code word for the raid borrowed a name from one of Beethoven’s most famous works: Mondscheinsonate, or “Moonlight Sonata.”
After the war, recovery was incremental. Estates emerged on the city’s perimeter and apartment towers rose from the ash. As auto factories were rebuilt, Coventry reclaimed its status as “Britain’s motor city.” Car manufacturing boomed, peaking alongside Detroit in the 1950s and ’60s. Shopping centers and multi-tiered parking garages signaled the rise of post-war leisure. It was a boxy, cinder block vision of the future, but a glimpse forward nonetheless.
And then the city was leveled once more—by a much quieter force, lacking shape and purpose. A nationwide recession crept in, stripping Coventry of its core industry; between 1974 and 1982, local jobs in manufacturing were slashed nearly 50 percent, and the resuscitated city center decayed. Youth gangs roamed the streets, which were often lined with shuttered shop windows. Coventry’s second decline couldn’t be measured in rubble mounds. The debris was invisible and ambient—a sour but fertile soil that sprouted one of England’s most vibrant music scenes.
Unlike Motown, which coincided with Detroit’s economic surge, the Specials and 2 Tone burst from Coventry’s crumbling infrastructure. Christened by bandleader and organist Jerry Dammers, the 2 Tone genre was a bubbling concoction of Jamaican ska and snide, stripped-back punk. By the early 1970s, scores of people had relocated from the West Indies to Britain, many settling in the Midlands city. Some Jamaican-born Coventry residents would throw sound system parties, stacking speakers in great towers and blaring roots and rocksteady into the night. The cross-pollination of effervescent ska rhythms and blue-collar malcontent was inevitable.
Dammers was the son of an Anglican minister, but he devoted his life to a different trinity: the Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks. He devoured records from Motown and Stax, and started writing songs at the age of 10. As a teenager, Dammers got hooked on radio hits like Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” and “Liquidator” by the Harry J All Stars. Cobbling together the Specials was a circuitous, multi-year phenomenon. The group was first known as the Automatics, and then the Coventry Automatics, and then the Special AKA, before their shorter, more sensible moniker was adopted. The lineup came together in pieces. At 15, Dammers played drums in his first band, Gristle, which included future Specials lead guitarist Roddy Radiation (née Byers). He met bassist Horace Panter while studying art at Lanchester Polytechnic. The two students shared a love of reggae and mischief. “We used to wreck the hippie parties, play Prince Buster records,” Panter once said of his early antics with Dammers. After college, Dammers played in a cover band, but longed to record his own music, a souped-up fusion of Jamaican pop and British grit.
In 1977, Dammers formed the Automatics with Panter, Jamaican rhythm guitarist Lynval Golding, drummer Silverton Hutchinson (later replaced by John Bradbury), and vocalist Tim Strickland. Strickland was quickly swapped out for a local 17-year-old named Terry Hall, who’d been plucked from a punk band called Squad. The following year, Roddy Radiation joined the fold, as did singer and toaster Neville Staple, a regular at Coventry’s Locarno Ballroom dance hall. These early details—the name changes and personnel revisions—were like the tiny bubbles creeping up the side of the pot before it boils over.
By 1979, Dammers had formed 2 Tone Records, giving a name and aesthetic to the nascent Coventry style. A 2 Tone single could be identified by a stripe of black and white checks stretching across the disc label, and the slim-suited rude boy logo—a nod to an early photograph of Peter Tosh. The Specials reconstructed the look, copping vintage suits from thrift shops and topping them with trim ties and pork pie hats. The name 2 Tone referred to the fabric of 1960s tonic suits, which was woven from two different colored threads for an iridescent effect. The first 2 Tone release was a split 7" from the Specials (then billed as the Special AKA) and fellow Coventrians the Selector. The Specials stamped Side A with “Gangsters,” their interpretation of Prince Buster’s bluebeat instrumental “Al Capone.” The band’s debut single kicked up the tempo of Buster’s original and curdled the mood just enough. “Why must you record my phone calls?/Are you planning a bootleg LP?” Terry Hall sang, his juvenile sneer toughening Dammers’ jaunty organ pulses.
The song was partly inspired by a fiasco the band endured at a nightclub in France. One evening, the landlady of a nearby hotel barged into the group’s dressing room with a couple of hired goons. Her previous lodgers, rowdy London punks the Damned, had trashed their room, and the proprietor demanded that the Specials cover the damages. At one point, she seized Lynval Golding’s Telecaster, sparking the lyric, “Can’t interrupt while I’m talking/Or they’ll confiscate all your guitars.” After a useless appearance from local police, the club owners restored order backstage. Their revenge on the French innkeeper, immortalized in “Gangsters,” was an early victory; the song climbed to No. 6 on the UK charts, and 2 Tone swept the country.
Meanwhile, Elvis Costello spent the summer of ’79 crisscrossing through England on trains, sustained by, as he once put it, “half a bottle of gin and some little blue pills.” Costello had just released Armed Forces, his terrific third album with the Attractions, but he was preparing for a new role on those hazy railway commutes. As the producer of the Specials’ forthcoming self-titled debut, Costello was devising a strategy to capture the kinetic flash of their performances. He trailed them from one seaside town to the next, catching as many live gigs as possible. “My job was to get the band on tape before some more skilled producer got ahold of them and screwed it up completely, by perfecting things that didn’t need perfecting,” Costello recalled in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. “Jerry [Dammers]’s dogged pursuit of his ideals and the improbable chemistry of the lineup did the rest.”
With the addition of horn players Dick Cuthell and Rico Rodriguez, the Specials had almost enough members to fill a baseball team. Costello jammed them all into TW Studios, a cramped space under a laundromat in West London that smelled of detergent and “drying socks,” as Costello remembers. The ensuing sessions were teeming with pranks, jury-rigged sound effects, and the occasional cameo. Costello, by then an elder statesman of New Wave, was a scrappy, madcap producer. He stomped amps with Doc Martens and beat tin trays with a broom handle to enhance the percussion. Everything reverberated off the studio’s concrete floor, lending the album a spacious, metallic quality, as though it’d been recorded in an industrial warehouse rather than a Fulham hovel. He also enlisted Pretenders leader and ultimate cool girl Chrissie Hynde to track the lusty panting on “Stupid Marriage,” and a brief condemnation of “slags” on “Nite Klub.”
Costello fell victim to the band’s drunken hijinks, but he leveraged it to improve the album. Sure, they laughed at the bespectacled singer when a chair collapsed beneath him early into recording. And yes, Neville Staple shut down a mixing session when he strolled into the studio and shot Costello with a .45 pistol that was, fortunately, loaded with blanks. But like a brave substitute teacher, Costello was unruffled; he embraced their buffoonery, perhaps fueling the fire by supplying the band with plenty of liquor. Gearing up to record the scorching, antisocial “Nite Klub,” Costello was hellbent on replicating the sweaty confines of a concert venue. He stocked up on booze, switched off the lights, and stuffed the studio with the band members and their bawdy friends. In the dark, plied with alcohol, human nature did the rest. The backing track is a drunkard’s symphony on its own, rendered with clinking bottles, strident chitchat, and an urgent demand for refreshment: “Pass that beer! Pass that beer! Pass that beer!”
Done and dusted, The Specials was released in October of ’79. Cruising in the wake of “Gangsters,” it scaled the British charts, landing in the Top 20 and priming the group for their first No. 1 single. “Too Much Too Young” was an unlikely hit, a dubby, downbeat shuffle about wasted youth and unplanned pregnancy. Interpolating Lloyd Charmers’ raunchy 1969 song “Birth Control,” the Specials drowned the piece in dishwater and stale tea. Hall took aim at a young woman, who was “married with a kid” and “chained to the cooker” instead of partying with him. “Ain’t he cute?/No he ain’t,” Hall sneered at her baby. “He’s just another burden on the welfare state.” These totems of domesticity—marriage, procreation—might have been pillars of a hit song 25 years prior, but “Too Much Too Young” was built on their wreckage. That the single reached No. 1 was a testament to England’s dispirited youth. Unemployment was on the rise, and the entire country was heading for a recession. It was an unappealing time to hunker down and have a family.
“Too Much Too Young” was also a bit of a sham. For all of its assumed social commentary, Dammers later admitted that he wrote it out of jealousy. His spiteful, sexist lyrics are an occasional blight on the band’s debut. “Little Bitch” is especially cruel. You could argue that it is a working-class rebuke of rich interlopers peacocking through the underground, until Hall twists the knife: “And you think it’s about time that you died/And I agree, so you decide on suicide/You tried but you never quite carried it off/You only wanted to die in order to show off.” Decades later, after his own suicide attempt, Hall expressed regret over the song. “It felt like a horrible personal attack on someone I didn’t know,” he said. The band eventually dropped it from their live set.
Despite the odd lapse into chauvinism, the Specials denied the uglier schools of punk philosophy. They rejected nihilism and fascist iconography, and took an aggressive stance against racism, often marching into the crowd to eject bigots from their live shows. Stray members of the neo-fascist National Front party would find their way to Specials gigs, sieg-heiling and hurling coins at the group. Hall would heckle the skinheads, and anyone else who rejected the positivity of their music: “We’d like to thank you lot up front who’re dancing and the rest back there—shit to you!” Despite the occasional intruder, Specials’ fans were largely a progressive, rambunctious crew. The band supported left-wing causes like Rock Against Racism, the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament, and the Right to Work March.
“Because we are multiracial, we want to see people live together the same way we work on our music,” Lynval Golding told The New York Times in 1981. “Issues like racism and unemployment can’t be pushed aside.” In the early ’80s, Golding was the victim of two separate racist attacks in London and Coventry. The latter left him nearly dead after the assailant slashed his jugular with a smashed bottle. “I only want to live in peace with people,” Golding told a reporter from his hospital bed. “I didn’t attempt to fight back and I don’t intend to start now.” Three years prior, Dammers penned the anti-racist skank “Doesn’t Make It Alright” in direct response to the hate that was putrefying an extreme sect of British youth. “Just because you’re a Black boy/Just because you’re a white,” Hall sings in his most tender register. “It doesn’t mean you've got to hate him/It doesn’t mean you’ve got to fight.” Today, the words read like a nursery rhyme—a bouquet of good intentions masking the complex stench of reality.
Ultimately, the Specials were necessary idealists. They managed to transcend the doldrums of their hometown, not by fleeing to London or the States, but by enriching the community around them. “The whole idea of the Specials and 2 Tone was to do something for Coventry,” Terry Hall told The Guardian in 1997. Hall attended school in the center of town, and his parents worked blue-collar jobs in the city’s once-booming auto industry. As a child, he felt suffocated by the oppressive, endless concrete, the spiking street violence, the stagnant gray Hell. He frequently asked himself: “How do I get away from Coventry?” For a few electrifying years, Hall and the Specials embraced the battered metropolis and built a refuge all their own.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan | 2022-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 2 Tone | April 3, 2022 | 9.3 | 862ae8be-61f7-4241-bdcc-90ed75b353e7 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Armed with advice for the next generation and lots of thank-you notes, Open Mike Eagle’s funny and reflective ninth album seeks a sense of closure within his discography. | Armed with advice for the next generation and lots of thank-you notes, Open Mike Eagle’s funny and reflective ninth album seeks a sense of closure within his discography. | Open Mike Eagle: Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/open-mike-eagle-another-triumph-of-ghetto-engineering/ | Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering | Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering should have a familiar ring to it: The title first appeared on a print illustrated by McKay Felt and sold with an exclusive vinyl edition of Open Mike Eagle’s 2022 release Component System With the Auto Reverse. The two records share a similar cast of characters, but where Component System focused on the lasting imprint of hip-hop history, Another Triumph plays like an ode to the music and memories that shaped Eagle’s own character and career. Along for the ride are STILL RIFT and Video Dave, who appear courtesy of his label, Auto Reverse; his longtime producers Child Actor, Quelle Chris, and Illingsworth; and mastering engineer Daddy Kev, founder of the influential former Los Angeles club night Low End Theory, where Open Mike Eagle and his peers first found their artistic footing.
Open Mike Eagle stuffs an abundance of obscure counterculture references and chuckle-worthy ramblings into the album’s brief 25 minutes, while also stepping back to prioritize guest verses and vivid imagery. “Every album is a little collection of pieces of yesterdays,” he admitted on the previous record; here, he pays tribute to memory, delivering a career’s worth of liner notes with the emotional maturity J. Cole strove for on “Note to Self.” Throughout the album Eagle thanks scores of people by name, from Thundercat to Dumbfoundead to Kenny Segal, as if he’s monologuing at the Thanksgiving table.
The other Triumph of Ghetto Engineering might be 2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, to which this album plays like an unofficial sequel: In a direct parallel, Open Mike Eagle spends its opening seconds whisper-rapping over a muffled electric guitar solo. His amorphous fusion of singing and rapping has ripened to a more confident resolve, while the beats remain sample-heavy and hypnotically lethargic. “the wire s3 e1” revisits the image of Chicago’s now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes, where those childhood daydreams unfolded. Joined by fellow L.A. poet Blu for their first song together in seven years, Open Mike Eagle winks at the two Brick Body Kids tracks produced by Exile as he grapples with similar themes—isolation, inner conflict—years later. He’s still searching for himself amid the rubble of childhood memory.
As he observes the world through a more mature lens, Eagle’s rapping remains as astute as ever. On “A new rap festival called falling loud,” he provides fatherly advice to those coming of age today, such as his own teenage son, Asa. Playful reminders like “Don’t do the shrooms when it’s Christmas dinner” underscore the humor and humility of Open Mike Eagle’s final wish: “When I die, mix up my ashes into some coffee grounds.” He finds levity in the inevitable, but rap seems bigger than him now that he’s living in a world where his heroes are no longer immortal. Open Mike Eagle’s feature on billy woods’ “Fool’s Gold” marked one of the first times he addressed MF DOOM in his work; on Component System’s “for DOOM,” Eagle paid tribute to the late supervillain. On “a new rap festival called falling loud,” he reminds a new generation that mortality only looms as large as you let it: “You probably drink the ashes of dead people all the time and don’t know it.”
The album ends at its emotional peak, the heaviness in his voice evident throughout closer “mad enough to aim a pyramid at you.” Each time he emphasizes the word “everything,” he pauses ever so slightly to soak in its gravity and totality—the anguish, the love, the nostalgia. After 20 years of making music, Eagle seeks a kind of closure within his own discography. Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering becomes a personal scrapbook and an open letter: tangible evidence of who he’s become through fatherhood, divorce, and nine solo albums. | 2023-09-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Auto Reverse | September 5, 2023 | 7.7 | 8634bd86-f727-4e9e-b6d2-56fb0df86d0e | Yousef Srour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/yousef-srour/ | |
Spencer Krug's latest release as Moonface features the former Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown member again by his lonesome. Written and recorded in his temporarily adopted home of Helsinki, City Wrecker reflects a sense of frigid displacement. | Spencer Krug's latest release as Moonface features the former Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown member again by his lonesome. Written and recorded in his temporarily adopted home of Helsinki, City Wrecker reflects a sense of frigid displacement. | Moonface: City Wrecker EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19817-moonface-city-wrecker-ep/ | City Wrecker EP | Spencer Krug’s songwriting is elastic. In the past, his sumptuous, warbling melodrama has been able to serve as the framework for larger arrangements, as in his prior outfits Wolf Parade and Swan Lake, as well as the minimalism sprinkled in his sometimes-solo projects Sunset Rubdown and Moonface. Like Sunset Rubdown, Moonface began as Krug alone and eventually expanded to an entire band. After Moonface’s 2012 LP With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery (which, as advertised, was made with the Finnish band Siinai), the project was scaled back for 2013’s lonesome, voice-and-piano album Julia With Blue Jeans On. Krug’s follow-up to Julia is the five-song EP City Wrecker, and it operates along the same compositional lines as its immediate predecessor. It was also, like Julia, written and recorded in his temporarily adopted home of Helsinki, and it reflects that same sense of frigid displacement. Krug has the ability to stretch himself, but here, he’s chosen not to, and it sounds like a certain stiffness has set in with regards to his songwriting.
Nonetheless, City Wrecker puts Krug through his paces. The most demanding of the EP’s five songs, “Daughter of a Dove”, is nearly 11 minutes long; the song right before it, “Helsinki Winter 2013”, clocks in at over eight. “Daughter” is the showpiece of the EP, a marathon of cascading runs on the keys broken up by clusters of chords that attack and decay in rapid cycles. Still, he plays with an audible slouch, as if entire galaxies of regret rest on his shoulders: “There is a fallen tree against a perfect January snow/ And that’s as spiritual as I need to be.” Just as it seems Krug is taking the Scandinavian pagan black-metal route, he adds, “So when they said turn up the kick drum, turn up the snare/ I turned away to see my baby put a flower in her hair.” “Daughter” is also City Wrecker’s most embroidered track; in addition to piano, the song’s slow crescendo is built on a flood of crystalline synths, like water swirling under the ice. “Helsinki Winter 2013” is more delicate and less bombastic, a demonstration of Krug’s classical prowess in which he sings, “You belong where you are found/ Overseas, underground.” Coming from a Finland-residing Canadian transplant, it’s a little on the nose, but no less arresting because of it.
“The Fog” doesn’t do much to help dispel the “cold album made in a cold place” cliché that City Wrecker evokes, but Krug, as always, is self-aware to the point of pain. The song trembles and reverberates, with synths that erupt and flutter like blossoms bursting out of a snowfall; it’s vague, without dramatic chord changes or much of a vocal dynamic, and as such cultivates too much of a sedative numbness. Unlike Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, who has struck gold in the past with the same implements used on City Wrecker, Krug doesn’t insert enough tonal distance between his instrument and his voice, which is evident on “Running in Place With Everyone”. The tune resembles a finger exercise mashed up with monotone poetry; it’s pretty, but when Krug coos the song’s title in the chorus, his energy level sounds less kinetic than it does spent.
“The city fell into a sort of boring ruin,” Krug confesses on City Wrecker’s title track. He’s singing about Montreal, his longtime home, and the lassitude of guilt and longing practically leaks from his lungs. It’s an anthem for burned bridges and scorched earth, as well as the warmest, most flesh-and-blood moment of the EP. His melody is limited, but it makes the most of its cramped, claustrophobic clutch of notes. Where Julia filled almost every available space with either emotional fullness or palpable absence, City Wrecker feels pinched and constrained; the former was a drain to listen to in the best possible way, while this new one only occasionally breaks the skin. | 2014-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar / Paper Bag | September 16, 2014 | 6.8 | 863e49fe-f1b1-4cff-ad70-cfc758fe7ccb | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The soundtrack from the new Marvel blockbuster has a staggering sonic diversity, but the absence of a curator is felt in how loosely songs are tied to the movie. | The soundtrack from the new Marvel blockbuster has a staggering sonic diversity, but the absence of a curator is felt in how loosely songs are tied to the movie. | Various Artists: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Music From and Inspired By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-black-panther-wakanda-forever-music-from-and-inspired-by/ | Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Music From and Inspired By | The first Black Panther had many themes—neocolonialism, infighting and unity across the African diaspora, the abundance of Soundcloud rappers in the late 2010s—but its most potent was the story of T’Challa becoming his own leader and his own man. In the record-smashing Marvel blockbuster from 2018, T’Challa had just inherited the throne of Wakanda and spent most of the film figuratively and literally grappling with the consequences of his ancestor’s actions. In the end, T’Challa kills his insurrectionist cousin Killmonger before taking his advice and opening up Wakanda’s borders to the world—with an emphasis on Black people and displaced Wakandans around the world—for the first time. By embracing the role of the Black Panther on his own terms, T’Challa set a new chapter in motion for the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of Earth.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever deals with an inversion of the same main challenge. T’Challa is dead—actor Chadwick Boseman passed away from a long and private battle with colon cancer in 2020—and without their warrior king, Wakanda is in disrepair. Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), spy Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and general Okoye (Danai Gurira) attempt to pick up the pieces and fend off invading forces, including those from Talokan, an underwater society led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta). Everyone involved confronts the weight of inheritance amid the fallout from T’Challa’s death, giving Wakanda Forever a more somber tone compared to the celebratory burst of the original. The film’s soundtrack follows in lockstep, trading the fireworks and scope of the Kendrick Lamar and TDE-led Black Panther The Album from 2018 for something more intimate but no less devoted to intercultural exchange.
Also unlike Black Panther The Album, Wakanda Forever has no celebrity guest curator. Director Ryan Coogler and composer Ludwig Göransson tackled the entire project themselves, recording over 2,500 hours of music across three continents. Göransson spent time in both Mexico City and Lagos familiarizing himself with local instruments and sounds, and the expanded roster of voices brings dimension to the soundtrack’s best songs. To accommodate the new characters from the Mayan-influenced Talokan, Latino and Mesoamerican artists are sprinkled in with others from across the African diaspora; South African amapiano shares space with Bay Area hip-hop, Afrobeats, R&B, reggae, and Mexican folk music.
Wakanda Forever’s musical diversity is staggering, and its best songs both flesh out their respective cultures and key moments in the movie. Namor’s birth scene is amplified by Mexican singer Vivir Quintana and rapper Mare Advertencia Lirika’s haunting vocals over deep drums and shakers on “Árboles Bajo El Mar.” Pivotal scenes within Talokan and Wakanda are soundtracked by the aqueous synths of Foudeqush and Göransson’s gossamer “Con La Brisa” and the shuffling vibrance of Fireboy DML’s “Coming Back For You,” respectively. Aside from the bland ramblings of Tobe and Fat Nwigwe on the chase scene number “They Want It, But No,” most of the songs used in the movie proper work within and out of their filmic context, painting their respective pictures in your mind on every replay.
The rest of the songs across the “from” and “inspired by” sections of the album are more of a mixed bag. The two highest profile tracks—Rihanna’s Chadwick Boseman tribute “Lift Me Up” and Tems’ cover of the Bob Marley staple “No Woman, No Cry”—are competent ballads meant for endless rotation on the autumn playlist at your local mall. Snow tha Product and E-40 bring an infectious Bay Area energy to “La Vida” that doesn’t quite translate to Oakland rapper OG DAYV’s “Limoncello,” bookended by an autopiloted Future verse. It’s fun to skim through Ckay and PinkPantheress’ dainty duet on “Anya Mmiri” and to hear Mexican rapper Pat Boy rap entirely in Mayan on “Laayli’ kuxa’ano’one,” but there’s a lack of truly show-stopping moments. While part of that is clearly by design because of the more reflective tone, another part stems from the lack of a guiding voice.
The reason why Kendrick’s presence on Black Panther The Album—and Beyoncé’s presence on her 2019 Lion King companion album The Lion King: The Gift—is effective goes beyond being a co-sign from a Black musical powerhouse. Those two albums worked because their leading artists embodied their films’ respective themes and used them to tie every song together. Kendrick’s relationship with spirituality and identity matched T’Challa’s in the same way that Beyoncé’s explorations of family and honor spoke to Simba and Nala’s. Different artists from different genres and countries shared space, yet every song was in conversation with each other. Coogler and Göransson’s efforts are admirable, but there’s no analogue for that on Wakanda Forever, no uniting element to emphasize the importance of T’Challa’s—and Boseman’s—passing. Many of these songs nominally speak to themes of spirituality, inheritance, and connection, but their respective conversations begin and end when their time runs out. That lack of connective tissue means the messages feel anonymous, even hollow; it doesn’t make the songs any less good, but it makes the album feel disposable when it should be anything but. | 2022-11-11T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-11T00:03:00.000-05:00 | null | Roc Nation / Def Jam / Hollywood | November 11, 2022 | 6.4 | 863fb22d-be84-419e-8951-a699dea3c20e | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Eugene Robinson returns with a record that's sparser than his band's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier. | Eugene Robinson returns with a record that's sparser than his band's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier. | Oxbow: The Narcotic Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10329-the-narcotic-story/ | The Narcotic Story | A guy dies and goes to Hell. The devil tells him that he has three choices as to where he'll spend his eternal damnation. The devil opens a door, behind which people writhe in perpetual flames. "No way," says the guy. The devil opens another door, behind which people convulse on an electrified floor. "Uh-uh," says the guy. The devil opens a third door. Behind it, people are buried to their necks in excrement, each sipping a cup of tea with one free hand. "Well, beats the other two," says the guy. "I'll take it." He eases into the filth, and just as he takes his first sip of tea, a voice comes over Hell's intercom: "Okay everybody, tea break's over-- back on your heads!"
The joke, like most, masks multiple profundities-- that we all create our own Hells, that none of our vaunted free will or personal agency will keep us from our final reward, and that poo is funny. But while most of us choose one Hell, Oxbow's Eugene Robinson is in the unique position of residing simultaneously in all three. A slab of lurid and tattooed muscle, often near-nude, Robinson strikes a fearsome presence at Oxbow shows, seeming to writhe as if burned and shudder as if electrocuted at once. (This is a guy who out-scaried Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart on his own song, a harrowing cover of "Saturn".) And given his gibbering delivery and nihilistic lyrics, which always seem unhealthily scatological even when they don't deal specifically with shit, he would probably be quite comfy in the third room of Hell, especially were the tea replaced with something more potent: embalming fluid, perhaps, or bleach.
Oxbow have been a metal band, one steadily moving into more credibly frightening territory. At this point, one can scarcely identify them with traditional metal's canned, often hokey menace, as The Narcotic Story fully embraces a sort of slow-burning, infernal blues. It's a malign transmission, sparser than Oxbow's more metallic styles, and, paradoxically, much heavier. After establishing its extreme poles with a brief intro of piercing ambient tones and heavy-bowelled bleats, The Narcotic Story sustains a deft balance between creeping dirges and panicky rock for its duration. Its evocative disorder is remindful of U.S. Maple, and Robinson's blood-curdling polecat yowl recalls David Yow and the Frogs in equal measure.
"Geometry of Business" is a raw-boned, blowsy blues with fuzz bass bombs and creeping pianos-- the lyrics, as elsewhere on the album, are mostly, mercifully, unintelligible. Through repeated false starts, the noodly quiet of "Time Gentlemen Time" arduously erupts into a sturdy rock slog, shrill tones rising up from the wrecked chords and howled imprecations. By the time the crusty blues-metal swagger of "Down a Stair Backward" bleeds into the orchestral butt-jazz of "She's a Find", it's clear that Oxbow's usual laddering plod is doubled in effect by the more elegant, tension-building passages that they've stitched, Frankenstein's-monster-style, into it. Every piano-laced tea break is cut short by a sulfurous blare, and then it's back onto our heads, back into Robinson's world of shit. | 2007-06-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-06-21T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Metal | Hydra Head | June 21, 2007 | 7.4 | 8653fd8f-2795-49ef-ad40-04004cae4176 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
At their best, as on Arrival, ABBA were as mysterious as Bowie, as rococo as Phil Spector, as unbearably sad as the Smiths. | At their best, as on Arrival, ABBA were as mysterious as Bowie, as rococo as Phil Spector, as unbearably sad as the Smiths. | ABBA: Arrival | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22600-arrival/ | Arrival | Sid Vicious loved ABBA. Joe Strummer loved ABBA. Pete Townshend really loved ABBA. As a five year-old boy on a Welsh council estate in 1977, I loved ABBA. My mum and dad loved ABBA. If ever I went round to a friend’s house whose parents had a record player in the living room, you could count on there being an ABBA LP leaning in the Formica cabinet beside it. Everyone, so it seemed in my five year-old’s perspective of the universe, loved ABBA.
The four Swedes—two couples, Agnetha and Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid (aka “Frida”)—first invaded British shores in 1974 at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with their winning entry, “Waterloo”; the United Kingdom awarded ABBA “nil points” on the night, making their subsequent domination of our charts one of the sweetest revenges outside the pages of The Count Of Monte Cristo. They properly conquered in 1976 with their Greatest Hits, the year’s biggest-selling album and the second biggest-selling album in Britain of the 1970s (beaten by Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water which had the advantage of a six-year head start). The same year saw a triptych of UK number ones: “Money, Money, Money,” “Fernando,” and the unstoppable “Dancing Queen,” which sold over a million copies and spent six solid weeks at the top. That the latter’s parent album, Arrival released in October 1976, should consolidate their stronghold was a fait accompli. By 1977 ABBA were unshiftable, omnipresent and commercially invincible.
Arrival was their fourth studio album but the first to forge an identity in tandem with its introduction of their soon-to-be iconic trademark reversed B logo. Its three predecessors—1973’s Ring Ring, 1974’s Waterloo, and 1975’s ABBA—had been a series of costume-changing forays and false-starts through folk-rock, glam, light ballads, and novelty rock‘n’roll. Nobody yet regarded ABBA as an albums band until the million-selling phenomenon of 1976’s Greatest Hits propelled them to the forefront of the market. An intriguingly-misnamed 15 track compilation from an act who’d so far made the UK singles charts just five times, to British audiences Greatest Hits acted as ABBA’s equivalent to a debut album, its success highlighting a major transformative shift: from the bedroom turntable at 45 rpm to the family stereo at 33 1/3. ABBA could never have succeeded as a teen pop act alone. The coup of Greatest Hits owed much to its appeal to the same age group as seen on its cover: four adults sat on a park bench in contrastingly coupled yin and yang of romantic bliss and collapse.
If Greatest Hits certified ABBA as undisputed superstars, on Arrival, the first album to follow it six months later, they finally looked like superstars, the kind who travelled in private helicopters like the one on the cover in which they’re cocooned with curiously cool expressions. The distance between this image and the terrestrial park bench portrait of Greatest Hits can be measured in light years. They could be The Tomorrow People. They could be from Tatooine. They could be four superbeings itching to escape some spooky spherical Phantom Zone. They are unmistakably other.
At their best, as on Arrival, ABBA are as mysteriously out-there as Bowie, as rococo as Phil Spector, as unbearably sad as the Smiths. At the centre of their infinitely bright star is a throbbing black mass of pain. “The Winner Takes It All” from 1980’s Super Trouper is still the debate-settler that ABBA are pop’s greatest tragedians, hailing as they do from a land of inherently fatalistic art, from the films of Ingmar Bergman to the face of Greta Garbo. The pagan Swedes of old believed that the end of the world was a coming inevitability they called “ragnarok.” ABBA are the sweet echo of that same ancient stoic pessimism. Ragnarok‘n’roll.
The second track on Arrival and ABBA’s only US number one in April 1977, “Dancing Queen” is one of the greatest pop records ever made because, like so many of the greatest pop records ever made, it throws multiple reflections. Its surface beauty and emotional depth is wholly dependent on the ear of its beholder. For some, it’s an emancipatory cry of joy. For others, a bawl from an abyss of sorrow. The song’s first discernible human sound is a suspended, exhaled “Ooo-ooh!” It could be a dove-like coo, or it could be a suppressed sob. Perhaps this is the song of someone who wants to be Esmeralda but knows they are Quasimodo; the harrowing dream of life outside as imagined by somebody imprisoned indoors. The “dancing queen” could be an isolated young girl alone in her bedroom, too scared, too shy, almost certainly believing herself too hideous to step out into Friday night; her one happiness her unrealistic fantasy that she could find love amongst the beautiful people out on the dancefloor. In this, its darkest reflection, the one directed by Bergman and starring Garbo, “Dancing Queen” is a song about the loneliest girl in the world, a “How Soon Is Now?” in “Rock Your Baby”’s clothing.
It’s safe to say that the ABBA writing team of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, and manager Stig Anderson were not trying to create a “How Soon Is Now?”; the abandoned first verse of its original 1975 demo began with the bubble-gum burst of “Baby, baby, you’re outta sight!” But they were trying to write a “Rock Your Baby.” The rhythm of “Dancing Queen” was directly inspired by George McCrae’s 1974 hit, even if theirs hasn’t quite the same slickness of syncopation. There’s a strange falter, as if the beat is stumbling under the weight of the flamboyant Liberace piano pounding overhead. “Dancing Queen” is almost disco, were it not for that rhythmic limp. It’s clubfooted disco, American R&B as could only be made by white Vikings who didn’t fully understand the instructions.
The power of their music lies in the enigmatic Mona Lisa smile created by similar accidents of mistranslation. As Andersson once stressed, “We are not Anglo-Saxon.” ABBA were four spectacularly talented Nordic persons trying to emulate Western Anglo-Saxon pop. Their ancestral blood was non-Christian, an ice-and-fire race who believed in giants, dwarves and elves, of ancient pagan sagas that inspired Wagner and Tolkien. The members of ABBA could learn and sing in English, but they still thought like Scandinavians. Their phrasings made grammatical sense but their assembly of words were not the natural choices of any lyricist for whom English was a first language.
It may also explain why the biggest-selling album in Britain of 1977 opens with a song about a schoolgirl aching to sleep with her geometry teacher. There is no ambiguity of meaning in the harmonic rush of “When I Kissed The Teacher.” “One of these days,” sings Agnetha, “gonna teach him a lesson alright.” The moral dilemma of this unexpurgated Lolita pop is only numbed by its sheer innocence of delivery. But then “love” in ABBA songs, legal or otherwise, rarely runs smooth. “My Love, My Life” and “Knowing Me, Knowing You” are two adjoining sides of the same heartbroken prism, the words of both virtually interchangeable. “I know I don’t possess you/So go away, God bless you” wails the first. “Breaking up is never easy I know/But I have to go,” sighs the second. In ABBA songs people are always going, never to but forever away.
None of the lyrical protagonists on Arrival are happy. “Carrie,” the heroine of the neurotic disco-ragtime “That’s Me,” is a self-deprecating mess. The woman in the daft “Dum Dum Diddle” is ill with sexual frustration, literal second fiddle to her maestro lover who’d sooner pluck his Stradivarius. The narrator of the Cabaret-inspired “Money, Money, Money” yearns for a rich Trump-style suitor, but “if he happens to be free, I bet he wouldn’t fancy me.” Men, too, get just as raw a deal on “Why Did It Have To Be Me?,” Björn’s barroom boogie about a sap who loses his heart, all but one lap-steel and two fingers of whisky short of vintage Hank Williams.
