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Deerhunter guitarist makes his solo debut, a hazy bedroom reverie that shouldn't surprise listeners accustomed to his main band. Bradford Cox guests. | Deerhunter guitarist makes his solo debut, a hazy bedroom reverie that shouldn't surprise listeners accustomed to his main band. Bradford Cox guests. | Lotus Plaza: The Floodlight Collective | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12844-the-floodlight-collective/ | The Floodlight Collective | It'll be a shame if Lockett Pundt's solo debut gets lost in all the light and heat coming from his main band. But it won't be surprising. In a rare interview, the shy Deerhunter-er told blog BBQCHICKENROBOT that he started recording his album at the beginning of 2007. Since then, Deerhunter has released Cryptograms, the Fluorescent Grey EP, and last year's Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.; lead singer Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound has released Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, plus a staggering number of mp3s, mixes, and non-album tracks. At shows, Pundt can be seen strumming wordlessly, staring toward his effects pedals.
And yet the sole figure behind Lotus Plaza has had a huge-- and all too often unacknowledged-- role in establishing Deerhunter's hallucinatory sound. The Atlanta band's chaotic 2005 debut, Deerhunter aka Turn It Up Faggot, gets kind of a bad rap, no doubt in part because Cox disavowed the thing. But it shows that Deerhunter didn't turn into the shoegaze-drenched dreamweavers we know and love until after Pundt joined. Pundt wrote the music for some of Deerhunter's most indelible songs-- "Strange Lights", "Like New"-- and made his singing debut on Microcastle. The Atlas Sound album, which features Pundt's guitar on "Cold as Ice", is dedicated to him.
So that the first Lotus Plaza album, The Floodlight Collective, is a hazy bedroom reverie shouldn't surprise listeners accustomed to other Deerhunter-related projects, the hypnotic solo work of Panda Bear, the lonesome longing of Jeremy Jay, or to a lesser extent the introverted homemade racket of Wavves and Dum Dum Girls. Produced by Brian Foote of Nudge, the album submerges plaintive vocals in layer after reverb-washed cloud layer of ethereal guitar atmospherics, achieving a woozy and sometimes barely intelligible prettiness. That can best be heard on tracks like the tambourine-jangling "Whiteout"-- its gentle melody gaining force on repeat listens-- or the squealing, Quickspace-esque rocker "What Grows?" (it does, an abstract Yo La Tengo). Pundt plays all instruments, except for Cox's turn on Factory-ready drums for the sweet dream pop of "Different Mirrors"; a bouncy Supremes beat gives way to outer-space Roy Orbison on "Quicksand". The krautrock pulse and piano-dripping radiance of seven-minute centerpiece "Antoine" sound like a Stereolab disciple starting to come into his own.
As with bashful Blur guitarist Graham Coxon on his own solo debut more than a decade ago, Pundt at times lets his diffidence get the best of him. For all the subtle detail in a track like the mournful, pitch-shifted "Sunday Night"-- which vaguely recalls Atlas Sound's "Bite Marks" in its nostalgic main riff-- with Pundt's melodic and conceptual strengths so submerged, the album can begin to run together. That's probably the point: From the washed-out cover art to the few discernible lyrics, The Floodlight Collective is obsessed with the indistinctness of memory, the dazzlement of bright lights. Opener "Red Oak Way", maybe Pundt's "Hazel St.", longs for "sunny Saturdays watching cartoons in the living room," warm rays shining through the windowpane. So The Floodlight Collective is a mostly elegant listen, and one whose failings are part of its theme: Like a vague recollection, it's still a little hard to hold onto after it's over-- pretty albeit somewhat ephemeral. Memory knows before knowing remembers, sure, but too much light makes the baby go blind. | 2009-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Kranky | March 20, 2009 | 6.8 | 901b9ae5-61af-4d1b-a31a-c563a2a95c43 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Australian duo Jagwar Ma’s gleeful debut Howlin’ evokes Madchester in its heady swirl of baggy beats, unabashed Beach Boys melodies, and charmingly silly lyrics. It's a backwards looking record about loving the present moment. | The Australian duo Jagwar Ma’s gleeful debut Howlin’ evokes Madchester in its heady swirl of baggy beats, unabashed Beach Boys melodies, and charmingly silly lyrics. It's a backwards looking record about loving the present moment. | Jagwar Ma: Howlin' | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18225-jagwar-ma-howlin/ | Howlin' | Let’s take account of Madchester’s enduring images: a heavy-lidded Ian Brown moaning “I wanna be adored” but not sounding like he wants to be awake. Bez freaky-dancin' his way through the Happy Mondays' prime and not even being the most loutish guy in the group. The rumors that Shaun Ryder ditched a meeting with EMI to score heroin, which was referred to as "KFC" by the band. And the sweaters. Point being that while the clash of ecstasy, acid house, and rock'n'roll resulted in a brief period of brilliant, forward-thinking music, the leading lights of the scene were never all that bright. That hindsight puts an interesting perspective on Australian duo Jagwar Ma’s gleeful debut Howlin’; their early singles cast them as the purest Madchester revivalists in some time and the full-length delivers on that promise. The music is a heady swirl of baggy beats and unabashed Beach Boys melodies, while the lyrics are wholly uninterested in anything intellectual. It’s silly enough to cause skepticism and charming enough to make you wonder what kind of scrutiny Screamadelica or Thrills, Pills & Bellyaches would meet if they were released in 2013.
The album gets its title from a line on the shambling “Uncertainty”: “When you’re gloomy/ Howlin’ looks so good to me.” The characters within Howlin’ are gloomy, they’re certainly not depressed; nothing that a little howlin’ couldn’t fix. They howl because they’re confused by loneliness, and unlike fellow Australian psych pop space cadets Tame Impala, solitude isn’t bliss; it can be externalized and rendered as a goofy Austin Powers-pop trifle on “That Loneliness”. They howl because it’s women, not drugs, that offer transcendence and Jagwar Ma needs the hook up; fluid breakbeats and classic psychedelic effects (backwards guitar, naturally) drive “Man I Need” and “Come Save Me”, tart and hooky songs too bashful to be overbearing. This is festival stuff, the movements coming off a bit drunk and a little wearied by the sun. The beat-driven tracks, “What Love” and “Four”, aren’t actually dance music, per se-- they lack the precision and rigor of proper electronic music. When Gabriel Winterfield yells “exercise your chemistry!” it's meaningless, but at least lets you know this isn’t rocket science.
In that sense, Jagwar Ma’s guilelessness works in their favor; they’re hardly the first guys who’ve banged the drums on Madchester's behalf, but they avoid the shamanistic mock profundity that resulted in a similarly positioned band named the Music making a song called “The People”. Ewan Pearson’s mixing is sweet, slick, and colorful as Skittles shells, meaning Jagwar Ma avoid the leathery cock-rocking that marred the Big Pink; the latter boasted “these girls fall like dominos,” whereas when Winterfield yelps “let me show me you babe just all the man I can be!” he sounds ready to pull a bouquet of flowers from behind his back. Only on the last two tracks do Jagwar Ma aspire to “serious” artistic ambitions, and the result is a preview of Howlin’s “darker,” “introspective” and duller sequel. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
It’s possible to be incredibly ambitious and disarming at the same time, and in that way, Howlin’ isn't that different in approach to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories-- a backwards looking record about loving the present moment, a big-tent affair that can be misunderstood as a reactionary record. (It's no less reactionary than Noel Gallagher claiming Howlin' to be more important than an Oasis reunion.) From the moment “What Love” fades in with its loose-limbed, floppy rhythm, Howlin’ ensures everybody will be dancing, few will be doin' it right, but they'll all be feelin’ alright regardless. | 2013-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Marathon Artists | June 21, 2013 | 7.7 | 90266a2b-db53-439a-8c22-126312e5c097 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Positioning their alter ego Mhysa as a queer black underground pop star for the cyber resistance, the multimedia artist E. Jane constructs an elaborate alternate universe out of experimental club rhythms. | Positioning their alter ego Mhysa as a queer black underground pop star for the cyber resistance, the multimedia artist E. Jane constructs an elaborate alternate universe out of experimental club rhythms. | Mhysa: fantasii | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mhysa-fantasii/ | fantasii | The Maryland-born and Philadelphia-based multimedia artist E. Jane (who uses they/them pronouns) described their pop-star alter ego Mhysa in a recent interview with Rhizome as “a part of myself I think white institutions tried to smother. Now I keep her with me and bring her out when we’re safe to be, preferably in spaces where Black women can just be themselves.” It’s apparent even from the first few seconds of fantasii, Mhysa’s debut album, the extent to which Jane and Mhysa actively construct such spaces: Mhysa’s warped, pitch-shifted vocals beckon over twinkling notes, “Come with me/Come with me/To feel that we belong,” coaxing the listener into a fantasy world in which Mhysa puts her own aspirations, feelings, and experiences unapologetically at the center.
Jane is a prolific artist. Whether releasing music as one-half of the blistering performance and sound art duo SCRAAATCH (the duo’s other half, chukwumaa, aka lawd knows, produced three songs on fantasii) or exhibiting their solo work—a recent exhibition, Lavendra, explored the cultural legacy of black divas from the 1990s like Brandy, Aaliyah, and Whitney Houston—Jane seems most interested in constructing expansive utopian worlds where black femmes exist in all their complexities. Through Jane’s work as Mhysa, whom they describe as “a Queer Black Diva and underground popstar for the cyber resistance,” Jane seamlessly weaves together the various threads of their artistic practice, from twisted sonics to diva worship to Afrofuturist potentialities.
After releasing the haunting HIVEMIND EP via NON Records last year and five installations of the hyperactive “THOT FANTASY” mix series, fantasii finds Mhysa inhabiting a more focused conceptual space. An epic poem of sorts, fantasii narrates the multiple facets of Mhysa’s persona: “Glory Be Black,” which sounds like a spectral hymn, is in part a tribute to her grandfather, a gospel blues artist, while the bass-heavy “spectrum” and the propulsive “STROBE” are veritable club anthems. And while Mhysa sounds vulnerable on the R&B slow-burner and album highlight “Bb,” repeatedly asking if a former lover ever thinks about her, on the very next song poet Diamond Stingily freestyles over screeching, string-like synths and police sirens: “I’ll maybe text you in the morning/Good morning/But probably not.” This type of opposition is central to the album: Mhysa’s persona is at once soft (on the ringing “Siren Song”) and hard as nails (on the stuttering, glass-shattering “You Not About That Lyfe”), and she’s as inspired by the dulcet sounds of church choirs as she is the liberating rhythms of the club.
Epic poems traditionally chronicle the valiant tales of heroic figures, and fantasii also references pop culture icons, including Janet Jackson, Donna Summer, and TLC. Yet Mhysa concludes the album with a tribute to Doris Payne, the notorious, 86-year-old jewel thief who has allegedly used over 22 aliases to steal over two million dollars worth of jewelry over the last six decades. Payne’s lack of shame and defiant ability to actualize her desires, especially through her dynamic performances of identity, is precisely the spirit that fantasii’s 11 tracks capture. Constructing a space where antiheroes like Payne exist on the same plane as icons like Prince, fantasii is a fine showcase for Mhysa’s utopian vision. | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Halcyon Veil | August 2, 2017 | 7.8 | 9027ca1b-f5c4-48f6-9199-89fcb1d24ed6 | Rachel Hahn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-hahn/ | null |
The brilliant and unassuming debut from the young UK musician and composer is a benchmark in ambient jazz featuring outstanding players and delicately woven arrangements. | The brilliant and unassuming debut from the young UK musician and composer is a benchmark in ambient jazz featuring outstanding players and delicately woven arrangements. | Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nala-sinephro-space-18/ | Space 1.8 | Nala Sinephro learned to play the pedal harp in secret. She was 16 and studying jazz; in the evenings, when she was supposed to be practicing, she snuck turns on a stringed behemoth she discovered in one of her high school’s music rooms. Technically, it was off-limits, but Sinephro had a fascination with strings; she had grown up playing fiddle, learning folk songs by ear. The harp beckoned.
On Space 1.8, assisted by a rotating cast of musicians from the UK’s dynamic jazz scene, the Caribbean-Belgian musician still sometimes sounds like she is trying to evade prying ears. Whether jamming with her peers or multi-tracking solo compositions on pedal harp and modular synthesizer, she is a subtle presence, her tone liquid, mutable, mysterious—the cosmic background radiation to a galaxy of her own creation.
Recorded when she was just 22, Space 1.8 is the London-based musician’s debut album, though it sounds like the work of a far more experienced composer. On a suite of pieces that range from just over a minute in length to nearly 18 minutes, she weaves a loose fusion of jazz balladry, beat music, and the sort of beatless, synthesizer-centric whorls for which there’s no better word than “ambient.” Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz is an obvious touchstone; so is the otherworldly sound-shaping of Jon Hassell’s processed horn. Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ recent Promises is a tempting point of comparison, given the way Space 1.8 lays out soft, spongy electronics as the backdrop for emotive saxophone solos. Reed players Nubya Garcia, James Mollison, of the Ezra Collective, and Ahnansé—a saxophonist who has collaborated with a host of musicians including Garcia, Emma-Jean Thackray, and broken-beat icon IG Culture—all deliver standout performances. But Sinephro and her collaborators sound less concerned with precedent than possibility. Not so much interlocking as complementary, the album’s eight tracks—titled “Space 1” through “Space 8”—collectively map out a novel, singular terrain.
One sign of the strength of Sinephro’s vision is how well all the pieces fit together, despite their outward differences. The album opens in a blur, harp sparkling against bokeh-like splotches of synthesizer; distant crickets and what sounds like a rain stick lend additional scene-setting. Recognizable shapes come into focus on “Space 2,” a gentle sextet recording led first by Mollison’s tenor and then Lyle Barton’s piano. (Guitarist Shirley Tetteh, drummer Jake Long, and double bassist Rudi Creswick round out the diaphanous, dreamlike track; the whole ensemble breathes like a single organism.) Edges sharpen on “Space 3,” a 75-second excerpt from a three-hour session with drummer Eddie Hick (Sons of Kemet) and synth player Dwayne Kilvington, aka Wonky Logic. Each track sketches out a different space: different dimensions, different light, different air. But these are rarely static spheres. “Space 4,” a showcase for Garcia’s lyrical playing, begins with a kind of dewy, dawn-lit optimism, but as Barton, Long, and double bassist Twm Dylan lean into the changes, the mood intensifies; soon Garcia sounds like she’s scooping up fistfuls of dirt with every low note. It’s one of many powerfully cathartic moments on the album.
Sometimes Sinephro plays in broad strokes, tossing out lustrous glissandi like fairy dust. Sometimes she processes her harp so that it sounds like steel drums—an echo, perhaps, of her Caribbean heritage. Sometimes, she overdubs synths upon synths upon synths, and sometimes she’s barely there at all: In “Space 2,” she only becomes audible around three-quarters of the way through the song, when the other instruments fall away to reveal her softly glowing chords that pulse and change color, dimming and Dopplering, across a 90-second slide into silence. In moments like these, she feels less like a player seated at her instrument than a source of light.
Marked by an abiding calm, the album is quiet until it isn’t. “Space 6,” another trio piece with Mollison on sax and Long on drums, opens with flickering hi-hats and tightens like a pit in the stomach, snare and sax trading sharp retorts, until the whole thing seems to spin off its axis. Sinephro’s synths thicken and then change in pitch and timbre: grinding, almost serrated. The electronic suggestion of a heavy-metal pick slide scrapes across the stereo field. For the first time on the record, the music turns heavy; swirling in the turmoil are intimations of grief, confusion, anger. It is a brief outburst, one whose extremity is tempered by the closing “Space 8,” an 18-minute meditation in which Ahnansé’s tender saxophone is cradled within dozens of layers of processed harp, synthesizer, and guitar. But the force of “Space 6”’s impact lingers.
Sinephro wrote and recorded Space 1.8 in 2018 and 2019, in the wake of her recovery from a serious illness, and she has described the process of making the album as “medicinal.” You can detect a hint of that medicine in the music, particularly when her synths and strings pool into a warm bath of light, or focus their energy into a cutting beam. Where the music of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders can tap into spiritual transcendence, leaving one’s body and reaching a higher plane, Space 1.8 feels more grounded, more interior. Even its most abstract pieces, like the long, amorphous closing track, are not really cosmic in scope. “Space 8,” despite its considerable duration, is less about journeying great distances than finding solace in one’s own bones, one’s own being. That deliberate smallness, that inner focus, is the source of much of this understated record’s outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, feels as simple and as steadying as breathing.
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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. | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Warp | September 16, 2021 | 8.3 | 902a78e3-1884-4148-8fc0-0379027f668b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s striking second album excels at a kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail. | The singer-songwriter’s striking second album excels at a kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail. | Nilüfer Yanya: PAINLESS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nilufer-yanya-painless/ | PAINLESS | Time can’t heal a wound you choose to leave open. All over PAINLESS, the second album by Nilüfer Yanya, the London songwriter lingers in feelings of heartbreak, dislocation, and rejection, and refuses to let them go. “Don’t like whenever I’m not in pain/Peeling back, not noticing/The blood and bones beneath my skin,” she sings on “midnight sun,” one of several disquieting lyrics about doing herself harm or inviting whoever hurt her to go ahead and grind her heart underfoot while they’re at it. The sting proves that this thing was once alive, even if she has to dig her nails under the scab to still feel it.
Yanya has always written such physical music. Her voice is a tender muscle; her songs have a sinewy twist, and her loud-quiet guitar can flood in as unexpectedly as cheeks flushing at the wrong moment. What’s remarkable about PAINLESS is how she whittles almost everything down—the near-monomaniacal emotional range, the abrupt, broken language, her palette reduced to smoke and ash and nerves—and makes even more of an impact. Partly that’s down to her beautiful melodies, which remain mercifully intact, looping in sync with her circular thoughts and fractal fears. “Troubled don’t count the ways I’m broken/Your troubles won’t count, not once we’ve spoken/What troubles me now if I tear this open/Some people won’t have the faintest notion,” runs the cracked lullaby of “trouble,” each line starting with the flicker of a chest heave.
Yanya could easily have followed her rollicking 2019 debut, Miss Universe, with an even more festival-ready record, but instead, this bold songwriter strands us with her in a state of alienation, where no touch or feeling works like it used to. If there’s an arrow from Miss Universe to PAINLESS, it’s in the former’s “Heat Rises,” a last-nerves gasp set to an insistent drum machine. That bristling electronic spine anchors many of these songs, supplying their desecrated foundations. Its tempos are terse, abrupt and unrelenting, mirroring the inevitability of time, a march Yanya can’t stop no matter how hard she tries. “the dealer” runs on a restless breakbeat that she attacks with loose-wrist, grimy guitar: “Patience there she goes/Cadence set in stone,” she sings in the spacious middle eight, as if standing on a cliff edge and watching it vanish. “L/R” observes a cold figure moving on autopilot over a cold, dubbed-out beat; meanwhile on “shameless,” she yearns to preserve a sad scene, questioning why someone’s touch is worth the humiliation it causes. The Sade-like beauty in her voice and the sweltering intimacy of the song’s fizzing beat tell you why.
PAINLESS excels at that kind of subtle disclosure, relying less on power than it does texture and immaculately sparing detail. When many of these songs appear to revolve around not knowing where you stand with someone, it’s a feat to give each one a distinct set of emotional stakes. The guitar playing speaks to Yanya’s emotional purgatory—right down to the knowing echoes of Radiohead’s anxious, spiraling arpeggios on “stabilise” and “midnight sun”; to the vaulting contradictions (the love-you-hate-you “belong with you” is intermittently as euphoric as Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180”), and the slumps of defeat daubed in classic, moody alt-rock blues on “chase me.” And she wields the immense expressive reserves of her voice with delicacy, as if diluting pigment to watercolor, writing with incredible economy. “Spit me out here/In the sunlight … Watch me burn/Night and day,” she gasps on “shameless,” while “stabilise” shapes a dismal inner-city scene in muttered vignettes. In the rare moments she reaches for poetry, it’s earned: She can’t tell whether the inevitable conclusion of “chase me” is coming, scarring, or already gone; whichever it is, “it heals like a cold setting sun,” a profound image of bloodless love. “try” finds her questioning what had seemed certain: “Silent leaves/I walked/In your forest/But there’s no roots/I am not sure I got this.”
Inevitably, time runs its course and heals the wounds for her. The end of PAINLESS blossoms into playful, springlike tones: “the mystic,” all melty and lilting, flirtatiously negotiates “red lines,” and “anotherlife” dips into the mellow ’90s groove that Lorde looked to on Solar Power, borrowing its ersatz chill to convince the departing party that she’ll be fine. Yanya’s voice, at its lowest range here, is bittersweet and conciliatory: You can’t quite tell whether she means it. But all of a sudden, you feel the warmth of the sun on her skin again. | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | ATO | March 4, 2022 | 8.4 | 902b6668-7847-4137-9c98-1385f57fa8f2 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
The New York City quartet’s 4AD debut is an entrée to a world of scuzzy, lewd, electro-punk camp. | The New York City quartet’s 4AD debut is an entrée to a world of scuzzy, lewd, electro-punk camp. | cumgirl8: phantasea pharm EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cumgirl8-phantasea-pharm-ep/ | phantasea pharm EP | At a recent gig in lower Manhattan, local act cumgirl8 stood onstage like Day-Glo dominatrixes. Drummer Chase Lombardo sported assless chaps; guitarist Veronika Vilim, in hot-pink fishnet and marabou pasties, towered above fellow guitarist Avishag Rodrigues, whose bondage harness encased an acid-green top. Dead center stood bassist Lida Fox, with a slab of black bangs shrouding her eyes. “This song’s about our favorite punk girl,” Vilim said as her bandmates kicked into “cicciolina,” a dark disco tribute to the famed porn star turned Italian politician, which they perform partially on an Emergency Bigfoot novelty toy. The song leads phantasea pharm, a six-track collection of gothic pop and scuzzy dance-punk studded with horny prose. Like their titillating outfits, phantasea pharm is fun and eye-catching, but only half of its tracks live up to the band’s vibrant stage presence.
According to cumgirl8 lore, the musicians met years ago in a sex chat room. “We consider the internet a member of our band,” Lombardo told Vogue last year. Their raunchy moniker is a nod to Y2K-era screen names, but it also suggests an erotic force in search of orgasmic enlightenment. cumgirl8 embody this concept via sexually liberated lyrics and outré costumes. “We act like this because it makes us feel powerful,” the band has said. “There is nothing degrading about being in control.”
Fox, Lombardo, and Vilim split lead vocal duties, accounting for a lot of the EP’s incongruity. Tracks helmed by Fox (“gothgirl1,” “cursed angel”) tend to be darker, while Lombardo (“pritney llc”) and Vilim (“Picture Party”) spit out tart and energetic rhymes. On the sludgy “dead pixels,” Fox abandons her girlish falsetto for a stoner’s deadpan, droning over shrill guitar. It feels like a ’90s alt-rock castoff—and a real dud following the saucy “cicciolina.” Fox eventually flips a phrase worthy of cumgirl8’s cleverest tracks, like her colorful take on making out: “Swallow my tongue/Like chewing gum/So you’ll feel me/In your gut.” But this vivid scene gets buried in the song’s drab arrangement.
cumgirl8 may be lewd, but their best moments are derived from pure joy, not shock value. Vilim and Lombardo seem to be having the most fun; onstage, Vilim executed a series of dramatic poses in slow motion, while Lombardo briefly fled her drumkit to dangle from a ceiling pipe. The theatrics translate to tape, especially on “pritney llc,” an oddball pop singalong led by Lombardo. Per the lyrics, Pritney is a renowned “party slut”—beloved, but deviant. She’ll jack your pack of cigs. She’ll vom on your shoes. She’ll tear your designer dress to shreds. She’s… a Pomeranian. The song starts as a lullaby but ends in a cartoonish pileup of skronks, chimes, and robotic backing vocals.
Smutty electro-punk cut “Picture Party” is even better, spiked with a gritty spoken passage from drag provocateur Christeene. In the opening moments, Vilim recites a litany of hormones, supplements, and cosmetic enhancements—Botox, Juvéderm—before crassly admitting, “I just took a huge shit.” There is something delightful and rebellious about the clashing imagery, especially from the lips of Vilim, who’s modeled for Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs. Lombardo chimes in with her own contrasting couplets, rhyming “pirouette” with “my pussy’s wet.” These conflicting ideas—rigid femininity vs. unapologetic body functions—are at the heart of the cumgirl8 philosophy. But more than anything, “Picture Party” spotlights their sly, sleazy wit. The bawdier, the better. | 2023-08-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-21T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | August 21, 2023 | 6.5 | 902e05dc-582d-4f98-b1f8-1cde342829ec | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The Virginia emo trio try to keep things as simple and accessible as possible on their fourth album. | The Virginia emo trio try to keep things as simple and accessible as possible on their fourth album. | Turnover: Altogether | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/turnover-altogether/ | Altogether | When they started, the Virginia trio Turnover resembled your garden-variety pop-punk outfit. Then, they morphed into dreamy emo, and then again into Pet Sounds-filtered surf rock; it seemed like they couldn’t stop evolving. Singer Austin Getz went from wallowing in dreary East Coast Decembers to whirling around beachside carousels in the final days of a Californian summer. He began to realize where he went wrong in failed romances instead of resentfully labeling his exes “meaningless lovers” in the same breath he fantasized about sleeping with them again. Like fellow latter-day emo torchbearers Joyce Manor and Touché Amoré, Turnover presented ongoing evidence of their adaptability while still remaining true to their core. On their fourth full-length, Altogether, they’ve remained loyal to producer Will Yip and label home Run for Cover; however, this record finds Turnover virtually unrecognizable.
“Chill” has always been an accurate descriptor for Turnover, but Altogether could be used in a D.A.R.E.-style campaign warning the risks of taking it too far. They’ve eviscerated any indication of their “emo-ish punk rock” roots, instead opting for a lackadaisical, stoned regurgitation of ‘80s new wave—like Talk Talk doused in CBD oil. Getz explained that in the making of this record, the band considered “people who don't have the time to delve into the niches and find fringe artists.” This album, he seems to say, is meant to go down easy, devoid of deeper implications—but Altogether winds up mostly just half-baked. In Turnover’s attempts to keep things uncomplicated and accessible, they sound anonymous and corny.
Take “Still in Motion,” a perfectly adequate album opener if it weren’t introduced with a wildly over-the-top trumpet solo. “Number On the Gate” could be a pretty good B-side to Good Nature; it pops up about midway through the record, as if to offer one last reminder of “oh, yeah, this is a Turnover album,” before the remaining bloodless tracks scrub your memory clean. The band can write hooks; At their gigs, Peripheral Vision highlights like “Cutting My Fingers Off” conjure mosh pits and singalongs even amid their relaxed atmosphere, while Good Nature opener “Super Natural” begs to be hummed while completing house chores. But hardly anything could be deemed catchy here, with refrains too monotonous to stick. Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.
This blandness would be excusable if Getz backed it up with compelling lyricism, but his words are typically underdeveloped at their best—at their worst, they induce eye rolls. He details his reluctance to going out on “Parties,” but once he sees his date’s “body move just the way that it should,” he’s suddenly fine with the shallow social interactions the party entails. On “Ceramic Sky,” he sings of “Waiting to feel the tingling of your lips/Sedative in your touch,” a line too nonsensical to be sexy. “Have you been through the things I have?/Did you lose your trust or feel betrayed?” he argues on “Number on the Gate,” sounding like the dude who complains about his “crazy ex” before ghosting you. Getz’s trifling depictions of women and inconsequential, clunky ideas—”I don’t mean to make you feel lonely/When I’m feeling like I have no reply”—amount to a record that hardly dips below surface level.
In their vision for Altogether, Turnover shot themselves in the foot at the get-go. They hoped for an album that was simple, but the banality that manifested instead was a pretty inevitable side effect. “We wanted to keep in mind...music for those of us who are busy with work or our families or whatever problems might be around,” Getz said. “Music is real magic that can change people's days and lives, and the more people listening and loving, the better.” Maybe he wasn’t planning to change lives with this album, but to make art catered to people who are presumably too preoccupied to fully digest it is a pretty careless and patronizing method of operation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | November 4, 2019 | 5.4 | 90379539-772d-46ca-b121-0ac7e2e4bd4e | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Apparat and Modeselektor's third album as Moderat absorbs a dark spectrum of postminimal electronic music—James Blake, Burial, The xx, Four Tet—and reflects it into spare, crystal-clear electronic soul. | Apparat and Modeselektor's third album as Moderat absorbs a dark spectrum of postminimal electronic music—James Blake, Burial, The xx, Four Tet—and reflects it into spare, crystal-clear electronic soul. | Moderat: III (Moderat) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21754-iii-moderat/ | III (Moderat) | What, exactly, traumatized Moderat so badly during their first recording sessions that they named their 2003 EP the German equivalent of "At the Cost of Health," and then took six years to follow it with a debut full-length? Though never really explained beyond allusions to fatigue and conflict, it has become such a part of the Berlin trio's lore that you'd expect a Pet Sounds-like work of self-immolating vision, not a modest EP of quietly propulsive bass music. But thirteen years later, at the end of a trilogy where tracks have almost begrudgingly given way to songs, Moderat's emotional expenditures have become more evident. III dissolves the group's diverse techno origins in crystal-clear electronic soul music that stands on a song-by-song, not moment-by-moment, basis.
It's actually not hard to believe that Moderat initially clashed; it was never the most natural fit. They were three musicians at the forefront of a developing minimal techno and performance scene, jamming together by linking their laptops with software they wrote, as it wasn't readily commercially available yet. Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary strung up heavy metals at high bpms as Modeselektor, muddling jungle, breakbeat, and glitch-hop. Sascha Ring, meanwhile, made fluttering, sculpted ambient pop as Apparat. Their merger could feel tentative or slanted on the first two parts of the Moderat trilogy, which were prone to instrumental tangents and guest vocalists. But it's apparent from III’s air of ease and consistency of style that they've finally gelled around one vision.
The album absorbs a dark spectrum of postminimal electronic music—the rococo bass and deep contrasts of James Blake, the windy knock and moan of Burial, the sultry lightness of The xx, the granular whir of Four Tet—and reflects it back. It reminds me most of Jamie Woon's underrated Mirrorwriting, from the committed vocal performances down to the new age incense wafting through the spare, softly thundering arrangements. Though it's Moderat's strongest record, III isn't quite all killer. The very Field-like "Finder" bounces its vocal loop into the pocket, but it doesn't show off the songcraft found on songs like "Reminder," which might have sprung from a solo album by Thom Yorke. The three best songs allow the vocal performances to lengthen, open up, and gather weight. The best of them is "Eating Hooks," where low wobbles and glittering trills are strung together in a hypnotic equilibrium. It's closely followed by "Intruder," a sincere big-whoa anthem, and "Ghostmother" that could pass for The Antlers if they were ex-ravers.
The last couple of tracks are instrumentals that seem superfluous—on closer "Ethereal," III has run out of songs as well as titles. But the highlights make it a must-hear for sensitive electronic-soul lovers waiting in vain for Rhye to return. It's also a resounding realization of what Moderat is and can be: a band you can relate to, not just a beat you can bob to. Here’s to their health. | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mute / Monkeytown | March 29, 2016 | 7.1 | 903cd0a3-754e-4894-a863-e73331d64744 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
A new reissue of the Emeralds guitarist’s 2009 album captures his style in its infancy. Careful songcraft would come later; these wide-eyed jams are cosmic and sprawling. | A new reissue of the Emeralds guitarist’s 2009 album captures his style in its infancy. Careful songcraft would come later; these wide-eyed jams are cosmic and sprawling. | Mark McGuire: A Pocket Full of Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mark-mcguire-a-pocket-full-of-rain/ | A Pocket Full of Rain | While writing Prefab Sprout’s 1984 debut, Swoon, bandleader Paddy McAloon hatched a character named Green Isaac. “I was fooling around with the word ‘green’,” McAloon said later that year, highlighting his idiosyncratic writing process. “In English, ‘green’ means innocent. Then I came across the biblical figure Isaac, the epitome of innocence, and immediately I had a great song title.” Twenty-five years later, ambient guitarist Mark McGuire titled one of his earliest releases after a lyric from that Prefab Sprout song: “Isaac’s a soft name, it sounds like a pocket full of rain.”
McGuire’s album, originally released in 2009, landed amid a prolific run of early solo releases, mostly CD-Rs and cassettes that ran parallel to his work in the Cleveland noise and drone trio Emeralds. He had yet to develop the carefully crafted tact of the linear, song-oriented material he would become known for a few years down the line. The charm of A Pocket Full of Rain lies in its innocence—much like McAloon’s wet-behind-the-ears Green Isaac, it sounds wide-eyed and drunk on possibility.
The newly reissued album opens with “Extended Forecast,” a patient tapestry of overlapping guitar lines. Each has its own distinct pedal effects and patterns, but the way McGuire weaves them together makes it hard to trace an individual thread from start to finish without your ear latching onto another. When he’s in this extended jam mode, which also distinguishes “The Marfa Lights” and “Radio Flyer,” the effect is similar to a constantly refocusing camera lens that goes from crystal clear to bokeh and back again: a kaleidoscopic array of abstract and tactile textures. This gorgeous approach lends itself to blissfully zoning out, but it’s also obvious that these meandering improvisations—many of which were cut down from 20-plus minute takes—were the product of McGuire “getting stoned and jamming for a couple hours,” as he said in a 2011 interview, as opposed to his more recent attempts to “fine-tune” his music.
Although the shorter tracks on A Pocket Full of Rain offer snapshots of McGuire’s melodic capabilities, the album lacks the cohesion of later albums such as 2010’s Living With Yourself or 2014’s Along the Way. By that point, McGuire was concocting elaborate concepts for each release and allowing those narratives, memories, or moods to guide the music. Knowing what’s on the other side of A Pocket Full of Rain makes some of its extended tangents seem tantalizingly inchoate, but it also spotlights the youthful abandon that McGuire brought to his early home recording process.
“Radio Flyer,” in particular, conjures the same childhood nostalgia as Living With Yourself while roaming further afield. The opening melodies are buoyant and carefree, but midway through they all fade out save one contemplative line that’s laid bare. When the rest return, they’re lower, rumbling, following the lead of the lonely, persistent motif. The song brings to mind the classic Calvin and Hobbes wagon escapades, which use harebrained adventures as the unlikely setting for philosophical musings on mortality.
That aching beauty is a strange contrast with A Pocket Full of Rain’s queasier moments, which roll in like thunderstorms to disrupt otherwise tranquil scenes. “Sick Chemistry,” in particular, recalls Emeralds’ drones, a billowing briar patch of distorted, sustained notes that stretches on for miles. But for much of the album, McGuire plucks out single notes on an open tuning, allowing him to layer tracks atop one another without getting muddled by fatter chord strums. The technique gives the Cleveland native’s work a passing similarity to Midwest emo and explains why the title track sounds like an American Football cassette left out in the sun for too long. The more opaque sound of “Sick Chemistry,” the album’s penultimate song, offers a palate cleanser before stunning closer “Sun Shining Through the Open Barn Door,” a gentle, pastoral postscript that tones down the effects-laden Frippery in favor of acoustic bliss.
Although McGuire’s early recordings have drawn frequent comparison to kosmische works of the ’70s, particularly Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar, McGuire insists in the Pocket Full of Rain liner notes that he hadn’t heard Göttsching’s work until “a year or so before” recording this album. There’s no denying the similarities of their delay-driven styles, but it’s also easy to see how McGuire arrived at this point on his own. For one, there’s something distinctly American, and more specifically Midwestern, about his sound. His approach to experimental music is earthy and humble, and not overly concerned with transcendence unless it’s to be found within its own surroundings.
There’s a certain sense of inevitability when you plop a restless creative in a room with nothing but a guitar and a bevy of effects to choose from. While McGuire would eventually learn to harness those effects with more specificity, and branch out to include other instruments and even lyrics, A Pocket Full of Rain is a captivating portrait of a green genius with his head down, surrounded by pedals, dreaming of possibilities. | 2023-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock / Experimental | Husky Pants | August 8, 2023 | 7.6 | 9044930c-54d0-4b00-b7bb-f953705ff715 | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
Ex-Sunny Day Real Estate leader's third solo album locates emotional coherence in disjointed images and fragmentary phrases. | Ex-Sunny Day Real Estate leader's third solo album locates emotional coherence in disjointed images and fragmentary phrases. | Jeremy Enigk: OK Bear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12984-ok-bear/ | OK Bear | The unique power of music is to give meaning to that which has no inherent meaning. A note, on its own, is just a sound. Same with a chord or the smack of a drum stick on a snare. But by organizing those sounds, music can give them incredible power, and it can do the same for words and phrases. OK Bear, Jeremy Enigk's third solo album and second since the break-up of his band Sunny Day Real Estate, offers quite a few examples of this phenomenon, making melodic sense out of puzzling couplets like "Crimson angel/ I live and plant there still" and "Morning arise/ Traced by surprise/ In an ocean wind the waves are lost." I'm not saying his lyrics are senseless on paper-- there's inherent power in a phrase such as "They got it all, but they ain't got emotion"-- but I am saying this album lives or dies on Enigk's ability to weave a bunch of disjointed images and odd, fragmentary sensory phrases into something that feels like a story or a coherent emotional statement.
Thankfully, the album mostly lives, and it's a small testament to the seemingly paradoxical ability of ethereal, bodyless music to affect us viscerally. To back up a bit, OK Bear is a confident modern-rock album, and Enigk spends considerably less time fussing with big arrangements and sweeping gestures than he did on 2006's World Waits. These songs are among his most direct, mature compositions yet in spite of their often oblique lyrics, and his delicately ragged voice is in fine form as he works to sell them. He controls the intensity of each song quite well--"April Storm" in particular benefits from a great deal of restrain in the early verses, and you really feel it when he opens up in the last verse and the guitars start to grind a little.
The album's most dramatic moment is also one of its weirdest, from a songwriting perspective. "Just a State of Mind" begins softly, with acoustic guitars and harmony vocals, and picks up with each verse, and then, at literally the last moment, he introduces a brand new, dramatic melody on the last two lines. It feels like the song is about to take off into some sweeping new section, but instead it just ends, leaving the listener hanging. "Sandwich Time" is more conventional, and probably the catchiest rock song on the album, with Enigk running his backing vocals through a Leslie cabinet (or a convincing approximation of one). In an unusual error, "Sandwich Time" and "In a Look" are flipped on the tracklist, both on the rear cover art and in the printed lyrics ("Sandwich Time" is actually track seven, while "In a Look" is actually track six). "In a Look" is a piano-driven song with a good 6/8 beat and some Eric Matthews-ish horns on the bridge.
The album's production aids Enigk's careful drama management, keeping every acoustic and electric guitar, Rhodes piano, bassline, and synth separate and strong-- all that space gives the dynamic shifts more power. OK Bear is a good album-- it won't blow you away, but I get the sense from listening that Enigk is confident enough in his music not to need to blow you away. Simply moving you a little is enough now, and sometimes it's nice to have an album that does that so ably and unpretentiously. | 2009-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-05-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Lewis Hollow / Cydonia | May 22, 2009 | 7.1 | 9044c0ed-5f27-4fc4-bbe9-6c0074fed37d | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
On their third full-length, the indie supergroup led by Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug sounds more unified as their songwriting voices bleed together. | On their third full-length, the indie supergroup led by Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug sounds more unified as their songwriting voices bleed together. | Wolf Parade: Expo 86 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14398-expo-86/ | Expo 86 | Are Wolf Parade a supergroup? Google seems to think so: It returns some 70,000 results on the matter, including several from this very website. Certainly their lineup is stacked enough for the distinction. Between Spencer Krug, Dan Boeckner, and Dante DeCaro, I count half-a-dozen notable bands past or present, and drummer Arlen Thompson has put in work with Arcade Fire. But supergroups are rarely this prolific, nor this devoid of ego, and Wolf Parade have excelled at reconciling two increasingly distinct songwriting presences to make their music with-- rather than on top of-- each other.
This is especially true of Expo 86, the third Wolf Parade record in just under five years. Co-leaders Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug are both coming off of arguably their most successful self-led projects yet. Last year's Dragonslayer served as a culmination of sorts for Krug's Sunset Rubdown, and Boeckner's Handsome Furs made a huge leap from curios to contenders on 2009's Face Control. Both seem to have carried the strengths of their respective sorta-side projects into the booth for Expo 86. While Wolf Parade's self-produced 2008 LP At Mount Zoomer was a notoriously laborious record to make, Expo 86 is said to have come together quickly, with help on the boards from Howard Bilerman. Limber and focused, it sounds like a record made by a band without a bunch of other commitments, and more than the two Wolf Parade records that preceded it, like a unified statement from its two songwriters rather than a couple of strong voices working in parallel.
Krug takes Expo's first shot with the chatty "Cloud Shadow on the Mountain", a jumpy, almost paranoiac ramble that that feels closest to the scattershot bluster of his work on At Mount Zoomer. Boeckner's "Palm Road" follows, a fairly standard Springsteenian rattler that gets it done but fails to ignite. Each track is distinctly the work of its author, but it's at this point that the differences between the two songwriters start to blur. "What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)" is Krug's, but it rides a rawboned riff that feels far more like the work of Boeckner, with Krug keeping the flights of lyrical and vocal fancy to a minimum. Here, especially in the wake of Zoomer, Krug's songs feel very to the point, as though he's saving the weird stuff for the Rubdown records and just wants the Wolf Parade tunes to pop. Which they do. And while I rather like Krug in the streamlined mode he's in here, one could easily argue he loses something having his edges sanded down like this.
While Boeckner's contributions to the Wolf Parade catalog have been by turns dizzying and drab, Face Control established him as a force of casual cool, and he brings that vibe to everything he touches here. Whereas Krug seemed to dominate Wolf Parade's 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary-- despite a strong showing from Boeckner in that record's back end-- the balance seems to have shifted some, and Boeckner's contributions here are uniformly strong. His circuitous songs are by and large more memorable than Krug's, but even at his best-- "Little Golden Age," "Yulia"-- he never quite blows it out like he did again and again on Face Control.
Expo 86, if nothing else, feels like the realization of a Wolf Parade sound; the exquisite Apologies carried the long shadow of its producer Isaac Brock, and Mount Zoomer felt too often like two personalities careening off each other rather than finding some common ground. Solid and occasionally striking through it is, I do come away from Expo 86 feeling a bit unsatisfied. Apologies was such an exhaustingly cathartic listen, Mount Zoomer was a puzzle you had to put together, but Expo just kind of lays it all out there, and the takeaway just isn't what it was for its predecessors. It's quite a feat to get these two singular songwriters, both riding waves of creativity, to cohere in this way. But after the individual successes of Face Control and Dragonslayer, Expo 86 finds a nice comfortable spot somewhere in the middle, which feels more dependable than revelatory. Could be a little more supergroup-standard ego would do them some good. | 2010-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | June 29, 2010 | 7.5 | 9044f5c2-2e12-4fa6-870e-780a2ba43b4d | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
At turns paranoid and explosive, Sister marks a climactic finish to the early albums that carved the New York band’s sound into punk and alternative culture. | At turns paranoid and explosive, Sister marks a climactic finish to the early albums that carved the New York band’s sound into punk and alternative culture. | Sonic Youth: Sister | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-sister/ | Sister | In March 1987, when Sonic Youth headed into the studio to record what would become their fourth full-length album, they were looking for a “rawer, more immediate sound,” Kim Gordon writes in her memoir, Girl in a Band. If the sublime double-album apex of Daydream Nation, released the following year, signaled a new phase, a door broken open, Sister was an explosion, the last hinge popping off. It was a gloriously climactic finish to the quartet of albums that followed Sonic Youth’s eponymous debut EP: Confusion Is Sex, with its subterranean clang and drone; Bad Moon Rising, which, with a title lifted from Creedence Clearwater Revival, represented the band’s dark-side answer to the American ’80s of Petty, Springsteen, and Mellencamp; and 1986’s brilliantly plangent Mansonian excavation, Evol, which garnered this diss in a review by People magazine: “the aural equivalent of a toxic waste dump.” It was proof, anyway, that the mainstream was already tuning in. By Evol, the band’s lineup had coalesced, replacing drummer Bob Bert with Steve Shelley to complete the original lineup of Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo.
Already, Sonic Youth were wide-ranging miners of culture. When Sister came out, the cover collaged a Richard Avedon photograph and a snapshot from Disney’s Magic Kingdom (both were later obscured or removed). But the band best articulated their artistic identity in their obsessive reworking of sound. Since their debut EP they had been altering their guitar tunings and instrumentation, a practice of rewriting Ranaldo and Moore picked up in their days playing with Glenn Branca. On Sister, the band renders that vocabulary in a less free-form, more familiar context—their grainy, revved-up cover of Crime’s “Hot Wire My Heart,” though pure garage on the surface, still points to a politically subversive underground canon (in 1978, the San Francisco punk group memorably performed for inmates at San Quentin State Prison while dressed in uniforms identical to those of the guards). Sister deconstructs ballads, too: The epic “Cotton Crown” finds Gordon and Moore singing a rare harmony (“Angels are dreaming of you”) over quietly dissonant guitars. “We’re interested in pop song structures, so we’ll do something that you wouldn’t believe could be used in a pop song structure but we think it could be,” Moore told an interviewer a year after Sister’s release.
For the album’s recording, Sonic Youth found both channel and container within the walls of Sear Sound, the midtown Manhattan recording studio run by Walter Sear, a classically trained tuba player and friend of Robert Moog who had helped steer the synthesizer inventor toward making his instruments more portable. His studio, then located inside the Paramount Hotel, was a trove of vintage analog equipment, including Moog synthesizers (one of which appears on “Pipeline/Kill Time,” the band’s first use of a synth), vacuum tube microphones, and the 16-track recorder used to record the album. Though the acoustics were lousy, Gordon writes in Girl in a Band, Sear was “the fulfillment of our sound fantasies.”
The band was also reading the cultishly metaphysical science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose mordant, visionary works and traumatic life experiences were very much in the air during Sister’s creation. The opener, “Schizophrenia,” alludes to a short story Dick wrote about his twin sister, Jane, who died in infancy; Dick felt her loss keenly for the rest of his life and was buried beside her. Both that song and “Stereo Sanctity” also reference Valis, a novel inspired by a mystical epiphany Dick had when a woman wearing a Christian fish-symbol necklace delivered a drugstore prescription to his front door; it was one of many messages he received from what he called the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a kind of life force that communicated to him in an AI voice. In the novel, the Valis inserts itself in the brains of humans, reordering the world through their splintered psyches. “Sister was record of the month in the newsletter of the Philip K. Dick Society,” Moore told Creem, but you don’t have to know Dick’s work to apprehend the paranoia and duality of experience that suffuses the album from the first racing heartbeats of Shelley’s drums to the beautifully discordant guitar crescendos.
“Schizophrenia” would remain a staple of Sonic Youth’s setlist, a song that still summons the band’s cathartic essence. Keanu Reeves recently sang it to a GQ writer at the Chateau Marmont. Who can blame him—Sister contains some of Sonic Youth’s most up-tempo and trenchant songs: the brutal annihilation of “Stereo Sanctity,” with a dystopic sentiment lifted from Valis (“I can’t get laid ’cause everyone is dead”), the brief blitz of “White Kross,” and one of their most classically punk songs to date, “Catholic Block,” where Shelley’s time as a hardcore drummer recieves full expression, underscoring lyrics sung by Moore: “I cross myself/It doesn’t help.” “When Dick wrote in Valis that ‘the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum,’ he was anticipating Sonic Youth’s lyrics,” Erik Davis wrote in a 1989 profile of the band published in Spin.
At its core, Sister plays with the duality of appearances. “Pacific Coast Highway” returns to the shadowy Los Angeles underworld of Evol and Bad Moon Rising, evoking the naive trust of a girl thumbing a ride to Malibu. Chillingly, Gordon takes on the voice of the predator who picks her up. The song shifts into a deceptive lull, a tranced-out California dream of an instrumental, which is then rebroken by a wave of feedback and the return of Gordon’s menacing refrain: “I won’t hurt you/As much as you hurt me.” A rock album rooted in underground surreality offers a kind of twisted reassurance: How boring would it be if the world were simply as it appears on the surface? Sister is about “the line between reality and dreaming—if there is any,” according to Ranaldo, who sings “Pipeline/Kill Time.” If there’s dystopic annihilation elsewhere on the album, that song serves up the last-ditch shot of noir (“I think you know the place that we should meet/Don’t worry if it’s dark and I’m late”). A conspiratorial, fatalistic sense of liberation embeds itself in the idea of killing time till the end of the world. The song and the album dissolve into a corrosive storm of feedback, wordless and transcendent, delivering. | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | SST | May 9, 2019 | 9.8 | 905a736f-8695-4a8e-881a-bbdc49381d76 | Rebecca Bengal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca-bengal/ | |
The California rapper is a nimble and versatile vocalist with an impressionistic, occasionally stilted writing style. Is it enough to make him TDE’s next big star? | The California rapper is a nimble and versatile vocalist with an impressionistic, occasionally stilted writing style. Is it enough to make him TDE’s next big star? | Reason : Porches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/reason-porches/ | Porches | If Reason’s inherited anything from his erstwhile TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar, it’s a bone-deep exhaustion. Across good kid, m.A.A.d city and To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar’s weariness underscored his subjects’ dim horizons: bright-eyed boys lapsing into sullen machismo, the insidious catch-22s facing Black men in American cities. On his second album, Porches, Reason forgoes the assiduous context of Lamar’s opuses, stitching familiar themes and settings into an impressionistic patchwork. In bypassing conventional setups and origin stories, Reason attempts a more diaristic urgency, but the abridged framework also dulls the record’s emotional reveals.
Porches’ weightiest monologues cluster together, concentrating their idiosyncrasies. “Call Me!” is a cogent, kinetic meditation on envy, an accomplished vocal performance in spite of clunky exposition (“Niggas look at me like I’m a dream, that’s only because I reached this/Fictitious place that people call success, and now they need it”). An interlude links the song to “Gang Shit!,” which volleys between first- and second-person perspectives to dramatize the divergence of childhood peers. The immediacy is reminiscent of Lamar’s proven tactics, but Reason is overreliant on jump-cuts; it’s like listening in on a phone conversation halfway through.
Though the dense songwriting rewards repeat listens, Porches is clouded by atmospheric window-dressing: raspy admonishments from neighborhood elders, voicemails from hectoring girlfriends, squabbles over territory and perceived slights. These tropes would be haphazard if they weren’t the sort of thing that appeared on Kendrick and YG albums a decade ago (not to mention Xzibit and Jayo Felony albums 15 years before that). Even the album’s overarching concept—a liminal-space metaphor positing the front porch as a portal between the streets and interior life—feels like a stilted take on “Swimming Pools” and “Money Trees.” It’s gesturing at something it’s not, suggesting discomfort with the record’s modest competence.
“A Broken Winter Break!” is the early standout, a gnarled slice of West Coast funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Schoolboy Q or ICECOLDBISHOP project; “Send You 2 the Afterlife!” is a fluid drive-by narrative heightened by fantastic production and vocal engineering. From there, the album shifts to a half-hour of somber keys and treacly chipmunk soul, songs burdened with labored similes (“I’ve gotta cover home like umpires”) and finger-wagging platitudes (“That’s the fucking problem with our people/Sometimes we don’t dream enough”) befitting a LinkedIn post. Porches spotlights Reason’s nimble delivery across a breadth of knotty, lopsided rhyme patterns, but rather than showcase his versatility, the survey course renders him chameleonic.
It’s worth revisiting There You Have It, the 2017 mixtape that attracted Top Dawg’s interest in the first place. Assembled with YouTube-sourced beats, it’s deeply felt if not quite profound; the label’s resources might’ve secured producer placements and sharpened Reason’s vision. There is, needless to say, a Kendrick-shaped hole in the TDE lineup. But on Porches, Reason raps like the daylight’s behind him, falling prey to the narrative inversion that plagues so many of J. Cole’s disciples—the supposition that a label’s investment ensures artistic triumph. A record deal is surely a climactic event, but to the audience, it’s an offscreen prelude. The action belongs between the opening and closing credits. | 2023-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Top Dawg Entertainment | August 11, 2023 | 6.6 | 905eeb9e-b554-4cdf-bb3f-dd1acfc5f5bb | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The English singer-songwriter makes her full-length debut with a charmingly melodramatic set full of earnest writing and kinetic, multi-dimensional production. | The English singer-songwriter makes her full-length debut with a charmingly melodramatic set full of earnest writing and kinetic, multi-dimensional production. | Holly Humberstone: Paint My Bedroom Black | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holly-humberstone-paint-my-bedroom-black/ | Paint My Bedroom Black | Holly Humberstone had a whirlwind 2021. Around the release of her debut EP, The Walls Are Way Too Thin, she earned touring spots with Olivia Rodrigo and Girl in Red, collaborated with fellow British success story Sam Fender, and won the Rising Star award at the BRITs. Her success was unsurprising, considering how squarely her work fit in the zeitgeist, indebted to Taylor Swift’s confessional pop writing and Phoebe Bridgers’ snarky folk music, married to vocoders and intricate synth programming straight out of a 1975 song (Matt Healy even co-wrote a track). Accordingly, her debut full-length Paint My Bedroom Black has all the angst of a young-star-dealing-with-fame record. Humberstone took the time to define herself as an artist outside the hype cycle: an endearingly wordy songwriting voice elevated by expansive, kinetic production.
Like her contemporaries, Humberstone excels at melodrama, but hers is more deliberate in its execution. It’s one thing to feel remorse for being a bad partner; it’s another to call yourself the Antichrist while the backing track plays homage to Kanye’s “Runaway.” You can want someone you shouldn’t, or you can declare, “You’re the center of the universe, my sorry ass revolves around you.” Humberstone lands a careful balance of pop theatrics and earnest emotion that might be overbearing if she wasn’t equally adept at more intimate expressions. She’s a strong enough writer that it’s disappointing when songs like “Kissing in Swimming Pools” end with stark lyrics like, “I just want to be alone with you.”
Humberstone’s music works just fine in stripped-down acoustic settings, but her producers—primarily Phoebe Bridgers’ collaborator Ethan Gruska and former Dog Is Dead frontman Rob Milton—turn every song into a holographic, immersive environment. Even the relatively conventional R&B ballad “Girl” is full of piano stabs, distorted synths, and Gruska’s murky rubber bridge guitars. “Flatlining,” one of several songs produced with Jonah Summerfield and Noah Conrad, is the most surprising experiment, with a manic backing track that nods to Jersey Club as much as it does Lorde.
The only outright misstep is “Cocoon,” where a generic 2010s-indie rock arrangement flattens some of the record’s most intense lines (“I’ve become a taxidermied version of myself”). Throughout the rest of the album, the production only elevates her writing. Even on minor tracks like the vocoder interlude “Baby Blues” or the stiff duet with TikTok star D4VD, “Superbloodmoon,” there’s a lovely narrative or an unexpected vocal effect that saves things from becoming too mundane. At the end of electro-country ballad “Ghost Me,” the drums fall away, and Humberstone includes a goofy voice memo of a friend (the Lauren of “Lauren”) comparing herself to a scene from SpongeBob. It’s undeniably silly but oddly relatable, getting by on sincerity once the novelty wears away. | 2023-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor / Darkroom / Geffen | October 17, 2023 | 6.8 | 90650c2c-37c7-42cd-9c16-ff6e7741483d | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
On her third solo album, North Carolina guitarist Sarah Louise Henson steps beyond her vivid acoustic work and into a realm of glowing studio experimentation and layered vocals. | On her third solo album, North Carolina guitarist Sarah Louise Henson steps beyond her vivid acoustic work and into a realm of glowing studio experimentation and layered vocals. | Sarah Louise: Deeper Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sarah-louise-deeper-woods/ | Deeper Woods | Deeper Woods, the third solo album by North Carolina-based guitarist Sarah Louise Henson, picks up where her previous work left off and lingers there for all of 60 seconds. Opening track “Bowman’s Root” begins with the intricate, fingerpicked 12-string acoustic that fills the two previous full-lengths she released as Sarah Louise and the high, clear singing that marked last year’s self-titled debut of House and Land, her duo with multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan. But, as the first minute of the song winds up, Henson begins harmonizing with herself, and an alto recorder traces out hidden threads. Soon, feedback and drums float up, and the harmonies rise even higher, as if sung from a cloud.
