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More science than fiction, Detroit techno maven Erika Sherman’s lean and icy new album plugs into the subtle environmental flux of an alien planet. | More science than fiction, Detroit techno maven Erika Sherman’s lean and icy new album plugs into the subtle environmental flux of an alien planet. | Erika: Anevite Void | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/erika-anevite-void/ | Anevite Void | Without wishing to spoil one of the best science fiction movies of the 1970s—you’ve had long enough to watch it, surely—there’s a crushing scene in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running that envisions a biome floating through deep space, its greenery sustained in perpetuity by a loyal robot. This off-world equilibrium can run and run, is the idea, at least until the next civilization chances upon it. The closed-system techno of Detroit authority Erika operates on the same principle.
Anevite Void is Erika Sherman’s second full album, though she’s been active in her local scene for nearly three decades. Now known as both a DJ and live act, Sherman was drafted into electro duo Ectomorph in the late ’90s to replace Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. She’s among the core personnel of Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit record label founded in 1994 by academic-turned-DJ Brendan M. Gillen (aka BMG) on the nagging instruction of “ancient voices” who repeatedly urged him to dump his girlfriend and start making techno.
There’s a definite wigginess to the I.T. worldview, which prescribes 14-hour raves and audiophile sound quality in search of an escape from the mainframe. Some artists on the label have taken their music in especially idiosyncratic directions: Alpha 606’s cranked-up take on electro’s Cuban roots; the crusty cassette house of I.B.M. (an alias of Hieroglyphic Being); I-F’s schlocky and formative “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass.” Erika’s music is more like the label’s neutral atomic core, an experiment in technoid equilibrium built from a space station’s worth of gear. (The Anevite Void liner notes include a thank you to “my closest friends and family”: 27 bits of kit from Roland, genoQs, Moog, et al.) With all that technology at her disposal you might expect the results to feel dense and overworked, but Anevite Void is rather sparsely populated. There’s a concept, of course: the “irregular life cycles” of a strange planet—half rock desert, half deep forest—orbited by three suns, with each track describing what she calls the “acts of survival of the biomes.” Perhaps a drone robot is lurking with a battered watering can, but certainly there’s no humanoid life.
If Sherman’s I.T. labelmates dream of ancient aliens and space invaders, Erika’s imagination is more science than fiction. Sometimes her systems are barely breathing, all rhythm reduced to the ticking of vital signs, like a bank of hospital monitors hooked up to a meditating monk. After the obligatory ambient opening track, “Opal Haze” enters on a ripple of hi-tech jazz in the Detroit fashion: tight blank kicks, a squelch of bass notes, fizzling hats. “Desert Red” rolls forth on a bottled-up bassline as a billion synapses blink on and off. On “Anion,” the gaseous remains of ’90s IDM evaporate on contact.
Sherman’s music can come across as purist to the point of austerity, but her own tastes are omnivorous, thanks in part to a past life as a programmer on student station WCBN-FM. (Many Detroiters will credit the city’s history of adventurous freeform radio for their eclectic listening habits.) While the I.T. crew’s No Way Back parties—the stuff of legend for scene outsiders—have burnished her reputation as a master selector of the dark and hypnotic, in her studio the dancefloor feels eons away. Gillen has compared her tracks to “[Charles] Darwin’s field drawings, very free and organic.” Interviewed in 2015, Sherman explained that she usually listens to the sounds around her at home—“echoing car stereos, the weather, a toilet flushing, heels on tile”—and sometimes blocks them out with drum machines and synthesizers.
At moments, especially when the analog gear is most present, like the wobbly synths of “Tomorrow’s Fires,” you could almost imagine no time had passed since this type of ultra-cool, ultra-clean techno first appeared on Detroit labels like Planet E. But take a small leap and imagine electro not so much as a genre, built from this type of kick or that type of snare, but as a dimension, an endless plane of contemplation. If you want it, it’s always there, this platonic zone of endlessly pulsating forms, drifting on a distant lifeworld, waiting for someone to pick up the signal. | 2023-02-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-17T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Interdimensional Transmissions | February 17, 2023 | 7.2 | 8e2a84bf-2a91-4e8f-b79a-72441d07b564 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
On what the band has said is its final album, Frog Eyes sound galvanized by the prospect of bowing out, resulting in their strongest record in years. | On what the band has said is its final album, Frog Eyes sound galvanized by the prospect of bowing out, resulting in their strongest record in years. | Frog Eyes: Violet Psalms | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frog-eyes-violet-psalms/ | Violet Psalms | Frog Eyes are a great band fated to be underrated: acclaimed but not canonized, productive but not prolific, established but not famous. They have never enjoyed the crossover success of indie-rock stars Spencer Krug (a former member) or Dan Bejar (a frequent collaborator), though they aren’t exactly languishing in obscurity, either. They are the kind of reliable stalwarts who release an album every two or three years to mild but certain praise—just consistent enough to take them for granted. If, as the band insists, Violet Psalms is to be their final record, “underappreciated” seems bound to be their legacy. We will miss Frog Eyes when they’re gone.
We nearly lost them once before—permanently, and for more harrowing reasons. In the fall of 2013, two days after completing Carey’s Cold Spring, lead singer, guitarist, and frontman Carey Mercer was diagnosed with throat cancer, a revelation that would keep the band off the road for years and cast the album unavoidably in the light of grim circumstance. Mercer has since recovered; their follow-up, 2015’s Pickpocket’s Locket, was recorded in part while Mercer underwent radiation treatment, and the resulting music had a surprisingly sprightly, playful exuberance, given his condition. It is a cruel irony that Frog Eyes are poised to disband so soon after evading tragedy—especially given that Mercer re-emerged as, in his own words, “a stronger singer now than I ever was.”
As an ending, Violet Psalms is the last testament of a band that even after 17 tenacious years remains relevant and indispensable. That it is also the strongest Frog Eyes album since 2007’s sprawling rock epic Tears of the Valedictorian is a happy concurrence. Or perhaps Mercer and his talented bandmates—drummer Melanie Campbell, bassist Terri Upton, and keyboardist Shyla Seller—were galvanized by the prospect of bowing out and invigorated every stroke of this record with dying-breath intensity and care. Either way, Violet Psalms feels concentrated and energized, more aggressively frenetic than the band has sounded in years. As endings go, it is more raging than going gentle.
Mercer has described the recording of Violet Psalms as an effort to return to the beginning. “We were trying to pretend it was our first record,” he has said, aspiring to the freedom felt “when there’s no expectation that anyone will actually listen.” It was recorded in the basement of the house Mercer shares with Campbell in Victoria, British Columbia, and is absent some of the more extravagant guest contributions notable on previous releases, such as the florid string arrangements Krug provided on Pickpocket’s Locket. Yet this is not the back-to-basics album suggested by that account of its making. These songs feel distinctly robust. The production is rich and detail-heavy; the instrumentation is elaborate and diverse. Even the reverb sounds strangely ornate.
Opener “A Strand of Blue Stars” begins with much the same distorted sprawl as “A Flower in a Glove,” the nine-minute introduction to Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, and Frog Eyes aficionados will feel on familiar ground as Mercer exhorts the listener to “Be the fire/Be the ruler/Be the squire,” with cryptic verve. But “A Strand of Blue Stars” never wends its way into the curlicues of noodling one expects of a Frog Eyes barn-burner; in fact it doesn’t digress at all, and comes to a close after a sensible four and a half minutes, with renewed and surprising focus. Mercer’s songs are often complex to the point of being elusive, at times meandering into chaos. Here his efforts feel distilled and lucid. The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.
“Idea Man” has the brisk zeal of a pop song, its eponymous hook crashing against the waves of Campbell’s crisp snare as ethereal backing vocals wave hello to “daughters in the sand.” “Don’t Sleep Under Stars,” meanwhile, brings out more of the propulsive rock’n’roll enthusiasm that has occasionally earned Mercer comparisons to Bruce Springsteen: His cries of “Don’t rock under the sun!” put him unmistakably in Boss territory, which you can hear him fairly delighting in. And the yearning, angst-ridden childhood battle cry “Itch of Summer Knees” (a quintessential Frog Eyes title) careens ahead with a sugar rush of synthesizer and guitar, as Mercer imagines himself a 13-year-old going crazy in a suffocating place. “I abhor this town!” he wails, the sad lament swallowed up in a whirl of reverb and distortion.
Through it all, that wail remains the centerpiece: the irreplicable signature touch that defines the Frog Eyes sound. Mercer’s singular voice, nightmare-bent and horror-pained, has put him in league with such eccentric vocalists as Tom Waits and Frank Black, and he shares with them the status of the truly inimitable. That his voice survived throat cancer undiminished is all the more extraordinary. It’s what gives Violet Psalms its otherworldly power—especially on its two final songs, “Unconscious Missive” and “Pay for Fire,” heartening demonstrations of Mercer’s expressiveness and range. His falsetto yawp on the last song, which finishes with a maelstrom of electric guitar and Mercer’s mysterious, moving declaration that “hell is the sun,” concludes as a showcase of Frog Eyes’ strengths. It’s a poignant end for a band never accorded their proper due—until, perhaps, after they are gone. | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Paper Bag | May 18, 2018 | 7.7 | 8e37bde1-655e-4edb-905d-cb3fb181bccf | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
Composer Peter Broderick manages to make simple, beautiful post-classical music with a distinctive personality. His new EP collects five tracks taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin. | Composer Peter Broderick manages to make simple, beautiful post-classical music with a distinctive personality. His new EP collects five tracks taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin. | Peter Broderick: Grunewald | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22684-grunewald/ | Grunewald | Composer Peter Broderick has spent the past ten years crafting consistently strong post-classical music, but on last August’s piano-only Partners he seemed to uncover a new gravitas and substance in his limpid, clear language. The inherent challenge with producing minimalistic music is figuring out how to infuse humanity and new ideas into work with only a handful of notes, and to avoid a reliance on vacant “prettiness.” On Partners, Broderick’s music remained stirring and evocative, but there was something new in it: a deeper injection of his personality, and a larger sense of how that plays into his relationship with his own compositions. Now, just a few months later, he returns with follow-up EP Grunewald, but rather than continue to expand on Partners’ developments, it sees him returning to the less vital, more ephemeral work of his past.
To be clear, Grunewald is less of a regression for Broderick than an amiable walk down memory lane. This graceful-but-slight release collects five tracks previously issued across two discs (one Japanese, one Taiwanese) that were taken from a single day’s live recording in Berlin. Grunewald takes its name from a beloved local church which functioned as a hub for other Berlin-based experimentalists from the Erased Tapes label constellation like Nils Frahm, seeming to provide inspiration for all those who passed its door, including Broderick here. As a result, Grunewald is Broderick’s way of marking the importance of both the place and time in the lives of him and the other musicians who’ve been impacted by it.
Like Partners, Grunewald is an entirely solo effort, featuring Broderick unaccompanied on piano, violin, and—on the opener “Goodnight”—a bit of vocals. Broderick’s use of his voice on Partners provided one of that album’s highlights, an arresting cover of Irish folk singer Brigid Mae Power’s “Sometimes.” On “Goodnight,” one of four piano-only numbers, he doesn’t quite sing as much as moan and coo on top of slow, plaintively struck chords. Broderick’s instincts for when to use vocals to enrich his minimalist performances are strong—sometimes he will even drop in a snippet of conversational speech, such as on Partners’ “Sometimes.” But the instrumentation of “Goodnight” is so bare and simple as to make it a trivial confection, more ambience than song. “Violin Solo, No. 1,” positioned as the middle of five tracks, provides another nice textural break amidst the four piano tracks, but is no more than advertised—a nice and brief minor key solo on violin.
The dark-night journey “Low Light” and the reflective “Eyes Closed and Traveling” offer entrancing melodies and more depth than “Goodnight,” but Grunewald’s clear highlight is “It’s a Storm When I Sleep.” Buoyed by Broderick’s thundering take on Alberti-style bass, he produces a cacophonous-yet-soothing drone that carries on for nearly eight minutes. A shorter version would have been interesting on its own, but stretched out here, it becomes formidable, challenging, and meditative. Though marooned amidst the lighter pieces here, it is suggestive of some of the new directions Broderick would take in making the leap from “pretty” to “profound.” | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Erased Tapes | December 16, 2016 | 6.7 | 8e3b0153-43b9-4c35-8ff7-e0a699c9b5c3 | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The trio’s debut is an exercise in post-punk and no-wave galvanism crafted from throbbing bass, tight-zipped drumbeats, and buzzing synths. | The trio’s debut is an exercise in post-punk and no-wave galvanism crafted from throbbing bass, tight-zipped drumbeats, and buzzing synths. | Automatic: Signal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/automatic-signal/ | Signal | If Los Angeles trio Automatic had been around in 1978, they’d probably play at the same clubs as their hometown heroes the Go-Go’s—they’re named after the band’s ominous 1982 single. On “Automatic,” Belinda Carlisle hovers over every word like Victor Frankenstein awaiting his monster’s first breath. “No thought, automatic,” her voice clicks. The sentiment is still menacing today, with our necks craned over our phones. With every hypnotic bassline and quotidian criticism on their debut album Signal, Izzy Glaudini, Lola Dompé, and Halle Saxon carry the torch of post-punk precision.
The band also has a personal connection to this era of foreboding stares and doomy lyricism: Their percussive engine Lola Dompé is the daughter of Bauhaus drummer Kevin Haskins. Automatic prefer brighter colors, but Signal has a fair amount of darkness and even spookiness to it. The band’s first collection of songs since forming in 2017 is an exercise in post-punk and no-wave galvanism, setting chilly motorik rhythms against contemplations of zombie robots and death.
Automatic are minimalists crafting songs with mostly throbbing bass, tight-zipped drumbeats, and synths that evoke the buzz of neon lighting. Album standout “Highway,” which recalls New Order’s “Blue Monday,” has only one lyric (“I drive all night”) but the music captures the restless desire to escape. The drumbeat has the crunchy propulsion of tires running over gravel; shallow bleeps emerge and recede like stripes of road paint. Though most of the production is sparse and controlled, Signal is rich with late-’70s genre influence: “Humanoid” references the psychedelic goth-rock of Bauhaus or Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop,” while the eerie vocals and post-punk morbidity of “Suicide in Texas” are reminiscent of Joy Division.
A fog of apathy plagues Signal. It’s in the repetitive nights out on “Strange Conversations,” the stubborn romantic proclamation of “I Love You, Fine,” and one particularly depressing assertion from lead single “Calling It”: “Emotion is always out of reach.” Glaudini’s deadpan lead vocal suggests the trio has given up hope, or that their hearts have been taken over by a tangle of wires and chrome. “Oh look at me/Machinery of modern life,” goes the anxious title track. We’re all another cog in the machine. “It’s not enough to be alive,” Glaudini chirps. She’s looking “through satellites or lonely nights unsatisfied” for a guiding mechanical transmission. By song’s end, she’s drawn “to wash away the man” in her. Does she seek to scrub away the stains of masculinity, or of humanity?
Automatic would be at home in the late ’70s, but their nostalgic, mechanical sound paired with ruminations on cyborgism eventually feel tired and directionless. When Glaudini recounts a jarring transformation on “Humanoid,” her hopelessness is just casual, without stakes. “Signal” and “Electrocution,” the latter inspired by a real-life near-death experience, are gloomy romps with a purposeful sense of dread. But by album’s end, the mesmerizing buzz becomes a numbing sedative. Automatic wrestle with preserving humanity, but at times it seems they’re barely fighting for theirs.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Stones Throw | October 9, 2019 | 6.4 | 8e3c43f8-ad12-4749-b87c-e52be3080076 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Fifty-two tracks deep, this archival compendium might seem like a catch-all. In fact, it’s a chance to peek under the hood of the multi-instrumentalist’s creative process. | Fifty-two tracks deep, this archival compendium might seem like a catch-all. In fact, it’s a chance to peek under the hood of the multi-instrumentalist’s creative process. | Sam Gendel: Fresh Bread | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-fresh-bread/ | Fresh Bread | Sam Gendel plays both guitar and saxophone with a sneaky virtuosity. His saxophone is often heavily modulated and his guitar attack is more like a tiptoe. Even his singing is hushed and mumbling. And while it might sometimes sound like he’s filtering ideas through an old Casio keyboard, Gendel has a sincere fascination with melody and rhythm—you might hear him suddenly break into an earnest beatbox that’s more like a jazz drummer recording a scratch track. In just a few years he’s built a reputation out of creatively hungry experiments and collaborations. Across his last two albums alone, he’s revamped songbook standards, covered “Old Town Road” on a German synthesizer, and produced some gorgeously glitchy beats. Throw a dart at Gendel’s discography and you might land on something that sounds like way-out free jazz or steamy R&B.
Gendel’s latest album, Fresh Bread, is a catch-all collection of songs he recorded between 2012 and 2020. It’s not just a lot of music, it’s a haphazard jumble. Some of the 52 tracks contained here are public performances and some are home recordings; there’s free improv and fuzzy cloud rap, solo performances and ensemble collaborations. In its full version, Fresh Bread feels more like a personal archive than an album, but Gendel has also pared the tracklist down to just under 20 songs for a vinyl edition. It’s tempting to wonder if he would have been better off editing down the digital version, too, but all of these recordings really do deserve the light of day.
Where to start? “Roomba” reminded me of an Ocarina of Time song, the type of video-game moment where the chiptune production undersells its emotional gravity. In Gendel’s case, a simple loop of saxophone, guitar, and drums turns meditative and trance-like until a solo soars near the end. The production might sound a little cheap at first, but it lays bare the beauty of the melody. Other tracks are less tinny and more spiritually open: Over the free-jazz groove of “Sometimes I Feel So Good,” Gendel euphorically sing-shouts the track’s title. Where some of his ideas require some coaxing out, this is immediate and cathartic.
There are slow swells of ambient (“Wwaasshh”), solo sax experiments (“Transparent Background”), and songs that feel like outtakes from other Gendel albums: The guitar-driven “Fractl,” would have been right at home on his full-length debut, 4444. Not all of these ideas quite stand on their own merit; the ambient noodling of “Birds of Paradise” (track number 40) and “Tape Tiger” (track number 21) feels untethered and nonessential. More than three hours into the album Gendel’s confident and fluid rapping on “Champs Élysées” might sneak up on you, but his vocal performance is almost buried in the mix to the point of obscuring all the lyrics.
This much music can understandably trigger an I’ll-just-sift-through-it defense mechanism. To Gendel’s credit, Fresh Bread both resists and rewards that approach. The music might run the gamut, but the tracks are often loosely bunched together—you still get some jarring transitions, but not at every turn. More importantly, as disconnected as they may be, for the most part these aren’t half-baked or unfinished drafts, they’re thorough explorations of singular ideas. What might appear at first like a hard-drive dump turns out to be more like an exhibition in an art gallery. How you navigate the space is up to you.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Leaving | March 4, 2021 | 6.5 | 8e3d58f7-dbd8-4be3-a535-8cfa5be640d9 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Jonathan Meiburg and co.'s latest album finds Shearwater dropping the arcane conceptual gambits of their recent "trilogy" and speaking in layman's terms emotionally and sonically. | Jonathan Meiburg and co.'s latest album finds Shearwater dropping the arcane conceptual gambits of their recent "trilogy" and speaking in layman's terms emotionally and sonically. | Shearwater: Animal Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16277-animal-joy/ | Animal Joy | Shearwater are often considered "underappreciated," but they're just properly appreciated by an understandably modest, devoted fanbase. Though their handsomely recorded albums and Jonathan Meiburg's former membership in Okkervil River put them in the context of NPR darlings and amphitheater headliners, they're still a tough sell: Often compared to Talk Talk at their most commercially forbidding, they're not populist like Okkervil or the National, their theatricality doesn't appeal to a specific brand of geekdom like the Decemberists or Andrew Bird, and their artiness is too pretty and studied to be edgy. Even when trying to describe what makes something like Rook's "The Snow Leopard" a staggering listen, you're left with chin-stroking explanations, like how a trumpet's fanfare finally breaks the tension of John Congleton's immaculate production, but it lasts three seconds and takes four minutes to get there.
On Animal Joy too many changes are afoot to think Meiburg isn't chafed by the situation: They've peripherally moved from one indie titan (Matador) to another (Sub Pop) and from one revered indie producer (John Congleton) to another (Danny Reisch). But more notably, take a look at the unusually plainspoken title: Animal Joy proves they are still a naturalistically minded band, but in dropping the more arcane conceptual gambits of their self-described "trilogy" of Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago and speaking in layman's terms both emotionally and sonically, they're taking their best shot at meeting new listeners halfway.
They come racing out of the gate to do so on "Animal Life"-- Meiburg's amped-up choirboy vocals have always been suited for grand, sweeping gestures and yet he's never delivered something so overtly pop. To put it in his preferred orinthological terms, it's a peacock moment for sure, pure 1980s corporate rock because it somehow sounds expensive, striving to honor ambition itself as intrinsically good-- it could be a Florence and the Machine song, NBC could use it to soundtrack their commercials for the Summer Olympics, but they throw in enough fussy chord changes and dissonant fringe to keep things from getting too cozy. There's a similar release-the-hounds rush to "You As You Were", a sonic and poetic ramble culminating in Meiburg's desire to "Go back to the East/ Where it's all so civilized/ Where I was born to the life/ But I am leaving the life." Whether it's meant as a candid admission from a touring musician or a nod to the desk jockey that longs to mount a wild steed, it feels like a mission statement; Animal Joy doesn't so much stand for carnality but for the thrill in upsetting the equilibrium between domesticated repression and desire for primitive abandon.
While Animal Joy doesn't totally do away with Shearwater's exploratory tendencies, Ek's production is radio-friendly in the sense that there's a constant presence to this music-- even the comparatively quieter moments make themselves heard fairly easily. In the past, Shearwater songs occasionally got loud, but lead single "Breaking the Yearlings" is loud throughout, big churning guitars and busy, inventive percussion from the truly underappreciated Thor Harris. That said, it's still a Shearwater song in that you'll get more out of it if you happen to know that yearlings are essentially pubescent horses, energetic and unpredictable. Indeed, though considerably dialed-back, Meiburg hasn't lost his preference for poetic devices-- whether equine or otherwise-- to keep any attempts to present Shearwater as a red-blooded, blue-collar rock band short lived. Amidst the trudging orchestral strains of "Insolence", he announces rapture as a time "when my thoughts become undisciplined... it is effortless," a wish-fulfillment fantasy for a band whose power is often the result of fairly obvious effort. And though Shearwater typically allow themselves one song per album to rock out of character, "Century Eyes" or "Corridors" wouldn't prepare you for how "Immaculate" gets all Eddie & the Cruisers with it, complete with tweaked 12-bar blues riffs, and a reckless loner named Johnny as a narrative device.
Yet while being Shearwater's most accessible record by some margin, it isn't quite the best, and toward the record's back half, it begins to become clear why. Meiburg's inimitable vocals aside, this is the first batch of Shearwater songs that could conceivably be the work of another band, confirming what made Rook unique while hinting at their shortcomings previously unexpressed. While the streamlined "Open Your Houses" and "Dread Sovereign" ably replicate the rhythmically stoic but emotionally jittery mien of fellow Austinites Spoon, Meiburg's imperious vocals cut against a musical backdrop that calls for more strut or swagger. Likewise, the startlingly ordinary iPhone-waver "Star of the Age" closes Animal Joy by bringing Shearwater perilously towards to the sort of adult-contemporary indie wallpaper they've never been.
These are minor quibbles, as even Meiburg admits that Animal Joy is something transitional for the band. And it's a welcome move-- The Golden Archipelago fell victim to the sort of indulgence and inscrutability that's to be expected from a concept album titled The Golden Archipelago, and the worry then was that Shearwater would be content to drift even further into their rococo fantasies without realizing they'd left the rest of us behind. Even if Animal Joy brings them closer to the mainland of pop and rock, it'll still take a lot to place these guys in the middle of the road, and after all, what's a more basic animal joy than to be appreciated? | 2012-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 16, 2012 | 6.9 | 8e43b285-c23b-43fb-ad5c-63a290c0c6ad | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Like James Ferraro or Dean Blunt, the Turin-based artist uses unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape. | Like James Ferraro or Dean Blunt, the Turin-based artist uses unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape. | Yves Tumor: Serpent Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22472-serpent-music/ | Serpent Music | Yves Tumor is an associate of Mykki Blanco and was a key player on last year’s C-ORE compilation. He’s also blipped up on comps from buzzworthy labels like NON and UNO and had Hippos in Tanks’ founder Barron Machat not passed away, Tumor would have been a ready-fit for that groundbreaking label, too. As it stands, Yves Tumor shares many sonic traits with the likes of HiT artists like James Ferraro and Dean Blunt. The latter is most apparent in that Tumor favors mysterious loops, soul music as rendered by the recently concussed and noise-as-loofah.
The early parts of Serpent Music seem equally noncommittal in choosing which side of himself to present. Early highlight “The Feeling When You Walk Away” needs little to cast its spell: winding itself around a looping sting of R&B guitar and allowing Tumor’s gossamer voice to serve as narcotic. “Cherish” attempts something similar with another hiccuping loop, but to little effect.
Minimal as those tracks are, something like “Dajjal” allows its rolling piano line to get cluttered with out-of-sync drum machine sputters and spurts of white noise, his voice lost underneath it all. For “Broke In,” Tumor again juggles a creepy close-mic whisper with footwork-fast beats and ambulance sirens, but it never quite congeals. “Role in Creation” begins promisingly enough, a strange hiccup of ethnic percussion and drum patter, only to have it do little more for the next two minutes.
“Serpent I” and “II” do more with ritualistic percussion, razing it with noise and field recordings of an undetermined nature, veering into eerie spoken word, crashing cymbals, rubbed drum heads and the sound of children playing in the distance. Lo-fi noise gets coupled to a tinny drum machine and mumbled vocals on “Seed,” but over the course of its seven minutes, the feedback squalls don’t quite attain the invigorating abrasiveness of the tracks Tumor makes as Bekelé Berhanu.
While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality. “Spirit in Prison” gets its pulse from the chatter of crows overhead, but just when it might give the track a sense of paranoia, the introduction of a female voice and harp plucks midway evokes the likes of Björk. Closer “Perdition” replicates what it’s like to walk along the docks in total darkness, with only the lapping of the waves (and a slow sine wave of bass) to console you. At times, such a sense of wandering makes the tracks feel unresolved or interrupted, but at other times it gives the sensation of being lost in a strange urban landscape, alternating between endless gray blocks and brief glints of beauty. Though given the legless nature of that titular creature, maybe Tumor revels in slithering through such sounds on his belly. | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pan | October 6, 2016 | 7.3 | 8e4c9fef-5437-4902-96b9-90ae92dc6ddb | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Esco Terrestrial is technically DJ Esco’s project, but the weight of it is carried by Future, who appears on all but two songs. Despite strong moments, Future sounds a little exhausted. | Esco Terrestrial is technically DJ Esco’s project, but the weight of it is carried by Future, who appears on all but two songs. Despite strong moments, Future sounds a little exhausted. | Future / DJ Esco: Project E.T. Esco Terrestrial | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22077-project-et-esco-terrestrial/ | Project E.T. Esco Terrestrial | It’s tempting for buzzing rappers to keep producing new work, to continue striking while the iron is hot. The model for this is 2Pac, whose legend is due in part to the fact that he was always in the studio, recording enough to ensure his discography outlasted him. It's a lovely idea, but it’s a double-edged sword. Not only is the sheer process exhausting, but the expectation to live up to a past standard grows heavier with each release. The love given to any artist is fleeting—dependent every time on whether or not the newest project lives up to the last.
This sort of relentless clip was a major factor in Future’s comeback in 2015. He dominated the year with three mixtapes (the first, Monster, technically came out in late 2014) in addition to the album DS2**, and a joint project with Drake. It seemed like whatever he released couldn't miss. The takeaway, in Future’s mind at least, was to keep doing the same thing. This a new mixtape, Project E.T.: Esco Terrestrial, could be considered his third project of the year, following both Purple Reign and *EVOL**; *good projects in their own right, but neither bringing anything like an evolution to what came before.
While Esco Terrestrial is technically DJ Esco’s project, the weight of it is carried by Future, as he appears on all but two songs on the tape. Despite a few strong records, this is a much less inspired Future than the one we’ve seen over the past year. This is unfortunate: as the third record to come before we’ve even reached the halfway point of 2016, it’s starting to feel like Future is dropping music just to stay relevant rather than showing the hunger, originality and insight into his mental state that put him in this position in the first place.
After the laid back, chilly intro that uses audio samples of news reports on UFOs and aliens, the tape tries to charge up and hit hard with “Check On Me” but it falls flat. Future transparently tries to follow his own formula for making a turn-up song, and he comes off like one of his imitators. Future is on autopilot: giving us what he thinks people like about his music (loud songs about drugs and hedonism) and nothing else. Despite the number of noteworthy guest appearances, lack of effort weighs the project down. Regardless of how you feel about any of the individuals involved, a song with Future, Drake, and 2 Chainz should be an easy hit record. But maybe it’s so easy that they can give us the lazy “100it Racks” with the assumption it’ll be a hit no matter what. Except for 2 Chainz rapping: “Put codeine in a Snapple/Put codeine on a salad/Guess I'm on a codeine diet”; there’s really nothing particularly memorable about a song featuring three popular exciting rappers.
Even album highlight “Juice,” an OJ Simpson-inspired subtweet at any guy trying to sleep with the mothers of his kids, doesn’t pack a punch; it’s just a fun-yet-predictable turn-up song. It does kick off the one run of good-to-great songs: The Zaytoven-assisted “Too Much Sauce” has the gorgeousness of a piano ballad that worked better for Lil Uzi Vert than for Future; “Who” brings Future and Young Thug back together and they bounce off each other so well that you wish they would keep making songs together, and “Married to the Game” is reminiscent of “The Percocet and Stripper Joint” with its smooth, melodic production. It also feels honest in a way that's missing from the rest of this tape. When Future raps, “I’m seeing the animosity, the riots is on CNN/I got some homies that just got out, some ones that just went in/The deeper the ocean, the deeper the pain/ Blow out their brains, switch through lanes/Ain’t gotta call out no names/They know I’m married to the game” it’s a sobering splash of water to the face not necessarily because of its subject matter but because it’s not trying to be a crowd-pleaser record in way everything else is.
The songs without Future are even worse. The Casey Veggies and Nef the Pharaoh collaboration “Stupidly Crazy” is the kind of pandering to radio hit that should be beneath everyone involved. Certainly a dope young artist like Nef the Pharaoh deserves better than this, and the Stuey Rock-featured “Deal Wit It” is just boring. As a showcase for DJ Esco, this tape lacks much of anything to make you think of him as the all-star DJ who rose to prominence DJing at Magic City. The end result is something that feels like a last-minute favor Future did for his friend more than anything else, and given the feelings of overexposure creeping into the Future reception, ultimately this ends up as a tougher hit for him than anyone else. | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Free Bandz | July 1, 2016 | 6.8 | 8e5196b5-0c77-4772-b33c-bd6f0c25f0d9 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
More direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, Beck's latest-- produced by Danger Mouse-- finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly 21st century outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations. | More direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, Beck's latest-- produced by Danger Mouse-- finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly 21st century outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations. | Beck: Modern Guilt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11977-modern-guilt/ | Modern Guilt | On his tour behind 2006's The Information, Beck and his band were accompanied by a troupe of marionette doppelgängers. Projected onto a big screen, the dot-eyed puppets mimicked the group with uncanny accuracy; if Beck triumphantly raised his hand during "Devil's Haircut", his counterpart quickly followed. As the distance between concert DVDs and concerts themselves continues to dwindle, the puppet scheme was a winning example of spontaneous, analog cleverness. It was also a crafty bit of outsourcing. The cute figurines provided much of the night's visual entertainment while offering a distraction from Beck's increasingly uninvolved performances. Since the famed stops on his Odelay tour more than a decade ago, he's become a static shell of his former break-dancing, bed-humping self. Similarly, while Beck has gotten darker and more apocalyptic, he's tried to temper his direness with upbeat, counter-punch production from the Dust Brothers, Nigel Godrich, and now, Danger Mouse. Though Modern Guilt is more direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, it also finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.
It wasn't always like this. At his creative peak Beck tackled everything from R&B to hip-hop to folk, and more often than not, his songs' sentiments matched their styles. On a base level, Sea Change was full of downtrodden couplets matched with picturesque melancholia; the falsetto zaniness of Midnite Vultures corresponded with its equally bizarre and hilarious imagery. And while there were plenty of serious specters like ghosts and devils all over Odelay, they were used to symbolize the invincibility of youth while the album's pastiche funk kept the post-modern party alive. But starting with Guero, the disconnect between the singer's frisky beat-based pop and his suffocating anxieties became more apparent ("Earthquake Weather", for instance, was filled with musings like, "The days go slow into a void we filled with death"). And now, after the overlong space jam The Information warned of modern society's ills while pumping futuristic dance-folk, we get Modern Guilt, probably Beck's most harrowing collection of songs yet.
As usual, you probably wouldn't pick up on the record's gravity by putting it on at a cookout. Danger Mouse does a decent job of injecting the record with the same 1960s sounds found on Gnarls Barkley's LPs: Scratchy snares, surf-rock rhythms, and piano vamps pop up and disappear in no-nonsense, three-minute bursts (at just over a half hour, the disc is half as long as The Information). Beck's first new producing partner in eons, Danger Mouse mostly plays into the star's love of vintage aesthetics while working in snippets of his signature style. The wobbly rocker "Orphans" could be a Mutations outtake, drum 'n' bass lullaby "Replica" would sound at home anywhere on The Information, and the lush "Volcano" would have made an excellent Sea Change bonus cut-- it's also one of very few songs on the album that couples its tenuous ennui with an appropriate backdrop. Interestingly, the record's best psych-rock showing-- the tripped-out "Chemtrails", featuring a wicked drum exhibition courtesy of longtime Beck collaborator Joey Waronker-- is also the only track that doesn't include any of Danger Mouse's beats or loops.
Elsewhere, Beck pushes his happy/sad dichotomy to its breaking point. "Gamma Ray" combines a beach-party beat with ecological updates ("If I could hold hold out for now/ With these icecaps melting down") and a call for nuclear annihilation. The title track comes on with plenty of Spoon-esque strut and swagger only to dwell on collective insecurities: "Don't know what I've done but I feel ashamed." These are nice tricks, but after two albums of similar bait-and-switches, they grow tired; with the world legitimately bent on a one-way trip to hell, Beck fails to ease the tension with the unadulterated fun he built his name on. (Tellingly, the 38-year-old recently admitted he's "not proud of" several songs from his wildest LP, Midnite Vultures, all signs of which have been erased from his live show.)
"I'm tired of people who only want to be pleased/ But I still want to please you," sings Beck on closer "Volcano". It's the most personal song on the album, where the alt-rock journeyman stunningly conflates his own troubles with those of the world at large. In his heyday, Beck seemed to please everyone by pleasing himself-- each new genre excursion was met with new fans and a fresh appreciation for his limitless talent. Now things don't come so easy. "It's harder and harder to write songs these days," he told The New York Times last week. "I'm always slashing and burning, going, 'Is this too on the sleeve?' But if you're not up front like that then you're hiding behind something, so it's a real maneuvering." With its off-the-cuff cover, brevity, and ramshackle feel, Modern Guilt comes off like Beck's attempt to outrun those songwriting complications. But the reluctance to break with his own conventions is still evident. The album ends with a look ahead: "I don't know where I've been, but I know where I'm going/ To that volcano/ I don't want to fall in, though/ Just want to warm my bones on that fire a while." It's a cautious prophesy-- maybe too cautious. | 2008-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-07-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | July 7, 2008 | 7 | 8e55d193-c314-4c19-8ebc-052a79c1a34f | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Four new reissues explore the acclaimed Japanese producer’s work c. 1984-1985, as he set aside techno-pop in favor of spacious, imaginative ambient music. | Four new reissues explore the acclaimed Japanese producer’s work c. 1984-1985, as he set aside techno-pop in favor of spacious, imaginative ambient music. | Haruomi Hosono: S·F·X / The Endless Talking / Paradise View / Mercuric Dance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haruomi-hosono-sfx-the-endless-talking-paradise-view-mercuric-dance/ | S·F·X / The Endless Talking / Paradise View / Mercuric Dance | After the dissolution of Japanese techno-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra following 1983’s Service (their final album until the one-off reunion Technodon a decade later), each of its members were eager to go their own way. Reluctant to call it a breakup, they opted for the softer term “fan out,” though creative differences had created such friction between the trio that it was difficult for them to keep working together. Beleaguered from staring into the spotlight of pop stardom, Haruomi Hosono let out a sigh of relief. “Our music happened to hit the chart and I had an awful time. I was too famous to walk around,” he told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014. “As the dust settled, I was liberated at last. I love to be free.”
Wasting no time, Hosono teamed up with Japanese major label Teichiku in 1984 to create two new imprints that would allow him to explore his newfound freedom—Non-Standard, a haven for Hosono’s friends, collaborators, and protégés, and Monad, an outlet for his more experimental solo outings. No longer beholden to the demands of YMO’s label Alfa or the desires of his bandmates, Hosono receded from the limelight and immersed himself in his own musical interests. The years 1984 and 1985 would be some of his most productive as he “fanned out” in several directions, bearing truth to the euphemism used to describe YMO’s collapse. Four new reissues, courtesy of Teichiku, survey this critical period—painting, with broad strokes, a picture of Hosono’s wildly creative post-YMO output.
In its brief few years of original releases, Non-Standard would become a petri dish of innovation. Hosono was the first to give a home to Pizzicato Five, a group whose fusion of Japanese pop, soul, jazz, and western kitsch was instrumental to the popularization of Shibuya-kei, the pluralistic pop sound of Tokyo’s most fashionable district. He offered the first sighting of World Standard, multi-instrumentalist Sohichiro Suzuki’s globe-trotting love letter to exotica and Americana. Non-Standard was also the launching point for Hosono’s group Friends of Earth, a revolving cast of musicians that has included vocalist Miharu Koshi, Senegalese session percussionist Aïyb Dieng, and, strangely, James Brown and his star saxophonist Maceo Parker.
For Hosono’s first solo project on his newly minted label, he brought along Friends of Earth to back him up. S·F·X is a stylistic grab bag, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in only half an hour. That eclecticism is on full display in “Strange Love,” a triumphant pop opus that feels like the logical step forward from YMO, and also like it arrived from another planet. A funky melody and Hosnono’s smooth baritone underpin alien-sounding synth, owed perhaps to an unlikely inspiration—video games. Hosono had released Video Game Music earlier the same year on Yen (a label he co-curated with YMO bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi) as an experiment in replicating arcade game music with synthesizer; the arpeggiated blips of Video Game Music’s “Phozon” would feel right at home here. We get a glimpse of his future on the piano ballad “Dark Side of the Star,” which draws a curtain on the album with a melody repurposed from a piece composed for the retail chain Muji, transforming it into a deep melancholy that feels like a eulogy for the Hosono of the past.
The following year, Hosono would narrow his focus with a trio of albums on Monad. Each is a collaborative effort, representing more facets of his fascinations. The Endless Talking, the least consequential, was composed for an Italian art exhibit titled “Japan, Avant Garde of the Future.” Hosono improvised its 13 sketches while looking at photographs of sculptures created for the show, resulting in short pieces intended to play on loop. The tracks are designed to talk endlessly, but not to each other as a cohesive body of work. “The Endless Talking” is the standout, a twinkling metronome of hypnotic melody—but it, too, is a reworked Muji composition.
Hosono takes a trip to Okinawa for Paradise View—the score for a film by the same name—exploring the musical traditions of the island prefecture while weaving in elements of gamelan and otherworldly chants. “The Paradise View” ties it all together into a compelling proof of concept, with Hosono plinking out a distinctly Okinawan melody as a sound reminiscent of Balinese gongs washes over it. Reaching across cultures and through time, Hosono crystallizes disparate influences into an image of a place that you wish really existed so that you could see it for yourself.
Mercuric Dance—the companion piece to a contemporary ballet by Arai Tadayoshi—stands as the most fully realized of the trilogy. It was based on Hosono’s time in scenic Amakawa Village, and the environmental themes run strong. Nara Prefecture (where Amakawa is located) is home to the highest concentration of protected cultural sites in Japan, and nearly a fifth of its area is national parkland. Hosono pays respect to the land with a series of compositions—each inspired by a celestial body—that shift slowly into one another, like a leisurely trip around the sun. With traditional Japanese percussion, soaring synth, and interspersed field recordings, Mercuric Dance unfolds like a time-lapse photo of a place slowly weathered by the passage of time.
Haruomi Hosono’s freewheeling spirit is what makes each phase of his endless reinvention so fascinating. After the dissolution of YMO, he made S·F·X, a pop album no one expected; then he didn’t make another for a long time, opting instead to set himself “adrift in the sea of ambient music,” as he later described it. In recent years, Hosono’s ambient work has attracted fresh interest—particularly the music he created for Muji around this time, which he’d since forgotten about. As they’ve been rediscovered by new listeners, the Muji compositions have lately gone somewhat viral, but the Teichiku albums, which iterate upon those ideas in bold and surprising ways, have yet to see their day. These reissues, though only a two-year snapshot of a long and winding career, contain a lot more music worth remembering.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | null | April 10, 2021 | 8.4 | 8e5b1b6b-230a-42fc-9b40-96939a65e45a | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Much more than one man's solo recordings or an Okkervil River side project, Jonathan Meiburg's Shearwater follow last year's partially re-recorded and re-released Palo Santo with their first LP of new tunes for Matador. | Much more than one man's solo recordings or an Okkervil River side project, Jonathan Meiburg's Shearwater follow last year's partially re-recorded and re-released Palo Santo with their first LP of new tunes for Matador. | Shearwater: Rook | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11560-rook/ | Rook | Since last year's partially re-recorded and re-released Palo Santo, Shearwater have gone out of their way to assert themselves as more than just an Okkervil River side project or one man's solo recordings, but a living, breathing full band. Rook, however, is their first album-length test, one that reaches deeper into their influences and flexes muscles no one knew they had. Singer and principal songwriter Jonathan Meiburg's voice is just one instrument among many that color these ten tracks, which, in one way, is disappointing, as Meiburg is a stunningly expressive singer who could easily carry a record by himself (see: either edition of Palo Santo). Regardless, they're blessed with engineers who sweat and toil over every incidental noise, guests on everything from clarinet to harp, and a drummer named fucking Thor-- all of whom assert themselves on Rook. This is good news for any listener, but perhaps especially for those who favor the more sensitive and baroque strains of indie rock, yet are tired of hearing it soundtrack every stray minute of public radio or primetime TV: Shearwater give "pretty" indie a good name.
From its hushed start to the crunch and swing of its chorus, "On the Death of the Waters" is a dramatic opener that announces how much clatter Shearwater 2.0 can make. First single "Rooks" is far more ordered and composed, but the attention paid to its craft is discernible, from Meiburg's more controlled vocal performance to the nimble guitar plucking and insistent half-note throb of bass.
"Leviathan, Bound" is the first hint at how far the band has stretched its palette, incorporating plenty of strings, glockenspiel, and glassy, mysterious percussion, with Meiburg finally letting out a more immediate howl as the song's simple melody gathers steam. Thor Harris' contributions to the record on percussion are more subtle than his name would imply, but his performances always elevate the song, whether it's the buttoned-up accompaniment of "Rooks" to the determined gallop of "Home Life", saving its seven woodwind-and-string-laden minutes from sagging. While he serves at the anchor to some tracks, he adds the most vivid touch to the already dramatic bridge of "Lost Boys" with a formal military march during its bridge.
A necessary jolt on a well-paced album, Shearwater's attempt to let their collective hair down on the guitar-driven "Century Eyes" comes off as forced next to all these cautious and mannered arrangements. They've lost no momentum, however, when they reach the steady rumble of "The Snow Leopard", which comes later on the record. It begins with conspicuous unaccompanied piano chords before slow, elemental drums and low single notes of guitar trudge forward, driving the song with the same woozy melodic force of previous Shearwater highlights like "White Waves".
The influence of Talk Talk's later records is even more apparent here than on their earlier work, notably in Meiburg's voice as he leans more on his falsetto and exercises restraint. It's also in the instrumentation, which tends towards the drifting and heavily atmospheric. Meiburg's more than capable of hanging with Mark Hollis vocally, and this approach drives the band to considerably expand its sound. Shearwater have not only broken new ground for themselves, but added a welcome sense of variety from track to track on Rook, all in a concise 35 minutes that feels more like a double album in scope.
Hollis acolytes or not, these are hardly song-sketches; all of them are careful compositions adding new instruments, moods, and sounds around the anchor of Meiburg's voice. The edges of these otherwise lulling, hypnotic songs hint at danger and chaos, but only the brief feedback excursion of "South Col" pokes a hole in the album's fabric and hints at what more avant-garde threads the band might be capable of following. As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come. | 2008-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 4, 2008 | 8 | 8e5d579b-dca2-4483-88e3-a1aa5285c434 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Released exclusively on a device called the Stem Player, the first version of Kanye’s 11th album is lackluster and undercooked. It does not bode well for any future updates or revamps. | Released exclusively on a device called the Stem Player, the first version of Kanye’s 11th album is lackluster and undercooked. It does not bode well for any future updates or revamps. | Kanye West: Donda 2 (V2.22.22 Miami) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-donda-2-v22222-miami/ | Donda 2 | For all the theatrics, mythmaking, and assholery that come along with a Kanye West album, at the center of it all used to be the music. I challenge anyone to watch the first two episodes of jeen-yuhs, the new three-part documentary about West’s early years, and not come away feeling a little bit nostalgic for a bygone era. Times when the hunger in Kanye’s raps could consume you like they did Mos Def, who looked on in awe as Ye rapped an a capella version of “Two Words.” Or when his irrational confidence and drive had this innocent charm to it, like the scenes of him going door to door in the Roc-a-Fella offices trying to get anyone he could to listen to “All Falls Down.”
The documentary began shooting years before the release of his debut album, 2004’s The College Dropout, a project Kanye and the directors approach as not just another batch of songs, but a soul-wrenching outpouring. An album nurtured and stressed over. An album that bum-rushed through industry politics, skeptics, and even a near-death experience. An album Kanye believed in so wholeheartedly that even before it lifted him from the shadows to the limelight, he spoke about it as if the world would stop spinning without it.
Somewhere along the way—I might point to the era around The Life of Pablo and I’m sure some would say earlier—that ego was no longer a piece of the art, but the art itself. The music became an afterthought, a mere bullet point in a Kanye machine more concerned with clothing lines, Forbes list rankings, and a pivot to “free thinking,” an excuse to pretend his dumb tweets and political stances were actually genius.
True to this direction, Donda 2, the sequel to last year’s Donda, is not chiefly concerned with the music. It hasn’t even been officially labeled Donda 2 yet—instead, it’s designated “V2.22.22 Miami” (the date and location of the most recent Donda 2 listening party) like it’s an iOS update. That seems to be what Kanye wants anyway. The album was released exclusively on the Stem Player, a $200 gadget that he believes is revolutionary new technology but is really a glorified iPod Shuffle. (You would think the device that is going to change the game would be able to hold more than 8GB.) The tennis ball-sized contraption allows you to isolate a specific element of a song, an idea that is fine for about five minutes until you realize listening to a song is way more fun without having to choose your own adventure through it. The 16 tracks uploaded on the device so far are hardly even finished. The idea of the Stem Player is that Kanye will update and revamp the album as he sees fit, which some may laud as innovative or iconoclastic, but it comes off as an excuse to put out lackluster, undercooked music and label it as a fluid, ever-changing art piece that may never be complete. Does this inherently make Donda 2 somewhat critic-proof?
It does not. This crudely unfinished dump of songs is hiding behind a spectacle. But unlike the G.O.O.D Friday buildup to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or the Madison Square Garden fashion show before The Life of Pablo, this spectacle is not designed to draw attention to the music but to distract from how Kanye’s passion has shifted: from making some of the most culture-defining albums of the last two decades to dreaming of being spoken about in the same breath as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
There’s no larger indictment of Kanye than him misfiring on arguably his greatest skill of them all: curation. For all the messiness of later Kanye records, his ability to bring any rapper into the fold and handpick the right bits and pieces of their style to let them shine was unmatched. I mean c’mon, Desiigner sounds pretty good on Pablo, and on the original Donda, Fivio Foreign was briefly the hottest rapper in New York. The only guest who sounds like they have a pulse on Donda 2 is Vory, whose sweet bellowing over one of those quintessential orchestral Kanye and Co. beats on “Lord Lift Me Up” is hypnotic. Future also sounds impassioned on “Keep It Burning”—but Kanye’s verse is muffled and unfinished.
The rest of the album’s collaborators suggest that Kanye is either scraping the bottom of the barrel or calling any rapper on the Billboard charts to see who will show up. Soulja Boy, sued multiple times last year for alleged sex crimes, phones in a shoddily mixed verse. The XXXTentacion hooks on “Selfish” and “True Love” feel minor and unmemorable, like they’re just there to fill space. Unlucky for everyone, Jack Harlow arrives doing a hacky tough-guy Drake impression.
The Harlow-assisted “Louie Bags” is probably the most disappointing track on the album. Not because it’s the worst but because, had it been treated with the attention to detail that Kanye used to be known for, it could have been great. Over a thumping beat, Kanye mourns the passing of Virgil Abloh in the most Kanye way possible: “I stopped buying Louis bags after Virgil passed,” he raps repeatedly on the chorus, sounding downbeat. Kanye’s verses don’t build off that. In fact, it’s more mumbled nonsense that would be tolerable if this was a leaked demo and not an official release.
This is a recurring motif on Donda 2: Songs have a cool moment or two, but do not hold any shape. “Security” has a hilariously great opening line (“No you can’t be on my mama album”) but no other bar has any weight to it, as if it was freestyled to be replaced later. “Get Lost” has serious 808s and Heartbreak vibes, with his voice submerged in so much Auto-Tune he sounds nearly robotic, yet as a straight a capella it bores me. The production on “Sci-Fi” is rich, though tacking on an SNL monologue from Kim Kardashian—where she boasts about Ye by calling him “the best rapper of all time” and “the richest Black man in America”—feels like the weird equivalent of a movie character cutting out photos of their crush and pasting them on the wall. Kanye is allowed to handle his breakup like a human, but why not put some of those feelings in the lyrics?
There’s no Silicon Valley-speak that can explain why Kanye should have released any music in this shape. It’s not ready or complete and one can only speculate that he was racing to meet some kind of external deadline, like the Netflix documentary or the new Yeezy Gap and Balenciaga collaboration. If so, that would align with the direction Kanye has been headed for a minute now: Music as a way to boost visibility for ventures that make him way more money. Like many, I have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that Kanye West, the rapper who made The College Dropout and Late Registration and so many more labors of passion and love and emotion, would reach the point of releasing anything as hollow as Donda 2 (V2.22.22 Miami). Every now and then, he can still crank out his signature sweeping production or drop a line that stops you in your tracks. But no minor edit or revamped version of Donda 2 can conceal the album’s inherent flaw: It is presented as a revolutionary work but it is decidedly a non-event. | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | March 2, 2022 | 4.3 | 8e6f5b84-0d57-4b4d-93b6-a2d416c7db27 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Chris Stewart continues his decade-long quest to rewrite ’80s synth-pop on his latest record, an enjoyable homage that struggles to reach the heights of its influences. | Chris Stewart continues his decade-long quest to rewrite ’80s synth-pop on his latest record, an enjoyable homage that struggles to reach the heights of its influences. | Black Marble: Fast Idol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-marble-fast-idol/ | Fast Idol | For Chris Stewart, the synthesizer wizard behind Black Marble, influence is more than a guidepost, it’s his whole act. On his latest record, Fast Idol, he continues his decade-long project of essentially rewriting ’80s synthwave classics. It’s a pastiche that sounds more New Order than New Order, so close to OMD that it makes you wonder if you were perhaps living inside of Pretty in Pink. It’s an enjoyable, sexy record that is little more than a composite of its influences.