And then along comes Jack the Ripper. “I am behind you, I’ll always find you,” screech the banshee sisterhood of Agnetha and Frida on the predatory “Tiger,” a fabulously unsettling psycho-pop thriller of urban dystopia and Droogish violence not so very far away from Diamond Dogs: “The city is a nightmare, a horrible dream.” “Tiger” is an alarmist horror story of metropolitan evil as imagined by folk who did most of their songwriting in an idyllic country cottage on Stockholm’s island peninsula. It’s also one of the better demonstrations of the sonic voodoo that occurs in the vacuum between Agnetha’s and Frida’s voices, a skull-rattling counterpoint when their respective wavelengths collide to create a near-supernatural vibration.
This same nuclear fusion of blonde soprano and auburn mezzo-soprano is why all attempts to cover ABBA songs end in failure. They are literally inimitable. ABBA’s music lands on the ear in bold strokes, but it arrives there through the most meticulous construction. They are not European impressionists but Northern renaissance masters, building up the sound layer by layer, one coat at a time with fanatical precision. Hence the glow in the opening notes of “My Love, My Life,” an ethereal cosmic tone evoking the fellow Scandinavian-blooded Gustav Holst. Hence the Valkyrie choir of “Dancing Queen” detonating its apocalypse of goosebumps. And hence why Arrival’s closing title track feels like being serenaded to sleep by God.
“Arrival,” the song, is colossal. Less a song, since there are no words, than a glacier of sound, the eerie buzz of divine light as it harpoons through stormy clouds. “Arrival” was named after the title of the album had already been decided. As originally written it was called “Ode to Dalecarlia” in honour of the Swedish folk province where, as late as the 19th century, the local culture still communicated in medieval runes straight out of The Hobbit. Melodically, “Arrival” is therefore ABBA at their most inscrutably Nordic and, to Anglo-Saxon ears, at their most other. It is a hymn from beyond the stars.
Last month it was announced that ABBA are due to make a live “comeback” of sorts in 2018, though seemingly not in physical body but some form of virtual spirit. Described as “a time machine,” the project in partnership with American Idol mogul Simon Fuller will “enable a new generation of fans to see, hear, and feel ABBA in a way previously unimagined.” Touring holograms, perhaps? If so, it would be a fitting fate for the intangible enigma of ABBA. At once here and not here, teasing us in the void between. Forty years later, still waiting for them to arrive. | 2016-11-06T02:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-11-06T02:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Polar | November 6, 2016 | 8.6 | 865c1bba-8e11-4f15-b222-b021bac34ee8 | Simon Goddard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-goddard/ | null |
Former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb finally steps to the microphone on his first album in 16 years, a meticulously arranged wonder steeped in English folk and proggy vibes. | Former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb finally steps to the microphone on his first album in 16 years, a meticulously arranged wonder steeped in English folk and proggy vibes. | Rustin Man: Drift Code | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rustin-man-drift-code/ | Drift Code | Remember when Bono generously allowed The Edge to sing that one song on Rattle and Hum? A flicker of shock tends to register when you hear a member of a beloved band who is not the vocalist sing for the first time. It’s like hearing an internet personality interviewed on a podcast— “Wait, they sound like that?” During his seven years in Talk Talk, a period in which the group mutated from the routine synthpop of The Party’s Over to the astonishing art-rock of Spirit of Eden, bassist Paul Webb never sang lead. Mark Hollis, owner of one of the great expressive voices of the 1980s, had that job covered. Even when Webb resurfaced during the early 2000s as Rustin Man, he shied from the spotlight, releasing the quiet gem Out of Season in collaboration with another mood-altering vocal talent, Beth Gibbons.
But at last, Webb’s own voice is the centerpiece of an album—Rustin Man’s rich and rewarding Drift Code, his first record in 16 years. Yes, Webb sang a bit in the short-lived .O.rang, but here he is writing specifically for his surprisingly commanding, unmistakably English warble. At times, he even sounds like late-career Bowie, adventurous and a bit haughty thanks to a distinguished nasality. This is particularly true of opener “Vanishing Heart,” which rises in both urgency and volume as Webb narrates an escape from a suffocating marriage over labyrinthine piano. He deftly sings harmony and counter-harmony with himself, too, as in the clamorous final refrains of “Martian Garden.” (Though Hollis grew to avoid anything resembling a chorus, Webb doesn’t shy away from legitimate vocal hooks.) And he sometimes stretches words beyond recognition, as when he renders the title phrase of finale “All Summer” as a six- and seven-syllable maze.
These nine songs collectively recall English folk, 1970s prog grandeur, and the work of great British eccentrics like Robert Wyatt and Syd Barrett. Organs, upright piano, and even a euphonium contribute to this vintage sensibility. Webb momentarily stumbles on “Judgement Train,” a clunky blues shuffle in which the singer envisions himself facing off against God in what O.A.R. would call a crazy game of poker. (The track’s sinister video, in fact, makes good on this concept.) But the gorgeous subsequent track, “Brings Me Joy,” makes up for it, with Webb’s lead set against a choral web of voices, including an angelic falsetto that feels plucked from an old Disney score. “Light the Light” is a pointy exercise in 7/8 time, while “The World’s in Town” boasts a sci-fi guitar breakdown before its spacious outro.
Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation. “Our Tomorrows,” for instance, concludes with a rousing trombone chorus, while “Light the Light” embellishes its staccato piano with wah-wah guitar and a fleeting xylophone coda. It might take some time to hear that last detail, as with the hammered sitar, flugelhorn, French horn, clavioline, and pandeiro that pepper the record. Webb seems to have taken Talk Talk’s interest in unusual instrumentation with him.
Talk Talk’s legacy is so coated in silence and mystique that Drift Code’s mere existence feels like a perplexing gift. When a member of this band emerges from the ether, you pay attention; there will be, after all, no reunion tour. And, in this case, you mutter, “That’s what his voice sounds like?” with welcome surprise. | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | February 6, 2019 | 7.6 | 866e493b-96a1-4ff7-9f79-3eeab894c851 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Australian sound artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is responsible for the existence of a daunting number of recordings, especially in regards to his own solo career. His latest solo album and first in three years gins up infernos of harmonic distortion not unlike the heavier sides of Tim Hecker and Ben Frost. | Australian sound artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is responsible for the existence of a daunting number of recordings, especially in regards to his own solo career. His latest solo album and first in three years gins up infernos of harmonic distortion not unlike the heavier sides of Tim Hecker and Ben Frost. | Lawrence English: Wilderness of Mirrors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19559-lawrence-english-wilderness-of-mirrors/ | Wilderness of Mirrors | Australian sound artist Lawrence English is responsible for the existence of a daunting number of recordings. As the founder of the Room40 label, he curates contemporary ambient and experimental music by the likes of Mike Cooper, Ben Frost, Grouper, Tim Hecker, Greg Davis, Oren Ambarchi, and David Toop, and English makes the same kind of music he releases—in abundance. The selected discography on his website runs to more than 30 items. Diving in at random, you could luck into the glittering electro-acoustic miniatures of A Path Less Travelled, his collaboration with Japanese group Minamo, or the brightly mottled drone of A Colour for Autumn, one of English's most fully realized works by the traditional album standards of variety and cohesion.
But you could just as easily land in more of a niche taste, such as the fine but ascetic For/Not for John Cage or the crumbling edifice of organ chords on Lonely Women's Club. Save yourself some floundering, then, by starting with English's newest album, Wilderness of Mirrors. His first proper solo album since 2011's chorally inclined The Peregrine, it gins up infernos of harmonic distortion not unlike the heavier sides of Hecker and Frost. With a couple of minimalist exceptions—the winding gusts of "Guillotines and Kingmakers" hearken back to Cage, while low frequencies roil between ghost harmonies on "Wrapped in Skin"—this is a maximalist effort, smear-painted on an abyssal dynamic range in scintillating masses of slow-moving tone.
English has said that the album is named after a line from T.S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion" and is conceptually based on Cold War misinformation campaigns—which, sure, why not? If abstract music has to be about something, that'll do. More meaningfully, English saw killer shows by Swans, Earth, and My Bloody Valentine while recording the album and was inspired to pump up the volume and density of his music, which is felt right away on "The Liquid Casket", a giant exhalation of thickly flexing drones that soon ignites in a radioactive mushroom cloud. English is an experienced technician, and his saturation of stereo space and tonality never grows murky—the songs make distinct impressions, from the backwards suck of the title track, like a foghorn tolling over heavy traffic, to the slowly subsiding muffled concussions of "Another Body" and the ritualistic cadence of "Hapless Gatherer".
Consistently, English cannily weighs out sticky, swarming passages against smooth pearlescent lengths, often drawing one out of the other with magisterial patience. The compositions range from delicate to mighty, and always activate invigorating corporeal effects. Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn. | 2014-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-07-31T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | July 31, 2014 | 7.5 | 8674d920-12d3-488b-ab25-3565dfb3f8fa | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke's latest in gurgling, crackling dub reductionism brims with ideas and vitality. | Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke's latest in gurgling, crackling dub reductionism brims with ideas and vitality. | Pole: Steingarten | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10000-steingarten/ | Steingarten | Good news: Pole's new album doesn't really sound anything like his last, 2003's self-titled effort for Mute. Even better news: It sounds even less like his early work. In one fell swoop, Pole-- Berlin studio mastermind and ~scape label proprietor Stefan Betke-- has slipped the yoke of early classics and mid-career questing alike, resulting in an album that brims with ideas and vitality but is utterly unique.
A quick recap. Pole-- Betke's fourth album, and his sole longplayer for Mute, after a long run with Germany's Kiff, which licensed his material to Matador in the U.S.-- marked a concerted effort by Stefan Betke to escape the omnipresent signature of 1, 2, and 3, the classic trilogy in which he proposed and perfected an idea of gurgling, crackling dub reductionism built of little more than sigh and suggestion. Flirting with hip-hop and a newly aerated sound, Pole succeeding in escaping what Mark Richardson, writing in Pitchfork, described as the "cul de sac" of the artist's calcifying style, but only at the expense of the kind of coherence and cohesion that had marked his efforts until that point. He had to try something, of course. The first three records were brilliant, dredging the sedimented floor of third-hand ideas of dub passed from sources like Seefeel's "isolationist" ambient music and Chain Reaction's shimmering "heroin house"-- and running the sludge through a rickety pipeline of busted filters and loose wires. But no matter how much mica (and who knows, gold) flecked his gloriously gunky stuff, there were only so many ways he could take it: even the most astonishing builders of sand castles are, ultimately, constrained by their materials.
Steingarten is still based upon dub reggae, from its loping rhythms to its revolving-door chord changes to traditional reggae staples like melodica and waxy analog delay. There's still plenty of fizz in the margins, too, though it no longer defines the shape of the songs. You can kinda sorta hear a glimmer of hip-hop in the opening cut, though thankfully there's no vocalist this time out, and two of the tracks here-- the back-to-back "Düsseldorf" and "Jungs"-- absorb the ubiquitous tick-tocking of Berlin minimal techno. But despite a continuity of influence, the sound of Pole's production-- its very heft-- is completely and refreshingly new.
This time out, Pole has reconfigured his relationship with gravity. Where before the music felt held together (and sometimes held down) by the weight of history-- both the music's and the musician's-- and the massing sound itself, here the individual parts hang together easily, as if brought together by chance and left bobbing in each other's orbits. The music is full of empty space, though it's not the insistent absence of minimalism-- more like the languid silence between two lovers who know when speech is moot. You can hear it in the opening track, "Warum", where every instrument-- from the aerosol shaker to the handclaps that crack like coals burning low-- stakes out its space in the mix, ceding the middle ground to... well, to nothing at all, really. There's just a wide swathe of ground, inviting you to stand there, stretch out and touch the sounds around you. It's certainly one of the most welcoming approaches to mixing and mastering I've heard.
The other big update this time out is the addition of noise-- not the blasted scree of Merzbow but an agreeable skronk sourced from muted guitar feedback and weeping tremolo. From the tube-amp uprising caught on "Winkelstreben" to the way he hammers at the guitar strings pulled taut below the bridge, it sounds like Betke was listening to Sonic Youth's Evol while recording Steingarten. It would be appropriate if it were true, given that this album represents the most important evolution in Pole's career.
More than anything, Steingarten is a remarkably easy-going album. Like all great recordings, it opens up over time, yielding fresh discoveries with repeat listens, but it hardly guards its secrets. You can hear the simplest kind of joy in the way (in "Düsseldorf") a high-pitched, pinging note run through delay begins gradually to throb out of time with the rhythm track. The opposing shapes and textures in "Winkelstreben" create totally unexpected convergences-- improbable harmonies on a par with those found in the best abstract painting or Japanese fashion. Full of resonant, glistening, almost tangible sounds, Steingarten is a synaesthetic's dream; I find myself continually running up against the limits of my own descriptive powers in trying to tackle its pear-shaped bass drops, its corrugated ambient underpinnings, its frog-throated choruses.
By contemporary standards, this is a short album: nine songs, 45 minutes. It takes guts to hold oneself to such meager numbers after a four-year hiatus, but Betke got it absolutely right: there's not a note out of place on this thing, not a single thread of delay that overstays its welcome. Steingarten is a nearly perfect album. Putting the melancholic "Pferd" last is just another of the record's successes; it makes the whole thing feel like a kind of meditation on the very nature of limits and limitations. Given the history of his Pole project, that's likely something Betke has mulled over plenty. Here, with inscrutable agility-- like the mechanics of meditating upon a Zen koan-- he moots the whole issue and achieves something very much like a state of grace. | 2007-03-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-03-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | ~scape | March 15, 2007 | 8.5 | 8678cdd9-062d-478a-8900-00ba748e80f8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A ginormous, mostly fans-only box set gathers together 80 records that tell the singular story of a man who has dedicated his entire life to the three-minute pop song. | A ginormous, mostly fans-only box set gathers together 80 records that tell the singular story of a man who has dedicated his entire life to the three-minute pop song. | Paul McCartney: The 7" Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-the-7-inch-singles/ | The 7" Singles | When the crate arrived at my house containing every solo Paul McCartney single on vinyl, I admit at first I gaped in horror: 80 7-inches, 159 tracks, sealed in a pine box. Who is this for? Me, that’s who: a 41-year-old white guy whose version of the White Album, taped off of his father’s vinyl, hiccuped so badly he sang along to a skipping “I Will” for 25 years. The Beatles-industrial complex is a fearsome thing, and to be reckoning with projects this big, still falling out of the sky, is both exhausting—when will it ever end?—and slightly wondrous. This melting border, where bald IP-grab cynicism meets childhood wonder, has been expanding for my entire adult life. If there is a labored metaphor to be reached between the Beatles and Star Wars, that other endlessly renewing fount of nostalgia (hold tight), The 7" Singles Box is somewhere between Obi-Wan Kenobi (pointless, hollow) and Andor (unnecessary, but delightful).
Besides collecting every official McCartney single, The 7" Singles Box also scoops 15 miscellaneous tracks that leaked out into the world in other formats: CD singles, digital downloads, bonus tracks. The idea, as outlined in Rob Sheffield’s loving liner notes, is to present the 7" as McCartney’s Rosebud, containing in its fragile sleeve the ideal of the rock’n’roll song as a disposable piece of eternity.
The entire box is available on Spotify, of course, which is endlessly accommodating, but interacting with McCartney’s singles via little pieces of plastic feels right. They reflect his lifelong reverence for the three-minute rock ditty, but also embody the inherent flimsiness of the form. Making my way through 159 McCartney singles tested my immunity to his airy charm at regular intervals: My smile hardened into a grimace about every 20 minutes. There are only so many times in a row you can listen to someone capable of grandeur settle without compunction for something pleasingly slapdash before rolling your eyes and giving up. The “oh come on” factor rears its head continually, but it is countered at every turn by a raised-eyebrow “what is this?”
These two poles— “oh come on” and “ooh, what is this?”—comprise the agony and the ecstasy of the lifelong Paul project. He will never stop grabbing our ear: No one else in pop history boasts his gifts for both melody and arrangement, nor have they matched his enthusiasm for deploying them. For good or ill, no Paul McCartney song has ever taken your attention for granted. But having your ear grabbed 159 consecutive times in this set, only to be offered pablum like “love is fine, for all we know” (“Listen to What the Man Said”) roughly as often as you are rewarded—it will make you steel yourself against this wily charmer’s arts.
The box set kicks off with McCartney’s first post-Beatles single, the lovelorn and still-resonant “Another Day,” which could have easily fit on Let It Be. Understated, elegiac, and uncharacteristically muted, it was McCartney playing his best role: empathetic observer of others. The flip side, “Oh Woman, Oh Why” showcased a hammy Howlin’ Wolf impersonation so unrestrained and cartoony that he resembled a furry green Muppet more than any Delta bluesman.
And thus begins the story of McCartney’s solo career, a tale of cheery productivity and even cheerier disregard for results. Wherever there is inspiration there must be inanity, and with each gold nugget unearthed comes at least one nose-wrinkling dirt lump, a reality that comes into focus when each song is granted its own piece of vinyl and bespoke cover art. There is a particularly instructive humiliation in selecting a side of vinyl that contains only “We All Stand Together (The Frog Song)” and flipping it over only to be confronted by “We All Stand Together (Humming Version).”
After “Another Day,” we find ourselves abruptly in the Wings years, a discography that has proved itself remarkably immune to large-scale critical rediscovery or revival. These were the happy-hippie years, when Linda McCartney twirled onstage, bedecking the microphone with scarves and playing keyboard, harmonizing with Paul in her yowling, indelible way. Linda, frequently the target of derision from her husband’s fans, openly derided the group: “We just picked the wrong people,” she told Playboy in 1984. And here is Paul, remembering his time in Wings in Sheffield’s liner-notes essay: “It was the weirdest thing...There was me, having been one of the world’s most famous people, a member of the Beatles, playing in this semi-professional band kind of thing.”
If Paul had dubbed Wings “Paul McCartney and the Semi-Professional Band Kind of Thing,” they might have gotten a fairer shot: People would have understood just how badly Paul needed to be surrounded by people, any people, playing music and making records. If it wasn’t going to the Beatles, well...here were these guys. Paul and Linda were the heart of Wings, if there was such a thing, and the lovely moments in their discography arise directly out of their dizzy, daft chemistry. There were a lot of bongos in these songs, as well as the near-constant implication of bare feet. “You are my song, I am your singer,” they sang to each other, trading the lines and turning them into two halves of one mantra.
Surfing through McCartney’s Wings discography single by single turns up all manner of sidelong pleasures and revelations. The 1950s tribute “Love is Strange” works up a diffident ska-skiffle groove and then throws in a wayward guitar solo that provoked me into imagining a Built to Spill cover. The repetitive chant of “Let ’Em In” was dismissed by rock critics as doggerel, but Philly Soul legend Billy Paul heard a radical call to inclusion in McCartney’s language—“Someone’s knockin at the door...do me a favor, open the door and let ’em in,”—and recorded a cover that spliced in snippets of speeches from Malcolm X.
There is a slightly melancholy tinge to imagining the alternate futures some of these sunny McCartney songs could have had, in another set of circumstances or another timeline. “You Gave Me the Answer,” from Wings’ album Venus and Mars, was another in a long line of McCartney’s tributes to Great British Music Hall, the kind of chipper pre-rock’n’roll tunes he would debut to the groans of his fellow Beatles. But seen through the bird’s-eye view of the Macca box, it’s easy to imagine this song, with its winning couplet, “I love you, and you/You seem to like me,” taking the place of the godforsaken “Honey Pie” on the White Album, improving that album’s final side enormously.
The set also offers salutary reminders everywhere of Paul’s unselfconscious weirdness. Did you know that the teddy-bear Beatle managed to get himself banned from the BBC in 1972 for the chorus of “Hi, Hi, Hi,” (as in, “we’re gonna get”)? Have you heard him sing, on that same song, “I want you to lie on the bed, get you ready for my polygon,” followed by a discomfiting buzzing sound—a chainsaw? Buzzing bees? Have you heard his cover of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? As if to prove some obscure McCartney hypothesis about just how slight of a scrap he could redeem with his talent and imagination, it undergoes several key changes and winds up sounding like an Abbey Road interlude.
At the twilight of the ’70s, the final Wings album, Back to the Egg, harbored the usual one or two moments of supreme grace and beauty: “Arrow Through Me,” a funky melange of Fender Rhodes and synthesized horn, basically adds a classic Hall & Oates song to the world under McCartney’s name. The tar-thick groove was deep enough to get Erykah Badu’s head bobbing, who sampled it for her 2010 classic “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long.”
As the ’80s dawned, Paul broke up Wings, expressing a desire to start “tinkering by myself like a mad professor locked up in his laboratory.” That impulse resulted in the unusually divisive (even for Paul) McCartney II, an album-length dive into synth presets and funny-sounding treated vocals that has been reclassified as a proper cult classic. The singles—“Temporary Secretary” b/w “Secret Friends”—are by now objects of fan devotion, often offered as evidence for the defense of his experimental impulses. But the sketches on McCartney II feel either graced or afflicted—depending on your perspective—by the same weightlessness that distinguishes “Silly Love Songs.” Listening to Paul’s solo work, you’re often forced to conclude that while writing songs matters to him more than anything in the world, this song, in particular, might be of very little importance. Finessing details, omitting flubbed lyrics, or revising bad ideas are all sacrificed to the ongoing flow, which is all that matters.
The set turns particularly unforgiving during the next two decades, a time during which McCartney’s best work reliably appeared on album tracks, hunched alongside garish singles. Sticking to singles throughout the ’80s means that instead of “Here Today,” his subdued tribute to John that still appears in his concerts, we get “Ebony and Ivory,” a No. 1 Stevie Wonder duet so repellent it practically birthed the Spectacularly Ill-Conceived Pop Star Appeal to Racial Unity subgenre (future examples: Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?”, Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist”). It means that instead of the lilting Everly Brothers throwback “Sweetest Little Show,” we get “The Girl Is Mine,” the only skip on Thriller. These were the years of teeth-setting frills like “We All Stand Together (The Frog Song),” “Spies Like Us,” and “My Carnival.” Things were so dire for Paul that in a 1985 cover story for Rolling Stone, Phil Collins felt smug enough to publicly offer him some help.
This trend of bad singles overshadowing good album tracks continued into the ’90s, albeit in more muted fashion. “Muted” is a good byword for ’90s solo Paul: while the Anthology series activated an entire new generation of Beatles obsessives, he played his role as Fab Four ambassador but otherwise laid low, perhaps chastened by the excesses of the previous decade. “Put It There” b/w “Mama’s Little Girl,” his first singles of the ’90s, were a direct callback to the grass-scented breezes of Ram and McCartney, consisting of nothing but his sweet voice and his acoustic guitar. The singles from his comeback album Flaming Pie were either mealy and undercooked rockers—“The World Tonight,” “Young Boy”—or mawkish ballads like “Beautiful Night,” all of them missing the spark of enthusiasm you could still hear in even his most syrupy ’80s material. With just this set as evidence, you’d never know of the existence of either “Little Willow” or “Calico Skies,” two lovely album tracks from Flaming Pie that are among the most affecting solo songs he wrote all decade.
As McCartney entered his sixth decade, something remarkable happened to his music. Age and loss, perhaps, had weathered him—cruelly, he lost Linda to cancer in 1998, when she was only 56—and there was a new autumnal croak in his voice, out of character for the eternal boy. He settled into his new role as an elder statesman and an album-oriented artist. Ironically, the moment he stopped straining to prove himself with hit singles, some of his best songs in decades popped out. In the albums he released in the ’00s—the riotous early rock’n’roll tribute album Run Devil Run, the Nigel Godrich-produced Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, the tough and mournful Driving Rain, and onward—the most emotionally opaque Beatle seemed to decide that maybe there wasn’t much point in playing his emotions so close to the vest. “Jenny Wren,” “From a Lover to a Friend,” “Fine Line” and other singles from these years nurse a quiet loneliness that feels entirely different from the blank merriment that characterizes so much of his earlier solo work. Even his life-affirming songs, like 2008’s “Sing the Changes,” had a newly desperate quality.
Paul McCartney is now 80. He just released a collection of his studio experiments last year, and based on the usual schedule of his output, he will probably record another full new record of rock songs in the next year or so. Then, health permitting, he will likely embark on a stadium tour. No one else has ever done this—devoted their lives to writing and recording hundreds of three-minute rock songs—for as long as he has, at such a high level, without getting bored. He has never decided to be above them, nor stopped throwing himself into the task of writing engaging, catchy ones.
In 1962, the same year John and Paul wrote “Love Me Do,” the art critic and painter Manny Farber published an essay entitled “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.” White elephant art, he wrote, was “masterpiece art,” concerned with posterity and timelessness, while termite art went about its omnivorous way, chewing energetically through borders and leaving nothing but pulp as evidence of its activity. When the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney was unquestionably a white elephant artist, and he has spent the following four decades fighting his way to termite status.
How do you go from white elephant to termite? If you’re Paul, you just record. If your ideas don’t seem to match up with your best ones, put them out anyway, and hope the next batch yields more inspiration. Few songwriters in history have been less precious or more generous with their gifts. He’s continued writing songs and tossing them out into the wood chipper of expectations, then shrugging with a beatific grin when they are ignored or insulted. Inevitably, within a few years, he’s at it again. There is something perversely heroic about this toil, its utter disregard for anyone else’s notions about the sort of music he should be making. McCartney’s solo career is perhaps the longest sustained war any artist has carried out against their own narrative.
One of the last songs in the box set, “Queenie Eye,” is about as compelling as anything else here, and he released it when he was 71. And one of the most blood-freezing entries—the maybe-I’m-appalled lust anthem “Fuh You”—is even more recent. McCartney’s solo quality-control meter bedevils all at sweeping statements: McCartney is best when he keeps it simple, or when he’s ambitious, or when he plugs in and rocks, and so on. Because the truth is he has written great and awful songs in all these modes. You can never point reliably to the moment when he is “trying” versus when he is not: The only certainty with regard to McCartney’s songs is that there will soon be another. | 2022-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | MPL | December 17, 2022 | 7.4 | 868738b3-74aa-4524-832b-841df9fd71cf | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Featuring Caroline Polachek, Kero Kero Bonito, and more, the latest from the PC Music artist is giddy and psychedelic, with a mischievous sense of humor. | Featuring Caroline Polachek, Kero Kero Bonito, and more, the latest from the PC Music artist is giddy and psychedelic, with a mischievous sense of humor. | Felicita: Spalarkle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/felicita-spalarkle/ | Spalarkle | Of all the maximalist pop futurism that’s flowed out of the PC Music camp over the past decade, felicita’s take on the kinetic form stands apart. Melding woozy lullabies with jerking beats and pummeling rave explosions, the London-based artist’s 2018 debut album, hej!, transformed the rubbery pop stylings of their peers into an experimental collage. Over the years, they occasionally veered toward an even more enigmatic approach (see: Pillowese, a dream language inspired by glossolalia they conceived alongside the artist Lydia Ourahmane). On giddy new album Spalarkle, felicita returns to pop-rave mode without sacrificing their taste for abstraction, hopscotching between harsh and soft electronic music to sink into an off-kilter vision of psychedelia. It’s a head-spinning trip of joyfully hyperactive energy and digitized ballads.
Spalarkle thrives when felicita manages the chaos with needlepoint control. The title track, featuring frequent collaborator Caroline Polachek, shreds her operatic voice into ribbons during its shrieking, Alice in Wonderland-riffing chorus: “Alice! Vanish!” Here, felicita plays the Cheshire Cat, pulling out the rug with suddenly accelerating tempos and joyous, pulverizing synth melodies. Keeping with that song’s fairytale inspiration, felicita sews fantastical imagery into many lyrics, which makes room for a mischievous sense of humor. Samples of clucking chickens punctuate the cheerleader stomp on early highlight “Cluck,” in which Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry sings about “tremendously buff” poultry juiced up on steroids. Later, peals of laughter interrupt the downbeat “ForeS Hopi,” breaking up its undulating flow with a dose of brightness. These unexpected additions add levity along the dizzying journey.
That lightheartedness tempers some of Spalarkle’s more drifting moments, often led by London vocalist Emma Warner. Her chanted vocals form a tranquil palette during “Can You See the Light Over There?,” which felicita interrupts with chittering handclaps and smacking beats. The sense of disrupted quiet continues through “Resistance,” a minimalist ballad in which Warner’s vocals are pitched into the realm of a plaintive digital voice assistant. “Underneath the crying screen, I’ll remember everything,” she sings over crashing waves. Though it’s a left turn, the interlude expresses a mournfulness lurking beneath the otherwise candy-coated exterior.
Felicita tries to balance those two poles throughout Spalarkle. They unspool an effervescent melody and quavering water droplets on the hypnagogic “Afraid” before pivoting to “Beast,” a jagged, menacing hip-hop track featuring frenetic Hong Kong rapper YoungQueenz. The whiplash isn’t as effective during the weaker tracks, like the cartoonish “Riff Raff,” whose bratty vocals and chainsawing guitars feel like self-parody. Yet the interfolded approach allows for pockets of transfixing beauty to emerge even in felicita’s busiest songs. Like the joyously outré “Cluck” or the slow-build trance workout “Sex With Anemone,” whose baffling title is repeated in a hushed whisper until it collapses into a wavy, mesmerizing blur, the best songs on Spalarkle showcase felicita’s sheer delight in toying with opposites to create richly expressionistic electronic music. | 2023-05-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | null | PC Music | May 9, 2023 | 7 | 86892521-88fc-4b91-bcb2-7022c8cc0bad | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Co-produced by Rick Rubin, Neil Young’s 42nd album is a mellow, off-kilter collection about the environment, mourning what’s already been lost while expressing a modicum of hope. | Co-produced by Rick Rubin, Neil Young’s 42nd album is a mellow, off-kilter collection about the environment, mourning what’s already been lost while expressing a modicum of hope. | Neil Young / Crazy Horse: World Record | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-crazy-horse-world-record/ | World Record | Downtime is a foreign concept to Neil Young. He’s been in constant motion ever since Buffalo Springfield broke up way back in 1968, dividing his time between the studio and the stage, making more music than could be released in a given calendar year. World Record, his 42nd studio album, arrives less than a year after Barn, the album he knocked out at a studio in his newly adopted home in the Rocky Mountains—a place so dear to his heart, he named his 2019 reunion with his longtime running partners Crazy Horse after the state of Colorado.
Colorado appeared just prior to the arrival of COVID-19, the pandemic being the one thing to force Young off the road. He channeled his energy into combing through his vast archive—World Record is the seventh Neil record to appear in 2022, with a 50th-anniversary edition of his 1972 landmark Harvest following hot on its heels—grounding himself by taking breaks to commune with nature. As he walked with his dog, he discovered himself whistling melodies he couldn't quite place. He'd capture those nascent tunes on an old flip phone, pairing the music with words written at a later date. As he wrote the lyrics, a common theme arose: Every song was about the environment.
The resulting World Record bears a title as plainly self-explanatory as Barn: That album was made in a barn; this is a record about the planet. It’s familiar territory for Young. Long an environmental advocate—his early standard “After the Gold Rush” imagined surviving a world turned against itself—the state of the planet has been at the forefront of his mind during the past decade, driving the 2015 anti-corporate farming protest The Monsanto Years and its accompanying bizarro live album EARTH, both recorded with Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real. Unlike those records, Young isn’t in a political mood here. He spends his time on World Record ruminating over the effects of climate change, mourning what’s already been lost while expressing a modicum of hope, one that’s founded in the notion that love—love of the earth and of each other—is paramount.
Fittingly, Young recorded these songs with the band he loves best, the shambling, shaggy outfit Crazy Horse, which has featured guitarist Nils Lofgren since Frank “Poncho” Sampedro retired in 2014. Seeking to preserve the spontaneity at the heart of the Horse, Young brought the group to Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu—the same place he cut the politically charged Peace Trail in 2016—this time retaining the services of Rubin as a co-producer. The plan was simple: to record the 10 songs “live in order,” thereby capturing the group as they slowly gain momentum. Another wrench in the works was Young’s decision to play guitar on only three songs, otherwise devoting himself to either piano or pump organ. The instrumentation gives the album an amiable, off-kilter gait; it often seems like the band is on the verge of stumbling over its own feet, righted either by hammered keyboards from Young, a wallop from drummer Ralph Molina, or by a net woven by the guitars of Lofgren and Billy Talbot.
At first, World Record seems to coast by on its mood; there’s a bittersweet undercurrent flowing through the album but the weathered humanity of Crazy Horse always pulls the music away from melancholy. Often, the band feels like they’re deliberately avoiding their old tricks, finding new ways to arrive at the same destination. Generally, the proceedings have a light touch, a gentleness that is readily apparent on the opening shuffle “Love Earth” but also on the thicker rock’n’roll of “The World (Is in Trouble Now),” a warning call that vaguely echoes Herbie Hancock’s jazz classic “Watermelon Man” on its refrain. The mellow glow suits a band who is keenly aware of their long history and their advanced years—in an interview with The New Yorker to promote World Record, Young says retirement “doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility”—and the relaxed sound is a distinct variation within their body of work: Young and Crazy Horse rarely sound as at ease as they do here.