Sarah Louise hasn’t gone electric on Deeper Woods—though there are both drums and electric guitar on the album—so much as broadened her ambitions. A gifted and expressive solo guitarist, her instrumental work (like that of other great guitar soloists) has always relied on a keen sleight-of-ear vocabulary: She has the ability to conjure worlds between notes. Her instrumental 12-string guitar album for Vin Du Select Qualitite, 2016’s VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12, conjured jeweled landscapes that unfolded in constantly renewing wonder.
A bold step forward for Henson, these new compositions underscore both the uniqueness and the expansiveness of her musical voice. Some solo guitarists (like Steve Gunn) have transformed into the centers of high-energy rock bands and others (like Ryley Walker) have assembled groups to follow their jazz-prog muses, but Henson’s new album holds on to the hushed glow of the previous Sarah Louise releases, a sense of nighttime quiet far from the city lights.
While traditional folk harmonies sometimes appear in the overtones, the album is filled with thoroughly modern surprises. The rural kosmische-pop track “When Winter Turns” features a hypnotic rhythm section and Henson’s own Crazy Horse-style electric six-string guitar jags. The closer, “Fire Pink and Milkweed,” is entirely a cappella, a vivid sound poem made of layered voices. In a previous critical epoch, Deeper Woods might have been called “freak-folk,” but to use any derivative of “freaky” to describe it is to ignore its careful construction.
Nearly every song enchants. Linked by images of natural forces and the swarming growth of a living Earth, the album luxuriates in organic sounds that complement Henson’s words. Only the electric-piano-and-synth-driven “The Field That Touches My House and Yours” feels out of place, as though the sky has turned some unsettling color and the laws of physics have shifted. Everywhere else, the music is unified, as if the pieces were grown in the same flower bed, from seeds of unknown plants, each one blooming in a different shape. No matter what Henson adds, her guitar remains at the deepest center of the songs.
“Pipevine Swallowtails” offers the album’s most intricate flowering. Sally Anne Morgan’s fiddle and the warm, vibraphone-like tones of an electric piano wrap around the hypnotic acoustic guitar melody as Henson’s voice stacks itself and jumps octaves. Nothing on Deeper Woods is predictable; Henson creates no musical formulas to follow, choosing instead to follow a vaguely defined path that might not be a path at all. Overflowing with first-person narrative and ecological parable—and often without obvious choruses—the lyrics feel well-tilled, too, borne by music beguiling enough to listen to until the words take root.
If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving. Deeper Woods is a new place she has found. “There I sat in wonder/There I sat listening,” she sings on “Bowman’s Root”—and, while those lyrics are certainly an invitation for the listener to do the same, it’s also easy to see why they’re in the past tense. The deeper woods are right here waiting, but Sarah Louise might already be gone. | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | May 23, 2018 | 7.8 | 906cacc4-d2a4-466e-851f-ded6914a0465 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
The sequel to There Existed an Addiction to Blood extends the trio’s bristly noise and gory horrorcore rap with a sense of terror that’s more academic than frightening. | The sequel to There Existed an Addiction to Blood extends the trio’s bristly noise and gory horrorcore rap with a sense of terror that’s more academic than frightening. | clipping.: Visions of Bodies Being Burned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clipping-visions-of-bodies-being-burned/ | Visions of Bodies Being Burned | Do you like scary movies? clipping. likes them so much that while recording 2019’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood, the group amassed enough songs to fill a second album. Built from the same blueprint of bristly noise and gory horrorcore rap, Visions of Bodies Being Burned continues where its predecessor left off, again indulging the trio’s love of horror. The sequel suffers from the same dryness as its predecessor, but clipping.’s collages remain richly textured and packed with slick allusions to film, rap, and politics.
The album’s title is lifted from “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” expanding Scarface’s anguished recap of a nightmare—“candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned”—into a cinematic universe of horrors. Single “Say the Name” uses the line as the centerpiece for a house ode to Candyman, rapper Daveed Diggs’ voice screwing into a demonic growl as dark synths strobe in the background. “’96 Neve Campbell” reimagines the Scream star as a slasher’s worst nightmare, guests Cam & China the foils to Billy and Stu. clipping. digs through the rap and horror archives with unrestrained delight.
Diggs is especially giddy. “Say the Name” nods to “What Da Hook Gon Be,” “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” and “Still Not a Player,” songs only a fan could link. “Check the Lock” nods to “Sleepin’ in My Nikes” by late Oakland rapper Seagram; the apocalyptica of “Something Underneath” channels sci-fi author N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and shouts out OutKast’s “Hey Ya.” Diggs isn’t as enamored with his influences as, say, JPEGMAFIA, but he’s clearly having fun.
The album falters when these hints of personality get snuffed out. Though Diggs is an animated performer, he isn’t a strong orator; his verses lose color when he raps in triple-time, which is his go-to mode when producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson dial up the intensity. That detachment is intentional, of course. One of clipping.’s foundational rules is the avoidance of first-person perspectives, a restriction they believe frees them from authenticity. “Our beats are more aggressive and scarier than Daveed’s actual personality,” Hutson has said. “And the way that the band works, we couldn’t have him pretending to be someone he’s not.” Sure. But third-person perspectives are not inherently impersonal and distant. DOOM’s whole career is rapped in third-person. Open Mike Eagle has rapped from the perspective of a building and community. Aesop Rock has used a dog and a gopher as muses.
clipping.’s self-erasure rubs up against the self-indulgence of their project. Though there’s plenty of stagecraft to their compositions—the echoing jungle breaks and EFX on “Pain Everyday”; the scratchy percussion and whispers of harp on “Eaten Alive”; the “200 years of rust” on a witch’s gate on “She Bad”—no matter how much detail Diggs, Hutson, Snipes pour into their elaborate hellscapes, their frights feel vacant. There’s plenty of mood to clipping.’s horrorcore, but no theater, no ham, no cheese.
Acts like Geto Boys, Gravediggaz, Three 6 Mafia, Kool Keith, and Eminem paired the occult with sex jokes, action sequences, and boasts. Visions of Bodies Being Burned, like There Existed an Addiction to Blood, is a clear homage to the horrorcore canon, so it’s necessarily a pastiche. But it’s disappointing how academic the record’s sense of terror is. Horrorcore isn’t some ancestral custom lost to history. It flows through the bully raps of 21 Savage and ShooterGang Kony; the crime sagas of Maxo Kream; the cartoonish villainy of Sada Baby; Ronny J’s caustic low-ends. clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological. Put differently: What would Vision of Bodies Being Burned sound like if clipping. made scary movies rather than just liked them?
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sub Pop | October 26, 2020 | 6 | 907b0022-2d24-43f4-97fc-4423a9226813 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The debut album from the virtuosic duo is undeniably accomplished, a smooth but frenetic set aimed at bringing jazz fusion to a new hyper-brained generation. | The debut album from the virtuosic duo is undeniably accomplished, a smooth but frenetic set aimed at bringing jazz fusion to a new hyper-brained generation. | DOMi & JD BECK: NOT TiGHT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/domi-and-jd-beck-not-tight/ | NOT TiGHT | There’s a video of Thundercat performing “Them Changes” with Ariana Grande, and two youngsters sit behind them. One has a baby blue sweater and plays keys. The other is mounted over drums, forehead cased in a fuzzy raccoon hat. The two play casually at first, then run amok and start wigging out, so fast and dense it’s almost excruciating—meanwhile, Ari is vibing, nodding her head. Taken at Adult Swim Festival 2020, it’s one of many YouTube clips that have helped catapult the zoomer jazz prodigies Domi Louna and JD Beck to internet fame. The comments radiate adulation: The future of jazz! Two alien miracles from outer space!
Domi (22, keys) and Beck (19, drums) communicate preternaturally on their debut record, sculpting blocks and chains of rhythmic architecture for the other to link with. DOMi weaves intricate melodies of bass and piano played ambidextrously. You could mistake Beck for a cyborg; his drums rattle with the controlled ferocity of jungle breaks. Like many young online stars, the duo’s fame outpaced their output. Frenetic live sets and sponsored jam sessions garnered them a sizable fanbase and the respect of folks like Thundercat and Anderson .Paak, who signed them to his Blue Note imprint Apeshit. They had the cosigns. The virality. The skills. All they were missing was an album, or any kind of release at all.
A key part of Domi & JD Beck’s online appeal was the live-time thrill. NOT TiGHT doesn’t try to replicate the magic of a haywire improv experiment pushed to the brink of delirium. It’s undeniably virtuosic but optimized for smooth listening to dazzle the widest possible audience, like a 44-minute display of the brightest neon-shell fireworks on the market. Based on NOT TiGHT’s cover, where the duo appears like doll-cute indie poppers, it feels part of their project is to bring jazz fusion to a new hyper-brained generation. It’s an impressive but fatiguing listen, like nu-jazz-hop played by savants typing 250 wpm, that doesn’t really cohere into something more meaningful than the sum of its very busy and skillfully imbricated parts.
The amalgam of influences and stylistic echoes—from Squarepusher and video game music to ‘70s jazz-fusion like Chick Corea and Weather Report and LA’s beat scene—can be overwhelming. For jazz heads and trained musicians, there’s a treasure trove of inventive drum and keyboard patterns and time signature mayhem to unpack. For the virgin ear, swaths of sweet texture: the dreamy vamp wash of “Duke,” the skittish yet serene pulse of “Moon” with Herbie Hancock on vocoder. “Space Mountain” reminds me of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon music reimagined as hyper-jazz. Everything comes alive here rhythmically: The keys somersault and distort, a cheeky pizzicato peeks its head in every now and then. Beck unleashes a deluge of fitful kick patterns and snare flams that sound like armies of Spirited Away soot sprites scrabbling across floorboards.
As a comic counterpoint to their technical poise, the duo also became notorious for inane antics. At the top of one live set, for instance, Domi broadcasted airhorn and fart noises into the mic. These hi-jinks obviously don’t translate to the record, but a trace of the puerility lingers in the track title “Sniff,” which was originally called “u can sniff my butt.” All of which strengthens the idea that they’re the 100 gecs of jazz. It’s like when you’re so good, you can afford to goof off. That silly side hardly appears on NOT TiGHT; just the odd fleck of folly, like the meandering “Bowling,” where Thundercat drops a Big Lebowski reference and entreats someone to go bowl.
Mostly, though, it's nuanced and mature, with a slickness that sometimes drifts into banality and makes you crave a reprieve in the form of surprise gastric sounds or cavalier testicle jokes. Ignoring the implied imperative in its title, “Take a Chance” stars silky verses from Anderson .Paak and comes across like gratingly inoffensive streambait, while “Louna’s Intro” evokes the sort of milquetoast movie soundtrack you’d hear at a Disney job orientation. It’s in these moments when the project can start to taste like gentrified coffee shop fodder, or two students trying so hard to impress their professors they write something robotically pristine.
Partly the album can feel this way because it’s, well, an album and not a live video. Without the visuals, you might forget Beck’s a human being and not a drum machine, and the drum-key clashes aren’t as cool when you can’t peep them nodding or smiling at each other across the room—micro-movements and quirks (see: pretzel overload) that lent emotional lightness to the matrices of harmonic madness. But the best songs successfully convey that telepathic synergy and friendship, like two humans knotted in such deep sync they dissolve into a single musical organism. | 2022-08-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Apeshit, Inc. / Blue Note | August 4, 2022 | 7.3 | 907e3da0-73e2-4c68-9e28-2b3cf00b9dee | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
Referencing writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti in heavy music is not a necessarily novel concept, but Raspberry Bulbs' new Privacy successfully transposes the intangible dread of these influential horror authors into a salvo of cold, sharp jolts to the psyche. | Referencing writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti in heavy music is not a necessarily novel concept, but Raspberry Bulbs' new Privacy successfully transposes the intangible dread of these influential horror authors into a salvo of cold, sharp jolts to the psyche. | Raspberry Bulbs: Privacy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19876-raspberry-bulbs-privacy/ | Privacy | The success of HBO's True Detective—and the plagiarism charges that dogged the show’s first season—sent thousands of viewers scrambling for books by authors that most of them had never heard of before. Those authors included the contemporary horror writer Thomas Ligotti (the alleged victim of True Detective’s plagiarism) and Robert W. Chambers, whose 1895 book The King in Yellow is referenced often throughout the show. Naturally, H. P. Lovecraft—whom Chambers influenced and, in turn, who influenced Ligotti—also casts a shadow. Like a squirming colony of worms underneath an overturned rock, that niche literary continuum found itself suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Privacy, the third album by Brooklyn blackened-punk outfit Raspberry Bulbs, also draws from that continuum, according to frontman Marco del Rio, who began the project as a solo affair following the demise of his black metal duo Bone Awl. There’s nothing novel in that connection; counting the number of rock bands that have cited Lovecraft alone would take ages. But what Privacy does so well, regardless of the listener’s familiarity with del Rio’s cult inspirations, is transpose the intangible dread of Ligotti, Chambers, and Lovecraft into a salvo of cold, sharp jolts to the psyche.
Raspberry Bulb’s last album, 2013’s Deformed Worship, was a strong step in this direction, but it also marked the project’s transition into a full band. The no-fi spew of Bone Awl had morphed into a murky howl, and that distance slightly blunted the record’s impact. On Privacy, though, del Rio and company—including Rorschach’s Nicke Forté and Les Savy Fav’s Andrew Reuland, both on guitar (and reunited two decades after their joint band Radio to Saturn)—don’t leave an inch of space in which to flinch. “Lionhead” staggers intrepidly into new dimensions of punk ugliness, set at a tempo too fast to be sluggishly grungy and too slow to comfortably mosh to. Forté and Reuland, old partners at guitar interplay, splinter their riffs into each other, leaving a nasty mess everywhere. The fully-rocking instrumental “Nail Biting” doesn’t justify its lack of vocals, but it’s a nerve-jangling exhibition of lacerated harmonics makes del Rio’s absence a little less glaring. But when “Finger Bones,” prickly and abject, gives del Rio room to chew out his own tongue while the band marches over the top of him, his pinpoint application of chaos congeals into a sickening, misanthropic logic.
Del Rio has denied any hint of black-metal allegiance when it comes to Raspberry Bulbs, but there’s no mistaking his blood-gurgling, Quorthon-circa-Under the Sign of the Black Mark grunt-screech, particularly on “Behind the Glass” and “Hopelessly Alive" which embody an awestruck disgust in the face of grotesque eternity. It’s almost religious, if such a thing as Raspberry Bulbs could be considered a creature of faith. There’s a perverse piety at play on “How the Strings Are Pulled", a Venom-meets-Negative Approach hymn to debasement and moral powerlessness. When the woah-woah-woahs in the chorus come deliriously close to comprising a pop hook, it seems for a second as if Privacy might pierce its own veil and reveal its squishy humanity. But every time the album builds up a lick of sympathetic momentum, it’s cruelly defused by one of the brief, ambient interludes that break up the proper tracks—six numbered asides constructed of treated noise, distorted spoken-word, strangled strings, and eerie keys that help elevate Privacy’s fractured, labyrinthine torment above Deformed Worship’s more straightforward assault
In The King in Yellow, Chambers writes of “the blackness that surrounds me”—a trite phrase to 21st-century readers, but one that carried far more existential weight in the author’s own time. Is Privacy’s “Light Surrounds Me” some kind of response to Chambers? The song itself certainly sounds as if it could be: del Rio slurs its title in spasms of loathing, as if light were twice as horrifying as the alternative. Yet Privacy as a whole is vivid andwide-eyed, with del Rio sounding more swaggeringly confident than ever about his utter lack of confidence. Doubt and fear as cleansing ecstasy: That cognitive dissonance is part of what makes del Rio’s literary antiheroes so cryptically enduring, and it’s what makes Privacy so hideously hypnotic. “Big Grin", a skeletal, garage-goth dirge that drags its carcass across five unforgiving minutes, feels like del Rio’s ultimate exorcism—only instead of a release, it’s a spiritual implosion. Unlike most bands that seek to probe the notion of a malevolent cosmos, Raspberry Bulbs aren’t trying to cheaply translate cosmic awe into a stomping, grandiose melodrama. Privacy is small, pitiful, tinny, messy, and emaciated, and it dares to demand that mankind doesn’t have the right to feel any differently. When punk stares into the abyss, this is what stares back. | 2014-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2014-12-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | null | Blackest Ever Black | December 1, 2014 | 8.2 | 90803afa-a925-474c-b007-85b6e61d8086 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
Chief Keef fittingly teams with trap architect Lex Luger for his daring new 17-song tape, which is weird and expansive. It reintroduces many of Keef’s most compelling quirks. | Chief Keef fittingly teams with trap architect Lex Luger for his daring new 17-song tape, which is weird and expansive. It reintroduces many of Keef’s most compelling quirks. | Chief Keef: Two Zero One Seven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22764-two-zero-one-seven/ | Two Zero One Seven | There’s something fitting about Chief Keef and Lex Luger collaborating in 2017. Luger, one of the architects of modern trap production, broke out with eight Top 20 rap hits in 12 months (beginning May 2010) and has had only one since (Wiz Khalifa and Travis Scott’s “Bake Sale”). Today, Luger has more or less been forgotten by the rap industry at large, washed away amid a sea of imitators and surrogates. His sound was explosive and opulent, and it was wholly singular—until it suddenly wasn’t, first becoming recyclable, and then disposable.
Keef, meanwhile, should be considered nothing short of a prodigy. In 2012, at 17, he released the drill opus Finally Rich, and in the years since he’s continued to grow bolder and more daring, experimenting without concern for who likes what and distancing himself further and further from the sounds that made him so popular in the first place, losing two deals in the process. Keef’s refusal to produce a proper sequel to what may forever be hailed as his masterwork has caused interest in him to wane. Chief Keef is now just 21 years old, at least a year younger than current it-rappers Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage—contemporaries Keef inspired when he was still in high school, who have already been tapped to succeed him. Both Keef and Luger are hugely influential, with elements of their sounds and aesthetics still impacting radio today, yet demand is down for both, just for different reasons. Rap is one of few genres where artists can be deemed obsolete before turning 23. It churns out new models fast.
But with someone as mercurial and talented as Keef, moments of brilliance can materialize in an instant. They’re likely to happen when no one is looking. This is the case on his latest mixtape, Two Zero One Seven, where Keef proves he can produce more dynamic songs than any of his progeny while sleepwalking. And instead of attempting to reclaim lost territory, he dares to venture even deeper into open space.
The 17-song tape is weird and expansive, and it reintroduces many of Keef’s most compelling quirks. On some songs, he’s almost deadpan; on others, he’s excitable. His sing-songs can scan as theatrical: near the start of “Fix That,” he warps his vocals into something resembling a cartoon voiceover, but by the end he’s unleashing a creaky falsetto. “Running Late” presents a rousing rendition of the creepy lullaby from Nightmare on Elm Street. Sometimes he mumbles, sometimes he chants. He often uses his voice as another instrument in his productions—it can be percussive or melodic or even amelodic in service of structure or flow.
No matter how they’re delivered or what their purposes, his raps are packed with refreshingly bizarre non sequiturs and stream-of-consciousness one-liners. His flows sputter, stagger, or just flat out drill. He’s a much better writer than his heirs, dropping gems like “My watch tried to take your bitch from me” (“Empty”), “Bitch, I’m still with the street shit/Clip longer than a selfie stick” (“Falling on the Floor”), and “the diamonds in my ear giving me a brain freeze” (“Trying Not to Swear”). He seems uninterested in honing the skills he already has, opting instead to try and figure out new ones. With every passing song, he moves onward.
Luger produces a handful of tracks on Two Zero One Seven, and the best, “Control,” is like the audio version of a miniature Tron light cycle race. But it’s Keef himself who produces the majority of the project, and it’s this aspect of his creative repertoire that’s grown the most. Earlier beats were unhinged, but these do more than just move in unorthodox ways; they pop and glow. Keef seems to have little use for traditional “bangers” and he’s no audiophile (the quality of his sounds can vary dramatically), but he is willing to try just about anything and he has remarkable instincts. He isn’t afraid to induce sensory overload with busy arrangements, but he’ll also strip sounds bare and leave them exposed.
One minute he’s tinkering with piano chords, the next he’s making minimalist 8-bit trap, the next he’s channelling late ’00s Shawty Redd. He’s impossible to predict. On “Trying Not to Swear,” the beat bottoms out and the sample gets muffled and distant, lined by the sound residue from the hum of a vibrating 808 kick. “Knock It Off” and “Dope Smokes” utilize keyboards with different intentions—the former as a pulse, the latter as an accent—and both have bite, cacophonous but never discordant. These songs on Two Zero One Seven are microcosms of the artist who made them. They can be difficult to read and sometimes even harder to understand on a functional level, but they’re quite exhilarating. | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Glory Boyz | January 13, 2017 | 7.3 | 9082425c-b7dc-4d20-aed5-8786cd602246 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
After co-writing several tracks with Kanye West and hits with Crookers, Kid Cudi releases his long-awaited debut album. | After co-writing several tracks with Kanye West and hits with Crookers, Kid Cudi releases his long-awaited debut album. | Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon: The End of Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13504-man-on-the-moon-the-end-of-day/ | Man on the Moon: The End of Day | Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak was undoubtedly a divisive record, but a rare one where it felt like both sides were essentially making the same argument: We care about it because it was made by Kanye West. It's a backhanded compliment, acknowledging that everything he does is a vital listen but also that it would be tougher to overlook the LP's glaring flaws had it come from someone who hadn't built up a decade of goodwill through his musical work and personal transparency. No wonder Kid Cudi threatened to retire before he even put out Man on the Moon: The End of Day-- his debut essentially exists because of a record that drew most of its power from a singular cult of personality, and that's a lot to live up to.
Cudi co-wrote several tracks on 808s (most notably guesting on "Welcome to Heartbreak"), and combined with hits in Drake's "Best I Ever Had" and Cudi's own "Day 'N' Nite", the commercial resiliency of that album proved that fad or not, this sadsack backpack stuff is here to stay. But whereas 808s was a record about a very public figure attempting a retreat he'd be incapable of sustaining, Man on the Moon uses quotidian, lonely stoner turmoil as a means of introduction.
Now, I still check for Atmosphere projects and I've got a functioning knowledge of the Get Up Kids' discography, so I can't knock Man on the Moon for skewing emo. And we won't play the hipster card, since this record lives and dies by its lyrics as much as any document of spit-these-bars formalism. The problem is how these two impulses feed off each other in all the wrong ways, with Cudi inverting the songwriting process so that a supposed pursuit of honesty is rendered predatory and manipulative. "I got some issues that nobody can see," goes the hook to "Soundtrack 2 My Life", and it's a boast as grandiose as you're likely to hear in 2009. Throughout, Cudi's issues could not be rendered in a more clumsy or obvious way, blowing up every slight perceived or real ("had mad jobs and I lost damn near all of them") into trials of such mythical proportions that it needs a bogus four-part "plot" (Cudi is sad, does mushrooms, starts to get famous, is still sad) and narration from Common.
Cudi also slathers his verses with a flat warble that Auto-Tune was made to salvage. It would be numbing enough on its own, but nearly every 30 seconds there's some terrifyingly underwritten lyric to jolt you into sharp pangs of embarrassment. He's referred to as "our hero" throughout Man on the Moon, and his superpower is managing to convey unlimited amounts of :-( while staying firmly in his vocab-stunted "sorrow"-"tomorrow"/ "room"-"moon" wheelhouse of rhymes. "Look at me/ You tell me just what you see/ Am I someone whom you may love/ Or enemy," goes a particularly Brandon Flowers-like line of the otherwise effectively spare "Mr. Solo Dolo (Nightmare)". As far as rap metaphors go, Cudi is Katrina with no FEMA: "I live in a cocoon/ Opposite of Cancun/ Where it is never sunny/ Dark side of the moon," or, even more pointedly, "Gray clouds up above, man/ Metaphor to my life, man."
But what's most frustrating of all is that Cudi can make Man on the Moon feel like a missed opportunity instead of a non-starter. His hooks have a way of burrowing into your brain-- you already know the deal with "Day 'N' Nite", and "Simple As..." bears a strange resemblance to "Semi-Charmed Life" but damn if I'll be able to forget it any time soon. He's also got a really keen ear for sounds: "Mr. Solo Dolo" nods to the warped Orientalism from Silent Shout's quieter tracks and you almost wish the tangible warmth emanating from the strings on "In My Dreams" would reveal itself in something other than a somnambulant intro. Cruelest of all, the album goes a long ways towards redeeming itself with its final two tracks-- "Hyyerrr" nods to the haziest productions from DJ U-Neek while "Up Up & Away" unabashedly makes its alt-rock intentions known with jarringly optimistic acoustic guitars.
It makes you think things could get better if Cudi manages to cheer up in the future (and why not? Man on the Moon is the rare record in 2009 that's beating sales expectations), but then we might just end up with more songs like "Enter Galactic" and "Make Her Say", the "Poker Face" remake where Cudi, 'Ye, and Common play misogynistically against type for laughs and somehow make you feel bad for Lady Gaga. Even with "Stapleton Sex" and "Gihad" making the rounds recently, it's probably still the most noxious sex rap I've managed to hear in some time.
Cudi would like to think this record is critic-proof, or at least that's what I cull from his decision to paraphrase the "there will always be somebody who will shoot down any dream" line from Kanye's "Bring Me Down". But that number up there isn't a judgment of Cudi's pain, as much as it is an ability to express it-- being misunderstood in the Midwest and lost in the big city will never fail to inspire phenomenal art in twentysomethings, but Cudi too often assumes some sort of higher ground even though his self-pity is flaunted no differently than any other tacky rapper accessory. | 2009-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-10-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Universal Motown / G.O.O.D. Music / Dream On | October 1, 2009 | 4.1 | 9085c421-a2b4-48ea-8f0d-058cc719000e | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Ten years after her last live record, Live in London feels like a valedictory statement. | Ten years after her last live record, Live in London feels like a valedictory statement. | Mavis Staples: Live in London | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavis-staples-live-in-london/ | Live in London | Arriving roughly ten years after Mavis Staples’ last live album—and not to mention just a few months shy of her 80th birthday—Live in London can’t help but feel a bit like a valedictory statement. Recorded over two July 2018 nights at the Union Chapel, Live in London caps a decade where Staples seemed to be a presence in pop culture in a way she hadn’t been since at least the 1970s, when the Staple Singers were scoring number one hits with some regularity. Hit singles weren’t in the cards for Staples in the 2010s, but that didn’t mean she rested on her laurels. Signing with Anti- in 2007, she cut We’ll Never Turn Back with roots maven Ry Cooder at the helm, then proceeded to make a series of records with indie rock stalwarts, singing songs by Nick Cave and Merrill Garbus while Jeff Tweedy and M. Ward sat behind the mixing board.
Live in London deliberately dodges a few of her signatures—“I’ll Take You There” and “Respect Yourself,” the Staple Singers enduring crossover hits of the early ’70s are nowhere to be found—to focus on the four records Staples made after We’ll Never Turn Back. The journey begins with the Tweedy-produced You Are Not Alone—the 2011 Grammy Winner for Best Americana Album—and the end of the road is 2017’s If All I Was Was Black, the album she was plugging while on tour in the summer of 2018.
Skewing the songbook in this fashion does help showcase Staples as a continually evolving working artist, placing the emphasis on music over the message. This is a bit of shift for the singer, who has been at the forefront of melding music and politics since the 1960s and whose passion for justice has been undiminished in recent years. If All I Was Was Black felt pointed when released in the thick of the Trump years, while Live: Hope At the Hideout, her 2008 live album, was designed as a celebration built upon the unspoken sentiment that Barack Obama’s impending election was a culmination of the civil rights movement.
Politics never surface on Live in London. Perhaps “Slippery People” could be read an allusion to the slithery creatures populating the Trump White House, but that’s a stretch: the Staple Singers covered the David Byrne song in 1984, when Speaking in Tongues was still fresh. In this context, surrounded by songs written by Tweedy, Justin Vernon and Ben Harper, “Slippery People” acts as a reminder that Mavis Staples never resisted incorporating the latest rock or pop fashions into her gospel-inflected soul. Sometimes, this openness has been camouflaged by Staples power as a singer: she can’t help but be the focus, sometimes overshadowing her source material.
The studio albums Staples recorded for Anti- over-compensated for this slight problem by favoring handsome productions where any sense of grit was carefully sanded away; they weren’t devoid of passion, yet they were often tidy. By its very nature, a concert album corrects this problem: even if some tweaks happened in the mix, the source material is rawer than what happened in the studio. Indeed, it’s striking that the band supporting Staples on Live in London is essentially the same one who recorded If All I Was Was Black, since they sound rough and ready here, with Rick Holmstrom’s guitar sometimes growling so loud, it seems impolite.
Hearing songs from Staples’ recent studio albums performed with such earthy gusto is something of a mild revelation. It places these songs firmly within the continuum that stretches back to Mavis’ earliest recordings, since they’re all delivered with the same lean, weathered groove. These arrangements may help give definition to a tune as fragile as Vernon’s “Dedicated” but, more than anything, casting these recent songs in the same light as “Touch a Hand” or “Let’s Do It Again”—a number one hit for the Staple Singers back in 1975, but rarely remembered as well as “Respect Yourself"”—helps shift the focus to how Mavis still sounds mighty as ever. | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- | February 8, 2019 | 6.8 | 9086a8db-aa46-465c-8d96-9af34485db03 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The London singer and producer’s glamorous, infernally catchy new dance-pop record suffers from a deeply modern affliction. | The London singer and producer’s glamorous, infernally catchy new dance-pop record suffers from a deeply modern affliction. | Tatyana: It’s Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tatyana-its-over/ | It’s Over | Pop music feels cursedly literal right now: Ariana Grande is singing about how she “spent so much on therapy”; Billie Eilish’s Barbie song is a transparently straightforward plot summary of Barbie; Kacey Musgraves’ new album is a ripped-from-the-group-chat account of going through a breakup and communing with nature. It’s not a problem exclusive to A-listers. It’s Over, the second album by London producer and singer Tatyana, is riddled with literalism, therapyspeak, and phrases that are profoundly overused on TikTok: “I’m down bad,” “touching grass,” “acting like a fan.” One wonders if there’s a new pharmaceutical doing the rounds that saps a pop star’s desire for subtext and mystery.
Thankfully, Tatyana has an ace up her sleeve. It’s Over may suffer from a deeply modern affliction, but it’s also a supreme pleasure to listen to, a glamorous, fine-tuned dance-pop record filled with brazen, mercenary hooks and hypnotic synth lines that sound squelchy and spiky at the same time. Even as her lyrics dip into the sans-serif blandness of contemporary pop, Tatyana manages to refute its other fatal flaw—melody-averse mushiness—with songs that bullishly force their way into your brain.
It’s Over was produced by Tatyana with Mikko Gordon (Idles, Arcade Fire), and it feels of a piece with high-saturation early-career records by artists like Tirzah and the Knife. Like those artists, Tatyana often alludes to analog house and techno but rarely dives in fully. Instead, she takes formal instruction from those genres: Part of the reason songs like “Down Bad” and “Hold My Hand” are so punishingly catchy is that their hooks repeat over and over like samples in a classic Detroit track, sometimes layering the phrase on the beat and other times throwing it in haphazardly. Despite their condensed forms, these songs play masterfully with tension and relief in a way that makes their limited emotional landscapes feel like a feature, not a bug.
At other times, Tatyana’s vocals can feel mismatched with her production. “It’s Over,” a blocky, lurching track on which she sings about feeling emotionally volatile, features the kind of winkingly dramatic performance that might have felt more at home on her 2022 debut Treat Me Right, which dealt more in clean, soaring ’80s-inspired pop. “Out of Time,” a lovely, melancholy ballad, is underserved by its grand, almost OPN-esque synth maelstrom finale, and by the fact that it arrives two songs after “I Do Care (& That’s Okay),” a slow-building piece of hazy electronica that does a better job with the same conceit. But Tatyana’s warm, smoky voice is perfectly at home on “Control” and “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible,” two simmering late-night house tracks that feel equal parts moody and cheeky.
These brighter moments are let down by lyrics that veer into total glibness. On “Down Bad,” clumsy lines like “All I do is feel my feelings/I write my silly little songs each evening” stall an otherwise riotous, sharply written song; on “We’re Back,” the heady idea of a potential reunion with an ex is undercut by a repeated hook of “we’re so back,” a phrase that’s overused and somewhat meaningless. Tatyana says that she wrote the lyrics for It’s Over in the way she would speak to her friends, but the result is an album that’s wildly proficient in one area and totally underwhelming in another—so off-balanced that you feel like it could topple at any moment. | 2024-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sinderlyn | March 28, 2024 | 7.1 | 9086fb57-8fb2-47ac-aadf-38377874b571 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The Philadelphia band’s seventh album draws from fiction, the history of international warfare, and their own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of post-hardcore. | The Philadelphia band’s seventh album draws from fiction, the history of international warfare, and their own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of post-hardcore. | mewithoutYou: [Untitled] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mewithoutyou-untitled/ | [Untitled] | This is how mewithoutYou’s 2015 album, Pale Horses, ends: In its closing seconds, frontman Aaron Weiss narrates a dream in which he becomes his own father; in the background, a series of guitar notes brighten and blur as if melting away in the fallout of a nuclear blast. The sky splits open. Protons collide in the empty air. Buildings burst apart and scatter weightless as dandelion seeds. Stars loosen from the sky like figs from a branch. Everything gets paved over with emptiness, the earth shaved down to a lifeless irradiated desert.
What happens then, after the end of the world sweeps through? The seventh album from the Philadelphia post-hardcore band, called [Untitled], seems to take place amid this scraped-out post-apocalyptic nothingness; its scale is wide, its landscape sprawls. Weiss opens the album as if waking from the dream that ended Pale Horses; chords gather and swell and he screams a date and time of uncertain significance—“9:27 a.m. / 7/29!”—his voice howling across a scorched earth. Weiss’ imagery—the glow of phosphorous, ploughshares morphing back into swords—draws alternately from scripture, from the history of international warfare, and from his own internal rosary of images to create a dense, literary tangle of meanings and associations, like sections of a newspaper spilling onto the floor as you read it.
The scene the rest of the band paints behind him is, in a way, just rock music, gnarled and swelling post-hardcore bruises inherited from bands like Sunny Day Real Estate. But it’s rock driven to the furthest edges of its own potential dreaminess and austerity. On “Julia (or, ‘Holy to the LORD’ on the Bells of Horses),” guitars bloom in hazy roses, as if glimpsed through a window cloudy with fingerprints; Weiss, instead of screaming or singing, barely whispers over this, a bird perched on a power line singing into the hum. He paraphrases Rumi (“Out beyond ideas of right and wrong is a field/Will you meet me there?”) under his breath and adapts imagery from 1984 (“‘Send a couple rats,’ said Julia/I’d have done the same thing to you”) to convey the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that boil beneath the surface of even the deepest, most telepathic relationships. When Weiss sings, “Who do you think needs who more?” it’s chilling—he’s peering fearlessly into the gap that gradually widens between ourselves and others.
Listening to Weiss’ almost overcrowded songs can feel like sifting through the static between two banded radio stations, as on “[dormouse sighs],” where voices and images from seemingly distinct sources overlap and disappear back into a low menacing thrum. There’s rarely one sure meaning to a mewithoutYou song; instead, you come away with a hundred little interlacings. On the centerpiece of the record, “Flee, Thou Matadors!,” Weiss plays the characters of both the fictional, mad Ferdinand VIII, King of Spain, and the historical, mad Maria I, Queen of Portugal. The song withers into silence towards its end before a guitar solo unfurls from its center, guitarists Michael Weiss and Brandon Beaver bending the remainder of the song into a question mark, unresolved, flickering between states—quiet to loud, composed to disintegrated ribbons of tape. It’s a microcosm of [Untitled] as a whole, a byzantine, feverish album that unravels and pieces itself back together song by song, a mind gradually turning inward on itself.
Both [Untitled] and its accompanying EP from August, also [untitled], find Weiss watching the wave of mental illness that overtook his father advancing toward him; “Dad tried his best/But finally fell apart at just my age,” he sings on the EP’s “Existential Dread, Six Hours’ Time.” Here, he zooms in on the rot he believes is inching through his skull. “Have I established a pattern perhaps/A biannual mental collapse?” he asks the closer, “Break on Through (to the Other Side) [Pt. Two],” the music of which explores the dreaminess of the other side as much as the Doors song depicted the breakthrough. Weiss later dreams of writing a sequel to the Belle and Sebastian song, “The State I Am In” in “New Wine, New Skins” and succeeds somewhat—both songs sustain a kind of slow, melancholy sway, at least before “New Wine” starts to stutter and lurch violently: “Come, unfastening android limbs/In the moonlight through translucent skin,” Weiss sings as the guitars stretch and shiver back into shape like elastic. “Now we’ve both been there and back again/to the state that I’m no longer in.” It’s as if he took the original Belle and Sebastian song and pulled it inside out until it was as bottomless and uncertain as his own thoughts.
As Weiss attempts to document his potential unraveling, the album’s language gets knottier and knottier. “Have I made myself?/And myself clear?” he shouts on “Another Head for Hydra,” as lost in what he acknowledges are imaginary constructions of the self as he is in their continuous fallings apart. His writing is dense, but the density is the point of the project; he is trying to convey the totality of not knowing. Like the exploding ropes of color on the album cover, the picture [Untitled] forms doesn’t necessarily get any clearer the more one stares at it; it’s a huge unhinged massing confusion of everything—the Old Testament, the French Revolution, lyrics from a Beatles song that stick in the mind like footage in an old projector. There’s no individual story that it can be reduced to; it’s all congealed together, so that by the end of the record there’s no thread to hold onto and no sound left except what any survivor can tell you comes after the apocalypse: the empty howl of mental illness. “Someday/I’ll find me,” Weiss sings almost mournfully on “Break on Through,” but the tremble of his voice seems to acknowledge there could just as well be nothing on the other side. | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | October 15, 2018 | 7.5 | 90888132-2b84-4274-b604-0f327db01304 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
Songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn and his publicity-shy Swedish muse resurrect Italo disco as a vehicle for deeply nostalgic and melancholic Swedish indie pop, resulting in a eloquent, auspicious debut album. | Songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn and his publicity-shy Swedish muse resurrect Italo disco as a vehicle for deeply nostalgic and melancholic Swedish indie pop, resulting in a eloquent, auspicious debut album. | Sally Shapiro: Disco Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9751-disco-romance/ | Disco Romance | A few dozen "2006: Year of You" think pieces later, we know a lot about "You": Web 2.0 has democratized the media, caught the eye of corporations from Silicon Valley to Detroit, and sparked new ways to call 'em as we see 'em. However, the rise of user-generated content has also accelerated the conversion of gestalt experience into symbolic form-- most basically, 1's and 0's-- and something usually gets lost in this translation. If I'm busy recording a moment, how can I be fully present in it? What most defines our lives nearly always defies documentation.
No wonder Sweden's Sally Shapiro prefers to keep her offline self to herself. Shapiro reputedly declines to be photographed by strangers, and she, like 1980s Italo disco singer Valerie Dore, records under an English pseudonym. (Shapiro hasn't told us her real name, and she doesn't do interviews-- if "she" exists at all.) Just six months ago, songwriter/producer Johan Agebjörn started posting on message boards announcing her debut 12" "I'll Be By Your Side"-- Pitchfork's #27 track of 2006. Not since Tigermilk-era Belle and Sebastian has an artist gotten so much publicity from refusing to do publicity. Here, as then, such reticence befits the music, which speaks, sensitively and eloquently, for itself.
"I'll Be By Your Side" returns to open Shapiro's first full-length, Disco Romance. Like Tigermilk's "The State I Am In", it's an auspicious introduction to an, ohhh, introverted world. Agebjörn's Italo-inspired tracks build gradually, drop melodies that could melt whatever global warming leaves behind, and then hold on for dear life. Shapiro's guileless vocals put an angelic face on her producer's melancholy, but she, too, is clinging to the past. Disco Romance is deeply nostalgic. It's the nostalgia of someone who has loved and lost and knows damn well it was indeed "better"-- no matter how gnawing the present hurt.
Sure, Italo's comeback has been here for years. Just ask Morgan Geist, Alec DeRuggiero, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, or Mrs. Guy Ritchie. Fundamentally a modern indie pop album (dig the cover art's references to old Heavenly and Field Mice design schemes), Disco Romance uses its sonic heritage not so much as a blueprint as for thematic material. Though German label ZYX Music didn't coin the term until 1983, Italo disco began when the strings, horns, and sweaty glitz of the Village People, K.C. & the Sunshine Band, or "Disco Duck" gave way to something new: an electronic-based amalgam of throbbing bass lines, aching synth arpeggios, and low-tech drum thuds. Like 80s house or 90s lo-fi, the genre that sprang almost fully formed from Giorgio Moroder's knobs, via Donna Summer's "I Feel Love", was cheap and easy to imitate.
In Agebjörn's hands, Italo is also essentially sad: Perhaps the first dance music made in solitude. "I'll Be By Your Side" draws its emotional depth from the way the arrangement implicitly contradicts Shapiro's vows of eternal togetherness. Detouring into intergalactic lounge, "I Know" shows its lonely narrator's struggle to go on believing those promises. If Shapiro really knows, then why does she have to keep telling herself so-- why are those squiggly synth solos so tragic? "Just tell me how I can hold onto this moment for now," she asks. The key changes, bass dives, and our moment extends for another two minutes.
Back on paper, the album should be as giddy as it makes Pitchfork HQ. After all, Agebjörn's love-oriented songs mostly polish up the simple, frequently nonsensical lyrics of classic Italo. "Be mine in the sunshine," Shapiro sings on "Hold Me So Tight", but it's beneath a deluge of rainy-day synths. Even on "Anorak Christmas", a cover of Swedish twee-poppers Nixon, Shapiro sings the words "please don't go away" as if she doesn't plan to be heard. "Find My Soul" reaches out a trembling hand, and ambient lullaby "Sleep in My Arms" is as desolate as a Star Trek captain's log. Disco Romance turns the Smiths' happy-music-with-sad-lyrics formulation on its head-- and then you dance to it.
Yep, style is ephemeral. Agebjörn can't bring back vanished innocence by recreating the sounds of our youth any more than Shapiro can keep love alive just by saying the words. They can, however, control the emotional experience of anyone who has ears-- now, and as long as their songs remain available in some form. Disco Romance takes history's revision process into its own hands with two remixes, one a slick "Norwegian electrojazz" take on "Find My Soul" and the other Netherlands electro artist Rude66's vocoder-ghostly, acid-squelched "I'll Be By Your Side" revamp. They're not new songs, but they provide another means of prolonging the present.
The Web's cacophony privileges criticism. You won't find God in scriptural commentaries, or save any children watching Hotel Rwanda, but you can fall in love to "My Love" (in theory). If verbalization is inherently reductive, then writing about music is a way to encode the moment loss-free. The track always endures. In his book Air Guitar, MacArthur Fellowship-winning arts critic Dave Hickey explains: "Even though my writing about art might momentarily intervene between some object and its beholders, the words would wash away, and the writing, if it was written successfully into its historical instant, could never actually replace the work or banish it into the realm of knowledge." All that lasts is music; Shapiro and Agebjörn know. | 2007-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Paper Bag / Diskokaine | January 9, 2007 | 8.5 | 90902a99-8da2-4381-95d2-3bff6f3393c9 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Los Angeles band’s 1988 debut, which infused the nascent alt-rock movement with a surreal vision of Hollywood hedonism. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the Los Angeles band’s 1988 debut, which infused the nascent alt-rock movement with a surreal vision of Hollywood hedonism. | Jane’s Addiction: Nothing’s Shocking | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/janes-addiction-nothings-shocking/ | Nothing’s Shocking | Anyone who’d ever put a microphone in front of Perry Farrell should’ve known that the oral history of Jane’s Addiction couldn’t possibly be contained by a print magazine. Still, Brendan Mullen got the green light to cover the band’s 2003 reunion for Spin and went 10,000 words over the original assignment. Within two years, it turned into a 300-page book. Throughout Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction, a large cast of disgruntled ex-bandmates and business partners credit the band’s 1988 debut Nothing’s Shocking as the first truly mainstream alternative rock album, though Farrell does acknowledge that he did not invent the concept. As the leader of pre-Jane’s goth outfit Psi Com and an ambassador of the mongrel Los Angeles post-punk scene that birthed Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he respected the ideological purity of America’s underground rock royalty. But none of them saw the big picture like Farrell, a product of New York privilege who reinvented himself as a motor-mouthed L.A. street hustler. Alternative rock was going to strange and exciting places with or without Jane’s Addiction, and Nothing’s Shocking made it go Hollywood.
Both prophetic and flying blind through the overlapping outgrowths of art-metal, proto-grunge and college rock that were formulating a legitimate alternative to MOR radio and MTV, Nothing’s Shocking is the sound of the ’90s arriving two years ahead of schedule. “Coming down the mountain/One of many children/Everybody has their own opinion,” Farrell yelped on “Mountain Song,” delivering alt-rock’s first mission statement like Moses on Mount Nebo, a vision of a promised land where the iconoclasts and idealists would reshape culture after years of toiling in obscurity. Note the message of the chorus: “Cash in now, honey.”
But in 1988, Nothing’s Shocking wasn’t intended as the constitution of Alternative Nation. Rather, it was a quintessential Los Angeles album. You know, L.A.—glitter and gutter, hippie hedonism fueled by heroin and Hollywood handshakes. The band’s origin myth is a history of grifts and sharp dealing: Jane’s Addiction boosted their local reputation by trashing and subsequently getting banned from influential venues, who would then make a pile of cash promoting the show where they were allowed back. Whores takes its name from an early song inspired by a sex worker named Bianca, who bankrolled those name-making gigs. Aside from bassist Eric Avery, her clientele mostly consisted of “toupeed Hollywood B-listers” and “wholesome married game show hosts,” according to Jane Bainter, the “first lady of the Wilton House,” an arts collective/crash pad started by Farrell. Its residents would often blame their escalating problems on her drug habit—“It’s all because of Jane’s addiction.” (This won over the proposed “Jane’s Heroin Experience” when it was time to pick a name.) During this period of early infamy, they ate expensive dinners with labels with whom they had no intention to sign and then ended up committing with Warner Bros.; Jane Addiction’s convinced their new label to allow a “fake indie release” of Jane’s Addiction on Triple X Records to maintain their street cred, a strategy they accused Guns N’ Roses, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgarden of copying afterwards. By 1991, the band topped Billboard’s Alternative Singles chart and won an MTV Video Music Award with a song that viewed shoplifting as a victimless crime.
They were hardly the only band of their time speaking to Los Angeles’ eternal dualities. Decades of hearing “Jane Says” sandwiched between “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Under the Bridge” has retconned Jane’s Addiction as an artsier variant of Sunset Strip sleazeball rock. But the truth of where they stood in 1988 lies somewhere between how they saw themselves and how they were perceived by the local press—as “the next big thing,” but also an uncertain commercial proposition against the likes of Warrant and Damn Yankees and Kingdom Come. As much socialites as musicians, Jane’s Addiction were at least adjacent to the debaucherous nightlife scene memorialized by bands like Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat, and Mötley Crüe. But while those bands prowled notorious Hollywood rock’n’roll club the Cathouse, Jane’s were regulars at the influential goth- and industrial-leaning club Scream. “All the Cathouse guys looked like Bret Michaels from Poison and the chicks were slutty Tawny Kitaen types,” Scream founder Dayle Gloria explained. “At Scream, all the guys looked like Ian McCulloch and the girls were all Siouxsie clones.”
It’s unlikely that Farrell intended to merge these two worlds when he approached Avery about starting a new project. Avery appraised Psi Com thusly: “I think they blow.” Still, the two bonded over Joy Division, Flipper, and pasty British goths like Bauhaus, the Cult, and the Sisters of Mercy, who enjoyed a symbiotic fascination with tanned SoCal outcasts. The duo initially tried to fill Jane’s ranks with ringers from Farrell’s Psi Com days before Avery’s sister liaised a meeting with her recent prom date Stephen Perkins and his marching band pal, Navarro. Farrell and Avery were skeptical of the duo, seeing them as an embodiment of cornball Valley metal excess; Navarro’s previous band, Dizastre, drew crowds of several hundred at the Troubadour and sounded exactly like you’d expect. Farrell recalled Perkins showing up to his audition with “soft red boots and a bandana to hold his curls together…and an 18-piece drumkit.” But the things they had going for them were nearly impossible to find in Farrell’s extensive underground network: They were reliable, had mind-blowing chops, and no qualms whatsoever about being rock stars.
Peers and critics alike used some variation of “shamanistic” to describe Farrell as a frontman; a transfixing presence both snake and charmer, he’d first begun to develop his stage moves as a Mick Jagger and David Bowie impersonator. The term also speaks to Farrell’s navel-gazing spirituality. “I want to be as deep as the ocean,” he brays on “Ocean Size,” a “Misty Mountain Hop” transported to Point Dume. Minutes later, he pees on himself during “Standing in the Shower…Thinking” and opens a gateway to a higher power. On “Summertime Rolls,” shoelessness is next to godliness. Farrell’s garish personal appearance suggested both a perpetual quest for transcendence and a general lack of self-awareness: He wore green dreadlocks and eventually underwent an African scarification ritual, only to find out that the desired keloid effects are less pronounced on white skin.
Already a veteran of Hollywood’s art-punk trenches, Farrell was at least six years older than Perkins, Navarro, and Avery, a wildly creative and deeply troubled trio. Though everyone in Jane’s Addiction came from some measure of privilege, Perkins was the only one to escape catastrophic familial trauma and also the only member not to self-identify as a drug addict. Farrell’s mother died by suicide when he was 3; Navarro’s mother was murdered by an ex-boyfriend when he was 15; Avery discovered the identity of his biological father in high school and quickly spiraled towards his first stint in rehab. The group’s inner circle witnessed how Farrell’s magnetism worked on his bandmates. “He felt like he could mold them and they would forever do what he wanted,” according to Casey Niccoli, Farrell’s girlfriend, stylist, and creative partner throughout much of the band’s initial run. “Eventually, they’d grow up but by then, he’d have gotten what he needed out of them.” He also leveraged this imbalance into a garishly lopsided, take-it-or-leave-it publishing split that granted him 50 percent for the lyrics alone, with an extra 12 and half percent for his share of the music, despite being credited with only vocals and piano. More than their escalating drug use or codependent romantic relationships or constant fistfights, the publishing split ensured that Jane’s Addiction were operating on borrowed time.
Rejecting a list of proposed producers from Warner Bros.—including Mike Clink, fresh off his work with Jane’s “mortal enemies” on Appetite for Destruction—Farrell instead handpicked Dave Jerden, a perfect fit: His engineering credits with Talking Heads provided Farrell’s desired art-rock cred, but he had yet to be the lead producer on any album, let alone a major-label release. His trust in the band’s vision resulted in the dank, cavernous production that evoked both the sequined squalor of clubs like Scream and Power Tools and the 4AD and Factory albums played there. By the time the two parties reunited for 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual, their collective palette had burst into wild color and Jerden would soon shepherd Alice in Chains and Anthrax out of metal into the greener pastures of alt-rock. Play the first two Jane’s Addiction albums back-to-back, and the ’80s become the ’90s.
Nothing’s Shocking was structured as the band conceived playing it live, which explains about five minutes of regal scene-chewing before the first true riff drops. By the time Jerden arrived to produce, the album was already a veritable Greatest Hits, bolstered by a batch of songs honed over three years of relentless local grind—tight enough for a recording window that might shut on any given day if someone got too high. “Pigs in Zen” was updated with a new, mid-song Farrell soliloquy, tamer than many to come (“I know about PAIN! I still wanna fuck!” he informed an Atlanta crowd in 1989). And though newly bolstered with unforgettable steel drum pings, “Jane Says” honors its roots as the product of endless acoustic jam sessions at the Wilton House: G and A chords played over and over again as Farrell draws lyrical inspiration from the ambient gossip. Everything that happens to Bainter and Sergio in “Jane Says” is completely true, which goes a ways towards explaining how it’s one of the most poignant and empathetic songs about drug addiction ever written; that it’s also a staple of every classic rock radio playlist in existence feels miraculous.
It was apparent that Jane’s Addiction had chemistry, though I suppose a meth lab does too. Nothing’s Shocking is shot through with a volatile combination of awe and fear, reverence and resentment, four exceedingly headstrong artists vying for the direction of a song, never knowing if they’d get the chance to do it again. Navarro drew the metalheads, having forged his craft putting fellow Guitar Center lurkers to shame with front-to-back recitals of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums. Yet when Jane’s earned comparisons to Zeppelin, it was largely due to the acoustic light and shade he brought to “Ocean Size” and “Jane Says.” A professed Deadhead, Navarro also understood the value of interplay; there’s a time for shredding, like when “Mountain Song” and “Had a Dad” require an emotional pitch out of Farrell’s range, and a time to hold back. The two chords in “Jane Says” can be replicated by anyone with a week of guitar lessons, while the brilliantly boneheaded riff on “Mountain Song” was preordained for Beavis and Butt-Head’s approval.
In a band that often veered towards excess, Avery’s contributions were masterstrokes of efficiency. Many of Jane’s most beloved songs began from the germ of an Avery bass riff, and the ones on “Mountain Song” and “Up the Beach” were both instantly recognizable and sturdy enough to be repeated for the next five minutes. The aerobic funk-punk of “Idiots Rule” drafts off the momentum created by the Chili Peppers and Fishbone, bands better known at the time for their (literally) balls-out live shows than tight songwriting; with Chris Dowd and Flea contributing to horns, Avery described the track as a Fishbone song from which Farrell had “trimmed away…the fat.” “Had a Dad” stemmed from Avery’s revelation about his father, an event that Farrell reimagined as a falling-out with God and introduced like a 12-bar blues:
I had a dad
Big and strong
I turned around
I found my daddy gone
He was the one
Made me what I am today
It’s up to me now
My daddy has gone away…
Let’s rock!
This unironic “let’s rock!” spoke to why Jane’s were more likely to be compared to Zeppelin and the Doors than peers like Sonic Youth and the Pixies, who drew wryer wisdom from similar folds of America’s underbelly. Banned from most mass-market retailers for its cover art, Nothing’s Shocking nonetheless found success on college rock radio. But Jane’s Addiction was by no means a college rock band: There were no forays into the musical avant-garde, nothing standing between an average kid in Iowa and the scum of St. Andrews Place, the open-air drug market namedropped in “Jane Says.” If you thought the songs about drugs were about God or the songs about girls were about drugs, you’d probably be right. For anyone who fantasized about California, about getting high and getting laid, about finding some relief from parental conflict, “Summertime Rolls” makes all of that feel entirely possible: six minutes that encompass the most smog-free day of July and also lose track of time completely.