Fast Idol is a record of makeout jams; the kind of druggy, pupil expanding synth-pop that you leave on so you can tune out. There’s nothing wrong with making mood music, but these songs often feel indistinguishable from each other; it’s a flat record without highs or lows, lacking momentum or lift. “Royal Walls” gives off the vibe of walking out of a club and into rainy city streets. It melts seamlessly into the grayscale “Try,” which is made up of the same slouchy drum machines and aqueous synths. Both songs feature crisp production, and Stewart plays his synthesizers with the dedication of a professor reading late into the night. They just don’t go anywhere.
Stewart is not one to change his sound though, and throughout his career he’s released record after record of extremely competent synth music; this one is no different. It sounds exactly like something that would be played in a club or on the radio in 1980s London, and the results are often really lovely, if not slightly repetitive. Opener “Somewhere” is the record’s longest and best track. It feels almost euphoric, with synths that reverberate like whispers in a cave. It’s six minutes long, but it’s so breezy that it’s over before you know it. Though the song could’ve been on any of Stewart’s records, it is nonetheless undeniably pretty. If there’s anything new about what Stewart’s doing here, it’s that he’s playing with slightly different textures from the past. There’s little flickers of dub here and there on songs like “The Garden” and “Streetlight,” breaking up the record like a short walk in the middle of a run.
At his best, Stewart is an archivist of past sounds. And for the most part, that’s what Fast Idol is: a collage of old synth tones that are cool to the touch. It can feel like discovering an old roll of film in a vintage camera, or like going to a dive bar and messing around with the jukebox. While it aspires to be the heart on your sleeve synth pop of the past, it’s most successful as mood music to soundtrack the present.
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. | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | October 22, 2021 | 6.8 | 8e73146f-5f3c-4ab4-859c-5e2ba4c6c519 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Even on this brief EP, the London producer’s music is becoming more confident and idiosyncratic, moving beyond familiar club contexts in search of points unknown. | Even on this brief EP, the London producer’s music is becoming more confident and idiosyncratic, moving beyond familiar club contexts in search of points unknown. | FAUZIA: flashes in time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fauzia-flashes-in-time/ | flashes in time | In early 2017, not long after she had begun DJing in earnest, London’s FAUZIA uploaded her inaugural DJ mix to SoundCloud. “first ever mix,” she noted in the track description. She quickly landed a monthly residency on NTS Radio and worked her way up to gigs at clubs like Frankfurt’s Robert Johnson and Berlin’s Griessmuehle; early last year, she joined the renowned Discwoman agency, stepping up alongside artists like Juliana Huxtable, Object Blue, and SHYBOI. But as swift as her rise as a DJ has been, she has taken her time in establishing herself as a producer. Her scant discography so far has felt like a collection of works in progress—stepping stones, perhaps, to a more official debut, ETA unknown.
FAUZIA only began putting out her own music last year: first a couple of compilation tracks, then a collection of original productions she showcased in her Discwoman mix, followed by more loosies and a proper EP. Her music could be fierce, sensitive, and striking. But many tracks also had the unfinished character of a sketch or DJ tool, right down to functional titles like “generic bass track,” “Percussive Track,” and “138 PERCS!” Her new EP flashes in time, which she bills as “a collection of demos/ideas/emotions,” shares the unvarnished presentation of her previous work. But despite the brevity of the release, which breezes through seven tracks in under 13 minutes, it marks an important shift. FAUZIA’s music is getting more confident and idiosyncratic; it’s moving beyond familiar club contexts in search of points unknown.
Until now, FAUZIA’s tracks have hovered mostly in a kind of interzone, drawing variously from UK bass, Detroit techno, electro, breakbeats, and IDM. On flashes in time, she abandons many of those clubby touchstones in favor of ambient vocal overdubs, lo-fi guitar, and long stretches where she lets reverb do most of the work for her. When there are drums, they sound like they’ve been carved out of bursts of white noise. Her voice is what tends to hold the songs together, like wispy connective tissue.
“Stormy Days” opens the EP on a low-key note, contentedly mulling over the kind of lilting melody someone might absent-mindedly sing to themselves in the contented daze of a new infatuation. “No more stormy days/Now I get to play/In the sunshine with you,” she sings, unaccompanied but for her own overdubbed vocal harmonies, which she alters as she repeats the refrain, subtly expanding the song’s dimensions. Then, about halfway through, her singing stops, the reverb tail on her voice whipping into a gust of echo. What follows is almost a minute of ambient sound, like bird calls ricocheting through a canyon.
The rest of the EP’s songs don’t get much heftier than this diaphanous opening. Moody and cinematic, the bookending “recollection” pairs mournful vocals with a scratchy drum machine and creaky streaks of dissonance, conjuring a symphony of rusty screen doors. “swirl,” the record’s most upbeat cut, makes do with little more than an electric guitar, post-punk bass, and tinny snare, her voice bobbing like flotsam over the dubby mix; it’s an inspired cross between the Slits and Two Lone Swordsmen. “rewind” is just 71 seconds of granular synth, as though she’d dipped a kaleidoscope in a glass of bubble tea.
It’s hard to put your finger on what it is, exactly, that makes these songs so rewarding, much less so coherent. FAUZIA’s rhythmic techniques are unusual but not radical; her melodies are mostly loop-based, her words often indistinct. You wouldn’t think that the Matthew Herbert-like IDM of “low!” would make sense in such close proximity with the lo-fi ambient folk of “one day.” Somehow, though, she conjures something distinctive, no matter how diffuse. More than merely a mood, it feels like the glimpse of a unique perspective. It’s unclear whether flashes in time’s “collection of demos/ideas/emotions” is meant as a clearinghouse before she embarks upon a more intentional project. For now, anyway, FAUZIA is finding new ways to express herself within the confines of the humble work in progress.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | March 5, 2021 | 7.3 | 8e758775-b659-457d-8fa0-98eeb8116a65 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The late songwriter recorded the unreleased Eight Gates in the ’00s. The posthumous version sounds by turns haunting and unfinished. | The late songwriter recorded the unreleased Eight Gates in the ’00s. The posthumous version sounds by turns haunting and unfinished. | Jason Molina: Eight Gates | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jason-molina-eight-gates/ | Eight Gates | Jason Molina’s songs are like unfinished houses. Wander the hallways late at night and you might open a doorway that leads nowhere, or look to the ceiling and find the moon staring back. Though the late Ohioan songwriter could write a rousing melody, he rarely offered them fully formed. Instead, he drew your ear toward the cracks in the edifice: placing an expanse of near-silence where a chorus might go, or emphasizing the empty space between someone’s high harmony vocal and his own distinctively damaged tenor. On Molina’s best albums, this vacancy is a virtue, imbuing the music with a sense of magic and mystery to match his lyrical preoccupation with the phantasms of memory and regret. The holes in the wall are invitations for spirits to come in.
Molina wrote and recorded Eight Gates while living in London in the late 2000s, where—according to press materials from his longtime label Secretly Canadian—he claimed he was recovering from a bite from a rare spider, writing in a letter about doctor appointments and drug prescriptions for which no medical records exist. Whether Molina was suffering a delusion or engaging in artistic myth-making is unclear, but he was on the cusp of real and dire challenges to his physical health either way. Ten months after the January 2009 recording sessions that produced this material, he cancelled a planned tour, blaming unnamed health issues. He never recorded or performed publicly again after that. In 2013, he died, at age 39, from complications related to alcoholism. Secretly Canadian presents Eight Gates, unheard until this posthumous release, as something like his final statement.
Like Molina’s classic albums, Eight Gates documents songs that are still in the process of becoming, a snapshot of their neverending journey toward a nonexistent final form. But given the nature of the release, it’s unclear what is an artistic effect and what is a more literal case of unfinished work. The album’s nine songs pass in 25 minutes, with several barely crossing the two-minute line—practically unheard-of for an artist who regularly sprawled out to six or seven. Some songs are plainly not done, like “She Says,” which fades out after a bit of studio banter and a single acoustic-strummed verse. Others sound more or less complete, like “Shadow Answers the Wall,” built on pensive organ chords and an uncharacteristically lithe drum pattern, coming off like Molina’s take on the rhythm-forward music Radiohead was making around the same time.
The songs of Eight Gates are often beautiful, but they can feel a bit like cues in a film score without an accompanying visual, hanging around for long enough to establish a mood but disappearing before they have a chance to progress. The palette is drastically limited—guitar, organ, cello, a bit of bass, hardly any percussion—and deployed with painterly aversion to excess, allowing subtle changes to instrumental inflection to serve as major events. These sounds are miles from the rangy rock of Magnolia Electric Co., the amorphous band Molina fronted for much of the 2000s. They have more in common with the pitch-black folk of Ghost Tropic and The Lioness, albums Molina released under his Songs: Ohia alias at the beginning of the decade.
The most confounding and moving material is the most difficult to assess in terms of completeness. “Whisper Away,” the opener, and “Thistle Blue,” the penultimate song, are like a room and its reflection in a broken mirror. Their arrangements, and introductions, are nearly identical: drones of organ and strings, with sharp, delicate electric guitar chords occasionally slashing through. Both move slowly, even by Molina’s standards, building tension without release. The latter contains the album’s most evocative lines: “Black bird and thistle blue/Whose wilderness has my heartbreak wandered through?/Whose questions have I left to go unanswered?” The former addresses a similar transience, one of Molina’s great themes. It could also be read as a premonition of death, or a comment on the ephemeral character of the music itself: “Whisper away the howling universe/Pale against something, pale against what/Hiss and the fading, the dying radio.” Their haunting arrangements are rich and deliberate, but as compositions they are not wholly realized; neither song feels complete without the other, and even then the image is fragmented. Is their uncanny duality a result of Molina's mastery over his art, or was he simply still working through this material when he went into the studio that day? For a listener approaching Eight Gates a decade later, how much does it matter?
Secretly Canadian muddles the issue slightly by giving Eight Gates the veneer of an album, rather than presenting it as a collection of archival material, holding it to a standard it shouldn’t have to meet. Molina released albums prolifically before his withdrawal from public life, sometimes at a rate of two per year. He was not shy about putting out material he’d recorded quickly, or that which showed its rough edges clearly. He once released a collection of album outtakes that was four times longer than the album itself. In spite of this open-book approach, the Eight Gates material sat on the shelf for four years of his life. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether he considered it a whole and successful body of work, or whether he wanted people to hear it at all. Still, regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.
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. | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | August 12, 2020 | 7 | 8e783e91-e759-440f-b528-a585169b3442 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Trite where it should be subtle and mellow where it should be exciting, the Jamaican star’s new album fails to consistently capture his magic. | Trite where it should be subtle and mellow where it should be exciting, the Jamaican star’s new album fails to consistently capture his magic. | Popcaan: Great Is He | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/popcaan-great-is-he/ | Great Is He | Popcaan’s music is slathered in sweetness. Andrae Sutherland has a gift for shiny, elastic flows, making him a singjay—a reggae or dancehall artist with an ultra-melodic style—in the purest form. His indelible 2014 anthem “Everything Nice” felt like sipping on an icy rum and Red Bull in the Kingston daylight, the sun’s rays a warm balm for the punishing turns of everyday life. But on his fifth studio album, Great Is He, that brightness isn’t pleasant; it’s overpowering. The production often feels languid and homogenous, yielding a plodding, monotonous slurry. Far from the pop thrills and rap escapades of 2020’s FIXTAPE, Great Is He is a too-mellow record bogged down by repetitive beats, familiar themes, and forced sentimentality.
The few prize moments on Great Is He arrive when Popcaan relies on classic dancehall flourishes or effective collaborations. “Set It” feels like the explosive peak of a bashment megamix from the ’90s, complete with speaker-frying bass punches and sweaty come-ons: “Waistline likkle, mama, you so curvy.” “Aboboyaa,” Popcaan’s second collaboration with Burna Boy, spotlights his knack for seamless collaborations, linking the shared Afro-diasporic musical genealogies of Nigeria, Ghana, and Jamaica. Its title references the Ghanaian term for a tricycle used to transport goods, but Popcaan flips it into a metaphor for a woman riding him in bed. It’s summery and playful, and a chorus of horns trumpets under the Afrobeats production, as if they were blaring out of a car radio on the streets of Accra. “New Benz” and “Freshness” are sybaritic odes to luxury cars and clean Gucci fits, familiar flexes made electric by the percussive echoes of a fever-pitch riddim and the ringing of a steel drum.
Yet it’s easy to forget about these flashes of delight in the face of the record’s trite rags-to-riches tales. There’s nothing wrong with a come-up anthem, but on Great Is He, the execution is too superficial. The opening song, “Defeat the Struggle,” lands as an obligatory motivational intro rather than a genuine victory. “St. Thomas Native,” “Appreciation,” and “Past Life” are so formulaic, you almost wonder if they were designed using a type beat tutorial on YouTube; there are maudlin string crescendos, sappy guitar strums, and heart-tugging piano lines lifted straight out of a trailer for a Hallmark Channel drama. The penultimate track, “Memories,” an ode to Popcaan’s late loved ones, is stained with flimsy lyrics and a hackneyed bridge; “Believe me it’s gonna be, gonna be fine” is a far cry from Popcaan’s typically subtle, grounded approach to questions of radical hope and spirituality. And when Sutherland sings “Life a nuh joke like Kung Fu Panda,” you might involuntarily screw your face up in disappointment.
It’s been nearly a decade since his breakout album Where We Come From established Popcaan as an artist able to swim back and forth between the waters of pop and dancehall, flaunting his sense of narrative and verve within the sunny templates of the Jamaican genre. He’s been a lifeline for Drake when the Canadian rapper has exhausted his own creative energies, first siphoning some of Popcaan’s magic for an unreleased version of “Controlla” and via a sample on “Too Good.” That impact is muted on Great Is He; the collaboration that appears here, “We Caa Done,” feels like the pair is retreading old ground just for nostalgia’s sake. Dancehall is a singles-driven genre, but Popcaan often shines in the album format, so it’s regrettable that many of these 17 songs feel so lackluster. For a genre rooted in joy and conviviality, the letdown is hard to ignore. | 2023-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | OVO Sound | February 4, 2023 | 6.7 | 8e7b5ee1-c26c-4f32-a2b2-470f719335bf | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
Dumb Flesh is the second LP from Benjamin John Power, one-half of Fuck Buttons. Where the debut featured glacial build-ups and monotonous loops, Dumb Flesh is filled with handclaps, 808s and is-that-human-or-what? vocal samples. As the album title and cover art suggest, it's concerned with the fragility of the human body, using sonic degeneration as a metaphor for the biological kind. | Dumb Flesh is the second LP from Benjamin John Power, one-half of Fuck Buttons. Where the debut featured glacial build-ups and monotonous loops, Dumb Flesh is filled with handclaps, 808s and is-that-human-or-what? vocal samples. As the album title and cover art suggest, it's concerned with the fragility of the human body, using sonic degeneration as a metaphor for the biological kind. | Blanck Mass: Dumb Flesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20459-dumb-flesh/ | Dumb Flesh | Since 2008's Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons has served to sublimate the noise genre into something that fans with lower tolerances for extreme music might enjoy. From the band's unlikely (but fittingly epic) use in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, to its status as festival mainstays, Fuck Buttons have brought music of the most punishing variety to an unusual level of popularity. If "pop" is what's popular, then Fuck Buttons fit the bill by definition, but no other act of their level can claim to scorch audiences with Fisher-Price-processed screams, only to rocket into a stratosphere of major-key bliss. For every club-leaning detour ("Prince's Prize") or humanist anthem ("Olympians"), there's a relentless "Brainfreeze" to remind us that the band is as unruly as ever.
The same can be said for the duo's solo ventures. Though Dumb Flesh is the second full-length LP from Blanck Mass, the stage name used by Benjamin John Power, it's been four years since his self-titled debut and three since his "White Math / Polymorph" single. In that time Fuck Buttons also released Slow Focus, their biggest-sounding record to date, and Andrew Hung, who records under his given name, dropped the retro-bizarro weirdness that was the Rave Cave EP. (Sure, Beck plays a Game Boy on stage, but who can say they made an entire album on one?) Dumb Flesh is an often-fascinating document of Power's evolving tastes over that time period, as well as a departure from his murky first album. While Blanck Mass often featured glacial build-ups and monotonous loops, Dumb Flesh is filled with handclaps, 808s and is-that-human-or-what? vocal samples. But for a record whose cover art is pinkish folds of human biomass, much of Dumb Flesh is actually pretty darn accessible. It also serves as occasional proof that Power is amenable to the idea that people might actually want to, like, dance to his music.
As the title and cover art suggest, Dumb Flesh is an album about the fragility of the human body, one that uses sonic degeneration as a metaphor for the biological kind. Opener "Loam" is a sound-collage of groaning vocals enmeshed with reversed tape hiss, while a mid-tempo chillout cut with squelching synths and a head-bobbing beat is called "Atrophies". Across the record, Power uses sounds that meld into each other fluidly, an ouroboros of cyclical synths where you don't know where one loop begins and another ends.
Fuck Buttons solo projects often give the chance to spot individual seams in what usually appears as a singular, monolithic endeavor, but Dumb Flesh could be mistaken for the latest Fuck Buttons album, albeit one looser and less cohesive than usual. The themes may be dark, but the songs often contain the ecstatic blissfulness of the band's best and most transcendental beauty. "Cruel Sport", a name that echoes Fuck Buttons' enormous-sounding second album, for instance, starts with a driving beat similar to "Olympians", but just before the five-minute mark the synths clatter and collapse into a squiggling pile—a breakdown in the literal and metaphorical sense. The shift plays like a commentary on Power's past; rather than achieving total liftoff, Power proves he can still take us all the way there and then deliberately doesn't. While "Cruel Sport" works, sometimes the less intense tracks don't quite land; "Lung" is a low-key track that sounds like you're waiting for a particularly avant-garde conference call—pleasant, but it's just not what Power does best.
Largely, however, Dumb Flesh is a pleasure. Album closer and highlight "Detritus" has multiple movements and features Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe of 90 Day Men on vocals. It's here that all of Power's strengths come out at once: dark noise gives way to a pounding rhythm which, in turn, melts into a tapestry of airy synths. If Dumb Flesh is about the prison of the body, "Detritus" is an entire life-cycle in eight minutes. Over his career, both in Fuck Buttons and as a solo artist, Power's music has been an exercise in the sweeping emotional and physical power of sound itself. Fuck Buttons may be unlikely stars, but their music's pure momentum almost guaranteed its audience by force alone. Like Power's best work, Dumb Flesh moves you when it literally moves you. | 2015-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-05-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | May 13, 2015 | 7.6 | 8e7d9d3c-c1fb-451b-93ba-29e54e438950 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
The New York quartet Stern is the vehicle of Chuck Stern, a singer who spent a decade leading the aggressively esoteric Time of Orchids. He formed an elite band including Toby Driver, the mastermind of art-metal savants Kayo Dot. Bone Turquoise is a promising start for the meeting of two captivating and contrasting bandleaders, reveling in the unexpected. | The New York quartet Stern is the vehicle of Chuck Stern, a singer who spent a decade leading the aggressively esoteric Time of Orchids. He formed an elite band including Toby Driver, the mastermind of art-metal savants Kayo Dot. Bone Turquoise is a promising start for the meeting of two captivating and contrasting bandleaders, reveling in the unexpected. | Stern: Bone Turquoise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20917-bone-turquoise/ | Bone Turquoise | Listening to Bone Turquoise, the proper debut album from the New York quartet Stern, you spend the better part of an hour waiting for the band to get loud, to go unhinged and generally to deliver the volume-heavy vexation its roster promises. Stern is the vehicle of Chuck Stern, a singer who spent a decade leading the aggressively esoteric Time of Orchids. That band tellingly hopscotched between metal labels like Relapse and imprints that embrace the avant-garde, including Cuneiform and Tzadik. Since the end of Orchids, though, he's recorded and released loose-limbed solo work under his last name.
For Bone Turquoise, he at last built an elite band (and even scheduled a handful of shows) that includes Toby Driver, the mastermind of art-metal savants Kayo Dot, and two of Driver's collaborators in that outfit. But the album's only real outburst—a plangent passage of sustained feedback, roiling drums, and ringing church bells—arrives just before the end of "Birds of Passage", the long record's serpentine closer. Instead, for much of these nine tracks, the quartet twists meticulously, almost seductively through pop-rock songs refracted at disorienting angles. At some points, what Stern terms his "alien pop" band even feels wistful—surprising given the group's pedigree, sure, but certainly not without reward.
Much of Stern's surprising restraint stems from the quartet's deliberate choices about dynamics and modulation. Rather than simply pivot between quiet and loud or fast and slow, this subtle group often does both at once, moving incrementally rather than aggressively. That's the most striking feature of opener "Reliquary", for instance, which goes from languid passages into tense interruptions and then back again. And "Ousted" deploys near-amoeboid motion, where every element, from the tempo to the tone, seems fluid enough to shift at any moment. No peak in volume or pace ever lasts too long. That approach allows for touches of post-rock and pop, math rock and metal inside songs where no one look overrides the others.
Stern himself is a provocative lyricist and an oddly endearing singer. His words are impressionistic and evocative—"Silt/ Precious memories/ A grave matter"—and his voice, like Scott Walker's, can quickly curve from a croon to a caterwaul. His songs and his sound deserve the full-rock-band treatment. Stern, however, seems to be readjusting to the role of proper bandleader a decade since Time of Orchids split, or of turning over his songs to collaborators who tamper with them. Across the eerie drift of "Common Carrier", piano notes echo against arid spaghetti western guitars, and the drums circle idly through low clouds of noise and hum. It's a wonderful arrangement, but Stern chooses to sit at its rear, merging his voice with the haze instead of pushing past it.
Much the same goes for "Storm Guide". It's a simple quatrain—"You are my storm guide/ You make it right…"—but the band's luxurious patter communicates the mood more than his near-diffident singing. And during "The Plot" and "Trappings", songs where the band zigs and zags through time signatures and textural approaches, his singing often seems to be chasing the playing, as if his songs have become so complex he's now just trying to keep up with them.
Still, Stern's tunes provide ballast and borders for Toby Driver and part of his Kayo Dot crew, something that band's albums have needed badly in recent years. Bone Turquoise is a promising start for the meeting of two captivating and contrasting bandleaders. Like the best of Kayo Dot and Time of Orchids, it revels in the unexpected—to the extent that it struggles with letting accessible songs stand, every once in a while, on their own. | 2015-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | New Atlantis | August 14, 2015 | 6.7 | 8e7f2bed-fd5d-43ca-ba71-39611e412309 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Guitarist Marisa Anderson's latest album soundtracks a theoretical sci-fi Western of her own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details. | Guitarist Marisa Anderson's latest album soundtracks a theoretical sci-fi Western of her own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details. | Marisa Anderson: Into the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22016-into-the-light/ | Into the Light | On 2013’s Traditional & Public Domain Songs, guitarist Marisa Anderson took tunes from the American songbook—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Pretty Polly”—and warped them to her own liking. The results dropped relics from the past into sometimes harsh, but always interesting, new environments. On her new album Into the Light, she bends American guitar traditions for a completely different, but no less captivating, conceit: They soundtrack a theoretical sci-fi Western of Anderson’s own invention, where it’s up to the listener to fill in the cinematic details.
Anderson's sensitive touch brushes Into the Light with a far-reaching haze that firmly evokes the open, wild West. Her songs often make you feel as though you’re squinting toward the horizon, straining to make out the edges of a mirage. Her faint picking encourages you to lean in and listen closer to soak in the details: She experiments with a more classical Spanish-style guitar on “He Is Without His Guns” and then immediately reprises these beguiling impressionistic strokes on the appropriately airy “Chimes.”
Anderson’s playing throughout the record is understated and exquisite—but then, she’s never veered toward shreddy, explosive showboating. Her guitar grumbles and murmurs, with low-end notes providing subtle muscle behind reverberating riffs and halos of twang. She achieves all of this right off the bat with the album’s opening title track, where she lifts a low, plodding roll with light, inquisitive curls. It’s easy to imagine the song behind the opening scene where we meet the tough and gritty hero/heroine, weary from desert wandering.
The only moments that feel dissonant arrive in “Resurrection” as a few unwieldy notes poke through, sounding like faraway car horns. But these off-kilter moments act as foils to Anderson’s fluid playing, again highlighting the baritone notes that anchor the song. Most often, Into the Light is breathtakingly beautiful: Anderson's licks ripple upward on “The Golden West,” sounding like a sinking stone in reverse. Its patient thrumming is soothing, and Anderson slides Into the Light toward a cinematic-sounding close as she drifts “The Golden West” into the sleepy, soft “End of the Night.”
Into the Light is the kind of record that requires rapt attention, best enjoyed in still solitude. But even as Anderson’s instrument simmers, it still reaches for the great beyond, and she makes you ache to reach along with it. | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Chaos Kitchen | July 9, 2016 | 7.9 | 8e853911-97ed-4b72-862a-1bf9705fe8b4 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
The North Carolina rapper refines his technical wizardry on his second album, but he’s too often buried by 9th Wonder and Khrysis’ overblown production. | The North Carolina rapper refines his technical wizardry on his second album, but he’s too often buried by 9th Wonder and Khrysis’ overblown production. | Reuben Vincent: Love Is War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/reuben-vincent-love-is-war/ | Love Is War | While an underclassman at Charlotte’s Myers Park High School, Reuben Vincent managed to squeeze a full-fledged rap triumph into his courseload. With production from North Carolina fixtures 9th Wonder and Khrysis, 2017’s Myers Park was the sort of go-for-broke debut that inevitably serves as a measuring stick. Flashing extraordinary mechanics across a suite of moody instrumentals, Vincent considered his life in wordy meditations, ably carrying an album without guest performers. He wore DatPiff-era influences on his sleeve—he flowed like Joey Bada$$, when he wasn’t harmonizing like Big K.R.I.T.—pursuing a modest thematic scope in deference to his remarkable technique.
The reception was muted, especially given the assembled personnel; Vincent enrolled at North Carolina A&T and secured a wealth of resources for the follow-up, Love Is War. Billed as a joint endeavor between Jamla and Roc Nation, with contributions from Dreamville’s Christo and TDE’s Reason—not to mention what can only have been a very expensive “Funny How Time Flies” sample—it feels like a tax write-off for the entire rap-industrial complex. 9th Wonder and Khrysis return as producers, joined by Sndtrk, Young Guru, and a half dozen others. It’s too big to fail, and too unwieldy for a cohesive statement: Now 22, Vincent isn’t unrecognizable so much as drowned by Love Is War’s orchestral arrangements.
Vincent remains a technical wiz, turning the album into a vocal clinic. On “Just Like a Dream,” he sails through intricate rhyme patterns with nimble enunciation. His voice is more textured than in the Myers Park days, and he modulates it in subtle degrees, gradually ratcheting up the tension like Nas on “One Mic.” The exacting syllable placement of “Geechie Suede” is underscored by Vincent’s breezy, melodic delivery. He’s honed his bars and breath control, but his increased musicality is the most impressive element of Love Is War.
Instead of making Vincent the featured instrument, though, the producers tend to bury him. Love Is War is a milepost for 9th Wonder, a backpack-rap icon once known for his serene beats composed on cheap desktop software. In the mid 2000s, his DIY approach posed a counterpoint to pricey major-label affairs; he wrangled evocative samples into concise drum loops, favoring approachable, small-town rappers. But between the frictionless layers of “Butterfly Doors,” the listless funk of “Geechie Suede,” and the ponderous chords of “Just Like a Dream,” Love Is War is slick and anonymous. The aforementioned Janet sample on “2ime Flies” marks the album’s nadir: 9th does nothing to disguise or dress up the instrumental, and it’s too obvious a reference for Vincent to make his own. It’s not a tribute or an homage, just an insipid cover.
Too often, Vincent takes lyrical cues from the melodramatic arrangements. “Bottle Service” and “Trickin’” are built around suggestive vocal loops; the former rehashes Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools,” while the latter paints a fallen woman straight out of J. Cole’s playbook. (In a weird pantomime of Cole’s origin story, Vincent claims to have skipped his senior prom for a chance to meet Lamar.) It’s a misapprehension that plagues Love Is War: the producers seem to have isolated ambient mood music as the main attraction of Lamar and Cole’s work, rather than the exquisite rapping. There’s also an unshakeable theater-kid quality to Vincent’s performance. He’s constantly referencing pop culture—A Different World, Uncle Luke, Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper, Steamin’ Willie Beamen—too old for him to have experienced firsthand. Could a 22-year-old really be so exasperated by women, money, and adulthood?
It’s tempting to blame North Carolina. Vincent harbors immense pride in his home, a place he’s described as “the perfect mixture of Southern culture and Northeast culture.” But Cole, Rapsody, and Little Brother—accomplished technicians and labored, sanctimonious lyricists—are inauspicious role models for such a promising artist. Their devotion to hip-hop as an institution manifests in reductive, classicist nostalgia, the defense of an imported canon. Charlotte boasts a breadth of fresh styles ranging from Mavi’s cerebral excavation to DaBaby’s freneticism and Elevator Jay’s down-home theatrics; Vincent needn’t be tethered to fake-deep revivalism. | 2023-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Jamla / Roc Nation | February 3, 2023 | 6.2 | 8e8b3dcd-a923-41d6-bdca-ec512273e102 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
On the Salt Lake City, Utah, grindcore band's third and best album, the sounds are as intensely amped as vocalist Jon Parkin's colorful, politically charged lyrics. | On the Salt Lake City, Utah, grindcore band's third and best album, the sounds are as intensely amped as vocalist Jon Parkin's colorful, politically charged lyrics. | Gaza: No Absolutes in Human Suffering | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17102-no-absolutes-in-human-suffering/ | No Absolutes in Human Suffering | Gaza's last album was called He Is Never Coming Back. The "He" in the title refers to God. Around the time of the record's release in 2009, vocalist Jon Parkin was quoted as saying "He Is Never Coming Back is a knife pushed slowly through the temple and into humanity's primitive religiousness. It is a call to utilize the same logic and reason applied in every other aspect of our lives in the assessment of theology." And when I spoke to him about the record shortly after it came out, he told me, "We wanted this record to pick you up and death shake you like a dog would snap a rabbit's neck. And to once in a while stop to lick the blood running from your nose." The frontman, who is 6'7", and wears his hair close-cropped, clearly isn't afraid to use colorful language when making a point. The music's just as intense and amped on No Absolutes in Human Suffering, the Salt Lake City, Utah, grindcore band's third album-- and best to date.
It works so well because they find a balance between melody and cacaphony. The 11-song collection was produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, who gives Gaza's warped blend of grind, hardcore, and crust a dense, sturdy feel. On their Facebook, the band calls what they do "progressive crust" and "math piss." The first works, but I might change the latter to "math pissed off." Like Gaza's past work, the music here is a dense and intense, a twisting, churning spin on noisy grind with a tendency toward rock'n'roll. The songs, with their constant warping mutations, feel like they're melting. Outside the more mid-tempo title track, and the closing dirge, it's unrelenting. Even when songs are longer-- the six-minute "Not With All the Hope in the World", which moves from a blur to a beautiful sludge anthem, to that surprisingly plaintive, doom closer "Routine and Then Death"-- the pieces never stop throwing unexpected shifts at you. "The Vipers" melds hyper grind, a mid-tempo breakdown, indelible melody, and a noise-rock pep talk. It's a dexterous showing: math rock made up of violent equations.
In a self-penned bio, the group refers to themselves as "failed emo musicians." A joke, maybe, but there is plenty of emotion and emoting here. Parkin reminds me of a short story writer in some ways, or Converge's Jacob Bannon writing for Harvey Milk. His lyrics are sketches and observations that move from the economy ("I understand we have invented ourselves out of a job"), playful anti-religiousness ("It sure was nice of Jesus to take time away from ignoring/ Ethnic cleansing genocide and famine-bloated children/ Or regrowing limbs for landmine victims/ To help you score that touchdown"), the generally political ("Know your children will know more of this earth than you ever will/ You should be embarrassed/ I can hear them laughing at their history books"), to tracks that remind me of punk zine Cometbus, or the poetic manifestos of the anarchist collective Crimethinc. In "Routine and Then Death", for example, the only words we get are "It's the same noise every day/ We walk back and forth." Parkin finds a way out of that cycle in "Skull Trophy" via "a deer carcass someone had cleanly taken the head off of" that he passes in his car. As he puts it, in a way that I find fairly romantic, "I thought of you/ I knew you'd find it full of wonder/ Someone had desecrated a corpse for a sportless opportunistic skull trophy/ That alone is some hillbilly shit/ But the bigger picture is that we've lost feeling in our left arm." Best pickup line of the year.
For all the challenging complexity, this is music that sticks in your head. No Absolutes opens with the wobbling post-rocking drone of "Mostly Hair and Bones Now"-- the track ushers in a huge grind explosion after 50 seconds-- and moves through the AmRep muscularity of the title track to the proggy soloing/post-rock slipperiness of "When They Beg" to the jazz breakdowns at the start of "Skull Trophy". You get the point. Amid all this chaos, though, there's calm. Amid the anger and bile, a discernable beauty. Gaza are a rare band in this way-- an uncompromising group that should appeal to folks who don't usually stock grindcore in their music collection, all without trying, in the least, to win them over. | 2012-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-09-14T02:00:03.000-04:00 | null | Black Market Activities | September 14, 2012 | 7.4 | 8e9fe4c4-c17a-411a-ac14-6c0f8b8bbacf | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The breakout Nigerian star’s second EP explores new sounds even as it returns to familiar ideas—her ongoing search for peace, love, and emotional clarity. | The breakout Nigerian star’s second EP explores new sounds even as it returns to familiar ideas—her ongoing search for peace, love, and emotional clarity. | Tems: If Orange Was a Place EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tems-if-orange-was-a-place-ep/ | If Orange Was a Place EP | This time last year, rising Nigerian pop star Tems was just about to unleash her debut EP, For Broken Ears. From the project’s seven bubbling tracks, the trio of “Damages,” “Free Mind,” and “The Key” stood out, and lead single “Damages” became the top-played song on Nigerian radio. The following months alerted the rest of the world to the magic of Tems: She offered a captivating performance on WizKid’s “Essence,” which secured a spot on Billboard Hot 100; a Justin Bieber-featuring remix elevated it into the Top 20. A short clip of Adele meeting Tems and joyfully singing Tems’ own song “Try Me” to her circulated online, and Drake engaged her for “Fountains,” a slow-burning track on his recent Certified Lover Boy. Now—with looks from some of the biggest artists in the world—Tems returns with a follow-up EP, If Orange Was a Place.
Even before she soared to mainstream recognition, Tems was protective of her signature sound. Early on in her career, she faced pressure from industry professionals to tweak her approach in order to succeed within the Nigerian music climate, she said in a recent radio interview. Tems, however, stuck with the distinctly emotional approach that lit up For Broken Ears, a collection of songs that sounded as deeply personal and turbulent as handwritten letters. Coupled with her freewheeling delivery and emotional rawness, whatever doubt anyone had about her artistry was dispelled.
If Orange Was a Place takes on a different texture and mood. If there’s any element still resonant, it’s Tems’ unrestricted expression, which she makes evident from opener and lead single “Crazy Tings.” Over brooding melodies and groovy percussion, Tems cooly sings about an estranged lover’s faults and pleas for peace: “Give me time/I need space.” The uptempo vibes of “Crazy Tings” slows on the Brent Faiyaz-assisted “Found.” Musically, the track recalls the early version of Tems, who loved to display her vocal prowess over gently strummed guitar. Turbulent feelings still weigh heavy on her mind, and she isn’t done analyzing them, concluding, “Basically, I might not be weak.” But by comparison to the clear emotional snapshots of From Broken Ears, the songwriting feels hazy. Faiyaz, seemingly playing the role of a comforting presence, offers words of healing and reassurance: “If you had you’ll forgive the past.”
After the moody haze of “Found,” the EP jerks back to vibrancy with the heady, swirling melodies and crisp, jazzy horns of “Replay.” Tems is coasting, soaring comfortably as she revels in her own elusive power: “Oh, my voice is a mystery,” she declares. Towards the end, she taps into intriguing pockets of melodies to empty her stash of unhealthy emotions: loneliness, heartbreak, and an unfortunate recent experience in Uganda, where Tems and fellow Nigerian artist Omah Lay were arrested last year for allegedly flouting COVID-19 protocols.
The similarity that links this EP and its predecessor is Tems’ preference to air her worries and talk about the darkness residing within. Save for closer “Vibe Out,” many of the songs linger in a familiar headspace—ruminating on being taken for granted as a lover, or trying to free oneself from the remnants of toxic emotions. Though she ups the ante on “Replay” and “Crazy Tings,” the more usual fare on “Found” and “Vibe Out” sometimes overshadows the new ideas, clouding the project’s intentions. If Orange Was a Place might not provide the same instant gratification as her debut, but it’s a presentation of her vulnerable self.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Since ’93 / RCA | September 23, 2021 | 7 | 8ea1cb27-8acc-42d9-b30f-d6bfab2f68d3 | Otolorin Olabode | https://pitchfork.com/staff/otolorin-olabode/ | |
On a brief collaborative EP, the digipop artists pay tribute to ’90s electronic music while rediscovering the kinetic thrill of their past work. | On a brief collaborative EP, the digipop artists pay tribute to ’90s electronic music while rediscovering the kinetic thrill of their past work. | Dazegxd / quinn: dSX.fm EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dazegxd-quinn-dsxfm-ep/ | dSX.fm EP | A few years ago, quinn and Dazegxd were key players in digicore, a sprawling internet scene that has lately felt more like a withering quarantine relic. quinn was at the forefront making frantic hyperpop, while Dazegxd produced spectral neon rap beats. Like most of the scene’s main flag-wavers, they’ve since departed the milieu. quinn has lately turned toward messy rap experiments and lo-fi idea-dumps. Dazegxd, meanwhile, has spun his instrumental technique into dreamy, expansive electronic music. Still, their scene was always friends first and this chummy spirit carries through to their collaborative EP dSX.FM, a jolt of hooks, hectic breaks, and astral synths that’s both a tribute to and an update of ’90s electronic music.
Drum ’n’ bass with vocals has been a hot fad since PinkPantheress skyrocketed in 2021, but this record is the work of passionate admirers of the genre, not trendbouncers; in fact it might turn away anyone looking for an easy injection of breakbeat ecstasy. quinn’s vocals are glowing but restrained; she hopscotches the 170 bpm breaks with a fiery coolness, rhyming and repeating her musings on thorny romance and self-assurance until each word gleams. It’s a joy to hear her surf inside these mellow rollers and frenetic typhoons, especially since her last two big albums were subtle and introspective. From ditching vocal music and hyperpop as a way to protect herself from viral fame in early 2021 to her recent streak of restless rap, quinn sounds to be slowly rediscovering the thrill of her kinetic, digitized early music.
quinn’s vocals flash across the mix like headlight beams, and they flutter and mold around the rippling backing tracks. Sometimes her voice splits into multiple layers, while at others it distorts and dissolves in the beat, like on the delirious “dementia footwork” remix of “say so.” Her total immersion in the ambiance gives the music a sweet home-crafted feeling at a time when much recent sing/rap drum ’n’ bass sounds optimized for breakneck intensity or like the breaks were plopped in as an afterthought. The lyrics trend vague, but there are moments of striking sharpness, like her and labelmate saturn’s baleful verses over the juddering medieval beat on “maybach music.”
Dazegxd’s voice is equally clear throughout the EP—it’s just that he’s speaking through his machine. In a recent blog post, Dazegxd described how he takes influence from the West African concept of “talking drums” to contour his breaks around the vocalist’s flow and pepper his beats with call-and-response rhythms. As guest vocalist Af1shawty extends a dreamy invitation on the MON co-produced “wait here,” synth keys dance in the background as if prancing in the street. The closing track ditches recorded vocals for sampled specters that Dazegxd warps and weaves into the symphony: an MC’s feverish shouts lead to an ecstatic bass drop, and a pitch-shifted voice yearns to “let me keep you,” followed by a chorus of sweet chirrups. The maximal quality of the hyper-digital sound and frazzled production finish evokes the in-your-face approach of the most chaotic internet rap. Whereas some zoomer junglists like Nia Archives produce in a more traditional style—tightly refined so you can follow all the moving parts—Dazegxd’s music hits like a big fuzzball of electric emotion.
Dazegxd’s actual voice is only heard during the spoken-word intro and intermission, which frame the tape as a fake radio channel. It wouldn’t be a great station in real life, particularly for a long car ride, since it’s a brief 15 minutes. You can easily envision a more fleshed-out version, one where Dazegxd wrangles other genres into the mix, the song structures transform, and quinn’s verses conjure up memorable scenes to match the sounds. But for now, while digicore fractures and fades into the digital archives, the scene’s soul lives on through the artistic bonds it cultivated. | 2023-05-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-01T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | DeadAir | May 1, 2023 | 7 | 8ea8bf24-ac04-4c35-8c5f-9054afd04a7e | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
On her promising debut EP, the New York singer-songwriter searches for ideal settings for her stunning, intimate voice. | On her promising debut EP, the New York singer-songwriter searches for ideal settings for her stunning, intimate voice. | Zsela: Ache of Victory EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/zsela-ache-of-victory-ep/ | Ache of Victory EP | Zsela Thompson’s rich, strange voice first appeared in February 2019 with her debut single “Noise.” There was something haunting about the song’s fluid, hymn-like motion, the way Thompson’s vocals evoked Sade. When the native New Yorker released her second single, “Earlier Days,” eight months later, I felt similarly to one of the commenters on YouTube: “HOW CAN I LISTEN TO MORE OF HER MUSIC, HELP.”
Her five-song EP Ache of Victory arrives after years of teasing. Although it’s her first official release, it comes with an intimidating pedigree. Thompson is the daughter of Marc Anthony Thompson, the neo-soul artist Chocolate Genius, and though her music has traces of her father’s sound, she also fits in with the modern R&B cohort. She’s a scene staple, playing local haunts like Joe’s Pub and Baby’s All Right as well as more rarefied gigs: She covered Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” at MoMA PS1 for the fashion label Vaquera, performed at NYFW for Collina Strada, and at the Whitney for the museum’s annual Art Party. Her producer on Ache of Victory is Daniel Aged, who’s worked with Frank Ocean, and, as one half of the duo inc., with FKA twigs and Kelela. Last year, she toured with Cat Power and Angel Olsen.
Judging by this EP, she belongs to her generation’s modern R&B cohort, marrying the bedroom-pop idiosyncrasy of Okay Kaya with the intimacy of Moses Sumney. In the opener, a synth-backed piano ballad called “Drinking,” the singer admits that she’s been “drinking again,” perhaps a nod to the bluesy sentimental standard of the same name. Alternating between the melancholy and maniacal euphoria that comes with ruining your own life, the song charts the ambivalence of falling off the wagon. Zsela’s voice vacillates between sulking and sprightly: “I’ve been drinking again/I’ve been losing all my friends.” The lines are sung from the bottom of a bottle, then from on high in an angelic chorus, then from back down again, before the song ends abruptly mid-sentence, jolting the listener from their vicariously drunken stupor.
The strongest songs here remain the singles. “Earlier Days” shows Zsela singing breathlessly over gauzy ambient synths punctuated by laid back percussion. On “For Now,” Zsela is backed by synth arpeggios and slow-rolling drums. Her vocal range is astonishing; on the chorus, her voice dives to a bellow, then climbs into a weightless falsetto. When the drums are pared down, her layered vocals produce a stunning, Enya-like choral effect.
The album’s last two songs, though they use similar stylistic quirks, do so with less precision. “Liza,” a torch song backed by a lovely undulating synth, offers little lyrical complexity compared to the rest of the album, and relies a bit too heavily on Zsela’s peculiar voice and vocal layering to carry it. Like “Drinking,” it ends abruptly, but rather than adding to the dizzying quality, it just sounds like someone’s pulled the plug. “Undone,” the album’s most stripped-down song, feels like a return to the piercing simplicity of “Noise,” but it’s so short that it feels unfinished.
Perhaps the first cut is the deepest. Where singles like “Noise” reveal a distinct sound, the other material succumbs to generic, murmured any-R&B—imagine Rhye, the xx, and Aged’s project inc., all blended into autoplay monolith. But Zsela is too interesting to become a casualty of the “beats to chill/study to” playlist, and there are plenty of signs on this short, promising project that her formidable voice will enter the pantheon of greats in a matter of albums.
Correction: Zsela’s father is Marc Anthony Thompson, not Marc Anthony Johnson. Her performance at the Whitney Museum took place at its 2020 Art Party, not at the Wide Rainbow Gala. This review has also been updated to clarify Daniel Aged’s production credits, both solo and as a member of inc. | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | self-released | May 1, 2020 | 7.4 | 8eaffdc5-b7ac-4c81-a3b2-1ebae70db6e2 | Zoe Dubno | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-dubno/ | |
The fourth album from the London duo recalls Brian Eno's post-psych, pre-ambient albums from the mid-’70s and explores how modern media interacts with musical transcendence. | The fourth album from the London duo recalls Brian Eno's post-psych, pre-ambient albums from the mid-’70s and explores how modern media interacts with musical transcendence. | Grumbling Fur: Furfour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22383-furfour/ | Furfour | For an album that radiates solemnity, Grumbling Fur’s *Furfour *is surprisingly preoccupied with television. Its trailer has the aesthetic of a scrambled cable signal, lines blurring into swirls as seen through dilated eyes. Snippets of found dialogue at the beginnings and ends of songs evoke channel surfing. The device itself is mentioned more than once in the London psych-pop duo’s lyrics, too, most strikingly in the chanted chorus of “Silent Plans/Black Egg”: “I can see through the day/To the fridge and television.” It’s an image that, like much of Furfour, suggests both a constant, voluntary awareness of the outside world and a simultaneous urge to escape from it.
The great selling point of psychedelic music is the distance it puts between the listener and material reality. Even in the absence of drugs, it’s spirituality without religion—or, at least, it’s immersive and abstract enough to transport you. But something curious is happening, now that hysterical news cycles and frenetic workdays can follow us to bed at night via smartphone. Artists who would’ve led us into reveries a decade ago are now making music that admits the impossibility of mental vacations. Morgan Delt’s recent album, Phase Zero, quotes clickbait and frets about the apocalypse. Of Montreal’s adds internet slang to Kevin Barnes’ robust vocab list and up-to-the-minute identity politics to his fantastical subversion of the gender binary.
On Furfour, so titled because it’s their fourth album, Grumbling Fur’s Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan have a subtle way of honoring reality while tilting towards transcendence. They’ve often described their music as a collage; their drowsy voices rest atop synthesizers, clips of sound and speech, and an array of organic instruments. In this case, the collage effect extends to the album’s themes, too. The multi-instrumentalists paste images of drudgery and loneliness onto a larger canvas that uses the language of science fiction to express a hunger for spiritual stimulation: “The ultraviolet sun/You know it radiates through everyone/But the show it must go on go on and on and on,” they sing in unison on “Heavy Days.”
Once an improvisationally inclined quartet, Grumbling Fur found themselves writing pop songs as a two-piece sometime after the release of their 2011 debut, Furrier. *Furfour *is a bit of a comedown from the two hallucinatory albums that followed, 2013’s *Glynnaestra *and 2014’s Preternaturals. Only its thumping first single, “Acid Ali Khan,” achieves the abandon of those two records. But you rarely miss it. Tucker and O’Sullivan are still working within the realm of psychedelia, and still collaging sounds in unexpected ways. “Pyewacket’s Palace,” a wordless piece of sound art situated midway through the album, trembles its way from the strings and timpani of a vintage film score to the choral sighs of heavenly ascension. Here they prove they know how to deploy a guest musician, too: the fluttery, wired flute at the end of “Golden Simon” comes courtesy of Bardo Pond’s Isobel Sollenberger.
But this is the first Grumbling Fur album that suggests a meditative trance more than an intoxicated daydream. With the exception of “Sapien Sapiens,” which layers a robotic speech about evolution and genetic engineering over ponderous drones in a way that feels surprisingly obvious, *Furfour *is too rich with ideas to become a drag.
Rooted in a long, strange tradition of English experimentalism that also includes bands like Throbbing Gristle and Coil, *Furfour *is most reminiscent of Brian Eno’s post-glam, pre-ambient albums from the mid-’70s—it’s music that proves pop is as fertile a genre for conceptual songwriting as any other. “Silent Plans/Black Egg” transitions from a violin-led dirge of quotidian exhaustion to a glitchy bed of noise that’s eventually paired with a clip of someone reading from the Book of Revelation. It sounds like the dream you might have if you fell asleep in front of that TV from the chorus.
Eno is also a great collaborator, but he never had a partnership quite as intimate as the one that underlies Tucker and O’Sullivan’s spirit of sonic inquiry. From the White Stripes to OutKast, duos are often studies in contrasts. On paper, Grumbling Fur are similarly mismatched. Tucker, a comic book artist who also records as a solo act and plays in the psych-folk duo Imbogodom, is entirely self-taught. “Put me in a room with instruments and I can play every single one of them—but I also have no knowledge at all of the mechanics,” he told FACT. O’Sullivan is a classically trained musician whose other past and current projects—proggy Guapo and the Norwegian post-metal act Ulver among them—hinge on technical mastery.
But the music they make together is remarkably coherent. Crowded as it is with instruments and ideas, Grumbling Fur doesn’t sound like a collision of sensibilities. Down to Tucker and O’Sullivan’s fondness for blending their voices, the band is an experiment in subsuming two personalities to a collective aesthetic—and that might explain why it’s so cosmic. It may be hard to transcend the spiritual starvation of the fridge and television, but *Furfour *suggests that the small-scale ego death of a creative friendship is one way to do it. | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | September 20, 2016 | 7.6 | 8eb2ff7b-f18d-486e-9550-d3ae42ba2c65 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | null |
On their full-length debut, the Danish dream pop group take a quantum leap forward, with a richer and more eclectic sound. | On their full-length debut, the Danish dream pop group take a quantum leap forward, with a richer and more eclectic sound. | Lowly: Heba | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22863-heba/ | Heba | When Lowly first appeared with a string of singles in 2014, the Danish five-piece’s proficiency with atmospheres was clear. Those singles, along with an EP the following year, showcased the band’s affinity for soaking its songs in heavy reverb. Naturally, Lowly’s music hearkened back to previous generations of dream pop, shoegaze, and even the Beach Boys recording vocals in a swimming pool. But atmosphere alone isn’t much more effective than aiming a video camera at a hunk of dry ice, and Lowly—like countless bands who aim for a similar feel—appeared to approach music from the outside in, as if tones and pedals could substitute for drama.
On Heba, Lowly’s debut LP, the band takes a quantum leap forward. Opener “Still Life” taps into universal feelings of sadness and isolation with such power it would be unbearable if the music supporting it weren’t so beautiful. “Still Life” captures that moment when one becomes aware that a relationship is doomed. Guitarist/vocalist Nanna Schannong and sampler/vocalist Soffie Viemose sing together, as keyboardist Kasper Staub’s synths sweep across the music like gusts of remorse. Viemose and Schannong convey a sense of repetition over multiple lifetimes when they sing, “The memories distort before I can tell/For centuries they’ve been fading/Over and over again.” Meanwhile, drummer Steffen Lundtoft—who manages to play with both a jazz player’s taste for active patterns and a pop musician’s instinct for economy—drags the beat back to a crawl, as if to frame the glacial pace of the lyrics.
Lowly’s previous work hovered in a state of somber, slightly edgy, but otherwise unremarkable introspection. The music on Heba is exponentially more rich. And unlike, say, Mazzy Star, Lowly don’t dwell in the languid cadence of the first song. “Deer Eyes” might have qualified as techno if Lundtoft hadn’t, in a sense, reverse-engineered an electronic beat for his live kit. Even if they had opted for a programmed beat, the song’s tempo layering and synths, along with bassist Thomas Lund’s Moog work, make it all difficult to classify.
At times, “Deer Eyes” recalls Radiohead’s Kid A-era forays into a form of music that is neither organic nor synthetic, but some combination thereof. At one point, the music clears away as Staub plays a synth line that evokes a warped, somewhat cartoonish string section; Staub drops the line in just once, a deft move that gives the song a fleeting touch of vintage records where pop chanteuses are backed by an orchestra.
