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For his third Telekinesis record, Michael Benjamin Lerner traded in producer Chris Walla for Spoon’s Jim Eno, and Dormarion's power pop is grander and tougher than Lerner's past material. | For his third Telekinesis record, Michael Benjamin Lerner traded in producer Chris Walla for Spoon’s Jim Eno, and Dormarion's power pop is grander and tougher than Lerner's past material. | Telekinesis: Dormarion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17748-telekinesis-dormarion/ | Dormarion | To paraphrase Sam "Ace" Rothstein, Michael Benjamin Lerner’s voice is like an emotional car wash. No matter what Lerner is singing about, it all comes out sounding clean, winsome, and nice. It’s a good voice for the music he makes as Telekinesis-- the power-pop blueprint has long relied on boyish dudes who can turn their inner misery into sunny songs, and Lerner’s pipes puts him squarely in the tradition of brooding tunesmiths like Matthew Sweet and Fountains of Wayne’s Chris Collingwood. But Lerner’s soft tenor also tends to cleanse his music of any semblance of tension or grit or personality.
Telekinesis’ third album Dormarion is Lerner’s best, most bountifiul to date. At 35 minutes, it’s the longest Telekinesis record by approximately 150 seconds. Sonically, Lerner veers into synth-pop on alluring tracks like the billowy “Ghosts and Creatures” and the near-danceable “Ever True”, and flirts with toned-down hard rock on the magnetic start-stop riff of “Little Hill”. Trading in Chris Walla (who produced the first two Telekinesis LPs) for Spoon’s Jim Eno, Lerner has made Dormarion sound grander and tougher than his old records; he’s looking outside his modest melodic pop-rock for the first time while adding some heft to his always solid melodies. In the studio, Lerner handles almost all of the instruments (though Eno supplies his Bonham-like timekeeping to several tracks), but Dormarion sounds like it was conceived for his road band. As grabby as the New Order-like “Wires” is on record, the big drums and insinuating bassline ought to get hips swinging when Telekinesis plays it live.
Musically, Lerner has broadened his range of dynamics. But tonally, Dormarion is a little flat. Opening track “Power Lines” has the standard Telekinesis structure: A quiet acoustic verse, an explosive chorus, and Lerner’s sweet vocal confessing bitter truths. “I’m a broken man,” he sings. “I’m damaged goods.” Several tracks later, the low-key jangler “Lean on Me” is selling fantasies of idealized domestic bliss: “We could cross the country in our beat-up truck/ stopping every minute because the thing don’t run/ but I don’t care because we’re in love.” Lerner’s delivery is the same on both songs-- happy or sad, he sounds blank. He’s like a narrator with no vocal inflections, which makes accessing something resembling an emotional core beyond the surface beauty of the songs very difficult.
If Dormarion is a record of superficial pleasures, at least those pleasures are considerable. As a craftsman, Lerner must be counted among the best young pop songwriters working in contemporary indie rock. At his best, like on “Wires”, he offers a wealth of hooks in the verse, chorus, and bridge. There’s no question he can put a good tune together; what’s less clear is whether he can interpret those tunes as well as he writes them, and breathe a little flesh-and-blood human messiness into them in the process. | 2013-03-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-03-28T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | March 28, 2013 | 6.9 | 8a480cb7-1011-4ae4-94db-eb145e3c2220 | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
The second album from the Boston hardcore group is a tentative push toward accessibility, exploding its sound in new directions while nodding to familiar touchstones. | The second album from the Boston hardcore group is a tentative push toward accessibility, exploding its sound in new directions while nodding to familiar touchstones. | Vein.fm: This World Is Going to Ruin You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/veinfm-this-world-is-going-to-ruin-you/ | This World Is Going to Ruin You | The only way Vein.fm’s second album might sound like a more hopeless reflection of the world today is if they wrote any of it in the past two years.The quintet finished recording This World Is Going to Ruin You at a locked-down New Jersey studio in April 2020, stunted by the pandemic while their 2018 debut Errorzone was still ascendant: a metalcore milestone that unified the Carhartt and AJ Soprano T-shirt factions like few others since their Boston Beatdown forefathers in Converge. But rather than leveling up on an expected timeline, they made lateral moves. There were inevitable side projects: most notably Fleshwater, a strong entry in an otherwise suffocating subgenre of hardcore bands practicing Deftones and Hum worship. They released Old Data in a New Machine, a compilation of remixes and B-sides whose “Vol. 1” seemed to promise more to come. They also added an “.fm” to their name that almost nobody says out loud. But these seemingly unrelated actions serve a unified purpose, to ready listeners for a version of the band that isn’t tied to what they did in 2018. And indeed, This World Is Going to Ruin You cannot simply be pegged as a lateral move or a leveling up: It explodes Vein.fm’s sound into seemingly dozens of different directions.
Despite inducting synth/turntablist Benno Levine as a full-time member, Vein.fm have largely dropped the tech in “Doomtech,” setting aside the breakbeats and breakdowns for ambience and blunt force, a blinding futuristic sheen swapped for a feel-bad rainbow of all rotted browns. Anthony DiDio described the lyrics as a “birth-to-death narrative,” often delivered in a panicked shriek or guttural bark that really does sound like either childbirth or death throes. The words are just about indecipherable without the album insert, so Vein.fm are wise enough to let the piledriven riffs of “Welcome Home” get the message across: Our birth-to-death narratives are nasty, brutish, and mostly short, at least until the closing duo of “Wavery” and “Funeral Sound” take up over a third of the album’s half-hour runtime.
Though the opening lyrics of This World Is Going to Ruin You are “Let go/Lay back like a patient,” the ensuing rhyme is more indicative of its mindset: “Let your conscience fuck the pavement.” “Pennies in the shit well/Pick ‘em up/Rinse ‘em off with your piss” is just a sample of what the lead single has to say about the human condition. But if the buckets upon buckets of Kool-Aid blood spilled in the video for “The Killing Womb” didn’t make it clear, two consecutive songs titled “Hellnight” and “Orgy at the Morgue” should settle any debates about whether Vein.fm has developed a sense of humor about themselves. It’s the difference between a dystopian, prestige horror film centered on experimental surgery and the analog gore of the Saw franchise.
Similarly, the plot of This World Is Going to Ruin You is a secondary concern, the dialogue mostly a self-aware series of prompts towards the next kill shot, each of which has to be more extreme than the last. No longer beholden to their signature alchemy of groove and grind, Vein.fm take an approach more akin to their remix album than Errorzone, doing everything they hinted at previously and doing it more. “Welcome Home” transposes detuned riffs to a tempo about half as slow as anything they’ve ever done, like if Slipknot contributed a chopped-and-screwed remix to Old Data in a New Machine. Conversely, the rave-rock hybrid “Magazine Beach,” named after a bucolic public park in Cambridge, could’ve feasibly fit on 120 Minutes, Headbanger’s Ball, and Amp playlists. Vein.fm have never fit more wrath and math into one song as they do on “Versus Wyoming,” which lasts all of 55 seconds. The impact of whatever’s happening at any given moment is amplified by the unseen—if the minute-long transitional tracks seem to cut off too early, something very different and just as thrilling will be happening 30 seconds from now.
Yet throughout, there’s a tension between what constitutes progress and regression; at times, This World Is Going to Ruin You feels like the album that could’ve come before Errorzone, from a band willing to try anything in search of a signature sound. When they lean on bionic drum programming and sinister samples during the album’s slower, more atmospheric moments, Vein.fm acknowledge massive debt to nu-adjacent classics like Iowa, White Pony, and The Fragile, benchmarks of the era’s genre fusion and progressive production values. But these days, it’s not so radical to hear a high-pass filter drum set against drop-C guitars. The melodic bent of “Wavery” and “Magazine Beach” is intriguing in the context of a Will Putney-produced album where listeners expect more breakdowns than choruses. But the hooks come off as a bit timid, not just compared to, say, “Left Behind” or “Rx Queen,” but also to Vein.fm’s own “Fear in Non Fiction.” What begins as a Brief History of Screamo in its scabrous, mutant origins fast-forwards to its platinum age with a clean vocal, swooping in to lift it toward the rafters. But the most thrilling and divisive moment of This World Is Going to Ruin You is also the most irreplicable—the hook is delivered by Thursday’s Geoff Rickly, a guy largely responsible for record execs throwing around millions at post-hardcore bands.
Perhaps the push toward accessibility on This World Is Going to Ruin You wouldn’t have sounded quite as tentative had it actually been released in 2020—before the first 20 seconds of “Virus://Vibrance” could be heard in Planet Rave’s embrace of late-’90s drum-n-bass; before the renewed critical and commercial interest in nü-metal; before the booming fortunes of Code Orange, Turnstile, and Knocked Loose proved there was a lane for uncompromising and artful heavy guitar music outside of its hardcore fanbase. Vein.fm still sound like a band ready to take on the world; only this time around, the world is just as ready for them. | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Closed Casket Activities / Nuclear Blast | March 11, 2022 | 7.4 | 8a4c62a3-9a97-4d79-9d19-f70892365473 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Fuck Buttons' Benjamin John Power offers his solo debut as Blanck Mass, working in a slower paced ambient vein to hypnotic effect. | Fuck Buttons' Benjamin John Power offers his solo debut as Blanck Mass, working in a slower paced ambient vein to hypnotic effect. | Blanck Mass: Blanck Mass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15572-blanck-mass/ | Blanck Mass | The sheer maximal strength of Fuck Buttons' second album Tarot Sport was something to marvel at. It felt as if the duo of Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung were shifting around vast tectonic plates of noise, daring one another to see how much detail their music could retain while pushing the volume firmly into the red. That love of scale remains firmly intact on Power's debut album under his Blanck Mass moniker, although he's purposefully tempered its overall feel with a more reflective bent. This is a themed work, based around "cerebral hypoxia and the beautiful complexity of the natural world" according to the Blanck Mass Bandcamp page. At times it crosses paths with the folksy elements of the Ghost Box aesthetic, where creepy electronics are twisted to produce the kind of deadened atmosphere found in old horror flicks like Witchfinder General. It sometimes shares that film's lack of refinement, with Power allowing his sounds to loop over vast expanses of time, matching Fuck Buttons' prowess for chiseling crude beauty from repetition.
Much of this music is rooted in the ambient tradition; there are no beats, and Power often leans heavily on a wash of wave-like noise similar to what Brian Eno cultivated on "Alternative 3" from Music for Films. On first glance it can feel like there's little structure underpinning the glass-like inflections of "Sifted Gold" or "Chernobyl", but dig a little deeper and subtle shifts in tone and mood gradually unravel. It demonstrates how adept Power has become at adding and subtracting layers of gentle abstraction in his music. Blanck Mass also shows how well he can foster an atmosphere of unease without pushing everything skyward all the time. Occasionally it threatens to topple over into a Fuck Buttons-style morass of jagged edges, but on songs like "Sundowner" the prickly distortion dissolves into clear digital glitchiness. The track has a woozy atmosphere, causing it to feel like Power and his table of instruments are rocking back and forth on a creaky old ocean liner.
Elsewhere the Blanck Mass sound sinks into introspection. "Sub Serious" is a densely layered piece full of twinkling loops and percussion elements that make it sound like it was recorded in the middle of a rain forest. The mood subtly slides from pessimism to dejection throughout; on "Sub Serious" it's the former, while the similar "Land Disasters" and "Icke's Struggle" use great swells of synth to generate an air of sadness. The latter two songs both use sampled birdsong, one of the few overt attempts to maintain the natural-world theme. Occasionally Power steps close to his other band's territory, particularly on "Land Disasters", where he channels that wall of gnarly distortion again and sets it to the kind of icy interference that dominated "Sundowner". Those two tracks feel like distant cousins here, both feeding off the same kind of ultra-frosty banks of towering electronics that Power was clearly obsessed with creating during the making of this record.
Blanck Mass reaches its apex in the form of the extraordinary 13-and-a-half minute "What You Know". The shifts in tone encompass many of this album's contrasting styles, including the glacial pile-ups of noise and the dips into impossibly quiet reflection. At its close there's even a hint of groove as a bass synth expands and contracts, ultimately blocking out the rest of Power's palette and opening up new lands for him to explore with this project. The air of serenity shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fuck Buttons' work-- in many ways Blanck Mass functions as a continuation of the bittersweet emotion pulled out of the closing Tarot Sport track "Flight of the Feathered Serpent". But this mostly feels like Power taking all his musical impulses and tunneling inward toward a more nuanced spot. The shadow of his other band always feels like it's on his shoulder, but that tension between his past and present guises is what makes this work so well. Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out. | 2011-06-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rock Action | June 27, 2011 | 7.7 | 8a4d3f29-9ba6-4fa2-99c5-376ccc308dd9 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The band’s seventh album adds more chaos to their stately drama. It is full of abandon and quiet contemplation as Matt Berninger sings not about how to enjoy life, but how to simply endure it. | The band’s seventh album adds more chaos to their stately drama. It is full of abandon and quiet contemplation as Matt Berninger sings not about how to enjoy life, but how to simply endure it. | The National: Sleep Well Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-national-sleep-well-beast/ | Sleep Well Beast | Here’s a handy tag cloud of adjectives the National have no doubt grown to despise: Restrained, controlled, intimate, slow-burning, patient, grand. No doubt, too, that their live shows can feel like frantic exorcisms of all of these respectable, middlebrow signifiers: Onstage, Matt Berninger is a kind of yuppie Dionysus, downing bottles of red wine, tearing at his collar, pushing through the crowd, shouting off-mic. The contrast between the two versions of himself, the staid crooner and the wild-eyed rocker, felt like the band’s ace in the hole: It meant they could play stadiums and soundtrack scenes of snow falling in sedate indie films about unhappy New England families.
Sleep Well Beast is their seventh album, and their first attempt at inviting some of that disruptive energy into the studio. Making records with this band has sometimes sounded about as fun as a forced-bonding office retreat, but this time they built a studio in a pastoral area of upstate New York that muted intraband creative friction. As Berninger memorably put it, “It’s hard to be a dick when you look out the window and there’s this tranquil pond.” As a result, Sleep Well Beast quakes and shivers with all kinds of un-National sounds—barbed, intentionally sloppy guitar attacks, drum loops, bits of digital crunch and splatter, and a rawer, more abandoned performance from Berninger. They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.
The first single “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” was a bit of a shot across the bow. The song introduces itself with a series of stray-hair noises—a steely guitar line, a frosty choir of “oohing” voices, a boxy drum loop, and an imperious grand piano airlifted from U2’s “New Year’s Day.” It forms an intriguing mist, but as you squint into it, familiar shapes emerge: The major-key chorus arrives with the same effortlessness as all their best songs, with that glinting phalanx of horns pushing it quietly forward. These are National Songs, made with the sounds and feelings that should be poured into the making of a National album. Some of the eccentricities and raw touches left at the edges feel like wind resistance tacked onto a beveled-smooth vehicle after the fact.
The same trick happens at the beginning of “I’ll Still Destroy You”: With a fluttering piece of drum programming and some mallet percussion, we are given a convincing twenty-second impression of a Björk song, circa Homogenic maybe. Then the swaying chords, the murmuring piano, and Berninger’s rumbling voice enters, dispelling the illusion and planting us back in the dimly lit auditorium on the cover of Boxer. The song kicks up again on its way out, with a wild, chaotic build that careens directly into “Guilty Party.” These controlled breakouts, bookending the otherwise-dependable pleasures of their music, provide a neat analog for the bits of craven irresponsibility and abandon you cling to in the margins of an otherwise stable existence—the occasional 2am-Tuesday, the weekend away from the kids. This has always been, and remains, Berninger’s character: “Let’s just get high enough to see our problems,” he pleads on “Day I Die.”
The wildest he allows himself to be, and maybe the wildest the band’s ever sounded, is “Turtleneck,” a mid-album cut that veers startlingly close to “National rave-up.” Berninger pitches his vocals at a ragged shout. It’s a political rocker, sardonic and full of withering asides like, “Light the water, check for lead.” “The poor, they leave their cell phones in the bathrooms of the rich,” he mutters, a lyric he’s explained refers to Trump venting typo-ridden tweets to the nation from his toilet-bowl throne. The song melts open into a pair of squealing, squiggled guitar solos that wouldn’t feel out of place on a latter-day Pearl Jam album, and Berninger moves in fitful circles around the kind of earnest activism that Vedder has practiced for years.
Like Vedder, or James Murphy, or really any rock singer wringing drama from their own limitations, Berninger remains the marquee character in the National’s music. He’s the guy the spotlight follows, and the band—as limber and powerful as the Dessner and Devendorf brothers are—serve mostly just to set the scene for Berninger to mutter intelligent, self-deprecating things into strange and counterintuitive rhythmic pockets of the songs. He wrote a lot of these lyrics alongside his wife Carin Besser and possesses an unerring ability to zero in on the bits of conversation that signify a lifelong coupledom: “I only take up a little of the collapsing space/I better cut this off, don’t want to fuck it up,” he repeats to himself on “Walk It Back,” a pitch-perfect evocation of trying to talk yourself out of having the same fight with the same person again, likely with the same results. “You keep saying so many things that I wish you won’t,” from “Empire Line,” is a sort of “I-don’t-want the-kids-to-hear-us” version of “shut up, goddamnit,” the version you offer when years of mutual respect have supplied the brakes to your worst impulses.
But perhaps the most resonant lyrics here speak to the band’s persistence and the durability of any long-term union. “Nothing I do/Makes me feel different,” he confesses on “I’ll Still Destroy You.” “Forget it/Nothing I change changes anything,” he offers on “Walk It Back.” Like R.E.M., whose ongoing existence became its own kind of raison d’être as they aged, the National offer testimony to something we don’t often celebrate: Enduring is a superpower of its own. The fact that no one can talk about the National without invoking their dependability might feel a bit unfair to them, or at least a bit tired. And yet, there’s a reason it remains such a dominating lens through which to examine them. Consistency is not boring. Consistency is a miracle, a small act of defiance against entropy. Berninger has compared the band to a marriage, as all band members do, but their music feels particularly devoted to the quotidian nature of lifelong unions, the way that your success is measured in time, how each year together turns your commitment into its own kind of monument. There’s a reason anniversary cards say things like “All these years later, I still love you.” It’s because the miracle isn’t in the “love,” it’s in the “still.” | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 8, 2017 | 8 | 8a514c77-2074-4a75-b217-a80355c8201e | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
On her debut solo EP, the cellist and vocalist explores a vaporous middle ground between R&B and chamber pop. | On her debut solo EP, the cellist and vocalist explores a vaporous middle ground between R&B and chamber pop. | Lucinda Chua : Antidotes 1 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucinda-chua-antidotes-1-ep/ | Antidotes 1 EP | Before she clocked hundreds of miles touring with Slint and Stars of the Lid, before she joined FKA Twigs’ live band, before she released dainty chamber pop as one half of the duo Felix, Lucinda Chua was a photographer. Her pictures are small moments, dramatically lit — a girl staring at a grand piano; a faceless woman searching for a book on her knees. To Chua, photography could only hope to convey a piece of a wider story, a small fraction of an emotion: “all it can show is a fragment of a narrative,” she said. Antidotes 1, her debut solo EP, radiates with the same kind of heightened interiority, swapping stage lighting for the complex rhythms of her cello.
As the vocalist of Felix, Chua had a kind of manic flow, urgent and hushed, like someone spilling secrets to a friend in the middle of homeroom. But from the first notes of Antidotes 1, Chua is altogether richer, closer, more patient. A classically trained cellist, Chua adeptly molds her vocals around her textured, drawn-out bow strokes. She wades carefully into opener “Feel Something,” taking stock of her surroundings, like a morning stretch: “How high, how far, how deep,” she sings, her voice velvety like a weighted blanket.
There is a tactile quality to Chua’s singing, an intimacy that incites goosebumps. She can take the word “something” in the opener’s refrain, “I just wanna feel something,” and chop it up, shortening the first half and dragging out “thing” until it reveals the crevices of her breath. In another world, her low, soothing croon could place her next to neo-R&B singers like Milosh, but there is a distinctive rawness to her singing. Parts of “Feel Something” originally appear in a composition called “Music For One,” and the record indeed seems designed for solo consumption: “It’s music for you, in your bubble, with your headphones,” she said of “Music For One” in 2013.
Chua takes a circuitous approach to writing. There is nothing that could be called a “chorus” here; she instead prefers to repeat long verses until they become hypnotic. Like her photographs, her lyrics are cryptic, dropping into the middle of a fable: “You better have bore a son,” she sings ominously on “Whatever It Takes,” before launching into a dark refrain about “witches in exile.” Chua has a way of sounding remarkably human even in the depths of a fairytale narrative: “The demons I carry are fake,” she sings, the pain palpable as her voice breaks on the last word.
Antidotes 1 is a lesson in patience—Chua holds a note for an entire breath, until she buckles and runs out of air, and drags the cello through one note until it seems to naturally fade into the next, as on “Semitones.” In music, a semitone is the smallest interval between two notes. Chua makes these steps, first on the guitar and then echoed on the cello, in slow, languorous movements. As if in conversation with the instrument, she fills the space in between notes with her voice, raised barely above a lilting whisper. When she harmonizes on “Somebody Who,” it is with an alien, distorted recording of her singing, sharpened slightly. “The earth is dying,” she repeats plainly, as her vocal accompaniment begins to break down. The cello descends a dissonant scale, glassy and full, until it seems to fade into memory. | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Experimental | self-released | March 29, 2019 | 8 | 8a54fba3-d297-40cd-aa98-ad846e4239dd | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
With flourishes of R&B, house, and funk, this exuberant and sweltering nine-track mini-album nails the transition from left-of-center cult favorite to bona fide diva. | With flourishes of R&B, house, and funk, this exuberant and sweltering nine-track mini-album nails the transition from left-of-center cult favorite to bona fide diva. | Mykki Blanco: Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mykki-blanco-broken-hearts-and-beauty-sleep/ | Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep | At a time when many rappers seem to reach astronomical levels of fame within literal months of their first release, Mykki Blanco works at their own pace. For almost 10 years, they’ve cycled through multiple musical identities and genres, always prioritizing creative exploration over any particular niche. The diaristic, introspective lyrics and relatively sleek production of their most recent full-length album, 2016’s Mykki, represented a watershed moment in Blanco’s output—perhaps the nearest they’ve come to full self-realization in their music. Five years on, Blanco has made yet another about-face. With flourishes of R&B, house, and funk, the exuberant and sweltering nine-track mini-album Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep nails the transition from left-of-center cult favorite to bona fide diva.
Not that this record is some sort of overly produced pop confection. In the past few years, Blanco has struck up a blossoming partnership with electronic producer FaltyDL, and the pair have collaborated on some understated gems, including a remix of Ashnikko’s recent single “Deal With It” and “You Will Find It,” a subtly gorgeous electro-folk-trap track featuring Devendra Banhart (a somewhat unexpected early touchstone for Blanco). FaltyDL takes the reins on Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, enveloping Blanco’s signature banjee rhyming style in a warm mist of languid beats, like summer jams spilling out of a parked car at the Christopher Street Piers on the hottest day of the year.
“Summer Fling,” with Kari Faux, is perhaps the best example of the album’s abiding mood. As a distorted vocal declares, “Summer come, no time to be boo’d up,” Blanco rattles off a list of seasonal conquests that harkens back to “men ain’t shit” classics like Lil Kim’s “How Many Licks?” Mykki’s firecracker wit is ever-present: When a “hippie dude” swears that “J. Cole saved rap,” Blanco spits back, “Your dick smells like hamsters, go take a bath.” This is what the persona of Mykki Blanco has always been—quick, cocky, confident, real. On “Summer Fling,” they sound ready to devour everything in their path.
Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep features an all-star cast of Blanco’s contemporaries; each supporting player brings their own flair, yet never outshines Blanco’s vision. When Big Freedia joins album closer “That’s Folks,” it’s not a frenetic bounce verse but a joyous, powerful moment to celebrate chosen families within the Black experience. On the Dev Hynes collab “It’s Not My Choice,” probably the most unlikely track on the record, Blanco is transported into a Blood Orange dreamworld without relinquishing their role as the main character. At every turn, Blanco asserts themselves, unwavering.
The old Blanco still rears their head, smeared eyeliner and all. “Fuck Your Choices,” a short, scathing breakup banger that packs acerbic ire over a quasi-industrial beat, is the song most reminiscent of Blanco’s earlier work. Smack dab in the middle of the album, it’s less a wake-up call than a screeching alarm. Though only a minute and a half long, it’s meant to remind the listener that Blanco isn’t just a rapper—they’re an artist who purposefully embodies multiple aspects of queer Black culture. Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep is the latest chapter in the chaotic yet deliberate evolution of a no-holds-barred performer who’s only now reaching their apex.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Transgressive | June 21, 2021 | 7.6 | 8a6fa0b3-1b03-4da7-8e42-76e1eb031e8a | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The rapper and singer’s endlessly imitative new album chases trendy sounds and obvious samples to mask that it has nothing to say. | The rapper and singer’s endlessly imitative new album chases trendy sounds and obvious samples to mask that it has nothing to say. | Coi Leray: COI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/coi-leray-coi/ | COI | While some artists begrudgingly hopped on TikTok to market their music, Coi Leray turned the app into her digital playground with bite-sized hits like “Big Purr (Prrdd)” and “Twinnem.” The 26-year-old rapper and singer knows how to play the numbers game, to create frenetic snippets to hold a toddler’s attention in between episodes of Bluey and Temple Run. Her imprint, Trendsetter Studios, seems to be based on principles of originality and future-forward creations. True to Trendsetters’ mission statement, Coi Leray models a future where generative AI has taken over the music industry. The year is 2040, and the only songs produced are ones “sampling the sample that was already sampled.” Welcome to Prince’s hell.
Coi Leray’s new album, COI, might as well be marketed as a covers album. Roughly 75% of the album relies on painfully obvious samples, copied and pasted in with little modification. Its big hit is “Players,” which deploys the intergalactic strut of Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” to insist that women can run games on men too. From Hall and Oates’ “Rich Girl” (“Bitch Girl”) to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” Coi unimaginatively spins songs by men into #girlboss anthems. Hall’s vocal presence on the former song disrupts the heart rate accelerating momentum of the electric guitar, gospel-like “oohs,” and Coi’s roach-stomping delivery—one of the few semi-unique elements on the album.
If Kidz Bop covered some of the songs on this record, you would only be able to tell it’s not an original because of the curse words. “My Body” butchers Lesley Gore’s iconic track “It’s My Party” with a childishly dull slogan: “It’s my body, I can fuck who I want to,” she raps brattily in an amateur attempt at slut-shaming commentary. “Hakuna Matata, these bitches don’t want a problem” she continues the egregiously corny lyrical streak on “Make My Day,” a workout tape version of Technotronic’s party-starting “Pump Up the Jam.” The raucous choir and country-rock guitar line lands on “Black Rose” lands more like a soundtrack to a Chevy Silverado commercial than stadium-ready rock in the vein of Joan Jett & the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock ’N’ Roll.”
When she’s not deploying samples of popular songs, she’s hopping on the wave of today’s popular sounds. House is popping, so she proclaims to like voguing on the lethargic club-thumper “Spend It,” complete with a phoned-in verse from Saucy Santana. Oh, the youth are shaking their hips to Jersey Club? Here’s “Get Loud” for you. “Don’t Chat Me Up” is the best example of Coi trying to jam her feet into a boot 5 sizes too small. Featuring Peckham rapper Giggs, the track also features an egregious British accent from Coi. Since the early 2010s, Nicki Minaj has used British accents for her alter egos Martha and Roman Zolanski or just to up the theatrics of her live performances. Of course, Gen-Z has been seen adopting fake British accents, but when Coi does it (“Gimme that ting I want”) it sounds like she’s weirdly mocking Giggs, not becoming a character.
“Bops” takes advantage of the late-’90s, early-00s music revival with slinky percussive clinks and a glitchy synth reminiscent of the Neptunes’ signature production. If you didn’t catch it, don’t worry, she gives you a clue: “Pull up in the spaceship, call me Neptune.” To be fair, the song is a bop. However, the plural “bops” she claims to have are on timeshare. In a recent interview with Ebro, Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI. | 2023-06-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Uptown / Republic | June 27, 2023 | 4.5 | 8a703b53-9925-45ce-b2bb-c5a8943e40f2 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
A new compilation from Habibi Funk records highlights the old and interweaving sounds of Algerian coladera, Lebanese AOR, Egyptian disco, Moroccan funk and more. | A new compilation from Habibi Funk records highlights the old and interweaving sounds of Algerian coladera, Lebanese AOR, Egyptian disco, Moroccan funk and more. | Various Artists: Habibi Funk: An Eclectic Selection of Music From the Arab World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-habibi-funk-an-eclectic-selection-of-music-from-the-arab-world/ | Habibi Funk: An Eclectic Selection of Music From the Arab World | In an interview with The Believer, Sublime Frequencies founder Alan Bishop described a vast difference between Western and other cultures. “There’s a thing about ‘new is everything,’ old is unwanted,” he said, going on to add that while he fetishized these cultures’ old music, he realized that in locales like Thailand, Morocco, or Syria, “the culture is left to rot, just like the buildings and the infrastructure. No money is going back into preserving things.” Perhaps as a bulwark against such rot, the Habibi Funk imprint was set up two years ago to shine a light on older music from the Arab world and founder Jannis Stuertz is aware of that dichotomy. “Too often re-releases of old music are mainly being consumed exclusively by a western audience,” he writes in the liner notes that accompany his label’s latest compilation, though he notes that in traveling through the Middle East, he now counters young fans who “got attached to music of their parents’ generations and that they are now themselves…looking for records.”
Reissues of late often scrounge neglected parts of the world for western pulses, be it Surinam, the French West Indies, or Hawaii. And across its first six releases, Habibi Funk generally does appeal to what sounds good to western ears, usually of the funk variety, with traces of soul, R&B, rock and smooth disco for good measure. But in our current climate where Islam and Arab culture remains grossly distorted and willfully misunderstood, there’s a sense of urgency that—beyond the music—the label is also offering a Western audience a chance to better understand this region by moving to it.
It’s fitting that the set kicks off with “Bsslama Hbibti,” a hard-sweating stomp from Fadoul, a Moroccan whose closest parallel might be to James Brown. From the artist who helped put them on the radar, “Hbiti” features gritty drums, lashing guitar, and Fadoul’s near-manic pleas atop it all. But whereas Brown and band would be dapper and disciplined, there’s something unhinged in the energy of the performance that brings to mind the raucous takes on R&B that Rob Tyner and the MC5 dipped into. Its companion is Bob Destiny’s “Wang Dang,” which—although recorded and released in Algeria—is shouted by an African-American from New Orleans who spent time in the region as a choreographer. Similarly curious is how the melody for “Für Elise” crosses borders to Morocco to become the guitar line for the shouts of a raucous unknown track from Attarazat Addahabia.
Fans of Sublime Frequencies and their exhaustive look at Southeast Asian bands taken by surf music will find kinship in “Mirza” and the skronking sax lines of Sudanese track “El Bomba.” And just when it seems the comp is firmly entrenched in an exploration of how ’60s rock and R&B infiltrated the region, the tumbling disco beat and needling reeds make Mallek Mohamed’s “Rouhi Ya Hafida” refreshing. (The liner notes also hint that the Algerian musician also recorded but never released experimental electronic music as well.) “Sah,” from Egyptian artist Al Massrieen, also rides a slick dance beat, the female backing vocals and slide guitar sending it towards the cosmic end of the disco spectrum. But sometimes the sleeker funk doesn’t quite work on some of the tracks, as on the too busy rubber bass of “Lala Tibki” and lo-fi “Games.”
The most arresting track is “Ayonha,” featuring buoyant drum machines, jangly guitars and tickly synths, all played by Libyan-born Hamid El Shaeri. El Shaeri found pop stardom in Egypt from the ’80s well into the ’00s and the track’s airy harmonies and easy feel wouldn’t sound out of place on AM radio in California. Similarly, sweet vocal harmonies drift across Tunisian band Dalton, who embrace the likes of Tim Maia and the Doobie Brothers on the laidback “Soul Brother.” Sounding at once American and Brazilian, the Tunisians suggest—if sadly not a real-world actuality—a musical brotherhood that transcends such boundaries. | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Habibi Funk Records | December 11, 2017 | 7.6 | 8a7a8bda-3311-4d49-89ec-e716fbc8f8e7 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The mysterious electronic musician, now a solo artist, scores a whimsical soundtrack to a 90-year-old German silent film. Soft, gentle, and sparse, his music is imbued with a quiet sense of wonder. | The mysterious electronic musician, now a solo artist, scores a whimsical soundtrack to a 90-year-old German silent film. Soft, gentle, and sparse, his music is imbued with a quiet sense of wonder. | Domenique Dumont: People on Sunday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/domenique-dumont-people-on-sunday/ | People on Sunday | Domenique Dumont’s music has traditionally entailed a game of hide-and-seek, concealing vocals behind layers of reverb and placing the drums right up at the front of the mix, daring the listener to dig to get to the center of it all. The artist is no less forthcoming about his, or their, own identity. The project was previously said to be a collaboration between the Latvian duo of Arturs Liepins and Anete Stuce and an unnamed (and possibly fictitious) French artist. Five years after their 2015 debut EP, Comme Ça, Dumont returns as a solo act, though not much more is known about him. The duo made its name with the underground hit “L’Esprit de L’Escalier,” a chirpy song that was just center-left of outright pop, and their debut album on France’s Antinote label, Miniatures de Auto Rhythm, continued in the same vein of Balearic pop songs made to be enjoyed in the sunshine.
By contrast, People on Sunday takes a more subdued—and more conceptual—tack. The album was conceived as an original soundtrack to a 1930 German silent film of the same name. Part documentary, part fiction, the film follows its characters, played by amateur actors, around a normal Sunday in Weimar Berlin, unwittingly capturing a snapshot of a city on the verge of cataclysmic changes. Accordingly, Dumont’s melodies are also like characters—soft and gentle, and often fairly sparse, yet imbued with all the sweetness, complexity, and intensity of the people they soundtrack.
The album’s title track opens on a motif that loops like a stuck record, suggesting the unchanging rhythms of everyday routine, but new sounds—flutes, harps, chimes—are constantly coming and going, as though testaments to the little changes that interrupt that monotony. Album closer “Everyday Life” has a plodding cadence; it’s upheld by an arpeggiated pattern that bumbles its way through the song, embellished by other elements along the way. In their tweeness, these ornaments resemble the work of Mort Garson, the synth pioneer who composed his landmark 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia to be played to houseplants. The return of the main theme after a significant breather, followed by a final metronome-like beep, recalls life’s ceaseless motion, ever forward, past the present moment and into the next.
Dumont’s palette of vintage synthesizers imbues these vignettes with a quiet sense of wonder. “Gone for a Wander” is contemplative and placid, embodying the aimless pleasure of the song’s title. Dumont’s short flourishes adorn the slow, steady rhythm with moments of delight, like a wanderer stopping in a clearing to observe light bouncing off puddles. “Merry-Go-Round” is one of the busiest tracks on the album, populated with lots of different elements and held together by a single arpeggiated melody. Eventually, the smaller motifs blend into one colourful blur, just as the world does from the viewpoint of the center of a carousel. In little moments like these, the joy that People on Sunday radiates is self-evident, even when untethered from the film that inspired it.
Like the film, Dumont’s soundtrack is about taking stock of the ordinary. It also imparts a valuable lesson, one that could equally apply to the events of this year: Savor the quotidian wherever possible, because who knows what tomorrow will be like.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | The Leaf Label | November 13, 2020 | 7 | 8a7b2c04-b214-40d3-8208-331ea4c3c318 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
The Chicago soul outfit’s latest album is well-arranged and reflective, content with being pretty and sitting still. | The Chicago soul outfit’s latest album is well-arranged and reflective, content with being pretty and sitting still. | The O’My’s: Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-omys-tomorrow/ | Tomorrow | Throughout their decade-long career, the O’My’s have been defined by where they’re from and who they’ve worked with. The group has swelled to almost double digits and been shrunken again to its founding twosome, the vocalist-guitarist Maceo Haymes and the vocalist-keyboardist Nick Hennessey. On their new album, Tomorrow, their first since 2015, those singers surround themselves with a familiar Windy City crew: Chance the Rapper and Nico Segal (who you might know better as Donnie Trumpet, Kaina, a rising singer, and Carter Lang, the bassist who produced the majority of SZA’s Ctrl. The message is clear: No matter how big or small the actual group is, the O’My’s will always constitute a community. Even when they are a duo, they are a merry band.
Haymes and Hennessey have been playing together since they were teenagers and their chemistry reflects the depth of their relationship; they coax a similar, light-fingered touch from their respective instruments, passing the baton to each other so rapidly that it can be hard to keep track of who’s carrying it. Their willingness to hand off the microphone to each other, and to their many collaborators, makes Tomorrow a more sleepy, reflective album, content with being pretty and sitting still. There’s too little energy here, but the record’s palette is so bright that it doesn’t feel comfortably languorous. Instead, it’s just sluggish.
There are exceptions. “Baskets” is a strong single, snapping out of the lull of its lilting verses with an urgent chorus, one that crackles with the dramatic tension that much of the record lacks. “Walkout,” another standout, is more representative, a slow-burning song about a romantic partner whose company serves as a welcome kind of human sedative: “You are my love, you keep me mellow.” But the melody has punch and the song’s lovely instrumental touches are invigorating, and the track ends with a sweet message from Haymes’ grandmother. And the title track gets by on pure stickiness, its refrain undergirded by lovely finger-picking from Haymes.
Unfortunately, stickiness is a characteristic that much of the record lacks. Part of the problem is pacing. The first two tracks on Tomorrow, ”Starship” and “Niña Fresa,” are among the record’s least interesting and they hamper the album’s momentum out the gate, hamstringing more urgent songs like “Baskets” and “Afraid.” Haymes has a lovely falsetto, but its frequent deployment dulls the contrast between different sections of the record and even the more moderately-paced songs seem to crawl. “There’s too much waiting around” the duo croons on “Faces,” and it almost feels like an inadvertent take on their album.
None of this is a knock on the musicianship of Tomorrow. Hennessey is particularly impressive, offering dynamic backup wherever needed and occasionally even breaking through the mix with passages like the ones that sit at the front of “Faces.” But it’s instructive to note what happens to able guest verses by Saba and Chance, which pass in a flash, as if the rappers don’t want to draw too much attention to themselves. On “Puddles,” Saba’s verse arrives within the first minute but, perhaps looking to match the mild production, he fails to make much of an impact. Chance fares only slightly better, adapting one of his softer flows on “Idea.”
The problem is, there’s little room for star turns on Tomorrow, a record that feels so tailored to the collective that it fails to highlight any originality on the part of the individual artists involved. Haymes told Billboard about the spontaneity of collaboration in the city, saying that they “happen just by being in the room or being at the park or bumping into somebody.” Tomorrow’s best moments are characterized by that sense of happy spontaneity. But it’s interesting to consider what the record might have sounded like if the duo at its heart fought for a stronger sense of authorship, or if one of their guests had been a little less polite, a little less agreeable. As it is, everyone concedes to everyone else, and a soulful record lacks the bodies that would otherwise give it shape. | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Haight Brand | September 12, 2018 | 6.4 | 8a7d21ea-cbe9-4407-8b02-05e0167c3448 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Jeremih's long-delayed third studio album officially renders his early career a distant memory and establishes himself as one of R&B's most singular voices. In its subtle seduction, Late Nights feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest. | Jeremih's long-delayed third studio album officially renders his early career a distant memory and establishes himself as one of R&B's most singular voices. In its subtle seduction, Late Nights feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest. | Jeremih: Late Nights: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21340-late-nights-the-album/ | Late Nights: The Album | Imagine a Groundhog Day sequel where each day is another doomed re-run of your significant other's birthday. "It's the best day of the year, girl," you mumble for the thousandth time, fumbling for a Cialis. No one gets older, and nothing changes. That's been the unfortunate majority of Jeremih's career—somewhat bafflingly, considering the singer and multi-instrumentalist has racked up three platinum singles and features on hits from half the rap game. Since "Birthday Sex"—his 2009 debut single, recorded in college classmate Mick Schultz' makeshift studio—took hold of Chicago radio and then the world, he's tried in vain to politely distance himself from the song. And meanwhile, he obsessively adjusted and readjusted Late Nights, his third studio album: the one that officially renders his early career a distant memory and establishes himself as one of R&B's most singular voices.
The Late Nights universe pays no mind to the swagless Gregorian calendar, abiding instead by the hours of Patron shots and wanton DM slides. Each day begins at dusk and ends at sunrise, eyelids gently twitching from leftover molly. It is a purgatory in the best sense, a retreat from reality for discerning hedonists. Jeremih seems to zone out a lot: two separate instances on Late Nights find him coming to the realization that he is the only clothed person in the room, as if he'd absentmindedly stumbled into a drunken orgy. Above all else, he needs room to breathe. Late Night's guiding principle is space—for his weightless upper register to float, and for the album's barely-there production to echo off itself. "Man, my whip's so big when you in it," he crows to his beguiling passenger on "Planez", this year's best radio R&B single in spite of J. Cole's paraphiliac trainwreck of a guest verse. It's a small sentiment that gestures at something grander: When you're with me, my world opens up. And that's exactly how Late Nights feels.
There is almost no continuity between this album and Jeremih's last, 2010's paint-by-numbers All About You. With its dim-lit crackle and delicate suggestions of beats, Late Nights' only real predecessor is his 2012 mixtape of the same title—one he released for free against the guidance of Def Jam, who seemed unwilling to give Jeremih the benefit of the doubt. To be fair, no one could have seen it coming: impeccably produced, subtle, and hot as fuck, it showed Jeremih like no one had seen before. Parts of Late Nights, the album, feel like direct continuations of that tape's sound: third single "Oui" builds on the delicate doo-wop of "Rosa Acosta" like a gently-traced impression of a Terius Nash creation. But then the bottom drops out, and Jeremih slips into a momentary interpolation of Shai's "If I Ever Fall in Love". It's easy to see what draws him to the 1992 hit: a wisp of a backdrop, over which the quartet's harmonies defy gravity.
But Late Nights' most stunning moments take the mixtape's best ideas and strip them down further than seemed possible. "Pass Dat" is little more than suggestive synth echo and bass tremor; "Woosah" rations percussion like there was a drought, sustaining itself off muted finger-snaps and the flick of a lighter. More than ever, Jeremih—who taught himself the drums at three years old—has learned to use his own voice as a rhythmic element, redefining the idea of "flow" for the R&B set. It's the logical reverse of the direction rap's been moving in for most of the 2010s, blurring rapped and sung delivery to indistinguishability; on "Drank", he skips nimbly from rap-inspired staccato to half-chanted dancehall melodies, the R&B equivalent of Young Thug's "Stoner". Late Nights' most overt hip-hop crossovers ("Giv No Fucks", "Royalty") feel less essential, but to watch Jeremih approach rap and R&B's midpoint from the opposite direction as rhythmic innovators like Future, Migos, and Twista is a fascinating study in contrasts.
It feels like poetic justice that the high point of Late Nights—an album about patience, space, the agonizing tease of perfectionism—is saved for its final track. Over nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Jeremih yawns blearily at his beachside paradise, kind of faded, the only one still awake. He pops some Tylenol, revisits the preceding night's debauchery, smiles. "Sooooo fuckin' wasted," he harmonizes like a delinquent angel choir. It's a derelict canticle, a lullaby for the perpetually hungover, a deep breath. It took him long enough to get here, and he's going to savor the moment for as long as he possibly can, in the little universe he's carved out because the industry didn't have space for him. Late Nights, in its subtle seduction, feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest. Jeremih makes you shut everything else out so that you can hear him whisper in your ear. It was worth the wait. | 2015-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | December 9, 2015 | 8.3 | 8a7ee552-1b8d-408e-bbe9-1628fdaa1f95 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | null |
Across a casually sublime album, Cass McCombs is at his most confident and intentional, constantly returning to the imagery of music and the casualties of a life devoted to making and sharing art. | Across a casually sublime album, Cass McCombs is at his most confident and intentional, constantly returning to the imagery of music and the casualties of a life devoted to making and sharing art. | Cass McCombs: Heartmind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cass-mccombs-heartmind/ | Heartmind | For an artist who has never seemed particularly interested in discussing the facts of his life or the meaning of his songs, Cass McCombs has been unmistakably straightforward about both when it comes to his latest record, Heartmind. “I made this album as a way to handle the loss of some close friends,” the 44-year-old songwriter said in a press release. “Strange to realize, it wasn’t them who were lost, it was me.” More than anything in his catalog, Heartmind could be called a concept album, and unlike anything since 2011’s moody high-water mark WIT’S END, it feels purposely unified and cohesive, sharing themes and textures and musical threads across eight songs in just over 40 minutes.
In the liner notes, alongside two quotes about Sufism, McCombs dedicates the record to the memory of three late musicians with whom he shared crucial history. The guitarist Neal Casal, who died by suicide in 2019, was his bandmate in his utopian folk side project the Skiffle Players; Chet “JR” White, the Girls instrumentalist who died in 2020, worked on McCombs’ 2013 double album Big Wheel and Others; and Sam Jayne, the songwriter from Lync and Love as Laughter who also died in 2020, played some pivotal early shows with him in the mid-2000s.
Created in the wake of their deaths, Heartmind constantly returns to imagery of music and performance and the casualties of a life devoted to making and sharing art. In the lighthearted “Karaoke,” McCombs questions whether he’s experiencing a real connection with someone or if they’re both going through the motions, reciting old lines in an attempt to convince the room they really feel it. In the gorgeously arranged “A Blue, Blue Band,” a down-on-their-luck touring act from Virginia City, Nevada, has a superpower of making every audience member feel, by the end of the set, precisely how they do—which is to say, blue.
Even the songs that don’t explicitly refer to these subjects eventually reveal their common ground. On one level, “Unproud Warrior” is among McCombs’ most traditional folk songs—a nearly spoken-word narrative about a veteran returning home from war, reconciling with his past and trying to ground himself in the unfamiliar present. And yet, for a subject so commonly associated with protest music, McCombs’ take feels almost apolitical—the point has less to do with the stakes of war than those of aging, making sense of the distinct choices that led to the path you’re on. To conclude his point, the final verse lists a series of masterpieces written by young prodigies—people who, presumably, didn’t feel haunted by decisions they made when they were younger, whose sense of agency carried through life.
As a writer, McCombs has never sounded so confident or intentional. For a long time, his most frequent comparison was Elliott Smith due to his hushed vocals, nonlinear lyrics, and stately, winding melodies. (“Karaoke” and “Belong to Heaven” from this record are particularly strong examples of that last gift.) On Heartmind, McCombs sometimes reminds me of Bob Dylan during the 1980s, the era when he shifted his attention to subjects like Lenny Bruce and the rejuvenating power of Jesus Christ and sleeping in a field with a small dog licking your face, all approached with the same fervent intensity, humor, and absurdity. “Empty ketchup packets may inherit the city,” McCombs sings near the end of the title track, one of the more stirring prophecies you’ll hear in 2022.
What comes next also helps: a slow, spiritual jazz coda that closes the record, breezing and rippling like little else in his songbook. The band assembled for this record—including, among many others, multi-instrumentalist and producer Shahzad Ismaily, drummers Kassa Overall and Joe Russo, keyboardist Frank LoCrasto, saxophonist Charlotte Greve, producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Buddy Ross, and guest vocalists Danielle Haim, Wynonna Judd, the Chapin Sisters, and Charlie Burnham—feels hand-selected to create this dusky, live-sounding atmosphere. Even moments of respite like “New Earth,” with its passing mentions of muted tweets and “Mr. Musk,” seem to rustle and shift as you listen, packing in as much texture as possible to keep things building until the fadeout.
This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics. In “Music Is Blue”—a song about obsession with a knotty arrangement that does, indeed, sound like it would take quite a bit of dedication to master, or even just sing along to—McCombs presents what reads like a bleak itinerary of touring life: living off beer, running out of money, losing touch with reality. “I stole to feed her/That’s the lie told by a cheater,” McCombs sings, and it’s around this point that “Music Is Blue” starts to feel like a love song to the person who brought some light into the dark inevitability of his lifestyle. Whether or not the song is autobiographical, you can hear its message resonate through Heartmind, shining on its hard truths and casting a strange, beautiful glow that, for the span of the record, seems like the only thing worth risking it all to share. | 2022-08-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-22T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | August 22, 2022 | 8.1 | 8a7efe7b-296a-45a0-9686-27ad7056605b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Sufjan Stevens, the New York composer Son Lux, and the Anticon rapper Serengeti form an oddball trio on this EP. | Sufjan Stevens, the New York composer Son Lux, and the Anticon rapper Serengeti form an oddball trio on this EP. | s / s / s: Beak & Claw | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16418-sss-beak-claw/ | Beak & Claw | Unlikely groupings of artists, promising as they seem, rarely yield anything more enduring than a colorful press release. Though it sounds cynical, a roomful of musicians who seem like they have no business being together usually don't, it turns out, and are far more apt to produce a dismaying mess than an unprecedented, illuminating fusion. Over the last five or six years, Sufjan Stevens seems to have suffered a particular weakness for just this sort of collaboration, and his fans, accordingly, have suffered along with him. For whatever reason, one of the earlier decade's most singular voices has grown increasingly fond of hurling himself into colorful masses of people. The BQE project, the Osso String Quartet dalliance, collaborations with everyone from the Clogs to the Castanets to Clare & the Reasons-- Sufjan is now defined largely as the guy you find on everyone else's records. It might be irrepressible eagerness, or it might be his crazy-like-a-fox way of working beyond the kind of flashpoint moment that can stop a career like a clock, but it's resulted in a breathtakingly erratic run littered with inconsequential one-offs just like this one.
Here's the lineup for s/s/s : Sufjan, the new York composer Son Lux (who keeps one foot in the cozy NYC indie classical scene), and the Anticon rapper Serengeti. You'll notice that all three artists' first initials begin with "S." You may now sigh a little and feel a slight sinking in your chest. The first song, "Museum Day", opens with the sound of Sufjan piped through an Auto-Tuner, a moment that heightens the general dubiousness. The effect is tweaked a little too artlessly, giving it a suspiciously parodic hint that feels about three years past its cultural sell-by date.
The good news is that the resulting EP is far less dire than all this suggests. Son Lux and Sufjan have created a nice tapestry of mournful synth pads and strings, and it makes a suitable background for those by-now familiar somber-choirboy voices Sufjan deploys to add shivers. Serengeti's loose, conversational story-rapping is the wild card, but he fits into the subdued atmosphere, talking quietly more than he raps. The downcast, emo-rap slam poetry he works in has a perilously high carnage margin, but he keeps from plummeting off a cliff here, staying understated and writing in reliably small, vivid images: "Sneaking in my sister's purse/ That was money for the water bill." Over an irregular, clomping beat on "Beyond Any Doubt", he tells us about being "Lonely and depressed/ Eating cold fried rice." We've all been there.
On "If This Is Real", Serengeti even invites us to his wedding, where his best man reads a poem: "A beautiful villanelle, you made everybody's eyes well." He tells someone else they are "vital like Krebs cycle," which feels almost ridiculous enough to be something a drunken groom tells a friend. All of this is awkward, obviously, but the openhearted spirit is endearing, and the songs themselves pulse fleetly enough that you aren't really given much of an opportunity to snort. You can feel the breeze on your face from the pages of a 500-page novel riffled in front of you. As for Sufjan, apart from a couple flourishes, his presence is about as detectable as a teaspoon of salt in a pot of jambalaya. But these three have managed to come away with this thing with some actual songs, which is, well, something. Whether or not they've produced anything that justifies the time away they could have spent producing something better, more consequential, by themselves? Well, the jury's still out there. | 2012-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | null | Anticon | March 23, 2012 | 4.8 | 8a856eba-9513-41e8-b0ef-6e6253ba8e33 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
This blistering punk-rock debut from a 55-year-old veteran of the scene delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. These are weary, angry songs, crafted with an insatiable verve and an almost triumphant fury. | This blistering punk-rock debut from a 55-year-old veteran of the scene delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. These are weary, angry songs, crafted with an insatiable verve and an almost triumphant fury. | Adulkt Life: Book of Curses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adulkt-life-book-of-curses/ | Book of Curses | Chris Rowley is an unlikely mouthpiece for adulthood. As a vocalist in the bombastic Brighton riot grrrl group Huggy Bear, he balanced the sardonic sneers of Niki Elliot and the harmonic cheers of Jo Johnson with his dry delivery, a spoken-word spitfire of resentment and frustration. “Kids get in, pulled out by parent-core in a gravy of envy they're descending,” he barked menacingly on their 1993 record Taking The Rough With The Smooch, a self-aware portrait of teenage rage. But in the 26 years since the band’s predetermined 1994 disbandment (the group, ever principled, allegedly decided their three-year lifespan before they began the band), Rowley has experienced the inevitable yet unthinkable for a one-time punk: middle age. The 55-year-old is now a father with a day job at a non-profit, who until recently had left his days of “boy-girl revolutions” in the past. If Book of Curses, his blistering debut as the frontman of Adulkt Life, is any indication, Rowley’s taut temper has only grown more gnarled in the intervening years. The only thing more infuriating than societal expectations of adolescence, it suggests, is the paralyzing ennui of growing old.
Adulkt Life (“no need to pronounce the ‘K’,” they insist) largely functions as a vehicle for Rowley’s lyrics, a focus that reflects the band’s inception. He connected with John Arthur Webb, who went on to found the British noise rock group Male Bonding, while shopping for records at Rough Trade in the early ’00s. Webb, upon discovering Rowley’s punk past, suggested that they record together. Their then-teenaged drummer and fellow Rough Trade regular, Sonny Barrett, was similarly sold after watching one of the sole live videos of Huggy Bear available on YouTube. With Male Bonding bassist Kevin Hendrick rounding out their sound, the band reimagines the intensity of riot grrrl within the brooding soundscape of post-punk and the thematic lens of fatherhood.
There’s still plenty of Huggy Bear’s “sex and confusion” abound on Book of Curses, but the former is couched in more Freudian, fraught terms: “In your hand a ticking cock,” Rowley shouts repeatedly on “Clean (But Itchy),” rushed as if the phrase were a subconscious tic or an all-possessing hex. And where Huggy Bear once sang of schoolyard sexuality, Rowley surveys the youth with suspicion on “New Curfew,” his rage building with each pass of the song’s winding, bluesy guitars. “What are these kids, 9 or 10?” he asks, before swallowing existential threats of climate change delivered by his daughter: “She said dad one day this will be gone.” Where Huggy Bear once sang of robbing cops, Adulkt Life mines the inner conflict of seeing your child’s generation take up the fight against state violence: “I don't know what I feel when I hear sirens outside anymore,” he yells, an eerily prescient summation of the deepening generational divide on law and order.