Conversely, Farrell can occasionally sound like the exact thing he was when Jane’s Addiction began, a jaded twenty-something luring the local kids with tall tales of vice and depravity. “Show me everybody/Naked and disfigured/Nothing’s shocking,” he yowls on “Ted, Just Admit It…,” a song inspired by the first serial killer to double as a proto-reality television star. Not surprisingly, most critics took issue with Farrell yelping “Sex! Is! Violent!” ad nauseam, not because it exposed some kind of unspeakable truth, but because it sounded like something Jim Morrison would say; see also the spoken-word psychobabble section of “Pigs in Zen,” easily the album’s weakest song. Yet that line is ruthlessly designed to capture the mind of someone who’s probably only experienced sex and violence from their television, i.e., teenagers.
Nearly everyone in Whores speaks in hushed tones about Farrell’s childlike aura, a boundless curiosity that he explains as a kind of whimsical survival mechanism. “I’m constantly warding off boredom,” he told Melody Maker. “Boredom’s a disease.” But if you believe the theory that trauma and addiction keeps people stuck at the age when they first experienced it, there’s likely a darker force that brought Jane’s together before it blew them apart. Even if the members of Jane’s Addiction underwent tremendous mental, physical, and emotional suffering for their art, things likely would have turned out worse if they’d never met at all.
Jane’s Addiction didn’t stick around to lead the revolution they started. On September 24, 1991, Nirvana released Nevermind; two days later, the first incarnation of Jane’s Addiction met an end pulled directly from Farrell’s id. He played their final gig in Hawaii completely naked, then proceeded to spend an undisclosed number of days on the island with a “ravishing, young hottie showing up with a doctor’s bag and a wink in her eye.” From that point forward, Farrell would live out the peak of his influence as the co-creator and public face of Lollapalooza, the traveling festival that codified “alternative rock” for suburbs across the United States and served as proof of concept for offshoots like Lilith Fair, Smokin’ Grooves, H.O.R.D.E., and Ozzfest.
It didn’t take long for the message to change from “cash in” to “cash out.” These days, it’s admittedly difficult to consider the legacy of Jane’s Addiction outside of Farrell and Navarro’s relentless brand ambassadorship over the years, not to mention the use of 2003’s “Superhero” as the theme song for Entourage, a live-action rendering of Maxim wish-fulfillment that went against everything the band once claimed to stand for. But even in its creators’ absence, Nothing’s Shocking felt like a rebuke of what alt-rock would soon become: If Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and Chris Cornell often shunned pleasure and adulation, rejecting their sanctification as brooding sex symbols, Jane’s Addiction were funky, funny, and unrepentantly carnal. Even with all the baggage of prophecy and influence, Nothing’s Shocking lives as a poignant, almost quixotic work of Hollywood imagination—not a documentary, but a beautifully doomed vision of a ’90s that could’ve been. | 2022-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | September 11, 2022 | 9.3 | 9097239a-d397-48ca-94f0-401b8393c496 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Returning with a slightly darker and more ornate sound, the National remain masters of widescreen, emotionally engaging rock. | Returning with a slightly darker and more ornate sound, the National remain masters of widescreen, emotionally engaging rock. | The National: High Violet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14203-high-violet/ | High Violet | The National became popular in a very traditional way: by releasing some really good albums, then touring the hell out of them. They're boilerplate indie, free of hot new genre tags or feature-ready backstories, which is something their detractors derive great joy from pointing out. If the National are important, rather than merely good, it's for writing about the type of lived-in moments that rock bands usually don't write about that well. The characters in National songs have real jobs, have uninteresting sex, get drunk, and lie to one another. They do so during the regular course of a workaday week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The National aren't "dad-rock" so much as "men's magazine rock": music chiefly interested in the complications of being a stable person expected to own certain things and dress certain ways.
On the National's fifth album, High Violet, those constraints are starting to wear on them, which makes a lot of sense: they wear on most people. In between patches of obtuse imagery, singer Matt Berninger sounds increasingly self-destructive. The record's upbeat numbers don't cheer him up so much as commiserate with him. All of this makes High Violet a dark affair, even for a band with a reputation for sad-bastard melodrama. The National have never sounded triumphant, but they can still be reassuring, with Berninger's lyrics acting as salves for our own neuroses. Six drinks in, tired of your coworkers, wishing you could just go home and laugh at sitcoms with someone? Maybe get laid? The National's got your back.
With an ever rising profile and plenty of indie-famous friends-- Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon guest here-- the National were afforded the opportunity to obsess over High Violet. They could've holed up and recorded an idiosyncratic, expectation-defying mess. Instead they produced an ornate, fussed-over record that sounds like no one other than themselves. Given the amount of flack they take for being a no-frills bore, simply refining their sound was arguably the braver option. They miss, occasionally-- the string-drenched closer, "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks", is too decadent for its own good-- but mostly, they construct gorgeous, structurally sound vignettes. There are few bands that could craft a song like "Sorrow"-- in which emotion acts as a character and the band turns Berninger's balladry into a well paced jog-- without stumbling over their own ambitions. The guitars on "Afraid of Everyone" actually sound nervous; "England" speaks of cathedrals over properly magisterial drums. These are triumphs of form.
Berninger is still, for the most part, a socially obsessed claustrophobe. He has upper-class guilt on "Lemonworld" ("Cousins and cousins somewhere overseas/ But it'll take a better war to kill a college man like me," "This pricey stuff makes me dizzy"). "Bloodbuzz Ohio"'s magnificent chorus ("I still owe money/ To the money/ To the money I owe") addresses the familiar, harrowing financial burdens of adulthood. He's best when he tones down the angst in favor of reflection or confusion. High Violet seems less likely to engender the personal connections of Boxer, but it's also bigger and more engaging-- a possibly offputting combination for a band following the footsteps of Echo and the Bunnymen, Wilco, and Arcade Fire. After all, eagerness often trumps execution, and the National aren't immune: For his part, Berninger looks increasingly like Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World, and his cryptic lyrics seem like an application for the title.
But the National rarely miss; when they aim for powerful or poetic, they get there. High Violet is the sound of a band taking a mandate to be a meaningful rock band seriously, and they play the part so fully that, to some, it may be off-putting. But these aren't mawkish, empty gestures; they're anxious, personal songs projected onto wide screens. Even if you don't consider yourself an upwardly mobile stiff with minor social anxiety, the National make it sound grand, confusing, and relatable. | 2010-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 10, 2010 | 8.7 | 909cbb6f-8795-484c-b4fd-9fd8de8519e0 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Oakland songwriter pairs abstract imagery with elegant arrangements on her dreamy, open-ended second album. | The Oakland songwriter pairs abstract imagery with elegant arrangements on her dreamy, open-ended second album. | Meernaa: So Far So Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/meerna-so-far-so-good/ | So Far So Good | Carly Bond, who records as Meernaa, describes her songwriting process as “psychedelic meditation,” an experience so immersive that when she gets into the flow, she forgets to eat. On her debut, 2019’s Heart Hunger, playful guitar solos and kaleidoscopic production lent the music that boundless exploratory feeling. Her follow-up, So Far So Good, is a more soulful, introspective collection of folk songs whose fingerpicked guitar, gauzy synth lines, and swooping string arrangements diffuse like smoke.
If meditation has a goal, it’s to be able to witness your emotions passing by rather than letting them overwhelm or control you. Bond’s lyrics adopt a similar perspective. They are full of yearning, but they maintain an observational stance. Bond rarely editorializes her feelings, instead collaging abstract imagery to gesture at them, so listening feels less like reading a dream journal than watching an experimental film interpretation of your own dreams. (I’m reminded of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which silently tells and retells a dream sequence, changing small details with each repetition.)
In her songwriting, Bond tends to pull from a recurring pool of phrases—“dreams,” “tenderness,” “the heart”—and pastes them together without much focus on narrative linearity. Rather than feeling disorienting or incomplete, the disparate images build into surprisingly poignant wholes. On “As Many Birds Flying,” Bond drifts through a chugging guitar riff and bandmate Rob Shelton’s ribbons of synth as she recalls water flowing, a sky turning lavender, and a lover’s voice echoing through a canyon. The scenes pass without much explanation, but together they establish a sense of outsized wonder at love she once experienced but can no longer access.
On “Mirror Heart,” Bond describes various aspects of someone’s face without using sight: Each feature is a stand-in for an emotion it evokes, from the tenderness in their eyes to the wildness in their smile. When love and longing are so intense and amorphous that language falls short, the writing on So Far So Good creates a constellation of tiny moments that speak to those grand feelings. Bond catches the glimmer in someone’s eye or watches them turn over a stone in their hands, then asks us to connect the dots with our own associations.
Her voice, too, conveys a wordless longing. On opener “On My Line,” she sings about anxiously awaiting a phone call, but decides to bury her feelings. A grinding guitar riff flares and percussionist Andrew Maguire’s drums simmer as Bond escalates from a cautious falsetto to a wail, using restraint and patience to relay a sense of barely contained frustration. “Bhuta Kala” is a plea to someone else to linger in a state of mutual reverie. Here, her singing meshes so seamlessly with the starry guitar and strings that it might feel like the sounds are emerging from the same instrument.
Throughout the album, Bond yearns for love but is rarely able to grasp it. There is no resolution, just a fog of memories and elliptical dream logic. But despite the intensity of the emotion, the symphonic, elegant arrangements make her words feel accessible and inviting. On So Far So Good, she provides a scaffolding of impressions upon which we are invited to impart our own narratives, making this music ours, too. | 2023-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Keeled Scales | October 12, 2023 | 7.4 | 90a12746-8ee4-4856-b406-0b1c087072ea | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Modest Mouse have been working on their new album for longer than many bands have existed. After reports of bizarre guest spots, shifting producers, and the departure of founding bassist Eric Judy, Strangers to Ourselves betrays no signs of its troubled birth, for better and for worse. | Modest Mouse have been working on their new album for longer than many bands have existed. After reports of bizarre guest spots, shifting producers, and the departure of founding bassist Eric Judy, Strangers to Ourselves betrays no signs of its troubled birth, for better and for worse. | Modest Mouse: Strangers to Ourselves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20335-strangers-to-ourselves/ | Strangers to Ourselves | Modest Mouse have been working on their new album for longer than many bands have existed. The breadcrumb trail of news reports depicting their progress over the years—they were recording with Krist Novoselic and Big Boi; they were switching producers—gave the worrying impression of a band that maybe didn’t know what the hell they were doing. In 2013, they canceled a tour to hit the studio, and somewhere in there founding bassist Eric Judy quit the band. The process left in its wake some dropped singles and a few different release dates, along with a lingering sense that maybe this venerable indie institution’s creative motor was stuck in neutral.
Strangers to Ourselves finally sees the light of day this week, and to hear Brock tell it, we’re getting another album "as soon as legally possible." They are back, in other words, and vigorously making up for lost time. For better and for worse, the album betrays no signs of its troubled birth. They might have spent eight years in the wilderness, but what they have delivered is…a Modest Mouse album, one that sounds like it could have been released five years ago. There are no new directions or tweaks to their approach. "Lampshades on Fire", the first single, is a good example. It offers a sort of greatest-hits version of all the sounds Modest Mouse have become known for—"Here’s the hard-swinging backbeat! Here are a few of those eerie-sounding harmonic guitar bends, and here are some tight, clipped 'bah bah bahs!'" Still, there’s satisfaction to be had, hearing this band of pros finding and hitting their marks so emphatically. They've been a touring juggernaut for years now, and you can imagine many of these songs exploding live.
Here and there some new flourishes pop up. The glimmering mallet percussion on "Ansel" is a nice touch, something we’ve never heard on a Modest Mouse record before. Opener "Strangers" is a patient and pretty ballad, featuring drowsy brush work by drummer Jeremiah Green, a prominent cello line, and Brock’s gentle, lilting midrange. The delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitar figure in the beginning of "Coyotes" is also lovely, a bit of late-period Beatles. "The Best Room" may or may not be inspired by a UFO sighting, as Isaac Brock coyly hinted in a recent interview. But the song is an unruffled and sweet pop-rock number that hits a feeling Modest Mouse never bothered with in their earliest days: It is sunny, optimistic, relaxed. Not even "Float On", their massive hit and a teeth-gritted ode to positivity, had this easy sense of goodwill to it.
At times, the record feels labored, like you can hear every studio session that went into its creation. By the time the metal guitars have crashed into "Sugar Boats"—and the tubas enter in a moment later, doubling over them—the song has grown both overwhelming and boring. "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL. 1996)", meanwhile, is an overcooked, clattering mess, a sloppy retread of "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" that might be the worst song Brock has ever recorded. On these moments, you get the sense the band simply recorded for eight years until someone told them to stop.
What’s ultimately missing are new ideas, or a fresh spin on their old ones. The lyrics, which used to be a very good reason to listen to a Modest Mouse record, are no longer the draw. Brock’s voice remains remarkable, an exclamation point he can bend into attention-getting shapes—a Tourette’s-like yelp, a heartburn-belch, a rooster crow. So lines like "We’re the sexiest of all primates" ("The Best Room") are simply awkward, like a party quieting down just as you shout something particularly banal.
Any band that stays together for nearly 20 years, transitioning from indie to major label, losing and gaining members along the way, is going to change. A long time ago, Modest Mouse were known for volatile, destructive behavior and piercing insights, but their last two albums have positioned them as paragons of alt-rock professionalism, a band that takes their fans and their albums seriously and think hard about how to deliver on their expectations. Here they sound like they’ve settled into their status as a reliable indie rock institution. Strangers to Ourselves is a pleasant album, and one that completes their transition from "inspired" to "sturdy". | 2015-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epic | March 17, 2015 | 6.4 | 90a9fea2-8bf0-4ea7-a0cb-ad2fa81217c0 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Untethered Moon is the first Built to Spill record Doug Martsch has released in six years, and its existence alone is a mild surprise. While the band has not altered its core sound, there are new moments and darker colors here if you listen closely for them. | Untethered Moon is the first Built to Spill record Doug Martsch has released in six years, and its existence alone is a mild surprise. While the band has not altered its core sound, there are new moments and darker colors here if you listen closely for them. | Built to Spill: Untethered Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20362-untethered-moon/ | Untethered Moon | Untethered Moon is the first Built to Spill record Doug Martsch has released in six years, and its existence alone is a mild surprise. His last LP, 2009’s There Is No Enemy, was quietly better and more focused than its two predecessors, but it didn’t get much attention from press or long-term fans. Martsch didn’t tour behind Enemy for three years, and when he spoke to Pitchfork in 2013 he admitted to feeling directionless. "It’s hard getting older, thinking maybe I’ve run my course," he said. In between then and now, another record was recorded and scrapped.
Built to Spill albums have themes, but they fit loosely, like the stretched-out tees and flannels Martsch wears onstage. Perfect from Now On was cosmic; Keep It Like a Secret explored miscommunication; There Is No Enemy seemed haunted by personal loss, unspecific but sharply painful. ("It doesn’t matter if you’re good or smart/ Goddamn it, things fall apart"). Untethered Moon also has a theme, and it’s one he spells out early: "I found a place where I know I’ll always be tethered/ And I knew, when I woke up, rock and roll will be here forever," he sings on "All Our Songs". On the modest arc traced on Moon’s 10 songs, a diffident soul finds his faith restored and his soul lifted by the music he’s loved his whole life.
This is the point to note that if you’ve loved Built to Spill’s music your whole life, Untethered Moon will have this same comforting, classic feel. In the mid-'90s, as his band and his vision took form, Martsch was a restless tinkerer, one who would throw together different versions of his band each time out, and for a while you never quite knew what shape or size or tone Built to Spill albums would take. There was something thrilling about that, and since the band settled into its current sound around the turn of the millennium, I’ve never quite stopped missing it.
Still, the familiarity of Built to Spill is a balm, and hearing Martsch fiddle with his main melodic ideas is like visiting cousins: everyone’s older, no one’s much different, someone’s hair is longer or shorter, someone’s brought a different girlfriend. Martsch is still messing around with unexpected ways to fit together guitar rock songs—on "All Our Songs", everything drops out for him to play a little three-note figure surrounded by silence, and then he brings the band back in with a pedal stomp. "Living Zoo" works an extended lyrical metaphor ("Being a human/ Being an animal, too"), as the tempo quickens and drags, the guitars twirling overhead like multicolored kites.
There are new moments and darker colors here if you listen closely for them. "On the Way" feels like a song form Martsch has never tried, with female backup singers, a walking bass line, and a cloudy sense of menace. The loosely dub-inflected "C.R.E.B." (Martsch was threatening a Built to Spill reggae album for a while last decade) is pained and even a little bleak, a welcome reminder that there are shadowy spots in the bright open spaces of his music. "I never meant to forget you/ I always forget people I really love/ If I haven’t seen them for a long time/ And I haven’t seen you for a long time," he sings, a moment where you can hear and feel some internalized regrets and emotions surface.
In general, the higher the emotional stakes, the better Martsch gets; you sense that he could jam out a passable Built to Spill album in a few weeks if he wanted to (and that’s exactly what it seemed like he did with 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future and 2005’s You In Reverse). There is even some audible self-deprecation creeping into his song titles: On There Is No Enemy, he offered us "another nowhere lullaby" ("Nowhere Lullaby") and on Untethered Moon he gives us "All Our Songs" and the shruggingly titled "Some Other Song". On "Another Day", he frets over "an obsolescence no one would plan." It sounds like a world-beating talent recognizing his own limitations, deciding whether or not to make something good or something great. There will always be flickers of the latter on Built to Spill’s albums, and if there are only four or five them here, they are bright enough to reassure that Martsch is probably not going anywhere, and that he’ll continue to grace us, every once in a while, with his unassuming, inscrutable presence. | 2015-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | April 21, 2015 | 7.1 | 90b1d6a8-081d-46be-b622-a7d69cbac5c7 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the most ambitious albums in Brazilian history. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the most ambitious albums in Brazilian history. | Milton Nascimento / Lô Borges: Clube Da Esquina | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/milton-nascimento-lo-borges-clube-da-esquina/ | Clube Da Esquina | If you grew up in the rural area of Rio Grande de Cima back then, you probably knew the two boys as Tonho and Cacau. Whether they were playing football or marbles, swimming in the river or in one of the nearby waterfalls, they were inseparable. One afternoon, Tonho and Cacau were playing on a dirt hill when photographer Carlos da Silva Assunção Filho (better known as Cafi) drove past in a Volkswagen Bug. He braked, shouted to the boys and as the dust settled, snapped their picture. “It was like lightning,” recalls Cafi. “It’s a strong image. The face of Brazil. And it was at the time when several artists were in exile.”
Cafi didn’t catch either boys’ name that day, but when he later showed the photo to Brazilian musicians Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, the two knew they had their record cover for their 1972 double album, Clube Da Esquina. And for many years after the fact, people thought the photo was in fact Nascimento and Borges as young boys. For the next 40 years, the boys on the album cover were a mystery throughout Brazil, one requiring a manhunt of sorts to try and track the boys down. “Someone in the car shouted at me and I smiled,” Tonho recalled some 40 years later, as a reporter and photographer had finally tracked him and his childhood friend down, even recreating the iconic photo. “I was eating a piece of bread that someone had given me, because I was starving. And I was barefoot. But I never knew I was on the cover of a record. My mother will be thrilled. We never had a photo of me as a boy.”
While deep in the morass of a brutally repressive military regime, 1972 was a watershed moment for Brazilian pop music, or as it’s often called, MPB: Novos Baianos’ Acabou Chorare, Paulinho da Viola’s A Dança Da Solidão, the duo album from Nelson Angelo E Joyce, not to mention self-titled albums from Tim Maia, Jards Macalé, Tom Zé, and Elis Regina. And after years in exile, Tropicália heroes Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso returned home with career highlights in Expresso 2222 and Transa, respectively. Yet looming over them all is Clube Da Esquina, one of the most ambitious records in Brazilian music history, a double album that not only belongs in the same discussion with others in the Western canon—be it Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main Street—but one that is even more uplifting and mystifying.
The music of Milton Nascimento ranges from the earthy to the angelic, both mysterious and plainspoken, haunting and sublime. Eumir Deodato, who provided string arrangements for Clube Da Esquina and subsequently worked with Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, and Kool & the Gang, heard in Nascimento parallels to classical music, but admitted: “To date I have not managed to discover the rhythmic impulse he gives to his songs. It is something new, mysterious, intriguing and challenging. Few people have a deep understanding of what Milton Nascimento’s music is.”
Such extremes befit a man whose voice is one of the most profound in 20th-century music, one that entices and inspires his fellow countrymen as well as Paul Simon, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, and Animal Collective. It’s a voice resonant and well-deep yet able to soar upwards to an ethereal falsetto, one capable of shaking vibrato as well as sustaining pure tones, and wordless shrieks closer to tropical bird calls than the human voice. Or, as Elis Regina once put it: “If God sang, he would do it with Milton’s voice.”
Born in Rio in 1942, Nascimento’s mom died when he was still an infant and his adopted family relocated to Brazil’s Minas Gerais region when he was three. His adopted mother sang in a choir under iconic 20th-century composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and in the streets, Nascimento could hear church music, romantic toadas and folia de reis during Christmas season. Lingering from a 17th-century gold rush that brought in a flux of African slave labor to the Portuguese colony, the racial diversity of Minas Gerais yielded a rich spectrum of music (as well as racial tensions). As one of only a few black children in the small town of Três Pontas, Nascimento felt such intolerance daily. Yet he wholly absorbed the musical culture of his adoptive state of Minas Gerais and let it reverberate in his own songs throughout his long career.
Obsessed with music though he was, Nascimento relocated to the capital city of Belo Horizonte in 1963 to take an accounting job. But he paid his bills by gigging in clubs at night, where he forged a close friendship with the Borges brothers, Márcio and his kid brother, Lô. With Marcio, he caught Francois Truffaut’s nouvelle vague classic Jules et Jim, watching it again and again until the last showing. Nascimento was inspired to start writing his own songs with his friend that same night. “All my songs are like a movie—they’re all very cinematographic,” he said. And it was through Lô that Nascimento first heard the Beatles, realizing just how classical music and pop could be fused together.
Nascimento’s rise through the ranks of MPB was meteoric. A performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965 garnered notice and by ’69, he found himself booked at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in North New Jersey, recording with producer Creed Taylor and helming a band that included fellow Brazilian jazz stars Eumir Deodato and Airto Moreira as well as Herbie Hancock.
But it was when he was back home in Belo Horizonte, making small talk and jamming with his friends on a stretch of sidewalk at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza that their “corner club” was born. Neither a club nor a movement at the time (a popular music venue now stands at the intersection), their “corner club” twined together various loves: bossa nova, the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Western classical, indigenous South American music, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and more. In 1971, Nascimento and friends rented a house in Praia de Piratininga to the east of Rio to pull their songs together and Clube Da Esquina was released the next year.
A landmark of Brazilian pop, the success of the album confirmed Nascimento as a star of MPB but also launched the careers of Clube bassist Beto Guedes, guitarists Toninho Horta, Nelson Angelo and the younger Borges. And while Nascimento was by far the most prominent member of the club, his name isn’t on the cover and he shared credit with the then-20-year-old Lô Borges, who sings lead on six of the songs. Nor is Nascimento’s face easily seen; you have to hunt through the 150 photos in the gatefold to find a small photo of him. As MPB scholar Charles Perrone wrote: “Because of his extraordinary individual musical talents…the collective aspect of Nascimento’s repertory are often overlooked. Clube Da Esquina emphasizes the notion of encounter and the importance of gathering.”
The magic of Clube Da Esquina is that while one can discern all of Nascimento and friends’ influences, their alchemy elevates it all to vibrate at a higher frequency. Casual and inspired, studied and spontaneous, the album is Pet Sounds, Innervisions and The White Album all rolled into one and it remains beloved even for those who know just a few Brazilian albums. And even for those who don’t speak or understand a lick of Portuguese, the vocal harmonies, hooks, and orchestrations slip the confines of language and strike at the heart.
So while you may not glean the lyrics of “Cais,” with its imagery of the sea, pier, and Nascimento’s plea for happiness, when the haunting ballad drops away at the 1:35 mark after singing about “launching myself,” a minor chord and his wordless harmonizing nevertheless conveys the bittersweet thrill of leaving the shore and drifting towards the unknown. You don’t need to translate the lyrics on “O Trem Azul” to feel the line about “the sun on your head,” so warm, languid, and tangible is its chorus. Same goes for the sensuous and ecstatic “Cravo E Canela,” which blends together sensations of caco honey and gypsy rain.
The album is full of such shifts, moments that act like a refreshing breeze across the skin on a sweltering day, a shaft of sun piercing the clouds, a kind gesture on a crowded bus, reflecting how in our own daily lives the smallest of movements can trigger a reverberation within. In the lyrics, in the subtle switching of a meter, a key shift or a pivot in instrumentation, each song sets you down in a space far different from where you began. That sense of movement is intentional, as trains, roads, and modes of transportation often figure into Nascimento’s writing, and he himself considered his music “a kind of oxcart, something that unrolls and develops.” There’s the burred guitar build-up at the end of the otherwise hushed “Dos Cruces,” the clamor of church bells that punctuate and illuminate “San Vicente,” the mournful cello and strings in the middle section of “Um Girassol Da Cor De Seu Cabelo” that launches into a redemptive chorus about “a sunflower the color of your hair.”
On the spare piano ballad “Um Gosto de Sol,” Nascimento moves through a half-forgotten dream, a stranger smiling in a foreign city, a river that falls to sleep, the sweet flesh of a pear, all of it tactile yet also ineffable. And then the minor key motif from “Cais” return, this time as a string quartet rather than piano and voice. It’s a surreal moment on the album, one worthy of Luis Buñuel, that image of the boat drifting from the pier now juxtaposed with a pear in a fruit bowl, the most poignant string section this side of “Eleanor Rigby” now reveals an underlying melancholy and sense of estrangement to the surface.
Yet one of the album’s brightest, breeziest tunes led to Brazil’s federal censors originally blocking the recording of the song, an instance of a disconnect between the music and words. “Paisagem Da Janela” [Landscape From the Window] is clopping, country-tinged soft rock with a chiming guitar line, but Lô Borges’s refrain belies such lightness: “When I would speak of those morbid things/When I would speak of those sordid men/When I would speak of this storm/You didn’t listen/You don’t want to believe/But that’s so normal.” It speaks of a past that could also be a commentary on that moment under the rule of the junta. It’s also one of the album’s catchiest choruses, a natural for a sing-along.
A military dictatorship trying to suppress such a song reveals that beyond the perfect pop songcraft and immaculate arrangements, Clube Da Esquina also signified the subtlest and most profound of revolutionary acts. “The military dictatorship imposed an element of urgency,” journalist Paulo Thiago de Mello wrote about the repressive political climate that surrounded Esquina. “And this is something that those who did not live those days may have difficulty understanding. The suffocation provoked by the dictatorship made life urgent.” Under such tyranny, the idyllic possibilities of youth are crushed. Be it Stalinist Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or under the brutal military dictatorships that sprang up throughout the Southern Hemisphere in the ’60s and ’70s, social bonds are not just strained and severed, but also called into question. It’s no coincidence then that Nascimento references the Mexican Revolution hero Emiliano Zapata in the first minute of the album.
“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life…by isolating men,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. “But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation…It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” In hanging and playing together, Milton Nascimento and his friends provided a beacon in the midst of their country’s “vazio cultural” (or cultural void).
Clube Da Esquina, the album itself and the subsequent movement, emphasized casual social encounters and the importance of getting together and playing, and as a result, it elevated not just Nascimento, but the entire collective. That spirit of collaboration continued for Nascimento well after, be it with saxophonist Wayne Shorter on the 1974 album Native Dancer that reintroduced him to a North American audience or his subsequent collaborations with everyone from Duran Duran to Pat Metheny to Quincy Jones.
Such a sense of camaraderie and community can be heard in the brief, joyous minute and a half of “Saídas E Bandeiras Nº 2,” with Nascimento’s falsetto and the guitars arcing to their uppermost registers and towards a not yet possible but still imaginable future: “To walk down avenues facing up to what’s over our heads/To join all forces, to overcome that tide/What was stone becomes a man/And man is more solid than the tide.” In playing on the corner together, Nascimento and his friends—and even Tonho and Cacau sitting on a patch of dirt—all of them became the face of Brazil. | 2018-09-02T08:22:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Global | Odeon | September 2, 2018 | 9.5 | 90ba25c9-6380-4b0b-9db1-234ca81133db | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The lo-fi, art rock project from Yung Lean is every bit as dazed as his rap music, while otherwise sounding almost nothing like it. | The lo-fi, art rock project from Yung Lean is every bit as dazed as his rap music, while otherwise sounding almost nothing like it. | Jonatan Leandoer127: Nectar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jonatan-leandoer127-nectar/ | Nectar | Jonatan Leandoer127 is a side project for Swedish musician Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad, though it could also double as an escape plan. Håstad is better known as the zeitgeist-chasing rapper Yung Lean, but it’s easy to imagine why a young white artist might not want to commit to decades of making music under a debatably insensitive stage moniker that celebrates the very substance to which he was once addicted. And while Håstad has cultivated a surprisingly devoted audience with his depressive cloud rap, to judge from his most recent Yung Lean release, November’s pulseless Poison Ivy, it sure doesn’t sound like his heart is in it anymore.
It’s always dangerous to read too much into publicity material, but it’s no accident that the press release for Jonatan Leandoer127’s Nectar doesn’t mention Yung Lean once (instead it just conspicuously refers to Håstad as a “Stockholm-based multi-disciplinary artist.”) Pitched somewhere between King Krule’s gothic art rock and the narcoleptic folk of Beck’s early lo-fi projects, the album plays to an indie audience that’d likely never give the time of day to an artist named Yung Lean. The distance is impressive: Nectar is every bit as dazed as his rap music, while otherwise sounding almost nothing like it. Håstad’s groggy monotone and alienated wordplay are the only binding threads.
Removed from the rack-stacking rap clichés he was always too quick to default to as Yung Lean, it’s easier to appreciate how compelling some of his more original prose can be. On “My Guardian” he paints a horrible vision: “Who’s the man with the sapphire eyes/Who used to watch me in my room late at night?/With spider arms, black teeth and lice/He made me wanna kill ’em all somehow.” Delivered with the nonchalance of a beat poet, his free-form prose scrambles figments of memories, dreams, and traumas.
The more refined musical backdrop hasn’t made Håstad’s delivery any more ingratiating, however. His singing is a lot like his rapping: hollow and half-committal. Opener “Razor Love” sets him against flattering splashes of New Romantic saxophone, but his flat voice undercuts any emotion. He may be trying to conjure an air of Lou Reed’s detached cool, but in execution, he sounds more like G. Love singing his shopping list into a voice memo.
Despite its icy posture, Nectar stacks two crowdpleaders back-to-back. With its rousing, Art Brut-caliber riff, the rocker “Off With Their Heads” is such fun that even the normally poker-faced Håstad can’t suppress a smirk, while “Wooden Girl” has the majestic twirl of the Cure’ss brightest pop singles. And “Tangerine Warrior (Freestyle),” while not a freestyle in the traditional sense, beautifully frames Håstad spit-balled poetry with an impulsive accompaniment of Neutral Milk Hotel trumpets and somber piano: “I walk around and I shine with no rhinestones/There’s no life in my eyes there’s just ice stones/When I remember my grandma in a nightgown.”
Even when he seems to be sleepwalking his way through these performances, his sentiments stick and his melodies linger in the head the way his Yung Lean material rarely does. Is Jonatan Leondoer127 a lark or a reinvention? There’s enough inspiration on display to suggest that, should he ever be so inclined, Håstad really could go ahead and quit his day job. | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Year0001 | January 30, 2019 | 6.9 | 90c5d7d8-511f-4abc-b0a8-d7d25f59f069 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The preposterously talented English band’s third record is pitched between clinical precision and crazed abandon. | The preposterously talented English band’s third record is pitched between clinical precision and crazed abandon. | Black Midi: Hellfire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-midi-hellfire/ | Hellfire | black midi thrive in the half-light between serious and silly. It’s just fun, man, Geordie Greep and his mates have repeatedly said in response to earnest questions about their mission, their message, their “responsibility” to carry forward the torch of prog rock. Words like “ridiculous” and “crazy” come up a lot in their interviews. “We’re just doing this stupid thing and somehow making the semblance of a living,” Greep said on Radio Primavera recently, when promoting the band’s third album, Hellfire.
When compared with their inky-black music, which throbs with a terrible intensity, Greep's insistence on “fun” seems like special pleading. Of course you are meant to take this shit seriously. There are nine or ten tabs open in any ten seconds of black midi music—themes, sub-themes, recurring characters, historical references. Their compositions don’t feel arranged so much as welded together at impossible angles according to the precise calculations of aeronautical engineers. The lyrics are dense and specific enough to wonder if the soldier character named Tristan Bongo (from “Welcome to Hell”) might have served under the homophobic, screaming captain from “Eat Men Eat,” or if the diamond miner who died and became a diamond himself (from Cavalcade’s “Diamond Stuff”) might have been buried in the dirt beneath the feet of the post-apocalyptic preacher and cult leader of “John L.” You can find multiple Reddit threads devoted to why Greep keeps mentioning anteaters. Music that vibrates at this frequency simply does not get made without lunatic commitment.
But there is a knowing wink buried within the music’s hairpin turns and dissonances. The members have been playing together since their teens, and their technical command, by now, borders on preposterous. The absurdity of high-level performance, the cosmic humor in any mortal human growing this proficient at basically anything, radiates from their music. In the right light, black midi sounds less like the work of zealots and more like kids who have beaten every level and are now trying again with the controller upside down.
The curtain opens on Hellfire with a creaky, arthritic march rhythm straight out of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Along with Cavalcade’s ode to Marlene Dietrich, the moment underscores the hint of Weimar cabaret in their music, with its exaggerated gestures and cheery bad faith. As a vocalist, Greep’s motor-mouthed yammer channels old black-and-white newsreels and wartime propaganda films. It’s the voice of the classic Hollywood flim-flammer, the confidence man, the “trouble right here in River City” type. Greep’s lyrics often cast a jaundiced eye on fraudulent performers and their fickle audiences: On Cavalcade’s final track, a composer named Markus attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing 65 ascending fourths in a row because “everyone loves” them, only to be dragged out in chains. On Hellfire’s finale “27 Questions,” Greep portrays a preening actor named Freddie Frost, who prances about the stage and trills pseudo-profundities to a credulous audience. Once you look for them, you find rib jabs everywhere in black midi’s music, indicating that all this just might be, at least in part, a put-on.
As they’ve progressed, black midi have become increasingly interested in play-acting and costume as songwriting prompts. A lot of their material, to hear them tell it, begins with some version of the thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we tried to write a ___?” “When you want to do something original...use something as a model or inspiration that you know you definitely can’t do," Greep has said. “Your failure will be interesting.” You can hear this impulse at work throughout Hellfire, as they offer mad-scientist takes on country songs (the pedal-steel and Hammond organ washes in “Still”) and even tropicália: The first two minutes of “Eat Men Eat” sounds for all the world like Caetano Veloso—wry, knowing, weightless. No pose lasts for more than a minute or two. The rhythm section on “Still” convulses repeatedly, and Cameron Picton’s vocal melody takes some intriguing, nearly Sondheim left turns, while “Eat Men Eat” careens from its quiet opening into a climax of screaming horns, like a large land mammal dying painfully.
Three albums in, it’s only growing more thrilling to watch the group navigate these hard swerves, each one arriving at a higher velocity, executed with even more breath-sucking precision. The songs don’t segue so much as upend each other like a procession of spiky blue Mario Kart shells. But as exhilarating as the highs are on Hellfire—the rampaging 32nd-note riff on “Sugar/Tzu” triggers gasp-laughs, for example—the world that Greep details and populates with his bustling characters can grow wearying, over time, in its emotional aridity. “Posterity will show me to be/The greatest the world has ever seen, a genius among nonentities,” blares Greep on “Sugar/Tzu”—a great line, but also a sneering pose he repeats one too many times throughout Hellfire: “Idiots are infinite, thinking men numbered,” he mutters on “The Race Is About to Begin.” This is the kind of insight you arrive at when you are 22 and most of the thoughts you have are concerned with making sure the world sees how smart you are.
There’s a deep suspicion—common to the sort of young, intense intellectuals who find themselves drawn to listening to or making complicated music—that surges of uncontrollable emotion are suspect, dangerous, in need of further, possibly forensic, inspection. That process of forensic inspection often feels like the same bloodshot-eyed force powering black midi’s music. Greep has a vibrato velvety enough to make the words “prostrate, supine” (from “The Defence”) sing like a Tom Jones ballad. But his crooning sounds the way a boy dancing awkwardly at a middle school dance looks; the movements are there, but hiding behind uneasy scare quotes that betray a distrust of strong feelings, of pleasure mechanisms.
There is also some wild-eyed Scott Walker energy at work in black midi somewhere—lyrics about military nightmare scenarios, the sort of acrid theater of being a crooner, the exaggerated Kabuki nature of all the pulled faces—the grimace, the scream. Greep will utter out-of-nowhere, completely non-idiomatic put-downs like “some people are as useless as lids on a fish’s eyes”—that’s a Scott Walker line if ever I’ve heard one. Like some of Walker’s more experimental later work, black midi’s music can feel curiously stunted and two-dimensional, despite its metatextual layers and fiendish complexity. If the intellect on Hellfire is feverish, the emotional temperature often dips to morgue levels; their music is better equipped to comment on emotion than to feel it, or express it. They continue to get over, as they always do, on pure conviction, riding the knife’s edge between clinical precision and crazed abandon. | 2022-07-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | July 15, 2022 | 7.8 | 90c91877-8479-4cee-bb02-308a9b0037dd | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Newly released on streaming services, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. | Newly released on streaming services, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. | Lil Peep / Lil Tracy: castles / CASTLES II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-lil-tracy-castles/ | castles / CASTLES II | Five minutes after Lil Peep and Lil Tracy met, they hatched plans to make music together. Peep told Tracy he had a verse open for him, and the song they recorded that day is a frenetic collision, excavating a tender beat from a Postal Service song and frothing over it with half-sung raps about switchblades and taking a girl home to “connect like WiFi.” It’s close to perfect. Tracy said later he had never connected like that with anyone. The two collaborated for a too-brief period, culminating in a bitter, public fall-out over Peep’s management and the way the media—and sometimes Peep himself—erased Tracy from the narrative around Gothboiclique and the rise of so-called “emo-rap.” They were barely speaking in 2017 when Peep died on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona.
The posthumous Peep projects that have trickled out since then have been gifts to fans, shrapnels of his legacy. castles and CASTLES II, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago, are time capsules for their collaboration. Newly released on streaming for the first time, these songs capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. These are bleary tracks, with a ragged mesh of rock and rap and blaring, ticking drums. It’s scratchy and sludgy and woozy; it sounds like it’s seeping into you.
Peep and Tracy sang about rot and mess and entropy, destroying everything around you to mirror the chaos in your head. “I know that’s your favorite dress,” they drone, “Set fire to it.” The best songs here find a cinematic shimmer. Their voices echo and layer on “Your Favorite Dress,” trading verses while dark synths pool under them. “Lord why, lord why do I gotta wake up,” Peep moans in “White Wine,” as Tracy howls harmonies over a sputtering beat. The intensity is the point, and they braid cartoon imagery—castle walls and demons, full moons and bloody teeth—into songs about coke and comedowns and ache. “Two weeks with the same old jeans on,” Tracy coos on “Dying Out West,” “I know you want to die, baby, this is your theme song.”
But this is also the sound of friends having fun, riffing off each other’s ridiculousness. “I can’t fuck with you if we weren’t friends on MySpace,” Tracy slurs on “White Wine.” They ad-lib word associations, which veers into bland asides about fake friends and good girls, or a line that falls somewhere between serious and self-satire—“If I die today, you would try to fuck my bitch!” Tracy hisses on “Never Eat, Never Sleep.” You can hear them self-mythologizing, egging each other on; they keep calling themselves vampires, crafting something mystical out of sleepless, strung-out nights. The core of any Gothboiclique song is a plea, for peace or corrosion or a way to hollow out. Here, Peep and Tracy revel in their disarray.
When they first released these tapes, it was stunning to hear them wail about wanting to die, with an intimacy that bordered on boredom. They turned death into the mundane. It’s hard to disentangle any posthumous album from nostalgia and grief; it’s also tough to separate listening to Peep’s music now from the reason people turn to it, for the glint of recognition that comes when you hear him scream the worst thought you’ve ever had, crashing over drums. Peep could be transcendent in how he wrote about life and death and meaninglessness. “Look at the sky tonight, all of the stars have a reason,” he sang on 2015’s “Star Shopping,” so earnest you had to believe him. On these mixtapes, he and Tracy sing about pain and waiting to not wake up, but more than anything, they look for refuge, brick walls and barricades. It is an act of hope to build a space where you can be alone, to carve yourself a hiding place, and call it a castle.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | July 7, 2021 | 7.1 | 90ccf714-e549-427f-a940-6efc53b47aff | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
An extended dance music composition from the Japan-based analog-synth trio audaciously tries to recreate a long-lost live session with contemporary global grooves. | An extended dance music composition from the Japan-based analog-synth trio audaciously tries to recreate a long-lost live session with contemporary global grooves. | Tokyo Black Star: "Fantasy Live 1999" | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22237-tokyo-black-star-fantasy-live-1999/ | "Fantasy Live 1999" | The quotes in the title are striking. Intimating a description as well as a headline, the punctuation marks are an essential part of the title of Tokyo Black Star’s second album, *“Fantasy Live 1999.” *They serve as an aspirational signpost for the artists, and a note of caution to those diving into their illusionary composition. Beyond the meta gates of those quotation marks, “Fantasy Live 1999” both reaffirms and moves beyond its deceptive title, playing around with what the piece is and what it isn’t.
The album is, in fact, a fantasia that exists amid extended-length masterworks such as Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 or Lindstrøm’s Where You Go I Go Too; the analog-gear live sets currently practiced by the likes of Magic Mountain High, Reagenz, and Blondes; and the dub-wise synthesizer music of global sprites such as Francis Bebey and the Yellow Magic Orchestra. In actual terms, it is a single, multi-part, instrumental “piece” constructed in the studio by Tokyo Black Star—long-time production partners Alex Prat (better known by his DJ name, Alex From Tokyo) and Isao Kumano (a Tokyo-based sound engineer, who is one of Japan dance music's most sought-after mastering pros), and a relatively new arrival, the modular synth wiz and bassist Kenichi Takagi. It runs a cool 40 minutes at a stately disco tempo, and as the title suggests, is a modern attempt to recreate a long-lost live session that Alex and Isao performed at a Shimokitazawa club back when they were starting and raving. It succeeds in spirit and in content, and thus spends as much time gazing back longingly as it does reaching forward.
TBS’s push and pull with the aesthetics of futurism—real, faux, beat-wise, ambient, contemporary, nostalgic—have been near their core from the get-go. Alex and Isao’s debut release was also the first record put out by Innervisions, the Âme- and Dixon-founded German label and crew whose house, techno and related materials have balanced underground quality and commercial popularity since inception. That 2005 EP, Psyche Dance, included a “beatless” version of a track, and set an important example for both artist and label: the pulsing qualities of synth chords and the oscillations of an analog synth’s sample-and-hold circuits made for a more Zen, less hedonistic approach to the art of the dance track. This laidback approach to the beat was hardly a new idea (it’s been a major ingredient of much great techno coming out of Japan for years), but in TBS’s music, it is especially intuitive, an unforced part of the group’s creative personality.
You can hear this relaxed comfort throughout the new recording, a large reason why “Fantasy Live 1999” feels so joyous. Beyond the clever title and the running time, nothing here carries much pretense; instead, like the intrinsically Japanese, post-Murakami cut-up sleeve art by Tomokazu Matsuyama, there’s a constant playfulness. At its heart, this is music for popping the balloon of life’s seriousness, for effortlessly dancing from one knowing smile to another.
The precedent is set at the top, where sci-fi sound effects and a synth run performed with classically trained dexterity create a B-movie atmosphere, while a rudimentary snare-and-kick boom-thwack completes the Kraftwerk-ian moment. Five minutes in—as the spacey synth chords reminiscent of the John Carpenter soundtracks drift by—the modus operandi of “Fantasy Live” as a journey to the past becomes abundantly clear. As soon as the chords mix down into an ambient string accompaniment for a minimal drum-machine-and-bass-synth foundation, the path is beyond doubt. Big-screen elegance slides in beside art-house kitsch—including a stretch (around the 25th minute) that can only be described as the suite’s Far East Dub moment, where koto and gamelan spirits invade the kick-drum world—co-existing naturally and maturely, and not as quirky juxtapositions.
The piece builds to a grand finale whose main elements come from “Mitokomon,” the standout from Edo Express, TBS’s 2015 EP. On its own, the track—a magnificent synth skank with some lightly sprinkled African percussion—seemed a glorious accident. Yet as the closing section of a wide-ranging “fantasy,” whose elements had been forecast throughout the piece, it is a groovy overture; the sonic references now full of inferred meaning about global movement, technology and rhythm. It’s a broadly satisfying ending, the kind of exclamation point that a great set of quotes richly deserves. | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | World Famous | August 24, 2016 | 7.6 | 90cf8692-9b88-4c22-838c-36d392e545b7 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | null |
American Tunes is a posthumous album from the legendary musician, songwriter, and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, whose smartly funky touch enlivens a selection of standards. | American Tunes is a posthumous album from the legendary musician, songwriter, and New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint, whose smartly funky touch enlivens a selection of standards. | Allen Toussaint: American Tunes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22007-american-tunes/ | American Tunes | *American Tunes *is a posthumous album from Allen Toussaint, who, though he had a six decade-long musical career, began his work as a regular touring live performer began in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina claimed most of his possessions and his recording studio in its destructive wake. Toussaint’s responsible for infusing the syncopated pianos of ragtime jazz and boom-bap style swing into New Orleans funk and rock, but his just-released collection does not necessarily reflect that level of innovation. However it highlights the iconic musical pioneer’s ability to lightly repurpose some of his favorite and most well-worn influences into his distinctive style. Whether re-imagining the work of piano boogie-loving New Orleans zydeco kingpin Professor Longhair, examining the melodies of jazz great Duke Ellington, or digging into his own canon via an instrumental redux of country star Glen Campbell’s Toussaint-written 1977 hit “Southern Nights,” *American Tunes *highlights Toussaint’s skill more as a pure musician, regardless of genre.
His live performances tended to veer discursively through his recording and production career, stopping to add re-interpretations of songs made popular by artists who served as his creative inspirations. However, it’s in Toussaint’s ability to weave his smartly appointed piano funk through the entire album that creates the tie that binds this disparate collection together. In less capable hands, Glen Campbell’s aforementioned country classic placed next to Rhiannon Giddens’ take on Ella Fitzgerald’s wistful “Rocks In My Bed” and a solo piano version of Professor Longhair’s swinging N’Awlins romp “Big Chief” would be three individual moments. However, there’s a virtuoso here weaving this all together, and it unfolds with the smooth inevitability of cocktail-party conversation.
Professor Longhair was often noted as one of Toussaint’s personal heroes, and the true highlight of American Tunes is his version of Longhair’s “Big Chief,” which builds as expected and then pivots from major-key euphoria into minor key-driven malaise. “Southern Nights” transforms here from a thumping soul-country groove into an orchestral-style pop number bearing a similarity to Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”
The most discordant moment on the album is it’s closing and titular single. In 1975, Paul Simon sang “American Tune,” offering a folk-meets-soul take on a style similar to 1971’s “You’ve Got A Friend.” 2016’s “American Tune” is almost an afterthought, as guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Jay Bellerose’s work is more showcased than that of the album’s lead artist. While the song is spare and hopeful in vibe, it’s at minimum “just” excellent.
Somewhere in the poly-stylistic Venn diagram that birthed Allen Toussaint’s vibrant and diverse musical catalog lie the spirits of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Glen Campbell, Professor Longhair and more. When combining those influences alongside modern era virtuosos like Bill Frisell, Rhiannon Giddens, Van Dyke Parks and others, something pleasantly expected emerges. A step left of center yet still striking familiar chords right on time, Allen Toussaint show us his understated brilliance one final time. | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Nonesuch | June 25, 2016 | 7.2 | 90d0e411-a0d3-4755-9c5a-0aedc9719c23 | Marcus K. Dowling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-k. dowling/ | null |
In 1986, Metallica released inarguably one of the best metal records of all time. Newly remastered with live takes and demos, the album’s riffs, power, and mania remain as potent as ever. | In 1986, Metallica released inarguably one of the best metal records of all time. Newly remastered with live takes and demos, the album’s riffs, power, and mania remain as potent as ever. | Metallica: Master of Puppets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-master-of-puppets/ | Master of Puppets | Before drummer Lars Ulrich even thought about acquiring Basquiats to auction off in the future, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was most stoked on obtaining the first issue of the Fantastic Four comic, which established Marvel as a big name and is now estimated to be worth around $135,000. The unmitigated success of Master of Puppets, inarguably one of the greatest metal albums of all time, let him do that, and set him on a path from obtaining valuable pieces of pop culture to becoming an icon in the culture itself. When asked about why he wanted the rare comic, Hammett replied, “To obtain the unobtainable is a real rush in itself.”
The lasting characteristics that took metal from its from heavier rock offshoot to its own distinct form were already taking shape by the time Metallica released their third album Master of Puppets in 1986. The Bay Area thrash scene where they originated—and quickly divested themselves from—was born from one of the most successful mergers in music: metal riffs and punk energy. Melody was increasingly prominent, bringing with it a wounded and raw beauty. Thrash also brought about an element of social consciousness, adding flourishes to British crust pioneers Discharge’s brute simplicity. Metal was both assimilated into pop culture and a bastion of musical expansion, a reimagination of progressive rock with more direct propulsion. It was music not content with its own alienation, ready to lash back as a big-tent alternative that demanded a deeper understanding.
Will this reissue of Master of Puppets—a remastered and expanded box set, featuring studio outtakes and live performances from around the world and one of bassist Jason Newstead’s first shows at a club in Reseda, Cali.—convince you it’s the greatest metal record of all time, if you’re not convinced already? The numerous early takes and rough demos have a diehard appeal (there’s a reason Metallica has a dedicated archivist on their payroll), though the live recordings present a band going through its most monumental transition punctuated by monumental tragedy. Recording a masterpiece was the easy part. Genius does not appear out of thin air and Puppets was a culmination of Metallica’s influences and forward direction, so yes, it will give you a more rounded sense of how a masterwork came to be. That the early roughness stands starkly shows how relentless they were in making a defining metal record.
Its predecessor, 1984’s Ride The Lightning, began with “Fight Fire With Fire,” a song fueled by nuclear paranoia, which was not at all uncommon in the ’80s. Puppets opens with “Battery,” a celebration of destruction as a liberating force, trading in commentary for a purely aspirational message, albeit one the heshers could revere. It’s basically “Fire” widened in philosophical scope and tightened in performance. In this way, Puppets wasn’t a radical break from Lightning. Both mostly follow a similar structure—acoustic intro, second song as title track, a “ballad” on the fourth song, a long instrumental—and yet Metallica were not copying themselves or refining their approach. They were crazy enough to think they could top Lightning, and they did. It’s what separated them from the rest of the thrash scene, and from most metal in general; they were the furthest thing from Def Leppard, but they wanted to push their own boundaries of metal as high art as much as Def Leppard was trying out-slick and out-pop their Los Angeles rivals. In hindsight, game recognize game. Metallica abandoned Los Angeles because they couldn’t hang with the pop bands there—all of those Decline of Civilization Part II Aqua Net rejects couldn’t fathom wanting to ascend to Metallica’s heights anyway.
Puppets deals with the very nature of control, presenting the hangover of its allure. Metal is fight music for underdogs and while that is empowering and worthwhile, Puppets shows the consequences of control in the wrong hands. The title track was Hetfield warning himself about addiction, something he would become intimate with, and he wouldn’t listen until their 2004 tell-all documentary Some Kind of Monster made a tragic comedy out of Metallica’s near collapse while recording St. Anger. Through its raging rhythm and heart-wrenching valleys, where bassist Cliff Burton brought a distorted symphony of the mind, Hetfield’s pleas for sanity sure don’t sound like someone coming to grips with how fucked up he is.
This isn’t unusual for cautionary drug songs, yet “Puppets” doesn’t sound like a morality play—“Master! Master!” is servitude delivered as arena unity, where you grow stronger, not indentured, by yelling it louder and louder. “Disposable Heroes” and “Leper Messiah” explore the illusion of control through more conventional topics—“Heroes” takes on war and “Messiah” skewers televangelists as any decent ’80s metal band would—and still manage to be more powerful than most bands at their best. Metallica embraced more complex structures without diluting themselves, a rare instance where a band gets more accessible by getting more complicated.
Puppets’ fusion of beauty and savagery is best defined in its last two songs, “Orion,” an instrumental, and “Damage Inc.” Both tracks were co-written by Burton, effectively sealing his legacy that still looms over Metallica three decades later. His presence is strongest on “Orion,” making thrash move like ballet, a swelling motion that’s not just about crashing into things. The bridge takes the control motif and creates worlds with it, creating tenderness and majesty, showing what a man’s hand masquerading as divine can summon. “Orion” is celestial through meaning, not explicit text, Hawkwind’s high-mindedness combined with Lemmy’s more direct glance.
“Damage Inc.” closes how “Battery” opened the album: reckless carnage as a cleansing, necessary fire. While it’s more of a contrast than fusion, they still coexist with a purpose to elevate metal. It’s even more apocalyptic than “Fight Fire With Fire”—there’s no mention of nuclear war, just a focus on getting mowed down for someone else’s survival. “Fuck it all, fucking no regrets” proved to be such an impactful line, Hetfield reused it again in 2003, on St. Anger’s title track with a teenager’s enthusiastic clumsiness.
Nevertheless, Hetfield is, bar none, metal’s standout rhythm guitarist, handling blazing speed with a precision and heft. Metallica are so ubiquitous that this perhaps has gone under-recognized; hummable as his riffs are, and the legions of hummers massive, Hetfield’s role as frontman obscures his contributions as a guitarist. The rough mixes included in this deluxe reissue are mostly devoid of solos and vocals, and they become pantheons to Hetfield’s rhythm stature. It’s jarring to hear gaps where Hammett’s solos or Burton’s fills should be, and yet through him (and our collective memories) the songs still flow as they should. Hetfield-Hammett-Burton-Ulrich is one of the few metal lineups where every member was equally integral, where if you removed one, the band would be radically altered. Hetfield was the bond between everyone else, a ground to Burton’s ambitions and Hammett’s squalling lead work, a reason that Ulrich didn’t need to be flashy because he certainly couldn’t be.
Puppets brought Metallica to their artistic climax, but its touring cycle proved a severe challenge to such loftiness. The live recordings here are closer to the tapes that Metallica made their reputation off of than the polished productions on the 1993 box set Live Shit: Binge & Purge, the cash-out from touring all corners of the globe. As demanding of perfection they were making Puppets, live they were still more concerned with tearing through, out-of-place leads be damned. Except for a 1987 VHS Cliff ‘Em All!, there weren’t a lot of official live recordings from this era, odd given how Metallica made their name as a live band. The live tracks here are rough, unpolished, but you can basically smell the beer and sweat from the band and the crowd throughout.