The band varies its approach on pretty much every song after that. When Schannong sings lead on the funkier “Look at the Sun,” her cutting voice injects a dose of Morcheeba-esque electro-R&B into the mix. And even though most of the lyrics only vaguely illustrate their subject matter, they shift in texture enough to magnify the stylistic changes from song to song. Named after a friend of the band who emigrated to Denmark from Syria, Heba doesn’t explicitly reference the real-life Heba’s experience. Without that context, you’d be hard-pressed to spot a correlation, although several of the songs could be interpreted to fit a refugee or immigrant’s perspective. “Have you ever felt so lonely/That you could map it on your body?” Viemose sings. The answer for all of us is “of course.” Yet Lowly have found a way to ask the question so that it sounds fresh every time, much like this album as a whole. | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Bella Union | February 16, 2017 | 7.8 | 8eb3ba49-d23c-4c60-937b-4f27a8f3c953 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s third album takes a microscope to the messy business of being human, finding revelatory moments of empathy in the smallest everyday details. | The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s third album takes a microscope to the messy business of being human, finding revelatory moments of empathy in the smallest everyday details. | Lady Lamb: Even in the Tremor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-lamb-even-in-the-tremor/ | Even in the Tremor | Aly Spaltro’s music has always been verbose in a way that’s as delightful as it is overwhelming. It takes two, three, four listens to catch up with her as she describes her world in painstaking detail. Her anecdotes are unusually specific: On “Billions of Eyes,” she sings of racing to make the train, only to discover that all of its passengers were rooting for her to succeed.
On Even in the Tremor, her second LP as Lady Lamb (third, counting one earlier LP she released as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper), Spaltro’s focus shifts toward the troubles and anxieties of a late-twenty/early-thirtysomething, a striking contrast to the romps of 2013’s Ripely Pine and 2015’s After, where she unspooled her hopes and worries at an upbeat, energetic clip. Though her breathless exuberance may have faded, her incisive commentary is as sharp as ever.
Spaltro’s inclination toward maximum wordplay serves her well. Lines that might be flimsy standing alone (“The past will kill the present if I let it,” from the title track) are bolstered with startling moments of clarity—the kinds of breakthroughs that usually require hours on a therapist’s couch. Like Annie Dillard reveling in the woods, Spaltro examines emotions and sensations in microscopic detail. Her vivid observations amplify nuance and color, giving her songs a synesthetic quality: the smells of bourbon and bonfires, licking birthday-cake frosting off her fingers, juicy berries dripping in the hands of teenagers.
Her straightforward indie-rock arrangements are unobtrusive throughout Even in the Tremor—they’re neither killer nor filler, clever enough to hold interest without overshadowing Spaltro’s lyric-writing. Electric guitars and drums mostly chug along, peaking with the heart-quickening “Strange Maneuvers,” while piano and strings lend heartfelt gravitas to “Deep Love” and a somber side to “Without a Name.” On closer “Emily,” a loose touch of pedal steel makes for a fitting, hazy complement to the song’s golden-hour nostalgia.
“Little Flaws“ and “Deep Love,” the album’s first two tracks, make a tidy and compelling package deal of Spaltro’s greatest strengths. With “Little Flaws,” she casts an empathetic eye on her partner: “You’ve got little flaws just like me/You try to be hard but I know you’re a softie,” she croons over a plunking rhythm as strings and electronics glide nimbly in the middle. On “Deep Love,” she celebrates her neighbors doting on their pets and other serendipitous moments of tenderness. There isn’t a name for the ambient warmth of stumbling upon those small moments of kindness or empathy, so Spaltro describes it in her own wordy fashion: “Passing through a good scene in somebody else’s life fills my cup.” (She’s since started a social-media campaign to encourage others to share their own heartwarming moments.)
Spaltro also digs into spiritual questions with frank vulnerability, expanding her internal inventories to include the greater baggage of adulthood and the even bigger questions inherent to being human. In “Young Disciple,” she recalls watching her parents, born-again Christians, get baptized in a kiddie pool; in another striking detail, she remembers her mother explaining the Second Coming over fast-food milkshakes. This storytelling serves a deeper purpose. As she explores the things about her mother that she doesn’t understand, she recognizes that they share the same essential existential fears.
With her thoroughly detailed accounts of everyday life, Spaltro offers the comforting affirmation that complicated, hard-to-identify feelings aren’t so strange after all. Her songs, stuffed with information and emotion, act as an extended reminder to appreciate the gentler things the world has to offer—proof that even in the tremors of everyday life at its most confusing, kindness, calm, and empathy still have ample room to grow. | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | April 11, 2019 | 7.1 | 8ec67854-a124-496f-bb80-5290ad9206be | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The Chicago duo makes slow and wide-open instrumental music for drums and pedal steel guitar, creating its own lane and rarely straying from it. | The Chicago duo makes slow and wide-open instrumental music for drums and pedal steel guitar, creating its own lane and rarely straying from it. | Mute Duo: Lapse in Passage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mute-duo-lapse-in-passage/ | Lapse in Passage | Mute Duo’s music is emblematic of their deep roots in Chicago. Pedal steel guitarist Sam Wagster and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Skyler Rowe draw on the city’s long legacy of omnivorous instrumental music, with a sound that is slow and wide open, incorporating elements of free improvisation, ambient music, and Americana. Many artists in Chicago’s underground music scene seek commonalities in seemingly divergent styles, inventing a new vernacular from their juxtaposition. Mute Duo’s list of local collaborators, ranging from folk-leaning mainstays Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay to up-and-coming jazz musicians Matthew Lux and Ben Lamar Gay, marks them as direct inheritors of that approach. Though the duo is similarly innovative, the results of their experimentations are mixed.
Lapse In Passage, the group’s second album, alternates between languid improvisations and riff-centric pieces. Regardless of compositional method, each track feels dusty and ragged, unfolding at a pace that slips fluidly between measured and lethargic. The music’s doomy twang recalls the mellow late-period albums of drone metal pioneers Earth, and the occasional glissandos of Wagster’s pedal steel paired with Rowe’s expressive, untethered drumming bring it close to Australian trio Dirty Three. His inventive approach to the kit, which places equal weight on colorful flourishes and steady time-keeping, provides Lapse in Passage with much of its character. The duo configuration lends itself to a sparse and conversational atmosphere, with each member taking turns conjuring the smoky ambience and generating steady forward motion among the haze.
The album arrives at a moment of pedal steel renaissance in experimental music, as Pitchfork contributor Jesse Jarnow pointed out in a recent essay. With its extended range and ability to slide between notes, the pedal steel has the capacity to create mystifying, idiosyncratic music. But Wagster only takes advantage of his instrument’s extraordinary potential for novelty in a few moments. It’s not that he plays into stereotypical Nashville tropes. Instead, with the exception of moments like the swelling rush of melody on the otherwise laid-back “Dallas In the Dog Days” or the subtly drifting chords that open “Canopy Bells,” much of the album sounds like it could have been written and realized on a standard six-string. It feels like a missed opportunity, as so many others develop new ways to make the instrument sing.
This dynamic embodies a significant difference between Mute Duo and their brightest peers and forebears in Chicago. While Wagster and Rowe’s amalgam of styles is unique, they rarely deviate from that formula once they’ve established it. After you’ve eased into Mute Duo’s sound, it is hard to be surprised by anything that follows. Classic groups like Art Ensemble of Chicago and Gastr del Sol, and more recently standouts like ONO and Angel Bat Dawid, are constantly reinventing—not just weaving together various genre signifiers, but making a practice of breaking their own rules. Despite Rowe’s impressive improvisational skills and the creative way he and Wagster synthesize elements of different traditions, Mute Duo largely stay in the lane of their own making.
This doesn’t make Lapse In Passage unpleasant, or even wholly uninteresting. There are moments, such as the climax of “Red-winged Blackbirds” when Rowe adds pounding atonal piano to the swirl of distorted pedal steel, that they tiptoe toward something like rapture. Opener “Derived from Retinas” is the album’s strongest song, moving through several different distinct movements: at first heavy, dour, and full of grit, then emerging triumphantly into a major key. But when they stretch out into looser, less defined structures, like the nearly 10-minute “Overland Line,” they drift into a comfort zone and stay there for the duration. The more purposeful and focused Wagster and Rowe are, the more enjoyable it is to get lost in their music. | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | American Dreams | March 24, 2020 | 6.9 | 8ec82a64-06a2-407c-9d10-fcc4064e83fe | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
On her self-produced second album, the Kentucky songwriter offers vivid portraits of complex people, synthesizing decades of Southern music into a singular vision. | On her self-produced second album, the Kentucky songwriter offers vivid portraits of complex people, synthesizing decades of Southern music into a singular vision. | S.G. Goodman: Teeth Marks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sg-goodman-teeth-marks/ | Teeth Marks | The South loves to make heroes and legends of its own kind, to spin the tales of rather ordinary people until they acquire a kind of mythic permanence. The Kentucky songwriter S.G. Goodman, though, requires no fabulists to be compelling. She is 33 and from a small Mississippi River town so emblematic of rural America its slumping population statistics betray a war of economic attrition. From a lineage of sharecroppers, she talks in interviews about cavorting in creeks and gigging for gar, then sings of her complicated love for the dollar-store economy and her adoration of Spanish moss sanctuaries. In a region where being gay can mark you for ostracization or damnation, coming out nearly killed her. “Space and Time,” the first song on her 2020 debut, even read like her farewell to the world. She sings not just of a progressive South but of shrugging off capitalism at large, of dismantling the systems that still make the place so difficult. It is apt that Kentucky novelist Silas House penned a recent magazine profile of Goodman; she knows the truth of her home but also eternally reimagines its future, epitomizing our shared New South dreams.
The self-produced Teeth Marks is a sharp and thoughtful distillation of these modern American small-town complexities. Religious hypocrisy, financial ruin, systemic addiction, ruinous love, devotion so intense it begins to burn like hatred: Goodman finds space for it all in these 11 tracks, which glide between breathtaking a cappella eulogies and dive-bar R&B, between gnarled rock and plaintive ballads. Goodman’s scenes are vivid and specific, like her nod to unswept floors or time marked by a procession of crinkled tin cans. Her conclusions, however, seem undecided and open, as if she holds too much hope for the characters and crises in her life to pass final judgment. Goodman takes care not to slip into diaristic voyeurism. She studies each stone carefully before she tosses it into the pond, watching the ripples scatter forever.
Much of Teeth Marks deals with complications of identity and existence—namely, the friction between your expectations for and the actuality of someone you love, like, or simply know. The broken waltz “Dead Soldiers” details a friend slowly losing a battle with alcoholism, steadily tumbling into a version of himself so damaged Goodman barely recognizes him. “Heart Swell” documents the disorienting effects of an unexpected breakup. “The cicada choir is my backing band,” she croons, sporting loneliness with a grudge, like wearing dirty laundry because it’s all that’s left.
The staggering opener “Teeth Marks” mentions physical scars, as the title suggests. But it’s more about the permanent mental wounds left behind by the lover that never respected you, the one who never even tried to “see things my way.” These songs concern the communities and relationships we think we’ve built—and the damage they leave behind when the façade fails.
It is tempting with Teeth Marks to get lost in logocentrism, to become so absorbed with the stories that you don’t notice how very musical these tracks are. Goodman always lands her hook, no matter how desperate the tale is. And there is, relative to lots of Southern indie rock, a staggering diversity in the assortment of inspirations and references. “The Heart of It” shimmers like R.E.M., then arches like Band of Horses. “All My Love Is Coming Back to Me” has the nervy thrum of Lee Bains’ bands or even Archers of Loaf, a feeling amplified by an endless vibrato borrowed from Sleater-Kinney. The solo lament of “If You Were Someone I Loved” aches like old gospel or Ralph Stanley, while motivational finale “Keeper of the Time” sways like Otis Redding until she rides out on a guitar jam that feels a little like a Skynyrd crescendo.
Remarkably, little of this suggests pastiche or collage. Goodman has synthesized decades of Southern music into a singular vision, cohesive even as the sounds shift. Her small but mighty set of collaborators helps. Kyle Spence—now a member of Kurt Vile’s Violators, formerly of weirdo Georgia metal demigods Harvey Milk—provides the perfect drift for the lovelorn “When You Say It,” exquisitely framed by the crystalline piano of Athens’ Jojo Glidewell and the lambent pedal steel of Nashville’s Luke Schneider. And on several songs, Goodman and longtime collaborator Matthew David Rowan play most everything, suggesting just how complete Goodman’s conception was from the start.
One of the best moments on Goodman’s 2020 debut, Old Time Feeling, came in the title track, a pugnacious song about people badmouthing or bailing on the South. “The Southern state is a condition, it’s true,” Goodman opined. “Stick around and work your way through.” It was a protest song for making the place Goodman still calls home better. It was also honest about how backward that home can feel—a diet of “gas station delicacies,” as she put it, and the deafening sound of a “coal train gunning.”
Goodman returns to that mode for “Work Until I Die,” Teeth Marks’ most distinctive song and the one where she suggests another partial solution for at least one challenge of Southern identity. Over drums that feel like a heavy-duty assembly line, she juxtaposes mutations of a 1988 hit by country superstars Alabama and the type of simple blessing one might offer over Sunday supper. “Oh, bless this food to our bodies/And our bodies to your service,” she sings. “In the company’s holy name. Amen.” She is excoriating the modern religion of work, of wasting our lives building the wealth of others. You wonder how many of the other problems she examines here—repression, addiction, depression—are symptoms of this condition, of Christianity crosshatched with commerce. For 40 minutes, Teeth Marks expertly surveys the thorny landscape of the modern South; for these six, Goodman suggests there’s a way to change. | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Verve Forecast | June 9, 2022 | 8 | 8eca9ea2-f27f-461d-b222-95c367f047ab | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The latest unearthed work from San Francisco disco innovator Patrick Cowley is a woozy, fascinating synth experiment with Candida Royalle, the feminist porn director and actress. | The latest unearthed work from San Francisco disco innovator Patrick Cowley is a woozy, fascinating synth experiment with Candida Royalle, the feminist porn director and actress. | Patrick Cowley / Candida Royalle: Candida Cosmica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22517-candida-cosmica/ | Candida Cosmica | Despite the decades that have passed since porn moved from cinema backrooms to the internet, the phrase “porn soundtrack” still conjures raunchy funk guitars and that “bom chicka wah wah” sound. In the ’70s, the porn movie genre was still taking shape, while box office successes like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat provided a template focused on male pleasure first and foremost. Working within the industry and yet pushing for more positive depictions of female sexuality, the late Candice Vadalla moved from being in front of the camera to behind it, a pioneer in feminist filmmaking. “Women were curious and wanted to see if there were some sexy movies they could enjoy with their partner, and there was nothing out there for that,” she once said of her own foray into directing blue movies.
With her interest in body- and sex-positive activism, it makes sense that Royalle—who would adopt the stage name Candida Royalle—found a kindred spirit in Patrick Cowley. Having left the East Coast, both were 20-something transplants living in the sexually-unshackled playland of post-’60s San Francisco. In the early ’70s, Cowley provided soundtracks for Royalle’s street theater work with the Angels of Light (a spinoff of legendary troupe the Cockettes) as well as her performance projects, Warped Floors and White Trash Boom Boom.
The Candida Cosmica EP is a fascinating, too-brief compilation of Cowley and Royalle’s recordings spanning ’73 to ’75. Predating Royalle’s own porn career, it shows where female sexuality and gay pornography, which is to say feminism and disco, briefly inhabited a shared space. (Some dates are hazy, but Cosmica may be contemporaneous with Cowley’s own gay porn soundtracks.) A decade before Cowley ushered in the Hi-NRG sound and scored a 1982 chart hit with Sylvester’s “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” Royalle was his early champion, occasional lover, and muse. The exploratory relationship between the two friends informs the slowly unspooling synth excursions of the five tracks here.
Still a student at City College of San Francisco then, Cowley playfully repurposed equipment like the Serge modular synthesizer and Arp 2600 to electronically recreate Eden, using the primitive patches and filters to suggest gurgling streams and gentle air. Royalle occasionally lends her purrs and sighs, giving the synth-scapes a sense of beauty and wooziness. Only on the sultry closing “Tomato Song” does Royalle sing a proper song. She primarily provides an array of mewls, exhales, and murmurs that—through the lens of her subsequent career—scan now as libidinal. There’s a playfulness to her appearance on the title track, which Cowley then experiments with, converting Royalle into all manner of bird chirps, amphibian blips, wind howls, and the like. The track meanders, but delights, as Cowley’s electronics slyly turn Royalle into river, wind, woods, and then back to a nymph.
“Elementals” is noisier, with Cowley evoking his early electronic forbearers. Its erratic blips and buried snatches of movie dialogue are reminiscent of Vladimir Ussachevsky, Luciano Berio, and Morton Subotnick, as Cowley sorts through just how to make electronics and the human voice work together. “Tantum Ergo,” meanwhile, is underwater electronic abstraction that brings to mind Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea.
The nearly 12-minute “Shimmering (Where Am I?)” is the cosmic Quaalude at the center of it all, as Royalle harmonizes with Cowley’s undulating sinewaves, wondering aloud where she is. This parallels the sensuous strangeness of the Dark Entries label’s previously unearthed Cowley offerings. As “Shimmering” evolves, a tingling sensation feels at first physical, then mental, before the notion of a binary fades. Perhaps not as crucial as previous Cowley discoveries, Cosmica nevertheless intrigues, as Cowley uses his electronics to transform Royalle from flesh to a goddess, her every whisper echoing as if from some other dimension. | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dark Entries | October 29, 2016 | 7.6 | 8ece219c-0090-45c0-90ce-3bf11b068f8e | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On their first album in seven years, Mercury Rev chart a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. As the album goes on, they enter some of the most bizarre territory of their career. | On their first album in seven years, Mercury Rev chart a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. As the album goes on, they enter some of the most bizarre territory of their career. | Mercury Rev: The Light In You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20975-the-light-in-you/ | The Light In You | It’s been seven years since Mercury Rev's last album, and even by this long-suffering band’s standards, the ensuing period was tumultuous. When we last heard from them, they seemed to be tentatively stepping away from their Catskills-scaled orchestro-rock on 2008’s Snowflake Midnight and its ambient companion piece Strange Attractors. And more recently, they revisited their avant-garde film-school roots, performing live improvized soundtracks to screenings as the Cinematic Sound Tettix BrainWave Concerto Experiment. But given the recent upheaval in Donahue and Mackowiak’s personal lives, The Light on You finds Mercury Rev taking comfort in the familiar. The band spent much of 2011’s touring behind a deluxe reissue of Deserter’s Songs, and, in many respects, that campaign continues here. But on The Light In You, the proverbial deserters throw themselves a celebratory homecoming after years in the wilderness.
The album charts a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. For the first time in Mercury Rev history, bassist/producer Dave Fridmann was not involved in the recording, but after 25 years of working with him, Donahue and Mackowiak have a pretty firm grasp on how recreate his seismic sound. So even if the opening "Queen of Swans" begins as typically twee Donahue ode to a mythical goddess, its helium-huffing chorus is followed by a rupture that sounds like an orchestra tumbling into a fault line.
While that song serves as a reintroduction to Mercury Rev’s symphonic might, they wield it to more devastating effect on "Amelie", where mounting string swells accompany a junkie’s plea for forgiveness ("I’ll break the habit/ it’s my last score") that seems destined to go unanswered; the gorgeous, ELO-esque sweep of "You’ve Gone With So Little For So Long" doesn’t gloss over the tale of impoverished hardship couched within. And with the six-minute epic "Central Park East", Mercury Rev provide a staggering reminder of what made Deserter’s Songs so captivating: They conjure a sense of intense isolation amid vast, breathtaking vistas. It’s the sort of song that’s intimate enough to let you see the cold breath coming from the mouth of Donahue’s park-prowling protagonist, while expansive enough to conjure the glow of the skyscrapers surrounding him.
But The Light in You eventually lets go of urban tensions to revel in the psychedelia of nature. Delivering the sundazed serenades "Coming Up for Air" and "Autumn in the Air", Donahue sounds like someone who can get a contact high just from watching the leaves fall. On the latter track, he sings, "I guess this must be what it’s like/ to be in Beatle George’s mind," which actually proves to be a relatively subtle namedrop compared to what follows.
In what might be the most bizarre turn in this band’s disjointed trajectory, The Light in You*’*s final third sees Mercury Rev refashion themselves as the house band on some alternate-universe ’60s teen dance show, complete with exuberant brass fanfares, sitar accents, and bongo-powered go-go-dancer breakdowns. In their time, Mercury Rev have covered enough oldies-radio standards to fill several jukeboxes, but here Donahue practically turns into a pitchman for a Time-Life box set—on "Are You Ready," he’s getting down to The Rascals and The Pretty Things and episodes of Shindig! and Solid Gold; "Rainy Day Record" awkwardly extols the life-changing virtues of listening to misanthropic ’80s post-punk on vinyl in the context of a cheery paisley-soul romp. (Even if you happen to enjoy Jonathan Donahue, rap music, and The Fall, you don’t need to hear Jonathan Donahue rapping about The Fall.) In light of all this band has gone through over the years, it’s understandable that they’d want to let loose, have some fun, and reconnect with the feeling of discovering a favorite band for the first time. But as The Light in You’s dichotomous halves prove, Mercury Rev are much better at being trippy than being groovy. | 2015-10-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union | October 1, 2015 | 7 | 8eda0ecd-f565-4758-b747-aa319e76dfd5 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The San Jose rapper’s unorthodox approach situates him with broader, border-crossing peers like Le1f, Big Baby Ghandi, and Cities Aviv. His new album finds him in a more meloncholy mood, but sadness is ultimately powerless before his insatiable libido. | The San Jose rapper’s unorthodox approach situates him with broader, border-crossing peers like Le1f, Big Baby Ghandi, and Cities Aviv. His new album finds him in a more meloncholy mood, but sadness is ultimately powerless before his insatiable libido. | Antwon: Heavy Hearted in Doldrums | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19262-antwon-heavy-hearted-in-doldrums/ | Heavy Hearted in Doldrums | Even by the standards of alt-rap eccentrics, Antwon’s pretty damn protean: a former hardcore kid brought up on boom-bap and pop singers who’ll readily name his new favorite thrash bands after compiling a list of the best Cocteau Twins songs. The San Jose rapper’s unorthodox backstory easily situates him within the broader, border-crossing movement that, thanks to peers like Le1f, Big Baby Ghandi, and Cities Aviv, seeps steadily into hip- hop’s consciousness. “Post-internet” labels aside, it’s easy to see why his two most recent mix tapes, End of Earth and In Dark Denim, were received with enthusiasm: combining vaporwave synths, Death-Grips-style compression, and Biggie worship into a cohesive rap song is hard enough, and tougher still when sex jams are one of your main specialties. Somehow, Antwon pulled it off. On his new album, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums, the rapper constructs his boldest collection yet, grounded in improved production and his characteristic schoolboy wit.
If the album’s mildly redundant title and its po-faced track list don’t make it clear enough, Antwon’s grown sulkier since we last saw him. From the shadowy posturing of “Cold Tears”—this album’s closest thing to a banger—to the molasses-thick, melancholic “Don’t Care”, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums is often mired in sorrow. But the sadness is ultimately powerless before the rapper’s insatiable libido. In spite of his laments on “Loser” (“I used to have a heart/ It once was filled with love”), Antwon continues to approach sex with the bushy-tailed perspective of a teenager who’s just been handed his driver’s license. “She bust seven times, made a nigga feel great!” he crows on “Break Yo' Back”, a boast he supports throughout the album with his many, many references to oral sex. Wacky erotic banter remains his biggest strength, fueled by a warmhearted, sex-positive spirit that recalls fellow horn dog Danny Brown, or perhaps, a kinkier Biz Markie. Even when he’s being a creep (“As long as your Dad don’t care/ I’ma run my fingers through your baby hairs”) or indulging his bad habit of running a phrase like “bust in threes” into the ground, you’ve got to admire his originality, not to mention his gusto. At the very least, he’s leagues above the majority of his guests, whose contributions to this album range from tight (Lil Ugly Mane’s crossfaded musings on “Rain Song”) to irremediably tepid (Wiki’s shrill, stilted verse on "No Metro Nome”).
Heavy Hearted in Doldrums has been billed as Antwon’s first proper “album”, a distinction that translates into some much-needed upgrades in production. Most notably, there’s none of the dodgy mixing that rendered portions of In Dark Denim downright unlistenable. After the cramped sonics of the past, even the first few seconds of the Sean Kemp-produced, “Rain Song” feel overwhelming: a sudden onslaught of ambient nature sounds, cavernous chorals, and somber violins before the bongo beat comes creeping in. When Antwon finally comes in over the primal beat, his voice doesn’t have to fight for space, so even a stale hook like “She’s got me up all night doing that rain dance” gets a vital dose of immediacy.
That’s not to say the mix is immaculate. It suffers from a serious dearth of bass, and frequently overemphasizes their weaker aspects, like the cheap synths that drive “Mr. Intercontinental”. “KLF ELF”, the worst offender in this regard, includes a refreshingly ribald guest verse from Das Racist’s Heems that packs in a reference to Olivia Benson from “Law and Order: SVU”, but it’s hard to appreciate the rapper’s wit when he’s muffled by Pictureplane’s blaring calisthenics jams. Were this another run-of-the-mill mixtape, these flaws could easily be overlooked. But considering the fact that Heavy Hearted in Doldrums was funded by a clothing company that charges upwards of 50 bucks for a faux-distressed t-shirt, one would think there’d be fewer duds.
Last summer, Antwon crossed paths with Deafheaven guitarist Kerry McCoy for a washed-out remix of In Dark Denim’s title track, hinting at a possible new scheme through which his two selves, Crusthead and Biz Markie .gif incarnate, could be joined in anguish. Instead of putting these new configurations to the test, Heavy Hearted in Doldrums tinkers with the made-in-the-‘90s blueprint he’s been using from the start, with solid and safe results. That framework suits the rapper just fine, but listening to this album, you can’t help but wish for his dirty genius to fester into something fiercer. | 2014-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-05-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Aesop | May 6, 2014 | 7.3 | 8ee56f3b-4b3e-4960-a412-6d4b58efc152 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
With at least 50 albums over three decades, the jazz pianist Matthew Shipp has honed an inherently diverse and exploratory style. He says Piano Song will be his final recording. | With at least 50 albums over three decades, the jazz pianist Matthew Shipp has honed an inherently diverse and exploratory style. He says Piano Song will be his final recording. | Matthew Shipp Trio: Piano Song | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22847-piano-song/ | Piano Song | After making at least 50 albums over the past three decades, pianist Matthew Shipp has decided that Piano Song is (probably) his final recording. So it’s tempting to hear it as a definitive statement, perhaps even a career summation. But really, every one of his records could be called definitive. His playing style is so inherently diverse and exploratory that he’s almost incapable of making narrow-sounding music. Even when he sticks to a specific theme or format, his full array of stylistic weapons eventually gets deployed.
There’s no explicit theme behind Piano Song. It’s simply strong, well-considered jazz, with Shipp’s piano leading a thorough dialogue with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker. In fact, the trio is so comfortably conversational it’s easy to miss how much territory they cover, especially in the beginning. Opening with a slow, somber solo piece, Shipp guides his partners through subtle, subdued tracks that earn names like “Blue Desert” and “Silence Of.”
But once the trio launches into “Flying Carpet,” with Shipp slamming out portentous chords and Baker pounding snare-bombs in response, Piano Song’s relentless variety becomes crystal clear. The contrast between those heavy sounds and the tune’s calmer passages is thrilling, and it’s one the band revisits in numerous variations throughout the album. On “Mind Space,” short stretches of quiet energy burst into raucous crescendos, while during “Gravity Point” furious action cleverly cascades into reflective pauses. The trio can run full-throttle for entire tracks, too: In “Microwave,” Shipp’s note clusters twist around Bisio’s stair-stepping bass without few gasps of breath.
The conversations in Piano Song feel ongoing, as if we’re merely getting glimpses of a longer, potentially-endless back and forth. All three players have an abundance of things to say, and though there’s sufficient space for each, no single recording could really encompass it all. That’s true of most of Shipp’s work, which makes his decision to leave the realm of recording disappointing but not entirely disheartening. He surely will keep conversing with his piano—he has no plans to stop playing or performing—and if the best venues for that might be something other than albums, he’s earned the right to make that call. Just absorbing his discography could take lifetimes as it is, and Piano Song is another entry that will reward listening for a long time. | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Thirsty Ear | February 7, 2017 | 7.2 | 8ee594b6-46ee-4fdb-99bc-64441689478e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
After decades of legal red tape and intraband strife, Minneapolis’ revolutionary punk trio break the silence with an exhaustive summary of their lo-fi, frenetic first three years. | After decades of legal red tape and intraband strife, Minneapolis’ revolutionary punk trio break the silence with an exhaustive summary of their lo-fi, frenetic first three years. | Hüsker Dü: Savage Young Dü | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/husker-du-savage-young-du/ | Savage Young Dü | On January 26, 1988, one of the most important contemporary American rock bands came to an end at a kitchen table in St. Paul, Minn. Exhausted from nearly a decade of nonstop touring and recording, compounded by the recent suicide of their manager and, most pressingly, drummer Grant Hart’s spiraling heroin addiction, guitarist Bob Mould and bassist Greg Norton sat down with Hart at his parents’ house. A few awkward minutes later, Hüsker Dü was no more—out with a whimper unbecoming of the noise they were semi-famous for.
And they never looked back; in fact, no band of their stature has ever looked back less. There were no gussied-up reissues or valedictory anthologies to cement the band’s legacy for latecomers or fans who wanted something beyond the sludgy audio quality of older recordings that was growing less romantic with age. A lot of this had to do with sundry legal and label entanglements, but there was a festering spite that time seemed to intensify rather than heal. “I’m blessed to have such a nice history,” Mould told me in 2008, “but I’m careful not to cash in on it.” Hart’s death this past September at 56 from liver cancer closed the book on this for good, but the band is no less worthy of reappraisal and recontextualization.
This longstanding animosity and frustration isn’t mere backstory; it’s the reason Savage Young Dü is an event at all, more momentous than the sum of its ramshackle parts. It was only two years ago that the appearance of a bare-bones official online merch store augured a major breakthrough; after nearly 30 years of post-breakup enmity rivaled only by the Smiths and the Gallagher brothers, all three members coming together to sell lapel buttons was a hard-fought victory. But the notion of them collaborating on a project as comprehensive and thoughtful as this still felt as fantastical as a headlining spot at Coachella. That it ultimately could only be undertaken by Chicago-based excavation specialists Numero Group, speaks to the degree of difficulty
Comprised of 69 chronologically sorted tracks, most live and 47 previously unreleased, Savage circumvents the nightmarish parsing of rights from SST and Warner Bros. by focusing on raw recordings from the band’s formative years in the Twin Cities between 1979 and 1982. Beyond heralding the band’s youthful prolificacy with a book including archival photos, a comprehensive band history, and the provenance of every salvaged track, the box set offers a slight revisionist tweak to the band’s generally accepted narrative arc as a Very Fast, Very Intense Hardcore Band That Evolved To Slow Down A Little And Write More Nuanced Songs. Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here—the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”—show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. Hart’s Thin Lizzyish demo “All I’ve Got To Lose Is You” could have been one of their most beloved songs had anyone known about it.
That playfulness was largely jettisoned once they got out of the Midwest and started spending time with punks like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and DOA. By the time they’d returned home from an eventful three-month 1981 West Coast tour, they had a mission: “If the Ramones were fast and the Buzzcocks were faster and the Dickies were even faster, that meant Hüsker Dü needed to be the fastest band in the world,” Mould wrote in his 2011 memoir See a Little Light. “Before we left, there was breathing room in our performances; now that breathing room had been replaced with a claustrophobic, frenetic intensity that reflected our eye-opening experiences on the road, our elevated ambitions, and our burning need to upstage any band in sight.”
Much of the box set captures that mission in full bloom, highlighted by a dutiful recreation of the band’s aptly titled debut Land Speed Record taken from a 1981 show a few weeks after the one that formed the original live album, showcasing the trio at their most punishing and political. The sheer speed is as shocking now as it must have been then—possibly more so given the clearer understanding that it was a conscious shift rather than overcompensating for tunelessness—while Reagan-era rants like “Guns at My School” and “Push the Button” feel depressingly up to date.
Nestled amid the amphetamine-fueled primordial punk are tracks like “Industrial Grocery Store,” “Outside,” “Call on Me,” and “Private Hell,” which stand as undiscovered blueprints for the rest of the band’s career, surrounding pop hooks and melody with discordant noise—a concept that is a lot more familiar in 2017 than it was in 1980. While any rarities collection is a map of paths not taken, Savage Young Dü presents dozens of crudely recorded castoffs as evidence of mounting confidence and feverish productivity; a different band could have built a career solely off the songs Hüsker Dü routinely discarded. The objective of a project of this magnitude and care isn’t just to show how a particular artist got to a particular place, but how we all got there, too; to remind, again, how things we take for granted about culture stem from basement experiments no one was supposed to hear.
Which is not to say that the non-hardcore songs here are an easy listen; production miracles were no doubt performed on all these recovered tapes, many of which were culled from the band’s former engineer and early acolyte Terry Katzman. But once you get used to the fidelity, the voyeurism makes the sense of discovering these otherwise fully-formed songs feel that much more palpable. By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor. Perhaps the most shocking takeaway is that for all this collection’s depth and intensity, it’s largely prelude. In the two and a half years between July 1984 and January 1987, Hüsker Dü released five bona fide classic albums (two of which were double LPs) and zero bad ones—a winning streak that deserves to stand with any in rock history, if one unlikely to yield the same trove of orphaned, unheard ideas.
In a Facebook post eulogizing Grant Hart in September, Numero Group’s Ken Shipley, who spent seven years tracking down tapes and artifacts and contracts, remembered a visibly ailing Hart asking him in March if there was any way the box set could come out “before I go.” While Mould has long been the most visible member of Hüsker Dü, Savage Young Dü makes the case for Hart as its, well, heart. His drumming propels the most brutally fast songs here while his barefoot-scamp charm grounds the catchiest; nothing defines the band better than its alchemy of those two elements. But it was his addiction issues that hastened the band’s demise, and the rest of his career, despite brilliant moments, can’t help but feel like a cautionary tale compared to Mould’s. If only an accident of timing, this immersive, high-profile origin story, cleaved from its messier conclusion, can be read as a redemption of sorts.
“We’re not the most professional band in the Twin Cities,” Hart sheepishly tells whoever happened to have been in the Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn in July 1979, right after tearing through the rarely heard, dizzyingly fun entomology-themed romp “Insects Rule the World.” Just 12 tracks into a collection that makes the definitive case for Hüsker Dü as the platonic ideal of a band discovering, absorbing, exemplifying, then eclipsing an entire subculture, it sounds like an apology and a promise to do better. | 2017-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Numero Group | November 6, 2017 | 9 | 8eea4215-18d7-41ac-86a7-ca6b6b608343 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
EL VY is the new project from Matt Berninger of the National and Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls and Menomena. Their debut offers a chance to hear Berninger divorced from the context of his main gig, and the results are muddled and confused, unsure of a clear direction to take. | EL VY is the new project from Matt Berninger of the National and Brent Knopf of Ramona Falls and Menomena. Their debut offers a chance to hear Berninger divorced from the context of his main gig, and the results are muddled and confused, unsure of a clear direction to take. | EL VY: Return to the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21161-return-to-the-moon/ | Return to the Moon | It's probably unfair to compare EL VY, the new project from Matt Berninger (the National) and Brent Knopf (Ramona Falls, Menomena), to Berninger's main gig. The National have come to cast a surprisingly long shadow over indie rock: even if their booking at Barclays Center was more a case of "huge in New York" than "huge in Oklahoma," the National have emerged as a big-tent indie mainstay because their widescreen melancholia has proven durable and difficult to emulate. EL VY provides our first look at Berninger divorced from that context and a clue toward deciphering how much of the National's appeal hinges on Berninger's GQuaalude musings and how much belongs to his band's gilded alt-rock.
It's easy to say EL VY's first record, Return to the Moon, isn't a National album; it's more difficult to put a finger on what exactly it is. On lecherous lead single "I'm the Man to Be" he's still talking about his dick, the one he swung around so much on 2005 breakthrough Alligator. Elsewhere ("It's a Game") he's comfortably forlorn, trading on elegant little phrases ("It's a game/ And I can't wait to see you") like he did on 2013's Trouble Will Find Me. Knopf's jaunty and hectic keyboard-heavy arrangements are a little indistinct and, worse, noncommittal, unable to choose between glam ("I'm the Man to Be") and lounge rock ("Paul Is Alive"), between lush folk ("No Time to Crank the Sun") and boozy bluster ("Sad Case").
We get glimpses of how Berninger might fare as a Bryan Ferry-esque put-on—he has the wardrobe for it—or as Greg Dulli-indebted horndog, but only in the moments before Knopf's arrangements whisk him away. The particularly ill-fated opening trilogy—including "I'm the Man to Be", the title track, and "Paul Is Alive"—reek of that fake-funky, post-Beck period when major labels gave odd, talented bands just enough rope to hang themselves; the results sound like Berninger and Knopf deemed Soul Coughing not haughty enough. There are cooing background vocals, dirty organs, harpsi- and power chords, but it all feels random, deployed only because something has to fill these spaces.
Berninger, for all his magnetism, doesn't help matters. Absent his backing band's grandeur, his poet-laureate-of-the-upwardly-mobile-schtick cedes way to a clever misanthrope in need of an editor and an Advil. The album opens with the unforgettable and irredeemable line, "I scratched a ticket with the leg of a cricket/ And I got triple Jesus," straight from the Tweedy School of Left-Leaning Refrigerator-Magnet Poetry. He's still name dropping other musicians—the Beatles, the Cramps, the Minutemen—but he puts too fine a point on things when, in the middle of "Sleepin' Light", he declares, "Ain't no Leonard Cohen." He's still funnier than he's given credit for ("You were supposed to bring me your brother's weed...this is heartbreaking!") but he seems in on the joke less often. His haphazard proper nouns—"Silent Ivy Hotel", "Happiness, Missouri"—carry less import.
Trouble Will Find Me was well-received, but there was a sense, even amongst National die-hards, that this was the last time the band, and Berninger, could coast on that particular sound. Return to the Moon is an unhappy departure, one that suggests that Berninger is as reliant on the National's luxe environments as they are on his all-the-wine sloganeering. And while there's nothing here that suggests Berninger and Knopf are truly incompatible, there's equally little evidence that Knopf's spirited arrangements are suited to Berninger's spotlight-gargling word soup. "Return to the moon/ I'm dying," Berninger croons on the opening track. Yeah, man. | 2015-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | November 2, 2015 | 4.8 | 8ef0c88e-5d79-4c6e-a899-3aef8f8baa27 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Meek’s fifth album is an extended victory lap that can be thrilling and thoughtful in spots but is mostly content to aggressively spin its wheels. | Meek’s fifth album is an extended victory lap that can be thrilling and thoughtful in spots but is mostly content to aggressively spin its wheels. | Meek Mill: Expensive Pain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meek-mill-expensive-pain/ | Expensive Pain | Meek Mill’s raps usually come with mortal stakes attached. It doesn’t matter if he’s in legal standoffs with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, digital standoffs with other rappers, or just taking aim at faceless haters; when his back is against the wall, he’s capable of making any adversity feel like a third-act Marvel Cinematic Universe blowout. This me-against-the-world fervor is what turns songs like “Dreams and Nightmares,” the intro to his 2012 major-label debut of the same name, into timeless anthems and his 2018 album Championships—released more than seven months after a long battle with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—into a celebratory middle finger. Meek had a rollercoaster of a decade and has vanquished (or made up with) most of his enemies. His fifth album, Expensive Pain, is an extended victory lap that can be thrilling and thoughtful in spots but is mostly content to aggressively spin its wheels.
With no tangible enemy to rally the troops against, the idea of “expensive pain” creeps along the edges of the album. Meek is pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars per show and is freed from the bondage of parole, but money and fame can also isolate people from the world. Sometimes, like on “Intro (Hate on Me)”—the latest in his series of explosive album openers—he barrels through the commotion and flexes for the hell of it (“I put baguettes on all of my dawgs; they fall, they makin’ a sound”). Other times, like on both the title track and “Tweaking,” he dwells on falling out with friends over money and being told to seek therapy after admitting to cuddling his gun in bed. For better and worse, he’s a long way from the cold Philly street corners where he cut his teeth, and the album’s best moments amplify the pros and cons that come with attaining wealth while grieving loved ones.
The soul-searching on Expensive Pain is some of the most potent of Meek’s career. He’s nervous about his friends leaving jail and jumping back into the streets (“Expensive Pain”); he’s reflecting on being a “gangsta since like 5, since my daddy died” (“Cold Hearted III”). His trademark pumped-up anthems, on the other hand, are more of a mixed bag. There, he’s mostly running in place, recycling well-worn stories of haters lurking in the shadows and women lurking in his bed and his wallet. He’s made dozens of songs like “Sharing Locations” and “Me (FWM)” before. Mid-album highlight “Hot” is most notable for the velocity of Nick Papz’s beat and a nimble guest verse from Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo, distracting from Meek’s unsexy sex bars. The fun and energy are there, but there’s little separating these Meek Mill songs from those already clogging workout playlists.
He’s singing more often on Expensive Pain, too, but his Auto-Tuned vocals are indistinct, the exact opposite of his well-established persona. “On My Soul” aims for glossy vocal runs but scans as Roddy Ricch cosplay. He sounds so much like Young Thug on “We Slide” that it’s genuinely surprising when Thug himself shows up on the second half for a duet. Paired with one of the most unique voices in rap, Meek sounds like a deepfake. He was clearly inspired to continue pushing his voice after isolated singing moments on his 2017 album Wins and Losses and Championships, but it’s largely an unwelcome expansion, drawing attention away from the more melancholy corners of Meek’s brain.
As a rapper who’s now five studio albums and nearly a dozen mixtapes into his career, Meek can’t be blamed for wanting to switch things up. Many of the experiments on Expensive Pain don’t pan out, and a handful of the album’s more traditional songs bleed together, but the glitz, glamour, and paranoia typical of his music generally hold. Expensive Pain is Meek’s first album not embroiled in or directly inspired by controversy since 2015’s Dreams Worth More Than Money, a place to regain his footing without playing defense. Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Maybach Music Group / Atlantic | October 6, 2021 | 6.8 | 8ef285ac-78f1-4532-8326-f11318f3b98f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Another consistent, quality LP from Scotland's three-headed power-pop songwriting team. | Another consistent, quality LP from Scotland's three-headed power-pop songwriting team. | Teenage Fanclub: Man-Made | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7957-man-made/ | Man-Made | Scotland's Teenage Fanclub are the standard-bearers of modern power pop. Eight albums into their career, no one else comes close to their mastery of the genre, and when you think about it, the pieces for their run of remarkably consistent albums were in place from the beginning. The band has three accomplished songwriters whose voices blended as though nature intended it; what it lacked is a sense of adventurous experimentation, and as such, their discography is consistent almost to a fault, always good but never surprising or amazing.
It's possible that the band felt the need for a bit of a shake-up when it came time to record Man-Made, and they traveled to Chicago to record with John McEntire at his Soma Electronic Music Studio. The change of venue and the choice of McEntire are the kinds of moves that could precipitate real change in a band's sound, but as it turns out the record is full of the same intensely classicist power pop that's filled every Teenage Fanclub album. McEntire's influence is felt keenly on the edges of the music, though, in the textures of the guitars and bass and in the injection of a host of buzzing and burbling keyboards low in the mix. So while it's not a reinvention, the production does bring in a subtle infusion of the kind of energy and youthful vigor that was missing from recent outings like Howdy! and Songs from Northern Britain and makes Man-Made possibly the band's best outing since 1992's near-masterpiece Bandwagonesque.
The tracklist is split amongst four songs each from Norman Blake, Gerard Love, and Raymond McGinley. Blake's finest is opener "It's All in My Mind", which features the band's trademark gentle harmonies through a monster hook that counter-intuitively pulls back from the verse. Francis MacDonald's drums give the song an insistent beat while buzzing organ and e-bowed guitar quietly mingle in the background to lend the sound a little extra punch. Blake's "Slow Fade" is an invigorating nod to the swifter tempos and louder volumes of the band's early-90s salad days, whipping by in less than two minutes and including a spry if somewhat tuneless guitar solo.
Love's "Time Stops" benefits from well-placed, almost inaudible pizzicato strings in the pensive verses and floats by on a buoyant rhythm full of richly recorded drums and artful piano accents. McEntire's peculiar talent for recording basslines is on full view on McGinley's "Nowhere", which rides and especially nice one in its harmony-soaked verses. The vocals aren't the only thing harmonized on "Feel", a song that bursts out of the gate with doubled lead guitar and rides a loose groove the relies on a sparse piano part for a lot of its motion.
Man-Made ultimately sounds exactly like you'd expect a Teenage Fanclub album to sound, but with just enough extra to make it feel new again. It's unlikely at this point that any of their fans would want them to completely overhaul their approach anyhow, and indeed those fans are treated to the band's best collection of songs in more than a decade here. The uninitiated shouldn't skip over Bandwagonesque for this, but fans of both Teenage Fanclub and power pop in general will be very pleased with this. | 2005-08-03T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-08-03T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | August 3, 2005 | 7.4 | 8ef7f021-0ab2-49e5-8a0e-eb4ae22c95e5 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Atlanta duo’s Sub Pop debut examines the mundane anxieties of modern life with caffeinated post-punk that recalls Parquet Courts or Wire. | The Atlanta duo’s Sub Pop debut examines the mundane anxieties of modern life with caffeinated post-punk that recalls Parquet Courts or Wire. | Omni: Networker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omni-networker/ | Networker | Omni chose their new album title with a pressing question in mind: How does an aspiring musician make a living? The Atlanta post-punk duo isn’t just referring to social media with Networker—they admittedly detest it—but also the perceived obligation to rub elbows with industry folk of importance, and the depressing spectacle of observing all your friends do the same around you. Thankfully, Omni found a little success, as this record marks their Sub Pop debut.
Their music has always thrummed with nervous energy, as if they were forever anticipating the worst. They’re considerably more secure since becoming labelmates with Sleater-Kinney, Beach House, and Father John Misty, but their worries haven't subsided: “Are you nervous for your career?/Are you insincere?” singer/bassist Phillip Frobos prods on opener “Sincerely Yours.” While there are mentions of modern technology, Networker is at its best when dissecting how these technologies intersect (or don’t) with the mundanities of daily life. On “Present Tense,” Frobos’ long-distance partner texts him a nude photo, but their clashing schedules keep him from responding right away.
Omni’s jittery post-punk, filtered through Parquet Courts and the Talking Heads, sounds slightly dialed back here, but the lyrics still burn with unease: “Continue to avoid me/But you’d like more photos to see/Are you dreaming of the stranger that turns you on?” Frobos asks “Skeleton Key,” recounting the agonizing self-consciousness of an online fling. “With your confidence, well, where do I fit in?” begs the narrator of “Sleep Mask.” “Is your silence concentration? Or should I take a hint?” There are more question marks than full stops on the lyric sheet, presenting frustrations with no hope for a resolution. “I’m an imposter/I blend like wallpaper,” Frobos laments over the quarter-note slog of “Genuine Person,” as matter-of-factly as if he were introducing himself.
At their best, Omni’s layered influences amount to a complex and absorbing churn, but here, the band sounds a bit depthless; frenzied guitar riffs can only evoke so much when there’s so little stylistic variation between them. The band is nimble and admirably tight, but most tracks chug along with similar tempos, volumes, and textures; the most memorable moments are the few welcome changes of pace, like the time signature shift of “Underage” or the synthy slow-jam of the title track. To stick with the digital-age-anxiety theme, Networker feels not unlike a dating app meetup that went fine, but not great—just entertaining enough to hold your interest for a round or two of drinks until you’ve decided you probably wouldn’t see them again.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | January 9, 2020 | 6.5 | 8efa9b76-bd6b-4c12-8409-012388c99ddc | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
7 Year Bitch's blunt and spiky rock music married social commentary with punk brevity and Riot Grrrl righteousness. Live at Moe comprises recently uncovered recordings from a 1996 show at Seattle’s Club Moe, and it's a welcome document that adds meaningfully to the band’s oeuvre while capturing a moment in the thriving Seattle scene of the '90s. | 7 Year Bitch's blunt and spiky rock music married social commentary with punk brevity and Riot Grrrl righteousness. Live at Moe comprises recently uncovered recordings from a 1996 show at Seattle’s Club Moe, and it's a welcome document that adds meaningfully to the band’s oeuvre while capturing a moment in the thriving Seattle scene of the '90s. | 7 Year Bitch: Live at Moe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21423-live-at-moe/ | Live at Moe | "I’ve been wanting to spit on you all night," sneers 7 Year Bitch’s Elizabeth Davis-Simpson. The throwaway line from Live at Moe, composed of recently uncovered recordings from a 1996 show at Seattle’s Club Moe, sums up the band’s appeal. A baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, 7 Year Bitch’s blunt and spiky rock music married social commentary with punk brevity and Riot Grrrl righteousness. Crowning their ferocious riffs on sex, trouble, and death were Davis-Simpson's heat-seeking remonstrations, which were as precise as they were lethal. Live is a powerful showcase—a welcome document that adds meaningfully to the band’s oeuvre while capturing a moment in the thriving Seattle scene of the '90s.
On Live at Moe, we hear a band in transition but not necessarily in decline. The opener, "24,900 Miles Per Hour," from 7 Year Bitch’s third and final album Gato Negro, is a furious demonstration of the band's broadening palette. Selene Vigil-Wilk’s melodic narration, detailing the demise of a "poor white trash" girl, has a looser cadence and more languid delivery than anything from the band’s earlier catalog—the song sounds like a Daydream Nation outtake, until the vocal snarls suddenly in the chorus. This version cleaves to the studio iteration but thrums with sharper urgency.
The live spark transforms other songs from Gato Negro, the band’s first and only album with Atlantic Records, which was simultaneously less scrappy and less compelling than 1992 debut Sick’Em and 1994’s ¡Viva Zapata!. Wandering beyond their original metal-underscored feminist fury to introduce funk idiom and bluesy touches, 7 Year Bitch’s lyrics also shifted, from incendiary directness to sometimes-more-clichéd lines. "Crying Shame," with its plodding chorus and piqued nursery-rhyme rhythm ("They like the kind of girl/ The kind they cannot tame") gets a thoroughly menacing showing here; Valerie Agnew’s hi-hats pull tension lines tight, and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson’s nimble, subterranean bass anchors the sparse instrumentation. While the live mix isn’t uniform between tracks—the recording was originally streamed online—it’s generally even-handed; it breathes, often capturing the distinctive character of the musicians’ contributions.
Nuclear force arrives in the set with "M.I.A.," from ¡Viva Zapata!; both the album and the track memorialized Mia Zapata of the Gits, who was raped and murdered in 1993. Directed at the killer, at any abuser of women, the song unites the band’s dual strengths of raw sonic power and scarifying screed: "Will there be hundreds mourning for you?/ Will they talk of the talent and inspiration you gave?/ No." Vigil-Wilk’s blistering delivery speaks of monstrous anger and loss, articulating a remembrance that is both salute and spur. "Hip Like Junk," also a ¡Viva Zapata! cut, prowls the dark grounds of drug abuse and addiction, a perennial theme for 7 Year Bitch after the drug-related death of original guitarist Stefanie Sargent in 1992.
"Lorna," from Sick ‘Em, harks back to beginnings, when the band’s sound had more in common with contemporaries L7 and Babes in Toyland, like surf rock filtered through granite. The penultimate offering is classic brat directive "The Scratch." Live at Moe’s version swaggers, growls, and grabs; "I want it," yells Vigil, "Give it to me." Closing out the record is "Kiss My Ass Goodbye," introduced as the last song guitarist Roisin Dunne would be playing with the group before departing. Given 7 Year Bitch would break up the next year, the energetic exit feels bittersweet but apt. Live at Moe is a fierce hello-again-and-farewell to an iconic group, chronicling a set that’s tight and short, like a skirt that says "Fuck you" on the butt. | 2016-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | MOE | January 14, 2016 | 7 | 8efb8aee-79b8-4ddc-8dbe-fb8942007f5d | Estelle Tang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/estelle-tang/ | null |
Lower Dens' Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it's not content to stop at homage. The Baltimore band uses the past, its clichés and its innocence, as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future. | Lower Dens' Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it's not content to stop at homage. The Baltimore band uses the past, its clichés and its innocence, as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future. | Lower Dens: Escape From Evil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20213-escape-from-evil/ | Escape From Evil | Lower Dens have toyed with the raw pleasure of pop music in the past, but they’ve never embraced it like this. Three years ago, the Baltimore band’s standout single "Brains" shone as a melodic gem inside the largely experimental Nootropics; now, on the band’s third album, core songwriter Jana Hunter embraces open, ringing melodies. Like a lot of current music, Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it’s not content to stop at homage. Lower Dens use the past—its clichés and its innocence—as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future.