There’s an anxiety that pulsates through Book of Curses, from the squealing horns that pierce the opening track to the rumbling feedback that echoes throughout “Room Context,” like a storm brewing on a distant horizon. Rowley’s lyrical brevity darts between the equally sparse instrumentation—”Ha ha!” he taunts on “Whistle Country,” playing the counterpart to Webb’s blunt, dense guitar. “Whistle Country” channels the thrashing noise of Male Bonding into its barest possible sketches; each note lands with the intensity of their fiery debut, but with an added swagger. These are slow songs, but their rhythm crawls with stiffness rather than patience, played through hunched shoulders and bleary, bag-laden eyes. This is the measured, staggering punk of exhaustion, the tense lurch of a band that has internalized the cruel pacing of life itself—Book of Curses, much like adulthood, advances glacially until its building tension suddenly implodes.
Adulkt Life delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. Rather than shouting for revolution, it screams into the void. It seeks to fill the emptiness left by endless PTA meetings, the ceaselessness of work, the unending charge of new, befuddling technologies. Their debut pummels with a confidence borne from nihilism, an acceptance that comes with the realization that history has no natural arc, and that life only grows more vexing after the high-minded certainty of youthful indignance has passed. It’s rock made by a man who refuses to buy a cellphone; it’s poetry written through gritted teeth and the forced parental facade of calmness in the face of chaos. But it’s also crafted with an insatiable verve, an almost triumphant fury. Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.
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. | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? | November 11, 2020 | 7.7 | 8a87a788-f6e6-41b6-8462-0fa95fa961b4 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Tom Krell’s latest album of ambient R&B club music feels both reverent and relevant, with icy textures and knotty lyrics that leave plenty to untangle. | Tom Krell’s latest album of ambient R&B club music feels both reverent and relevant, with icy textures and knotty lyrics that leave plenty to untangle. | How to Dress Well: The Anteroom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/how-to-dress-well-the-anteroom/ | The Anteroom | How does one contend with the term “blue-eyed soul” when listening to the radio nowadays? Bazzi’s “Mine” or something by blackbear always seems to come up; Post Malone is perennial on pop and hip-hop stations. Post is technically a rapper but on “Psycho,” he is doing the same slurry crooning as his guest Ty Dolla $ign—who is not a rapper—and the line of what is R&B to a radio programmer continues to be confounding.
White guys are not just inhabiting the dirtbag tenderness space built in the early ’90s by Jodeci and now dominated in this decade by Bryson Tiller and the Weeknd. Since he first started releasing music online in the late 2000s, How to Dress Well (né Tom Krell) has been working with a palette that incorporates just as much traditional R&B as it does ambient electronic music. But as much as Krell’s music registers as “cool,” the evolution of his sound has been delightfully unhip. His 2014 album, “What Is This Heart,” was more adult contemporary but in a way that made obvious Krell’s grown and modernist vision of pop music. Krell’s latest, The Anteroom, is another endeavor of his polyglot pop fortitude, only this time instead he’s working with icier source material.
Krell’s intention was to make “an ambient dance record where the energy never goes above three out of ten.” Most of the album’s sensations are serene and spectral, often reminiscent of the ghostly electronic-R&B urtext, Burial’s Aaliyah-sampling “In McDonald’s.” The Anteroom is full of skittery electronics with hints of ambient and house textures that work as both as a marker for how outside of the margins Krell operates and how narrowly he deviates from his own previous innovations in the underground. His attention to detail—like corners of the haunting, warped vocals on opener “Humans Disguised as Animals | Nonkilling 1” and the tightly wound phrasing of the lyrics—is what makes the album shine. But in a year when electronic music feels more introspective than ever, calming dance music isn’t really a breakthrough thesis. The intent do something more slowed, oddly, puts him in the company of Post and co.’s Xanax-soothed renditions of R&B.
The lyrics on The Anteroom could work as a standalone chapbook with plenty to pick apart. A striking line comes from “Body Fat”: “There’s still so much pain and anger in your body fat.” It is really jarring to hear something that uses the same language of insult sung in falsetto. It is really jarring to hear the words “body fat” sung so tenderly, in general. It invokes that stoner wisdom that you can exercise the THC out of its storage in your own body fat before a drug test, as if anger and pain can be stored there, as well. The lyric could also reflect the language of body-shaming back to its listener and ring densely cruel with its invocation of pain and anger and fat, even though all bodies have it. I don’t think this is intentional, it’s just late-capitalism has designed the world to make me feel that way. This is the kind of experience, the untangling of his words, that Krell goes for here.
The last three tracks on the album are also worthy of their own study. Here, there is real friction, the kind of cross-pollination of pop, indie, and electronic that Krell excels at. Closers “False Skull 12” and “Nothing” are heavy with the self-cited influence of Coil’s pioneering experiments with new wave and industrial but through the lens of Krell’s own pop vision. On “Brutal (feat. Ocean Vuong) | False Skull 5,” he trills over syrupy boom-bap and pitched-up strings, another new terrain for a record so full of conventional riffs.
These pieces have the same intricacies as his lyrics and make for the most interesting music on the album, but they also skew the perception of where Krell fits in in 2018. Placid R&Bish pop by guys like blackbear and Bazzi works because its numbness is a palliative for the constant influx of heinous news and the din of social media. This is also why ambient is having an enormous resurgence in electronic music. Club music, however, is still a necessary tool to combat tough times and Krell’s soft club ventures don’t quite surprise like his hybrids usually do. He is at his best when he’s tinkering in territories where others are not. | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | October 24, 2018 | 7.3 | 8a89aec9-d73d-4e81-a060-ca9e48d9a7d7 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | |
Kenny Dixon Jr.—aka Moodymann—represents the second wave of homegrown Detroit electronic music masters. His new self-titled album throws in plenty of gospel, blues, house music, and roller-rink funk on top of his singular sound. | Kenny Dixon Jr.—aka Moodymann—represents the second wave of homegrown Detroit electronic music masters. His new self-titled album throws in plenty of gospel, blues, house music, and roller-rink funk on top of his singular sound. | Moodymann: Moodymann | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19037-moodyman-moodymann/ | Moodymann | After the rise of “The Belleville Three”—Detroit techno originators Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins (soon joined by Carl Craig)—and after that decidedly Eurocentric African-American musical export took root in London and Berlin, Kenny Dixon Jr. represented the second wave of homegrown Detroit electronic music masters. He released his first single in 1994 and helmed a renaissance of that scene alongside peers like Rick Wilhite, Marcellus Pittman and Theo Parrish (the four intermittently collaborate as 3 Chairs). Since the 90s, no two producers have better exported that “Detroit” sound than Theo Parrish and Moodymann. In citing that bankrupted American city though, one means a very specific sound, one that writer Michaelangelo Matos recently described in an NPR story as “a byword for high-minded purism, a bulwark against ‘commercial’ dance music,” the music itself informed by “jazz chords, R&B melancholy, snatches of old soul and plenty of cosmic-mindedness.”
All four genres abound in Moodymann’s work, and his self-titled newest album also throws in plenty of gospel, blues, house music, roller-rink funk, all of it capped by a long slow nod in the direction of forbearers Parliament-Funkadelic. There’s a purism to Moody’s music, but it’s made of muddy waters (literally, on “Sunday Hotel”), dusty vinyl grooves and—if the Popeye's inner sleeve is to believed—greasy fingers. Playful in juxtaposition to Theo’s seriousness, the Dizzy Gillespie to Theo's Miles Davis, Dixon might be best glimpsed through the prism of another Detroiter: J Dilla. Both men deconstructed and flipped old funk and soul to new ends, Dilla’s focus towards hip-hop, Moodymann's towards basement-deep house music.
Take an album highlight like “Desire", which features Moodymann with uncredited Blue Note crooner José James. James does his deepest Gil Scott-Heron impersonation, Moody deploys piano chords as judiciously as Bill Evans did, all of it set against a beat that edges towards house only to dissipate just before settling into a steady pace. Old 33 1/3 soul gets spun at 45 on the ecstatic “Lyk U Use 2", the skittering snare pattern of fellow Detroiter Andrés then slowed all the way down to 45 BPM. It’s not only old soul vocals though: there’s an acid squirt over the Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan on “IGuessuneverbeenlonely” and most peculiar of all, has Lana Del Rey ask about death on “Born 2 Die".
But the most prominent voice on the album is Dixon’s own. In a close-mic’d croak, Moodymann’s vocal delivery vacillates between late-night disc jockey and booty call from Sly Stone. He laments that “eight and a half is not enuff anymore,” that girls may not like 45s. One of the funniest call-and-responses of the year occurs on the too-brief “No”; KDJ heavy-breathes from a payphone to one of those bikini-clad nymphets draped across him on the front cover, asks if she likes fried chicken without hot sauce. Also: “Y’all mad I’m a local Detroiter?”
While almost every second of Moodymann’s oeuvre hearkens back to his hometown, Moodymann is perhaps his most explicit ode yet. Snippets of movie dialogue, murder statistics and tales of 70s heroin kingpins like Henry Marzette emerge between the spacious, slack grooves. For all the insouciance that’s informed Moodymann’s work over the past two decades, Moodymann feels downright serious at times. It comes to the fore on the sprawling twelve-minute version of Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop", which is part cover, part edit, part deconstruction, part remix. Yet for a reason not altogether clear amid its haze is that these parts just don’t quite add up. Blame the news report samples or perhaps Dixon’s own croon, but midway through, I fantasized what a sidelong KDJ edit circa 1998 might’ve sounded like instead. | 2014-02-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-02-27T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Mahogani | February 27, 2014 | 7.8 | 8a89c448-bbd9-4b48-ac54-8a8d504450a2 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
For his first album in five years, Matthew Houck puts fatherhood and a move to Nashville to good use on songs that are sly and wry and allow his voice to cut through intricate arrangements. | For his first album in five years, Matthew Houck puts fatherhood and a move to Nashville to good use on songs that are sly and wry and allow his voice to cut through intricate arrangements. | Phosphorescent: C’est La Vie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phosphorescent-cest-la-vie/ | C’est La Vie | Maybe it was Pro Tools. Perhaps it was the post-Napster access explosion. Or it may have been the slow spread of Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, or even Bright Eyes. But at some point after the turn of the millenium, every block and every burgh seemed to sprout its own home-recording, achy-voiced strummer, ready to reorient their tunes with field recordings, hip-hop edits, swirling arrangements, Max/MSP processes, or a personal Wrecking Crew of session musicians. It was all personal and wonderful—or, sometimes, simply forgettable.
Matthew Houck emerged into into a moment seemingly glutted with often-bearded songwriters eager to deconstruct and expand themselves, from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon to Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. Houck arrived with a thin but instantly recognizable creak, somewhere in the neighborhood of Will Oldham, and an Elephant 6 auteur’s sense of scope. For the past 15 years, Phosphorescent’s discography has pivoted among arrangement concepts for that voice, from the spare colors of his 2003 debut to the ambitious countrypolitan landscapes of 2013’s much-loved Muchacho. Houck’s tone and songs could disappear into his well-built, tasteful atmospheres. At least for me, Phosphorescent often fell safely in the realm of perhaps-incorrect stereotypes—enjoyable, but ultimately failing to stick.
But on C’est La Vie—the first Phosphorescent studio album in a half-decade and since Houck left Brooklyn for fatherhood in Nashville—his voice cuts through inventive settings with a confidence, clarity, and sensibility that can vividly and unexpectedly recall 1980s Paul Simon, minus the global beats and entitled boomerness. “New Birth in New England” bounces irresistibly, not too far removed from Vampire Weekend, either, but counterbalanced by Ricky Ray Jackson’s luminous pedal steel. Though nothing else on the album quite sounds like that first single (or hits the same giddiness), the Simon similarity runs deep. Houck’s narrator is often sly, wry, and conversational. “‘C’est la vie,’ she says/But I don’t know what she means,” he sings on the chorus of “C’est La Vie No.2.” Like Simon, Houck casts himself as a slightly befuddled subject, his internal monologues tumbling into melody.
As far removed from Phosphorescent’s bedroom folk days as Simon’s 1986 Graceland was from his singer-songwriter debut, C’est La Vie is a mirror of Houck’s own maturation, its similarities to Simon perhaps as structural as they are sonic. In places, it sounds like a late-30s check-in for Houck and his listeners, as “My Beautiful Boy” attests. The type of open-hearted dad-dom, that might make a younger songwriter sneer (or blush), it floats on a cloud of gorgeous ambient percussion that keeps the arrangement from drifting into nebulous string-synths. Though Houck has relocated to Nashville, C’est La Vie’s most compelling music is perhaps its least C&W, finding new uses for all that pedal steel. Some of the album’s best moments are more Lambchop than George Jones, especially the vocoder-touched R&B float of “Christmas Down Under.” It would have been unthinkable on Houck’s earliest work.
Sometimes C’est La Vie is a bit too on-the-nose, much like 2010’s middle-of-the-road Here’s to Taking It Easy. “These Rocks” recalls Daniel Lanois’ work with Bob Dylan. Serving as a piece of late-album heaviness, with Houck condensing life’s battles into a refrain, the music seems to strain to match the gravity of the central lyric—“These rocks, they are heavy/Been carrying them around all my days.” But it does underscore the bittersweet, top-loaded sense of fun possessed by the rest of C’est La Vie, exemplified by the moment that Jackson’s pedal steel locks into the kosmische pulse of “Around the Horn.” The music suddenly soars beyond the land of songs. It’s the kind of turn on the kind of album that might even make a previously unimpressed listener reevaluate how Houck arrived here. Maybe it was Pro Tools. Or maybe it was daddom. | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | October 10, 2018 | 7.6 | 8a8a2409-df55-4bac-b644-b81d59821933 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Sade’s third album turned the band’s elegant, composed music into meditation, exploring romance as an interior experience. | Sade’s third album turned the band’s elegant, composed music into meditation, exploring romance as an interior experience. | Sade: Stronger Than Pride | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sade-stronger-than-pride/ | Stronger Than Pride | Sade’s discography has no sharp pivots or seismic reinventions, but there are plenty of slight tweaks and shifts. On Stronger Than Pride, self-produced after collaborator Robin Millar went blind during the recording of Promise, the English band began to whittle down their sound. Dispensing with the nightclub swing and louche, haunted characters of Diamond Life and Promise, Sade’s third album turned the band’s elegant, composed music into meditation, exploring romance as an interior experience.
After releasing and touring their first two records in quick succession, the band took a breather for Stronger Than Pride. Written in Spain and London and then recorded in France and the Bahamas over the course of a year, the album took shape casually. Guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman recalled it as the first time the band composed songs piecemeal rather than as a collective, an approach perceptible in the looseness of the compositions. The album is a breezy, unrushed affair, where songs loop back in on themselves, sway in place, and fizzle out. Sade doesn’t do outright jams, but “Keep Looking” and “Give It Up” come close, locking into grooves and letting the melodies leisurely unfurl. The latter even features some horn blasts—practically an indulgence, given the band’s tendency toward restraint and poise. While Sade doesn’t reinvent itself on Stronger Than Pride, it does unwind.
The music on Stronger Than Pride is reduced on all fronts: softer rhythms, lighter melodies, fleeter verses. “I wanted it to be more basic and less embellished, with the quiet songs quieter and the harder songs harder,” band leader Sade Adu said at the time. The record isn’t as minimal as that quote suggests (especially when compared to the ethereal, hollowed-out mood music of Love Deluxe), but it is certainly sparse. The arrangement on lithe title track “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” is open like a cloudless sky, carried by a patter of keys, percussion, and pan flute that drift around Sade’s airy voice. As she sings of a love that endures a betrayal, the weightlessness of the arrangements sells her candor. “I still really, really love you,” she croons.
Adu maintains the directness and simplicity of the title track throughout the record. Her writing is noticeably less scenic and moody, treating love as more of a concept than an embodied experience. “To turn my back on you/Now would I turn my back on me?” she asks on the dubby “Turn My Back on You,” perhaps the only Sade song that could be described as hard. “Give it up, give it all” on “Give It Up” is delivered less like a steamy bedroom command and more like a call to prayer. Compared to the glitz and melodrama of hits like “Smooth Operator,” “Is It a Crime?”and “Jezebel,” these songs don’t have much sizzle or flair. But there is an emotional clarity to these spare lyrics—a cleanness almost, as if Adu has rinsed them in cold water.
The writing takes on a mantric bent as Adu reuses phrases and words from previous verses and repeats them by herself or alongside background singer (and secret weapon) Leroy Osbourne, whose rich voice adds warmth to her cool melodies. “Wanna share my life/Wanna share my life with you,” they duet on the upbeat “Paradise.” “Nothing can come/Nothing can come/Nothing can come/Between us,” they incant on “Nothing Can Come Between Us.” These chants aren’t particularly catchy, but their repetition imbues the record with a quiet anguish. Despite their outward mellowness, these songs always have a faint darkness at the edges.
Matthewman, Paul Denman (bass), and Andrew Hale (keyboard) play up the loneliness and fear lurking behind all the affirmation. On the drumless “Haunt Me,” which is replete with lush riffs and fills, the production wafts around Sade’s pining whispers like a perfume cloud. “Haunt me/In my dreams/If you please,” she beckons nervously. Where most pop ballads center the voice, “Haunt Me” allows it to sink into the abyss. On “I Never Thought I’d See the Day,” another breakup tale, the voice is the focal point, Adu hitting the top of her range as Denman’s restrained strums and Hale’s hushed chords fuse into a fluid void. “I wish you could shelter me,” she nearly belts, her voice streaking through the amorphous mix like a lightning bolt. She sounds utterly alone.
Stronger Than Pride is buoyed by Sade’s ability to coalesce around Sade Adu’s directions, fleshing her ideas out or ceding them space to bloom. The band, especially Adu, is sometimes mocked for being risk-averse and even-keeled—never breaking stride or cutting loose like the divas, heartthrobs, and pop rockers they adjoined on the charts—but in a way, their faith in each other is their gamble. Matthewman once described his bandmates as conduits, saying, “Sade doesn’t play guitar, but she plays it through me...we all kinda play each other that way.” Stronger Than Pride is the sound of Sade calibrating that affinity and establishing—for listeners and for themselves—that they are a unit.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | October 9, 2020 | 8.2 | 8a8ee14e-c87b-4cfc-a27f-560cf053e8e1 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Brooklyn-based crooner’s abundant talent vanishes behind hazy production and indistinct writing. | The Brooklyn-based crooner’s abundant talent vanishes behind hazy production and indistinct writing. | Nick Hakim: Cometa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-hakim-cometa/ | Cometa | Nick Hakim seems poised to make a great album. He’s a guitar-slinging soul singer who’s fluent in punk, jazz, psych rock, and hip-hop, a clear descendant of D’Angelo and Funkadelic. His husky voice and unpretentious guitar playing are ideal vehicles for decorative instrumentation: doubled saxophones, flickering Wurlitzer, programmed drums, the occasional synth. While his full-length debut, 2017’s Green Twins, effortlessly demonstrated his virtuosic abilities, 2020’s WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD sagged with tired melodies and sluggish arrangements, sounding like a neverending studio session where every idea was recorded, even the mediocre ones. Yet Hakim’s talent, as ever, shone through; it was easy to sense a more potent, specific, and emotionally active version of the album buried somewhere in the original. His latest offering, Cometa, creates the same dissonance between what is and what could be. Hakim’s talent is once again on display, but the songs here crumple with limp lyrics and listless structures.
Working with an all-star team of guests, including Alex G, Helado Negro, DJ Dahi, and Andrew Sarlo, Hakim creates sleek, rugged backdrops to croon over, his compositions favoring mood and texture over movement and tension. Most songs are built from simple, stacked guitar riffs, analog hiss, electric bass, and gentle drum patterns. “Vertigo” beautifully blends these components together, leaving Hakim with enough room to sing one of the record’s finest melodies, his vocal harmonies blanketed with reverb and delay. On “M1,” a choral synth meshes with a filtered drum loop as Hakim’s smoky voice rises softly above the instrumentation. Cometa’s at its most engaging when Hakim’s singing seizes the spotlight and resists burrowing beneath the beat, when the production breaks free from its haze and shimmies into an improvisational breakdown, like the fuzzy free-for-all that arrives at the end of “Ani.”
Throughout the album, though, Hakim vanishes behind the production. While there are certainly some standout moments, Cometa aspires to be just another vibe in a vibe-saturated economy. It doesn’t help that Hakim’s lyrics struggle to conjure any memorable image or meaningful emotion. Though he describes the record as a “collection of romantic songs written through different lenses,” Hakim’s writing lacks the detail and specificity required to tell a story, evoke a feeling, or flesh out a metaphor. He operates almost exclusively in euphemism, crafting entire songs around airless bromides like “Time seems to slow down when you’re near me” or “I feel like I’m flying when you stare into my eyes.” “Perfume” is a song about being really into his partner’s perfume; the message at the core of “Market” is that love never dies, sort of like… a flame.
One of the album’s best moments is stashed at the end. “Something” features a crusty acoustic guitar melody and a pocky drumbeat; Hakim’s voice sounds richer and fuller than at any other point on the record. “I just wanna feel something,” he sings once, twice. It’s a biting and propulsive song that clearly communicates his appeal: He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim. | 2022-10-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | October 26, 2022 | 5.8 | 8a8f04fc-939b-4200-99f8-e0f6289d18d4 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The art-rocker reworks songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, offering a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career. | The art-rocker reworks songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, offering a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career. | Kate Bush: Director's Cut | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15448-directors-cut/ | Director's Cut | This is not, strictly speaking, a new Kate Bush album. Just a warning for all of you who'd gotten used to agonizingly long waits between Bush records. It was easy to hope, when Director's Cut was first announced, that we'd been blessed ahead of schedule with the latest transmission from her private art-rock fairy land. Instead, this is a rethink of a somewhat controversial period in her career, by an artist who claims not to give much thought to her albums once they've been sent to market.
Director's Cut transforms songs from 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes. Sometimes crucial elements (rhythm tracks, vocals) are re-recorded. Some aspects (like certain guest performances) are left unchanged. Occasionally an entire song gets a note-by-note remake. It's a major and unexpected reinvention of familiar and very time-bound material, not quite "new" and also not quite what fans have been playing for years now. The very different mix of Director's Cut changes not just the sound but the emotional kick inside many of these songs. What was once the work of a shy woman who came to roaring life on record is now just as often subdued, reflective, inward-looking. It's worthy of standing as its own entry in Bush's discography, without necessarily replacing the albums it draws from.
At the time of its release, The Sensual World seemed both up to date and not of its time. The glossy studio-obsessive production sounded definitely of its moment, fitting for the era of booming drums and reverb-soaked pop trifles from bands like Fine Young Cannibals and INXS. But the songs, and Bush's performances, were stark reminders that she actually came out of the same tradition that gave us the operatic vocals of prog rock, the jazz-tinged complexity of the Canterbury psychedelic scene, the unashamed theatricality that led to Peter Gabriel dressing up like a giant daffodil. It made for a strange hybrid, the smoothness of the Big 80s meets the complexity and expressionism of the prog 70s. Much of the record's tension came from wrapping shiny pop accessibility around songs that might burst into emotionally raw strangeness at any time. Bush played to the moment, but couldn't be contained by it.
By the time of The Red Shoes-- with its prog structures, guest-star guitar heroics, world music touches, all given another dose of pop polish-- Bush's music was too ornate to fit in with the stripped-down "realness" of alt-rock. It was also still too defiantly individual to sit alongside the work of her 70s and 80s peers, many of whom had moved into comfortable, profitable, and bland MOR singer-songwriter territory. Her moment hadn't so much passed-- though it'd be hard to point out anyone else making music that sounded like this at the time-- as she'd become a genre-of-one. The fussed-over textures and genteel folk touches of adult contemporary peeled back mid-song to reveal naked eroticism, rage, joy, Bush's voice spluttering out wordless weirdness or leaping into ecstatic ululations.
What Bush has done on Director's Cut, put simply, is to strip the 80s from these songs. (That goes for the Red Shoes material, too, even though the album was released in the 90s.) The gigantic drums and digital polish, what both dated the music instantly and gave it that stark contrast between accessibility and the deeply personal, have been replaced with less showy rhythm tracks, and a warmer, more intimate atmosphere. On the original "The Sensual World", the elements drawn from Celtic folk felt like striking intrusions in an all-digital world. Renamed "Flower of the Mountain" here, those rustic elements no longer feel quite so out of place, whether you found the original an intriguing hybrid or an awkward merger of old and new. The songs still don't have the feel of a band playing together, but they have a new unity, even the synthetic elements part of a lovingly handcrafted sound. "The Red Shoes", another Celtic-inflected standout, with one of Bush's wildest performances, gains a new intensity precisely because the instruments no longer feel so sterile. But not every element of this patchwork has been pieced together perfectly. The eerie keyboard textures on "And So Love Is", the kind of sour 80s kitsch beloved by Gang Gang Dance, seem surprisingly natural in this new environment. But Eric Clapton's bluesy wanking sounds even more out of place now, stadium pop bluster in a homemade world. It produces tension for sure, but the wrong sort.
It's the singing that just as often startles, though. Bush is less show-offy on Director's Cut than any of her pre-hiatus albums. For a woman known for her range, and her fearlessness at using that range, her performances are always tempered and often low-key here. As with so many songs on Director's Cut, "This Woman's Work" becomes almost shocking in its difference, not least because it's transformed from one of Bush's biggest showstoppers into something far more mournful, the singer restraining herself as if almost but not quite broken by love. The backing track is just as minimal, but deeper, the instrumental textures less brittle. A hushed, lonely Bush sounds as if she's drifting through a vast, lonely space. But instead of the original's childlike verses surging to grown-ass-woman longing on the choruses, Bush is more evenly paced here, communicating deep regret more through a bereft tone than diva theatrics. It's desolate and intimate, like much of Director's Cut, where the original's bravura made it feel both tender and defiant, like much of Bush's early work.
Even with an older and more reserved Bush occasionally putting the brakes on that melodrama, these reworked songs don't totally relinquish that unashamed grandiosity that makes Bush such a love-hate proposition. Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions. | 2011-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-05-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | EMI / Fish People | May 19, 2011 | 7.3 | 8a9be814-d540-4b05-8304-319a83eb6988 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
With 2020’s lockdown measures in place, the Los Angeles neighbors passed the time playing harp and guitar together. The results capture the melancholy strangeness of those days. | With 2020’s lockdown measures in place, the Los Angeles neighbors passed the time playing harp and guitar together. The results capture the melancholy strangeness of those days. | Mary Lattimore / Paul Sukeena: West Kensington | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-lattimore-paul-sukeena-west-kensington/ | West Kensington | Memory, place, and the ways they intertwine are recurring themes in Mary Lattimore’s music. The harpist’s titles often allude to the places she holds dear, like Wawa, a mid-Atlantic convenience store chain known for its cheap hoagies. “I’ve always loved romantic melancholia in music,” she told 15 Questions, pinpointing her favorite musical qualities as “lush, deluxe with a little nostalgia and some inexplicable sadness.” On West Kensington, she teams up with guitarist Paul Sukeena to continue to explore the ways that music can bring the past to life. Spinning outward from short, looping melodies that offer ample space for reflection, their music is tinged with a dreamlike haze.
The two musicians recorded West Kensington while lockdowns in the United States were at their strictest. Sukeena and Lattimore lived next door to each other in Los Angeles, and they passed the time by making music together. Their tranquil 2020 track “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool,” whose title references a public swimming pool in Philadelphia, offered an early glimpse into their pensive style. West Kensington picks up where “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool” left off, wrapping gauzy plumes around delicately interwoven synths, harp, and electric guitar.
The duo’s most compelling tracks make the most of both brightness and darkness. “Altar of Tammy” folds deep, agitated tones into twirling layers. Twinkling harp spirals around crunchy electric guitar, building from tiny, melancholy melodies into vast undulations. “Didn’t See the Comet” similarly unites airiness and moodiness. Here, the duo weaves together spun-out drones that waver and grow, letting the natural pulse of the sound swell and dissipate.
West Kensington often sounds like a fantasy, hovering in the space between imagination and reality. At times, though, this starry-eyed style can feel sluggish, weighed down by distorted effects and repetition. Opener “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” builds from a quavering, ascending melody that repeats throughout but never quite blossoms. Instead, it sounds heavy, as if it’s stuck in place. Rather than exploring the details that made other songs feel full, they lean too much into one idea, forgoing intricacy for sameness. But with “Garage Wine,” the record’s most compelling track, Lattimore and Sukeena effortlessly bridge poignant remembrance with glimmers of hope. It’s here that the music encapsulates the broadest spectrum of feeling, from gloominess to contentedness.
More than two years since Covid-19’s arrival, the “pandemic record” has become an increasingly familiar trope. West Kensington is another addition to the bunch, but because so much of Lattimore and Sukeena’s work already dwelled upon wistful reminiscence, their contribution to the genre doesn’t feel like a gimmick. Instead, it builds on themes they’ve often explored to create music that’s both soothing and introspective. At times, the album’s balminess can feel cloying, but at its best, it captures dazzling complexity with a graceful touch. In those moments, Lattimore and Sukeena showcase the mixture of melancholy, nostalgia, and joy that keeps them pushing forward. | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Three Lobed | May 20, 2022 | 6.8 | 8aa5d182-26dd-4fe2-a8e6-f4a12851d3ab | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Mavis Staples' second album produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy traces the believer's journey from doubt-- conveyed by a reverent cover of Low's "Holy Ghost"-- to certainty, its sentiments more reflective than 2010's rousing You Are Not Alone. Compositions by Funkadelic, Nick Lowe, the Staples Sisters, and Tweedy himself also appear. | Mavis Staples' second album produced by Wilco's Jeff Tweedy traces the believer's journey from doubt-- conveyed by a reverent cover of Low's "Holy Ghost"-- to certainty, its sentiments more reflective than 2010's rousing You Are Not Alone. Compositions by Funkadelic, Nick Lowe, the Staples Sisters, and Tweedy himself also appear. | Mavis Staples: One True Vine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18220-mavis-staples-one-true-vine/ | One True Vine | The opening track on Mavis Staples’ One True Vine, her second record with Jeff Tweedy, may sound familiar. The song is called “Holy Ghost”, and it’s a lonely monologue featuring her full, beautifully controlled vocals backed by a whispery acoustic guitar strum and a judiciously unobtrusive backing choir. Written by Alan Sparhawk, it appeared on Low’s recent full-length, The Invisible Way, which Tweedy also produced. It’s a curious bit of synergy, and the Wilco frontman might be guilty of shameless product-placement had Staples’ version not turned out so well. Essentially a cappella, it’s a fine showcase for the vocalist, even if it she obliterates all the ambiguity in the original: This is not about “some holy ghost,” but the Holy Ghost.
What rankles, however, isn’t the song choice but its placement. On The Invisible Way “Holy Ghost” comes late on the first side, sounding like a mournful bit of spiritual questioning. As an album opener here, it’s so wistful and downcast that it sounds like we’ve intruded on Staples’ private prayer. This is not introduction but a benediction. One True Vine takes a while to get going, burdened by curious sequencing that emphasizes the songs’ low-key production and lurching pace. After “Holy Ghost” comes the Tweedy-penned “Every Step”, whose guitar feedback and punctuating stomps sound cheaply ominous. That’s followed by the sluggish Funkadelic cover “Can You Get to That”, which features a fine bass vocal from Donny Gerrard but never quite gets to that.
You Are Not Alone, Staples’ first collaboration with Tweedy from 2010, highlighted the septuagenarian’s still-commanding voice-- which has become all the more powerful with age and experience-- and proved the Wilco frontman could work in styles and genres well beyond indie Americana. Its tone was celebratory, as he showed a light touch in the control room and never burdened Staples’ performances with too much sound or too many studio tricks. You Are Not Alone sounded like a celebration: of a God who had blessed Staples with a long and influential musical career but also of a partnership that seemed to bring out the best in both artists.
That’s an almost impossible act to follow, and by contrast One True Vine sounds subdued, hesitant, downtempo, downcast-- its sentiments more reflective than rousing. It’s not until the fourth track, “Jesus Wept”, that the album really picks up. The song begins with Staples' voice: “My throat quits when I try to say how I long for the day,” she intones. “How I wish there was a way I could see you again.” Staples invests those lines with so much fear and yearning that the sense of loss becomes palpable. It’s an arresting moment, and in the album’s best bit of sequencing, it’s followed by “Far Celestial Shore”, written by Nick Lowe. An upbeat tune with a sharply strummed guitar propelling its quirky melody, it provides a contented punctuation to “Jesus Wept” by promising a reward in the afterlife for the trials of this life.
As Staples ponders the connections between the earthly and heavenly realms on “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today” and “Sow Good Seeds”, One True Vine shakes off the dust of the first half and rights itself mightily. An old Staples Singers tune, “I Like the Things About Me”, achieves a light, mobile funk, as though set in motion by some great epiphany, and “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind on Jesus)” establishes a buoyant country-gospel groove punctuated by Staples’ ecstatic hallelujahs.
With its quick pace and infectious hook, “Woke Up This Morning” would make an effective and ebullient album opener, but it works well enough as the impassioned climax before the denouement of the title track. The album intends to trace the believer’s trajectory from doubt (“Holy Ghost”) to certainty (“One True Vine”), which lends the album an introspective quality and invests those final numbers with even more power. Still, One True Vine tarries too long in doubt before finally breaking that dour spell and inviting the listener in on the celebration. | 2013-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- / Epitaph | June 26, 2013 | 7.4 | 8aa86cfc-5b22-472b-9ec4-d1750545b64a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On an eerie new record, the anonymous collective strays from its metal roots and takes influence from jazz, telling stories of life on America’s class margins. | On an eerie new record, the anonymous collective strays from its metal roots and takes influence from jazz, telling stories of life on America’s class margins. | Mamaleek: Diner Coffee | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mamaleek-diner-coffee/ | Diner Coffee | Diner Coffee, the seventh record by Mamaleek, opens with a real laugh riot: a cacophony of recorded voices erupting, stumbling over one another, overripe with pleasure. When a horde of guitars and drums finally thunders a response to the cascading, borderline uncomfortable guffawing, it’s swiftly laughed back down. For longtime fans of the elusive metal project, two things should be immediately clear: The laughter will always win, and traditional notions of heaviness are often the butt of the joke.
Since debuting in 2008 with their self-titled record, the two anonymous brothers in Mamaleek have reveled in showing how extreme metal’s theatricality and full-throttle dynamics can make its darkness less menacing—even comical. This, to Mamaleek, is both an uproariously good joke, and a deadly serious idea: The guy in corpse paint singing about entrails is no match for, say, an earnest conversation about the state of public housing, which Mamaleek criticized on 2020's Come and See. On that album, they melted jazz instrumentation and blues textures down into music as heavy and fluid as molten iron, using sudden hushes and surprisingly melodic—even funky—basslines to create a sound that felt alive, vicious, and dripping with nausea.
Diner Coffee is both a stranger and more accessible record, the work of a group—newly expanded to a quintet, still anonymous—nearly abandoning their metal roots. But even when they’re at their most placid, an acrid fragrance clings to these songs, deepening the band’s brutal, nuanced stories of life on America’s class margins and proving they’ve still got a bit of necromancy in them. Metal artists have found inspiration in spiritual jazz for years, picking up on the discordant cosmic quests of the Sun Ra Arkestra and the long-distance drones of Alice Coltrane. But on Diner Coffee, Mamaleek play it sleeker, closer to the ground, affecting the swing and tone of bebop even when they’re playing ferocious avant-rock.
A sense of internal conflict pulses through these songs, the profusion of relatively light moments covering the anger like a tarp thrown over a bull. In the verses of “Boiler Room,” Mamaleek churn up a tavern sleaze until it’s so rich you can practically see the flocking on the Bud Light mirror behind the bar. In a yawp that’s part death-metal growl and part Tom Waits pastiche, the vocalist slurps out a list of regrets—all the other jobs he could’ve done if he hadn’t gotten stuck in the boiler room—then marshalls the band as the mood turns violent, saxophones screaming in support. If the lounge-lizard setting feels ironic, it’s only because that’s how the character is presenting himself, the not-so-laid-back guy casually chomping the ice from the bottom of his rocks glass; even the dots of electric piano that twinkle around the edges of the noise are a sign that the prettiest presentation often conceals something awful.
In a recent interview, the band collectively stated that they find diners “comforting and haunting at the same time,” and on much of Diner Coffee, they pulse with the spectral, erotic energy of the Bad Seeds, delighting in conjuring up uncomfortable environments where horror finds peace. There’s a Badalamenti sway to the title track (not to mention a guitar solo that could’ve been on Steely Dan’s Aja), and, sure, that rhythm combined with a lyric about a lonely guy ruminating on the beauty of a cheap cup of coffee does feel a touch on the nose for a band this invested in blue-collar grime. But there’s a righteous fury to Diner Coffee that’s largely missing from David Lynch’s vision of the Pacific Northwest, even as it shares Twin Peaks’ dreamy form of logic.
Mamaleek’s sense of empathy is particularly clear in “Wharf Rats in the Moonlight.” It’s the album’s best song, a patient march through the mental dissolution of a female war veteran whose worldview unravels after hearing Afghani women sing for their own joyful liberation. The song sputters with tension, as trilling woodwinds suggest the promise of light flitting around the edges of confusion. A sampled pinprick of sound, peaceful in tone and breathy like a bow that's just touched the violin's highest string, is repeated just off beat enough to startle. “Now she was the one trapped and unable to express herself,” the singer screams, and the song goes haywire with glitching feedback, harsh static, and what sounds like an overdriven TV. In its textural complexity and expressive power, it’s the closest Mamaleek gets to free jazz.
Like the hollowed-out electronic music of Burial, which critic Mark Fisher described as having “less to do with a near future than with the tantalizing ache of a future just out of reach,” Diner Coffee creates an atmosphere of gloom, hemmed in by molten edges and riddled with reverberant crackles. Moans drift through the distance, calling to mind old barroom songs; guitars sway like a boat knocking against a dock. These aren't simply moments of extramusical flourish, or attempts to elevate these songs even further above and beyond genre cliches. They’re the clearest articulation yet of Mamaleek’s ongoing resistance to the status quo. | 2022-09-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock / Experimental | The Flenser | September 30, 2022 | 7.6 | 8ab6d95d-6062-4022-8bfb-7a5fa48d81c3 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Gojira's fifth album is the French metal act's best work to date. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, one prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash. | Gojira's fifth album is the French metal act's best work to date. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, one prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash. | Gojira: L'Enfant Sauvage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16752-lenfant-sauvage/ | L'Enfant Sauvage | A little less than halfway through L'Enfant Sauvage, the excellent fifth album from French metal masters Gojira, the tone shifts dramatically. For the first four tracks, the technically sophisticated band extends a blitz of intensity, with drummer Mario Duplantier sending up rapid, precise salvos from behind the field-marshal bark of his brother Joseph. But during the 108-second "The Wild Healer", Mario slows to a steady snare-and-cymbal trot, the guitars circling overhead in two repetitive riffs. They just sit there, too, letting the guitars squeal a bit more and the distorted bass swell through the mix.
Of course, this is just an interlude, as "Planned Obsolescence" rips through the relative silence with the same ferocity as the record's front end. But the pause offers perhaps the most revealing moment on L'Enfant Sauvage, an album that earns the rank of Gojira's best work to date not only because the Duplantier brothers are Meshuggah descendants with a head for melody, but also because it's so well paced. Go back through those first four tracks: Opener "Explosia" appropriately explodes from its haunches and then roars, with Joseph beginning the album-length story about a person's slow fight against self-depravity like he's shouting loud enough to purge the process from himself. But then the seven-minute track eases into a blur of guitars and mid-tempo march, Joseph's growl now enhanced by the hints of a hook. The title track, which follows, builds tension for half of its length by extending one riff, stopping it, and playing it again; just when the tease starts to get tedious, though, Gojira finally spring forward into the kind of violently controlled breakdown that reminds you what a circle pit is for. It's exhilarating because it is so expertly timed. Still, after a minute or two of that melee, the quartet buries itself with a sudden fade, as if they've disappeared into the mouth of an abyss. As a whole, L'Enfant Sauvage is exhausting. But taken bit by bit, it's awesome.
Gojira take most of their twists and turns within songs-- that is, the bulk of L'Enfant Sauvage churns and sprints and charges, with tangents taking shape within the songs rather than dictating them. Though "Pain Is a Master", for instance, opens with a moody mix of field recordings and forlorn acoustic guitar, it rights itself with rigid force soon enough. Aside from a late-song onslaught, "Born in Winter" is Gojira's attempt at a ballad, with Duplantier doing his best solemn grunge moan above a rapid guitar line that serves more as a canvas than a progression. Even amid the heaviest bits, Duplantier sings like he's staring at an arena of lit lighters, letting the glow of this narrative drift toward its end. In that way, Gojira recalls Baroness, a band that uses a much different strain of heaviness toward the same end. As Gojira do with their feverish wizardry, Baroness play to their mid-tempo strength only to then play against it constantly, breaking the pace (and concomitant expectations) with tangents that strengthen the record's general rigors. For L'Enfant Sauvage, that plan works just as well within individual songs as it does across the entire album.
This record revolves around struggling toward transcendence or, at the very least, working to avoid the mire of self-destruction. "One day, we'll wake up from this absolute nonsense," Duplantier charges toward the end of "Planned Obsolescence", a pulverizing piece of thrash that seems to wink, at points, to bands like Shellac before shrieking toward the exit like grindcore on fire. "Conscience awakened, we'll take it from there." A decade into their career, that's a fitting moral for the story of Gojira, a band that's occasionally stumbled (2008's less-than-stellar The Way of All Flesh) after great success (2005's deserved breakthrough, From Mars to Sirius) to arrive at one of the most riveting and challenging metal records of the year. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash. For these 52 browbeating but not-quite-brutal minutes, they recognize that those moving parts aren't enough to make a great album. With that realization in mind, they've done exactly that. | 2012-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-28T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Jazz / Metal | Roadrunner | June 28, 2012 | 8.1 | 8ab81313-52ee-40c1-943c-3350817fd778 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
With help from Owen Pallett, the long-running experimental duo maps a sprawling path through seemingly unconnected musical ideas; the result is an enveloping overload of ideas and inspirations. | With help from Owen Pallett, the long-running experimental duo maps a sprawling path through seemingly unconnected musical ideas; the result is an enveloping overload of ideas and inspirations. | Nonconnah: Songs for and About Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nonconnah-songs-for-and-about-ghosts/ | Songs for and About Ghosts | At least on streaming services, the tracklist of Songs for and About Ghosts may deceive first-time listeners. The third full-length album from Memphis couple Zachary and Denny Wilkerson Corsa as Nonconnah, the 50-minute record is split into four near-equal movements, each brandishing an evocative title—“At the End of Everything, At the Edge of Nothing,” for instance, or “To Follow Us Through Fields of Lightning.” Sample the start of each piece, and Songs for and About Ghosts scans as an eerie electroacoustic beauty. Field recordings of ecstatic choirs or enthusiastic tourist advertisements burble through florid synths or scrims of static, like Philip Jeck taking up residence in DJ Shadow’s stacks.
But those movements are subdivided into five gestural miniatures with subtitles of their own, though they’re not listed on Spotify or Apple Music. Each bit lasts two minutes or so. Sometimes, they are as distinct and disconnected as letters of the alphabet; other times, Nonconnah transition between them so methodically it feels like watching the numbers spin ever higher on an old analog gas pump. The first track pirouettes from triumphant choral samples to luminous glitches and chimes, then jumps abruptly into bludgeoning power electronics that subside into what sounds like baby circuits suckling on electrons. The strings come in, and the track slowly escapes Earth’s orbit, like some leftover from Eno’s Apollo mission. Every piece follows that basic Godspeed You! Black Emperor-like premise, taking a long route of unexpected detours between two vaguely related musical ideas.
That template is like a condensed version of what someone might experience during a day—a volatile admixture of wonder, worry, irritation, and angst that affirms none of our feelings are ever fixed. It could also be a real-time score for scrolling your timeline, bouncing between stories that might enrage, fascinate, or gratify you all within the course of a few minutes. The second movement, “Changed in Autumn’s Feral Depths,” flows from a seraphic hum to a pair of tinfoil-hat brigadiers raving about EMP and chemtrail conspiracies. Owen Pallett’s strings float in over Zachary Corsa’s halting electric guitar but stall the moment they start to seem unambiguously hopeful. It’s as though Pallett recognizes that unguarded optimism is just another opportunity to be let down.
The real lure of Nonconnah’s nonlinear approach is how many layers and ideas there are to uncover here. Historically, this sort of electroacoustic music can be proudly (and often wonderfully) didactic, tracing tiny variations on a single idea for an hour or more. Once they’ve dipped into a sound, for instance, Christian Fennesz, Claire M. Singer, and Francisco Lopez aren’t prone to jar you with something entirely unexpected; instead, they slowly shift the focus to reveal a new level of detail inherent in the sound.
But Nonconnah work like magpies, webbing together their own idiosyncratic renditions of sounds they love. That hyper-distorted barrage of noise during “Fields of Lightning” recalls the pummel of Birchville Cat Motel, softened from beneath by neon synthesizers. The hiccupping guitar-and-Casio loop that opens “At the End of Everything” sounds like The Postal Service fed through William Basinski’s tape heads. One particularly vertiginous span toward the middle of closer “The Willow and the Meeting Twain” feels like Oval’s Markus Popp using field recordings of American county fairs as musical grist. Yes, that’s a lot of references (if only a tiny sample), but that’s the joy Songs for and About Ghosts—it’s a slow-motion carousel of musical surprises, with each new sound causing you to reconsider the context of what you’ve already heard.
The prolific Corsas have been making wide-screen experimental music for a decade under several names, often working with some mix of powerful drones and inquisitive field recordings. It has often been interior music, the result of a pair hunkered down in their home studio. But Songs for and About Ghosts feels like a revelation within their catalogue because it understands the multivalence of our times, neatly encapsulating the idea that outrage, joy and most every other emotion coexist within a click. Songs for and About Ghosts is an overload of ideas and inspirations, each just as likely to pick you up as to slam you back down again.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ernest Jenning | March 25, 2021 | 7.4 | 8ab88878-6dea-4f8b-a793-22ef0e1599d5 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Pairing Midwestern hip-house with Los Angeles G-funk, the South Central native emphasizes subtly bumping grooves and gruff, hypnotic rhymes. | Pairing Midwestern hip-house with Los Angeles G-funk, the South Central native emphasizes subtly bumping grooves and gruff, hypnotic rhymes. | Channel Tres: Black Moses EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/channel-tres-black-moses-ep/ | Black Moses EP | Channel Tres emerged in 2017 with the single “Controller,” an effortless slice of hip-house that sounded like Dâm-Funk mixed with Todd Terje and infused with the swaggering bodaciousness of West Coast rap. The five songs on his self-titled EP extolled the virtues of life’s simplest pleasures—driving with the top down, drinking Hennessey, and stealing your girl—with ounces of bounce to spare. Lyrically, Channel Tres often shares less with the G-funk of his native South Central, a regular sonic reference point in his instrumentals, and more with the gleefully vulgar, verging-on-pornographic tracks of Detroit ghettotech producers like DJ Assault.
Channel Tres’ second EP adopts an almost identical structure to his first. Both are five tracks in length, and each opens with dreamy, warbly intros just over a minute long. As on his debut, the order of the day here is the scintillating blend of hip-house that Godmode, also home to Yaeji, has come to specialize in. Though Channel Tres’ most obvious reference points are Moodymann and Galcher Lustwerk, the twinkling flutes, rumbling congas, and clean bass guitar on a song like “Brilliant Nigga” echo house classics like Larry Heard’s “And So I Dance” or Deep Aural Penetration’s “Into the Kick With Tito,” while the whining synths and regional roll call on “Sexy Black Timberlake” recall Channel Tres’ roots in California funk.
Channel Tres comes from the Lil B school of songwriting; comparisons to various celebrities abound. “Sexy Black Timberlake” assumes the mantle of Justin Timberlake; on “Raw Power,” a bit of performative shirtlessness makes him feel like Iggy Pop on the cover of (you guessed it) Raw Power. The EP’s title inevitably invokes the soulful aura of Isaac Hayes. Even when he insists it “ain’t about me,” Channel Tres’ subject is pretty much always himself.
Like his production style, Channel Tres’ voice is heavy on the low end, clinging to the gruffer side of his register. His strength is timbre, not technical flow, and he’s much more adept as a tour guide to a dubby soundscape than eyewitness to events. On Channel Tres, that quality oozed charisma; here, it just sounds like a little too much cough syrup. The limits of his languid flow are most apparent on “Black Moses,” which features a welcome interruption from JPEGMAFIA. Hostile and high-pitched, JPEG’s delivery has a dangerous energy that can’t be captured in a bottle. Channel Tres sounds over-the-counter by comparison.
Black Moses isn’t a tremendous step forward for Channel Tres, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for an artist who emerged almost out of nowhere two years ago and still hasn’t released a full-length album. But it’s beginning to look like he is being underserved by his chosen format. Though part of the appeal of Channel Tres’ music is his ability to distill the feeling of a deep groove into a pop-sized package, some of his rhythms demand more than just a few minites on the dancefloor. These songs all yearn for an extended remix by Kerri Chandler or Masters at Work—maybe it’s time to stop echoing Moodymann and start cutting him a check. | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Godmode | August 20, 2019 | 6.7 | 8abbdd7e-944e-4408-abc3-433c76b1da5b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The post-punk/proto-industrial group is now down to just founding member Richard H. Kirk, who fills the first Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years with invitingly rough-hewn sounds. | The post-punk/proto-industrial group is now down to just founding member Richard H. Kirk, who fills the first Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years with invitingly rough-hewn sounds. | Cabaret Voltaire: Shadow of Fear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cabaret-voltaire-shadow-of-fear/ | Shadow of Fear | Shadow of Fear, the first new Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years, finds the UK post-punk/proto-industrial act reduced to just one person: founding member Richard H. Kirk. That has been the case since the project was resurrected in 2014 at Berlin’s Atonal Festival, two decades after the longest-running incarnation of the group (Kirk and fellow multi-instrumentalist Stephen Mallinder) parted ways.
Keeping Cabaret Voltaire as a solo act seems to be by design—an insistence on moving the project forward rather than trying to cash in on the past. Kirk apparently turned down a lucrative offer from Coachella to reform the group, and when he finally began to perform live as Cabaret Voltaire, he played nothing but new material. “I always make it really clear that if you think you’re going to come and hear the greatest hits,” he told FACT in 2017, “then don’t come because you’re not. What you might get is the same spirit.”
Shadow of Fear falls comfortably under Kirk’s rubric. The eight songs on the new record are all original compositions written and developed over the past six years, yet there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a Cabaret Voltaire album. While not as pulverizing as the group’s early recordings nor as sleek as the techno and house-inspired work found on 1993’s International Language, it blends the various eras of the group into a mostly satisfying whole.
Much of the album’s throwback sound is due to simple technology choices. Kirk’s recent Cabaret Voltaire performances didn’t make use of laptops, but rather stuck to his array of older synths and drum machines. According to the press notes for Shadow, when he tried to upgrade his setup for the recording, his computer melted down.
Working with older gear lends an invitingly rough-hewn quality to much of the album. The heaving melodic groans and guitar flickers on “The Power (Of Their Knowledge)” are underpinned by a tinny preset beat from a cheap keyboard, and “Microscopic Flesh Fragment” slowly builds from an off-kilter, never resolving drum sample into a dark, soupy dub-inspired tangle. Kirk also makes a direct connection to Cabaret Voltaire’s past on “Papa Nine Zero Delta United” via a wonky drum machine rhythm that is almost a mirror of the one he, Mallinder, and original member Chris Watson used on their 1979 single “Nag Nag Nag.”
At the same time, Shadow of Fear belies its creator’s intentions to keep Cabaret Voltaire, as he said in that FACT interview, “breaking new ground and moving forward.” For someone who has clearly kept up with the evolution of electronic music, as proven by his own club-ready releases or the remixes he’s done for Factory Floor and Powell, Kirk doesn’t apply the same contemporary approach to this material. The most current-sounding track on the album, “Universal Energy,” is a squirrely excursion into Chicago-style acid house.
The album’s title seems to nod to the gloomy anxiety that seems to be following our every move these days. Cabaret Voltaire, past or present, is the ideal soundtrack to an era of doomscrolling and persistent creeping dread. The group once presaged a dystopian future in tense early tracks like “No Escape” and “Spread The Virus.” That time has come and Kirk is once again a prescient musical messenger. In the hiccupping, strangely groovy final track “What’s Goin’ On,” a sampled voice asks the song’s title, sounding harried and fearful. The answer, according to another sample on the track: “Take a look.”
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. | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute | November 30, 2020 | 6.8 | 8abf589a-5d5e-4735-979d-d2dd4dc7aabf | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
On their latest album, the Atlanta duo paints a more intimate portrait of their city but struggles to personalize their homages. They hit their stride when they speak directly to the people. | On their latest album, the Atlanta duo paints a more intimate portrait of their city but struggles to personalize their homages. They hit their stride when they speak directly to the people. | EarthGang: Ghetto Gods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earthgang-ghetto-gods/ | Ghetto Gods | EarthGang dedicated Mirrorland, their major label debut, to the many sounds of Atlanta. Staging their hometown’s rich musical heritage as a wacky carnival, Olu and WowGr8 melded Battle of the Bands drumlines and Dungeon Family funk, trap bounce and Sunday service call-and-response. That tentpole approach sometimes obscured the two people running the circus, but it allowed EarthGang to both showcase their many influences and present greater Atlanta—a sprawling metropolis often portrayed as unwieldy and fractured—as a unified whole. That commitment to capturing every aspect of their homeland continues on follow-up GHETTO GODS, a portrait of Atlanta that centers the city’s inhabitants. But even within this more intimate framework, EarthGang still struggle to personalize their homages to their beloved home.
The lack of live shows at the beginning of the pandemic helped recalibrate EarthGang’s relationship to the city. They used to think of touring and repping Atlanta as the best way to support it. “But really, being back home gave us a chance to actually be there, answering the phone calls, pulling up on people, checking up on our little cousins,” Olu said in an interview last year. That heightened sense of presence guides EarthGang as they navigate a plague-stricken Atlanta. Amid the ambient desperation and uncertainty, they find a new appreciation for the quiet comforts of kin and community.
Much of GHETTO GODS spotlights EarthGang’s relatives, friends, and peers, casting them as overlooked gods. The title track pairs triumphant horns with deferential references to Olu’s mother and WowGr8’s grandfather. On “Lie to Me,” a psychedelic synth loop wafts as adrift influencers and ballers distort their means. “American Horror Story” probes the lingering impact of the Middle Passage on Black families. EarthGang’s cursory storytelling tends to make these individuals feel more like census data points than deities—especially the women, who tend to be sex objects, generic muses (“Black Pearls”), or transient voices peripheral to the music (“Jeans Interlude,” “Neezy’s Walk”). But everyone belongs.