All of this genial warmth makes the closing “Chevrolet” hit harder. One of the band’s patented extended guitar workouts, “Chevrolet” feels like a collective exhale from Crazy Horse: They’ve spent the rest of the record on good behavior, now they finally get to push amps to a breaking point while Young rhapsodizes about old cars. “Chevrolet” sticks out like a gas guzzler at a nature reserve: It’s long, loud, and dirty, a celebration of everything the rest of the record rejects. It’s always been a bit difficult to reconcile Young’s environmental advocacy with his love of automobiles, and a close listen to “Chevrolet” reveals that he too is attempting to square that circle. Over the course of its 15 minutes, Young takes stock of what’s been lost over the past 50 years, still exalted by the open roads but reconciled that it’s now a memory: “Gone is crowded highway, lost are the roads we left behind/Found in the place they live inside me.” With that line, the connection between “Chevrolet” and the rest of World Record is clear: It’s an album of acceptance, where Young takes a look at his life and his planet and decides there’s still a lot of love. | 2022-12-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | December 2, 2022 | 7.1 | 86969b95-b450-4400-9a92-a285dc468041 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Producer on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint has an uncanny knack for sculpting organic-sounding beats. | Producer on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint has an uncanny knack for sculpting organic-sounding beats. | Teebs: Ardour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14798-ardour/ | Ardour | Teebs has been billed as someone who benefits from his dues-paying backstory. He's a visual artist turned musician, he shared an apartment building with mentors Flying Lotus and Samiyam, and he put together his first Brainfeeder release, Ardour, over a two-year stretch that saw his father pass away. Run in certain beat-geek circles, and you might start getting an idea of what his deal is just from those details. But who Teebs knows, how he came up, the creation process, what scenes he's echoing off and adding to-- well, it's important, but there's something about Ardour that makes it feel like it has no manmade origin. Think of a building that's been left unattended for 100 years, and all of the foliage that pushes up through it and engulfs its crumbling foundations. For all the artisanal care that went into this album's creation, it sounds like decaying beats being split apart by deceptively fragile yet resilient melodies, post-hip-hop production as a simulation of nature reclaiming concrete.
Here's what I mean: try and focus on a specific instrument when you listen to an individual track, and you'll discover that Teebs' manipulation has rendered it into something unexpected. That's a wobbly harp on "Double Fifths", though in the first few seconds of the loop getting spooled up, it sounds like an out-of-tune ukulele, and over the course of the song its off-time loops start to come across as precipitation rather than a set of strings. There's a trilling piano glissando on "Moments", tweaked at points-- drenched in reverb, distorted, subsumed under layers of percussion and hiss-- to halfway convince you into thinking it might not actually be a piano at all. Percussive elements are built in a way that puts kicks and snares front and center, but lets just enough supplemental backbeat elements like backspun loops, flowing chimes, and sparking electronic synapses bubble under the surface so that even the most minimalist rhythms sound mystifyingly busy. Such elements make songs like "My Whole Life" and "Wind Loop" into drum-rich tracks that sinuously trickle instead of straight-up banging.
A lot of ink and pixels have been thrown around trying to make a case for the idea of electronic music's organic possibilities, but Ardour actually captures the sonic equivalent of watching biological life expand in sped-up time-lapse. And no, that's not to say that Ardour is about as interesting as watching grass grow. Its methodology is subtle, but its mood is immediate. Maybe the best way I can think of to describe that tone is one of disorienting joy: It's wispy and gentle and a bit cheerful on the surface, but giving it a deep listen will bring forth some of the more complex and abrasive elements to the forefront. This music can be flat-out beautiful while still giving your head a jostle: The romantic soundtrack strings of "Humming Birds", the icy bells of "Arthur's Birds", and the digital bird-chirps of "Autumn Antique" are undercut by clicking snap-beats and bass throbs that sound like they're coming from a loose, twitching high-voltage power line. That juxtaposition of gentleness and heat makes Ardour a pleasant exercise in loop-chopping naturalism-- but even through all the foliage, you can still nod your head to it. | 2010-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-11-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | November 9, 2010 | 8 | 86976a30-6345-4ff3-8590-fc365cf511f4 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
After the departure of co-founding member Larissa Loyva, P:ano's remaining threesome have returned as No Kids, changing course from 2005's ukulele-driven Ghost Pirates Without Heads for a debut that rivals the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address in its art-saturated omnivorousness. | After the departure of co-founding member Larissa Loyva, P:ano's remaining threesome have returned as No Kids, changing course from 2005's ukulele-driven Ghost Pirates Without Heads for a debut that rivals the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address in its art-saturated omnivorousness. | No Kids: Come Into My House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11217-come-into-my-house/ | Come Into My House | No Kids are the non-children of P:ano, a Vancouver-based indie pop group who borrowed from an unusual array of influences-- from Broadway to post-disco-- over a catalog of three little-heard albums, one 7" single, and an 11-track EP. After the departure of co-founding member Larissa Loyva, P:ano's remaining threesome have returned as No Kids, changing course from 2005's ukulele-driven Ghost Pirates Without Heads for a debut that rivals the Dirty Projectors' The Getty Address in its art-saturated omnivorousness, though its appetites aren't always within its means. On Come Into My House, everything from present-day urban radio to kitchen-sink chamber-pop to college glee clubs serve as fodder for F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque depictions of effete East Coast student loneliness. This old beach house is an extravagant one, peopled by characters who probably weren't hurt by the housing-market slump.
Plenty of indie pop bands borrow from 1960s Motown, but No Kids' appropriation of contemporary r&b puts them in a lineage that runs from Orange Juice's Chic-style guitars and Scritti Politti's soulful balladry to Hot Chip's self-aware electropop-- and, alas, labelmate Hey Willpower's un-FutureSex-y Timberlake sounds, too. When the compositions are as engaging as the intricate percussion, as on advance mp3s like piano-based male-female duet "For Halloween" or the falsetto-frosted "The Beaches All Closed", songwriter Nick Krgovich conjures a world of empty vacation homes and full scrapbooks. The T-Pain-esque Auto-Tuning on "Listen For It/Courtyard Music" comes off as an eccentricity next to what sounds like bassoon, but Krgovich's protagonists have eccentricities instead of girlfriends. "Neighbour's Party" interpolates the slinky piano riff from Amerie's "Crush" as if it were a sample; the obviousness of the reference is a painful reminder that Amerie would be a lot more fun to hear blasting from your neighbor's party.
Of course, No Kids know this, too. "It's a dance in my heart," Krgovich and Julia Chirka sing-- not a night in the club. Opener "Great Escape" describes "wandering around the gardens on this great estate" with the band's Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis fascination hidden behind lush orchestration, marching-band drum rolls, and quiet wistfulness. When the time comes for celebration on "I Love the Weekend" or "Old Iron Gate", Krgovich's melismas flit over Brazilian rhythms instead of icy-hot r&b. "Four Freshmen Locked Out as the Sun Goes Down" sets barbershop-style harmonies atop unobtrusive strums. Lyrical mentions of upper-crust academic life are about as frequent here as musical allusions to the pop charts.
In Fitzgerald novels like The Beautiful and Damned, the characters may come from the WASP elite, but their passions burn like the booze in which they can't help but overindulge. Come Into My House represents another side of paradise-- the yearning of the well-to-do young intellectual who doesn't do well when it comes to matters of the heart, the insider who finds himself on the outside (with his pockets full of saltwater taffy). The album could use a little more of Fitzgerald's fiery extremes, and a bit less of meandering disappointments like "You Looked Good to Me" or "Dancing in the Stacks", but at its best it's a clever piece of musical storytelling by a band unintimidated by genre. | 2008-03-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2008-03-12T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Tomlab | March 12, 2008 | 6.1 | 869b6294-fc77-4208-a9fb-218947af671a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Britrock survivors’ first album in 11 years is the sound of men in their 50s channeling the memories of their teens through the music of their 30s. | The Britrock survivors’ first album in 11 years is the sound of men in their 50s channeling the memories of their teens through the music of their 30s. | Doves: The Universal Want | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doves-the-universal-want/ | The Universal Want | The transformative power of sound has served as the subtext for basically every song Doves have ever written. On “Cathedrals of the Mind,” it’s the entire text. The band’s Jimi Goodwin describes the third single from The Universal Want as “a prayer to sonics,” a recollection of ravers “going insane” in an open field as soundsystems blast at ego-crushing volumes. When the trio behind erstwhile dance project Sub Sub reinvented themselves as a vaguely mysterious and very grandiose Y2K Britrock band on their 2000 debut Lost Souls, there’s no way they would’ve allowed themselves to be so literal. That they can now is proof of concept for the band’s first album in 11 years: men in their 50s channeling the memories of their teens through the music of their 30s.
Merely by sounding much like other Doves albums, Universal Want is nostalgic. Though their first single was a booming, nearly eight-minute statement of intent, Doves’ debut made for a notable break from the Glastonbury giants then being felled by various forms of ego and bloat. And while Lost Souls and its follow-up The Last Broadcast topped the UK charts, the British press, “desperate for something to kick us out of the stupor of the previous two or three years,” quickly flocked towards the more tabloid-friendly Strokes and Libertines. For a time, Doves were at least perceived as being cooler or less crassly commercial than Coldplay—praise that eventually seemed shortsighted when comparing the technicolor splendor of the Brian Eno-produced Viva La Vida to 2009’s Kingdom of Rust.
As most of their peers have either shuttered or grown into the middle-age MOR tag, Doves seem to see their own continued existence as a form of defiance. “If you gotta believe in someone, don’t make that person me,” Goodwin sniffs on “Prisoners,” which seemingly advocates for rioting within the cell walls of your own life. It’s an unusually bristling sentiment, especially within the swirling, string-laced strums. Doves aren’t just picking up where they left off, but actively invoking their two earliest and most beloved albums. Both Lost Souls and Last Broadcast announced themselves with a portentous intro leading into a bracing, percussive mission statement; The Universal Want does the same. A cracking Tony Allen breakbeat serves as the selling point of “Carousels,” though Doves aren’t really riding the rhythm or working within a pocket. The sample dominates an already crowded mix, but maximalism is the point: “Carousels” works as a recreation of the competing nostalgias in Goodwin’s lyrics. It’s not meant to sound like the future, more, “they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
The same could’ve been said in 2005 or 2009, when Some Cities and Kingdom of Rust arrived to increasingly muted receptions. Some of the critiques still hold true: As always, the midsection gets a bit soggy, one guitar overdub is never enough, and while Godwin’s vocals have an appealing, worn grain, they’re also incapable of modulation. But The Universal Want troubleshoots wisely—keep the tempos at a brisk jog, dabble in Afrobeat, Motown, and cinematic soul rather than prog, and watch the clock. Whereas Kingdom of Rust felt like twice its hourlong runtime, Universal Want is Doves’ first filler-free album, floating by like a warm breeze.
It also leaves about the same impression: In the moment, Doves’ candor and lyrical clarity on the title track are a welcome shift for a band whose personality is mostly divined from its production choices. Yet it’s the punched-in, drum-machine bounce of “I Will Not Hide” that lingers more than its hook; the mere attempt at making “Mother Silverlake” the grooviest Doves song is more memorable than the melody. The twinkling icicle lights of guitar that twist around the chorus of “Carousels” render its lyrics redundant at best. Despite their rep as throwback, album-oriented studio geeks, 2010’s The Places Between proved that Doves are a frequently transcendent singles band. The Universal Want lacks the take-on-the-world bullishness of “There Goes the Fear,” the cinematic sweep of “The Man Who Told Everything” or “Caught By the River,” or a chorus that could translate as easily to a jazz-pop cover as “Catch the Sun.” These are the kind of songs that might have driven Doves fans to the same ecstatic highs that Goodwin describes on “Cathedrals of the Mind,” but The Universal Want understands that those same people probably can’t experience that sensation anew, just fondly remember it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Imperial | September 14, 2020 | 6.7 | 869d0c5e-f860-47da-b5c3-9ff34d8cc9ad | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The debut solo album from the former lead singer of Priests feels caught between reality and nightmare, balancing dissonant soundscapes against an eerie, self-possessed sense of calm. | The debut solo album from the former lead singer of Priests feels caught between reality and nightmare, balancing dissonant soundscapes against an eerie, self-possessed sense of calm. | Katie Alice Greer: Barbarism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katie-alice-greer-barbarism/ | Barbarism | Since 2015, Katie Alice Greer has released solo music as KAG. Then she realized her Twitter algorithm was flooded with MAGA content: Turns out KAG is also short for “Keep America Great.” The grossly ironic overlap highlighted one reason why Greer has adamantly resisted describing her music as “political.” Everything is political; the word’s value as a descriptor has lost its potency. Greer recognizes that our vocabulary hasn’t evolved as fast as conditions have deteriorated. But her music melts the myth of American order into a hot waxy soup. Her debut solo album, Barbarism, casts a bleary yet charged gaze on recent history. These 11 songs feel caught between reality and nightmare.
As the former lead singer of Washington, D.C. punky-tonk group Priests, Greer is known for sharply polemical words delivered with a bratty wail or an operatic howl. But on Barbarism she sounds possessed. It’s unnerving how calm she is over the noisy drone of “Fake Nostalgia,” where she sings about “a simpler time” and “a sense of certainty that was never mine.” Her chilling composure stands out, harnessing the mindset of those fixated on going back, whether to a pre-pandemic normal or an antebellum fantasy. The contrast between the industrial background and her rose-tinted vocals illustrate the futility of looking to the past while the present is on fire. Despite her brainwashed tone, Greer is trying to escape the trap: “I don’t want to go back to some old life,” she sings. She’s calling from an alternate dimension, trying to break through a Twilight Zone mirage.
This extreme pivot from Priests’ serrated rockabilly-punk isn’t new for Greer; she’s already penned throbbing industrial electronic music about Diana Ross and lo-fi surf grunge inspired by the 1947 film Black Narcissus. “FITS/My Love Can’t Be,” the new album’s paranoid opener, is the closest Greer comes to hooky post-punk here. “There’s been a lot of talk about what happens when we sleep,” she announces in the opening line. Later, she mentions surveillance and police informants. Maybe Greer doesn’t mean literal sleep at all, but the act of looking away: from the theft of personal data, the rise of citizen policing, or the erosion of privacy. Warped steam engine drums transition into a tornado of percussion—a stampede’s rumble, sonar pings, a tinny alarm, marimba patters, as confused and overstimulated as life in the 24-hour news cycle. Her voice is sharp, almost cheeky as she sings: “A spectator sport and more popcorn when you’re bored.” Unfortunately, that captivating, acerbic tone doesn’t reappear elsewhere on the album.
The sound of Barbarism is like a machine at work, but it’s unclear if it’s malfunctioning or operating at max capacity. Drums, guitars, and synths are ripped, mangled, and plastered back together with industrial glue. Fleeting melodies and cultural references float by like jetsam in the waves. There’s an unrecognizable sample of a Bernie Sanders speech accompanied by the click of a typewriter on “Flag Wave Pt. 2” and a slightly more identifiable sample of Dorothea Lasky’s poem “Porn” coupled with metallic hiccups on “No Man,” which takes its title from John Donne. “There was no cotton in England to grow/A million miles away and a big bank loan,” Greer sings in a silvery tone, a brief, impressionistic history of American opportunism. “I know in my bones/I am entitled to something.”
Barbarism is a deranged playground, a portal to uncomfortable feelings in an increasingly uncomfortable world. Like a half-remembered dream, it seems to continuously promise access to hidden answers, if only we could penetrate the chaos. And though it’s grating, uneven, and perplexing, Barbarism feels familiar. Lansky, the poet, has talked about the compassion of art that appeals to our impulse for evil. “This sense of the demonic is beautiful because it has to care about who it’s targeting,” she said. “It’s a way to seduce the reader into an intimate place. That’s all a demon wants. It wants to be heard like any other restless spirit.” On Barbarism, Greer is possessed by the uncomfortable and the alien. Falling into her world, it’s hard not to be possessed in return. | 2022-06-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | FourFour | June 29, 2022 | 7 | 86a4fe67-fb29-4acd-b875-1a7ac86ca7fe | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before, the second-full length by Sarah Beth Tomberlin finds peace in the unraveling. | Sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before, the second-full length by Sarah Beth Tomberlin finds peace in the unraveling. | Tomberlin : I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This… | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomberlin-i-dont-know-who-needs-to-hear-this/ | I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This… | On her debut record, 2018’s At Weddings, Sarah Beth Tomberlin summed up her lyrical outlook: “To be a woman is to be in pain,” she lamented over muted piano and spectral reverb. “And my body reminds me almost every day.” The Brooklyn singer-songwriter often writes about characters who are constantly burdened: Whether they’re struggling with unrequited love or a Baptist upbringing, Tomberlin looks at small moments as a microcosm of larger, lifelong issues. Her 2020 EP Projections let in a little light, with playful songs about secret crushes and queer relationships, but religious trauma and fear still complicated the sapphic bliss of “Sin.” On her second full-length, I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This…, she loosens up and finds peace, if not quite joy, in the unraveling.
Working with producer Phil Weinrobe, Tomberlin surrounds these songs with layered percussion and lush arrangements, providing company as she struggles with isolation. Woodwinds creep in on “Unsaid” and synths throb on “Memory,” but even when she raises her voice on “Sunstruck” and “Stoned,” nothing can shake Tomberlin from the feeling of stasis in her lyrics. The percussive “Tap” is set during the first pandemic winter of January 2021, where she’s stuck watching mindless television and unloading in the DMs of people she hardly knows: “Talk to strangers like we already met/Even though it hasn’t happened yet.” Spirituality isn’t quite doing it for her either: A tarot card reading in “Unsaid” only makes her miss a toxic relationship, and a visit to church on “Born Again Runner” leaves her dissociating, “syncing my breath with the A/C.”
When Tomberlin’s songs leave the comfort of solitude, she reveals a versatility in her writing not always apparent under the weight of anxiety and depression. An uncertain dalliance on standout “Happy Accident” suggests the only thing more complicated than yearning for someone is actually developing the relationship: Across nearly six minutes, Tomberlin wrestles with feelings for a person who may or may not feel the same way. The unexpectedly funny “Collect Caller” swaps ambivalence for vitriol: “Collect caller/Don’t say you’re a baller/You’re a white boy living on your daddy’s dime.” A petty diss track towards a superficial “indie boy” sounds out of place on a record so emotionally closed off, but among these despairing stories of lost connection, his egotism looks even more shameless.
Vulnerability has powered Tomberlin’s music for years, and “Collect Caller” aside, these songs are sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before. One exception is the ending of “Stoned,” a fuzzy, pitch-shifted guitar solo that’s a jarring distraction from the record’s serenity. By contrast, “IDKWNTHT” is a strong addition to the canon of indie songs that sound like an adult coloring book, its major-key, looping chord progression evoking a nursery rhyme, give or take some expressive saxophones. Its tenderness is rare in Tomberlin’s anxious music, and rare even on this album. Guest vocalist and percussionist Felix Walworth of Told Slant provides call-and-response throughout the song, a playful, charming touch that feels like a sign of growth for a songwriter who has tended toward insularity. Even as she struggles to fight those instincts, the refrain brings a knowing smirk: “Sometimes it’s good to sing your feelings.” She knows, of course, that finding self-love is easier sung than done. | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | April 29, 2022 | 7.8 | 86ad2542-311c-4649-afd7-ee4a91e69ddd | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The third volume in this storied series of leftfield disco appears a few years after-- rather than, like the first two volumes, a year or two on the other side of-- a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won. | The third volume in this storied series of leftfield disco appears a few years after-- rather than, like the first two volumes, a year or two on the other side of-- a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won. | Various Artists: Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11055-disco-not-disco-post-punk-electro-leftfield-disco-classics-1974-1986/ | Disco Not Disco: Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics 1974-1986 | What happens when the undisclosed past gets overwhelmed by the open-source present? Should we cheer or mourn? Is there a word, maybe in German, that accounts for both? When it came out in 2000, the first Disco Not Disco compilation begged no such questions. Other surveys had already started to recognize an alternative history of disco, but Disco Not Disco was the collection that made the pursuit into a movement. Part of that owed to timing: However much talk of old weird disco affected the weather in 2000, it would be another year or two before young upstarts turned that weather into a certifiable front. And it's worth remembering, now well into an age when fixation on genre plays as a vestige of an unenlightened past, just how new the notion of historical "disco" that was also "not disco" proved just a few years ago.
The original impulse behind Disco Not Disco was monumental, so much so that the formulation "X not X" has become part of music's critical vocabulary. But that same monumentality eats away at the new third volume of the series, which arrives on the other side of a revolution whose most important battles have already been fought and won.
Tangling with obsolescence is a great problem to have for an enterprise charged with rescuing the obscure, but still: James White's "Contort Yourself"? Delta 5's "Mind Your Own Business"? These are not songs that lack for anthology affirmation at this point, and their inclusion here marks a conspicuous absence of energy and purpose for a series that made its name on both.
That's not to argue against their greatness. Both songs are quite good, as are many of the other Post Punk, Electro & Leftfield Disco Classics included here. Vivien Goldman's "Launderette" leads off with the kind of walloping dub bass that played an integral role in post-punk's warming up to rhythm as a top-of-mind priority. Using that as a metric, Disco Not Disco 3 skews more directly toward post-punk than either of the previous two volumes; it's given more to bottom-up wanderings toward discretionary disco than to top-down digressions of disco itself. Shriekback charts the journey in a skulking track called "My Spine Is the Bassline", which would have made a good survey title if Disco Not Disco had not been in play. The ghostly horns intimated by Shriekback go on to tip the scales in Konk's "Your Life", which mixes tendrils of rocky rhythm guitar with flares of dancey brass.
The tenor changes with Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Seoul Music", a magisterial mood-piece in which the seeds of LCD Soundsystem can be heard rustling in the dirt of a planet starting to grow more futuristic in the early 80s. From there, more overtly electronic sounds figure into tracks by Kazino, Liasons Dangereuses, and A Number of Names. The last one comes with a caveat, though: Hats off to any compilation that makes room for A Number of Names' "Sharevari", but still: an "instrumental" version? The song in its full form figured into the story of disco turning into techno in Detroit, but the voided version here-- like Disco Not Disco 3 itself-- plays a bit too much like a hedged bet. | 2008-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-01-17T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Strut | January 17, 2008 | 6.2 | 86c3ad90-00aa-4f28-a880-44b7ff0e4c4f | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
The New York quartet’s scant and downtempo album deftly uses stillness as a way to pull listeners deeper into the music. | The New York quartet’s scant and downtempo album deftly uses stillness as a way to pull listeners deeper into the music. | Altopalo: frozenthere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/altopalo-frozenthere/ | frozenthere | To analyze Altopalo is to decipher a transmission from a faraway planet. The bass rattles and drops at a moment’s notice. Faint guitar chords clatter in the distance. The vocals are often garbled and unclear, tucked behind a layer of moody synths and staggered electronic drums. The band uses stillness to its advantage, slowly unpacking it as a way to pull listeners deeper into the music. The sounds are barely there at certain points, and you have to lean in a little closer to fully absorb its vibration.
That’s most evident on the title track of Altopalo’s new album, frozenthere: Amid deafening bass, the words of lead vocalist Rahm Silverglade are pitched higher and played in reverse; when coupled with a loop of haunting guitar chords, the song feels equally magnetic and disorienting. Then there’s “Pulp,” a visceral meditation near album’s end. Here, Silverglade pivots between low-pitched groaning and primal squealing, both of which convey the singer’s gut-wrenching torment. One can almost feel his pain, and see him writhing through the suffocating darkness.
frozenthere is a sharp sonic turn from Altopalo’s previous project, 2015’s noneofuscared, which skewed closer to funk and indie rock. Along with Silverglade, who’s released solo material on Terrible Records, Altopalo features guitarist Mike Haldeman (a member of Moses Sumney’s band), bassist Jesse Bielenberg, and drummer Dillon Treacy. Though noneofuscared was louder and more direct, songs like “loafly” and “goodnight (boom)” employed a mix of rock and ambient, and foreshadowed the band’s creative approach for this LP. frozenthere is scant and downtempo, drawing direct lines to the early work of experimental vocalist/producer James Blake and the remote serenity of Frank Ocean’s Endless.
Much like Blake, Silverglade uses his voice as an addendum to the music, sometimes filtering it to the background. Atmosphere is key here; the aura is more important than the words being spoken. Thematically, the album explores what it means to be human in a world dependent on technology, and on “Terra,” Silverglade seems to delve into the feelings of inferiority that social media can cause. “Scroll down to the picture lost in a feed,” he mutters. “Scroll down, countin’ thumbs, still dreamin’ of the hearts you hold.” The lyrics could have a double meaning in this instance; maybe the thumbs and hearts are digitized signs of approval. Then there’s “Blur,” a love letter to coveted photos: “I’m not alone when you’re so pocket-sized … frozen arms and legs can’t wrap me up at night.”
Throughout the album, the band captures the desperation of modern times, wagging the finger at cell phone addiction while urging listeners to find peace beyond the cascade of likes and retweets. Ultimately, frozenthere fulfills its premise as a rich suite of weightless compositions that float gently through your speakers. It’s a headphones record best consumed in the dead of night or just before dawn, right as the sky fades to a majestic blue, and life begins to rise from its slumber. The results are rewarding: You have to be patient and let it happen. | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Samedi | September 20, 2018 | 7.4 | 86c5e2fa-0b4b-421a-9323-2af4462968b8 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | |
After the 2016 election, the Brooklyn musician embarked on a cross-country train trip that yielded an album that inextricably links America’s abstract political reality with the human lives it has shaped. | After the 2016 election, the Brooklyn musician embarked on a cross-country train trip that yielded an album that inextricably links America’s abstract political reality with the human lives it has shaped. | Gabriel Kahane: Book of Travelers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gabriel-kahane-book-of-travelers/ | Book of Travelers | What is an artist supposed to do with the United States in 2018? Before it was even a country, this confederation of colonies was often defined by divergent opinions and experiences. But in recent years, what might have once (often falsely) passed for a civilized divide has widened at an astounding rate, into an inhospitable canyon whose erosive effects sometimes suggest a New American Antebellum. That leaves the artist with two unattractive options: address the national tension directly and risk making predictable and laughable propaganda, or write about almost anything else and seem privileged to ponder something beyond our urgent existential crises.
The Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and composer Gabriel Kahane stumbled headlong into this conundrum on the morning of November 9, 2016, when Americans were either waking to the news that Donald J. Trump would be our 45th president or still struggling to get some sleep after swallowing that fact. During the last decade, Kahane has explored the United States through an orchestral concert that mined government-commissioned guides to 48 states from the Great Depression, through an album that used 10 Los Angeles locales to ponder the country’s wider promise and perils, and through an early song cycle that drew on the works of a poet whose ancestors had arrived via the Mayflower.
Busy with a set of new songs about travel written before Election Day, Kahane had already booked a set of train tickets meant to take him across the United States in a serpentine journey of 8,980 miles stretched across 13 days. He hoped the experience would not only provide personal ballast for his project, but also give him a classic sort of front-row seat from which to witness the country’s fractious mood.
Instead, after Trump’s win, the journey and the conversations it prompted with strangers during that moment of national convulsion became the entire project: an immersive stage show, 8980: Book of Travelers; and his subsequent Nonesuch Records debut, Book of Travelers. Sometimes verbatim, like an anthropologist, and sometimes with the long-distance gaze of a poet, Kahane relays the stories of the people he met and the patchwork portrait of the United States they form as if singing out his daily journal to the sounds of his piano. It is the rare piece of art that aims, for better and worse, not merely to suggest that political art is personal art but to interlock those categories inextricably, until the social systems and the discrete stories they have created become extensions of one another.
On a train, daily seating arrangements in a dining car are a dice roll, based on times and party sizes. Kahane took advantage of this randomness, engaging his mealtime companions with a simple, sincere mantra: “I just wanna talk to you.” Some complied, sharing deeply personal backstories that became, one by one, the backbone for Book of Travelers. “Crawling back toward the national pain/I’m a city boy swimming in the Laramie Plain,” he sings with élan during “8980,” the album’s deeply blue but swaggering theme song. “Looking for something: What it is?”
Like his frequent collaborator Sufjan Stevens, Kahane has the rare ability to turn arcane information into winning tunes. On the tragic “Baltimore,” he shapes facts about Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its Civilian Conservation Corps into a crystalline verse, where every young man is given “an ax and a seed… a pack and a tree.” “Baedeker” morphs maps and anecdotes from a ponderous early-20th-century guidebook into an anthem with internal architecture as majestic as some grand cathedral. That he’s able to do this with nothing more than a few keyboards, subtle effects, and his sensitive voice makes Kahane’s melodies and performances here all the more remarkable; there are no gilded strings or cascading choirs to sweep you along, just stories translated into exquisite little songs.
Most of these 10 tales relate quiet, common tragedies whose very quotidian nature communicates some national truth—the Christian mother whose devotion unintentionally enables her son’s fatal opioid addiction, contrasted with the couple that has found its own vision of heaven on a sliver of preserved coastline. There is a sketch of the country’s shambolic healthcare system and an indictment of the xenophobia beneath its melting pot façade, delivered with the details of actual experience.
Kahane interlaces these personal histories with his own. The album’s prelude, “November,” pulls the audience from the end of his last record, the Los Angeles-centric The Ambassador, to the train station. While everyone gawks at post-election news, he daydreams of a surrealistic trip where he might see the continent through the ages in an instant. Later, in the stunning two-song suite “October 1, 1939/Port of Hamburg,” he sings about his grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany to the U.S., whispering and crooning fragments from her diary over jarring prepared piano. Then, he turns the infamous practice of banning refugee ships from docking in American ports, which began just after her arrival, into a startling allegory for current headlines.
Perhaps this seems precious, the reporter embedding himself so deeply within his reports. But these moments constitute Kahane’s most ingenious trick: By inserting himself and his family into the songs he’s distilled from the train, he suggests that any of us could have been onboard—and that all of us have been, at some point, uplifted or injured by our national ideals and forever-new deals. There’s strength in recognizing and integrating the multiplicity of a country’s voices, he asserts, in understanding the everyday and everlasting impacts of political choices.
Kahane’s family history with America’s tradition of imbalanced justice can make his quest to find homegrown goodness on the rails frustrating. The heartbreaking “What If I Told You” shares the lunch-car testimonial of a wealthy black woman named Monica. Her family has risen from the bowels of Southern slavery to the upper class and the Ivy League, but she’s taking the train to a funeral in Mississippi because her sons fear racial violence along “a stretch of farm-stand highway”—in the United States, in 2016. Elsewhere, Kahane points out that we still refuse plenty of religious refugees and neglect our most vulnerable people.
In a rare feel-good moment, however, Kahane reflects on singing with strangers aboard the train and the communion it offers. “Is difference only distance from the people I don’t know?” he asks. This is as close to a thesis statement as Book of Travelers ever gets. But the question scans like some vapid Super Bowl commercial that insists we have too much in common to argue (or take a knee), softening in an instant the hard truths Kahane has demanded we hear. His songs can sound polite to a fault: In his slight croon, each vague query feels like a forced smile—an attempt to avoid drawing the correct conclusion because it may offend someone. In its search for an anchoring idea, the album only finds well wishes.
Kahane’s struggle to locate the common thread, or at least pull it taut, rings true for me. A few months after he finished his journey, I began one of my own, traveling across the continent in part to search for something to cherish within a United States that seemed so disunited. Kahane moved 8,980 miles over 13 days on a train that stopped only at predetermined destinations; I went 66,350 miles in 15 months inside an RV that stopped anywhere that looked interesting. Still, despite the scope of my journey, I too have fought to communicate what I found out there in the United States. Some days, I am convinced it is a land worth saving, an expanse of endless possibility; other days, I think it is already gone, a wonderland stripped of so much it once offered. Both pronouncements seem too reductive.
Intentionally or not, what Book of Travelers articulates best is that there are no easy answers, no surefire predictions regarding national doom or deliverance. Kahane expresses the confusion of looking for the best in your fellow citizens but often reckoning with their worst—pervasive racism and uncaring capitalism, our failure to learn from history and our obsession with gratification in the moment. You keep looking anyway. Like the United States itself, Book of Travelers seems stuck in limbo about what it values most, about what it should accept or abhor. Both album and country teeter on a precipice above that inhospitable canyon, even as they keep chugging like trains along its edge. | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | August 23, 2018 | 6.8 | 86cf80ea-c2b6-498e-8843-7616e9cbc12c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Stephin Merritt explores another aesthetic conceit on his latest record, creating a characteristically self-aware play at a "folk" record. | Stephin Merritt explores another aesthetic conceit on his latest record, creating a characteristically self-aware play at a "folk" record. | The Magnetic Fields: Realism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13876-realism/ | Realism | In the 10 years since the Magnetic Fields released 69 Love Songs, Stephin Merritt's ornate orchestrations and wry, referential lyrics have gone from indie rock anomalies to NPR staples. And while countless artists have successfully tempered the emotional gratification of "rock" with self-aware sophistication, Merritt continues to defiantly withhold the former. Merritt embraces artifice where other musicians disavow it, willfully avoiding (or outright mocking) gestures at "sincerity" and presenting his songs as stylized works of fiction. Even Merritt's earliest work with the Magnetic Fields found its most devastating moments via lyrical irony and musical footnotes. The Magnetic Fields will never release an "arty indie rock" record, even though they were instrumental in making such records de rigeur.
For the second album in a row, Merritt is placing an aesthetic conceit front-and-center. While 2008's Distortion was a foray into Jesus and Mary Chain-style squalls of feedback, new LP Realism is Merritt's characteristically self-aware play at a "folk" record. This approach is not entirely new territory for Merritt; 2004's i casts a broadly similar sonic footprint to Realism. The difference largely comes down to arrangement; on i, the Magnetic Fields often sounded like a small ensemble playing together in a room. Here, Merritt's approach is more wide-ranging; gang vocals abound, as do bevies of non-traditional string instruments. Of course, Merritt would not be so gauche as to turn in an "acoustic guitar and vocals" record, and those hoping to find anything even remotely autobiographical or directly emotive on Realism will be sorely disappointed; if anything, Realism is Merritt's most cold and distant-sounding record to date.
This contrast, or course, is not lost on Merritt. Sure enough, Realism is not a "documentary" recording but rather a collection of elaborate, immaculately constructed songs, each encapsulating its own (distorted) "reality." There's even a note of operational irony here, as the compression necessary to bring Realism to a marketable volume makes it as loud as Distortion. But while Distortion saw Merritt gleefully twisting streams of feedback into palp [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| able melancholy, Realism comes off just a little too dry, too straightforward. Merritt's formalism paired excellently with unexpected genres like synth-pop and distorted rock, but such a stately approach to such a stately sound yields frustratingly sterile results.