As an aesthetic reservoir, the '80s continue to feed an abundance of nostalgia, from the American highway fantasies of the War on Drugs to Twin Shadow’s boy-meets-girl melodramas. Inhabiting characters from the past can lend a singer a certain gravitas; unburdened by modern irony, big emotions play bigger on a decades-old frame. But few artists have seized that retrospection as an opportunity to flip the power dynamics that governed pop culture 30 years ago. For Lower Dens, a neon palette serves as fertile ground for subversion. Hunter absorbs the range of gendered feeling from Billy Idol to Bonnie Tyler, emerging as a bandleader capable of flipping effortlessly between extremes of masculine aggression and feminine yearning.
The word "genderfluid" didn’t exist 30 years ago, but it’s a useful term for gripping the edges of this new work. The video for the album’s lead single "To Die in L.A." works almost as a queer retelling of William Friedkin’s 1985 drama To Live and Die in L.A., complete with characters that aren’t cast based on their actors’ birth-assigned gender. Hunter appears as a masculine presence in a buzz cut and suit to glower at the video’s lead femme, who’s vying for movie stardom; in the clip’s last image, the main character sets fire to a painting of herself, then she and Hunter gaze into the flames as it burns away.
The video is full of ambiguous, evocative imagery, and Escape From Evil also runs thick with powerful, slippery emotions. While Hunter seems more enamored of radio hits by the likes of Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls here, Lower Dens never quite settle into an easy genre hook. A krautrock chug left over from 2012’s Nootropics powers "Company", where Hunter assumes the role of anonymous authority figure with lines like "you look really uncomfortable if I might be honest" and "we just want to help." You can hear the same smirk that Mike Patton wore on Faith No More’s "Land of Sunshine", the same glee in inhabiting a vague malice disguised as aid.
Hunter is a charismatic singer willing to deal in grand, sweeping gestures and also idiosyncratic specifics. Escape From Evil is a vivid world of queer retrofuturism, a wide open space that offers access the emotionality of the recent past without subscribing to its violence. Hunter embraces retro-pop as a channel of escape from the power that routes us in our mundane outer lives. In the world of this album, no one will tell you who to be or where to go; it’s all yours to become. | 2015-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ribbon Music | April 3, 2015 | 8.3 | 8efbad46-803d-41b7-bef5-f9105773980f | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The fourth album from the NY duo composed of Elucid and billy woods is freer, lusher, and brighter than anything they’ve done before. | The fourth album from the NY duo composed of Elucid and billy woods is freer, lusher, and brighter than anything they’ve done before. | Armand Hammer: Shrines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armand-hammer-shrines/ | Shrines | In 2003 the NYPD, acting on an anonymous tip, punched through the wall of an apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 141st Street in Harlem. Through that hole, officers saw a mattress that had been shredded the way a dog might shred a newspaper and claw marks that reached all the way up to an eight-foot ceiling. The tiger they removed, a Siberian-Bengal mix named Ming, belonged to a construction worker named Antoine Yates. Ming grew as the story spread: 350 pounds, then 425, 450, 500. Yates had acquired the tiger from an exotic animal dealer in Minnesota by falsifying papers to suggest he had land to build a zoo in Sullivan County; he had just been hospitalized after it maimed him in an attack.
The fourth song on Shrines, the new album by Armand Hammer, ends with a clip of Yates’s brother being interviewed. “My brother wanted to build a zoo,” he says, maybe a little bit drunk, talking over the music in a club. “He wanted to build a utopia. Because when he looked around him all he seen was destruction in our neighborhood.” The interviewer does not follow up on the spiritual tip. Instead he asks a practical question: How much does it cost to feed a tiger?
Shrines is the third LP that Armand Hammer, the duo composed of New Yorkers Elucid and billy woods, have released in the last two and a half years––roughly the same amount of time that Yates kept Ming in his apartment. There are times it turns grim: see, for example, Elucid’s reference to the “prayers up but quickly fallen like sweat on the brow” in the face of a paramilitary police, or the way woods flips the Nas maxim from “Life’s A Bitch” into “that buck that lost the lotto could’ve bought a fucking bottle.” But on the whole Shrines is freer, lusher, brighter than anything the pair has done before, an album that strays into “streets where Siri noted coordinates and was too scared to speak” and sees what might grow from the soil.
woods is an extraordinary writer who populates his raps with characters he dangeles like a puppeteer, and with details that unnerve––like the expendable football players who are reduced to “donated brains” that “bob gently in solution,” or the “list of ill-fated quick licks” magneted to the fridge next to permission slips from a child’s school. His aunts tap cheap watches proudly as they tout the “Swiss movement.” His middle-aged men speak to shredded-knee prospects (“You got your whole life ahead of you son… nothing to be ashamed of”) in a way that makes clear they’re really consoling themselves. And his prosecutors consider lenience before stabbing a shiv in the accused’s neck.
He’s not just smooth, he’s “graceful as third-generation bomb makers”; he cracks jokes about plagiarizing a famous commencement speech at a “cash-strapped HBCU.” When he recalls his father’s second burial, you can picture the motorcade that curves “like a snake through the streets,” and when a cocky king thinks he can wade into the masses, you see the mob with “claws reaching, eyes like sequins.” One of the most incisive passages comes on “Ramesses II,” named for the Egyptian pharaoh from the “Ozymandias” poems. Of numbing luxury, woods raps:
Waves of pleasure, thought you had the best till you taste better
Taste butter
The tailors’ tape measure touch like a lover
Doormens’ faces blend into one another
Glass panels in the sky, with the sound off
Even when you drive you fly, they rarely touched the Porsche
Elucid does not lapse into the voices of others. Instead he flits between the chillingly real and poetic abstraction. A typical excerpt comes from the foreboding “Pommelhorse”: “It started as a lesson of achieving dreams and reaching fantastical heights/Ended with us watching the Challenger rocket smoldering on the black and white/Flame licked flame, like lovers do.” His voice––he sounds like a great singer whose vocal cords have been trimmed by a jagged knife—is an indispensable anchor on a record whose beats can be playful, even weightless.
The rappers are superb foils for one another; where woods’ language tends to be more straightforward, he will rap elliptically around a theme, while Elucid uses more cryptic phrasing but goes directly for the jugular. On “Slewfoot,” the latter raps of a simmering revolution that the white majority “...choose not to see–the labor’s free, with hidden fees/Razors tucked under wigs and weaves, plus degrees.”
Shrines begins by striving for some communion with the natural world. Toward the end of first track “Bitter Cassava,” Elucid raps about the summertime: the “thunder in the sky, rolling wide,” the jars of fireflies with holes poked in the lid. This gives way to a brief solo song of his, “Solarium,” which sounds like a mid-July celebration.
All is not perfect, of course—in that song some of the smiling friends on the block have turned informant, and in another the trees felled from forests are chopped up and spit out of “university printers” as counterfeit $20s. This feeling, this combination of wonderment and worry, emerges most clearly in the wrenching “Flavor Flav.” In that song–the Public Enemy hypeman’s cartoon clocks tick down your sprint toward middle age––Elucid recreates, with terrifying detail, the 1968 massacre at South Carolina State University, where three black men were killed and dozens of other protesters were injured when highway patrol officers opened fire at an anti-segregation demonstration. All nine officers were acquitted. Elucid draws attention to what he’s doing in the verse (“Traveling 50 years back, I only moved the pen six inches”), but not before he notes the humbling breadth of time––the future, the unknown, the “possibilities invisible, but endless.”
As its title might suggest, Shrines plays in a liminal space between the corporeal and something beyond, the “ritual smoke flumed above the tomb” and the Ruger underneath the robe. On the album cover a cop dangles by a thread on the outside of Antoine Yates’s apartment building, clutching a rifle in one hand, while the tiger rages inside. | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Backwoodz Studioz | June 10, 2020 | 8 | 8efddd0e-b586-4091-ae11-81c50aec128c | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Cameron Mesirow’s third album as Glasser is lightly fanciful yet deeply felt, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after. | Cameron Mesirow’s third album as Glasser is lightly fanciful yet deeply felt, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after. | Glasser: crux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glasser-crux/ | crux | Cameron Mesirow—better known as art pop auteur Glasser—has always done it herself. Ring, her 2010 debut, was entirely made with Garageband. Its follow-up, 2013’s Interiors, traded colorful ridges for sleek contemporary avant-garde pop yet retained an independent spirit. A decade later, for her third studio album, Mesirow has pivoted to something more complex and idiosyncratic. If Interiors looked to the future and Ring faced the past, crux is nestled in a baroque, nearly-medieval period—a sort of in-between-ness of things, befitting for the album’s narrative of life after the death of a close friend. Falling back on her Celtic and Scottish roots, Mesirow crafts a lightly fanciful yet deeply felt elegy, using subtle flourishes to consider the meaning of death and what comes after.
In the olden days, a poet typically called upon a muse in the first few lines of a poem. Here, Mesirow echoes this technique with the opening song, “A Guide.” It’s a kind of invocation that fits neatly within the Vangelis-chic of the Weeknd’s After Hours, with neon-lit synths simmering in the wet dark and digitally androgynous backing vocals. On “Design,” from her last record, Mesirow wondered if there was a God. On crux, she seems to have surrendered if not to a specific deity then at least to a higher power—hope for the afterlife, perhaps.
Undergirding Mesirow’s spirituality is the physical desire that runs through all her work. “As far as I’m concerned, all my records are horny records,” Mesirow said in a recent interview with Vogue. Describing him simply as her “first love” in the same interview, Mesirow lets the music tell us all we need to know about her relationship with the man she lost to an accidental overdose. crux lovingly addresses that absence. “Knave” and “Thick Waltz” turn with nonverbal and primordial feeling, reaching for something folkloric but also instinctual with slide guitar and alto sax, respectively. On “Clipt,” Mesirow centers her Celtic ancestry, leaving room for a sprightly violin breakdown in the song’s second half. “Drift” balances a buoyant beat and strings with existential musings. “What a good life/except for all those times/when you want to die,” Mesirow sings.
If you’ll forgive a few lapses into the maudlin, where her songwriting lacks the words for grief’s indeterminable emotions, crux becomes a vibrant and altogether moving record. It relinquishes old frameworks for a deeper, more complicated approach to music than anything in Mesirow’s discography. It doesn’t just fill an empty space, it takes the shape of the void. | 2023-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | One Little Independent | December 21, 2023 | 7.1 | 8f056fb8-96e2-48a0-99f4-c96ed15cc28e | Peyton Toups | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-toups/ | |
Located at the midpoint between UK bass and swooning lounge pop, Jamie Woon follows Katy B and James Blake as justifiably big-deal potential crossovers. | Located at the midpoint between UK bass and swooning lounge pop, Jamie Woon follows Katy B and James Blake as justifiably big-deal potential crossovers. | Jamie Woon: Mirrorwriting | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15309-mirrorwriting/ | Mirrorwriting | Is 2011 turning out to be the year UK bass music goes semi-mainstream? Well, kinda. Sorta. Not exactly. For one thing, genres like dubstep and funky have been moving away from the club fringe and toward the center of the pop conversation for a while now. (In the UK itself, they've been at the center for some time already.) Dubstep sonics, however toned-down or disguised, can be heard in all sorts of chart music these days. And now we have a full slate of singers with (sometimes very loose) connections to bass culture, several of whom have released albums in 2011 aimed as much as folks who need songs as folks who obsessively collect dubplates.
Thing is, and not a little ironically, the singer whose songs have the strongest sonic connection to UK bass is also the most pop, Katy B, where the hard-hitting drums and wobbler bass effects are sweetened by her I-wanna-be-a-star delivery. Meanwhile, dubstep fans, juiced on the weird rhythmic experiments of his early singles, have been scratching their heads trying to figure out why James Blake's album so firmly lashed itself to the mast of indie-crooner culture. And in the middle, we have Jamie Woon.
Almost the exact middle, actually. Young and school-trained London singer Woon's debut album, Mirrorwriting, sits between Katy B and James B, pop theatricality and singer-songwriter calm, club culture and bedroom indie, old-school soul and modern electronic R&B, extroverted and introverted. And tying it all together is the language of UK bass. His first major single, 2010's justly lauded "Night Air", announced him as one of a number of young English artists for whom garage, and everything that came after, was just another bit of pop language to use. And from the slow-motion jungle syncopations and muted bass blare of "Street" to the stuttering retro-rave breakbeats that drive "Spirits", the computer-assisted Woon makes sorta-pop from the last 20 years of UK dance the way current U.S. guitar kids draw from surf-rock and girl-groups.
But if that's all Woon was doing, he'd be just another indie one-man-band with a full software suite, making specialist music with materials from stuff with more pop-appeal. A couple things about Mirrorwriting make you wonder though if Woon really is destined for crossover success. One is his voice, which is the instrument that turns many of these songs from sorta-pop to real-deal pop. Much has been made that Woon went to the same school that gave us Amy Winehouse. His delivery is low-key for most of Mirrorwriting, far from her roadhouse belting, but the guy's clearly got chops, and an elastic way with a number of styles.
And unlike a lot of guys making a murky late-night brand of indie-soul right now, Woon's pleasingly warm and smooth tone, mixed mostly up-front with little obscuring reverb or distortion, gives you the feeling that he could have a straight R&B career if he wanted. His restraint and lack of melisma trickery seems more like a choice to fit the slow drift of the music, not a limitation, and his use of HTDW/Blake style heavily processed vocals is careful, like Burial samples deployed as background harmonies. Woon wants these songs to appeal to folks for whom digitally tweaked singing is an occasional fun special effect, rather than the whole draw. And while the album's mostly full of left-field R&B, there are also hints of Hall and Oates, 80s Brit synth-pop, house, and more. There's also an occasional and unfortunate tendency toward limp VH1-ready MOR ballads, which it must be said comprises the album's weakest stuff, though thankfully Woon doesn't indulge this side as much as a truly crossover-minded hack might.
Woon's attempted to bridge so many opposed vibes here that you'd want to praise his ambition, even if he couldn't pull it off. The fact that Mirrorwriting really does manage to blur so many different musical worlds into something so smoothly unified is Woon's real achievement. But because of that very in-betweenness, Mirrorwriting is still likely to rankle genre partisans of all stripes. Too slick and synth-heavy and modern for fans of Winehouse-style retro-soul. Too subtle for true dubstep fans wanting more club thunder. Not subtle enough for those heart-on-sleeve beat weirdos who've made James Blake a cause celeb. So it'll be interesting to see if it really is the wide mass of pop and indie listeners that winds up embracing Woon's everything-at-once approach. Whoever his audience turns out to be, Woon's managed one assured and beguiling hybrid of UK bass pressure and slick blue-eyed soul. | 2011-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor / Candent Songs | April 14, 2011 | 8 | 8f05e42c-09a0-48a0-b138-1eb6952faa14 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Nearly five years after their debut marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—Sepalcure return with a second album. | Nearly five years after their debut marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—Sepalcure return with a second album. | Sepalcure: Folding Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21958-folding-time/ | Folding Time | If Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma are indeed more concerned with refining their sound than developing it, Folding Time is Sepalcure polished to a textureless patina of reference points. Nearly five years after their self-titled debut album marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—the duo's second full-length returns to that once vital style to find it rendered prosaic. “Inside me, inside of you/I've been going backwards,” sings Body Language's Angelica Bess amidst the swaying UK funky-lite of “Devil Inside.” It's surely all too perfect that she wraps up Folding Time's complications so succinctly, and yet the music's dearth of adventure can only be traced to an unflinching myopia.
Maybe it's unfair to fault a rose for having thorns: Sepalcure offered such a gorgeous example of pancultural electronica in 2011 that they have every reason to reclaim their past successes. Besides, “Pencil Pimp” and “The One” aren't being rinsed for nostalgia just yet, so why not transpose their clubby effervescence and disembodied soul to another colorful, balanced stretch of tunes? These guys certainly have the fans for it, and the kind of dubwise dynamism in “Hearts in Danger,” “Loosen Up,” and “Brother Forest” is a textbook execution of hybrid sensibilities made seamless. But when those ideas sound underexplored (“Dub Of”), detached (“Hurts So Bad”), or superfluous (“Ask Me”), it's as if Sepalcure see their self-imposed genre as exemplary in electronic music's constantly changing ecosystem.
Stewart and Sharma have said that Folding Time's writing process was like “connecting the present with the past…digging through old memories.” How listeners interface with the refurbished music hinges on their value of that past and the currency it holds. The vocal samples in these tracks offer a reliable barometer in that regard (nothing says 2010 UK bass like an Aaliyah stand-in tossed over some kick-and-stick). Both Sepalcure and their solo projects, Machinedrum and Braille, have always fixated on vocals—sampling the likes of Whitney Houston, Jocelyn Brown, Monica, and KC & JoJo, among others—so their heavy presence is no surprise here. Unlike the Burials and Four Tets and James Blakes out there, however, Sepalcure have never been much for abstraction, lifting lyrics and their sentiments wholesale (maybe pitched down a couple steps) instead of flipping them into a unique translation. “Not Gonna Make It” grabs the opening line of Gladys Knight's “Neither One of Us”; “Been So True” samples liberally from “Heard It All Before” by Sunshine Anderson; hooky and animated as they are, neither song manages to speak new meaning from the vibrant source material. Such handling of samples can relegate empowering and soul-searching music to props for a stunt.
Folding Time's original vocals meet that issue head on. Canadian singer Rochelle Jordan and Brooklynite Angelica Bess each give a nuanced, personalized performance that nudges the music into a pop context. Whiffs of SBTRKT and Bonobo linger in the lush, chilled-out motifs of “Fight for Us” and “Devil Inside,” but their dubby atmospheres and injured melodicism are Sepalcure hallmarks writ sync-friendly. The verse-chorus structures and downtempo arrangements don't offer a way forward for Stewart and Sharma so much as point towards an alternate space for their music to inhabit, well-adjusted and respectably commercial. Likewise, Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin. | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | June 1, 2016 | 6 | 8f05f974-3f72-4c7e-b849-7ce549591740 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
Exhaustive, dense, and detailed, Sufjan Stevens’ electro-opus is another huge artistic leap that speaks plainly to complicated emotions and attempts to rebuild his sound from the ground up. | Exhaustive, dense, and detailed, Sufjan Stevens’ electro-opus is another huge artistic leap that speaks plainly to complicated emotions and attempts to rebuild his sound from the ground up. | Sufjan Stevens: The Ascension | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sufjan-stevens-the-ascension/ | The Ascension | The title track on The Ascension is one of the best songs Sufjan Stevens has ever written. Accompanying himself on keyboard with a sad, pulsing melody, Stevens uses precise and empathetic language to address faith and hopelessness, regret and revelations. He shouts out a character from King Lear. He rhymes “confess” with “confess.” He declares life to be meaningless—and he sounds like he means it. “To think I was acting like a believer,” he sings in his feathery, heartbroken way, “when I was just angry and depressed.” It is the only song on the album that fits squarely into his comfort zone, where questions of life and death feel as intimate as the words to a love song.
Also worth noting: It takes more than an hour to get here. Along the way, there are slow jams and dancefloor singalongs, a panic attack set to creeping industrial music and what sounds like Stevens’ score for a campy ’80s horror movie. It is exhaustive and dense and detailed—which, of course, is nothing new. From his 2005 breakthrough Illinois to his last proper solo album, 2015’s grief-stricken Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has always worked best when he immerses himself in his subjects, encouraging the same devotion from listeners. And while The Ascension lacks the direct throughline of these high-water marks, it is another huge leap, an attempt at rebuilding his sound from the ground up.
The majority of the album was recorded with a drum machine and several Prophet synthesizers while Stevens’ more characteristic equipment—acoustic guitars and banjos—were in storage during a move. Leaving his longtime Brooklyn home for a more scenic and remote spot in the Catskills, the 45-year-old songwriter found new hobbies, like getting off the internet and buying a tractor. Consciously or not, these songs follow a similarly picturesque voyage, zooming out from the daily grind toward the kinds of refrains that have become pop music clichés, largely because of how good they feel to say and hear: I wanna love you. Run away with me. Tell me you love me.
It’s one of the first things that strikes you about this blocky, electronic music—the pared-down language and echoed refrains from radio hits and pop culture. The cerebral, ambitious songwriter—whose tracklists once looked like stage directions to a quirky play—now seems intent on speaking directly, sweeping you away with him. It leads to seductions (“Make love to me/Surrender your spirit/Sing my eulogy”), threats (“Go on wipe that look off your face”), and bare confessions. At one point, he sings in a breathy whisper, “I shit my pants and wet the bed”—a hard thing to imagine coming from a performer who has worn enormous angel wings on stage.
Stevens attempted something similar on another major pivot, 2010’s The Age of Adz. In those songs, he sang over buzzing synths and clattering rhythms, gravitated toward conversational language, and steered away from the nuanced storytelling and character studies of his past. At the same time, the compositions on Adz were a continuation of his more symphonic work, surrounding his voice with countermelodies and choirs, building to flute-accompanied crescendos and multi-part epics. It felt new for him but still played to his strengths: heartfelt, ecstatic, too much.
The Ascension, in comparison, is spare and sad, purposefully repetitive and almost entirely down-tempo. Many of its arrangements evoke steep, neon-lit half-pipes that Stevens glides up and down, sometimes shouting along the way and other times muttering anxiously to himself. A song called “Die Happy” features just one lyric—“I want to die happy”—which he sings over and over, relying on the twists and layers of synths to add new dimensions to his mantra. The whole thing works best when you approach it like a big-budget IMAX movie set in space with a great leading actor: Don’t get too hung up on the plot—just tilt back your head and watch him float.
Once in a while, Stevens lands on something magical and his writing transcends. This happens in the final 70 seconds of the otherwise dirge-like “Tell Me You Love Me,” and it happens again in “Landslide,” when he wails the title in a desperate warble, incorporating his own vocals into the arrangement like a sample. In these moments, the steady slow-burn pays off. He lets you in on the feeling of breaking free from something heavy and monotonous pulling you under.
Stevens has spoken about feeling emotionally depleted after making Carrie & Lowell, a quiet album that uncovered childhood trauma with vivid memories and hushed, acoustic arrangements. It makes sense that he would follow it with something less revealing, more open to interpretation. Multiple songs discuss crises of faith and coming apocalypses, and they employ their pop choruses to offset the gravity, to place his stories in the present tense, to give us something to dance to. “I also think this record, because it is political and bossy and bitchy,” Stevens told The Atlantic, “needed to be somewhat fun, sonically.”
But despite its allusions to pop music escapism, The Ascension is, by design, kind of a drag: a dark and emotionally distant mood piece whose lyrics rarely touch on the specifics necessary to anchor the music, and whose music is rarely exciting enough to elevate his words. “Every song title on the album is a cliche,” he admitted to The Quietus. “...I’m desperate for some kind of platitude that tells me where to go, and how to go about my business in a way that’s healthy and sustainable.” It’s a relatable anxiety, although, purposefully or not, he mostly sounds stuck in place. Not to mention, he’s been here before, and too few of these thoughts approach the prayer-like resonance of, say, “All things go,” or “I want to be well,” or “We’re all gonna die.”
In its search for direction, The Ascension fares best when Stevens looks inward. He finds momentum in the bittersweet “Goodbye to All That,” returning to one his most familiar settings: on the road, despondent, “hopelessness incorporated.” And just before the sweeping curtain call of “America,” there’s the title track—the point when Stevens accepts his strengths and speaks to the moment. “But now,” he sings in the most heart-tugging reaches of his falsetto, “it strikes me far too late again/That I was asking far too much of everyone around me.” Whatever perspective he may be singing from, he sounds tapped into something elemental, filled with purpose and clarity, following wherever his vision leads. He sounds like himself.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | September 25, 2020 | 7 | 8f0b6570-4756-41ed-ac2e-45c94a924fa0 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, 19-year-old North Las Vegas native Shamir exudes agile, fluttering performances. His debut EP, Northtown, finds Shamir moving back and forth between sweet, almost holy purity and unearthly hysteria over churning, minimal house tracks. | With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, 19-year-old North Las Vegas native Shamir exudes agile, fluttering performances. His debut EP, Northtown, finds Shamir moving back and forth between sweet, almost holy purity and unearthly hysteria over churning, minimal house tracks. | Shamir: Northtown EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19425-shamir-northtown-ep/ | Northtown EP | "I consistently felt myself to be not male or female, but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist." The words are poet Patricia Lockwood's, as quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine feature, and they come to mind when hearing the music made by Shamir Bailey. With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, the 19-year-old North Las Vegas native dismantles the expectations maintained for vocalists based on their gender, demanding instead that the focus be placed on his agile, fluttering performances. His debut EP, Northtown, is named for the dusty suburban neighborhood where he grew up; it finds Shamir moving back and forth between sweet, almost holy purity and unearthly hysteria over churning, minimal house tracks.
Shamir is still a new hand at writing and recording dance music; raised on an omnivorous musical diet of rock, hip-hop, jazz, and R&B, the first explicitly beat-driven track he wrote ended up launching his career. “If It Wasn’t True” remains a stunning opening salvo, one that plays on the tension between Shamir’s slender vocal and lyrical naiveté and grimy, threatening instrumental tones before devolving into a chaotic mess, swallowed by a haphazardly firing synth corroding in real-time. It’s a contrast that’s employed several times throughout Northtown, and it manages to retain its effectiveness because it’s so stark and clear, as Shamir’s fragile, yearning voice is pitted against aggressive, hard-charging electronics that actively warp and decay as the songs develop.
The toughness and rigidity of the instrumentation plays well against his lyrics, too. Shamir spends most of Northtown in a state of constant romantic turmoil, and thanks to the delicacy of his voice it sounds like he’s exploring new depths of disappointment with each new track. On “If It Wasn’t True”, he’s trying to process a relationship that quickly soured, eventually settling into a tenuous but deadened peace; the core of the filthy, pulsing “Sometimes a Man” is his resigned sigh, “Sometimes a man ain’t what he says he is/ Sometimes a man is just a man.” You can picture him rolling his eyes and exhaling slowly while a synth spirals out of control, leaping around like a Roomba gone rogue before falling into a dead-eyed pulse. The volatile electronics seem like windows into Shamir’s psyche: anger and resentment made into ferocious backing tracks, shielding his heartbreak.
The one song on Northtown that deviates from the distorted electronics first glimpsed on “If It Wasn’t True” is its closer, a cover of Canadian country singer Lindi Ortega’s 2013 track “Lived and Died Alone” that Shamir cut with a single microphone in just one take. Accompanied by just an acoustic guitar, it’s a lonely lament that quickly blackens into something a little more sinister: resigned to a solitary existence, he journeys in the dead of night and excavates a bunch of graves, giving the deserted dead the love he never had the chance to receive himself. It’s strange, surprisingly tender, and blessed with an alien beauty; in other words, a perfect fit for Shamir. | 2014-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Godmode | June 9, 2014 | 7.3 | 8f0cd2e2-eac0-4474-bf5e-34e23cfb7973 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
Suzanne Kraft is an alias of the L.A.-based dublab DJ Diego Herrera. His new Kraft collection, Talk From Home, isn't a homage to new age music, but it take cues from the more chilled-out end of the ECM and EG catalogs and sits at the border between breezy and cheesy. | Suzanne Kraft is an alias of the L.A.-based dublab DJ Diego Herrera. His new Kraft collection, Talk From Home, isn't a homage to new age music, but it take cues from the more chilled-out end of the ECM and EG catalogs and sits at the border between breezy and cheesy. | Suzanne Kraft: Talk From Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20776-talk-from-home/ | Talk From Home | In 2011, an L.A. producer blipped into view thanks to a well-received debut EP on Gerd Janson's Running Back imprint. Credited to Suzanne Kraft, an alias of dublab DJ Diego Herrera, Green Flash did nu-disco infused with a low-slung pacing and a warmth not unlike a cassette tape left on the dashboard at midday. It was soon followed by the Horoscope EP and a handful of more Balearic cuts from Herrera's other band, Pharaohs, suggesting that more floor-filling tracks lay ahead.
But when Missum, Kraft's next release for Running Back, came out last year, it showed Herrera not leaning in but rather taking a step back. The record was actually a reissue, but it showed a different side of him: The drums turned down to register as gentle pulses, samples of old boogie records gave way to chord organs and saxophone lines that mimicked deep breathing exercises, unfurling slowly and deeply across each track. Missum revealed the mellow, contemplative side of Suzanne Kraft, which in comparison to the DJ tracks, might have sounded anomalous. With Talk From Home, it instead illuminates that the unhurried pacing of those first dance singles might be the outliers.
Released on the Melody As Truth imprint out of the UK, Talk From Home isn't an homage to new age music per se, but it does take cues from the more chilled-out end of the ECM and EG catalogs. "Two Chord Wake", with its brushed hi-hat programming and measured snares, might have the most pronounced beat of the album, yet even with flares of guitar spiking above the rhythms, it pads about gently like music for children’s television.
"Never Heated" might be carved out of Julee Cruise’s exhales, a wordless vocal paired with a simple figure on bass guitar and a tube amp buzzing like cicadas. Throughout, Kraft gets the most out of the simplest of ingredients, "Male Intuition" imparting its contemplative vibe with little more than a guitar line couched in reverb and echo that brings to mind Durutti Column.
Other moments of the album sound like something Mark Isham might have cut around the time of Vapor Drawings, just at the border between breezy and cheesy. The pads of the title track at first bring to mind a Muzak version of "King of Pain" but as the track evolves, a bath-warm depth is revealed. The beatific slow swells of closer "The Result" brings this all too-brief outing to a close, but Talk From Home is the ideal soundtrack for taking a leisurely stroll rather than frantically Ubering to reach a destination. | 2015-07-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-07-16T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Melody As Truth | July 16, 2015 | 7.3 | 8f0f6df1-e1f2-44bd-8775-e35e067c18bc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
YYY is a collaboration between the minimalist techno of Tyler Friedman and the improvised jazz drumming of Samuel Rohrer, split across two long, flowing tracks. | YYY is a collaboration between the minimalist techno of Tyler Friedman and the improvised jazz drumming of Samuel Rohrer, split across two long, flowing tracks. | Tyler Friedman / Samuel Rohrer: YYY EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21703-yyy-ep/ | YYY EP | YYY is essentially a 12-inch single that functions more like a 2-track EP, with each side lasting in the neighborhood of 12 minutes. It super-imposes Tyler Friedman's minimalist-techno framework over the organic, improvisation-heavy approach of Swiss-born jazz drummer Samuel Rohrer (Laurie Anderson, Skúli Sverrisson, Charles Gayle) and then flips the script somewhat when you flip the record. But, though both pieces are titled "YYY," the two different versions— the "Original Mix" and "Drum & Vocal Dub"—they don't draw from any of the same source material and aren't the same besides a shared core basis in overlapping rhythms.
Rohrer doesn't even appear on the original version of the piece, but the sensitivity to timbre that he shows on the alternate version undoubtedly influenced Friedman's structure and choice of sounds, most notably a synthesized percussion pattern that by the pair's own description resembles a digitized cross between a vibraphone and a kalimba. Friedman created all the sounds on the original "YYY" using a modular synth setup, and the kalimba-vibes hybrid tone is also drenched in pitch modulation so that the various hits sound like different-sized drops of water dunking into reverberant pools. When Rohrer does enter the picture on side 2, he supplies a vaguely tribal meshwork of hand- and stick-tapped beats, one of which gives the impression of a drum head whose tension is always changing so that the pitch bends up and down in a circular pattern.
On hearing them together, it's easy to see how the second version started out as a remix/re-imagining of Friedman's original but then evolved into its own separate piece. Both versions start out as a set of skeletal components and then swell as more and more layers of sound stream into the stereo field until, at their peak, each piece becomes quite busy. Both also make optimal use of the stereo field. But for all the thought that went into the juxtapositions here—synthetic vs. organic, improvised vs. composed—Friedman arguably covers more ground and creates a more fertile set of contrasts on his own. Rohrer would likely have matched him had he added his own, third version consisting entirely of acoustic-based sounds, or had he been left to his own devices on side 2.
On side 1, it's easy to get lost in the endless shifting between the kalimba-like pattern and the steady-hissing techno beat. On much of side 2, however, the robotic and human sounds cause more friction as they collide. Perhaps this was intentional, but since side 1 derives much of its energy from Friedman's interpretation of Rohrer's style, the drum-vocal dub leaves the listener wondering what could have happened had Rohrer returned the favor in isolation. The duo shares a rehearsal space, so the temptation to team up makes sense. And to mimic the effect of haunting sine-wave swells on the original mix, Friedman and Rohrer brought in Norwegian singer Tora Augestad, whose voice they manipulate at times so that it sounds like, say, a screeching saxophone reed or a swarm-like cloud of distortion.
Clearly, Rohrer and Friedman have been mindful of ambience and space in their separate careers up to this point—Friedman with his installations and works for film, and Rohrer doing the rounds in a number groups in the experimental jazz and ECM records orbits. Interestingly, they've chosen to give YYY a flat, almost space-less quality—the musical equivalent of a green screen. That decision serves as one of this EPs defining characteristics, but if there's one knock on this music, it's that it's quite literally out of place without a spacial, visual, or extra-musical dimension to go with it.
In spite of its steady pulse and proximity to dance music, YYY is ultimately coming from a ponderous rather than sweaty place. While there are spots, particularly on side 2, that speak to something innate in the hips that wants to move, it's hard to see this music ever making an appearance in a club. On the other hand, Friedman and Rohrer favor a kind repetition that's ultimately too active to encourage trance-like zoning out. Dance fans might find it too stiff and jazz fans might find it too electronic. But alienating genre loyalists is usually a good sign that an artist is onto something. Let's hope that he and Friedman expand on this initial dalliance and come up with more. | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Arjunamusic | April 15, 2016 | 6 | 8f127d1f-8042-4937-81ad-569d04c1886b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
A satisfying collection of the obscure synth-based music that drew from post-punk and early new wave in a decidedly low-budget and DIY style. | A satisfying collection of the obscure synth-based music that drew from post-punk and early new wave in a decidedly low-budget and DIY style. | Various Artists: Wierd Presents: Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13843-wierd-presents-cold-waves-and-minimal-electronics-vol-1/ | Wierd Presents: Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics, Vol. 1 | Though its chilly sound owed an obvious debt to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Depeche Mode's Speak & Spell, the music now grouped as minimal synth was more simplistic and primal in execution, existing well outside the expensive, studio-honed aesthetic of the time. The relatively short-lived genre ran concurrent with guitar-based post-punk and early new wave from the late 1970s to the mid 80s without enjoying the commercial success of either. Featuring the analog synthesizer as a foundation, minimal synth tracks were fleshed out with little more than a drum machine, vocals, and occasionally, a bass line. The limited sonic palette arguably enabled the ultimate DIY movement, with solo and duo minimal synth projects cropping up all across Europe.
Paradoxically, the ubiquity of minimal synth in the European underground may have worked against its broader acceptance: the sheer number of acts made it difficult to form a consensus around its leading practitioners. Furthermore, many of the artists preferred singing in their native tongues, creating regional pockets-- in France and Belgium in particular-- as opposed to a truly pan-European movement. As a result, while minimal synth flourished on the stage, its recorded works were often consigned to regional European labels and quickly went out of print. The fragmented nature of the movement has also posed a formidable challenge to anyone hoping to offer a representative compilation.
Cold Waves is not the first minimal synth retrospective, though it certainly stands as one of the best and most accessible. Assembled by Pieter Schoolwerth, founder of the Brooklyn-based Wierd Records, along with Joe Daniel of Angular, the compilation leans heavily toward DJ-friendly material. Wierd has been championing minimal synth, along with guitar-driven cold wave, since 2003, as part of its series of DJ nights in Brooklyn called Wierd Nights. Schoolwerth, meanwhile, has been an avid minimal synth collector for years, making him uniquely qualified to oversee Cold Waves for London label Angular.
The album opens with the ferocious and sinisterly assertive "Figures", from Belgium's Absolute Body Control. An early tone-setter, "Figures" portends the aggressive fare to follow, and lithe, sinewy tracks like End of Data's "Danse Votre Monde" and Ausgang Verboten's "Consumer" deliver on that promise, favoring immediacy over subtle shading. Even the few restrained and pensive tracks, like "A Gift of Tears", from Italy's Jeunesse d'Ivoire, remain hauntingly elemental in construction. In this respect, Cold Waves remains true to minimal synth's fundamental tenet of simplicity, never sacrificing raw emotion for complex arrangements.
While minimal synth is typically classified as a strictly European movement, two of the most arresting songs on Cold Waves come courtesy of North American artists. "Watching Trees" from New York's Eleven Pond has been a staple at Wierd Nights almost since its inception, and with its eerie, icy veneer, it's easy to hear why its become an anthem of sorts for Schoolwerth's weekly parties. Canada's Land of Giants offer the somewhat less severe but no less engrossing "Cannibal Dolls". The 1982 single features a playful, pinball rhythm that hints at the new wave movement that would follow even as Anya Varda's tense, strained vocal keeps it squarely within minimal synth's darkly paranoid tradition.
That neither song sounds out of place is fairly remarkable considering their creators were an ocean removed from the epicenter of minimal synth, even if the seamlessness also suggests that, as minimal synth compilations go, Cold Waves might be a little too convenient. As other retrospectives have demonstrated, including the recent Minimal Wave Tapes, this music isn't as singularly focused or narrowly defined as Cold Waves might lead a newcomer to believe. However, as an introduction to this obscure movement, Cold Waves is tough to top. These songs may not have been popular in their day, but Wierd and Angular together have ensured they won't soon be forgotten. | 2010-03-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-03-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Angular | March 9, 2010 | 8.2 | 8f1f63f0-524f-4a12-a017-5904c487be76 | Jonathan Garrett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-garrett/ | null |
His purported final posthumous album is more of monument to XXXTentacion’s brand rather than his artistry. | His purported final posthumous album is more of monument to XXXTentacion’s brand rather than his artistry. | XXXTentacion: Bad Vibes Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xxxtentacion-bad-vibes-forever/ | Bad Vibes Forever | “You are literally entering my mind,” said XXXTentacion at the beginning of 17, his debut album. On its follow-up, ?, he issued a caveat, insisting listeners must “open their minds” to grasp his vision: “This album is far different, far more versatile, far more uplifting than the last.” Both statements were overblown bids for empathy and acknowledgment from an artist whose notoriety preceded him. He was trying to project that he was more than his pain, more than his worst actions, and experiencing the stylistic sprawl of his music would prove it, allowing listeners to see Jahseh Onfroy as he saw himself.
The late rapper makes a similar petition on his second posthumous album, billed as his “final” release. “I’m tryna to tell the world to fucking relax, bro… Let me be a prince, let me be a king, nigga,” he says in a rambling snippet repurposed as the album’s introduction. XXXTentacion’s estate clearly chose this clip to honor and preserve the self-image that the rapper was cultivating when he was shot and killed in 2018 while awaiting trial for domestic abuse charges. But like ? and his first posthumous record, Skins, Bad Vibes Forever fails to make his personal perception and aesthetic ideas cohere into anything other than generic kingmaking. This flimsy, haphazard album attempts to memorialize the rapper as a martyr and renaissance man when he is neither.
At his best, XXXTentacion was a reductionist. Favoring blunt, undermixed songs with slapdash structures and high-octane performances, his music turned crudeness into a kind of honesty. In his world, to be broken and distorted was to be real. This approach could approximate intimacy, but the flip side was that it prioritized his “truth” alone, cropping out the world beyond his rage and pain and fizzing into drivel whenever he attempted storytelling beyond “I’m hurt.” As he began to extend himself beyond emo crooning and mosh rap into full-on rock balladry and thrash ragers, his solipsism remained his main tool, resulting in genre-straddling that never amounted to more than cosplay.
“He wanted to be the artist that literally conquers all genres,” his manager Solomon Sobonde said. But he’s more tourist than conqueror, a one-man karaoke performance. From the diet dancehall of “Hot Gyal” and “Royalty” to the off-brand Chief Keef-isms of “Eat It Up” to the Cudi hums of “before i realize,” for all his versatility, XXXTentacion largely comes across as rudderless and indistinct. His constant hopscotching reveals no new dimensions to his songwriting, no larger artistic vision. His legacy, as presented by Bad Vibes Forever, is that he used SoundCloud between 2011 and 2018 and he listened to everything, even country.
The expansive features list heightens this lack of cohesion, resulting in jumbled songs that treat XXXTentacion like an accent rather than the marquee artist. On “School Shooters,” reportedly recorded as a response to the Parkland shooting, XXXTentacion threatens to drink the blood of school shooters while Lil Wayne empathizes with them, ending with XXX screaming gibberish. They sound like high-schoolers trying to shit-talk their way through detention. The boisterous, swaggering “Voss,” on loan from Sauce Walka’s 2018 mixtape Drip God, feels like a Sauce Walka song, a common problem when XXXTentacion is paired with artists whose versatility is rooted in technique and perspective rather than pantomime. The dark, soul-bearing Kemba verse on “Daemons” so thoroughly outclasses XXXTentacion’s vague occultisms (“Torture victims are due to scripture”) that its appearance feels like a pity offering.
It’s never clear what XXXTentacion represents to the artists who show up to support him. Despite their shared Miami origins, Rick Ross mentions XXXTentacion alongside Nipsey Hussle as if reading from a teleprompter list of recently deceased rappers. The Blink-182 feature that closes the album is clearly meant as a nod to XXXTentacion’s love of pop-punk, but the only thing Mark Hoppus seems to know about XXXTentacion is that he died. “Do you still dream about me late at night?/Or are you out there living better times?” he reads from his Cameo inbox. Compared to the atmosphere of grief and loss on January’s Members Only, Vol. 4, recorded by the rapper’s Members Only clique, Bad Vibes Forever feels like a Hallmark card adapted into a tribute concert.
This empty mythmaking draws attention to XXXTentacion’s dubious requests for listeners to absolve him of choices and actions he doesn’t even express. He seeks forgiveness without contrition, context, or self-awareness, claiming, “I’m not with the torturing shit” one moment and then boasting, “Dove into the pussy, caught a battery” the next. His desire to be purged through his art is untenable--not just because it’s self-serving and evasive even in absentia, but because his posturing isn’t remotely consistent. His music has never even attempted to address the way his charges of strangulating a pregnant woman, domestic battery, and witness tampering fueled his blustering persona. Of course, a posthumous album will try to flatter its subject, but this album is a hoodwink from start to finish.
XXXtentacion as a polyglot is an especially tough sell in an era where border crossing and cross-wiring are standard. It’s hard to square the hollow way Bad Vibes Forever falls back on the aesthetic alibi with the way stronger records from this year, like Denzel Curry’s ZUU, Beyoncé’s Homecoming, and Rapsody’s Eve, use range as a means of refinement. This idea that XXXTentacion was some kind of precocious savant with a natural talent for hybridity (producer John Cunningham claims XXXTentacion is “a far more versatile artist” than 2Pac) ignores the free-wheeling SoundCloud cohort that he was apart of, the rowdy South Florida scene that shaped him, and the broader permeability of contemporary music since average internet bandwidth crossed 1 mbps.
Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art. His legacy is as defined by his heinous actions as it is by his hamfisted music, and in death, as in life, he makes no attempt to suture that fissure. Why should we? | 2019-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Empire | December 14, 2019 | 3.5 | 8f282ef8-4919-46ce-8a99-f194f60980ca | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The New York band’s first album in seven years sounds like a post-rock orchestra playing around a campfire. It’s the sound of hard-won peace of mind, rendered in the lightest brushstrokes. | The New York band’s first album in seven years sounds like a post-rock orchestra playing around a campfire. It’s the sound of hard-won peace of mind, rendered in the lightest brushstrokes. | The Antlers: Green to Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-antlers-green-to-gold/ | Green to Gold | A decade ago, the Antlers were a deadly fucking serious band working at an unsustainable emotional pitch. Their preferred metaphors for doomed relationships included, but were not limited to, a terminal cancer patient, a dead dog, and a fire that claimed the lives of three children. By their fifth album, 2014’s Familiars, Antlers occupied a fascinating space between slinky jazz and smoked-out space-rock. But the past eventually caught up to them. Suffering from tinnitus, vocal lesions, and physical exhaustion, bandleader Peter Silberman quietly put Antlers aside, took up gardening and meditation, fostered a fulfilling relationship, and made a solo album, Impermanence, that used silence as an instrument. He brings the past seven years with him on Antlers’ latest album, Green to Gold, finding a peace that once seemed incompatible with this band.
“I set out to make Sunday morning music,” Silberman explained, a laid-back posture that forms the foundation of the album’s artistic vision. Green to Gold is designed for the part of the week with the lowest stakes and the strongest indication of where someone’s at in their lives: Are you waking up with a splitting hangover? Lying in with a loved one? Getting up early to work on the yard? As with Impermanence, Green to Gold begins with nearly 10 seconds of silence, paying homage to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, a foundational text for artists considering a life off the grid, and for everything Antlers have done since breaking out of Silberman’s bedroom.
But for the most part, Antlers sound influenced by themselves. When they came out of hiding for the 10-year anniversary of Hospice, the band played unplugged at venues like Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reconfiguring songs out of necessity. No longer able to rely on the surges of distortion or Silberman’s shattering falsetto peaks to deliver the emotional death blow, Antlers eased back and let the devastating beauty of the songs speak in a whisper.
That approach carries over to singles “Wheels Roll Home” and “Solstice,” where Silberman’s vocals dissipate rather than surge on the chorus, striking a tone of awestruck wonder. Green to Gold works with only the lightest brushstrokes, its ambience either a spring breeze or a slight winter chill, or in the case of “Volunteer,” a distant crackle of heat lightning. The instrumentation is unerringly lustrous and brilliant—12-string guitars, capos at a perilously high fret, saxophones, slide guitars, a post-rock orchestra playing a campfire gig. At times, this concept is rendered literally: Silberman spends the seven-minute title track narrating the change of the seasons and follows it with a song called “Porchlight.” Nearly every moment of quiet is a field recording from his upstate New York home, filled with the sounds of crickets and cicadas.
For all of its soft-focus beauty, Green to Gold is not subtle; Antlers never have been. “Keepin’ bright, bright, bright,” Silberman coos on “Solstice,” an uncomplicated song about uncomplicated summer days. Yet no matter how much Antlers try to serve as a magic-hour backdrop, Green to Gold is just as anchored in conflict as its more overtly conceptual predecessors. If “Stubborn Man” and “Just One Sec” strain a bit to fit into their classic soul rhyme structures, it parallels the central struggle of Antlers’ long-awaited return. “For just one sec, free me from me,” Silberman pleads, one of many intimate moments that can easily be extrapolated to a larger conversation between the band and its audience. Green to Gold isn’t likely to be anyone’s introduction to Antlers, which is why a song like “It Is What It Is” is not a dismissive cliché but instead the album’s centerpiece. We are hearing someone who risked his physical and emotional well-being searching for catharsis with “Two” and “Bear” and “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” and discovered freedom in acceptance. Green to Gold might feel peaceful, but it didn’t come easy.
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. | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Anti- | March 30, 2021 | 7.4 | 8f2c4e80-7c13-4d67-9218-6245d5810d87 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
For the first time since the mid-1990s, Dylan Carlson's slow-handed metal project has added vocals into their doomy mix. Mark Lanegan and others contribute. | For the first time since the mid-1990s, Dylan Carlson's slow-handed metal project has added vocals into their doomy mix. Mark Lanegan and others contribute. | Earth: Primitive and Deadly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19777-earth-primitive-and-deadly/ | Primitive and Deadly | No matter what phase of Earth you’re considering, be it the enormous and electrostatic drones of the band’s earliest and heaviest days or the swaddled blues elegance of their post-millennial reboot, there’s one simple and unifying link: Dylan Carlson is a paragon of guitar control. On Earth 2, he wielded his instrument and amplifiers with a powerful precision, creating sounds that weren’t only big but also topographically rich; you could study the curves and crags of his sound as if you were reading a three-dimensional map of the Cascade Range. When Carlson rebuilt Earth as an instrumental rock band a decade ago, he used his guitar to cut a filigree of exquisite riffs through the bedrock of Adrienne Davies’ patient drumming. Hearing him play during The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull suggested a woodworker cutting soft, delicate shapes into an enormous oaken block. Whether working on the monolithic scale of Earth’s origins or through the microcosmic scope of its rejuvenation, Carlson has always handled his duties like a master puppeteer with supreme, expressive sway.
The most telling moment, then, of Earth’s latest LP arrives with “Even Hell Has Its Heroes”, an instrumental that finds Carlson fighting against Earth’s need for stricture and structure with bona fide guitar solos. Above a bed of dense, multi-tracked guitars, he even trades licks with Built to Spill's Brett Netson. The song begins as archetypal latter-day Earth, the notes pneumatically bolted to the beat. Carlson’s tone, however, is a bit more pointed than usual, and he and Netson soon unspool the song’s theme into spirals of variations, taking liberties with their leads rather than submitting to Earth's usual economy. Supported by Netson and producer Randall Dunn, Carlson is free to step out near the seven-minute mark; you can almost picture him with his eyes closed and jaw titled skyward, fingers feeling the strings and flying across them rather than calculating where and when the melody must land. It’s one of the most electrifying moments in Earth’s inconsistent quarter-century history, a genuine rock ’n’ roll climax for a band that’s mostly marched slowly, steadily into the middle distance.
Those licks speak to a restlessness that defines Primitive and Deadly, the first Earth album to feature vocalists since Carlson sang a little in the mid-’90s and since Kurt Cobain and Kelly Canary signed on for the group’s earliest work. Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan slips inside two tracks, sending up his dark-eyed observations about destructive dawns and grim landscapes with his static, speak-sing clip. Despite Lanegan’s stentorian voice, he gets lost inside Earth’s latticework, his voice often feeling more like a footnote than a new feature. “Children, children, get ready/ You better get ready/ It’s new revelation time,” he musters during “The Serpent is Coming”, trying to twist some soulful cadence into his stiff proclamations but coming across like a revival preacher being overrun by his congregation. During “Rooks Across the Gate”, he reads the text of some macabre fever dream, the Carlson-penned lyrics suggesting the murder ballads he’s encountered in his studies of European folk. Despite the scare of the material, though, Lanegan undersells the images. It’s possible to ignore his echo-enhanced voice altogether, to overlook it in favor of the sharp rhythmic interplay between Carlson, Davies, and bassist Bill Herzog. The idea of Earth’s desolate music augmented by harrowing visions solemnly delivered is an intriguing one, but Lanegan’s execution is inchoate and underwhelming. Next time, perhaps Nick Cave, David Tibet and Julian Cope can be on standby?
Where Lanegan missteps by giving Earth a kind of deferential distance, Rose Windows singer Rabia Shaheen Qazi succeeds by using their music as a platform. She commands during “From the Zodiacal Light”, the album’s first single and 11-minute centerpiece. Invoking Ozzy Osbourne and Sandy Denny, she perches above the band to deliver a sermon of fear and salvation. Bewitching and intimate, she represents the vocal fulfillment of the balance between black, white, and gray that Earth has pursued with guitars, drums, and bass for the last decade. The band moves perfectly with her and the words. During the song’s more fraught moments, the trio tenses into moments of feedback and pause; late in the track, when Qazi lingers between the future and failure, the band slinks into a similarly indecisive circle. This is doom metal, delivered with the very grace and meticulous design that’s characterized Earth’s second life.