Before Burton’s death from a bus accident in 1986 on tour in Sweden, Hetfield considered kicking out Ulrich, an alternate timeline that scores of metal fans might still wish into existence. Loving Metallica and hating Ulrich are not mutually exclusive; Metallica could make more money charging fans and ex-fans to spit on him than they ever did making music. Even as the fantasy lingers, it’s impossible to imagine Metallica without Ulrich. Puppets is the product of brashness with an eye towards heaven, and that’s Hetfield and Ulrich to a fault. And Hetfield was going to make that relationship work: he described early Metallica as the family that replaced his own, his mother died from treating cancer with Christian Science and his father abandoned him when he was young. Burton’s death reopened that feeling of abandonment, making him grip to control even more. Trying to obtain the unobtainable is not for the foolhardy, and it will drain you into a husk if you’re lucky. That’s what Hetfield tried to warn you about on Puppets by yelling at you about chopped breakfasts on mirrors: control is a deathwish that keeps you alive. | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Blackened | December 2, 2017 | 10 | 90d196be-f727-490b-be58-d0b6122abdb6 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
As the phonk sound that he helped develop has evolved, the Parisian producer has switched up his own style. His latest album feels like a grab bag of genre experiments that lack a distinct identity. | As the phonk sound that he helped develop has evolved, the Parisian producer has switched up his own style. His latest album feels like a grab bag of genre experiments that lack a distinct identity. | NxxxxxS: Short Term Agreement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nxxxxxs-short-term-agreement/ | Short Term Agreement | Parisian producer NxxxxxS was among the first wave of artists who shaped the aesthetic of SoundCloud’s phonk scene in the early 2010s, finding equal inspiration in the dreamlike stillness of filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Jarmusch and the atmospheric mixtape curation of DJ Paul and DJ Screw. Like his online peers DJ Smokey and Mr. Sisco, NxxxxxS sought to meld the nascent underground microgenres of that moment—cloud rap, vaporwave, and Memphis hip-hop fetishism—into hour-long soundtracks for late-night drives and smoke sessions. His work, however, aims beyond the movement’s traditional palette of library music and lo-fi vocal chops, exploring sci-fi bass music, chillwave production, and the synth arrangements of horror soundtracks over the course of fully realized concept records.
Though NxxxxxS and co. have managed to maintain a devoted cult following over the past decade, the rise of “drift phonk”—an unusual fusion of distorted house beats, Memphis a cappellas, and the repetitive 808 cowbell samples popularized by Russian TikTok edits of street-racing footage—has eclipsed the popularity of its SoundCloud forebears. You can detect traces of drift phonk’s influence in NxxxxxS’ recent streak of high-profile co-signs, from a noticeably drift-y collaboration with Beyoncé’s Ivy Park brand to the release of his latest album, Short Term Agreement, on Diplo’s Mad Decent Label. The latter represents a significant departure from NxxxxxS’ established sound. In contrast to the cinematic direction of previous full-length efforts, it feels like channel-surfing through a series of one-off genre experiments that lack a distinct identity.
There are some solid offerings front-loaded into Short Term Agreement’s first half. “Slump” and “No Witness,” collaborations with horrorcore revivalists Freddie Dredd and Apoc Krysis, respectively, embody NxxxxxS’ best traits. The former transforms a comfy lounge-music loop into a sinister tableau, mashed kick drums warping both the sample and Dredd’s double-time rapping beyond recognition, while the latter is more overtly evil, weaving cowbell riffs through a mist of synthesized strings. Neither reinvents the wheel, but each foregrounds the ambient, hypnotic effects of ’90s Southern rap production. It’s downtempo, but still rattles the trunk.
NxxxxxS’ ability to conjure immersive atmospheres makes the fickle sequencing of Short Term Agreement feel all the more jarring. “Grub,” built around brooding verses by London emcee Jeshi, would make for a good one-off drop on SoundCloud, but its pristine mix and drill-adjacent drum programming sound incongruous wedged between the two aforementioned tracks. The remainder of the record’s first half veers into largely instrumental ambient trap, bookended by fizzy synth sketches that sound like the opening bars of a classic Bones cut. While these brief interludes toy with evocative analog textures, the space in between them feels somewhat empty. “The Room” and “External Memories” are nondescript, flooded with goopy synth pads and buckets of reverb. Once the 808 drops, there’s not much more beyond a few snare rolls and sound bites of evil laughter to keep you engaged—it’s Muzak for the background of a vlog.
On the album’s second half, NxxxxxS abandons cohesion for a kitchen-sink approach that doesn’t play to his strengths. Co-produced by Iceland’s Lord Pusswhip and composed of crisp percussion and atonal industrial synths, the quirky West Coast bounce of “Find the Bag” is unrecognizable as NxxxxxS’ own. Guest rapper Baby.com’s performance is creative and charismatic, but without an infusion of NxxxxxS’ vaporous sound design, it’s not enough to feel like more than a gimmicky foray into club rap. Aside from the eerie harpsichord buried deep within the mix, “Mosh O’Clock” feels similarly removed from his wheelhouse, plugging sounds into the same skronky template used by EDM/rap fusions like Duckwrth’s “Start a Riot” and label boss Diplo’s “Welcome to the Party,” both written for blockbuster superhero flicks and far cries from NxxxxxS’ Tarkovskian subtlety.
Aside from a flaccid attempt at emo-pop with Pollari, whose cyborg delivery would be better served by more dynamic production, and a pair of amorphous cloud-rap cuts, this final stretch includes a couple of cracks at new-wave phonk that pan out surprisingly well. Drift phonk is formulaic by nature, but “Head! Shot!” finds plenty of room to tinker within the subgenre’s structure, deploying enough filters, ominous chants, and pitch-shifts to keep you guessing throughout its two-minute runtime. “Panic!” uses a wafer-thin Memphis cassette rip as a springboard for NxxxxxS to test out complex drum patterns. Each loop is peppered with a unique blend of squelching bass and cartoon sound effects: It’s sensory overload, but it feels as inventive and playful as the Tennessee source material he’s appropriating.
Though the many iterations of phonk that have arisen over the past decade can vary drastically in terms of tempo and intensity, the style’s ethos remains roughly the same. It’s about meticulous scene-setting and creating a coherent aesthetic—like furnishing a haunted house with 808 hits and a hard-drive full of Lil Noid mixtapes. There are pockets of phantasmal intrigue interspersed throughout Short Term Agreement, but listening to the record in its entirety feels more akin to sitting in on a focus group than exploring an immersive space. When you’re on board for a cinematic experience, being used as a test subject really snuffs out the vibe. | 2023-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mad Decent / Because Music | May 5, 2023 | 5.8 | 90d1e419-9b7c-4d09-bd4a-959b411bd80e | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The Chicago band’s third album brings wiry new energy to their fuzzed-out rock songs. The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger. | The Chicago band’s third album brings wiry new energy to their fuzzed-out rock songs. The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger. | Cafe Racer: Shadow Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cafe-racer-shadow-talk/ | Shadow Talk | With their radiant warmth and cracked, spidery riffs, Chicago jangle-rock band Cafe Racer sound a bit like a sidewalk on a summer day. For a while, they seemed perfectly content to stroll: On their second album, 2018’s Famous Dust, they shuffled along at a leisurely pace, guided by singer Michael Santana’s staticky whisper-sneer. It was a vibe, but the songs didn’t always move with confidence—some had one chord change too many, one true change too few.
Their third album, Shadow Talk, doesn’t just leave those critiques in the dust—it’s also the rare case of a band that sounds entirely aware of how much better it’s gotten. Cafe Racer are now bigger, sharper, and far more flexible. While Santana still sings as though from behind Jim Reid’s and Jason Pierce’s sunglasses, he also doesn’t hesitate to tear them off for the occasional towering ripper and bark some heavy-sounding words, pushing his full weight into “boulder” and “vulture” on “Seminal Art.” Behind him, bassist Rob McWilliams and new drummer Elise Poirier hum in the shadows. They do heavy lifting without breaking a sweat; when the rest of the band violently crashes down around them in the middle third of “Exile,” they keep the whole thing up while hardly raising their voices.
Still, the best part of Shadow Talk is its gestalt: The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger. Credit not only Cafe Racer’s conviction to rewire their love of fuzz with new energy, but also the album’s phenomenal sequencing. Subtle but firm, Shadow Talk’s motion mirrors time and weather: the first three tracks sound like a lucid morning becoming a focused afternoon, then gliding into a depressurized evening. Midway through the 10-minute closing track, a sustaining organ slips in unannounced, the whistling breeze that gently informs you that you have about four minutes before it turns into a droning downpour.
Shadow Talk is soluble yet rock-solid; it evaporates and re-materializes with ease. For a five-piece like Cafe Racer, grasping this slippery balance doesn’t happen by accident. It can take years of trial and error, the kind of long-term conditioning made possible by the independent venues where the band came up—venues that suddenly find themselves endangered. Shadow Talk is a victory made possible in part by artistic incubators like the Hideout, the Empty Bottle, and Beat Kitchen; it’s heavy but fitting that the album now takes on additional meaning advocating for their survival. | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Born Yesterday | May 12, 2020 | 7.4 | 90d1e74f-ded1-42d1-b9e2-8c358e81da89 | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
This week the legendary Sleater-Kinney returned with a new song, "Bury Our Friends", and word of a forthcoming album. The song was included as a single in Start Together, a vinyl box set containing remastered versions of all their full-length LPs. The records have lost none of their visceral power. | This week the legendary Sleater-Kinney returned with a new song, "Bury Our Friends", and word of a forthcoming album. The song was included as a single in Start Together, a vinyl box set containing remastered versions of all their full-length LPs. The records have lost none of their visceral power. | Sleater-Kinney: Start Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19860-sleater-kinney-start-together/ | Start Together | "World domination is what I want for Sleater-Kinney." I am wont to believe Carrie Brownstein when the Sleater-Kinney guitarist, then 21, qualified this 1996 assertion by shrugging it off as a joke. She was, in all likelihood, alluding to the mainstream-affixed mantra of Seattle's blown-up grunge scene, which her own band's roots in the nearby punk-feminist community of Olympia opposed. Like Bikini Kill and Fugazi before them, Sleater-Kinney would never succumb to the beckoning of major labels. And in 1996, with their crass punk insurrectionism, the idea of mass success was laughable. Of course, Brownstein's reputation for regional parody on "Portlandia" now precedes her. "We're never going to be huge like Pearl Jam or something," she said in that interview, "but I want more people to have access to our music, not just the geeky kids." Seven years later, in 2003, during the beginnings of the Iraq War, Sleater-Kinney played its first of many arena-sized gigs—on tour with Pearl Jam.
From 1994 to 2006, Sleater-Kinney seemed to have it all. The trio of Brownstein, singer-guitarist Corin Tucker, and (from '96 on) drummer Janet Weiss created and then fervently revised one of the most distinctive sounds in rock: The friction of their overlapping voices—Brownstein's monotone speak-sing anchoring Tucker's wild vibrato—had an ecstatic, unusual beauty. The expressive longing of Tucker's alone was a gift, like Kathleen Hanna's hardcore holler aspiring to the quasi-operatics of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. Tucker is perhaps the first punk singer to attempt such a thing while worshipping the enormity of, say, Aretha Franklin, channeling lessons from the Queen of Soul into her own singing, holding onto moments for dear life and then projecting them to the heavens, becoming Queen of Rock.
In practice, Sleater-Kinney were humble, imageless indie-rockers; in song, they demanded icon status. This streamlined set, Start Together, captures that dichotomy, archiving the Sleater-Kinney canon with care: from the ideological-punches of thirdwave feminism to their post-riot grrrl classic rock revisionism, all seven albums have been remastered and paired with a plainly gorgeous hardcover photobook, as well as the surprise of a reunion-launching 7" single. In all, Start Together tells the unlikely story of how this band carried the wildfire of '90s Oly-punk to pastures of more ambitious musicality—a decade that moves from caterwauling shrieks to glowing lyricism, from barebones snark to Zep-length improv, from personal-political to outright (left) political.
Sleater-Kinney was consciously about rock'n'roll. Lou Reed sang for Jenny whose life was saved by rock; Ramones told us how Sheena became a punk. In 1994 there was no shortage of women plugging in—newly born classics included Hole's Live Through This, Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, the Breeders' *Last Splash—*but the lineage of larger-than-life stars, the deified behind-the-head-shredders, still had few instances of women delivering rock-as-saviour meta-narratives themselves. Sleater-Kinney turned the machismo of hippie-blooded '60s and '70s rock on its head: covers of Springsteen and CCR, homages to Kinks and the Clash, Brownstein's Pete Townshend windmills and shin-kicking swagger, Tucker's defiant declaration that "I make rock'n'roll!" A life-or-death seriousness is omnipresent with Sleater-Kinney, but they never rejected rock's base desires—sex, dancing, proverbial milkshakes—although sometimes they vaguely mocked them. Sleater-Kinney stole from men what men had in turn stolen from the margins: electrified blues that all still made girls scream.
The first Sleater-Kinney practice was in March of 1994. It was the spring that Kurt Cobain died. Hindsight paints it clear: Cobain's desire for a future-rock made by women dispersed into the universe. Brownstein and Tucker did Sleater-Kinney as a side-project to their respective bands, the queercore power-chord screams of Excuse 17 and soul-baring punk of Heavens to Betsy. Sleater-Kinney fused these politicized sounds, but as they grew—with affection for B-52's shimmy and Sonic Youth cool—they never let the punk rulebook limit their vision. Riot grrrl was fragmenting and they learned from its successes and failures—a radical streak pervaded their writerly Hüsker Dü-type storytelling—but they also fought to not be removed from the context of their foundation. The wiry blast of 1995's Sleater-Kinney is as good an indicator of Bikini Kill's influence as any feminist album since, echoing their sound as well as an interest in making punk become activism.
The debut is foremost a rejection of heteronormative sex, as Tucker and Brownstein were reckoning with life inside their bodies as women who approached sexuality fluidly. There's a song about how much sucking dick sucks, called "How to Play Dead"—it began Sleater-Kinney's mission of showing how society can silence women and minimize their problems. The urgency is real; all of Sleater-Kinney was scrappily-recorded in one night, on a trip to Australia, where they enlisted drummer Lora MacFarlane, who also kept-time on 1996's Call the Doctor. "A Real Man" is like an incendiary take on classic feminist text The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm: "Don't you wanna feel it inside/ They say that it feels so nice," Tucker gasps with visceral sarcasm. Call it clit-rock, I guess; over hard-style riffs, Tucker makes it clear she won't wait "to cum every time." Amid this whirlwind of pleasure and pain, which occasionally veers towards emo, Brownstein and Tucker's whispers erupt on "The Day I Went Away", one of two wistful songs that foreshadow Sleater-Kinney's impending greatness.
Sleater-Kinney continued feeding its appetite for destruction of archetypes on 1996's Call the Doctor. It improved their raw punk convictions in every way: more complex guitarwork, more distortion to intellectualize, more aggression and profound sadness. "Why do good things never wanna stay?" Tucker asks on "Good Things", an earnest stomach-twister of a teardrop tune, while the dire "Anonymous" wonders why its female protagonist is voluntarily unspoken. "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" uses tradition to infiltrate and subvert—the riff could be Ramones pushing Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" into the red—to cleverly protest the worship of male icons and spur revolution: "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/ Pictures of me on your bedroom door/ Invite you back after the show/ I'm the queen of rock and roll." It's a two-and-half-minute rock'n'roll joyride deserving of a gender studies thesis.
Tucker's fierce and vulnerable depictions of unconventional love marked the title track, where the dueling vocals first exploded. "It felt like something had opened up," Brownstein told Rolling Stone. "We just stopped. And [Corin] was like, ‘This is so awesome, you have to keep doing that.’ It felt like I had fused with her. This bolt of lightning had gone from my chest to hers." Call the Doctor landed at number three on The Village Voice’s then-influential critic’s poll. Their label, Chainsaw, couldn’t press copies fast enough.
Then, behold: Janet Weiss. She joined on 1997's breakneck Dig Me Out, an all-time great American punk statement, giving Sleater-Kinney the most crucial muscle a drummer can offer: not sheer force, but heart, taking the momentum to a new plane. Sleater-Kinney released their next four records with the larger Olympia feminist label, Kill Rock Stars, but none distilled the band's sound and attitude like Dig Me Out: sometimes brutal heartache, sometimes a menacing threat, always intelligent and extreme, there are enough hooks architected into these two- and three-minute songs to span several albums, but even the added dum-de-dum sugar seems as though it must be raw Portland agave.
"Little Babies" critiques stereotypes of motherhood, "Heart Factory" roars over synthetic emotions of the Prozac Nation, and the instantly classic "Words and Guitar" is an ode to rock that just feels necessary. At the peak of "The Drama You've Been Craving"—Tucker's "Kick it OUT!"—there are practically fireworks bursting on either side. Really, Dig goes from 0-to-100 within seconds of its opening salvo of a title track, which begs for transcendence from worldly oppression, "Outta this mess/ Outta my head." Unlike so much in the trajectory of punk, there is no nihilistic self-destruction in the face of chaos. More than skepticism, anti-consumerism, or the glories of tattoo art, punk teaches empathy, a principle Sleater-Kinney practiced with nuance. This is why Sleater-Kinney's music shines a light despite its loudness, why it is easy to be alone with the songs and feel protected. Sleater-Kinney would never forego the optimism to believe their songbook could make us smarter, angrier, more tender and hopeful. Dig Me Out dreams of a better future, clawing itself up with every note.
The highlight of Dig Me Out and Sleater-Kinney's career, "One More Hour" is one of the most devastating break-up songs in rock. "Oh, you've got the darkest eyes," Tucker and Brownstein quaver in unison—the song is about their own short-lived romance—and the way Tucker extends the last word, it is like she can't let them go. There are complex feelings near clear ones, which is what break-ups are: someone wants to untangle the mess, someone wants to snip it apart. "I needed it," Tucker howls, hardly distinguishing where one word ends and another begins. "One More Hour" is sublime sadness, a kind one can only know when staring at the end of something and wanting desperately for it not to be so.
This feeling would root 1999's atmospheric The Hot Rock: subdued and spiritual, it served a number of firsts for Sleater-Kinney, among them a slot on the Billboard charts (at 181). Tucker, Brownstein, and Weiss had never sounded so introspective, existential, and dark, so aesthetically poetic and conventionally pretty. The album's interlocking parts were influenced by the gentle alterna-pop of Go-Betweens and Yo La Tengo; voices intertwine gracefully, as if braiding together dreams and wounds. It's the Sleater-Kinney record you're most likely to play on a train while gazing out the window and getting lost in thought.
Brownstein and Tucker sang of personal becoming, the uncertainties of adulthood, dying relationships and technological paranoia—it was, after all, the year before tin-foil Y2K Bugs would signal the end civilization—sometimes with abstract metaphors. The jaw-dropping despair of Brownstein's wearied ballad "The Size of Our Love" has a lonely ambience, a love-story plaintively set between hospital walls: "The ring on my finger/ So tight it turns blue," she sings over a crying viola. "A constant reminder/ I'll die in this room/ If you die in this room." It's unsurprising that Brownstein has since catapulted her storylines to a mass scale: Comedians are professionals at manipulating our emotions, and if it is one's intention to make people laugh, it must help to have mastered the ability to make them cry.
The sun, ocean, and cosmos build the imagistic single, "Get Up". A staccato riff quilts the emphatic drumming, and the guitar tones are magic—had the band not called those natural elements out, it's evident that "Get Up" absorbed their expanses. Tucker's hovering speak-sing evokes Kim Gordon beaming down from an imagined heaven on Sonic Youth's "Tunic (Song for Karen)". Echoing Patti Smith as well, Tucker's words fly into the air as if given wings—"Goodbye small hands/ Goodbye small heart/ Goodbye small head"—zen-like as she watches her body go, "like a whole bucket of stars dumped into the universe." Sleater-Kinney didn't necessarily follow their '60s rock predecessors into ashram training, but this reflects the Eastern belief that when you die, you become a part of nature. Tucker works through primal desires—"Do you think I'm an animal? Am I not?"—and despite the textured makeover, The Hot Rock emerges as one of Sleater-Kinney's heaviest records.
Swinging back to capital-R Rock, 2000's All Hands on the Bad One was Sleater-Kinney's most straight-ahead arbiter of thirdwave feminism and also, surprisingly, their most jovial record. Sing-song guitar-pop turned up alongside plainspoken take-downs of sexism in music, and hints of new wave, girl-groups and Go-Gos mixed (cohesively, too) with some of their hardest whiplash-rippers. The enormously hooky "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun" taunts dry girl-averse indie snobs: "You're no rock'n'roll fun/ Like a piece of art that no one can touch!" the trio sang together, throwing "whiskey drinks and chocolate bars" at these guys to shake up the mood, 'cause why not? When Sleater-Kinney note how "the best man won't hang out with the girl BAA-AAND!" we're only left wondering why he'd pass on such fun.
Similar humor plays out on "Milkshake n' Honey", a Spinal Tap-esque wink at the debauched rocker/groupie complex, but the incisive messages make the best songs: "The Professional" uses charged surf-punk to condemn the marginalizing of women in music, "Male Model" dismantles the sexist canon and rejects investigations of women's authenticity. A lyrics sheet proves Bad One is Sleater-Kinney's most direct sloganeering, but it doesn't come off as such; Tucker's ferocity and Brownstein's French-sung interjections make it cool, even. "#1 Must Have" is the centerpiece, in which Tucker dissects the commodification of riot grrrl and—in light of the rapes at Woodstock in '99—powerfully asserts, "The number one must-have/ Is that we are safe." The song's lasting relevance can't be overstated.
The world was irreversibly changed by the time of 2002's One Beat, Sleater-Kinney's weightiest record. Adventuring with math rock and stomping horns, it was their most explicitly political album, grappling with the aftermath of 9/11 on "Far Away" and "Combat Rock". These songs reflected the national headspace as selflessly as any act of using someone's tragedy for art allows. Tucker questioned the all-or-nothing patriotism sweeping the U.S., and detailed her own experience that day with raw catharsis, calling-out the hidden President Bush, honoring those who served, and striving for a glimmer of kindness: "I look to the sky/ And ask it not to rain." One Beat was not all war songs—the bouncy organ-led love-anthem "Oh!" had glammy inflections, "Prisstina" chronicled an outcast's discovery of rock. The closer, "Sympathy", rips instrumentation from "Sympathy for the Devil" but inverts its theme, a prayer for the life of Tucker's premature-born child: "There is no righteousness in your darkest moment," Tucker belts, "We're all equal in the face of what we're most afraid."
Even the scope of One Beat couldn't predict Sleater-Kinney's monstrous phase-one farewell, 2005's The Woods. The band's appeal had become that of the indie rock mainstream, and a suburban high-schooler (such as myself, then) could readily learn of The Woods' greatness from the same weirdo dude-friends who repped new CDs by Queens of the Stone Age, the White Stripes, and Wilco (like I did). Sleater-Kinney had just played arenas with Pearl Jam, bending notes into heavier, looser sounds, when they journeyed upstate New York to track The Woods with producer David Fridmann, himself only two years removed from helping turn Flaming Lips' 2002 opus Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots into a wider breakout.
When your best work is also your most uncompromising and unintelligible, you have accomplished a considerable artistic feat—this was the The Woods. It was tracked live with more distortion than usual, giving it a freneticism, a deranged euphoria. "[Friddman would] say things to Janet like, 'Play like Keith Moon, but Keith Moon with a blanket coming down over him,'" Tucker said. That possessed orchestra-of-rhythm translated. The album's heaving 11-minute mega-solo, "Let's Call It Love", and the soulful echo "Night Light", comprise a grandiose jam colored in Deep Purple. Zep riffs abound. "Entertain" is an atypical military march, declaring war on hollow retro rock; its "woah-oh-ohs" are more like shields than exaltations. "You come around looking 1984/ You're such a bore, 1984/ Nostalgia, you're using it like a whore"—Brownstein's Orwellian invocation opposes this music with a far more poetic dismissal than "Fuck Interpol." Sleater-Kinney's first six records gave a lens through which we might imagine a feminist rewrite of classic rock; The Woods is a front-row seat.
"Jumpers" was inspired by a New Yorker piece on suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge—"the intensity of feeling that you can't find meaning in your life, so you need to find meaning in your death," Brownstein said—which oddly befit the band's decision to end on top. "Modern Girl" is Sleater-Kinney's most timeless song, impressionistic as closing one's eyes and staring at the brightest star: "My whole life was like a picture of a sunny day," Brownstein sings, like Sleater-Kinney's "Yesterday". But embedded in the soft twinkle is a critique of the consumer culture Sleater-Kinney resisted. (They despised the new proposition of a career-shifting iPod commercial.) The band stopped just as independent music was becoming more financially significant—2004 was the year future indie-Grammy-holders Arcade Fire landed*—*but traditional notions of integrity were also growing complicated. Brownstein was strangely prophetic: "I took my money/ And bought me a TV/ TV brings me closer to the world." This is music you make when you can sense it's one more hour 'til the walls close in.
Little is concrete in rock'n'roll—at the very least, its pivotal moments have often been shrouded in discrepancy and myth. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the first guitar hero; no, Robert Johnson. Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing was auto-destructive art; no, Townshend's wrecked guitar was privilege. Elvis is dead; Elvis is in Las Vegas. Punk started in London—no, New York—girls started punk rock, not England. But there are unequivocal truths of Sleater-Kinney's career. Objectively, the trio was born of riot grrrl, an underground band that started with two girls together in a living room and became the movement's greatest critical success and so much more: an initial seven-album streak worthy of setting in stone eternal. There is an overcast art-print that accompanies Start Together, set at a weathered race track: Tucker is pounding pavement with a raised fist, Weiss is caught in a fierce skip, and Brownstein, in the middle, has both arms extended skyward, cracking a smile as if she just crushed a marathon. In reality, the band was only just beginning. Sleater-Kinney look invincible there, triumphant even, like superheroes, and if Start Together proves a thing, it is that with passion, persistence, and unwavering purpose, ordinary people can become them. | 2014-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 24, 2014 | 9.2 | 90d3adf4-cc96-4f82-85e0-27022f48ba33 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
On this collection of remixes from Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s 2016 LP, the latter artist flexes his mastery at deconstructing beats and samples—occasionally transforming the mood of a track. | On this collection of remixes from Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s 2016 LP, the latter artist flexes his mastery at deconstructing beats and samples—occasionally transforming the mood of a track. | NxWorries: Yes Lawd! Remixes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nxworries-yes-lawd-remixes/ | Yes Lawd! Remixes | When Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge dropped Yes Lawd! on Stones Throw at the end of 2016, they entered the label’s lineage of underground superduos like Jaylib and Madvillain, pairing a vocalist and a producer with complementary styles, with shared ancestors on their musical family tree. They largely lived up to the tradition, lacing what would otherwise be a classic tape from the L.A. Beat Scene with .Paak’s soulful R&B vibe. Each artist stepped slightly outside his comfort zone, and in the process, proved that together they really do have the range.
For Yes Lawd! Remixes, .Paak’s vocals are recycled from the original LP, making this collection all about Knxwledge flexing his mastery at deconstructing beats and samples. That they’re his beats to begin with does nothing to diminish his technical prowess. The producer has an uncanny understanding of the function and importance of each instrument, expertly wielding them for effect. He doesn’t have to change much to completely alter the vibe. On “Alltypeofchnces,” he swaps out crunchy static for clean pickwork from an electric guitar; on the “Wngs (Remix),” the track is completely transformed by swapping the drum kit for a dominant percussive bassline. The macabre strings on “Lyk Dis (Remix)” transform its mood from a sexy bedroom jam to something more depressive.
Projects like this seem to flow from Knxwledge like water—his Bandcamp page currently offers a staggering 84 albums for sale—and he somehow manages to improve a number of the tracks on this already stellar LP. The original “Suede” impersonated the warm tones of Brian Jackson’s Fender Rhodes, which the remix abandons in favor of airy atmospherics worthy of a Sade record. “Best One” was already lovely, with a smooth organ melody, but the remix manages to be both crunchier and more lush, as the organ takes a backseat to somber strings and what sounds like a vibraphone. It’s gorgeous, and makes the additional “Chppd” version seem superfluous.
By its very nature, the Yes Lawd! Remixes were always going to be less consistent than the originals. Knxwledge is essentially disassembling a completed puzzle and re-fitting the pieces back together, occasionally to its detriment. The “Kutless” remix sounds completely Xan’d out, all the energy drained from the original, and the new version of “H.A.N.” has a distracting warble that doesn’t add much to what was Yes Lawd!’s standout track. If nothing else, though, these remixes offer a compelling glimpse into the mind of one of the game’s most talented beat architects, a sample artist freaking his own samples. He doesn’t always stick the landing, but the moments in which he does make it worth the effort. | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | November 30, 2017 | 7.4 | 90d46344-372e-4f9f-a726-a46f01162b83 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
With the energy and conviction of a debut, the intuitive singer-songwriter returns with a dazzling folk album that contends with the long grip of grief and the belief that it will steadily loosen. | With the energy and conviction of a debut, the intuitive singer-songwriter returns with a dazzling folk album that contends with the long grip of grief and the belief that it will steadily loosen. | Hannah Frances: Keeper of the Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hannah-frances-the-keeper-of-the-shepherd/ | Keeper of the Shepherd | Not so long ago, Hannah Frances’ dazzling voice often got lost in the sounds around it. At the start of 2018’s White Buffalo, a fingerpicked acoustic guitar was enough to swallow her poignant opening words about the ways that time steals our chances to love. Frances was still new to her 20s, a recent art school dropout who had decamped to New York a year after her father died of a heart attack. The songs soon emptied out of her, three records’ worth in a little more than a year. As she lurked beneath the layers, she seemed to be hiding as much from herself as from the listener, trying to untangle a knot of woes in the private recesses of a quiet song. There were still traces of this during 2021’s very good Bedrock, her relatively loud and full-band contemplation of how to find redemption amid life’s wreckage. She would disappear behind the music, as if she still needed the space to sort these things out for herself.
There are no such retreats on Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ epiphanic fifth album but the first in which she fully grapples with what is possible when we finally step out of grief and into the rest of our lives. Her voice—a commanding alto one moment and a swan-diving soprano the next, often multi-tracked to give her words the credence of gospel—remains always at the fore, leading a compact band that can be as quiet as a creek or as rapturous as a waterfall. A triumph of perseverance, of trying to live alongside your fear rather than always underneath it, Keeper of the Shepherd has the inexorable energy of an auspicious debut, a set of songs that have simply been waiting to spring forth. Imagine if the love-riven Sharon Van Etten of Epic and Tramp had retreated, as Frances has, to the maple woods of Vermont rather than the concrete wilds of Los Angeles; it might sound a lot like the mighty Keeper of the Shepherd.
Many years ago, Frances found that the alternate guitar tunings that Joni Mitchell used enhanced her relationship with the instrument, augmenting her intuitive connection with its strings. Her work lingered in that gilded folk space for years, and she occasionally returns to it in these seven songs. With its big, open chords and subtly bent notes galloping beneath her, “Floodplain” feels a little like Mitchell and John Fahey sitting beside a campfire during a springtime road trip through the American Southwest. The long, interwoven phrases of “Woolgathering” suggest some unused Hejira skeleton, as if Mitchell never found the proper riposte to stick inside its graceful lope.
But for much of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances’ intuitive instrumental patterns are only springboards for uncanny song structures, methodically built by Frances and producer and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland. There is more than a touch of genteel prog around its folk core, situating Frances somewhere among Joanna Newsom, Jeff Buckley, and Fleet Foxes. Opener “Bronwyn” rises and falls, jerks and jumps as if on some ramshackle carousel, always about to slip into hell or ascend into heaven. Tangled wisps of saxophone curl around the dub-like strut of closer “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” all of it blurring into a paisley dream after a brief cool-jazz interlude. Frances suffered a bout of writer’s block before these songs arrived in a rush; their scope and flexibility are gifts of endurance, of sticking with it.
That lesson is written into every song here, as Frances contends with the long grip of grief and her belief that it will steadily loosen. Frances returns to a small set of images—caves, shepherds and their sheep, ribs and rivers—repeatedly across these 37 minutes, allowing her to make a map of her own progress. In “Bronwyn,” it’s loss that rips through her chest, expanding her rib cage until her body warps like the distorted drums beneath her; two songs later, in “Woolgathering,” she is breathing in a new love and life. “Give me time to free my lungs,” she sings, like Vashti Bunyan in an electrostatic haze, “the ribs are loosening.” Frances says she often sequences her albums in the order in which she wrote the songs; witness her inching forward into her own life.
Frances might come across like some precious emissary of sylvan New Age yuppiedom, trapped somewhere between a favorite yoga studio in town and a preferred farmstand in the country. She is, after all, a self-described “movement artist” who makes earnest music videos amid lush evergreen landscapes and does interpretive dance to her own songs in the near-dark on the Olympic Peninsula. “As my writing is inextricable from my kinship with the land,” she wrote recently in her newsletter, “I weave ecological imagery and archetype to recount my personal mythology more expansively, more richly.”
Yes, that reads like a lot, but it’s also true: Frances’ songs betray a genuine rootedness in the world around her, an understanding that loss can lead to growth if given enough space and time. This is the most natural cycle on the planet. “Floodplain” wonders what it’s like to have your past washed away like debris on a riverbank, “Vacant Intimacies” to find a shelter that actually gives back. These are things Frances has seen, felt, internalized, and now sung. At the end of “Husk,” after she has pondered the toggle between life and loss for four steadily intensifying minutes, the taut strings and harmonies fall away, leaving her voice unencumbered at last. “Death is a husk,” she offers with unqualified clarity. “Holding the shape of my life.” Keeper of the Shepherd is an arrival, not only of a transfixing singer-songwriter who has made a stunning record but also of a person realizing they are more than the pain of their past. | 2024-03-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Ruination | March 7, 2024 | 8.2 | 90e94e88-98eb-4ae0-bf5b-4cb4fd6e2da9 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Cyndi Lauper’s massive debut, a slyly feminist new wave pop record whose undeniable singles helped usher in the MTV era. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Cyndi Lauper’s massive debut, a slyly feminist new wave pop record whose undeniable singles helped usher in the MTV era. | Cyndi Lauper: She’s So Unusual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cyndi-lauper-shes-so-unusual/ | She’s So Unusual | As Cyndi Lauper leaped around singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on The Tonight Show in 1984, it seemed like she might never put down the microphone. After she kicked off her stilettos, danced with her backup singers, sprinted back and forth repeatedly from the monitors at the front of the stage to the drum kit in the rear, and belted out the final refrain enough times to ensure that every spectator would be singing it for the rest of the day, the song only ended with the musicians stumbling one by one to a halt: some of them ready to wrap up, and others apparently willing to continue accompanying Lauper until the end of time.
“If I wasn’t doing this, Johnny, I might’ve been a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist,” she told Johnny Carson afterwards, refastening her heels and adjusting her jewelry. “A visiting professor at Harvard,” he offered in return. Though the host’s response had a note of condescension for this young woman singer who’d just spent the last several minutes exalting the virtues of a good time above all else, it’s clear that she was in on the joke. There would be no rocket science or brain surgery for Cyndi Lauper: not because she was too fizzy and fun-loving to learn how, but because she was born to perform.
There are only three original songs on She’s So Unusual, Lauper’s 1983 debut. Years before its release, she’d been the frontwoman of a cover band. She didn’t need to write songs to express her immense natural talent as a performer. Instead, she used the words of men to illuminate her assertive vision of womanhood, each impassioned yelp a detonation inside its source material. Lauper waffled about ascribing deeper feminist meaning to songs like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” but there’s a gravity in her vibrato that’s hard to shake. She brought the weight of her past—her childhood growing up in an abusive home, her battles against male industry gatekeepers—into that music. Her voice walks the line between desperation and the self-assurance she gained from playing in bars night after night. It begs, with its technical skill, to be taken seriously, yet is softened by Lauper’s cartoonish inflections that garnered frequent comparisons to actresses like Bernadette Peters more than contemporary female rockers like Pat Benatar. “That’s all they really want,” she belted on “Girls” with more than a hint of indignation, as if to say, Is that seriously so much to ask?
With She’s So Unusual, Lauper shoehorned rebellion into the familiar, both musically and visually: Who else would play a 1920s song written for the real-life Betty Boop wearing tulle fingerless gloves and a mullet? With her taste for synthesizer-driven disco (she apparently met with Giorgio Moroder once, but he seemed to dislike that she called him “George”), Lauper helped to usher in an electronic era for popular rock. After decades of being rejected by her peers, local bands, and record labels, Lauper wanted not just acceptance, but an embrace, of not just her quirks, but of eccentricity itself. She’s So Unusual imagined a world where women danced through New York in ruffle skirts and combat boots, partied with a sense of purpose, and were just as powerful at their most vulnerable as their most ferocious.
Born and raised working-class in New York City’s outer boroughs, Lauper was too stubborn and strange to succeed at school socially or academically. Her parents, both casually musical, divorced by the time she was five. She and her older sister Elen spent the rest of their adolescence, in Lauper’s words, “dodging pedophiles and the crazy folks,” including their stepfather and grandfather. Cyndi left home at 17 to live with Elen on Long Island, where she worked as a “hot walker” for racehorses at Belmont Park, singing Hare Krishna mantras into their ears to calm them down. In her free time, she auditioned for cover bands that traveled the Long Island bar circuit. By 1974, she landed a gig as a backup singer, and was soon asked to step up for brief solos: “Lady Marmalade,” “Tell Me Something Good.” Once it became clear that Lauper’s voice worked best front and center, she became a permanent lead.
Cover bands were an ideal proving ground for Lauper. With her four-octave range and irreverent sense of humor, she reimagined the pop canon, imbuing it with her particular sense of wonder toward the world. Just as she would after finding stardom years later, she twisted other peoples’ words to her own will, cracking songs open to reveal new meanings beneath their popular interpretations. It’s hard to hear her sing Jackie Wilson’s “Baby Workout” and miss how enthralled she seems by her own delivery, adding extra vocal runs as if it’s as easy as breathing. And Lauper’s particularities as a performer offered a counterintuitive kind of universal appeal: If this highly unusual woman with a neon orange buzzcut who spoke like a streetwise Minnie Mouse could convincingly inhabit music from Jefferson Airplane, or the Rolling Stones, or Prince, then maybe those songs were for everyone.
Still, she aspired to more than singing other people’s hits. “If you sing ‘White Rabbit’ one more time, just shoot yourself,” she remembered thinking at the time. By the end of the decade, she had formed her own group, the rockabilly-inspired Blue Angel, with John Turi, a saxophonist from her cover band. Critics loved them; they toured with Hall and Oates and the Human League. Lauper was the kind of singer everyone wanted to sign as a solo artist—“Like Chrissie Hynde and Deborah Harry, Lauper possesses the vocal ability to make her stand out,” Billboard raved at the time—but she held out until Polydor agreed to sign Blue Angel as a full band.
It didn’t quite work out: After a batch of expensive failed demos, a subsequent lawsuit, and a debilitating vocal cyst, Lauper began the 1980s bankrupt and out of the music industry. She started working at Screaming Mimi’s, the Manhattan costume vintage store where she honed her singular sense of style, combining layered neon skirts with punk’s jagged industrial edges. She hired a vocal coach and connected with David Wolff, who became her longtime manager and boyfriend. By 1983, she found herself in the studio with Turi and producer Rick Chertoff, recording her first album under her own name.
Chertoff, an Arista veteran and Clive Davis disciple, saw Lauper as a mouthpiece more than a creative force, someone who could give life to a batch of songs he had been collecting, with his college buddies Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian of Philadelphia group the Hooters (named after the melodica, of course) backing her up. His selections were scattered: a cult classic from the short-lived pop rock group the Brains (“Money Changes Everything”), a little-known love song by Jules Shears (“All Through the Night”), Prince’s quietly bitter “When You Were Mine.” Lauper’s delivery clearly inflects the latter song’s meaning, her howl supplanting Prince’s coy plausible deniability with an unmistakable sense of raw, real rejection. It was Lauper’s job to make these disparate selections cohere, not just with her singing, but also with her slightly left-of-center musical taste. For She’s So Unusual’s arrangements, she wanted a fusion of synth-pop with reggae and ska; something that sounded like both the Clash and Grace Jones. Just like in her years on the cover circuit, she was forging a voice for herself from the material in front of her.
Not every song Chertoff pitched landed with Lauper. She initially balked at what would become the album’s first single, a throwback rockabilly song from an unknown writer named Robert Hazard called “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the original version, Hazard’s male protagonist blames his listless life on the behavior of the women he knows, who understandably just want to relax after work. To Lauper, the lyrics sounded vapid and misogynistic. With some rewriting (and backing vocals) from Brill Building legend Ellie Greenwich, she found a second life for the song as a generational rallying cry. For Lauper, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” spoke to the repressed lives of her mother and grandmother, who were barred from any semblance of a social life outside the home. Changing only a few words—instead of Hazard lamenting that “All my girls have got to walk in the sun,” Lauper exclaims, “I want to be the one to walk in the sun”—they transformed the song’s perspective: from that of a moping burnout trying to placate his disappointed parents to a frustrated woman trapped by staid societal expectations of settling down.
Hazard sounded on the verge of tears in his version, his warbling Elvis Costello impression jostled about by the song’s breakneck guitar. Lauper, over synthesizers, gated snares, and a tempo that significantly slows Hazard’s original, sounds triumphant. The more relaxed pace fit Lauper’s delivery, the sound of a woman confidently making her demand for leisure, rather than a boy freaking out about his dating prospects. Her alternating staccato and extended vocals in the song’s opening verse lend a human element with their variations and slight imperfections, balancing out the slick and garish Memorymoog synth. Her vocal hiccups, inspired by Roy Orbison’s, act as the verbal counterpart to the marimba-like synth solo at its center. “Girls” reflected her vision of an electronic ska record, any incongruities between styles patched over by the theatrical flair of her singing.
There is a sad irony in the creation of She’s So Unusual: an album about an ostensibly liberated woman, whose creator was surrounded by men who wanted to control her artistic vision. Even “She Bop,” a thinly veiled ode to self-pleasure that was one of the album’s few original singles, came from a directive from the songwriter Steve Lunt, who insisted that “no other girl has done this before.” So Lauper, who never envisioned herself as a glorified cover singer, was ecstatic when Chertoff asked her and the Hooters team for one more original song to complete the album. She went back to the studio with Hyman, stood next to his piano, and began to sing over a four-chord progression he had put together.
Hyman and Lauper were both dealing with issues in their romantic relationships, the kind of messiness that comes with detangling lives spent together. He referenced a “suitcase of memories” that he carried around with him after his breakup. She thought of the clock Wolff brought back from his mother after he broke hers, its wind-up tick so unbearably loud that she moved it to the bathroom, only to hear it through the walls. The unwinding second hand of the first verse was real, too: Chertoff’s watch had become demagnetized, and he excitedly showed its machinery moving backwards to Lauper and Hyman in the studio. “Time After Time” used these metaphors to capture the sadness of a breakup: the slow-building resentment in a relationship like a metronome that won’t shut off, or the logic-defying bond between two ex-lovers that can erase years in minutes.
Hyman and Lauper originally wrote “Time After Time” with the ska-inspired uptempo groove that drives other She’s So Unusual tracks like “Witness.” But as they continued working, it became clear to them that this song would require a gentler treatment, one inflected with the conflicted feelings of nostalgia, betrayal, hopefulness, and acceptance. That ambiguity is the song’s strength, never fully giving into the sentimental desire for reconciliation or the petty urge to burn bridges. When Miles Davis began to work the song into his set a year after its release, he pulled on those threads, heightening both its triumph and its sadness with his improvisations, just as Lauper made songs her own as a cover singer a decade prior.
The album’s sound was only part of its success. Released the same year as MTV came on the air, She’s So Unusual had a symbiotic relationship with the nascent television channel; Lauper hosted its first-ever New Year’s Eve broadcast to close out 1983. At the time of its release, music videos were a relatively new concept: “Brief, Bizarre Films Rekindle Record Industry’s Hopes,” the Wall Street Journal reported that year. The video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” looked like Lauper’s life: volumes of hair and fabric heretofore thought unimaginable (styled by Screaming Mimi’s, of course), New York as its centerpiece, a cameo from her own mother. Though the concept might seem trite today—a singer dancing through the streets with a gaggle of backup dancers—its reimagining of a song away from a simple stage performance was groundbreaking at the time.
The video also featured professional wrestler Lou Albano as Lauper’s disapproving father, the start of a strange PR campaign cooked up by Wolff in which the singer and the wrestler took part in an ongoing staged feud. Lauper credits the wrestling connection with jumpstarting the album’s sales, but from today’s perspective it looks like just another male directive boxing her in: it’s painful to watch her repeatedly credit Albano and his “P.E.G. principles” (politeness, etiquette, and grooming) in interviews and performances around the album.
When Lauper performed on The Tonight Show, after bantering with Carson about her alternate career options, she broke the fourth wall and addressed the crowd directly: “You guys don’t know, but he’s got this whole thing back here,” she said in her over-the-top New York accent. She gestured at Carson’s elaborate set design, apparently fascinated with the artifice of it all, and wanting to bring the audience with her on her journey. She wasn’t some slick industry creation, just a strange kid from Queens, more like the people in the crowd than she was like Carson. She made pop music for outcasts and oddballs: the kind of artist who entered the homes of Americans watching MTV by dancing through the streets of New York and inviting every passerby to join in. Years later, she would win a Tony for her songwriting for Kinky Boots, the unlikely hit musical she wrote with “Time After Time” collaborator Hyman about drag queens and shoe cobblers, applying her career-long belief in the universal appeal of the particular. Lauper succeeded by harnessing the power of the underdog, a quiet majority that she knew was desperate for a voice. As she told Creem in 1984, “There’s a lot of us, aren’t there?” | 2024-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Portrait | June 2, 2024 | 8 | 90ec4f7d-9dbc-4e6d-aba9-e5abc08a0bc3 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
On the three albums that compose The Centennial Trilogy, the New Orleans horn player and composer pays tribute to the American jazz tradition by tapping into the legacy of fusion. | On the three albums that compose The Centennial Trilogy, the New Orleans horn player and composer pays tribute to the American jazz tradition by tapping into the legacy of fusion. | Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ruler Rebel / Diaspora / The Emancipation Procrastination | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christian-scott-atunde-adjuah-ruler-rebel-diaspora-the-emancipation-procrastination/ | The Centennial Trilogy | Depending on the decade, jazz artists who mix advanced improvisation with popular music might be required to engage in some tough lobbying—of audiences, critics, or even fellow players. We are not currently living in one of those eras. Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and Esperanza Spalding have all built imposing reputations thanks, in part, to their adaptation of pop textures.
In this environment, fusion seems not merely legitimate or acceptable, but desirable. It’s a far cry from the early 1990s, when a talented saxophonist like Greg Osby could work with elite hip-hop producers and become the target of too-easy jokes. (Osby’s 3-D Lifestyles is now ripe for reappraisal.) That means the challenge before today’s fusion-oriented artists is not to defend the organizing principle, but rather to distinguish the execution.
In 2015, trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah formally debuted his fusion concept of “stretch music,” with an album of the same name. Over the course of three releases this year—Ruler Rebel, Diaspora, and now The Emancipation Procrastination—Adjuah has continued to hone his strategies. Together, Adjuah calls them The Centennial Trilogy, in honor of the 100-year anniversary of the song often considered the first jazz recording.
At points throughout Stretch Music, it was possible to pick apart Adjuah’s main ingredients, mid-song: a bit of soul-jazz driving the beat during solos before a rush of hip-hop-influenced percussion delivered a track’s hook. On the best portions of The Centennial Trilogy, the stirring happens more slowly and the flavors blend more fluidly over the course of the project.
Early in Ruler Rebel, we are introduced to “New Orleanian Love Song,” a melancholic, feverish track that presents Adjuah’s arcing trumpet lines over rhythms built up from samplers and African percussion instruments. The tune that follows is called a remix, but it feels like a complete rearrangement: A piano-driven melody is similar to that of the original take, but instead of moving through legato phrases, the line has turned staccato and nervy—the sort of motif you might hear in a track from E-40’s production shop.
On “Phases,” blending Sarah Elizabeth Charles’ ethereal vocals with burbling percussion programming yields a ballad influenced by trap music’s sonics. Ruler Rebel’s closing track, “The Reckoning,” draws from the clatter of drum ‘n’ bass and the sustained tones of ambient. With these reference points firmly established, Diaspora has a more relaxed, casual air. Throughout, Adjuah departs from acoustic-jazz practice by freely overdubbing his solos, most noticeably on “Idk.” That choice can help a listener acclimate to Adjuah’s overall environment, rather than living or dying with each improvised riff.
After two releases filled with high-concept fusion, some listeners might be hungry for solos that hang around longer and aren’t so beholden to the mood of the production. Adjuah delivers exactly this on The Emancipation Procrastination. It is also here that he more willingly invites associations with past styles. The prominent use of electric guitar suggests a vintage rock-fusion approach, and soulful Fender Rhodes playing by Lawrence Fields often seems like it’s channeling some of Miles Davis’ late-1960s sound.
The lengthy closing number, “New Heroes,” features some of the most exciting instrumental interplay of the entire series. Adjuah’s trumpet, Elena Pinderhughes’ flute, and Braxton Cook’s alto saxophone all take turns shining. Adjuah reserves the last solo for himself, letting rip with some of his most ecstatic riffs. Sometimes he growls through his horn. At other points he lets loose with some piercing cries. Eventually, he settles on a final texture, one both burnished and regal. It’s the sound of a player confident not just in his chops, but fully at home in his own compositional world. | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | null | October 21, 2017 | 7.6 | 90fdf6aa-2add-4c34-9fa1-2b9ba74b7f8c | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
The record that marks the end of Magnetic Fields' self-imposed "no synth trilogy" is also the first Magnetic Fields album in a more than a decade that isn't organized around a formal limitation. | The record that marks the end of Magnetic Fields' self-imposed "no synth trilogy" is also the first Magnetic Fields album in a more than a decade that isn't organized around a formal limitation. | The Magnetic Fields: Love at the Bottom of the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16360-the-magnetic-fields-love-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea/ | Love at the Bottom of the Sea | Over the past decade, the Magnetic Fields have put out a trio of rigorously formalist albums, each of which, with the clinical exactitude of a lab report, handed the listener a tidy intellectual conclusion about pop music. Even the stuff we perceive to be "confessional" songwriting is just a parade of characters and personas (citation: i, an album-length meditation on the first person pronoun), every simple melody sounds a little bit better when buried under an avalanche of Jesus and Mary Chain-grade scuzz (see: the aptly titled Distortion), and music made with "real" instruments like acoustic guitars and ukuleles can easily sound just as artificial as music made on computers and synthesizers (the folksy yet artifice-guilded Realism).
With a frontman iconically haughty enough to be a feasible answer to a New York Times crossword puzzle clue (L.A.-by-way-of-East Village curmudgeon; 14 letters)-- it has been especially easy during this run of albums to dismiss the Magnetic Fields as Ivory Tower pop, wrapped up in the cleverness of their own ideas and out of touch with the world below. But a quick glance around the cultural landscape shows Stephin Merritt's inquires to be pointedly, perennially relevant: There's Dave Grohl at the Grammys, professing the very conceit that Realism poked fun at; here's a whole slew of underground lo-fi bands taking Distortion's dictum as gospel; there's the same voice that yelled "Judas!" at Robert Zimmerman shouting a whole string of unprintables at Lizzy Grant.
At the endless, stuffy cocktail party where everyone's going on about authenticity in music, Merritt's formalist convictions feel, at best, like a refreshingly icy gust of wind coming in through an open door. Or, at least, in theory. Because as interesting as these records might have been to think about or discuss, the fact is that their listenability varied greatly, with the most recent, the overstuffed Realism, pretty much unendurable as a front-to-back experience. Another tidy truth about pop music: You can't have a conversation about a record if you've never met another person who has cared to sit through it twice.
For anyone who found the Magnetic Fields' recent work too tethered to formal shtick-ery-- or who just missed the amiable synth-pop sound of Holiday or Get Lost-- the first few notes of their latest, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, peal like potential chimes of freedom. The record marks the end of their self-imposed "no synth trilogy," and its opening track, the bleakly comic "Your Girlfriend's Face" is the first Magnetic Fields track to feature a synthesizer since 1999's 69 Love Songs. Is this a return to form, or could it even be the beginning of a whole new direction? That seems possible on paper, since Love at the Bottom of the Sea is also the first Magnetic Fields album in a decade and a half that isn't organized around some kind of formal limitation. So is this record an exercise in liberation, an opportunity to explore bigger ideas, take risks, and reinvent the project as Merritt has so many times before? Well-- and isn't this becoming the damnedest phrase when it comes to this band-- in theory.
From the start, Love at the Bottom of the Sea seems to be a more welcoming listen than Realism. Two minutes in, we're greeted with an instant classic "Andrew in Drag", easily one of the band's best tracks since 69 Love Songs. It's sharply funny ("A pity she does not exist/ A shame he's not a fag," Merritt laments, "The only girl I'll ever love is Andrew in drag"), but it doesn't have the punchline-crazed flatness that some of his more self-consciously jokey songs do. Though just two minutes long, "Andrew in Drag" is an efficient, elegantly crafted character study, and once the initial jolt of its punchline wears away, it remains a surprisingly affecting parable about unattainable desire ("Ill never see that girl again/ He did it as a gag/ I'll pine away forevermore for Andrew in drag") that smartly, swiftly ends before it has a chance to become maudlin. And while the droll tableau "God Wants Us to Wait" doesn't quite have much in the way of emotional resonance, it still sets the album off to a strong start thanks to a few vividly goofy turns of phrase ("I guess it's true I should have told you before/ And not have waited 'til we're nude on the floor") and a catchy, Shirley-Simms-voiced melody.
But after these frontloaded highlights, it doesn't take long for Love at the Bottom of the Sea to become a rain-boot-worthy slog through water-logged mid-tempo material: There's a particularly plodding song called "I'd Go Anywhere With Hugh" that feels triple its two-minute runtime; there's the prancing, carousel vibe of "The Horrible Party" which feels like a retread of Realism's weaker material; and then there's "My Husband's Pied-A-Terre", which rhymes the titular line with "derrière." They're all foregone conclusions: Knowing just the titles, you can pretty much imagine exactly what these songs will sound like and, as the lyrics unfold, what the next rhyme (or punchline) will be. That's the frustrating paradox of Love at the Bottom of the Sea: Though it finds the band shaking off the limitations of their formal exercises, it's actually the safest and most predictable thing they've put out in years.
Of course, that Love at the Bottom of the Sea is ornate, pun-crazed, and flagrantly synthetic is not necessarily a strike against it: Merritt's spun these qualities into gold before. Marking the return to longtime home Merge Records and their long-shunned electronic sound, Love has the feel of a band getting resettled and plotting its next move, but it ultimately amounts to something less than the sum of its parts: It has the feel of a collection of B-sides rather than a proper statement. There are enough good songs to put it a cut above Realism (including, late in the game, the sweetly vitriolic "Quick!"), but it's a new kind of disappointment from a Magnetic Fields record: It doesn't even give you much to talk about. | 2012-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 8, 2012 | 6.1 | 90fe7b67-64f5-4f25-9c07-370a4b818548 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Assembled from samples of unwatched YouTube videos, the Big Thief drummer’s solo album harnesses a harsh and overwhelming torrent of information to convey how the internet skews reality. | Assembled from samples of unwatched YouTube videos, the Big Thief drummer’s solo album harnesses a harsh and overwhelming torrent of information to convey how the internet skews reality. | James Krivchenia: Blood Karaoke | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-krivchenia-blood-karaoke/ | Blood Karaoke | James Krivchenia is drawn to projects with a wide-eyed view of the world and a hopeful interest in the interconnectedness of all things. It’s true of the nature-worshipping music he makes as part of Big Thief and Mega Bog, and it’s also true of his work with Taylor Swift, in whose hands a scarf or cardigan can take on cosmic significance. His new solo album Blood Karaoke presents the same unknowable vastness of existence through the lens of a computer screen, but this time, the overload of information it shoots through the listener’s brain feels claustrophobic, airless, humid, and chemical. Listening to this information-age nightmare next to the rootsy, utopian sprawl of Big Thief’s Krivchenia-produced Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is a great argument for logging off and touching grass.