Opener "You Must Be Out of Your Mind" is both promising and portentous. Within 10 seconds, Merritt's songwriting strengths are on full display: strong melodies given room to breathe, thoughtful and funny lyrics, concise and elegant structure. But "You Must Be Out of Your Mind" sounds suspiciously like a drum-less rehash of i standout "I Don't Believe You". The "Interlude" that follows all but derails the album mere minutes in, and cries out for a more flattering context; it's a narrative song sans narrative, cultivating a flighty and groundless mood (hence the title) with no real lead-up or comedown. The opening bars of "I Don't Know What to Say" constitute the loveliest moment on the record, but like far too much of Realism, the song seems frozen in suspended animation and put behind glass.
This heightened sense of artifice is not accidental; on songs like "The Dolls' Tea Party" and "Painted Flower", Merritt is more or less explicitly painting still-lifes. These, along with "We Are Having a Hootenanny" and the surprisingly re-listenable "The Dada Polka" fall broadly under the "kitsch/novelty" category of Merritt's work, but these songs are really no better or worse then the rest of Realism. The variety show approach Merritt takes to his records is part and parcel of the Magnetic Fields' M.O.; I'm not even sure what it would sound like if Merritt attempted to create a "masterpiece" in the traditional sense. As a result, even the weakest songs on Realism aren't simple throwaways. "Always Already Gone" will be right at home on the next mix you send to your favorite critical theory major (alongside "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" from 69 Love Songs). Looking for some music to play at your next holiday party? Allow me to recommend "Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree".
As rock music listeners, we are generally given to degrading music that seems so rooted in a specific theme or purpose. Realism is not a sit-down-and-listen-to-it-all-the-way-through record, but neither is any Magnetic Fields release. The problem with Realism isn't that it is too clever or too campy, but rather that these qualities are merely reflected in its finely polished exterior. At his best and at his worst, Merritt is smart, thorough, and unerringly precise; the distinction lies in which songs simply display these qualities, and which songs channel them into moving, memorable and/or hilarious works of art. Here, Merritt's songs are as delicate and meticulous as porcelain miniatures. Unfortunately, Realism holds more tchotchkes than museum pieces. | 2010-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | January 27, 2010 | 6 | 86d55e9a-0bd8-4fab-8a68-5abbb8bf71a3 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Mastodon follow the amazing Leviathan/Blood Mountain 1-2 with a Brendan O'Brien-produced LP that mixes more rock and prog into their metal core. | Mastodon follow the amazing Leviathan/Blood Mountain 1-2 with a Brendan O'Brien-produced LP that mixes more rock and prog into their metal core. | Mastodon: Crack the Skye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12872-crack-the-skye/ | Crack the Skye | First off: Mastodon's album concepts are officially out of control. It's one thing to base an entire album on Herman Melville's Moby Dick, as the Atlanta band did on 2004's amazing Leviathan. But when you're making a record about a kid who experiments with astral travel and then goes through a wormhole and meets Rasputin and Rasputin enters his body to escape assassination, or something, you've pushed this whole thing way, way further than it needed to be pushed. I interviewed guitarist Bill Kelliher a couple of weeks back, and he sighed deeply before delving into the story, and it took him a good five minutes or so just to get through the thing. That's a bit much.
But it doesn't particularly matter how wound-up and excruciating the band's album concepts might be as long as their music kicks as hard as it does. Mastodon's music never really settles into a locked-in groove. Instead, it skips and dives and wanders. When the band switches up time-signatures, something it does often, it's not to show off math-rock chops; it's to rip the rug out from under you, to keep you uncomfortable. Crack the Skye, the band's fourth album, stays in weirdly soft midtempo churn mode more than their previous albums do, but it never lingers. Instead, it delays the gratification of the band's gigantic sunward-screaming choruses just long enough to make you wonder if they're ever coming, which makes the release that much more overwhelming when it finally arrives. "The Czar", a four-part, 11-minute epic that's still only the second-longest song on the album, gargles and fumes and lurches for nearly three minutes before launching into its first glorious steamroller riffs. This band is playing with you.
The seven songs on Crack the Skye stretch over about 50 minutes, an indulgent track-length average for any band not named Opeth. But Mastodon's odysseys never feel forced or pretentious. Even on 13-minute closer "The Last Baron", I never really notice the track length. Every riff and roar flows organically into the next until I'm totally lost in it; hard to imagine checking the time remaining on your iPod when things get like that. In a way, Mastodon operates something like prime-era Metallica, unleashing these huge, blistering tracks that journey over peaks and valleys and ditches and oceans before leaving you spinning. It's just that Mastodon's arsenal of weapons is different; instead of demi-classical guitar interludes and blazing twin-guitar leads and thuggish hey-hey-heys, they've got soupy quasi-jazz trundles and pigfuck distortion-explosions and quick bursts of time-honored Southern-rock melody.
First single "Divinations" ranks among the best things the band's ever done, a quick banjo intro into a juddering riff that whips and soars through a serious full-speed attack of a song with one of the biggest, most cathartic choruses in the band's career, then dissolves into a space-surf solo before ending in a deeply satisfying thud. I just wish the band could've maintained that level of breathless intensity over the course of the full album, the way they did on Leviathan, still probably their best. On this one, they've broken with Leviathan/Blood Mountain producer Matt Bayles for Springsteen/Pearl Jam collaborator Brendan O'Brien. O'Brien doesn't drag them kicking and screaming onto active-rock radio or anything; this is still very much a Mastodon album, with all the blistering roar that phrase has come to imply. But this one doesn't have the expansive, suffusing grime of the previous two, and the band's churn can feel a bit stretched-thin for minutes at a time. Also, Troy Sanders and Brent Hinds are singing more than ever before, rather than delivering their mythologies in vein-popped grunts the way they once did. That's not a problem in itself, but Sanders and Hinds both sing in gurgly, nauseous whines that shoot for Ozzy territory but never quite get there. When they're harmonizing eerily deep in the mix, it works. When they get closer to the top, it sometimes doesn't.
And so the most powerful moments on Crack the Skye are almost always the most direct. On the title track, Neurosis' Scott Kelly shows up for a lung-busting guest-vocal, bellowing over the din of the band's complex thunder-crunch while a demonic vocodered thing screeches out a counterpoint. And near the end, Kelly growls out the most serious lyric on the whole record: "Momma, don't let them drag her down/ Please tell Lucifer he can't have this one." And you remember something else the band has been saying in interviews. This isn't really the band's opus about astral travel or Rasputin or whatever; it's drummer and primary lyricist Brann Dailor's attempt to wrestle with his sister Skye's way-too-early death. If he has to conjure alternate universes to get there, it's easy to see why. And even at its most prog-tastic heights of absurdity, this band's wriggling thunder never falls apart. It just punches deeper when Mastodon drop their defenses. | 2009-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Reprise | April 1, 2009 | 8 | 86da3cb4-3b39-43f3-94b7-3c7a4de7589b | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The Tuareg guitarist and his bandmates deliver the fullest picture of his gifts yet. Recorded piecemeal during tour breaks, the album captures the group’s easy chemistry and explosive energy. | The Tuareg guitarist and his bandmates deliver the fullest picture of his gifts yet. Recorded piecemeal during tour breaks, the album captures the group’s easy chemistry and explosive energy. | Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mdou-moctar-afrique-victime/ | Afrique Victime | If it were up to Mdou Moctar, the fiery, psychedelic rock music that has made him one of the most respected guitarists working today would be kept far away from professional recording studios. “With all due respect to all engineers,” the Tuareg virtuoso recently confessed to Reverb, “I find it much too square.” Late last year, the Nigerien musician gathered his bandmates outside a friend’s house in Niamey to test out material from Afrique Victime in a more comfortable environment. In the open air, the quartet quickly attracted an audience: adults dancing, children air-drumming, and others just watching in awe as Moctar’s songs ascended and burst in the desert sky like fireworks.
This communal atmosphere is the ideal setting for Moctar’s music, an adrenalizing take on assouf, or desert blues, that seems engineered to reach as many people as possible. His songs are often based on one- or two-chord riffs. The lyrics, sung primarily in Tamasheq, delve into political subject matter, like imperialism or women’s rights, or more romantic reflections, like young love or the natural world. The magic happens when he starts soloing: a silvery, fluttering sound that ricochets from each surface like a rubber ball thrown into a small room. While his vocals are delivered in group chants or anthemic call-and-response, his guitar playing is a searing, untameable thing, always the star of the show.
Before he assembled his electrifying band—with rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane, drummer Souleymane Ibrahim, and bassist Mikey Coltun—Moctar searched for a proper runway for these ascensions. A far cry from the blistering, live-band sound he favors now, Moctar’s first studio album proposed a kind of burbling sci-fi folk featuring his Auto-Tuned vocals over acoustic guitar and drum machines. He attributes this style to his primary influence, the Nigerien guitarist Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou, whose hypnotic songs of perseverance and rebellion inspired Moctar to build his own guitar when he was a child.
As Moctar’s recordings have evolved, the constant has been his distinctive playing. Left-handed and self-taught, Moctar developed a style of brushing the strings with his left index finger in furtive, constant motions while his right hand gallops along the fretboard, building melodies from nimble hammer-ons, often filtered through a series of pedals that creates the sound of a metallic, echoing siren. As evidenced by a charming interview with Dweezil Zappa, Moctar can easily mimic the style of Western guitarists he admires—like Jimi Hendrix, a common influence among Tuareg guitarists, or Eddie Van Halen, whose tapping style he only recently became familiar with. Like these guitar heroes, Moctar’s playing has become a recognizable voice no matter the context: whether he’s playing acoustic or electric, on a protest song about colonialist violence or a Bonnie “Prince” Billy track.
Afrique Victime is the fullest portrait of Moctar’s gifts that he has offered yet. To capture the explosive, uncontainable sound of the band’s performances, Coltun once again handled production duties, recording on breaks during a long tour behind 2019’s breakthrough Ilana (The Creator). The band’s only member not originally from Niger, Coltun spent his formative years in D.C. punk and attempted to sculpt the group’s long jam sessions into the tent poles of a rock record. Listening to opening track “Chismiten,” you can hear the tighter structure working in their favor: Pivoting around Moctar’s solos, the song constantly revs up, building speed and momentum, like a motorcycle racing up a mountain.
In longer songs, like the epic title track, the band settles into a groove: The colossal jam at the end puts a spotlight on drummer Ibrahim, whose filtered tom rolls add a sense of surreal world-building to their raw performance. Moctar’s climactic solo, meanwhile, veers into newly chaotic territory, as close to pure noise as he has ever come. To accompany these peaks in energy, the band experiments with quieter textures—the acoustic blues of “Layla,” the spacey ballad “Tala Tannam”—and scene-setting flourishes. A brief, untitled interlude separates the album’s two sides: a field recording that attempts to bring the outside world inside the studio, to better situate the material around it.
While these songs play like joyous surges of inspiration, Moctar has discussed the music with deep intensity, even melancholy. He spoke at length about the atrocities in Niger over the past year, adding to the urgency of his calls to action in the title track: “If we stay silent, it will be the end of us.” Moctar’s current focus is on building wells throughout local villages, for people who have been deprived of water and electricity. In its righteous, inventive way, his music is also part of his ongoing effort to aid people: “My wish is that the new generation of musicians will continue to flourish and develop,” he explained to Dazed Digital. You get the sense that when the lights go down and he looks out at the audience, he doesn’t just see his community: He sees the future.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 20, 2021 | 8.4 | 86e2505d-bf7f-4865-9bff-8e95b32abe81 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Anxiety swirls through these songs about non-normative relationships, the unease countered by a bucolic mix of pleasing melodies, soft guitars, and gentle vocals. | Anxiety swirls through these songs about non-normative relationships, the unease countered by a bucolic mix of pleasing melodies, soft guitars, and gentle vocals. | Hand Habits: placeholder | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hand-habits-placeholder/ | placeholder | On placeholder, the second album from Meg Duffy’s Hand Habits, the singer/songwriter orbits a stinging absence, ruminating on the ephemeral nature of emotional attachment. Characters pass through placeholder like silhouettes on the horizon; as Duffy watches them go, these songs weave narratives around the space they leave behind. What’s a love story with only half the cast? A plaintive consideration of the ways people shape each other, even in disappearance.
Alongside Big Thief and recent Deerhunter albums, Hand Habits are part of a strong contingent of contemporary acts staging queer stories against a wistful Americana backdrop. A guitarist in Kevin Morby’s band and a recent collaborator to William Tyler, Duffy hails from Los Angeles via upstate New York. For placeholder, Duffy returned to more rural lands, recording with producer Brad Cook at Justin Vernon’s Wisconsin studio. Duffy navigates the ambiguity of non-normative relationships against distant wails of slide guitar and sprays of open acoustic chords. “I start worrying/That you don’t know me anymore,” they sing over brushed drums and staccato bass. “Jessica/I forget/You shattered my reality.” The emptiness left by a faded relationship is like the emptiness of a desert plain: Both paralyze with their expanse.
Duffy’s unfailingly pleasant melodies smooth over the existential terror of their lyrics. On “can’t calm down,” they posit anxiety as familial inheritance: “What if I can’t calm down/And I don’t have that in my bloodline?” The song’s speaker can’t find peace, but the instrumentation offers it in abundance. A strummed guitar overlaps with a fingerpicked one, shaping a steady, soothing rhythm, as if Duffy were trying to play away their stress. They sound calm but insist they aren’t calm, carrying a minuscule but heavy granule of uncertainty like an invisible cross.
That anxiety swirls through placeholder, and Duffy seeks to counter it at every step—with pleasing melodies, soft guitars, and gentle vocals. They shoulder loss and dissonance with former loved ones and try to muscle on toward forgiveness. Even as they sing repeatedly about fires scorching the landscape, they sound as if nothing could fracture their sense of calm. “What’s the use if you’re not trying to forgive?” they ask at one point. A line like that suggests an impending flash of bared teeth, for the anger that presages acceptance. Yet placeholder rarely stirs from its placid foundation. Duffy’s voice never cracks, and this insistence on quiet benevolence starts to wear thin.
Still, amid more abstract verses, Duffy plants images of startling clarity. “Your heart beats hard/Like the pounding of the sparrow/On the window that faces the yard,” they sing on “yr heart [reprise],” a re-recording of a 2017 single. The original put the crisp vocals high in the mix; in this incarnation, Duffy’s voice diffuses gently across a sound field of blurred piano and strings. The soft glow here opens up the recording, making the song, already one of Duffy’s best, even more inviting.
This musical approachability belies a persistent bitterness, like Duffy were trying to keep cool while being eaten up inside. Wanting to seem OK while secretly falling apart is a tricky dance that placeholder deftly captures. But hearing about a riot is not the same as listening to one. Duffy excels at mapping resolution, which might make you want to hear about the conflict. | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | March 1, 2019 | 7.3 | 86e2a0fa-60e4-449b-aa28-4139fba37658 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Plants and Animals may not have made their most original album with Waltzed in from the Rumbling, but they have definitely made their most beautiful one. | Plants and Animals may not have made their most original album with Waltzed in from the Rumbling, but they have definitely made their most beautiful one. | Plants and Animals: Waltzed in from the Rumbling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21744-plants-and-animals-waltzed-in-from-the-rumbling/ | Waltzed in from the Rumbling | Plants and Animals singer/guitarist Warren Spicer has recorded and mixed his band's fourth full-length to near perfection. This cannot be overstated. Each instrument on Waltzed in from the Rumbling is so exactly in tune and at the optimum volume and placement in the speakers that it feels like each note is tangible. From the chop of the stereo-panned acoustic guitars to the gentle golf claps on last month's single, "No Worries Gonna Find Us," to the train-brakes flute on "So Many Nights," to the string and horn arrangements that bring so much texture to this album, everything is in its right place. If that sounds like I'm referencing a different band, this is because Plants and Animals sound like a different band, namely a combination of turn-of-the-century Radiohead and turn-of-the-century Flaming Lips.
It's another detour in a career made of them. Over the years, Plants and Animals' disinclination to stick with a signature sound has pretty much become their signature. Their first album favored folk rock arrangements and invited comparisons to Blitzen Trapper and Neil Young. Their second offered pared-down rock that ignored the precedent set by their debut. The third album was the proverbial “mature” outing. So now, after a four-year absence, Plants and Animals have made a collection of songs that sound gorgeous and will pop up on your Radiohead Pandora station, even though they likely wouldn't even pop up on your Plants and Animals Pandora station.
If the music falls between a soundtrack to dystopia and a technicolor symphony, Spicer's words also fall somewhere between Thom Yorke's sneering cynicism and Wayne Coyne's wide-eyed wonder. Both lyrical ends of the OK Bulletin spectrum—"love is the place that you're drawn to" on one end and "when I am king, you will be first against the wall" on the other—are highly effective, but the area Spicer chooses to inhabit is often a no man's land. The first words he sings on the album are "all my time, my friend, I'll spend with you," which doesn't sound nearly epic enough for the music he's created with guitarist/bassist Nicolas Basque and drummer Woody Matthew Woodley.
The most rewarding surprises of the album occur when the influences aren't as apparent. The trio brought many guests into Montreal's Mixart Studios for the recording sessions, most notably vocalists Adéle Trottier-Rivard and Katie Moore, who add winning romanticism to the mix. They trade call-and-response vocals on lead single "Stay" and sing with Spicer on "Off the Water" that they won't always have the chance to "move with you like water when we dance." Although all of this is expertly orchestrated, it retains a loose feel, one brimming with the excitement of friends getting back together to collaborate on music again. In doing so, Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original. | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secret City | April 23, 2016 | 6.8 | 86eeb3ad-64ec-4710-a8ec-24bd550a2806 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
Famed Icelandic producer (Björk, Will Oldham) and Bedroom Community boss soundtracks an environmental doc. Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, and Ben Frost guest. | Famed Icelandic producer (Björk, Will Oldham) and Bedroom Community boss soundtracks an environmental doc. Sam Amidon, Nico Muhly, and Ben Frost guest. | Valgeir Sigurðsson: Draumalandid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13976-draumalandid/ | Draumalandid | Northern European film soundtracks and dramatic scores don't get a lot of attention, but they could arguably be their own pop music subgenre at this point. From Jóhann Jóhannsson's Englabörn to Erik Enocksson's Man Tänker Sitt, they often contain similar ingredients-- gothic strings, terse pianos, haunting vocals, and a melancholy atmosphere. But due to the format and the potency of the style, you can actually get away with making some very slight music. At minimum, you have to write only one memorable, stirring theme. Record it in a string-led arrangement, and again in a piano-led one. Stash allusions to it in a bunch of filler drone you use to glue things together and, voila, you're done.
But on Draumalandid, a soundtrack for a new Icelandic environmental documentary, Valgeir Sigurðsson goes the extra mile to produce work that stands up against the best of its genre. He lays the requisite foundations in place, with a palette of classical instrumentation and severe electronics. The powerful title motif he concocts for strings on "Dreamland" is reprised on "Draumaland", now scored for mercurial pianos wrapped in wheezing pump organ. But Sigurðsson isn't content to let his themes just sit there; he works them through a variety of mutations, climaxes, false endings, and codas. A bevy of collaborators, culled from Sigurðsson's own Bedroom Community label, inject their personalities and prevent the album from being stylistically monolithic.
Sigurðsson has an illustrious career as a producer and engineer. He's worked with Björk on numerous albums, plus CocoRosie, Ben Frost, Sam Amidon, Will Oldham, and Nico Muhly. His first and only solo LP to date, 2007's Ekvílibríum, predicted the magisterial classical/electronic style he explores here. But as a producer first, he knows how to use his collaborators effectively. Amidon and Muhly appear on opener "Grylukvæði", the best and most distinct track here. Amidon has one of the most inviting voices around today, and his Icelandic folk song, flecked with banjo, sounds wonderful, glinting through a rich haze of strings and crackling with space-transmission interference. And Ben Frost threads subliminal disturbances through the Death Star strings of closer "Helter Smelter".
But most of the record's success stems from Sigurðsson's commitment to making the music a drama unto itself, not just a supplement for existing drama. In the final minute of "Dreamland", a simple 4/4 thwack appears, but it does wonders, turning the stately dirge into a desperate march. "Past Tundra" seems like it's going to be pleasant but nondescript, until the mighty bass chords kick in, the string section starts to cook, and the piece veers off on a warpath you'd have never predicted from its beginnings. There are other gradations of tone, some effective ("Beyond the Moss", where stripes of melody lick out of loose, jazzy clutter), some less so (a trio of brief, negligible interstitials in the middle of the album). But overall, Draumalandid is an excellent addition to my growing collection of music for movies and plays I'll probably never actually see. | 2010-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-03-04T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Bedroom Community | March 4, 2010 | 7.3 | 86f2baf6-5b3f-482d-98d4-94a1357cab45 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
After the ascent of her electronic-pop duo Sylvan Esso, Amelia Meath reassembled her old vocal folk trio for a surprise second album—a charming reflection on age, friendship, and play. | After the ascent of her electronic-pop duo Sylvan Esso, Amelia Meath reassembled her old vocal folk trio for a surprise second album—a charming reflection on age, friendship, and play. | Mountain Man: Magic Ship | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mountain-man-magic-ship/ | Magic Ship | Where does a sense of quiet fit within indie folk these days? During the last decade, some of the genre’s new staples—Iron & Wine, Hiss Golden Messenger, Amanda Shires—have turned up the amplifiers as they’ve turned toward more elaborate production. But for Mountain Man—the hushed, harmony-drenched trio of Amelia Meath, Molly Erin Sarlé, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, rarely accompanied by more than six strings and a tapped foot—it’s less about finding a quiet place than forging one. They started carving out their space on their lovingly ramshackle debut, 2010’s Made the Harbor, but an unintentional eight-year hiatus halted the headway. They’ve now reemerged with Magic Ship, a capricious turn through Appalachian, American, and British folk. Quiet? Perhaps. Subdued? Never.
Success came fast for the group nearly as soon they formed at college in the Vermont mountains—online buzz, a lauded debut, a tour backing Feist. Rather than build on that momentum, though, the members relocated to separate lands—Meath to North Carolina, Sarlé to California, and Sauser-Monnig to Minnesota. New sounds followed, with Meath co-founding the ascendant electronic-pop duo Sylvan Esso and Sarlé and Sauser-Monnig focusing on respective solo music.
All three eventually settled in North Carolina, where they reunited first as friends and then as singers. They found little had changed when it came to their voices’ uncanny blend. “We all have this secret access to each other’s feelings, whether or not we’re singing,” Sarlé has confided. “That is what creates the alchemy when we are singing together.” It usually takes family members to achieve such intimate three-part harmonies with these round, warm tones. Recorded in winter, the temperature has less to do with kindled fireside moments than it does flaxen summer rays. Magic Ship glows. Yellow-gold sunbeams cast a different light on the traditions the group invoke—porch music, gathering music—even if the album’s themes aren’t always so sunny.
Magic Ship examines, in part, the tempestuous emotions inherent in the transition from your 20s to your 30s. Through vivid triads, Mountain Man remind us that growing pains never cease. “Guilt” captures the way regret can visit unbidden at any age, accidentally knocking against the present like a tender bruise. “You can think about it, and be mean to your insides/And forget that you were 10 or 12/Or even 25,” the group sing knowingly. “Or it can just be something that happened that way/That makes you who you are today/And it hurts/But that’s/Alright.” They emphasize the final three words, underscoring the hard-won wisdom of tough times.
Dance parties abound on Magic Ship, too. Meath, Sarlé, and Sauser-Monnig use their voices for simple fun during standouts like “Stella” and “Underwear.” They frame “AGT” with bright melodies and skipping cadences, situating it among the playful whimsy of the traditional classic “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” and Sylvan Esso’s own “Hey Mami.” While Mountain Man look back to folk traditions to find their footing, they’re delightfully undecided about how much reverence they must pay.
When Meath, Sarlé, and Sauser-Monnig do pay their respects, their voices are a collective bridge between past and present. Their interpretation of “Bright Morning Stars” recalls the resplendent partnership of Appalachian folk trailblazers Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard and the British folk singer Shirley Collins. Mountain Man leave no lingering space within the song’s central lament, their claustrophobic look at grief made more palpable by stark harmonies. A cover of the tender “Baby Where You Are,” by Michigan singer-songwriter Ted Lucas, takes a similar look at longing. The members’ voices exhale like one breath, the kind whispered across distances that never seem to shrink. Their tranquility resurfaces the original tune’s dull ache with a rosy sheen.
Magic Ship cuts a path between beauty and meaning. Though Mountain Man’s radiant harmonies are as pretty as they come, there’s still considerable weight to the shiny package. Quiet may seem like an outlier in this noisy present, but Mountain Man understand its power. Their clear-eyed presentation on this welcome return captures ideas of friendship and adulthood, of cherishing a sense of play even as we age. | 2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | September 22, 2018 | 7.6 | 86ff8678-cdf0-4542-a373-c7978ffb6cd3 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
On her hushed second album, the Chicago artist writes minimal, unpredictable songs that explore the in-between states of relationships with subtlety and grace. | On her hushed second album, the Chicago artist writes minimal, unpredictable songs that explore the in-between states of relationships with subtlety and grace. | Tasha: Tell Me What You Miss the Most | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tasha-tell-me-what-you-miss-the-most/ | Tell Me What You Miss the Most | Tasha shines brightest when everything has been stripped away. The Chicago musician’s dreamy, fragile songs about intimacy and reminiscence are often given color when she’s fronting her band, who can make her spellbinding voice sound even more so with just the smallest touches. She is also the type of songwriter whose talents are especially apparent when she’s working by herself: Performing solo, she plays guitar so softly that the instrument seems to reel in her voice with a gravitational pull. It’s a fitting atmosphere for an artist who writes so often about the very state of being alone: singing into a void that someone left behind and trying to whisper them back.
The hushed songs of Tasha’s second album, Tell Me What You Miss the Most, highlight the best of both modes. On the spare, acoustic “Bed Song 1,” she opens the album with six cycling notes and a lyric that rides a perfect line between funny and sad, self-deprecation and self-pity: “If I could, I would stay here in this bed all day long/But I quite like the way pretty girls sway to my songs.” On “Burton Island,” she pushes the complexity of her fingerpicking: It’s a gorgeous solo piece that thrives in solitude, moving nimbly yet at peace in a way that recalls Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. The feeling here, and at many points throughout Tell Me, is minimal but unpredictable, sweet but not cutesy, and familiarly structured but not exactly folk music.
On the standout track “History,” Tasha counters the album’s spare opener with an outstanding full-band arrangement. When she barely gets out the words “What’s left of touch?,” her voice seems to make a slight, brushing contact with the suspended chord that it hangs over, like a hand touching a knee under a table in a restaurant. That exact image happens to appear in “Sorry’s Not Enough,” where she uses delicate harmonies to illustrate the nerves at stake in these quiet interactions. Drummer Ashley Guerrero and bassist and co-producer Eric Littmann follow Tasha into subtle, sneaky swells and decrescendos. By the song’s end, they palpitate in between, winding down two steps then rising with a twitchy cymbal crash, ending things in an intriguing state of ambiguity (Tragically, the album is also a memorial to Littmann, who passed away earlier this year at 31.)
Embracing the in-between is a recurring theme for Tasha, in her music as well as the relationships that she writes about. Tell Me What You Miss the Most is a step forward mostly because it’s a step inward: While her debut album, 2018’s Alone at Last, featured a gently distorted electric guitar that sounded wavy and cool, at times recalling her English contemporary Nilüfer Yanya, it also added a sense of distance. On the cleaner Tell Me, she peels off that filter, reaching more often for her acoustic guitar and singing more directly. This quieter side amplifies her strengths, emboldening her vulnerability and her willingness to face uncertainty head-on.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Father/Daughter | December 1, 2021 | 7.6 | 87090ace-337a-4d8d-9500-4966b8eeb6d9 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
The Hold Steady attempt to balance widespread appeal while remaining embedded in the scenes they've been chronicling for half a decade. | The Hold Steady attempt to balance widespread appeal while remaining embedded in the scenes they've been chronicling for half a decade. | The Hold Steady: Heaven Is Whenever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14196-heaven-is-whenever/ | Heaven Is Whenever | The Hold Steady's latest album begins with "The Sweet Part of the City", a number about kids meeting up under theater marquees, drinking until they run out of booze, partying till the cops come, listening to music all night, and making runs for more liquor. The song is quintessential Craig Finn, especially when he reveals a twist ending in the final lines: "We were bored so we started a band," he admits. "We'd like to play for you." The line comes across like a stinging punchline, sad and self-aware: Kids start bands to tell their stories, yet their stories are often the same. They play music to feel transcendent, to feel larger than their mundane circumstances-- so why isn't the crowd paying attention?
Coming from a band so rooted in notions of community and classic rock, "The Sweet Part of the City" seems to acknowledge that the Hold Steady realize their function as a liaison between the underground and the mainstream. They're trying hard to achieve widespread appeal while remaining embedded in the scenes they've been chronicling for half a decade. Heaven Is Whenever loiters in the same dives, clubs, and party houses as their previous albums and chronicles the sagas of similar hoodrats, townies, gamblers, waitresses, and girlfriends. Meanwhile, the band has graduated to larger venues, festival appearances, and an avid fanbase that shouts along with every word. The distance between subject and band has never been greater than it is on this album, and these new songs just don't hit as hard.
Finn still writes street-level narratives with a large cast of characters all united by their dire circumstances, and on previous albums, he managed to insert himself into their stories as a hapless buyer, a reckless hook-up, an accidental witness, or a reluctant participant. His first-person involvement gave him first-hand access to the kids, and he built songs out of stray phrases and details that explained their lingo and motivations. But on Heaven Is Whenever, he sounds one or two steps removed, less active in their sagas and less concerned with the particulars of the characters. Now he's shooting for the bigger picture instead of collecting the persuasive details and the convincing slang, which leaves these songs sounding largely uninhabited. Finn sings in first person throughout the album, gesturing at character and point of view, but the perspective from which these songs are written is neither entirely convincing nor consistent.
The band tries to punch up these songs as much as possible, adding intrusive synths and backing vocals, but they don't always achieve the fervor necessary to make songs like "A Slight Discomfort" uplifting. Tad Kubler gets a few good riffs in on "The Weekenders" and "Rock Problems", but the lackluster production blunts their impact. Elsewhere, the music is strangely staid and anonymous, lacking the drama that Franz Nicolay-- the mustachioed keyboard player who proved surprisingly divisive among fans-- could add with a simple piano flourish. "Barely Breathing" breaks into an out-of-nowhere clarinet solo, but that element of surprise is the most notable thing about it.
Still, there are strong moments here: That languid slide guitar on "The Sweet Part of the City", the shout-along hook of "Rock Problems", and the hammering chorus of "Our Whole Lives". "The Weekenders" musters a moody, desperate urgency that makes it sound like the dark sequel to "Chips Ahoy", with its hints of clairvoyance. But hearing the band hit this sort of stride is nothing out of the ordinary; hearing them sound so directionless and tired not only sounds new, but suggests that the Hold Steady aren't holding steady. Despite the confidence of that opening track, Heaven Is Whenever sounds like a transitional album, hopefully paving the way for something stronger, more cohesive, more specific. In the meantime, this remains an uncharacteristically weak effort by a good band that may be in danger of running out of stories. | 2010-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade / Vagrant | May 4, 2010 | 6.2 | 870e85d6-b1bc-4549-b909-803c9b8dbd94 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Los Angeles rapper’s second album this year confronts the uncertainties of life with characteristically reflective rhymes and a steely new determination. | The Los Angeles rapper’s second album this year confronts the uncertainties of life with characteristically reflective rhymes and a steely new determination. | Maxo: Debbie’s Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxo-debbies-son/ | Debbie’s Son | Maxo’s music, especially as of late, has felt like those coming-of-age movie scenes where the frenzied young protagonist meets someone they aspire to become—picture Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez and Babe Ruth—and realizes that today’s stressors eventually build tomorrow’s character. The Los Angeles veteran’s output has long thrived through reflection, inhabiting soupy, hypnagogic production like a confessional booth of his own creation. For the cover art of his most recent record, February’s Even God Has a Sense of Humor, he took the uncomfortable measure of lifecasting: a process like getting a portrait painted, except that you’re slathered in guck, you can’t see anything, and the “painting” is a large, topographically accurate bust of your body. The songs on that project were disarmingly personal and deliberate, larger-than-life without being invincible. It’s hard to run when you’re stuck under a coat of alginate.
Where much of Maxo’s output has functioned like a living diary, Debbie’s Son sounds less like he’s taking inventory of his baggage than trying to cut through it with a knife. The record’s ethos is encapsulated in the opening verse to “Another. LAnd,” where contemplation is supercharged by acknowledgements of his right to self-interrogation. “I question the ways inside my being/I’m workin for change but present time speak,” he admits, before turning away from the mirror to lob an abrupt question: “Who is you to judge?” As much as his self-image has hardened, it remains too nuanced to feel impenetrable. On the track directly following “Another .LAnd,” he turns his back on the scornful “you,” and returns to the mirror. “Reminding myself I’m strong as what I’m faced with,” he says, in a sing-songy voice that borders on teasing. “But it’s hurting, aint it?” As much as you can hear the pain, there’s also a sense of triumph.
Debbie’s Son features an eclectic cast of producers, including lastnamedavid, Alexander Spit, The Alchemist, and Beat Butcha. They provide a compelling range of cinematic backdrops, against which an on-edge Maxo hurls mantras like graffiti on government buildings. His tone is careful yet unapologetic, self-confident without being reckless. While some tracks thump along to rhythms as precise as assembly lines (“PlayDis!”, “Another. LAnd,” “What Are You Looking For?”), others bask in his more characteristic jazz arrangements, reverb-heavy vocals cutting through haze like the sort of old-and-wise deity that Morgan Freeman could portray on camera. On the Ahwlee-produced “Boomerang,” a love song to “the old me,” lush guitar arpeggiations stumble into one another in a trance. There’s unresolved sentimentality to the instruments’ circular haze, complementing Maxo’s lyrical back-and-forth between past and future.