When EarthGang speak directly to the people they aim to honor, they hit their stride. “Strong Friends” offers refuge to stalwarts who rarely get a chance to be vulnerable. “Check in on your strong friends/How you been, my nigga?/I’m here if you feel like talkin’,” WowGr8 croons over a bluesy beat, the sentiment simple yet pointed. “Eyes On Me” is just as casual, venting frustrations about rap money failing to uplift distressed friends and relatives. The spare and airy beat, reminiscent of DJ Ayo’s moody work on Polo G’s Die a Legend, gives EarthGang ample room to clear their heads and find their words.
The rapping on GHETTO GODS features less filler and empty showmanship than EarthGang’s past releases, but their writing remains anonymous. Their lyrics rarely feel as expressive as their modular flows, which swerve into breezy melodies or bouncy triplets with ease. Nor do they outwardly compete with each other. Their verses tend to be almost symmetrical in terms of length and emphasis. The two are familiar enough with songwriting best practices that their music structurally works, but as every guest rapper (except a rambling CeeLo) upstages them, it’s hard to overlook how little happens in Olu and WowGr8’s verses. Even when they rap with purpose, they fail to offer distinctive turns of phrase or convey a unique perspective, which is ironic considering their constant promotion of Atlanta as the city of a million misfits. Their love for their home is palpable, but there’s a difference between flying a flag and weaving one. | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dreamville / Interscope | March 4, 2022 | 6.5 | 8abf8c34-8240-4325-adf3-53f820fc5521 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
As recently as last year, So Stressed were a ferocious post-hardcore trio. Now, inspired by the contentment love brings, they make blithe, breezy, and unapologetically melodic pop music. | As recently as last year, So Stressed were a ferocious post-hardcore trio. Now, inspired by the contentment love brings, they make blithe, breezy, and unapologetically melodic pop music. | So Stressed: Pale Lemon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/so-stressed-pale-lemon/ | Pale Lemon | “Contentment has either no need of artistic expression or few resources for it,” observed the critic Clive James. “In that regard, all the great art we know of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content.” It may be a liability, then, that So Stressed seem so happy. The Sacramento rock band’s new album, Pale Lemon, is a full-throated celebration of an enduring relationship—one that’s not euphoric so much as stable, tranquil, and satisfying. Most great love songs are about wanting or losing; having means happiness, and happiness tends to write white on the page. You can hardly fault the band for enjoying healthy relationships. But making that contentment interesting is the daunting challenge this record sets out to meet.
So profound is the fulfillment expressed on Pale Lemon that it has occasioned a radical transformation of the band’s sound. As recently as last year’s Please Let Me Know, So Stressed were a ferocious, turbulent post-hardcore trio that seemed at home among the mosh pits of suburbia. Now they make pop music that is blithe, breezy, and unapologetically melodic, rejuvenated by pedal steel guitar and flourishes of kalimba. Their new album shares more of an affinity with Pavement or the Wrens than with Spazz or Dystopia; “Miniature Flag” even features a sprightly flute solo, a choice that almost veers into yacht-rock territory. This is the sound of a punk band with nothing left to scream about. So Stressed have traded in their sleeveless denim jackets for blue blazers and Hawaiian shirts.
It is a fascinating reinvention, and one rendered successful by the versatility of their songwriting. “Cream & Gold” has the pleasant, languid mood of a summer heatwave, adrift in the slow twang of electric guitar and Morgan Fox’s listless, somnambulant vocals; the brief melodica solo that swells midway through it is an inspired and lovely touch. “Very Long Cloth” offers a great deal more intensity, but its soaring back-and-forth chorus and anthemic verve push the song closer to mid-2000s indie rock than to the band’s former punk severity—it’s more buoyant enthusiasm than feral squall.
This, of course, accords with Pale Lemon’s theme of romantic harmony. One line in “Very Long Cloth” is a clear thesis: “The things that you’ve done/The things that you do /Always ensure that I love you.” A sentiment like this is difficult to quote without sounding mawkish. The affection expressed throughout the record—earnest, sincere, and unflaggingly devout—would make any lover blush, but the lyrics rarely lapse into greeting-card cliché, despite their undisguised passion. These are honest confessions of a feeling that can be hard to articulate aloud: “I’m so thankful that you are here”; “You are my home”; “I’ve never been so close to anything before”; “Right now I don’t want for anything else”; “I couldn’t be here if you weren’t here”; “I miss you when I sleep because I don’t dream.” Each of these lines comes from a different song. This is the ardor that courses through the album—and it rings utterly true.
If the contentment at the heart of Pale Lemon bristles with some other emotion, it’s fear—fear of being discontent again or, more precisely, of screwing it all up. Abiding love always bears a faint trace of danger, because if it feels that good, for that long, you become desperate to hold onto it. So Stressed understand this peril. Pale Lemon is a record of happiness fraught around the edges with anxiety: “We’re standing on thin ice,” Fox sings on “Snowshoer,” the album’s emotional climax. “I am shivering but it is nothing new.” On “Onion Paper” he lays it bare: “If I’m scared it’s because I don’t want to end up without.” That’s the thing about contentment: It’s always under threat—by time, by crisis, or by death. | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ghost Ramp | July 12, 2018 | 7.3 | 8abff8dd-4eb6-4128-8da5-4b419e944797 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
A new reissue of Let It Be includes four discs of live material, demos, alternate takes, and lost mixes, shining a light on the brilliant and tumultuous process of what would become the Beatles’ final album. | A new reissue of Let It Be includes four discs of live material, demos, alternate takes, and lost mixes, shining a light on the brilliant and tumultuous process of what would become the Beatles’ final album. | The Beatles: Let It Be (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-beatles-let-it-be-super-deluxe/ | Let It Be (Super Deluxe) | By 1969, the dream was ending. Since their early-’60s arrival as a mesmerizing foursome of Elvis and Everlys-inspired child savants, the Beatles had continuously and spectacularly leveled up: from chipper and prolific chart dominators in England to beloved Liverpool exports conquering America, to shaggy-haired counter-culture superstars lurking subversively in the pages of teenage glossies, to society-shifting psychedelic pioneers and avant-garde astronauts. All of it seemed ordained by magic. The run between 1963’s Please Please Me and 1968’s The Beatles (known colloquially as the White Album) remains credulity-straining in both its breadth and brilliance. But all things must pass. And by 1969, the Beatles were barely functional.
The problem was basically everything. Their fame was such that even having begged off touring three years previous, they remained far too well-known to walk comfortably down any street. They had legal issues and Apple—the utopian multimedia company they had recently founded—was quickly devolving into an untenable boondoggle. In 1967, their beloved longtime manager Brian Epstein died of an overdose, a casualty of Beatlemania’s ceaseless pressure cooker. The four-month sessions for the White Album had both tested relationships between the Fabs and emboldened each of them to pursue the possibilities of what might be accomplished alone. And yet, against what feels like common sense, the Beatles reconvened just 10 weeks later in January, intending to find some way to top themselves yet again.
For a rock band in 1969, “getting back” was all the vogue. Following Bob Dylan’s self-conscious rejection of psychedelic pageantry John Wesley Harding and the magisterial traditionalism of the Band’s first two releases, the hip move was a return to basics. Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ self-appointed problem-solver, saw in this trend an opportunity to address a creative issue while exploiting a commercial possibility. Put on notice by Dylan, the Band, and the Rolling Stones’ roots-adjacent ’68 masterpiece Beggars Banquet, McCartney suggested they try their own hand at a stripped-down, informal approach, one that would reconnect them musically to one another and re-establish their working man’s band bona fides.
It wasn’t a horrible idea, but it wasn’t quite feasible. The Beatles were simply too massive to do anything on a remotely small scale and soon enough, the project had morphed into a documentary that was to precede their first live performance in three years. Serious consideration was given to holding the concert in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater in Tunisia—not exactly what you’d call modest. They finally settled on the more practical but still strenuous plan of three weeks of filmed rehearsals and then a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row in London. Even without the trip to Africa, the brief was still unreasonable: Write and record a new album in front of rolling cameras and then get your live chops up to speed for a performance to be viewed by millions. It turned out to be the first time that they were not completely up to the challenge.
Sessions commenced at the Twickenham Studios soundstage in southwest London, a drafty and vibeless space, not at all like cozy Abbey Road, where nearly all their greatest recordings had taken place. The demands of the movie shoot required the band to convene at a 10 a.m. call time, disrupting the conventional evening-to-early-morning flow of their process. Lateness was a persistent issue. John Lennon, in particular, seemed to be shocked to learn that such a thing as 10 a.m. even existed.
The days at Twickenham were fraught and not particularly creative by their established standards. The bickering that had become a feature of recent sessions reached new levels of hostility. George Harrison needled McCartney about his lack of spontaneity. Paul complained about everyone’s level of preparation. Ringo couldn’t finish “Octopus’s Garden.” If the idea was to set aside grievances and establish a new esprit-de-corps, then the environment could scarcely have been less ideal. The sessions eventually migrated to the more pacific setting of their own studio at Apple Headquarters. Slowly the band began to find their way, and an LP began to take shape. All of this and more is covered in forensic detail on the new five-disc reissue of Let It Be with the (Super Deluxe) appendage, an accompaniment to Peter Jackson’s forthcoming six-hour re-imagining of the original documentary.
The tumultuous aftermath of the Let It Be sessions is reflected in the byzantine miasma of versions of the album which emerged, and continue to emerge. To wit: The group initially turned over dozens of hours of recorded material to engineer Glyn Johns, tasking him with separating the wheat from the chaff and providing a mix suitable for release. The results were deemed unsatisfactory by Lennon, Harrison, and Starr, who outvoted McCartney and turned the tapes over to Phil Spector to remix. Spector gave many of the songs the maximalist treatment for which he was renowned. McCartney hated it, but that was the version that was first released to the public in 1970. McCartney eventually won the argument, in a sense, shepherding to market the de-Spectorized Let It Be… Naked edition in 2003. This is where things more or less stood until the new box set, which now includes a third mix of the LP, helmed by George Martin’s son Giles, and a separate disc restoring the 1969 Glyn Johns mix that the band initially rejected. Make of it what you will, but the very notion that no one can seemingly figure out what Let It Be should sound like to this day is important for understanding just how confused the band was in the moment. Constant tinkering of this sort with Revolver or Rubber Soul would be tantamount to a desecration.
The new Giles Martin mix makes for an interesting hybrid of the original Phil Spector and Let It Be… Naked versions. Notably, Martin makes the decision to restore Spector’s heavily orchestral treatment of “The Long and Winding Road,” and the edit seems like the correct one: It’s a track that always worked better as show tune camp than a philosophical cudgel. Other changes like the aggressively close-mic’d mix of “Across the Universe” provide no improvement over the raft of existing versions. The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been.
The original Glyn Johns mixes are certainly rough and ready, so much so that you can understand the group’s nervousness about releasing them. Parts of it, like “Medley,” sound like a rag-tag forerunner to Harry Nilsson’s 1974 Lennon-produced freakout Pussy Cats. An early take of “Teddy Boy,” which would later surface on McCartney’s self-titled 1970 solo debut comes across as anarchic and stoned as Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes. Johns clearly had a weirder idea in mind for what Let It Be might have been, and his original mixes make a persuasive case for his vision. Distracted, exhausted, and locked in contretemps by the time they finally issued the LP, the Beatles had seemingly forgotten what they were even trying to do in the first place.
Plagued by uncertainty, they delayed the release of the album and opted instead to start an entirely different one, recording Abbey Road in February 1969, only three weeks after sessions for Let It Be concluded. The culminating rooftop concert was a fraught bit of business. As sound and lighting preparations were being made for the afternoon of January 30th, the band wasn’t even certain they would go through with it. George was in a mood and Ringo was having trouble seeing why it all mattered. Finally, John Lennon, asserting himself as bandleader for perhaps the final time, had the last word: “Oh fuck—let’s do it.” They plowed through 42 minutes of takes until the cops showed up and issued a noise ordinance. It was slapdash and strangely perfect. The first rooftop performance of “Don’t Let Me Down,” included on disc two of the new box set, ranks on a short list of the best things the band ever recorded.
So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away. There’s a moving take on Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” which would become the title track of his classic solo debut, after it had been deemed unworthy of being on a Beatles release. No wonder he was frustrated. Paul walks us through the soon-to-be Abbey Road standards “Oh! Darling” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” while John previews the stand-up routine polemic “Gimme Some Truth,” which wouldn’t emerge until 1971’s Imagine LP. Even Ringo painfully efforts his way through a touchingly tentative “Octopus’s Garden.”
In the years that followed, the Beatles would splinter viscerally while never quite being able to quit one another. Ringo played on All Things Must Pass and Lennon’s epochal solo debut, Plastic Ono Band. Paul and John nurtured a public animus that provided a tissue-thin veneer over what was plainly the hurt feelings of two estranged siblings. The finely-rendered Abbey Road LP allowed the group to put the dream of the Beatles to bed with a fan-service-worthy flourish. Let It Be was just before all that, when the emotions and the tunes were too raw to gloss over.
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. | 2021-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | October 16, 2021 | 9.1 | 8ac87159-58ed-4c77-8629-69338dba475d | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
Newly reissued by Drag City, three albums from the early ’90s capture the Japanese psych titans at their most mystical. | Newly reissued by Drag City, three albums from the early ’90s capture the Japanese psych titans at their most mystical. | Ghost: Ghost / Second Time Around / Temple Stone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ghost-second-time-around-temple-stone-ghost/ | Ghost / Second Time Around / Temple Stone | Japan’s Ghost have always seemed more like an arcane religious sect than a traditional band. In the 1980s, they avoided traditional rock clubs, performing instead in fields, ruins, woods, caves, and temples. Since they sidled into Western consciousness via their self-titled debut album on Hideo Ikeezumi’s P.S.F. label in 1990, Ghost have built a discography rife with solemn psychedelia, opiated folk rock, and confounding improv.
Newly reissued by Drag City, their first three albums—the self-titled debut LP, 1992’s Second Time Around, and the 1994 live document Temple Stone, all originally recorded for P.S.F.—capture the group at its purest and most mysterious, like a Japanese analogue of Popol Vuh. In a 2004 interview, lead singer/guitarist/banjoist Masaki Batoh observed that Ghost’s creativity stems from unknowable origins: “Music falls from highest sphere. We don't make music. It's born naturally.”
Ghost was my gateway into the splendors of Japanese psychedelia. The image on the cover captures the enigmatic pastoral air permeating the album: Batoh—long-haired, rail-thin, and behatted— and the rest of the band pose on a grassy, mist-shrouded hill before massive speakers, ancient sculptures, or perhaps both. Opening track “Sun Is Tangging” begins with a triangle tap and shaken shells before a horrifying scream and rumbling drums puncture the calm. This enlightening kick in the ear eventually gives way to a languid folkadelic sway, with Batoh cooing inscrutable lyrics (“Sea Mous melt and sleep/While my evil eye’s closed/Think about your rough land/All the bitch and milk snow, pun is dry”). His cyclical acoustic guitar riff, Noriaki Hagiya’s mournful oboe, and Mu Krsna’s conga slaps cohere into a hypnotic fantasia. Batoh proves an inelegant crooner who often sounds tipsy, his accented English hard to decipher, but that only adds to Ghost’s charm.
Ghost’s salubrious infatuation with Can surfaces in “Guru in the Echo,” whose chunky, Jaki Liebezeit-esque tom-tom tattoos lead into a grandiloquent strain of garage rock bearing traces of the Hombres’ “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out).” Hearing Ghost bust out of their dominant restrained mode is exhilarating. The three songs bearing “Moungod” in their titles carry a whiff of ominous ritual—replete with monk-ish chants and rickety hand percussion—and reveal Ghost’s kinship with nomadic improv ensemble Taj-Mahal Travellers.
But the real meat of Ghost resides in the ballads—which distinguished the band from most of their P.S.F. comrades, who favored overwhelmingly distorted power chords and swift tempos. The wispy “I’ve Been Flying,” a song of gentle escapism, floats on Batoh’s acoustic guitar and featherlight vocals reminiscent of Nick Drake. One of Ghost’s most moving and inventive songs, “Ballad of Summer Rounder” balances between elegance and shambles until the drums and bass propel the piece into a defiant work of empowerment. After a poignant, fragile flute solo by Taishi Takizawa, the track morphs into a chaotic, Faust-ian rock entanglement. On the lacily beautiful “Rakshu,” the mood is gloriously devotional; Hagiya’s valedictory oboe part sends the listener to the exit feeling shaken to the core.
Ghost expanded their timbral palette on Second Time Around, adding Celtic harp, lute, vibraphone, and bouzouki to the group’s arsenal. The predominant style is folk rock that yearns for a mythical, unspoiled past, but without the baggage of sentimentality. On the title track, Ghost locate the golden mean between starkly menacing and triumphantly majestic, while the band makes intimacy sound vast on “A Day of the Stoned Sky in the Union Zoo,” where Ogino’s heroic recorder solo moves with plumed-serpent aplomb. “Awake From a Muddle” is a dramatic, flute-powered ballad with obliquely beautiful acoustic plucking. As often happens with Ghost in this era, the song revs into a higher gear and ascends the mountain with puffed-out chest. On mantric rocker “Orange Sunshine,” Ghost, flaring into prog-rock pugnacity, achieve the rare feat of making acoustic guitars sound heavy and ominous. Second Time Around peaks on “Forthcoming From the Inside.” After a trance-inducing acoustic guitar and flute intro, the track jump-cuts to an urgent rhythmic thrust, thanks to Iwao Yamazaki’s vigorous tom bumps; think Can’s “Vitamin C,” but not as funky. One wishes that Ghost ventured into this hard rhythmic-attack mode more often, as it contrasts nicely with their folkier inclinations.
Temple Stone contains spiritualized iterations of songs from Ghost’s first two LPs, recorded in the Seiryu Temple and Waseda Salvation Church. The production is remarkably vivid, given where the recordings were made. The songs vibrate with more intensity than in their album versions, as if performing in sacred zones had elevated the members’ chops. The traditional “Blood Red River” is a revelation, its fractured blues and noisy free-jazz explosions evoking a wracked combo of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and the Red Crayola’s free-form freakouts. A lot of live records come off as redundant, but Temple Stone renders Ghost’s early, magisterial material in boldfaced italics.
Following Temple Stone, Ghost transformed into a slightly more conventional rock group (they even did a Rolling Stones cover), adding White Heaven guitarist Michio Kurihara and developing a facility for prog rock and more overtly political stances, as exemplified by song titles such as “Change the World” and “Tune In, Turn On, Free Tibet.” Collaborations with Magic Hour and Damon & Naomi showed that Ghost could adapt to blown-out and hushed Western indie-rock protocols, respectively. But as interesting as those excursions are, Ghost created their most distinctive and enduring music on these first three albums. | 2024-02-27T00:53:34.829-05:00 | 2024-02-27T00:53:34.829-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | null | February 27, 2024 | 8 | 8ac9feb4-0def-44fc-9a5d-aa789a33ede9 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
The Sheffield duo's sophomore album dials down its predecessor's twee, hyper-romantic delight in favor of songs that emphasize rhythm and atmosphere, with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter. But that's not the most drastic shift. | The Sheffield duo's sophomore album dials down its predecessor's twee, hyper-romantic delight in favor of songs that emphasize rhythm and atmosphere, with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter. But that's not the most drastic shift. | Slow Club: Paradise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15823-paradise/ | Paradise | Slow Club's first album, Yeah So, was a twee, hyper-romantic delight, full of charming little indie folk songs ideally suited to mix tapes and teen television soundtracks. The Sheffield, England duo could have kept going in that direction indefinitely with potentially great commercial rewards, but instead they've opted to make a second album, Paradise, which dials down their perky sweetness and emphasizes rhythm and atmosphere with lyrics confronting more emotionally complicated subject matter.
This isn't to say that Slow Club have become unrecognizable. One of the most impressive things about Paradise is the way the band have retained so much of their character while shifting their tone considerably. A few of the songs here-- the rollicking "Where I'm Waking" and the wistful "Hackney Marsh"-- would have made sense on Yeah So, but for the most part, the melodic and lyrical sensibility of that record has been filtered through a different set of influences. There is still a sweetness to their sound, but it's balanced out with a range of more difficult emotions and a darker tonal palette.
The most drastic difference between Yeah So and Paradise is that Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor have largely abandoned close harmonies. Instead, Taylor has asserted herself as the dominant vocalist, with her voice taking the lead on nearly every track, while Watson provides complementary harmonies or focuses on his guitar. This was a brilliant decision on their part. Watson has a pleasant tenor, but Taylor's voice is much more colorful and expressive. Though she supplied the high points of previous singles "Trophy Room" and "Giving Up on Love", her vocal performances through Paradise are a revelation: Her phrasing is consistently thoughtful and surprising, full of subtle cues that invest her straightforward lyrics with remarkable depth much in the same way a great actress can draw rich character detail out of a threadbare script.
Taylor's best performances-- and not coincidentally, Paradise's two best songs-- take her voice in very different directions. The ballad "You, Earth, or Ash" is so stark and delicate that her voice often seems naked, barely accompanied by the minimal plucking of Watson's guitar. She sounds wounded and fragile, but her tone is very adult and dignified; she gracefully transitions from moments of self-assured beauty to sounding as though she could spontaneously break down into tears. She is more girlish on "Two Cousins", the set's percussion-heavy opener, leaning hard on her upper register and reaching up further still to underscore particularly anguished lines. The song, about a pair of estranged family members, cycles through two choruses-- the first one carried by a trebly, diagonal synthesizer part and the second more focused on her voice, which rings out with heart-breaking clarity as she sings the tune's gutting conclusion: "I look into your eyes/ You don't know who I am."
In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine. Led along by Taylor's confident voice, the duo has evolved from being among the best of an indie pop field overcrowded with cutesy duos to carving out a distinct niche for itself that opens up further opportunities for creative growth. | 2011-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-09-16T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | September 16, 2011 | 7.8 | 8ace2d2d-040e-4132-b938-16f147f134db | Matthew Perpetua | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-perpetua/ | null |
Over the past decade, the Melbourne group’s music has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with every release. Here, they trade their minimal-wave roots for unexpected forays into gothic country. | Over the past decade, the Melbourne group’s music has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with every release. Here, they trade their minimal-wave roots for unexpected forays into gothic country. | HTRK: Rhinestones | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/htrk-rhinestones/ | Rhinestones | Melbourne’s HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”) have spent a decade ruminating in the shadows of loss. After the deaths of mentor, producer, and Birthday Party member Rowland S. Howard, in 2009, and their founding bassist, Sean Stewart, in 2010, the surviving duo reconfigured its industrial no-wave detachment into an intimate blend of elegiac synth music, slowcore rhythms, and flushed-cheek vocals. Still throbbing with sadness, their dramatically layered sound has grown lighter, gentler, and more inviting with each release. It’s now so sparse, you could almost hear a pin drop amid the amplifier hum. On Rhinestones, HTRK peel back even more layers, further revealing the fragile heart at the center of their music. Vocalist Jonnine Standish’s wispy poetry drapes over ephemeral textures as if she’s whispering a devastating secret in the form of a lullaby. The album plays like a heartbreaking country ballad’s matte-black underside, capturing the desperate solitude of a freshly bruised heart.
Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang resemble a subterranean Everything But the Girl, with Standish patiently spilling gorgeous vocal half-hooks over minimal acoustic guitar, electric delay, and dimly lit textures. Opener “Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones” stirs its country tropes into a blurred-out dream state. Standish’s peculiar poetry draws us in closer as she plays the word “glitter” two ways: “I can make you glitter/I can make you feel glitter than this/Kiss kiss and rhinestones/I’m covered in kisses/From head to toe,” she coos over dewy acoustic strumming. The music recalls the goth-country twang of Townes Van Zandt, decorated with steel-string flourishes that sound like Lindsey Buckingham hammer-and-pulling himself to sleep. Using barely audible synth and vocal layering, they craft an entire universe of sound while simultaneously capturing the feeling of being completely alone in a dark, empty room. The track’s sophisticated subtlety merges with its lo-fi desolation, vivid textures echoing off the walls. HTRK’s music is deceptively prickly; its glittering gemstones adorn deeper emotional wounds.
The album sequences its heavy-hearted vignettes over a brisk 27 minutes that weigh heavier than the sum of their parts, as Standish and Yang soundtrack the confusion of being drawn to that which may eventually cause you harm, or perhaps already has. The songs’ tender tones and blurred edges capture both sensual intimacy and lurking violence. “Valentina” features blossoming acoustic fingerpicking paired with murky electric guitar swells as Standish recalls, “As her petals fall on my bed/A familiar thorn in my hand/Can you remove it from my finger?” The song neatly describes the record’s fundamental ambivalence, caught between the allure of enigmatic beauty and the discomfort of emotional turmoil.
Rhinestones is infatuated with ennui’s disorienting dazzle, and the tragic discovery of what lies behind its knotty, ornamental gates. On “Fast Friends,” Standish comes to terms with the catalytic spark of an instant bond with a new, emotionally unstable friend: “What a house on fire/Crossed electric wire/A bat out of hell/With so many meltdowns/Just makes you seem interesting.” That revelation captures the spirit of the entire record. Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable. Though it might first seem a worthy, almost admirable task, the duo suggests, in the end, you only wind up breaking your own heart.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | N&J Blueberries | November 10, 2021 | 7.6 | 8ad7de89-bca2-4b67-85c0-f30de06b0c0f | Drew Litowitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-litowitz/ | |
The original David Bowie hits compilation tells the story of Bowie's metamorphosis from quizzical folkie to a conquering colossus, and is partially responsible for cementing his stardom. | The original David Bowie hits compilation tells the story of Bowie's metamorphosis from quizzical folkie to a conquering colossus, and is partially responsible for cementing his stardom. | David Bowie: Changesonebowie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21896-changesonebowie/ | Changesonebowie | It's easy enough to think there's no need for a reissue of Changesonebowie, the original David Bowie hits compilation, in 2016. In the 40 years years following its initial 1976 release, it has effectively been written out of Bowie's active discography, banished from the catalog after a rush-released 1984 CD. Changesbowie, a 1990 revision designed for compact disc, swapped out the original hit version of “Fame” for a remix but otherwise presented a thorough overview of Bowie's hit-making peak, setting the stage for a flood of digital-era compilations that reworked the same territory. The most recent of these was the shape-shifting 2014 set Nothing Has Changed but 2002's double-disc Best of Bowie is something of a standard bearer, offering 39 hits, including all 11 songs from Changesonebowie. All these compilations have had the effect of making the original greatest hits feel antiquated: it would seem an album made redundant by history.
And, yet, Changesonebowie is an important record in the arc of David Bowie's career—maybe not on the level of The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars or Low, but it isn't a stretch to say that the album is partially responsible for cementing Bowie's stardom. When Changesonebowie first appeared in May of 1976, Bowie was four years removed from his Ziggy Stardust-fueled UK breakthrough, but he had only recently cracked the U.S. market, with “Fame” hitting number one in 1975. He'd remain in the Billboard Top 10 with Young Americans and Station to Station and, this, the compilation that closed the curtain on the first act of his career.
Bowie would soon decamp to Berlin to reinvent himself as an electronic art-rocker, but Changesonebowie isn't especially interested in his progressive side. Some freakiness lies on its margins—the interstellar folk of “Space Oddity,” the coy sexuality of the non-LP single “John, I'm Only Dancing”—but the anchors here are the heavy rockers: “Ziggy Stardust” and “Suffragette City,” “The Jean Genie,” “Diamond Dogs” and “Rebel Rebel.” Riffs rule all, so loud and hooky they obscure whatever faint hint of camp there may lay underneath Mick Ronson's guitars. Those suggestions of a stranger world—all the allusions to aliens, tramps and zombies—are faint transmissions from the depths of the individual albums, but what's here is Bowie at his simplest. This is quite deliberate. He chose the tracks for Changesonebowie, bypassing actual British hits while elevating “Ziggy Stardust” and “Suffragette City” into the canon by their mere inclusion.
That's because Changesonebowie turned into a major hit upon its release. It is one of the handful of David Bowie albums to be certified as Platinum in the U.S.—it earned that distinction in 1981, five years after it went gold upon its initial release—an honor Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station, Low, and “Heroes**” all missed. Odds are Changesonebowie would be the one Bowie album that you'd find in a record collection in the '70s and early '80s, and it was designed to be that way. It was meant to be cool, stylish and accessible—as glamorous as the Tom Kelley portrait on the cover—which means Changesonebowie deliberately bypasses stranger elements. Absences are abundant, some of them puzzling from the vantage of 2016. “Starman,” his 1972 breakthrough, is absent, as are “Drive-In Saturday,” “Life On Mars?” and “Sorrow,” all singles that peaked at three on the British charts; the Top 10 “Knock On Wood” from 1974's David Live is MIA, too. Nothing from Pin Ups is here, nor is there anything from The Man Who Sold The World, not even the title track which is a modern-day standard thanks to Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York rendition in 1994.
Yet, as this economical compilation plays, none of these tunes are missed. There's an elegance to the structure of Changesonebowie, with its near chronological sequencing lending the album a narrative: it is the story of Bowie's metamorphosis from a quizzical folkie to a conquering colossus. As Changesonebowie progresses, the music expands: the brawny glam turns ornate on the second side and then slides into soul, with the funky rhythms supplying an artful ascendance. “Golden Years” ends the compilation on a note of triumph: it plays as a celebration of the self-reinvention showcased on Changesonebowie.
This moment of triumph didn't last long. He traded celebrity for art in 1977, throwing himself off the populist path Changesonebowie carves. But the record itself endured, as records do. Audiences who never found much patience of the cubist synths and uneasy aural pools of the Berlin years would find solace with the songs on Changesonebowie, whether they were heard on this old LP, a new hits collection or, most likely, on the classic rock radio that embraced these songs for the very reason they were included on the comp in the first place: these are the tracks that present Bowie at his hardest and straightest. Collected, they provide a summation of his peak as a rock star and, in some ways, remain an excellent introduction to his work: it doesn't tell you everything you need to know, but it captures Bowie's essence and repackages it as a roaring good time. That's reason enough for Changesonebowie to be back in circulation. | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | May 24, 2016 | 8.8 | 8adaf222-fe4c-49b1-996e-40c5f9a87478 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
On his fourth album for the Blue Note label, James deftly underlines jazz's flexibility in relation to new pop trends, the way Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis did in the past. | On his fourth album for the Blue Note label, James deftly underlines jazz's flexibility in relation to new pop trends, the way Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis did in the past. | José James: Love In a Time of Madness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22962-love-in-a-time-of-madness/ | Love In a Time of Madness | Modern jazz fans have a right to feel possessive about the singer José James. In the last decade, he’s been one of the suavest vocal improvisers on the scene. His 2015 album devoted to songs made popular by Billie Holiday, Yesterday I Had the Blues, sounded to me like the most soulful tribute to come out during Lady Day’s centennial.
Steeped as he is in jazz, James has also shown a restlessness with strict genre categorization. He’s described his love of funk, R&B and hip-hop in interviews. And when Blue Note announced his new album, the label’s press release bore a striking quote from the artist: “I could make jazz albums the rest of my life, but I want to reach people, man. I like Jamie xx as much as I like Miles Davis, you know?”
You could practically hear the well-drilled corps of Jazz Defenders grinding their teeth in response. But on this new record, James doesn't discard his old skill set. He’s merely doing his part to underline the music’s flexibility in relation to new pop trends—much as Louis Armstrong and Davis himself did in decades past. (Clive Davis once wrote that Davis asked Columbia to stop labeling him as a “jazz man.”)
James knows all about this history. And so does Blue Note. So while there are indeed trap-music snares in a few songs on Love in a Time of Madness, there are also plenty of James’ more typical textures. On opening track “Always There,” a stark synth line presents a useful contrast with the light-touch smoothness of James’s baritone. During “Closer,” he responds to a looped, low-pitch sample by cutting back on melodic filigree—save for a brief escape, on the line “show you I can be the only one.” In the context of the song, it’s a standard line about romantic prowess. At the level of arrangement, it reminds the listener that James has more to offer when singing over a rhythmic grid.
If you’re dead cold to trap beats or the dolorous mood of the Weeknd’s R&B, the subtle but real changes James works on these styles won’t be radical enough to win your affection. But there might be something else for you here, since the core strength of Love in a Time of Madness is its range of dance-pop appreciation. In the middle of the record, James includes a trio of songs that sound like an EP Prince could have produced for the Time in the early ’80s. Uptempo standout “Live Your Fantasy” contains call-and-response funk and the kind of synth chords Jamie Starr snatched from earlier waves of jazz fusion. “To Be With You” is the sultry ballad. And on “Ladies Man,” James flashes his newly drilled falsetto voice. Hewing this close to the Purple Formula is as risky as anything else James tries on the album, but he executes the play.
There are a couple of songs that simply assist us in identifying this set as a 21st-century pop-crossover record on Blue Note. “Remember Our Love” looks at a failed romance, and counsels sweetness. The downtempo “Let It Fall” has just a hint of social commentary, but stays tranquil. These are the most easily forgotten tracks. James initially envisioned Love as a double-album set, in which social themes could alternate with intimate ones. Even without the protest music, the 12-song version can sound as though caught between imperatives: eager to test the boundaries of a contemporary pop and jazz, but not ambitious enough in scale to do all the work the singer can envision. Still, he’s clearly got the range to make a “big statement” record seem plausible. If he can put everything together, he’ll have more at his disposal than most singers in any tradition. | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | March 11, 2017 | 7.3 | 8adca508-b0df-4477-8ab4-34e71de96bd0 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Islands' Nick Thorburn teams with L.A. hip-hop producer Daddy Kev for his third record of the year, following his primary band's sophomore effort and the debut of folk duo Human Highway. Busdriver guests, while Flying Lotus and Dntel provide remixes. | Islands' Nick Thorburn teams with L.A. hip-hop producer Daddy Kev for his third record of the year, following his primary band's sophomore effort and the debut of folk duo Human Highway. Busdriver guests, while Flying Lotus and Dntel provide remixes. | Reefer: Reefer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12408-reefer/ | Reefer | After five years and as many bands, we know two things for certain about Nick Thorburn: 1) Dude likes to stay busy, and 2) He loves islands. It is in service of both of those quirks that he presents his latest project, Reefer, a partnership with L.A. hip-hop producer Daddy Kev that resulted in a Maui-created, self-titled album. In a year in which Thorburn has already released two albums-- Islands' mediocre sophomore effort and the middling debut of folk duo Human Highway-- one must wonder if the prolific songwriter is spreading himself too thin. But Daddy Kev, who adds a sense of play with his cut-and-paste samples and beat-heavy production, and Hawaii, with its hula melodies and lush vacation living, prove to be an inspiring collaborator and muse, respectively.
Despite Daddy Kev's pedigree, however, Reefer isn't an obvious hip-hop collection; it is more informed by its Polynesian birthplace than a street-wise aesthetic. After all, practically the first word spoken on this collection is "aloha." But despite oozing Don Ho-worthy ukuleles and steel guitar, the album does have one big hip-hop moment: "Crony Island", which, like Island's "Where There's a Will There's a Whalebone", uses Busdriver's flow and some stuttering, heavy beats to infuse jagged edges and a sense of urgency into these languid tropical sounds. Daddy Kev also adds three "interludes" that act like skits on a rap album, breaking up the songs with moments of spoken-word samples set to easy ukulele strums and fuzzy effects.
The rest of the album is just four original songs of Thorburn's whispery warble, minor-key melodies, and cymbal-heavy beats that explore the dark side of tropical getaways-- what, you expected sunny songs from a guy with lyrical obsessions with ghosts and bones?-- and a cover of "Blue Moon" that's spun out of a hollow drum machine beat, ambient twinkles, and Thorburn's surprisingly rich baritone croon. Tracks bleed into one another using the sounds of the surf as a guide, and because crashing waves and dreamy ukulele noodling tie together the songs and interludes, Reefer feels like one long track, a cohesive statement instead of nine separate compositions.
The collection ends with two remixes, which, unfortunately, feel tacked on (perhaps a tactic to keep the short album from being simply an EP?). And though they are nowhere near as good as any of the originals, they at least come from producrtion geniuses Flying Lotus and Dntel. The latter's take on "Hit and Run" (the better of the two) bleeds the track of its slightly sinister organ and melancholic guitar and, instead, leaves a spare, echo-laden shell in their place. And with a robotronic effect added to Thorburn's vocals amidst such a cavernous arrangement, the song suddenly becomes more remote and lonely. It may not be a pleasant listen, but it is an affecting one. "Let It Go", however, which is marked by breezy ukulele and the prettiest, warmest chorus of the album, is, in Flying Lotus' hands, simply a wash of glitchy, ticking-time-bomb beats, spacey videogame effects, and an overall clinical vibe. With barely any vocals or semblance of melody, it bears no resemblance to Reefer's version-- which is perhaps the best song on the album-- but though disappointing, it is an intriguing experiment.
Despite it all, Reefer is Thorburn's best album of the year, and it is so successful because it feels tossed off, like he's not trying so hard. Maybe the islands-obsessed Islands frontman should take more vacations. Although judging from how often the guy likes to work, that's probably unlikely. | 2008-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2008-11-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap / Rock | Alpha Pup | November 10, 2008 | 7 | 8ae97514-eecb-4400-944c-c9d5fe8b7581 | Pitchfork | null |
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Six albums deep into their career, Super Furry Animals have world-built an entire mythology of Welsh mysticism, Beach Boys homages ... | Six albums deep into their career, Super Furry Animals have world-built an entire mythology of Welsh mysticism, Beach Boys homages ... | Super Furry Animals: Phantom Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7600-phantom-power/ | Phantom Power | Six albums deep into their career, Super Furry Animals have world-built an entire mythology of Welsh mysticism, Beach Boys homages, and Pete Fowler's bubbly cartoons to such a point that slipping into Phantom Power comes as a comfortable, pleasant exercise. To some, comfortable may counted as a weakness-- for those who wear their bands like fashion, balling up inside Super Furry Animals' farmer-spun wool sweater won't compare to the Issey Miyake-esque bands peacocking down the runway in a loose web of spangles, layers of veneer, and sprigs of feathers. SFA are past forcing outwardly cool, past design and into craft. This is a warm album you'll want to hang in your closet for a damp day.
The third interior panel inside Phantom Power's liner notes shows a Fowler image of a tired, collapsing horse in burnt oranges and blues. It's a striking tribute to the cover of the Beach Boys' overlooked masterpiece Surf's Up; instead of the slumping Geronimo, a spectral wisp winds around the mare. Though Phantom Power takes its title from the Bush-trimming chrome-plated stomper "Out of Control"-- in reference to both a stormy zeitgeist and the U.S. leader's simultaneously world-threatening and vaporous personality-- it could just as easily reflect the spirits of American legends The Byrds and the Beach Boys which charge the album. This dichotomy is what makes the album so fascinating-- Super Furry Animals rail against the "gulf of misery" created by America (snowballing seas "painted red by bleeding army"), yet more than ever invest their efforts in honey-dipped California harmonies, Mississippi mud slide-guitars, and snapping Stax drumming. The record is living testament that our nation's greatest contribution to the world will be our music.
Super Furry Animals never settle into one mood here, and Phantom Power sees the down-to-earth Welsh band moving away from genre-hopping and rough juxtapositions, and beginning to blend their influences into an evenly spread melange that simply sounds like a highly evolved pop band. The final third recalls their wildest forays into world and electronic music, without sounding apart from the whole. "Valet Parking" runs bossa nova down an open autobahn. "The Undefeated" steals enough ketamine to finish off that Surf's Up horse, melts down, and gets crunk with hillbillies in the lost Black Ark studio before bursting with horns and, literally, machine guns. Before long, bouncing globes of synth have sprung into sweeping strings on the stunning closer, "Slow Life", before segueing into swirling technopop and back again.
But back to the beginning: "Liberty Belle" sees Gruff Rhys topping himself in pure songwriting with a simply lovely, brilliant song about, well, everything that's happening right now. The lyrics work so wonderfully in repeating geographic and avian themes, as Rhys sees birds' fight-or-flight defense mechanisms in cities around the world-- like seagulls suddenly taking to the sky in Abu Dabai-- as a warning cry to mounting global trouble. After repeatedly telling us we're "drowning in [our] oil wells," Rhys relates that imagery of birds fleeing trees in danger to ashes rising in New York City, past "the grimy clouds above New Jersey, past the kids who smoke like chimneys, to the sea." It's the most colorful, tragic, witty, and beautiful passage written about 9/11. In typical SFA fashion the next song is called, rather jokingly, "Sex, War, and Robots".
Upon first listen, "Venus & Serena" sounded like a ballad drawn from the resentment of two sisters forced by a conniving father from a young age to enter competitive tennis. After reading the liner notes, it turns out to be about a boy raised by wolves whose two closest friends were pet turtles. Go figure. But this is what makes Super Furry Animals so enjoyable-- you never get what you expect, and even then the results are layered musically, emotionally, and lyrically. This is the most richly melodic, inviting album they've recorded.
Gruff Rhys' voice doesn't have that to-the-back-of-the-arena power that so many angstful singers seem to rely on, which pushes him into more rewarding harmonies and melody, much like Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, who were never going to be confused with Sam Cooke, but still managed to write "Artificial Energy" and "Get to You". Like the Beach Boys, The Byrds were an ideal collective. And with other members singing on "Sex, War, and Robots" and the b-side "Blue Fruit", Super Furry Animals sound that way more than ever. In case you still doubt the connection, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, to which Phantom Power best compares, also features a horse on the cover.
The mythos of the American West remains a potent signifier for nostalgia, hardship, and bloodshed. Forty years ago this was best exhumed with cowboy iconography. These days it can be done musically through the two ultimate American West pop bands, and it's what Super Furry Animals are after. If Phantom Power sounds like a tame record to your ears in comparison to the Furries' past extroverted wackiness, dig between the mesas to find the bones, blood, and booze. | 2003-07-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-07-24T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | July 24, 2003 | 8.9 | 8ae9e794-94a0-4d19-8def-d55593962dfa | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
Art Angels is Claire Boucher's fourth record as Grimes and her most audacious yet: a gilded coffin nail to outmoded arguments that women in pop are mere frames for male producers' talents. These 14 tracks articulate a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in. | Art Angels is Claire Boucher's fourth record as Grimes and her most audacious yet: a gilded coffin nail to outmoded arguments that women in pop are mere frames for male producers' talents. These 14 tracks articulate a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in. | Grimes: Art Angels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21264-art-angels/ | Art Angels | "I'll never be your dream girl," sings Claire Boucher on "Butterfly", the final song on Art Angels, her most audacious album to date. Perhaps she's just being coy, because for many she is exactly that. In the age of the female pop auteur, Boucher's work as Grimes is a glorious addition to the canon, someone who beckons us to the dancefloor with big ideas and bigger beats, and resists simplistic notions of who she can be on a record or a stage. Art Angels is a gilded coffin nail to outmoded sexist arguments that women in pop are constructed products, a mere frame for male producers' talents—that because their music is immaculate, they are somehow not authentic. These 14 tracks are evidence of Boucher's labor and an articulation of a pop vision that is incontrovertibly hers, inviting the wider world in.
Grimes shows that Boucher is the ultimate fangirl study: a D.I.Y. musician whose love of Mariah, Katy Perry, and K-pop has expanded her palette, driven by her fascination with the possibilities of the synthetic and unreal, and ultimately given wings to Art Angels. Here, she closes the gap between the pop she's idolized and the pop she is capable of. Boucher has claimed that the record has two halves, and indeed, the songs line up most easily into beginning- and end-of-the-night dancefloor jams. The former is exemplified by the bright, anxious "Kill V. Maim", with its mocking cheerleader chant over blown-out beats and Boucher working both ends of her register in a propulsive celebration of vocal fry.
Same for "Flesh Without Blood", which is the sweetest fuck-off of 2015, one that highlights that there is much more to Boucher's voice than Visions ever had a chance to reveal. The song is Boucher eating the lunch that Miley packed, may it be #blessed with infinite stadium-EDM remixes. Post-Art Angels, it's hard to imagine anyone will reject a Boucher-penned cut: This is an album, but it's also a resume, and someone who made "California" could certainly be making crossover hits for any marquee Nashville name, while "Easily" suggests that Kesha co-writes should be in Boucher's future.
The late-night closers and their arrangements are where Boucher shows her mastery and discipline as a producer. "Realiti", "Venus Fly" with Janelle Monáe, and "Butterfly" give her a new set of peers: Sure, she's there with collaborator Monáe and Annie Clark as an auteur, but purely as a pop producer she's as deft and clever as anyone we consider a master of Top 40 craft—be it Greg Kurstin or Diplo. The songs are graced with small details: curious skeets of beats, buried samples that only appear once, toxically cute '90s pop guitar. The songs build in unexpected ways, but explode and gratify in the way we hope pop always will. "Butterfly" is a let-tonight-last-forever mutant bruiser with roiling sub-bass, the chorus's side-chained pulse making it like an uncanny valley version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head".
All of this might seem as if Boucher has fashioned a whole-cloth reinvention and is gunning for the Top 40, but neither of these things feel true. Art Angels is a natural progression from Visions; if you strained out some of the processing and murk of the latter, you would find these structures lurking. Boucher's voice is recognizable and familiar, but it's bigger and has more range and depth than on "Oblivion". This album foregrounds her, samples her, piles tracks of her half a dozen high to form melodies and countermelodies.
One of the most notable and striking differences between Art Angels and its Top 40 kin is that these are not love songs. The album is an epic holiday buffet of tendentious feminist fuck-off, with second helpings for anonymous commenters and music industry blood-suckers. Her conflicted, vertiginous relationship with the fast fame that followed Visions seems to have led her to a place of DGAF liberation. Some songs, like "Kill V. Maim", course with a thrilling rage, even a casual misandry. ("I'm only a man/ I do what I can," she sings on the hook). Yet, what's most exciting within Art Angels is the sheer will and fearlessness of Boucher's fight to be heard and seen on her own terms. She's not a human Tumblr, as we called her (somewhat humiliatingly) in 2012; she's a human zeitgeist, redrawing all the binaries and boundaries by which we define pop music and forcing us to come along. | 2015-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | November 10, 2015 | 8.5 | 8af02434-25e6-4ac7-a5ac-ae6dc57c9a89 | Jessica Hopper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-hopper/ | null |
Adam Levine’s band return for their sixth album of smooth, professional, antiseptic soft-rock, which somehow also features Kendrick Lamar, Future, and A$AP Rocky. | Adam Levine’s band return for their sixth album of smooth, professional, antiseptic soft-rock, which somehow also features Kendrick Lamar, Future, and A$AP Rocky. | Maroon 5: Red Pill Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maroon-5-red-pill-blues/ | Red Pill Blues | Adam Levine’s voice is one of the most benignly ubiquitous sounds in pop. It is air-conditioning, it is tap water, it is a thermostat set to 72 degrees. It’s coming, right now, from behind that potted plant over there. It doesn’t even belong to Levine’s throat alone—it is a sine wave that has also been loaned out to Akon, to Bruno Mars, to Nico & Vinz. It’s a voice that can sound vaguely like the Police, vaguely like Hall & Oates, or vaguely a young Michael Jackson. On 2012’s “One More Night,” it sounded vaguely like Rihanna. Forget his role as actual judge of singers—his voice has been its own franchise for years, rebooting itself year after year.
The fact that there is a band behind Levine, with lineup largely intact and original members miraculously unfired is a fact that seems to surprise even the band’s fans (they call themselves “Marooners.”) Here’s a fun test: Google “Maroon 5 members” and behold just how many results focus on the fact that yes, the band does have other members. It’s hard to blame these poor Marooners. Pulling my headphones off in the coffee shop where I was listening to this album, I discovered the same Maroon 5 single playing quietly over the system that I had just finished listening to. They are a piece of our built environment, and caring about them seems like a strange philosophical test: Can you care about bathwater or halogen lamps? Do you know that Maroon 5 has recorded five previous studio albums?
They have! Their sixth, Red Pill Blues, generated a groundswell of online response insofar as people wondered if the members knew that “the red pill” is a toxic term inextricably linked to the alt-right (turns out: No, they did not know this.) The band (for the record: Levine, along with Jesse Carmichael on keys and rhythm guitars; Mickey Madden on bass; James Valentine on lead and rhythm guitar; Matt Flynn on drums; and then PJ Morton and Sam Farrar on assorted other keys, MPCs, and filigree) have always had a shrewd and easy touch with soft rock, and opener “Best 4 U” reasserts their dominance here. The keys twinkle with a hint of wry humor; the guitars are there to remind you, distantly, of the existence of guitars, little dots and blobs surrounded by starchy white silence. Levine’s voice murmurs and glints in the corners of the arrangement, and the total effect is exactly as pleasingly immaculate and numbing as all soft rock should be.
The band themselves have always been tight and professional and smooth, and they remain truly excellent at this sound. But this sound alone, regrettably, doesn’t guarantee the kind of chart success that being Maroon 5 dictates. To help scale that mountain, which gets taller every album cycle, they’ve pulled several of One Direction’s songwriters into their orbit. That includes John Ryan, a covert pop operator who has landed co-writing credits on an impressive 27 1D songs and who also loosed Jason DeRulo’s unholy “Wiggle” into the universe. He pops up multiple times on Red Pill Blues, from the spiraling wind-tunnel “whoo-oo-oo” hook of “Wait” to the finger-picked guitar of One Direction dead ringer “Bet My Heart.”
Also pulled into the tractor beam is Starrah, whose onomatopoetic hooks on songs like Jeremih’s “Pass Dat,” Kevin Gates’ “2 Phones,” and Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” pop up here on “Girls Like You” and “What Lovers Do.” Everything and everyone that pops up on a Maroon 5 album sounds somewhat leached of their essence, though—SZA duets with Levine on “What Lovers Do,” and somehow, that slightly anarchic mischief that enlivens and animates CTRL is gone completely. You wonder what filter they passed her vocal take through to render her so inert.
You also wonder, sadly, the same thing about Kendrick, who wanders through “Don’t Wanna Know” sounding pretty confused about how someone of his immense stature should be spending his cultural capital. A$AP Rocky, on the nonsensically worded ballad “Whiskey” (“I was so young/Till she kissed me, like I’m whiskey”), sounds equally lost, a designer t-shirt left in an Old Navy dressing room. Only Future sounds at home in these antiseptic environs.
It’s this utter lack of libido that ends up making Red Pill Blues so difficult to even finish. Soft rock and sex have a tricky relationship, and so do sex and Hot 100 pop. It’s the ostensible subject, or the ultimate aim, of 99% of the material, but actual, physical copulation is a nasty rumor to most of these songs. On “Lips on You,” Levine offers, in a gentlemanly way, to go down on you; the offer might be sexier if the heart-thump of the drum programming and the new age synth didn’t sound like Sting was servicing you in a Pier 1 Imports store.
The mixing on the album was done by Serban Ghenea, a secret-weapon pop engineer who has mixed hundreds of Hot 100 songs. His songs are distinguished by their naked-smooth surfaces that erase any hint of pumping blood. His work is astonishing, in its way, a series of swooping stainless steel curves that mark out our pop landscape. He’s a perfect partner for Levine, who sounds more appealing the more he transforms himself into a bouncing sound effect. On “Help Me Out,” he rackets around the twinkling synths in his head voice, sounding at least as nimble and half as human as they do. He is the perfect coach for a show simply called “The Voice:” disembodied, inhuman, he dances across the surface like laser light. | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | November 8, 2017 | 4.8 | 8afea20e-115f-4237-a819-4d9d4e805a38 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Continuing his run of dancefloor-focused records, the German breakbeat specialist tilts his rearview mirror toward grime’s nascent stage. | Continuing his run of dancefloor-focused records, the German breakbeat specialist tilts his rearview mirror toward grime’s nascent stage. | Skee Mask: ISS004 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-iss004/ | ISS004 | In a fractious dance-music scene, one thing seemingly everyone agrees upon is that Skee Mask is in a class of his own. Munich’s Bryan Müller began tracing the contours of his style on 2016’s Shred, but 2018’s Compro filled in a detailed 3D render for the world to see. Part of why Compro crossed over is how well it functioned as a proper album—a notoriously tricky tightrope to walk in electronic music. It was sequenced to begin softly, accelerate to a roaring full clip, and spin off into the ether at the death. The music, a meld of warp-speed breakbeats and wistful atmospherics, was lethal in the hand of discerning DJs but suited bedroom listening too. It brought memories flooding back to older heads of dancing to Moving Shadow or tripping in lounges to Autechre, while enshrining fresh memories for a new generation of ravers. Müller tipped his hat to electronica’s past while opening a portal to its immediate future.
Flush with confidence and taking more gigs than ever, Müller has crafted his 2019 productions with club sound systems in mind. “Trackheadz,” the walloping standout from springtime release 808BB, and “DJ A.Sieff,” a heavyweight loosie on the Infinite Drift compilation Shiny Zero, are markedly less murky and more direct. When Müller’s trademark becalming pads do arrive, they feel like torches shining into the back of a rave, or a laser tracing curlicues through smoke. They afford a momentary breather rather than an extended spell of reflection.
ISS004 continues to pull away from Compro’s stargazing. Only “Slow Music,” with acid-green synths stalking the corners and drums that crackle like a line-in cable connecting to a live speaker, feels tied to that era. Instead, three songs on the EP explore Skee Mask’s grimewise side. “Play Ha” and “RZZ” are reminiscent of cuts by Wizzbit, Zinc, and DJ Oddz found on the Bingo Beats series. It was an in-between stage where the moodiness of dark garage and drum’n’ bass lingered, dubstep wasn’t quite dubstep yet, and Wiley, while publicly asking “Wot Do U Call It?,” was trying to sell “eskibeats” as the term for what wound up popularized as grime. Müller captures that moment and updates it with hi-def sound design and eye-popping drum programming.
The most exciting of Müller’s eski excursions is opener “Juug.” Each time the drums pull back on the fourth bar, the bass becomes more feral, eventually snarling like a mecha-jaguar. When a breakbeat kicks in at the halfway mark, it feels like listening to a DJ execute a daredevil mix between two genres that bear little relation to one another. In Müller’s hands, it’s as smooth as a tablecloth trick, one of many moments in his catalog that elicits a reaction of, simply, what the fuck.