What Krivchenia has done here is sample dozens of YouTube videos with zero views and mash them together into overstimulating collages. He’s not the first experimental musician to dip into YouTube detritus. The Range’s 2016 album Potential airlifted the video-hosting site’s aspiring singers and rappers into sky-scraping bangers that suggested anyone could be a star. On the Soft Pink Truth’s Why Pay More?, Drew Daniel pulled from the back pages of specific search queries to evaluate his own relationship with a site capable of hosting both fuzzy-animal videos and footage of senseless violence. Blood Karaoke is more interested in the sheer wealth of information available at the click of a button, and in its sonic density we get a glimpse of how immense the internet really is: a world within a world that both mirrors and skews reality.
Krivchenia’s default style on Blood Karaoke is a sort of deconstructed take on rave, with popping sequencers and blocky synth chords building to nothing. There’s a lot going on at high volume, each track barreling into the next with minimal interruption, and the longest reprieve comprises two minutes of droning strings on “Wall Facer,” just before the album ends. It’s not hard to connect this harsh and overwhelming torrent of information to the daily ordeal of scrolling social media, with mindless clickbait adjacent to global horror. Blood Karaoke is no less exhausting an experience, albeit far less addictive, and though the sheer volume of content makes it a consistently interesting listen, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone with a hangover, a predilection for panic attacks, or an interest in doing anything besides frying the frayed nerve ends of their brain.
There are moments of pop melody, but they’re delivered in the cheesiest, chintziest contexts: what sounds like a cheap Yamaha keyboard demo on “Calendrical Rot,” or a snatch of canned pop-rock on “Sub-Creational Reality” that could be a ringtone or a GarageBand loop. As in the music of Frank Zappa, another avant-garde prankster interested in the pitfalls of a media-saturated society, melodies and hooks only exist here to be parodied and exposed as sugar-coated simplifications of the world’s complexities. At times, the ear longs for something to remind us that as horrific as this hell planet is, it’s also beautiful and there’s a lot to make life worth living. But you’d have to hop on over to one of Krivchenia’s other projects for something like that. | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Reading Group | April 15, 2022 | 6.6 | 90ffa500-d086-4131-8a72-dc0125c7b02f | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Detroit rapper’s latest mixtape is a vivid anthology of first-person vignettes driven by a deep sense of paranoia. | The Detroit rapper’s latest mixtape is a vivid anthology of first-person vignettes driven by a deep sense of paranoia. | Los: F**K Da World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-fk-da-world/ | F**K Da World | Los’ songs go a lot like the scene in Goodfellas right before Ray Liotta is arrested: Helicopters hover above. He’s unsure if anyone close to him is trustworthy. The phone endlessly rings, but he’s afraid the feds might be eavesdropping. He goes on sweaty drives where every car might be the one that pulls him over. Usually, it ends with drugs flushed down a toilet, a race across state lines, and the decision to leave his life behind to fall off the grid. It’s blurred by a looming sense that all of this is driven by his own paranoia.
These tales aren’t completely rooted in reality, given that Los isn’t currently on the run. Los essentially makes crime sagas that if fleshed out further could be sprawling scripts of their own. His latest mixtape Fuck Da World compiles 10 moody, first-person vignettes into an anthology of sorts: On “Daisy Lane Records” he survives a scheme by the skin of his teeth, but the cops bust down his door anyway; on the aptly titled “Goodfellas,” he heads to Pittsburgh, a recurring location in his music, and a hotspot of duffel bag-passing chaos; “Just Start Saving” is like a montage of all his shady dealings going right for once, though we know darkness is around the corner.
But Los’ music is more than anecdotes about a man tired of a life he can’t seem to escape. They’re delivered in the type of gruff, hoarse voice you might have after waking up with a hangover, laid over grimy beats that could be deep cuts on a late-’90s No Limit cassette. “300k” is the blueprint of this style, with a trunk-rattling instrumental and piercing police sirens that set the tense mood. In only two minutes, Los builds a world full of sketchy detectives (probably in tailored suits), and cat-and-mouse games with faceless enemies (probably also in tailored suits). Occasionally, he’s held back by production choices that sound like cheap imitations of his Southern rap inspirations: The booming drums and grim melody on “Can’t Rap Bout It” would have been better suited in the Lex Luger era of Atlanta, and the church bell-heavy “Ain’t Goin’” is like a lifeless Tay Keith-type beat. Both distract from his storytelling.
Los remedies production mishaps through a growing relationship with the Detroit-based trusted hand Topside, who last year released a joint mixtape called G Shit Vol. 1 that remains their best work to date. On “Hit Em Wit Dat Fye,” Topside blends ticking hi-hats, Mannie Fresh-influenced blaring horns, and an atmospheric melody; Los is such a vivid storyteller, he can make the most monotonous tasks sound lively. Likewise, “Cool Cat 2” is captivating: Topside laces the emcee with a groovy bassline, and Los is so stressed out by his lifestyle that his typical intensity turns to exhaustion: “I’m just tryna get some rap money then take it home/The pandemic, yeah it’s over wit’, all the money gone,” he raps as if he wishes he could enter retirement. Similar to Scorsese’s mafia epic, the constant anxiety and paranoia are not only thrilling, but funny in a twisted way.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | PANAGNL4E | April 7, 2021 | 7.5 | 910130f9-b54f-459f-8201-c929638e2d17 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Usher’s ninth album is another impressive display of his endless charm and vocal chops. Thirty years into his career, the R&B icon still knows how to keep it light and throw a great party. | Usher’s ninth album is another impressive display of his endless charm and vocal chops. Thirty years into his career, the R&B icon still knows how to keep it light and throw a great party. | Usher: Coming Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/usher-coming-home/ | Coming Home | I can’t be sure of this, but I feel fairly confident that Usher Raymond IV has never consumed a drop of milk. How else could you attribute the archival-grade preservation of his vocal cords, his leggero tenor as athletic and diamond-sharp as the day he dropped his self-titled debut in 1994—which, if you recall, was a whole 30 years ago? On Coming Home, his ninth album, his low warbles and falsetto are soft and airy, his natural register as creamy as the dairy he’s certainly never consumed. You can picture him pairing his kettlebell runs right alongside his vocal exercises, as pristine and optimized as any Southern former choirboy determined to stay at the top of his game.
What went down at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show was everything that has made Usher into a pop icon: an old-school Hollywood entertainer whose choreography is always step-perfect and whose position as a multi-generational sex symbol is both good-natured and tasteful. Hordes of women, famous and otherwise, flocked to his Vegas residency for the Usher Seduction Experience, which included individual serenades that were so convincing they may have very publicly exploded at least one relationship (and produced a soundtrack for the meta-drama).
On Coming Home’s 20 songs, he remains most comfortable and effective playing the sensual lover with come-hither abs, where even the most blatant sexual metaphor doesn’t come off as seamy. “Wanna cuddle in bed/Won’t just open your legs and then leave you for dead,” he sings on the sunny title track, which is also an extended allegory for an orgasm. On the album cover, he holds a Georgia peach in front of his shiny deltoids just so, projecting hometown pride and provoking deep lust. On “Stone Kold Freak,” his request for enthusiastic consent should come with a fainting couch: “Right after you make your decision,” he warbles confidently, “I’m gon’ make my incision, girrrl.” A business journalist should investigate whether he has stock in folding fans.
As much as Usher plays up his lifelong amiable-ravisher persona on Coming Home, he maintains the versatility he’s established through the years, whether on enduring crunk hits like “Yeah!” or dance-music experiments like “Numb” and “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love.” Here his musical curiosity extends to amapiano, with Nigerian superproducer Pheelz joining him on the plush love song “Ruin” and a Burna Boy feature on “Coming Home,” while the delectable Tricky Stewart-produced electro jam “Keep On Dancin’” slide-glides its way around French house. The album sequencing divides these impulses into digestible and tonally paired sections—the bass-funk and backbeat of “I Love U” precede the baby-making midtempo jam “Please U,” both of which evoke Prince at his 1982 peak of shirtlessness, and pay homage with a wink, like Usher’s casually exhibiting his adaptability to the greats. “Big,” a horny song about a fat ass and, probably, his Magnum-wrapped anaconda, couches a salacious grin in a horn section and synth bassline reminiscent of Quincy Jones productions; “Luckiest Man” is an ‘80s throwback love song with a pristine synth cowbell that will leave you wistful and nostalgic for Al B. Sure!
On the handful of collaborations with The-Dream—the standout drippy flex “Margiela"; the crying-in-the-strip-club subwoofer anthem “Cold Blooded,” produced by Pharrell—Usher draws on sounds and sentiments invented and popularized in ’90s and ’00s Atlanta. It marks a return to the music that raised him as an artist while firmly reiterating his place in its legacy. It’s his comfort zone, but a performer with his emotional mettle doesn’t become complacent or entitled; even cheese is on the table. “A-Town Girl,” a snap-music track featuring a costly Billy Joel sample and a hyper-local Latto verse, interpolates Joel’s “Uptown Girl” for a love letter to the A. Is it corny? Yes, but I’m not from Atlanta, and within Usher’s orbit, this feel-good devotional to “Magic City lemon pepper wings” and a woman who “keep a blicky on her just in case somebody try” works markedly better than a Georgia tourism board ad.
Yet 2004's Confessions remains the standard-bearer, both in Usher's catalog and among pop R&B men proposing their own versatility. Part of that was its attendant narrative—that each successive single seemed to build up to a plot worthy of a telenovela (and it didn't hurt that Usher experienced his own breakup during the height of Confessions' popularity, with longtime girlfriend Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas). That level of cohesion is missing here, as Coming Home is more of a document of his own musical ambidexterity—a reflection on the first three decades of his career and a love letter to various R&B styles across decades—than the kind of all-encompassing album that can practically eclipse everything around it. Coming Home is full of delectable singles that prove Usher is still the king of pop-R&B—he’s simply reminding his fans what he can do, how many ways he can do it, and how nastily, too, if you’ll allow him.
Appropriately, then, the most classic-sounding Usher arrives with “I Am the Party” and “On the Side,” collaborations with longtime producer and career-maker Jermaine Dupri, the king of Atlanta and alleged source material for much of Confessions. The latter, built on a simple synth line played by co-writer Bryan-Michael Cox, is a heart-wrenching midtempo ballad about falling in love with his side-piece: “I mean, I love my baby, but she way thicker,” he coos, rude but endearing. And therein lies the secret sauce: Usher’s voice, full of solemnity, can even invoke sympathy while he’s being a dog. Performing better than all of his male peers may have gotten him to the top, but only this sort of emotional fortitude builds a legacy. As he puts it himself: “It’s all here baby… I am the party.” | 2024-02-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Mega / Gamma. | February 14, 2024 | 8 | 910fbace-27f9-4fa8-8cbf-746c5bd81f0d | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Australia has a rich tradition of producing some of the most unfettered, uncontrollable metal. Impetuous Ritual, whose guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue are also in Portal, carry on Australia's reputation for madness with their second album, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which blurs the ever-thinning lines between death metal and noise. | Australia has a rich tradition of producing some of the most unfettered, uncontrollable metal. Impetuous Ritual, whose guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue are also in Portal, carry on Australia's reputation for madness with their second album, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which blurs the ever-thinning lines between death metal and noise. | Impetuous Ritual: Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19191-impetuous-ritual-unholy-congregation-of-hypocritical-ambivalence/ | Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence | Australia has a rich tradition of producing some of the most unfettered, uncontrollable metal. The country's most prominent bands, such as Sadistik Exekution, Bestial Warlust (the former band of Destroyer 666 leader K.K. Warslut), and Portal, are united by an absolute abandon of conventional form and an emphasis on conjuring as much chaos as their equipment can physically accommodate. The guitars can sound so reckless that they make Kerry King's free soloing sound like the most conservative nylon-string plucker, the drumming perfectly balances skill and savagery, and the vocalists less resemble singers than they do drill sergeants in spikes. It's metal taken to its absolute limits, nearly bordering on experimental music; Impetuous Ritual, whose guitarists Ignis Fatuus and Omenous Fugue are also in Portal, carry on Australia's reputation for madness with their second album, Unholy Congregation of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which blurs the ever-thinning lines between death metal and noise.
The quartet is sometimes confused as a Portal side project due to the shared members, who in reality only recently joined the long-running Portal; it's also tempting to assume that Impetuous Ritual represent a middle ground between Portal and Grave Upheaval, the latter of which Ignis Fatuus also plays drums in. Portal's sound is more jagged, though, and unless you literally recorded your album in a cave, it is impossible to sound more subterranean than Grave Upheaval. For Impetuous Ritual, repetition is more strongly emphasized than those bands, with tremolo-picking that builds and reinforces a howling wall of despair.
There are elements that break up the blackened torrent—the bells on “Metastasis,” some disjointed guitar solos here and there, the occasional doom-stomp—but otherwise the mood on Congregation is relentless and impossible to escape. In Portal, Omenous Fugue plays bass and Ignis Fatuus plays drums, so the fact that these guys can play a similar form of death metal in different roles makes you admire their skill in a way that triggers a fear for their well-being. Same goes for Ingnis Fatuus' vocals; mostly, he goes for a indecipherable growl, but on “Inservitude of Asynchronous Duality” he reaches piercing highs reminiscent of Absu's Proscriptor.
It's difficult to experience Congregation as anything but a full meditative experience. The vibe is so oppressive that it's not unreasonable to think that this record really does not give a fuck about any of your feelings. Is it oppression through freedom, or freedom through oppression? Congregation concludes with the nearly 15-minute “Blight,” and it's the most warlike in an album littered with doves' corpses. The song represents everything essential about Impetous Ritual pushed further and further into the breaking points of comprehension and endurance. If you made it through “Blight,” then congratulations. Your taste in death metal is superb, and you're probably a little imbalanced. | 2014-04-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-04-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Profound Lore | April 14, 2014 | 7.9 | 9116603f-42b1-43f3-8cd9-19a53057b979 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
A sleek and bleary new project from the Savannah rapper drifts toward R&B and pop, communicating as much through the sound as its lyrics. | A sleek and bleary new project from the Savannah rapper drifts toward R&B and pop, communicating as much through the sound as its lyrics. | Duwap Kaine: Faith Like Esther | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duwap-kaine-faith-like-esther/ | Faith Like Esther | Duwap Kaine is a true product of the internet: a drifter among the Soundcloud extended universe who’s had a marked influence on hip-hop but mostly stands on his own. His vocal runs are somewhere between the hazy confessions of Lucki and the spiraling conspiracies of Rxk Nephew, and with a propensity for lengthy projects with no features, his work can feel like a torrential flood whose individual songs often blur together. There’s something almost Zen about the swirling patterns of Duwap’s voice, marred by a distinctly digital sound, like the audio equivalent of a music visualizer. On his new album, Faith Like Esther, the 20-year-old Savannah, Georgia rapper assumes a more romantic and passionate tone—while he’s always had a sing-song delivery, he now drifts closer to R&B and pop.
An unapologetic rap nerd, Duwak often interprets himself through the personas of other artists. On “Oppa Gangnam Style” he says he feels like Migos, then just a few bars later changes his mind and switches trends: “This ain’t no Migos era no more/We ain’t rockin’ Versace.” As the title suggests, “Future & Designer” treats the resemblance between the two rappers as a metaphor for flow-jackers and clout vampires. Kaine’s flow is dependably unpredictable: a melodic falsetto or a verbose stream of imagery fighting the beat. As much as actual Auto-Tune, Kaine swaddles his voice in layers of reverb and overdubs, lending an almost shoegaze essence to his delivery. When he does land more purposefully trolling punchlines, they’re offset by the ethereal layers of his voice.
Faith Like Esther can almost sound like Drake fell down a rabbit hole into a trippy Dr. Seuss-like dimension, and the beat of “Outro (Seasonal)” resembles a sped-up Baltimore Club flip of “Passionfruit.” Beneath the powerful 808 bass, “Hard 2 Please” has an almost Sade-like instrumental backdrop, while “Revolve Around Me” is like an R&B ballad on fast forward, with a defined sense of melody that’s compacted and hyperactive. After exhibiting a sensitive and even sultry side, Duwap peaks into the red with the noisy crunch of “ProPella,” grounded in demented synths and overcompressed bass. There’s darkness behind the clouds, and the bleary eyes and blurry colors come as much from internal struggle as euphoria: “It’s really hard tryna quit the lean/Especially when you seein’ things.”
Duwap can slip into darker territory, but he remains sincere throughout the project, with an occasionally childlike sense of love seeping out of his bars. On emo banger “#Mood,” he croons about wiping away his tears with dollar bills, and he makes a hook out of his adoration for humankind: “If I could help everybody I would.” The title of the song “ASMR” offers a clear analogy for listening to Duwap at this stage in his career—the words and the content matter, but the experience is equally informed by the texture and our instinctive emotional response. While there’s still room to get hype, crack jokes, and express pain, Duwak Kaine seems increasingly concerned with soothing the listener. | 2022-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | TAF | July 6, 2022 | 7.2 | 91195e9a-0050-4bda-a6ce-0671c55946c0 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Sacramento guitar/drum duo go Speakerboxxx/Love Below on this 2xCD release. | Sacramento guitar/drum duo go Speakerboxxx/Love Below on this 2xCD release. | Hella: Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11757-church-gone-wildchirpin-hard/ | Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard | Sometimes the best way to succeed in music is by pretending you're already the biggest band in the world. Hella, a Sacramento guitar/drums duo whose music elicited little more than a shoulder shrug and a "meh" from most listeners, confidently put the cart before the horse with Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard. Borrowing the Speakerboxxx/The Love Below format, the epic double-solo album is the band's third and most extensive full-length, capturing virtuosos Zach Hill and Spencer Seim at their creative and technical apex.
So Zach's got Church, Spencer has Chirpin', and the two albums couldn't steer freak-out rock in more disparate directions. Seim's crowning moments thrive on electro-pop/noise synergy; as a result, Church feels a bit homogenous and redundant when juxtaposed to Chirpin'-- which is no surprise considering Hill initially composed the disc as one hour-long song. Still, on numbers like "I'm Quitting the Cult" and "Wish I Never Saw a White Man", Hill's metronome goes haywire as he pulverizes the skins at Mach speed, a change of pace from other tracks on which he merely bludgeons them at 220 bpm. To top it off, Hill throws in fuzzed-out vox, hellraising guitar sounds, chilling church organ, and any other instrument appropriate for the apocalypse.
Seim's response? A soundtrack for a chaotic NES game that never existed. The part-time Advantage drummer uses that band's covers as prototypes for his own twisted form of Nintendo-rock. Chirpin' employs Hella's traditionally linear song sequencing to enhance the disc's narrative quality. Opener "Gold Mine, Gold Yours" is exactly the song I'd expect after pushing the NES power button, "Famnail" conjures up that impossibly long level I could never beat, and "Home on the Arrange" menaces like so many Mega Man bosses. Even more impressive is Seim's channeling of NES pathos; just as Bowser simultaneously appears intimidating and ridiculous, Seim's songwriting evokes a healthy balance of fear and lightheartedness. And oh yeah, those 8-bit beeps and squelches are mostly acoustic instruments slickly altered to resemble digital sine waves.
Naturally, the double-album's peaks occur when both members' ideas intersect. "Song From Uncle" fuses Church's proactive percussion with Seim's buoyant songwriting. Likewise, Seim's guitar playfully mimics Hill's nihilistic vocals on "Imaginary Friends", Church's closest stab at melody. With these moments, Hella back up their ambition with impressive amounts of ingenuity and elbow grease, creating a White Album for disgruntled Gen Xers still finding solace in shoeboxes full of NES cartridges. | 2005-03-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2005-03-23T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Suicide Squeeze | March 23, 2005 | 7.8 | 911c4448-f4b6-4b4b-b464-ddc8f9810d7e | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
These outtakes are less determined to deliver neatly packaged hooks, but there are still moments where the band strikes with full vulnerability and force. | These outtakes are less determined to deliver neatly packaged hooks, but there are still moments where the band strikes with full vulnerability and force. | Charly Bliss: Supermoon EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charly-bliss-supermoon-ep/ | Supermoon EP | On their second album, this year’s Young Enough, Brooklyn power-pop band Charly Bliss documented the simultaneous pain and ecstasy of growing into a better version of yourself. Buoyed by soaring guitar riffs and glittery pop choruses, the album was a self-critical and self-affirming coming-of-age meditation. The songs on their new EP, Supermoon, were recorded at the same time, before the band settled on a final track list. These outtakes provide insight into the ethos behind Young Enough, filling out a mood board of anxiety and romantic alienation. As a study in the process of writing and editing a record, Supermoon is interesting. But on its own, it doesn’t have the same impact.
Similar yet slightly grungier than Young Enough, the songs on Supermoon are dense and sweet like a tub of frosting. The chorus of “Slingshot” hits with the heart-swelling force of a Third Eye Blind anthem and the guitars on “Supermoon” chug like a heartbeat. There’s never a moment that reaches the unbridled euphoria of Young Enough’s “Capacity” or “Blown to Bits,” though. These songs feel unravelled, less determined to deliver neatly packaged hooks.
The greatest departure is in Supermoon’s lyrics. Slivers of bodies, relationships, and emotions—uncrossed legs, twisted arms, festering resentments, declarations of love that sound like threats—shine bright. But you have to squint to see the constellations they form, the bigger picture they’re building towards. “Feed” creates a chorus out of the line, “I would feed the whole world if I could.” It’s a hard sentiment to argue with, the kind that tells us almost nothing about the person saying it. Sandwiched between imagery of expired milk and melted trophies, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re supposed to feel. “Supermoon” and “Slingshot” are similarly opaque, evoking emotional chaos without establishing origins or intentions. It’s understandable that these songs didn’t make the cut for Young Enough, where every track encapsulated the joy of overcoming trauma and practicing self love.
There are still moments when Charly Bliss’ songwriting strikes with full vulnerability and force. On Supermoon highlight “Heaven,” the lyrics are simpler, often only a few syllables per line. Over gauzy, distorted guitar, lead singer Eva Hendricks relays dreamy romantic contentment, culminating in a triumphant declaration of hope: “I’m gonna buy a house and fill it/With daughters and daughters and daughters.” The bright guitar lines of “Threat” coyly conceal the aggravation of a comfortable but unfulfilling romantic relationship. Heartbreaking lines like, “I’d rather be dead than have it be true/That no one can ever love me more than you” are hidden in plain sight.
Creative writing instructors sometimes encourage students to develop a better understanding of their characters by describing the contents of their trash cans. But this kind of exercise is usually one step in a creative process, not the end product itself. By presenting their outtakes, Charly Bliss offer superfans the chance to better appreciate Young Enough by hearing what songs it isn’t. New listeners may wish to start somewhere else: Though fun and propulsive, the songs on Supermoon don’t match the time-stopping, soul-affirming exhilaration that make Charly Bliss’ best music so special. | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | November 9, 2019 | 7.2 | 911e7e46-cc6d-46fc-bdac-c46ede32c33e | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Following career-peak Rook, Jonathan Meiburg and co. return with another excellent record of restrained grandiosity and enigmatic grace. | Following career-peak Rook, Jonathan Meiburg and co. return with another excellent record of restrained grandiosity and enigmatic grace. | Shearwater: The Golden Archipelago | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13934-the-golden-archipelago/ | The Golden Archipelago | Some claim albums as a format are dying out, and I keep refusing to believe it. I don't think economics or the slipperiness of mp3s will save it, so much as musicians who like the format will. It lets them say something a single track often can't, and it's hard to figure a better way to capture a snapshot of where a band is in its creative life. Based on The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater are perfectly served by the medium. The record has just a couple of tracks that would be especially striking outside of their context on the LP, and nothing on the level of the huge highs of 2008's Rook, "Snow Leopard" and "Rooks". But it's still thoroughly captivating and confident-- and one of the best recent examples of effective sequencing.
The placement of every song is so precise that it almost sounds as though they were recorded in order. The listener feels an impeccable sense of balance as the album's loudest guitars follow its quietest whisper of a song during the transition from "Hidden Lake" to "Corridors". "Castaways" is deliberate and mannered and achieves the sort of restrained grandiosity that distinguishes Shearwater from nearly everyone else-- it carries you to a peak, and the song that follows gently carries you away from it as it bobs in on a swaying, natural beat. The album's first three songs feel almost like a suite. Hovering over all the perfect transitions is songwriter Jonathan Meiburg's loose unifying theme, islands. That seems simple enough for a concept, but it's a natural extension of Meiburg's fellowship work studying daily life in remote communities, as well as his well-documented interest in ornithology and academic work focusing on migration patterns.
Indeed, the record is introduced by a field recording of what sounds like an island choir, before the band kicks in with an oceanic swell of guitar and imagery of waves on the shore. Meiburg's voice is finely honed, and it's the primary reason the band is frequently (and justifiably) compared to Talk Talk-- he has the same richness, range, and inexact enunciation that made Mark Hollis so enigmatic and interesting. He belts powerfully on the intro to "Black Eyes" before he's joined by a weighty beat that subtly shifts beneath him as the bass line evolves and the drums gradually change their emphasis. It's a sharp arrangement that doesn't do anything overtly odd but makes the song captivating and exciting nonetheless.
The only parts of the album that don't feel quite as balanced as their surroundings are "God Made Me", which lacks the fluency of the record's other songs and weighs down the middle a bit, and the final two tracks: "Uniforms" is okay on its own, but its extreme dynamic range and slow start leaves the already wispy closer "Missing Islands" feeling, well, like an island, divorced from the rest of the record. Even so, it's a great piece of work, capturing a band at a moment of creative confidence and maturity. The band's organic incorporation of marimbas and other mallet percussion, its use of acoustic instruments to create textures, its sense of restraint-- these are all well on display on The Golden Archipelago. It's an album you can spend time with and understand as a whole work, and one that grows on you with each listen, revealing yet more detail and nuance. | 2010-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 24, 2010 | 7.9 | 91221713-8195-4b02-8c2f-c2ba95b1c4b8 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Staple Singers’ legendary 1965 performance at New Nazareth Church, the live album Freedom Highway has been remastered and restored to its original setlist and runtime. Don't Lose This finds Jeff Tweedy completing, at Mavis Staples' behest, a handful of spare guitar and vocals songs that Pop Staples recorded before he died in 2000. | To mark the 50th anniversary of the Staple Singers’ legendary 1965 performance at New Nazareth Church, the live album Freedom Highway has been remastered and restored to its original setlist and runtime. Don't Lose This finds Jeff Tweedy completing, at Mavis Staples' behest, a handful of spare guitar and vocals songs that Pop Staples recorded before he died in 2000. | The Staple Singers / Pops Staples: Freedom Highway Complete/Don't Lose This | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20155-freedom-highway-completedont-lose-this/ | Freedom Highway Complete/Don't Lose This | It’s impossible to discuss the Staple Singers’ 1965 live album Freedom Highway without considering what was going down in America that year. On March 7, more than 600 marchers set out to make the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and were attacked by Alabama state troopers and armed posses. Two days later, they tried again, but turned back when Governor George Wallace denied them state protection. Two long weeks later, they tried a third time, with federal protection from the US Army and the National Guard. It took them three days, but they finally reached the state capitol.
Just a few weeks later and several hundred miles north, one of the hottest groups on the gospel circuit debuted a new song during a service at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side. Pops Staples, patriarch and bandleader of the formidable Staple Singers, explained the inspiration in his introduction. "From that march, word was revealed and a song was composed," he explains, sounding less like a preacher addressing his congregation and more like a close friend shaking your hand. "And we wrote a song about the freedom marchers and we call it the ‘Freedom Highway’, and we dedicate this number to all the freedom marchers." As he is addressing the congregation, Pops strikes a clutch of chords on his guitar, and those chords coalesce into a spry blues riff that he sends rolling down the aisles of New Nazareth.
Then Al Duncan enters on drums, his rhythm a little funkier and more physical than you might expect in such a godly setting; Phil Upchurch lays down an elastic bass line, and the syncopated clatter of handclaps completes the rhythm section. Just as the song is taking off, the Staple Singers—Pops and his kids Pervis, Yvonne, and Mavis—shout the chorus: "Marching… up freedom highway, marching… each and every day." Mavis sings lead on the verses, her voice lunging at the low notes and filling every space in the sanctuary. Despite the worry in the lyrics ("The whole wide world is wonderin’ what’s wrong with the United States"), the family does not sound concerned or beaten down or fatigued in any way. Rather, "Freedom Highway" is pure jubilation, as though the Staples are celebrating that third march to Montgomery, confident in the righteousness of their cause. With God on their side, how could they fail?
Recording the performance that day was producer Billy Sherrill, who edited the songs for radio play, then rearranged them for the Staples’ first live album, Freedom Highway. Instead of coming halfway through the performance, the title track opened the first side, announcing Pops’ intentions of connecting gospel music with the struggle for civil rights. It was the family’s biggest hit to date, a pivotal record that inched them toward the pop mainstream without sacrificing their gospel message for a secular audience. In that regard, the New Nazareth concert proves a pivotal event not just for the family, but for pop music in general—just as crucial as anything that happened at Woodstock or Monterey, albeit not as storied or as celebrated. Somehow, the record slipped out of print and has been unavailable for decades. (An excellent 1991 compilation bears the same title but includes only two tracks from the album among contemporaneous studio and live recordings.)
To mark the 50th anniversary of the freedom marches as well as the Staples’ performance, the New Nazareth concert has been remastered and restored to its original setlist and runtime, complete with a short sermon by Rev. Dr. John E. Hopkins, a benediction, and even a guilt-motivated offertory ("We got less than 75 dollars here. You know this is not right.") As a historical artifact, it is invaluable for what it reveals about gospel performances of the era, even if the proceedings fall into a lull whenever the singing gives way to talking. That’s true of so many church services, though, especially those you don’t actually get to attend.
This remaster, however, emphasizes the bustle of the congregation, lending the proceedings a you-are-there intimacy. You can hear every cough and mutter, every rifle of a Bible page, and every amen. In this vivid setting, the songs take on new power. Pervis’s recitation of Hank Williams’ "The Funeral" sounds more intensely melancholy, as though he is not quite convinced of God’s mysterious motivations but is surrendering to Him nonetheless. You can hear Pops joking with his son-in-law just before he launches into "Samson and Delilah", and his good spirits inject the song with a vivid snap.
And this version restores the original sequencing, so that "Freedom Highway" is immediately preceded by "We Shall Overcome", which was a familiar standard that had taken on new relevance for African Americans during the 1960s. It’s a sly bit of programming by Pops, as it primes the audience to respond enthusiastically to a tune they do not know. Yet, "Freedom Highway" is a very different song, one that is less concerned with someday and more interested in today. It was Pops’ way of marking a victory, of saying they were already in the process of overcoming.
Even if he was often overshadowed by his daughter Mavis, whose voice often sounded like the hand of God parting the clouds, Pops was definitely the leader of the group and the head of the family. Even as they won mainstream success, trading choir robes for Afros and churches for concert halls, he kept them rooted in gospel and focused on a spiritual message. He also became an influence on several generations of guitarists—including Robbie Robertson of the Band and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival—who mimicked Pops’s nimble melodic lines and distinctive tremolo. Shortly before he died in 2000, he recorded a handful of new and old songs, just him and his guitar, and he must have been pleased with the results, because he entrusted the tapes with his daughters with the request, "Don’t lose this."
Mavis held on to them for 15 years, before asking Jeff Tweedy to complete them. To his credit the Wilco frontman brings to these songs the same restraint he showed on You Are Not Alone and One True Vine. He never crowds the performances with extraneous elements or modern touches; in fact, he is largely invisible on Don’t Lose This, occasionally playing bass and generally trusting Pops and his guitar to speak as clearly now as they did in 1998 or in 1965. Spencer Tweedy plays drums on a few songs and proves himself to be as sensitive a sideman here as he did on last year’s Sukierae. His beats on "No News Is Good News" and "Somebody Was Watching" have a textural quality that accentuates the songs’ genial funk, and he knows exactly where to put the downbeat so that it complements Pops’ vocals. Spencer may be one of the best and most interesting drummers around, but he also knows this is someone else’s show.
As a result, Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog. Without sounding like a career retrospective, the album revisits the straightforward gospel of the '50s and '60s as well as the sunshine funk of the '70s, all the while playing up the humane optimism in Pops’ vocals. Songs like "Sweet Home" and "Love on My Side" may depict men at their lowest points—steeped in self-pity, pickled with booze, distant from God—but they are cautionary tales: Any of us could end up in a similar situation, lonely and despairing but never undeserving of redemption.
Still, this is a Pops album in name only. At its core, it may be the final Staple Singers record. His children—including Cleotha, who died in 2013—feature prominently on many of these songs, harmonizing as sweetly as ever in the background and occasionally even taking lead. It’s bracing to hear them sing together again, especially on a song like "Sweet Home", which plays up their individual styles. Pops’ vocals are steady and measured, exuding the quiet authority of a man confident that he’ll see heaven. But Mavis’ voice flutters around his in a perfectly controlled gospel melisma that mimics the motion and expressive tone of a reed instrument. For a lesser singer, her performance might sound ostentatious or overbearing, but for Mavis, it sounds natural and fluid, a perfect complement to her father’s performance.
Perhaps the standout on Don’t Lose This is "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", an old Baptist hymn popularized in the 1930s by another pop music patriarch, A.P. Carter. The Staples covered the song in the '60s, but 40 years will change anyone’s perspective on life and death. Chronicling the funeral of a beloved parent, the song poses the important question, Will the bonds of family persist beyond this world? On the new version Pops manages to gently interpret the song, singing not from the point of view of a child losing a parent, but from the perspective of a parent singing to the children he will leave behind. Even if it’s not the last song on the album, it sounds like a final statement, one last bit of wisdom from a man who showed us the spiritual potential in pop music of all kinds. | 2015-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-02-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 17, 2015 | 8.7 | 9127bfda-1256-4eae-bd76-de9c1e848c9e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Brooklyn duo’s cheeky spin on Gen-X slacker rock asks: What does it take to become a 1990s alt-rock star right this minute? | The Brooklyn duo’s cheeky spin on Gen-X slacker rock asks: What does it take to become a 1990s alt-rock star right this minute? | Momma: Household Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/momma-household-name/ | Household Name | Thirty years ago, the biggest sin an alt-rock band could commit was making it big. When the Smashing Pumpkins did it, Pavement dissed them directly: “I don’t understand what they mean and I could really give a fuck,” Stephen Malkmus sneered on 1994’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Brooklyn duo Momma reference both bands on their third album, Household Name, a cheeky spin on Gen-X slacker rock by zillennial high-school friends Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten. Some of the band’s biggest musical heroes—Nirvana, Liz Phair—have lamented the trials of rock stardom. On Household Name, Momma seem to argue: What would be so bad about stepping into the limelight?
Household Name operates with foresight the Smashing Pumpkins lacked: If you aspire to selling out before other people accuse you of it, can their ridicule even touch you? The 2020s pop-punk renaissance has bred a number of acts whose schticky self-awareness often transpires as braggadocio. But no one said Momma weren’t putting in the work: Household Name opens with “Rip Off,” a song that navigates the art of schmoozing industry insiders between complimentary whiskey shots. “Rockstar,” the first song Momma wrote for the album, channels Pixies’ loud/quiet dynamics as the band seem to talk themselves down from impending imposter syndrome: “It takes a lot to admit it/Yeah, I got what they want/I’m a real rockstar,” the duo intone. On “No Stage,” Momma speculate that the only fate worse than remaining a nobody is to shine bright and flame out: “If I’m famous for the night/I’ll be lonely all my life.”
But each reference to imminent rock stardom on Household Name is shrouded by the fact that Momma are reminiscing on—even aspiring to—a title that arguably doesn’t exist anymore. “It’s just not something we’re probably ever going to experience,” Weingarten has said, meaning Household Name is, to some extent, satirical. In the whimsical video for “Rockstar,” Friedman and Weingarten take home a hefty cash prize at a Battle of the Bands and watch their single reach the top of the charts. “I wanna make a hit and run,” the duo muse, a winking triple entendre that conjures existential questions: What happens if you become disillusioned with fame just as it’s finally within your grasp?
Should Momma indeed become household names, it’s the hooks that will get them there: The beefy riffs and call-and-response chorus of single “Speeding 72”—their best shot at a true hit—just barely outweigh its cliché of a good old-fashioned joyride. “Put the pedal to the metal, lay it all to rest,” the duo sing, before piecing together a chorus from boilerplate rhymes. Household Name could easily feel too formulaic, but with tongue partially in cheek, moments like “Speeding 72” come as a welcome indicator of a band that isn’t taking itself too seriously.
As invested as Momma are in rocking out, they can also tap into the type of angst-ridden sincerity that put so many of their forebears on the map. “I can keep my body small ’til it’s good enough for you to fight/Don’t be delicate with me, keep it real, I don’t need polite,” goes the final verse of “Brave,” a heavy ballad indebted to Only Everything-era Juliana Hatfield. “Never disrespect me/I’m the fucker down the street/I could be your everything,” Momma warn over a mellow, Pinback-like jangle in “Tall Home.” These rare earnest lines are generally too slight to make a lasting impact, and feel slightly out of place on a record that otherwise eulogizes a lifestyle of rock’n’roll hedonism. If Momma never make it there, at least they can say they had fun trying. | 2022-06-30T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-30T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 30, 2022 | 7.2 | 912a2ab0-4d5a-4452-a359-bfcfd80ec93e | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The Aussie rockers’ unabashed fetishization of 1970s staples like punk, glam, and their country’s sharpie scene only helps fuel the invigorating rush of their music. | The Aussie rockers’ unabashed fetishization of 1970s staples like punk, glam, and their country’s sharpie scene only helps fuel the invigorating rush of their music. | Amyl and the Sniffers: Amyl and the Sniffers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amyl-and-the-sniffers-amyl-and-the-sniffers/ | Amyl and the Sniffers | It’s entirely justified to find Amyl and the Sniffers annoying just on the basis that the Melbourne punk quartet romanticizes the dirtbag 1970s to a degree that’s cartoonish. Too young to have experienced Dookie firsthand, let alone Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, Amyl and the Sniffers are blessed by the callous disregard of youth, adopting ratty mullets and tacky high-waisted jeans as gleefully as they swipe riffs from the Damned and the Stooges. The blatant rips are the point: Irked by dead-end jobs and digital chaos, they’re seeking refuge in the past.
What keeps Amyl and the Sniffers from being a boring retread of old rock’n’roll tropes is that apart from their intentionally ugly images—whether it’s their stage getups or the cover art to their eponymous first album, they celebrate the aspects of the ’70s best left forgotten—the band really doesn’t care about the specifics of history whatsoever. No matter how often their fuzzed-out riffs and frenetic rhythms hint at familiar sounds, Amyl and the Sniffers rarely evoke any one specific band on their debut: It’s all a gaudy pastiche, cobbled together from barre chords, spittle, and lager.
On their earliest EPs, Amyl and the Sniffers played with this same aesthetic but they were constrained by their homespun origins. The group wrote and recorded the entirety of 2016’s Giddy Up within 12 hours, and its 2017 sequel, Big Attractions, seemed only slightly more considered. Both EPs were textbook exercises in DIY where it was impossible to separate the content from the format; as the songs blazed by in minute-long bursts, the sound thrilled as much as the hooks.
By the very virtue of being released on a major label, Amyl and the Sniffers reverses that equation. While the group still tends to run lean—most of the album’s 11 songs clock in well under three minutes, with the whole thing rushing by in half an hour—all of the songs feel formed. Give some of the credit to producer Ross Orton. A veteran of the Sheffield scene—he played drums in Add N to (X) and floated through Pulp’s circles on his way to working on M.I.A.s’ Arular, gaining a noteworthy credit by producing Arctic Monkeys’ 2013 LP AM—Orton gives the band a beefier, bolder sound. This increased heft accentuates how Amyl and the Sniffers can sound like heirs to the sharpie rockers of Australia, a dirty underground movement of the ’70s that traded upon glam and nascent heavy metal—a sound that eventually wormed its way into the gnarly riffs of AC/DC and Rose Tattoo. To an extent, these callbacks are deliberate—certainly, Amyl and the Sniffers borrow heavily from the sartorial style of the sharpies—but what makes the group such a blast is that it takes no knowledge of arcane Australian rock’n’roll to enjoy their debut. The group exists entirely on the surface, cranking amps to 11 and playing like it’s in a rush to head back to the bar.
What makes Amyl and the Sniffers slightly preferable to one of the band’s gigs is that Orton channels its energy and then adds definition to its roar. Also, at home it’s easier to catch lead singer Amy Taylor’s knack for the catchphrases and fleeting images that anchor their songs. Perhaps Taylor doesn’t often shape these words into a coherent story—“Gacked on Anger,” a perennial anthem of the underclass (“I wanna help out the people on the street/But how can I help them when I can’t afford to eat”), and the besotted “Got You” come the closest—but it’s enough to suggest she could sharpen this instinct once she bothered to take a breather.
Then again, the appeal of Amyl and the Sniffers is that it never bothers to slow down. That doesn’t mean the record lacks slack moments—the opening instrumental fanfare “Starfire 500” feels best left on the stage, where the lads can vamp as audience anticipation for Taylor grows—but the aggressive acceleration means the album never invites any time for contemplation. Such relentless momentum can give the illusion that the songs are sturdier than they are, but that’s also the pleasure of Amyl and the Sniffers: The album exists so thoroughly in the moment that it winds up obliterating the group’s fetishization of the past and just delivers pure, uncut rock’n’roll fun. | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO / Rough Trade / Flightless | May 24, 2019 | 7.2 | 912b35cd-f871-4e42-b83c-622764485db1 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
In 1970, just four months before his death, the avant-jazz saxophonist played two concerts to a rapturous crowd in France. A new 5xLP set collects the complete recordings for the first time. | In 1970, just four months before his death, the avant-jazz saxophonist played two concerts to a rapturous crowd in France. A new 5xLP set collects the complete recordings for the first time. | Albert Ayler: Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondations Maeght Recordings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/albert-ayler-revelations-the-complete-ortf-1970-fondations-maeght-recordings/ | Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondations Maeght Recordings | As the summer of 1970 approached, things weren’t going great for Albert Ayler. His brother and musical partner Donald suffered from mental health issues, and family members were pressuring Albert to help him more. Musically, encouraged in part by his label Impulse!, Ayler had moved from groundbreaking avant-jazz to a more conventional R&B sound. The resulting albums (1968’s New Grass and 1969’s Music is the Healing Force of the Universe) featured lyrics and vocals by Ayler’s wife and manager Mary Parks (aka Mary Maria), a guiding force in his later years, but they were not well received. Reflecting the tone of the criticism, jazz critic John Litweiler later wrote that Ayler “forsook his musical vision” and “mock(ed) his magnificence.” Impulse! ended up dropping him.
But Ayler had at least one reason for optimism. In July, he was invited to France to perform at the fine-art museum Fondation Maeght. Situated on a hilltop near Nice, it featured a newly built geodesic dome in which Ayler’s group could play. His previous concerts in that country had gone well, and he felt better understood in Europe than America. Ayler quickly put together a group including musicians he’d never played with before, providing them no sheet music or rehearsal time. Pianist Call Cobbs missed his plane from New York, meaning the first night would be a quartet concert with Ayler, Maria, bassist Steve Tintweiss, and drummer Alan Blairman, followed by a performance by the full quintet two days later.
Evidence that these shows were a success came later that year, via two volumes of LPs called Nuits de la Fondation Maeght. They were released by the French label Shandar, run by the man who had invited Ayler to play there, Daniel Caux. The performances—including versions of Ayler classics such as “Spirits” and “The Truth Is Marching In”—sounded triumphant, especially when followed by boisterous applause. But according to notes from a subsequent CD version, Caux had intentionally chosen the “wildest” material from the two nights, specifically avoiding pieces that included Maria’s vocals. Though a few more songs showed up on a 2005 ESP-Disk’ album Live on the Riviera, a full picture of these concerts remained hidden.
Over 50 years later, Revelations presents both nights in their entirety, with two hours of material never released before. While it turns out that Caux’s initial selections were indeed highlights, every moment on this four-hour box set (released in 5xLP and 4xCD versions) is worth hearing. Alongside fresh takes of pieces from across Ayler’s catalog, there are looser versions of songs that sounded stiff in the studio, spirited tunes that never made it onto albums, and a wealth of high-energy improvisations. Most compellingly, each night offers the twists and turns of a narrative, with lots of sonic variety and shifts in momentum—especially during the second evening, in which the wildly enthusiastic crowd became practically another member of Ayler’s group.
The first night opens with Ayler alone, playing “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” to set a fiery, inspired tone for the evening. Maria’s spoken poetry soon follows, and while her verse verges on platitude, what matters most throughout Revelations is the way she delivers it, with a dramatic authority more stirring than her contributions to Ayler’s studio albums. It helps that Tintweiss and Blairman add electricity to her exhortations, making them nearly a match for Ayler’s earlier rhythm sections. (That feat is all the more impressive given that, as Tintweiss writes in the liner notes, Ayler’s only directions were, “You start off with the bass and I’ll come in and we’ll take it from there.”)
Soon after that opening tune, one of Revelations’ biggest revelations emerges: Maria could play soprano saxophone, and quite well at that. She injects it briefly into a version of “Masonic Inborn” (a sweeter take on Healing Force’s bagpipe-heavy original), but it’s on the first improvisation that her playing really takes off, circling in and out of Ayler’s like a snake. From there, the group deftly steers through many curves, including Ayler’s fluttery lead vocal on “Oh! Love of Life,” Maria’s catchy singing on “Heart Love,” a reverent version of the Ayler classic “Ghosts,” and three improvised pieces that showcase Ayler’s dizzying runs, inhuman noises, and frequent references to traditional melodies. As the audience literally stomps for more, Ayler and Maria end with a stretch of wordless vocalizing that’s as captivating as their horn duets.
Ayler’s first night at Fondation Maeght got mentioned on local TV news, which Tintweiss claims resulted in a much larger crowd for the second show. “The place was packed,” he writes. “The audience was ecstatic, just built up.” Revelations bears him out, as escalating cheers give this second set a stair-climbing arc. This is despite the fact that the music is a bit tamer than two days before, owing mostly to the arrival of Cobbs, whose more conventional piano playing centers on melody and chord changes. Still, Ayler remains forceful and adventurous, cresting during a kaleidoscopic 20-minute improvisation.
The straighter parts of night two work pretty well, too. Cobbs’ bop stylings on “Holy Family,” from 1965’s Spirits Rejoice, partner perfectly with Ayler’s fluid horn, while Maria’s spoken-word piece “Again Comes the Rising of the Sun” is a moving melange of folklore-inspired verse. Most surprising is “Thank God for Women,” a hooky tune that Ayler had hoped would someday be a pop hit, but was never able to include on a studio album. Hearing him chant the song’s title while the band vamps behind him is thrilling. After over two hours of ever-heightening music and applause, Maria effusively thanks the audience while Ayler adds, “I would say something, but I can’t talk—I’ve been blowing so hard!”
That’s the last known recording of Albert Ayler’s voice. He was found floating in New York’s East River four months after these concerts, though the circumstances of his death were never determined. An LP of studio recordings called The Last Album, which included many songs played during this concert, came out posthumously in 1971. The energy and breadth of these French shows make Ayler’s tragic death even more poignant. As Litweiler observed, “There’s a renewed sense of purpose in this final concert… Possibly some major changes in his art were on the verge of occurring.” Revelations helps us imagine what might have come next. | 2022-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Elemental Music | April 23, 2022 | 8.4 | 912e8ac4-f54c-44a1-84a1-078e9b9dadf3 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Based upon early 1900s German poetry about sick patients and maimed soldiers, these two side-long tracks of experimental vocalizations highlight the singer’s conceptual, confrontational heft. | Based upon early 1900s German poetry about sick patients and maimed soldiers, these two side-long tracks of experimental vocalizations highlight the singer’s conceptual, confrontational heft. | Diamanda Galás: *Broken Gargoyles * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diamanda-galas-broken-gargoyles/ | Broken Gargoyles | Diamanda Galás composes violently compassionate music about suffering. Her late-1980s Masque of the Red Death Trilogy focuses on AIDS, which killed her brother, Philip-Dimitri, in 1986, while other projects delve into the oppressive Greek Junta and the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Genocides. The 67-year-old goth icon performs less harrowing stuff, too—a hard-grooving 1994 collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a bevy of brilliant takes on blues standards. Yet at her best, Galás sharpens her cutting sense of empathy, slices open difficult subject matter, and approaches it from inside: Her 1991 dirge for HIV’s most deadly era, Plague Mass, might be the heaviest live record ever made. Ultimately, Galás’ haunted ritual, like all of her releases, is a ceremony of tenderness.
A master of the early 19th century style of bel canto singing, Galás uses her operatic genius to explore tropes uncommon in experimental composition—especially the breakdown of tortured, diseased bodies. Shaped from spectral piano and electronics, her soundscapes batter, unsettle, rouse us. Her virtuosic voice, inspired by avant-garde saxophonists Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, spans an untold number of octaves. She screeches, wails, bleats, and slips between characters, usually vengeful, demonic figures skulking around like a bad conscience. Both performance artist and diva, Galás has a potent theatrical sense and a persona at once progressive and full of fire and brimstone. Echoing obsolete medical drawings that illustrate sickness as floating miasma or bodily humors to be drained, she rebukes ignorant societies while harnessing their wild imaginations.
Her latest record, Broken Gargoyles, highlights the chronic nature of our callousness toward the ill and injured. Inspired by the mistreatment of wounded World War I infantrymen, Galás unearths devastating source texts from a slightly earlier era: the verse of Georg Heym (1887-1912), son of an assistant in a yellow-fever clinic and an enfant terrible of German expressionist poetry. Before his death at 24, Heym wrote unflinchingly about sick patients, maimed soldiers, and other doomed souls he might have been exposed to through his father’s work. Setting four of Heym’s poems to pulsing, droning accompaniment, Galás traces a throughline of ostracized invalids across the past century-plus of public health catastrophes. Appropriately, she premiered some of this material at a medieval German leper sanctuary and began cobbling the album together during COVID lockdown. Broken Gargoyles targets governments’ botched coronavirus responses—implicitly, it sets sights on their homophobic sluggishness to protect gay men from monkeypox, too.
The album may not shock the singer’s die-hard fans, but Broken Gargoyles is a moving, painful listen and an ideal access point for the uninitiated. Split into two tracks, each of which hovers around 20 minutes, the record occupies recognizable terrain Galás charted out on her recently reissued early career peaks, 1982’s The Litanies of Satan and 1984’s Diamanda Galás. We’ve even heard facets of this material before: In 2020, Galás released De-formation: Piano Variations, an instrumental setting for one of Heym’s poems and a collaboration with sound designer Daniel Neumann, who returns on Broken Gargoyles.
The duo’s overhaul from solo piano to full arrangement, though, is thorough. Over the skeleton of De-Formation’s chords, the opening “Mutilatus” hangs ominous synths, eerie, wordless arias, and renditions of two poems. The composition is lush and undulating, full of voices that bedevil the edges of the audio field. There’s a palpable tension between sustained keys and Galás’ precisely articulated, staccato recitations. And while her piano is largely dissonant, when she allows herself a few snatches of somber, left-handed melody, the mood turns immediately from agonized to elegiac.
Throughout, Galás draws a singular timbre from Heym’s guttural German, approaching the language itself as an instrument. Still acrobatic and versatile, her voice sounds occasionally treated, bubbling from beneath a pool’s surface. Galás’ varied intonations circle each other, crying out from mutual isolation like ailing bodies on a long, crowded ward. Thin whimpers emanate from somewhere far off; a gurgle of filtered noise fills out the low end; repetitive chimes mock us with memories of human comforts, like a food cart wheeling down a hospital hallway. On the second song, “Abiectio,” Galás’ voice warbles between consonance and caterwaul, as strings swell from melancholic tunefulness into abject anxiety. Over muffled moans, Galás’ readings grow increasingly desperate: Somehow, the track manages to be even more mortifying than its predecessor, a coda from beyond the grave.
While she’ll always be admired for her remarkable singing ability, Broken Gargoyles draws our attention to Galás’ conceptual, confrontational heft—a quality we haven’t heard from her on record since 2003’s double-disc Defixiones: Will and Testament. Her mixture of literary intelligence and three-dimensional sound design feels particularly relevant today, a direct predecessor to the talky strain of noise music that links Lucy Liyou, Lingua Ignota, even claire rousay and more eaze. Yet Broken Gargoyles pushes this side of Galás’ practice to such an extreme that she still seems a world apart from other musicians, while leaving us unable to ignore the urgency of her themes. There’s a good reason that the voices on Broken Gargoyles feel so maddeningly real: Their hurt might be bygone, but sinews of experience tie it to the present. Galás shows us humankind as both culprit and victim, a self-destructive pawn that each year grows guiltier, sadder, and more overwhelmed by the weight of bottomless trauma. | 2022-08-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-29T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Intravenal Sound Operations | August 29, 2022 | 7.7 | 91398ef2-4380-4845-9015-adbad267f834 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Once rumored to be a full-on Roxy Music album, Bryan Ferry's latest does feature original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno. | Once rumored to be a full-on Roxy Music album, Bryan Ferry's latest does feature original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno. | Bryan Ferry: Olympia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14782-olympia/ | Olympia | There was a point at which Olympia was intended to be a new Roxy Music album. It would have been the band's first since 1982's Avalon, and there even seems to be a sly nod to that two-decade gap on album opener "You Can Dance", which opens with a brief musical passage that is pretty much a note-for-note reference to Avalon's "True to Life". Somewhere in the process, though, this became another Bryan Ferry solo album, featuring original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno, and Ferry brought in a raft of collaborators, some old, some new, to round out the record, his first to feature original songs since 2002's Frantic.
The funny thing is, if Roxy Music had released this exact album in 1983 as a follow-up to Avalon, I don't think anyone would have batted an eye. It spills over with the aesthetics and sounds of Ferry's 80s work, which has the strange effect of also making it sound very current. The synths, fluid beats, wiry guitar parts with just a bit of chorus, and electric pianos are all things you can hear on any number of indie rock records today. Ferry puts them together in a very classic rock way, residing at the center as the charismatic front man. The FM-rock approach to the emphasis on vocals is mirrored in the lead guitar contributed by Manzanera and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour-- that kind of playing is one of the few elements of 80s album rock that hasn't made a significant comeback, which may partly be down to the proficiency it requires.
The first half of the album is as solid as anything Ferry has done under his own name. "You Can Dance" and "Alphaville" have their roots in a late-90s session that ultimately produced about half of Frantic, and they're both very centered on grooves. "You Can Dance" grinds along on a creeping bass line and heavy drumming, guitars hovering in the wings as Ferry underplays his signature vocal quaver. "Alphaville" is more slippery, cut through with nicely phrased lead guitar by Gilmour, and it's good pivot to one of the album's standouts, "Heartache By Numbers". The song features the Scissor Sisters as backing band, and their studied grasp of disco and New Wave suits Ferry well-- the echoing piano intro is almost cheeky in its easy anthemic fluency, but it's very much of a piece with the singer's classic songs.