The record leans into the foundational elements of Maxo’s music—verses that meander more than they attack; roomy, coffee-shop-band auras; autobiographical honesty—but occasionally departs to give old tricks new vigor. Compared to the murky vocal mixes on his earliest releases, he’s coming through noticeably clearer now. And he’s more willing to be a prophet in places where he once was content being a proselyte. “No wonder why I been chasin’ unknown,” he echoes, with the knowing whisper-speak of a Black grandparent telling a story, over the jazzy title track. As he repeats these words, an upright bass stumbles along a riff that’s just as asymptotic. As meditative as his work has always been while foregrounding a new sense of fortitude, Debbie’s Son shines in the many moments when Maxo and the music are convincingly one. | 2023-10-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Smileforme | October 4, 2023 | 7.4 | 87112971-98c7-4be7-9ce7-9c2a086f1b96 | Samuel Hyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samuel-hyland/ | |
The veteran producer and Cypress Hill alum reconnects with his New York roots on a fun, if not terribly challenging, revivalist romp surrounded by outer-borough icons and a few hungry upstarts. | The veteran producer and Cypress Hill alum reconnects with his New York roots on a fun, if not terribly challenging, revivalist romp surrounded by outer-borough icons and a few hungry upstarts. | DJ Muggs: Dia del Asesinato | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-muggs-dia-del-asesinato/ | Dia del Asesinato | DJ Muggs may forever be associated with California, thanks to his work with Cypress Hill, but recently he’s returned to his New York roots. Born in Flushing, the veteran producer has, several times over the past year, collaborated with an unlikely muse: the charismatic Queens rapper Meyhem Lauren. Lauren shows up on Muggs’ new album, Dia del Asesinato, another strong collection of outer-borough street rap. He’s joined by a trio of legendary MCs (MF Doom, Raekwon, and Kool G Rap) as well as Freddie Gibbs, Mach-Hommy, and others.
Muggs was a mentor to the Alchemist, and Dia del Asesinato is not unlike one of that producer’s showcase records from around the turn of the decade. It’s coherent by virtue of its smooth, hard-hitting production, which doesn’t flit from style to style or experiment with new approaches. Muggs’ beats are attention-seeking, with audacious, well-chosen loops; on songs like the early “Day of the Dead,” Kool G Rap doesn’t so much rhyme over the production as battle through it. “Black Snow Beach” is elegant and velvety, sounding like something Nino Rota might have made if he had a habit of playing around on Ableton. Muggs’ drums, in particular, are huge, heavy, commanding. They never sound programmed. On tracks as divergent as “Blue Horseshoes” and “Duck Sauce,” you can almost imagine a drummer beating the hell out of his instrument, working to the point that sweat drips down his forehead. And because few songs surpass the three-minute mark, nothing wears out its welcome.
The producer has chosen his collaborators well. No one falls down on the job, and some of the rappers sound sharper than they have in some time. Kool G. Rap bodies his back-to-back early-record appearances, dusting Doom, who’s not necessarily bad, but is rapping at a quarter of his top speed on “Assassination Day,” the stronger of his two features. (He does get a nice Maino reference in.) Almost all the marquee rappers have two features each, save Freddie Gibbs, who, along with Hus Kingpin and Eto, only gets one song. It’s a shame. Gibbs lights into “Death Wish” with vigor, sounding, appropriately, 15 years younger than the group of 50-year-old legends he bests here. His portrait of the gangster as a young man includes a particularly evocative image: “Ninja Turtles backpack/.38 next to my Lunchables.” Mach-Hommy also acquits himself well. The eccentric Newark rapper is particularly good on “Contagion Theory,” where he sings and raps casually, sounding great over horns.
What Dia del Asesinato does best is foster a welcoming environment. Muggs is a conservative producer: He picks an excellent loop, places it over the right drums, and lets things ride, with few surprises hidden around corners. That gives the rappers here, all of whom fetishize this sound, license to LARP freely as kingpins, street hustlers, alley backstabbers, whatever. It’s less ’90s boom-bap and more ’00s revivalism, which means that yes, the record is a revival of revivalism, something expertly recycled several times over. It doesn’t sound new, and that’s why everyone sounds so comfortable, so contented.
If there’s a downside: That’s it. The rappers are, for the most part, so relaxed that they don’t seem interested in competing. The flows are on point more often than not, but few of the lyrics are particularly memorable (or worth quoting). An environment of mutual support in the studio can make a record sound cozy, but also complacent. What Dia del Asesinato is missing is a sense of urgency. Thank Muggs for recruiting Gibbs and Hommy, younger rappers who still sound hungry. But, hey, the album is a brisk 12 tracks. The outro is pure instrumental, brash and filled with personality. Every time it ends, you wish that it would have gone on longer. | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Soul Assassins | August 10, 2018 | 7.1 | 87156e2a-b680-4136-ab9c-9b5cb2e56c80 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
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 Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut album, a despairing and sweeping document of post-rock. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s debut album, a despairing and sweeping document of post-rock. | Godspeed You! Black Emperor: F♯ A♯ ∞ | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/godspeed-you-black-emperor-f-a-infinity/ | F♯ A♯ ∞ | The grizzled voice could be that of God. “The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel,” he begins over a ground-shaking rumble of drone, before surveying the horrifying landscape: The government is corrupt, buildings are imploding, the skyline is ablaze while a populace hides indoors, numbed by chemicals and drowning out the screams with the radio. The voice continues as mournful strings enter, playing a theme wracked by sadness and loss, the sound of the band on the deck as the ship goes down. Do we hear hope as a fragile guitar enters and repeats those lines? I think so. And once we sense that feeling of being crushed by despair while seeing a flicker of possibility, we’re fully inside of the universe of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 1997 debut, F♯ A♯ ∞.
The piece, which came to be called “Dead Flag Blues,” is a career-defining debut album-opener to rival Patti Smith’s “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo,” the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” and Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath.” Everything you need to know about Godspeed was foretold by the words and music of this first track, which occupies the album’s entire first side. They would eventually become one of the key bands in what we’d call post-rock. Through the first decade of the 21st century, more than a few groups would copy their soft/loud crashing orchestral style. All of their music takes place in the world described by that voice, a place where those buried by calamity are on the verge of breaking free.
The words on “Dead Flag Blues” were written by Efrim Menuck, who was born in Montreal and grew up in Toronto before returning to the city of his birth in his early 20s. They came from a script for an unfinished film called “Incomplete Movie About Jail” and were read by an unidentified friend. Menuck, like many in his circle, had grown up listening to punk and hardcore, but after moving to Montreal he started making music of his own in a very different style. In 1994, he and his friend Mauro Pezzente, who played bass, recorded a tape they called All Lights Fucked On The Hairy Amp Drooling and made 33 copies, giving them to friends. The project’s name, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, came from the title of a Japanese documentary about a motorcycle gang. (The band would relocate the exclamation point in 2002.) Twenty-five years later, All Lights remains a rumor—there have been no confirmed leaks of the music, not even a photo of the cassette. But after recording it and playing a few live shows, the band, joined by guitarist Mike Moya, began to take shape.
Pezzente moved into a warehouse space near the train tracks in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood, and it became a place to practice, to hang out, and to scheme. When Menuck took over the lease, they called the space Hotel2Tango, translating part of the local postal code—H2T—to its military call sign. Soon they were hosting shows, and Godspeed became a kind of collective, with a swelling lineup that changed from one gig to the next. Cellist Norsola Johnson was another early member, and years later she’d articulate the ethos at work. “I think a lot of that just came from punk rock backgrounds,” she told Lucinda Catchlove in a 2016 interview. “You want to make something happen, you have to do it yourself.”
For Montreal art kids in the 1990s, there was no other way. Godspeed’s dark and foreboding sound suggests civilization heading toward collapse, and conjuring such a world wasn’t an act of imagination. They could see it around them. In April 1996, right around the time things were heating up at Hotel2Tango, an article appeared in the International Herald Tribune called “Montreal’s Deep Malaise,” in which reporter Anne Swardsoa described a city on the brink. On the ballot the previous year was a referendum on Quebec’s independence, and it was defeated by less than a single percentage point. Conflict and uncertainty were rife, and many English-speaking Montreal residents fled the city during the campaign. “The city that once was Canada’s financial and cultural center is in serious trouble,” Swardsoa wrote. “Its tax base is eroding, poverty is increasing, roads are deteriorating and, most important, citizens are leaving.”
As 1996 turned into 1997, a community was growing in these grim surroundings. Hotel2Tango, where a number of musicians lived and played, was a hub of activity, and a new label, Constellation, was on hand to document it. Constellation cofounder Ian Ilavsky played guitar with Sofa, a local band that made grimy post-punk—a 7" and album by the group were the first two releases by the imprint. F♯ A♯ ∞, on vinyl only, was the third.
Godspeed recorded the album in Hotel2Tango, with a group of musicians that had more or less solidified into a band. No single element in Godspeed was new, but their particular fusion of sounds didn’t sound like much else. For string-led drama over loose, stumbling rhythms, you could look to Australia’s Dirty Three, particularly their 1996 album Horse Stories. The twangy guitars, sometimes played with slide, brought to mind the high-plains drama of Ennio Morricone’s scores and the lonesome tumbleweeds of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas, a vein the more ambient-leaning Richmond band Labradford was exploring around the same time. And the gradual builds to crushing climaxes that brought the whole history of rock to bear were something Mogwai were exploring in Scotland, on their 1997 debut Young Team.
It wasn’t hard to draw lines connecting these sounds and scenes, but Godspeed were operating in a world of their own. Perhaps owing to Menuck’s interest in film, the album feels like a product of editing as much as playing, stitching together composed ensemble sections, field recordings, samples, and more abstract sound design. Over time, Godspeed would perfect the kind of pieces that go from soft opening to gradual build to thundering crescendo. But F♯ A♯ ∞ is a different beast, one more fragile and less tied to idiom.
So after the opening monologue concludes, “Dead Flag Blues” drifts—first come the screeching wheels and chugging motor of a steam train, and then gossamer slide guitar tones so quiet you begin to notice the ambient noise in the room you’re hearing them in. These are the album’s two essential features. The vibrating string sound—whether made by guitar, violin, or cello—evokes cables snaking down brick buildings, power lines framing the horizon as the sun sets, flaccid balloons snagged in barren trees. And the train sounds remind us of what the machines carry away, whether it’s a product of industry or the people who worked to create it.
The edits keep coming, as the band stitches together fragments, only some of which sound as if they were initially designed to fit together. After a middle section of “Dead Flag Blues” that’s as close as F♯ A♯ ∞ comes to a spaghetti western soundtrack, the piece shifts back to hammered guitar strings, like the sounds you get when you strike a cable that keeps a telephone pole upright. The first side then shifts to a tuneful vignette led by glockenspiel, a jaunty melody you might find in a music box, the sort that people decades ago put on to forget their problems. And then it concludes with what sounds like an improvised piece for voice and banjo, where the player asks “What’s my motivation?” as if speaking to a director as the camera is about to roll.
It turned out that the elaborate structure of the original LP was only one possibility among many. After the Constellation release of F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed contacted the Chicago label Kranky because they were playing shows in the U.S. for the first time. The Chicago imprint—home to Labradford, Stars of the Lid, and several other bands whose music was situated in the same general universe—wanted to put the record out on CD, and for a wider audience than Constellation’s limited distribution allowed. But rather than reissuing the LP as is, the band made a new version of the record to take advantage of the CD’s longer runtime. They re-edited and re-configured the material, shuffling the sections and adding music, a large chunk of which wound up on a new, third track, called “Providence.”
The album, released in multiple formats with different tracklists, broken with long overarching suites divided into sub-titled sections, can be difficult to parse on paper. It’s an unusual situation for such a defining record—two competing versions, quite different from one another, on two different formats, put out by two different labels. The additional material is excellent, but for my money, the definitive version of the record is the Constellation vinyl LP. Regardless, “East Hastings,” from the CD version, would contain the most-heard piece of music in Godspeed’s oeuvre, after Danny Boyle used the section titled “The Sad Mafioso” in his 2002 post-apocalyptic zombie film 28 Days Later. The side opens with a man’s voice yelling on the street, and then a bagpipe plays the theme from “Dead Flag Blues,” easing us back into landscape established by the first side. From its desolate opening section, “The Sad Mafioso” builds piece by piece into the sort of wall of sound that Godspeed would later become famous for.
In Boyle’s film, the opening section of “The Sad Mafioso” plays as the main character, Jim, leaves the hospital and discovers a deserted London. “For me, the soundtrack to 28 Days Later was Godspeed,” the director told The Guardian. “The whole film was cut to Godspeed in my head.” It’s easy to understand why: Boyle had the means to create a film with a scene—gazing out over desolation, feeling completely alone—that was familiar to those who listened to F♯ A♯ ∞ and dreamt up their own pictures.
Besides the quintessential Godspeed builder, the second side of the LP has several abstract sections, some built from manipulated samples. The final movement of the album proper, called “String Loop Manufactured During Downpour...,” begins with a warped recording of a haunting voice sourced from the early-’70s musical Godspell. The voice floats into a whining drone that whines and hisses and quakes, until, on the vinyl version, it slides into a locked groove and plays for as long as you want it to.
Godspeed had good timing. As the 20th century was winding down, there was an uneasiness in the air that sometimes became outright paranoia. Any calendar change this significant will bring with it people who think the end of the world is nigh. In this case, there was the Y2k bug, which suggested that the computers that now powered so much of the world’s infrastructure might stop working properly when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. “Dead Flag Blues” describes being trapped inside the belly of a horrible machine that’s bleeding to death. At the end of the millennium, in more despairing moments, it seemed as though a simple programming glitch might open that vein.
Godspeed’s avoidance of the trappings of the music industry only enhanced their prophetic aura in the year after the release of F♯ A♯ ∞. They issued no photos, sold no t-shirts, and gave very few interviews. Given all the mysteries surrounding the record itself, and the openness to interpretation of the mostly instrumental music, that contextual void left a lot of room for the imagination.
The band did provide a few clues. Within each LP copy is a print showing a train with a tribute to the Reverend Gary Davis, a show flyer, a small envelope that contains an intricate blueprint called “Faulty Schematics of a Ruined Machine,” and, most famously, a single Canadian penny that has been crushed by a train. The coin is a potent symbol that connects so many of the album’s threads—the proximity of violence to money, the surprising endurance of supposedly obsolete technology, the intensely local nature of the entire enterprise, and, above all, the simple childlike joy of knowing a giant machine turned such a common object into a copper pancake.
The vinyl version of F♯ A♯ ∞ has to rank with the greatest packages in the history of the LP, but not because it’s especially elaborate. Its ultimate triumph is that each copy still comes with its own sleeve of goodies, including the penny, while the record itself is still comparatively inexpensive. Where most labels create special editions that become valuable because of scarcity, Constellation, 23 years and almost 50 pressings later (some runs numbered in the thousands), makes this one available to all for a modest price.
Which brings us back to community, and that dirty loft by the railroad tracks, and a word that crops up a lot with Godspeed: hope—you don’t start a long-term project with people you care about unless you’re driven by it. As dark as this band’s music gets and as deeply fucked as the world it portrays may be, it always contains a glimmer of catharsis, some moment that suggests there’s a future worth struggling for. “When you live in the city, railway tracks are the most open space you can find,” Menuck told the Montreal publication AMAZEzine in 1998. “There’s usually no high buildings around and it’s the place where you can see the most sky.” That’s what those massive major-key resolutions point to—they suggest that if we’re creative, we might band together with others and find possibility in what surrounds us, even in places the rest of the world has abandoned. | 2020-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Experimental | Constellation / Kranky | March 1, 2020 | 9.5 | 871f3726-8fa7-4fb7-bd3e-e0bbdf132470 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The former Yeasayer member returns with a refreshingly uninhibited, occasionally undercooked set of 1970s-style singer-songwriter music. | The former Yeasayer member returns with a refreshingly uninhibited, occasionally undercooked set of 1970s-style singer-songwriter music. | Anand Wilder: I Don’t Know My Words | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anand-wilder-i-dont-know-my-words/ | I Don’t Know My Words | Brooklyn indie-rock trio Yeasayer called it quits in late 2019, and going it alone clearly suits Anand Wilder, who’d shared singing and songwriting duties in the band since its founding more than a decade earlier. Wilder’s first solo album since the split, I Don’t Know My Words, begins with homespun instrumentation, lofty vocals, and catty lyrics worthy of one of the Beatles’ post-breakup albums. “Cheap hooks can’t sell if there’s no honesty,” Wilder sings over rudimentary piano toward the start of album opener “Beginning Again,” later sniping that “I can’t help your shitty attitude.” The arrangement swells but the song is over in less than two minutes, sounding less like a statement of intent than a late-night sketch.
It’s a relief hearing Wilder in such a relaxed setting. Yeasayer could channel bits of Animal Collective’s psych-folk whimsy and TV on the Radio’s synth-rock grandeur, but they always had a festival-ready professionalism that, by the last couple of albums, seemed to have lost its ability to charm. This 10-song, half-hour set of 1970s-style singer-songwriter music might not signal some bold new way forward, but Wilder’s high, lilting melodies and sun-dappled production sound refreshingly uninhibited. After years of having to please crowds, bandmates, and industry suits, Wilder, a married father of two, sounds here like he has spent the pandemic focusing on himself and his family.
Recording alone in his home studio and accompanying himself on all instruments, Wilder infuses I Don’t Know My Words with an easygoing surface appeal. I’m not sure what the first single “Delirium Passes,” with a title borrowed from James Joyce, is supposed to be about, but it’s overwhelmingly pleasant, with whirring organs, mountain-dew harmonies, and merry-go-round verses. “Fever Seizure,” which hints at a child’s real-life health scare, unfolds with the leisurely elegance of Air or Beach House at their most indebted to Serge Gainsbourg’s 1971 landmark Histoire De Melody Nelson. The raga-like drone that infuses “Get More Than My Share“ offers another intriguing wrinkle.
I Don’t Know My Words doesn’t work as well when it comes to the words. Wilder’s songwriting is sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes undercooked. The title of “I Don’t Want Our Love to Become Routine” must be relatable for any couple in a long-term relationship, but when Paul McCartney wanted to keep the fires of domestic bliss alive, he didn’t sing about falling asleep on the couch—he wrote “Maybe I’m Amazed.” (OK, also the great, goofy Ram, but still.) Elsewhere, a couple of songs comment directly on COVID-19 a bit clumsily. “I’m waiting for a second wave/To fill another mass grave,” Wilder sings, inhabiting the perspective of a Rikers Island inmate, on “Hart Island,” named for the site of New York City’s potter’s field. It’s a well-meaning experiment, but on such a light-textured album, it’s also a lot.
For anyone who has been following along with Yeasayer this far, I Don’t Know My Words has enough unshowy craft to suggest a promising solo career for Wilder. At the very least, it’s light years ahead of the previous album he released under his own name, 2014’s unfortunate Break Line the Musical. Wilder recently mentioned that he has been listening to Cate Le Bon and Aldous Harding, and at times the DIY deftness signals a kinship with those two leading lights of contemporary art-pop; more often, I Don’t Know My Words merely brings to mind other solo albums by tied-down indie rock vets looking to relight their spark. Not every breakup leads to All Things Must Pass, but Wilder’s return is welcome, especially because he sounds so free. | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Last Gang | March 31, 2022 | 6 | 871f5f82-d9b1-4e41-b12e-8c464092fa15 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Drukqs. Druck-kyoos. Drug use? Or just another one of the Twin's\n\ cryptic pranks? Your guess is as good ... | Drukqs. Druck-kyoos. Drug use? Or just another one of the Twin's\n\ cryptic pranks? Your guess is as good ... | Aphex Twin: Drukqs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/225-drukqs/ | Drukqs | Drukqs. Druck-kyoos. Drug use? Or just another one of the Twin's cryptic pranks? Your guess is as good as mine.
After two years of public silence and what many had judged to be his final exit from the world of corporate music, the original IDM iconoclast has returned with another puzzle. The problem with Drukqs, a two-disc, 30-track medley that allegedly wraps up Richard D. James' contract with Warp Records, is that there's really no puzzle at all.
This album charts familiar Aphex territory, surveying styles he's plied on previous records, rather than suggesting new directions. It says something that Aphex enthusiasts expect James to reinvent himself with every record, and that the general reaction to this album (which has been trading hands over online piracy channels for months) has been somewhat unenthusiastic. From a man who has made a career staying a step ahead of his fans, an album as conventional as Drukqs comes as a sad surprise.
The stylistic pastiche here mirrors many different points of James' career. Most of the tracks are brief melodic exercises conducted on piano and harpsichord, styled after "Nannou" from the Windowlicker EP. There are several purely electro-acoustic excursions, some in the cacophonous vein of the "equation" song on Windowlicker, others more reminiscent of the lysergic drone of Selected Ambient Works II. "Bbydhyonchord" and "Orban Eq Trx4" emulate the rhythmic, sensual sounds of Analogue Bubblebath 4, or the softer facets of I Care Because You Do. Abrasive electro pieces like "Omgyjya Switch7" and "54 Cymru Beats" steal the show, grafting drill-n-bass beats onto stark mechanical backdrops that recall James' early Joyrex releases.
But Drukqs showcases Aphex's crude instrumental contemplations to a fault. His production talents have their bounds, and they wear a little thin when he dons the mantle of artistic maturity, attempting to imitate Erik Satie. "Father," "Avril 14th," "Strotha Tynhe" and "Jynweythek Ylow" rove dangerously close to the Windham Hill new age aesthetic of the 80s.\t"Prep Gwarlek 3b" and "Kladfvgbung Micshk" take the formula to a more sophisticated, brooding level, but fail to bring anything exciting to a sound that Philip Glass pioneered more boldly 25 years ago. These languid noodlings comprise over half of the album; take them away and the cracks begin to show in Drukqs' monumental 30-song promise. In the end, with all the filler, this monster packs a lot less punch than some of Aphex's shorter releases, like the legendary Selected Ambient Works 85-92, or the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs.
James fares better in other arenas. A muffled, throbbing pulse propels "Gwely Mernans" through a macabre tableau of disembodied strings and white noise. Though not on par with the best ambient work in Aphex Twin's canon, this song weaves a compelling web of mood and texture. "Hy a Scullys Lyf a Dhagrow" takes ambient music to the other extreme with a disjointed demonstration of ear-shattering sonic sleight. "Gwarek2," one of the most chilling additions yet to James' demented repertoire, sounds like a stripped down take on \xB5-Ziq's "Mr. Angry." Tortured screams resonate through an abandoned foundry, joined by the unsettling clamor of clashing metal and screeching vermin.
"Meltphace 6" delivers in signature Aphex style, with brisk snares trading fire over a wash of solemn synthesizers, thick squelches and warbling, high-pitched flourishes. "Mt. Saint Michel Mix+St. Michael's Mount" carries the torch, matching its relentless drill-n-bass torrents with simple, innocent refrains. In its final minutes, the song frays into a stuttering swarm of dissected, time-spaced samples-- certainly one of Drukqs' finer moments.
Other honorable mentions include "Vordhosbn," whose wistful and occasionally dissonant timbre is offset by the biting ring of blistering drums. Imagine "IZ-US" with Venetian Snares operating the drum kit, and you'll get the general picture. The protean "Ziggomatic v17" runs through several movements-- frenzied electro breakcore and anthemic 4/4 warehouse techno, interspersed with lush melodic passages-- before tapering off with a soft refrain.
"Taking Control" is concentrated Aphex acid. The scathing electro breaks and spliced, vocoded samples evoke memories of "Humanoid Must Not Escape" from Joyrex J9. But the absence of engaging melody and firm structure keep "Taking Control" and a several other songs ("Cock/Ver10," "Afx237 v7") from really enveloping the listener. The sterile, clinical feel and limited palette of the heavier electro numbers renders them grating, one-dimensional and sometimes entirely unlistenable.
Even the successful drill-n-bass pieces offer only shallow satisfaction. They sound like throwbacks to the past rather than prospects on the future; and for all of their compositional strength, there's an element of the Aphex Twin mystique missing.
This record simply doesn't inspire the same degree of astonishment and awe as its predecessors-- seminal works like I Care Because You Do, Selected Ambient Works II and his last proper full-length, 1997's The Richard D. James Album, which not only struck fans on a personal level, but often reshaped the way they listened to music. Drukqs speaks a familiar tongue, instead of inviting us to learn new languages; it gives us the answers before asking the riddles. In this sense, it defies every expectation we had of Richard D. James. But in hindsight, it seems to show that some conventions are worth following. | 2001-10-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2001-10-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp / Sire | October 25, 2001 | 5.5 | 87202559-95b6-4534-a4b3-3ddca3e37812 | Pitchfork | null |
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Jon Langford, frontman for the legendary punk band the Mekons, has explored Americana both with his main group and in a series of side projects, one of which is the Waco Brothers. Going Down in History is their first studio LP since 2005’s Freedom and Weep and a tight set of aggressive heartland rock. | Jon Langford, frontman for the legendary punk band the Mekons, has explored Americana both with his main group and in a series of side projects, one of which is the Waco Brothers. Going Down in History is their first studio LP since 2005’s Freedom and Weep and a tight set of aggressive heartland rock. | Waco Brothers: Going Down in History | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21560-going-down-in-history/ | Going Down in History | The Mekons could have easily ridden out an entire career off the energy of their grimy start in the Leeds art-school scene. Instead, when they started anew following a brief hiatus in the early '80s, frontman and co-founder Jon Langford chose to train their gaze across the pond, led by the spirit guides of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. Their next album, 1985’s Fear and Whiskey, didn’t just execute a brilliant and unlikely-seeming stylistic merger, it ushered in a whole new generation of imitators, acolytes, and even icons.
Langford's continued interest in Americana has produced several Chicago-based side projects, as well: There's Pine Valley Cosmonauts, a revolving door of tributes covers for artists like Cash and Bob Wills, and then there's the Waco Brothers, a heavier group with a more deliberate populist pulse. Following a decade of dalliances—a covers album and B-sides collection here, a collaboration with songwriter Paul Burch there—the latter band’s returned with Going Down in History, their first studio LP since 2005’s Freedom and Weep and a tight (if occasionally underwhelming) set of aggressive heartland rock.
Twenty years on, the Bros’ grizzled sonics are set. Opener "DIYBYOB," set off by Dean "Deano" Schlabowske's throaty twang and clattering axe, immediately brings us back into familiar territory. Therein lies the genius of Schlabowske's first line: "This is the first track from the last album/ No one knows which way this ship will head." Depending on your interpretation, the lyric could be a knowing wink to the same ol’-same ol’ of the band’s chosen style, a masochistic joke, or even a tongue-in-cheek resignation—either way, it adds a crucial twist to an otherwise straightforward bit of songcraft.
Indeed, playfulness abounds on Going Down in History. For a reflection on the dead-end determinism of the status quo, "Building Our Own Prison" proves downright chipper, with an onomatopoeiac, syncopated hook (a spirited "Click clack clackety-clack," right on the beat of the jagged fretwork). Meanwhile, "We Know It" offers an all-purpose anthem for, well, anything; Langford’s croons of "We know it when we see it/ We know it by its name" could stand in for God, the Devil, or the mold beneath your kitchen tiles.
It’s not all fun and games, though—political disillusionment and hand-wringing reflections of the working class remain a perennial concern for the Waco Brothers, and the pervading outsider’s perspective resonates strongly in a tumultuous campaign season. Going Down in History may not mark a sea change for Langford and company, but between the humor, the honky-tonk, and the affable, full-bodied sound, it’s an awesome chance to catch up. | 2016-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | February 24, 2016 | 6.7 | 8723472d-a477-47f5-a6c3-7a6c2f7c14ba | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Despite featuring two of the band’s most enduring hits, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ debut is best remembered as a sketchpad for ideas that came together better later. | Despite featuring two of the band’s most enduring hits, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ debut is best remembered as a sketchpad for ideas that came together better later. | Tom Petty / The Heartbreakers: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-petty-and-the-heartbreakers-tom-petty-and-the-heartbreakers/ | Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | On November 9, 1976, an album containing two of the most widely beloved and unavoidable rock radio staples ever recorded was released, and nearly a year went by before anyone noticed. It’s not that the music was difficult or short on power-pop hooks or songs about rockin’—all the elements that later made Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers one of America’s most agreeable and enduring music institutions were clear and present on the band’s self-titled debut. But the album and the band were square pegs culturally—neither downtown cool nor Southern-rock sprawl, too dirtbag to be sex symbols, too nice to be dirtbags. “There’s an eccentricity to the first album,” Petty told biographer and former Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes. “It doesn’t sound like anything else from the time.”
Eclectic might be a better word than eccentric. There was nothing particularly weird or inaccessible about the album’s 10 tracks in 30 brisk minutes; if anything, arriving in the heyday of punk and glam and new wave, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers weren’t weird enough to grab immediate attention. Petty’s cover pose, heavy-lidded smirking while sporting a black leather jacket and bandolier in front of a cloud of smoke and a logo with a flying-v, promised something snottier than the music delivered, trademark adenoidal whelp notwithstanding. The punchy drum beat and bassline of opener “Rockin’ Around (With You)” quickly gave way to the great wide open of “Breakdown,” a change of pace that hardly seems jarring now but may have been just a left enough turn to defy easy categorization at a moment when easy categorization was essential for launching a career.
In 1974, Tom Petty moved from Gainesville, Florida, to Hollywood with his new wife Jane and his band Mudcrutch, who were signed to esteemed British producer Denny Cordell’s Shelter Records and then dropped before an album was even made. Shelter kept Petty on as a solo artist but he brought along Mudcrutch’s guitarist Mike Campbell—Petty’s closest collaborator for the entirety of his career—and keyboardist Benmont Tench, and added fellow Gainesville transplants, bassist Ron Blair and drummer Stan Lynch to start from scratch under the new name. In between, Petty had an apprenticeship of sorts with Cordell’s Shelter partner Leon Russell and spent time with idols like Brian Wilson and future bandmate George Harrison. He’d gotten a close look at what success looked like, but so closely on the heels of Mudcrutch’s disheartening failure—and with a newborn daughter to take care of—he knew he didn’t have all the time in the world to find his own.
Under Cordell’s watch, much of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers consisted of amiable but forgettable trifles like “Mystery Man,” and “Hometown Blues,” as well as parallel-universe classics that foreshadowed bigger, better hits to come. “The Wild One, Forever” is the kind of cinematic power ballad that found its final form in “Nightwatchman” five years later while the simmering, mid-tempo “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It)” scans now like a dry run for “Refugee.” It’s a band figuring out how to be a band in real time—familiar with one another but still adjusting to a new dynamic in which their onetime hometown pal and bandmate was now unequivocally their boss. The luxurious groove of “Breakdown” was the ideal showcase to sell Petty’s subtropical homesick alien voice (“your eyes give you ay-whey”), always unique even when the songs themselves weren’t, necessarily. Throughout, they fade out abruptly rather than properly end, as if the album has somewhere to be in a half-hour.
Stylistically, the biggest gambit is “Luna,” an atmospheric, vaguely proggy ballad that nods to Cordell’s background producing the likes of Procol Harum and the Moody Blues. Petty sings in a higher register, ironing out the wrinkles of his most distinctive vocal tics, and even as the album’s longest song at just under four minutes, it feels like an incomplete thought and drifts away before ever getting to anything like a hook. “I mean, you can tell we’re discovering things, that we’re happy to be there, you know?” Campbell told Warren Zanes. “Tom and I were probably more curious about the recording studio than the other guys. We wanted to figure out how to make records.” Even with the benefit of generous hindsight, the album as a whole is mostly significant today as a sketchpad and a respectable starting point from which the band sought to, and did, improve.
And yet: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers also contains what by now has to be on a very short list of the most perfect rock songs ever written. The musical equivalent of a starter’s pistol or a struck match, “American Girl” is, somewhat counterintuitively, the album’s final track; had it been the opener, it might not even have mattered what came after. From that clarion opening chord and snare crack to the jittery guitar solo outro and all beats in between, the song is a master class in economy and a snapshot of a newish band that’s found its footing. The archetypal story of the girl from nowhere—or more specifically, from somewhere overlooking Highway 441 in central Florida—dreaming of somewhere else, is what eventually helped vault Petty into the sub-Springsteen league of capital-A American songwriters. It feels like the very blueprint of a hit, even though it never cracked the Billboard Hot 100 (but did peak at 40 in the UK).
In the aftermath of the album’s release, radio stations were uniformly ambivalent, and opening for KISS went about as badly for Petty and his band as that sounds. Twenty-five years before Kings of Leon accepted this playbook like sacred scrolls from atop a Waffle House, five fresh-faced good ol’ boys found their first real acceptance by going to London.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened a UK tour for Nils Lofgren in spring 1977 and “Anything That’s Rock N’ Roll,” a perfectly generic stickin’-it-to-the-man anthem that is unlikely to reside on even diehard Petty fans’ deep-cuts playlists, hit the UK charts (it was never released as a single in the U.S. at all). They stuck around, played “Top of the Pops,” wound up on the covers of NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker, and got their first taste of the rock-star trappings that they would soon grow accustomed to over the next four decades. But by the end of that summer, the debut album—eight months after its release—had still only sold 12,000 copies in America.
ABC Records, which distributed Shelter, continued to badger radio stations into playing “Breakdown,” which finally hit the top 40 just over a year after it first came out. But by then, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were back in the studio at work on an album, 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It!, that hit all the strengths their debut did, just a little bit harder. | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Shelter | October 10, 2017 | 7 | 8724f77d-99ee-4802-81fc-4621f16865d1 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
The Live in Concert studio collaboration between Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y was held up for some time because of sample clearance issues; in that respect it was worth the wait, as the jazzy production has much to recommend. | The Live in Concert studio collaboration between Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y was held up for some time because of sample clearance issues; in that respect it was worth the wait, as the jazzy production has much to recommend. | Wiz Khalifa / Curren$y: Live in Concert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18067-wiz-khalifa-curreny-live-in-concert/ | Live in Concert | Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y’s collaborative project Live in Concert (not an actual live album) was supposed to come out last summer as a free mixtape but it wound up being delayed. Following a lawsuit against Mac Miller for an unapproved Lord Finesse sample, rappers became more conscious of what they were sampling on mixtapes. Fearing copycat lawsuits, Khalifa and Curren$y held onto the sample-heavy Live in Concert, waiting for the legal dust to settle, and now they've released it as an EP, one that costs money.