That the 2010s are ending with Skee Mask as one of its anointed stars is interesting. In the first half of the decade, popular club tunes were colourful and simplistic, with buildups and breakdowns signposted clearly to maximize coordinated release on dancefloors. The period of “deconstruction” that followed, where intense and abstract music lurched toward a form, brought material that was arresting but often a challenge for audiences to enjoy. You could call Skee Mask reconstructed club, if you like; he makes dancefloor-vaporizing weapons, but with galaxy-brain complexity scuttling below the surface. That snatches of grime, breakbeat, ballroom, IDM, electro, ambient, and as-yet-nameless styles find a home in just 28 minutes underlines the praise heaped on Skee Mask. ISS004 is the sound of a highly skilled producer who’s in love with the lot, and can’t wait to show you how good it can all be. | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | November 1, 2019 | 7.8 | 8b0a75b9-1379-42a9-96e1-de21778c484a | Gabriel Szatan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gabriel-szatan/ | |
Modern country’s prodigal son returns with a 36-song album that says a whole lot of nothing. | Modern country’s prodigal son returns with a 36-song album that says a whole lot of nothing. | Morgan Wallen: *One Thing at a Time * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morgan-wallen-one-thing-at-a-time/ | One Thing at a Time | Morgan Wallen has met the girl of his dreams; he has fucked up considerably and lost her forever; he is drowning his sorrow in whiskey; he feels the spark of new love; he pledges to change his miserable ways. The 29-year-old Tennessee native’s music portrays life in this never-ending cycle, and at each point along the way, he’s got all kinds of bumper sticker slogans, frat-brotherly advice, and heartfelt apologies to bestow upon his enormous fanbase. Lucky for them, these thoughts arrive to him in great, bountiful harvests so that all his albums are incredibly long, resulting in a thick catalog of frothy, familiar country anthems, spilling forth like a bursting keg to flood the Billboard charts.
After the release of his second album in January 2021, the 30-song Dangerous: The Double Album, Wallen’s hyper-prolific strategy merged with his gruff, reality-show nonchalance (he first found an audience as a contestant on The Voice) to cement him as the crossover country star of the young decade. Then a month later he got caught on video using the n-word while stumbling home drunk over the weekend, and he quickly became something even bigger. Despite the public fallout and some short-lived repercussions (he was disqualified from the Grammys and placed on temporary hiatus by his label), Dangerous became the year’s most commercially successful release, tying a record set by Whitney Houston during the Reagan administration. As of this week, more than two years later, it’s still hanging around the Top 5 albums.
Through it all, Wallen’s attitude has been this: What is the absolute least I can do? There was, in quick succession, a requisite apology tour that included a direct-to-camera vlog posted on Instagram, some talk of charitable donations, an interview on Good Morning America, and a collaboration with Lil Durk. All the while Wallen seemed mentally fatigued and physically uncomfortable, as if the most important lesson he learned from his experience was that a lot of people are watching and it’s best not to make any sudden moves. Recently, the most engaged he’s seemed was an hour-long podcast appearance with his collaborator and friend Ernest Keith Smith, where they mostly talk about working out and their high school baseball careers. When Ernest asks what Wallen did as a teen to inspire his polarizing reputation on the ballfield, Wallen gives a knowing smirk as he chews his Skoal: “Just doin’ the same thing I would do today.”
Herein lies the key to Wallen’s music. So much of his appeal—and any country artist on his level—comes down to convincing the world of their inherent confidence, the distinctness of their personality and unwillingness to change. You love them because you know them, and you know them because they know themselves. “I take a lot of pride in what I am,” sang Merle. “Blame it all on my roots: I showed up in boots,” yodeled Garth. “I was around some of my friends, and we just… We say dumb stuff together… I think I was just ignorant about it,” hedged Wallen.
I imagine the importance of Wallen being true to only himself was a bolded instruction for all 49 co-writers on his latest album, One Thing at a Time. This focus group was seemingly assembled to craft the most true-to-Wallen reflections of his Tennessee realness and repentant heart in the wake of—Note to collaborators: please keep this part as vague as possible—all the mistakes people make in this crazy world. The mistakes we all make.
Part of Wallen’s self-knowledge means understanding that nobody wants to hear him tackle institutional racism or Southern history and trauma in his music. From the beginning, he’s gravitated toward balmy love songs suited for the pleasant hum of a car radio or a Bluetooth speaker on a camping trip; it was his lackadaisical, sepia-toned worldview that made him stand out on breakthrough singles like “7 Summers,” where qualities like flow and mood were more important than writerly specifics, nevermind real-world commentary. Consider this: The most narratively intricate song on this record is called “Single Than She Was,” an ode to barroom flirting complicated solely by the fact that, interestingly enough, this girl already has a boyfriend.
And so the word through Nashville is that Wallen needs a boatload of very catchy, very vague, very laid-back songs about screwin’ up and makin’ amends. Also he’s newly sober! Or, at least when he’s on tour. Well, mostly. A trio of hired guns offer a tune called “Water Into Wine,” which features this touching lyric: “Baby, I just hope you’ll forgive me/I’m tipsy, come kiss me by the time it’s empty.” The heartfelt “Whiskey Friends” lands on this note of introspection: “Looks like I did it again, me and my stupid mouth/I dug myself into a hole in the wall... and I gotta drink my way out.”
Yes and yes, Wallen says, more like this, please. And so the album becomes what feels like five hours of music, all circling the same verse-chorus orthodoxy and covering the same thematic territory. So much apologizing. So much drinking. (If you wonder why there’s a song called “Keith Whitley,” close your eyes for five seconds and try to think of a brown beverage he could rhyme with the “Miami, My Amy” singer’s last name.) “What do you expect from a redneck/Hell, I was born with a beer in my hand,” he sings in the album’s first—and best—chorus, and this is a moment of uplift, not self-pity. He understands his expectations and he’s grateful for them. This is his comfort zone, his kingdom.
Thirty-six songs is too many. I know it, you know it, and I’m willing to bet Morgan Wallen knows it as well. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say he doesn’t want anyone to listen to this record in its entirety, and the length has less to do with any particular vision than spawning as many hits as possible, for as long as possible. Even then it’s kind of a slog. There are some tracks that take a more pared-down approach, with minimalist rhythms and acoustic fingerpicking that accentuate his gift for delivering tugging, bittersweet pop melodies. There are some couplets clever enough to catch you off guard. Meet him on his level and you sometimes remember how he charmed so many listeners in the first place. In “Single Than She Was,” he takes an itinerary of all the things he was able to do with that girl before her boyfriend showed up, which includes giving her a taste of his drink and dancing to Semisonic (unless he’s referring to the “Closing Time” by Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen).
Needless to say, none of this leads to anything interesting enough to change how you think of Morgan Wallen, let alone earn back any of the goodwill from his New Yorker interview days. Not to mention, he seems to have lost a great deal of energy as a singer and performer, leading to a ton of uninspired retreads and some truly generic filler. (Do you think his backing band even remembers cooking up the microwaved Southern rock of “Last Drive Down Main”?) Even the album title seems to acknowledge that Wallen considers this a transitional moment. As on The Voice, he knows it’s up to the audience to decide what happens next. By the sound of it, his lack of agency comes as a relief. And from the continuing success of muted singles like “Last Night” (imagine: acoustic Chainsmokers) and “You Proof” (as in “I need something you-proof”), you can see why he’s not sweating it.
In that same conversation with Ernest, Wallen comes as close as he ever has to acknowledging the dire consequences of repeated bad behavior. It comes in the form of a parable about his childhood dog, a white German Shepherd who disappeared after developing a habit for terrorizing the chickens on a nearby farm. “I think I’m pretty sure what happened to it,” he says, shifting his eyes ominously. The first time the dog came home covered in blood and feathers, he says, the neighbors let him off with a warning. “Just don’t let it happen again.” A few days later, when it happened again, they sent his dog away to “Papaw’s farm,” where, having acquired a taste for blood, it immediately killed another dog. And then? “I think I know what happened to that dog,” Ernest interrupts in a booming drawl. Wallen lifts the bottle to his lips and spits and shrugs to signal the story is over. | 2023-03-03T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-03T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Big Loud / Mercury / Republic / UMG | March 3, 2023 | 4.1 | 8b0ab9e3-10db-4910-af1f-285fd0756be2 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The pop-punkers are a bit less frantic as they turn their attention from politics to affairs of the heart, and the results are mixed. | The pop-punkers are a bit less frantic as they turn their attention from politics to affairs of the heart, and the results are mixed. | The Thermals: Personal Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14615-personal-life/ | Personal Life | Honestly (and legitimately) distressed by the direction his country has taken in the 21st-century, Hutch Harris of the Thermals can be an angry songwriter. "Pray for a new state/ Pray for assassination," he sang on "God and Country" in 2004, the year of the most soul-deadening American election of my lifetime. They're probably the two most infamous lines in the band's catalog, but they're not even the most crucial lines in "God and Country". Those come near the beginning: "I can hope, see/ Even if I don't believe."
Hope when all evidence suggests you should despair, honest confusion offered in place of stock rhetoric, music that sounds like it's fueled as much by joy as rage: The Thermals' moral indignation is never a bummer. Harris is no demagogue, just another guy looking for answers, just like me and you, and the band typically sounds like they're having a blast. Even at their angriest, the Thermals have turned out some of the giddiest, most super-charged punk of the decade.
This was one of punk's better life lessons, of course: We're regular folks, we've got our eyes open to the bullshit going down, but we're not going to let it grind us into apathy. We're going to use it. The Thermals understand that anger without energy (to gloss John Lydon) leads to cynicism, resentment, diffidence. If you're going to be angry, your music better not be a drag. And melodrama, however well-intentioned, is not the Thermals' bag. You sure as hell can't imagine them writing a grand concept album kvetching about suburban sprawl.
It's coincidental that they titled their new album Personal Life in a year of Big Indie Statements, but it does underline what makes them special. The Thermals were never a "political" band per se. On Personal Life, as on all of the Thermals albums, you get the sense that you're listening to an individual think out loud, puzzle through some shit, register the aforementioned hopes, confusion, and occasional joy. Sometimes that individual just happens to be thinking about the federal government, organized religion, and other ulcer-inducing topics.
Despite some obvious exceptions like "Power Lies", whose title says it all even if the lyrics are fairly vague, Personal Life is mostly relationship songs as far as I can read them. That hasn't dulled the passion of Harris' delivery; he gets just as worked up about love as he does about god and the president. I find that invigorating when compared to 2010's sea of lo-fi mumblers, but presumably his cracked-note intensity will still be off-putting to those who prefer singers with cooler heads and more controlled pipes.
What has changed is the music: This might be the least frantic record the Thermals have yet recorded. Bassist Kathy Foster is driving the songs more than ever; without her, "Not Like Any Other Feeling", with its almost negligible guitar hook, would collapse completely. Sure, there are a few interesting curveballs to make up for the energy deficit. "Never Listen to Me" is probably the closest the Thermals will ever get to dance-rock, which is to say not very close but still closer than you would have expected. But the songs that truly stick, as usual, are the rave-ups like "I Don't Believe You", with its perfect bubblegummy "oh-oh-a-oh" hook.
I have to admit that I do miss the messy, noisy, get-it-done-in-under-two-minutes Thermals. They were just so good at the ramshackle thing, the feeling that they were racing toward the finish line before one or all of their amps exploded. Personal Life is hardly a failure; much of it is excellent. But it's also missing that anger-meets-energy urgency that made the Thermals' early albums so undeniable. It's not quite clear that they've found a new approach to match it, at least just yet. | 2010-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | September 8, 2010 | 6.7 | 8b0adf98-c4de-4bc0-a68e-a5050741af0d | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The cult director’s third standalone collection of electronic music isn’t necessarily innovative, but it’s comforting, like a chilling movie you’ve seen a million times. | The cult director’s third standalone collection of electronic music isn’t necessarily innovative, but it’s comforting, like a chilling movie you’ve seen a million times. | John Carpenter: Lost Themes III: Alive After Death | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-carpenter-lost-themes-iii-alive-after-death/ | Lost Themes III: Alive After Death | For years, John Carpenter was thought of more like a session musician than a serious artist—a slick and sturdy genre craftsman, more of a cult icon than a name brand. That’s all changed in the last decade as he’s become thoroughly deified as the untouchable and exalted Master of Horror, and without even returning to the director’s chair. Carpenter’s shadow falls over much contemporary American genre cinema and extends internationally too, from the recent Brazilian political thriller Bacurau to the über-stylish movies of Bertrand Bonello, who composes the electronic soundtracks for his elegant French riffs on American genre formulas just like his idol.
After his prolific run in the 1980s and 1990s, Carpenter’s filmography tapered off in the 21st century, leading him into de facto retirement. Then, sensing renewed interest in his work, Carpenter brought his brand back from the dead by focusing on music. The 2015 album Lost Themes, his first non-soundtrack recording, kicked off a comeback that has encompassed live gigs and new scores for the Blumhouse-produced remakes of his most iconic films. Carpenter had almost always dismissed his musical efforts as the product of necessity, but their utilitarian qualities, like his filmmaking itself, found accolades for their stern and chilling minimalism. While his soundtracks may have begun simply as a cheaper alternative to orchestral arrangements, they have effectively spawned their own genre. The Lost Themes franchise has culminated in this year’s third installment, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, giving the series more sequels than Carpenter has ever directed himself.
Carpenter’s style—distinguished by his formal precision and almost architectural sense of composition, as well as his bare-bones scores—has become easy shorthand for filmmakers looking to channel or reference that long cultural decade known as the ’80s. The revival and influence of the now commodified Carpenter aesthetic is owed in part to Netflix series like Stranger Things, as well as YouTube algorithm-driven nostalgic microgenres like synthwave. Carpenter's new music fittingly feels meant to be streamed as background music, a sort of gothic electronic equivalent to lo-fi hip-hop beats: not ambient exactly, but spooky furniture music, like Erik Satie with eyeliner. These would-be music cues feel like the familiar beats of a horror movie—not exceptional or innovative, but comforting in the eerie way a chilling movie you’ve seen a million times can be on a gloomy day.
Carpenter has long had a canny eye for branding himself as an artist, consistently using the Albertus font to render his name in opening credits sequences, and even stylizing his film titles as John Carpenter’s The Thing or John Carpenter’s Vampires. On the cover of Lost Themes III, Carpenter’s own face overlaps with those of his bandmates, son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, acknowledging the work released under his own name as a family affair. John Carpenter has become a true enterprise, a full-fledged band, not just an auteurist solo effort. Though his scores are often thought of as the product of a solitary synthesizer wizard, they were, just as often, jam music—the soundtrack for Ghosts of Mars is the result of Carpenter riffing and ripping it up in the studio with Anthrax, Steve Vai, and future Saw composer Buckethead. Alive After Death has the same quality, tight and precise but still somewhat loose and improvised in its construction.
Ghosts of Mars might be Carpenter’s most overtly hard-rock score, but his soundtracks consistently shared as much with Van Halen as they did with Tangerine Dream. That’s never changed, even when the movies are imaginary; “Cemetery” is driven as much by a chugging guitar as it is a Kraftwerk-like techno beat and drum machine, and solos blaze across tracks like “Vampire’s Touch” and “Dead Eyes.” But unlike Carpenter’s nu-metal collaborators on the unfairly derided Ghosts of Mars, Carpenter’s bandmates mostly help him resurrect an old sound instead of crafting a newer, fresher one, yielding distinctly diminished returns—a little like how the David Gordon Green remake of Halloween looks toothless and bland when held against Rob Zombie’s surreal, psychedelic, and misunderstood interpretation of the same material. At times, like on “The Dead Walk,” the organ presets and synthesized voices start to sound a little like the autumnal version of Mannheim Steamroller.
The proliferation of Carpenter copycats has become so rampant that it’s only fair the master cashed in himself, like Juicy J and DJ Paul’s revival of the Three 6 Mafia brand after their early underground work was plundered by so many rappers. (In fact, Paul and the Juiceman owe something of a debt to Carpenter—they’ve returned to the well of his soundtracks time and again for samples from which to construct their own horrorcore universe.) But while it’s wonderful that such a singular artist is getting regular work, it’s hard not to feel like Carpenter is simply data-mining his past life for new material—unlike, say, David Lynch, who does polarizing and uncomfortable things with both his albums and his resurrections of past intellectual property. It’s almost impossible to distinguish “Weeping Ghost” from moments from various Halloween movies. Sometimes the “lost” in Lost Themes feels less like a Satanic tome written in blood and more like a folder of unfinished GarageBand projects Carpenter stumbled upon while organizing his desktop.
But Carpenter is, for the most part, an artist whose work has not been fully understood in its own moment. It took time for audiences to find value in his later, lower-budget efforts: The Hollywood-spoofing Snake Plissken sequel Escape from LA, the mind-melding theory-fiction of In the Mouth of Madness, the virulently anti-church horror-western Vampires, and the Ice Cube-starring Ghosts of Mars have all been reclaimed in certain critical corners, their once-decried nu-metal flourishes and early CGI experiments now embraced with affection. The only third part of a trilogy he has ever been involved with before now is Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which was hated in 1982 for playing fast and loose with the canonical narrative, but is now beloved by many because it dared to try something different. Perhaps Lost Themes III should, ideally, be forgotten for a few decades, so that it can be found again by future generations looking for art to reevaluate, reconsider, and reclaim.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 17, 2021 | 6.1 | 8b0b3fe2-c11e-4ad1-9d67-f5281cd5b722 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The 20-year-old TikTok personality turned punk rocker’s debut album won’t stop announcing how punk it is. | The 20-year-old TikTok personality turned punk rocker’s debut album won’t stop announcing how punk it is. | Jxdn : Tell Me About Tomorrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jxdn-tell-me-about-tomorrow/ | Tell Me About Tomorrow | Before Travis Barker drummed behind a fist-pumping Willow Smith, before he and Machine Gun Kelly released an album of catchy, thrashing rock songs, before Rolling Stone crowned him “Gen-Z’s Pop Punk Whisperer,” he became convinced Jaden Hossler was the future. One of Barker’s teenage children told him about Hossler, a TikTok star who came to fame as part of the fratty content collective Sway House; many of his videos feature him shirtless and lip-syncing, scowling on a skateboard with a cigarette or dancing in a pool. In 2020, Hossler self-released a single, “Comatose,” a blown-out, guitar-heavy lament about not caring enough to miss his ex. Barker called him the next day, and soon signed Hossler as the first artist on his DTA label. Tell Me About Tomorrow is Hossler’s debut as Jxdn, but it’s Barker who looms over every track. Despite Hossler’s outsized online persona, the record tells us nothing about who he is, only who he wants to emulate.
The result is an album that won’t stop announcing how punk it is. There are incessant power chords and pounding drums, howls and moans and shouted choruses. If Hossler sounds like he’s discovering the genre for the first time, it’s because he is. He’s open about only starting to listen to punk two years ago, after wearing a Descendents T-shirt in a music video; now, he proudly tells interviewers they’re his favorite band. Hossler has a sweet, melodic voice that he strains into a grunt or a rasp, or contorts into a whine in the grand tradition of 2000s-era pop-punk bands like Boys Like Girls or All Time Low or Mayday Parade. Most of the time, though, he’s just doing his best Machine Gun Kelly impression.
The difference is that Machine Gun Kelly often sounds like he’s in on the joke, basking in his own schtick or writing with scene-setting specificity. Hossler treats “rock star” as a stand-in for identity or taste, repeating the phrase over and over like he’s trying to convince himself. He’s “fucked up like a rock star”; he begs a lover to “fuck me like a rock star”; he claims a girl called him a rock star “so I gotta rock it.” “I’m still a fucking rock star!” he wails on “Angels & Demons Pt. 2,” “and I can still dance when I want to!” “Haha, siiiick,” he sneers at the end of “So What!,” verbalizing the self-serious satisfaction that permeates the record.
Hossler’s two goals with the album were “helping mental health awareness” and “making real, authentic music,” he said last December, but clunky writing makes legitimate struggles sound hokey and synthetic. “I think I’m addicted to the feeling of depression,” he yowls on “No Vanity.” “It’s been cloudy with a chance of anxiety,” he trills on “Better Off Dead,” a twinkly track co-written with the mopey pop singer Lauv. For all of Barker’s obvious fingerprints, Tell Me About Tomorrow’s credits also include a curated lineup of sadbois. The garishly too-online singer blackbear helped produce; SoundCloud-adjacent rapper Iann Dior stops by for a sludgy verse; MGK himself screams along over thwacking drums on “Wanna Be.” The soundscape blurs together until every sincere-seeming confession—“I wanna be alright,” “Some days I wish I could disappear,” “I wish I didn’t waste so much time bein’ anxious”—gets sanitized and sanded down.
Hossler’s music sounds more like a collision of trend and opportunity than anything birthed out of his skillset. It’s hard not to imagine how drastically different this album would be if he’d become famous five years ago, or five years in the future, when the current resurgence in Hot Topic stylings will have inevitably faded. Until then, there will likely be a glut of albums that sound like this, some produced by Barker and some glibly mimicking him: pop-punk fueled by all the same angst, misogyny, and interpersonal toxicity as the mid-aughts, just with more influencer clout and fewer side parts.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | DTA | July 20, 2021 | 4.6 | 8b0f25a1-2678-4eee-9430-6f57b83aa825 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
On his third studio album, Rocky is more experimental and personal. But for music that relies on the New York rapper’s artful intuitions, it’s unfortunate his intuitions are often very basic. | On his third studio album, Rocky is more experimental and personal. But for music that relies on the New York rapper’s artful intuitions, it’s unfortunate his intuitions are often very basic. | A$AP Rocky: Testing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asap-rocky-testing/ | Testing | In late May, A$AP Rocky confined himself to a glass cell fitted with cameras, microphones, and harsh industrial lights. He wandered through a swarm of balloons, nibbled on raw peppers, teased new music, and dunked his face in ice water—real art stuff. Hosted at the New York City headquarters of auction house Sotheby’s, this live multimedia installation, titled Lab Rat, functioned more as a signal than an experience: A$AP Rocky was no longer just a rapper; he was high art. His wardrobe change during the event, from a slick tux to a traffic-cone-orange jumpsuit, hinted at this new, vague direction. “I don’t completely know what I’m doing, I just know what I like and what I don’t like,” he told The New York Times earlier that day.
Testing, Rocky’s third studio album and first outing without the direct oversight of his late friend and counsel A$AP Yams, uses intuition as its guiding force, broadening Rocky’s palette by simply trusting what he likes and what he doesn’t. If curation is the union of taste and restraint, intuition is the union of taste and curiosity. Rocky’s intuitions are basic. Like the crash dummies from which Testing and Lab Rat crib their aesthetics, Rocky is enamored with collision. His approach to songcraft on Testing is to mash sounds together and capture the friction. The results are often dismal.
On “Gunz N Butter” Rocky’s distorted vocals are stacked atop a chunky, pitched-down sample of Project Pat’s “Still Ridin Clean” that’s accented by ad-libs from Juicy J (who is also a guest on the Project Pat song). Rocky’s flow slides in and out of sync with Pat’s signature staccato, generating a counter-rhythm that gets played up by choice record scratches. The sum of all this layering is a leaning Jenga tower of sounds that hisses and warbles like a shaky radio signal. “Calldrops” works similarly, heaping a blissful sample of Dave Bixby’s “Morning Sun” onto muted, nonsensical croons from Rocky and Dean Blunt, who then cede space to an incarcerated Kodak Black. Kodak’s bluesy vocals are garbled and gnashed, a sonic ugly cry. All this density makes these songs dynamic, but it doesn’t mask their aimlessness. Rocky’s Kodak support comes off as an empty flex; his long-running infatuation with Memphis rap feels like muscle memory. Rocky constantly conflates method with insight, process with vision.
And his vision is often literal. For the opener “Distorted Records” Rocky chants the song title over...distorted bass. “OG Beeper” tells the story of a young Rocky wishing to be a rapper by offering the beginning and the end. “My whole life I just wanted to be a rapper/Then I grew’d up and the boy became a rapper,” he summarizes as if nothing happened in between.
When Rocky’s intuitions aren’t painfully straightforward, they’re outsourced. Testing is in many ways Rocky’s attempt to remake Frank Ocean’s insular 2016 album Blonde. From the seagulls and surf-rock flourishes of “Kids Turned Out Fine,” to the verbatim citation of Blonde on “A$AP Forever,” to the constant pitch-shifts and nonlinear storytelling, Blonde serves as a direct and indirect template for Rocky’s sprawling interests. Ocean’s actual appearances on “Purity” and “Brotha Man” ground his muse by showing a genuine aesthetic overlap—Rocky and Ocean are fond of murky, immersive soundscapes and sharp pivots between longing and lucidity—but Rocky’s Blonde retreads are a lack of direction at best and yet more taste-signaling at worst. Both scenarios are damning; Blonde’s fluidity and depth are the product of a specific and pained artistic vision; its style and experimentation are means, not ends.
Rocky’s instincts aren’t always unreliable. On “Buck Shots,” alongside A$AP affiliates Playboi Carti and Smooky Margielaa, Rocky moves nimbly, letting the beat breathe. It feels like a cypher hosted inside a lava lamp. Lead single “A$AP Forever” captures the charisma that often eludes Rocky’s music. “I put New York on the map,” he raps, a claim so preposterous it’s infectious. A gratuitous sample of Moby’s “Porcelain” lends the song a flickering warmth, but Rocky remains the centerpiece. When Kid Cudi and T.I. chime in to praise Rocky’s progress, their admiration feels neither staged nor bought.
Likewise, the sterling Frank Ocean cameo on closer “Purity” feels born of real collaboration. “Got they hands out like acknowledging the Führer,” Ocean raps, evoking the creepiness of being publicly adored. “Lose someone every release/It feels like the curse is in me,” Rocky sighs following a sample of Lauryn Hill’s “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a cut from the reclusive artist’s final record after a brief but potent overexposure to fame. “Purity” deftly collapses and isolates their three voices, turning Hill’s anxiety, Ocean’s reservation, and Rocky’s grief into a triptych of black anguish. In moments like these, Rocky’s intuition feels rooted in practice and experience rather than mere curiosity.
The bright side to Rocky’s arthouse pretensions and free-wheeling songwriting is that he sounds free. The rap world’s infatuation with high art, from Jay-Z, to Kilo Kish, to Kanye, has largely been corny and naive. But tucked between the pomp and the self-importance is a real sense of conviction, that rap is a worthwhile investment of time and effort, for the culture, and for artists themselves. Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone. | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | May 29, 2018 | 6.7 | 8b395ace-0f8e-45cf-aea7-2131ba2186b2 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Matador's all-star power poppers return with a record that's mellow mood and baritone guitar obsession mark it more as a sequel to frontman Carl Newman's solo record The Slow Wonder than the band's own Twin Cinema. | Matador's all-star power poppers return with a record that's mellow mood and baritone guitar obsession mark it more as a sequel to frontman Carl Newman's solo record The Slow Wonder than the band's own Twin Cinema. | The New Pornographers: Challengers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10557-challengers/ | Challengers | In interviews, the New Pornographers have made known that they don't want to be called a supergroup. Sorry, bros, no dice. Putting aside that "supergroup" is a much easier term than "band made up of people from other notable bands," it also has certain connotations about the way a band operates that fits the New Porns snugly, from how they tour in various iterations depending on the schedules of the primary figures to how the albums have allotted space for each songwriter or singer (i.e. the Bejar-Triad Rule). Whether due to evil, lazy media folk like me or their own early press kits, the New Pornographers will never be seen as just a regular group, especially as the profile of Neko Case, Destroyer, and Carl Newman grows concurrent with the band's success.
But maybe the reluctance to accept the term is wise; after all, supergroups aren't known for their longevity. That's especially been a worry for the New Pornographers, whose first record, Mass Romantic, sounded like the giddy, breathless product of a few collaborative weekends snuck between other commitments, a brilliantly spontaneous all-star one-off. Those kinds of records are the hardest to replicate, and the band struggled to find its legs through the inconsistent and tentative Electric Version. It took 2005's Twin Cinema to confirm them as more than a side project, in part by successfully establishing a group identity beyond the three stars-- Kurt Dahle's drumming was as crucial as any vocal turn on the record.
You'd expect Challengers to build on that momentum, as the New Pornographers get used to touring without Case or Bejar and members like Dahle and Kathryn Calder continue to step up their game. But at the same time, the increasing "guest-star" status of Case/Bejar has made the Pornographers even more firmly Newman's show to run. Of course, Newman's always had his hands on the steering wheel, but Challengers asserts his dominance; with its mellow mood and baritone guitar obsession, it's more a sequel to his solo record The Slow Wonder than Twin Cinema.
That's not entirely a bad thing, as The Slow Wonder is like the great lost New Pornographers record. But the determination of Challengers to sound mature and not get too crazy is frustrating in the context of the Pornographers catalog. With its string sections and French horns and four different vocalists, it's on a larger scope than the intimate Wonder, and thus is less pleasant evening pop than widescreen midtempo power ballad territory. The Pornographers have dallied with this sound-- "The Bones of an Idol," for instance-- but only as contrast betwixt the power-pop sugar-highs. Now those up-beat moments are themselves the contrast, rather than the focus, and Challengers sags because of it.
Those first three songs set this agenda: "My Rights Versus Yours" resembling a Slow Wonder outtake with its chugging Pet Sounds baritone foundation and awkward refrain, the repetitive, teasingly flat "All the Old Showstoppers", and the title track, which squanders Case's pipes on a meandering ballad with no peaks. Even Bejar appears to have gotten the memo, as his "Myriad Harbour" contains plenty of characteristic vocal jokes-- intrusive, impatient backing singers, lyrics directed at fellow Pornographers-- but doesn't even touch the sprawl of his anthemic Rubies work.
Finally, 15 minutes in, the Pornographers deign to give us the throwback of "All of the Things that Go to Make Heaven and Earth", the first spike of genuine pop enthusiasm to cut through the ruminative fog. Yet it's only a brief flash, its energy quickly absorbed by Calder's uninspiring vocal debut "Failsafe," and the lumbering six-and-a-half minutes of "Unguided," as schmaltzy as the usually nonsensical Newman has ever gotten. Sadly, the album never recovers: there's another Neko-wasting tune ("Go Places"), two forgettable Bejar C-sides, and only one more track that attempts to recapture the old pep ("Mutiny, I Promise You").
But the problem isn't so much the pace of the record as the topography; Twin Cinema ballads like "Bleeding Heart Show" and "These Are the Fables" built to euphoric payoffs, while Challengers tracks end with uncharacteristic whimpers instead of bangs. Newman, as the undisputed leader at this point, has to take most of the blame, but it's possible to cite the other primaries as well, as Neko and Bejar show up just to go through the motions. Perhaps it's just impossible for a supergroup-- sorry, band made up of people in other notable bands-- to properly mature, but Challengers is the first to suggest that the spark of creative collaboration may be gone from the New Pornographers, and that settling into being just a regular band is more challenging than they might have thought. | 2007-08-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 20, 2007 | 6 | 8b3a79a5-f77a-4ff2-b716-09bccd4bffe3 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
A sequel of sorts to the pair's 2001 First Album shows how much has changed since electroclash's heyday. | A sequel of sorts to the pair's 2001 First Album shows how much has changed since electroclash's heyday. | Kittin / The Hacker: Two | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13075-two/ | Two | Though she was working prior to this, it's safe to say Miss Kittin's career truly began with 2000's "Frank Sinatra". As career highlights go, never mind first bows, it's a pretty enviable one-- over the Hacker's brilliantly stupid rinky-dink ur-techno backdrop, Caroline Hervé speak-sings self-absorbed bon mots like "To be famous is so nice/ Suck my dick/ Kiss my ass," over and over with a dispassionate cadence. Miss Kittin's aloof sex-on-ice charisma, paired with synthesized tunes that exploited that detachment ("Stripper" and "Life on MTV" proving you can judge a book by its cover), made First Album a trailblazer for that like-it-or-lump-it music movement known as electroclash. So now, nearly a decade later, in a year that sees electroclash standard-bearers Fischerspooner and Peaches also release new albums, Miss Kittin & the Hacker reconvene for their purported follow-up to that debut, conveniently titled Two.
Of course, there are some things to keep in mind when trying to paint this "reunion" as just that-- this isn't the first time Kittin & the Hacker have worked together since First Album (with the Hacker contributing beats to I Com and Batbox), and the Miss Kittin from the turn of the century isn't the same as the turn-of-the-decade version. Just look at some of the song titles from Two-- "The Womb", "Emotional Interlude", "Inutile Éternité" (French for "useless eternity"), "Suspicious Minds". And, yes, that's Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" that the duo is tackling, and they're doing it in a straight-faced manner. Now given the ways and means of Kittin & the Hacker, "straight-faced" might not be the best description for this cover, but if it's possible to do a techno'd version of "Suspicious Minds" straight, then by gum they're doing it as well as they can. Which is to say, not very well at all, unless you're partial to Eurodisco karaoke. Accouterments aside, the distance between Sinatra and Presley-- as heartthrob icons, pop music iconoclasts, or Vegas showmen-- is probably minuscule. But the distance between the cultured self-aware cool of "Frank Sinatra" (or First Album as a whole) and the oblivious earnestness of "Suspicious Minds" could be measured in light years.
It's a distance that's only accentuated by this record's superficial attempt to hearken back to the duo's glory days. But folks that kept up with Kittin's post-First output already know about the conflict between what she does best (the cooler-than-you kiss-off) and what she seemingly wants to be. On Two, only "PPPO" sidesteps that tar pit, mostly because Kittin's vocal input is limited to shouting four words-- "people," "pleasure," "objects," and "power"-- every so often. That the tune also features the Hacker's best block-rocking beat of the album doesn't hurt. But the Hacker's workmanlike production here can't save Kittin from herself. When she's given room to speak her mind, as on "The Womb" ("I am strong, and I'm climbing the social ladder on my own") or "Party in My Head" ("I'm so small, I'm so not individual"), she sounds like she's trying to convince herself that she's one of the little people she once enjoyed stepping on. In tracks like "Ray Ban" and "Indulgence", she makes a vain attempts to reconnect to the glitz and gaudiness of First Album-era Kittin, and sounds even more out-of-step as a result. And only die-hard Kittin fans (or folks with a severe allergy to melisma and other diva signifiers) will find anything of substance to enjoy in "1000 Dreams" or "Electronic City". As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken. | 2009-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-06-02T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Nobody’s Bizzness | June 2, 2009 | 4.4 | 8b3cdfe1-b920-4a48-97dd-a43a793ea705 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
The French psych rockers’ send-up of mythic American road trip fantasies is undeniably fun, even if the humor and hooks don’t approach anything like real insight. | The French psych rockers’ send-up of mythic American road trip fantasies is undeniably fun, even if the humor and hooks don’t approach anything like real insight. | La Femme: Paradigmes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/la-femme-paradigmes/ | Paradigmes | Europeans, specifically members of the French intelligentsia, have long had a thing for the unknowability of the American interior. Just look to Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, cultural theorist, and, among other things, author of a book called Amérique. Published in 1986, it describes a cross-country trip through white-hot stretches of desert and Midwestern megaplexes. “Seedy bar in Santa Barbara,” Baudrillard writes. “Sex, beach, and mountains. Sex and beach, beach and mountains. Mountains and sex. A few concepts. Sex and concepts. ‘Just a life.’” His book is arguably unreadable, but it’s important—if only because it perfectly encapsulates the mystic, misty-eyed view certain French intellectuals take of the ordinary American road trip. On Paradigmes, the third record by the Paris-via-Biarritz band La Femme, Marlon Magnée and Sacha Got take that view of America and deviously turn it on its ear.
La Femme is perhaps the biggest rock band in France right now. They’ve soundtracked a Céline runway show and appeared in black-and-white photos on Hedi Slimane’s personal blog. They’ve been on the cover of Les Inrockuptibles, the country’s most influential culture publication, twice. They are inescapable in Paris. You could go to any record store in the city and easily find their previous releases: 2016’s Mystère, with its yonic cover art and coldwave-indebted songs about getting wasted near Strasbourg Saint Denis, and Psycho Tropical Berlin, 2013’s dystopian acid trip of a debut. In Paris, prior to the pandemic, La Femme—a band that at times sounds a bit like ye olde prog rock warlocks Amon Düül—could pack an arena.
Far less krauty than its predecessors, Paradigmes is a trip through America in the same way that an old Italian spaghetti western is. But there’s no solid narrative structure—only hours spent behind the wheel, traversing mountains and deserts, quixotic geographic markers that appear like characters in a story. The brassy surf-pop of “Cool Colorado” slithers through “Denver City” and eventually lands in “la Cité des Anges,” where “la vie est so cool.” On the glitchy “Nouvelle-Orléans,” New Orleans is a state of mind, a place to dream about when everything else is uncertain. “Pasadena” recounts teenage romance with drugged-out drum machines and synthesizers that light up like a Catherine wheel. The song has the cool sensibility of a Spike Jonze skater flick, the lyrics so effortless they’re almost lazy. “Toi avec tes copines/Moi avec mes potes/Direction: le skate park” (“You with your friends/Me with my mates/Heading to the skate park”), Magnée mutters, his voice a sinuous wave of distortion.
Not every song is so explicitly about America, if it’s about America at all. Like Kraftwerk before them, La Femme’s rendering is often textural, a byproduct of international pop-cultural backwash. “Disconnexion,” the record’s most ambitious track, moves from armchair philosophizing about Pascal and Descartes to breakneck banjo to a huge, baroque Moog solo à la Wendy Carlos. “Lâcher de chevaux” feels like a reference to Ennio Morricone’s theme music for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, complete with samples of a horse’s neigh and a cracking whip. “Foreigner” evokes Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity with synthesizers that chirp like animatronic birds. It also features some of the record’s wryest—and most obnoxious—lyrics. “You fuck this guy without a condom/A DJ or whatever/And I’m sick of that,” sings Magnée in English, with a visible smirk.
Paradigmes is fun, tight, and never boring, though there are lackluster moments, like “Foutre le bordel,” a derivative of Plastic Bertrand’s hugely popular “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” and several instances when songs like “Paradigme” and “Le sang de mon prochain” skirt close to the nefarious genre of electro swing. The whole album is so unserious that it can seem like an hour-long inside joke; at times I felt convinced I was being trolled, as if it would all soon turn out to be a stunt. If someone like Baudrillard approached the American travelogue in the most humorless way imaginable, then La Femme fall at the opposite extreme. Paradigmes is a good time, but its intellectual merit is entirely surface level. It’s like watching the funniest person in a college philosophy seminar give a presentation they failed to prepare in advance: you laugh, but not because you learned anything.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Disque Pointu / Idol | April 6, 2021 | 6.9 | 8b434ebd-ae40-4963-a552-20cd12e92659 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Over field recordings sourced from the Mexico of Antonin Artaud’s travels, the New York singer gives voice to the French poet’s hallucinogenic visions. | Over field recordings sourced from the Mexico of Antonin Artaud’s travels, the New York singer gives voice to the French poet’s hallucinogenic visions. | Soundwalk Collective / Patti Smith: The Peyote Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soundwalk-collective-patti-smith-the-peyote-dance/ | The Peyote Dance | In 1936, the celebrated French poet, playwright, and theorist Antonin Artaud traveled to Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara to escape the confines of insular bourgeois society, seek out mystical ways of being, and kick an opioid addiction. He found the key to all three quests in peyote. The result of his hallucinogenic journey to the mountains was a 1945 collection of writing called The Peyote Dance, which today reads uncomfortably as a dated account of a European engaging in some drug tourism. It is as snooze-inducing as listening to someone you don’t like very much telling you about their experience with doing edibles on study abroad. It is also the source text of the second album from Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith.
Like the group’s last effort, The Peyote Dance features Smith interpreting another poet’s work over a series of field recordings processed through electronics and delay. Tracing Artaud’s footsteps, Soundwalk Collective went to Mexico to capture the sounds on the album (gusts of wind, crackling fire, a breeze flowing through leaves); one member actually took peyote while he was there. Following a Spanish-language introduction set to ritual drumming and read by Gael García Bernal in which Artaud describes experiencing “the two or three happiest days of my life,” the darkness sets in. Artaud’s writing offers a panoply of grotesque imagery (“urinary camphor from the bulge of the dead vagina which smacks us when we spread it out”) designed to shock. The poet was deeply influenced by Surrealism, which looked to dreams as a source of hidden truths. And what better way to access dream states than through drugs?
Reeling off line after line (“What does it mean? It means that Daddy-Mommy no longer buggers the innate pederast, the filthy tusk holes of the Christian fuckfests”) of Artaud’s psychoanalytical soul-dredging, Smith brings an undeniable urgency to the task, her voice a gravelly hiss. It’s too bad that her tenacious and tactile approach to these words is largely dwarfed by such monotonous backing tracks. You can only listen to thunderclaps in the distance for so long, and whatever Soundwalk Collective traveled to Mexico to capture—the spirit of the Rarámuri people, the echo of Artaud’s presence there—it doesn’t translate to tape. The music is hypnotic only in that it never seems to end.
Artaud’s writing hasn’t aged well. Today, it smacks of exoticizing a persecuted group of people for the benefit of a privileged European traveler’s self-discovery. Smith’s interest in the subject matter makes sense, particularly given the prevalence of addiction among her friends and peers in New York’s underground. Still, hearing a piece like “Tutuguri: The Rite of Black Night” treat the Mexican landscape as one big drug-fueled apparition doesn’t feel great. The static-filled “Alienation and Black Magic” is more compelling, attacking “insane asylums [as] conscious and premeditated receptacles of black magic.” “There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death,” Smith intones, offering a bleak premonition of the final years of the poet’s life, as he cycled through one institution after another.
Fortunately, one song on the album is unhindered by Artaud’s ramblings: the only track that Smith wrote, “Ivry.” On this nearly seven-minute lullaby, the proto-punk icon sings of vines, mothers, and lovely mornings. The fingerpicked guitar sparkles like a celestial body painted on a bedroom ceiling. It is a moment of clarity on an otherwise foggy and disappointing record, and it leaves you feeling full of light and ease, at least for a moment. | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Bella Union | June 4, 2019 | 5.8 | 8b43577c-ee50-48f6-8747-722937334058 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Layering reverberating guitar melodies with subtle electronic sound design and foggy atmospheres, the ambient musician formerly known as Ulla Straus has a way of making the vaporous feel intimate. | Layering reverberating guitar melodies with subtle electronic sound design and foggy atmospheres, the ambient musician formerly known as Ulla Straus has a way of making the vaporous feel intimate. | Ulla: Limitless Frame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ulla-limitless-frame/ | Limitless Frame | Brian Eno was wrong when he declared that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” In reality, there’s little in music that’s as powerful as ambient; its effects on the mood of any given space take hold immediately upon pressing play. The genre’s most astute artists understand how easily listeners succumb to such stimuli, and they utilize ambient’s discreet demeanor to build constantly unignorable atmospheres. The past 30 years have seen that play out in various forms: stuttering glitches, caustic noise, cinematic grandiosity. More unexpectedly gratifying are those who opt for gentler modes, doubling down on quietude to subvert expectations. Ulla (fka Ulla Straus) is one of contemporary ambient’s best practitioners of this style. Her songs are inviting in their softness, providing meditative sound worlds, but they also provoke endless curiosity through subtle fluctuations. Her pieces feel alive.
With Limitless Frame, Ulla builds on the emotional, sensitive canvases of 2020’s Tumbling Towards a Wall and inside means inside me. Partway through the latter, someone asks, “How do we fall in love with ourselves?” This notion of self-love also animates this album, which is accompanied by a poem: “Being somewhere, while being somewhere else/A place I look for in other places/A moment on repeat/I made this music as a way to hug myself.” Ulla’s intention on Limitless Frame, it seems, is to create music that transports you to instant and enveloping comfort. Opener “Aware of Something” captures that well. It’s a dubby ambient piece, but instead of the bleary afterparty comedowns of Echospace or mu tate, Ulla’s track feels like a heartfelt embrace. When its gliding bassline appears, it’s like someone running their hand across your back during a long, deep hug: a tender reminder of another’s warmth.
Ulla’s greatest feat with Limitless Frame is making the vaporous feel intimate. On “Look or Look Away,” reverberating guitar melodies flutter and twirl. Fingers slide along the fretboard, creating a rhythm that cradles the listener. “Somewhere Else” is compositionally similar but even sparser, and it drifts at a slower tempo, too. Here, there’s beauty found within every crevice; moments without the gauzy sounds of guitar are as cozy and evocative as those with them. Ulla goes to a further extreme with “Both Feelings,” a spectral and lonely song that’s little more than processed field recordings and piano. Much like “Clearly the Memory”—which marries Ulla’s guitar with emotive microsound electronics akin to soft tissue—it’s wistful and nostalgic, like nights spent searching for contentment in long-held memories.
The two longest tracks on Limitless Frame, however, allow for luxuriating in the here and now. “Something Inside My Body” features a gossamer layer of wind, piano chords, and what might be someone in a bathtub, while “Far Away” is defined by restrained yet exuberant saxophone playing. Despite their differences, these spacious tracks emanate serenity, and like all of Ulla’s best works, they seem like they’re doing nothing but simply existing. This effect recalls that special feeling of being so close to someone that their mere presence is enough to provide solace. Ulla’s brand of ambient music elegantly embodies that sense of calm, so much so that its nourishment can be taken for granted. But when Limitless Frame ends, its absence—like that of a loved one—is suddenly, even painfully noticeable. And that’s not something you can really ignore.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Motion Ward | June 15, 2021 | 7.4 | 8b4acb43-2c01-4502-bb52-9df73fe92b4a | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Embracing the spirit of simplicity that has long characterized the best house music, the Manchester producer’s album knows the transformative power of a lean groove and a catchy sample. | Embracing the spirit of simplicity that has long characterized the best house music, the Manchester producer’s album knows the transformative power of a lean groove and a catchy sample. | Finn: Everything Is Alright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/finn-everything-is-alright/ | Everything Is Alright | One of the many reasons that house music has endured and expanded beyond its Chicago roots is that it can be so incredibly simple. The young Manchester producer Finn’s new album Everything Is Alright is a perfect example. Take album opener “Everything Is Alright”: There’s little more to it than a bluesy vocal sample, organ riff, and shuffling drum pattern. But in putting together these elements with heart, soul, and a sense of musical relativity, it feels as if Finn is tapping into the very essence of house music, where a single groove and a modest idea can go a long way.
Everything Is Alright is, more than anything, an exercise in taste and restraint—in choosing exactly the right elements for your song, then leaving well alone. So “A.Y.O.Y.O.” may highlight a sledgehammer-basic, four-note piano riff, which plays off against a chopped vocal sample and deep bass cushion. But it is striking how the riff adds just the right touch of measured melancholy, while the dub-inflected bass line skillfully lifts the bottom of the mix without dominating. Much like his friend and collaborator India Jordan, Finn is an especially dexterous sampler. On “I Don’t Know,” he uses a brief snatch of female vocal that he stretches like children’s putty into an angelic drone; on “Ere U R,” three snippets of a longer vocal line are pulled apart and put back together to create a brilliantly nagging hook.
In doing so, Finn calls back to American filter-house innovators Todd Terry and DJ Sneak and micro-sampling pioneers Marc Kinchen and Todd Edwards, producers who have long known the transformative power of the right sample. Being British, it is perhaps inevitable that Finn allows elements of UK garage and rave to sneak in, from the 2-step skip of “Everything Is Alright” to the touch of hardcore breaks and offbeat donk on the excellent “Things, Things, Things!” In its fresh-faced stylistic lunges, the record often summons the spirit of old-school British house music (think early Leftfield and pre-progressive Spooky), where hardcore was just starting to splinter off into its own sound but future techno god Carl Cox and jungle figurehead Grooverider could still share a DJ bill.
Far from being throwback, though, Finn’s music feels alive and eternal; its verve and imaginative spark make Everything Is Alright a record for house grandads and new ravers alike. There’s real personality to these beats. “Things, Things, Things!” and “Big Raver” are just that little bit stupid in their embrace of galloping-horse hardcore sonics, while “Never Leave” and “Forever Blue” show the mournful side of house, the wet Wednesday to “Big Raver”’s endless Saturday night. In the end, there is something rather charming in Finn’s ability to throw all of house history into the pot—here’s the classic Robin S. Korg organ sound, there’s the hands-in-the-air Italo-house piano riff—with no regard for self-consciousness or historical inhibition.
Would an older, more dyed-in-the-wool producer have been daring enough to pillage so obviously, albeit affectionately? Perhaps not. But doing so feels very much in the liberating spirit of house music in which Everything Is Alright was created. Finn made the nine tracks in an attempt to get back in touch with what he loved and cherished about dance music. With an open mind and lubricated hips, the album could work wonders for you too. | 2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 2 B Real | April 19, 2022 | 7.4 | 8b4d47c5-72d4-46cb-9e71-84febb8f1767 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Bruce Springsteen returns with elegiac and wise songwriting conjuring the golden expanse of the American West; it’s his best studio album in years. | Bruce Springsteen returns with elegiac and wise songwriting conjuring the golden expanse of the American West; it’s his best studio album in years. | Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-western-stars/ | Western Stars | The voices in Western Stars are old and restless, lost and wandering. On the title track, Bruce Springsteen sings from the perspective of an actor who once worked with John Wayne but now mostly does commercials—credit cards, Viagra. Elsewhere, we meet a stuntman whose body has been destroyed by the job, a lonely widower idling in his old parking spot, and a failed country songwriter wondering if any of the sacrifices he made in his youth were worth it. Sung in a defeated growl, this latter track is among the shortest, starkest things that Springsteen has ever recorded: an acknowledgment of how quickly a song—and life—can pass by.
That song is called “Somewhere North of Nashville,” and it’s an outlier on Springsteen’s 19th studio album, both geographically and musically. On the rest of the record, Springsteen, with producer Ron Aniello, aims to conjure the golden expanse of the American West, with sweeping orchestral accompaniments unlike anything in his catalog. Springsteen albums are usually grand affairs but he’s never made one that sounds so vast and luxurious throughout. Paired with the down-and-out characters who haunt its mountains and canyons, the purposefully anachronistic arrangements—recalling jukeboxes, FM radios, sepia-toned montages, faded memories—carry an elegiac tone. It’s been a long time since popular music sounded like this, and it ties these characters to an era as much as a place.
Neither is where you expect to find Springsteen, who turns 70 this fall. He has spent the last few years drawing attention to the most beloved corners of his career, from lovingly curated box sets and live releases to an anniversary tour behind 1980’s commercial breakthrough The River. His nostalgic bent culminated in two presentations of his life story: a 500-page memoir and a one-man Broadway show. Both begin with a wink toward his self-described fraudulence—an “absurdly successful” entertainer who made his fortune by telling stories of blue-collar workers—and end with solemn prayers and reflections on mortality. In the book, Springsteen discusses the struggles with depression that have threatened to derail him over the past 10 years. “Mentally, just when I thought I was in the part of my life where I’m supposed to be cruising,” he writes, “My sixties were a rough, rough ride.”
All this looking back plays into the music of Western Stars. “Hell, these days there ain’t no ‘more,’” he sighs in the title track, “Now there’s just ‘again.’” Repetition and waiting course through the record as constants—sunrise, sunset. There’s a song called “Chasin’ Wild Horses” that prescribes its title as a means of counterbalancing pain; the arrangement grows more romantic as the chorus hardens into a routine. Springsteen’s narrative writing has always served to reflect his host of anxieties outward. A darkening mindset and feelings of isolation in his early 30s inspired him to summon the hellbound outsiders and dark highways of Nebraska; navigating his first marriage resulted in the doubt-plagued domestic portraits on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. During his exhaustive live shows, he is known to venture into the crowd to be swarmed by the community that’s united by his work. In the studio, he has to invent it himself: a sea of faces where he can find his own reflection. Western Stars transports him to a ghost town of broken male narrators, alone with their never-ending work and shortening timelines. He sings to us from somewhere among them, looking wearily beyond.
Following 2012’s Wrecking Ball and 2014’s High Hopes—records that responded to current political issues and sought to modernize the E Street Band’s rock’n’roll exorcisms with loops and samples and Tom Morello—this music is a left turn. The stories, however, remain archetypically Springsteen. Occasionally, he sounds like he’s checking in with characters from his songbook, furthering them along or bidding them farewell. For those wild spirits who worked 9 to 5 and somehow survived till the night, there’s “Sundown,” a tour through a bittersweet twilight where you long for companionship. After all his promises of escape—these two lanes that could take us anywhere—there’s the hardened narrator of “Hello Sunshine,” cautioning that “miles to go is miles away.”
And while nearly every one of Springsteen’s road songs is sung from the driver's seat, this record opens with “Hitch Hikin’,” a folk song propelled by a gentle windmill of strings, sung by a drifter with nowhere to go. He invites us into the backseats of three cars, whose drivers stand in for the pillars of Springsteen’s career. There’s a father, a trucker headed toward a big open highway, and a solitary racer in a vintage model from 1972, which also happens to be the year that Springsteen scored his record deal with Columbia. These avatars introduce a record that favors new sounds and perspectives—he often sings as a shadow or a visitor, giving credence to a recently revealed habit for crashing strangers’ funerals—but remains carefully rooted in his history. David Sancious, an early collaborator who played the virtuosic piano solo in 1973’s “New York City Serenade,” returns here to guide “The Wayfarer” to its tragic-triumphant conclusion. His jazzy touch on the keys offsets the thump of Springsteen’s acoustic guitar and the earthy twang of his baritone, as open-hearted and desperate as it has ever sounded.
In this song, Springsteen reframes his wanderlust in a series of confessions. He acknowledges that put in his position most people would be happy with what they have. He knows his worries are nothing new. The title of Western Stars is a phrase that also appears in “Ulysses,” a 19th-century Tennyson poem that Springsteen has drawn from before. (Another, more ubiquitous, Tennyson quote is invoked at the end of this record: “It’s better to have loved,” he sings in “Moonlight Motel,” his voice trailing off.) It’s easy to see why Springsteen finds resonance in these particular texts: defining works by a grief-stricken poet wondering if our brief, complicated lives are worth the legacy we leave behind. “Ulysses” is narrated by a hero approaching old age, returning from a long journey only to realize he felt more fulfilled on the road. So he heads out again, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” And stay alive, if he can. | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | June 14, 2019 | 7.8 | 8b579f95-d543-4d7d-a9b9-5a3411750f4d | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Known for her dark production and striking vocals, singer/songwriter Nina Nastasia offers this prequel to her two Touch & Go full-lengths. | Known for her dark production and striking vocals, singer/songwriter Nina Nastasia offers this prequel to her two Touch & Go full-lengths. | Nina Nastasia: Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5714-dogs/ | Dogs | On Dogs, Nina Nastasia sings about dogs, as a symbol of the pursuit of love, or a metaphor for the easy life, but also as a colloquialism-- "your dogs are tired," on "The Long Walk"-- or to set up, by way of the cat/dog dichotomy, a clever pun, when Nastasia admits that "curiosity kills me." She also makes a musical pun when the cello quotes the "give a dog a bone" line of "This Old Man". Nastasia doesn't fixate on the animal as a formal concept for the record-- it's more like a recurring gag. Dogs pass through as easily as the fleeting smokes, or the beers that she and her friends half-heartedly throw back outside the high school, or an unsurprising string of bad relationships.