Earth has now existed for longer and made more records as a set of subtle, almost-quiet instrumentalists than as the jolting, pioneering volume lords that first earned Carlson a reputation. And though the albums made between 2005’s Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method and the two-volume Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light set offered variation with a rotation of keyboards, basses and cellos, they all mined a similar aesthetic. Primitive and Deadly even begins by recapitulating every phase of the band’s career, as opener “Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon” attaches the finesse of latter-day Earth to a touch of downtrodden, heavy doom. But Earth have seemed overdue for a change, and these songs collectively represent a promising half-step toward it. This is the closest Carlson has ever been to leading a rock band, to fully offloading his exceptional sense of control into a systemic and thorough whole. This isn’t quite, as Lanegan suggests, “a new revelation,” but sure, children, go ahead and get ready: This might be the beginning of a new Earth. | 2014-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | September 5, 2014 | 7 | 8f31cb68-6aac-48e2-875e-45d3d5da461d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
I'm not the first to imagine a parallel-universe version of Being John Malkovich entitled Being Stephen Malkmus-- that credit ... | I'm not the first to imagine a parallel-universe version of Being John Malkovich entitled Being Stephen Malkmus-- that credit ... | Stephen Malkmus: Stephen Malkmus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5057-stephen-malkmus/ | Stephen Malkmus | I'm not the first to imagine a parallel-universe version of Being John Malkovich entitled Being Stephen Malkmus-- that credit goes to weblogger Adam Kempa, although he neglected to take the concept to its logical extreme and consider the ramifications of Malkmus going through his own portal. Of course, one would expect there'd be a lot of "Malkmus Malkmus Malkmus. Malkmus? Malkmus, Malkmus!"-type carrying on, but the punchline would have to be that he'd actually enjoy the experience, so much so that he'd abandon Pavement and the rest of the outside world to stay in there, maybe form a band with other himselves, and record an album called, oh, I don't know, Stephen Malkmus.
I won't presume to be able to gauge how much influence Malkmus' new bandmates (Portland gadabouts Joanna Bolme and John Moen) had on this, his eponymous solo debut; anyway, it's his name and mug plastered on the album's cover, so he's going to get the majority of praise and blame.
There are two immediately apparent differences between Stephen Malkmus and Pavement's catalog: First and least surprisingly, there's less of a group dynamic. It definitely has the sonic hallmarks of a "solo" album-- the songs are less jammy and spontaneous, more rigidly structured. Second, it's a lot more fun-sounding than Pavement was near the end of its shelf-life. Let's face it, Pavement hadn't really sounded "fun" since Wowee Zowee-- Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight had occasional moments of playfulness, but on the whole they were considerably more sober, bordering on ponderous.
As Malkmus has noted in interviews, this increasing lack of fun was one important factor in Pavement's dissolution; now having escaped from the handcuffs of "band"-dom, the solo Malkmus is savoring his freedom, the spring back in his step. He's not indulging in that freedom to the extent that he would confound all expectations and, say, record an album of Swedish reggae; Stephen Malkmus is Stephen Malkmus as Stephen Malkmus, splitting time (as always) between smirky loopiness and wistful melancholy. The whimsy factor may have been turned way up, but Malkmus spends his time on the album learning how to focus that whimsy towards specific ends, not just for its own sake.
If Pavement fans were grinding their teeth over the prospect of Stephen Malkmus being a flop, the first single, "Discretion Grove", didn't help matters much. It's about as MOR a song as he's ever written (with the exception of, perhaps, "Major Leagues"), chugging along mindlessly when it should be building toward a more satisfying climax. Also in the less-than-desirable category is "Jo Jo's Jacket", a prime example of Malkmus at his least appealing. In what is ostensibly a song about Yul Brynner, he doesn't do much beyond tack a sample of a Brynner interview at the beginning and namecheck Westworld, abandoning the subject matter entirely by the second verse and freestyling his way to the end. Let's be clear about something: songs about nothing in particular are fine if done right, as are songs about specific subjects, but switching between the two formats doesn't speak well of properly realized intentions.
Fortunately, Malkmus doesn't let his whimsy get the better of him elsewhere on the album; "Phantasies" is so unremittingly goony with its annoying samples, rubbery guitar and gratuitous falsettos that I can't help but love it. Likewise, "Troubbble"'s farting keyboards and guitar spasms make it a quick spurt of inspired head-bobbery. Ever since "Zurich is Stained" and "Here", I've always preferred Malkmus' achier, laid-back songs, of which this album has an abundance: "Church on White" is a lush, tender tribute to a deceased friend, and "Deado" and "Trojan Curfew" balance sublime, shimmery beauty with gentle humor.
Malkmus' biggest departure from his work with Pavement, however, lies in "The Hook" and "Jenny and the Ess-Dog", where he puts his gift for non-sequitur detail in the employ of an actual storyline. I've heard some people describe "The Hook" as Malkmus' "Lou Reed song," which seems sort of appropriate given his speak-sing delivery and deceptively simple, classic-sounding guitar solo. Naturally, it's a song about pirates, and an unromantic one at that: "We had no wooden legs or steel hooks/ We had no black eyepatches or a starving cook/ We were just killers with the cold eyes of a sailor." "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" unrolls a relationship between a young rich girl and an older slacker; the song's resolution initially feels like a shrug, with the things between them sputtering out when she goes off to college. But it speaks to something deeper about relationships as a temporary escape from the expectations of real life, and the eventual obligation to face "real life" again, albeit with a slightly different perspective.
Stephen Malkmus is a more coherent album than any one Pavement release, which can be seen as both a good and bad quality. There's less variation between the songs in terms of structure, but it's the minor tweaks to the sound that are the things to savor-- the ghostly sample that ties together "Deado", the silly but completely apropos steel drum bit on "Vague Space", the flute that swoops through the snarling trudge of "Black Book". Malkmus has regained his songwriting stride, and he sounds more confident than he's been in a long time. There aren't as many extremes or chances taken as some Pavement fans might like; it's not "important" or "groundbreaking," and it probably won't make many best-of lists come December. But it's still an enjoyable album with its share of Malkmus-worthy moments. | 2001-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2001-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 31, 2001 | 7.7 | 8f3cb5f8-a59a-493b-b98f-60551a1f6081 | Pitchfork | null |
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Clocking in at almost 100 minutes, the Italian producer’s latest is a muted effort that was originally designed as a sound installation for a bridge in Rome. | Clocking in at almost 100 minutes, the Italian producer’s latest is a muted effort that was originally designed as a sound installation for a bridge in Rome. | Donato Dozzy: 12H | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/donato-dozzy-12h/ | 12H | For over 15 years, Italian producer Donato Dozzy has masterfully ranged from tech house to trance to straight techno. But at his core, he is a minimalist, gleefully finding the strangest, most archaic element to zoom in on, turning any mole hill into Monte Bianco. His beatific ambient techno collaboration with fellow producer Neel, 2012’s Voices From the Lake, took as its starting point a single incident, a live set to be performed at Japan’s infamous Labyrinth festival. And in the past few years, Dozzy’s zoomed in even further, relentlessly exploring every imaginable facet of the mouth harp, the 303, and Anna Caragnano’s singing voice across full-length albums.
So it makes a certain kind of sense that a single object lies at the heart of his latest epic, 12H: the Armando Trovajoli - Music Bridge in Rome. While plans for the structure date back to 1929, the bridge was only completed in 2008. It’s the lone steel bridge that runs over the River Tiber into the historic center of Rome. This release on Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!? label is culled from material that Dozzy recorded and assembled for a sound installation designed for 24 speakers that ran the length of the colonnade of the bridge. 12H clocks in at almost 100 minutes, at times evoking the immersive, exquisitely detailed ambience of Voices from the Lake, but without the same breathtaking vistas and sumptuous peaks.
The set opens with Dozzy in resplendent, shimmering ambient mode, all body-dissolving washes, tingling small bells, electronics that mimic the sound of frogs at night, and slow-moving arpeggios. Other elements pop up, like running water and clattering wind chimes, before “12H.3” introduces a gentle pulse and quivering synth line, only to have it splash back into gurgly water sounds and electronics.
A magnificent highlight comes on “12H.5,” which could be a leftover from Sintetizzatrice, his collaboration with Caragnano. The track painstakingly layers her gossamer breaths, building a sigh into a skyscraper. As that piece dissipates, the first smattering of percussion finally enters, nearly 45 minutes into the album, the hand drums pinging about the stereo field like a gentle tribute to E2-E4. Usually when drums enter Dozzy’s mixes, they elevate the proceedings to an unimaginable new high. Here, they don’t really add much in the way of emotion or release.
The throbs of “12H.8” soon get submerged by field recordings of insects rustling in the distance. The metallic thrums and acid stabs that punctuate “12H.9” are texturally intriguing, though they too soon fall to the wayside. We’re left to wonder what it might have sounded like had Dozzy pushed a few elements further or higher (as when Dozzy dropped a masterful techno rework of “12H.5” as a single earlier this year), rather than let the strictures of minimalism tamp everything down. The sounds of bridge traffic dovetail nicely with 12H’s kosmische-esque closing track, but like most urban congestion problems, it just takes far too long to get there. | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Presto!? | October 28, 2019 | 6.8 | 8f400213-97f9-4a30-b7cc-f80b40c36822 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Eighteen-year-old Atlanta songwriter Raury is exactly the type of performer that makes record companies salivate in 2014. His free debut, I**ndigo Child, serves as a perfect introduction to Raury’s style-sampling aesthetic, as well as the blizzard of sometimes-undercooked ideas he brings to the table. | Eighteen-year-old Atlanta songwriter Raury is exactly the type of performer that makes record companies salivate in 2014. His free debut, I**ndigo Child, serves as a perfect introduction to Raury’s style-sampling aesthetic, as well as the blizzard of sometimes-undercooked ideas he brings to the table. | Raury: Indigo Child | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19790-raury-indigo-child/ | Indigo Child | Eighteen-year-old Atlanta songwriter Raury is exactly the type of performer that makes record companies salivate in 2014. Though the sound of his full-length debut Indigo Child is tough to pin down, listening to his music easily conjures comparison to beloved acts of this generation: André 3000, Bon Iver, Kid Cudi, Frank Ocean. He is reminiscent of Lorde, another teenage shuffling disparate interests—rap, folk, EDM—into something logical. And like Lorde, Raury has a nose for the sky-scraping moment and knows how to make a big song seem personal. If you had to bet on an artist-on-the-verge becoming a big star, there are worse bets.
I**ndigo Child serves as a perfect introduction to Raury’s style-sampling aesthetic, as well as the blizzard of sometimes-undercooked ideas he brings to the table. On “Superfly”, he borrows liberally from the melody of Kid Cudi’s “Day 'n' Nite”, switching from rapping to reaching for the heavens with a soulful breakdown. “God’s Whisper” aims unabashedly for an exultant campfire singalong and mostly nails it; “Wildfire” is a string-laden track resembling something a teenage André 3000 would have made if he had never met Big Boi, steering Raury into a trance-like climax where he paraphrases Lil Wayne’s “The Block Is Hot”. Though the ideas come from a variety of points existing on the pop music spectrum, Raury’s warm production helps Indigo Child achieve a general coherence, a testament to his ability to organize the swirling nature of his sound.
Indigo Child shows all the hallmarks of promise, but the music doesn't always live up to the prevailing comparisons that have been thrust upon the teenager. Though many of Raury’s ideas are strong and linked together in interesting ways, sometimes he doesn't quite hit his mark. Album closer “Seven Suns” is an eight-minute, staring-at-the-sun style melter that feels gratuitous, while the record's other large-sized, orchestrated moments feel a little hollow ("Chariots of Fire") with lyrics that take on the form of of empty teenage philosophizing (“I shared my cigarette with her/ I fucked her every Wednesday evening/ Why do you always use that word/ When you don't even know its meaning?”). Overall, Indigo Child is an intriguing blueprint for Raury's talent, and watching Raury continue to put it all together going forward will definitely prove fascinating. | 2014-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | September 3, 2014 | 6.5 | 8f439b2a-7b05-42e1-907a-64d52809e0fe | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
After a 17-year hiatus, Mazzy Star are back, and they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Their fourth album Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to the band's established sound, and is rendered so perfectly, that it’s almost hard to believe. | After a 17-year hiatus, Mazzy Star are back, and they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Their fourth album Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to the band's established sound, and is rendered so perfectly, that it’s almost hard to believe. | Mazzy Star: Seasons of Your Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18533-mazzy-star-seasons-of-your-day/ | Seasons of Your Day | Mazzy Star went away in 1996 and even a few years ago there was no reason to think they would return. They made three very solid records that explored a small handful of musical ideas and those records seemed to say all the group had to to say. In that sense (and a few others—both were on Rough Trade in 1991), they bring to mind Galaxie 500, another band that created slow, expansive, and gorgeously atmospheric music. In each case, their brief arc was complete; for anyone interested in that Mazzy Star feeling, She Hangs Brightly, So Tonight That I Might See, and Among My Swan were still there, ready to provide a distinctive mix of of psych-tinged folk, blues, Laurel Canyon glide, and Hope Sandoval’s captivating voice, which expressed hushed, lean-in intimacy and aloof distance simultaneously. In the years since, the sound of those albums proved surprisingly influential, though in an appropriately small-scale way, and that influence crested in the last few years. Mazzy Star may have benefited retroactively from a renewed interest in the darkly sexy side of David Lynch’s aesthetic; their first three records captured that feeling perfectly and artists from Beach House to Widowspeak to Lana Del Rey have offered variations on that particular theme.
But they did come back, and unlike recent records from other bands that made their names in the 1980s and 90s, they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to Mazzy Star’s established sound and is rendered so perfectly that it’s almost hard to believe. There is no sign of age or intrusion of an additional influence; if word emerged that this record was actually recorded in 1997, a year after the release of Among My Swan, there would be no reason to doubt it. The tone and phrasing of Sandoval’s voice are exactly where we left them when Bill Clinton was seeking a second term as President. The slide guitar, brushed drums, and tambourine hits are all recorded beautifully, and there is enough space around every element to suggest a lack of sonic trickery.
David Roback, Mazzy Star’s musical driving force and a veteran of 1980s L.A. bands from Rain Parade to Opal, hasn’t been in the public eye since Among My Swan, but whatever he’s been up to, he remembers how to make a record sound good and how to write simple and effective chord changes. The craftsmanship of the songs—their mix of longing, weary resignation, and dusty cracks of sunlight—remains at a high level. To hear this Mazzy Star record is to understand why the modest and enjoyable Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions never really took off; Roback studied the work of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Jagger/Richards in their prime, and he’s retained those lessons all these years later. The reverb forming a halo around Sandoval’s voice on “California” is warm and haunted, Roback’s guitar tone on “Common Burn” is impossibly lonesome and beautiful, and the acoustic slide imparting a sense of “Wild Horses” blusiness on “Sparrow” and “Does Someone Have Your Baby Now” cuts through yawning canyons of silence. The record is sonically impressive in an elemental way, and the songs are memorable and distinct.
But if Mazzy Star have done amazingly well bringing back their initial sound and spirit, they also haven’t done anything to transcend its limitations. As gorgeous as the music can be, it still tends to work best in the background, a mood or vibe to give a dim room a nice tint. “Fade Into You”, their one hit and the only song most of the world has heard by them, with its “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” progression and pronounced romantic ache, did manage to connect with a lot of people on a deeply emotional level, but that wasn't necessarily the point of Mazzy Star as a whole. There was always some remove to the project, a certain formalism; still, to my ear, none of these qualities detract from what makes Mazzy Star so listenable and appealing. Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them. | 2013-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhymes of an Hour | September 27, 2013 | 7.8 | 8f44df16-5412-46cd-be66-8f1d9bc73df2 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Working primarily with the 1975’s George Daniel, the English songwriter crafts a breakup album that’s vibrant and playful while exploring nuanced emotional threads. | Working primarily with the 1975’s George Daniel, the English songwriter crafts a breakup album that’s vibrant and playful while exploring nuanced emotional threads. | The Japanese House: In the End It Always Does | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-japanese-house-in-the-end-it-always-does/ | In the End It Always Does | In the End It Always Does, Amber Bain’s second album as the Japanese House, strikes a beautiful equilibrium, wedding perceptive writing with bright, buoyant production. Reveling in the raw sting of a breakup, it continues Bain’s collaboration with the 1975 drummer and producer George Daniel, who, along with London-based producer and engineer Chloe Kraemer (Lava La Rue, Glass Animals) co-produces every song. While Bain’s early music tended toward hazy tones that occasionally overwhelmed her contemplative vocals, the music here is emotional and danceable, elevating her forlorn melodies and nuanced thematic through-lines.
With brief appearances from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, MUNA’s Katie Gavin, Matty Healy, and Charli XCX, Bain bends heartbreak into new shapes. One moment she basks in horny reverie, the next she’s catatonically depressed. The extravagant pop-rock of “Touching Yourself” attempts to square sexual desire with the sensation of not being truly seen. “I want to touch you, but you’re too far away,” she belts in the hook, an exuberant climax softened by Bain’s aching delivery. Throughout the album, the bubbly production is freighted with hurt, like on lead single “Boyhood,” which explores the loss of self that can come with loving others. Bain describes trying to find love amid the possibility of change and the fear of being alone. But the twiddly acoustic guitars, thumping kick drums, and swooning falsetto infuse the song with a sense of optimism.
In some of the most affecting tracks, Bain considers how to build a meaningful life without the support of a romantic partner. She’s reading The Artist’s Way, birdwatching, tending to a garden, and spending time with her dog. The production slows and strips down in these reflective moments. On “Over There,” co-written with Vernon, or “Morning Pages,” Bain’s patient melodies slink across airy keys and muted guitars, her lyrics capturing still lifes of days lost in despair: “She came by to get some things she left behind/She keeps her shoes on/There’s not a lot to lose when you’ve lost someone.”
In the End is sharpest when Bain’s writing and Kramer and Daniel’s production meet at opposite ends, when the feelings of sadness are punctured with vibrant instrumentation. Take the Healy-assisted “Sunshine Baby,” in which a gorgeously somber hook—“I don’t know what’s right anymore/I don’t want to fight anymore”—is spliced with sunny, effervescent production. Even “Sad to Breathe,” with its heart-wrenching chorus, doesn’t take off until the tempo picks up in the second verse, the beat erupting with Daniel’s punchy drums, a thwapping bass, and a plucky guitar. Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt. | 2023-06-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | June 30, 2023 | 7 | 8f44f215-9055-4f8b-9f2a-5e5eea1eafa7 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Nearly every song on Currents is a statement of leader Kevin Parker's range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and a vocalist. Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice, and Currents is the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music. | Nearly every song on Currents is a statement of leader Kevin Parker's range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and a vocalist. Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice, and Currents is the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music. | Tame Impala: Currents | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20578-currents/ | Currents | After two Tame Impala albums that centered on Kevin Parker's withdrawal from society, he has entered the stream of life on Currents. And he's lonelier than ever. The bemused, occasionally melancholy isolation that defined Innerspeaker and Lonerism has metastasized into heartbreak, bitterness, regret—feelings that can actually kill you if left untended. This is a breakup record on a number of levels—the most obvious one being the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but also a split with the guitar as a primary instrument of expression and even the end of the notion that Tame Impala is anything besides Kevin Parker and a touring band of hired guns. Because of these shifts, the question of whether Currents is better than his first two albums is beside the point: it stands completely apart.
Parker has never minced words about his intentions, and there's a song here called "Yes I'm Changing". The music communicates even more clearly: Currents' opening salvo "Let It Happen" has barely any audible guitars and makes ingenious use of a passage where it sounds like a half-second loop is accidentally stuck on repeat. It's a despairing, open-ended psych-disco hybrid whose closest modern analog is Daft Punk's Random Access Memories—a record that cast disco, yacht rock, and dance pop as shared founts of old-school, hands-on music-making. In this sense, the album reimagines and expands Tame Impala's relationship to album rock—like Loveless or Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music while redefining their relationship to album-oriented rock. There's more care and nuance put into the drum filtering on "Let It Happen" than most bands manage in an entire career of recording.
Currents is the result of many structural changes, most of which exchange maximalist, hallucinatory swirl for intricacy, clean lines. As we knew from "Elephant", the song that Parker sheepishly admitted "[paid] for half my house," Parker is good at writing catchy, simple guitar riffs. But he’s also somehow the best and most underrated rock bassist of the 21st century, and it’s not even close on either front. The near total absence of guitars means there is nothing remotely like "Elephant" here. But this allows the bass to serve as every song’s melodic chassis as well as the engine and the wheels: "The Moment" actually shuffles along to the same beat as "Elephant", though it's a schaffel rather than a trunk-swinging plod, its effervescent lope and pearly synths instantly recalling "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" or even Gwen Stefani and Akon's "The Sweet Escape". "The Less I Know the Better" merges Thriller's nocturnal, hard funk with the toxic paranoia of Bad.
And make no mistake, Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice. During the lead-up to Lonerism, he claimed he wrote an entire album of songs for Kylie Minogue and had to stress he wasn't joking. Perhaps appearing on one of 2015's biggest pop records inspired him. Either way, the external or internal pressure to keep his pop impulses at bay are gone.
Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala: Parker is just as irreverent working in soul and R&B as he is with psych-rock. "Nangs" and "Gossip" function as production segues, pure displays of "How'd he do that?" synth modulation that prove Parker sees himself as a friendly rival of Jamie xx rather than someone who sees a strict DJ/"musician" binary. While the sitar-like frill on "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" has hints of shimmering Philly soul, there's also engagement with the dubby textures and repetitive melodies of purple R&B. And for good measure, there's a bridge where Parker makes a modern studio take sound like a forgotten, vinyl breakbeat and drops it mid-track like a jarring DJ transition—a trick most effectively used on Yeezus' "On Sight" and "I Am a God".
While Parker will never not sound like John Lennon, this time, he imagines a fascinating alternate history where the most famous Beatle forsakes marriage and the avant-garde for "Soul Train" and Studio 54. On Innerspeaker, Parker's melodies were effectively smudged with reverb and layering—once drawn with charcoal, now they're etched with exacto knives. As a result, the singles on Currents could be covered by anyone, and Parker has advanced to the point where he can write and sing an immaculate choral melody on "'Cause I'm a Man" and have it sound like a soul standard.
"'Cause I'm a Man" also puts Parker's personal life front and center in a new way. The chorus ("I'm a man, woman/ Don't always think before I do") finds him in league with Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear and My Morning Jacket's The Waterfall, taking an unsparing and often unflattering look at masculinity and romance, examining what qualifies as biological instinct and what qualifies as mere rationalization for wanting to fuck around and/or be left alone.
The emotional power of Currents comes from its willingness to accept that relationships will expose an introvert's every character defect. Parker's lopsided inventory is revealed on "Eventually", which exposes the false altruism often used to justify "it's not you, it's me." The structure of the chorus ("But I know that I'll be happier/ And I know you will, too/ Eventually") makes it plain that it's always about me first. And even if Parker honestly wishes eventual happiness for "you," he wants it to arrive on his schedule. On "The Less I Know the Better", he calls out an ex's new lover by name and plots his empty revenge (his "Heather" to her "Trevor"). By the next song ("Past Life"), Parker passes her on the street and considers giving her a call not because he cares or wants to get back together, just because he can. He fools himself into thinking a new routine of picking up dry cleaning and walking around the block, which he enumerates in a mumbled, pitched-down monologue, constitutes a new existence, but it's all part of the same continuum.
Currents could be called a "transitional album," but what Parker seems to realize is that all albums should be so named, because life is transitional. This is why "Let It Happen" leads off Currents rather than serving as its climactic laser-light show. It's a dazzling, impossibly intricate song about resisting the temptation to micromanage your life. And it may be a companion piece to "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards". Notice that Parker presciently phrased the lyric with *we—*whether it's about a partner, a fanbase, or just the construct of one's self, there's always the tendency to seek comfort and stability rather than dealing with the dissonance between two entities that are inevitably subject to changing at different frequencies. The kicker was even more prescient—"Every part of me says, 'go ahead'." And so Currents ends up being Parker's most convincing case for solitude yet—he knows that perfection can only be achieved inside the studio and progress is the ultimate goal outside of it. | 2015-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | July 13, 2015 | 9.3 | 8f4b4ada-0628-4197-8d24-478cadae2fc8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The debut from the experimental indie pop duo of Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos is a textured, intimate, blurry account of being in the throes of a relationship and having it fall apart. | The debut from the experimental indie pop duo of Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos is a textured, intimate, blurry account of being in the throes of a relationship and having it fall apart. | My Idea: Cry MFer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-idea-cry-mfer/ | Cry MFer | When Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos began writing Cry Mfer, their debut album as the eccentric indie pop duo My Idea, they were in the trenches of a let’s say ambiguous mutual fascination that they didn’t fully understand: “We definitely were like, oh, maybe we’re in love?” Konigsberg said in a press release. And perhaps the scariest part of being in love with someone else is your newfound and mutual ability to really hurt one another. This is My Idea’s raison d’être: scrawled between its moments of whimsy, Cry Mfer reads like a journal entry of all the things you wanted to say in the throes of a relationship but never did.
My Idea formed after Konigsberg, of the arty punk trio Palberta, brought in Amos, of the experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes, to produce her spunky solo record, Lily We Need to Talk Now. Cry Mfer is expectedly eclectic, hurdling between indie folk, electro-pop, and one piano ballad for good measure—while the differences may feel jarring, the common thread is Konigsberg and Amos’ unflappable chemistry, and their willingness to put even some of the most difficult sentiments to tape. Though they’ve made amends with one another, Cry Mfer is, almost literally, the soundtrack of a situationship that is falling apart.
Each of the songs on Cry Mfer loosely navigates the nuances of this companionship with self-awareness and brutal honesty. Konigsberg and Amos trade vocal and writing duties across the album, each putting the things that are often left unsaid in the spotlight. “I will be the one to say goodbye this time,” Konigsberg sings in the album’s opening lines, insinuating all the other farewells that have preceded and followed. Over a sleek, country-pop chug that evokes a more subdued version of Taylor Swift’s “Style,” Konigsberg has a harsh reality check: “Nothing ever lasts that feels amazing/Circumstances bury what your heart’s saying.”
Cry Mfer is full of confessions that it’s hard to imagine the band members truly wanted to share. On the minimal slow jam “Breathe You,” Amos seems to liken his lover’s addictive nature to that of a cigarette, alluring and slowly destructive: “I can’t wait for the next time I get to fuck you,” he sings through a Vocoder (Amos admittedly wrote the song while “high as shit,” poking fun at Justin Bieber’s unflatteringly earnest odes to lovemaking.) Meanwhile, on “Lily’s Phone,” Konigsberg alludes to making inebriated booty calls over a no-frills guitar riff that recalls the playful candor of early Liz Phair. That sense of humor keeps Cry Mfer from feeling too morose, a refreshing reminder that this jilted storyline is about friends, after all.
Cry Mfer is largely self-reflective, and perhaps the best example of this is “Crutch,” a burst of jangle-pop on which Konigsberg admits to her own codependency: “If punishment is a crime/Then I’m a bad guy almost all of the time,” she sings between apologies. It’s a twisted love song that appears to mirror Konigsberg and Amos’ relationship with each other as much as it does their relationship with alcohol, a substance they’ve both abandoned since completing the album. To what extent will we distance ourselves from what we really need in order to pursue what we want in the moment? And what happens when that discordance blurs our better judgment? Cry Mfer doesn’t attempt to find any clear-cut conclusions, but it’s a portrait of a mess caught in real-time. Maybe the only way to make it out is to make it through. | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | April 26, 2022 | 7.3 | 8f539910-c985-4c53-9f58-9768d4a4be8e | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Her first solo record since 1999 is mildly ambitious and sounds spectacular, but Windy City is not a great showcase of Allison Krauss' crossover sound. | Her first solo record since 1999 is mildly ambitious and sounds spectacular, but Windy City is not a great showcase of Allison Krauss' crossover sound. | Alison Krauss: Windy City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22915-windy-city/ | Windy City | The easy listening criticism has dogged Alison Krauss for more than twenty years, and she does nothing to dispel it on Windy City, her first solo record since 1999. Her music is thoughtfully poised between the bluegrass she grew up playing as a fiddle prodigy and the jazzy mainstream adult pop popularized by Norah Jones. At least since the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack made her voice so famous, she has focused more on singing than playing the fiddle. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Krauss has a bright, soft soprano that at its best blends Dolly Parton’s cheery expressiveness with Willie Nelson’s dexterous phrasing. The downside, however, is that her music, while expertly performed and recorded, is often blanched of any distinguishing twang or genre character. The listening becomes too easy.
As though addressing that criticism directly, Windy City includes a cover of the 1967 crossover hit “Gentle on My Mind,” written by John Hartford but made famous by Glen Campbell. The song lives right at the intersection of pop and country, its lyrics even describing how the music should operate: “You’re movin’ on the back roads by the rivers of my memory/And for hours you’re just gentle on my mind.” Krauss isn’t the first female singer to take a shot at the song—Aretha, Patti Page, and the Band Perry have all recorded versions—but she does unintentionally show just how tricky the song can be. While her voice is perfectly suited to the song’s rosy nostalgia, she can’t quite navigate the narrative twist in the last verse, when the narrator is revealed to be not just a wanderer but literally homeless, haunting trainyards and barrel fires with a coal-dark beard and a dirty hat.
Krauss doesn't conjure that kind of character of setting, but then again, Campbell himself barely could. Still, he knew enough to play up the contrast between the grittiness of the circumstances and the gentleness of the memory. This version is all gentle: technically sharp but emotionally blunted. That’s a problem throughout Windy City, as her pursuit of a viable crossover sound opens up new musical possibilities even as it burnishes away the genre edges of these songs. Working with Nashville producer Buddy Cannon, Krauss displays a broad palette, covering left-of-center choices from the Osborne Brothers and Roger Miller, Brenda Lee and country songwriting legend Cindy Walker. But the arrangements on opener “Losing You” and the title track don’t even bother to evoke the messiness of actual loss. They’re stately and elegant, but also cold and detached.
Windy City sounds liveliest whenever Krauss gets away from crossover pop. She navigates the twisting rhythms of the honky-tonk hit “It’s Good-Bye and So Long To You” with a jazzy agility and actually sounds like she’s having fun with it. Likewise, her version of the bluegrass chestnut “Poison Love” has a calypso pulse that seems to defy gravity. Even “River in the Rain” retains its showtune determinism: If this Roger Miller obscurity, penned for a Huck Finn musical, is the album’s centerpiece, it’s because Krauss keeps it anchored to the stage. She sounds more at home with that kind of theatrical drama than she does with a story-song like the title track or “Gentle on My Mind.”
Windy City is not the best place for newcomers to start with Krauss. The curious should search out the 1995 retrospective Now That I’ve Found You, which features a savvier, more imaginative crossover sound. Windy City never quite reconciles her genre history with her populist ambitions, creating an album that toggles back and forth between the two poles and then ends abruptly. Krauss conveys a stately heartbreak in her closing cover of the Cindy Walker/Eddy Arnold classic “You Don’t Know Me,” striking the ideal balance between elegant countrypolitan backing, eccentric piano and pedal steel flourishes, and vocals that convey both power and personality. It’d be a fine starting point for a follow-up. | 2017-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Capitol | February 25, 2017 | 5.9 | 8f54a512-06ff-4ecd-a8e1-d059d8475565 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Armed with a caustic wit and a poetic eye, Open Mike Eagle builds a small, quiet monument to a housing project in Chicago across a diverse and singular piece of contemporary hip-hop. | Armed with a caustic wit and a poetic eye, Open Mike Eagle builds a small, quiet monument to a housing project in Chicago across a diverse and singular piece of contemporary hip-hop. | Open Mike Eagle: Brick Body Kids Still Daydream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/open-mike-eagle-brick-body-kids-still-daydream/ | Brick Body Kids Still Daydream | The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development finally demolished the last building of the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side in 2007, but by then, the more than 11,000 people that formerly occupied its 28 buildings had long been written off. After a 1969 shift in public housing policy that made rent commensurate with one’s income, working-class families were replaced with new tenants on public assistance paying nearly nothing. As operating income plummeted, resources became scarce, tenant screening almost non-existent, and crime ubiquitous. HUD’s solution, the HOPE VI program, dealt with the project buildings the same way HUD dealt with black bodies—discarding them when they become inconvenient, marking the Robert Taylor Homes for demolition and redevelopment. For Michael Eagle II, who had grown up in the community and whose aunt was displaced by the demolition, the metaphor was not subtle. And neither is the cover of his new album as Open Mike Eagle, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream.
The record lives quietly in the daydreams of a kid in the Robert Taylor Homes, the life of a child with an active imagination in a hardened environment often actively hostile toward creativity. Tonally, it evokes Tupac Shakur’s posthumous collection of poetry, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the rich history of art born from black pain. It’s a colorful portrait of lives that are typically rendered in one dimension. And yet somehow, he can still make us laugh.
Eagle is a late-30s indie rapper on his fifth solo LP, no small feat in and of itself. A graduate of LA’s Project Blowed collective, he’s carved out his own lane with a successful podcast and a live show that’s since been optioned as a program on Comedy Central. He’s long been an advocate for the wealth of diversity in the black experience in hip-hop, wielding the morose truth-telling aesthetic of stand-up comedy to bring levity to the often tragic circumstances of his social commentary.
Brick Body Kids Still Daydream serves as an antidote to dystopian depictions of the neighborhoods and communities on Chicago’s South Side that are often one-dimensional, serving as a glimpse into the mind of a poet who can see the beauty and articulate it through the eyes of a child. It’s a very specific brand of ’90s nostalgia—wistful remembrance of a life he left behind, one that inexorably shaped him.
Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work, but he’s still comfortable pulling sounds from anywhere: guitars and wind instruments, analog synthesizers, or distorted vocal samples. His voice is soulful and reserved, and his sing-raps are smooth.
Eagle’s strength is as a writer, and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is chock full of witty one-liners (“Been woke so long I might need to take a nap,” he raps on “TLDR (Smithing)”). But unlike actual comedians, he doesn’t seem too invested in lingering on the punch lines. His flow is slow but always nimble, packing verses with complicated rhyme schemes while maintaining crystal clear diction. He has the writer’s gift for detail, the ability to articulate ephemeral concepts rooted in nostalgia. On “(How Could Anybody) Feel At Home,” he raps: “I’m avoiding my nose/It smells like you should imagine you boiled a rose/And the oven is on/And the coil’s exposed.” He mints poignant aphorisms with ease (“An apple a day/What apple sellers say”) and as he dabbles in casual misandry (“If there was justice all men would have to die/Patricide/Tweet at the void and heart the at replies”) it’s as if you can see the smirk on his face that hides all the pain.
At the heart of the album’s concept is the “Legendary Iron Hood,” a too-smart-for-his-own-good ghetto child who’s been trampled underfoot by life. He’s become an expert at keeping his head down, his hood a protective shroud from the dangers that surround him. On “No Selling,” we see him force himself to play it cool amid the chaos, remaining steely in the face of pain and fear. The LP’s centerpiece, “Brick Body Complex,” is about as forceful as Eagle gets, promising “I will never fit in your descriptions/I’m giant/Don’t let nobody tell you nothing different/They lying/A giant and my body is a building.” The projects are more than just a collection of buildings at this point; they’re tied up in his identity, even his physical self. The bricks are his armor.
If “Brick Body Complex” is the LP’s centerpiece, then “My Auntie’s Building” is its coda. Swirling static and dissonant noise seethe over boom-bap drums as he begs some higher power not to knock him down, bitter that the destruction seems only to find bodies that look like his: “They say America fights fair/But they won't demolish your timeshare.” And as he repeats the record’s final line—“That’s the sound of them tearing my body down”—the distorted sounds of demolition rumble in the background.
On a recent flight, Eagle was transfixed by a pair of documentaries on his auntie’s projects, and moved to write something about the place where much of his youth played out. In this way, a strange parallel can be found with Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, who wrote about the since-demolished Bronx high-rise of her youth on The Navigator’s “Fourteen Floors,” exploring the existential limbo of returning home, only to be unable to recognize it. But as much as demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes altered the landscape of Chicago’s South Side, it’s hard to say that much has changed. The violence that plagued the project still plagues the community, and ghetto children still dream of iron hoods with their heads in the clouds, and Open Mike Eagle builds a small monument where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood. | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | September 19, 2017 | 8.1 | 8f556de2-af79-4261-846f-3126417f53dd | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Washington D.C. producer’s drum tracks are bold, burly numbers that move with abandon. Even without melodies, no two sound remotely alike. | The Washington D.C. producer’s drum tracks are bold, burly numbers that move with abandon. Even without melodies, no two sound remotely alike. | Dolo Percussion: DOLO 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dolo-percussion-dolo-4/ | DOLO 4 | Andrew Field-Pickering’s music as Max D (aka Maxmillion Dunbar) represents a kind of cheerful excess. Bursting with energy and ideas, it’s scrappy in spirit and also execution, cobbled together from a motley array of daisy-chained drum machines and outmoded synths. With rhythms variously modeled on 1980s house, techno, new jack swing, and the sorts of percussive dub mixes that used to come standard on the B-sides of pop and R&B 12"s, it’s rooted in classic dance music without being expressly retro (despite the occasional shakuhachi flute sample that might come sailing out of the murk).
The music’s kinetic overload is rivaled only by its super-saturated tone colors, sticky as squished berries. So what happens when Field-Pickering strips out all the musical bits—the opalescent pads, glassy leads, and squelchy basslines—and narrows his focus to the drums? You get Dolo Percussion, the name he’s used for an occasional series of drum tracks and DJ tools since 2013. The first installment came out as a four-track EP on L.I.E.S.; Dolo 2 followed in 2014 on his own Future Times label, and Dolo 3 popped up last year on The Trilogy Tapes. Dolo 4 gathers all three EPs and rounds them out with four new tracks. Together, they make for a masterful display of Field-Pickering’s rhythmic chops.
No staid boom-tickers or pokey pitter-patterers here. These are bold, burly numbers that move with abandon: swinging, lunging, barreling, lurching. He likes his kicks beefy and his cymbals clanging, and he rides the pitch of individual drum hits like a bush pilot hopped up on pep pills, soaring and plunging with scant regard for weak stomachs. Even without melodies, no two tracks sound remotely alike. That’s thanks in part to his ear for distinctively syncopated grooves that unspool with the propulsive force of a tightly wound spring; it has just as much to do with his textural instincts. In “DOLO 4,” the hi-hats and snares take on the liquid quality of Baka water drumming; the drums in “DOLO 7” seem to be coated with a fine film of ash; in “DOLO 9,” they vibrate like a mouthful of Pop Rocks.
Drum tracks have a rich history in DJ culture; long before Serato and CDJs made it easy for DJs to extend a looped beat for as long as they’d like, dance producers pressed up percussive edits to facilitate long, intricate blends. But Dolo Percussion cuts aren’t mere DJ tools (though a creative DJ could presumably get plenty of dancefloor mileage out of these 16 flights of rhythmic fancy). Some tracks extend to six, seven, even 11 minutes, and they earn every second of their run time, drum patterns morphing like amoeba under an electronic microscope.
The final four tracks, which are exclusive to this release, are the most inventive and varied of the lot. “DOLO 16” suggests dub reggae with all the reverb sopped up by silica packets; “DOLO 15” is slow-motion drum’n’bass suffused in finger cymbals and ring modulator; the quick-stepping “DOLO 13,” all wind chimes and electronic buzz, could almost be mistaken for something off Perlon, the iconic German minimal-techno label. Best of the bunch is “DOLO 14,” a slow, heady funk cut that’s steeped in D.C. go-go (a palpable influence on Field-Pickering’s dynamic sense of swing), and whose disorienting array of hissing cymbals and clacking woodblocks give the impression of surround sound, even on just two speakers. The conventional wisdom might say that drum tracks are an inherently limited form. But rather than exhausting their possibilities, Field-Pickering has clearly become more inspired as he continued the series. As the Slits once sang, “Silence is a rhythm too”: By muting his melodies, Field-Pickering keeps finding new ways to make his beats sing. | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Future Times | May 11, 2019 | 7.3 | 8f5c5200-f77c-470e-bb55-31e4f1a8ebf6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet’s music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. On their second album, they venture into an art-metal terrain that not many other acts have visited. | According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet’s music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. On their second album, they venture into an art-metal terrain that not many other acts have visited. | Bloodiest: Bloodiest | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21432-bloodiest/ | Bloodiest | If you've ever set foot in an art gallery, then you know what it's like when an artist's description of their work turns out to be way more compelling than the work itself. Clearly, the act of creating something distorts the perspective of the person making it, which means that artists can sometimes be the least qualified people to shed light on the things they make.
According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet's music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. That sounds enticing on paper, but it's not what you hear on album opener "Mesmerize," a fairly straightahead number built on an insistent riff that manages to borrow from Tool guitarist Adam Jones while leaving out the intangibles that distinguished Jones' playing from the riffmongers of his era. The fact that a band so focused on mood and dynamics would emulate the most superficial and brutish aspects of Jones' playing makes you scratch your head—and also speaks to the pitfalls of playing musical dress-up.
Though they're enthusiastic fans of metal, the members of Bloodiest aren't dyed-in-the-wool metalheads. The group identifies as underground indie/post-rock at heart, which makes sense considering that at various points its membership has included alums from experimental Chicago acts like 90 Day Men, Lustre King, and Russian Circles. Founding guitarists Tony Lazzara and Eric Chaleff played together in Sterling and Follows, and vocalist Bruce Lamont plays sax and howls in the more jaggedly experimental quartet Yakuza. For better or worse, they have little collective experience playing heavy stuff that openly identifies as such.
To be fair, sometimes you get very "authentic" results from people who aren't "natives" to the style they play. In fact, several of metal's most iconic trailblazers never actually listened to the stuff much. But as you make your way through Bloodiest, the band’s follow-up to its 2011 debut Descent, it's hard to shake the feeling that Lazzara, Chaleff, and their cohorts handle these riffs with the same combination of fascination and distance that tourists show when they're in the gift shop of a foreign country, where the untrained eye has a hard time spotting the difference between cliché, truth, and the gray area where most cultural hallmarks are actually both.
There are times on Bloodiest where the band does twist otherwise conventional riffs into shapes they wouldn't have assumed in their usual habitat. On "Broken Teeth," for example, one of the guitarists takes the familiar theme from Holst's "Mars" (the same melody you hear at the beginning of Metallica's "Am I Evil" cover), puts it on a cutting board, and dices it up. Later in the same song, Chaleff and Lazzara counterpose another coiling Adam Jones-esque riff against a drum pattern that former 90 Day Men drummer Cayce Key purposely drags so far behind the beat that it makes the whole band sound like it's stuttering. Meanwhile, pianist Nandini Khaund underlays the dense, sludgy wall of sound with elegant chords that hint at what Dixieland jazz might sound like in a cough-syrup induced nightmare. At moments like these, regardless of whether this band falls as close to modern classical, post-rock, or film scores as it would have you believe, it does manage to find itself in art-metal terrain that's still mostly untouched.
When fringe musicians with indie sensibilities dabble in metal, they tend to either put a ponderous spin on it (Liturgy) or a campy one (Dave Pajo's one-off group Dead Child). Bloodiest most definitely leans towards the former, especially during its lengthy stretches of classical-tinged guitar spiked with ethereal chanting. Almost three decades since John Zorn compared Napalm Death to free jazz, the genre still has a way of luring dilettantes who can't resist what they perceive as its lowbrow/junk-culture temptations. Never mind that, musically speaking, Zorn's comparison was totally fair; it still smacked of unintended snobbery.
But Bloodiest doesn't come off as the product of well-intentioned but privileged slumming. After all, this band is from Chicago, where musicians inclined to shuttle between various genres have long felt free to do so. Most of the members of Bloodiest have roots in bands that operate or operated at the outskirts of metal anyway. With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own. | 2016-01-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | January 15, 2016 | 6.5 | 8f5fea73-2e38-4c31-bfcd-2d45dd6c1cb0 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Though written during the throes of identity crisis and recovery, the official debut from Boston-based indie-folk artist Anjimile Chithambo radiates the happiness and pride that come with stability. | Though written during the throes of identity crisis and recovery, the official debut from Boston-based indie-folk artist Anjimile Chithambo radiates the happiness and pride that come with stability. | Anjimile: Giver Taker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anjimile-giver-taker/ | Giver Taker | Boston-based singer-songwriter Anjimile Chithambo’s life changed when they realized they could rebuild themself. Born in a Dallas suburb to conservative, Presbyterian immigrants from Malawi, the 27-year-old indie-folk artist, who records mononymously as Anjimile, spent the past decade whittling away at music as a hobby-turned-coping method. The experience of coming out to their parents as queer eventually inspired “Maker,” a song that compares a redefinition of gender to one of faith—and paved the way for Giver Taker, their first album on Father/Daughter. Written during the throes of a personal decline and recorded after reaching safety on the other side, Giver Taker recounts a difficult climb to sobriety, the loss of loved ones, and the gradual understanding of their identity as a nonbinary trans person. It’s not the struggles that define the album, but rather the joy and resilience that permeates it.
A grant from a local arts group gave Anjimile the budget to create Giver Taker the way they envisioned: by hiring longtime bandmate Justine Bowe of synthpop group Photocomfort and New York-based artist and producer Gabe Goodman. Together, Bowe and Goodman add layered depth to Anjimile’s compositions: Sunlight peeks through piano chords on the title track, strings and bass clarinet shimmer throughout “In Your Eyes,” and vocal harmonies enliven “Baby No More.” Childhood favorites like Madonna and Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi surface in Anjimile’s pop refrains and African polyrhythms, while their teenage appreciation for Iron & Wine influences their approach to finger-picked guitar. Though the album was primarily written while in rehab and experiencing a quiet identity crisis, Giver Taker proceeds with the radiant happiness and pride that come with securing a sense of stability in life. Even when they quote Shakespeare in the heartfelt ballad “Ndimakukonda” (the title means “I love you” in Chichewa, their parents’ native language), Anjimile emphasizes gratitude by reworking the love song to address friends instead of an ex-partner.
It’s hard not to compare Anjimile to a young Sufjan Stevens, both because of their warbling vocal deliveries and their ambiguously religious lyrics. While the songs on Giver Taker center around life experiences with family, grief, and love, a thread of faith weaves through each: the calls for help in “Not Another Word,” the stubborn refusal of death in “Your Tree,” the reckoning with hereditary traits in “1978.” Like Sufjan, Anjimile subverts the platitudes of Christian music by softly treading along the metaphoric ridge where spirituality adjoins hope. “I’ll walk the line to meet you there,” they promise at the album’s end, singing just above a whisper. Tucked throughout are soft piano, stirring banjo, and frail falsettos—the result of Anjimile’s first year taking testosterone—that recall the holistic intimacy of albums like Michigan and Seven Swans.
Though they’ve released several records over the past six years, Anjimile has declared Giver Taker to be their debut full-length. It’s a choice that reflects their significant growth in style and sound: Whereas their earlier material veered towards melodic art-rock, the music on Giver Taker sounds radically gentle and confident, as if made by someone who’s experienced a rebirth. Even the stripped-back reworkings of songs from 2018’s Colors and 2019’s Maker Mixtape feel revitalized. It’s most evident in “Maker,” a song that unfolds like a mantra of self-actualization: “I’m not just a boy, I’m a man/I’m not just a man, I’m a god/I’m not just a god, I’m a maker.” A transcendental evolution from gender identity to spiritual calling and, finally, to creative purpose, it’s the centerpiece of Giver Taker, the album where Anjimile takes pride in their voice and the person they’ve become.
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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. | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Father/Daughter | October 6, 2020 | 7.5 | 8f606110-8f1d-4573-a77e-d487895f2d49 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The darkly austere alt-country group Freakwater has kept their simple, gothic sound consistent through the years, but on their eighth album they overhaul it almost completely. It's their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to their short, violent songs. | The darkly austere alt-country group Freakwater has kept their simple, gothic sound consistent through the years, but on their eighth album they overhaul it almost completely. It's their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to their short, violent songs. | Freakwater: Scheherazade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21484-scheherazade/ | Scheherazade | When Freakwater made their first recordings in the late '80s, they set a template that would serve them well for the next 27 years: a darkly austere country sound rooted in the sisterly harmonies of Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean. Making good use of a minimal backing band—often just their own guitars and an upright bass, with flourishes of pedal steel and electric guitar—they updated the downcast vocals of the Carter Family and wrote songs set in some alternate-reality American past. It seemed like there was a ghost or a corpse on every album. Freakwater had a simple, yet powerful palette to match the Appalachian gothic tone, and that combination has kept the band alive and relevant even as many of their alt-country peers have fallen by the wayside. Their best albums—especially 1995’s Old Paint—sound less like products of a particular scene and more like the sepia-toned recordings of eccentric artists dislocated from history.
Even when they’ve put a full decade between albums, Bean and Irwin have never strayed far from their recognizable sound or their bleak subject matter. But on Scheherazade, their eighth album overall and their first since 2005, they overhaul it dramatically: For the first time since they recorded demos in the Bean's parents’ basement, they ventured out of Chicago and recorded in Louisville, the city with which the band has long been identified. They also recruited a slew of Northern Kentucky musicians, including Sarah Balliet from Murder by Death, Morgan Geer form Drunken Prayer, and Evan Patterson of Young Widows. Noted Louisville resident Will Oldham doesn’t show up, disproving my theory that he is required by law to play on every local release. On the other hand, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds does play violin and flute.
It’s the largest cast and crew they’ve assembled under the Freakwater banner, and as a result, Scheherazade sounds fuller and looser, a bit rougher around the edges, with more rock in the arrangements. It’s their most cinematic album yet, with the music functioning almost as a soundtrack to Irwin and Bean’s short, violent songs. On the very first song, "What the People Want," somebody throws a baby down a well, accompanied by tense swirls of strings. On "Down Will Come Baby," they rewrite the old, twisted lullaby "Rock-a-bye Baby," and the band navigates a series of key changes that lends a vertiginous effect, as though the cradle is in freefall.
The presence of so many imperiled infants on Scheherazade is oddly reassuring, a nice reminder that this is a Freakwater album after all. The tight harmonies that marked their previous efforts here come slightly unraveled; they sing against each other as often as with each other. These are some of their most visceral performances, as rough-hewn on quiet numbers like "Ghost Song" as one heavier numbers like "Take Me With You," which features roof-raising hollers by Bean. There’s something invigorating about hearing two alt-country veterans take apart their tried-and-true sound and reassemble it slightly askew, and Scheherazade is not only their most modern-sounding record; it might be their best since Old Paint. | 2016-02-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Bloodshot | February 4, 2016 | 7.5 | 8f606a78-eb14-4404-9ae2-dc3b2ce42bc4 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his latest nine-track triumph, the Griselda star finds an easy chemistry with Harry Fraud, whose syrupy samples lend poignancy to these stories of hustling and survivor’s remorse. | On his latest nine-track triumph, the Griselda star finds an easy chemistry with Harry Fraud, whose syrupy samples lend poignancy to these stories of hustling and survivor’s remorse. | Benny the Butcher / Harry Fraud: The Plugs I Met 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/benny-the-butcher-harry-fraud-the-plugs-i-met-2/ | The Plugs I Met 2 | Like executors of a late painter’s estate, Griselda operates markets of self-imposed scarcity: $60 screen-printed hoodies, $200 limited-press vinyl, thrift store Wrestlemania gear showcased like lots in a Sotheby’s auction. Of late, Benny the Butcher has ratcheted up the entrepreneurial spirit, enjoining Facebook fans to “get paid with me” via crypto-based schemes. An acolyte of Jay-Z’s pre-“retirement” oeuvre, Benny internalized the elder rapper’s ideal of hustling as a stepping stone to the C-suite. But as Griselda approached rap stardom, even that ladder had been pulled up: there’s no modern-day equivalent to heavy rotation on turn-of-the-century Hot 97 or 106 & Park, just like there’s no analogue for the working, touring musician in the age of COVID and Spotify. It makes a certain sense that the heir of ‘97 Hov would also be a Facebook scammer. What is drug dealing if not a pyramid scheme? How else are we supposed to get rich now?
The latter question looms ominously over The Plugs I Met 2, a nine-track triumph produced by Harry Fraud. Benny is rarely regretful, but his diaristic verses cast back forlornly, weighing risks and consequences like someone who’s narrowly avoided a wreck on the interstate. On “Survivor’s Remorse,” he considers his divergence with an old associate: “I thought about this rap shit and had to stick to the business/Changed my mind, he didn’t, now he doin’ 20 in Clinton.” Where so many of his peers rap about drug trafficking with a listless, stony-eyed fatalism, Benny establishes clear stakes and cause-and-effect throughlines. Over the course of an album, these endless calculations build into something like a manifesto. “Close my eyes and the voice in my eardrums tell me, ‘fore the feds come/To turn these breadcrumbs to a hedge fund,” he rhymes forebodingly on the intro.