These rappers have some history. Back in 2009, Khalifa and Curren$y released a collaborative mixtape, How Fly, just at the point where both were carving out their respective niches. Khalifa found mainstream success with his single "Black and Yellow" and Curren$y found critical and underground appreciation by releasing a constant stream of quality music. Both make long records that grow more enticing with repeated listens, after one has tuned in to their respective off-color jokes and personal ticks. Though Khalifa has never been able to match Curren$y’s sheer rapping skill, his nasally voice has a more welcoming tone next to Curren$y's weary snarl.
Imagery is where Curren$y excels (“Motion sensors all over my house/ For investigative-ass hoes/ That’s waiting on me to pass out/ So they can tip-toe all over my home”, from "Landing"), and Khalifa will never be able to equal him there. Instead, his verses feel weightless, as he raps about much money he’s made and many places he has been. Where Curren$y’s attention to detail takes you to those places, Khalifa’s never achieves that kind of tangibility.
The duo share a penchant for jazzy and relaxed funk production (see: Curren$y’s Pilot Talk series) and production is the EP's strength. The excellent flute work from Bobbi Humphrey’s Fancy Dancer is heard all over this EP-- Curren$y and Khalifa can write strong hooks on their own but here they're content to let Humphrey take over. Take “Revenge and Cake”, which lifts its lovely refrain of “Sweeter than sugar/ Sweeter than love” from Fancy Dancer. The samples aren't really mixed or chopped, and since with every track gets an extended intro or outro, it almost feels like the two rappers were in the studio with Humphrey.
Still, Live in Concert is not a mixtape and it isn't free. In a post-Datpiff world, it's reasonable to wonder if anyone will pay for it. But even free mixtapes require studio space, someone to do mixing, cover art and especially here properly cleared samples, all of which cost money. So while Live in Concert might not justify the money a listener might spend, you can understand why they would try to recoup. | 2013-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | April 30, 2013 | 6.8 | 8725a384-a40d-4f9b-bc2a-1f84aaa2cfa0 | David Turner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-turner/ | null |
A sequel to his 2017 tape shows the one-time rising star of Chicago drill again offering a sobering depiction of life outside of rap myths. | A sequel to his 2017 tape shows the one-time rising star of Chicago drill again offering a sobering depiction of life outside of rap myths. | Lil Durk: Love Songs 4 the Streets 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-durk-love-songs-4-the-streets-2/ | Love Songs 4 the Streets 2 | Lil Durk’s music offers a sobering depiction of life outside of rap myths. He writes like someone keeping his head above water, hustling paycheck to paycheck, with dwindling hopes that a career in music will provide all promised riches.
Durk Banks knows what it’s like to brush with rap superstardom. A prominent player in the early-2010s Chicago drill surge, he leveraged interest in the scene to cut a deal with Def Jam. But Durk never seemed comfortable breaking bread with the majors, and has since retreated into the cold embrace of his hometown. Last year’s Signed to the Streets 3 was released in partnership with Interscope, representing another—perhaps final—throw of the dice in Durk’s pursuit of mainstream acceptance. But the album just kind of came and went, and so he returns with Love Songs 4 the Streets 2, a follow up to a 2017 tape that offered hymns for the Chicago neighborhoods he’ll forever orbit, and an antidote to some of his label struggles.
At its best, Love Songs 4 the Streets 2 evokes similar sentiments. “I thought my life was supposed to change when I got that deal,” Durk sighs on “Rebellious” as he details the need to pay his grandmother’s bills and mourns fallen cousins. Assertions like “even though I’m still rich” feel perfunctory, with Durk’s half-sung, Auto-Tune-doused croons deflating like a punctured basketball. On “Locked Up,” he appears to talk directly to a jailed friend about the thoughtlessness and pain that led the pair to this point in their lives—a song that hits just weeks after it was revealed that a Georgia judge has found probable cause to charge Banks, as well as fellow rapper King Von, with criminal attempt to commit murder. There’s no American Dream success story here. Durk makes being a rapper sound like a hard slog.
At a full seven songs longer than its preceding volume, Love Songs 4 the Streets 2 has time to run the full gamut of Durk’s styles. “Green Light” is a hardboiled trap thriller; “Die Slow” slides into guest 21 Savage’s haunted lane. As if to underline Durk’s mainstream struggles, cracks appear on the tracks ostensibly cut for radio appeal. The Durk-Meek Mill team-up “Bougie” lacks chemistry. Sleazy sex jam “Extravagant” comes close, but it’s held back by Nicki Minaj’s ill-suited bombastic verse and a few laughable Durk one-liners.
Culling these missteps would have helped the tape’s batting average, but they can’t mask Durk’s undeniable strengths. Looking back on drill, nobody really cashed in on the promised riches. Very young stars had the keys to the kingdom but couldn’t find their way through the gates. But in the case of Lil Durk, something special happened: He kept making great music, evolving out of a hard-boiled subgenre towards something more meditative and essential. | 2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo / Interscope | August 2, 2019 | 6.9 | 87352d8a-fc5a-4025-8406-d8518052399f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The third studio album from Coupler lays out ambient music that is hyper-specific, detailed, and undemanding. | The third studio album from Coupler lays out ambient music that is hyper-specific, detailed, and undemanding. | Coupler: Gifts From the Ebb Tide | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coupler-gifts-from-the-ebb-tide/ | Gifts From the Ebb Tide | Ryan Norris, the founder and guiding force behind Coupler, describes the electronic project’s output as “deliberate ambient music.” He is apparently keen to distinguish his work from music that doesn't require your full attention and is in fact designed to communicate from the margins of your awareness. According to Norris (who also supplies keys and programming in Lambchop), Coupler’s art is a different animal altogether. It may have the same soft focus but it’s going to come into the room and plop itself down in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Norris might be disappointed to know that Coupler’s third studio album Gifts From the Ebb Tide doesn’t entirely support his assertion. It doesn’t actually demand your attention. Its greatest achievement is that it doesn’t demand anything all.
Like so many ambient titles, Gifts From the Ebb Tide lends itself to casual listening. Its four electro-acoustic tracks—the first to expand the project to include other musicians—are as easy to get comfortable with. Norris and his collaborators are so subtle that you have to lean-in and even snap yourself out of the pleasant lull their music induces in order to appreciate its detail. Once you realize how much intention went into crafting their meshwork of keys, programming, and saxophone, the sharper focus doesn’t compromise the ease of the experience. There is no single detail that dominates the soundscape, which is a testament to how all the parts here work in unison.
This is all the more remarkable considering that Gifts From the Ebb Tide covers quite a bit of stylistic ground. Take, for example, the transition between the picturesque melancholy of “Invention 1: Dreams of Strange Continents” and the motorik insistence of “Invention 2: Pattern Recognition.” Stereolab may have navigated the same course decades ago on the same record (sometimes even on the same song), but Coupler execution is undeniably smooth. Meanwhile, as obviously as “Pattern Recognition” borrows from Kraftwerk and Can, the track doesn’t take us down the Autobahn as much as conjures sensations of a leisurely, soft-pedaling bike ride along a canal.
There are moments when the album gets slyly subversive, most notably on “Invention 4: Silenzio (or Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion),” where Norris aimed to meld the structures of acid house 12-inches with the sprawling “Shhh/Peaceful” suite that takes up a whole side on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way. Think of all the acts who would have honed-in on the shiniest, most audacious aspects of those two influences. With Gifts From the Ebb Tide, Coupler goes in the opposite direction, sustaining a level of reserve that takes discipline and yet asks little in return. A gift, indeed. | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | YK | November 20, 2017 | 7.1 | 8737c28e-5688-4020-82d1-8cce284e38b6 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
null | These reissues-- of arguably the three most beloved records in Depeche Mode’s catalog-- come in a slightly baffling format. Each package contains one CD, for the remastered album, and one DVD, featuring a pointless 5.1 Surround Sound mix, a small handful of bonus tracks (playable only via DVD), and a 20-minute talking-head documentary on the making of the album and the corresponding period in the band’s career. The decision to include those documentaries seems telling, and it seems like a struggle to get at the one thing that reissues-- no matter how many B-sides or demos they throw at you-- | Depeche Mode: Speak & Spell / Music for the Masses / Violator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11881-speak-spell-music-for-the-masses-violator/ | Speak & Spell / Music for the Masses / Violator | These reissues-- of arguably the three most beloved records in Depeche Mode’s catalog-- come in a slightly baffling format. Each package contains one CD, for the remastered album, and one DVD, featuring a pointless 5.1 Surround Sound mix, a small handful of bonus tracks (playable only via DVD), and a 20-minute talking-head documentary on the making of the album and the corresponding period in the band’s career. The decision to include those documentaries seems telling, and it seems like a struggle to get at the one thing that reissues-- no matter how many B-sides or demos they throw at you-- can rarely capture: How and why a band in question seemed so very cool at the time.
That turns out to be a big issue with Depeche Mode. These days, the sound of their older records seems less like a revelation and more like a given: The band’s vibe has evaporated out into America to the point where you can spot it in anything you want, whether it’s Linkin Park, Marilyn Manson, or Britney Spears. (Rather incredible, for a British group.) These days, their carefully crafted look has them resembling a failed Hungarian metal band and their reputation is just that of a big, respectable, slightly drama-queeny pop act-- idiosyncratic, maybe, but hardly that unusual. New listeners cannot expect to hear these albums quite the way their fans did at the time.
What’s funny is how that affects each of these records differently. With 1990’s Violator, the band’s pop-crossover classic, it makes hardly any difference at all; the way most people think about and imagine Depeche Mode was built largely on this record. Interview subjects in the documentary have much to say about how “perfect” the album is, how neatly and naturally it matches the sounds and synths of “progressive technopop” with the kind of grand songwriting that can play to massive stadiums. And they’re right. Like any good crossover, this record needs no particular context to appreciate, and listening back through, one gets a sense of why: The battle they’re winning here, of giving electronic music the human feel of teenage anthems and power ballads, is the same one still being fought by any number of Germans; it’s not constrained by time. The dark and slinky soul of the record-- the sex or drama-queen poses, the mix of domineering threats and extreme tenderness-- don’t hurt either.
But in carrying its context with it-- and in being somewhat critical to today’s pop-- Violator just stands as a moving, solid, record, a classic for the archives of popular music; it doesn’t so much carry a lot of the things that made Depeche Mode feel so much themselves. With 1987’s Music for the Masses, that stuff is all there-- which makes the music both harder to “get,” from today’s perspective, and also more interesting. The Depeche Mode of this album is the one that brought together a rabid audience of trendy coastal kids and middle-American teens who got beat up over stuff like this-- all of whom saw them not only as the peak of style, but as something positively revelatory, something speaking only to them (even in a crowded stadium), something alien and cool, disorientingly kinky, and entrancingly strange. For many, this was probably one of the first dance-pop acts they’d heard that didn’t seem to be entirely about being cool and having a good time; their music had been dark, clattery, and full of S&M hints and blasphemy, and on this record it reached a level of Baroque pseudo-classical grandness (see depressed-teenager shout-out “Little Fifteen”) that lived up to those kids’ inflated visions of the group.
At the same time, though, this Depeche Mode could be fun, even in its minor keys: The go-to radio pick for this album was the version of “Behind the Wheel” that segued into a cover of “Route 66”. And it’s somewhere around that fact that we might recognize how far we are from the mainstream “alternative” audience of the late-80s, a scene we see in passing between the chatter of the documentary. Anyone looking to understand that context, or just infatuated by the guy in the front row of Depeche Mode’s Rose Bowl concert wearing a Fishbone t-shirt, would do well to look to Depeche Mode 101, D.A. Pennebaker’s tour film-- which, in a canny pre-"Real World" move, spends time following a group of fans who’ve won a chance to follow the band on tour.
With the band’s 1981 debut, the increasingly adorable Speak & Spell, our distance from the original context actually makes things better. Of course, this is not the Depeche Mode we know: The songs on this album were written by Vince Clarke, who would shortly after leave the group and find fame with Yaz and Erasure. And these, of course, are the early days of synth-pop: These songs are building-block simple, bleepy and discoid, and the band sounds as gawky and adolescent as Dave Gahan looked. There’s something terrific in hearing this from a distance, not as stylish futurism (not anymore) but as the happy noises of teenagers who believed it to be stylish futurism-- and with a charming earnestness. “Happy” because of, well, Vince Clarke, whose work with Erasure is a testament to both his love of joyous disco-pop and his ability to pack it full to bursting with emotion. The best tracks here (like the Kraftwerk-y “New Life” and the dancefloor standard “Just Can’t Get Enough”) are classics, and even the lesser ones-- packed as they are with hooks and verve-- can charm you giddy, in the same way it can charm you giddy to see Dave Gahan prancing around in a bow tie on "Top of the Pops" in the documentary: He looks so young! And shy! And they haven’t even started dressing like leather men yet!
What’s funny is that these three records, despite being the obvious standouts for reissue, are some of the most vexed by this whole issue of context and aging. Violator can sound like a solid but not particularly interesting pop record; Music for the Masses seems to be reveling in an audience that’s less comprehensible now; and Speak & Spell is a lovely "historical" gem. Here’s hoping Rhino’s reissue series will be able to make its way further down into the catalog, to those records that aren’t so weirdly situated-- first-rate synth-pop like the songs on Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward, the ones that first developed that American cult around something that didn’t need much social explanation, and probably still doesn’t. | 2006-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-07-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | July 20, 2006 | 7.5 | 873c388d-be8e-4c6c-af4c-f0b182fbe165 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Unlike his bandmates’ forays in electronica or contemporary classical, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien’s solo debut looks fondly back at the kind of British rock his own group abandoned. | Unlike his bandmates’ forays in electronica or contemporary classical, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien’s solo debut looks fondly back at the kind of British rock his own group abandoned. | EOB: Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eob-earth/ | Earth | For all of the radical reinventions Radiohead have undergone over the past 30-odd years—the shift to experimental electronica, the redrafting of instrumental roles, Thom Yorke’s ponytail—guitarist Ed O’Brien has always remained guitarist Ed O’Brien. Amid the flurry of instrument swapping and machine tweaking that occurs at a typical Radiohead concert, O’Brien is rarely without his six-string and trusty bank of effects pedals, while his backing vocals often provide a crucial melodic underpinning for Yorke’s flights of fancy. That grounding principle carries over to his first proper solo album. Where Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have used their extracurricular projects to further explore dissonant techno and avant-garde orchestration, O’Brien’s debut as EOB revisits the late-’80s/early-’90s student-disco sounds that gave rise to his main gig. While his bandmates are going on about Flying Lotus and Oliver Messiaen, O’Brien is preaching the life-changing effects of Screamadelia.
That said, Earth isn’t your typical guitar-based rock record. Inspired in part by O’Brien’s year-long stint living in Brazil in 2012, the album was initially conceived as a solo electronic effort before exposure to the country’s famed Carnival festivals prompted a more communal, celebratory approach. While he stopped short of making a batucada album, he did rally an all-star cast—including producer Flood, Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley, and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche—to infuse the songs with a more physical spirit. The opening “Shangri-La” was actually written after an all-nighter at the eponymous Glastonbury DJ stage, and though this wiry rocker is more Blur than PLUR (thanks to O’Brien’s uncannily Coxon-esque chorus), the track exudes a playfully scrappy energy and hedonic swagger that greatly distinguish it from any other Radiohead-related product. The record eventually achieves its true peak-hour potential on “Olympik,” which sounds like an Achtung Baby-era U2 song stretched out into a sweaty, !!!-style punk-funk workout.
Between those high points, Earth can feel less like a dance-festival communion and more like the lonely, meandering trek back to your pup tent in the dark. The album’s more robust rhythmic exercises are counterbalanced by mellow meditations, and while these yield some affecting moments (like “Cloak of the Night,” a sort of coffeehouse “Dear Prudence” duet with Laura Marling), the songwriting isn’t captivating enough to sustain momentum during Earth’s simmered-down stretches. “Deep Days” comes on with bald, brow-raising expressions of desire but neuters them in a foot-dragging acoustic-soul lurch, while the atmospheric textures that envelop folk sketches like “Mess” and “Sail On” aren’t enough to compensate for their slight, vaporous melodies. Even when O’Brien suddenly detours from campfire tropicalia into Hacienda bacchanalia partway through “Brasil,” the track plateaus when it should soar, as if the mere novelty of flipping the switch was enough to justify riding out its mid-tempo Madchester groove past the eight-minute mark.
For an album rooted in the idea of connectedness, Earth feels more like a mood board of ideas in search of a through line. Nowhere is the record’s jumbled quality more pronounced than on “Banksters,” a song O’Brien wrote in response to the 2008 financial crash. Hating on the 1 percent has hardly gone out of style since then, but the song’s vitriol and strident topicality feel out of place on an album otherwise occupied with more personal and spiritual concerns. And while the fact that “Banksters” sounds like a bossa-nova “Paranoid Android” may appeal to that faction of old-school Radiohead fans who still rue the day Thom Yorke bought his first Aphex Twin record, it ultimately seals Earth’s fate as the sort of tasteful, tentatively adventurous post-Britpop record that would’ve gotten sandwiched between Elbow and South on a “next Radiohead” listicle 20 years ago. | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | April 21, 2020 | 5.7 | 873eabc1-a305-470e-981c-4f60a167930b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The former Mac DeMarco guitarist shifts to tepid synths and limp beats on his fourth album, a pastiche of references beyond his reach. | The former Mac DeMarco guitarist shifts to tepid synths and limp beats on his fourth album, a pastiche of references beyond his reach. | Homeshake: Helium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/homeshake-helium/ | Helium | Is it possible to evaluate art without making some assumptions about an artist’s intentions? The imperfect aesthetics of indie rock offer a case study: Is the production “lo-fi” or a result of incompetent recording? Is the musicianship loose or lazy? Are those off-key vocals subversive, or can this person just not sing? This conundrum becomes particularly acute when discussing self-styled slacker figurehead Mac DeMarco and his “jizz jazz” acolytes, typified by a veneer of unctuous production that replicates the pallid soft-core of an American Apparel photo shoot. This includes Homeshake, the popular project of former DeMarco guitarist Peter Sagar. That associative context made it easier to appreciate Homeshake’s previous albums of offbeat, gag-filled psych-pop. But on Helium, his fourth, he trades guitars for synths and scrubbed-up production while citing experimental influences. That question about intent becomes pointed: Does Helium aspire to do anything more than replicate and compound the boredom that inspired it?
As may be expected from a guy whose previous albums were titled In the Shower and Midnight Snack, Sagar owns the inconsequence of his music. Nearly every song on Helium thrums on an ambient social anxiety and a refrigerator-hum kind of chill, quintessential elements of a millennial online persona. “Everyone I know lives in my cell phone,” he speak-sings on the album’s very first line. Elsewhere, the lyrics read like sativa-enhanced observations on technology and extroverted introversion, the kind of stuff minor celebrities pass off as insight to the tune of a thousand retweets.
Sagar forays into styles that are, by design, somewhat boring: smooth jazz, quiet storm, hold Muzak, stuff that is so antithetical to counterculture that it almost becomes avant-garde. The doddering synths and dashed drums of Helium should be familiar to anyone who passed through the altered zones of experimental R&B in the early 2010s. Where How to Dress Well and Autre Ne Veut revealed themselves as powerhouse vocalists the moment they got a budget to match their vision, Sagar only works in signifiers. The bass slap of “Like Mariah” is a @Seinfeld2000 gag translated to song, divorced from the rhythm and friction of funk; the song itself is a one-note joke about having a five-octave range and, lol, how weird that would be. The drum sample of “Just Like My” appropriates New Jack Swing in the most obvious way, swapping out timeless songwriting for Sagar’s best shower falsetto.
What’s more, Helium is supposedly influenced by the experimental textures of Visible Cloaks, footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, and next-generation footwork warper Jlin. But maybe he’s just reading The Wire? Helium moves with the numbing pace of a stubborn hangover, and its drums have the grain and snap of limp celery. The alleged impact of Young Thug, one of the most inventive and unpredictable vocalists of the 21st century, on these inert melodies is anyone’s guess. The lyrics, Sagar says, were inspired by a Murakami binge—while the narrators do share a general displacement, he lacks any sense of the surreal.
The sheer lethargy of Helium at least creates, under anything less than the slightest scrutiny, a coherent experience that can be praised as a “vibe.” And numbers don’t lie—several Homeshake songs have amassed more than 10 million Spotify streams, a testament to the benefits of blending in with any permutation of “Chill” or “Indie” playlists. After all, they are built to satisfy requests like one Sagar makes here. “I need something medium,” he sings, underscoring how the paralyzing malaise of Helium can’t even get him there anymore. | 2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sinderlyn | February 26, 2019 | 3.5 | 874259f8-f5f9-49c4-91f1-2351c96f97de | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The “120 Minutes” revivalists trade manic exuberance for panicked agitation on a debut album that applies their infectious brand of motorik jangle rock to lovelorn ruminations and geopolitical laments. | The “120 Minutes” revivalists trade manic exuberance for panicked agitation on a debut album that applies their infectious brand of motorik jangle rock to lovelorn ruminations and geopolitical laments. | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Hope Downs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rolling-blackouts-coastal-fever-hope-downs/ | Hope Downs | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are either the world’s most meandering pop band or its most efficient jam band. Either way, for their purposes, jamming is as much a lyrical strategy as musical one. Over the course of two excellent EPs, the Melbourne quintet has mastered an adrenalized, infectious brand of motorik jangle rock that’s both warmly nostalgic and thrillingly unpredictable. The band’s three alternating singer-guitarists—Tom Russo, Fran Keaney, and Joe White—load their songs with fragmented narratives, overlapping dialogue, and impressionistic detail. Although the literal meaning of their lyrics isn’t always easy to discern, the internal dramas that play out in each track are deeply felt, and the jokes always land. RBCF may careen like a runaway locomotive, but they’ve decked out each car with its own distinct decor and unique cast of characters.
The band sustains that brisk momentum throughout its full-length debut, Hope Downs—although, at 10 songs and 35 minutes, the album is only slightly longer than the EPs that preceded it. Rolling Blackouts are still harnessing their strengths as erudite tunesmiths and freewheeling rock’n’rollers, and the past few years of steady touring have transformed them into a crack live act. Hope Downs feeds off that onstage intensity: “An Air Conditioned Man” kicks off the record like a car chase joined already in progress, with Russo and White’s chiming guitar lines slowly unraveling into dueling solos, while drummer Marcel Tussie trips up the steady backbeat with destabilizing fills. As the song hits a fever pitch, Keaney’s lovelorn ruminations give way to a detached, spoken-word denouement, with Russo emerging like a voice inside Keaney’s head to amplify his torment. “You walk past the wall you first kissed her against/How could you forget,” Russo intones. “Did it ever matter in the first place?” His languorous drawl has a sedative effect on the song, which—like the pent-up desire it chronicles—flames out into a smoky apparition of its former self.
Rolling Blackouts songs have always been fueled by a jittery energy; though Keaney is billed as the band’s acoustic guitarist, he’s more like a second percussionist, his ceaseless strums propelling the songs with bongo-like fury. As “An Air Conditioned Man” vividly illustrates, however, Hope Downs radiates panicked agitation more than manic exuberance. Sure, the band continues to function as an ’80s college-rock fantasy camp: “Talking Straight” packs in all the post-punk propulsion, needling jangle, and crestfallen harmonies of an I.R.S.-era R.E.M. classic, while “Bellarine” practically begs you to sing the Go-Betweens’ “Was There Anything I Could Do?” over its opening riff. But RBCF are hardly operating in a blissful record-collector bubble. On “Mainland,” they put their own privilege under the microscope, with Russo recounting a recent trip to his ancestors’ homeland near Sicily, where bathers enjoyed postcard-perfect waters not far from where refugees were swimming for their lives. The beautifully downcast “Cappuccino City” paints an immersive yet damning portrait of café culture, singing of “FM on the stereo/Belgians in the Congo” as he subtly threads the needle between simple Western pleasures and colonialist violence.
Thirty years ago, RBCF’s brand of alternative rock would have made them ripe for crossover fame. But these days, their “120 Minutes”-era sound has been pushed to the margins—and not just of the pop charts. Even within the realm of contemporary indie, the band is a glorious anomaly. Sophisticated and subversive in equal measure, their staccato sing-alongs come on pristine and precise, then unspool in surprising directions as decorum gives way to abandon. Rolling Blackouts may occupy an empty playground on the modern rock landscape, but that gives them the freedom to run wild in that wide open space, inventing their own games and making up the rules as they go. | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 15, 2018 | 8.1 | 8742c08c-78e4-4fe0-a099-de0bd72fecb5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Collaborating with producer Lynyn, the chameleonic Chicago musician offers a toned-down vision of his exuberant experimental pop. | Collaborating with producer Lynyn, the chameleonic Chicago musician offers a toned-down vision of his exuberant experimental pop. | NNAMDÏ: Are You Happy EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nnamdi-are-you-happy-ep/ | Are You Happy EP | As he’s cycled through hip-hop, math rock, and jazz, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, a.k.a. NNAMDÏ, has always exuded zany energy. On his newest EP, Are You Happy, he tones things down. He and Lynyn, aka Conor Mackey, his bandmate in the experimental jazz group Monobody, began writing these songs in 2020 as a way to find happiness during “a time of introspection when things were generally bleak.” This goal gives the EP its title, but the music lingers longest at its most melancholy. It feels a little foggier than the irreverent NNAMDÏ we’re used to, as if the attempt to manifest musical joy uncovered its own form of dismay.
Most NNAMDÏ albums are self-produced, but Lynyn produced Are You Happy in its entirety, locating a zippy, Auto-Tune-heavy sound at a novel intersection of IDM, late-2010s Charli XCX, and 808s & Heartbreak. Vocal manipulation is nothing new for NNAMDÏ; his 2017 breakthrough DROOL featured near-constant pitch-shifting, and 2020’s BRAT pushed the formula, leaping between rumbling lows and helium highs. The vocal tricks went hand-in-hand with NNAMDÏ’s shapeshifting melodic and production choices, but they’re less effective amid Lynyn’s brisk, streamlined breakbeats and early-morning tones. As the silken electronics of “Doing Too Much” accelerate into double-time, NNAMDÏ’s Auto-Tuned falsetto struggles to keep up. A brief moment of clarity arrives in the second verse, but this too yields to effect-laden vocals that are all but swallowed by the hefty percussion.
Lynyn’s production best elevates NNAMDÏ when his lyrics and delivery lean gloomier. “Are you happy at all? ’Cause I’ve seen you smiling, and I want to feel whatever you feel,” he sings on “Barely Reason for a Smile.” Lynyn adds a layer of brooding synths, deftly connecting the sentiment—darkness feels that much darker when you can’t find the light—with the sound. On “Backseat,” NNAMDÏ appears so eager to depart for a better life that any potential consequences don’t even register: “Hop in the backseat/Where you wanna ride to?/I can take you anywhere,” he sings, his voice descending from high to mid-range as fluttering synths brighten his fantasies. It’s an open invitation to join him wherever he goes, and the double-time, non-Auto-Tuned raps that follow are just as enticing.
As Are You Happy draws to a close, a guest verse from fellow Chicago musician and longtime NNAMDÏ associate Sen Morimoto illustrates why Lynyn’s production isn’t always the right fit for NNAMDÏ’s voice. Even as the oversized synths of “You Don’t Know” glitch and wobble, Morimoto’s verse sounds crystal clear. When he asks, “Why do I feel gaslit when the whites ask if I’m half white?” the question practically jumps out of the mix, his nonplussed delivery cutting through the hyperactive production like a diamond. NNAMDÏ’s voice, by contrast, oscillates almost as ballistically as the music—usually a big part of his charm, but here his words sink in somewhat indistinctly. On Are You Happy, it’s his most downcast and least eccentric vocals that feel paradoxically convincing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | Sooper | December 2, 2021 | 6.9 | 87468e04-5957-403d-b07a-7432b468a5ea | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
In his score to LeSean Thomas’ anime series about a Black samurai in medieval Japan, the Los Angeles musician aligns his visual obsessions with his wide-ranging musical instincts. | In his score to LeSean Thomas’ anime series about a Black samurai in medieval Japan, the Los Angeles musician aligns his visual obsessions with his wide-ranging musical instincts. | Flying Lotus: Yasuke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flying-lotus-yasuke/ | Yasuke | Midnight movies and anime have long played a crucial role in Flying Lotus’ aesthetic universe. Now, between the recently established film division of his Brainfeeder label, numerous scoring projects, and his foray into directing with the animated feature Kuso, the artist born Steven Ellison is increasingly making his mark on film as well as music. It’s a natural development for an artist who cites the influence of Shinya Tsukamoto’s grimy cyberpunk body-horror nightmare Tetsuo: The Iron Man as often as he does any given musician. The man did get his start composing Adult Swim bumpers, after all.
Ellison recently contributed original music to two anime productions: a Blade Runner 2049 anime prequel short and the series Carole & Tuesday. He makes his full-length anime scoring debut with Yasuke, a new Netflix series, animated by Japan’s MAPPA studio, that spins a wild cosmic yarn from the mysterious historical case of a real-life Black samurai during the much-romanticized shogunate era. Though the protagonist is based on an actual figure from the 16th century, the show is not limited to a medieval milieu: The action is charged with superpowered mecha, sojourns through time, trippy battle sequences, and sinister Catholic priests. Credit Yasuke creator LeSean Thomas, who made an early name for himself at Adult Swim—just like Flying Lotus—with these innovations before relocating to South Korea and eventually Japan. Thomas is much like the hero of his show: a self-starting, singularly driven individual who has carved out a new space for himself in a country and industry he is not native to.
Ellison is rendered as a samurai on the cover of the Yasuke soundtrack, though his sunglasses are as much Blade as medieval knight. It’s hard not to take that image as a metaphor: Like a samurai, Ellison is constantly testing himself and honing his skills. In a recent interview, he describes his emotional connection to the story of Yasuke, both as someone who has felt like an outsider in various worlds—a hip-hop producer and electronic DJ branching out into jazz, a musician making movies, a fan of David Lynch working with David Lynch—and more specifically because of his own experiences in Japan as a Black man. An intense and prolific collaborator, Ellison is far from being a lone ronin, but his style remains his own. His first few records as Flying Lotus are firmly part of the Los Angeles beat scene: a swirl of psychedelic drum patterns, fusion jazz bass lines, and the chirps and clicks of video game soundtracks. Soon, he’d flesh out that base pattern into something even more cosmic and expansive—truly maximalist works inspired by progressive rock and spiritual jazz. Yasuke strips down many of those familiar references and molds them into a more minimalist form. Though tracks like “Your Lord” incorporate sparse strings, flutes, and wooden percussion meant to evoke East Asian musical traditions, Ellison is careful to avoid falling prey to the tropes common to Western stereotypes of Japanese music.
Ellison said that he wanted to break with what one might expect from an anime score by a producer with roots in hip-hop, offering a counterpoint to explicitly beat-driven soundtracks like RZA’s Afro Samurai or the cult favorite Samurai Champloo, created by regular Flying Lotus collaborator Shinichirō Watanabe and with a soundtrack by the late lo-fi beats progenitor Nujabes. These shows use hip-hop as a way to break with anime tradition, whereas Yasuke pays homage to scoring conventions while also incorporating the occasional trap drum or mind-bending synthesizer effect. Ellison’s cues don’t overwhelm or outshine the show’s visuals; his synth-driven riffs are often comfortable hanging out on the margins, a series of undulating tones grounding the emotional movement of a scene.
As his profile has grown, Ellison’s albums have come to include more vocal features—2019’s Flamagra put Denzel Curry and David Lynch back to back—but the guests sometimes distract from the complexity and creativity of his actual compositions. Scoring, however, gives his work room to breathe. Right-hand man Thundercat’s falsetto is cast as the lead in the protagonist’s theme, “Black Gold,” a moment of dreamy reflection in a show frequently filled with kinetic action. Regular collaborator Niki Randa adds an angelic tenor to the stringed introspection of “Hiding in the Shadows” and the trip-hop of “Between Memories.”
There’s often a self-consciously vintage sound to Flying Lotus’ cues, from bubbling Moog tones reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Wendy Carlos on “Shoreline Sus” to Vangelis and John Carpenter-type beats on “Pain and Blood” and “War Lords.” Though much of Yasuke is shaped by synthesizers, it’s only appropriate that drums begin to dominate during battle sequences, like the pounding tablas and timpanis of “Fighting Without Honor,” a flurry of jangly percussion that rings out as skilled warriors stand their ground. Ellison circles around hip-hop in his score and sometimes steps away from it entirely, but here and there he embraces it: “Mind Flight” climaxes with trap hi-hats, and “Survivors” is a boom-bap cut destined for YouTube rainy-day study playlists. The lone rap verse comes from Denzel Curry on “African Samurai,” who asserts himself over a sparse, trembling beat.
Taken into consideration alongside Ellison’s own growing body of animated work, Yasuke illuminates the kinship between Flying Lotus’ musical and visual instincts. Just as Thomas synthesizes sci-fi mecha and paperback fantasy with Japanese medieval history, Ellison’s universe is constructed out of jazz riffs, new-age synthesizer noodling, hip-hop drums, and the sounds of the many, many anime he’s ingested over the years, all coming together into one cohesive frame. In Yasuke’s self-consciously hybrid genre approach, Ellison finds himself well matched with a like-minded visual artist who dreams up new worlds and alternate timelines. Flying Lotus ultimately asks us to consider electronic music in similarly fantastical terms: Why limit yourself to one style or school of sound when an infinitude of timbres and textures is at your fingertips?