With its snarky cover shot and the salutation ("Thank you, comrades") on the back sleeve, Dogs seems more light-hearted and somehow "younger" than Nastasia's other records, and for good reason: She recorded it five years ago, and is now re-releasing it for the fans she gained with The Blackened Air and Run to Ruin. In her work since, she's honed an elusively grim atmosphere, and her albums are stronger for it-- not because they need moodiness to prop them up, but because the moods draw out the nuances of her frank but graceful songs. On Dogs, she sounds more like a standard singer/songwriter, and it's hard not to treat this as a prelude to her better albums.
Nastasia has an understated voice with a limited range, and on several of these ballads, you can hear her drift into its limits, accepting a whispering tone as the cost of expressiveness; on her later albums, she sings more confidently, or lowers her voice to a warning. The arrangements on Dogs are also a simpler precursor of The Blackened Air, where the strings and saws drift in on an autumnal gust, or the striking textures of Run to Ruin.
Steve Albini, who has engineered all of her albums, plays the part of creating an objective as-is document, but he and Nastasia have a good idea as to where to put the focus. The recording makes impressive use of vintage instruments, whose birthdates and makers are detailed in the liner notes. (Who knew that Nastasia was a socialist and a gearhead?) The strings augment Nastasia's ballads without sweetening them, and Stephen Day's cello smoothly complements her voice. But the delicate arrangements hold back louder songs like "Nobody Knew Her", on which a surprisingly powerful guitar deserves more room.
Nastasia has said she practices in the bathroom of her apartment, and Dogs has the ease of a performance that you're catching as you sit in the shower stall. The songs here include some of the best she's written, but they're also some of the most unexpected. Without this reissue, we could have forgotten that she has an ear for big guitar riffs, or that she sounds beautiful just playing straight on an acoustic guitar. And who would have remembered that she has a sense of humor? | 2004-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-09-08T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Socialist | September 8, 2004 | 7.4 | 8b59bc10-9030-4c9b-a245-7132c8772f13 | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
Six years since her last studio album, the veteran singer-songwriter and slide guitarist returnswith a collection of robust professional rock that may inspire deep dives into her back catalog. | Six years since her last studio album, the veteran singer-songwriter and slide guitarist returnswith a collection of robust professional rock that may inspire deep dives into her back catalog. | Bonnie Raitt: Just Like That... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-raitt-just-like-that/ | Just Like That... | If the young feel hard and forget fast, adults feel hard and remember long. To her credit, Bonnie Raitt has never courted the youth market. Avoiding disco strings and guest raps, the slide-guitar legend has amassed a body of work immersed in the blues and fully committed to the Well-Written Song; both her chosen repertoire and the material she’s penned herself adduce a belief in adulthood as a well-earned grace. Her sunny, wide-open voice and the sparkling correctness of her playing have kept bathos at bay ever since she invested Eric Kaz’s “Love Has No Pride,” one of her chestnuts, with an aw-shucks sensual abandonment: She’s in love, yet damn straight she keeps her pride.
Thirty-three years after Nick of Time, which yielded perhaps the most career-changing Grammy coronation in history, and six years since her last studio album, Dig in Deep, Raitt returns with Just Like That…, a self-produced effort boasting most of her strengths: a fidelity to the material that borders on the idolatrous, a penchant for leading mostly male pros through unfamiliar paces, and the exquisite precision of her guitar. As for weaknesses—well, she could have ventured further afield with the covers, as she did with Dig in Deep’s sly take on INXS’ “Need You Tonight.” Still, she sounds good, she plays better, and her band, co-led by longtime foil George Marinelli, simmers. A fine career summation should she choose to stop, Just Like That… is robust professional rock, a demonstration of Raitt’s vitality, like, say, Catherine Deneuve’s recent film work.
Her 18th album cedes a few of the solos she and Marinelli might have played to Glenn Patscha, a first-rate organist whose fills have the lightness of Charles Hodges. On her own “Waitin’ for You to Blow,” she lays down the guitar so Kenny Greenberg and Patscha can exchange solos over Ricky Fataar’s hi-hats. “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart” gets a lift from Patscha’s Fender Rhodes colors, given a mixing boost by Raitt and Ryan Freeland (the funereal “Blame It on Me” is the only lapse into heavy-handedness). A chugging little thing familiar to fans of her 1973 cover of Martha and the Vandellas’ “You’ve Been in Love Too Long,” her band’s take on the Bros. Landreth’s “Made Up Mind” greases up a melody “like a rainstorm tin-roof symphony.” But they falter with a static reggae-lite version of Toots and the Maytals’ “Love So Strong”; it has a skank but not much else.
When Raitt keeps things fresh with narrative writing, the cleanness of her melodies and lyrics deepens her empathy. With the help of an acoustic lick that’s the stepchild of the Beatles’ “Blackbird ” and Patscha’s shimmering organ, “Down the Hall” examines a man’s stint in a prison infirmary; he observes Tyrone, “cancer eatin’ him inside out,” takes time to shave Julio’s head and, “crackin’ him up,” wash his feet. The Springsteen of Nebraska might have smiled with recognition, but Raitt’s contralto repels attempts to imbue “Down the Hall” with existential portent. Its just-the-facts approach is closer to Springsteen influences like Bobbie Ann Mason than Nebraska.
Just Like That… may inspire catalog deep dives. Many fans’ relationship with Raitt began with 1991’s Luck of the Draw, the septuple-platinum follow-up to Nick of Time that remains a landmark of boomer pop outreach—as much a generational touchstone as Paul Simon’s Graceland, the sort of album Mom and Dad played on vacation road trips because here was a woman Mom’s age having fun making her most powerful music at middle age. In a summer when Bryan Adams strangled the top 40 with a mousy ballad sprung from Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, “Something to Talk About” was a well-deserved hit, sexy in a mature, fully cognizant way; you’d have to go back to Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” to find as worldly a Top Five hit sung by a fortysomething white woman. And her take on Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” is the kind of recording that comes along just once in an artist’s career, though it’s echoed in the pungent aphorisms of Just Like That…’s “Down the Hall”: “I don’t know about religion/I only know what I see.”
It’s okay if few performances on Just Like That… match that highlight. Most of her albums contain time bombs; even records like 1986’s Nine Lives, regarded as misbegotten, have miracles of grace like “Crime of Passion” that reward the digging. But Just Like That… will do—ostensible hand-me-downs like the Stones-y “Livin’ for the Ones” shame that band’s recent output, for example. The album title is the giveaway. Pros know their shit. | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Redwing | April 26, 2022 | 7 | 8b5a5184-f325-4aa6-953f-320a4e4e5ce7 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Director Jim Jarmusch has been increasingly hung up on music since shooting his last feature, The Limits of Control. After releasing two albums with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, his new band SQÜRL comprises Carter Logan and Vampire Weekend engineer Shane Stoneback, and draws on feedback, drone, and song-based disciplines. | Director Jim Jarmusch has been increasingly hung up on music since shooting his last feature, The Limits of Control. After releasing two albums with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, his new band SQÜRL comprises Carter Logan and Vampire Weekend engineer Shane Stoneback, and draws on feedback, drone, and song-based disciplines. | Sqürl: Sqürl EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18077-squrl-squrl-ep/ | Sqürl EP | Director Jim Jarmusch has been increasingly hung up on music since shooting his last feature The Limits of Control, a beautiful slow-crawl through the mind of an assassin. He's produced two albums with lutist Jozef Van Wissem, worked as a curator at the New York incarnation of ATP, and recorded a series of EPs with his new band, a trio named SQÜRL. This project began life under the name Bad Rabbit, assembled by Jarmusch, drummer Carter Logan, and Vampire Weekend/Sleigh Bells engineer Shane Stoneback. The initial aim was to flesh out the Limits soundtrack with thoughtful, instrumental rock passages. This EP, apparently the first in a series, is an advance on that music. The setting is firmly fixed to "desert," with each of the four tracks touching on Josh Homme's approach to psychedelic rock.
It's not hard to imagine an alternate universe where Jarmusch pursued music harder than film. At a recent show at the Mercury Lounge in New York, staged to showcase SQÜRL and his work with Van Wissem, he cut an imposing figure on stage. Whether stepping up to the mic or stooping down by his amp to pull out a wail of feedback, it felt like these were the predominant moments Jarmusch played out in his teenage dreams. Of course, he's played on stage many times before, notably with no wave outfit the Del-Byzanteens, but at this stage in his career, where he's comfortably established in a different medium, the show at the Mercury was pleasing for the full-blooded commitment it showed. It's indicative of the way Jarmusch works, finding weight in moments both big and small, never ascribing more importance to one over the other.
That wilfull artistic blindness is fundamental to Jarmusch's stradling of the avant garde and the mainstream. It's what allows him to put Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes in a movie with Robert Mitchum and Johnny Depp. Similarly, SQÜRL draws from a number of different disciplines. One track on this EP is simply drawn from layers of feedback. Another matches crunchy, distorted guitar lines to Jarmusch singing about being surrounded by piles of dead hippies. Yes, he's singing here, on two out of four tracks, only one of which deviates into the forlorn rock & roll crooner trap you might expect him to fall into. That track-- a cover of Elvis Presley's "Little Sister" forcibly shoved through a meat grinder-- is the weakest work here, the only song that feels like an afterthought, and currently outpaced in the gutter-neon stakes by Jarmusch acolyte Dirty Beaches.
Where SQÜRL works best, perhaps unsurprisingly, is through the planes of repetitive sound that make up "Pink Dust". It’s the most soundtrack-y thing here, the closest this EP gets to forming a link to the material this band specifically composed for film under their Bad Rabbit guise. The guitar tone isn’t far from Boris's "Farewell"-- itself a part of the Limits of Control soundtrack-- but with a far nastier undercurrent crudely stamped all the way through it. It's a decent approximation of the kind of stuff Jarmusch has clearly been listening to in recent times, judging from his soundtrack work and handpicked ATP lineup. It's part drone-rock, part metal, part blissful stoner fatigue. There's a power to it that the rest of the material can't get back to, a sense of magic unfolding in those gigantic riffs. For now, SQÜRL describe themselves as "enthusiastically marginal," but there's enough going on here to suggest that's a placeholder rather than an epitaph. | 2013-05-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | ATP | May 20, 2013 | 6.2 | 8b5eb919-67bd-4ce0-8fe5-3e41548ba393 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
The Chicago drummer and producer transforms Gil-Scott Heron's final album into a masterpiece of dirty blues, spiritual jazz, and deep yearning. | The Chicago drummer and producer transforms Gil-Scott Heron's final album into a masterpiece of dirty blues, spiritual jazz, and deep yearning. | Gil Scott-Heron / Makaya McCraven: We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gil-scott-heron-makaya-mccraven-were-new-again-a-reimagining-by-makaya-mccraven/ | We’re New Again: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven | Gil Scott-Heron’s final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, was a moving but unfinished statement from an important but overlooked artist. By the mid-’00s, the writer, poet, and singer had a long and storied career behind him, with more than a dozen albums of word-dense soul and R&B, two novels, and one phrase, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taken from his song of the same name, that echoed through culture and became more famous than he would ever be. He was a crucial voice of protest who deeply influenced black music across genres—hip-hop especially—but he hadn’t done much in a while. His last LP had been released more than a decade earlier. In the years between, he’d had drug problems, which led to health problems and legal problems, including an extended stretch incarcerated at Riker’s Island. A lot of people had forgotten about Scott-Heron, but Richard Russell, who founded the label XL, remembered, and he got in touch.
Scott-Heron wasn’t in a place where he could offer much creative input, but Russell persuaded him to make a record, a little at a time, and he built I’m New Here from fragments. In a New Yorker profile of Scott-Heron that ran six months after the album’s release, the writer and singer, then 61, said that he didn’t think of the album as his creation. “This is Richard’s CD,” he told Alec Wilkinson. “My only knowledge when I got to the studio was how he seemed to have wanted this for a long time. You’re in a position to have somebody do something that they really want to do, and it was not something that would hurt me or damage me—why not? All the dreams you show up in are not your own.”
A decade later, the songs, poems, and conversational snippets Scott-Heron recorded with Russell are showing up in another dream, this one imagined by Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. It’s the second album-length reworking of the I’m New Here material, following Jamie xx’s 2011 collection We’re New Here, but this one feels definitive. Though Jamie xx assembled a fantastic record, one thick with hypnotic samples and irresistible beats, We’re New Again brings us closer to Scott-Heron’s world.
Working with his regular circle of collaborators, many of whom have made highly regarded albums of their own in recent years (Jeff Parker on guitar, Brandee Younger on harp, Junius Paul on bass, Ben Lamar Gay on instruments and percussion), McCraven brings Scott-Heron’s work down to earth and situates it in a milieu the elder artist would have recognized. With arrangements that move between dirty blues, angelic spiritual jazz, and free-form drumming, McCraven has created a kind of survey of 20th-century black music that doesn’t draw undue attention to itself, one in which every piece fits together.
McCraven is both a player and a collagist, splicing together long jams and improvisations into structured pieces. Everything on his records feels close—you hear the instruments more than the rooms they’re recorded in, which can make individual parts sound simultaneously machine-like and deeply funky. He likes compression and uses it artfully, and his beats radiate force and muscle. They’re like a layer of armor behind which his more subtle and delicate musical ideas can develop and grow.
On We’re New Again, McCraven takes Scott-Heron’s primary themes from his sessions with Russell—what it means to live in fear, the idea of home, how we confront our mortality, the mysterious and transformative power of familial love—and channels them into a concept record. His sources speak to his big-picture ambitions. Via samples, he incorporates music played by both of his parents—his father Stephen McCraven, a drummer, worked with Archie Shepp, the Last Poets, and many others, and his mother, Ágnes Zsigmondi, is a singer—to connect this music to his own history, reinforcing the album’s central concerns of place and lineage.
The work Scott-Heron recorded for I’m New Here was connected to his memoir, The Last Holiday, which he’d been tinkering with for years and was published the year after his death. The book finds Scott-Heron making history—he was one of the first black students to integrate white schools in Tennessee, and its final sections focus on his desire, alongside Stevie Wonder, to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday—but many of its most moving passages are simpler scenes drawn from his childhood. And many of these detail his relationships with his mother and grandmother.
Even if they didn’t read the memoir, fans of I’m New Here know his grandmother’s name, Lily Scott, because Scott-Heron mentions her in the track “On Coming From a Broken Home.” It’s a piece about not just her love but also the ways a seemingly dysfunctional family can provide all the emotional nourishment a kid might need. McCraven splits “On Coming From a Broken Home” into four parts, ensuring that its words are never far from our minds. “But Lily Scott was absolutely not your mail-order, room-service, typecast, black grandmother,” Scott-Heron speaks, adding later, “I loved her from the absolute marrow of my bones/And we was holdin’ on.”
McCraven finds a different setting for each section of the poem—the album-opening part one is floating and spacey, part two is a throbbing acoustic blues drone, part three emits the glow of ’70s AM radio, and part four has percussive textures from West Africa—and that eclecticism carries through the rest of the record. “Running,” a powerful incantation about the desire to keep moving even when you know nothing will change, is driven by a propulsive drum break. McCraven turns “New York Is Killing Me” into a dense piano arrangement that sounds like an early-’60s Blue Note recording, with a layer of voices from the Harlem Gospel Choir on the “Lord Have Mercy on Me” refrain that underscores its connection to soul-jazz.
The record’s cover songs are, in their own way, just as autobiographical. Bill Callahan’s “I’m New Here” suggests scenes from Scott-Heron’s itinerant life. Its narrator is both confident and vulnerable, taking in his surroundings and feeling reborn but also aware that he’ll need human communication to make it through. McCraven gives it his most relaxed and gentle arrangement, as if the hopeful chorus, “No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around,” might actually be true. The exceedingly spare rendition of “I’ll Take Care of You,” by R&B singer Brook Benton, could be an expression of a desire that Scott-Heron could never quite manifest, to be someone else’s place of safety. And Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” featuring a horn sample from one of McCraven’s father’s recordings, is a dark anthem for a man whose demons were never far behind.
Early on, Scott-Heron wrote songs about alcoholism (“The Bottle”) and drugs (“Home Is Where the Hatred Is”), but “The Crutch,” which McCraven backs with a filthy electrified blues vamp, feels especially autobiographical. The song is about heroin (“His eyes half-closed revealed his world of nod/A world of lonely men and no love, no god”) but as the harrowing New Yorker profile made clear, by the time Scott-Heron recorded it, he was addicted to crack cocaine. His words and songs showed compassion for addicts and framed chemicals as a way to cope with pain and loneliness. They also turned the concept of “home” found elsewhere on the album inside-out—sometimes, a place of salvation becomes one of torment. The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact. It’s odd to draw lessons about survival from someone in trouble who is facing the end, but that’s another paradox the album negotiates. McCraven helps us feel it: For a little longer, anyway, Gil Scott-Heron was still here, and he was holding on.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | XL | February 7, 2020 | 8.6 | 8b61f231-62f5-460e-8446-cae68c293b8b | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
Open Your Eyes, the first set of new tracks released on Teklife's eponymous label, features collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never and a host of footwork veterans. | Open Your Eyes, the first set of new tracks released on Teklife's eponymous label, features collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never and a host of footwork veterans. | DJ Earl: Open Your Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22246-open-your-eyes/ | Open Your Eyes | If you listen closely, you can hear footwork undergoing a transition that house and techno made before it: from a functional music created for dancers to a music made, at least in part, for personal expression. As with house and techno, this has resulted in tighter and more precise compositions, as producers—who have also gotten better at using their gear/software—are no longer rushing beats to the dance floors. If you compare DJ Rashad’s Double Cup or Jlin’s Dark Energy with the types of tracks—full of eerie ambiance and seams-showing production values—featured on the seminal Bangs & Works compilation, there is an uptick in both fidelity and personality.
The shift is apparent, too, in the work of DJ Earl, New York-based, Chicago-born member of the Teklife crew. The first set of new tracks released on Teklife’s eponymous label (the first release was a cull of Rashad’s archive), Open Your Eyes is eight tracks of knocking-but-composed footwork. Featuring several collaborations with Oneohtrix Point Never (as well as a host of footwork veterans) and artwork by OBEY founder Shepard Fairey, Open Your Eyes feels leagues away from the harsh digital productions on earlier Earl EPs like Teklife Or Nolife or Afrika Tek.
Earl is still working well within the purview of footwork, offering up the kind of tempos and chopped vocal refrains you’ve come to know and love. There are vocal samples about weed, and about ass, and one about fucking shit up. Little summer storms of snare drums come in fast and hard. But Open Your Eyes is an orderly and uncluttered album, even when working at higher tempos. The vocal bits never clash or confuse; there’s space in the arrangements for synthesizers to float in and out of the mix.
If you are the type of listener who generally finds footwork too manic and roughshod, Open Your Eyes may be for you. “Let’s Work,” a collaboration with Oneohtrix and MoonDoctoR, is almost elegant: a house vocal—“C’mon let’s work!”—deployed economically over electric piano and horn. (As with many collaborations in the co-operation friendly footwork world, it can be difficult to discern who is doing what, exactly.) “RacheTt” (with MoonDoctoR and OPN) threatens to whip itself into a noisy froth but stops just short. Even the more aggressive “Smoking Reggie” (again with MoondoctoR and OPN) has a kind of call-and-response logic to it, and a whinnying synth melody to anchor it.
It’s hard not to notice, though, that Open Your Eyes is also somewhat conservative. It features none of the wild juxtapositions or mayhem of, say, RP Boo. It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music. DJ Earl is traveling a different road than footwork’s pioneers, and he may yet find that magic on it. | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Teklife | August 19, 2016 | 6.9 | 8b7cd496-38f0-4969-bbd9-d80a73cab5cd | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
YYYs make the dreaded "mature album" work by taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected. | YYYs make the dreaded "mature album" work by taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected. | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12855-its-blitz/ | It's Blitz! | The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' debut LP, 2003's Fever to Tell, set an early-decade benchmark for sheer ugliness, a deliberately heinous splatter of webbed blood, stabbed snakes, and flaming heads. The music was also confrontational, with lead singer Karen O following in the footsteps of countless riot grrls and righteous rock queens in crafting a persona of raw defiance and sexual menace.
Fast-forward six years, and a glance at the instantly iconic cover of the band's third full-length, It's Blitz!, tells you all you need to know about how far the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have come, from Fever to Tell through the middle-ground growing pains of 2006's Show Your Bones and up to today. A clean, simple image of a woman's hand bursting an egg-- it's no less powerful an indication of feminine strength and defiance than Fever's abrasive scrawl, yet it's miles and miles more subversive. It's also a fitting symbol for its music, taking familiar shapes and tools and recombining them in ways that are bracing and unexpected.
It's Blitz! is constructed from parts that by themselves aren't extraordinary-- in fact, many of them are quite banal, like the generic Franz-Bloc-Killers modern rock riff that propels "Dull Life" or the doomy one that drives "Shame and Fortune", sounding ripped straight off a late-period Smashing Pumpkins record. Much has been made of the album's heavy reliance on rock's eternal bugaboo, the synth, but often the synths are doing rock things rather than dance things, like on the buzzing, road-burning opener "Zero". Only two songs, "Heads Will Roll" and "Dragon Queen", deliver real disco backbeats.
With these unremarkable tools, however, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims. Take the lovely, insinuating "Soft Shock", for instance-- it starts with tinkly keyboards and an Far East-sounding melody that builds to a refrain utilizing the words in the song's title, but it isn't the song's emotional climax, which is hidden until later, when Karen worriedly intones "what's the time, what's the day, gonna leave me?" Even more compositionally jarring are the slow, stretched-out set showcases "Skeletons" and "Runaway", the former taking a blippy little electro-ballad and then plopping martial drums and a melody that sounds taken from some Scottish battle hymn smack dab in the middle. In keeping with the arty tendencies that have blossomed within the band from the beginning, these songs often feel portioned out into passages or movements as opposed to flowing organically throughout.
With such an absence of easy signposts, we're especially apt to follow Karen wherever she goes, since she's our only hope for a guide. Yet she refuses to be a locus of explanation or control, keeping her lyrics generally vague and frequently losing herself in bursts of incomprehensible excitement or fervor. These fits and embellishments account for most of the best moments on the album-- the way she breathlessly pants "crying, crying, crying" on "Zero", or giddily draws out the last syllable of the line "a hundred years old" on "Dull Life", or how "Heads Will Roll" and "Dragon Queen" periodically dissipate into an inchoate softness.
The ninth song on Fever to Tell was "Maps", a fleeting glimpse of vulnerability on an album of gleeful scorn. On It's Blitz! that slot is occupied by "Hysteric", a song every bit as emotionally naked and immediately indelible as "Maps". Here though, it represents an island of piercing clarity and happy convention in a sea of bewilderment, impulse, and ecstasy. | 2009-03-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-03-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | March 26, 2009 | 8.1 | 8b7dbc7e-b058-4662-90c8-f8d520e0b9de | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Seven albums in, the Portland prog-poppers have tidied up their act on Evil Friends, with help from producer Danger Mouse. Portugal. The Man take a surefooted approach here, confidently blasting through their pan-genre Frankensongs. | Seven albums in, the Portland prog-poppers have tidied up their act on Evil Friends, with help from producer Danger Mouse. Portugal. The Man take a surefooted approach here, confidently blasting through their pan-genre Frankensongs. | Portugal. The Man: Evil Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18098-portugal-the-man-evil-friends/ | Evil Friends | The latest album by Portland's Portugal. The Man, Evil Friends, is rarely the same from one minute to the next, careening between alt-rock bombast, punk snot, Lumineersy campfire singalongs, pixelated MGMT headbandcore, dawdling George Harrison solos; you name it, Evil Friends has probably stuck it somewhere. All that might sound like more than one album can bear, but funnily enough, Evil Friends is just about the least convoluted Portugal LP so far. With Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton behind the boards, Evil Friends finds Portugal sharpening their poppier instincts while still leaving room for the proggy ambitions that got them there.
At least as far back as 2009's The Satanic Satanist, Portugal's hooks sharpened, their restless compositions cut with flyaway choruses. With Burton's help, Portugal continue to clear a path through the fracas; he hasn't done much to tamp down their taste for maximalism, but he's certainly helped them sculpt the melee into something a little less unwieldy, making sure these songs have enough hook to carry the weight of all the instrumental bedlam swirling around them.
It's not a perfect fit; every surface glistens, and Burton certainly helps Portugal keep a lot of balls in the air while staying mindful of information overload, but his mix has that bright-as-the-sun quality of most modern major label rock that leads to fatigue after too long. And he seems to have talked John Gourley into sticking to the upper ranges of his acrobatic pipes, a move that won't likely sit well with every Portugal fan. Still, Burton helps Portugal keep some control of what could easily turn to chaos, taking great care with their elaborate embellishments.
With Burton at their backs, Portugal take a surefooted approach on Evil Friends, confidently blasting through these pan-genre Frankensongs. But, just as the music seems to reposition itself every few seconds, so do John Gourley's lyrics, albeit with a lower success rate. He makes a couple of things clear on Friends: he's anti-apathy (the presumably ironic "Creep in a T-Shirt"), pro-ecstasy ("Purple Yellow Red and Blue", featuring two-thirds of Haim), and more than a little conflicted about religion. "We don't need no modern Jesus to roll with us," he notes. "Who cares if hell awaits," he wonders a bit later, "we're having drinks at heaven's gate."
But then there's "Hip Hop Kids". What starts out as a stroll with his young daughter takes a sudden turn into bile-spewing rebuke: "You hip-hop kids think we give a shit when we don't," he spits, apropos of... your guess is as good as mine. Gourley seems like a pleasant enough dude, so this "get off my lawn" thing has to be an act; either way, it doesn't work, the song's tart melody spiked with this untoward bitterness. Several songs on Evil Friends sport choruses that seem at odds with their verses, or stabs at profundity that don't hold up under scrutiny. With everything else floating around these songs, they could occasionally use an anchor, a task Gourley's flimsier lyrics aren't always up for.
It took me maybe four or five good listens before Evil Friends stopped setting off my claustrophobia. Even with prolonged exposure, Evil Friends' ever-present busyness can be overwhelming; there's a lot-- and sometimes too much-- going on here. Still, even when their ambitions outpace their execution, Portugal deserve their props for continuing to overshoot the mark. Seven albums in, with a seemingly permanent mid-day slot at almost every decent-sized festival on either side of the pond and a big-name producer on their side, Portugal. The Man could've easily spent Evil Friends shedding complexities and doubling down on catchiness. The frequently overstuffed, occasionally scatterbrained album is far from perfect. But even when going for broke gets them into trouble, Portugal seem happy to get up there and overshoot the mark. | 2013-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | June 11, 2013 | 6 | 8b7f641e-9b77-48ff-b64f-d50860bea2fd | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The international jazz-rap project Sélébéyone is a rare case of the two genres mixing at their most far-out, abstract corners. | The international jazz-rap project Sélébéyone is a rare case of the two genres mixing at their most far-out, abstract corners. | Steve Lehman / Sélébéyone: Sélébéyone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22239-selebeyone/ | Sélébéyone | Jazz-rap collaborations mostly happen at the spot where both genre's mainstreams overlap. Guru's Jazzmatazz series tapped the talents of one-time Billboard-charting trumpeter Donald Byrd. Herbie Hancock approached Grandmixer.DST for the scratches on “Rockit” well after the keyboardist had settled into his populist, funk-fusion period. The same tends to hold true today, as when Kendrick Lamar chooses improvisers who have already proved their expertise with incorporating R&B flourishes.
Much less familiar is the sight of left-field rappers experimenting with artists from jazz's avant-garde scene. One artist who's been an exception to this rule is HPrizm—the rapper formerly known as High Priest, from Antipop Consortium. In 2003, Antipop recorded with the blazingly talented pianist Matthew Shipp. Their partnership was notable for its boldness, though the album is more a curiosity than a highlight (in both catalogues).
HPrizm’s latest foray into hybrid-genre adventurism easily stands with the most successful jazz-rap crossover efforts of years and decades past. Part of what makes this new project work is the fact that it’s not merely a meeting between one rapper and one jazz artist. Going by the name Sélébéyone—a word for “intersection” in Senegal’s Wolof language—this ensemble contains two different emcees who hail from different continents, as well as two composer-saxophonists, and three other valuable supporting players with strong pedigrees in jazz. What they come up with feels both legitimately new and surprisingly approachable.
The two saxophonists who share composition duties on this group’s self-titled debut are altoist Steve Lehman (the nominal session leader) and his onetime student Maciek Lasserre (who plays soprano saxophone). Lehman is already celebrated in jazz circles for his complex rhythm switches and a taste for experimental harmonies. And while his tunes on Sélébéyone occasionally showcase these attributes, those characteristics have been mixed so well into the collective’s sound that they don’t call too much attention to themselves.
Despite all the wild change-ups on a track like “Are You In Peace?,” the air of abandon and possibility is due to its fresh take on the posse cut: one in which the jazz solos are positioned as equal to the verses, and in which electronic sampling bolsters instrumental bridges. It’s possible to pick it all apart and figure out who’s doing what, but the surfeit of talent is just as easily enjoyed on its own.
On this and several other cuts, Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic shares vocal duties. He’s a revelation: When he isn't raising the entire group's energy level during hype-man verses, Bandimic’s lyrics often orbit around topics of social-humanist concern, as well as the emcee’s Sufi practice of Islam. His lines from the album (as well as HPrizm’s) are presented in English on Lehman’s site, though a listener won’t need a line by line accounting of the bars spit in Wolof to appreciate the way that Bandimic throttles between a staccato flow and more fluid passages. As he’s demonstrated in his solo music, Bandimic can also carry a tune—a skill he shows off on the slinky minor-mode conclusion of “Dualism,” where he duets with Lasserre’s soprano horn. The rapper’s sensitivity to pitch is also in evidence during more uptempo moments, as with the exciting closing minutes of frenetic album finale “Bamba.”
Amid Bandimic’s onslaught of approaches, HPrizm more than holds his own. He threads fast passages through “Hybrid” (“No imagination, only my real life / Pulse over drums, hope to show what it feels like”). He offers a thrilling, predominantly a cappella introduction to “Dualism.” And during “Laamb,” the album’s slowly evolving opening track, HPrizm stretches his line breaks, creating unpredictable syllable stresses in a verse about the psychological tolls exacted by political inequality. (“Jewels I find/Under three-fourths water/From flooded streets I was brought up/Now in this era facing the ramifications/Of blocks to the occupation/As bars over propaganda/They criminalize the victim/Then the truth sets in.”) The rhythmic structure that Lehman uses for “Laamb” matches the lyrics—as a steadily marching piano ostinato gradually makes room for polyrhythms, and eventually some graceful accompaniment from his saxophone.
Though its members don’t have much solo space, the rhythm section is critical to Sélébéyone’s excellence. As a veteran of keyboardist Robert Glasper’s earliest explorations of Dilla’s legacy, drummer Damion Reid knows how to drive rap-influenced jazz performance—and he’s never sounded more excited than he does here. The varied qualities of tracks like “Origine” and “Cognition” show his ability to move from energetic swing to subtler support. And he fosters joyous head-nod vibes during more consistently burning tracks like “Akap” and “Hybrid.”
Perhaps the most convincing mark of this group’s confidence is their understanding that, collectively, they have more skills than can be put to use in every single song. On some tracks, the celebrated saxophonists appear not at all with their main axes (instead focusing on composing or sampling). Bandimic rhymes alone on select cuts. This wise restraint makes the full-ensemble performances hit with the force they deserve. And the variance also helps pace an album that might otherwise have become overstuffed. Over its 41 minutes, Sélébéyone walks the fine line stretched between fusion’s twin perils—too much accommodation of preexisting tastes the one side, too much invention on the other—and makes the unusual triumph look easy. | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Global / Rap | Pi | August 22, 2016 | 8.1 | 8b82dc06-5dea-4aca-b4fa-8e9e668c23aa | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Having traded city life for the Catskills, the New York artist explores a more relaxed sound on the follow-up to 2018’s Old Ghost, finding new purpose in her soft-focus optimism. | Having traded city life for the Catskills, the New York artist explores a more relaxed sound on the follow-up to 2018’s Old Ghost, finding new purpose in her soft-focus optimism. | Renata Zeiguer: Picnic in the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/renata-zeiguer-picnic-in-the-dark/ | Picnic in the Dark | After years of being stretched thin by the pressures of the city, every New York artist inevitably confronts the urge to resettle, speaking in hushed tones about the semi-mythical network of small cities and sleepy towns upstate, or greener pastures even further afield. Life in lockdown was the breaking point for many in the city’s fragmented underground, but long before COVID, Brooklynite songwriter Renata Zeiguer was nurturing an obsession with nature and plotting her escape.
Old Ghost, her 2018 debut album, raced through a bright cacophony of zig-zagging guitars and tumbling percussion, presenting a mirror image of the heady, sprawling indie rock of Ava Luna and Landlady, underground heroes that Zeiguer collaborated with before striking out on her own. Pulsing at the heart of every song was a yearning to break free. “Enough is enough,” she cooed on anthemic opener “Wayside,” planting her feet in surf-friendly jazz chords before erupting into jagged, revelatory howls; “I know it’s not true,” she cried at the song’s closing chorus, fleeing from a faded mirage into an album teeming with hopeful visions of wild animals meeting beneath the moonlight and seedlings pushing through winter ice. Old Ghost unspooled into a series of affirmations, promising that the paranoid visions of today—the insects “burrowing in filthy mounds” on “Bug” and nightmares of a flood “drowning a space that will never fill” on “Dreambone”—would ultimately be nothing more than a rearview distraction. “I’ll be surfacing in no time,” she sang on “Below,” determined that self-actualization could be lurking right around the next chorus.
Zeiguer has since traded the crush of city life for softer living in the Catskills, and though she hasn’t let Old Ghost’s fever dreams cool entirely, on Picnic in the Dark she is comfortably settled into a quieter place, banishing old fears with hard-won grace. Gone are the frayed transitions and explosive drums that once poured fuel on her fiery songwriting. Instead, Zeiguer anchors her dreamy melodies to a steady pulse, counting herself into opener “Sunset Boulevard” with an airy two-bar drum-machine pattern before the familiar crunch of her guitar creeps in. On five of the album’s songs, she redeploys the same introductory beat until it evolves into a mantra-like motif. Cooling off from Old Ghost’s raging urgency, she allows musical ideas to dovetail naturally, each gently pulling the next into being instead of clambering over each other.
Zeiguer revels in the wide-open spaces that she’s carved out, filling them with the most compelling vocals she’s ever tracked. “Sunset Boulevard” slowly winds upwards through a spellbinding pre-chorus, bass and drums plodding dutifully along as her voice slides higher and higher. On the jaunty folk verses of “Child,” she flirts with the slightest country twang before the arrangement hollows out and leaves her multi-tracked voice soaring into ambient richness. Even on the album’s shortest track, the lounge-pop interlude “Mark the Date,” Zeiguer matches the song’s lilting surrealism with a playful deadpan: “Do you know what day it is?” Hearing her seize these songs so completely, unencumbered by a band roaring at her back, is a delight.
This spare, unhurried approach also helps illuminate the soft-focus optimism at the core of Zeiguer’s lyrics. On Old Ghost’s closer, “Gravity,” she luxuriated in her own power, singing, “I have this feeling that I’m never gonna lose.” On Picnic in the Dark, she finds new purpose in beaming that wisdom outwards. “Heaven and hell are a place in your mind,” she sighs on “Avalanche,” waving away fears of damnation and encouraging a leap of faith. “Eloise,” another character sketch, takes a sterner approach, extending a hand but acknowledging, “I know you’re not gonna try unless you want,” with the knowing tone of someone who’s grudgingly come to accept the necessity of showing up for yourself, no matter how unappealing the task may be.
Picnic in the Dark threatens to leave some of Zeiguer’s long-time followers out in the cold. Those searching for the crashing, tropical dream pop of her past won’t find it here—her focus on documenting the uneasy transformations that have taken hold since taking her permanent sabbatical from New York City has yielded nothing with the bracing anthemics of “Wayside” or the guttural soloing and full-band histrionics of “Neck of the Moon.” The only contender, “Whack-a-Mole,” never quite finds its footing; the shaky metaphor for an elusive lover falls flat amid an arrangement that neither lifts off or settles down. It’s understandable to yearn for a touch of the old chaos. But in downshifting from the always-on New York grind, Zeiguer triumphs on Picnic in the Dark by seeking a different kind of thrill, unburdening herself for a shot at true inner peace. | 2022-04-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Northern Spy | April 8, 2022 | 7.6 | 8b82f41c-1104-4776-af3e-9cf73612af65 | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
On his Fabriclive mix, UK producer Skream struggles to settle on a vibe. | On his Fabriclive mix, UK producer Skream struggles to settle on a vibe. | Skream: Fabriclive 96 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skream-fabriclive-96/ | Fabriclive 96 | In dance music, genre is often woven into an artist’s DNA. It’s not uncommon for a DJ/producer to pick a lane and stick with it for the next 10 or 20 years. Skream, on the other hand, is proof of just how far you can travel from your origins. The UK producer, born Oliver Jones, is part of dubstep’s original generation; he came up back when the bass-heavy style was strictly a niche concern, and his foundational single “Midnight Request Line” is virtually synonymous with its subterranean origins. As a member of transatlantic crossover behemoths Magnetic Man, he’s also representative of that moment in the early 2010s when dubstep went overground. (It’s almost mind-boggling to think that an artist with roots in dingy South London basements would also figure on compilations like this one alongside Skrillex, Calvin Harris, and Kaskade.)
By the time dubstep’s popularity cratered, though, Skream had moved on. By 2013—the year of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories—he, too, had gotten the disco bug. His single “Rollercoaster” was a cheesy whiff of falsetto-led funk; his contribution to Pete Tong’s All Gone Miami 2013 2CD was a mix of middle-of-the-road house. It was a 180 so sharp that it looked a little mercenary at the time. Five years later, a regular fixture in places like Space Ibiza, Skream has settled into a comfortable kind of second adolescence, banging out reliable and rather faceless crowdpleasers, full of Pavlovian filter sweeps and chunky tech-house shuffle, as well as moodier excursions with more character and purpose. He is, frankly, a maddeningly inconsistent DJ.
His Fabriclive suffers from the same lack of focus. It can’t decide quite what it wants to be—a history lesson, a showcase of state-of-the-art house, or a boisterous Friday night stocked with sugary low-hanging fruit. It gets off to a promising start. The chirping saxophone of Hieroglyphic Being’s “Ashrams” makes for a wonderfully unexpected opener; the Salon des Amateurs resident Bufiman’s “Peace Moves,” with its echo of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “B-2 Unit,” is a strange and captivating blend of vapor and solid, of then and now. And James Burton’s newly released “Sounds of a Different Colour (Kincaid & Sinàl Remix)” merits the full six and a half minutes he devotes to it: It’s funky and atmospheric, full of odd sounds and unusual fireworks.
But things quickly get confused. By track five, the rolling bass of Rundell’s “Jack the Bass” goes down like a Jäger bomb on a too-crowded dancefloor. A conga-hammering Latin house two-fer from Skream and his Magnetic Man cohort Artwork (the latter in a 1999 outing as Santos Rodriguez) comes on as excitable as a gaggle of clubbers bursting from a bathroom stall. In this context, Floorplan’s gospel-sampling “Made Up in My Mind” feels almost sacrilegious.
If you’re only including 14 tracks in a 75-minute mix, they need to fit together like puzzle pieces, and each one needs to be essential. That is not the case here. Radio Slave’s “Screaming Hands (Krautdrums Mix),” all nine minutes of it, lands like a boulder from the sky between the Floorplan track and Sascha Funke’s key-clashing “MZ.” Skream regains his footing for the final stretch: Greg Venezia’s thrilling, Detroit-inspired “Lies” is big-room done right; two tracks later, Skream dusts off a 24-year-old slice of bleepy intelligent techno from LA Synthesis, a tune so revelatory that including it here feels like a public service. But Steve Murphy’s chilly electro tune that joins them constitutes such a change in energy and air temperature that it’s almost like wandering from the main floor to the side room and back again. Here, just a few tracks from the end, Skream still can’t quite settle on a vibe. | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fabric | January 26, 2018 | 5.6 | 8b84bcf2-7307-4e51-bf1b-7369b683cf61 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Ambient musician KMRU and experimental producer Aho Ssan balance tectonic rumbling and grinding steel against whispering white noise and synthetic choirs. | Ambient musician KMRU and experimental producer Aho Ssan balance tectonic rumbling and grinding steel against whispering white noise and synthetic choirs. | KMRU / Aho Ssan: Limen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kmru-aho-ssan-limen/ | Limen | Growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, Joseph Kamaru was accustomed to noise. Then, as a teenager, he moved outside the city, and the din eased; the sounds of traffic and souped-up matatus gave way to birdsong, and he began carrying a handheld recorder, learning to navigate the world with his ears. His eureka moment as a young artist was discovering that he could channel the sounds of a rickety old passenger train into looping rhythms; that was the birth of the musical style that he has developed under his KMRU alias on recordings like his 2020 breakout album Peel, where field recordings and synthesized sounds come together in a porous weave. A prolific producer, KMRU has continued to explore the use of field recordings across a number of mostly self-released recordings, sometimes emphasizing tonal elements and elsewhere pushing deeper into the swirl of found sounds; what has held constant is his music’s meditative quality.
Where stillness reigns in KMRU’s music, Niamké Désiré courts chaos. Better known as Aho Ssan, the Parisian electronic musician builds his own virtual instruments in the visual programming language Max/MSP; whatever numbers are being crunched under the digital hood, his music often feels like a snapshot of something being torn at the molecular level. His debut album, 2020’s Simulacrum, recalls the church-on-fire drama of Ben Frost, but pay close attention to his swells of distortion and what at first appears to be a solid wall of sound disintegrates into waves of granular detail, every bass hit a boulder crumbling to dust.
Even so, Désiré’s music is not without its more contemplative register, so you might assume that a meeting of the two musicians would entail finding a halfway point between their respective styles. But when they sat down together, they surprised even themselves: “I never made something so extreme,” said Désiré of their first recording. Featuring three tracks composed and recorded on three separate occasions, Limen documents the duo’s ongoing dialogue.
“Resurgence,” based on an installation they created for Berlin Atonal’s 2021 edition, opens Limen with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up in a burning theater, static crackling at the edges of thickening drones; it’s somehow harsh yet lulling. Three and a half minutes in, the first real motif appears: a mournful lead melody somewhere between a trumpet and a table saw that sounds more dramatic and more regal than anything in either artist’s catalog. The bass rumbles volcanically; the edges of the soundscape are a sustained paroxysm of sharpening knives and sandblasting guns. Roughly halfway through the 12-minute piece, there’s a brief decrescendo, only for the assault to resume with renewed force before something even more surprising happens: The quaking bass briefly smooths into a syncopated pattern reminiscent of techno. And then, the shards having momentarily assembled themselves into relative order, the whole thing dissipates, bowed strings and whispers of white noise dissolving back into nothingness.
“Rebirth” pursues similar ideas. Again, the space of the track is a broad field of sourceless shimmer; there are alien hints of symphonic timbres, as if an AI had been trained to replicate frequencies vacuumed up from the orchestra pit. Crusted in distortion, the low notes throb, while the high end throws off a steady spray of sparks, like a slab saw cutting through stone. But the tonalities are more consonant, and the track’s relatively compact form, just five and a half minutes long, yields a swifter climax and neater denouement than “Resurgence.” Manageably bracing, it’s a thimbleful of whisky compared to its predecessor’s tumbler of bleach and broken glass.
The closing track is the album’s longest: “Ruined Abstractions,” the duo’s first recorded collaboration, runs more than 20 minutes. It was originally released as part of a lockdown-era compilation series in December 2020, but its inclusion here makes for an interesting contrast. In one sense, it’s noisier than either “Resurgence” or “Rebirth,” particularly in its opening movement, where the squealing and grinding suggests a riot of shortwave radios and dental drills. But even here, its noise feels relatively refined, never quite reaching the forcefulness of its predecessors. And in its second half, glowing tones modeled after strings, organs, and wordless choirs predominate. In its grace, the music isn’t a world away from the liturgical compositions of Arvo Pärt—just scorched and serrated, sliced by knives and baptized by fire, a mirror image of beauty and destruction. It remains considerably different from either artist’s solo work, yet in its introspective depths, you can glimpse the fingerprints of both. | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Subtext | April 29, 2022 | 7.2 | 8b8801df-7e64-447f-b9ca-c7edc3bf86b1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Conceived as a companion piece to 2017’s Twin Solitude, the Canadian songwriter’s fourth album is a dialogue with the person he’s been. | Conceived as a companion piece to 2017’s Twin Solitude, the Canadian songwriter’s fourth album is a dialogue with the person he’s been. | Leif Vollebekk: New Ways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leif-vollebekk-new-ways/ | New Ways | While putting the final touches on his third album, 2017’s Twin Solitude, Canadian songwriter Leif Vollebekk began to understand it better. Across 10 tracks, he’d mourned the dissolution of a relationship, grasping to resolve his past as newfound success created geographic and emotional distance. Only when he stopped searching did clarity find him. Rather than revise Twin Solitude, Vollebekk set about fashioning new songs to explore his growing perspective. “I started working on this new record [New Ways] while I was mixing that one,” he told Atwood Magazine. “I had this idea,” he said, “that it would be a companion piece.”
Vollebekk sensed chatter between the two projects—so much so that he considered titling the new album Phaedrus, after Plato’s dialogue by the same name. Among the discussion topics in Plato’s Phaedrus is the effect of writing on memory: how creating a record of an event discourages remembering it. Vollebekk doesn’t heed that warning. New Ways sidles up to the past, opening a dialogue with time, with place, and with the person he’s been.
One central figure lingers across the album—a present absence that sits easier than on Twin Solitude. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine,” Vollebekk sings on the bruised “Never Be Back.” Love has come and gone, but on New Ways the lesson finally sticks. “She’ll never be back, never be back,” he adds, briskly repeating himself. The steady piano paces Vollebekk’s manic verses. His desire to understand hasn’t abated, but he no longer seeks to change the past—merely to invoke it. “Not making a case for you or for trying,” he sings.
Vollebekk laces his capacious, meandering music with a ’60s folk-jazz sensibility. As with Twin Solitude, he recorded New Ways directly to tape, allowing each song’s mood to dictate its direction. “When I hear music, I hear lots of space,” he’s explained, “and then I find that when I add instruments it’s almost like somebody saying too much [...] or saying the wrong thing. It takes the air out of the room.” The sparse, tense “Hot Tears” doubles his voice while a piano and burnished hi-hat clear space to collate bygone days. When he fills out that baseline with a sumptuous Wurlitzer (as on “The Way That You Feel”) or a crestfallen sax (as on “Wait a While”), the songs remain understated and affecting.
His frenetic lyricism sits in clarifying contrast to the spare arrangements, the same qualities that helped Twin Solitude earn nominations for the Polaris Prize and Juno Award. “Hot Tears” and “Transatlantic Flight” stand out, but on the whole New Ways doesn’t live up to the emotional spark of its predecessor. There’s a point when mulling over the same memories shifts into melancholia; Vollebekk comes close to that cliff, but he keeps regret at bay by focusing on reality. The drums on “I’m Not Your Lover” tick like a clock as he traces how time has changed his circumstances: “Drifting in thrift stores I see something pretty/See a jacket I’d wear ’til I gave it to you,” he sings, before soberly reminding himself, “I’m not your lover.” On “Phaedrus”—what remains of the album’s original title—he repeats the first and last verses as if they were a mantra: “The way that it was/Is the way it should be.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Secret City | January 7, 2020 | 6.9 | 8b894147-da17-49ba-b3f6-30c713510891 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Peder Mannerfelt has produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead. On his new EP, he channels his interest in emancipatory politics and exotic rhythms into crisp, clever tracks. | Peder Mannerfelt has produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead. On his new EP, he channels his interest in emancipatory politics and exotic rhythms into crisp, clever tracks. | Peder Mannerfelt: Equality Now EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22688-equality-now-ep/ | Equality Now EP | No subliminal messaging for Peder Mannerfelt: on Equality Now, he wears his politics on his record sleeve. Hailing from Stockholm, Mannerfelt is a skillful engineer and a tireless collaborator. As well as his solo production work, he performs as one half of analog synth duo Roll the Dice, has produced records for Blonde Redhead and Glasser under the name the Subliminal Kid, and played an integral role in Karin Dreijer Andersson’s Fever Ray. He shares a few common interests with Andersson—emancipatory politics, exotic rhythms, and Brothers Grimm dress-up. Playing live, he wears a waist-length wig that obscures his face, making him look like a sort of techno Rapunzel.
The Equality Now EP marks Mannerfelt’s first output on Numbers, the Glasgow dance imprint that discovered Rustie and SOPHIE, among others. Its three tracks explore three quite different directions, while holding to a few base tenets: clever ideas, executed simply, with a minimum of gloss or clutter. The title track is crisp, propulsive techno produced with such economy that you probably couldn’t excise a single aspect without the whole thing disintegrating. Arid drums lock into a manic bounce, synth lines bend and flex into strange timbres and two synthetic voices—one male, one female—intone the world “equality”, mostly in unison, sometimes a tantalizing half-beat out of of step. Its repetition recalls a chant or a march: grassroots activism tailored for the dancefloor.
While at first glance Equality Now’s productions can appear fairly simplistic, they often conceal ingenious elements. “Breaking Patterns,” the EP’s second track, is a borderline-crude acid number that contains rhythmic echoes of Mannerfelt’s 2015 LP The Swedish Congo Record—a sonic “research project” which attempted to fastidiously recreate 1930s field recordings of tribal music in the Belgian Congo using modern tools. Taut hand drums pound ceaselessly, as synthesizers spit out electronic zaps and distressed strings crawl mournfully across the frame. But most of the action happens on a microscopic level: beats form themselves into unusual polyrhythms that morph and reshape, while small twists of FX or a shifting mix suddenly jolt the track onto a new footing.
Equality Now bows out with “Rules, Ropes & Strings,” an ambient piece that pares back the beats and ushers in slow tidal washes of shimmering texture. It’s a strangely sedate end for a record that is elsewhere out to enthuse or provoke. Hardly unusual for a figure as mercurial as Mannerfelt, though. This is music guided by impulse, not premeditation; music in which an idea is good, right up until the moment that it’s spent. | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Numbers | December 15, 2016 | 7.1 | 8b993390-259f-4112-a95d-2dcb64309c7b | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Yeasayer's third LP is an abrupt transition for a band whose sound always seems to be in flux, bearing both a more limited stylistic range and a narrower sense of identity. | Yeasayer's third LP is an abrupt transition for a band whose sound always seems to be in flux, bearing both a more limited stylistic range and a narrower sense of identity. | Yeasayer: Fragrant World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16940-fragrant-world/ | Fragrant World | Say what you will about Yeasayer, but up to this point in their career, their music hasn’t been easily categorized as "unremarkable". It’s invited opinions-- loud ones-- from supporters and detractors alike. Since their tracks are based on similar qualities-- spirited, can-do lyrics, sweeping harmonies, and deliriously stacked arrangements-- there's been almost no middle ground separating their excellent run of singles ("2080", "Tightrope", "Madder Red", "O.N.E.") from their catastrophic face-plants ("Mondegreen", "Rome"). Now that's changed. Yeasayer's third album, Fragrant World, is their first and only consistent LP. It not only proves that Yeasayer can make an unremarkable song, but that they can make 11 of them in a row.
Fragrant World marks another transition for a band whose sound appears to be in constant flux, and initially, it can make you miss the "old" Yeasayer. There's a significant change here. While *All Hour Cymbals *and Odd Blood sounded nothing like each other, they reflected Yeasayer's surroundings at the time, the maximalist grab-from-anywhere approach that defined ambitious East Coast indie rock. They were in the lineage of TV on the Radio and Animal Collective when those bands they were still psychedelic and tribal, and they brought to mind the track-stuffing, techno-hippie approach of MGMT or Gang Gang Dance in a pop mood. Fragrant World, on the other hand, is a decidedly minimalist affair. Its album cover might suggest otherwise, but Yeasayer have not gone dubstep or witch house, although the occasional undulating bass wobble and ticking hi-hat suggest they're going for something a little more trunk-rattling this time around. On the whole, the stylistic range is far narrower, and the geographic one much wider, as Fragrant World sounds like it's trying to jockey alongside miniaturists such as Grimes, Purity Ring, or the xx-- acts that make music that sounds simultaneously tiny and fragile enough for iPod shuffles and scalable to subwoofers.
None of which plays to Yeasayer's strengths. The leaner sound puts the focus squarely on their lyrics, and their overall disposition hasn't changed along with their sonics; Fragrant World can feel painfully self-aware. A typically curious juxtaposition occurs over the phased chords of "Blue Paper", when Anand Wilder sighs, "She used to walk on concrete/ Now the sidewalk isn't green enough for her/ Says she misses Mother Earth." Later on the squelching "Devil and the Deed", he mocks, "You could never handle if she was into magic/ You could never stand it/ She couldn't speak your language." The robotic bump 'n' grind of "Longevity" is a new look for Yeasayer, but the only real friction is that of a square peg plugging into a round hole: "My girl says that all the rain promises is to give life to the seeds/ Live in the moment/ Never count on longevity," sings Chris Keating. It's the sort of thing people say with alarming frequency in Yeasayer songs and absolutely nowhere else.
Songs here often take an advisory tone, and the lack of grounding becomes more pronounced whenever Yeasayer get topical. The overkill of EQ filters makes it nearly impossible to identify the folk hero or the shtick on "Folk Hero Shtick", with "The emperor's standing naked/ How much longer can he fake it?" failing to serve as any sort of guidance. Likewise, witness "Reagan's Skeleton" imagining right-wing oppression as a "Thriller"-like phantasmagoria.
Then again, did the lyrics of "2080" or "Ambling Alp" get in the way? With those songs, Yeasayer managed to overwhelm the listener with an undeniable melody and sheer psychedelic swooning. Though their previously hyper-colored records were also self-produced, Fragrant World is curiously thin. It goes beyond the arrangements. While the hooks of "No Bones" and "Devil and the Deed" slowly grow on you, each hits a point around the three-minute mark where you might expect a pivot, a bridge, or some new texture. Instead, they just end meekly. This quality is most noticeable on lead single "Henrietta", which works a melodic bassline, and the sort of elastic groove that powered Odd Blood's best tracks. Yet after only two minutes, it cuts out and spends more than half of its time playing catch up with the first Neon Indian album.