Elsewhere, Ferry indulges in a couple of covers; one is a completely disposable take on Traffic's "No Face, No Name and No Number", but the other is a pretty stunning transformation of Tim Buckley's epochal "Song to the Siren" into a sweeping, synth-soaked pop ballad. Ferry has always been fond of interpreting others' songs on his albums, and like his very best covers in the past, this one reveals a real connection to the song. The album does falter a bit in its second half--"BF Bass" just has a sort of generic fashion-rock sheen, aiming for something high-class and hitting something more like the oddly sterile cover image of Kate Moss, which basically looks like a perfume ad. Still, it's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades. | 2010-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-10-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | EMI | October 27, 2010 | 7.5 | 91399eb2-f0a2-42f0-9a45-c6610b846b46 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Friend of Mine is the debut LP from Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy's DJ Dodger Stadium project. The record is built on ecstatic forms of house and techno, but its influences go both broader and deeper than simple genre revivalism. | Friend of Mine is the debut LP from Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy's DJ Dodger Stadium project. The record is built on ecstatic forms of house and techno, but its influences go both broader and deeper than simple genre revivalism. | DJ Dodger Stadium: Friend of Mine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19562-dj-dodger-stadium-friend-of-mine/ | Friend of Mine | “Lately I’ve been singing love songs by myself.” Those eight words, an unashamed proclamation of loneliness and heartache, form the mantra around which DJ Dodger Stadium's delirious new album Friend of Mine is built. The album is the first full-length release from the Los Angeles dance imprint Body High, and DJ Dodger Stadium is the name that founders Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy have chosen for themselves as a duo. The moniker is fitting in its audacity and camp, as well as a celebration of Los Angeles as both city and symbol.
Friend of Mine is built on ecstatic forms of house and techno, but its influences go both broader and deeper than simple genre revivalism. At its core, the album draws energy from the intense emotionality trumpeted in the music of artists like Body High associate Shlohmo. Jerome LOL, both with the defunct LOL Boys and in his own solo work, has long shown the ability to mine authentic emotion from what might otherwise seem a particularly cerebral form of dance music. Samo has similarly tempered his technical finesse with wounded samples that elevate his projects beyond your casual beat-happy wonkery. Together, the two wed their technical expertise to produce an album that’s far more trickier to pull off than it sounds: through the majority of the churning, frantic Friend of Mine, they maintain a sense of near-constant climax.
The need to reach that peak and stay there, and the previously mentioned words that form the album’s mantra, originate on the thumping “Love Songs”, which repeats those eight words endlessly without losing momentum. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, and the duo accomplish it by adjusting almost every other element in the song—pulling a gun-patter drumbeat in and out of the mix, shifting the volume and clarity of the sample, and playing with countless other minor beat variations that keep things fresh for the entirety of the track’s running time.
“Love Songs” is the best song on the record and a blueprint for the rest of it, as its perennial high and repetitive vocal loop are echoed on the majority of Friend of Mine’s ten tracks. This maximalism is maintained by clever sequencing; though the repetitive vocal sample on “One Who Lost” could prove numbing in the wake of "Love Songs", it’s quick and effective in its delivery. But even the seemingly lighter songs here reach an eventual fever pitch. The album's exception to that rule is the organ-powered “Sit Down Satan”, which reaches for a more explicit type of ecstasy and is perfectly positioned to stoke momentum for the album’s final flourishes.
DJ Dodger Stadium’s sound counters assertions of superficiality in current-day dance music by doubling down on the human element within their music. Some of that humanity is owed to the record’s firm sense of place. Los Angeles is inescapable here: on the carnival sounds and Salvadoran sermon incorporated into “The Dust”, the Hollywood-style intro “The Bottom is As Low as You Can Go”, and in the video for “Love Songs,” which used an aerial drone to capture a one-shot take of the duo’s Westlake neighborhood*.* With its happy contradictions—theatricality and genuine emotion, self-consciousness and self-awareness—Friend of Mine functions as a symbol of the neurotic, nocturnal Angeleno, happily alone upon the highways or anonymous on the city’s dance floors, free to lament and to celebrate existence. | 2014-07-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-07-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Body High | July 15, 2014 | 8 | 913ab030-302e-4312-ae3b-0e7192fee6b6 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
On their first official mix album, the Lawrence brothers broaden their horizons, focusing on a selection of classic-sounding house. It’s a far more intimate vibe than their festival-stage fare. | On their first official mix album, the Lawrence brothers broaden their horizons, focusing on a selection of classic-sounding house. It’s a far more intimate vibe than their festival-stage fare. | Disclosure: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/disclosure-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Throughout an 11-year career, English production duo Disclosure have never exactly tested dance music’s boundaries. Brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence are classicists: torchbearers for the vintage influences they pull from Chicago house, Detroit techno, and UK garage. But within that crowded market they’ve made a niche for themselves by emphasizing the immediacy and familiarity of pop music. Call them the Starbucks of EDM: They’re not here to deliver a sublime gourmet experience, but a reliably sweet and satisfying pick-me-up.
And so it continued with 2020’s ENERGY, the third Disclosure album and a half-successful attempt at tapping into what made their 2013 debut LP so electric. Some of its best moments came from the duo’s reimagining of UK garage, but their dabblings with African house, French filter house, and North American hip-hop freshened up the standard fare. So if the Lawrence brothers don’t push at the edges of dance music itself, they do at least broaden their own horizons. In its own way, Disclosure’s DJ-Kicks mix album furthers the trend of eclecticism. This lively and effortless 58-minute DJ set feels like the id to the ego of their studio albums: Stripped of guest vocalists, radio-friendly song structures, and big-budget production, it’s like listening to what makes Disclosure tick.
Little surprise that what makes them tick is house music of all stripes. The 12 selections here pull liberally from acid, disco, garage, Afrobeat, breakbeat, and deep house, with hardly a lull in the flow. After a densely textured ambient intro from Spanish producer Pépe, London’s Harry Wolfman sets things in motion with mix exclusive “LOTF,” a warm and easygoing roller that brims with understated funk. It feels like the perfect opening tune for Disclosure, setting a solid 120 BPM baseline while reminding listeners this is more intimate than the festival stage. But the energy only climbs from there with some wiggly filter-house from the Netherlands’ Cleanfield and one of two original Disclosure tracks featured here. The bright, bubbly “Deep Sea” is a bit of an outlier in the duo’s catalog, with all the carefree samples and pillowy bass notes of a Pampa Records B-side. If this is the Lawrence brothers letting loose, they should do it more often.
Kicking off the final third of DJ Kicks is “Observer Effect,” another Disclosure original that further strips things down. Produced solely by Guy without his brother Howard, the track sounds like a DJ tool with just enough Trax Records influence to keep it interesting. Sandwiched between two of the mix’s most flavorful selections, however, “Observer Effect” is bland in comparison. “Mezmerized,” a 2005 cut by English trio Slum Science, is all slinky breaks and hip-hop samples set to a skipping rhythm, whereas “bRave,” by Londoner East End Dubs, livens things up with little more than an elastic, sub-rattling bassline and a swinging groove. Both tracks utilize techniques similar to Disclosure’s, but they land much more effectively.
Other tracklist highlights include &on&on’s gentle, synthy “Don’t Say a Word,” M-High’s soulful and stratospheric “Harmony in the Distance,” and exclusive mix closer “Recognise,” a jazzy jungle hybrid by Arfa x Joe. All three are recent releases that confidently point back to the heyday of their respective genres, mimicking those ideas while slyly folding in an update or two. Disclosure seems enamored both with that concept and the many ways it can play out, which makes their DJ-Kicks a consistent and entertaining—if not at all surprising—listen. As the mix shows, the further the Lawrence brothers expand their reference points, the greater an impact their tried-and-true formula can make.
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. | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | October 21, 2021 | 6.9 | 913ccc98-444d-478b-bca5-542cc3a6df0d | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
As the shadows deepen on Sophie Allison’s third album, she sees into the lie on the other side of success: You can win, but you still have to live with yourself. | As the shadows deepen on Sophie Allison’s third album, she sees into the lie on the other side of success: You can win, but you still have to live with yourself. | Soccer Mommy: Sometimes, Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soccer-mommy-sometimes-forever/ | Sometimes, Forever | Sophie Allison sings from the exhaustion at the end of a big feeling. Across her work as Soccer Mommy, she has excavated that point after despair or elation where your nerves reel back from overdrive, when the intensity wanes and you’re left with the blankness of yourself. Since releasing her debut studio album, Clean, in 2018, she’s worked to heighten the contrasts of her guitar-based songs. The 2020 LP color theory drew vintage synthesizers and layered sampling into the mix, expanding the space in which her wry, acerbic, and poignant lyrics could play. On her latest album, Sometimes, Forever, Allison teams with Daniel Lopatin of the retrofuturist electronic project Oneohtrix Point Never, whose production deepens the shadows in her songwriting. Soccer Mommy’s music has often folded in the bitter and the melancholy, but this is the first time Allison has faced down danger so squarely.
At the heart of Sometimes, Forever lurks the axiom that nothing lasts. The most vivid triumphs and hollowing depressions each evaporate in turn. Though repeated to the point of cliché, “this too shall pass” butts up against another persistent cultural narrative: That it’s possible to make it, that if your output or your essence is good enough, you’ll ascend, be rewarded, never work a day in your life. By now, Allison has shored away enough cultural capital that she can see into the lie on the other side of success. You can win, but you still have to live with yourself.
“I lost myself to a dream I had/And I’d never give it all away/But I miss feeling like a person,” Allison sings on the album’s swirling closer, “Still.” Throughout Sometimes, Forever, she and Lopatin expand on the ’90s palette that has characterized previous Soccer Mommy releases. Bolstering the lingering imprints of Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow, and Sleater-Kinney is a healthy dose of Loveless worship: glide guitars and tendrils of haze. “Darkness Forever,” with its abundant negative space and snaking bassline, calls back to the menacing creases of Portishead’s Dummy: Allison’s half-whispered vocals rise from the pit of her stomach as they orbit the kind of self-destruction ideation that feels permanent in its intensity. The minimally melodic pummel of “Unholy Affliction” echoes PJ Harvey’s work with Steve Albini on her second album Rid of Me. A choked-out bassline thrums underneath the heaviest percussion yet to appear on a Soccer Mommy song, an agitated pattern whose busyness counterbalances Allison’s lank vocal delivery. “I’m barely a person/Mechanically working,” she sings, hinting at the churn demanded of an artist once the system decides their work is valuable and wants more of the same, forever.
Between these bleaker points, Allison’s characteristic humor and wit still glimmer. The advance single “Shotgun” boasts a pitch-perfect Soccer Mommy line at its chorus, set there like a crown jewel: “Whenever you want me, I’ll be around/I’m a bullet in a shotgun waiting to sound.” One second we’re on the receiving end of a sunny, weightless show of devotion; the next we’re staring down the barrel of a deadly weapon. Allison’s invitation to pull the trigger holds both poles: boundless love and fathomless threat. They’re indivisible. The sun gilds the summer evening and it’s also a nuclear inferno.
“I don’t know how to feel things small/It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all,” Allison sings on “Still.” The couplet recalls a similar totalizing switch in Dinosaur Jr.’s deadpan alt-rock hit “Feel the Pain”: “I feel the pain of everyone/Then I feel nothing.” It’s a duality common enough to culture workers, people whose art is tasked with carrying the feelings of so many others they’ll never meet. For a little while, you’re everything to everyone. Then the show wraps, or the needle loops, and the vacuum of individuality sets in: you’re only yourself to yourself. Sometimes, Forever reckons with that whiplash, surfing its highs and puddling in its lows—wondering, maybe, if there’s a humanizing middle ground somewhere between being an image aloft on a billboard and a body alone in a room. | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | June 24, 2022 | 8 | 913ffdf2-06ed-45c1-88b0-426a0feb5793 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The drill rapper sets juvenile joy against the harshest realities that some of the UK’s young people face, encapsulating the stiff push and pull of street violence. | The drill rapper sets juvenile joy against the harshest realities that some of the UK’s young people face, encapsulating the stiff push and pull of street violence. | Digga D: Noughty By Nature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/digga-d-noughty-by-nature/ | Noughty By Nature | Digga D scored his first UK Number One last week with his third mixtape, Noughty By Nature. Among those listening and poring over the snappy West London drill rapper’s lyrics were the Metropolitan Police officers responsible for enforcing the conditions of his extraordinary Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO). Under the terms of his CBO, Digga, born Rhys Herbert, has to notify the police of any new music within 24 hours of it being released and provide lyric sheets. Breaching his CBO can mean more prison time (Digga, now 21, has already discovered this the hard way). But for Digga, these conditions aren’t a legal oddity. Since 2017, he’s been forced to adapt, which means verses thick with misdirection and a lyrical dexterity and comic wink that outstrips most of his drill rap peers.
The first thing Digga says on Noughty By Nature, pattered over a plaintive harp, is “Anything you hear man rapping about is facts. Nothing’s fabricated.” He proceeds to slide on fat kicks and skittish snares into a potted autobiography—but the names of people and places have all been skidded through by the censor’s pen. The tussle between facts and Digga’s own freedom is at the heart of his output, both as a conceit and a tool to unpick the depths that his braggadocio conceals.
The way Digga raps about violence is particularly complex. Over drunken trumpets on highlight “Stuck in the Mud,” playground games are the setting for street duels, where sickly sweet Jammie Dodgers biscuits become slang for faulty firearms, and being found in a game of hide-and-seek has deadly consequences. On “Addicted” (a half-successful piano ballad), he draws parallels between physical and mental addictions and how violence has become embedded within his peer group. Even while he raps about having “Blood on my cutlass” (on “Rambo”), he’s alive to the futility of these conflicts: The brutality on show here isn’t always to be gawped at. As Digga recalls a victim’s “horrendous” scream on “Let It Go,” the song’s knotty double entendre—with its refrain of “I told bro don’t let it go”—encapsulates the stiff push and pull of street violence.
Digga hasn’t forgotten how to have fun. He likes flashing his cash. He likes traveling: to influencer petting zoo Dubai, where he shot a glitzy video for “Pump 101” (one of three boisterous 50 Cent homages on the tape); and to the U.S., where he links up with Hotboii, B Lovee, and Moneybagg Yo for a string of convincing collabs. And he still gets giddy over blowjobs in a way that only teenage boys do. His quick delivery and class-clown ad libs—of “glee” and “whee” and “woi,” and other variations that no doubt haunt the sleep of parents and school teachers—are TikTok catnip. The have-a-go approach inevitably spits out the occasional dud: “Why,” a collaboration with fellow West-Londoner AJ Tracey, raises only the question of why—with its droning chorus and ham-fisted Robert Miles sample—it was included on the album at all.
But the ease with which Digga sets juvenile joy against the harshest realities that some of the UK’s young people face, and the way he smartly pulls it off, is part of what makes his voice so compelling. At the end of “Statement”—a moody, mostly beatless contemplation—he compares himself to Stormzy and Dave before offering a blunt “Fuck you” to anyone doubting him on account of his record. Digga’s self-belief and willingness to raise a middle finger were never in doubt. As he continues to test and flex his talents, his path forward will only become clearer—no matter who’s looking over his shoulder. | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | April 28, 2022 | 7.2 | 91407783-b3d1-4bdd-b677-f7af5779be49 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
On his 41st album, Van Morrison splits the difference between nostalgia, impassioned gripes, and spiritual yearning. | On his 41st album, Van Morrison splits the difference between nostalgia, impassioned gripes, and spiritual yearning. | Van Morrison: Three Chords and the Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/van-morrison-three-chords-and-the-truth/ | Three Chords and the Truth | Forty-one albums into his storied career, Van Morrison remains one of rock’s most enduring studies in contrast, never changing and forever restless. Three Chords and The Truth is his sixth record in the last four years, the latest dispatch of a particularly productive period, and the first to feature all-new original songs since 2012’s Born to Sing: No Plan B (minus one co-write with lyricist Don Black). Though he sticks closely to the conservative R&B, blues, and jazz modes that have defined his ’00s discography, the LP’s 14 songs showcase his determination to wring profundity out of even the most common language. Songwriter Harlan Howard coined the phrase “Three chords and the truth” to describe the necessary ingredients for country and western music, but this isn’t a country record. Van’s talking about his desire to take simple rhymes and traditional song structures and imbue them with Caledonia soul heaviness.
As it has since his raging beginnings with Them, it’s Morrison’s voice that affords him such latitude. At 74, he sounds incredible, his voice deepened and richer with age, growling, cooing, and occasionally barking about familiar but resonant concerns. As always, he’s grouchy— sick of the powerful getting away with it all (the Brexit commentary “Nobody in Charge”), annoyed by notoriety and the complications of stardom (“Fame Will Eat the Soul,” which features a rousing call and response assist by Righteous Brother Bill Medley), and uncertain if goodness makes any difference in a compromised world (“Does Love Conquer All”).
But he’s equally nostalgic, riffing on the joy of sound on the title track and earnestly recalling the freedom and purity of youth (“Early Days,” “In Search of Grace”). There’s a warmth here that recalls his ’90s highwater marks, Hymns to the Silence and The Healing Game, and connects even farther back in time to 1971’s Tupelo Honey, which balanced the charms of domesticity with R&B raves. Credit the superb backing band for the record’s subtle but palpable drive. With Astral Weeks guitarist Jay Berliner in the mix, they support Morrison sympathetically. “It’s called ‘the flow,’” Morrison said in a recent interview, detailing his optimal conditions for making music. “I don’t know the mechanics of how that works. I just know when I’m in it.”
“The flow” makes Three Chords and The Truth a deeply pleasurable listen, but it’s the moments where Morrison sounds less settled that carry the most weight. The album’s third song, “Dark Night of the Soul,” never wanders as far out as epics like “Madame George” and “Listen to the Lion,” nor does it match spaced-out gloss of his ’80s albums with trumpeter Mark Isham, but it’s gripped by the same existential fervor. Its mellow heat has a lot in common with 1997’s “Rough God Goes Riding,” a gentle midtempo cut with apocalyptic visions hiding in plain sight. Revisiting the 16th-century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross’ poem about the unknowability of God, one he’s sung about a number of times before, Morrison showcases the way his twilight years haven’t dimmed his yearning for growth, his desire for a deeper understanding. Morrison concludes the song with passionate vocal riffing, treating his voice like a saxophone pushed nearly to its breaking point.
That tension, between the sublime and the terrifying, has always fueled Morrison’s best work. He’s always been split between the desire for complete freedom and a love of tight structure; He’s a guy who once shouted out L. Ron Hubbard in the liner notes to Inarticulate Speech of the Heart but also “wouldn’t touch [religion] with a 10-foot pole.” He’s been a prophet of metaphysical openness and also the chronicler, as author Steven Hyden has noted, of “an infinite number of grievances, both real and imagined.” There aren’t a lot of songwriters who can fit the word “skullduggery” into the lyric book, as Morrison does here with “You Don’t Understand.” Even fewer make the word sound so natural—in Morrison’s songs, griping and testifying are never separated by much.
Like his peer Bob Dylan, Morrison has found resonance in singing standards of a sort. This time around they’re all of his own design, and his fitful, relentless desire for cosmic fulfillment animates them. Comfortably appointed in his twilight years, he’s still chasing enlightenment, haunted by “the things I might not yet know,” as he puts it on “Dark Night of the Soul.” For Morrison, there are always mysteries left to articulate.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exile / Caroline | October 31, 2019 | 7.3 | 9145ca3b-c095-4056-8491-1e9dc40b1bbf | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
The follow-up to last year’s Konoyo—recorded, like its predecessor, with a Japanese gagaku ensemble—functions as a counterbalance to that album: a kind of photo negative, more subdued but no less overwhelming. | The follow-up to last year’s Konoyo—recorded, like its predecessor, with a Japanese gagaku ensemble—functions as a counterbalance to that album: a kind of photo negative, more subdued but no less overwhelming. | Tim Hecker: Anoyo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tim-hecker-anoyo/ | Anoyo | Ambient music is having a moment, or so the algorithm would have you believe. Streaming apps are intent on offering the stressed-out masses the promise of the perfect mood-management tool, optimized to increase focus and settle nerves whether you’re coding, falling asleep, or writing music reviews. As I type these words I’m listening to a Spotify mix called Productive Morning that has 435,363 followers, many of whom, I assume, play the Album Leaf and Jon Brion as they down salt juice and stack nootropics. Amanda Petrusich, in a recent piece for the New Yorker, wrote about the wildly popular Chillhop YouTube channel, whose anodyne beats offer just enough oomph to push you from one Keynote slide to the next. There’s even a service called Focus@Will, which, for a subscription fee, “has been scientifically proven to increase attention span and increase your productivity by 400%.” Who can argue with science?
Tim Hecker, for one. Over nearly two decades the Canadian electronic composer has made a career of enmeshing the algorithmic and the analog, capturing cosmic infinity with buzzsaw synths. While playlists use science to refine our routines, Hecker’s machines dismantle them. “I feel that my role in the conversation of music is to, say, lapse and leave people to connect the dots in their own ways and meanings,” he said. At their best, Hecker’s compositions come alive as corporeal objects, sound made tangible as if shaped with clay. With his 2011 breakout record, Ravedeath, 1972, Hecker joined the ranks of Christian Fennesz, William Basinski, and the handful of avant-garde composers whose unapologetically out-there compositions are appreciated by a weirdly large audience. On 2016’s Love Streams he employed thrumming synths and mutated Icelandic choir to stunning effect, further blurring electronic and human elements to “interrogate the voice.”
Anoyo, Hecker’s exquisite new record, is the second of a pair of LPs, including 2018’s Konoyo, that Hecker created in collaboration with Japanese gagaku musicians. Gagaku (which means “elegant music” in modern Japanese) is the traditional ensemble of the imperial court; Hecker recorded these albums with Tokyo Gakuso, a collective assembled by the musician Motonori Miura. Together, along with other collaborators, they worked through a series of improvisational sessions at Jiunzan Mandala-Temple Kanzouin, a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Though Hecker is often labeled an ambient producer, Anoyo fits this description only in a literal sense; Anoyo becomes your environment as it envelops your senses. In order to fully appreciate the album, one must actively probe its crevices, exploring the space between anguished reeds and thundering taiko. Brian Eno’s famous definition, that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” simply does not apply.
Because they were created from the same sessions, Anoyo is best viewed as a counterweight to Konoyo. Together, they are two parts of a singular whole. Konoyo translates to “this world” or “the world over here”—our world—while Anoyo represents “the world over there,” where the spirits reside. Though the two could have sensibly been released as a double album, the space between them is welcome. They represent distinct experiences: light and dark, yin and yang. Following this logic, Anoyo acts as a sort of photo negative of Konoyo, more subdued but no less overwhelming. Wind instruments—the hichiriki, shō, and ryūteki—and percussion punctuate the silence. “Into the void,” a particularly plaintive track, might evoke the doleful cries of whales separated by leagues of sea, siren calls from the abyss. Or perhaps you may be reminded of NASA’s recent image of a black hole, with its halo of doomed light. Strange, how sound can evoke emptiness better than actual silence.
Like Hecker’s other records, Anoyo lives in opposition to the sort of soundscape-as-wallpaper that has become a staple of the streaming economy. Rather than a soothing balm, Anoyo’s ambience is a carefully modulated anxiety attack. Inspired by a series of conversations with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hecker’s friend and collaborator, Hecker became fascinated by the Japanese concept of ma, which translates roughly as “void” or “the space between two structural parts.” Anoyo is seemingly permeated by this notion, expressed as an uneasy thrum beneath ancient Japanese instruments (see the controlled clatter of “Not alone,” which uses spare percussion to excellent effect). This nothingness serves as connective tissue with notes emerging occasionally from the dusk. Anoyo could be described as a meditative album, but it’s not one you’d want to meditate to. What Hecker offers is a gateway to another world rather than a new filter for this one.
With Anoyo and Konoyo, Hecker has further swapped studio plugins for human musicians. On Love Streams he built an album from an Icelandic chorus that was later processed to oblivion. But Anoyo mostly leaves its human players unadulterated. “I don’t want to set up a digital-analog divide because I find the most interesting things confuse the two, like hybridity or in-between,” he told FACT in 2016. With Anoyo and Konoyo Hecker takes another step toward erasing any distinction between the two approaches.
Hecker’s music is not easy, but it is worthwhile. As music becomes another palliative tool for sanding the edges from our daily grind, embracing art that makes us uncomfortable, that asks significant questions, becomes all the more important. On the six tracks and 35 minutes that make up Anoyo there is no purpose but to explore the shadows in which Hecker and his collaborators have blanketed themselves. Because they know what those life hackers do not: If you’re going to reach for the sublime, it’s going to take some work. | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Kranky | May 10, 2019 | 7.8 | 914852a2-c837-429e-853c-ab0fe34642fb | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | |
The singer and former G.O.O.D. Music signee returns with a palette of adult contemporary synth-pop and early-’10s R&B. It’s bright and open, built with sounds that move and breathe with the artist. | The singer and former G.O.O.D. Music signee returns with a palette of adult contemporary synth-pop and early-’10s R&B. It’s bright and open, built with sounds that move and breathe with the artist. | Kacy Hill: Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacy-hill-is-it-selfish-if-we-talk-about-me-again/ | Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again | Kacy Hill, the 26-year-old singer and erstwhile model from Phoenix, Arizona, explores acceptance across her second album, Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again, a collection that she’s self-released after five years with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music. It was an affiliation that cast an austere, serious pallor over her 2017 debut, Like a Woman, and also placed her against Travis Scott on one of his earliest hits, “90210,” juxtaposing her real and fragile soprano with his lurid Auto-Tune raps. In a way, that song summarized her time with the label: unfairly cast as a complement or texture and not given space to focus on herself or her sound.
The acceptance Hill seeks on Is It Selfish If We Talk About Me Again is primarily of herself. The album acts as a therapy session, filled with bits of advice that suggest countering times of pain or heightened worry with patience and trust. On the effervescent single “Porsche,” Hill sings, “No one’s gonna tell you/It isn’t all about you,” a guiding principle for an album whose core conflicts originate in loneliness, insecurity, and heartbreak. The issues are not trivial but common, and Hill acknowledges their universality and rejects the urge to dwell, instead focusing on the ways she can better herself. It’s comforting to hear a pop record embrace life’s in-betweens.
As she admits her troubles, Hill embraces joy. Is It Selfish is bright and open, built with sounds that move and breathe with the artist, instead of existing beside her—as was often the case on her debut, when she and the beat seemed to take turns at the microphone. Hill co-produced all but one song on Is It Selfish, working primarily with Francis and the Lights, BJ Burton, and Jim-E Stack for a palette of adult contemporary synth-pop and early-’10s R&B. The atmosphere suits Hill, whose voice requires similarly delicate tones and supplemental melodies to add some heft to her careful singing. Previously, on her G.O.O.D. songs, which were often criminally minimal, it could sound like she was suffocating in total emptiness. There is now real momentum to her work, a feeling that you’re self-discovering alongside her.
Still, Is It Selfish gains strength from Hill’s ever-present doubt. The album’s title, the opening line of “Much Higher,” is an admission that, no matter how much she hurts, Hill feels reluctant to open her own wounds at the risk of taking up others’ space and energy. It’s unclear what sort of answer she’d accept from the titular question (which pointedly lacks a question mark), but what is evident is that she wants to channel her diffidence into supporting and loving others. Later on “Much Higher,” Hill sings, “Do I tell you enough to thank you right?/’Cause nothing matters as much.” In Hill’s world, goodness can still emerge from darkness and you must confront your own faults in order to show love to others.
Across the album, Hill details little moments—car rides, rainstorms, late nights lying awake—that give life to her emotional and psychological breakthroughs and setbacks. The album’s best and final song, “Dinner,” is a story of unrequited love that Hill colors with two small stories that capture the sweetness and plainness of everyday life: a night getting too high with this other person and needing their warmth, followed by the smell of California, bringing to mind the scent of “Arizona after warm thunderstorms,” the prettiest four words on the record. The song captures the album’s themes and moods succinctly: Hill is longing but resolute. When she encounters disappointment, she doesn’t aim to change the circumstances but hopes to share tenderness, singing, “You could love me the same.” She’s content.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | July 13, 2020 | 7.6 | 914c602d-bb60-40b7-8769-ce1c70181e4b | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
Parquet Courts are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility tendency you can think of. Their music ably mixes skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos. | Parquet Courts are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility tendency you can think of. Their music ably mixes skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos. | Parquet Courts: Light Up Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17405-light-up-gold/ | Light Up Gold | Parquet Courts are high as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Stoned, starving, and maybe just a little bit irritable, they're approached by a clipboard-carrying do-gooder seeking donations. "'A minute of YOUR time?'," they ask co-frontman Austin Brown, who quickly sends Mr. Greenpeace off with a snide-beyond-belief "for-GET about it" and a (questionably apropos) reminder that Socrates died in the fucking gutter. Munchie money secure, there are far more important details to attend to: roasted peanuts or Swedish fish?
Parquet cohorts Brown and Andrew Savage-- also of Fergus & Geronimo-- are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility, sativa-hoovering tendency you can think of. Their tangent-prone music flits, not always smoothly, between skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos. It's wound tight but fraying at the edges. They're smart but they don't always act it. They could probably play these songs a little better if they wanted to. They're very funny, but not the kind of funny that makes you laugh much. They contradict themselves constantly. They probably wait until the afternoon to shower.
The tension between the sharp rhythms (courtesy of Savage's brother Max) and the ace fretwork is Gold's most reliable thrill; were it not for all this forward motion from the younger Savage, there's just no telling how far afield these songs would drift. Still fresh off Fergus & Geronimo's genre-hopping, indie-skewering Funky Was the State of Affairs, Savage seems considerably looser here: though F&G sometimes hew too closely to constraints of their source material, here he drops the retro studiousness and gets a little weird. Of the pair, though, Brown's the real eccentric; his outburst-riddled material slot in beautifully against Savage's anthems-in-miniature. After a while, you start to see the logic in all all their rambling deflections.
It's not much of a stretch to hear many of of indie rock's recent go-tos-- blurry edged-production, meaning-averse lyrics-- as a form of disaffection. Times are strange, the future's rarely seemed less certain, so it's pretty easy to see the haze surrounding indie rock as a sonic counterpoint to the unfixed nature of, well, everything. Parquet Courts may be potheads but they're not head-in-the-clouds escapists. And, while there's a we're-all-fucked undercurrent running through Light Up Gold's lyric sheet, Parquet Courts aren't about to take it sitting down. Mumbly highlight "Careers in Combat" speaks to a fairly uncomfortable reality: there are no more lifeguard jobs or decent gigs left, but hey, the military's always looking for warm bodies. Savage, on "Yonder is Closer to the Heart", sees the wadded receipts and spare change piled on his desk as a reminder of the mundane passage of time; later, up to his neck in "motivation neglect," he unhappily admits "these days I'm captive in this borrowed time." Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll. | 2013-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-01-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? / Dull Tools | January 14, 2013 | 8 | 9151e024-c6b7-439b-92fe-e5190016aca7 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way. | Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way. | No Home: Fucking Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-home-fucking-hell/ | Fucking Hell | No Home has been aware of precarity for a long time. The solo project of London-based musician Charlie Valentine, No Home gained well-deserved attention in recent years opening for Big Joanie, Priests, and Moor Mother, playing the city’s Decolonise Fest, and releasing a series of EPs that seethe with critiques of capitalism and exploitation. If industrial music was meant to echo the alienation of mechanical factory labor, No Home’s unhurried progressions, minimalist percussion, and bursts of distortion mimic the disorientation of being locked out of labor-time to begin with. Fucking Hell is punk the way reclaiming your time is punk. On their full-length debut, Valentine’s powerful voice and experimental song structures dilate and expand time, pushing against the boundaries of genre and resisting enclosure. Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way.
Valentine’s voice is the clear centerpiece of the album. It stretches expansively, shapeshifting from a mesmerizing full-bodied blues vocal on “Burning the Body” to Liz Phair deconstructed alt-rock on “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” (where “I think I’m paranoid” seems to cite Shirley Manson); from Thom Yorke in outer space on “Secondary Actor” to a waxing swell on the meditative “Exile.” Valentine does with their voice what many noise musicians hope to do with their soundscapes: It is both the shifting emotional core and the steady unspooling that holds the song together. Its breadth creates a space of undoing.
The record’s narrative rests on classic transitional moments—graduating, looking for a job, trying to find steady footing. But these songs are not stumbling pauses along a well-lit upward path, as in some sort of Boomer imaginary; they’re elegies for the swamp of exploitation and humiliation, where the cost of entry is your self-worth and any rewards are fleeting and illusory. Valentine’s depiction of this headspace is brutally funny and also devastating, as in a memorable line from “The Perfect Candidate”: “Sorry we’ve considered other applicants/Good luck/Have a nice job search/Have you ever considered/Fucking off forever?” In “4x4,” which zeroes in on the music industry’s particular indignities (playing for free, emailing gatekeepers), Valentine returns to a line that escalates to a near-howl: “Say you wanna do this for life/Are you being realistic, baby?” It’s simultaneously one of the record’s most chilling moments and one of its best hooks. A quiet moment in “Candidate” hits just as hard: “I wish I could be worth more than this.”
Valentine turns that same incisiveness inward, digging into themselves and their creative process. “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” is ostensibly about music-making as an alternative to therapy because therapy itself is too expensive, but also about the double-bind of performing your pain for an audience. The song’s dissonance stretches in opposite directions, opening with ominous keyboard noise but veering into pop melodies, as if trying to stay one step ahead of itself. “You masturbate to my misery,” Valentine sings, “I learn how to cry in public.” Their narrator twists in the gaze, fighting to trust themself while remaining keenly aware of the pressure to be consumable. “Only white people dream of utopias,” Valentine sings, resisting any neat resolution. Economic and personal insecurities (and all the ways they intertwine) exert their ruthless gravity even as the record fights to pull out of their grasp.
Although the songs on Fucking Hell take different forms, all are stripped down to such sharp immediacy it feels like you’re hearing them at a house show. The sparse instrumentation creates a folk intimacy, foregrounding Valentine’s vocals and furthering the sense of temporal dislocation. The plaintive “A B- in This Economy” and “The Perfect Candidate” have the conversational tone of Sneaks or Frankie Cosmos, while the foreboding bursts of noise and eerie vocal samples in “Couldn’t Cry” and “Catholic School Never Taught Me How to Talk to Men” are as haunted and avenging as Moor Mother or early EMA tracks. But though No Home traverses indie rock cosmology, the project is singularly itself. Eschewing traditional pop structures, songs meander and change direction: There is no neat narrative to pain, no efficient linearity outside of the ruthless logic of capitalist production.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of release. Despite themes of debt and social anxiety, “Drink! You’re One of Us” is a fun, uptempo rocker with clear melodic hooks. Album closer “YY” is surprisingly pop, with the melancholy warmth of a Tracy Chapman song and a more traditional chorus that includes both a line about “doing good by your neighbor” and the skeptical refrain, “Don’t quite like the fruits of your labor.” There is no escape, but there are moments of reprieve: mutual aid, community support, collective and individual resistance. “YY” breaks the fever of despondency, allowing some cathartic sweetness to sneak in. “I made a good thing out of a bad situation,” Valentine sings, “Maybe I’m okay with my fall from grace.”
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 | Experimental / Rock | Hungry and Undervalued | July 9, 2020 | 7.8 | 91546ca3-7675-4b7f-bb03-f00028ca491f | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
Famous for his widescreen imagination, the legendary R&B producer and arranger helped define Chicago soul. This anthology of home recordings uncovered by his daughters reveals his more intimate side. | Famous for his widescreen imagination, the legendary R&B producer and arranger helped define Chicago soul. This anthology of home recordings uncovered by his daughters reveals his more intimate side. | Charles Stepney: Step on Step | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charles-stepney-step-on-step/ | Step on Step | A legendary R&B producer and arranger that sample-flipping rap producers turned into a hip-hop touchstone, Charles Stepney also made prismatic one-man-band demos in his Chicago South Side basement, working up songs for Earth, Wind & Fire, Rotary Connection, and other collaborators during a dazzlingly fruitful decade before a heart attack killed him in 1976 at age 45. “Charles was such a gorgeous musician,” Richard Rudolph, lyricist for Rotary Connection, told Wax Poetics in 2007. “He’d play all these beautiful things, and give me the tapes with the melodies on them, and I’d ride around and—God, it was fantastic—try to write to them.”
It’s sweet to imagine that scenario while listening to Step on Step, a compilation of previously unreleased Stepney demos uncovered by his daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté. The album is part of a multimedia project to commemorate the work of their dad, a crate-diggers’ hero whose widescreen imagination helped define Chicago soul, in turn birthing a generation of Windy City rap innovators—Common, Kanye, Lupe, Chance, Noname, Jamila Woods—many of whom would sample his work, re-enacting Rudolph’s experience. (It wasn’t just a local phenomena; when his daughter, comedian Maya Rudolph, first met Q-Tip—who famously incorporated Rotary Connection’s “Memory Band” in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum”—she told him, “Your band put me through college.”)
Step on Step, though, shows an unfamiliar side of Stepney, whose signature maximalism incorporated call-and-response choral arrangements, jazzy brass pageantry, and swirling storm clouds of strings, often drawing on the talent of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Witness the majesty of “Les Fleurs,” a solo signature of Rotary Connection’s Minnie Riperton, Maya’s mom and Rudolph’s wife—an oft-sampled gem that underscored the credits of Jordan Peele’s Us and, more recently, capped the controversial “Big Payback” episode of Atlanta. Stepney came up as a jazz pianist and vibraphonist, recording with Chicago saxophonist Eddie Harris in the early ’60s, and those instruments dominate these demos alongside a new acquisition: an early Moog synthesizer, which by all indications Stepney quickly mastered. “Gimme Some Sugar,” “Daddy’s Diddies,” and “Gotta Dig It to Dig It” are effervescent synth-funk workouts in the vein of Stevie Wonder’s contemporaneous Talking Book and Innervisions; “Daddy’s Diddies” also features Stepney’s delightful, multi-tracked scat-singing, the set’s only vocal performance: a South Side echo of the joyous vocal play of Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’ “Cravo E Canela” from Clube Da Esquina, another early-’70s touchstone.
The draw here for many listeners will be the blueprints of classic recordings. “Black Gold” is a piano sketch for Rotary Connection’s psych-soul revival meeting “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun,” a Stepney masterpiece that triggered one of his periodic revivals when house-music heroes Masters at Work remade it in 1997 for their Nuyorican Soul project. Stepney’s “That’s the Way of the World” is a fully imagined realization of the 1975 Earth, Wind & Fire hit, a watercolor of Moog melodies, while “Imagination,” played on what sound like electric piano and organ against a skeletal drum-machine beat, distills the brassy falsetto gospel-soul highlight from Spirit, the 1976 album the group was creating with Stepney when he passed. (In one of the narrated footnotes sprinkled through the compilation, one of his daughters mentions her plans to use the recording to walk her down the aisle at her wedding in her late father’s absence.)
The downscaled intimacy of Step on Step may or may not be an accurate picture of the solo album Stepney had planned one day to record. Its 23 tracks—fully developed songs plus fragments and ephemera—do capture his rich sense of melody and counterpoint, flair for embellishment, and modular approach to composing; its mosaic format recalls the “segues” that Stepney and soul-folk singer Terry Callier used on the latter’s sublime Occasional Rain while laying out a banquet of stems for future beatmakers to repurpose. But as a portrait of an artist whose defining achievements were ultimately collaborative and monumental, the miniaturism showcased here is sometimes frustrating, especially as no one has yet ventured a survey like what Ace Records has done for Motown psych-soul swami Norman Whitfield and Sound of Philadelphia orchestral-soul architect Thom Bell, producer peers that Stepney is every inch the equal of and then some. It’s overdue. It’d be wonderful to hear his work with EW&F, Callier, and Rotary Connection alongside the Afro-Brazilian jazz-funk of Ramsey Lewis’ Salongo, the psych-blues freakouts of The Howlin’ Wolf Album and Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud (fueled by future Miles Davis hire Pete Cosey), and Stepney’s other Chess/Cadet/GRT Records productions: Riperton’s lush solo debut Come to My Garden, the Dells’ mighty Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach tribute, etc. Hopefully this set—together with a forthcoming documentary and the formation of Rotary Connection 222, a new repertory outfit of Stepney offsprings both spiritual (Junius Paul, Makaya McCraven) and literal (granddaughter Brandice Manuel)—will spur a lasting reappraisal of a man whose expansive cosmic soul feels as inspiring and necessary now as when it was first made. | 2022-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | International Anthem | September 10, 2022 | 8 | 9157c5d1-db06-455e-a192-acc6d07acdb9 | Will Hermes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-hermes/ | |
Inspired by a childhood dreamworld and the pop radio hits of the 2000s, Bea Kristi’s second album is simultaneously heavy and light, dense and playful, melodic and dissonant. | Inspired by a childhood dreamworld and the pop radio hits of the 2000s, Bea Kristi’s second album is simultaneously heavy and light, dense and playful, melodic and dissonant. | Beabadoobee: Beatopia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beabadoobee-beatopia/ | Beatopia | Beabadoobee’s 2020 debut Fake It Flowers captured Bea Kristi as an angsty, impulsive adolescent, with the disaffected college rock hooks and box hair color to match: “Let me cut my hair and dye it red if I want to,” she bellowed over thick and dissonant guitars, on a song that began with “Kiss my ass.” But Kristi—who recently turned 22—is a different person now than the teenage singer who screamed about throwing it all away. When she finally toured the album, “I almost felt like I had to force myself back into the Fake It Flowers world,” she said. On Beatopia, Kristi moves forward by retreating backwards, finding a brighter sound in the sanctum of her inner child.
The title of her new record comes from the name of an imaginary world Kristi dreamed up when she was about seven. As a child, Kristi immigrated with her parents from Iloilo City to London, where she felt like an “alien” in a majority-white school. She found a much-needed escape in the invented alphabet, people, and places of Beatopia, but she blotted out her fantasy land after her teacher and classmates found—and roundly mocked—her grand escapist vision. It wasn’t until recently that Kristi rediscovered her lost world. Maybe it was the psychedelics she started taking in her early 20s, or maybe time had healed some deeper traumas, but as Kristi began drafting her follow-up album, her forgotten kingdom started to come back.
To an outsider Beatopia might sound disjointed, but any fellow child of early ’00s pop radio will feel intimately at home with Kristi’s mix of adult contemporary and guitar-driven bubblegum pop. If her first album was an homage to the decade before her birth, all slanted guitars and screams and Sub Pop cosplay, this one is a send-up of the soft rock of her actual childhood: “Sunny Day” is relaxed and radiant, a bubbly echo of Norah Jones, Ingrid Michaelson, and Natasha Bedingfield. Paired with Kristi’s sly, lythe vocals, the shimmying bossa nova of “The Perfect Pair” is a vision of an internet-age Corinne Bailey Rae. “Talk,” with its compact percussion and smudged vocals, takes the canned one-hit-wonder pop-punk princesses of the 2000s and cranks up their levels. It’s an inspired and nuanced take on an era flattened by nostalgia: Kristi’s riffs are more explosive and her lyrics are stranger (“See You Soon” is supposed to make the listener “feel like you’re tripping on shrooms,” and her sighs of “I’m deteriorating” are an apt approximation). Where her source material is often facile or vindictive, these songs are restorative; “Fairy Song” sounds like a self-care checklist, with gentle reminders to drink water, eat food, and call your brother just to check he’s okay.
If Beatopia the universe was a solitary creation, Beatopia the album is a far richer text, buoyed by a bevy of collaborators that help flesh out Kristi’s world with demonic-sounding backing vocals (“10:36”), baroque orchestral flourishes (“Ripples”), and towering guitar solos (“Talk”). The personnel list reads like a freshman class of burgeoning British pop stars—Georgia Ellery of Jockstrap contributed string arrangements, while TikTok drum’n’bass revivalist PinkPantheress adds elven harmonies to “Tinkerbell Is Overrated.” As on last year’s Our Extended Play EP, Kristi partners with labelmates Matty Healy and George Daniel of the 1975, but here their fingerprints are more visible: “Beatopia Cultsong,” the spacious overture that opens the album, echoes the 1975’s signature self-titled opening motif. On Beatopia, their contributions broaden her sound while at the same time making it less specifically Bea: The Healy cut “Pictures of Us,” with its Midwest emo-tinged guitar noodling, is a striking stylistic departure that feels a bit out of step, as if Kristi is doing her best 1975 impersonation. But the sentimental and sleepy closer “You’re Here That’s the Thing” is a perfect fit for her lithe voice, even if the smarmy sensuality of a line like “When the lights go down don’t say I didn’t warn ya/I don’t think that’s legal in the state of California” feels quintessentially Healy.
Kristi’s most prolific partnership is with her guitarist, Jacob Bugden, who co-wrote almost every song on Beatopia. You can hear their dynamic grow in real time on “Don’t Get the Deal,” with Bugden’s lower register serving as a perfect foil to Kristi’s featherlight vocals. As their voices meld into a harmonic duet and a “Maps”-inspired guitar solo crashes in, the Beatopia universe comes into focus: heavy and light, dense and playful, melodic and dissonant, all at the same time.
Beabadoobee is well-suited to imaginary worlds: Her lyrics are often more form than function, her words merely vessels for sounds. “I find words that don’t really make sense but fit perfectly with the melody or just feel nice to say,” she has said of her writing process. Untethered from the typical constraints of grammar and diction, Beatopia finds its own dreamlike logic. “Is it me/Or recently/Time is moving slowly?” she and a chorus of friends and musicians repeat, entranced, on her titular “Cultsong.” Try to decipher the verbiage—shouldn’t it be “time has been moving slowly”?—and you’ll miss the point entirely, just as her classmates and teacher did 15 years ago. But let the sentences flow as just another instrument, as something nice to say and nice to hear, and you might get a glimpse at Beatopia. | 2022-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-18T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dirty Hit | July 18, 2022 | 7.6 | 9157d75a-8d3c-44f0-9d19-a4b94c7e8d63 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Ten of the eighteen tracks on the soundtrack for the Miles Teller-starring boxing film Bleed for This come courtesy of composer Julia Holter, in her first-ever film work. | Ten of the eighteen tracks on the soundtrack for the Miles Teller-starring boxing film Bleed for This come courtesy of composer Julia Holter, in her first-ever film work. | Various Artists: Bleed for This OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22581-bleed-for-this-ost/ | Bleed for This OST | Every year, the film industry reliably churns out a new biographical boxing film with aspirations towards artistry and, hopefully, awards. This year’s entrant is Ben Younger’s Bleed for This, starring the famously boorish Miles Teller (Whiplash, Fantastic Four) as Vinny Paz, a world championship boxer on the road to recovery from a devastating car accident. It was executive produced by Martin Scorsese, in itself setting up an unfortunate parallel to the already-existing Raging Bull. The soundtrack, meanwhile, pairs selections from artists like Willis Earl Beal with some period-specific ’80s glam, and, intriguingly, several selections from the composer and performer Julia Holter.
Holter provides ten of the eighteen songs on this soundtrack, each a piece of new music from her. It is definitely an odd fit, and the soundtrack doesn’t make any efforts to make sense of it: In its first few tracks we are treated to selections from Billy Squier and Bad Company, selections that serve a scene-setting purpose in the film that they do not serve here. Songs from Willis Earl Beal’s 2013 album Nobody Knows are peppered throughout to add a dash of emotional depth, but Beal’s probing and leftfield soul is mismatched with the film’s rote aggression. This disjunction is even more apparent when Holter’s music appears in the film.
For the most part, her contributions are short, almost weightless, instrumental pieces that lean towards ambient. Almost none of the pieces are over a minute long, making them closer to sketches. In the film, they are deployed where easy emotion needs to be summoned. No matter how beautiful some these tracks can be, they are forced to serve utilitarian ends: “Fighting Dele,” one of the most well-executed pieces, only exists to heighten the tension of Vinny Paz’s title fight against Gilbert Dele. Instead of the old tricks of heavy breathing, audible heartbeats, shaky camera angles, or even silence, Holter’s song is used to make a difficult moment in the fight (right before the telegraphed victory) seem ethereal, almost divine. The strategy ends up making her music feel silly when tied to the film.
Worse, Holter’s songs are given the hoary old agenda of making the aggressive and masculine edges of the film seem more sensitive, softer, and intimate. Bleed for This does not break any stereotypes about boxing films. It follows a narrative arc, a cast of characters, and explores a set of emotions (failure, redemption, victory) that are well trodden. The score’s best songs, “Fighting Duran,” (a grandly wrought three-minute ambient song), “Home Movies,” (a short minimalist epic of luxuriant and melancholic strings) and “Vinny’s Trumph” (the score’s triumphantly horn-filled closer) make clear just how mismatched Holter’s sensibilities are to this ultimately lazy and formulaic film, filled with scenes of sweaty gyms, casino floors, and other places of contest. Holter admirably writes music that attempts to complicate these spaces, but in the end she is mismatched with this film. And that’s a bummer, because any film would be lucky to have her contributions.
Holter’s work for Bleed for This is her first film score. Without a doubt her music will continue to appear in film because it is subtle, spectral, and densely packed with energy without being plodding or gaudy. Bleed for This like any run-of-the-mill white-elephant film vying for critical success is going to do away with those kinds of qualities, in order to activate base pleasures in a movie viewer. This film’s palette of emotions and events is only made of primary colors, while Holter’s music often exists in a spectrum that is murkier and less defined. The kind of film that Holter’s work may be suited for will more fluidly incorporate the hypnotic pace of her compositions. It will be a film that chooses not to retell the same story over and over again. | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Milan | November 12, 2016 | 6 | 9158c263-a883-46e2-ba7d-5de8b213b0b6 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Wolfgang Voigt’s investigations of German heritage turn ominous on an imposing, hour-long ambient album whose title translates as “frenzy”; it feels closely keyed to the current political state. | Wolfgang Voigt’s investigations of German heritage turn ominous on an imposing, hour-long ambient album whose title translates as “frenzy”; it feels closely keyed to the current political state. | GAS: Rausch | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gas-rausch/ | Rausch | “They dreamed of a fusion of worlds,” wrote the historian Modris Eksteins in his landmark Rites of Spring, describing Germany on the eve of the first World War: “The technical became spiritual.” Following a rapid economic expansion from a loose network of rustic provinces to a united industrial superpower, the nation embraced a fresh mythology. “Efficiency became an end, not a means. And Germany herself became the expression of an elemental ‘life force.’”
In many ways, this description applies just as readily to the music of Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS alias. By using computers to meticulously process samples of Wagner, Volksmusik, and Schlager into pulsating atmospheres, Voigt refracts German identity through a haunting digital prism. Albums like 1998’s Königsforst and 2000’s Pop are collections of moments drawn out for five, 10, or 15 minutes. The tracks barely evolve; the music feels like a slowly unfolding natural phenomenon, born from a collision of the acoustic and digital. Evoking his youthful LSD trips in the Black Forest, the tingling high frequencies call to mind buzzing insects or rippling water, while slow-motion chords envelop like the womb.
The GAS alias went silent following the release of Nah Und Fern, a retrospective 2008 box set cementing the project’s legacy. But last year, Voigt reappeared with Narkopop, which was a bumpy landing for fans: Listeners expecting a second helping of the project’s iconic, mesmerizing tones were instead met with fidgety disruptions. Returning now with Rausch, GAS remains in an unsettled headspace. In 1999, Voigt described the project warmly: “The aim is always to give love and to be loved for your work.” It’s hard to draw that conclusion today. Rausch heaves with a potent cocktail of seasick unease, grand visions, and snarling intensity. As far-right nationalist political views lurch back into Germany’s mainstream, the project’s motherland obsessions seem suddenly less comfortable in their own skin, exuding a dissonant terror alongside the requisite transcendence.
Rausch is meant to be taken in as a single, hour-long piece made up of seven parts. It’s an imposing listen. More than anything, this album looms over you, swaying back and forth between awesomeness and menace. The title translates to an ecstatic state of drunkenness, or “frenzy,” and the most joyful passages teeter on the edge of chaos and oblivion.
The opening contains some of the most beautiful music on the record: nearly eight minutes of stretched-out symphonic tones, rain-like static, and depth-charge bass. The arrangement is stacked to emphasize the sense of scale: The low end invites vertigo, while cymbals guide your gaze upwards, letting you breathe in pure, brisk air. In the middle, dense harmonies cascade with the muted majesty of cloud banks. Voigt has left the Black Forest for an alpine summit.
If Voigt were to fade it out here, “Rausch 1” would stand as another gorgeous addition to the GAS catalogue. Instead, it’s a prelude to a descent accompanied by a chugging beer-hall beat. A bleary unease sets in, the threat of violence looming in the otherwise ethereal mist. Dissonance ripples across the surface, at times deep in the background, elsewhere rudely elbowing its way to the front. By the time we get to “Rausch 4,” the mix is half consumed by a wind-tunnel roar.
Over three cycles, this rhythm rises up to the surface amid alternating waves of confusion and splendor, only to recede again. It’s another take on the timelessness that distinguished the GAS albums of the early 1990s. If those records suggested a kind of meditative eternity, Rausch feels like the mess of history playing out in an intoxicated melee. GAS’ rebirth could have easily coasted on almost two decades of accumulated goodwill, ignoring the knotty and uncomfortable problems of the day in favor of a detached, expertly crafted rehash. No one would complain, or perhaps even notice. Instead, Voigt continues to absorb and explore. Rausch, though hardly topical, feels current, as jarring and revealing as last night’s nightmare. | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | May 18, 2018 | 7.8 | 9165604a-fed4-49f1-b321-f73f4da58cef | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
On an album meant to strike “a balance between rural and city living,” the Canadian producer evokes rural idyll in dozy deep house, but the mood too often verges on soporific. | On an album meant to strike “a balance between rural and city living,” the Canadian producer evokes rural idyll in dozy deep house, but the mood too often verges on soporific. | Project Pablo: Come to Canada You Will Like It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/project-pablo-come-to-canada-you-will-like-it/ | Come to Canada You Will Like It | While house and techno emerged from the staunchly urban settings of New York, Chicago, and Detroit, the countryside played a pivotal role in the second phase of electronic music, as Summer of Love ravers turned England’s farmland and fields into unlikely hotbeds of kick drums and bass.
Project Pablo—aka Vancouver-born, Montreal-based producer Patrick Holland—is almost certainly too young and Canadian to have experienced this. Yet his new album, Come to Canada You Will Like It, speaks to the same mystic pastoralism you can see in footage of those early raves, where dazzled partygoers and early house came together in a rustic techno paradise. Holland has said that the album is “about slowing down while finding a balance between rural and city living”; the record’s cover features a childlike painting of a country cabin under a benevolent yellow blue sky. It might be the least typically techno record sleeve in the past few years of dance music.
This pastoral creep is reflected in Come to Canada’s 10 sprawling tracks, which seem to suggest house music if it had been raised on a diet of fresh fruit and outdoor exercise rather than gay clubs and city basements. While British raves mixed the thrilling rush of illegality with their bucolic charm, Come to Canada suggests the well-worn idea of the rural idyll, all yawning pace and dappled green. The familiar elements that have made Project Pablo’s music so inviting are present and correct—the wandering bass lines, jazzy chords, and subtly swinging drums—but they feel laid back to the point of sloth, with all the energy of a cat catching 40 winks in a suntrap.
“Tunstall,” for example, is recognizably house music, thanks to its 4/4 beat and bongo lilt. But it sounds utterly unconcerned whether you dance or not, its noodling touches quite happy to wander along with little in the way of build or friction. The same format is repeated throughout the album: Drums skip by contentedly, synth chords lend a suggestion of melody, a bass line ambles, and jazzy keyboards solo away, all without a care in the world.
There’s something to be said for such stylistic consistency—it holds the album together well—but it feels limiting over the course of 10 tracks. What is initially lush and golden rapidly pales to a gilded froth. Electronic music can often get away with extreme tonal minimalism, thanks to its percussive thrust. But Come to Canada has none of the energy of earlier Project Pablo songs like “Movin’ Out” or “Is It Dry?” and the album’s palette isn’t particularly rewarding, either. “Fine Match,” for all its melodic charm, resembles an Air demo before the French duo have applied their studio magic. You frequently find yourself longing for some level of detail that might lift the songs above their basic level of affable stodge.