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 6, 2021 | 7.4 | 8746983b-e526-4cc6-ad6a-712fa9adca0b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Glaswegian DJ Jackmaster is best known for his ability to traverse genres, decades and moods in a few sweaty hours, and the prestigious DJ-Kicks series is an ideal format for his talents. | Glaswegian DJ Jackmaster is best known for his ability to traverse genres, decades and moods in a few sweaty hours, and the prestigious DJ-Kicks series is an ideal format for his talents. | Jackmaster: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22105-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Glaswegian DJ Jackmaster (a.k.a Jack Revill) is best known for his ability to traverse genres, decades, and moods in a few sweaty hours. In one set he might jump from Hudson Mohawke to Anthony Shakir to Prince; an extended house jam might morph into crisp techno; those 808s or 909s you’re hearing could be a crate digger’s treasure or a soon-to-be chart topper. With Jackmaster, the *what’s next? *and *who’s that? *are part of the adventure. He’s a DJ’s DJ and a crowd pleaser, but not one before the other.
Jackmaster is also famous for what he is not: a composer. At a time when “producer” and “DJ” are nearly synonymous, Revill’s emphasis on purely DJing is almost quaint—but also refreshing. He knows his job is to curate, mix, and recontextualize other people’s records, not make his own music, and he’s good at it. A side-effect is that releases with Jackmaster’s name attached have more significance than they might for another artist, for whom a mix might be seen as an afterthought to their LPs or singles. So, for Jackmaster, an entry in the prestigious DJ-Kicks series provides an opportunity for listeners to get a taste of what he offers in a live setting, albeit with more time for him to tinker and refine. This is as much of a Jackmaster record as we’re ever likely to get.
Because Revill isn’t a producer, he’s had to build his fan base almost entirely by working in front of an audience. He plays a lot—some 200 times in a year, he’s said—and started in his teens. Today, Jackmaster remains a fixture at Numbers, the label he helps run and which has thrown an influential party for more than a decade. (The label has released music from SOPHIE, Rustie, SBTRKT, and Jamie xx, to name a few.) He’s the sort of name that is equally comfortable at festivals like the EDM-leaning Ultra or London's fabric, where you might find him on a bill with Ricardo Villalobos. At 30, Jackmaster isn’t old by any means, but he’s a veteran who can keep jaded audiences thirsty for the unexpected, and he brings that experience to his official releases.
Like his live shows, Jackmaster’s DJ-Kicks selections are an eclectic, precise, and unflaggingly propulsive collection of old and new. Revill has said the album should been read as a love letter to the music of Detroit, Chicago, and Glasgow and it’s true that *DJ-Kicks *may be Jackmaster’s most streamlined release to date. (He’s also said that it’s a look back at his early days as a straight-forward techno DJ.)
The record takes its time heating up with a mood-setting, scene-stealing cut from 1080p staple LNRDCROY before heading off to the races with an exclusive, deftly-edited vocal-driven track from Denis Sulta called “MSNJ”—already a club hit in advance of the mix. Other up-front winners include Massimiliano Pagliara’s “I Am Running All My Drum Machines At Once And Dancing,” whose title is an accurate description of its contents: it slides seamlessly into Chicago house legend Mike Dunn’s early ’90s cut “A Groove.” Another exclusive—Alcatraz Harry’s “Ode To Frankfurt”—is a fun and funky house track.
Jackmaster saves the highest highs for the third of the mix, building to his finale slowly and assuredly. A fantastic, exclusive Tessela cut, “Up (Demo Version),” is paired with Riccardo Villalobos’ “Logohitz,” for a bit of driving techno. It’s Jackmaster at his best—a combination of the new and now with a beloved mainstay. The album ends with a three-punch denouement starting with Underground Resistance co-founder Robert Hood’s “The Pace,” then a trip to mid-’90s Detroit with Overmow’s “Convulsions,” and, finally, Pom Pom, who closes the mix breathlessly and beautifully with “POM POM 18 B2.”
According to Jackmaster, putting together *DJ-Kicks *was marred by near disaster. Assembly started in a rush while DJing on a cruise, was set back by a lost hard drive, and took four or five complete revisions before he was happy with it. Listening to the record today, however, none of those seams show. Jackmaster lets his choices breathe and doesn’t hurry from cut to cut for the sake of covering more ground, even as tracks pool together and reform anew. A fun way to listen to the record might be to read the release dates of the tracks—’90s, ’00s, ’10s—as they fly by. It's the sort of fluidity that house and techno heads appreciate and dancefloors thrive on, something you don’t often notice until it's *not *happening or too awkwardly executed to ignore. With Jackmaster, laser-focused competency becomes its own sort of thrill. | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | July 15, 2016 | 7.5 | 874a6e61-c6bf-41de-ab56-dd8c83ec9d57 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Kansas City producer Huerco S.'s second album is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears. | Kansas City producer Huerco S.'s second album is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears. | Huerco S.: For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21885-for-those-of-you-who-have-never-and-also-those-who-have/ | For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) | The Kansas City producer Huerco S. put out his first release in 2012, when he was just 21 years old, and though its structures loosely hewed to the tenets of house and techno, he hadn’t yet spent much time in dance clubs. It was a fantasy of club music, a perspective schooled by records and YouTube and hearsay, and whatever it lacked in polish, it more than made up for in its suggestiveness. Like a secret whispered in your ear while standing too close to the sound system, it was all the more exciting for the parts of the transmission that were garbled, or simply lost, on their journey from his machines to our ears.
Ironically, as his profile has risen, especially in Europe, and he has logged plenty of late nights in the kind of clubs Kansas City could barely dream of, he has progressively removed the elements that define house and techno—the steady kick drum, the rat-a-tat hi-hats, the body-moving bassline. On his debut album, 2013’s Colonial Patterns, the most exciting tracks were the ones that seemed the most unkempt and overgrown: Instead of techno's reliable, rectilinear grid, his structures followed mossier geometries, like paving stones forced aside by weeds, or a trellis sagging under the weight of rampant morning glory. Now, on his second album, the weeds have won. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) is ambient music through and through—though it’s informed by a memory of club music, which hangs over it like a ringing in the ears.
There are no drums or percussion on any of the album’s nine tracks, just soft tendrils of synthesizer, submerged pulses, and tape hiss smeared on in thick, buttery swirls. The album opens with a soft, rose-tinted chord and it never gets much more abrasive than that. Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.
The music doesn’t do much; it doesn’t develop or even evolve. It just twists slowly in place, like wind chimes. In fact, it’s often hard to imagine that any of these patterns were played by hand at all; they feel aleatory, as though generated by arcane processes, like the movements of swallows over an open field, or the molecular behavior of melting ice. And though nothing here is completely randomized—this is still loop-based music, not noise—that sense of instability has a curious effect; the music never sounds quite the same way twice, and as sentimental as a track like “Promises of Fertility” or “Lifeblook (Naïve Melody)” might be, it’s virtually impossible to fix them in your mind, even while listening.
In places, Huerco S. seems to be nodding to systems musicians—experimental composers who use generative processes to create the work—and folding their ideas back into a more soothingly repetitive framework. The drifting “Hear Me Out” recalls the burnished bell tones of Oval’s 94diskont; the smeared and indistinct qualities of the album’s palette suggests the influence of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” a 1969 composition for voice and magnetic tape that dissolved the physical world into a spectral hum. On the opening “A Sea of Love,” you can just barely make out the outline of the patiently looping synthesizer melody; its contours are all but worn away, and you almost wonder if there’ll be anything left of it in another dozen listens.
That’s absurd, of course. This isn’t a dubplate, or a record made of ice; it’s a piece of wax and a bundle of 1s and 0s, and it'll stay this way as long as there are playback devices to play it on. But part of the album's magic is the way that Huerco S., after the fashion of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, has captured a feeling of fragility, of things flaking to dust before our very eyes and ears.
There’s only one thing to break the reverie, and that’s the musician's curious habit of finishing his songs by simply cutting them off in mid-swirl. It happens again and again, on “On the Embankment,” “Marked for Life,” “Cubist Camouflage,” “Promises of Fertility”—all of the record’s C- and D-side tracks but one, in fact. It’s a strange tactic: Here you are, blissfully immersed in this amniotic bubble of sound, and then—nothing, just a silence so abrupt it feels like waking up on cold cement. He does it so often that it has to mean something. The closest that I can figure is it’s a way of acknowledging that these objects of trans-human beauty could easily go on forever; to fade out would be a kind of illusion, a lie. By cutting them off in mid-stream, and sacrificing the experience in the process, Huerco S. is simply living up to a purist ideal. I’m not sure it works, ultimately, but you've got to admire his gumption. It’s a kind of tough love, essentially—a hard-headed approach absolutely in keeping with the history of Midwestern techno, no matter how downy the music itself. And anyway, there’s always the repeat button. | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Proibito | June 13, 2016 | 8.1 | 874edef7-b58d-461b-ba39-22dc1c918c48 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
A posthumous album showcases the late Atlanta rapper’s head-spinning dexterity without attempting anything more than that, both grounded and limited by its avoidance of the usual pomp. | A posthumous album showcases the late Atlanta rapper’s head-spinning dexterity without attempting anything more than that, both grounded and limited by its avoidance of the usual pomp. | Bankroll Fresh: In Bank We Trust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bankroll-fresh-in-bank-we-trust/ | In Bank We Trust | When Trentavious White, better known as the rapper Bankroll Fresh, was murdered on March 4, 2016, at Atlanta’s Street Execs studio, modern hip-hop’s capital city lost one of its most innovative stylists and authentic storytellers. Even in a city where new talent seemed to emerge daily, Bankroll’s peak was short. “Hot Boy,” his breakout hit, dropped in fall 2014, only 18 months before his death. Yet Bankroll was notably connected, and respected: he was a collaborator of 2 Chainz and Future, close friends with Zaytoven and Metro Boomin’, and he gave Jeezy his last hit, the thunderous “All There,” which owed its success to Bankroll’s sound. Before Migos and Young Thug asserted control of Atlanta, Bankroll was on his way to creating a lane of his own, linking micro-generations of Atlanta trap: Travis Porter’s club-ready bounce, T.I.’s menacing swagger, and frequent collaborator Gucci Mane’s warbly wordplay.
A hardened, husky-voiced trap rapper, whose stories of life in Atlanta’s Zone 3 rang of pain and paranoia, Bankroll was blessed with the dexterity to switch between myriad flows and invent new ones seemingly on the spot; his go to ad-lib, fittingly, was “switch it up!” “ESPN,” a highlight from his best tape, 2015’s Life of a Hot Boy, has Bankroll approaching the beat from its side, rapping offbeat so forcefully that it creates its own pocket. He delighted in exploiting a beat’s open spaces: On the mesmerizing “Fuck is You Sayin,” released the same year, the rhymes tumble out of Bankroll as if involuntarily, like he’s on the verge of sputtering out. He rapped with the control and violence of a deranged puppet master, prefacing the irreverent, rhythm-warping flows of rappers like Lil Baby, Gunna, and Valee, and helping to set the stage for 21 Savage’s deadpan menace to break out into the mainstream.
Bankroll’s rise and untimely crash happened so fast that he never got to release his debut album. In its place, after years of delays, we get In Bank We Trust, a collection of hard-hitting loosies, a feast of dizzying rhyme schemes and mournful trap synths that showcases Bankroll’s talent but never attempts anything more than that. In Bank We Trust isn’t a sappy, exploitative posthumous tribute, but a no-frills reminder of Bankroll’s gripping artistry.
The record starts out blisteringly hot, punctuated by the brooding “Extra” and the regal “Quarter Million,” which starts with Bankroll nearly screaming, “I pull the trigger like MacGyver! Young nigga ballin, I got the eye of the tiger!” He changes gears three different times on the riot-starting “Right On,” and stretches and snaps his flow like a rubber band on the astounding opener “Mind Body Soul.” The beats, handled mostly by Atlanta stalwarts D. Rich and Shawty Fresh, are often bombastic, but they’re also dated and rudimentary, the stuff of mid-decade Gucci Mane tapes. Yet Bankroll still makes magic here, commanding trap numbers like “Feel Me,” the Boosie-featuring “Million Up,” and the highlight “Playin Wit a Check” with murderous precision.
In Bank We trust is both grounded and limited by its avoidance of the outsized glitz and ambition that often accompany posthumous albums. It’s difficult not to imagine what a Zaytoven and Metro Boomin-helmed project, or an album featuring any grouping of Bankroll’s long list of admirers, would have sounded like instead. But there’s something fitting about the lack of pomp. This is a rapper who, despite his ridiculous talent, didn’t seem intent on making it as a rapper. “I want the fortune, motherfuck the fame,” he raps to begin the album. Industry acceptance and household-name status weren’t part of the plan. Listeners loved Bankroll because of the gritty authenticity that radiated from every verse, and his undeniable dedication to his people.
As an album, In Bank We Trust is somewhat less than the sum of its mostly strong parts; it’s a tantalizing, yet unorganized and unrefined, look at a remarkable rapper. But it does what it needs to do, which is to allow Bankroll to continue sharing his life, despite its early end. “Tell em your story, bankroll fresh...” Erykah Badu tweeted two months before his death. Thankfully, that story isn't over quite yet. | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Street Money Worldwide | April 4, 2020 | 7.1 | 87593028-fe8a-47b1-8d23-c5395336a935 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
Assisted by Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, and Makaya McCraven, the Chicago drummer pays tribute to his late brother with an innovative fusion of jazz composition and spoken-word memorial. | Assisted by Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, and Makaya McCraven, the Chicago drummer pays tribute to his late brother with an innovative fusion of jazz composition and spoken-word memorial. | Jeremy Cunningham: The Weather Up There | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeremy-cunningham-the-weather-up-there/ | The Weather Up There | The Weather Up There, drummer Jeremy Cunningham’s second album as a bandleader, is part of a lineage of jazz that uses diverse musical forms to contemplate death and bereavement. Grief, to cite a famous example, prompted Alice Coltrane to turn to the tamboura and oud after the death of her husband, John. More recently, it led the pianist Kenny Werner to mix orchestra and choir on No Beginning, No End, and trumpeter Dave Douglas to synthesize bluegrass, traditional hymns, and Sibelius on Be Still. After suffering a loss, jazz history suggests, musicians look beyond their immediate surroundings, as though seeking beauty in parts of the world they might have missed before.
In 2008, Cunningham was a straight-ahead player in his native Cincinnati, almost finished with college and hoping to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music. His younger brother Andrew was playing video games at home when two men, carrying AK-47s, broke down the door. Having mistaken Andrew for his roommate, Tyler, they beat Andrew with their gun butts and robbed the house. Tyler, who was in the shower, managed to run across the lawn and call for help; the two men shot and killed Andrew.
In shock, Cunningham bombed his graduate school audition and moved to Chicago, where straight-ahead became another color in a wide musical palette. Over the course of the next decade, he became close with some of the city’s most forward-thinking virtuosos: guitarist Jeff Parker, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Makaya McCraven, all of whom play on The Weather Up There.
The record is cut with the voices of family and friends from back home, who recount his brother’s murder. The emotionally complex interplay between these spoken samples and the shifting ambiance of Cunningham’s jazz fusion makes for a story of mourning that simultaneously illuminates the strangeness of life after tragedy. Opener “Sleep” begins with elegiac OP-1 synthesizer textures as Cunningham’s aunt describes a dream about Andrew. “All of my dreams from people who have died,” she says, the song slipping into Reid’s sentimental strings and Josh Johnson’s saxophone swells, “all take place in my kitchen, for some reason.” The music’s doleful mood breaks abruptly. The exuberant half-note pulses that begin “1985” evoke the pop of “Bennie and the Jets” or “Super Rich Kids,” and then Cunningham and his collaborators loosen their playing styles to match Parker’s guitar heroics: a light skein of feedback and a couple solos.
With Parker producing, alongside New Breed bandmate Paul Bryan, the album’s construction is imbued with a sensitive, meticulous studio wizardry. That’s particularly true of “Elegy,” a harrowing voice collage: Recordings Cunningham made of his Cincinnati community—his sister, his ex-girlfriend, his brother’s best friend—speak with each other about Andrew, join together like a choir, and discuss the need for gun control. They’re accompanied by the “drum choir” Cunninghman formed to play on the track, an assemblage of Chicago percussion talent whose potentially climactic inclusion on the album he idiosyncratically buries under his hometown’s memories of tragedy.
The spoken sections ground Cunningham’s vision in its subject matter, distinguishing his unique way of processing grief; it’s impossible to mistake the album’s sorrowful origins. The Weather Up There is taut and well-sequenced enough to occasionally risk becoming background music, but its long monologues snap the listener to attention. They grate with their unmusicality, and sometimes delve too deep into exposition about that awful night in 2008. They also allow for a record of dualities that plucks the listener out of the march of ordinary habit and into the pain of another, before revealing the many ways that life can become new again. Daily concerns seem to fall away during Cunningham’s collective emotional journey—even the act of criticism itself.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Northern Spy | March 2, 2020 | 7.8 | 875e3c52-661b-4931-8fa2-bd8eba44f698 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
This assemblage of strange outtakes and demos—including what may be the first demo of "Space Oddity"—find Bowie in his tentative folkie phase, about to blast off. | This assemblage of strange outtakes and demos—including what may be the first demo of "Space Oddity"—find Bowie in his tentative folkie phase, about to blast off. | David Bowie: Spying Through a Keyhole | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-spying-through-a-keyhole/ | Spying Through a Keyhole | Until the heat death of the planet, some of us will never stop seeking out David Bowie rarities, because nothing feels quite as good as communing with him. And if any artist can escape the sad trap of diminished-return posthumous releases—the same gluttonous estate mindset that insists any time Jimi Hendrix sneezed, it deserves a pressing—it’s the Starman, whose innovations and recalibrations were so often two steps ahead of the rest. In the three years since he died, Bowie’s catalog has been expanded modestly in comparison with other departed rock greats—a handful of live sets, unreleased experiments, and collected eccentricities; this has yielded shocking, empathetic peeks into his most troubled era (Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74)’s live pyrotechnics), victory laps in front of enormous crowds (Glastonbury 2000), and a bittersweet coda to Blackstar (No Plan).
The latest offering is an assemblage of strange outtakes and demos. Spying Through a Keyhole collects nine late-1960s tracks, smattering them across four 7” singles for no terribly clear purpose. (A boomer collector enticement, perhaps, since Parlophone released them digitally last winter?) Written circa “Space Oddity,” which will turn 50 this June, the tracks nestle in the long-haired, bucolic folkie vibe Bowie batted around in his early career, the era when he still went by Davie Jones and, shortly after, warbled about “The Laughing Gnome” to a wholly disinterested populace. Even for demos, they’re surprisingly rough, in a way that only sometimes breeds intimacy; most often, he bashes around on an acoustic guitar, both his verve and falsetto well into the red.
Though Bowie’s folk period is ignored today by all but his diehards, it does offer some insight into the man’s mind, and Keyhole adds several moments to that discussion. “Mother Grey,” a cheery dash of singsong twee, nods towards the pleasantly shambolic harmonies of the Beatles’ “Two of Us,” interspersed with the requisitive agrarian imagery: leafy surroundings, cozy kitchens cluttered with pots and pans. Young Bowie bids farewell to this hearth, twitching out of the beat a few times on his guitar before a brash, boxcar harmonica solo. Its b-side is even more evocative: “In the Heat of the Morning” is an extremely rough draft of a song that will be more familiar to fans, as Bowie and Tony Visconti eventually smoothed it out enough that Bowie performed it on the BBC in 1967. Remarkably, this one has a pristine, prophetic fingerprint: Bowie fiddles around with the same vertiginous vocal jumps that will reprise in “Ziggy Stardust” in 1972. But here, he’s still far from that psychedelic bombast; in the demo, he strums his guitar with the blithe zeal of Meg White at a drum kit, nudging it out of tune as he yelps, in flashes of that rebellious wit to come, “Señorita sway, dance with me before their frozen eyes.”
The best song of Keyhole is, itself, workshopped in rapid succession: “Angel Angel Grubby Face,” a rarity that, according to Thin White Duke fan lore, once almost saw release when Bowie was on Deram Records. Here it appears twice, in two demos. The first take is the keeper: a kooky little sojourn with slightly marble-mouthed delivery, strummed primly to suggest austere society and frilly collars. But no polite trappings can disguise how plainly strange the song is: No matter however gently he coos it, “Angel angel grubby face/I love you” is not high on the seduction scale. The second, later demo of “Angel” is more polished, with stronger, murmured vocals and defter fingerpicking, but it’s the earlier version that feels more attuned to Bowie’s spirit—the winking subversion, the wisp of true human connection hiding inside the arch refrain.
Keyhole also boasts two demos of “Space Oddity”—one just a snippet, though, according to its accompanying press, quite possibly the first one ever recorded. Though plenty of demos have surfaced over the decades, this one could very possibly stand up to its promise; its vocals are timorous enough that Bowie seems to be asking, to himself and to the microphone, “What are we about to do here?” The string section and the folk warble will vanish by the time Major Tom officially lifts off, but here’s they’re a fascinatingly clear bridge between an artist’s polite past and his boundless future.
Elements of the final “Space Oddity” single sneak into the second demo, the first with Bowie’s longtime guitarist John ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson: There’s a gothic chill to the instrumentation, and a deadpan in Bowie’s tone. (Mission control’s dispassionate countdown first appears here, too.) There are cracks in Bowie’s voice, the kind he’d intentionally wield to great effect later, and strange, leaking synth tones; he sings fatalist lines that “I think my time on earth is nearly through” that will soon be scrapped, before a much more calamitous acoustic guitar climax. And is that Morse code at the end? There was so much pouring out of this man’s mind—but as Keyhole proves, quite well, he wasn’t born a revolutionary. Bowie put in his miles. | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino / Parlophone | April 4, 2019 | 7 | 87694d62-9676-4c38-97c2-044a8921af7a | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
null | *For Emma, Forever Ago*\-- Bon Iver's 2007 debut LP-- was nearly eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology. Famously: Singer and songwriter Justin Vernon curled up in a "remote northern Wisconsin cabin" for three epic, torturous months of post-heartbreak introspection/catharsis, writing the songs which would ultimately comprise his first solo album. *For Emma* was self-released by Vernon before being picked up by Jagjaguwar and afforded a proper launch; grateful listeners swooned and shivered, circling the record like kids around a bonfire. *For Emma* became synonymous with dark winter ennui: the musical translation of earth's cruelest season.
By the end of 2008, | Bon Iver: Blood Bank EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12581-blood-bank-ep/ | Blood Bank EP | For Emma, Forever Ago-- Bon Iver's 2007 debut LP-- was nearly eclipsed by its own (endlessly repeated) mythology. Famously: Singer and songwriter Justin Vernon curled up in a "remote northern Wisconsin cabin" for three epic, torturous months of post-heartbreak introspection/catharsis, writing the songs which would ultimately comprise his first solo album. For Emma was self-released by Vernon before being picked up by Jagjaguwar and afforded a proper launch; grateful listeners swooned and shivered, circling the record like kids around a bonfire. For Emma became synonymous with dark winter ennui: the musical translation of earth's cruelest season.
By the end of 2008, Bon Iver-- along with similarly bearded, folk-minded acts like Fleet Foxes-- became emblematic of a new, woodsier trend in indie rock. Although it boasted its own brand of (presumably unintentional) theater, For Emma was frequently cited as an antidote of sorts to Auto-Tuned, vocoder-laden pop. It seems particularly skewering, then, that Bon Iver's four-song follow-up-- the Blood Bank EP-- closes with a long, a cappella folk song wherein Vernon's voice is so aggressively filtered through a vocoder that you're likely to back off the stereo and double-check the contents of your drink.
Recorded in four different locations at varying times (from December 2006 through June 2008, in an assortment of apartments, roads, hunting lodges, and studios), Blood Bank's A-side ("Blood Bank", "Beach Baby") is considerably less jarring than its second half, although neither feels unprecedented-- while Vernon wrote these songs to be played with a band (unlike on For Emma, Vernon's got two steady backers here), the EP is still imbued with all the intimacy and desperation that made For Emma so beloved.
"Blood Bank" opens with prodding acoustic strums and a series of hushed "oohs" (unmistakably reminiscent of Iron and Wine's lo-fi debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle), before Vernon begins: "I met you at the blood bank, we were looking at the bags," he explains, tossing off the kind of opening sentence most aspiring novelists spend their whole lives praying for. "Beach Baby", with its steel guitar and stomach-punching lyrics ("When you're out, tell your lucky one to know that you'll leave/ But don't you lock when you're fleeing, I'd like not to hear keys") feels spare and fleeting, disappearing into the runout groove before you realize it's over.
"Babys" features a prickly, unrelenting keyboard riff and a curiously zoological refrain ("Summer comes, to multiply!") but "Woods" is the most intriguing cut here: For armchairists prone to detached psychoanalysis, For Emma's legend might suggest that Vernon has a penchant for escapism, and there's no easier way to eschew the crags of your own voice than by piling on studio effects. Vocoder isn't exactly a shack in the mountains, but, when employed to excess, it's about as close as a vocalist can get to going off-grid. Still, "Woods" feels like more of a formal experiment than an emotional one, and the results are oddly and unexpectedly stunning. Vernon's folksinger-in-a-cabin origins might not be exceptional, but "Woods" sort of is-- it's disorienting and delicate, a mix of Vernon's staunchly organic vocals and otherworldly effects, punctuated, on occasion, by sharp, falsetto howls. It's the kind of thing that sounds hideous on paper, but eventually coalesces in practice; ironically, the Auto-Tune serves as more of a muddler than a safety net, and without it, it's hard to know if "Woods" would feel so intoxicating.
Blood Bank certainly dispels concerns that Vernon's accomplishment was somehow environmental-- that For Emma's poetic circumstances, and not its contents, were responsible for its success. Blood Bank is still a wintry record-- there's snow on the cover, and lyrics about snow, and, if you listen on vinyl, the metaphorical snow of hissing surface noise-- but Bon Iver is hardly a seasonal taste. | 2009-01-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-01-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | January 20, 2009 | 7.9 | 876f01b3-9098-45fe-83e0-1be81badb914 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
The Oakland rapper’s quarantine album is meant to portray a radically different artist. More often, he just finds new ways to telegraph the same stories he’s told all along. | The Oakland rapper’s quarantine album is meant to portray a radically different artist. More often, he just finds new ways to telegraph the same stories he’s told all along. | G-Eazy: Everything’s Strange Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/g-eazy-everythings-strange-here/ | Everything’s Strange Here | G-Eazy named his last album after an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, to suggest he’s tortured and well-read; he used one of its songs to rap about flushing condoms down the toilet, to suggest that his sexual partners plot to steal his semen. Throughout his decade-long career, the Oakland artist has sought to differentiate himself among white frat rappers by clinging to a self-serious, hamfisted darkness. He brags about parties, then wheezes that they’re killing him. He wallows in the gilded hallmarks of celebrity, usually finding a way to also complain about his exes. It’s a boring schtick.
In quarantine, G-Eazy has had “the fortunate opportunity to self-reflect, grow and evolve,” as he wrote on Instagram. He’s covered David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and the xx; he’s been learning piano over FaceTime. On his new album, Everything’s Strange Here, we’re meant to hear a radically different Gerald Earl Gillum, one who’s mostly abandoned rap in favor of singing. More often, though, he just finds new ways to telegraph the same stories he’s told all along.
Everything’s Strange Here oozes melodrama to the point of parody. It opens with a cover of a Beck song used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and progresses to crawling ballads about coke baggies with “trouble packed inside.” “Life is suffering, oh yes, I know,” G-Eazy wails on “Every Night of the Year,” a five-minute exercise in clumsy writing (“About me/They’ll reminisce”) and gnarled, synth-bathed guitar. “My mind is in a fight against the time that I have left,” he rasps on “Nostalgia Cycle.” G-Eazy isn’t a terrible singer, though the effects-heavy production seems to purposefully obscure his voice. And even though these are still soggy odes to crushed pills and the dangers of anonymous sex, they’re exponentially more interesting than his usual material.
Out of this mush of hotboxed platitudes and theatrical existentialism emerges one of the best songs G-Eazy’s ever made. “Free Porn Cheap Drugs” isn’t profound or even particularly pleasant—his voice is a nasally scratch—but it condenses all the faux noir and dilute sadness into one stark, impactful statement. “Desensitize and just let go,” he sings. “No bright screens, no place to go.” It sounds like acceptance, a rare plea for emotional connection that doesn’t arrive tucked between brags. This is the G-Eazy who could be a genuinely intriguing artist: contemplative and remorseful, but not morose.
Unfortunately, maybe inevitably, the album swings back into claustrophobic pettiness. After nine tracks without any rapping, the final song begins with a classic G-Eazy grunt, followed by the announcement, “Talking about my crazy-ass ex.” It descends into a twitchy, bitter rant about a “selfish” ex-girlfriend, but the character is so common in G-Eazy’s music that the specifics are almost irrelevant. Even in this new, softer soundscape, he paints women as spiteful and conniving. “You turned me into a monster,” he moans on “Back to What You Knew.” “You keep acting like you’re perfect, but the smile that you wear is too fake,” he complains on “In the Middle.” Words like these pierce the album’s gloss, breaking the illusion that, at age 31, G-Eazy has shifted and grown. Everything’s Strange Here winds up sounding like another caricature of the women he can’t stop condemning: shiny and novel at first, but ultimately corrosive.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | RCA | June 30, 2020 | 5.6 | 8772cce2-94c7-443a-90af-390a78735b02 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, and Pusha T all star on the fifth album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon crew, another gloomy party playlist for the end of the world. | Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, and Pusha T all star on the fifth album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon crew, another gloomy party playlist for the end of the world. | Gorillaz: Humanz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23146-humanz/ | Humanz | In the spring of 2016, Damon Albarn tells Pusha T to picture, if he would, an album that envisioned Donald Trump winning the presidency. Albarn was working on new Gorillaz material, the first in six years, and he had been squinting at the man brandishing his shriveled claws at his Republican challengers and bragging about his dick size and imagining him in charge of the free world. “When it really happened,” Pusha T said, “I was like, ‘Wait a minute…I started wondering like, what type of crystal ball did this guy have?”
It’s a funny little anecdote, considering how closely the fifth studio album from Gorillaz resembles its predecessors in tone, style, and mood. The cartoon-band project of Albarn and Jamie Hewlett has evolved into a surprising little institution by relying on a sturdy formula: Return every few years with an album loaded up with au courant guests and a doomsday vibe that fits whatever disaster is currently dominating the headlines. Post-9/11 panic? Great Recession malaise? Trumpian discontent? Gorillaz have a song for that somewhere. Hitting play on a Spotify blender of Gorillaz will take you across eras, continents, genres—Bobby Womack will show up, as will Lou Reed and Ibrahim Ferrer and Tina Weymouth. But somehow, it will all sound like the inside of the same suburban-mall Gamestop, circa 2000. Damon Albarn’s vague ideas about societal passivity and dystopia feel roughly the same now as they did around the release of the first Gorillaz album, and they will probably feel the same in 2028, when President Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is running for reelection.
As usual, the guest list on Humanz promises untold riches—Vince Staples, Danny Brown, Kelela, Pusha T, Mavis Staples, D.R.A.M., and Jehnny Beth from Savages—on which the music doesn’t deliver. No matter the rotating cast, Gorillaz tracks come in a few basic colors and flavors: A stew of fat drums, gloomy synth patches, crooned and muttered hooks from Albarn in the background. With this reliable frame, every guest ends up smeared with Gorillaz makeup and bearing a whiff of Suicide Squad-style corporate menace.
Humanz mostly feels like a playlist as a result, with each song acting as a self-contained referendum on how this particular guest fares in Gorillaz World. Vince Staples sprints his way through “Ascension” without finding much traction in his surroundings. The joy and weightlessness that Popcaan brings so naturally to his usual guest spots is extinguished by the the drizzly murk of “Saturnz Barz.” De La Soul, who showed up on Gorillaz’s 2005 hit “Feel Good, Inc.” and on Plastic Beach, are jostled by a clomping, inelegant beat on “Momentz” that gives them none of the room to sound effortless or funny or wry or observant. They sound lost in the middle of the wrong party.
“The wrong party” or “the right party” is a useful Gorillaz rubric. Grace Jones is at the wrong party on “Charger,” which introduces you to a wriggling little two-note worm of a guitar lick before Jones shows up to mutter a few words. Neither she, nor Albarn, nor that wiggling guitar, seem to have thought of much else to hold your attention. Danny Brown and Kelela are at home on the clanking synth-popper “Submission,” pitching in measured jolts of wistfulness and pop-eyed panic. The Chicago legend Peven Everett sounds fantastic on “Strobelite,” spilling effortless warmth all over the track. Singer and rapper and Virginia ham D.R.A.M. is at the right party, pitching in stacked, breathy multipart harmonies behind Albarn’s lead vocal, on “Andromeda.”
But the sneaky star of that song is the streaking comet-trail synth that repeatedly claims center stage. It sounds thick and wispy all at once, a lovingly rendered globule of sound so dazzling it turns everything around it superfluous. Guests may come and go, but Albarn’s menagerie of pawn-shop synth gear remains the reason the party exists. The most powerful and heartfelt moment on all of Humanz comes when all the humans disappear, and Albarn is left to himself to croon sadly to his machines: “Busted and Blue” could have been a song on the last Blur album. It explores similar feelings of glassy-eyed melancholy and resignation. And most importantly, it sounds gorgeous, full of digitized finger snaps that spiral out like space junk drifting across the atmosphere. The synth washes here feel like orchestral string sections, and as the emotion intensifies the flimsy Gorillaz pretense burns off again, as it does on every Gorillaz album: All the masks and cameos aside, this still feels like a Damon Albarn solo project, a place for him to treat the studio like the welcoming arms of oblivion, and for us to join him. | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Parlophone / Warner Bros. | April 28, 2017 | 6.9 | 8775598e-68da-4b41-a87f-59f498f66442 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On her well-formed debut EP, Harriette Pilbeam's version of dream pop is more pop than dream. | On her well-formed debut EP, Harriette Pilbeam's version of dream pop is more pop than dream. | Hatchie: Sugar & Spice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hatchie-sugar-and-spice-ep/ | Sugar & Spice EP | New artists don’t get much time to carve out an identity anymore. So it’s either fortunate or canny that Harriette Pilbeam—an Australian bassist and singer-songwriter who records as Hatchie—opens Sugar & Spice with a song that captures her aesthetic even before the vocals kick in. Like most of the record, “Sure” is a wide-eyed appeal to a lover that alternates between drowsy verses and honeyed choruses. The intro foregrounds an acoustic guitar melody that definitely recalls the riff on “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer. But first, Pilbeam efficiently codes the track as dream pop, opening with a buzz of feedback so short as to be almost imperceptible before diving in with a chiming bassline.