Credit where it's due-- Yeasayer are ambitious enough to do something other than write "2080" sequels, even though they have every incentive to do just that. But unlike the erratic, occasionally captivating, and always bold Odd Blood, Fragrant World rests in a tentative middle ground. | 2012-08-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 16, 2012 | 5.4 | 8b9c5122-0475-4e77-a432-d4062ded7643 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Though at least two of Maiden’s first four albums are metal masterpieces, they showcase a band eagerly evolving while building a classic lineup in a breathless four-year span. | Though at least two of Maiden’s first four albums are metal masterpieces, they showcase a band eagerly evolving while building a classic lineup in a breathless four-year span. | Iron Maiden: Iron Maiden / Killers / The Number of the Beast / Piece Of Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iron-maiden-iron-maiden-killers-the-number-of-the-beast-piece-of-mind/ | Iron Maiden / Killers / The Number of the Beast / Piece Of Mind | Iron Maiden’s first four albums—Iron Maiden, Killers, The Number of the Beast, and Piece of Mind—have been reissued again. It’s part of a year-long project by Parlophone to recommit the band’s 16 studio albums to CD, four at a time, though availability has never exactly been an issue. These versions don’t add much; they are CD dumps of 2015 vinyl remasters with the original British tracklists. Knowing that hardcore Maiden collectors are legion, the only addition is that The Number of the Beast—the band’s third album and the first featuring dynamo singer Bruce Dickinson—includes a plastic figurine of the iconic Eddie and a patch of, well, the Devil. Cynically, it’s a cash grab. Still, this is the band that harnessed 1980s fear and turmoil in order to shape metal as we know it, and these records deserve any life support a record label wants to give them.
These four albums, issued one per year from 1980 to 1983, show a band in constant mutation: Melodies get stronger. Arrangements get more intricate. Dickinson replaces the scrappy upstart Paul Di’Anno, pushing the band to the next level of power and popularity. These records are not flawed but certainly developmental, battles won and occasionally lost on the journey to supremacy. Beast and Piece of Mind are redoubtable metal classics; still, even if it’s hard to consider “Run to the Hills” and “The Trooper” pieces of a work in progress, they are points along Maiden’s path to becoming the global behemoth that made 1984’s Powerslave, their landmark fifth album. And watching Maiden develop was watching metal develop, shaking off the haze of 1970s boogie and speeding up its attack while borrowing from the harder side of progressive rock. If Sabbath birthed metal, Maiden looks and oftentimes sounds more like metal’s stereotypical boogeyman.
Maiden arose from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) scene at the dawn of the ’80s, though they’re so foundational to metal they’re often not talked about in that way. You link Maiden with Sabbath and Judas Priest, not Tygers of Pan Tang and Satan. The distance is evident from the jump on their self-titled debut, brimming with hooks and attitude. “Running Free” is the first archetypal song from a band with several of them, as they doggedly pursue some ambiguous form of “freedom.” It barely matters what freedom is, though, as Di’Anno convincingly sells the idea that going blind into the future is the only way during the gutsy chorus. “Prowler” succeeds on self-assurance, too. It’s unclear on Maiden’s first two records if Di’Anno is an untethered beast or a weird stalker (probably the latter), but he gives Maiden’s crisp melodies an energy that would remain a calling card.
Di’Anno excels at these kinds of barreling tracks, which is why he ultimately wasn’t long for the world of Maiden. “Phantom of the Opera,” to wit, seems written for Bruce Dickinson two years before he joined Maiden, as it’s the first taste of what bassist and mastermind Steve Harris wanted his band to be. It’s here that Harris sets the template for Maiden’s longer, more complicated but melodically rich songs by fusing jumping basslines inspired by Yes to bastardized classical ideas routed through heavy rock (in essence, metal, or what Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore had done). “Remember Tomorrow” isn’t even as complex as “Opera,” but you can still hear Di’Anno’s limits during the quasi-ballad. It’s too slow for his hesher persona, requiring a sensitivity he just couldn’t summon.
In 1981, Killers shined floodlights on the debut’s dinginess, allowing Maiden to clear the muck from a dirty rocker like “Purgatory” without removing its grimey heart. Adrian Smith’s addition on second guitar allows for bombastic dynamics with Dave Murray, another piece of Maiden’s grand design. “Wrathchild” blends the menace of “Prowler” and the breezy fun of “Running Free,” while “Murders in the Rue Morgue” shows that Di’Anno is trying to match Harris’ ambition as he keeps up with the jittery bass. By doubling down on attitude, and bolstered by the record’s brightness, he sounds more confident and able. And on the title track, he introduces two vocal tics that Dickinson would master—terse declarations in the verses, arena-ready “whoas” in the open spaces.
There are still fans who insist that the Di’Anno Maiden of these first two albums is the best Maiden—contrarians, honestly. Those declarations undercut metal’s capacity for exploration, growth, and having a higher sense of purpose. Sure, “Wrathchild” and “Free” are plenty great and far more memorable than most NWOBHM obscurities, but they wouldn’t have made Maiden a global force. It’s not all about Di’Anno, either; Harris was still refining his ideas as a songwriter. He hadn’t yet loosened the reins for other members, but he also hadn’t fully tapped into the progressive rock that would influence Maiden from the mid-’80s onward. Still, the short but intricate “Genghis Khan” is probably best left as an instrumental, anyway—it would be too much for Di’Anno to handle.
Iron Maiden emerged as more than a way-above-average NWOBHM band on 1982’s The Number of the Beast. The proof is instant on “Invaders,” an underrated Maiden opener that shows just how much Dickinson vitalized the band as he yells “IN-VADERS!” in acrobatic high notes. Murray and Smith bob and weave, pierce and strike in calculated disarray; they get wilder, because Dickinson’s technical aplomb has empowered them.
The explosive wails at the end of “Children of the Damned” set the bar for the higher-the-better theatrics that would soon become a metal hallmark. As when Dio joined Sabbath, the vocalist switch was never simply about technical ability. Harris’ writing boasted a dizzying drama that Di’Anno was too streetwise to nail. But here was a voice that could match him. Real mania drips from Dickinson’s every word during “22 Acacia Avenue,” a feeling the straightforward Di’Anno would have missed.
What’s more, who knew a band that still packs soccer stadiums would be so existential? During “The Number of the Beast” and “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” two of Maiden’s definitive songs, Dickinson and Harris pit the self against the world and one’s own self-judgement and temptation. “Hallowed” is Maiden not just versus death but also versus fate, versus the powers that be, versus the fear that you’ll end up watching your sands of time run low. Its somber opening presaged metal’s forthcoming darker tones, too. “The Number of the Beast” works the same way, essentially saying you’re going to encounter some bad shit when you’re cutting loose. Do you take the plunge? In heavy metal, of course.
A year later, on Piece of Mind, the classic Iron Maiden lineup finally cohered, with Nicko McBrain replacing Clive Burr on drums. Just as Dickinson turned the start of Beast into a showcase as to why he was the one for the job, the arresting, tom-filled opening of “Where Eagles Dare” does the same for McBrain. He is more crisp and fluid, like a relaxed Neil Peart but every bit as ecstatic. The songs here again run up against hopeless situations and make music from the despair. “Flight of Icarus” indulges in Dickinson’s mythology geekery and unintentionally presages The Decline of Western Civilization II, the infamous documentary that featured many hair metal bands flying too close to the sun.
Though bursting with melodies and some of Dickinson’s most dramatic performances, “Die With Your Boots On” and “The Trooper” don’t romanticize war. Dying by the state isn’t cool, whether it’s getting shot at in the name of imperialism or by the death penalty. Dickinson is the most convincing drill sergeant, yelling that this isn’t triumph. The triumph comes from overcoming war and misery, always Maiden’s aim.
Theocracy doesn’t entail burning “Satanic” metal records en masse anymore, and demagogues may not seem as sneaky as they once were. But Maiden’s message—“If you’re gonna die, die with your boots on,” or don’t back down in metal parlance—has persevered. Maybe that’s why, even if these reissues are mere collector bait, Maiden still speaks, screams, and solos to our times nearly four decades after these records were made. War’s still hell, stalkers and grifters still abound, and dreams still get deferred. That’s reason enough for heavy metal, reason enough for Iron Maiden. “Life down here is just a strange illusion,” Dickinson offers during “Hallowed,” perhaps not even knowing how right he is. | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | null | December 4, 2018 | 7 | 8baa3e92-3e38-45bb-b009-35499ffb0c99 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
This double-album soundtrack functions like a greatest-hits set, with a focus on the singer-songwriter’s early material and some recent collaborations. | This double-album soundtrack functions like a greatest-hits set, with a focus on the singer-songwriter’s early material and some recent collaborations. | Sheryl Crow: Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sheryl-crow-sheryl-music-from-the-feature-documentary/ | Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary | Toward the end of Sheryl, a new documentary that’s somewhere between a gentle hagiography and an electronic press kit, Sheryl Crow reckons with her status as a music business veteran: “There’s a weird thing that happens when you become a ‘legacy artist.’ It’s sort of a sideways compliment. It’s like, ‘OK, you’ve stood the test of time but also you’re old and you just haven’t gone away.’” The accompanying double-album soundtrack, Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary, proves Crow’s point by balancing the core of her catalog—the songs that have stood the test the time—with the music she’s made as a legacy artist who no longer visits the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100. Partly a greatest hits collection, partly a testimonial to Crow’s endurance, Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary leans heavily into the bookends of her career, emphasizing her 1990s hits along with Threads, the 2019 album she claims is her farewell.
Like the film, Sheryl places the spotlight squarely on the music she made at the outset of her career, which seemed like a throwback even in the 1990s. Raised on classic rock, Crow tapped into a distinctly 1970s vibe with her 1993 debut Tuesday Night Music Club, a record steeped in the slick, heady sounds of Southern California. Its retro vibe was roughly in the same ballpark as alternative rock, which happened to crash into the mainstream just prior to the album’s release. Crow courted the alternative rock audience just once: She smudged up her sound on her self-titled second album, which arrived during alt-rock’s commercial peak in 1996. The thick, churning guitars of “If It Makes You Happy” represented a definitive break from the effervescent sunniness of “All I Wanna Do,” signifying her artistic independence more than any desire to chase trends.
Sheryl doesn’t create a strong differentiation between the sunny vibes of Tuesday Night Music Club and the relatively grungier aspects of Sheryl Crow. The soundtrack deliberately alternates material from the two records, a sequence that emphasizes continuity over evolution: What stands out is how Crow managed to freshen classic rock conventions without repudiating their clichés. Her best work demonstrated a clear debt to idols like Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones—both Stevie Nicks and Keith Richards return the favor by appearing in Sheryl— but she synthesized these elements into a distinctive voice that sounded weathered, soulful, and hopeful. She deepened this approach on 1998’s The Globe Sessions, then turned it into shiny pop for C’mon C’mon in 2002.
These four albums provide the backbone of both the documentary and its soundtrack. The first hour of the 90-minute film takes viewers up thorough C’Mon C’mon, while the soundtrack relies heavily on material from these records: Seven of the 11 songs on Tuesday Night Music Club are here, as are eight of the 13 cuts from Sheryl Crow, then four songs from The Globe Sessions and two from C’mon C’mon. The entire Sheryl project essentially glosses over the following two decades of Crow’s career, bypassing the handsome adult-alternative album Wildflower, the R&B genre exercise 100 Miles From Memphis, and Feels Like Home, her excursion into country music. While these records aren’t as bracing or idiosyncratic as her first four, they’re supporting evidence for Crow’s strength as a troubadour.
Instead of touching upon these albums, Sheryl concludes with a heavy dose of duets from Threads, the collaborative 2019 record Crow claims will be her final studio album, adding three new tracks that underscore her lifer status. “Forever” is a pretty ballad that hearkens back to delicate moments from Sheryl Crow, and “Still the Same” charts somewhat new territory for her, a stately romantic pop ballad with a heavy debt to Paul McCartney. She returns to her wheelhouse with a version of the Rolling Stones’ “Live With Me” that’s a bit too polished for its own good, its tight rhythms contrasting sharply with the looser feel of her first recordings. As a listening experience, the 35-song set feels somewhat anticlimactic. This isn’t a full portrait of Crow’s gifts as an artist, but it is a reminder of the high standard she set early on—music that retains its vitality, so much so that it can overshadow the perfectly enjoyable work that came later. | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe / Big Machine | May 25, 2022 | 6.8 | 8bab8b49-0e0f-45c7-8de0-eb9d316e12fb | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Electronic music at the moment may not get more gurgling than Amnesia Scanner. The European duo keeps pushing the outer limits of noise and techno further on this excellent new collage of songs. | Electronic music at the moment may not get more gurgling than Amnesia Scanner. The European duo keeps pushing the outer limits of noise and techno further on this excellent new collage of songs. | Amnesia Scanner: AS TRUTH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22910-as-truth/ | AS TRUTH | Berlin-based Finnish producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala first made waves in 2011 as Renaissance Man, an impish electro duo equal parts quirky energy and bleary-eyed techno. The producers have since discarded that shell, reinventing themselves as Amnesia Scanner, a brutalist avant-club project whose music is engineered to alienate and provoke. In loose dialog with dance deconstructionists like Arca, Angel-Ho, and Lotic, Amnesia Scanner’s violently kinetic club visions deal in the dissonant and the absurd, all the while glimpsing hellish dystopian wastelands and the disorientation of future shock.
Since 2014’s AS LIVE [][][][][] and the following year’s AS ANGELS RIG HOOK, Amnesia Scanner have been crumpling grime, trap, rave and various regional dance strains into one convulsive, machine-like knot. Last year’s AS EP, Amnesia Scanner’s first official physical release, dialed back on the aggression ever so slightly, distilling the duo’s inclination for shrapnel textures and keening electronics into comparatively shorter, more accessible bursts. The duo’s latest, the AS TRUTH mixtape, flips the script once again—Amnesia Scanner has never sounded this abstract, this exceptionally unstable.
AS TRUTH’s artwork depicts a lobotomy—what looks like a forced lobotomy, to be specific. The victim appears resigned to his fate, looking confused, dejected, but also angry. In turn, the viewer is forced to share in that terrifying scene, in that discomfort, in that fear. Similarly, AS TRUTH feels like a music that’s flung at you, forced on you—something that not so much asks to be interpreted as reaches out and grabs at your attention, in thrilling, if deeply unnerving, ways. Throughout its 15 unbroken minutes, the mixtape hurls listeners into a bramble of juxtaposing textures and timbres. Hi-tech, high-gloss sounds clash up against coarse, serrated ones; needling dissonance rubs shoulders with creaky silences. Synths screech and squeal, bellow and gurgle. The percussion flits between skittering, frenzied beat-programming and concussive thunder. Shards of disembodied vocals are interspersed throughout the mixtape, reduced at turns to melting, pitch-shifted ooze and flinty cries. Seemingly brittle one moment, colossally impenetrable the next, AS TRUTH’s angular shapes move in fits and starts, like some cybernetic albatross still searching for its sea legs.
AS TRUTH’s tracklist outlines seven individual cuts, but simultaneously released on SoundCloud and Bandcamp as a single unsegmented stream, the mixtape functions as one long-form work without noticeable seams. Apart from the back-to-back midsection deluge of “AS TRUTH” and “AS BRIETH”—released as a two-sided single last December—AS TRUTH consists of all new material. It starts with a wail—part marine air horn, part digital leviathan stirring to life—and closes with a throaty exhale. In between lives some of the most radical and ear-splitting electronic music you’ll likely encounter all year. From opener “AS POWERLESS,” with its helicopter flicker and haunted rave theme, to outro “AS SANE”, which is of a piece with OPN’s Garden of Delete, AS TRUTH never fails to confound. It’s a release of ferocious intensity, constructed from an unwieldy set of moving, interconnected parts. Vestiges of melody and rhythm are teased here and there, but no sooner do they gain footing than they collapse in on themselves, receding back into the maelstrom.
Yet, for all its noise and frenzy, AS TRUTH also contains some of the slowest-paced and quiet music Amnesia Scanner has released so far. Take the funereal ambient of “AS WEEP”, which breeds tension in its gaping negative spaces. Gothic harpsichord, computerized plinks, slurred vocals, and muted drums are all that cut through the silences. However, this proves to be just another of Amnesia Scanner’s clever devices: they lull you into a false sense of serenity, just so they can later spring a noisy trap. | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | February 20, 2017 | 8 | 8babbe66-7b3e-4abf-9e6d-6f6705fdd723 | Jonathan Patrick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-patrick/ | null |
With livewire intensity, the Savages singer-songwriter’s ambitious and experimental solo album explodes with life from every corner as an epic display of contrasting themes and emotion. | With livewire intensity, the Savages singer-songwriter’s ambitious and experimental solo album explodes with life from every corner as an epic display of contrasting themes and emotion. | Jehnny Beth: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jehnny-beth-to-love-is-to-live/ | TO LOVE IS TO LIVE | Jehnny Beth didn’t set out to write love songs. In 2011, as the French singer born Camille Berthomier began to write a debut album with her new punk band, Savages, she swore off the subject, finding topics like identity and censorship more fruitful. But when it came time for Savages’ second record, a switch had flipped. Overwhelmed by the generosity and warmth radiating from her audience, Beth wanted to bounce some of it back. That impulse yielded 2016’s Adore Life, an album whose slash-and-burn guitar work lit up the tenderness of its lyrics.
TO LOVE IS TO LIVE, Beth’s new solo album—written and produced with Savages producer (and Beth’s longtime partner) Johnny Hostile—is not a Savages record by another name. Beth sidelines the grimy, distorted guitar and reaches for a more diverse palette, including strobe-like synths, downy woodwinds, and inscrutable snippets of found sound. But there are constants: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is rife with the same livewire intensity, the same embrace of tensions and apparent contradictions. Lyrically and musically, it vacillates between the corporeal and the ethereal, prudence and excess, softness and severity. Its various parts could fill out the whole character alignment grid from lawful good to chaotic evil. If not always love, they demonstrate fascination with the full spectrum of human experience and beyond.
Presenting herself as an alien (or a sentient robot?), Beth opens the record with a sweeping, spoken-word poem warped by vocal filters. Elsewhere, she’s an all-too-human lover, longing for closeness. On “I’m the Man,” she’s an aggressor, spitting the titular phrase more than 30 times through an audible snarl. She is pious and a miscreant, sometimes at once. Beth appears as a statue on the record’s cover, her powerful stance and icy glare locked in stone; under the surface, though, things are far more fluid.
This has structural implications, too: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is stuffed with disorienting interludes, codas, and about-faces. On more than one occasion, Beth and her collaborators build up a hardcore frenzy, then swiftly pull out the rug: The seething chaos of “How Could You” abruptly tumbles into ambient birdsong. Instrumental lines are collaged together with skittering synthetics; Beth’s alto is distinctive but mutable, and she flits between acridity and softness. There is some organizing logic across the album, like the reprisal of the opening poem on its final track, signaling the completion of a cycle. But, on the whole, it is indifferent to order.
Rather, urgency emerges as its guiding principle, heard in its dramatic crescendos and emphatic percussion. Beth’s idea for a solo project germinated in 2016, following the death of David Bowie. After revisiting his final album, Blackstar, she was overtaken by an existentialist conviction that man (or woman) is nothing but his or her own making. Beth wanted to create something to cement her own legacy—an undeniably daunting task. “I couldn’t shake the feeling of my mortality, all through doing it,” she recently said, of working on the album. “I felt it was important that I do this before I died.” The sense that the clock is ticking hangs in the air. On opener “I Am,” a timer pulses as if Beth is on deadline to transfer her thoughts onto tape. There’s no room for tidiness under such conditions.
Pondering death raises matters of conscience (particularly for someone like Beth, who is, as she notes on “Innocence,” plagued by Catholic guilt). And so sin—both of the flesh and of society at large—emerges as a motif. Near the midway point, Beth enlists actor Cillian Murphy to bemoan the cruelties of war and capitalism in a piercing reading of her poem “A Place Above.” Beth said that “I’m the Man,” which follows, is not an excoriation of the patriarchy, but an exploration of the destructive tendencies that live within all of us. It’s difficult, though, to write off the song’s blatantly misogynistic language (“There’s no bitch in town/Who doesn’t understand/How hard my dick can be”) entirely; in this self-interrogation, Beth takes toxic masculinity as a given, a baseline against which she can measure her own inner demons.
But Beth’s lyrics are often more evocative than they are precisely descriptive or narrative. And for all her fixation on virtue and sin, she’s not out to moralize, exactly, but rather to capture all the messiness, contradiction, and even ugliness of life. This is true even of album closer “Human,” on which she refutes her humanity altogether and surrenders her body to the cloud: “I used to be a human being/Now I live in the web.” Scientists say that whole brain emulation—actually uploading our minds—is still a distant prospect, for reasons both technological and ethical. Until then, we’re left with more analog methods of cataloging our lives and shoring up our legacies. As any artist knows, this is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline | June 16, 2020 | 7.7 | 8bb2cef8-0055-4981-ba65-38cb789608ff | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Drawing from emo, pop-punk and '90s alt-rock, Pity Sex trawl the messy depths of failing romances. White Hot Moon follows the course the band set on 2013’s Feast of Love, with a few deviations. | Drawing from emo, pop-punk and '90s alt-rock, Pity Sex trawl the messy depths of failing romances. White Hot Moon follows the course the band set on 2013’s Feast of Love, with a few deviations. | Pity Sex: White Hot Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21794-white-hot-moon/ | White Hot Moon | For the surprising influence that it wields today, second-wave emo was not without its shortcomings. While the movement’s largely male figureheads were more than happy to detail the emotional harm they suffered in relationships—usually at the hands of women—their avoidance of the topic of sex was near puritanical. Arriving nearly twenty years after the fact, Ann Arbor’s Pity Sex felt like something of a corrective. Despite their typical beginnings—hardcore scene vets start melodic project—Pity Sex were very much unlike their peers, a co-ed emo act willing to venture beyond the bedroom door. What’s more, their first-person vignettes turned emo’s central trope on its head, telling stories of doomed romances from the perspective of the unfeeling aggressor, rather than the wounded victim. “There’s nothing to talk about,” one such protagonist admits on 2013’s Feast of Love, “When we talk about love."
Pity Sex don’t sound all that emo these days; since their noisy, shambolic beginnings on 2012’s Dark World, they’ve expanded their sonic palette, borrowing guitar tones from alternative rock’s '90s heyday and brisk, hooky songwriting from that same era's pop-punk. Their latest, White Hot Moon, doesn’t stray far from this path, though it does find the band further cleaning up their sound, with the assistance of producer Will Yip. There’s a satisfying crispness to be found on White Hot Moon, from the crunch of its power chords to the bright pop of each snare hit. Like many of Yip’s projects, White Hot Moon recalls a time when even scruffy bands like Jawbreaker had access to the sort of studio equipment a major label budget affords.
Still, if you’ve been following Pity Sex, most of White Hot Moon’s dynamics will feel familiar: quiet verses, loud choruses, fuzzed-out guitars set atop driving percussion. The beating heart of most Pity Sex songs lies in the interplay between Brennan Greaves' stoic tone and Britty Drake’s earnest delivery, and lead single “Burden You” leverages this formula to great effect. Here, Greaves takes on some of the messier lines ("Follow me home between my sheets and mend the burden in me”) with a cool detachment, while Drake alternates between singing “I wanna burden you” and “I wanna burn in you,” channeling the dark intimacy of In Utero-era Kurt Cobain. That’s not all they’re borrowing from the monsters of alt-rock: the song closes with a squall of feedback that creeps up steadily through the final verses. Even so, the kicker—Drake’s gutting admission, “I’ll always think of your lips/When I’m moving mine against his”—feels like a signature Pity Sex move, an emotional time-bomb delivered as a casual aside.
Most of White Hot Moon plays out similarly, from the punky sprint of “Orange and Red” to the squealing string bends and knuckle-dragging minor chords of “White Hot Moon.” For evidence of the band venturing outside of their comfort zone, look to the handful of ballads, which extend their range with mixed results. “Dandelion” gets by on prettiness, hiding its payload inside of the kind of bodily metaphors ("Let roots run through me like veins, ventricles, and arteries”) that rank among emo’s most beloved clichés. “September” goes further yet—here, the band attempts to pass as a clean-cut, Midwestern emo act. Its sappiness is maybe a bit too on the nose: after all, the refrain of “You are the earth beneath my feet” is just a few words away from being a Bette Midler lyric.
The album’s most striking number, “Plum,” manages to put that same earnestness to better use, with Drake detailing the loss of a parent with an artful yet unflinching candor. Her sadness here is deeply felt but never morose, while the band provides just enough muscle to propel the narrative forward. Pity Sex’s primary asset is their willingness to approach emotionally difficult topics head-on, and “Plum” is perhaps the most wrenching demonstration of this skill yet.
Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex—its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record—its hooks feel a bit dilute next to an earworm like “Drown Me Out.” The band's relative lack of growth here is also disappointing. Certainly, their central conceit—using the tools of angsty, suburban teens to get at some very adult themes—continues to be compelling. But with an emo revival in full swing, they’re hardly alone in this endeavor. Just look to bands like The World is a Beautiful Place..., The Hotelier, or Touché Amoré, all of whom have found emo to be a more than capable vehicle for mature songwriting. Emo is growing up, but is Pity Sex? | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | May 5, 2016 | 6.5 | 8bb3de47-c3bb-4ec3-ace0-f66d826a553f | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Like a corrupted file ripped straight from LimeWire, the Houston rapper’s new tape smashes together crunk, snap, and SouljaBoy ad-libs into a blast of nostalgia that’s never stuck in the past. | Like a corrupted file ripped straight from LimeWire, the Houston rapper’s new tape smashes together crunk, snap, and SouljaBoy ad-libs into a blast of nostalgia that’s never stuck in the past. | TisaKorean: Let Me Update My Status | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tisakorean-let-me-update-my-status/ | Let Me Update My Status
| In the fall of 2013, the Treasury Department issued the first new $100 bill design in nearly two decades. The Series 2009A was a radical change mostly because it was, well, blue. These bills present something of a problem for TisaKorean, the Houston-bred dancer and rapper. On “StEvIe wOnDeR (yCg).mp3,” from his new tape Let Me Update My Status, he laments that thumbing through the new currency is leaving dyed residue on his fingers. Like a boom mic sagging into frame, the stains puncture the almost perfect illusion of an LP—or, more likely, a .zip file unearthed from the late W. Bush years.
The file in question might scan as slightly corrupted: Most of Update’s antecedent styles—crunk and snap primarily—coexisted, but seldom fought for space in the same mix. Song titles are styled as if ripped straight from LimeWire, or as if a clip of a Bill Clinton speech is nestled next to TisaKorean bragging about changing a girl’s pH balance. On “cRaNk iT Up (BoNuS).mp3,” snap’s incremental creep seems perpetually on the verge of exploding into a totalizing roar. “StUnNa sHaDeS.mp3” has even more negative space, but the digital pings approximate a steel drum and a dial-up modem searching for connection, instilling the same menace as the most elbow-animating crunk beats.
A handful of song titles, a few appearances of fossilized “YOU!” ad-libs, and other assorted hallmarks frame Let Me Update My Status as an album-length Soulja Boy tribute. But his view of the period is more expansive—so much so that it can accommodate the twilight fugue that rappers like SahBabii explored in the early 2010s (“SiLlY MoAn.mp3,” the sublime “StOp tExTiNg.mp3”), or the type of serrated synths the Neptunes might have handed Fam-Lay in 2005 (“uHhH HuH.mp3”). Still, each of these songs sounds like it could have been haphazardly coded onto a MySpace page. TisaKorean is also a fundamentally different writer than Soulja Boy was in this period; as loose as the latter’s songs could seem, they were generally built around phrases that had been sanded down to their essential elements. Meanwhile, TisaKorean’s verses have a first-thought unpredictability that complements the usually self-produced beats. On “hYpNoTiZ4.mp3,” that unpredictability even survives the instant vocal screwing: As far as I can remember, Pimp C never rhymed “certified” with “circumcised,” even if it feels spiritually correct.
Scattered moments throughout Update recall TisaKorean’s earlier work, which was sometimes so formless it was almost avant-garde. “mOtOrCyClE.mp3” sounds like one long, intoxicating mistake, a series of clipped phrases rapped to a beat that’s largely just distortion. But on the whole, the album lingers on the fringes of pop, nearly every song a potential viral hit that would nevertheless stand out as the oddest thing on any YouTube playlist it burrowed into. They’re not exactly relics and not exactly new—they’re code being mulched and conflated and spit back out forever. | 2023-04-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Jazzzy | April 13, 2023 | 7.8 | 8bb50b04-c2e2-4e0f-8043-f61675cc9127 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
null | null | Shuggie Otis: Here Comes Shuggie Otis / Freedom Flight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11795-here-comes-shuggie-otis-freedom-flight/ | Here Comes Shuggie Otis / Freedom Flight | Shuggie Otis, we hardly knew ye. No, the former child prodigy hasn't spun off this mortal coil just yet, but Shuggie's erstwhile recording career has certainly seen better days-- and unfortunately, those days were 30 years ago. Back in 1974, Shuggie managed to raise critical eyebrows with his ambitious Inspiration Information LP, an elegant, absorbing collage of delta blues, soul, R&B;, and funk laced with the velvety psychedelic twist of his own flawless production. At the time, due to promotional misfirings and a fickle music market, album sales barely registered, and a despairing Shuggie turned reclusive. But finally, following a 2001 reissue on David Byrne's globe-spanning Luaka Bop label, the record gained the widespread acclaim it was previously denied, and rock's standard bearers hailed its genius at last.
Sadly, Shuggie's ain't the Cinderella story it could have been. Grasping at his 15 minutes three decades after they were due, Shuggie embarked on a major-city tour in the fall of '01, culling voracious audiences on both coasts. But this time, the press wasn't so thrilled-- SF Chronicle critic Joel Selvin called Otis' Fillmore performance "haphazard" and "inept"-- and Shuggie once again retreated from the spotlight.
Whether this release from Australian two-for-one reissue mavens Raven Records is a worthwhile listen for fans of Inspiration Information depends on how much of a completist you are. Raven packages Shuggie's solo debut, 1971's Here Comes Shuggie Otis and its '72 follow-up Freedom Flight together on one epic CD, but only Here Comes Shuggie Otis contains any true classics not featured on the Luaka Bop release. That disc added Freedom Flight's four best tracks, including the cosmic funk of the title song and Shuggie's most famous composition, "Strawberry Letter 23", a swirling, swinging midtempo breeze inspired by his girlfriend's scented stationery. "Me and My Woman" and "Someone's Always Singing" elicit Shuggie's gentle bump, but fail to merit revisitation rights. And even though his B.B. King-inflected guitar and deft, overdubbed bass on the instrumental "Purple" reveal his rootsy intuition, the song is far from classic.
The liner notes, which are interesting but never revelatory, can't overstress Shuggie's youth during the original recording of Here Comes, and the depth of the record's content certainly belies his 16 years: He played six instruments, sang, and co-wrote each tune with his famous father, bandleader Johnny Otis, Sr. Kicking off the twofer, "Oxford Gray" is second only to "Freedom Flight" as Shuggie's grandest stroke. Blazing guitar and harpsichord lead into a massive, stirring pizzicato-strings-vs.-slide-guitar duel which trips through a rock 'n' soul jitterbug crowned by a elaborate orchestrated horn section. It's an astounding opening statement from the father-and-son team, and its heaving, soulful psychedelia rivals even Axis: Bold as Love.
But from there, Here Comes becomes less focused, and its quality wavers. "Jennie Lee" is noteworthy for its gorgeous strings and horns, darkened blues guitar, and Shuggie's Alan Toussaint-esque vocals, while "Bootie Cooler" brings standard Sly/Meters funk nodding to Shuggie's bouncy organ and Hammond overdubs. Namedropping his guitar influences (B.B., Elmore, Son House), Shuggie busts into a rolling blues shuffle on "Shuggie's Boogie". Elsewhere, the rolling horn section and syncopated guitar on "Hurricane" provide a gritty Stax/Volt spark, while "The Hawks" closes with a Memphis country funk feel.
Casual consumers will likely pass up this reissue like they did Inspiration 30 years back-- which is probably fine, as the majority of these songs fail to add much of significance to Shuggie's discography. Still, for groove hounds, funk archivists, and collectors, there's more than enough solid material here to justify at least a few spins. | 2004-04-22T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2004-04-22T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 22, 2004 | 7.5 | 8bb99324-2e50-48da-bb80-d04db7149c08 | Jonathan Zwickel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-zwickel/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit INXS’s fifth album, a pivotal and underrated moment for one of music’s most formidable, hit-making pop-rock bands. | 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 INXS’s fifth album, a pivotal and underrated moment for one of music’s most formidable, hit-making pop-rock bands. | INXS: Listen Like Thieves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inxs-listen-like-thieves/ | Listen Like Thieves | At the 1996 BRIT Awards, INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence gave an amiable fist-pump as he announced the winner for Best Video, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” Moments later, Noel Gallagher, clutching the BRIT and smiling cocainely, sneered, “Has-beens shouldn’t present fuckin’ awards to gonna-bes.” At the time, the slag was simply on-brand petulance, all part of the Gallagher brothers’ calculated and successful anti-charm offensive, yet it hit a nerve. INXS’ most recent album, the grunge-bandwagoning Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, had come out in 1993, marking their longest period of dormancy amid no small amount of personal turmoil; in a year and a half, Hutchence would be dead.
Nearly 22 years later—and 11 since Oasis were gonna be anything but broken up—the insult is still a cheap shot, but it also feels in league with a broader cultural dismissal of a band whose legacy feels more complicated than a mere 15-year run of singles. From 1980 to 1984, INXS were a likeable, unassuming Australian pub band turned New Romantic synth-pop strivers with a handful of good songs and one perfect one. From 1987 to 1997, they minted hits seemingly at will behind a swaggering, came-with-the-frame picture of a louche rock star, filling stadiums before riding diminishing returns to a tragic end. In between, they made one pivotal album that mined the hookiest qualities of the former iteration while laying the groundwork for the latter. Stacked with eminently catchy songs from top to bottom that sound evergreen in ways that evaded so much pop music from the same era, Listen Like Thieves is a classic “verge album”—think Fleetwood Mac, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, R.E.M.’s Green, or U2’s The Unforgettable Fire—a mid-career highlight where a fully formed, fully confident band finds its footing at the precipice of something much bigger and maybe just beyond their control.
By their fifth album, INXS were known entities, products of and grist for the nascent MTV juggernaut thanks in large part to frontman Michael Hutchence’s basic-cable charisma and moves like Jagger. Shabooh Shoobah, from 1982, introduced the band via the video for “The One Thing,” in which a black-tie banquet erupts into a bacchanalian food fight, replete with shots of Hutchence eye-fucking the camera and a woman defiling a fig. Their following album, 1984’s The Swing, went double platinum in Australia, thanks in no small part to marquee assists from fellow blue-eyed soul purveyor Daryl Hall and, more crucially, Nile Rodgers’ production on “Original Sin.” The album was a conscious effort to further blend rock and funk and at least indirectly channel Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. The Farriss brothers—guitarist Tim, keyboardist and songwriter Andrew, and drummer Jon—along with multi-instrumentalist Kirk Pengilly and incredibly named bassist Garry Gary Beers, had spent years grinding in bars and clubs across Australia, but the producer enlisted for the follow-up to The Swing didn’t hear any of that grit, or Hutchence’s obvious sex appeal, in those records. A couple hit singles aside, the album didn’t do huge numbers in the U.S. or the UK.
“To me, The Swing had nothing to do with what the band was doing live,” famed producer Chris Thomas said in the band’s 2005 memoir. “That album doesn’t sound like a rock’n’roll show at all. The gig I saw at the Hollywood Bowl was a dangerous concert—grown women were throwing themselves at the stage. I hadn’t seen a gig that exciting or a band having that kind of effect on people in years.” Thomas worked on the White Album and Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, then went on to produce four Roxy Music albums and Never Mind the Bollocks, as well as all three Pretenders albums, culminating in 1984’s crossover Learning to Crawl—a dream CV to take on a band navigating the moat between mannered new wave and swing-for-the-fences rock, and he held that spot for the three-album run that definitively reinvented INXS.
What Thomas was implicitly advocating for over the course of three months in Sydney’s Rhinoceros Studio was an album built out of “Don’t Change.” The final track on Shabooh Shoobah and the band’s usual set-closer, it’s the kind of feel-good, brawny U2 anthem that U2 have spent decades trying to write. Still driven by Andrew’s keyboards, “Don’t Change” felt leaner and less fussed over, destined to be covered by, among many, many others, Bruce Springsteen, a man who also spent a lot of time in 1984 and 1985 thinking about what rock songs for the masses should look like.
The song’s DNA is evident in “This Time,” about as uplifting a breakup song as anyone will ever require, from the isolated-riff intro to the slow but cathartic build. “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain)” and the title track follow similar scripts; they don’t necessarily sound like “Don’t Change,” or like one another, but they share a penchant for climactic escalation tricks—a head-fake key change here, an extra-soaring chorus there—that pulled off the even neater trick of not sounding like tricks and not being overly laminated in studio polish. There was an ease to the songs that belied their ambition.
Even the songs that managed to not be huge hits were as catchy as the ones that were. The smoldering “Same Direction” and “Shine Like It Does,” the brassy “One X One,” and ripping closer “Red Red Sun” were stripped of the kind of studio gloss that might have been applied on past records, and have aged better because of it. Pengilly’s saxophone flourishes nearly save the instrument from punk-rock punchline status. While The Swing’s “Original Sin” and “Dancing on the Jetty” broadly gestured at social issues (institutional racism and war and strife, respectively), Listen Like Thieves had no particular flag to wave or message to send beyond the one that would propel them for the rest of their career: Michael Hutchence fucks.
As much as INXS operated and presented as a proper tight-knit and deeply skilled band, with shared songwriting credits and half its members literal kin, they thrived once they figured out how to nudge Hutchence even further front and center without disrupting the balance, and once he fully embraced it. (“I really am a great fucking rock star,” he told Q in 1993.) But before he shacked up in a French villa with Helena Christensen or corrupted Kylie Minogue or took a guy on tour with him for the express purpose of supplying ecstasy, Hutchence had to shed the last of his new wave chrysalis, grow out his mullet, embrace tank tops, and lean into the whole disco-Morrison thing. “What You Need” was that nudge.
The first song on Listen Like Thieves was the last one recorded for the album, a quick cure for what was diagnosed as I-don’t-hear-a-single-itis that wound up changing the band’s lives forever. Thomas had Andrew dust off a demo labeled “Funk Song No. 13,” which contained the slinky two-chord guitar riff to what would very quickly become “What You Need”—an eminently danceable no-brainer that landed in the Top 5 in America, cast Hutchence’s casual lustfulness as a halo around the band, and cemented Hutchence and Andrew Farriss as the band’s principal songwriters.
Of all the members of INXS, Andrew was the one who seemed the least like Hutchence, and the least likely to be the driving force behind a libidinous multi-platinum rock band; his brothers were naturally hammier and looked the part, while he seemed content to be the introvert tucked behind stacks of expensive-looking keyboards. (His floppy safari hat in the “Don’t Change” video should go down in the annals of Why Didn’t Anyone Say No to This?) But the duo’s chemistry was recognized and elevated as the band’s secret weapon.
Thomas returned to produce 1987’s Kick, which, not all that implicitly, was built out of “What You Need,” particularly in regard to blockbuster lead singles with crystalline, ambiently funky guitar riffs and the word “need” in the title. (Rather than leave anything to chance, 1990’s X featured basically a third iteration of this rollout plan with “Suicide Blonde.”) Doubling down on the use of Hutchence’s face as the band’s identity, Kick sold tens of millions of copies and established the visual aesthetic that would define INXS until Hutchence’s death. Kick wears some of the sonic pockmarks of its era in a way that Listen Like Thieves doesn’t, and made INXS both a bigger success and a bigger target. If anyone wanted for any reason to scoff at the spectacle of a tousle-haired rock god whose shirts all appeared cursed with non-functioning buttons lounging in the south of France with supermodel girlfriends, INXS provided. Hutchence’s charm, however, lay in the fact that he seemed in on the gag; excess was baked into the band’s name. And he was just vexingly likeable. If anyone used that spectacle as an excuse to dismiss the workmanlike ease with which they churned out hit after hit, that is understandable, but a shame.
Though they didn’t have the impact of the three they made with Chris Thomas, the band’s final albums with Hutchence yielded songs that outlast the legacies of the albums themselves. “Heaven Sent,” from 1992’s Welcome to Wherever You Are, is as good a pop song as any made in the past 30 years, and yet it somehow feels like an afterthought in their own estimable discography. INXS’ rise to massive global financial concern wasn’t without its collateral damage: At the height of American Idol mania in 2004, the surviving members recruited a new singer via network TV reality show; 2005’s Switch, with JD Fortune, mostly just furthers the argument that Hutchence’s chemistry and charisma can’t be recruited.
Which is why Listen Like Thieves feels like a moment worth preserving—a snapshot of a band finding its voice and its lane in real time and figuring out how to do something that seems nearly beyond comprehension 35 years later. There are no heirs apparent. The 1975 have the big-tent ambition and certainly the look, but are complicated and navel gaze-y in a way INXS never seemed interested in. The Killers have the chart success but a decidedly Mormon interpretation of sex appeal. Coldplay have to work too hard to convince you that they’re any fun. Spoon have the songs and the hooks and the decades of consistency that make them easy to overlook, but not the actual hits. (Oh god, is it Maroon 5?) But the notion of sex, drugs, and dance-oriented, innocuous, hugely popular rock’n’roll as a formula for a decades-long career in some ways died with Hutchence. This almost sounds like a backhanded compliment now but it should be a badge of honor: INXS were a very good band that was very good at their job and that no longer really exists.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | WEA / Atlantic | October 18, 2020 | 8 | 8bbe4dbf-3954-495b-8a30-903fafe843d2 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
Trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, the ubiquitous producer’s purported country album suffocates in treacly kitsch. | Trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, the ubiquitous producer’s purported country album suffocates in treacly kitsch. | Diplo: Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley Chapter 1: Snake Oil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diplo-diplo-presents-thomas-wesley-chapter-1-snake-oil/ | Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley Chapter 1: Snake Oil | For every Diplo that you see—slouched on a Zoom DJ set in a shirt that says “Mercury’s in quarantine,” slack-jawed on a red carpet in a bright pink cowboy hat—there are maybe five Diplos you don’t see. There he is, folded into Jack Ü, working with Skrillex to make the best song of Justin Bieber’s career. Catch him in the Mark Ronson collab group Silk City, throwing throbbing beats under a Dua Lipa track. You could be forgiven for not knowing Diplo is part of Major Lazer, or that he toured with Grimes on a train across Canada, or that he produced two songs on Beyoncé’s Lemonade. And if you lost track of who ended up on which remix of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” as the song contorted into genre after genre (K-pop! Kidz Bop!), maybe you forgot that Diplo was the one to make it shiver and surge into electronica.
Diplo is aware of his tendency to be both ubiquitous and forgotten; he named a 2014 album Random White Dude Be Everywhere. His new album, a purported country record trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, has his real name in the title, signifying a shift from sparkly club bangers. Snake Oil is a country album the same way Westworld is a western, or “Cotton Eye Joe” is a saloon ballad. The record is steeped in stock-image cowboy aesthetics. A fiddle trembles through AutoTune. “Uh, uh, do si do,” Blanco Brown grunts, 18 times in two and a half minutes. In Diplo’s world, the Jonas Brothers are as convincing a country group as the Zac Brown Band; they bleat about hometowns, back roads, and “giving into love,” while crawling guitars give into beat drops and blurry synths. But Diplo succeeds in what he sets out to do: He braids classic Diploisms into country frameworks, and sometimes, he doesn’t sound like Diplo at all.
Such is the case on the best song on the album, “On Mine,” a gentle, rasping Noah Cyrus love song. The production borders on theatrical—melodramatic wobbling bass, a chorus of layered vocals, seconds-long cymbal reverb echoing at the end—but this is still Diplo at his most subdued. “I don’t know if I can walk this world alone,” Cyrus pleads. The chorus rises in a swelling mash of instruments; it’s close to sounding genuinely euphoric, a mood Diplo typically reserves for juddering bass-blasted rave tracks. On “Dance With Me,” he coaxes strumming guitars into muted tropical house as Young Thug snakes around the beat and country-pop songwriter Thomas Rhett croons, “Give me your body.” It’s as danceable and easily dissolved as any summertime Top 40 radio hit.
You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch. Song titles betray the generic romance clichés: “Heartless,” “Heartbreak,” “Real Life Stuff.” “I guess what goes up, it must come down,” Ben Burgess drawls over trudging 808s. “Just because you’re out here running doesn’t make you free,” cries the country singer Cam. “Sometimes in life, what you wanna do isn’t necessarily what you’re gonna do,” Orville Peck says on the album’s intro, a 97-second spoken-word mush of countryisms about gunslinger showdowns and desert hideouts. It’s meant to be funny, and it is: This is Thomas Wesley’s playground, and success isn’t measured by whether his country songs are convincing or even by whether they’re good, only by whether the listener has fun. Still, the closing “Old Town Road” remix feels like a reprieve from the rest of the album, not a template for it. You want to stay in this thumping oasis, a place where Billy Ray Cyrus moans about Fenty sports bras and whistles whirl around the beat, buoyed by the simple neon ecstasy of Diplo doing what Diplo does best: soundtracking the party, wherever it leads. | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | May 30, 2020 | 4.8 | 8bc03ad7-9d09-450c-a172-0c7918537d82 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
Having added a second drummer and a synth player since its 2018 debut, New Orleans’ self-described “free-jazz party band” vacillates between abandon and unease. | Having added a second drummer and a synth player since its 2018 debut, New Orleans’ self-described “free-jazz party band” vacillates between abandon and unease. | Basher: Doubles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/basher-doubles/ | Doubles | In New Orleans, it rains every day in the summer. The mornings are bright and beautiful, the sky a surreal and optimistic blue filled with towering clouds, which by afternoon give way to violent grays and gashes of lightning. When the storm has finished its 20-minute rage, the soft colonial buildings of the French Quarter sparkle with light, and the Mardi Gras beads perennially stuck in the oaks of St. Charles Avenue blink like jewels. It is unbearably beautiful. It is miserably hot. It is an impractical climate to live in. It is precisely what Basher’s new album sounds like.
Doubles is the second LP from the New Orleans “free-jazz party band,” following 2018’s 100% Humidity, but it feels like the kind of identity-staking work you expect from a debut. In the four years since 100% Humidity, the group added a second drummer and a synthesizer player and fundamentally reshaped their sound, juicing up the dark-night jazz into a somewhat slick, free-ranging, and surprisingly expressive music that could be played everywhere from the packed clubs of Frenchman St. to a secret house show in St. Roch to the apron of the Superdome on game day. Despite that winsomeness, Doubles is soaked in disappointment and clouded by tragedy, its undeniable joys always gated by the expectation that they’ll be ripped away without notice.
Such competing dualisms reveal themselves in multiple ways: not just in the freedom of improvisation versus the control of form, or in the celebration of life and the mourning of its compromises, but also in the album’s structure itself. Doubles mostly alternates between small-group improvisations for alto and tenor sax and synthesizer, and tightly structured jazz-funk songs powered by a pair of drummers. At times it can feel like the two sides of the band are in conversation with one another. In the improvised “Artemis,” alto saxophonist Aurora Nealand pinches her tone until it sounds like a crying trumpet, quivering in response to the dry breaths and clicks of tenor saxophonist Byron Asher. The shuffle-strut of “Carnival 2019” is turned around and backed up by the two drummers, patiently building its way to revelry with stabs of horn and flashy tightness in a way that recalls the legendary Lundi Gras sets of local funk heroes Galactic. An overblown version of the song’s melody line comes ripping through the parade sirens and daiquiri rush of synth in the following “Borealis,” a visceral rendering of how quickly the excesses of Carnival season can turn into a total loss of control in the blur of deep gras.
These overflowing, abundant moments are rare on Doubles. The improvisations are mostly restrained and responsive, if a touch tentative. Asher and Nealand’s careful attention to one another’s playing at times can be too deferential; it can feel as if the tracks have been daubed in gray to keep the brightest lights from shining through. In a similar way, the traditionally composed songs are orderly and well drilled; “Claptrap Clapback” is a study in staying on task even as Daniel Meinecke’s synths whistle and whirr.
Still, there are moments when the band’s two sides merge. A couple of minutes into the stately funk of “Primetime a Go-Go,” the two drummers pull apart and expand the song’s boundaries, giving Asher and Nealand enough room to back away from one another and push off down what become wildly separate paths, the two discordant solos unrolling over a cut-and-thrust rhythm. You don’t even notice how high in the rafters they’ve taken you until they guide your feet back onto the ground.
It’s easy to want Basher to go the full Mwandishi, to not only test the limits of their concept but blow right past them; you sense that these songs were built to do just that in a live setting. But as a studio work, Doubles is more interested in maintaining a level of unease that is endemic to New Orleans culture. The humid blues of “Ponchatoula” pulses with mourning and the feeling of joy squandered, with Asher letting out a satin braid of a solo that flashes and dims as the band guides it through the changes. New Orleans musicians have been writing storm-dampened songs like “Refinery Skies” for a hundred years, and maybe longer; like the light that shines through the polluted air of the oil facilities across the Mississippi River, the music’s incredible beauty is the direct product of the malignancy of the environment.
New Orleans loves a good time. But for longtime residents, the thrills can often feel like meager recompense for the exhaustions of climate, crime, and—since Katrina, at least—a horde of transplants eager to be redeemed by the Big Easy’s legendary juju. Doubles pays tribute both to the city’s abundant spirit and to its complicated legacy. Decay creeps into this album’s brightest moments, making these songs feel a little distant, a little difficult to love for the way they seem to keep the party at bay. | 2022-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Sinking City | October 12, 2022 | 7 | 8bc5632f-3b81-408b-8820-f2d64a7b8520 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
First Songs collects Kleenex’s output from 1978 to 1982. Their gleefully anarchic music still feels like liberation, reveling in the limitless freedom that comes with tossing logic aside. | First Songs collects Kleenex’s output from 1978 to 1982. Their gleefully anarchic music still feels like liberation, reveling in the limitless freedom that comes with tossing logic aside. | Kleenex / LiLiPUT: First Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22661-first-songs/ | First Songs | Kleenex began with a crash. It transpired one night not long after they’d formed, in Zurich of 1978, while the germinal punk group was onstage. They had but four tunes then—“Beri-Beri,” “Ain’t You,” “Heidi’s Head,” “Nice”—and at early gigs they would play them over and over to small but delighted crowds who did not want the noise to stop. When Kleenex’s original male guitarist didn’t care to continue on as such, the late Marlene Marder stepped up from the audience and swiftly found her place alongside bassist Klaudia Schifferle and drummer Lislot Ha. Marder—a literal post-punk; she delivered mail—was armed with a knowledge of two chords if not an awareness of pitch. “Lislot didn’t know that you can tune a drum kit,” Marder once said. “We played like this for a year, without tuned drum kits or a tuned bass or guitar. The guys were more ambitious so they didn’t want to play with us. For us, it was OK not because we said, ‘We’re the greatest!’ We just did as we could. Not serious in the beginning.”
In all their chaos, those four songs were unusually taut. Kleenex made riotous music like a rubber band; it could tighten, or snap, or shoot in air. When some friends in the small Swiss punk scene released them as the Kleenex EP, word moved fast. The exuberant 45 made its way quickly to Britain, entering the orbit of John Peel as well as the Marxist intellectuals at the then-nascent Rough Trade label, beginning Kleenex’s affiliation with that bohemian London scene. “Ain’t You”—with its wiry riffs and chanted, pogoing hooks, its chic edge and abandon—fit well on Rough Trade’s 1980 Wanna Buy a Bridge? comp, alongside the scratchy Swell Maps and their similarly daring one-time tour mates, the Raincoats.
First Songs collects Kleenex’s output from ’78 to 1982, preceding their first album (at which point they’d been forced by the tissue company to switch their perfect name—capturing the very Pop disposability of consumer culture—to LiLiPUT). The band’s lineup was constantly in flux; these songs also feature saxophonist Angie Barrack and vocalists Regula Sing and Chrigle Freund. The reissue’s title is clever; if these 24 tracks are all indeed songs, then Kleenex was reimagining what a song could be. The shortest one, the 69-second “1978,” for example, is a queasy interstitial propelled by unsparing riffs and amusingly primordial drumming. On “Eisiger Wind” (“Icy Wind”), the clangor and “OOO AHHH”s and “LA LA LA LA”s culminate with a nails-tough 15-second coda that brings to mind Mothers of Invention. But then, in Kleenex’s gleefully anarchic world, “song structures” seemed tedious.
Their methods of composition were peculiar even for punk. One was extreme repetition, in which a song would progress by repeating a few minimal bars over and over, starting slowly and speeding up each time, as if running up a hill and then tumbling down it. The band punctuated their music with things like whistling and saxophones and kazoo sounds. Their guitar chords had a soured edge, and their lopsided call-and-response vocals alternately evoked stoic Patti Smith and a wayward school choir. Most crucial were the befuddlingly shredded human voices—grunted, exasperated, bloodcurdlingly shrieked, pitched so high as to pierce into the reddest red—which sounded more like a Yoko Ono Fluxus experiment than anything resembling pop. But the inquisitive core of Kleenex’s music stokes curiosity in a listener: From what plane of existence does that scream originate? Is that a person? Is that a recorder? What even is a nighttoad?
The lyrics, sung in English and Swiss-German, veer between ominous images or deliberate nonsense. On “Die Matrosen” (“The Sailors”), the song’s jovial whistling is undermined by a narrative of a man in a pub who “had a blackout” and “lost control.” The combination of a grave voice with sugary ones on “Beri-Beri” skewers the lyric “and each day you feel nicer!” “Madness” is one of the most affecting Kleenex songs, with its alternately slammed and melancholy chords: “Hey madness you have touched me,” it goes, “Hey madness what do you want from me?” These emphatic early songs are fervent invocations, evidence that pure conviction could summon magic and newness from the wilderness within.
The signature Kleenex songs fall together in ways that manage to approximate pop. The best one is “Hitch Hike.” “Girl was on the road to drive away/She had no money to pay the train,” goes the gummy, sing-song chorus. “Hitch hike ghost, don’t touch me/...Let me be.” Upbeat as “Hitch Hike” feels, it also touches on the necessary guardedness of being a woman in public, the adventure and risk of the female wanderer (it reminds me of Cindy Sherman’s 1979 Untitled Film Still #48). Defiant beyond its jingly form, it’s cut with the howls of a rape whistle. Not unlike their comrades in the Raincoats, Kleenex’s collective shouts were eruptions of joy as well as gestures of outsider solidarity.