There are some lovely moments on Come to Canada. Holland is a gifted melodicist, and you can hear it on “Intro,” which resembles Boards of Canada with all the menace surgically removed, or the warmly wistful “Nanana,” while “To Sealeigh and Back” has a brilliantly fluttering hi-hat sequence. But there is no urgency, no feeling that this music simply had to exist. Holland has described Come to Canada as “a collection of songs that I’ve been sitting on for a while,” and it feel exactly like that: a selection of perfectly inoffensive tracks that could have stayed locked on his hard drive without too much disappointment.
Canada has a reputation—generally ill-informed, and often lampooned by Canadians themselves—for politeness. And, as promised by Holland’s surely tongue-in-cheek title, Come to Canada is perfectly likable and nice. But for base thrills, edge, and energy, you might want to look elsewhere. | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Verdicchio | June 28, 2018 | 5.9 | 9166e6f6-1a90-45b2-82ad-e533c35d9c85 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
House and Land is the new collaboration of Asheville guitarist Sarah Louise with fiddle player Sally Anne Morgan. The tension between new and old, between folk and avant-garde, is its driving force. | House and Land is the new collaboration of Asheville guitarist Sarah Louise with fiddle player Sally Anne Morgan. The tension between new and old, between folk and avant-garde, is its driving force. | House and Land: House and Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/house-and-land-house-and-land/ | House and Land | When 12-string guitarist Sarah Louise Henson (aka Sarah Louise) first recorded the mournful ballad “The Day Is Past and Gone,” it was a very different piece of music. As the Asheville native plucked and bent the strings of her guitar, you could feel the sorrow in the song all within her playing. But on the debut release of House and Land, Louise’s new duo with multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers), it approaches the form of a folk epic. Louise has become one of the most exciting figures in solo guitar music, with a style of fingerpicking that aligns her more with banjo players and pianists, notes cascading in constant patterns like rain. In House and Land, she often takes on the role of lead vocalist, echoing the hum of Morgan’s fiddle with a sad, steady sigh.
House and Land’s self-titled debut feels expansive and immersive while using the simplest resources. Its source materials stem from centuries-old folk songs, so traditional they share lines with Old Testament verses. But Louise and Morgan attack them with urgency and excitement. The record’s best moments, like “The Day Is Past and Gone” and “Rich Old Jade,” are warmly psychedelic, proceeding patiently with minimal percussion and unfolding into new shapes at every turn. Other songs take up smaller spaces. “Listen to the Roll” is nearly a capella, with Louise singing sternly over a low drone. “I had to answer for myself,” she repeats, adding an ominous edge to the melody by raising her voice just a half-step between the syllables of “answer.” It’s a haunting sound, showing just how much these musicians can communicate with such sparse arrangements.
“It doesn’t make sense to me to draw a hard line about what is folk music and what is avant-garde,” Louise has said, “Because so many ‘folk’ musicians are incredibly inventive and plenty of ‘avant-garde’ artists are just doing the same stuff over and over again.” This tension—between new and old, between folk and avant-garde—is the driving force of House and Land. The sounds throughout the album are alluringly simple: the primitive buzz of a shruti box, the percussive trill of a banjo, the fluttering sound of the pair’s tight, ghostly harmonies. In the opening track “Wandering Boy,” House and Land illustrate their potential as a more accessible folk duo, with a straightforward arrangement that places an emphasis on melody and harmony. But the pair are not just content to retell stories from the past; they also take pleasure in bending them at their will.
For their rendition of Shirley Collins’ “The False True Lover,” Morgan maintains the song’s persistent flow while slightly restructuring the melody, adding a new emotional undercurrent similar to Sam Amidon’s reinterpretations on I See the Sign. In “Johnny”—a song the duo discovered on a late ’90s private press folk album—they shift the song’s subject from “father” to “mother” and replace the word “sterling” with “garland,” because, according to the liner notes, “[It was] more to our liking.” These subtle, personal changes are indicative of the album’s success. House and Land don’t just make these songs their own: they effectively reclaim them, illustrating that they’ve always been theirs. | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | June 19, 2017 | 7.8 | 916efa33-8310-49d4-b828-433268c63b67 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The New England rapper celebrates the joys of gaming on a bright and bubbly collaborative album. | The New England rapper celebrates the joys of gaming on a bright and bubbly collaborative album. | Pink Navel / Kenny Segal: How To Capture Playful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-navel-kenny-segal-how-to-capture-playful/ | How To Capture Playful | Devin Bailey, the rapper, producer, and singer who records as Pink Navel, has an effervescent and nasal voice, an extensive knowledge of animated television, and an immense, somewhat intimidating pool of references and SAT words. Thankfully, the term “nerd” no longer stings like an insult—these days, it’s more like a term of endearment. On the charming How to Capture Playful, Pink Navel teams up with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal to celebrate nerdom with joyous raps that revolve around their enduring love of video games.
In games, Bailey finds a way to process the intricacies of existence and as well as a place to disappear when life gets too overwhelming. “I’m thinking that a game can make the pain stop,” they rap on “Cracked,” sounding almost surprised to admit it out loud. Little moments here and there indicate how deeply the subject is woven into Bailey’s life. They play anytime they have to wait in line (“Memory Card”); they sit all day with the controller in their lap, poised to respawn at a moment’s notice (“Reset”); they estimate that their hours of screen time stretch well into the triple digits (“Synergy'').
Gamer life can be isolating, but Bailey doesn’t wallow in darkness or escapism. While they occasionally question the space their hobby takes up, they also relish the wonder and meaning it provides. In “Maps & Navigation,” which is ostensibly about in-game cartography, Bailey ruminates on what it is to be present, how following a set path may not take you where you need to be. In “Present Vendor,” they rap glowingly about Beedle, the merchant who appears throughout The Legend of Zelda series, transforming him from a bit character to a working-class hero. Beedle could be the friendly bodega clerk who remembers your usual order or the postal worker who keeps the line moving efficiently.
Kenny Segal responds to Bailey’s whimsy with an equally spirited palette. The beats are a far cry from the ramshackle doom jazz he provided to billy woods on Maps, instead feeling more akin to the pastoral instrumentals on his 2018 solo album happy little trees. He supplies Bailey with shivering psych-folk flutes (“Speedrun”), distorted 8-bit jazz (“Hours Played”), and lush loops (“Poet Gang Playing Cards”). Each track feels bright and slightly over-caffeinated, goofily stumbling over itself to create space for Bailey’s infinitely unspooling rhyme schemes.
Pink Navel’s complex writing and dexterous command of rhythm reflect their immersion in the music. Listen to the way Pink mimics the bassline on “New Tech” before pivoting to a syncopated staccato that mirrors Segal’s sporadic needle-drop sampling. Their triple-time cadence on the washed-out drill of “Solving Combat” tumbles over the insistent hi-hats, finding nooks and crannies between the kick drums. They make a Cones of Dunshire reference, rap about scrolling TikTok while hiking, and say “IRL” unironically—but they make it sound cool. Bailey’s passion is the joyful heart at the center of this record. Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s easy to get swept into its bright, pixelated world. | 2023-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | October 26, 2023 | 7.4 | 9173fca8-0ef1-43e6-86d9-d8355f205a80 | Dash Lewis | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dash-lewis/ | |
The Brooklyn punks remain focused on the ceaseless challenges of living in the big city, but their overdriven guitars no longer sound quite as bitter or fed up—particularly when they shift to love songs. | The Brooklyn punks remain focused on the ceaseless challenges of living in the big city, but their overdriven guitars no longer sound quite as bitter or fed up—particularly when they shift to love songs. | Bodega: Broken Equipment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bodega-broken-equipment/ | Broken Equipment | Brooklyn punk band Bodega’s debut album, Endless Scroll, was largely a lament that modern life is lived through screens, but there were also songs about low-wage workers selling gluten-free sugar water in Union Square and the ridiculousness of center-liberal New Yorkers thinking Trumpism was unprecedented. Songwriters and vocalists Ben Hozie and Nikki Belfiglio made incisive points, but the approach they took on some of Endless Scroll’s political songs wasn’t always the sharpest line of attack. They sometimes mocked the very people who might stand a chance of coming around after some open-minded conversation—say, the identically dressed but potentially well-intentioned showgoers of “Name Escape.” On follow-up Broken Equipment, which Hozie co-produced with Bodega’s live sound mixer Bobby Lewis, Hozie and Belfiglio still stumble a bit when they attempt sociopolitical commentary. They remain focused on the ceaseless challenges of living in New York—and, by proxy, any major U.S. city—but now, their overdriven guitars don’t quite sound as bitter or fed up. Broken Equipment often sounds like a band weary of having to make the same points they’ve always made but then doing it anyway.
They shine best when they write about love, when their vocals go beyond sing-speaking, and when they blast the overdrive on their midtempo punk riffs. On “Doers,” Hozie’s cadence approaches rapping, an exciting new style for him. When the band adds crunchy guitars and Tai Lee’s percussive thwacking during the chorus, Bodega briefly transcend their lopsided lampooning. Ham-fisted references to a “soylent toilet seat” and innovation being impossible without dongles sandwich the razor-sharp line “I take all my meals to go/It’s fast down the tube/Delivery, and back to my workflow,” a gastronomical take on the productive forces of capitalism.
His rhetoric holds up slightly better on “NYC (disambiguation),” where relatively pared-back verses swell into an overdriven singalong chant of “New York was founded by a corporation”—a history lesson that in 1626, the Dutch West India Company bought New York from the indigenous Lenape tribe. Elsewhere, when he and Belfiglio aim their accusations upward, they fall back to the ground before they reach their target. On “Thrown,” he spits, “I’m surrounded by bureaucrats/And I was cold-called by two Democrats/Who said ‘senators thrown’/Still failing the class,” over click-clacking guitars; his voice has a scornful sneer but not quite the rage that lambasting a whole political party begs for.
Hozie is at his most engaging when exploring romance. On “All Past Lovers,” right after he sings, “All past lovers live inside of you,” guitars rattle like little fireworks going off, as though he finds power, not dread, in reflecting on past relationships that didn’t pan out. “I’m gonna show I love you,” he slowly intones atop phaser-heavy chords on “Pillar on the Bridge of You,” a love song he wrote for Belfiglio, before transitioning to something more like a speak-shout: “When my back lifts you up that street!” His excitement is audible, and there’s something sweet about someone so prone to derision being so genuinely enamored that he’ll use his whole body to show it.
When Belfiglio takes the mic, Bodega sound even better. On “Territorial Call of the Female,” her voice swings from a mild mid-register vibrato to a Karen O-like wail in a fraction of a second, and dovetails thrillingly with walloping power chords and Adam See’s punchy bassline. While Hozie can sound less like a singer than someone simply complaining loudly, Belfiglio sounds inviting and sharp. Her luminosity fades as the song closes, her wails of “call me out” gradually sounding ever more breathless and exhausted. It's unclear who she's addressing: herself? Some unnamed other? Society itself? But in that ambiguity lies one of the perplexing things about Bodega: She and Hozie have always known how to identify problems, but they’re still figuring out how to get people on their side. | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | What's Your Rupture? | March 15, 2022 | 6.4 | 91843a4d-10d6-47b9-8a5b-d90ceb809eda | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
The debut album from the celebrity production duo is a somber departure from their EDM days—a lifeless, anodyne pop record that wallows in basic feelings of regret and narcissism. | The debut album from the celebrity production duo is a somber departure from their EDM days—a lifeless, anodyne pop record that wallows in basic feelings of regret and narcissism. | The Chainsmokers: Memories...Do Not Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23148-memoriesdo-not-open/ | Memories...Do Not Open | Commercial EDM thrives on triumph, each one greater than the last, and the Chainsmokers have a bootstrap story as big as any in the game. When Drew Taggart and Alex Pall released “#SELFIE” in December 2013, they were relative nobodies trying to make a dent on the EDM scene. A month later, Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak label picked up the single—a novelty song about social media that suggested women are somehow more vain and annoying than men—and things started happening for the duo. But, like the viral spread of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the success of “#SELFIE” and its attendant backlash threatened to eclipse their fledgling career.
“We made a novelty record that was, in my opinion, one of the most clever records ever made... Obviously not everyone got the joke,” Taggart told Idolator in late 2015, gravely underestimating everyone's ability to get jokes. “But we’re working our way out of that and proving that we’re pretty well-rounded musicians.” So they abandoned their EDM to emphasize slower tempos, slinky melodies, and songs about bruised feelings. Whether they helped initiate the move away from super-sized dance music or merely sniffed the shifting winds, it was a canny move. In the past year, they have become one of the biggest names in pop music. On YouTube, a pair of videos for their single “Closer”—a moody, surprisingly convincing song about sex, regret, and the passage of time—has been viewed 1.6 billion times. Their 10 most popular songs on YouTube and Spotify alone account for a combined seven billion plays.
This stylistic and emotional maturation is a big part of the narrative the Chainsmokers tell about themselves as party bros made good. The first lines we hear on the album are an apology: “You know I’m sorry,” sings a wounded, suspicious Taggart, sounding more like an emo singer than a superstar DJ, and it sets the brooding tone for an album preoccupied with breakups and betrayals. Musically, Memories… Do Not Open is of a piece with all of their output post-“Roses,” the single that marked their big shift. There are no big-room bangers, no concussive drops, no coked-up-mosquito-with-a-vuvuzela synth riffs. Diplo and Skrillex’s big hit for Justin Bieber, “Where Are Ü Now,” serves as the template for their pneumatic pads and processed vocals. With few exceptions—like “Break Up Every Night,” a peppy pop-rock number that could be a more caffeinated MAGIC!, or “Last Day Alive,” which features the country duo Florida Georgia Line in the musical equivalent of a poster of fighter jets—the duo and their 32 credited co-writers keep the tempos slow and the moods muted. It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality. None of it sounds anything like “#SELFIE,” but its worldview is barely any bigger than that song's narrow perspective; toggling between cheap thrills and bitter recriminations with all the emotional stakes of a drunken beach fight caught on Snapchat.
Taggart first sang on one of the duo’s songs with “Closer,” and its success seems to have encouraged him to take more of the spotlight here. His voice is capable, deep and boomy, and he has a way with reaching down for the low notes that faintly resembles the Crash Test Dummies. His chief quality, though, in song as in interviews, is a kind of everydude relatability, mapped out in conversational lines like, “Fuck it, yeah, I said it.” It is indicative of the Chainsmokers’ irony: a #nofilter vernacular sung through countless vocal filters.
Only “Paris” comes close to what they achieved with “Closer.” It’s enlivened by a similar ear for detail that flickers between the specific and the universal, and its us-against-the-world chorus has a way of reaching even the inner teen of even the most hardened listener. But too many of their songs writhe around in pettiness. “She wants to break up every night/Then tries to fuck me back to life” takes the art of the couplet to a new low—though whether that’s lower than the same song’s “She’s got seven different personalities/Every one’s a tragedy” may depend upon your views on assonance, make-up sex, and mental-health shaming. “Wake Up Alone” wastes Jhené Aiko on a song about worrying that once you’re rich and famous, people will only want to have sex with you for being rich and famous. And “It Won’t Kill Ya” pulls out all the stops—swaggering trap beats, horn fanfare, dolorous piano—for a song about hooking up before last call.
For two guys who sell reckless abandon as a lifestyle, they're just not very fun to be around. The smirk they wore on “#SELFIE” is dwarfed by the massive chip on their shoulder—both as Artists Who Demand to Be Taken Seriously and more exhaustingly as Dudes Who Can’t Seem to Catch a Break. The narcissism comes to a head on “Honest,” in which the song’s protagonist is tugged between his faithful girlfriend and the temptations of life on the road. “Bloodstream” might best encapsulate the album’s spiritual void. You don’t need to read the duo’s exegesis (“We are often criticized for being ‘party boys’ in what seems to be an attempt to discredit our artistry, when in fact, our partying has led to some of our most sobering songwriting moments”) to grok that it’s another song about the perils of fame. “Those things that I said/They were so overrated/But I, yeah, I meant it/Oh yeah, I really fucking meant it.” I’m not sure “overrated” means what he thinks it means here if he’s complaining that people have blown the duo's poorly thought-through public statements out of proportion.
But none of this stuff has happened in a vacuum. Despite the preponderance of sad piano across the album, the Chainsmokers remain preening arena hams who make videos that look like Maxim spreads. And that, as much as anything, is why they are so popular. The regret that’s baked into their tired-of-winning debut has as much to do with the ennui gnawing at the heart of modern culture as it does any of the time-worn traditions of teenage kicks, star-crossed lovers, and spring break blackout episodes. Beneath its shiny veneer, Memories… Do Not Open is a Pandora's box of self-loathing that, to use their vernacular, also wants to be really fucking meaningful. It would be daring to say that there’s levels to their music because maybe, like “#SELFIE,” this is all pop-art commentary and we’re still not getting the joke. But their billions of plays don’t lie: They've just got their fingers pressed to the basic, regressive pulse of America. | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia / Disruptor | April 11, 2017 | 4.2 | 91868392-162b-4122-a054-b096a94e1ca2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
By 1995’s The Great Annihilator, Swans weren’t imitating pop music so much as swallowing its features to create something monstrous. This deluxe reissue also includes Michael Gira’s solo LP Drainland. | By 1995’s The Great Annihilator, Swans weren’t imitating pop music so much as swallowing its features to create something monstrous. This deluxe reissue also includes Michael Gira’s solo LP Drainland. | Swans / Michael Gira: The Great Annihilator / Drainland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23166-the-great-annihilator-drainland/ | The Great Annihilator / Drainland | Michael Gira was just two years away from pulling the plug on his band Swans when it released The Great Annihilator in 1995. Well before then, by the late 1980s in fact, it was clear that the shape-shifting experimental outfit had morphed into something quite far removed from the brutishly loud, grinding repetition of its early efforts. The difference was most glaring on its surprisingly faithful covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home.” From there, though, Gira and company re-calibrated their ability to bastardize pop music for a sound that was anything but conventional, even when they opted for seemingly traditional song structures and arrangements.
The Great Annihilator documents a configuration of Swans that wore pop, country, and lounge stylings in a way that no longer clashed with the malevolence of the group’s spirit. By this point, Swans weren’t imitating pop music so much as swallowing its features to create something monstrous. And although the album suggests that Swans were still far cry from the orchestral ensemble Gira assembled when he relaunched the band in 2010, that was only the case on record. Swans Are Dead, a live album that covers The Great Annihilator era, shows that Swans circa ’95 had grown much closer to their present-day state than one might expect.
On its own, The Great Annihilator doesn’t offer a complete picture of what Swans were truly capable of at the time. For fans who got onboard early in the band’s career, the album might lack abrasion; on the other hand, compared to the oceanic aural depth of the latter-day albums, *The Great Annihilator *is relatively thin. Nevertheless, the album does offer crucial perspective on a band whose versatility has basically known no bounds. Doug Henderson’s remastering for this deluxe edition gives Martin Bisi’s mix room to breathe where it had been flattened before, and the inclusion of Gira’s solo album Drainland sheds additional light.
After a brief instrumental opener laced with mystical overtones, airy chants, and the sounds of laughing children, The Great Annihilator gets underway in earnest with “I Am the Sun.” Even the uninitiated will get the irony as Gira and frontwoman Jarboe sing the refrain “I love everyone”—an irony further highlighted by the band’s leaden live rendition and Jarboe’s horrifying 2012 solo remake. But The Great Annihilator actually benefits when the band dials-back the heaviness. Jarboe, whose full range extends from jazz elegance to sugary pop to demonic growling akin to Diamada Galás, brings a sense of playfulness to the original “I Am the Sun.” At the end of the song, her voice is multi-tracked with handclaps to sound like children on a playground.
Gira too restrains himself from laying it on thick. These days, Gira tends to sing nakedly from the heart. On much of The Great Annihilator, he leers as if doing a self-consciously evil take on Johnny Cash. On “I Am the Sun,” with his straight delivery of the lines “when the light goes out/I kill another child,” he proves that his imagery requires no affectation in order to sting. On the contrary, the song’s vocal styles, bright harmonic makeup and manic drive all make for a rather fertile study in contrast against the words. Song titles like “Killing for Company,” and “My Buried Child,” now paired with Drainland’s “Why I Ate My Wife” and “Low Life Form,” suggest that Gira’s preoccupations hadn’t changed all that much.
But the opening sequence on Drainland—a recording of Gira demanding that Jarboe support him while she protests his excessive drinking and drug abuse—throws his words into relief that no longer feels comfortably distant as theater. More droning and abstract than The Great Annihilator, Drainland imports Jarboe and multi-instrumentalist/drummer Bill Rieflin from Swans, suggesting that if it isn’t a Swans album in name, it shares the same disposition. Again, Gira and company play up contrasts by using acoustic guitar, found sounds, and wide-open space as vehicles for immersive negativity.
Ironically enough, in some ways Drainland makes a more powerful impact with a comparatively gentle attack, especially without the artificial-sounding gated snare that dates The Great Annihilator. The two albums are conjoined by songs that share the same lyrics, “Where Does a Body End?” and “Where Does Your Body Begin?”—which suggests an internal call-and-response between Swans and Gira’s other creative pursuits. He would go on to make just one more Swans album—the far more experimental Soundtracks for the Blind—before putting the band on ice for over a decade. For all The Great Annihilator is missing, it is nevertheless pivotal as Swans’ final pop-leaning release. It also leaves no doubt about Gira’s lifelong dedication to breaking the mold. | 2017-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 29, 2017 | 7.2 | 9189979e-c46c-4377-a399-e63e6c798a51 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The founder of the influential Hotflush label here crafts a satisfying mix that finds him moving seamlessly between bass music and techno proper, carving out a middle ground that feels oddly fresh. | The founder of the influential Hotflush label here crafts a satisfying mix that finds him moving seamlessly between bass music and techno proper, carving out a middle ground that feels oddly fresh. | Scuba: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15928-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | There's been no shortage of dialogue around how dubstep has exploded and splintered into countless fragments-- disparate but still interlinked shards reflecting shades of techno, house, garage, drum'n'bass and everything else under the sun. English-born Paul Rose has historically been one of the earliest agents of this dubstep disintegration, making the move to techno haven Berlin early and establishing an interest in the genre that soon became commonplace among many of his genre contemporaries. Founding what would become one of the leading institutions in the techno/dubstep fusion with his Hotflush Recordings label and unprecedentedly landing a residency at the world's most infamous techno club, Berghain, Rose-- better known as Scuba, SCB, or Spectr-- has been a leading light in dissolving the boundaries between different worlds of dance music.
But no matter how experimental or cross-boundary this particular sphere of music gets, there's always a line drawn between all these iterations of "bass music" and what might be considered "proper" techno and house. It's the reason why Rose splits his time between Scuba (bass music) and SCB (straight-up techno), why his memorable RA podcast was a "versus" between his alter egos, and why his SUB:STANCE club night happens on Fridays at Berghain and not Saturdays. It's the reason why his only previous commercial mix CD as Scuba focused almost exclusively on dubstep-centric sounds with none of SCB trickling in. But all bets are off with Rose's contribution to the long-running DJ-Kicks series, where that border fence between "bass" and techno is finally demolished. Mixing genres isn't anything out of the ordinary anymore (in fact, it's pretty much expected), but rarely do we see this kind of flitting between extremes in such a small and confined space.
I'm tempted to say that the overarching theme here is techno, but it's a weird sort of techno. Even when we get big names like Surgeon and Marcel Dettmann, we're not given chunky workouts or sleek, streamlined bangers, but the militarist thrust of "The Power of Doubt" and the jerky IDM of "Captivate". Rose prefers these album cuts over easily more functional single material from either producer, which says a lot about his outside-the-box approach here. Forgoing both the instant-gratification quick mixing of bass music DJs and the lengthy blends of Berlin techno jocks, the tracks feel like they're melting in and out of each other, which means their generic signifiers melt away as well. Rose's style is a fastidious ebb and flow of microscopic beat-stitching. Structurally, Scuba's DJ-Kicks throws another curveball: It doesn't build toward any particular climax, nor is it centered around the "drop" structure inherent to most bass music. The closest we get are the bits of warm melody that seep in with tracks like Braille's jazzy "Breakup" or Mr. Beatnick's elegant G-funk epic "Don't Walk Away From My Love".
Lately Rose's own productions have been moving into house territory, slowing below even the accepted median "bass" tempo of 130 beats per minute (as theorized by Pitchfork's own Martin Clark). What this means is that his mix plays the aural illusion of actually slowing down over the course of its duration: where most DJs would gradually ratchet up the tempo, Rose drags it down from a healthy 132 BPM to a leisurely 125, right where his newest tracks sit. The descent is deceptive, because the mix comes closer to anthemic as it slows: The CD-exclusive "M.A.R.S" is an uncharacteristically happy-go-lucky banger, and it's followed by a rousing selection of house producers like Recondite, Jichael Mackson, and Rivet, previously unassociated with either Scuba or SCB.
No late-2011 Scuba mix would be complete without his controversial "Adrenalin", and DJ-Kicks finally delivers it. The track is given a five-minute spotlight, a gratuitous move for an equally gratuitous track touching on the untouchable: The pariah genres of prog house and trance are fastened with the most decadent breakdown you've heard since you used to listen to Sasha. Leaving "Adrenalin" to the end of the mix is perhaps the only predictable moment on Paul Rose's DJ-Kicks, a disc that's otherwise determined in its mission to keep you on your toes, knitting complex percussive webs and blending genres at a reckless rate that feels like a new gold standard for an already bled-through music world. It might be just a mix CD, but Scuba's DJ-Kicks is a landmark both personal and scene-wide. It shouldn't come as a surprise though, because Paul Rose is just leading the pack like he's always done. | 2011-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | October 25, 2011 | 8 | 918d69d9-d727-48b0-b34b-b30cf59fcfd6 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Grapefruit is by turns astounding, accomplished and difficult to digest, an album shouldering ambitions so big that you fear that at any point it might give way at the knees. | Grapefruit is by turns astounding, accomplished and difficult to digest, an album shouldering ambitions so big that you fear that at any point it might give way at the knees. | Kiran Leonard: Grapefruit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21727-grapefruit/ | Grapefruit | Kiran Leonard is just 20 years old, but if you were looking to paint him as a wide-eyed ingénue, you've already missed the boat: Such is his experience and tireless work ethic he's already coming to resemble a veteran. A rangy young man from Oldham, Greater Manchester, Leonard picked up the mandolin aged five, and wrote his breakout 2013 song "Dear Lincoln" – a manic piece of psychedelic pop, like Van Dyke Parks reincarnated in the body of a hyperactive English schoolboy – when he was 14 years old. Currently ensconced at Oxford University's Wadham College, where he's studying Spanish and Portuguese, Leonard is an intellectual sponge drinking up an ocean of knowledge. His frame of reference encompasses playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the mangled productions of Death Grips and the brainbox pop of Elephant 6, while "Pink Fruit" – the second song on this, his second LP – is a sprawling song suite with more twists and turns in its 16 minutes than Slint's Spiderland. The crux of its peculiar lyric? An erotic encounter between a woman and a squid.
It's a lot, right? Right. Grapefruit is by turns astounding, accomplished and difficult to digest, an album shouldering ambitions so big that you fear that at any point it might give way at the knees. Undoubtedly, Leonard is an autodidact of amazing talent and energy. At times his idiosyncratic performance style resembles Dirty Projectors' Dave Longstreth – see "Don't Make Friends With Good People," with those wandering, pointillist guitar lines, that voice that leaps boldly across octaves, as if participating in some tipsy parkour. Elsewhere, he recalls a fellow British outsider, Richard Dawson, whose take on the narrative folk tradition is both wild-eyed and whimsical. The lolloping, rusty groove of "Öndör Gongor" is a fractured song-story sketched in enigmatic strokes – a strapping maritime fantasy set "in the night of the shotgun," in which sharks lurk as "a clatter of shins hit the dock" and a mysterious orb named Ethel waits, hungrily. The song ends with staccato blasts of guitar and a chanted shanty-like coda, although how all this relates to the subject of the song's title – a giant who lived in early-20th century Mongolia – is left unaddressed.
Grapefruit is a gnarlier-sounding record than its predecessor, its lurching guitars and skittering, free percussion recalling math-rock luminaries such as Don Caballero or Storm & Stress. It is at its most digestible, however, when Leonard plays it orchestral. "Caiaphas in Fetters" is a beautiful confection of strings and fluttering guitar that finds him posing questions to a lover: "Ask yourself/Do you feel as I feel?" "Half Ruined Already," meanwhile, is a fingerpicked love song in which two participants – one legless, one armless – come together in one romantic whole. It was inspired by a Werner Herzog short about a couple who met in a leper's colony, but succeeds in taking such grim subject matter and alchemizing it into warm sentiment. At the other end of the scale is the somewhat opaque "Exeter Services," which flips between quizzical improv and skidding emo, all flail and gasp and rickety cathedrals of language built to collapse: "I'm in the Catskills! Total duality! All of Ophelia! Absolute anarchy!"
Grapefruit is 57 minutes long and feels packed to the rafters, as if Leonard is a hoarder of ideas and song fragments, unwilling or unable to let anything go. Take "Pink Fruit." In its 16 minutes, it flits between noisy spazz-rock, folk shambling, woodwind interludes, short-wave radio tinkering and free percussion. I'd stop short of calling it confused – even when it's getting wild, there's enough recurring lyrical cues to suggest its maker is working to a detailed map. But he can be rather an impatient guide, and while the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit. Perhaps in this regard, at least, Kiran Leonard still has things to learn. | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | March 22, 2016 | 7 | 918ee911-5dad-4a65-8e5e-fa75c8eb83b9 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Citing influences from DJ Screw to James Baldwin, Kevin Barnes’ latest is a maximalist dance party about our simulated realities. | Citing influences from DJ Screw to James Baldwin, Kevin Barnes’ latest is a maximalist dance party about our simulated realities. | Of Montreal: White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/of-montreal-white-is-relicirrealis-mood/ | White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood | Did you hear the one about how reality is an illusion and what we think of as “human life” and “the universe” are just lines of code in some superior being’s cosmic computer simulation? Although it has the ring of stoner mysticism, simulated reality is an actual theory that scientists and philosophers have seriously entertained. At a debate on the subject a couple of years ago, moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson confessed, “It is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” The theory gained currency, for obvious reasons, after Brexit, the 2016 election, and the odd best picture mix-up at last year’s Oscars.
It also made quite the impression on Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes, who cites months of Trump-related “simulated reality paranoid” as a chief influence on his new album, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood. On the chorus of the best track, “Plateau Phase/No Careerism No Corruption,” he suggests that what we think of as reality is so fragile and fluid that, “If we put our ear to the ceiling, we can hear the multiverse seeding, we can hear the simulation wheezing.”
Not that Barnes—a maximalist in all things, from songwriting to character creation to performance style—could ever confine himself to a single inspiration. For more than a decade, he’s been documenting his emotional crises on Of Montreal albums that double as catalogs of his recent obsessions. Along with referencing Germaine Greer, James Salter, and classic European art films like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Barnes increasingly conceives each LP as a genre study. False Priest, from 2010, was his Prince-inspired foray into plastic funk. His most recent album, 2016’s Innocence Reaches, filtered contemporary EDM sounds and internet/social justice jargon through vintage synthesizers. Now, each almost-yearly release plays like a new season of an ongoing Kevin Barnes anthology series; the styles, characters, and themes change, but the auteurist creator and his intellectual voracity remain the same.
With White Is Relic, Danceteria season approaches. Barnes includes a list of influences that features ’80s-era extended club mixes, the late chopped-and-screwed pioneer DJ Screw, and the colorful gender fuckery of films by Pedro Almodóvar. On a personal level, Barnes says he’s finally forgiven himself for the failure of his well-documented marriage to former bandmate Nina Aimee Grøttland and fallen in love again. But it’s simulated reality that makes these apparently unrelated sounds and ideas hang together, in one of the most cohesive Of Montreal albums since their 2007 masterpiece, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
It’s to Barnes’ credit that, despite his experimentation, every song he records has his stamp—those churning melodies, the faintly androgynous vocals, the comically vast lyrical vocabulary. Still, White Is Relic goes a step beyond even his recent genre studies, stretching the typical four-minute Of Montreal single so that only six tracks fill its 41-minute runtime. Punctuated by fluttery horns and synths that recall zippers on nylon, the long instrumental passages really do give the impression that Barnes has remixed his own compositions.
Cribbing from DJ Screw, Barnes often slows down just one element of a song, creating the spooky sensation that it’s playing in two different dimensions at once. In the outro to “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia,” his vocals are pulled thin like taffy over increasingly arpeggiated drum beats. “Body dysmorphia, I know how it feels,” he chants, as the music translates that perceptual distortion into aural terms. The overall impression is of some outside force—perhaps an alien species with next-level programming skills and a sick sense of humor—adjusting each track as it plays. In fact, Barnes did compose the album as a sort of disembodied intelligence, incorporating the contributions of remote collaborators instead of gathering a band in the studio.
If Kevin Barnes the songwriter is playing god, then Kevin Barnes the singer is all too human, a digital ant like everyone else desperate to stay sane in this darkest computer-simulated timeline. Love is one source of transcendence. It gives us a glimpse of the dirty-minded, late-’00s Of Montreal on “Sophie Calle Private Game/Every Person Is a Pussy, Every Pussy Is a Star!,” a mid-tempo sex jam that name-drops Sappho and recounts all-night Almodóvar binges, alongside erotically asphyxiated saxophones.
Like so many of us fragile aesthetes, Barnes has spent the past two years looking to political art for inspiration to resist America’s new dystopian regime. That’s where he channels the work of Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, as well as the words “white is relic,” for better and worse. On the ghostly “Writing the Circles/Orgone Tropics,” the compulsively self-dramatizing singer seems to be chiding himself with the observation, “This acute loneliness that you feel has nothing to do with other people.” But even if your tolerance for white artists discovering racism two decades into their career is high, it’s sure to be tested by some of Barnes’ more self-indulgent lyrics. The dreamy opening track “Soft Music/Juno Portraits of the Jovian Sky” finds him complaining, “Soft music drains the oxygen from besieged Bushwick streets reflexively retching Anglo influx” and resolving that “there will be no gentrificating our graffitied warship of summer love.”
It’s easy to miss the album’s sonic and conceptual ingenuity amid the lyrical bloat. The thing is, even Barnes’ worst clunkers serve a purpose. When they give way to one of the devastatingly plainspoken lines he’s also capable of writing—“It’s good for us depressives to keep someone else alive” on “Sophie Calle,” for example—it’s like he’s lifting a curtain to reveal a shaft of midday sunlight. Whether that blackout shade is Kevin Barnes’ tortured psyche, America in 2018, or our entire, allegedly simulated universe, everything is briefly, brilliantly illuminated when White Is Relic pulls it back. | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | March 13, 2018 | 7.2 | 91954a0c-bef6-424f-87e8-5de18919d2f0 | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | |
Veteran producer, DJ, and remixer finally issed his debut LP this year, and it features collaborations with Jake Shears and Soulwax as well as covers of Public Enemy and Nine Inch Nails. | Veteran producer, DJ, and remixer finally issed his debut LP this year, and it features collaborations with Jake Shears and Soulwax as well as covers of Public Enemy and Nine Inch Nails. | Tiga: Sexor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9714-sexor/ | Sexor | Forget chestnuts and nog. The close of the calendar year is a time for rifling through the past twelve months and catching up on all the records you either didn't pay enough attention to or slept on entirely. Released with a whimper in February, Tiga Sontag's Sexor probably falls under that banner for a lot of people. While the Montreal DJ has long enjoyed renown among clubgoers as a top-tier supplier of slithery, trashy electro (check his 2002 DJ-Kicks mix for proof), this marks the first original outing of his career.
Released on Canada's Last Gang Records-- best known for breaking the likes of Death From Above 1979, Metric, and MSTRKRFT-- Sexor finds Tiga atoning for the silence with a series of bangers, skits, and-- in keeping with a longstanding tradition that's seen him try his hand at everything from Nelly's "Hot in Herre" to fellow Montrealer Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night"-- a fresh handful of cover treatments. The bad news is that Sexor feels a bit forced, a bit sellotaped together. Where Sontag's singles and remixes are generally pretty immaculate, you can sense his anxiety over the long-form format here. Everything from the album's loosely-conceived conceptual overlay (Sexor is apparently a planet where "imagination rules the nation" and "sexy lightning always strikes twice") to its light smattering of voicemail excerpts and telephone conversations points to his willingness to kowtow to long-player conventions. While it's clear from the tracks' compact running times that he's trying to keep things concise and poppy, he might have been better served by instead letting some of these songs unfurl and build.
Nonetheless, with co-production courtesy of Soulwax and Jesper Dahlback, there's also lots to like here. With a bassline containing trace amounts of "Material Girl" and an insidious little chorus, "Far From Home" proves Sontag fluent in effervescent, 80s-tinged synthpop. Elsewhere, Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears tags along for the snaking, sweaty electro of "You Gonna Want Me", "Brothers" conquers a silly lyric with a convincing New Order impression, and "Good As Gold" finds Tiga and producers Soulwax channeling their inner James Murphys to deliver the album's only real epic. Even the covers yield decent returns. Despite being originally released in 2004, Tiga's drastically retooled version of Public Enemy's "Louder Than a Bomb" makes strange sense here; perhaps even more surprising is that he also manages to wring genuine atmosphere out of a slowed-to-a-crawl take on Nine Inch Nails' "Down in It".
Ultimately though, too much of Sexor feels suspiciously like the middle of the road. If it doesn't bump enough, slink enough, or sing enough, what good is it? Tiga's capable of better than this, and his discography bears that fact out; the good news is that he's reportedly working with Soulwax on a followup. That he's not waiting another five years for the next album has to bode well. | 2006-12-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2006-12-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Last Gang | December 15, 2006 | 6.2 | 919909ec-d770-4434-a9f6-4d37bd709a89 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
On their first sustained collaboration since the Squirrel Nut Zippers disbanded, Bird and Mathus draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel, with the ease of old friends getting together for coffee. | On their first sustained collaboration since the Squirrel Nut Zippers disbanded, Bird and Mathus draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel, with the ease of old friends getting together for coffee. | Jimbo Mathus / Andrew Bird: These 13 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jimbo-mathus-andrew-bird-these-13/ | These 13 | The makers of These 13 met at a pivotal moment in their lives. Back in 1994, Jimbo Mathus’ band the Squirrel Nut Zippers were just starting to put their stamp on a host of pre-rock musical styles, from jazz and swing to klezmer. They ran into Andrew Bird at the Black Mountain Music Festival, where he was playing fiddle, and eventually invited him to play on 1996’s Hot, which went multi-platinum off the unlikely popularity of the single “Hell,” a song that describes eternal damnation in gruesome detail. Although never a core member, Bird recorded and occasionally toured with the Zippers throughout the ‘90s, when they were misfiled under swing revival alongside groups with Daddy in their names. While Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy borrowed willy-nilly from big band influences, the Zippers were more specific and knowledgeable—they freely commingled hot jazz with jump blues, irreverent string-band folk and Depression-era pop.
These 13 is not Bird and Mathus’ first time playing together since then. In fact, Bird played on “Train on Fire,” from last year’s Lost Songs of Doc Souchon. But it is their first close and sustained collaboration, with the duo recording these songs mostly live around a single mic and no other musicians intruding. Somber, spare, and amiable, these 13 songs draw from a range of old styles, primarily gospel. The gap between the Zippers’ heyday and this reunion only reveals how they’ve grown as artists, each taking the band’s anything-goes lessons in opposite directions. Bird’s music is based on flights of fancy, running folk through his looping pedal and whistling like a theremin on top of it. Mathus, on the other hand, has plumbed old-school country and rural blues. Bird can sound too clever, Mathus not clever enough. But These 13 allows each to compensate for the shortcomings of the other while playing up what makes them distinctive. Their voices and instruments combine effortlessly, like old friends getting together for coffee.
Still, there is also something oddly old-fashioned about this music and the sentiments they’re putting across. “Poor Lost Souls” surveys the homeless situation in Los Angeles and sees wasted potential in the men and women who are “just a lump of coal” when they “could have been a diamond.” It plays more like a cover of an old song than a new original, like something the Louvin Brothers might have sung on Satan Is Real, yet this odd ventriloquism can be weirdly distancing, especially for a song about crushing poverty. The downcast “Red Velvet Rope” heads toward the opposite end of the class spectrum, dreaming up a celebrity romance where a lover competes with a legion of fans for affection. Disconnected from any current celebrity culture, it sounds unexpectedly stuffy, as though they’ve unearthed an outtake from a Gold Diggers musical from the ‘30s.
Even if they do get lost in the past, both Mathus and Bird remain attuned to the morality of folk music, whether urban or rural. They seem to understand that it enables empathy and compassion in the performer as well as in the listener, which plays into the hymn-like quality of the music. In fact, the best moments on These 13 sit you down in a hard wooden pew in a little church somewhere far from any city. On “Stonewall (1863),” Mathus sings like he’s leading a congregation in fellowship, speaking each line before singing it. It’s an old technique used in churches without access to hymn books—a means of making sure that everyone can experience the fellowship and community that comes with simply singing along.
The chorus of that song, however, is darker than such a description implies. “Let us now cross over the river,” Mathus and Bird sing together, “and rest ‘neath the shade of the trees.” Death looms over these songs, although the duo describe heaven without the baggage of culture-war Christianity. Mathus revels in the Book of Revelations imagery of closer “Three White Horses & a Golden Chain,” which describes an unusual funeral parade. “You’re gonna need somebody when you come to die,” they sing as the album draws to its close, and these two lifelong friends sound like they’ve got each other covered.
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. | 2021-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Thirty Tigers | March 8, 2021 | 7.2 | 91999f1b-8abd-4d3e-92cf-9983ac072362 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
On It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, Detroit's Differ-Ent (aka DJ Bone) doubles down on his hometown’s techno legacy, delivering a triple LP that acts as a sort of manifesto. | On It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, Detroit's Differ-Ent (aka DJ Bone) doubles down on his hometown’s techno legacy, delivering a triple LP that acts as a sort of manifesto. | Differ-Ent: It's Good to Be Differ-Ent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22884-its-good-to-be-differ-ent/ | It's Good to Be Differ-Ent | Eric Dulan, aka DJ Bone aka Differ-Ent, has spent the past two decades as a loyal soldier in the trenches of Detroit techno. Though often overlooked (his bio defensively asserts “Think of Detroit Techno and DJ Bone might not be high on your list of luminaries because he is 100% independent and does things on his terms and on his terms only”), he has developed a small-but-rabid following for his flashy, technical and decidedly old-school approach to DJing. His productions—often self-released on his Subject Detroit label—adhere faithfully to the fundamental principles set forth by Underground Resistance and Jeff Mills, with tough, driving drum programming laying a solid foundation for either wide-eyed celestial synth work or teeth-gritting severity, designed to drive dancers into a frenzy. If this suggests a kind of bunker mentality, it’s not without good reason: For many, Detroit’s original strain of techno remains the most potent, with transatlantic exports rarely making good on the Motor City’s exhilarating mix of meditative depth and rushing energy.
On It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, his debut album as Differ-Ent, Dulan doubles down on his hometown’s legacy, delivering a triple LP that acts as a sort of manifesto, career encapsulation and litmus test for fans. As with many dance music albums, the format itself runs counter to the nature of the music. Simply put, listening to a long stretch of DJ tools can be a tiring affair, with extended intros and outros begging to be blended with something else. It’s an issue that every producer who ventures outside the comfort zone of 12” EPs has to contend with, and Dulan does so in his signature style, by putting his head down and powering through.
The slightly-overwhelming eighty minutes of It’s Good… are meant strictly for DJs and heads, with plenty of bangers and little else. To be fair, this record was likely never meant to be listened to front-to-back. Each side has two songs on it, allowing you to digest each of the three 12”s as a standalone EP. Approached this way, the album clicks, with each third offering a slightly different side of the producer’s work.
Opener “Inhabit Tense” dives right in with some thick pads and pummeling, machine funk toms. This first run of songs blasts out of the gate, with Dulan’s extrovert side in full effect. Exciting as it is, he can lapse into a predictable deference to his elders, particularly Mike Banks. The fidgety lead and blasting strings on “Marvel Less” scratch the Detroit itch well enough, but by same token feel a bit rote. No doubt in the right hands they will come alive on a dance floor, but elsewhere on the album Dulan delivers the goods with more personal aplomb.
The middle of the album offers some of the strangest and strongest work attributed to the Differ-Ent alias so far. “We Have U Surrounded” pares back the sound palette, using a single liquid note and tight percussion to cast a graceful spell. “Motive Hate Shun” chokes out all the air in the room with miasmic subbass and menacing flanger—it’s one of the album’s highlights. Perhaps meant as a counterpoint, “Fasten 8 Shun” returns to Dulan’s beloved string sounds, but here his melodies ambitiously reach beyond the clouds rather than cruise coldly into the abyss. Finally, E-side opener shows “Gem In Eyes” shows Dulan’s emotional side, reminiscent of Hieroglyphic Being’s “So Much Noise 2 Be Heard” if it was recorded in a real studio.
The album’s closing stretch feels a little throwaway, with the obligatory chill-out of “A Calm Bliss.” It’s cool enough, but once it’s over it doesn’t particularly resonate, and “Lazer Eyes” swerves right back to the dense paranoia rather than maintain the mood. “I M Different” closes the album in a more electro style. He may not actually be that different from his Detroit forebears, but It’s Good To Be Differ-Ernt does stand apart from much modern techno. Orthodox but accomplished, it’s an album that exists outside time, sidestepping fashionable tropes staying true to it’s roots. However, it may be more rewarding for the casual fan to catch Bone in one of his virtuosic DJ sets than here. | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Don't Be Afraid | February 11, 2017 | 6.5 | 919bfb76-1dc3-48f0-9603-ca812b6fdd68 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | null |
On their ninth album, the twins revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers and polishing them into poignant synth-pop gems. | On their ninth album, the twins revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers and polishing them into poignant synth-pop gems. | Tegan and Sara: Hey, I’m Just Like You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tegan-and-sara-hey-im-just-like-you/ | Hey, I’m Just Like You | In 1998, Tegan and Sara caused a small stir when they won a Calgary, Alberta talent contest called Garage Warz. The identical twins appeared on a local news segment to talk excitedly about their win, draped in capacious clothing and distinguishable by Sara’s long hair and Tegan’s lip piercing. “The thing that I like the best,” said Sara, “is that, I don’t think that [the judges] think, ‘Wow, they’re perfect, they [need] no improvement’... I think they just see maybe a sparkle of something, that can get to be something bigger.”
Even in her wide-eyed hopefulness, Sara probably didn’t imagine that the duo would go on to have a storied 20-year career: first as Canadian grunge-folk darlings, then pop-punk rebels embraced by the White Stripes and Paramore, and later as synth-pop troubadours joining Taylor Swift onstage. On Tegan and Sara’s ninth studio album, Hey, I'm Just Like You—and the simultaneously released High School, a co-written memoir about their time dropping acid and moshing to Green Day in the ’90s—they revisit their roots, re-recording demos they wrote as teenagers. This time, they’re both the open-hearted teenage songwriters and the wiser industry professionals who can spot, and expand on, their spark.
It’s a smart move for a band whose fan base has both aged with them, and continually refreshed itself with younger members. At a Tegan and Sara show, you’re as likely to meet women in their 30s or 40s who have been die-hard fans of the trailblazing LGBTQ icons since the opening guitar strums of “You Wouldn’t Like Me” in 2004 as you are to meet younger listeners who caught the wave with their 2016 breakthrough pop hit “Boyfriend.” On Hey, I’m Just Like You, the band seem to acknowledge and speak to each of these audiences at once. Listening to the title track in its plaintive, unvarnished demo form, it’s clear that it was written by the same two girls who, as described in their memoir, once built a shrine to Kurt Cobain. On the album, the song opens with sharp claps, and builds to a synth-spangled chorus that cushions the jagged melancholy of the original in a pop cocoon.
As well as reconciling their different sounds, the album is a fierce reminder of the twins’ ability to write an irresistible chorus. Particularly memorable ones here include the stadium-sized exhalation of “I Don’t Owe You Anything,” the bratty moshpit-lite chorus of “Hold My Breath Until I Die,” and the angst-ridden, fist-pumping “I Know I’m Not the Only One.” On “Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You (They Lie),” a clunky title becomes a surprisingly great refrain when the song breaks open, halfway through, into a widescreen anthemic surge.
“Don’t Believe…” is not the album’s only clunky phrasing. Glancing through the track list is like flicking through a teen’s journal, with its powerful “get off my case, Mom” energy. The album’s general embrace of Tegan and Sara’s teenage earnestness is mostly its strength, but there are moments that grate: the “hello, hello, hello” hook on “Hello, I’m Right Here” carries strange hints of the “British whine” that Sara recalls their teenage voices carrying in High School. On the electronic bounce of “You Go Away and I Don’t Mind,” the stripped-back production gives the juvenile, baffling opening lyrics (“I’m complicated, I was raised by icons”) nowhere to hide.
On “Don’t Believe…,” however, they strike the right balance between the clumsy originality of the song that Sara says she wrote in 1995, at age 15, and the polished pros they are now. The melodrama of the chorus (“I belong”) is muted, filtering the pain of teenagerhood through refined adult tastes. There’s a radical kind of self-acceptance to honoring your goofy and heartbreaking teenage sentiments with such seriousness. Sara recently told the Guardian that she has a lot of “self-hatred” and “internalized homophobia” stemming from her difficult high school years, but that revisiting the music and memories of the time—rather than embarrassing her as much as she expected—helped her to love herself. “I’m so amazed at what that person accomplished, knowing that inside they were really, really damaged.”
The fact that these songs have been interpreted by their writers 20 years later creates a layer of knowing poignancy, such as when Tegan sings, “I wonder if someday, we'll just be a memory?” on “I Know I’m Not...,” or when Sara sings “What if I become all of the horrible things that I said I would never be?” on the delicate “Please Help Me.” The sting of their adolescent fears is softened both by the heightened shimmer of the production, and by the very fact that we know how this story ends. Compare the gentle, winking nature of the line “Right now, I wish I was older” on “Hello, I’m Right Here,” to the brute force of Billie Eilish—still in the thick of all-encompassing young turmoil—singing about wishing she could be someone else. Memories of the very real pain and passion we felt as teenagers become cool enough to touch when we’re older. In Tegan and Sara’s hands, they become mantras, glimmering and hopeful and full of sparkle.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sire | September 27, 2019 | 7.1 | 91a648e4-8d06-45d8-aa73-0a3d13e89697 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
On her first album in six years, Santigold reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation. | On her first album in six years, Santigold reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation. | Santigold: Spirituals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/santigold-spirituals/ | Spirituals | Santigold has always had her ear towards the future, pioneering genrelessness before the era of streaming and social media collapsed its borders. On Spirituals, her most introspective and existential body of work to date, Santigold concocts her own version of African-American gospel music that sustained enslaved peoples through horrifying conditions. Using modern sounds of celestial pop, punk-rap, funk, electronica-reggae, and a smidge of hyperpop, she reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation. It’s an experiment with transcendence as a vehicle for catharsis that, at times, gets muddled with attempts to ground its commentary within the music.
Ever since she embarked on her solo career, Santigold has functioned as a sort of griot bearing witness to racial and socioeconomic injustice. Dating back to her days as the frontwoman of the punk-rock band Stiffed, she was met with industry dismissal: “Black, female, punk artists would just never happen.” The usually mellow Santi White people saw in interviews channeled her frustrations into a confrontational punk persona. Whether it’s the insidiousness of the music industry on her breakthrough Santogold or consumerism on her third album 99¢, her lyrics speak truth to power and archive corruption. Her time spent as a child listening to artists like Fela Kuti, Burning Spear, Nina Simone, and Marvin Gaye shows up in “Ain’t Ready” and the Afro-Caribbean-influenced “No Paradise,” where Santigold the freedom fighter takes center stage. In the video for “Ain’t Ready,” she goes mad in an interrogation room as she returns the security camera’s invasive gaze. The siren-like intro serves as both a warning to adversaries and a wake-up call to comrades and herself.
To control the gaze is powerful; to constantly be on the lookout is exhausting. “My job as an artist is to feel and to absorb, you know, and it’s a lot. And it’s heavy,” she explains in a recent interview. On songs like the opening track “My Horror,” where she laments her dissociative daze through unsettlingly ethereal vocals, Santigold is haunted by her disposability as a Black woman in American society. She lingers in a moment of ego-death having recently couched her commentary in infectious pop beats and satire: On “Nothing,” she sings: “Am I free proving I’m better just so I’m not less … Don’t keep telling me I’m nothing/Say I mean something.”
With “Shake,” Santigold taps into a galvanizing cadence characteristic of the civil rights movement-era music. She fills the song with positive affirmations over a plucky bass instrumental—“I won’t buckle under pressure/I’m ’a be alright”—and body-stirring commands to pay homage to those who used music as a communal ritual to make it through “un-get-throughable” times. She just wants you to escape your body. And on the Boys Noize-produced “High Priestess,” Santigold is at her most Afrofuturistic: “Bow down, don’t freak out/In the presence of a queen/I guard the gates here/Guard the secrets while you wonder. ” She slips in and out of sing-rap, reminiscent of childhood playground chants, over metallic synths and punchy drum beats. In the tarot, the High Priestess card is associated with intuition, mystical knowledge, and the occult.
Santigold certainly acts as a spiritual guide here, steering us from angst toward a collective out-of-body release. As is the case when someone is pioneering an innovative soundscape, the journey sometimes faces some obstacles—Spirituals is peppered with clunky, too-literal lyrics that disrupt the spell cast by the music’s emotion. But by the end, we get a glimpse of the next phase of Santigold’s artistry—a project not bound by genre, form, physicality, or language. | 2022-09-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Little Jerk | September 13, 2022 | 7.4 | 91aa3494-36e9-4959-85cc-22c16bd2c20e | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The Long Island emo band’s adventurous new album is a document of abstract experiments and stoned afternoons, stranger than their previous work while still buzzing with the pursuit of bliss. | The Long Island emo band’s adventurous new album is a document of abstract experiments and stoned afternoons, stranger than their previous work while still buzzing with the pursuit of bliss. | Oso Oso: Sore Thumb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oso-oso-sore-thumb/ | Sore Thumb | The liturgy of Oso Oso is built from finding the perfect view, feeling sand between your toes, and watching the sun rise. You know the motto: Life Is Good. Though frontman Jade Lilitri culls his sound from the malcontent and often misogynistic legacy of Long Island emo, his lyrics fawn more than they fight, staring doe-eyed at the universe. In his native Long Beach, New York, it’s easy to find the Biblical in the everyday—the vastness of the Atlantic is never more than a mile away, and the town was devastated by Hurricane Sandy only a decade ago. The sea is a running motif in his work, and on Oso Oso’s fourth record, Sore Thumb, it’s a fatal mission: “Captain of my own Titanic,” he sings on opener “Computer Exploder,” trapped in a fated battle against his own worst impulses. If emo had its Herman Melville, Lilitri could be the strongest candidate.