Plugs 2 is haunted by casualties of wrong-place-wrong-time (that Benny salvaged a guest verse from Chinx, a charismatic Queens rapper murdered in 2015, is almost too on-the-nose), but Fraud’s lush production makes it an archly buoyant affair. With Benny, Fraud finds the chemistry that’s eluded him on work with Action Bronson, who demands the spotlight, and French Montana, who makes his producers do the heavy lifting. Fraud’s syrupy samples assume poignancy in the company of Benny’s melancholy street rhymes, his spacious percussion a welcome change of pace from the flinty loops Griselda usually favors. The winding, layered arrangements reveal intricate details, such as the rich transition between pre-chorus and hook on “Overall” and the subtle beat switches deployed throughout “Live By It.”
The ’97-vintage Jay-Z that Benny idolizes had learned to live with regrets, briefly enjoying the spoils of stardom before morphing into the board room-dwelling robber baron of his later catalog. Accordingly, Plugs 2 maintains a smirking joie de vivre—just so long as you’re on the right side of it. On “Live By It,” Benny dons a UPS driver’s khaki uniform in order to facilitate a home invasion, because “A record deal will get you lit, but a robbery makes you super famous.” His rags-to-riches setups are always relayed with a knowing wink: “This magic that I’m making, Pyrex classes was my major/It’s hard to tell a butterfly from caterpillar stages.” He doesn’t second-guess his choices or suffer crises of faith, mostly because he can’t afford to.
Admittedly, it’s total catnip for tri-state rap purists. In addition to Chinx’s exuberant posthumous appearance, there are guest spots from French Montana and Rick Hyde; around the tape’s halfway point, Fat Joe wanders into the frame and rhymes “pipe dreams” with “Weinstein.” But Benny and his collaborators never stoop to empty homage. “Longevity” has the most enthralling Jim Jones verse in years, delivered from the perspective of a grizzled veteran who, glory days behind him, has begun to fear obsolescence. His recollections are relayed in an uneasy wheeze: “If you a hustler in the street, well, here’s some candid advice/Dope is an iPhone wet, to save it, you jam it in rice/But you probably never cooked up a thousand grams of the white.” It’s like the wistful final act of every mafia movie—half the wiseguys are washed-up dads, the other half are six feet under, and distance throws everything into devastating relief.
In happier times, Benny wouldn’t make a very sympathetic protagonist: he’s a bully who neither relishes nor laments a life of organized crime. But as in the most riveting contemporary grifter sagas, there’s a vicarious, revenge-fantasy thrill in a shameless crook betraying the trust and institutions that failed the rest of us. There’s nothing left to lose and everything to gain.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Black Soprano Family / Srfschl | March 19, 2021 | 7.8 | 8f6918eb-2422-49d2-a7b7-2018b749411d | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
At turns soulful and spirited, the debut album from the British singer balances rabble-rousing political energy with a nonchalant chumminess. | At turns soulful and spirited, the debut album from the British singer balances rabble-rousing political energy with a nonchalant chumminess. | Connie Constance: English Rose | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/connie-constance-english-rose/ | English Rose | Connie Constance’s music has a neo-soul sheen and a bloody punk heart. Performing live last year, the British artist moved with Ari Up swagger: She wore pink eye makeup smeared like a bandit’s mask, mashed her feet to the floor, and let her colorful box braids fly. Yet her mutable singing voice can take on the measured care of jazz, and, on her debut album English Rose, convincingly pulls off spiky indie-disco anthems and melancholic pop as well. An unruly energy remains throughout, though, and at times Constance’s serrated rasp sounds like it could tear out of her throat.
Constance, 23, grew up in Watford, a green suburb at the tail end of the London tube line, where she’s said she felt like an “anomaly” as a mixed-race kid. English Rose’s title track revisits the gnawing feeling of being an outsider in your home country with a spare, subversive cover of the Jam’s 1978 song, originally a paean to a fair-skinned beauty. Constance’s should-be-definitive version takes the historically white privileging term “English rose” and refigures it as a symbol for the porous, prismatic nature of British identity. Another of the album’s lyrics sums up her inclusive point of view: “Our British blood ain’t all the same.”
Blunted vowels, dropped consonants, and liberal f-bombs lend a devil-may-care chumminess to Constance’s music, whether singing about relationship strife or airing insurgent political views. Her rakish edge fuels the anxiety-ridden “I Want Out,” where staccato speak-singing and two-tone ska synths construct a slam-poetry “Ghost Town” for the Brexit era. The guitar-driven “Bloody British Me” sends up armchair activists with a hot-blooded fury that’s no less vivid for a couple of lyrical clangers. (“Pick up the penny[...]/But I can’t buy a penny sweet,” she sings. Yes, we know: Everywhere is contactless now.) A nonchalantly lovely chorus is memorable for happier reasons, evoking Lily Allen’s ability to flip from sanguine to sly in the space of a beat. “Stuck in the mud/Can't move forward,” Constance sings sweetly, before raging, “Forward?/What's that?/Fuck that!”—a chant sure to animate any young, impassioned British crowd.
When not rabble-rousing, Constance’s voice takes on scratchy, sonorous depth that brings to mind the subterranean soul of fellow London artists Nilüfer Yanya and King Krule. In less individualistic hands (and with less swearing), the torchy piano ballad “Bad Vibes” could be shmaltz fit for a reality-show montage; on English Rose, it is a rough-cut gem. “Blooming in Solitude,” co-produced by Mura Masa, has a beat like ‘90s trip-hop stuck in reverse, and the lively Dave Okumu (The Invisible) co-write “Give & Take” recalls the wry hyper-literacy of ‘00s UK indie shape-throwers. Meanwhile, the bass groove and sultry sighs of “Yesterday” bring crimson sensuality: “We love like we’re animals,” she sings, one of the album’s many refreshingly frank takes on sex.
While Constance is adept at gear-shifting, English Rose might have felt stronger with a less scattered approach to genre. Still, the record is buoyed by her chameleonic voice and spry lyrical perspective; she co-writes on every song, excluding the Jam cover, adroitly shifting from indignation at systemic racism (“black boy in prison for selling a little green”) to poignant personal reflections on identity. “Same shades making me invisible,” she sings, a plaintive reflection on erasure. Constance’s work has also offered corrective: In a video for the luminous pop-soul single “Fast Cars,” she runs riot in a Marie Antoinette-esque pompadour, a pointed reminder of the central role of women of color throughout British history—a motivating impulse shared with filmmaker Amma Asante’s Belle, or millennium-era R&B star Jamelia’s baroque fantasy “Money.”
Constance’s outspoken mein brings to mind the recent work of black British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge, who powerfully dismantles the phrase “angry black woman” as symptomatic of white patriarchy’s “suffocating dominance and delicate fragility.” A new generation has no time to play that game: Constance sings of herself, with pride, “I can’t put a saddle on a wild beast.” On “Bloody British Me,” she is unapologetic about her ambition, secure in the power of sharp edges to leave a mark. “I won’t be tamed if I want a legacy for my name,” she sings, sounding carefree amid glimmering guitars. Constance’s liberated defiance indicates high promise as her musical focus sharpens; for now, hers is an entirely fresh take on youth in revolt. | 2019-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Virgin EMI | April 1, 2019 | 7.4 | 8f6aacec-493f-4a57-99de-6cab25f9d421 | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
Written and recorded in a guest-filled marathon session, the Texas legend’s second live outing with producer Statik Selektah carries a spirit of friendly competition. | Written and recorded in a guest-filled marathon session, the Texas legend’s second live outing with producer Statik Selektah carries a spirit of friendly competition. | Bun B / Statik Selektah: Trillstatik 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bun-b-statik-selektah-trillstatik-2/ | Trillstatik 2 | By rap standards, Bun B’s aged like merlot. Across a prolific career, he’s worn a number of hats—Gulf Coast underdog, chart-topping ambassador, grieving flagbearer—ultimately assuming the mantle of elder statesman. Now in his fourth decade of recording, he’s eased into the role of goodnatured mensch, an avowed wife guy who’s happy to share the spotlight with younger Houston-area acts. (There are Trillburgers to move, after all.)
Bun’s post-UGK catalog continues to grow at a steady clip. Through no fault of his own, he suffers a similar conundrum as Big Boi, whose commendable solo projects are outshadowed by OutKast’s cultural milestones. Ridin’ Dirty and Underground Kingz remain unsurpassed for their rare collision of genius; Bun’s latter-day records are distinguished by songwriting and beat selection, even if they lack the barbed humor and knotty internal rhymes of his groundbreaking work. For better or worse, they are workmanlike, hard-hat-and-lunch-pail rap albums.
Trillstatik 2 leans into Bun’s blue-collar ethic. Recorded during a 12-hour marathon, it’s his second live outing with Statik Selektah, the tireless DJ, producer, and satellite-radio host. Staged in a Lower East Side storefront aromatic of its usual tenant, a fried-chicken joint, the session featured upwards of a dozen rappers hopped up on complimentary tallboys of Monster Energy. Around 8 p.m., the street entrance was choked by a hundred thirtysomething men, clouded in fruit-scented vapor and angling for glimpses inside; you’d have thought a new Foamposite colorway dropped. By midnight, the spectacle had mellowed to a simmer, red-eyed technicians hovering while a saxophonist recorded interludes. In the middle was Bun, perched on a desk chair and scribbling into a lined notebook, 10 hours in and no worse for wear.
The finished product—uploaded to streaming not even a day later—bears little evidence of its spontaneity, a feat reflective of Statik’s broader philosophy. A spiritual disciple of DJ Premier, he’s maintained quality standards across a packed release calendar by programming bright samples into contemplative loops. While his cookie-cutter technique makes for a structural uniformity, his punchy melodies inject life into rigid drum patterns. On “Only Life I Know,” Statik wrangles a bedeviling guitar lick into an arrangement dour enough to make Harry Fraud blush; “Building Bridges” contrasts Paul Wall’s marble-mouthed couplets with ceremonial horns. Where the wistful chords of “Ain’t No Tellin” might have been overly maudlin, Statik slows the instrumental to a somber tempo suitable for 38 Spesh’s animated verse.
Statik’s beats suffer for their lack of edges. His layering technique makes for an uncanny digital polish, each sample clipped just so; the snares feel like an afterthought. It’s an identifiably East Coast approach, yet the music itself is shorn of regional character. On “Devastating,” Bun is shoehorned between Styles P’s precision and Propain’s Texas drawl, their idiosyncrasies sanded away in pursuit of some holier hip-hop ideal. It’s a neat party trick, but the effect is flattening: There’s no thematic coherence beyond a shared devotion to bars.
Sometimes that’s more than enough. Bun remains one of rap’s great voices, and his showmanship compensates for lyrics (“I hit Jamaica to politic with the Rastas/You hit Jamaica and order jerk chicken pasta”) written against the clock. With a family affair like Trillstatik 2, you take the good with the bad. You can’t, for instance, hold Papoose’s terrible punchlines on “Every Hour” against him—that’s just what he does. On “Acetone,” Boldy James turns in a typically brilliant verse over a solemn piano instrumental, toasting “Uncle Bun” as “UGK alumni”; when Bun clocks in, Statik switches out the percussion, washing the keys with a sturdy bassline in deference to his gravelly voice.
Trillstatik 2 can’t surmount the foibles of its many contributors (“Still wearin’ Yeezys, despite the controversy,” Flee Lord crows on “Only Life I Know”), but the abundance of middle-aged male energy makes for more of a cypher than a jam session. There’s an undeniable air of competition among ostensible collaborators, each rapper intent on outshining the next. So long as there’s a flame, these guys are eager to carry the torch. | 2023-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Showoff | January 10, 2023 | 7.2 | 8f6f887e-8d6d-4a70-8b64-6260a0ab611d | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Taylor Vick, a prolific Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love. | Taylor Vick, a prolific Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love. | Boy Scouts: Free Company | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boy-scouts-free-company/ | Free Company | Music briefly deserted me last year after a boy kicked my heart in the ass. No song was capacious enough for all that I felt. Not a fists-in-the-air empowerment anthem, not a fuck-you punk tirade, not even a gently masochistic ballad. Obviously, the happy stuff was out, too: the grand swoon of Wolf Parade that had scored my daydreams; the Taylor Swift hook he sang to me that one afternoon, our legs swinging from the highest platform of a children’s playground. It was a little like that stage of grief where food turns to cardboard on your tongue. Nothing tastes good; nothing sounds good. You starve; you sit in silence.
Free Company is an album I wish I’d had last autumn. Taylor Vick, an Oakland songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who performs as Boy Scouts, has made a generous and gorgeously empathetic chronicle of the aftermath of love. Through sunny arrangements and spare songwriting, Vick compresses the dust of her romantic disappointment into a glittering jewel. She loves the subject of her songs, but she loves herself, too—loves herself more, enough to step away and carry on, alone, with her head held high.
Though Boy Scouts’ backing tracks are hazy and dreamlike, calling to mind tour mate Jay Som, Vick’s writing is direct, sharp, more bee-sting than butterfly. Free Company lulls the listener with short sentences and single syllables, until a tripwire of a lyric—“And now you’re mad at me/And I’m no longer twenty-three”—sends you sprawling headfirst into her perspective. Like the prose of Sally Rooney, Vick’s lyrics explore the vast complexity of human emotion by reveling in the simplicity of its expression. The indelible chorus of “All Right,” for instance, makes a meal out of a mere eight words: “I’m all right, I swear/I’m all right, how dare you?” In a song that explores weighty, existential questions—the existence of heaven, the permanence of souls, the mortifying ordeal of being known—Vick’s verbal economy keeps her feet planted firmly on the ground.
This is not Vick’s first album as Boy Scouts. Her substantial Bandcamp output stretches back nearly a decade, studded with bedroom recordings and borrowed instruments. (On 2016’s “Homeroom Breakfast,” she offers endearing thanks to “rosie’s piano,” “scott’s guitar,” and “ben’s bass.”) What is clear in the arc from those records to this one are Vick’s substantial gifts not only as a writer, but as an editor. A throwaway line from “Homeroom Breakfast”—“Everything great has an expiration date”—resurfaces on “Free Company,” sharpened to a sad, subtle point in the service of a stronger song. A kind of emotional editing is evident, too. Vick has always contended, in her music, with rejection and resentment. But on “Free Company,” the woman who once wrote, “The world doesn’t need me like the world needs you” now writes from a position of hard-won, sober self-respect. “I don’t know why you’d fall through,” she sings. “I never did for you.”
The arc of Free Company is shot through with tender compassion, even for those who’ve wronged her. On marvelous opener “Get Well Soon,” she offers her best wishes—but “no balloons, ’cause they just die, too”—to a former love. She doesn’t apologize for asserting herself: “Hardly a fight when you know I’m right.” In the depths of her grief, on “In Ya Too,” she likens herself to “the desert sprawl—empty, but still forceful.” She is still adjusting to aloneness, but she is learning to love its strange rhythms, its small pleasures. On “Momentary Love,” perched in her “favorite place,” she lets her thoughts wander to an old love during a moment of solitude. The memory still makes her ache, but that’s okay, she sings: “This doesn’t keep me sane/But the views up here lessen the pain.”
We’ve devised no end of performative mechanisms to distance ourselves from our more unsavory emotions. But on “Free Company,” Taylor Vick dares to feel everything. Reflecting on the death of a friend, on gorgeous closer “You Were Once,” Vick sings, “I knew I’d never be the same again/I know it now and I knew it then/There is only so much you can pretend.” Vick wants her listeners to know both the fullness of her grief and the strength and spirit with which she freed herself of it. She renders each subtle swell of anger, embarrassment, and regret with something almost like gratitude, the retreat of each wave only affirming the solidity of her place on the shore.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- | September 5, 2019 | 8.1 | 8f709093-108e-4e94-b302-20fd01a37927 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
The pop-star-baiting, credibility-seeking, Noel-Gallagher-approved (and then shunned), surly major label rocker Jake Bugg turns in one of the most baffling collections of music in recent memory. | The pop-star-baiting, credibility-seeking, Noel-Gallagher-approved (and then shunned), surly major label rocker Jake Bugg turns in one of the most baffling collections of music in recent memory. | Jake Bugg: On My One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21726-on-my-one/ | On My One | As a surly young major label malcontent, Jake Bugg has been put through all the authentic rock rites. Slagging off popstars? Endlessly! Posing with naked dollybirds? Right here! Album with Rick Rubin? 2013’s Shangri La. Gallagher patronage? Mais bien sûr. Which brings us to 2016, where at the ripe old age of 22, Nottingham-born Bugg confessed that his newfound wealth had opened his eyes to the benefits of voting Conservative. “Coming from a working-class background, if you didn’t go left, you’d be resented,” he told NME in March. “But after having a few albums and touring a while, maybe financially it’s better to be right-wing. So you’re stuck in the middle.”
If he's not quite moving to the Isle of Man yet, his political ambivalence still isn’t particularly surprising. Despite Bugg’s much-toted council estate background, his skifflin’ songs have always hidden a ruthlessly individualist streak: a sorry-not-sorry attitude about escaping his past (while exploiting its downtrodden character for poverty tourism ballads and cred) and sneery dismissals of his less ambitious friends. “When you’re the kingpin, people wanna take you down,” he sang on Shangri La, in what he unconvincingly claimed was a song inspired by The Wire. As Bugg’s first record without the help of cowriters or much of a producer (Jacknife Lee worked on three songs), his third album On My One is the test of whether he can indeed stand alone and swim without his authenticity armbands.
Uninspired as Bugg’s previous records could be, they were at least coherent: 2012’s Jake Bugg coasted on dusky pre-Beatles bonhomie, while Shangri La had a rockier sting in its tail. The prevailing impression left by On My One is of a young man desperately grasping in the dark for his musical identity, and coming up with one of the most arrestingly baffling collections of music in recent memory. Lead single “Gimme the Love” is a swaggering slab of maxed-out radio dynamics in debt to Kasabian and Second Coming-era Stone Roses, written at the label’s insistence that Bugg give them a single. He makes his feelings on the matter evident in a tirade of jibbered lyrics about airplay, fakery, and the “middle road well bode the game played.” He recently explained that his people had reservations about the bombastic track. “People would say to me, ‘How’s that gonna sound on the radio next to Little Mix?’ That was the wrong question. It should be, ‘How are Little Mix gonna sound next to this?’” (Like sweet, sweet relief.)
Bugg has not been blessed with a natural singing voice (just hear him honk “LAYDEH!” on “Hold on You”) though on doleful acoustic numbers like “All That,” he finds a low husk that suits him well enough. It transpires that one of the benefits of having external producers and songwriters may have been their rather more judicious understanding of this limited vocal range. “Love, Hope and Misery” elicits the kind of “bless him for trying” pity of *The X Factor’*s audition week: a lovely, dramatic torch song whose poise is shattered by Bugg crooning like a stuck sheep. The words “I'm just a maaaaaaan” have rarely been sung in a less convincing fashion; the chorus does not grow any less painful after a dozen listens. It’s like watching the Titanic hit the iceberg again and again.
“Ain’t No Rhyme” is equally embarrassing. It’s here that Bugg deals with his political uncertainty in a Beastie Boys-inspired rap. It’s his “Straight Outta Clifton” moment, a visit to his old stomping ground that manages to be utterly graceless about his money-grabbing friends, and sound like a government PSA warning young people about the perils of prison. “C’mon Kurtis/Just put down the knife,” he urges. “I knew from his eyes he wasn’t gonna think twice/Put your mask on before committing crime/These kids need to think about time inside/Cos a dagger through the heart comes at a price.” It is miraculous that he doesn’t start the song with the words, “I’m MC Bugg and I’m here to say.”
The diversity of On My One shows that Bugg certainly isn't short of musical inspiration. There are country ballads, like the title track (“I'm just a paw boy from Notting-hum”), while “Bitter Salt” is “Keep the Faith”-era Bon Jovi. “Livin’ Up Country” and “All That” evoke Ryan Adams circa Heartbreaker (or, less favorably, Britpop also-rans Cast). He’s trying, and his time with Rick Rubin has made him into a decent producer. But the lyrics expose Bugg as a young man with nothing to say about society, masculinity, love—anything other than his arrogant, dull disgruntlement at being “three years on the road, 400 shows... no place to go.” His love songs are muddled and mean, one verse accepting blame for a relationship’s downfall, the next telling a girl, “it's all your fault because I won’t do what I’m told.”
On My One is Nottingham slang for “on my own,” subtly illustrating how isolated Bugg seems to feel from his upbringing, and from the major label system that’s got him this far. An album this terrible is certainly the product of some bad decisions by people who don’t have his best interests at heart. To the outside world, it shouldn’t matter that Bugg is a bit manufactured, or that he had help writing his early material. But there’s a difference between being capital-A authentic and being convincing. All the effort he put into diligently slagging off pop music in order to shore up his own indie credentials (even One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson called him on it) has backfired massively. On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system. | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island / Virgin EMI | June 17, 2016 | 3 | 8f709991-b002-478c-a499-5d6a7f8eaef7 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On this compilation, artists in Young Dolph’s circle keep the rapper’s legacy of love and loyalty alive, giving the project a clear sense of purpose. | On this compilation, artists in Young Dolph’s circle keep the rapper’s legacy of love and loyalty alive, giving the project a clear sense of purpose. | Various Artists: Long Live Young Dolph | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-long-live-young-dolph/ | Long Live Young Dolph | The pressures of the music marketplace are not often conducive to respecting real-life tragedy. When an artist unexpectedly passes, there’s a demand to hear their musical last words, both from listeners who wanted more time with a person they love and from cynical industry forces. On one end of the spectrum are the verging-on disrespectful posthumous albums of Pop Smoke, stitched together from scraps of low-fidelity vocal stems; on the other, the tribute that Lil Peep’s family has paid to him by bringing his early work to streaming services and clearing samples instead of excessively mining unreleased material.
In the wake of Young Dolph’s death, so much of the discussion and coverage of him focused not just on his relentless grind or effortless flow but on his deep sense of community, charity, and kinship. Dolph paid his success forward in many facets of his life, leaving behind a material legacy in a way few musicians do: he cared for his family, invested heavily in his hometown of Memphis, and closely mentored a new generation of rappers. Where others might lend only clout or co-signs, Young Dolph gave the hand-selected artists who formed his Paper Route Empire stable the reins of their careers outside the major label system. Long Live Dolph is then a fitting reflection of a man who supported future stars, a tribute straight from the acts he so actively embraced.
What Dolph meant to the artists he worked with and mentored—and especially to the next generation of Memphis rap—is apparent in the heartbreak of Jay Fizzle’s “LLD.” At first, Jay tries to undo and obscure the reality of Dolph’s death, then he tries to understand it, before realizing all he can do is live out the potential Dolph saw in him: “Tryna OD off these drugs to erase the whole situation/But I know this shit ain’t good for me/You wanted what’s good for me.” Singer Ricco Barrino’s aching voice comes in with a message from Dolph’s wife and children: “Even though you’re gone, your legacy lives on.” It’s keeping that throughline of love and loyalty alive that now defines Paper Route Empire and gives Long Live Dolph such purpose as a project.
The portrait that’s drawn of Dolph is of a man who would have given the Polo off his back to anyone who could benefit from his encouragement. “Role Model” opens with a sample from an interview with Dolph and then-new signee and pupil Kenny Muney, who recalls listening to Dolph’s High Class Street Music mixtapes when he was younger. Muney’s role model then became his friend and biggest supporter, but by the end, Muney has become the role model, carrying the torch that brought light to his life. “Proud” is classic Key Glock, his voice fried like he’s been up all night, eyes bloodshot as much from the high as the tears he’s been hiding. Over a cut-throat Bandplay beat, he speaks with the Grim Reaper, making deals for his lost comrade’s soul. Though Glock is more than equipped as a solo artist, he and his older cousin had once-in-a-generation chemistry that’s hard to recapture, and in many ways, his contribution to Long Live Dolph is the most effecting. The hustle is a way for him to cope with the hole in his heart: “Just the other day, caught myself cryin’/Then I wiped my face, shook that shit off, and got back on my grind.”
The EP’s second half pays tribute to Dolph less in lyric and more in spirit, with rappers Big Moochie Grape and PaperRoute Woo capturing the kind of classic Southern trunk music that Dolph did so masterfully. Sosa 808’s beat on “In Dolph We Trust” is glistening and baroque, flipping “Carol of the Bells”—once a staple of the DJ Paul and Juicy J production toolkit—into an ornately menacing march. Joddy Badass and Snupe Bandz’ “I Like” shifts the project into a more chilled-out and romantic mode, a welcome comedown from the intensity of the first half that nevertheless comes off a bit hollow compared to the brutal emotionality. The one new Dolph verse, on Chitana’s “Love for Me,” sees him getting serene, almost tropical, but that peacefulness takes on a bittersweet tinge when you remember why you’re listening to this album.
Even in a rap landscape where personal trauma and mental illness are unpacked in chart-topping hits, the members of Paper Route Empire reach a level of sincerity and emotional reflection that’s still hard to come by. In between the denial and unreality of tragedy, the confusion and rage at a world that continues to take Black men from their families so senselessly and constantly, there’s a sharply defined sense of resolve. The next phase of Paper Route recognizes that the best way to pay tribute to their teacher isn’t just to put respect on his name, but to put the principles he lived into action.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Paper Route Empire | January 26, 2022 | 7 | 8f783db0-eeda-418d-a9b1-6ca8a34b331b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt curates the latest in the label’s ambient series with a compilation of dark and moody tracks that reflect the best of what modern-day ambient has to offer. | Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt curates the latest in the label’s ambient series with a compilation of dark and moody tracks that reflect the best of what modern-day ambient has to offer. | Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2019 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-pop-ambient-2019/ | Pop Ambient 2019 | When Kompakt launched its first Pop Ambient compilation in the winter of 2001, CDs were selling in massive quantities. The notion of paying $15 for one in order to get an hour-long mix of instrumental electronic music seemed perfectly normal. Kompakt even sweetened the pot on that inaugural CD—it included a trippy QuickTime video that you could play on your computer.
At that moment, ambient music was still understood within the context of rave, and hearing these sounds in a “chill room” while coming down from a night of drugs and dancing was for many still a recent memory. In the two decades since, ambient music has grown more ubiquitous while also losing some of its distinction. Vastly improved tools for the creation and dissemination of electronic music have led to a flooded market, and playlists of “functional” music have proliferated, giving casual music fans easy access to ambient music for any occasion. But in this time of plenty, individual artists can find it harder to stand out. In this climate, as the Pop Ambient compilations continued to arrive each year, it was hard not to wonder about the point of it all. Do these comps make sense in the streaming era?
For Pop Ambient to matter, a given record has to be coherent over its complete length. We should approach these releases as playlists, an invitation to a music experience that lasts for an hour-plus, with considered flow and sequencing. And since Pop Ambient is assembled by Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt, the man behind the influential ambient project Gas, we can hear each set as a reflection of whatever he’s into at a specific time. Pop Ambient 2019, which delivers as a playlist as outlined above, has something in common with the first edition, in that much of the music on it seems to exist in relation to Voigt’s contemporaneous ambient work. In 2001, that meant the warm, fizzy textures found on the 2000 Gas album Pop. And here, that means darker tracks with moody strings and gradually shifting drones redolent of Narkopop and Rausch, the two most recent Gas albums after a 17-year hiatus.
The most striking section of Pop Ambient 2019 comes in the middle of the set, where the Gas influence is most prominent. The tracks by Kenneth James Gibson and Morgen Wurde, are dark, throbbing coils of energy. Gibson’s track recalls the see-saw feedback drone of early Stars of the Lid, while Wurde’s “Schien Immer” is a drafty, vaporous swirl of gloomy strings positioned against a bright keyboard shimmer, like watching two suns on the same horizon, one rising, one setting. Gregor Schwellenbach’s tense and swaying “Rot 2,” which follows, also features strings, but in a neoclassic mode that brings to mind Arvo Pärt or Morton Feldman. The three tracks together work like a suite, and this 23-minute stretch of the compilation is heavenly, rich with feeling while emotional specifics remain just out of reach, representing the best of what ambient music has to offer.
The back half is heavier with synth-driven drones, and tracks by Thomas Fehlmann and Leandro Fresco take mix gliding, steady-state tones with soft whooshes and bass pedals that help them to breathe. Selections of generic ambient (see series mainstay Triola’s limply melodic “Arden”) are par for the course for Pop Ambient, but the set’s modest ambitions and comfort with slipping into the background make them relatively easy to overlook. Eighteen years in, Pop Ambient 2019 makes a solid argument for the continued existence of the series, ranking among the best of its installments. | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Kompakt | December 8, 2018 | 7.6 | 8f7e0828-09b0-46cf-b907-6f811d313b14 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
The underrated Irish post-disco singer returns with her second album in two years after a lengthy dry spell. The songs flit amongst genres, united only by her fearless, restless spirit. | The underrated Irish post-disco singer returns with her second album in two years after a lengthy dry spell. The songs flit amongst genres, united only by her fearless, restless spirit. | Róisín Murphy: Take Her Up To Monto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22085-take-her-up-to-monto/ | Take Her Up To Monto | Fans of underrated Irish post-disco singer Roisin Murphy rejoiced last year as she finally concluded a lengthy dry spell with the release of her third record, Hairless Toys, ending eight years of near-silence from Murphy since 2007’s excellent Overpowered. It turns out, however, that the levee really broke when she decided to get back to work, because just one year later Murphy is issuing yet another record of additional songs from those same sessions.
Unlike other past examples of second records culled from a previous session, Take Her Up to Monto offers neither a strikingly different type of songs as with Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, nor are they obviously lesser leftovers like on Jay-Z & R. Kelly’s Unfinished Business. Instead, Take Her Up to Monto is more like Disc 2 of a quasi-double album, offering a set of nine tracks that display a similar tone and feel to the eight songs on Hairless Toys, and maintaining the same high level of quality established by its predecessor.
That’s not to say though that Take Her Up To Monto is identical to Hairless Toys. Murphy has called the songs of her latest “more extreme: more dynamic or more complex or more pop ... If they were siblings, Hairless Toys would be the nice child and Take Her Up to Monto more of a problem child.” It’s not a dramatic shift, but an evident one—as stable and consistently enjoyable Hairless Toys was, Take Her Up to Monto follows that sonic blueprint but ups the ante with even more experimentation and risk-taking, showcasing Murphy’s range and depth as a songwriter to a fuller extent.
Opener “Mastermind” is six-and-a-half minutes of the type of effortless nu-disco of which one could easily imagine Murphy making entire albums. Murphy’s soulful contralto is perfect for the genre, as easily capable of call-and-response as it is of deep-throated dancefloor roars. “Mastermind” is a clear example of how Murphy could be a champion disco diva if she really wanted—imagine her as the voice of a future Hercules & Love Affair album!—but the rest of Take Her Up to Monto attests to Murphy’s greater aspirations.
What elevates *Take Her Up to Monto—*and all of Murphy’s records, frankly—is a fearless, restless spirit. Multi-part tracks like “Thoughts Wasted,” “Ten Miles High,” and “Nervous Sleep” toss the rulebook out the window as Murphy merges genres, sounds and feelings. “Thoughts Wasted” is perhaps the album’s highlight: Beginning with a echoey piano riff, the song starts off as a pop song before violins arrive for a startling minimalist bridge with countermelody that would be more expected on a Bang on a Can album. When Murphy’s voice re-emerges, it’s accompanied by a ghostly choir that signals that song's third act, a spoken word tour-de-force. Even though lyrics are relatively inscrutable, when Murphy delivers the line, “Humans are fucked,” it pierces.
On “Nervous Sleep,” the album’s penultimate and longest track at nearly eight minutes, Murphy offers what is more or less a prog epic. Beginning with reverbed whispers, machine bleeps and gently intoned vibraphones, Murphy conjures an aura of sleepy noir that is more enigmatic than nervous. The laconic pacing is perfectly controlled as Murphy calmly shares a story of a couple having problems, her voice sliding mellifluously from narrator to woman to man to chorus. At the end, the song begins breaks down and fade away into air much like those last moments of consciousness before sleep takes you away.
Murphy has expressed surprise over the years that she never became a pop star. In the States, she is criminally under-appreciated and even somewhat unknown. But her sensibility has always been too wide-ranging, too challenging, to satisfy the tastes of a mainstream audience. Even the album’s title, a reference to a classic Irish folk song, and cover, a photo of her at a construction site wearing a worker’s jacket and hardhat, say “curious experimentalist” rather than “pop star.” But for connoisseurs of high-end electropop, disco, and dance music, Murphy has so much to offer. Let's hope now that she's turning out new music at a rapid clip that more people will begin to notice her. | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Play It Again Sam | July 11, 2016 | 7.8 | 8f84b8eb-45da-4f28-a8d7-cc4a7aa88b7d | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Two reissues of the late composer’s work highlight the attention he paid to the malleability of language and the way its sound often conveys more than its substance. | Two reissues of the late composer’s work highlight the attention he paid to the malleability of language and the way its sound often conveys more than its substance. | Robert Ashley: Automatic Writing / Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-ashley-automatic-writing-improvement-don-leaves-linda/ | Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) / Automatic Writing | “Say what you mean and mean what you say” is sage yet impractical advice. Societal conventions often throw a spanner in the works of meaningful communication. These fragmented thoughts swam into focus while listening to the late American composer Robert Ashley’s 1979 album Automatic Writing and 1985 opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) in circling sequence. The two works were recently reissued together, the former marking its 40th anniversary and the latter documenting a 2019 production of the opera at legendary New York performance space the Kitchen. While aesthetically poles apart, they make for a complementary pairing, because they illuminate Ashley’s interest in the interplay of speech and convention from opposite directions.
On Automatic Writing, which comprises one 46-minute piece, Ashley repeats the line, “My mind is censoring my own mind,” or a slight variation of it, a dozen times. The composition is based on a recording of the composer’s involuntary speech, a symptom he attributed to a possible “mild form of Tourette’s.” “It is against the ‘law’ of our society to engage in involuntary speech,” he wrote in the liner notes of a 1996 reissue of the record. “That’s why we are embarrassed to talk to ourselves. That’s why Tourette had to leave the room.” Ashley came to record himself because he’d noticed repetitions in the phrases he muttered and wondered how these unconscious patterns related to his work as a composer. Could he find music within the mysterious workings of his own body?
In his searching, Ashley distorted his voice to the point of granular gesture on Automatic Writing. (Save for a few moments of clarity, it is only possible to understand what he says by reading the transcription that accompanies the release.) In a rare example of an echo being more legible than its origin, the emotional resonance of his mouth sounds is underscored by a whispered French translation of his involuntary speech performed by long-time collaborator Mimi Johnson. The faraway melody of an organ and the murmurings of a Polymoog, the latter evoking a crate of old-fashioned milk bottles jiggling against each other in transit, hold the space for the two voices. Layered together, these four sonic elements—or characters in an opera, as Ashley saw them—have a proto-ASMR quality, textural and sensual.
Where Automatic Writing puts Ashley’s own (involuntary) language under the microscope, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) takes a widescreen view of the ways in which societal conventions can inhibit communication. On the page, it’s a hugely ambitious project: a domestic narrative (Linda is abandoned by her husband Don and has to make a new life for herself) laid atop a historical one (in 1492, the Jewish population of Spain was forced into exile by the country’s Catholic leaders). Yet instead of sweeping dramatic scenes, the story unfolds through social transactions that range from the awkward to the absurd, the kind that consumer society runs on: an encounter with a busybody family that gives Linda a lift to the airport after she finds herself abandoned (“Good luck trying to/Use your ticket. We would help you/If we could, but probably/It would only make things worse”); an exchange at an airline ticket counter (“Where were you when your husband left?”/“I was in the toilet at the turnoff”); a conversation with a doctor Linda met at a party in which she tells him about the dream she had the night before, which goes about as well as anyone who has ever tried to tell a stranger their dream. (“I’m sorry. What I meant that last night I dreamed as/I ordinarily do, and I wanted you to know that the dream/Was a common one for me, which I thought you could/Not know unless I told you.” “Just a moment, please.”)
It’s not just what the characters say but the way that they say it that tickles the senses. And they do say it, rather than outright sing it, often delivering lines—solo and in unison—at a thrilling sing-song pace, in clear-as-a-bell tones. “The essence of my music,” Ashley explained in a 2003 interview with The Wire, “is that the syllables go by as fast as they do in the American English language and the pitch stresses, which make one syllable more important than the other syllable, are all within a range of half an octave. It's like you squeeze it in one direction and expand it in another direction.”
What connects these two works is the malleability of language and the way the sound of it conveys as much as the substance. The line that Robert Ashley repeats on Automatic Writing has resonance for both: “My mind is censoring my own mind.” These seven words that sprang unfiltered from his interior world gesture to the way that self-awareness obstructs expression as much as they do the freedom that can come from breaking with societal convention. It’s this gift that the avant-garde opera pioneer left today’s artists: the precedent to take the form in whichever direction satisfies the senses.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | December 27, 2019 | 8.5 | 8f84fa0f-8d19-48a3-8f65-ec01dc2a7a59 | Ruth Saxelby | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ruth-saxelby/ | |
On his second solo album, the saxophonist and Destroyer collaborator grapples with intergenerational trauma by turning interviews with his mother into gorgeous and empathetic ambient music. | On his second solo album, the saxophonist and Destroyer collaborator grapples with intergenerational trauma by turning interviews with his mother into gorgeous and empathetic ambient music. | Joseph Shabason: Anne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joseph-shabason-anne/ | Anne | Though he’s only begun releasing music under his own name recently, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason has already used his horn to flesh out two of the decade’s best experimental rock albums. He played a key role on the War on Drugs’ 2014 breakthrough Lost in the Dream, but his greatest impact can be heard three years earlier on Destroyer’s masterpiece Kaputt. Frontman Dan Bejar had largely completed his soft-rock opus before asking Shabason to improvise over the recordings, where his ghostly saxophone lines proved to be the perfect complement to Bejar’s alternately hedonistic and weary narrator, hanging over every story like a heavy cologne.
Shabason has history in ’80s-style synth pop with his project DIANA, but his work on Kaputt functioned more like a metropolitan take on Jon Hassell’s music, using foggy atmospheres to paint a cocaine-fueled cityscape that exists in the mind. That influence solidified on his 2015 debut, Aytche, a collection of synth-treated saxophones that hovered between jazz and ambient. With Anne, Shabason follows impulses hinted at on his debut and enlists several collaborators to help him craft an album superior in every way. The most important of those is right in the album’s title: Shabason’s mother, Anne, whose vocals, taken from a series of recorded interviews with her son, provide the album’s throughline.
This technique appeared on Aytche’s best track, “Westmeath,” in the form of a foggy recording of a man reflecting on his father’s eventual suicide after surviving the Holocaust. Shabason, whose grandparents were survivors as well, says that he partially concealed that speaker’s voice as a sign of respect. With Anne, he and his mother bravely reflect on intergenerational trauma in frank discussions where nothing is held back sonically or emotionally.
Anne’s recordings are as personal and specific as you might expect of a candid conversation with her son; every stammer and background noise adds a degree of intimacy to the hypnotic soundscapes Shabason builds around them. Though her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease looms large in the album’s background story, the recordings focus primarily on her memories as a child and a parent. It’s captured powerfully on “Deep Dark Divide,” in which she admits, “You grew up with the feeling that you were worthy, you were worthy of that support. I don’t think I grew up with that feeling.” Shabason methodically builds up synth and saxophone lines until they blur into one, crafting a somber illustration of the “deep dark divide” she alludes to.
Shabason finds new ways to transform his horn throughout Anne, and, thanks to a subtle use of field recordings, instrumentals fit like natural pauses in the album’s conversation. The heartbreaking centerpiece “Forest Run” opens with a brief dialogue about the need to appear “perfect,” and the frustration in her voice is palpable. No wonder: Children expect perfection from parents, just as parents do from themselves, but that idea often crumbles before the inevitability of age and illness. Shabason’s instrumental response, built around a gorgeous synth progression, functions as wordlessly and powerfully as a tender hug.
Two other crucial collaborators appear near the end of Anne. Gigi Masin, whose ambient classic Wind was an important influence on Aytche, melts into “November” with a gorgeous synth bed for Shabason’s steadily rising sax. And finally there’s Bejar on a bonus track, “I Don’t Want to Be Your Love” (to be released digitally in late January), which anyplace else might threaten to steal the show, but here functions perfectly as a coda. Rather than a lost chapter from Kaputt, the song sounds like an evolution of it, or more accurately an evaporation, with Shabason’s sax turned into an glimmering echo. Simply expanding that one-of-a-kind sound is enough of an achievement, but Anne is more than that. It’s the sound of Shabason finding his voice, primarily by listening to another. The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy. | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Western Vinyl | November 30, 2018 | 7.8 | 8f8895c1-0a82-46b3-a378-4bc85b719cb9 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
The remarkable EP from the New York-based artist is a one-of-a-kind debut, filled with small details, warm soul, and great emotional depth. | The remarkable EP from the New York-based artist is a one-of-a-kind debut, filled with small details, warm soul, and great emotional depth. | duendita: direct line to My Creator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duendita-direct-line-to-my-creator/ | direct line to My Creator | duendita’s soul music speaks to the heart and spirit. Ordained by her connection to the ups and downs of the human experience, she is a gateway to the divine. With her achy, bass-coated tones, the New York-based singer builds altars that hold space for love, ancestral reverence, and a blessed existence for all of the black and brown people on earth. duendita’s remarkable debut direct line to My Creator is the body around which these principles orbit. Created over the span of two years, she wrote and produced the 10-track EP that captures her musings in just 30 minutes. It’s a style of concision recently adopted by rap contemporaries who’ve also opted for pithy offerings to the heart of the music. But over unhurried instrumentation, duendita wallows in her melodies and gives the project a lasting feel.
Born and raised in Queens, New York, the Afro-Latinx artist channels a sentimental blend of life experiences in her work. The vibrations of her identity, faith, and enduring familial lineage anchor the foundation of duendita’s art. Before releasing direct line to My Creator, she shared the single “pray”: a testimony to the pain and isolation that manifests in black and brown communities as a result of being underserved and denied access. As she dips into her deep and jazzy range, duendita spirals in a staccato rhythm while grappling with the emotions of a daunting reality. To soothe the heaviness, she spends the chorus pouring love into her people and reminds them of their place in her prayers.
But the first real song on the EP is a sobering track, “blue hands.” Written as a response to the 2016 killing of 23-year-old mother Korryn Gaines, duendita bellows a mournful six-line incantation for the protection of black girls and women from police violence. Although it begs for more time to sit with this dulcet lamentation, the song’s brevity allows its lyrics to be unpacked with each quick listen. Her breathy ad-libs mist over the track as if she’s gasping for air but her sadness turns optimistic as she warbles the lingering phrase, “I wish you a long, long, long black life.” Her sisters can disappear at the hands of cops with ease, but with “blue hands,” she brings them visibility and places the humanity of women at the forefront. This level of intention is present in all of duendita’s songwriting as she wades through a cascade of feelings.
At times, the ebb and flow of the EP can sound like one continuous mega-track, but that cohesiveness is a sign of duendita’s fluidity. She falls apart in the pursuit of romance, the blows of anxiety, and finds solace in her ever-present spirituality. It’s an emotional depth reminiscent of the soul legend Sade—one that’s honest and backed by music that’s equally as pure.
The album amounts to an enormous statement from an artist who values small, intimate details. In a few videos on her Instagram account, deundita sits with her microphone, keyboard, and drum machine and experiments with acoustic notes like the celestial ones she created for the EP. On the wistful ballad “September,” she plays cinematic chords that wail like singing bowls. She ends her first opus strong with the vulnerable cut “Bury Me” as her hums fade-out in harmony. direct line to My Creator leaves a margin for imperfection and its sometimes patchy vocals and odd notes are symbols of truth. In duendita’s openness about lovers, grief, and racial oppression, the singer starts the work of reclaiming her birthright of joy and healing. She makes it feel possible for the rest of us. | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | The Vanguarde Craft and Creative | January 24, 2019 | 8.1 | 8f8e71fe-5a44-4a7c-8b71-38b40cb2638a | Lakin Starling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lakin-starling/ | |
The North Carolina songwriter summons a vast network of real-life characters for an empathetic, intensely personal record about death, rebirth, and transformation. | The North Carolina songwriter summons a vast network of real-life characters for an empathetic, intensely personal record about death, rebirth, and transformation. | Al Riggs: Themselves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/al-riggs-themselves/ | Themselves | Al Riggs has been one of the busiest songwriters in their home state of North Carolina for most of a decade. Not yet 30, the songwriter has steadily churned out fuzzy, self-produced songs, digging into the work of lo-fi heroes and speaking openly about their life with autism. After focusing on guitar-led twang with last year’s I Got a Big Electric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep, Riggs’ latest album, Themselves, is a definitive pivot in both presentation—according to a press release, it will be their final album under the name—and subject matter. “The trans allegories are through the roof,” Riggs said in a statement, and Themselves coheres these narratives into a series of ghost stories and monuments.
Trading in themes of death and rebirth, Themselves presents Riggs at a crossroads, sending off their former selves in a tide of creative cross-references. As if self-soothing for the discomfort that comes with any kind of transition, Riggs pads out Themselves with cushy synths and restless electronic rhythms. Riggs’ voice wavers as they meander through the record, their low warble tumbling over lines about waiting, what-ifs, and wanting. Their sense of wariness is palpable.
Themselves’ track titles read like the guest list of an unusual dinner party, attended by dead artists: Moomin creator Tove Jansson, monologist Spalding Gray, Peanuts mastermind Charles Schulz, musician Richard Swift, and American Splendor originator Harvey Pekar are among the invitees. Even the cover art bears a wink: Its artist, Box Brown, has penned stirring graphic novels about the singular lives of cult heroes like Andy Kaufman and André the Giant. Like Olivia Liang’s The Lonely City, Riggs lovingly invokes this array of free spirits to relate to their own journey of individual self-discovery, spiraling into their own interior maps.
In “National Freedom Christmas (For R. Swift),” producer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Swift, who died unexpectedly at 41 in 2018, becomes Riggs’ outlet for a prospective redemption. In the surreal scenery changes of “Halloween for Norma Tanega,” the titular California singer-songwriter gets a nod, too, and the connection feels loose but funny: Tanega’s tune “You’re Dead” found a new life through the comedy What We Do in the Shadows, another set of transition-related adventures about vampires adapting to modern life on Staten Island. In Riggs’ world, the underdogs end up on top, whether they’re artists establishing their distinctive styles or yearning lovers seeking affirmation.
Riggs makes use of the year 1987—several years before their birth—as another narrative pillar, opening Themselves in “Chelsea, 1987,” a cradle of New York’s gay community, a mile from where the grassroots political group ACT UP was born the same year. Across the album, plans are set, people disappear, conflicts remain at loose ends. But Riggs reaches a breakthrough with “The Bardo, 1987,” laying their vulnerability plain with the line “Death never gets me/It’s the rebuilding that’s tough.”
Themselves’ heavily annotated structure adds profound dimensions, and following its branches can feel cumbersome, like an elaborate game between Riggs and the listener: How much do you want to know? But the many details buried within Riggs’ songs rarely impede their reach for steady reassurance. There’s no need to be aware of a writer’s fractious, if not justified, pro-labor ribbing of a late-night host to understand the glory of unfettered alone time that Riggs outlines within “Pekar on Letterman.” Their balance of extreme detail and semi-anonymity lands at a middle ground where neither inclination overpowers the other.
Themselves is an intensely personal record, if you let it be one; it’s also an empathetic transmission that aims to crack apart the aches of major changes. As with so much else in life, an open, curiosity-fueled approach yields the sweetest rewards. | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Horse Complex | June 8, 2022 | 7.4 | 8f8f52eb-16d0-424b-ae0c-a6a6ca3768b9 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The former teen heartthrobs’ first album in almost 10 years is by no means extraordinary, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they got. | The former teen heartthrobs’ first album in almost 10 years is by no means extraordinary, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they got. | Jonas Brothers: Happiness Begins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonas-brothers-happiness-begins/ | Happiness Begins | Before they could all legally drive, the Jonas Brothers could stop traffic. In Chasing Happiness—the documentary that, in a bit of spectacularly on-the-nose cross-promotion, accompanies the release of their first album in nearly a decade, Happiness Begins—the brothers recount a time in 2007 when they had to be air-lifted to a performance at the Texas State Fair because their fans had caused a traffic jam stretching all the way to Oklahoma. At the time, Kevin, Joe, and Nick were 19, 18, and 15, respectively; they had just finished filming Camp Rock, the Disney Channel movie in which Joe starred opposite a then-unknown Demi Lovato, and, unbeknownst to them, would spend the next several years selling out arenas across the country.
In their earliest iteration, the Jonas Brothers were a bunch of preacher’s kids from New Jersey, signed to Columbia and touring the East Coast mall circuit billed as a punk rock group. Later, after they were picked up by Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records, a necessary branding refresh placed them squarely in the realm of pop-rock. They swapped their Ed Hardy t-shirts for blazers and scarves, and got to work pumping out stadium-sized guitar riffs (“That’s Just the Way We Roll,” “S.O.S.”) and anthemic choruses destined to be screamed by thousands of pre-adolescent lungs (“When You Look Me in the Eyes,” “Lovebug”).
Though those songs will surely have their moment when the trio heads back out on tour, with Happiness Begins, they (wisely) don’t shoot for pure nostalgia. If Jonas Brothers 1.0 was punk rock, and Jonas Brothers 2.0 was pop-rock, Jonas Brothers 3.0 is true pop—which is to say, a little bit of most things you could hear in today’s Top 40. They haven’t made music together since breaking up in 2013, but the brothers weren’t inactive in the interim: Nick released two albums, including a Top 10 single, on his own; Joe found success as the frontman of the electro-pop group DNCE. Reunited, the group have adjusted their sound to incorporate elements from both projects—Nick’s soulful, sexy R&B and DNCE’s light-hearted funk. In 2019, the Jonas Brothers rely on spacious synths and programmed drums; on several songs, guitars aren’t even a notable part of the mix. Nick and Kevin’s Gibsons have never been so underworked.
Often enough, the smorgasbord approach yields solid results. “Only Human” rides a reggae beat that works surprisingly well; it’s a Shellback-produced show of brass (instrumental and otherwise), on which the boys try out new percussive cadences and punctuate their phrases with in-vogue, monosyllabic ad libs. “Don’t Throw It Away” is a feat of falsetto, with enough West Coast breeziness, synthetic shimmer, and rich harmony to recall another dominant sibling trio, Haim. The fizzy, supremely self-assured single “Cool” packages up some of the brothers’ best tricks, old and new: acoustic strums meet vocal processors and a thundering stomp-clap beat.
“Cool” also benefits from a hearty dose of good humor. Laced with celebrity name-drops, it harkens back to “Year 3000”—the group’s first big hit, which gave voice to their dreams of outselling Kelly Clarkson. On “Cool,” Joe reports feeling “like Post Malone” and audibly grins into the mic when he references his thoroughly cool new bride, “Game of Thrones” star Sophie Turner. Though it borders on silly, the song packs oomph that some of the others lack. Notoriously guarded while on Disney’s payroll, the new iteration of the band has inhabited the public eye more fully than ever before—weddings, babies, and family therapy included. One might hope their newfound transparency would translate into a bit more personality and specificity on tracks like “Love Her” and “Hesitate”—two tender, but very generic, love songs that appear on the back half of the album. “I will take your pain/And put it on my heart,” Joe croons on the latter, sounding like someone not entirely familiar with the concept, before the song turns into overproduced soup.
In the late aughts, at the height of JoBros fever, the group’s commercial success was tempered by ridicule in popular culture at large, stemming from some combination of their Disney affiliation, their purity rings, and the demographic of their fan base. There was a South Park parody; Russell Brand mocked them from the 2008 VMAs stage while the boys sat in the audience, stony-faced; Jay-Z rapped, “No I’m not a Jonas Brother, I’m a grown-up/No I’m not a virgin, I use my cojones.” Youth has always been currency in pop music, both as it applies to performers—especially women—and consumers, who, in their teenage years, often have time and cash to expend on artists they care about. But the biggest paydays usually go to label execs; Disney, in particular, has faced criticism for micro-managing young stars and commodifying family values to reap profit from children. It wasn’t hard to imagine the entire Jonas Brothers franchise as a cash grab predicated on marketability rather than genuine talent and hard work. With the added baggage of their openly acknowledged Christian upbringing and the physical markers of their abstinence—a practice deeply at odds with the lifestyle expected of “real” rockers—the brothers had a hard time getting people to take them seriously.