At the heart of Kleenex’s music is a radical sense of resourcefulness. It’s part of what helps them transcend their moment; indeed, many of the works of artier O.G. punk bands feel more potent today than those of their instigating major-label peers. Accordingly, the decimating screams of “Ü”—“EEEEEEEEEEEE”—are the point of punk (it’s worth noting that Greil Marcus put “Ü” on his influential Lipstick Traces compilation). Kleenex collaborated with Rough Trade’s early go-to production duo of Geoff Travis and Red Krayola’s Mayo Thompson on the “Ü”/“You” single, perhaps owing to its audacious and wildly electric ensemble feel. “You” explodes with democratic purpose: “This is your life/This is your day/It’s all for you.” With that, the influence of Kleenex on a punk scene like Olympia’s from the 1980s onward is palpable; Kurt Cobain included “anything by Kleenex” on his list of favorite albums, but Bikini Kill’s “Liar” or Girlpool’s “Jane” are primary sources for the legacy of Kleenex screams today.
“Split” is the perfect storm of Kleenex’s bottle-rocket inventiveness. The lyrics go, “Hotch-potch, hugger-mugger, bow-wow, hara-kiri, hoo-poo, huzza, hicc-up, hum-drum, hexa-pod, hell-cat, helter-skelter, hop-scotch.” This dizzied, scissor-cut, full-throttle collage is undercut with spirited declarations that, “Yesterday was a party! Yesterday the drinks were strong!” and a crude siren of “woo! woo! woo! woo!”s. There is nothing cerebral; there is only pure jubilance, only action. “Split” doesn’t sound “sung” as much as it sounds like it’s bolting out of someone’s chest. Play “Split” alongside anything off Never Mind the Bollocks and see which sounds more lawless; Kleenex make Sex Pistols sound like alt-rock.
“We didn't have songs like ‘Fuck the System’ like other bands had,” Marder once said. “We didn’t throw stones and smash windows. We stood there and played songs.” But an autonomous message persisted. For several months in 1980, violent youth riots turned Zurich into a “war zone,” sparked by “a paucity of funding and space for the alternative arts scene.” Kleenex responded viscerally to this unwelcoming world by creating their own.
In 2017, the rollercoaster ride of punk remains replete with adrenaline and adventure and thrills, with semblances of danger and truth. But rollercoasters have tracks and belts and guards; they are always the same. Kleenex built a rollercoaster with loose bolts, not at all predictable, bravely betraying structure, careening. At its best, punk offers up a self-immolating blueprint that says, year after year, “the blueprint is yet to be written.” Kleenex’s raw rapture still lights up this idea. First Songs is a testament to the freedom in limitation, or rather, the limitless nature of freedom when logic is tossed aside. | 2017-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars / Mississippi | January 6, 2017 | 9 | 8bca7162-2382-4ca8-a33a-b394bccec94f | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
Critic and theorist Fred Moten joins bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a conceptually rich, politically weighty album that asks timeless questions without overexplaining. | Critic and theorist Fred Moten joins bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a conceptually rich, politically weighty album that asks timeless questions without overexplaining. | Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver: Moten/López/Cleaver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandon-lopez-gerald-cleaver-motenlopezcleaver/ | Moten/López/Cleaver | In an interview included with his 1988 album Live in Vienna, Cecil Taylor struggled to define the boundaries of his music. The innovative, classically trained pianist had just released Chinampas, a full-length album of spoken-word poetry featuring yelps, screeches, chants, and other percussive sounds, but largely devoid of piano. Were these vocal pieces to be viewed as part of the same trajectory of free jazz that he helped define with his piano compositions? Or were they something else entirely, a new language even further uncoupled from the structural limitations of jazz? “I’ve always tried to be a poet more than anything else,” Taylor told the writer and photographer Spencer Richards. “...[The] music is primary, but everything is music once you care to begin to apply certain principles of organization to it.”
Fred Moten uses these lines to make the claim that poetry can function as a kind of musical system, one that, for Taylor and others, stands at the forefront of the Black avant-garde tradition. Moten, a poet, critic, theorist, and recent MacArthur Fellow, has spent roughly the last 20 years writing about music and poetry with conceptual rigor. His book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and his three-part consent not to be a single being book series synthesize the work of Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others into a dizzying account of the fundamental irreducibility of Black expression to inscription technologies like magnetic tape, digital recordings, or written language. Moten’s poetry is similarly ambitious, deploying dense, reference-rich language with an economy and restraint that still feels personal. In 2019, the writer joined upright bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a one-off performance at the long-running Vision Festival in New York, and the three reconvened in 2020—in the midst of a global pandemic, and in the weeks following the George Floyd protests—to record their debut as a group. “For me, it was like a fanboy experience because I love their music and listen to it so much,” Moten said at a recent Guggenheim Museum panel. Like Cecil Taylor years before, the trio’s self-titled album pushes back against the formal limitations of jazz convention, expanding the scope of López and Cleaver’s improvisations with the totalizing perspective of Moten’s poetry.
The eight-minute opener, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me,” plainly states the stakes of artmaking while recognizing that music alone can’t resolve the troubles it addresses. “Art don’t work for abolition/Art works for bosses like you and me,” Moten says. The statement becomes a deft point of entry, contesting his own self-awareness to prove how much still can be done. The track spirals over lurching pizzicato from López’s bass and sparse percussion from Cleaver, making rapid references to the many people and places that have shaped Moten’s thinking. “Let’s work against royalty, like a Prince, formerly known as the artist/Let’s work against how art don’t work for abolition,” he says. A passionate defense of art’s emancipatory potential, the piece sets the tone for a heavy, conceptually rich collection that asks timeless questions without overexplaining.
While Moten’s poetry feels like the conceptual engine driving the album, it always functions in tandem with López and Cleaver’s improvisations. Pieces like the two-part “b jenkins” start from sparse instrumentals, as López paces across the fingerboard with increasing intensity. Named for Moten’s late mother, the tracks make oblique reference to the Great Migration and the hardships that ensued for generations of Black Americans alienated from any sense of place that they might call home. “Up and down the regular highway in every two-tone station/Passing through the cure, for preservation to unfold it all away,” Moten states. The poet broadly gestures at the kind of Black Internationalism taken up by writers like Cedric Robinson and C.L.R. James, even as he spends most of the tracks situating these ideas within the personal lives of those affected by the cold-blooded politics of space. These weighty concepts fall into the background, overtaken by quotidian images of lives lived in the shadow of systemic oppression. “The phonograph is also a photograph of movement and what it bears/You found dances waiting for dancers,” he says. With off-kilter drumming and relentless bass, the piece takes instrumental cues from free-jazz classics like Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, reinforcing the trio’s political aspirations as they venture in their own direction.
It’s tempting to view Moten’s theoretical writing as a skeleton key that unlocks the meaning of his poetry, and while the two bodies of work overlap, there are limits to this approach. Midway through “the faerie ornithologie,” Moten flips a line about color field painting into a succinct condemnation of the “blood at the root” of abstract expressionism and modernism generally. While these words wouldn’t sound out of place in his first book, the line works in service of a broader meditation on the violence and brutality of the cultural economy, which mirrors the violence imposed by the state on Black people. “You don’t get to not see motherfucker, but what happens when you act like you do?/Somebody black and poor can’t breathe,” he states with a burning rage. Pointed and direct, the line lands with newfound intensity, using the language of protest to capture a bald-faced anger that’s largely absent from his other work.
While it’s possible to interpret these lyrics as a direct response to the George Floyd uprising and ongoing pandemic, Moten/López/Cleaver ultimately asks how these events fit within a broader history of Black struggle. Grounded in the present, each track looks backward, mining the wreckage of history for parallels in music, poetry, and visual art. Exhausted of reference, the album closes with a look at the “face” at the heart of the word “surface,” riffing on concerns about agency and personhood that have followed Moten since his first book. Rather than retread familiar theoretical territory, the writer leans into the track’s emotional weight as the music flattens out, punctuated by stretches of breathy silence. It’s a rare moment of recovery on an otherwise breathlessly complex album, one that finally brings its passion and its pain fully into focus. | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Reading Group | April 18, 2022 | 8 | 8bcb6a1c-b37e-4488-a4d9-7d126cabddd9 | Rob Arcand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob-arcand/ | |
Soulja Boy just isn’t able to capitalize on his recent goodwill with some worthwhile new music. | Soulja Boy just isn’t able to capitalize on his recent goodwill with some worthwhile new music. | Soulja Boy: Best to Ever Do It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soulja-boy-best-to-ever-do-it/ | Best to Ever Do It | Long before the maligned “mumble rap” claimed the title as the most contentious style of the day, there was ringtone rap, and no artist embodied its market-savvy spirit quite like Soulja Boy. As a 17-year-old, the Batesville, Mississippi rapper parlayed a viral dance into radio ubiquity with the most despised hit of 2007, “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” a catchy pairing of Atlanta snap and chintzy synthesized steel drums. Fleeting as its pleasures were, the song lingered on the radio for an eternity, well after the novelty of its youthful accompanying dance wore off. It was as if some bitter Clear Channel executive had decided to shame the public for taking to the track in the first place by keeping it in rotation as long as possible.
“Loathe” isn’t a strong enough word for how the masses felt about Soulja Boy when “Crank That” was at its most inescapable. But the public’s hatred didn’t deter Soulja much; if anything, he fed on it. “I don’t give a fuck, middle finger to the sky,” he responded on his 2008 track “I Know You Hate Me.” He went on to land several much-improved hits, “Kiss Me Through the Phone” and “Pretty Boy Swag” among them, before the laws of gravity took hold and the industry lost interest in him.
Even his detractors had to marvel at his resilience. Soulja Boy used his independence as an opportunity to reinvent himself. He befriended Lil B and adopted his process, firing off as much music as possible with no regard for quality control, in the process releasing a few undeniable mixtapes. For a few years in the early-’10s “Soulja Boy is actually good” became a fashionable contrarian take. When Beyoncé paid tribute to Soulja Boy’s most fondly remembered single “Turn My Swag On” on Lemonade, it felt like the culmination of a long redemption story. He was finally appreciated.
If only he were able to capitalize on that recent goodwill with some worthwhile new music. His new workmanlike mixtape, Best to Ever Do It, says everything you need to know about why, unless you run in some very esoteric corners of online rap fandom, you probably haven’t heard anybody beat the drum for new Soulja Boy project in quite a while. It’s also a reminder that Soulja Boy never had an original bone in his body. He’s still going about his swagger jacking ways, except now instead of cribbing from OJ Da Juiceman or Doughboyz Cashout he’s looking to fresh blood like Lil Pump, whose boyish cadence he lifts on “Rollie Wrist” and “I Got the Yop on Me,” or Playboi Carti, whose spacey adlibs inform “Pull Up in a Coupe.” He also mimics 21 Savage’s dead-eyed croon on “Mega Star” and does a patronizingly awful impression of Swae Lee’s falsetto on “Cotton Candy.” Even the tape’s one feature, from Lil Uzi Vert soundalike 24Hours, is on-brand by being off-brand.
Soulja’s Hamburglar routine would be easier to excuse if he backed up his borrowed styles with some vivid writing, or at least flashes of his old, mischievous spark. There isn’t one verse on the entire tape where he says something revealing or unexpected, or even so much as a single colorful word choice. He prattles on about pots, pans, Phantoms, and Porsches without a lick of conviction, regurgitating tropes instead of spinning them. There was a time when that might have been good enough. Earlier in his career, it was possible to claim a real market share with passable facsimiles of popular sounds, especially if you hustled as enthusiastically as he did. But in the era of abundant free streaming, there’s less demand for knockoffs than ever, and Soulja Boy’s business model has grown outdated. | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SODMG | July 27, 2018 | 5.1 | 8bcdc28e-b97d-4c4b-b122-df4e42635ca5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Spacehog’s 1995 debut, an architecturally sound, occasionally great, always amusing collection of transatlantic power pop. | 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 Spacehog’s 1995 debut, an architecturally sound, occasionally great, always amusing collection of transatlantic power pop. | Spacehog: Resident Alien | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spacehog-resident-alien/ | Resident Alien | Spacehog was founded in New York City in 1994 when guitarist Antony Langdon met drummer Jonny Cragg in an East Village café where Cragg had a job killing rats with a shovel. This is the story that Cragg seems to have told every reporter he’s ever spoken to, so it may as well be true. They recruited Langdon’s younger brother Royston, a singer and bassist with a notebook full of songs left over from a previous musical endeavor, and then Cragg’s friend Richard Steel on lead guitar. All four band members had come to the States from Leeds, England. They named their first album Resident Alien in reference to their visa statuses.
They could’ve joined up back home and saved themselves a trip, but there was probably some calculation behind the move. In the UK, Britpop had taken hold and you couldn’t swing a Super Furry Animal without hitting a band turning its retro influences into brightly catchy alternative rock. But in New York, hip-hop reigned and the local A&R departments had to fly all the way to Seattle to find guitar groups, which meant Spacehog had Lower East Side clubs more or less to themselves while they played nightly auditions in the industry’s backyard.
British bands were a tough sell in the U.S. but Spacehog made a commercially plausible pitch that distinguished them, somewhat, from their countrymen: They were the happy middle between Britpop and American grunge, with the hooks and humor of the former tempered by the familiar Big Muff’d power chords of the latter. (Plus, if you liked the Gallagher brothers, just wait till you got a load of the Langdons, who were equally quarrelsome but slightly more handsome.)
Spacehog’s own retro influences primarily included British glam-rock artists of the ’70s—Bowie, Queen, T. Rex, Slade—to whom they paid tribute through high-effort, decorum-free stagecraft. In concert, the Langdons dressed like Spiders From Mars and prowled around like a pair of Freddie Mercurys; Steel played solos with a foot up on his monitor and a cigarette stuck in the headstock of his Flying V; and Cragg twirled drumsticks and lit his gong on fire. All this would’ve looked pretty stupid if their music couldn’t back it up, but it actually sort of could—one song in particular!
If you remember Spacehog, it’s almost certainly for their first single “In the Meantime,” an alt-rock anomaly so packed with wonders that it seems to give you a new reason to like it every time you listen. There’s the dial-tone intro (sampled from a track by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra); Royston’s yodeling falsetto and venturesome bassline (how he played it while singing is a mystery that has vexed other singing bassists for 26 years); the double-bend guitar riff; the dramatically dopey lyrics of the verse (“And in the end we shall achieve in time the thing they called divine”); the fuzz-bomb chorus sung from the perspective of friendly extraterrestrials (“All in all we’re just like you/We love the all of you”); and the bridge that flies by like an F-14. It’s not seamless, but that’s by design; the song’s three main sections are all in different keys, which creates the feeling, harmonically speaking, of climbing an Escher staircase where the rules of gravity change at every landing.
“‘In the Meantime’ was the first song I ever played in Spacehog,” Cragg has said. “It had this brilliant rubbery McCartney-esque bassline, played by this little kid with a huge voice… It was the one that got me hooked and made me realize what a special talent Royston Langdon is.” The band recorded a demo in a Manhattan jingle studio, inviting Antony’s friend Sean Lennon to tag along. (Afterward, “he invited us back to the Dakota building to jam,” Cragg remembers. “Sean gave Roy one of his dad’s Rickenbacker 4001 basses that night.” He played it on the album version of the track.)
In 1994, record labels were so desperate to land the next Nirvana that one of them had even signed Candlebox. So after Spacehog's demo made the rounds—quiet verses and loud chorus? Check and check—a live showcase was arranged for Sire founder Seymour Stein, who offered them a deal immediately. Resident Alien was released in October 1995 and sold 500,000 copies in its first eight months, largely thanks to its lead single, which played on MTV and topped Billboard’s mainstream rock chart for four weeks. Spacehog opened for Tripping Daisy and Everclear and then hit the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When they got home, they packed New York’s medium-size venues by themselves.
They weren’t exactly rock stars, but in a scene that wouldn’t beget the Strokes for a few more years, the Langdons became local celebrities. Soon, they were recurring characters in international tabloids that were cool on the music but captivated by the brothers’ romantic adventures. Here’s the short version: Antony befriended fledgling heartthrob Joaquin Phoenix, who introduced the Langdons to his then-girlfriend actress Liv Tyler, who broke up with Phoenix and began dating Royston—they eventually married and divorced—and then introduced her friend Kate Moss to Antony, who unsuccessfully proposed marriage to the model after just three months. (Phoenix and the Langdons stayed friends; he cast Antony as his personal assistant in the 2010 mockumentary I’m Still Here.) There weren’t any blogs or camera phones around to document it, so we’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that everything that happened to all the bands in Lizzy Goodman’s New York aughts-rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom happened to Spacehog first between 1995 and 2001.
One thing that didn’t happen, though, was another hit. Follow-up singles from Resident Alien failed to connect, and Spacehog’s artier second record, 1998’s The Chinese Album, generated nice reviews but not much business; Sire gave it a small push and then dropped the band. Comeback attempts in 2001 (The Hogyssey) and 2013 (As It Is on Earth) stalled, and they split up for good in 2014, leaving behind one song for future generations of karaoke singers but perhaps failing to, in the end, achieve the thing they called divine.
Still, “In the Meantime” seems to be remembered more fondly than other one-off hits from its decade. The song’s bassline was recently voted the fourteenth best of the whole 1990s by readers of UltimateGuitar.com (just four spots behind the Seinfeld theme). This summer, Ezra Koenig revealed a soft spot for the track on an episode of his Apple Music show Time Crisis, imagining a Yesterday-style scenario in which he wakes up in an alternate timeline where nobody else remembers Spacehog, allowing him to steal “Meantime” for the next Vampire Weekend album. (“I could make this work in 2021”, he said.) Were Spacehog not merely a one-hit wonder but in fact, as has been posited, the greatest one-hit wonder?
Revisiting Resident Alien now, it’s easy to hear the ingredients for a longer career than they had. Many alt-rock debuts had one catchy single and a dozen lesser songs bearing little resemblance—that was a good enough blueprint for some other Brits—but Resident Alien over-delivers. Considering the pressure a track like “In the Meantime” would put on any band’s first record (especially when sequenced as the album’s opener), Spacehog’s is an architecturally sound, occasionally great, always amusing collection of transatlantic power pop.
Recording the band in a Woodstock, New York studio, producer Bryce Goggins (Pavement, Apples in Stereo) mines the tension between their native influences and the American rock of the time and winds up with something that never sounds fully like either. The guitars—thick and wooly but with top-end bite, deployed in wide dynamic range and played into warm amps through long chains of fuzz and phaser pedals—clobber those on most early Britpop records. But there are also pianos, glockenspiels, and bongos, among other textures not found on many grunge albums, not even when Stone Temple Pilots mounted their own glam revival a year later.
It might be harder than you’d think to pick a second-favorite song on Resident Alien, because Spacehog had a way with a tune. Take “Cruel to Be Kind” (no relation to the Nick Lowe song), a rewrite of “Jessie’s Girl” so likable that Rick Springfield may as well just give them the publishing. Or “Space Is the Place” (no relation to the Sun Ra song), a Buzzcocks-style pop-punk workout that gets stuck in your head in a lot less time than it would take to parse its sexual politics (“Just because you kissed your brother/It doesn’t mean to say you’re gay/’Cause even when you’re fucking him it doesn’t mean you don't love me”).
If either of those descriptions makes this album sound derivative, well, it is, but Spacehog were not worried about camouflaging their inspirations. You can hear the Langdons doing the “hoo hoo”s from “Sympathy for the Devil” in “Never Coming Down - Pt 1” and Royston bellowing the hook from Tin Machine’s “Crack City” through the outro of “Spacehog”—and is the chorus of “Starside” quoting the melody from “Starman” or the theme from Star Trek or both? A lifetime’s worth of listening to their idols hadn’t yet coalesced into a unique identity, but it’s fun to hear the band figuring it out.
The album’s most shameless lift is conceptual. Lyrically, Resident Alien is an unlicensed reboot of Bowie’s Major Tom franchise starring the Langdons as astronauts floating around heaven feeling low. Narrators on no fewer than five tracks spend the verses bemoaning their earthly miseries before blasting off to outer space for the choruses (“See you later, now I’m gone/So long I’ll see you when I’m starside,” “Space is the place where I will go when I am all alone and when nobody calls me on the phone,” etc). As a songwriting device, it works better some times than others, but taken as a metaphor for the band’s own feelings of dislocation—they’re aliens, they’re resident aliens, they’re Englishmen in New York—it has some thematic resonance.
Much was made in early reviews over Royston’s vocal similarity to Bowie, but his impersonation on Resident Alien is so over the top that it kind of becomes its own thing, a baritone vibrato with enough wobble to send a less confident Adam’s apple flying across the room. Royston could also jump octaves like Bono and grind vowels like Axl Rose, stirring up drama even in sleepy side-two ballads “Ship Wrecked” (“So if you raise a glass to love you passed/Raise a glass to me”) and “Zeroes,” about a woman who gives him the brush-off when he asks for her phone number. During one of Spacehog’s hiatuses, Royston failed an audition to replace Scott Weiland as the singer of Velvet Revolver—their loss.
In recent interviews, members of Spacehog have reflected on what they might have done differently to prolong the band’s lifespan. (“I think the prevalent feeling amongst the group is that we fell short of our potential,” Cragg lamented in 2017.) Antony has said he wishes they’d built momentum by releasing a couple of other singles before “In the Meantime,” which wouldn’t have hurt. Were they also hindered by an awkward name? It could’ve been worse: “I believe Grass was the original idea,” Cragg has said, “but it was shite” (and might’ve invited unfair comparisons when they shared a bill with Supergrass). “We settled on Spacehog in the end. I think it was a bit less shite.” Maybe they miscalculated the demand for a Ziggy Stardust update at a time when American glam rock had only just been vanquished, and when David Bowie himself was making some of the least-loved music of his career. “We were inauthentic,” Cragg has said. “We got thrown in with all that mid-’90s alternative rock… but we really didn’t have all that much in common with a lot of the other bands out there.”
Others blame Spacehog’s followup to Resident Alien, The Chinese Album, a concept record with a concept that nobody could ever quite figure out. It was supposedly intended to be the soundtrack to a movie that was never made—R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe was said to have toyed with directing it—about a band that moved to Hong Kong after being dropped by its American record label, but none of that is clear in the music. The songs themselves were actually pretty good, though. Try “Mungo City,” “Carry On,” and “Almond Kisses,” featuring Stipe.
Then again, in the second half of the ’90s, right around when Spacehog might’ve had their theoretical second hit, the six major record labels became five; the radio industry was deregulated and playlists tightened; MTV abandoned music videos; and at-home broadband gave rise to file-sharing—not exactly conditions under which a band of arch, glam-rocking aliens were designed to thrive. So maybe Spacehog peaked too early. Or maybe they wrote a great song and came 3,000 miles to play it for us just in time.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | HiFi / Sire | December 19, 2021 | 7.5 | 8bce35cf-4c79-43f3-9cb5-a37e53f39476 | Lane Brown | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lane-brown/ | |
Composed by Donnacha Dennehy and performed on viola by Nadia Sirota and viol de gamba by Liam Byrne, Tessellatum is an impressive, sweeping work whose 15 pieces seem to just peel off one another. | Composed by Donnacha Dennehy and performed on viola by Nadia Sirota and viol de gamba by Liam Byrne, Tessellatum is an impressive, sweeping work whose 15 pieces seem to just peel off one another. | Nadia Sirota: Tessellatum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nadia-sirota-tessellatum/ | Tessellatum | Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s music is repetitive and minimalist, but he will never remind you of a bustling city street or a multi-lane highway like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Dennehy’s repetition evokes a rushing river—everything flows endlessly around you, guided by patterns but interrupting itself everywhere you look. He doesn’t have one specific style: Some of his pieces are bright, hard, and brilliantine—like the “Bulb,” which sounds like a transcription of a heart arrhythmia. Others, like his totemic 2007 piece Grá agus Bás, gather tones into darkening clouds, like a massive storm front seen from a rooftop. But they all carry an elemental weight, suggesting creeping overgrowth and boundaries being slowly encroached.
Nadia Sirota heard Dennehy’s sprawling music and found herself drawn towards it. Over the past eight years, her own work has grown so sprawling that the honors hailing her achievements have gotten ludicrously specific: She hosts the world’s best contemporary classical music podcast and has contributed her music to over 60 albums from Björk to John Legend to Arcade Fire. Above all, she is a relentless commissioner and performer of music, and has brought forth an impressive thicket of it into existence. Her pursuit of new work is as admirable as her tenaciously good ear and her ability to throw herself bodily into the landscapes that composers bring to her.
Out of Dennehy’s and Sirota’s union arises Tessellatum, an album-length collaboration with accompanying animated visuals by Steven Mertens, an animator whose done darkly whimsical work for Regina Spektor and Dan Auerbach. Nadia Sirota plays the viola, Liam Byrne plays the viola da gamba, and between the two of them, they build up 15 tracks that swirl thickly around you. The music blends into a kind of tabula rasa, pulsing drone, a shifting mass that is meant to smudge the edges on your perception of passing time. It isn’t quite a drone, though: the 15 multi-tracks of strings played by Sirota and Byrne peel off from each other in long, moaning strands, like someone planing clean strips from a board of wood.
The album was produced by Sirota and mixed by Bedroom Community label co-founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, whose coursing music also whispers inside of this piece. Mertens’ accompanying animations focus on deep sea imagery, flashing on images of fish skeletons, fossils, floating scraps that suggest drifting phytoplankton. The viola da gamba and the viola themselves feel suspended in solution; they are both mid-range instruments, their husky timbres evocative of human voices, and hearing them twist and invert around each other, you can almost feel your feet leave the ground.
You don’t really isolate high points in a piece like this—like pointing out animal shapes in a cloud, it has changed by the time you revisit it. It also tends to lose its meaning when you don’t experience it in full. Instead, It creates one long, hypnotic moment, a fixed space for you to inhabit as variations emerge and disappear around you. | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Bedroom Community | August 10, 2017 | 7.2 | 8bdad820-aa33-4db5-990a-124fe7a716b3 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s 12th album is a lucid, jazzy, and unique entry in her catalog. The complex, hypnotic arrangements belie the warm simplicity of her verse. | The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s 12th album is a lucid, jazzy, and unique entry in her catalog. The complex, hypnotic arrangements belie the warm simplicity of her verse. | Mia Doi Todd: Music Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mia-doi-todd-music-life/ | Music Life | Mia Doi Todd has an uncanny gift for music that glides and ascends and lands smoothly, always somewhere unexpected. Over the past two decades, this quality has made the Los Angeles native a favored collaborator for a wide range of artists looking to explode the boundaries of their music—from Dntel to Laraaji to Saul Williams—and it makes her an equally compelling artist when working alone. She is a singer-songwriter who views her work more like a landscape painter, patiently bringing a world to life across the canvas.
The lush and meditative Music Life marks Todd’s first collection of original songs in a decade, following a film score and two sets of covers: 2014’s Floresta, which featured interpretations of Brazilian music, and 2016’s Songbook, which took on influences like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Elliott Smith. Both albums highlighted Todd’s signature qualities—a spectral, swooning sense of melody, her light and easygoing soprano—while showing how adept she is at working outside her comfort zone.
Music Life furthers this exploration while offering an inviting survey of her strengths as a songwriter. Several tracks are tender reflections on family and motherhood, like the lullaby “Wainiha Valley,” featuring zither accompaniment from Laraaji. Others tell more imagistic stories, like the lilting, mermaid fable of “My Fisherman.” While she accesses a wide range of characters and genres through these songs, Todd unifies the material with an instinctive sense of uplift and connectedness (“I think my worldview is full of pink glasses,” she told NPR last year), and her writing reveals this outlook with the plainspoken directness of aphorisms.
Todd contrasts the lucidity of her words with her complex, hypnotic arrangements. In “Take Me to the Mountain,” she describes a kind of vision quest while the music—featuring saxophone from Sam Gendel amid layers of violin and viola, clarinet and flute—conjures a similar journey, trudging then surging uphill. At the end of each verse, Todd plays a subtle trick with her phrasing, repeating the last syllables of a line: “Let’s go someplace where we can breathe/Where we can breathe/Where we can breathe.” Stretching the words into new shapes, her voice becomes part of the tapestry of instruments, her lyrics evoking a texture and rhythm all their own.
The merging of music and meaning also lies at the center of the title track, one of Todd’s most magical performances to date. Accompanied by guitarist Jeff Parker and keyboardist Money Mark, she leads a jam session that mirrors the increasingly dark turn of her lyrics. “If you give your life to music,” she sings, “It might not go quite like you thought.” It’s a simple premise, but as the mood shifts from excitement to exhaustion, hotels to hospital rooms, the music grows uncharacteristically urgent and intense. When she comes back down to earth in the closing lines, a gentle repetition of “I loved you” and “I love you,” the preceding images linger like a vivid dream.
The best songs on Music Life evolve with this subtle, intuitive sense of escalation. Take, for example, the centerpiece “Little Bird.” It’s the kind of thing another songwriter might fashion into a breezy interlude, a breather amid the heavier material. Duetting on nylon string guitar with Brazilian musician Fabiano do Nascimento, Todd sings a sweet, sad melody for someone who has never left L.A. and could use a little perspective. But as she starts making her case, her ideas begin to snowball: “Bali or Bangkok/Denver or Dallas/Maybe Atlanta... or Atlantis.” Soon, we are nearing the eight-minute mark, and she just seems to be ramping up. It’s a pleasant reminder that we are on Mia Doi Todd Time, only visitors, and the world has never seemed bigger or more full of possibility.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | City Zen | March 2, 2021 | 7.3 | 8be45824-5440-4281-bb82-5cf0c61acb35 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The UK synth-pop duo’s 18th studio album attempts—but doesn’t quite attain—the electric thrill of the material that first made them pop sensations. | The UK synth-pop duo’s 18th studio album attempts—but doesn’t quite attain—the electric thrill of the material that first made them pop sensations. | Erasure: The Neon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erasure-the-neon/ | The Neon | Of the artists to emerge from the first big wave of UK synth-pop acts in the ’80s, Erasure is one of the few still standing. Along the way, singer Andy Bell and synth fanatic Vince Clarke have weathered all manner of highs and lows—from their commercial peak in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when they landed four consecutive albums at the top of the British charts, to Bell’s 2004 announcement that he had been diagnosed with HIV nearly seven years earlier.
Most impressive is the continued quality of their music. By mostly sticking to their chosen lane—Clarke’s glitzy, club-ready electronics as backdrop to Bell’s beguiling voice and lyrics of emotional enchantment and anguish—the duo amassed an impressive collection of good-to-great albums. Their streak was broken only in 2017 with World Be Gone, a dour record tainted by slower tempos and existential fears fueled by an ugly political present.
While it steers in the right direction, Erasure’s latest full-length The Neon doesn’t quite get the pair back on track. The album is a deliberate effort to return to the sounds and mood of the material that first made them pop sensations: Clarke reached for the analog synths he’s had since the duo’s earliest days, and Bell describes the new album as “going back to the beginning.” In its best moments, like the gooey, glammy “Nerves of Steel” and the disco blurt of “Diamond Lies,” The Neon provides a flicker of the same electric charge found in early hits like “Sometimes” and “Chains of Love.” But Erasure mostly don’t reach those same heights. Though it’s often frothy and fun, The Neon is really the sound of settling—into middle age, into committed relationships, and into their place in musical history.
Throughout, Bell takes on the tone of an elder statesman, offering pleas of care and caution either to the younger men in his orbit or to a younger version of himself. “There’s a sweetness in your eyes/You better take my good advice/You’d better keep away from them,” he sings over a blowsy Moog melody on lead single “Hey Now (Think I Got the Feeling).” On album closer “Kid You’re Not Alone,” Clarke’s mid-tempo pulses and quick-fading synth surges mirror a lyric that serves as warning on how indulgence in “earthly delights” can lead to shame and regret.
Bell has long distinguished himself from his dance-music peers by singing more of romance and lasting love than hedonism or easy thrills. On The Neon, that tender-hearted quality comes alive in tracks like “New Horizons,” a stirring torch song about weathering life’s storms beside a loved one, and “Careful What I Try to Do,” a bouncy, bubblegum tune that’s flush with the delight of new romance. But the album fails to truly surprise. Were it not for Bell’s thicker, throatier vocals, there would be little to distinguish tracks like “Shot a Satellite” and “Hey Now” from those on 1997’s Cowboy or 1994’s I Say I Say I Say.
Erasure clearly are open to updating their classic sound, as on 2014’s The Violet Flame, where co-producer Richard X helped add a sharp, icy sheen to their otherwise effervescent tunes. They even presented a different perspective on the bleak World Be Gone by re-recording the album with Belgian neo-classical ensemble Echo Collective for 2018’s World Beyond. And each man’s activities outside of Erasure—Bell’s theatrical work, and Clarke’s left-field collaborations with Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware—proves that they can push themselves beyond the tried-and-true. The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.
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. | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mute | August 21, 2020 | 5.8 | 8be4f20b-4fd4-4203-9e80-7105f85a69b0 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
When reissues serve their highest calling, it's to shed light on voices neglected by history. These two reissues, from Recollections GRM, focus on two neglected voices in electronic composition from the '60s and '70s. While both albums oddly exist outside of time, they both feel at home in the modern electronic moment. | When reissues serve their highest calling, it's to shed light on voices neglected by history. These two reissues, from Recollections GRM, focus on two neglected voices in electronic composition from the '60s and '70s. While both albums oddly exist outside of time, they both feel at home in the modern electronic moment. | Beatriz Ferreyra / Michel Redolfi: GRM Works / Pacific Tubular Waves/Immersion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20526-grm-works-pacific-tubular-wavesimmersion/ | GRM Works / Pacific Tubular Waves/Immersion | Reissue culture gets derided for many reasons—they comprise the majority of RSD chum; they can obscure newer artists; they make for long queues at record pressing plants. Some see them as a pernicious symptom of something deeper: Britt Brown of 100% Silk wrote that the proliferation of past musics "reveals a host of aesthetic anxieties, disappointments, and insecurities lurking beneath the surface of our 21st century music landscape." But when reissues serve their highest calling, they shed light on voices neglected by history, and were it not for reissues and rediscovery, a generation of vital female electronic composers might have been lost.
It was in the late '90s, near the end of her life, for example, that BBC Radiophonic Workshop member (and "Doctor Who" theme composer) Delia Derbyshire received some recognition for her electronic music, and it's only in this century that more notice has been paid to the likes of Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani. Argentinean composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an early colleague of musique concrète inventor Pierre Schaeffer who studied at the Paris Groupe de Recherches Musicales studios from 1963-70, only had her work issued (by the label) in 2012. The Recollection GRM label, which has done fine work reissuing epochal works from the likes of Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani, two recent reissues investigate Ferreyra's overlooked work and a revered obscurity from Michel Redolfi.
Ferreyra's release pairs two shorter '60s works with two longer, more recent compositions, and there's a fluidity to her work that suggests her methodology remains unchanged. The 21st century pieces are crisper and clock in at over twice the length as the earlier ones, but they sound of a whole. The accompanying notes, referencing alchemy and the Qabalah, suggest that change and the mercurial state of the natural world is a crucial theme to Ferreyra.
"Demeures aquatiques", from 1967, manipulates the sounds of metal sheets and glass rods to explore what Ferreyra writes is "the flow constantly facing the ebb." In it, a nervous wobble of electromagnetic tape gets nearly submerged by a drone before high fluttering tones shoot up, those high frequencies themselves becoming a drone. "Médisances", from the next year, is a four-channel piece turning orchestral instruments and mouth harp into salt water taffy, twangs and bowed strings slowed to an exhilarating crawl, all leading up to an exclamatory yelp at the last moment. There's a similar sense of speed on "Un fil invisible", which warps its source sounds at a dizzying rate. At the same time, there's far more space and silence in the mix for the smaller sounds to move about, with strings zooming, tactile objects bursting into stardust, and small scurrying sounds suggesting mice aboard a space station.
Fans of the furthest fringes of electronic dance music might recognize Michel Redolfi’s name, as his music has appeared in mixes by Demdike Stare, Rene Hell and early on in Four Tet’s Fabriclive mix, leading into twisted UK garage. As the 3D graphics (like the original edition, this reissue includes a pair of 3D glasses in its gatefold sleeve) and title attests, Redolfi became enchanted with the Pacific Ocean during a seven-year period he spent in California "attempting to musically translate my discovery of the Pacific," as he puts it.
Having spent one season learning to surf in the Pacific Ocean—which more often than not meant learning to read its temperamental, ever-changing waves and not be overwhelmed by its powerful currents—Redolfi’s compositions are a remarkable ‘translation’ of that body of water. Deploying the then-newfangled Synclavier digital synthesizer (which around 1977-78 was used primarily by Frank Zappa and Wire producer Mike Thorne), "Pacific Tubular Waves" differs radically across its five movements. Redolfi conveys a wide emotional range on this side: giddiness, exhilaration, bewilderment, glee, panic, uncertainty, and both an eerie and sun-kissed state of calm.
While one side explores the surface of the Pacific, "Immersion" uses as its source sounds from hydrophones submerged into the ocean itself. The design of Redolfi’s compositions can feel macro and micro at once, where the sensation of the Pacific’s vastness as well as the way small droplets bead up on your skin are both tangible. One can visualize the tiny bubbles surrounding each sound event here and "Deep Immersion" in particular is mesmerizing.
There’s a peculiar contradiction at play when it comes to reassessing such obscure electronic compositions. On one hand, they are cloistered soundworlds, artifacts with no outside signifiers; on the other, they don’t sound dated. Despite the five decades separating some of Ferreyra’s works, one won’t find any correlation to the many changes that mainstream music underwent during that same time period. They both exist outside of time, yet now feel at home in the modern electronic moment, where it’s normal to have DJ sets in the footwork/Fade to Mind/Hudson Mohawke mode be quicksand-solid and quickly morphing. In an uncanny manner, both reissues anticipate an aesthetic that now lurks just beneath the surface of our 21st century music landscape. | 2015-05-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-05-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | May 8, 2015 | 7.3 | 8bef5fba-d5bd-4186-9695-8ec00eca0b98 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Phoenix psych-punk group Destruction Unit make a refreshing show of cross-genre camaraderie in a live setting and celebrated the release of their latest album with the pioneering prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance. But despite the commitment to activism and their exploding of aesthetic cliques, Negative Feedback Resistor sounds rather familiar. | The Phoenix psych-punk group Destruction Unit make a refreshing show of cross-genre camaraderie in a live setting and celebrated the release of their latest album with the pioneering prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance. But despite the commitment to activism and their exploding of aesthetic cliques, Negative Feedback Resistor sounds rather familiar. | Destruction Unit: Negative Feedback Resistor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21073-negative-feedback-resistor/ | Negative Feedback Resistor | No band makes a show of underground camaraderie like Destruction Unit. The group tends to invite friends on stage, uniting players from typically insular realms like hardcore, minimal synth, and metal in the service of further saturating its already dense, imposing performances. There’s a tagline for this, New American Heavy Underground, which you can find on t-shirts. And the catalog of Ascetic House—an art collective and tape label tied to Destruction Unit—likewise corrals sounds from the shadowy margins of accessibility. Eroding those superficial scene divisions dovetails with broader visions of liberation: Destruction Unit celebrated the release of its latest album, Negative Feedback Resistor, with the pioneering prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance, for instance. But for all of that refreshing commitment to activism and exploding aesthetic cliques, the album sounds rather familiar, an echo of its last full-length statement, Deep Trip, and the usual proto-punk touchstones.
Destruction Unit's current lineup solidified by 2013’s Void. Previously, the handle was a vessel for vocalist and guitarist Ryan Rousseau, a refugee from the Reatards. With a new lineup, the Arizonan outfit favored up-tempo, punchy beats inherited from hardcore; riffs pitched to near-total scree; and barren, windswept passages reminiscent of the group’s forbidding but awesome Sonoran Desert surroundings. It was an estranged sort of psychedelia, distinguished by what felt like elemental terror from the American southwest, but with Destruction Unit’s latest album the same approach risks exhaustion. Repeatedly evoking an arid landscape is perilous work; inspiration could evaporate.
That said, Negative Feedback Resistor is assaultive in a way that Void wasn’t. This is in no small part due to the rhythm section, which defaults to an up-tempo beat that lurches and bludgeons in the insistent style of Motörhead or even Discharge. With their reliance on halftime breakdowns and sharp drum patterns, Destruction Unit sound inspired by hardcore, but they leave out the concision. That’s too bad. The three-minute highlight "If Death Ever Slept" could lead a savage seven-inch. Instead, it’s easy to miss after the album’s midway slog through redundant nine- and seven-minute numbers.
This lack of dynamics works better in the band's cataclysmic live show, where the band has few peers. But Negative Feedback Resistor’s relentlessness made me pine for Void’s atmospheric excursions. There are a few hazy, impressionistic moments, notably the introduction to "Judgment Day", but they feel appended rather than interwoven. And, as with many traits of Negative Feedback Resistor, the same could be said for Deep Trip. Indeed, Destruction Unit’s prior album opened with a song that pivots abruptly from sprint to halftime in much the same way as "Disinfect".
Negative Feedback Resistor also harks to space-rock like Hawkwind, not to mention that the core riff for "Salvation" is essentially identical to the Stooges’ "I Feel Alright". Rousseau’s words are mostly inaudible, morphed into queasy, feverish missives, but the ongoing allusions to drugs and the bible indicated by song titles and lyrical snippets are frustratingly pat and disappointing. Off record, the band’s ideas about getting free are much more urgent, inventive, and contemporary than those psych clichés. Sadly, the band's stylistic conservatism has such a blurring effect on their records that any three tracks contain its total rewards. | 2015-09-23T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-09-23T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | September 23, 2015 | 6.6 | 8bf00ec2-ccf5-4e3f-a37b-17e73cddcacf | Sam Lefebvre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-lefebvre/ | null |
Legacy reissues the first three albums from the legendary singer-songwriter, adding a few bonus cuts in the process. | Legacy reissues the first three albums from the legendary singer-songwriter, adding a few bonus cuts in the process. | Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen / Songs From a Room / Songs of Love and Hate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11901-songs-of-leonard-cohensongs-from-a-roomsongs-of-love-and-hate/ | Songs of Leonard Cohen / Songs From a Room / Songs of Love and Hate | In his excellent 1997 biography of the Canadian poet, novelist, and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, Ira B. Nadel relates an anecdote that seems too perfectly symbolic to be true: A teenaged Cohen, after reading a book on hypnotism, successfully hypnotizes and undresses the family maid. This is the stuff of parable, presaging the hands-on mysticism, conflicted morality, and voracious lust that would come to define Cohen's art. The story also speaks to the peculiar effect of his music-- few singers leave us feeling so mesmerized and vulnerable.
On paper, Cohen's music is astoundingly simple. Because he became well-known as a poet and novelist in his 20s, there's a popular misconception that he didn't begin to play music until he started releasing albums in his 30s. But he became infatuated with the guitar at an early age, played in a country band called the Buckskin Boys at McGill University, and accompanied his poetry readings with live jazz, inspired by the Beat poets for whom he was a little too aristocratic to be taken seriously. He didn't become known as a musician until his 30s, but he was moving toward it his whole life, in an attempt to put his poetry where he thought it belonged-- with the people, not the academy.
Because of this long gestation period, Cohen's music seemed to emerge fully formed, and the qualities that dominate his first three, newly reissued albums can be succinctly cataloged. There's his reedy baritone-- a humble, melancholy instrument and an inviting source of warmth; there's his unique guitar style-- most of his songs are built from delicate webs of musky, finger-picked flamenco or broad, awkward chord progressions; and there are his lyrics, tracing out the hidden contours of love, lust, sex, religion, responsibility, and history through an inflexibly personal lens.
There's also the uncanny ambiance of the songs, the almost brutal frugality of which is offset by calliope, bells, keyboards, strings, horns, and Jew's harp. While Cohen was resistant to such embellishments and particularly displeased with John Simon's arrangements on his debut, they've worn into the songs' creases. These reissues do a good job of bringing out the instrumentation without crowding Cohen's voice or tainting the music's dark thrall, and an early version included on Songs from a Room reveals that "Bird on a Wire" isn't quite "Bird on a Wire" without those drafty keyboards pushing in under it.
This is enough to explain why these albums are good, but what makes them great is the ongoing search for personal truth and spiritual grace that they express, and how they manage to always embody both sides of their thematic coin. Everything is married to its dark twin: Freedom and shelter in "The Stranger Song", laughter and tears in "So Long, Marianne", salvation and destruction in "Joan of Arc", whom Cohen often used as a symbol for spiritual discipline and the power of womanhood.
We find this same dual nature in Cohen himself: Born to a stern religious father and a bohemian mother, Cohen's sensibility was forged in the tension between the liberal and the conservative. He's been a religious sensualist, a student of police work and law, bourgeois outsider poet, and disciplined dabbler in marijuana and LSD. While he emerged as a Dylan-inspired folkie, his music was anachronistic and only nominally political, less concerned with the timely issues of the day than the timeless issues of the spirit. Cohen was interested in "The Old Revolution", with its outmoded concepts of chivalry, and its religious (not secular) imperatives. The political ferment of the 60s manifests only obliquely, as in "Story of Isaac", which is as much about Cohen's awe of his father's stern religion as it is about the sacrifice of youths upon the altar of war.
It's appropriate then that Cohen's songs present him to us in far-flung locales. "Famous Blue Raincoat" finds him in a cold New York hotel, catching snippets of music wafting up from Clinton Street. In "So Long, Marianne", he's probably on Hydra, a pale spectre amid the Grecian island's greenery and whitewashed terraces. In "Suzanne", eating Chinese oranges on the St. Lawrence river in Montreal. In "Diamonds in the Mine", checking his empty mailbox on an isolated farm outside of Nashville.
All three of these albums, despite their musical simplicity, are leavened with the wisdom that comes from such a diverse existence. 1968's Songs of Leonard Cohen contains many of his most essential songs-- "Suzanne", "Master Song", "Stranger Song", "Sisters of Mercy", "So Long, Marianne"-- and establishes the themes and stylistic tics he would pursue relentlessly over the ensuing decades. John Hammond, the album's original producer, fell ill during the process and was replaced by John Simon; the two bonus cuts are from the Hammond sessions. "Store Room" emulates the restrained urgency of "Teachers" while "Blessed is the Memory" is more prayerful; both feature rather incongruous Ray Manzarek-style organs.
A long-time country music fan, Cohen would travel to Nashville to record his next two albums. 1969's Songs From a Room is similar to his debut: Just as Songs of Leonard Cohen replaced original producer John Hammond, who had signed Cohen to Columbia (as well as Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan) with John Simon (then just off the Band's Music From Big Pink and Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends), this album was started with the Byrds' David Crosby and finished with Dylan producer Bob Johnston. It also contains a number of Cohen's signature tunes, including "Story of Isaac", cover song "The Partisan", "Lady Midnight", and the seminal "Bird on a Wire", whose iconic opening lines ("Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free") were cited by Kris Kristofferson as his desired epitaph. It seems a direct continuation of his debut, and in truth, the debut seems superior simply for having come first.
Of course, any seeker can become lost, and on 1971's Songs of Love and Hate, Cohen shows signs of disorientation. Though he's backed by a crew of ace musicians, including Charlie Daniels on fiddle, the record is thinner and less even than the first two. In contrast to his early precision, Cohen takes some wild swings that miss the mark, such as the weird Santa Claus imagery on "Dress Rehearsal Rag" and the uncomfortably strained singing style he adopts on "Diamonds in the Mine", which might be chalked up to an insecurity about his voice encouraged by his negative press. It's also a more blatantly depressive album than the first two, lacking hopeful equanimity, and does indeed reflect a period of great depression and uncertainty in Cohen's life.
But elsewhere on Love and Hate, he's in his finest, subtlest form-- "Avalanche", "Last Year's Man", and "Famous Blue Raincoat" alone justify the album's classic status. Despite its relative flaws, it's an indispensable document in the development of one of the 20th century's most enduring artists. Cohen potently captures the pull between safety and the unknown, love and freedom, spirituality and sensuality: a panoramic view of human experience, rendered through the work of one exceptional artist. | 2007-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-05-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 4, 2007 | 9.6 | 8bf31ab2-2235-455b-ad0d-7dad53e77e97 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Timothy Showalter's fourth album as Strand of Oaks and first for Dead Oceans is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself. | Timothy Showalter's fourth album as Strand of Oaks and first for Dead Oceans is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself. | Strand of Oaks: HEAL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19536-strand-of-oaks-heal/ | HEAL | “I was just an Indiana kid, getting no one in my bed,” sings Timothy Showalter, a.k.a. Strand of Oaks, “but I had your sweet tunes to play.” That song, mysteriously titled “JM”, recounts long afternoons spent rebelling against his parents, smoking in his car, hating all his friends, and playing JM’s sweet tunes at presumably high volume. The guitars swell and crash around him, then lumber into the kind of crunchy jam that once upon a time had teenage misfits pumping fists or raising lighters in unison. Given that the song is set in Indiana, JM could conceivably be John Mellencamp, the Hoosier rocker laureate who used to sing about such kids, but in fact Showalter has disclosed the song’s true subject: Jason Molina. “JM” is a moving tale of extreme adolescent alienation, alleviated only by the narrator’s identification with a rock hero, in this case one whose locality as a Midwesterner—and sometime Indianan—makes him all the more relatable, more approachable, more real.
“JM” is the lynchpin on Strand of Oaks’ fourth album, HEAL, in that it shows two different versions of Showalter: the angry, potentially violent teen blasting Songs: Ohia and the adult who now knows Molina’s fate. The song’s power lies not only in its barrage of guitars, but in the sad wisdom gleaned from fallen heroes. On all of these songs, Showalter comes across as the kind of character Molina certainly identified with and occasionally wrote about: a blue-collar, dead-end kid with an uncertain future and some darkness in him. HEAL is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself. The choruses may swoop and soar, the guitars may churn valiantly, but Showalter’s nostalgia for his own past is never rosy. There are still hints of shame and self-loathing in his voice, as though he is still very much the kid he sings about.
“Shame” and “self-loathing” are not words often used to describe great rock records—at least not those made outside the 1990s, when personal darkness became rock’s eventually tiresome subject matter. The songs on HEAL, however, are more than just therapy sessions; in fact, they reveal an idiosyncratic artist rummaging through his memories to find the source of his art. Opener “Goshen '97”, named after Showalter’s hometown in the northern part of the state, describes his first stabs at making music, buying beat-up Casios, “singing Pumpkins in the mirror” and finding his dad’s tape machine. The details are so vivid you hardly mind that he tries to sneak the line, “That’s where the magic began,” by you. The song describes a lonely kid finding some comfort in music and some camaraderie in his musical idols, so it’s perfectly apt that guitar hero J Mascis (another JM) shreds his way through “Goshen '97”.
HEAL follows the young Showalter through his teenage years and into his twenties, as he becomes, in his own words, “fat, drunk, and mean.” Showalter’s self-assessment can certainly be grizzly (“I was an abomination”), but he couches everything in vivid scenes: stashing porn under the bed, listening to Sharon Van Etten on his headphones, drinking a jug of wine to summon the courage to ask a girl home. This autobiographical mode is unusual for Showalter, who as Strand of Oaks has not mined his own life for material—at least, not to the extent he does here. Rather than rely on the typical confessional models that inform so much indie-rock and -folk songwriting, his earlier songs addressed subjects that rarely, if ever, get sung about. This is a man who penned a revenge fantasy of Dan Ackroyd torturing John Belushi’s dealer. It’s not that those songs were impersonal; rather, they portrayed him as an artist trying to find his reflection in the mirror of the world.
On HEAL, it’s not just the lyrics that are memoiristic, but the music as well. These songs draw on the pop songs of Showalter’s youth—not just Molina’s epic Americana, but also postpunk synth pop and heavy metal. If Strand of Oaks started as a primarily acoustic folk act, it has morphed into something very different. There is lots of pre-grunge guitar on here: some actual shredding and soloing, albeit no showboating. Synths play a much larger role on HEAL, especially on the neon-lit title track and on “Same Emotions”, with its video-game solo on the coda. It’s a way for Showalter to map his own past musically, to fit his memories with a soundtrack based on what might have been playing when he bought that first keyboard or asked that girl out.
There’s a rawness to HEAL, a damaged quality to the music, as though Showalter—who played almost all of the instruments—recorded everything in the old Goshen basement with his first rickety keyboards. The title track burbles with beats and synths that might be described “postpunk” or “motorik”, but really they just sound like a guy fucking around with a Casio. That only makes the whoa-oa-oa’s on “Woke Up to the Light” and closer “Wait for Love” sound too easy, an obvious means of conveying gravity and implying transcendence. Such moments are too similar to the wordless anthemizing of Coldplay, which makes them too public and too current; they break the spell. As a result, the album loses some of its urgency, its specificity, and its narrative thrust as it progresses. But that won’t matter to the angry kid who discovers HEAL and blasts it in his own car. | 2014-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | June 24, 2014 | 7.9 | 8bf79c9a-a878-481a-b4c2-3a92cd5fe5ee | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Half-formed thoughts, departed lovers, music on the gramophone, the sun's last rays. | Half-formed thoughts, departed lovers, music on the gramophone, the sun's last rays. | The Clientele: The Violet Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1504-the-violet-hour/ | The Violet Hour | Half-formed thoughts, departed lovers, music on the gramophone, the sun's last rays. These images from the "The Fire Sermon" section of T.S. Eliot's examination of spiritual isolation, The Waste Land, could easily have been lifted from the expressive lyrics of The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean. It's no wonder the English band have taken the title of their long-awaited debut album from Eliot's masterpiece. In Eliot's tome, the violet hour is "When the eyes and back turn upward from the desk/ When the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting." It's a time of transition from the shackles of the day to the potential vibrancy of the early evening, when-- after the drain of work, desperate for rewarding social connections-- we are able to seek emotional nourishment. Much of The Violet Hour is concerned with this quest, and seems haunted by the spirits of lost opportunities to experience rich, honest humanity.
The album is also haunted by the sound of the band's string of evocative singles and EPs-- most of which were previously collected on Suburban Light and the U.S.-only A Fading Summer-- and many of the band's familiar traits thankfully return here: Alasdair MacLean's languid, almost resigned whisper, his eloquent lyrics, a slightly out-of-tune guitar, and all of that reverb. But The Clientele add some new instrumentation as well-- steel and Spanish guitar, field recordings, violin, chimes-- to create a lush tapestry of hazy pop, like Felt at their most impressionistic.
The band is given the opportunity to explore the scope and expanse of the album format for the first time here, and it embraces it, erecting vivid song cycles and mood pieces. Just as surrealist Joseph Cornell (a Clientele favorite) frequently updated his boxes of found objects by adding items, so does the band, adding layers to the ephemeral template established by its earlier work. Out of character for the Clientele, "Lamplight" and "The House Alw [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/<script type=]|||||| js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript"> ays Wins" even stretch to upwards of six-and-a-half and eight minutes respectively, drifting beyond the band's typical hazy psych-folk and unfolding tighter arrangements and heavier guitar work than ever before. Also like Cornell, The Clientele dabble in a sort of light surrealism, the arrangement and cherishing of mismatched images and scattered snapshots. Their songs are sentimental collections of memories and moments, some treasured and some lamented, frequently filtered through odd shades of light and the often-unreliable hazes of memory and nostalgia. MacLean's delicate, sometimes poignant, sometimes mordant words of loss and love unfold like a soft-focus slideshow over the band's swirling, reverb-drenched tones.