Sore Thumb wasn’t supposed to be the band's next record—or at least, not quite in this form. In early 2021, Lilitri and Oso Oso guitarist Tavish Maloney spent a month with longtime collaborator Billy Mannino at his studio, writing and recording early ideas for a follow-up to 2019’s leap into anthemic pop, Basking in the Glow. But the would-be demos took on new weight soon after they wrapped when, less than a month later, Maloney suddenly passed away. These dozen songs, written between LSD trips and video games, became an unwitting memorial to a late bandmate, cousin, and best friend. Aside from mastering and mixing, the album has been essentially untouched since they recorded. It’s a document of abstract experiments and stoned afternoons, stranger than any Oso Oso record while still buzzing with his pursuit of bliss.
The album’s intimate origins—days on end spent in the studio during a pandemic winter—are reflected in its exploratory flourishes and madcap experiments. For the first time on an Oso Oso record, there’s plinking piano, whistled melodies, warm synths. It’s telling that one of the last things Lilitri shared before the album was a cover of the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping.” Sore Thumb is the closest thing to his Revolver, a drug-fueled, freewheeling expansion of their sound: slanted Britpop (“Pensacola”), jangling folk (“Because I Want To”), and reggae accented with a vibraslap for good measure (“Father Tracy”). There are still weightless falsettos, restless guitar solos, and refrains that crash like tidal waves—Oso Oso never sacrifices a perfect pop hook for the sake of eccentricity—but they’re now flecked with auxiliary percussion, pitch-shifted vocals, and backmasking as a counterbalance to their power chord sugar high.
Where Oso Oso’s previous efforts shared thematic ties—a fictional town, the quest for contentment—the closest thing to a unifying concept for Sore Thumb is the creation of the album itself. The record is filled with glances behind the music—count-offs, studio banter, a dusty room tone. Oso Oso have often felt like a band created in a lab for the O.C. soundtrack, layering Beach Boys harmonies over a perfected emo formula of drop-tuned guitars and stadium-sized choruses. There’s still plenty of that here—“Nothing to Do” sounds like a power-pop fever dream—but it’s even more moving to hear the songs that feel rushed, private, incomplete. It’s the same quiet vulnerability that made Basking in the Glow’s “One Sick Plan” such a standout, packing the same emotional weight as their larger than life songs with a more humble setup.
Knowing that these songs were likely meant to be reworked before their release makes the record seem contoured by imperfections: The drums, played by Lilitri, are loose, and his voice occasionally cracks on the high notes. But these flaws underscore the band’s irrepressible radiance, as if they can’t help but stumble into hooks and harmonies. Sore Thumb is Oso Oso when no one’s watching, still casually sincere and effortlessly earnest. It seems intentional that “All Love,” a bleary-eyed acoustic soliloquy about an LSD trip, is followed immediately by the muscular wallop of “Fly on the Wall”—it’s impossible to separate their adrenaline highs from their soft, stoned introversion.
Oso Oso’s outlook is, generally speaking, bro with a heart of gold, and the more adventurous lyrics flesh out that universe. The winding verses of “Pensacola” find our protagonist staring down a gin and soda in Florida’s panhandle. There’s the alcoholic priest on “Father Tracy,” preaching salvation between sips from his flask; there’s the drug dealer on “Computer Exploder,” who Lilitri addresses with the highest possible title of dude-endearment: “My friend.” Some moments feel like inside jokes, like the jingle-ready exuberance of “Nothing Says Love Like Hydration.” Others feel like sparse outlines for love letters—facile rhymes (“bad”, “mad”, “dad”) on ”Because I Want To” might have been reworked in a second round of edits—but even those songs feel inspired in their simplicity. Lilitri doesn’t embellish his words, he builds towering epics in his own vocabulary: “Some days this year, man, they feel never-ender,” he sings on “Pensacola,” a moment of bong-hit wisdom that’s hard to shake.
A de facto farewell to Maloney, “Tav World” is both the goofy vinyl-only closer about smoking weed and a strange kind of hymn. It might seem exaggerated to find transcendence in a record of ostensible demos, but it’s fitting for a band who professes love with a lyric as conversational as “I mean if you want, we can just stay here,” from 2017’s The Yunahon Mixtape. Oso Oso venerates friendship, and on Sore Thumb, they lighten up and dig deeper, waxing existential about the vital importance of hanging out. As a pseudo-music documentary, this is the story of two unassuming guys in their 20s, hashing out complicated feelings about the world, and it’s both intense and familiar. After all, isn’t one of the lessons of Peter Jackson’s Get Back that the Beatles were just homies? When Maloney died, Lilitri shared a long and heartfelt tribute to his late creative partner. “I wish I could go back to the times where I felt depressed and lonely and asked you to chill and you drove for hours to chill for days no questions asked,” he wrote. In the church of Oso Oso, chilling with your friends is a sacrament. | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | March 21, 2022 | 8.3 | 91ae359e-b500-4eb8-b88d-50c757ffd23f | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The mischievous electronic producer teams up with the photographer on an album where the latter’s voice becomes the source material for unsettling tracks full of silence and space. | The mischievous electronic producer teams up with the photographer on an album where the latter’s voice becomes the source material for unsettling tracks full of silence and space. | Wolfgang Tillmans / Powell: Spoken By the Other EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolfgang-tillmans-powell-spoken-by-the-other-ep/ | Spoken By the Other EP | Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is a reminder that no freedom is a given. The German-born photographer started out in the 1980s capturing his young peers, a generation removed from the nation’s post-war privations, growing up and living freely in ways that none of their forebears did, or could: taking ecstasy in clubs, getting naked in parks, finding comfort in their true selves.
His newest project, a six-track collaborative EP with the electronic producer Oscar Powell, applies his ethos to sound—which remains a little-explored medium for him, at least relative to his sprawling body of visual art. After playing around with music in his teens, he took a 30-year break from it, returning in 2016 with a focus-free EP and a full-spotlight appearance on Frank Ocean’s Endless. When he and Powell first began work on Spoken By the Other, it was originally envisioned as a showcase of Tillmans’ singing over Powell’s dance beats. Unsatisfied with the predictable direction materializing, they ditched the songs and pushed outward. Ultimately, Tillmans’ voice became the source material for these six tracks: Powell toys with it one short phrase at a time, manipulating textures and exploiting glitches without succumbing to an obvious pulse. There’s rhythm here, technically speaking, but these aren’t exactly songs. These sometimes unsettling tracks are full of space and silence, and not necessarily made for the same audience who enjoyed the twisted club throb of Powell’s 2016 statement album, Sport. Spoken By the Other contains no dance music, and only a few moments that could be charitably described as danceable music.
“Feel the Night” starts the EP the same way that some great live sets end: with the synthesizers making a climactic final crescendo, falling apart, and melting into an ambient wash while the spotlights flash. Powell’s strobe-like synth quivers as Tillmans bellows, “Feel the night/Lose your pride.” As a singer, Tillmans doesn’t exactly shine, but his willingness to belt away feeds the album’s free-will energy. He plunges rudely into the final third of “Tone Me,” aggressively snapping the titular command—meant as a sendup of gym culture—after nearly four minutes of Powell’s dread-filled, arachnoid creep-up. On “Speak Out (Version),” he gratingly groans a generic call to arms, which Powell then spins into an inhuman, whirlwind drone, as if reaffirming their freedom to do whatever they want with a melody. “Rebuilding the Future” is a side step into humor, where Tillmans sounds like a water-damaged sales robot clamoring, “Rebuilding the future/Rebuilding the now!”—which sounds a little like something a text generator might write after analyzing transcripts from Apple’s product reveals.
Of Tillmans’ photographic work, the project that’s closest in spirit to Spoken By the Other might be “Sendeschluss/End of Broadcast,” his 2014 series of photograph of television static. The images appeared to be nothing more than the black-and-white chaos of a screen with no signal, but they also revealed swaths of color hiding in plain sight. On “Doucement,” especially, Tillman’s voice sounds subsumed by granular sound, which Powell seems to drop around him indiscriminately—two humans wandering freely through noise without a signal, just for the joy of it. For a fun, unencumbered, first-time collaboration, Spoken By the Other similarly harbors its fair share of color. | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | XL | November 30, 2018 | 6.8 | 91ae4c48-17df-4ebc-83f7-ee4cf709248a | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
With his gorgeous, cocksure flow and odd ear for beats, the Memphis rapper asserts his position as a singular rising star. | With his gorgeous, cocksure flow and odd ear for beats, the Memphis rapper asserts his position as a singular rising star. | Key Glock: Son of a Gun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-glock-son-of-a-gun/ | Son of a Gun | Memphis rapper Key Glock’s music exists in a world where extreme is normal. There’s no artificial binary between realism and mythos—everything feels right on the edge. On his new tape, Son of a Gun, which comes on the heels of February’s Yellow Tape, he offers more autobiographical flashes that span childhood to present day and veer from heartfelt to troubling. While the themes rarely expand beyond growing up, hustling, getting money, and buying ostentatious extravagances, the air-tight focus of his narratives and the richness of his language reveals a writer capable of detailed world building.
“Cream” parrots the Wu-Tang Clan’s song of almost the same name. Many have paid tribute to the Clan’s classic, but Glock brings his own self-assurance. Depicting a day in the life of a hustler, the 22-year-old describes rising out of bed, saying his prayers, and immediately counting his money. A declaration like, “Came up out the dirt, now I got diamonds around me” might feel overly worn but Glock balances it with funny wordplay: “And ever since I was ten, my best friend name was Ben/Franklin, nigga, what you thinkin’?” He rarely wanders beyond his narrow field of vision—there’s no room for guest rappers—but Glock’s delivery is confident enough to reinvigorate even the hoariest street-rap cliches.
Helping color in Glock’s universe is his unusual taste in beats. Son of a Gun is distinguished by a set of tightly wound instrumentals featuring booming drums, strange samples, and a level of murk that brings a noir atmosphere and high-art sheen to the proceedings. The classical-music sample of “Son of a Gun” and repetitive acoustic riff of “Money Talk” (both served up by frequent collaborator Bandplay) are among the most daring pieces of music Glock has ever spit over, but his flow—identifiably Memphis in its swagger—stays eternally loose, multidimensional, and dripping in a natural confidence that forces every beat to bend to his will.
Glock’s most potent showcase yet might well be “Rich Blessed N Savage.” He flows with a natural sense of melody that makes every bar gorgeous to the ear: “Bitch, I ball, it’s necessary/I’m cool as Ben & Jerry/If you don’t like me, blame my parents/Sit down if you can’t stand me.” The next step for this talented young spitter is to add some new colors to his palette, even if just in the form of mild updates to his current formula. Still, by staying fully attentive to the next dollar to be made, the current watch on his wrist, and the impending threat to his well being, Key Glock doubles down on his strengths on Son of a Gun, asserting his position as a singular rising star. | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paper Route Empire | June 23, 2020 | 7.4 | 91aeb5f2-1edf-4084-a0dd-1f64704c42b1 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
A boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown on which the Boss tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty, and unrest without sacrificing joy or release. | A boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown on which the Boss tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty, and unrest without sacrificing joy or release. | Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7729-we-shall-overcome-the-seeger-sessions/ | We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions | On paper, The Seeger Sessions seems like a terrible idea: traditional American folksongs paid hyper-reverent homage by one of rock'n'roll's most earnest performers, an attempt to transform campfire songs into sermons and anoint sweet, old, cord-cutting Pete Seeger high priest of Americana. Instead, this collection-- consisting of songs Seeger has sung, but none he's written-- is a boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown, conjured by a 12-man band (guitar, harmonica, tuba, violin, B3 organ, upright bass, banjo, piano, drums, accordion, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, and more) and a pack of grinning backup singers. Perhaps ironically, Bruce Springsteen-- one of America's most-adored songsmiths-- is soaring high on a record full of tracks other people wrote.
On The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen growls, warbles, groans, and gags, sounding often like Tom Waits (check the scratchy, ominous vocals on "Erie Canal") or later Bob Dylan. It's a stark contrast to Seeger's crisp, clear pipes, and it reinvigorates a handful of ancient American tracks. Like any good folk record, The Seeger Sessions tackles the tangle of war, strife, poverty, and unrest, but does so without sacrificing joy or release (really, the very reasons people began singing in the first place). The resulting collection happily drowns out echoes of Springsteen's underwhelming recent efforts, and just might be the very best and most inspiring album Bruce has produced in more than a decade*.*
Embracing early E Street shuffle and ditching the solemnity of 2005's Devils and Dust, The Seeger Sessions culls from a century of rich, gritty Americana tradition, from bluegrass to country to rhythm and blues to gospel, rock'n'roll, Zydeco, Dixieland, and more. Springsteen is an obvious descendent of folk tradition, but, as he writes in the record's liner notes, this is "street corner music, parlor music, tavern music, wilderness music, circus music, church music, gutter music." Or: The Seeger Sessions is a party record.
Clawing through Seeger's considerable catalogue, Springsteen ultimately selected a smart, varied, and cohesive smattering of songs, proving he retains a deep and nuanced understanding of folk tradition. In a recent New Yorker profile of Seeger, Springsteen talks about folk songs as tools with potential to become "righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness," and claims to have chosen this particular repertoire because, "Everything I wanted, I found there." Appropriately, Spingsteen's voice seems custom-made for tracks like "We Shall Overcome", where his signature gravity spreads shivers, destined to silence even the most jaded listeners with its convincing optimism. Written in 1905, "Erie Canal" (sealed comfortably in the consciousness of any kid born or raised in western New York), is ominous and hypnotizing, with banjo picks punctuated by organs, strings, and an unexpected Dixieland breakdown midway through-- it's not hard to imagine whole arenas shouting, "Low bridge, everybody down!"
The gorgeously explosive "O Mary Don't You Weep" cracks open with teasing fiddles, before horns and drums kick up and Springsteen's throaty shouts are rounded out by a bevy of backing singers, organs sliding in and out, a gloriously sloppy mélange of sound, as indebted to New Orleans as it is to Newport. Springteen's voice is gravelly and real, happily divorced from the overproduction and studio tweaking that plagues his recent work, and perfectly in sync with his band's raucous, gleeful pounding. Everyone here is loose and intoxicated, and nowhere else is the record's quasi-live conceit (the record was made in three day-long sessions, preceded by no rehearsals) as gloriously palpable.
Springsteen has a habit of folding current events into his songs without ever being specific enough to limit a verse to a single time and place. Unsurprisingly, that timelessness syncs up perfectly with the centuries-old songs on The Seeger Sessions, and, if nothing else, confirms that Bruce Springsteen was the right (and maybe only) person for this particular gig. Less an exhumation than a celebration, The Seeger Sessions is the best proof we've got that America's folksongs are also our finest artifacts. It's all here: recipes, prayers, promises, fears, hopes, and hollers. | 2006-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-04-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | April 23, 2006 | 8.5 | 91b03764-cead-45be-a7de-60f78171ed28 | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Mike Silver follows his underrated debut LP of mostly instrumental electro-pop and a scattershot remix EP with this more contemporary-feeling release. | Mike Silver follows his underrated debut LP of mostly instrumental electro-pop and a scattershot remix EP with this more contemporary-feeling release. | CFCF: The River EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14941-the-river-ep/ | The River EP | Mike Silver has left the bedroom and is now running up that South American hill. After an underrated 2009 debut LP of mostly instrumental electro-pop, Continent, followed by last year's slightly more scattershot Drifts remix EP, the Montreal producer known as CFCF takes inspiration for his latest from Fitzcarraldo, a 1982 Werner Herzog film about an Irish rubber baron who wants to build an opera in the Peruvian jungle-- but first must haul a riverboat up a small mountain. In keeping with its source, The River EP is cinematic, slow-paced, and more organic-sounding than previous CFCF releases, almost a mini-soundtrack in its own right.
There are still moments of remarkable beauty here, but you have to wade a little bit deeper to find them. The River is at its best when its productions feel most contemporary. See "Frozen Forest", with its Fever Ray-frosty synths, José González-hued acoustic guitar, and R&B slow-jam breakbeats. Another standout is the six-and-half-minute title track, all panpipe-like synths and urgent tribal pounding until a sudden, exhilarating crescendo that might evoke the image of Fitzcarraldo's vessel finally cresting-- and tumbling-- over the hillside. Elsewhere, the EP's more directly nostalgic tracks, whether the krautrock chorale of "Upon the Hill" (which distinctly recalls Popol Vuh's soundtrack for Herzog's film) or the opening and closing ambient synth pieces, are no less elegant and foreboding, though they do tend to drag. For whatever it's worth, you won't find any of the movie's signature Caruso arias.
Like Fitzcarraldo itself, The River EP isn't a perfect, unified statement. The digital bonus version (included with vinyl purchases) swells to more than 50 minutes-- longer than many albums-- and includes two epic "Frozen Forest" remixes. Luckily, both Brooklyn producer/DJ Jacques Renault's no-guitars house rework and UK Balearic duo Coyote's elastic scrawl are rewarding enough in isolation. A catchy, concise remix of hypnotic ambient trip "It Was Never Meant to Be This Way" by Games, the duo of Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin and Tiger City's Joel Ford, similarly amps up the dancefloor potential. On the other hand, a big part of Fitzcarraldo's appeal is that its director was as mad as its protagonist, filming his story on location and without special effects. "It's a land which God, if he exists, has created in anger," Herzog would later say. CFCF has wrought a fine and auspicious record about that land, but something is missing; you can't hear the place itself. In more ways than one, The River EP seems like a transitional effort. | 2011-01-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-01-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rvng Intl. | January 6, 2011 | 6.8 | 91b0af6e-0657-44cd-a7f8-2d0b5f26e9df | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Solar Motel Band leader Chris Forsyth strikes a near-perfect balance between ’70s rock tradition and present-day experimentation with his signature guitar tone. | Solar Motel Band leader Chris Forsyth strikes a near-perfect balance between ’70s rock tradition and present-day experimentation with his signature guitar tone. | Chris Forsyth and the Solar Motel Band: The Rarity of Experience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21753-the-rarity-of-experience/ | The Rarity of Experience | Ten years ago, Chris Forsyth was a very different type of guitar player. As a member of the Brooklyn trio PSI (later Peeesseye), he traded in scratches and scrapes — abstract and confrontational tones that punctuated the group's eerie improvisations. Their shows involved a certain amount of shock and awe, particularly when murmurs turned to shrieks and moody drones gave way to shrill distortion. I recall one band member walking out of a set to antagonize patrons in an adjoining bar while wearing a kind of percussive poncho that clattered as he walked. Some of those people might have cast an ear towards Forsyth's alien-sounding techniques and wondered if the guitarist had any "real" riffs.
He does. Forsyth's work in Solar Motel Band leaves no doubt that he is a shredder of the highest order. The Philadelphia-based quartet, which the guitarist has led since 2013, draws its core inspiration from the more transcendent guitar music of the 1970s. Their largely instrumental music sounds at once meticulously composed and entirely spontaneous, the product of some miracle jam session with no bum notes or wasted moments.
The Rarity of Experience is Solar Motel Band's richest set of compositions to date. The record is laid out — perhaps not unintentionally — like a stellar Grateful Dead bootleg, beginning with concise songs and moving toward long-form, improvisatory drift. At times, like on album centerpiece "High Castle Rock," the band is urgent and energetic. For ten minutes, Forsyth and guitarist Nick Mellevoi are in sustained ascent, modulating through a seemingly endless supply of melodies and patiently pushing towards an extended solo-driven climax. Majestic and intense, the song is an appropriate spiritual sequel to Television's epic "Marquee Moon." On "Harmonious Dance," the band is serene and vibey, couching jammy ambience with swooning chords. "The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues" channels Neil Young & Crazy Horse, but between its beefed-up percussion and increasingly unhinged brass, there's a bit of Agharta/Pangaea-era Miles Davis in there, too.
Solar Motel's ability to drift and improvise is an important part of what distinguishes the band from other contemporary guitar-oriented instrumental groups. Go-to post-rock bands like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky tend to eschew individual identity. Their compositions are about accumulation – the gradual build-up of voices, tones, and volume in an effort to generate a monolithic emotional peak. Solar Motel Band's music is more concerned with nuance and interplay, a dialogue between the players. On The Rarity of Experience, a certain amount of noodling is permitted. The destination is often a crescendo, but not always.
In a first for Solar Motel Band, Forsyth provides vocals for a handful of songs on The Rarity of Experience. These are beneficial in that they offer a change of scenery amid large stretches of guitar chatter. As a singer, though, he sounds only half-committed and more than a little self-conscious. On the band's cover of Richard Thompson's "Calvary Cross," Forsyth's delivery is muted. The lines are dutifully muttered in order to set up the good part, the solos — which do not disappoint. As a guitarist, Forsyth has a clear and immediately identifiable voice. His tones and melodies are familiar yet fresh, at once embodying grace and freakiness, tradition and experimentation, the past and the present. | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | No Quarter | March 17, 2016 | 7.7 | 91b53395-3671-4b6e-b37c-1923608f2023 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
After the death of guitarist Thomas Fekete last year, Surfer Blood return with an album shadowed by grief. Paradoxically, it’s their sunniest and loosest record in years. | After the death of guitarist Thomas Fekete last year, Surfer Blood return with an album shadowed by grief. Paradoxically, it’s their sunniest and loosest record in years. | Surfer Blood: Snowdonia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22842-snowdonia/ | Snowdonia | Surfer Blood’s fourth album Snowdonia arrives with something the band hasn’t experienced in a long time: good will. After frontman John Paul Pitts’ 2012 arrest for domestic battery instantly transformed the band from potential indie-rock mainstays into permanently damaged goods, he at times seemed to carry on the group out of sheer spite. Their 2013 album Pythons opened with him eating literal sour grapes and only got nastier from there; listeners understandably steered clear of it. Even the fans who jumped off the band’s surf board long ago, however, had to feel for the group last year when they lost guitarist Thomas Fekete to stomach cancer. He was only 27 years old. Snowdonia may be the closest Surfer Blood gets to a second chance, and it poses a test for Pitts: Can he really be the kind of frontman that listeners empathize with, and maybe even care for, again?
He certainly puts his best face forward. There’s no trace of opportunism on Snowdonia—no bitterness, no self-pity, no overstatement of grief. Instead, Pitts uses the terrible circumstances as a chance for reinvention. With a shuffled lineup that includes new guitarist Michael McCleary and bassist Lindsey Mills, whose harmony vocals lend welcome warmth to the record, he recasts Surfer Blood as the kinder, gentler guitar-pop band they might have been better off trying to be a couple album cycles ago. It’s their calmest record, a relaxed, sunny outing pitched at the same volume as The Feelies’ casual late ’80s LPs.
This is not the same Pitts who blasted through walls, sledgehammers swinging, on “Swim,” nor is he the same bitter soul who played the victim so passive-aggressively on Pythons. He sounds about 90 anger management sessions removed from that guy, and the lyrics are peppered with promises that he’s a changed man. “Thought I had a corroded heart/Oxidizing, torn apart/Now you’re starting it up yet again,” he sings, brimming with hope on the Inverted World-esque “Dino Jay.” And rather than reaching for that bowl of sour grapes again, “Matter of Time” opens the album with an assurance that Pitts’ aim is true this time: “In a world so full of murky intentions, we’ll make ourselves a home.” He’s really trying to make the best of things, he insists.
Given the circumstances, Snowdonia is a surprisingly light album. With its paisley guitars and Sunday drive tempos, many listeners would be hard pressed to even locate the grief on first listen. It’s a nifty trick that the song that most directly touches on Fekete’s death is also the album’s most mirthful: “Six Flags in F or G” builds from a “Rock Lobster” tempo to a confetti burst of Mamas and the Papas-style sunshine pop before signing off with some Wowee Zowee guitar scribbles. Instead of making a big display of their bereavement, they pay tribute to their friend with some sounds he always enjoyed. A similarly sweet pragmatism carries through closer “Carrier Pigeon,” a heartbreaker he wrote after his mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. He responds not by cursing the cruel hand, but constructively, with an appreciation for the woman who always looked out for him and his sister: “I know you swam upstream for most of your life, dodging the grizzlies.” He’s never sounded closer to the songwriter we were promised on Astro Coast.
So does Snowdonia mark a redemption for a once toxic band? As with all issues surrounding the art/artist divide, it’s not so clear cut. One tactful album can’t buy a musician forgiveness any more than it can erase the pain of losing a loved one. And in truth, Snowdonia probably isn't a flashy enough album to re-spark significant interest in the band anyway. At their early peak, this group had a serious wow factor; now they're mostly setting out for modest pleasures. For the first time in five years, though, this band has a reason to exist, and possibly even a path forward. It’s Surfer Blood’s first album since their debut that doesn’t invite you to think about what could have been. It simply makes the most of what is. | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | February 10, 2017 | 6.9 | 91b709f7-7d30-4e09-90ca-c7a7dd6874f5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
On the Detroit rapper’s newest tape, lean and mean stories from the drug game take shape against ominous beats and inspired references. | On the Detroit rapper’s newest tape, lean and mean stories from the drug game take shape against ominous beats and inspired references. | Los: War on Drugs 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-war-on-drugs-2/ | War on Drugs 2 | With his husky voice and murky selection of beats that sound best when the sky is gray, Los brings hard-boiled chronicles of Detroit’s underworld to life. In the west side-bred rapper’s tales of the drug game, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Lexington are regular pit stops; American-made SUVs and minivans are the preferred mode of transportation; and the grind never stops. His distinctly suffocating world-building has ear-to-the-street rappers in cities like Rochester (Rx Papi), D.C. (Paco Panama), and Tallahassee (Wizz Havinn) trying to capture their own regionally specific renderings.
Each mixtape Los drops, whether solo or with brother Nutty, further fleshes out this ominous milieu. On his newest project, War on Drugs 2, the sounds of television news clips and encroaching police sirens make the urgent mood clear. Los has enough stories to fill a coffee table book, but they’re almost always delivered in loose, bite-sized vignettes. “Lying 2 You” is a compact collage of sequences: the demise of a short-lived romance, the seedy alleyways where Los and his crew hang out for business purposes, the Ohio State frat houses where they move their product. The Blaxploitation-era funk of “Hip Hop Shit” is a slight step outside his comfort zone, but it gives Los’ descriptions of neighborhood turmoil the type of vivid montage treatment that characterizes so many of the dark and unforgiving flicks of that era, like Across 110th Street and Truck Turner.
A handful of other tracks on War on Drugs 2 expand what a Los song can sound like without feeling out of character. On “Priceless,” his weathered anecdotes of sleepless nights and 5 a.m. phone calls are a bit routine but don’t lose any steam thanks to Dat Boi Will’s G-funk synths. On “Cant Stop,” he rips a freestyle over a time capsule of a beat from Philly group the Young Gunz’s 2003 single, and though he leans on punchlines, those punchlines are pretty damn good: “Getting off pounds, welcome to my weight journey.” From the Young Gunz freestyle to a clever Boosie reference on the hard-hitting “Back 2 Ballin” to a Beanie Sigel namedrop on the breezy Topside-produced “Kick Game,” the tape nods to some of Los’ musical touchpoints, beyond the obvious: 2000s Atlanta trap, late-’90s New Orleans, Doughboyz Cashout-era Detroit.
The next step for Los is to thread together the vignettes into a full story. On “I 75,” a reference to the interstate highway that connects Michigan with Miami, he starts off hot, like he’s about to take off on one of those tense drives across state lines that he sometimes hints at—much like his brother Nutty’s “The Ride.” But after a few seconds, Los drops the thought and moves on to typical shit talk. You can see the potential for more ambitious storytelling, for narratives that last beyond a couplet or two. Still, within these tight frames, he is one of rap’s most economical storytellers right now. “I’m the type to put the marble floors in the vacant,” he barks on “Renovated,” and that’s all you need to picture a man trying to patch up his crooked past now that he’s finally got a little bread: pages of exposition in just one bar. | 2023-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Daisy Lane | July 27, 2023 | 7.3 | 91b910f7-c55a-43c8-b51f-7e1ce3ab54df | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Bronx-born DJ melds genres at breakneck speed on a disconsolate and deeply personal breakup record. | The Bronx-born DJ melds genres at breakneck speed on a disconsolate and deeply personal breakup record. | Joey LaBeija: TEARS IN MY HENNESSY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joey-labeija-tears-in-my-hennessy/ | TEARS IN MY HENNESSY | Bronx-born Joey LaBeija is a homegrown New York DJ, with diverse taste reflecting his city’s disparate communities. He’s a known quantity on the queer nightlife circuit—he previously co-hosted the defunct Techno Cumbia party, which put on shows by Bbymutha and LSDXOXO—and in his punkish, winking vision of club music, there is equal space for dembow, ballroom, rave, and techno. His first LP, 2016’s moody Shattered Dreams, slowed down the tempo to ruminate on themes of loss and death, rendering much of the music nondescript in the process. Luckily, LaBeija’s club bona fides are more discernible on TEARS IN MY HENNESSY, a breakup record on which he vacillates between sinewy club workouts and synth ballads to seek deliverance from a deteriorating relationship.
As its melodramatic title suggests, TEARS finds LaBeija in a miserable headspace, self-medicating with alcohol and sex so as to not face the end of a crumbling romance with his boyfriend. LaBeija translates this heartache best when he writes in vivid, blunt terms; there’s brutal clarity to a line like “the way you fuck me feels like charity,” as he vents on the queasy, psychosexual synth centerpiece “charity.” Capped off by an extended garage breakdown, the song is an example of LaBeija firing on all cylinders, melding genres at breakneck speed à la his DJ sets while still carving out space for his own deeply personal revelations and experiences.
That tendency, however, doesn’t extend to all of TEARS. “dial up affection” chugs over stuttering programmed beats, with LaBeija’s voice pitched up demonically high as he compares personal issues to computer errors. (Even with a Vocoder, no one can convincingly sell the stilted technobabble that is “Gateway timeout/Bandwidth limit exceeded/Time to force quit/All our pages are freezing.”) He one-ups it instantly with “simulated love,” which similarly pitch-shifts his voice for a paranoid club song that zeroes in on a simpler lyrical conceit: “Why do you wanna play with my emotions?/Simulated love just going through the motions.” Blown up in size with airhorn synths and twitchy beats, the song reshapes his frantic, increasing paranoia to better effect.
TEARS succeeds elsewhere as well: The sawing industrial morass that envelops “wait” resembles Yves Tumor’s seething experimentation. He even recruits mid-’00s twin sister duo Nina Sky for the hook on R&B cut “dry your eyes,” amid skyward synth lines and pulsing 808s. And on the comparatively upbeat closer “animosity,” he seems to finally find a way out, offering up a bittersweet sense of altruism: “There is no animosity/Over your curiosity/You gotta do what’s best for you/So baby I’ma set you free.” It’s a generous outlook that sees him finally at peace, and the off-balance, rubbery synths and club-ready drums behind him reflect the changing mood. LaBeija may have lingering scars to carry, but on TEARS he wears them like armor: durable and, in their own way, life-saving. | 2019-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Coming for Blood | June 17, 2019 | 6.8 | 91b93f2a-1566-40b7-a786-0de483b5b859 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Collecting the hits alongside parts of Queen’s rapturous 1985 Live Aid set, this soundtrack mirrors its movie in reflecting the band’s inability to move on. | Collecting the hits alongside parts of Queen’s rapturous 1985 Live Aid set, this soundtrack mirrors its movie in reflecting the band’s inability to move on. | Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/queen-bohemian-rhapsody-ost/ | Bohemian Rhapsody OST | Queen have now existed longer as a band without Freddie Mercury than with him. Mercury died on November 24, 1991, 20 years after he joined guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. May and Taylor have kept the Queen brand alive for more than the quarter-century since, even shedding bassist John Deacon in 1997, or after it became clear that the reunion inspired by recording to the sounds of Mercury’s unused vocal tracks for 1995’s Made in Heaven was not a passing phase. Queen have toured with Mercury replacements, from former Free and Bad Company vocalist Paul Rodgers (essentially, Mercury’s antithesis) to able Mercury emulator and “American Idol” runner-up Adam Lambert. Absent another studio album, they have instead churned out archival releases, attempting to celebrate Mercury’s music while continuing without him. During his lifetime, Mercury saw the release of just two Queen compilations; there have since been at least a dozen. Here’s another one—the essentially extraneous soundtrack to Bohemian Rhapsody.
Queen’s tension between the ever-present past and the actual present provides the key to the problems around the making of the new Bohemian Rhapsody, positioned as a fictionalized film about Queen’s history but largely understood as a Mercury biopic. After being cast as Mercury, Sacha Baron Cohen pulled out of the project following three years of development. He claimed that the surviving Queen members wished to sanitize an often-lurid story and that the plan called for the singer to die mid-movie, so the film would become a portrait of a band that “carries on from strength to strength.”
Queen denied Cohen’s contention, but the anecdote crystallizes the inherent problem with the band after Mercury, anyway: They’re still trading on the glories they achieved with the late singer, forever living in his shadow. Whenever punters stepped up for a performance, they were paying tribute to the dearly departed with the fellow faithful. Whenever fans bought a live album (six between 2004 and 2016 alone), the recordings functioned as a substitute for never being able to see Mercury in concert. Whenever the faithful purchased a box set (again, five since 1992, plus four volumes of the Singles Collection), they were reviving memories of the first time they fell in love with an actual Queen LP. For decades, being a current Queen fan has meant accepting that the group’s glory days effectively ended with Mercury’s death.
As both a film and a soundtrack, Bohemian Rhapsody reveals that even Queen have abandoned the notion that they exist outside of Mercury’s gravitational pull. The pivot becomes clear through the decision to end the film’s narrative when Queen achieved their last international triumph—when they stole the show at Live Aid in 1985. By ending on this emotional beat, the film avoids the messiness of depicting a bunch of survivors carrying on year after year, achieving a perfectly honorable but dramatically dull balance. This means the soundtrack also contains portions of that stellar Live Aid performance, the one noteworthy Queen set to not previously make it to disc. Their power at that moment owed, in no small part, to the fact that they were playing to a captivated crowd in their hometown of London and not the States, where they were considered passé by 1985.
Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is. This isn’t a slight against the source material, which balances standards like “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Under Pressure” with a few more unreleased live cuts and a handful of tracks assembled for the film. But only one of those surprises: “Doing All Right” is resurrected from Smile, May and Taylor’s band before they linked with Mercury. Original Smile singer Tim Staffell leads this re-recording, a mini-suite that revives the spacy 1970s, complete with hippie harmonies and a pastoral midsection that culminates in headbanging. It’s early Zeppelin in miniature.
The familiar favorites get some cinematic contours in this sequence. The album opens with a cheeky take on the “20th Century Fox Fanfare” with signature May fuzz and ends on the dual rallying calls of “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “The Show Must Go On.” But after a quarter-century spent recycling a catalog again and again, such attempts at flair deliver no actual pizzazz. At a certain point, everything that could be said about Queen has been said. Maybe that point is now. Not even a splashy movie can change that stone cold fact. | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Virgin | October 25, 2018 | 4.5 | 91c38a1d-bdda-4ac6-94b8-e88c4e4ba2e6 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
A low-pressure psych-rock jam session between Canadian artists Yves Jarvis and Romy Lightman produces a few happy accidents and a lot of aimless experimentation. | A low-pressure psych-rock jam session between Canadian artists Yves Jarvis and Romy Lightman produces a few happy accidents and a lot of aimless experimentation. | Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band: Banned | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lightman-jarvis-ecstatic-band-banned/ | Banned | When Romy Lightman and Yves Jarvis’ voices fall into harmony on “Olamim”—the opening track on Banned, their first album as the duo Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band—they sound at ease, like they’re on familiar ground. Which makes sense: Banned was recorded at the Tree Museum, an outdoor, installation-style gallery spanning 200 acres in Ontario, and neither Jarvis nor Lightman is a stranger to the property. Jarvis’ last solo record, Sundry Rock Song Stock, was made there; Lightman’s aunt co-founded the museum. Plus, as romantic partners, nor are the pair strangers to each other.
Lightman is half of the Toronto folk duo Tasseomancy, and Jarvis is the stage name of Montreal’s one-man psych-pop outfit Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet. Recorded over two weeks—Lightman plays synthesizer, Jarvis plays guitar, both sing—Banned is an experimental, largely improvised attempt to blend the two’s musical impulses. The results are closer to Jarvis’ more far-flung reference points: acid-rock, sound collage, surrealist folk. Lightman once described the couple’s approach to the collaboration as a “non-approach,” and Jarvis has called the album a “waste product” of sessions that were primarily a means for them to connect with each other. Naturally, Banned is a bit of a hodgepodge, a collection of wayward sounds and textures built by happenstance rather than intention.
Sometimes their experiments pay off: “Red Champa” pairs a distorted vocal sample with a rhythmic steel drum loop to charming effect, while the percussion in “Elastic Band” pitter-patters satisfyingly over itself. Tracks tend to pick up in their latter halves, as though after some trial and error the elements finally click into place. But just as often, Banned is a free-associative exercise that seems to demand little commitment from the artists. Meandering instrumentals often dissolve into shapelessness—for instance, “Ein Sof,” built from a staccato bass loop and randomly strummed acoustic guitar, wears out its welcome long before its three minutes are up. Elsewhere, cut-and-paste lyrics just evoke scrawled bathroom-wall graffiti. Phrases like “toxic masculinity,” “a sacred BPM of 69,” and “cums” are tossed out at random to little more than gimmicky effect. Not helping matters is the fact that Jarvis sings with an academic indifference, as though he were reading from a dictionary. It can seem like the duo is trying both too hard and not hard enough.
Banned is stronger when the pair sound more invested, when the songs feel more composed and can unspool without as many distractions. In “Recurring Theme,” Jarvis pleads, against a low and ominous cello, “I am fighting/I don’t wanna fight,” with a quivering desperation while Lightman intones limberly along. And after four minutes of splattered words and chaotic drum hits, it’s a relief when “Stomach Pit” breaks into a lovely singalong chorus: “Old ways broken and in front of me/I feel the beauty of love/Deep in the pit of my stomach.”
The record’s most compelling tracks are the ones that put Lightman and Jarvis’ hearts a little more on display, when they exploit the tension in their own relationship. In “Elastic Band,” they enact a lover’s quarrel alongside a jaunty bassline, while in standout track “Nymphea,” they sing to each other over gentle acoustic strums and a wash of synths: “Yes there’s always surprises, my love/To sustain excitement in love.” And in these moments, it almost doesn’t matter that we are on the outside, hopelessly peering in.
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. | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | July 26, 2021 | 6.2 | 91c5901b-f827-409c-aefe-538a1e7c24e3 | Kelly Liu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kelly-liu/ | |
CCFX is the filmic dream pop collaboration of Mary Jane Dunphe (Vexx, CC Dust) and members of Olympia band Trans FX. Their EP for DFA Records is brought to life by Dunphe’s visceral, magnetic vocals. | CCFX is the filmic dream pop collaboration of Mary Jane Dunphe (Vexx, CC Dust) and members of Olympia band Trans FX. Their EP for DFA Records is brought to life by Dunphe’s visceral, magnetic vocals. | CCFX: CCFX EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ccfx-ccfx-ep/ | CCFX EP | Despite their aesthetic overlaps, CCFX is formed around an odd couple of sorts. On the one hand, you have Chris McDonnell of Olympia band Trans FX—an artist methodically studied in writing romantic noir at its most evocative. In the three-part film that accompanied Trans FX’s 2016 album The Clearing, there are shots of goths dancing through tall grass, a kid in a Thrasher shirt smiling shyly in a backseat, silhouettes lounging languidly under a tree while the sky glows an apocalyptic pink. McDonnell is clearly well-versed in sex and death and cigarette poetry, but the ooze of it can feel almost too smooth, until Mary Jane Dunphe arrives to trouble it.
Dunphe—of driving punk outfit Vexx, and minimal wave pop duo CC Dust—is a visceral, magnetic artist, known for her lurching vocals and hyper-embodied performance style. From Iggy Pop to Priests’ Katie Alice Greer, punk’s most memorable front-people affect a sort of sinister simper, inviting the audience’s gaze only to shatter it. In Vexx’s live videos, Dunphe snarls, flails, shakes, taunts, and preens her way into this legacy, while leaving room to actually dance, to let a song move her as a participant, not just an architect. Accordingly, whether she’s riding out the storm of a Vexx show or dancing life into an oft-bloodless new wave tradition in CC Dust, her voice absolutely writhes.
Dunphe and McDonnell have collaborated elsewhere, like on the Lucinda Williams-styled country group the County Liners, but, as the name suggests, CCFX is a true marriage of their projects, rounded out by David Jaques and Mirče Popovic. McDonnell’s cinematic compositions create an atmosphere of lush, nostalgic melancholia while Dunphe explores more subdued vocal styles. Their first collaborations, “Ode” and “2Tru,” appear here as B-sides. On “Ode,” the most narrative moment on the EP, Dunphe and McDonnell’s voices intertwine in an elegy for female isolation under late capitalism. Dunphe moves from the abstract (“Locked up and closeted/No time to heal/Its solitude that shines a light but isolation kills”) to the howling personal (“I want to go to work/I want to live my life”) with a clarity framed by crisp beats held over from its inception as a CC Dust track. Conversely, in “2Tru,” written by Popovic (also of Trans FX), Dunphe’s hushed fragments are carried away on waves of thick shoegaze, becoming another instrument in a mix of droning guitar and textured helicopter synths. It’s deceptively simple, but it has a way of staying with you: Who here hasn’t wanted to fight the ocean?
The first half of the EP is more integrated. “Venetian Screens,” anchored by a swaying, swaggering bassline, nods to the best of gothic dream pop. Dunphe turns down to a melodic croon, the line “I never said a word that’s real/In my head/Like a melody” set as a near-direct analogue to Annie Lennox’s “Here comes the rain again/Falling on my head like a memory.” The second half dissolves gushing into a too-brief fully-Cocteau Twins coda, vox cascading in feathered layers.
The true standout is opener “The One to Wait,” a circular track that captures the iridescent limbo between leaving and staying—an abyss that tends to open quietly in small insular towns such as CCFX’s Olympia, dislodging people from their scenes and pulling them into the sky, or at least to New York or L.A. or a land project in rural anywhere. Dunphe’s vocals gulp air, sometimes breathy, sometimes breathless. “The choice was made for me/Now I don’t know when I should leave,” she sings, drawing out the last note, letting it dip grotesquely, until it catches in her throat like the choice itself. As Dunphe hashes out the moral value of transience versus permanence (“Is it right to stay? Is home a trap and growth a phase?”), McDonnell strings together melody after melody on airy, jangling guitar and warm, nostalgic synths straight out of a John Hughes soundtrack. It’s a track that begs for a hazy party scene, the main character moving slowly through a crowded house or dark club, fashion goths swaying to the steady padded breakbeats, lights fading in and out with the synths—bright but always a little sad.
McDonnell is elusive when it comes to press; Dunphe, even more so. With that, the circumstances around the CCFX EP remain undefined. But with all its thematic mourning and yearning for truth, it feels born out of a moment of change. That change is present in how the EP’s ebbs feel as poignant as its swells, in Dunphe’s triumph as she sings “and you know that I will miss you/but I’m selling everything,” and all the mundanity and ecstasy of such a choice. | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | DFA | October 25, 2017 | 7.5 | 91c77c1b-423d-4d21-8634-80ec22036b4e | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
Jazz piano shredder Craig Taborn is a compositional force on his new quartet album. From the LP’s grand design to its smallest quirks, Taborn and his bandmates make the music gently rage. | Jazz piano shredder Craig Taborn is a compositional force on his new quartet album. From the LP’s grand design to its smallest quirks, Taborn and his bandmates make the music gently rage. | Craig Taborn: Daylight Ghosts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22848-daylight-ghosts/ | Daylight Ghosts | If invitations to jam can give any hint of a musician’s reputation, then Craig Taborn has to be one of the most admired jazz pianists in the world. He’s released a handful of albums under his own name, beginning with a hard-to-find 1994 debut on the DIW label. But Taborn has been featured in a sideman role on a stunning array of sessions. Of late, he has delivered vigorous free-improv work alongside Art Ensemble of Chicago co-founder Roscoe Mitchell. And he has also played some of John Zorn’s most lyrical pieces in a trio that included the fiercely swinging bassist Christian McBride.
Central to Taborn’s wide appeal is the way he can thread “free jazz” style playing inside more conventional structures. A knowledge of funk and electronic music informs his ability to create catchy, short vamps, in the midst of otherwise frenetic solos. In his original compositions, Taborn’s playing has an exquisite rightness—even during the most out-there passages. If he starts playing motifs in different meters, in each hand, it’s not because he’s in a particular hurry to show off his chops. When a rush of tricky rhythm hits, it’s clear that the tune has been building toward that density. The fact that Taborn can shift into this experimental high gear so casually helps keep his music feeling poised and approachable.
Since signing to ECM earlier this decade, Taborn’s output as a leader has ticked up in pace a bit. A 2011 solo piano album, both impressionistic and intense in character, served as his label debut. A trio record of subtle heat followed in 2013. The peaks of bash that Taborn produces elsewhere were mostly absent on those outings. (It’s not a complete surprise, given ECM’s focus on serene aesthetics.) The trend continues on Taborn’s new quartet album, Daylight Ghosts, but on this occasion, he sets a quixotic challenge for himself. The pianist and his bandmates find ways to make the music sound raging despite the moderate dynamic levels.
Opening track “The Shining One” creates drama through jagged switches. To start, drummer Dave King—most famous for his work in the Bad Plus—teases listeners with a brief solo groove. Then he’s gone, leaving Taborn and tenor saxophonist Chris Speed to voice the piece’s winding, long-lined theme together. When the rhythm section comes back in, the beat is free. Taborn dives with precision over the keyboard during his solo, while Speed rephrases portions of the main hook, rooting the performance.
The contrasts here—between fixed and free rhythms, between melody and cacophony—are wild. Still, the group’s collective touch remains gentle, sublime. As they eventually converge on a beat that recalls King’s opening, there’s a sense that the music is fulfilling an inevitable destiny. This all happens in three and a half minutes: an economy of duration that is rare in exploratory modern jazz.
Nothing else on Daylight Ghosts repeats this pattern, though several other tracks manage to be equally surprising. On “Ancient,” an introductory solo from bassist Chris Lightcap has a solemn spirituality. The rest of the ensemble enters gingerly—yet by the end of the tune, they’re all engaged in an ecstatic group dance. The title track’s initial chorus and solos sound bummed out beyond belief; soon, the cloistered vibe gives way to a minimalist theme that suggests rising spirits. “Abandoned Reminder” is driven by noir sonics before a Taborn riff puts the tempo into urgent overdrive. On “The Great Silence,” Speed switches to clarinet—and Taborn’s arrangement responds to the reed player’s lustrous tone with an electronic percussion part.
In between those unpredictable statements, Taborn provides a few palette-cleansers that are more direct. “Jamaican Farewell,” his cover of a Roscoe Mitchell ballad, is handled gorgeously, as the bandleader oversees a slight electronic sheen. And “New Glory” doesn’t shroud its intentions at all. It’s simply an uptempo shot of Taborn’s gift for joyous, funk-inspired riffing—as well as a look at his ability to ornament a catchy melody for as long as he wants.
The final cut, “Phantom Ratio,” is a fitting capstone for an album with this much range. The lengthy track features droning tones that would fit in well in a concert of contemporary-classical chamber music, but it’s also driven by an electronic keyboard loop. This is the sort of fractured, almost-danceable motif that Taborn has occasionally toyed with since his influential 2004 fusion album Junk Magic. Here, the stylistic distance from vintage IDM trends is greater. A brief electronic percussion pulse rounds out the performance—and the album—much as a brief hit of King’s acoustic drumming started things off. From its grand design down to its smallest quirks, Daylight Ghosts shows that Taborn is much more than an elite jazz piano shredder. He’s a compositional force, as well. | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | ECM | February 16, 2017 | 8.2 | 91c86915-c572-44a0-ae4c-4c5dd32b6b7d | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The Wilco drummer returns with an album of pieces influenced by classical minimalism, including a work writen for the Kronos Quartet. Where his previous albums foregrounded himself as a virtuoso performer, Adventureland is about Kotche as a composer first and foremost. | The Wilco drummer returns with an album of pieces influenced by classical minimalism, including a work writen for the Kronos Quartet. Where his previous albums foregrounded himself as a virtuoso performer, Adventureland is about Kotche as a composer first and foremost. | Glenn Kotche: Adventureland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19123-glenn-kotche-adventureland/ | Adventureland | Glenn Kotche is best known as the drummer of Wilco 2.0, the rebel whose junk metal thwacks and snaking marimba lines on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” heralded the beginning of the band’s most creatively fertile period. He also once played the Four Tops on faucets in a Delta commercial. But even before his tenure with Tweedy in Wilco and Loose Fur, Kotche wrote and performed contemporary classical music. His previous albums of original works foregrounded himself as a virtuoso performer, but on Adventureland, a new collection of pieces for chamber ensembles, he’s a composer first and foremost.
As a percussionist writing music based around the obsessive repetition of small, pulsating melodic cells, Kotche automatically puts himself in the shadow of Steve Reich, even quoting the elder composer on “Clapping Music Variations” and “Individual Trains” from 2006’s Mobile. But though he constructs his work from similar building blocks to Reich’s, the pivot points in Kotche’s pieces are more frequent and jarring. He roughens minimalism around the edges and speeds up its action, forcing the listener to adapt quickly to constant metrical changes.
“The Haunted Suite”, the better of the two large works that make up the bulk of Adventureland, is full of these unexpected turns of phrase. Kotche works in his area of greatest expertise, writing for a horde of pitched and unpitched percussion instruments and two pianos. Each movement in “The Haunted Suite” focuses on a different eerie, real-life location, and the shifting scenery inspires radical musical contrasts. The acerbic “The Haunted Furnace” evokes the ruins of a steel mill in Alabama, and takes a page out of the book of the early 20th-century American composer Henry Cowell’s uncanny, tone-cluster-ridden piano music. Similarly herky-jerky rhythms and dissonances arise in the lively “The Haunted Dance”, but the piece is much more restrained dynamically, channeling Indonesian gamelan music. The “Haunted Hive” moment is a percussion-only piece which, unlike the other sections, deals entirely in ambient, sometimes onomatopoeic sound.
In “Anomaly”, a larger-scale work originally written for and performed by the Kronos Quartet, Kotche adopts a less diverse approach. His liner notes mention that some of the piece’s sections were composed on drum kit; it makes sense, then, that the metrical patterns are its most interesting elements. Unfortunately, the actual pitched material often feels like an afterthought, and it's certainly a bit too familiar, coming across like movie-soundtrack-ready pseudo-minimalism with a pop harmonic sensibility. It’s also too bad that Kotche doesn’t further embrace the possibilities of his chosen instruments, considering he has the world’s premier avant-garde string quartet at his disposal. Unusual string timbres arise only briefly, elsewhere on the album, in the muted middle section of the collage piece “Triple Fantasy”.
So the most compelling section of “Anomaly” is the first, one that Kotche realized electronically instead of with the quartet. The dizzying melodic counterpoint is rendered on what sounds like a water-damaged version of Thom Yorke’s Rhodes on “Everything in its Right Place”, and fractured increasingly by electronic manipulation. This treatment provides the piece with the textural interest that its other sections lack; it’s the one moment where Kotche embraces the noise, grit and incidental sounds which amplify his best work, from his free improvisational recordings to “Ashes of American Flags”. | 2014-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | March 27, 2014 | 7.2 | 91cc12fc-2b1c-4c4a-9de2-c2df8a0184ad | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
A collection of George Gershwin interpretations by the avant-jazz legend traces his roots in the swing era, fleshing out a seldom-heard side of the astral voyager. | A collection of George Gershwin interpretations by the avant-jazz legend traces his roots in the swing era, fleshing out a seldom-heard side of the astral voyager. | Sun Ra: Sun Ra Plays Gershwin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-ra-sun-ra-plays-gershwin/ | Sun Ra Plays Gershwin | “Calling planet Earth,” sings Herman Blount, aka Le Sony’r Ra aka Sun Ra, less than 10 minutes into the 1980 documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise: “I am a different order of being.” Decked out in splotchy face paint, a purple wig, flowing robes, and a crown, and surrounded by a large ensemble of similarly costumed musicians honking, moaning, and screeching away, he makes you inclined to believe him. Though born in May 1914, Blount claimed a spiritual rebirth occasioned by an interplanetary, out-of-body journey to Saturn at some point in his early adult life. This is the image most people probably think of when they think of Sun Ra: the cosmic seer behind mid-1970s classics Space Is the Place and Lanquidity, a kind of ur-freak that all aspiring weirdos duly give props to.
Beyond these gateway LPs, however, lies a vast and daunting expanse of recordings that stretches from highly experimental group pieces to novelty songs to solo piano works. A generation older than the free-jazz players he would influence and often employ in his Arkestra, Ra had his roots in the swing era of the 1930s. He never really shed the influence, which is detailed on this compilation of George Gershwin interpretations. A quick, 38-minute dip into a less-celebrated corner of his catalogue, Sun Ra Plays Gershwin offers an opportunity to explore some of his formative recordings and to expand on the story of one of the 20th century’s most distinctive musicians.
The album’s first piece is a previously unreleased live take of “Rhapsody in Blue” by the Arkestra. Though the fidelity is a little muddy, it nonetheless stands as a testament to Ra’s rigorous bandleading and fluency in jazz’s inner and outer rings. The first three minutes showcase him soloing on the piano, one moment chopping up the iconic melody in an angular collage worthy of Thelonious Monk, the next laying back into impressionistic eddies. Gershwin’s soft-focus swagger is supplanted with something more ambiguous, even dangerous. In the middle of his solo, a small group of horns accents the melody and then darts upward into a squealing scream. The full band’s sudden, joyful entry, some three minutes in, leaps with rugged joy and swings with authority.
Elsewhere things get stranger. A deliciously lo-fi recording of “The Man I Love” with Ra on piano and Wilbur Ware on guitar mucks around in proto-skronk dissonance. The sentimental melody gets a plunky once-over from Ware, and the in-the-red tape saturation adds to the atmosphere. Toward the end, what sounds like a Mellotron creeps in for a warbly, schmaltzy refrain, and there might even be an autoharp tucked in there somewhere. The track ends abruptly; perhaps the tape ran out or someone pressed stop just a little too early. It feels like we’re eavesdropping on something private, even secret.
The vocal collaborations are some of the most charming pieces in the collection. An “early version” of “S Wonderful,” with Hattie Randolph, is two minutes of pure sweetness that places the vocal lead in front of a distant, hissy combo of piano, hand drums, and bass. There are no solos or head-turning key changes and certainly no visions of Saturn. Two songs with the Nu Sounds, an otherwise off-the-radar male vocal group, are delicious slices of jazz ephemera. Likely intended for release as cash-grab singles, these tracks and their quick-and-dirty arrangements bubble with spontaneity. “Nice Work If You Can Get It” clocks in at less than two minutes long, but even in this brief window the singers seem late to the party; they give themselves less than a minute to get through two choruses, a verse, and a tossed-off coda. But the track brims with small details—the elegant bass vocal that leads the first chorus, the sloppy handclaps that crowd the verse, Ra’s chunky piano embellishments—that make it all worthwhile.
The album closes with “I Loves You Porgy,” one of the most poignant melodies known to humankind. Here, the Arkestra are far from the astral denizens of A Joyful Noise; they sound more like the house band of a particularly jumping night club. As on “Rhapsody in Blue,” they are both tender and forceful. If Sun Ra had stopped here, he would perhaps live on in collectors’ wish lists, an eccentric also-ran from one of jazz’s most vital eras. Instead, he kept going—mythologizing, philosophizing, and defying almost every available orthodoxy. But the core musicality on display here never left him. Cosmic voyager though he was, Sun Ra Plays Gershwin shows him to be a softie at heart. | 2018-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Enterplanetary Koncepts | January 16, 2018 | 6.6 | 91dac8c7-93b3-4a70-9fe8-bf2dbf6f5691 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ |
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