In the intervening years, quite a lot has changed. Social media and readily available production technology have given young artists unprecedented power to create and disseminate their own music without prerequisite label backing. Stars like Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X—17 and 20, respectively—amassed fame through a combination of talent and internet smarts, undermining skepticism about the artistic agency of the very young. The sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll ethos the Jonas Brothers famously eschewed continues to reveal its dark underbelly, casting new doubt as to whether that lifestyle was ever really something to aspire to. And as feminism gains cultural ground, it’s more obvious than ever that discounting the interests of girls and young women says more about societal misogyny than the validity of their opinions.
Happiness Begins is by no means an extraordinary album, but it’s a respectable showing from a group that has long deserved more respect than they’ve received. Though they’ve brought their sound up to date with current pop trends, aesthetically, not all that much about the Jonas Brothers has changed in the past decade: They’re still earnest, charismatic, media-savvy family men. When Nick sings, “When I grow up, I want to be just like me,” on “Cool,” you can kind of see what he means. The Jonas Brothers didn’t need a total reinvention to come back—they just needed a clean slate. | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | June 14, 2019 | 6.2 | 8f9a5a30-7c7f-4669-8d65-64b75f1869f6 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Chicago post-rock band makes its best album yet, both in structure and execution. | Chicago post-rock band makes its best album yet, both in structure and execution. | Russian Circles: Geneva | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13607-geneva/ | Geneva | It may share its name with another second city, but the third LP from the Russian Circles calls to mind a fairly famous quote from one of their hometown's favorite sons. "Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring," Nelson Algren wrote, and Geneva's an October sort of album no matter when you put it on. Geneva feels very much like the city its members hang their hats: rusty and steely and shifty, overcast and a little cold, and-- Algren again-- "battle-colored." It evokes a long early morning's drive down the length of any one of Chicago's city-spanning north-south thoroughfares, blowing through both industrial grit and beatific parkways, eyes peeled for crumbling facades and flashes of chrome and the not-so-occasional pothole.
There were signposts to Geneva all over the spiny, immediate Enter and last year's prettier, driftier Station, but on their third go, the Circles are clearing a path all for themselves. Debts are still due to genre godheads like Mogwai and Slint, for certain, but like the best work of their obvious forebears, on Geneva the Circles have found a way to make three guys in a room sound like a lot more than three guys in a room. Credit where credit's due: a great deal of Geneva's success lies in the string work of cellist Allison Chesley and violinist Susan Voelz, who add a resonant depth to many of the record's best moments, filling in the gaps around these insistent compositions with a kind of sweeping gothic grime. But even without the hired hands, Russian Circles are penning limber, purpose-driven tunes, then playing the hell out of them. And, in their structure and execution both, this is doubtless their finest work yet.
Instrumental prowess is a double-edged sword in just about any genre, but when instrumental's all you do, you run the risk of the dreaded wank with every flick of the wrist. That's something the Circles in general and Brian Cook in particular have handled admirably through the years; they're capable of sneaking thunderous Lightning Bolt-style blastoffs and fingery Yngwie thingys in with opulent drift, while coming across as neither tossers or tossed-off. Drummer Dave Turncrantz gets plenty in, but favors the boom over the barrage, and guitarist Mike Sullivan, as Pitchfork's Cosmo Lee pointed out in his review of Station, often cedes the presumptive lead role for the good of the group. But it's Cook who's come into his own here on Geneva, consistently holding down the low end with inventive but unshowy aplomb. And when he's given a shot at the spotlight-- a position he takes only a handful of times throughout-- the record is his.
The Circles have long done peaks far better than valleys, and there's really only one such dip on Geneva: "Hexed All", a tune they all but give over to Chesley and Voelz, flipping the melee of, well, "Melee" for a supine string-laden swoon. It's clearly meant as a respite from the relative brutality that surrounds it-- much like the first few minutes of "Verses" was to the middle of Station-- but it also works against the album's momentum a touch, the widescreen beauty of Explosions in the Sky reformatted to fit your screen. It's fine, but it's not necessary; the string section is so seamlessly integrated into the Circles' sound on meatier tracks like "Fathom", putting them front and center feels more like a conciliatory gesture than a Russian Circles tune.
The record's second half favors an enveloping crumble over the opening trio's crushing hypnotism; tracks unfurl more patiently, perhaps more gracefully, but with nearly the same sense of purpose that underlies the weightier start-up. Save the proggy "Malko", this stuff is textbook post-rock; songs start soft and slow, more elements get thrown into the mix, and we eventually have our climax. Still, there's a sense of internal dynamics in the tunes that makes this particularly good textbook post-rock; instead of a simple gradual increase in volume, they pull in sounds from left-field, lending the tunes a ratchety, rust-covered feeling that is unusually complex. Nearly all of these tunes die screaming, they just take a bit longer to get there as Geneva goes on. It's more a matter of contrast than anything else; were the running order reversed, you'd sit on your hands through the first half waiting for the impending blowout. I suppose this, too, is like Chicago, with the livelier South Side giving way to the statelier North, both with their unique merits. Either way, Geneva's a record with dirt underneath its fingernails and resolute urgency at its heart, and like the place from which it hails, it's worth the bluster. | 2009-10-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-10-21T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal / Rock | Suicide Squeeze | October 21, 2009 | 7.8 | 8f9d65c1-10b7-460f-b4f3-bf63e1d0863f | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Chicago band’s first full-length is a collection of sweet, brightly colored love songs from the mind of an acid enthusiast, woven from a small used record store’s worth of influences. | The Chicago band’s first full-length is a collection of sweet, brightly colored love songs from the mind of an acid enthusiast, woven from a small used record store’s worth of influences. | Divino Niño: Foam | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/divino-nino-foam/ | Foam | Chicago quartet Divino Niño started out playing distinctive-enough psychedelic garage-pop. With Foam, their first proper full-length after a couple of demo compilations, they forge a richer and more inventive sound. Their squiggly, retro-futurist approach borrows freely but selectively from among a vast pop-rock songbook, the psychedelic explorations of the past, and more recent internet subgenres. This is a collection of sweet, brightly colored love songs from the mind of an acid enthusiast, woven from a small used record store’s worth of influences.
The opening space-lounge fantasias of “Foam” and the Wurlitzer-festooned “Quiero” represent new territory for the band, and though they toy with different styles, they resist flattening music history into mere aesthetic. Songs like the relentlessly tuneful “Melty Caramelo” sound like singles from an especially quirky boy band, but Foam has the energy and anything-goes sense of adventure of early-2000s indie rock. These blithe melodies and lightly carbonated hooks could click into place on any number of Spotify playlists, yet remain subtly, irreducibly weird.
“Ooh la la” backing vocals notwithstanding, Foam is a progressive-minded record. If its references are nostalgic, its spirit isn’t. The band has assembled their touchstones with a connoisseur’s ear and the streaming era’s egalitarian approach: All sounds may be selected to serve the needs of the moment. With a killer mid-tempo chorus and lightheaded glide guitar, the strangely affecting “Coca Cola” sounds like a ’70s AM radio hit by way of post-punk. “Cosmic Flower” plants fibrous roots in British Invasion-era rock as it sways in a vaporwave breeze. The band’s garage foundation shows up now and again, especially on the all-Spanish “Maria,” and though it anchors their music nicely, Foam is more like soft art rock. There is no real kitsch, just cheery, artful clutter.
Two of Divino Niño’s founding members, guitarist Camilo Medina and bassist Javier Forero, are originally from Bogotá, Colombia. It’s tempting to connect the band’s romantic lyrics and soulful melodicism to the lineage of U.S. Latino rock pioneers such as Thee Midniters, or classic South American pop groups like Los Pasteles Verdes. But if their background shows up in their music—outside of Medina’s casual shifts between English and Spanish—it is most likely found in their wide palette of influences: everything from Roberto Carlos to Brandy.
Foam demonstrates that it’s possible to draw from everywhere, without sounding quite like anything else. With so much music so freely available, it’s easy to get lost in the noise, to fall back on a too-familiar sound from the ocean of possible influence. Divino Niño navigate expertly against the tide.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Winspear | July 1, 2019 | 7.5 | 8fa01d73-0163-421d-95a1-55d1f951d1ef | Beverly Bryan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/beverly-bryan/ | |
Post-breakout solo releases are supposed to be this-is-my-time proclamations, but the SOB x RBE member’s project feels engineered to bring out his pathos. | Post-breakout solo releases are supposed to be this-is-my-time proclamations, but the SOB x RBE member’s project feels engineered to bring out his pathos. | Slimmy B: Feel My Pain EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slimmy-b-feel-my-pain-ep/ | Feel My Pain EP | On SOB x RBE’s second full-length, Gangin, the Vallejo boys tasked themselves with repping decades of Bay Area’s sonic history in addition to displaying the star potential of their free-flowing group chemistry. While avoiding clutter, Gangin also delivered a group with four distinct personalities: Lul G, the young tough with the pipsqueak-ish voice; DaBoii, who taunts in a barking sneer; Yhung T.O., the sing-song stylist; and Slimmy B, a bluesman with the group’s most conversational delivery. T.O.’s pop-ready versatility makes him a star, but when he’s not countering his groupmate’s melodies with his plainspoken presence, Slimmy B cuts a captivating figure on his own. The most obvious showcase is his Gangin solo cut, “God,” which is less about salvation than it is about the pain (and small shimmerings of hope, like his son) underlying his worldview. “Niggas dyin’ everyday, who the fuck the shit fun to?” Slimmy asks the listener. Even in the spotlight, he can’t escape himself.
Slimmy B’s latest solo project, the seven-track Feel My Pain, shares this ruminative space right down to its cover, a black-and-white image of him brooding with his hoodie over his face. While trauma speckled Gangin’s boasts, Feel My Pain pulls it toward the center. “Call On” arrives midpoint and features Slimmy B in an uninterrupted confessional, mourning deceased kin and remembering a suicide attempt. The bleakness is only briefly allayed with minor hopes like buying a Bentley coupe and promising his girlfriend a family.
Ideally, post-breakout solo releases are supposed to be outward, this-is-my-time proclamations: You’ve worked to be able to talk your shit, after all. But the album feels engineered to bring out the pathos in Slimmy B’s verses. For one, the excited bounce that threads through his prior solo effort Problem Child is traded in for sparser, more contained production. It’s a big stylistic change even from Gangin; the busy ’80s freestyle beat that backs “Carpoolin’” doesn’t fit within Feel My Pain’s negative space.
While the kinetic energy of his prior work is missed, Feel My Pain does make for a cathartic 18 minutes within Slimmy B’s headspace. There’s an urgency to the wobbly way his consonants spring off the mournful bass lines, particularly on the paranoid “Don’t Love Me.” Slimmy recalls the tears falling and pleading with God as he watched his man’s casket lower, before pledging to kill the murderer (“He gon’ die that’s on my kid”). It’s sorrow-filled imagery made even more heartbreaking by the bleating synths backing his narrative. “Ride 4 Me” is Feel My Pain’s standard AutoTune anthem, but even that holds a deeper significance; romantic platitudes like “You the one I put my trust in” feel binding when you’re this familiar to mortality.
Slimmy B doesn’t spend the entirety of Feel My Pain in a dour mood: He’s back on his bullshit on the final two tracks, playing “NBA 2K18” mid-coitus on “Free Theze” and drops more gun talk while marveling at how “these damn hundreds make a nigga pants sag” in the spry album closer “Like I Do.” The latter works more as a coda than a standalone because it’s told from the perspective of someone who’s survived. That link between excess and escape has been one SOB x RBE’s central dynamics, and it compels from Slimmy’s solo lens. | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SOB X RBE | July 19, 2018 | 7 | 8fa9adaf-ff92-4599-a633-439f9eeea1a5 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
The second EP from the queer hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S. conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression. | The second EP from the queer hardcore punk band G.L.O.S.S. conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression. | G.L.O.S.S.: Trans Day of Revenge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22050-trans-day-of-revenge/ | Trans Day of Revenge | Hardcore punk can often seem incapable of nuance; Minor Threat songs, as much as they communicated one person’s choices, were elevated to the dogma of the straight edge movement by their audience. But hardcore is a shapeshifting genre, full of inversions and melted dichotomies. And even as it can act as a conduit for regressive political expression, it can also serve as a metaphor for queer possibility.
Enter G.L.O.S.S., a hardcore band from Olympia, Washington. Their name, an acronym for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” determines the shape of their music, which resembles Boston hardcore if rerouted through the perspectives and experiences of trans women. (Lead singer Sadie and guitarist Jake are originally from Boston.) Trans Day of Revenge is their second EP; it’s all of seven minutes long, following a demo of about equal length released last year. Revenge, released the day after the mass shooting in the Orlando club Pulse, conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression.
The EP opens with a swirl of feedback, over which Sadie screams, “When peace is just another word for death, it’s our turn to give violence a chance!” The song describes police brutality and the degree to which this brutality flows from the superstructures that determine who survives in America. “Killer cops aren’t crooked.../they do as they’re told,” she sings. “Black lives don’t matter in the eyes of the law.” Hardcore as a form can often condense language to its most bladed form; Sadie’s lyrics depict queer experience in sharp fractions. “Singing in G.L.O.S.S. is kind of like getting to be a superhero,” Sadie told BitchMedia last year, “like weaponizing a lifetime of anguish and alienation.” “We scream/just to make sense of things,” she sings in “We Live.” “Studs and leather/survivors’ wings.” Her words are precise and rapid-fire but they’re also embedded with sensitive detail that give them the occasional rhythm of poetry.
In the title track she compresses historical and modern indignation into a single verse: “Remember those/Dead and gone/but don’t let the media set us up for harm/HRC, selfish fucks/Yuppie gays threw us under the bus.” In a few seconds, a library shelf’s worth of ideas are touched on: Queer erasure, the particular way in which media tends to flatten the specificities of queer life, the way that even within the queer community, transgender people are treated as inexplicable, illegitimate, politically inconvenient. This is the fragile calculus of hardcore that G.L.O.S.S. maintains, embedding politically complex ideas in emotionally unambiguous music without it flattening into a wave of rhetoric.
G.L.O.S.S.’s music also functions as great hardcore; the songs dazzle for the asymmetry and velocity of their guitar riffs, some of which land so heavily that they resemble columns toppling. The riffs in “Fight” move with such a molecular insecurity it feels as if the song could at any point melt down into shapelessness. G.L.O.S.S.’s songs tend to feel both old and new, the past and the present occurring simultaneously, layered on top of each other so they produce an interesting dissonance located somewhere between noise and precision.
At its best, hardcore is personal; it tends to erase the spatial distinctions between performer and audience, until there is a primordial flow of bodies, ideas, and energy. Growing up, the experience of my own queerness was often unreal and abstract, which combined into a kind of confusion and anger in myself. Trans Day of Revenge takes the anger and confusion one feels in the depths of the margins, and translates them, literalizes them, from a burning abstraction into something almost tangible. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. “We’re fucking future girls/living outside society’s shit!” Sadie screamed on the first song on their demo. G.L.O.S.S. advance the possibilities inherent in queerness, even as they depict and reject the present horrors that queerness endures. It is music that is, above all, about survival and survivors. They project a future, both in the genre of hardcore and in the genre of reality. | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nervous Nelly / Total Negativity | June 24, 2016 | 8.5 | 8fab9092-ed4e-4bf3-b7b6-981a2e10389a | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
On his first proper comeback album, the funk legend displays his unmatched vocal chops over polished, modern production. | On his first proper comeback album, the funk legend displays his unmatched vocal chops over polished, modern production. | Steve Arrington: Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-arrington-down-to-the-lowest-terms-the-soul-sessions/ | Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions | Steve Arrington is a true funk legend. At age 64, the singer-songwriter and producer is now on his third go-round in the music industry. Following a star-making stint as the lead vocalist and drummer in Slave, Arrington produced ‘80s hits like “Feel So Real” and “Weak at the Knees” as a solo artist before he left music altogether to become a minister. Though he technically returned at the beginning of the 2010s, Arrington’s new album Down to the Lowest Terms: The Soul Sessions is his first proper solo comeback. Don’t let the retro cover artwork fool you—there are no “soul revival” or fake-funk tracks here. In fact, the polished, modern production flourishes throughout the album serve to highlight how unmatched Arrington’s voice and vitality remain.
Recorded entirely at the Stones Throw studio in Los Angeles, Down to the Lowest Terms also doubles as a who’s who of the city’s notable beat scene producers. Label boss Peanut Butter Wolf brought together established figures from the roster (Knxwledge, Mndsgn) and rising talent like versatile bedroom producer Shibo to contribute to the album. Arrington’s voice becomes the banner under which these various musicians ride. They bring a remarkable sonic cohesion to the record, and Arrington rarely contorts himself to fit into these tracks, even though they run the gamut from R&B ballads to crushed lo-fi beats.
The best songs give Arrington the room to sprawl out and flex those ever-charismatic vocals, nearly untarnished by the sands of time. Just listen to the cascading background parts on the gleaming slow-burner “Keep Dreamin’” or the tightly-knit scatting passages near the end of “Lord Knows,” one of two tracks that Arrington recorded drums on. Down to the Lowest Terms, especially its first half, is peppered with these kinds of awe-inspiring vocal moments. Hearing him is like watching a veteran tightrope walker take to the slackline for the first time in years and breeze their way through a complex routine.
Arrington’s songwriting also remains refreshingly free of cynicism. It doesn’t matter that the stakes are so low on “Good Mood,” once he drops into a wavering, theatrical timbre just to describe how merely thinking of the sun can put a smile on his face first thing in the morning, you’re hooked in. By contrast, the ruminative “Make a Difference” carries on a lineage of political funk by touching upon the legacy of racial oppression in America. “My great-great-grandmama was a slave,” he murmurs at the start. Not every song is so compelling—the dissonant house number “You’re Not Ready” feels like a cutting room floor loosie—but Arrington’s performances have enough swagger to them to carry him through.
Elsewhere, the two Knxwledge contributions—“Love is Gone” and “Make Ya Say Yie”—envelop Arrington in crunchy slo-mo soul textures à la NxWorries, and the latter’s loping horn melody lets the soul singer commit to some stellar falsetto runs. The mid-album cut “My Favorite Swing” taps into a style of frenetic jazz similar to that of Thundercat, who Arrington worked with on “Black Qualls.” In the same way Prince cultivated and collaborated with up-and-coming talent throughout his career, Arrington’s willingness to garner inspiration from a younger generation that considers him a formative influence creates a powerful feedback loop of creativity. The songs themselves mostly cover well-trodden ground, but the chemistry and musical dialogue between the funk forefather and his collaborators make Down to the Lowest Terms feel wholly new.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Stones Throw | September 21, 2020 | 7.5 | 8faba107-9e4e-4203-9958-3a9e333791fe | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Much-loved cult singer and songwriter Mark Kozelek releases both the new Sun Kil Moon record and, under his own name, a disc of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks to accompany the American release of his book of lyrics, Nights of Passed Over, which is culled primarily from his work with Red House Painters. | Much-loved cult singer and songwriter Mark Kozelek releases both the new Sun Kil Moon record and, under his own name, a disc of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks to accompany the American release of his book of lyrics, Nights of Passed Over, which is culled primarily from his work with Red House Painters. | Sun Kil Moon / Mark Kozelek: April / Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11672-aprilnights/ | April / Nights | Few songwriters could bear the scrutiny of a book of lyrics, although far too many invite it. Writing good songs is only half the challenge; the other is to set words compellingly to paper, without the securities of voice, chords, and melody to reinforce their internal rhythms and recast their meanings. In 2002, Mark Kozelek, formerly of Red House Painters and currently alternating between a solo project and the loosely defined Sun Kil Moon (which is pretty much a solo project), released a book of lyrics called Nights of Passed Over in Europe, where his cult is even more intensely rabid than his American audience. Culling primarily from his work with Red House Painters, the book argued persuasively for Kozelek as a gifted, intuitive, and insightful songwriter, with an aversion to sentimentality and a way of combining words that is evocative without being showy or clever. His lyrics can stand on their own, even without his low, rich, sad voice and shimmering, patient guitar.
Six years later, Kozelek has reissued Nights of Passed Over in America. A lot has happened during that interim: He has released three albums as Sun Kil Moon and has already reissued one of them, has put out a live album under his own name, and has formed his own record label, Caldo Verde. The label is also publishing this new version of Nights of Passed Over, which is accompanied by Nights, a full disc of alternate takes, rarities, and live tracks. It might seem like an act of supreme hubris if it weren't for the fact the Kozelek often eludes musical associations in favor of literary ones. Despite the persistent comparisons to Neil Young and Crazy Horse at their most compact, his literary influences seem much more useful: Kozelek draws from Raymond Carver when he's in storyteller mode, at other times from Robert Lowell or Norman Dubie or James Kavanaugh. That's a big statement for any musician, especially one who tends to write about his cats.
Nights begins with a live version of "Michigan", from the Painters' 2001 swan song Old Ramon. The song thrums with a palpable sense of desire and a quickly diminishing sense of restraint: "I see through your thin cotton dress/ I don't know if we'll get to rest/ So pull by that store parking lot/ You know I've missed you lots/ Warn me of the cans and nots." Recorded at Union Chapel in London, this version of "Michigan" features only Kozelek's vocals, which are subtle as an internal monologue, accompanied by his acoustic guitar and a rapt audience. That's really all it needs. In a sly stroke of sequencing, he moves directly into "Drop", from the same venue, with its devastating admission delivered in long lines that seem to break the meter: "All the love in an instant makes my life stop/ But then my hate for you makes my feelings altogether drop."
Of course, Kozelek isn't a literary figure, but a musical one, so the CD lives and dies by the sounds that accompany his words. And these are, by Kozelek's own admission, the lesser takes, so occasionally Nights does little more than remind you to pull out your old copy of Ocean Beach. The guitars on this "Jam version" of "Carry Me Ohio" ground out the melody like a cigarette into asphalt, but the nice, twisty solo somewhat redeems this take. Originally released on Cameron Crowe's Vinyl Films label, this acoustic version of "Duk Koo Kim", from Sun Kil Moon's Ghosts of Great Highway, sounds hypnotic as the guitars pick out a steady theme that changes notes even as they repeat the same rhythm. For all its ups and downs, Nights never feels like a vault-emptying exercise. It's more a compendium of Kozelek's marginalia.
Kozelek has updated Nights of Passed Over up through April, his long-awaited Sun Kil Moon follow-up to Ghosts of Great Highway (not counting the Modest Mouse covers album Tiny Cities). The simultaneous release of both works makes Nights of Passed Over seem like one of the most elaborate lyrics sheet ever. These new songs continue his emphasis on steadily paced compositions about lost loves, distant friends, deep regrets, and nebulous sadness, but shifts the setting from the open road to closed-in rooms at the end of long drives.
Not as immediately accessible as Ghosts, April starts with "Lost Verses" and "The Light", two long, slow songs that are together nearly twenty minutes long. This is Kozelek time, and it takes a moment to adjust. But once you do, the nuances of the songs' melodies and arrangements gradually announce themselves, like lengthy jam tacked onto "Lost Verses" and the grinding electric strums that fill the spaces between the vocals on "The Light". Lyrically more than musically, "Lost Verses" makes for an effective opener, as Kozelek seems to consider all the things that he has neglected to write down: "Lost verses well up my eyes and ears," he sings plaintively, fearing that he'll become a lost verse to the people he loves. That sense of faltering memory colors April in shades of rainy grays and deep blues. It's a spring album that still pines for previous seasons.
By the time the moody, acoustic "Lucky Man" comes around, the album has set its stride and maintains it through eight more songs. Bonnie Prince Billy lends backing vocals on the country-tinged "Like the River and "Unlit Hallway", which breaks for a spiky banjo solo. These are the most dramatic departures on April, which expands only minimally on the solemn Americana of Kozelek's previous works. He hits many familiar notes, yet manages to make it all sound new and even adventurous instead of conservative or quaint. He reaches into his fragile upper register on "Harper Road", and maps out a travelogue on "Moorestown" that feels nearly threadbare with remembering. "Tonight the Sky" draws out its meanings with churning guitars, pausing for a lengthy solo that threatens to fall apart with every note. The album draws its power not simply from the quality of Kozelek's songwriting, but from the close intertwining of words and music, which makes his albums much more essential than any book he could ever publish. | 2008-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2008-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | null | April 11, 2008 | 8.3 | 8fb1c6fe-562c-4f3f-989a-4207d1d4e3dd | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The NYC rapper, having left his label, shakes off the pressure of his tumultuous last few years with a set of straight-ahead, grimy rap songs. | The NYC rapper, having left his label, shakes off the pressure of his tumultuous last few years with a set of straight-ahead, grimy rap songs. | Wiki: OOFIE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wiki-oofie/ | OOFIE | With his sprawling XL debut No Mountains in Manhattan, Wiki seemed primed to break out of the NYC underground he had spent so long toiling in, but the years that followed would prove tumultuous. He formed the indie rap supergroup Secret Circle with Lil Ugly Mane and Antwon but disbanded it in disgust after Antwon was accused of sexual assault, shelving years of work in the process. And he left XL Recordings—the British label that signed him to his first record deal with his group Ratking—releasing his last song for them (“Cheat Code”) in February.
So while Oofie is Wiki’s second full length, it finds the 26-year-old MC weary, reflective, and somewhat mature. The gap-toothed hoodrat who used to revel in drunken debauchery now favors nights at home with his girl and their cats. He sounds almost contrite recounting the night in Stockholm when, hyped off a DMX song, he punched a window out in a club and spent a night in jail (“Dame Aquí”).
His last LP was a high-water mark, distilling concepts he’d been exploring his whole career into a clear and forceful statement. But he’d become disillusioned with life at the label that launched Adele’s career and counts Radiohead and Sigur Ros among its roster, telling DJ Booth he felt like “a small fish in a big sea.” Rather than shop for a new label, he went independent, availing himself of his old label’s basement studio as he got to work returning to basics, which for Wiki means beats and bars, as raw as possible.
If NMIM was Wiki’s magnum opus, Oofie is just Some Rap Songs. It’s less ambitious but just as focused, with tight, diaristic raps and vignettes and grimy production. His departure from XL seems to have been amicable; Much of the album was recorded at XL’s studio in Manhattan by the label’s in-house producer Alex Epton, but Brooklyn’s Tony Seltzer makes frequent appearances (“Pesto,” “4 Clove Club,” “Back Then,” and “Dame Aquí”), as does the drummer Michul Kuun, who performs as NAH. The muddy production is sparse but never simplistic, often disguising nuance that reveals itself on repeated listens, like the security alarm on “Downfall,” or the tamboura lurking in the shadow of a squeaky trumpet on “Freaks.”
Lyrically, Wiki seems to hint at a mid-life crisis, which sounds strange until you realize he’s been recording since he was in high school. He laments how critical acclaim doesn’t always equal a massive audience (“Reviews strong, not enough views on the songs,” he raps on “Pesto”), and notes on “Promises” that he can’t afford to rest on his laurels (“I still ain't made enough for my ass just to stay indoors”). New York City is still a main character, but he’s not so much crowing about the city’s supremacy as he is artfully exploring its mundane details with a microscope, the minutiae that makes it unique, the signifiers of what makes it his home as well as his muse. The sentiment is clearest on “Back Then,” in which he resists the urge to romanticize its past at the expense of its future, joining Queens’ Lansky Jones in reminiscing on both the good (“We knew the delis that sold you brew”) and bad (“You never got ass then/You was always sad then”).
If there’s any disappointment to Oofie, it’s that it finds Wiki running in place, flexing his considerable lyrical chops without extending himself. In a way, it’s a step back from his debut, though that step is clearly intentional—an attempt to shake off the pressures of a label while he figures out his next steps. The record would likely feel stronger if sequenced with some of the loosies he’s dropped in 2019, namely the filthy Madlib production “Eggs” or “Fee Fi Fo Fum.” But that would seem almost beside the point. If the album has any concept, it’s one of perspective; those songs are in the past, and Wiki’s gaze is firmly planted forward. Because as strong as it is, Oofie still feels transitional, a waystation for a rapper still plotting his next move. | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Wikset Enterprise | November 16, 2019 | 7.4 | 8fb50cf4-871e-423f-af09-52c32aad8116 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
After an auspicious debut in 2016, the young R&B enigma looks for ways outside of the sound that has become her trademark—and gets lost in the process. | After an auspicious debut in 2016, the young R&B enigma looks for ways outside of the sound that has become her trademark—and gets lost in the process. | H.E.R.: I Used to Know Her: Part 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/her-i-used-to-know-her-part-2-ep/ | I Used to Know Her: Part 2 EP | At the age of 19, Gabi Wilson seemed to arrive fully formed as H.E.R., an emotive but guarded R&B artist with songs that keyed in on supernatural perspective, profound vulnerability, and what felt like decades of experience. Upon arrival in 2016, the songs on H.E.R. Volume 1 were instantly familiar, and not just because they were so indebted to the likes of the Weeknd. They felt lived-in—intimate, personal, infectious, so much so that you began to internalize the words with one spin. During Volume 1’s glittering opener, “Losing,” H.E.R. sings as if she were mid-sentence, and we just happened to overhear: “My ambition is attractive/My aggression isn’t passive/I promise with you/The butterflies in my stomach are active,” she tells a lover with the ease of rare self-assurance.
In 2017, both Volume 2 and a handful of assorted tracks confirmed that H.E.R. wasn’t a fluke, but those songs didn’t hint at much growth or many next steps, either. August’s I Used to Know Her: The Prelude offered a serviceable retread of old ideas that likewise failed to produce a grand statement. But if that EP’s lack of urgency suggested H.E.R. was starting to tire of her trademark sound, this month’s I Used to Know Her: Part 2 feels like a complete existential crisis. Uneven and occasionally confounding, this is the work of an artist trying to slip from her pigeonhole style but struggling to find a viable exit. Remember how it took trial and error for the Weeknd to learn how to translate what made his 2011 trilogy of mixtapes into something with broad appeal? H.E.R., it seems, is stuck in a similar moment of creative transition.
Quiet-storm drums, melancholic synths, and magnetic R&B hooks defined Volume 1 and Volume 2, recalling the best of SWV and Toni Braxton. H.E.R. was also convincing over uptempo instrumentals that ferried along bits of nostalgia and melodrama. I Used to Know Her: Part 2 trades much of that for acoustic guitar. Yes, she sounded radiant on last year’s “Best Part,” her breakout acoustic collaboration with Daniel Caesar, but the arrangements here aren’t morning strums of glory. Instead, these guitars conjure Florida Georgia Line and an open-mic night in a college town. They warp the dynamism and depth of H.E.R.’s voice into an adult-contemporary mess.
During “Carried Away,” H.E.R. sings blandly about loneliness over perky, hoedown-ready licks and handclaps. It is a beat better suited for Natasha Bedingfield, and it yields the worst H.E.R. song yet. This carries over to “Can’t Help Me,” which at least shows some mercy with the help of 808s and more evocative songwriting. “Sorry that I’ve been yelling at your face/I know you hate when I speak to you this way,” she sings. The guitar comes closest to sounding natural and conducive to H.E.R.’s voice during “Hard Place,” produced by legendary R&B architect Darkchild. It threatens to soundtrack some finding-myself montage in an upcoming rom-com, but there’s at least a measure of tension and an enormous chorus.
Questionable sequencing otherwise plagues I Used to Know Her. The 15 collected songs of Volume 1 and Volume 2 bled into one another, a collage of intimate snapshots inside the H.E.R. orbit. But these eight tracks have no business being in the same room. When she’s not trying to honor Sheryl Crow, H.E.R. returns to her roots on “I’m Not OK” and “Take You There,” sharing narratives that remind you what a special lyricist she can be: “Feel a little guilty/I feel like it’s written all over me/Tryna find a balance/Trusting you, trusting me,” she sings on “I’m Not OK,” examining the effects of a decaying relationship with audible desperation. Alongside the bland guitar of “Can’t Help Me,” though, such throwbacks are so out of place they grate.
I Used to Know Her: Part Two ends with the jumbled “Lord Is Coming,” where Wilson, now 21, ponders social ills from war and religious persecution to economic anxiety and inequality in a miserable spoken-word preamble. “It’s a World War III, corruption versus greed/Not you versus me/But do we ever think of the need for inner peace?” she asks before talking about the price of one’s soul. It’s cringeworthy. The growing pains are evident. But at least H.E.R. is venturing into new subject matter. Despite the major-label contract and the devoted fanbase, she isn’t afraid to take some kind of stand or chance, even if the result is her first full flop. | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | November 12, 2018 | 6 | 8fb80449-c190-4302-896c-e897f28c7dcc | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
With production flourishes from Mark Ronson, Josh Homme leads the band's most accessible album in decades. It’s equal parts disco inferno and devil-may-care experimentation. | With production flourishes from Mark Ronson, Josh Homme leads the band's most accessible album in decades. It’s equal parts disco inferno and devil-may-care experimentation. | Queens of the Stone Age: Villains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/queens-of-the-stone-age-villains/ | null | They don’t make anti-heroes like Josh Homme anymore. The Queens of the Stone Age mastermind is not so much a musician as he is the all-American badass incarnate. His is a persona shaped by the blasphemous gospel of your typical truck stop bathroom stall: white lies by day, regular Johns by night, and of course, drugs by the songful. Just like the Gadsen—the spirit animal for the live-free-or-die crowd—Homme would rather eat dirt than bow to anyone else’s standards, musical or otherwise. His stark commitment to independence (and by extension, his open embrace of the subversive) fueled the Queens’ rise to infamy at the tail end of the 1990s. With its abundance of soft, lilting vocals and coolly-phrased fury, 1998’s debut Queens of the Stone Age bravely, subtly defied hard rock’s arch-masculine roots, putting a refreshingly witty spin on a genre regarded by many as brutish and boneheaded. The name says it all.
Nearly two decades later, Queens of the Stone Age are one of the biggest names in contemporary hard rock. Aside from Foo Fighters and Nine Inch Nails—whose figureheads, Dave Grohl and Trent Reznor, have both appeared on past Queens albums—you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of comparable critical or commercial standing. Further buttressing the group’s ubiquity is Homme’s many collaborations, seen in the frontman’s resume of side projects (Desert Sessions, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures) and production/performance stints (Arctic Monkeys, Iggy Pop, the Strokes offshoot CRX).
Their foundation intact and their reputation secured, Queens now move to hit the reset button in 2017 with Villains, their seventh LP. The daring nine-track album sees Homme in company old and new: guitarist and creepy synth expert Troy Van Leeuwen, who joined the band for 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze; axesmith/keyboardist Dean Fertita and bassist Michael Shuman, who first appeared on 2013’s ...Like Clockwork; and newly minted drummer Jon Theodore, previously of the Mars Volta. Together, they’ve streamlined Queens’ hulking arena gloom into carnivalesque, chrome-plated boogie rock with the help of British producer and “Uptown Funk” architect Mark Ronson. Villains is disco inferno and devil-may-care experimentation all wrapped up into one—not to mention their most immediately accessible record since their magnum opus, 2002’s Songs for the Deaf.
Scandalous as their creative partnership might seem to purists, Homme and Ronson make a rather uncontroversial pair on Villains. Consider first single “The Way You Used to Do” a primer on the album’s claustrophobic trappings; the drums hiss and thump like a Camaro in overdrive, further compressed by the guitars’ animalistic thrust. In the afterglow of ...Like Clockwork’s post-apocalyptic melodrama, this palette feels a bit paltry but refreshingly upbeat. Fans who’ve stuck with the group since the days of 2000’s Rated R and Songs for the Deaf will undoubtedly find the lack of a thunderous, dynamic rhythm section a bit off-putting. Moreover, the static mix renders Shuman and Theodore—a pair of bona fide dynamos onstage—more or less anonymous, although the former gets his chance to shine on “The Evil Has Landed,” a Zep-flavored barnstormer powered almost single-handedly by Shuman’s thunderstruck arpeggios.
The album’s predetermined angle of Ronson-assisted simplicity is ultimately a red herring. Villains’ songwriting is just as, if not more, devious than anything in the band’s discography. Homme builds each track elliptically, rather than linearly: “Instead of a song that is like a merry-go-round, where you go around in circles and you know what’s going to happen, I want it to be more like a bus stop–you get on and you get off at a different location, and you’re kind of along for the ride,” he told The New York Times.
So Queens spend most of the record playing the long game. With the exception of “The Way You Used to Do” and the psychobilly freakout “Head Like a Haunted House,”almost every track on the 48-minute Villains runs into overtime: songs clock in between five and six minutes, and a third of them extend even further. “Future tense meets middle finger/We take the long way home,” Homme sneers on epic, ass-shaking opener “Feet Don’t Fail Me,” and thank God for that. Villains is at its most thrilling when the band explores their own back-roads on their own terms, making time for new discoveries along the way.
“Domesticated Animals” rides a severed groove off into mucky oblivion, jeering at the beleaguered masses as they go. “All for one, all for naught/Perish, baby/Perish the thought,” Homme muses, his falsetto syllables soft and sardonic. Over on the flip side of the sonic spectrum, there’s “Hideaway,” a lye-soaked lounge-rock ballad. The closing “Villains of Circumstance” becomes a slow-burning reflection on a long-distance relationship that culminates in an unsettling orchestral swell, the sound of a cabaret ablaze.
Villains isn’t always so smooth and several sections fall flat, like the staccato-spiked funk that surfaces midway through “The Evil Has Landed” or the melodically static refrains on “Fortress.” Nevertheless, the stalled moments don’t detract from the fun of the ride. Queens’ final destination is what matters—and a beeline into the unknown sure beats another go at the merry-go-round. Villains reaffirms what makes this band so special to begin with: their willingness to blow up the status quo as established by their riff-rock brethren, and even themselves. | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | August 28, 2017 | 6.9 | 8fbe6f3f-7226-44a5-971c-ed5a89924664 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The First Nations songwriter receives his overdue recognition with this brilliant and troubling anthology, which shows the breadth of his skill. Nearly every song is remarkable, and nearly any of them could have served as a breakthrough. | The First Nations songwriter receives his overdue recognition with this brilliant and troubling anthology, which shows the breadth of his skill. Nearly every song is remarkable, and nearly any of them could have served as a breakthrough. | Willie Dunn: Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/creation-never-sleeps-creation-never-dies-the-willie-dunn-anthology/ | Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology | Give one listen to his 1971 song “I Pity the Country” and you will know Willie Dunn. Over a winding, fingerpicked acoustic guitar melody, the First Nations songwriter uncovers layer after layer of hard wisdom in his deep, solemn voice. “I pity the country/I pity the state,” he sings of the colonialist system working against him and the agents it employs, from politicians to prisons to portrayals of Indigenous people like him in films and TV. In under three minutes, it is a protest song that seems to capture an entire lifetime and philosophy, condensed in a few simple lines.
If this fearless and unflinching vision is what made Dunn’s music so compelling, it also kept him from playing along with the music business. In producer Kevin Howes’ extensive, illuminating liner notes for a new posthumous anthology, Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies, you will find stories of Dunn turning down early attention from Columbia Records (they wanted to market him as some rebellious cowboy archetype), smashing a guitar in defiance during a potentially career-making tour with Glen Campbell (he thought his tourmates were “a bunch of phonies”), and whispering an insult to Queen Elizabeth while filming her for a documentary with his activist group (“We are not your children anymore”).
When it comes to career-spanning anthologies, there are those that dazzle you with the directions one artist was able to explore in their lifetime, and then there are the more troubling ones like this. Featuring 22 tracks in just under 80 minutes, it serves as a meditation on all the things Dunn was capable of but unable to pursue. Nearly every song is remarkable, and nearly any of them could have served as a breakthrough—say, “I Pity the Country,” or the humorous but hopeless satire of “School Days,” or the Moby-Dick epic “The Pacific.” “You know, I’m a good fisherman,” Dunn once said of his career-long desire to get his music out there, “but there are no fish.”
Because of his flat, searing baritone and his ability to infuse basic folk melodies with mystic, allusive poetry, Dunn was often compared to Leonard Cohen. Like Cohen, Dunn came up around Montreal’s downtown scene. In this community of artists, he opened a coffeehouse, called the Totem Pole, after dropping out of school at grade 10 and finding work as a chef on a passenger train. Inspired by American folk singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, he began writing and performing protest songs, appeared frequently on Indigenous programs on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and signed a record deal in 1970. Many of his best songs from this era feature accompaniment solely from guitarist Bob Robb, but he soon experimented with fiddle, harp, and hand drum players as his writing grew more ambitious.
As he was finding his voice as a musician, Dunn became equally focussed on activist work. His first brush with success arrived when he combined his two passions, writing long, narrative songs based on the characters he encountered in his studies. Placed as the opening track on Creation Never Sleeps, the ten-minute “Ballad of Crowfoot'' was his first introduction to the mainstream. Originally composed for the CBC’s Indian Hour radio show, it is one of several of Dunn’s songs that plays like equal parts archivist work and songwriting, presenting the heavily researched story of the Blackfoot leader through a series of haunted, harrowing verses. “Why the sadness? Why the sorrow?,” he asks in each chorus. “Maybe there’ll be a better tomorrow.”
For a long time, this song would be Dunn’s most lasting legacy, largely due to its film accompaniment, often hailed as Canada’s first music video. A collage of photos and artwork corresponding to the narrative, it was used to teach Indigenous issues in classrooms throughout North America, and it received attention from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, furthering Dunn’s reputation as a leading political voice. Despite his growing acclaim, Dunn’s music career stalled, and he was frequently imprisoned for attending protests. As the decades wore on, he became disillusioned with the industry, battling long periods of depression as his records went out of print and tour offers stopped rolling in. “I play his tapes, and the audience always writes in to ask if the songs are on records,” says early supporter, CBC host Johnny Yesno, in the liner notes. “They’re not… Most of the time you can’t even find him.”
Over the course of his career, Dunn released only four studio albums: 1971’s self-titled debut, a remake of the same album one year later for charity, and two records from the ’80s that attempted to expand his sound into more atmospheric and conceptual arenas: Sometimes this meant reciting poetry by Shakespeare over accompaniment from Akwesasne musicians, as in “Sonnet 33 and 55 / Friendship Dance,” and sometimes it meant singing peaceful, melodic folk music over field recordings of birdsong, as in the gorgeous “Pontiac.” In “The Pacific,” he delivers a spoken-word meditation as the band jams on a beautiful, dusky melody that sounds a little like the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple.” You could imagine this being his show-stopping closer on tours to come, showcasing his art at its most boundless and communal.
In the decades since these recordings, Dunn’s story traveled through the Indigenous artists he inspired—from the folk-rock duo Kashtin, who recorded his song “Son of the Sun” in 1991, to the author and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who covered “I Pity the Country” on her latest album this year. Still, his most identifiable work remains in the style of “Crowfoot”: acts of historical bookkeeping that strike a deep emotional chord, far beyond their original time and context. One of those songs, “Charlie,” tells the true story of an Ojibwe child, failed by the Canadian school system, who ran away at age 12 and never returned home. Shortly before his death in 2013, Dunn was asked to perform the song as Light in the Attic was preparing the pivotal Native North America compilation, a release that would bring his music to wider audiences and newfound acclaim. At the time, Dunn refused to play “Charlie.” “It’s just too sad,” he replied. Now, Creation Never Sleeps will do the singing for him.
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. | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Light in the Attic | March 22, 2021 | 8.7 | 8fcba432-f867-4253-bcdd-d11dfe1f3528 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The UK’s Trees were not scholarly devotees of the folk tradition but enthusiastic recent converts who brazenly experimented with traditional forms and never missed the opportunity to jam. | The UK’s Trees were not scholarly devotees of the folk tradition but enthusiastic recent converts who brazenly experimented with traditional forms and never missed the opportunity to jam. | Trees: Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trees-trees-50th-anniversary-edition/ | Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) | Some new sounds emerge gradually, as like-minded artists circle similar ideas over time. Others arrive with the bang of one great record. British folk rock, a misty and elusive thing, almost entirely distinct from its jangly West Coast American counterpart, belongs mostly to the latter category.
In the late 1960s, Fairport Convention, a talented young London band enamored of Bob Dylan and the Byrds, recruited Sandy Denny, an amber-voiced troubadour in the city’s folk revival scene, as their new singer. Denny brought to the band a deep interest in the traditional songbook of the British Isles, and in 1969, they recorded a stunning 11-minute version of the 18th-century ballad “A Sailor’s Life,” setting its lyrics about doomed lovers to electric instrumentation that churned like a gathering storm. This recording is widely seen as the first to render traditional English folk song in the rhythmic and timbral vocabulary of rock. Along with Liege & Lief, a Fairport Convention album released later that year, “A Sailor’s Life” inspired interest in folk history among a generation of English rock bands who found that the canon’s archetypal tales of blood and magic resonated anew amid the hippieish mysticism of their early-1970s era.
Trees were one such band. Like Fairport Convention, they performed mostly electrified renditions of traditional songs, peppered with a few originals in the same idiom, which untrained listeners would have trouble distinguishing from the genuine article. In Celia Humphris, they had a singer, like Denny, whose ethereal presence seemed like an extension of the ancient characters she inhabited and addressed in song. In Barry Clarke, they had a lead guitarist who was plainly influenced by the articulately lacerating style of Fairport’s Richard Thompson. He is not shy about admitting it. “There’s no doubt Richard Thompson [led] all of us down the path of the English lead guitar style,” Clarke is quoted as saying in the liner notes to Trees (50th Anniversary Edition), an excellent box set from Earth Recordings that compiles the band’s brief recorded legacy, amounting to two studio albums released in 1970-71, a short BBC session bootleg, and a handful of demos and alternate mixes.
Trees may have appeared in Fairport’s wake and quickly flamed out, but their music is well worth appreciating on its own. At their best, they seemed to grasp at something just beyond themselves, beyond even their forebears. Clarke’s acknowledgement of Thompson’s influence comes with an important caveat: “He showed us the ways and means… but in truth the understanding we all shared was simply to get in the car and put our foot down! We were nothing if not instinctive.” The members of Trees were not scholarly devotees of the folk tradition but enthusiastic recent converts whose appreciation of the old songs came pre-filtered through modern interpreters. Their dilettantism was no hindrance; it freed them from the burden of reverence to traditional forms, which they mixed brazenly with open-ended instrumental passages and hard-rocking riffs. Fairport’s classic lineup, after the epic journey of “A Sailor’s Life,” tended to unleash its improvisational power only at carefully chosen moments; Trees, on the other hand, never missed an opportunity to jam.
The Garden of Jane Delawney, Trees’ debut, and On the Shore, their final album, arrived within nine months of each other. The band itself didn’t last much longer than that. The two albums have long been cult items among a certain sort of listener, for whom stumbling on Trees for the first time may feel like wish fulfillment from an alternate universe. What if Fairport Convention went fully psychedelic? Or the Grateful Dead formed in Norfolk instead of the Bay Area, and put their cosmic touch on the Child Ballads instead of American bluegrass and R&B? In highlights like “She Moved Thro’ the Fair,” from Jane Delawney, and “Sally Free and Easy,” from On the Shore, Trees achieve communal interplay on par with the Dead’s, using the songs’ simple modal melodies as scaffolding for elaborate spontaneous compositions in which no one voice holds the lead for too long. Bias Boshell, primary writer of Trees’ few original songs, is the rare rock bassist whose style seems to follow Phil Lesh’s. Rather than adhering to any recognizable pocket, he fills the low end with circuitous melodies, lending the music a feeling of unsettled searching in even its heaviest moments.
The Garden of Jane Delawney has a ramshackle charm that anticipates indie-minded psych bands from the 1990s onward. (After listening, you may wonder whether Woods chose their name as a subtle homage.) “Nothing Special,” the opening track, consists of little more than a simple two-bar ascending pattern from one guitar and near-constant soloing from the other. “Snail’s Lament,” the tender closer, features harmonized male and female vocals pledging humble mutual devotion: “Live another life on me/When you find it hard to cope/Take my eyes if you can’t see/Give them back when you find hope.” Its sweetness is undiluted, and maybe even heightened, when the two voices fall occasionally out of alignment, or Humphris reaches for a high note and just misses it in the final chorus. “The Garden of Jane Delawney” is eerie and emotionally complex, its surreal stillness suggesting the aftermath of a murder by the titular character without ever directly acknowledging her crime. Boshell has said that he wrote it in a kind of trance and he’s still unsure of the story he was trying to tell with the lyrics. The song’s haunted atmosphere is so convincing, you almost want to believe him.
Despite its status as the title track of Trees’ debut, the darkly sophisticated “The Garden of Jane Delawney” is more aligned with the sensibility of their second album, as the band’s founder and acoustic guitarist David Costa points out in the liner notes. On the Shore is more confidently rendered than Jane Delawney, and more like a fog borne on heavy wind than a ray of sunshine. At several points the album seems to pick up directly where Fairport Convention left off with “A Sailor’s Life,” a richly ambiguous vein of improvisation that neither group explored much further—Fairport because they moved on to other concerns, Trees because they’d effectively broken up by 1971.
On the Shore’s take on “Geordie,” a folk song about an honorable man who has been condemned to death, is steadfastly minimal, with Humphris’ laments swirling in the negative space between tumbling bass and swells of guitar. Gnarls Barkley sampled the song on the title track of their 2006 smash album St. Elsewhere, prompting Costa to reflect on what his band shared in common with Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green. “We never engaged in any heavy dialogue about the authenticity of the tradition,” Costa admitted in the liner notes to a 2007 reissue of On the Shore. “We were only sampling, too. I’m not a great folk musician. What I loved was those aberrations and accidents, and the weird things that could happen when the tradition was really alive and subject to all and any other influences.”
Costa is remarkably clear-eyed about what Trees embody for contemporary listeners. Like the makers of many other great “lost” albums, they leave something more than a historical footnote but less than a major legacy, with a mystique that draws some of its power from the fact that they simply didn’t produce very much work. “Part of what people love about Trees is that as a band you were in, and out, and then gone,” the guitarist says in the box set liner notes, paraphrasing a remark his son once made. Fifty years on from their beginnings as psychedelic rockers running amok through the English folk tradition, they have themselves passed into history and become fodder for younger musicians and record collectors who are as excited as they were by the prospect of finding something new in dusty old sounds.
In 2018, a decade after the death of drummer Unwin Brown, Costa and Boshell gathered some of these younger musicians and performed a concert of songs from Trees’ repertoire as the On the Shore Band. A few recordings from this show are included along with the ’70s material in the box set. They sound spirited and alive, if a bit slick compared to the original, updating the sprawling Trees sound with additional instrumentation and occasional electronic textures that would have been difficult for a rock band to employ in their time. The COVID-19 pandemic stifled plans for a further reunion, according to the liner notes. Then, in mid-January, Celia Ford Drummond, née Humphris, died of undisclosed causes, having lived just long enough to witness this latest loving tribute to the band she fronted for a few years as a young woman. For better or worse, Trees may remain forever an aberration, the way David Costa’s son described them: in, out, then gone.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Earth Recordings | January 26, 2021 | 8.3 | 8fcd59ef-dd84-4122-b4d0-420bb2f4f99b | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On the third release from its ongoing reissue series, the BBE label continues to excavate the hidden wonders of Japan’s post-WWII jazz scene. | On the third release from its ongoing reissue series, the BBE label continues to excavate the hidden wonders of Japan’s post-WWII jazz scene. | Various Artists: J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-j-jazz-volume-3-deep-modern-jazz-from-japan/ | J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz From Japan | One of the many hidden narratives of post-WWII Japan is its long-running jazz scene. This taste for the most American of art forms intensified after the war, when a crackdown on what was considered the music of the enemy ended, the interests of stationed U.S. troops helped reignite the scene, and, later, touring legends found a willing market. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Japan was a hub of jazz invention, even if much of the music recorded was released on severely limited runs or private presses, meaning it barely traveled within the country, let alone beyond it. A half century later, the period is a cave of wonders for even for the most dedicated genre fanatic. The breadth of it may be beyond full encapsulation—thankfully, collectors Tony Higgins and Mike Peden are giving it a shot.