A sense of time has always been indicative in much of The Clientele's work, and it continues here. Check the titles of songs past and present: "An Hour Before the Light", "As Night Is Falling", "Lamplight", and, of course, each of their long-playing titles: Suburban Light and now The Violet Hour. Stepping into the unreal light of The Clientele's violet hour is like looking at faded photos or grainy film stock, emerging into the daylight following a matinee, trying to peer through the London fog, or walking into dusk after a day inside artificial light. It almost sounds the way different shades of light alter otherwise familiar objects, or the way the experiences of the past, which always seem extraordinary in hindsight, loom over the present, at which they almost always seem trite. As a result, there's a lot of longing here: "Missing", "Everybody's Gone", "When You and I Were Young".
Just as Eliot's The Waste Land is credited with helping to define modernism, The Clientele are marking slight shifts in time, mood and atmosphere. In combination with their faraway, almost Francophile sound, it's a poignant noise. They're capturing moments of transition, loss, or ones that magnify the banality of the everyday: "So that summer came and went as I became cold." "I picked her up at half past four and felt the evening come in her tired eyes." "The first time I saw you, I couldn't say a thing." "I took one step back, and I returned to evening." "The southbound train through Battersea in glowing rain I ride." "I see your face each time I close my eyes."
So does this record demonstrate growth? Maybe not. The Clientele aren't necessarily expanding their sound, just perfecting it. Like Cornell, they're collating their collective past, arranging experiences into tight little boxes to cherish their memories and make sense of them. They're drifting through the London streets collecting ephemera, flutters of the heart, and snapshots of dying days. Like the modernists, they aren't building a linear timeline but seeking to grapple with more universal conditions. Is that hopelessly retrofit? Some might say so. Me? I'm not sure that combating spiritual isolation or seeking emotional nourishment will ever go out of style. | 2003-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 8, 2003 | 8.7 | 8bfcac3e-52b4-46d8-8e3e-2ab4ef616bde | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Alternately slick and herky-jerky in its delivery, Field Music's sixth full-length plays like post-punk Steely Dan—jazzy, elegant, and ultimately satisfying, but not always in the ways you expect or necessarily want. | Alternately slick and herky-jerky in its delivery, Field Music's sixth full-length plays like post-punk Steely Dan—jazzy, elegant, and ultimately satisfying, but not always in the ways you expect or necessarily want. | Field Music: Commontime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21483-commontime/ | Commontime | Comprised of brothers Peter and David Brewis and abetted by a revolving cast of supporting players, Field Music have released five studio albums over the past decade, each of them distinguished by a kind of erudite pop sensibility that is largely kept at arm's length. Their last record wasn't a proper album at all, but rather a collection of covers imbued with their inimitable wiry energy. Listening to them reconfigure tracks by Roxy Music and the Pet Shop Boys—and somehow making an overly covered song like Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" sound weirdly alien—only proved how much Field Music operate on their own strange frequency. At their best, the experience of listening to Field Music is akin to moving into a beautifully designed house in which there are no right angles—everything just slightly and perfectly off.
Alternately slick and herky jerky in its delivery, Commontime, the band's sixth full-length*,* plays like post-punk Steely Dan—jazzy, elegant, and ultimately satisfying, but not always in the ways you expect or necessarily want. It opens with "The Noisy Days Are Over"—a slyly funky missive that both acknowledges and rejects the pains of growing older. "The noisy days are over/ And here we are instead," harmonize the brothers. "Why don't you go to bed like everybody else? Why don't you grow old like everybody else?" It's hard to know to whom exactly the two are singing—or if the song is somehow self-directed—but it introduces a sentiment that flourishes throughout Commontime. The album's 14 tracks function like bits of shared conversation, the brothers' interweaving voices shedding some of the obtuseness of earlier releases in favor of songs that openly address the perils of the everyday—the often mundane nature of relationships, the gravitational pull of childhood memories, and accepting one's own shortcomings.
Commontime is brimming with ideas, splitting the difference between the artful leanings of 2010's Measure and the more conventional post-punk pop immediacy of their 2005 debut. "Disappointed" ranks among the catchiest and most jubilant pop songs the band has ever recorded, even if the track itself is about managing one's expectations: "If you want this to be more/ Then you've got to let me know/ But if you want me to be right every time/ You're gonna be disappointed." The best songs here—"Don't You Know What's Wrong?," "The Morning Is Waiting," "How Should I Know If You've Changed?"—are both clever and refreshingly earnest, unafraid of shedding some of the band's now trademark ambiguity in favor of relatable feelings. It's surely not a coincidence that one of the record's best songs includes the lyric, "This is as close to perfect as we were wishing for."
Even though it is generously filled with orchestral flourishes and a kaleidoscope of synths and nimble guitar lines, Commontime rarely feels overstuffed or, as was often the case on previous Field Music releases, busy to the point of sounding incoherent. Instead, the album balances the Brewis brothers' predilection for unusual song structures and unconventional instrumentation with a decidedly grown up narrative. It's a kind of album-length conversation best summed up in the record's final track, "Stay Awake," which could appropriately read like a dialogue between the band and their listeners, a lover, or maybe even with each other--"I might seem a little reticent / Sometimes I can be miles away, days away / And I'm sorry if I'm ever short with you / I don't mean it / It's a good job that you know me so well." | 2016-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | February 2, 2016 | 7.8 | 8c05aa24-6981-4033-b95a-5ed80f13ae28 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, George Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did on All Things Must Pass: He changed the terms of what an album could be. | Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, George Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did on All Things Must Pass: He changed the terms of what an album could be. | George Harrison: All Things Must Pass | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22037-all-things-must-pass/ | All Things Must Pass | In 1970, the year the Beatles officially called it quits, divorce was on the American mind. One year earlier, California then-Governor Ronald Reagan had signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, freeing couples from the burden of having to produce evidence of wrongdoing in order to legalize their separation. From 1965 to 1970, the number of divorce filings nearly doubled, and in the wake of similar laws pending in other states, the rate would surge through the beginning of the next decade. By the time Kramer Vs. Kramer won Best Picture in 1980, the number of divorces had nearly doubled again. But 1970 remains a mysterious fulcrum point: Whenever a new study is issued on separation rates, our progress or regression is always measured “since 1970.”
Like everything else the Beatles did, their dissolution in that year invented a new way for a band to be—in this case, painfully and publicly splintered. In their death throes, the group would become rock music’s proxy divorcees for the ensuing decade. Just as there had been a Fab Four Beatle for every adolescent discovering the giddy thrills of rock and roll in the ‘60s, there was a divorced Beatle for every teenager caught between screaming parents in the ‘70s. The solo albums appeared immediately, like bruises on a wound, and each had the quality of argument brought to a deposition, a side of a story argued. Paul hightailed it off into new love and a second round at domesticity; John gazed into the ugliest parts of himself and wailed; Ringo retreated into the schmaltzy pre-rock ’n’ roll standards of his youth.
And then there was George, who exhaled deeply, stretched, and flourished. “I had such a lot of songs mounting up that I really wanted to do, but I only got my quota of one or two tunes per album,” he said mildly on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, referring to the increasingly tense time, from The White Album through the troubled Let It Be and Abbey Road, when each of the three main songwriters in the band had grown so attached to their individual visions that they began to see others in the room as obstacles. “Over the last year or so, we worked something out which was still a joke, really,” he told Howard Smith a year before. “Three songs for me; three songs for Paul; three songs for John, and two for Ringo!” The last official Beatles recording sessions, for the album Let It Be, were on January 3rd and 4th of 1970; John was not even present, vacationing with Yoko Ono in Denmark. Fittingly for a band that had become so consumed by conflict, the last Beatles song committed to tape was “I, Me, Mine”; even more fittingly, it was a George Harrison song.
Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did: He changed the terms of what an album could be. Rock historians mark All Things Must Pass as the first “true” triple album in rock history, meaning three LPs of original, unreleased material; the Woodstock concert LP, released six months before, is its only only spoiler antecedent. But in the cultural imagination, it is the first triple album, the first one released as a pointed statement. With its grave, formidable spine, it’s symbolically freighted photo of Harrison in the country, pointedly surrounded by three toppled garden gnomes, it still sits like a leather-bound book, a pop-music King James Bible on any shelf of records it occupies. It is one of the first such objects in pop music history, the unwieldy triple album that spilled out oceans of black vinyl, printed thousands of sheets of lyrics, traversed multiple sides and made you get up and sit back down again five times, walking half a mile between your couch and your stereo to experience it all. It was the heaviest and the most consequential Beatles solo album, the first object from the Beatles fallout to plummet from the sky and land with a clunk in a generation of living rooms. It is a paean to having too much ambition, too much to say, to fit into a confined space, and for this reason alone it remains one of the most important capital-A Albums of all time.
It was also massively popular, despite its hefty retail tag; All Things Must Pass spent seven weeks at No. 1, and its’ lead single, “My Sweet Lord,” occupied the same slot on the singles chart, marking the first time a solo Beatle had occupied both spots. The success was sweet vindication for Harrison; his triumph was so resounding that his former partners could not pretend to ignore it. “Every time I turn on the radio, it’s ‘Oh my lord,’” John Lennon joked dryly to Rolling Stone. Rumors have it that John and Paul reacted with chagrin at hearing the bounty of material spilling forth on the album, finally grasping the depth of talent they had been slow to recognize. Their solo albums would be considered successes to various degrees, in their own ways, but only George had the wind of true surprise at his back.
All Things Must Pass had the quality of a broken-off conversation picked up years later; there were gorgeous songs here that Harrison had brought to the group, only to be met with to varying degrees of indifference. “Isn’t It a Pity” had been rejected from Revolver, while “All Things Must Pass” was passed over for Abbey Road. In hindsight, it is impossible to imagine these songs having half the impact if they had appeared sandwiched between, say, “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” Taken together, they have their own cumulative weight and depth; you can even imagine their demos perhaps sounding too patient or too plodding to the other three. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone at the time, Ben Gerson compared it to the Germanic Romanticism of Bruckner or Wagner, composers who were unafraid of risking a little ponderousness to reach grandiose heights. Harrison might have been nursing resentments, but his former bandmates did him a perverse favor by leaving him with this material: This is music of contented solitude, and it only makes sense by itself.
Besides John, George was the only Beatle unafraid of writing from anger or negativity—his early Beatles tunes, like “Think For Yourself” and “Taxman” are almost startling in their bile. But where John thrashed and sometimes wallowed, George gently explored; when John Lennon pounded his fist, hollering that he was “sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites,” George simply noted it was a “pity” that “not too many people/ Can see we’re all the same.” The biting “Wah-Wah,” produced by Phil Spector and layered with so many different guitar tracks it feels like three guitar rock songs fighting each other, is possibly Harrison’s most pointed missive as a solo artist, addressed to his increasingly alienated former bandmates. But even here he seems more bemused than pissed-off; the swoop and dip of the melodies and antic main riff resemble chuckling rather than shouting, and the most resonant lyric (“And I know how sweet life can be/ If I keep myself free”) is the sound of a tentative soul allowing himself a measured yawp of freedom, however provisional and careful.
Harrison’s music from this era embraced the Eastern philosophy that he had discovered studying with the Maharishi and would diligently follow throughout the ‘70s. When asked about these ideas in interviews, he could come off in print like a somewhat-tiresome scold, and his Beatles-era explorations in mysticism sometimes had a student’s overcompensating sternness. But All Things Must Pass, though it is easily the most spiritual statement by any Beatle, is a wiser work, made by someone whose hard ideas have been softened and tenderized by a series of salutary body blows. There’s a song called “Let It Down” and a song subtitled “(Let It Roll)”—simple expressions of surrender from someone who’s learned exactly what they do and don’t control. The title track turned on a phrase that sounded as much like “It’s not always gonna be this grey” as it did “it’s not always gonna be this great”; both interpretations are equally valid (even though the actual lyric is “grey”). “It’s time to start smiling/What else should we do?” he inquired on the shimmering country-rock of “Behind That Locked Door.”
And, of course, there was “My Sweet Lord,” the song that, purposefully or not, followed directly in the footsteps of The Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine.” Harrison was eventually sued for what a judge called “unconscious plagiarism,” which could be a good euphemism for “pop songwriting.” The situation was doubly ironic considering Harrison’s intrinsic generosity as an artist. The album was a collaborative party in itself, a gathering in which Eric Clapton, Ringo, Billy Preston, future Yes drummer Alan White, and even a young Phil Collins, playing bongos on “Art of Dying,” were given space. Having been elbowed out of a room too many times before, it seemed, he was staunchly unwilling to do the same to others.
John and Paul were their songs, and you couldn’t cover them without invoking some sort of impression of them. George’s songs had room for others—other interpretations, other viewpoints, other voices. It’s fitting that he invokes Dylan twice on All Things Must Pass—first on “I’d Have You Anytime,” co-written with Dylan, and “If Not For You,” which Dylan himself included on New Morning. Like Dylan, Harrison saw songs like common goods, favors to be traded or plates to be shared. You could always visit George’s songbook, like a village well, and bend it towards whatever personal ends you needed. He’d have you anytime.
Several generations have taken him up on his implicit invitation, as his best songs go from artist to artist—Britt Daniel and Jim James; David Bowie and Dave Davies. Elliott Smith would arguably never have written a single song on Either/Or or XO without this music. The Beatles obsession of late-‘90s indie rock—the Elephant 6 bands, Guided by Voices—and the Britpop bands Oasis and Blur were channeling George as often as anything. Soul and jazz artists were drawn by the clean profundity of his simple lyrics and his languorous melodies; Nina Simone’s 11-minute version of “Isn’t It a Pity” turns the song into a small dead planet with herself as the only inhabitant, and she brought “My Sweet Lord” into the black church; James Brown’s “Something” drenches the humble love note in anguished sweat. Ella Fitzgerald took the tricky rhythms of “Savoy Truffle” for a jazzy spin.
As for the third disc, called Apple Jam; it doesn’t exactly yield new revelations with time. No one’s ever listened to the stuff clogging up the back half of the last side, just like no one remembers what they said at last call and wishes they'd left the bar an hour earlier the next day—“Plug Me In” and “I Remember Jeep” and “Thanks for the Pepperoni” are the sound of a contented artist happily forgetting you are there. Harrison arguably knew exactly what he was doing with this last slab of vinyl; there has to be a reason you don’t encounter “Thanks For the Pepperoni” sandwiched in between “Isn’t It a Pity” and “What Is Life.” If you stick around for this party, it’s because you know exactly what you’re getting; they are the deluxe cuts and alternate takes of their day. Even those little pieces and scraps have a role to play in All Things’ inheritance to future generations, for better and for worse: When The Clash filled up the third LP of Sandinista! with children’s versions of their best-known songs, there was only one precedent to reach for.
Sometimes, it seems as if the Beatles invented everything worth knowing about pop recordings. The process of making them, the process of venerating them, the idea that albums could be Ahab-like pursuits swallowing their creators nearly whole: We carry these notions in our heads because the Beatles put them there. With its sheer size and heft and gravitational pull, All Things Must Pass reinforced that the album could be an epic novel for a different sort of age. Today, “albums” exist largely as ideas rather than objects, shadow puppets we throw up against the wall to remind ourselves of the forms they represent. The language of physical media still haunts our vocabulary. Streaming services debut playlists that get dubbed “mixtapes”; we pull music from the available air and pipe them through our phones like water from a tap, and we still call use quaint words like “LP” and “EP” to describe them. For that legacy, we have artifacts like All Things Must Pass to thank. Today, albums like this are a bit like old ruins: They are important to keep around, even if they mostly remind us of what has changed. This dichotomy is the kind of thing that Harrison, who exited the earth in 2001, would probably have appreciated. All Things Must Pass is a monument to impermanence that has never once, even for a moment, left us. | 2016-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Apple | June 19, 2016 | 9 | 8c142ae3-7e0d-4eac-921a-bb27bbc4369a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Say what you will about Pavement's noncommittal live performances; they always brought great opening acts\n\ with them. Before ... | Say what you will about Pavement's noncommittal live performances; they always brought great opening acts\n\ with them. Before ... | Mick Turner: Moth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8193-moth/ | Moth | Say what you will about Pavement's noncommittal live performances; they always brought great opening acts with them. Before Malky's alkies semi-rocked the joint, concertgoers were treated to such stimuli as Rollerskate Skinny, Shudder to Think, David Kilgour, David Lowery's oompah outfit FSK, and-- prior to the release of the Australian band's debut-- Dirty Three. Warren Ellis would saw at his violin, gazing into his amp as if it were a mirror he was trying to smash with telekinesis. Jim White's drums served as a texture rather than a timekeeper, swishy and shimmying one minute, then pronouncing an on-guard pomp the next. I've watched the man drop a stick and continue unfazed, staring ahead like a piece of David Lynchian atmosphurniture listed in the end-credits as Weird Glaring Man. Guitarist Mick Turner, a beanstalky James Dean who appeared to be petting his hollow-bodied Gretsch, conveyed the band's blue cool. After Dirty Three's raw outpouring, Pavement's profile was reduced to that of the smirking DJs they once were.
Over several albums Dirty Three perfected their style, which was to lilt a bit, only to erupt into violent über-crescendos that called to mind an Itzhak Perlman score for Spielberg's holocaust vigilante epic Schindler's Pissed. Members of the band became a kind of Funk Brothers for indie rock's dark horsepeople, backing such nihiluminaries as Nick Cave, Cat Power, Will Oldham and (Smog). On Dirty Three records, Ellis was always the madman scampering around Turner's garden. When that garden is undisturbed, though, it's a beautiful thing, as Turner has proven on releases with White as Tren Brothers, with Oldham (reciting excerpts from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali) as Marquis de Tren, with an all-star cast as Boxhead Ensemble, and on three solo full-lengths, the newest of which is Moth.
If Moth's nineteen untitled parts comprise a sequel to Marlan Rosa, that album's cresting ship is marooned somewhere, and its captain has carved himself out a domicile; barking dogs on "Part 1" help to ground the album. Rosa's violins and drums must have never washed ashore, but the island's other inhabitant, multi-instrumentalist (and Simon Joyner/Edith Frost/Pinetop Seven sideman) Mike Krassner, more than makes up for their absence with plaintive piano tones that would melt even David Grubbs' icy fingers. And how to describe Turner's playing? I don't know, "heroin-flamenco?"
He strikes chords with a kind of rolling, prophetic brush. He plucks strings as if he's confidently repairing or cleaning them with nervous tools. Yet there's something "organic" about his leapfrogging tranquilly up the fretboard's stream. His arpeggios sound like they're stumbling home from ex-lovers' porches. Middle Eastern influences are detectable, but clouded with purposeful imprecisions. Here and there the songs seem composed, but Turner's apparently reading from Polaroids instead of sheet music. The pieces' only flaw is that they're often abbreviated, as if Turner fliply stopped the tape (though the same technique wasn't so problematic on Turner's more wholly fragmented solo debut Tren Phantasma).
Moth is meditative, in a trance sense-- you can't concentrate to it, since its odd timing sidesteps willfulness, and its organs may leave you humming along like some guru's brain-spanked disciple. (Turner's word "Tren" might even be a shorthand for Zen trance, since "Zance" sounds stupid.) This album's baroque implosions prefigure what would happen if someone let the hot air out of Sigur Rós, and its dilapidated majesty suggests that it'd have made a fine soundtrack for the earthier moments in that popular, unflinchingly homoerotic trilogy about the gay wizard and the elves fighting to keep jewelry out of the penis-towers. (One of the Latin words for "ring," after all, is rectum.)
The listener won't mind Moth's retreads of other Turner progressions. The listener will be treated to un-pedaled acoustic pieces as well as backward loops and dubs as fragile as a tapestry of overlaid spiderwebs. The listener will envision Nick Drake warming up for "Black Eyed Dog." The listener will feel like the dentist's assistant just adjusted the sweet nitrous knob. The listener will think a bunch of abstract hokum-- gag, I seriously wrote in my notes that "Part 12 traces the savage architecture of the snot-trails generated by a weeping deadbeat dad." The listener will forget how funny it is that web searches for Mick Turner result in lists of sites that reference Mick Jagger and Tina Turner (and that Bill "Smog" Callahan's web-presence is outsized by that of Bill Callahan the Oakland Raiders coach). The listener will be reminded, even by Moth's nineteen exhalations, of how Dirty Three flies in the face of all the instrumental trignometrists: Their emotiveness makes them a rock band. | 2003-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-02-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Drag City | February 2, 2003 | 8 | 8c171fa8-f5bb-4629-b5a0-9dde08e244d6 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
More muted indie pop from the Brooklyn band, and this time they've teamed with kindred spirit Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing for a track. | More muted indie pop from the Brooklyn band, and this time they've teamed with kindred spirit Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing for a track. | Beach Fossils: What a Pleasure EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15161-what-a-pleasure-ep/ | What a Pleasure EP | If Beach Fossils' eponymous debut was the quintessential Brooklyn rooftop party soundtrack for last year, What a Pleasure is what happens when the party gets rained out. The band may not venture into genuinely depressing territory, but there's a wistful feeling that courses through it. On "Out in the Way", head Fossil Dustin Payseur and Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum sing in unison, "Everything feels different now here without you." The EP's final track is titled "Adversity". Clearly, this is a different look from the band who made being carefree sound so alluring on "Lazy Day".
Even though the song is about the moments that make you overwhelmed with happiness, "Fall Right In" sounds anxious and contemplative, like it's a referencing a love long since passed. The pensive guitar lines have something to do with the feeling, but it's mostly because Payseur's detached vocals are too plaintive to display the exuberance of romance. There's a similar disposition on "Face It", where he pledges to "give up the city life" for his paramour. These tunes create an interesting dichotomy-- joyous lyrics delivered solemnly.
The other tunes on What a Pleasure sound like scaled-back variations of themes explored to their fullest potential on the band's debut, which is odd considering how much more collaborative this record is. One of the biggest drawing points on Beach Fossils-- which Payseur wrote and recorded by himself-- was the way every instrument was written directly in relation to everything going on around it. It was carefully arranged in the way a jazz or classical piece might be. Here, Payseur wrote the songs along with bassist John Peña, and it shows. On certain songs, the bassline provides much of the instrumental melody during the verses, which spreads things out a little, but oses some of Payseur's compositional flair in the process. The aforementioned "Out in the Way" sounds like the exact midpoint between Beach Fossils [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| and Wild Nothing, which is very pretty but also a little superfluous.
This is rectified on "Calyer", where a sun shower of guitar work provides what is probably the EP's best moment. It's a tune that won't catch you as remarkable on the first few listens, until you start to notice all of the counter-melody blooming between the guitars. But this moment is fleeting, and a few short minutes later, the ending of "Adversity" is meant to sync right back into opener "Moments". It's one of the times where it seems like the songs on What a Pleasure bleed into each other, with the really bright ideas coming in small batches. It'll be interesting to see where Beach Fossils go from here, because What a Pleasure is the type of release that shows they're talented, but still have a little work to do fully capitalize on it. | 2011-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-03-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Captured Tracks | March 8, 2011 | 7.2 | 8c2189e5-a916-4e96-b753-de5013c1ac82 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
The experimental artist’s fifth solo album is among her best, a beautiful collection of minimalist ambient compositions in which no line extends for long without dissolving into an inky blot. | The experimental artist’s fifth solo album is among her best, a beautiful collection of minimalist ambient compositions in which no line extends for long without dissolving into an inky blot. | Laurel Halo: Atlas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laurel-halo-atlas/ | Atlas | “Atlas” is a weighty term for a weighty tome—hardbacked, oversized, cutting the whole world down into perfect-bound pages. To the mythologically inclined, it has other associations, too—namely, the weight of the world itself, resting heavily on a Greek Titan’s brawny shoulders. But whatever Laurel Halo may have been thinking when she hit upon the title, this strange, beguiling record has little in common with either reference. It offers neither the certainties of cartography nor the force required to sustain such an oppressive planetary burden. To the contrary: Halo’s fifth solo album maps a diaphanous universe in which no line extends for long without dissolving into an inky blot, and even the densest, most massive shapes might disintegrate beneath a puff of breath.
Halo—an American electronic musician, DJ, and composer who made her name in New York and Berlin, and recently relocated to Los Angeles, where she teaches at Cal Arts—has had a singular career, with no two records alike. Her earliest releases danced on the fringes of the nascent vaporwave movement; she has since explored avant-pop, splintered techno, and alien, biomorphic vocal treatments. In recent years, she has increasingly foregrounded abstraction and dissonance, and her new album is clearly an extension of the lines of inquiry behind 2018’s Raw Silk Uncut Wood and 2020’s Possessed soundtrack. Here as there, atmosphere and texture take precedence over rhythm or melody. But where Raw Silk Uncut Wood could meander, sometimes privileging process over outcome, Atlas—for all its seeming difficulty—is exponentially more invested in the experience of pleasure. Even its most impenetrable passages morph into gorgeous, sweeping strings or bittersweet piano cadenzas. It might be the most moving record of Halo’s career.
Atlas came together in 2020 and 2021, a period Halo has called “a disquieting and sleepy moment in all our lives.” For inspiration, she looked to things she was selecting for Awe, her monthly show on London online radio NTS: ambient music, electroacoustic composition, minimalism, and jazz piano. Another influence was the “slow-cinema” auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films she has praised for their “humor, hidden detail, and dream logic”—all qualities that animate Atlas. (The humor may be harder to pick out, but it’s there, I think, in the sheer bewilderingness of the record’s dissonance; its opacity, at points, verges on absurdism, like an existentialist joke.) A residency at Paris’ historic ina-GRM studios gave Halo the opportunity to run keyboard sketches through arcane electronic gizmos, producing an otherworldly palette that is neither strictly acoustic nor obviously digital. She also relied on a few close collaborators (saxophonist Bendik Giske, cellist Lucy Railton, violinist James Underwood, and, singing on “Belleville,” Coby Sey), yet their contributions tend to be routed back into the album’s murky matrix. Everything—even Halo’s own wordless, stacked vocal harmonies—is subservient to the foggy totality. Nothing survives vaporization; nothing remains whole.
The album begins conventionally enough, with a dusky swirl of strings that might belong to the familiar terrain of an act like Stars of the Lid. But as the sound expands, it becomes stranger. Its dimensions turn amorphous. Across the stereo spectrum, competing string passages swell and bleed into one another. Deep in the murk, piano chords chime as arrhythmically as church bells. Bows saw away at strings, but it is impossible to say how many players there might be, or even how many ensembles; it feels like standing in the hallway between two different orchestras as they tune up.
Soupy chaos defines the album. Again and again, Halo returns to those themes of density, clashing frequencies, and overcast colors. But submerged in the ambiguous gloom are melodies that occasionally rear their head, stealthy and triumphant, before plunging back down into the depths, never to be heard from again. In “Naked to the Light,” Halo plays a brief, searching refrain on the piano, repeating it with slight variation a handful of times, as though striving to frame an elusive question. In “Late Night Drive,” an echo of dub techno pulses faintly before a languid phrase bubbles up like the memory of a Hollywood musical, capturing all the tragic romance of Julia Holter’s Aviary or Lucrecia Dalt’s ¡Ay!. In “Sick Eros,” a fleeting orchestral flourish summons memories of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s unabashedly sentimental soundtrack to The Sheltering Sky.
Trying to make sense of Atlas can sometimes feel like searching for Rorschach blots in a Rothko. The tone is largely uniform, yet the mood is mercurial. Alluring and radiant yet perpetually slipping from your grasp, the music plays with disappearance the way most contemporary music uses repetition. The album’s simplest and sweetest track is “Belleville,” its centerpiece. For a minute and a half, Halo plays a gentle piano ballad before the piece blossoms into a mournfully ecstatic passage of strings and wordless singing. The passage lasts just six or seven seconds before falling silent, leaving only the piano in its wake. A less daring composer might have built upon the refrain, expanded it into a dramatic climax. Yet Halo seems to realize that to let it go on any longer would be overkill. Atlas derives its power from the tension between broad expanses of formlessness and sudden eruptions of destabilizing beauty. To me, this tender, elegiac album sounds like deathbed music—a flash of rapture while everything fades to black. | 2023-09-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-26T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Awe | September 26, 2023 | 8.1 | 8c25d49b-8efd-4856-bc8f-c93e51c1a4bc | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
N.Y. electronic duo Gatekeeper first released their extravagant, operatic new EP as a free torrent on Pirate Bay. The material is tighter and more expansive than what came before it, with their sense of absurdity deliriously heightened. | N.Y. electronic duo Gatekeeper first released their extravagant, operatic new EP as a free torrent on Pirate Bay. The material is tighter and more expansive than what came before it, with their sense of absurdity deliriously heightened. | Gatekeeper: Young Chronos EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18772-gatekeeper-young-chronos-ep/ | Young Chronos EP | Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross, the New York duo who record as Gatekeeper, produce planet-sized electronic works. At present their audience is relatively small, setting up a marked contrast between where they find themselves and where they'd seemingly like to be heading. Their last LP, the Hippos in Tanks release Exo, wilted under the strain of ideas at times, ultimately forging an uncertain path between acid house-inspired club jams and a fondness for the bombast of rock. On the Young Chronos EP, a free Pirate Bay torrent that's also available for 300 USB tokens from the Italian label Presto!?, they've kept the central tenets of their sound intact while solidifying their overall vision. This material is tighter and more expansive than what came before, with the sense of absurdity deliriously heightened.
If you've ever wondered what Montserrat Caballé would sound like if she necked a fistful of pills and teamed up with A Guy Called Gerald, this is as close as you'll ever get. Operatic vocals are threaded in and out of the EP, along with enough dramatic élan for Hollywood to finally consider giving up on "The Ride of The Valkyries". Essentially this is the sound of Gatekeeper capitalizing on the closing track of Exo, "Encarta", where they blew everything wide open via imposing choirs, a healthy sense of pretense, and beats that sounded like they were storming the palace at Versailles. One of the tracks on Young Chronos, the fantastically titled "Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven", begins with the kind of vigorous chanting that Exo closed out with, setting up a neat loop between one work and the other.
Another tie that binds this with prior Gatekeeper output is the feeling of high concept pranksters at work, albeit ones with a meagre budget compared to artists they’re obviously indebted to, such as the KLF and Malcolm McLaren. McLaren even tried his hand at opera fusion on the 1984 record Fans, to uneven effect. The tracks here are anything but backward looking, instead taking elements of dance music's past (knotty twists of acid, thundering jungle-inspired drum programing) and spewing them out in an unholy mangle that's uniquely theirs. It works better as a representation of Gatekeeper's vision than Exo, partly because it's a quickie EP with half the tracks under the three-minute mark. But it's also because the pomposity is so well executed. There are grand plans here, hatched with a sense of ridiculous self importance, and humor.
The different shades of Young Chronos include patient builds ("Imperatix"), wonderfully ludicrous slow-burn tracks ("Flame of Displeasure"), and something that resembles incidental music from a lost arthouse feature ("The Soil Has Soured"). The highs and lows come rattling so fast that it's frequently disorienting, with "Harvest" and "Hanseatic" both dipping into disappointingly straight acid grooves just when they appeared to be leaning further into eccentricity. Fortunately, Arkell and Ross keep acting on extravagant ideas throughout, upping the sense of scale and ambition from Exo to a point where it's difficult to imagine how loud and wide they could go next time out. At the very least this is a strong step in the right direction. A search for the Pirate Bay torrent at the time of writing indicates Young Chronos has 11 seeds and one leecher. Such grandiose dreams need a far bigger stage than that. | 2013-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Presto?! | November 13, 2013 | 6.4 | 8c26790e-331e-4d5a-919d-33a537c4cd2d | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s debut album traces the hole left by the loss of her faith, filling it in with wave-like acoustic phrases and a sharp-eyed attention to everyday details. | Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s debut album traces the hole left by the loss of her faith, filling it in with wave-like acoustic phrases and a sharp-eyed attention to everyday details. | Tomberlin : At Weddings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomberlin-at-weddings/ | At Weddings | On her debut album, Sarah Beth Tomberlin occasionally reaches for the profound. “To be a woman is to be in pain,” the Louisville-based singer-songwriter contends on “I’m Not Scared,” one of several songs on At Weddings that are, by and large, about feeling alone and scared. One track later, on “Seventeen,” she sings, “Love is mostly war/And war, what is it for?” Sweeping statements like these would risk feeling overblown if Tomberlin—who records and performs under her last name—didn’t seem so unimpressed by them. The line about womanhood is delivered with about the same gravity as her cataloging, later in the same song, of baseline needs like food and cash. As she ruminates on the question of love and war, Tomberlin asks, “What is up with that?” with the low-stakes curiosity of someone griping about bad weather.
Considering Tomberlin’s background, it’s unsurprising that she would be wary of profundity. After being raised and homeschooled in a strict Baptist household and briefly enrolling at a private Christian college when she was 16, Tomberlin felt her faith dissolving, and she turned to music to fill in the empty spaces it left behind. Reckoning with her religion meant reckoning with one of the great touchstones of her musical life: the hymns that she sang in church, once-familiar songs that grew strange as their fire-and-brimstone rhetoric felt increasingly problematic. While unmistakable traces of reverence spill from these hymns into Tomberlin’s secular music, radiating through her hushed, tender vocals, her songs forgo the ethereal realm and turn their attention to the quotidian.
You might say that At Weddings is a testament to the sanctity of the everyday. On it, Tomberlin memorializes the overcoming of obstacles—like having to get out of bed, or do homework when your heart is hurting—that could be passed off as trivial, but, compounded, make surviving each day feel like a small miracle. No incident is too minor to be picked up by her perceptive pen. Tomberlin zeroes in on feeling remorse for taking God’s name in vain, hunting for meaning in the way a partner says her name—the way the tiniest of remarks can destabilize you. The album’s overall aversion to melodrama crystallizes in a set of uneventful yet heart-wrenching lines that open “A Video Game”: “The day you fell out of love/Began like other days/…The edge that put you over/You can’t even recall.”
Again and again, subtlety proves potent. Tomberlin favors simple, undular musical phrases whose crests and troughs arrive with comforting regularity. “Any Other Way” hones in on a single melodic idea—it’s all Tomberlin needs to carry her as she chews over growing up and feeling awkward, guilty, and a little out of control. The album’s instrumentation is similarly understated, relying mostly on broken piano chords and fingerpicked guitars. All of it is drenched in so much reverb that notes hang in the air long after they’re played, like humidity after rainfall. On the whole, the simplicity of Tomberlin’s writing feels like a kindness to the listener—these songs don’t demand rigorous attention, or catch you off guard. Life is taxing enough as it is, they seem to say.
The singles released ahead of At Weddings were heralded by a bevy of flattering comparisons. For her pensiveness, she has been held up to For Emma-era Bon Iver—though, truth be told, that likeness manifests before you press play on either album, as both are handed down with origin stories so captivating that it’s hard not to read them in to every lyric and melody. For her spacious, ambient production, Tomberlin gets compared to Grouper. To my mind, early Sharon Van Etten is another fitting analog—confessional tone, close harmonies, pared-down guitar, and a calm approach to personal chaos (“I am a tornado,” they both admit on their respective songs titled after the natural disaster) define both women’s debuts.
Van Etten changed course after her first album, following it up with Epic, on which she is fiercer and nervier. If Tomberlin charts a similar path, it will have been foreshadowed by one particular song on At Weddings. Arriving toward the end of the album, “Self-Help” cuts deeper than anything preceding it, from its visceral opening lines—“Electrocuted in the bathtub/Yellow-black my bruises become”—to the jolting drone that splits the track down the middle. Here, some of the album’s darkest sentiments bare their fangs. Regardless of what this may or may not indicate about Tomberlin’s future musical endeavors, At Weddings remains remarkable for its grace, candor, and composure. For now, with or without religion, Tomberlin seems equipped to keep her demons at bay. | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | August 17, 2018 | 7.5 | 8c26eba2-5d9a-42e1-87d5-9d92c077bb36 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
The quietly virtuosic Parisian producer STWO worked on Drake’s “Weston Road Flows” from VIEWS, and his debut EP is chock-full of impressive guest vocalists, testifying to his ear for talent. | The quietly virtuosic Parisian producer STWO worked on Drake’s “Weston Road Flows” from VIEWS, and his debut EP is chock-full of impressive guest vocalists, testifying to his ear for talent. | STWO: D.T.S.N.T. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22190-dtsnt/ | D.T.S.N.T. | In the final minute of Drake’s “Weston Road Flows,” the drums fade out and Aubrey goes in, multiplying the intensity of his bars. It’s the most potent section of a deeply nostalgic song on a deeply nostalgic album; as if to acknowledge that, the production contracts and chords blur together in a clear evocation of the production on the Toronto rapper’s early projects.
The deft effect was contributed by the 24-year-old producer STWO (pronounced Stu), a Parisian who moved to Drake’s hometown in early 2015. STWO, whose real name is Steven Vidal, is worth seeking out if, like Drake, you’re a vocalist looking to flex your abilities. On his new EP, D.T.S.N.T., he makes room for a globally sourced array of collaborators, giving Rotterdam’s Sevdaliza, Sydney’s MK Grands and the Peruvian-born A. Chal, among many others, a chance to show off their voices.
These names may not be familiar to you—they certainly weren’t to me before D.T.S.N.T. But all of them represent the aesthetic offspring of artists like the Weeknd and James Blake. STWO’s collaborators thrive over the kinds of beats that producers like Noah “40” Shebib, Clams Casino, and Shlohmo mastered long ago. The drums are programmed and flat, the mix is smoky and these beautiful voices float atop it all, creating a drugged-out haze that will be exhaustingly familiar to anyone who’s kept an eye on the colliding continents of R&B and (so-called) alt-R&B in the last five years.
The E.P. is almost long enough to be considered an album, as Vidal acknowledged shortly before finishing it up in March, and is chock-full of impressive vocal takes, testifying to the young producer’s ear for talent. The L.A.-based singer Brent Faiyaz dominates one of the stronger offerings, “Insecure,” showcasing range and power as he sings about his trust issues. Daniel Caesar, a Toronto vocalist who at times sounds a little like Frank Ocean and Amir Obe, a Detroit native whose flow is reminiscent of Drake’s, perform their respective impressions to great effect on “Fill the Void.”
STWO shares a manager with the Montreal-based producer Kaytranada, whose collaborator-filled debut LP from earlier this year shares some qualities with D.T.S.N.T. But Vidal’s approach is significantly different from that of his friend: Where Kaytranada’s beats bear a clear signature, it’s difficult to pick out a calling card that distinguishes Vidal from the producers who have influenced him. His immaculately produced soundscapes do a great service to his vocalists, and Vidal has talked about how it’s a priority for him to make them sound their best. But he’s lowered his own voice to a whisper.
This disappearing act is evident on the record’s strongest songs. The appropriately-named single “Haunted,” owes much of its character to Sevdaliza, her torrid alto atop synth and bass, condensing the potential energy of the beat into a full-on quiet storm. The beat on “Angeles,” another standout, starts with an explosion of synths accompanying MK Grand’s falsetto. But the production attends the needs of the vocals too closely to make any mark at all.
The record also suffers from a lack of lyrical focus, an element that Vidal has explicitly admitted that he is not interested in (which is fair, given that he only started speaking English fluently within the last several years). That inattention robs D.T.S.N.T. of any kind of narrative build. One song flows smoothly into the next with few surprises and no developments, save for an abrupt change in sound on the last track, “Blue Sky.” STWO told The Fader that the record’s title stands for “Down To Say Nice Things,” though when the project was first announced it was called Distant. Both names are apt: they communicate the blandness that plagues an otherwise solid project.
STWO wasn’t credited for his work on “Weston Road Flows” when VIEWS came out. Drake was so convinced that 40 had made the final part of the beat that the rapper was able to convince his faithful producer that the work was his own. That’s indicative of just how voiceless STWO’s production has been to this point. The overriding skill he demonstrates on D.T.S.N.T. is an ability to reflect his collaborators’ shine back onto them. That’s an enviable talent for a background player. But if STWO aspires to stardom, he’ll need to be a little more selfish.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified singer Brent Faiyaz as being from Charlotte. He lives in L.A. | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ultra / HW&W | July 29, 2016 | 6.3 | 8c2bc89b-706e-42a4-be98-e7cdfbac682e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Famed producer (U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel) releases his latest set of low-key singer-songwriter music. | Famed producer (U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel) releases his latest set of low-key singer-songwriter music. | Daniel Lanois: Belladonna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4951-belladonna/ | Belladonna | Daniel Lanois is primarily a producer, but what he's always wanted to do is perform. Known for twiddling nobs for U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, and even Willie Nelson, Lanois has always appeared to want out of the constricted control room and onto the open stage, and over the past two decades, he has made a handful of albums full of low-key singer-songwriter fare as well as numerous ambient-oriented collaborations with Brain Eno. Needless to say, these records sound great, but they don't always hold up extremely well. Like Quentin Tarantino delivering a dramatic line reading, Lanois's considerable talents are weakest when it comes to composition. Inspired by a trip to Mexico, Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.
Belladonna refers to the herb Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade, whose poison results in, among other symptoms, total loss of voice-- which makes it a particularly apt title for an album of instrumentals. The overall scheme is almost soundtrack-like in nature, or rather like a nature soundtrack. Rumbling feedback on opener "Two Worlds" suggests storms on the horizon, time-delay shots of clouds morphing rapidly past-- New Agey mood scenes conveying the passage of time or the amorality of an arid desert floor. The songs that follow take a similar tack, and song titles refer to south-of-the-border locales or fauna -- "Oaxaca", "Agave", "Desert Rose", "Todos Santos" -- giving specificity to the vague evocations of the music. For better or worse, such earthly signposts work to ground the music's spacey ambience.
Lanois communicates this ethereality mostly through his pedal steel, which recalls Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, his 1983 collaboration with Eno. Lanois manages to coax some lovely textures and melodies out of the instrument, as on the florid notes of "Desert Rose" and "Carla", but typically it gets lost among the other elements, proving the least compelling element on the album. As a result, the songs often fold into one another, distinguishable only by inspired flourishes like the reggae rhythms of "Frozen", the Mariachi horns on "Agave" and Brad Mehldau's sparkling keyboard melodies on "Sketches". Lanois is aiming for a kind of ascetic aesthetic, with each song a sort of musical haiku: concise, disciplined, sublime. But on Belladonna less is not more, but merely much less. The album is so stuffy and self-serious that it practically demands your respect and admiration. However, it rarely commands your attention, so it doesn't reward much of anything. | 2005-08-21T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2005-08-21T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph / Anti- | August 21, 2005 | 3.8 | 8c2ec6c7-7d8e-419c-96ce-6eedb697ba03 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Rather than repeat the 80s indie pop they'd so expertly nailed, Pains trade up to 90s-style alt-rock-- a potentially risky gamble-- and nail that too. | Rather than repeat the 80s indie pop they'd so expertly nailed, Pains trade up to 90s-style alt-rock-- a potentially risky gamble-- and nail that too. | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15270-belong/ | Belong | The Pains of Being Pure at Heart landed with a bookish and fuzzy aesthetic, the sound of ace indie pop students mimicking their heroes. Yet the band has been forthcoming in their love of crossover alternative rock, and on their second LP, Belong, Pains link up with Flood and Alan Moulder, the superproducers who manned the boards for a number of 90s titans-- Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, U2, Depeche Mode, and PJ Harvey just to name a few. Coming after a scrappy, low-profile debut, this is the sort of power move that used to have cred-conscious listeners crying "sell-out!" (remember that word?), but fortunately, Belong is a bigger, bolder, and brighter follow-up that adds new dimensions to the Pains' sound while nearly equaling the songwriting of their debut.
The first three tracks on Belong-- the title track, "Heaven's Gonna Happen Now", and "Heart in Your Heartbreak"-- make up the strongest run the Pains have put together. That's in large part because, while they feature the seamless verse-chorus-bridge transitions the debut had in spades, they sound like actual 90s alt-rock radio hits. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart wasn't as lo-fi as it was often made out to be, but it didn't allow for the thrilling deluges of fuzz or the punchy clarity on this opening trio of tracks. Later, Pains nudge themselves slightly out of their comfort zone, replicating the motorbike roar of JAMC on "Girl of 1,000 Dreams" or the bliss of My Bloody Valentine on "Strange".
Even with their shiny makeover, the most noticeable alteration is that Kip Berman is no longer just a lead singer-- he's a frontman as well. While maintaining his soft, lisping lilt, he's now much higher in the mix, giving the singalong hooks of "Heart in Your Heartbreak" and "Too Tough" an underlined emphasis. His lyrics are also more inclusive; he's dropping the puns and arch prose of its predecessor for magnanimous songs about you, we, and us. But this newfound stress on speaking directly to the listener doesn't come without its awkward growth spurts: It's worth questioning whether striving for the perfect chorus at times comes at the cost of fully thought-out verses. The group's momentum also gets occasionally jarred by a stray lyric that can be overreaching or undercooked.
And yet, even the dodgiest lyrics on Belong don't really come off as pandering to me so much as a reminder of the margin for error inherent in a move this brave and necessary. Having dabbled in brighter production and a Saint Etienne remix on their Higher Than the Stars EP, it was evident that the Pains were trying to figure an exit strategy from a narrow, reverent sound they utterly nailed the first time around. And considering the game plans of recent New York bands that faced the same struggle-- either buy time by repeating themselves (like the Strokes or Interpol) or screw the pooch with a charmless, big-budget disaster (like the Strokes or Interpol)-- it's no small achievement that Belong transcends its time-coded sound as expertly as their self-titled did. | 2011-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | April 1, 2011 | 8.2 | 8c33c59f-3239-48d7-9512-e780fa96c4b5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The first three records from the R&B group that came out of “Soul Train” show their evolution from a schmaltzy cash-grab to a bona fide bringer of disco joy. | The first three records from the R&B group that came out of “Soul Train” show their evolution from a schmaltzy cash-grab to a bona fide bringer of disco joy. | Shalamar: Uptown Festival / Disco Gardens / Big Fun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shalamar-uptown-festival-disco-gardens-big-fun/ | Uptown Festival / Disco Gardens / Big Fun | The constant churn of an underground sound leads to mainstream success leads to brazen attempts to cash out. For every genre-shattering release, there are thousands of way-more-terrible versions of that release, all blatantly attempting to strike gold. In the late ’70s, disco’s made the ascent from the R&B-meets-psychedelic sound found in black, Italian, Latino and gay nightclubs and house parties to the schmaltz born in the wake of Saturday Night Fever’s massive global success. In Los Angeles, “Soul Train”—the influential syndicated dance television program that was revolutionary in its depictions of black American music—was undergoing a shift. Creator and host Don Cornelius bristled at the advent of disco music, but his show was a national phenomenon and set so many trends that he didn’t want to miss out on a chance to leverage his platform to dip a toe onto the dancefloor under the mirror ball.
Cornelius partnered with “Soul Train” talent coordinator Dick Griffey to launch Soul Train Records and for their first act, created a packaged pop-disco group they called Shalamar. This somewhat crass marketing tactic led to the Shalamar experiment’s first release, 1977’s Uptown Festival. Using session singers to get the album out quickly, Festival is a naked cash grab posing as a fully-formed concept. Save for the title track—a medley of familiar Motown standards laid over a disco beat—the record is completely forgettable unless used as a marketing case study and doesn’t have a ton of replayability.
However, just because the album wasn’t good doesn’t mean that album wasn’t successful. The record charted thanks to the promotional powerhouse of “Soul Train” backing it. After the first album proved successful, the follow-up would take a big step in associating Shalamar with “Train” forever.
Enter Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel—two “Soul Train” dancers and members of a makeshift crew of “Soul Train” personalities known as the Waack Dancers (the name, per a 1978 Ebony profile, was just randomly made up). Like the dance legend Fred “Rerun” Berry, the duo was immensely popular on the program as visionaries of style and moves that were never before seen on such a wide platform. Watley was the always-smiling female lead who set style trends with her unique fashion sense and model-level good looks. Daniel—the man who debuted the Moonwalk on national television, which led to his recruitment by Michael Jackson as unofficial muse and official dance coordinator—was the innovator, capturing attention via his unique moves. In a Los Angeles Times interview from the late ’80s, Cornelius was blunt about how Shalamar came to be. “The group’s lead singer, Gary Mumford was excellent. I decided to replace the background people, however, with two ‘Soul Train’ dancers who would work behind Gary. Since Jody and Jeffrey were the most recognizable dancers on the show, then, I said, ‘Let’s use them. My partner said, ‘Jody Watley can’t sing.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, only the look matters.’”
To compensate for the lack of vocal talent, Griffey recruited Gerald Brown and producer Leon Sylvers III and the new incarnation of Shalamar debuted on 1978’s Disco Gardens. The album was released on Griffey’s SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records) instead of Soul Train, as Cornelius moved on from the nascent label to focus on expanding the Soul Train brand via national syndication. SOLAR would later find larger success as a home of R&B by applying the Motown formula of record creation to black radio so effectively that The New York Times saw fit to run a profile of Griffey in 1980 with the not-at-all-subtle headline “Solar Records could be the Motown of the 80s.”
As an album, Garden serves as a great relic of disco’s waning influence on pop and R&B. Shalamar’s Disco Gardens could be slid into any contemporary disco mix without blinking an eye, but the novelty of the album blunts its impact a bit. In a nod towards the future, Leon Sylvers III pivoted the album’s sound from all-disco towards more traditional R&B ballads (“Lovely Lady”) and the black adult contemporary pop sound that would come to be known as the SOLAR sound in the ’80s.
After Gardens, Gerald Brown’s tenure as Shalamar’s male lead lasted only one album, as disputes about appropriate payment (an all-too-familiar refrain for those studying the history of black music in America) led to his departure from the group. Griffey’s replacement was Howard Hewett, an immensely talented singer from Akron, Ohio who also spent time dancing on “Soul Train” before being added to the group for the next Shalamar album, 1979’s appropriately-titled Big Fun.
Big Fun is the textbook for what made disco, well, fun (please just look at its cover). A thumping four-on-the-floor drum rhythm with plenty of identifiable hi-hat and basslines (the latter of which were laid down by Sylvers himself) incorporated into lasagna-thick layers of instrumentalization all come to a head on this album, specifically standout tracks “Let’s Find the Time for Love,” “I Owe You One,” and “Right in the Socket.” Fun also features the biggest single in the group's history, “The Second Time Around” which showcases Hewett’s apple-butter-smooth vocal stylings over a beat built for two-stepping. Good disco music should make you feel like you have an uncontrollable urge to throw your ass around and whether that’s on the dance floor or in the bedroom is your call. Big Fun is good disco music.
After the success of Fun (it hit at No. 4 on the R&B chart and No. 23 on the Billboard 200), the Hewett/Watley/Daniel/Sylvers lineup worked together for four more albums until Daniel and Watley left the group in 1983 due in equal parts to dissatisfaction with SOLAR and Watley’s solo career taking off. Shalamar’s legacy lives through those who grew up in black households in the UK and America. While the group started as a formulaic product trying to glom on disco’s popularity, they found their voice over the years by focusing on one goal: making people dance. It’s hard to have multiple hits as it is, but to grow and develop as artists while giving you solid tunes to dance to on every album? Give your long-overdue flowers to Shalamar. | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | null | May 26, 2018 | 4.2 | 8c367ea0-9530-49ea-badb-a3fa2967e70f | Ernest Wilkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ernest-wilkins/ | |
Two veteran German producers come together for an outstanding album that, despite its lengthy tracks, remains oddly accessible. Here they draw on all the styles they've touched on in the past, from dubby minimal techno to house to ambient. | Two veteran German producers come together for an outstanding album that, despite its lengthy tracks, remains oddly accessible. Here they draw on all the styles they've touched on in the past, from dubby minimal techno to house to ambient. | Move D / Benjamin Brunn: Songs from the Beehive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12539-songs-from-the-beehive/ | Songs from the Beehive | Move D and Benjamin Brunn's Songs from the Beehive counts as one of the year's most idiosyncratic electronic releases. A collaboration between Germans David Moufang (Move D) and Brunn, Songs overlaps little with signpost trends of the past few years, instead grasping for the type of been-there thwump-and-click so familiar you'll struggle to find a buzz-word buzzier than "techno." Drawing on almost all of its creators' past dalliances-- trip-hop, trance, minimal, dub, ambient-- Songs is an album that constantly whispers in your year, sometimes literally, and builds damp, murky headspaces out of its elliptical grooves.
That Songs trends towards the classic techno sounds shouldn't come as a huge surprise: Moufang has been an underground favorite since the early 1990s and Brunn has been releasing singles since 1999. And while this review is a little late on the come-up, make no mistake: Songs marks something of a breakthrough for Brunn and especially Moufang, the type of album that makes even electronic junkies-- those who have long praised Moufang's catalogue-- sit up and notice.
Songs consists of seven long-form tracks, most of which aim to soundtrack the soft-palate dancefloor in the back of your head. "Love the One You're With" encapsulates this cloistered clubby-ness, opening Songs with a chopped vocal sample and slow-change synth notes. A rhythmic chirp, stunted bass sequence, and spacey, panning notes are introduced slowly, like how an innertube sits motionless for a few moments as the motorboat tenses the line. The ingredients undoubtedly sound familiar, but Brunn and Moufang make subtle upgrades: The high-pitched chirp that anchors the track sounds like an insect, while the clipped vocals are indecipherable speech, not song.
"Love the One You're With" is the first of three long tracks to open Songs, which gives the opening 40 minutes of the album a hazy, marathon feel. "Honey" ramps up the fastest, beginning with skittish bass notes before Moufang and Brunn coax out a quick 4/4 kick. The track is an exercise in tempo: Long ambient drones contrast with flurries of rainbow notes and taut rhythms. "Velvet Paws" searches purposefully without ever wandering, as Moufang and Brunn tend to the track's early morning orbits with patient, veteran fingers.
The prize at the end of the three-headed marathon is Songs' most singular track, "Like a Restless Sea", which loops a whispered refrain-- "The wind that moves the trees like a restless sea"-- over distended, subtly rhythmic keyboard noise. Indeed, most of the motion in the track is provided by its hushed voice-- a stressed syllable on "rest" serves as the track's tether-- and the result sounds like Moufang and Brunn singing a lullaby to house music.
Album closer "Radar", clocking in at nearly 21 minutes, sounds forward and flirtatious, a bulbous, trance-y floor-filler that dissipates into murky, rhythmic clatter and one miniature, exhilarated voice. Moufang and Brunn have long proved themselves bright, dedicated composers, but Songs represents a new high for both: a careful, vibrant long-player from two unheralded 12" warriors that should make thoughts and soles move with equal grace. | 2009-01-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2009-01-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smallville | January 12, 2009 | 8.1 | 8c37cb9b-4883-4091-9d55-ed6a4c3321f9 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
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