Hatchie’s version of dream pop is more pop than dream, using the airy vocals and coruscating guitars of her 4AD heroes in service of giddy love songs with massive hooks. This synthesis yielded her debut single, “Try,” which became a surprise hit on Australian radio station Triple J before appearing on the EP. Over guitar jangle and glittery bursts of synth, she reckons with a romance that has devolved into sinking feelings and sleepless nights. But just before Pilbeam resigns herself to conscious uncoupling, she starts ramping up to an exultant chorus: “I know you wanna try/I can feel it in your sigh.” In the context of relationship talk, the word “try” is about as sexy as couples therapy, yet Hatchie makes it sound like an adventure.
Most pop songs about love fall at one extreme on the timeline from infatuation to breakup, but Sugar & Spice obsesses over everything in between. On the title track, a tart guitar-and-drum passage cuts the sweetness of Pilbeam’s high-pitched vocals, as she worries that someone she’s still mad about seems to be losing interest, then dares him to soothe her uncertainty. As she does in the chorus of “Try,” Pilbeam underlines that sudden shift from anxiety to hopefulness with a vocal melody so addictive it almost feels malicious. If a similar attempt at an earworm on “Sugar & Spice” doesn’t land with the same ecstatic force, blame the hackneyed refrain: “You don’t call me ‘baby’ anymore.”
Pilbeam switches up her formula on the EP’s best track, “Sleep.” A sunshower of keyboard anchors the melody. The chorus swoops in before the 15-second mark, stacking the vocals in paper-thin layers. It’s an inspired production choice that makes the song immersive and weightless at once, setting precisely the right mood for a fantasy about meeting a sleeping lover in a dream and coaxing out of them all the things they’ve left unsaid in waking life.
When it comes to writing breathless love songs with hooks that rival those of alt-pop idols like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira—both of whom she’s cited as influences—Pilbeam is a prodigy. She recorded “Try” in college. Now, after releasing a debut EP on which three out of five tracks strongly resemble one another in style and subject matter, her challenge is to vary her songwriting without losing the infectiousness of her early singles or the dreamy tangles of guitar and bass that might have convinced Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins to remix “Sure.”
Her lyrics can sound like an afterthought. Sugar & Spice is as cliché-ridden as its title, all dreams, stars, and pregnant sighs. “I don’t think I’ve that many interesting life experiences yet,” Pilbeam recently told Pitchfork, explaining that she was in her first serious relationship (her boyfriend, Joe Agius, is her guitarist) and still needs to work on “how poetic my writing is as opposed to just explaining how I feel.”
This self-awareness is a good sign, but Pilbeam sounds more distinctive when she’s leaning into bluntness than when she’s reaching for the rarefied heights of poetry. Although it isn’t Hatchie’s most memorable song, the unadorned honesty of closing track “Bad Guy” is exhilarating: “I’m backwards/And I feel stupid/Watching you back away,” she sings. For the first time on Sugar & Spice, the realness of the lyrics resonates with the same force as the music. Sometimes heavenly sounds are most potent paired with words that tether them to the unpoetic push and pull of life on Earth. | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | May 26, 2018 | 7.5 | 877c6ada-9555-4beb-9916-705fcee397c2 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
The first album from the breakout star of New Jersey club rap isn’t quite the revelation its title suggests, but his breakneck sound remains intoxicating. | The first album from the breakout star of New Jersey club rap isn’t quite the revelation its title suggests, but his breakneck sound remains intoxicating. | Bandmanrill: Club Godfather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bandmanrill-club-godfather/ | Club Godfather | Any song backed by the iconic triple kick drum of a Jersey club beat is designed to test your speed and precision, and Newark rapper Bandmanrill is at the forefront of a new strain thriving in the Garden State. He’s far from the only East Coast spitter to embrace rapping over club music—the Philly and Baltimore club rap scenes are equally rich and adventurous—but his precise balance of breathless energy and swaggering cool has helped his voice rise to the top of the young subgenre. Early singles like “Heartbroken” and “I Am Newark” were propelled by his crisp chest-beating and tales of short-lived romance as much as their respective rhythmic pulses, a unique meld that’s helped Bandman focus the spotlight of TikTok and YouTube’s recent obsession with dance music back onto one of its cultural hubs.
While Jersey club and house music are in Bandman’s blood—his father is a club DJ—he’s not trying to limit himself. During a recent visit to On the Radar Radio, he revealed that his earliest songs had a melodic bent similar to New York stalwarts A Boogie Wit da Hoodie or Lil Tjay, and that his first foray into club rap came from a playful home studio session. He’s become as preoccupied with showing his range as he is with showing his history: “It’s a lotta talent in Jersey outside of rapping on club beats, but at the end of the day, that’s what we known for. It’s always gon’ be there regardless, so why not?” That isn’t to say Club Godfather, Bandman’s first full-length mixtape and Warner debut, is some massive stylistic shift. The vast majority of these songs move to the pulse of Jersey club, just with glossier production in the vein of the prestige rap coming from his neighbors in New York. Tracks like “Influence” and “Piano” scan as standard club rap made to sound a touch more expensive, like a velour jacket over a plain tee. The handful of experiments across Godfather are a mixed bag, but the breakneck sound Bandman made his name on remains intoxicating.
Much of the exuberance comes from frequent collaborator MCVertt, who’s credited on nearly half the album and many of Bandman’s most popular songs to date. It’s a solid formula, and the most memorable examples seesaw between maximal and minimal renditions. “Bouncin’” is an early album highlight built around nothing more than a sped-up trumpet sample and drum loop. Its zany, stripped-back canvas gives Bandman and guest rapper NLE Choppa room to devour a beat that sounds equally fit to soundtrack a block party or a Scooby-Doo chase. Two collaborations with Bronx rapper Sha EK (“Jiggy in Jersey,” Who You Touch”) take a more maximal approach, mixing in the moody accents and rumbling bass of New York drill. Club rap and drill share similar structure and content but differ in rhythm and texture: Club music skews bright and peppy, while drill seethes beneath menacing grooves. Bandman and EK’s blend of the two feels natural, and their respective breathy delivery and slick talk form a lethal yin-yang—they cram more excitement into the 108 seconds of “Who You Touch” than many rappers coax out of entire albums.
Godfather trips over itself when it takes a few abrupt left turns. Mid-album cut “Don’t Mix” abandons club music for a stab at pain-rap balladry that lands like a forgotten Polo G deep cut. If Bandman wants to continue expanding, he should stick with ideas like “Beautiful Diamonds,” which gleams with pianos and a shimmering vocal sample from Yoyis’ 2021 song “Diamond Eyes” that sounds airlifted from the stadium-ready EDM of the 2010s. The song feels ready to derail at any moment, but a subdued kick drum grounds Bandman in the rhythm as he celebrates victory against the odds. The touch of melody he brings to the second verse (“I told my niggas we next/We gon’ stack up this money and flex”) does more to sell the line than the writing, and the armor of his self-belief holds the song together.
Up to this point, Bandman has been known as a singles artist. Viral hits have minted many a star, but even the most confident spitters can hit a brick wall when it’s album time. Club Godfather isn’t quite the revelation its title suggests and half the tracklist is made up of previously released, albeit very enjoyable, songs. But its best tracks are unnervingly catchy—and Bandman, who’s effectively a pioneer of a subgenre that has yet to truly take off, has more than enough skill and presence to carry them. He’s not here to change your life or make you think too hard; he just wants to see if you can keep up. | 2022-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-10T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner | November 10, 2022 | 7.3 | 87876dfa-b163-4f1d-a037-3261751f4b51 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Oh Sees leader John Dwyer indulges his jammiest tendencies alongside a new cast of powerhouse players, channeling a distinctly 1970s sort of communal exploration. | Oh Sees leader John Dwyer indulges his jammiest tendencies alongside a new cast of powerhouse players, channeling a distinctly 1970s sort of communal exploration. | Various Artists: Bent Arcana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bent-arcana-bent-arcana/ | Bent Arcana | John Dwyer likes to keep Discogs editors busy. Over the last couple of decades, the Oh Sees guitarist and bandleader has founded a string of often short-lived projects—Pink and Brown, Damaged Bug, Zeigenbock Kopf—while also turning out a steady stream of music with his best-known group (which might also be written as Thee Oh Sees, or OSees, or OCS, depending on whim, day of the week, phase of the moon, and so on). You get the sense that Dwyer’s slippery approach to identity is guided by his puckish streak, but there’s a method, too: Each new name offers an opportunity to view his firecracker creativity from a fresh angle.
So it is with Bent Arcana, which is shorthand for the band’s official name: Ryan Sawyer, Peter Kerlin, Kyp Malone, Brad Caulkins, Tom Dolas, Marcos Rodriguez, Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita, Joce Soubiran, Andres Renteria, and John Dwyer. Recent Oh Sees records have augmented the group’s garage-punk attack with a looser, jammier sensibility, and now Dwyer is going all in, assembling a sprawling ensemble drawn from the worlds of jazz and avant-garde improvisation. It doesn’t quite feel right to call it a “supergroup”—that suggests a certain level of name recognition, and the closest you get here to star material is TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone, holding it down on modular synth. The lineup favors underground heads, all apparently selected for their technical mastery and taste for live experimentation: Brooklyn drummer-for-hire Ryan Sawyer, Sunwatchers bassist Peter Kerlin, saxophonists Joce Soubiran and Brad Caulkins, and violinist Laena “Geronimo” Myers-Ionita. Bent Arcana is Dwyer’s way to break free from the shackles of songcraft and lose himself in the ocean of group creativity.
The six tracks of Bent Arcana’s self-titled debut are excerpted from five days of extended improvisation at Dwyer’s own Stu-Stu-Studio recording space. The mood is freeform and exploratory in a distinctly 1970s vein: think electric Miles Davis, the furiously complex jazz fusion of Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the funkier end of krautrock. If you heard much of this music blind, you’d struggle to date it. Hitting play on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” feels like being dropped in midway through some long-lost Can live performance: a “Mother Sky”-style drumbeat rises and falls, feints and tumbles, as plectrums scrape along strings and a modular synth chokes out clouds of static.
Though Dwyer calls Bent Arcana “frenetic” in his liner notes for the album, it generally lacks the pugilistic attitude of much of his work. Opening track “The Gate” is swampy and restrained, with drums set to a low simmer, and snakish guitar and saxophone keeping loose and low. Perhaps it’s the title, but “Outré Sorcellerie” has a whiff of the occult; its shadowy improv will be familiar to fans of the influential Euro-jazz label ECM, as a lonely saxophone weaves through a gloomy antechamber of chimes and bass.
Though Bent Arcana can sag in its less propulsive moments, the band generally hits the right ratio between eerie investigation and chunky jams. A highlight in the latter style is “Oblivion Sigil,” 11 minutes of bass-and-drums shuffle with Dwyer adding the occasional acrobatic guitar scrawl. The record’s most melodically memorable moment comes in “Mimi,” a gorgeous but disappointingly brief saxophone duet, over in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 84 seconds.
Dwyer has hinted this might be the first chapter in a series of releases dedicated to this off-the-cuff approach. You wouldn’t want his new band to nudge out his more song-powered releases, but given his exceptional work rate, there’s probably not much danger of that. Though Bent Arcana is certainly an ensemble effort, it also stands as an example of yet another style that Dwyer’s more or less nailed. If you’re going to dispense with songwriting, here’s the best way to do it—assemble a band of extraordinary players, hit on a groove, and follow it wherever it takes you.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to the band as Bent Arcana. Bent Arcana is shorthand for the group, which is named after all of its members.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Castle Face | August 22, 2020 | 7.1 | 8788699a-eb2a-4c87-a646-98a13b94ed83 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Delivering his most interesting work in years, the UK techno producer throws convention to the winds while indulging a dark sense of humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque. | Delivering his most interesting work in years, the UK techno producer throws convention to the winds while indulging a dark sense of humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque. | Blawan: Woke Up Right Handed EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blawan-woke-up-right-handed-ep/ | Woke Up Right Handed EP | If a certain punk band hadn’t gotten there first, then Anarchy in the UK would have made an excellent alternative title for Woke Up Right Handed, the third EP this year—and the first for UK super-indie XL—from British post-dubstep survivor Blawan. Woke Up Right Handed doesn’t so much ignore the rules of electronic music as stumble around blissfully unaware of their existence, the kind of record that plumps for a parabolic curve when asked to choose between left and right. The result, happily, is Blawan’s most interesting work in years, a return to the turbulent spirit of the Brandy-sampling “Getting Me Down” or the comedy tech-horror of “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” after years of largely furrowed-brow techno.
Like “Bodies,” Woke Up Right Handed is, at its best, a surprisingly funny record, employing a dark humor that feeds off the preposterous and the grotesque. “Under Belly,” the EP’s standout track, is techno re-tooled for maximum nervous laughter, sporting a thoroughly ridiculous, steel-clad electronic shape that collywobbles around like an iron slug in a jelly. To compound matters, this is set to an electronic rhythm closer to the twist than to Tiësto and carried by a bassline forged of volcanic rumbles. The song’s charred-metal sculpture will be familiar to fans of Blawan’s 2018 debut album, Wet Will Always Dry (a record that also featured a killer hook, on “Careless”), or his more recent Soft Waahls EP. But Wet Will Always Dry largely played out within the 4/4 strictures of techno, a shadow that the more adventurous Soft Waahls also couldn’t quite escape. On “Under Belly” the brakes are firmly off: There is scant pattern to the song, an almost total disregard for dancefloor convention, and little separation between musical elements. It’s like a techno record that has been rescued from a lava flow.
There’s nothing quite as outlandish on the rest of this EP, but Blawan’s mischievous spirit rules throughout. Both “Close the Cycle” and “Gosk” sport riffs that could, in other hands (or perhaps in Blawan’s own, were he feeling less impish) become the kind of sledgehammer ear-worm motifs that translate into lucrative Ibiza club residencies. But Blawan treats them with the disdain of minor irritations. The tightly wound electronic coil that powers through “Gosk” is scattered to the wind by a bizarre mechanical scurrying and a snare drum for whom repetition is just a word in the dictionary, while the thick, serpentine riff of “Close the Cycle” refuses to sit still in the mix, its inconstant, boggy squelch as treacherous as quicksand.
“Close the Cycle,” in particular, feels like a work of deliberate obfuscation. The song features a vocal from Blawan, whose catchy rhythmic patterns and half-submerged words never quite converge into recognizable phrases, leaving the enthusiastic listener off balance. “Blika,” which opens the EP, is similar. What does “Blika” mean, anyway? And what is the other phrase Blawan solemnly intones over the song’s flinty, crab-like beat? We may never know. But perhaps uncertainty is the perfect response to this deliciously amorphous EP. Like any good anarchic work, Woke Up Right Handed stands for subversion over structure and diversion over devoir.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ternesc | December 7, 2021 | 7.8 | 8788d282-3f71-4c93-8a67-b6fab82b9a92 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The DBTs return, focusing on the songwriting of Patterson Hood and refreshingly reconnecting with the macabre and darker corners of the American psyche. | The DBTs return, focusing on the songwriting of Patterson Hood and refreshingly reconnecting with the macabre and darker corners of the American psyche. | Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13993-the-big-to-do/ | The Big To-Do | On their first two albums (1998's Gangstabilly and 1999's Pizza Deliverance), the Drive-By Truckers were supreme redneck jokesters, specializing in scabrous white-trash vignettes owing more to Southern Gothic fiction (Flannery O'Connor, Barry Hannah) than any sub-Mason-Dixon stand-up hacks. As the band matured and its de facto frontman Patterson Hood started writing songs that were weightier and more universal in sentiment, however, its more darkly off-kilter early work came to be generally viewed as juvenilia, the dicking around these guys did before they grew up into real artists. That would be a mistake, because songs like "18 Wheels of Love", "Bulldozers and Dirt", and "Zoloft" were wickedly clever and deeply revealing slices of Southern life that hold relatable truths for all listeners regardless of region. That said, it's a refreshing surprise that the group's latest album, The Big To-Do, finds Hood reconnecting with the macabre, with grim twists and booze-fueled mayhem, and with the dark corners of the American psyche.
The album begins morbidly with "Daddy Learned to Fly", its whining riff propelling the first-person reflections of a young boy whose father has died. It's a colorful kind of morbidity, however, as we learn the boy has been eased into an acceptance of loss by the creative lie that his father is perpetually flying the friendly skies. Weighing the most deadly serious facts of life against a highly skewed sense of irreverence has always been one of DBT's greatest feats, and it's a balancing act the group maintains throughout the album's raucous first half-- on the booze-fueled bottoming-out of "Fourth Night of My Drinking", the small-town sex scandal of the portentously delivered "The Wig He Made Her Wear", and the nasty little slice of backwater intrigue called "Drag the Lake Charlie".
It's a damn good thing Hood drops some of his gravitas, too, because his partner in crime, Mike Cooley (aka the Trucker you've always been able to rely on for witty shit-kickers) inexplicably contributes only three songs out of The Big To-Do's 13. Two of the three are great, as "Birthday Boy" offers up the musings of a savvy stripper while "Get Downtown" provides a shaggy snapshot of no-account losers outfitted to a shucking Chuck Berry groove. Still, that leaves quite a heavy burden on Hood's shoulders, even after you account for a couple of very nice turns from bassist Shonna Tucker, who was a bit of a weak link on Creation's Dark but who chills the blood here on the heartrending, hymnlike "You Got Another", then sets it racing again on the full-throated "(It's Gonna Be) I Told You So".
To his credit, Hood's restored mischievousness manages to carry the album for quite some time, but he starts to falter along the record's back stretch. "This Fucking Job" and "After the Scene Dies" are sonically torqued-up and admirably pissed-off, but their respective gripes against occupational drudgery and the death of the rock'n'roll dream represent well-trodden ground for this songwriter. The Big To-Do then proceeds to bow out rather unceremoniously with the relative whimpers of "Santa Fe", "The Flying Wallendas", and Cooley's sweet but tepid "Eyes Like Glue". The Truckers demonstrated with 2008's Brighter Than Creation's Dark that they don't need non-stop yuks and grotesqueries to reach greatness, but the best moments of The Big To-Do nonetheless offer tantalizing proof that these guys still possess fascinatingly warped minds when they feel like showing 'em off. | 2010-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | March 16, 2010 | 7.4 | 878b1e64-3eb7-4732-b8ed-6ffd5d856c59 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
On their second post-reunion album, the shoegaze band sound emboldened, merrily tinkering with their legacy. | On their second post-reunion album, the shoegaze band sound emboldened, merrily tinkering with their legacy. | Ride: This Is Not a Safe Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ride-this-is-not-a-safe-place/ | This Is Not a Safe Place | If you listen closely to This Is Not a Safe Place, Ride’s second post-reunion album, you can hear the exact moment when they stop caring what people think. It happens 16 seconds into the first track “R.I.D.E.”: the shuffling drums pause, the swirling guitar effect abates, and a voice solemnly intones the band’s name into the silence, like a hip-hop producer testing a calling card on their first BeatStars upload. It’s strange, funny, and unexpected, an out-of-the-blue, well-actually-why-not experiment that suggests a band entirely at peace with their place in the world.
This same happily adventurous spirit runs through the best of This Is Not a Safe Place. The band has variously described it as a guitar album and a work inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Behind both of these not-particularly-illuminating descriptions lies an emboldened album by an emboldened band, one that seems to realize that people genuinely like them after all these years, giving them license to merrily tinker with their legacy.
London producer and DJ Erol Alkan, who produced 2017’s Weather Diaries, is back on board, but This Is Not a Safe Place feels considerably more natural than its predecessor, which felt like the work of a band that felt like it had to change, rather than one that really wanted to. This Is Not a Safe Place easily encapsulates everything from juddering guitar assaults (the very Swervedriver “Kill Switch”) to Byrds-ian jangle pop (“Future Love”) and acoustic laments about the internet (“Dial Up”). Strangest of all is “Repetition,” which sounds uncannily like the work of the Human League, made all the better by lyrics that seemingly thumb noses at fans who want Ride to knock out “Drive Blind”-style guitar fuzz until they keel over on their own amps. “Repetition” sounds—in the very best way—like a song knocked together in five minutes of spare studio time with inspiration flowing and the pressure off. “Dial Up,” meanwhile, cleverly intertwines a synth line among its acoustic guitars, the undulating electronic tones adding to the song’s overall effect rather than tearing the listener’s attention away.
This Is Not a Safe Place may not quite have the consistency of Slowdive’s self-titled fourth album—still the benchmark for reformed shoegaze acts—but it gives Ride the start of a very listenable post-reformation playlist. You wonder, though, what might have been had the album maintained its early zip. “Kill Switch,” for all its noise, lacks a notable melody, while “Clouds of Saint Marie” and “Eternal Recurrence” feel a little wan. “In This Room,” meanwhile, is almost a great song, its wistful melody stretched thin over eight and a half minutes. This Is Not a Safe Place is not, in the end, the classic Ride Mark 2 release that its first three songs so casually tease. But it has enough joy, verve and invention to suggest that Ride could get there one day.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita | August 15, 2019 | 6.5 | 878fbd23-0c23-4667-b37a-dd895ab4ac8f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
While the brooding pop singer can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, III is still Banks’ best album to date. | While the brooding pop singer can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, III is still Banks’ best album to date. | Banks: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/banks-iii/ | III | In 2013, Jillian Banks emerged as a poster girl for brooding, twilight-hours pop. She made all the right moves for an artist working in the burgeoning “alternative R&B” space: She committed to a monochromatic aesthetic, linked up with trendy collaborators, and commissioned Hype Machine-ready remixes. It worked, to an extent. Following a stint opening for the Weeknd, Banks became a relatively well-known name. Yet despite impressive stream counts, even her biggest singles weren’t quite enough to push her over the edge. Her signature sound relied on cookie-cutter production and “indie-pop voice” that weren’t hard to find elsewhere. With her latest album, III, Banks seems eager to reestablish her footing and take greater creative risks. While she can’t always shake the anodyne songwriting that plagued her past work, it’s still her best album to date.
Other than Banks herself, the most prominent presence on III is producer and Bon Iver collaborator BJ Burton, who produces or co-produces 10 of the album’s 13 tracks. He brings his unique bag of tricks—the Messina vocal harmonizer technique popularized on 22, A Million, the apocalyptic distortion that defined Low’s Double Negative. Paired with Banks’ voice, these strategies work wonders, and album opener “Till Now” sets the tone with liberal doses of both. A song like “Stroke” may lack lyrical finesse—“Say it’s hard to breathe inside my ocean/I give you the deep, but you’re still floating”—but flanked by Burton’s growling fuzz, Banks stands confident, smirking as waves of low-end crash around her.
On its face, lead single “Gimme” is another haughty banger about unfulfilled lust. But where on past albums it may have sounded lifeless, Banks’ voice sears through “Gimme” like twisted metal. Hudson Mohawke’s speaker-busting drums and bass blasts undergird a syncopated synth line reminiscent of Justin Timberlake’s classic “My Love.” Ballad “Hawaiian Mazes” strikes a diaristic tone against a melancholy backdrop of piano and old-world string trills, courtesy of Frank Ocean musical director Buddy Ross. “Telling me why you left and then complain you’re alone and I don’t know why,” Banks cries at the song’s apex. Though her lyrics can be as stilted as ever (“I tried my best to follow, but you moving too fast on ya daddy long legs”), the stream-of-consciousness style works far better than more playlist-ready fare.
When Banks does attempt the latter, she stumbles. The lone collaboration, “Look What You’re Doing to Me,” featuring Francis and the Lights, fails to extract a memorable melody from either party. “Alaska” half-heartedly pursues a pseudo-dancehall vibe that never finds its rhythm, while “If We Were Made of Water” tries to rebottle the quivering magic of “Warm Water,” Banks’ similarly aquatic 2013 breakout single. When she sings, “Maybe if you say it again, change some words around, maybe I’ll believe you then,” she’s also speaking on behalf of her listeners.
The most interesting moments on III tap into life experiences beyond doomed relationships. On “The Fall,” a sharp-tongued critique of the music industry co-written with Miguel, Banks adopts the perspective of a record company bigwig and attacks herself viciously, painting a picture of gaslighting and sexualization that scans all too familiar. It’s not her best vocal performance—Banks can sound brittle through Auto-Tune, and rap-singing isn’t her forte—but it’s one of the only times we glimpse the real Jillian Banks, ostensibly the driving force behind all these songs. Seven years after her debut, III brings the overblown excitement around her career to an official close. With the death of that hype, she’s finally delivered a record that gives her room to expand.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Harvest | July 17, 2019 | 6.5 | 87941155-a9d0-4ac5-bbb1-91736b7959e8 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Light in the Attic keeps up its winning streak, reissuing one of the most underrated albums of the 1960s, as well as rate work from the uncompromising Monks. | Light in the Attic keeps up its winning streak, reissuing one of the most underrated albums of the 1960s, as well as rate work from the uncompromising Monks. | The Monks: Black Monk Time / The Early Years (1964-1965) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12905-black-monk-time-the-early-years-1964-1965/ | Black Monk Time / The Early Years (1964-1965) | Alright, my name's Gary
Let's go, it's beat time, it's hop time, it's monk time!
On paper, it's hard to imagine a couplet that looks less like an opener for one of the best albums of the 1960s. When you hear it barked out by Monks lead vocalist Gary Burger over an otherworldly groove, though, it's an unlikely call to arms, and an immediate auditory stamp for one of the most strikingly original bands of the mid-60s. The band's sole studio album, released only in Germany in March 1966, has since become something of a legend, hailed as a precursor to punk and krautrock, and exerting influence far beyond its modest initial sales. Obscurities that routinely bathe in glowing praise naturally engender skepticism among people who haven't yet heard them, and often that skepticism is healthy. In the case of the Monks, though, all the praise is true: in 1966, Black Monk Time was beyond the cutting edge, and today it's easy to hear what made it so innovative and challenging.
The Monks were five Americans living in West Germany. They came there as G.I.s, stationed near Heidelberg in the southwestern Baden-Württemberg region, and the Monks began life inauspiciously as the 5 Torquays, a run-of-the-mill beat group that covered Chuck Berry and the latest English groups, drawing good local crowds. When their time in the Army was up, they stayed, but beneath the conventional exterior of the Torquays lay a group hungry to experiment and break the mold of beat music. They accidentally discovered guitar feedback during a rehearsal, and made it a part of their sound, to the dismay of club owners and some patrons. Their apparent willingness to experiment brought them to the attention of two German ad executives, Walther Niemann and Karl Remy, who the band took on as managers, and who would fundamentally reshape the band's image and sound.
You know we don't like the Army
What army?
Who cares what army?
Why do you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?
Mad Viet Cong!
My brother died in Vietnam
James Bond, who was he?
Stop it, stop it, I don't like it!
It's too loud for my ears!
It's this sequence of lines from "Monk Time" that drives home just what a different game Black Monk Time is. After his call to arms, Burger's demented vocal runs through a whithering critique of war, sealing it with a curt dismissal of James Bond, who at the time was the biggest movie hero in the world. It not only decries violence, but the glorification and fetishization of violence, and Larry Clark's brutal organ interjection is waved off with a couplet that swiftly co-opts critics of the band's new, chaotic sound. One of the things that makes "Monk Time" one of the all-time great album openers is how completely it distills the band and its music. The stomping, repetitive bass and drum groove, the splatter of fuzz guitar, the six-string electric banjo hammering out percussive chords, the flailing vocals and loud organ outbursts exemplify the band's confrontational, rhythm-based sound. This is not flower power-- it's rage inspired by senselessness and tempered with humor.
Perhaps paradoxically, what makes the Monks' attack on war and the military so effective is the military discipline they applied to the band. On stage and off, they wore monks' robes with noose neck ties and cut their hair in the traditional monks' tonsure, and their music has a rare precision for something so wild. The group shouts of "Shut up! Don't cry!" on "Shut Up" are in lock-step, and they nail the complex, interlocking rhythm of "Complication." All the members sang, and the backing vocals alternately back Burger with drawn-out chants and sudden, shouted responses. "Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy" combines a children's rhyme with a savage rhythmic attack.
As doggedly out-there as they could be, the Monks did possess some pop sense-- this music, unique and strange as it is, is entirely approachable, and the band's final recordings, made after Polygram panicked and told them to produce more commercial material, are deranged pop songs that the band genuinely seems to have fun with. "I Can't Get Over You" is like a cartoon version of pop music, with weird falsetto harmonies and a big, rubbery bassline, while "He Went Down to the Sea" has a tribal Beach Boys quality, with its hard drumming, harmonies and glockenspiel. These and a few others are added to Light in the Attic's reissue of the album, as they were to Infinite Zero's long out-of-print 1994 reissue.
On the other side of the band's brief career, The Early Years is a collection of the band's early demos, made as they felt their way toward the sound of Black Monk Time, along with a 45 made in 1964 when they were still the Torquays. It has a different running order, but contains the same tracks as Omplatten's out-of-print Five Upstart Americans compilation from 1999. LiTA's two reissues are meant to function as a combined package, and Kevin "Sipreano" Howes' detailed liner notes are written as one piece, split across both discs. The material heard here is good, though anyone new to the Monks should probably make sure they love Black Monk Time before picking it up, the same way you would with any band's demos. One of the interesting things about the demos is how clearly the band's vision had already crystalized-- the recording is structured something like a musical mass, with little churchy organ interludes from Larry Clark and a bit of banter from Burger. For a fan, to hear them honing their rhythmic attack is gratifying-- their sound was no accident.
The Monks' music sounds so inevitable on Black Monk Time that it's easy to forget how unlikely the band's story is. For these five guys to find each other in the Army and subsequently devote themselves so fully to such a unique sound, and for two advertising executives to find them and push them to get weirder-- well, there's a reason that even with every incredible change in popular music during the 60s, there's only one Monks. Their one album was revolutionary, but sparked no revolution, due to circumstances beyond the band's control. They wandered back home and got real jobs, played in other bands, and Burger even became mayor of Turtle River, Minnesota. All these years later, you have a chance to hear what they did together again. Don't miss out. | 2009-04-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-04-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 20, 2009 | 9.2 | 87a80cad-6805-4094-bded-769abe4210cf | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, together with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, swap their customary electronics for muscular, guitar-driven sounds influenced by bands like Slint and Unwound. | Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, together with percussionist Valentina Magaletti, swap their customary electronics for muscular, guitar-driven sounds influenced by bands like Slint and Unwound. | Moin: Moot! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moin-moot/ | Moot! | In pop music, the 1980s remain inescapable, but in the electronic realm, the 1990s currently reign supreme. The sounds of trance, jungle, garage, and IDM have all experienced a major resurgence in recent years; somehow things have reached a point where even electronica is being reevaluated and the average club kid often looks like an extra from The Fifth Element.
Moin’s debut album, Moot!, is heavily indebted to the ’90s as well. But instead of mining of classic Aphex Twin and Goldie records for inspiration, the UK outfit—which consists of Raime’s Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead along with percussionist and longtime collaborator Valentina Magaletti, who’s also logged time in the group Tomaga—dives deep into post-punk and post-hardcore, worshipping at the altar of bands like Slint, Shellac, and Unwound.
With its brawny riffs and jagged guitars, the largely instrumental Moot! brilliantly hearkens back to a time when labels like Dischord and Touch & Go were at the top of the indie-rock heap. It’s a direction that Andrews and Halstead have hinted at before, both with their initial Moin outings on Blackest Ever Black—which were released with little fanfare in 2012 and 2013—and again on 2016’s Tooth, by Raime. That LP infused the group’s usual low-end sonics with elements of muscular Albini-core, but Moot! tilts the balance heavily toward the latter. Although they haven’t abandoned electronics altogether, the guitar is now clearly front and center, as is Magaletti’s percussion, which gives the album a thrillingly organic feel.
For anyone who’s seen Raime in concert during the past few years, the thundering grooves of Moot! will likely ring familiar. Magaletti, who also provided drum sounds for both Raime LPs, has been part of the group’s touring lineup for several years now, and live recording techniques featured prominently in the new album’s creation. Moot! is a scrappy, stripped-down effort, but the general lack of polish does nothing to diminish the album’s power. The spiky “Lungs” sounds like something the Jesus Lizard might have cooked up (minus David Yow’s vocals), and the taut basslines of album highlight “Crappy Dreams Count” channel Fugazi. Songs like “I Can’t Help but Melt” and LP closer “It’s Never Goodbye”—the latter could be a lost track from Spiderland—slow things down, embracing the dirge while sprinkling a bit of psychedelia into the mix, but Moin’s intensity never wanes.
Thirty years ago, indie rock was rife with records that sounded like Moot!, and the bands of that era inspired successive waves of followers. But today, an album like this, coming from a context like Moin’s, feels radical. Most of the band’s peers put their guitars down a long time ago, and AD 93 isn’t known as a hub for post-punk experiments, but none of that matters once the sinewy, distortion-licked chords of LP opener “No to Gods, No to Sunsets” kick in. With its incantation-like vocals, the song also brings to mind the moody ambiance of groups like Three Mile Pilot, and that nightmarish spirit spills over into the feverishly chugging “Right Is Alright, Wrong Is to Belong,” another highlight.
Moot! is steeped in the past, but its appeal isn’t limited to its nostalgia factor. In a time when the electronic-music landscape has been flooded with precision-crafted DJ tools, escapist bouts of narcotic abstraction, and awkward pop-crossover attempts, Moin have taken a different route: plowing straight ahead, cranking their amps, and greeting listeners with a swift kick to the chest. It’s jarring, but it’s also an exhilarating reminder of just how powerful live music—and live post-punk in particular—can be, even in 2021. After a year-plus of life without concerts, Moot! is anything but.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | AD 93 | July 13, 2021 | 7.9 | 87b0453f-bf83-4d40-8aba-ecb615a6d4df | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ |
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