Working with British label BBE—probably best known for releasing records by J Dilla, Madlib, Pete Rock, and other bohemian rap artists—Higgins and Peden have spent the past few years reviving hidden Japanese jazz for Western audiences with a series of reissues under the banner of J Jazz. Though the collection includes full-album reissues—I’m partial to the Tohru Aizawa Quartet’s Tachibana and Koichi Matsukaze Trio + Toshiyuki Daitoku’s Earth Mother—it’s the J Jazz compilations that have provided the pillars of Higgins and Peden’s preservation work. Here, for the third time, the pair have assembled a comprehensive set of vintage cuts to help capture the scope of that crucial 1960s to 1980s period.
J Jazz Volume 3: Deep Modern Jazz from Japan opens with Yasuhiro Kohno Trio + One’s “Song of Island” and a storm of solo piano keys. When the rest of the band enters and the full arrangement kicks in, Kohno’s delightful playing sits perfectly next to guest Masahiro Kanno’s smooth vibraphone as the pair take turns in front. The cymbals don’t so much crash as hum in the background. Like many of the selections in this set, “Song of Island” was recorded live—polite applause greets the end of the solos—and the mastering work at Carvery Studio in London preserves a warm, organic sound. This edition is probably the strongest evidence yet that the Japanese jazz drew not just from its American counterparts, but from an array of global sounds. Plenty of compositions roam far beyond conventional jazz borders, and some of them push the limit of the term’s meaning: Hiroshi Murakami & Dancing Sphinx’s “Phoebus,” recorded in 1978, features driving West African rhythms; Hideo Shiraki’s “Groovy Samba” (a CD-only bonus track) lives up to its title. Maybe nothing encapsulates the genre synthesizing better than Eiji Nakayama’s “Cumorah,” which features a Spanish guitar lead before developing into a full flamenco workout, while the song’s title, surprisingly, refers to a hill in Ontario County, New York, on which Latter-day Saints say their prophet Joseph Smith discovered the golden plates that would inspire the Book of Mormon.
Experimental moments are balanced by more traditional arrangements. “Song for Hope”—cooler than the hymn-like title suggests—is by Aki Takase Trio, an outfit led by a pianist said to be the compositional disciple of Charles Mingus and one-time Lester Bowie collaborator. An equally impressive performance comes with “Planets” by Masaru Imada Trio +1, a soothing late-night number that drapes the lead piano in elegant double bass and drums. Kohsuke Mine’s looping “Morning Tide” shows how young Japanese players were pivoting at the end of the 1960s to post-modal and free jazz forms.
There are occasional dips in quality—the guitars on the second half of Tatsuya Nakamura’s “1/4 Samba II” sound detached from the rest of the arrangement; the isolated double bass and drum solos on the lengthy “Acoustic Chicken,” by Koichi Matsukaze Trio featuring Ryojiro Furusawa, just kind of hang around like kids on a street corner. Still, no song feels unworthy, and Higgins and Peden have offered another loving composite of their chosen era. The vinyl release even includes an obi strip, a band of paper typically wrapped around Japanese records, for an extra sense of authenticity. These details solidify another worthy introduction to a nation’s jazz music treasure chest.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | BBE Music | March 16, 2021 | 8 | 8fd5cafa-fbf8-4e40-890b-4ba47f546777 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Xiu Xiu's tribute to the music of Twin Peaks is one of their most haunting and beautiful LPs in years. | Xiu Xiu's tribute to the music of Twin Peaks is one of their most haunting and beautiful LPs in years. | Xiu Xiu: Plays the Music of Twin Peaks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21749-plays-the-music-of-twin-peaks/ | Plays the Music of Twin Peaks | Xiu Xiu are an archetypally "difficult" band. Hard to measure and, at times, hard to digest, they are experimental in the most literal meaning—not musicians exploring "experimental genres" of music, but ones who actually experiment, leading to music whose ideas travel the map so broadly as to be deemed unclassifiable when put together. This approach has led the band to develop passionate followers but also put themselves in a position where these constant new approaches not only alienate the mainstream but past fans as well.
Given this perspective, the band’s latest release, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks, makes a lot of sense. It’s easy to see parallels between Xiu Xiu and David Lynch—both are challenging, uncompromising artists unafraid of real experimentation or the uneven results that come from it. Though the passing of time (and specifically the post-Mulholland Drive afterglow) has seen public view of the man’s work elevated to near-canonical status, for much of his career Lynch was seen less as a genius and more as a fascinating but flawed artist obsessed with the '50s and the death of the American Dream.
Perhaps nowhere is this mix of "Wow!" and "Ungh :-/" on display more in Lynch’s work than in 1990’s groundbreaking show "Twin Peaks." "Twin Peaks" was a watershed moment—the first time anyone had attempted to port sinister art-house cinema vision to Big Three television, that mainest of mainstreams—but despite What It Did and What It Meant, "Twin Peaks" was still a messy failure that devolved into a soap opera slop—James’s search for meaning, Dick Tremayne, BILLY ZANE!!!—difficult for even diehard fans to stick by. But if you "got it" anyway, it just didn’t matter. You just put on headphones, kept watching and felt ok knowing it made you feel ok.
One of the reasons why Lynch’s work always hit hard was his way with music and sound, particularly his partnership with Angelo Badalamenti. The score to "Twin Peaks" is arguably Badalamenti's crown jewel, and Xiu Xiu do it justice. Their success here is twofold: Not only do they capture the haunted spirit of the show, they also provide Xiu Xiu fans with one of their strongest releases in awhile.
The simple, live-in-the-studio recorded feel helps keep the band grounded and the sound uniform, giving it the sense of a live performance. They skip the obvious choice of "Falling" as opener--the vocal version of the famous theme, the first music you hear on the show and "Twin Peaks"’s most recognizable number--and opts for the instrumental "Laura Palmer’s Theme," which begins not with the famous Moby-sampled synth but instead a very portentous tom drum thud followed by sustain-pedaled piano notes. The choice here indicates upfront that they intend to evoke something deeper and more resonant than simple nostalgia.
"Laura Palmer’s Theme" is followed by "Into the Night," the album’s best track, and one of three with vocals. The original, featuring Julee Cruise, is hard to top, but this version is bold and ominous, propulsive and mysterious. In a way, Stewart's manic delivery suits this material better than it sometimes does on his own. On the last vocal number, "Sycamore Tree," they take a tune originally sung by jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott and bring it closer to "a Xiu Xiu song" (if such a thing exists, I guess), than anything else on Plays. Stewart channels the dead Scott with a caricatured capital-P Performance that succeeds without feeling fake or contrived. On “Falling,” Stewart relies on the soaring, heart-tweaking power of the song without overselling it. While Stewart’s singing in Xiu Xiu often feels like it's been appended on top of or along side of the music it accompanies, on these three it feels threaded into its fabric. I even found myself yearning for a Xiu Xiu version of "Just You," the corny and inexplicable '50s ballad sung by Laura Palmer’s boyfriend James.
The instrumentals are nearly as strong, including "Packard’s Vibration," which begins as a vibraphone-led jazz number before the distorted guitar and shimmering synths help it achieve lift-off. The only real misstep is the closer, "Josie’s Past," which adds spoken word readings of entries from "Laura Palmer’s Diary" by band member Angela Seo. The vocals, spoken in stilted, accented English, only call attention to the terrible cheesiness of the writing—and, god, at nearly eight minutes, it nearly dares you to stop listening before the end. Stewart gives a perfectly ridiculous thirty second reading of the '40s song "Mairzy Doats" (sung by Laura’s dad Leland Palmer on the show) five minutes in and the whole track would have worked better as a 60 second bit with just that.
These are minor gripes, though. Appreciators of the uncanny, the beautiful, the upsetting, the uncomfortable–all groups that contain hardcore Lynch and Xiu Xiu fans—will find something here. In evoking Lynch and Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu have made one of their most beautiful and listenable albums, one that highlights everything the band does well while shaving down the rough edges that often turn away foes and friends alike. | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Polyvinyl / Bella Union | April 14, 2016 | 7.7 | 8fdb33d3-80d3-4d66-9563-df7e62fa6f5f | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
Krautrock, psychedelia, and a DJ’s flair for track sequencing come together on an album that proves this Tokyo trio is more than just a revival act. | Krautrock, psychedelia, and a DJ’s flair for track sequencing come together on an album that proves this Tokyo trio is more than just a revival act. | Minami Deutsch: With Dim Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/minami-deutsch-with-dim-light/ | With Dim Light | Since their formation in 2014, Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch have tried to strike a balance between honoring the musical styles of yesteryear and creating something new. These self-described “repetition freaks” cite psychedelic rock and minimal techno as guideposts, but—as evidenced by a band name that is Japanese for “South Germany”—they’re really obsessed with krautrock. Lead guitarist and vocalist Kyotaro Miula has said that they gravitate toward this sound because it’s music for people who want to innovate. On their second album, With Dim Light, Minami Deutsch start delivering on that claim.
Plenty of Japanese bands have been inspired by the motorik pace of early-’70s German outfits, but Minami Deutsch focus on a very specific period in krautrock history. Their earliest releases and self-titled 2015 debut album drew on the scene’s primordial days, particularly the locked-in rhythms of the first two Neu! albums. On record and in live settings, they excel at reproducing this sound—it’s not shocking to learn that they’ve jammed with Damo Suzuki. Listening to Minami Deutsch, though, you can start longing to hear the pioneering sounds of Neu! 2instead.
With Dim Light doesn’t minimize the band’s influences—“Tunnel” is like a motorik training exercise, with Minami Deutsch studiously testing the limits of repetition. But now they’re allowing some original flair into their songs. “Concrete Ocean” starts the album with a familiar, driving drum beat and bassline but takes its time settling into a groove. When Miula’s guitar finally enters the mix, it speeds up the tempo slightly while lending a sly, melodic prettiness to the trio’s often hard-edged sound. “Tangled Yarn,” a knot of criss-crossing electric guitar melodies and softly sung vocals, brings to mind the psych-rock slow burners of their Guruguru Brain labelmates Kikagaku Moyo; that band’s drummer, Go Kurosawa, happens to be one of four guest percussionists on the album who help to give each track its own character.
While Minami Deutsch’s eagerness to explore novel sounds makes them more than just revivalists, it’s the structure of With Dim Light that makes their experimentation powerful. Beyond the repetitive beats dance music takes from krautrock, it can be tough to pinpoint the techno influences that the band has talked up, but the sequence of the new album evokes the peaks and drops of a great DJ set. After two relaxed opening numbers, “Tunnel” picks up the pace. Then, centerpiece “I’ve Seen a U.F.O.” fuses a simple, speedy rhythm with distorted guitar bursts and Miula’s murmured vocals, in a career highlight whose psychedelic wildness dilates time and conjures an unnerving tension at once. “Bitter Moon” offers an acoustic comedown before sliding into nine minutes of tuneful oblivion on closer “Don’t Wanna Go Back.”
The band makes the most of repetition on this last track, letting new guitar and bass arrangements slowly emerge as a steady beat maintains the song’s momentum. “I’m tired,” Miula starts chanting, about five minutes in—and he’s earned that fatigue by the end of an album that rarely settles for mimicry. If krautrock was all about ingenuity, then With Dim Light takes Minami Deutsch one step closer to following in the footsteps of their German heroes. | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guruguru Brain | May 1, 2018 | 7 | 8fe136c4-ff8d-41cb-a447-102286d6df05 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | |
Buried somewhere in this overstuffed, 80-minute crew compilation is Gucci’s best album in years. | Buried somewhere in this overstuffed, 80-minute crew compilation is Gucci’s best album in years. | Gucci Mane: So Icy Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gucci-mane-so-icy-summer/ | So Icy Summer | Since his 2016 release from prison, Gucci Mane has been more of a self-help guru than a trap star. The ventures that he prioritized this year are a new book called The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness and the label compilation Gucci Mane Presents: So Icy Summer, featuring a brand-new roster of artists on his revamped imprint The New 1017. The two projects seem to share a principle: providing insight to those who might benefit from it. “I’m in a better place than I ever been in my life, even though the world deteriorating around me,” he told XXL. “I want to share [with new artists]. I feel like I got a lot of knowledge. That’s what you can be charitable with.” It’s an admirable cause, and one reflective of the new and improved Gucci, who has become a model of rehabilitation. But on the compilation, his charity comes at his own expense, as an otherwise-inspired Gucci album is bogged down by his attempts to uplift lesser rappers.
Most of the music Gucci Mane has released in his second act feels like a supplement to his narrative, and not the focus. It has been easy to ignore and easier still to forget, especially for a prolific rapper with a massive back catalog of impressive mixtapes. The music centering him here is the first to feel essential to his rap legacy since he came back from jail. He writes and raps like a veteran recounting war stories, reliving the glories of victory and the traumas imposed by violence. Buried somewhere in this overstuffed, 24-song, 80-minute crew compilation is his best album in years.
When Gucci was first released, there was a ridiculous (albeit hilarious) conspiracy theory that the newly healthy and fit Guwop was actually a clone. The unsavory implication was that a problematic rapper can’t change unless genetically modified. The truthers needn’t look any further for proof of his realness than this album, which finds him refining longtime tendencies and dwelling on pre-prison life and its ramifications for his post-prison self. Flanked by the cousins Young Nudy and 21 Savage on “Nasty,” he reminisces about his days in the drug game, half-nostalgic, half-relieved that it’s over. His stacking rhyme schemes are densely packed (One bit from his verse on “Gucci Land”: “Send a bail in the mail/Fuck the judge and the jury and the jail and the muthafuckin’ cell/Know Chanel, and it’s Gucci, you can tell/You can smell, I’m a player, pull up in a V12”), and he sounds like an elder statesman settling comfortably into a new role. But any momentum built is soon derailed by the other voices he’s amplifying.
The compilation is divided into halves: the Gucci-led opening section, which functions like a filler-free comeback album, and the twelve songs affixed to it, which gives his new artists free reign. The second half feels a bit like watching a G League exhibition after an NBA playoff game. The rappers Gucci is grooming for The New 1017—particularly, Foogiano, Pooh Shiesty, and Big Scarr—never escape his looming shadow and never really get the chance.
To Gucci’s credit, he has been one of rap’s most underrated A&Rs, and there’s reason to believe he’s onto something with this crew, too. Foogiano sounds right at home with Gucci and Future on the Zaytoven-produced opener “Step Out,” his babbling Auto-Tuned flows cascading down the synth arrangement. Pooh isn’t doing anything Yo Gotti couldn’t do better, but on songs like “Monday to Sunday” he displays an adequate eye for detail (“Got twenty shots left up in the K, thought I shot the whole hundred/Pay tithes at church from hustlin’, even the pastor know we thuggin’”). The two women on the roster, K Shiday and Enchanting, team up for one song; Gucci has been adamant that they aren’t a group, but as the So Icy Girlz on “Left On Read,” they channel fierce City Girls energy. The comp could’ve used far more of them.
Instead of feeling like a big break for The New 1017, So Icy Summer just feels like a missed opportunity for Gucci. On “Iran,” he uses his unwillingness to get drafted as aframe for the injustices suffered under a racist American government. “Lifers” channels the dark world of Three 6 Mafia, and he sounds confident there: “Them suckers them, what’s up with them?/I buck on them, scuff up them Timbs/Petty hustles, predators, pressure them then they crumble them,” he raps. But all of this he-man virility builds to the somber “Still Remember,” an introspective finale about an inability to shake all of the things he’s seen, how the memories of his past life still haunt him. It’s the fitting climax to a resurgent moment. Everything that comes after feels incidental.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | The New 1017 / Atlantic | July 9, 2020 | 6.8 | 8fef9664-95e5-4199-89d8-a1f38f69feaa | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
On his fourth album, the expert producer comes into his own as a solo artist with a hushed, finely tuned album that showcases his unassuming voice and impeccable songcraft. | On his fourth album, the expert producer comes into his own as a solo artist with a hushed, finely tuned album that showcases his unassuming voice and impeccable songcraft. | Blake Mills: Mutable Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blake-mills-mutable-set/ | Mutable Set | Blake Mills is a virtuoso guitarist who can’t stand the typical trappings of the phrase “virtuoso guitarist.” Even though his playing has earned him praise from boomer rock icons like Eric Clapton and Jackson Browne, the 33-year-old’s style is understated and eclectic, always in service of the song, not the ego. In his 20s, he caught the ear of Los Angeles’ songwriter intelligentsia, playing with the likes of Jenny Lewis and Fiona Apple, becoming the guy keen artists turned to when they wanted to add a layer of striking, yet subtle, musicality to their work.
He could have spent his career as a secret-weapon guitarist, but he pivoted to solo work and production; his debut, 2010’s twangy Break Mirrors, doubled as a calling card that showed off his humble, affecting voice and burgeoning skills behind the boards. After producing albums for Alabama Shakes and Perfume Genius that redefined those artists’ sounds, he is now the clearest successor to turn-of-the-century studio sophisticate Jon Brion. And he brings all of that know-how, experience, and taste to his fourth LP, Mutable Set, a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream.
Mills’ first two solo records were largely made up of country-rock tales of wounded love, sung by a rootsy obsessive who had seemingly spent thousands of hours commiserating with Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, and Wilco’s Summerteeth. They contained moments of brilliance, like the disarming and plainspoken “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me,” a duet with Apple from 2014’s Heigh Ho, but they could also be too referential, like a graduate paper stuffed with citations yet lacking in original ideas.
With Look, from 2018, he decided to remake his own sound. That album revolved around Mills’ experiments with vintage guitar synthesizers, and featured five wordless tracks that brood and flutter with the widescreen grandeur of a Terrence Malick movie. Mutable Set splits the difference between Mills’ two sides—the unassuming singer and the ambient wanderer. It’s song-based, but it’s not just another singer-songwriter record. Its arrangements are slippery, and it’s often hard to tell if what you’re hearing is a keyboard, a guitar, a saxophone, or something else entirely. It’s never clear exactly where this album will go next, but there’s no doubt an expert hand is guiding the way.
Opener “Never Forever” starts where Look left off, slowly amassing a fog of tones for more than two minutes before Mills starts to sing atop a soothing fingerpicked figure. The song points out how modern human connection is so often thwarted by a society hellbent on wasting our time with the mundane, but its touch is featherlight. Here, the Southern California native trades in the drawl he used on past albums for a shrugging murmur that can recall L.A. ambassadors Randy Newman and Elliott Smith. Mills’ musings are more intriguing, and more oblique, than before too. Perhaps this is because he wrote about half of Mutable Set, including “Never Forever,” with Cass McCombs, who’s spent nearly two decades making sidelong folk-rock that always avoids the obvious. Throughout the album, the pair prove to be wonderfully complementary lyricists, with McCombs’ dark poeticism adding another dimension to Mills’ folksy groundedness. Another Mills/McCombs composition, the stunning ballad “My Dear One,” mixes the comfort of lasting companionship with existential dread. “My dear one, shelter my heart,” Mills sings, sweetly, over a lush backdrop. Then the arrangement suddenly empties, leaving only an unsettling dissonance, a lonely heartbeat thump, and a nagging creak. As the song draws to a close, Mills repeats, “The sky has grown dark.” The effect is ominous, bringing to mind a dinghy in the middle of a vast sea, with the worst still to come.
Such vivid images of loss—“a bedroom with a bed that isn’t there anymore,” fish flopping on a beach ravaged by climate change—are in concert with the album’s equally spare and tactile production. Mutable Set pours out of the speakers. It unfurls like lilies in a garden. The album was mainly recorded at L.A.’s famed Sound City Studios, where everyone from Neil Young to Nirvana cut classics, and Mills tunes it for maximum intimacy. Every bass pluck and keyboard wash, every acoustic guitar chord and string flourish is rendered with loving clarity. But Mills isn’t aiming for air-tight perfection. There are little choices, like how you can sometimes hear the moving parts of a piano chugging or fingers squeaking over guitar frets, that accentuate the overall sense of living, breathing humanity. And though Mills may not be the most naturally arresting singer, the way his somber croon sits in the mix, as if his mouth is inches from your ear, makes these mostly drumless tracks feel both eerie and reassuring.
Aside from the haunting instrumental “Mirror Box,” which sounds like something Nina Simone could have sung over, the album’s only real guitar spotlight comes at the end of the six-minute centerpiece “Vanishing Twin.” As the shadowy track builds from a whisper to a rumble, Mills stops singing about a flickering doppelganger, and his guitar slowly fills the void. He proceeds to let loose a stream of feedback and mangled notes, as trilling strings prettify the air around his signal. It’s a melted solo, abstract in its power. At points, it barely sounds like a guitar at all.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | New Deal / Verve | May 8, 2020 | 8.3 | 8ff112c6-997b-49eb-a0a3-999082069a3a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
As heard on this 6xLP box set, the UK classic rockers were artier than their reputation suggests, with a subdued sense of adventure that propelled the group throughout its career. | As heard on this 6xLP box set, the UK classic rockers were artier than their reputation suggests, with a subdued sense of adventure that propelled the group throughout its career. | Dire Straits: The Studio Albums 1978-1991 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dire-straits-the-studio-albums-1978-1991/ | The Studio Albums 1978-1991 | Stats don’t lie, but the tales they tell can be misleading. Take Dire Straits, who were by any measure one of the biggest rock bands of the 1980s. Their 1985 LP Brothers in Arms was a blockbuster on par with Thriller, Born in the USA, and Purple Rain; for nearly a decade, it held the title as the best-selling British album ever, before being dethroned by Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?. Yet singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler’s fame quickly eclipsed the rest of the band, including bassist John Illsley, the only member who stood alongside him in every one of the group’s incarnations. Musicians came and went with regularity during the group’s heyday, the cast changing as Knopfler and Ilsley refined their silvery, slithery hybrid of British progressive rock and American country—a curious, improbable fusion that Dire Straits made seem logical, perhaps even inevitable. In doing so, the group acted as the bridge between the ’70s AOR and ’80s MTV, shepherding a transition from faceless arena rockers to flashy video stars.
Brothers in Arms benefited greatly from MTV. The network placed the computer-animated video for “Money for Nothing” into heavy rotation, sending the album into the upper reaches of the charts, a place it would call home for the better part of a year. The video’s success could be called a fluke, but the album appealed to legions of sophisticates who couldn’t be bothered with MTV. Its novel production—a DDD affair, in the parlance of the times, meaning it was recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally—appealed to audiophiles, and its reputation for sumptuous sound helped make it the first million-selling compact disc. But beneath the digital gleam, Dire Straits’ debt to roots rock was evident, particularly in Knopfler’s mellow growl and clean, deft guitar solos.
A tension between polish and grit was evident from the start, as the 2020 box set The Studio Albums 1978-1991 illustrates. Containing nothing but straight reissues of the six studio albums the group released during its lifetime, the set contains nary a frill. (Regrettably, the 1983 EP Extendedance Play, with its giddy new-wave single “Twisting by the Pool,” isn’t here, nor 1984 live 2xLP Alchemy.) But that modesty helps draw connections between records, tracing the band’s growth while underscoring its constant attention to detail. Heard collectively, these albums suggest that Dire Straits were a far artier band than their reputation suggests, with a subdued sense of adventure that propelled the group throughout its career.
Artiness was not a quality associated with Dire Straits back in 1978, when the band released its eponymous debut; the UK was in the thick of punk rock, yet Dire Straits were tagged a pub-rock band. There was some truth to that label. Knopfler and drummer Pick Withers both played in the regrettably named Brewers Droop, who managed to go not much further than their hometown of London during their brief lifetime in the early ’70s. And Charlie Gillett, a renowned London DJ whose Honky Tonk show was one of the pub-rock scene’s epicenters, gave early airtime to Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” demo, an act of generosity that quickly led to a record contract for the band. “Sultans of Swing” certainly had a tinge of country rock; Knopfler skated up and down his fretboard with ease as he growled half-spoken lyrics about a group playing Dixieland jazz and Creole music in South London.
“Sultans of Swing” is their self-titled debut’s snappiest number by some margin—its only rival in hooks is “Setting Me Up,” the record’s tightest cut and also the one song that could be comfortably be called country—but it also contains much of what makes the album beguiling: Knopfler sketches scenes, setting his ambiguous, evocative scenarios to vamps that hint at both melody and groove without quite coalescing into either. Ghosts of an imagined American West float through Dire Straits, but despite the imagery, rhythms, and instrumentation, the album keeps drifting towards an amorphous atmosphere that betrays the group’s British roots. It hints at other styles and sounds without quite committing to either earthiness or mind-expansion. The elusiveness is one of its pleasures: the band’s identity lies within these margins.
Once “Sultans of Swing” turned into an unexpected smash on both sides of the Atlantic, Dire Straits rushed out Communique, tentatively expanding their reach while Knopfler honed his songwriting and co-producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett stripped away some of the slipperiness producer Muff Winwood had brought to the debut. Their rhythmic evolution is immediately apparent as the album bounces into focus with the reggae lilt of “Once Upon a Time in the West.” The band’s dreaminess is less apparent here, but it surfaces on “Portobello Belle,” a lovely, relaxed character sketch that shows Knopfler’s growth as a songwriter, as does “Lady Writer,” a “Sultans” rewrite that’s sharper than it should be.
Knopfler wasn’t the only one so enamored with “Sultans of Swing” that he wanted to recapture its magic. Bob Dylan enlisted the guitarist and Withers for support on his 1979 gospel makeover Slow Train Coming, and Steely Dan hired Knopfler to play on “Time out of Mind,” a highlight of their 1980 magnum opus Gaucho. Dire Straits were now operating in the big leagues, and they chose a correspondingly big-league producer for 1980’s Making Movies: Jimmy Iovine, the producer behind big hits by both Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty.
Working with Knopfler at his side and AOR airwaves in his sights, Iovine gave Making Movies considerable muscle. The album reaches its apex with “Sold Rock,” a macho bit of hard rock that leans into its rock’n’roll puns, but the record’s heart lies within its first side, where the triptych of “Tunnel of Love,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Skateaway” realizes Dire Straits’ most romantic, cinematic tendencies. None of the three are love songs in the traditional sense; they’re songs of longing, songs whose bittersweet nature suggests better times. The sentiment runs throughout Dire Straits’ catalog, and Iovine’s canny production gave it definition and direction. The closing “Les Boys” muddies their rose-tinted glance at the past, however: A jaunty bit of after-hours vaudeville, the song is meant asa sideways salute to post-war Germany’s gay cabarets, yet the lyrics’ stream of stereotypes and Knopfler’s audible sneer undercut any claims of affection for his subject. It’s a sour note on an album that otherwise finds Dire Straits hitting their stride.
Instead of pursuing the AOR direction of Making Movies, Dire Straits took a leftward detour with 1982’s Love Over Gold. Apart from the lively “Industrial Disease,” Love Over Gold abandons any lingering pub-rock vestiges for a full immersion into prog rock. Frontloading the album with the 14-minute “Telegraph Road”—the remaining four songs are all shorter, but usually only by an order of half—the band positions itself way out in space, a journey assisted by the addition of keyboardist Alan Clark and rhythm guitarist Hal Lindes. The additional musicians allow Knopfler and Ilsley to drift, pushing texture into the foreground and underscoring the group’s often unspoken debt to Pink Floyd—an inevitable comparison, thanks to the crawling keyboards and dextrous single-note guitar solos. In places, Dire Straits sound almost like they were working toward a rock-oriented spin on new-age music, one where the sonics overwhelmed the songwriting.
Songs came crashing back into the spotlight on Brothers in Arms. Stripping away the excesses of Love Over Gold, Dire Straits distilled a shimmering, atmospheric sound that could withstand industrial-strength rock’n’roll, cowboy laments, and heartache alike. That delicate balance between songcraft and austere atmosphere is key to the album’s phenomenal success: It could appeal to traditionalists and modernists alike. Some of Knopfler’s sturdiest songs are here, such as the pining “So Far Away” and “Why Worry,” a tune so lovely the Everly Brothers covered it soon after its release. Listening to Brothers in Arms decades later, its moodiness is striking, particularly when Knopfler’s guitar glides atop Clark’s keyboards; this is the sound modern acolytes like the War on Drugs and Jason Isbell have adopted as their own.
Brothers in Arms is also home to “Money for Nothing” and “Walk of Life,” a pair of smash singles that helped sustain Dire Straits’ popularity into the 1990s. Like “Industrial Disease” before it, “Walk of Life” is the rockin’ anomaly on Brothers in Arms, but its cheerful, old-time rock’n’roll became a standard on screen and in sports arenas alike. As popular as it was, “Walk of Life” was overshadowed by “Money for Nothing,” a screed against music videos cannily given a cutting-edge video that made it a staple on MTV. Sung from the gruff perspective of a blue-collar appliance installer who can’t believe musicians draw a paycheck, the song theoretically gives the songwriter license to portray his character’s homophobia in the third person, but the song’s verse about the “little faggot with the earring and the makeup” is jarring and distasteful. Heard in close proximity to “Les Boys,” it’s hard to hear it as simply Knopfler singing in character, the way his idol Randy Newman did on “Rednecks."
Some critics did call out Knopfler about this “Money for Nothing” verse back in 1985—Robert Christgau noted the singer-songwriter somehow got the word on the radio “with no static from the PMRC”—and Canadian radio ultimately banned the song in 2011. The controversy may dog Dire Straits, but it’s never quite tarnished the group, possibly because Brothers in Arms was simply too big: It was certified platinum 14 times in the UK, nine times in the U.S. The record’s success afforded the group the opportunity to take an extended hiatus, allowing Mark Knopfler to pursue his country-rock busman’s holiday the Notting Hillbillies and cut a duet album with his hero Chet Atkins in 1990.
A year later, Dire Straits lurched back into action for On Every Street. The archetype of a ’90s mega-album, On Every Street was bigger than its predecessor in every way: longer, louder, slicker, steelier. Outwardly, it announced itself as a big deal, but its pleasures were modest. Dire Straits seemed to come to life when Vince Gill picked up his guitar on the rollicking novelty “The Bug,” and they took full advantage of George Martin’s arrangements on the knowingly nostalgic slow-dance number “Ticket to Heaven,” but when they attempted to conjure a bit of “Money for Nothing” swagger on “Heavy Fuel,” they sounded listless. This sense of fatigue runs throughout On Every Street, its enervation accentuated by the album’s CD bloat; where earlier Dire Straits albums wrapped things up at an efficient five or seven songs, this rambled through 12, overstaying its welcome.
Somehow, Knopfler sensed Dire Straits had overstayed their welcome, too. He pulled the plug on the group in the mid ’90s, pursuing a decidedly understated solo career and never once getting lured back for a reunion, despite the prospect of larger paychecks. When the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, he never acknowledged the honor publicly. His brother David, who played with the band at the outset, also sat out the festivities, as did Withers: instead, Illsley accepted on behalf of the group, with Clark and Guy Fletcher in tow. Knopfler’s absence carried the message that Dire Straits belonged to the past, a band to be relegated to anthologies like this one. Beyond the box set’s nostalgic charm, what’s interesting about the group’s collected catalog is what it says about their genre and era. Over the course of six studio albums, Dire Straits evolved from eccentric oddities into smooth commodities, neatly encapsulating classic rock’s own journey from the fringes to the center of the establishment.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 23, 2020 | 8 | 8ff3c85f-95ee-4c89-aa0e-2dee54c856f3 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The latest record from the Austin trio is split in two halves: elaborate, hellish metal and dissonant chamber music. | The latest record from the Austin trio is split in two halves: elaborate, hellish metal and dissonant chamber music. | Portrayal of Guilt: Devil Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/portrayal-of-guilt-devil-music/ | Devil Music | There are so many ways music can make people uncomfortable, and Portrayal of Guilt have tried nearly all of them. The Austin trio’s journey from screamo to blackened noise culminated in last year’s Christfucker, where new levels of extremity and ugliness were amplified by the band’s command of dynamics: It could make blank space sound just as terrifying as wall-to-wall static. Devil Music is a more straightforward and refined version of the same idea, an exploration of the greening skeleton beneath Christfucker’s rotting skin.
On Devil Music, whose two halves present the same five songs in radically different arrangements, Portrayal of Guilt bring their energy to bear on composition and form as much as the actual performance. These songs are elaborately plotted, moving efficiently from section to section, though played with a ferocity that makes them feel like they’ve been belched out spontaneously. Their complexity is made plain by the album’s second half, in which the songs from the first are presented as chamber music, re-arranged predominantly for cello, french horn, and tuba. Symphonic metal has existed for nearly as long as metal itself, but these resurrected versions don’t invest the music with a greater drama or make Portrayal of Guilt’s evil feel like anything more cosmic than the product of a few misanthropic dudes.
Portrayal of Guilt sound firmly in control, even when they’re playing warp-speed black metal, and the album’s most moving moments are the result of subtle changes. There is none of the blitzing antsiness of grindcore, none of the torpor of sludge; they’re focused enough to know when these songs feel naturally ready to move on—then they hold onto them for a moment longer. Opener “One Last Taste of Heaven” ramps from strutting nu-metal to anxious blast beats and into a muddy groove in its first 30 seconds, each change articulated by drummer James Beveridge’s shifting of the beat. He’s everywhere on Devil Music, digging deep trenches, foaming up into maximalism, executing wind-sprints; the perpetual ringing of his cymbals surrounds the music like a brassy, acidic container.
Even the more obvious moves feel novel. Singer and guitarist Matt King has spoken frequently about his love of horror movies and his desire to create musical jump-scares. As in film, the quick cut from relative calm to burning chaos can be gimmicky, but when the seething, repetitive industrial grind of “Burning Hand” is snipped by the opening maelstrom of “Where Angels Come to Die”’s black metal, it’s genuinely terrifying, and a reminder that even the most brutal sounds can become a comfort if you sit with them long enough.
King’s vocal roar blots out much of what he has to say as a lyricist, but what comes through seems to have been written from deep within the thickets of anxiety—or while being fucked by satan on a bed of nails. There’s a morbid tenderness to his songwriting, and at times he sounds like Anaïs Nin describing a Cannibal Corpse album cover: “The cold touch grazes my cheek before her fingers enter my mouth,” he sings in the title track, and his coo of “No one will ever hurt me the way you do” over a thick Hum riff in the song’s fadeout is Devil Music’s one purely angelic moment.
By stripping away much of the distortion, the songs’ sense of interdependence becomes more obvious during the second half of the record, giving the album the topography of a symphony with none of the majesty. The chamber versions are smaller and leaner, and the clarity of the sound shows the warts and abrasions in King’s riffing; his melodies bulge and shrink at unexpected moments. Cellist Rachel Gawell mimics most of King’s guitar parts, sawing open “One Last Taste of Heaven” and “Untitled” in a way that reveals the latter’s riff as an echo and elaboration of the former. You can hear elements of Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood score in how Gawell plays her cello so tightly it sounds like it’s choking, and elsewhere she briefly nods toward Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. But she and french horn player Rachel Drehmann and tuba player Joe Exley use the natural midrange and bass registers of their instruments to keep this music close to the earth. Like Lingua Ignota’s Caligula, Devil Music recognizes that there’s just as much horror and pain to be found in the light of day as there is in the darkest crevices. It’s dirty, smudged music, bitter with the terroir of suffering. | 2023-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | April 27, 2023 | 7.4 | 8ffe0173-4e74-44c0-be89-1dd39f181ed6 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
Inspired by a move into Manhattan, the adventurous drummer fuses worlds of avant-jazz and electronica in a dozen restrained pieces that feel like streetscape scores. | Inspired by a move into Manhattan, the adventurous drummer fuses worlds of avant-jazz and electronica in a dozen restrained pieces that feel like streetscape scores. | Eli Keszler: Stadium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eli-keszler-stadium/ | Stadium | For more than a decade, experimental percussionist and sound artist Eli Keszler has dismantled the idea of what a drum can be and how it should sound. He’s done this on enormous scales, turning Boston’s Cyclorama building and a Louisiana water tower into makeshift monolithic instruments. When Keszler pares down to just a drum kit, even those massive installations begin to feel small. For 2016’s Last Signs of Speed, he rendered a seemingly infinite array of sounds—hits, taps, scratches, rattles, creaks, clinks, thuds—from a kit, the results skirting the edges of techno, jazz, and modern composition. That adaptability has made him a stellar collaborator for experimental greats, from Keith Fullerton Whitman and Oren Ambarchi to Laurel Halo and Oneohtrix Point Never. On Laurel Halo’s Dust, for instance, he sounded as excellent melting into her electro-symphonic vision as he did joining her in a stripped-down duo. Keszler’s intricate playing suggests he could take on an army of Aphex Twin’s computer-controlled acoustic instruments, barehanded.
On Stadium, an album inspired by his recent move from south Brooklyn to Manhattan, Keszler makes music as expansive as the borough itself. Though geographically close, the areas are worlds apart, and the record matches the latter’s bustle at every step. Listening to Keszler’s music in a place like Manhattan has previously seemed daunting; try navigating overcrowded streets and clogged subways while hearing the disorienting “Sudden Laughter, Laughter Without Reason” without getting the spins. But Stadium begins with the feather-light jazz of “Measurement Doesn’t Change the System At All,” where cool drum leads and synth splashes that recall Bitches Brew glide like a subway leaving its stop. For an hour, his dynamic highs and lows match the unpredictable velocity of a place where something wondrous, tragic, hilarious, or simply frustrating seems to linger behind every corner.
Even as moments skew lively or contemplative or purely abstract, pieces like “Flying Floor for U.S. Airways” and “Lotus Awnings” reveal subtle complexities in flux. The latter lifts things early with nimble polyrhythms and a sprightly Mellotron hook, but Keszler shifts between tension and release as uneasy pianos and percussive drones drift into focus from behind. By the end, the piece flirts with atonality, that melodic loop now outnumbered and swallowed. Those two tracks bookend Stadium’s devastating epic, “We Live in Pathetic Temporal Urgency,” where Keszler’s percussion spreads out like a skyline. The drums are restrained for most of the song’s seven minutes, hanging still to let the layers of synths and horns haunt. It’s a bleak passage, capturing the daily communal that traveling strangers share in their “pathetic temporal urgency.” This triptych is only one example of the album’s brilliant sequencing. The delicate trio of “Which Swarms Around It,” “Fifty Four to Madrid,” and the horn-dappled “French Lick” rest in the center of the album like a valley. Those constant shifts in velocity align Keszler perfectly with Manhattan’s coherent chaos and place Stadium’s elastic rhythms comfortably between Autechre’s Confield and the free jazz odysseys of Milford Graves.
For all the complexity of Stadium, its true genius lies in understatement and how a thousand small sounds build into a larger vision. The album ends on its lightest note with “Bell Underpinnings,” where vibraphones twinkle over a submerged bed of subtones. Recalling exotica king Martin Denny at his most atmospheric, this is Keszler at his most playful. It should blend perfectly with the winter New York streets when jingling bells from charities soundtrack busy sidewalks. It’s one of the many instances where you can picture this music adapting to any season, city block, or neighborhood. That’s ultimately Keszler’s greatest accomplishment: He doesn’t try to make sense of a subject as cacophonous as Manhattan so much as he simply frames it. | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Shelter Press | October 22, 2018 | 8 | 8fff8f4b-4272-4159-98c4-ddc3c7246b24 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Awkward titles are a given at this point, but the legendary hip-hop outfit brings the musical goods this time out, resulting in their best album in years. | Awkward titles are a given at this point, but the legendary hip-hop outfit brings the musical goods this time out, resulting in their best album in years. | Public Enemy: How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul??? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10926-how-you-sell-soul-to-a-souless-people-who-sold-their-soul/ | How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul??? | Entering their third decade of hip-hop proselytizing and nation-building-- lest history forget, they were blasted by students in city squares during the overthrow of the former Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic-- Public Enemy has entered a productive reclusion on their 11th full-length.
A far cry from their recent self-indulgent pouts, 2002's Revolverution and 2005's New Whirl Odor, How You Sell Soul to a Souless People Who Sold Their Soul??? gets at the finicky emotional recipe for P.E.'s success. Instead of pretending to strut and rage à la those aforementioned mid-1990s old grey mare trudges, How You Sell Soul (there is no way to cleanly truncate most P.E. titles) revisits instrumental blueprints from Fear of a Black Planet and It Takes a Nation of Millions, enshrined intros-- "The brother don't swear he nice/ He KNOWS he nice!"-- and plays the self-referencing cards with aplomb. Because when piss and vinegar is your blood type, there's no such thing as tempering. Old age is just a new window to shoot from.
The band combats "age" with disclosure: The liner notes sprawl like yearbook memories, thanking old AC/DC records for inspiration alongside Chuck's hand-holding descriptions of just how and why each song was constructed-- sample history, just WHY he respects KRS so much and just needed him for "Sex, Drugs & Violence". Chuck D even tones down his still-glorious solo megaphone riot and concedes: "Thank you for letting us be ourselves/ So don't mind me if I repeat myself/ These simple lines be good for your health" ("Harder Than You Think"). Simple chestnuts they are: kids gotta read, governments gotta be questioned, and gangster rap is fine, as long as you know it's rap, not reality.
And the skeletal disclosure works. Aside from a few ungainly, obvious missteps-- trying to play the Scott Storch melodic game on "Amerikan Gangster", wasting the KRS run-in on a track that sounds like a D12 refuse pile ("Sex, Drugs & Violence")-- the album is finely sequenced. Newsreel-ish interludes punctuate the album into thematic thirds (rebirth, bitches!/appraising the day/stumping for the apocalypse). The nakedly obvious structure loosens everyone's valves. Chuck worries about images and phonetics-- "watch the masses move as a mass of switches," "Botswana to Watts and Queens." The best melodies are given the space (Read: minimal Flav howling, Chuck pays attention to breath control) to breathe-- see the stubble-funk trash on "Frankenstar", the Commodores sample on "Escapism", and, the album's best track, Redman's burbling production and winsome guest verse on "Can You Hear Me Now?"
When How You Sell Soul rounds the corner into its raging final third, there's a nice little epiphany. With the way we now appreciate and consume music, P.E. may never be able to change America again (they probably have a bigger contemporary fanbase outside this continent), but they still can light up a few souls. No matter their pop "relevance," they refuse to, and refuse to let their listeners, be complacent. Read Orwell, beat Yung Joc with a trashcan, don't watch CNN. Just. Do. Something. When the apocalypse is finally unveiled, don't be the hollow man Joc-ing your way toward Bethlehem. | 2007-12-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2007-12-06T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rap | Slam Jamz | December 6, 2007 | 7.1 | 90052ee8-cdfa-4fa9-b7d4-93c5e2df9ed9 | Evan McGarvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-mcgarvey/ | null |
The singer-songwriter pays tribute to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Arthur Russell, and more on a set of covers that play like quiet seances. | The singer-songwriter pays tribute to Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Arthur Russell, and more on a set of covers that play like quiet seances. | Shannon Lay : Covers Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shannon-lay-covers-vol-1/ | Covers Vol. 1 | Shannon Lay has always had an intimate connection with her heroes. On “November,” from her 2019 album August, she pondered the fate of Nick Drake and tried to consider him as a flesh-and-blood human rather than just another influence: “I think of him often,” she sings softly. “Wonder if he’s listening/I wonder if a voice so quiet could ever die.” For Lay there is consolation in the notion that Drake might live on in the songs he left behind, and perhaps even in her songs, whether they mention him or not.
It's telling that more than half of the artists on Lay’s first covers album are dead: Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Jackson C. Frank, Arthur Russell, and Lou Reed. Lay’s versions of their songs are seances, a means of direct communication, but her music is never overly reverent or indulgently ghostly. Rather, she respects the quietness of the originals, that undying quality, and Lay knows that restraint can focus the melancholy of Sibylle Baier’s “I Lost Something in the Hills” and sharpen the barbs of Russell’s “Close My Eyes.”
Nothing here is as transformative as Lay’s live cover of Black Box’s “Everybody, Everybody,” which recasts the ’90s dance banger as an indie-folk call-and-response—without the back-patting irony of so many cross-genre covers. Rather than grand or ambitious, her interpretations rely on subtle changes, things you might not pick up the first time around. She distinguishes her version of Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” from the many, many, many others by employing a more forceful vocal to give it an unexpectedly optimistic tone. Rather than a lament like the original, hers is a rumination on interconnectedness: It becomes oddly reassuring to know that everybody everywhere is motivated by the same blues.
Lay can’t quite muster the spite and bitterness of Smith’s “Angeles,” but through her deft fingerpicking and Debbie Neigher’s piano flourishes she recasts the song more as a question than a statement. Drake’s “From the Morning” ends with a coda cribbed from the instrumental “Horn,” also from Pink Moon. It’s a nice, knowing touch that reminds you that she’s drawing inspiration not only as a singer and songwriter but also as a guitarist.
Among these heroes, it’s especially interesting to hear her tackle songs by her peers. Lay has toured as a guitarist with Ty Segall, so she’s intimately familiar with his sense of melody and lyrics, with his own set of heroes. “The Keepers,” from his 2013 album Sleeper, settles comfortably among these older songs, with Lay adding a new layer to its exhortation to radical creativity: “We can still dream and shake our hands /And sing a song so grand.” By contrast, she drains the psychedelic queasiness from OCS’s “I Am Slow,” replacing it with a halting guitar theme that sounds like an ellipsis at the end of this collection. It’s not the most satisfying conclusion, but it does remind you that Covers Vol. 1 is not a self-contained album but the first installment of a larger project. These recordings suggest Lay isn’t merely cataloging her influences: She is showing us how she continues to live with them. | 2023-04-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | April 18, 2023 | 7.1 | 90131461-92f9-4aa8-93de-d9af9ac30084 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
These 1981 devotional recordings for voice and Wurlitzer, meant to guide meditation through chanting, offer an alternate version of the cosmic jazz visionary’s synthesizer masterpiece, Turiya Sings. | These 1981 devotional recordings for voice and Wurlitzer, meant to guide meditation through chanting, offer an alternate version of the cosmic jazz visionary’s synthesizer masterpiece, Turiya Sings. | Alice Coltrane: Kirtan: Turiya Sings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alice-coltrane-kirtan-turiya-sings/ | Kirtan: Turiya Sings | In 1981, Alice Coltrane sang on record for the first time, at the behest of God. Having lived many musical lives—church organist, bebop pianist, cosmic jazz visionary, intrepid experimental composer—she was by then serving as spiritual director for her interfaith Vedantic Center in Southern California, seeking new modes of transcendence. It would be a couple of years before Coltrane opened her Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, but already she was deep into a personal journey in consciousness. She had begun a transfiguration following the death of her husband John in 1967, and her auspicious meeting, not long after, with guru and counterculture icon Swami Satchidananda.
“Several years ago, following a long period of elementary meditating and reading of some of the diverse books on spirituality and world religions, I felt the deepest transcendental longing to realize the Supreme Lord,” Coltrane wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, in 1977. “This longing within the depths of my heart was soon acknowledged, for within a short period of time I experienced the first rays of illumination and spiritual re-awakening.”
Coltrane is still best known for her 1971 record bearing Satchidananda’s name, which mixed cascading harp and droning tanpura with Pharoah Sanders’ expressive saxophone. But a sense of spiritual awe suffused her music from her 1968 debut as bandleader onward. Whether in her glittering post-bop or her orchestral proto-noise psychedelia, Coltrane’s compositions make you feel connected to yourself and the world with preternatural clarity. They make you believe things you otherwise wouldn’t; they may even facilitate the process of temporarily suspending fear. Coltrane spent the second half of the 1970s releasing revelatory albums like 1976’s Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and 1977’s Transcendence, which fulfilled and challenged her major-label recording contract with manifestations of her Universal Consciousness.
Turiya Sings was the first album she made alone. Having left the commercial music industry behind, she released these uncanny compositions based on Hindu devotionals, or bhajans, on cassette through her Vedantic Center’s publishing imprint, Avatar Book Institute. Luxuriating in every prayerful syllable, naming deities like Krishna and Ramachandra, Coltrane made a small number of the tapes available to her students and Vedantic Center visitors. Though she used relatively spare components—the subtitle of the original album cover read, “Devotional Songs in Original Composition with Organ, Strings and Synthesizer”—they contain an unusual, self-contained grandeur. In the aching shimmer of these hymns, which evoke both South Indian classical music and the Black church, you can hear Coltrane’s life coursing through: her journey from gospel accompanist to jazz prodigy, the drama of the European classical music she loved, the soulful melodies of her Detroit youth, grief and exaltation. Yet the power of this music is elemental. The tone of the original Turiya Sings is as certain and spectral as anything associated with the Coltrane name. Her voice hovers distantly above the mix as if she’s floating, or astral projecting—which she wrote about extensively in Monument Eternal—like a woman actively inhabiting a higher dimension.
The recordings of Coltrane’s ashram period have taken on a mythical status in her catalog over the past decade, particularly Turiya Sings, which has circulated online and on bootleg cassettes, never officially re-released. The 2017 Luaka Bop compilation of Coltrane’s ecstatic music included no tracks from Turiya Sings. If there is reluctance to make those particular recordings commercially available, it’s understandable: The music emerged at the very moment Coltrane was trying to divorce herself from the material world. On a more technical level, according to a label representative, the original Turiya Sings remains formally unreleased because the Coltrane family has never found its master synthesizer recordings.
What Coltrane’s son Ravi did find—around the time of his mother’s final album, 2004’s miraculous Translinear Light—were 1981 recordings she made of Turiya Sings featuring only her voice and Wurlitzer electric organ, an instrument that she once said came to her in a divine vision. (“In one meditation… the precise instrument I should get was revealed to me,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t need to do any research; it was just conveyed to me.”) These pared-back tracks of Coltrane’s most minimal music are now released as Kirtan: Turiya Sings, like seeds of the cassette that also, in some sense, expand it. As Ravi Coltrane writes in a producer’s note, this is “functional music,” meant to guide the practice of chanting: creating vibrations inside of oneself in order to transcend, like embodied meditations. During a call-and-response kirtan performance, the leader sings devotionals, typically with a harmonium pump organ, and the audience joins in collectively. Despite the surge of interest in kirtan in the U.S. in the 1990s—and Coltrane’s groundbreaking fusion of gospel and jazz elements into the form—her spiritual music remained little known in the U.S., as scholar Franya J. Berkman notes in her 2010 Coltrane biography, in considerable part because she didn’t perform it outside of her ashram.
Where before, the stately music of Turiya Sings had evoked celestial bodies, inquisitive synth lines whirring as if in accordance with their own cosmology, now there’s the tactility of earthly reality. The click of the organ on “Jagadishwar” makes its soul-stirring melody—which Coltrane reimagined unmistakably on Translinear Light as well—feel newly intimate, and she enunciates each word with enlightened precision. It puts you in the room, into electric air. By this point, Coltrane had been playing the Wurlitzer for a decade, having first used it on 1971’s mind-bending galactic trip Universal Consciousness. Her subtle flourishes of extra notes make the compositions bloom and groove anew. Her mystic organ lines seem attuned to the drone of the universe.
Coltrane’s singing is rich and stoic, putting stillness, humility, and conviction into every incantatory curve. Many of these Sanskrit chants are about non-attachment, channeling the ancient wisdom found in such sacred texts as the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Through a resolute melody on the liturgical centerpiece “Charanam,” she praises a “Supremely unattached/God of Gods,” and on “Jai Ramachandra” she delivers “Victory to Ram, who destroys worldly ties.” Her newly autonomous sound was one of self-liberation, delivering a direct line to healing. The fact that Coltrane is able to command so much movement with such stark instrumentation, as on the sweeping, 11-minute “Rama Katha,” or in the deep, wild melodic contours of the closing “Pranadhana,” is enchanting and entrancing. This was a woman who had a decade prior conducted her own 25-piece orchestra, distilling all of that singular majesty into a solitary voice for the purposes of collective rapture.
Listening to the Kirtan: Turiya Sings recordings feels less like discovering a hissy cassette lost in time than what it must have been like to experience Coltrane leading the songs at one of her legendary Sunday services. Each composition steadily ascends with a charge of aliveness. “Music can be very complex, very technical, very experimental, but it can also be very spiritual,” Coltrane told Yoga Journal in 1982. “Out of all of these considerations, spirituality, as music, is what I appreciate the most.” Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure. The cover of the 1982 album depicts a devout portrait of Coltrane surrounded by deep unclouded blue. Once, she wrote in Monument Eternal, the Lord said to her, “Hey Turiya [...] be so big, that sky will learn Sky.” Listening is an act of expansion. But to really understand Kirtan: Turiya Sings is to answer its call with your voice.
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. | 2021-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Impulse! | July 17, 2021 | 8.5 | 901a232b-cf55-47ba-ba72-accec9f18ba7 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ |
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